American Language Supplement 2 (69 page)

My call for a comprehensive inductive grammar of the common speech of the United States, first made in a newspaper article in 1910 and repeated in piteous tones in AL1 in 1919, has never been answered by anyone learned in the tongues, though in the meantime philologists have given us searching studies of such esoteric Indian languages as Cuna, Chitamacha, Yuma and Klamath-Modoc, not to mention Eskimo.
¹
There has even been an excellent grammar of Pennsylvania German, a decayed patois standing much further from standard High German than the American of an interstate truck-driver stands from the English of Walter Pater.
²
But while the wait has been going on for a savant willing to chart the vernacular in the grand manner there have at least been some approaches to the business by the writers on regional dialects – for example, Vance Randolph and Oma Stanley. Randolph, whose researches into the speech of the Ozark hillbillies have been noticed in Chapter VII, Section 4, points out that, in its grammatical structure, this speech is quite close to the underprivileged American norm,
³
and Stanley, whose examination of the dialect of East Texas has been dealt with in the same place, reports that “it is doubtful that anything will be found” there “that is not common to less well educated speakers everywhere in America.”
⁴
Also, there has been an oblique attempt upon the common speech by I. E. Clark, who sought his materials,
not in the field but in the pages of that incomparable reporter, Ring Lardner.
¹
Says Clark:

That the grammar taught by these poor Holoferneses, male and female, is full of absurdities engendered by the medieval attempt to force English into the Procrustean bed of Latin was recognized by Noah Webster so long ago as 1789. “The most difficult task now to be performed by the advocates of pure English,” he wrote in his “Dissertations on the English Language,”
²
“is to restrain the influence of men learned in Greek and Latin, but ignorant of their own tongue, who have labored to reject much good English because they have not understood the original construction of the language.” And then: “They seem not to consider that grammar is formed on language, and not language on grammar. Instead of examining to find what the English language
is
they endeavor to show what it
ought to be
according to their rules.”
³
Thomas Jefferson,
with his invariable common sense, supported this on the plane of vocabulary in a letter to John Adams in 1820:

Unhappily, Webster’s theory of the divine origin of language interfered with his excellent attempt to set up a truly inductive grammar, and when he passed from that theory to his doctrine of analogies he began to give considerable countenance to the pedants who sought to show what the language ought to be.
¹
These pedants had the floor unchallenged throughout the first half of the Nine-teenth Century, and their influence upon the American schoolma’am was enormous. Nothing was known at that time about the psychology of speech, and the discoveries in linguistics that were being made in Europe did not penetrate to the Republic until after 1850, when they were brought home from Tübingen and Berlin by William Dwight Whitney (1827–94). An Englishman, Robert Gordon Latham (1812–88), had raised some pother in the 40s by proclaiming that “in language whatever
is
is right,” but he got no attention in this country, and so late as 1870 a favorite American authority, George P. Marsh,
²
was misunderstanding and denouncing him, though even Marsh was constrained to admit by that time that “the ignorance of grammarians” was “a frequent cause of the corruption of language.”

The enormous proliferation of public-schools produced a heavy demand for text-books of grammar, and nearly all of them were written by incompetents who simply followed the worst English
models. “The larger part of grammatical instruction,” says Rollo LaVerne Lyman, “remained a slavish verbal repetition of rules and a desperate struggle with complicated parsing formulæ.”
¹
There were, of course, some grammarians, even so early as the 30s, who saw the futility of this method of instruction, and one of them, Warren Colburn, attempted a more rational grammar-book in 1831,
²
but the majority of the pedagogues of the time continued, as Lyman says, to favor “slavish memorizing, nothing more or less,” and grammar remained a horror to schoolboys until the end of the Nineteenth Century. In 1870 the rambunctious Richard Grant White fluttered the pedagogical dovecotes by announcing the discovery that English really had no grammar at all,
³
but White was too pedantic a fellow to follow his own lead and during the rest of his life (he died in 1885) he devoted himself mainly to formulating canons of “correct” English which greatly aided the schoolma’am in afflicting her pupils.

The new philological learning brought to the United States by Whitney was a long while taking root. Even when, after fifteen years at Yale, he founded the American Philological Association, it was quickly engulfed by intransigent followers of Varro and Priscian, Posidonius and Apollonius Dyscolus, and the Sanskrit grammarians of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries
B.C
. When the Modern Language Association was launched at the new Johns Hopkins in 1883 it met a fate even more grisly, for the young college professors who flocked into it passed over the living language with a few sniffs and threw all their energies into flatulent studies of the influence of Lamb on Hazlitt, the dates of forgotten plays of the Seventeenth Century, the changes made by Donne, Skelton and Cowper in the texts of forgotten poems, and such-like pseudo-intellectual gymnastics.
¹
Not until the Linguistic Society followed in 1924 was there any organized attack upon language as it is, not as it might be or ought to be, and even the Linguistic Society has given a great deal more attention to Hittite and other such fossil tongues than to the American spoken by 140,000,000-odd free, idealistic and more or less human Americans, including all the philologians themselves, at least when they are in their cups or otherwise off guard. On the level of the common, or dirt pedagogues
²
the notion that language should be studied objectively, like any other natural phenomenon, made even slower progress, and it was not until 1908 that any effort was made in that direction. That effort, at the start, took the form of trying to find out just what was in the common speech – in other words, to get together the makings of a purely descriptive and scientific grammar.
³
But in a little while the more intelligent inquirers – most of them
not
pedagogues, but philologians – began to ask themselves what validity there was, if any, in some of the rules inculcated by the schoolma’am, and to seek light in the speech habits of unquestionably cultured Americans. They found, as might have been expected, that few of the latter took the rules very seriously. Many used
it is me
habitually, and with no thought of sin. Others used
who
for
whom
in the so-called objective case. Yet others paid little if any heed to the delicate English distinctions between
shall
and
will
.

