PETER Curran (Letters, September 27) is broadly correct in saying that we must not be tyrannised by the "rules of grammar". As an avid follower of orchestral and choral scores I also like his musical analogy.
There are many usage books which would support him – the various editions of Fowler's Modern English Usage, for example; and Oliver Kamm, a journalist for the other broadsheet I read, has written "Accidence will happen", an eminently readable refutation of pedantry.
However, some solecisms obfuscate meaning, and I regret to say that the same edition of The Herald illustrates one of these. On page nine there is a very distressing account of a fatal accident inquiry involving a gate swinging in a storm, which killed the victim. Your journalist got it right in the article when he says "Another factor which might have saved him . . . ", but the headline is "Colleague may have saved boss hit by gates in storm".
The headline suggests a situation which is still possible, but the article shows that survival did not happen, very sadly. "May" should have been "might". This is a common error, but it does not aid clarity.
So grammar does have its uses, and is not just for learners of the language.
James McIntyre,
Bonnaughton Road, Bearsden.
I WAS delighted by your correspondent’s swift rebuttal of statutorily expired charges of grammatical malfeasance levelled against Star Trek (Letters, September 27). As a lifelong devotee (still holding out for the promised prosperity), I too felt compelled to enter to the log my weariness as once again blame for an “epidemic” of the supposed wickedness of the split infinitive in English usage is traced to my second favourite television programme.
The question I’d ask rhetorically of pedants revolting on the split infinitive is this: prior to ever caring so passionately, how many of them would even know what one was were it not for William Shatner’s stirring prologue? Rather, I think these people are indebted to him for gifting them an unsolicited explanation to bore us with in the pub, a standby when they’re not wrongly insisting that it’s necessarily incorrect to start a sentence, or indeed a paragraph, with a conjunction; dreadful Rees-Moggs who’d shrink from flirting with a wayward semi-colon, too prescriptively preoccupied perhaps with containing a full one.
Finally, I’m reminded of the late film critic Philip French’s wry observation of its similarly enduring Desilu Studios stablemate Mission: Impossible, that it did for the colon what Star Trek did for the split infinitive. I’d suggest that the last-minute re-christening of that series as such had the genius of precluding it from criticism that any episode ever stretched credulity.
It’s a mistake to presume the talented people who first conceived these television perennials weren’t expert in how best to put English at their service.
(Meanwhile, don’t get me started with the Freudian implications on the formative mind of the curvature of the Starship Enterprise. … am I wrong in thinking it has a nipple? Probably very.)
James Macleod,
Howford Road, Glasgow.
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