The Latter of Three

"I had perhaps been the only American teenager", writes an author in an article reprinted in The Week, " . . . to have graduated from high schoool without reading The Catcher in the Rye, though it had sat on my parents' bookshelf, right next to Franny and Zooey and Raise the High the Roof Beam, Carpenters . Once 0r twice, on rainy afternoons, I'd skimmed the first pages of the latter books and found the writing overly cute, the subject matter tired."

We Brits must not sneer at the north American 'overly', though it may not be in our twenty-first century vocabulary. But 'nearly' is, and has the same construction, and I am not aware that any pedant has complained about it. The truth is that 'overly' was in our language centuries before 'nearly': it's just that it has gone out of fashion this side of the Atlantic, but the Yanks have preserved it.

But we can't so easily excuse the 'latter' of three books. The best I can do for the defence is to insist that Franny and Zooey and Raise the High Roof Beam are to be seen as a single pair, as one unit , perhaps in this instance even bound together in one volume, and thus quite reasonably contrasted syntactically with the other unit consisting solely of The Catcher in the Rye.

No. I don't believe my case would stand up in the Court of Pedantry.

The Latter of Three