101 YEARS OLD AND STILL DELAYED BY PEDANTRY...

MY ARRIVAL in the office yesterday was delayed by a rather confusing sign I saw in a shop window. “Sale,” it proudly announced in large red letters, followed by the words: “Up to half price”. Those final words bothered me, so I entered the shop and asked a young lady assistant for an explanation.

“We’re having a winter sale,” she said. “Many prices are reduced.”

“I am fully aware what a sale is,” I assured her, “it’s the word ‘ up’ that bothers me. Surely prices, as you suggest, go down rather than up in sales.”

“Indeed they do, sir,” she cheerfully agreed, “but what the sign is telling you is that the reduced prices are up to half the price of the original ones.”

“But they’re not,” I said. “I’ve looked at some of the price tags and while a few are around half the original price, most are rather more than that. Surely ‘ up to half price’ suggests that the new prices will be up to half their previous value which means they will be either half the previous value or less. In fact, they are half their previous value or more.”

“I begin to see what you’re getting at,” she said, “but I’m afraid you have misconstrued the sign. What it’s saying is that you can save up to half the original price.”

“If the sign had said, ‘ Save up to half price’, I’d have had no problems with it,” I told her, “but it doesn’t. Syntactically, the only thing that ‘ half’ can refer to in the sign is ‘ price’, not the amount one saves and the new prices compared with the old occupy a range that is down to half, not up to half. Again, I would say there are strong grounds that you have used the wrong preposition: ‘ up’ rather than ‘ down’.”

“One moment,” she said, holding a finger up to silence me. “I feel I must take issue with what you just said. ‘ Up’ and ‘ down’ are adverbs, not prepositions, are they not?”

“Technically speaking,” I said, “I suppose you are right. A preposition is generally followed by a noun while an adverb, as one might assume from its name, modifies a verb. Yet in a phrase such as ‘ up to’ ( or indeed ‘ down to’) half price, one could argue that ‘ half price’ is a noun to which the preposition ‘ up to’ applies.”

“I wouldn’t argue with that,” she said, “but you didn’t say that ‘ up to’ was a preposition, you used that word to describe ‘ up’ which I maintain is incorrect.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “you can hardly say that ‘ up’ is an adverb when, in the case we are discussing, there is no verb for it to modify.”

“That’s just being over- prescriptive,” she protested. “If one puts up the prices, ‘ up’ is an adverb modifying the verb ‘ put’, and it retains its adverbial nature if one omits the ‘ put’ and says simply that the prices are up.”

“But in a sale,” I insisted, “the prices are down, not up, whether you call ‘ up’ and ‘ down’ adverbs or prepositions. That’s my whole point.”

“Agree they’re adverbs and I’ll have a word with the signwriter,” she said with a smile and we shook hands on it.