The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left

by David Crystal

Book Overview

In The Fight for English, Crystal offers a stimulating account of the struggle between various schools of grammar to control how we write and speak. Ranging back a thousand years, to the anguished concerns of Aelfric the Grammarian, and illuminating the contributions of Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, and many others, the book sheds light on ten centuries of warfare over spelling, punctuation, pronunciation, and much more. The author takes to task such...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0199229694
• ISBN13: 9780199229697
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.4" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

It's where it's at

From neologisms to busting the myth about putting prepositions at the end of a sentence ("This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put," said Churchill), the new Crystal book, "The Fight for English: How the language pundits ate, shot, and left" is a real gem. He takes the reader for a drive through the stiff prescriptive attitudes of English to the cooler, more flexible rules of today. He does this all with taste and respect for both sides of the linguistic courtroom. A must read.

The Fight for English as a saga

Ok, I have always believed that it is better to speak and write "correctly" than not. As Americans go, I think I do pretty well. But I also am aware of the fact that many other people from various parts of the country speak their own languages "well" and communicate among themselves just fine--even though it may sound awful to me. And yes, I was teased when I was a kid. The book, The Fight for English makes it clear, however, that both sides of that conversation have been far more vicious to each other in England than in America for something like a millennium. And David Crystal's story of how all of those dialects that grew up in the relative isolation of horses and buggies turned into modern English is fascinating. And particularly amusing is the fact that for the last 500 years or so, there was invariably somebody complaining about how the decline in the standards of English was leading the whole society to ruin. (It turns out, by the way, that starting the last sentence with "And" isn't nearly the horrible sin that I was raised to believe.) David Crystal's view is that throughout its history, the English language has been evolving--first bringing together the very different languages of the Celts, Angles, and the Saxons, and then merging in Norman French and Latin. Shakespeare understood that different dialects added variety to the language and included many in his plays, but he did so without prejudice. People from Yorkshire were not presented as comedic figures, presumed to be ignorant. Their accents were included simply to add variety to the sound of the language in the play. Soon after his time, however, the early "pundits" began to make it clear that there was a particular language for the upper classes, and if you didn't speak that, you were clearly a hick, with all that that implied. But different accents and dialects have persevered to this day, and the English language has not died. To the contrary, it is flourishing and is working on becoming the first true international language since Latin. None of this means that there should be no standards and it certainly does not mean that children should not learn the grammatical structures of the language. Indeed, in the 1960s, the British system discontinued teaching grammar in the 1960s as a backlash from the ruler on the knuckles approach to teaching English that had prevailed for a hundred years or more, and an entire generation has suffered. The students didn't even learn parts of speech. That approach clearly was faulty, so the response (in the UK, at least) has been development of the New English National Curriculum. This is a radically different approach that focuses on preparing students to understand the nature and structure of the language, with all the different ways that it can be used. The idea is that they should understand what the old rules are--as well as why they are changing. They should understand why different cultures use language differently.

Yes, I liked it

This is a great read, especially if you are into the evolution of our language. I read a lot of this stuff. I got interested in this area years ago when I watched the Story of English on PBS. That was perhaps 20 years or more ago. I don't try to pick up the historical pronunciation, because in my case, it would be impossible. The great thing that one comes away with is that English is still evolving.

The Big Con

Is your English educated or uneducated? Grammatical or ungrammatical? Urban or provincial? Standard or dialect? U or Non-U? Lered or lewed (to use the words that distinguished the high prestige English dialect from low presitige ones centuries ago)? All these terms imply something about people's social standing as well as they way they speak. And that's no coincidence. It's part of what David Crystal calls "the Big Con," recalling the movie The Sting. Crystal calls his book a "history of usage," but its focus is the history of prescriptivism in English, written to learn why Lynne Truss's book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, is so popular. Crystal may be the most interesting writer on English. (I can't pick between him and the Australian linguist Kate Burridge, author of Blooming English and Weeds in the Garden of Words.) I was a little concerned The Fight for English might be a recapitulation of Crystal's The Stories of English, but it's not. Crystal looks at how English evolved from a group of different but equal dialects to a presitigious dialect trying to keep it's status over other ways of talking that refused to be extinguished. This book isn't meant as sociology, but you do learn about the development of the British class structure. The most interesting part of the book is Crystal's story of growing up in Wales and Liverpool, learning to speak the right dialects so he didn't get beaten up on the playground or get a ruler on the back of the hand in class, where "educators" instilled in him the Received Pronunciation (what was then "BBC English"). The playground and the ruler both work. Crystal shows how the institutions that matter to us (like schools, the BBC, and The Simpsons) teach us about language. Crystal calls for a similar kind of language education that Anthony Burgess did in his 1992 book, A Mouthful of Air - - something between technical linguistics and old-fashioned prescriptivist "grammar." Crystal uses the analogy of a mechanic friend who can fix any car but is a lousy driver. Being a good driver takes more than knowing how an engine works. Grammar isn't everything. The Fight for English is also funny. Like the university student who thought (for a good reason) that a preposition had something to do with getting on a horse. And the humor in Crystal's book brings up another important point, one of the things that make all of his books a pleasure to read. It's easy for a professional linguist to mock "language mavens" like Fowler, Strunk and White, Lynne Truss, and other prescriptivist critics. (And in this book Crystal does show in specific cases why these language guardians don't know as much as they think they do.) But Crystal, unlike many "experts" is very respectful of other people's opinions, even (or especially) when they disagree with him. That's a change from argument in Britain and America lately. As Crystal says, "Pedants have their place. . . . without them, there would be no way of teaching young people how