‘Theoretically correct’ is generous. To hanker after the very distant past is grotesque; it denies progress and misunderstands the essential dynamism of language. The world’s languages are forever rubbing up against one another, and as they do so they alter. Items from one language enter another. The more of us there are on this planet, and the more we travel, the more this will happen. The most extreme kind of alteration is, of course, death. Every two weeks a language becomes extinct. Around five hundred of the world’s roughly six thousand languages have fewer than a hundred speakers, and it is fair to say that more than half our languages are moribund. A language disappears because the people who speak it die – victims of conflict, political oppression, sickness or a cataclysm such as an earthquake – or because their culture is swamped by another, more powerful one – perhaps because of urbanization or thanks to the long reach of the commercial media. Sometimes abandoning one’s language can be a survival strategy. When we speak of the death of a language, we mean the end of its being spoken. If written records are preserved, we may be able to revive it. But in practice, with the exception of Hebrew, extinct languages have not come back to life.
Some see a reduction in the number of languages as convenient. According to this view, in an ideal world there would be just one language – theirs. The result would be a return to the perfect condition that supposedly existed before Babel. This is naïve. Global peace will not be achieved by humanity’s sharing a single language, and no one language provides a mechanism fit to convey all the complexity of human thought. Languages other than our own suggest different ways of understanding the world. Moreover, the death of languages has high costs: in the short term we lose some of the knowledge accumulated by their now departed speakers, and in the longer term the creativity and vitality of our own language diminish. Maintaining the diversity of languages supports a complex ecosystem, a richness akin to the genetic variety that is essential to evolution.
Purists are possessive: they are tremendously proprietorial not only about the correctness of what they say, but also about the myriad examples they have corralled of other people’s gaffes and atrocities. They especially like to trot out specimens of vocabulary that they find offensive. In the 1550s Thomas Wilson could parody an ambitious clergyman’s use of such spurious words as ‘domesticall’ and ‘Archigrammarian’; a hundred years later Peter Heylin relished listing the ‘uncouth’ words in a recent history of the reign of Charles I, including some that we now use a good deal (‘complicated’, ‘relax’) and others that we don’t (‘accalladoes’, ‘anomabous’); and Addison wrote in The Spectator about a soldier whose ‘Modern Military Eloquence’ meant that his father, reading one of his letters home, ‘found it contained great news, but could not guess what it was’.5 Purists continue to do this sort of thing. Of course, in their eyes the faults they find are matters of eternal verity, not personal taste. But much of what is now considered pure was once regarded as barbarous. Purists exult in their resistance to change not because they have a rigorous understanding of the relationship between language and time, but because they are heavily invested in the status quo – or, more often, in a fantasy of the status quo. References to the ‘mother tongue’ are telling: for language as for women, purity has traditionally been represented as the ideal.
A dislike of borrowed words can be presented as a preference for simplicity. Borrowings, so the argument goes, confuse people. They make documents hard to understand. They obfuscate the truth – of the scriptures, for instance. But purists in their hostility to imported terms fail to keep pace with the changing realities of the world around them. Although some borrowings are whimsical, most are not. A borrowed word answers a need; rejection of a word is in many cases also the rejection of a phenomenon.
As the example of Percy Grainger shows, the purist’s nostalgia can have a sinister edge. In his book On the Death and Life of Languages the French scholar Claude Hagège makes the point that purism is often the mark of a language in decline; those who use a language in a ritualistic fashion, or express a finicky concern for traditions even though their command of them is far from perfect, are defensive zealots who ‘want to give themselves the illusion of full competence by artificially maintaining a stringent norm that runs counter to the healthy image of life’.6
Purists are people who want you to do things their way. At their best, they are well-informed and their arguments are carefully constructed. The Society for Pure English, founded in 1913 by the poet Robert Bridges and quickly joined by an assortment of other distinguished literary figures including E. M. Forster and Thomas Hardy, published a series of tracts between 1919 and 1947. The SPE Tracts are impressively scholarly. The project began from an enlightened position: democracy was a watchword, and there was a policy of not interfering with ‘living developments’. Yet the SPE’s name was a promise of failure. Societies ‘for’ anything are almost always busily defiant in the face of massive and irreversible realities. And ‘Pure’ in this case came to mean ‘Traditional’. By the 1930s the SPE was preoccupied with such things as defending the honour of English from American invasions, and its efforts were being likened to those in the political sphere of Europe’s ascendant Fascists.
