'Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English,' by John McWhorter

"English is subjected to a great number of descriptors in “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue,” John McWhorter’s brief and engaging look at some of the history of our language. It is, among other things, “very special,” “not normal,” “miscegenated,” “interesting,” “peculiar” and, in case we haven’t yet gotten the point, “genuinely weird.” McWhorter’s goal is to shine some light on topics he feels that authors of the typical “grand old history” of English, with their “fetish” for vocabulary at the expense of grammar, have left out.



McWhorter is a past professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Cornell; a current senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; and the author of numerous books on both language and race. Refreshingly, this book is neither a dry examination of academic minutiae nor an excessively simplified history. McWhorter’s book is a welcome change from the sort of scholarly book in which the foundation of an idea seems often to be built on the ­corpses of the author’s enemies. He may disagree with a number of his predecessors, but he is unflaggingly polite in doing so, either not mentioning them by name, or emphasizing that he enjoys and respects their other work immensely.

“Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue” is by no means a complete chronicle of our language. McWhorter is more interested in, as the subtitle puts it, “the untold history of English.” He points out that English has what he calls “kinks” in its grammar, qualities that are not shared by any of its relatives in the Germanic family of languages, but which do exist in a number of the Celtic ones, and questions why it is that these Celtic influences on English have gone unnoticed. I am frequently of the opinion that “untold histories” have remained untold for a very good reason, and it is testament to McWhorter’s persuasiveness that I took umbrage on behalf of Welsh and Cornish.

McWhorter states that he has two lessons that he intends to get across. “First, there is nothing unique about English’s ‘openness’ to words from other languages.” And “second, there is no logical conception of ‘proper’ grammar as distinct from ‘bad’ grammar that people lapse into out of ignorance or laziness.” (“Grim little rules” like the one against using “they” as a ­gender-neutral singular pronoun, he writes, make no sense — hey, Shakespeare did it — but laymen cling to it “like Linus to his blanket.”)

It’s not so surprising that English’s “openness” to words fails to overwhelm McWhorter — he’s a linguist, and as a bunch linguists tend to be less impressed with the words that make up a language’s vocabulary than they are with how those words fit together. Along the way he also touches on what the Vikings took away from our grammar, takes a skeptical look at the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which holds that language affects thought patterns) and raises the question as to whether the ancient Phoenicians may have had more of a hand in our language than is currently thought.

As for his own language, McWhorter occasionally adopts a tone that is jarringly colloquial. He has already established a relaxed yet informative style in which to explain linguistic history to a general audience, and he does it quite well — he gains nothing by beginning sentences, as he is wont to, with “Yeah” or “But check this out.”

A more comprehensive history of the language can be found in David Crystal’s “Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language” or “The Story of English,” by Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil and William Cran. But McWhorter has provided a pleasingly dissenting view — one that wears its erudition lightly."




OUR MAGNIFICENT BASTARD TONGUE
The Untold History of English
By John McWhorter
230 pp. Gotham Books. $22.50

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'The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan,' by Gregory Feifer

"In early January 1988, 39 Soviet paratroopers were positioned on a cliff overlooking the Gardez-Khost road in southeastern Afghanistan. Their job was to protect the soldiers below, who were trying to open up the dangerous, heavily mined route. All around waited Islamic fundamentalists who had spent the last eight years fighting the Red Army and the government it had installed in Kabul just after Christmas 1979.



Soon, groups of black-clad mujahedeen, probably from Pakistan, were crawling toward the Soviets from all directions, machine guns blazing. The Soviets fought back valiantly. A helicopter soared in daringly through heavy fog to deliver ammunition. One soldier died while trying to wire together weak spare batteries to make a radio work.

For all their courage, though, the Soviets were adrift. They were outsiders, fighting outsiders, in a third country — and they didn’t really understand why. The Pakistanis believed they were on a mission from God and screamed “Allah Akbar!” as they headed toward battle. The Soviets could think to respond only with the names of their faraway hometowns. “For Borisov!” one hollered as he threw a grenade.

The scene sums up much of the folly of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The Russians held off the attackers and got the road open. But the paratroopers soon left their position, the tanks below moved on, and the mujahedeen quickly retook it all. The fight was won, but the battle was lost — and of course the war would be too. Three and a half years later, Borisov became part of a newly independent Belarus.

Gregory Feifer relates these events in his fascinating new book, “The Great Gamble.” It’s a highly readable history of the conflict, which began with so haphazard a decision to intervene that Feifer gives credence to the assertion of one general staff officer that “no one ever actually ordered the invasion of Afghanistan.” It just happened through inertia and confusion under the sclerotic Soviet leadership of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

The author, NPR’s Moscow correspondent, tells the story mainly through the eyes of Soviet veterans and spies. The results are vivid and original — even though there are limitations to basing so much of the book on individual, self-serving recollections. For example, Feifer describes in detail how the K.G.B. hustled four Afghan ministers out of the country in ammunition boxes. It’s a great story, but Feifer appears to rely on one K.G.B. intelligence operator for most of the dialogue and drama. And two pages after it ends, Feifer reveals that one of the allegedly smuggled ministers denies the whole thing.

