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Sat 13 Jul 2002 00.55 BSTFirst published on Sat 13 Jul 2002 00.55 BST
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The scene has been restaged many times since it was sculpted 850 years or
so ago, and was in all likelihood traditional even then. In one version, the
two boys have names - respectively, Eric Griffiths and Sir Paul McCartney -
for I share with the former Beatle not only lyric gift and fabulous wealth but
also an English master, AJ "Cissy" Smith.
Paul had just released "Yesterday" when Mr Smith began to teach my class
clause-analysis and how to avoid dangling participles. We gazed at him,
agog and aghast, because it was a legend in the school (rescued years later
from dereliction by Sir Paul and now the Liverpool Institute for Performing
Arts) that he had washed Paul's mouth out with soap and water for
persistent solecisms or excess fruitiness of vocabulary. Cissy has long gone
to his reward, I struggle on with my round shoulders and inculcated dislike
of the "split infinitive", and Sir Paul still has the big grin.
So the Cambridge Grammar's editors note that sentences like "They invited
my partner and I to lunch" are "regularly used by a significant proportion of
speakers of Standard English... they pass unnoticed in broadcast speech all
the time". They explain convincingly why "my partner and me" would be no
more grammatical; there is no better reason to require English pronouns
always to comply with Latin inflection for the accusative case than there is
regularly to hear English verse according to Graeco-Roman templates such
as the "iambic pentameter" which have been misleading our ears since the
19th century.
We should not expect too much from linguists; they are witnesses not
judges. Yet even the members of this excellent Cambridge team sometimes
fail to confine themselves within the narrow bounds of testimony. They
rightly decline to prescribe usage, but they exceed their remit when they
proscribe prescription, for it is a fact of language use that writers and
speakers concern themselves with more than information throughput and
grammaticality as strictly understood.
When we disagree about such phrases as "my partner and I", this may be a
matter of taste, but from that it does not follow, as the editors assume, that
"all evidence" is simply "beside the point". If that were so, then nobody
could be "someone eminently worthy of being followed in matters of taste
and literary style", as they say on the same page, nor would there be any
reason for appealing, as they sometimes do, to "the writings of highly
prestigious authors" or "the usage of the best writers" (they carefully refrain
from naming these paragons).
They say of the sentence "In this day and age one must circle round and
explore every avenue" that it "may be loaded with careworn verbiage, or it
may even be arrant nonsense, but there is absolutely nothing grammatically
wrong with it". The sentence seems innocent enough in contrast to their
own comment, which groans with inexactitude and redundancy: the
example is not nonsense of any kind, being easily intelligible; the
grammarians' "arrant" and "absolutely" are semantically empty,
thoughtlessly transferring habits of spoken emphasis into the written
language. And what is "careworn verbiage"? Perhaps the adjective is here a
new portmanteau word made up from "outworn" and "careless".
Nor are they to be wholly trusted when they tell us "The most frequent use
of media is in the phrase the media, applied to the means of mass
communication, the press, radio, and television, where both singular
agreement and plural agreement are well established" (we indiscriminately
say "the media is..." or "the media are..."). All descriptive grammarians can
determine is whether something is "established" or not; their "well" is
illicit. After all, there are many things which are certainly "established" but
only arguably "well established" - the Church of England, for example.
Take the case of "only". The Cambridge Grammar observes wearily: "There
is a long-standing prescriptive tradition of... saying that in writing only
should be placed immediately before its focus... This is another of those
well-known prescriptive rules that are massively at variance with actual
usage." Yet those of us who are not only grammarians have just cause for
complaint about official letters which run along the familiar lines of "We
can only say how sorry we are that your train was late" - that may be all
they can say, but we want them to do something too, improve the service or
compensate us.
He was not asking Celia to restrict her drinking of healths to his alone but
either calling her his "onely" or, more likely, saying that her eyes were the
one intoxicant he needed, just as "leave a kisse but in the cup" means that a
blown kiss, the mere aftermath of her lips, is all he wants on his.
The traditional usage is actual in his lines every time somebody reads them
with understanding; it was still going strong when Dick Powell, in a Busby
Berkeley musical, sang the magnificent compliment "I only have eyes for
you". Put the "only" elsewhere and the schmooze evaporates: "Only I have
eyes for you" (nobody else would look at you twice); "I have only eyes for
you" (I like looking but don't want to touch); "I have eyes for you only" (the
others leave me cold) - none of them matches the hyperbole of "I only have
eyes for you", which can imply he was given vision just to look at her.
