Pickering’s professional career was made in the law, with occasional ventures into politics, but he passed for a scholar in his time, he was offered the chair of Oriental languages at Harvard in 1806 and that of Greek in 1814, and he published a Greek-English lexicon in 1826. The preface to his Vocabulary was largely devoted to a defense of the English reviewers. “It cannot be denied,” he said, “that we have in several instances deviated from the standard of the language, as spoken and written in England at the present day. [His italics.] By this I do not mean that so great a deviation has taken place as to have rendered any considerable part of our language unintelligible to Englishmen, but merely that so many corruptions have crept into our English as to have become the subject of much animadversion and regret with the learned of Great Britain.” Pickering then proceeded to argue that these animadversions and regrets were well founded, and called upon his erring countrymen to “imitate the example of the learned and modest Campbell,”67 who, though he had devoted a great part of a long life to the study of the English language, “yet thought it no disgrace to make an apology for his style,” and to remember the similar diffidence of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lugdunum (Lyons) in Gaul, who prefixed a similar apology for his shaky provincial Latin to his “Adversus Hæreses.” Thus Pickering summed up:
Upon an impartial consideration of the subject, therefore, it seems impossible to resist the conclusion that, although the language of the United States has perhaps changed less than might have been expected, when we consider how many years have elapsed since our ancestors brought it from England, yet it has in so many instances departed from the English standard that our scholars should lose no time in endeavoring to restore it to its purity, and to prevent further corruption.… As a general rule, we should undoubtedly avoid all those words which are noticed by English authors of reputation as expressions with which they are unacquainted, for although we might produce some English authority for such words, yet the very circumstance of their being thus noticed by well-educated Englishmen is a proof that they are not in use at this day in England, and, of course, ought not to be used elsewhere by those who would speak correct English.
Again I follow Pickering’s italization. His theory is still entertained by multitudes of American pedagogues. They believe as he did that the natural growth of the language is wild and wicked, and that it should be regulated according to rules formulated in England. To this end they undertake periodical crusades against “bad grammar,” the American scheme of pronunciation, and the general body of Americanisms — in the classroom, by means of hortatory pamphlets and leaflets, and over the air. In 1915 the National Council of Teachers of English, following that hopeful American custom which gave the nation Mothers’ Day, and Safety-First, Paint-Up-Clean-Up and Eat-More-Cheese Weeks, proposed to make the first seven days of November Better-Speech Week. Ten years later the General Federation of Women’s Clubs joined the movement, and for some unknown reason the time was changed to the last week in February. For awhile Better-Speech Week was much discussed in the newspapers, and it is still observed, I believe, in parts of the country. Some of the schoolmarms, despairing of effecting a wholesale reform, concentrated their efforts upon various specific crimes against their canons, and among the subsidiary weeks thus launched were Ain’t-less Week and Final-G Week. They also established a Tag Day, and hung derisory tags on youngsters guilty of such indecencies as “I have got” and “It’s me”68 This missionary effort was not confined to school-children. Efforts were also made to perfect the speech of their parents and of the public in general, and even the newspapers were besought to mend their linguistic ways. In 1925, a Los Angeles schoolmarm went about Southern California inducing women’s clubs to pass the following resolution:
Whereas, we believe that if newspaper comic strips and jokes use English free from grammatical errors (except for decided character rôles) they will become more attractive to many readers, and
Whereas, we believe that this effort on the part of the newspapers will be of invaluable aid in raising the standard of American speech, therefore
Be it resolved, that we request editors of newspapers and comic writers to eliminate grammatical errors in the comic strips and jokes except for decided character rôles.69
The object of attack here, of course, was the grotesque slang that appears from nowhere, has its brief day, and then vanishes. But the American pedagogues, with few exceptions, seem to be opposed also to more decorous Americanisms, and many of them devote themselves to teaching a pronunciation that is quite foreign to the country, and to inculcating grammatical niceties that were concocted during the earnest but innocent days when English grammar was assumed to be a kind of Latin grammar — niceties that have been long since abandoned by the English themselves. The influence of Samuel Johnson is thus still more or less potent in the American public schools, though Noah Webster was denouncing it so long ago as 1789. On this melancholy theme I shall discourse at greater length in Chapter IX.
