Green ideas and Wobbly spelling
The English language has many challenges for the unwary. In Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw's Eliza was quite clear about her aim: 'I don't want to talk grammar, I want to talk like a lady'. Even when a sentence is grammatical, it may not mean very much, as the linguistics scholar Noam Chomsky demonstrated with his famous line 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously'.
Lewis Carroll's characters have their usual unique take on language: 'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on. 'I do,' Alice hastily replied; 'at least—at least I mean what I say—that's the same thing, you know.' 'Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter. 'Why, you might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see!" '
The critic Clive James described the difficulty of following the speeches of US president George Bush: 'Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail'. But too much attention to rules can also be a problem. Winston Churchill once scribbled a marginal note on an unfortunate effort to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition: 'This is the sort of English up with which I will not put'.
More than eighty years ago the long-standing arguments over split infinitives were summarized very neatly by the grammarian H. W. Fowler: 'The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and distinguish. Those who neither know nor care are the vast majority, and are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes.'
Spelling, too, is not that easy, as A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh explains: 'My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places'. Sam Weller in Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers takes a much more cavalier approach. '“ Do you spell it with a 'V' or a 'W'?” inquired the judge. “ That depends upon the taste and fancy of the speller, my Lord,” replied Sam'.
For quick and effective help with all those questions about correct English, try Oxford's new A-Z guides:
Oxford A-Z of Better Spelling second edition edited by Charlotte Buxton
Oxford A-Z of Grammar and Punctuation second edition by John Seely
Oxford Guide to Plain English third edition by Martin Cutts
Also available:
Oxford A-Z of English Usage edited by Jeremy Butterfield
Susan Ratcliffe
20/08/2009
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