We have a few IT issues here
No, we are not talking about Information Technology, but the impersonal pronoun in English. Because for a little word, it sure causes a lot of problems
“I suppose it all began with Miss Fothergill,” he said at length.
“‘It’ began?” asked Stephen. “What began, my dear Eustace? You must be more definite. Am I to assume that this Miss Fothergill was a kind of Eve?”
(L P Hartley, The Sixth Heaven)
The Stephen in this extract from the Eustace and Hilda trilogy is a posing, pedantic undergraduate. Poor Eustace. It – it – is quite unfair to pull someone up if their grammar is a bit lax in conversation and every time they want to take a shortcut via the it-word. In writing, too, ‘it’ must be allowed to have its day.
Stephen has a point, all the same. A too frequent use of it makes for wooliness; and it is hard to think of a writer who doesn’t use it too frequently. Another Stephen, King, even made a scary novel out of It.
It’s worth the bother of checking your copy to see if it won’t benefit from a little more precision. (Or, if you prefer, check your copy to see which phrases might benefit from a little more precision).
A too-casual use of the it-word can lure the writer into grammatical slips. Take this:
The first British Airways Boeing 777 entered service in November 1995, making it the first airline to take delivery of the GE90-powered version of this wide-bodied, twin-engined jet.
The subject of the sentence is the Boeing jet, not (as I’m pretty sure the writer intended) British Airways.
Reduce your it count by all means; but please don’t get a complex about it. Eustace, I’m afraid, did, and it just made him worse:
I can’t help it,” he mumbled. “It’s the way I talk. You’re not the first person who’s complained of it...
Taking a spade to a soufflé
Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi is Number One in the Forthwrite It Parade.
Strap yourself in. We are going to analyse the bejaysus out of it.
The word ‘it’ occurs 16 times in this short lyric. Even allowing for repetitions, it is required to do a whole lot of work.
It’s tough, so tough. That’s in the second line, and there’s no ambiguity here. Tommy has lost his docks job while the union is on strike. It – life – is tough.
Then Gina, who works in a diner ‘for her man’ makes a plea that she and Tommy hold on to what we got. She goes further: it doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not.
At this point, we really need to ask what ‘making it’ means in the Tommy and Gina context.
They could be talking about economic prosperity – or even survival. Alternatively, does ‘making it’ mean the survival and growth of their relationship?
This is important, because Gina goes on to say it doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not. Nevertheless, we’ll give it a shot.
Here comes the chorus – and a curveball. Someone sings woah, we’re halfway there, woah, livin’ on a prayer. They go on: take my hand, we’ll make it I swear, before reasserting they are livin’ on a prayer.
Who is that ‘someone’? We’re not told. It could be Gina continuing her rallying call to Tommy. But having just claimed that it doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not, her fervour in promising we’ll make it I swear surely contradicts her previous indifference to achieving whatever ‘it’ is.
Perhaps it’s Tommy countering Gina’s implied defeatism? That makes the most logical sense; but throughout the song, Tommy is presented in the third person, as in the following verse where we learn that his guitar is in hock and he is holding in what he used to make it – the guitar – talk.
The ‘what’ here, as in the ‘there’ in the lyric, is elusive. But we can infer that Johnny used to pour his passion and desire into his guitar playing.
The final use of ‘it’ comes in the final verse, where one of the protagonists tells us you live for the fight when it’s all that you’ve got, having urged the other to hold on, ready or not.
Again, if this is Gina, it contradicts her earlier claim that we’ve got each other and that’s a lot for love. She can’t have it both ways: either all they’ve got is ‘each other’ or it’s ‘the fight’.
Let’s cut to the chase. After extensive textual analysis, I believe we must choose between two theories about the true meaning of Livin’ on a Prayer:
THEORY A: The ‘voice’ is Gina’s throughout. We must allow her to contradict herself – after all, she is desperate to find any way she can to shake her man out of his seeming torpor. In this interpretation, Johnny is a silent and disconsolate presence in the song: out of work, without a guitar, suppressing what he feels inside.
THEORY B: Despite the lack of a stage direction to make this clear, the lyric really alternates between Gina and Johnny’s voice. This interpretation has the virtue of solving our confusion over the ‘making it’ question. While Gina reassures her man that making it doesn’t matter as long as they have each other, Tommy swears that – together – they will make it: in fact, despite appearances to the contrary, they are already halfway there.
I believe the answer is ‘B’. In the penultimate verse, we’re told Gina dreams of running away – we must assume, as an alternative to fighting that soul-destroying battle to ‘make it’. But note this: Tommy whispers baby it’s okay, someday.
It’s a Delphic remark, and the only one we can definitively attribute to Tommy. But is it not also a sure sign that Tommy is not as downtrodden and dumbstruck as Theory A would have us believe? And this, I feel is a decisive point: would an alpha male rock singer such as Mr Bon Jovi allow his male hero to let his woman do all the talking and remain supine throughout?
Still, we go straight back to the double-chorus that’s such an interesting feature of the song – and that tension between it not mattering if they make it or not, while simultaneously swearing that they will make it.
But I think we can cut Tommy some slack at this point.
What is the origin of the phrase ‘taking a spade to a soufflé?
The writer Evelyn Waugh was a near contemporary and huge admirer of the comic novelist P G Wodehouse. When critics dared to analyse Wodehouse’s oeuvre, an exasperated Waugh said ‘to criticise him is like taking a spade to a soufflé’. It’s become a shorthand for any heavy-handed attempt to read too much significance into something that, in the end, is meant as pure entertainment.
Let’s get grammatical, grammatical
There’s not enough English grammar taught in the world. Schools and universities obviously feel it went out with chalk and blackboards. But that’s not what we hear from the highly-educated people who attend our Forthwrite courses.
Highly-educated and high-flying these executives might be, but they invariably feel that their ignorance of verbs and nouns and syntax all too often brings them down to earth with a bump.
Our Clarity course does grammar in a brisk, intelligible and highly practical way. We don’t get deeply into gerunds and imperatives but we do take apart the English sentence and how you put it together in a way that makes your writing a model of smoothness and efficiency.
More here.
I found as a working critic that Bon Jovi's main problem, was the lyrics. They would have gotten more love if they gave a little more thought to what they were saying. There's something to be said for the easy rhyme, but Bon Jovi's lyrics are just lazy.