There are three types of people in the world. One, the grammarian schoolmarms
who love to lecture others condescendingly for their perceived sins against
grammar, like don't end a sentence with a preposition.
Two, those of us who see the schoolmarms as would-be authoritarians,
who are peddling the very sort of bloody nonsense up with which we will not put.
And three, people who didn't understand that joke.
But if you're the third type, what are you doing in my audience?
For the rest of us, I've just read a deeply fascinating and provocative book
that affirms something I've been striving to articulate for three decades.
So join me today as I explore David Crystal's The Fight for English and discover
what the glorious anarchy of language has to teach us about the beautiful spontaneous
order that defines our daily existence.
The Corbett Report.
CorbettReport.com.
Welcome back, friends. Welcome back to another edition of the Corbett Report.
I'm your host, James Corbett of CorbettReport.com, coming to you,
as always, from the sunny climes of Western Japan here in May of 2026 with episode
501 of the Corbett Report podcast, The Fight for English.
And as you almost certainly don't remember, I had the occasion about a decade ago to record a short,
pithy, but deeply felt message here in the sunny climes of Western Japan about
the anarchy of language.
Grammar Nazis. We all know them. Those people who fly into apoplectic fits of
rage at a misplaced comma.
People who can't countenance a misspelled word.
People who will dismiss entire arguments because of a greengrocer's apostrophe.
Well, here's a little tidbit to send any would-be grammar Nazi in your life into a fit of rage.
Did you know that for over a century, there has been a small but notable group
of writers, including G.B.
Shaw and others, who have argued that there should not be apostrophes in the
English language anymore?
It's an archaism. It is something that the language does not need in order to
actually get our point across.
And there's an interesting little article on this that I'll put in the show
notes so you can check it out about this history of the war on the apostrophe
that makes its point by not using a single apostrophe in the entire article.
But the entire article is perfectly comprehensible to anyone who can read English
because we really don't need the apostrophe for the purpose of communication.
And I think that's what rankles about these grammar Nazis. It's that.
Want us to believe that there's some sort of system of rules and laws that must
be adhered to rigidly in order for language to to effectively communicate when
that is evidently not the case.
And yes, certainly there are occasions and contexts in which we must adhere
to whatever style guide is being used by whatever organization we're writing for.
If you're writing a business proposal for some important client,
if you're writing a term paper for college, of course, yes, you have to follow
the norms and strictures of grammar as we have been taught.
But even that is a bit of an open question because there are different style
guides in different countries, different spelling variants and grammatical structures
that are used in different countries.
The Oxford comma, for example, not being particularly common in the United States, etc.
So even what form of English do you want to adhere to is a question in and of itself.
But more importantly, I think it misses the point because the real point of
communication is communication, the miracle of communication.
And it may be a miracle that is so mundane and everyday that we don't really
even contemplate it anymore.
But it is a miracle that I can take these thoughts and ideas and half formed,
ambiguous, vague concepts, put them into words, force them out my mouth hole
and into your ear hole, and you will get at least an understanding of what I'm talking.
Is a miracle, and that is the beauty of language.
And I posit to you that that is the beauty of the anarchy of language.
Yes, I may not speak at all times and in all contexts in a perfectly grammatically
correct way, but if I get the point across, then isn't that enough?
And I would argue that yes, that is in fact not only the potential of this miracle of communication.
But also, that's the delight, the play of language.
That's where poetry comes from. That's where we can really play with the concept
of how we communicate things.
And we don't always have to rigidly adhere to those grade school verities that
you must not begin a sentence with a conjunction or things of that sort.
As long as we get the idea, the feeling, the impression across,
that's, I think, really what we should be aiming at.
And I think the more perceptive people in the crowd will understand what I'm
driving at here and the fact that language itself is a beautiful,
spontaneous order that does not require policemen or grammar Nazis in order
to tell us what to say and how to say it.
It's really a negotiation that happens between people each and every day spontaneously.
The spontaneous order that arises when crowds simply have to negotiate and get
their point across to other people, it will happen. And it may not happen in
some way that's been prescribed in some rulebook somewhere, but it will happen.
And that, I think, is very beautiful.
Perhaps that's a point that we can apply more broadly in more political senses.
