Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

  In practice, Whitney was almost as conventional as White. In his book he lists the usual parts of speech with familiar definitions—a noun is “the name of anything.” He also includes parsing exercises that are recognizably related to those found in earlier books, although with more linguistic explanation. For instance, brother in one example sentence is parsed as “a noun, because it is the name of something…; a common noun, because it belongs alike to every individual of a class;… masculine, because it denotes only a male being.”

  Although he doesn’t give students “set rules” to memorize, he doesn’t invite them to break the rules, either. All his grammar choices are orthodox. He identifies noun cases by their old-fashioned names, including dative and vocative. His examples feature the pronouns of standard grammar, such as nominatives in comparative phrases—he is a better man than I. He uses whom and keeps it with its preposition—To whom did you speak? rather than the more colloquial Who did you speak to? In any event, Essentials of English Grammar must have seemed conventional enough overall to appeal to a significant number of teachers. It went through eighteen editions between 1877 and 1903.34

  Lounsbury, Whitney’s onetime collaborator, enjoyed a long and versatile career, remaining active until his sudden death in 1915 at the age of seventy-seven. Like Whitney, he continued to write about usage while focusing on other scholarship. He wrote books about several authors, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, and James Fenimore Cooper. He became increasingly interested in American spelling and served as president of the Simplified Spelling Board beginning in 1907. He also wrote numerous language-related articles for Harper’s. In 1908, several of these would be collected into a book, thus hurtling nineteenth-century grammatical controversies into the twentieth century with no loss of momentum.

  * * *

  All the participants in the usage debates routinely garnered admiring reviews. Equal respect did not lead to equal sales figures, however—the verbal critics were incomparably more popular with the book-buying public. While Whitney’s textbook sold reasonably well, its sales numbers didn’t begin to touch those for White’s books. Both Words and Their Uses and Every-Day English went through printing after printing and were still available in the 1920s. Other word use books—for instance, The Verbalist by Alfred Ayres—were also reprinted dozens of times. In contrast, Recent Exemplifications of False Philology never rated a second printing.

  The philologists complained that White and other verbal critics didn’t provide objective standards or a broader context for judging good usage. Most readers, however, thought the critics offered something much better—specific instructions for what to say or not say. Hall was right in predicting that White’s “dogmatism and positiveness” would make a deeper impression on the minds of the grammatically insecure than the cogent, but subtle, arguments of the philologists.

  At the turn of the nineteenth century, working-class Americans memorized Murray’s grammar to give themselves linguistic confidence as they climbed the social ladder. White’s books fulfilled a similar purpose for their post–Civil War descendants. For those people, maintaining a solid social position meant heeding White’s pronouncements on split infinitives and other slippery usage issues.

  Meanwhile, far from the linguistic front lines, grammar teaching proceeded much as it had always done. Public fights about what constituted standard English didn’t filter down into the classroom. Although some schools experimented with new ways of teaching grammar, or with not teaching the subject at all, most still felt the need of a conventional textbook. In 1878, one year after Whitney brought out Essentials of English Grammar, a book appeared that was destined to have a much more lasting impact on the course of grammar studies than either Whitney and his fellow linguists or their adversaries the verbal critics.

  Higher Lessons in English by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg signaled a new era in the classroom. The book incorporates some popular teaching trends of the time. The authors discourage rote memorization and only define parts of speech after describing them and giving examples. They emphasize inductive reasoning, feeding students information a little at a time. For instance, they begin their lesson on sentences by explaining that sentences express a thought. Then they encourage students to explore the concept of sentences, leading them eventually to the idea that a sentence consists of two main parts—a word or phrase about which something is said, and what is said about it. Only then do they provide definitions for the terms sentence, subject, and predicate.

