David Marsh - For Who the Bell Tolls

Oh, my old mans a dustman, he wears a dustmans hat, He wears cor blimey trousers and he lives in a council flat. He looks a proper nana in his great big hobnail boots, Hes got such a job to pull them up that he calls them daisy roots.

LONNIE DONEGAN

You have to ask probing questions of nature. Thats what is called experimentation, and then you may get some answers that mean something. Otherwise you just get junk.

NOAM CHOMSKY

It all started with Lonnie Donegan and the girl of my eight-year -old dreams. My Old Mans a Dustman was not the first record I bought: that was Cliff Richards The Young Ones. It was, however, the first record I loved. Lonnies irreverent tale of his fathers adventures as a council binman was cheekily related in an exotic (to me, 200 miles north of London) cockney accent and full of fascinatingly arcane language 50 years later, I still dont know what cor blimey trousers are, and I dont want to know: it might break the spell.

I became so obsessed with the song that I even began to wish my own old man were a dustman, rather than a telephone engineer. And not only because it would mean I could stop trying to justify my claims that while serving in the Royal Air Force (true), he had been a Spitfire pilot during the Battle of Britain (untrue). How hilarious it would have been when Dad came home to take off his dustmans hat and hobnail boots and regale us with tales of his life as what the songs subtitle ironically called a refuse disposal officer.

I knew I just had to perform this song live at the class Christmas concert organised by our teacher, the glamorous Mrs Birtles. My big problem, apart from a lack of instruments and talent which I reckoned I could bluff my way through was finding a sidekick to enable me to crack Lonnies jokes. Sample:

My dustbins absolutely full of toadstools.

How do you know its full?

Because theres not mushroom inside!

I asked all the boys in the class but, rightly fearing that they might make fools of themselves, they turned me down. I was too scared to ask the girls, and especially the girl I secretly loved: Clare, an ice-cool blonde with pale blue eyes who was the epitome of junior school style and sophistication. Admittedly, I didnt have much to go on my mum, Mrs Birtles and Valerie Singleton of Blue Peter were my only points of comparison but to me, Clare was the perfect woman.

Imagine my astonishment, then, when in response to Mrs Birtles appeal to the girls, who should volunteer to be the foil for my comic musical turn but Clare herself. The gig was a fiasco she was, naturally, word perfect and charmed our sceptical audience while I fluffed or forgot most of the lyrics but it was what Clare said to me backstage afterwards that was to have a lasting impression. Trying to act casually, I spluttered out a feeble question: why had she agreed to be my straight man?

Because you always come top in the spelling test.

My spelling the one thing I was any good at had got me the girl!

Things didnt work out between Clare and me: it turned out that gauche eight-year-old geeks were not really her type (although this didnt prevent her equally lovely younger sister inexplicably agreeing to go out with a spottier, but still gauche and geeky, teenage me a few years later). But she taught me a valuable lesson. You have to make the most of what you are given in this life, and while my preferred career choices footballer or rock star would probably have been a more reliable route to getting girls, a flair for spelling (and, later, grammar) were what I had been given. They have been the basis of nearly four decades in journalism and a lifelong quest for grammatical perfection. Or, as you might regard it, messing about with other peoples words to make them read better. This book is the result of that quest.

The late Nicholas Tomalin, a distinguished foreign correspondent, said the only qualities essential for success as a journalist were rat-like cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability. He was right about the first two, but Im not sure about the last one I have worked with plenty of successful journalists I would not trust to write a shopping list. The phone-hacking scandal came as no surprise to most of us because anyone who has worked as a reporter knows that you would sell your grandmother into slavery if it helped you get a good story. When it comes to writing, however, journalists are like any other group of people: some are better than others. The less good ones rely on colleagues to translate their efforts into something you can publish with reasonable confidence that the person whose name appears on the story will not be pelted with rotten fruit by contemptuous readers.

Ive spent my adult life working for newspapers, from Kent to Hong Kong, from the Sun to the Financial Times, from local weeklies that sold a few thousand copies to the Guardian, with its global readership of many millions. Among other jobs that no one else would do, Ive been a ballet critic, football reporter, lonely hearts correspondent, restaurant reviewer and pop pundit. But editing has given me the greatest satisfaction: the satisfaction that only comes from turning the sows ear of rough-and-ready reportage, written against a deadline, into a passable imitation of a silk purse, then putting a witty, apt or at the very least not inaccurate headline on it.

Its been a lifelong mission to create order out of chaos. And thats what I mean by a quest for perfection. The chaos takes many forms. It might be sloppy syntax, a disregard for grammar or a fundamental misunderstanding of what grammar is. It could be an adherence to rules that have no real basis and get in the way of fluent, unambiguous communication at the expense of ones that are actually useful. Then theres chaos and confusion about punctuation for which the poor greengrocer seems, rather unfairly, to get most of the blame and spelling. The chaos is not random, however. Clear, honest use of English has many enemies: politicians, business and marketing people, local authority and civil service jargonauts, rail companies, estate agents, academics even some journalists. Thinking and writing in cliches, abusing and misusing language, assaulting us with gobbledegook, they are a powerful foe but we can beat them. I hope this book will help.

Lets face it: most grammar books are boring. This includes academic works couched in language so technical and arcane that they might have been written specifically to make the subject difficult to understand, much as people imagine (wrongly, as it happens) that the Qwerty keyboard was invented to slow down typists. In Shakespeares