The enormous proliferation of public-schools produced a heavy demand for text-books of grammar, and nearly all of them were written by incompetents who simply followed the worst English models. “The larger part of grammatical instruction,” says Rollo LaVerne Lyman, “remained a slavish verbal repetition of rules and a desperate struggle with complicated parsing formulæ.”1 There were, of course, some grammarians, even so early as the 30s, who saw the futility of this method of instruction, and one of them, Warren Colburn, attempted a more rational grammar-book in 1831,2 but the majority of the pedagogues of the time continued, as Lyman says, to favor “slavish memorizing, nothing more or less,” and grammar remained a horror to schoolboys until the end of the Nineteenth Century. In 1870 the rambunctious Richard Grant White fluttered the pedagogical dovecotes by announcing the discovery that English really had no grammar at all,3 but White was too pedantic a fellow to follow his own lead and during the rest of his life (he died in 1885) he devoted himself mainly to formulating canons of “correct” English which greatly aided the schoolma’am in afflicting her pupils.
The new philological learning brought to the United States by Whitney was a long while taking root. Even when, after fifteen years at Yale, he founded the American Philological Association, it was quickly engulfed by intransigent followers of Varro and Priscian, Posidonius and Apollonius Dyscolus, and the Sanskrit grammarians of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries B.C. When the Modern Language Association was launched at the new Johns Hopkins in 1883 it met a fate even more grisly, for the young college professors who flocked into it passed over the living language with a few sniffs and threw all their energies into flatulent studies of the influence of Lamb on Hazlitt, the dates of forgotten plays of the Seventeenth Century, the changes made by Donne, Skelton and Cowper in the texts of forgotten poems, and such-like pseudo-intellectual gymnastics.1 Not until the Linguistic Society followed in 1924 was there any organized attack upon language as it is, not as it might be or ought to be, and even the Linguistic Society has given a great deal more attention to Hittite and other such fossil tongues than to the American spoken by 140,000,000-odd free, idealistic and more or less human Americans, including all the philologians themselves, at least when they are in their cups or otherwise off guard. On the level of the common, or dirt pedagogues2 the notion that language should be studied objectively, like any other natural phenomenon, made even slower progress, and it was not until 1908 that any effort was made in that direction. That effort, at the start, took the form of trying to find out just what was in the common speech – in other words, to get together the makings of a purely descriptive and scientific grammar.3 But in a little while the more intelligent inquirers – most of them not pedagogues, but philologians – began to ask themselves what validity there was, if any, in some of the rules inculcated by the schoolma’am, and to seek light in the speech habits of unquestionably cultured Americans. They found, as might have been expected, that few of the latter took the rules very seriously. Many used it is me habitually, and with no thought of sin. Others used who for whom in the so-called objective case. Yet others paid little if any heed to the delicate English distinctions between shall and will.
One of the first investigators to follow this line of inquiry was Sterling Andrus Leonard, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, who had begun to flog the pedants in 1918, when he was still a young interne at Columbia.4 In 1930 or thereabout he undertook to find out what was really good usage by asking a committee of linguists, teachers of speech, authors, editors and business men, 229 in number, to pronounce their judgment upon 230 usages, ranging all the way from forms endorsed even by purists to forms seldom encountered outside the talk of baseball players and policemen. His report, published by the National Council of Teachers of English after his death,1 made a sensation in pedagogical circles and was very influential in reorienting the traditional approach to English. It showed that at least 75% of the experts in linguistics approved as regards, none-are, all dressed up, go slow, I don’t know if, only before the verb, it is me, who are you looking for?, the reason was because, invite whoever you like, to loan, but what, I wish I was, every one-they, providing for provided, and awfully as a general intensive, and that between 25% and 75% of them favored proven, four first, gotten, either of these three, I can’t seem, older than me, neither-are, these kind, most anybody, it is liable to snow, in search for, ain’t I?, don’t in the singular, sure as an adverb, like for as if, off of, due to for on account of, some, little ways and different than. All these forms had been banned by the school books for years, and likewise by the innumerable books of “correct” English for adults. Two years after Leonard’s study appeared one of his students and successors at Wisconsin, Robert C. Pooley, supported its conclusions with examples from the historical dictionaries and the accepted belles lettres of the language, and concluded with a recommendation that the books be given a drastic overhauling.2 Three of his specific proposals were:
Whenever traditional grammatical classification ignores or misrepresents current usage, it must be changed.
When custom has established two forms or usages on approximately equal standing, both must be presented.
When current established usage conflicts with traditional rules, the rules must be modified or discarded.
