These are not just whimsical details. Ellis needed the tuning forks for his study of the pitch of musical instruments, and his work in comparative musicology fed into his thinking about language. The twenty-eight pockets of his greatcoat allowed him to organize the manuscripts and notes he liked to carry. Ellis was in all things systematic, and in his pursuit of his masterpiece, a five-volume analysis of English pronunciation, this was vital. In its opening chapter, he makes the following statement: ‘Spoken language is born of any two or more associated human beings. It grows, matures, assimilates, changes, incorporates, excludes, develops, languishes, decays, dies utterly, with the societies to which it owes its being. It is difficult to seize its chameleon form at any moment … The different sensations of each speaker, the different appreciations of each hearer, their intellectual growth, their environment, their aptitude for conveying or receiving impressions, their very passions, originate, change, and create language.’ He goes on to say that ‘a uniform system of spoken sounds cannot extend over a very large district’.15 Ellis’s writing is marked not by the rigid certainty of his peers, but by descriptiveness and an emphasis on the difficulty of reaching clear-cut conclusions. ‘Writers on phonetics,’ he comments, ‘are too apt to measure the pronouncing powers of others by their own.’16 He is doubtful about his predecessors’ notions of right and wrong. In a long note he comments on John Walker’s condemnation of ‘unwritten language’, observing that ‘it is not … the speakers that are in fault in obeying and carrying out the organic laws of speech and word formation’, but rather ‘those stiff-necked, pedantic, unphilosophical, miserably-informed, and therefore supremely certain, self-confident, and self-conceited orthographers who … maintain that though their rules must be right, it is only the exceptions which prove them’.17
This sense of the absolute as something fragile, and of the value of avoiding ex cathedra statements about delicately shaded matters, was not shared by many of Ellis’s contemporaries. In 1855 a London publisher brought out a volume entitled Never Too Late to Learn: Mistakes of Daily Occurrence in Speaking, Writing, and Pronunciation, Corrected, which drew attention to more than four hundred everyday blunders and their remedies. Some of these now seem strange. ‘I propose going to town next week’ should apparently be ‘I purpose going to town next week’, and we also learn that in speaking of Gibbon’s ‘Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire’ we ought to pronounce rise so that it rhymes with price, although really it would be better not to speak of it at all, since the title of Gibbon’s book was The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.18 The following year a New York firm released an expanded version, in which the number of flubs had increased to five hundred.
Edward Gould’s Good English; or, Popular Errors in Language (1867) is typical of the fierce certainty of the nineteenth-century amateur. It identified a deterioration in English over the preceding twenty-five years. An American, Gould mentions the popularity of Alford in the United States, but while he finds ‘great value’ in parts of the Dean’s English, he also accuses him of ‘bad faith’ and inconsistency. George Washington Moon’s counterblast is, however, ‘a masterpiece’.19 Gould’s real interest is not in Moon and Alford, but in what he labels ‘misused words’. He is particularly exercised by reference to ‘a couple of days’, ‘a couple of dollars’, and in fact any so-called ‘couple’ where the items in question are not ‘fastened, chained, joined, linked, connected together’. I can remember being gently reproved as a child for saying ‘a couple’ in reference to a number greater than two, but Gould’s concern is of a different nature. He believes we would be better off talking about ‘a pair of dollars’ and ‘a brace of days’. He suggests, too, that we often say ‘a few’ where really we mean ‘a many’.20
No one better represented the American position on such matters than Richard Grant White, a native of Brooklyn who was a distinguished editor of Shakespeare and a noted cellist. In 1871 he published Words and Their Uses, a book full of complaints about ‘newspaper English’, the inadequacy of dictionaries, and ‘words that are not words’. He even included a section of Briticisms – ‘There is a British affectation in the use of some … words which is worthy of some attention’ – and gave as an example the British use of the verb to ride only in terms of going ‘on horseback, or on the back of some beast less dignified and comfortable’, where an American might speak of riding in a carriage. ‘English,’ he argued, ‘is an almost grammarless language’, and ‘In English, words are formed into sentences by the operation of an invisible power, which is like magnetism.’21
It is in his discussion of ‘words that are not words’ that Grant White seems most similar in temperament to today’s snipers. Enthused is a ‘ridiculous word … in vogue in the southern part of the United States’, gubernatorial is a ‘clumsy piece of verbal pomposity [which] should be thrust out of use’, practitioner is ‘an unlovely intruder, which has slipped into the English language through the physician’s gate’, and so on.22 Nine years later came a sequel, Every-Day English, in which he tackled among other things Americanisms, spelling, and the ‘enfeebling’ effect of a fastidious concern with verbal elegance. He also targeted common misusages, opining that ‘Some of the most ludicrous mistakes in language that are made are to be seen where they are likely to do the most harm – in the street railway cars’.23
Another American, Thomas Embley Osmun, writing under the pseudonym Alfred Ayres, published The Verbalist: A Manual Devoted to Brief Discussions of the Right and Wrong Use of Words (1882) and The Essentials of Elocution (1897). Osmun was not one to speak softly. In the first of these books he occupied himself with what he liked to call ‘gross vulgarism’. For instance, answering the question ‘How do you do?’ with the word ‘Nicely’ was ‘The very quintessence of popinjay vulgarity’ and signing a letter off with ‘Yours, &c.’ was a mark of being ‘ignorant and obtuse’ – ‘Few vulgarisms are equally offensive’.24 The Essentials of Elocution presented chapters on subjects such as ‘Deportment’ and ‘The Pause – Its Importance’. Ayres fancied himself a social commentator, remarking on the disastrous effects of mumbled sermons on church attendance, and claiming that lawyers’ diction tends to be better than actors’.
