To boldly go... byWyn Evans
It is the custom in our house that when Star Trek appears on the telly The Boss must remind me that ‘to boldly go’ is a split infinitive. What goes unsaid but is taken as implicit is that splitting an infinitive is ungrammatical and akin to farting in public. How is our sixteen-year-old daughter to master the rules of language when correct grammar is so wilfully cast aside? This in turn reminds me of my time on secondment from the NHS to the Welsh Office Health Department. Tasked with creating the first draft of advice that would eventually make its way to the Minister, I became quite nervous. Writing policy papers without superfluity and with clarity of meaning (or, sometimes, the complete opposite) is what senior civil servants pride themselves on doing. It’s what they are for. Ergo, the sine qua non I first needed to attend to were grammar and punctuation. It needed to be right up there: no incorrect ‘itses’ nor dangling participles; split infinitives to be rooted out and unnecessary commas extirpated. My Assistant Director called me in after he’d analysed my first draft. Truth be told it was my third draft, but the only one I’d sent up to him. He laid the document on the conference room desk and I was mortified to see his manuscript comments, in red ink covering my magnum opus. It was like being back in secondary school only worse; I’d achieved an ‘A’ in ‘A’ level English and thought I was quite the prose stylist. In fact, I did find his comments to the point and helpful. Because I took from that meeting the importance of considering the audience you are talking to, the way we can use words to convey clarity of purpose, and
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how to use them to imply meaning without being explicit (sometimes this was useful). And he took umbrage that when listing things I wrote, ‘Firstly..., secondly..., thirdly...’. The correct way to write would be “First..., secondly..., thirdly...), he assured me. Why this was, however, upon what authority, he could or would not say. It was a grammatical rule, which was enough. I knew how Moses felt when he received the tablets of stone. The more policy papers I contributed to the clearer something else became: no matter the subject, author or make-up of the audience, every first draft ever written could be cut by at least twenty per cent; with a commensurate increase in clarity. I named this Evans’ Law and I subsequently extended it to apply also to third or even fourth drafts. I have above written different to just about every rule my boss taught me, to every rule he had faith in. His red pen would be running dry if he looked at what I’ve written so far. The solecisms that I have spotted I have left in the text for your delight. These include punctuation errors, a dangling participle, whether to use ‘who’ or ‘whom’, inconsistent use of the Oxford comma, unnecessary use of Latin, an arguably incorrect use of apostrophes, whether and when to use semi-colons, etc. (Have fun correcting me!) So where do these ‘rules of grammar’ come from? Is there a body that does for English what the Royal Society does for science, or the Academie Francais does for French? In his smashing little book(1) Oliver Kamm argues that the English language benefits
