Hard questions, not easy answers

By R.L.G. | BERLIN

TODAY is National Grammar Day in America. (It really should be International Grammar Day, but Johnson’s urging on this point has been unheeded.) It was founded by a group called the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, and though the society itself seems to have last updated its website in 2012, Grammar Day has outlived it. Many will celebrate by venting about their most hated grammar mistakes: Poynter.org asks, typically, "What are your biggest grammar pet peeves?"

This column, instead, will celebrate some of grammar’s more curious corners. Grammar is not a list of do’s and don’ts, but a description of the rules of a language. Below are three legitimate grammar controversies, where good arguments can be made on different sides. Pondering hard questions, in your columnist’s view, is a better use of National Grammar Day than spouting frustration at internet denizens who can’t keep your and you’re straight.

This is one of those things that drives me crazy. Many readers will pause mid-sentence on reading this. Should it not be This is one of those things that drive me crazy? After all, things is plural; should not the verb agree with that? The answer is maddeningly unclear: there are two possible ways of parsing the sentence. It can be understood as both

This is one [of those things] that drives me crazy

And

This is one of [those things that drive me crazy]

One parse has one of those things as the noun phrase in question. The other has those things. This is a real ambiguity. It has generated many efforts to impose hard-and-fast rules, but they are misguided. The best thing about this is that there are two possible interpretations—and they are both flawless English. A gift to nervous writers everywhere on National Grammar Day.

Conundrums? Yes. What to do with foreign words in English is a conundrum, and there are many such conundrums in English. English has fairly regular rules for forming plurals. Add –s or ­–es, mostly. But English has also imported many foreign words. Must it also import the pluralisation rules with them? Some people would have you write conundra, which is the plural in Latin. After all, we write data and media, not datums and mediums. But ultimata and quora look odd; ultimatums and quorums are more natural. Fora has a long history in English, but since 1930, forums has been more common in English books. Once again, there simply is no hard-and-fast rule. “Always use the grammar of the foreign language” will make you the only person at the Italian café in London insisting on a panino with two espressi. The person behind the counter may be one of London’s many Italians, but if not, you are likely to receive either a nonplussed stare or a heavy sigh.

So what is the rule? There are no rules, only tendencies. Datums is almost non-existent, while forums is not just common but preferred. Choose a style book (The Economist’s has a section on just this issue) or use Google’s tool to search published books, and go with the majority. The only rule here is to be internally consistent.

A date which will live in infamy. Many American style books will tell you that the preceding phrase, used by Franklin Roosevelt to describe the bombing of Pearl Harbour, is ungrammatical. Instead, they propose the following rule: that should introduce relative clauses that define and restrict the preceding noun. (In other words, they should tell us which day is meant.) Meanwhile, which should merely introduce some extra information that is not crucial to defining the preceding noun. (The Porsche, which is yellow, is for sale describes a Porsche which just happens to be yellow.)

H.W. Fowler suggested this rule to neaten English grammar in the 1920s. But it was only a suggestion: he confessed that relative pronouns as of his time were already “an odd jumble”. The Lord’s Prayer addresses our father which art in Heaven and, despite the long pause it is often given in church services, is meant to refer to the heavenly father as opposed to the earthly one. In other words, it is a supposedly forbidden "restrictive which".

So which with a “restrictive” clause is perfectly fine. Any “rule” forbidding it can be no more than a preference, without a solid anchoring in syntax. That said, it is a good preference. Which is used more often with non-restrictive clauses, and that is only used for restrictive clauses. (No one says The Porsche, that is yellow, is for sale). Americans are more likely than Britons to observe the distinction. But it is worth observing, as a preference if not a rule. Though commas do most of the work making clear which clauses are restrictive and which are not, keeping that for one kind and which for the other reinforces the work that the commas do. This aids the reader a bit.

There are very good reasons for thinking hard about grammar, and National Grammar Day is as good a time as any for that. But resist the temptation to think that “grammar” always provides an easy, exceptionless answer to tough questions. It is precisely because tough questions remain that grammar is worth taking seriously.