I’ve just read a deeply fascinating and provocative book that affirms something I’ve been trying to articulate for three decades! So, join me today as I explore David Crystal’s The Fight For English and discover what the glorious anarchy of language has to teach us about the beautiful spontaneous order that defines our daily existence.
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SHOW NOTES:
The Fight For English by David Crystal
Daniel Defoe’s “On Academies”
David Crystal Lecture – Cambridge University Press
Quote Origin: “This Is the Sort of Nonsense Up With Which I Will Not Put”
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Order without intent: How spontaneous order built our world.
Michael Malice: Anarchy, Democracy, Libertarianism, Love, and Trolling | Lex Fridman Podcast #128
So here’s a question from the opposite perspective: how much are you ignoring the true lesson of the tower of Babel? The true lesson of the tower of Babel is not to worship some boogity-boo guy in the sky, it’s that in order to divide people, you fracture the language.
Also, (as you point out) a lot of the supposed grammar rules (including not ending a sentence with a preposition) were proposed by self-ascribed pedants. They were immediately dismissed because of the already-existing history of the written word.
Once again I’m going to point out this ridiculous and hypocritical idea of “anarchy doesn’t means no rules, it means no rulers”. It is (at best) blind to the cannot-not axioms of society. For someone to say that anarchy means rules without rulers, then it either means that the collective people who decide what the rules cannot be called or referred to as anything. It is a paradox.
But I view the fake definition of anarchy as a subconscious implementation of the line that Tears for Fears song: “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”. When people give that BS definition of anarchy, I see it as a denial to the nuances and grey of existence as a means to put ones own thumb on the art of language. In other words, I see this definition as an exercise no different than that of the grammar nazis.
Shakespeare wrote that brevity is the soul of wit, but that is only true if one’s ideas are accurately and completely conveyed. Less said leaves more imagined, and someone can give you the idea that they have accurately understood the idea you were conveyed, but how do you know if they haven’t?
So that brings the question: what’s important?
Do we need a system? Well, how much time do you want to spend with each new person developping a language with them, and how much do you want to have to remember for different people?
Can we have a system that comes from a single point? How far is that going to reach and reach accurately? Do you know what an eggcorn is?
Personally, what I think causes the most problems in language is when a singular word is meant to encapsulate these grand and convoluted things as part of its definition when, in reality, they are little more than personally ascribed connotations.
And I will say that I find value in the recognition of keeping parts of etymological history in our words, because it reveals those people who will ask, “Hey, why is that there?”
Yes, it’s a good thing that language evolves, but the meaning of words can be twisted and weaponised as they were during the Covid scamdemic.
I enjoyed Truss’s book Eats, Shoots and Leaves and am sorry that you diss it James.
Judging by the comment sections on many podcasts and interviews, I do get annoyed by many commentators’ inability to spell common words.
Listening to a really fluent and articulate speech that is not littered with “kind of” or “sort of” is welcome.
At home we speak 65% Italian, 35% English. Our three children understand both languages perfectly, and they mostly speak Italian which is their mother’s tongue. I will say this: as a native English speaker, I never felt so good and so free until I learned to express myself freely in a second language. Looking back, even with a fine command of the English language, it’s quite restrictive to have English and only English at one’s disposal for communication.
I noted with interest the fact that David Crystal is also a speaker of Welsh, the original and oldest language of Britain, still spoken by around half a million of us here in Wales. Whereas English (more accurately named as Franco-Saxon) was established in the 16th century with the printing of the Holy Bible aided by William Shakespeare’ plays, Welsh continued to develop organically in the mountains and valleys of Wales. The result is that regional variations in Welsh continues to evolve, despite the BBC’s attempts to standardise it. We can pinpoint where a Welsh speaker comes from within a 30 mile radius simply by the way they speak and the words they use. Even the word order we use in constructing sentences can vary . I suspect this regional variation in the Welsh language informed David Crystal’s analysis of English and languages in general. Perhaps it gave him a more relaxed approach to variation in grammar.