Book description
In its long history, the English language has had many lawmakers--those
who have tried to regulate or otherwise organize the way we speak.
Proper Words in Proper Places offers the first narrative history of
these endeavors and shows clearly that what we now regard as the only
"correct" way to speak emerged out of specific historical and
social conditions over the course of centuries. As historian Jack Lynch
has discovered, every rule has a human history and the characters
peopling his narrative are as interesting for their obsession as for
their erudition: the sharp-tongued satirist Jonathan Swift, who called
for a government-sponsored academy to issue rulings on the language; the
polymath Samuel Johnson, who put dictionaries on a new footing; the
eccentric Hebraist Robert Lowth, the first modern to understand the
workings of biblical poetry; the crackpot linguist John Horne Tooke,
whose bizarre theories continue to baffle scholars; the chemist and
theologian Joseph Priestly, whose political radicalism prompted violent
riots; the ever-crotchety Noah Webster, who worked to Americanize the
English language; the long-bearded lexicographer James A. H. Murray, who
devoted his life to a survey of the entire language in the Oxford
English Dictionary ; and the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who worked
without success to make English spelling rational.
Grammatical "rules" or "laws" are not like the law
of gravity, or even laws against murder and theft--they're more like
rules of etiquette, made by fallible people and subject to change.
Witty, smart, full of passion for the world's language, Proper Words in
Proper Places will entertain and educate in equal measure. Jack Lynch
is a professor of English at Rutgers University and a Johnson scholar,
having studied the great lexicographer for nearly a decade. In addition
to his books on Johnson and on Elizabethan England, he has written
journal articles and scholarly reviews, and hosts a Web site devoted to
these topics at http://andromeda. rutgers. edu/~jlynch/18th/. He is the
author of Becoming Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson's Insults and the
editor of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary. He lives in Lawrenceville, NJ.
