Good english [antikvár]

PRELUDE The antic haverings of-a pedantic pedestrianism in quest of Pure English are rapidly producing a new form of Addison's Disease—for Addison was the first to complain that 'the late war had adulterated our tongue with strange words'. —C. K. Ogden : Basic English. The Scope and Aims of this Book Any book that professes to set down rules for ' good English' or 'plain English' or 'direct English' is based on a fallacy. This book is no exception. There are good reasons for this, some of which have been hinted at or touched upon in the following pages. One lies in the fundamental fact that the language is living and constantly changing, so that any formalised record of its accidence and syntax 1 is bound to be, in some measure, out of date. For example, Cobbett's famous Grammar (about 1820), which is several times quoted in these pages, is out of date; so is Fowler's Modern English Usage, published in 1926; so is Sir Alan Herbert's What a Word!, published in 1935; and so, already, is this very book, since there is a time-lag between its writing and its publication, in which the language has in certain ways, however small and trivial, developed and changed. For the same reason, every Dictionary is out of date as soon as it is published. Language always outpaces its grammarians and lexicographers. Another Ues in the fact that there is no such thing as 'standard English'—an English controlled, that is, by a central Academy, as French is controlled by L'Académie 1 These two words are used from time to time throughout the book. A ccidence simply means the classification of the ' accidents ' that befall individual words—that is, inflexions, or changes (usually in the endings) which indicate different functions. Syntax is the set of rules governing the order and arrangement of words in the sentence. The word itself is derived from a Greek root meaning ' order'.