In Leviathan (1651), arguably the most important work of political thought ever written in English, Hobbes proposes that the role of the sovereign – the absolute and indivisible ruler who compels people to work for the common good – is to stop arguments about the meanings of words becoming interminably pedantic. Otherwise, a man that seeks the truth ‘will find himselfe entangled in words, as a bird in lime-twiggs; the more he struggles, the more belimed’. The sovereign should lead his subjects to agree definitions of good and bad. The alternative is violence, and ‘seeing nature hath armed living creatures, some with teeth, some with horns, and some with hands, to grieve an enemy, it is but an abuse of Speech, to grieve him with the tongue.’19 For Hobbes, as for many of his contemporaries, the disorderliness of language was associated with the story of the Tower of Babel – and thus with sin. Reforming language was a moral necessity. His thoughts owed much to his experience of the English Civil Wars of 1642 to 1651; he had witnessed the disintegration of language and the social bonds it embodied.
Bacon and Hobbes predated Port-Royal, but John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was responsive to what was widely known as ‘the new logic’. Like the Port-Royal philosophers, Locke wanted to enquire into the origins and extent of knowledge, and he saw the study of language as crucial to a rigorous understanding of how people think. The Port-Royal logicians had argued that a sign, i.e. a word, embraced two ideas: the thing that is represented, and the thing that does the representing, with the first of these being ‘excited’ by the second. Locke’s best-known insight about language is, in its most simple form, that words are the signs of ideas. Although we use words publicly, their significance is private in the sense that the ideas we associate with them are to some degree idiosyncratic. To quote him: ‘Words … stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them.’20
Locke was kicking against the old idea that words are a nomenclature of things – a ready-made list of names for them, like labels. This had been asserted in Lily’s Grammar. ‘A Noune is the name of a thing,’ Lily had written. It follows that the number of nouns should be the same as the number of things. Locke challenged this, and identified other deep problems to do with language and communication. He recognized that many arguments, perhaps even most, have their origins in differences over the significance of words, rather than in a real difference in the understanding of things. He also recognized that readers may well extract from books meanings different from those intended by their authors. Locke suggests our insularity. Our simple ideas – of whether something is round or hot, for instance – have a good chance of being in step, but our complex ideas – which we arrive at voluntarily, and which may include for instance our view of whether something is just or beautiful – are less likely to be. Locke sees language as inherently imperfect, and he is therefore not hopeful about our ability to communicate successfully. The signification of words is mired in ‘doubtfulness’.
The new focus on the connection between language and thought gradually encouraged writers to move away from radical schemes and look instead into the rational grounds of grammar. One consequence was an overt concern with ‘method’, ‘order’ and ‘sequence’, which found its most banal expression in grammarians’ extensive use of tables to set out the different classes of words – types of verb, for instance, and their conjugations. The layout of the page became a priority; grammarians had to work closely with printers to ensure that the systematic representation of the different parts of language was lucid and as elegant as constraints of space would allow. One rather ironic effect of this was that the philosophy of language – the inspiration for this more rigorous approach to classification, but inherently discursive – was relegated to footnotes. Eventually the footnotes would disappear, and the idea of linguistic discipline would push aside knottier questions of theory.
5
Hitting le jackpot
Arguing about academies
The English love of liberty is fabled. It’s one of those ‘myths about the English’ that is fundamentally true. But really the love of liberty is a characteristic of English-speakers. They have resisted and always will resist any attempt to reorganize their language and regulate it from the top down. Yet they will complain endlessly about problems that could finally be resolved only through such regulation.
The idea that the English language should be sent to school flourishes today. Witness the recent announcement by the Queen’s English Society, a British charity, of its plan for an Academy that will act as a ‘moderating body’ to protect and discipline the language.1 Schemes of this kind blossomed in the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries. There was a determination to achieve greater clarity of syntax. This involved, among other things, doing away with double comparatives (more wiser) and double superlatives (most wisest), paying attention to concord (mainly the agreement between verbs and their subjects), using tenses more rigorously, and differentiating between which and who. To many of those who pressed for change, it seemed that an institution was needed to hand down rulings on such matters.
