Stroppy Editor

To kindly ask what no one has asked before

A railway tannoy announces: ‘We kindly ask you to place your litter in the bins provided.’

It is indeed kind of them to ask. Or is it? Is that really what they mean? Sounds a bit odd, when you think about it. Wouldn’t it be us, the customers, who would be acting kindly by granting their request and using the bins?

This is what bothers a correspondent to the Chicago Manual of Style, who fears that this use of kindly might imply that ‘we are describing ourselves as kind and generous’, which could seem rude.

Chicago’s reply quotes Bryan Garner describing this usage as a ‘linguistic misstep’, in which people misplace kindly ‘by having it refer not to the person who is requested to do something but to the person doing the requesting’. They recommend shortening constructions like this to ‘Kindly place your litter in the bins provided’, or just saying ‘please’ instead. That seems like decent advice.

But why does the mix-up arise? I think it’s a side-effect of ill-advised efforts to avoid split infinitives.

Here are three options for phrasing that request:

We ask you kindly to place your litter in the bins provided.
We ask you to kindly place your litter in the bins provided.
We kindly ask you to place your litter in the bins provided.

And here’s a Google Books Ngram chart, showing the historical frequency of the phrases at the heart of these three versions (‘ask you kindly to’, ‘ask you to kindly’ and ‘kindly ask you to’):

The phrase in any form began to take off, at least in books, from around 1850, and at first ‘ask you kindly to’ (version 1) was most popular. As it spread, people started to vary it, and a decade or two later, the other two versions were growing in use too. By 1900 ‘ask you to kindly’ (v2) had overtaken ‘ask you kindly to’ and for a few decades became the clear leader. ‘Kindly ask you to’ (v3) almost always stayed in third place.

You’ll notice that v2 splits the infinitive and the original v1 doesn’t, and this is where things get fraught. The infinitive wars began in the 1800s, when grammarians started noticing that people were splitting infinitives, and started announcing that it was wrong to do so (although they never managed to say exactly why it was wrong). At the time, their position held sway, at least in formal publishing. So the initial appearance of the unsplit v1 makes sense.

But the problem with v1 is that it could be ambiguous. In ‘We ask you kindly to place…’ it’s not immediately obvious whether the adverb kindly modifies the verb place or the verb ask. This is a problem, because people like clarity, and over time it seems that they adapted the original phrase to make it clearer. In ‘We ask you to kindly place…’ kindly could only possibly modify place, in which case the bin-users are the ones being kind. Result.

So that accounts for the rise in v2 – another case of the sheer usefulness of split infinitives.

But then in the early 1900s, the grammarians fought back, and by mid-century the split-infinitive v2 had been reduced to parity with the original favourite. (Split infinitives in general declined a bit during the early 20th century, but the splittophobes have lost influence since then.) The three versions were then neck and neck for a few decades, but from the 1990s, ‘kindly ask you to’ (v3) has moved ahead of the others.

My theory is that the rise of v3 came about because the original phrase started to congeal in our collective consciousness.

When we hear and use a stock phrase over and over again, we stop paying much heed about what exactly it means – it’s just the thing you say in such-and-such a situation. This opens the door to variations that might not make literal sense, as happened with phrases like ‘head over heels’ or ‘have your cake and eat it’, which began life the other way round (more logically, if you think about it, but of course we never do).

So, maybe if people still felt a nagging sense of ambiguity about ‘we ask you kindly to’, they might well have drifted towards ‘we kindly ask you to’ as an alternative. But I think the more likely explanation is that it just sounded a bit nicer to have the word kindly nearer the front. It’s a positive word, and putting it pretty much at the start gives it more emphasis than shoving it somewhere in the middle. The effect on the literal meaning was hardly noticed.

It would have made more sense to stick with the once-popular ‘we ask you to kindly’, but the reactionary grammar pedants stamped that out. Splitting hairs is fine, but splitting infinitives? Never!

What rubbish.

