For Who The Bell Tolls

Ever since Lynne Truss’s marvellous affirmation of the uses of punctuation in Eats, Shoots and Leaves books such as this commentary by David Marsh have almost restored some sense of the importance of grammar to the linguistic world as English-speakers use it.

Time was when we were all taught the difference between an adjective and an adverb, when parsing and analysis were part of any pupil’s education, when conjunctions, participles and even gerunds (although I never quite got those right) were ritually explained and examined and when even pronunciation had its place in English as she is spoken. Much seems to have been banished when it was decided by well-paid and highly educated idiots that the most important thing about language was self-expression.

The difference between self-expression and communication was ignored, so out went grammar and spelling and pronunciation and even logic; these elements were left to the students of Latin (or indeed Irish) and we know what has happened there. David Marsh is all for communication, which, after all, is how language was developed, with writing from the first scratches on stone to the hieroglyph, hieratic, demotic and Coptic scripts all following on via Egypt and the East.

It’s not always easy to grasp because speakers of English write with the Latin alphabet. Marsh’s incidental reminders include notice to speakers of English who like to infuse their speech with elements of other languages — French and Latin being particular traps — that they must be cautious with their embellishments.

His quest for grammatical perfection is probably doomed by his own insouciant attitude, although this may be simply an attempt to popularise something most people seem to consider not worth worrying about. Sorry! Something about which most people seem not to worry. See how tidy that correction makes the sentence, dropping a sub-ordinate clause without losing the meaning? This is a diverting book, although not as entertaining as The King’s English, the famously astringent attack by Kingsley Amis on same subject, but it does have the provenance of Marsh’s role as production editor at The Guardian newspaper.

Its scatter-gun listings may not suit serious grammarians but more casual readers will find its corrections and reminders both useful and enjoyable, and sometime in the future if the concept of accurate grammar and spelling survives at all, it may even reduce the number of salaried experts such as sign-writers and advertising personnel who can’t understand (or care about) the difference between the snake sheds its skin, it’s a skin-less snake and some snakes shed many skins.