Lost for Words (John Humphreys)

The first half of this book is a long rumbling grumble about the state of modern youth, modern teaching and all things modern that impact on the English language. Humphreys admits that language changes over the centuries (and decades) and decries the idea of an English Académie Française to protect the language from change, but he can't help complaining about the laissez faire approach this leads to. Or is that "to which this leads", avoiding sentence-ending prepositions. The second half describes the failures of politicians, bureaucrats and advertising men in their attempts to promote messages that contort simple English into an unrecognisable list of over-syllabic verbised nouns, superfluous additional extra words and super-long sentences that serve to confuse more than inform.

And Humphreys is of course correct: we do not want a language dominated by the culture of cool nor by the excesses of bureaucrats. But in putting across this message, he argues himself in circles. He stands in the middle ground and argues for balance between changes and rules, which is precisely the position the English language adopts. As the author's question would be to any politician (around 8am) - "... and your point is?".