  The book made its strongest impact with a novel idea for identifying the pieces of a sentence. To help students visualize the relationships between the various words and phrases, Reed and Kellogg introduced a technique called sentence diagramming. Sentence diagrams indicate the connections between words—subject, direct object, modifier, and so on—using a system of horizontal, vertical, and slanted lines. Diagramming is a comparatively fast and uncomplicated way to analyze sentences. Instead of tediously writing out the information that a word is a noun, the subject of a particular verb, and so on, students could simply draw a horizontal line under the subject and the verb and then draw a short, straight vertical line to separate the two. Other lines would connect modifiers to the main subject and verb. Once completed, the diagram gave students a clear picture of a sentence’s internal structure.35

  Although Reed and Kellogg’s book added a new twist to grammar lessons, its grammatical information was safely orthodox. The authors issue their rules in the form of cautions, but the content is still the same. Their caution for negating sentences is stated, “Unless you wish to affirm, do not use two negative words so that they shall contradict each other.” When discussing adverbs, they write, “Caution.… They should not stand between to and the infinitive.” In their section on pronouns, they explain in a footnote that while some people have defended It is me, “a course of reading will satisfy any one that the best writers and speakers in England are not in the habit of using such expressions … and that they are almost, if not quite, unknown in American literature.”36 (The latter assertion is questionable. Webster had noted nearly a century earlier that It is me was common in America, at least in spoken speech. While the usage was obviously still deprecated among grammar sticklers, it’s doubtful whether it was any less common in 1878.)

  Grammar teachers enthusiastically adopted this innovative teaching tool. Well into the next century, grade-school students would be put to work diagramming sentences, with Higher Lessons in English going through twenty-one editions between 1878 and 1913. At the same time, all the traditional grammar rules remained firmly in place. Reed-Kellogg diagrams have never completely gone away. Although sentence diagramming has not been part of the standard curriculum in recent decades, some teachers still introduce their students to diagrams, drawing on lessons from their own school days. Online parsers can also be found that will generate diagrams automatically.37

  By the early decades of the twentieth century, philologists, grammar teachers, and verbal critics inhabited separate worlds. Philology—soon to be called linguistics—prospered as a scholarly discipline. At the same time, it nearly disappeared from the public conversation about language use. While specialists in university linguistics departments explored the history and structure of English, grade-school students absorbed the same grammar rules that their parents and grandparents had learned. Double negatives and sentence-ending prepositions were still absolutely wrong in most people’s minds.

  Adults who needed usage advice continued to turn to popular magazines and style guides such as White’s. The “antipathies and prejudices” that Hall castigated changed from year to year—jeopardize and pants soon entered the standard vocabulary—but they never disappeared. Seekers after linguistic wisdom could always find some list of questionable words or grammar mistakes to avoid. Lowth and Murray had weathered their most powerful challenge yet and come through largely unscathed.

  7.

  Grammar for a New Century

  On March 4, 190
5, seventy-six years after Andrew Jackson was inaugurated as the “people’s president,” the east lawn of the Capitol was once again the scene of tumultuous celebration. By early morning, thousands of festive, jostling men, women, and children had gathered around the inaugural platform in front of the building’s East Portico. The crowd stretched back nearly to the Library of Congress a block away. More people thronged nearby Pennsylvania Avenue. According to one witness, people were wedged together so tightly that “only the tops of their heads could be seen.”

  The mood was jubilant. Even the biting winds and threat of a shower didn’t dim the crowd’s enthusiasm. They were here to cheer on their hero, Theodore Roosevelt—or Teddy, as they called him. They had just elected him president and were waiting to see him take the oath of office later in the day.1

  Roosevelt had already served as president for nearly four years. As William McKinley’s vice president, he stepped into the presidency when McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist in 1901. President Roosevelt was a success from the start. When the 1904 election came around, voters swept him back into office, in the words of The New York Times, “with a degree of acclamation such as was never before given to a candidate for the Presidency.”2 Roosevelt won by the widest popular vote margin since Madison ran unopposed in 1820 and the largest majority of electoral votes since Andrew Jackson crushed Henry Clay in 1832.