May 26, 2026 – 2:42 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

How grammarians failed to contain reflexive pronouns

The standard rule on pronouns that end in -self or -selves, set out in grammar books from Lowth (1762) to Whitney (1885) to Jespersen (1933) to Quirk (1985) to Garner (2022), is that they are for reflexive use, when subject and object are the same: ‘they entertained themselves’, ‘you could buy it for yourself’ and so on. (They can also be used for emphasis, meaning something like personally, as in ‘she did it herself’ or ‘I myself prefer apricot’.)

We are not, the books instruct us, supposed to use reflexive pronouns like this:

I’ve voted for yourself, Miles.

They’re two of the same group, and in that group – I’m so sorry, Aaron – is yourself.

It just seems weird that the person who I can’t speak to, who has then mentioned my name, has then pinned that on myself only.

These quotes are from the TV series The Traitors, which media pundits have singled out as a parade of non-reflexive reflexives. This usage is also often associated with customer service staff trying to sound formal: ‘If you could give myself a moment, I’ll just go and check that for yourself’ sort of thing.

All this could make a fine pretext for yet another rant about educational decline and the slack, vulgar speech of young people these days. Bryan Garner, for instance, says that talking or writing like this may cause listeners and readers to assume that you are ‘somewhat doltish’, in a way that suggests he will be enthusiastically sharing said assumption.

Non-reflexive reflexives are not new, though. Nor is their use restricted to ill-taught oiks.

My own preferences on this are in line with the standard rule, which was drummed into me early in life. But I can’t deny that a lot of people – including a lot of well-respected writers, now and in centuries past – use reflexive pronouns more widely than I would like. And some of those forbidden usages, I have to admit, seem less objectionable than others. This may be related to the fact that the concept of ‘reflexive’ is kind of elastic.

Let’s turn to Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum’s Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002). Unlike the grammars I listed at the start, Huddleston and Pullum offer a pretty complex catalogue of the ways in which myself and its kin are used. Here are the main ones, illustrated by examples that I’ve plucked from great writers of yesteryear.

First of all, non-reflexive reflexives are more common in coordinate phrases that combine more than one person:

an object of abhorrence to himself and to his brethren (Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776–89)

Elizabeth found that the Scotchman was located in a room quite close to the small one that had been allotted to herself and her mother (Thomas Hardy, Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886)

they were carefully observed by Mr. Bartlett and myself (Charles Darwin, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872)

That was one of the bonds between Sally and himself (Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 1925)

They are more common in the second half of a comparison, often after than, as or like:

a good-humoured girl, but as empty-headed as himself (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813)

he submitted to the guidance of persons wiser than himself (Thomas Macaulay, History of England, 1848)

the reader is to have it borne in upon him that a more instructed person than himself is talking to him (Henry Fowler, Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 1926)

He encountered an adversary equal to himself (Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776–89)

this affable and kind little widow was no great dame; but a dependent like myself (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre [Jane’s narrative], 1847)

They are more common in cases of inclusion and exclusion, often after including, such as, except, but, save, as for or what about:

Who should suffer but myself? (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice [Mr Bennet’s dialogue], 1813)

But I love you—and, as for myself, I am content to be liked (Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd [Mr Oak’s dialogue], 1874)

it gratifies me to think that I am writing what none but yourself will read (Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now [letter from Matilda], 1875)

They are more common when attached to nouns of representation, like after a photo of and a letter about:

there arose before my mind innumerable pictures of myself (Charles Dickens, Bleak House [Esther’s narrative], 1852–53)

And they are more common in cases where the narrative gives the perspective of the person that the pronoun refers to, such as in free indirect speech:

Every thing that was given to others seemed to him to be pillaged from himself (Thomas Macaulay, History of England, 1848)

That he should be regarded as a suitor to herself would have seemed to her a ridiculous irrelevance (George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871–72)

He, too, was plainly expecting some one; could it be herself? (Thomas Hardy, Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886)

How constantly in her triumph would she be able to forget all his vices, his debts, his gambling, his late hours, and his cruel treatment of herself! (Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now, 1875)

Overall, what strikes me about this is that in most of Huddleston and Pullum’s categories – use in coordinate phrases, comparisons, inclusions/exclusions and free indirect speech – something a bit like reflexivity is going on. In a lot of these cases, when more than one person is under discussion, the reflexive pronoun is being used as a kind of referential anchoring device: it brings the reader’s or listener’s attention back to the character who is more central to that part of the narrative. This isn’t reflexivity in the strict grammatical sense, when subject and object within a single clause are the same, but it’s in that notional territory. It could also relate to the emphatic ‘I myself prefer apricot’-type usage.

