The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage

By Kingsley Amis

A Parthian shot from one of the most important figures in post-war British fiction, The King's English is the late Kingsley Amis's last word on the state of the language. More frolicsome than Fowler's Modern Usage, lighter than the Oxford English Dictionary, and brimming with the strong opinions and razor-sharp wit that made Amis so popular--and so controversial--The King's English is a must for fans and language purists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466873766

Kingsley Amis

Born in London in 1922, Kingsley Amis was one of the best-loved British novelists of the twentieth century. He was the author of more than twenty novels, including the classic Lucky Jim, and a number of other works of criticism, poetry, and memoir. He was knighted in 1990, and died in 1995 at the age of seventy-three.

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A

-able and -ible

I once wrote deduceable instead of deducible in a book, though nobody then or since has taken me up on it. A small point as they go, perhaps, but Rule 1 of writing acceptably is to get everything right as far as you can, and in this case I had neglected to.

If I were assembling a complete guide to usage I should feel bound to give here a list of -able and -ible words, but I am not so I do not. Fowler gives a list of ‘-ble words not in -able’ with something like 140 adjectives in it. There follow similarly long lists of ‘negatives in -able not having -un’, and others of comparable length and function, five such lists in all containing between them a thousand words ending in -able and -ible. Lists look impressive but their usefulness is limited. Consult a dictionary.

Accentuation

I use this term to refer to the prominence given a spoken syllable by stressing it. So in hypnosis, for example, the middle syllable receives accentuation. My hope is to avoid the ambiguity that use of the sometime synonymous accent might bring.

There is a tendency with English words to put the accentuation as near the front of a word as possible. This tendency was once strong enough to make a schoolmaster some years ago do his best to pronounce anticipatory accentuating its first syllable, a difficult task even with the number of syllables halved, and a noise like ántsiptry attempted. More recently the old tendency has been at work on words like contribute and distribute. Once to all appearance fixed irreversibly as contríbute and distríbute, these are in unpopular process of becoming cóntribute and dístribute. Resistance to all linguistic change is obviously a healthy instinct, but perhaps not so much in the present case, and the accentuation díspute for the noun, much execrated, seems natural enough, in line with the general tendency of the language to stress noun on first syllable as against verb on second, as in présent and presént. I predict that all three changes will shortly be established.

American practice in this matter seems, to a British ear, whimsical if not perverse. Sometimes Americans will throw accentuation further forward than we do, on to the first syllable of foreign words like consommé and Dubonnet, though they might argue that their practice sounds at any rate less defiantly non-French than ours. In the case of the noun research, their practice of stressing the first syllable is spreading over here, much to the resentment of conservative or older speakers. This feeling is perhaps misplaced, since the Americans are only following a traditional rule of the language; see remark on dispute above.

I am less wonderfully tolerant over the other and opposite American habit of shifting accentuation the opposite way, especially in personal names. This has been going on over here too for a long time: my father had a friend called Mr Barrel or Barrell who understandably stressed his surname on its second syllable. Bernard, forename and surname, is perhaps a more typical case: Bernárd in USA, Bérnard in UK, though the surname is tending to follow US convention over here and the BBC lays it down. But then the BBC also lays down that the surname Bottome – a pseudonym, strange to relate – should be stressed on the second syllable. In fact, both Bottome and Botham are cosmeticised forms of the old English word bottom, for centuries nothing to do with anyone’s posterior, signifying a valley or its floor, found in surnames and meaning ‘dweller in the valley’ (cf. Wood, Hill, Holt, etc.) and in place-names like Six Mile Bottom.

To resume briefly: my tolerance wears thin when I hear an accentuation that seems to me wilfully or absurdly eccentric, as when an American in the flesh, no broadcaster he but a decent young fellow, came up with the surname Fussell, an English name, stressed in the American way, which I happen to know is not the stress given it by the American writer of that name. (Does the young fellow talk about Bertránd Russéll?) And it – my tolerance – snapped altogether the other day when I heard an English broadcaster refer to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with Juliet given last-syllable-stress treatment. What next? Antony and Cleop’trah? See also AMERICANISMS.

Adaptation, adaption

The term adaption, presumably made in the first place on strong analogy with adoption, is driving out the older and perhaps more correct adaptation, especially on literary fringes. Publishers and suchlike will talk to authors about possible adaptions of their novels, etc., for the screen or stage. If only to reduce imputations of illiteracy, I mean to continue with adaptation for the moment, but the time will probably come when it will seem first quaint and then unintelligible. Sensible people will have switched to adaption before then, as they are already switching to retraction (rather than retractation).

I ask for Glenmorangie malt whisky stressing the third syllable of the name, even though I happen to know the head man there stresses the second, because a rational being prefers being understood, and served, to being right. No contest if the place serves The Macallan.

Address

Near the end of his enjoyable piece, ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), George Orwell gives six rules for decent writing ‘that one can rely on when instinct fails’. They are not infallible, these rules, as he would have agreed, but no. 1 has a great deal to be said for it:

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

Adherence to this prohibition would certainly cut down the tedious incidence of addressing this, that and the other, of addressing a question, a problem, a situation, a difficulty that requires to be faced in defiance of the many attempts to sweep it under the carpet, confronting most newspaper readers most mornings. As so often, both reader and writer are helped to feel that some progress is made towards handling, even solving, a question or problem merely by mentioning it. A really fresh approach calls for fresh words, and without them silence is at least fairer.

