To boldly go

by Wyn 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 infi nitive. What goes unsaid ‘to boldly go’ is a split infi nitive. What goes unsaid but is taken as implicit is that splitting an infi nitive but is taken as implicit is that splitting an infi nitive 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 Offi ce Health Department. Tasked with creating the fi rst draft of advice that would eventually make its way to the Minister, I became quite nervous. Writing policy papers without superfl uity 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 fi rst needed to attend to were grammar and punctuation. It needed to be right up there: no incorrect ‘itses’ nor dangling participles; split infi nitives to be rooted out and unnecessary commas extirpated. explicit (sometimes this was useful). And he took umbrage that when listing things I wrote, ‘Firstly...,

My Assistant Director called me in after he’d analysed my fi rst 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 mortifi ed 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 fi nd 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 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 fi rst 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 benefi ts

from not having such a body. He cites developments in cognitive science suggesting that the facility for language is innate rather than a cultural invention. Arguing against what he calls ‘pedants’ or ‘sticklers’ he notes these rules-based groups want to use style guides as prescriptive whereas what is needed is a descriptive approach. He suggests that style guides may be useful when decisions about usage are unclear. “Some of these decisions are about tacit conventions. Conventions change, and so indeed can rules of grammar.” Context is important and “we all adapt our style of prose (casual, formal, etc) according to the audience”. Internalising conventions of usage to learn ‘proper English’ by means of a style guide is problematic since there “is not proper English and substandard English. There are ‘Englishes’, all of which conform to grammatical rules. Standard English is one form of the language”.

It is vital to know these conventions and “for children to be schooled in [them] as a means of gaining fl uency in a universally recognisable form of the language”. These different registers (e.g. language used in an offi cial capacity and language used by teenagers amongst themselves, with all its slang and neologisms) can make a teenager “feel at home in a like-minded group. That isn’t wrong but it is limiting”. Standard English has a wider audience. “That’s its merit: not correctness but usefulness.” Rather than arguing the toss about usage conundrums in style guides what’s important is how the language is used. Prescriptive stipulations are ‘made up’. Agreement on usage aids mutual understanding but “the agreement is tacit. No one legislated these usages. They can change. Nor is there any moral element to them”.

Next time she complains about Captain Kirk and Mister Spock boldly going I shall tell The Boss that she is using the rule about split infi nitives robotically. What matters is that the ‘boldly’ is correctly placed to have the greatest impact. ‘English belongs to its users not its self-appointed guardians.’ And I shall tell The Girl, my daughter, to stick with it, that she can even learn some slang... innit!

Footnote:

Kamm, Oliver. 2015: “Accidence shall will happen: The nonpedantic guide to English usage.”