More to the point, though, Shakespeare was a coiner of new words and, more interestingly, a great manipulator of the language’s existing resources, exhilarated by its semantic possibilities. The notion of ‘coining’ a new word arose in the 1580s, and before it became usual to talk of ‘borrowing’ words from other languages one instead spoke of ‘usurping’ them. Shakespeare was a particularly influential usurper. More than three hundred years later, Virginia Woolf provides an incandescent image of this: while working on her novel The Waves in 1930, she writes in her diary of reading Shakespeare straight after every burst of writing ‘when my mind is agape & red & hot’, and of the thrill of Shakespeare’s ‘stretch & speed & word coining power’: ‘the words drop so fast one can’t pick them up’.8
Some of the changes in vocabulary were achieved by means of prefixes and suffixes (hence the new terms uncomfortable and overindulgence, straightish and relentless), and some by compounding existing words (novelties including, for instance, laughing-stock and pincushion), but borrowing was the chief cause of concern for conservatives. I deal with this in detail in my book The Secret Life of Words. Not just Latin and Greek, but also French, furnished many new words at this time, and there were other, less numerous imports, from Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch and Hebrew. In Love’s Labour’s Lost we hear Holofernes, a character possibly modelled on Richard Mulcaster, speak in a way that should be reserved for writing – if indeed used at all. With lines such as ‘Most barbarous intimation! Yet a kind of insinuation, as it were, in via, in way, of explication’, he embodies the vanity of the Renaissance man addicted to fancy flourishes of erudition. Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (1553) disapprovingly mentions ‘straunge ynkehorne termes’, and for roughly half a century a writer who spattered his text with novelties was likely to be told his work reeked of the inkhorn – a vessel used for carrying ink, a little horn of plenty that became a symbol of authorial self-indulgence.
For many, big words were needed to do justice to big ambitions. A various and copious vocabulary was evidence of literary sophistication. In 1593 the noted gossip and critic Thomas Nashe – a figure at the heart of the period’s literary culture, a witty scribbler with a talent for making enemies – published a work entitled Christs Teares Over Ierusalem. It warned Londoners of their corrupt city’s potential for collapse, and began with an apology to his fellow man of letters Gabriel Harvey, with whom he had previously clashed in print. The following year Nashe presented a new edition; the main body of the text was unchanged, but, after Harvey had rejected the offer of a truce, he took another swing at him. Nashe was offended by the reception his book had received, and specifically by comments about its style. In characteristically noisy but nimble fashion he dashed off his complaints.
Nashe remarked that the ‘ploddinger’ London critics had accused him of ‘a puft-up stile … full of prophane eloquence’, while others had objected to ‘the multitude of my boystrous compound wordes, and the often coyning of Italionate verbes, which end all in Ize, as mummianize, tympanize, tirannize’. He wasn’t having any of this: ‘To the first array of my clumperton Antigonists this I answer, that my stile is no otherwise puft up, then any mans should be which writes with any Spirite.’ Moreover, ‘For the compounding of my wordes, therein I imitate rich men, who, having gathered store of white single money together, convert a number of those small little scutes into great peeces of gold, such as double Pistols and Portugues.’ His intention was to make up for the limits of his country’s language: ‘Our English tongue, of all languages, most swarmeth with the single money of monasillables, which are the onely scandall of it. Bookes written in them, and no other, seeme like Shop-keepers boxes, that containe nothing else save halfe-pence, three-farthings and two-pences.’ Reflecting on his decision to use a particularly obscure word (mummianize, meaning not ‘to mummify’ but to ‘to turn something into mummy’, mummy being a liquid extracted from embalmed carcases), Nashe called on his critics to find one more succinctly conveying his meaning: ‘Expresse who can the same substance so briefly in any other word but that. A man may murder any thing if hee list in the mouthing, and grinde it to powder … betwixt a huge paire of iawes: but let a quest of calme censors goe upon it twixt the houres of sixe and seaven in the morning, and they will in their grave wisdomes subscribe to it as tollerable and significant.’ Finally, he wondered ‘wherefore should they hate us for our sting that bring forth Honny as well as they?’9
Such showmanship was typical of Nashe the pamphleteer. His prose is spangled with oddities. He is a risk-taker, socially and sexually mobile – his best-known poem circulated in manuscript under the name ‘Nashe’s Dildo’ – and his racy writing delights in all things new and exotic. Nashe at one point in his short career got into trouble for having reviled the entire Danish nation; at another for having upset all his own country’s bishops. His style was vital to his invective: sparkling, quarrelsome, brattish. He personifies the fashions of an age in which the possibilities of the printed word were dizzying. It was Nashe, as I mentioned earlier, who first wrote of the Queen’s English, and from the many words that appear to be Nashe’s coinages or imports – balderdash, braggadocio, to emblazon, grandiloquent, helter-skelter, hufty-tufty, multifarious, obscenity, silver-tongued, star-gazing, swaggering – we may construct an image of that English as a many-coloured land.
