I SMH, then ROFLMAO!

Of course, he meant, Over-Much Gaudiness, stop giving me gongs.

A new book on our Mother Tongue covers a lot of words:

As in his previous book, Does Spelling Matter? (the answer was yes, but not all the time), he is at his best when illustrating how modern usages that horrify linguistic purists in fact have deep historical roots. “OMG” was used by a septuagenarian naval hero, admiral of the fleet Lord Fisher, in 1917: so get over it. Long before Facebook, Thomas More, Shakespeare and Alexander Pope all wrote of people who’d been “un-friended”. Though Tesco was shamed by grammatical purists into altering the wording of its checkout signs from “10 items or less” to “Up to 10 items”, there’s no sound historical or logical basis for such pedantry. (As Horobin points out, the fact that the tills of its upmarket rival, Waitrose, read “10 items or fewer” cleverly confirms its customers in their false “sense of social and intellectual smugness and superiority”). 

Instead of bemoaning the supposed illiteracy of texting and social media, Horobin prefers to highlight their creativity and playfulness. (Like any up-to-date media don, though he doesn’t mention it in the book, he himself tweets: you can follow him @SCPHorobin.) He is keen to stress the value of everything from the use of “amazeballs”, to the Brummie accent, to Singlish, Chinglish, Japlish and other mixed tongues. 

All the same, the book’s perspective is very much the view from an Oxbridge high table. If, as I did, you grew up happily paging through the different editions of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, or if you still worry about the distinction between a jack and a knave, or can’t abide the way that Tony Blair speaks, this historical survey will help you understand why. 

But its approach will be less illuminating to anyone who enjoys hip-hop, or revels in the prose of Junot Díaz, or has ever wondered why all the tannoy announcements at Heathrow airport are nowadays made by a woman (or, rather, a robot) speaking English with a Dutch accent. The fact that English is a world language, even more than it is the mother tongue of most people living in the UK, is gestured to at the beginning and end of the book, but otherwise largely ignored. 

Looking ahead, Horobin’s focus is likewise on “what the future holds for standard British English”. Other varieties are portrayed mainly as threats to the status of this privileged dialect. As he concedes, there are now far more speakers of English in the United States than in Britain, and American English dominates the world. Yet, like all those British politicians desperate for their nation to punch above its weight in world affairs, he persists in arguing that we plucky Brits are still a linguistic superpower. As English spreads across the world, Horobin fantasises, it’s possible that the upper-class British accent (“received pronunciation”) will end up becoming the new global standard, trumping all others. It’s an oddly parochial stance for a self-proclaimed champion of pidgin and creole languages, emoticons and emojis.