Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

  Harvey includes all the standard usage rules as well. “Avoid the use of two negatives to express negative,” he tells students, and “a noun or pronoun, used as the predicate of a proposition, is in the nominative case.” It is me is just as wrong as it was in the days of Murray. So are sentence-final prepositions. Harvey warns, “Such expressions as ‘Whom are you talking to?’ are inelegant, if not ungrammatical.” More recent concerns also make an appearance. The author explains in detail the rules for using shall and will, and includes the ban on separating to from the infinitive verb.46

  Gone are the literary examples of grammar mistakes, the improving fables, and the biblical excerpts. Otherwise, A Practical Grammar could easily have found a place in Noah Webster’s first schoolroom. Yet the last edition of Harvey’s book appeared in 1906. More than 130 years after Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar arrived on American shores, grammar students were still ingesting Lowth’s rules with very few changes.

  By the late 1870s the ideal of educated word use was well entrenched. At the same time, grammar rules remained as firmly fixed as ever, at least in most classrooms. Newspapers and magazines featured regular columns on proper speech and linguistic advice books continued to sell well. That included traditional grammar books. Although their format had evolved over the years, their basic message remained the same—educated people followed the rules.

  Verbal purists had not yet won the day, however. They were beginning to come under attack from a new direction—the expanding field of linguistic science. Armed with new discoveries and up-to-date methods, practitioners in this field were exploring English usage from a whole new perspective. Their conclusions were significantly different from those of White and his fellow critics. As serious academic scholars, the linguists considered themselves professionals, while they saw the verbal critics as ignorant amateurs. The two groups were headed for an explosive collision.

  6.

  The Science of Grammar

  The title of Richard Grant White’s June 1871 Galaxy article—“Words and Their Uses: The Author’s Humble Apology for Having Written His Book”—must have startled his regular readers. A quick scan of the first paragraph, however, would have reassured them. The “apology” was actually a determined defense of his work. White seldom needed to take such a step. As he explains in the article, his book has provoked much “intelligent and decided” discussion, nearly all of it positive. A glaring exception has recently come to his notice—a series of hostile articles that appeared in the Yale College Courant from November 19, 1870, through January 28, 1871.

  The articles were signed “X,” but White knew they were written by a Yale professor named Thomas Lounsbury, with substantial input from his colleague William Dwight Whitney. With mock humility, White tells his Galaxy readers that he takes it as a great compliment that “two of that famous faculty felt that it was prudent for them to unite their forces for the demolition of the work of a poor dabbler … like me.”1

  “Demolition” is a strong word, but it’s not an exaggeration. The professors had not merely given White’s book a poor review. They had spent ten weeks and several thousand words blasting away at it. (Why Lounsbury and Whitney chose to use a pseudonym for their articles is unclear. Signing controversial commentary with a false name—usually Roman or Greek—was common practice earlier in the century, but unusual by the 1870s.)

  The College Courant articles opened a new front in America’s ongoing usage war. Grammarians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whatever their differences, agreed on their basic goals. While they might quibble over details—and radicals like Webster and Fowle might reject certain traditional rules and labels—they all believed that an ideal of elegant English existed and could be captured in the right kind of grammar book. In the end, they all produced familiar-looking volumes that combined precedent with their own judgment and taste.

  The Courant authors viewed grammar from a far different vantage point. Unlike earlier generations of usage warriors, they were not schoolteachers or popular writers. They were scholars of language. Lounsbury was a professor of English literature with a comprehensive knowledge of early English and Whitney was a professor in the new field of philology—the systematic study of language. Lounsbury and Whitney’s approach to grammar and usage was one of scientific inquiry. They didn’t believe that personal taste had any place in grammar discussions.

  The professors were not against grammar teaching—several years after the Courant articles appeared Whitney himself would author a grammar book—but they believed in researching the history and development of words and phrases before making pronouncements on their use. White relied on reason and his own preferences to decide what was correct. He passed judgment on usage standards, while Lounsbury and Whitney explored actual use.

  The clash between the verbal critic and the professors drew the battle lines for a fight over the nature of grammar that’s still going strong. In the beginning, the debate played out mostly in the pages of magazines. Nineteenth-century periodicals often gave generous space to scholarly controversies, printing lengthy attacks and detailed responses, supplemented by heated letters from readers. The Galaxy provided White with lavish room for his columns, The Nation frequently published Whitney’s commentary, and Lounsbury’s articles appeared regularly in Harper’s.

  Today the battle has moved to the Internet. Dueling blog posts from language specialists and grammar critics trigger furious arguments and rebuttals. Heated posts to the comments section take the place of letters to the editor. In spite of the new format, the content and general tone of these discussions has not changed much over time. White and his antagonists would no doubt recognize the basic arguments.

