The incident served as a reminder that some universities and examiners attach great importance to what I regard as the accidentals of thesis presentation. I have known of British candidates “referred” for some months for the correction of what to me seem mere minutiae. I know of one Ivy-league thesis being held up because the typing did not conform to the prescribed width for the left-hand margin. How fussy do we need to be? I also know of a don at the University of Oxford who incurred the wrath of his colleagues because he allowed a candidate to make – there and then at the viva – a handwritten correction to an obvious slip in the typescript submitted. Though it is now well over half a century ago, I still remember my own oral, held in a London college. The external examiner, a distinguished renaissance scholar whom I had never met and of whom I stood in considerable awe, invited me to have a cup of coffee with him in his room. After some amiable chat and a few friendly questions he produced a half-sheet of notepaper with the remark “Just make these half dozen corrections in the copy deposited in your university library.” It took me some moments to register that my oral examination was over. I had passed.

Some examiners seem to regard a thesis not as a report on research but as a fully published book, and demand a standard of presentation that is not always demonstrated these days in the publications of their own university presses. One reason may be that university staff now have computer systems that can produce page after page of crisp typescript of a standard unheard of a decade or two ago.

As I look at the reports of my two fellow examiners I detect the difference. It is almost a generation gap. The senior (and now emeritus) external typed his report himself, inserting without any apologies numerous inked-in corrections where he had hit the wrong key. The other examiner sternly criticised the candidate’s “presentation and layout”, opening with the pronouncement “The font is a regrettable choice. A font with serifs for quotations would improve the readability.”

Since when has a sans serif typeface been inadmissible in a thesis presentation? The key to all this lay in the examiner’s own report. It was beautifully printed in Times Roman on one of his university’s numerous laser printers. For all I know, the actual typing had been the work of his secretary.

My candidate had done all his own typing at home on a fairly primitive but perfectly efficient machine, its only typeface being sans serif. I never had any problem reading either his preliminary or his final drafts. Perhaps I am just not fussy enough.

I would be the last to condone sloppy work and am wholeheartedly for tidy presentation with due attention to the protocol of the discipline. Aren’t we all? But a thesis is not a book, and a little common sense is no bad thing when it comes to how we handle the assessment and its consequences to the candidate. Essentials and accidentals have a different order of importance.

We ‘learn’ our own language in much the same way; a few painful tumbles,
a few precarious balancing acts (wobbling between ‘I saw it’ and ‘I seen
it’) and we are away. Children on their first arrival at school still have
plenty to learn about their own language, but they are already equipped
with much of its idiom, most of its intonations, and all of its major structures.
Nobody ‘taught’ them.

Learning a second language as an adult is very different. If learning
one’s first language is akin to the instinctive ‘learning’ required for
riding a bicycle, learning a second language is like acquiring the skill
needed to drive a motor car – you can no longer rely on a series of self-correcting
wobbles, you have to know the position of the brake, the accelerator and
the clutch, and what they do. Acquiring a second language means you have
to know not only the lexical items (the ‘vocabulary’) but also how to use
a complex series of controls, labelled with such technical terms as ‘transitive
verb’ and ‘indirect object’ and ‘secondary stress’. Instinct and intuition
are not enough.

All this arises from an appeal I had from a Chinese student baffled
by the English use of ‘quite’. He had consulted several standard dictionaries.
Their answers were confusing and some of them contradictory. None told him
how to use ‘quite’.

We (who ride our bicycles with unconscious ease) can say colloquially
that Dame Kiri te Kanawa is ‘quite a singer’ or even ‘quite something’,
meaning this as the ultimate compliment. But if we say of someone else
that she is ‘quite a good singer’ the word ‘quite’ is now less complimentary.
The lady who is ‘quite a good singer’ is agreeable enough to listen to,
but she will never make Covent Garden. How can the same word at one moment
denote the highest praise and at the next be slighting in the extreme?

The most common meaning of ‘quite’ is ‘absolutely, completely’ as in
‘I am quite ready to leave’, ‘He had not quite finished’, ‘The answer had
quite gone out of my mind’. Although ‘quite’ can modify other kinds of
words, it is generally used before adjectives: ‘quite impossible’, ‘quite
superb’, ‘quite perfect’, ‘quite ridiculous’, ‘quite mistaken’. From this
absolute sense there grew the colloquial usage ‘quite a . . .’ followed
by a noun. In Emma, Jane Austen writes: ‘You are quite a humorist, and may
say what you like. Quite a humorist.’ In that passage ‘quite’ reinforces
the sense of the word ‘humorist’.

This construction dropped out of English literary language but it survived
strongly in the US in the spoken idiom. ‘He is quite a guy!’ From the US,
the usage has been reintroduced into spoken English. The same ‘absolute’
meaning attaches itself to the typically British laconic formula of complete
agreement with the previous speaker: ‘Quite so’ or simply ‘Quite’.

If you now look at the kind of adjective to which ‘quite’, in the sense
of ‘absolutely’, attaches itself, you will find that they are all adjectives
of one type; they are themselves absolute in meaning and hence do not normally
form a comparative or a superlative. If something is impossible it cannot
be more impossible or most impossible. This kind of adjective is technically
called nongradable.

A quite different usage has developed with gradable adjectives, which
comprise the great majority of our stock of adjectives. As its name implies,
the gradable adjective can form a positive, a comparative, and a superlative
(for example, good, better, best; fast, faster, fastest). When ‘quite’ is
put in front of a gradable adjective it does not mean ‘absolutely’. On the
contrary, it means anything in a range from ‘moderately’ to ‘only moderately’,
the precise grade depending on context and intonation. In front of a gradable
adjective, ‘quite’ (especially in British English) downgrades. To say someone
is ‘quite good’ at his job is to damn with faint praise, ‘quite good’ being
lower down the gradable scale than ‘very good’ or ‘good’.

The contrast can be seen in near-synonyms. ‘Quite munificent’ implies
great generosity because ‘munificent’ is nongradable. But attach ‘quite’
to its gradable near-synonym ‘generous’ and the result is different. ‘Quite
generous’ downgrades – someone who is ‘quite generous’ has not made as large
a contribution to an appeal for funds as one who is ‘generous’.

The complexities of ‘quite’ do not end there. There is a set of adjectives
which are gradable (for example, ‘beautiful’ with its comparative ‘more
beautiful’ and its superlative ‘most beautiful’). But the positive of this
kind of adjective is already itself a kind of superlative, semantically
expressing an absolute quality. If you say a girl is ‘beautiful’ you rank
her very high indeed on your beauty scale. Other adjectives in this ‘already
superlative’ category include ‘stupendous’, ‘outstanding’, ‘excellent’,
‘hideous’, ‘horrifying’, and are all strongly assertive in meaning. ‘Quite’
with such adjectives behaves as if they were non gradable, adding strong
reinforcement to the meaning – ‘quite outstanding’, ‘quite beautiful’, ‘quite
łó´Ç°ů°ůžą´Ú˛âžą˛Ô˛ľâ€™.

‘Quite’ can be quite a problem and dictionaries designed for native
speakers offer no real help to the foreign learner. A word then to all you
freewheeling easy riders, who balance and steer with native instinct: next
time you hear an Asian student using offbeat English, just think how you
would feel if you had to get off your bike and twiddle with the unfamiliar
controls of a language like Chinese? Learning another language can be quite
something.

Ian Gordon is a dictionary editor and language consultant in Wellington,
New Zealand.

The traditional job of the adverb in English is to modify the verb;
in modifying the verb it also tells you something about the nature, the
capabilities, the activities of the grammatical subject of that verb. Take,
for example, the simple sentence: ‘The man climbed up the hill.’ Now add
a simple adverb: ‘The man climbed painfully up the hill.’ In addition to
modifying the action of the verb, the adverb ‘painfully’ also adds information
about the man, who is the subject of the sentence. He is tired, or old,
or perhaps injured. One simple adverb transmits the message.

So far, no problems. But problems have been gathering thick and fast
in recent times, as writers and speakers of American English and increasingly
of British English have taken to the extensive use of an adverbial construction
that used to be fairly restricted.

One of the earliest adverbs to enjoy disjunctive status was ‘briefly’.
The traditional usage can be seen in ‘He spoke briefly and to the point’
– where ‘briefly’ modifies the action of the verb and simultaneously conveys
information about the verb’s grammatical subject. Now look at the sentence
‘Briefly, these are some of my main findings’ – here ‘briefly’ does not
modify the verb and it has no relationship to the verb’s subject ‘these’.
What it does is to stand outside the syntax of the sentence (syntactically
‘disjoined’), expressing an opinion or an attitude or offering a comment
from the writer or speaker.

In that second sentence, ‘briefly’ means ‘I, the speaker, know that
I have been allotted only a 10-minute slot in this symposium and I shall
try to offer a brief summary of my findings in the time available.’ The
displaced – or disjunctive – use of ‘briefly’ is a handy shorthand way of
compressing a whole sentence – even a whole attitude into a single word.

