Today I was reading a book called What not to write by Kay Sayce. It's a short guide to correct English usage and a very enjoyable one too, although I wonder if it is the sort of thing that would appeal mainly to people who care very much about correct English anyway, and so wouldn't make the sorts of mistakes that are discouraged. Such guides, and there are several of them, remind me of Nancy Mitford's Noblesse Oblige; I suspect they function as a sort of check-list for those who fear becoming whatever the editorial equivalent of non-U is. I'm certainly not immune myself: upon reading each new point, I congratulate myself on my good English, or make a mental note not to do something again, or even decide I disagree.
I wonder how much shorter the book would be if all the controversial points - the bits people might disagree with - were taken out; certainly I doubt the remnants would be long enough to fill a book. I suspect most people do not remember all of the rules about apostrophe use that they were taught at school and a lot of those people will regard such rules as unnecessarily complicated and therefore pedantic. Some rules appear never to have had much consensus, indeed I wonder if a few are entirely fictitious; a good example is the rule prohibiting prepositions at the ends of sentences. Certainly, throughout the history of English prose, constructions that seem more Latinate have been regarded as especially elegant; one might say:
"This is the man about whom we were speaking."
rather than:
"This is the man we were speaking about".
Later I shall say why I think Latin does this. For now I want to point out that I haven't yet come across a manual that prohibits the sentence-final preposition, although I've come across many that refute that prohibition. I'm not even sure it's possible to avoid; how exactly does one say "I looked up" without putting a preposition at the end of the sentence? And when exactly was the golden age of zero-tolerance for the sentence-final preposition? Certainly the Victorians littered their novels with the construction, and I don't believe Dickens could even have been aware of such a rule. Furthermore, as the decades passed, it became even more common. The same goes for the rule about not beginning sentences with "and", "but" or "nor"; has any author ever consciously obeyed this rule?
What not to write includes one rule that looks very odd to me:
before / previous
'Before' should always be followed by a noun, so don't put it at the end of a sentence. Use 'previous' instead. -The Trainees had applied in the previous year (not The trainees had applied the year before).
For some reason I found the author's alternative bulky and inelegant and I thought of one of the most memorable sentences of Brideshead Revisited:
"This was my third term since matriculation, but I date my Oxford life from my first meeting with Sebastian, which had happened, by chance, in the middle of the term before."
It's a delightful introduction, filled with nostalgia; a perfect opening to "those distant, Arcadian days" in Oxford. How dull and matter-of-fact it would sound if it read:
"This was my third term since matriculation, but I date my Oxford life from my first meeting with Sebastian, which had happened, by chance, in the middle of the previous term."
I don't know where this rule came from but I can't possibly accept it. I can't accept either that one should prefer the active voice. What seems coarse to one person might be acceptable to others and what seems elegant to that person might seem pedantic to most. Nevertheless, I think prescriptive rules are absolutely essential. Pupils in schools should be taught about split infinitives and even sentence-final prepositions; they should be discouraged from writing "the reason is because" and "there's lots of people" and "the other alternative"; their written work should suffer merciless underlining and they should be made to write out corrections where anything objectionable is found.
I remember reading a friend's job application and noticing a missing apostrophe. I thought it best to point out the mistake but his response was to laugh at my pedantry and to ask if I really thought anyone would care about something so minor. Fair enough. He knew that the mistake was there and could make his own decision, though I suspect he might have cared more if he knew how to punctuate. Being able to write good prose, like learning to dress well, requires informed judgement. When someone goes for a job a interview he needs to know how to dress appropriately. He might decide he doesn't need to wear a tie but he will at least know how to tie it. Before that he needs to write a covering letter and his writing needs to be appropriate too. It may be that he thinks the rule about split infinitives is dated and he therefore has little regard for it; he may hold the same opinion about the apostrophe rules, which are far more prescriptive. Denying him the opportunity to make the decision is like not teaching him to knot his tie and it means that he will never be able to write the most formal prose.
As a final note, the case of Latin prepositions is an interesting one. Not only does each Latin preposition require a noun complement, it must also be the complement of a verb. It's not possible to say "the man in the moon came down", not literally anyway. A Roman would not write homen in luna descendit but homen qui erat in luna descendit. Incidentally this is in contrast to Greek, where such constructions are a staple of the language, ὁ ἐν τῇ σελήνῃ ἄνθρωπος κατῆλθε, in this case. The preposition in the sentence, "this is the man we were talking about," is a special type of preposition called a preverb, which means that it's part of the verb, like "stand up", "put down", "go out" and so on. Such items in Latin are always expressed by single words (sto, depono, exeo). If there is a preverb in Latin it must be a prefix to the verb, but verbs with preverbs are not readily coined. Often constructions with relative pronouns must be used, though examples seem far easier to find among works of neo-Latin, the following is from Descartes: nec idcirco hic recenseo varias illas quaestiones de quibus etiam in ipsis ex occasione tractatur. I suppose the Romans were more imaginative with their limited vocabulary; might a Roman perhaps have written iactatas instead of de quibus and tractatur?