  Voters took to Roosevelt for some of the same reasons that an earlier generation had loved Jackson. Like Jackson, Roosevelt was a war hero. Americans thrilled to his daring exploits with the Rough Riders during the recent Spanish-American War, including the famous charge up Cuba’s San Juan Hill. Although Roosevelt was not a born frontiersman like Jackson, he seemed like one. He had owned a ranch in the Dakota Territory and hunted buffalo and other big game. He was as tough and skilled in the outdoors as Jackson had been in his day.

  The two men shared another important trait as well. They spoke to the voters in down-to-earth language that was unpolished but compelling. Old Hickory had not gone in much for fancy rhetoric, and neither did Teddy. Although Republican Party insiders considered Roosevelt too volatile, ordinary Americans loved his robust ways and forceful, slangy speech.

  At ten o’clock on inauguration day, Roosevelt’s open carriage, drawn by four matched bays, started on its journey from the White House to the Capitol. As the carriage with its honor guard of Rough Riders rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue, the multitudes lining the street let out a roar loud enough to be heard by those waiting on the east lawn almost a mile away. Men threw their hats into the air and women waved handkerchiefs. Another three hours would pass before the actual swearing in. Preliminary ceremonies, including the swearing in of Vice President Charles Fairbanks, were scheduled to take place in the relative privacy of the Senate chamber. In the meantime, the crowd milled around, munching sandwiches and watching the weather.

  Another ear-splitting cheer went up shortly before one o’clock, when Roosevelt finally strode out of the East Portico onto the inaugural platform. The president emanated vitality, with a stocky, muscular body, military moustache, and square, white teeth that were a gift to political cartoonists. By this time, the morning’s clouds had given way to bright sunshine. “Roosevelt weather,” everyone agreed—“Roosevelt’s luck.”

  After the brief oath-taking ceremony, Roosevelt gave his inaugural address, one of the shortest on record. The blustery winds carried most of the words away from the crowd, but it really didn’t matter. The content of Roosevelt’s message—a call to commit to the duties of citizenship—wasn’t as important as the style of delivery. One spectator who stood close to the platform later commented that he only heard eight words of the speech. He did receive a clear impression of the speaker though—“a strong man in dead earnest saying the things that he believed from the bottom of his heart.”3

  Even Roosevelt’s supporters agreed that he was not a born orator. He spoke in a high-pitched shout and jumped from topic to topic. “It does not seem to me … that Mr. Roosevelt is a persuasive speaker,” opines the author of an article on political speechmaking. “He always gets an uproarious response; but this is not a tribute to his oratory, it is awarded the man.”4

  Roosevelt was not overcareful about grammar, either, any more than Jackson had been. One journalist remarks on his “too great use, perhaps, of the split infinitive, an ambiguous use of pronouns or participles, or some other carelessness in syntactical matters.” Another commentator marvels at Roosevelt’s ability to get away with all kinds of “blunders and mistakes, errors of judgment and of taste,” including many “absurdities of language.” He complains that Roosevelt “dismisses subjects of gravity and importance with a last word in the slang of the streets. He is ‘delighted’ to see people, he has ‘corking’ good times, and his enemies and opponents he ‘beats to a frazzle,’ ‘pounds to a pulp’ or ‘wipes off the map.’”5

  These critics missed the point. To most of Roosevelt’s supporters, his taste for slang and punchy metaphors was not a problem—it was a plus. They thought that his knack for producing just the right memorable word or phrase more than compensated for any weaknesses as a formal speaker. The Roosevelt era, like the age of Jackson, was a moment when slang and casual speech came into their own. Americans’ love of inventive colloquial language seemed close to overcoming their commitment to grammar and proper word use.

  Roosevelt embraced this trend with gusto. His speeches were peppered with dramatic terminology. Those whose points of view he disdained were labeled muckrakers, parlor Bolsheviks, or the lunatic fringe. He summarized his approach to foreign policy with the pithy advice, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” His colorfully aggressive speech—slang-whanging, Jackson’s friend David Crockett would have called it—captured the American public’s imagination. As with Crockett’s backwoods idioms, it made a much more lasting impression than carefully grammatical formal phrases would have done.

