How many such monstrosities were set afloat during the uproar no one will ever know, for many of them, like the pews at the public teat that they designated, had their names changed frequently. On April 7, 1943, the Hon. Earl C. Michener, a statisticsminded congressman from Michigan, filled nearly two columns of the Congressional Record with the names and their abbreviations of eighty-five high calibre lancets for bleeding taxpayers, ranging from the Agricultural Adjustment Agency (AAA) to the War Shipping Administration (WSA).2 Twelve days later the Hon. Walter E. Brehm, of Ohio, produced evidence3 that the number had grown to ninety-two, and even while his list was being printed more were coming off the White House assembly line.4 These, remember, were only major agencies, and the longest abbreviations recorded had only five letters, e.g., OSFCW (Office of Solid Fuels Coördinator for War), and PWRCB (President’s War Relief Control Board). No wonder the newspapers and press associations began dropping the periods, and making all other possible condensations.5 Thus the W.A.A.C. of 1942 became the W.A.C. of 19436 and then the WAC or Wac. So early as 1939, in fact, the slaughter of periods had begun, and when J. S. Pope, managing editor of the Atlanta Journal, polled his fellow-editors on the subject in that year he found that the majority of them were in favor of it.7 The New Deal saviors of humanity had barely got started by then, but there were plenty of other troublesome abbreviations, and the editors advocated taking the periods out of all of them, e.g., CIO, TVA, CCC, GOP and even AFL. “The YMCA informs us,” wrote Lindsey Hoben of the Milwaukee Journal, “that it often drops the period nowadays and sees no possible objection to it. Neither DAR nor WCTU has protested our style.”1
Meanwhile, the habit of making more or less pronounceable words of the new abbreviations, examples of which were provided by the Russian loan Ogpu2 and the German Nazi and Gestapo, also began to spread. The English had already made a beginning in World War I with Anzac for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and Dora for Defense of the Realm Act; in World War II they followed with Mew for Ministry of Economic Warfare, Waaf for a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force Service; Wren for a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, and many another. The last-named, in fact, actually became official, and one of the ranks in the force, by the end of the war, was that of Leading Wren.3
1 The Declaration of Independence: the Evolution of the Text, by Julian P. Boyd; Princeton, 1945, pp. 19–21.
2 The English Restoration took place in 1660; George II ascended the throne in 1727.
3 Franklin’s Vocabulary, by Lois Margaret MacLaurin; Garden City (N.Y.), 1929, p. 44. In this same letter Franklin denounced also the “fancy” that had lately “induced some Printers to use the short round s instead of the long one.” The long s died hard. In Vol. I of the Monthly Magazine and American Review for 1800, Jan.-June, the longs and the shorts were still fighting it out.
4 Private communication, Oct. 28, 1945.
5 In its Sept. issue, p. 114, it put dr. before the name of Franklin himself, dead only a year! See AL4, pp. 413–14, for the use of baron, colonel, etc., before proper names by the Cambridge History of English Literature. Mr. Theodore E. Norton, librarian of Lafayette College, calls my attention to the fact that this is standard practise in preparing American library cards.
1 But Abraham Lincoln, in a letter written during the early part of the Winter of 1864–5, was still using small letters for the names of the days of the week, though he wrote President.
2 That is, in caps and small caps. This custom survives on the editorial pages of the New York Times, the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Minneapolis Journal and various other old-fashioned newspapers. I am indebted here to Messrs. Carl B. Costello, of Duluth, Minn.; Douglas McPherson, of Philadelphia, and Theodore W. Bozarth, of Mount Holly, N. J.
3 Supplement I, pp. 618–26.
4 I am indebted here to Mr. R. E. Swartwout, of Cambridge.
5 This leads to occasional uncouthness, e.g., St. James’s-street, Gray’s Inn-rd. and Red Lion-square. I am indebted here to Mr. Leslie Charteris, of Weybridge.
1 Capital M, by Robert C. Morrow, April 7, p. 68.
2 Matthew XXVI, 26–28. The text quoted is that of the Douay Bible.
3 In French, as the Dictionary notes (seventh edition, 1933, p. 84), the order is 5 Juin 1903 and in German 5 Juni 1903. It will be noted that no comma appears after the name of the month.
