Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/110
e. Miscellaneous uses and abuses of the relative.
(i) A relative clause is sometimes coordinated with an independent sentence; such coordination is perhaps always awkward, but is not always incorrect. The question arises chiefly when the two have a common subject expressed only in the relative clause; for when the subject is expressed in both, the independent sentence may be taken to be coordinate, not with the relative clause, but with the main sentence to which the relative clause is attached, as in the following instance:
To begin with, he had left no message, which in itself I felt to be a suspicious circumstance, and (I) was at my wits' end how to account plausibly for his departure.
Retain 'I', and 'I was' may be coordinate with 'he had left': remove it, and the coordination is necessarily between 'I was' and 'I felt'. In our next examples the writers are committed:
These beatitudes are just laws which we have been neglecting, and have been receiving in ourselves the consequences that were meet.—Daily Telegraph.
The idea which mankind most commonly conceive of proportion, is the suitableness of means to certain ends, and, where this is not the question, very seldom trouble themselves about the effect of different measures of things.—Burke.
Fictitious capital, a name of extreme inaccuracy, which too many persons are in the habit of using, from the hasty assumption that what is not real must necessarily be fictitious, and are more led away by a jingling antithesis of words than an accurate perception of ideas.–H. D. Macleod.
The first two of these are wrongly coordinated: the third, a curiosity in other respects, is in this respect right. The reason is that in the first two we have a defining, in the third a non-defining relative clause. A defining clause is grammatically equivalent to an adjective ('violated laws', 'the popular idea'), and can be coordinated only with another word or phrase performing the same function; now the phrase 'we have been receiving', not being attached to the