Filled with happy academic memories of the 7th Prescriptivism Conference organised by Linda Pillière and her team at the University of Aix Marseille towards the end of last month! The papers were all very interesting, the plenarists (Nuria Yañez-Bouza, Jane Hodson and Ian Cushing) very well chosen, and it was great to meet academic friends of long standing (in person once again) and to make new ones in the process. There are plans for publishing the proceedings (Multilingual Matters has already shown interest), and the next conference on the subject will be held in Brussels, to be organised by Rik Vosters and colleagues. Looking forward to it already!
One of the papers was particularly interesting from the perspective of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project. It only came on towards the end, so there was little time to exchange views and experiences, but it was fascinating to see how it drew on our HUGE database but dealt with styleguides rather than usage guides. These are text types which we took great care to distinguish in our project, not only because there are so many of them but also because they are expected to have exerted a different kind of influence on users and their language use. Style guides are used obligatorily, whereas usage guides are only consulted at the need of the individual user. There is nevertheless a great deal of overlap between them.
The style guide project is run by Holly Baker from Brigham Young University, and it owes a debt, she noted in her paper, to the HUGE database. It will also be freely accessible, she said and should already be available (if I remember correctly) by the end of next year. Her co-presenter at the conference was Liana Jankovich (not mentioned on the conference programme, but apparently a student from Brigham Young University as I found by googling her), who presented some preliminary results from an analysis of the use of metalangistic terms in the database. I expect considerable overlap with data on this subject from usage guides (see my book Describing Presciptivism, chapter 6) or from normative grammars from the eighteenth century, which is where the roots of prescriptivism can be found (see The Bishop’s Grammar, chapter 4). So I’ll be following this fascinating project with great interest!
On Richard Osman and his editors
So I’ve finally read them all, all four of Richard Osman‘s The Thursday Murder Club crime novels. Not in the order in which they were published, due to their availability in our public library (so that in the end I actually bought three of them). I do recommend reading them in their order of publication though, so first The Thursday Murder Club (2020) itself, as it presents the main characters, followed by The Man who Died Twice (2021), The Bullet that Missed (2022) and The Last Devil Today (2023). They probably could be read independently, but there is a continuing line of storytelling, and the final novel neatly and sadly wraps the whole series up.
As I wrote elsewhere on this blog, I find it impossible to read without a pencil, especially when I come across metalinguistic comments relating to prescriptivism (and this blog). And yes, I found them in Osman’s novels, too. On the who/whom issue in the very first of them, for instance, or on I/me and got for have in the last one I read (The Man who Died Twice).
The comments all make sense, as making linguistic corrections is in line with the character of Elizabeth, former MI5 agent, but reading the Acknowledgements (as I always do) made me think that something else is going on. In all except for the closing novel Osman pays thanks to his editors, Trevor Horwood (twice, for the first two) and Natalie Wall (for the third) for pointing out particular linguistic strictures to him and (presumably) making him correct his language accordingly:
That last comment makes me wonder whether Natalie Wall is perhaps American, even though she appears to have been part of the UK publishing team? See p. 420 of novel number 4, which, surprisingly at this stage, contains no linguistic thanks to his editors (I looked three times).
What does all this mean? To me it suggests that Osman was playing a linguistic game with his editors, who may have pointed out particular linguistic infelicities (I find it striking, for instance, to find what looks like a deliberate split infinitive in the acknowledgement to Natalie). It may even be the case that he put in particular covert metalinguistic comments in his novels, just to make the point that in his eyes such criticism was trivial. And that by the fourth novel he had tired of the game, and chose not to comment on the linguistic editing process any more.
There won’t be any more Thursday Murder Club crime novels, it seems, but the good news is that the series is being adapted into a Netflix film, with Helen Mirren being cast as Elizabeth, Pierce Brosnan as Ron, Ben Kingsley as Ibrahim and Celia Imrie as Joyce. What a cast, and what a film to look forward to. Needless to say, I’ll watch with pencil and notebook at hand to see whether any of the metalinguistic comments made it into the script.
[Thank you Lyda, and Joan for confirming this, for commenting that “earlier this year Osman announced on FB that the series’ fifth book will be coming next year”. Will be hugely looking forward to it, and also to see if Richard Osman will continue to haggle with his editors over issues of prescriptivism.]
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