  The College Courant was an unlikely venue for Lounsbury and Whitney’s attack. A weekly newspaper for Yale students, faculty, and graduates, the Courant filled most of its pages with a mix of school news, alumni announcements, book notices, and brief excerpts from other periodicals. Although the paper kept two columns free for submissions from faculty and alumni, a ten-part series devoted to reviewing one book was something out of the ordinary. Evidently the topic was deemed compelling enough to keep subscribers engaged for two and a half months.

  In Part I the authors ease into their theme by noting that nearly everyone is sensitive to the possibility of making an error in language use. This feeling, they write, is widespread and powerful, extending through all classes of society. It’s no wonder, then, that so many books have appeared lately with the aim of correcting common usage mistakes. “Certainly,” they remark, “the rapid sales of these shows how general is the desire for information. Unfortunately, their contents show how extensive is the ignorance of those who set out to supply it.” While the authors concede that most usage books include a few helpful observations, “these are so mingled with unsupported assertions and ill-considered statements” that they are “as likely to mislead as to correct.” Such books seldom lay down any objective principles for deciding what’s right.

  The authors’ description of typical verbal criticism could easily apply to a majority of grammar discussions before and since. They note “a certain arrogance of tone which jars unpleasantly upon the reader’s feelings,” and comment that the “denunciatory style” is more appropriate “for a prophet warning sinners … than for a scholar discussing disputed points of grammar and expression.” Usage rules are passionately asserted rather than supported with evidence. For, the authors say, “owing to some yet unexplained reason, a contest in grammar is only a little less bitter than a contest in theology.”2

  Although they start out speaking in general terms, and briefly mention other recent books, they quickly zero in on White. He is the most prominent of those offering verbal advice, and moreover, he has a reputation as a Shakespearean scholar. They believe that White’s audience had a right to expect a better than average usage book. In their opinion, Words and Their Uses has been a disappointment. It “abounds with statements s
o reckless, with blunders so gross, and with ideas so confused, that it will be a dangerous guide to anyone who is disposed to regard it as an authority.”

  The professors challenge White’s insistence that general usage—even the usage of respected authors—doesn’t count when deciding whether a certain word or grammatical construction is correct. In Words and Their Uses, White claims that “there is a misuse of words which can be justified by no authority, however great, by no usage, however general.” He argues that logic is the highest arbiter of correct speech. When “formal grammar” and reason collide, he declares, English will always shift in the direction of reason. New words and word uses that go against logic, or that blur established meanings, are wrong, according to White. They should be rooted out of the language, even if most people now use them.3

  Lounsbury and Whitney intend to demonstrate that, contrary to White’s assertions, general usage is the only possible measure of linguistic correctness. Correctness cannot be based on reason, they argue, because “reason is very much like conscience; from the same fact it may lead two men to draw directly opposite conclusions.” Nor can a word’s acceptability be based on its historical meaning, for the simple reason that very few English speakers know the histories of the words they use. Everyone, including White, uses words and grammatical forms that were once new or that meant something different. The relevant meaning of a word is what it means now. White only believes otherwise, they say, because he is ignorant of how language really works.

  Echoing the long-ago conclusions of Noah Webster, they state, “It is the duty of the grammarian simply to collect, digest, and enroll the laws which the users of language have established; it has been too much their practice to fancy themselves legislators where they are only recorders.” Verbal critics like White follow eighteenth-century grammarians in assuming that great writers sometimes made usage mistakes—the “false syntax” examples of traditional grammar books. Lounsbury and Whitney take the opposite view. They assume that if a word or grammatical form appears regularly in the writings of respected authors, it can safely be considered a standard usage. “Of all the delusions into which purists and grammarians fall,” they remark, “none is wilder than the belief that a great literary artist is not as particular in the details of his art as the critics who sit in judgment upon him.”4

  The professors demonstrate the difference between their attitude and White’s with an example of an unquestionably nonstandard use—the substitution of past participles for simple past, as in I seen for I saw and I done for I did. Although such forms are heard among the lowest classes, they say, educated people universally consider them unacceptable. Could such a usage ever become proper under any circumstances?

  They predict that White would answer no. He would presumably argue that I seen, I done, and similar forms offend against basic principles of logic and linguistic tradition. The authors themselves, however, take a contrary position. They believe that if did were to disappear from the language and “all the best speakers … invariably said I done,… done would be the legitimate imperfect [past tense] of do, and it would be the merest pedantry to persist in condemning the new form.”

  Interestingly, that’s exactly what happened historically with a number of Anglo-Saxon verbs, for instance speak and break. Everyone now says spoke and broke—probably shortened forms of the past participles spoken and broken—while the old past tense forms spake and brake have become obsolete. In other cases the opposite has occurred. The past tense of certain verbs is now used as the past participle. “We, for instance,” they tell readers, “in our low-minded and vulgar manner of speaking, say I have stood, or I have understood, while Mr. White, in obedience to a higher law, doubtless says I have stonden or I have understonden.” After all, they point out, those forms were correct in earlier varieties of English.5 To underline their point, they plan to explore the history and evolution of English verbs through the next several essays.

