A function word—a standard linguistic term coined by Fries in this book—was a word that had no actual content but expressed a grammatical relation. The educated layman to whom Fries addressed American English Grammar surely found this to be one of its most difficult concepts. The function word helped to illustrate the increasingly abstract relationships among certain words and usages, especially in standard English. These were always words, many of them prepositions, whose contributions seemed to be nil outside of the phrases they were a part of, linguistic zeros that expressed a relationship but nothing in themselves.
Standard English showed three times as many instances of the adjective–plus–function word phrases according to, owing to, relating to, and the sometimes controversial due to. Certain kinds of relational word groups appeared only in the standard English letters: In as much as, In case, In the event that, in order that.7
The standard language appeared rife with such phrases made up of otherwise familiar words whose distinct meanings could not be individually plucked from their context. The common criticism, then, that modern language was becoming a mumbo-jumbo of pompous, ritualized, technical-sounding phrases was a complaint to be set at the door of the standard language and educated speakers.
Again and again, Fries emphasized context and grammatical patterns over and above the values of individual words with individual meanings. Inflectional languages, he pointed out, allowed more freedom of word order. Modern English was mostly uninflected, and word order was critical. Meaning depended on context. Differences in grammar were subtle and sometimes difficult to comprehend, but the evidence Fries had gathered described a virtual class system of the language spoken in the United States.
Vulgar English, like Mencken’s parody, relied heavily on pronouns. It also used many fewer adjectives, and much less frequently used a noun as an adjective preceding another noun. Like the Declaration of Independence, “the standard English materials contain many more nouns in the subject and object relation than do those of vulgar English.”
Vulgar English omitted many function words like that and which, and made less use of relational terms such as provided and since in their conditional meanings, yet, and however. Most standard English writers failed to use whom in the interrogative according to rule (like parts of shall, another usage that was fading from the language), but the word whom did not appear even once in the letters of vulgar English. Structurally, vulgar English was not less complicated than standard English, but lexically it was very different.
Get, that humble and irritating everyword that never refuses a task, especially in the language of children, appeared “ten times as frequently in vulgar English.” The word so, in the meaning of “therefore,” appeared six times as frequently in vulgar English. Vulgar English strove much less often to express an “analysis and emphasis of the precise meaning relationship involved,” as in what Fries called “expanded forms”—phrasings that could, in theory, be simplified but were instead aired out to allow for subtle pinpointing. Vulgar English (like, one might note, a lot of professional, intentionally colloquial writing) tended in the opposite direction. “In vocabulary and in grammar the mark of the language of the uneducated is its poverty. The user of vulgar English seems less sensitive in his impressions, less keen in his realizations, and more incomplete in his representations.” The cure for this, Fries would argue elsewhere, was less language study and more language in general, foreshadowing contemporary findings that emphasize the numbers of words and books to which children in educated households are exposed, compared to their economically less fortunate peers.
In American English Grammar, Fries ignored literary standards to examine the grammar of the people, but his study did not romanticize the people’s language. Unlike the litterateurs of the time, he did not vouch for its ingenuity (as did Hurston) or dignity (Steinbeck), but instead wanted educators to notice its actual structure and a few distinguishing characteristics in order to address its failings. And this required clearing away rubbish like the traditional lessons on lie and lay, which had never reversed the habit among educated people of saying laid instead of lay for the past tense and instead of lain for the past participle. It also required admitting that the actual difference in underlying grammar between vulgar and standard was, in reality, quite small.
Pompous formality about the rightness of standard English was not going to work. “The experience of at least two hundred years shows that we cannot hope to change the practices of a language; we can only help students learn what those practices are.”
Certain speech habits could be supported by social pressure, but “it must be the vigorous social pressure of a living speech, the forms of which can be constantly verified upon the lips of actual speakers.”8
Rather than go on teaching make-believe rules that were supposed to govern lie and lay, or the old business about shall and will, or insisting that neither, either, none, and any always take a singular verb, or any number of other crotchets of textbook writers, it should be the business of the schools, Fries argued in 1940 and throughout his career, to teach the language of modern professionals, increasingly informal, though still polite, and typical of the educated speaker, language that a child might actually hear in the world outside the classroom.
After sending off his manuscript to the publisher, however, Fries did not hear back for a long while. Finally, about twelve months later, the revised manuscript came back, and it was a shock to look at. Every single instance of uneducated grammar that Fries had quoted in his study—hundreds of passages painstakingly transcribed from those handwritten letters—had been corrected for grammar and usage by some well-meaning copy editor.9 Luckily Fries had another copy of his original manuscript.
Chapter 17
Woodrow Wilson had been a great speechmaker, as much when he was president of Princeton University as when he was president of the United States and lecturing Europe on how to put an end to war forever. With his Fourteen Points, America began to lead the world, though more in speech than in deed. Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the United States withdrew from the world stage, tending once again to isolationism. Presidential rhetoric remained, with some exceptions, old-fashioned, while American linguists and litterateurs became much more invested in the genuine American idiom.
