Legal Ease

By Howard Posner
     
      Teach Your Children Well
      I was reading to my six-year-old, or perhaps he was reading to me?he takes over the bedtime reading when he wants it done right?and he pointed to a sentence that began with And. "What's wrong with this sentence?" he demanded, sounding like a particularly imperious law professor. But unlike a law professor, he actually answered the question: "You can't start a sentence with a conjunction." My efforts to disabuse him of that notion were doomed, because his source was his first-grade teacher, Mrs. Malloy, a dynamic educator who drops such advanced tidbits for the brighter students to absorb. Mrs. Malloy was wrong on this one, but there was no way I, a mere daddy and writer of a column my son doesn't read, could compete with her as an authority figure. So I retreated and left the debate for another year. I can wait.
      I've had more extensive discussions about such things with colleagues and readers of this column, despite my protestations that I am not a grammarian and hope never to be one. Lawyers like to debate usage, and many of us fancy ourselves grammatical perfectionists. Or perhaps we imagine we are surrounded by a profession full of grammatical perfectionists and need to defend our reputations against imputations of improper usage, much as citizens of a primitive warrior society must avoid the taint of cowardice. We suffer from a pathological fear of impropriety that drives us to take refuge in arbitrary "rules" that never had a place?or have long since ceased to have a place?in actual writing. So we write defensively.
      In the case of In re Marriage of Van Hook (147 Cal. App. 3d 970 (1983)), Justice Richard Sims wrote, "Meredith next suggests the Butte County Superior Court lacked authority to preliminarily restrain enforcement of the Orange County Superior Court judgment." A footnote to "to preliminarily restrain" said it was "one of the very few acceptable split infinitives." A rough translation would be: "I'm an intelligent, educated person who makes his living with words. Of course I know that a split infinitive is ordinarily not acceptable, so don't give me a hard time about this one." He did not explain why this split infinitive was acceptable when others were not. This is probably because there is no good reason to ban split infinitives.
      There was once a bad historical reason for the ban: In Latin an infinitive is always one word?and unsplittable?and until a century or so ago upper-crust trendsetters studied Latin, rather than English, grammar. (Latin casts a long shadow over our language in many ways. About 20 years ago Justice Stanley Mosk wrote an entire op-ed article to defend his calling a single piece of information "data" instead of "datum," because somebody somewhere quoted a passage from the article with "data" and put "[sic]" after it.)
      Even language maven Henry Fowler, who did not like split infinitives, wrote in The King's English (1908) about "the curious superstition that the splitting or not splitting makes the difference between a good and a bad writer." Other authorities scoff at the idea of a blanket split-infinitive prohibition, and it's hard to imagine Captain Kirk uttering such a clunker as "Boldly to go where no man has gone before" just to keep an infinitive intact.
      The aversion to beginning a sentence with a conjunction is even stranger. My dictionary contradicts the usual argument that it's improper because a conjunction is for coordinating two parts of a sentence. Joseph Devlin's classic How to Speak and Write Correctly admonishes, "Never commence a sentence with And, But, Since, Because, and other similar weak words." But eight sentences in that book start with But. And three of them start with And.
      Electronic searches of texts available online show that the best writers have always started sentences with conjunctions. In Great Expectations Dickens begins 167 sentences with But and 75 sentences with And, not counting dialogue. There are lots of sentences beginning with But from Jane Austen (293 in Emma), George Bernard Shaw (61 in The Perfect Wagnerite), Robert Louis Stevenson (139 in Treasure Island), and Charles Darwin (332 in The Origin of Species). God only knows how many sentences in the King James Bible (and other translations) begin with And. Granted, this is because the Hebrew original lacked punctuation and used And to separate the sentences, but still, there it is. Telling children to avoid writing sentences that start with conjunctions may serve some purpose, like telling them fairy tales to put off explaining reproduction, but it's not useful to go through life believing in the stork.
      The notion that a sentence cannot end with a preposition is similarly lacking in reason and is similarly, if less extensively, contradicted by classic literature. The dismissal of the notion as pedantry "up with which I will not put" (legendarily, if hazily, attributed to Winston Churchill) pretty much sums it up.
      The pathological fear of impropriety has a related syndrome: the pathological fear of anything remotely colloquial. Any expression that someone might actually say is likely to be quarantined with quotation marks. "Plaintiff obtained an injunction 'freezing' defendant's assets." "Plaintiff's employment with defendant was a 'gravy train.' " "Plaintiff has no legitimate claim, and is suing this defendant only as a purported 'deep pocket.' " Each set of quotation marks is intended to tell the reader that the writer really knows better than to use such a common, vulgar expression. The quotes may actually convey something else, such as the idea that the characterization comes from someone other than the writer, or that the writer is skeptical about it. Even if that confusion is avoided, professing dignity makes the writer look ridiculous, like Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers movie.
      If you're going to be colloquial, be colloquial and drop the pretense. It will save you from colloquializing the noncolloquial, as in "Timothy Dailey was killed near Barstow, California when a truck driven by an employee of Dallas hit the truck Dailey was driving 'head on.' " (Dailey v. Dallas Carriers Corp., 43 Cal. App. 4th 720, 723 (1996).) The court was using head on to say precisely what the dictionary says it means, and nothing in the opinion indicated that there was any question about it. Perhaps someone thought it might be slang. There was no reason to call attention to it. At least, I don't think there was. I haven't checked with Mrs. Malloy about it yet.
     
      Howard Posner (howardposner@ca.rr.com) practices appellate law in Los Angeles, consults with other lawyers about writing, and writes about nonlegal matters.
     

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