Founding Grammars (30 page)

Roosevelt also wrote easily and prolifically—books and articles spilled off his pen almost continuously throughout his life. He published his first piece of writing while still at Harvard—a pamphlet cataloging the summer birds of the Adirondacks. He authored over forty books on a wide range of subjects, from hunting memoirs to a history of the War of 1812. Perhaps his best-known work, the four-volume
Winning of the West,
appeared a few years before his election to the vice presidency.

Roosevelt also wrote dozens of articles about topics as varied as the art of Frederick Remington, wolf hunting in Oklahoma, and the meaning of American citizenship. After he left the presidency, he became a contributing editor to
The Outlook.
Even while in office, he wrote articles for
The Outlook, Scribner's
, and other magazines. (Although it's not obvious from his finished writing, he did struggle with spelling, as had Jackson. He supported the Simplified Spelling Board and tried unsuccessfully while president to require that all government documents be written in simplified spelling.)
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Several of Roosevelt's favorite words and expressions have become part of America's political vernacular. He frequently used
bully,
which had acquired the slang meaning of admirable or first rate around the middle of the nineteenth century (as in the congratulatory
Bully for you
). More than once Roosevelt pointed out to friends that the presidency provided “a bully pulpit”—that is, a first-rate platform—for airing his views. The term evidently made a deep impression on those who heard him use it. Several mentioned it in later reminiscences. One close associate, for instance, remembered gathering in Roosevelt's office with half a dozen others while the president read out the draft of a forthcoming speech. After one tub-thumping paragraph, Roosevelt paused. The narrator recalled that the president swung around in his swivel chair to look at his audience while remarking, “I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.”
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Another of Roosevelt's expressions that outlasted his time is
malefactors of great wealth.
He invented the term to describe corporations or wealthy individuals who behaved unethically, and used it in both speeches and writing. During a 1907 address, for example, he spoke of the government's continued determination “to punish certain malefactors of great wealth.” In an
Outlook
editorial, Roosevelt attacked “the big newspaper, owned or controlled by Wall Street,… which is quite willing to hound politicians for their misdeeds, but which … defends all the malefactors of great wealth.”
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The president found that this and other trenchant coinages were highly effective at getting his point across.

Roosevelt made his final contributions to the political vocabulary during his unsuccessful 1912 attempt to retake the presidency. In the excitement of his 1904 victory, Roosevelt had rashly declared that because he had already served nearly four years as McKinley's replacement, he wouldn't run again. Instead, he handpicked a successor, Secretary of War William Taft. Taft and Roosevelt were close friends and allies at that time. Unfortunately, the good will didn't last. Roosevelt believed that his friend had betrayed his policies and the two men parted ways. As the 1912 election drew near, Roosevelt decided that in spite of his promise, he should run once more.

Typically, he announced his intention with a striking metaphor. When a reporter asked him if he had decided yet whether to run, he answered with language from his boxing days—“My hat is in the ring!” he cried. “The fight is on and I am stripped to the buff.” Throwing a hat in the ring had been an actual boxing activity since the early nineteenth century. Professional boxers earned money by traveling to county fairs and other venues and offering to take on all comers. A man interested in accepting the challenge threw his hat into the boxing ring, presumably because a shout or raised hand might not have been noticed in the ringside chaos. Before 1912,
hat in the ring
appeared frequently in magazine and newspaper descriptions of fights. Now it exists entirely as a political metaphor, thanks to Roosevelt.

