Crystal's new book openly mocks that of Eats, Shoots and Leaves with a picture of a panda under a road sign showing an exclamation mark and the title: The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left.
So that makes me a linguist of sorts. I also approached Lynn Truss's book with trepidation borne of what I judge to be the same soret of concerns as Dr Crystal has:
lurking beneath the surface there's an 18th-century "us vs them" attitude here which I find unpalatable.'
I've had things to say before about linguistic prescriptivism and it's the attitude of disparaging pseudo-superiority that too often goes with it that is really horrible. The fact is that the 'rules' are human-made and not at all obvious. They have the effect of enshrining one group's approach as the norm and so entrenching further the priviledge and the 'markers' of status and in-groupness. Now I happen to agree to a limitted degree with Truss in that writing, as opposed to speech, lacking intonation, gesture and facial expression has to compensate with punctuation to try to disambiguate and keep meaninngs clear. That said, the apostrophe is notoriously difficult in English and is in fact a relatively recent addition. Look at 17th and 18th century writing and you'll hardly find it at all in the genitive [I've recently been reading the poetry of George Herbert who uses no apostrophes for genitive 's']. You'll find a lot of 'wobbly' spelling too. It's mostly a way of marking out who's had how much of what kind of education. And therefore who is 'one of us'. And it's that implied stigmatising of other forms that is at issue. In spoken language it is rare that a native speaker is wrong; language doesn't work like that; it's just that not everyone uses the 'priviledged' forms of speech.
I think that's what David Crystal is objecting to, not as David Humphrys, author of Lost for Words, said:
'I think David Crystal is making a fundamental mistake when he says rules don't matter that much. I say they matter enormously. Take the example we always use on both sides of the debate: the apostrophe. It is either right or wrong. We wouldn't accept something being wrong in any other walk of life, would we?'
I very much doubt that Crystal has said any such thing; he spent an enormous amount of time in his academic career discovering, explicating and discussing the best way of describing the rules of English. The crucial thing, though, is the rules of English as they are actually used by native speakers not as prescribed by self-appointed elites. Humphrys'is wrong any how, there are lots of areas where we accept that there may be differences of opinion, even in something like medicine. Humphrys' naked bid for the power to define right and wrong in English by appeal to a 'natural' law should be resisted. If we all decided to go back to a Herbert punctuation standard, we'd overturn the thing overnight.
The fact of the matter is that people like me who can be self-reflective about this, tend to stick with the norm because we are habituated to it and because we know the social reality is that if we don't people will assume that we have made a mistake and at the end of the day that's the only reason to encourage people to conform: it's about image and projecting competance; it's not about right and wrong, it's about fitting in and getting on.
The Observer | UK News | Author takes on the queen of commas:
Filed in: linguistics, language, English, punctuation
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