Customer Reviews

The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left

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Is your English educated or uneducated? Grammatical or ungrammatical? Urban or provincial? Standard or dialect? U or Non-U? Lered or lewed (to use the words that distinguished the high prestige English dialect from low presitige ones centuries ago)?

All these terms imply something about people's social standing as well as they way they speak. And that's no coincidence. It's part of what David Crystal calls "the Big Con," recalling the movie The Sting.

Crystal calls his book a "history of usage," but its focus is the history of prescriptivism in English, written to learn why Lynne Truss's book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, is so popular.

Crystal may be the most interesting writer on English. (I can't pick between him and the Australian linguist Kate Burridge, author of Blooming English and Weeds in the Garden of Words.) I was a little concerned The Fight for English might be a recapitulation of Crystal's The Stories of English, but it's not.

Crystal looks at how English evolved from a group of different but equal dialects to a presitigious dialect trying to keep it's status over other ways of talking that refused to be extinguished. This book isn't meant as sociology, but you do learn about the development of the British class structure.

The most interesting part of the book is Crystal's story of growing up in Wales and Liverpool, learning to speak the right dialects so he didn't get beaten up on the playground or get a ruler on the back of the hand in class, where "educators" instilled in him the Received Pronunciation (what was then "BBC English"). The playground and the ruler both work.

Crystal shows how the institutions that matter to us (like schools, the BBC, and The Simpsons) teach us about language.

Crystal calls for a similar kind of language education that Anthony Burgess did in his 1992 book, A Mouthful of Air - - something between technical linguistics and old-fashioned prescriptivist "grammar." Crystal uses the analogy of a mechanic friend who can fix any car but is a lousy driver. Being a good driver takes more than knowing how an engine works. Grammar isn't everything.

The Fight for English is also funny. Like the university student who thought (for a good reason) that a preposition had something to do with getting on a horse.

And the humor in Crystal's book brings up another important point, one of the things that make all of his books a pleasure to read. It's easy for a professional linguist to mock "language mavens" like Fowler, Strunk and White, Lynne Truss, and other prescriptivist critics. (And in this book Crystal does show in specific cases why these language guardians don't know as much as they think they do.) But Crystal, unlike many "experts" is very respectful of other people's opinions, even (or especially) when they disagree with him. That's a change from argument in Britain and America lately.

As Crystal says, "Pedants have their place. . . . without them, there would be no way of teaching young people how not to be pedantic."

Ok, I have always believed that it is better to speak and write "correctly" than not. As Americans go, I think I do pretty well. But I also am aware of the fact that many other people from various parts of the country speak their own languages "well" and communicate among themselves just fine--even though it may sound awful to me. And yes, I was teased when I was a kid.

The book, The Fight for English makes it clear, however, that both sides of that conversation have been far more vicious to each other in England than in America for something like a millennium. And David Crystal's story of how all of those dialects that grew up in the relative isolation of horses and buggies turned into modern English is fascinating. And particularly amusing is the fact that for the last 500 years or so, there was invariably somebody complaining about how the decline in the standards of English was leading the whole society to ruin. (It turns out, by the way, that starting the last sentence with "And" isn't nearly the horrible sin that I was raised to believe.)

David Crystal's view is that throughout its history, the English language has been evolving--first bringing together the very different languages of the Celts, Angles, and the Saxons, and then merging in Norman French and Latin. Shakespeare understood that different dialects added variety to the language and included many in his plays, but he did so without prejudice. People from Yorkshire were not presented as comedic figures, presumed to be ignorant. Their accents were included simply to add variety to the sound of the language in the play. Soon after his time, however, the early "pundits" began to make it clear that there was a particular language for the upper classes, and if you didn't speak that, you were clearly a hick, with all that that implied.

But different accents and dialects have persevered to this day, and the English language has not died. To the contrary, it is flourishing and is working on becoming the first true international language since Latin.
None of this means that there should be no standards and it certainly does not mean that children should not learn the grammatical structures of the language. Indeed, in the 1960s, the British system discontinued teaching grammar in the 1960s as a backlash from the ruler on the knuckles approach to teaching English that had prevailed for a hundred years or more, and an entire generation has suffered. The students didn't even learn parts of speech.

That approach clearly was faulty, so the response (in the UK, at least) has been development of the New English National Curriculum. This is a radically different approach that focuses on preparing students to understand the nature and structure of the language, with all the different ways that it can be used. The idea is that they should understand what the old rules are--as well as why they are changing. They should understand why different cultures use language differently.
Most significantly, they should learn how to use language in a way that is appropriate to each situation.