After the successful introduction of disjunctive ‘briefly,’ other adverbs
began to follow suit, similarly replacing longer statements. ‘I shall now
introduce a new and not particularly relevant piece of information’ can
be neatly replaced by ‘Incidentally . . . ‘ The question-begging ‘It is
clear that no explanation or demonstration is called for’ can be replaced
by ‘Obviously . . . ‘ ‘I hate to say this about her but it is best that
you should know . . . ‘ can be compressed into one devastating disjunctive
adverb ‘Candidly . . . ‘ Then again, if you feel that you are on shaky ground
you can boost your own (if not your audience’s) faith in your hypothesis
by opening with the disjunctive ‘Surely . . . ‘

The disjunctive adverb does have its uses; it also has its abuses, particularly
if over-employed in writing. Any device which can compress a sentenceful
of meaning into a single word is a good servant but it can be a bad master.
Surprisingly, happily, fortunately, mercifully, obviously, wisely, regretfully,
predictably, sadly, etcetera have their use as signal flags, but increasingly
they have tended to become mere cliche opening formulae. Watch them.

A further development of the disjunctive adverb is its aspectual use,
signalling a generalised point of view (not necessarily that of the author)
– disjunctives like ‘morally,’ ‘politically,’ ‘economically,’ ‘aesthetically,’
‘philosophically’. Use these with caution. They do signal, but too often
only in the vaguest way. It is remarkable how speedily they lose any real
meaning. ‘Morally, politically and economically, it is a matter of urgency
that the British government . . .’ (I did not invent that. It was spoken
in Parliament.) Disjunctive adverbs of this aspectual type can degen-erate
rapidly into windy rhetoric. Some of them are already 100 per cent wind
– people who begin a sentence with ‘Basically . . . (long pause)’ are merely
playing for time. They have not even begun to think of what they will say.

Writing with an excess of disjunctive adverbs has produced in our time
a smart-alick magazine style, which is best avoided in responsible writing.
I offer no prizes for the source of the following rewrite by a disjunctive
subeditor: ‘Initially, God created the heaven and the Earth. Basically,
the Earth was without form, and void. Tragically, darkness was upon the
face of the deep. Reportedly, the Spirit of God moved the face of the waters.
Mercifully, God said ‘Let there be light’ and – predictably – there was
ąôžą˛ľłółŮ.’

Instead, I offer two pieces of advice on disjunctive adverbs: First
learn to recognise them and how they operate. Secondly, use them – like
garlic – sparingly.

Ian Gordon is emeritus professor in English at the University of Wellington,
New Zealand

I am beginning to wonder if it is not time to cry halt to the idea that
historical linguistics is so much dead wood and that descriptive linguistics
is where the shining future lies. The English language is a continuum, not
a series of discrete linguistic episodes some of which can be conveniently
swept under the carpet. What T. S. Eliot called ‘the intolerable wrestle
with words and meanings’ will become even more intolerable unless we recognise
that the synchronic study of today’s vocabulary is not enough. Our words
belonged to someone else long before they belonged to us.

Do I detect the beginnings of a linguistic parallel to the uncertainty
principle? Are we in danger of not knowing what words mean because we have
no conception of what they meant? Words come freighted with their history
and we as linguistic observers (or even as mere ‘common readers’) need to
note the sign ‘Caution: words at work’.

Take a simple idea like ‘morning’. My dictionary defines morning as
‘the first part of the day, ending at or about noon’, an admirably scientific
piece of observation. That is, so long as the observer is living in the
1990s and the text read is of our own time.

But shift the observer and change the text and a very different meaning
emerges. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) there is a sentence
‘They arrived in Gracechurch Street at noon and spent the morning in shopping?’
The morning?

It is no error. ‘Morning’ to Austen did not mean what it does today.
Her day was divided up according to mealtimes. At her social level breakfast
was served at 10 am and was a leisurely and substantial meal. A few sandwiches
or some cold meat were available around midday for those who wanted what
we now call ‘lunch’.

In Austen, any reference to ‘morning’ indicates the hours between 11
am (when breakfast ended) and ‘dinnertime’, somewhere between 4 pm and 5
pm. The result is that we today read with astonishment in an 1840 newspaper
that ‘M. Liszt will give at two o’clock on Tuesday morning Recitals on the
Pianoforte’. His recitals took place not at the dead hour of 2 am but in
what to us is the early afternoon.

In reading older books one must be conscious of this different timing
of mealtimes and of the naming of parts of the day. Otherwise we can misunderstand
wildly what is going on. In Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) an angry squire
locks his lovesick daughter into her bedroom shortly after 10 am and there
she has to remain until she is summoned to dinner.

To a modern reader this sounds like a long, hungry, incarceration. In
fact the bedroom door would have been reopened about 1.30 pm, as dinner
was on the table in this early-18th-century rural household by 2 pm. She
was merely expected to spend the ‘morning’ in her own room, where she probably
would have been in any case. The squire was angry but he was no monster.

