1. Formally correct English, appropriate chiefly for serious and important occasions, whether in speech or writing; usually called “literary English.”
2. Fully acceptable English for informal conversation, correspondence, and all other writing of well-bred ease; not wholly appropriate for occasions of literary dignity; “standard, cultivated, colloquial English.”
3. Commercial, foreign, scientific or other technical uses, limited in comprehensibility, not used outside their particular area by cultivated speakers; “trade or technical English.”
4. Popular or illiterate speech, not used by persons who wish to pass as cultivated, save to represent uneducated speech, or to be jocose; here taken to include slang or argot, and dialect forms not admissible to the standard or cultivated area; usually called “vulgar English,” but with no implication necessarily of the current meaning of vulgar; “naif, popular, or uncultivated English.”1
Two observations on this summary by its authors are worth recording. The first is that the levels of English are, to a large extent, social levels – that they indicate status by reflecting environment and education. The second is that “popular or illiterate speech is frequently just as clear and vigorous as more cultivated language.” The former observation had been made long before by Ellis, Wyld and other English authorities, and is often repeated by lay writers on speechways.2 The fact it exhibits is perhaps largely responsible for the persistence with which the outworn rules of “correct” English are rammed into the bewildered young by schoolma’ams and the lesser varieties of college pedagogues. The overwhelming majority of such poor quacks come from the lower cultural levels, and take a fierce and perhaps pardonable pride in the linguistic arcanum they have acquired, for it testifies to their improvement in status. If they issued from a more secure and tolerant social class they would be less doctrinaire, but with the ten-cent store and the filling-station barely escaped they are naturally eager to dig in. The easy way to improve their fitness would be to recruit them from better sources, but that would be as impossible, practically speaking, as trying to improve the race of washerwomen by recruiting them from café society. How the nervous vigilance of such fugitives from the folk produces frequent absurdities in speech has been amusingly described by Robert J. Menner, of Yale,1 who shows that I have saw and its analogues were probably introduced into the American vulgate by schoolma’ams over-eager to eradicate I seen. Their excess of zeal convinced their alarmed customers that saw was elegant and seen incurably abominable, so a substitution was made across the whole board.2
The second observation of Leonard and Moffett supports their first. They say:
It is not correct, as we have often done, to tell a boy who says “I didn’t see no dog” that he has stated he did see a dog. His statement is clear and unequivocal. What we can tell him is that he has made a gross social faux pas, that he has said something which will definitely declass him, causing cultivated people to say “Who fetched that boy up?” as Mrs. Ruggles put it. Ungrammatical expressions are very rarely unclear. In fact they are often clearer and more forceful than their cultivated equivalents.3
To this Robert A. Hall, Jr., of Brown University, adds:
In practical terms, if you say it ain’t me instead of it is not I, or I seen him instead of I saw him, you will not be invited to tea again, or will not make a favorable impression on your department head and get the promotion you want.… [But] in itself, and apart from all considerations of social favor, one form of speech is just as good as another: I seen him has exactly the same meaning and is just as useful as I saw him, and there is of course no ethical “right” and “wrong” or “good” and “bad” involved. In many cases, however, certain forms are looked on with displeasure by certain people, often including those who are most influential. A complete description of the forms should, of course, include this fact; when we are telling others about the English language, for example, we need to describe the variation between he did it and he done it, and then to add: “If you say he done it some of your listeners will consider you beneath them in social status, and will be less inclined to favor you than if you said he did it.” … It should be added that the choice of forms to be favored or disfavored varies from one social stratum to another. It is just as bad a break to say it is not I among workmen (who will accuse you of “talking like a school teacher”) as it is to say it ain’t me among school teachers (who will accuse you of “talking like a workman”).1
The power of such social compulsions was analyzed by Carl G. F. Franzén, of Indiana University, as an incident to a study of speech levels made by him and his students between 1929 and 1933.2 He concluded that “the only force which influences an individual to speak a better type of English than that to which he is accustomed is not the teacher in the schoolroom but the associates on the new level which he is trying to reach.”3 Robert C. Pooley, writing in 1937, stressed the fact, already noted, that a given individual frequently passes, under differing circumstances, from one level to another, and that sometimes his swing is very wide. The most illiterate speaker, he pointed out, is usually able, on occasion, to speak what passes for “good standard English,” and even the most careful speaker occasionally descends to the lower levels. Of these levels Pooley distinguished six, to wit, the illiterate, the homely, the informal standard, the formal standard, the literary, and the technical.4 The second he described as follows:
It often has a slightly quaint or old-fashioned cast to it and displays, in many of its specific forms, the survival of words and idioms once widely used but now dropped from standard speech. It is heard in rural homes (excluding foreign influences), in the shops and homes of small towns, and among the older natives of large cities. In fact, it is so universal that few people in the United States escape its influence entirely, including all but a small portion of school teachers.
