The Language Wars: A History of Proper English

Henry Hitchings, theatre critic of this newspaper, has written such an intriguing and committed book. Under the guise of being a genial history of the development of the English language - from the arrival of Germanic settlers in the fifth century right up to the emergence of what he calls Multicultural London English - The Language Wars is an attack on all who have ever thought there is any right or wrong way of writing and speaking English.

Hitchings tells us "All attitudes to usage can be classified as either prescriptive or descriptive... A prescriptivist dictates how people should speak and write, whereas a descriptivist avoids passing judgments and provides explanation and analysis. One says what ought to happen, one says what does happen."

Hitchings is, unsurprisingly, a descriptivist. So he gleefully explains, over 28 chapters, organised pretty much chronologically while covering areas such as spelling, punctuation, pronunciation, obscenity and slang, that all attempts to prescribe "correct" usage have always been outrun by ceaseless change in the language itself.

In 1762, Robert Lowth published A Short Introduction to English Grammar, laying down rules about punctuation, double negatives, ending a sentence with a preposition, the difference between "would" and "should", etc, while exposing what he considered to be faulty usage in even "our best authors".

Hitchings has sneaking admiration for Lowth, even detecting a sense of humour in him, but for nearly all those who have subsequently tried to lay down the law and stop the language moving on, he expresses contempt.

That many of the self-appointed guardians of good usage are hypocrites doesn't stop them being subject to tempestuous rages, he tells us. When they appeal to "logic", it's "often a mask for smugness and jingoism".

"Purists are possessive," he warns, "tremendously proprietorial not only about the correctness of what they say but also about the myriad examples they have corralled of other people's gaffes and atrocities." Then again, "Purists exult in their resistance to change, not because they have a rigorous understanding of the relationship between language and time but because they are heavily invested in the status quo - or, more often, in a fantasy of the status quo." They are deluded. They are bullies. They falsify history. They are insecure and insensitive. "As for the purists' attempt to repel lexical invasions, it's a repression of life itself." Life itself!

So Hitchings attacks prescriptivists not just for what they get wrong but for their base motives and sorry psychology too. At the end, he acknowledges both sides in the debate contribute to the life of the language, even those whom by now he is calling "the pedants". Risible they may be but "they stimulate debate," he concedes.
We do need to engage with language critically. If the conservatives have never won and can never win, perhaps we should admire them all the more for putting up some resistance at least?

Hitchings doesn't think so. This book is a sustained assault on all who call for order and restraint. If descriptive is not quite the word for such an approach, what is? Laxative, perhaps.