I was taught that between applies only to two things, and among should be used for more than two – a rare example of Mrs Birtles, my first grammar teacher, getting it wrong. Not Standard English, it's true, but no native English speaker is likely to misunderstand, any more than when Jane Austen produced the eloquent double negative "there was none too poor or remote not to feel an interest". Chaucer used a triple – "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde" – and Ian Dury gave us: "Just 'cos I ain't never 'ad, no, nothing worth having, never ever, never ever." When Mick Jagger first sang "I can't get no satisfaction", it was not uncommon to hear the older generation witter on like this: "He says he can't get no satisfaction, which logically means he can get some satisfaction."īut while a double negative may make a positive when you multiply minus three by minus two, language doesn't work in such a logical way: multiple negatives add emphasis. So be it – if you want to sound like a pirate. The journalist Simon Heffer is a fan of the subjunctive, recommending such usages as "if I be wrong, I shall be defeated". Many writers scatter "weres" about as if "was" were – or, indeed, was – going out of fashion. Misusing the subjunctive is worse than not using it at all. It's not true, however, that David and Don Was came under pressure from language purists to change the name of their band to Were (Not Was). The subjunctive is more common in American than British English, often in formal or poetic contexts – in the song If I Were a Rich Man, for example. The writer Somerset Maugham, who in 1949 announced "the subjunctive mood is in its death throes", might be surprised to see my son Freddie's bookshelf, which contains If I Were a Pig … (Jellycat Books, 2008). You can spot it in the third person singular of the present tense (resign instead of resigns) and in the forms be and were of the verb to be: if she were honest, she would quit. The subjunctive is a verb form (technically, "mood") expressing hypothesis, typically to indicate that something is being demanded, proposed, imagined, or insisted: "he demanded that she resign", and so on. As HW Fowler observed: "The power of saying 'people worth talking to' instead of 'people with whom it is worth while to talk' is not one to be lightly surrendered."ģ Don't get in a bad mood over the subjunctive Like not splitting the infinitive, this became a "rule" when taught by grammarians influenced by Latin. In the 17th century, John Dryden, deciding that ending a sentence with a preposition was "not elegant" because you couldn't do it in Latin, set about ruining some of his best prose by rewriting it so that "the end he aimed at" became "the end at which he aimed", and so on. They are followed by an object: from me to you. Prepositions relate one word or phrase to another, typically to express place (to the office, in the net) or time (before the flood, after the goldrush). This "rule" is not just half-baked: it's fully baked, with a fried egg and slice of pineapple on top. Adverbs should go where they sound most natural, often immediately after the to: to boldly go, to personally guarantee. Stubbornly to resist splitting infinitives can sound awkward or, worse, ambiguous: "He offered personally to guarantee the loan that the Clintons needed to buy their house" makes it unclear whether the offer, or the guarantee, was personal.
Geoffrey K Pullum, a scarily erudite linguistics professor – and, unless this is an internet hoax, keyboard player in the 1960s with Geno Washington & the Ram Jam Band – calls them "zombie rules: though dead, they shamble mindlessly on … " And none more so than the one that says the particle to and the infinitive form of the verb should not be separated, as in Star Trek's eloquent mission statement "to boldly go where no man has gone before".
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