The Writer's Toolbox: A Review of Origins of the Specious

There are any number of useful tools which together make up the writer’s toolbox. Recently I came across one, and wanted to give it due credit.

The book is titled Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language, the authors are Patricia T. O’Conner, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review, and Stewart Kellerman. She has written four books on writing other than the above, tomes which I plan soon to add to the room I use upstairs for a book repository (as ‘library’ seems far too sophisticated a term for that multi-purpose junk room).

The essence of this particular book is to confront and vanquish the urban legends surrounding the English language. For example, you’d think that English is related to the Romance languages such as French, Spanish and Italian, what with how liberally we’ve borrowed from them. However, this is not true. According to Wikipedia, the Romance languages are: all the related languages derived from Vulgar Latin and forming a subgroup of the Italic languages within the Indo-European language family. Which English is not. Our mother tongue is a Germanic language, specifically West Germanic.

This has, over time, become a problem due to those Latin scholars not content to leave well enough alone, and who have over time fought to convert English into a Latin-derived tongue with the persistence of a Jehovah’s Witness on one’s doorstep. This ‘square peg into a round hole’ determination has resulted in a multitude of neologisms being pushed on us like credit card applications at the local department store.

The book is subdivided into wonderful chapters, such as Stiff Upper Lip: Why Can’t the British Be More Like Us and Grammar Moses: Forget Those Commandments. Grammatical urban legends are assaulted with a two-handed sword and swiftly laid to rest. Clumsy ‘rules’ are kidney-punched with quotes like this one: “It is better to be understood than to be correct.” And phony foreign words are put down for the count, such as the phrase nom de plume, which is supposed to be French for ‘pen name’ or ‘pseudonym’. (It’s not either, the British made it up) .

This little book from Random House (at just over 200 pages sans notes, acknowledgments, etc.) is a marvel, and should be included on the reference shelf of anyone who writes in the English language. You can also visit the Ms. Connor and Mr. Kellerman’s web site and blog at www.grammarphobia.com.