2. Usage problems and the general public

If the public side of the debate was mostly conducted by linguists – Richard Hudson and the Milroys in The Guardian,Footnote ⁷ John Vincent in The Times, Roy Harris, David Crystal and Peter Trudgill in the BAAL Newsletter and Roy Harris in TES (Graddol & Swann, Reference Graddol and Swann1988: 105–11) – the publicity surrounding the publication of The Language Trap produced many letters from members of the public addressed to Honey directly as well. Letter writers mention having heard Honey on the Jimmy Young programme, on the Today programme or World at One on BBC Radio 4, all on February 14, and on BBC Radio 3 the next day, probably on the Rush Hour programme. In a reply to one of these letters, Honey referred to the ‘many radio and press interviews which resulted from the enormous media attention given to my newly published pamphlet The Language Trap’ (March 11, JH/50), and in another, dated March 18, he mentions ‘a dozen radio interviews in February’ (JH/138), noting that the pamphlet is ‘selling like hot cakes, thanks to all the publicity in the Telegraph, Guardian, Times and TES’. Altogether, Honey received 108 letters, notes and postcards from readers and listeners, most of which he replied to personally.Footnote ⁸ One letter of March 23, written by his secretary, Judith Smith, apologises for the fact that ‘Professor Honey has had an enormous mailbag as a result of the great publicity given by all the media to his new publication’ (JH/120). There are quite a few references in the letter collection to the ‘huge mailbag’ that Honey had to deal with (e.g. JH/124): as many as 20 letters came in on March 2 alone.

Several letters to Honey deal with usage problems, inspired by the nature of the controversy over The Language Trap – the question of whether or not to teach Standard English in the schools, as advocated by Honey. Other letters tell the story of frustrated teachers who were no longer allowed to teach grammar in their English classes, a controversial topic discussed in detail by Cameron (Reference Cameron1995) (see also Ager, Reference Ager2003). These teachers in distress must have been drawn to the opportunity of pouring out their hearts to a professor of education who appeared to be standing up for their cause. Usage problems form a key interest in the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, as witness our regular contributions to English Today between 2014 and 2016. In many of these brief publications we invited readers to respond to questionnaires which served to elicit data for our research, and we regularly asked informants to tell us about their ‘pet peeves’, usage problems they were particularly critical about. Writing about features like the flat adverb (as in go slow vs. slowly), the use of literally as an intensifier, the plural of octopus, and the acceptability of the dangling participle (as in Pulling the trigger, the gun went off) or of have went, we also hoped to identify usage problems that are not yet part of the prescriptive canon, which comprises so-called ‘old chestnuts’ (Weiner, Reference Weiner, Stanley and Hoad1988: 173) like the placement of only or the split infinitive. Trying to elicit such information is usually a tricky process, since asking specifically for what people might consider problematical rarely produces anything that is not already dealt with in the vast amount of usage advice literature available. The Honey Papers include letters from people writing to him on the spur of the moment, upon hearing an interview with him on the radio, to consult him about linguistic features they considered problematical, and on which they sought his advice (which he usually supplied). In this paper, I will focus on these letters in particular, since they allow us to gain insight into what were considered usage problems during the early 1980s. The Honey Papers offer first-hand information on this topic, produced spontaneously rather than in a forced setting like an interview. This makes the information contained in the letters unique, and of great value for sociolinguists and scholars interested in prescriptivism.

3. The letter writers’ linguistic complaints

Broadly speaking, three types of complaints occur in these letters, concerning American influence on British English, the language of broadcasters, and Honey's own language use. In addition, a number of language features are discussed which the letter writers were particularly critical of. One letter writer, a Mr D., aged 70, from Scotland,Footnote ⁹ found the use of American billion acceptable only ‘for the sake of misunderstanding & brevity’, while ‘shudder[ing] to think that the golfer should become TAHM WAHTSON as it is pronounced by Mark M'Cormick or that we should lose the T from the language because Americans & pop singers convert waiting into wading’ (JH/75). The letter is part of a longer correspondence with Honey, and in an earlier one (JH/8a), D. complained about words like number, couple and group occurring with a plural verb, while a fictitious example in the letter, ’e don't know no f --- g better, suggests that he is also critical of h-dropping, he don't, double negation and the use of fucking as an intensifier. Another letter writer critical of Americanisms is a Mr S. from Somerset, who identified himself as ‘a former grammar-school teacher brought up on the grammar of English, French and Latin’ (JH/21b.a). S. had heard Honey on Radio 3 on February 15 (having read the account of The Language Trap in the Daily Telegraph the day before), and had been struck by Honey's pronunciation of ‘the indefinite article “a” to rhyme with “day” instead of with “the” and in this you are certainly in line with practically every public speaker nowadays on radio and TV’. ‘Is this now standard English?’ he wanted to know, adding that he considered the usage a ‘barbarism’, and that he ‘had thought it one of those importations from the U.S.A. that sweep this country and become fashionable, like “basically” and “a –– situation” both of which one can count on hearing in every “public” speaker's opening sentence’. Honey replied by agreeing with S. on the barbarism of rhyming ‘a’ with ‘day’, adding in his own defense that having listened to ‘the tape recording my wife made of my interview’, there were ‘only two such examples out of a score or so uses of the indefinite article’, and that such ‘infelicities’ are only natural when ‘fluent speakers … “think aloud”’. However, he added, ‘the practice must be fought!’

