I have read the Lynne Truss book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, but even though I often agreed with the points she made I found her general tone to be rather obnoxious and off-putting. I enjoyed the following book far more.
The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot and Left by David Crystal
David Crystal is no stranger to the peculiarities of the English language. He has written or collaborated on several books about the history and development of English as a language, including the very comprehensive The Stories of English and the 2005 Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. And as someone who has spent quite a bit of time pondering the English language and charting its evolution, he is both intrigued and deeply disappointed by the popularity of books such as Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, which its author touts as the ‘zero-tolerance approach’ to punctuation. As he remarks, ‘Zero tolerance? That is the language of crime prevention and political extremism. Are we really comfortable with the recommendation that we should all become linguistic fundamentalists?‘ To try to understand the origins of this recent trend in linguistic intolerance, Crystal decided to look into the history of the fight over English usage, the battles that pit the self-proclaimed defenders of ‘proper English’ against those who (for one reason or another) were not exactly prepared to impale themselves upon an upturned semi-colon. The product of that study is The Fight for English, a book that turns an understanding and occasionally sympathetic but nonetheless critical eye on the idea of linguistic fundamentalism.
As Crystal relates, the fight for English is by no means a thing of the recent past; it is almost as old as the language itself. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for example, are peppered with instances of educated people mocking the speech of the uneducated, and vice versa, with both sides claiming that the other has no real understanding of how English works. Over the centuries, various waves of invasion and the steady rise in cross-Channel trade continually brought new words into the English language and sparked arguments over whether these words were proper additions to the language. Revisions in spelling conventions, often carried out by those who wanted to make English words more closely resemble their ancient origins (as in the silent ‘b’ in ‘debt’, to match the Latin debitum), ran into resistance from those who preferred to spell words as they were commonly pronounced — often with regional dialect variations. As a result, the English language was already a confusing jumble by the time the printing press arrived in England, and the rise of print culture, the expansion of literacy, and the sheer amount of printed material produced prompted further calls for standardisation. Various language authorities, including John Hart in the mid-sixteenth century and Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, pleaded with fellow members of the literary elite to follow particular ‘accepted’ spelling and punctuation styles. Grammar books, mostly based on the Latin grammars that were beaten into English schoolboys’ heads, sought to enforce some sort of order and regularity on a frequently irregular language. As English spread across the Atlantic Ocean, new variations in spelling and punctuation sprang up that continue to cause confusion to this day. And still the language debates continue, with periodic squabbles over comma usage and the best location for quotation marks at the end of sentences…up to the present day, when educators bemoan the rise of netspeak and self-identified language authorities (like Lynne Truss) can find a lucrative audience for their zero-tolerance guides.
Crystal’s linguistic history is lucid, fast-paced, and entertaining, but toward the end of the book The Fight for English starts to dissolve into a rambling authorial attempt to defend himself against the ‘pedants’ who criticise him for having too much of an ‘anything goes’ attitude towards the English language for their liking. One can readily agree that the zero-tolerance mindset is often counterproductive — the very phrase ‘grammar Nazi’ is proof of that, if nothing else. It also tends to breed the sort of tiresome Internet flamewars involving scathing critiques of the original poster’s spelling or grammar in lieu of an actual rebuttal to what the poster wrote. (Is there a Godwin’s Law for grammar Nazis?) Yet it is equally true that attention to the finer points of English grammar, spelling, and punctuation improves the clarity and readability of ideas, reducing ambiguity and suggesting that the writer has taken the time and effort to write well. Arguing over these standards forces us to continuously evaluate the English language and to be conscious of how it is changing — in short, to be more self-critical and aware of what our words and our usage standards convey to others. If, as Crystal claims, the language fundamentalists are useful because they define one end of the tolerance spectrum, then they are also useful because they keep the debate going on some level. At the risk of making an overly Orwellian metaphor, the fight for English will only be truly won when we all use Newspeak — and most any kind of debate would be preferable to that alternative.
Commentary: A very un-Canadian Caper….
27 September 2012(I originally wrote this on another online journaling site, but after consideration I feel that it’s worth re-posting here as well, with a few minor edits.)
I know that I shouldn’t let myself get too upset about Hollywood’s usual approach to history, because if I did then I’d likely never do anything with my time but froth at the mouth. But I feel rather strongly about this most recent bit of history that Hollywood’s taken on: the Canadian Caper, which will shortly air as the new Ben Affleck picture Argo.
It’s an exciting true-life story, I’ll admit. At the height of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, a CIA operative is given the task of rescuing six Americans who managed to escape the storming of the Tehran embassy and are hiding in the homes of two Canadian diplomats, one of whom is Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor. So the CIA fakes an entire film production company, Studio Six, and gets into Iran under cover of scouting locations for a new film called Argo. When the fake film team leaves the country shortly thereafter, the six Americans (having been given Canadian passports with CIA-forged Iranian visas) leave under their cover as the film crew, reaching the safety of Switzerland before travelling back to the States. The remaining Canadian diplomats evacuate the country shortly thereafter, and when the press breaks the story of the daring ‘Canadian Caper’, Iran breaks off diplomatic relations with Canada in retribution. Lots of room for action, adventure, and dramatic tension in a story like that. It’s a nail-biting suspense flick if I ever heard one.
But now we come to Argo, the film based on these events.
According to the IMDB cast list, as best I can tell the only Canadian figure given reasonable billing is Ambassador Ken Taylor, played by Victor Garber (thankfully, Canadian himself). Taylor’s wife Pat is also included, further down the cast list. But there is no mention of John and Zena Sheardown, the Canadian immigration officer and his wife who also sheltered three of the six Americans for more than two months. No mention of either Prime Minister Joe Clark or Foreign Minister Flora MacDonald, who originally pushed through the Order in Council that issued six Canadian passports to be used for the rescue attempt. Yes, Tony Mendez and the CIA organised the actual rescue, faking the visa information and going into Iran as the exfiltration team. But for those two months, Taylor and Sheardown put themselves and their families at great personal risk to hide the fugitive Americans, living with the constant fear that someone would find out what was going on and let it slip to the hostage-takers at the American embassy. Why are the Canadians so conspicuously absent from a film about the Canadian Caper?
Granted, I understand that the film is based on Tony Mendez’s book Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled off the Most Audacious Rescue in History, which naturally focuses on the CIA’s part in the rescue of the six Americans. Unlike Canadian historian Robert Wright’s book Our Man in Tehran, which centres on Ambassador Taylor’s role during the hostage crisis, Argo plays up the successful, hands-on American action — such a contrast to the months of waiting endured by the hostages, and the shambolic failure of the Operation Eagle Claw rescue attempt. Nonetheless, by all but writing the Canadians out of the Canadian Caper, Argo suggests that Ben Affleck has taken all the wrong lessons about creating historical drama from his heavily panned role in 2001’s Pearl Harbor.
I will probably see Argo, just so I can critique it on its own merits or lack thereof rather than on what I’m seeing from the trailers and the cast list. I’m particularly interested in how the Iranians themselves are portrayed, and if even the slightest nods are given to the history of American meddling in Iran and its less-than-honourable support for the shah. But I’ll be fighting my own blood pressure the whole time.
Posted in commentary, diplomacy, film and television, intelligence, metahistory, USA | Leave a Comment »