Founding Grammars (20 page)

Goodrich's solution was to ruthlessly strip the dictionary of nearly everything that made it unique. Since the main point of the abridgment was to produce a shorter book, he naturally cut extraneous items like the essay on language origins and the condensed
Philosophical and Practical Grammar.
Then, without consulting his father-in-law, Goodrich normalized most of the spellings. As the preface euphemistically explains, in “disputed” cases “the old orthography takes the lead.”
45
Some variant word pairs, like
acre
and
aker,
are listed under both spellings
.
Many others, like
bridegoom
and
bridegroom,
are listed only under the orthodox spelling, with Webster's version of the word relegated to a parenthesis.

Worcester, who had strong views on what dictionaries should look like, added his own spin to what were already significant revisions. He rewrote definitions and deleted pronunciation advice that he considered questionable. He also contributed new material. “The vocabulary has been considerably enlarged,” the preface tells readers. Some of the words that Worcester added were suggested by Webster himself, but most came from Worcester's edited version of Johnson's dictionary.

When the abridged dictionary came out and Webster realized how severely Goodrich had pruned it, he was furious. The spelling and pronunciation changes made it appear that Webster no longer believed in his own reforms. The etymologies that he had labored over so meticulously were drastically reduced, and his grammar guidelines completely erased. The book also included many words and definitions that Webster himself hadn't written.

He was so distressed over the changes that he rushed to dissociate himself from the book. Shortly after it appeared, he sold the copyright to Goodrich. Then he cut the Goodriches out of his will, saying they would benefit enough from money made on the abridgment. Whether or not Webster genuinely believed this prediction, it would turn out to be true. Priced at $6, the abridged dictionary sold briskly from the first. It was not the dictionary that Webster envisioned, but it was more compatible with American tastes.

*   *   *

Webster lived another fifteen years after publishing his great dictionary. He remained healthy and energetic. An acquaintance meeting him in 1840, when he was eighty-one, noted that “his mind was strong, clear and active as ever; his conversation was full of … spirit and vivacity.”
46
Webster's activities included a trip to Washington, D.C., in 1830 to speak before Congress in favor of a bill extending the term of copyright to twenty-eight years. The bill passed shortly afterward. While he was there, he lobbied to get his dictionary accepted as the country's standard for spelling.

Webster continued writing until the last, but not about grammar. After the fiasco of the abridgment, he did his own editing to create a short dictionary for schools. Several years later, he embarked on an update of the original dictionary, mortgaging his house to finance the publication, much to his family's dismay. The second edition appeared in 1841. In 1843 he published his final book, a collection of his articles on political subjects. Webster died in April of that year, at the age of eighty-four.

Shortly after his death, the publishers George and Charles Merriam bought the copyright to Webster's original dictionary, hiring Goodrich to make revisions for a new edition. The
Merriam-Webster Dictionary,
now denuded of all unorthodox features, appeared in 1847. The Merriam brothers' dictionary would be the version that made Webster's name lastingly famous. The Merriams soon outmarketed rival dictionaries, including Joseph Worcester's, which had been in fierce competition with Webster's since its appearance in 1830. Many educators preferred Worcester's conservative approach to spelling and pronunciation. Nonetheless, by the 1850s, the Merriams had cornered the school dictionary market and were on their way to dominating the home market.

While Webster's name was becoming synonymous with dictionaries, his writings on American usage and grammar were forgotten. By the time of his death, his grammar books had virtually disappeared. Fowle's claim that he could not find a copy of
A Philosophical and Practical Grammar
anywhere in Boston in the 1820s suggests that the demand for it by then was almost nil.
Dissertations
was never reprinted. The
Institute, Part II
had long ago been superseded, as Webster himself noted, by Murray and others.

