An awful lot of books are being published these days about the English language. David Crystal has a new one out every few weeks, and John Sutherland probably has half a dozen on the go. The Language Wars: (John Murray, £17.99) is Henry Hitchings’s third and unlikely to be his last.
An awful lot of books are being published these days about the English language. David Crystal has a new one out every few weeks, and John Sutherland probably has half a dozen on the go. The Language Wars: (John Murray, £17.99) is Henry Hitchings’s third and unlikely to be his last.
Previous books have been described as ‘chewy and edible’ and ‘a goldmine of pleasures’, which leads you to expect something discursive, entertaining and not particularly substantial, but Hitchings (in real life the Evening Standard’s drama critic) has a serious, even polemical purpose here.
His intention is to show us that ‘proper’ English, the basis of all that Simon Heffer holds most dear, is a ramshackle construct whose rules are constantly changing, and that there was no golden age when everyone spoke properly and knew his gerunds. Instead, for as long as there has been an English language, finger-wagging grammarians have been telling us that it’s not what it was. ‘To hanker after the very distant past is grotesque; it denies progress and misunderstands the essential dynamism of language.’
A 26-page bibliography (the longest I think I have ever seen in a non-academic book) suggests that Hitchings has done his research, and although thoroughness sometimes bogs him down, his droll turn of phrase keeps you reading. Some parts of Fowler, he says, ‘possess an air of both Oxonian grandeur and sub-molecular pedantry.’ All hail, then, the anti-Heffer.
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