There is a well-established American campus joke which goes something like this. On the first day of a new academic year, a freshman approaches a senior and asks, ‘Hey, excuse me, do you know where the freshman dorms are at?’ To which the senior responds, ‘At Princeton, we don’t end a sentence with a preposition.’ The freshman tries again: ‘Excuse me, do you know where the freshman dorms are at, motherfucker?’
Why shouldn’t a sentence end with a preposition? One answer often put forward has to do with the etymology of preposition, which comes from the Latin for ‘place’ and ‘before’: the preposition should be located before the word it governs, as in the sentence ‘She sketched his likeness with crayons’. It is also argued that a preposition at the end of a sentence gives the appearance of being stranded, and that in terms of both logic and aesthetics it is therefore undesirable.
The hostility to the stranded preposition begins, however, with a single opponent: Dryden. It was Dryden’s habit to assay the purity of his English by examining how smoothly it could be translated into Latin; he then translated the Latin back into English, to see if anything got lost along the way. This was not just a piece of whimsy; he was concerned to establish that English was suited to heroic subject matter, and in promoting its potential he emphasized where he could its connections with Latin. Understandably, given his prominence even in the 1660s, he had been a member of the Royal Society’s ‘committee for improving the English language’, and the idea of improvement had lodged in his mind. Becoming Poet Laureate in 1668, he returned to this theme. Influenced by the way prepositions were treated in Latin, where they always preceded their objects, and mindful of etymology, he became hypersensitive to their use in English. Having pronounced that stranded prepositions were ‘a common fault’ in the works of Ben Jonson, and knowing that he was himself guilty on this count, Dryden made a point of eradicating them from reissues of his published writings. Thus ‘such Arguments … as the fourth Act of Pompey will furnish me with’ becomes ‘such Arguments … as those with which the fourth act of Pompey will furnish me’.
The exact nature of Dryden’s alterations was spotted only at the end of the following century when Edmond Malone was preparing an edition of Dryden’s prose. Malone compared the 1668 and 1684 editions of Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie, and noted the differences between the two. The most striking was the removal of prepositions from the ends of sentences. In pruning his own prose, Dryden had invented a rule. The circumstances of its invention had eluded everyone up till Malone, but the fact of its existence had not. People simply followed Dryden’s example. It impressed eighteenth-century grammarians, and by the end of that century the stranded preposition was conventionally viewed as a grave solecism. Yet there are times when its strenuous avoidance proves ugly. Winston Churchill is often alleged to have responded to a civil servant’s objection to his ending a sentence with a preposition, ‘This is the kind of pedantic nonsense up with which I will not put.’ Though the story is probably apocryphal, this constipated statement usefully illustrates the point that the avoidance of a supposed offence can lead to something far worse.
The aversion to ‘sentence final’ prepositions has led to condemnation of phrasal verbs. A phrasal verb is one in which a particle (usually a preposition) alters and narrows the meaning of the verb. These verbs tend to be informal. They are also very common, and they can cause confusion. In some cases the distinction between related phrasal verbs may be both large and unobvious. Take, for instance, ‘compare with’ and ‘compare to’. Undoubtedly these get used interchangeably. Yet by convention, if I compare myself to Christ, I am suggesting a similarity, whereas in comparing myself with Christ I am mainly concerned with the differences between us. There is a tradition of arguing that phrasal verbs are crude; according to this view, ‘carry on’ is inferior to continue, ‘open up’ to enlarge or expand, and ‘put up with’ to tolerate. Foreign learners of English find phrasal verbs puzzling – ‘He put me down’ can mean several different things, and questions such as ‘What are you up to?’ and ‘Are you having me on?’ can seem bafflingly indirect. The use of up in phrasal verbs can feel especially odd, since it often has to do with completeness rather than upwardness – ‘I’m closing up’, ‘Eat up your sprouts’, ‘He finished up the season as the club’s top scorer’ – and often also seems redundant. Today, courses aimed at foreign learners pay special attention to the phrasal verb; its combination of prevalence and potential for confusion makes it an important subject. Phrasal verbs create opportunities for dangling prepositions, and this has been used as an argument for avoiding them. But here, as so often, the fear of a solecism can lead to stilted expression.
To go back to Dryden, though: his concern with the best place for prepositions was part of a larger interest in reforming literary style. He even went so far as to translate passages of Shakespeare (specifically, The Tempest) into a plainer, more modern idiom, streamlining his language and in particular its syntax. Dryden shunned the esoteric. He described Shakespeare’s style as ‘pestered’ with figurative phrases, and worried about its obscurity.11 He spoke for an age that associated stylistic flourishes not just with vanity, but with witchcraft.
Dryden is a creature now thoroughly alien to us: the poet-as-legislator. A sort of one-man equivalent of the Académie Française, he is the leading representative of an age in which poetry, rather than being something that happened at the margin of society, was a central feature of civilization and education. The poet was seen as a practical, useful figure, often involved in politics and acts of patriotism, and capable of prophecy, revolutionary thought and steering or defining popular taste. Some people still cherish the therapeutic powers of poetry, but in the English-speaking world the poet rarely now administers his or her therapies to a wide public – or even often in public.