The higher varieties of gogues are somewhat less naïve, but they nevertheless show a considerable reluctance to deal with American as the living language of a numerous and puissant people, making its own rules as it goes along and well worthy of scientific study. Very few American philologians have specialized in it, and such study of it as has been undertaken has been carried on by amateurs quite as often as by professionals. It is rare for any discussion of it to appear in such journals as Modern Language Notes, Modern Philology, Language, the American Philological Journal, the English Journal, and the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, or for it to be undertaken seriously at the annual meetings of the philological associations.70 Dialect Notes, the first journal to be devoted to it, was not set up until 1890, and American Speech did not follow until 1925. Both have had very meager support. Dialect Notes was launched by the American Dialect Society, which had been organized at Harvard University in 1889, with the late Professor Francis J. Child, the authority on English and Scottish ballads, as its first president.71 It made very slow progress. Though there were, at that time, fully 5,000 teachers of English in the United States, including at least 500 in the colleges,72 it started off with but 140 members, and the publication of the first volume of Dialect Notes, running to 497 pages, dragged through six years. When the second volume was completed, in 1904, the society had 310 members, but many of them failed to pay their dues, and by 1912 successive purges had reduced the roll to 219. The income was then less than $400 a year. By 1926 the membership had grown to 266 and by 1932 the income was $776.38. Neither membership nor income appears to have increased since, for Dialect Notes now comes out only at long intervals, and its average issue is very thin. Yet its files contain a very large amount of invaluable matter, as my frequent references to them will show, and it long offered the only outlet for the work of that small minority of American scholars who took the national language seriously, and gave it scientific study — among them, Drs. Percy W. Long, C. H. Grandgent and E. S. Sheldon of Harvard, E. H. Babbitt of Columbia, George Hempl of Michigan, George T. Flom of Iowa, E. H. Sturtevant of Yale, O. F. Emerson of Western Reserve, C. S. Northrup of Cornell, J. W. Carr of Maine, L. W. Payne, Jr., of Texas, William A. Read of Louisiana, Josiah Combs of Texas Christian, John M. Manly and Allen Walker Reed of Chicago, and Louise Pound of Nebraska.
The work of Dr. Pound has been especially productive, for whereas most of the other members of the Dialect Society have confined their investigations to the regional dialects of American, she and her pupils have studied the general speechways of the country. She took her doctorate at Heidelberg under the distinguished Anglicist, Johannes Hoops, and soon afterward joined the English faculty of the University of Nebraska. Her first contribution to Dialect Notes was published in 1905; thereafter, for twenty years, she or her pupils were represented in almost every issue. In 1925, in association with Dr. Kemp Malone of the Johns Hopkins and Dr. Arthur G. Kennedy of Stanford, she founded American Speech, becoming its first editor. She continued
in that capacity until 1933, when she was succeeded by Dr. William Cabell Greet of Barnard College, Columbia University. American Speech, even more than Dialect Notes, has encouraged the study of American: its files constitute a rich mine of instructive and often very amusing stuff. But it has got but little more support from American teachers of English than its predecessor. Though its first issues contained many articles addressed to them directly, they refused to be interested, and during its later years its pages have been supplied largely by lay students of the language. During its first five years its subscription list never reached 1500 names, and at the beginning of its sixth year it had but 329 subscribers. When Dr. Pound retired in 1933 it was taken over by the Columbia University Press. Today it continues to be published at a loss, though Dr. Greet and his associates make it a very useful journal.73 Beginning as a monthly, it is now a quarterly.
This failure of support has greatly hampered the work of the American Dialect Society. It projected an American Dialect Dictionary immediately after its organization in 1889, and by 1930 its collection of materials embraced more than 30,000 words and phrases. But so far the lack of funds has prevented the completion of the work,74 and it has had to give place to two more recent enterprises, both of which seem to be adequately financed, and promise to give the study of American English great encouragement, and to set it, in combination, upon a scientific foundation. The first is the Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, now going forward at the University of Chicago under the direction of Sir William Craigie, one of the editors of the New English Dictionary (now called the Oxford English Dictionary); the other is the Linguistic Atlas of the United States, in charge of Dr. Hans Kurath of Brown University and sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies. The first fascicle of the former appeared early in 1936, and the first map of the latter shortly afterward. Both will require years for their completion. Sir William and Dr. Kurath are alike of foreign birth, the former being a Scotsman and the latter an Austrian.75
Sir William described the origin of the Dictionary of American English in the English Journal (Chicago) for January, 1926. The dictionaries hitherto published in the United States, he said,
have commonly noted the different usage of the two countries, in respect both of the words and of their pronunciation. In none of these dictionaries, however, has there been any attempt to make the language of the United States the sole, or even main, basis of the matter they contain. Even Webster, although he patriotically called for a “national language” as well as a national government, contented himself, when he published “An American Dictionary of the English Language,” with having cited American authors as well as English. All subsequent dictionaries which have appeared in this country have adhered to the same principle — their American material is merely an addition (sometimes a very restricted addition) to that drawn from English or British sources.… So far as I am aware, this fact had not clearly presented itself to anyone until it occurred to me one day in the Summer of 1924, in Chicago, while I was reading some proofs of the Oxford English Dictionary. I observed that in the case of two or three words beginning with the prefix un- the older quotations (from the Seventeenth Century) were from English sources, while the later (of the Eighteenth Century) were all American. From the evidence it seemed probable that the use of the words had continued later in this country than at home. It then occurred to me that it would be interesting to know how far back the words could be traced in American use; and that thought immediately brought me up against the fact that we had no means of ascertaining this point, for the simple reason that no effort had yet been made to trace the whole vocabulary which had been in use on this side of the ocean from the Seventeenth Century to the present day. It was then a simple matter to draw the natural conclusion that what was required was a new dictionary.76