Franzén and his associates, in their search for material, examined current dialect stories and popular plays,5 and recorded locutions heard in railroad and bus stations, on the radio,6 in the courts, and from “after-dinner speakers, preachers, lecturers and politicians.” They might have found even better grist for their mill in popular songs and the comic strips.1 Sigmund Spaeth, in a paper on the language of the former,2 has shown that “bad grammar” has been their tradition for many years. Paul Dresser, author of the immortal “Banks of the Wabash” and brother to Theodore Dreiser the novelist, used the right pronoun in the title of his “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me,” but in the text he indulged himself in “Remember I was once a girl like she.” All old-timers will recall “He Don’t Belong to the Regulars; He’s Just a Volunteer,” “Just Because She Made Them Goo-Goo Eyes,” and the refrain of “Frankie and Johnnie”: “He done her wrong.”3 “A song writer,” says Spaeth, “would hardly dare to use whom in a sentence, even if he knew it was correct. Such things are just unsingable.… ‘Who do you love?’ would lose all its enticing quality if it were made grammatically correct.”4
426. [The vulgar American’s vocabulary is much larger than his linguistic betters commonly assume. They labor under a tradition that the lowly manage to get through life with a few hundred or a few thousand words.] This nonsense seems to have been set afloat by the famous Anglo-German philologist, Max Müller (1823–1900).5 It still survives in handbooks of “correct” English, but there is no truth in it whatsoever. “The complete vocabulary of any full (not minimum or pidgin) language,” says Robert A. Hall, Jr., “regardless of the cultural level of its speakers, is at least 20,000 to 25,000 words.”1 This is borne out by the anthropologist, A. L. Kroeber, who has been able to find 27,000 words in the vocabulary of the Aztec Nahuatl, and 20,000 in that of the Maya.2
It is not to be argued, of course, that any individual speaker of a language uses or even knows every word in it, but by the same token it must be borne in mind that no investigator, however competent and assiduous, can be expected to unearth all of them. Indeed, in the case of highly sophisticated languages, with machi
nery for inventing or taking in indefinite numbers of new words, it is impossible for even the most expert lexicographers to make complete reports. This is shown in English by the wide differences among them. Noah Webster’s first dictionary of 1806 listed 28,000 words, the largest vocabulary assembled up to that time, but when he undertook his larger dictionary of 1828 he increased the number to 70,000. His successors kept on discovering more and more words, and the Webster’s New International of today lists more than 550,000. Meanwhile, the Century Dictionary, in its final form, listed 530,000; the Standard, 455,000, and the NED, without its Supplement, 414,825.3 These figures, of course, include combinations, and Robert L. Ramsay has argued plausibly4 that many such combinations are really only variants, and should not be listed separately. Ramsay believes that the total number of different words in English is actually “something like 250,000” and that “over 50,000 of these are obsolete.” He says that the best German dictionary lists 71,750 simple words and 112,954 compounds, or 184,704 in all, and that the figures reported for other languages are: French, 93,032; Spanish, 70,683; Italian, 69,642; Latin, 51,686; ancient Greek, 96,438 and Anglo-Saxon, 41,142. But it must be obvious that these vocabularies are far from complete, and that nearly all dictionaries are based mainly on the written language alone. In the case of Latin and ancient Greek there is no other source. “English,” says Ramsay, “should be roughly three times as wealthy in words as other languages, for its curious history has made its vocabulary to no small degree an amalgamation of three wealthy languages, Anglo-Saxon, French and Latin. But there is no occasion for exaggerating our advantages to the point of absurdity.”
