The Language Wars

by Henry Hitchings

  Statements about the power of language are often couched in religious imagery. But when we talk about language, we are not always acclaiming its power: we lament its inadequacies and its obstructions, absolving ourselves of failings by blaming the organs of delivery. We speak of it as something diabolical, an affliction, a sickness; as broken, fallen or blunted. At the end of his book The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker writes, ‘Language is not just a window into human nature but a fistula: an open wound through which our innards are exposed to an infectious world.’3 The sense that our linguistic constitution is fragile is one of the reasons that people invent rules about usage.

  Rules are a sort of armour. Yet rule-makers miss out on the dynamism of speech. Language is democratic. Although linguistic dogma may impress many, confirming their view of the world, it is temporary. Time eats away at its pillars. In any case, the people who dole out corrections invariably include a few incorrections of their own.

  We need to be more careful when we talk about the ‘rules’ of English. There are rules, which are really mental mechanisms that carry out operations to combine words into meaningful arrangements. Then there are principles: ‘Express yourself clearly’, ‘Say no more than circumstances require’, ‘Keep to what is relevant’. And there are conventions: at the start of a letter to the male editor of a newspaper I write ‘Dear Sir’, and I sign off my letter with the words ‘Yours faithfully’. The mental mechanisms are beyond our conscious control. The rest is within our power.

  When we write, and also when we speak, we should pay attention to the needs and expectations of our audience, and we should never forget that we are part of that audience. In most cases, adhering to the conventions is the right decision. They are worth learning, because they enable lucid communication, and they are worth teaching. But, from an educational perspective, penalizing someone who starts every third sentence with ‘And’ is of less value than showing why a more varied style is preferable.

  Our education never stops. We are forever learning about the effects of our use of language on the people with whom we converse. We learn the value of precision and clarity, much of the time by discovering the sore consequences of their absence. We learn, too, the usefulness of formality, as well as the occasions when formality can and even should be dropped, and we come to understand how we can be exposed by shibboleths. We master the virtues of unobtrusiveness and the versatility of standard usage. We learn that change is incessant, and that amid change there is a core of continuity.

  Disputes over meaning and standards are unavoidable, and it is naïve to think that they are a special feature of our moment in history. Dig beneath the present, and instead of hitting something solid you open what appears to be a bottomless shaft into the past. If today’s arguments about English seem louder and nastier than ever before, it is because they are played out through mass media, where violent imagery is normal.

  Some of the language wars that are being waged today are vicious. They have grave consequences for those caught up in them. To most native speakers of English, those wars seem remote. But the future of English is not something that should be contemplated with serenity. It is worth emphasizing that, up to the present day, the most important things that have happened to English have happened in England. Worth emphasizing because in the future this will not hold true.

  In the meantime there are the smaller conflicts we experience from day to day. These are in many instances eloquent about matters that otherwise find limited expression: who we think we are, where we come from, how we know what we ‘know’.

  Reflecting on this, I am reminded of the following deliberately improper sentence, which appeared in the New York Times in September 2009: ‘So I say outpedant the pedants, and allow yourself to gluttonously revel in the linguistic improprieties of yore as you familiarize yourself with the nearly unique enormity of the gloriously mistaken heritage that our literature is comprised of.’4

  The pedants are not often comprehensively outpedanted. They will usually fight back, and they are not about to go away. Their intransigence is occasionally risible. Yet, undeniably, they stimulate thought about language. That is vital, because we need to engage with language – and yes, with our language – critically. We tend to discuss it in a cantakerous or petulant way, but thinking and talking about what makes good English good and bad English bad can be, and should be, a pleasure.

  Acknowledgements

  In the course of writing this book I have incurred many debts of gratitude. As ever, I have drawn with pleasure on the resources of The Oxford English Dictionary and The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Most of my research was carried out in the British Library, and I would like to thank its staff for their assistance.

  I am grateful for help of various kinds to Jag Bhalla, Jane Birkett, Jonty Claypole, Angela Cox, David Crystal, Nick de Somogyi, Bernard Dive, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Lesley Downer, Jonathon Green, Stephen Harrison, Jenny Hewson, Gesche Ipsen, Kwasi Kwarteng, Guy Ladenburg, Victoria Murray-Browne, Terttu Nevalainen, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Michael Quinion, Anna Saura, James Scudamore, Jesse Sheidlower, James Spackman, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Mary Wellesley. I must also mention two websites that have alerted me to news items I would otherwise have missed: Language Log, a blog launched in 2003 by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum, which can be found at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/, and Steven Poole’s Unspeak, which is at http://unspeak.net/.