A careful reader will find confirmation later in the novel: ‘it being
now past three in the morning, or to reckon by the old style, in the afternoon’.
Fielding, writing in the 1740s, was conscious that the ‘afternoon’ had in
his lifetime become ‘morning’. By Austen’s time, the ‘afternoon’ had ceased
to exist. It had become the ‘morning’ – which stretched from 11 am to the
family’s chosen dinnertime. When some of her women characters pay a ‘morning
call’ they arrived about the time that we might turn up for a cup of afternoon
tea.

Some years ago I did a series of research lectures in French universities.
But one university insisted I simply take a class on one of their set books
Daniel Defoe’s Roxana. It looked like a simple assignment. Defoe’s easy
colloquial narration had often figured in my course on the 18th-century
novel. Robinson Crusoe can be read by schoolchildren; my university classes
I left largely to their own devices and Defoe was invariably disposed of
before I pushed on to analyse the subtleties of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy.

But French students cannot treat their set texts lightly. They are expected
to scrutinise them under a high-power microscope and examined every word
of Roxana as if it were the text of Sophocles. I now wonder what children
really get from Robinson Crusoe? Roxana drove me on one page out of every
four to consult the historical sections of the Oxford English Dictionary
to extract the real meaning. Defoe is easy but only if you skip, reading
with the eye and not with the mind, and that is no way to treat a finely
crafted piece of writing.

Yes, linguistics is indeed a science. But you need to comprehend all
aspects of it if you are going to get anywhere with the proper study of
language.

Ian Gordon is emeritus professor in English at the University of Wellington,
New Zealand.

His specific concern lies in the ‘punctuation’ of the names of the chemical
elements – capital or no capital? I assume no one makes errors with the
handy shorthand, a mix of upper and lower case letters introduced in the
early 19th century by the Swedish chemist Berzelius – Au for gold, C for
carbon, Fe for iron, H for hydrogen and the rest. The trouble lies elsewhere.
Is Au Gold or is it gold? Is C Carbon or carbon? Is H Hydrogen or hydrogen?
And (since the elements with high atomic numbers are all named from people
or places automatically entitled to their own private initial capital letter)
is it Curium or curium? Is it Americium or americium? Is it Mendelevium
or mendelevium? For good measure, I throw in a further nasty question –
mine, not that of the physics professor. Does it matter?

The solution lies back in history. In science, there are occasions when
looking backwards is not a useless exercise; it can sometimes explain the
present. There was a period when all English nouns were printed with initial
capitals, as German nouns are to this day. Modern reprints of older books
generally conceal this; if you pick up a handy paperback of Addison’s Essays,
you will not find you are troubled by strange initial capital letters.

Yet Addison (no scientist he, but he had his age’s intelligent interest
in what the Royal Society was up to) wrote one of his Spectator essays on
17th-century scientific thought. He noted with approval how Robert Boyle
had amplified the earlier work of Francis Bacon, and here is how the passage
was printed on its first appearance in 1712:

‘The Excellent Mr. Boyle was the Person, who seems to have been designed
by Nature to succeed to the Labours and Enquiries of that extraordinary
Genius I have just mentioned. By innumerable Experiments He, in a great
Measure, filled up those Plans and Out-lines of Science, which his Predecessor
had sketched out.’

In the modern paperback, the only noun to retain its initial capital
in that passage is the proper name ‘Boyle’. The reason for the change is
that a dramatic shift in printing practice occurred around the middle of
the 18th century. It continues to affect our punctuation to this day. Capitals,
for 200 years now, have been reserved for the opening word of a sentence,
for a few abbreviations, and for personal and geographical names.

When chemistry took its great step forward, in the late 18th and the
early 19th century, our present-day printing habits had already become well
established. People and places got initial capitals; things got an initial
lower case. So, Sir Humphry Davy; but what he isolated were potassium and
sodium and chlorine and the rest. He was a person (capital, please!); the
chemical elements were things (no capital).

This ‘tradition’ (which arose from the purely accidental concurrence
of a change in printing practice with a surge towards modern chemistry)
remains in place. The ‘newer’ elements continue the practice adopted for
the ‘older’ elements discovered in the 19th century. The element with the
atomic number 95, even if it is named after America, is americium and the
same goes for nobelium and lawrencium – and whatever lies to be discovered
beyond them.

I hope this answers my physics professor’s question and mine. Mine first
– does it matter? Briefly, no. The use of lower case is the result of a
historical accident. But to the professor of physics and his students my
answer is quite other. When a practice is so well established that it has
been going on for close on 200 years, why alter it? There is nothing now
to be gained by a random mix of upper and lower case initials in naming
the chemical elements. Stick to good old oxygen and hydrogen and carbon
and accept with good grace fermium and einsteinium.

