What do we do in the face of all the bashing that English as we know it has been getting lately? Do these relentless assaults on its established usage bode well or ill for English as a global language?
In the first Advice & Dissent feature here two weeks ago, we saw how Prof. Geoffrey K. Pullum, head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh, debunked Strunk and White’s
The Elements of Style on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its publication. In an article entitled “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice” in the April 17, 2009 issue of
The Chronicle Review, Prof. Pullum said the now iconic book “does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.”
As reported here the following week, four more present-day English usage luminaries later joined Prof. Pullum in taking potshots at Strunk and White. This was in a forum run by
The New York Times last April 24 to mark the book’s 50th year. The forum contributors, apart from Prof. Pullum, were Patricia T. O’Conner, author of the bestselling grammar book
Woe is I; Stephen Dodson, an editor and blogger at languagehat.com; Ben Yagoda, author of T
he Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing and English professor at the University of Delaware; and Mignon Fogarty, creator of the “Grammar Girl” podcast and author of
Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.
The consensus among the forum panelists seemed to be that the grammar advice in T
he Elements of Style, although useful at first encounter, is too simplistic and sometimes too contradictory to be truly helpful to serious learners of English. As Patricia O’Conner tartly remarked in her forum piece, “Rereading Strunk and White on its 50th birthday is like meeting an old lover and realizing how much you’ve outgrown him. Things have changed, little book, and you have not, or not enough…Oh, the first 14 pages are still the gospel truth…but much of the grammar and usage advice in the rest of the book is baloney.”
Now, Patricia O’Conner is on the English-grammar warpath again with the publication of
Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language, a book she has co-written with her husband Stewart Kellerman, former editor at
The New York Times and foreign correspondent for UPI in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. In their book, the wife-and-husband team punctures what they consider as myths and misconceptions about English usage that people have been taught over the years, then postulates that some of the generally accepted “rules” of English grammar are not and never were rules in the first place.
Read
an excerpt from Origins of the Specious (Chapter 1) Read
Alexandra Mullen’s review of the Origins of the SpeciousRead
Rick Kleffel’s “The Agony Column” review of Origins of the SpeciousWhat do you think of the Origins of the Specious
and the two reviews of it? Click the Reply button to post your thoughts on Jose Carillo’s English Forum.
