by Kory Stamper
Prescriptivism and descriptivism have been shoehorned into this moral dualism as well. The former purportedly champions the “best practices” of English and eschews the newfangled linguistic relativism of descriptivism.*4 Prescriptivism, then, must be good—how can the “best practices” of English be anything but good? And if prescriptivism is good, then descriptivism, its principles, and its practitioners must perforce be bad. In a letter to his publisher, E. B. White, the second half of the famous Strunk and White responsible for the best-selling writing guide The Elements of Style, beautifully expresses the modern complaint against descriptivism:
I have been sympathetic all along with your qualms about “The Elements of Style,” but I know that I cannot, and will-shall not, attempt to adjust the unadjustable Mr. Strunk to the modern liberal of the English Department, the anything-goes fellow. Your letter expresses contempt for this fellow, but on the other hand you seem to want his vote. I am against him, temperamentally and because I have seen the work of his disciples, and I say the hell with him.
Descriptivists, those anything-goes hippies: we have seen their work, and right-thinking people everywhere say to hell with them.
Now, as a lexicographer, you are one.
* * *
*1 bent adj…—get bent slang—used as an angry or contemptuous way of dismissing someone’s statement, suggestion, etc. (MWU)
*2 Like many things that are claimed as Western inventions, grammar was first practiced in the East. According to scholars, there is a rich tradition of grammatical typology in Sanskrit that dates back to at least the sixth century B.C. and probably the eighth century B.C.
*3 I had that teacher, and that comment still chaps my hide.
*4 Modern linguistic relativism goes back at least two thousand years: “Multa renascentur quae iam cercidere, cadentque / quae nunc sunt in honore vocabula, si volet usus, / quem penes arbitrium est et ius et norma loquendi.” (Many words shall revive, which now have fallen off; / and many which are now in esteem shall fall off, if it be the will of usage, / in whose power is the decision and right and standard of language.) Horace, Ars Poetica, A.D. 18. What a commie hippie liberal.
It’s
On “Grammar”
The bloody battle to defend English and champion “good grammar” hasn’t always been in existence; in fact, prior to about the middle of the fifteenth century, there was very, very little thought given to English as a language of discourse, officialdom, and permanence. Prior to that, most official documents were recorded in Latin (the gold standard for Languages of Record) or French.*1 Sure, there had always been anonymous writers (and a few onymous*2 ones, too, like Geoffrey Chaucer) who chose to preserve their wisdom—or fart jokes, in the case of Chaucer—in English, but it wasn’t taken seriously as a literary language until Henry V suddenly began using it in his official correspondence in 1417. Within a few decades, English had become the language of the English bureaucracy, replacing French and Latin almost completely.
The problem with this shift was that both French and Latin, having been used as languages of record for a while, were already comparatively standardized, and English was not. Latin and French had written forms that stood independent of their pronunciation; English, on the other hand, was entirely phonetically spelled. That meant that while Medieval Latin had one way to spell the word that we know as “right” (rectus) and Old French as used in English laws and literature had six (drait, dres, drez, drettes, dreyt, and droit), Middle English, the form of English in use when it became an official language of record, had a whopping seventy-seven recorded ways to spell “right.”*3 The Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage puts it best: “English now had to serve the functions formerly served by Latin and French…and this new reality was a powerful spur to the formation of a standard in written English that could be quite independent of variable speech.”
The key words here are “in written English.” The pronunciation of English continued to be wildly variable, but starting in the fifteenth century, a standard written form began to emerge. (It should be noted that though this movement began in the middle of the fifteenth century, English spelling wasn’t fully standardized for at least another five hundred years, give or take.) The focus was on making English a suitable language of record; you couldn’t have official court and legal documents written in whatever form of the language the local scribe had at hand. The type of English used among the clerks of the chancery*4 (called, appropriately, Chancery English or Chancery Standard) became the seed around which Early Modern English was able to form.
It wasn’t all the law clerks. The printing press came to England in the fifteenth century, which helped speed along the standardization process. William Caxton and Richard Pynson, the two most well-known British printers at that time, adopted the Chancery Standard.
While Chancery Standard was spreading throughout the realm in the form of books and printed pamphlets, trying its level best to regularize English spelling, English itself was growing like gangbusters. In the sixteenth century, English was established as a language of record; now it was time to make it a fully literary language.
The problem was that plenty of England’s best writers thought English wasn’t quite up to the task. This wasn’t anything new: complaints about the fitness of English have practically been a national pastime since at least the twelfth century, and if the written record were more complete, I’m sure we’d find scrawled in the corner of some Old English manuscript a complaint that English is horrible and Latin is way better. John Skelton wrote a poem that most likely dates to the early sixteenth century in which he claims that “our naturall tong is rude” and really not up to the task of poetry, and he was the damned poet laureate of England. If English was going to be a literary language, it had a lot of work to do.
