Murray’s career as an author of instructive books about language began successfully. The English Grammar was written for the benefit of the girls at Trinity Lane School in York, of which his wife Hannah was a proprietor. It went through more than fifty editions in its first thirty-seven years. Beginning with the fifth edition in 1799, it was published in London as well as in York, an abridged version having been issued in London the previous year. Murray followed English Grammar up with several more successes. His compact and neatly printed English Spelling-book of 1804, ‘calculated to advance the learners by natural and easy gradations’, had gone through forty-four editions by 1834. Murray’s publications also found significant audiences abroad; the English Grammar was translated into numerous languages, including Russian, Spanish, French and Japanese, and its English editions were widely reprinted, from Dublin and Belfast to Calcutta and Bombay. A version for the blind was printed in New England in 1835, and John Betts of the Strand, a firm otherwise known mainly for its collapsible portable globe, produced a board game called ‘A Journey to Lindley Murray’s’.
The success of Murray’s English Grammar had nothing to do with originality. Heavily reliant on the writings of Robert Lowth, as well as on Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric, it drew accusations of plagiarism. To counter this charge, Murray in later editions gave details of his sources. He never made much pretence of having new ideas. Others grammarians saw their role similarly, presenting themselves as compilers, not original thinkers. One contemporary, Peter Walkden Fogg, apologized for plundering much of his material from other books – ‘my character in this undertaking is a mixture of the author and collector’ – and then suggested rather oddly that his predecessors ‘have been plagiarists to me’, before claiming for himself ‘the mitigating merit of Robin Hood, who took from the rich and gave to the poor’.5
For Murray, selectiveness was essential. Yet he could be steely in his prescriptivism; much of what he took from Lowth he stiffened, establishing rules where Lowth had registered tendencies. The central pillar of Murray’s book is the section on syntax. This sets out twenty-two fundamental rules. For instance, Murray repeats Lowth’s argument about double negatives; they ‘destroy one another, or are equivalent to an affirmative’. He also states, none too elegantly, that ‘All the parts of a sentence should correspond with each other, and a regular and dependent construction, throughout, be carefully preserved’.6 Just occasionally he arrives at a rule with less certainty, as when he explains that ‘We say rightly, either “This is the weaker of the two;” or “The weakest of the two:” but the former appears to be preferable, because there are only two things compared.’7 Sticklers will agree with the final judgement, but will be surprised to see Murray allow ‘The weakest of the two’ as well.
Murray imagines a connection between proper syntax and moral rectitude. His names for what he considers the two fundamental principles of syntax are ‘Concord’ and ‘Government’, and when he explores the criteria of good writing, he emphasizes purity, propriety, precision, the ‘unity’ and ‘strength’ of sentences, and ‘perspicuity’, a quality previously stressed by Priestley and now characterized by Murray as ‘positive beauty’. By ‘purity’ he says he means ‘the use of such words or constructions as belong to the idiom of the language which we speak, in opposition to words … not English’. ‘Propriety’ involves avoiding ‘low expressions’ such as ‘topsy turvy’ and ‘hurly burly’; ensuring we omit no words that are needed to make our sense clear and ‘in the same sentence, avoid using the same word in different senses’; steering clear of baffling technical terms and ambiguities as well as ‘unintelligible words and phrases’ more generally; and avoiding ‘in our words and phrases … all such as are not appropriated to the ideas we mean to express’. The perspicuous writer ‘frees us from all fatigue of searching for his meaning’, and his ‘style flows always like a limpid stream, where we see to the very bottom’.8
Like Lowth, Murray displays errors, but the examples tend to be of his own invention, rather than lifted from famous authors. He is insistent about the difference between will and shall – frequently mixed up, so Noah Webster alleged, by the Irish and the Scots. ‘Will, in the first person singular and plural, intimates resolution and promising,’ he writes, and ‘in the second and third person, only foretells’. He gives as an example of the former, ‘I will reward the good, and will punish the wicked’, and of the latter, ‘You or they will have a pleasant walk.’ He then explains that ‘Shall, on the contrary, in the first person simply foretells; in the second and third persons, promises, commands, or threatens.’ He exemplifies this with the sentences ‘I shall go abroad’ and ‘They shall account for their misconduct.’ Finally, ‘Would, primarily denotes inclination of will; and should, obligation.’9 As we know, these distinctions were not original to Murray, having been drawn by Wallis and by Lowth. But Murray made them stick. He also popularized spelling rules, such as ‘Words ending with y, preceded by a consonant, form the plurals of nouns … by changing y into i; as, spy, spies’, ‘those words, which end with double l, and take ness, less, ly or ful after them, omit one l, as … skilful’, and ‘able and ible, when incorporated into words ending with silent e, almost always cut it off; as cure …, curable … : but if c or g come before e in the original words, the e is then preserved; as, change, changeable; peace, peaceable’.10
Murray’s work was often criticised – William Hazlitt being a notable detractor, partly because he had his own grammar textbook to boost – and was also satirized, notably in Percival Leigh’s A Comic English Grammar (1840), which is full of ludicrous examples and analogies. There was also a parody, The Comic Lindley Murray (1871), which abridged his grammar and replaced his serious examples with frivolous ones. But to several generations of English-speakers Murray’s name was synonymous with grammar. It appears in Dickens more than once. In Little Dorrit Mr Pancks the reluctant rent collector wonders, ‘Is any gentleman present acquainted with the English Grammar?’ The people gathered around him in Bleeding Heart Yard (in London’s Clerkenwell) are ‘shy of claiming that acquaintance’. The ‘English Grammar’ in question is undoubtedly Murray’s. There was doubt, though, over whether Dickens himself knew the work well; a review by Thomas Cleghorn of Martin Chuzzlewit slammed him for barbarous grammar that ‘offends the shade of Lindley Murray’.11