Freud imagined that "where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same
time admire Nero's vanished Golden House. [...] The observer would
perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in
order to call up one view or the other." Such time-travelling can happen in
language too, and goes by the name of "literature". The last line of Geoffrey
Hill's poem, "Pisgah", reads: "Formalities preserve us: / perhaps I too am a
shade."
Hill's line, though, is a revolving door between Englishes past and present,
and intimates a history of moods, verbal and otherwise. The faint but
persistent lavender of the subjunctive about his "preserve" gives him reason
for a moment to regard himself as superseded or at least on his way into the
shade, as if, talking to an elderly relative, he began to feel his own self aged
too.
But when we read the exquisite loop of Hill's line "I imagine singing I
imagine" (from "That Man as a Rational Animal...", in Canaan), we need to
recognise that "singing" is both gerund and participle, so that the line
paraphrases out as "I imagine the sound of voices in song and I am myself
singing while I imagine", as if it had six and not five words, for "singing"
has been subjected to a grammatical "double exposure"; the poem at this
point takes a time-lapse photograph of English usage, brings historical
difference home to us now.
"London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in
Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the
streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth...
Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with
flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning,
one might imagine, for the death of the sun."
You can see the ambiguity from the possibility of rewriting with either "is"
or "was" between "Michaelmas Term" and "lately", and again between
"Lord Chancellor" and "sitting", and so on. The Cambridge Grammar would
call this "desententialisation", and alert us to the lack of clear bearings on
"time referred to" (the time Dickens is writing about) and "time of
orientation" (the time Dickens is writing in or from).
Bleak House havers creatively over the boundaries between past and
present in order to ask whether the story it's telling is about the bad old
days or the way we live now, to question confidence about history's
direction, to gauge the gap, if gap there be, between the primordial "mud"
and the "Mlud" with which the Lord Chancellor is eventually addressed on
the novel's third page.
Readers need respect for, a capacity to delight in, usages other than their
own; such respect and delight are not encouraged by the tendency of
grammarians to treat "usage" as if it were a noun which occurred only in
the singular, nor by their habit of dismissing how the language used to be
with their equivalent of the characters' constant refrain in EastEnders:
"that's history, Kath, you got to put it behind you and move on". To those
who have interests in language other than those of the linguist, "synchronic
study" can at times seem like a polite name for parochialism.
The pedantic carper is, however, right and on the verge of a discovery; there
is something odd about that chorus, and its oddness is apt to the situation
in which two, previously promiscuous homosexuals shakily embark
together on a possibly monogamous future. Of course they are uncertain
about number, and whether number of partners matters.
The syntax is not what it seems; "one in a million men" is not the subject of
a sentence which continues "change the way you feel". "One in a million
men" is a vocative, an address to the new, perhaps permanent lover;
"change the way you feel" is an imperative, addressed by the singer to the
two of them (as is clear if you listen to the middle eight). The apparent
grammatical stumble expresses splendidly a trepidation such as any one at
such a moment might experience, but you have to wonder if the words
aren't wrong to find how right they are. Language too is an affair which,
from one point of view, is always just in the flush and tremor of beginning
while, from an other, quite as sharp-eyed a point of view, it continues to run
down foreseeable grooves formed by accumulated habit. To delineate the
experience of living with and through a language (a task beneath or beyond
the ambitions of systematic grammar), we need fresh-minted terms and
brilliant redescriptions such as the Cambridge Grammar supplies in its
strong arguments for the claim that "English has no future tense", soon to
be reported in the Daily Mail, no doubt, as "dons say english has no future".
These 1,842 pages are not short of terms which will be new to the non-
specialist, and they bristle with a more-than-grammatical deliciousness :
"nested dependencies"; "desiderative bias"; "sloppy identity";
"ambiclippings"; "mounting process"; "ultimate head".
Yet a language like English is simultaneously virgin and long clapped-out,
so old words for it are still good too. When Beckett gave his only broadcast
talk, about his experiences of the Irish Red Cross Hospital in Normandy
where he served as interpreter and store-keeper from August 1945 to
January 1946, he ended by entertaining
"...the possibility that some of those who were in Saint-Lô will come home
realising that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed
what they could hardly give, a vision and a sense of a time-honoured
conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms
in which our condition is to be thought again. These will have been in
France."
I appreciate there not being a paywall: it is more democratic for the media
to be available for all and not a commodity to be purchased by a few. I’m
happy to make a contribution so others with less means still have access to
information.Thomasine, Sweden
If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps fund it, our future
would be much more secure. For as little as £1, you can support the
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Ben J onson
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