23 September1999, 780 words
Perhaps you have wondered why it is there are certain rules in English, such as the one which says that that must be used for restrictive clauses and which for non-restrictive clauses. Or perhaps you have a life. I myself never even knew there was such a rule, until a few weeks ago. My own practice has been to mix them up, just for variety. I am a typical man in this respect. The rule about that and which was first introduced in 1906, when Henry and Francis Fowler presented it in The King's English, mainly because the more rules a grammar book has the better it sells. But. although you may find it difficult to take anyone named Fowler seriously, the rule is laid and all dedicated writers of good English must now follow it, or die trying.
Another error I commonly commit is using the singular "they". I suspect this is what has prevented me from becoming a great writer. For me, a sentence like "It's hard to prove to anyone that they're a fool, especially when they themselves prove it every week in the newspapers." is much more effective than "It's hard to persuade anyone that he or she is a fool, especially when he or she proves it every week in the newspapers."
Last year the Oxford Dictionary declared that the singular they was grammatically acceptable, which just shows how intellectual degeneration is corrupting even the highest institutions of learning. It is true that the singular they was a standard form up to the13th century but, remember, there were a lot less people to gossip about back then.
Nowadays, people are even writing double negatives. I think it's the French influence on English which is causing this. Who told them that "Je ne sais pas", where ne and pas are both negative, was good English? Admittedly, the double negative was a norm in Chaucer's time, but there was a lot of disease, wars and poverty, so people needed double negatives to really express themselves. Now, in the twentieth century, we have penicillin, toilet paper and Prozac, but Mick Jagger still sings "I can't get no satisfaction". Can you imagine how many confused people are walking wondering, if Jagger gets all satisfaction as he says, why he horned Jerry Hall?
Even more pernicious is the growing habit of ending sentences with prepositions. Winston Churchill said, "It is a rule up with which we should not put", and I feel it's only right we should listen to a man who won both World War II and the Nobel Literature Prize. Just the other day, a friend of mines ended a sentence with five prepositions. I had carried a book up to her apartment to read to her, but she was interested on less cerebral, though more heady, pastimes, and said, "Kev, why did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to out of up for?" Needless to say, I was completely traumatised.
What we need to do is return to the Fountainhead of Good English - i.e. the speech and writing of the English court in south London six centuries ago. We must follow the wise advice in George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesy, written in 1589: "...neither shall [the poet] follow the speache of a craftesman or carter, or other of the inferiour sort...for such persons doe abuse good speaches by strange accents or ill shapen soundes, and false ortographie."
So, nowadays, we say, "Our father who is in Heaven, may Your name be kept holy." Wrong, wrong, wrong! and I say that not merely because I'm an atheist. Much better is the language of the 1600s: "Our father which are in Heaven, hallowed be thy name." And better yet is 15th century English, which had proper spelling, too: "Our fadir that art in Heunes halowid be thy name."
We must ignore and condemn people like H.L. Mencken, who writes: "With precious few exceptions, all the books on style in English are by writers quite unable to write. The subject, indeed, seems to exercise a special and dreadful fascination over school ma'ams, bucolic college professors, and other such pseudo-literates...Their central aim, of course, is to reduce the whole thing to a series of simple rules - the overmastering passion of their melancholy order, at all times and everywhere."
If you ask me, people like Mencken should be burned at the stake, like they used to do in those halcyon days when men were men who spoke properly.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh