The Language Wars
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1. Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1921), 38.
2. Sir Henry Newbolt et al., The Teaching of English in England (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1921), 282, 289–90, 293.
3. Thomas Wilson, The Many Advantages of a Good Language to Any Nation (London: Knapton, Knaplock et al., 1724), 6.
4. Ian Michael, English Grammatical Categories and the Tradition to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 208, 507.
5. H. G. Wells, An Englishman Looks at the World (London: Cassell, 1914), 224.
6. Wells, Mankind in the Making, 220–21.
7. Sterling A. Leonard, The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage 1700–1800 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 1929), 76.
8. George Snell, The Right Teaching of Useful Knowledg (London: W. Dugard, 1649), 49, 176–80.
9. The subject is beguilingly discussed in Nicholas Ostler, Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin (New York: Walker, 2007).
10. John Stirling, A Short View of English Grammar, 2nd edn (London: T. Astley, 1740).
11. Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 70.
12. Lynch, The Lexicographer’s Dilemma, 45.
13. Joan C. Beal, English in Modern Times, 1700–1945 (London: Arnold, 2004), 9.
14. Monthly Review 33 (1765), 20–21.
Chapter 8: ‘Bishop Lowth was a fool’
1. Samuel Johnson, Johnson on the English Language, ed. Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 109.
2. Ibid., 108–9.
3. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Harold F. Harding, 2 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), I, 173–4.
4. Johnson on the English Language, 301.
5. Ibid., 102–3.
6. Ibid., 74, 84, 92, 105.
7. Ibid., 73, 100.
8. This argument is developed at length by Carol Percy in ‘Periodical reviews and the rise of prescriptivism’, in Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Wim van der Wurff (eds), Current Issues in Late Modern English (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 117–50.
9. See Karlijn Navest, ‘An index of names to Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), (1763), (1764)’, Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics 6 (2006).
10. Robert Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar (London: Millar, Dodsley & Dodsley, 1762), 157–8.
11. Ibid., 43, 48, n., 93, n.
12. Ibid., 125, 48–9, 99, 76.
13. Mikko Laitinen, ‘Singular YOU WAS/WERE variation and English normative grammars in the eighteenth century’, in Arja Nurmi, Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin (eds), The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800) (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009), 199–217.
14. Robert Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar, 2nd edn (London: Millar, Dodsley & Dodsley, 1763), 63.
15. Ibid., 139.
16. Cited in E. Ward Gilman (ed.), Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1994), 365.
17. ‘Two Negatives, or two Adverbs of Denying do in English affirm’ – James Greenwood, An Essay Towards a Practical English Grammar (London: R. Tookey, 1711), 160.
18. Robert Baker, Reflections on the English Language (London: J. Bell, 1770), 112–13.
19. Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar, (1762), 1, 7.
20. Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar, 2nd edn (1763), 63.
21. Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), 158–9, 155.
22. Ibid., 35–6.
23. Philip Withers, Aristarchus, or The Principles of Composition (London: J. Moore, 1788), 23.
24. Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), 127.
25. Ibid., 9, 15.
26. See Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, ‘Robert Lowth and the strong verb system’, Language Sciences 24 (2002), 459–69; ‘Lowth’s Language’, in Marina Dossena and Charles Jones (eds), Insights into Late Modern English (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), 241–64; and ‘Eighteenth-century Prescriptivism and the Norm of Correctness’, in Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds), The Handbook of the History of English (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 539–57.
27. John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730–80: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 141–2.
28. William B. Hodgson, Errors in the Use of English (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1881), iii.
29. Wells, Certain Personal Matters, 148.
30. An excellent account of changing prose styles in this period is Carey McIntosh, The Evolution of English Prose, 1700–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
31. Quoted in Lynda Mugglestone, Talking Proper: The Rise and Fall of the English Accent as a Social Symbol, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 181.
32. Joseph Priestley, The Rudiments of English Grammar (London: R. Griffiths, 1761), vii.
33. Ibid., vii, 56–7.
34. Ibid., x–xi.
35. See Jane Hodson, ‘Joseph Priestley’s two Rudiments of English Grammar: 1761 and 1768’ in Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.), Grammars, Grammarians and Grammar-Writing in Eighteenth-Century England (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), 177–89.