The grammar books of Fowle and his fellow reformers also failed. Fowle continued teaching and writing until 1860, when he retired and moved to the Massachusetts countryside. He died in 1865, aged sixty-nine. Fowle never abandoned his grammatical principles. In 1842 he brought out
Common School Grammar,
intended for preparatory schools. In the preface he makes it clear that he hasn't repented of his earlier views. He still believes that writers like Lowth and Murray “sought to adapt our grammar to other languages … and to destroy every feature of it that can be called natural.”
47
He's still hoping that his book will provide an antidote.

By the time Fowle died, Lindley Murray's popularity was also waning. The books that replaced his, however, were nothing like Fowle's. They were much closer to Murray's. One of the more popular volumes was
The Principles of English Grammar
by Rev. Peter Bullions. Reverend Bullions announces in the preface that the aim of his book is to improve on Murray's
English Grammar
—“correcting what is erroneous,… compressing what is prolix, elucidating what is obscure.” He has no thought of developing any original theories. “Utility, not novelty” is his goal and Murray is still the benchmark.
48

Bullions rephrases and reorganizes, but all the familiar rules and definitions remain intact. He's content to list the same parts of speech as Murray offered. He tells students, as Murray did, that “double comparatives and superlatives are improper.” He agrees that “one negative destroys another, or is equivalent to an affirmative,” and that “a sentence should not be concluded with a preposition.”
It is me
is still wrong. The rules of composition that Bullions lays out—purity, propriety, and precision—are the same ones that Murray suggested several decades earlier.
49

By the mid-nineteenth century, contention over grammatical issues was entering a new phase. Arguments over usage and style would shift to the public sphere and be aimed not at learners, but at educated adults. A new type of expert would enter the scene—the verbal critic.

Verbal critics were not so much grammarians as guardians of elegant upper-class speech. While earlier grammarians had aimed to educate upwardly aspiring Americans, verbal critics concentrated on making distinctions between the ladies and gentlemen in the top echelons and everyone else. These arbiters of proper speech did not abandon the grammatical strictures of Lowth and Murray—they simply added another layer of refinement. They didn't really need to repeat the basic rules found in eighteenth-century grammar books. These had by now become an uncontroversial fact of American life.

 

5.

Grammar and Gentility

In his 1870 book
Words and Their Uses,
influential verbal critic Richard Grant White vividly recalls his first clash with the forces of proper grammar. The time was nearly fifty years earlier. The scene was “an upper chamber of a gloomy brick house,” where the five-year-old White stood in despair before the schoolmaster. He was failing his grammar lesson. When asked about prepositions governing nouns, the young boy answered, “I don't know,” and when quizzed on subject-verb agreement, he had to admit, “I can't tell.” This ignorance brought down on him a terrible punishment. “You are a stupid, idle boy, sir, and have neglected your task,” his teacher told him. He then proceeded to grab White's hand and smack it with a ruler until it was reduced “as nearly to a jelly as was thought … to be beneficial.”
1

This first dreadful experience with grammar studies also became his last. White reports that his father, on hearing the story, removed his son to a more progressive school. “Thereafter,” he says, “I studied English … only in the works of its great masters and unconsciously in the speech of daily companions, who spoke it with remarkable but spontaneous excellence.”
2
As a result, he confesses, he has remained ignorant of the rules found in grammar books. However, he does not consider this gap in his education to be a problem. In White's view, English is almost a “grammarless” tongue, if grammar means the kinds of word variations that signal different noun cases and verb tenses in languages like Latin and Greek. Except for possessives, English nouns don't show evidence of case. Only a handful of irregular verbs like
go
/
went
change their basic form. White, like Webster, Fowle, and others before him, has concluded that forcing children to memorize lists of artificially labeled, mostly unvarying nouns and verbs is pointless.

