SCARCELY ENGLISH - AN A-Z OF ASSAULTS ON OUR LANGUAGE
The English language has evolved throughout its history, and usually for good reasons. However, in recent years, egged on by social media and the ubiquity and velocity of the internet, it has been subject to some grave assaults. There appear no longer to be any rules, in an era when, thanks to the web another word to have changed its meaning everyone can be a published author, completely unedited and unregulated. This often has dire consequences for the English tongue.
Simon Heffer's A to Z runs though a whole litany of common confusions 'flaunt' and 'flout', 'imply' and 'infer', 'uninterested' and 'disinterested' , unidiomatic English 'fed up of', 'focus around', the use of 'impacted' in such construction as 'the loss impacted him badly' , and lazy expressions these days every extended activity is an '-athon', every scandal is a 'Something-gate' . It bemoans some truly awful neologisms, 'infotainment' and 'funwashing' among them. And it registers the horror of those of us who do not believe that you can answer the question 'How are you?' with the words 'I'm good'.
Trenchant and sprinkled with dry wit, Scarcely English is both a chamber of horrors of bad and lazy English and a plea for accuracy, clear thinking and elegance.
Edad recomendada: Adultos.
HEFFER SIMON
Simon Heffer es un destacado historiador, periodista y académico británico nacido en 1960. Se formó en el Corpus Christi College de Cambridge y ha desarrollado una extensa carrera en medios de prestigio como The Daily Telegraph y The Spectator. Es ampliamente reconocido por sus detalladas biografías de figuras políticas y culturales, como Thomas Carlyle y Ralph Vaughan Williams, así como por su ambiciosa serie sobre la historia de Gran Bretaña, que incluye títulos como High Minds y The Age of Decadence. Su trabajo se caracteriza por un análisis riguroso de la era victoriana y eduardiana.
