Have You Eaten Grandma?

June 24, 2019
Self-styled “language obsessive and... punctuation perfectionist” Brandreth (Oscar Wilde and the Return of Jack the Ripper), a mystery novelist, BBC broadcaster, and former member of Parliament, defends the correct use of English in this witty usage guide. Presenting “the richest language in the world” as a well-established route to health, wealth, and happiness—albeit one imperiled by social media and other modern developments—he starts with the basics: proper punctuation, dashes and hyphens, apostrophes, spelling, and pluralization. Brandreth uses humorous examples, historical asides (Dan Quayle’s “potatoe” spelling), extensive charts, and mnemonic devices of his own creation to illustrate his points. Though the Queen’s (i.e., British) English is his main focus, he also sets aside his “stiff upper lip” (a stereotypically English trait which is actually an American coinage) to explore its many divergences from American English. The resulting confusion, he shows, is compounded by the continual addition of all types of new words into the common lexicon, such as social media lingo, euphemisms, and portmanteaus. Ultimately, clarity, not rigid rule-adherence, is key to Brandreth’s philosophy of writing. Bolstered with an epilogue giving straightforward definitions for different parts of speech, his passionate, enlightening, and easily navigable manual is certainly the right book at the right time.