The opposite position was that of the Saxonists, who, measured against Nashe’s exuberance, really do seem ‘ploddinger’. They wanted not this flashiness and florid devilry, but instead the gravity of Anglo-Saxon. Among those who promoted a return to that ancient gravity were William Camden and Richard Rowlands Verstegan. In a collection of what he called ‘rude rubble and out-cast rubbish’, published in 1605 as Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britain, Camden applauded the usefulness of Germanic monosyllables for ‘expressing briefly the first conceipts of the minde … so that we can set downe more matter in fewer lines, than any other language’.10 That same year Verstegan, a printer and sometime Catholic spy, brought out A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, in which he went a good deal further.
The English-born grandson of Dutch immigrants, Verstegan was peculiarly attuned to the importance of Englishness. In A Restitution he set out to remind his countrymen of their true origins – in Germany – and the dignity of these. Applauding the ethnic integrity of the Germans and the integrity of their language, he complained that English had become ‘the scum of many languages’. Borrowing words from other tongues was embarrassing, but, if the words were returned, people would be ‘left … dumb’.11 The only solution was for old words to be reclaimed. In making this case, he was extending a political argument that he had previously pursued more directly. During the reign of Elizabeth, he had written pamphlets attacking the government and celebrating Catholic martyrs. Now, two years after the accession of James I, he was hopeful that Catholics would be better treated, especially given the possibility that the new monarch would create at Westminster a monument to the memory of his own martyred Catholic mother, Mary. In order to buoy his hopes, Verstegan chose to think of James as an Englishman, not a Scot, and dedicated A Restitution to him. Yet even as he saw the potential for a regime much less hostile to Catholicism than Elizabeth’s had been, he anticipated the possibility of England being overrun by Scottish influence. The solution, he believed, was to cement the Catholic identity of England by restoring the German character of its language.
Camden and Verstegan present English as a language of impressive antiquity. We know that this is not really the case, but imagining the deep past of English was a seductive enterprise for them, faced as they were with so much evidence of its strangeness and malleability. It was within their camp that the enduring basic principles of linguistic rightness were established: clarity, decorum, an avoidance of the vulgar and the awkward, a rejection of all things voguish, a nebulous admiration for the past. But nothing like a modern style guide came out of their work; contemporary authors had to rely on the
ir own judgement.
Anxieties about the roots of English and the language’s new directions led scholars to puzzle over the relationships between languages. The word philology was not in use in its modern sense; it meant little more than ‘love of literature’, and would not be used much more specifically till the early eighteenth century. The study of language was in its infancy – in 1598 the lexicographer John Florio called it toong-work – and tended to go hand in hand with an interest in old artefacts and family pedigrees. Yet the word grammarian was current. A petty or inept grammarian was a grammaticaster – the word is used by Ben Jonson – while discussions of grammar were known as grammatication.
Jonson is a pivotal figure. Born eight years after Shakespeare, in 1572, he lived until 1637, twenty-one years after Shakespeare’s death. Poet, playwright, translator, critic, historian and political shapeshifter, he produced a body of work full of contradiction and experiment. His varied career connects the vertiginous excitement of Elizabethan literature to the religious conflicts of the 1630s. His writings seem to delight in the range of language, mixing the learned and the colloquial, but they also suggest unease about ambiguities, rustic speech and the rise of the letter q. Jonson was the author of the first treatment of English grammar that called itself precisely that.
When first used in English, in the fourteenth century, the word grammar was synonymous with Latin, for Latin was the only language taught grammatically. Not till the seventeenth century did it become a generic term, such that it was necessary specifically to refer to a ‘Latin grammar’ or an ‘English grammar’. As we shall keep seeing, the association between grammar and Latin has proved hard to escape. During this period the standard work on grammar was what came to be known as ‘Lily’s Grammar’. Ostensibly this was by William Lily, a distinguished London schoolmaster. Lily was steeped in Classical learning; he had a talent for Latin verse, which he used to bestow moral advice on his pupils at St Paul’s School, and he had enriched his understanding of Ancient Greek by spending time with people who spoke the modern version of the language – refugees from Constantinople whom he met at Rhodes on his way back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The grammar book that bore his name was a composite work; drawing extensively on earlier surveys of grammar, it included contributions by Erasmus and by John Colet, the founder of St Paul’s.
Lily’s Grammar focused on Latin, but provided a template for thinking about English grammar. The examples he included were larded with proverbial wisdom and moral guidance. Published around 1513, and twice substantially revised, it received the approval of Henry VIII. This was renewed by Edward VI, who decreed that no other grammar book be used in schools, and then by Elizabeth I. Its authority endured for two hundred years, and it was reprinted around 350 times. Shakespeare craftily alludes to it in Titus Andronicus,12 and countless later authors refer to it; as late as the mid-nineteenth century the novelist George Borrow recalls having been forced as a child to memorize Lily’s Grammar.
