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, MD, 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, New Jersey, 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.
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 CDs and DVDs if not records?"
That's how to drive home a point in writing about language, with plenty of plain examples. As he knew I would, I looked up the origin of lecture, which Barzun noted is now "not necessarily read"; sure enough, the root of the verb that now means "to deliver a discourse" is the Latin legere, "to read."
In another column, about the latest D.C. word whitelist, I began, "The keynote speaker was one of those privacy nuts who exhorts businesses to tighten up their software and databases lest they threaten customers with ever-more-dangerous identity theft."
Barzun: "I do have a question based on following your prose in all its virtuoso gyrations. Have you no particular view in the matter of `He is one of those who is ... (are)'? You seem to run on both sides of the fence. Can you perhaps take it up in one of your pages not devoted to D.C. slang? I am an are partisan. Reasons on request."
That sent me to the Times archives, where, in a 1985 article, I laid out in exhaustive certitude when the subject one of those whatevers should be construed as singular to be matched by a verb like is and when it should be construed as plural to be matched by are. However, that was one of those confident diktats that was (were?) not followed in my own subsequent virtuoso gyrations. Instead, I have been matching the verb to the nearby plural noun, as in nuts ... exhort, as if the verb's proximity to the antecedent word were controlling. But there has been a jarring incongruity between what I instructed then and what I do now.
Is it nice to jettison a surviving nicety? Help on one of those, Jacques: your reasons requested.
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