Conan doyle makes a mistake | thearticle

In the story _A Scandal in Bohemia_, Sherlock Holmes receives a note informing him that he is to be visited by a person who desires his help on a highly important matter but who wishes to

remain incognito. While waiting for the mysterious visitor, Holmes explains to Watson how he knows that the writer of the note is a German-speaker.  The note, which requests that he be ready

for the visitor at a quarter to eight o’clock, reads, “Your recent services to one of the royal houses of Europe have shown that you are one who may safely be trusted with matters which are

of an importance which can hardly be exaggerated. This account of you we have from all quarters received. Be in your chamber then at that hour, and do not take it amiss if your visitor wear

a mask.” Holmes points out the construction of the penultimate sentence, with its verb at the end in the German manner: “This account of you we have from all quarters received”, as proof

that the author is a German speaker.  But note that in the following sentence, in the words “do not take it amiss if your visitor wear a mask”, the writer has observed a rule of English

grammar which even in Conan Doyle’s day was unlikely to have been observed by any but the best educated, namely that following “if”, which introduces a conditional clause, the verb is in the

subjunctive – correctly so: “wear” in “wear a mask”. Most otherwise competent speakers of English might more naturally say “_wears_ a mask”. If the writer of the note is sensitive to this

degree of refinement in English construction, he would not position the verb of the preceding sentence in the Germanic manner. Grammatical sensitivity is a thing so vulnerable to the force

of mimicry in common usages that the results are wonderful to behold. The motility of prepositions is a case in point. A century ago people said and wrote that they would “_telephone to_

someone” and that they would “_advocate_ caution”. Now people say that they will “_telephone_ someone” and will “_advocate for_ caution”. The “advocate for” construction is particularly

grating on the ear; “telephone to” merely sounds archaic. Because I am a person of a certain generation I refer to automobiles as “motor cars” because my parents, Edwardians both, were of

the generation that came to birth with the motor carriage, a time at which the horse-drawn carriage still existed. “Motor car” sounds archaic to the offspring of my second marriage, a

generation younger than the offspring of my first marriage.  Most offensive to my ear, however, is the loss of distinction between “less” and “fewer”. This is not because I am such a purist

that change in usage is offensive merely because it is change; on the contrary, I accept and often enough applaud the changes, enrichments and economies that linguistic mutability, a

permanent and ubiquitous thing, bring with it. But when logic is lost because of laziness in use, the loss is material. “Less” denotes a diminution in quantity of stuff that is measured by

weight, volume or extent, “fewer” denotes a reduction in number. “There were less people there” is strictly nonsense, as would be saying, “There were fewer butter on my toast”.  Consider

this peach of a sentence, which figured in an advertisement to bus passengers on a south London route informing them of changes to the service: “So,” says the final sentence (presumably by

way of encouragement), “the bus services run smoother and there are less delays”. Here there are several acts of grievous bodily harm to the language. The sentence, were it grammatical and –

more to the point — logical, would read, “Therefore the bus services run more smoothly and there are fewer delays”. “Smoother” is a comparative adjective; “running” is a verb and the

qualifier of a verb is an adverb, hence the sentence should have “more smoothly”, for one does not “run smooth” and if one runs in an increased version of this manner then one runs “more

smoothly” and, if it is not possible to run yet more smoothly than this, then one is running “most smoothly”. One would not “run smoothest” any more than one would “run smooth” – or as we

now see, “run smoother”. As to delays: since delays can be counted, there are either more or fewer of them in the course of a day’s service, not more or less of them – despite the fact that

the latter construction has now been normalised by lazy usage. There can however be _less delay_; the difference is that a count noun takes a plural form, usually adding “-s” as in “delays”,

whereas mass terms do not: more butter is not “more butters”, more milk is not “more milks”. The words “butters” and “milks” are verbs, not plural nouns. He butters (verb) his toast with

yet more butter (stuff); he milks (verb) the cow but gets less milk (stuff). You can count pats of butter but not butter; you weigh butter. You can count glasses of milk but not milk; you

measure milk in pints or litres. You can have more or fewer pats of butter, and accordingly you will have more and less butter. So for glasses of milk and milk. It is often pointed out that

there are no, or at least few, fixed rules in English grammar, apart from what current usage makes them. True. But where nuances of language make for differences in logic, another kind of

rule comes into play: the rule of intellectual, or if you prefer conceptual, accuracy: accuracy of thought, as captured and expressed in a choice of words and the form of their arrangement.

  There are resources in English grammatical forms for conveying information about the subject of a discourse which is sometimes pertinent. Chinese has “measure words” or classifiers to

indicate what kind of thing is being talked about, helpful among other things for disambiguation in so homophonic a language. There are measure words for everything, for rectangular things

and long thin things, for people, books, vehicles – _yi ge ren_ “one (instance of) person”, _er ben shu_ “two (instances of) books”, _san fen mifan “_three (portions of) rice”, and so forth.

Likewise, in English, the _fewer-less_ distinction conveys information about whether it is things or stuffs, countables (denoted by count nouns) and measurables (denoted by mass terms),

that are being talked about. The subjunctive mood in “if you were to do X, you would need to do Y” tells you that a conditional situation is being spoken of, in which the protasis of the

conditional (what follows “if”) describes a counterfactual situation. (What follows the implied “then” of the second half of the conditional is known in logic as the “apodosis”.)  For

another example, “may” implies permission in most uses, “might” implies probability in most uses. As in the bus example, people will understand if you say “It may rain tomorrow”, but there

might be a problem if you say “You may go to town tomorrow”. Does that mean you are allowed to, or that the probability you will do so is at least fairly high? These are matters of

conceptual accuracy which can make an enormous difference – in a legal document or a court of law, in an order to an officer in the midst of battle, in a chain of reasoning in a forensic

laboratory. We use our language on the basis of habits we pick up unconsciously from what we hear and read. As languages age they simplify, losing distinctions and subtleties, especially in

demotic forms; it is said that red-top tabloid newspapers rely on a stock of about 800 words, though most of their readers will know many more, perhaps the 3,000 most commonly recognised

words. But note that _recognising_ is not the same as _using_. It is said that a university graduate might have 30,000 words at her disposal, and that the Oxford English Dictionary contains

about a quarter of a million headwords of which about 50,000 are obsolete. Derivative forms of the headwords double the number of individual entries in some ways of constructing a

dictionary. Interestingly, headword numbers for most dictionaries in most languages are thereabouts. Some years ago I had a debate with the then Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and

Communication at Oxford (yes, truly, there is such a chair). The Rupert Murdoch Professor’s view was that anything goes: languages change, driven by usage, and there’s an end of the matter;

any attempt to hold a line is pointless and no more than reactionary purism. This is 98 per cent correct. Even the most demotic and variant forms of any human language are capable of great

expressive power across all the uses to which language is put – often even more so than orthodox uses. The remaining two per cent concerns the logic that grammar supports, as in the examples

above, because in these cases what grammar has evolved to provide is disambiguation. Ambiguity is good in a poem, not good in a legal document. In the latter case, the choice of grammatical

form makes the difference. Ambiguity is not the same as vagueness. Many expressions are vague, usefully so; “fire” can mean anything from the flame at the tip of a match to a vast bushfire

in the Australian outback. Adjectives help to locate the required point on the scale when greater precision is required. Ambiguity – “our mothers bore us” – is not guaranteed to be useful

except when it is intentional, because it licenses different and even competing inferences. The solutions are straightforward where any undesirable ambiguity is syntactic (“he said on Monday

there will be rain” – did he say it on Monday, or will it rain on Monday?), lexical (“bore”) or punctuational (“eats shoots and leaves”). But “the buses run smoother” – better suspension,

or better timetabling? – requires attention to grammar. Suppose the bus company pledges to “make the buses run smoother”, and I have so bumpy a ride that I am injured, and sue; my chances of

remedy depend upon whether it was the suspension or the timetable that was meant. The aim of the Graves and Hodges _Reader Over Your Shoulder, _a classic of its genre, was to advocate

clarity and accuracy of expression. It inveighed against verbosity, padding and other insults to readers, but consistently throughout it champions logic and meaning. That remains a fight

worth having, as their book remains a book worth reading. And by everyone: for – to illustrate by example – the less people that make less mistakes the more better and fewer ambiguous the

language may not be.  And to prove that such devices as emojis, acronyms and abbreviations are acceptable extensions to the language’s expressive power, a response to that last sentence’s

mismanagement of “less”, “fewer”, comparatives and “may” might well be – WTF? A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an

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