‘Few things,’ says Toby Young, ‘are more likely to provoke the disapproval of the bien-pensant left than criticising someone’s grammar.’ I haven’t consulted all my colleagues in the Metropolitan Media branch of the bien-pensant left so speak for myself. Young is wrong. I have no objection to criticising someone else’s grammar, and I’m a zealot for English language teaching in schools. What I won’t do is cede that field to people whose complaints are unwarranted and – on matters of fact, not opinion – untrue.
That category includes purported traditionalists who have secured the undeserved attention of Michael Gove, lord chancellor and former education secretary. NM Gwynne, author of a pamphlet commended by Gove called Gwynne’s Grammar, modestly asks (and he is ‘only partly joking’) if his didactic piece of fluff is ‘the single most important book in print in the English language today’. I can answer that definitively: it’s not. Gwynne is an ignoramus who bungles basic grammatical concepts while insisting that certain weird peeves of his are the only ‘correct’ way to write (so no split infinitives or fused participles, and you must say per caput instead of per capita).
You can ignore charlatans like this. To the detriment of public life, Gove doesn’t. Neither does his plenipotentiary Toby Young, whose feeble defence of Gove’s stipulations is that they invoke George Orwell. Yes, I’m familiar with ‘Politics and the English Language’, and can correct Young’s claim that aversion to using the passive voice originates with Orwell (it dates back at least to style guides of the early 20th century, including Strunk and White’s Elements of Style).
But Orwell was wrong and his essay is unduly revered. The passive voice is a natural way to frame some clauses. If you ignore its potential, you’ll write clunky prose. Indeed, Orwell disregarded his own advice, using passive constructions repeatedly. From comments I’ve seen in support of Gove, I’m not certain that the sticklers would even be able to recognise this (one blogger linked to on Twitter by Peter Oborne condemns officials’ use of the ‘passive tense’ – whatever that is –while unwittingly using passive clauses himself).
I take no pleasure in pointing out the linguistic incompetence of the ‘good grammar’ crowd. But they’re the ones criticising other people’s usage and their campaign is ugly. Of course it’s possible to make mistakes of grammar and orthography – journalists inadvertently do it often. But the grammar scolds go beyond this truism by insisting that standard English and ‘correct’ English are the same thing.
They’re not. Standard English is one dialect among many. Its merit is not correctness but usefulness: it’s more useful than any non-standard form of English, because it’s recognised wherever the language is spoken. That doesn’t make other dialects substandard. Nor are the pedants’ bogus ‘rules’ any part of the grammar of standard English.
English grammar is taught much better now than it ever was in the golden age imagined by Gwynne, Young and Simon Heffer. Standards of literacy have never been higher. Meanwhile Gove has swallowed these obscurantists’ linguistic superstitions and wants other people to follow them too. You can do it if you like but your prose will be better for ignoring them.
Listen to Toby Young and Oliver Kamm debate Michael Gove’s grammar guidelines on this week’s podcast:
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