Sunday, May 13, 2012

The English Wars


The battle over the way we should speak.

by May 14, 2012 - The New Yorker


The second group was right about the multitudes. English is a melding of the languages of the many different peoples who have lived in Britain; it has also changed through commerce and conquest. English has always been a ragbag, and that encouraged further permissiveness. In the past half century or so, however, this situation has produced a serious quarrel, political as well as linguistic, with two combatant parties: the prescriptivists, who were bent on instructing us in how to write and speak; and the descriptivists, who felt that all we could legitimately do in discussing language was to say what the current practice was.
 This dispute is the subject of “The Language Wars: A History of Proper English” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by the English journalist Henry Hitchings, a convinced descriptivist.
In England, the most important and thorough prescriptivist volume of the twentieth century was “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,” written by H. W. Fowler, a retired schoolteacher, and published in 1926. Its first edition is seven hundred and forty-two pages long, and much of it has to do with small questions of spelling and pronunciation. Fowler’s true subject, however—his heart’s home—is a set of two general principles, clarity and unpretentiousness, that he felt should govern all use of language. The book’s fame derives from the articles he wrote in relation to those matters—“genteelism,” “mannerisms,” “irrelevant allusion,” “love of the long word,” to name a few. Fowler defines “genteelism” as “the substituting, for the ordinary natural word that first suggests itself to the mind, of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the common herd, less familiar, less plebian, less vulgar, less improper, less apt to come unhandsomely betwixt the wind & our nobility.” As is obvious here, Fowler was dealing not just with language but with its moral underpinnings, truth and falsehood. To many people, he seemed to offer an idealized view of what it meant to be English—decency, fair play, roast beef—and to recommend, even to prescribe, those things. Accordingly, Hitchings deplores the book.
England did not. “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage” sold sixty thousand copies in its first year. Its most famous descendant was George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Published just after the Second World War—that is, just after most of the world had been nearly destroyed by ideologues—the essay said that much political language, by means of circumlocution and euphemism and other doctorings, was “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” (Orwell repeated the point three years later, in “1984.”) Orwell was thus the most urgent prescriptivist possible. To him, our very lives depended on linguistic clarity. Hitchings nods at Orwell respectfully but still has questions about the campaign for plain English to which the great man contributed so heavily.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/05/14/120514crbo_books_acocella#ixzz1ugkWFanr

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