4 I turn, for example, to the London Times, Aug. 12, 1946, and find August 12 1946 (no comma after 12) in the flagstaff of the paper, Aug. 12, 1944 in an In Memoriam notice, September 14, 1946 in a legal notice, Aug. 11 (no year) in the date-lines of many news dispatches, and July 13, 1946 in a wedding announcement, though 31st August, 1946 appears in another legal notice.
5 New Yorker, Sept. 16, 1944, p. 11; American Notes & Queries, June, 1946, p. 40.
6 I am told by a correspondent that when Rear Admiral Samuel McGowan, ret. (1870–1934), formerly paymaster-general of the Navy, became chief highway commissioner of his native South Carolina he ordered the use of 8 October, 1926 by his subordinates. But they went back to the usual American order after he left office.
7 Revised edition, Jan., 1945, p. 139.
8 Style Manual of the Department of State; Washington, 1937, p. 215. For discussions of the War Department order see The Pleasures of Publishing (a weekly press-sheet published by the Columbia University Press), July 15 and July 29, 1946.
1 Authors’ & Printers’ Dictionary, seventh edition; London, 1933, p. 370.
2 AL4, p. 502, n. 4.
3 New York, 1939.
4 Reginald Skelton, in Modern English Punctuation; London, 1933, p. 65, says that tomorrow is also “in regular use” in England. The Authors’ & Printers’ Dictionary, however, still ordains to-morrow, and likewise to-day.
1 Some of the inevitable inconsistencies in Miss Ball’s scheme are pointed out by Robert J. Menner in Compounding, American Speech, Dec., 1939, pp. 300–02.
2 Unhyphenated American, Nation, Sept. 5, 1942, pp. 194–95.
3 I add sweetpotato from the Congressional Record, April 2, 1946, p. 3050.
4 The inconsistencies in Webster 1934 are reviewed by Miss Ball, pp. 9–11, and also in Note on Websterian Orthography, Prairie Schooner, Summer, 1946, p. 152. See also Hyphenation of Compound Words, by Arthur G. Kennedy, Words, March, 1938, pp. 36–38. H. W. Fowler’s ideas on the subject, first set forth in S.P.E. Tract No. VI, 1921, pp. 3–13, are to be found in his Modern English Usage; Oxford, 1926, pp. 243–48. A discussion of the differences between English and American printers’ practises in the division of words at the ends of lines is in Word Division, by Kenneth Sisam, S.P.E. Tract No. XXXIII, 1929, pp. 441–42.
5 It survives, however, in the names of many colleges named after saints, e.g., St. Mary’s, Winona, Minn., though it may be dropped when it would be inconvenient, e.g., St. Francis, Brooklyn, and St. Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana. A correspondent of American Speech (April, 1937, p. 121) calls attention to the fact that when the sex of the students is indicated in a college name the singular woman’s is commonly used for a college for females and the plural men’s for one for males. This, of course, is because man’s would sound incongruous. But why not women’s?
6 This practise is discussed by Steven T. Byington in Certain Fashions in Commas and Apostrophes, American Speech, Feb., 1945, pp. 22–27, and also the habit, common among newspaper headline writers, of printing a series of nouns without any and at all, e.g., Committee Hears Protests of Millionaire, Educator, Philanthropist.
1 Modern English Punctuation, by Reginald Skelton; London, 1933, pp. 41–47. Topics of the Times, New York Times, July 13, 1942.
2 p. 121.
3 p. 203.
4 The Century’s Printer on the Century Type, Century, Dec., 1895, pp. 794–96.
5 Still the English term for what we call quotation marks or quotes.
6 The Text-quote, by Ernest Boll, American Notes & Queries, June, 1941, p. 36.
1 Style Manual, revised edition, Jan., 1945, pp. 21 an
d 145.
