By David Crystal

Proscribe Prescription. A memorable, straightforward tagline if ever I saw one, and this is the premise of this book, yet another on the conveyor from the eminent professor in the fields of language and linguistics.

This is a reaction to the best-selling book on punctuation Eats, Shoots & Leaves, written by Lynne Truss. Crystal’s aim is to encourage people to break the shackles imposed by centuries of pedants, such that many people are afraid of language, unsure whether what they are saying is ‘correct’.

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By David Crystal

I’m a language fan. I speak a few to relatively high levels.

If you factor in that I’m not a native, you could call my French near fluent and my Esperanto advanced. My Italian, though rusty, is not so bad that I can’t pick up a magazine and read it. My understanding of Spanish, relatively untried and certainly untaught, is passive enough that I used documentation from the Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe in my MSc dissertation, and I successfully translated an excerpt from a novel to Radio the other day.

I have knowledge of other languages that is functional for tourism reasons but not for conversation. I’m thinking of German and Swedish here, both of which I have used to limited degrees on my travels, and the grammars of which I have read.

You can factor in the historical aspect of language too. I’m very well versed on the history of English and its progression over last 1500 years, and was just this morning reading a grammar of Old and Middle English.

I’ve also read a few books on linguistics over the years, including breakdowns of a couple hundred diverse languages from all over the world. I’ll be doing it again soon after purchasing Nicholas Ostler’s Empires Of The Word, nearly 700 pages dedicated to language from the first moment that they were written down.

Add all these factors together and you’ll likely reach a seemingly obvious conclusion:

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