Prescriptive pedantry

The journalist and author Simon Heffer has called on schools to put more emphasis on teaching good grammar.

The problem is that what is good grammar is not a matter of universal agreement, even among professionals. I have two monumental tomes, each of about 2,000 pages, that are professional English grammars and they see things differently. They are A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al.) and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston & Pullum).

What pedants like Heffer mean when they talk about good grammar is what they think they remember from their schooldays. It doesn’t occur to them that the grammar that they were taught in their youth is different from the grammar used by the authors of previous centuries whose works they studied. It is obvious to anyone that Shakespeare’s grammar is not that of the modern language: If music be the food of love contains a present subjunctive that was rare in the nineteenth century and was hardly used at all when Heffer was learning grammar at school, yet we must assume that he was aware of it. The use of thou forms had also become extinct between the days of Shakespeare and Heffer. And I cannot help wondering what Hefferian grammar has to say about Jane Austen’s statement that Emma Woodhouse … was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father.

What excites him on this occasion is the question of what is wrong with this sentence:

The Prime Minister has warned that spending cuts are necessary.

His answer is that warn is a transitive verb and cannot be used in an absolute form. One response to this is to say that it was not always thus. The OED mentions an absolute use and has three quotations . The most recent is, admittedly, from 1398 but that should not discourage a traditionalist like Heffer.

a 1000 Sax. Leechd. III. 196 Swefnu binnon þrim daᴁum beoð onwriᴁene hwilan to warnienne. a 1225 Ancr. R. 182 Sicnesse‥wardeð [MS. C. weorneð] to ȝein þeo [sins] þet weren touwardes. 1398 Trevisa Barth. De P.R. xii. xxxiii. 124 b/2 (Bodl. MS.), [Þe] sparowe dredeþ þe wesell and cryeþ and warneþ ȝif awesel come [L. presentiam ejus prodit].

A search of the British National Corpus gives me three examples out of its random selection of fifty in which warn is used absolutely. They are

ALV 846 He went on to warn that next year's public spending plans for science will only accelerate the decline

J3F 52 But environmentalists warn that the diversion will upset the delicate ecological balance of the river system

K1U 2375 Trading standards [sic] warn that the law will be vigorously enforced

Looking at these examples, and also at least the last of the OED quotations (I am unable to read the first two and any comments on them are welcome), we find that they are all general warnings; the object of the warning is non-specific. This is also the case of Heffer’s test sentence:

The Prime Minister has warned that spending cuts are necessary.

It thus seems that we are seeing an absolute sense of warn when the warning is given generally or to a known group of recipients. Moreover, in all of these examples the word warn could be changed to give a warning with no need to state who it was being given to.

The COED does not actually admit an absolute usage

1 inform of a possible danger, problem, etc.

2 give cautionary advice about actions or conduct to.

but the to at the end of definition 2 looks awfully vulnerable. It is the only indication in the whole entry, apart from the transitive nature of inform, that warn is transitive and it is clearly possible to give advice to a general or understood audience that does not have to be defined specifically if the context makes its identity clear.

Heffer doesn’t like to see verbs used as nouns:

Some of us cannot understand why spending cuts need to be targeted on a specific department of state when they can just as well be aimed or directed there.

But why is he only concerned about target used a verb? Cut is a verb by origin that has come to be used as a noun to mean the act of cutting.

He is not immune to the etymological fallacy:

The bespectacled columnist is also unhappy that the word "viable" is commonly misused. He explains that the dictionary defines viable as "capable of living", and therefore a term that should correctly be applied to beings, organisms and plants capable of life.

And of course he mentions shall and will. In fact the use of these two words is horrendously complex, impinging as it does on the use of should and would in subjunctive, conditional and indirect speech forms. In 1906, perhaps before Heffer’s own English teacher was born, the Fowler brothers said in The King’s English

if anyone has been brought up among those who use the right idiom, he has no need of instruction; if he has not, he is incapable of being instructed because any guidance that is short and clear will mislead him and any that is full and accurate will be incomprehensible to him.

Many people, including Fowler himself in the 1926 MEU, insisted on this distinction but it is hard to justify nowadays from observation. Burchfield’s Fowler goes through the motions but admits that informally will is used. It also points out the problem with parsing the contraction I’ll. Of the two large professional grammars that I mention above, the former (Quirk et al.) barely mentions this distinction in a footnote, and the latter (Huddleston & Pullum, 9.6.2) describes the traditional rule, with the classic (and very silly) contrasted example of a drowning man saying I shall drown and no-one will save me and I will drown and no-one shall save me, and goes on to say ‘It is quite clear, however, that this rule is not valid.’

Sadly, pedants like Heffer are always with us. What’s more, they publish books. It is a book by Heffer that is, apparently, the reason for the BBC publishing this article.