Chasing The Muse
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The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left

by David Crystal

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The Fight For English

by David Crystal

reviewed by C. Michael Becker

The title of David Crystal's book The Fight for English manages to suggest the two questions central to its thought provoking and surprisingly entertaining subjects: "What is there to 'fight for' over English?" and "Who would do such a thing?" The answer, the reason that this volume should be considered required reading for anyone who has taken up a pen, who has fitted spool and paper into typewriter or who has had a love/hate relationship with a computer's word processing program is simply that the combatants have been (and are most likely to remain) us: authors of every stripe, both literary and academic (prose, poet, graffito artist), editors and even the printers who have steadfastly enforced their own prejudices (some educated, some not) on manuscripts with complete disregard for the proofreading marks on the copy before them.

Mr. Crystal warns his reader that the word "'fight' is not my metaphor." He quotes a newspaper headline which proclaimed, "We must fight to preserve the tongue that Shakespeare spoke." He goes on to demonstrate, beginning with eleventh century Old English, in which many individuals "tried to shape the language in their own image but, generation after generation, failed." His first eleven chapters are organized in a generally chronological mode to the eighteenth century when, he says, "there was a huge shift in the way people thought about usage." The remaining chapters focus on what he perceives as the main themes people recognize today: "notably grammar, punctuation, spelling, and pronunciation."

We discover that "fight" is a mechanism often literally associated with the currency and the fortune of a given language. The Norman Conquest brought a third tongue to be the language of the aristocracy, French, which would function alongside Latin (spoken by the educated, such as clergy) and English (left to the masses). Norse raids and the invaders' attempts to colonize northern regions imposed an additional influence on regional language. The political outcome of the "100 Years' War" worked against French. Yet, if we are to progress as a peaceful society, Mr. Crystal reminds his reader, "A nation needs a standard language to permit mutual intelligibility. Nor is it just a nation. In a global society, it is the whole world that can benefit from a lingua franca." In today's global society, that language is (surprise) English.

The Fight for English gives us historic background and sheds considerable illumination on topics which are generally important not only to writers like ourselves (split infinitives or punctuation) but also to the debate over bilingual societal acceptance of immigrants and the perception of desirability for bilingual education.

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C. Michael Becker was born in Chicago, Illinois, and has been a resident of Naperville since 1982. He received the Master of Arts in English Literature from Northwestern University before devoting thirty years to a career in employee benefits. He retired to concentrate on freelance and creative writing and photography. His essays, short stories, poetry and photography have appeared in the Naperville Writers' Group Rivulets and Rockford Writers' Guild Review, the Online Journal of the Dana Literary Society as well as Chicago area newspapers. His collection of poetry and photography, The Dead Letter Office, was published in July 2006. He is currently writing a novel.