Founding Grammars (23 page)

The worst offenders in both the slang and the bombast categories were the cheap daily papers. Americans had always been avid newspaper readers—by 1790 over 250 papers were in circulation—but before the 1830s newspapers were too expensive for many people.
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Instead, they were passed from reader to reader. Laboring men and others on limited budgets shared a single subscription or visited coffeehouses to read the copies provided for customers.

The situation changed dramatically with the advent of the penny press. Advances in printing technology during the early nineteenth century made cheap newspapers feasible for the first time. In 1833 a young New York printer named Benjamin Day brought out a daily paper called the
Sun
(motto: “It shines for all”) that could be purchased for a penny. Since the average newspaper sold for six cents, the
Sun
attracted an immediate audience. Other mass circulation dailies followed. Besides their cheap price, newspapers like the
Sun
drew readers with a titillating mix of sensational news, political expos
é
, crime stories, and scandal. By the 1870s their circulation outpaced that of traditional dailies like
The New York Times
and their influence was at least as great.

In contrast to the
Times
and other staid, high-class newspapers, the penny papers gloried in colorful prose. They used slang expressions like
fork over
and
sound as a nut.
They made up bizarre word combinations like
charmfulness, hostilize,
and
councilmanic.
They also excelled in heavily ornamented vocabulary. Complained one critic, “The newspaper writers never allow us to go anywhere, we always
proceed
.… We never eat, but always
partake.
… No man ever shows any feeling, but always
evinces
it.” One newspaper reported on a military skirmish along the Potomac by saying that “the thousand-toned artillery duel progresses magnificently at this hour, the howling shell bursting in wild profusion in camp and battery, and among the trembling pines.”
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Penny papers also used slang to give their stories some extra zip. The
New York Herald
jocularly titled a piece about a public s
é
ance “The War of the Ghouls.” The piece begins “Irving Hall last evening was the scene of some high old times … Spiritualists were on the warpath and the goblins played the very mischief.” The papers could be painfully blunt as well. An article about the business dealings of the notorious robber baron “Diamond” Jim Fisk is headlined “The Great American Grabber.”
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To the minds of the verbal critics, newspapers like the
Herald
epitomized all that had gone appallingly wrong with current language use. Gould remarks in
Good English,
“Among writers, those who do the most mischief are the original fabricators of error, to wit: the men generally who write for the newspapers.” White's chapter on newspapers is titled “Newspaper English. Big Words for Small Thoughts.” He considers newspapers the worst purveyors of pretentious nonsense. “The curse and peril of language in this day,” he claims, “is that it is at the mercy of men who, instead of being content to use it well according to their honest ignorance, use it ill according to their affected knowledge.”

Even worse, they infect their readers with the disease. White writes of encountering a policeman while walking past an unfamiliar building and inquiring of him what the building was. The policeman replied, according to White, “That is an institootion inaugurated under the auspices of the sisters of Mercy, for the reformation of them young females what has deviated from the paths of rectitood.” White does not blame him for this pomposity because he knows that the man reads similar sentences every day in the penny papers. To buttress his case, he quotes a reporter's recent description of a murderer's arrest—“a policeman went to his residence, and there secured the clothes that he wore,” which were “so smeared by blood as to incarnadine the water of the tub in which they were deposited.” White surmises that to say the clothes were “so bloody that they reddened the water into which they had been thrown” would be far too plain a statement for the newspaper.
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Even fellow editors from the high-end newspapers criticized the language of the penny press. An 1865 issue of
The Nation
includes an article titled “The English of the Newspapers.” It condemns “the solecisms, the barbarisms, and the vulgar phraseology which the readers of many public journals are fated to encounter.” The paper agrees with the verbal critics that coarse language implies a coarse mind. “He who constantly obtrudes printed slip-slop upon the public can hardly have either the feelings or the manners of an educated gentleman,” the article's author comments sternly. He then reviews various “verbal absurdities” found in lesser newspapers, such as saying
pluvial
instead of
rainy. The Nation
doesn't mean to be finicky. The editors simply believe that “the loose and irregular methods of employing words which obtain in some newspapers … are of dangerous import to the purity of our tongue.”
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Horace Greeley, obstreperous editor of the high-profile
New York Tribune,
couldn't have disagreed more. His approach to editorial writing was to come out swinging. The
Tribune
avoided the jaunty slang and sensationalism of papers like the
Sun
and the
Herald,
but was fully committed to bluntness, especially when writing about politics. “We defy the Father of lies himself to crowd more stupendous falsehoods into a paragraph than this contains,” he writes in response to a rival paper's article. An opinion piece advocating for pensions for Mexican War veterans begins, “Uncle Sam! you bedazzled old hedge-hog!” Of a persistent opponent, Greeley says, “We ought not to notice this old villain again.”
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(Greeley used
villain
as an insult so often that his political enemies nicknamed him Old Villain-You-Lie.)

Greeley had begun his journalism career much differently from White. The child of a poor day laborer, Greeley was born in Amherst, New Hampshire, in 1811, but his family moved frequently in search of a living. His scanty education ended when he was fourteen. Most of what he knew he picked up by reading library books and working at odd jobs in various small-town newspaper offices. In 1831, at the age of twenty, he left his parents' home in Erie, Pennsylvania, and set out for New York City with $10 in his pocket and all his other belongings tied up in a handkerchief. He later described himself at that time as having an “unmistakably rustic manner and address.”
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Over the next ten years Greeley worked his way up in the journalism world with a succession of jobs, beginning with typesetting. Soon he was writing for magazines and newspapers, including the
Daily Whig.
In 1840 the Whig Party hired him to edit presidential candidate William Henry Harrison's campaign weekly, the
Log Cabin.
After the election the
Log Cabin
ceased publication and Greeley launched the
New York Tribune,
a pro-Whig penny daily. Greeley's goal, he later wrote, was to found a newspaper “removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand, and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other.”
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Greeley was never neutral and certainly never mincing. A man of deeply felt convictions, he expressed his views in forthright, pungent language. (He is best known today for the editorial advice, “Go west young man, and grow up with the country.”)
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Greeley's attitudes were radical, occasionally bordering on eccentric. He wrote forcefully against slavery and was among the first to join the newly formed Republican Party when the Whigs split apart over the issue. He supported labor unions and opposed capital punishment. He also advocated Fourierism, based on the French philosopher Charles Fourier's idea of organizing society into cooperative communities called phalanxes.

