An authoritative but highly witty and entertaining book came off the press recently to wage war against pedants of English grammar and usage, demonstrating without mincing words that many of their hoary prescriptions for good style are “little more than folklore mixed with prejudice and can be cheerfully disregarded.” The book is
Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 301 pages), and its author is the British writer and journalist Oliver Kamm, a former leading financial services and central bank official and interventionist foreign policy advocate who changed careers to journalism in 2008 to become an editorial writer and now columnist for
The Times of London.
“The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren’t real rules of grammar at all,” Kamm argues in “There is No ‘Proper English,’” his essay about the book that came out in the March 13, 2015 issue of
The Wall Street Journal. “They are, at best, just stylistic conventions: An example would be the use of a double negative (‘I can’t get no satisfaction’). It makes complete grammatical sense, as an intensifier. It’s just a convention that we don’t use double negatives of that form in Standard English. Some other pedantic stipulations are destructive pieces of folklore, like the belief that it is wrong to split an infinitive or to end a sentence with a preposition. We should be entirely relaxed about that sort of choice. Why worry, as some pedants do, about whether to write ‘firstly’ or ‘first’ when you begin a list of points? Either is correct.”
Kamm rails against the prescriptive urge in language advocated by snobbish 18th-century usage gurus who criticized “low people,” especially servants and actors, for their standards of English: “The whole debate about English usage has been bedeviled ever since by this snobbery, whereas the real task of language instruction (for adults as for children) should be to help people learn how to address different types of audience at different sorts of occasions. A speech delivered at a public event marking a great tragedy, for instance, demands a highly formal register; commentary on the Super Bowl needs a conversational tone. If you mix them up, you have failed not just in standards of language but in proper behavior as well.”
Says Nick Cohen, English journalist and book author, in his review of Kamm’s book in the March 7, 2015 issue of
The Spectator of UK: “Kamm is not a siren luring us into linguistic permissiveness. As he says, children master the complex grammar of their native tongue with astonishing speed. We already know grammar. (If we didn’t, we would not be understood.) Nor does Kamm argue that poor children should not master Standard English. It is the dialect of social advancement, and they need it to succeed in the world, whatever dialect they use at home or among their friends. Rather he fights to allow Standard English to breathe.”
Read Oliver Kamm’s “There is No ‘Proper English’” in The Wall Street Journal now!Read Nick Cohen’s “If ‘incorrect’ English is what’s widely understood, how can it be wrong?” in The Spectator of UK now!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Oliver Kamm is a British writer and journalist who wrote “Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy” (2005), an advocacy of an interventionist foreign policy. Educated at New College, Oxford and Birkbeck College, University of London, he started his career in the financial services sector, working in the Bank of England and in the securities industry, including as Head of Strategic Research at Commerzbank Global Equities in London, and helped start a pan-European investment bank in 1997. He went into journalism in 2008 to become an editorial writer and now columnist for
The Times of London.
RELATED READINGS:Poor hypercorrective “whom”! In “The whom,” the regular Prospero grammar column in the March 12, 2015 issue of The Economist, pseudonymous columnist R.L.G. wrote from Berlin that among the few bits of grammar in standard written English that are tricky even for experienced writers and fluent speakers, perhaps one of the most commonly problematic is the so-called “hypercorrective whom,” a usage that he personally thinks is a mistake. “Poor
whom,” he says. “Not only is mastery of
whom scarce; use of
whom is in decline, full stop… Since only
whom and a few other words (
I/
me,
he/
him etc.) show case, English-speakers rarely have occasion to think about the matter. Nonetheless, good writers should master
whom: edited prose with
who in a place where the objective case (
whom) is expected will strike an educated and careful reader as wrong. But worse—as with
between you and I—is ‘hypercorrecting’: using
whom in the wrong places.”
Read R.L.G.’s “The whom” in The Economist now!Lowdown on the Italian language. In “Dante turns in his grave as Italian language declines,” an article by in the March 9, 2015
CNN iReport, Rome-based freelance reporter and writer Silvia Marchetti is incredulous that Italy, the land where Latin originated and from which many other European languages descend, is becoming “illiterate.” She laments: “Not only have Italians long forgotten the language of their Roman Empire, but they hardly know how to speak and write proper Italian. They’ve been negatively dubbed asini (donkeys), as in “stupid.” If you take a look at Italian language forums and debate websites it’s clear that many Italians are clueless on grammar and don’t even know how to use verbs properly. At age 15, Italian students rank below the OECD average literacy level and Eurostat reports that Italy has the lowest percentage of university graduates aged 30-34 in the European Union.”
Read Silvia Marchetti’s “Dante turns in his grave as Italian language declines” in CNN iReport now!
