by Melvyn Bragg
His dictionary is also lacking in the areas of law, medicine and the physical sciences. Above all, like Swift, he hated what he called “cant,” which he described as words to be found in “the laborious and mercantile part of the people” where, the doctor decreed, “the diction is in a great measure casual and mutable; many of their terms are formed for some temporary or local convenience.” It was Dr. Johnson, and only he, who was High Priest and sole Tyrant of language and if he decided what you said was cant, cant it was and it was out. Other much lesser but very many dictionaries were to spring up to fill the gaps. Johnson’s dislike of bawdy, naughty and slang words, for instance, was surely a major provocation to Francis Grose, whose classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, thirty years later, went where Johnson would not have spent a syllable.
With all his omissions and banishments, it might today seem a wonder that the Dictionary carried any weight at all. In fact it carried immense authority at the time and also served a purpose of pride, that English literature could boast such a mighty engine of words, through the genius of one individual. The Dictionary and Johnson both seemed to reinforce basic qualities in the English character.
By modern standards it does not stand up. Some of its etymologies are ludicrous. It is prejudiced, capricious and idiosyncratic. That, though, I think, only adds to the relish to be had from it. It becomes an autobiography and portrait of an age as well as the first time that a mass of English had been tamed. Here are a few of the entries, selected, perhaps, with less reverence than is due, though we begin on a classical note:
Network: any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.
Cough: a convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity.
Dross: the recrement or dispumation of metals.
Little doubt there that a man of serious learning was seriously on the case. The anti-French sentiment is evident.
Ruse: cunning; artifice; little stratagem; trick; wile; fraud; deceit.
A French word neither elegant nor necessary.
The Scots are also there to be biffed.
Oats: a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
The inaccuracies are very collectible.
Tarantula: an insect whose bite is only cured by musick.
There is even a rare example of a rude word: perhaps the authority of Middle English “verteth” helped him here.
Fart: to break wind behind.
As when we gun discharge
Although the bore be ne’er so large
Before the flame the muzzle burst
Just at the breech it flashes first;
So from my lord his passion broke,
He farted first and then he spoke. [Swift]
(There is an anecdote about the absence of rude words from the dictionary: two society ladies commented on this, to which Johnson replied, “What! My dears! Then you have been looking for them?”)
He defined “Excise” as “A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.” The Commissioners of Excise were so offended that they tried (but failed) to take Johnson to court for defamation.
He is good at knocking himself — another trait which could be called endearingly English.
Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the significance of words.
Grub Street: originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems.
Dull: not exhilarating, not delightful: as, to make dictionaries is dull work.
The politics of the Tory doctor are set out firmly.
Whig: the name of a faction.
Tory: one who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England.
He felt poorly treated by his so-called patron, Lord Chesterfield, and served his revenge cold.
Patron: one who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is repaid with flattery.
His confessions of ignorance are irresistible.
Etch: a country word of which I know not the meaning.
Parsnep: a plant.
Pastern: the knee of a horse.
(When asked by another of the ladies who questioned him how he came to be so wrong in this, he replied, “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.”)
He was fearless in his inclusion of archaic and obscure words such as “digladation,” “cubiculary,” “incompossibility,” “clancular,” “jobbernowl,” “denominable” and “opiniatry.”
In this he drew down the criticism of Webster in America, who wrote:
I am inclined to believe that Johnson’s authority has multiplied instead of reducing the number of corruptions in the English Language. Let any man of correct taste cast his eye on such words as denominable, opiniatry, ariolation, assation, ataraxy . . . deuteroscopy . . . discubitory . . . indignate, etc. and let him say whether a dictionary which gives thousands of such terms as authorized English words is a safe standard of writing.
American English was not yielding an inch to the high falutin old country. Webster was not the only critic. John Horne Tooke attacked Johnson for violating his (Tooke’s) theory that there should only be one meaning per word. William Smellie, editor of the first Encyclopaedia Britannica, expressed misgivings. Macaulay called him a “wretched etymologist.” Even his faithful biographer Boswell questioned his etymologies though he did assert that his hero was “the man who had conferred stability on the language of his country.” That he did it in such an original, personal, prejudiced and idiosyncratic manner has rather added to his fame as time has rolled over many of his definitions.
There was generous praise from two august keepers of the flame abroad. Marquis Nicolini, President of the Accademia della Crusca (Italy), said it was a “noble work” which would be a “perpetual monument of fame to the author, an honour to his own country in particular, and a general benefit to the Republic of Letters throughout all Europe.” And in France itself, a journal declared that Johnson was “an academy” for this island.