As poet, dramatist and critic, Dryden was involved in a project to cement the status of English as a language that could proudly compete with others – French being the most obvious. In the late seventeenth century it became conventional to characterize English as manly, whereas French was weakly feminine. Dryden played his part in this. But he had what could be called a ‘heterosexual’ ideal of English.12 For Dryden, masculinity works best when it coexists with femininity: what seem to be the softness and harmony of feminine expression are an essential means of balancing what he sees as the boldly masculine properties of noble, rational writing. He favours a style in which there is a careful and faithful collusion between male and female qualities. It is, in short, chaste. This may help explain why the dangling preposition had to eliminated. For it is anything but chaste – a slovenly provocation, leaving a sentence gaping open rather than decently closed.
6
The rough magic of English spelling
A ‘scarce creddibel’ story
If we look at the original published versions of works by Dryden, Defoe and Swift, one of the things that strikes us is their use of capital letters, which appear in places we would no longer expect them. Peep inside a book from the seventeenth or early eighteenth century and it is apparent that, as in German today, nouns were printed with their first letter in upper case. The convention seems to have been introduced by printers who came over from the Continent; its supporters included one A. Lane, a schoolmaster in Mile End, whose A Key to the Art of Letters (1700) contained the assertion that capitals should be used to mark ‘all proper Names, and Adjectives derived of proper Names’ as well as ‘all Emphatical or Remarkable Words’.1 The practice of capitalizing nouns seems to have peaked around 1720 or 1730, having climbed for the previous 150 years or so. But many writers during this period were erratic in their use of capitals. For everyone who was as careful with them as the poet James Thomson there were several who erred in the direction of the notably sloppy Defoe.
Authors of works about spelling tended, from the middle of the seventeenth century, to offer guidance on capitalization. Their instructions varied, and there is evidence that writers who saw the use o
f capitals as a rhetorical resource had to tussle with printers who were keen to achieve a uniform system.2 In the 1790s the grammarian Lindley Murray would make the valid point that the practice of capitalizing nouns ‘gave the writing or printing a crowded and confused appearance’.3 As far as he was concerned, it was a thing of the past. There is evidence that this kind of capitalization, along with the frequent accentuation of words by means of italics, fell out of use in mid-century. The influential Gentleman’s Magazine stopped capitalizing nouns in 1744.4 In 1756 we find Daniel Fenning, in The Universal Spelling Book, stating that ‘Substantives should be wrote with a Capital Letter’,5 but later editions of Fenning’s popular work dropped this prescription.
An area of significantly greater conflict between printers and writers was spelling. I touched on this three chapters ago, when discussing Caxton. Now, before we turn to the more general standardizing efforts of the eighteenth century, it is appropriate to look at English spelling in some detail, surveying its whole history. The difficulties of spelling and the potential for improving our spelling system are perennial concerns. Scholars of writing systems are known as orthographers: there have been English orthographers since the Middle Ages, and their main concern has been the way we spell. As printed books grew more common after about 1500, printers came to accept and practise a fixed spelling. But progress was slow. If we look at Wyclif’s Bible, we find inconsistencies of spelling. Shall appears as shal and also as schal. Stood is sometimes stod. Similar inconsistencies are rife in the books Caxton printed. Should one write boke or booke? Hous or hows? While such uncertainties can now seem quite amusing, anxiety about spelling remains – spelling shows up, after all, in every sentence that we write – and we are guilty of mistakes and irregularities in our correspondence, the notes we make at work, emails, diaries, and domestic jottings such as shopping lists.
In the face of ridicule, some people wear their inept spelling with pride. Winnie the Pooh is a classic example of the poor speller who detects some virtue in his mistakes: he concedes that his spelling is ‘wobbly’ but immediately insists that all the same ‘It’s good spelling’. Pooh is, famously, ‘a bear of little brain’, and his attachment to his wobbliness, endearing though it may be, reinforces most people’s sense of this. Idiosyncratic spelling is often interpreted as an index of idiosyncratic and indeed defective mental powers, and most readers will have some familiarity with the social penalties of poor spelling, perhaps through having observed the way that dyslexia was (and frequently still is) misunderstood as evidence of stupidity. In The Three Clerks (1858) Anthony Trollope portrays a young man who ‘persisted in spelling blue without the final e’ and ‘was therefore, declared unworthy of any further public confidence’. The novelist Willam Golding anticipated the day when ‘some bugger’ would edit his manuscripts and correct his spelling, interrupting the text with ugly parentheses – ‘But my bad grammar and bad spelling was me.’6 Sometimes a person’s wayward spelling can become a focus for larger suspicions about his or her worthiness. When in 1992 the gaffe-prone Dan Quayle, the American Vice-President, urged a child to amend his spelling of potato to potatoe on a blackboard while being filmed, he amplified the ridicule he had already attracted for an official Christmas card that declared his nation ‘the beakon of hope for the world’.