White disliked Murray as much as the reforming grammarians did. In
Words and Their Uses—
a review of his fellow citizens' crimes against English—he claims that Murray's rule regarding possessives is uninterpretable. It is “truly an awful and mysterious utterance,” he declares. He also attacks Murray in a later book,
Every-Day English.
He writes, “The first great English grammar, the one by which school-boydom has been chiefly oppressed, was written by an ‘American,' Lindley Murray.… The influence of this book and its imitations in our country has not been happy. Our English has suffered from it.”
3
Like many other people of the time, White considered
Murray
synonymous with grammar, but for him the name had decidedly negative connotations. His childhood experience with grammar study obviously still stung.

White's opinion of traditional grammar books suggests kinship with Webster and the radicals of the 1820s, but his perspective on the subject was very different. The radicals rejected the bulk of standard grammar rules because these don't reflect the way ordinary people talk. They urged instead greater acceptance of Americans' natural speech habits. White, on the other hand, believed that Americans' natural speech habits were ruining English. He just didn't think that grammar books were relevant to reversing that trend.

Unlike the grammar reformers of earlier days, White condemned not only Murray, but all grammar books. Webster, Fowle, and Cardell didn't question the value of grammar study itself, only the content and teaching methods of traditional textbooks. White went further. He says in
Words and Their Uses,
“Of the rules given in the books called English Grammars, some are absurd, and the most are superfluous.”
4
People don't need to be taught how to speak their native tongue, he argues. Even if they did, the vague, inaccurate formulations in grammar books wouldn't help them. At least, grammar books wouldn't help them acquire the English of “remarkable, but spontaneous excellence” that he heard as a boy. In White's opinion, that kind of English can't be taught.

White was a new type of language advisor—not a teacher, but a purveyor of superior English. As he explains in the preface to
Words and Their Uses,
his aim is not to teach the “entirely uninstructed” how to speak correctly (hardly possible anyway). Rather, he wants to bring order to the current linguistic chaos. He will condemn innovations that are damaging to the language and encourage preservation of what's worthwhile. He hopes his remarks will be helpful to “intelligent, thoughtful, educated persons, who are interested in … the protection of [English] against pedants on the one side and coarse libertines in language on the other.”
5

He tells readers that if any of them hope to acquire a good speaking style by studying either typical grammar books or advice books such as his, “they will be grievously disappointed.” Language skills come through “native ability and general culture.”
6
In other words, the only sure way to sound well educated and upper class is to actually be well educated and upper class. As the anecdote about White's school days suggests, he thought good speech habits were acquired by associating with the well spoken.

This idea sharply contradicted most Americans' cherished belief that grammar books were essential for self-improvement. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, thousands of Americans—including illustrious men such as Abraham Lincoln—had turned to grammars to raise themselves to a higher cultural and economic plane. Now the most prominent usage arbiter of the time was saying that elevation to the upper ranks was not that straightforward. Speaking like a member of the elite was more than a matter of learning noun declensions.

White's own social position was unassailable. His ancestors included several generations of impeccably respectable New Englanders, beginning with John White, who helped found Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1635 and was later among the first settlers of Hartford. White's grandfather, who graduated from Yale, was a minister and divinity scholar and an unbending Tory. White's father was a prosperous New York shipping merchant who was able to afford a privileged education for his son. After his early false start, the young Richard attended the prestigious Grammar and Preparatory School associated with Manhattan's Columbia College (now Columbia University). He then graduated to Columbia College itself. Presumably it was at the grammar school that he learned proper English by listening to those around him.

After college, White first apprenticed himself to a doctor, but later switched to the study of law. He passed the New York bar exam in 1845 at the age of twenty-four. In the meantime, however, White's father lost his fortune in a catastrophic business failure. The senior White died shortly afterward, leaving his son as the sole support of two as-yet-unmarried younger sisters. Needing to earn money immediately, the young man abandoned the idea of building a law practice. Instead he turned to journalism, where he enjoyed quick success. White first wrote music criticism—he was passionate about music and had considered making it his profession—then branched out into art, literature, and politics. Besides writing critical essays, he edited a twelve-volume edition of Shakespeare's works, later published as
The Riverside Shakespeare
.