Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

  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.

  One reader of Lounsbury’s book believed that he was not only wasting time while the language decayed, but actively contributing to the problem. Leila Sprague Learned, author of an Atlantic article titled “A Defense of Purism in English,” wrings her hands over “the ever-increasing tendency to slang and to colloquialisms.” She points to the increased use of It is me, due to for owing to, everyone followed by their, and similar examples of degraded speech.

  It’s especially deplorable, says the author, that some professors of English now positively condone such usages. Surely they are exacerbating the problem. “When a college professor expresses the idea that improprieties are excusable because of their frequent use,” she comments severely, “it seems to me timely and justifiable to suggest that our teachers of English be examined for their qualifications.”

  Later in the article Learned critiques Lounsbury’s grammar. She suggests that “sometimes Professor Lounsbury’s use of language might impress the critical student as inconsistent with the rules of rhetoric.” She follows up this observation with a list of infelicitous phrases from his book, along with suggestions for more elegant paraphrases. (She does the same for the “much praised” Richard Grant White. It seems that even he did not always live up to his own standards of linguistic purity.)27

  The Nation also waded into the controversy over corrupt usage. Like Learned, the magazine blames professors for the new climate of linguistic permissiveness. In the 1870s The Nation welcomed Whitney’s attacks on White and other verbal critics, but now the editors decry the cult of usage. A piece titled “It’s Me” begins, “A notable development of present-day civilization is the tightening bond of sympathy between science and the small boy.” The author explains that scientists have recently come out in favor of various formerly forbidden activities. For example, he says, “It’s good for a boy to have three helpings of pie … because his growing organism demands it.” It’s also good for the small boy to say It’s me and It’s her “because that is the way everybody will speak a few hundred years from now.”

  The author attributes this upside-down state of affairs to an exaggerated respect for usage. Although the allure of usage is powerful in a democracy—“anybody can walk out into the street and pick up usage”—The Nation questions whether it’s sufficient for judging good English. “What if … Shakespeare said ‘Damned be him who first cries hold, enough?’” asks the author. That doesn’t automatically make it correct. He suggests that “Shakespeare … might have slipped on the ice and broken a leg without making fractured legs an essential attribute of genius. Life is guided by norms, and not by aberrations.”

  A letter that appeared two weeks later points out that It’s me is “a fact of language,” in frequent use since Elizabethan times. The letter writer provides several literary examples from authors more modern than Shakespeare, including Emerson, Shelley, Thackeray, and Browning. The editors reply unrepentantly, “Perhaps this letter from a teacher of English explains in part the inability
of so many college graduates to write correctly.”28

  Another topic that inspired sharp exchanges in the letters section of magazines was the use of split infinitives. From being a nonissue in the days of Lowth and Murray, split infinitives had become a grammatical hot button by the late nineteenth century. In 1895 The Critic published a series of letters to the editor that reveal a typical range of views. The first letter begins plaintively, “Is it too late to try to save the infinitive mood in its original simplicity?” The writer continues, “There is no such verb as ‘to fully notice,’ yet one of the smoothest pens that [has] run on your pages for many a day writes in the review of Zangwill’s ‘The Master,’ ‘It almost takes an artist to fully notice.’”29

  Another reader writes in to defend the construction. Recalling the stern strictures that hedged around infinitives in his school days, he says, “We might never dare ‘to fully prove’ anything; we could only aspire ‘fully to prove it’ or ‘to prove it fully.’ Neither of which was exactly what we wished to do.” He then suggests that perhaps it’s because the reviewer in question has “one of the smoothest pens” that he decided to split an infinitive for the sake of clarity and euphony. The author of the letter thinks talented writers should be allowed the freedom to insert adverbs “where sense and emphasis require.”30

  This broad-minded attitude drew a quick response from a third reader. He writes, “It is painful to see a serious attempt to defend the so-called ‘split infinitive,’ but the pain gives way to blank astonishment when the defence is put on the ground of euphony.” In this reader’s opinion, the reason split infinitives have been banished from good usage is that the best writers have found them clunky and inelegant and therefore avoided them. He then argues that the worse a piece of writing is, the more split infinitives it will contain. As a case in point, he mentions the flyers and other ephemeral publications surrounding the recent Chicago railroad strike. These low-class pieces of writing, he claims, featured “a perfect avalanche” of split infinitives.31

  After seeing the furor surrounding his colleague’s use of this deprecated form, it’s no surprise that another Critic writer starts off an article titled “How to Not Read” with the disclaimer, “It is bad luck, I know, to commence with a split infinitive.” He excuses himself with the explanation that “how to not read” means something different from “how not to read.”32

  In The Standard of Usage, Lounsbury devotes a chapter to this vexed issue. He lists the most common criticisms of the form—that it’s a corruption, that it’s a recent innovation, that good authors avoid it—and counters them one by one. As always, he bases his case on the history and structure of English.

  Lounsbury answers the corruption argument by pointing out that on the contrary, the true corruption occurred when speakers started joining to with what Lounsbury calls “simple” infinitives. In Anglo-Saxon English, infinitive verbs always appeared on their own, without to or any other introductory word. Some infinitives still do—those following make, for example. A sentence like They made me to leave sounds very strange. Other verbs present a choice. Either I helped to cook or I helped cook is possible. Given this history, the term “split infinitive” doesn’t make much sense. The infinitive, properly speaking, is only the verb itself. The to is a later addition. “Let us imagine,” jokes Lounsbury, “what must have been the feelings of the purist of the twelfth century … when he saw the preposition to … prefixed indiscriminatingly to the infinitive.”33 Somehow the usage caught on in spite of him.