In World War II, the United States began to genuinely lead the world, this time not with the eloquence of college presidents but with the courage of soldiers and the know-how of engineers. War was a kind of school for American culture, and its graduates spoke less and less like Woodrow Wilson or FDR and more like Dwight D. Eisenhower. Manly bluntness and technical jargon replaced High Church eloquence. Our leaders went from talking of “fear itself” to coining “the military-industrial complex.”
Any number of lives from this era might illustrate some of what this implied, but the journalist and publisher James Parton happens to be an important figure in the larger story of this book. And while many observers noted the war’s effect on American English, Parton noticed how a Texan’s use of American English changed the course of the war.
Fresh out of college, Parton worked as an assistant to the legendary Edward L. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud who looked to use his uncle’s theories to manipulate public opinion. Bernays is quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary under public relations, an activity he personally helped transform into a profession and industry: “To some the public relations counsel is known by the term propagandist.”
A cynic might say it was logical for Parton to go from the manipulations of PR—an abbreviation that begins to appear in the coming decade—to working for Henry Luce. But, in Parton’s case, writing for a general audience was a family tradition.
His grandfather James Parton had been one of the great popular American historians of the nineteenth century, writing biographies of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and other prominent Americans before penning two books about “captains of industry,�
�� whom he also called “the rightful successors of the feudal lords of another time.” Several of these men (and all were men) had risen from humble beginnings and made their mark upon the world through hard work and ingenuity.
The younger James Parton rose from the Harvard Class of 1934, and, after a year of working for Bernays, took a job at Fortune, from which he slid over to Time. He was promoted to aviation editor. Time had consistently shown great interest in the derring-do of pilots flying monoplanes and biplanes and other flyers in the 1920s. Airplane makes its first appearance in Webster’s in 1929, another generic term being airship, yet another being aëroplane. Like the language it gave rise to (flyboy, wingman), aeronautics was a reliable source of novelty and excitement. In 1927, Time published a harrowing first-person account of a double plane crash in Buenos Aires that took place during a goodwill tour by the U.S. Army Air Corps.1 The article was written by Ira C. Eaker, one of the surviving pilots.
Eaker was a propagandist in his own right: for the military potential of airplanes. During the isolationist 1930s, he asked the army to send him to journalism school so he might better craft his message, which he formulated in a series of popular books, cowritten with Colonel Henry H. Arnold, about the romance and adventure of military flying. Born in Llano County, Texas, Eaker wrote like a graduate of the James Parton School of Writing.
“The fighter pilot is a throw-back to the knights of King Arthur. His safety, his success, his survival lie in his own keen eyes, steady arm and stout heart. . . . Here the principles of mass warfare have broken down, we are back to the tournament joust, to the mailed knight on the great charger.”2
But propaganda was not enough. The United States refused to cultivate airpower and paid a dear price for it in Pearl Harbor, where, Parton thought, “long-range land-based air patrols could have thwarted the Japanese surprise.”
In January 1942, Colonel Eaker was promoted to command the American bombing effort in Europe, to be run out of Britain. Parton joined his staff, which was made up of civilian lawyers and journalists, a group that came to be known as “Eaker’s Amateurs.” That spring, they set up headquarters at the Wycombe Abbey School for Girls, a residence with cooks and waitresses as well as tennis courts both grass and clay. Eaker was keen on fitness. He ordered his officers to exercise for an hour a day, and often joined them with a cigar still in his mouth.
Eaker’s military duties required a good deal of diplomacy, but he did not talk like an ambassador. And he did not talk the way he wrote. At a dinner with High Wycombe’s mayor, city council, and some two thousand other people, he was called on to give a speech.
Rising reluctantly from his chair, he delivered an address only two sentences long. Its tone was informal and its language was colloquial. It contained no literary or historical allusions, no medieval imagery, and no calls to arms. The word honor did not cross Eaker’s lips even once. All he said was this: “We won’t do much talking until we’ve done more fighting. After we’ve gone we hope you’ll be glad we came.”
The speech was a hit. Like a Hemingway character (or, later, one played by John Wayne), Eaker had found simple American eloquence in the rejection of old-fashioned speechmaking. It was of a piece with the famous story of General Anthony McAuliffe of the 101st Airborne Division, who later held the Belgian town of Bastogne against superior German forces. Given a chance to surrender, McAuliffe refused and sent the Germans a one-word reply: “Nuts.”
Airpower was, of course, critical in the European Theater. In less than two years, the Eighth Air Force grew from a handful of officers with no equipment to 185,000 officers and 4,000 planes. Their job was to cooperate with the Royal Air Force to execute a lethal counterattack against Hitler.
Churchill was saying, though not publicly, that “the severe ruthless bombing of Germany on an ever-increasing scale will not only cripple her war effort, including U-Boat and aircraft production, but will also create conditions intolerable to the mass of the German population.”
