Struggle for the soul of English usage is not just small potato's

Texting and social media are the new battlefield for language pedants and libertines

AT THE start of the century, Martin Amis published a collection of critical essays called The War Against Cliche.Amis's title referenced the desire of any serious writer to avoid stock phrases and hackneyed constructions. Quite right too. If some poor sap is paying you to write, the least you can do is dream up your own smart-aleck remarks. (I would say something about "avoiding cliches like the plague", but that joke has been so overused it has itself gained the status of cliche.)

In recent years, however, self-righteous lunatics such as this writer have launched a fresh campaign against a particular use of that linguistic term. Prowl the comments sections of prominent websites and you will find us flinging barbed missiles from our loftiest nags (see how I avoided “high horses” there?).

“Fruitbat666 says that ‘Gorilla Wars IV is really cliche,” we rave. Is it really? Is it? Is it? Perhaps, it’s also “really comedy” and “really drama”. Will Fruitbat please note that “cliche” is a noun, not an adjective?”

As it happens, Penguin Books has recently re-issued an economic, highly amusing guide to English usage by Martin’s late father. Kingsley Amis’s (slightly archly titled) The King’s English studies many of the linguistic infelicities that so outrage correspondents to newspaper letters pages. As you didn’t need to be told, “enormity” means great wickedness, not hugeness. “Disinterest” means lack of bias, not lack of concern. “Fortuitous” means “occurring by chance”, not lucky. And so on.

Here’s the question. Does it really matter if writers make this class of error? As long as the meaning is clear, why worry if a word is not used in the manner prescribed (not “proscribed”) by the Oxford English Dictionary? The same question could be asked of mistakes in punctuation and syntax. Be honest. When the proverbial grocer advertises “potato’s” you don’t really wonder which unnamed entity the lucky tuber owns.

Sir Kingsley was known, in later years, to be a fearsome curmudgeon. Like the title character of Evelyn Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, he seemed to abhor "everything . . . that had happened in his own lifetime". But he demonstrates surprising degrees of tolerance in The King's English. He sees no reason to stubbornly avoid (ahem) the spilt infinitive. He sighs at the notion that prepositions should never appear at the end of sentences.

Nonetheless, Amis pére leaves us in little doubt that he requires certain rules to be followed. The misuse of “disinterest”, for example, is “a case of ignorant bullshit”. Lord knows what he would have made of the current vogue for turning “cliche” into an adjective.

You’d expect Stephen Fry to be pernickety in this area, but the UK’s national treasure claims to have little time for the usage zealots. On an episode of QI, he railed against the temptation to stand outside greengrocers bellowing about misplaced punctuation points. Fry takes the line that, as long as the message is understood, supposed linguistic errors should be quietly tolerated.

And yet. Study Fry’s busy Twitter feed and you will note that he rarely slips into the syntactic anarchy that characterises so much of the new media. “To” does not appear as “2”. Proper names are capitalised. There is even a smattering of punctuation. Does he care more than he pretends?

It is in the arenas of texting and social media that we encounter the fiercest divisions between pedants and libertines. It has, alas, become an accepted convention that such communications are carried out in a class of half-English that suggests an unholy combination of Finnegans Wake and lavatory-wall graffiti. Some texting enthusiasts will go so far as to argue that inserting dashes and parentheses into such messages actually constitutes a stylistic error.

Your current correspondent proudly counts himself among those fruitcakes who treat every text message – and angry bulletin-board post – as a piece of formal prose. Watch me as, while standing pathetically in the rain, I finger shift keys to ensure that a semi-colon separates two linked sentences in an unimportant message concerning ingredients for tonight’s dinner. How the hell do I get my phone to render the acute accent in bleeding “cliche”? The rain pours down and still I strive to insert inverted commas around every direct quote. What an idiot.

Let’s be frank. Yes, we pedants admire the formal balance of carefully written prose. Sure, certain standards are worth maintaining. But an angry dedication to correcting every supposed error in usage is really just a way of showing off one’s own supposed erudition. Look at me. I know that “hopefully” is an adverb that should not be used in place of “I hope so”.

After all, the language is full of words that once meant something else entirely. Enormity will, almost certainly, lose its original meaning and be permitted in formal descriptions of elephants, continents and stellar nebulae.

What's this I see in the online version of Webster's Dictionary?"Cliche – adjective"? Now, that's going too far.