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For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man's Quest for Grammatical Perfection by David Marsh - book review

The Guardian              October 30, 2013


A grammar guide that knows when to break the rules

David Marsh wouldn't stand for it. Photograph: Jamie Carstairs/Alamy

The people who choose to write guides to grammar and usage are often, mysteriously, those least qualified to do so. They mistake private hobbyhorses for general law, and break their own rules without noticing. To the sensitive reader, indeed, cataloguing such forlorn error is the only amusement to be had from recent stentorian compendia of wrongness such as Simon Heffer's Strictly English. Meanwhile Nevile Gwynne, author of the bestselling Gwynne's Grammar, proved himself weirdly incapable last year of parsing the phrase "too much too young" when it appeared in an open letter by some academics. Gwynne declared it "simply not English". Not only is it the title of a well-known 1979 song by the Specials, but the phrase also appears much earlier - in, for instance, Jack London's John Barleycorn of 1913. "I knew too much too young," the narrator says. No doubt Gwynne thinks London couldn't write English either.

David Marsh, as production editor of this newspaper and its style guru (at least in the sense of prose style; I do not claim to be qualified to comment on menswear), is better placed than most to offer a practical guide to writing, and he is not shy of taking witty sideswipes at the competition, including Gwynne, Heffer and Lynne Truss. He begins by explaining the mechanics of syntax through analysis of pop-song lyrics from the Beatles to De La Soul. This at first looks ingratiatingly groovy-uncle-ish, but it is at least partially rescued by his playful humour. ("Red Hot Chili Peppers, unlike the Police, favour the Middle English spelling of 'magik'.")

With admirable clarity, Marsh goes on to explain the gerund and subjunctive, the difference between comparing to and comparing with, and the correct use of "whom", avoidance of which has given this book its deliberately teeth-grating title. Cleverly, Marsh here inverts the usual reasons for understanding conventions. You need to know the rule for "whom" not because you should use "whom" whenever appropriate (because it will sometimes sound pompous), but because you need absolutely to avoid using "whom" when it should actually be "who", since that will sound both pompous and stupid.

Despite the deceptive subtitle, much of the rest of the book is not about grammar at all: it dissolves into an entertaining compendium of usage notes and mini-essays. (Lists of common mistakes provide filler, as apparently is inevitable in this kind of book.) Marsh touches on rhetorical devices such as antanaclasis (teaching us, splendidly, how to parse the sentence, "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo"), and "fronting or topicalisation, a device of which Milton, like Yoda, was fond". (Marsh has the good taste not to modernise the spelling of Milton or other writers.) There are divertingly knockabout sections on jargon in politics, on the railways, in the NHS, among estate agents and, of course, in newspapers. ("Very few people in real life," Marsh observes, "talk about jobs being 'axed' or given a 'massive boost' … ")

Most satisfying is an angry chapter on so-called "political correctness", which demolishes the pretensions of those who think they have a God-given right to abuse those less fortunate than themselves. What is decried as "politically correct" language by people such as Rod Liddle, Marsh points out unimprovably, "mainly boils down to consideration for others. Is this such a terrible burden?" Only for those, one might suspect, who trade in self-congratulatory nastiness.

Guardian readers especially will enjoy the fact that Marsh happily hangs out for our ridicule many examples of horrible writing from the Guardian. I confess I felt mightily relieved that none of them had been perpetrated by me. In the interest of full disclosure, I ought also to reveal that Marsh says very nice things about my book Unspeak. So to demonstrate critical independence, I must now point out some errors. The French for "It's nothing" is "Ce n'est rien", not "Ce n'est pas rien" - which does actually, pace Marsh, mean "It's not nothing", ie it's something. And I groaned to see here the repeated claim that "'denialist' is not a word". When I checked three years ago after Marsh wrote this in Guardian Style, there were 80,000 Google results for it. Now there are 348,000. So, yep: pretty sure it's still a word.

As Marsh's idiosyncratic anti-denialism shows, the general and amiable tolerance of his book has its limits. He can't stomach, either, using "literally" to mean anything but, well, literally. "To me it seems perverse to use a word to mean something like its opposite." But it has been so used since at least the 17th century, and by some quite respectable writers such as Pope. I find its modern use as a comic intensifier endlessly amusing (in part, I admit, precisely because it annoys people). In the main, though, Marsh is wisely liberal. There is, he says, "no real justification" for insisting that "bored of" (instead of "bored with") is wrong. (Indeed: compare "tired of".) And if you want to boldly go, do it. "Feel free," he advises, "to insert anything you like, within reason, between the particle and the infinitive."

That "within reason" expresses a fine respect for the reader's own judgment, though it might be frustrating to the kind of grammar-guide buyer who expects to be told exactly how to write properly. Perhaps, indeed, the remarkable popularity of this metaliterary genre, even when the books are strewn with nonsense, stems from an idea that the right set of unbreakable rules will provide an infallible formula for scrivening success. That fine and grumpy semi‑pedant Samuel Johnson, however, observed the falsity of this long ago: "Rules may obviate faults, but can never confer beauties; and prudence keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy. The world is not amazed with prodigies of excellence, but when wit tramples upon rules, and magnanimity breaks the chains of prudence."

That "within reason" expresses a fine respect for the reader's own judgment, though it might be frustrating to the kind of grammar-guide buyer who expects to be told exactly how to write properly. Perhaps, indeed, the remarkable popularity of this metaliterary genre, even when the books are strewn with nonsense, stems from an idea that the right set of unbreakable rules will provide an infallible formula for scrivening success. That fine and grumpy semi‑pedant Samuel Johnson, however, observed the falsity of this long ago: "Rules may obviate faults, but can never confer beauties; and prudence keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy. The world is not amazed with prodigies of excellence, but when wit tramples upon rules, and magnanimity breaks the chains of prudence."


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