“Only an idle fool would convict Jane Austen of bad grammar”, runs the Times headline of yet another panegyric to illiteracy produced by Oliver Kamm.
By contrast, a clever, busy chap like Ollie has no time for fine distinctions among ‘convict of’ and ‘accuse of’ or ‘charge with’, either of which would have fit his sentence better.
What Ollie has plenty of time for is a systematic campaign based on a linguistic philosophy he summarises thus: “[Grammar] has many rules and the way to find out what they are is to examine how native speakers use their own language.”
Exactly which native speakers are we talking about, Ollie? Tattooed Millwall fans? Smug Times columnists? The average of the two? Since, on this evidence, there’s little intellectual difference, the grammatical extremes must also be converging.
Real grammar, Ollie, is not only descriptive but also normative. Anyone who asserts that whatever native speakers say is correct because they say it is effectively declaring all norms to be invalid.
I’ve heard this view expressed before, though never by someone with pretensions to expertise. “Language,” they’d say, “is just a means of communication.” To which my usual retort is that linguistic norms are precisely what makes communication precise or indeed possible.
If native speakers say ‘masterful’ instead of ‘masterly’, or ‘appraise’ instead of ‘apprise’, no communication occurs because what the listener understands is different from what the speaker thinks he’s saying.
Ollie is scathing about those who criticise William Hague “for the supposed error of discussing whether he or Tony Blair held ‘the best job’. The sticklers insist that the comparative must be ‘the better job’. What hogwash.”
The sticklers are right and Ollie is illiterate, or at least ignorant of the difference between a comparative and a superlative. In the cited sentence, ‘the better job’ would mean the better of the two jobs, one held by Mr Hague and the other by Mr Blair. ‘The best job’ would mean one better than all other jobs. Either option is possible, so how is the listener to know which one is meant?
Quoting great writers’, in this case Jane Austen’s, solecisms as support for Ollie’s cherished grammatical populism is disingenuous. Jane Austen et al create their own language universes in which they are the deities establishing all the rules.
Sometimes they use bad grammar on purpose, to achieve a stylistic effect. Sometimes they do so out of carelessness, caused, say, by that second sherry before dinner, time pressure or the late hour of the day. Either way, simple mortals haven’t earned the right to the same latitude that great writers enjoy and silly mortals demand.
Encouraging such latitude is guaranteed to produce generations of tongue-tied, monosyllabic functional mutes – exactly the type churned out by our oxymoronic comprehensive education.
But hold on, Ollie takes exception to that assessment. He extols “the generally high standard of English language teaching in schools”. A less permissive grammarian would be tempted to say ‘…of English taught in schools’, which would make the sentence more mellifluous of sound if no less wrong of thought.
Here we leave the domain of grammar to enter that of ethics. Ollie, I’m like, where was you brung up, mate? Wasn’t you teached not to lie? Or is you deaf as well as dumb? Djahmean? Wha’ever.
A short walk through the streets of any British city, and not necessarily its bad part, will disabuse anyone of the notion that in our schools English is taught well, or indeed at all. One would get the impression that we’ve reverted to the primordial era, well before man received the gift of coherent speech.
Never mind the streets: listen to our newscasters who, if unprompted and unscripted, have trouble talking in correct sentences. What regularly comes out of their mouths is “people who were sat at the table”, an ugly usage of recent provenance, doubtless inspired by Ollie-style laissez-parler.
I’m sure he’ll spring to the defence of that usage with the same energy he showed a few months ago when supporting the reply “I’m good” to the question “How are you?”.
To display the power of his convictions, he’d now probably answer this question with that liberally egalitarian Americanism. Glad to hear you’re good, Ollie. But you’re clearly not well.