Founding Grammars (28 page)

As far as Whitney can ascertain, White's second edition is merely a longer version of his first edition, “in which the author defends at greater length his old dogma that usage does not govern language.” White, just as wrongheaded as ever, still apparently believes in the superiority of his own linguistic judgments. Whitney says ruefully, “If, then, Dr. Hall imagined that his criticisms would have any real effect on his antagonist, he has probably by this time seen his error.”
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Obviously, White could not allow Hall's attack to pass unnoticed. His answer was a vitriolic three-part
Galaxy
essay of several thousand words titled “Punishing a Pundit.” This scathing rejoinder had a twofold aim. White wanted to show that Hall's scholarship was not nearly as impressive as Hall believed it to be, but he also wanted to argue that scholarship isn't what counts when writing about usage. White thought that Hall, like Lounsbury and Whitney, fundamentally misunderstood what it takes to practice verbal criticism. Good taste, good judgment, and a feel for linguistic style are what matter, according to White. He considered Hall lacking in all three, therefore not really qualified to write about the subject.

White's
Galaxy
articles are mostly devoted to picking apart Hall's arguments. Before getting down to cases, however, White takes some time to insult “Dr. Hall” personally. He implies that Hall's decision to live in England even though he's an American has something disreputable about it. He also belittles Hall's scholarly credentials. An English university has seen fit to award Hall a doctorate, but White is “sufficiently familiar with the scholastic essentials to the honorary dignity borne by him not to be unduly impressed by it.” He himself saw through the author at a glance, he says, “for even a millstone may be seen through if it has a hole in the middle.”

Hall, a man born “without a sense of decency,” is nothing more than a verbal critic himself, says White, but one who has the remarkable gall to criticize better writers than he is. White accuses Hall of writing a book not to improve or protect the English language—“not to help his readers to understand it, or to use it with simplicity, clearness and force—but merely to show that he knows everything knowable about it.… He, Fitzedward Hall, formerly Vermont Yankee, now British resident … Professor of Sanskrit, and Pundit by brevet…” He had originally planned to ignore the book, which he felt was beneath his notice. However, since a respectable journal like
The Nation
has thought it appropriate to devote column space to a glowing review, he feels that it's his duty to discuss Hall's book after all.
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Hall's excesses offer a tempting target and White scores some bull's-eyes. He jeers at Hall's weakness for ornate words and phrases, writing, “Upon his pages swarm such words as
provection, neoterism, antithet,
” and such phrases as “criterion of grammaticalness.” White feels that anyone with “a loving sense of real English” would shrink from these pedantic absurdities. He considers Hall's long lists of example quotations pointless, calling them “mere repetitions of this or that word, which are of little or no significance.” They are just a way for Dr. Hall to show off.

White also complains with some justification of the “sourness of temper” that leads Hall to “speak injuriously of men for the mere sake of saying something to hurt them.” He treats with contempt Hall's assertion that Hall has not attacked White out of vindictiveness. He points out that Hall has searched
Words and Their Uses
“with the eye of a mosquito,” even attacking what he must have realized were typographical errors.
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White trained an equally intense gaze on Hall's book. He uses most of his two remaining articles making copiously detailed critiques of Hall's arguments and writing style, and pointing out his limitations as a scholar. He uses descriptions like “amazing pretence” and “pompous ignorance.” White also makes it clear that he stands by everything he said in
Words and Their Uses.
For instance, he devotes three pages to defending his condemnation of the new word
jeopardize,
even adding to his original arguments.

At the end of this furious assault, White seems satisfied that he has adequately destroyed his enemy's position and can afford to offer one or two backhanded compliments. He gives Hall credit for having “every accomplishment in English except the faculty of understanding and the ability to write it.” Hall's learning is considerable, says White, even though he has no “true philological instinct.” Finally, White announces that he forgives Hall for his splenetic attack and now, having exposed his critic as a “mere etymologist,” is ready to turn his attention to some worthier topic.
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*   *   *

In fact, neither White nor Hall showed any sign of retreating from the field. Both remained active partisans in the ongoing conflict between philologists and verbal critics—a conflict that never got any closer to being resolved because neither side could accept the other's basic premises. The two positions may be irreconcilable. Quarrels over the value of specialist's knowledge versus educated taste still blow up regularly, with the issues no nearer to being resolved than they were in Hall and White's day.

The closing paragraphs of White's answer to Hall show how far apart the critics and the philologists really were. White clearly felt that he was making a devastating criticism by calling Hall a “mere etymologist” without literary taste or skill. Hall would not have interpreted that word the same way. From Hall's perspective, etymologists—trained scholars of language—were far more qualified to comment on usage than an amateur like White, however literary he might be. That was the whole point of his attack in
False Philology.
White refused to accept that idea. He considered education and taste the only qualifications necessary for making linguistic judgments. The fact that Hall knew a lot more than he did about the structure of English didn't impress him at all.

None of the 1870s participants in the usage debates ever budged from their original opinions. White's confidence in his own judgment remained unshaken in spite of repeated batterings at the hands of philologists. During the two years following his clash with Hall, he wrote five linked
Galaxy
articles with the title “Linguistic and Literary Notes and Queries.” These consist mainly of responses to the many letters he received asking for his opinion on disputed words and grammatical structures. His replies indicate that his linguistic attitudes were as rigid as ever.