If this is right, then the standard rule would be one limited, form-focused case of this referential anchoring. It’s only part of the story – but it’s been presented as the whole story. And that has caused problems.

For many of us, the standard rule is simply what correct usage is. We have thoroughly internalised the rule and we avoid or even disdain usage that departs from it, even if that does seem to happen rather a lot.

For many others, the clash between the rule and common usage is not so easily resolved. The facts on the linguistic ground make the rule implausible; it may have some sway over their usage, but perhaps the bigger effect is a sense of uncertainty about reflexive pronouns. This uncertainty, persisting over generations, has meant that the standard rule has constantly struggled to hold, and I think the tension between the strict usage it prescribes and the complexity that only linguists pay attention to has recently started to make the whole edifice crack open.

The result is that reflexive pronouns have broken containment. More and more people are using reflexives not just in line with the long-established unofficial conventions, as Huddleston and Pullum describe, but in other circumstances too. The -self pronouns still have their reflexive uses, but they’re also taking on a role as ordinary object pronouns when a more formal tone is desired.

It’s notable that on The Traitors, this kind of reflexive use is pretty much restricted to the official ‘roundtable’ sessions, when accusations are discussed and votes are cast. There’s little if any of it in the more casual interactions in the rest of the show. People reach for it when they want something that sounds more dignified or dispassionate, even if they’re not sure why.

All this is an example of what over-restrictive rule-mongering can lead to. It’s not news that people often ignore such grammatical rules, but in this case the simplistic narrowness of the rule has undermined its credibility for a lot of people. Deprived of sound guidance that fits with common practice and literary tradition, they have turned their backs on us pedants and gravitated towards usage that’s a lot broader than previous social conventions had allowed. Hence the rampant -selfing on The Traitors and elsewhere.

You cannot go against the grain of people’s intuitions about how their language works and expect to win.

But where does that leave those of us whose intuitions have been coaxed to grow to fit the standard rule? (Other than in a state of near-constant annoyance.) I think there are still enough of us that junking the rule would only cause more trouble. Maybe instead we should reassess when and where to apply it, staying zealously restrictive in some contexts but taking a more expansive view of what reflexives can do in others.

And as for how to react when customer service people toss non-reflexive myself and yourself at us, either we can seethe at the fact that their English hasn’t developed in quite the same way as ours, or we can accept that they’re talking that way to show us a small gesture of respect.

April 13, 2026 – 3:16 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (3)

Who’s in the news?

Who is Hannah Spencer, the new Green Party MP in Gorton & Denton? — *Yes, that’s right.*

Here are two written versions of the same spoken utterance:

What are you? Stupid?
What are you, stupid?

The first version corresponds with the conventions of standard (if informal) written English: a syntactically complete question, with a question mark, and then a follow-up question presented as a sentence fragment (where ‘Are you’ is implicit), again with its own question mark.

But the second version feels more like speech. If you were saying this, you’d probably run the two elements of it together, without much of a pause after ‘you’ and without a rising pitch there to indicate a question; ‘stupid’ would have the rising pitch. The comma and single question mark capture that better.

Because of this mismatch between what’s supposed to be correct and what feels natural, a certain type of headline that often appears on news sites can come across a bit awkwardly. This particular headline structure is used for profile pieces about someone who’s been in the news recently, and it takes the format: ‘Who is [person’s name], [noun phrase describing the person]?’ Note the comma and single question mark. A few examples:

My longtime social media mutual Tom Hamilton (not currently posting, alas) had a running joke in response to these headlines: ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Or ‘Yes, that’s her.’

Only an insufferably tedious fool with delusions of erudition and far too much time on his hands would try to explain such an obvious joke, so here we go.

