Review of: Dimitra Fimi, Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits. Palgrave Macmillan 2009. 252 pages. 9780230219519. Hardback £50.00

Nils-Lennart Johannesson, Stockholm University, Sweden

In ET102 (June 2010), Geoffrey K. Pullum poured scorn on the book The Elements of Style by W. Strunk and E. B. White, saying it had a ‘vice-like grip on Americans’ view of grammar and usage' and that ‘almost everything they say on that topic is wrong.’ Elements is a fairly short book, containing 85 pages of advice on writing, presenting some of it in a way you could describe as rules of usage. Pullum thinks that many Americans go further and treat it as holy writ. I should like to defend Elements here and to attack Pullum's critical method. Some ET readers may be surprised by this, as in 1992 I wrote ‘The vital principle is that there are no rules of correct usage. The basis for choice is aesthetic, not technical, and since language rests on convention, there is no authority that can justify your preferences.’ I stick to that. How, then, am I going to defend Elements without seeming to contradict myself? I think the answer is in what I went on to say: ‘That does not mean you should not make linguistic judgements: you should, but on grounds of quality, not of correctness.’ (Who Controls the Language?, ET31, July 1992.)

The etymological trail of drug use.

There are two sides to drugs. They can either be the life-saving preparations we ingest to fight harmful bacteria and combat serious illness, or they can be the devastating concoctions that destroy our personalities, our bodies and can lead to undignified and frequently painful death. Society needs the former but conducts a seemingly endless war against the latter as it tries to restrict the flow of the so-called ‘recreational drugs’ onto our streets. The addicts, on the other hand, do everything they can to outwit the authorities as they and their suppliers become ever more inventive in the ways they think of for smuggling marijuana, cocaine, ganja and countless other substances past border guards, customs officials and drug squad officers in order to satisfy their craving.

Linguistically, although they are probably unaware of it, these addicts owe their epithet to Roman law. In ancient Rome financial matters were taken very seriously and there were strict (some might say harsh) rules and regulations governing the borrowing and lending of money. For instance, if a debtor fell behind with his repayments he or she could be taken to court where the usual decision was that he be given a period of thirty days to come up with the money to clear his debt. If he failed to do so in the allotted time he would be assigned to his creditor who was required to treat him in a manner prescribed by law. He would keep the poor man in chains for sixty days, display him on three consecutive market days (held every nine days) and try to find someone who would take him off his hands for a fee equal to the amount of debt owed. Whoever paid the debt would have the man assigned to him as his slave. And the Latin for ‘assigned’ was addictus, from the prefix ad ‘to’ and the infinitive dicere ‘to say’, the implication being that transaction was more often than not a verbal one rather than a written one. Either way the result was the same: one human being became a slave to another much in the same way that, in the modern sense of the word, an addict is enslaved by his craving for his next fix.