Founding Grammars (31 page)

Society members launched an ambitious program of language collection and began planning a dictionary of American words. In the meantime, they published their findings in the periodical
Dialect Notes.
A typical issue of
Dialect Notes
might include a list of several dozen college slang terms; lists of colloquial expressions, vocabulary words, and pronunciations unique to a specific region; the jargon of fringe groups like hobos and circus people; and historical vocabulary from pioneer diaries or obscure folk songs. A volume from 1908, for example, features a list of regionalisms from East Alabama, including the nonstandard verbs
brung, et, drownded, cotched,
and
used to could;
local words like
y'all, yonder,
and
bodacious;
and metaphorical expressions like
sit on the anxious bench
(be nervous).

Many of the words and expressions that the Society assiduously recorded were appearing in print for the first time. In some cases they were retrieved as they were disappearing from daily speech. Grammarians and language experts of earlier days would only have recorded such nonstandard forms to warn their readers against using them. More likely, however, they wouldn't have felt a need to mention these words at all—everyone knew they constituted bad English and should be avoided.

The Dialect Society sought this language out. Members combed old documents, newspapers, letters and diaries, and out-of-print novels in search of America's submerged linguistic past. They sent out hundreds of questionnaires to colleges around the country. They advertised for speakers willing to give interviews. For the first time, the language that fell outside the boundaries of grammar books was being treated with respect. (The American Dialect Society is still going strong today. Its early regional word lists are incorporated in the recently completed five-volume
Dictionary of American Regional English.
)

Slang was gaining a newfound respectability even among those fierce cultural monitors, the editors of mainstream magazines. A 1909
Scribner's
editorial, discussing a bill in the New York legislature that outlaws “joy riding,” offers the opinion that “the wealth of language comes from below.” Some readers might feel concern at the legislature's enshrinement of the term
joy riding,
but the author of the editorial approves. Speaking of slang, he says, “This enrichment of the American tongue is probably reckless, but certainly picturesque and often approaches the higher realms of poetry and philosophy.”
15

An
Atlantic
writer concurs. “All language which grows out of a man's instinct … is beautifully interesting, wholesome, and spirited,” he says. Forcing people into an artificial linguistic formality is generally a mistake, in this writer's view. “Everybody talks well when he talks in the way he likes … the rest is effort and pretense,” he argues. Some people use more elevated words naturally, and there is nothing wrong with that. If a man speaks naturally of “trousers,” well and good. However, the author declares, “The man who says ‘trousers' when he wants to say ‘pants' is a craven and a truckler.”
16

The editors of
The Living Age
tell readers that a letter writer has scolded them for using the word
swashbuckling.
They admit that the word is slang, but point out in their defense that many of the words that the best speakers now take for granted started out as nonstandard innovations. If the word is coming into common use, that must mean there's a demand for it. They remind their disgruntled correspondent, “All language is but the invention of man for his own convenience.… We should be the poorer if we kept out all ill-formed words.”
17

Naturally, some writers dissented from this enlightened stance. Ambrose Bierce offers “Some Sober Words on Slang” in a 1907 commentary for
Cosmopolitan.
Slang, he explains, once defined the jargon used by thieves, peddlers, vagabonds, and other lowlifes. Now it means something different and “more offensive”—the “intolerable diction of respectable persons who obey all laws but those of taste.” Although often originating among the lower and criminal classes, these words and expressions become part of the normal vocabulary. They may even be formerly ordinary words that have acquired new, “extravagantly metaphorical” meanings. “It is not altogether comprehensible how a sane intelligence can choose to utter itself in that kind of speech,” muses Bierce. Then he voices the still-common concern that nonetheless, “speech of that kind seems almost to be driving good English out of popular use.”

Bierce is especially outraged by the continued popularity of George Ade's
Fables in Slang,
which he denigrates as “unspeakable stuff.” He complains that slang has taken the place of wit, and writing such as Ade's has replaced more intelligently satirical essays. He continues, “Slang has as many hateful qualities as a dog bad habits, but its essential vice is its hideous lack of originality.” A piece of slang may sound clever the first time it's used, but after that it becomes repetitive and boring.

Bierce ends his comment by relating in scandalized tones the story of a learned professor who has recently suggested that if the author of the Scriptures were alive in the early twentieth century, he would no doubt enliven his writing with current slang. He might, for instance, replace “possessed of a devil” with “bats in the belfry.” Bierce remarks stiffly, “I should not care for his Revised Edition.”
18

Others agreed with Bierce. One article writer repines, “We read of the Stone Age, the Gospel Age, the Golden Age to Come … but that we are today living in what may pertinently be termed the Slang Age is an undeniable fact. The fearful inroads that are being made on pure English by this wily intruder is … deplorable in the extreme.” A short piece in another magazine presents a list of words and phrases including
beat it, sure, classy, it's a cinch, peachy,
and
nutty,
with the recommendation that anyone using them be liable for a prison sentence.

A periodical aimed at young people also suggests that slang users be punished, although more mildly. The editors advise girls to form “diary clubs” and meet once a week or so to read their diaries out loud. A public airing of their writing will encourage them to avoid low expressions like
she don't
and
I haven't got any.
If these and similar phrases creep in by accident, the guilty one can pay a small fine that will later be used to buy refreshments for all the club members.
19

*   *   *

In spite of Americans' increased pride in their vernacular, large numbers of people still worried about correct usage. Like slang, the topic was controversial. As America's endless grammar discussion crossed into the new century, it began taking on the familiar contours still apparent today. On one side were the linguists, who focused on recording American English and describing it from a specialist's point of view. On the other side were the usage critics, worried that linguists' neutral approach to the language would open the door to a grammatical free-for-all and the death of old standards.

