The Adventure of English – The Biography of a Language
By Melvin Bragg
Published by Sceptre, 2003

A billion people today speak Mandarin, but just as many use English to communicate across borders. English should be fine. Really. My review for The Nation, published in November.

Fatigated by the nidulating of alien illecebrities, scholars latrate and try to abstegrify all that is subsecive.
Thus the adventure seemed to have taken a wrong turn, but English soon found its way back to the high road, the today scholars instead grow weary that foreign enticements are building nests and try to cleanse the language of everything that’s spare.

I’m taking liberties with the translation, but the first line above is indeed how things might have gone had someone not thought better not all that long ago.

Melvin Bragg makes much of the language’s adaptability in this lively, 300-page history, which is neither definitive nor scholarly but quite fun. It rides the great whale of English on its global migrations, surfacing to spout in the Americas and India and Australia and then diving back to the depths, dragging all the indigenous dialects and inventions with it like so many defeated Ahabs.

We finally arrive at the Oxford English Dictionary’s waiting room, where “bigorexia” and “rump-pumpy” hope for admission, their applications every bit as worthy as “google” and “gaydar”, which have just been let in. In a corner by itself sits “earworm”, confident that people need a word to describe those blasted tunes you can’t get out of your head.

What’s next?

The future, Bragg suspects, will be defined by those for whom English is a second language – the world’s already massive and still swelling L2 brigades. He quotes linguist Jennifer Jenkins: “Whereas the traditional English ‘talk about’ something or ‘discuss’ something, almost all L2 speakers ‘discuss about’ something.”

“She believes that phrase is here to stay and will spread into Standard English.”

So that helps explain something I find myself “fixing” virtually every day as I edit newsroom copy. Perhaps I should leave it alone – it wasn’t that along ago that I wondered why the BBC always spoke of Margaret Thatcher “taking” a decision rather than “making” one.

I only hope that the English of newspapers as they rush to reap Internet advertising doesn’t collapse into textspeak, of the type “u c al the x” – you see all the time – in Web forums now.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, words like “industry” and “exaggerate” were regarded as strange mutants. Shakespeare, of course, was a factory churning out new phrases.

“He shoved into bed together words that scarcely knew each other before, had never even been introduced,” Bragg writes. Thank the Bard for “puppy-dog” and “smooth-faced”, not to mention “as luck would have it”, “not budging an inch” and “vanish into thin air”.

But those Elizabethan days were inventive if nothing else. The royal poet Philip Sydney was the first person to say “far-fetched”, and John Donne soon handed us the grand philosophy that “no man is an island”.

Finding out where such common words and expressions came from is always fascinating, but Bragg’s “Adventure” offers a great deal more. He coasts merrily “from Friesian to Shakespeare, from Shakespeare to Joyce, from Joyce to Chomsky”, finding high drama on the battlefield with Kings Alfred and Harold and in the archbishop’s cloisters as William Tyndale sneaks out the first vernacular Bible (and in the process coins “signs of the times”, “landlady” and “the powers that be”).

There are Vikings, Picts, Celts, Goths and loads of Frenchmen to deal with, but the language of every newcomer to the isles is milked for all it’s worth, and when the English set sail themselves, they did more word-harvesting everywhere they went.

Odd enough that America’s Pilgrim Fathers should be greeted on a wild shore by a native saying “welcome” in perfect English (he’d met their predecessors far down the coast). Odder still that the Mayflower Puritans embalmed the English they knew while back home it kept growing, and thus Americans today still pronounce “either” as ee-ther, the English as the newer eye-ther. And it’s quite alright stateside to say “gotten”, a word abandoned long, long ago in the land where it was made.

“In the west,” Bragg writes, “English went wild.” But unfortunately the third of the book devoted to cowboy, gambler and boozer lingo, Mark Twain “gettin’ sivilized” and even West Indies patois is tiresome because it’s so familiar; Bragg even cites Bill Bryson, who’s been this way before.

He gets back into more compelling territory with Jonathan Swift fretting over the language “perpetually changing” and Thomas Sheridan’s pronunciation police. Samuel Johnson had a go at fixing English in place with his dictionary, but in the end decided “neither reason nor experience can justify it”. Just as well, because he defined “tarantula” as “an insect whose bite is only cured by musick”.

“English, like water,” Bragg reckons, “will find its own level.”