Saturday, November 20, 2010

Your call is very important to us

Right.

The Economist's language blog, Johnson, has an amusing look at this all too familiar phrase.

NEAL WHITMAN of Literal-Minded:
“Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order it was received.”
I stayed on the line, cleaning up the kitchen one-handed while I waited. By the time I was speaking to a real person, I had listened long enough to have heard the message at least five more times... It was really starting to get to me …
Did you get what was starting to get to Mr Whitman?  I'd have said the absurd lie that "your call is very important to us" repeated over and over while you are inconvenienced by being kept on hold. But he noticed something else that I missed the first time:
You’re missing the final in!, I kept thinking... you have more than one option for what to do with the in. You can leave it stranded at the end, the same way as you’d leave it at the end of the house I grew up in. Or you can take the in along with order, and put them both at the front of the relative clause.
But you shouldn't just abandon it. This phenomenon was noticed as far back as Ernest Gowers, the usage-book writer who called it preposition "cannibalism" in 1954. Mr Whitman notices that the preposition is more likely to get cannibalised by its exact likeness: the in in "in the order" eats the in that should be found in "in which it was received". It sounds wrong to our ears, it seems, to hear in twice so close together, so much so that some people don't notice the preposition sitting there cleaning its teeth after devouring its twin.

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