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

by David Crystal (Author)

31 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-0199229697

ISBN-10: 0199229694

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Weve all been taught that this sentence--"Driving in from the airport, the flags flapped furiously"--is wrong, wrong, wrong. But is it, asks David Crystal. Everyone knows what this sentence means. No one actually thinks that the flags were driving the car. Is this sentence really incorrect.
In The Fight for English, Crystal offers a stimulating account of the struggle between various schools of grammar to control how we write and speak. Ranging back a thousand years, to the anguished concerns of Aelfric the Grammarian, and illuminating the contributions of Samuel Johnson, Noah
Webster, and many others, the book sheds light on ten centuries of warfare over spelling, punctuation, pronunciation, and much more. The author takes to task such take-no-prisoners grammarians as the well-known Lynn Truss (whose Eats, Shoots, and Leaves was a giant bestseller), arguing that we
should say no to zero-tolerance prescriptive rules. Indeed, as one of the world's leading authorities on the English language, Crystal offers an original and authoritative counter-argument to the prescriptive agenda. He shows for instance that context is very important, that the dangling participle
"driving in from the airport" is not wrong because the context makes the meaning clear. Moreover, even the hope for a standard system of spelling is in vain, since approximately 25 per cent of the words in a standard dictionary have more than one spelling (such as dark room and dark-room and
darkroom).
Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "fascinating and insightful, often funny," The Fight for English is a welcome breath of fresh air in the often stultifying debate over English usage.

Editorial Reviews

Review

`Sensitive, balanced ... elegant, accessible, illuminating' Times Education Supplement

`Illuminating' The Guardian

About the Author

David Crystal is the foremost writer and lecturer on the English language, with a world-wide reputation and over 100 books to his name. He is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor, and has been awarded an OBE for services to the English language.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; Reprint edition (January 3, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 239 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0199229694
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0199229697
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.9 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.4 x 0.9 x 5.2 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #365,837 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #448 in Linguistics (Books)
- #716 in Grammar Reference (Books)
- #798 in Words, Language & Grammar Reference

Customer Reviews:
31 ratings

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2 star		3%
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Top reviews from the United States

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Dr. Jonathan Sarfati

Balancing flexibility with appropriateness and precision

Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2018

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It's hard to defend a strict prescriptivist view when I have lived in three English-speaking countries all with different dialects and even spelling conventions. That's the synchronic linguistics aspect of the debate. Dr Crystal likewise grew up in two separate parts of the UK, with different dialects.

The way English has changed over time, i.e. diachronic linguistics, makes it even harder to be a strict prescriptivist. Different eras had different quirks, as the book documents. E.g. when Caxton brought the printing press to England, he hired Dutch printers. In Dutch, their g is like the ch in German and Hebrew, so to make our g sound, they added an h. Hence the silly spellings "ghost" and "ghoul" Another was trying to be helpful by linking words to their Latin source so people would learn the meanings. This is why a silent b was added to debt and doubt, to connect with debitum and dubitum. A split infinitive often sounds more rhythmic in English because our speech likes to use alternating weak and strong stresses, e.g. Stark Trek's "to BOLDly GO where NO man has GONE beFORE" rather than "to GO BOLDly …"

But Dr Crystal makes it clear he doesn't support "anything goes". There is a place for the right language for the right situations.

2 people found this helpful

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Ray

Great Resource!!!!!

Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2018

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Fantastic Book...if you want to know the truth about grammar.

One person found this helpful

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J. True

Kindle Edition badly formated

Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2008

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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.

13 people found this helpful

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Julie Anne Woodward

Loved hearing about why English words are spelling so weirdly

Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2015

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Interesting read. Loved hearing about why English words are spelling so weirdly.

2 people found this helpful

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Christopher M. Hill

Yes, I liked it

Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2007

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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.

13 people found this helpful

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Nicholas Kadar

I enjoyed the book even though it was not what I ...

Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2015

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I enjoyed the book even though it was not what I was expecting. It is more about how the English language developed than how to write it well.

One person found this helpful

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Animal Lover

Read Stories of English Instead

Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2018

After I read Crystal's Stories of English, I became one of his fans so I grabbed this book when I saw it. However, much of what he covers in this book is just a brief rehash of what he covered in Stories of English, and not covered as well as he covered it in Stories of English. In addition, it seems to me that Crystal wrote this book to cash in on Lynn Truss' success of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

One person found this helpful

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David C. Hay

The Fight for English as a saga

Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2008

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.

26 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

O. Joffe

Does what it says on the tin

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 2, 2013

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I like David Crystal's books and have read a fair number of them. His approach is to observe linguistic phenomena and to describe them in a non-judgemental way. This book is a bit of a departure from his usual style, as it is a polemic. He argues (cogently) that one should not be too judgemental about the way people use language, and one should differentiate between using appropriate language, whether that be RP or a particular dialect or register, and following rules blindly. I completely agree with him on all those points. The problem, nevertheless, is that this is a polemic. He is arguing with those people who think otherwise, and since I am not one of them, I found the book a bit dull. So, if you are someone who hates split infinitives, and bemoans sentences ending in a preposition, buy this book and give yourself a heart attack... Otherwise, choose a different, more informative book by this prolific author.

4 people found this helpful

km123

Thought provoking

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 31, 2014

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An interesting history of challenges to the English language and how there has always been someone shouting about how standards have suddenly started slipping. It certainly softened my stance on what is "grammatically correct". You can judge for yourself whether that is a good thing or not!

One person found this helpful

Ms. R. Galletly

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 14, 2018

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Great book. Arrived earuler than I was expecting!

Joanna

but I know I will love it because I enjoy David Crystal's work

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 7, 2017

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Haven't read it yet, but I know I will love it because I enjoy David Crystal's work!

M.Collins

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 23, 2015

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Crystal clear.

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