And for more on that, I will invite you to check out my previous International
Forecaster editorial on the concept of spontaneous order and the ramifications
it has not only for our politics, but our society and our culture at large.
But that's a very heady philosophical concept to think about.
So I'll leave that to Stu for a little while. Once again, this is James Corbett
of CorbettReport.com here in the beautiful, sunny climes of Western Japan.
Looking forward to talking to you again very soon.
Now, you might have thought that was just a witty video about a trivial subject
recorded by a dashing, handsome, and articulate young man in Western Japan,
and you'd be mostly correct.
I am dashing, handsome, and articulate, and that is a witty video.
But it's not a trivial subject, and it's not intended as a joke.
In fact, I'm quite serious about the topic, and I really do believe that a proper
understanding of the development of language offers us an insight into how human
society itself can be ordered in the absence of a central authority.
Let's begin with an examination of the grammar policeman.
We all know the type. The person who reads, eats, shoots, and leaves back 25
years ago, and now considers themselves a self-appointed authority on the English language.
A constable on patrol valiantly guarding us from dangling participles and sentence-ending prepositions.
But the glorification of grammar Nazism did not begin with Lynn Truss.
It is not a 21st century phenomenon. It's been around for almost as long as
printed English itself.
Get a load of Daniel Defoe's On Academies, an article he wrote in 1697 to propose
that King William III establish a society for policing the English tongue.
The work of this society should be to encourage polite learning,
to polish and refine the English tongue, and advance the so much neglected faculty of correct language,
to establish purity and propriety of style, and to purge it from all the irregular
additions that ignorance and affectation have introduced,
and all those innovations in speech, if I may call them such,
which some dogmatic writers have the confidence to foster upon their native
language as if their authority were sufficient to make their own fancy legitimate.
That passage is positively unhinged.
Just imagine this learned author frothing at the mouth,
positively apoplectic over the notion that some two-bit poet would have the
gall to employ an irregular edition or, heaven forbid, actually coin a new phrase, the impudence.
It's even funnier when you look at the passage from our perspective.
How's this guy going to lecture us on the proper use of English with all those
Germanic capitalized nouns and those medial S's and what the hell even is that CT mark thing?
That ain't English. That ain't even Mexican. But this is inevitably how the
Grammarian fascists end up looking.
Like idiots, hell-bent on enforcing the completely arbitrary rules of language
with which they are already familiar and refusing to countenance the idea that
language changes and that that's a good thing.
Now, I've been attempting to lambaste these self-appointed policemen of language
since I was an undergrad studying English at the University of Calgary.
When I sensed one of my professors or fellow students were being overly prickly
in their attempt to correct improper English, I would inevitably respond with
the hilarious retort, Stop shutting down the polysemy of language, man.
You see, the humor derives from the seeming
disconnect between the implied unsophistication of the laid-back hippie and
the implied high-level vocabulary demonstrated by the term polysemy of language
It deconstructs the class snobbery inherent in the very act of language policing
I'll give you a moment to collect yourselves from your fit of laughter Anyway, the point is,
I've been thinking about language and what it shows us about the remarkable, spontaneous,
anarchic self-ordering of human community for longer than some members of this
audience have been alive.
And in all that time, I wish I had
a book that would adequately explain my frustration to the average layman.
Guess what? I found the book! It's called The Fight for English.
It's by David Kristol. And if you listen to nothing else I say today, listen to this.
If you're interested in A, the history of English, B, the development of English
grammar and spelling, and or C, the way that these subjects combine to explain
the beautiful spontaneous order
of the human community, then you owe it to yourself to read this book.
But first, since I know people who feel personally attacked for their affinity
for pointing out grammatical graphs and spelling errors are going to look for
an easy excuse to dismiss the entirety of today's podcast,
let me start by placating you about David Crystal's bona fides.
In case you are curious, yes, he is highly qualified to talk about English.
How to introduce David Crystal.
Professor David Crystal, FBA, OBE, or it probably should be the other way around.
Whichever, David Crystal is undoubtedly one of the foremost linguisticians in
the world today, and the preeminent expert on the history, development,
and usage of the English language.
His OBE, perhaps uniquely, was for services to the English language.
He has made numerous radio and television programs, including the BBC's Story of English series.
He has been president or patron of numerous language-related organizations,
including the International Association for the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language.
Following his early years as a research student at UCL, working with Randolph
Quirk on the Survey of English Usage project, he has taught at several and lectured
at scores of universities around the world.
When the Globe Theatre bravely decided to put on a performance of Romeo and
Juliet in authentic Elizabethan pronunciation in 2004,
it was David Crystal, naturally, who they turn to as their language consultant.
Underpinning these activities, David has published around a hundred books on
phonetics and phonology, on language teaching, language death,
and lexicography, on grammar and stylistics,
on the language of the internet, and on English as a global language.
From a proprietorial cambridge standpoint
and celebrating yet another anniversary it
is exactly 40 years since his book
prosodic systems and intonation in english inaugurated the press's flagship
academic series cambridge studies in linguistics and it was in that same year
1969 that david became editor of the press's flagship serial the journal of linguistics,
But perhaps most significantly of all, and most appropriately for someone with
so encyclopedic a range of interests,
David is the author of two of the most respected and widely used reference books
on the subject of language.
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the
English Language, combined sales to date 475,000 copies.
And if that weren't enough, in 1990, he edited the Cambridge Encyclopedia,
whose entries range from the A-bomb to the zygote.
All that, and he also speaks Welsh. Ladies and gentlemen, David Crystal. Thank you very much.
And when and if you go and watch that lecture, or any of his other public lectures
or interviews, I'm confident that even the marmiest of school marms will be
suitably pleased with his Dumbledorian diction and Gandalfian grammar.
Yes, Crystal has the credentials to lecture you on why you shouldn't be so uptight about language.
But in the spirit of showing, not telling, let's look at an example from Crystal's book.
In The Fight for English, Chapter 17, Incorrectness, Crystal explains the joke
that I used to open today's episode.
The joke goes that when Winston Churchill was circulating a draft of one of
his speeches for input, one aide attempted to correct Churchill's grammar.
Winston had apparently written a sentence that ends with a preposition.
You know the rule. In proper English, you don't say, that's the man I was talking to.
You say, That's the man to whom I was talking Oh goodness, look how learned I am,
Churchill, for one, wasn't having any of it Irate, he responded indignantly
to his aid This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put,
The story is probably apocryphal Like all great stories from history are But
you get the point It's frankly ridiculous The lengths some overzealous editors
will go to to conform to arbitrary rules of taste like never end a sentence with a preposition.
But where does that rule come from? After all, we find end-placed prepositions
in Chaucer and in Shakespeare and all over classic English literature.
And it makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not all.
Which pedant sought to lecture Shakespeare about his poor grammar?
As Crystal explains, that pedant was John Dryden, who criticized Shakespeare,
Johnson, and other giants of English literature for their use of double comparatives
and end-placed prepositions and other grammatical constructions that he decided he didn't like.
So, what's wrong with putting a preposition at the end of a sentence?
As Crystal explains, why did Dryden not like a preposition at the end of the sentence?
It was probably a mixture of things. He may have developed a stylistic taste
for finishing a sentence with an important word.
He may have been impressed by the different rhythms involved in the alternatives.
He may have sensed that the end-placing was very common in colloquial speech.
But above all, Dryden, a classical scholar, would have been influenced by Latin grammarians.
In Latin, prepositions go before nouns. That is why they are called prepositions.
So, there you go. Why do some of you in the audience get your panties in a twist
when you see a preposition at the end of a sentence?
Because some old dead guy in the 17th century decided English should be more
like Latin, and generations of future pedants decided that it was a great,
non-intuitive, completely arbitrary rule that could be used to separate the
educated from the hoi polloi. Yay.
That's just one example of many from the book where Crystal breaks down the
actual roots of these so-called rules and shows their arbitrariness,
their self-contradictions, and their overall stupidity.
Those of you who cry out in pain every time you hear, too boldly go.
Another example of Latin reasoning that was grafted onto English books,
this time in the 19th century.
In English, the infinitive is typically presented as two words, to love, to go.
In Latin, an inflected language, there is just one, irae, amare.
