The Language Wars

by Henry Hitchings

  Several female grammarians followed Fisher. The most successful of them was Ellin Devis, who initially published her work anonymously, but soon acknowledged her authorship. The Accidence; or First Rudiments of English Grammar (1775) was ‘designed for the use of young ladies’ – a first – and went through eighteen editions in the fifty-two years after it appeared. Devis, a teacher in Kensington and then in Bloomsbury, combined moral and grammatical guidance in her concluding ‘Maxims and Reflections’. Her name became a touchstone for female educationalists and others interested in promoting women’s education. Erasmus Darwin, for instance, set up a school in Ashbourne in Derbyshire where two of his daughters, Susanna and Mary, did the teaching, and two, Emma and Violetta, were among the first students. His published plan of how young women should be educated made specific mention of Devis, and other programmes aimed at girls suggested using Devis’s The Accidence alongside Lowth’s Short Introduction.

  Devis is an intriguing figure, but Ann Fisher is historically more remarkable. She is interesting partly because of her argument that Latin, rather than being the ideal model for English, was inferior to it. English’s lack of inflections made it more manageable. Unlike her contemporaries, she did not insist on Latin grammatical terminology. However, inasmuch as her name is now known, it is for a different reason. For it was Fisher who promoted the convention of using he, him and his as pronouns to cover both male and female in general statements such as ‘Everyone has his quirks’. To be precise, she says that ‘The Masculine Person answers to the general Name, which comprehends both Male and Female; as, Any Person who knows what he says’.18 This idea caught on. Since then it has been attributed to another grammarian of the day, John Kirkby, but Kirkby nabbed the idea from Fisher. The convention was bolstered by an Act of Parliament in 1850: in order to simplify the language used in other Acts, it was decreed that the masculine pronoun be understood to include both males and females. The obvious objection to this – obvious now, even if it was not obvious then – is that it makes women politically invisible.

  It is not unusual to hear a sentence like the following: ‘If someone asks to spend the night on your sofa, you’d be rude to send them packing.’ A common objection to this is that them is plural, whereas someone is singular. However, this use of them gets round a problem we today take seriously. Until quite recently, it would have been considered standard to write, as Fisher and Kirkby would have encouraged, ‘If someone asks to spend the night on your sofa, you’d be rude to send him packing’. But this would now widely be considered sexist. It’s not hard to understand why: you cannot see he, him or his without thinking of a male. The inclusive alternative, which I often use, is ‘he or she’. (In the 1850s a lawyer by the name of Charles Crozat Converse proposed thon. Other suggestions have included ha and heer.) Employed repeatedly, though, ‘he or she’ sounds clunky. In 1880 Richard Grant White pronounced, ‘The fact remains that his is the representative pronoun … To use “his or her” in cases of this kind seems to me very finical and pedantic.’19 It’s easy enough to exemplify his point: ‘If someone asks to spend the night on your sofa, you’d be rude to send him or her packing, and you should give him or her every chance to make himself or herself comfortable, perhaps even furnishing him or her with a spare duvet and a towel for his or her morning ablutions.’ Two of the alternatives – defaulting to her rather than his, or switching arbitrarily between the two – feel arch. Hence the quick fix: ‘If someone asks to spend the night on your sofa, call them a taxi and pay their fare home.’

  Often it is alleged that everyone equals ‘every one’, and that therefore it should be matched with not only a singular verb, but also singular pronouns. Imagine that John and Christine run camping holidays for teenage boys on their remote island. If Christine picks the teenagers up on arrival and John then comes along with essential equipment, we might say, ‘Christine met everyone off the boat before John arrived with their tents.’ The convention requires us, however, to say that ‘Christine met everyone off the boat before John arrived with his tent’. This phrasing could invite doubts about John’s motives for running the camping holidays. The use of their in this instance is not slovenly; rather, it removes ambiguity.