Roosevelt, who still commanded legions of followers, won the majority of the primaries—there were only about a dozen in those days. However, Taft controlled the Republican Party machinery. He made sure that state nominating conventions committed all their delegates to him, guaranteeing him the nomination. Roosevelt ran as the candidate of the breakaway Bull Moose Party, named for his boast that he was as strong as a bull moose. During the campaign, the former president, obviously fighting fit, continued his habit of hurling pungent language at opponents. He excoriated Taft as a “fathead” with brains “less than a guinea pig.” He likened Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson's demeanor to that of “an apothecary's clerk.” One journalist described Roosevelt's campaign speeches as “a fierce onslaught.… He is not there to persuade his antagonists, but to break their heads.”
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Wilson, a former president of Princeton, spoke in a very different style. “Mr. Wilson has long been known as an exquisite master of English prose,” gushes one political writer. He adds that in spite of Wilson's “classical habit of language,” he uses “simple words and strong words, but seldom slang.” Roosevelt thought Wilson's measured rhetoric masked bad intentions. Later, when President Wilson hesitated to bring the United States into World War I, Roosevelt accused him of misleading Americans with “a shadow dance of words.” Roosevelt declared, “He has covered his fear of standing for the right behind a veil of rhetorical phrases.”
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Many 1912 voters no doubt preferred Roosevelt's fiery, if rough-edged, oratory over Wilson's careful phrases, but the political logistics were against him. Republican Party loyalists who would ordinarily have supported Roosevelt voted for Taft as the party's nominee. The resulting split in Republican votes assured Wilson's victory. After the 1912 election, Roosevelt retired from public life and Americans had to adjust to presidential language that was much more sedate. He left behind a legacy of political words and expressions that still resonate today.

Part of Roosevelt's political genius was to recognize voters' enjoyment of lively, piquant language. Although often warring with a desire to speak correctly, this appreciation has remained an enduring aspect of American culture. Grammar books could never entirely root it out. In the early nineteenth century, David Crockett rose to fame on the strength of his Tennessee folk speech. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Roosevelt used “the slang of the streets” to get to the White House.

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The Roosevelt era was a good time for slang users. Casual language was more widespread and more accepted than ever before. One reason was the proliferation of popular novels and magazine stories that pepped up their dialogue with slang, jargon, and regional speech. These included the form of mass entertainment known as the “dime novel.”

Dime novels had been available since the 1860s. Cheaply printed and flimsily bound, these magazine-like volumes were intended to appeal to a broad audience. In spite of the name, many of the books cost only a nickel, making them affordable for working-class people. Readers of all classes and ages enjoyed them, though, from school-age children to educated adults. The most popular sold in the tens of thousands and were reissued multiple times. Although dime novels reached their sales floodtide during the late 1800s, they were still a favored choice of reading matter at the turn of the century.

Dime novels specialized in stories of adventure, romance, and suspense. Many of the books appeared in series. The series recounting the adventures of schoolboy Frank Merriwell was among the most popular. Two other bestselling series featured private detective Nick Carter and famous rodeo star Buffalo Bill. Dime-novel genres included westerns, detective stories, school stories for boys, spy stories, and travel tales, complete with sensational cover illustrations and highly colored double titles, such as
Frank Merriwell in Gorilla Land, or the Search for the Missing Link.

Part of what made these books so entertaining was their jaunty dialogue.
Frank Merriwell in Gorilla Land
includes such catch phrases as
dead as a door-nail
and
my blood freezes.
Characters behave badly by “cutting out” a rival and “kicking up” trouble. Frank's sidekick is a Vermonter named Ephraim Gallup, whose regional dialect runs to down-home phrases such as
gol dern it, by gum,
and
dinged ef that don't beat all.
A Nick Carter story titled “The Call of Death, or Nick Carter's Clever Assistant” is rich with crime jargon. Nick tosses around terms such as
mug shot, easy mark, bad egg,
and
the straight goods.
He says dismissively of an unsuccessful crook, “He could not frame up and pull off a job of any size … if his life depended on it.”
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More serious authors also added color to their narratives with slang and local speech. Mark Twain's stories are full of western and southern regionalisms, folksy expressions, and uneducated usages. His most famous character, Huckleberry Finn, narrates his adventures in his own distinctive idiom. Huck says
ain't
and
clumb,
and
real swell,
and uses
set
for
sit
and
learn
for
teach.
He also makes lavish use of double negatives—
It warn't no use, I didn't mean no harm.
Not only were Twain's stories popular with the reading public, most reviewers were charmed by his effective portrayal of colloquial speech. Only one or two deplored his linguistic “coarseness.”