2 Many papers, and perhaps most, have no italic linotype matrices. Instead they use black-face.
3 The reader interested in the history of English punctuation will find nourishment to his taste in Historical Backgrounds of Elizabethan and Jacobean Punctuation Theory, by Walter J. Ong, S. J., Publications of the Modern Language Association, June, 1944, pp. 349–60; The Punctuation of Shakespeare’s Printers, by Raymond Macdonald Alden, the same, Sept., 1924, pp. 557–80, and Shakespeare’s Punctuation, by P. Alexander, Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. XXXI, 1945. So far as I know, there is no history of American punctuation. Down to a century ago it was marked by a heavy overuse of commas, now happily abandoned. For the present practise in series see The Serial Comma Before and and or, by R. J. McCutcheon, American Speech, Oct., 1940, pp. 250–54.
1 The varying practise of American magazine and newspaper was reviewed by Mamie Meredith in The Plural of Bus, American Speech, Aug., 1930, pp. 487–90. See also Buses or Busses, a powerful argument for the latter, by C. W. L. Johnson, New York Herald Tribune, editorial page, Dec. 6, 1940.
2 Attorney-Generals, Jan., 1939.
3 The Irregularities of English, S.P.E. Tract No. XLVIII, 1937, p. 287.
4 The Plural of Nouns Ending in -th, by C. T. Onions, S.P.E. Tract No. LXI, 1943, pp. 19–28.
5 Those Sporting Plurals; Washington, March, 1939. See also Predators Killing Off Game, by Ed Tyng, New York Sun, Jan. 25, 1946, in which both fox and foxes appear. Mr. Tyng, on inquiry, informed me (private communication, Jan. 30, 1946) that it is “increasingly common usage among anglers and hunters” to use the singular of fox and skunk in the plural, “as well as deer, quail and grouse.” He said, however, that the singulars of bear, rabbit, pheasant and squirrel were not so used. He went on: “Fishermen use trout, bass, perch, smelt, pickerel, pike, bluefish, shad, etc., whether referring to one or many. Muskellunge (the name is spelled four or more ways) is used as both singular and plural, but the diminutive, muskie or musky, always becomes muskies in the plural. An angler never reports a catch of eel or flounder; it is always eels and flounders.” In a report of George N. Dale, a high dignitary of the Newspaper Publishers Association, Editor & Publisher, Jan. 12, 1946, p. 8, I find “all mechanical craft” used twice. The use of license, molasses, etc., as plurals will be discussed in Chapter IX, Section 4.
1 Revised edition, March, 1933, pp. 55–61.
2 Style Manual, revised edition, Jan., 1945, p. 93.
3 Current Abbreviations; New York, 1945.
4 A List of Abbreviations Commonly Used in the U.S.S.R., compiled by George Z. Patrick; Berkeley (Calif.), 1937. This ran to 124 pp.
5 A Dictionary of Abbreviations, With Especial Attention to War-Time Abbreviations, by Eric Partridge, “with the able assistance of several other victims”; London, 1942.
1 EIDEBOEW ABEW, Aug. 7, 1943.
2 pp. A1805–06.
3 Congressional Record, April 19, 1943.
4 When the United Nations organization was set up it began to add to the number, and by Oct. 21, 1946 its Weekly Bulletin was constrained to print a glossary. It included ECITO (European Central Inland Transport Organization), PICAO (Provisional International Civil Aviation Organization), UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and WHO (World Health Organization). The end, of course, is by no means yet.
5 William Hickey, the Walter Winchell of England, began reducing U.S.A. to USA in 1936, and his paper, the London Daily Express, on Aug. 29 of that year, announced that it would follow him. “We’ve dropped full-points in USA,” it said, “because there’s just no need for them; they’re lumber in the way of a taut, streamlined style.”
6 This change was made by the War Department when the WAAC became an actual part of the Army, the word Auxiliary being dropped.
7 Shop Talk at Thirty, by Arthur Robb, Editor & Publisher, April 22, 1939, p. 84. On March 29, 1947, in the same, p. 68, Robb reported that that majority had become almost unanimity.
1 In its issue for May, 1933, p. 83, the Delta Kappa Epsilon Quarterly had been constrained to explain “for the benefit of recent initiates (and of some older dogs who have difficulty in learning new tricks)” that its name was made up of three Greek letters, and that when it was “written in English … there should be no periods after the letters.”
