Mind your language

`RUBBISH,' said my husband, tossing aside the newspaper folded in four with the completed crossword upmost, decorated with a few whisky-glass stains. Well, I didn't ask him to do the thing in the first place.

Rubbish or not, crosswords, although they command a language of their own, sometimes indicate changes in English. I have just been shown a couple, as it happens. One piece of evidence that English syntax is breaking down, or at least becoming simpler, is trouble with pronouns. A few weeks ago, the Times crossword had an answer: `Everything comes to he who waits.' Someone at the Times was kind enough to draw it to my attention. It should have been him, `to him who waits'. But even if that were realised, him would not have fitted in the lights available for the solution.

A similar obstacle to amendment could not be blamed by a Daily Telegraph compiler who was caught last year giving the clue, `Common sense for we French.' The solution was meant to be nous, meaning both 'mind' or `common sense' and, in French, 'we'. But if the clue had been couched grammatically in its literal sense, the play on words would still have worked: `Common sense for us French', since nous means 'us' too.

I think there are two forces working to produce these pronouns in the wrong grammatical case. One we have mentioned before - that we and I sound more genteel than us and me. Generations of children have been told it is bad manners to say `Me and Jim' or `Us British can beat them'. When the oblique cases really are called for `Save some for Jim and me', `It's easy for us British' - they sound impolite, and thus grammatically incorrect.

The other force at work is the unfamiliarity of clauses having their own little cosmos of subject, verb and object. Unconsciously we expect the relative pronoun to agree in case with its antecedent, as with `He who hesitates is lost.' I get the impression that Englishspeakers rarely use, in speech, constructions on the model `to him who waits'; they use different constructions, such as `If you wait long enough, you can get anything.' It is only in fossilised phrases such as proverbs that the obsolescent construction is retained, and even there the grammar breaks down.

My husband never learnt of these insights, for by now he was practising his stertor and dreaming of Binswanger's disease or whatever the latest fashion is among the Wimpole streetwise.

Copyright Spectator Apr 24, 1999
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