Plain Words (36 page)

*
On hyphens see also
pp. 255
–
7
.

*
See also
p. 222
.

*
See also
pp. 214
–
5
for the dangers of the throwback comma combined with
which
.

*
The
Guardian
supplies a splendid example of the species of parenthetical, half-submerged ‘sea-serpent' sentence that Mark Twain attempted to warn against: ‘In a highly political family, daughter Rachel also worked for Brown at No. 10 while her older brother Stephen—born in 1970, a few months before his father, only child of a mining family from the closely knit Welsh valleys, became an MP—carved out a post-Cambridge career with the British Council'. This sentence may be boggling in many ways, but it is undoubtedly most boggling for its momentary suggestion of a son born some months before his own father. ~

*
Gowers's preferred system of punctuation has largely fallen out of fashion, though it is still used here and there, for instance in the
Times Literary Supplement
. ~

*
George Eliot uses the ‘I say' device in
Middlemarch
: ‘Brother Jonah, for example (there are such unpleasant people in most families; perhaps even in the highest aristocracy there are Brobdingnag specimens, gigantically in debt and bloated at greater expense)—Brother Jonah, I say, having come down in the world …'. But in modern writing this use of ‘I say' would be likely to invite what Gowers calls elsewhere ‘the prick of ridicule'. ~

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Since Gowers wrote this, the
OED
has gone further, describing
officialese
as ‘formal and typically verbose' and ‘turgid or pedantic'. ~

*
But see
pp. 141
–
2
. ~

*
If all the commas are left out, as they are in
Usage and Abusage
, this passage is made to look even harder to understand than it really is.