Vocabulary boomed in the sixteenth century, and many of those new words were words borrowed from lovely, literary languages on the Continent—Latin, Italian, and French. The Romance-language borrowings weren’t without controversy—Shakespeare himself made fun of people who piled on the highfalutin foreignisms just to sound smart*5—and by the end of the century the language was growing so quickly, both with borrowed words from other languages and with foreign speakers attempting to get their mouths around this burgeoning language, that a handful of native speakers stepped in to provide order. In 1586, William Bullokar, a man who was interested in regularizing and reforming English, published the first English grammar (appropriately titled Bref Grammar for English); in 1604, Robert Cawdrey published what is held to be the first monolingual English dictionary.
The concern was that English was becoming terribly unruly, and it needed some reining in. Some called for a large-scale remedy—an academy of English that would not only prescribe good usage but proscribe bad stuff out of English. By “bad stuff,” they meant not just words that people thought were uncouth but all forms of the language—styles, uses, poetic meters, the whole kit and caboodle—that were deemed inelegant and unlovely. Daniel Defoe loved the idea of an English academy: he thought it would be best not only for English but for English identity and interests. The job of the academy would be “to encourage Polite Learning, to polish and refine the English tongue, and advance the so much neglected faculty of correct language; also, to establish purity and propriety of style, and to purge it from all the irregular additions that ignorance and affectation have introduced; and all those innovations of speech, if I may call them such, which some dogmatic writers have the confidence to foster upon their native language, as if their authority were sufficient to make their own fancy legitimate.”
Don’t think Defoe didn’t like English. He goes on to say, “By such a society I daresay the true glory of our English style would appear; and among all the learned part of the world be esteemed, as it really is, the noblest and most comprehensive of all the vulgar
languages in the world.”
This desire to see English exalted wasn’t Defoe’s alone: Jonathan Swift longed for it; John Dryden strove for it. A grammar was no longer a book used to teach foreigners how to speak English but a book used to teach native English speakers how to speak English.
If that seems presumptuous, realize this: literacy (particularly formal education) was booming in the eighteenth century, and it wasn’t too long before “good grammar” became the dividing line between the educated, well poised, polite, and morally upright and the ignorant, vulgar, and morally compromised. English, the grammarians claimed, was a system that could be reduced to a set of logical rules and expectations, and these logical rules expressed right thinking. This weird connection between morality and English usage didn’t just appear ex nihilo: England and its colonies were beginning to undergo a huge social shift in which middle-class merchants (many of whom traditionally had a rudimentary education but nothing beyond) were making enough money to buy their way into polite society, and members of the aristocracy (most of whom had an exemplary education) were losing lands, money, and therefore influence. People moving up the social ladder have always aspired to the manners and education of the rank above them, but they need help in doing so; the eighteenth century was no exception. Merchants who were suddenly flush with cash were expected to behave as if they had always been so, particularly when it came to business.
Help came in the form of letter-writing guides written specifically for the benefit of the rising middle class. Daniel Defoe released one such guide, The Complete English Tradesman in Familiar Letters, in 1725. The book is filled with all manner of business advice for the middle-class merchant, along with some solid moralizing: “I cannot allow any pleasures to be innocent, when they turn away either the body or the mind of a tradesman from the one needful thing which his calling makes necessary, and that necessity makes his duty.”
The eighteenth-century English grammars were thus the linguistic complements to the etiquette books. Robert Lowth, the bishop of London, wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar: With Critical Notes in 1762 and explains in the preface,
It is with reason expected of every person of a liberal education, and it is indispensably required of every one who undertakes to inform or entertain the public, that he should be able to express himself with propriety and accuracy. It will evidently appear from these notes, that our best authors have committed gross mistakes, for want of a due knowledge of English grammar, or at least of a proper attention to the rules of it.
In Lowth’s grammar, we have the beginnings of our popular notion of what constitutes “grammar.” The first line of his book reads, “Grammar is the art of rightly expressing our thoughts by words,” and his grammar doesn’t just cover actual grammar, like the difference between a preposition and an adverb, but also what we moderns call “usage,” like when to use “will” and when to use “shall” (“Will, in the first person singular and plural, promises or threatens; in the second and third persons, only foretells; shall on the contrary, in the first person, simply foretells; in the second and third persons, promises, commands, or threatens”) and how important it is to use “who” and “whom” correctly, because confusion between the two means that you have not mastered the subjective and objective cases yet.*6
This is not grammar for grammar’s sake, however. To Lowth’s mind, propriety and accuracy of expression become the hallmarks of a gentleman. Good manners, good morality, and good grammar all go hand in hand.
