CAMBRIDGE LETTER
This week... in Britain
BILL KIRKMAN
REUTERS
Christmas ... when the U.K. virtually closes down.
FOREIGNERS finding themselves in Britain during the Christmas holiday period are often astonished — and dismayed — to discover that the country virtually closes down for more than a week. What on earth, they may reasonably ask, do the British do during this period of hibernation.
It is a good question, and there are several good answers, including the cynical response that traditionally they shut themselves away with their families — which is one reason why divorce lawyers are busy early in the new year.
This year, it seems likely that a number of my fellow countrymen will be spending a good deal of time pedantically pursuing punctuation rules and grumbling at grammatical solecisms. The evidence? It lies in the fact that at the top of the current bestseller lists is a book by Lynne Truss called Eats, Shoots and Leaves.* The title is a reference to the joke about the panda which walked into a café, ordered a sandwich, ate it, then pulled out a gun and shot the waiter. "Why?" groaned the injured man. The panda shrugged, tossed him a badly punctuated wildlife manual and walked out. When the waiter consulted the book, he found an explanation. "Panda. Large black and white mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
The intrusive comma changes the sense, and gives the dedicated pedant a linguistic heart attack (though clearly in this case the actual likelihood that it will cause confusion is infinitesimal). Dedicated pedants, however, are quite thick on the ground, and the popularity of Lynne Truss's book comes as no surprise. Indeed, I readily confess to being among their number, as I have indicated in previous "Cambridge Letters".
My particular hobby horse is the misused apostrophe which in British English has reached epidemic proportions. Many people haven't a clue whether haven't should have an apostrophe, and see nothing wrong in abbreviating the plural of tomatoes to "tom's" (which must be irritating for Tom).
Another recently published book will also give pleasure to grammatical purists. Between you and I, by James Cochrane, is sub-titled "A little book of bad English".** The author has a serious purpose — to expose the "half-educated" use of language by people who employ words and phrases wrongly, in the belief that they are more correct than the English they would have spoken naturally. Some such usages are so common as to pass almost unnoticed, such as "free gift". It is salutary to read the author's comment: "Next time you are offered a free gift, ask yourself — or better still the party offering it — whether there is any other kind, a gift being something that is given, not sold".
Similarly, he turns a sharp eye on common cliches, such as "quantum leap", commenting tartly that it is "a term from the world of sub-atomic particles, in which it means something like `an abrupt transition from one quantum state to another', and should be left to people who are at home with such matters."
I am not, and shall scrupulously follow that advice.
To those who really enjoy the structure and variety of the English language, I can commend a much more serious book: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language,*** by David Crystal. It is a comprehensive scholarly masterpiece, which covers everything from the origins and history of the language, through regional and national forms of English (Australian, Indian, Jamaican and so on), to texting.
David Crystal is kinder to misusers of apostrophes than we pedants would be, commenting "These usages are universally condemned by educated writers, but the uncertainty is understandable, given the long and confused history of this punctuation mark in English".
The Encyclopedia is, of course, a serious work of scholarship, but it is eminently readable. In the section dealing with humour based on manipulation of language structure, for example, the author gives some delightful examples. They include part of a children's poem by Charles Connell, in 1985, which takes a spelling exception and turns it into a general rule:
Please ptell me, Pterodactyl
Who ptaught you how pto fly?
Who ptaught you how pto flap your wings
And soar up in the sky?
No prehistoric monster
Could ptake off just like you
And pturn and ptwist and ptaxi
Way up there in the blue.
The hibernating British may still leave visiting foreigners in the cold (literally) during the Christmas holiday break, but it is not all bad. We may be in for an outbreak of linguistic purity in the new year.
Bill Kirkman is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, U.K. E-mail him at wpk1000@hotmail.com
* Published by Profile
** Icon Books Ltd, Cambridge
*** Cambridge University Press
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