Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

  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.

  White’s career as a verbal critic began in the late 1860s with regular columns on American English in Galaxy magazine and The New York Times. These were later collected into Words and Their Uses, Past and Present, published in 1870, and the sequel, Every-Day English, which appeared in 1880. A tall, stern-looking man with luxuriant side-whiskers, White employed a writing style that was as Victorian as his looks. His work—formal, learned, and discursive—includes a generous scattering of literary allusions and lengthy, untranslated Latin quotations. White was not writing for the masses, but for people of his own sort. He expected his audience to be well-read.

  Although White envisioned a select audience, his steady book sales indicate that he struck a chord with a broad range of people. His books were not bestsellers on the scale of Webster’s speller or Murray’s grammar, but they were very successful. By 1899 Words and Their Uses had been reprinted thirty-six times. The publisher’s note on the 1899 copyright page stated that the demand for the book has been “so large and so constant” that new plates were needed for that edition. It was still in print in 1927. Every-Day English also went through numerous printings, staying in print until the early twentieth century. Most of White’s large number of reade
rs must have come from outside the upper-class circles that he was addressing. They surely bought his books expecting to improve their speech, in spite of his warnings to the contrary.

  White’s goal in Words and Their Uses is to expose the absurdities of speech that he hears daily on the streets and reads in newspapers. He argues that using words in inaccurate or novel ways is a serious social problem. It leads to breakdowns in communication, loss of time and money, and a “sore trial of patience.” He bluntly sums up by declaring that the failure to preserve established distinctions in word meaning constitutes nothing less than “a return toward barbarism.”7 If allowed to continue, it could irreversibly damage American English.

  He blames this impending disaster on the “superficially” educated—those whose reading is limited mostly to newspapers, “hastily written by men also very insufficiently educated.” The honestly ignorant lower classes, he says, know better than to attempt refined speech. It’s the half-educated upstarts, with their “pretentious ignorance and aggressive vulgarity,” who are responsible for corrupting the language. He believes that commentary such as his is necessary to defend English “against the assaults of presuming half-knowledge.”8

  White realizes that languages inevitably evolve over time. Nonetheless, those who care about the integrity of English should resist unnecessary usage changes that come about through carelessness or ignorance. Just because a word or expression is fashionable, or a nonstandard form is becoming more common, that doesn’t mean it should be accepted as correct.

  White believes that the ultimate test of whether a word or phrase is acceptable is whether it makes good sense. In any conflict between logic and grammatical standards, he claims, logic is always victorious. He writes, “Speech, the product of reason, tends more and more to conform itself to reason.” Mere general usage cannot be the final arbiter of correct speech. All sorts of “mean and monstrous colloquial phrases” would automatically become a permanent part of the language, just because they were in common use.

  Nor do words and phrases become acceptable just because they are found in the works of great writers. Like the early grammarians, who used quotations from Shakespeare and the Bible as examples of false syntax, White has often found questionable usages in literary works. “There is a misuse of words which can be justified by no authority, however great,” he insists, and “by no usage, however general.”9

  White rejects words mainly for their lack of logic, overlap in meaning with other words, vulgarity, pretentiousness, and excessive gentility. He is contemptuous of euphemisms that arise from squeamishness, such as calling a leg a limb. Other terms offend him because they are needlessly pretentious—initiate for start, repudiate for reject, manufacturer for maker. These words, often Latin in origin, are even more problematic when they are slightly misused. Portion really signifies a measured-out amount, but many people think it’s a synonym for part. Worse than pretentious words are coarse slang terms like gents for gentlemen and pants for trousers. “The one always wears the other,” sneers White.10

  White’s approach to linguistic critique started a trend that still has many followers. People today often use the phrase “bad grammar” when they really mean questionable word choice. Slight word misuse—substituting infer for imply, for instance—is a major annoyance for today’s verbal critics. They also tend to cite the same offenses against correct speech that White named—sloppiness, ignorance, and an apparent lack of logic. Like him, they often criticize certain uses that fly in the face of tradition or fail to preserve a word’s “true” meaning. They insist, for example, that decimate, which originated in a Roman military practice, should mean putting to death one in ten people in a group, rather than its modern meaning of wiping out a large number.

  Modern sticklers for correct usage might agree with the general tone of White’s critique, but they would probably be puzzled by the words and word uses that offended him. Some—like using aggravate with the meaning of “irritate” instead of its original meaning of “make worse,” or confusing lie and lay—are still contentious issues. Most of the usages he mentions, however, are now either uncontroversial or obsolete.

