Sorry to be so boring

IT IS PETTY and perverse of me, I admit, to look around my local pub and observe with complacent satisfaction the empty chairs, the bored staff, and the increasingly desperate special offers.

I read in the local press that pub trade has reduced by 10 per cent since the smoking ban and backstreet boozers with no opportunity to provide outside facilities are facing a harsh commercial winter.

I got up from my table the other day, where there was a smug conversation going on about the administrative cock-up that is ‘Smoke-on-Trent’ to order another drink. I noticed a sign on the bar offering a steak at half price. ‘Vegetables of your choice,’ it promised. ‘Just ask our friendly staff.’

‘Are you one of the friendly ones?’ I asked Molly, the barmaid. ‘I’m never quite sure?’

‘What?’

‘Well, it says here, ‘’Ask our friendly staff.’’ I don’t want to ask any one unfriendly by mistake.’

She expressed doubts about my grip on reality and advised me to absent myself forthwith. Except she didn’t bother with the circumlocution.

Now that’s the thing about the English language. It’s so gloriously imprecise in some ways. In other ways it’s quite the opposite, because it’s got twice the number of words as, say, German. It’s a great mongrel of a language – and my father always told me to avoid pedigree dogs – unlike French, which even has an Academy to maintain its incestuous decline.

But French can’t be accused of being imprecise. I wouldn’t have been able to make my joking remark about ‘friendly staff’ in that language. Because French allows you to put an adjective before or after a noun, depending on the sense. Take ‘green grass’, for example. If you want to distinguish the green grass from grass of another colour, you would place ‘verte’ after ‘l’herbe’. If on the other hand you were just using green as a standard description of grass – all grass is by default green – it would go in front. This was the purpose of ‘friendly staff’, I presume.

I LEFT MY PINT on the table and strolled along the outside of the pub, to smoke a cigarette. I paused to light it and realised I was by an open window. What, I thought, if my smoke were to waft inside the pub? Would that count as ‘smoking inside a confined public space’? This thought took me back to my Latin lessons. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?

I had to ask myself if ‘confined space’ is in the ablative case or the accusative. If the former, ‘smoking in the pub’ would have the sense of ‘inside the pub’. If, on the other hand, ‘in’ is followed by the accusative case of the noun, it would mean ‘into the pub’. I would therefore be on the wrong side of the law (except in Stoke, that is).

Surprisingly, for such a language as English, flexible if you like, vague if you prefer, people will insist on being pedantic about it. Lynne Truss famously, and very profitably, wrote Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a combination of diatribe against poor punctuation and manual of correct practice.

Interestingly, if the New York Times is typical, the Americans were not impressed. This article not only disagrees with her rules of punctuation, but criticises her prose style, her grammar and her syntax.

I REMEMBER the fuss when the Ministry of Transport had a campaign about the dangers of falling asleep at the wheel of the car. ‘Don’t Drive Tired’ was the slogan.

‘Tired’ is an adjective. A verb must be modified by an adverb, must it not? What kind of message does it send when a government department propagates bad English? Etc . . . etc..

The criticism was misplaced, of course. The slogan may not be very elegant, but it’s more elegant, and certainly more effective, than ‘Don’t Drive Tiredly’, or ‘Don’t Drive While Fatigued’.

If I wanted to get into syntactic analysis, I could prove that the adjective, ‘tired’, is qualifying the understood ‘you’, part of the understood phrase, ‘while you are’. And in any case, if Dylan Thomas could write ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, why can’t we say ‘Don’t drive tired’?

(Should that question mark come before the quotation mark, I wonder? After all, Sir Roger Casement was hanged on a comma.)

The imprecision of English leads to inadvertent humour – ‘I see chickens are going cheap in Asda;’ bawdy humour – ‘I wonder if you’d be so kind as to introduce me to your wife;’ and poetry – ‘Now does he feel his secret murders sticking to his hands.’ Is any other language so prone to punning?

