Authors Electric

It so happens that May is a singularly appropriate month for the following grammar grumble. Call me a pedant - sorry, madam, no pedant available just now but more will be arriving shortly ( cue howls of joyous mirth ) - but Things Have Got to a Pretty Pass. No, really.  Winston Churchill: a ban on prepositions ending sentences was a practice up with which he would not put. It’s not about split infinitives. Nor about prepositions not being allowed at the ends of sentences (up with which Winston Churchill famously refused to put). Nothing can be done with ‘she spoke to my friend and I’, I’m afraid, except to stand doggedly by me and try not to wince when others don’t. Thing is, all these infelicities (though the preposition rule is not an infelicity, Churchill was right there) don’t muddle meanings. You know exactly what people are saying, even if the grammar isn’t perfect.  No. What flummoxed me a few days ago was this sub-heading in The Times , in a story about the Factor 8 ...

On holiday recently, I ended up reading the newspaper more than usual. (Books too, which was far more pleasant an activity.) This was all down to a bad back, which had the twofold effect of stopping me from swimming and increasing my general grumpiness. I share this (as they say) by way of an apology for what follows… though I’m not really sorry.  You, on the other hand, may be, if you stay to the end of a grammatical grouse that has been brooding in my breast for years.  ‘An arrant pedantry up with which I will not put’ Sir Winston Churchill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill No, it’s not the split infinitive. Nor ending sentences with a preposition (I’m with Winston Churchill on that one, the rule against doing so being An Arrant Pedantry Up With Which I Will Not Put). It does have to do with prepositions, though, indirectly; but mostly it centres on a supposed elegance of style popular in the loftiest newspapers, and which is simply grammatically wrong. ...

  I was driving along with a friend, who commented on the beauty of the English countryside. “It’s so green everywhere!” I had to agree with her, for many of the local roads are like green tunnels. Often, the road gives you a stunning view of green valleys, dotted with sheep and cattle, bordered by wildflowers. The thing is, as I explained to my friend, the reason it’s so green is because of the rain. I’m not a fan of rain, my children aren’t fans either, and being unable to get out makes my children very restless indeed. Cabin Fever, but with lots of capitals and exclamation marks. Once the rain has stopped, and the sun is out, however, it all looks amazing. It’s very much like writing. It’s hard work some days to find enough energy to sit down and think in a straight line. Other days, when I sit down with a corrected manuscript, working through each page and deleting entire paragraphs, I worry that there will be nothing left to publish. Or I moan at my grammar App, “What do y...

I wrote a similar piece some years back, so I’m plagiarizing my own work with this article. If you guessed that I’m writing about the overuse of the exclamation mark again—you are correct!!! The Internet has made communicating so easy there is a tendency to disregard grammar. That goes for texts, emails, blogs, and comments on all social media platforms. In today’s electronic age, the skill to communicate is not only determined by how well we write, but also by how familiar we are with emojis like smiley or sad faces, acronyms like ROFL, LOL, ICYMI, and bolding of words to create emphasis. All these tools are meant to help us express our thoughts more clearly, but have they made us lazy writers in the process?  When someone writes a sentence using all uppercase letters, I imagine them screaming at me. If they also bold it, they’re screaming even louder. If they punctuate the sentence with several exclamation marks … it’s downright deafening.  The Chicago Manual of Style says...

Apologies for the quality of the image on the right, but it comes from an Early? Mid? Nineteenth Century French children's book called, "LA POUPEE PEINTE PAR ELLE-MEME", its cover image faded almost to oblivion. It came originally from an ancient house in La Vendee, a house full of such historical treasures, and which had been in the family of our very close French friends for centuries (at least three centuries, if not four). I set one of my Young Adult novels there - "WOLFSONG", which is currently available as an ebook on Amazon, if you're curious. The house itself, sadly, has had a dramatic end to its very long and doubtless dramatic life. When the estate was  broken up and divided - French inheritance law is quite uncomfortable and often destructive - it went on to become a hotel in a part of rural France that didn't really attract tourists, so it failed, and eventually, after a succession of owners, was abandoned to the elements and the vandals...

A couple of months ago I set out to do a grammar grouse blog, but Jacob Rees-Mogg got in the way (let’s face it, he does that, a lot). So now, in the dark days of November, it seems a good moment to try again… and this time it’s Jeremy Vine who’s got me going. Not because I disagree with him. On the contrary, he put out a tweet recently that was music to my ears (or eyes? Eek, that doesn’t work either), all about our dear old friend, the apostrophe: Grammar question. I have friends whose surname is Hobbs. I went to a function celebrating their anniversary. I have just emailed a friend I ran into there, and said it was "great to see you again at the Hobbses' party." Am I exactly correct in the way I wrote their surname? YES, I replied, yes yes yes. Scrolling down, I realised I was pretty much the only one out of hundreds of replies. Everyone else was absolutely certain it should be the Hobbs’ or the Hobb’s party. So a party given either by a couple c...