This book looked promising – it was subtitled A How-Not-To Guide to the 47 Most Common Mistakes in English Made by Journalists, Broadcasters, and Others Who Should Know Better – and in the first few pages I came across a passage referring to that group:
| What did these people study in high school and college? Headline writing? Advertising techniques? No English, no history? Have they never loved words and ideas, the way a carpenter loves wood or a chef loves herbs? Didn't they want to know subjects and verbs, adverbs and prepositions, as the carpenter knows nails and sandpaper and hot glue? Have they never taken a sentence apart to see what made it run? |
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Good stuff. He had me very much on his side right at the start.
However, I wasn't much further into the book before I realised it was actually full of unsupported assertions that even a beginning grammarian like me could see were dubious.
Pettiness arises early in the piece. The author takes exception to a Hong Kong jeweller being quoted by a journalist as saying that, "he had dreamed all his life to have enough money to …". Of course the "to have" should be "of having", but what's his point? That people who live in Hong Kong don't always speak perfect English? Some news flash. Or perhaps he feels that journalists ought to rework direct quotes to improve the grammar – thereby having their interviewees speaking better than they actually did. Few native English speakers would utter a sentence like that, and certainly none who would be in the target audience for the book.
Even when he's making a valid and important point, instead of giving a few representative examples, he hammers away with case after case after case until the reader becomes exasperated: "Yes, yes! I get it, for heaven's sake – move on!"
For instance, subject-verb agreement, an easy point to demonstrate, is given fourteen examples, before he writes, "At this point, I felt I had probably chosen enough examples of subject-verb disagreement to make the point clear." But then, at the urging of the grumpy grammarian, he goes on to cite another twenty-two (!) examples that add nothing whatever to the argument. This kind of spoon-feeding is counter-productive. The informed reader has long since become bored, and the novice is misled into believing there's something diabolically subtle about the concept.
Two important issues were mishandled: Firstly, the difference between may and might, and secondly, the lie/lay problem. In both instances I finished the chapter a bit less clear in my own mind than at the start, although the issues are not actually that hard to explain. A few minutes browsing much shorter passages in my other reference works restored my clarity.
Then there were the places where the author had pointed out a common mistake, and pretended to be astonished that people could be so idiotic as to make it, when the error was in fact quite understandable. For instance, he gets all bent out of shape about people using lead instead of led as the past tense of lead, when it's obvious that people are unconsciously working on the analogy of read/read. English is tricky; sometimes you engender more goodwill by acknowledging that fact instead of battering people around the head for trivial slips.
The book lacks an underlying philosophy. Sometimes the author strains to be liberal, but at other times he's pedantic on minor points; the overall impression is of a grab-bag of personal prejudices rather than a coherent view of English usage.
Another problem I had was with the presentation. The device he uses is that he has a friend (the grouchy grammarian of the title), whose clippings he mines for examples of egregious errors. But the method quickly becomes tiresome and artificial, and the grouch is poorly characterised – he's pretty much an empty cliché of a grump (e.g. he says "humph!" a lot). At no time was I able to believe or pretend that the grouchy grammarian was anyone other than the author.
The last problem I have with the book, and I admit that this may be specific to me, is that there's a great deal of sports talk – mostly about baseball and American football. The author is clearly a fan of these two sports, so many of the solecisms he cites are from TV or newspaper sports commentators. For this non-American, non-sporting reader, that made much of the content foggy and incomprehensible.
To be fair, there is much of interest, and even a few gems, in the book, but if you purport to write about correctness in language then you have make sure that everything you write is actually correct. I don't mind people putting forward suggestions or opinions about usage, but when these are clearly debatable, yet presented as incontrovertible facts, the integrity of the whole enterprise is thrown into doubt.
Fortunately, I got this book out of the library; I would have been very disappointed if I had paid good money for it. I'll photocopy a few pages when I take it back, but I won't be sorry to drop it in the returns slot after that.