“I have a memo here which consists of thirty single-space pages on the subject ‘Repetition in Definitions,’ referring to the use of the defined word in subsequent definitions of derivative words. Every point is itemized in clear detail, with all possible methods considered. . . . It would take anyone hours to digest and follow it. Do you want that sort of thing mimeographed and circulated before meetings? Can we afford the expense and time of it?”
Gove volunteered that all such memoranda be kept in a master book, a digest of editorial policies the board would be free to consult but not modify. “I don’t want a vote,” he said. “Take the botany classification memo. It’s been shown to you; if anyone objects, the objection is on the record.”
President Munroe readily allowed that handling such questions was really the job of Gove and the editorial staff. But, he wanted to know, if such matters were not brought to the attention of the board, how would the company avoid the inclusion of entries that might hurt sales?
Munroe mentioned the embarrassing entry for journalistic. Few things could be more dangerous than the mistake of antagonizing journalists, who not only exercised great influence over the stylistic direction of the language but among whom there appeared a number of individuals who delighted in writing about language questions and dictionaries.
Gove pointed out that the definition for journalistic was, essentially, a procedural mistake. The proper first sense of the word—characteristic of the work of gathering news and reporting in a periodical—was skipped, and the deprecating sense, which indeed needed defining, was given as the only meaning.
“You must grant that the editorial department consists of human beings,” said Gove, “and they will make a slip once in a while. I think that the consensus seems to be that we do not need to have the detailed analyses of the Second Edition Editorial Board meetings.”
Gove’s appointment, like his comments, marked a major shift for Merriam. The staff expert became the company’s point man (to use a World War II term), chosen not for his reputation among educated consumers but for his highly developed skills as an editor and lexicographer. The technical grumbling usually concealed within a company’s lower ranks now surfaced at the executive level, and the happy face of a company leader was replaced by that of a truth-telling middle manager.
He took an insider’s view of dictionary work, but Gove was not without broad ambitions for Webster’s Third. Its predecessor had called itself “an interpreter of the culture and civilization of today.” The same should be true of “the dictionary of 1960,” Gove said, even if “the culture and civilization of 1960 is not coequal with that of 1930.”
Chapter 25
“What shall we do about grammar? What is the relationship of English to a core program? Shall we have separate courses in English and speech? How should the literature program be organized? What shall we do about radio, television, newspapers, magazines?”1 Such questions—illustrating how shall in the first-person plural interrogative had come to seem hopelessly earnest—were asked of the leadership at the National Council of Teachers of English in the 1940s and ’50s.
The old rules were in doubt; classroom drills were out of favor. In the optimistic glow of postwar rebuilding, students were to be treated as individuals, equals even, all worthy of an education, and education was to reflect the goals of society. Communications was the new byword, as teachers talked of the powers of mass media, and language skills were understood to go far beyond reading and writing. Learning was a cooperative activity. And listening, it was said in all seriousness, might just be the most important skill of all. (No laughing.)
In 1945, the council had established a special commission on the English curriculum and divided the field into four parts: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. The resulting four subcommittees multiplied into twenty or so sub-subcommittees, as almost two hundred concerned educators representing kindergarten to graduate school outlined a new curriculum for language development. The results would fill five portentous volumes, the first of which, an introductory overview, was published in 1952 under the title The English Language Arts.
NCTE had come a long way from the 1920s, when organizers had to worry whether at least fifty people would attend the annual conference, thus qualifying members for a discount on train passage.2 Yet the spirit and person of its onetime president Charles Carpenter Fries were still influential, even if Fries himself was no longer an officeholder in the council’s growing bureaucracy. Other linguists close to Fries had become active: Albert Marckwardt, Robert C. Pooley, Harold B. Allen.
The linguists formed an intimidating faction among the ranks of schoolteachers and college instructors. They were armed for intellectual battle to a degree the average English teacher or school principal was not. But the council’s aims reflected not only the agenda of its linguists.
NCTE was, broadly speaking, a liberal organization, high-minded and eager to advocate for the latest ideas of its profession. H. L. Mencken would have called them improvers, do-gooders. Their purpose floated high above recommending a course of study. They wanted to release the American student from all that was holding him back.
“The problem,” as described in the preface of The English Language Arts, was “looking at the learner and the society of which he is a part and aiding his growth both in and through the elements of reading, listening, and expression necessary to effective living today.”
NCTE sought a better world through language arts—a world of freedom, democracy, and “effective living.” Teachers were instructors in “democracy’s schools.” And “democracy,” they added, “can be no more effective than the individuals of which it is composed.”3
The rhetoric was almost Wilsonian in its support of educational self-determination. Students were equals. “Children will share with the teacher the responsibility for determining how effectively they now use language.” The old hierarchical concept of a teacher judging a student’s performance and, if unsatisfactory, holding him back, so-called nonpromotion, was a thing of the past.
