* This December, I am reblogging some of the more popular poems and articles that I have posted in the course of the past year. Today I am posting an omnibus edition of the five ‘poetic essays’ on English prepositions I published this year. This is an ongoing series of posts, more of which should be appearing in the coming year.*

For the Love of Prepositions Parts 1-5

I have always harbored a special affection for prepositions. I love the way they combine functionality with brevity and beauty and their capacity to effect subtle changes in meaning. I am also fascinated by the various shapes they assume and the way the uses to which they are put shift over time; and the fact that, even when closely related etymologically, they are not easily mapped from one language onto another.

In so far as prepositions serve both to concatenate weightier lexical items into meaningful phrases and as a basis—by way of affixation—for the creation of new words, they can be seen as the linguistic equivalent of the subatomic particles that invisibly glue reality together, and yet, on closer examination, are found to exhibit the oddest quirks and bizarre patterns of behavior.

This series of blog posts looks at some of my favorite prepositions from the combined perspective of someone who is both a poet and a language teacher.

Part 1—At

‘At’ is one of the trickiest prepositions from the point of view of someone coming to English as a second language. It is one of the last things that even advanced learners manage to master and even those who begin to acquire a taste for it tend thereafter to employ it more liberally than necessary.

The reason why learners find prepositions in general—and the in/at/on distinction in particular—so difficult to acquire is that they have been schooled to think in terms of rules and exceptions, rather than in terms of flavors and patterns.

The problem with the rules and exceptions approach is that language does not work in this mechanistic way and, as a result, exceptions tend to outweigh rules, a situation that, understandably, generates nothing but frustration. Why do people say ‘in the morning,’ ‘in the afternoon’ and ‘in the evening’, but ‘at night’? And, if this is a rule, how is it that things can ‘go bump in the night’? Why do people say ‘at the weekend’ in the UK, but ‘on the weekend’ in the US?

An honest and well-meaning but somewhat facile, supercilious and unhelpful response to such reasonable questions is simply to say “Because they do. Don’t worry about it.” Many teachers these days—rightly wary of grammar books—provide just this kind of answer to students and, given that it is, objectively speaking, indisputably the ‘right answer,’ it is very tempting to do so.

Subjectively, however, such a response sends a very mixed message to the learner. On the one hand, it offers no explanation whatsoever for something the student finds troubling and mysterious; on the other it tells them that this mysterious something doesn’t matter and should not be bothered about. This is akin to telling a small child frightened by a bump in the night that such noises ‘just happen’ ‘so there’s no need to be scared.’ A non sequitur that has kept many an active young mind anxiously awake at night.

How though do we avoid sending this mixed and unhelpful message without falling back on essentially untrue (or at best highly inadequate) formal rules and explanations?

I believe the best way to do this is to learn to see language in a different way—not as a machine whose nuts and bolts need to be unpicked, but as a gourmet dish to be savored or a symphony to be enjoyed and reflected on. That way a peculiarity or an irritating exception can be reconfigured emotionally as a charming detail or pleasing discovery.

I do not—given the weight of pedagogical and social history that urges us to think, act and feel otherwise—underestimate just how difficult it is to effect such a change of mindset. But I am certain that it is the way to go and am increasingly convinced that it is the only way that people ‘properly’ learn a second language.

In this spirit, my ‘explanations’ of prepositions aim to contribute in some small way to this change. I try to use etymology, history, comparison with other languages, speculation and poetry and constant reference to everyday life to convey a ‘feel’ for the language rather than construct an abstract explanation. I attempt neither to shrug mysteries off nor explain them away.

“At” is a very ancient preposition and it crops up all over the Indo-European ‘family’ of languages at various points in space and time. Its form has suffered very little alteration over time from its ancient roots. English ‘at’ is cognate with Latin ‘ad’.

In some Germanic languages (German and Dutch, for instance) it has lost out completely to a preposition cognate with English ‘to;’ while, in the Scandinavian languages, the reverse has occurred, ‘to’ losing out to ‘at’. English, as if often the case, lies somewhere in between the Scandinavian and Continental Germanic languages. “At’ and “to” both still exist, although ‘at’ has ceded a lot of ground to ‘to’. We do not, for example, normally use ‘at’ for movement towards [but see below for a case where we do].

In neo-Latin languages ‘ad’ is still very much alive and kicking in the form of “a” and has retained both of its original meanings of ‘movement towards’ and ‘location in’ a place. In European Portuguese it is routinely used with verbs in the infinitive to convey a progressive or continuous aspect, a feature absent from Brazilian Portuguese, but a very interesting one with an intriguing parallel in English (to which I shall return later).

