American Language (90 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
Many of the forms that the grammatical pedants rail against most vehemently — for example, the split infinitive, the use of
between, either
and
neither
with more than one, the use of
than
after
different
, the use of
like
for
as
, and so on — are so firmly established in the American vulgate that the schoolmarm’s attempts to put them down are plainly hopeless. Most of them, in fact, have crept into more or less elegant usage, and such reformers as Robert C. Pooley and Janet Rankin Aiken argue boldly that the war upon them should be abandoned. So long ago as 1872, the peppery Fitzedward Hall demonstrated, in his “Recent Exemplifications of False Philology,” that
different than
had been used by Addison, Steele, Defoe, Richardson, Miss Burney, Coleridge, De Quincey, Thackeray and Newman, yet most of the current textbooks of “correct” English continue to denounce it. In September, 1922, the novelist, Meredith Nicholson, joined in the
jehad
against it in a letter to the New York
Herald:
Within a few years the abominable phrase
different than
has spread through the country like a pestilence. In my own Indiana, where the wells of English undefiled are jealously guarded, the infection has awakened general alarm.
To which the New York
Sun
, a few days later, replied sensibly:
The excellent tribe of grammarians, the precisians and all others who strive to be correct and correctors, have as much power to prohibit a single word or phrase as a gray squirrel has to put out Orion with a flicker of its tail.
The error of Mr. Nicholson, and of all such unhappy viewers with alarm, is in assuming that there is enough magic in pedagogy to teach “correct” English to the plain people. There is, in fact, far too little; even the fearsome abracadabra of Teachers’ College, Columbia, will never suffice for the purpose. The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it. Their lives would be more comfortable if they ceased to repine over it, and instead gave it some hard study. It is very amusing, and not a little instructive.
1
See The Verbs of the Vulgate, by Robert J. Menner,
American Speech
, Jan., 1926, p. 239, and The Verbs of the Vulgate in Their Historical Relations, by Henry Alexander, the same, April, 1929.
2
An excellent account of the contents of these books is to be found in Grammar and Usage in Textbooks on English, by Robert C. Pooley; Madison, Wis., 1933. The bad ones recall a dictum of Noah Webster in his Dissertations on the English Language; Boston, 1789,
pref.
, p. vii: “Our modern grammars have done much more hurt than good. The authors have labored to prove, what is obviously absurd,
viz.
, that our language is not made right; and in pursuance of this idea, have tried to make it over again, and persuade the English to speak by Latin rules, or by arbitrary rules of their own. Hence they have rejected many phrases of pure English, and substituted those which are neither English nor sense.”
3
If there were a Pulitzer Prize for such works it would undoubtedly go to Dr. Morris Swadesh’s monograph, The Phonetics of Chitimacha,
Language
, Dec., 1934, p. 345
ff
. Chitimacha is an Indian tongue that is now spoken by but two people, and “they employ slightly different phonemic systems.” Thus Dr. Swadesh was forced to deal with one form as the standard language, and the other as a dialect. His immensely patient and exhaustive inquiry was carried on during the Summers of 1932 and 1933 on a grant from the Committee on Research in American Native Languages. His report occupies no less than eighteen pages in
Language
.
4
The pioneer study seems to have been a brief investigation of the oral errors made by public-school children in Connersville, Ind. It was undertaken by G. M. Wilson, and his observations were printed in the report of the Connersville School Board for 1908. Unluckily, I am informed by Mr. Edwin C. Dodson, superintendent of schools at Connersville, that a fire destroyed the board’s copy of this report, and I have been unable to find one elsewhere. But in Dec., 1909, Mr. Wilson printed a paper on Errors in the Language of Grade-Pupils, based upon the Connersville material, in the
Educator-Journal
.
5
Dr. Charters’s report appears as Vol. XVI, No. 2,
University of Missouri Bulletin
, Education Series No. 9, Jan., 1915. He was aided in his inquiry by Edith Miller, teacher of English in one of the St. Louis high-schools.
6
The Verbs of the Vulgate, above cited, p. 231.
7
The report of Dr. O’Rourke is summarized in English Use and Misuse, by Paul S. Schilles, New York
Times
, July 10, 1934. A more extensive account of the investigation is in Rebuilding the English-Usage Curriculum to Insure Greater Mastery of Essentials, by Dr. O’Rourke himself; Washington, 1934. It was made on a grant from the Psychological Corporation, with aid from the Carnegie Corporation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and among its sponsors were Dr. Charles H. Judd of the University of Chicago and Dr. Edward L. Thorndike of Teachers College, Columbia.
