Mind your language | 19 July 2008

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.