The Language Wars

by Henry Hitchings

  One other mark that deserves mention is the point d’ironie, sometimes known as a ‘snark’. A back-to-front question mark, was used by the sixteenth-century printer Henry Denham to indicate rhetorical questions, and in 1899 Alcanter de Brahm, a poet, suggested reviving it. I would venture that there are two problems with using a special mark to indicate irony: the first is that it dampens the irony, and the second is that readers are likely to wonder whether the mark is itself being used ironically.

  The chances of the point d’ironie becoming common are slim. The heavy modern use of email and text messaging is encouraging a lighter, more informal style of punctuation. New punctuation marks may find widespread popularity, but I doubt it. I think it far more likely that more punctuation marks will disappear. One candidate may be the semi-colon, which has become a sort of celebrity among punctuation marks – regarded by some as delectable, and by others as superfluous. In France there has been a noisy debate about its value. In 2008 an April Fool’s joke circulated to the effect that President Nicolas Sarkozy had decreed the semi-colon should be used three times a page in all official correspondence. One critic, the satirist François Cavanna, dismissed it as ‘a parasite’ signalling ‘a lack of audacity, a fuzziness of thought’.20 Plenty of writers insist that it is an invaluable mark, helping to reveal relationships within their arguments, yet critics suggest that an argument that needs a semi-colon is an argument that needs recasting.

  A few pages ago I referred to ‘a misused semi-colon’. Now what is that? Traditionally, a semi-colon has been used to separate clauses that have a close relationship. For instance, ‘The car juddered to a halt; it had run out of fuel.’ A colon is used when something is to be specified: a result, a quotation, a list, a contrast. A semi-colon is like a partition, whereas a colon draws attention to what comes next. Another way to imagine the difference is to think of passing from one room into another: when we encounter a semi-colon it is as if the door between the rooms has been left half-open and we need to open it further to continue on our way, whereas a colon is akin to a door open wide, which invites us in but at the same time makes us briefly pause to see what lies ahead.

  More widely lamented than the seeming decline of the semi-colon is the jeopardy of the apostrophe. I talked a moment ago about its misuse, and gave an impression of its historical insecurity. Yet the real story is its peril right now. A report in the Daily Telegraph in November 2008 noted that in a poll of 2,000 British adults more than nine hundred thought, when confronted with the words ‘people’s choice’, that the apostrophe had been incorrectly placed.21 Apostrophes have passionate defenders, but they are undeniably a source of confusion.

  In Britain, one of the main guardians is the Apostrophe Protection Society, which was founded by John Richards, a former journalist, in 2001. Its stated aim is ‘preserving the correct use of this currently much abused punctuation mark in all forms of text written in the English language’. When Richards set up the Society he hoped to find half a dozen like-minded people. But, he reports, ‘I didn’t find half a dozen people. Instead, within a month of my plaint appearing in a national newspaper, I received over 500 letters of support, not only from all corners of the United Kingdom, but also from America, Australia, France, Sweden, Hong Kong and Canada!’ Sarah Lyall, reporting Richards’s crusade in the New York Times, quoted Jean Aitchison, Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at Oxford University, on the apostrophe’s misuse: ‘Greengrocers might do it out of ignorance, but it is also being used intentionally to draw attention to what you are selling. In the informal setting you can do what you like. That’s the way language works.’22 Richards disagrees, and he was on hand in January 2009 when Birmingham City Council decreed that apostrophes be removed from local street signs. A report in The Times noted: ‘There was anger … at the headquarters of the Apostrophe Protection Society in Lincolnshire.’ ‘It’s setting a very bad example,’ said Richards, ‘because teachers all over Birmingham are teaching their children punctuation. Then they see road signs with apostrophes removed.’23 In an accompanying article Philip Howard vilified the Council, whose decision was ‘wet, cowardly, solecistic and philistine’ – an example of ‘linguistic vandalism’, the more alarming because ‘those who neglect exactness and correctitude in little things cannot be trusted with big things such as local elections and council tax’.24 The use of correctitude is telling, because the word blends correct and rectitude, conflating linguistic nicety with morality.

