Cleaning Up the Mess From the Tower of Babel

English, like any other language, is freeflowing and constantly changing, according to The Language Wars, while its rules are in most cases entirely arbitrary and historically accidental. A single clause can sum it up: “…in 1712 the typographer Michael Mattaire suggested, for instance, that the correct plural of species was species’s.” Throughout the book, author Henry Hitchings delights in the historian’s task of presenting accepted truths, then demonstrating that conventional wisdom may be incomplete or downright wrong. That’s easy and often necessary work in the pompous world of proper English.