Being Mr. Kenny

… the losses that matter are semantic losses, not grammatical losses

From Begging the Question

How beautifully sane!

While I heartily enjoy correcting people’s grammar and laughing at spelling mistakes, just like any good Englishman should, I do find a few of the rules of English grammar a little annoying. Namely, the rule against split infinitives and the rule against putting prepositions at the end of the sentence.

The infinitive is that form of the verb which is not marked for number, tense, mood or person. I.e. it’s the verb in its purest state, it’s just the verb on it’s own before people or time have happened to it, like “eat” or “sleep” or “write” (as opposed to “eats, eaten, eating, ate”, “sleeps, slept, sleeping”, “writes, written, writing, wrote” etc).

In English, the infinitive often takes the form “to go”, “to play” etc, and you’re not supposed to put any words between “to” and the verb. Thus, “to boldy go” should be either “boldy to go” or “to go boldly”, both of which sound a little ridiculous. It’s also strictly not correct: “to” is not part of the infinitive, it’s just a connecting word. You don’t find it in sentences about the future which use the infinitive, such as “I will eat”.

Prepositions are words like at, to, before, about, for, with, and you’re not supposed to finish a sentence with them. Thus it is not “What are you looking at?” but “At what are you looking?”.

These rules came about because some guy decided that English should be more like Latin, where the word order is completely different. Take for example, the sentence “Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori”. Literally translated, this reads (with a few words added to make sense): “Sweet and fitting is it, for your country to die”. Who speaks like that? English is a language with many roots, only one of which is Latin.*

As Harry Hutton writes, no sane man cares about such things!

Let’s take a well-known example of a supposedly incorrect sentence:

To boldly go where no man has gone before.

Here we have two errors: there is a split infinitive (“to boldy go”) and the a preposition (“before”) is at the end of the sentence. Rewriting it to make it obey the rules of English grammar:

To go boldly to those places to which, before now, no man has gone.

As you can plainly see, the sentence is now damaged. It has lost some of it’s readability and all of its impact. Ironically, it now also sounds incorrect due to the awkward phrasing. Correcting that would mean adding even more words, thereby destroying whatever dynamic effect it once had. I think this example is a good instance of where the style of the language is ciritical to its effectiveness. “To boldly go” needs to be short and punchy, else it fails to inspire.

I would say that these rules are good in that they allow you subtle control over style and emphasis, but they shouldn’t be enforced as mandatory. In my opinion, they are optional in modern English, in all but the most formal writing styles. And you certainly shouldn’t think twice about splitting an infinitive in your speech, or allowing the last word you say to be a preposition. I notice that Oxford agrees with me.

You can read more about Robert Lowth on Wikipeda, as ever. It was he who introduced Latin rules to English grammar.

* Here you will note that the sentence doesn’t end with a preposition. How ironic!

Writing for the web is generally more successful when it’s informal, that’s why blogs are so popular. Formal writing tends to bore users unless it’s about something of interest. For instance, how many people actually read documents entitled “Terms and Conditions” without falling asleep half-way through?

But an informal style doesn’t mean you get to be lazy about basic things like capital letters and punctuation. While I can just about bear to read something written entirely in lower case, I find it infuriating when people have used just one line break for a new paragraph (i.e. they’ve only pushed the return key once, instead of twice).

It makes text difficult to read, it makes it look ugly, and it decreases the chance that what you’ve written will be read (or if it is read, it won’t be so easily understood). It also makes you look stupid.

Ok, I’m starting a new post category for when I find glaring mistakes people make in English that make me laugh. It’s fussy, anally retentive and mean, but since when were those reasons not to do something?

And the first is this:

To all intensive purposes …

When what they really mean is:

To all intents and purposes …

A while ago I emailed the Google people about the recent addition of the words “Personalized Home” to the Google front page. People who get bothered about things like spelling and apostrophes* in the wrong place will have also noticed (I hope!) that this is the American spelling, and shouldn’t be seen on a site whose address is .co.uk!

Anyway, with great pleasure I hereby reproduce my original email:

I have just been on the google.co.uk homepage, when I noticed the words “Personalized Home” in the top right hand corner.

I just wanted to say that you should be using British English spellings on a site targetted towards British English users! The correct spelling is “Personalised” with an S not a Z!

Thanks for taking the time to read my pedantic email :D

Mark

No, I can’t quite believe I actually took the time either. Perhaps I’m practicing for when I get old and have nothing better to do than write to people about their use of SPAG.

Anyway, I was happy to receive their reply just a few minutes ago:

Hi Mark,

Thank you for the suggestion. We apologize for our delayed response. We really appreciate your thoughtful feedback, and we’ll keep it in mind as we work to improve your Google personalized homepage.

Regards,
The Google Team

Do you think they did that on purpose?

* You will be pleased to know that I originally spelt this word with an apostrophe…

Update: Hey! Check it out! It’s spelt with an S now :D What do you know?