The matter of usage

Text 12

LINGUISTIC PURITY

Text 11

(from “ An Introduction to Language”)

Even more tenacious, perhaps, than the esthetic appraisal with which we have just been concerned is what we may call the moral attitude toward language. Those who hold this attitude conceive of hypothetically pure lan­guages, set off" in a linguistic outer space, spoken by no one, and guarded by the deity who presumably created them. It follows logically from such a notion that a given language may be more or less pure in proportion to its adherence to an ideal language. Thus we hear of "pure English," "pure French," and the like. Unless the above-mentioned concept actually exists, it is difficult to understand what is meant by purity as a linguistic concept. The purism of many Renaissance writers and scholars made somewhat more sense; to them "pure English" meant that which had come down to them from the speech of King Alfred's day, and they rejected loan-words, particu­larly those from Latin and Greek, as "inkhorn terms." The terms pure, purist, and purism, as used nowadays, have many, usually vague, meanings.

The concept of linguistic purity—whatever it may mean at a given time in the mind of a given commentator—furnishes an interesting chapter in the history of human folly. That sturdy linguistic patriot, Noah Webster, in a letter to Thomas Dawes written from New Haven in 1809, claimed that in the spelling changes recommended in his dictionary of 1806 he was endeavor­ing "to call back the language to the purity of former times." (One wonders what the cutoff date would be.)

(from “ An Introduction to Language”)

People in general think of language, when they think of it at all, as either "good" or "bad." Thus,you were is good English; you was is bad English; didn't do anything is good; didn't do nothing is bad; and so on. Now, if by "bad" we meant 'not occurring in the usage of socially influential persons,' the derogatory adjective would provide a roughly accurate description of the present status of you was and didn't do nothing —only roughly because the awareness that many highly successful and influential men have used and even habitually use these particular locutions ought to make us somewhat distrustful of any simple two-valued approach to the matter of usage. Such locutions, condemned in classrooms and in letters to the editors of such journals as the Saturday Review and of various metropolitan newspapers, are used by aspirants to, and holders of, fairly high political offices in some parts of our country. Many older-generation businessmen, and a few professionals as well, particularly in our small towns, have also found that "bad English" is no hindrance to success. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that today the use of you was and didn't do nothing, selected more or less arbitrarily for purposes of illustration, is indeed a negative status-designator.

On the other hand, "good English" does not guarantee success of any sort; if it did, those teachers who know all the rules in the school grammars would have to be adjudged highly successful people. But the fact is that those who are highly successful by current standards usually evince a condescending, patronizing, and at times even contemptuous attitude toward those who are presumably dedicated to teaching children such relatively trivial matters as the avoidance of ain't and irregardless and similar stigmatized constructions. And they would be quite right if these small matters really constituted the whole, or even the most important, business of the teacher of English, for the rules governing these matters can be easily learned, and their mastery will not in itself make one a stylish or even an interesting speaker. Still, it cannot be denied that there is widespread, if unreasoning, prejudice against certain forms of speech, and that younger speakers had best eschew these forms, even though they may have been used by quite respectable speakers and writers. We shall later examine such forms in detail.

Widespread, if only thinly spread, literacy has made even the so-called culturally disadvantaged aware that the use of various locutions condemned in English classes may debar them from those circles in which it is presumed they yearn to move. Those who have achieved worldly success despite their use of such locutions are by and large, as we have said, older people living in semiurban and rural communities. When they have gone to their eternal reward, as is shortly inevitable, bad English need no longer be heard in high places, for it presumably will not be perpetuated by their children and grand­children, who, given a modicum of intelligence and motivation, will have learned "proper" usage in school.

Everyone who learns an approved set of grammatical precepts will then be speaking good English—this at least is the theory. What will have been gained is anybody's guess. Certainly it will not be clarity, for the you was form used in the singular throughout the eighteenth century and defended by no less a mahatma than Noah Webster made possible a clear distinction between second person singular and plural, a distinction impossible in current Standard English.

As for the double or multiple negative construction, we lost a useful device for emphasis when it was arbitrarily outlawed. The simple man who says "I ain't going to do nothing about it" has a distinct rhetorical advantage over those of us who reject this emphatic construction, also frequently used by our earlier writers.

But as every modern schoolboy should know, in mathematics two minuses make a plus, and this axiom was most effectively applied to language by Bishop Robert Lowth in his highly influential Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762): "two Negatives in English destroy one another, or are equiv­alent to an Affirmative." This arbitrary application of mathematical logic to English speech has triumphed completely in current Standard English, though the old "illogical" construction is still very much alive in the use of the folk. It is of course impossible that I ain't going to do nothing about it could ever be understood as / am going to do something about it —a little white lie sometimes employed in teaching children.

We all understand this socially outlawed construction to mean exactly what it has always meant; we all recognize it as simply a more emphatic, if lowbrow, way of saying I'm not going to do anything about it. But the Pyrrhic victory against this historically respectable and highly effective rhetorical device was won a long time ago. Lost it we have, as far as educated speech is concerned. And no one is likely to start a crusade to restore it; it simply doesn't make enough difference to us.

But if "bad English" (or, alternatively, "bad grammar") is used to mean something like "un-English," as it frequently is, then the constructions we have just been discussing, and a good many others stigmatized with almost equal vigor, cannot be considered bad. Moreover, they have not been invented by simple, unschooled people; they are not corruptions but merely old-fashioned locutions like the much more recently tabooed he don't, which has also lingered on in the speech of the folk and in that of a few older members of the landed gentry in both America and England.