Although Jonson followed convention in insisting on Latin grammatical categories, he broke with it in calling his book The English Grammar, declaring the existence of something that had previously been not much more than a mirage. The title page made it clear that his method was descriptive; he based his work on ‘observation of the English Language now spoken, and in use’. Jonson’s scheme was poorly organized, but was accepted because it was the work of a respected creative writer. Throughout the history of English, statements about grammar by popular writers have been taken seriously, regardless of their depth of expertise, and it is striking how many of those who have launched themselves successfully into the language wars – Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, William Cobbett, George Bernard Shaw and Kingsley Amis, to name a few – have been non-specialists, admired because of this rather than in spite of it. Jonson’s account of English grammar was striking, too, because it was presented as an attempt to ‘ripen the wits of our owne Children’. At the same time he sought to ‘free our Language from the opinion of Rudenesse … wherewith it is mistaken to be diseas’d’ and show its ‘Matchablenesse, with other tongues’.13 Even though the finished product was imperfect, Jonson put on an impressive show of combining practical intentions with a proud assertion of English’s ability to do what any other language could do.
Until the middle of the eighteenth century, there was an enthusiasm for ‘double grammars’, in which the grammar of English and that of another language were presented side by side – one way of exhibiting ‘Matchablenesse’. But as scholarly interest in English increased, the need for stand-alone grammars of English felt more urgent. One of the most successful responses to this need was John Wallis’s Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (1653), which, despite being written in Latin, argues that English should not strictly follow the model of that ancient tongue. Wallis, a mathematician whose most lasting achievement was inventing the sign ∞ for infinity, writes in his preface of how a slavish devotion to Latin had produced unhelpful rules for English usage, creating confusion and obscurity.14 Among Wallis’s more influential propositions was the distinction between the use of shall in the first person, to make a prediction, and in the second and third persons, when threatening someone or making a promise.
Wallis suggested that there were links between sounds and meanings: words that began st suggested strength, and those that began sp often conveyed the idea of expansion. Many of Wallis’s contemporaries felt the same way; the mouths of men could make certain simple sounds, and these had a natural, fixed power. This sense that sounds and meaning existed in parallel prompted plans to simplify the way sounds were represented on the page.15 Some writers on the subject spoke of approaching English as if for the first time: of making it new. There were attempts to develop a scientific or ‘philosophic’ language – one that was built from the ground up. Samuel Botley boasted of the excellence of a system of tiny symbols which he marketed under the name Maximo in Minimo. Francis Lodwick developed ‘a common writing’, in which, for instance, a ‘drinker’ was represented by a swollen, drunken sort of d with a hook on its shoulder, ‘drinking’ by the same hieroglyphic with an extra hook, a ‘drunkard’ by what looks rather like the rounding off of that second hook, and ‘drunkenness’ by yet another hook.16 In 1657 Cave Beck set out a system in which all words were replaced by minutely organized combinations of letters and numerals – a fly was r1941, a firefly r1944, a butterfly r1945, and the verb ‘to fly’ was 1940.
The best-known work in this field was by John Wilkins, who hoped to create a universal language that would eliminate the ambiguous and the inexact from all written communication. Wilkins, a churchman and administrator, in 1668 delivered An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, in which he proposed repairing the ruin of Babel by means of a newly created language. This would be able to catalogue everything in the universe; it would consist not of words, but of basic generic symbols – which could be elaborated to account for all the departments of existence. The elements of this ‘real character’ must be ‘comely and graceful’, ‘methodical’, ‘sufficiently distinguishable from one another to prevent mistake’, and capable of being ‘described by one Ductus of the pen, or at the most by two’.17 The result looks a little like Arabic.
In all these efforts, the emphasis was on words and how best to symbolize them. But in the final quarter of the seventeenth century, largely in response to the pioneering work of the philosophers at the Port-Royal monastery near Paris, the focus widened. The Port-Royal philosophy had two main prongs: a concern with the principles of logic, and a determination to explain the grammatical features shared by all languages. Its exponents set out a grammar that was also a theory of mind: more important than the presentation of individual words were sentences, the ways in which these represented the workings of the mind, and the relationship between language and knowledge. In other words, the grammarian was depicting an activity rather than creating a system of rules. The Port-Royal philosophers suggested a distinction between the surf
ace structures of languages and deeper mental structures – an inspiration, much later, for Noam Chomsky. They argued, moreover, that it was hard to communicate the truth because the apparently close relationship between words and things meant that one often reflected on words more than on what they were intended to denote.
In seventeenth-century England, such problems of meaning occupied the most original thinkers. Francis Bacon distrusted language, arguing that it led reason astray or ensnared it. ‘A poor and unskilful code of words incredibly obstructs the understanding,’ he wrote in 1620, and ‘words do violence to the understanding, and confuse everything; and betray men into countless empty disputes and fictions’.18 Later Thomas Hobbes presented language in a similar way. He saw it as deeply problematic – full of words that do not really mean anything and of ‘inconstant’ terms that inconveniently mean different things to different people. The inconstant words are awkward; they are significant, but they tell us as much about the person who uses them as they do about the things of which they are being used. For instance, I may say, ‘John is evil.’ This is not an insignificant statement, but does it shed more light on John or on me? Hobbes argued that meanings are to be established almost as if by contract; the true senses of words derive from custom and common usage, and we must by political means manage the inconstancy of significant words.
The Language Wars Page 6