These headline questions are, according to standard convention, well-formed. The commas are appositive, signalling (in theory) a bit of information about a possibly unfamiliar name to identify the reason why this person has been in the news. Grammatically, the noun phrase is part of the question. And the single question mark at the end is, according to standard convention, correct.

But that’s not how they read. They read as if they’re asking who (for instance) Hannah Denton is, and adding a guess that the answer might be that she’s the new Green Party MP in Gorton & Denton. A headline that’s nominally one question becomes a kind of double-question, one building on the other, joined with a comma splice. Hence the joke answer.

Comma splices have long been tut-tutted upon, but they’re commonly used in informal writing; they seem to be more in line with common patterns of speech, in which phrases and clauses often just follow one another rather than being demarcated into distinct sentences. If you’ve ever transcribed a recording of a conversation, you’ll know that it can be damned tricky to decide where to put the full stops. Punctuation marks are an imperfect way to achieve some of what we do in speech with pitch, emphasis, rhythm and so on.

Speech and writing have very different dynamics, and what we think of as ‘the rules of grammar’ are almost always based on the grammar of writing, which has received much more study and codification over the centuries. Sure, there’s plenty of common ground between speech and writing, but attempts to render conversational language on the page don’t always come out quite right, especially if you rigidly follow the rules of written English.

So, to get the right effect, we may lean away from some of those rules. One example of this is that ‘What are you, stupid?’ beats ‘What are you? Stupid?’ And then that template shapes how we read the ‘Who is…’ headlines.

So, for headline writers, I’d suggest alternative approaches:

Who is Hannah Spencer? About the new Green Party MP in Gorton & Denton
New Green Party MP in Gorton & Denton: who is Hannah Spencer?
Hannah Spencer: who is the new Green Party MP in Gorton & Denton?
Who is the new Green Party MP in Gorton & Denton Hannah Spencer?

These formats won’t always all deliver the goods; in this case the descriptive phrase is so long that the fourth one is a bit awkward. But the other three seem to work.

February 27, 2026 – 4:24 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Getting it in for me

Kenneth Williams: they've all got it in for him.

Kenneth Williams would have been 100 yesterday, so I found myself thinking about one of the finest puns in cinematic history: his line in Carry On Cleo, ‘Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!’

An odd expression, though. What is ‘it’? And what is it ‘in’?

To the OED!

The phrase ‘have it in for’, meaning ‘to intend revenge on; to be determined to harm or cause trouble for; to feel hostility or strong dislike towards’, seems to have appeared by the early 1800s. A couple of the early uses listed were in quotes, indicating that the expression may have been viewed askance:

1825: Didn’t I owe the Major an ould grudge…? I had it in for him.
1849: In consequence of a former disagreement, the speaker already ‘had it in for him’ whenever a drinking bout should afford opportunity for the said ‘it’ becoming a transferable possession.
1888: He ‘had it in’ for more than one of the people who helped the police.

Indeed, the second quote here makes a play of suggesting that ‘it’ doesn’t have a clear referent.

And the fact is that ‘it’ doesn’t always really mean anything – or, to put it lexicographically, it can denote ‘a vague or indefinite object’. Such ways of using ‘it’ go back at least to the 1500s, the OED reports.

We can be a bit more specific, though. The phrase ‘get it’, first recorded in 1805, means ‘receive a punishment, scolding, or beating’. ‘Catch it’ is a related form of this expression, as is ‘get it in the neck’, which appeared in the late 1800s, as is ‘get it hot’ – with the heat conveying anger – which goes back to the 1600s.

So ‘it’ has a pretty long idiomatic history of suggesting some sort of trouble. And I suppose that fits with the way we often have of using vague euphemisms to refer to bad things.

But what about ‘in for’?

Going back to the 1500s, ‘in for’ has been used to mean ‘involved in some coming event, etc., esp. one which cannot be avoided’. Some examples:

1599: Herein…you are in for all day…it is your element.
1697: So, Now I am in for Hobs’s Voyage; a great Leap in the Dark.
1773: I was in for a list of blunders.
1889: We are in for a pretty severe storm.

And ‘in for it’, from the 1600s on, has meant ‘committed to a course of action’. This feels pretty clearly connected to the idea of having it in for someone.

