To boldly grow
Review by Henry Hitchings
Published: December 18 2009 23:17 | Last updated: December 18 2009 23:17
By Jack Lynch
Walker $26, 326 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16
Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language
By Patricia T O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman
Random House $22, 266 pages
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition
By HW Fowler
With a new introduction and notes by David Crystal
Oxford University Press £14.99, 784 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99
If you want to provoke a really scorching exchange of views, then make a claim about the proper usage of English. Better still, commit what most people would consider a grammatical mistake. On internet discussion boards and comment pages, arguments about English usage rapidly mutate into disputes – or, in the argot of cyberspace, “flame wars” – of eye-watering unpleasantness.
We all have an idea of what it means to use English correctly. But many of our notions about what is right and wrong are hard to justify. Why exactly should one not split an infinitive? Why are we not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition? Grumblers and pedants are apt to offer emotive explanations, yet most of their arguments are informed by tradition or aesthetic judgments.
Complaints that English is being debased by the internet, text messaging, progressive teaching methods or slovenly journalism are common. But while these particular irritants may be fairly new, the theme of protest is not.
Nor are books on the subject. They have been around for centuries, and remain a flourishing publishing genre, as this latest crop shows.
In The Lexicographer’s Dilemma, Jack Lynch, an American university professor, provides a readable and richly informative history of such protest. In Origins of the Specious, Patricia T O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman offer a jauntier view of the subject. The couple, former editors on the New York Times who now run a popular website called www.grammarphobia.com, enjoy deflating myths, and do so in a bite-sized and opinionated fashion. Unsurprisingly, they all have plenty to say about Henry Watson Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Reissued here in a chunky new hardback, its humane yet punctilious discriminations have made it a favourite among sticklers for more than 80 years.
These three books raise intriguing questions. Who is responsible for policing English usage? What characterises these defenders of propriety? And how, if at all, have our attitudes to the issue changed over the past 500 years?
In the age of Shakespeare, commentators fretted that the language was being depraved by “Frenchified” poseurs and “back-door Italians”. Elizabethans, such as the pamphleteer Philip Stubbs, denounced the bad behaviour of football players, men wearing earrings, the greed of lawyers – and the cheapening of English. The equation of moral and linguistic corruption became standard. It has been so ever since.
As Lynch shows, by the early 18th century, the state of English was seen as an embarrassment in need of political resolution. In a pamphlet published in 1712, Jonathan Swift deplored the surfeit of “affected phrases” and “conceited words”. The highly educated young men who crowded London’s fashionable coffee-houses were, he noted, particularly grave offenders. A Tory propagandist, Swift believed that the solution was an official body akin to the Académie Française, which could legislate usage. “Our language is extremely imperfect,” he wrote. He suggested that a standard form should be determined by experts, and then, “perhaps, there might be ways found out to fix it for ever”.
But the English language has never been governed by an academy. The reasons for this are not hard to fathom. As Lynch points out: “The world’s English-speaking countries, with their long tradition of favouring individual liberty, have never supported the kind of absolutist, top-down government that linguistic regulation seems to require.”
Instead, as Lynch demonstrates, we have had to rely on individuals for rulings about usage. They have tended to be clerical or schoolmasterly types – mostly middle-class men of advanced years. Some of them are well-known: Samuel Johnson with his great dictionary (1755) and Noah Webster with his patriotic American dictionaries in the early 19th century. Less well-known yet deeply influential are Robert Lowth, a bishop whose 1762 A Short Introduction to English Grammar created many of the familiar shibboleths of English usage; Lindley Murray, whose grammar book, originally produced for the girls at a school in York, went through 50 editions between 1795 and 1832; and a whole caste of Victorian pedants who produced books with titles such as A Plea for the Queen’s English and Don’t: A Manual of Mistakes and Improprieties More or Less Prevalent in Conduct and Speech. The spirit of this last group lives on in contemporary tirades such as Lynne Truss’s 2003 bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
The most prominent legislators have been prescriptive. In fact, they have often been proscriptive, forbidding particular vices rather than expounding a syllabus of virtues. In the opposing camp have stood descriptivists, who objectively analyse the use of language. Lynch’s book pleasingly delineates the conflict between those who have attempted to embalm English and those who have documented, and in some cases revelled in, its plasticity and mutability. In the history of arguments about English usage, the best known names are the extremists who interpret the decline of refined pronunciation and the abuse of apostrophes as signs of civilisation’s ruin.
Henry Watson Fowler is one of these superstars. The title of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is a misnomer, for Fowler’s work was backward-looking, even in 1926. Still, it is Fowler’s personal perspective that has ensured its continuing popularity, despite having been twice revised by others over the years. The book has come to be known simply by his surname. The reissue presented here is Fowler’s unadulterated first edition.
