Grammar and morality

The preface to Lindley Murray’s English Grammar reveals the author’s intention to ‘promote the cause of virtue as well as learning’. Murray was neither the first, nor the last, to equate ‘good’ English with moral virtue, as these 1985 comments by Norman Tebbit, the former Conservative cabinet minister, demonstrate:

‘If you allow standards to slip to the stage where good English is no better than bad English, where people turn up filthy … at school … all those things tend to cause people to have no standards at all, and once you lose standards there’s no imperative to stay out of crime.’

Similar sentiments expressed by Prince Charles, John Rae and Jeffrey Archer (Cameron 1995: 85–94) attest to the remarkable persistence of such attitudes wherever what Milroy and Milroy (1985) have called ‘the linguistic complaint tradition’ is strong. Across the Channel, attempts to reform French spelling were criticized in 1990 by Danielle Mitterrand, wife of then President François Mitterrand, on the grounds that they represented a unacceptable weakening of standards:

‘Loosening standards is a slippery slope: once you’ve let things slip with spelling, why shouldn’t moral standards go the same way?’ (Quoted by Ball 1997: 191; translation mine)

Madame Mitterrand would no doubt have been horrified by the Presidential communiqué announcing her death in November 2011, which contained no fewer than five spelling errors, provoking something of a media storm in France.