Did Simon Heffer’s new book come out on St George’s Day? If not, it probably should have done. If we ever needed someone to defend what’s left of our national culture from the massed armies of lefties, foreigners, proles, riff-raff, illiterates, young people, thin people and David Cameron, he would be our man. For three decades he has fought the good fight, a squat colossus of unquenchable fury, his red hair forever threatening to burst into flames, just because it can. He is one of the marvels of the age and, I now discover to my shock, exactly four days younger then me. We Cancerians have to stick together — although my moon is in Aries and his is in Taurus, which I’m told makes all the difference.
Recently, then, young Simon has turned the white heat of his attention to the English language. Strictly English (2010) started life as a series of emails sent to Telegraph staffers who kept writing ‘emend’ when they meant ‘amend’ and foozling their subjunctives. Professional writers liked the book, whether or not they liked Heffer. Academics were less keen. The professor of general linguistics at Edinburgh university saw ‘this perversely atavistic book’ as a ‘perversion of grammatical education’.
Still, it sold well, mainly to people who knew all the rules already, but liked reading them again for old times’ sake. Simply English isn’t so much a follow-up as a variation on the previous book. Expanded and rewritten, it has been rearranged into a handy A-to-Z format, enabling you to look up solecisms and barbarisms with the greatest of ease. It could be the pedant’s loo book of 2014. (Heffer says that ‘loo’ is mere slang. I suspect he would prefer ‘lavatory’, or even the briskly utilitarian ‘water closet’.)
Even in other rooms of the house, though, it’s a bracing read. Heffer takes no linguistic prisoners. New and vogueish terms are swept aside with disdain. The use of the word ‘source’ as a verb (as in ‘she sources her ingredients from organic farmers’) dates only from 1972, and is therefore not to be countenanced. Nor does he like what one might call the ‘dangling hopefully’ (as in ‘hopefully, it will stop raining soon’). ‘It remains wrong, and only a barbarous writer with a low estimation of his readers would try to pass it off as respectable prose.’ At times you can easily imagine the veins throbbing on the side of his forehead. ‘Akimbo can only apply to arms, signifying hands on hips and elbows pointing outwards.’ Which means that the only time anyone ever uses the word, in the phrase ‘legs akimbo’, it’s wrong. Call me a softy, but when I read this, it felt as though a word had just died.
When he mirrors my own prejudices, though, Heffer can be quite brilliant. ‘Brilliant in its figurative sense, meaning extremely clever or superlative talent, is a much over-worked adjective… some newspapers apply it to so many columnists, series, special offers or free gifts that is remarkable that their readers have not been blinded.’ He is sound on ‘refute’, the misuse of which I have long felt should be punished by death.
There are omissions. There’s nothing on ‘national treasure’ — maybe it’ll appear in the paperback — and I was disappointed not to see his opinions on the popular half-witted confusion between ‘parameter’ and ‘perimeter’. For there are quite a lot of opinions in here, elevated to the status of high judgment by Heffer’s robust self-belief and, I would guess, extreme intellectual impatience. There’s no room for shilly-shallying in Hefferland. ‘Loo’ is slang because he says it is, and that’s all there is to it.
If you can forgive the eruptions of high-handedness, though, this is a useful, well constructed and often absorbing book. The war goes on, and our man is up on the ramparts, armed to the teeth, and waiting to see the whites of their eyes.
Comments