The book’s structure and style mean that Feifer adds little specifically to the question that will draw many readers: What can the United States learn for its own wars today? Feifer flicks at the topic, but the grim answers he offers have already been absorbed: don’t shoot up wedding parties, never underestimate fanatics who know the terrain, and remember that all politics in Afghanistan are messy. Remember, too: Fighting these guys is hard. According to Feifer, the mujahedeen were canny enough to smuggle heroin into Soviet barracks to get their adversaries hooked.

Even if Feifer fails to offer what his publisher calls “striking lessons for the 21st century,” he succeeds in his main goal: presenting a new side of a long, sorry war that would leave an estimated 1.3 million Afghans dead and the Taliban surging through the ravaged countryside toward Kabul. It’s “a tragic human story,” Feifer writes — and one that he recounts with skill."




THE GREAT GAMBLE
The Soviet War in Afghanistan
By Gregory Feifer
Illustrated. 326 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99

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'A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub,' by Bill Barich

"If you close your eyes and imagine an old-fashioned Irish pub, you might think of worn wood floors, bric-a-brac on the walls and gents in flat caps. According to Bill Barich, an American writer based in Dublin, this stereotype is great for tourism worldwide but wields a culture-sapping strength that’s killing off pubs in Ireland itself. Nothing less than the country’s national identity is at stake.



Driven by a need to experience a timeless tavern like the one in John Ford’s 1952 film “The Quiet Man” — a place with a strong sense of community, where the art of conversation flourishes — Barich travels throughout Ireland and is routinely disappointed. The pubs he finds are either lifeless “museum pieces,” corporate sports bars with TV screens or shameless fakes hawking manufactured nostalgia. The old cereal boxes and tin signs advertising tobacco at E. J. Morrissey’s are, Barich laments, “just for show.” The banjo-and-bodhran-playing musicians at the Brazen Head resemble “a tepid version” of the Clancy Brothers. Throughout Ireland, literary giants like Joyce and Yeats are memorialized in ways that suggest they were regulars at a laughably improbable number of spots.

Inauthenticity and modernization, Barich concludes, have ruined bar fun (or “craic as it’s known to the Irish). Interviews with elderly publicans like Dessie Hynes help Barich understand why the old-fashioned businesses are dying: Tougher drunk-driving laws keep people from venturing to local taverns, and members of the community no longer convene in public houses. (Yet another reason to dislike Starbucks, shopping malls and the Internet.)

Greed also takes some of the blame. “Pubs aligned with the leisure industry,” Barich explains, describing popular gimmicks like quiz nights with cash prizes, Texas Hold ’Em tournaments, bingo and karaoke. At one low point, he finds himself surrounded by five Bud-drinking jocks watching a soccer match while the barman sends text messages on his cellphone. Elsewhere, Barich encounters a device that lets patrons pour their own pints, “thereby reducing the contact between people even further.” He’d cry into his beer if only he could find a decent one: Even the local Guinness — “flavorless,” “sticky,” tainted with burnt barley — falls short.

But as rural pubs are dying in the mother­land, the concept has become a hot commodity around the world. The Dublin-based Irish Pub Company has built about 500 bars in 45 countries. Their advice: Add an “& Son” tag to make your place sound older. The multinational drinks conglomerate Diageo-Guinness sells Irish Pub Concept (I.P.C.) business plans. And statistics suggest that more stout is now sold in Nigeria than in Ireland.

These changes — insidious byproducts of globalization — come across as relentless downers, but Barich weaves a ­never-ending stream of oddly engaging historical and literary references into every dead end. In explaining why some publicans doubled as undertakers up until the mid-1900s, he notes that “under the Coroners Act of 1846, any coroner had the right to dispatch a dead body to the ­closest pub, and the proprietor was obligated to store it, usually in a cool cellar with the kegs of beer, until an inquest could be held. The law stayed on the books until 1962.”

To shed light on the manly art of drinking (and perhaps lend credibility to his beer-soaked pursuit), Barich invokes all kinds of Irish literary heavyweights, including Conor McPherson, William Carleton and Flann O’Brien, whose poem “The Workman’s Friend” inspired the book’s title. Occasionally his digressions seem overly indulgent — not every reader will care that a bartender named Helen McLean, in the crossroads hamlet of Bally­scannel, was once fond of ballroom dancing — but Barich’s passion for boozy subjects is broad and undeniable. He’s equally at ease covering the effects of the temperance movement and introducing regional slang terms for being drunk.

By the end of his travelogue, Barich admits that “there’s a good deal of hand-wringing . . . over what it actually means to be Irish” and that plenty of Irish men and women don’t actually mind the disappearance of old pubs. And while he finds a few worthy spots, he never deeply contemplates the paradox that makes them worthy. He has, after all, based his notion of authenticity on a few plays and poems and an American movie — on a romanticized stereotype."




A PINT OF PLAIN
Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub
By Bill Barich
242 pp. Walker & Company. $25

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