Thomas Lounsbury, now retired after thirty-five years of teaching, was still writing about usage for the subscribers to
Harper's
magazine. In 1908 he collected several of his
Harper's
articles in a book titled
The Standard of Usage in English,
a volume that would no doubt have infuriated Richard Grant White had he been around to read it. In the preface, Lounsbury reaffirms the principles that he laid down in his
College Courant
essays nearly four decades earlier. When it comes to deciding how to speak, he still believes that the “authority of great writers” counts for more than the “confident assertions of the more or less imperfectly trained … persons who profess to show us what we are to do and what we are to refrain from doing.” He also still thinks that as a grammarian he should be a “historian,” not an “advocate.”
20

Lounsbury's attacks on language reactionaries in
The Standard of Usage in English
have a recognizably modern flavor. Although grammar radicals of earlier times were equally committed to refuting what they saw as linguistic nonsense, they weren't above indulging their own prejudices. Much of Webster's advice about proper pronunciation and word use was based on nothing more solid than his belief in the superiority of the New England dialect. He also relied on his own fanciful notions of etymology when classifying parts of speech.

Lounsbury aimed for a higher standard of objectivity. He rarely admitted to any personal grammatical tastes. Nor did he try to imagine how English would change in the future or offer suggestions for its improvement. He restricted himself to analyzing the language based on its known history and current actual use. His main goal was to counter widespread linguistic myths with demonstrable facts.

The book's first chapter, titled “Is English Becoming Corrupt?” takes on the perennial belief that the language is in a state of collapse and failing fast. Both Lounsbury's outline of the problem and his counterarguments still sound familiar. He starts by describing the “grammatical sentinels … on the watch-towers, ready to raise the cry of warning or alarm” at the first sign of linguistic corruption. There is nothing new about “these foretellers of calamity,” he assures readers. They have always been with us and he suspects that they always will be.
21
(Lounsbury's prediction is true so far. Concerns about the disintegration of English still pop up regularly in twenty-first-century newspapers and grammar blogs.)

What's more, he says, this sort of fretting displays a kind of sameness over time. Grammatical worriers always start with the assumption that English enjoyed a golden age that's now in the past. They always blame the same culprits for recent linguistic decline—slang, unnecessary new words, ungrammatical locutions, foreign phrases. They declare that slipshod speech is becoming more acceptable, not only in daily life but in published writing. They inevitably attribute this sorry state of things to ignorance and moral decline.

Lounsbury concedes that in the past the “foretellers of calamity” had some excuse for their wailings because little was known about the forces that affect language. With the discoveries of modern philology, the situation has changed. We now know, he explains, that language is constantly evolving. Words gain or lose meanings or disappear from the language entirely. Grammatical forms shift, or become more or less acceptable. It's not possible to freeze a language in some perfect state unless, like Latin, nobody speaks it anymore. In any case, Lounsbury says, attempts to rescue English are pointless. Verbal critics of earlier times had no effect on language-use trends. Words and expressions that they deplored (like
scientist
) became standard anyway, while words that they championed (like
jeopard
) slipped out of use. He doubts that today's critics will have any better luck.

Lounsbury then moves on to a critique of traditional grammar books that, except for its slightly old-fashioned wording, might have been written by a linguist today. “Since the middle of the eighteenth century,” he writes, when grammar books “first began to … exert distinct influence, far the larger proportion of them have been produced by men who had little acquaintance with … the history and development of grammatical forms and constructions.” Because of their lack of knowledge, they substituted artificial rules for informed descriptions of actual usage. Later grammar arbiters repeated these rules in their books and eventually, he concludes, “a fictitious standard of usage” was established.
22

In Lounsbury's view, the real danger to English doesn't lie in any potential tendency toward grammatical lawlessness and corruption. Instead the danger comes from the “amateur champions of propriety” who wage wars of “ignorant formalism and empty precision” against the natural development of the language. Such strictures amount to nothing more than personal preferences. If “a particular individual dislikes a particular word or phrase,” remarks Lounsbury tartly, “that is one of the best of reasons why he should not employ it himself; it is not a very cogent reason for inducing others to follow his example.”
23

Later in the book, Lounsbury restates his long-held position, founded on his philological training, that the only workable way to establish proper usage guidelines is by taking into account the actual speech habits of respected writers and other educated people. He repeats the idea that he first stated in the
Courant
—“good usage is not something to be evolved from one's own consciousness, or to be deduced by some process of reasoning; it is something to be ascertained.” He sums up, “Whatever is in usage is right.”
24

In the early twentieth century, that sentiment was more acceptable than it would have been in Webster's day, but still far from universal. Because Lounsbury was a respected public writer on language,
The Standard of Usage
received some favorable notice from serious reviewers. One writes, “[Lounsbury's] clear analysis and sound deductions ought to make this work rank high among the productions of modern American scholarship.” Another reviewer observes, “Ancient superstitions die hard.… There was a call for a book … which should declare that English … does not need a guardian.”
25

A third reviewer, however, has a contrary perspective. All in all, he considers the book “excellent reading as well as sound doctrine,” but he is disappointed by Lounsbury's unconcern for “the ultimate fate of ‘shall' and ‘will.'” He characterizes the professor's attitude as “Let usage determine; he remains a calm looker-on.” All very well, the reviewer complains, but “what was once a clearly defined and useful distinction will soon be obliterated.” Evidently, the reviewer didn't notice—or was not convinced by—Lounsbury's contention that verbal critics and even linguists are helpless to stop such changes.
26
Later usage sticklers would continue to reject that argument. Linguists are still occasionally accused of standing idly by while cherished standards collapse.