SYNTACTICAL TANGLES: Mavor Moore has sent me two clippings from the Globe and Mail containing what he calls "two dandy bits of syntax." The first, in an excerpt from an American book on management, runs: We have been through a decade of gross hucksterism in which executives have been had to undergo assertiveness training. I think this is probably a simple error in typesetting had for made. Or it may reflect a change of mind on the author's part: perhaps he decided to alter have had to the more forceful have been made, was interrupted by a phone call in mid?correction, and never completed the change. But if that was so the copy?editor should have caught it. (By coincidence, I originally started that sentence "But in that case," started to change it to "But if that was so," was interrupted, and didn't notice till later that I hadn't crossed out "case." These things happen.)

The second example is more interesting. David Livingstone is writing about a photographer named Joel?Peter Witkin, whose works bear such tifles as "Woman Breastfeeding an Eel," "Androgyny Breastfeeding a Fetus," and "Testicle Stretch with the Possibility of a Crushed Face." The passage in question runs: . . . his son, whom Witkin himself ? too tired for semen, an option he had considered ? baptized with spit and to whom he has never refrained from showing his work. The significant point about this is that it's perfectly correct grammatically. But it's a dreadful piece of writing because the writer has loaded too much into one sentence. The reader might have been a little less disconcerted if to had been moved to the end. But the writer, perhaps unconsciously, bowed to the long?discredited rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. Pedants used to say you couldn't do it in English because it was never done in Latin and after all the word meant "beforeputting." This is one aspect of "prescriptive Latinate grammar" that I don't defend.

Yet another example from the Globe and Mail. (Did all its copy?editors lose their jobs in the recent upheaval?) Here is Bart Testa, writing in the Books section on a collection of film reviews by someone called Doug Featherling. (What a coincidence ? I know a writer called Doug Fetherling.) He concludes his review: Featherling's tight and sober prose is old?fashioned enough to know where his readers agree with him, and this is doubtless more in the eighties than a film critic as intelligent as this would try to imagine writing on Hollywood today. I can't even diagnose the trouble here, let alone prescribe a remedy. All that's clear is that Testa's prose is neither tight nor sober.

FORMER: In the March issue I objected to the newspaper practice that makes journalists write such things as He entered the cabinet of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau in 1972. From Phoenix, Arizona, comes this rejoinder: Perhaps, as a frequent contributor to Books in Canada, you're familiar with details of the political lives of Pierre Trudeau. Perhaps I'm not. When "former prime minister Pierre Trudeau" is used, I'm assured that as of the date of the article, Trudeau is a former prime minister and someone else now holds the job. You know this because of your fascination with Trudeau, but others may not know about Trudeau, or about the various premiers, governors of U.S. states and dozens of other elected and appointed officials. I agree that if the fact that Trudeau is no longer prime minister is relevant to the subject?matter of the article it should be conveyed somewhere. That doesn't affect my point about this phrase. It describes Trudeau as a former prime minister, not "as of the date of the article," but in 1972.

PROTAGONIST: We often see protagonist used as the opposite of antagonist by writers who mistake the Greek prefix port (o)?, "first," for the Latin prefix pro?, "in favour of." This is understandable. It's harder to understand how anyone could use protagonist as a synonym for antagonist. Yet this was done by John Sewell, a former mayor of Toronto, in a Globe and Mail review of a book on Toronto history. Writing of the first mayor, he said: In spite of a reform majority, the new council did little, and Mackenzie's chief protagonist, George Gurnett, easily obtained a Tory majority in the next election. I doubt if this use will catch on. But the common error of making the word mean "defender" or "advocate" will probably continue. There is another use, however, that is condemned by Fowler but not by me. "The Greek protagonistes," he says, means the actor who takes the chief part in a play... & to talk of several protagonists, or of a chief p. or the like, is an absurdity as great, to anyone who knows Greek, as to call a man the p. of a cause. The weakness of this is that Fowler's definition of protagonistes is misleading. Greek plays were written for three actors only, and each of them took more than one part ? that's why they used masks. If, then, we allow the shift of meaning from "actor" to "character" (as Fowler does), we may as well admit that a play or a novel or a historical event, may have two or more principal characters, and call them protagonists. Distinguished writers do it. Thus Conor Cruise O'Brien (who probably knows Greek) writes in the New York Review of Books: Subjectively, in the intentions of its protagonists, the Enlightenment was a movement of tolerance. And my friend Anagnostes of the Idler (who certainly knows Greek) speaks of the two protagonists of Dangerous Liaisons. These examples suffice to legitimize the use for me, though for my part I'll probably continue to write "principal characters" for fear of reprisals from more extreme purists.