Yes, sometimes I make rules for myself – and then happily break them! More about that in a moment.

Let’s talk about Latin first. I wasn’t a serious student in high school, and I don’t remember much from my four years of Latin. (Before you judge me, let me ask how interested you would be in Caesar’s Gallic Wars if you were fifteen years old!)

One thing did stay with me, however: the non solum…sed etiam pattern in Latin. It translates into “not only…but also.” Here’s an example:

Jane non solum studet difficile sed etiam iocum esse cum.

Jane not only studies hard but also is fun to be with.

Although my husband (who never studied Latin) sometimes uses this pattern, I dislike it. I would probably go wild with this sentence I just gave you and and come up with something like this:

You might expect a serious student to be a serious person as well. But Jane makes straight A’s–and she’s fun to be with.

I just searched my new book about Bernard Shaw. I used “not only” a mere three times in the book – and always without the “but also.”

Here’s one of those sentences. (It’s about Freddy Eynsford-Hill and Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion/My Fair Lady.)

Not only does he talk with one of his social inferiors: he marries her–and then goes on to do something else that’s equally unthinkable: he becomes one of those “inferiors” himself–a shopkeeper.

Recently I was discussing all of this with a writer friend – who promptly pointed out that this is a mouthful of a sentence. I’m the one who’s always railing against cramming too much into a sentence – and look at what I’ve done! (Even worse, there are two colons.)

Damn it – I like this sentence. I think it has a lot of energy. The language is actually very simple: all but four words have only one or two syllables. (I just received the page proofs for this book, and I’m happy to report that the copyeditor didn’t touch this sentence.)

Writing rules (even the ones I make up myself) have limited usefulness. You have to go with what works. (Did you notice that my sentence about Jane ended with a preposition? Was that a problem for you? Did you care?)

If I were writing for a more general readership, there’s a simple fix for that fancy sentence about Freddy and Eliza: make it two sentences.

Not only does he talk with one of his social inferiors: he marries her. And then he goes on to do something else that’s equally unthinkable: he becomes one of those “inferiors” himself–a shopkeeper.

It’s okay to have fun and feel free with language!