The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left Review

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The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left ReviewIs your English educated or uneducated? Grammatical or ungrammatical? Urban or provincial? Standard or dialect? U or Non-U? Lered or lewed (to use the words that distinguished the high prestige English dialect from low presitige ones centuries ago)?
All these terms imply something about people's social standing as well as they way they speak. And that's no coincidence. It's part of what David Crystal calls "the Big Con," recalling the movie The Sting.
Crystal calls his book a "history of usage," but its focus is the history of prescriptivism in English, written to learn why Lynne Truss's book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, is so popular.
Crystal may be the most interesting writer on English. (I can't pick between him and the Australian linguist Kate Burridge, author of Blooming English and Weeds in the Garden of Words.) I was a little concerned The Fight for English might be a recapitulation of Crystal's The Stories of English, but it's not.
Crystal looks at how English evolved from a group of different but equal dialects to a presitigious dialect trying to keep it's status over other ways of talking that refused to be extinguished. This book isn't meant as sociology, but you do learn about the development of the British class structure.
The most interesting part of the book is Crystal's story of growing up in Wales and Liverpool, learning to speak the right dialects so he didn't get beaten up on the playground or get a ruler on the back of the hand in class, where "educators" instilled in him the Received Pronunciation (what was then "BBC English"). The playground and the ruler both work.
Crystal shows how the institutions that matter to us (like schools, the BBC, and The Simpsons) teach us about language.
Crystal calls for a similar kind of language education that Anthony Burgess did in his 1992 book, A Mouthful of Air - - something between technical linguistics and old-fashioned prescriptivist "grammar." Crystal uses the analogy of a mechanic friend who can fix any car but is a lousy driver. Being a good driver takes more than knowing how an engine works. Grammar isn't everything.
The Fight for English is also funny. Like the university student who thought (for a good reason) that a preposition had something to do with getting on a horse.
And the humor in Crystal's book brings up another important point, one of the things that make all of his books a pleasure to read. It's easy for a professional linguist to mock "language mavens" like Fowler, Strunk and White, Lynne Truss, and other prescriptivist critics. (And in this book Crystal does show in specific cases why these language guardians don't know as much as they think they do.) But Crystal, unlike many "experts" is very respectful of other people's opinions, even (or especially) when they disagree with him. That's a change from argument in Britain and America lately.
As Crystal says, "Pedants have their place. . . . without them, there would be no way of teaching young people how not to be pedantic."The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left OverviewThe story of battles--both past and present--surrounding English language usage, The Fight for English explores why millions of people feel linguistically inferior.Unhappy with the "zero tolerance" approach to punctuation offered by Lynn Truss's Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, David Crystal offers a view of the subject that is much more balanced.Instead of answering the claims made by other manuals of English usage, Crystal provides an explanation and analysis of the genre as a whole.Crystal weaves an intricate and engaging account that traces the history of the English language and its development over time.From Anglo-Saxon to Modern English, Crystal addresses why the same language issues that were bothering people 250 years ago are still bothering people today. This is the story of the fight for English usage--the story of the people who tried to shape the language in their own image, but failed generation after generation.In short, they ate, shot, and left.The Fight for English brings language to life on the page with a witty and engaging writing style.Broadening the perspective on the English language, this compellingly informative book has something for everyone interested in the topic.Move over Harry Potter.Here comes punctuation.

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