Introduction

Abstract

During the 1930s and 40s, there was no shortage of writers ready to comment on language. These writers varied widely in their focus and motivation, and, as seems so often to be the case with such commentaries, their reasons for writing specifically about language often reflected preoccupations with much more general features of contemporary society and social change. Again, as often seems to be the case, much of the amateur commentary on language was straightforwardly prescriptivist; A. P. Herbert commented in 1935, with some approval, that: ‘We poor professional writers receive by every other post advice and criticism from strangers, not only about what we say but about our manner of saying it — hyphens, split infinitives, relative clauses, ‘if and when’, etc’.¹ It was not just professional writers who were beset by advice on language use. The Society for Pure English, founded in 1913 at the instigation of the poet Robert Bridges, was still publishing regular tracts in reaction to what it saw as the declining standards in the use of the language. In some cases, the concern for ‘getting things right’ linguistically was linked to social anxiety and aspiration. This is reflected for instance in the attitudes to language varieties and their users voiced by characters in the contemporary novels of Nancy Mitford, and eventually presented, lightheartedly, in her Noblesse Oblige.²