  White complains, for example, that women use the noun dress to mean gown when it rightly refers to all apparel for both women and men. Sounding a little like Horne Tooke, he tells readers, “dress, the verb, means simply to set right, to put in order.… The kitchen dresser is so called because upon it dishes are put in order. As to the body, dress is that which puts it in order, in a condition … suitable to the circumstances.” (Dress derives from an Old French word that means “arrange,” and ultimately from a Latin word meaning “straighten” or “guide.”) White voices the same sort of objection to the word obnoxious being used to mean offensive. He explains, “Its root is the [Latin] verb noceo, to harm … and therefore obnoxious means liable or exposed to harm,” as in obnoxious to disasters. This use was already rare by White’s day, but he thinks it’s worth preserving. “We do not need both offensive and obnoxious with but one meaning between them,” he says.11

  He criticizes many new word coinages because they are illogical or unnecessary. He calls these “words that are not words.” The list includes practitioner, gubernatorial, presidential, jeopardize, reliable, donate, and several other words that are now part of standard English. He objects to practitioner because there is no such word as practition and to gubernatorial because there is no such word as gubernator. Presidential logically ought to be presidental. Donate has been formed by the questionable method of chopping off donation and turning the result into a verb, a pointless proceeding since English speakers can already choose from give, present, endow, bequeath, and various other possibilities.

  Jeopardize, which he calls “a foolish and intolerable word,” is problematic because the –ize ending is normally added to nouns or adjectives to form a verb, as in equal/equalize, civil/civilize, patron/patronize. In the case of jeopardize the ending has instead been added to jeopard, a verb—all but obsolete by 1870—meaning “to put in peril.” Jeopardize was not a recent coinage. The word was familiar to Webster, who also disapproved of it. His response was the opposite of White’s however. He chose to include the term in his 1828 dictionary in spite of his personal dislike because respectable American writers used it. To Webster’s mind, established usage meant that jeopardize was unarguably part of the American vocabulary. For White, forty years as a common word wasn’t enough to make it acceptable.

  Some of the word uses White objects to would turn out to be passing fads. Taverns are no longer called sample rooms and people seldom say allow when they mean believe or use fellowship as a verb (as in Next Sunday we will fellowship with neighboring churches). Much more often, usages that were a problem for White have become uncontroversial. Affable to mean “friendly,” bountiful to mean “generous,” recollect as a synonym for remember, ice water rather than iced water—these and many other locutions that disgusted White are now standard. The same is true for the word inventions that he stigmatizes as “not words.” Even the most linguistically sensitive twenty-first-century Americans would find it hard to explain what’s wrong with practitioner, gubernatorial, or jeopardize.

  It’s not surprising that most of White’s commentary is now irrelevant. Languages are constantly evolving and the vocabulary changes more obviously than other linguistic features. Drifts in meaning, as happened with dress and obnoxious, new words created out of old ones, like donate from donation, and abandoned words like jeopard are common over the history of a language. Once these changes get under way they can rarely if ever be reversed. What’s more remarkable is that several grammatical usages first condemned in late-eighteenth-century grammar books were still considered problems when White was writing. Some continue to be live issues today.

  White repeatedly emphasizes in his writings that good style can’t be taught and that grammar books are useless. Nonetheless, he can’t resist discussing a few troublesome forms that he thinks educated people m
ight benefit from studying. One peeve is the common misuse of shall and will. This issue also troubled eighteenth-century grammar book authors and, for once, White shares their view. Like them, he has noticed that will is replacing shall in many people’s speech. He thinks it’s important for shall to be preserved.

  White reiterates the shall/will rules first detailed in Lowth and other early grammars. Simple statements of future actions use shall with first-person pronouns and will with second and third person. The opposite is true for statements of determination, promises, or threats—I will go! but You shall obey me! He realizes that many people will label this distinction a “verbal quibble.” That’s true of any distinction “to persons too ignorant, too dull, or too careless for its apprehension.”12

  Another problem that White points out is the common confusion between like and as. White writes that he has noticed many people using like to introduce sentences, as in He talked like he was crazy. He reminds people of the standard rule—still current in modern usage guides—that like compares things, while as compares actions or states of being. A verb should never follow like.

  A third problem is using they with a singular antecedent. White describes an example that a reader of his column has sent in—If a person wishes to sleep, they mustn’t eat cheese for supper. The reader surmises that while the sentence is technically incorrect, it’s what most people would say. White disagrees. He replies, “A speaker of common sense and common mastery of English would say, ‘If a man wishes to sleep, he must not eat cheese at supper,’ where man … is used in a general sense for the species.”13 He suggests that sympathizers with the Women’s Rights Convention replace a man with one. (He also points out in passing that the correct preposition is at supper, not for supper, unless the entire supper consists of cheese.)

  The persistence of these rules—and the fact that White felt the need to mention them—suggests that traditional grammar books still retained their old power. Unlike many of the evolving word uses that White discusses, the nonstandard versions of these grammatical forms never became completely acceptable. Although shall has long been rare in American speech except for questions like Shall we go, the shall/will rule remained enshrined in grammar books until at least the mid-twentieth century. The like/as rule and the ban on singular they are still contentious topics. Grammar book writers and style arbiters like White made sure that these rules continued to be part of what constitutes standard grammar, even though speakers then and now break them all the time.