WINNER 2023
THE TWENTY-SIXTH KING’S ENGLISH SOCIETY PRIZE FOR EXCELLENT ENGLISH
The twenty-sixth Prize for Excellent English covered material published in 2022. All entries were read by each of the three judges, who are members of the QES and experienced writers with diverse backgrounds and tastes in writing. This year we welcomed a new judge, John Bennett, replacing Adrian Williams, who retired after 25 years of meritorious service.
For the first time ever, one writer’s pieces have been placed first, second and third. We congratulate Allison Pearson (a previous winner in 2011) on this great achievement.
The Winner
Allison Pearson for Angela Rayner is patronising – we all deserve good grammar, from The Daily Telegraph, 5/7/2022.
The views expressed are extremely sensible in support of good grammar and are put in such clear, decisive English. There is delightful touch of vernacular hyperbole, Ange expectorating.
Allison starts by asking What is working class grammar? This previously unknown variant of the English language has been coined by Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the Labour Party. ...
I’m afraid Rayner is confusing authenticity with ignorance – the former is to be celebrated, the latter holds back children from poorer backgrounds. Telling them that “talking proper” is a betrayal of their working-class roots is cruel and delusional. Few professional careers are open to applicants who lack the rudiments of grammar. ...
It would certainly have come as a surprise to great working-class Parliamentary orators such as Aneurin Bevan to hear that using good grammar is some kind of class betrayal. … Thank the Lord, Nye Bevan never had to listen to Ange expectorating at the despatch box. ...
Yet the mastery of good English remains the one great engine of social mobility. When I was an English teacher, the ambitious Asian children in the front row wielded a thesaurus as though it were their ticket to a new world (it was). Meanwhile, it was the white working-class kids skulking in the back who never acquired grammar. ...
Sorry, Angela, there is no such thing as working-class grammar, only good or bad grammar. Knowing the difference could change your life. It changed mine.
The Runner-up
Allison Pearson for Trans hype is gripping schools – it’s time we learned what our children are taught, from The Daily Telegraph, 6/7/2022.
This is a clearly argued exposure of a dangerous current trend. The consistently good English carries one easily along with her well-marshalled facts and arguments, showing that trans hype is damaging and unnatural.
The teacher ... tells me it felt deeply wrong and uncomfortable to be talking to parents who had no idea their beloved child had adopted a whole new identity at school and was, in some cases, taking the first steps to casting off their girlhood altogether.
It’s chilling. We send our daughters to school to be educated and helped to grow into capable, happy, confident young women who can compete on an equal footing with any male. What we don’t expect is for schools to secretly facilitate their pupils to make major, life-altering decisions while keeping parents in the dark because they might be “transphobic” bigots.
Recently, the category of bigot seems to have expanded to mean anyone who doesn’t feel they can enthusiastically affirm their daughter’s decision to bind her breasts as a possible prelude to “top surgery”. That is a cringe-making jaunty term for a double mastectomy performed on a healthy young female. Affirmation is the only permitted reaction to this brutal mutilation. ...
This pernicious ideology has rapidly taken root here in the UK. Look at Liz Laybourne, the head of Burgess Hill Girls near Haywards Heath, West Sussex, who said that she now thinks twice about using the word “daughter” in letters to parents. “I don’t call pupils ‘girls’ because there are too many gender options,” chipped in this useful idiot for the increasingly militant trans cause. ... too many teachers and cluelessly liberal parents have been indoctrinated in this way of thinking.
Third
Allison Pearson for Our leaders broke Britain, but we’re getting the blame. Politicians expect voters to be grateful for ‘handouts’ made necessary by their own scandalous failures, from The Daily Telegraph, 12/8/2022.
This was written with great skill, vigour and feeling, keeping the momentum of the arguments well. It has a well-planned series of complaints that ordinary people are blamed for government and corporate failings, with good rhetorical questions and a varied sentence length.
It could be the heat, but I find myself fuming at the use of the word “handouts”. It’s as if Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were Victorian benefactors who, out of the goodness of their flinty mill-owner’s hearts, were minded to drop a few coppers into the outstretched cloth cap of the millions who can no longer afford their gas bill. ...