The realist author William Dean Howells, although less known than Mark Twain today, was another respected writer of the 1880s whose characters often expressed themselves informally. In his 1889 novel
A Hazard of New Fortunes,
an unsophisticated young woman from a natural-gas boomtown in the Midwest startles New Yorkers with expressions such as
I reckon
and
as cross as two sticks.
She drops the
–g
in words like
goun', dyun', meetun'.
She describes her hometown of Moffitt as “a real live town.” A magazine writer of her acquaintance wonders whether he dare represent the young woman in a story, “just as she is, with all her slang and brag,” and decides that she would have to be toned down to be believable.
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Another character, an entrepreneur named Fulkerson, energizes his speech with racy expressions like
from the word go, first rate, natural-born,
and
Ta ta!

In the turn-of-the-century works of George Ade, slang vaulted from a supporting role to stardom. Ade is now obscure, but his stories and plays drew enthusiastic audiences when they were new. Originally from Indiana, Ade moved to Chicago in 1890 and began writing for the
Morning News.
He loved to roam the Chicago streets, chatting with all sorts of people from shopgirls to newsboys to policemen on the beat. He soaked up jargon and cant expressions and turned them into literary gold.

Ade began writing very short stories that he called “slang fables.” These preserved the formal tone of real fables, but replaced their archaic language with current slang. The lengthy titles are reminiscent of dime novels—“The Fable of the Kid Who Shifted His Ideal,” “The Fable of Paducah's Favorite Comedians and the Mildewed Stunt,” “The Fable of the Copper and the Jovial Undergrads.”

“The Fable of the Preacher Who Flew His Kite, but not because He Wished to Do So” is typical of Ade's stories. It opens with the line, “A certain preacher became wise to the fact that he was not making a hit with his congregation.… He suspected that they were rapping him on the quiet.” The preacher concludes that his congregation is unimpressed with his straightforward sermons because he doesn't use enough fancy Latin words and arcane biblical allusions. He decides that to prove “he was a nobby and boss minister, he would have to hand out a little guff.” He duly dresses up his sermons with quotations from fake Icelandic poets and other made-up sources. Sure enough, the pew holders think it is “hot stuff.” The story ends with the preacher's parishioners “boosting” his salary in appreciation.
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Besides his slang fables, Ade also wrote plays. His built his plots around homey topics like football, small-town politics, and college life. All the plays feature liberal doses of casual speech—terms like
gee whiz, pinhead, rube, done for,
and
ain't.
Ade's slang-filled extravaganzas drew packed houses week after week. It seemed that Americans couldn't get enough of their native tongue at its most vulgar. Ade's skill at manipulating the speech of the streets allowed him to retire a rich man.

While writers were taking advantage of colloquial words and phrases to amuse their audiences, language scholars were beginning to study nonstandard language and regional dialects more seriously. In 1889 a group of English and linguistics professors, writers, and other interested people met at Harvard to organize the American Dialect Society. Their purpose was “the investigation of the English dialects in America, with regard to pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, phraseology, and geographical distribution.” The organization drew 140 members the first year.

Dialect Society members believed that “the real life of language is found only in the folk dialects.” They turned the traditional thinking about language on its head by declaring that dialects are not “corruptions,” as were previously thought, but “the native and natural growths” of everyday speech. From their perspective, it is the standard that's “semi-artificial.” A 1912 leaflet explaining the Society's position notes that “most persons are prone to look upon [dialectal] variations as … ‘bad grammar.' … The truth is, however, that these variations represent one of the most important groups or classes of facts on which the scientific study of language rests.”
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