We need a coherent strategy deal a genunine or diplomatic wedge but first we need to learn our own language
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Six books that explain the rules and illuminate the idiosyncrasies of an
ever-changing tongue.
Woe Is I
The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English
By Patricia T. O'Conner
Riverhead. 265 pp. $22.95
Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences
A Guide to Avoiding the Most Common Errors in Grammar and Punctuation
By Janis Bell
Norton. 151 pp. $13.95
I Love It When You Talk Retro
Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins
of American Speech
By Ralph Keyes
St. Martin's Press. 310 pp. $25.95
From the Horse's Mouth
Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms
Edited by John Ayto
Oxford University Press. 408 pp. $21.95
The Insect That Stole Butter?
Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins
Edited by Julia Cresswell
Oxford University Press. 502 pp. $21.95
What Made the Crocodile Cry?
101 Questions About the English Language
By Susie Dent
Oxford University Press. 159 pp. $18.95
Reviewed by Howard Shapiro
Now, here's a look at six books that cut the mustard.
Uh - they cut the mustard? How many times have you said that? Maybe, oh,
countless? Me too. Even so, while I regularly spread the mustard, I
don't actually cut the mustard, or the mustard seed.
I could cut mustard greens, but then I'd have to call this a piece about
six books that cut the mustard greens. Nah.
Such are the vagaries of our language. Not only do we regularly use it
and abuse it - and from those abuses, a living language continues to
breathe and evolve - but we constantly say stuff we are unable to explain.
Often, there is an explanation. English, that greatest and most
flamboyant of thieves, often leaves clear tracks in its pilferage, and
they swirl in mazes of strange idea associations and pronunciation
shifts back through the centuries and directly to the tongues of the
original owners. (Tongue is an example: from the French langue. Before
that, the Latin lingua. Before that from dinghu of Indo-European
languages. Dinghu? Don't ask. We'll never get to the books.)
For other words and phrases, the origins are lost. Maybe the reason we
still cut the mustard when we're successful at something is because the
sound of it tracks nicely.
"In America, to say something was 'the proper mustard' in the early 20th
century meant it was the genuine article, and 'cutting the mustard'
became a popular idiom to describe something that was up to scratch and
more," writes Susie Dent in What Made the Crocodile Cry. Her fun book
comes from the folks who continue to print the remarkable Oxford English
Dictionary - about English eccentricities that we've turned into
everyday language. She also writes that, alas, the precise origin of any
form of the phrase is lost. Which doesn't mean that cut the mustard
doesn't make sense figuratively just because its essence is lost literally.
But what about that up to scratch that Dent used to define the phrase in
question? For the answer, I turned to another new release by Oxford,
John Ayto's From the Horse's Mouth, the third edition of a dictionary of
idioms. Turns out that we do know the origin of up to scratch, which
Ayto, who edited the dictionary, attributes to the sports world.
The scratch, he tells us, was the mark from which competitors began a
race unless they'd been given an advantage, and could start ahead of the
mark. So a competitor starting from scratch (there's another one!) began
the competition without any advantage. And up to scratch? "A competitor
who was up to scratch was of a good enough standard to start a race,"
Ayto writes.
His idiom book is essentially a typical dictionary - an index long on
definitions and with a nod to etymologies - but the phrase origins he
cites are often surprising or just plain interesting, the sorts of
things you store in some mental file folder, and who knows when you'll
use them.
For example, I looked up one of my favorite words, fly, the muscular
workhorse of only three letters that has so many meanings, without being
used in idioms, that it's a clear example of both the versatility and
difficulty of English. Fly and its variants take up all of page 134, and
I was particularly struck by fly in the ointment, a phrase that conjures
a perfect image.
I learned this, which fascinated me: "This expression alludes to
Ecclesiastes 10:1: 'Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to
send forth a stinking savour.' "
A third new Oxford release - they get lots of mileage out of their words
over there - is called The Insect That Stole Butter?, which I spent many
hours with because I became glued. It's a dictionary of word origins,
and, abracadabra (first recorded in an A.D. 2 Latin poem), it cast a
spell on me. Something as simple as learning that a cupboard was
originally a single table for the display of cups, what we now call a
sideboard, sent me scrambling for other words that once had literal
meanings.
And then I got to words with odd origins: pedigree, for example, from
the French spoken by Norman settlers in England: p� de grue, a crane's
foot. "In medieval manuscripts," explains the book's editor, Julia
Cresswell, "a mark consisting of three curved lines was used to indicate
a person's family descent or succession. People saw a resemblance
between this mark and the claw of a crane." Who knew?
It's easy to see, after a few examples, the market for these books.
Every language both shapes, and is shaped by, the way its speakers
think. Every time we speak or write in English, we think within its
pushable boundaries. These books are a glimpse into the way we shape
ideas and make connections - and they make it easy to become gung-ho on
words.
As for gung-ho, Ralph Keyes points out in his new I Love It When You
Talk Retro that it was the motto of a New Zealand group, taken from the
Chinese words kung and ho - work and together. A colonel in the South
Pacific adopted it for his Marine battalion, and a 1943 movie made that
battalion's story popular - and also the phrase. "Over the years," Keyes
writes, "gung-ho took on an odor of overzealousness. Nowadays, calling
someone 'real gung-ho' isn't necessarily a compliment."
Times change, meanings too. Keyes' book is full of phrases, most still
in use, whose origins are not what we might think, and some really take
the cake - a phrase originally used after the Civil War by freed slaves
to refer to the cake they'd give the winner of a dance competition that
mocked the marches in plantation balls.
Write about words, and people think you're a walking encyclopedia of
cool stories. Write about grammar and no matter what you say, someone
will hate you. (English class students, always, to name many someones.)
We're not as protective of our tongue as the French, but we'll still
fight not to split an infinitive ever. Or if we like, to always split one.
For guidance that explains grammar in a precise understandable fashion,
Janis Bell's Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences works just fine. It's a
no-nonsense grammar, with quizzes after each chapter and solid examples,
and while it doesn't address splitting infinitives, you'll come out of
it knowing all the basics of tense and case and even punctuation use.
If you already know all that and like to write (or speak), pick up the
extraordinary Woe Is I by Patricia T. O'Conner, in its new third
edition. O'Conner, a former editor at the New York Times Book Review, is
among American English's smartest grammarians - and she writes about
grammar as if she's wrangled you into a conspiracy to put common sense
above anyone's rules.
This seems a bold idea, because logic has little to do with the way
language works, but the more I read O'Conner - and believe me, Woe Is I
is a grammar that reads like a conversation - I realized that common
sense has everything to do with the way we use English, no matter how
the language is supposed to work.
And she makes it so easy to be sensible. One chapter of "tombstones" is
about all the dead rules we've long broken but many people still insist
on. (There, I just broke one.) O'Conner speaks not for an anarchy, with
a language so imprecise it's meaningless, but for one that lives
overtime because people in general, and not just grammarians, make it
work. I'm keeping this book by my keyboard.
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