Pedants of the world unite

Simon Heffer is one of our foremost and unforgiving guardians of the English language. The former Daily Telegraph style editor established himself as such in his books, Strictly English: The Correct Way to Write… and Why it Matters (2010) and Simply English: An A to Z of Avoidable Errors (2014). In his new book, Scarcely English: An A to Z of Assaults on Our Language, he has returned once more to his favourite themes: how to write correct, simple, precise and pleasing English prose, and how to avoid textbook errors, ugly neologisms and wrong usage.

Heffer’s approach to the English language is deeply unfashionable. The complementary (not complimentary) judgements of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’, and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, have long been widely scorned in the field of education by progressives, as they have in society at large. Indeed, Heffer squarely blames ‘the dismal standards of our education system in the past 30 or 40 years’ for the parlous state of our mother tongue today. He sees signs of its decline not just in casual vernacular, but also in the press, academia and corporate world, where confusion, laziness and obfuscation abound.

In this respect, Heffer implies (and the reader infers) that we need books such as his because there has been a long-standing crisis of authority. We don’t know what is right and wrong English any more because most people have been too afraid to say so in our entrenched climate of non-judgementalism.

But we can talk, and must talk, about right and wrong. One doesn’t have to be a student of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to grasp, as he did over a hundred years ago, that words have no intrinsic meanings, that the significance applied to them is ultimately arbitrary and alters over time and through space. Yet societies can only function if those who speak the same language agree on the definition of words, even if these definitions are contingent and protean.

In this regard, it is imperative that we abide by notions of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. We need to keep in mind that these word-concepts only sometimes convey moral judgements. They also have parallel, neutral meanings that apply to facts, numbers and conventions, such as ‘2 + 2 = 4 is correct’, or ‘womans’ is the wrong way to pluralise ‘woman’.

Heffer has plenty of critics. Many scoffed at his previous works for their old-fashioned didacticism. But he is right that precision, correctness and, as a consequence, elegance, are linguistic goals worth pursuing.

He is not afraid of being judgemental, which is hardly surprising given he’s a journalist and writer of profound conservative temperament. Nor is he afraid of being called a pedant; indeed, he is literally proud to call himself one (and by ‘literally’, I literally mean ‘literally’). And nor is he reluctant to make points that still need repeating in regard to persistent, inexact usage: that to be ‘uninterested’ is to be bored and to be ‘disinterested’ is to be impartial. His clarification of the distinction between ‘rebut’ and ‘refute’, with the second assertion requiring proof, is mandatory. The entry explaining the difference between ‘imply’ and ‘infer’ also feels obligatory, but could have been explained more pithily. Simply put, a speaker or writer implies, a listener or reader infers.

Heffer is at his most fresh and entertaining in his invectives against corporate speak, and academic and woke speak. Both of these serve to confuse outsiders and establish tribal loyalty among their users. They also mask incoherent ideas, conceal unoriginal thinking and often betray bogus pretensions to intellectualism.

From the corporate world we have such jargon as ‘connect’, where ‘meet’ would quite easily do; ‘going forward’, where ‘in the future’ would suffice; and ‘think outside the box’, a hackneyed way of saying ‘think afresh’. Lapsing into this kind of verbiage, Heffer says, may ‘be a valuable usage to those in the corporate world who wish to indicate that they have gone native, and ceased to have minds of their own’.

From academia, we have confusing new developments, such as ‘debate’ without a preposition, which throws up such ambiguous sentences as ‘I’m going to debate Richard Dawkins’. In the political arena we have outright horrors, which betray an even more dismal mindset. This includes ‘inappropriate’, that appalling passive-aggressive word deployed to censure or censor. Its usage is all the more objectionable for its vagueness and broad application. It can be used to describe the appearance of swearwords in a film such as Barbie – where ‘unsuitable’ would be more accurate – and acts of predatory sexual behaviour, where ‘deplorable’ or ‘abhorrent’ would be far more appropriate (in the neutral sense of that word).

Heffer also singles out that other atrocity, ‘lived experience’, not least for being grammatically absurd. He writes that ‘life experience’ and ‘lived experience’ are ‘tautologies and show either a poor command of the language or attempt at manipulation of the feelings of others’. (Another grating tautology, as heard on public transport, is ‘personal belongings’.) ‘Vibrant’, invariably employed to describe something pertaining to an ethnic minority, is not only a tiresome cliché, but a patronising one, too.

Heffer’s arguments are not wholly persuasive. He rails against ‘enormity’ used as a synonym for ‘immensity’, rather than ‘extreme seriousness or something bad’, but I fear that battle has been lost. The meaning of ‘enormity’ continues to drift with seeming irrevocability from its original sense. Another usage forever deprecated by pedants is saying ‘can I?’ to mean ‘may I?’. That ship has also sailed, and its popular usage now reminds us of the importance of context. When a stranger on a train asks ‘can I sit here?’, we know exactly what he or she means. Heffer makes a familiar complaint against passive usage, but the passive is entirely justified when the object of a sentence is more important than the subject, as in ‘John F Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald’.

Furthermore, Heffer is just plain wrong when it comes to the usage of foreign words. He denounces the use of the plural Latin nouns ‘bacteria’, ‘data’ and ‘media’ as singular in English. Yet imported words and their usage are invariably naturalised to conform to the language in which they settle; in English, plural nouns as a general rule end in ‘-s’. This is why we also don’t capitalise the German noun ‘zeitgeist’, why we use the Italian plural ‘graffiti’ as an uncountable noun with a verb in the singular and eat a single ‘panini’. It’s also why our plural of the Neapolitan dish is ‘pizzas’, not as it is in Italian, ‘pizze’.

Nonetheless, Scarcely English is an entertaining and informative book, with its assaults on myriad ‘abominations’ and ‘hyperbolic drivel’. It is recommended for all pedants, and for those who believe in right and wrong.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.

Scarcely English: An A-Z of Assaults on Our Language, by Simon Heffer, is published by Hutchinson Heinemann.