And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, ‘Let me go over’; that the men of Gilead said unto him, ‘[Art] thou an Ephraimite?’ If he said, ‘Nay’, then said they unto him, ‘Say now Shibboleth’: and he said ‘Sibboleth’: for he could not frame to pronounce [it] right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.
From this story comes the idea that the pronunciation of a particular word marks whether one belongs to a certain group. In World War II, American soldiers used the word lollapalooza as a means of catching out Japanese spies who were posing as Filipinos or indeed as Americans. Its l sounds were difficult even for Japanese who were confident in English.
Being put to the test in this way is rather like being handed a live grenade – an unusual example of the cliché that ‘Words are weapons’. The best writers renew the force of this line. John Bunyan suggested that the Ten Commandments were cannons firing upon the soul. For Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.’ Swift wrote of ‘the artillery of words’, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus likened the Furies’ speech to ‘a cloud of winged snakes’, and of course Hamlet promises to ‘speak daggers’ to his mother Gertrude. We can use words to force unpleasant thoughts on other people. It is with good reason that in the metaphysics of many religions the holiest of believers retreat into speechless solitude and the soul ultimately ascends from the material world into silence.
One of the most significant thinkers in this area is Thomas Hobbes, who argued that words have allowed people to behave antagonistically. For Hobbes, language is a transformative invention, a technology that makes it possible to reason, but it also makes monsters of us, amplifying our desire for power and glory, and causing us to advertise this publicly. To be able to speak is to convert private desires into public ones, and thus to engage in the complex and unpleasant business of jockeying for position as we seek to satisfy our desires. We talk not just about the present, but about the future too, and this primes us with anxiety.12
Consider, for instance, the tendency of news reporting to present all stories as straightforwardly antagonistic: East versus West, terrorists versus governments, black versus white, tradition versus modernity. These are crude binary distinctions. But crude binary distinctions are easy to grasp and enable the most attention-grabbing coverage; the altogether greyer business of what we might call The Truth just isn’t easy to package. Truth is not its own ambassador. ‘War’ is itself a term that constitutes what are actually quite diffuse and disparate activities: we speak of ‘nuclear war’, a full-scale form of which has never happened), the ‘war on terror’, terrorism itself as a type of war, civil wars and guerrilla wars, holy war, the sex wars, the culture wars and – yes – language wars. War is the failure of communication; it happens when communication is exhausted or impossible, and the rhetoric of war crystallizes tensions and antipathies, turning debatable issues into hard positions.
Furthermore, success in war legitimizes the identity of the successful. A historical example: Great Britain was a slippery entity in the eighteenth century, created by the Act of Union in 1707, but came to seem more real and less disparate through its victories in wars abroad, especially with France. We determine who we are by emphasizing who we are not. Actually, war may buttress the losers’ sense of identity, too. Conflict creates easy-to-see distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and on each side this bolsters unity – or rather, a mindfulness of unity.
It is relevant to our thinking about nations that the names we give things instantiate our perceptions of division, not real divisions. For when we speak of nations, uttering their names, we divide geographical and social continuities into pieces. There are historical reasons for the divisions, and the boundaries are defined geographically and in most cases linguistically. But the constructs that result are fragile. Putting faith in the durability of one’s national language is a strategy for holding one’s own arbitrary or fragile domain together, and this is one of the reasons why even small threats to a language can feel so harmful.
12
Of fish-knives and fist-fucks
The discreet charisma of Victorian English
‘The Victorian age will not go away,’ writes the historian Lawrence James. It lasted more than sixty years and ‘produced a social and moral environment that has not entirely disappeared … Whenever Britain undergoes one of its periodic fits of moral introspection, the codes and certainties of the Victorian middle class are invoked, either in admiration or in horror.’1 The period began with political unrest, passed through a prosperous ‘age of equipoise’ and culminated in a mixture of bold scientific progress, pomposity, nervous pessimism and a loss of imperial confidence. To the reign of Queen Victoria, from her accession as an eighteen-year-old in 1837 to her death in 1901, we can attribute a large portion of the myth of Englishness – that compendium of invented traditions and pruned historical verdure used by the English to present themselves to the rest of the world. I say ‘English’ rather than ‘British’ advisedly, for Britishness is a set of qualities less romantically imagined. Many Victorian thinkers displayed an antiquarian preoccupation with defining and lionizing Englishness, and the England of Queen Elizabeth conveyed an especially seductive image of national pride and power. They cleaved to the Elizabethan idea that controlling the resources of English was the basis of a strong nation. We can also trace to the Victorian age the origins of many of the attitudes to English usage that are prevalent today.
A brief survey of that era and its spirit will help anatomize those attitudes. Many of the period’s linguistic legislators were responding not so much to real and immediate problems as to issues that had become ingrained in polite imagination. Victorian doctors derived most of their income from treating imaginary complaints, and thus it was with many of the doctorly types who sought to remedy the defects of Victorian English. English changed less in the nineteenth century than in any century since the Norman Conquest, but even when language change is not dramatic people perceive it as such. The fortunes of the language, and of society, were compulsively discussed.
