Simon Heffer – Scarcely English

Where do you stand on the contemporary use of English and its almost daily revisions, updates and additions?  

Our language has evolved throughout its history and usually for good reasons. However the distinguished journalist Simon Heffer maintains that in recent years it has been subject to grave assault. Egged on by social media and the ubiquity and velocity of the internet there appear no longer to be any rules and everyone can be a published author, completely unedited and unregulated.

Simon Heffer’s A to Z runs though a whole litany of common confusions and lazy expressions, and bemoans some truly awful neologisms, ‘infotainment’ and ‘funwashing’ among them. And it registers the horror of those of us who do not believe that you can answer the question ‘How are you?’ with the words ‘I’m good’.

In conversation with Lucasta Miller