  Roosevelt’s background and early life could hardly have been more different from Jackson’s. While Jackson hailed from the Tennessee backwoods, Roosevelt was born in a spacious New York brownstone to a wealthy and old-established family. Growing up, he was privately tutored until he entered Harvard at seventeen. Unlike Jackson, who never picked up a book for pleasure, Roosevelt read constantly. He even carried books on hunting trips. He was fascinated with natural history and considered a career as a scholar in that field.

  Roosevelt also wrote easily and prolifically—books and articles spilled off his pen almost continuously throughout his life. He published his first piece of writing while still at Harvard—a pamphlet cataloging the summer birds of the Adirondacks. He authored over forty books on a wide range of subjects, from hunting memoirs to a history of the War of 1812. Perhaps his best-known work, the four-volume Winning of the West, appeared a few years before his election to the vice presidency.

  Roosevelt also wrote dozens of articles about topics as varied as the art of Frederick Remington, wolf hunting in Oklahoma, and the meaning of American citizenship. After he left the presidency, he became a contributing editor to The Outlook. Even while in office, he wrote articles for The Outlook, Scribner’s, and other magazines. (Although it’s not obvious from his finished writing, he did struggle with spelling, as had Jackson. He supported the Simplified Spelling Board and tried unsuccessfully while president to require that all government documents be written in simplified spelling.)6

  Several of Roosevelt’s favorite words and expressions have become part of America’s political vernacular. He frequently used bully, which had acquired the slang meaning of admirable or first rate around the middle of the nineteenth century (as in the congratulatory Bully for you). More than once Roosevelt pointed out to friends that the presidency provided “a bully pulpit”—that is, a first-rate platform—for airing his views. The term evidently made a deep impression on those who heard him use it. Several mentioned it in later reminiscences. One close associate, for instance, remembered gathering in Roosevel
t’s office with half a dozen others while the president read out the draft of a forthcoming speech. After one tub-thumping paragraph, Roosevelt paused. The narrator recalled that the president swung around in his swivel chair to look at his audience while remarking, “I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.”7

  Another of Roosevelt’s expressions that outlasted his time is malefactors of great wealth. He invented the term to describe corporations or wealthy individuals who behaved unethically, and used it in both speeches and writing. During a 1907 address, for example, he spoke of the government’s continued determination “to punish certain malefactors of great wealth.” In an Outlook editorial, Roosevelt attacked “the big newspaper, owned or controlled by Wall Street,… which is quite willing to hound politicians for their misdeeds, but which … defends all the malefactors of great wealth.”8 The president found that this and other trenchant coinages were highly effective at getting his point across.

  Roosevelt made his final contributions to the political vocabulary during his unsuccessful 1912 attempt to retake the presidency. In the excitement of his 1904 victory, Roosevelt had rashly declared that because he had already served nearly four years as McKinley’s replacement, he wouldn’t run again. Instead, he handpicked a successor, Secretary of War William Taft. Taft and Roosevelt were close friends and allies at that time. Unfortunately, the good will didn’t last. Roosevelt believed that his friend had betrayed his policies and the two men parted ways. As the 1912 election drew near, Roosevelt decided that in spite of his promise, he should run once more.

  Typically, he announced his intention with a striking metaphor. When a reporter asked him if he had decided yet whether to run, he answered with language from his boxing days—“My hat is in the ring!” he cried. “The fight is on and I am stripped to the buff.” Throwing a hat in the ring had been an actual boxing activity since the early nineteenth century. Professional boxers earned money by traveling to county fairs and other venues and offering to take on all comers. A man interested in accepting the challenge threw his hat into the boxing ring, presumably because a shout or raised hand might not have been noticed in the ringside chaos. Before 1912, hat in the ring appeared frequently in magazine and newspaper descriptions of fights. Now it exists entirely as a political metaphor, thanks to Roosevelt.