Like all prepositions, ‘at’ has a tendency to shift from a purely spatial meaning to adopt a temporal one as well. We thus say “at six o´clock” by analogy with “at home.” The prefix a- (in ‘away’, ‘aside’, ‘about’, ‘around’ etc.) may also be related to ‘at’, but this is more controversial and it is clearly not related in a direct fashion.

There is a strong feel to ‘at’ of something that is fixed in the ground at a specific point, and by extension at specific points in time. To my synesthetic poet’s mind, the final –t even has the sound of someone hammering a post into the earth to demarcate territory.

We are thus ‘at home’, when we are at home; and we reside at an address. By extension, the bookkeeping symbol @ (pronounced ‘at’ and used to refer to price/cost per unit), made obsolete by the advent of electronic spreadsheets, has now been universally adopted to indicate an e-mail address.

We do not, however, live “*at Birmingham”, because Birmingham is a vast sprawling conurbation surrounding us. We live in Birmingham, in the West Midlands, in England, in the United Kingdom, in Europe. Such geographical frames of reference are not specific or personal enough to merit ‘at’. They embrace us; but it is difficult for us to embrace them.

Following the metaphor of the post in the ground, ‘at’ is also the natural preposition of choice for signposting and the giving of directions. “Turn left at the crossroads.” “There are a lot of people at the bus stop.” “I’ll meet you at the library.” “The train stops at Birmingham.” (i.e. at the railway station—a point on a rail network—passengers are not at liberty to get off and wander around in Birmingham for a while before continuing their journey!)

This signposting usage extends both to time and to written or spoken text. “at the start”, “at the end” “at the bottom of the page” “at the start of his speech” etc. etc.

This may also (and it is a big MAY) explain “at night” and “at the weekend” (in UK usage). Different from morning, afternoon and evening, the night is traditionally regarded as a time of repose, when people are at home, asleep. The night is more a point of positional reference, marking one day from the next, than a period of time in which people go about their business. Ghosts, however, do not go to sleep at night; they move about in it making bumping noises. Likewise, the weekend marks one week off from the next and is a time of repose, when people are at home rather than at work.

Why then do we say “at work” meaning “at one’s place of work?” This is arguably yet another extension of the fixed-in-the-ground flavor of ‘at’. We say that we are ‘at’ a place or an institution, when we are there for some specific practical purpose for which that place or institution is designed. Worshippers are ‘at church’ worshipping; while tourists are ‘in the church’ taking selfies. “My daughter is studying at the university,” but escaped convicts are found hiding “in the university.” Yet again we get a clear flavor of fixed in space, fit for a specific purpose and emotional attachment in the case of ‘at’, while ‘in’ is enclosing, non-specific, and neutral, if not alienating.

The same principle may also apply loosely to a wide range of fixed phrases: “at peace,” “at war”, “in doubt,” “in despair”, “at rest”, “in confusion”, but this may be a speculation too far.

There are some cases where ‘at’ retains its older meaning of ‘movement towards’. These are confined to prepositional and phrasal verbs and always overlaid in some way with something of the fixed in the ground flavor I have outlined above.

If I throw a ball to someone, I intend them to catch it; but if I throw a ball at someone, I intend to hurt or startle them. In the first case, I am, to some extent, at least temporarily, relinquishing ownership of the ball and it leaves my emotional space and enters that of another. But in the latter, I am using the ball to invade their emotional space or co-opt them into mine—telling them, in contemporary colloquial parlance, “where I am at.” Likewise, if I talk to someone, I am having a mutual conversation or expecting them to listen to and mull over what I am saying; whereas, if I talk at them, I am merely giving orders or letting off steam, regardless of whether they are listening or likely to respond.

Finally, I turn to speculation regarding the use of a- as a prefix in English, especially the archaic use of a- plus the –ing form of the verb (a circumfix—lovely word!) to indicate continuity or persistence of action. It is not possible to say for certain whether this is related to ‘at’, in fact, it is most likely that, strictly speaking, it is not. The now largely non-productive a- prefix in English derives from the corruption and conflation of various archaic prefixes. The situation is muddied, perhaps irreparably so, by the fact that the prefix has been used in this way by various English poets and song-writers over a long period of time to produce a kind of faux archaic effect, to such an extent that it is virtually impossible to distinguish the fake from the genuine article in extant historical corpora.

But does this matter? The apparent connection between ‘at’ and the modern use of the progressive is so tantalizing it is hard not to believe that there is some truth in it. The continuous form of the verb in modern English emerged somewhat suddenly and mysteriously and most scholars now concur that it is not related to a similar Anglo-Saxon form, which had a different structure and function.

A more promising suggestion is that the form reflects a very similar one in Celtic languages. But this theory begs serious historical explanations as to why such a substrate should suddenly pop up again. Recent archaeological and genetic research and new historical methodologies have cast considerable doubt on traditional accounts of how England was populated and thereby how English developed as a language. Unfortunately it would inflate this post very greatly, if I went into all this in any detail here.

Here I am more interested in whether the scent of ‘at’ can be detected in any of these distinctions. “Nancy is writing a letter” could easily be an erosion of “Nancy is a-writing a letter” (a form that is attested but archaic, perhaps faux archaic) or “*Nancy is at writing a letter.” (a form that is frustratingly absent from the written record). She has her mind fixed on this activity; she is dominating it; it is not dominating her. Modern constructions such as “Nancy is good at writing letters,” although somewhat different in meaning, suggest at least the possibility of some such connection, as do the tantalizing similarities with Celtic languages and modern European Portuguese.

As studies of etymology and historical linguistics tend to end, with all the inevitability but none of the implicit optimism of scientific papers that urge the ‘need for further research’, ‘we will probably never know.’

This is the point where science and language most radically diverge. In science, everything is potentially knowable; in language, most things will always remain unknown.

Part 2 By

It is hard not to wax lyrical about ‘by’. No little word is so resourceful and yet it sets about its business with such humility that it goes largely unnoticed. It finds itself on the end of the names of humble ancient Viking towns, and also as a stylish, if somewhat starchy, prefix betokening bespoke elegance. It is the preposition writers, composers and film-directors use to sign their work and yet it is also the one used to refer to two objects that find themselves in accidental proximity. It bears the whole burden of labor of the instrumental case inflexions of more antique languages. An omnibus of a word; its most ancient origins lie in an embrace. It can even disappear completely and yet still be there, blessing us with its absent presence.

German ‘um’, meaning ‘about’, ‘around’, is a cognate of English ‘by’. We know this because, in this case, we have some flimsy written testimony. In the vast majority of cases, no such evidence exists. Etymologists should beware of mirages; but also open to the bizarre.

Both German “um” and English “by” derive from proto-Germanic “umbhi.” German took the first half of the word; English the second, as if in some indenture arrangement. “Umbhi” itself is conjectured to derive from a more ancient “*ambhi”, which is, in turn, related both to Greek “amphi-“ as in amphitheater and amphibian and Latin “ambi” as in ambiguous and ambidextrous. It is further conjectured that the “bhi” part of “*ambhi” is in fact an instrumental inflexion akin to the –bus suffix in the dative and ablative plural of third declension Latin nouns. It may also be related to ancient dual inflexions of verbs and bi- type words for two; perhaps even to being itself, seen not as one but as two.

And yet this little word with such a long pedigree and such metaphysical weight goes largely unnoticed. It is not a preposition—like in, at, and on, or to and for—that language learners lose much sleep over. It is introduced humbly in textbooks and classrooms as a means of transport—by foot, by car, by train, by plane—like the school bus driver. It insinuates itself into the mind of the learner in the form of under-the-radar colloquial phrases conveyed in casual discourse and popular ditties as time goes by. Teachers use it unthinkingly in banal classroom discourse as X sits by Y and the lesson ends by four and thus teach it without thinking. It rarely merits more than a page in a grammar workbook.

Blessed be the word by. It is quietly telling us how all teaching should be. Urging, egging, nudging, ever open to change; subtle and profound; yet never quite explicitly telling us what to do.

Part 3 – The F-words

According to most counts, ‘of’ is the third or fourth most frequent word in the English language. This is largely a result of its increasing use to form the genitive, a habit that began when Old English, with its genitive inflexions, began, in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, to coexist with Old French, in which de had long since taken on this role. Although de is, ironically, related etymologically to to not of

‘Of’ has undergone much erosion over the years. From Old English ‘aef’ to ‘of’ to ‘o’ to a bare schwa (more frequent in US English) and is increasingly coming to be replaced by the use of a noun as a qualifier, especially in bureaucratic and journalistic language (e.g. ‘newspaper language’ rather than ‘the language of newspapers’).

Ultimately ‘of’ derives from Germanic and Latin ‘ab,’ cognate with Ancient Greek apo-, which is also the conjectured proto-Indo-European form, with a stronger sense of ‘away’.

‘Off’ is exactly the same word as ‘of’, except with added emphasis, and dates back to the early period of Middle English. The spelling results from that beautiful tendency in post-printing press written English to double up consonants at the end of the word, especially if the word begins with a vowel/zero consonant or if it is a monosyllabic proper name (e.g. egg, ill, odd, add, Webb, Cobb, Clegg). I believe that this derives from an eminently practical need to fit letters onto the printed page and to provide a more pleasing shape for the reader’s eye. “Wel” and “od” would look, well, odd, in the middle of an English sentence.

“Off” is replete with negative connotations. The various expletives that over the years have appeared before it, “fuck, piss, sod, bugger,” are so many place-holders; it is the ‘off’ that delivers the rebuff, the éminence grise that arranges an array of thuggish verbs to effect the hit. ‘Game over’ is a subtle exhortation to continue playing; “(Turn that fucking) game off!” leaves us in no doubt as to what we are expected to do. Words that end in /f/ tend to be rough.

In the vast array of idioms and phrasal verbs it has commandeered, ‘off’ can signify ‘leaving’ (“I’m off”), ‘rotting’ (“The milk has gone off”), ‘shedding’ (“cast off”), ‘de-activation’ (“turn off”), ‘cancellation’ (“The bets are off”), ‘completion’ (“finish off”), ‘irrevocable beginning,’ (“set off”, in at least two separate senses) ‘severance’ (“cut off”), ‘distortion’ “off-color”, ‘deviance from the norm’ (“There is something off about him”), ‘repulsion/rejection’ (“put off”, “shrug off”) or ‘casual self-gratification’ (“jerk off”, “sound off”). Often it can convey the sense of all of the above in one biting phrasal verb. It fizzles like gunpowder in a firework.

It hovers between the status of preposition, adverb and adjective. Can even be used as a verb, has even coaxed verbs into its orbit and partially digested them, as in “doff”. It is a preposition on the up and, flick-knife always at the ready, not in a nice way. There is always something faintly distasteful about it.

“Of,” however—the gentler older sibling—rhymes with ‘love’ and bonds people, places and things together, rather than cutting them off. Sadly, it is perhaps less interesting for that and this may well tell us much that we do not wish to know about ourselves as human beings.

Part 4 Back and forth

Between them, ‘back’ and ‘forth’ and the various other prepositions, particles, compounds, suffixes, adjectives and nouns related to them (backwards, forwards, behind, in front of, front, from, frame, for, fore-, before, after, aft, pre-, per-, pro-, para-) cover a lot of ground.

The difference between that which lies before one and that which lies behind, between movement forwards and backwards, is not as clear-cut as it might seem and, historically, people often confuse and switch the two.

For example, which direction does time run in? The prevailing metaphor in modern English is that of moving forwards from the past through the present into the future. We have our futures before us and our past experiences lie behind us. But there are also vestiges of the opposite metaphor. The temporal prepositions ‘before’ and ‘after’ suggest that the past is in front of us, the future behind. Imagined spatially rather than temporally, this makes sense. We can have knowledge of the past, as if it stretched out before our eyes, whilst the future remains hidden, tucked out of sight behind us. Time moves forwards through us from the future into the past, while we move backwards through the flow of time.

Walter Benjamin’s famous image of the ‘Angel of History,’ inspired by a Paul Klee painting and conjured up shortly before Benjamin fled Nazi-occupied and collaborationist Vichy France and ended up committing suicide in Spain, suggests something of this gloomier pre-modern view of time. “The… face [of the Angel of History] is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment… to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.” –Walter Benjamin “On the Concept of History” http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/ThesesonHistory.html (English translation) http://www.mxks.de/files/phil/Benjamin.GeschichtsThesen.html “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (Original German version)

I shall return to this idea later in this essay, but for now shall leave it hanging in the air.

*

A particularly intriguing branch of the family of English words related to ‘forward’ revolves around the word ‘frame’. Frame originated first as a verbal form (‘framian’) of the Old English preposition ‘fram’, which evolved into Modern English ‘from’. ‘Framian’ originally meant something similar to ‘forward’ as a verb today, in the sense of ‘advance, further or promote,’ but gradually narrowed in use to come to signify the preparation of materials for building, whence the nominal use (as in ‘timber frame’ ‘framework’ ‘picture frame’, and ultimately ‘mainframe’) was derived. By extension, the term is common in Renaissance English (as readers of Shakespeare and Donne will be aware) to refer to the physical material structure of the human body. It was also at this time that the range of connotations of the verb began to extend back into the mental sphere, coming to mean ‘plotting, planning, or devising’ in an intellectual sense, narrowing in use, once again, thanks to the popularity of hard-boiled detective fiction in the 1920s and 30s to refer more specifically to ‘plotting to ensure that an innocent party is accused of a crime.’

