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Why I will continue to split hairs over split infinitives
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Business English: Why I will continue to split hairs over split infinitives
Language, and what we regard as correct, changes over time. But until it does change, we should pay close attention to what our readers think are mistakes.The other day, I implored my colleagues to maintain the distinction between "uninterested" and "disinterested" after a couple of instances of us mixing them up. You know the difference. " Uninterested'' means not interested. " Disinterested'' means impartial. People say "I am completely disinterested in Celebrity Big Brother" when they mean they are uninterested. Disinterested would mean they held no shares in the production company.
Or so I thought until I read Steven Pinker's magnificent book The Language Instinct. Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, also loathes people getting the words confused. "Since we already have the word uninterested, there can be no reason to rob discerning language-lovers of disinterested by merging their meanings, except as a tacky attempt to sound more high-falutin'," he writes. But having got that off his chest, Pinker tells himself: "Chill out, Professor. The original 18th-century meaning of disinterested turns out to be - yes, 'uninterested'." Oh.
The same happened when one of our contributors wrote about a character saying something but "inferring" something else. I corrected "inferring" to "implying". To imply means to suggest. To infer means to deduce. I thought the contributor might protest about the change so I decided to arm myself with the evidence. The Chambers Dictionary was lying in wait, giggling in anticipation of just this moment. Yes, "infer" meant "deduce" or "conclude", it said, but it also meant "imply" - "often condemned as a misuse, but generally accepted for over four centuries". So sucks to me.
Language experts love this game. Take another grammatical dilemma. Which is correct: "He is bigger than I" or "He is bigger than me"? Those of you who were taught grammar will say "bigger than I", even though most people probably say "bigger than me". On my shelves is a book called Grammar by Frank Palmer, which was first published 36 years ago. Palmer, a professor of linguistics, pointed out that "bigger than I" was based on Latin's grammatical rules. Why, he asked, should English follow Latin? Why not French? In French we say "plus grand que moi", not "plus grand que je".
Pinker, in spite of his queasiness about "disinterested" for "uninterested", is even more robust. Yes, there are ungrammatical sentences, he says. "Apples the eat boy" is ungrammatical. But beginning a sentence with "because" is not ungrammatical. Neither are split infinitives. (The rule that says they cannot be split is another holdover from Latin, whose infinitives cannot be split because they are one word.) Grammatical speech is the way people speak.
Imagine, says Pinker, watching a wildlife documentary. The narrator does not like what he sees. "Dolphins do not execute their swimming strokes properly. White-crowned sparrows carelessly debase their calls . . . the song of the humpback whale contains several well-known errors and monkeys' cries have been in a state of chaos and degeneration for hundreds of years." We would be incredulous, Pinker says. "What on earth would it mean for the song of the humpback whale to contain an 'error'? Isn't the song of the humpback whale whatever the humpback whale decides to sing?"
Prescriptive grammatical rules are a shibboleth, he says, "differentiating the elite from the rabble''. "Shibboleth", you will recall, comes from the Book of Judges and from the battle between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites. The Gileadites crossed the Jordan and when any Ephraimite tried to follow, they set him a little test: "Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth." This was sneaky because "shibboleth" was an Ephraimite tongue-twister. They said "sibboleth" instead, marking themselves out as different.
But this surely is the point. Language is the way we signal what group we belong to. A 16-year-old can enthuse about a band being "bare safe". A 66-year-old using the same language at the Royal Opera House would be regarded as either pretentious or peculiar, assuming anyone knew what he was talking about.
In the same way, if you read this newspaper, you probably say "we were" rather than "we was", even though "we was" is acceptable among some English speakers. When we do breach what educated people regard as convention, you expect us at least to know what convention we have breached.
Language, and what we regard as correct, changes over time. But until it does change, we should pay close attention to what our readers think are mistakes. That is why I will carefully read your e-mails about the lapses you have no doubt spotted in this column. Based on past experience, some of you will not be gentle. I can take it. They are only words. The Ephraimites had it tougher: 42,000 of them were slaughtered.
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FTD.de, 19.03.2007
© 2007 Financial Times Deutschland,
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Bereitstellung der Kurs- und Marktinformationen erfolgt durch die Interactive Data Managed Solutions AG. Es wird keine Haftung für die Richtigkeit der Angaben übernommen!
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