"Ordinary English" as _proper_ English

The English "ordinary language" philosophers (Grice) would not state it so bluntly, but the implicature allways (sic) was that proper English is ordinary-language (rather than, say, some technical Cantabrigensis idiom). Ordinary, proper colloquial, man-in-the-street English flourishes in Oxford -- 'town' rather than 'gown'. Grice loved it.

Quinion reviews in today's World Wide Words this new book by Hitchings.


The Language Wars
-------------------------------------------------------------------

"Henry Hitchings's previous works include a biography of the man he
wrote his PhD thesis on, Dr Samuel Johnson. Here he turns to the
history of disputes about what constitutes good English. To call it
warfare is to seriously overstate matters - nobody has ever manned
a barricade in defence of the right to split an infinitive - but
publishers do like catchpenny titles."

"He unpacks the history of proper usage, occasionally diverting to
offer up examples from other languages as mirrors to English. He
shows that complaints about the decline of our language are almost
always illogical, that later generations frequently find the view
of pundits to be either irrelevant or risible and that attempts to
hold back change are futile. He is sympathetic to the view that
there is nothing absolute about grammar; its rules are not laws of
nature but conventional beliefs which are modified through changing
fashion and shifting everyday use."

"Debate over meaning and standards isn't peculiar to our times. But
today's prescribers and proscribers may be surprised to learn for
how many centuries the idea of good usage has been debated and how
much standards have varied. As one example, the apostrophe has been
the subject of unending debate since it was first used in English
in 1559 (the next century, John Donne could write "any mans death
diminishes me" without needing it). Writers in the early eighteenth
century used it to mark the plurals of nouns. It wasn't until the
late nineteenth century that usage settled down. Today's mistakes
with it aren't a sudden eruption of ignorance but a continuation of
misunderstandings and differences of opinion that are centuries
old. The author believes the apostrophe is likely to disappear, not
least through a desire for crisper design and less cluttered pages."

"The value of individual words has long been debated, often with a
sense that there are good words and bad words. The history of such
objections shows how ill-judged most of them are. Eric Partridge
hated "economic". Fowler objected to "gullible", "antagonise",
"placate" and "transpire". Last century, as they became known
through the talkies and other imports, British writers complained
about Americanisms such as "reliable", "lengthy", "curvaceous",
"hindsight" and "mileage". In 1978, the Lake Superior University
Banned Words unavailingly deprecated "parenting" and "medication".
Conversely, many Words of the Year selections ("pod slurping",
"locavore") show that the usual fate of new words, even fashionable
ones, is obscurity."

"We all speak more than one variety of the language. We pitch our
vocabulary and style to suit our hearers, whether those are our
children, our friends, our colleagues or the unseen readership of
public prose. Standard English has the highest prestige, the one
appropriate to formal communication, and the one we need to master
if we're to be taken seriously in that world. But it's useless to
apply the rules of standard English to the informal registers of
conversation or of slang and dialect. Hitchings argues that - in
spite of widespread condemnation - instant messaging, textspeak,
with all its abbreviations, informality and often casual disregard
for the rules of the standard language, doesn't degrade English. He
contents that the people who use it are easily able to distinguish
it from the language needed in an essay or report."

"Some parts of The Language Wars will be familiar to anyone who has
read previous works on the evolution of language. But Hitchings
provides a wealth of examples to illustrate his points. He writes
well and is never dull. Even if you're predisposed to disagree with
him, he's worth reading."


[The Language Wars: A History of Proper English by Henry Hitchings,
published by John Murray in the UK on 3 Feb. 2010; hardback, pp408,
including bibliography and index; publisher's UK price, GBP17.99;
ISBN 978-1-84854-2082.]