State of the Language: 1990 Edition

by Christopher Ricks (Editor), Leonard Michaels (Editor)

"Sprawling, uncoordinated, uneven, noisy, and appealing," wrote one reviewer of the first edition of this book, published on 1 January 1980. "The language is in rude health," wrote another.Exactly a decade later, here is the book anew, with the same editors but with fifty fresh contributors writing essays and poems that engage our language today.Imaginative attention is bestowed on the changes of recent years, changes not only in the language but in how language is understood. In the forefront are the relations between British English, American English, and those other Englishes with which they compete or cooperate.The nervous negotiations of gender and feminism. The darkness of AIDS. The bright flicker of the computer. The old smolderings of "standard English" and correctness. The "bad language" that has lately done so well in our society. How all this has been politicized--or is it rather that its inevitably political nature has only now been recognized?Here these and many other facets of the language catch the various light. What has changed is understood in relation to what has not changed, and what has been gained in relation to what has been lost. There is sweep as well as detail, telescope as well as microscope, in this contemplation of the world of our language as it enters the world of the 1990s.The State of the Language has been prepared in cooperation with the English-Speaking Union of San Francisco.

Genres: Language, Essays, Nonfiction, Words

600 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks, FBA, is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (U.S.) and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (England) from 2004 to 2009. He is the immediate past-president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book-length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious (Marshall McLuhan, Christopher Norris, Geoffrey Hartman, Stanley Fish); and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous (F. R. Leavis, W. K. Wimsatt, Christina Stead). Hugh Kenner has praised his 'intent eloquence', and Geoffrey Hill his 'unrivalled critical intelligence'. W. H. Auden described Ricks as 'exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding'.

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are over sixty essays, extracts and poems in this unwieldy and often self-indulgent guide to the state of the English language in 1990, an update (then) of a similar book that explored the state of English in 1980. I am not surprised the experiment was not repeated in 2000 0r 2010.

The entries are very uneven ranging from obscure poems through literary potboilers and rants to the posturing and preening of pompous academics burnishing their credentials to articles of staggering dullness and on to genuinely intelligent and informative articles with honest insights.

There are long periods of boredom and cultural introversion interspersed with a few fascinating gems but the overwhelming impression is of a cultural elite talking to itself somewhat narcissistically without any editorial discipline or preparedness to contextualise.

Looking back on this from the perspective of thirty years of cultural turmoil and wars, the seeds of it all are here if we want to look for them - certainly the activist appropriation of language in the dominant concern with AIDS and the proliferation of -isms and identity concerns.

With 60 or so contributions, it is almost impossible to comment in much detail. There are, of course, the linguistic purists who want a restoration of Latin learning in the schools to underpin grammar (Enoch Powell) and the restorations of right usage but these are relatively few.

There are those at the other extreme (more persuasive) who see language as a fluid and organically developing process where yesterday's solecism can become today's normality if it is consistently used in communication and understood.

In the middle (my preferred breed) are those who just describe without trying to impose value on what they describe although even the describers are not very good at explaining (which is certainly not the same process as judging) what is going on as it is going on.

And there are those, the bane of modern culture, who actively seek to mould language for socio-political purposes, the proof-positive of the great claim that language is essentially not a truth or a virtue but a weapon or a tool in the human struggle for status, power and resources.

George Orwell gets five or six mentions in over 500 pages but we are no longer living in his world of honest use of language. Indeed, since this book's time, Orwell has tended to be used as a weapon himself more often than he is regarded as the standard for a common framework for truth-telling.

While there are many decent academics, dull or not so dull, rising above this tendency to weaponisation, too many do not. The later cultural aggressions surrounding gay rights, BAME discontent and feminism are all played out here as sustained 'ressentiment'.

In fact, the book is to be read as one less about language and more as a psychological source book. Sixty or so different intellectual elite minds talking their book over each other's heads where, in many cases, you can hear behind the verbiage the simple cry - "here, here, look at me!"

