Ammon Shea - Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation

Linguistic pet peeves require two things in order to survive and flourish: constant maintenance and the blood of a freshly wounded language. If the people who are peeved about a perceived language misuse do not remain vigilant, the issue is likely to slip from the awareness of the general public. And if the misuse is not repeated often enough, the peeve becomes irrelevant.

Anything that is worth fighting over is also worth celebrating. The aim of this book is to examine a number of the issues commonly thought of as mistakes in English usage and to see how these mistaken forms have been used over the past five hundred years in ways both eloquent and awkward. It is presented as a history of the things that we think are correct, the reasons why we think them so, and a celebration of the marvelously flexible language that has allowed room for such myriad forms.

According to those who sit up at night worrying about the state of our language, English has been headed to hell in a hand basket for a very long time. From the stubborn continuity of English, however, it seems clear that either (a) we are in an exceedingly slow hand basket or (b) the language will not break, no matter how willfully we mistreat it.

For hundreds of years we have been hearing a familiar litany of complaints: The language is being weakened by foreign imports, the failure to distinguish between similar words will lead to some devastating lack of specificity, young people are debasing the language with slang, Americans are ruining the Kings English, improper grammar will lead to an inability to communicate beyond the most basic level of grunts. Yet in spite of all the indignities that we have heaped upon the English language, it continues to thrive and grow in rather magnificent fashion.

A good number of the complaints that one hears about language usesuch as avoiding overly long wordshave been constant for hundreds of years. Many otherssuch as the distinction between shall and willhave largely fallen by the wayside and now appear to us as historical curiosities, rules about which we scratch our heads and wonder why they once had people so bothered. Some complaints are modern creations, such as the hand-wringing over how the Internet and the use of text messaging are robbing our youth of the ability to write or think in phrases that exceed 140 typographic characters. Throughout all of this there are but two things that have remained constant: The English language continues to change and a large number of people wish that it would not.

For five hundred years speakers of English have been arguing over, worrying about, and scolding each other about how the language should be used. These speakers are largely divided into two camps: those who suspect that they themselves misuse the language and feel insecure about it and those who think they do not misuse the language and feel rather irritated by those who do (although there is admittedly some overlap between these two groups). In the view of the latter group, a perfect world would have a uniform standard taught to everyone, and there would be some authoritative guide that could enforce linguistic perfection, a sort of almanac for the language that could instantly settle any dispute about the use of a word or turn of a phrase. But then English would not be English: Our language is a glorious hodgepodge that is the result of invasion, exploration, linguistic inventiveness, and yes, simple error. And the book you hold in your hands is not an attempt to turn our language into an almanac of lists.