White still disapproved of grammar as a subject of formal study. “I wish that so many of my correspondents were not so anxious on the subject,” he writes, “so disturbed because sentences won't ‘parse,' so solicitous to find a ‘rule.'” He reiterates his belief that the best way to learn good English is to “read the best authors and talk with the most cultivated people.”
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White also still believed in applying the criterion of logic to new coinages. Several letter writers have asked him about the word
scientist,
a recent coinage that was becoming popular. He replies that he finds the word “intolerable both as being unlovely in itself and improper in its formation.” If anything, the word should be
sciencist.
Even that, however, illogically combines a word derived from Latin (
science
) with a Greek ending (–
ist
). It would be more appropriate to say
man of science.

He still rejected widespread use as an argument for accepting certain words and phrases. When one correspondent asks him to weigh in on the increasingly agitated “split infinitive” debate, he agrees with the man's description of the usage as a “barbarism of speech.” He says, “The examples which [the letter writer] gives are in themselves a condemnation.” Then he adds, “Distinguished precedent might be shown for this construction, as for many other bad uses of language; but it is eminently unenglish.”
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For White, a long pedigree was not enough to render a usage respectable English, in spite of what Hall or his colleagues might argue.

White steadily produced books and articles, not only on language, but on Shakespeare, music criticism, and other topics, until shortly before he died in 1885. His second collection of
Galaxy
columns,
Every-Day English,
published in 1880, confirms his unhesitating commitment to his earlier work. Writing about
Words and Their Uses
in the preface, he says, “The views taken in the book in question … seem … to need no apology or modification; at least I have none to offer.”
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Both books would remain popular with the public well into the twentieth century. Although White encouraged his readers to polish their speech habits by reading good authors and associating with literate people, many obviously considered his books a faster route to achieving their linguistic aims.

Hall also remained in the fray throughout his career. He spent most of his time editing and translating Indian literature and writing on scholarly philological topics, but that didn't stifle his urge to spar with verbal critics. His attacks were not limited to White. In 1880 he published an article in
The Nineteenth Century
magazine titled “English Rational and Irrational.” It is a choleric blast against “would-be philologists who collect waifs and strays of antipathies and prejudices, amplify the worthless hoard by their own whimseys, and … digest the whole into essays and volumes.”
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The piece doesn't mention White. Instead it attacks several popular writers who have been foolish enough to voice an opinion on word use.

He also engaged in extended combat with Ralph Olmsted Williams, author of a book about dictionaries. For several years, they traded criticisms and rejoinders in the pages of
The Dial
and
Modern Language Notes.
Most of their discussions concern such nitpicky issues as whether
part from
or
part with
is more correct, with neither man giving much ground.

Hall devoted his last years mainly to unpaid work on Oxford University's new dictionary project. Still hale and energetic, he spent at least four hours a day reading and correcting page proofs and providing example quotations culled from his extensive reading and his own memory. By the time he died in 1901 at the age of seventy-five, he had contributed several thousand quotations to the still unfinished
Oxford English Dictionary.
These included over two thousand examples from the dialect spoken in his adopted home of Suffolk.

Whitney also continued to write about usage, although he concentrated on scholarly work. He produced grammars of Sanskrit, German, and French, as well as a second book of modern linguistic thought titled
The Life and Growth of Language.
He also edited
The Century Dictionary,
an important resource for later dictionary makers, including the editors of the
Oxford English Dictionary.
Illness forced him to retire in 1886 and he died eight years later, aged sixty-seven.

Seven years after the
Courant
articles appeared, Whitney published a textbook called
Essentials of English Grammar.
The book is an unusual melding of modern linguistic insights with traditional notions of proper speech. In his opening remarks, Whitney says, “It has been my constant endeavor to bear in mind the true position of the grammarian … that he is simply a recorder and arranger of the usages of language, and in no manner or degree a lawgiver.”
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He notes that he has provided only a very few “set rules.” He believes that the point of studying a grammar of one's own language is to gain an understanding of the linguistic principles involved. Rote memorization won't help students toward that goal. Throughout the book Whitney makes an effort to explain the why as well as the how of English usage.

He explains that the point of grammar books is to help students recognize the difference between “good English” and “bad English.” He defines good English as “those words,… and those ways of putting them together, which are used by the best speakers, the people of best education.” Bad English is whatever those speakers avoid. Whitney reminds students that “grammar does not at all make rules and laws for language. It only reports the facts of good language.” Grammar books, he suggests, should be used more as reference guides than instructional manuals.
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Whitney's advice here almost echoes White's plea to his readers to be less “solicitous to find ‘a rule.'” Both men believed in a standard for English and both thought it should be based on “the best speakers.” The difference lay in how they determined the best speech. Whitney looked to the common everyday usages of reasonably educated people, especially when those usages were backed up by literary precedent. White proposed standards based mainly on his own feelings about individual words and grammatical constructions, without regard for how well established or widespread they were.

In practice, Whitney was almost as conventional as White. In his book he lists the usual parts of speech with familiar definitions—a noun is “the name of anything.” He also includes parsing exercises that are recognizably related to those found in earlier books, although with more linguistic explanation. For instance,
brother
in one example sentence is parsed as “a noun, because it is the name of something…; a common noun, because it belongs alike to every individual of a class;… masculine, because it denotes only a male being.”

Although he doesn't give students “set rules” to memorize, he doesn't invite them to break the rules, either. All his grammar choices are orthodox. He identifies noun cases by their old-fashioned names, including dative and vocative. His examples feature the pronouns of standard grammar, such as nominatives in comparative phrases—
he is a better man than I.
He uses
whom
and keeps it with its preposition—
To whom did you speak?
rather than the more colloquial
Who did you speak to?
In any event,
Essentials of English Grammar
must have seemed conventional enough overall to appeal to a significant number of teachers. It went through eighteen editions between 1877 and 1903.
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