Snobbery and the split infinitive People who make a fetish of grammar are often ignoramuses
Roy Hattersley
Monday February 10, 2003
The Guardian
No doubt you think, serious-minded reader, that writing about the rules of grammar - at what Thomas Hardy would have called The Time of the Breaking of Nations - is an entirely frivolous activity. Good. What follows is not intended as an aesthete's insistence that, as we march to war, the nation's morale depends on the quality of its leaders' syntax. It was decided, by this paper's equivalent of Lord Copper, that with so much profound thinking exposed on this page today a leavening of trivia was absolutely essential. And for reasons about which I dare not speculate, it was agreed that I was ideally equipped to provide it.
Fortunately, there was at my disposal a subject ideal for 850 words of farce - the suitably named John Bercow, Tory MP, exhibitionist and (on the evidence of last Thursday afternoon) ignoramus. I confess to feeling some regret at mentioning Mr Bercow in this column. For he is one of those politicians who would rather be immersed in excrement than not noticed. But the way in which he made a complete ass of himself was too spectacular to be ignored. He fell flat on his face while attempting to trip up Stephen Twigg, the parliamentary secretary at the Department for Education.
While answering questions on behalf of his ministry, Mr Twigg used a split infinitive and Mr Bercow leapt to his feet as if the junior minister had broken one of the three golden rules of parliamentary procedure - criticising the Speaker, mentioning the royal family and suggesting that Estelle Morris is not a candidate for canonisation. What a pity he seems not to have read the definitive Ernest Gowers edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage. For it contains a passage on split infinitives that might have been dedicated to him. Gowers judged that the split infinitive divided the English-speaking world into five classes. Mr Bercow occupies class two - "those who do not know but care very much".
That second class consists of people "who would as soon be caught putting their knives into their mouths as splitting an infinitive but have only a hazy notion of what constitutes that deplorable breach of etiquette". For second-class people "the aversion to the split infinitive springs not from instinctive good taste but from the tame acceptance of the misinterpreted opinions of others". Gowers goes on to write that splitting infinitives is fine as long as the sentence in which it appears makes smooth sense. And that was certainly the case last Thursday.
Despite the instruction that political philosophy must not spill across the page into this column, I must point out that Mr Bercow was using the English language as a "positional good" - something by which he could demonstrate his elevated status and condition. The fact that his intervention on behalf of the tongue that Shakespeare spoke made him sound like a cross between Polonius and a rude mechanical is neither here nor there. He was showing off. William Cobbett, in his Grammar of the English Language (to which, by happy coincidence, I have just written an introduction) explained in his inimitable language why people behave as Mr Bercow behaved. They are "unwilling to treat with simplicity that which, if made somewhat of a mystery, would make them appear more learned than the mass of people".
Cobbett certainly believed in the importance of observing the formal rules of English grammar. But he insisted that they must - far from being a conceit or a contrivance - spring from the simplest principle of all, pure logic. Thus he condemned the habit of "endeavouring to strengthen an adjective by putting an adverb before it" when the adjective is itself absolute. The notion of "a very honest" man is absurd. "A man cannot be more honest than another; every man who is not honest must be dishonest." We do not have to accept Cobbett's affection for the semi-colon to find that judgment irresistible.
Almost all the "gross mistakes" to which Cobbett's grammar draws attention were perpetrated by his political enemies. "When a company consisting of men who have been ennobled by favour of the late William Pitt to plunder and insult people, meet under the name of the Pitt Club, those who publish accounts of their activities always tell us that such and such toast were drank instead of drunk." I would not like you to imagine, unprejudiced reader, that I have picked on Mr Bercow because I come from what Cobbett would have called "a different political persuasion".
I rejoice at the opportunity to emphasise his errors because I do not believe that our writing or speech should be constructed by silly class-based contrivances. All that matters is Cobbett's rule of logic and an ear for the natural resonance of the language. As Fowler said, "literary pretensions can make us deaf to the normal rhythm of English sentences." Which is why Mr Bercow was foolish to boldly go into territory that he had not charted.
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posted 13 February 2003 03:37 AM
Excellent, Mycroft, thanks!