American influence on British English is a topic raised by Honey himself in his reply to Mr W. from near Manchester, who used to work for the local government. In his letter (JH/143a, March 14, Reference Honey1983), W. complained about the use of you was and they was by a former boss (‘a member of the Chartered Institute of Secretaries’ no less), and also about the fact that he heard ‘more bad English’ on the radio, such as got and get (I've got a pen), which he called ‘ugly words because in most contexts they are superfluous’. In addition, he wrote that he is ‘sick of hearing the phrase “sort of”’ (I was sort of looking for an answer, as used by the actor James Fox). W. concluded by saying that he thought it ‘a mystery … how the accent used by royalty, the public schools and the BBC ever came to be accepted as correct’. Instead, he wrote, he would prefer to hear an accent on the radio like that used by Lancastrians, who would not say oda for ‘other’, ‘bawth wota’, or ‘Radio foe’. Honey's reply reads that on the use of get and got, ‘British English is yielding to American English’Footnote ¹⁰ but that we have ‘[s]o far … flinched from yielding to the American form “gotten”’. As for which accent ‘can be called “better” than another’, he explained that there ‘is a great dispute among specialists in phonetics and sociolinguists’ about this, by which he may have been alluding to the criticism from linguists his pamphlet had evoked in the papers.

If the use of a non-rhotic accent on the BBC was criticised by one writer, so was intrusive /r/ in a letter from an anonymous Scot who responded to an article about The Language Trap in the Scottish Sunday Standard (JH/135). The article had appeared on February 27, on the front page no less, bearing the headline ‘Lawrs of speech that Scots get wrong’ (JH/144). The article, which was based on The Language Trap as well as on an interview with Honey conducted by telephone (JH/52), quite understandably produced the kind of response from this ‘angry Scot’, as he signed himself, concluding his letter by saying ‘I would say we are pleased enough with our Scots language, so please keep your hands off’. In the Sunday Standard article Honey is quoted as saying: ‘The best thing a Scot can do is come to England … I want them only to speak in an intelligible way’ – words that provoked the response, quoted in the same article, from a lecturer in English Studies at Stirling University (who herself was English) that such an attitude reflects ‘supreme arrogance’. In his reply to a letter from a Mrs N. from the Shetland Islands, inspired by the article in the Sunday Standard, Honey admitted that he ‘had made a few unguarded comments to a journalist from the Sunday Standard over the telephone, and I dread to think what he had made of them in his piece’ (JH/52).

N.’s letter is the longest letter in the Honey Papers. It offers details about the Shetland dialect, but also argues that dialect speakers can, with a bit of effort on the part of the listener, be understood while they are quite able to understand standard English themselves. People like her husband, she added, who do not travel or ‘are not required to write reports or read documents’, might not have a great need for standard English. For all that, she believed that ‘a graded grammar of the English language for use throughout both primary and secondary schools’ would sell very well, aimed especially at ‘all teaching staffs below about age 40’, and supported by ‘in-service training, seminars & so on’. ‘The money will roll in!’ she added. As for herself, she would have been a member of the ‘grammarless generation’ – a term used by Keith (Reference Keith and Carter1990) to refer to speakers in the UK who had been taught no grammar in school during the 1970s and 80s (see Ebner, Reference Ebner2017: 377) – if her family hadn't moved to Scotland when she was nine, upon which she experienced ‘a revelation, a blinding light explaining all the functions of language that I'd blindly ½-formulated myself till then’. Her greatest worry as a trained teacher of English and French is the same as Honey's, and which was one of the points he made in The Language Trap: ‘What has now happened is that a whole generation of teachers has grown up who know no English grammar, & many of them have no working knowledge of a 2^nd or 3^rd language either. Yet they hold our children's future in their hands’.

The Honey Papers contain more letters in support of Honey's cause. But they also include one other angry letter, by a man called A.S., from Staffordshire, who accused Honey of ‘wander[ing] into blandard English’, a word of which he says ‘[y]ou may have the copyright … if you wish’.Footnote ¹¹ The word, which is not in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), may have been slang at the time – the author used more slang in his letter, like Dicker for ‘dictionary’ (not in the OED either), adding ‘oh dear’: he was clearly taunting Honey as he wrote; blandard is explained in the online Urban Dictionary as a contraction of bloody standard. S. said blandard refers to ‘a form of speech which creates distrust in hearers, or at least some hearers’, and the word that put him off when he heard Honey ‘speak on radio today’, February 14, was quite. This is ‘an unnecessary word’, he said, and one that has two meanings, ‘very’ and ‘not very’. ‘More important,’ he added, ‘when you said “It is quite (very) clear” I knew you were pontificating, and started to distrust what you were saying’. Inspiring this kind of criticism, not directed at the content of the message but trying to disparage the speaker, typically characterises prescriptive writings. Lynne Truss, for instance, was criticised in some of the reviews of Eats Shoots and Leaves (2003) for not sticking to the punctuation rules she had outlined herself (del Rosario Medina Sánchez, Reference del Rosario Medina Sánchez and van Ostade2013). S. concluded by saying that ‘the real question is have you invented a way of teaching grammar which does not create the stultifying misery of older methods, or the nit-picking of correcting trivial mistakes in the midst of a (fine) piece of creative writing?’ This is a key question, and one that has continued to worry linguists and teachers down to this day. The letter contains a PS: ‘Don't bother to answer. I am not a teacher and of no influence’.

There is another letter telling Honey not to bother to reply, but in this case it was because the letter writer, a Mrs R. from Bradford, ‘understand[s] pressure of work to Educators like yourself’ (JH/21c). It is a multi-coloured document written on the backs of letters that suggest this writer was something of a professional complainer – on language this time: the use of cos for ‘because’ (‘a lot of Politicians do it … the queen does it the D. of Ed does it … Newly Royal Weds do it!!!!!’) and ‘unemployed teenagers up here [who] seem to say “ fink ” a lot Wonder why cos its cockney!!! is it not’. Other letter writers complained about the BBC ‘engaging “professional speakers” who lack a basic knowledge of English grammar and desecrate the language daily’, as one letter writer from Herefordshire put it (JH/22a), adding that ‘the B.B.C. should remember its duty as laid down in its charter and set a continuous good example’ and that ‘[t]he idea that anything goes’ – a common misunderstanding which Honey (unsuccessfully) tried to correct in The Language Trap – ‘will ultimately mean we shall have our own English Tower of Babel’. Another letter writer, from Norwich, asked Honey if ‘the expression “going to go” is incorrect grammar’. It used to be so in his youth, the writer explained, ‘but now this expression is so freely used on T.V.’ (JH/40a). He likewise added that ‘we expect the B.B.C or I.T.V to set a good example but what do we get’. BBC broadcasters were criticised in other letters for using different to, and for overusing very, as in very, very hot, and totally: ‘it is always “totally” unrealistic or “totally” unacceptable’ (JH/74, March 28). This letter writer, Mr W., has already been cited for complaining about his former boss's language (JH/143a, March 14), and he once again wrote to say that he would:

Some six months later, Honey responded to a letter from a member of the BBC listening panel, who had consulted him on the occurrence of ‘hesitation phenomena such as … hum-ing and ah-ing’ which Honey said would not have occurred ‘before the mid-1950s when most sound broadcasting was based on scripted interviews’ (JH/106a). In the same reply Honey commented on the occurrence of a sentence coordinator (and, so) even when there is no link with what came before. Honey concluded by saying that he hoped that ‘[o]ne day … the BBC will invite me to address their announcers and presenters about how I feel they could make improvements in the way they speak’, a suggestion that his correspondent said in his reply he passed on ‘to the Head of Broadcasting Research at the BBC’. Whether an invitation ever materialised I do not know.

One final letter worth quoting is from a certain J.B., BA, MA, who described himself as someone ‘who left school at 14, never having received any credible instruction in formal grammar’, but who worked his way up to becoming ‘a sort of sociologist and teacher’. As Head of Campus of a school in Sheffield, he was particularly critical of a colleague applying ‘for a senior post in adult education’ but who didn't know how to spell, ‘frequently uses “guy” for “man”, and … has a tendency to interject “like” ungrammatically into descriptive accounts’ (JH/29a). D'Arcy (Reference D'Arcy2007: 392), however, identifies as many as four different vernacular functions of like – quotative like (‘we were like, “Yeah, but …”’), like used as an approximative adverb (‘to go like thirty miles’), the use of like as a discourse marker (‘but like she's the funniest’) and as a discourse particle (‘She's like dumb or something’) – and because the letter writer didn't illustrate his comment with examples, it is unclear which of the four uses of like he was particularly critical of. All functions except for quotative like, according to D'Arcy, have long been in use, which may have been true for the usage criticised here, too. The comment is nevertheless of considerable interest, since the fact that the person criticised in the letter was a man confirms D'Arcy's point that, contrary to general belief, gender differences are not at issue here. But because, as she argues, all uses of like ‘sound the same’ (Reference D'Arcy2007: 411), it may well be that the letter writer was alerted to his colleague's usage by the general increase of quotative like at the time, a usage possibly ‘introduced by the Valley Girls in the early 1980s’.

4. Other new pet peeves?

Though the above uses of like are widely criticised today, criticism is only beginning to find its way into English usage advice literature (Tieken–Boon van Ostade Reference Tieken–Boon van Ostadein progress). It is therefore interesting to see that it was already commented upon by one of Honey's correspondents. Other usage features commented on in the letters are, however, not new: Americanisms, as Crystal (Reference Crystal and van Ostade2018) has shown, were already parodied in Punch during the 1860s, and some usage guides, such as Kingsley Amis's The King's English (Reference Amis1997), even devoted separate entries to them. The use of plural verbs with nouns like number or group which one letter writer disapproved of was already prescribed by Fowler's Modern English Usage (Reference Fowler1926), probably the best known English usage guide in the 1980s. As for the objection to the use of different to (rather than from), this, according to Fowler, is due to ‘a superstition’: quoting the OED, Fowler writes that to is ‘found in writers of all ages’. Using from, he concludes the entry, is not wrong: ‘on the contrary, it is “now usual” (OED); but it is only so owing to the dead set made against d[ifferent] to by mistaken critics’ (Reference Fowler1926: 113–14).

In 1981, so around the same time that the above letter writers sent Honey their linguistic comments, Robert Burchfield published a booklet with recommendations for BBC newsreaders, to avoid letters of complaint being directed at the BBC whenever what were perceived as linguistic mistakes were heard on radio or television. The letters in the Honey Papers confirm that broadcasters, and the BBC in particular, regularly came in for linguistic criticism at the time. One of the items listed by Burchfield is different from/to/than, which is not considered a very serious issue (receiving one star for objection only), but for which he recommends the use of from ‘whenever possible’ (Reference Burchfield1981: 33). Burchfield, too, prescribes the plural verb for nouns like media and data; the use of a singular verb form he classifies as ‘unacceptable in any circumstances’ (Reference Burchfield1981: 28). His least serious category includes what he called ‘meaningless fillers’, like sort of, commented on by one letter writer, and Honey's ‘hesitation phenomena such as … hum-ing and ah-ing’ (Reference Burchfield1981: 35). The word basically, criticised by another letter writer, is not listed, but might have come into the same category. Burchfield does not condemn got in have got for have. While Fowler pronounced it to be ‘good colloquial but not good literary English’ (Reference Fowler1926: 217), Burchfield, in the third edition of the book, no longer advises against it (Reference Burchfield1996: 352).

Cos for ‘because’, objected to by the letter writer from Bradford, does not occur in Fowler (Reference Fowler1926) but it does in Burchfield's third edition of 1996, which indicates that it had become a usage feature that evoked criticism in the meantime. Burchfield, however, does not condemn it, noting that it was ‘first recorded in 1828, and used only in the representation of informal or regional speech’ (Reference Burchfield1996: 185). The letter writer clearly noticed its widespread use, by supposedly authoritative speakers of English such as politicians and members of the royal family, which to her mind doesn't necessarily make it acceptable. Overuse of colloquial features, like the reduplication of very – commonly attested in the British National Corpus, a 110-million word corpus which covers the period of the Honey Papers (1980–93) – or the use of totally and popular interjections like basically and even fucking that some letter writers commented on, are characteristic of a process known as ‘colloquialisation’ which, according to Mair (Reference Mair2006) affected the English language during the twentieth century. It is in effect this development that the letter writers in the Honey Papers are critical of. Finally, the comment from the writer from Bradford on the use of fink, which she calls Cockney, is of interest, too, since th-fronting is today characteristic of Estuary English, a 20^th-century non-class-based variety (unlike RP) that originated in London and that spread ‘to other cities and towns in the late twentieth century’ (Beal, Reference Beal2004: 198). The writer from Bradford identified the usage as far north as Yorkshire during the early 1980s. Though we won't know what the words ‘a lot’ mean in her comment (‘unemployed teenagers … say “ fink ” a lot’), this comment is of great interest in the light of the spread of th-fronting during the final decades of the twentieth century, which Kerswill (Reference Kerswill, Britain and Cheshire2003: 17) notes didn't occur in his ‘1983 cohort of seventeen 14–16 year olds’ from Durham while it did some twenty years later. Estuary English, it might be mentioned here, was not a variety of English that Honey approved of, not surprising perhaps in view of his insistence on the teaching of Standard English in schools. In his later book Language is Power (Reference Honey1997), he writes:

A call for an English Academy, as this comment seems to represent, is remarkable to say the least, as it was rather more characteristic of the early eighteenth than the late twentieth century.