‘Framework’ has recently become a buzz-word in bureaucratic and business circles in relation to strategic planning. Its etymological connotations neatly combine the idea of solid preparation with that of forward movement through time into a rosier future.

The idea of progress, which Walter Benjamin implicitly critiques in the above quotation, has become the ideological touchstone of our age, perhaps even more so than in the late 19th century, to which our times bear more than a passing resemblance. By a happy etymological accident, the Latin-derived ‘pro-‘ prefix has come to combine a sense of favorability and forward-thrusting movement (implicit for example in ‘project’, explicit in ‘projectile’).

I have often argued in print and in public and private conversations that the Zeitgeist tends to dwell emotionally and rhetorically on that which it most lacks. Our current obsession with children and childhood (verging on hysteria, overprotection and a pandemic Peter Pan complex), for example, reflects the regrets of an ageing population, just as mawkish Victorian attitudes towards children reflected the challenge of a growing population with high rates of infant mortality, poverty and economic abuse. Likewise, our modern-day obsession with nature—including more intangible concepts such as ‘authenticity’—reflects the fact that most of our natural environment is now irrevocably degraded and lost and that moral stances of the past have been eroded by cynicism.

The chirpily positive attitude with which we are all encouraged nowadays to face the future (See Barbara Ehrenreich’s excellent Smile or Die: How positive thinking fooled America and the World http://www.amazon.com/Smile-Die-Positive-Thinking-America/dp/1847081738 ) also clashes starkly with the reality of an increasingly socially reactionary and economically regressive world and growingly insurmountable demographic, economic and environmental challenges. The smiley face is mocking and ironic.

This prevailing spirit differs from the Utopian mindset of times gone by in so far as Utopians envisaged a quantum-leap or great leap forward into a largely unimaginable, often impossibly idealistic, but always undoubtedly far superior future realm, while we incline blithely to assume that a constant drip-drip of production of ever smarter apps will gradually lead to a better future, as surely as the value of our houses and the returns on our stock options will continue to rise.

Careful observation of discourse and changes in language use can help us to detect—like canaries in a mine—the ways in which everyday rhetoric works to deny reality (to put it in Freudian terms) or generate false consciousness (to put it in Marxian ones).

The fossilization of psychoanalysis and Marxism into their own perverse ideologies has not helped the cause of those of us who pursue the truth from the side of resistance to the status quo that has come metaphorically and somewhat demeaningly to be equated with ‘the left’. “Denial” is an unhelpful abstract term based on poor translation across various languages and a history of Prussian and scientific pomposity: ‘turning a blind eye’ might be a more apt turn of phrase. “False consciousness” likewise has a very negative, condescending and, ironically, alienating, feel to it: fantasy, ‘jam tomorrow’ or ‘pie-in-the-sky’ might be more useful down-to-earth alternatives. I am a strong advocate of ‘working-class language’ being used more to ‘frame’ ‘big ideas’.

The élite language of business, bureaucracy, politics and journalism merits a kind of very close analysis that goes far beyond the essentially snobbish backward-looking and prescriptivist armchair grammarian’s mockery with which it is usually critiqued, even in the supposedly ‘high-brow’ or ‘quality’ press.

The epidemic use, for example, of the term ‘going forward,’ where, not so long ago, ‘in the future’ or ‘from now on’ would have sufficed, suggests that the people speaking (almost always people in an assumed position of power) have some control over the future and subtly implies that the future will invariably be better–change is always good; it is always ultimately for the good if someone moves (or steals) your cheese. However, such a shift in language also betrays a deep anxiety as to whether either of these assumptions are in fact the case. This is ‘false consciousness’, ‘fantasy’, ‘pie-in-the-sky’, a form of ‘magical thinking’ that evokes a world in which our will alone, armed with the right apps, can always overcome the inevitable onslaught of unpredictable events. It is a world of fairy stories and Marvel comics, bearing little resemblance to a real world beset by conflict and defeat.

