The State of the Language: 'For the Ear Trieth Words, as the Mouth Tasteth Meat'

' WHICH,’‘THAT,’ AND COMPANY

ONE of the lowest abysses of the pun is sounded in the ancient conundrum, On what would you live if you were marooned in the Arabian Desert? The answer: On the sandwiches there. It is an answer that could never pop into the mind of one entrenched in a very pure and exacting linguistic usage; not not in a thousand years of painful concentration. What would make it impossible for him ever to think of it is not merely the dismal implied mispronunciation of which, but the very fact that which is called for at all. For the kind of usage referred to requires that in the room of which — and then where is your conundrum?

The quasi-grammatical rule, you may recall, is that you use which to introduce a nonrestrictive or nondelining clause, and that to introduce a restrictive or defining clause. But the very radical difference between the two can and ought to be made luminous enough to those who are merely dazed by grammatical terminology. Inspect this utterance of a college official accounting lor an athletic policy: ’The alumni(,) who are interested in our athletic prestige(,) insist on a paid coach and the full schedule.’ With the commas the sentence means; The alumni as a whole group are interested in our prestige, and all of them insist . . . Without the commas it means: Some of the alumni are interested in our prestige, and those so interested insist . . . The second form is the restrictive one: it restricts the class alumni to a part of itself, the part to which the qualifying clause applies. The difference is the useful one of meaning, and the question that brings it out is, Does the clause qualify all or some of the given class? The acid test, evidently, is whether the qualifying clause can be left out without falsifying the meaning. If it can, it is nonrestrictive; if it cannot, it is restrictive. And when it is restrictive (as sand which is there was in our sad riddle) the most exacting usage prescribes that instead of which or who. Strictly speaking, you say ‘Members of the Cabinet, who are Presidential appointees,’ but ‘Members of the House that are coming up for reelection.’

The usage recommended as ideal finds its classic statement (and the one most often hurled at me by way of rebuke for my own lapses) in Fowler’s Modern English Usage: ‘If writers would agree to regard that as the defining relative pronoun, and which as the nondefining, there would be much gain in both lucidity and ease. The approved practice is illustrated in Browning’s Pied Piper:

It is noticeable, however, that Browning, though he made the distinction for that and which, shrank from making it for that and who. Like many another, he regularly used who of persons, whether his meaning were restrictive or nonrestrictive.

I must confess myself unable, thus far, to overcome the same inhibition. I should write ‘tricks that are vain,’ but ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here. My feeling seems to be that there is something slightly fuzzy and not clear-cut in referring to persons by that. But the theoreticians are against me, and I warn all and sundry that my practice is not quite canonical.

One potent argument in favor of the orthodox distinction is that punctuation is becoming all the time a frailer clue to the very great difference in sense between restrictive and nonrestrietive clauses. It is latterly a fact of common observation that nonrestrietive clauses appear very often in print without the commas and, less often, restrictive clauses with them; so that the reader is left more and more to the process of inference from the context. How dubious this process can be is seen in a sentence such as this one: ‘Abstain from fleshly lusts(,) which war against the soul.’ You have, say, no clue to whether the comma, if there, was put there by an author or printer who fully understood what he was doing. Does the sentence mean (a) All fleshly lusts war against the soul, and we should abstain from them all, or (b) Some of the fleshly lusts war against the soul, and from such as do we should abstain? Rich revenues have been lost over a comma meant but not written; martyrs’ blood has dyed the sands for theological guesses as parlous.

THE DRAGNET

AFTERWORD ON ‘WHICH.’ The foregoing counsel of perfection is far from being practised in America, unless my observation of current print is much at fault. One very common habit is to use which and that interchangeably at random. An even commoner one is to use which for both purposes except where it leads to awkward repetition, and then to invoke that as a last resort. I must admit having spent a number of years in that stage myself, for reasons that at the time seemed better than they do now. I owe my belated conversion to Homer P. Earle of Los Angeles, linguistic scholar and eminent authority on the works of the Spanish novelist-philosopher Unamuno — not so much because Mr. Earle bludgeoned me with good arguments (I knew most of them) as because his own style, as easy as it is accurate, is always the proof of an enviably nice ear. He said among other things: —

I applaud your vigorous attack upon the slovens . . . and hope you will renew it. . . . Meantime I venture to suggest that in those renewals you guard against a counter-attack upon the only weak point I have discovered in your own front. It is true that the choice of the better relative pronoun is not analogous to the gross errors you considered in your article. Nevertheless it would be a substantial gain if English should emerge from the present confusion of relatives and distinguish the defining from the nondefining clause. Let me illustrate the confusion from your article —

whereupon he cited ‘the language which we inherit’ and ‘blunders which are commonly made,’ with a crushing number of others. For good measure he added the telling argument of euphony: —

At best there is too much s and st and sh and eh in English. I wish we could dump the lot on Stalin and his sputtery language. I believe it is well to minimize the Russian effect wherever a which may be equitably replaced by a that.

It is, by the way, to Mr. Earle that the readers of this department must be grateful for suggestion of the fine motto (Job 34.3) at its head. The words of Elihu to Job go on: ‘Let us choose to us judgment: let us know among ourselves what is good’ — a sentiment also not without its aptness above the doorway of such a forum as ours.

WILSON FOLLETT