Inquire or enquire?

Alan Watkins

The Oxford Guide to English Usage Compiled by E. S. C. Weiner (Clarendon Press £7.95)

Until about 30 years ago, a school that did not teach English grammar was either very good or very bad. The very bad ones did not bother. The very good — or hat the ,nYvvay very expensive — ones assumed boys (for these were chiefly schools for boys) would have picked up all that was home andby hearing their parents talk at gonie and learning the classics at', school. ioday grammar is taught to hardly anyone. N,"Vben it was taught, the fashion was for literary folk to depreciate it, even to claim "tat knowledge of it was constricting. Now that n is not taught, we feel a sense of loss. " ,,°Me people also feel that they do not

IOW where they are. They want guidance.

One result is the language column. Like many other developments in our lives, this, 111 its most recent form, comes from kwm„e,rica where Mr John Simon and Mr p 'warn Sartre have long been famous as '212guistic varieties of Mr Manners. Today Philip Howard writes away in The .'irries, Mr John Silverlight more briefly in :ne Observer and Mr John Whale more 'engthily in the Sunday Times Magazine. Mr Weiner's compilation (though it is el„ea,_11Y his book, and he should call himself author rather than compiler) Possesses cula.11Y of the characteristics of the language r°,1urrins, and some additional ones. It con- rahins more about grammar than they do, si,°4811 the subject is not dealt with a'„steMatically: it is not a textbook. Nor is it follow edition of Fowler, though Mr Weiner ri2lows the old boy in some of his injunc- hrs such as that after scarcely.. or th,,r411Y- • • the word must be when, not ty". Nor is it a manual of style in the of the sense, thought' it covers some some Elle ground in Hart's Rules, and has of lithe attributes of newspapers' or ;shere style books. Worn an in-between kind of book, and no fwav se for that. It will not supplant my own arkjurites, G. H. Vallins's Good English (not Fowl English and F. L. Lucas's Style eel.: ;Fowler, you may notice), but it will he a,.111Y suPPlement them. Mr Weiner is to reasvngratulated on doing a good job at a pap,„e'llable price for 238 accurately printed bit"s- I should like to make this clear leariatirse books of this kind nearly always eviewers to contradict and confute. In tesPect, I am no exception. eil4,,Y first doubt is about whether Mr one"oe; is wise to include Pronunciation as are ,yord his Principal sections — the others mm mar Formation, Vocabulary and and, indeed, whether it is necessary to deal with the subject at all. For it is notoriously difficult to lay down general rules about the business, though Mr Weiner has a gallant try. Moreover, pro- nunciation is quite a different game from grammar and syntax, and a different one also from idiom and vocabulary (though here, admittedly, there are certain similarities). Pronunciation makes people cross. It also makes them unhappy. It is connected with class, region, nation, even race, as written English is not. For instance, a speaker of correct English will not, I think, modify his grammar to accom- modate his companion or audience, though he may well simplify and limit his vocabulary. He will not say 'My father in- vited my brother and 1 to dinner' simply because the person he is talking to has just made a similar mistake. He may never- theless, if he is a sensitive spirit, follow his companion's pronunciation. Thus of valet Mr Weiner writes 'those who employ them sound the 12 Quite so. But a non-nob speaker, addressing a member of the valet- employing class, may talk about a vallay. His nob companion may then follow this usage in the immediately succeeding con- versation. But we are getting into deep waters and had better paddle back towards the sands.

Unfortunately, they are shifting sands. One expects books of this kind to make nice distinctions. That is part of their purpose. But one does not expect them to make new distinctions for which there is no warrant and which can cause nothing but misery and confusion all round.

Mr Weiner is guilty of this over enquiry and inquiry. The former, he asserts, is ask- ing a question; the latter, conducting an of- ficial investigation. Etymologically this is invention. The Shorter Oxford provides no support. It merely suggests tentatively that enquire implies a question. Nor is this all. Over inquire, Mr Weiner uses 'formal in- vestigation' and 'official investigation' in- terchangeably. But they are not the same: not all formal investigations are official, and not all official investigations are for- mal. Let us, however, assume that there is a formal-official category which attracts or implies inquire. The result is still confusion.

`The chaps in Accounts are enquiring in- to your expenses — just asking a few odd questions, not systematic at all, nothing to worry about, old boy.'

`These chaps in Accounts are inquiring into your expenses — they've convened some kind of tribunal with old Roger in the chair, you'll be hauled up before it, wouldn't like to be in your shoes when they get round to that Brussels trip.'

This illustrates that the purported distinc- tion is hard to apply in the real world. Even cursory newspaper readers will, however, have noticed that inquire and enquire are now often used in the same issue of the same paper — sometimes in the same story or piece. Does this mean that Mr Weiner has been anticipated by Fleet Street? No. Fleet Street is merely being idle and in- competent, left hand not knowing what right is up to, in thorough conformity with the debased standards of the age.

It is the same with judgement and judg- ment. This similarly is a matter of typographical convention. Mr Weiner will not have it. He is a dogmatic e man, though he adds that judgment is used 'often in legal works'. This is perfectly true, but it carries the untrue implication that non-e is unac- ceptable in non-legal works or, presumably, non-legal contexts generally. But how is a non-legal judgment to be distinguished from a legal one? We are back to tribunals again. Does a domestic tribunal — the Committee of the Jockey Club, say deliver a legal judgement? Mr Weiner's distinctions entail endless exercises in public law and jurisprudence.

The inevitable though, inarticulate major premise of the book is that writers are bemused people, in need of help. So they often are. But they are often puzzled too by what comes out at the other end. Good writers dread if-clauses. This is because publishers tend not to understand straight conditionality, and change was into were.

`If he were interested in Lucky Jim, he would not be looking out of the window.'

'If he was interested in Lucky Jim, he is welcome to borrow another novel by Mr Amis.' (Both correct.) Mr Weiner is not very helpful here. Nor does he deal with another area where cons- cientious writers dread the attentions of others: the placing of a full-stop inside or outside a closing bracket. The rule is simple enough. The placing of the stop depends not on the words used or their order but on the punctuation inside the bracket:

`Jones was a good journalist (though fre- quently drunk: his tipple was whisky).'

`Jones was a good journalist (though fre- quently drunk. His tipple was whisky.)'

Mr Weiner admits prestigious and pro- tagonists but lists viability as a cant word. So it is, but it nevertheless seems to me a pity to lose a perfectly good word which has a precise meaning, 'being capable of life'. He is, from a scholarly point of view, right to support the -ize ending, but I remain an unrepentant -ise user because it makes life simpler. He deserves our thanks for suppor- ting whose applied to non-persons and deploring an excess of of-whichery. He is right to encourage a revival of that as an oc- casional substitute for who or whom. On that and which he is sensible but not ex- haustive: he does not hold to the old Fowlerian dogma that for defining relative clauses that only must be used. Altogether he deserves praise. If he had not written such a good book I should not have taken the trouble to disagree with so much of it.