Review: The Language Wars by Henry Hitchings



WHAT IS THE good of books on “proper English?” If you felt self-conscious about the way you spoke in the late nineteenth century, you might throw yourself on the mercy of Oliver Bell Bunce’s guide, from 1883, to good English. Its title, Don’t, is menacingly negative, but at least it promises some definitive rules. “Don’t say lady when you mean wife,” Bunce counsels. “Don’t fail to exercise tact”; “Don’t speak ungrammatically.” The last two examples are curiously roundabout and non-specific, but Henry Hitchings finds them “pernicious.” Writing like Bunce’s, he says, reinforces the unhelpful belief that “the avoidance of mistakes is more important than the achievement of excellence.”

Yet Hitchings’s new book points out all of the ideological pitfalls of debating language use, and he takes pains to avoid falling into them himself. Where Bunce’s aspirational Victorian readers wanted to learn to speak “proper English,” Hitchings’s presumably want to know what their attitude to “proper English” should be. On the first page, Hitchings half apologizes for putting the word “proper” in inverted commas: “I might have deployed them in several other places, save for the suspicion that you would have found them irritating.” This bit of courtesy is tongue-in-cheek, but it is followed by a straight-faced justification: “notions such as ‘proper,’ ‘true meaning’ and ‘regional’ are all contentious.”


Hitchings’s point is not a trivial one. But too often this cautiousness saps the sense of fun suggested by claims such as the following: the history of language disputes, he writes, is “the history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance.” Hitchings admits that he is part of this “mad confederacy,” a racket of writers who thrive on attacking other people’s illogical usage. He winces when he hears someone say “between you and I” instead of “between you and me.” Where Bunce would yell “don’t!” (he wrote under the playful pseudonym “Censor”), Hitchings denies himself an emotional response to the words. “Even as I wince, my inner linguist recognizes that the response is aesthetic and is one which I have been conditioned to express.”

The inner linguist is bound by a descriptivist’s code of honor: instead of instructing people how they should use English, he should simply describe how they tend to use it without making value judgements. This may be more noble than his aesthetic response—which could be to wince, but which could equally be delighted laughter, or sympathy—but it is only the aesthetic response that can persuade someone to change the way he uses language, for better or worse. To use an example that Hitchings quotes, Benedick is wrong-footed by Beatrice’s inventive way of speaking in Much Ado About Nothing. He concedes, “Thou hast frighted the word out of his right sense, so forcible is thy wit.” It is no coincidence that it takes an effort of seduction to bring about a change in the meaning of a word as well as a change of heart in a sparring partner.

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