If you want to add an adverb to express such meanings as how or when or where
you are loving, then you don't have the option to insert it within the verb
to say, in effect, am adverb areae, but you do in English.
In fact, as Crystal argues, the split infinitive is fitting in native English.
Not only is it something that no one in English was even concerned about until
the 19th century, it also breaks the natural iambic rhythm of English,
around which most English verse is based.
To boldly go where none have gone before, rather than boldly to go where none have gone before.
In the end, though, Crystal points out that boldly to go, or to go boldly,
or to boldly go is just a matter of taste.
So don't be fooled when a grammarian tells you, ah, but one is clearer than the other.
It isn't. The three forms above convey exactly the same meaning.
If you let yourself believe otherwise, you have been taken in by the big con.
And in that passage, we start to see part of the point of Crystal's book, meaning.
Language is about conveying meaning, and that can be accomplished by understanding
what is expected of us in various situations.
If you're writing a formal academic paper, you probably should avoid ending
a sentence with a preposition.
If you're talking to your friend, it might be more helpful to relax and speak
like a normal human being.
So what is the point of the fight for English? Crystal starts the book by talking
about Lynn Truss's remarkably popular 2003 screed about punctuation,
Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.
A lifelong student and teacher of English, Crystal expresses amazement that
Truss's book became so popular.
He even advised her against writing a book on the subject. I wouldn't bother,
he said. Books on punctuation never sell.
But it went on to become a New York Times bestseller.
So, what do I know? I still have no clear idea why that book has done so well.
Why did people buy it? What did they hope they would get out of it?
Did they actually read it?
What is it that makes people think that a book on punctuation will somehow solve
their imagined language problems?
And after they have read it, do they feel any better?
These are some of the questions I hope to answer in this book.
Having said that, my book isn't especially about eats, shoots,
and leaves, but rather about the whole genre of books which that book represents.
Manuals of English usage have sold well for generations, and they all make the same claims.
The curious thing is that the same issues that bug people now were bugging them 250 years ago.
Life and language have moved on, but still people worry.
Millions feel linguistically inferior, and their inferiority complex is reinforced
by the muggle who stares out at us from many a newspaper advertisement.
Are you shamed by your mistakes in English?
Deep down, everyone who bought Lynn Truss's book, and millions more who haven't, thinks yes.
Now, there is some schadenfreude to be had in the fact that these grammar Nazis
are inevitably hoisted with their own petard, as Truss herself was.
As a New Yorker reviewer pointed out with glee when the book was first published,
Truss herself didn't even make it to page one before she committed a grievous
punctuation error of her own.
Her book begins with a dedication To the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St.
Petersburg Who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks
as for letters And thereby directly precipitated the first Russian revolution,
But, uh-oh, did you see the horrible mistake that Truss made there?
She meant the relative clause, who demanded to be paid, to be non-restrictive.
But since she didn't put the comma before who, it implies that she was differentiating
printers who demanded to be paid from printers who didn't demand to be paid.
What a terrible faux pas. I hope she commits seppuku immediately.
Well, actually, no. Because punctuation is an art, not a science.
And Truss has done what many of us would do.
She used commas around in 1905 to represent the pause that a speaker would insert
when reading that sentence aloud.
The comma before who would be inserted for grammatical reasons,
but having three commas in a row like that looks cluttered and unnatural,
and so we tend to subconsciously resist it.
Crystal, to his great credit, sympathizes with Truss and her predicament.
I don't know how conscious of this issue Lynn was when she composed the dedication.
Evidently, the phonetic criterion was foremost in her mind.
But if she wanted to defend her choice against the New Yorker Review,
she could do so by relying on a very important criterion, context.
All Lynn has to say is that the meaning of her dedication is clear from the
context, whether we use commas or not.
Only sticklers would insist on making the distinction when it isn't necessary.
The New Yorker reviewer Was evidently a stickler But then By her own admission
So is Lynn Hoist by your own petard Comes to mind.
Indeed, the stickler fellowed by fellow sticklers.
But it's important to understand that this is no mere passing observation.
It's actually the heart of the
subject and why I am so fascinated with Crystal's book in the first place.
You might think it's just a part of the jokey way we talk about the subject.
