Verbal Hygiene

Deborah Cameron, 2012 [1995]

(October 2013)

…grammar drills present pupils with an apparently trivial and pointless task which must nevertheless be performed precisely on command. The point is not to teach the task in and for itself, but to teach discipline – obedience and punctiliousness – in all tasks.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

Excellent. Simply excellent. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Cameron offers the obvious but apparently not observation that disputes about language (falling standards, political correctness, ‘women’s language’) are almost always disputes about something else (i.e. ideology and politics), and then works through a number of examples with impressive depth and clarity of focus.

This is what my copy looks like now, and it’s only like that because I ran out of post-its. I realize that a highlight isn’t a highlight if it covers the entire work, but this whole book impacts upon everything I’m interested in right now: professionally, academically, and personally. I’ll stick some less slaveringly fanboyish thoughts up in the usual manner as and when, but there’s almost too much here to unpack in a couple of days and I’m on a schedule here.

In the meantime though I’ll just point out that, in amongst everything else, it also includes a substantial section on translating the bible into Klingon. Can’t really go wrong with that, can you?