Founding Grammars (34 page)

Case's worries about the book's reception turned out to be unfounded. As a reference book of under one hundred pages,
Elements
didn't draw major reviews, but several magazines and newspapers printed positive notices. A reviewer for
The Rotarian
says, “This small book is immensely practical and thoroughly enjoyable. I recommend it strongly.”
The Analysts Journal
assures its subscribers that business writers will “find
The Elements of Style
not only interesting but editorially profitable.”
51

New York Times
writer Charles Poore devoted a “Books of the Times” column to
Elements.
E. B. White, he says, has been rummaging in our linguistic attic and “brought out a splendid trophy for all who are interested in reading and writing.” Not that Poore agrees with all of White's rules. White's insistence on adding possessive
's
to names ending in
s
—
Charles's tonsils,
for example—seems unnecessarily cumbersome. Nonetheless, he thinks readers can learn much from the book. “Buy it, study it, enjoy it,” he says, “it's as timeless as a book can be in our age of volubility.”
52

White's own magazine,
The New Yorker,
only gave the book a brief unsigned notice, but described it in glowing terms. “Distinguished by brevity, clarity, and prickly good sense, it is, unlike most such manuals, a book as well as a tool,” praises the reviewer. The notice rounds off with a warm commendation—“his old teacher would have been proud of him.”
53

Elements
may have won only superficial notice from reviewers, but book buyers clamored for it. In May 1959 it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. By fall the book had reached the top of several bestseller lists and seemed in no danger of falling off anytime soon. A year after its first appearance, it had sold a dizzying 200,000 copies.
54
Elements
was more like a bestselling grammar book of early America than a typical twentieth-century usage guide. These were usually steady sellers, but few if any vaulted to literary fame.

White did occasionally receive letters from readers who had noticed that the book sometimes failed to follow its own rules. For example, it includes many passive sentences even though one of the principles of composition is “Use the active voice.” White answered these letters good-humoredly, pointing out that Strunk often modified his advice by saying “as a rule” or something similar. Strunk did, after all, point out in his explanatory paragraph that passive was often desirable or necessary. Answering a letter from a reader who complains that White uses
parvum opus
(“small work”) although the book tells writers to avoid foreign languages, he replies, “Latin … isn't a foreign language, it's a dead language. To me, it's very much alive—at the root of many of our words.”
55

Much more often than not, the letters were laudatory. One woman wrote to tell White that his writing reassured her that the world is a rational place. Another wrote to let him know that she was omitting needless words. “Thanks,” he responded. “So am I.”
56

Some of the popularity of
Elements
is no doubt attributable to White's status as a well-known author. The book itself, though, clearly had great appeal. A pocket-sized style guide consisting mainly of brief, numbered commands is much easier to read and consult than a detailed guide the size of a dictionary. People were no doubt attracted to
Elements
for the same reasons that colonial Americans liked the grammars of Lowth and Dilworth—it was short, straightforward, and seemed to guarantee that following the rules would result in elegant English.

Elements
would go on to sell millions of copies through four more editions. It would become required reading for beginning writers and publishing professionals alike. Writing teachers would recommend it to their students. Editors would keep copies on their desks. The rules themselves would be memorized and quoted, while the mitigating comments were forgotten or ignored.
Strunk and White
would soon become shorthand for no-fail usage advice, just as
Murray
had once been another word for grammar.

The century had begun with an unprecedented embrace of slang and colloquialisms and an apparent loosening of grammatical standards, but nearly sixty years later the old grammar rules still retained a tight cultural grip. In spite of the Happiness Boys, large numbers of midcentury Americans felt the need for an old-fashioned usage guide. There wasn't much grammar in
The Elements of Style,
but what was included was strict enough to gladden the hearts of purists.

 

8.

The Persistence of Grammar

In 1961, 133 years after the appearance of
An American Dictionary of the English Language,
the name of Webster was once again embroiled in controversy. It began in early September when the G. & C. Merriam Company issued a press release announcing the imminent appearance of
Webster's Third New International Dictionary.
It would be the first complete overhaul of the company's venerable unabridged dictionary since the publication of
Webster's Second
in 1934.

The first hint that the new dictionary would break with tradition came with the press release issued a few weeks before publication. It promised no fewer than 100,000 new words and updated meanings, from
A-bomb
to
Zen,
but the changes would not be limited to new words. People who upgraded to
Webster's Third
could expect several “revolutionary” new features, among them a new pronunciation key and a new way of structuring definitions.

The press release highlighted the third edition's up-to-the-minute content. It quoted the dictionary's editor-in-chief, Philip B. Gove, revealing that the new volume would reflect “the informality of current usage” with “pungent, lively remarks” from “contemporary notables.” Scores of illustrative examples from bygone literary figures like Dryden and Pope had been replaced by the likes of Ethel Merman, Willie Mays, novelist Mickey Spillane, and former madam turned bestselling author Polly Adler. As yet more evidence of the current linguistic informality, Merriam's marketers featured a snippet of the new volume's unusually broad-minded entry for
ain't.
1

The publicity department's attempt to shake up the stuffy image of the dictionary would turn out to be a mistake. Especially unfortunate was their decision to showcase
ain't.
When newspapers reported on the forthcoming dictionary, they focused on the shock aspects of the new book.