We call them grammar Nazis.
Truss herself subtitled her book The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.
But however jokingly such references are intended, there's actually a genuine
underlying pathology being identified here.
We already saw Defoe's dream of establishing a society for policing the English language.
Others, like the wealthy 18th century aristocrat Lord Chesterfield,
were even more explicit.
We need an actual dictator to enforce an ironclad rule of the English language.
Luckily, he had a candidate in mind.
I give my vote for Dr. Samuel Johnson to fill that great and arduous post,
and I hereby declare that I make a total surrender of all my rights and privileges
in the English language as a freeborn British subject to the said Mr.
Johnson during the term of his dictatorship.
Nay more, I will not only obey him, like a Roman as my dictator,
But like a modern Roman, I will implicitly believe in him as my pope and hold
him to be infallible while in the chair, but no longer.
This is the madness of the linguistic authoritarians.
Their pathology belies a genuine desire for authority.
There must be a dictator of English, a pope whose infallibility cannot be questioned
and who we must surrender our rights and privileges to.
I mean, to whom we must surrender our rights and privileges.
Forgive me my transgression and don't punish me too hard, daddy dictator.
There are many similar examples of linguistic zealotry that Crystal demonstrates
in his book, but this, to me, is the pathology that makes this particular subject so fascinating to me.
It really pains a certain segment of the population who fervently desire to
be ruled over by a dictator.
The language does not need a dictator.
There does not need to be a society making decisions about split infinitives
or a pope of English that will cast out the end-placed preposition heretics.
On the contrary, language itself is one of the most powerful,
undeniable, and downright beautiful illustrations of the existence of the fundamental
concept of a free society.
Spontaneous order. In the late 19th century, the book Unuo Libro was published
by a man writing under the name Dr. Esperanto.
He wanted to construct the first serious international language,
which came to be called Esperanto.
And it was a noble plan, designed an easy-to-learn language that could be adopted
universally and international cooperation would follow.
But despite virtuous goals and over 130 years of development,
Esperanto failed to really take off.
Lots of smart people figured that this would be a perfect thing,
a language that would be a universal language that everyone would adopt.
And it failed massively.
That's Professor Bruce Caldwell. He says that a big reason why some languages
fail has a lot to do with how they're developed. And there's two main ways that can happen.
The first is that a language can be constructed, much like Esperanto.
Its rules are designed with intention, typically by a small group of experts.
The second, and more common way, is for a language not to be designed, but to emerge.
Think of it this way. This is a caveman with no formal language,
and he needs to warn the rest of his tribe of a nearby predator.
By using a sound they all know means run, he's able to quickly communicate the
threat to everyone else.
And the more they use this sound, the more it starts to resemble a word with a definition.
With the exception of Esperanto, no one person designs these words.
They emerge from the bottom up by people pursuing their own goals,
creating words to communicate simple concepts for their own limited needs.
And over time, without anyone intending it, these words come to form an orderly what we call a language.
This process of creating something big and complex by no one's design but through
everyone's action is what economists like Professor Caldwell call spontaneous order.
Spontaneous orders are often contrasted with constructed orders.
The idea that you could have something that is not deliberately constructed,
that is nonetheless beneficial, is quite a wonderful one.
And the idea of spontaneous order isn't unique to just language.
It's everywhere, from legal systems to culture, even art. Back in 2017,
Reddit conducted a three-day social experiment.
They created a 1 million pixel canvas, allowing over a million users to place
one pixel down every five minutes.
And what emerged was at first vulgar and… silly.
This battle between the German and French flags ended with users turning the
intersection into the flag of the European Union in a show of harmony.
But the beauty of the experiment wasn't how it ended.
It was the process of how it got there. It was witnessing what people do when
they face competing interests and limited resources.
How they're able to achieve order without a master designer.
Cooperation without a master coordinator.
Spontaneous orders are easy to miss when you're not looking for them.
But there are plenty of examples in everyday life. One particularly nice example
is the idea of Paris getting fed.
No one decides to feed Paris. What you've got are millions upon millions of people.
Some of them are people who want to be fed, but lots and lots of people are
cooperating in the feeding of Paris.