36. Joseph Priestley, The Rudiments of English Grammar, 2nd edn (London: Becket, De Hondt & Johnson, 1768), xxiii.
37. This is explored in detail in Robin Straaijer, ‘Deontic and epistemic modals as indicators of prescriptive and descriptive language in the grammars by Joseph Priestley and Robert Lowth’, in Tieken-Boon van Ostade and van der Wurff (eds), Current Issues in Late Modern English, 57–87.
38. Priestley, The Rudiments of English Grammar, 58.
Chapter 9: O my America, my new found land!
1. Gentleman’s Magazine 22 (1752), 281.
2. Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 198.
3. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 53–4.
4. Ibid., 147.
5. Ibid., 132.
6. Quoted in David Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 29.
7. Frederic G. Cassidy, ‘Geographical Variation of English in the United States’, in Richard W. Bailey and Manfred Görlach (eds), English as a World Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 186–7.
8. H. L. Mencken, The American Language, 4th edn (New York: Knopf, 1941), 117, 146.
9. Quoted in Allen Walker Read, Milestones in the History of English in America, ed. Richard W. Bailey (Durham, NC: American Dialect Society, 2002), 43.
10. Mencken, The American Language, 313.
11. Thomas Dilworth, A New Guide to the English Tongue, 13th edn (London: Henry Kent, 1751), 129–30.
12. United States Democratic Review 17 (1845), 5, 9.
13. Quoted in David Micklethwait, Noah Webster and the American Dictionary (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 11.
14. The subject is covered at length in Makoto Ikeda, Competing Grammars: Noah Webster’s Vain Efforts to Defeat Lindley Murray (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1999).
15. Noah Webster, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, 3 vols (Hartford: Connecticut, Hudson & Goodwin, 1783–5), I, 8, 10.
16. Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1789), 24.
17. Ibid., viii.
18. Dissertations on the English Language, 394–5.
19. A Grammatical Institute, I, 14–15.
20. Dissertations on the English Language, 20.
21. Ezra Greenspan, ‘Some Remarks on the Poetics of “Participle-Loving Whitman”’, in Greenspan (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 94.
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22. Walt Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks, vol. 3, ed. William White (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 717.
23. Ibid., 678.
24. These quotations all appear in F. O. Matthiessen’s discussion of Whitman in American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 517–625.
25. Walt Whitman, An American Primer, ed. Horace Traubel (London: G. P. Putnam, 1904), 2, 9, 30.
26. Ibid., 24.
27. See Shirley Wilson Logan, Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008).
28. Susan-Mary Grant, ‘From Union to Nation? The Civil War and the Development of American Nationalism’, in Susan-Mary Grant and Brian Holden Reid (eds), Themes of the American Civil War, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2010), 296.
29. Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 13, n.
30. The subject is thoroughly dealt with in John Algeo, British or American English? A Handbook of Word and Grammar Patterns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
31. Wells, Mankind in the Making, 128–9.
32. Zoltán Kövecses, American English: An Introduction (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2000), 13.
Chapter 10: The long shadow of Lindley Murray
1. Charles Monaghan, ‘Lindley Murray, American’, in Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.), Two Hundred Years of Lindley Murray (Münster: Nodus, 1996), 27–43.
2. The subject is covered in detail in Jane Hodson, Language and Revolution in Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine and Godwin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 21–40.
3. John Walker, A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (London: Robinson, Robinson & Cadell, 1791), 18, 51.
4. A valuable account of the Murrays is Charles Monaghan, The Murrays of Murray Hill (New York: Urban History Press, 1998).
5. Peter Walkden Fogg, Elementa Anglicana, 2 vols (Stockport: J. Clarke, 1792–6), II, x–xi.
6. Murray, English Grammar, 121, 139.
7. Ibid., 105.
8. Ibid., 179–200.
9. Ibid., 55–6.
10. Ibid., 17–19.
11. Quoted in Marcus Tomalin, Romanticism and Linguistic Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 148–9.
12. See Emma Vorlat, ‘Lindley’s Murray’s Prescriptive Canon’, in Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.), Two Hundred Years of Lindley Murray, 163–82.
