LETTERS OF THE LAW
Nick announced that the Lib Dem manifesto will include a commitment to end childhood literacy by 2025.
From Lib Dem election leaflet, Chippenham, Wiltshire
Today, this blog is courting disaster. Tempting fate. Playing with fire - a dangerous pastime when you are skating on the thinnest of ice. For today we are defying all odds and taking on Muphry's Law. So far, I'm pretty sure there isn't a typo in this, despite the reference to Muphry's Law, which might suggest otherwise. But Muphry knew a thing or two, and one of the things he or she knew was that :
If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.
Wikipedia : Muphry's Law
So Muphry dismays and intimidates me in equal measure, and his or her mates aren't much help either – a shadowy associate called Skitt postulating a Law which is even more dispiriting, dictating that :
the likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster.
Language Log : April 2005
Muphry and friends are intransigent; they know whereof they speak, and expect blogs like this one to fall meekly into line. So in drawing attention to what Nick and his chums will doubtless be calling a 'brainfade' – and one to do with literacy at that - you can see that we are not merely walking on eggshells but doing so in five inch stiletto heels, however difficult or painful it may be to visualise a 6' 4” 16 stone blogger tramping about on a tray of eggs thus shod. The blogger, that is, not the eggs. You see the problem.
Politicos like Nick come in for such frequent and brutal kickings, and on such a sustained basis, that you wonder why anyone aspires to such a job in the first place, but let's consider the possibility that Nick meant every word. He'd go on the offensive, wouldn't he?
'Mr Clegg, are you saying that we can no longer afford to teach children to read and write?'
'Look, I think the real issue here is not whether we spend huge sums of money – your money and mine remember – on teaching reading and writing, which, frankly, has had very mixed success over the years, but what sort of future we want for our young people. Look, if they can't read we protect them at a stroke from the great tide of propaganda and manipulation that confronts them every minute of every day. So many young people – your future and mine, remember - are led astray and abused by those who have no thought for their welfare, but cynically, shamelessly exploit their ability to read. This commitment from the Lib Dems solves the problem in a radically new way. Frankly, this is a long overdue child protection measure....'
'But.....'
'No, no. Look, we will of course monitor the success of this groundbreaking initiative closely, as you would rightly expect. There's still work to be done, though, and I'm already very excited by the idea that they shouldn't be able to count either....'
'Really?'
'Yes. Look, we're obsessed by numbers, we constantly look at statistics, set numerical targets. But statistics and targets can lie and most people agree that gets in the way of looking at real issues, outcomes. Lib Dems want to get to the heart of the problem. Only once nobody's got a clue what any of the numbers actually mean can we make real progress.'
'Is that in your manifesto?'
'No, but I want to see it there for the election in whatever 2015 + 5 is. By then, of course, lots of people won't be able to read the manifesto anyway, so in the long run we can do away with them altogether. Come to think of it, we could do away with election campaigns as well. It's no more than the great British public deserves.'
Well, OK, perhaps not. But might this be evidence of Muphry at work? Slip a simple error into a statement about literacy, one that could easily pass unnoticed, then sit back to see what happens? If so, it looks as though it didn't work very well, and Muphry was compelled to try again with a somewhat grosser error. Time was when The Guardian would have been Muphry's medium of choice for this sort of thing, but more recently he or she has turned increasingly to The Independent. Take this from its online version:
SKIP PRINCE CHARLES AND HAND THROWN TO WILL
The Independent
If you're struggling with what this is even supposed to mean, it relates to a report that George Galloway has suggested that Prince Charles' corner should chuck in the towel and let Prince William be our next king, although why someone like George should be so concerned about the monarchical succession remains unclear. It's doubtful whether even Nick could mount a convincing explanation of why a hand had been thrown to Prince William – a human hand? A hand of cards? Of bananas?
To give them their due, The Independent quickly spotted the error and the headline was hastily corrected. But not hastily enough. This was the moment for which a Young Turk working at the Pedantry Association had been waiting. This would make his name. Guest of honour at the Association's annual dinner, perhaps? Young Pedant of the Year? Might there even be a magna cum laude as well? Surely not a summa!
The Pedantry Association is housed in a gloomy third floor office in a large and crumbling Victorian house on the unfashionable side of Hounslow. From there, its founder and President, Sir Arthur Dickens (Cambridge and the Guards, and an uncompromising monarchist to the tips of his highly polished boots) periodically sends blistering comments to hapless newspaper editors accused, tried and found guilty – all in their absence - of linguistic felonies. Or at least, he does eventually; believing that accurate proofreading and careful, unambiguous phraseology must take their proper precedence over any fancy notions of immediacy or vitality.
Sir Arthur, a man to whom Pilgrim's Progress demonstrates a dangerously racy literary style, is a retired Professor of Reactionary Grammar with a Torquemada-like devotion to rooting out tomfoolery like pairing singular nouns with plural verbs. Indeed, a number of his former students is badly traumatised by his volcanic reaction to such transgressions. His seminal treatise on The Correct Use of Conjunctive Adverbs enjoyed sales of as many as four copies, comfortably outstripping those of his three volume Later History of the Semi Colon. It has become something of an in-joke at the Association that the comparative rarity of the semi colon in modern literature results from the fact that Sir Arthur used them all up in his monumental history.
