Bridging the Unbridgeable

Out today, and open access: Of greengrocers, sports commentators, estate agents and television presenters: who’s in a usage guide and why, published in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.

With thanks to Olivia Walsh for organising the symposium In the Shadow of  the Standard in Nottingham, in September 2018.

Source: Cathleenschine.me

If you’re interested in prescriptivism, you might well want to read this recently published novel. It’s about twins who gradually grow apart, with the one thing binding them to the end being an old copy of a dictionary, probably  by Samuel Johnson, though they can only have it each to themselves 6 months at a time.

While the one twin turns into a poet, the other becomes a copy editor, whose focus is linguistic correctness: they couldn’t be further apart in the linguistic interests they develop over the years. There is a lot there for readers interested in prescriptivism: Fowler is referred to several times (though I wouldn’t have called Fowler’s Modern English Usage “an old grammar book”, p. 194: usage guides are not grammars), and many usage problems fly by, like the dangling participle, the split infinitive, the placement of only, the use of who/whom, and singular they – stuff we, linguists, don’t expect to find playing such a major role in a novel but love reading about.

What I don’t understand about the novel though is the role played in it by Johnson’s dictionary, who is quoted at the start of every chapter. The girls, in their early youth, had a fascination with words, and even developed their own secret language. They’re finally given a copy of a dictionary by their father, leaving it jointly to them after his death. By then, the twins are no longer on speaking terms and they have to find a way out for this. But Johnson was neither a grammarican nor a prescriptive handbook writer like Fowler, whose views on language do play more of a role in the novel. Perhaps my real (and actually only) problem with the book is its title: grammarians is what neither of the girls are.  Would The Poet and the Prescriptivist have been a better title? Even then, Johnson’s dictionary hardly seems to fit in.

Great news: my book will be out in two weeks time. 23 October is the official publication date. I can’t wait! To be published by Routledge, and copies can be pre-ordered there, in hardback and as an e-book.

Proofreading my forthcoming book Describing Prescriptivism, I came to p. 100 where I mention that Caroline Taggart’s Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queeen’s English (2010), published by the The National Trust, used to lie for sale in country houses all over Britain. That is, I remember seeing it lying about at every country house we visited while living in Cambridge in 21011. Unfortunately, I never thought of taking a picture of the book as evidence at the time.

This time, accompanying a Jane Austen garden tour last week as an academic tour guide and visiting several country houses in the process, I looked everywhere for Her Ladyship’s Guide, but to no avail. None of the shop assistants had even heard of the book. But we did find one of Caroline’s books, on two occasions even: 500 Words You Should Know. Not a usage guide, and not published by The National Trust, but still (I suppose) testifying to Caroline’s name and fame as a writer on language.