Mind your language
EDWARD WINDSOR has written to me, asking that I 'allow us to try to carry on our lives as normal'. I have given due consideration to this plea. I hope it will not prevent the Prince, 'Sophie' (as he calls her familiarly in his letter to me, though I have never met her), or any- one else from trying to carry on their lives as normal if I defend him gram- matically.
There is a peculiar clause in the let- ter: 'we only met each other in the last few months'. Now, it may seem odd that he doesn't say, 'we have only known each other for the last few months', or 'we only met a few months ago'. Such breaches of idiomatic tensing bother some people and not others.
No, the point for which I would readi- ly die on the Prince's behalf and which I have had cause to mention before is his usage of only. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is a bit sniffy about this: 'Only was formerly often placed away from the word or words which it limited; this is still frequent in speech where the stress and pauses pre- vent ambiguity, but is avoided by per- spicuous writers.' This simply won't do. Apart from never knowingly having used the word perspicuous, either in speech or writing, 1 cannot see that the natural order .of words need be dis- turbed for the sake of an imagined ambiguity. And all the best writers agree with me, from Marvell ('I only write this word to let you know') to Jowett ('I only asked the question from habit').
Even stuffy old Fowler accuses the only fetishists of 'putting a strait waist-
coat on their mother tongue'. So why is it still the favourite shibboleth of ama- teur grammarians? As Rosa Dartle remarks in David Copper* 'I only ask for information.'
Dot Wordsworth
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