The King's English (Penguin Modern Classics) by Kingsley Amis

Author:Kingsley Amis [Amis, Kingsley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141961910
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-06-01T23:00:00+00:00

L

Lather

As long as I can remember I have known, or been told, that lather rhymes with gather and not father, and like everybody else I go on doing as before and pronounce the wretched (and seldom needed) word as I always have, to rhyme with father. At the rate we seem to be going with shaving-cream and machine washing of clothes, dishes, etc., both thing and word will soon have fallen out of use. What happened to the first syllable of solder?

Letters or figures

A journalist recently lamented the seeming fact that ‘among the 231 million inhabitants of the United States there were not even 3 or 4,000 who might be interested in [his] life story’. That at least was what appeared in print. What the man actually wrote had obviously pertained to three or four thousand people who might or might not have been interested, but some officious intermediary had turned it into nonsense.

Numbers expressed in words, as four thousand people or a hundred reasons, are not necessarily intended to be precise. Those expressed in figures cannot help seeming as if they are so intended. The title of Ian Hay’s account of the beginning of the Great War, The First Hundred Thousand, meant something quite different from what The First 100,000 would have meant. What until the other day was a firm distinction is now being eroded.

Other agents of this erosion are the practice of printing, for instance, ‘£4.3m’ for ‘£4,300,000’ but continuing to set, for instance, ‘£43,000’ in full. The apparent rule whereby a number coming first in a sentence must be spelt out in words leads straight to nonsense, as in ‘Nineteen-forty-five, unlike 1950, gave Labour a comfortable majority in the House.’ Another apparent rule binds broadcasters, such that ‘one hundred’ must always be said instead of ‘a hundred’, producing nonsenses like ‘a one-hundred-pound bottle of wine’.

Nowadays more and more people are innumerate, very likely know which is the bigger of a million and ten thousand but would not much care to have to write out the two of them in figures, and so are more vulnerable than their parents to confusion over quantities. Some may even feel dimly that knowing about such things is better left to computers. Conspiracies are unlikely things but unorganised consensuses are less so, and if there exists one to degrade the importance of quantities it comes at an infectious time.

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