Book review
by Elizabeth Potter

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

Anyone who has ever written about language in any kind of public forum will have had experience of the enraged letters that arrive whenever a contentious piece of usage is discussed or displayed. Such breaches of linguistic decorum, the authors of these letters often suggest, will result – or may indeed already have resulted – in the collapse of civilisation as we know it. The people who use and tolerate these horrors, it is suggested, are criminally irresponsible in their neglect of linguistic standards and will be first up against the wall when the grammatical revolution comes.

The sticklers for 'correct' usage might well take as their patron saint Lynne Truss, whose entertaining book on punctuation Eats, Shoots and Leaves was a surprising runaway bestseller at Christmas a few years back. This romp through the uses and abuses of the main punctuation marks is dressed up in the guise of a guerrilla campaign against incorrect punctuation. Its tone and thrust are made clear in the introduction:

Sticklers unite, you have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion, and arguably you didn't have a lot of that to begin with.

If linguistic permissivists were seeking a patron saint, they might well choose Professor David Crystal, who throughout a long and distinguished career has celebrated the variety of English – he likes to use the term 'Englishes' – and has argued passionately that variation in English usage is a good thing. His new book (out just in time for another Christmas, this time 2006) makes cheeky nods to Lynne Truss's volume in its title and cover design. In his introduction Professor Crystal both pays tribute to Lynne Truss – he was a consultant and contributor to the original radio series which led to her book – and outlines his objection to the so-called "zero-tolerance approach to punctuation" which her book advocates.

To be clear, a zero tolerance approach to punctuation does not mean not tolerating any punctuation at all, in the style of some exotic modern novel, but rather not tolerating any deviation from the rules of punctuation. It is this extremist approach that uses "the language of crime prevention and political extremism" to discuss commas and apostrophes that David Crystal dislikes, and he sets out to counter it in The Fight for English. In thirty short, elegantly written and often witty chapters, Professor Crystal takes the reader on a brisk trot through the history of English and the history of attempts to control and purify it, from Anglo Saxon times to the present day. He points out amusingly that writers down the centuries – from unknowns such as Thomas Sprat to literary greats such as Swift and Dryden – have produced laments about the state of the language and warnings of its imminent demise if urgent action is not taken to rectify matters. He observes that reports of the death of English were as exaggerated 350 years ago as they are today, and that the patient continues to be in robust health.

Professor Crystal looks at how standard English emerged – essentially it was that of the court and the area around London – and shows how varieties of language that were not courtly and not southern came to be mocked and shunned. He outlines the failed attempts to set up a national Academy on the lines of those in France and other countries. He then focuses on topics such as spelling, grammar, pronunciation and, of course, punctuation. In the latter part of the book he comes up the present day with chapters on the current state of education in English and ends with a cautiously optimistic view of the future.

Actually, he ends with an amusing epilogue about the broadcaster John Humphrys, self-proclaimed language pundit and Trussian stickler, who labelled Professor Crystal 'very much an "anything goes" man'. The fact is that David Crystal is not an "anything goes" man. He has no quarrel with standard English and believes strongly that it must be taught and taught well. But he also believes there is room for other kinds of English – other dialects, other accents, other types of usage – and that, as ever, context is everything. It is as inappropriate for a child to use standard English among its peers in the playground as it is for him or her to use textspeak in an essay; mastery of the types of language appropriate to many different contexts is an essential goal of education.

David Crystal recognizes that people dislike some types of language change and always have done: I bridle at flaunt being used instead of flout, you cannot abide split infinitives, she detests hopefully. His point is that language change is inevitable and neither can nor should be halted. In a chapter entitled Change he writes:

You cannot stop language change. You may not like it; you may regret the arrival of new forms and the passing of old ones; but there is not the slightest thing you can do about it. Language change is as natural as breathing. It is one of the linguistic facts of life.

Actually, he says, there is one thing we can do about it. We can learn to understand language change, come to terms with it and manage it. This would be a better use of our energies, he suggests, than getting worked up about commas or carrying around marker pens with which to correct errant apostrophes, as advocated by the author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
by Lynne Truss
published by Profile Books
2003
ISBN 1861976127