8
In O’Rourke and Leonard, by Janet Rankin Aiken,
American Speech
, Dec., 1934, Dr. O’Rourke is criticized sharply for assuming that the “bad grammar” he unearthed is really bad. “The more people make a given mistake,” she says, “the less it should be corrected. This fundamental principle, recognized by lexicographers and the more liberal grammarians, must be the basis of our thinking on the subject. Unlike arithmetic, where the more frequent an error is, the more attention it needs, the linguist must insist that speech errors proved to be very frequent are thereby proved to be not errors at all.” As an example, Dr. Aiken cites the use of
who
in “Do you know
who
they were waiting for this morning?” See also the preface to George O. Curme’s Syntax; Boston, 1931, p. vi.
9
Logan Pearsall Smith, in Words and Idioms; London, 1925, p. 149, points out that there are no less than four distinct varieties of Standard English. The first is “the language of colloquial talk, with its expletives, easy idioms, and a varying amount of slang.” Second comes “the vernacular of good conversation, more correct, more dignified, and entirely, or almost entirely, free from slang.” Then comes written prose, “which is richer in vocabulary and somewhat more old-fashioned in construction than the spoken language,” and finally there is the language of poetry. “If we examine this linguistic ladder,” says Mr. Smith, “we will find that its lowest rung is fixed close to the soil of popular and vulgar speech.” The vulgar speech has like varieties. Its written form differs considerably from its spoken form, and the latter ranges from an almost simian gabble to something closely approximating ordinary colloquial American.
10
Menner, p. 232.
11
A bibliography of the very meager literature of the subject from 1908 to 1930, running to but 33 items, is to be found in The Most Common Grammatical Errors, by Henry Harap,
English Journal
, June, 1930. Mr. Harap lists the errors usually observed, but makes no attempt to estimate either their relative or their absolute frequency. He avoids the question, he says, because “of the lack of uniformity in recording them by various investigators.” Some later studies are summarized in A Critical Summary of Selective Research in Elementary School Composition, Language, and Grammar, by W. S. Guiler and E. A. Betts,
Elementary English Review
, March–June, 1934. Of these, the most interesting is Studies in the Learning of English Expression; No. V: Grammar, by Percival M. Symonds and Eugene M. Hinton,
Teachers College Record
, Feb., 1932.
12
Saturday Evening Post
, July 11, 1914. Reprinted in You Know Me, Al; Garden City, L. I., 1915.
13
Lardner died on Sept. 25, 1933, at the early age of 48. My own debt to him was very large. The first edition of the present work, published in 1919, brought me into contact with him, and for the second edition, published in 1921, he prepared two amusing specimens of the common speech in action. At that time, and almost until his death, he made penetrating and valuable suggestions. His ear for the minor peculiarities of vulgar American was extraordinarily keen. Once, sitting with him, I used the word
feller
. “Where and when,” he demanded, “did you ever hear anyone say
feller?
” I had to admit, on reflection, that the true form was
fella
, though it is almost always written
feller
by authors. But never by Lardner. So far as I can make out, there is not a single error in the whole canon of his writings. His first book of stories, You Know Me, Al, was published in 1915. He had many imitators, notably Edward Streeter, author of Dere Mable; New York, 1918; H. C. Witwer, who published more than a dozen books between 1918 and his death in 1929; and Will Rogers, who contributed a daily dispatch to a syndicate of newspapers, written partly in Standard English but partly in the vulgate, from 1930 to 1935. He also provided inspiration for the writers of popular songs and of captions for comic-strips. See Stabilizing the Language Through Popular Songs, by Sigmund Spaeth,
New Yorker
, July 7, 1934, and The English of the Comic Cartoons, by Helen Trace Tysell,
American Speech
, Feb., 1935. But these disciples never attained to Lardner’s virtuosity.
14
Margaret Morse Nice, in On the Size of Vocabularies,
American Speech
, Oct., 1926.
15
The results of various investigations are set forth in Mrs. Nice’s article, just cited. See also Measuring the Vocabulary of High-School Pupils, by H. L. Neher,
School and Society
, Sept. 21, 1918; Says Average Man Uses 8,000 Words (an interview with Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly), New York
Times
, July 15, 1923; The Speech of Five Hundred College Women, by Sara M. Stinch field,
Journal of Applied Psychology
, June, 1925; Contemporary English, by W. E. Collinson; Leipzig, 1927 (an account of the growth of the author’s vocabulary); A Vocabulary Study of Children in a Foreign Industrial Community, by Alice M. Jones,
Psychological Clinic
, March, 1928; Statistics of Vocabulary, by E. A. Condon,
Science
, March 16, 1928; Extent of Personal Vocabularies and Cultural Control, by J. M. Gillette,
Scientific Monthly
, Nov., 1929; and Vocabulary of Children’s Letters Written in Life Outside School, by J. A. Fitzgerald,
Elementary School Journal
, Jan., 1934. I list only a few studies. The literature of the subject is very large.