It is not easy to determine how many words a given man knows, and it is even harder to find out how many he uses. The method usually selected is to choose by some arbitrary method one word on each page of a dictionary, determine how many of the words thus gathered the subject can define, and then multiply the result by the number of pages in the dictionary. But this plan admits a large element of mere chance; moreover, it is limited by the limitations of the dictionary used. Gillette, in the paper already cited, criticized it severely and effectively. He found that his own vocabulary, when tested by a dictionary listing but 18,000 words, ran to but 16,833, but that when a large unabridged dictionary was used and due regard given to subsidiary words, it leaped to 127,800. This, to be sure, represented only words known, not words used. The former category is always larger than the latter, whether one considers speech or writing. But in any case the vocabulary of a given person, when adequately tested, turns out to be much more extensive than a layman would guess. E. A. Kirkpatrick has estimated that the average child in the second grade at school knows 4,480 words, the average sixth-grader 8,700, the ninth-grader 13,400, and the high-school senior 20,120.1 Very young children, especially those of high IQ’s, sometimes show astonishing vocabularies. Miss Margaret Morse Nice2 records one who had 523 words at eighteen months, another who had 1212 at two years, and a third who had 1509 at thirty months. She shows that the average child of three years, living in a cultured family, has 910, and that this average goes up to 1516 at four, to 2204 at five and to 2963 at six. There is a report of a German boy who had 1142 at three.1 E. H. Babbitt, writing in 1907, concluded that the vocabulary of the average American college sophomore, despite his superficial appearance of imbecility, runs to between 50,000 and 60,000 words, and that even non-college men and women, provided they read a few books, know between 25,000 and 35,000. F. M. Gerlach puts the average high-school student’s vocabulary at 71,000 and the college student’s at 85,000. Other inquirers offer more modest estimates, but I know of none who gives any countenance to the popular delusion that there are millions of people who get along with vocabularies of a few thousand or even a few hundred words.2
There is a plain fallacy in the frequent attempt to estimate an author’s stock of words by counting those he uses in his writings. This has led to the notion that Shakespeare knew but 15,000 (some say 20,000), Milton but 8,000, and the translators of the Old Testament but 5642. In 1920 or thereabout some human adding-machine listed the different words in Woodrow Wilson’s three books, “Congressional Government” (1885), “The State” (1889) and “A History of the American People” (1902), and found that there were but 6,221 altogether.3 It was, however, manifest even to newspaper commentators that Wilson knew and used a great many more than that; indeed, the estimates of his vocabulary made by later pundits ranged from 62,210 to 100,000.4 How far such nonsense can go was illustrated years ago by a floating newspaper paragraph reporting that there were but 600 words in the vocabulary of Italian opera, and hinting that most singers knew no more. How hard it is to put down is shown by the following sentence in a 1944 issue of a putatively respectable literary review, written by a professional literatus of considerable pretensions: “The vocabulary of the average American business man, outside of profanity and pornography, is about a thousand words.”1 As a matter of fact, an investigation of the vocabularies of business executives, made in 1935,2 indicated that they know more words, taking one with another, than so many college graduates. A good deal of this current balderdash about midget vocabularies is caused, I suppose, by confusion between words known and words in constant use. The very nature of language puts a heavy burden upon a relatively small number of common words, and so tends to conceal the number and importance of those used only seldom. So long ago as 1925 the late Leonard P. Ayres (1879–1946) made an investigation of the vocabulary3 of everyday correspondence which showed that 542 words constitute seven-eighths of the average letter, that 43 constitute one-half, and that nine constitute one-fourth. The nine are I, the, and, you, to, your, of, for and in. Of these, the first three alone constitute an eighth.4 But this really says nothing about vocabularies, for it must be manifest that all casual writing, like all casual talk, is made up very largely of a small group of common words.5
1 Most of these have appeared in the International Journal of American Linguistics, published by Indiana University under the auspices of the Linguistic Society of America, the American Anthropological Association, and a committee of the American Council of Learned Societies.
