Mind your language
WHO decides these things? I mean things like the announcements on trains that 'the next station stop' will be Northampton. I suppose the rea- soning is that there might be a station before that one at which the train does not stop. But surely there has never been trouble with any such ambiguity before.
And who taught our children to say train station instead of railway station? I've even heard Veronica say it, though, when I asked her where she got it from, she was quite unable to say. The Zeit- geist has a lot to answer for.
Perhaps the Zeitgeist conjured up a change noted by a reader, Mrs Anne Hosford of Blandford Forum, who sent me a headline from the Sunday Tele- graph, that agreeable hebdomadal treat: `He can't please all the people all of the time'. Whither, was the enquiry, came the of? The learned Dr Robert Burchfield in his New Fowler points out that the con- struction of all with of (apart from cases with certain personal pronouns such as all of it or all of us) is comparatively modern (by which he means more recent than 1800). According to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, the words attributed to Lin- coln (or, in another source, Phineas Barnum — much the same) are: 'You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time.' Thus the construction all the people is used by Lincoln (or Barnum) once and all of the people once, indifferently. It so hap- pened that all of the time was not used. Up to now I cannot say that the com- paratively modern construction has troubled me. But, like station stop, it will from now on.
Dot Wordsworth
Previous page
