His latest book examines the battle (the ‘language wars’ of the title) between prescriptivists and descriptivists in the historical development of English. Early in the book Hitchings notes: ‘Most people cleave to certain rules about English. They behave as though these are eternal, immutable edicts – the violation of which is a symptom of low intelligence and poor breeding. I can remember being chastised at school by a teacher who insisted that a civilized person could never put a comma before and or use the words lot and got.’ I have never quite understood the prejudice against the word get, but it seems to derive from the notion that get is a very vulgar and common word, clearly inferior to such educated synonyms as ‘receive’, ‘acquire’, and ‘experience’. I vividly remember the story told to me by a radio talkback caller a few years ago. When she was in Grade Six at primary school, in country New South Wales, her teacher made all the students write out the word get on a piece of paper. Each student then dropped their slip of paper into a small cardboard box. A lid was placed on the box, and it was carried with great ceremony out into the school playground. A hole was dug, the box was placed in it, and the students dropped clods of earth on to the becoffined gets. The buried word was not to be uttered again.

This is a story that obviously works at the expense of the schoolteacher, who belongs to a long line of slightly barmy prescriptivists, members of a language police force who have finally been mocked into silence in this enlightened descriptivist age. In a grander narrative about the history of English, the prescriptivists are on the losing side in a battle whose fate was sealed when England did not follow the model of the Académie française. The French Academy was established in 1635 with the aim of keeping the vocabulary and grammar of French pure and free from contamination, especially from foreign contamination. Of course, the immediate causes of the triumph of English in the twenty-first century are self-evident: Britain’s imperialistic power in the nineteenth century; the political and economic power of the United States in the twentieth century. Many historians of the English language, however, argue that the English language’s eventual victory as the global language was in part a consequence of that moment when the English decided not to follow the French in establishing a language Academy to control what is acceptable and what is not acceptable in a language. (England toyed with the idea of its own academy, but finally rejected it.) In this narrative, English is the language that triumphed because it rejected prescriptivism. English rejected rules and bureaucratic authority, promiscuously borrowed words from any language, and developed into a language of great richness and power.

In such an account, the prescriptivists are relatively easy targets, since in some form or other time will always prove them to be on the losing side. Hitchings notes that in the seventeenth century the writer Edward Phillips, a nephew of John Milton, complained about the words autograph, ferocious, misogynist, and repatriation in his New World of English Words (first published in 1658). Jonathan Swift objected to mob and banter. Samuel Taylor Coleridge loathed talented. The prescriptivists have often had a touch of the Gallic racial purity argument about them, especially when arguing that we should rid English of the promiscuous borrowings and return to some form of Anglo-Saxon prelapsarian Eden. There was always a whiff of this about Noah Webster in America, and the movement was strong in England in the nineteenth century, with the poet William Barnes (1801–86) preferring wheelsaddle to bicycle and leechcraft to medicine. In the first half of the twentieth century, our own Percy Grainger plotted the eradication of foreign words from English and the installation of a kind of Nordic English, in which a telephone would become a Thor-juice-talker.

But Hitchings is not in pursuit of Aunt Sallies of this lexical kind, or of the grammatical ‘do not split an infinitive’ kind. Jonathan Swift was keen on the idea of an English Academy, and in 1712 he wrote A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. Swift was certainly one of the earliest commentators to attempt to forge a link between a decline in language and a decline in morality, but it is simplistic to dismiss outright his argument that there might be some point in attempting to bring order to the sprawling English language. Books on grammar and other aspects of ‘correct’ English were extraordinarily popular from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and this no doubt had something to do with the perception that others make judgements about the kind of language a person uses. One of the strengths of Hitchings’s account of the prescriptivists (for example, his analysis of the work of the eighteenth-century grammarian Robert Lowth) is that he does not subject them to ridicule, but gives a fair-minded analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of their positions.

At the core of the argument of this book, Hitchings points to a significant paradox. On the one hand, the English ‘have resisted and always will resist any attempt to reorganize their language and regulate it from the top down’, but at the same time ‘they will complain endlessly about problems that could finally be resolved only through such regulation’. While the notion of a French Academy was rejected, thus allowing the English language a remarkable freedom, it is as if the idea of such an Academy has been dispersed over the centuries through a series of independent guardians of the language. Hitchings readily admits that the history of the presciptivist guardians is in part ‘a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic ... and educational malfeasance’, but he insists that we also need to admit the positive aspects of this history, especially its ‘attempts to make sense of the world and its bazaar of competing ideas and interests’. Hitchings concludes: ‘the quarrel between descriptivists and prescriptivists ... is a sort of mad confederacy: each party thrives on lambasting the other.’

Such a dynamic interplay is evident in the career of the English language’s first great lexicographer. At the beginning of his dictionary project, Dr Johnson felt that his task was to give order and control to ‘the boundless chaos of living speech’, but by the end he realised that language is by its very nature volatile and mutable, and incapable of ‘enchainment’. Johnson’s completed dictionary exists somewhere in that space between the desire to give order to chaos and the chaos that resists order. Such, too, is the realm of the existence of the English language.