Book review: Sick English, by Janet Byron Anderson

Specialist language sometimes spreads beyond its initial domain and becomes part of common currency. From baseball we get home run; from jousting, full tilt. And from medical science we get syndrome, viral, clinical, [X] on steroids, and others – not exactly an epidemic (that’s another one), but a significant set all the same.

For example: a detective novel I read lately (Angels Flight by Michael Connelly) contained the phrase: “the senseless and often random violence that was the city’s cancer”. Intuitively we understand the cancer metaphor, but we might never have thought about it analytically. You’ll be glad to know that someone has.

Janet Byron Anderson, a linguist and medical editor, has written a book about these words. Sick English: Medicalization in the English Language looks at how medical terminology has “migrated from hospital floors and doctors’ offices and taken up dual citizenship on the pages of newspapers, in news reports and quoted speech”.

Book review: The Old Editor Says, by John McIntyre

Many of you know John E. McIntyre, night editor at the Baltimore Sun and purveyor of consistently good sense on language and editing – evident on his blog You Don’t Say, which I read daily and often link to. Good news: McIntyre has written a book, titled The Old Editor Says: Maxims for Writing and Editing, and it is excellent.

At 70-odd pages, The Old Editor Says is short enough to breeze through in an hour or less, depending on how long you pause for thought, laughter, and quoting to neighbours. Then you’ll want to read it again.

McIntyre is a sharp and entertaining writer, traits honed by his newsroom experience. Take this line: “The next time you use ‘to die for’ in copy, we can make that happen.” (His point: beware exaggeration and journalistic tics and clichés.)

Each page opens with similarly aphoristic advice (occasionally inherited from other editors), followed by a brief discussion. The prose is clear, concise, measured, and filled with sound guidance. Here are some conclusions from one such piece of advice:

First, from your editor, as from your butler, there are no secrets. If you have allowed yourself to be lazy, careless, turgid, or sloppy, there is no concealing it.

Second, everyone – everyone – is capable of shoddy work, especially in the first draft. That is why writers need editing, not just self-editing, but editing from an independent set of eyes.

Third, humility should be the outcome. The writer should understand the human propensity toward error, and the editor should not assume some snooty sense of superiority for having ferreted out errors, because the editor is equally prone to them.*

The book does not deal much with specific issues of grammar; instead it devotes space to pointing out how errors and deficiencies commonly arise and suggesting how to prevent or mitigate them. It explains what’s necessary to keep readers reading and not frustrate them through carelessness and complacency. And it has fun doing so.

The Old Editor Says offers wise counsel on proofreading, word choice, office politics, ethics, stylebook use, job satisfaction, and more. Its main province is the newspaper trade, but its distilled insights are generally applicable to wordsmiths in other fields, as seen in this passage on rules and responsibility:

Those “rules” from whatever stylebook you use aren’t statutory; they’re guidelines. One-sentence exhortations, the ones in this little book included, are not adequate for the complexity of experience.

What you need is judgment.

Mr McIntyre has written a useful and original book that’s also a pleasure to read. If you’re in the business of writing or editing, The Old Editor Says will satisfy, gratify, and edify. You can get it through Amazon and elsewhere in paper and electronic formats; I ordered my copy from the Book Depository (UK).

*

* Anyone who doubts the fallibility of editors should see these confessions at the Subversive Copy Editor Blog.

Book review: Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing

Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch is the memorable name of a new book by Constance Hale; its subtitle, Let Verbs Power Your Writing, reveals it to be a handbook for the craft. In its introduction Hale sets out her primary aim – to teach “the art of making sentences that are as enticing, graceful, sexy, and smooth as the tango” by shining a light on what “pulses . . . at the heart of English”: verbs.

The smoochworthy title, we soon learn, is not just a list of fetching verbs but a structural device. Each chapter has a Vex section that lays out a problem, dipping into history, linguistics and grammar; a Hex section that addresses and dismantles myths; a Smash section that analyses bad writing habits; and a Smooch section that showcases writing “so good you’ll want to kiss its creator”.

Book review: ‘The Horologicon’ by Mark Forsyth

The Horologicon (“book of hours”) is a reference book. Its author, Mark Forsyth, says so, as does its publisher, Icon Books, who kindly sent me a copy for review. But it is a very unusual reference book – the kind you could read from cover to cover in an evening or two, and would, willingly and happily.

