Plain Words

by Rebecca Gowers

  (a) Not using a pronoun at all, and writing ‘by what Mr Gladstone had told her’.

  (b) Parenthetic explanation—‘by what he (Mr Gladstone) had told her’.

  (c) The former-latter device—‘by what the latter had told her’.

  (d) By rewriting the sentence—‘The Queen was much upset by what Mr Gladstone had told her, as Mr Ponsonby then informed him’.

  (e) The device Henry Sidgwick called ‘the polite alias’ and Fowler, ‘elegant variation’, writing (say) ‘by what the Prime Minister had told her’, or the ‘G.O.M.’ or ‘the veteran statesman’.

  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 its. 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.

  (11) They for he or she

  It is common in speech, and not unknown in serious writing, to use they or them as the equivalent of a singular pronoun of common sex, as in: ‘Each insisted on their own point of view, and so the marriage came to an end’. This is stigmatised by some authorities as a usage grammatically indefensible. The Judge ought, they would say, to have explained that ‘He insisted on his own point of view and she on hers’. Jespersen says about this that ‘In the third person it would have been very convenient to have a common-sex pronoun, but as a matter of fact English has none’, and that we must therefore use one of three ‘makeshift expedients’. These he exemplifies as follows:

  (a) ‘Nobody prevents you, do they?’ (Thackeray, in Pendennis); ‘God send everyone their heart’s desire’ (Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing).

  A writer of formal English might be wise for the present not to be tempted by the convenience of using they or their as a singular common-sex pronoun, though necessity may eventually force it into the category of wholly accepted idiom. Meanwhile whatever justification there may be for it, there can be no excuse for this practice when only one sex is referred to, as in,

  The female manipulative jobs are of a type to which by no means everyone can adapt themselves with ease.

  There is no reason why herself should not have been written, instead of themselves.

  Note. Since Gowers wrote these remarks, the use of they and them as singular pronouns has become so widespread that his earlier quotation about the theft of a chicken (used to illustrate ambiguous antecedents of pronouns) might strike the modern reader as doubly opaque:

  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.

  Did all the chickens dash over, whereupon a single unlucky bird paid the price, or did a sole, suicidal chicken run to the man with pockets? There is no doubt that by ‘they ran’, the original author of this sentence meant all the hens; but a modern speaker and indeed writer might well say ‘one of them when they ran to him’ meaning a single chicken. It nevertheless remains safer in formal English to treat as incorrect, still, a remark such as, ‘The reader may toss their book aside’. And it is inexcusably slack that Part 10 on the application form for a United Kingdom passport should carry this isolated sentence: ‘If a countersignature is needed, they must fill in this section after the rest of the form has been filled in’. ~

  (b) ‘The reader’s heart (if he or she have any) …’ (Fielding, Tom Jones).

  The Ministry of Labour and National Service have adopted a new device derived from this second expedient. It is ugly, and suitable only for forms:

  Each worker must acknowledge receipt by entering the serial number of the supplementary coupon sheet issued to him/her in column 4 and signing his/her name in column 5.

  Note. Him/her, his/hers and he/she—let alone s/he—have not ceased to be ugly devices. He or she, him or her, etc., may sometimes get a writer out of a hole, but repeated use of this expedient will render the best prose inelegant. ~

  (c) ‘He that hath ears to hear, let him hear’ (Authorized Version).

  Note. About this third expedient, where he is made to stand for anyone and everyone (‘the reader may toss his book aside’), Gowers said no more in 1954 than that it was ‘for the present’ preferable to expedients (a) and (b). He still thought so when he came to revise Fowler in 1965 (using they and them, he said, set his teeth on edge). But he now described using he as a ‘risk’, and removed a sentence from the original book, of 1926, in which Fowler disparaged as a ‘sectional’ interest the efforts of various ‘ladies’ to make English more neutral. Gowers added to his edition of Fowler the following sentence (from a Civil Service document), with a note conceding that the all-embracing his and him were used in it with a ‘boldness surprising’:

  There must be opportunity for the individual boy or girl to go as far as his keenness and ability will take him.

  This sentence may appear particularly ridiculous, but it is logically no more so than ‘the reader will probably throw his book in the bin’. The formula Gowers called a risk decades ago has become much riskier since, and a sentence such as the one above of a boldness surprising is worth rewriting (here, using the plural) to stop it sounding perverse:

  Boys and girls must have the opportunity to go as far as their individual keenness and ability will take them. ~

  (12) What

  What, in the sense of that which, or those which, is an antecedent and relative combined. Because it may be either singular or plural in number, and either subjective or objective in case, it needs careful handling.

  Fowler says that its difficulties of number can be solved by asking the question, ‘What does it stand for?’

  What is needed is more rooms.

  Here Fowler would say that what means the
thing that, and the singular verb is right. On the other hand, in the sentence ‘He no doubt acted with what are in his opinion excellent reasons’, are is right because what is equivalent to reasons that. But this is perhaps over-subtle, and there is no great harm in treating what as a plural in such a construction whenever the complement is plural (‘what is needed are more rooms’). It may be thought to sound more natural.

  Because what may be subjective or objective, writers may find themselves making the same word do duty in both cases, a practice condemned by grammarians. For instance:

  This was what came into his head and he said without thinking.

  What here is being made to do duty both as the subject of came and as the object of said. If we want to be punctiliously grammatical we will write this:

  This is what (subjective) came into his head and what (objective) he said without thinking.

  Preferably, we will say:

  This is what came into his head, and he said it without thinking.

  (13) Which

  The New Yorker, in an issue of 1948, quoted a request sent to the Philadelphia Bulletin:

  My class would appreciate a discussion of the wrong use of which in sentences like ‘He wrecked the car which was due to his carelessness’.

  The Bulletin’s reply, also quoted by the New Yorker, was:

  The fault lies in using which to refer to the statement ‘He wrecked the car’. When which follows a noun it refers to that noun as its antecedent. Therefore in the foregoing sentence it is stated that the car was due to his carelessness, which is nonsense.

  What, the New Yorker wanted to know, was nonsense here? Carelessness? Which shows how dangerous it is to dogmatise about the use of which with an antecedent consisting not of a single word but of a phrase. Punch has provided an illustration of the same danger (from a novel):