  In the US there are very few places (in fact, five) with apostrophes in their names: Martha’s Vineyard is the best known. There are rather more in Britain – well-known examples are King’s Lynn, Bishop’s Stortford and St John’s Wood – but there is no consistency – witness the place-names Kings Langley, Bishops Lydeard and St Johns. On the London Underground a particularly droll juxtaposition is that of Earl’s Court and Barons Court. According to one historical explanation, Barons Court is named after Baronscourt, the Irish estate of Sir William Palliser, who developed the area, and Earl’s Court takes its name from its former owner, the Earl of Oxford. This is plausible rather than provably correct.

  In truth, there are not many situations in which the omission of an apostrophe can lead to real confusion. Its incorrect use can be more confusing than its neglect. To give a banal example that is for obvious reasons close to my heart, I am sometimes thrown by its use with people’s names. Can I be sure when I read ‘Jenkin’s argument is weak’ that the arguer under fire is Jenkin rather than Jenkins? Experience suggests not. Experience, that is, of reading about ‘Hitching’s book’.

  My guess is that the apostrophe is going to disappear. One factor that may contribute to this is the preference among graphic designers for a clean, unfussy look. Walking around my home town I pass shopfronts emblazoned with the names Dixons, Barclays, Lloyds and Boots – all of which ‘should’ have an apostrophe. The reason for its absence in these cases is not ignorance, but rather the desire for visual crispness.

  23

  Flaunting the rules

  On not being, like, disinterested in modern life’s meaningful aggravations?

  In White Heat, his history of the second half of the 1960s, Dominic Sandbrook notes the British affection for gardening. Its popularity can be interpreted, he says, ‘as evidence of the underlying conservatism, individualism and domesticity of British life’. Britain is a densely populated and decidedly urban country; genteel, ‘pseudorural’ husbandry is a pleasant antidote to the frequent grimness of metropolitan existence.1 The same impulses – an infatuation with verdure, so long as it is decorously managed, and a desire to keep the borders nice and neat – are present in our maintenance of language. The connection between this and gardening is an old one, made popular by Baldassare Castiglione’s Renaissance best-seller Il Cortegiano (1528) and by Thomas Hoby’s English translation of it (1561).

  I have yet to come across anyone who is never irritated by other people’s use of language. Some people pretend to be above this sort of intolerance, but they turn out to have their pet hates: most of us will readily admit to being irked by certain words or forms of speech. It is not always a matter of believing one’s own use of language more polished; there are many who make a point of showing contempt for the patrician and the punctilious, poking fun at anything that seems old-fashioned or fey. But most pedantry runs on the fuel of self-applause, and, to an impassioned few, the question of whether one eats soup or drinks it is as urgent as any other.

  It is not just inveterate fusspots who target what they see as defects in others’ grammar, pronunciation, spelling, punctuation and vocabulary. In the last of these categories our assumptions are often especially supercilious, like Estella’s in Great Expectations when she disdainfully says of Pip, ‘He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!’ And we are familiar with the pattern of Pip’s reaction: when he is next alone he looks at his ‘common boots’ and his ‘coarse hands’, and, though these have never troubled him before, he now sees them
– and of course his less than genteel vocabulary – as ‘vulgar appendages’.

  By airing our grievances in public, we perform a ritual show of irritation. The naming and shaming of words that offend us is also a naming and shaming of people – or, more often, types of people – we find distasteful. An orgy of abuse may result. A sure way to start a flame war on the internet is by posting an article about one’s lexical peeves. The people who take time to add their comments will, you can be confident, compete over whose peeve is the most pestilential. All the while they hyperstimulate one another’s peevishness; anyone joining the fray will be confronted with many new examples of things to get upset about.

