This paper explores popular perceptions of language, in particular linguistic prescription. It focuses not on formal acts of censorship such as might be carried out by a language academy, but on the attitudes and activities of ordinary people in, say, letters to newspapers or comments on radio. In these contexts, language users act as self-appointed censors and take it upon themselves to condemn those words and constructions that they feel do not measure up to the standards they perceive should hold sway.

People's concerns about language and the kind of linguistic censorship and puristic activities that accompany them belong to our tabooing behaviour generally. Prescriptive practices are part of the human struggle to control unruly nature – in this case, to define language and to force the reality of ‘the boundless chaos of a living speech’ (as Samuel Johnson put it in his Preface) into neat classificatory systems. As with tabooing practices generally, linguistic purists see a very clear distinction between what is clean and what is dirty – in this case, what is desirable and undesirable in a language. Linguists who challenge these prescriptions are challenging their ‘cherished classifications’. Small wonder there is often such a schism between linguistics and the wider community.

The most proscriptive eighteenth-century grammar of English, according to Sundby et al. (1991), is Knowles's Principles of English Grammar (1796). With 722 comments in which grammatical mistakes are criticised, Knowles heads the list which Sundby et al. compiled for their Dictionary of Normative Grammar. The copy of Knowles's grammar which Sundby et al. analysed was the fourth edition; the grammar had first come out in 1785 in Liverpool, and it enjoyed a moderate popularity (Alston, 1965:78–9). The fourth edition of Knowles's grammar consists of 144 pages, which makes it considerably longer than the first edition (36 pp.) (Alston, 1965:79). Fifteen pages of the book are devoted to a section called ‘Of Verbal Criticism’. This section includes according to Sundby et al. (1991:8) ‘some 460 “improper” sentences [which] are presented in alphabetical order …, the “proper” form of (the relevant part of) each sentence being given on the right’. In addition, the book contains an appendix with ‘Exercises of False Construction’, which are included to ‘afford the schoolboys and teachers for whom the grammar was intended ample opportunity for testing their linguistic ability, improved (it may be supposed) by diligent study of the first two lists’.

There is a pervasive view, held by academics and educated laypeople alike, that the Oxford English Dictionary is a descriptive work. When plans for this great dictionary were first taking shape, the originators made their intentions very clear. Archbishop Trench, delivering the two lectures to the London Philological Society in 1857 which initiated the project, famously stated the axiom that the lexicographer ‘is a historian of [the language], not a critic’, while the Philological Society's Dictionary Committee announced to its members in a document of 1860 that their job was to list and describe words accurately and disinterestedly.

The Elements of Style (henceforth, Elements) is a slender book of advice on usage and writing, revised by the admired novelist and essayist E. B. White from a book by his former English professor. White did well to accept Macmillan's suggestion that he should revise and expand his former professor's book for commercial republication: successive editions of the revision sold over ten million copies. Many college-educated Americans revere Elements, swear by it, carry it around with them. It was reissued in in April 2009 to a chorus of approval from famous American literary figures. One fan has published a whole book about its history (Garvey, 2009).

The title of Elements suggests a focus on style, but in fact much of it concerns grammar. The final chapter, ‘An Approach to Style’, opens by characterizing the earlier parts of the book as ‘concerned with what is correct, or acceptable, in the use of English’, and not with ‘style in its broader meaning’; and indeed, Elements is frequently cited as an authority on questions of grammar.

I believe the success of Elements to be one of the worst things to have happened to English language education in America in the past century. The book's style advice, largely vapid and obvious (‘Do not overwrite’; ‘Be clear’), may do little damage; but the numerous statements about grammatical correctness are actually harmful. They are riddled with inaccuracies, uninformed by evidence, and marred by bungled analysis. Elements is a dogmatic bookful of bad usage advice, and the people who rely on it have no idea how badly off-beam its grammatical claims are. In this essay I provide some illustrations, and a review of some of the book's most striking faults.

“Dictionary of Modern English Usage, short forms Modern English Usage, MEU. The best-known usage manual of the 20C, compiled by H. W. Fowler and published by Oxford University Press in 1926 […]. This work in particular has made the name Fowler as well known among those interested in usage and the language as Johnson and Webster, a point of reference for both those who venerate and those who regret what he has had to say.” (Burchfield, 1992a: 311)

If the quotation above is anything to go by, it tells us two things, namely that Fowler's Modern English Usage [MEU] is regarded as the best-known usage manual of the 20th century and that opinions about Fowler are highly controversial. Works like the Fowler Brothers' (1906) The King's English [KE] and Henry W. Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) [MEU-1] can be regarded as role models for usage handbooks in Britain. The immense success and popularity, especially of the latter work, with new editions in 1965 (revised by Sir Ernest Gowers) [MEU-2] and in 1996 (further revised by Robert Burchfield) [MEU-3], calls for an explanation. In order to reveal the relationship between authority and success, the present article places MEU and its predecessor KE in their socio-historical contexts and then gives a detailed account of the success story of MEU. It analyses the book's reception in its three editions and its treatment in English-language histories and introductory textbooks to the English language.

By the time you read this article we in Great Britain will probably have been through the process (or should that be charade?) of a general election when we will all be expected to choose who will represent (or misrepresent) us in Parliament. Any day now politicians will start running around kissing babies and turning up on our doorsteps asking for our support. Currying favour with the electorate they will even offer to take the old and infirm to the polling stations in the hope that such beneficence will encourage their charges to cast their votes for them. And of course they will attempt to persuade us that their party is the only one with the policies necessary to get us out of the economic mire we find ourselves in, omitting to say that politicians helped put us there in the first place. O tempora, o mores!

For the origins of the terminology we use in politics we must turn, as is so often the case, to ancient Greek and Latin for the answers to our questions.

“Some shops use an apostrophe, wrongly, to indicate an plural (‘pea's’), but will generally omit the apostrophe when one is actually required (‘new seasons asparagus’), a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the greengrocer's (or grocer's) apostrophe. Try to avoid this.” (Marsh & Hodsdon (eds), 2008: 5)

In this article, I shall examine a range of evidence from printed and web-based sources to gauge the extent of interest in punctuation, and the kinds of discourse employed in discussion of these matters. I shall also compare this with the comparative lack of attention paid to punctuation by 18th-century ‘prescriptivists’. I shall also consider why prescriptivism has returned with such a vengeance in the 21st century, and why punctuation is a focus of attention.