H. W. Fowler, at his best, on the placement of only:
only, adv.: its placing and misplacing. I read the other day of a man who ‘only died a week ago’, as if he could have done anything else more striking or final; what was meant by the writer was that he ‘died only a week ago’. There speaks one of those friends from whom the English language may well pray to be saved, one of the modern precisians who have more zeal than discretion, & wish to restrain liberty as such, regardless of whether it is harmfully or harmlessly exercised. It is pointed out in several parts of this book that illogicalities & inaccuracies of expression tend to be eliminated as a language grows older & its users attain to a more conscious mastery of their materials. But this tendancy has its bad as well as its good effects; the pedants who try to forward it when the illogicality is only apparent or the inaccuracy of no importance are turning English into an exact science or an automatic machine; if they are not quite botanizing upon their mother's grave, they are at least clapping a strait waiscoat upon their mother tongue, when wiser physicians would refuse to certify the patient.
The design is to force us all, whenever we use the adverb only, to spend time in considering which is the precise part of the sentence strictly qualified by it, & then put it there—this whether there is any danger or none of the meaning’s being false or ambiguous because only is so placed as to belong grammatically to a whole expression instead of to a part of it, or to be separated from the part it specifically qualifies by another part.
It may at once be admitted that there is an orthodox placing for only, but it does not follow that there are not often good reasons for departing from orthodoxy. For He only died a week ago no better defence is perhaps possible than that it is the order that most people have always used & still use, & that, the risk of misunderstanding being chimerical, it is not worth while to depart from the natural. Remember that in speech there is not even the possibility of misunderstanding, because the intonation of died is entirely different if it, & not a week ago, is qualified by only; & it is fair that a reader should be supposed capable of supplying the decisive intonation where there is no temptation to go wrong about it.
This is so eloquent and true that I will commit it to memory. If only there were a Fowler antidote for every petty Simon or Strunk/White rule.
Il était une fois un prince beau comme le jour. Il vivait entre son chien et son cheval, à l’orée d’un bois, dans un château aux murs gris et au toit mauve... [Boris Vian]
I’ve always been a fan of constructed languages, but one of my favorites is set forth in John Wilkins’ An Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language (1668). The real thing would set you back a cool couple of grand (or more), and there is a reprint available for around three or four hundred dollars, but now it’s available online both in scanned and text versions. One of the problems with the real character that I noticed right away was that the meaning of words is coded with the least amount of redundacy possible, and the margin for error is quite large. (See also, Jorge Luis Borges’ essay on the Real Character.) A large part of the book is taken up with an outline of knowledge, or ontology, which is fun to browse. Wilkins, who was one of the founders of the Royal Society, got fellow scientists to help him with his categories. One of the illustrations for the book appears often enough in phonology textbooks as one of the earliest illustrations of the vocal tract.
Bob Becker of the Haynt project just notified me of an Australian web site dedicated to the Polish poet, Yisroel Shtern, who died in 1942 or 1943. There’s plenty of materials in Yiddish, some of which are translated into English.
Israel Stern (1894-1942) also starved in the ghetto [as did Hershele Danielewitz in the paragraph before this one]. A legend spread that he lay down on the stone pavement of a ruined courtyard and did not budge for days until he died of hunger. Upon this legend, H. Leivick composed in 1943 the moving lyric “My Brother, Israel Stern,” in which he compared the self-sacrifice of this religious poet to the akeda of the patriarch Isaac.
[Sol Liptzin. 1985. A History of Yiddish Literature. p.430.]
It’s a wonder, how tender and pure the sick are,
gazing across vast distances, seeing things that no one else does,
staying up at night, and smiling in the darkness,
as their beds caress them with the joy of having solved a mystery.
Is it then a wonder, how the sick arise from napping
rich and perfumed (like a seed awakening from sleep in spring),
lie fresh in quiet wards, and listen as a fly knocks
on their headboards, and someone calls their names?[Yisroel Shtern. Springtime in the Hospital, translated by Jon Levitow. English, Yiddish.]
Why are Sholem Aleichem’s books so full of life? The talk is, after all, not of blue but of grey skies; of angry clouds, that often scream dark rains over the frightened heads of a whole people. Just as our foolish world has as many unemployed as there are stars in the night sky, so Sholem Aleichem’s work is full of troublemakers, miseries, misfortunes, the need for permits to reside outside the Pale, ethnic quotas, and (for a change) straightforward poverty, suffering and wanderings.
[Yisroel Shtern. “Sholem Aleichem: On the twentieth anniversary of his death”, translated by Beni Gothajner. English, Yiddish.]
For some unknown reason, I have decided to reread John Simon’s Paradigms Lost again, after having slogged through it a couple of decades ago. It’s nice to see that I still disagree with Mr Simon, not only on the matter of film criticism but also on the state of the English language.
In the 1940s, when I became a graduate student, people were not going around saying: “Come to dinner with Bill and I” or “Hopefully, it won’t rain tomorrow”; they were not accentuating the penult in influence or using disinterested as a synonym for uninterested. Some things were causing trouble even then: for example, that the substantive precedent rhymes with “less a dent,” whereas precendence rhymes with credence; or that less refers to quantity (less sugar) and fewer to number (fewer diabetics). But these were, so to speak, more sophisticated errors that might bring a tear to an angel’s eye, but would not make heaven weep.
Why—if I am not merely a laudator temporis acti, and I am reasonably sure I am not—was language better in those days? And what started it on its downhill course? For one thing, standards in the schools were higher because education had not yet dealt the four great body blows: (1) the student rebellion of 1968, which, in essence, meant that the students themselves became the arbiters of what subjects were to be taught, and grammar, by jingo (or Ringo), was not one of them; (2) the notion that in a democratic society language must accomodate itself to the whims, idiosyncracies, dialects, and sheer ignorance of the underprivileged minorities, especially if they happened to be black, Hispanic, and, later on, female or homsexual; (3) the introduction by more and more incompetent English teachers, products of the new system (see items 1 and 2, above), of ever fancier techniques of not teaching English, for which, if the methods involved new technologies and werre couched in the appropriately impenetrable jargon, grants could be readily obtained; and (4) television—the nonlanguage and aboriginal grammar of commercials, commentators, sports announcers, athletes, assorted celebraties, and just about everyone on that word-mongering and word-mangling medium that sucks in victims far more perniciously than radio ever did.
But in my graduate-school days there were still relatively prescriptive dictionaries, i.e., ones that distinuished between the incorrect and correct use of words based on established practice, cultural tradition, the way of good writers; between preferred and suspect, or even unacceptable, pronunciations. Descriptive (or structural) linguistics had not yet arrived—that statistical, populist, sociological approach, whose adherents claimed to be merely recording and describing the language as it was used by anyone and everyone, without imposing elitist judgments on it. Whatever came out of the untutored mouths and unsharpened pencil stubs of the people—The People—was held legitimate if not sacrosanct by these new lexicon artists.
Oh, for the times when we tended to go to the second edition of Webster’s International Dictionary and its derivatives, the pre-seventh-edition Collegiates, and other lexicoal authorities that, although not totally prescriptive, nevertheless indicated preferences and exercised a certain selectivity. With the coming of Webster’s Third in 1961, descriptive linguistics had its resounding victory.
[John Simon. 1980. Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline, pp.xiii-xv]