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joyce L

Books of The Times - 'The Lexicographer's Dilemma' - Jack Lynch Explores English - Revi... - 0 views

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grammar

shared by joyce L on 19 Aug 11 - Cached
  • Not until the 17th century did people begin thinking that the language needed to be codified, and the details of who would do that and how have yet to be resolved. Should it be accomplished through a government-sponsored academy, an officially sanctioned dictionary, or what?
  • onathan Swift, for instance, had a thing about the word mob, a truncation of the Latin “mobile vulgus” (fickle crowd). Who knows how many other masterpieces he might have written had he not wasted all that energy fighting a battle that didn’t need fighting.
  • While some early writers were trying to pin English down, others were contributing to its disarray, as Mr. Lynch notes. “Another threat to good English,” he writes, “came from the poets, who, in order to get their lines to scan, had squeezed and mangled good English words until they were barely recognizable.”
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  • And then there’s the matter of the split infinitive, which some today who fancy themselves grammatical purists cannot abide. Mr. Lynch points out that the split infinitive has actually gone in and out of fashion several times, for no apparent reas
  • How do you collect every known word, decide between competing spellings, reflect shades of meaning, separate faddish uses from the ones that will endure, and so on?
  • “Too often,” he writes, “the mavens and pundits are talking through their hats. They’re guilty of turning superstitions into rules, and often their proclamations are nothing more than prejudice representing itself as principle.”
  • grammatical doomsayers had better find themselves some chill pills fast, because the crimes-against-the-language rate is going to skyrocket here in the electronic age. There is already much whining about the goofy truncated vocabulary of e-mail and text messaging (a phenomenon Mr. Lynch sees as good news, not bad; to mangle the rules of grammar, you first have to know the rules). And the Internet means that English is increasingly a global language.“All the signs point to a fundamentally reconfigured world,” he writes, “in which what we now think of as the English-speaking world will eventually lose its effective control of the English language.”
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