Walter Nash




An appreciation of and guide to the work of British linguist Walter Nash, Emeritus Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Nottingham.



I discovered the works of Walter Nash in 1987 while working on my dissertation. At the University of Louisville, I was attempting to explain how certain unpleasant attributes of the graduate assistant experience in the regional North American university comprised "the effect" of the context of the writing classroom on the text taught there as "writing." I was in search of a genuinely useful definition of "humor" in other words, as that practical quality discovered or created in the language of everyday life which lets people overcome dire unpleasantness in order to surmount big difficulties.

I had been studying various complex and highly abstract theories of comedy belonging to Freud, George Meredith, Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke. These were often very interesting but they were all difficult to comprehend and more often than not applicable only to literary texts. Imagine my relief then, when I stumbled upon Nash's The Language of Humour. This book is gorgeous. It has to be the most down-to-earth, understandable, and FUNNY book on comic style in language AND literature anyone ever produced by academic man.

Several years later, living in England, browsing in a bookstore, I came upon Language in Popular Fiction. In this book, WN talked about "womens' writing" (popular romance) and "mens' writing" (hard-boiled detective and spy fiction) in a way that I had just not seen academic writing done before. He was acutely observant, wisely informed, practically precise. He was both reverent and flip. He had a grip on both fine stylistic detail and the broad stroke of an overall view. I loved this book. Here was a reader and a writer I would emulate.

And then when I discovered that he had written a book on Rhetoric, "the wit of persuasion," I was frankly a bit spooked. And then a book on academic writing! And one on HOW TO WRITE! And another one and then another one on language study!! This guy cares about all my subject headings!-I exulted (right there in Blackwells, second floor, "Linguistics"). His categories are my categories!! He chunks up his world in the way I (try to) chunk up my world.

And so then I read everything of his that I could find in the Bodleian Library. And when I was finished doing that I wrote to him. I tried to tell him that in his books I had found a path of study that reflected, anticipated, and patterned my own interests in language and literature. It felt odd to do this. I did not want to flatter him. I did not want to sound like some foolish American fan. I wanted to say Thank You, but I also wanted to convince him that I was paying serious attention.

And that is what I am trying to continue to do here with this Web site. Like Rob Pope, I want to have some serious fun with what I do in my reading and writing and teaching. In all my works and days, in all my travels and my degrees, I have never found a person who has more serious fun with important work than Walter Nash.




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