Simon Heffer
Tuesday 8th October
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7pm
7.30pm
This autumn we are looking forward to welcoming back historian and Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer for Scarcely English, a chamber of horrors of bad and lazy English and a plea for accuracy, clear thinking and elegance.
Scarcely English
The English language has evolved throughout its history, and usually for good reasons. However, in recent years, egged on by social media and the ubiquity and velocity of the internet, it has been subject to some grave assaults. There appear no longer to be any rules, 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. This often has dire consequences for the English tongue.
Simon Heffer's A to Z runs though 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'.
About Simon Heffer
Simon Heffer read English at Cambridge and took a PhD in modern history at that university. His previous books include A Short History of Power, Simply English, High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain and Staring at God: Britain in the Great War. In a thirty-year career in Fleet Street, he has held senior editorial positions on The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, and is now a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.