Oliver Kamm’s Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage has yet to be reviewed by one of his opponents, who can be assumed to include Lynne Truss, John Humphrys and Simon Heffer – while their writings on grammar amounted to a pedants’ revolt against linguistic sloppiness, the Times columnist’s book puts the case for the permissiveness they condemned. Instead, his reviewers have largely been sympathetic to his campaign against the “sticklers”. “His book is a welcome corrective to the notion that there is an objective standard we should strive for, and a celebration of a language in constant flux,” cheered the Sunday Times’ Ian Critchley. In the Daily Telegraph, Tom Payne fingered Kamm as a closet prescriptivist (“clearly he has his own rules - he just doesn’t call them that”) but overall was enthusiastic about “a liberating project” that “really does manage to make pedants ridiculous”. Similarly, the Observer’s Peter Conrad devoted most of his review to endorsing Kamm’s tolerance as “certainly preferable to the bigotry of sticklers” (citing examples from the “snobs” Truss and Humphrys) “who treat grammatical lapses as crimes or sins”; only in his concluding paragraph did he mildly complain that the author “undervalues language when he claims that it ‘reflects how we perceive the world rather than determining it’”. More vigorous opposition came, perhaps surprisingly, in Kamm’s own paper where Roger Lewis applauded “an immensely intelligent and playful polemic, cheeky and erudite by turns”, but advanced counterarguments for sticklerism: “without a grounding in grammatical subtlety, much of our literary tradition will remain a closed book”; and “these rules are a thin red line - give up the ghost on, say, split infinitives and we move closer to grunting inarticulacy”.
“David Bainbridge, vet turned popular scientist, is such a fan of fat that he has written a book adumbrating its merits,” wrote Paula Byrne, reviewing Curvology: The Origins and Power of Female Body Shape in the Times. While she complained about “sentences such as ‘women’s bodies are a diverse smorgasbord of curvaceousness from which men can choose”, and about a “deep confusion” in Bainbridge’s use of Darwin, annoyance was only part of her response to a “stimulating, uproarious and irritating read”. Other critics were more damning. “The author is on secure ground when discussing biology, but culture is an altogether more slippery customer,” noted the Observer’s Helen Lewis. His scientific terms become “disconcerting when used to describe living, breathing women”, and his “attempt to uncover the factors that influence eating disorders, body image and clothing choices ultimately collapses in a welter of contradictory claims”. Kate Chisholm, in the Daily Telegraph, criticised the “blokeish reductionism” of a book apparently intended “to infuriate half its readership”, and wondered “why are so many women dissatisfied with their body shape if it is to their evolutionary advantage to be curvaceous?” Irked, like Chisholm, by Bainbridge’s opening sentence, which calls the female body “the strangest thing in existence”, the Independent on Sunday’s Lucy Scholes found his “forays into the female mind” made for “uneasy reading”, and concluded that “this frustrating and confusing tome is by far a stranger beast than the female form could ever be”.
