Henry Hitchings

To my surprise, this was a relatively dense work of scholarship, and not the popular history I'd expected, given its publisher (Holt, a fine press, but not the kind of university or academic press that normally publishes this sort of book), and the general appearance of the book, blurbs and all. In fact, I couldn't help but wonder, especially given the author's clear reliance on the Oxford English Dictionary, if this wasn't more the province of the Oxford University Press.

In any case, Henry Hitchings offers his prospective reader a kind of travelers' history of the accretion of the English language. War, revolution, peace, trade, exploration--all of these are points of contact for English speakers with the rest of the world, and it is these contacts that have shaped and will, as Mr. Hitchings notes in his conclusion, continue to shape the English language. Mr. Hitchings, in my estimation, is a competent scholar and an elegant stylist. Both of his attributes, therefore, make for a dense but generous and readable book.… (meer)

_The Language Wars_ is a wide-ranging discussion of perceptions of English usage. Hitchings strenuously attempts to mediate between the prescriptivist and descriptivist camps, implying that those who take strong positions are usually proven wrong by history.

I especially appreciate his explanations of how usage "rules" were developed and defended by the high priests of grammar. What we think of as iron-clad grammar rules can often prove a barrier to clarity and understanding;"correct" pronoun antecedent agreement, for example, sometimes leads to confusing sentences. As an English teacher, this will lead me to be less dogmatic and more flexible with my students' writing and speaking. Ultimately, the standards should be:

1. Is your use of language intelligible?
2. Is your use of language the best way to express your ideas?
3. Does your use of language reflect meaningful, complex, higher-order thinking?… (meer)