Many books and websites are dedicated to unusual words, but they tend to be arranged alphabetically and glossed minimally, so it can be hard to find the words you want. The Horologicon is structured thematically, which makes it easier to locate a desired word – and you’ll see it supplemented by context and historical notes.

The book’s subtitle, A Day’s Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language, is a good description of its contents. It runs according to the clock, but lightly and loosely, starting at dawn and taking us through to bedtime. Along the way we are introduced to a fabulous feast of archaic, dialectal, technical, slang, and otherwise little-known words.

Book review: Punctuation..?

User design, a book design company based in the UK, kindly sent me a copy of their recently reissued book on punctuation, simply titled Punctuation..? Or not so simply: shouldn’t those two full stops be a three-dot ellipsis? Maybe it was intended to get editors talking.

More booklet than book, Punctuation..? consists of 35 illustrated pages aimed at a “wide age range (young to ageing) and intelligence (emerging to expert)”. It’s an attractive pamphlet that covers the usual punctuation marks – comma, dashes and co. – and some less familiar ones, such as guillemets [« »], interpunct [·], and pilcrow [¶].

The book’s advice is basic and broadly helpful. General readers won’t mind its traditional definition of a noun as “a word used as the name of a person, place or thing”, though to me this everyday description is dated and deficient. The prose sometimes jars: “As with many rules, there is always an exception”. Well, which is it?

There are more serious shortcomings. Comma splices are not always errors, but they oughtn’t to appear in a book on punctuation without comment; this one has a few. It says em and en dashes are “longer than the hyphen (-) which is not a dash”, which implies some hyphens are dashes. This construction recurs. (See my post on that vs. which.)

For clarity, some words should be in inverted commas or italics (“the word to”), and some shouldn’t (“What about ‘rent’?”). “[D]iscreetly indented paragraphs” is probably meant to be discretely. Semicolons are not the mark “least used in many modern books” – what about pilcrows and interpuncts? – and there’s more semicolon trouble in this example of exclamation mark use:

Ah! you are wrong, once she sees me cleaned up; washed and shaved, she will find me irresistible!

It suggests that when she is washed and shaved, she will find the speaker irresistible. The first comma is also problematic. The same page says exclamation marks are used to “demonstrate hope or regret”, as in “I hope Betty can come!” No: the word hope does that. Elsewhere, words are repeated (“ready to to feed”), omitted (“at end of this sentence”), and questionably hyphenated (hook-up as a verb).

Punctuation..? has a sense of fun, particularly evident in the sometimes witty sketches that enliven the book’s already-pleasant appearance. Their style may be seen in the image below. The tone is light and friendly, some of the marks are well described, and there is welcome coverage of technical marks, such as prime symbols, which would often be overlooked in a work of this type.

Unfortunately, these virtues are overshadowed by the slip-ups in grammar, style, spelling, punctuation, and fact. Other reviewers have been less critical, but I don’t know if they failed to spot the problems that bothered me, or just didn’t care. Punctuation..? is a nice idea for a book, but it needs – and deserves – more work and better editing.

Language play in ‘Jude in London’

Some people’s accents are so settled that it’s hard to imagine them changing much, if at all, through outside influence. Other people’s accents change readily and strikingly, a point exaggerated for comedic effect in Julian Gough’s recent novel Jude in London:

Her accent, in so brief a time, had gone completely London. I had seen the phenomenon before: some of the Lads, after a weekend in Limerick, would return to the Orphanage with accents so foreign they made the younger Orphans cry.

Elements of language and identity feature prominently in Jude. Its eponymous hero, an irrepressible young Irishman, initially finds his speech emerging in the form of parodically British English as a result of a “Mental Catastrophe” (explained in this extract).

His appearance has already been radically and rudely refashioned by plastic surgery. In this guise, in a valley in England (“or perhaps Wales”), he meets a group of construction workers:

I concentrated hard on distilling the pure drop of my Irishness. I structured my sentence in the glorious grammatical forms of the original language of all these islands. I would be authentically Irish.

I’d be Jude. And what name would you be after having yourself? I thought.

“The name is Jude. May I enquire as to your identity, sirs?” I said.

The more Irish I tried to be, the more English I sounded.

Holy shite.

“God’s dung!”

