The Mother Tongue (22 page)

In 1660, Dryden complained that English had “not so much as a tolerable dictionary or a grammar; so our language is in a manner barbarous.” He believed there should be an academy to regulate English usage, and for the next two centuries many others would echo his view. In 1664, the Royal Society for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy formed a committee “to improve the English tongue,” though nothing lasting seems to have come of it. Thirty-three years later in his
Essay Upon Projects,
Daniel Defoe was calling for an academy to oversee the language. In 1712, Jonathan Swift joined the chorus with a
Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue.
Some indication of the strength of feeling attached to these matters is given by the fact that in 1780, in the midst of the American Revolution, John Adams wrote to the president of Congress appealing to him to set up an academy for the purpose of “refining, correcting, improving and ascertaining the English language” (a title that closely echoes, not to say plagiarizes, Swift's pamphlet of sixty-eight years before). In 1806, the American Congress considered a bill to institute a national academy and in 1820 an American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres, presided over by John Quincy Adams, was formed, though again without any resounding perpetual benefits to users of the language. And there were many other such proposals and assemblies.

The model for all these was the Académie Française, founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635. In its youth, the academy was an ambitious motivator of change. In 1762, after many years of work, it published a dictionary that regularized the spellings of some 5,000 words—almost a quarter of the words then in common use. It took the
s
out of words like
estre
and
fenestre,
making them
être
and
fenêtre,
and it turned
roy
and
loy
into
roi
and
loi.
In recent decades, however, the academy has been associated with an almost ayatollah-like conservatism. When in December 1988 over 90 percent of French schoolteachers voted in favor of a proposal to introduce the sort of spelling reforms the academy itself had introduced 200 years earlier, the forty venerable members of the academy were, to quote the London Sunday
Times,
“up in apoplectic arms” at the thought of tampering with something as sacred as French spelling. Such is the way of the world. Among the changes the teachers wanted and the academicians did not were the removal of the circumflex on
être, fenêtre,
and other such words, and taking the
-x
off plurals such as
bureaux, chevaux,
and
chateaux
and replacing it with an
-s.

Such actions underline the one almost inevitable shortcoming of national academies. However progressive and far-seeing they may be to begin with, they almost always exert over time a depressive effect on change. So it is probably fortunate that the English-speaking world never saddled itself with such a body, largely because as many influential users of English were opposed to academies as favored them. Samuel Johnson doubted the prospects of arresting change and Thomas Jefferson thought it in any case undesirable. In declining an offer to be the first honorary president of the Academy of Language and Belles Lettres, he noted that had such a body been formed in the days of the Anglo-Saxons English would now be unable to describe the modern world. Joseph Priestley, the English scientist, grammarian, and theologian, spoke perhaps most eloquently against the formation of an academy when he said in 1761 that it was “unsuitable to the genius of a free nation. . . . ​We need make no doubt but that the best forms of speech will, in time, establish themselves by their own superior excellence: and in all controversies, it is better to wait the decisions of time, which are slow and sure, than to take those of synods, which are often hasty and injudicious” [quoted by Baugh and Cable, page 269].

English is often commended by outsiders for its lack of a stultifying authority. Otto Jespersen as long ago as 1905 was praising English for its lack of rigidity, its happy air of casualness. Likening French to the severe and formal gardens of Louis XIV, he contrasted it with English, which he said was “laid out seemingly without any definite plan, and in which you are allowed to walk everywhere according to your own fancy without having to fear a stern keeper enforcing rigorous regulations” [
Growth and Structure of the English Language,
page 16].

Without an official academy to guide us, the English-speaking world has long relied on self-appointed authorities such as the brothers H. W. and F. G. Fowler and Sir Ernest Gowers in Britain and Theodore Bernstein and William Safire in America, and of course countless others. These figures write books, give lectures, and otherwise do what they can (i.e., next to nothing) to try to stanch (not staunch) the perceived decline of the language. They point out that there is a useful distinction to be observed between
uninterested
and
disinterested,
between
imply
and
infer, flaunt
and
flout, fortunate
and
fortuitous, forgo
and
forego,
and
discomfort
and
discomfit
(not forgetting
stanch
and
staunch
). They point out that
fulsome,
properly used, is a term of abuse, not praise, that
peruse
actually means to read thoroughly, not glance through, that
data
and
media
are plurals. And from the highest offices in the land they are ignored.

In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter betrayed a flaw in his linguistic armory when he said: “The government of Iran must realize that it cannot flaunt, with impunity, the expressed will and law of the world community.”
Flaunt
means to show off; he meant
flout.
The day after he was elected president in 1988, George Bush told a television reporter he couldn't believe the enormity of what had happened. Had President-elect Bush known that the primary meaning of
enormity
is wickedness or evilness, he would doubtless have selected a more apt term.

When this process of change can be seen happening in our lifetimes, it is almost always greeted with cries of despair and alarm. Yet such change is both continuous and inevitable. Few acts are more salutary than looking at the writings of language authorities from recent decades and seeing the usages that heightened their hackles. In 1931, H. W. Fowler was tutting over
racial,
which he called “an ugly word, the strangeness of which is due to our instinctive feeling that the termination -al has no business at the end of a word that is not obviously Latin.” (For similar reasons he disliked
television
and
speedometer.
) Other authorities have variously—and sometimes hotly—attacked
enthuse, commentate, emote, prestigious, contact
as a verb,
chair
as a verb, and scores of others. But of course these are nothing more than opinions, and, as is the way with other people's opinions, they are generally ignored.

