1 - A web of worries
Anxiety about language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Personally I wish someone had told me… in my youth that… language is primarily speech and only secondarily writing. I wish someone had also told me that most grammar texts are so many etiquette books, and accepted usage a dialect of middle-class residents of a capital city…
The truth is that ‘rules’ never existed, they have little to do with language. They were superimposed on organic word-wisdom by a set of largely clerical-minded inkhorns standing around with a lot of egg on their faces.
Geoffrey Wagner The wisdom of words (1968)Is our language sick? You might think so, judging from complaints: ‘The standard of speech and pronunciation in England has declined so much … that one is almost ashamed to let foreigners hear it’, moaned a writer in a daily newspaper. ‘The language the world is crying out to learn is diseased in its own country’, ranted another. ‘We are plagued with idiots on radio and television who speak English like the dregs of humanity, to the detriment of our children’, lamented yet another.
But why? At a time when English is a major world language, is it really in need of hospital treatment? A wide web of worries, a cobweb of old ideas, ensnares people as they think about language – any language – and this must be swept away.
But clearing the cobwebs is only the first stage. The language web is the overall title of this book. Webs, especially cobwebs, may entangle.
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- Information
- The Language WebThe Power and Problem of Words - The 1996 BBC Reith Lectures, pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996