History Forum / General / British History / February 2008

March 19, 2006

On Language

Standing Corrected

By WILLIAM SAFIRE
The New York Times

Soon after his appearance during the Super Bowl halftime show, Mick Jagger
was berated in this space for saying, "All things come to he who waits."
With icy humility, I explained that the sentence should go, "All things come
to _him_ who waits."

In came an objection from William Rickles, M.D., of Los Angeles, who
identified himself as "just a shrink who waits and listens to a great deal
of wrong pronoun case usage in my well-educated, 20-something patients, and
my ear no longer rebels as it used to."  He noted: "_He_ is not the object
of the preposition to in this sentence.  The phrase _he who waits_ is the
object of _to_, and _he who_ is the subject of the verb _waits_ and is
properly the subjective case."

Another pro-Jagger-usage reader, Andrew Charig of Port Murray, N.J., agreed:
"The object of the preposition _to_ is the noun clause _he who waits_ — with
_he_ being the subject of the clause, and correctly in the nominative case."

Hmf, I thought. (I often think in snorts.)  What do they know from grammar?
_Him_ is the objective case of the second-person male pronoun and thus used
as the object of the preposition to.  _Who waits_ modifies him and is not
the tail end of a "noun clause."  Then in came a letter — a real postal
letter signed in antediluvian ink, mailed from San Antonio at the cost of an
old-fashioned stamp — from Jacques Barzun, the revered emeritus professor
from Columbia University who published his masterpiece, "_From Dawn to
Decadence_," in 2000, when he was 92.

After saluting my energy in skewering nonce neologisms like _deliciousing_,
my candidate for World's Wisest Living Intellectual wrote: "Isn't there a
sign of split personality or bipolarity of some sort" — everybody's a
shrink — "in your appending a squib about the error of _he_ instead of _him_
in an otherwise normal sentence?  For my part, I would let go all the rules
requiring _whom_, _him_ and _as_ for _like_ and so on.  They are but
survivals in a language that has been stripped of niceties, and I consider
_deliciousing_ a far worse offense than _between you and I_."

That's a shocker, coming from my favorite frequent correspondent, who has
manned the ramparts of proper usage and accurate etymology since Hector was
a pup.  I kind of like the surviving niceties of language.  We can defend
the pleasures of living in syntax with time left over to mock the profusion
of confusion by the _couldn't-care-less_ niceties-strippers.
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The instruction that comes from my friend and mentor Jacques is welcome
because he doesn't merely correct.  He teaches with specific examples.
Consider this letter that followed a column of mine about "snoopspeak," the
lexicon of sophisticated electronic surveillance that can no longer
accurately be called _wiretapping_. "I regret that you want to discard
_wiretap_," he wrote.  "You lend aid to the fallacious notion that the use
of every new gadget for an old purpose must get a new name.  Doing that
regularly would be distracting, and the quality of the perpetual
replacements would be dubious.  Electronic surveillance is a case in point:
it has compelled you to write four paragraphs about pronunciation and wind
up wrong at that, since _survey_ should end not with the l sound but with a
_clear eyyy_."

(That means that he pronounces the verb surveil as sur-VEY-yuh. That's all
very well for Jacques, born in France 98 years ago, but in Merkin, we
already pronounce the l in adopting the French noun _surveillance_ and
should logically pronounce the l in the verb we have back-formed, with
_surveil_ rhyming with _prevail_.  End of interruption.)

"The fallacy behind perpetual recoinage," Barzun continued, "is to suppose
that words must describe instead of stand for and evoke.  For a reasonably
stable language, words must continue to cover new details, and they can: we
_ship_ goods by truck and plane.  We have _cash_ in the bank though it is
only a balance and not even written down.  The _bath_ room has only a shower
stall.  The table and bed _linen_ are of cotton thread with some plastic
intertwined.  A _lecture_ is not necessarily read.  I am _typing_ on a
computer that uses no type.  The man you quote who said _record store_ was
'outdated but still in use' didn't stop to think.  What are CD's and DVD's
if not records?"