Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
American Language Supplement 2 (71 page)
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 machinery 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 plausibly
4
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 Nice
2
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 vocabulary
3
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 the 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.
2
By a pedagogue I mean one trained in the so-called technic of teaching, but not in anything beyond the elements of the subject taught. This category embraces 99.9% of the teachers in the elementary schools, 95% of those in the high-schools and prep-schools, and probably 85% of those in all the colleges save a few dozen of the upper crust.
3
This pioneer work is described in AL4, pp. 418–23.
4
Old Purist Junk,
English Journal
, May, 1918, pp. 295–302. In this early paper he laid down the excellent principle: “A usage which one finds properly recorded as colloquial must certainly not be considered as thereby banned from the English classroom or from any but the most solemn and formal themes. Objection to real colloquialism is surely as wrong as that against genuine Americanisms, which one finds even yet in the common attitude of purists toward such words as
depot
for
station
.” Leonard defended
none are, proven, try and see, to get sick, have got, quick
and
slow
as adverbs,
then
as an adjective,
through
for
finished
, and a number of other forms condemned by pedants.
1
Current English Usage: Chicago, 1932. The persons who gave him help in his investigation and completed his report after he was dead are listed on pp. xxi-xxii. He was born in California in 1888, and was drowned while canoeing on Lake Mendota, Wis., on May 15, 1931. There is an account of him in
American Speech
, June, 1931, p. 373.
2
Grammar and Usage in Textbooks on English,
Educational Research Bulletin No. 14
of the University of Wisconsin; Madison, Aug., 1933.
1
Studies in Current Colloquial Usage; New York, 1933. There is a bibliography of language tests in Part IV, pp. 3 and 4.
2
Part II, p. 2.
3
Facts About Current English Usage; New York, 1938.
1
pp. 133–34. This was anticipated by a thoughtful layman of legal training and distinction, Walter Guest Kellogg. He wrote in Is Grammar Useless?,
North American Review
, July, 1920, p. 10: “Usage is standard and by usage English must be taught. No grammar or dictionary can lay down the law nor have the effect of a statute; they can only record what passes current among the people of the time and can only preserve the customs of today and the precedents of yesterday, as do the common-law reports.”
2
Warfel says, p. 84, that “Webster declared this work to be the one he was most satisfied with,” but that it “never took hold, and only a few editions appeared.” The established grammarians of the time were all against it.
3
Published in Boston. The subtitle was “an Attempt to form a Grammar of English not modelled upon those of the Latin, and Greek, and other Foreign Languages.” Fowle tried to reduce the parts of speech to nouns, verbs and adjectives. He argued that the articles were really adjectives, and that most proper names were the same. He recognized only two tenses, the present and the past, and tried to get rid of mood, number and person.
1
Wilson’s conclusions were first published in the form of a bulletin to his teachers, reprinted in the report of the Connersville School Board for 1908, and again as Errors in the Language of Grade Pupils,
Educator-Journal
, Dec., 1909, pp. 178–80. He found that ten errors constituted 58% of the total number unearthed, and urged the ma’ams of his flock to concentrate upon them. These ten, he said, “were reported again and again, and as persistently in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades as in the lower grades.” They were the use of
ain’t
or
hain’t I seen
and
I have saw
, the double negative, the coupling of plural pronouns with singular verbs, the addition of
got to to have, git
for
get, come for came, them
for
those, learned
for
taught
, and
me
and
him
in the nominative.
2
Special Report of the Boise Public Schools, June, 1915, pp. 29–35, republished in Sixteenth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I, pp. 89–91. I am indebted here to Mr. Frederick L. Whitney, of the Colorado State College of Education.
3
A Course of Study in Grammar Based Upon the Grammatical Errors of School Children of Kansas City, Mo.; Columbia (Mo.), 1915. Its findings are summarized in AL4, pp. 418–21.
4
Rebuilding the English-Usage Curriculum to Insure Greater Mastery of Essentials; Washington, 1934.
5
A bibliography down to 1927 is in The Most Common Grammatical Errors, by Henry Harap,
English Journal
, June, 1930, pp. 444–46. It lists 33 titles. Since then there has been a heavy accumulation, mostly repetitive. But there is an original approach, along with a criticism of previous approaches, in Errors in the Oral Language of Mentally Defective Adolescents and Normal Elementary School Children, by Theodore Carlton and Lilyn E. Carlton,
Journal of Genetic Psychology
, Vol. LXVI, 1945, pp. 183–220. The Carltons, in this valuable study, report that four common errors accounted for between 40% and 55% of the total numbers they encountered, and that seven accounted for between 64% and 70%.