There it still is, in all its dusty but readable glory, the first English academy: in a book.
Johnson’s work heralded and triggered a cavalcade of grammars. Everyone wanted to get hold of English and tell it how to behave. They could not wait to lay their hands on this unruly mob of words and smarten it up, sort it out, establish some discipline down there.
The most interesting grammarian was Joseph Priestley, who was a noted supporter of civil and religious liberties, wrote about electricity, was a radical dissenting preacher, invented carbonated water (fizzy drinks) and nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and discovered carbon dioxide and oxygen. Science was his chief interest. He also occupied himself with The Rudiments of English Grammar, a book in which he expressed a view, novel for that time, that grammar is defined by common usage and should not be dictated by self-styled grammarians.
He had little impact. The battle was won time and again by the men who knew best. Robert Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar was as conservative and prescriptive as Priestley was liberal and tolerant. Lowth swept the field: twenty-two editions in forty years. Certain grammatical structures were regarded as “correct,” others as not only “incorrect” but vulgar. The committed corps of codifiers, whose admirable descendants exist and in numbers to this day, took to the fight in earnest after Dr. Johnson and they have never willingly retreated.
Do we use “lie” or “lay”? “Would,” not “had,” is approved as the full form of “I’d better” (i.e. “I had better’). Different “from” is preferred to different “to.” “Between you and I” is out. The comparative and not the superlative is to be used when two things are involved. The question of proper case after “than”
or “as” was a cockpit. Lowth declared, and millions have followed, that it would be determined by the construction that was to be understood or implied, so “he is older than she [is]”; but “he likes me better than her [he likes her].” The double negative, which not unusually had ornamented speech untold times, was sent into exile.
Some of these rules could be seen to make sense. Others were arbitrary. It was a paradise for those terrible twins — Class and Snobbery — and in they came, pat on cue. But in the deep and apparently unstoppable development of language, Priestley’s cry that “custom of speaking is the original and only just standard of any language” is always eventually the case, from Kansas City to Canberra by way of Kingston and Hong Kong. But Lowth’s rules will not be denied.
In the nineteenth century at least eight hundred fifty-six different grammars of English marched into print, ordering the language into shapes. It often obliged them for a while but just as often slid away, went absent without leave, played truant.
It was not only grammar that came in for the often helpful and often infuriating organisation of language. Certain words irritated people, then and now, and there are those who would cut off their heads. Swift tried to execute “mob” and “banter” among many others. George Harris attempted to sink “driving a bargain,” “handling a subject” and “bolstering up an argument.” “Subject-matter” drove one writer to a frenzy. “In the name of everything that’s disgusting, nay detestable, what is it? Is it one or two ugly words? What’s the meaning of it? Confound me if I ever could guess! Yet one dares hardly ever peep into a Preface for fear of being stared in the face with this ghastly Subject-Matter.” Yet “subject-matter” has outlived the name of that author.
Hating English words and phrases is not as common as liking them, but the flying squads of opposition are always with us and sometimes they are to be welcomed. There’s a sense in which they can’t fail and they can’t succeed either. English, like water, will find its own level. The language itself through usage and natural selection will see that what is survivable will survive. Those who attack words can hasten the departure of the weak and useless and only hammer into further obstinate strength the words which we all somehow agree have come to stay; for a while longer.
The huge efforts to control English, to rule and order it, had met with some success and no lover of the language would be without one of the many fine dictionaries for whom Dr. Johnson’s can claim parentage. But what moves language along is mysterious, half hidden and rarely ordered, even by the most erudite and sensible of scholars. Something as ephemeral as fashion, manners or dress can exercise a significant influence. English is open to every influence, however insignificant the source might be.
17
The Proper Way to Talk
The Age of Enlightenment, roughly the latter part of the eighteenth century in Europe and America, saw a loosening of the bonds and ties of religion. It began to create and believe it could control secular cathedrals of the mind. The attempt to control language, whether by Webster and Franklin in America or by Johnson and Swift in England, was part of this attempt to control and it failed. Yet the road to failure can be as influential as the path to success. From the attempts to tame English, to make it jump through hoops, sit up and beg, obey the lash of its superiors, consequences flowed which were to have a widespread, even a worldwide, significance.
Correct spelling was now fully accepted by this unruly language after the pioneering efforts of Caxton and his printing heirs, the necessary legal pedantry of Chancery and the final stamp of Dr. Johnson. No more games there. The written word consumed forests, and what was written became available to more people, who had more time and inclination merely to sit and read.
