The Mother Tongue (21 page)

One of the last-gasp holdouts against old-fashioned spellings was Colonel Robert R. McCormick (1880–1955), editor and publisher of the
Chicago Tribune,
who for two generations insisted on such spellings as
nite
for
night, frate
for
freight, iland
for
island, cigaret
for
cigarette,
and some 300 others—though never all at once. After his death most of the more jarring spellings were quietly dropped. Oddly, McCormick never called for two of the most common shortenings,
tho
and
thru.
He just didn't like them, which of course is all the reason that is necessary when it's your newspaper.

So while spelling reform has exercised some of our finest minds for nearly two centuries, the changes attributable to these efforts have generally been few and frequently short-lived. The one notable exception is Noah Webster (about whom more in a later chapter), though even his changes were not nearly as far-ranging as he dreamed.

What is less often noticed is that spelling reform has been quietly going on for centuries, in a small but not insignificant way, and without the benefit of any outside agencies. In that splendidly random way that characterizes most facets of English development, it just happened. Many words have shed a pointless final
e—deposite, fossile,
and
secretariate,
for instance.
Musick
and
physick
similarly gave up their needless
k
's. The tendency continues today with simplified spellings like
catalog, dialog,
and
omelet
gradually easing out the old spellings of
catalogue, dialogue,
and
omelette,
at least in America. Two hundred years ago there were scores of words that could be spelled in two or more ways, but today the list has shrunk to a handful—
ax/axe, gray/grey, inquire/enquire,
and (outside North America)
jail/gaol
—but even here there is a clear tendency in every English-speaking country to favor one form or the other, to move toward regularity.

Even so, there is still, on the face of it, a strong case for spelling reform. Anyone who has tried to explain to an eight-year-old, or even a teenager, the difference between
wring
and
ring
or between
meet, meat,
and
mete,
or why we spell
hinder
with an
e
but
hindrance
without, or why
proceed
has a double
e
but
procedure
doesn't, or why we spell
enough, biscuit,
and
pneumonia
in the very peculiar ways that we do will very probably appreciate that. But calls for spelling reform inevitably overlook certain intractable problems. One is that the old spellings are well established—so well established that most of us don't notice that words like
bread, thought,
and
once
are decidedly unphonetic. Attempts to simplify and regularize English spelling almost always hav a sumwut strānj and ineskapubly arbitrary lūk abowt them, and ov cors they kawz most reederz to stumbl. There is a great deal to be said for the familiarity of our spellings, even if they are not always sensible. What simplified spelling systems gain in terms of consistency they often throw away in terms of clarity.
Eight
may be a peculiar way of spelling the number that follows seven, but it certainly helps to distinguish it from the past tense of
eat.
Similarly, the syllable
seed
can be spelled a variety of ways in English—
seed, secede, proceed, supersede
—but if in our quest for consistency we were to fix on the single spelling of, say,
seed,
we wouldn't be able to distinguish between
reseed
and
recede. Fissure
would become
fisher; sew
and
sow
would be
so.
There would be no way to distinguish between
seas
and
seize, flees
and
fleas, aloud
and
allowed, chance
and
chants, air
and
heir, wrest
and
rest, flu, flue,
and
flew, weather, whether,
and
wether,
and countless others. Perplexity and ambiguity would reign (or rain or rein).

And who would decide which pronunciations would be supreme? Would we write
eether
or
eyther?
As we have already seen, pronunciations often bear even less relation to spellings than we appreciate. In spoken American English, many millions of people—perhaps the majority—say
medal
for
metal, hambag
for
handbag, frunnal
for
frontal, tolly
for
totally, forn
for
foreign,
and
nookular
for
nuclear.
Shall our spellings reflect these? The fact is, especially when looked at globally, most of our spellings cater to a wide variation of pronunciations. If we insisted on strictly phonetic renderings,
girl
would be
gurl
in most of America (though perhaps
goil
in New York),
gel
in London and Sydney,
gull
in Ireland,
gill
in South Africa,
gairull
in Scotland. Written communications between nations, and even parts of nations, would become practically impossible. And that, as we shall see in the next chapter, is a problem enough already.

*
 Further, and possibly conclusive, evidence of this was shown in 1874 when Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, an Englishman, invented an outdoor game that he called sphairistike. It only caught on when his friend Arthur Balfour, the future prime minister, suggested he call it lawn tennis.

9.

Good English and Bad

C
onsider the parts of speech. In Latin, the verb has up to 120 inflections. In English it never has more than five (e.g.,
see, sees, saw, seeing, seen
) and often it gets by with just three (
hit, hits, hitting
). Instead of using loads of different verb forms, we use just a few forms but employ them in loads of ways. We need just five inflections to deal with the act of propelling a car—
drive, drives, drove, driving,
and
driven
—yet with these we can express quite complex and subtle variations of tense: “I drive to work every day,” “I have been driving since I was sixteen,” “I will have driven 20,000 miles by the end of this year.” This system, for all its ease of use, makes labeling difficult. According to any textbook, the present tense of the verb
drive
is
drive.
Every junior high school pupil knows that. Yet if we say, “I used to drive to work but now I don't,” we are clearly using the present tense
drive
in a past tense sense. Equally if we say, “I will drive you to work tomorrow,” we are using it in a future sense. And if we say, “I would drive if I could afford to,” we are using it in a conditional sense. In fact, almost the only form of sentence in which we cannot use the present tense form of
drive
is, yes, the present tense. When we need to indicate an action going on right now, we must use the participial form
driving.
We don't say, “I drive the car now,” but rather “I'm driving the car now.” Not to put too fine a point on it, the labels are largely meaningless.

