Plain Words (26 page)

If the baby does not thrive on raw milk, boil it.

Nevertheless, he adds, it is well to be very careful about one's pronouns.
*

Here are one or two examples to show how difficult it can be to avoid ambiguity:

Mr S. told Mr H. he was prepared to transfer part of his allocation to his purposes provided that he received £10,000.

The
his
before
purposes
refers, it would seem, to Mr H., and the other three pronouns to Mr S.

Mr F. saw a man throw something from his pockets to the hens on his farm, and then twist the neck of one of them when they ran to him.

Here the change of antecedent from the man to Mr F. and back again to the man is puzzling at first.

There are several possible paths to removing ambiguities such as these. Let us take by way of illustration the sentence, ‘Sir Henry Ponsonby informed Mr Gladstone that the Queen had been much upset by what he had told her', and let us assume that the ambiguous
he
refers to Mr Gladstone. We can make the antecedent plain by

It may safely be said that the fifth device should seldom if ever be adopted,
*
and the third only when the antecedent is very close.

(3) Do not be shy of pronouns

So far we have been concerned in this section with the dangers that beset the user of pronouns. But for officials no less a danger is that of not using pronouns when they ought. Legal language, which must aim above all things at removing every possible ambiguity, is more sparing of pronouns than ordinary prose, because of an ever-present fear that the antecedent may be uncertain. For instance, opening a random Act of Parliament, I read:

The Secretary of State may by any such regulations allow the required notice of any occurrence to which the regulations relate, instead of being sent forthwith, to be sent within the time limited by the regulations.

Anyone not writing legal language would have avoided repeating
regulations
twice, and would instead have put
they
in the first place and
them
in the second.

Officials have so much to read and explain that is written in legal language that they become infected with pronoun-avoidance. The result is that what they write is often, in Cobbett's phrase, more ‘encumbered with words' than it need be:

The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries are anxious that the Rural Land Utilisation Officer should not in any way hinder the acquisition or earmarking of land for educational purposes,
but it is the duty of Rural Land Utilisation Officer (his duty) to ensure …

Arrangements are being made to continue the production of these houses for a further period, and increased numbers of these houses (them) will, therefore, be available.

Often the repeated word is embroidered by
such
:

the admission of specially selected Public Assistance cases, provided that no suitable accommodation is available for such cases (them) in a home …

This is no doubt due to infection by legal English, where this use of
such
is an indispensable device for securing economy of words: in legal writing, where the concern is to make the meaning certain beyond the possibility of error, it is sensible to avoid pronouns lest there should be an ambiguity about their antecedents. The official need not usually be so punctilious.

But using
such
in the way that lawyers use it is not always out of place in ordinary writing. Sometimes it is proper and useful:

One month's notice in writing must be given to terminate this agreement. As no such notice has been received from you …

Here it is important for the writer to show that the second sentence refers to the same sort of notice as the first, and the
such
device is the neatest way of doing it.

(4) It is usually better not to allow a pronoun to precede its principal

If the pronoun comes first the reader may not know what it refers to until arriving at the principal:

I regret that it is not practicable, in view of its size, to provide a list of the agents.

Here, it is true, the reader is only momentarily left guessing what
its
refers to. But even that brief doubt could have been avoided if the sentence had been written:

I regret that it is not practicable to provide a list of the agents as there are too many of them.

(5)
Each other

Grammarians used to say that
each other
is the right expression when only two persons or things are referred to and
one another
when there are more than two. But Fowler, quoted with approval by Jespersen, says of this so-called rule, ‘the differentiation is neither of present utility nor based on historical usage'.

Note
. Gowers proved his own indifference to ‘this so-called rule' in this very chapter, with the sentence: ‘Sometimes the weight of a plural pushes the verb into the wrong number, even though they are not next to one another'. But today's sticklers continue to protest against the usage. To return to the story of the writing on the wall (see
p. 123
), we are told that when the unattached fingers inscribed ‘Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin' on the plaster in King Belshazzar's palace, he was so frightened that his knees ‘smote one against another'. A reader in whose mind this produces the image of a man with at least three knees might choose to side with the sticklers. ~

(6)
Former
and
latter

Do not hesitate to repeat words rather than use
former
or
latter
to avoid doing so. The reader will probably have to look back to see which is which, and will be annoyed at the waste of time. And there is no excuse at all for using
latter
merely to serve as a pronoun, as in:

In these employments we would rest our case for the exclusion of young persons directly on the grounds of the latter's moral welfare. (Their moral welfare.)

Remember that
former
and
latter
can refer to only two things, and if you use them of more than two you may puzzle your reader. If you want to refer otherwise than specifically to the last of more than two things, say
last
or
last-mentioned
, not
latter
.