So if there are no officially appointed guardians for the English language, who sets down all those rules that we all know about from childhood—the idea that we must never end a sentence with a preposition or begin one with a conjunction, that we must use
each other
for two things and
one another
for more than two, and that we must never use
hopefully
in an absolute sense, such as “Hopefully it will not rain tomorrow”? The answer, surprisingly often, is that no one does, that when you look into the background of these “rules” there is often little basis for them.

Consider the curiously persistent notion that sentences should not end with a preposition. The source of this stricture, and several other equally dubious ones, was one Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose
A Short Introduction to English Grammar,
published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly influential life both in his native England and abroad. It is to Lowth we can trace many a pedant's most treasured notions: the belief that you must say
different from
rather than
different to
or
different than,
the idea that two negatives make a positive, the rule that you must not say “the heaviest of the two objects,” but rather “the heavier,” the distinction between
shall
and
will,
and the clearly nonsensical belief that
between
can apply only to two things and
among
to more than two. (By this reasoning, it would not be possible to say that St. Louis is between New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, but rather that it is among them, which would impart a quite different sense.) Perhaps the most remarkable and curiously enduring of Lowth's many beliefs was the conviction that sentences ought not to end with a preposition. But even he was not didactic about it. He recognized that ending a sentence with a preposition was idiomatic and common in both speech and informal writing. He suggested only that he thought it generally better and more graceful, not crucial, to place the preposition before its relative “in solemn and elevated” writing. Within a hundred years this had been converted from a piece of questionable advice into an immutable rule. In a remarkable outburst of literal-mindedness, nineteenth-century academics took it as read that the very name
pre-position
meant it must come before something—anything.

But then this was a period of the most resplendent silliness, when grammarians and scholars seemed to be climbing over one another (or each other; it doesn't really matter) in a mad scramble to come up with fresh absurdities. This was the age when, it was gravely insisted, Shakespeare's
laughable
ought to be changed to
laugh-at-able
and
reliable
should be made into
relionable.
Dozens of seemingly unexceptionable words—
lengthy, standpoint, international, colonial, brash
—were attacked with venom because of some supposed etymological deficiency or other. Thomas de Quincey, in between bouts of opium taking, found time to attack the expression
what on earth.
Some people wrote
mooned
for
lunatic
and
foresayer
for
prophet
on the grounds that the new words were Anglo-Saxon and thus somehow more pure. They roundly castigated those ignoramuses who impurely combined Greek and Latin roots into new words like
petroleum
(Latin
petro
+ Greek
oleum
). In doing so, they failed to note that the very word with which they described themselves,
grammarians,
is itself a hybrid made of Greek and Latin roots, as are many other words that have lived unexceptionably in English for centuries. They even attacked
handbook
as an ugly Germanic compound when it dared to show its face in the nineteenth century, failing to notice that it was a good Old English word that had simply fallen out of use. It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions—like
trusteeship,
which consists of a Nordic stem (
trust
), combined with a French affix (
ee
), married to an Old English root (
ship
). Other languages cannot do this. We should be proud of ourselves for our ingenuity and yet even now authorities commonly attack almost any new construction as ugly or barbaric.

Today in England you can still find authorities attacking the construction
different than
as a regrettable Americanism, insisting that a sentence such as “How different things appear in Washington than in London” is ungrammatical and should be changed to “How different things appear in Washington from how they appear in London.” Yet
different than
has been common in England for centuries and used by such exalted writers as Defoe, Addison, Steele, Dickens, Coleridge, and Thackeray, among others. Other authorities, in both Britain and America, continue to deride the absolute use of
hopefully. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage
flatly forbids it. Its writers must not say, “Hopefully the sun will come out soon,” but rather are instructed to resort to a clumsily passive and periphrastic construction such as “It is to be hoped that the sun will come out soon.” The reason? The authorities maintain that
hopefully
in the first sentence is a misplaced modal auxiliary—that it doesn't belong to any other part of the sentence. Yet they raise no objection to dozens of other words being used in precisely the same unattached way—
admittedly, mercifully, happily, curiously,
and so on. No doubt the reason
hopefully
is not allowed is that somebody at
The New York Times
once had a boss who wouldn't allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because
his
father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because
he
had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning . . . ​and so on.

Considerations of what makes for good English or bad English are to an uncomfortably large extent matters of prejudice and conditioning. Until the eighteenth century it was correct to say “you was” if you were referring to one person. It sounds odd today, but the logic is impeccable.
Was
is a singular verb and
were
a plural one. Why should
you
take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer—surprise, surprise—is that Robert Lowth didn't like it. “I'm hurrying, are I not?” is hopelessly ungrammatical, but “I'm hurrying, aren't I?”—merely a contraction of the same words—is perfect English.
Many
is almost always a plural (as in “Many people were there”), but not when it is followed by
a,
as in “Many a man was there.” There's no inherent reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar. They are because they are.