Language and correctness

My previous two posts were about some expressions in English that had interested me. Some of the comments raised questions about the notion of ‘correct English’ v. evolving usage. I tend towards a critical but not judgemental version of the latter way of viewing language use.

Is there such a thing as ‘correct English?’ I typed this sentence into Google, and it came up with this:

Yes, “correct English” exists as a social standard, but not as a scientific rule. Linguists generally agree that no regional dialect is naturally superior, but society uses Standard English as a baseline for formal writing, education, and legal communication.

That sounds about right to me; it’s not helpful to have an over-prescriptive view of what constitutes correctness in language use; so much depends on a complex range of factors, from social and other contexts in which the language is being used, to the purpose and audience of the conversation or written text.

With these kinds of questions in mind I dipped back into The King’s English: a guide to modern usage, by Kingsley Amis (Harper Collins, 1997), a self-confessed ‘officious neurotic who sets right venial blunderers uninvited…a vocal stickler’ (introductory section, p. xi). He begins by citing his debt to HW Fowler’s monumental Modern English Usage (1926), the aim of which Amis says was

 …to settle scores as well as problems, to shake things up, to make people think about what they said and wrote, to be provocative with being unjust.

Amis’s book also does all of those things, but usually with the emphasis on ‘provocative’ and negative, an approach that’s hinted at just a few sentences after the quotation above, where he writes

…without Fowler and his heirs and allies, the language might be in an even worse state than it is. A lost cause may still deserve support, and that support is never wasted.

He goes on to say that occasionally he feels he has insufficient ‘training’ to launch into linguistic argument, but then

I spot some fresh linguistic barbarism and am off again. I am sustained by reflecting that the defence of the language is too large a matter to be left to the properly qualified…

Ok, it’s clear he’s being mischievously contentious here, and in much of the rest of the book. But that kind of ultra-prescriptive attitude is still fairly prevalent, and says more about the person pontificating than it does about language itself. That language is in a decadent state, that those who try to rectify ‘barbarisms’ are fighting a ‘lost cause’ is meant, I presume, to be amusingly splenetic, but it exposes an attitude that’s patrician and surely rather snobbish and patronising.

I admit to sometimes feeling my hackles rise in a way that probably resembles what Amis describes when I hear people say (and even write) things like ‘I should OF done X’ or ‘I would OF liked to…’ But it wouldn’t presume to ‘correct’ this ‘error’. This is a structure that’s clearly caused by the speaker or writer HEARING ‘of’ instead of the standard form ‘have’ when it’s compressed into ‘should’ve’ or ‘would’ve’, and being unaware of the distinction. Some might call this ignorance or sloppiness, but it’s best surely to see it as a fairly natural development in a culture that’s increasingly oral rather than written, or in which written texts are mostly electronically generated and shared, and ephemeral – like text messages and social media posts.

An example or two of Amis’s bromides about language use. On the term ‘aggro’, for example (the key words under discussion in his book are arranged in alphabetical order, so this is on pp. 4-5) he writes

Plenty of disreputably descended works and persons have found a tolerated if not a welcome place in this country, to risk sounding pompous.

Yes, I find that unsubtle quip pretty pompous, like many of his other entries in the book. But some are more balanced and tolerant; for example, the idea that we should avoid starting a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’. This is  what he calls ‘an empty superstition’. It’s a pity he isn’t often as broadminded as that.

I could go on with countless further examples of his heavy-handedly witty fulminating about ‘barbarisms’ and errors, but I’ll end with his mildly offensive characterisation of what he calls ‘berks’ and ‘wankers’.

Berks are ‘careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one’s own. They speak in a slipshod way’ [dropped Hs, glottal stops and ‘mistakes in grammar’]. ‘Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin.’

Wankers ‘are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one’s own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded…Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin.’

For once I think this is quite clever and witty. He goes on, however, to suggest we ‘try to pursue a course between the slipshod and the punctilious’, avoiding extremes, ‘and this is healthy’ for speakers and writers, and for the language. All very laudable – but I don’t think he succeeds in avoiding the position of the excessively pedantic ‘wanker’.

I leave the final word to Fowler, as quoted by RW Burchfield in his invaluable revision of that 1926 work: The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (third edition, Oxford, 1996). In his entry on ambiguity, Fowler originally wrote (and Burchfield quotes):

‘A captious critic might find examples [of false ordering of words] on almost every page of almost any writer.’

 Amis is definitely a captious critic.

I recommend an article which expounds a very different, much more liberal and, in my view, more sensible attitude to such matters. It’s by writer and broadcaster Michael Rosen, whose engaging and entertaining BBC Radio 4 programme on language, Word of Mouth, I’ve mentioned before. It’s called Sorry, there’s no such thing as ‘correct grammar’, and was published in the Guardian newspaper in 2012; it’s available online HERE (no paywall).