This Is English, Rules Are Optional
By Neil Genzlinger
Published New York Times: December 31, 2009

THE LEXICOGRAPHER’S DILEMMA The Evolution of ‘Proper’ English, From Shakespeare to ‘South Park’ By Jack Lynch Illustrated. 326 pages, Walker & Company. $26.

It’s getting harder to make a living as an editor of the printed word, what with newspapers and other publications cutting staff. And it will be harder still now that Jack Lynch has published “The Lexicographer’s Dilemma,” an entertaining tour of the English language in which he shows that many of the rules that editors and other grammatical zealots wave about like cudgels are arbitrary and destined to be swept aside as words and usage evolve.

(Right - Photo of author by Art Paxton)

Also, despite what some fussbudget may have told you, civilization will not end when this happens.

Mr. Lynch, a professor of English at Rutgers University, subtitles his book “The Evolution of ‘Proper’ English, From Shakespeare to ‘South Park,’ ” and those quotation marks around “proper” are telling. He takes us back to a time, half a millennium ago, when the very concept that there was a right and a wrong way to speak and spell things did not exist. Those edible things that come out of chickens were “egges” in the northern part of England and “eyren” in the southern. “Eggs” were still years in the future.

Not until the 17th century did people begin thinking that the language needed to be codified, and the details of who would do that and how have yet to be resolved. Should it be accomplished through a government-sponsored academy, an officially sanctioned dictionary, or what? These and other means were attempted, but meanwhile ordinary folks, dang them, kept right on talking and writing however they wanted, inventing words, using contractions and so on.

Odd quests against specific words and uses were cropping up even in the 1600s, and they reveal the modern-day grammar warriors who campaign against, say, “finalize” to be tomorrow’s ridiculous footnote. Jonathan Swift, for instance, had a thing about the word mob, a truncation of the Latin “mobile vulgus” (fickle crowd). Who knows how many other masterpieces he might have written had he not wasted all that energy fighting a battle that didn’t need fighting.

While some early writers were trying to pin English down, others were contributing to its disarray, as Mr. Lynch notes. “Another threat to good English,” he writes, “came from the poets, who, in order to get their lines to scan, had squeezed and mangled good English words until they were barely recognizable.”

And then there’s the matter of the split infinitive, which some today who fancy themselves grammatical purists cannot abide. Mr. Lynch points out that the split infinitive has actually gone in and out of fashion several times, for no apparent reason. Shakespeare, he says, “has only one split infinitive in his entire body of work,” but by the end of the 18th century infinitives were being split right and left, by the learned as well as the common folk. Then the tide shifted again and the poor split infinitive was an outcast again: “Whatever the reason, the prohibitions against it grew and grew until, by the early 20th century, it was among the most reprehensible of verbal crimes.”

Mr. Lynch, an expert on Samuel Johnson, spends a good deal of time on the evolution of dictionaries, doing a fine job of conveying the daunting task facing Johnson and all the dictionary makers since: How do you collect every known word, decide between competing spellings, reflect shades of meaning, separate faddish uses from the ones that will endure, and so on?
Full story at NYT.