The written word colonised society and a gap grew between what was said on the page and what was said on the tongue. It had always been there but what began to happen now was that the written word dictated to the spoken word. The best spoken English was increasingly supposed to sound like the best written English. But what did written English sound like? Who decided? Out of that argument came “the best” way to talk and a bewildering number of ingenious distinctions, from scholars, from snobs, from social climbers, from satirists. The attempt to fix the sound of the language became an obsession. But English was too smart to be pinned down, even by the English. It knew that its future lay in freedom. That, though, did not stop those who wanted conformity to their view of the matter.
This chapter is about how, having failed to ascertain or fix the language in Jonathan Swift’s “Words more durable than Brass,” the powers that would be attempted to brand it on the tongue. True Pronunciation was now the prize.
The relationship between sound and spelling in English is a nightmare. Our writing system is not phonetic to the point of being antiphonetic. There are, for instance, at least seven ways of representing what for most people is the same vowel sound — “ee”: free, these, leaf, field, seize, key, machine. What do we do?
As you would expect, given the magnetic attraction of English to everyone who speaks or writes it for whatever purpose (Newton, mathematician and alchemist, took an interest in phonetics and wrote about it), this attempt at fixing pronunciation had been tried earlier.
In 1589, George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie advised budding poets on which words and which speech to draw on. He is against anything from the north. He is against Langland and Gower because, like Chaucer, though we can revere them we cannot understand them. Puttenham plumps for the speech of London but “neither shall he follow the speech of a craftes man or carter, or other of the inferiour sort . . . for such persons doe abuse good speeches by strange accents . . .” The slippery slope has been taken. The ideal sets out to replace all street language, all “uncouth” usage.
It is in the eighteenth century that the dialects lost most status. This was to do with the codification of writing and the pressure to write “correctly.” Dialect systems were no longer used for devotional purposes and only rarely used for literary purposes. They continued, with an admirable deep stubbornness, to be the first choice for informal conversation between most equals in the land, but they were as much a casualty of the tidal surge of “superior” English as any North American Indian tongue.
The pronunciation police came in, led by an Irishman, Thomas Sheridan. His father had been a teacher and friend of Jonathan Swift; his son was to be one of Britain’s greatest dramatists. Thomas was a professional actor and theatre manager — and at the centre of London fashion — when, in 1750, he spotted the need for an elocutionist. He seized the opportunity and it warms the heart to know that English as it is most properly spoken by those who set the standard for these things was very much the diktat of an Irish player.
Sheridan’s first and crucial book was published in 1756, hard on the heels of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary. He called it, significantly, British Education. Not English. Sheridan was reclaiming the lands and the tongues banished by the Anglo-Saxons twelve hundred years previously: the British were now the subject. And “Education”: no messing about with “Way of Speaking” or “Pronunciation.” He went for the key and jugular word: if you wanted to say what you said in the best way, then what you needed was an education, and this book, this man, could provide it, which, remarkably, he did.
He gave public lectures on elocution in Dublin, Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge and London in 1757, which attracted large and influential audiences. He took some members of the ruling elite as his private pupils. He went about the job systematically, which pleased and impressed a culture still happy to live in the shadow of Newton’s glory and in the sun of the new Enlightenment. Thomas Sheridan was one of the first to establish the number of distinctive sounds in the English language and the number and types of diphthongs and syllables; he also studied the use of stress in words.
There are two streams of ideas here.
Until about 1750, the metropolitan speech of the court had a higher prestige but there was no social disadva
ntage for either upper or under class in speaking with a regional accent or a foreign accent — James I, on the throne during part of Shakespeare’s reign, spoke and wrote in broad Scots. The Hanoverians were German speakers just as the Normans had been French speakers. Sheridan found his most responsive audience among the aspiring educated middle classes, those who were taking England and English around the world in thought, word and deed. That middle class, the easily mocked but incalculably influential stratum of British life which wanted to out-Rome Rome, out-Athens Greece, took the mongrel island and turned it into a pack of bulldogs raging across the planet. They wanted their own way. They wanted their own words. Sheridan hit the nerve. In one of his lectures, in 1762, he wrote: “Pronunciation . . . is a sort of proof that a person has kept good company, and on that account is sought after by all, who wish to be considered as fashionable people or members of the beau monde.” He took no prisoners. “All other dialects are sure marks, either of a provincial, rustic, pedantic or mechanic education; and therefore have some degree of disgrace annexed to them.”