2 Defined as Unified State Political Department in a List of Abbreviations Commonly Used in the U.S.S.R., hitherto cited.
3 Bits of Words, London Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 30, 1943.
IX
THE COMMON SPEECH
1. OUTLINES OF ITS GRAMMAR
My call for a comprehensive inductive grammar of the common speech of the United States, first made in a newspaper article in 1910 and repeated in piteous tones in AL1 in 1919, has never been answered by anyone learned in the tongues, though in the meantime philologists have given us searching studies of such esoteric Indian languages as Cuna, Chitamacha, Yuma and Klamath-Modoc, not to mention Eskimo.1 There has even been an excellent grammar of Pennsylvania German, a decayed patois standing much further from standard High German than the American of an interstate truck-driver stands from the English of Walter Pater.2 But while the wait has been going on for a savant willing to chart the vernacular in the grand manner there have at least been some approaches to the business by the writers on regional dialects – for example, Vance Randolph and Oma Stanley. Randolph, whose researches into the speech of the Ozark hillbillies have been noticed in Chapter VII, Section 4, points out that, in its grammatical structure, this speech is quite close to the underprivileged American norm,3 and Stanley, whose examination of the dialect of East Texas has been dealt with in the same place, reports that “it is doubtful that anything will be found” there “that is not common to less well educated speakers everywhere in America.”4 Also, there has been an oblique attempt upon the common speech by I. E. Clark, who sought his materials, not in the field but in the pages of that incomparable reporter, Ring Lardner.1 Says Clark:
The essence of Lardner’s grammar is facility. His characters, like a great number of Americans, do not distinguish between the forms for the nominative and accusative case of pronouns, the preterite and past participle of the verb, and the comparative and superlative of the adjective.… The environment of the average [American] during his early years did not provide all the niceties of cultured English. School teachers tried desperately to improve his grammar, but they were unskilled in psychology, and their method was unconvincing.… He accepted the language spoken by his family, and by the friends he made before he started school. It was simple, it had lost useless forms, it permitted use of the handiest word. The language of the English teachers, enforced by the psychology of the Department of Education, only confused him.
That the grammar taught by these poor Holoferneses, male and female, is full of absurdities engendered by the medieval attempt to force English into the Procrustean bed of Latin was recognized by Noah Webster so long ago as 1789. “The most difficult task now to be performed by the advocates of pure English,” he wrote in his “Dissertations on the English Language,”2 “is to restrain the influence of men learned in Greek and Latin, but ignorant of their own tongue, who have labored to reject much good English because they have not understood the original construction of the language.” And then: “They seem not to consider that grammar is formed on language, and not language on grammar. Instead of examining to find what the English language is they endeavor to show what it ought to be according to their rules.”3 Thomas Jefferson, with his invariable common sense, supported this on the plane of vocabulary in a letter to John Adams in 1820:
Dictionaries are but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage. Society is the workshop in which new ones are elaborated. When an individual uses a new word, if ill-formed, it is rejected in society; if well formed, adopted, and after due time, laid up in the depository of dictionaries.
Unhappily, Webster’s theory of the divine origin of l
anguage interfered with his excellent attempt to set up a truly inductive grammar, and when he passed from that theory to his doctrine of analogies he began to give considerable countenance to the pedants who sought to show what the language ought to be.1 These pedants had the floor unchallenged throughout the first half of the Nine-teenth Century, and their influence upon the American schoolma’am was enormous. Nothing was known at that time about the psychology of speech, and the discoveries in linguistics that were being made in Europe did not penetrate to the Republic until after 1850, when they were brought home from Tübingen and Berlin by William Dwight Whitney (1827–94). An Englishman, Robert Gordon Latham (1812–88), had raised some pother in the 40s by proclaiming that “in language whatever is is right,” but he got no attention in this country, and so late as 1870 a favorite American authority, George P. Marsh,2 was misunderstanding and denouncing him, though even Marsh was constrained to admit by that time that “the ignorance of grammarians” was “a frequent cause of the corruption of language.”
American Language Supplement 2 Page 48