The coming recession? All down to Peter and Jane in Sutton Coldfield for going over the top with terracotta pots... Nothing to do with Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England. Did you seriously think it was his job to keep inflation to 2 per cent? The poor man’s only paid £495,000 a year. You can’t get much for that. ...
Lacking any droplet of shame, Thames Water, the leakiest supplier in the country...
I hope I speak for many when I say they [the gilded, frictionless “Nothing To Do With Us” class] can stick their solar panels where the sun doesn’t shine. Oh, and the next time some patronizing politician vows to give “handouts” for the horrible energy bills which their net zero fanaticism and economic mismanagement helped to inflate, don’t scream and shout. Simply smile and say: “Thank you so much, but it’s not a handout. It’s our money, which you mis-spent. And we’d like it back.”
Other finalists in random order
Charles Moore for Christianity’s retreat has left the West vulnerable to harmful new beliefs, from The Daily Telegraph, 24/12/2022.
This eloquent article deals with very important issues for the West and for humanity. The sentences are beautifully calm and measured, with good use of rhetorical questions.
... Worse, this intense interest in the exact language we use, which now obsesses universities and other institutions across the West, is not expansive, but restrictive. Far from rejoicing in the multiple possibilities of language, it fears them. It sees free speech as dangerous – which indeed it is, but so is all freedom. ...
Why, when so much of the world is in such pain, is such emotional and intellectual energy in the West being wasted on this exercise in thought control? Mightn’t our obsession with harmful language be, well, harmful? ...
If the West, once known as Christendom, is to maintain its capacity to lead the world in culture, security, freedom and civil peace, it needs to recover its language to express those things. This will not be done by taking a dentist’s drill to words it considers harmful, but by reconsecrating the words that convey the truth.
Suzanne Moore for “Wo-man”. When did this become the hardest word? If a politician can’t give a clear definition of what a woman is when asked on Woman’s Hour, we have a problem, from The Daily Telegraph, 10/3/2022.
This important and topical issue is well-researched and clearly expressed with great feeling. The sub-heading sets the scene well.
... In what context is a woman not a woman? I am not sure. Yvette Cooper, who is no fool, was asked the same question next day and refused to be drawn, only saying she “was not going down that rabbit hole”. I can only conclude that women are rabbits. Or they may as well be. ...
So there we have it, scientifically explained: the thing that cannot be named by female politicians. Women have babies and men don’t. This does not mean all women can or want to have children, but biologically this is the reality of sexual difference. ...
Is “woman” now a dirty word? Actually, it is, because women’s bodies are a messy affair, what with blood, milk, babies and all sorts of goods that we produce. ...
The place for women in the Tory Party may be to make cream teas or be Prime Minister.
Rod Liddle for O grammar community, help me rescue yourselves from the seven deadly syntaxes, from Thetimes.co.uk, 15/5/2022.
This lively, well-written piece has some excellent descriptions, such as deep-frozen dead fellow passengers, and some curious original phrases, such as ectoplasmic notions.
I reached peak “myselfism” last week while on the phone to a fabulously annoying woman. I was trying to locate a rug I had ordered online, which she – I blame her – had lost somehow. She not only referred to herself as “myself” but also addressed me as “yourself”. And then, in a moment of crowning glory, referred to my wife as “herself”. ...
Or perhaps I can at least make a start on a lexicon of syntactic witlessness and deviousness and leave other people to complete the work. ...
Sometimes “vulnerable” is used as a euphemism, or synonym, for “thick as a plate of mince”.
Then there’s “survivor”, one of my favourites. This noun was once employed to describe
someone who, say, had been a passenger on a plane that crashed in the Andes and had crawled from the wreckage, eaten a couple of deep-frozen dead fellow passengers and then made her way down 15,000 feet to a village of Peruvian peasants to alert her family that she was still alive.
It is now routinely applied to someone who, several years ago, was subjected to an
inappropriate sexual remark by an ageing and tipsy Liberal Democrat peer...