Don't get the wrong idea. Mr. Crystal has no patience with obfuscation--either intentional by politicians and marketers, or unintentional by people who simply don't understand language. But correctness of grammar has never guaranteed that writing would be clear. Sometimes just the opposite is the case.

Yes, I recommend this book highly.

From neologisms to busting the myth about putting prepositions at the end of a sentence ("This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put," said Churchill), the new Crystal book, "The Fight for English: How the language pundits ate, shot, and left" is a real gem. He takes the reader for a drive through the stiff prescriptive attitudes of English to the cooler, more flexible rules of today. He does this all with taste and respect for both sides of the linguistic courtroom. A must read.

This is a great read, especially if you are into the evolution of our language. I read a lot of this stuff. I got interested in this area years ago when I watched the Story of English on PBS. That was perhaps 20 years or more ago. I don't try to pick up the historical pronunciation, because in my case, it would be impossible. The great thing that one comes away with is that English is still evolving.

I bought the Kindle edition of this book, because I love the English language and its history. As others have written, the contents of the book are very interesting, providing much insight into how and why the various grammatical rules of English were "discovered" and forced upon students, whether those rules made sense or not. Crystal's writing is very easy to read and is fun.

If I read this as a physical book, I would undoubtedly give it a 5-star review. Unfortunately, I read the Kindle version of the book, and it is clear the publisher made no effort to make sure the book was formated properly. The opening paragraphs of each chapter are clearly in the wrong order, with the chapter's opening paragraph usually the second or third paragraph, while the first paragraph presented is clearly not the opening paragraph. There are endnotes at the end of the book, but the publisher does not provide hyperlinks to enable the reader to reference an endnote from the text, or, having found the endnote, to go to the text the note refers to. The index of the book is provided, but each entry of the index references a page number, which, of course, is meaningless in a Kindle book. The Index should refer to Locations in the book, and include hyperlinks to those Locations.

People who complain about pundits are often pundits themselves, and David Crystal is no exception. If I had a nickel for every time Crystal complained about Lynne Truss, I'd be able to buy another copy of her highly entertaining book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves. What exactly is Crystal's complaint? Is it that "prescriptive grammarians" should not be determining what is "right" and what is "wrong" with language usage? Or is it simply that Lynne Truss, with her humorous look at punctuation has sold a million copies of her book, while David Crystal, a much more deserving pundit, has been left in the dust?

As far as linguistics is concerned, Crystal has a valid point. The job of a linguist is to observe language in all its variations, to analyze patterns, and then synthesize those patterns in order to discover the underlying linguistic logic. Linguists don't judge,and neither does Crystal. Society, however, does. If you dare defend your right to use "might could" on a college application then you can look forward to a career as a bagger at the local Stop and Shop.

To his credit, Crystal does admit that usage manuals are very important. (As he is quick to point out, he wrote one himself.) It is not the fact that we need to have rules explained that bothers him, it is the attitude of superiority expressed by "pundits" (especially those who have gotten a lot of attention in the media recently). He traces this attitude back through the centuries, to those members of the upper class who not only exerted their privilege through conspicuous consumption, but through the appropriation of "proper" language. The "lewd" members of the laboring masses with their "strange accents" and "ill-shaped sounds" were plainly a lower form of life--and what more convenient means of making the distinction between classes than speech? As we all learned from Henry Higgins, all you have to do is open your mouth to be pigeon-holed. (Henry Higgins, I might point out, had the right solution.)

Unfortunately, it is our lot to be saddled with a language that has a thousand rules, hundreds of variants and a culture that is highly competitive. Unlike the streamlined elegance of Spanish, English is a mess, the result of a fistfight between German and French. Once you throw in the vagaries of Latin, Greek and Dutch spellings, you get a printer's nightmare. How do we sort it all out so that we can understand one another? With prescriptive grammars. Without those pompous, self-righteous, know-it-all pundits, we would be completely lost.

As a literate society this is our fate: to consult our dictionaries early and often, to dog-ear our usage manuals, and to join our third grade teachers when they admonish us with "'ain't' ain't in the dictionary!"

I enjoyed this book on the English Language and it was very important for me to look at my profession at bit more from a general perspective. David Crystal is a Brit who has written many books about English. He criticizes the zero tolerance grammar police but defends the teaching of grammar as a necessity. Interesting read.