IT would be vain to deny a touch of envy vis-à-vis the author of a book the first printing of which was sold out before publication date. I cannot recall any book of mine having achieved this distinction. However that may be, the fact that PN Review had to wait for the second impression before receiving a copy for review, and the fact that the book has been so extensively reviewed already, may excuse me from doing more than reflecting somewhat at large on Robert Burchfield's essay on The English Language (Oxford University Press, £9.50).

Dr Burchfield, who smiles quizzically from the back dust-cover, is by way of being an authority on the subject-one might say an official expert. The portrait the publishers have provided us with shows him in what must be nothing less than the editorial chair of A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. Such an authority is to be treated with respect if also, perhaps, with a little of the suspicion which properly attaches to bureaucrats and particularly, perhaps, to the bureaucrats of culture. Dr Burchfield is certainly one of these. He is the appointed successor of that line of lexicographers which dates from 1857 'when Dean Trench set in motion the greatest trawling of English words ever undertaken: that is, when he took the first steps towards the compilation of the twelve-volume Oxford English Dictionary'. By 1928 'a permanent record of 414,000 words had been set down in alphabetical order'. The rate of accretion has grown, for A Supplement, which started to appear in 1972, is to be in four volumes, of which three have already appeared. We must try to look back without too much contempt on our ancestors, who from 740 to 1928 could manage only an annual intake of 350 words.

There are many reasons for this relative poverty of invention, and a large part of Burchfield's book is given over to a popular but naturally immensely well-informed history of the language from Anglo-Saxon times to the current world-wide diaspora. The general outline of this development is well-known. For the makers of ever-larger dictionaries, including not least the publishers, it is a triumphal march, the only bitter reflection being that the record will have to be continued in computers rather than in books. Naturally this ceaseless multiplication of words induces a progressive frame of mind in the dictionary-men. Lesser collectors may have misgivings, akin to those of stamp-collectors who look back to the days of penny blacks and Cape triangulars and then around them at the dreary range of special issues by which the Post Offices of the world seek to inflate their revenues. Dr Burchfield's smile seems reassuringly to suggest that there can never be too many words, rather as the dogmatic assurance of certain ecclesiastical authorities in relation to the growth of populations suggests a charity so bland as to verge upon indifference.

The editor of A Supplement does not of course see himself as a dogmatist. He belongs rather to that great company of technologists who are convinced of their own utter impartiality. He drops many no doubt proper insinuations as to the narrow-mindedness and criminal bias of the rest of us. We lack instruction in linguistic analysis and therefore are 'poorly equipped to make any but prejudiced judgments about the nature and importance of developments in the language of our own time.' Like Dr Johnson, it seems. Burchfield assures us that Johnson 'was wrong when he said that the diction of "the laborious and mercantile part of the people . . . which is always in a state of increase or decay, cannot be regarded as any part of the durable materials of a language, and therefore must be suffered to perish with other things unworthy of preservation" '. Dr Johnson was certainly not free from prejudice, nor did he pretend to be, yet, however much one admires the historical method of the O.E.D., one might think Burchfield a little hasty in condemning him. What 'language' are we talking about? That recorded in the O.E.D. and A Supplement is not a language which anyone has actually used, or could use; it bears the same relation to human speech as a vast furniture warehouse might do to a furnished and inhabited room. Johnson was not, like Chomsky (whom Burchfield reasonably, though less critically than might have been expected from an enemy of prejudice, qualifies as 'messianic') seeking 'a simple linguistic theory which would "generate all the sequences of morphemes (or words) that constitute grammatical English sentences" '. Nor was he, as Burchfield professionally is, a mere collector of words. He was interested in human speech, as it could best be used and, principally, written, in his own day and place.