He believed in saying what he thought and, when criticized, vigorously defended his right to do so. In 1868 he wrote an opinion piece titled “Gov. Seymour as a Liar,” attacking Democratic presidential candidate and former New York governor Horatio Seymour for vastly overstating the amount of federal money being spent on Reconstruction. “Of all the evil-doers,” Greeley tells readers, “the Political Liar … is among the basest and most wicked.” After comparing Seymour's numbers with the actual government figures, he ends the article by asking, “Is not the infamy of Horatio Seymour unspeakable?”
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The article provoked an outcry among the city's more conservative editors.
The Round Table,
a weekly collection of financial and political news and literary reviews, printed a column titled “Mr. Greeley as a Gentleman.” It begins, “Mr. Horace Greeley has just disgraced himself, his newspaper, and the American press.” The writer informs Greeley that the language he has employed in his article “is such as to unfit him for the society of gentlemen” and advises him to take up the study of deportment.
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The New York Times
also scolded Greeley for lack of professional courtesy. Whether or not Greeley's accusations are true, says the
Times,
using “low” language to express them does not help his case. Greeley's language has been “the language exclusively of blackguards and brutes … as is only used by persons of coarse natures.” It would justify a response in words that would make Greeley's sound “tame and mealy-mouthed.” The
Times
writer winds up his lecture by opining that “if the whole Press of the country … adopted the teachings or followed the example of
The Tribune
 … it would be quite as unfortunate for that journal as for the reputation of the country at large.”
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Greeley responds by inviting
The New York Times
to do its worst. “We would have
The Times
use such terms as most forcibly express its ideas,” he writes. “We especially beg it not to be ‘mealy-mouthed.' So far from deeming it ‘unfortunate'
for us
that other journals should be abusive, we insist that no one is ever harmed by any bad language except his own.”
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Greeley points out that while the
Times
article has been polite, the writer has failed to show that anything he said about Seymour was untrue.

By the time White and other verbal critics began mounting attacks on newspaper style, Greeley's editing days were nearly over. Disappointed in the corrupt Grant administration, Greeley allowed himself to be drafted into running against the president in the 1872 election. He suffered a devastating defeat, carrying only six states. To add to his distress, his wife had died of tuberculosis just one month earlier. Greeley received yet another blow when he returned to the
Tribune
after the election. He discovered that during his long absence on the campaign trail, the newspaper, which was now owned by stockholders, had handed his editorial duties to others. Overwhelmed by these repeated shocks, Greeley's physical and mental health failed and he died shortly afterward.

*   *   *

If Horace Greeley stood for fearless plain speaking, Sarah Josepha Hale represented the opposite end of the spectrum. Mrs. Hale, longtime editor of the popular women's magazine
Godey's Lady's Book
(or editress, as she called herself), unabashedly promoted genteel speech. Through her magazine editorials and other writings, she introduced tens of thousands of women at all social levels to the idea that proper language use was an essential part of gracious living.

Hale was a remarkable woman. Born Sarah Josepha Buell in 1788, she grew up on a Newport, New Hampshire, farm. Sarah was unusually well educated. Besides the typical school subjects available to girls, she learned Latin and philosophy from her older brother. When she was twenty-five she married Newport lawyer David Hale, who encouraged her to continue educating herself. He also supported her first writing attempts—poems and articles that she submitted to local newspapers. Sarah Hale's hobby turned into a career in 1822 when David Hale died suddenly, leaving her with five small children. The thirty-four-year-old widow decided to begin writing seriously with a view to earning money. Her first publication was a volume of poems. Over her long life Hale published nearly forty books, including poetry, novels, edited letters, anthologies, gift books, cookbooks, and advice books. Her most lastingly famous composition is the children's poem that begins “Mary had a little lamb.”

Hale made her greatest mark as a magazine editor. In 1828 she became the first woman to hold such a position when the Boston-based
Ladies Magazine
offered her the job. Nine years later Philadelphia publisher Louis Godey bought the
Ladies Magazine
and merged it with his
Lady's Book.
He kept Hale on as editor. She ran
Godey's Lady's Book
for the next forty years, writing her final editorial for the December 1877 issue when she was eighty-nine, only sixteen months before she died. During her tenure, the monthly magazine gained readers every year. By 1860 the number of subscribers had risen to 150,000 and Godey could boast that the
Book
was sent to “every State in the Union and to every Territory.”
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Godey's Lady's Book
blends the educational, the inspirational, and the practical. A typical issue features several poems and short stories, including many by well-known authors; color plates of the latest fashions; knitting and sewing patterns; piano music; recipes and household hints; and book notices and reviews. Tucked into the spaces between the longer pieces are uplifting quotations and snippets of advice. One paragraph of advice begins, “Another rule for living happily with others is to avoid having stock subjects of disputation.” Another reminds readers, “Never suffer your children to advance in years before you attend to their education.” A short entry titled “A Word for Grumblers” offers the consoling observation, “In every man's cup, how so ever bitter,… there are some cordial drops … which if wisely extracted, are sufficient to make him contented.”