In the opening chapter of Uncle Tom’s Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe condemns Haley the slave-trader because of his ‘gaudy vest’ and ‘flaunting tie’ before concluding: ‘His conversation was in free and easy defiance of Murray’s Grammar, and was garnished at convenient intervals with various profane expressions, which not even the desire to be graphic in our account shall induce us to transcribe.’ In Moby-Dick this semi-precious volume is studied by Pip, the genial black boy who looks after the Pequod when the others go out whaling; he hopes to improve his mind. The most memorable reference to Murray is in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, set at the time of the 1832 Reform Bill. In that novel Mrs Garth, a former schoolteacher, is representative of her age in cherishing Murray’s writings: we are told that ‘in a general wreck of society [she] would have tried to hold her “Lindley Murray” above the waves’. Defective grammar, Mrs Garth believes, prevents a person from gaining the attention of the world. Murray’s books are ideal for her purposes as she doles out education while making pies in her kitchen; they are specifically intended for the use of learners who have not had much formal education.
Lindley Murray’s conservative dogma percolated through nineteenth-century ideas about grammar. For instance, he resisted the idea that there could be different yet equally valid forms of usage; in his eyes, one form had always to be preferred. There were a few exceptions: he was prepared to accept both ‘expert in’ and ‘expert at’, and ‘He was never seen to laugh’ was considered neither better nor worse than ‘He never was seen to laugh’. But his doctrine was that the rules of usage should not allow choice. He insisted on what he called ‘clearness’, yet did no
t define what he meant by this, and in much the same way urged subjective notions of ‘graceful’ or ‘elegant’ expression. He cleaved to an ideal of the true ‘nature’ of language, which he did not expound.12 In one of his more risibly inexact moments he asserts that ‘Sentences, in general, should not be very long, nor very short’.13 His writing has a quality of littleness – in striving for a proud certainty he is sometimes comic. Things that now seem strange would not have surprised his contemporaries. Today we would be startled to be told that it is ‘harsh’ to use the relative pronoun who when speaking of a child – as in ‘A child who likes swimming’ – for the reason that ‘We hardly consider children as persons, because that term gives us the idea of reason and reflection’.14
In his memoirs Murray says of the English Grammar that ‘the approbation and the sale which the book obtained, have given me some reason to believe, that I have not altogether failed in my endeavours to elucidate the subject, and to facilitate the labours of both teachers and learners of English grammar’. In making this statement, he reiterates the ‘special regard’ he has always given to ‘the propriety and purity of all the examples and illustrations’.15 Murray did a huge amount to reinforce the connection between sound grammar and virtue, and at the same time to reinforce another connection: between mistakes and vice.
Considering the temper of Murray’s writing, it may come as a surprise that he has nothing to say about slang. One feels confident that he would have dismissed it as a disgraceful aberration. But slang would not have meant much to him. The OED’s first citation for this word in the sense ‘language of a highly colloquial type’ is from 1818. As a term for the special vocabulary of a group of disreputable people, it appears in 1756. Previously what we now think of as slang had been known as jargon, cant, lingo or – less commonly – speciality. Alexander Gil, writing in 1621 in support of a phonetic spelling system, had condemned the ‘cant speech’ of ‘the dirtiest dregs of the wandering beggars’; he described their language as ‘that poisonous and most stinking ulcer of our state’, and argued that it would not go away ‘until the magistrates have its authors crucified’.16
Jargon, originally a term for the chattering of birds, was used censoriously by Hobbes, Swift and Johnson. It signified the language peculiar to professions – and, less commonly, to cliques and particular ethnic groups. But only one substantial and wide-ranging view of the subject had been produced. This was the work of Francis Grose, the son of a rich Swiss jeweller, who in 1785 had published A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. There had, it was true, been compilations of slang as long ago as the sixteenth century; one early collection appeared in Thomas Harman’s A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors (1565), which its author was able to put together as a result of about twenty years’ ill health, during which he would interview any beggar who appeared at his door. It was Grose, though, who made this kind of compendium a credible department of lexicography. He argued, too, that the abundance of English slang was a reflection not of the nation’s corruption, but of its liberty: ‘the freedom of thought and speech, arising from, and privileged by our constitution, gives a force and poignancy to the expressions of our common people, not to be found under arbitrary governments.’17
The noteworthiness of Grose’s work lies partly in its almost clairyvoyant interest in what we might now call popular culture. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was the fruit of a considerable amount of reading and also of numerous nocturnal trips from his favourite Holborn tavern into the nearby slums – accompanied by Batch, his manservant, and later by another friend he called The Guinea Pig. In the Dictionary Grose explains about three thousand words. Among these are items of jargon used by soldiers and sailors, prostitutes and pugilists, tailors and tradesmen. But Grose is not just a collector of pleasing oddments; he argues that slang is central to the life of language, and notes how quickly the language of the street finds its way into politics, as well as into the prose of people writing for magazines.