On both sides of the Atlantic, newspapers and magazines played a leading part in the crusade for better English. In the 1870s, the New York Times, New York Evening Post, Chicago Tribune and Boston Daily Advertiser were all significant platforms for conservative comment on language. In Britain the role belonged above all to The Times; its writers were conscious of the paper’s status as a journal of record, and letters to the editor frequently addressed its failure to uphold linguistic standards. Thus the issue of 14 February 1872 contains a letter from one E. K. Karslake, a barrister, complaining about the word cablegram, applauding the paper’s leader writers, and then discussing etymology – with detailed reference to Greek – as well as suggesting that a telegram ‘sent by a submarine cable’ might be called a ‘thalassogram’, which is ‘not unpleasant to the ear’. In the next column there is a letter from J. T. of the Athenaeum which laments the ‘prevalent delusion that it is easy to write good English’: ‘the mere act of rewriting, with intent to improve, is a wonderful solvent of the haze which usually accompanies first conceptions’, and ‘the submergence of the individual in the committee, which finds so much favour under Constitutional Governments, is a serious drawback as regards good composition’.25 Items of this kind were common in The Times, and they were given considerable space.
In the later stages of the nineteenth century, there was among serious writers on language a move towards surveying usage. This began with a significant effort to organize English vocabulary, which seemed huge and unruly. Scientific terminology was one area of dense growth. Another was the arts. There was more professional jargon and a richer lexis of fashion. As the horizons of the English-speaking world expanded, the word-stock did so too. The use of prefixes and compounds increased, as did other means of forming new wor
ds: clipping (gym), blending (for instance, chortle from snort and chuckle), deriving verbs from nouns (to reference, to package), and so on.26 Enthusiasts characterized these masses of new vocabulary as armies, while sceptics muttered about ill winds and foul streams.
Among those who busied themselves with classifying the welter of verbiage was Peter Mark Roget, a distinguished physician who was the son of a Swiss pastor. The first edition of his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged So as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition – or, to give it its shorter name, Roget’s Thesaurus – was published in 1852. The concept was not new, but Roget’s presentation, with its five-level hierarchy, was pleasing. It won a large audience, and by 1879 thirty-five editions had appeared. Roget’s masterpiece of taxonomy is an example of a kind of achievement all too common in the history of reference works and books on language: admired for its practical usefulness, applauded for its theoretical soundness, yet used rarely by most who own a copy.
There was a much bigger project to come. The Philological Society, founded in 1842, identified serious weaknesses in existing dictionaries. In 1857 it set up a committee to collect words and idioms that had not previously been registered. Two papers presented to the Society that year by Richard Chenevix Trench laid the foundation for the opus that would become the Oxford English Dictionary, a comprehensive record of English vocabulary that improved significantly on the deficiencies of Johnson’s work and Webster’s. Initially the new dictionary was expected to be a supplement to these volumes, but it became clear that something greater than this was needed. It would be compiled on historical principles. The effectiveness of this approach had been shown by Charles Richardson’s A New Dictionary of the English Language (1837), which attempted a factually correct history of every word it contained. The creators of the OED saw that each word’s life had to be documented: all senses had to be included for all words, even obsolete ones. Real work did not get under way until 1878 when Oxford University Press took over the project and then agreed to pay for James Murray, the president of the Philological Society, to be its editor. The first part of the OED, 352 pages long, appeared on 29 January 1884, and the last in April 1928, thirteen years after Murray died of heart failure. Its dozen finished volumes comprised 15,487 pages, and five years later there came a thirteenth volume, rounding up omissions.
One of James Murray’s most enduringly useful ideas was that English vocabulary has no definite limits. Its ‘vast aggregate’ of words is like the ‘nebulous masses familiar to the astronomer, in which a clear and unmistakable nucleus shades off on all sides, through zones of decreasing brightness, to a dim marginal film that seems to end nowhere’.27 You can see the core of English well enough, but you cannot see its circumference. Whoever compiles a dictionary has to draw the line somewhere: this is a matter of policy, however, not an exactly scientific calculation. Murray was a descriptive lexicographer, but even the work of a hardcore descriptivist is an abridgement. Nevertheless, the OED was alive to the range of English as no previous dictionary had been, and Murray’s origins in rural Roxburghshire, where his formal schooling ended at fourteen, must have shaped his sense of what English was; in editing the OED, he was providing an account of the nation’s history, and his Scottish roots made it clear to him that this had multiple centres and was as much about the provinces and rural communities as about London and other big cities.
