Founding Grammars (21 page)

White's career as a verbal critic began in the late 1860s with regular columns on American English in
Galaxy
magazine and
The New York Times.
These were later collected into
Words and Their Uses, Past and Present,
published in 1870, and the sequel,
Every-Day English,
which appeared in 1880. A tall, stern-looking man with luxuriant side-whiskers, White employed a writing style that was as Victorian as his looks. His work—formal, learned, and discursive—includes a generous scattering of literary allusions and lengthy, untranslated Latin quotations. White was not writing for the masses, but for people of his own sort. He expected his audience to be well-read.

Although White envisioned a select audience, his steady book sales indicate that he struck a chord with a broad range of people. His books were not bestsellers on the scale of Webster's speller or Murray's grammar, but they were very successful. By 1899
Words and Their Uses
had been reprinted thirty-six times. The publisher's note on the 1899 copyright page stated that the demand for the book has been “so large and so constant” that new plates were needed for that edition. It was still in print in 1927.
Every-Day English
also went through numerous printings, staying in print until the early twentieth century. Most of White's large number of readers must have come from outside the upper-class circles that he was addressing. They surely bought his books expecting to improve their speech, in spite of his warnings to the contrary.

White's goal in
Words and Their Uses
is to expose the absurdities of speech that he hears daily on the streets and reads in newspapers. He argues that using words in inaccurate or novel ways is a serious social problem. It leads to breakdowns in communication, loss of time and money, and a “sore trial of patience.” He bluntly sums up by declaring that the failure to preserve established distinctions in word meaning constitutes nothing less than “a return toward barbarism.”
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If allowed to continue, it could irreversibly damage American English.

He blames this impending disaster on the “superficially” educated—those whose reading is limited mostly to newspapers, “hastily written by men also very insufficiently educated.” The honestly ignorant lower classes, he says, know better than to attempt refined speech. It's the half-educated upstarts, with their “pretentious ignorance and aggressive vulgarity,” who are responsible for corrupting the language. He believes that commentary such as his is necessary to defend English “against the assaults of presuming half-knowledge.”
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White realizes that languages inevitably evolve over time. Nonetheless, those who care about the integrity of English should resist unnecessary usage changes that come about through carelessness or ignorance. Just because a word or expression is fashionable, or a nonstandard form is becoming more common, that doesn't mean it should be accepted as correct.

White believes that the ultimate test of whether a word or phrase is acceptable is whether it makes good sense. In any conflict between logic and grammatical standards, he claims, logic is always victorious. He writes, “Speech, the product of reason, tends more and more to conform itself to reason.” Mere general usage cannot be the final arbiter of correct speech. All sorts of “mean and monstrous colloquial phrases” would automatically become a permanent part of the language, just because they were in common use.

Nor do words and phrases become acceptable just because they are found in the works of great writers. Like the early grammarians, who used quotations from Shakespeare and the Bible as examples of false syntax, White has often found questionable usages in literary works. “There is a misuse of words which can be justified by no authority, however great,” he insists, and “by no usage, however general.”
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White rejects words mainly for their lack of logic, overlap in meaning with other words, vulgarity, pretentiousness, and excessive gentility. He is contemptuous of euphemisms that arise from squeamishness, such as calling a leg a limb. Other terms offend him because they are needlessly pretentious—
initiate
for
start, repudiate
for
reject, manufacturer
for
maker.
These words, often Latin in origin, are even more problematic when they are slightly misused.
Portion
really signifies a measured-out amount, but many people think it's a synonym for
part.
Worse than pretentious words are coarse slang terms like
gents
for
gentlemen
and
pants
for
trousers.
“The one always wears the other,” sneers White.
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White's approach to linguistic critique started a trend that still has many followers. People today often use the phrase “bad grammar” when they really mean questionable word choice. Slight word misuse—substituting
infer
for
imply,
for instance—is a major annoyance for today's verbal critics. They also tend to cite the same offenses against correct speech that White named—sloppiness, ignorance, and an apparent lack of logic. Like him, they often criticize certain uses that fly in the face of tradition or fail to preserve a word's “true” meaning. They insist, for example, that
decimate,
which originated in a Roman military practice, should mean putting to death one in ten people in a group, rather than its modern meaning of wiping out a large number.

Modern sticklers for correct usage might agree with the general tone of White's critique, but they would probably be puzzled by the words and word uses that offended him. Some—like using
aggravate
with the meaning of “irritate” instead of its original meaning of “make worse,” or confusing
lie
and
lay
—are still contentious issues. Most of the usages he mentions, however, are now either uncontroversial or obsolete.