A LITTLE LATER, once again outside indulging the pleasures of the flesh, I stopped to read the notice warning against smoking in the pub. What a contemptible little scrap of card, and what execrable English. What a perfect feast for lawyers, so perfect an example of imprecise English it is.

‘These are no smoking premises. It is an offence to smoke or knowingly to permit smoking in these premises.

‘If you observe someone smoking here, a complaint may be made to the manager.’

‘These are no smoking premises.’ That could mean that ‘these premises don’t smoke.’ And if you’re not going to say ‘NON- smoking premises’, shouldn’t you at least put the hyphen after ‘no’.

‘Knowingly to permit . . .’ Well, at least the writer didn’t split the infinitive. But does this mean that other customers are obliged by law to prevent smoking? Are citizen’s arrests permitted?

‘A complaint may be made.’ Does this mean that there is a possibility of complaint or that you have permission to complain? Or could it mean that a complaint may be made about you observing smoking?

You see what nicotine deprivation does to people.

And if you’ve reached the end of this blog, you’re a sadder man that I am.

Chewing the fat

One of my pastimes is solving The Times crossword. Most days I do it in concert with my friend, Ken, and there is a fair bit of friendly rivalry involved. He's better than I at the lateral thinking element of the process, while I, as he would say adopt a more analytical, indeed anal, approach.

To be a successful cruciverbalist you need a decent general knowledge and a wide vocabulary. More than that you need to take an interest in how words are formed, their origins and variations. To ask the question, for example, is there any connection between 'anal' and 'analytical'? Probably not. It's an example of what my old Latin master, Joe Gledhill, use to call 'Macedon and Monmouth' - now did he make that up or does it come from somewhere. You see, already two things to look up.

Yesterday, someone asked, 'Why do we say ''in the offing''?' I wondered. Something to do with 'offering' or 'on offer'? Apparently not. It's a nautical term, referring to that part of the sea that is most distant from the land while remaining visible. Thus a ship approaching harbour might be said to be in the offing.

The other day I heard a radio programme called Back to Square One. Why was it called that when it was about the history of football commentating? According to the contributors it's because when the football matches were first broadcast on radio, listeners were assisted by means of squared charts published in The Radio Times. Thus, if a ball was passed back to the goalkeeper, it was sent back to square one.

Others say it is merely a reference to board games like Snakes and Ladders, which seems more likely to me.

I wonder if this phrase is one of those that the Oxford Dictionary is asking the public to help it research. Apparently there are only very recent datable occurrences of phrases like 'Jack the Lad', 'Bloody Mary' and 'Codswallop'.

Often people like to give knowledgeable-sounding but totally false explanations of how words and phrases arose. For example, I was told once that Massachusetts got its name when the first governor, wondering what to call his new jurisdiction, asked his black slave if he had any ideas. 'No,' said the man. 'Massa chuse it.' That wasn't supposed to be a joke, either.

Another one was the claim that New Zealand is nicknamed the Land of the Long White Cloud because of the masses of sheep that can be seen from the air.

If you take the tour bus of historic Lincoln during the summer you will be shown where public hangings used to take place in the Castle. You will be told the the practice led to two expressions in general circulation today: 'Hangers-on' and 'Money for old rope.'

'Hangers-on' is supposed to relate to the relatives of the condemned man or woman who would often be left to dangle and choke. The relatives would hang on to his legs to speed up his death and end his suffering. Who knows, but it's more colourful than the obvious explanation that it means a simple parasite or leech.

'Money for old rope'. Ghoulish onlookers at these executions would be willing to buy pieces of the rope as a souvenir. The executioner would cut it up into as many pieces as possible to maximise his profit. Hence the expression. Others say it merely meant being paid for inferior rope of any kind, rope once being used for far more purposes than it is today. In other words, the same sort of thing as ' a pig in a poke'.

At least the tour guide doesn't say that the phrase 'left hanging around' originated at these events.

And by the way, I want no more Saddam jokes.