Stephen Fry's complaint about the complainers about spelling and grammar
relies on a dubious assumption.  Like many another who rails at the
Œpedants¹ who jump to correct misuse of English in the media, he uses the
argument that public usage is the final court of appeal.

What is not inquired into is how Œusage¹ is to be defined.  For example,
English schools once had to make more of a fuss about distinguishing words
(once part of the  English examination syllabus, actually called
ŒConfusables¹ ­ such as the little group Œjudicious-judicial¹,
'industrious-industrial', Œcontinuous-continual¹, Œsensuous-sensual¹,
Œceremonial-ceremonious¹, etc.).  Because of this inclusion in the syllabus,
very few errors with confusable pairs appeared in the usage of newspapers,
magazines, -- even comics. So it was part of the common Œusage¹.   If such
discriminations have disappeared, it says more about fashions of teaching
than anything else.
 
Another UK example, occurs in the pronunciation of the letter H:  I was
taught in school that its name was Œaitch¹ (now still to be heard on the BBC
television programme ŒCountdown¹, a word-game, and also confirmed by the
Oxford English Dictionary), but my bank contacts tell me that they are
working for the ŒHaitch SBC Bank¹, having, no doubt, been avid viewers of
the Australian soap ŒNeighbours¹.  Similarly, are our English pupils to be
told that the pronunciation ŒharASS¹ is the common English usage and not
ŒHARass¹ because a sufficient number of American cop shows are on English
TV?  It becomes a question of ŒWhich country¹s  usage?¹
 
Take one other of Stephen Fry's examples, the confusion of 'refute' and
'deny'.   ŒRefute¹ means BY USING COUNTERVAILING PROOF, PRODUCE A CONVINCING
ARGUMENT AGAINST ANOTHER¹S ASSERTION:   Œdeny¹ means WITHOUT ARGUMENT, TO
CONTRADICT ANOTHER¹S ASSERTION.  The loss of the distinction between
Œrefute¹ and Œdeny¹ would be an enfeeblement of the language:  I read last
week in the newspaper that the Irish Sinn Feiner Jerry Adams has just
'refuted' recent accusations against him, but no arguments had been
forthcoming from him.  Amazing!  I would have very much liked to have read
his refutation.  What I don't like about this error is that it seems to be
used by persons uncertain of their vocabulary WHO ARE TRYING TO USE A BIG
WORD TO SOUND IMPRESSIVE, THOUGH THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS.

One can add that it does not take very long to teach the correct use of the
apostrophe.  Stephen Fry himself appears to be aware of the rules:  he could
not have picked this up from greengrocers' price tags, could he?  Similarly
with 'imply' and 'infer' -- I was fairly successful in teaching the
difference with the rhythmic tag 'Speakers and writers imply:  hearers and
readers infer'.

Nor does he seem to have heard of redundancy in language, and the essential
part it plays in our everyday communication -- for example, that involved in
the distinction between count and mass nouns, subject and verb agreement,
singulars and plurals, and more.  'Fewer' and 'less', for example, is tied
to the count noun/mass noun distinction -- Does one ever hear anyone say
'fewer sand'?  As for plurals, one can hear and read in the media BOTH
'bacterium' AND 'bacteria', 'criterion' AND 'criteria', 'phenomenon' AND
'phenomena' for the SINGULAR -- so just what is the common usage?  The fact
that no one says 'radiuses' instead of 'radii' I attribute to the fussy
pronunciation of the former (though I have heard 'crisises' instead of
'crises').  Redundancy is fact disappearing as regards subject and verb
agreement (e.g.  -- heard this week on BBC radio, 'There's lots of planes on
the tarmac', 'All of us objects to it').  But redundancy is badly named
because these extra, strictly repetitive clues are there to ensure that we
can pick our way more clearly through the cloud of words we hear, and thus
they cannot be summarily jettisoned.  The aim of redundancy is to help
hearers get the message.

Do I sense an underlying old-romantic resistance to the teaching of grammar
here?  With all the excellent textbooks now on sale in the U.S.A. (by
Constance Weaver, Martha Kolln, and the like, and the absence of them in
England) I fear that we English are still mired in a self-defeating ideology
which is sustaining class distinctions by which we over here, both 'upper-'
and 'lower-class', seem to be mesmerized.  An overall appeal to 'usage'
conceals both snobbery and its inversion.  I trace the prejudice to the
deeply embedded division in the UK between private and state education, and
the foundations of that can be traced further.  We even had a CONSERVATIVE
member of parliament this week complaining about the Prime Minister being
too 'posh' to understand the plight of the poor.  I imagine that you
Americans don't even use the word 'posh'.  So we are 'posh', are we, if we
try to teach apostrophe rules to working-class children?

Edmond Wright


Dr. Edmond Wright
3 Boathouse Court
Trafalgar Road
Cambridge
CB4 1DU
England

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Website: http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/elw33/
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