The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  Gove busied himself with research, getting to know London, and getting to know Johnson scholars and lexicographers. At the end of the summer, he rejoined his family, and, after placing the children in a school, he and Grace “spent a few quiet days in a bungalow on the banks of the English river Looe, surrounded by the calm green tops of Cornwall hills.”6 Years later Gove recalled the details of these weeks in a poignant memoir.

  The bungalow owner’s son was an Air Raid Precautions warden who liked to regale his guests with stories about local preparations for war. “The gas squad, urgently called out to assist the Plymouth fire squad in the practice burning of slum quarters, had themselves been so overcome by mere woodsmoke that it was necessary to call out the first aid squad to carry them off on emergency stretchers.” Gove savored the grim humor of these practice episodes: “One ‘casualty,’ assigned to be badly wounded, having given up all hope after interminable wait, left a note on his spot, reading, ‘Have bled to death and gone home to bed.’ ”

  In late August, Philip and Grace set out for London, learning at the nearby train station that, in fact, the city was being evacuated. The next day, September 1, the poet Auden noted “the clever hopes expire of a low dishonest decade.” With their luggage and gas masks from Her Majesty’s government, the Goves bought tickets to go as far as Reading. “The train was crowded. People seemed uneasy, apprehensive, and uncommonly concerned about soldiers and sailors who filled the station platforms.”

  A day later they visited the city, “impelled by curiosity.” Philip and Grace hoped to encounter American acquaintances, someone with information on what was really going on. Like hapless tourists, they made their way to the American Embassy, which was thronged. “I do not know why such a visit seemed desirable,” recalled Gove, “or what we would have said even if we could have talked to Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy himself. I think what we both wanted was for someone—anyone at all—to tell us to run along, and not worry.”

  They joined the evacuation of London, heading back to Reading, and then on to Oxford the next day. The morning of Sunday, September 3, Grace and Philip took a walk “along Iffley Road to look at a Norman church with its dogtooth carving and the yew trees in the churchyard.” Their stroll led into fields where children were playing. The married couple admired the town’s “neat rows of brick houses, garden plots bright in the sunlight, and cheerful-looking people.” When they returned to their boardinghouse, the landlady greeted them. “ ‘Did you have a nice walk? And see the church? Well, we are at war.’ ”

  The Goves stayed abroad nonetheless, and it was a productive year for Philip, who published four journal articles on Johnson. In reviewing the competition between Bailey’s serialized dictionary and Johnson’s, he noted that Bailey’s updaters had relied more than a little on Johnson’s newer dictionary, borrowings that struck the modern eye as dubious: Wrote Gove, “A glance at any page of Bailey will reveal that line after line is rankly plagiarized” from Johnson.7

  This argument drew interest from other Johnsonians, mainly for its lack of context: Copying among lexicographers had been more common in the eighteenth century, and even Johnson could be shown to have borrowed from Bailey’s original dictionary. On the bicentennial of Johnson’s dictionary, the American scholars James Sledd and Gwin J. Kolb returned to the issue, quoting Gove and commenting that “indignation at a lexicographer’s raids on his predecessors is a little utopian.”

  The problem with Gove’s very earnest argument was that it expected too much originality, and even integrity, from a mere dictionary, that repository of traditions, including the minor tradition of imitating one’s predecessors. On the upside, his career was showing signs of life and his work was finally winning some attention.

  Chapter 16

  In one of the classic parodies of vulgar American English, H. L. Mencken rewrote the Declaration of Independence.

  The original text begins with a handsome specimen of eighteenth-century British English rhetoric, written from a lofty, transcendent point of view and filled with beautiful noun phrases that must have taken hours to assemble: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

  Mencken’s comic translation is written as the passionate speech of an American philistine, with an ear to the shifting standards of American English to favor street-corner slang and simple pronouns: “When things get so balled up that the people of a country have to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, except maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see that they are on the level, and not trying to put nothing over nobody.”

  The famous next sentence of the original says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

  Mencken’s version: “All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, you and me is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain’t got no right to take away none of our rights; every man has a got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time however he likes, so long as he don’t interfere with nobody else.”1

  And so on. In 1936, Mencken removed the parody from the fourth edition of The American Language—to avoid any confusion. He said that outraged purists had mistaken it for a model of how American English should be written.

