Simon Heffer

Having been forced to withdraw from last year’s Literary Festival, we are delighted to welcome journalist, author and defender of the English language back to Petworth.

The English language has evolved throughout its history, and usually for good reasons – but just how far does that need to go!? Egged on by social media and the ubiquity and velocity of the internet, Simon Heffer argues that it is now the subject of a number of grave assaults where time honoured rules no longer apply. In an era when, thanks to the web (another word to have changed its meaning), everyone can be a published author, completely unedited and unregulated, often with dire consequences for the English tongue.

Simon Heffer's A to Z runs through a whole litany of common confusions ('flaunt' and 'flout', 'imply' and 'infer', 'uninterested' and 'disinterested'), unidiomatic English ('fed up of', 'focus around', the use of 'impacted' in such construction as 'the loss impacted him badly'), and lazy expressions (these days every extended activity is an '-athon', every scandal is a 'Something-gate'). It 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'.