The Language Wars

August 29, 2011
Hitchings (The Secret Life of Words), theater critic for London’s Evening Standard, explores “the history of arguments about English,” from Chaucer to Lenny Bruce. There are endless debates over proper usage, but what is proper? The self-appointed guardians of good usage can be irate: “Just ask the language professors who have received hate mail for refusing to take a stand against split infinitives.” (Hitchings himself defends the familiar Star Trek opening: “The assonance of ‘to boldly go’ is more striking—not only because of its rhythm, but also because it’s less compressed—than that of ‘to go boldly’.”) Hitchings examines such topics as dialects, diction, double negatives, word purists, grammatical rules, regional accents, obscenity laws, text messaging, and prescriptive books such as The Elements of Style: “A great deal of what it has to say looks quaint now.... Its continued success owes much to a refusal to be modern.” This insightful look at the evolution of English overflows with entertaining historical anecdotes. It also serves as a fine contemporary usage guidebook.