One of the earliest mentions came in
The New York Times.
Under the lighthearted headline “Webster Soups Up Its Big Dictionary”
Times
writer McCandlish Phillips announces that the new Merriam-Webster dictionary will be “entirely renewed in content and radically altered in style.” He quotes Gove's comments on the informality of American speech. Then at the end of his brief article, Phillips tosses in one last fun fact. “The use of ‘ain't',” he notes, “is defended as ‘used orally in most parts of the U. S. by cultivated speakers.'”
2

This tidbit, an afterthought for Phillips, counted as big news for other journalists. A rash of facetious headlines broke out—“Saying Ain't Ain't Wrong” (
Chicago Tribune
), “It Ain't Necessarily Uncouth” (
Chicago Daily News
), “It ‘Ain't' Good” (Washington
Sunday Star
), and “Say It ‘Ain't' So” (
Science
). After having fun with their headlines, the papers generally gave a matter-of-fact description of the dictionary's main features, and for the most part, their reports are positive. The
Daily News,
for instance, takes issue with
Webster's
justification of
ain't,
snapping, “Cultivated, our foot,” but it applauds the inclusion of new words like
A-bomb
and
beatnik.
“In the main,” remarks the reviewer, “we believe it the function of an unabridged dictionary to deal realistically with a world that has, after all, buried John Dryden and Alexander Pope and elevated Mickey Spillane and Miss Adler to best-sellerdom.”
3

The first truly negative notice came from the September 8
Toronto Globe and Mail.
In the somberly titled article “The Death of Meaning,” the paper accuses Merriam-Webster of contributing to the degeneration of English by embracing the word
ain't.
The new dictionary, cries the reviewer in dismay, “will comfort the ignorant, confer approval upon the mediocre, and subtly imply that proper English is the tool only of the snob; but it will not assist men to speak truly to other men.” The reviewer pictures a future in which civilization, helped along by the barbarities of
Webster's Third,
will regress into a primitive state. Yet the dictionary itself may prepare Americans for their fate. “In the caves,” concludes the reviewer, “a grunt will do.”
4
The Washington
Sunday Star
spoke up next. Opines the
Star
reviewer, “Perhaps the most shocking thing in the whole book is that it takes a rather respectful view of ‘ain't.'” The reviewer prefers the dictionary's 1934 edition, “which bluntly—and correctly in our view—brands ‘ain't' as a ‘dialectal' and ‘illiterate' expression.” (The superiority of the 1934 edition would become a common theme among the dictionary's opponents, who would set up a cry of “Hang onto your
Webster's Second
!”) The
Star,
like the
Globe & Mail,
sees the appearance of the new dictionary as the first step toward anarchy. It's no wonder, frets the reviewer, that the English-speaking world, “when it thus tolerates the debasement of its language,” is having trouble with types like Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
5

This apocalyptic language was typical of the negative reviews that would soon proliferate. Horrified commentators reached for words like
shock, disaster, calamity, debased,
and
vulgarism. The New York Times
referred to the new volume as “Webster's Third (or Bolshevik) International.”
The Richmond News Leader
predicts a war that will be waged “wherever men who believe in excellence find themselves in conflict with men who prefer an easy mediocrity.” There is “madness in their method!” cries Garry Wills, writing for the
National Review.
6

In some ways, there's nothing remarkable about this outpouring of anguish. The same themes reverberate through centuries of usage arguments. Over-the-top outrage, ridicule, and scandalized disgust have dogged linguistic radicals from Noah Webster to Fitzedward Hall. As Lounsbury and Whitney noted in their first
College Courant
article, arguments about language have more in common with religion than with scholarly inquiry. Champions of linguistic orthodoxy have routinely predicted societal collapse when the old ways are challenged.

Even so, the outcry over
ain't
seems like an extravagant response to a word that, after all, had also appeared in
Webster's Second,
as well as earlier versions of the dictionary. Webster's 1828 dictionary includes an entry for
ant
(pronounced “ain't,” according to the key), defined as “vulgar dialect, as in the phrases
I ant, you ant, he ant, we ant, &c.
” Although some had criticized Webster at the time for including “low” language in his dictionaries, recording colloquialisms and slang had long been standard practice among dictionary makers. It was not normally a matter for hand-wringing.

The problem with
ain't
in the eyes of
Webster's Third
critics was not so much that it was listed in the dictionary, but that it was treated with respect. As the
Sunday Star
reviewer points out,
Webster's Second
makes the low status of
ain't
clear by appending the labels “
Dial.
or
Illit.
”
Webster's Third
takes a more neutral approach. After the definition, it comments, “Though disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech, used orally in most parts of the U. S. by many cultivated speakers, especially in the phrase
ain't I.
” The word is only labeled
substandard
when it's used to mean “have not” (as in
I ain't got it
).

The controversy was hotter than it might have been because the Merriam press release presented the entry for
ain't
in drastically edited form. It omitted both the phrase “disapproved by many” and the information that the “have not” meaning was considered substandard. Reviewers were left with the erroneous impression that
Webster's Third
considered
ain't
completely acceptable. Even when the dictionary entry is read in its entirety, however, the difference in slant from the second to the third editions is obvious.

Critics believed the rephrased definition of
ain't
signaled a dangerous turn toward linguistic permissiveness.
Ain't
was merely the most egregious example of what they saw as the disastrously mistaken approach to language use that permeated the whole dictionary. Reviewers objected to the inclusion of business-speak terms like
irregardless, finalize,
and the new coinages created by casually slapping on
–wise,
as in
speechwise
. They were also offended by popular slang terms like
boo-boo
and
footsie,
and beatnik lingo like
cool cats.
Besides questionable vocabulary, the dictionary gave examples of often heard, but nonstandard, grammatical formations like
whoever
in object position and
different than,
without necessarily condemning them as wrong.