For too long people who care about language have allowed themselves to be represented as authoritarian monsters wanting to impose their views on everyone else. Some do and they will fail. Many more are just worried about the way things are going and would like to feel their voices are being heard. They want to be able to engage in the argument and try to have some influence in the battle over usage.
That’s John Humphreys in Lost for Words (2004).
Humphreys’ subtitle: ‘the Mangling and Manipulating of the English Language’. It’s the manipulating that I’d like to hamper, however minutely.
Carol Atherton at NATE, the UK’s National Association for the Teaching of English, didn’t like Humphrys’ book much. . She says, with justice, that the effect of the book after a while is like being locked up with a grumpy old man. She calls Humphrys an ‘amateur’ albeit a ‘permitted amateur’. It’s clear she wouldn’t renew his permit. She likes the ‘professionals’ – linguistics people like David Crystal – who reject the idea of better and worse usage. So you’d only offer a class ‘excerpts’ – or does she mean ‘specimens’?
Look 5B a prescriptivist.
Oo-er Miss.
And just look at the the metaphors of filth and disorder that he uses to describe the current state of the language‘.
That’s us Miss, innit?
How could we mobilise other discourses to recontextualise Humphreys?
Fascist!
