RSS

Contact us

Monday 13 October 2008

Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth on Language

Although I do not smoke, I find my sympathies drawn more and more to persecuted smokers. Outside Victoria station an aggressive notice says: ‘It is against the law to smoke in these premises including under this canopy.’ Never mind that the canopy, really a porte-cochère, is open to the elements, with a broken roof-pane that lets rain pelt the taxi queue, nor that the welcome Sir Nigel Gresley regularly enters the train shed smoking powerfully. What grates is to be bossed about in bad grammar.

Including is a participial adjective. In neither of the ways that it is used can it qualify an adverbial phrase such as ‘under this canopy’. It would be correct to say ‘under canopies, including this one’. It would be correct to say ‘including this canopy, there are eight roofs under which smoking is illegal’. The latter construction is described by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a kind of active of the passive absolute clause’. The passive absolute would be ‘canopies being included’; the active form gives a meaning: ‘if we/one/you include canopies’.

It is not necessary for bureaucrats of the railway authorities to ponder the syntactic role of including. All they need do is consult a competent speaker of English. And yet, even as I write those words, I wonder if this syntactic structure is not slipping. Evidence of such slippage comes from the increasing replacement of as with like.

Like is an adjective, just as including is. I admit that it may have sounded hypercorrect of Elvis Presley to sing ‘Now and then there’s a fool such as I.’ One might expect him to have sung: ‘fool like me’ (even though the lyrics confirm that he is exemplifying: ‘such as I am over you’). That song was first published in 1952. In 1960, that other King, Kingsley Amis, published Take a Girl Like You. I suppose that means ‘a girl of your kind’ not ‘a girl such as you’. I don’t mind much either way, for delinquency has spread much further.

Like and unlike are now constantly used to govern adverbial phrases: ‘unlike before the war, servants are rare’; ‘don’t smoke indoors, like under this canopy’. Worse, it is used to introduce clauses: ‘he was always hanging round, like he wanted to be invited to dinner’. Here the normal conjunctive would be as if, for like, cannot function successfully as a conjunction.

There are other misuses of like that annoy, but none has so deeply infiltrated the prose of educated writers. It looks like (recte: as if) it’s getting worse.

 Dot Wordsworth

More articles from: Dot Wordsworth | this section

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comments (3)

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved