David Nickson of Chipping Norton will have amused readers of The Times on Monday with his letter (in the bottom right corner slot reserved for ‘funnies’) about Jane Austen’s faulty punctuation. Set a piece of her text to punctuate at school, he copied out the original — and scored only six out of ten.
His was the latest in a series of letters about Austen. The first was from Robin Thompson, who asserted that it must be correct to talk of the ‘youngest’ of two sisters, because this great writer did so in her novel Emma.
But ought one to take lessons in grammar, asked J.R.G. Edwards, from a novelist who referred in Persuasion to the “Miss Musgroves” and in Mansfield Park to the “Miss Bertrams”? In both case they ought to have been ‘the Misses’, plus surname. He concluded: “The use of a particular construction by a great author is no guarantee of its soundness.”
The Times’s grammar expert (self-appointed) Oliver Kamm entered the fray last Saturday in his Pedant column. He argued that the use of the superlative with only two subjects had to be correct because in sports circles one would never say of two teams that “the better won” but that “the best won”. This seemed a somewhat dubious contention.
Elsewhere in The Times last week was a reference to “the neighbouring London districts of SW3, SW10 and SW6”. The writer in Bricks & Mortar then went on to refer to SW3 as “the former” and SW6 as “the latter”. A double error, since former and latter can only be used where two things are under discussion. Of SW10 it was said to sit “schizophrenically” in between — a statement both incorrect and highly offensive.
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