The word Victorian is usually associated with primness and propriety. In the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary published in 1986, part of its definition is ‘prudish, strict; old-fashioned, out-dated’. To this we might add ‘reticent’. In Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) Isabel Archer, who is an American, makes the bracing remark that ‘An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.’ When this was not possible, the Victorian Englishman had recourse to euphemism: masturbation was referred to as ‘peripheral excitement’, a limb was sometimes a ‘lower extremity’, and a prostitute was a ‘fallen woman’. Another word to avoid was trousers. Nouns such as emolument and honorarium sanitized dirty talk of money. The journalist and social reformer Henry Mayhew recorded the job title pure-finder to describe someone whose daily work consisted of collecting dog shit that was then used by tanners.2 Mayhew documented the lives of London’s poorest citizens, and claimed to be transcribing exactly what he had heard. But the poor people he depicts rarely swear or blaspheme; their real speech has been edited. Verbal evasions were central to the Victorian public consciousness. A typical relic of that age, which I recall vividly from childhood, is the tendency when carving a turkey or chicken to ask people whether they want ‘white’ or ‘dark’ (or ‘brown’) meat, rather than mention the bird’s breasts and legs.
There were other fundamental Victorian virtues and vices – often linked. Lawrence James provides a good overview, highlighting the energy, practicality and work ethic of the Victorian middle class, as well as the period’s commercial bustle and (in opposition to it) escapist medievalism, its mass production and urban regeneration, self-congratulation and urge to improve the rest of the world. There was a culture
of public works and civic spirit, a concern with developing the national infrastructure, a desire for permanence and public symbols of permanence, a combination of modern building materials with backward-looking aesthetics, and a devout belief in the sovereignty of the market. Industrialization and urbanization went hand in hand, bringing disparate groups of people together as never before.
Family life was exalted. You cannot read Victorian literature without sensing how important it had become. G. M. Young wrote in his classic Victorian England (1936) of ‘the Victorian paradox – the rushing swiftness of its intellectual advance, and the tranquil evolution of its social and moral ideas’, and suggested that the age’s ‘advance … in all directions outwards’ was possible because it began from ‘a stable and fortified centre’.3 The fortified centre of family life was, in both literal and figurative terms, a place to keep spotlessly clean. Especially in the 1870s, as knowledge about germs increased, sanitation became a cause for anxiety. Poor drainage and inadequate ventilation were demonized. Modernity meant creating new systems for flushing away pollution. Where the real filth proved worryingly ineradicable, relief could be achieved by getting rid of verbal filth. Yet as prudery and squeamishness propelled the editing and policing of English, acts of rebellion and subversion multiplied. Then as now, disgust and desire tended to mingle. Pornography thrived, and there were writers delighted to produce salacious works for an audience of enthusiasts. Lady Pokingham, Or They All Do It is one striking example, a novel dating from 1880 which is full of deflowerings and orgies, and My Secret Life, a very long, repetitive and startlingly explicit erotic memoir, provides the OED’s first citations for fist-fuck, frig, fuckee and randiness. It is tempting to characterize the Victorian age as schizophrenic, and the combination of outward respectability and inner squalor appears again and again.
Though often viewed as an age of laissez-faire, the Victorian period saw ambitious law-making. Much of this involved revising existing legislation: one result was the expansion of the middle-class bureaucracy – a caste of literate law-givers who formed a significant part of the new bourgeoisie that glorified machines, record-keeping, printed documents and neat mechanical procedures. (The notion of ‘lawyer’s slang’ emerges in the early nineteenth century.) The urge to mark boundaries and create mechanisms of control was evident in the treatment of language. During the nineteenth century the number of English-speakers globally almost quintupled, from 26 million to 126 million.4 More than a thousand grammars were published in Britain, and perhaps as many as eight hundred in America. English became a university subject with the opening of King’s College London, in 1831; boosted by Matthew Arnold, it took off in the 1850s when applicants for civil service posts in India started being examined in English language and literature. It is telling that the rise of English as an academic discipline was associated with training adolescents and young adults for bureaucratic careers.
Literacy improved significantly, and, thanks to better and cheaper printing techniques, a drop in the cost of paper and the abolition in 1861 of the tax on paper, there was more to read – magazines, newspapers and cheap books, including a wealth of writing aimed specifically at children. From the 1850s public examinations, controlled by the universities, helped set the previously chaotic schools system in order. Whereas previously a minority of working-class children had attended school, from 1870, when the Elementary Education Act was passed, schooling for children aged between five and twelve was compulsory, and throughout the United Kingdom that schooling had to be conducted in English. By 1880 English literature had become the most popular subject in schools – albeit with an emphasis on memorizing extracts.5 In passing, it is worth recalling how many noted figures of the nineteenth century did not go to school: examples include John Ruskin, George Eliot and John Stuart Mill, while those who had very little schooling include Dickens, Darwin and Disraeli.6 One of the features of late-nineteenth-century education, besides an optimism about eliminating illiteracy and the various evils with which it was associated, was the propagation of a national tradition that transcended local identity and was clothed in the rhetoric of conservatism and a kind of romantic xenophobia.