Education was for everyone. Literature, however, was not. “For many young people, time spent in the effort to read the literary classics is largely wasted.” For others, “the purpose of reading literature is clearly defined as an aid to personal growth.”
Reading itself was overrated. In fact, people listened most, spoke much more than they read, and wrote very little. But the American school curriculum, NCTE said, made it seem like reading and writing, the least frequently used language skills, were the only ones worth teaching.
“Men communicate because they are concerned with ideas; and the ideas are conveyed and received both by oral and written means.” The teaching of language arts needed to reflect the genuine uses of language in the world outside the classroom. And, according to NCTE, this outside world looked and sounded something like a welcome address to the recently formed United Nations.
“Problems of values, of interpersonal relations, of recreation and leisure, of life purposes, of the spirit and aspirations of the democratic society, of world unity, of the motives of human beings, of the intelligent utilization of the mass media of communications, of the meaning of life itself—these should provide the substance of the language arts program.”4
Yet while promoting world unity and discovering the meaning of life teachers also had to teach grammar. And not grammar as it was once taught.
It was no longer “a set of fixed facts and principles, a logical structure of rules.” Such a “static and authoritarian point of view” no longer obtained. “In the last half century linguists . . . have evolved five basic concepts which are, or should be, the foundation of the current attitude toward any teaching of the English language today.”
1. Language changes constantly. The anonymous author of the chapter quoted Chaucer and referred to Shakespeare (literature, apparently, being sometimes quite useful) to note that over the course of ye
ars and centuries the language changed. Words sometimes changed meaning; styles of expression came and went. The language of older generations and found in books documented these changes.
2. Change is normal. More than normal, change was good, said English Language Arts. “The changes which take place in all languages, but especially in English, are in the direction of simplification and clarification.” Good itself, the author noted, had once been used with various endings for case, number, and gender, in addition to two adjectival declensions for weak and strong. Was the shedding of all this complexity not improvement?
3. Spoken language is the language. First-rate speakers and writers set the standards for the language. Second-rate minds made these standards into rules that, often enough, one could not avoid breaking. “We have the ludicrous picture of teachers solemnly enunciating rules and creating exercises for their practice when at the same time they and their educated colleagues violate these very rules in their normal speech and writing.” For example, the reason is because was condemned by teachers and composition books for being logically redundant, but “an actual count of the idiom will find it quite frequent in our best current publications and spoken without self-consciousness by highly educated persons.”
All five principles bore the influence of Charles C. Fries, but this one practically quoted him, saying “the language of today is not to be identified with that found in books but is to be found chiefly upon the lips of people who are currently speaking it,” echoing the language Fries used in 1940 to argue for the standards of “a living speech, the forms of which can be constantly verified upon the lips of actual speakers.”
4. Correctness rests upon usage. From misbegotten rules came misbegotten notions of correctness. Under the influence of Latin and Greek, eighteenth-century grammarians had used rules to stabilize the language and give it polish. Their doctrine brought out dissenters, who noted that correctness could not be in opposition to actual usage carefully observed. But these dissenters had little influence. In the twentieth century, however, “their position has been vindicated and the relationship of correctness to use has been made clear.” Thanks to linguistics, of course.
5. All usage is relative. “The contemporary linguist,” said English Language Arts, “does not employ the terms ‘good English’ and ‘bad English’ except in a purely relative sense.” The passage quoted Robert C. Pooley, after Fries one of the most important linguists to lay siege to the rule of rules, saying, “Good English is that form of speech which is appropriate to the purpose of the speaker, true to the language as it is, and comfortable to speaker and listener.” For differing situations, there were differing standards: “levels of usage rather than a single standard of usage.” Indeed, “an educated user of English will vary his speech and writing from extreme formality to literary elegance to extreme informality, including slang and dialectal expressions. He does so knowingly and with intention.”5
These five principles of linguistics were generalizations. They had not been inscribed on tablets by Otto Jespersen, blessed by Edward Sapir, and confirmed by Leonard Bloomfield. Instead, they were written (according to the linguist and NCTE insider Ravin I. McDavid Jr.) by Robert Pooley and bore the marked influence of Charles C. Fries.6 They were propaganda of a kind, conceived as a way to send a message to people who did not think like linguists. Their primary intent was, of all things, corrective: to adjust the attitude of English teachers to become less rule-bound and more tolerant of linguistic variety. But the thing about propaganda, about communicating, about teaching even, is that variety needs to be simplified for the most important elements to be made noticeable amid the everyday welter of information. It was easy to see how the principles might be taken as the basis of their own prescriptive doctrine, possibly as stiff, unforgiving, and prone to caricature as those the linguists were rebelling against. And, like that of the eighteenth-century grammarians, the triumph of NCTE’s grammatical doctrine gave rise to dissenters.
Harry R. Warfel, a professor of English at the University of Florida, had long stood poised for this moment.