  Especially warm thanks are due to Richard Arundel, Robert Macfarlane and Leo Robson, as well as to Jack Lynch, who kindly shared his book The Lexicographer’s Dilemma with me before its publication.

  Finally, I reserve deep gratitude for my agent Peter Straus, my generous and sensitive editor Eleanor Birne, and my parents.

  Notes

  Chapter 1: ‘To boldly go’

  1. The short answer is that the former is dismissed because it is considered ugly, the latter because it seems pretentious. See ‘The Awful Rise of “Snuck”’, The Awl, 1 December 2009, http://www.theawl.com/2009/12/the-awful-rise-of-snuck, retrieved 17 June 2010. See also ‘Some Common Solecisms’ in The Economist Style Guide, http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index.cfm?page=673903, retrieved 26 June 2010.

  2. See Alan D. Sokal, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, Social Text 46/47 (1996), 217–52.

  3. Quoted in Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 239.

  4. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (eds), Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 305–6.

  5. William Dwight Whitney, Language and the Study of Language (London: Trübner, 1867), 48.

  6. Ibid., 32.

  7. Jacques Barzun, Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers, rev. edn (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 207–9.

  8. Some nice examples of invective against the usage of, among others, tailors, upholsterers and ‘the architects of pastry’ can be found in Richard W. Bailey, Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 239–44.

  9. See Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene (London: Routledge, 1995), 218–19.

  10. See Robin Tolmach Lakoff, The Language War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 75–6.

  11. Jack Lynch, The Lexicographer’s Dilemma: The Evolution of ‘Proper’ English from Shakespeare to South Park (New York: Walker, 2009), 97–8.

  12. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (London: Penguin, 1995), 374.

  Chapter 2: The survival machine

  1. Leonard Bloomfield, An Introduction to the Study of Language (London: G. Bell, 1914), 17.

  2. Malcolm Gladwell examines this in detail in his book Outliers: The Story of Success (London: Allen Lane, 2008).

  3. I have been strongly influenced in my selection of cultural baggage by Anna Wierzbicka, English: Meaning and Culture (Oxford: Oxf
ord University Press, 2006).

  4. Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility (London: Harvester, 1979), 191.

  5. See Jean-Louis Dessalles, Why We Talk: The Evolutionary Origins of Language, trans. James Grieve (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 282.

  6. Jonathan Cott (ed.), Dylan on Dylan: The Essential Interviews (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006), 100.

  7. Quoted in Ronald Carter, Investigating English Discourse: Language, Literacy and Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), 7.

  8. My answer to this question draws on Otto Jespersen, Mankind, Nation and Individual from a Linguistic Point of View (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1925), 94–122.

  9. Oliver Bell Bunce, Don’t: A Manual of Mistakes and Improprieties more or less prevalent in Conduct and Speech, 3rd edn (London: Field & Tuer, 1884), 66, 45, 61.

  10. Ian Michael, The Teaching of English: From the Sixteenth Century to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 380.

  11. William Mather, The Young Man’s Companion, 2nd edn (London: Thomas Howkins, 1685), 267, 279, 288.

  Chapter 3: The emergence of English

  1. Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 11–26.

  2. Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, 5th edn (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2002), 154.

  3. D. G. Scragg, A History of English Spelling (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), 7–8.

  4. The subject is covered in detail by Michael Benskin in an article on ‘Chancery Standard’ in Christian Kay, Carole Hough and Irené Wotherspoon (eds), New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics: Lexis and Transmission (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004), 1–40.

  5. David Crystal, The Stories of English (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 253.

  6. Ibid., 252.

  7. Ben Jonson, The English Grammar (London: Richard Meighen, 1640), 36. The first version of this work was destroyed by fire in 1623; Jonson put together a second version roughly a decade later.

  8. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 62.

  Chapter 4: From Queen Elizabeth to John Locke

  1. This is convincingly explored in Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

  2. This idea is investigated by Helen Hackett in Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

  3. Voltaire, visiting in 1728, noticed that Shakespeare is ‘rarely called anything but “divine”’. See James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 30.