2 A Simple Grammar of Pennsylvania Dutch, by J. William Frey; Clinton (S.C.), 1942.
3 The Grammar of the Ozark Dialect, American Speech, Oct., 1927, p. 1.
4 The Speech of East Texas, American Speech Reprints and Monographs No. 2; New York, 1937, p. 95.
1 An Analysis of Ring Lardner’s American Language, or, Who Learnt You Grammar, Bud?; Austin (Texas), 1944. This is a thesis presented to the faculty of the graduate school of the University of Texas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts. It has not yet been printed, but I have had access to it by the courtesy of Mr. Clark. For Lardner see AL4, pp. 424–25. He founded a school that has included such sharp observers as Anita Loos and Damon Runyon, but its members would all agree, I am sure, that he was facile princeps.
2 p.ix.
3 p. 37. The extent to which the first English grammarians leaned upon Latin precedents is set forth in Early Application of Latin Grammar to English, by Sanford Brown Meech, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1935, pp. 1012–32. All the technical terms that still survive were borrowed from the Latin, e.g., verb (traced by the NED to 1388) from verbum, noun (1398) from nomen, adjective (1414) from adjectivus, adverb and pronoun (1530) from adverbium and pronomen, and to parse (1553) from pars. See also The Rules of Common School Grammars, by Charles C. Fries, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1927, pp. 221–37 and An Introduction to Linguistic Science, by Edgar H. Sturtevant; New Haven 1947, p. 54.
1 Mrs. Charles Archibald (Mildred E. Hergenhan), in The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage in the Nineteenth Century, says that the divine origin of language was held by John Locke and supported by Adam Smith, and that it survived into Goold Brown’s Grammar of English Grammars, 1851, and even into Daniel Cruttendon’s Philosophy of Language, 1870. She adds that th
e doctrine of analogies was part of the theory of language launched by George Campbell in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1776, a work long held in high esteem. I am indebted to Mrs. Archibald for access to her excellent study, which is not yet published.
2 Lectures on the English Language: First Series, fourth edition; New York, 1870, pp. 645–46.
1 English Grammar in American Schools Before 1850; Washington, 1922, p. 140. The subject was very little taught before the Revolution, but it became a favorite soon afterward, and by the end of the Eighteenth Century at least a dozen grammar-books were in circulation. Of these Lindley Murray’s English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners, first published in 1795, was the most successful and by far. Lyman says that more than 1,000,000 copies of it and its successors were sold before 1850. Of the other grammars of the time about 4,000,000 copies were sold. A list in Seth T. Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector; Philadelphia, 1848, pp. x and xi, shows that nearly 100 different ones had been published by 1847.
2 Lyman, pp. 132–53. Colburn seems to have been influenced by the Swiss educational reformer, J. H. Pestalozzi (1746–1827).
3 Words and Their Use; New York. 1870, Chapter X.
1 This frenzy to unearth the not-worth-knowing still goes on. Publications of the Modern Language Association occasionally prints a very useful paper, as readers of the footnotes to the present volume are aware, but in the main its contents are hardly worth embalming. See Supplement I, p. 101, n. 3.
American Language Supplement 2 Page 50
