Whichcraft | TLS

Whichcraft

MARY NORRIS

Frank L. Cioffi
ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
A microcosmic usage handbook
384pp. Princeton University Press. £16.95 (US $24.95).
978 0 691 16507 3

Published: 23 March 2016

Frank L. Cioffi

We hope you enjoy this piece from the TLS, which is available every Thursday in print and via the TLS app. Also in this week's issue: Claire Lowdon on Stephen Mitchelmore and squinting through the verbiage; Rowan Williams on modern Orthodox thinkers; Stephanie Coontz on modern families; B. W. Ife on Don Quixote on stage; Natasha Lehrer on Emmanuel Bove – and much more.

This little volume has several things going for it: it's compact, bound in the style of an industrial manual, so it can take a lot of punishment. It illustrates points about grammar and punctuation using examples drawn from newspapers and magazines all published – online or in print – on December 29, 2008 (hence talk of the financial crisis, the election of Barack Obama, strife between Israel and Palestine). And its author, Frank L. Cioffi, who teaches writing at Baruch College in New York City, is humble. His aim is not so much to enforce rules as to provoke debate. He wants you to look beyond the meaning of the sentence to the choices made by the writer and the editor.

You consult a handbook when you want to fix something – you don't read it from cover to cover. You can, of course, study it systematically so you know where to find something when you need it. It doesn't hurt if the author has a little personality. Expressions such as "I think", "I suppose", "I would lobby for", "many of you might disagree with me here" are scattered throughout the author's commentary, giving the book a friendly, conversational tone. Once in a while, Cioffi lobs in an intimidating word without providing much context– "Grammar and usage are not simply arbitrary and apodictic intellectual constructs" – as if to say, "Would it kill you to pick up a dictionary?"

So where does he stand on the eternal questions? Cioffi endorses the Oxford comma, the one before and in a series of three or more. On the question of whether none is singular or plural, he is flexible: none can mean not a single one and take a singular verb, or it can mean not any and take a plural verb. His sample "None are boring" (from the New Yorker, where I work) was snipped from a review of a show of photographs by Richard Avedon. Cioffi would prefer the singular in this instance – "None is boring" – arguing that it "emphasizes how not a single, solitary one of these Avedon photographs is boring". To me, putting so much emphasis on the photos' not being boring suggests that the critic was hoping for something boring. I would let it stand.

Because Cioffi chooses some examples from the New Yorker, it was inevitable that I would come upon a sentence that I had had a hand in. It happened on page 199. This is from David Denby's review of Revolutionary Road, in Cioffi's section on commas before that and which: "There's a sourness, a relentlessness about the movie which borders on misanthropy".

Cioffi has already introduced the concepts of restrictive and non-restrictive. "To repeat," he writes, "that usually precedes elements that are essential to your sentence's meaning [restrictive], while which typically introduces 'nonessential' elements [non-restrictive], and usually refers to the material directly before it." Americans sometimes substitute which for that, thinking it makes us sound more proper (i.e. British). On both sides of the Atlantic, the classic nonrestrictive which is preceded by a comma.

Cioffi considers the sentence from all angles. The which is not preceded by a comma, but it does not seem to refer to the noun in front of it. If Denby meant that the movie "borders on misanthropy", he would have used that, but if you try to substitute that, the sentence goes all to pieces. It seems that the which harks back to "a sourness, a relentlessness", but that's plural, and the verb, "borders", is singular. If there were a comma after "relentlessness", it could be read as an appositive for "sourness" (non-restrictive; Cioffi is illuminating on appositives), and therefore singular. If only there were no verbiage sprouting up between the pronoun and its antecedent. Cioffi's rewrite – "The movie's relentlessness and sourness border on misanthropy" – makes the meaning clear, but flattens the voice of the writer.

The New Yorker has bred its own species of which, which the legendary editor William Shawn called the "irregular restrictive which"

So what is the rationale for leaving the sentence as it is? The New Yorker has bred its own species of which, which the legendary editor William Shawn called the "irregular restrictive which", and which refers back to the noun preceding the noun that got in the way. In Denby's sentence (and in the mind of the New Yorker editor), the irregular restrictive which snaps back to an antecedent ("a sourness, a relentlessness") that looks plural but feels singular. I wouldn't try teaching that to a college freshman, but in the workplace it passes for whichcraft.

By the way: apodictic: "expressing or of the nature of necessary truth or absolute certainty" (Webster's). Can't argue with that.

Mary Norris is the author of Between You and Me: Confessions of a comma queen, which is due to appear in paperback next month.

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