Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
American Language Supplement 2 (70 page)
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 the 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 NED
2
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:
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
