From: I. Zelnik
Category: Amis's Works
Date: 6/30/99
Time: 1:58:43 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
http://www.atlantasilverbacks.com/roster.htm
[Poster's note: The following newspaper excerpt is from *The Independent* of London. From June 27, 1999. Never in a million years did I think that Martin Amis would ever turn into a prissypants linguistic purist. You know---like John Simon and Edwin Newman and the entire turd-sucking population of France. A bunch of prissy dickweeds who throw a shit-fit if you pronounce *mischievous* as *mis-chee-vee-us*. Or if you use *was* for the subjunctive case instead of *were*. Martin Amis turns out to be one of *those* ass-cracks. Who'da thunk it? Well Martin Amis can take his linguistic prissiness and slide it up Jacques Chirac's hairy ass. I can't believe this Amis character. Give the guy 8 million dollars and he immediately turns into a prissy-ass fussbudget. By the way. In case you didn't know: According to Adam Sherwin in *The Montreal Gazette*, Amis got 8 million dollars from Miramax.]
FROM *LANGUAGE, TRUTH, AND THE DANGERS OF MASS EDUCATION* / BY FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO
Celebrity illiteracy is now official. The public discovered this great new English deficiency last week, when the publishers of a concise dictionary ran a publicity stunt. Members of a panel of ill-assorted glitterati, including Martin Amis and Vanessa Feltz, denounced top people for language-abuse---the only kind of perversion which can still be condemned with impunity. Tony Blair was blamed for banality and evasiveness. Zoe Ball bludgeoned for blather. John Prescott dunned for drivel. These were unsurprising findings. Media-speak always drifts into idiocy. Meaningful utterance has to be avoided in case someone is offended. Obfuscation gives repellent policies electoral appeal. The mike is merciless: only split-seconds separate soundbites from Colemanballs. If you talk a lot, you talk a lot of nonsense. In the consumer society, language is like every other commodity: cheapened by glut.
More worrying than the survey's routine judgements was the evidence of the judges' incompetence. They droned on pedantically about split infinitives, politically correct circumlocutions and the sanctity of adjectives. They corruptly targeted their own political pet aversions. Apart from the verbally incontinent Chris Evans, all the most widely criticised offenders were politicians.
Fussing about linguistic purity is not just an innocent form of silliness: it is snobbish and in its extreme forms can be chauvinistic and even racist. Language is a bright weapon to be kept sharp and wielded with flair: this does not mean that everyone's armoury must be identically regulated. On the contrary, all should develop their own argot. That is how language gets enriched. The news about celebrity illiteracy in England broke on the day Jacques Chirac claimed that the European Charter on Minority Languages would 'imperil national unity'. Linguistic fetishism was formerly, in English eyes, a French vice. Now it is becoming an English obsession, too.