There is a purism of a different and smaller kind, which begins – and often also ends – with the protest that a word is not being used in its true etymological sense. The idea is that we should treat words as they were treated in the language from which we derived them. But do we really believe that a candidate should be dressed in white, that being meticulous means feeling beset by fears, or that a sycophant must be someone who reveals the whereabouts of figs? A real stickler for etymology would be required, absurdly, to claim the truth of these definitions.
Many other words have ‘etymologically pure’ senses that are now lost to most English-speakers. I can remember being told as a child that my reference to a dilapidated stable was incorrect, because only things made of stone could truly be called ‘dilapidated’. I can also recall being instructed that to decimate meant to kill one person in ten. This procedure had been practised in the Roman army, where among a unit that had committed some offence one man in ten, chosen by lot, would be clubbed or stoned to death. It did not stop with the passing of Imperial Rome; in his account of the Battle of Stalingrad, Antony Beevor describes a Soviet divisional commander lining up cowardly riflemen and shooting every tenth man in the face until his pistol was emptied.7 However, to decimate is now commonly used to mean something more like ‘to kill or destroy a significant part of something or some group’. Opportunities to employ the verb in its Latin sense are rare, and pretending that this is the only permissible sense is a denial of reality. To decimate has been used not just of killing, but also of taxation and in mathematics, since the seventeenth century, and has been employed ‘loosely’ for a couple of hundred years at least.
Sometimes the etymologies to which such heed is paid are in any case bogus. Those who suggest that till should be written with a single l imagine that it is a contraction of until, but in fact until was originally spelled untill and is a thirteenth-century intensification of the much older till. Something similar happens with none. I tend, through force of habit, to treat none as though it is singular: ‘None of us is going on holiday soon.’ Occasionally this results in what seems quite ungainly phrasing: ‘I’m making extra mince pies even though none is likely to be needed.’ The idea that none takes a singular verb stems from the misconception that none is a contraction of not one. The popularity of this belief can be traced to Lindley Murray. But in fact none is closer to not any. The OED explains, ‘Many commentators state that none should take singular concord, but this has generally been less common than plural concord, especially between the 17th and 19th centuries.’ It is perhaps worth noting that Robert Lowth uses plural verbs with none.
Such professions of etymological fidelity are the fictions of people who claim history as their justification without having troubled to check what the history i
s. This type of purism often involves manipulating the past, rather than understanding it. More broadly, purism is an emotional commitment, which betrays insecurity and usually results in insensitivity. As for the purists’ attempt to repel lexical invasions, it’s a repression of life itself. For now, as for all the recorded past, languages are able to cross-pollinate, and as they do so the achievements, visions, philosophies and memories of different cultures interfuse, enriching our expressive resources and making our experience more intricate.
14
Organizing the Victorian treasure-house
Schemes of correctness, large and small
The most redoubtable guardians of proper English are never the grand theorists. Instead they are the defenders of morality. Swift, Lowth and Priestley were all clerics, but their piety was exceeded by the unordained high priests of Victorian correctness.
For a large part of the nineteenth century one of the leading moralists in print was Henry Butter. A follower of the teachings of the Swedish Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, Butter was a prolific author of instructional volumes. His popular titles included The Etymological Spelling Book and Butter’s Reading and Spelling in Easy Gradations. He also addressed himself to impressionable young people in books such as Maiden, Prepare to Become a Happy Wife and Is the Pleasure Worth the Penalty? The latter was meant for young men and afforded ‘a common-sense view of the leading vice of the age’. In What’s the Harm of Fornication? Butter expanded on the subject, condemning young men’s appetite for ‘riotous enjoyment, which they mistakenly fancy to be happiness’. Extramarital sex was guaranteed to ‘insanely pervert them to the destruction of their health’.1 Butter is interesting because he so clearly sees moral teaching and language training as related activities. His volumes on one subject tend to include advertisements for those on the other.
