Martin Amis reflects on his father's love of language at The Guardian:

"Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist – in other words, my mother did it all. It should be noted, though, that if I did come across him (before he slipped back into his study), he always said something that made me laugh or smile. This went a long way. And the humour usually derived from the originality of his phrasing. When I was 16 or 17, and started reading books for grown-ups, I became, in his eyes, worth talking to. And when, six or seven years later, I started using the English language in the literary pages of the newspapers, I became worth correcting. I was in my early-middle 20s; my father was still amiable, but he was lenient no longer.

'Has your enormity in the Observer been pointed out to you?' he asked with enthusiasm over breakfast one Sunday morning (I had left home by then, but I still spent about every other weekend at his house). 'My enormity?' I knew he was applying the word in its proper sense – 'something very bad', and not 'something very big in size'. And my mistake was certainly atrocious: I had used martial as a verb. Later, while continuing to avoid hopefully (a favourite with politicians, as he insists), I pooh-poohed his reprimand about my harmless use of the dangling thankfully. I also took it in good part when, to dramatise my discipleship, as he saw it, of Clive James (a very striking new voice in the 1970s), Kingsley started reading out my reviews in an Australian accent."

Read the delightful essay here.

More:

"The battle – the internal campaign – is in essence directed against the false quantity, in its non-technical sense. I mean those rhymes, chimes, repetitions, obscurities, dishonesties, vaguenesses, clichés, "shreds of battered facetiousness" and "shopworn novelties" (past its sell-by date, Marxism lite, no-brainer, and all other herd words and herd phrases): anything, in brief, that makes the careful reader "pause without profit". Naturally the other side of this circumspection is the acceptance, indeed the embrace, of positive linguistic change."

Thanks to Johnson.