People who produce the food, who bring it to the restaurants,
people who create cutlery, napkins, tablecloths, built the restaurant,
created chairs, mined the ore that was used in the creation of various utensils.
None of these people said, I'm going to feed Paris.
All of them cooperate in the action of feeding Paris. It's a beautiful,
beautiful metaphor, and it has the virtue of being true.
No one designs the outcome of feeding Paris. How could they?
At any given time, they would need to know how many people are hungry,
where they are, what they're hungry for, in which grocers and restaurants are
best suited to feeding Paris.
And getting a hold of this specific, ever-shifting knowledge from millions of people is impossible.
Thankfully, Parisians don't need to have all this knowledge in order to eat.
The genius of a market that's spontaneously ordered is that all this dispersed
knowledge is able to be seamlessly communicated through prices.
Markets emerge through people's interactions trying to improve their lives.
The whole idea of supply and demand, which we can put up on a blackboard,
is meant to represent the interaction that people undertake naturally.
Full credit for that extended clip goes to the Institute for Humane Studies.
So if you want to see the rest of that video, please do follow the link from
today's show notes at corbettreport.com/english.
But I trust you are starting to understand the point.
Our intuitions and our desires often fail us.
And our intuition that the creation of something as complex as the feeding of
Paris or as complex as the English language itself cannot possibly happen unless
there is a coordinating authority,
a dictator, or at the very least a learned society of experts directing the
process from the top down.
But that is not how the most complex and the most stable orders emerge.
Esperanto failed. English lives. Dictatorships by technocrats form orders that people reject.
Communities of free people form spontaneous orders that thrive,
survive, and change naturally over time.
Of course, this leads to the surprising conclusion that there are many people,
including people in my audience right now, who mouth words about freedom,
who pretend to be opposed to dictators,
but who actually desire authority to rule over them, to set the rules which
we must all obey linguistically and otherwise.
Now, the question why so many people desire to be ruled over is an interesting one.
And like all interesting questions, it admits of a number of overlapping explanations.
For one, it certainly makes things easier for the average person.
You don't have to think about how to express yourself. You don't have to engage
in the negotiation that is the process of coming to an understanding with others through language.
You just let someone else make the rules and then follow them.
And police others so that they also follow the rules.
We could psychoanalyze the phenomenon, of course. I've pointed out before that
the state is the family writ large on the societal scale.
Rule me harder, daddy government, is not just a metaphor.
Take care of me, mommy government, is not just a metaphor.
We desire to have the same perceived stability in our relations in the world
as we did in our own homes growing up. or that we wished we had in our homes growing up.
Kristol, for his part, gestures to another motivator of the grammarian prescriptivists
who are so adamant about enforcing the rules of English.
When I presented a program on split infinitives on Radio 4 in the 1980s,
I got this letter from a listener.
The reason why the older generation feel so strongly about English grammar is
that we were severely punished if we didn't obey the rules.
One split infinitive, one whack. Two split infinitives, two whacks, and so on.
He would have been punished for saying, the reason why, too.
That was another usage which was frowned upon.
But Crystal being the eminently reasonable and empathetic scholar that he is,
he even goes on to concede that there is a place for pedants in the fight for English.
As I said earlier, the language pundits play an important role in alerting us
to the ways in which difficulties can be caused by language change.
Changes can't be stopped, but it does need to be managed.
They also provide a critical perspective for uses of language where the users
have let everyone down by genuine examples of laziness, carelessness,
lack of training, lack of thought, or deliberate attempt to obfuscate.
These are not appropriate or acceptable behaviors. They break my basic principles.
A principle you can learn more about in Chapter 16 of The Fight for English on appropriateness,
where Crystal makes perhaps the most important point to be made on the subject
of when and how and in what way to apply and enforce various grammatical and orthographical rules.
Appropriateness in language is the same as appropriateness in other walks of life.
Take clothing. If you looked into your wardrobe and found there only one suit
of clothes or one dress, how prepared would you feel to face the sartorial demands upon you by society?
No one would be happy if they had only the one option for all types of formal
and informal occasion, for different days of the week or for different functions,
such as swimming, gardening, or washing a car.
The more types of clothing we have, the better.
But having a large and varied wardrobe is only useful if we have developed a clothes sense.