White complains, for example, that women use the noun
dress
to mean
gown
when it rightly refers to all apparel for both women and men. Sounding a little like Horne Tooke, he tells readers, “
dress,
the verb, means simply to set right, to put in order.… The kitchen dresser is so called because upon it dishes are put in order. As to the body, dress is that which puts it in order, in a condition … suitable to the circumstances.” (
Dress
derives from an Old French word that means “arrange,” and ultimately from a Latin word meaning “straighten” or “guide.”) White voices the same sort of objection to the word
obnoxious
being used to mean offensive. He explains, “Its root is the [Latin] verb
noceo,
to harm … and therefore
obnoxious
means liable or exposed to harm,” as in
obnoxious to disasters.
This use was already rare by White's day, but he thinks it's worth preserving. “We do not need both
offensive
and
obnoxious
with but one meaning between them,” he says.
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He criticizes many new word coinages because they are illogical or unnecessary. He calls these “words that are not words.” The list includes
practitioner, gubernatorial, presidential, jeopardize, reliable, donate,
and several other words that are now part of standard English. He objects to
practitioner
because there is no such word as
practition
and to
gubernatorial
because there is no such word as
gubernator. Presidential
logically ought to be
presidental. Donate
has been formed by the questionable method of chopping off
donation
and turning the result into a verb, a pointless proceeding since English speakers can already choose from
give, present, endow, bequeath,
and various other possibilities.

Jeopardize,
which he calls “a foolish and intolerable word,” is problematic because the –
ize
ending is normally added to nouns or adjectives to form a verb, as in
equal
/
equalize, civil
/
civilize, patron
/
patronize.
In the case of
jeopardize
the ending has instead been added to
jeopard,
a verb—all but obsolete by 1870—meaning “to put in peril.”
Jeopardize
was not a recent coinage. The word was familiar to Webster, who also disapproved of it. His response was the opposite of White's however. He chose to include the term in his 1828 dictionary in spite of his personal dislike because respectable American writers used it. To Webster's mind, established usage meant that
jeopardize
was unarguably part of the American vocabulary. For White, forty years as a common word wasn't enough to make it acceptable.

Some of the word uses White objects to would turn out to be passing fads. Taverns are no longer called sample rooms and people seldom say
allow
when they mean believe or use
fellowship
as a verb (as in
Next Sunday we will fellowship with neighboring churches
). Much more often, usages that were a problem for White have become uncontroversial.
Affable
to mean “friendly,”
bountiful
to mean “generous,”
recollect
as a synonym for
remember, ice water
rather than
iced water
—these and many other locutions that disgusted White are now standard. The same is true for the word inventions that he stigmatizes as “not words.” Even the most linguistically sensitive twenty-first-century Americans would find it hard to explain what's wrong with
practitioner, gubernatorial,
or
jeopardize.

It's not surprising that most of White's commentary is now irrelevant. Languages are constantly evolving and the vocabulary changes more obviously than other linguistic features. Drifts in meaning, as happened with
dress
and
obnoxious,
new words created out of old ones, like
donate
from
donation,
and abandoned words like
jeopard
are common over the history of a language. Once these changes get under way they can rarely if ever be reversed. What's more remarkable is that several grammatical usages first condemned in late-eighteenth-century grammar books were still considered problems when White was writing. Some continue to be live issues today.

White repeatedly emphasizes in his writings that good style can't be taught and that grammar books are useless. Nonetheless, he can't resist discussing a few troublesome forms that he thinks educated people might benefit from studying. One peeve is the common misuse of
shall
and
will.
This issue also troubled eighteenth-century grammar book authors and, for once, White shares their view. Like them, he has noticed that
will
is replacing
shall
in many people's speech. He thinks it's important for
shall
to be preserved.

White reiterates the
shall
/
will
rules first detailed in Lowth and other early grammars. Simple statements of future actions use
shall
with first-person pronouns and
will
with second and third person. The opposite is true for statements of determination, promises, or threats—
I will go!
but
You shall obey me!
He realizes that many people will label this distinction a “verbal quibble.” That's true of any distinction “to persons too ignorant, too dull, or too careless for its apprehension.”
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Another problem that White points out is the common confusion between
like
and
as.
White writes that he has noticed many people using
like
to introduce sentences, as in
He talked like he was crazy.
He reminds people of the standard rule—still current in modern usage guides—that
like
compares things, while
as
compares actions or states of being. A verb should never follow
like.

A third problem is using
they
with a singular antecedent. White describes an example that a reader of his column has sent in—
If a person wishes to sleep, they mustn't eat cheese for supper.
The reader surmises that while the sentence is technically incorrect, it's what most people would say. White disagrees. He replies, “A speaker of common sense and common mastery of English would say, ‘If a man wishes to sleep, he must not eat cheese at supper,' where
man
 … is used in a general sense for the species.”
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He suggests that sympathizers with the Women's Rights Convention replace
a man
with
one.
(He also points out in passing that the correct preposition is
at supper,
not
for supper,
unless the entire supper consists of cheese.)

The persistence of these rules
—
and the fact that White felt the need to mention them—suggests that traditional grammar books still retained their old power. Unlike many of the evolving word uses that White discusses, the nonstandard versions of these grammatical forms never became completely acceptable. Although
shall
has long been rare in American speech except for questions like
Shall we go,
the
shall
/
will
rule remained enshrined in grammar books until at least the mid-twentieth century. The
like
/
as
rule and the ban on singular
they
are still contentious topics. Grammar book writers and style arbiters like White made sure that these rules continued to be part of what constitutes standard grammar, even though speakers then and now break them all the time.