Full-dress English

What's formal usage, anyway?

TOM STERN, WHO writes about language for a group of weekly papers in Marin County, California, wasn't about to let my use of "snuck" tiptoe past him. After spotting the highly irregular verb in this column last month, he e-mailed to ask what I was up to.

"Forty years ago, the Random House American College Dictionary did not even acknowledge the existence of snuck," he pointed out. It's true, he conceded, that the 2006 American Heritage Dictionary allows it - with the caution that "snuck 'still meets with much resistance' in 'formal written English.'

"I think your column qualifies as formal written English, and as for me, I won't even say snuck in a conversation. Your thoughts?"

Well, my first thought is: I would use snuck, in a jokey context, even if it were labeled nonstandard, like ain't. Snuck is still informal for me - if I were talking about weapons smugglers, I would use sneaked - but like whole nother, it's fine in its place.

Others, of course, may differ; we all accept change at our own pace. Me, I still hear "the shirt shrunk" as incorrect; I was startled to read, in a New Yorker profile a couple of years ago, that Christopher Hitchens's "mouth shrunk like a sea anemone poked with a stick." But my current American dictionaries all list shrunk as a standard alternative to shrank. (American Heritage OK'd the verb in the 1969 edition, long before Disney shrunk the kids.)

My second thought is: "formal written English" - who, me? "Formal" isn't a word I would apply to most journalism today. There's a range of sobriety, of course, with serious editorials at one extreme and chatty columns at the other, but even the press's most elevated prose is not terribly formal by historical standards.

What makes prose formal? The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style cites "careful explanation of background information, complexity in sentence structure, explicit transitions between thoughts," and of course an appropriately dignified vocabulary.

Informal English "incorporates many of the elements of spoken English," such as contractions, and assumes shared knowledge between writer and audience, allowing for a breezier tone. Both varieties, however, are standard English; the difference is style, not correctness.

Most general-interest prose today, like the rest of daily life, is more informal than not. And "formal" increasingly suggests not just correctness but stuffiness; in fact, the entry for "formal words" in Garner's Modern American Usage is a list of pretentious terms to avoid, like purchase for buy.

Everyday written English is something like business casual dress; a bit unbuttoned, not too daring, and hard to define. But if there's an adjective that doesn't describe it, "formal" is that word.

. . .

PARALLEL UNIVERSE: "I was once slapped on the hand (figuratively, of course) by an officious young editor for using the formulation 'not only . . . but' without including the 'also,' " writes a friend. "Having just committed the same sin, for probably the thousandth time, I find myself wondering, for probably the 999th time, whether he was right. If one says 'not only,' is one required to say not only 'but' but also 'but also'?"

No, one is not. In fact, even the "but" is sometimes optional.

I've never worried about this rule, but I certainly knew some people thought it was law. If not only appears, then but also must follow: "He saw not only dolphins but also mermaids."

Imagine my surprise when, after consulting more than a dozen usage writers, I could find only one who endorsed the rule. That was James Kilpatrick, who admits he's just following "Charles H. Hamilton, city editor of the Richmond News Leader in the 1940s," who "was nuts about not only but also. He insisted that one half of this pair could not live without the other."

He was wrong, of course. As Theodore Bernstein explains in his discussion of the rule, some kinds of sentences are better without but also: "He is not only a painter, but a very good painter," for instance, or "[She] remained not only childless but single."

Most usage advisers, in fact, are concerned not with the but also wording but with the parallelism of the phrases or clauses involved. "He saw not only the movie but read the book" fails this test; it should be "He not only saw the movie but (also) read the book."

And even on that score, there's wiggle room. As Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage notes, many writers use "not only {hellip} but" without strict parallelism: "I was not only endowed with the faculty of speech, but likewise with some rudiments of reason," wrote Swift. Even Charles H. Hamilton of the Richmond News Leader probably let some of these slip by.

So if an editor slaps your hand over "but also," you can slap right back. Figuratively, of course.