Heffer warns that inappropriate intransitivity will not be tolerated.
There has been much cackling among media types about Telegraph editor Simon Heffer's email to his staff, complaining about errors in the newspaper. The Guardian, with considerable Schadenfreude, stuck the whole thing on their website, and you can read it here if you so wish.
He starts off fairly reasonably highlighting some basic spelling mistakes that escaped the sub-editors' gaze, but then, all too predictably, moves into more idiosyncratic territory. I won't bore you with all the things that Simon Heffer considers incorrect (although the email should make almost anyone say ‘omgwtf’ in at least a couple of places), but one point in particular jumped out at me. He says:
If you are "warning" you need to warn something or someone: otherwise you are "giving warning".
This was a new one on me. Was anyone else aware that people frown on using warn as an intransitive verb? I sure as cock wasn't. But right enough, in the Torygraph's own style guide, they say bluntly:
"He warned that... " is wrong. The speaker must warn somebody or "give a warning that."
I turned to the OED for some common sense, only to find that they too show all major senses as transitive. With a couple of provisos; but first, some history.
The Old English verb warnian could happily be used as a true intransitive - but only in certain senses. In sentences like
Se man mot geornlice warnian, ðæt he eft ðam yfelum dædum ne geedlæce
...it means ‘be aware’ or ‘take care’, a sense which has been lost in modern English. Still, it's very clear that direct objects for more familiar senses were frequently dropped in the Middle-English and early-modern period. This from Tyndale's Bible (1526), Galatians II, verses 9-10:
then Iames Cephas and Iohn [...] agreed with vs that we shuld preache amonge the Hethen and they amonge the Iewes: warnynge only that we shulde remember the poore.
This is taken straight from the OED, although they say only that the verb is being used here ‘absolutely’, and label the construction obsolete. Watch this space - they start revising W next year. But anyway, it seems to me that from here it's only a skip and a jump to true intransitivity.
A few admittedly random searches of specific authors on Google Books suggests that in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was definitely avoided. Austen, Dickens, Henry James, and a few others - they are all scrupulous about giving warn a direct object. But when you hit the twentieth century it's clear that this usage is not limited to colloquial or informal writing. Among the examples I found were:
She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a different name to warn that they might not come true [...]. - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
She warned that he was seriously thinking of withdrawing his offer to part the waters, ‘so that all you'll get at the Arabian Sea is a saltwater bath [...]’. - Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
Every country has its resident experts who warn that imported television will destroy the national consciousness and replace it with Dallas, The Waltons, Star Trek and Twin Peaks. - Clive James, ‘Making Programmes the World Wants’ (1991)
Going over the Wiktionary entry for warn, with all this in mind, I wasn't really sure how to deal with this sense. I started off labelling it as colloquial, but then changed my mind and just added a note saying that some people don't like it. So I ask you - if any of you have read this far - does it sound wrong to you?
He starts off fairly reasonably highlighting some basic spelling mistakes that escaped the sub-editors' gaze, but then, all too predictably, moves into more idiosyncratic territory. I won't bore you with all the things that Simon Heffer considers incorrect (although the email should make almost anyone say ‘omgwtf’ in at least a couple of places), but one point in particular jumped out at me. He says:
If you are "warning" you need to warn something or someone: otherwise you are "giving warning".
This was a new one on me. Was anyone else aware that people frown on using warn as an intransitive verb? I sure as cock wasn't. But right enough, in the Torygraph's own style guide, they say bluntly:
"He warned that... " is wrong. The speaker must warn somebody or "give a warning that."
I turned to the OED for some common sense, only to find that they too show all major senses as transitive. With a couple of provisos; but first, some history.
The Old English verb warnian could happily be used as a true intransitive - but only in certain senses. In sentences like
Se man mot geornlice warnian, ðæt he eft ðam yfelum dædum ne geedlæce
...it means ‘be aware’ or ‘take care’, a sense which has been lost in modern English. Still, it's very clear that direct objects for more familiar senses were frequently dropped in the Middle-English and early-modern period. This from Tyndale's Bible (1526), Galatians II, verses 9-10:
then Iames Cephas and Iohn [...] agreed with vs that we shuld preache amonge the Hethen and they amonge the Iewes: warnynge only that we shulde remember the poore.
This is taken straight from the OED, although they say only that the verb is being used here ‘absolutely’, and label the construction obsolete. Watch this space - they start revising W next year. But anyway, it seems to me that from here it's only a skip and a jump to true intransitivity.
A few admittedly random searches of specific authors on Google Books suggests that in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was definitely avoided. Austen, Dickens, Henry James, and a few others - they are all scrupulous about giving warn a direct object. But when you hit the twentieth century it's clear that this usage is not limited to colloquial or informal writing. Among the examples I found were:
She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a different name to warn that they might not come true [...]. - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
She warned that he was seriously thinking of withdrawing his offer to part the waters, ‘so that all you'll get at the Arabian Sea is a saltwater bath [...]’. - Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
Every country has its resident experts who warn that imported television will destroy the national consciousness and replace it with Dallas, The Waltons, Star Trek and Twin Peaks. - Clive James, ‘Making Programmes the World Wants’ (1991)
Going over the Wiktionary entry for warn, with all this in mind, I wasn't really sure how to deal with this sense. I started off labelling it as colloquial, but then changed my mind and just added a note saying that some people don't like it. So I ask you - if any of you have read this far - does it sound wrong to you?