Grammar boughs out

The Last Straw: English is a notoriously slippery customer, as those of us obliged to work with it know well. You can never be too careful, writes Frank McNally.

There I was during the week, for example, smiling - in a forgiving but quietly superior way - at an apparent mistake in a press release from Fine Gael's Bernard Durkan, which described the Russian gas crisis as "a shot across the boughs" of EU energy ministers. The image of energy ministers sitting in trees, or even falling out of their trees as a result of the shot across their boughs, only added to my enjoyment.

Then I consulted the Oxford dictionary and, as often happens, it ruined the whole thing. "A shot across the bows," which is what the FG man obviously meant, is of course a naval expression. But when the dictionary pointed out that a ship's "bow" derives from the Low German "boog", the Dutch "beog", the Danish "boug" and so on (that it is, to cut a long definition short, the same word as bough), well, it took all the good out of it.

That said, a Google search for the phrase as used by Durkan suggests that he and a correspondent with the UCD soccer team's website are members of a tiny minority. Describing a college game last May, the UCD reporter wrote that a player called Niall Daly "fired a late shot across the boughs of the DCU goal". This sounds like an extraordinary event: Daly's shot must have been real to start with, before turning into a metaphor in mid-air. Futhermore, the suggestion is that he wasn't trying to score, but was merely warning the DCU goalkeeper that if he didn't behave, the next shot wouldn't miss.

Then again, if the goalposts were wooden, the reporter's description may have been entirely literal. With a good lawyer, he and Durkan would both get off on a technicality. The worst you could convict them of is confusing readers.

It's for reasons such as this that I always keep a copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style near my desk. A slim but indispensable guide to clarity in English, it was written almost a century ago by Cornell professor William Strunk jnr and, years later, revised by one of his pupils, the New Yorker's EB White. But its tone - concise, humorous, occasionally cranky - was set by the older man, who used to "quiver with revulsion" (White recalls) whenever he saw a sentence beginning: "The fact that . . ." As Strunk wrote: "If you feel you are possessed of the truth, or of the fact, simply state it. Do not give it advance billing."

Some of the literary crimes Strunk highlighted are uniquely American. For example, the book cautions against using "fix" in the colloquial sense of "prepare" (as in Bob Dylan's Fixin' to Die). Strunk also frowned at those who confused the transitive verb "lay" with the intransitive "lie". "The hen lays an egg; the llama lies down," he wrote. It's a small mercy that he was dead by the time of Dylan's 1969 hit Lay Lady Lay, which exhorts the unnamed female to "lay across my big brass bed" and "lay with your man a while".

But most of the problems featured occur wherever English is written. As the book warns, so many people think that "inflammable" means the opposite of what it's intended to mean that trucks carrying petrol now have to be marked "flammable". Despite this, Strunk warned crankily: "Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable."

In a message still flouted by every politician in Northern Ireland, he also deplored the use of "however" at the start of a sentence "when the meaning is nevertheless". But it wasn't only incorrect usage he targeted. Describing "prestigious" as an "adjective of last resort" he grudgingly conceded: "It's in the dictionary, but that doesn't mean you have to use it." And yes, returning to where we started, he also warned against confusing similar-sounding words, including alternate/alternative, farther/further, nauseous/nauseated. The book doesn't mention the bow/bough controversy. But if Strunk were alive, I suspect he would lecture Bernard Durkan that shooting across boughs, while arguably legitimate, presents a danger to apple pickers and tree pruners, and should be avoided.

The professor probably wouldn't know much about soccer, but I imagine he would also disapprove of shooting across the boughs of a goal. As for those occasions when a shot actually hits the boughs, Strunk would surely decry the habit of soccer commentators who suggest that the player was "denied by the woodwork". Why is the woodwork always blamed for inaccurate shooting? The absence of the goal-post still wouldn't make it a goal.