Although his pronouncements have long been admired, Fowler is hardly a reliable authority. Instead he is a passionate amateur and, as David Crystal says in his introduction, “an amazing collector of examples”. His quirkiness and citation-finding skills are apparent on every page. Wishing us to avoid “elegant variation” – the practice of using elaborate synonyms rather than repeating a single word – he attempts to “nauseate by accumulation of instances”. If we are exposed to enough cloying examples of something superficially appealing – and in this case he gives us five columns of them – our taste for it will be cured.
Fowler is a busy combatant. Not for him the leniency and relativism of the modern academic linguist. He scourges individual words such as “bureaucrat” (“so barbarous that all attempt at self-respect in pronunciation may perhaps as well be abandoned”) and elevator (“a cumbrous and needless Americanism; it should at least be restricted to its hardly avoidable commercial sense of grain-hoist”). In his “general articles”, he thrashes pedantic humour; the mannerisms of distinguished writers – Macaulay’s use of antithesis, Bagehot’s use of repetition; “popularized technicalities”; and “love of the long word” (“it need hardly be said that shortness is a merit in words”).
Yet, for all his zest, and his moments of unexpected flexibility, Fowler has a lot to answer for. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is the prescriptivists’ bible. Like the Bible, it provides a mixture of useful guidance, potted history and ornate digression. Fowler is spirited rather than scholarly, locally opinionated rather than overarchingly methodical. In this he has, regrettably, been an inspiration. The pundits who have followed him have exacerbated this tendency to ventilate pet peeves without much thought for the larger currents of change.
Language is always on the move, just as people are. Swift’s plan of fixing English could never have worked. When Samuel Johnson set out to compile his dictionary in the 1740s, he intended to regulate English. Yet by the time his work was done he saw language in a different light: its mutability was essential to its power.
Nevertheless, the urge to send English to school has not waned. Today, we are familiar with an arbitrary line-up of rules: “ ‘Like’ cannot be used as a conjunction”, “Never start a sentence with ‘And’ ”. These rules, or rather conventions, describe what were once, perhaps a couple of generations ago, the language habits of the most influential members of society – the educated upper classes and the aspirational middle classes.
Some of these conventions can be traced to a single originator. For instance, the aversion to what is sometimes known as a sentence-final preposition – “That’s not the sort of a bar I’d go to” – was, as Lynch shows at length, cultivated by the English poet John Dryden. Influenced by the fact that in Latin you could not end a sentence in this way, Dryden shuffled his prepositions around to avoid the construction. O’Conner and Kellerman highlight the role of Ann Fisher, author of a grammar guide in the 1740s, in inaugurating the convention, now unpopular, of using the pronouns “he”, “his” and “him” to refer to both men and women, as in, “Every student should submit his essay by Thursday”.
As for the split infinitive, it isn’t quite the perennial bugbear we imagine. Lynch notes it has “come and gone through the history of the language”. Popular in the age of Chaucer, it disappeared around 1500. Shakespeare’s works contain only one split infinitive: in Sonnet 142, “Thy pity may deserve to pitied be”. It had become common again by the end of the 18th century, only to become taboo in the 19th; the first explicit prohibition was in an anonymous article published in 1834 in the New-England Magazine, and the first time it was actually termed a “split infinitive” was in 1897, when a critic in the magazine Academy pointed a finger at Lord Byron as the father of this solecism.
With a certainty reminiscent of Fowler, O’Conner and Kellerman describe the split infinitive as a “non-issue”. They discuss this and other points of grammar lucidly, but they specialise in interesting little revelations. For instance, “nom de plume” is a faux-French term rather than an authentically French one, seemingly invented by an obscure Victorian novelist, Emerson Bennett. The expression “to call a spade a spade” dates back to a mistranslation of Plutarch by Erasmus, which was then immortalised by Erasmus’s English translator Nicholas Udall. Yet while Origins of the Specious is not meant to give an overview of English usage, the story that develops is an at times farcical one of small misconceptions accumulating to form a dense network of error.
Samuel Johnson argued that “languages are the pedigree of nations”. As all these books show, the pedigree of English is tangled and cluttered; the family tree is not just gnarled but also full of cuckoos. Although English’s guardians, invariably self-appointed, behave like directors, they are really just activist shareholders. Arguments about English, both great and small, are coloured by class prejudice, historical misunderstanding, anxiety, moral dogmatism and personal caprice.
Henry Hitchings is the author of ‘The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English’ (John Murray)
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