A must for any descriptivist who's constantly fighting battles against language prescriptivism. ( )

This book is a history of usage of the English language. As standard English more or less coalesced about 400-500 years ago, many people became obsessed with what "proper" English should sound and look like. It's the linguistic battle between prescriptivists and descriptivists. Crystal likes to see local dialects be preserved and likes a wide latitude for English. This is pretty well-written, somewhat more oriented to the situation in Britain than perhaps in the rest of the world, although he acknowledges the richness of the English language beyond the North Sea area extensively. ( )

I enjoy David Crystal's writings on language very much and having read - and loved - Lynn Truss' Eats, Shoots and Leaves, to which this book is somewhat of a response, I was excited to read this.

It is both a historical survey of the evolution of the idea of "correct" language - how there came to be such an idea - and a thematic survey of what the sticking points have been in defining "correct language". Crystal is more broad than Truss, focusing on more than just punctuation, which was nice.

The strongest points of the book were the explanatory chapters. Crystal shows how the English language used to allow a much wider range of variation in spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. than it has come to do. The weakest points are when Crystal goes on the attack against Truss and others espousing rigid ideas about language "correctness." These sections seem petty, irrelevant, and tacked on in an attempt to capitalize on the success of Truss' book. Fortunately, despite what the title may indicate, these episodes are fairly minor and are confined mostly to the latter part of the book.

Overall, this book was acceptable to me. I did not find many new ideas in it but it reinforced concepts about language change that I had previously touched on in other readings. ( )

Having read, and enjoyed, Eats Shoots and Leaves, I just had to read this one. The subtitle hooked me: "How language pundits ate, shot, and left".

David Crystal argues against a "zero tolerance" approach to punctuation changes and other evolutions in the English language. Language has evolved for centuries; the only languages that don't evolve are dead. Mr. Crystal chronicals some of the evolutions in usage, pronunciation, spelling and punctuation. He argues that the understanding of changes and of the appropriatness of different usages in different contexts is more important than learning strict rules of grammar. I agree...although I still get angry when I see a sign in a parking lot saying "small car's only"! ( )