A little while afterward Walter Barnes, of New York University, undertook to check the Leonard findings by a reëxamination of the locutions they covered, especially those set down as “illiterate” or “disputable.” His referees and associates were students in his own seminar, but they also examined various printed authorities. In general they agreed with Leonard’s jury, but in a number of cases they raised a given word or phrase a grade or more. Thus complected, which appeared as “illiterate” in the Leonard study, became “disputable” in that of Barnes, good and cold was lifted from “disputable” to “established,” and data in the singular all the way from “illiterate” to “established.” Barnes also submitted the locutions marked “disputable” on the Leonard list to a jury of 52 radio announcers, 29 writers and 40 business executives, and tabulated their votes. A majority of them approved to fix in the sense of to repair, the one-he combination, in back of (often denounced by English purists as an abhorrent Americanism), right in the sense of direct, I can’t seem, dove for dived, going some, good and cold, and to aggravate in the sense of to vex.1 Said the Barnes group in its summary:
Certain self-appointed saviors of “English undefiled” have taken it upon themselves to put a stop to the evolution of the language, and to preserve it intact for future generations. They disregard the fact that it was far from a perfect tongue at the time from which their status quo begins.2
Between 1933 and 1937 Albert H. Marckwardt and Fred G. Walcott undertook a further study of the Leonard material3 and found that a large percentage of the usages marked “disputable” were to be found in English and American authors of high rank, and that many of the rest were recognized as allowable in colloquial speech by generally accepted authorities. They unearthed neither-are from Johnson, Cowper, Southey and Ruskin, like as in “Do it like he tells you” from Southey and William Morris, try and from Milton and Coleridge, only before the verb from Dryden and Tennyson, slow as an adverb from Byron and Thackeray, and I wish I was from Defoe, Swift, Fielding, Jane Austen, Byron, Marryat, Thackeray, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith and Oscar Wilde. Their conclusion was:
Grammar is seen to be not something final and static but merely the organized description or codification of the actual speech habits of educated men. If these habits change, grammar itself changes, and textbooks must follow suit. To preserve in our textbooks requirements no longer followed by the best current speakers is not grammatical but ungrammatical. It makes of grammar not a science but a dogma.1
It is hard for grammarians, who have always been regarded as the archetypal pedagogues, to yield up this dogmatism, but in late years they have shown a considerable tendency to do so. That tendency, in trut
h, is not altogether new, for the once famous John Horne Tooke made an effort to clear away a lot of ancient grammatical rubbish in his “Diversions of Purley,” the first volume of which was published in 1786, and some of his ideas were borrowed by Noah Webster in “A Philosophical and Practical Grammar of the English Language” in 1807,2 and by William B. Fowle in “The True English Grammar” in 1827.3 But it has not been until comparatively recently that these more or less amateurish reformers have got any substantial support from the professionals. The first break came when some of the latter began to turn their eyes from the written language to the spoken language, and to observe that what was true of the former, grammatically speaking, was not always true of the latter. The second came when others made a serious effort to find out just what rules, if any, governed the speech of the vulgar, and to consider whether those rules, at least in some cases, were not quite as “good” as those that had long adorned the grammar-books. The ensuing debate became a hot one and is still going on.
The pioneer study of errors in the speech of a typical group of American school children was made by G. M. Wilson, superintendent of schools at Connersville, Ind., in 1908.1 It was followed by a similar study of the speech of school children in Boise, Idaho, by C. S. Meek, made during the years 1909–15,2 and by a much more extensive investigation in the public schools of Kansas City, directed by W. W. Charters.3 Many other local studies followed, and in 1930 one was begun on a national scale, directed by L. J. O’Rourke.4 The result was the accumulation of a great deal of interesting (and often racy) information about the actual speech-ways of Americans,5 but most of the grammarians were reluctant to grant the fair and indeed inevitable implications of their studies. This was especially true of O’Rourke, whose somewhat timorous conclusions were criticized sharply, immediately after they were published, by Janet Rankin Aiken, of Columbia University, a woman grammarian of great originality and independence.1 This was her conclusion:
What the present writer wishes is that some competent scholar would take the O’Rourke tabulations and analyze them to show just where the English language stands today in respect to the wild flowers in its wood, the uncultivated usages which some of us find sweeter and more interesting than all the geraniums ever grown in pots. The competent scholar will then tell of his findings, not in the weary, flat reportese of the average survey, but in an English which is itself worth imitating as a model of freshness and flexibility.2
Later studies have come into greater accord with Dr. Aiken’s demands, notably the one reported in “American English Grammar,” by Charles Carpenter Fries.3 The material used consisted of 2,000 letters from average Americans received by various departments of the Federal government at Washington. Fries recognized the difficulty lying in the fact that this material was all written, not spoken, but he used various ingenious devices to get rid of it as far as possible, and in his report he sought to separate his examples into three categories – Standard English, Common English, and Vulgar English. He found that what he called Common English was mainly a mixture of Standard and Vulgar, with few distinct characters of its own, so he gave it relatively little attention. His conclusions were conservative. He did not advocate any wholesale abandonment of the traditional grammar, but he called for a more intensive study of the language as it is, and advocated training pupils in that study. “Grammars with rules that were in part the rules of Latin grammar and in part the results of ‘reason,’ ” he said, “did not and could not provide the tools of an effective language program.… To be really effective a program must prepare the pupil for independent growth, and the only possible means of accomplishing that end is to lead him to become an intelligent observer of language usage.” This, of course, was somewhat vague, but it at least turned its back upon the cock-sure dogmatism of the old-time grammarians. It was not the long-awaited realistic grammar of the American common speech, but it brought that grammar a few inches nearer.
