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.”