Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

  Roosevelt, who still commanded legions of followers, won the majority of the primaries—there were only about a dozen in those days. However, Taft controlled the Republican Party machinery. He made sure that state nominating conventions committed all their delegates to him, guaranteeing him the nomination. Roosevelt ran as the candidate of the breakaway Bull Moose Party, named for his boast that he was as strong as a bull moose. During the campaign, the former president, obviously fighting fit, continued his habit of hurling pungent language at opponents. He excoriated Taft as a “fathead” with brains “less than a guinea pig.” He likened Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson’s demeanor to that of “an apothecary’s clerk.” One journalist described Roosevelt’s campaign speeches as “a fierce onslaught.… He is not there to persuade his antagonists, but to break their heads.”9

  Wilson, a former president of Princeton, spoke in a very different style. “Mr. Wilson has long been known as an exquisite master of English prose,” gushes one political writer. He adds that in spite of Wilson’s “classical habit of language,” he uses “simple words and strong words, but seldom slang.” Roosevelt thought Wilson’s measured rhetoric masked bad intentions. Later, when President Wilson hesitated to bring the United States into World War I, Roosevelt accused him of misleading Americans with “a shadow dance of words.” Roosevelt declared, “He has covered his fear of standing for the right behind a veil of rhetorical phrases.”10

  Many 1912 voters no doubt preferred Roosevelt’s fiery, if rough-edged, oratory over Wilson’s careful phrases, but the political logistics were against him. Republican Party loyalists who would ordinarily have supported Roosevelt voted for Taft as the party’s nominee. The resulting split in Republican votes assured Wilson’s victory. After the 1912 election, Roosevelt retired from public life and Americans had to adjust to presidential language that was much more sedate. He left behind a legacy of political words and expressions that still resonate today.

  Part of Roosevelt’s political genius was to recognize voters’ enjoyment of lively, piquant language. Although often warring with a desire to speak correctly, this appreciation has remained an enduring aspect of American culture. Grammar books could never entirely root it out. In the early nineteenth century, David Crockett rose to fame on the strength of his Tennessee folk speech. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Roosevelt used “the slang of the streets” to get to the White House.

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  The Roosevelt era was a good time for slang users. Casual language was more widespread and more accepted than ever before. One reason was the proliferation of popular novels and magazine stories that pepped up their dialogue with slang, jargon, and regional speech. These included the form of mass entertainment known as the “dime novel.”

  Dime novels had been available since the 1860s. Cheaply printed and flimsily bound, these magazine-like volumes were intended to appeal to a broad audience. In spite of the name, many of the books cost only a nickel, making them affordable for working-class people. Readers of all classes and ages enjoyed them, though, from school-age children to educated adults. The most popular sold in the tens of thousands and were reissued multiple times. Although dime novels reached their sales floodtide during the late 1800s, they were still a favored choice of reading matter at the turn of the century.

  Dime novels specialized in stories of adventure, romance, and suspense. Many of the books appeared in series. The series recounting the adventures of schoolboy Frank Merriwell was among the most popular. Two other bestselling series featured private detective Nick Carter and famous rodeo star Buffalo Bill. Dime-novel genres included westerns, detective stories, school stories for boys, spy stories, and travel tales, complete with sensational cover illustrations and highly colored double titles, such as Frank Merriwell in Gorilla Land, or the Search for the Missing Link.

  Part of what made these books so entertaining was their jaunty dialogue. Frank Merriwell in Gorilla Land includes such catch phrases as dead as a door-nail and my blood freezes. Characters behave badly by “cutting out” a rival and “kicking up” trouble. Frank’s sidekick is a Vermonter named Ephraim Gallup, whose regional dialect runs to down-home phrases such as gol dern it, by gum, and dinged ef that don’t beat all. A Nick Carter story titled “The Call of Death, or Nick Carter’s Clever Assistant” is rich with crime jargon. Nick tosses around terms such as mug shot, easy mark, bad egg, and the straight goods. He says dismissively of an unsuccessful crook, “He could not frame up and pull off a job of any size … if his life depended on it.”11

  More serious authors also added color to their narratives with slang and local speech. Mark Twain’s stories are full of western and southern regionalisms, folksy expressions, and uneducated usages. His most famous character, Huckleberry Finn, narrates his adventures in his own distinctive idiom. Huck says ain’t and clumb, and real swell, and uses set for sit and learn for teach. He also makes lavish use of double negatives—It warn’t no use, I didn’t mean no harm. Not only were Twain’s stories popular with the reading public, most reviewers were charmed by his effective portrayal of colloquial speech. Only one or two deplored his linguistic “coarseness.”