One of the first investigators to follow this line of inquiry was Sterling Andrus Leonard, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, who had begun to flog the pedants in 1918, when he was still a young interne at Columbia.
⁴
In 1930 or thereabout he undertook
to find out what was really good usage by asking a committee of linguists, teachers of speech, authors, editors and business men, 229 in number, to pronounce their judgment upon 230 usages, ranging all the way from forms endorsed even by purists to forms seldom encountered outside the talk of baseball players and policemen. His report, published by the National Council of Teachers of English after his death,
¹
made a sensation in pedagogical circles and was very influential in reorienting the traditional approach to English. It showed that at least 75% of the experts in linguistics approved
as regards, none-are, all dressed up, go slow, I don’t know if, only
before the verb,
it is me, who are you looking for?, the reason was because, invite whoever you like, to loan, but what, I wish I was, every one-they, providing
for
provided
, and
awfully
as a general intensive, and that between 25% and 75% of them favored
proven, four first, gotten, either of these three, I can’t seem, older than me, neither-are, these kind, most anybody, it is liable to snow, in search for, ain’t I?, don’t
in the singular,
sure
as an adverb,
like
for
as if, off of, due to for on account of, some, little ways
and
different than
. All these forms had been banned by the school books for years, and likewise by the innumerable books of “correct” English for adults. Two years after Leonard’s study appeared one of his students and successors at Wisconsin, Robert C. Pooley, supported its conclusions with examples from the historical dictionaries and the accepted
belles lettres
of the language, and concluded with a recommendation that the books be given a drastic overhauling.
²
Three of his specific proposals were:

A little while afterward Walter Barnes, of New York University, undertook to check the Leonard findings by a reëxamination of the locutions they covered, especially those set down as “illiterate” or “disputable.” His referees and associates were students in his own seminar, but they also examined various printed authorities. In general they agreed with Leonard’s jury, but in a number of cases they raised a given word or phrase a grade or more. Thus
complected
, which appeared as “illiterate” in the Leonard study, became “disputable” in that of Barnes,
good and cold
was lifted from “disputable” to “established,” and
data
in the singular all the way from “illiterate” to “established.” Barnes also submitted the locutions marked “disputable” on the Leonard list to a jury of 52 radio announcers, 29 writers and 40 business executives, and tabulated their votes. A majority of them approved
to fix
in the sense of
to repair
, the
one-he
combination,
in back of
(often denounced by English purists as an abhorrent Americanism),
right
in the sense of
direct, I can’t seem, dove
for
dived, going some, good and cold
, and
to aggravate
in the sense of
to vex
.
¹
Said the Barnes group in its summary:

Between 1933 and 1937 Albert H. Marckwardt and Fred G. Walcott undertook a further study of the Leonard material
³
and found that a large percentage of the usages marked “disputable” were to be found in English and American authors of high rank, and that many of the rest were recognized as allowable in colloquial speech by generally accepted authorities. They unearthed
neither-are
from Johnson, Cowper, Southey and Ruskin,
like
as in “Do it
like
he tells you” from Southey and William Morris,
try and
from Milton and Coleridge,
only
before the verb from Dryden and Tennyson,
slow
as an adverb from Byron and Thackeray, and
I wish I was
from
Defoe, Swift, Fielding, Jane Austen, Byron, Marryat, Thackeray, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith and Oscar Wilde. Their conclusion was:

It is hard for grammarians, who have always been regarded as the archetypal pedagogues, to yield up this dogmatism, but in late years they have shown a considerable tendency to do so. That tendency, in truth, is not altogether new, for the once famous John Horne Tooke made an effort to clear away a lot of ancient grammatical rubbish in his “Diversions of Purley,” the first volume of which was published in 1786, and some of his ideas were borrowed by Noah Webster in “A Philosophical and Practical Grammar of the English Language” in 1807,
²
and by William B. Fowle in “The True English Grammar” in 1827.
³
But it has not been until comparatively recently that these more or less amateurish reformers have got any substantial support from the professionals. The first break came when some of the latter began to turn their eyes from the written language to the spoken language, and to observe that what was true of the former, grammatically speaking, was not always true of the latter. The second came when others made a serious effort to find out just what rules, if any, governed the speech of the vulgar, and
to consider whether those rules, at least in some cases, were not quite as “good” as those that had long adorned the grammar-books. The ensuing debate became a hot one and is still going on.