"And Yet" Again: An Idiomatic Bugbear

Is it time to reread George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”??It is. The essay was published seventy-five years ago, but it’s as trenchant and relevant as ever. Thus I’ll refer to it in the present tense.

English, Orwell says, “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” Fortunately, “the process is reversible,” or so he asserts. “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and . . . can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”

The essay isn’t long, and it is easily available online. In it Orwell categorizes, describes, and bemoans “dying metaphors” “pretentious diction,” vagueness, padded language, and passive constructions (such as “render inoperative,?militate against,?prove unacceptable,?make contact with?. . . , etc. etc.).”

In a 2018 screed published here, titled “Beyond Peccadillo: A Copy Editor’s Sole Pet Peeve,” I alluded to some of this. I mentioned a few peeves that fell short of my grand pet peeve and noted “the frequent use of ‘utilize’ instead of ‘use’ and ‘and yet’ (a styling widely common in print) instead of simply ‘yet.’”

That last one will not go away.

“And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust.” The words are venerable. Shakespeare, second act of Hamlet. There’s something I don’t love about that line, which refers to humans and follows “What a piece of work is a man.”

The two-word phrase “And yet” hits my ears as a double conjunction: “And but.”?

“And yet.” It confronts me almost daily, and you may think I should get over my aversion. After all, some of my favorites had no such distaste. Walden, the nineteenth-century scripture of Henry David Thoreau, contains “and yet” twenty-three bloody times. Just one example: “We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us!”

Clunk, clunk. (Walden, it is worth noting, is the book that uses double epizeuxis to advise: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”)

Virginia Woolf, A Room of Her Own: “And yet on the stage woman equals or surpasses man.” “And yet, I continued.” “The world revealed and yet soon to perish.”

James Baldwin uses “and yet” not once, not twice, but thrice in his 1962 New Yorker essay “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” For example: “And yet power?is?real, and many things, including, very often, love, cannot be achieved without it.”

Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire, which I love: “I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked?self?merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate.” Why not “but somehow” or “yet somehow”? “And yet!” In the penultimate chapter, Abbey uses the phrase, this time with Thoreau’s epizeuxis: “True, I agree, and yet—and yet [my emphasis] Rilke said that things don’t truly exist until the poet gives them names.”

What rot!, I think. But I keep digging.

Octavia Butler uses “and yet” over and over in her novel Parable of the Talents.

Yes, “yet” can mean not just “but” in such cases but also “however.” But in each case, see if “but” alone will not suffice.

The topic has been discussed in online forums, and one commentator makes a fair point about how lines scan—in poetry or song, saying “‘And yet’ is a perfectly acceptable idiom. Where would Lerner and Loewe have been without it? ‘I was serenely independent and content before we met / Surely I could always be that way again — / And yet / I've grown accustomed to her look / Accustomed to her voice / Accustomed to her face."

Sing it, then. Go ahead. But sling it? Maybe not. Please think twice.

I have let much go by the wayside. I’m holding on to this crotchet for a while longer.