The important thing in all this is to recognise that what is usually
known as ‘punctuation’ in the manuals really embraces two quite different
sets of signs, each set with a different function. The stopper/joiner/intruder/intoner
punctuation set of my earlier article are functional signals, alerting the
reader to the structure and (on occasion) to the intonation of the sentence.
You need to use that kind of ‘punctuation’ to get your meaning across with
precision.

But some of what the manuals include under the heading of ‘punctuation’
have no parallel functional value; their use or nonuse has no effect on
the meaning; they are merely typographical conventions. Addison capitalised
all his nouns; we capitalise only proper names. The meaning is unaltered,
however you print the text. Similarly, meaning is unaffected if you write
nitrogen as Nitrogen.

But it looks bad to those of us brought up in the tradition. On these
merely typographical conventions my advice is: let sleeping dogs lie. There
are more exciting things to do in the lab than to irritate your professor.

Ian Gordon is emeritus professor in English at the University of Wellington,
New Zealand.

The maps strongly suggest a correlation between genetic make-up and
the language of the region. The north-south division between the langue
d’oil and the langue d’oc, the French of Paris and the French of Provence,
may not be simply the product of geographical separation. There may well
be a deeper cause, the initial settlement of these regions by people with
different genetic characteristics, characteristics which can still be detected.
That double helix has certainly started something.

British linguists could do well to follow the outcome with interest.
The next breakthrough may come not from post-Chomsky grammatical introspection
but from dialectology. The study of British regional dialects has never
been a strongly supported area of research. The University of Leeds, which
hosted the Linguistic Atlas of England, and Edinburgh University, the final
host of the Scottish National Dictionary, are honourable exceptions. But
the Scottish National Dictionary had to struggle for many years towards
its completion, and its progeny the Concise Scots Dictionary had to appeal
to private donors. Joseph Wright’s monumental English Dialect Dictionary
was ultimately printed by Oxford University Press – but at his own expense.

I suspect that the gathering and codification of British dialect words
has been generally regarded as a hobby for provincial schoolteachers and
rustic eccentrics, somewhat on a level with stamp collecting, at best mere
taxonomy. ‘Real’ scholars looked elsewhere. Now that the French have discovered
it has a link with a proper science – and a very up-to-date brand at that
– things may begin to look rather different.

There is certainly a great deal still awaiting explanation and even
discovery. I had a letter the other day from an English academic, a Cambridge
graduate, telling me he was ‘chuffed’ with his latest findings. He would
not have employed that colloquialism in writing up his results but he and
I knew that he was delighted.

I decided to look up the word ‘chuff(ed)’ in my Concise Oxfords (I have
all eight editions). Understandably, it did not appear in the early issues
but the more hospitable sixth edition of 1976 has the word, labelling it
‘slang (from the dialect chuff)’. What was surprising was the definition:
‘pleased; displeased’. This must surely be the most unsatisfactory definition
ever offered by a dictionary claiming some authority in modern English usage.

Intrigued, I pressed on. The modern ‘standard’ dictionaries were no
help. I turned to the 19th-century English Dialect Dictionary. The answer
was there. Nobody had bothered to look.

There are (were?) not one but two ‘chuffed’ adjectives, lookalikes but
totally different words. One means ‘pleased’; the other means ‘ill-tempered,
displeased’. Joseph Wright, being a real scholar, cited his sources for
each by county. When I plotted these on an old county map of England (not
easy to come by these days) the answer was clear. ‘Pleased, delighted’ chuffed
belongs to the North and the Midlands. The ‘Displeased’ chuffed occurs (occurred?)
exclusively in a southern area that stretches from Cornwall and Devon to
Hampshire, Berkshire, Surrey, Sussex and Kent, with a swing north to Norfolk.
It corresponds closely to the old West Saxon kingdom of the 9th century.
Whether these two quite different adjectives correspond to genetic differences
between the West Saxons of the South and the Anglian tribes who settled
further north I do not know. But in view of the French findings the situation
is worth investigating.

British dialects are part of our linguistic totality. It is true we
all speak English. But do we always understand what the other English speaker
is saying? Have you ever made an arrangement to meet someone ‘next Thursday’,
to find that the other party did not turn up? Who is to blame? Have you
ever considered that regional differences in idiom can lie embedded in what
appears to be ‘standard’ English speech?

In the South ‘next Thursday’ means the Thursday immediately following
the day on which you are speaking. In Scotland, Yorkshire, on occasion anywhere
north of Watford – ‘next Thursday’ means what southerners probably call
‘Thursday week’, that is the Thursday immediately following, plus one week.