1
O’Rourke and Leonard,
American Speech
, Dec., 1934, pp. 291–95.
2
Dr. Aiken, who died in 1944, published A New Plan of English Grammar; New York, 1933, in which she sought to reduce the traditional eight parts of speech to six functions, and to introduce other rationalizations. She followed this with Commonsense Grammar; New York, 1936, and Psychology of English (with Margaret M. Bryant); New York, 1940. Other efforts to the same end have been made by other teachers of grammar,
e.g
., Patterson Wardlaw in Simpler English Grammar,
Bulletin of the University of South Carolina
, July, 1914, and James Hayford in American Grammar,
College English
, Oct., 1942, pp. 38–45.
3
New York, 1940. Fries’s investigation was “financed by the National Council of Teachers of English and supported by the Modern Language Association and the Linguistic Society of America.”
1
Linguistic Change; Chicago, 1917, p. 1.
2
A Grammar of Spoken English on a Strictly Phonetic Basis; Cambridge (England), 1924.
3
Essentials of English Grammar; New York, 1933.
4
George O. Curme had published A Grammar of the German Language based on actual usage in 1905; revised edition, 1922. In his Grammar of the English Tongue, which began to appear in 1931, he gave studious attention to colloquial speech and even to vulgar speech. “Those who always think of popular speech as ungrammatical,” he said in his preface to Vol. III, p. vi, “should recall that our present literary grammar was originally the grammar of the common people of England.”
1
Grammar: the Swing of the Pendulum,
English Journal
(College Edition), Oct., 1938, pp. 637–43. See also Smith’s A College Man Looks at High School English,
English Journal
, May, 1942, pp. 375–84, and An Apology for Grammar, by W. Alan Grove,
Science and Society, May
30, 1942, pp. 600–05.
2
For the former see three papers by Reuben Steinbach, all in
American Speech
– On Usage in English, Feb., 1929, pp. 161–77; The Misrelated Constructions, Feb., 1930, pp. 181–97, and English as Some Teach It, Aug., 1930, pp. 456–62. For the latter, Grammar for the Populace, by Stuart Robertson,
English Journal
(College Edition), Jan., 1939, pp. 24–32.
3
Schoolmarm English, by John J. De Boer,
American Scholar
, Winter, 1936, pp. 78–86, and American Youth and Their Language, by Walter Barnes,
English Journal
(College Edition), April, 1937, pp. 283–90.
4
How English Teachers Correct Papers, by Sterling Andrus Leonard,
English Journal
, Oct., 1923, pp. 517–32; Are Our English Teachers Adequately Prepared for Their Work?, by George O. Curme,
Publications of the Modern Language Association
, 1931, pp. 1415–26, and The Failure of Freshman English, by Oscar James Campbell,
English Journal
(College Edition), March. 1939, pp. 177–85.
1
Standard English and Incorrect English,
American Speech
, April, 1934, p. 88.
2
Vol. I; Oxford, 1888, p. xvii.
1
Current Definition of Levels in English Usage,
English Journal
, May, 1927, p. 349.
2
For example, William Feather, in the
William Feather Magazine
, May, 1945, p. 13: “For better or for worse, I move among those who insist on correct speech in business and social life. You can’t do business and you can’t drink cocktails with this bunch unless you speak the King’s English.”
1
Hypercorrect Forms in American English,
American Speech
, Oct., 1937, pp. 167–78. Allen Walker Read has used
hypersophic
to designate the same thing – a better word, and much needed.
2
This explanation was anticipated by Leonard Bloomfield in Literate and Illiterate Speech,
American Speech
, July, 1927, p. 436.
3
p. 348.
1
Language and Superstition,
French Review
, May, 1944, p. 377.
2
A Technique for Determining Levels in English Usage,
English Journal
(College Edition), Jan., 1934, pp. 57–69.
3
This study was followed by A Study of Levels of English Usage, by Mayme Berns, one of Franzén’s students. It is unpublished, but I have had access to it by his courtesy.
4
The Levels of Language,
Educational Method
, March, 1937, pp. 289–98.
5
Usage Errors in Oral English as Found in Representative Plays, by Alice E. McKeehan and Carl G. F. Franzén,
Journal of Educational Research
, Dec., 1945, pp. 300–04.