But the central problem of Victorian English was class. The title page of Young’s Victorian England displays the Victorian maxim ‘Servants talk about People: Gentlefolk discuss Things’. How alien that now seems: we all talk about people, perhaps more than is good for either us or them, even if we also talk more than ever about ‘things’. Yet throughout the nineteenth century the things one talked about and the ways one talked about them were symbols of status; the eighteenth-century equation of linguistic and moral propriety became a fact of education. The result was an oppressively limited style of conversation. The enthusiastic epithet was one of its conspicuous features. Disraeli joked that English appeared to consist of only four words: ‘Nice, jolly, charming and bore, and some grammarians add fond’.7 Class was more fluid than we may imagine: movement from one level up to the next was achievable. The erosion of traditional class barriers created self-consciousness and uncertainty; as old markers of class became less secure or even disappeared, attention to language as a source of information about people’s social standing became more intense. Many of the most derided articles of Victorian life – the words as often mocked as the things they denoted – were the paraphernalia of the new middle classes: serviettes and tea-cosies, fish-knives and napkin rings, flounces and trimmings. The upstart Veneerings in Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend are identified through their ‘bran-new’ belongings: furniture, horses, carriage, pictures, and even their baby. They see people only in terms of their roles. Dickens shifts into the present tense when describing their behaviour, as though to emphasize its shallow modernity, and the name he chooses for them hints not just that their glossiness is mere varnish, but also that their empty acquisitiveness might be a sinister (venereal) disease.
The noun class is defined in Thomas Blount’s Glossographia, a 1656 dictionary of ‘hard words’, as ‘an order or distribution of people according to their several Degrees’. A hundred years later it is often used in discussions of social structure. But it is in the nineteenth century that the word comes alive – to denote the system of social divisions, and by the end of the century to suggest ‘distinction’ or ‘high quality’. Increasingly, it involves a range of judgements about status. The OED shows ‘class interests’ (first attested in 1828), ‘class morality’ (1833), ‘class feelings’ (1839), ‘class prejudices’ (1850), ‘class grievance’ (1852), ‘class system’ (1877), ‘class barrier’ (1889) and ‘class conflict’ (1898). Class shifted from being something that was accepted as having a basis in fact to being a matter of popular debate. And as this happened, crucially, concerns about correctness shifted from a focus on grammar to an obsession with vocabulary and pronunciation. Where Dr Johnson had written of ‘solecisms’ and ‘barbarisms’, in the nineteenth century the terms of criticism became ‘socially loaded’, with an emphasis on ‘vulgarism’, ‘slang’ and ‘etiquette’.8 Beginning in the 1830s, there was a spate of publications about the last of these; whereas the old conduct books had focused on the individual, these new titles constructed the idea of polite people as a class and emphasized social standing rather than moral behaviour.
For William Cobbett, the division between those who knew grammar and those who did not was a mainstay of the class system: the poor were taught no grammar and as a result were condemned to lives of unlettered servility. He wrote A Grammar of the English Language in the hope of enabling the working classes to protect themselves from abuse. At the same time he ridiculed authority figures, providing specimens of false grammar from the writings of Dr Johnson and examples of nonsense from a speech by the king. He labelled Noah Webster a ‘toad’.9 He laid into Lindley Murray and pounced on errors in Hugh Blair’s lectures. One of his more striking ideas is that one should always write spontaneously, using the first words that come to mind, and resisting the temptation to recast one’s thou
ghts. It was a mistake, he claimed, to slow down in order to make a deliberate choice of words; that would lead to artificiality.
Cobbett’s Grammar was remarkable in its purpose rather than its material. His representation of grammar was conventional, but he insisted that grammatical knowledge could liberate working men from a group he called the ‘borough-tyrants’. In his newspaper The Political Register, he wrote of his desire in presenting a work of grammar to create ‘numerous formidable assailants of our insolent, high-blooded oppressors’.10 As far as numerousness was concerned, he succeeded; the book sold 100,000 copies in the fifteen years following its publication. But it was not adopted in schools, and, although it was admired by self-taught working men who appreciated its political bent, it seems that its price (2s 6d) deterred many of those Cobbett had hoped would acquire it. Instead his audience was mostly lower middle class.11
When Cobbett’s son James Paul reworked the Grammar for a fresh edition, published in 1866, his changes reflected a different kind of sensitivity about class. He added a section in which common pronunciation mistakes were pointed out and corrected. His father had thought such matters unimportant. James Paul, who was sixty-three by the time he revised his father’s work, had had half a century of exposure to attitudes that he, unlike his father, had not been able to ignore. Faults in speech, he wrote, ‘are the most offensive, because they happen to be those which so frequently cause, with the hearer, a presumption of “vulgarity” in the pronouncer’.12
The Language Wars Page 18