Johnson －What to look for in a usage and grammar guide The Economist March 2nd 2019 文法書
Why do people buy books on English usage? The obvious answer, “for authoritative advice”, doesn't square with what people actually buy. For decades the best-selling grammar book in the English in the English-speaking world, by far, has been William Strunk and E.B. White’s “Elements of style”. It is breezily readable, but neither comprehensive － a recent edition is 95 small pages － nor even always reliable.
It is not the only book in that category. Lynne Truss had a mega-seller with “Eats, Shoots and leaves: a Zero Tolerance Guide to Punctuation”. Never mind that “zero-tolerance” needs a hyphen; Ms Truss’s style － sometimes crisp humour, sometimes camped-up outrage － was the real selling-point. A gentler humour is on offer in Gyles Brandreth’s contribution, “Have You Eaten Grandma?”, which follows Ms Truss in making a joke of a missing comma. It calls “Most of the time” a subordinate clause, among other lapses. But it too has sold well. It seems that people prize attitude over expertise.
At the other end of the spectrum lie venerable reference books. The “Chicago Manual of Style”, in its 17th edition, is a bible for American copy editors. Bryan Garner, a lawyer and lexicographer, produces well-researched tomes. “Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage” is one of the best in the business. But these hefty books cannot be zipped through like those of Ms Truss or Mr Brandreth.
Some journalistic outfits, including the Associated Press, the New York Times and The Economist, offer advice in a smaller package. And a few individual writers have done the same in recent years, with “Accident Will Happen” by Oliver Kamm (the language columnist for the Times of London), “The Joy of Syntax” by June Casagrande (a copy editor and columnist) and “The Sense of Style” by Steven Pinker (a Harvard psychologist). All three are natives, not tourists, in the study of language, but their books can be read for fun. And so can “Dreyer’s English”, the newest entry. Published only last month in America, it is already in its fifth printing － quite an achievement for a 60-year-old first-time author with strong opinions on en-dash.
Benjamin Dreyer is the copy chief at Random House, a New York publisher. For four decades he improved others’ prose without showcasing his own. His experience and good sense are established as early as page 9, where he dispels what he calls “the big three” unkillable myths － that you can't start a sentence with a conjunction, end one with a preposition or split an infinitive. Do all three, says Mr Dreyer. “You’ll have a certain percentage of the reading and online-commenting populace up your fundament to tell you you're subliterate. Go ahead and break them anyway. It's fun, and I’ll back you up.”
Although he enjoys killing off bogus rules, Mr Dreyer is more concerned with injunctions you should follow than with ones you should discard. In some places he is conservative (singular they is on the rise, but he can't quite endorse it). In others he is unconventional (he does not use question-marks with so-called tag questions, which can jar, can't it). But on page, the serious stuff is spiced with his distinctive humour.
On some, the serious-to-spice ratio is reversed. The section on proper nouns is heavy on Broadway. The section on redundancies probably didn't need “assless chaps” (“chaps are by definition assless. Look at a cowboy. From behind”). But these digressions are delivered with a wink. One reviewer called the book “for the 1%”, but that missed the point, and the percentage. This book is not for a financial upper crust, but an intellectual one, and not just a slim sliver. It is a democratic and liberal-minded book for readers who care for grammar, usage and a good read at the same time. Judging from the book’s sales, more than 1% might want that. All the better that it is informed by decades of dealing with subtleties, edge cases, language change and the rest. Where Mr Dreyer delivers a sharp “do this, not that” on a matter of dispute, he admits that you are getting his opinion, not some unchanging rule on stone tablets.
Mr Dreyer says he considered calling the book “The Last Word”, but decided against: “There's no rule without an exception (well, mostly), there's no thought without an after thought (at least for me), there's always something you meant to say but forget to say. There's no last word, only the next word.” This is what to look for in a language book: authority without arrogance. There is always more to learn.
