Deference and erroneous deference - a hobbyhorse

Deferring to a linguistic authority figure is always wrong but “she lives a long way from John and I” is doubly wrong.

Not only is the speaker deferring to an authority figure; but they have misinterpreted what the authority figure actually said. No teacher ever told you to put the nominative after a preposition.  Of all linguistic mistakes the erroneous deference grates with me most.  No child naturally says “from John and I”. You have to teach yourself to say “from John and I”.  And teach yourself wrong!  Bah!

A common instance of mere deference, as opposed to erroneous deference, is avoiding the split infinitive. It’s usually harmless but occasionally sounds a bit contrived.  The supreme example of a good split infinitive is “to boldly go”.  The context is the introductory text spoken at the beginning of Star Trek episodes : “To boldly go where no man has gone before”.  Does it work?  Yes. Does it sound good?  Yes. Therefore it's good English.

The rule against the split infinitive has indeed been promulgated, so in that narrow sense, deferring to it isn't erroneous.  But whoever promulgated the rule acted without authority, for there can be no authority in language.  (Apart, that is, from your humble servant.)

Note added since I first wrote this. The technical term for avoiding one grammatical trap only to fall into another is hypercorrection.

Ending a sentence with a preposition

Digressing from my theme, another rule that isn't a rule is “never end a sentence with a preposition”.  Actually it’s one of the glories of the Germanic languages that you can end a sentence with a preposition.  Churchill had his faults but he knew his English.  Once, when a civil servant re-cast a sentence of Churchill’s to avoid this alleged error, he reinstated the original word order adding in the margin: “this is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put.”   The anecdote comes in many varieties and seems to be undocumented, but even so it’s one of those stories that just has to be true.  The version I have given comes from a fabulous English teacher I had when I was 12.

And no, fellow pedants, I don’t mean that my English teacher was mythical!

Things that annoy me. No 3, “The Nanny State”

There are two things that annoy me more than people going on about the nanny state, although they happen to escape me just now.

Felicity Lawrence wrote a good article in the Guardian on 8th July heaping scorn on health minister Lansley. Eager to show that the Tories are a front for unscrupulous businesses, he says no need to regulate the food industry, lets treat obesity as a moral failure, all we need is for everyone to just eat more responsibly.

Lets take a step back and survey the scene.   A privileged elite has found a way to enrich itself by creating ill-health in the population; and has created a culture in which personal freedom is deemed the highest good, which is to be interpreted to mean freedom for children to choose crisps and food companies to sell them.

Judging by the blogs at the end of the article even some Guardian readers fall for this (or are they paid by the food industry to leave these comments??)

Afterthought: I think, but I'm not sure, that the Americans conduct these discussions without benefit of the expression “nanny state”.  Even so, there's plenty of opportunity for shouting at the radio.

Listen to this American discussion of Taxing Soft Drinks.  It deals with soda pop, obesity and studies that link soft drink consumption to America's growing obesity epidemic and spiralling healthcare costs. Calls have been made for a new tax on sugary soft drinks. Hear a corporate "libertarian" argue against the proposed tax.

It’s an episode of The Diane Rehm Show (American University Radio, WAMU). October 15, 2009.

Unfair to Huygens

I’ve read the Huygens book again and in fact he does recognise that it’s most unlikely there are inhabitants on the Moon, due its dryness and no atmosphere.  When he talks of the sights the inhabitants can see, he says the view both from our Moon and from other solar system moons, “must occasion great many very pretty, wonderful sights to their Inhabitants, if they have any: which is very doubtful, but may for the present be suppos’d …” and then goes on to describe what they would see were they to exist.

So I apologies to Huygens and will rewrite the post of a few days ago.  I'm still disappointed by the way and shall explain why.

Telling the story of Adam and Eve

This is one of the stories I tell Martha.  I've decided to write these stories down, sell them, and get rich. Feel free to tell me if you think this is (a) a likely or (b) an unlikely outcome.  This particular story starts with …

When God had finished making the world and had rested – which by the way he did on Saturday – he brought all the animals to Adam to name. Whatsoever name Adam called a particular animal, that would be its name always.

At this juncture, there's an opportunity for endless diversion where I describe an animal and Martha says what Adam called it – big yellow cat with a mane – Lion! Huge grey animal with legs like tree trunks and the biggest nose Adam had ever seen - Elephant!  In fact we normally don’t get past this point in the story.  I've written an unfinished draft see it here.

Tory bashes the Mail - a Nixon in China moment

I won't see Newsnight tonight, or any night for that matter as I rarely watch TV, but the Newsnight newsletter tells me that the one phrase from the Tory handbook on crime-fighting that no-one ever forgets is, arguably, Michael Howard's mantra that 'prison works'.

But that was old Tory, it says, and today Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has torn up the handbook and called short term sentences an expensive failure. He accuses previous Labour home secretaries of building up the prison population with 'a chequebook and a copy of the Daily Mail'.

This is a real Nixon in China moment.  When was the last time a Labour politician dared to deride the Daily Mail?

Tidal power – the earliest proposal?

Is this the earliest instance of a scientist advocating tidal power as an alternative to burning fossil fuels?

A book published in London in 1874 calls attention to “the stupendous reservoir of power that the tidal waters constitute, a form of power which has not as yet been sufficiently called into operation, but which may be invoked by-and-by, when we have begun to feel more acutely the consequences of our present prodigal use of the fuel that was stored up for us by bountiful nature ages upon ages ago.”

The book is “The Moon: considered as a planet, a world, and a satellite” by James Nasmyth &  James Carpenter.

Other benefits of tides are that they clean the ocean shores, and move ships up and down the Thames which otherwise would consume steam. For the port of London alone, the authors claim this represents a money value “reckoned in millions sterling, seeing that if our river was tideless all transport would have to be done by manual or steam power”. (p 188).

I read this book in the British Library on 21st June.  It contains amazing illustrations of the Moon which you could swear were taken from an orbiting satellite but which are actually photographs of clay models, themselves based on drawings made in the course of 30 years of observing.

Let's all step down one rung

In this Labour Party poster from late 1931, the class stereotypes on the ladder are the £10,000-a-year man, the £1,000-a-year man, the £250-a-year man and The Unemployed Man.  The caption reads: THE MAN AT THE TOP:- “Equality of sacrifice, that’s the big idea friends – let's all step down one rung”