Reasons for letting our hare down

We all shared the pain of our readers' representative when she apologised on Monday for a series of recent spelling mistakes in this newspaper. It's no defence to say that some of the misspellings had a certain plausibility. A compliant taxpayer might well have reason to be a "complaint" one, as one of our reports apparently suggested, and a dream could conceivably come "through" (or indeed "thru," if it was the American dream). But as for the competitor who came within a "hare's breath" of winning something, well, unless he was a greyhound, there can be no excuse.

The problem, as the readers' rep pointed out, is a relatively modern one. In the old days, a journalist who was party to any of the mistakes mentioned would have been handed a revolver and expected to do the decent thing. So what has changed? Well, one major development, as anyone who has read the accounts of the old-timers knows, is that the modern journalist is much more likely than his predecessor to be sober, which has apparently had a disastrous effect on grammar. But clearly, the education system is partly to blame as well.

As the reader and I both know, a hair's breadth - the phrase our reporter was groping for - is an old measurement equivalent to one 48th of an inch. Unfortunately, this sort of easy erudition, which at least one of us has just borrowed from Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, is rare nowadays. But even if he or she is not handicapped by poor education, the younger journalist must also struggle with the growing abstraction of the English language.

My point is that many of the everyday phrases we use are drawn from a pastoral life which has long ceased to be normal experience. For example, most people who use the term have never in fact made hay - while the sun shone or at any other time. Nor, except in loose terms, can they have any idea what it is to plough a lonely furrow (never mind a straight one).

Most of them will have eaten eggs, and even chickens, but few will ever have witnessed a live chicken-and-egg situation. I could give examples such as these until the cows come home. Which is why I'm guessing that the "hare's breath" incident was a case of over-compensation.

If you're living, as most us now are, in cities and towns, chances are you won't see a hare from one end of the year to the other. And yet the long-eared rodent makes frequent appearances in the English language, popping up in everything from "hare-lip", "hare's foot" and "hare-brained", to the fairy-tale race in which he is beaten controversially by a tortoise. There's also the famous phrase "mad as a March hare". This as you probably know refers to the mating season, when hares are even wilder than usual, and it also provides a good example of how confusing English can be. Call me a know-all, but if I remember correctly (and I should, because I've just read it in Brewer's), Erasmus in his Aphorisms uses the phrase "mad as a marsh hare," explaining that hares run wilder in marshland because of the absence of hedges or other cover.

A picture emerges here of the hare as a generally unstable animal, prone to excitement. And a young city reporter could therefore be forgiven for thinking that a "hare's breath" was a colourful phrase meaning something very short. From there, unfortunately, the reporter is on a slippery slope. It would be all too easy to assume that hares were once trained as circus performers and that to "make one's hare stand on end" was a popular trick. Hence to "let your hare down" after the show, and so on.

Of course, loss of meaning in certain phrases is only one aspect of a general decline, and the fall in grammatical standards has no such excuse. Personally, I blame the move away from Latin. We may have complained about it at the time, but I'm glad now that they drummed Latin grammar into us at school, and I doubt I will ever forget how to decline a verb in its nominative, accusative, genitive, ablative and carboniferous periods.

Our readers' rep also mentioned the issue of the Americanisation of language thru - sorry, through - the internet, and the related rise of text messaging, which is threatening to do for vowels what Finnegans Wake did for punctuation. We often boast of our highly-educated workforce, and obviously the technical skills of our graduates have been a big factor in attracting US investment. Which is all very well. But if we neglect the basic language skills, we can hardly be surprised when the chickens come home to roast.

fmcnally@irish-times.ie