Allen Lane £25 pp584

In a classic episode of The Simpsons, a couple of schoolteachers are showing little Lisa and her classmates around a local museum dedicated to the founder of their home town, Jebediah Springfield. Jebediah’s motto, it seems, was: “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” The first teacher is dismayed by this unconventional English: “Embiggens?” Her colleague is unperturbed: “Perfectly cromulent word”, she replies. Teacher A, we may safely infer, is what David Crystal and his peers in the world of linguistics would call a prescriptivist — one who believes that the rules of standard English should be maintained as rigorously and vigorously as possible. Teacher B, by contrast, is . . . well, some might call her a “descriptivist”, although the term proposed by Crystal for such free-and-easy types is “pragmatist”.

Crystal is very much in the pragmatist camp: if a word or a usage exists, it’s perfectly cromulent. Hence, in part, the plural in the title of his compendious study. He admits there are umpteen books dedicated to the tale of how a minor tribal tongue of rainy northern Europe was raped, hammered and teased into a world-wrapping language; but, he suggests, his competitors have been handicapped by a prescriptivist bias, conscious or otherwise. He, in contrast, wishes to treat all manifestations of English as equal in the sight of the gods. He rejoices in dialects, argots and cants, and derides as vain reactionaries all those who wince at split infinitives and dangling modifiers, or who believe that “disinterested” and “uninterested” are not synonymous, or who recall that “to decimate” once meant “ to kill every 10th soldier.”

Fair enough, given his trade: a zoologist is not the same thing as a poodle-tamer, and if this brusque summary makes Crystal sound like some Dave Spart of philology and phonetics, it should also be stressed that most of his book is written in a lucid and mainly cant-free mode of standard English. More: as one would expect of a scholar as assiduous as Crystal, it is uncompromisingly learned, crammed with (often fascinating) facts and usually enlightening — in a word, excellent. Anyone who reads it carefully and then claims not to have had their knowledge of the field substantially enlarged — embiggened? — is probably either a scholar or a liar.

Powerful as Crystal’s arguments for universal linguistic tolerance are, however, they fail to be convincing. For one thing, he writes as if the relationship of standard to non-standard English is a matter of the educated bullying the uneducated, the metropolitan bullying the provincial, the rich bullying the poor. Surely not so? The most bitter and significant fights about the nature of English are conducted, as it were, in-house, within the educated classes, and turn on issues of pomposity, sloppiness, jargon or gobbledegook — for instance, the notorious crimes against the language of Inland Revenue officers, Lacanian psychoanalysts and other such riffraff. Paul Fussell quipped that you can divide English speakers into those who giggle at the label “executive”, and those who treat it with reverence; while T S Eliot said he worried more about the future of English when he read a political leading article than when he heard taxi drivers arguing.

So, while it doesn’t greatly fuss me when Crystal dangles the odd modifier, I am somewhat bothered to see such a conspicuously intelligent man using the term “inferiority complex” as if it were identical with “sense of inferiority” (“Once people have been given an inferiority complex about the way they speak or write . . . ”), or being spendthrift with the word “mindset” (a novelty more in vogue among the mindless than the mindful), or using “modern” as an unambiguous praise word. It bothers me more to read his cheerful assertion that the “bad dream” of 300 years of prescriptivism is over, thanks to the glorious national curriculum, which has turned out a sparkling new generation of rhetorically hypersensitive schoolchildren, each one capable of spotting the precise ideological shading of any given passive verb.

When I read out the relevant passages to some schoolteacher friends, the response was either untranscribable or unprintable in a polite context. And a good thing, too: the fantasy that the hordes of Nigel Molesworths have given way to grim regiments of pubescent Noam Chomskys is chilling. These weak points don’t cancel out the many valuable chapters here, but for anyone with so much as the smallest streak of prescriptivism in their bones, they do gravely disfigure an otherwise admirable work. Embiggening it sure is, perfectly cromulent it ain’t.

Available at the Books First price of £20 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy