On the fight for English and John Humphrys

In David Crystal‘s book The Fight For English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot and Left, he assesses the debate over rights and wrongs in English usage. For example, which spelling is correct, anemic or anaemic? Well you will just have to read the book to find out! Below Crystal weighs in on the debate between him and his contemporaries John Humphrys and Lynne Truss.

Towards the end of 2006 there was a great gathering of language pedants at a dinner-party in London,
to mark the publication of John Humphrys’ second book on English, Beyond Words. Lynne Truss was there. I was invited, but a prior lecturing commitment meant I couldn’t make it. Just as well, perhaps, after reading a report about the event on the Internet which said that there had been a lot of talk about usage, but the one thing the participants had agreed about was that ‘David Crystal writes tosh’. I assume this wasn’t the old Scots use of tosh meaning ‘neat and tidy’.

I enjoy reading about people’s personal likes and dislikes about language, and Beyond Words is a fine firework display of (mainly) dislikes which reviewers have praised or panned according to whether their linguistic tastes coincided with those of the author. And in Chapter 1, I am given special mention by John Humphrys as someone who ‘infuriates’ him – and presumably therefore also Lynne Truss, who is quoted on his front cover as saying: ‘I’m with him’. Inspiration, it seems (as I say in The Fight for English, p. 132) has given way to infuriation.

Why do I cause such fury? Because, he says (and I paraphrase):

1. I don’t believe in rules,
2. I believe that ‘anything goes’,
3. I don’t believe in the need for a ‘dependable common language’,
4. I don’t think it matters if people put apostrophes in the wrong place,
5. I think that intelligibility is all that counts, and
6. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be someone who has no ‘knowledge of how to use language properly’.

Six examples of real tosh. If you have read The Fight for English you will be able to answer the points for yourself. But let me recapitulate:

1. Of course I believe in rules: language can’t exist without them. What I am against is artificial rules – phony rules which have no basis in linguistic reality, or only a limited basis, but which people hang on to like grim death (such as the ones cited in my Chapter 23).
2. I do not believe that ‘anything goes’. He still has to read my lips (see p. 217).
3. I have always affirmed the importance of a dependable common language – standard English, in other words – as a means of ensuring national and international intelligibility. The principle is emphasized again on p. 206.
4. I do think it’s important to correct apostrophes if they are put in the wrong place. Whether we like them or not, apostrophes are a part of modern standard English, and if people want to communicate using that variety then they should follow its rules – insofar as the rules exist. What I am against, once again, are artificial rules – as when people insist that an apostrophe should never be used for a plural, although there are many cases where it is a perfectly acceptable option in standard English (as in the 1960’s, dot the i’s and cross the t’s, or do’s and dont’s).
5. I have never said that intelligibility is the only thing that counts. Intelligibility is just one criterion of language use. Other criteria include identity, playfulness, and the whole range of pragmatic factors that go under the heading of ‘intention’. Language Play and Making Sense of Grammar are two of my books which illustrate this view.
6. I have spent the main part of my research life (as opposed to my popular writing life) working with language handicapped children and adults, and still do some work with those who look after the linguistic needs of disadvantaged adults and ethnic minorities. One of my own children was born with a cleft palate. I most certainly do know what it is like not to have knowledge of how to use language.

When someone states categorically that you believe X, when the reality is that you believe not-X, it is difficult to set the record straight. So I wrote to John, pointing out the misapprehensions (a politer word than tosh), referred him to the books of mine which state my real position, and expressed the hope that a future edition of Beyond Words would correct them. I posted a response in my blog, too.

My letter arrived on his desk at a bad time. He was trying to handle thousands of letters from listeners to his ‘Talking About God’ radio series – and he’d also just come back from Iraq. He didn’t respond to my points, but he did accept the thrust of them and he apologized for ‘traducing’ me. He said he would make amends in the following week’s Spectator, where his diary column did indeed address the matter. ‘I toy with two (inadequate) defenses’’, he wrote. First, he said, he hadn’t read my other books because there are too many of them. And second, as a journalist he said he was following the ‘basic law of journalism: First simplify, then exaggerate’. I wish he’d made that point in his Chapter 1.

(Tosh, by the way, is a word whose etymology in the sense of ‘rubbish’ is unknown. The OED has found it used in Victorian thieves’ argot, meaning ‘items of value retrieved from drains and sewers’. But the dictionary also suggests an origin in cricketing slang, and gives a citation from Tit-Bits magazine in 1898: ‘Among the recent neologisms of the cricket field is “tosh”, which means bowling of contemptible easiness’.)

‘Arguments about language often segue into arguments about behavior in general’, I say in my book (p. 214). But in this case, a language argument resulted in a shared behavior, though in a totally unexpected direction. We carried on an affable correspondence for a while, during which it turned out that we had a shared concern about Africa. In 2005 he had set up a charity to help people there who are ‘at the bottom of the pile’, called the Kitchen Table Charities Trust. And for the past decade I’ve been doing some work on behalf of the John Bradburne Memorial Society, whose focus is the leprosy settlement in Mtemwa, Zimbabwe. So we ended up thinking about how to help each other promote these enterprises.

Africa certainly puts dangling participles and split infinitives in their place. It’s nice to think that a row over English usage ended up with a practical outcome in the real world, for a change.