the rule of three: a fustarian’s fumb

To wit, to whom?

I’m copy-editing again. When you get into a big copy-edit you start noticing things everywhere, not just in the thing you are copy-editing. Some of them are (blessedly) funny, but others just remind you of pet peeves you had managed to forget for the time being. Things like “triple” (used as a verb).

So…

1. Triple is not a verb. It is an adjective. If you want to say that your profits, readers, overdraft, number of redundant adjectives, rose by 300% (or indeed “per cent”), you say they trebled. They trebled, in fact, to triple previous levels. They tremulously warbled like birds, like the choirs with their unbroken treble, trembled in their timorous and fremulous

Well, you get it.

But they didn’t triple. Or trip on the tripod in Tripoli, or ripple, or Whipple. Don’t trifle with triple.

2. To whit, to who. Last week’s amazing blog fracas where Laurie Penny called some guy a c-word in a public meeting contained one small surprise. (I know! Oh, okay, here’s the link again. You should have looked the first time.) It was that, when she went back in in the comments to lay on all the reasons why he was such a c-word, she enumerated them and then said: “To whit: a c-word.”

Ah, Laurie. It is not “to whit” (though the owls no doubt think it should be). It is “to wit:” an elegant little saying, a reference to the old form of “wit” as being know.

“Whit” is a tiny amount of something, a passing whiff – usually negative, an absence, as in: “not a whit”. But wit, as in”to wit: he is a c-word” is a neat summing up, which comes to us from the olden days, where it was current English. Its sister is the wonderful archaism, a slightly earlier form, wot (first and third person, as in “I wot not…”)

3. That thing where people say, “This, and that, is the biggest cause of…” I saw an example yesterday that just depressed me. It was in a newspaper article written by someone distinguished – I’m sorry, I now can’t remember by whom (to wit); I read far, far too many newspaper articles every day) – and it was plain that it had been fine, and that some sub, subbing in a hurry and possibly not knowing the difference, had subbed it so that the verb, which followed two nouns, was made to agree with only one of them. Sowing discord forever in the ranks of the sentence. Inserting a bass rumble of trouble where had only been a divine double trill.

The rest of the writing was beautiful. And the sentence wasn’t even very complex. I wish I could remember now what it was.

You see it all the time, of course, but this time it seemed just unnecessarily unfortunate. It was just a bit depressing, that someone who is paid to know these things (sic) went and did that.

And, with that unedifying tale, I retire to my evening. A gallery opening. Hooha!