The Fight For English

Browsing through Waterstone's bookshop the other day I noticed that David Crystal has written a counterblast to Lynne Truss's "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" entitled "The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left".

Crystal has written about the book in the Guardian.

I am a great admirer of Crystal. When I was studying for my CELTA his book "Rediscover Grammar" saved me from becoming an insufferably pedantic prescriptivist* . I was privileged to hear him speak at Westminster University last summer when a friend of mine invited me to a linguistics conference there.

I haven't yet ordered a copy of the book, but I have a paycheck on the way very soon, and my basket at Amazon is filling up.

*I can still be insufferably pedantic on occasion, but only in unarguable matters of fact.

It's not Prague's fault!

The British press yesterday made a lot from a Foreign & Commonwealth Office report on the use of consular services by British tourists abroad. Apparently a higher proportion of British visitors to Prague need consular assistance than those in any other foreign destination.

Somehow the stories seemed to imply that there is something dangerous about Prague. I think that gangs of drunken Brits can lose their wallets, phones, clothes etc wherever they happen to be. So many of them do it in Prague because it's a really great place to visit and a half litre of beer is cheaper than most non-alcoholic alternatives.

A follow-up story in today's Guardian lists other places where Brits get into difficulties, and does put Prague into perspective.

"I don't know whether the Czech Republic is more dangerous than anywhere else," says Frances Tuke of ABTA. "I think the thing is that we can be a danger to ourselves, particularly when cheap booze and - shall we say - other cheap services are so readily available."

A 2004 report by the Czech tourism office found that local police believed 20% of all weekend crime in Prague involved British men on stag trips. My colleague Gary confirms this view of events: "My biggest fear when I'm in Prague - I go most years - is that I'm going to get beaten up by a bunch of English people on a stag or hen do."

I remember one Friday when was catching a lunchtime flight back to the UK for the weekend. I arrived at the airport at about 11:00 and one of the airside bars was full of Brits from a stag weekend. This really puzzled me, I figured that they had got straight off the plane and gone into the first bar they saw, before they even went through passport control. Maybe they were waiting for friends on another flight, or maybe they were on a mission to drink in every bar they saw during their time in Prague.

Luckily the stag and hen parties didn't make their way to my favourite haunts.