Aggro

This colloquialism, already showing signs of age, can be taken as descending partly from aggression and partly from aggravation in the colloquial, improper sense of annoyance, exasperation. It is often decried, but in its striking of the balance between the two in expressions like I kept away because I couldn’t stand the thought of all the aggro it has or had its niche in the informal vocabulary. Plenty of disreputably descended words and persons have found a tolerated if not a welcome place in this country, to risk sounding pompous.

Albeit

This word is perhaps not felt by its occasional users to be an archaism and probably not felt either to be just a fancy variant of though or although. It can carry a sense of special understanding and indulgence missing from the more ordinary conjunctions, as in, it might be, ‘He was not seriously annoyed, albeit a trifle irritated, that she left without saying good night’ – not annoyed, just, well, it might have been silly of him but he couldn’t help feeling a little put out that she left, etc. Not the sort of thing we hope to find in our sort of book, maybe, but surely innocuous enough. And it is right, or at any rate understandable, to be impatient with anent and aught and perchance, but to write an occasional albeit never did anyone much harm if an eye was kept on the tendency.

Ale

Fowler is right so much of the time that it is a guilty pleasure to correct him on those rare occasions when insufficient knowledge on his part or a change in circumstances has shown him to be wrong. So in writing of ale and beer he asserts that ‘in ordinary use, as at table, both denote the same thing, including the pale and excluding the dark varieties of malt liquor; the difference is that beer is the natural current word, and ale is’ a horrible thing called a Genteelism, like stomach for belly. (See BELLY and GENTEELISM.) No longer true, if ever. It remains the case that only a fearful fellow would ask, say, if you would care for a glass of ale with your ham sandwich, but the two drinks are distinct, ale being the result of a fermentation of malt, and beer being the same thing flavoured with hops (or ginger, etc.). Malt liquor, especially in the USA, became the name for an extra strong ale.

Allergic

Allergy is an unusual sensitivity to the action of particular substances or foods, such as gluten or shellfish, that are harmless to normal people. The reaction can be serious as well as distressing. It is perhaps yobbish to say one is allergic to certain people when all that is meant is that they get on one’s nerves.

All right

I hope I need not say that this is the correct form, making two separate words of it. The one-word travesty, alright, was said in the A–G volume of the Supplement to OED in 1972 to be ‘a frequent spelling of all right’. Yet the citation there of most recent date is taken from MEU of 1926, where Fowler says, in part, that alright, ‘if seldom allowed by the compositors to appear in print, is often seen … in MS’.

Fowler never said anything without good reason, and I can testify personally that in my schooldays before the Second War alright was indeed often seen – and nearly as often derided. I remember part of a solemn condemnation that ran, ‘Alright is always and altogether all wrong,’ and the incorrect form became nearly as much a favourite target of popular scorn as get in the sense of ‘obtain’ or ‘become’. Perhaps this did the trick; something did, anyway, for alright is very seldom seen nowadays. Its appearance in the title of an amusing television show of the 1990s, It’ll be Alright on the Night, a succession of embarrassingly spoilt takes, may seem a conscious barbarism. Even so there will perhaps be many whom it offends.

I am one of them. No doubt as fully aware as most people that language is nothing but a series of signs to convey meaning, and that in this sense no damage seems to be threatening any part of our existing arrangements, I still feel that to inscribe alright is gross, crass, coarse and to be avoided, and I now say so. Its interdiction is as pure an example as possible of a rule without a reason, and in my case may well show nothing but how tenacious a hold early training can take.

Also

This word, as Fowler properly reminds us, is indeed an adverb and not a conjunction, but it would be dull to forbid its conjunctional use altogether. Grammatical rules do not apply so strictly to comic writing and dialogue. A vernacular style can very readily produce boring or offensive results, but no amount of grammar would alleviate

Reviews for The King's English

[setnahkt · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As he aged, British author (and he has an opinion on “British”) Kingsley Amis often got described as “irascible” or something similar. In this book on English usage, he doesn’t come across as irascible so much as tired and long-suffering. The title, honoring a classic work on usage by H.W. Fowler, is a pun; Amis’ nickname was “The King”. Amis has no objection to puns, noting that Shakespeare made them and if they’re OK with him they’re OK with Amis.
Not a style manual or grammar or reference, but instead a collection of essays that can be read for pleasure (one is a discussion of the difference between a book of essays that can be read for pleasure and a book of essays which can be read for pleasure).
Among the interesting stuff is a derivation of “ain’t”. I remember an elementary school teacher pouncing on me, and anybody else who used “ain’t”, with the triumphant question “Because “ain’t” has an apostrophe it must be a contraction. Of what?”. Amis proposes “Am not I?”, parallel to “isn’t he?”, “aren’t you?” etc. The simple contraction, “amn’t I”, is unpronounceable, leading to “ain’t I”. Take that, Mrs. Jones.
Just with “A” we also have “Americanisms” (Amis generally approves), “alternate” versus “alternative” (Amis notes that it should be “alternative history”, not “alternate history”, but accepts that particular use) and “-athon” (as in “telethon” or “sale-a-thon”; he comments that despite his overall acceptance, some Americanisms should be shot on sight). Lots of other fun stuff with the rest of the alphabet; he’s got some wonderful invective for journalist-speak.
Found in the remainder bin; easily worth the $3.00 paid for it.

[themulhern · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book was published posthumously. Likely there were no readers left alive who would have been able to be amused by it. However, it is occasionally interesting, and it is always nice to find more authorities who condemn the split-infinitive rule.