LanguageEveryday language, writes the BBC journalist John Humphrys in his Introduction to James Cochrane's Between You and I, "should be plain, simple and accurate.
It should use no more words than are needed to do the job and they should be the right words". Pedants might point out that in American-English there would be a comma in this sentence after "simple", a fact which suggests that language is not always as plain and simple a matter as Humphrys seems to assume, and that even in British English the absence of a comma after "job" is questionable. Non-pedants might point out that Humphrys's austere linguistic puritanism, with its schoolmasterly insistence on instant transparency and stringent economy, is a travesty of the richness and subtlety of everyday speech. We should have as many words as possible to relish, in all their ambiguity and lush diversity, not a meagre clutch of well-scrubbed tokens.
Humphrys is fly enough not to be branded an old fogey. Language, he concedes, must change, and ought not to smell of the museum. Samuel Johnson, rather similarly, wrote a dictionary which tried, Canute-like, to stem the tides of linguistic degeneration, but glumly concluded that such decay belonged to our fallen nature. To Johnson, pronouncing words like "bath" and "grass" with a long "a" would have sounded vulgar and bumpkinish; for Standard English speakers today, it is the short "a" which signals the flat cap and the soiled smock. What was standard BBC pronunciation in 1935, or even in 1965, sounds absurdly toffee-nosed today. In any case, so-called Standard English was once just another regional dialect. In parts of Bradford and Brixton, dropping your aitches could be seen as correct usage - meaning that, like "frightfully sick-making, darling!", it is the way your associates speak. Whether you pronounce "aitch" with an aitch indicates whether you are English or Irish.
For all his love of precision, Humphrys fails to distinguish between various kinds of bad English. (The purist James Cochrane would presumably write there "among various kinds . . ."). There is incorrect usage, for example, as when (in Cochrane's examples) we confuse "refute" with "deny" ("I refute that allegation!"), "immanent" with "imminent", "imply" with "infer" or "flount" with "flaunt". We should remind ourselves that disinterested people are not people who don't give a damn, and that enervating activities do the reverse of invigorating you.
Mistakes like this are to be avoided not in the name of some myth of purity, but for just the opposite reason: because they diminish the opulence and intricacy of our speech. In any case, we need both to refute and rebut, imply and infer, and these activities are harder if we lack the appropriate verbal distinctions. This is not a knock-down objection, however, since languages often fail to mark distinctions which their practitioners regularly make. The discourse of colour is a case in point.
Then there is cliché, or what Cochrane dubs "auto-pilot English", which is quite distinct from incorrect usage. Those for whom every change is a sea change, every analysis is in-depth, every haven a safe one (what other kind of haven is there?) and every gift a free one (ditto) are more mentally indolent bores than slipshod speakers. This, in turn, is to be distinguished from management-speak and bureaucratese, for which thinking is best when it is outside the box, stretching the envelope and seizing the window of opportunity to deliver objectives, achieve sustainable targets and maximise best practice.
The objection to this kind of managerial cant is not that it is obscure - so is the language of motor mechanics and neurosurgeons - but that it belongs to a more pervasive process of dehumanisation known as late capitalism. The packaging, automating and telescoping of speech reflects a world in which you might have lost a cool million while you were laboriously writing "has an impact on" rather than "impacts". It is hard to see John Humphrys drawing the full political implications of this while keeping his job on the Today programme.
Cochrane shows some surprising flashes of forbearance. He accepts, however dolefully, that "myriad" no longer means "ten thousand" and that "lowest common denominator" will go on meaning "lowest possible" rather than indicating what is in fact a relatively high number. In a surprising fit of progressivism, he endorses both "hopefully" and "different than", but is properly strict on the misuse of "literally" ("they were literally glued to their TV sets"), on "fortuitously" misused to mean "fortunately", and on "dilemma" as meaning any old problem rather than a choice between two unappetising options.
Once again, however, the criterion here is (or "criteria here is", as some would now write) diversity, rather than pedantry or snobbery. When Cochrane informs us that those who write "in the throws" of should be treated "with ridicule and contempt", or that "educated" people pronounce "secretary" one way while "trade union officials and politicians" pronounce it in another, we are chillingly aware that we are in the presence of rather more than a harmless linguistic zealot. In class-ridden Britain above all, questions of language can often trigger quasi-fascistic reactions, as indeed can all questions of purity. Language and class are never separable in Britain, as one can see from the fact that the working class says "ay?", the lower middle class says "pardon?", the middle class says "sorry?", and the upper class says "what?" In Ireland, by contrast, the working class speaks of "Brown Tomas" and so does the middle class, though for quite different reasons. The lower middle class, however, puts back the "h", for fear of being tarred with the brush of Ballymun.
James Cochrane is not a quasi-fascist, just an old-fashioned English snob, as in his supercilious use of the word "educated" (how "educated" were Shakespeare and Dickens? How educated are Stella McCartney or Paul Merton?), or his fastidious insistence that the word "February" has four syllables (did it for Gibbon or Macaulay?).
"Educated speakers of British English place the stress on the first syllable (of 'harass')," he writes. "Others do not."
The syntax speaks volumes. Those who pronounce the first syllable of "homosexual" to rhyme with "Tom" rather than "home" will indicate their familiarity with the word's classical root. The less erudite, no doubt, will just shout "poofter!"
Some pubs in Britain have taken to advertising "real" ale, which is surely what the logicians might call a self- negating proposition. No doubt the quotation marks are meant as a form of italicisation. Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a wonderfully readable little treatise on the uses and misuses of punctuation, which will tell you all you need to know about the hyphen, the apostrophe and that now rare and threatened species, the colon. Truss holds out for consistency and clear usage without being neurotic about it and, unlike the stylistically stilted Cochrane, manages to be witty and entertaining as well as informative. It's one thing, in short, to know how to write, and another to be able to do it.
Terry Eagleton's latest book, After Theory, is published by Penguin Allen Lane
Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English
By James Cochrane
Icon Books, 126pp. £9.99
Eats, Shoots and Leaves
By Lynne Truss
Profile Books, 209pp. £9.99