By Michael Skapinker - Financial Times - 14 January, 2012
The self-appointed guardians of standards in English may struggle to keep up but at least they carePlanet Word, by JP Davidson, Michael Joseph, RRP£25, 448 pages
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything, by David Bellos, Particular Books, RRP£20, 400 pages
The Story of English in 100 Words, by David Crystal, Profile, RRP£12.99, 288 pages
The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language, by Mark Forsyth, Icon Books, RRP£12.99, 288 pages
The Banned List: A Manifesto Against Jargon and Cliché, by John Rentoul, Elliott & Thompson, RRP£8.99, 112 pages
Geoffrey Chaucer was probably the first English author to have his books printed. He did not live to see it happen, which is a pity because he had evidently tired of the mess the hand copiers had made of his work. At the end of Troilus and Criseyde he beseeches: “For there is so great diversity in English and in writing of our tongue, so pray I God that none miswrite thee.”
Printing Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, William Caxton used the opportunity to try to standardise English spelling and usage. As JP Davidson recounts in Planet Word, there were at the time more than 20 different ways to spell “might”. There were also, as today, many variations of English speech and vocabulary. Caxton opted for the dialect of London and the south-east Midlands as his printing standard.
Today’s standard English sticklers are more insistent than ever, convinced there is only one correct form, the Queen’s English, which never changes. A Financial Times reader once attempted to argue a grammatical point with me by quoting Fowler’s Modern English Usage – the 1937 version. As there have been several Fowler editions and revisions since then, this seemed as useful as adjudicating a scratched wing-mirror dispute with the 1937 Highway Code, but he was not to be diverted.
Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a surprise (and deserved) hit when it was first published in 2003, reflected people’s worry about getting their English wrong (in this case, their apostrophes). The many books since then have not always followed Truss’s prescriptive line, some pointing out that English rules have changed frequently over the centuries.
Link here to the FT to read the five reviews and essay.
More from the Financial Times:
- Philippe Sands reviews David Scheffer’s ‘All the Missing Souls’
- George Pendle reviews ‘The Sounding of the Whale’ by D Graham Burnett
- Manjit Kumar on David Kaiser’s ‘How the Hippies Saved Physics’
- Virginia Rounding’s take on the ‘Amateurs in Eden’ by Joanna Hodgkin
- Karl Marlantes’s ‘What It Is Like To Go To War’
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