The application of this analogy is probably obvious, so just a few lines are
needed to illustrate it.
If children have only one variety of language to use, it is like having a single-item wardrobe.
On the other hand, if they have been made aware of all the varieties in a language,
by degrees, of course, during a language syllabus of several years,
they leave school linguistically fully dressed.
And the more that adults who may have missed out on this kind of training take
steps to familiarize themselves with the stylistic range of English,
the more prepared they will be to interact effectively with people from all walks of life.
Wow, a reasonable and balanced perspective on the value of learning a language.
Not just the dictates of the schoolmarm, but a broad and deep understanding
of all the choices that one makes when navigating the grand,
spontaneously ordered, ongoing negotiation that is communication with your fellow men and women.
Now, I should definitely caution that I have not even begun to scratch the surface
when it comes to the fight for English. It's a fascinating book,
and it covers a lot of ground.
This book traces the historical roots of the grammarian prescriptivists,
the reformers and the systematizers alike, in the demographic upheaval that
turned London and Western Europe on its head in the 16th century,
and the attendant worries about signaling class identity and social status through one's speech.
And Crystal gives many fascinating examples of how and why English grammar and
spelling and punctuation and pronunciation evolved as it did.
Do you know why there are so many words in English with silent letters?
Why do we spell debt with a B?
Because some grammar Nazi of the distant past decided it would help make English
easier if we included nods to the etymological roots of our words.
So that's why the Old English debt, D-E-T, became dept with a B.
And now everyone knows that it came from the Latin debitum.
There's also much more in the book about Crystal's own ideas for how English
education should take place.
And in case I've given anyone the wrong impression, Crystal is crystal clear
that he is not an anything-goes kind of anti-grammarian.
On the contrary, he just has a bone to pick with the overly and inappropriately
rigid prescriptive grammarians.
The error of the prescriptive grammarians is that they adopted a normative stance about usage.
They assumed that one variety of language, the standard as seen in formal written
English, was the only variety worth using, the norm for everyone.
They asserted that the rules of that variety were the only ones which could be called correct.
Everything else was rubbish. Informal writing, informal speaking,
regional speaking or writing. This approach to grammar, or to any other aspect
of language, is not one we should espouse That is the chief argument of this book.
All that being said, let me reiterate, if you are at all interested in this
subject, and if you've made it this far in the podcast, I'm going to assume
you are, then this book will provoke,
inform, and entertain in good measure. 10 out of 10 do recommend.
But if you're still puzzled after all of this explanation as to why I am covering
a book about grammar and pronunciation on the Corbett Report,
it's because my takeaway from this book revolves around another one of its key insights.
Studying language change is important because it gives us unique insight into
human society and identity.
That's right. This isn't ultimately about grammar and spelling.
This is about humanity and freedom.
It's about our ability to negotiate with others in the grand unfolding story
of the formation of human community.
And that spontaneous order, not governed by popes or dictators or learned societies
of technocratic experts,
is a beautiful and remarkable example of how humanity can govern itself.
Thank you for your time and attention. Please see corbettreport.com/english
for links to everything I've cited to date.
I'm James Corbett of corbettreport.com.
Do you know what the most beautiful example of anarchism is that is just beyond
beautiful when you stop to think about it? I'm not being tongue-in-cheek. Language.
There's infinite languages. The things that language can be used for bring tears
to people's eyes, quite literally.
It's also used for basic things. No one is forcing us. We speak two languages each, at least.
No one's forcing us to use English. No one's forcing us to use this dialect of English.
It's a way, and despite there being so many different languages,
lingua franca emerge, you know, the language that everyone is, Latin.
Even in North Korea, they refer to the fish and the different animals by the
Latin scientific, no one decided this.
Sure, there's an organization that sets a binomial nomenclature,
but there's no gun to anyone's head referring to sea moth as a pegasus species.
And when you think about how amazing language is, And some other contexts would
say like, well, you need to have a world government and they're deciding which
is the verbs and you have to have an official definition and an official dictionary.
And none of that's happened. And I think anyone, even if they don't agree with
my politics or my worldview, cannot deny that the creation of language is one
of humanity's most miraculous, beautiful achievements.