Parton relished a story about Eaker’s British counterpart, Sir Arthur Harris, who had been stopped by a policeman for speeding. “You might have killed someone,” the officer said. “Young man,” the commander replied, “I kill thousands of people every night!”
The Americans, in Parton’s telling, were chary of the British taste—acquired during Hitler’s savage bombing of London—for taking the fight to the front doors of the German people. But they were overwhelmed by the cooperative spirit of their British hosts and allies. A disagreement meanwhile developed over a common strategy.
The OED gives a 1939 citation for precision bombing, which Webster’s Third later defines as “the dropping of aerial bombs by means of a bombsight on a narrowly defined target.” In 1942, the phrase was still more of a rhetorical conjuring than a military reality.
The British flew only at night, which, before radar, made it impossible to be discriminating in target selection. The reality of aerial targeting in World War II was better described by another term popularized by the war: carpet bombing. This was accomplished by massive formations of bomber planes. Parton, in a biography of Eaker he wrote many years later, dramatically described the coordination this required.
“Each B-17 or B-24 had a crew of ten, and each crew member was a specialist—gunner, navigator, radio operator, bombardier, pilot. Each had to be taught procedures not included in the flying schools of Texas. How, for example, to take off along with as many as 2,000 other planes from 43 airfields crammed in an area the size of Rhode Island, spiral up through as much as 10,000 feet of heavy clouds with constant risk of collision, then assemble above the overcast behind their own squadron and group commanders, rendezvous with fighter escort over the Channel and proceed in huge formations in prescribed sequence to assigned targets and back, a trip often requiring ten hours in the air, much of the time on oxygen.”
It was no joust. The defeat of Hitler depended on the success of extraordinary technical undertakings and helped introduce any number of aeronautics acronyms into dictionaries and, to some extent, the standard lexicon: VHF for Very High Frequency radio sets for communication among planes, IFF for Identification—Friend or Foe, and ILS for instrument landing system. But the most critical phrase in the Allied attack on Germany was much less technical-sounding: round-the-clock bombing, which Eaker made up.
Around the clock had been around for over a century, but Merriam-Webster dates the a-less version to 1938. Eaker used the a-less version. He thought that while the British continued to hit Germany at night, his American forces should attack in daylight hours, when it was easier to see a target though also easier to become one.
Working on Eaker’s staff brought Parton, only thirty years old, into contact with a number of prominent military and political leaders. He briefed General Eisenhower in the war room at Wycombe Abbey. Though remembered by later generations for his reservations about modern warfare, Ike was a believer in the Eighth Air Force’s potential to devastate Germany.
Eleanor Roosevelt passed through, shaking hands with every single one of the three hundred officers present to greet her. Parton escorted her on a tour of a B-17, watching as the first lady “nimbly shoehorned her lanky body” through the bomber’s small door near the rear. From the inside, she examined its guns, navigation, and radio systems, and “then gamely insisted on tottering on high heels up the narrow steel catwalk through the bomb bay to the pilot’s and bombardier stations.”
On her way out, “her eye was caught by a black rubber funnel and hose clamped to the rear bulkhead. ‘What is that?’ she asked.” Parton said it was “for the convenience of the crews during long flights.”
“How clever,” ER replied.
Parton was promoted to captain and became Eaker’s aide-de-camp. On January 15, 1943, he flew with his boss to Casablanca for a major war conference. At dinner Eaker learned from his old co-author General Arnold that the plan to bomb Germany by day was in danger
of being overruled.
Parton wrote in his diary, “The president is under pressure from the Prime Minister to abandon day bombing and put all our bomber force in England into night operations with (and preferably under the control of) the RAF.” Eaker thought it would lead to disaster. “We’ll lose more planes landing on that fog-shrouded island [Britain] in darkness than we lose now over German targets.”
It fell to Eaker to meet with Churchill and persuade him to withdraw his opposition. To prepare, he got down to writing. The first draft of his memo, “The Case for Day Bombing,” was “completed with journalistic fluency in about three hours,” wrote Parton.
“Day bombing,” Eaker argued, “is the bold, the aggressive, the offensive thing to do.” For Churchill he prepared a one-page “minute,” listing seven reasons for day bombing, while handing off another sixteen pages of supporting argumentation to General Arnold to be used in other meetings.
Churchill knew Eaker and liked him, and he knew Eaker was unhappy. Arriving in his air commodore’s uniform, which he wore to meetings with air force personnel, the prime minister said, “Young man, I am half American; my mother was a U.S. citizen. The tragic losses of so many of our gallant crews tears my heart.”
Day bombing was not working out, said Churchill, because American losses were double those endured by RAF forces flying at night. Eaker might have rebutted this claim. The Eighth Air Force had, according to Parton, recently lost planes at a rate much lower than the RAF. But rather than argue numbers, the Texan stuck with his one-pager, handing it to Churchill, who motioned for Eaker to take a seat.
The prime minister read the memo half aloud. “When he came to the line about the advantages of round-the-clock bombing,” according to Eaker, “he rolled the words off his tongue as if they were tasty morsels.”
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