October 21, 2004, 3:00 p.m.
Mother Tongue
From the October 11, 2004, issue of National Review.

By Jay Nordlinger

The Stories of English by David Crystal (Overlook, 584 pp., $35)

You are awfully lucky to be reading this page. I'm not referring to my review, for heaven's sake — I'm referring to the language. We are awfully lucky to have English, the richest, most useful, most delightful language on earth.

Now, it does not become a native speaker to say this — we should leave it to others. Just as President Bush, in my opinion, should leave it to others to declare America "the greatest nation on earth" (that's the president in his recent convention speech).

Fortunately, people all over the world celebrate English and America alike. (Some of them do it silently, or through gritted teeth.) Those who know an abundance of languages tend to declare English tops. The rest of us should simply be grateful. One of the most touching things about Norman Podhoretz's touching memoir, My Love Affair with America, is his repeated expression of gratitude for "having been born into the English language." (I might add that English has made out pretty well on that deal, too.)

At present, a billion and a half people speak English, this tongue that originated 1,500 years ago midst the weird tribes of the British isles. David Crystal knows the language, and the tribes, and the isles. He is one of the U.K.'s foremost linguists, and was, in fact, knighted in 1995 "for his services to the English language," as his bio says. The Stories of English must be his summa.

You will note the plural word in that title: "Stories." He makes a great fuss over this, saying that there are multiple — almost endless — stories, and that the diversity of English has been given short shrift in traditional histories, with their emphasis on the Standard (not a particularly favorable word in Crystal's vocabulary). In his Introduction — actually, Introductions — he says — over and over — that he is going to relate the real story (oops) of English, taking special care with "ethnic minorities and women." He writes of "Englishes," which, to me, sounds the same alarm as "musics" — yuck.

Not to worry: His Introductions, PC and self-pleased, are the most annoying parts of the book. There are practically no others. When Crystal gets down to work, he lays out a feast of history, erudition, stimulation, and provocation.

He starts with Creation, moves into Middle English, slides into the Early Modern period, and ends with us (in a manner of speaking). Throughout, he sprinkles little essays he calls "Interludes," and hundreds of boxes, or "panels," into which he crams facts, yarns, or mysteries. It is a "patchwork quilt of a book," as he says, but it is not without an internal logic.

We meet good King Alfred (849-99), who loved English, and wanted it respected and nurtured. (In part as a bludgeon against the Danes.) Old English was a sprawling, messy affair, at the mercy of its users, high and low, and not necessarily in touch with one another. (Little has changed.) A monk, Æfric the Grammarian, despaired of copying errors, regarding them as a many-repercussioned curse:

Now I desire and beseech, in God's name, if anyone will transcribe this book, that he carefully correct it by the copy, lest we be blamed through careless writers. He does great evil who writes carelessly, unless he correct it. It is as though he turn true doctrine into false error. Therefore everyone should make straight that which he before bent crooked, if he will be guiltless at God's doom.

I believe I have copied this correctly. I can't vouch for David Crystal or his predecessors.

English has ever been hospitable to foreign influences; it is, as Crystal notes, "the most etymologically multilingual language on earth." But this has not sat well with some people, over the centuries. In the 1500s, one John Cheke decried the marks of Greek and Latin on English, wanting to return to the pure Anglo-Saxon beginning (which was itself highly impure). "Don't say prophet, say foresayer," implored Cheke. Too bad. English is a vast melting pot of a language. You can't even tell the Germanic words from the Latinate ones, Crystal proves — not always.

Like the English constitution, this language evolved, informally. It was always up for grabs, in a sense. Shakespeare grabbed like mad, as you know. Crystal has fun showing us what he did with the prefix un- alone — e.g., "Unshout the noise that banish'd Martius . . ." And the author — Crystal, not Shakespeare — invites us to participate in "a lexical thought experiment." It's about, oh, 1570. You need an adjective from the noun discord. Whaddya do? You got — in alphabetical order — discordable, discordal, discordant (ah!), discordful, discordic, discording, discordish, discordive, discordly, discordous, discordsome, and discordy. Go ahead. Pick one. It's in your hands.

On the language went, with the Wycliffe, Tyndale, and King James Bibles doing much to ratify. But always people complained about change, as they do today. Always, the English of a generation or two ago was better. Always does someone fancy himself the knower of the One True English — at variance with some other fellow's One True English.

We Americans have staked our ground. Perhaps the first American "loanword" to English comes from Captain John Smith, in 1608. It is "Rahaughcums" ("raccoons" — really). About 200 years later, John Adams proposed a language academy, with no success. But a couple of decades hence, such an academy was established, "to promote the purity and uniformity of the English language." John Quincy Adams was its president; Thomas Jefferson refused to become its honorary president. When it dissolved, Jefferson wrote, "Judicious neology can alone give strength and copiousness to language, and enable it to be the vehicle of new ideas." That is a Jeffersonian approach to English.

If Crystal has a hero, it's Samuel Johnson, who was a balance of formal and informal, prescriptive and permissive — who embodied, to use Jefferson's word, judiciousness. Johnson was a conservative, but he had the noble conservative's hatred of dogma and bullying and lordliness. In language as in other matters, he was generous (while principled).

Crystal is a linguistic liberal, but a linguistic liberal with reason. He ridicules the schoolmarms skillfully, and ultimately bests them, I believe. Anyone who thinks that you can't end a sentence with a preposition, or begin one with "However," is . . . misled. And Crystal is surely right that "etymology can never be a guide to contemporary usage." Anyone who whines that decimate used to mean zapping one in ten should be slapped.

Despite the freedom that English gives us — or, indeed, because of it — many people long for a dictator. Lord Chesterfield was such a person, and he chose wisely: "I give my vote for Mr Johnson . . . 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 . . ." Our language is a mixture of art and science, and we should live in the wealth of it to discover what is right. There is no substitute for experience, searching, and taste (or "ear," if you wish).

But when freedom overwhelms, and you feel the need for a dictator — I suggest Bill Buckley.

*   *   *

YOU’RE NOT A SUBSCRIBER TO NATIONAL REVIEW? Sign up right now! It’s easy: Subscribe to National Review here, or to the digital version of the magazine here. You can even order a subscription as a gift: print or digital!