  Interest in the varieties of American English was certainly on the rise. Alan Lomax, following in his father’s footsteps, was recording songs and stories directly from the mouths of hillbillies, field hands, and rural preachers. Woody Guthrie, an Okie who had learned songs on the migrant worker circuit, was recording folk music for a major record label. Zora Neale Hurston was touring the depths of Florida to record the words and sounds of African Americans whose speech reflected not the rules of the classroom but cultural isolation and even sounds of the Middle Passage. John Steinbeck, sometime newspaper reporter, was writing about farmhands and grape-pickers to call forth the unglamorous lives of real people. The Grapes of Wrath was chosen by Henry Seidel Canby as a selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and then it won a Pulitzer and became a celebrated movie. The true American, Roosevelt’s “Forgotten Man,” was everywhere being stalked and made to show himself. In music, literature, and the movies that Americans now routinely watched, the Voice of the People, with varying degrees of authenticity, was being spoken. Even President Roosevelt—who could sound like the world’s greatest WASP standing atop a stack of Harvard Classics—had gotten in on the act, adopting a less formal persona and simpler language in his fireside chats on the radio.

  In his own way, Charles C. Fries was listening. Through the efforts of the Modern Language Association and the Linguistic Society of America, he had gained access to three thousand letters to the United States government, all written by native speakers whose parents and grandparents were also native speakers of American English. Until now every “corpus” study in linguistics had involved edited material written for a public audience—in short, literary writing. Fries wanted material that did not sound like essays or novels, language conceived without any intent to enlighten, flatter, or amaze. And these letters to the federal government were as plain as the words one might address to a clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

  The language was simple, honest, and prosaic. Still it was not ideal.

  The letters were written to the U.S. Army and came from military family members. Much of the language was informal, but all of it was rather ser
ious, at times desperate. Much better, thought Fries, would have been a large body of mechanical recordings of American speech. “The use of any kind of written material for the purpose of investigating the living language is always a compromise,” he wrote, “but at present an unavoidable one.”2

  At least the letters were spontaneous, all “personal letters written to accomplish an immediate purpose with presumably no thought that they might ever be read by any other than the particular person to whom they were directed.” Fries knew the writers’ biographical specifics: age, current address, relevant family information, and, most important, occupation and educational background. The last two pieces of information he used to categorize the letter-writers into groups.

  The first group consisted of urban professionals with a degree from “one of our reputable colleges” whose spelling, capitalization, and punctuation conformed “completely to the usual conventions of written material.” Their letters were used as examples of “standard English.” The other important group comprised individuals with eight years of schooling or less, who held manual jobs making less than ninety dollars a month, and whose spelling, capitalization, and punctuation showed them to be “semi-illiterate.”3 Their letters represented “vulgar English.” In between was a middle group of people with at least some high school education who held skilled jobs, but the goal of the study was to document differences between standard and vulgar English.

  Fries’s method was as radical as his choice of materials: He defined standard English by the people who used it, not by a preordained set of rules that could have been used to measure just how standard the language of the letter-writers was. In this, he was completely inverting the traditional method of popular grammar-writing, in which a rule was set forth, followed by examples of written or spoken English that violated the rules.

  The National Council of Teachers of English, where he had served as president, had commissioned the study, which was called American English Grammar. Begun many years prior to its publication in 1940, it asked the reader to put aside his assumption that the “language practices of formal writing are the best or at least that they are of a higher level than those of colloquial or conversational English.” Fries dwelled on this point. Too many people, he said, when “they find an expression marked ‘colloquial’ in a dictionary, as in the phrase ‘to get on one’s nerves’ in Webster’s New International Dictionary, they frown upon its use.”

  But colloquial did not mean bad or wrong. The word “is used to mark those words and constructions whose range of use is primarily that of the polite conversation of cultivated people, of their familiar letters and informal speeches.” Such informality was claiming an increasing share of public discourse: “Even the language of our better magazines and of public addresses has, during the last generation, moved away from the formal toward the informal.”

  Another bias that had to be put aside was the presumption that standard English, the language spoken by educated people in positions of influence, was better English. Historically, it was “a local dialect, which was used to carry on the major affairs of English life and which gained thereby a social prestige.” In the United States, the usages of New England predominated “because of the fact that New England so long dominated our intellectual life.” There was now, however, a broad American standard that was identifiable and coherent despite regional differences.

  But the most important thing to remember was that standard English—American or British—was not standard because it was “any more correct or beautiful or more capable than other varieties of English.” Instead, it was standard because it was the language “used in the conduct in the important affairs of our people.”