  Vocabulary is a garden of delights. But all gardeners are obsessed with pulling up weeds. Thus William Zinsser, the author of a much-loved volume called On Writing Well, spends a good deal of time pinpointing the essence of writing badly. He decries journalese, which he suggests is ‘the death of freshness in anybody’s style’. Consisting of ‘a quilt of instant words patched together out of other parts of speech’ (that is, ‘a world where … the future is always “upcoming” and someone is forever “firing off” a note’), it is defined by a ‘failure … to reach for anything but the nearest cliché’.2 A cliché is a threadbare phrase or trite expression, not a single overused word. Zinsser additionally distinguishes between ‘good’ words and ‘cheap’ ones. His own views about which words fall into these two categories are not important here. Rather, it is the existence of the categories that matters. For we are all familiar with the sensation of relishing one person’s use of what we quietly believe is a good word and recoiling at another’s use of what we consider a cheap one.

  We have already come across Thomas Lounsbury, the eminent professor ‘in Yale University’. He claims that ‘Nothing is more striking in the history of language than the hostility which manifests itself at particular periods to particular words or phrases. This is a state of mind which characterizes us all, and rarely, if ever, does it affect seriously the fortune of the expression disliked.’ Lounsbury cites the example of Thomas De Quincey, who was appalled by the word unreliable and insisted that it would be more correct to write ‘unrelyuponable’. ‘From that day to this,’ wrote Lounsbury in 1908, ‘the discussion of the propriety of the word has been constant.’3 Many other authors have voiced highly specific revulsions. Jonathan Swift detested not just mob, but also banter. Benjamin Franklin was so offended by the use of progress as a verb that he wrote to Noah Webster asking him to help keep it at bay, and he was similarly concerned about to advocate. Samuel Taylor Coleridge reserved special loathing for talented. Fowler condemned electrocution and gullible. In 1877 William Cullen Bryant, editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post, published a list of words he could not stomach; it included artiste, pants and standpoint. (Editors today make such proscriptions part of their papers’ house style. I know of one who will not accept the word iconic, and another who disallows whilst.) Much further back, Edward Phillips in The New World of English Words (1658) expressed a distaste for autograph, ferocious, misogynist and repatriation. In venting hatred of a particular word, one may reach for arguments from etymology or logic, but typically the reaction is aesthetic and coloured by political and personal sentiment. It may stem from an aversion to a sound or to a word’s associations, or because we feel the word is a mask for something terrible, or, more simply, because it denotes something that upsets us. Identifying the cause of aversion can be difficult: I know I dislike the adjective moist, but when I try to explain this, my reasoning sounds hollow.

  Each year Lake Superior State University in Michigan publishes a list of words and phrases that its professors and students have agreed should be banished. In 1976 they threw out meaningful and input; two years later they discarded parenting and medication; and thirty years on they chose to do away with wordsmith and waterboarding. Of course, no word can ever be consigned to oblivion by academic edict; the quirky and not exactly publicity-shy folks at Lake Superior State University seem aware of this – another cherished activity on campus is unicorn-hunting; one’s licence to hunt must be worn over the heart, pinned with a sprig of rosemary – but the spirit of the exercise will be appreciated by many.

  Which verbal tics especially annoy you? Rhetorical questions, perhaps? Among people I know, the list of irritants includes (brace yourself for a long sentence) stock phrases and nuggets – ‘at the end of the day’, ‘I think you’ll find’, ‘in the final analysis’, ‘with all due respect’ (the noun respect is in some, mostly political contexts an irritant in its own right), ‘new and improved’, ‘tried and tested’, ‘at this moment in time’, ‘bear with me’, ‘it is what it is’, ‘I’m good to go’, ‘almost exactly’, ‘sum total’, ‘lifestyle choices’, ‘quality time’, ‘decisive factors’, ‘the lowest common denominator’ (with the implication that this is a small number, though often it isn’t – the lowest common denominator of ⅓ and ¾ is 12), ‘no problem’, ‘in fairness’, ‘to be honest’, ‘free gift’, ‘workable solution’, ‘positive feedback’, ‘it is incumbent upon me’, ‘you don’t want to go there’, ‘no offence, but …’, ‘can I ask you a question?’, ‘for your convenience’, ‘do you know what I mean?’, ‘what’s not to like?’ – and a number of individual words that have become wearisomely common – synergy, sustainable, paradigm, ongoing, facilitate, empower, customer-facing, closure, process in contexts to do with emotions and psychology (‘the grieving process’), and perhaps also context to boot, along with creativity, leverage, proactive, pathfinder, challenge, solution, 24/7, co-worker, user-friendly, the emptying situation (compare ‘There is crime’ and ‘There is a crime situation’) and the pretentious historic (‘This is an historic moment for Basildon’). These words and phrases are disliked because they seem devoid of meaning; they have been discoloured through overuse or through too much unthinking use, and have become fillers, formulae, dumb scraps barnacling the truth. But we can’t eradicate them. The reason? It’s not rocket science. And yes, dear reader, I added that one just to pique you.

