A sentence from a New York Review Books e-mail:
Thomas Tryon’s The Other narrates the tale of two identical twins, one of whom begins to terrorize the peaceful New England town that they call home.
I first thought
Omit needless words :
Thomas Tryon’s The Other narrates the tale of two identical twins, one of whom begins to terrorize the peaceful New England town that they call home.
But wait a sec — what if it’s a tale of a town’s worth of identical twins? The village of the twins! The context for this sentence is an e-mail devoted to horror and science-fiction, so anything is possible, no?
But wait another sec — the phrase “one of whom” pretty clearly suggests that the story is about two twins.
But wait one more sec — without “two,” perhaps there’s still a slight risk of misreading before one gets to “one of whom.” Okay, leave it in.
I would like to think that the writer of the sentence went through the same process of overthinking that I just did. Sometimes writing can be improved by going back to what you had. Not every improvement is an improvement.
This sentence got Elaine and me to thinking about the word
pair. Why say “a pair of shoes”? They’re just shoes, right? Only sometimes. An everyday shopper buys “a pair of shoes.” Imelda Marcos bought “shoes.”
*
November 25: It occurred to me to look up
pair. From the entry for
pair in
Garner’s Modern English Usage:
Is it right to speak of a pair of twins — that is, does this phrase denote two people or four? Because twins are always two per birth, a pair of twins is two people. (Shoes also come in pairs, and a pair of shoes is two — not four — shoes.) Four twins are two pairs of twins. But the redundant phrase pair of twins can be found in print sources fairly steadily from 1800 to the present day.
*
April 24, 2021: A passage I found by chance, in Theodore M. Bernstein’s
Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer’s Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971):
In ordinary, forgivable usage a pair of twins is the customary phrase. In some situations it is almost necessary. If you were walking down the street and two like-looking creatures approached, you would probably nudge your companion and say, “They are twins”; but if you were relating the incident to a companion who had not been present, you would be quite likely to say, “Coming toward me was a pair of twins,” rather than “Coming toward me were twins.” Incidentally and not altogether irrelevantly, “a pair of trousers” is never questioned, although, of course, “trousers” by itself covers the thought (as well as the legs). But it should be noted that no idea of two-ness is inherent in that word.
Miss Thistlebottom? “Your eight-grade English teacher,” Bernstein says. The sexism of Bernstein’s unfortunate title lives on in
Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style (2014). Pinker borrows the name Thistlebottom and adds his own sexist insults: ”grammar nannies,” “Ms. Retentive and her ilk,” “schoolmarm,” “schoolteachers,” “spinster schoolteacher,” and “usage nannies.”
Related reading
All OCA
“How to improve writing” posts
[I read
The Other for my tenth-grade English class. It was good then. Would it still be good now? And how many shoes are “some shoes”? This post is no. 89 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]