  Wielding they, them and their in this way has a much longer history than is generally recognized. It was practised by Shakespeare – ‘And every one to rest themselves betake’ in his poem The Rape of Lucrece – and by Chaucer, as well as by a host of others that includes Lord Byron, John Ruskin, George Eliot, Henry Fielding, Jonathan Swift, Lord Chesterfield, Lewis Carroll and Dr Johnson. We end this chapter’s rapid journey here, with something apparently minor, because it is in arguments over such small details of everyday English that we most often come into contact with big issues of cultural bias or suffocating tradition, and because, too, it suggests that some usages regarded as illiterate are really acts of discretion.

  19

  Modern life is rubbish

  Facing up to language ‘as it is’

  Reporting in the early 1980s on the ‘critical condition’ of English, the combative theatre critic John Simon lamented the effects on it of the ‘four great body blows’ dealt to education: the student rebellion of 1968, the notion that ‘language must accommodate itself to the whims, idiosyncrasies, dialects, and sheer ignorance of underprivileged minorities’, ‘the introduction by more and more incompetent English teachers … of ever fancier techniques of not teaching English’, and the rise of television, a ‘word-mangling medium that sucks in victims … perniciously’.1 Simon is unusual only in the burning vehemence of his expression. Decline was the main theme of twentieth-century comment on English. As scholarly understanding of language in general and this language in particular grew massively, aided by developments in technology, the gap widened between academic views of English and everyday ones. In trade books and in the mainstream media, the state of English was endlessly lamented. Meanwhile professional linguists pursued technical matters that had ever more technical names: among the different branches of linguistics, for instance, emerged schools variously labelled computational, generative, cognitive, integrational, contrastive, and stratificational.

  The seeds were sown in the nineteenth century, in an area that at first looks unlikely – the comparative study of languages. The scientific understanding of languages and their relationships, articulated by William Jones and Franz Bopp, changed how language was imagined. As Edward Said wrote in his classic study Orientalism (1978), ‘the divine dynasty of language was ruptured definitively’ and language became ‘less a continuity between an outside power and the human speaker than an internal field created and accomplished by language users among themselves’.2 The scientific turn shifted the emphasis from statements about what ought to hold true to an examination of language as it is.

  Popular writers on language felt the rush of modernity. It became conventional to think about the future of English and to imagine ways of securing that future. I have already several times cited H. G. Wells: best known today for his visionary scientific fiction, he often wrote non-fiction about the future, in which he made forecasts, discussed the challenges of modernity, and urged his readers to embrace a new vision of the world – republican and rational. His fantasies, whether cast as fiction or non-fiction, tended to be played out against the familiar landscape of southern England, and he frequently considered the role of English in the future. He speculated, for instance, that by 2000 ‘the whole functional body of human society would read, and perhaps even write and speak, our language’.3

  Wells’s most sustained discussion of the subject is in his book Mankind in the Making and is worth quoting at length. Wells is not now a fashionable figure, and sometimes he expressed himself in a way that offends modern sensibilities, but his prescience and perceptiveness are arresting.

  There can be little or no dispute [he writes] that the English language in its completeness presents a range too ample and appliances too subtle for the needs of the great majority
of those who profess to speak it. I do not refer to the half-civilized and altogether barbaric races who are coming under its sway, but to the people we are breeding of our own race – the barbarians of our streets, our suburban ‘white niggers’, with a thousand a year and the conceit of Imperial destinies. They live in our mother-tongue as some half-civilized invaders might live in a gigantic and splendidly equipped palace. They misuse this, they waste that, they leave whole corridors and wings unexplored, to fall into disuse and decay. I doubt if the ordinary member of the prosperous classes in England has much more than a third of the English language in use, and more than a half in knowledge, and as we go down the social scale we may come at last to strata having but a tenth part of our full vocabulary, and much of that blurred and vaguely understood. The speech of the Colonist is even poorer than the speech of the home-staying English.4

  Wells felt that his contemporaries tended to ‘speak a little set of ready-made phrases’, could write English ‘scarcely at all’, and read nothing except ‘the weak and shallow prose of popular fiction and the daily press’. He lamented,

  One is constantly meeting, not only women, but men who will solemnly profess to ‘know’ English and Latin, French, German and Italian, perhaps Greek, who are in fact – beyond the limited range of food, clothing, shelter, trade, crude nationalism, social conventions and personal vanity – no better than the deaf and dumb. In spite of the fact that they will sit with books in their hands, visibly reading, turning pages, pencilling comments – in spite of the fact that they will discuss authors and repeat criticisms, it is as hopeless to express new thoughts to them as it would be to seek for appreciation in the ear of a hippopotamus. Their linguistic instruments are no more capable of contemporary thought than a tin whistle, a xylophone, and a drum are capable of rendering the Eroica Symphony.

