Why do you think that grammar matters?
I think for two reasons, firstly, it’s good, whatever you do for a living, to be able to communicate with people. One reason we have grammar is to avoid ambiguities, and the more grammatical you are, the more clearly you communicate. The other reason is that many young people who have not had the educational advantages that you and I have had lag behind in life because they are unable to make people believe that they are credible. If you go for a job interview and are inarticulate or you string words together in the wrong way and use words that don’t mean what you think they mean, the person interviewing you, who will normally have a better command of English than you do, won’t give you the job. I’ve always been very distressed by the way that academic linguists think that language shouldn’t be prescriptive and that people should speak and write as they see fit. These academic linguists are usually very well educated, with numerous university degrees, and they inflict on others a life-long ignorance that will hold them back.
You only have to look at some of the more successful immigrant communities that have come over in the past few years. The ones who learned to speak the language got on, the ones who didn’t learn it didn’t. That’s a regrettable fact but it is a fact nonetheless. If you want to prosper in this country: professionally, socially, academically, you’ve got to be able to speak English properly. So, one reason that I’d like grammar to be taught more widely in secondary schools is that it will create a level playing field for everybody and ordinary people going to get jobs will be able to speak English as well as those who have gone to the top public schools.
What do you say about those who are supposedly educated using words such as ‘them’ and ‘was’ in the wrong context?
There’s a difference between using those sorts of words in speech and in writing. I wouldn’t think badly of you if you make grammatical errors in conversation and you would think me very pompous if I used a phrase like ‘It is I’ rather than ‘it's me.’ Unfortunately there are a lot of educated people who make such mistakes in writing, and such mistakes call into question the author’s credibility. This could be avoided if people were taught grammar in schools, but there are very few schools, even private ones, who do that. In my experience, both as a pupil and as someone who goes into schools to give talks, people who don’t learn a foreign language are also very bad at grammar and I deplore the fact that there’s no longer a compulsion to learn a foreign language at GCSE. I think that if everyone did French or Latin to GCSE they would learn grammar in a way that they don’t learn it in English.
Would that encourage them to apply these grammar rules to their own language?
If they’re intelligent they’ll realise that what they’re learning is relevant. The skeleton of any language is the same as any other language, and that skeleton is grammar. If you learn in French that something is a noun and something is an adjective, and that there’s something called the subjunctive, you may, if you’re very clever, start to ask yourself what the equivalent in English is, and you will start to think more closely about your own language. I notice that those who study a language to a high level speak all languages pretty well, including their own language. I see this in my own children, who are 17 and 14 and have both done lots of foreign languages at school. My eldest son is studying three languages to A-level, and they both speak English better than their peers who are scientists. I think that it does give then a care for language.
You have a passion for grammar, then. What led you to write Strictly English?
Money. I wrote the book because someone had read my e-mails to Telegraph staff on writing bad English and they wondered if I’d write a book on it. I said that there’s a slight difference between doing what I do professionally and inflicting that on people out in the real world. If we make a grammatical error in our newspaper or use a word wrongly we get enormous amounts of negative feedback from readers. People buy us because we are a quality paper and are cross if there are errors in the paper that they would associate with people who are less educated than they are. So I’m very strict and there’s a man whose job it is to read every word that goes in the paper, who normally doesn’t miss anything. We are a business and I want people to keep buying the paper. I always fear that people might stop buying the paper if we don’t communicate with them at a level that they expect. I explained this to the man who suggested I wrote the book and he replied “there’s an enormous market for such books”. He was right, Strictly English sold 30,000 copies in hardback in four months, and my scepticism was misplaced. It hasn’t really been promoted and one of the reasons it sold so well is that people buy it and go and tell their friends “I should use fewer rather than less and use a subjunctive here or there.” I think that people of my generation, who were not as lucky as I was in having a good education, feel self conscious if they speak English badly. I think they find a straightforward book such as mine, which tells them clearly what’s right and what’s wrong, quite valuable.
The audience is everyone who wishes to improve their language, whether they’ve had an Oxbridge education, or only went to a comprehensive school. How did you pick the right tone?
I didn’t talk down to readers; I used the same tone as I use with my colleagues. I assumed that readers are clever, educated people who are capable of learning. I think that if you are very stupid you won’t buy my book because you won’t care about improving your English. This book is for people who are intelligent and who have been failed by the English education system, so I didn’t patronise them. I remember watching a programme on the television about 30 years ago. It was a programme about numeracy for adults who had not grasped numeracy at school. A picture came up on the screen and the very nice man who presented it said “here’s a picture of some chimney pots, can you work out how many there are?” There was silence for about 30 seconds and at the end of it he answered “there were 6, but if you got between 4 and 8, well done, you’re on the right line.” I was heaving with laughter and that was wrong because one shouldn’t make fun of people who are innumerate, probably through no fault of their own. I wanted to avoid writing a book about English that was like that because English is an exact science, you’re either right or you're wrong. There’s no point telling people that they can get away with things when they can’t. Political correctness is an example of this. People use the word ‘they’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’ because they are afraid to use ‘he’ because it excludes women. As I said at the front page of the book, I was brought up to use ‘he’ to include women – and it doesn’t mean any disrespect to women or to the great women writers we’ve had, it is just correct. Saying ‘he’ is less laborious than saying ‘she or he’, and it’s not wrong, in the way that saying ‘they’ is.
I quite liked the way you called that opening section ‘A Word about Sex’. Were you trying to be slightly populist in the way?
It was a bit of a joke wasn’t it?
Yes, the heading ‘PC Plodding’ for the chapter on political correctness is another one
What I wanted to do is try to alert people at page one that they weren’t going to get a very dry or boring book. I tried to be entertaining and amusing in it. If people buy the book expecting it to be full of exciting stories about sexual intercourse than so much the better. I don’t care why people buy it as long as they buy it.
What of the title ‘Strictly English’, did you pick it because of the popular connotations of Strictly Come Dancing and things like that?
I didn’t pick it. I was at a shoot on a Saturday 18 months ago, when I’d been asked to write the book. A man I've never met before or since, who was talking to me and my wife when we were between drives, asked me if I was writing another book, and I said “yes I am, I’m writing a book on the English language about how we should do things properly, and I can’t think of a title”. He replied “It’s on writing English correctly? – Strictly English.” He’s acknowledged in the front of the book. The ‘strictly’ phrase has got some currency at the moment; it lodges in people’s minds when they see it in bookshops. The word of mouth thing going on, is, I think, partly to do with the fact that the title is easy to remember.
I looked at some of the reviews of Strictly English...
Some of the reviewers hated it. Those who are academic linguists do not like people like me telling people what to do. I would say to them, it’s all right for you because you can speak and write proper English when it’s necessary. I worry about people who can’t; who don’t pass their GCSEs, don’t pass their A-levels, don’t get job interviews and don’t get into the right universities, because they are inarticulate. I want to make money, but I also hope that people whose grasp of English is not as good as mine to get a better grasp of English, because everyone can do it. No one is barred by lack of affluence from doing this sort of thing. Although some didn’t like it, some reviews really did. One of the reasons that Strictly English has had a boost in sales in recent weeks is that the Field, of all magazines, reviewed it, and they thought it was wonderful. Every time an academic linguist has given it an unpleasant review it’s sold more copies, so I take the view that all publicity is good publicity.
The reviews did spot a few errors and inconsistencies though. One that stood out was when you wrote that ‘Telegraph readers write to each other on writing paper rather than note paper’ which, according to Stephen Poole, suggests that the Telegraph has undergone a decline in its readership since we have earlier been told that “the phrase 'each other' can only apply to two people or things.”
Yes, that’s probably right; I’ll have to kill myself. The book was proofread by the most brilliant proof reader and read very carefully by my editor who is a very intelligent man. So any errors are purely my fault.
You listed all the books that you read for the book in the footnotes: the Oxford English Dictionary, and books by H.W Fowler, Eric Partridge and Charles Talbot Onions, none of which were written later than 1960. Did you read any more recent grammar books?
I read a book by Kingsley Amis published just after his death, which added nothing to my knowledge at all. I just read the dictionary. I am quite broad minded about this. I accept that words will change their meaning and that new words will come into the language to describe new phenomenon. I object to words changing their meaning for no reason, such as when people confuse ‘prevaricate’ and ‘procrastinate’ and ‘flaunt’ and ‘flout’.
You admit that words do change their meaning and you also say that you see no reason for a word to be used in any other than its etymologically correct sense, yet you prevaricate over phrases and words like 'to target’ and ‘obscene’, refusing to accept the new meaning, even as you admit that the nre meaning will be accepted in the future.
That’s just stating a fact about how language progresses. One word which doesn’t mean what everyone thinks it means is ‘prestigious’. You could say ‘distinguished’ or ‘honoured’, but ‘prestigious’ means ‘deceitful’, it’s from the same root as the French word prestidigitateur which means ‘conjurer’. Words become vogue words, I never remember anyone in my teens using the word prestigious, and then suddenly in the 1980s, everyone and everything was ‘prestigious’. Look it up in a dictionary and it doesn’t mean what everyone else thinks it means.
That’s a word that I’ve used and my generation’s used to mean 'honoured'. If the word has been used for the past twenty years in that context surely there’s no problem if everyone understands what it means?
It’s a problem for me. But then I’m very strict. If I were reading a professional writer and they use the word ‘prestigious’ in the wrong context I would cease to think that they were in quite the league that I hoped they were in.
Do you think there are many like you?
There is one on every newspaper, which is a good thing. I did a joint public meeting last week with the Production Editor of the Guardian. We talked about our respective stylebooks and he is as strict as I am. He is always attacking people on his newspaper for making mistakes, in the same way that I attack people.
Yes I’ve read one of your style emails, which was actually circulated on Facebook. You commented on the ‘public’ and ‘pubic’ error in there, amongst others.
That’s one of the least enjoyable errors that we make, and we make it all the time. It’s most depressing.
When you wrote the book you used various examples to illustrate your points: from the tabloids, from novels, from Aldous Huxley, from a newspaper published two years ago. Where did you find these examples?
I have a degree in English. I have read a lot of books. When I came to do this book I pulled books off the shelves of my library at home and used examples from those – as simple as that. Huxley was about the use of dashes wasn’t it?
Dashes and colons, yes.
I remember reading Huxley when I was your age and thinking, he really does love dashes. I also remember reading Barbara Pym and George Orwell and remembering how concise their sentences were. Enoch Powell was given to me for a practical criticism exam as an example of a rhetorical speech.
There’s one example you quoted from a newspaper which I’d like to ask you about: ‘the day before he died, David Cameron and his wife played with their son’
Well, that’s the question of the misplaced participle isn’t it?
The fact that you used it as an example could be seen as distasteful
I don’t know why the writer couldn’t have said: ‘The day before his son died, David Cameron and his wife played with him’, which would have solved that problem. Some things are going to be in questionable taste, but it also serves as a warning to my colleagues of the sort of embarrassment that can be caused if you get your grammar wrong
.
I’m interested in your opinions about politicians’ use of language, particularly the passive voice
It’s very easy for politicians to say something will happen rather than I will do something, since it distances them from their action. Orwell rails against the use of the passive voice for that reason: he felt it was the weapon of dictators and tyrants. If ever have a colleague here I will not say ‘it has been decided that there is not much happiness with you’, I will say ‘I am not happy with you’.
What about the way in which they coin phrases ‘squeezed middle’ ‘alarm clock Britain’?
Of course, they don’t coin them; a team of bright young things like you sit up late inventing them. They often are meaningless to everyone but the politician who uses them. I invented the phrase Essex Man in an article I wrote some years ago, and then he became a stereotype. Its patronising, it becomes a cliché.
How do you think we can reverse the decay of our language?
People can read my book, which has sold over 2 million copies. For our children, we start teaching grammar in schools and stop this notion that anything goes. There is such a thing as right and wrong. For people who are past that stage, I would advise reading writers of English prose and, if they are good, ask yourself why they are good, and if they are bad, ask yourself why they are bad, and try to emulate the good and distance yourself from the bad.
Strictly English is published by Random House.