16
The subjunctive
be
, of course, is extinct. In the plural,
are
is commonly used correctly. The use of
is
in the second and third persons singular and in all persons of the plural is a Negroism, though it is also observed occasionally among the lowest classes of Southern whites. There is a familiar story illustrating its use. A customer goes into a store and asks, “You-all ain’t got no aigs,
is
you?” The storekeeper replies, “I ain’t said I ain’t,” whereupon the customer retorts in dudgeon, “I ain’t axed you is you ain’t; I axed you is you
is. Is
you?” In the negative, whether singular or plural,
ain’t
is employed almost universally;
am not, is not
and
are not
are used only for emphasis, and
aren’t
is unknown.
17
The use of
were
in the first person singular occurs in certain English dialects, and was once not uncommon in vulgar American, but it has passed out. Today
was
is often used in the second and third persons plural. In the Eighteenth Century
you was
was used in the singular and
you were
in the plural. George Philip Krapp, in The English Language in America, Vol. II, p. 261, quotes “
Was
you fond of seeing,” etc., from a letter of John Adams, 1759.
18
Usually pronounced
bin
, but sometimes
ben
, and often appearing without
have
, as in “I
bin
there myself.” The English
bean
is never heard.
19
In The Druid, No. VI, May 16, 1781, the Rev. John Witherspoon listed
attackted
among his “vulgarisms in America only.”
20
R. J. Menner, in The Verbs of the Vulgate,
American Speech
, Jan., 1926, argues that
beaten
and its analogues,
bitten, broken, forsaken, hidden, ridden, shaken, taken, fallen, forgotten
and
gotten
, are preterites only in certain regional dialects. He says: “
Taken
appears in lists of dialectical peculiarities from Tennessee, Southern Ohio, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Alabama and Virginia, and often occurs in stories written in a Southern dialect. But it is not characteristic of New England, New York and Pennsylvania; if it occurs in the North, it occurs exceptionally, and cannot be considered a preterite of the vulgar speech.” This was written in 1926. Since then, I believe, the form has made progress, and Mr. Charles J. Lovell tells me that he has heard it very frequently in Bristol county, Mass. There is a discussion of it in The Grammar of the Ozark Dialect, by Vance Randolph,
American Speech
, Oct., 1927, p. 2.
21
Become
is seldom heard in the present tense.
Getting
is usually substituted, as in “I am
getting
old.” But
become
is often used as a preterite, as in “What
become
of him?”
22
In Old English, according to Menner,
began
(n) was the preterite singular and
begunnon
the preterite plural. When this distinction began to fade, both
began
and
begun
came into good usage, and both were recognized by Ben Jonson in his Grammar, 1640. Henry Alexander, in The Verbs of the Vulgate in Their Historical Relations,
American Speech
, April, 1929, gives examples of
begun
from Easton’s Relation of the Indyan Warr, 1675, and Madam Knight’s Journal, 1704. Noah Webster preferred it to
began
in his Grammar of the English Language, 1807. In 1928 or thereabout the National Council of Teachers of English submitted a long list of current usages to a committee consisting of authors, editors, linguists, teachers and business men, and asked their judgment. Only 5% of them approved
begun
as the preterite, but all of those who did so were persons specially trained in English philology. See Current English Usage, by Sterling Andrus Leonard; Chicago, 1932, p. 116.
23
See the note under
beaten
, above. I have even heard “He
bitten
off more than he could chew.”
24
Here usage seems to be uncertain. I have heard “The whistle
blowed
,” “He
blew
in his money,” and “They
blown
into town.”
25
Alexander quotes
brake
from Samuel Sewall’s Diary, 1673. It was frequently used in those days, apparently under the influence of the King James Bible, in which it occurs 63 times. But it never got into the common speech.
Broke
is always used in the passive. One hears “I was
broke
” but never “I was
broken.” Broke
was once in good usage as a participial adjective. The Oxford Dictionary gives examples running from
c
. 1230 to 1647.
26
Menner argues that
brung
belongs only to the lowest levels of the vulgate. He says: “Everyone knows that many a person who regularly says
I
sung
or
I
begun
would be horrified at the thought of saying
I
brung.
” He adds that “some speakers who habitually say
I have did
and
I
have saw
regard
I
brung
as merely childish or humorous.” But he finds
brung
as a preterite in Artemus Ward,
c
. 1865, and in John Neal’s The Down-Easters, 1833, and reports it used as a perfect participle in the last-named and in J. G. Holland’s The Bay Path, 1857. It appears in a list of Appalachian Mountain words in
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Pt. X, 1927, p. 470.