It was only natural that he would take an interest in the writings of his former teacher Charles C. Fries. He and Fries were both from Reading, Pennsylvania, where they had attended the same high school ten years apart. They pledged the same fraternity at Bucknell, and Warfel went on to become an English professor specializing in American literature. He became a member of NCTE and contributed to English Language Arts by serving on the Committee on Reading and Literature. For all that he had in common with Charles C. Fries, whom he considered a friend, it was clear that Warfel had been stoking the coals of this disagreement for years.
He called his dissent Who Killed Grammar? The answer was in the first paragraph: linguists. In the second paragraph, after mentioning the recent NCTE report, Warfel was more specific: Professor Charles Carpenter Fries, he wrote, was the “villain” in this “murder” story.
Warfel agreed with many of the basic complaints made by Fries and the new linguists. The author of a book on Noah Webster, he could easily cite examples from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of English “as it is” parting from English as it was taught. And he could think of many a traditional rule that was inadequate to describing good current usage. But the addition of linguistics to the wishful thinking of progressive education had resulted in a series of incoherent and silly notions about language and teaching.
When linguists discussed various “levels” of English, standard and nonstandard, formal and colloquial, educated and vulgar, they rarely attached a clear moral to their story, Warfel complained. For instance, it was possible, he lamented, to read Fries’s American English Grammar as showing that standard and vulgar English were essentially identical and should be treated as such. There was also an unstated political dimension to their work. Warfel quoted Fries himself, who had written in 1927, “It is indeed always a question whether a democratic society can afford to permit a class consciousness of any kind to develop, especially a class consciousness based on language differences.”
It was all rather confusing. Were linguists the observers of linguistic differences or, as good liberals, the enemies of linguistic difference?
Closely related to this was the confusion regarding colloquial language. If some people thought colloquial a term of disapproval, then linguists and even lexicographers were partly to blame. Warfel cited the latest edition of Webster’s Second, which explained that colloquial meant “unsuited to formal speech or writing; hence informal.” The same dictionary then defined informal as “not in conventional or customary form.” How, then, was one supposed to know that colloquial English could be good English?
Grammar itself was portrayed as intellectually bankrupt and a weapon of class snobbery. The only authentic grammar, according to linguists, was that which was observed from scratch. Such thinking led to the eminently silly suggestion, put forth in English Language Arts, that each student be taught to observe language for himself and draw his own conclusions.
If some people looked at all this and saw an abandonment of standards, Warfel wondered, how could it be said that they were wrong?
Warfel did not think like a linguist, and it showed in his apparently sincere assumption that science amounted to some perfectly arithmetical form of investigation, incorruptible by bad thinking and impervious to the human failings of scientists themselves. Thus anytime he found Fries drawing some conclusion that was, in Warfel’s own opinion, less than perfectly supported by existing evidence, he claimed Fries was guilty of “non-science,” which Warfel then ham-handedly rechristened “nonsense.” Fries invited much of this criticism, however, as his own career thoroughly blurred the lines between the academy and activism.
Warfel fastened onto one other particularly interesting dynamic. The linguist had much to say to the layman but didn’t much like it when the layman spoke back. For all the enthusiasm linguists showed for democracy and the l
anguage as it is spoken, they disdained the average person’s views of language and were shocked to find their own ideas roughly received by common people.
Warfel cited an exchange between Fries and the Detroit Free Press. Fries had been interviewed by the paper, which then published a jovial article called “Grammar? It Ain’t Gotta Be Perfect. U-M Prof Defends Us as Says, ‘It’s Me,’ ‘None Are,’ ‘Lay Down.’ ” After an hour-long interview the newspaper had reported that Fries “urged us not to sneer at use of the term ain’t” and “took an indulgent view of the interchangeable use of shall and will.”
Fries responded with a long, testy letter, saying ain’t did enjoy some currency in southern parts of the United States and he had never actually said shall and will were interchangeable. “No linguist,” he exclaimed, “would suggest that because a form is used anywhere it is satisfactory to use it everywhere.”
The effort to explain linguistics to the layman remained fraught with drama and misunderstanding. It was especially difficult to square its principles with the expectations of literary intellectuals such as Harry R. Warfel, who, whatever his faults, was bright and well educated and had been reading and thinking about his hometown friend’s work for years.
Warfel was not unsympathetic. He thought the five basic principles of linguistics were poorly explained in English Language Arts, but he actually agreed with them. And yet—the word here is ouch!—reading that chapter of English Language Arts had moved him to blame the death of grammar and the disrepute of English teaching on Charles C. Fries. Instead of enlightening the layman, linguistics was antagonizing him.
Warfel hoped readers would understand that his differences with Fries were “entirely intellectual.” But the next time Professor and Mrs. Fries ran into old Warfel, Mrs. Fries refused to speak to him.7
The Story of Ain't Page 17