  Many of these words became common because they seemed capable of exalting our thoughts. If I tell you I am ‘hopeful’ that something will happen, you may well believe that I think it is unlikely. If I say instead that I am ‘optimistic’, you will have greater faith in my outlook. Such, at least, seems to be the prevailing pattern of thought. But change is afoot. Optimistic, a term once comical because of its association with Voltaire’s buoyant and pedantic Dr Pangloss, now seems anaemic because it has become part of the rhetoric of mediocrity. It is a word many of us have ceased to take seriously. Still, not so long ago it seemed more hopeful than hopeful, and plenty of words are in vogue today because they are believed to maximize the flavour of what we are saying. A lot of us object to nouns becoming verbs: task, leverage, action, transition, architect, roadmap, version, showcase. These verbs are meant to sound cutting-edge, serious, busy and indeed business-y, but instead of conveying salt and spice they mostly seem pretentious.

  In Britain, dissenters argue that the phenomenon is American in origin. This is doubtful. A more common complaint is that British English is generally being tainted by Americanisms. As I have suggested, outrage at American influence was common among Victorian defenders of British English, and its volume increased as first American silent movies and then ‘talkies’ conquered the British picture palace. In a piece for the Daily Express in January 1930, Jameson Thomas wrote that ‘the talkies have presented the American language in one giant meal, and we are revolted’.4 This type of complaint was a journalistic staple from the 1920s onward. There were supporters of American words and expressions, such as Frank Dilnot, who described them as ‘like flashes of crystal’ and deemed American English ‘a potent and penetrating instrument, rich in new vibrations, full of joy as well as shocks’.5 But among the British the pro-American party has always been small. Neutrality is common enough, but hostility has always made itself loudly felt.

  Of the
more recent claims that American English is a menace, the most sustained I have come across is Edwin Newman’s 1975 book Strictly Speaking: Will America be the Death of English? A distinguished American broadcaster, Newman claimed, ‘The United States may prove to be the death of English, but Britain … plainly wants to be in at the kill.’6 Newman’s suggestion that the British are apt to hop aboard every American linguistic fad still earns eager approval. Meanwhile British newspapers routinely dismiss the particular vocabulary of American English with words such as ‘loose’, ‘annoying’, ‘strangling’, ‘obscure’ or ‘insidious’. There are also, so we hear, those pesky American pronunciations: putting the stress on the third syllable of advertisement and the second of detail, saying docile in such a way that it rhymes with fossil, the noticeably different sounds of depot, apricot, tomato, clerk and missile. There are the different spellings, too: ax, plow, color (the Webster legacy). But most repugnant, if you believe the detractors, are the little oddities of American vocabulary: semester, garbage can, cookie, elevator and, perhaps worst of all, math instead of maths. Never mind that buzz saw is more evocative than circular saw. Never mind that many words once condemned as rank Americanisms are now in everyday use in Britain: lengthy, mileage, curvaceous, hindsight. Never mind that there are more of ‘them’ than there are of ‘us’. Never mind that American English is now the most important of English’s many varieties. For, no, the vital thing is to resist and indeed repel the onslaught of Americanisms because they are, you know, wrong, man.