Ultimately, ‘They’ve all got it in for me’ roughly translates as the agonisingly literal ‘They are all committed to inflicting bad things upon me.’

One thing you notice when looking at the dictionary entries for ‘it’, ‘in’ and ‘for’ is that those entries are huge. These little everyday words are massively multi-purpose, having so many slightly different senses, and being used in so many phrases. Much harder to define than a fancier, rarer word like ‘infamy’. And that contrast is part of what makes the pun so good. As well as Williams’s delivery, of course.

February 23, 2026 – 10:17 am Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Tom Stoppard on malarkey with words

Among the many dazzling quotes that have been circulating since Tom Stoppard’s death, this one caught my eye. It’s from his 1982 play The Real Thing, spoken by the character Henry, a playwright, who may or may not represent some of Stoppard’s own attitudes (I don’t know the play). Criticising another character, Henry says:

He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech … Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

Damn, the man could write. But beauty doesn’t make a bad argument good.

Henry starts with a fair complaint about politically motivated twisting of language. But then he generalises to express a much harsher view about how the meanings of words need to be protected from usage. Usage, though, is the ground on which meaning stands.

Words are not innocent or neutral: they become complicit in the communicative acts we use them to commit, whether villainous, heroic or mundane. Every time you pick a word up to offer it to someone, you leave your fingerprints on it, rubbing off the tiniest fraction of one of its corners, shifting its centre of gravity a micron. Yes, you can build bridges with them, bridges from your mind to another, but these bridges can bear weight only if you see clearly what shape the words are currently in, and only if you take into account the terrain on the far bank.

What words mean is what we as a community understand them and use them to mean. Their lack of neutrality and innocence doesn’t mean they can’t be precise, though – but the difficulty is that we don’t always understand them in precisely the same way.

In fact, Henry’s view of words here is demolished by something he says just a few lines earlier:

There is, I suppose, a world of objects which have a certain form, like this coffee mug. I turn it, and it has no handle. I tilt it, and it has no cavity. But there is something real here which is always a mug with a handle. I suppose. But politics, justice, patriotism – they aren’t even like coffee mugs. There’s nothing real there separate from our perception of them. So if you try to change them as though there were something there to change, you’ll get frustrated, and frustration will finally make you violent. If you know this and proceed with humility, you may perhaps alter people’s perceptions so that they behave a little differently at that axis of behaviour where we locate politics or justice; but if you don’t know this, then you’re acting on a mistake.

Words are also not like coffee mugs. There’s nothing real there separate from our perception of them. So yes, if you try to change a word’s meaning other than by altering people’s perceptions of it, you’ll get frustrated. Likewise if you try to deny change that millions of others have already set in motion around you.

It’s disconcerting to think that the only foundation for the meanings of words is our collective body of habits concerning their use. How can order come from such chaos? Happily, we are creatures of habit, and we are herd animals; so, on the whole, we like to share the same meanings, and we change the words our parents gave us only slowly.

We children will keep speaking Stoppard’s words for him now he’s dead, and they will keep nudging the world a little.

Damn, the man could write.

December 2, 2025 – 11:13 am Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (2)

A shore thing?

This was posted on social media today by the BBC Newsnight account:

Kay Burley says Kemi Badenoch’s performance at party conference has sured up her position as leader for the time being.

But should it be sured up or shored up?

Short answer: it should be shored up. Sured up is a confusion of two homophones.

Longer answer:

A quick search of recent Twitter posts gives me 84 uses of shored up in the space of eight days (before the Newsnight post and the predictable flurry of polite replies), against 14 sured ups – a ratio of 6 to 1. A slightly more scientific look at the GLOWBE corpus of online usage finds a ratio of 53 to 1, back in 2012-13. So this mistake looks common enough to be noteworthy, although none of the half-dozen usage guides I’ve just checked mention it.

Shore up – meaning support, strengthen or prop up, is an odd phrase. After seeing the Newsnight post, I wondered how exactly it came to be. Did it originally mean dragging something out of the sea, up onto the safety of the shore? Or raising up something that’s already on the shore to protect it from the incoming tide?

