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.
* * *
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.”15
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?’”18 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.21
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.
* * *
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.
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.23 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 exposé, 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.”24
Penny papers also used slang to give their stories some extra zip. The New York Herald jocularly titled a piece about a public séance “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.”25
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 t
he 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.26
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.”27
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