The Language Wars
Page 44
7. Geoffrey Nunberg, The Years of Talking Dangerously (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 31.
8. Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 3–4, 7.
9. Louis Menand, ‘Bad Comma: Lynne Truss’s strange grammar’, New Yorker, 28 June 2004.
10. David Crystal, The Fight for English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 134.
11. C. C. Barfoot, ‘Trouble with the Apostrophe’, in Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and John Frankis (eds), Language: Usage and Description: Studies Presented to N. E. Osselton (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), 133.
12. Elizabeth S. Sklar, ‘The Possessive Apostrophe: the Development and Decline of a Crooked Mark’, College English 38 (1976), 175.
13. M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992), 55–6.
14. John Ash, Grammatical Institutes, 4th edn (London: E. & C. Dilly, 1763), 34.
15. Quoted in Vivian Salmon, ‘Orthography and punctuation’, in Hogg (gen. ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992–2001), III, 37.
16. Parkes, Pause and Effect, 93.
17. A more detailed account is offered by Anthony G. Petti in English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden, 25–8.
18. Ash, Grammatical Institutes, 4th edn xxiii.
19. Murray, English Grammar, 200.
20. Quoted in Jon Henley, ‘The end of the line?’, Guardian, 4 April 2008.
21. Richard Alleyne, ‘Half of Britons struggle with the apostrophe’, Daily Telegraph, 11 November 2008.
22. Sarah Lyall, ‘Boston Journal; Minder of Misplaced Apostrophes Scolds a Town’, New York Times, 16 June 2001.
23. Will Pavia, ‘Scene is set for a pedants’ revolt as city dares to banish the apostrophe from its street signs’, The Times, 30 January 2009.
24. Philip Howard, ‘A useful mark we should all get possessive about’, The Times, 30 January 2009.
Chapter 23: Flaunting the Rules
1. Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London: Little, Brown, 2006), 201.
2. William Zinsser, On Writing Well (New York: Quill, 2001), 33–4.
3. Lounsbury, The Standard of Usage in English, 193, 197.
4. Quoted in Mencken, The American Language, 4th edn, 39.
5. Ibid., 45–6.
6. Edwin Newman, Strictly Speaking: Will America be the Death of English? (London: W. H. Allen, 1975), xi.
7. A useful catalogue of today’s salient terms is contained in Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris (eds), New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
8. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 3.
9. Ernest Gowers, ABC of Plain Words (London: HM Stationery Office, 1951), 3.
10. Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shape the World Around You (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 84–6.
11. Stefanie Marsh, ‘The rise of the interrogatory statement’, The Times, 28 March 2006.
12. Ian Jack, ‘Tense? Relax, it’ll be clear presently’, Guardian, 27 March 2004.
13. James Gorman, ‘Like, Uptalk?’, New York Times, 15 August 1993.
14. William Safire, ‘Vogue Words’, New York Times, 11 March 2007.
15. Partridge, Usage and Abusage, 349–57.
16. Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London: Penguin, 2001), 4–5.
17. Geoffrey Nunberg, ‘What the Usage Panel Thinks’, in Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels (eds), The State of the Language (London: Faber, 1990), 469–71.
18. Légghorn for the style of hat, Leggórn for poultry, and Légghórn for the place, apparently.
19. William Cobbett, A Grammar of the English Language, 3rd edn (London: Thomas Dolby, 1819), 133–5.
20. David Crystal, ‘Talking about Time’, in Katinka Ridderbos (ed.), Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 114.
21. Baker, Reflections on the English Language, ii–v, 48, 55.
22. My thanks to Jack Lynch for bringing this book to my attention.
Chapter 24: Technology says ‘whatever’
1. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Faber, 2006), 237, 249.
2. Ibid., 228.
3. Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (London: Orion, 1999), 1–2, 224–5.
4. Sven Birkerts, ‘Sense and semblance: the implications of virtuality’, in Brian Cox (ed.), Literacy Is Not Enough: Essays on the Importance of Reading (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 20, 24.
5. Derrick de Kerckhove, The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality (London: Kogan Page, 1997), 205, 208, 217.
6. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2002), 21.
7. Quoted in Mark Abley, The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English (London: William Heinemann, 2008), 183.
