Founding Grammars (22 page)

White's dismissal of formal grammar study was not meant to be taken as permission to use nonstandard forms. He expected speakers of superior English to say
It is I,
to avoid double negatives, and to follow all the usual rules. He believed, however, that anyone who spoke good English would have absorbed these rules unconsciously while learning how to talk. People who missed that opportunity were unlikely to be able to compensate for it by memorizing a grammar book. White was writing for those who were already beyond Murray. His goal was to keep his readers informed of bad new words and usages so they could avoid them.

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To White and other verbal critics, the chaotic state of the American language mirrored the chaotic state of the country. When
Words and Their Uses
appeared in 1870, Americans were still struggling with the political and economic upheavals of the Civil War. Social boundaries began shifting in unsettling ways. African Americans were voting for the first time, as well as running for office. Women were demanding that they, too, have the right to vote. Adding to the tumult, millions of immigrants were pouring into the country, many of them non-English speaking. All of them—Irish, German, Scandinavian, Chinese—hoped to gain a foothold on the ladder of financial and social advancement.

The United States was on the verge of the Gilded Age, the only era in American history to be labeled with a negative nickname. It was a time of unparalleled opportunism. Mark Twain, who gave the era its name with an 1873 book of that title, claimed that the “chief end” of most of the population was to get rich—“dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must.” In reality, rags-to-riches stories were the exception rather than the rule. Still, enough people made fortunes to give the impression that general prosperity was on the rise, and with it social mobility.

The country's freshly gilded surface hid a tawdry interior. Political corruption openly flourished. President Grant's administration was so riddled with fraud, bribery, and kickback schemes that newspapers began using
Grantism
as a term for shameless government dishonesty. At the local level, “machine” politicians like New York's William “Boss” Tweed took over state and city offices, then used their power to squeeze money out of local business people. As organized political graft took hold in the cities, “carpetbaggers”—northerners bent on exploiting Reconstruction—headed South to milk as much profit as they could out of government rebuilding programs.

The Gilded Age was the era of the instant millionaire. Heavy industry was booming in the East and Midwest, while in the West fortunes were made from railroad building and large-scale cattle ranching. Those lacking the capital for big money-making operations could try their hand at stock market speculation or hope to strike it rich with entrepreneurial schemes. Some of the era's wealthiest men rose from modest backgrounds. Andrew Carnegie, the steel industry giant, had arrived in the country as the child of working-class Scottish parents. John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil, was the son of a traveling salesman. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who used cutthroat competition to corner the shipping industry, started out working on his father's ferry.

The newly rich quickly adopted aristocratic lifestyles. They built luxurious homes in exclusive neighborhoods and vacationed in upper-class enclaves like Newport, Rhode Island. They joined select clubs and sent their children to Ivy League schools. Even those lower down the economic scale had the means to vastly improve their standard of living. New consumer goods were constantly coming on the market—everything from bottled ketchup to machine-made clothing. Most items could now be shipped anywhere in the country by steamship or rail. People who didn't live in large cities just ordered what they wanted from the Montgomery Ward catalog.

These suddenly well-off social climbers were the people Richard Grant White had in mind when he wrote about the “superficially educated” who were damaging the language with their “pretentious ignorance and aggressive vulgarity.” White and other cultural commentators worried that a dangerous social leveling was taking place. Former slum dwellers now lived in the same neighborhoods as old established families. Even Americans in the middling classes now had the buying power to dress well, furnish their homes grandly, and entertain on a more lavish scale than in previous times.

Americans with new money were only part of the problem though. Many people, including a majority of immigrants, were as poor as they had ever been. They were nonetheless beginning to acquire the same manners as their economic betters and even more scandalously, assume an attitude of social equality. The age-old differences in behavior and dress that identified different social classes were starting to disappear.

Both these groups fell short, however, when it came to language. They tended to use words like
gents
and
pants,
or erred in the other direction with over-genteel or pompous word choices like
retire
for
go to bed
and
intoxicated
for
drunk.
Grammar books—the traditional route to self-betterment—didn't teach people how to make subtle word choices. White and other verbal critics believed that the established upper classes could still maintain a distinction between themselves and their social inferiors through careful speech. One purpose of their books was to explain how.

While the grammarians of earlier days came mainly from the ranks of schoolteachers, the verbal critics were often writers—either journalists like White or professional men concerned about language use. Like White, they believed that superior speech habits were largely a matter of good background—in White's words, of “social culture which began at the cradle.” William Mathews, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Chicago, whose book
Words: Their Use and Abuse
sold 25,000 copies, expresses it this way: “Man's language is a part of his character … the words he uses are an index to his mind and heart.”
14

Their concerns about social leveling led to much fraught discussion about the overuse of
lady
and
gentleman.
White complains in
Every-Day English
that the two terms are now too vague to have any generally accepted meaning. “There are some people,” he says, “whose idea of a perfect gentleman is one who pays his bills without question the first time they are presented.” He knows a woman whose idea of a perfect gentleman is a man who takes off his hat when he speaks to her in the street. White's fellow critics have similar complaints. “Perhaps no honorable term in the language has been more debased than ‘gentleman,'” says Mathews. The term has sunk so low that it's now applied to “the vilest criminals and the most contemptible miscreants, as well as to the poorest and most illiterate persons in the community.”
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As for
lady,
it had become even more debased. Edward S. Gould, a fiction writer who also wrote books critiquing his fellow verbal critics' prose, points out in
Good English, or Popular Errors in Language
that
lady
has become a “snobbish vulgarism.” In some circles it is used as a substitute for wife—“Mr. Somebody and
Lady.
” As with
gentleman,
it can refer to anyone of the appropriate sex. Alfred Ayres, author of
The Verbalist,
tells readers that using
lady
as a general label for any adult female is in the worst possible taste. “Gentlemen and ladies establish their claims to being called such by their bearing, and not by arrogating to themselves,
even indirectly,
the titles,” he says.
16