We seldom stop to think about it, but some of the most basic concepts in English are naggingly difficult to define. What, for instance, is a sentence? Most dictionaries define it broadly as a group of words constituting a full thought and containing, at a minimum, a subject (basically a noun) and predicate (basically a verb). Yet if I inform you that I have just crashed your car and you reply, “What!” or “Where?” or “How!” you have clearly expressed a complete thought, uttered a sentence. But where are the subject and predicate? Where are the noun and verb, not to mention the prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and other components that we normally expect to find in a sentence? To get around this problem, grammarians pretend that such sentences contain words that aren't there. “What!” they would say, really means “What are you telling me—you crashed my car?” while “Where?” is a shorthand rendering of “Where did you crash it?” and “How?” translates as “How on earth did you manage to do that, you old devil you?” or words to that effect. The process is called
ellipsis
and is certainly very nifty. Would that I could do the same with my bank account. Yet the inescapable fact is that it is possible to make such sentences conform to grammatical precepts only by bending the rules. When I was growing up we called that cheating.

In English, in short, we possess a language in which the parts of speech are almost entirely notional. A noun is a noun and a verb is a verb largely because the grammarians say they are. In the sentence “I am suffering terribly”
suffering
is a verb, but in “My suffering is terrible,” it is a noun. Yet both sentences use precisely the same word to express precisely the same idea.
Quickly
and
sleepily
are adverbs but
sickly
and
deadly
are adjectives.
Breaking
is a present tense participle, but as often as not it is used in a past tense sense (“He was breaking the window when I saw him”).
Broken,
on the other hand, is a past tense participle but as often as not it is employed in a present tense sense (“I think I've just broken my toe”) or even future tense sense (“If he wins the next race, he'll have broken the school record”). To deal with all the anomalies, the parts of speech must be so broadly defined as to be almost meaningless. A noun, for example, is generally said to be a word that denotes a person, place, thing, action, or quality. That would seem to cover almost everything, yet clearly most actions are verbs and many words that denote qualities—
brave, foolish, good
—are adjectives.

The complexities of English are such that the authorities themselves often stumble. Each of the following, penned by an expert, contains a usage that at least some of his colleagues would consider quite wrong.

“Prestige is one of the few words that has had an experience opposite to that described in ‘Worsened Words.' ” (H. W. Fowler,
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,
second edition) It should be “one of the few words that
have
had.”

“Each of the variants indicated in boldface type count as an entry.” (
The Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage
) It should be “each . . . ​
counts.
”

“It is of interest to speculate about the amount of dislocation to the spelling system that would occur if English dictionaries were either proscribed or (as when Malory or Sir Philip Sidney were writing) did not exist.” (Robert Burchfield,
The English Language
) Make it “
was
writing.”

“A range of sentences forming statements, commands, questions and exclamations cause us to draw on a more sophisticated battery of orderings and arrangements.” (Robert Burchfield,
The English Language
) It should be “causes.”

“The prevalence of incorrect instances of the use of the apostrophe . . . ​together with the abandonment of it by many business firms . . . ​suggest that the time is close at hand when this moderately useful device should be abandoned.” (Robert Burchfield,
The English Language
) The verb should be
suggests.

“If a lot of the available dialect data is obsolete or almost so, a lot more of it is far too sparse to support any sort of reliable conclusion.” (Robert Claiborne,
Our Marvelous Native Tongue
)
Data
is a plural.

“His system of citing examples of the best authorities, of indicating etymology, and pronunciation, are still followed by lexicographers.” (Philip Howard,
The State of the Language
) His system are?

“When his fellowship expired he was offered a rectorship at Boxworth . . . ​on condition that he married the deceased rector's daughter.” (Robert McCrum, et al.,
The Story of English
) A misuse of the subjunctive: It should be “on condition that he marry.”

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin—​a language with which it has precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn't, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans. Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity. But once this insane notion became established grammarians found themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies. As Burchfield notes in
The English Language,
one authority, F. Th. Visser, found it necessary to devote 200 pages to discussing just one aspect of the present participle. That is as crazy as it is amazing.

The early authorities not only used Latin grammar as their model, but actually went to the almost farcical length of writing English grammars in that language, as with Sir Thomas Smith's
De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione Dialogus
(1568), Alexander Gil's
Logonomia Anglica
(1619), and John Wallis's
Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae
of 1653 (though even he accepted that the grammar of Latin was ill-suited to English). For the longest time it was taken entirely for granted that the classical languages
must
serve as models. Dryden spoke for an age when he boasted that he often translated his sentences into Latin to help him decide how best to express them in English.