The history of the OED’s title is vexed. Murray chose at first A New English Dictionary Showing the History of the Language from the Earliest Times. Benjamin Jowett, the energetic but also meddlesome Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, sneakily altered this in proof to A New English Dictionary Written so as to Show the Continuous History of Words. Murray was appalled, but attempted a compromise: A New English Dictionary on a Historical Basis. It was the view of more than one of his associates that this should read ‘an Historical Basis’. The title eventually changed again – to A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by Members of the Philological Society. From 1895 it was commonly known as the Oxford English Dictionary, which was the title under which it would be reissued in 1933.
Murray presented himself as a collector, and the OED as an arrangement of facts rather than as a narrative. But the finished product is not just an inventory; it has some of the bias of a story. The first edition of the OED pays more attention to literary texts than to non-literary ones, treats medieval writings patchily, provides really good coverage of scientific vocabulary only for the nineteenth century, and indeed overall treats that period and the late sixteenth century more thoroughly than the two hundred years in between, though the representation of sixteenth-century vocabulary is incomplete.28 Moreover, it pays scant attention to one of the great new developments of the nineteenth century: the working-class newspaper, a radical type of publication that explained to its readers the reasons for their poverty. The OED was a stunning achievement, and its reception was warm, but, even as its supposed inclusiveness caused anxiety about a collapsing of the divide between good and bad Englishes, there was much that it did not disclose about the range and colour of English vocabulary.
It seems a happy coincidence that the OED’s first cited user of the unusual words interlinguistic (‘intermingling in speech’) and lexiconize (‘to compile a lexicon’) is the novelist George Meredith. For few other Victorian authors write as sharply about linguistic self-consciousness. Though now little read, Meredith was once celebrated as the last of the great Victorian men of letters. His perspective on English was that of a man capable of seeing it as an outsider would, and in this he was lastingly influenced by the period he spent as a teenager at school in Neuwied, near the German city of Koblenz.
Meredith relishes hyperbole, and so do his characters. In his political novel Beauchamp’s Career (1874) he has one of his female leads, the cold and jealous beauty Cecilia Halkett, reflect that ‘between the vulgarity of romantic language and the baldness of commonplace … our English gives us no choice’, for ‘we cannot be dignified in simplicity’. The idea of choice is one that Meredith emphasizes. He frequently pursues the question of what English affords its users and fails to afford them, and attitudes to English usage are often also an index of attitudes to class and gender. In The House on the Beach (1877) a young woman’s unsuitability as a match for a much older man is summed up thus: ‘She’s sharp on grammar, and a man mayn’t like that much when he’s a husband.’ In Lord Ormont and his Aminta (1894) a character observes that ‘There’ll be a “general rabble tongue,” unless we English are drilled in the languages we filched from.’ Of an uneducated woman in One of our Conquerors (1891) Meredith writes, ‘her English was guilty of sudden lapses to the Thameswater English of commerce and drainage instead of the upper wells’. Most memorable is the journalist Rockney in the author’s early, unfinished Celt and Saxon (posthumously published in 1910), who is said to have his hand ‘upon the national heart’ on account of ‘his art of writing round English, instead of laborious Latinised periods: and the secret of the art was his meaning what he said. It was the personal throb.’ Meredith was sensitive to his age’s difficulties with meaning what it said, and in celebrating the intimacy of a ‘personal throb’ he was inviting the innovations of literary modernism, an artistic escape from repression into stylistic autonomy.
The literature of the 1920s, astonishing in its innovations, was produced by writers born in the 1880s: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot. Their precision was also an act of destruction. In Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), the main character is Rachel Vinrace, whose life initially seems hemmed in by convention. We are told that ‘her mind was in the state of an intelligent man’s in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth’. Yet she wants to break free, and we see this in her reading: she goes for Meredith, but above all consumes ‘modern books, books in shiny yellow covers’. As she travels to South America on a ship that belo
ngs to her father, she emerges into the full glare of modernity. At one point she imagines being ‘flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven about the roots of the world – the idea was incoherently delightful’. The Voyage Out is Woolf’s ominous imagining of the evaporation of Victorianism and its replacement by a more fragmented, visionary culture. When Rachel reads, ‘the very words of books were steeped in radiance’ and ‘seemed to drive roads back to the very beginning of the world’. Not for the moderns the old view of Francis Bacon that intellectual life becomes sick ‘when men study words and not matter’: Woolf’s novel imagines, with some prescience, a new age preoccupied with words and symbols, in which philosophical questions are likely to be linguistic, and in which, too, the struggle of the individual to find a voice – to find a language in which to live – becomes paramount.
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The warden of English
The Language Wars Page 22