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Preface

The inspiration for this book came from reading W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, an atmospheric semi-fictional account of a walking tour throughout East Anglia, in which personal reflections, historical allusions, and traveller observations randomly combine into a mesmerizing novel about change, memory, oblivion, and survival. The metaphor of the title – Saturn’s rings created from fragments of shattered moons – captures the fragmentary and stream-of-consciousness flow of the narrative.

I was frequently reminded of the serendipitous nature of language study, when reading that book. Around the next corner is always a new linguistic experience, waiting to be observed. Language is in a state of constant change, with each day bringing new developments. Any linguistic study is a search for the impossible – to say something sensible about the ‘whole’ of a language. I have spent my entire professional life as a university teacher and researcher in linguistics trying to make valid statements about language and languages – and about the English language in particular. Every now and then I feel I have come close to it, and then it leaves me behind, like the soldiers chasing the Ghost in Hamlet –‘ ’Tis here!’ Tis here!’ Tis gone.’ I feel I am always dealing in linguistic half-truths.

My subtitle has other echoes, chiefly of the series of explorations carried out by H. V. Morton in the 1920s and ’30 – In Search of England, In Search of Scotland, In Search of Wales… This is what he writes, in the preface to In Search of England:

I have gone round England like a magpie picking up any bright thing that pleased me. A glance at the route followed will prove that this is not a guide book, and a glance at the contents will expose me to the scorn of local patriots who will see, with incredulous rage, that on many an occasion I have passed silently through their favourite village. That is inevitable. It was a moody holiday, and I followed the roads; some of them led me aright and some astray. The first were the most useful; the others were the most interesting.

This has been my experience too: the linguistic side roads always proved more interesting. And writing this preface having finished the book, I can see that its spirit – and certainly its style – is far more Morton than Sebald.

Both Sebald and Morton had reasons for starting their journeys. I did not. The idea for this book had been wandering around my head for several months, but I had no particular motive to go off on a linguistic journey. After all, where should I go? There was everywhere to choose from, and that was too much. A journey needs a structure, and I didn’t have one.

Then, out of the blue, I was given a reason, and a structure. In 2002 the BBC had initiated an ambitious project to record and celebrate the whole range of present-day British English accents and dialects. The project was called, quite simply, ‘Voices’, and it came to fruition in August 2005, when broadcasters all over the country presented a wide range of programmes in ‘Voices Week’. I had been the project’s linguistics consultant.

It was mainly a radio experience, but a few television programmes were also being made, and in May I was asked to help present one of them, for BBC Wales. The idea was to travel around the principality to find out what was happening to the English accents in the region. My impression was that Anglo- Welsh accents were becoming increasingly diverse. Was this so? And what did people feel about the changes which were taking place? The programme would find out.

And that is how I found myself suddenly faced with a series of ports-of-call, dotted around Wales. Several of them coincided with plans I had already made to visit places in nearby England, such as the Hay Festival, and one week in particular, at the beginning of June, stood out as an especially wide-ranging opportunity. The events of that week, I decided, would act as my structure.

In making a television documentary, there are long chunks of time when there is nothing for a presenter to do, other than wait for the moment when the producer and the film crew have everything ready – the right light, the right angle, the right background… I imagine some presenters read a novel at that point. With me, the linguistic bit of my mind goes walkabout. The spoken and written paraphernalia around me – voices, place-names, signs, noticeboards – trigger all kinds of questions, reflections, and memories. Everything goes into a notebook. My book includes those moments too. They took me all over the English-speaking world.

By Hook or by Crook is a linguistic travelogue. It is an attempt to capture the exploratory, seductive, teasing, quirky, tantalizing nature of language study. Certainly, in both structure and style, it is unlike anything I have written before. My previous published encounters with the English language have ranged from the research monograph to the school textbook, and from highly illustrated encyclopedias to the most unillustrated of dictionaries. But everything, hitherto, has had a tight structure. In each case, I knew where I was going, and where my book would end.

As I began to write By Hook or by Crook, I realized it was not going to be like that. In piecing together my journey, telling my ‘Voices’ story, and researching the answers to my notebook questions, I found still more linguistic side roads that I could not resist exploring. A surprising number of questions have more than one answer. This book includes them all. I suppose it might be called ‘stream-of-consciousness linguistics’.

DAVID CRYSTAL

Holyhead, 2006

BY HOOK OR BY CROOK