“Due to inability to market their grain, prairie farmers have been faced for some time with a serious shortage of sums to meet their immediate needs.”

That’s not the Queen’s English!, the purists and prescriptivists are beginning to protest (and I have to admit, my ears are slightly cringing in sympathy). Isn’t “due to”, strictly speaking, an adjectival phrase, meant to describe nouns and not verbs? If you can’t replace it successfully with “caused by” or “attributable to”, shouldn’t you be sent to the grammatical corner to gather your thoughts and rephrase your words?

Well, it was actually Queen Elizabeth II who uttered that sentence about the prairie farmers, in her speech on the opening of the Canadian Parliament in 1957. So whether anyone likes it or not, it is — both literally and idiomatically — the Queen’s English, and it was so as far back as more than half a century ago. Quoting Her Majesty in his Modern English Usage in 1965, H. W. Fowler used this example to concede grudgingly that “Now, when this usage is still ‘as common as can be’ and is freely employed by BBC announcers, it seems clear that idiom, though still resisting stoutly, is fighting a losing battle.”

So the old-fashioned purists should consider themselves roundly defeated, however ungracefully this expression still sits upon their ears in this usage. As the Oxford English Dictionary now defines it, due to is a) an adjectival phrase meaning attributable to, ascribable to (mid-17th century); and b) a prepositional phrase (often considered erroneous, though widely used) meaning because of, on account of, or owing to (late 19th century).

Case closed, don’t you think?

But that doesn’t excuse the venerable sign-makers at Box Hill’s Servery, whose work is illustrated above. Even though the servery’s dues are sound, they still need to fix more than just the coffee machine …

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A note about this post’s title: why is the state of being anonymous “anonymity”, whereas the state of being synonymous seems to have two names: “synonymy” and “synonymity”. Why not “anonymy”?