8. Quoted in David Crystal, txtng: the gr8 db8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9.
9. Quoted in Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Little, Brown, 2005), 389.
10. John Humphrys, ‘We will soon be lost for words’, Daily Telegraph, 24 October 2006.
11. De Zengotita, Mediated, 176.
12. Naomi Baron, Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 7, 171.
Chapter 25: ‘Conquer English to Make China Strong’
1. See Salah Troudi, ‘The Effects of English as a Medium of Instruction’, in Adel Jendli, Salah Troudi and Christine Coombe (eds), The Power of Language: Perspectives from Arabia (Dubai: TESOL Arabia, 2007), 6.
2. H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (London: Chapman & Hall, 1905), 17, 21–2.
3. H. G. Wells, The World Set Free (London: Macmillan, 1914), 215, 217–18.
4. Alexander Melville Bell, World-English: The Universal Language (New York: N. D. C. Hodges, 1888), 7.
5. Quoted in Braj B. Kachru, ‘American English and other Englishes’, in Charles A. Ferguson and Shirley Brice Heath (eds), Language in the USA (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 39.
6. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 368–9.
7. The subject is discussed at some length in Robert Phillipson, ‘Lingua franca or lingua frankensteinia? English in European integration and globalization’, World Englishes 27 (2008), 250–84.
8. Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009), 106.
9. Louis-Jean Calvet, Language Wars and Linguistic Politics, trans. Michael Petheram (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 197–8.
10. Mark Abley, Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages (London: Arrow, 2005), 90.
11. Alastair Pennycook, Global English and Transcultural Flows (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 5.
12. Robert McCrum, Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language (London: Viking, 2010), 213–16.
13. Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 8.
14. This question is explored in Jacques Maurais and Michael A. Morris (eds), Languages in a Globalising World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
15. Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (London: HarperCollins, 2005), 476.
16. See Evan Osnos, ‘Crazy English’, New Yorker, 28 April 2008.
17. See, for instance, Simon Caulkin, ‘English, language of lost chances’, Observer, 24 July 2005.
18. David Graddol, English Next (London: The British Council, 2006), 93.
19. Quoted in William Greaves, ‘Selling English by the Pound’, The Times, 24 October 1989.
20. Phillipson, English-Only Europe?, 78.
Chapter 26: What do we do with the flowing face of nature
?
1. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: Athlone, 1981), 19.
2. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin, rev. edn (London: Fontana, 1974), 80.
3. These ideas are examined at length in Joseph W. Poulshock, ‘Language and Morality: Evolution, Altruism and Linguistic Moral Mechanisms’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2006).
4. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 14–21, 89–96.
5. Andrew Goatly, Washing the Brain – Metaphor and Hidden Ideology (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 83–5.
6. Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, ed. John B. Carroll (New York: John Wiley, 1956), 240–1.
7. Ibid., 57–9, 61, 63.
8. Ibid., 216.
9. Bloom’s work is summarized in John A. Lucy, Language Diversity and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 208–56.
10. Jack Hitt, ‘Say No More’, New York Times, 29 February 2004.
11. See Pinker, The Language Instinct, 57–67.
12. John McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (New York: Gotham Books, 2008), 139.
13. A genuine example, from The Economist of 11 October 2003.
14. Mark Halpern, Language and Human Nature (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009), 142.
15. David S. Palermo and James J. Jenkins, Word Association Norms: Grade School Through College (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964), 278–80, 406–7.
Chapter 27: Such, such are the joys
1. Steven Poole, Unspeak (London: Abacus, 2007), 144.
2. Orwell, Essays, ed. Carey, 695.
3. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, 493–6.
4. Orwell, Essays, ed. Carey, 966.
5. Plain English Campaign brochure, 2009. http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services_brochure_2009.pdf, retrieved 19 March 2010.
6. Martin Cutts and Chrissie Maher, The Plain English Story (Stockport: Plain English Campaign, 1986), 84.
7. BBC news report – ‘Councils get banned jargon list’. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7948894.stm, retrieved 23 March 2010.
8. Chris Mullin, A View from the Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin, ed. Ruth Winstone (London: Profile, 2010), 26.
9. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 262. Pinker explores metaphor closely in pp. 235–78 of this book.
10. Quoted in Don Watson, Gobbledygook (London: Atlantic, 2005), 105.
11. Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (London: Secker & Warburg, 1959), 233.
12. As far as I know, this name was dreamt up by Bruce D. Price for an article which appeared in the magazine Verbatim in February 1976.
Chapter 28: Envoi
1. See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1–2.
2. John Yeomans, The Abecedarian, or, Philosophic Comment upon the English Alphabet (London: J. Coote, 1759), 62.
3. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 425.
4. Ammon Shea, ‘Error-Proof’, New York Times, 28 September 2009.
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