Wales shots | HUTCHEON: Since leaving the world of full-time academia more than twenty years ago, | 00:00 |
Crystal and Hutcheon walk | David Crystal has become one of the most prolific authorities on the subject of English. | 00:08 |
| Crystal: Out there somewhere is Dublin. | 00:16 |
| HUTCHEON: Working from Holyhead in Wales, a somewhat stark corner of the British Isles, Professor Crystal's career has flourished. | 00:19 |
Word montage | Music | 00:28 |
Crystal. Super: Linguist | Crystal: The reason why I write so much popular stuff on language is not because it's my idea, it's because people ask me to! | 00:41 |
Word montage | Music | 00:46 |
Crystal | Crystal: Everybody is interested in language. Where does that word come from? What shall we name our child? I wonder what that, what that name means? | 00:55 |
Crystal giving speech | Crystal: Would you like to come and give us a lecture... | 01:01 |
| HUTCHEON: Tonight he's on home ground in Holyhead, performing in an Arts Centre he helped to establish. | 01:04 |
| Crystal: One of the things linguists do is they go looking for slang. It's a bit like a butterfly hunter with a net, you know, always going out looking for the next specimen. | 01:10 |
Book signing at Holyhead | Crystal: Hello. Woman: Hello, can you put ‘to Rob' please . HUTCHEON: Many have known about his work for years, but some are | 01:18 |
| new converts, enticed by the current debate about punctuation and grammar. | 01:25 |
Montage. Hay-on-Wye bookshops | Music | 01:31 |
| HUTCHEON: In the book-lovers' capital of Hay-on-Wye, the war of words over punctuation has taken on new intensity. | 01:39 |
| Music | 01:48 |
Crystal giving speech | Crystal: How many of you have heard of Lynne Truss's ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves'? Audience: Yes. Crystal: Thank you. How many of you have read ‘Eats Shoots and Leaves' from beginning to end ? Audience: Yes. Crystal: Hm, hm, yeah I thought so. ‘Stephen Hawking' syndrome we call it . Yeah. Yeah. | 01:51 |
| HUTCHEON: Professor Crystal calls writers like Ms Truss pedants who don't do the English language any favours with their so-called ‘zero-tolerance approach'. | 02:13 |
Book cover | Her book turned out to be a literary phenomenon, selling more than three million copies. | 02:24 |
Truss. Super: (author) | Truss: I wanted to write about that feeling. That feeling that a lot of people have when they see something, words wrongly used, punctuation wrongly used. They feel it deeply, they- and they are ashamed of feeling it and they don't think they should express their, you know, this, this horror that they feel. But they do feel it and I wanted to sort of make it legitimate. I don't know what you're supposed to do with it, but you're allowed to say ‘That's wrong. That is wrong.' | 02:30 |
Borough market signs | HUTCHEON: In any one of Britain's bustling markets, pesky apostrophes abound. But David Crystal believes attacking that represents a value judgement on greengrocers. | 02:56 |
Crystal | Crystal: It's this underlying feeling I have that, that the people who don't get punctuation right are somehow inferior citizens, somehow second class citizens. That it, that it's their fault, that they are to blame, that it's carelessness, that it's sloppiness. That its, that there's a blame element in here. That's what I don't like. | 03:14 |
Truss | Truss: Well, I'm obviously hurt by it. I'm hurt by it if it's personal. I don't think David Crystal's personal. I think, I think what he's getting at is that, I think the success of the book, rather than the book itself, really horrified him, that's all. | 03:34 |
Crystal | Crystal: Oh, I would love it if one of my books sold 3 million copies, you know, or however many million she's sold. I mean fat chance really. Annoy me? No! | 03:48 |
Truss in bookshop | Truss: ‘Not in your opinion she replied, semi colon.' I mean we would probably put a full stop there. HUTCHEON: Lynne Truss, admits to being intolerant when she spots punctuation mistakes. | 03:58 |
Truss | Truss: I sometimes will change, change something in a shop or something when I think I can do it without anybody seeing. HUTCHEON: So you really do change things? | 04:09 |
| Truss: Well, only two or three times in my life I've changed things, but I, I kind of think, well it says Valentine's Day and it is, it's a possessive you know, I'll put in an apostrophe. HUTCHEON: Do you have a marker in your bag now? | 04:16 |
| Truss: No, I don't think so. | 04:29 |
Scrabble board | Music | 04:31 |
| HUTCHEON: While Lynne Truss laments declining standards of English, David Crystal says he's an optimist and sees it differently. | 04:35 |
| Crystal: There's no such thing as a demise of language. Language changes, language moves in a different direction, language evolves all the time. Where a lot of people see deterioration I see expressive development, you see. You see it's the zero tolerance that I don't have any truck with. | 04:47 |
Looking over original Folio of Shakespeare
| HUTCHEON: And for anyone as passionate as he is about English, you can find it all in Shakespeare. | 05:02 |
Crystal | Crystal: I think Shakespeare's wonderful, absolutely, and I don't care what anybody says. I would spend happily my whole life exploring the language of Shakespeare, because there's so much there. | 05:09 |
Globe Theatre | HUTCHEON: And the best place to experience Shakespeare isn't in a book, it's on stage. Professor Crystal's son Ben is an actor at the Globe Theatre, rebuilt as it was in Shakespeare's day. Crystal: He shows us | 05:20 |
Crystal | how to, how to take the language that was there at the time and stretch it and bend it and push it in new directions. In a word, he shows us how to dare to do things with language and that's one of the reasons why he's so relevant today. | 05:36 |
Children at Globe Theatre | HUTCHEON: For David Crystal, enthusiastic school kids at the Globe are proof that Shakespeare - and English - are still alive and well... And that's the final word. | 05:54 |
Credits: | Reporter: Jane Hutcheon Producer: Justine Kerr Camera: Michael Cox Steve Higgs Editor: Mark Douglas
| 06:14 |