(7)
I
and
me

The practice of using
I
for
me
in combination with some noun or other pronoun is increasingly popular, e.g. ‘between you and I' or ‘he must let you and I go'. But why this has become so prevalent is not easy to say. Perhaps it comes partly from an excess of zeal in correcting the opposite error. When Mrs Elton said, ‘Neither Mr Suckling nor me had ever any patience with them', and Lydia Bennet, ‘Mrs Forster and me are
such
friends!', they were guilty of a vulgarism that was, no doubt, common in Jane Austen's time, and is far from unknown today. One might suppose that this mistake was corrected by teachers of English in our schools with such ferocity that their pupils are left with the conviction that such combinations as
you and me
are in all circumstances ungrammatical. But that explanation will not quite do. It might account for a popular broadcaster's saying ‘that's four to Margaret and I', but not for why Shakespeare had a character in
The Merchant of Venice
write: ‘all debts are cleared between you and I'.

It is the combination of oneself with someone else that proves fatal. The official who wrote: ‘I trust that it will be convenient to you for my colleague and I to call upon you next Tuesday' would never, if proposing to come alone, have written, ‘I trust that it will be convenient to you for I to call upon you …' A sure and
easy way of avoiding this blunder is to ask oneself what case the personal pronoun would have been in—would it have been
I
or
me
—if it had stood alone. It should remain the same in partnership as it would have been by itself.

The association of someone else with oneself sometimes prompts the use of
myself
where a simple
I
or
me
is all that is needed, e.g. ‘the inspection will be made by Mr Jones and myself'.
Myself
should be used only for emphasis (‘I saw it myself') or as the reflexive form of the personal pronoun (‘I have hurt myself').

Note
. Gowers also wrote under this heading: ‘About the age-long conflict between
it is I
and
it is me
, no more need be said than that, in the present stage of the battle, most people would think “it is I” pedantic in talk and “it is me” improper in writing'. Now, however, most people would find ‘it is I' disquietingly fey in any modern context, written or not. By contrast, the gramatically needless use of
myself
is flourishing. The Deputy Prime Minister, for one, clearly believes that
myself
confers a certain something that
I
and
me
both lack: ‘Myself and the Prime Minister are saying exactly the same thing'; ‘There is not a cigarette paper between myself and the Prime Minister on this issue', ‘But all of us in this government, including the Prime Minister and myself, are not willing to compromise …' etc. ~

(8)
It

This pronoun is especially troublesome because the convenient English idiom of using
it
to anticipate the subject of a sentence tends to produce a plethora of
it
s. A correspondent sends me this example:

It is to be expected that it will be difficult to apply A unless it is accompanied by B, for which reason it is generally preferable to use C in spite of its other disadvantages.

This could be put more effectively and tersely by writing:

C is generally preferable, in spite of its disadvantages, because of the difficulty of applying A without B.

As Cobbett said, ‘Never put an
it
upon paper without thinking well of what you are about. When I see many
its
in a page, I always tremble for the writer'.

(9)
One

(
a
)
One
has a way of intruding in a sentence such as ‘the problem is not an easy one'. ‘The problem is not easy' may be a neater way of saying what you mean.

(
b
) What pronoun should be used with
one
?
His
or
one's
, for example? That depends on what sort of a
one
it is, whether ‘numeral' or ‘impersonal', to use Fowler's labels. For instance:

One hates most of
her
teachers, but another delights in them all (numeral).

One despairs of
one's
weaknesses, yet
one's
virtues can be equally hampering (impersonal).

But any sentence that needs to repeat the impersonal
one
is bound to be inelegant, and you will do better to rewrite it.

(
c
) ‘
One of those who
…'. A common error in sentences of this sort is to use a singular verb instead of a plural, as though the antecedent of
who
were
one
and not
those
—to write, for instance, ‘it is one of the exceptional cases that calls for (instead of
call
for) exceptional treatment'.

(10)
Same

When the Thirty-nine Articles were drawn up in the sixteenth century, it was good English idiom to use
the same
as a pronoun where we should now say
he
or
she
,
him
or
her
,
they
or
them
, or
it
:

The Riches and Goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same; as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast.

This is no good reason for the present pronominal use of
the same
and
same
, which survives robustly in commercialese. It is to be found to some extent in official writing also, especially in letters on business subjects. This use of
same
is now by general consent reprehensible because it gives an air of artificiality and pretentiousness:

As you have omitted to insert your full Christian names, I shall be glad if you will advise me of same. (I shall be glad if you will let me know what they are.)

I enclose the necessary form for agreement and request that you kindly complete and return same at your earliest convenience. (That you will kindly complete and return it.)

The following sentence is curious:

I am informed that it may be decided by X Section that this extra will not be required. I await therefore their decision before taking further action in an attempt to provide.

I like to think that the writer stopped abruptly after
provide
, leaving it objectless, in order to check the urge to write
same
. But
it
might harmlessly have been used here instead.