  The realist author William Dean Howells, although less known than Mark Twain today, was another respected writer of the 1880s whose characters often expressed themselves informally. In his 1889 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, an unsophisticated young woman from a natural-gas boomtown in the Midwest startles New Yorkers with expressions such as I reckon and as cross as two sticks. She drops the –g in words like goun’, dyun’, meetun’. She describes her hometown of Moffitt as “a real live town.” A magazine writer of her acquaintance wonders whether he dare represent the young woman in a story, “just as she is, with all her slang and brag,” and decides that she would have to be toned down to be believable.12 Another character, an entrepreneur named Fulkerson, energizes his speech with racy expressions like from the word go, first rate, natural-born, and Ta ta!

  In the turn-of-the-century works of George Ade, slang vaulted from a supporting role to stardom. Ade is now obscure, but his stories and plays drew enthusiastic audiences when they were new. Originally from Indiana, Ade moved to Chicago in 1890 and began writing for the Morning News. He loved to roam the Chicago streets, chatting with all sorts of people from shopgirls to newsboys to policemen on the beat. He soaked up jargon and cant expressions and turned them into literary gold.

  Ade began writing very short stories that he called “slang fables.” These preserved the formal tone of real fables, but replaced their archaic language with current slang. The lengthy titles are reminiscent of dime novels—“The Fable of the Kid Who Shifted His Ideal,” “The Fable of Paducah’s Favorite Comedians and the Mildewed Stunt,” “The Fable of the Copper and the Jovial Undergrads.”

  “The Fable of the Preacher Who Flew His Kite, but not because He Wished to Do So” is typical of Ade’s stories. It opens with the line, “A certain preacher became wise to the fact that he was not making a hit with his congregation.… He suspected that they were rapping him on the quiet.” The preacher concludes that his congregation is unimpressed with his straightforward sermons because he doesn’t use enough fancy Latin words and arcane biblical allusions. He decides that to prove “he was a nobby and boss minister, he would have to hand out a little guff.” He duly dresses up his sermons with quotations from fake Icelandic poets and other made-up sources. Sure enough, the pew holders think it is “hot stuff.” The story ends with the preacher’s parishioners “boosting” his salary in appreciation.13

  Besides his slang fables, Ade also wrote plays. His built his plots around homey topics like football, small-town politics, and college life. All the plays feature liberal doses of casual speech—terms like gee whiz, pinhead, rube, done for, and ain’t. Ade’s slang-filled extravaganzas drew packed houses week after week. It seemed that Americans couldn’t get enough of their native tongue at its most vulgar. Ade’s skill at manipulating the speech of the streets allowed
him to retire a rich man.

  While writers were taking advantage of colloquial words and phrases to amuse their audiences, language scholars were beginning to study nonstandard language and regional dialects more seriously. In 1889 a group of English and linguistics professors, writers, and other interested people met at Harvard to organize the American Dialect Society. Their purpose was “the investigation of the English dialects in America, with regard to pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, phraseology, and geographical distribution.” The organization drew 140 members the first year.

  Dialect Society members believed that “the real life of language is found only in the folk dialects.” They turned the traditional thinking about language on its head by declaring that dialects are not “corruptions,” as were previously thought, but “the native and natural growths” of everyday speech. From their perspective, it is the standard that’s “semi-artificial.” A 1912 leaflet explaining the Society’s position notes that “most persons are prone to look upon [dialectal] variations as … ‘bad grammar.’ … The truth is, however, that these variations represent one of the most important groups or classes of facts on which the scientific study of language rests.”14

  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

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  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.