Henry Higgins, the pompous professor in My Fair Lady, puts it succinctly: "Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?" As his near-namesake Henry Hitchings points out, we have been asking that question since the end of the 14th century, if not longer. The way we speak and the way we write are entwined with our upbringing, social milieu and sense of self. Language allows us to share our thoughts, yet most public discourse about it seems to concentrate on division, on error, and on our limitless capacity to get worked up about stray apostrophes. An informative and lucid guide to the battlefield, The Language Wars charts a long history of pedantry, prejudice and scholarship. Some will object that the title puts the case a little strongly. But listen to John Humphrys in the introduction to a recent book about "proper" English: "Many battles have been lost, but the war is not yet over." Or consider Simon Heffer's silly proposition that it is relatively easy to define "correct English … once one has armed oneself with the Oxford English Dictionary". There has been a lot of belligerence about bad grammar.
"A language," Hitchings writes, "is a transcript of history, not an immutable edifice." This, he explains, is a descriptivist view: we speak and write in ways that change over time in response to many factors, and the job of linguists is to describe what happens and, if possible, why. Prescriptivists, by contrast, tell us the "correct" way to speak and write. Critics of the descriptivist position tend to argue that it favours laziness and sloppy teaching. Surely, they argue, we can't raise fulfilled and productive citizens who don't know how to write and speak properly? But that isn't what Hitchings suggests. Instead, he asks us to understand that, like the language itself, our criteria for assessing "proper" English are always in flux. The history of those criteria is "in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic… and educational malfeasance. But it is also an attempt to make sense of the world."
Many language warriors have entered the lists on both sides, some with strong opinions that now sound baffling. Thomas De Quincey, we are told, couldn't stand the word "unreliable". Coleridge loathed "talented". The Australian purist Percy Grainger wanted to strip English back to a brisk Anglo-Saxon vocabulary: musicians would play on "tone-tools" rather than instruments, and telephone calls would be placed by means of a "thor-juice-talker". Previous generations of language police seem to have been considerably more interesting than our own lot. The Victorian philologist Alexander Ellis, for instance, "weighed himself both dressed and undressed every day, always carried two sets of nail-scissors and a selection of tuning forks, and wore a greatcoat with twenty-eight pockets, which he called Dreadnought". (The tuning forks were for testing the pitch of tone-tools.) Even gumshoes have ideas about proper usage: one unlikely gem cited here is Rex Stout's 1962 detective novel Gambit, in which the disgusted hero burns a copy of the new Webster's dictionary because it "fails to uphold the distinction between imply and infer". It would have pleased him to know that a couple of years later Audrey Hepburn – fresh from playing Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady – could still explain the difference to William Holden in Paris When it Sizzles.
Hitchings tells a good story, but he also cares deeply about intricacy and nuance. He deals briskly with the ban on split infinitives (the fault of overzealous Latinists) and terminal prepositions (blame John Dryden). He is never prudish – there is an enjoyable chapter on obscenity and censorship – and is particularly critical of developments that stifle clear thinking, arguing that "political correctness" risks hiding real discrimination behind a veneer of ostentatious sensitivity. Interestingly, those who decry PC as an infringement of the right to free expression are often the same people who faint at the sight of a grocer's apostrophe. For all their ideological differences, supporters and opponents of PC are alike in being linguistic prescriptivists, enforcing arbitrary rules rather than praising nuanced, careful and varied expression.
Strong feelings about language often reveal underlying anxieties about identity and nationhood. In the 18th century, "getting English in order was increasingly seen as a way of solidifying national identity", and it seems likely that the recent rash of polemics has something to do with a similar desire for cohesion. Yet it would be a mistake to think, as some of his opponents will, that Hitchings is laidback about language. Far from it. The Language Wars asks us to think beyond tradition, habit and deference, and to consider what we want from our words. It is a very intelligent and polite call to arms, but a call to arms nonetheless.