Of Wankers and Berks

At the end of a lifetime of sailing, what more natural than to pronounce on boats? Thus: a book about words and usage by the late Kingsley Amis. Comic master of the particular British angst that consists of unhappiness with other people, Amis wrote 21 novels and a dozen collections of short stories, poems and essays.

Or as he would put it, short stories and poems and essays. He was against stitching together brief lists of things merely with commas: too crimped and prissy. One of Amis’ lifelong targets was the intellectually finicky and snobbish, or “wankers” (a reasonably respectable term by now). The other was loutish know-nothings, or “berks.” They are the two wheels on his attack engine; revolving in contrary directions, they give his novels a precarious uncertainty that makes up for a certain sameness.

With a similarly divergent effect, wankers and berks--the affected and the crude--are the miscreants of Amis’ “guide” to modern English usage. If I employ quotation marks, it is not because his book is not in some sense a guide, but because it is an unremarkable one. What it more remarkably is is a portrait of Amis.

As he puts it, a book of this sort “is to settle scores as well as arguments.” That is a quote from H.W. Fowler, the revered but neither saintly nor undisputed author of “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.” Amis sufficiently reveres him despite an occasional disagreement. In fact, he calls his own book “The King’s English”: a self-deprecating tribute since it is the title of a concededly lesser Fowler work.

A writer arguing language is arguing for his corner of the world. Ranging alphabetically, Amis begins neutrally with “able, ible” as adjective endings (comfortable, defensible, etc.), something he has no particular interest in pondering. Were he attempting a comprehensive usage manual, he would have included long lists of each, he says, “but I am not so I do not.”

It is not long before he has warmed up. With the final alphabetical entry--”yoo, oo” as rival ways of pronouncing the U sound--he has written a paragraph that bleeds. It is a mini-essay on class and the generations.

Amis’ own “sue” and “suit” sound as “syoo” and “syoot” because, he explains, he is “an elderly Londoner of lower-middle-class origin.” Hence--and we get to the twisted English heart of things--the refined diphthongs. As for his sons (one of them the writer Martin Amis), whose father’s success elevated their origins into the upper middle class, they insist on an ostensibly proletarian honk: “soo” and “sooot.”

A jazz lover, he is beguiled by sounds and takes wicked joy in pronunciatory eccentricities. The English tend to place the stress as far forward in a word as possible, he writes, though few go as far as a professor who telescoped the six syllables of “anticipatory” into three--”antsiptry.”

Amis has it from the proprietor that the proper pronunciation of the malt whisky is Glenmorangie; nevertheless he bows to the consensus at the pub and orders Glenmorangie. A rational being prefers “being understood and served to being right.” Verbal sticklers must settle for the Macallan.

That Amis was a curmudgeon is unquestionable, but “The King’s English” shows him surprisingly non-stickling. Of course, he can blast with the best. Sardonically, he applauds the cant “meaningful,” trumpeting that “one would not wish to be deprived of a phrase that so unerringly points out its user as a humorless ninny.”

“Honesty is the best policy” lost its wicked sting and turned soft, he laments, with the disappearance of the original meaning of policy as devious calculation. “When a piece of accurate cynicism or well-directed spite passes out of currency, something is lost.”

By and large, though, the author is more flexible than his later-years reputation as a reactionary would suggest. He welcomes “gay” even though he regrets that its older meanings have been crowded out. “It is cheerful and hopeful, a half a world away from the dismal clinical and punitive association of ‘homosexual.’ ”

He deplores “kid” as disrespectful to young people. This from a writer who famously deplored the youth culture. (Perhaps Martin got in a word.) A youthful radical glint occasionally issues from under the Tory eyebrows. “Malnutrition” is not simply underfeeding, as Fowler obliviously has it. It is a prolonged lack of adequately sustaining food, Amis points out, as with the British working class up into the 1950s.

He disputes a second Fowler pronouncement. What’s wrong with the occasionally useful “if and when,” he wants to know. He applies brakes to the exhilarating jargon-bashing of George Orwell--for instance, when the latter mocks the cautious English “not-un” usage. “Not unpromising” may be waffle, Amis agrees, but Orwell missed “the possible virtues as well as the more selfish advantages of an unwillingness to commit oneself.” Anyway, how else would you phrase “the jailer spoke to him not unkindly”? “Kindly” would be something else entirely.

Amis’ views on what is and is not acceptable are subjective, as usage pronouncements are apt to be. He tends to muddle complex distinctions; for example, when to use “very” and when to use “much.” There are one or two howlers; for instance, he vaguely allows the possibility that Basque might be a dialect of Spanish. Digression comes to the rescue, though: Amis recalls a linguist insisting that Finnish and Hungarian are very close. How close? the author wants to know. “As close as English and Greek.”

Digression, in fact, is one of the book’s most useful features. It could hardly be otherwise when talking usage means talking life. His friend, the poet Philip Larkin, gets to writers’ bone-marrow anguish when he wittily evokes the obsessive discipline of Hemingway’s writing habits:

“You know how when you start in the morning it’s like getting blood out of a stone to begin with, with lots of time spent just staring at the blank paper and going out for a pee and thank God when the phone rings, and then you gradually speed up so that after an hour or more the stuff’s coming quite easily, well of course I don’t mean easily, just a bit faster. . . . Well, our Ernie’s no exception there, only when he gets to the point where he starts speeding up, he stops writing.”

“The King’s English” is not rigorous, nor are its pronouncements and distinctions especially keen. Amis’ indignation, in old age, was something short of Swiftian. Yet his last book records a lifelong struggle akin to that fought by activists for the forests and streams and air and the Earth’s species.

Language is the environment of the mind, and a battle for its elegant lines may sometimes be as doomed as the one for the spotted owl, and more essential.