Lavengro

Is a rock a structure?

The Guardian tells us:

Australia has three iconic structures: Uluru, the giant red rock in the Northern Territory, the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge…

but is a rock, or any other natural feature, a structure? Is Mount Everest or the Grand Canyon a structure? I would say not, and the COED says:

structure

· n.

…

2 a building or other object constructed from several parts.

A pernicketiness of pedants

Here is a treasure trove of pedantry. The Daily Telegraph asked its readers What is the most annoying phrase in the English language? The answers came in thick and fast. I didn’t have the stomach to read all the grumping and moaning, but as I skimmed through the list two comments caught my eye. One Steve complains about:

“Awesome” - when it isn't.

I wonder what Steve thinks about something being described as “awful” - when it isn't.

And Sue Millbank complains about:

The misspelling of the abbreviation of the word until as in ‘Open till late’.

This is an interesting one as the basis of the comment is factually wrong. Till is not an abbreviation of until, so those who carefully write ’til (and there are some) are demonstrating pedantic zeal rather than linguistic knowledge. According to the COED:

till1

· prep. & conj. less formal way of saying until.

– ORIGIN OE til, of Gmc origin (not, as is commonly assumed, a shortened form of until).

until

· prep. & conj. up to (the point in time or the event mentioned).

– ORIGIN ME: from ON und ‘as far as’ + till1 (the sense thus duplicated).

If anything, then, the til in until is an abbreviation of till.

Until was originally written untill. The scond <l> disappeared gradually from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. Perhaps this came about by association with adjectives that end with -ful, where the word full has been similarly abbreviated.

Pedantry is one of the curses of language: dependant is a noun and dependent is an adjective; practice is a noun and practise is a verb; is James Bond licenced or licensed to kill? (Answer: He is licensed because he has a licence.) The language (at least in its British version) is stuck with such nonsensical distinctions because no-one will be the first to change them. Those who complain about the stultifying effect of an Academy of the Language might like to consider how such an Academy could give a lead by throwing its weight and authority behind a moderate reform of English spelling; the Spanish language, which has such an Academy, is almost completely phonetic in spelling. But that would annoy the pedants, who like to show off the supposed superiority of their education and culture (and, thereby, their social class) by insisting on these very points.

And so to Shakespeare, who can usually be relied on to deal with pedants:

“All debts are clear'd between you and I” (Merchant of Venice, Act III, scene ii, line 319)

The ‘logic’ that one should say between you and me is inescapable in its own terms, but the fact is that people commonly use I as the second pronoun in this phrase. In Spanish this is entre tú y yo (not… *y mí), and in French no-one ever says *c'est-je for it is I. In French the moi in c’est moi is called the stressed or disjunctive pronoun; in other words, reality is acknowledged and described with its own terminology even if it seems wrong (this is what mathematicians do with their imaginary numbers and so on). Modern descriptive English grammar* also accepts this, with the term ‘object territory’ for the use of the objective case of the pronoun in sentences such as:

It’s me

I’m older than her

because it seems natural to use an object pronoun at the end of the sentence, in a position where the pronoun is usually the object of a verb.

I have discussed between you and I more comprehensively here.

*Quirk et al., A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, Longman.