“What?” said the Lads.

“My speech,” I explained, “has been corrupted by English novelists.”

Jude’s plot is episodic, its elaborate set pieces tied together by the narrator’s continuing journey to learn his origins and find true love. Sincerity mixes with silliness, sometimes in the same serendipitous sentence. Throughout, opportunities for wordplay and mischief are inventively grasped.

As he wends his wandering way through the adventure, Jude meets many colourful characters borrowed from reality and warped with authorial abandon. Some serve chiefly to fuel an extravagant pun, for example the artists formerly known as Eminem and Tracey Emin, who together have founded a movement to fight for women’s rights:

“It is modelled on the Be-ism of John Ono Lennon and Yoko Ono Lennon. Except they used pacifism, and we use violence.”

“Fair play to you both,” I said.

“We call it Feminemineminemism,” he said.

“It rolls off the tongue,” I said. “Eventually.”

Eminem is subsequently referred to as Eminem Emin-Eminem. This sort of revelry in daftness gets me giggly, so as you might imagine, I had a lot of fun with the book. It’s constantly playful — almost exhaustingly so — with jokes operating on multiple levels, some immediate and obvious, some allusive and engineered with patient intricacy.

In this regard Jude is reminiscent of the work of Flann O’Brien and even Buster Keaton, and it shares their plasticity of form and robust disregard for plausibility. The world is distorted this way and that, for all sorts of structural and opportunistic reasons. (Gough has described the book as being about “the bizarre love triangle between consciousness, language, and reality”.)

The style will not appeal to everyone. There is relentless use of Comedy Capitals and Emphatic Capitals, and the story and language alike are frequently and deeply scatological. Readers of Gough’s earlier novels, Juno and Juliet and Jude in Ireland (formerly Jude: Level 1), will have an idea of the tone, and may double it.

But the underlying voice is warm, wry, and consistent even as it embraces paradox and multiplicity. For all its puns, perversions, and prods at literary luminaries, Jude is no mere cheeky comic novel. It’s an original, idiosyncratic and well-written tale that resists tidy categorisation: it’s a lark within a love story and a quest full of questions; whimsy and lunacy belie heartfelt points about life, art, literature and criticism, Irish culture and politics, and Tipperary sandwiches.

John Self’s insightful review says Gough “pursues flights of fancy with ruthless logic” and that he has “not so much killed his darlings, as filled the book with them” — which is fair, I think, but then darlings have their own appeal. Kevin Barry in the Irish Times said he was interested in stories “where the writer has managed to get all of his or her darlings onto the page.”

Jude in London is part 2 of a trilogy. For a flavour, I recommend the aforelinked extract; and The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble, a surreal satire of economic madness first published in the Financial Times as a standalone piece and later incorporated into Jude. Both showcase Gough’s freewheeling style and flair for farce.

Jude is available from Old Street Publishing and in bookshops.

Book review: ‘Evolving English’ by David Crystal

Earlier this year, ELT Journal kindly sent me a copy of Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices, a new book by the eminent linguist and author David Crystal.

Published by the British Library, Evolving English is an illustrated history of the language, and it is a fine and fascinating work. My review has now been published and is available online. Here’s an excerpt:

The relationship between language and culture is a theme that runs throughout Evolving English. As its subtitle One Language, Many Voices indicates, the emphasis is on the great variety of English. . . . Everyone who speaks or writes does so in a unique idiolect. Our language overlaps with the shapes it assumes in the particular circles and cultures we move in, but English would not have become a global lingua franca were it not flexible enough to accommodate so much regional variation. (I find Irish English a particular joy, but again I could be biased!)

Crystal’s book celebrates this diversity and the infinite ways it gives life to language. . . . [It] offers not just a snapshot of English as we know it but a panoply of snapshots throughout history, some familiar, some obscure. It presents them in the context of their times and cultures and shows skilfully and entertainingly how they bring to bear on the language we revel in today.

You can read the full review at ELT Journal. At about 2000 words it is quite detailed – but it will, I hope, appeal to anyone with an interest in language and the history and evolution of English.

A note on the publisher: ELT Journal, originally named English Language Teaching, has been in continual publication since 1946 and gave its name to the field of study often called ELT. The website has a large archive of articles, but – my review excepted – you’ll need to subscribe or pay to read more than an extract or abstract.