They can certainly not be considered un-English. English authors, as we have indicated, used the double or multiple negative construction up to about the time of Shakespeare; even the learned and academically respectable Francis Bacon used at least one. "He was never no violent man."¹ Chaucer, who wrote long before it occurred to anyone to count negatives, sprinkles them about rather lavishly— and, it should not be forgotten, stylishly. We need not seek out obscure examples; in the oft-quoted lines from the General Prologue to his Canterbury Tales, he used no fewer than four negatives to express heightened negative intent: "He nevere yet no vileynye ne seyde/In al his lyf unto no maner wight"—in effect, "He didn't never say no rudeness in all his life to no manner of man." The cancellation process formulated by Bishop Lowth and taken seriously ever since evidently concerned Chaucer as little as it concerned Bacon and our other early writers.

The now-condemned third person singular don't is not, as is frequently supposed, a corruption of doesn't; on the contrary, it occurred at least a century earlier than doesn't² and was frequent in cultivated speech through­out the nineteenth century and not uncommon in the early 1900's—probably up to about 1920. It is more or less usual in the dialogue of W. S. Gilbert and George Bernard Shaw (one would not expect to find either don't or doesn't in expository writing). Otto Jespersen has pointed out that Lord Byron used the third person singular don't repeatedly in Don Juan and that it was "used constantly" in such books as Hughes's Tom Brown, which is about young English gentlemen at Rugby. He has also given citations from Shelley, Jane Austen, Kingsley, and Meredith.

It would seem then that what is thought of today as bad English is frequently nothing more horrifying than archaic good English. And this is true of pronunciation as well as of inflection and syntax. In Alexander Pope's "Good-nature with good-sense must ever join; / To err is human, to forgive, divine" (Essay on Criticism 11.324-25) the pronunciation indicated by the rime join/divine was characteristic of the courtly speech of his day. It survives in our day only in unsophisticated speech, where it is obviously no corruption. Those who say "jine" and "bile" do not do so because they are too simple-minded to say join and boil our way; it is merely that they have preserved the older pronunciation, which does not reflect the changes that have occurred in present Standard English. Pope's riming of besieged and obliged (Prologue to the Satires, 204-5) likewise indicates an older pronunciation of the second word that was current in old-fashioned, mainly rustic, speech until well into the second decade of the present century.

When Jonathan Swift rimed dis­pensing with ensign in "The Progress of Marriage" and brewing with ruin in "To a Lady"— to mention only two of a number of such rimes—he was using the pronunciation of the ending -ing usual in his day. The current "educated" pronunciation—in H. C. Wyld's words, "an innovation, based upon the spelling"³—did not become widespread in the Modern English period until the early years of the nineteenth century. Nowadays the impor­tance of the innovation has been so stressed as a sort of shibboleth that one occasionally hears such pronunciations as "lunching" for luncheon, "mount­ing" for mountain, and (from a cab driver in Evanston, Illinois) "Evingston."

The occurrence of such "overcorrect" pronunciations as those just cited indi­cates the ineffectualness of some of our teaching of usage; in other words, "overteaching" those who lack a cultured, linguistically sophisticated tradi­tion to the extent that they self-consciously avoid such pronunciations as "huntin', shootin', an' fishin'" may easily result in what we may call over-pronunciation. The plain fact is that this phenomenon, popularly but quite inaccurately called dropping the g, looks worse than it sounds. For example, in ordinary running speech most of us would actually say "As I was walkin' down the street..." It only looks ignorant, like "wimmin" and "likker" for women and liquor.

While we are not justified, then, in regarding many of the currently stig­matized constructions as un-English, the fact that didn't never, he don't, you was, and other such locutions were once good English is no justification whatever for recommending their use in contemporary English; nor does any objective student of usage do so. The taboo against them may have been senseless and arbitrary in the beginning, but that has nothing to do with their present status.

Most, if not all, taboos are in fact senseless and arbitrary, like those governing fashion; and, as George Campbell wrote in his Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776), while Bishop Lowth was still very much alive, "language is purely a species of fashion," defining good use as "reputable, national, and present use."⁴ The many-sided Joseph Priestley, best known as the discoverer of oxygen, had less effectively said much the same in his pre-Lowthian Rudiments of English Grammar (1761). Good sons of the Age of Enlightenment that they were, Priestley favored analogy to decide between variant usages (but only as the last resource), and Campbell, inconsistently with his doctrine proceeded in precisely the manner of Bishop Lowth to pillory as "barbarisms solecisms, and improprieties" locutions from such "reputable, national, and present" (or recent) writers as Addison, Swift, Bolingbroke, and Smollett, reaching back a bit to rap Milton's knuckles.

The objection to such locutions as the ones previously cited—historically respectable though they may be—is a very valid one, even though it is fre­quently based upon the invalid assumption that they represent degeneration. Actually, the employment of such locutions in current speech is roughly comparable to eating with one's knife—once a perfectly good way of doing it, but certainly no longer acceptable. Chaucer's Lady Prioress, who never dipped her fingers deep in the sauce—probably never deeper than the first joint—would not have hesitated to ply a knife at table, though she would probably have eaten with her fingers most of the time, like other fine ladies of her day. But table manners, like manners in speech, have changed since that day. The inevitability of the latter type of change was well recognized by the Prioress's creator when he wrote "Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge/ Within a thousand yeer, and wordes tho [then]/ That hadden pris [value], now wonder nyce and straunge/ Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so" (Troilus and Criseyde 11.22-25). The fact is, it takes considerably less than "a thousand yeer." Just as the third person singular don't and the second person was —once irreproachable usages—are now considered "bad English," so our present "good English" may one day be stigmatized as boorish (like the Prioress's eating habits) or at least "quaint" (an adjective often used to describe Chaucer's English by those who are not very familiar with it).

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