  One problem, he felt sure, was the poor quality of teacher training: ‘Too often our elementary teachers at any rate, instead of being missionaries of linguistic purity, are centres of diffusion for blurred and vicious perversions of our speech.’5

  Though he expressed himself in arresting terms, Wells’s vision of a widely diffused and poorly maintained English was not uncommon. Progressives put forward radical ideas for streamlining the language’s international form. The most significant of these was the work of a psychologist, C. K. Ogden, who in the 1920s conceived and developed what he called Basic English. ‘Basic’ was a felicitous acronym for British American Scientific International Commercial. Ogden, an entrepreneurial pacifist whose interests included collecting masks (and wearing them), envisaged ‘an auxiliary international language comprising 850 words arranged in a system in which everything may be said for all the purposes of everyday existence’, and by 1939 he had published more than two hundred titles demonstrating what he had in mind. Strongly influenced by the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham – even going so far as to acquire and wear his ring – Ogden was especially taken with Bentham’s idea that verbs impede meaning, and he invested two years working towards a core stock of just eighteen essential English verbs.6 The practical aspect of the scheme had a moral motivation; Ogden’s frequent collaborator, the literary critic and theorist I. A. Richards, felt that the lack of an international language led to individual countries’ insularity, which in turn led to conflict.

  There was a good deal of support for Ogden’s proposals, especially during the 1940s when Winston Churchill championed the cause. A Basic English Foundation was set up with a grant from the Ministry of Education, Basic English was taught in more than thirty countries, and Ogden grudgingly accepted £23,000 in return for assigning his copyright to the Crown. But interest dropped off sharply in the 1950s. Typically, there was a feeling that, even if Basic English proved a success, it posed a danger: it was seen as threatening to constrain not just language, but thought. Ultimately, it failed because of the widespread suspicion that it lacked range and expressiveness (it wasn’t even possible to say ‘Good evening’ or ‘Thank you’), was clumsy and open to parody, and was too deeply coloured by Ogden’s personal world-view, and also, crucially, because of the longueurs of British bureaucracy and a lack of sustained political or institutional support. Ogden retreated into the narrow life of a garrulous clubman, and by the time he died of cancer in 1957 the demise of Basic English was certain. Recently, though, it has been revived by Wikipedia; Ogden’s Basic is the model for the Simple English version of the online encyclopaedia.

  In America, institutions strove to promote a more realistic sense of how English was used and how it might be used in the future. The American Philological Association was founded in 1869, and there followed the Modern Language Association in 1883, the American Dialect Society in 1889, the National Council of Teachers of English in 1911, and the Linguistic Society of America in 1924. These bodies contributed to a new scholarly idea of correctness, grounded in the mapping of actual usage.

  One of the most influential figures to emerge from American academia during this period was George Philip Krapp, who in Modern English (1909) asked, ‘What is good English?’ Stressing the importance of living speech, he argued that the laws of English arise from the ways in which the language is used, rather than originating in theory. Questioning the existence of any such thing as a standard form of English, he delighted in the notion of the language constantly being refreshed. Krapp repeatedly acclaimed the idiomatic life of the language, which he saw as something lying within its users.

  Krapp’s work inspired theorists of education such as Charles Carpenter Fries to advocate a new style of teaching that would focus on the practical business of using English. Eventually this led to the publication in 1952 of The English Language Arts, a report by the National Council of Teachers of English which argued for a change in the way English was taught in schools and colleges: instead of emphasizing rules and a negative view of language, teachers should offer ‘positive insights’. The English Language Arts was ‘a benchmark for a half-century of growing liberality in attitudes towards usage’.7 Its relativism was dismissed by traditionalists such as Jacques Barzun, who criticized what they saw as the report’s central message that change was invariably improvement – though in fact the report offered no such maxim.

