The Miss Grundy grammarians in the crowd may not always like Hitchings’ line of argument, which some will find shockingly...
Caring about the propriety and properness of language is so gay.
Those are fighting words. In fact, there are fighting words in just about every utterance we make. But, observes Evening Standard theater critic Hitchings (The Secret Life of Words, 2008, etc.), some words are fighting-er than others. “When I was younger,” he writes (the author was born in 1974), “one of the most common complaints I heard about any aspect of the English language was the change in the use of the word gay.” No longer a word meaning “merry” among the oldsters, “gay” had come to mean something else—though it had come to mean that something else well before World War II and had just taken time to catch up. “Experience suggests”—not “past experience,” which is redundant—“that you can always start a row by staking a claim about English usage,” he writes. And he’s right. Go around insisting that “data” must be always a plural, agreeing with the plural verb form—“the data are convincing”—and you’ll wind up with a mouthful of loose teeth one day; go around using “gay” flippantly, and you’ll be branded as incorrect and worse. But proscriptive and prescriptive grammarians have been with us always, or at least since the Georgian age, when Britons seemed very ill at ease speaking their mother tongue and a catastrophic social faux pas was always only a syllable away. Hitchings is good on the history of that dis-ease, and though he lacks the zest of some of the old-timey word writers, from Edwin Newman to the sainted H.L. Mencken, he acquits himself well on the use, misuse, disuse and abuse of English grammar over the centuries.
The Miss Grundy grammarians in the crowd may not always like Hitchings’ line of argument, which some will find shockingly permissive because realistic. But word lovers will.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-18329-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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