Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words - Bill Bryson [54]
not all. “For some time now tales have been circulating that all was not well in the Goldsmith empire” (Times). What the writer really meant, of course, was that not all was well in the empire, not that everything was unwell. The authorities are curiously, and almost unanimously, tolerant on this point. The Evanses are actually rather vehement about it, stating, “Distinctions such as this, between all is not and not all is, appeal to a fictitious logic and seem to have been invented for the purposes of proving other people wrong. They are not good for much else.”
I’m afraid the authorities and I are at odds here—or, as the Evanses might put it, all of us don’t agree. It seems to me difficult to justify a sentence that so blatantly contradicts what it is meant to say, especially when the solution is as simple a matter as moving the not back two places. Setting aside any considerations of grammatical tidiness and rectitude, if we accept the Evanses’ position, how do we make ourselves clear when we really do mean that all isn’t well? A few expressions unquestionably have the weight of idiom behind them (“All is not lost,” “All that glisters is not gold”), but on the whole, I think the construction is better avoided in careful writing. Certainly I wouldn’t want to have to defend the New York clothing store that advertised “All items not on sale” (cited by William Safire, New York Times).
Notes from Underground is the novel by Dostoevsky. Not the Underground.
not so much is often followed by but when the word should be as, as here: “He was not so much a comic actor, consciously presenting an amusing part, but a real comedian” (J. B. Priestley, cited by Partridge). Make it “as a real comedian.”
Nullarbor Plain, Western Australia. Often misspelled Nullabor.
number. Errors of number—the failure to maintain agreement between the subject and verb in a sentence—are probably the most common grammatical fault in English and often the least excusable. In a language where so much is so complicated, the rule is gratifyingly simple: a singular subject takes a singular verb and a plural subject takes a plural verb. As Bernstein says, anyone who can distinguish between one and more than one shouldn’t find that too sophisticated a challenge. Yet errors abound—even, as we shall see, among those who should know better. Many of the causes of errors are treated separately throughout the book, but five in particular are worth noting here.
1. Errors involving “and.” When two nouns or pronouns joined by and form a compound subject, a plural verb is required. “Impatience and anger in political and editorial circles has been sharply mounting” (Los Angeles Times). Make it have. “She told the meeting that the disorder and despair of the Conservative Party was not self-evident” (Times). Make it were.
The error is especially common when the normal subject-verb order is reversed, as here: “Why, you may ask, is correct speech and writing important, as long as the writing is clear?” (Simon, Paradigms Lost). Speech and writing are important.
Simon might argue—indeed, he would have to—that speech and writing are so closely related that they form a single idea. When that is the case, a singular verb is unobjectionable. But such exceptions are better kept for things that are routinely combined—fish and chips, ham and eggs, law and order, the long and the short of it, etc.—and even then a