In 1660, the year Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot published the Port-Royal Grammar, the Royal Society was founded. Its stated purpose was ‘the improvement of natural knowledge’. This ‘natural knowledge’ was what we now call ‘science’ – a word that did not attain its current meaning until the early eighteenth century – and in 1664 the Society, hoping to establish a new model of methodical expression, organized a twenty-two-strong ‘committee for improving the English language’. However, the committee met only a handful of times. The real influence of the Royal Society was on the style of scientific writing.
In 1667 the Society’s historian Thomas Sprat argued in favour of a ‘natural’ and ‘naked’ mode of speech. He thought English was on the slide; there was too much noise in men’s prose. Sprat excoriated fineness and abundance of phrasing, which were vain and deceptive – possibly even demonic. Fancy diction was a form of sorcery; in Sprat’s view, writing that contained a great deal of ornament was an instrument of wickedness. The sometimes bewilderingly long sentences of sixteenth-century writers, who followed the stylistic example of Cicero, were to give way to a new curtness of expression. Short words and ‘primitive purity’ were in; digressions and ‘specious tropes’ were out. It is easy to say that this was inevitable, since the advance of science called for a more clinical style of writing. But the Society’s stylistic agenda was shaped by politics: its members advocated plainness (which they didn’t always practise) to emphasize their distance from the verbosity and fanciful metaphors of the period’s jingling assortment of religious fanatics, alchemists and millenarian bullshitters.
Joseph Glanvill’s The Vanity of Dogmatizing, an essay on the importance of scepticism and testing ideas by experiment, is an interesting example of the influence of the Society’s thinking. Its first version, published in 1661, is flowery. In 1664 Glanvill was elected Fellow of the Royal Society; a second, retouched version of the book appeared the following year. By the time he brought out a third version in 1676, he had absorbed the ideas of Sprat, and he radically stripped back the style. So, for instance, where the 1661 text has ‘those that have never travail’d without the Horizon, that first terminated their Infant aspects, will not be perswaded that the world hath any Countrey better than their own’,2 fifteen years later we read ‘those that have always liv’d at home, and have never seen any other Country, are confidently perswaded that their own is the best’.3
However, the Royal Society did not achieve reforms beyond the realm of science. As the Restoration ushered in a self-consciousness about manners, not least about how best to handle one’s words and expressions, calls persisted for there to be a national Academy, as there had been in France since 1635. One of the loudest came in 1697 from Daniel Defoe, known then not as a writer but as a risk-taking businessman involved in importing tobacco, making bricks, and farming civet cats in Stoke Newington. Defoe, perp
etually interested in money-making schemes and political advantage, declared the need ‘to encourage Polite Learning, to polish and refine the English Tongue, and advance the so much neglected Faculty of Correct Language, to establish Purity and Propriety of Stile, and to purge it from all the Irregular Additions that Ignorance and Affectation have introduc’d’. He proposed that a society be set up by the king, William III, to achieve this. Its members would be ‘Persons Eminent for Learning’; lawyers, clergymen and physicians would be debarred, and instead the panel should consist of twelve noblemen, twelve ‘Private Gentlemen’ and a final twelve selected ‘for meer Merit’. This panel of thirty-six would ‘have liberty to Correct and Censure the Exorbitance of Writers’. Moreover, ‘no Author wou’d have the Impudence to Coin without their Authority’. In Defoe’s eyes, under such a regime it would be ‘as Criminal then to Coin Words, as Money’. And there would be less swearing, ‘that Scum and Excrement of the Mouth’ – a mixture of ‘Bruitish, Sordid, Senseless Expressions’ – that ‘makes Conversation unpleasant’.4 Defoe’s proposal did not win strong backing, and a similarly minded individual, a London schoolmaster called Lewis Maidwell, who four times petitioned the government for state subsidy to found an Academy in Westminster, also met with no success.