‘Aspiration’ is another much-employed political term that points conveniently vaguely forwards towards a brighter future and economic betterment, whilst turning a stubborn blind eye to facts on the ground. It suggests the possibility of incrementally improving the lot of all—as if with a nice yoga-like series of in-breaths and out-breaths—but ignores the radical structural flaws of a prevailing social and economic system that can only be corrected by fundamental change. ‘Hope’ is the even more anemic, if more emotive, cousin-phrase preferred by incrementalists on the left.

We need to think forward, but also to think back, and, perhaps above all, to think about what these metaphors of backwards and forwards really mean and why. And ditch them, if necessary. We need to think in a truly historical fashion, as Walter Benjamin suggests with his haunting image of the Angel catapulted ‘back to the future’ or ‘forwards to the past’ by a blast, perhaps especially on this anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which Benjamin did not live (perhaps did not wish to live) to see.

Part 5 To be or not to be

“To be or not to be…” is probably the most famous quotation in the English language. Few note, however, that this phrase is not really ‘good’ English, either by modern or more antique standards. A more natural Present-Day English ‘translation’ might be “Should I be or should I not?” by analogy, for example, with the title of the Clash song “Should I stay or should I go?” which, in turn, would surely sound ridiculous rendered today as ‘to stay or to go?” “Being or not being” might be another more authentic-sounding, if somewhat over-existentialistic, contemporary rendition. Some interesting more modern-sounding paraphrase some street rapper came up with would more likely be even more appealing.

There is in fact, no good reason whatsoever why the preposition to should be attached to the idea of infinitives in English, as it invariably is, even in modern grammar books.

The tendency to use a preposition with an infinitive stemmed from an Anglo-Saxon dative use (indicating purpose or intention) and spread rampantly in Middle English, even to cases where no clear idea of purpose or intention was meant.

Nevertheless, the use of to+infinitive is still by no means universal in modern English and still tends to be employed primarily where some kind of intention is involved. Consider, for example, the difference between “I like to eat fruit” (i.e. “I think it is a good idea and make an effort to do so”) and “I like eating fruit” (“I enjoy it out of sheer self-gratification”). Or the newspaper headline use of to with no preceding finite verb to indicate intention or (by extension) mere futurity, as in “PM to open new talks with US.” Or more colloquial uses in popular culture such as Star Trek’s famous ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before; to seek out new worlds…’

In fact, to is not and never has been an integral part of the ‘infinitive’ in English. It is merely an appurtenance that has tended to attach to it as a matter of habit but has never quite attained the status of standardized convention. It is thus absurd to the point of churlishness to suggest that to should never be parted from its accompanying verb. To rewrite Star Trek’s ‘to boldly go’ as ‘to go boldly’ would be to exsanguinate the preposition of all its invigorating sense of thrusting out into worlds unknown, merely for the sake of obeisance to the supposed rhetorical diktats of a long-since dead language.

Arguably, there is no such thing as an infinitive in English. It makes no sense, therefore, to use the so-called infinitive-with-to to transform a verb into a subjective or objective noun, especially when we have a nominal –ing form of the verb that is specifically fit for this purpose.

The reason, of course, why people once did this and why it still persists, is the ghost of Latin, which, for such a long period of the history of the English language, was a constant devil on its shoulder, whispering unhelpful criticisms in its ear and undermining its self-confidence as a major world language in its own right.

Latin and neo-Latin languages use infinitives as substantive forms of the verb. Latin-worshippers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment thus felt compelled to follow suit.

Why then, would Shakespeare, the greatest exponent of our national language, indulge in such fawning nonsense? Well, for one thing, Shakespeare, like all of us, was a child of his age and followed the fashions of his time. His greatness derives from the fact that he played—linguistically, dramatically, politically and psychologically—with these fashions much more than most dare do.

More interestingly, however, is the theory that Shakespeare deliberately put the fussily hypercorrect bad grammar of the schoolmaster into the mouth of his flawed, dithering, over-reflective male lead. “To be or not to be” sounds almost, when you think about it, like the beginning of a conjugation learnt by rote under the rod: the outset of a neurotically scholastic syllogism, not the foundation of a firm decision-making process.

Compare the tremulous self-conscious language of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, with the clipped confident imperatives (indistinguishable from bare infinitives in English) with which Fortinbras (whose name means literally ‘strong of arm’) closes the play.

“Let four captains

Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage,

For he was likely, had he been put on,

To have prov’d most royal; and for his passage,

The soldier’s music and the rite of war

Speak loudly for him.

Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this

Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

Go, bid the soldiers shoot.”

Such sturdy discourse, not a foppish imitation of Latin, was the kind of language that would go on, for good or ill, to make Britain great.