Next time you make an arrangement for ‘next Thursday’ maybe you should
consider asking for a blood sample (although it would take weeks to get
the results back from the lab). I find it easier to insist on a specific
date, in numeric code.

But would someone please keep an eye on these French investigations
and their implications for what has happened and is still happening in our
language? They come a bit late for me. Having spent a career in the study
of languages I do not think I have time to do a postgraduate degree in molecular
biology. But somebody had better start thinking of it. There may be linguistic
gold in them thar genes.

Ian Gordon is professor of English language and literature at the University
of Wellington, New Zealand.

This tug-of-war between ‘s’ and ‘z’ has been going on for a very long
time. Today’s purists may wrinkle their noses in distaste when a new -ise/-ize
horror hits the popular press. The truth is that the suffix has been for
centuries a handy general-purpose verb-making additive. Contemporary purists
prob-ably wrinkled their noses when ‘canonise’ made its first appearance
in the 14th century, ‘monopolise’ in the 15th, ‘gormondise’ in the 16th,
‘sterilise’ in the 17th, ‘democratise’ in the 18th, and ‘maximise’ in the
l9th; they certainly did when ‘hospitalise’ made its appearance in the 20th.

Margaret Thatcher did not invent ‘privatise’ but when she launched it
some years ago as the verb-of-the-month the immediate problem was not to
accept or reject it. It was how to spell it. The public prints divided sharply.
The Times and the Daily Telegraph went for ‘privatize’. The Observer, The
Listener, and the New Statesman opted for ‘privatise’. Should social scientists
perhaps add spelling to their other indicators?

Which is right? There is no simple answer. Derivation is no help. A
few of these -ize words (such as ‘stigmatize’) come direct from Greek and
can lay some claim to retain the zeta of the original. Many more come from
French -iser verbs and can justify their ‘s’. The great majority are ad
hoc neologisms, mongrels, all hybrid vigour and no pedigree.

The printers (who are the usual arbiters on these matters) at first
strongly favoured the ‘z’ spelling, probably instinctively on phonetic grounds.
Present-day scientists are blissfully unaware that Robert Boyle (and-for
that matter-Shakespeare, Addison and Steele) were all printed with the spelling
‘surprize’. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was in 1719 ‘surpriz’d’ to see a footprint
in the sand. That footprint remains indelible; in modern reprints the original
spelling is obliterated by other sand, the sands of time.

The shift towards ‘s’ began in the mid-18th century and is best seen
in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), which confirmed the spelling ‘surprise’.
But Johnson was no great stickler for consistency. In one of his own letters
he wrote ‘surpriz’d’. He wrote ‘realise’ in another letter-but insisted
on ‘realize’ in his Dictionary. In longer words (such as ‘familiarize’)
he tended to the ‘z’. Dr Johnson was about as confused as we are.

All this confusion faced Sir James Murray, the great editor of the Oxford
English Dictionary. After consideration he decided-on the grounds that the
ultimate source of the suffix was Greek-to zed the lot: ‘In this dictionary
the termination is uniformly written -ize.’ This pragmatic decision (which
ran contrary to much l9th-century printing practice) became embedded in
the ‘house style’ of the Oxford University Press and in those two printers’
bibles Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers and Collins’s Authors’ and
Printers’ Dictionary.

But alas for uniformity. Murray made his decision towards the end of
the last century, when the early volumes of the OED had already been on
issue to the public for some years, its first volume (for example) blandly
offering (in unreformed ‘French’ spellings) both ‘advise’ and ‘advertise’.
Hart’s Rules contains three pages of accepted -ise/-ize spellings. Its small
group of permitted -ise spellings comes (with two exceptions) from these
early volumes of the OED which the editor had been unable to back-track
on.

The two exceptions were words edited after Murray’s death. His successor
could not bring himself to accept -ize in a couple of words in Volume X.
One of them was (surprise! surprise!) Dr Johnson’s long-established ‘surprise’.
Consistency is difficult in human affairs.

What should have been the last word has turned out to be anything but.
In spite of the massive authority of the OED and its derivatives, British
publishers have not been unanimous in following its lead. Spellings in -ise
have continued unabated in publications of many types, and my impression
is that -ise/-isation spellings are steadily on the increase. The ‘ordinary
reader’ (if there is such a person) deep down seems to react with unconscious
hostility towards the letter ‘z’. It is the odd-man-out in our alphabet.
Would Lord Clark’s great series have been such a popular success on TV and
in print if the BBC had titled it Civilization?

Significantly the Concise Oxford Dictionary, which for 50 years insisted
exclusively on -ize, has progressively from its fifth edition (1964) come
to record both variants. The Preface to its 8th edition (1990) indeed states
bluntly ‘English is a language that has an exceptional tolerance of variations
in spelling (generalize and generalise, and so on)’. It looks as if there
is no last word. Synthesise or synthesize, as you will.

