The Language Wars by Henry Hitchings

Author:Henry Hitchings [Hitchings, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Linguistics, Grammar, Reference, General
ISBN: 9781848545106
Google: VbTCgiuBlFAC
Publisher: John Murray
Published: 2011-02-02T18:00:00+00:00

5

Hitting le jackpot

Arguing about academies

The English love of liberty is fabled. It’s one of those ‘myths about the English’ that is fundamentally true. But really the love of liberty is a characteristic of English-speakers. They have resisted and always will resist any attempt to reorganize their language and regulate it from the top down. Yet they will complain endlessly about problems that could finally be resolved only through such regulation.

The idea that the English language should be sent to school flourishes today. Witness the recent announcement by the Queen’s English Society, a British charity, of its plan for an Academy that will act as a ‘moderating body’ to protect and discipline the language.1 Schemes of this kind blossomed in the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries. There was a determination to achieve greater clarity of syntax. This involved, among other things, doing away with double comparatives (more wiser) and double superlatives (most wisest), paying attention to concord (mainly the agreement between verbs and their subjects), using tenses more rigorously, and differentiating between which and who. To many of those who pressed for change, it seemed that an institution was needed to hand down rulings on such matters.

In 1660, the year Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot published the Port-Royal Grammar, the Royal Society was founded. Its stated purpose was ‘the improvement of natural knowledge’. This ‘natural knowledge’ was what we now call ‘science’ – a word that did not attain its current meaning until the early eighteenth century – and in 1664 the Society, hoping to establish a new model of methodical expression, organized a twenty-two-strong ‘committee for improving the English language’. However, the committee met only a handful of times. The real influence of the Royal Society was on the style of scientific writing.

In 1667 the Society’s historian Thomas Sprat argued in favour of a ‘natural’ and ‘naked’ mode of speech. He thought English was on the slide; there was too much noise in men’s prose. Sprat excoriated fineness and abundance of phrasing, which were vain and deceptive – possibly even demonic. Fancy diction was a form of sorcery; in Sprat’s view, writing that contained a great deal of ornament was an instrument of wickedness. The sometimes bewilderingly long sentences of sixteenth-century writers, who followed the stylistic example of Cicero, were to give way to a new curtness of expression. Short words and ‘primitive purity’ were in; digressions and ‘specious tropes’ were out. It is easy to say that this was inevitable, since the advance of science called for a more clinical style of writing. But the Society’s stylistic agenda was shaped by politics: its members advocated plainness (which they didn’t always practise) to emphasize their distance from the verbosity and fanciful metaphors of the period’s jingling assortment of religious fanatics, alchemists and millenarian bullshitters.

Joseph Glanvill’s The Vanity of Dogmatizing, an essay on the importance of scepticism and testing ideas by experiment, is an interesting example of the influence of the Society’s thinking. Its first version, published in 1661, is flowery.

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