But then, we have all at some point observed the inconsistencies of English spelling. Many of us have had occasion to curse them. Compare English with a language such as German, in which the pronunciations of words can be derived from their spelling, and we grasp the problem. In English, what you see is often not what you get. Numerous words are spelled in ways that seem both familiar and – if we trouble to think about them – odd. For instance: night, knife, psalm, diarrhoea, colonel, aisle, biscuit, rhythm, daughter. As I have suggested, a key factor in shaping English spelling was the Norman Conquest. In the period that followed, many of the scribes in important centres of learning (monasteries) were men who had been trained in France, and they introduced French spelling habits into the English texts they copied. A few Old English letters were abandoned – for instance, æ – and new letters were introduced: k, q, x, z. The scribes’ work often involved making personal choices, and these were inconsistent. As the Old English model of spelling came under pressure from French methods, irregularities proliferated.
In addition, etymology accounts for some peculiarities. Since the Renaissance, there has been enthusiasm for preserving evidence of etymology in the spellings of borrowed words, and in the sixteenth century many words that had been borrowed from French were treated as though they had in fact been imported from Latin. In his classic study of English spelling and etymology, Walter Skeat explains that ‘the old spelling was, in the main, very strictly etymological, because it was so unconsciously,’ but this changed in the sixteenth century when ‘the revival of learning … brought classical words, and with them a classical mode of spelling, to the front’. This ‘involved the attempt to be consciously etymological, i.e. to reduce the spelling of English words, as far as possible, to an exact conformity in outward appearance with the Latin and Greek words from which they were borrowed’. Words of Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian origin were generally let alone, but borrowings from French ‘suffered considerably at the hands of the pedants’.7
In Chaucer one reads of a ‘parfit’ knight; the word had been introduced from French some time before 1300. But in the age of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson an awareness of the earlier Latin word perfectus – and the use of words such as perfection and perfective that wore their Latin colours openly – meant that perfect became the usual spelling. Today’s word victuals was originally a borrowing of the French vitaille, but the spelling was influenced some time after 1500 by an awareness of the Latin victualia. This explains why victuals is pronounced to rhyme with whittles rather than with an audible c and u. In some cases the Latinized spelling affected the pronunciation: the noun aventure, borrowed from French, had been in use for more than three hundred years before, around 1570, it became adventure, on the model of the Latin adventura, with the d sounded. In other cases, such as doubt and salmon, the consonants introduced by etymological regard for Latin were audible only in the speech of eccentric, exaggeratedly learned figures, such as Shakespeare’s Holofernes, who insisted on sounding the l in calf and the b in debt.
A few peculiarities have etymological explanations of a different kind. The Italian word colonello entered English via French, and was borrowed twice by French, once as colonel and once as coronel. In English the two forms were used indiscriminately until the middle of the seventeenth century, when the former spelling became more common. However, the r sound held on, partly because it was easier and also, it seems, because of a tacit and incorrect habit of associating the word with the Latin corona meaning ‘crown’.
There are some words and expressions that seem – and I must stress ‘seem’ – to be mangled more often than they are presented correctly. You have very likely come across several of the following: ‘soaping wet’, ‘chaise lounge’, ‘preying mantis’, ‘tarter sauce’, ‘baited breath’, ‘straight-laced’, ‘just desserts’, ‘duck tape’ and ‘dough-eyed’. These substitutions – creative, idiosyncratic and confusing – are known as ‘eggcorns’; the term was suggested by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum in ironic homage to a woman who habitually referred to acorns by this name.
Occasionally it is asserted that English spelling is 50 per cent regular. This belief dates back to a research project carried out at Stanford University in the 1960s, with funding from the US Office of Education. The project involved using a computer to analyse the ‘phoneme–grapheme correspondences’ of 19,000 words – that is, to look at how often a computer program provided with the details of these words’ pronunciation would derive their correct spelling. The figure of 50 per cent, though much quoted, improved when the algorithm was refined. But, conversely, the data fed into the algorithm apparently presented some phonemes in a way that made correct spelling more l
ikely. The figure of 50 per cent must therefore be treated with caution.8
It is certainly true that spellings are much more predictable in many other languages – in Italian and Spanish, for instance, and in German, where they were fixed mainly by Jacob Grimm. In English, uncomfortably, there are many examples of words that sound the same but are written differently and have different meanings: a few examples are freeze and frieze, key and quay, stationery and stationary, semen and seamen. These are a rich source of punning humour, but a cause of confusion to learners. Commonly misspelled English words comprise unpredictable elements: for instance, there are silent letters, as in rhythm or parliament; they contain an ee sound, for which there is no obvious pattern (litre, protein, people, beneath, achieve); and they include double consonants where, according to commonly taught rules, we would not expect them (dissolve, palette), and lack them where we would (linen, melody, element).
The Language Wars Page 8