Spelling advice, then, to researchers. (l) When you write up your findings
spell as well as you can. (2) If in doubt consult a dictionary. (3) If your
dictionary is dog-eared throw it away (unless-as is likely-it is an old
school prize, in which case you may wish to store it with your old teddy
bear). (4) Buy the most recent edition of the dictionary you fancy. Lexicography
(like your own subject) moves fast these days. (5) If your software incorporates
a spelling checker, be advised that it is clever-clever but basically stupid.
It will ‘pass’ any word ‘correctly’ spelt and will cheerfully accept ‘the’
when you intended ‘then’ and in all likelihood will spell in the American
way. (6) Leave the final decisions to your editor. He (or more likely she)
will know more than you can about your publisher’s house style.

Ian A Gordon is emeritus professor of English Language and Literature
at the University of Wellington and a dictionary editor.

This was not always so. The early scientists of the Royal Society wrote
with a delightful clarity and simplicity, their prose looking towards that
of our own day. Their punctuation, however, clung to an older rhetorical
system, which has disappeared for ever. That often-quoted sentence in Sprat’s
History of the Royal Society (1667), describing the society’s ‘native easiness’
in prose usage, contains fewer than 50 words, all of them still current.
But it is cluttered with an outdated punctuation: nine commas, three semicolons,
two colons and one full stop-one punctuation symbol to every three words,
on average.

Whole manuals are now devoted to the craft, crammed with pernickety
details which however needful to the printer and typographer, leave the
average writer unable to see the wood for the trees. The whole idea of punctuation
is to make things clearer and easier for the reader.

If readers know the meaning of the words they read and yet find themselves
stumbling over the full sentence, you can be sure the punctuation has been
at fault. Good punctuation is a series of signals that keep the reader on
the right track. One mark of good writing is that readers are not even aware
of the punctuation unobtrusively steering them in the right direction.

How, then, to punctuate in terms of today not yesterday? First, the
principles. There are four main types of punctuation. Let’s call them the
stoppers, the linkers, the intruders and the intoners. They all have different
jobs.

The stoppers are what the name implies. They mark the stops. The major
breath-pauses in spoken English are marked in the written language by stopper
number one (termed the full stop or the period and, by printers, the full
point). It marks the end of sentences.

If a sentence has several clauses, there is often a secondary pause
at a clause boundary, marked in print by stopper number two, the comma.
You can write with vigour and clarity and precision and never use any punctuation
more complicated than the two stoppers. These grand members of the Order
of Merit, TS Eliot and Ernest Rutherford, could write whole pages using
only commas and full stops. Why not you?

Master the two stoppers and then-and only then-you are ready for the
linkers. There are three linkers, the semicolon, the colon and the dash.
First the semicolon. Where two sentences are felt to be strongly associated
you may use a semicolon linker to re-enforce to your reader their close
relationship. ‘He was going home. He lived in Yorkshire’-the full stop between
these two sentences indicates the separate, unrelated, nature of the two
statements.

Contrast that with: ‘He was going home; it was to prove a disappointment’-here
the semicolon linker implies that the two statements must be read together.
In the first sentence-pair, separated by a full stop, ‘home’ and ‘Yorkshire’
are simply localities. In the second pair, ‘home’ is an evocative term with
expectations offset by the ‘disappointment’ in the second sentence.

A comparable use occurs in: ‘I never study style; all that I do is to
try to get the subject as clear as I can in my own head, and express it
in the commonest language which occurs to me’ (Charles Darwin). In each,
the second sentence casts light on the first, the two performing a syntactical
pas de deux. The use of the semicolon linker signals this visually to the
reader.

More specialised linkers, offering even fancier visual signals, are
the colon and the dash. The colon points forward, meaning (in effect) ‘here
it comes’-‘What a scientist does is compounded of two interests: the interest
of his time and his own interest’ (Jacob Bronowski). The dash, on the contrary,
points backwards, offering a comment on what has gone before: ‘In science
we do the same thing-the philosopher exercises precisely the same faculties
though in a much more delicate manner’ (Thomas Huxley). Linkers are more
sophisticated than stoppers. Only link when you know how to stop, as in
skiing. This way you will not get into difficulties.

Third come the intruders, which separate off words or phrases not part
of the ongoing syntax of the sentence, phrases in apposition, phrases of
explanation, intrusive comments, ‘extras’ which expand or modify the meaning
of a sentence without affecting its grammatical unity. Such phrases are
marked off from the main sentence by being included within pairs of intruder-signs-commas
in pairs, dashes in pairs, round brackets in pairs, in an ascending scale
of formality.

