The English language, a victim of its own success, has become a polylingual babble. Internationally, it serves as both the slick idiom of commerce and, despite French protests, the lingua franca of tourism; at home, it has splintered into tribal dialects, with urban hoodies grunting sentences made up exclusively of consonants, teenagers gabbling in a quizzical transatlantic “upspeak”, and members of the royal family uttering vowels that emerge in a strangulated squawk.
Chaucer long ago appealed against “miswriting of our tongue”, and purists in later centuries tried to fix and standardise English by tethering its vocabulary to classical sources. Hence the superfluous B inserted into “debt” to underline the word’s derivation from the Latin “debitum”. But preserving the language’s integrity usually involves quaint, eccentric affectations. Churchill, for instance, insisted on pronouncing Nazi as “Natsee”, which absurdly anglicised the word to rub in his victory over the Third Reich and to proclaim the superior moral character of what he called “the English-speaking peoples”. Orwell campaigned against the semicolon, and set himself to write an entire novel without using one. Kurt Vonnegut went further, abominating the harmless mark – a colon that flaunts a comma like a tail – as a “transvestite hermaphrodite”. Can punctuation really be so perverse?
Oliver Kamm, a Times leader writer and columnist, is more permissive. The title of his book is a slippery pun: for Kamm, there is no guarantee that accidence – the part of grammar that governs inflections – will happen as planned. Accidents are also liable to happen, because language is a mutable, irrepressible chaos, and its purported rules are only conventions, easily revised or overturned.
Kamm’s tolerance is certainly preferable to the bigotry of sticklers who treat grammatical lapses as crimes or sins. The dotty philosopher Michael Dummett believed those who thought “billion” meant a thousand million not a million million were responsible for “cultural rape”. More recently, John Humphrys has railed against teenage texters for “raping our vocabulary”, and fumed that to leave a participle dangling “should be a hanging offence”. Lynne Truss, Kamm’s predecessor at the Times, opines in her book on punctuation that anyone who misplaces an apostrophe should be “struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave”: her envenomed outrage makes me feel more kindly about signs advertising “Tomato’s” on grocers’ stalls. Prince Charles, by contrast, seems almost moderate when he protests that American slang – so jazzy in its liveliness, perpetually freshening our staid, stale phraseology – is “a corrupting influence”.
These bilious overreactions are concerned less with language than with manners. The sticklers are snobs, protecting the preferences of their own class: another self-appointed censor condemns the phrase “comprised of” because it is employed by estate agents, which prompts Kamm to comment, “He doesn’t like the language of trade.”
Smiling on modish illiteracies, Kamm is nonchalantly utilitarian. “English,” says Kamm, “reflects what its users say and write rather than arbitrary judgments of correctness.” It depends, however, on the identity of the user. I remember with a shudder a snotty Oxford undergraduate who, when I corrected his spelling, responded with a scornful sigh. “Mr Conrad,” he said, “many great writers are bad spellers.” (Twenty years later, I’m still waiting for him to join the literary pantheon.) Likewise, when the bird-brained Sarah Palin was ridiculed for urging Obama to “refudiate’”rather than repudiate an assertion, she defended herself by pointing out Shakespeare too had invented lots of words.
Kamm resourcefully mobilises quotes to demonstrate that Jane Austen had a weakness for the supposedly improper double genitive, Coleridge split infinitives, and Charlotte Brontë described one thing as “different than” another, not different from. While we’re quibbling, Dickens ought to have entitled his great novel about money and waste Our Common Friend (though he rightly reckoned that “mutual” better suited the collusion between social classes that his plot exposes).
Kamm’s advice is sensible enough, but he undervalues language when he claims that it “reflects how we perceive the world rather than determining it”. Surely words are more than convenient tags attached to things? The Bible defines God as Logos, a personified word; the creator speaks the world into existence, articulating it as he shapes the formless void. Words still give shape to experience and sort out the muddle of phenomena. “Language,” as Heidegger put it, “speaks us”, and it shouldn’t idly gush or drool from our mouths like water dribbling from a tap. Our capacity to speak is a proof of rationality; it makes us human, and it remains our best way of communicating with one another and holding together a frayed society. Unlike the pedants Kamm cites, I wouldn’t hang, draw and quarter those who are guilty of grammatical solecisms, but I might hand out the odd Asbo.
Accidence Will Happen is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99. Click here to buy it for £10.39
