Unlettered
`IF WE CAN face up to the fact that there is no God, and therefore no judg- ment, our fear of death will end,' wrote the leader-writer of the Sunday Tele- graph the other week. Not that he was writing in propria persona, for he does indeed believe in God, I have no doubt.
No, it is 'the fact that' construction which caught my eye. We all do it. Orwell does it in his essay on Dickens; he also uses phrases such as in fact, obviously, actually, naturally which serve the purpose of intensifiers, or the alter- native to banging on the table.
But 'the fact that' need not have much to do with fact. As the Oxford English Dictionary points out, it is 'now often used where the earlier language would have employed a clause or gerun- dial phrase as subject or as the regimen of a preposition; of the modern use of the circumstance that'.
This usage dates at least from the early 19th century, so we ought not to shiver at it as trendy. In 1803 George Moore wrote in his diary: 'I would not agree to the fact that ennui prevailed more in England than in France. Here, of course, the fact means the fiction. Just as, the Psalms remind us twice, 'The hath said in his heart There is no God.'
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