Here are examples of all three. ‘It is conceivable, for example, that
some unknown external force may supply the necessary disturbance to cause
disintegration’ (Rutherford). ‘What I will maintain-and maintain vigorously-is
that knowledge is much more often useful than harmful’ (Bertrand Russell).

The third example exhibits not one but two intruder-pairs: ‘I know of
no existing culture or ethical system (as these are conventionally understood)
which does not, to some degree at least, rest on a delusion’ (Anatol Rapoport).
There is scientific caution for you, all done by punctuation!

Stoppers, linkers and intruders are reader-guides to what is being said.
Intoners attempt to indicate how it is to be said. English once had a great
variety of intoners-some older English prose texts are marked up like a
Gregorian chant. Only two intoners are now in use, the question mark and
the exclamation mark. These are indicators of expression, operating like
those marks in a musical score that call for (say) a crescendo or pizzicato.
They tell the reader not about the syntax of the sentence but about the
tone of voice in which the sentence is to be understood.

Of the two, the question mark is easy. The exclamation mark is hideously
difficult. Avoid it. Even experts (who use it to signal irony or indignation)
have found themselves hopelessly misunderstood. When it comes to marks of
expression, the symbols on the typewriter keyboard cannot really cope with
the range of the human voice.

Stick, then, at first to the stoppers and the semicolon linker. That,
till you get the hang of it, is really enough, believe me. Sophistication
can wait.

Ian A. Gordon is emeritus professor of English language and literature
in the University of Wellington, New Zealand.

The diploma announced I was a Man of Achievement; I had been awarded
this diploma for Distinguished Achievement and – in case I thought it had
come to the wrong address – there was my name, engrossed by hand on the
diploma in handsome Gothic script. I know what degree diplomas look like
from the university of (shall I call it Oxbridge?). They are liable to be
on plain notepaper with your name and details filled in by the typist. This
one was different.

I examined the postmark. Oxbridge undoubtedly. The handsome diploma
was beautifully engraved on as near as modern paper technology can come
to ancient parchment. A thing of beauty. Framed and hung in a waiting room,
I could see it could set me up for life in the practice of one of the obscurer
branches of alternative medicine.

Grateful though I was for this bogus distinction, I had no alternative.
It was too handsome to destroy, too incriminating to leave around for the
family to discover. I put it at the bottom of a drawer and tried to forget
about it.

It was not to be. Somewhere, in a small office in a back street in Oxbridge,
my name and address were impaled in a data bank. Mailing files made up in
this way are commercial commodities. Either the chairman of the board or
the registrar (come to think of it, the handwriting of both seemed curiously
alike) had sold his information and I was on somebody’s sucker-list.

There was, I will admit, one good thing to be said about my Man of Achievement
award. It cost me nothing, not even postage. Later I came to realise that
it was what the supermarkets call a loss leader. I now receive at invervals
other and even more flattering commendations. The latest is a distinguished
Leadership Award. I can have it for ‘Extraordinary Service in . . .’, and
I am invited to fill in the blank space and so nominate what my extraordinary
service is in. Mind you, for a DIY citation, the price has gone up. No more
free awards. This one will cost me $97.50 (in US dollars, of course); and
if I really want the family to be impressed I can have my award engraved
on solid brass and mounted on genuine walnut for an extra $85.00.

Since I am now both a Man of Achievement and a Distinguished Leader
it is only to be expected that I am coming into line for the award of honorary
degrees. As befits my status, I have had several offers. True I have never
heard of any of the granting universities, who have addresses that are Post
Office Box Numbers in the Southern States of the US. The price seems to
be higher than that for Distinguished Leadership. I estimate the going rate
for an honorary doctorate as between $200 and $400.

At the moment I am being severely tempted. The latest offer is signed
by the president and board chairman. The cost is a mere $100. His asking
price is actually ‘a minimum contribution of $100 in US funds’ but I feel
sure he would settle for the round figure. What I like about this last degree
is its utter freedom. There is an application sheet enclosed. It demands
my name and address (which they already have), my ‘Bio Data’ (which I suspect
they also have), and then all I need to do is to fill in the space for the
honorary degree I want awarded and for the subject in which the award is
to be made. This is what I call an offer I can hardly refuse.

If by any chance some time in the future you find yourself in the waiting
room of a smart office with diplomas on the walls which announce that your
consultant is a Man of Achievement and a Distinguished Leader and that he
has an honorary doctorate in Cerebral Jurisprudence and/or Biogenetic Engineering,
my advice to you is to run – do not walk – to the nearest exit.

You never know who might be behind that door. It might be me.

Ian Gordon’s achievements include an emeritus professorship at the University
of Wellington.