Founding the Pedantry Association hadn't been without its problems. Indeed, much of the first couple of meetings were taken up with debate about what it should be called. The Society of Pedants had been a fairly popular front runner, until Sir Arthur himself – in a move which earned him a nomination for the Association's first ever Fellowship – pointed out that the society of pedants was what he and like minded members came together to enjoy. The Pedants' Society was rejected because of the possibility of some future member causing embarrassment by misplacing the apostrophe, but not before the relevant motion had been amended by some Young Turk of the movement to '...omitting or misplacing the apostrophe', infuriating Sir Arthur because he hadn't thought of it first. He glowered. He could bide his time but he would have his revenge on the Young Turk.
Today, Sir Arthur is scowling as he glares irascibly from his Hounslow window to observe the 237 bus crawling down the Staines Road towards Brentford and Shepherd's Bush. He can feel the veins in his temples throbbing whenever he looks at the bus's destination board. His exhaustive researches prove beyond doubt that more than one shepherd worked in the area, but his attempts to have the area correctly renamed Shepherds' Bush, with concomitant amendments to all relevant maps, timetables, postal addresses – anywhere in fact where the abomination exists - have so far come to naught. He has a strong suspicion that there was more than one bush as well, but acceptance of the name Shepherds' Bushes remains for now only a distant dream. Don't even get him started on Golders Green.
His scowl deepens as he turns his attention to two cuttings the Young Turk has brought him – one from The Independent, and one from a Lib Dem election leaflet in Chippenham. He himself lives in Chippenham and therefore feels the offence all the more keenly.
The Young Turk has drawn up proposals to promote the work of the Association on the back of publicising these blunders. He has contacts in the press, television, he bangs on incessantly about something called social media. Sir Arthur stares at him, then waves him curtly away. Much better, he thinks, to stick with what he knows. He decides on writing to both culprits - that's 'writing' as in assembling, paper, pen, ink and envelope and applying one to another in a familiar and comforting sequence. He drafts and re-drafts with a consuming passion. The voice of the Pedantry Association shall be heard! The Young Turk will be put firmly in his place. He, Sir Arthur Dickens, will emerge as a fearless warrior, an indomitable champion for spelling and proofreading! Hark! Is that siren whisper the sound of a Nobel beckoning?
In the end, he settles for the main body of the letters being identical. He is after all in both cases extolling accuracy and carefulness while lambasting inattention and slovenliness. So far so good, but the conclusion to each letter must wound the recipient with a trenchant and more individual jibe. After much inner debate he settles for a demand to the editor of The Independent that the perpetrator of the 'thrown' outrage be 'throne' to the mob. Caution dictates though that he append a lengthy note explaining the deliberate misspelling and insisting that both the letter and the explanatory note be published in full.
His letter to the Lib Dems in his home town enumerates the multiple catastrophes that will follow if the literacy policy is followed. His excoriation of the party grows increasingly venomous, finishing with the ringing phrase 'Do you understand, sir, that you are advocating policies leading to a succession of utter calamities?'
Sir Arthur confines himself to the content of his letters, knowing little and caring less about the administrative workings of his office. He checks and re-checks them, signs both with an angry flourish, and places them carefully in his out tray.
Where, it turns out, Muphry is waiting.
It is only the following day that Sir Arthur discovers that there has been a mix up, the letter destined for the Lib Dems going to The Independent (without its explanatory note) and vice versa.
He is a prominent local figure in Chippenham, a member of various worthy bodies, but is much too fussy and, well, pedantic to be much liked. He rapidly becomes the butt of much wild mirth in the town when his complaint about the childhood literacy blunder is published, complete with its stern and unexplained demand that the guilty party be 'throne to the mob.'
If that is humiliating, worse – much worse – is in store. The following day The Independentleads with a full copy of the letter from Sir Arthur, widely known as a fervent royalist and arch supporter of the monarchy. He has apparently described the succession of Prince William and his heirs as 'a succession of utter calamities.' He simply has no credible way of explaining why.
He doesn't even bother to defend the 'no confidence' motion at the Pedantry Association, nor the charge that he has brought it into disrepute. He leaves the hearing a broken man, his reputation in tatters. Even now he doesn't realise that he has been sabotaged by Muphry, working through the only too willing agency of the Young Turk, who is surreptitiously polishing his CV even before Sir Arthur has left the building.
Sir Arthur thought he could take on Muphry with impunity, show the world which of them was stronger. But he was wrong. Muphry is not so easily beaten. Muphry will find a way. Muphry will always find a way.
Now do you see why I am so worried?
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ANAGRAM CORNER
THE GENERAL ELECTION
ELECT INELEGANT HERO!