13. Murray, English Grammar, 188.
14. Ibid., 98.
15. Lindley Murray, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lindley Murray (York: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1826), 91.
16. Alexander Gil, Logonomia Anglica, 2nd edn (London: John Beale, 1621), 19. My translation.
17. Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London: S. Hooper, 1785), i.
18. Jonathon Green, Chambers Slang Dictionary (Edinburgh: Chambers, 2008), xi.
19. Alexander Marjoribanks, Travels in New South Wales (London: Smith, Elder, 1847), 58.
20. Ashley Montagu, The Anatomy of Swearing (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 260.
Chapter 11: The pedigree of nations
1. John Horne Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, or The Diversions of Purley, ed. Richard Taylor, 2 vols (London: Thomas Tegg, 1829), I, 26.
2. Christina Bewley and David Bewley, Gentleman Radical: A Life of John Horne Tooke (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1998), 6.
3. For a full account of Tooke’s ideas about linguistic equality, see Susan Manly, Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s: Locke, Tooke, Wordsworth, Edgeworth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
4. This is discussed by Andrew Elfenbein in Romanticism and the Rise of English (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 2006), 6.
6. See Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995), 1.
7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1970), 290.
8. Graham Robb, The Discovery of France (London: Picador, 2007), 50–57.
9. Robert Phillipson, English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy (London: Routledge, 2003), 146.
10. Marc Shell, ‘Language Wars’, New Centennial Review 1 (2001), 2.
11. The subject is discussed at length in Sarah G. Thomason, Language Contact (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001).
12. These ideas are explored in detail in Philip Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Chapter 12: Of fish-knives and fist-fucks
1 Lawrence James, The Middle Class: A History (London: Little, Brown, 2006), 231.
2. These examples are from Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 215–16.
3. G. M. Young, Portrait of an Age: Victorian England, ed. George Kitson Clark (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 154.
4. Richard W. Bailey, Nineteenth-Century English (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 4.
5. Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader, 2nd edn (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 161.
6. These examples are drawn from A. N. Wilson, The Victorians (London: Arrow, 2003), 282–3.
7. Quoted in Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (London: Minerva, 1995), 40.
8. Manfred Görlach, Explorations in English Historical Linguistics (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002), 139.
9. Quoted in Bailey, Nineteenth-Century English, 258.
10. Quoted in James Sambrook, William Cobbett (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 105.
11. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, An Introduction to Late Modern English (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 4.
12. James Paul Cobbett, ‘Pronunciation’, in A Grammar of the English Language, with an additional chapter on pronunciation by James Paul Cobbett (London: Charles Griffin, 1866), 241.
19. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber, 1992).
14. The World, 6 December 1753.
15. Quoted in Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 4.
16. See Harold J. Laski, The Danger of Being a Gentleman and Other Essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1939), 13–31.
17. Anon., Woman: As She Is, and As She Should Be, 2 vols (London: James Cochrane, 1835), I, 2, 16, 28, 74; II, 254, 257.
18. Cited in Gilman (ed.), Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 582.
19. George Vandenhoff, The Lady’s Reader (London: Sampson Low, 1862), 1, 3, 4.
20. Peter Trudgill, The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 94–5.
21. Bailey, Nineteenth-Century English, 84.
22. Quoted in Manfred Görlach, English in Nineteenth-Century England: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 174.
23. Harry Thurston Peck, What is Good English? and Other Essays (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1899), 3.
24. Charles Mackay, Lost Beauties of the English Language (London: Chatto & Windus, 1874), xxii, xxiv.
25. See Virginia Tufte, Grammar as Style (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971).
26. McIntosh, The Evolution of English Prose, 5.
27. My figures here are from Harold Herd, The March of Journalism: The Story of the British Press from 1622 to the Present Day (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952), 174–5.
28. Jason Camlot, Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 112.
29. T. L. Kington Oliphant, The Sources of Standard English (London: Macmillan, 1873), 1.
30. Ibid., 323,
328, 334, 338.