True ladies, Ayres declares—that is, women of taste, education, and refinement—are satisfied with being referred to as women. Only those in the lower classes, such as young women who work in shops, insist on being called by such terms as “saleslady.” It's a way of demanding status that they're not rightly entitled to. In
Every-Day English,
White scornfully describes “the gentlemanly conductor” who asks passengers “to move up in the bulging streetcar and ‘let in this lady,' as Bridget McQuean, smelling slightly of pipe and poteen, struggles at the car door with her basket of clothes.”
17

White's example of Bridget McQuean is not random. He often singled out the Irish for linguistic ridicule. More than a million Irish immigrants had crowded into New York and other large eastern cities since the mid-nineteenth century, many escaping the famine that hit when Ireland's potato crop was stricken with blight. They were largely unskilled laborers who took the most miserable, poorly paid jobs on offer (such as laundress).

Their distinctive brand of English nonetheless made an impact on the American language. Although they contributed only a few vocabulary words (
smithereens
and
hooligan
are two), they influenced usage in ways that White felt were unfortunate. For instance, the Irish were thought to be responsible for the disappearance of
shall.
White writes of suffering “a smart little verbal shock when the Irish servant says, ‘Will I put some more coal on the fire?'”
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He was also unhappy with their nonstandard use of
adopt
to mean
be adopted.
He cites a personals ad reading: “A lady having two boys would like to adopt one.” He assumes that “this lady, quite surely an Irish emigrant peasant woman, wished to rid herself of one of her children.”
19
The Irish were also blamed for introducing
them
as a noun modifier, as in
them boys over there.

Another character frequently held up for White's scorn was the “gentleman from Muzzouruh.” Elevated to high society because of his “suddenly acquired” wealth, he had a tendency to express himself with inflated vocabulary words. He said
allow
to mean “assert” or “believe,” as in, “He was mightily took with her, and allowed she was the handsomest lady in Muzzouruh.” He also said
locate in
when he meant “move to” or “settle in.” White considered this usage “insufferable to ears at all sensitive.”
20

White and his fellow critics all believed that faulty education—especially the superficial “half-knowledge” of the self-educated—was at the root of America's linguistic problems. In
Good English,
Gould explains how corrupt words enter the language. It begins, he says, when an educated man invents a word, perhaps improvising from a foreign source or an Anglo-Saxon root. He may also discover a new meaning for an established word. If the word is useful, then others adopt it as well. So far, so good. The glitch occurs when an ignorant man encounters the word, but only half learns it, reproducing it “in a wrong shape or with a wrong meaning.” Other half-educated people pick it up in its new, corrupt form. Soon this “spuriously fabricated” word has found a permanent home in the American vocabulary.
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The fact that a word was widely used in its new sense did not make it legitimate. Nor did its adoption by the best writers. Mathews complains that modern-day writers coin so many new terms that even Noah Webster, “boundless as was his charity for new words,” must be turning in his grave. Gould concurs. He believes that authors of “vapid, trashy, ‘sensation' novels” are much to blame, but even the best writers have a tendency to spread new usages without considering the damage they may cause.

The critics coalesced around the same problematic terms—
jeopardize, donate, editorial
as a noun,
in our midst
instead of
in the midst of, inaugurate
for
begin, patronize
in the sense of buying goods. Their complaints usually centered on slight misuses or confusion between two words with similar meanings—for example,
demean
and
debase.
Although most of the uses they deprecated have since become standard, others still spark heated arguments—
aggravate
for
irritate, decimate
to mean
wipe out
instead of
reduce by one-tenth, due to
meaning
owing to, different than
instead of
different from, less
instead of
fewer
with count nouns.

They also agreed in condemning verbal prissiness. Mathews writes, “In the seventeenth century, certain fanatics in England ran about without clothes, crying: ‘We are the naked Truth.' Had they lived in this age of refinement … they would have said, ‘We are Verity in a nude condition.'” Gould scorns the word
casket
for
coffin,
which he has recently noticed in an obituary by a “sensational” writer. He wonders whether the writer imagines that “a man in a ‘casket' is not quite so dead as a man in a coffin.”
22
The critics favored calling things by their unvarnished Anglo-Saxon names.

The shift in attention from grammatical structure to word use indicates the post–Civil War verbal critics' changed focus. Unlike the grammarians of earlier times, they weren't interested in teaching good speaking and writing habits. Their aim was to draw a clear line between well-educated, refined, truly ladylike and gentlemanly people and those in the lower echelons. Their underlying message was the same one often heard today—the half-educated, with their slang, misguided word inventions, and misunderstood terms, were wrecking the language.

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The verbal critics were fighting on two fronts. On one side they railed against slang and cant, coarseness, and trendy new word inventions, which they believed degraded the language. On the other side they attacked pretentious bombast and excessive gentility. These stemmed from a lack of social confidence and were as bad as coarseness. Those who wanted to practice the best usage would avoid both extremes. The best speech was clear, precise, unembellished, and respectful of linguistic tradition. It used plain, forceful, mostly Anglo-Saxon words.