“As soon as the idea had presented itself to me,” he continued, “I communicated it to Professor [John M.] Manly, [head of the department of English at Chicago], who at once took steps to interest the University of Chicago in the project.” The upshot was that Sir William was made professor of English in the university, and provided with a competent staff of assistants at the cost of the General Education Board. Before sailing for the United States to take up his work, in June, 1925, he said to the London correspondent of the North American Newspaper Alliance:
The United States is now at a period in the national development which corresponds closely to the Elizabethan age in England. It is a period of intellectual creativeness and invention. The extraordinary facility that you, as a people, exhibit in the coining of picturesque and expressive slang is only one of many manifestations of this. I thoroughly approve of American slang. It is often carried to an excess, but on the other hand many of your current colloquial phrases are extremely apt, and win the admiration of even the most strict purist. In America slang gets into general conversation much more widely than in England, and is therefore more likely to win a place in permanent usage. The real test of slang is its utility. If a slang phrase fills a long-felt want it will get into the language. There are some American expressions of comparatively recent vintage which have already been adopted wherever English is spoken, and they are so particularly apt and expressive that one wonders how the idea was expressed before they were invented. One instance of this is the phrase, it’s up to you.
The Dictionary of American English is of course confined to the written language. Its staff has been engaged since 1926 in a laborious search of all available American records, whether printed or in manuscript. While the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary was similarly engaged, from 1859 to 1928, it had the aid of a large corps of volunteer searchers, and some of its most valuable material came from them, but Dr. Craigie and his collaborators, James Root Hulbert, George Watson, M. M. Mathews and Allen Walker Read, have had relatively little such help. In order to keep the dictionary within reasonable bounds its plan had to be made somewhat narrow. According to Dr. Louise Pound,77 it will deal with the following classes of words only:
1. Those descriptive of the physical features of the country, as backwoods, bluff, canyon, prairie.
2. Words connected with the material development of the country, as frame-house, log-cabin, canoe, steamboat, turnpike, railroad.
3. Terms of administration, politics, religion, trade and other activities, as Senate, caucus, Mormon, lumber, elevator.
4. Colloquialisms and slang, so far as they are specially American in origin or in later use.
But the bounds of these classes will be elastic, and not only words and phrases originating in this country will be included, but also, as Sir William Craigie has explained, “every one which has a clear connection with the development of the country and its inhabitants. The most ordinary word may call for insertion on the latter ground, as having not only a real but often a vital connection with the life of the settlers and their descendants.” No words will be included for which records before 1900 do not exist, and examples of the use of admitted words will not be carried beyond 1925. Slang and colloquialisms will be dealt with fully down to 1875, but after that date only terms that have come into literary use will be included. The work will be in no sense a dictionary of slang. Soon or late, said Dr. Craigie in 1927, it “must be supplemented by a dialect dictionary and a slang dictionary; otherwise the record will be either defective or ill balanced.”
The Linguistic Atlas seems to have been first proposed by a committee of the Modern Language Association in 1924, but it owes its actual launching to Dr. E. H. Sturtevant of Yale, who interested the American Council of Learned Societies in the project in 1928. A conference of philologians was held at Yale on August 2 and 3, 1929, in connection with the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America, and on its recommendation the Council appointed a committee to make definite plans. The chairman of this committee was Dr. Kurath, then of Ohio State University, who remains as director of the work, with his headquarters moved to Brown.78 He has a s
taff of seven assistants, headed by Dr. Miles L. Hanley, secretary of the American Dialect Society,79 and the collection of materials is being furthered by other members of the society and by a small number of outside volunteers. The project has received grants from the Carnegie Corporation, the General Education Board and the Rockefeller Foundation. It proposes eventually to publish maps covering the whole country, but so far it has concentrated most of its attention upon New England. The reasons for this are thus stated:
1. The dialects of New England are primary as compared with those of the more Western areas, such as the Ohio region.…
2. New England has striking geographical dialects; the class dialects are perhaps more distinct than in any other part of the country; there are clear urban and rural dialects; there are large elements of the population that have been only recently assimilated or that are in part still unassimilated.
3. The fact that we possess more information regarding the present linguistic situation in New England than we have for any other area will shorten and simplify the important task of selecting the dialect features that are to be recorded in all the communities selected for study.
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