Thread by @EvilJoeMcVeigh

Hey-o! I’ve been off this hell site for a while. Must’ve been good for my mental health, right? Wrong! Because I’m still reading trash language books. This time it’s “Have you eaten grandma?” by Gyles Brandreth. Thread time!

It's another book written by someone who hates language. They say they love it, but spend 300 pages moaning about it. What gives? Do paleontologists write books about how Triceratops were a bunch of asshats?

So the subtitle of this book is “Or, the life-saving importance of correct punctuation, grammar, and good English” – LIFE-SAVING!!! I didn’t see any evidence for this in the book. Quite the opposite in fact. More on that in a bit.

Who is this Gyles Brandreth, you ask. Is he a linguist? A language professional? An editor, maybe? One a them there lexicographers? Someone trained in language analysis??? Lol. No. He is none of those and he just straight up admits it in his bio.

Side note: according to @simonschusterUK, those are the credentials you need to write a book about language. You don’t need to be a linguist or language professional. You don’t even need to get things right. You just need to… be on some British game shows? Cool cool. 👀

Ok, on to the book. Here’s the start. Language and power? Will this book be about the topic of language and power?!
No. No, it will not. Also, “worth getting it right” means getting it right in the way that Gyles Brandreth thinks is right. #TheMoreYouKnow

More credentials. Still no linguistic credentials. Almost like he’s trying to cover up for something. And how come your family that brought you up with a love for words didn’t already have a copy of Fowler’s?

“Linguistic horrors”. 🙄Saw that one coming. Why do people who claim to love language write books showing that they actually hate it?

We're only on the third page and there's this dog turd of a paragraph. Lots wrong here.

“I am passionate about the English language. It’s the richest language in the world.” Ugh. These kinds of comments are not made by people who study language. We don’t rank them in terms of how “rich” they are – because that doesn’t make sense.

You can like a language more than another, but that’s akin to liking a fruit more than the others. It’s doesn’t make your favorite fruit better or worse than others. And your opinion matters about as much as a rotten banana

“All the research shows that the better the English you speak and write, the happier and more successful you will be.”

ALL THE RESEARCH!!! Does Brandreth cite any of all the research? No. Of course he doesn’t. 🙃

“People with better English are healthier and live longer lives because they can understand and communicate better with doctors, nurses, and carers.”
Ok, this one is a serious fuckup. It's not only wrong. It's dangerous.

Research shows that marginalized people are less likely to be believed by doctors and nurses – because they are black or brown. It doesn’t matter how well you speak sometimes. Or how “articulate” your racist doctor thinks you are. BIPOC suffer at the doctor’s office and hospitals

Don’t believe me, Gyles? Here’s some things I found on a veeery quick internet search. If you spent less than a minute on this topic, you wouldn't be part of the problem
medium.com/age-of-awarene…
npr.org/sections/healt…

“And, alarmingly, good English is under threat.”
Oh, fuck off. Under threat from who? Let me guess – people who don’t look and sound like Gyles Brandreth. Did I get it right?

Any research to back up this claim? The next paragraph gives the sources: surveys and YouTube polls. So people ~*think*~ that English is under threat. That’s different than the language actually being under threat.

This claim is utter nonsense. It’s boilerplate for shitty books about language. English is the *least* threatened language in the world. It’s the GD lingua franca! English literally _threatens_ other languages.

There are actual languages that are actually under threat. Languages dying. And we get this trite claim about English being under threat. GTFOH with this, Gyles.

Later on we get some more evasive maneuvers. Gyles really wants you to think he knows about language, but it's pretty clear he doesn't know and doesn't care. Hey, Gyles, if you don't care about grammar then maybe don’t put the word in the title of your book!

“you don’t need to understand all the intricacies of English grammar to be able to communicate well.”

Agreed. But you might need to understand them in order to WRITE A BOOK ABOUT LANGUAGE.

These are the reasons that Glyes Brandreth doesn’t write books about computers, his wife, or statins. And yet when it comes to language and grammar…

Alright, I’m skipping ahead now. Most of the book is meh – some stuff is correct, some isn’t. Brandreth meanders over topics, but mostly talks about spelling and punctuation. There are places you can learn this stuff better and not have to slog through 200 pages.

Let’s focus on two things: 1) Brandreth’s discussion of discourse markers, especially “like” and “well”, and 2) Brandreth’s clown fall of a discussion of grammar.

That section name. You just know this is going to be bad.

Hey, Gyles, I was reading a book about language the other day and saw a TV presenter prove to everyone how little he knows about language

Any intro ling textbook would clear this up. They’re called discourse markers & they absolutely serve a useful purpose. You would figure someone who claims to care about language so much would – I don’t know – read a book about the study of language!

Kee-rist, there’s even a Wikipedia page about discourse markers. You could read it on your phone. On the bus.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse…

This is what we call anecdotal evidence. One schoolboy on one bus in one city on one day and in one sentence is given as evidence that like “has become the go-to linguistic filler of our times”. I know you think you’re good with language, Gyles, but that’s not how it works.

You know what’s coming, don’t you?

That’s right. In the 1st video on a search for “Gyles Brandreth interview”, Gyles begins his first answer with the word "well". FUCK OFF ONE THOUSAND TIMES.

This book is annoying and unnecessary. But also thank you for not making me have to watch more than 16 seconds of interviews with Gyles Brandreth.

Maybe beginning with "well" or "so" is how you answer the first question in an interview on the radio? Did you ever think of that? At what point after hearing everyone do a certain thing do you stop and think, “Huh, I guess that’s how that’s done”?

Brandreth probably looks at dogs and wonders why they don’t say meow.

Ok, on to Brandreth’s brain farts about grammar. It's in the very last chapter, 287 pages in. And he spends less than 10 pages on the topic.

It’s almost like this guy who is writing about grammar, who put the word “grammar” on the cover of his book, can’t be bothered with writing anything about grammar. Strange.

But I know why Brandreth tucked his grammar section way in the back: because he makes an ass out of himself when discussing grammar. Seriously.

After calling grammar lessons “the worst kind of punishment” and claiming that his readers don’t need to know about grammar (and trust me, you’re not going to know anything about grammar by reading Gyles Brandreth’s book), he says:

Lolllllll! The subject of the sentence is absolutely not the person or thing doing the action – that’s the agent and that’s a semantic analysis. The Subject is a term for syntactic analysis and we figure out what it is in a few different ways.

But guess what? The subject of a sentence in English can be a noun phrase, a prepositional phrase, a finite clause, a non-finite clause – all kinds of stuff. Again, just a peak into a linguistics book or a grammar would clear this up for Gyles. But I guess it’s too much torture.

So, how far into Gyles Brandreth’s book we have to go to find a sentence in which the subject is not a noun or a pronoun? If you guessed ZERO SENTENCES, you would be correct.

Literally the very first sentence of this book is “Language is power and how we use it defines us.” In the second independent clause of that sentence, how we use it is neither a noun nor a pronoun. It’s a finite clause functioning as the subject.

Brandreth doesn’t know about grammar, doesn’t care about grammar, doesn’t care that he doesn’t know about grammar.

He makes the same mistake with the syntactic element Object - he says they have to be nouns or pronouns and he recognizes them with a semantic definition. *groooooaaan*🙄

The rest of the (very few) pages of grammar are meh. He gets some things right, but then says that English has a future tense (it doesn’t) and that aspect is a tense (it isn’t).

The section is essentially too short to give you anything beyond dictionary definitions of grammar terms. Or then it’s just straight wrong.

The only good thing about this book was that I read it during the school year, so we got to dunk on it together with my students 😊