  4. Edward Brerewood, Enquiries Touching the Diversity of Languages, and Religions (London: John Bill, 1614), 42.

  5. Charles Barber, Early Modern English, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 52–3.

  6. See William Nelson, ‘The Teaching of English in Tudor Grammar Schools’, Studies in Philology 49 (1952), 119–43.

  7. Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1582), 81–2, 254.

  8. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3 (1925–30), ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 300–1.

  9. Thomas Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904), II, 183–5.

  10. William Camden, Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine (London: Simon Waterson, 1605), 21.

  11. Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (Antwerp: Robert Bruney, 1605), 204.

  12. Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London: Viking, 2009), 83–4.

  13. Jonson, The English Grammar, 33.

  14. John Wallis, Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1653), Praefatio.

  15. Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England 1640–1785 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 10–14.

  16. Francis Lodwick, A Common Writing (privately printed, 1647), 20.

  17. John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language (London: Gellibrand & Martyn, 1668), 386.

  18. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 42.

  19. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 26–28.

  20. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 405.

  Chapter 5: Hitting le Jackpot

  1. Nicola Woolcock, ‘Pedants’ revolt aims to stop English being lost for words’, The Times, 7 June 2010.

  2. Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (London: E. Cotes, 1661), 226.

  3. Joseph Glanvill, Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (London: J. D., 1676), 29.

  4. Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects (London: Thomas Cockerill, 1697), 233–41.

  5. Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1712), 8, 18–19, 24–5, 30–31.

  6. John Oldmixon, Reflections on Dr Swift’s Letter to the Earl of Oxford, About the English Tongue (London: A. Baldwin, 1712), 27.

  7. Jonathan Swift, A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Enter’d into Holy Orders, 2nd edn (London: J. Roberts, 1721), 5–6, 11.

  8. John Knowles, The Principles of English Grammar, 4th edn (London: Vernor & Hood, 1796), 1.

  9. John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 5.

  10. Quoted in Robin Adamson, The Defence of French (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2007), 27.

  11. This is discussed in Ryan J. Stark, Rhetoric, Science and Magic in Seven-teenth-Century England (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 177–80.

  12. I owe this insight to Laura L. Runge, who explores Dryden’s ‘gendered’ writing in her Gender and Language in British Literary Criticism, 1660–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 40–79.

  Chapter 6: The rough magic of English spelling

  1. A. Lane, A Key to the Art of Letters (London: A. & J. Churchil, 1700), 6.

  2. This subject is discussed in N. E. Osselton, ‘Spelling-Book Rules and the Capitalization of Nouns in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ in Mary-Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes (eds), Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1985).

  3. Lindley Murray, English Grammar (York: Wilson, Spence & Mawman, 1795), 174.

  4. Manfred Görlach, Eighteenth-Century English (Heidelberg: Winter, 2001), 81.

  5. Daniel Fenning, The Universal Spelling Book (London: Crowder & Woodgate, 1756), 96.

  6. Quoted in John Carey, William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (London: Faber, 2009), x.

  7. Walter W. Skeat, Principles of English Etymology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 323–4.

  8. Edward Carney, A Survey of English Spelling (London: Routledge, 1994), 86–94.

  9. Florian Coulmas, Writing Systems: An Introduction to their Linguistic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 182.

  10. Pinker, The Language Instinct, 190.

  11. John Hart, An Orthographie (London: W. Serres, 1569), 2, 5.

  12. William Bullokar, Aesop’s Fables in True Orthography (London: Edmund Bollifant, 1585), 31.

  13. Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie, 121–2.

  14. Details from Anthony G. Petti, English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden (London: Edward Arnold, 1977).

  15. Examples from Lynda Mugglestone, ‘English in the Nineteenth Century’, in Mugglestone (ed.), The Oxford History of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 279–80.

  16. H. G. Wells, Certain Pe
rsonal Matters: A Collection of Material, Mainly Autobiographical (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1898), 145–7.

  17. David Wolman, Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling (New York: Collins, 2008), 115.

  18. Quoted in Richard L. Venezky, The American Way of Spelling: The Structure and Origins of American English Orthography (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 228, n. 56.

  19. Wolman, Righting the Mother Tongue, 121.

  20. H. G. Wells, Mankind in the Making (London: Chapman & Hall, 1903), 217.

  Chapter 7: The many advantages of a good language