Such an air of freedom, closely related to the political cant of the 1960s and after, blows through Burchfield's book that one might almost forget that A Supplement, like the O.E.D. itself, is also a piece of book-learning. All the words are words which have been written down and printed. Much is said about the restrictions which class, race and location, to say nothing of a tyrannical good taste, put on the use of words, but little-once the original invention of printing has been noticed-about the fact that the conception of the language which the great Oxford enterprise embodies is one which becomes increasingly dependent, as the years go by, on what is now the almost morbid diffusion of printed matter. Johnson quotes in the main from the best English authors; Burchfield, in the specimen column of A Supplement he shows us, quotes from, among other things, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Sunday Times, Amazing Stories, Bang Bang Birds, the Journal of the British Inter-Planetary Society and a variety of technical journals. Some of this could surely 'be suffered to perish with other things unworthy of preservation'. Not for Dr Burchfield's purposes, of course, but then his 'English language' is an academic construction, made possible by nineteenth-century scholarship and brought to its present condition of elephantiasis by the size of post-war academic and publishing investment. It is not a dead language; it is simply one that was never alive. The point has some relevance to the question of the relative weight to be given, in humane studies, to Greek and Latin on the one hand and the more abstruse forms of linguistics on the other.

Running through the whole of Burchfield's disquisition is the distinction, following 'more or less the work of Ferdinand de Saussure', between 'prescriptivism and descriptivism'. 'In the present century,' he says, 'emphasis has been placed much more firmly than hitherto on language as it is used rather than how experts say it should be used.' 'Prescriptivists by and large regard innovation as dangerous or at any rate resistable' (Burchfield expends a good deal of humour on the obtuseness of those who are not altogether sold on description 'without reference to older forms of English'); 'descriptivists, whether with resignation or merely with a shrug of the shoulders, quickly identify new linguistic habits and record them in dictionaries and grammars with no indication that they might be unwelcome or at any rate debateable'. Such habits are not debateable, if the whole duty of man is to record whatever rubbish is printed. I have nothing to say against the innocence of this occupation in itself; I wish only to point out that it is extremely marginal to the care of the living language. Burchfield rather unrealistically imagines 'the educated general public' to whom 'the complicated new rules' have not yet been transmitted, as continuing 'in their engagingly persistent way to resort to the old prescriptive manuals, and in particular to the battered old grammars they used at the schools they arrended', but it seems likely that in general members of this public do not bother about manuals of grammar at all. It is almost certain that writers of any inventiveness do not. They have to make such progress as they can rather by the assimilation of such writers, dead or living, in their own language or another, as seem most germane to their own particular purposes, simultaneously picking their way through the spoken word, a field largely closed to the inkhorn men who sort through the press for new words and ways of using them. The writing of a poem, in particular, involves the rather rare act of choosing (in Coleridge's phrase) 'the best words in the best order' for what someone has to say at the moment of writing.

It is this sense of the ultimate practicalities of human speech which is missing in Dr Burchfield. One cannot but observe the conventionality and superficiality of his references to literature, for which he naturally expresses a great regard. He appears to think Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh among the great writers of the century. He boldly asserts that in its written form the English language 'retains the power, in the hands of our best writers, to reach standards as high as those set by the great writers of the past', among whom he mentions blithely Chaucer and Shakespeare without saying who in our time has come anywhere within a million miles of them. Even the most elementary acquaintance with the history of literatures makes it clear that all times and places are not equally propitious for the production of literature, that is to say, for using words in the best manner to convey matters of enduring importance to mankind. Of course a contemporary writer will avail himself of any material that comes to hand, to say what he has to say, and he can only start from what is at hand. The conversation he engages in is with the past as well as with the present (which is really only a limited and impoverished past) and he is known to have done this work well only when he takes his place in a sequence of writers who have recognisably been engaged in the same business as he is himself. That business, to state the matter in its most general form, is that of purifying the language-an inventive rather than a prescriptive process. It implies no disrespect to the O.E.D. or even to A Supplement to suggest that there is a place also for the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française and for Johnson's, 'the only English dictionary', as Burchfield says, 'to be compiled by a writer of the first rank'. Perhaps, in the present debauched and dispersed state of the English language, something of this kind is needed now? But who is to write it? C. H. SISSON