In defence of Gove’s grammar

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[/audioplayer]Few things are more likely to provoke the disapproval of the bien-pensant left than criticising someone’s grammar. The very idea that one way of speaking is more ‘correct’ than another is anathema to them. Under the guise of being helpful, it asserts the supremacy of the white educated bourgeoisie and seeks to rob the working class and ethnic minorities of any pride in their own culture. It’s a form of ‘linguistic imperialism’.

This explains the tidal wave of hostility that engulfed Michael Gove earlier this week after he issued some letter-writing guidance to officials in the Ministry of Justice. Typical Gove, eh? First he tries to impose his -narrow, right-wing view of British history on the nation’s schoolchildren and now he’s telling senior civil servants they should all write exactly like him. Time to stick his head in the stocks again and reach for the rotten -tomatoes.

I first became aware of Gove’s latest ‘outrage’ via the reaction on -Twitter and googled his memo expecting to find a detailed enunciation of grammatical principles so archaic they hadn’t been in use since the outbreak of the second world war: ‘The particle “to” and the infinitive form of the verb should not be separated…’ etc, etc.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, to discover that the vast majority of Gove’s ‘rules’ weren’t grammatical at all, more of a beginner’s guide to how to write good English. For instance, he counsels against using too many adverbs, which ‘add little’. Nothing controversial about that. Indeed, it reminded me of Elmore Leonard’s third and fourth rules of good writing: ‘Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue’ and ‘Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”… he admonished gravely.