Fifteen years later Jonathan Swift launched a fresh campaign for such an institution. Swift was at that time an enthusiastic participant in the coffee-house culture of London, and worked as a propagandist for Sir Robert Harley, a Tory who became Lord Treasurer in 1711. Harley was one of the first politicians to grasp the usefulness of the then quite new phenomenon of journalism, and Swift was his pet writer, attending Harley’s intimate Saturday Club dinners where the most powerful Tory figures devised their policy. Much of Swift’s writing for Harley was trifling, but in 1712 he published a substantial tract in which he sought to reframe his political image: A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue.
This pamphlet, which took the form of a letter to Harley, has been seen as beginning the tradition of complaint about English. There were complainers before Swift, but his proposal initiated a new heightened rhetoric of linguistic disgust. He pronounced the language ‘extremely imperfect’, noting that ‘the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities’. ‘In many Instances,’ he wrote, ‘it offends against every Part of Grammar.’ Swift commented that the ‘Licentiousness’ caused by the Restoration had infected first religion and morality, then language. This was evident in ‘affected Phrases’ and ‘new, conceited Words’. Universities were culpable, and in the speech of the educated men who flocked to the coffee-houses he heard ‘monstrous Productions’ and ‘conceited Appellations’. Swift argued that there should be an Academy to enlarge, polish and fix English. Its members, he foresaw, ‘will find many Words that deserve to be utterly thrown out of our Language … and perhaps not a few, long since antiquated, which ought to be restored, on account of their Energy and Sound.’5 For Swift, an Anglo-Irish Protestant who between 1689 and 1714 spent much of his time in England, stabilizing English would be a patriotic act – a credit to the nation and to its ruler, Queen Anne. It would ensure that future generations were able to understand the texts that recorded history. A fixed language could guarantee the continuity of tradition and a national memory; the alternative, a mutable English, threatened to compromise the future of the social values he and his political paymasters held dear.
Swift savoured his dislikes. He abhorred vagueness; in Dublin he had proposed that beggars be given badges so that people could know their individual circumstances. He worried about cultural amnesia – manifest in a casualness about language, in which the histories of words were ignored. He was anxious about the poverty of conversation; good talk was one of the binding energies of society, and bad talk was a recipe for social meltdown. All these concerns fuelled his satire. One of his more unusual notions was that uneducated rustic folk naturally speak well, having avoided corruption by the spurious sophistication of the urban elite.
He was strikingly hostile to contracted and abbreviated forms of expression. In this he was following Joseph Addison, who had written in The Spectator of the Englishman’s ‘natural aversion to loquacity’ and tendency as a result to scrunch up words into ‘clusters of consonants’. Swift and Addison were responding to the seventeenth-century flourishing of contractions. Poets were to blame; they had introduced silly abbreviations that helped them fit their thinking to their verse schemes. Only Northerners, Swift claimed, could bear the harsh sounds of these condensed, unnatural words. The objection to could’ve is that it easily becomes ‘could of’, and the awkwardness on the page of when’ll or how’re, which seem perfectly natural in speech, is conspicuous. But Swift could not stomach even disturb’d – let alone mob, which was short for mobile vulgus.
Within a week of the Proposal the pamphleteer John Oldmixon published a response, in which he laughed off Swift’s distaste for these contractions. Oldmixon also objected to Swift’s plea for fixity, commenting that ‘every Age, as well as every Nation, has its different manner of Thinking, … according as the Times take their Turn’.6 Yet it’s a bit too easy to laugh at Swift’s dismissal of mob and imagine he achieved nothing, for some of the other modish contractions he disparaged did fall out of use, and his hostility may have helped this.
Affectation nauseated Swift. In A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Enter’d into Holy Orders (1721) – the contraction in the title presumably not to his taste – he stressed the need for ‘the Study of the English Language, … the neglect whereof is one of the most general Defects among the Scholars of this Kingdom’. As far as he was concerned, ‘Proper Words in proper Places, makes the true Definition of a Style.’ The faults in people’s use of English were ‘nine in ten owing to Affectation, and to the Want of Understanding’.7 He revisited the matter in a parodic anthology of ‘genteel and ingenious conversation’ published in 1738. Begun around 1704, it was packed not with wit, elegance and examples of restrained intelligence, but instead with clichés, mangled pronunciations, malicious gossip, innuendoes, mechanical inanities and modish catchphrases. Swift’s ‘polite’ conversationalists were in fact astonishingly rude.
