In a health story this week, we said: “GPs cannot prescribe e-cigarettes as none is yet available as a licensed medicinal product . . . ”
There’s nothing wrong with the wording but my preference, if I’d been writing it, would have been none are rather than none is. I was alerted to the wording by Tom Harris, the former Labour MP, who posted this approving message on Twitter: “Good to see The Times using proper grammar — ‘none’ is singular, short for ‘not one’.”
That’s a common view in usage manuals. For example, in his book Strictly English: An A-Z of Avoidable Errors, Simon Heffer writes: “None is singular. It derives from the Old English negation of one and means ‘not one’. Therefore one writes ‘none of us is free tonight’, ‘none of us was there’, ‘none of us has done that’, and so on. The dictionary now says that the use in the plural is common. That does not mean it is correct.”
This is seriously misguided. The whole of Heffer’s approach to language runs aground on his conviction that where general usage (which is what dictionaries record) conflicts with his own, the fault lies with us millions of native speakers. That’s not how language works. There is no external arbitrator of “proper grammar”. The rules of grammar are observed facts about regularities in the way native speakers use their own language. The grammar of modern English is different from the grammar of Old English in numerous respects (for example, inflection for case). No one intended the change; it just happened. Language is always doing that, because no one is in charge. If most people treat none as plural, then it’s plural.
Yet even in its own terms, the insistence that none must be singular is untrue. As Jeremy Butterworth, editor of a new (and very good) edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, notes: “It should be borne in mind that none is not a shortening of no one but is the regular descendant of Old English nan (pronoun) ‘none, not one’. At all times since the reign of King Alfred the choice of plural or singular in the accompanying verbs, etc., has been governed by the surrounding words or by the notional sense.”
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That’s exactly right. In my book Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage I give many examples from literature over the centuries in which none is treated as plural. Here, for example, is Samuel Johnson from his novel Rasselas: “The time is already come when none are wretched but by their own fault.” This isn’t a mistake; it isn’t improper grammar. Johnson is following a rule that modern grammarians refer to as the principle of notional concord (or, as Butterfield refers to it, notional sense). None is sometimes singular and sometimes plural, and one common way of distinguishing these is if the writer is considering an entire group or one specific member of it.
It’s because our report was considering the entire category of e-cigarettes that my preference would be to treat none as plural here. It wasn’t wrong for us to treat it as singular but to me that seems clunky — as if we were determined to be correct even at the cost of fluency. And that approach is a misunderstanding of language. Grammar isn’t something we aspire to, like good deportment or knowing how to use a fish knife: it’s something we already do. Yes, it’s possible for me or you to make mistakes; but it’s not possible for most native speakers to be wrong on the same linguistic point simultaneously.