Don't do this at home, kiddies!
safirethat
Some people never met a rule of grammar they didn't like. And
some people seem not to have read the books they recommend with
enthusiasm. And some people believe that freedom from social
constraints -- those rules of grammar, for instance -- is allowed only for the
elite, the professionals and the artists: Don't do this at home,
kiddies!
Bill Safire seems to be all three of these, to judge from his exchange
on restrictive
which versus
that with Saul Bellow, as reported
in his "On Language" column (in the
New
York Times Magazine of 1 May 2005, p. 26).
Safire tells us:
...some years back I performed an
exegesis in this space on a beautiful extended metaphor the novelist
used in one of his rare Op-Ed essays. Snowbound in Boston, he
wrote: "Let the pure snows cool these overheated minds and dilute the
toxins which have infected our judgments."
In case anyone complained about his use of "the toxins which" instead of that introducing the restrictive
clause "that have infected our judgments," I noted that "you get Nobel
prizes for literature, not grammar." Bellow promptly responded:
"I'm only fair at relative pronouns. I do know the restrictive from the
nonrestrictive. 'Which' sounded
better than 'that,' and I do go by sounds as well as by grammar."
That I took as a lesson for the overheated minds in the endless
struggle of Language Snobs against Language Slobs. Good writers
are free to break the rules of grammar, but their freedom gains meaning
when they know the rules and overrule them only for an artistic or
polemical reason.
Point 1: Safire just accepts the advice "use
that for restrictive relatives,
which for nonrestrictive relatives"
as a genuine rule of English grammar. Even H. W. Fowler, whose
1926 formulation of this advice seems to have been the source of the
astounding popularity of this "rule" (which has found its way into the
practice of thousands of copyeditors, not to mention the
Microsoft
Word grammar checker), didn't go this far. Fowler observed:
"Some there are who follow this principle now; but it would be idle to
pretend that it is the practice either of most or of the best writers."
Fowler's idea was that, since the variation between
that and
which in nonrestrictive relatives
had by 1926 pretty much been eliminated, in favor of
which, things would be neat and
clean if this variation in restrictive relatives were also eliminated,
in favor of
that. He
apparently saw no basis for choosing between the two in restrictives
and abhorred a choice that would be made entirely on the basis of murky
considerations like the "sound" or "feel" of a sentence; there should
be Only One Right Way to do anything, and it was the business of those
who gave advice on grammar and usage to dictate how people should
behave, or at least to exhort them to choose the Right Way.
Most linguists -- especially sociolinguists -- think this a really
silly idea, but some people, like Safire, seem to have never met a rule
they didn't like, especially if the rule would bring order into
apparent chaos.
In any case,
Merriam-Webster's
Dictionary of English Usage details the sad history of this
"rule", noting wryly that authors who recommend it routinely violate it
and that the facts of usage are squarely against it.
MWDEU concludes, "You can use
either
which or
that to introduce a restrictive
clause--the grounds for your choice should be stylistic" (as it was for
Bellow), and adds, "Formality does not seem to be much of a
consideration in the choice", despite what a number of commentators
have claimed.
Point 2: The cover of
MWDEU
carries an enthusiastic recommendation from Safire: "One of the great
books on language..." Now, if only Safire would read the damn
book and take its lessons to heart! Interestingly, the column
from which the quotation above is taken is mostly about the puffery of
blurbs: "Literary editors have learned to be suspicious of all
endorsements." Rightly so, I gather.
Point 3: The "Don't do this at home, kiddies!" advice -- leave
the breaking of rules to the competent professionals, and then only if
they have a good reason for breaking them -- is really
condescending. Writers like Bellow are allowed the freedom to
have a personal style, but not the rest of us, who are expected to be
compliant to arbitrary authority. Hell no, I won't go.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 3, 2005 03:19 PM