Swift’s capacity for outrage may be timeless, but legislating usage was now a matter of fashion. As the rise of a prosperous and socially self-conscious middle class caused the urban gentry to seek ways of marking their own superiority, correct usage and moral excellence were packaged together as tokens of just this. Everyday usage – the language of the social upstarts – was depraved, and for those who wished to keep them at bay it was essential to maintain a standard of elegance. ‘Propriety’, a keyword for both Swift and Defoe, would become ubiquitous in eighteenth-century discussions of language.
The opening sentence of John Knowles’s The Principles of English Grammar (1796) is ‘Grammar teaches us to speak and to write with Propriety’.8 Knowles is unusual only in so quickly getting to the point. ‘Politeness’ was also an important concept, at once moral and aesthetic. Precise definition was difficult, but one was expected to know polite conduct when one found it. There existed a model of correct social behaviour in which conversation and letter-writing were the keys to good relationships and were practised with a chaste delicacy.
Among those who established the relevant principles of polite and proper sociability was the writer and printer Samuel Richardson. When he entertained his many female fans at his home in Fulham – described by his friend John Duncombe as ‘that mansion of cheerfulness and grotto of instruction’ – he discussed his novels. These had grown out of his correspondence, in which he had attempted to combine moral prescription with a style that was at once rigorous, innocent and agreeably conversational.9 Both in person and on the page, Richardson was sensitive to the intricacy of relationships. A critic of the theatre, which seemed to him to be too often a force for social disorder, he nonetheless expounded a highly theatrical view of society. To be polite was a postu
re. Dr Johnson called it ‘fictitious benevolence’, a highly conventional performance of friendship. Yet, as Swift had earlier recognized, a product of the cult of politeness was a remarkable and, one would probably have to say, distinctively English talent for being impolite.
It is easy to understand why Swift wanted to regulate English. The society in which he lived was expanding. This made the successful traffic of ideas more important and more difficult. In an age when print culture was growing, institutionalized norms seemed desirable. But no one thought seriously about acting on Swift’s proposal. Nor have similar proposals since been embraced. The British generally do not trust centralized regulation, so the idea of a government-sponsored system of linguistic regulation is anathema. Moreover, the performance of academies abroad does not encourage a positive view of their effectiveness.
Turning for a moment to the present, we can see that the Académie Française has not succeeded in preventing French from absorbing English words. Nor have other mechanisms for defending French from English. The Loi Toubon, passed in 1994, asserts that French is ‘un élément fondamental de la personnalité et du patrimonie de la France’ and provides protection for the language in public life, education, the workplace and the media.10 Successful prosecutions have been brought against, for instance, the company General Electric Medical Systems for the failure of its subsidiary GE Healthcare to issue French workers with security instructions written in French. But despite the large bureaucratic efforts and enthusiastic individual ones to maintain linguistic patriotism, French continues to assimilate words from English. The ninth edition of the Académie’s Dictionnaire incorporates words such as ‘le chewing-gum’, ‘la cover-girl’ and ‘le jackpot’.
Wits like to say that the main purpose of the Académie Française is not to affect the behaviour of French-speakers, but to provide amusement for foreign journalists. To observers contemporary with Defoe and Swift, though, this learned body – with its founding motto, ‘À l’immortalité’ – seemed regally impressive. One of the leading proponents of an English Academy was the poet and playwright John Dryden, who was England’s pre-eminent literary figure in the final decades of the seventeenth century. Dedicating his play The Rival Ladies (1663) to his fellow dramatist the Earl of Orrery, he expressed disappointment that there was no English equivalent to the French institution, and he repeated this line in the dedication of his reworking of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1679) to the influential Earl of Sunderland. Dryden was intent on leading an English cultural renaissance, and recognized the importance both of courting political support for this and of collaborating with like-minded men. I have kept Dryden in reserve till now, partly because his main intervention in matters of English usage requires – or at any rate permits – a digression.
The Language Wars Page 7