In Review

09 January 2009 12:39 BST

A Plum in Your Mouth: Why the Way We Talk Speaks Volumes About Us by Andrew Taylor

Published by HarperCollins Entertainment, out now, hardback, 260 pages (inc index), £9.99.

In a nutshell…

Eloquent. Plummy. Concise.

What's it all about?

Why speaking proper is not as clear cut as certain accents are. Rory Bremner claims that Andrew Taylor attempts to "do for pronunciation what Eats Shoots and Leaves did for punctuation", but this is not really the case. Unlike Eats Shoots and Leaves, this book doesn't try to tell you what the "right way" of speaking is, but traces the evolution of spoken English in the UK and wider world up to its current usage.

Anyone who spends their life correcting how others speak may be disappointed in picking this book with intentions to use it as a justification for pronunciation, but any budding philologists may find something interesting interspersed with amusing anecdotes.

Who's it by?

Andrew Taylor is a former BBC correspondent, a Times columnist and Oxford English graduate, though of course none of these automatically enable him to have the right to be authoritative on the English language. Perhaps it is because he is also a Yorkshireman who has been associated with these bastions typically associated with the 'right' way of English that has prompted him to right a book defending people's way to speak as they want.

As an example…

"The favourite phrase of the people who want to tell us how to speak, whether they are talking about our pronunciation or our grammar, is 'Well, it's just not English!' Sometimes they'll sniff grumpily that sye-multaneous rather than simultaneous, or nooz instead of news, are just Americanisms, as if that ended the argument. But the language itself is nothing like so prissy. English has always picked up words, phrases and pronunciations wherever it could find them, like a tramp scooping up old tab ends in the gutter."

Likelihood of becoming a Hollywood blockbuster

Although there is the current trend for superheroes with angst, it's unlikely that we'll see Superman pondering what accent he should affect on return to Krypton, or multi-millionaire Batman worried that his upper-class background comes across in his dialogues with his working-class enemies.

However, I'm sure that there are plenty of awfullyBritishdontcherknow types willing to put on tweed for TV, or perhaps bray into the mike for Radio 4. If anything, someone with plums in their mouth, like the book, would have the perfect face for radio.

So is it any good?

Pronunciation is a tricky subject for anyone to attempt, as George Bernard Shaw once said: "It's impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him."

Taylor's book then is an appeal for all Anglophones for a little bit of love and tolerance of all accents, from rhotic South African to h-'ating cockney and prunustic Received Pronunciation.

A book about pronunciation invites those off-putting little symbols and obscure technical phrases, but Taylor manages to make do perfectly well without such confusing things and writes engagingly and wittily.

However, at times the listing of pronunciations can get a bit wearisome, a bit like listening on loop to Let's Call the Whole Thing Off with its sung discourse on saying tohmahto and toymayto. To get around this though, there is a sprinkling of quite amusing (and occasionally sinister) anecdotes about pronunciations which helps prevent boredom setting in, by which point the chapter is over anyway.

In all, A Plum in Your Mouth is kept short and to the point and is certainly worth picking up by anyone who has corrected someone's speech, been corrected, or just has a passing interest in English.

Prime ministers from both parties who like to inconsistently change their accent should not be surprised to find this in their stocking this Christmas.

7/10

Jonathan Richardson