  A rush of erudition follows. The authors of the Courant articles outline the classification of Anglo-Saxon verbs, explaining the different verb conjugations, tracking their evolution down to present-day English, and offering examples from literary works of different periods. They compile a list of verb forms that were once acceptable but are now considered wrong. In particular, they give several examples of drunk used as simple past, including one from the collection of Shakespeare’s plays that White edited—“Falstaff: I am a rogue if I drunk today [King Henry IV, Part 1, act 2, scene 4].” They point out that White has complained in his book about the form I drunk (rather than I drank) even though he must realize that it was acceptable in Shakespeare’s time. That means he can’t be ruling it ungrammatical on the grounds of tradition or logic. The only reason I drunk is wrong in 1870 is that general usage has changed.

  The professors apply the same treatment to several of the usages that White condemns, burying White’s arguments under a heavy bombardment of scholarship. For instance, White has been reckless enough to speculate that the use of me in the “not entirely vulgar” phrase It is me can be traced back to an Anglo-Saxon form of the pronoun. They respond, “No one who has any respectable knowledge of Anglo-Saxon or early English” could ever hold that opinion. Someone who has made a genuine study of the language would know that the Anglo-Saxons used a different idiom altogether (a phrase that translates as I am it).

  Then they pile on details. They refer to instances of I am it in “Semi-Saxon” and early English. They provide late examples from Chaucer. They discuss evidence that nominative and objective pronouns began to be confused around the fourteenth-century Middle English period, when It is me first appeared. They note that occurrences before the fifteenth century “are exceedingly few and scattered.”6

  By this point it’s clear that White’s attackers are much more at home with the history, logic, usage, and original meanings of English pronouns than their victim. The implication is that his views on the vulgarity or otherwise of It is me are nothing more than his uninformed personal opinion. (They don’t offer their own judgment on this usage. Whitney notes in his 1877 grammar book that it’s become so common that “it is even regarded as good English by respectable authorities,” so they probably found it at least marginally acceptable.)7

  The writing is laced with sarcasm. Exclaiming breathlessly on the “wonder-working power” of applying reason over usage, the authors marvel that “in the course of two pages, Mr. White’s remorseless logic has knocked the life out of some fifty common English words.”8 In another place they express surprise that White, who is a man of sense “when his mind is not perverted by what he fancies to be learning,” has accepted the ban on female to refer to women. They show the flimsiness of the usual argument against it by saying, “A cow, or a sow, or any she-brute, we are constantly told, is a female; therefore how can we know that a woman is meant?… All that is necessary to reply to this profound observation is that all who have brains will understand it.”9

  The professors wrap up their Courant series by explaining why they have trounced so hard on White’s book. They have devoted so much space to it, they say, “because books constructed upon the essentially vicious principles upon which this is constructed are becoming far too common. Setting out to reform, they end by originating more errors than they correct.” Besides, “they render respectable and inoffensive people unhappy by leading them to doubt the correctness of the most common and legitimate words and idioms.”

  The authors say that they would be happy to see a trustworthy work on disputed usages. However, to be of value, it would need to be based on “the principle that correct usage is not something to be proved by processes of logic, or something to be evolved from the depths of one’s consciousness, but something to be found out by the patient, and careful, and wide-reaching study of the language itself.” They doubt that such a book will appear soon. Writing it would take time-consuming “labor, and thought, and research.” Also, as White and other verbal critics became more knowledgeable
about English, they would inevitably be less inclined to critique it as they do now.10

  White, always feisty, responds defiantly to this bludgeoning in his Galaxy article, published several months later. He realizes that the purpose of these attacks is to expose him as “a shallow pretender to knowledge which I did not possess.” This criticism gives him little concern. It has never been his intention, he says, to lay claim to philological scholarship—he makes no pretensions to learning. He feels compelled to point out, however, that all except one of the many Anglo-Saxon examples scattered through the Courant articles are familiar to him. He has no doubt that he could find just as many others that would support his own position rather than theirs.

  These are minor issues. White devotes most of his attention to answering the heart of their criticism—his position that reason always trumps illogical forms, even those adopted by eminent writers. Here White remains adamant. He says, “I believe, assert, and endeavor to maintain that in language, as in morals, there is a higher law than mere usage.… This is the law of reason.”

  He argues that producing examples of certain usages from Chaucer and Shakespeare, as his opponents have done, is beside the point. They obviously believe that eminent writers give a word or phrase authority, but he doesn’t, so there is really no basis for discussion. He goes further—“This citing of poets as authority on the correct use of language is to me one of the most amazing of the aberrations of the professorial mind.… There is no monstrosity, no extravagance in the use of words, no verbal outrage of the laws of reason … that could not be justified by their example.” He still firmly believes that great writers sometimes make usage mistakes.11