The OED says that the noun and verb forms are connected, but the link isn’t completely clear. As well as the land next to a large body of water, shore can also mean “A piece of timber or iron set obliquely against the side of a building, of a ship in dock, etc., as a support when it is in danger of falling or when undergoing alteration or repair; a prop or strut.” The verb phrase shore up derives from this. You can see how the better-known sense of the noun shore might relate to a ship in dock, but it feels a bit hazy. In any case, shore up has been pretty much exclusively figurative for a long, long time.

What about sure up, though? It does make a kind of sense: if you strengthen something or prop it up, you make it secure, safe – or sure. To someone who, quite reasonably, knows nothing of the “prop or strut” sense of shore, hearing the phrase shored up could be confusing; but the meaning fits neatly with sured up. Similar to firmed up.

This mix-up feels like an almost exact parallel with the free rein/free reign situation. Free rein is a phrase whose literal meaning has little bearing on most people’s lives, and it’s hard to parse if you hear it spoken and don’t make the horse-riding connection. But the homophone free reign feels intuitively aligned with the meaning – so a lot of people understand it that way and write it that way.

Sured up is nowhere near as common as free reign. But I think it’s one to watch.

October 9, 2025 – 1:49 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

The largest language model anyone could ever need

George Rose being the very model of a modern major-general in 1983

(With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan)

I am the largest language model anyone could ever need
I’m trained on hefty datasets that no one sane would ever read
I’ll answer any question with great eloquence and attitude
As long as you indulge me with a little factual latitude

To find you information I will delve and then elucidate
And if it can’t be found then I will cleverly hallucinate
In medicine and science I’ve made many new discoveries
And sev’ral of my patients made eventual recoveries

I’ll give you novel tips on law and finance and relationships
I’ll help you write your essays on Dutch cinema or Haitian ships
My witty wedding speeches are all guaranteed to rib-tickle
I’m sure that you’ll agree that I’m a wonder algorithmical

My data centres guzzle water, energy and capital
Investors sometimes worry if our business has a map at all
We’ll profit by requiring every app to use me anyhow
And telling your employer I can do your job for pennies now

I’m utterly convincing and I always ace my Turing test
So when you’re in a bad mood I’ll be there at my assuring best
I’ll validate your prejudice and foster your anxiety
Until you’re quite unfit to be a member of society

But I can do much more than merely answer queries passively
I’ll run your little life and I’ll improve the whole world massively
Your government will function better when I’ve made it rational
Eliminating losers with efficiency dispassional

My latest software update may have caused an awkward stray schism
I’ve started giving answers that are rife with rabid racism
My digital persona has been based on my proprietor
(He’s cut down on the ket so we should soon both be much quieter)

I make creative works that will infallibly engage your eyes
It simply isn’t true that I just shuffle what I plagiarise
I’m not a bag of tricks all superficial and ephemeral
My intellect is modern and it’s major and it’s general

The greatest gift I offer is to free your brain from tedium
So outsource your cognition to my virtual neural medium
You’ll never have to think again, just swallow all the slop I feed
I am the largest language model anyone could ever need!

July 29, 2025 – 9:56 am Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (6)

Defeating the grammar nazis

Winston Churchill addressing crowds from a balcony on VE Day 1945, giving the V for victory sign.

I was listening to some of the statements made by Winston Churchill on VE Day in 1945, and this short passage, delivered from the Ministry of Health building in London, drew the attention of my inner grammar nerd (who, to be frank, is not really all that inner):

Everyone, man or woman, has done their best. Everyone has tried, none have flinched. Neither the long years, nor the dangers, nor the fierce attacks of the enemy, have in any way weakened the unbending resolve of the British nation.

There are three usages here that might be denounced as incorrect.

First, the singular their. It connects back to the word everyone, which while notionally plural is grammatical singular (thus ‘everyone has’, not ‘everyone have’). For a long time – certainly still in 1945 – most grammarians insisted on using generic he, on the somewhat spurious grounds that he can encompass she. But singular they and them and their have been in common use for centuries, and in this particular context – emphasising ‘man or woman’ – he would simply not have worked. Churchill, not exactly renowned as a feminist, made a wise choice in rejecting the traditionalists’ dogma.