The moralizing continues to this day, in no small part because we like to be correct and because bombast sells. Lynne Truss released her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation in 2003, and it was full of outsized, near-biblical smiting of people who misused punctuation:
The confusion of the possessive “its” (no apostrophe) with the contractive “it’s” (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian “kill” response in the average stickler. The rule is: the word “it’s” (with apostrophe) stands for “it is” or “it has.” If the word does not stand for “it is” or “it has” then what you require is “its.” This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, “Good food at it’s best,” you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
Though Truss must certainly be joking regarding the unhappy fates of those who use the wrong “its,” some of her readers seem to have missed the joke. One online review begins, “I proudly consider myself a punctuation martyr.” Truss’s book was a runaway hit in spite of the fact that I’d wager every person who read that paragraph has, at some point in their life, misused “its” and “it’s.” And it’s not as though the genre reached its hand-waving apotheosis in Truss. In 2013, N. M. Gwynne released a book called Gwynne’s Grammar: The Ultimate Introduction to Grammar and the Writing of Good English, in which Gwynne (a businessman turned autodidactic schoolmarm) begins his grammar with a logical proof that one cannot be truly happy unless one uses what he considers “good grammar”: “In summary of the proof: grammar is the science of using words rightly, leading to thinking rightly, leading to deciding rightly, without which—as both common sense and experience show—happiness is impossible. Therefore, happiness depends at least partly on good grammar.”
So what is the grammar that leads us to true happiness? It’s consistent with the grammar we find in other books: avoid splitting infinitives because some of your readers may find them inelegant; ending a sentence with a preposition is wrong because the word “preposition” literally means “to position before something”; get your “its” and “it’s” straight because it’s not that difficult.
The biggest problem with this sort of grammar, however, is that it sounds logical but it’s based on a faulty logic. Take the oft-repeated injunction to get “its” and “it’s” straight. Everyone claims it’s remarkably easy to remember that “its” is possessive and “it’s” is a contraction. But logic tells us that in English, ’s attached to a noun signals possession: the dog’s dish, the cat’s toy, the lexicographer’s cry. So if English is logical, and there are simple rules to follow, why doesn’t “it’s” signal possession? We know that ’s also signals a contraction, but we don’t have any problems with differentiating between “the dog’s dish” and “the dog’s sleeping”—why should we suddenly have problems with “it’s dish” and “it’s sleeping”?
This type of grammar often completely ignores hundreds (and, in some cases, well over a thousand) years of established use in English. For “it’s,” the rule is certainly easy to memorize, but it also ignores the history of “its” and “it’s.” At one point in time, “it” was its own possessive pronoun: the 1611 King James Bible reads, “That which groweth of it owne accord…thou shalt not reape”; Shakespeare wrote in King Lear, “It had it head bit off by it young.” They weren’t the first: the possessive “it” goes back to the fifteenth century.
But around the time that Shakespeare was shuffling off this mortal coil, the possessive “it” began appearing as “it’s.” We’re not sure why the change happened, but some commentators guess that it was because “it” didn’t appear to be its own possessive pronoun, like “his” and “her,” but rather a bare pronoun in need of that possessive marker given to nouns: ’s. Sometimes this possessive appeared without punctuation as “its.” But the possessive “it’s” grew in popularity through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until it was the dominant form of the word. It even survived into the nineteenth century: you’ll find it in the letters of Thomas Jefferson and Jane Austen and the speechwriting notes of Abraham Lincoln.
This would be relatively simple were it not for the fact that “it’s” was also occasionally used as a contraction for “it is” or “it has” (“and it’s come to p
ass,” Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII, 1.2.63). Some grammarians noticed and complained—not that the possessive “it’s” and the contractive “it’s” were confusing, but that the contractive “it’s” was a misuse and mistake for the contraction “ ’tis,” which was the more standard contraction of “it is.” This was a war that the pedants lost: “ ’tis” waned while “it’s” waxed.
“Its” and “it’s” began to diverge in the nineteenth century, likely as a way to distinguish the possessive form from the contraction. But old habits die hard: The possessive “it’s” still shows up with regularity in print, and not just in hand-lettered flyers for local garage sales. Our files have recent evidence of the possessive “it’s” in everything from Vogue to The New York Times Magazine to Gourmet to Time magazine (which is quoting Ronald Reagan), and then some. They are, of course, typos, but the fact remains that each “it’s” was unobtrusive enough that it slipped slyly by the two people most invested in an error-free article: writer and editor.
—
So where do these rules come from, if not from actual use? Most of them are the personal peeves, codified into law, of dead white men of yore.
Take, for example, the rule that we’re not to end sentences with prepositions. It’s one that is drummed into most young writers at some point in their careers, and failing to heed it will result in some teacherly knuckle smacking (literal or figurative). If you ask a modern adherent to this rule why, exactly, you aren’t supposed to end a sentence with a preposition, they merely goggle at you as if you had just asked why you aren’t supposed to lick electrical sockets. Because it’s objectively better not to, that’s why.