The 1860s witnessed a public quarrel between two of the most strident arbiters, Henry Alford and George Washington Moon. Alford was a piously evangelical man. At the age of eight he had written a ‘history of the Jews’, and at ten a sermon setting out ‘what looking unto Jesus means’ and ‘when we ought to look unto Jesus’. By the time he published a series of articles about the state of English in 1863, under the title A Plea for the Queen’s English, he was Dean of Canterbury, an established poet and the author of several popular hymns. In these pieces, which appeared in the magazine Good Words, Alford worried about ‘manly’ English’s dilution: nothing appeared to upset him more than the ‘bespanglement’ of English with words imported from other tongues, and he condemned the taste for ‘flimsy’ foreign terms as morally disgraceful. He fretted about the dropping of hs and intrusive rs (as at the end of the word ‘idea’, say), as well as about journalese, the inflated language used in prayer books for children, the prevalence of embarrassing nicknames, the ‘false glitter’ of borrowings from French, ‘terrible’ or ‘horrible’ words (examples being desirability and the verb to evince), the correct way to pronounce cucumber, bad spelling in regional newspapers, and Americanisms – the last of these characterized as typical of a people guilty of ‘reckless exaggeration’ and a ‘blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man’.2 Other criticisms were focused closer to home: ‘I never knew an English man who misplaced “shall” and “will”; I hardly ever have known an Irishman or a Scotchman who did not misplace them sometimes.’ He added that ‘it is strange to observe how incurable the propensity is’.3
George Washington Moon was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, who over a period of roughly forty years made it his business to vituperate about eminent figures’ errors of language, morality and religious conviction. Born in London to American parents, he forged a career out of arguing with those who dared to offer pronouncements about English usage. His response to Alford’s pieces for Good Words was initially published as A Defence of the Queen’s English. When Alford gathered the pieces in a book he called The Queen’s English, the title of Moon’s volume now sounded like an endorsement of Alford rather than an attack, so Moon punchily rebranded it as The Dean’s English.
Alford was not the first writer Moon clobbered, nor the last. Another of his books had the title The Bad English of Lindley Murray and Other Writers on the English Language, and attributed to Murray an ‘almost malicious pleasure’ in the confusions caused by his rules of grammar.4 Moon was explicit that he was paying Murray back for the pain he had suffered as a child when forced to learn his grammatical rules by rote. But it was the squabble with Alford, a living target who could answer back, that attracted widespread notice. Moon addressed himself to Alford in the form of a long letter which, although signed ‘Yours most respectfully’, was larded with disrespect. He argued that ‘Great writers may make or may mar a language. It is with them, and not with grammarians, that the responsibility rests; for language is what custom makes it; and custom is, has been, and always will be more influenced by example than by precept.’5 Moon, incidentally, is one of the few authorities to be explicit in saying that one should never begin a sentence with And.
Of the two, Alford is the more representative, a self-professed amateur who characterized his writings as a collection of ‘stray notes’. As a rule, people who tell you they are offering a hotchpotch of stray notes are really peddling what they hope are big ideas. False modesty is not an accident, but an assault strategy. Typical of this movement with its surreptitious moralism (and xenophobia, to boot) was the best-selling Enquire Within Upon Everything, which sold 592,000 copies between 1856 and 1877.6 It contained a wealth of information about household management, and dropped in on such thorny linguistic issues as the use of hyphens and the imperfections of regional usage. Indeed, a list was provided of ‘examples of provincial dialects [that] will be found very amusing’.7 This sturdy volume – advertised as offering guidance on how to cure a headache or bury a relative – set down 256 ‘rules and hints for correct speaking’. ‘Rules and hints’ suggests just how flaky its rules could be. Apparently, one should not say ‘If I am not mistaken’; it is better to say ‘If I mistake not’. ‘Two couples’ is an unacceptable locution; the proper form is ‘four persons’. ‘Instead of “Handsome is as handsome does,” say “Handsome is who handsome does.”’ ‘Instead of “It is raining very hard,” say “It is raining very fast.”’ And ‘He must not do it’ is inferior to ‘He needs not do it’ – never mind the difference in meaning. Not everything in the list looks wrong-headed. One can hardly complain about the instruction that instead of ‘I enjoy bad health’ one should say ‘My health is not good’.8 But it is surprising that the author thought it acceptable to talk about one’s health at all.