  Standard English was the language of the socially powerful, and that was why it was standard. It enjoyed no divine right. Its selection as the standard language was simply a by-product of historical and political evolution. The double negative, for example, was no longer a part of English not because it was redundant or irrational, but because the double negative was not a characteristic of the English spoken by those whom history had favored with social and political power. A grammar of the language spoken in the United States—standard and nonstandard alike—had to overcome this bias by identifying the linguistic tendencies of all, including “the great mass of people in most of our communities” and especially the poor and uneducated.

  Fries did not, however, conclude from these premises that all varieties of English were equal. He accepted without qualification that it was a proper educational aim to fit children with the means to speak standard English. The problem was that the language taught in classrooms was not standard English.

  “Seldom have school authorities understood the precise nature of the language task they have assumed and very frequently have directed their energies to teaching not ‘standard’ English realistically described, but a ‘make-believe’ correctness which contained some true forms of real ‘standard’ English and many forms that had and have practically no currency outside the classroom.”4

  So, it was necessary to look for examples of how and to what degree standard English differed from vulgar English. And this is where the letters came in.

  Fries examined the letters for grammar only, never commenting on their contents. From the scientific point of view, what the letters said was irrelevant, but one can hardly pass here without observing the strange tonal effect of so clinical an approach. It is similar to that of a head doctor who is making rounds with residents in tow, observing patients in great distress but never letting on that he is personally affected. Letter 8288 says, “there will be Six little orphans in the Street if my Son doesn’t come back home soon,” but Dr. Fries wants us to merely see that the patient, a speaker of vulgar English, has used an “adverb of locality” in the opening word there—a usage that occurs, actually, twice as frequently in standard English. Elsewhere Fries points out that letter 8296, another example of standard English, employs and to introduce a consequence: “he was living in hell all the time and had to drink to keep from going crazy.” Of course, with a whole F. Scott Fitzgerald–style breakdown going on in that sentence, the layman is to be forgiven if his eyes aren’t instantly drawn to its grammatical qualities.

  Personal tragedies aside, the letters did provide Fries with an impressive catalog of verbal tells of differences between vulgar and standard English. Examining plurals in vulgar English, Fries noted that s-less forms were common: “16 year of age,” “2 mile down the road,” “ten gallon of water.” So were certain plus-s forms: “a lots of,” “youse,” “in regards to.”

  The quirks of standard English number forms were of a different order. “Concord or agreement in number has . . . nearly passed out of the language,” Fries stated. Then he showed that none, any, and neither and either, with only one exception, all appeared with plural verb forms, in flagrant contradiction of the traditional rule, which insisted that all of these be accompanied by a singular verb.5

  Elsewhere Fries had argued that complaints about he don’t were all too typical of the misplaced priorities of the purists, but the letters examined for American English Grammar demonstrated this was indeed a signature usage of vulgar English. He don’t appeared not even once in the letters of standard English; in vulgar English the use of doesn’t was “exceedingly rare.”

  In their treatment of such verbs as be and do, the vulgar English letter-writers sounded like Ma Joad or a Zora Neale Hurston character. “My children is on starvation,” lamented the writer of letter 8037. “The dirt floors requires continual work,” said 6413. Letter 8293 voiced the perennial line about misfortune: “Times is so hard.” Said 8275, “Father . . . don’t make but a small salary.”

  Double subject nouns connected by and were, even in standard English, frequently used with a singular verb when the sense of the noun subject suggested a one-ness. Singular noun subjects were used with plural verbs when intervening words suggested a plural-
ness. Another grammatical misdemeanor often found in standard English was the split infinitive. Eighteen of the twenty split infinitives Fries found were from the standard English letters.

  In similar amounts of writing, the letters of standard English “contained nearly four times as many participles as did the Vulgar English.” And the vulgar examples included past participles without -ed endings (“The people ain’t never discharge my son”) and mixed past-tense forms (“My folks may have wrote you”).

  The standard English letters yielded many examples of genitives (“possessives” in layman’s terms) followed by gerunds (-ing verbs that function like nouns) that did not follow classroom rule. By many lights, these phrases all required an ’s but did not have one: “due to the instruments being out of adjustment,” “Another reason for the War Department crediting my war service to West Virginia,” and “There is no record of this officer having been attached.”6

  Fries demonstrated that standard English was less traditional than vulgar English, contrary to popular assumptions. Along with the notions that standard English was standard because it was more beautiful and more correct, the received wisdom held that it was also more conservative of linguistic tradition—which had long been one of its selling points.

  For example, the standard English letters contained four times as many examples of past participles, which was typical of later patterns in modern English. In the use of the inflected endings -er and -est, the vulgar English letter-writers were far more traditional, avoiding the newer tendency to use such comparative “function words” as more and most.