One can't go knocking out Letters to the Editor every time something dubious appears in the paper. I've had to stop reading Oliver Kamm's column on grammar in The Times on Saturdays because his relentless discovery and debunking of the grammatical pedant is just as pedantic as theirs. It only needs saying once, yes, language is as it is used and not a matter for textbooks on usage. If, indeed, 'decimate' now means 'obliterate' then so be it, it no longer means 'reduce by one tenth'. And, a big favourite in our office, 'literally' is by now simply an intensifier and doesn't any longer mean 'actually', as in,
he has literally just disappeared
(Serena Brocks, Portsmouth, circa 2003)
That was fine although my friend Alan and I didn't think so at the time. But once Prof. Terry Eagleton had explained it was an intensifier and, in this case, the person only had to have gone elsewhere very recently, we were disabused and eventually relented from our literal linguistic interpretation. Thank heavens for that.
I did e-mail in to The Observer when their television reviewer said that Christopher Jefferies, in The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies, was listening to a Bach concerto in his flat. No, it was one of the cello suites. But I realize that nobody likes a smartarse and nobody's grateful, it's not big and it's not clever.
So I restrained myself this week when Robert McCrum credited James Shapiro, in the new Shakespeare book, 1606, The Year of Lear, with the 'revelation' that,
the age-old thespian fuss about 'the Scottish play' was actually a Victorian invention, the work of the incomparable Max Beerbohm.
So, what is a revelation, then. Is it when something is revealed to the world or is it when something is revealed to Robert McCrum.
A few years ago, a lady in our office asked me where all the superstition came from and I explained there were a number of stories of deaths among cast members during productions of Macbeth, that The Globe had been burned down during a production of Henry VIII, that it was a play about witchcraft and that a certain sort of camp, theatrical type thrives on this kind of old baloney but I wasn't sure it had any real foundation. And then, only a couple of weeks later, an edition of QI devoted to questions on Shakespeare revealed that which James Shapiro now reveals again, which is apparently news to Robert McCrum.
So, then, of course, I had to scuttle round to the other side of the office the next day, 'Oh, Veronica, your little lad that's doing Macbeth at school, can you tell him.....'