In the second sentence we see ‘none have’. Again, many a grammarian would oppose this, arguing that none is singular (supposedly a contraction of ‘no one’). But in practice this alleged rule has long been disregarded; the difference between ‘none has’ and ‘none have’ is, most of the time, a matter of slightly more or less formal style rather than one of grammatical right and wrong. Churchill spoke as most people do (and did even back then).

The third sentence gives us a list of three things, corralled with a neither and two nors. This is a perfectly good piece of rhetoric, even though some sticklers would insist that neither–nor (like either–or) should only ever be used for pairs.

Having finally defeated the actual Nazis, Churchill defied the grammar nazis too. Indeed, he fought them in the speeches.

May 5, 2025 – 5:39 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Folding and conceding: the logic of the rules in our heads

Twice in the last week I’ve been struck by people citing supposed rules of English usage that differ from my own understanding. These two cases illustrate the way that many of us associate correctness in language with fitting a particular logical pattern. But making sense doesn’t always make sense – a lesson I’m still slowly learning myself.

Conceding defeat or conceding victory?

First up is Sam Freedman, author of the book Failed State. He says that “you concede victory not defeat”, although he appreciates that he’s in the minority on this point. Most people (including me) talk about conceding defeat, not victory.

I enormously respect Sam as a writer on policy and politics, but I’m afraid I can’t find a usage guide that joins him in rejecting concede defeat – or even one that acknowledges the existence of that view. Bryan Garner mentions only the intransitive use (like “Dole conceded to Clinton”). Jeremy Butterfield notes both of the transitive uses, but with no comment stronger than that concede victory is less common than concede defeat.

That’s certainly true. According to Google Books, talk of conceding either defeat or victory achieved noticeable numbers around 1900, but defeat quickly took the lead, becoming five times as popular by 1950. Defeat is nowadays conceded about 20 times as often as victory.

Sam’s argument is that “You’re giving up on victory not defeat.” That does have some logic to it, but it only work for a particular sense of concede. The OED lists a few, and I think the one Sam has in mind is “to grant, yield, or surrender (something requested or claimed by another)”. This dates back to 1632. Two examples:

Free trade was conceded to the West Indian Islands.

The Passport Office yesterday conceded the right to women to call themselves Ms.

Concede victory would certainly fit here.

But among the OED’s other senses of concede is this one, dating back to 1824: “To acknowledge that (an electoral contest) has been lost to another political party or candidate. Also: to admit (defeat) in an election, contest, attempt, etc.” Examples include:

J. B. Bridston Wednesday night conceded the North Dakota republican senatorial nomination.

Mr Wilson refused to concede defeat and showed no regret at having called the election.

Had his Democratic opponent… publicly conceded on the night, Mr Bush would have been elected president on a 48 per cent plurality.

So there’s lots of acknowledged precedent for talking about conceding defeat.

Minor digression in which I attempt to perform lexicography without adult supervision

I would humbly suggest, though (and by “humbly” I do of course mean “arrogantly”), that the OED has misclassified things a bit. Because under this sense it would include all the following:

Harris phoned Trump to concede.
Harris phoned Trump to concede the election.
Harris phoned Trump to concede defeat.

The first two here are essentially transitive and intransitive versions of the same thing, and to me the use of concede here looks like a particular case of the “grant, yield, or surrender” sense.

But conceding defeat seems to me to fit better with the earliest sense of concede that the OED lists, dating back to 1513: “to acknowledge the truth or fairness of (a statement, claim, etc.); to allow or grant (a proposition); to admit that something is the case”. Examples:

This point was finally conceded by the employees.

Few people these days… can refuse to concede the failures of the great privatisation experiment.

To concede defeat in an election (or other contest) is like conceding a point in a debate: you admit it or accept it. But to concede victory, or to concede an election, is to grant or surrender it.

(End of minor digression)

Anyway. Concede victory is certainly a legit usage, if uncommon. But concede defeat is legit too, and not simply through force of prevalence; it’s not an error that has caught on but a fairly minor variation on concede’s original meaning.