  Next, Lounsbury takes care of the argument that split infinitives are a recent innovation by noting that people have been splitting to and the simple infinitive almost as long as the two words have been joined together. Among the earliest examples in print are several that appear in John Wycliffe’s fourteenth-century translation of the Bible. Moreover, many great writers have used the construction. Lounsbury offers a list that includes Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe, the poets Coleridge and Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Matthew Arnold, among others.

  Lounsbury does admit that the usage has become much more common in recent years. It’s happening, he believes, because English speakers have discovered that they can express a greater range of nuances if they sometimes insert an adverb between to and the verb. If such is the case, then no amount of condemnation on the part of critics will prevent split infinitives from becoming a permanent feature of the grammar.

  He concludes, “The mere opinions of individuals, no matter how eminent, will never long carry much weight with the users of speech. If men come seriously to believe that ambiguity can be lessened or emphasis increased by changing the order of words in any given phrase, we may be sure that in time the habit of doing so will be adopted.” Trends like these are simply part of the normal process of language change. If they were truly corruptions, says Lounsbury, “our language would have been already ruined any number of times.”34

  * * *

  While the more high-toned periodicals gave space to advanced discussions of linguistic topics, popular magazines continued to offer grammar advice as if modern philology had never been invented. The Ladies’ Home Journal, for instance, printed a regular column on correct speaking and writing. Readers wrote in requesting, “If space permits, please condemn ‘localisms,’” or asking for “a practical rule” for deciding between you and me and you and I, or wondering what the difference is between loan and lend.

  Their questions were answered with calm authority. The Journal editor advises that when confused about whether to use you and me or you and I, the reader should drop the you and to see which of the remaining pronouns sounds better. The distinction between loan and lend, she tells another correspondent, “which should be observed but which very often is not,” is simply that loan is a noun and lend is a verb. A section titled “Heard in the Street” lists overheard grammatical mistakes along with their corrections. “Thank you, I will be happy to go” should be “Thank you, I shall be happy to go.”35

  The Journal provided straightforward advice that could easily have come from an old copy of Lindley Murray’s grammar (and actually might have—late editions were still around). Its subscribers weren’t looking for a historical analysis of disputed structures or guidelines for making nuanced usage choices—they wanted to know what was correct. It’s doubtful that many popular magazine readers had heard of the controversies raging between linguists and traditionalists, or would have been stirred by them. They still thought of grammar as a list of memorizable rules.

  * * *

  By this time, more than a century had passed since the first appearance of Lindley Murray’s English Grammar and few people remembered his name. Conversations about grammar in recent decades had advanced into territory that he could hardly have imagined. Still, his spirit lingered. In some quarters, the old beliefs were as strong as ever.

  The twentieth century’s answer to Murray started life modestly as a student writing aid. This forty-three-page booklet, titled The Elements of Style, first appeared on the shelves of Cornell University’s bookstore in 1918, where it sold for a quarter. English professor William Strunk Jr. had written it specifically for his English 8 classes. Other students wandering the textbook aisles probably would have passed it by unnoticed. A diminutive five inches wide by seven high with gray board covers, Elements was more like a classroom handout than a real book. It was self-published and looked it. Around campus it became known as “the little book,” with the emphasis on “little.”

  The Elements of Style appeared at the end of World War I, on the eve of America’s first explosion of youth culture—the raucous decade now known as the Roaring Twenties. Soon the red-hot slang of flappers and flaming youth would take the country by storm. Youth slang was already rampant on college campuses, where young men and women bonded with their own brand of talk. The American Dialect Society even took college slang seriously enough to record it in Dialect Notes. Several decades would pass, however, before college students would be encouraged t
o write creatively in their natural voices. Those hoping to pass English 8 were still confined to conventional usage and traditional word choices.

  Strunk’s one-time student and future coauthor, Elwyn Brooks (E. B.) White, writing about his old professor in a 1957 New Yorker article, describes him as “a memorable man, friendly and funny,” with a passion for clean, bold, concise writing. White took Strunk’s English 8 class in 1919, so was one of the first to use Elements. In his article, White recalls that “Will Strunk really put his heart and soul” into the idea of tight writing. Brevity was his watchword. His lectures were so pared down, says White, “that he often seemed in the position of having shortchanged himself, a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill.”

  Strunk solved the problem, according to White, by repeating his sentences three times over. White remembers that “he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels in his hands, and in a husky, conspiratorial voice said, ‘Rule Thirteen! Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!’” That rule, which struck White so forcibly when he first heard it, would become the most famous command in Elements.36

  Strunk’s motives in writing The Elements of Style were similar to Lindley Murray’s when he wrote the first version of his English Grammar for the local Quaker girls’ school. Like Murray, Strunk wrote with a narrowly defined audience in mind—the students taking his advanced classes on literature study and writing technique. He hoped to save them and himself time and frustration. Over many years of teaching, he had graded hundreds of compositions and encountered the same missteps over and over. Now, with the help of his little book, students could correct their most egregious style mistakes before handing in their papers.