H.W. Fowler and the History of
an Error
By Jon N. Hall
October 7, 2019
For the last century or so, language
experts have been having a hard time with the conjunction “nor.” For example, in
his entry for NOR in The Penguin
Dictionary of American English Usage and Style (2000), Paul W. Lovinger
considers a perfectly grammatical construction, which he even admits “some
grammarians would condone,” but still advises: “Change ‘nor’ to or.”
What, pray, is wrong with
“nor”? Lovinger never really explains. But he might try to understand how “nor”
and “or” actually function and what they specify, for he also writes: “Nor, like or, links alternatives.”
Not so. The word “alternative”
indicates choice. “Nor,” however, does not link choices; it links things which
are all excluded, denied, disallowed,
or negated. In the online Oxford English
Dictionary, the fourth selection in the entry for NOR has this quote by W.
E. Gladstone: “Not a vessel, nor a gun, nor a man, were on the ground to
prevent their landing.” Are we to think that a gun or a man could have been on the ground? Of course
not; both gun and man were kept from being on the ground by little old “nor.”
Parents who tell their spirited daughter that she cannot date Tom, Dick, nor Harry, aren’t offering her an
alternative.
The confusion surrounding “nor”
seems to be of recent vintage. Shakespeare certainly understood the word when
he penned: “Not
marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful
rhyme.” (No one’s gonna correct the Bard, are they?)
Shelley also exhibited a knack
for “nor” when he wrote: “NOR
happiness, nor majesty, nor fame, / Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms
or arts, / Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame.”
As late as 1954, the American
novelist Alan Le May showed that he could correctly handle “nor” in The Searchers: “You don’t have to call
me ‘Sir,’ neither. Nor ‘Grampaw,’ neither.
Nor ‘Methuselah,’ neither. I can whup you to a frazzle.”
By 2013, however, in Edna
O’Brien’s Country Girl: A Memoir we
read that as a schoolgirl she had been disappointed that Jesus “had been so curt with his mother at the Feast of
Cana, when, worried about the scarcity of wine, he said, ‘It is not my business
or thine.’” (Surely Jesus would have used “nor.”)
Here’s the Culprit
In 1926, the revered British
usage maven H.W. Fowler became the genesis of our bad usage with his venerated A Dictionary
of Modern English Usage. In the
first paragraph of his entry for NOR, Fowler posits that “He does not move or speak” is
the equivalent of “He neither moves nor speaks.” Fowler then explains:
The tendency to
go wrong is probably due to confusion between the simple verbs (moves &c.)
& the resolved ones (does move &c.) ; if the verb is resolved,
there is often an auxiliary that serves both clauses, &, as the negative is
attached to the auxiliary, its force is carried on together with that of the
auxiliary & no fresh negative is wanted.
Gobbledygook! Mr. Fowler contends that negative force “is carried on” by means of an auxiliary. But the English language
doesn’t need auxiliaries to carry negative force onward. Language is linear; it
has only one place to go, and that’s onward. The subject goes forth into the
predicate; that’s the way language usually works. So the business about “this carrying
on of the negative force” is a mite daft. Of course, it carries on. Meanings coalesce
as one moves onward, piling up words.
What “He neither moves nor
speaks” really imparts is: He does not move and
he does not speak. And if that be so, then Fowler and I have expressed the same
sense with three conflicting conjunctions. But that’s not the case, because one
correct reading of Fowler’s “He does not move or speak” is: He does not move or he does not speak. And that isn’t
equivalent.
With his fixation on
auxiliaries and “resolved verbs,” Fowler shows that he does not fully understand
conjunctions. For it is not the leading negative that does the work here; it is
the conjunction. Indeed, “nor” doesn’t even need a leading negative. However,
Fowler seems to think such usage “is legitimate in poetry,” but not in
“ordinary” prose. Although it is now less common, one can still hear this usage
of “nor.” For example, in her dispatch
from Moscow on February 19, 2014, Fox News correspondent Amy Kellogg said this:
“Ukraine desperately needs money, which Moscow, uh, nor anyone would be likely to dispense to a government that does
not have control of the country, Bret.”
Fowler offers up several
erroneous examples that he attempts to fix. In five of the examples he says
that “or must be corrected into nor if the rest of the sentence
is to remain as it is,” which is terrific. But Fowler’s disdain for “nor” is so
strong that he then goes on to rewrite the examples so that he doesn’t have to
use the dread word, and in those rewrites he makes a mess of things. What’s
disturbing is that this madness has been sanctioned by language experts on both
sides of the Atlantic for at least the last 93 years!
Not everything Fowler wrote
about “nor” is nonsense. But if I were Fowler’s editor, I’d advise him not to
begin an entry with the Book of Common Prayer unless it is free of sin. This is not the case with
his entry for NOR.
The
Error Proliferates
Fowler’s tome was first revised in 1965 by Sir Ernest Gowers, (download the PDF of the book and go
to page 394 for his entry on NOR). In
this second edition, Sir Ernest inserts his own example and corrects it, and
it’s fairly interesting:
In this kind of work there was often little oral preparation of material,
little systematic collection of facts and views, well assimilated and digested,
or much discussion of balance and proportion. The writer has forgotten that he began there was
often little and has ended as though he had said there was seldom much.
Or must be corrected to nor was there.
Sir Ernest makes a serious
mistake here, as he fails to recognize that his example does not contain a negative and therefore
cannot be used to illustrate the problem. “Little” is attenuation, not negation. He then compounds that
mistake with his correction; replacing “or” with “nor was there” would negate the
previous items. But as Sir Ernest noted, the author of the example created the
problem with his shift from “little” to “much.” What he (probably) intended would
be better said by continuing with the parallelism; that is, by changing “or
much” to “and little.”
The snag with that rewrite is
that I’m assuming I know what the author intended. But perhaps the author meant
exactly what he wrote. After all, his statement is grammatical, and can be read literally, as presenting three alternatives;
i.e. little oral preparation, little systematic collection, or much discussion.
Inasmuch as Sir Ernest
deletes some of the first edition’s examples, if you want to read all of them
refer to the screengrab below of Fowler’s entire entry for NOR. And if you’re interested
in what the enskied and sainted H.W. Fowler had to say on other
issues of usage, refer to “The Classic First Edition.” British language
expert David Crystal provided added notes in the section “Notes on the Entries,”
but, alas, there is no note on “nor.”
In 1996, R.W. Burchfield revised Fowler (download the PDF of the book and go
to page 527 for his entry on NOR). Mr. Burchfield wisely (and mercifully)
avoids our issue altogether. In fact, the third edition seems to have replaced
Fowler’s entry in its entirety. Good show, old boy.
In 2015, Jeremy Butterfield revised Fowler with a fourth edition, and retained some of Burchfield’s
sensible positions on “nor” from the third edition. Even
so, the damage had already been done, as Fowler’s crazy ideas about
conjunctions had continued to proliferate among prescriptivists, including the
respected American usage expert Bryan A. Garner, who seems to be channeling
Fowler when he writes that the “initial negative carries
through.”
In any case, the rules of the
English language have got to provide for those arenas where expression must be
100 percent unambiguous. If you can’t devise such rules, step aside.
If that sounds like the
ravings of some pathetic anal retentive stickler, some grammar Nazi, then know
that I don’t mind it so very much when regular folks misuse the language. In
fact, I mydamnself just love to mangle the frickin language; I often write my
emails in the patois of an Ozark hick, which for me comes natural. It’s when the
experts, the “Rule Makers,” mess up that this kid gets riled. Language experts,
I can whup y’all to a frazzle.
Comments
Post a Comment