Enquire Within Upon Everything also had great fun – or what its author thought to be great fun – at the expense of a woman called Mrs Alexander Hitching. This woman, supposedly the author’s neighbour, had ‘a most unpleasant habit of misusing the letter H to such a degree that our sensitive nerves have often been shocked when in her society’. She was therefore known to the world as Mrs Halexander Itching.9 Sensitivity to the opinions of one’s neighbours, be those opinions real or imagined, is one of the most exasperating features of daily life; it creates anxiety, and inspires us only to a tawdry homogeneity. Among Mrs Hitching’s sniffy coevals, sneering at people who misplaced their hs was common. This was fairly new: the habit had not been stigmatized until the second half of the eighteenth century, and it seems it was Thomas Sheridan who created sensitivity about the matter. John Walker had been especially forceful in condemning this ‘vice’, which he thought was most common in London. Now there was even a little sixpenny manual entitled Poor Letter H, presented as the work of the abused letter itself, which sold more than 40,000 copies in the ten years following its publication in 1854. Though hardly a success on the scale of Enquire Within, it was still indicative of the snobberies and anxieties occasioned by English usage. It was read mainly for amusement, not instruction. Its sales led others to try to cash in; Charles William Smith in 1866 produced a similar volume wi
th the somewhat unfortunate title Mind Your H’s and Take Care of Your R’s. Smith thought English was ‘perhaps, the most ill-spoken language in the world’, and he found the blurring of the ‘fine, manly sound’ of the letter r ‘more worthy a monkey than a man’.10
This one easily observable detail of pronunciation created what I think of as a ‘toxic binary’: if you got it right, you were not guaranteed acceptance, but if you got it wrong you could count on being a pariah. It is far from clear when h-dropping began. In 1880 Alfred Leach published The Letter H: Past, Present, and Future, in which he wondered, ‘Why has H-dropping been made the butt of ridicule in the present century only?’11 Leach does not reach back far enough, but he was right to speak of ‘ridicule’, and such ridicule persists: in Britain, whether a person pronounces hs is still a significant shibboleth. Leach comes up with a startling image on this matter, claiming that ‘As the chemist employs a compound of sulphur in order to decide by the reaction whether a substance belongs to the group of higher or of baser metals, so does society apply the H-test to unknown individuals, and group them according to their comportment under the ordeal’.12
This contrast is a theme of Victorian fiction: the ‘two nations’ formed by different backgrounds and ‘ordered by different manners’ that are depicted by Disraeli (these words are his), Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell.13 In David Copperfield, Uriah Heep strategically drops his hs to confirm how ‘’umble’ he is, and the behaviour of this grotesque figure must have influenced some readers to cling on to the letter, though ideally without going as far as the likeable servant Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers, who adds hs in inappropriate places. In 1869 Alexander Ellis, a prolific scholar of phonetics, found that ‘at the present day great strictness in pronouncing h is demanded as a test of education and position in society’; in 1890 the Oxford scholar Henry Sweet wrote that the pronunciation of the letter served as ‘an almost infallible test of education and refinement’.14 Of Sweet, it is perhaps sufficient to say that he was the main model for Henry Higgins, the professor of phonetics in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. But it is hard to mention Ellis without noting some of his many eccentricities: he weighed himself both dressed and undressed every day, always carried two sets of nail scissors and a selection of tuning forks, and wore a greatcoat with twenty-eight pockets, which he called Dreadnought.
The Language Wars Page 21