The movement to make the spoken language rather than the written language the objective of grammatical study seems to have been launched by E. H. Sturtevant, later eminent as a Hittite scholar, in 1917. “Whether we think of the history of human speech in general or of the linguistic experience of the individual speaker,” he wrote, “spoken language is the primary phenomenon, and writing is only a more or less imperfect reflection of it.”1 This lead was followed by the English phonologist, Harold E. Palmer, in 1924,2 and by various other writers on language during the years afterward, including the Dane, Otto Jespersen, probably the most profound student of English of the last half century.3 Palmer explained in his introduction to his book that what he meant by spoken English was “that variety which is generally used by educated people in the course of ordinary conversation or when writing letters to intimate friends.” He went on:
One of the most widely diffused of the many linguistic illusions current in the world is the belief that each language possesses a “pure” or “grammatical” form, a form which is intrinsically “correct,” which is independent of usage, which exists, which has always existed, but which is now in danger of losing its existence.… [The purist] is generally perfectly unconscious of the forms of speech which he uses himself. He warns the unsuspecting foreigner against what he calls “vulgarisms,” and says to him, “Don’t ever use such vulgar forms as don’t or won’t: you won’t hear educated people using them,” or “Never use a preposition to finish a sentence with,” or he may say, “I don’t know who you learn English from, but you are always using the word who instead of whom.” Or we may hear him say, “Oh, I’ve got something else to tell you: don’t say I’ve got instead of I have.”4
This movement against the traditional authoritarianism has not gone, of course, unchallenged. As I have recorded in AL4, p. 51, the National Council of Teachers of English established a Better-Speech Week in 1915, and it afflicted the schoolma’am and her pupils for nearly twenty years afterward. It finally blew up, but there remain respectable philologians who believe that the teaching of orthodox grammar is still useful, and ought not to be abandoned until the reformers perfect a coherent and effective substitute. One of these defenders of the old order is Dr. Reed Smith, dean of the graduate school of the University of North Carolina, who said in a paper published in 1938:
The opponents of grammar have been outspoken against it, frankly and without apology. Let its advocates be equally outspoken in its favor. Unless future development and more convincing evidence prove that it is best to give up the teaching of grammar in whole or in large part, and until the opponents of grammar have a satisfactory substitute to offer, it is time for those who favor it to stop apologizing and begin fighting back.1
Tradition is also upheld by most of the authors of books on “correct” English, and by all save a few of the sages who answer language questions in the newspapers. The imbecilities of both groups have been exposed frequently, but to very little effect.2 The schoolma’am clings to the same unhappy conservatism,3 and so does the college tutor who wrestles, in Freshman English, with students who come up from the high-schools using between you and I.4 Says Curme, in one of the papers just cited: “Our school grammarians are not scholars. They do not inform themselves upon the subjects they teach. They are helpless if the little antiquated school grammars do not give them information.… I do not expect to see a much better condition in my lifetime.” The hardest thing for these peewee pedants to understand is that language is never uniform – that different classes and even different ages speak it differently. What would be proper in a radio message-bringer “soaring in the high region of his fancies, with his garland and singing robes about him,” would be only ridiculous in a schoolboy playing with his fellows; indeed it would be quite as ridiculous in the message-bringer himself, crooning to a manicure-girl or jawing his wife. The American of a Harvard professor speaking ex cathedra is seldom the same as the American of a Boston bartender or a Mississippi evangelist. Let the daughter of a hog-sticker in the Chicago stockyards go home talking like t
he book and her ma will fan her fanny. “Substandard students,” said Thomas A. Knott, general editor of the Webster dictionaries, in 1934, “are not ‘making mistakes.’ They are simply talking or writing their own language.” Knott suggested that, to some extent at least, the failure of pedagogy to teach them standard English might be lessened by thinking of standard English as a foreign language, and teaching it by the devices found effective in teaching French, German and Spanish.1 But so far as I know, this proposal has never been put to trial.
In the General Explanations prefaced to the NED2 Dr. James A. H. Murray, the chief editor thereof, undertook to show the interrelations of the various levels of English by means of a diagram. In the center he put what he called “the common words of the language” – the “nucleus or central mass of many thousand words whose Anglicity is unquestioned, the great majority at once literary and colloquial.” Above this domain of the general and almost universal he put that of the literary language, with its greatly expanded vocabulary and tight grammar, and underneath he put colloquial speech, with its frequent counter-words and free use of outlaw idioms. Running out from this group he showed various branches or offshoots – that of the regional dialects, that of slang, that of technical language, and so on. In 1927 Sterling Andrus Leonard and H. Y. Moffett made this a little clearer by substituting two intersecting circles for Murray’s somewhat crude diagram. One circle was labeled “formal or literary” and the other “informal or colloquial.” Where they overlapped there was a common area, perhaps amounting to one-third of each, to indicate the usages appearing in both. Outside the circle were places for the smaller and less important categories – archaic forms of the language, slang and argot, technical vocabularies, dialects, and so on. They defined the four principal divisions as follows:
American Language Supplement 2 Page 49
