Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 28 May 2005

A Lexicographer writes

issue 28 May 2005

An unquiet correspondent sends a ‘breath of rage’ all the way from Burrum Heads, Queensland. ‘I do wish you could manage to educate some of your fellow columnists,’ barks Mr Geoff Baker, adding a few paragraphs about ‘ignorance’, ‘solecisms, ‘disappointment’, ‘Bad English’, ‘after-hours adult education’.

Goodness! What have we done? Why, we’ve used ‘or not’ after ‘whether’. Mr Barker’s gripe is that this introduces a culpable redundancy. That, however, is not the way the community of English-speakers has seen it over the past few hundred years.

Whether had a busy private life even before it was written down in the Vespasian Psalter in ad 825, the earliest citation known, unless someone has found an earlier. The function that interests Mr Baker is as a conjunction. Since the days of Alfred the Great it has introduced a disjunctive dependent question or its equivalent.

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