It will be apparent by now that language plays a central role in establishing our relationships with other people, and this is especially true in the case of slang. For slang, more than any other kind of language, creates solidarities. Slang is a kind of sport; Otto Jespersen remarked that like all other sports it essentially belongs to the young. Slang is playful. It also feels quick. ‘I fancy I do like slang,’ says Lily Dale in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1864). ‘It’s so slow, you know, to use nothing but words out of a dictionary.’ Words undictionarized are considered smart and snappy; they have yet to be tamed. In the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which aired from 1997 to 2003, a highly original form of teenage slang becomes one of the weapons deployed by the eponymous heroine; it enables her to survive, and, in an intriguing development of traditional vampire stories, her words are the sharpest stakes she can use against her adversaries. Of course, to turn the idea on its head, there is something just a little ridiculous about people in the vanguard of this kind of usage. The desire to appear up to date, often evident in an obsession with looking and sounding young, can be to others a source of mirth or embarrassment.
Walt Whitman likened slang to belching (‘eructation’, he called it), but it’s a very revealing kind of belching. The slang we use says a lot about who and what we want to be. Social groups have their particular dialects: electricians have an argot that is largely incomprehensible to the initiates of a college fraternity, and vice versa; the jocks and the burnouts in a high school have discernibly different specialized vocabularies; a jeweller talks about gems and their settings in a manner unlike that of a professional thief; and there are kinds of jargon familiar only to mariners, truckers, bankers and gamers. ‘Chicken salad’ means quite different things to a snowboarder and a chef. In Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette (1853) the narrator Lucy Snowe comments that ‘the strange speech of the cabmen … seemed to me odd as a foreign tongue. I had never before heard the English language chopped up in that way.’ Chopped-up English is, according to your perspective, conveniently brisk, gibberish or a kind of poetry. Inasmuch as it’s the last of these, it is the people’s poetry – a creative expression of a group dynamic. In the 1950s David Maurer wrote Whiz Mob, a book-length study of the specialized language of American pickpockets. Their argot was rich. Picking a person’s pocket outside a bank was known as a ‘jug touch’; skilful, shrewd pickpocketing was reckoned to depend on ‘grift sense’; an especially deft and fast-moving practitioner was a ‘lightning tool’, while the more ruthless operators who worked public conveniences were known as ‘crapper hustlers’. Perhaps all this sounds a bit James Ellroy: to an outsider, talk of ‘donickers’, ‘dinging the poke’ and ‘double duke frames’ seems almost gratuitously obscure. But this esoteric language is subtle and detailed, and reveals something of the pickpocket’s psychology – his cult of finesse, his unexpectedly proud professionalism, his equation of grifting with sex. It’s with good reason impenetrable.
One leading lexicographer of slang, Jonathon Green, reflects on his work in the field and finds that ‘in comparison with the Standard English lexis its vocabulary covers a tiny waterfront, but in what depth: 3,000 drunks, 1,500 copulations, 1,000 each of penises and vaginas’. These words are usually ‘coined at society’s lower depths, and make their way aloft’. He characterizes slang as a target, as ‘resolutely human’, as ‘welcoming of the crassest stereotyping’, as Falstaffian, and as ‘the great re-inventor’.18 While editing this I was on a London bus and was treated to a panorama of slang at its most discussibly bizarre, which bore out Green’s description. Treated, or subjected – but really both, for I was at once fascinated and appalled as two teenage boys attempted to outdo each other in itemizing really grimy terms for having sex. Many were new to me, and when they were done I felt enlightened more than sullied.
This suggests why dictionaries of slang are popular: we turn to them partly in order to arm ourselves, but mainly because they help us understand what seem to be the d
eformities of the world around us. Actually, slang dates quickly, and much of what we will find in a slang dictionary is dusty stuff: instead of helping us practically, a book of this kind will end up on a shelf within arm’s reach of the loo. Readers of Francis Grose’s dictionary were, I think it’s safe to say, more likely to be amused or scandalized than enlightened by the information that when somebody spoke of ‘one who uses, or navigates the windward passage’ he meant ‘a sodomite’, and that a dildo was ‘an implement, resembling the virile member, for which it is said to be substituted, by nuns, boarding school misses, and others obliged to celibacy’.
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