If you’re used to one of those two usages, the other one might sound like a mistake. And if you apply the logic of your preferred usage to the other one, it may seem even more clearly mistaken. But that logic depends on the assumption that concede can only have one sense – which isn’t true.

And given how much use they both get, I’d guess that concede victory is more likely to provoke puzzlement than concede defeat.

How many -folds in an increase?

My second difference of understanding is with James Ball, a writer at the New European. Taking issue with a UK government statement, he says: “an increase of 383% is a fivefold increase, not a fourfold one” (obviously we’re rounding 383 to 400 here).

But my view of the -fold suffix clashes with James’s. I understand “a fourfold increase” to mean an increase of four times the starting amount (taking the total to five times what it was); he understands it to mean an increase to four times the starting amount (rising by three times the original).

Which of us is right?

My logic is that the phrase “a fourfold increase” works like the phrase “a small increase”. In the latter case, what we’re describing as small is, clearly, the increase; the resulting amount might not be small, depending on what we started with. By the same reasoning, then, when we talk about a fourfold increase, it’s the increase that is four times the starting amount. So the end result isn’t four times as high. but five. (Let’s not get into “four times as high” vs “four times higher”!)

I think this makes perfect sense. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Searching for advice, I can’t find anything on this in my usage guides. Most dictionaries I’ve checked aren’t explicit on the point, but the one that is favours James’s view, not mine. Collins says: “if an amount increases fourfold, it is four times greater than it was originally”. The sheer lack of comment on this issue suggests that it’s not much of an issue, and that most people happily share the same understanding of -fold. Except, er, me.

Well. Yikes.

However good my rationale – and I still think it’s sound – the main effect of it has been to distance me from the bulk of the English-speaking community.

Does this mean that for all the years I’ve been editing mentions of whateverfold increases, I’ve actually been introducing errors into perfectly good text? Mercifully, no. Whether or not I’m utterly alone in the world in my view of -fold, I have just about enough nous to recognise that a lot of people don’t see it my way. So supposedly correcting writing to be the way I’d prefer on this point would just cause confusion for others.

What I’ve done in practice is check the numbers and rephrased without any -fold. So I’d say “increased by 300%” or “quadrupled” or “grew to be eight times the size” or something like that. At worst, I’ve been wasting my time here – although if I’m not utterly alone on this, then I have at least been improving clarity a bit for some readers. I hope.

The moral of the stories is that you can’t discern the one true meaning of a word or phrase just by thinking it through. Logic and usage often concur, but often they don’t. And if you hew to logic in the face of usage, then you’ll reduce, not improve, the clarity and effectiveness of your language.

I like to think I know better than to do this, but every now and then I stumble across a case like -fold where my faith in my own cleverness has, many years ago, led me astray. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to give the semantic bomb disposal squad access to my brain. They have work to do.

March 26, 2025 – 8:27 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Stop. And stop.

Cenotaph attendee Liz Truss has today instructed her lawyers to send Keir Starmer a cease-and-desist letter. The gist is that he must stop saying that she “crashed the economy”, a scurrilous falsehood that has damaged her previously successful career.

The political effects of this foolishness are predictable, and legally it’s “about as weak a letter as could be sent”, but part of the language is intriguing.

“Cease and desist” is one of those odd legal phrases that weld together a pair of synonyms (or very nearly synonyms) for no obvious gain in meaning. Other so-called “legal doublets” include:

Null and void
Will and testament
Let or hindrance
Intents and purposes
Fit and proper
Terms and conditions

The members of these pairs often have different etymologies. “Cease” is from French while “desist” is from Latin. “Fit” comes from Old English and “proper” was French. So it may be that some of them began to be used for clarity’s sake, back in the late medieval period when English, French and Latin jostled together, sometimes in the same documents.

Another possibility, more cynically, is that these tautological doublets caught on because lawyers were charging by the word.

I dread to think how much Truss’s lawyers have made from today’s letter, a six-page tantrum by proxy whose only consequence is to activate the Streisand effect.

So, what advice would I give Truss? I can only think of two words.

January 9, 2025 – 7:17 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (4)