From this perspective the tense exchange between linguistic prescriptivists and their opponents and the incursions of identity politics (yes, it really does start around this time and, indeed, comprises the very first section of this book) is unutterably tiresome.

The chaotics are just a reflection of the chaotics of the early stage of globalisation and the rise of a cosmopolitanism that, in cultural terms, should have meant freedom and tolerance within a shared and respected framework but instead would come to mean a nasty struggle for cultural power.

As if to confirm its relationship to power rather than knowledge, the book is strongly orientated towards American culture, use of English and problems and makes the mistake of assuming that English-English and American-English language and culture are more cognate than they are.

This Atlanticist myth is a political construction derived from Churchillian rhetoric but then paradoxically taken up by an academic-intellectual elite towards the end of the last century in obeisance to American progressivism and a racial politics totally alien to the English.

It is a myth that stills drags on us English with its 2020 political context being the recovery of sovereignty but the fighting over its bones by the sinophobic Atlanticist Right and the East Coast-orientated remants of university liberal-leftism still smarting from its recent losses.

In this book you see a culture beginning to oust the old national culture of traditionalism (represented by Enoch Powell and Roger Scruton) and flexing its new elite muscles ready to create the liberal centrism that triumphed before 2008 and collapsed after 2016.

This is not yet at its peak in this book. It is still pushing its way forward. It represents a generation of ambitious intellectuals who know what is right and are angry. One reads some of the articles and feel a deep gloom about what is to come - the Clintons, Blair, political correction, ideology.

Still, we should not disrespect the non-weaponised and non-narcissistic contributions. We are grateful for the relief of tedium. As to tedium, there is a surprising amount of coverage of legal language in American contexts but that is just a reflection of another coming trend - lawfare.

We have Delbridge's review of current Australiian English, Scruton's on the feminist attempt to expropriate the language of dissent and Lesser's informative piece on the history of the language of philanthropy (matched by Keith Thomas' disquisition on the history of letter endings).

There is an extract from a David Lodge novel with its subtle evocation of the fundamentally nasty cultural attitudes that lead to culture wars, Odean's description of the slang of the financial markets with its in-built aggression and Gross' insight into the practice of editing.

There is a descriptive account from Burchfield of how the language of a popular mass market novelist (Archer) and a literary novelist (Brookner) use language, This posits two kinds of English with different purposes and (frankly) of equal value in the context of those purposes.

There is a suggestive piece by Bawtree on why there has been no English high operatic tradition between Purcell and Britten and how this links to language and an excellent piece on the strange linguistic inventions and history of the American entertainment industry magazine 'Variety'.

The book close with Weiner's intelligent account of the attitudinal changes required to create the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and some examples of linguistic change from Adamson but by then we are exhausted.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Large collection of essays (with the odd poem bunged in) about aspects of English in 1990. Most but not quite all, I think, specially written for the book.
There are 50 or so contributions. I started all of them but (more and more as I went on) skipped them if they didn't interest me - some of them contained interesting material but were too dry or too whimsical for me to stomach.

I guess nobody but the most facebook-damaged all-liker would enjoy everything in here, given the breadth of approaches. I found maybe half of them interesting enough to read to the end.

For me the most interesting general feature of the essays is how strikingly time-specific they are. In a lot of cases that translates as markedly dated: linguistic battles are sized up, or entered into, that have not so much been won or lost since as the battlefields have been buried in the ongoing explosion of internet culture that began in the years just after publication.

That gives them an antiquarian interest; it is like wandering around the ruins of Pompeii (not that I have), or perhaps round a dinosaur theme park, thinking: oh they used to do that, how odd! Or indeed: wow, that was a different world: quaint, baffling, charming - or dull - anyway, gone for good.

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall a bit of a slog. Many of the essays were highly political, which is a bit of a bore being bashed over the head with someone’s agenda; other essays were out of date, although that’s my fault for buying a book published in 1990.

A few were very interesting, which made the read worthwhile.

[J.]

Read a handful--maybe 10--of the essays. A couple were slightly interesting, the rest were rambling and boring. Clearly not for me.