  Mounting tension between traditionalists and liberals found dramatic expression in the controversy surrounding Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, which was published in September 1961. Its editor, Philip Gove, stressed that it would impose no artificial notions of correctness. It certainly represented a sharp deviation from the practices of the lexicographer whose name it bore. Although the edition was billed as ‘Utilizing all the experience and resources of more than one hundred years of Merriam-Webster dictionaries’, beneath its traditional packaging lay new thinking. Gove insisted that lexicography should be descriptive, not prescriptive. Consequently, Webster’s Third would sparingly apply status labels to different types of usage. The previously popular label ‘colloquial’ was discarded. Webster’s Third had virtues – a high level of scholarship, including greatly improved etymologies, and crisp layout – but the descriptive approach provoked acerbic criticism, and Gove was instantly demonized.

  There were some positive assessments, but many bruising ones. The editors of Life magazine complained that it was typical of ‘the say-as-you-go school of permissive English’ and came close to abandoning ‘any effort to distinguish between good and bad usage – between the King’s English, say, and the fishwife’s’.8 The Atlantic Monthly headed its coverage with the words ‘Sabotage in Springfield’. The New York Times parodied the dictionary’s inclusiveness: ‘A passel of double-domes at the G. & C. Merriam Company joint … have been confabbing and yakking for twenty-seven years … and now they have finalized Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, a new edition of that swell and esteemed word book.’ A later item dubbed the new edition ‘Webster’s Third (or Bolshevik) International’.9 It was not just the newspaper writers who derided the efforts of Gove and his team. Two deca
des after the publication of Webster’s Third, John Simon, never one to mince his words, called it ‘seminally sinister’.10 And in Rex Stout’s 1962 detective novel Gambit the hero, Nero Wolfe, feeds the pages of this ‘intolerably offensive’ work into a fire. The reason for this topical gesture? Webster’s Third fails to uphold the distinction between imply and infer. Since the two volumes comprised more than 2,700 pages and cost $47.50, Wolfe’s was an expensive and time-consuming expression of disgust.

  Strikingly, the traditionalists perceived Webster’s Third as being actively unpleasant rather than just passively so. Its greatest offence, in the eyes of many, was its alleged acceptance of ain’t. According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, the ‘embrace of the word “ain’t” will comfort the ignorant, confer approval upon the mediocre, and subtly imply that proper English is the tool only of the snob; but it will not assist men to speak true to other men. It may, however, prepare us for that future which it could help to hasten. In the caves, no doubt, a grunt will do.’11 Comment of this kind was widespread. The language of outrage was white-hot. In the New Yorker, Dwight Macdonald described as an ‘incredible massacre’ the removal of many of the entries that had graced the previous edition. Others resented not only the desecration of the past, but also the generous welcoming of the present. Webster’s Third was considered a product of the dope-smoking counterculture.12 The approach of Gove and his colleagues to their subject matter resembled the non-evaluative method of Alfred Kinsey’s work on sexual behaviour, and, according to the Jeremiahs, like Kinsey’s reports Webster’s Third was a licence for depravity. It was, in short, evidence of the disintegration of civilized existence.

  Besides the descriptivism there were plenty of specific features of the new Webster’s for critics to deplore. Why, they wanted to know, were there illustrative quotations from the Broadway stalwart Ethel Merman and the baseball player Willie Mays? Merman was quoted to illustrate the verb to drain: ‘Two shows a day drain a girl.’ Why were brand names such as Kleenex presented without an initial capital? Just one headword in the entire dictionary was given a capital letter: God. There were complaints about the dropping of much of the encyclopaedic material that had been available in the previous edition; for instance, readers could no longer find in the pages of Webster’s details of the names of the twelve apostles. But the real fuss was over the absence of value judgements. The message was simple: if a dictionary bearing the name of America’s greatest lexicographer could not be counted on to condemn loose usage, we might as well start preparing for the end of days. Ironically, at the very time that Webster’s Third was being launched, Merriam-Webster was printing advertisements, in popular magazines such as Life, promoting the idea that ‘Good English is a must for success in high school and college!’ and claiming that ‘This ability develops quickly with regular use of a personal copy of Webster’s New Collegiate’.