Authors: Bill Bryson
as French spelling. Such is the way of the world. Among the changes the teachers wanted and the academicians did not were the removal of the circumflex on
etre, fenetre,
and other such words, and taking the -x off plurals such as
bureaux, chevaux,
and
chateaux
and replacing it with an
-s.
Such actions underline the one almost inevitable shortcoming of national academies. However progressive and far-seeing they may be to begin with, they almost always exert over time a depressive effect on change. So it is probably fortunate that the English-speaking world never saddled itself with such a body, largely be-cause as many influential users of English were opposed to academies as favored them. Samuel Johnson doubted the prospects of arresting change and Thomas Jefferson thought it in any case undesirable. In declining an offer to be the first honorary president of the Academy of Language and Belles Lettres, he noted that had such a body been formed in the days of the Anglo-Saxons English would now be unable to describe the modern world. Joseph Priest-ley, the English scientist, grammarian, and theologian, spoke per-haps most eloquently against the formation of an academy when he said in 1761 that it was "unsuitable to the genius of a free na-tion. . . . We need make no doubt but that the best forms of speech will, in time, establish themselves by their own superior excellence: and in all controversies, it is better to wait the decisions of time, which are slow and sure, than to take those of synods, which are often hasty and injudicious." [Quoted by Baugh and Cable, page 269]
English is often commended by outsiders for its lack of a stulti-fying authority. Otto Jespersen as long ago as 1905 was praising English for its lack of rigidity, its happy air of casualness. Likening French to the severe and formal gardens of Louis XIV, he con-trasted it with English, which he said was "laid out seemingly without any definite plan, and in which you are allowed to walk everywhere according to your own fancy without having to fear a stern keeper enforcing rigorous regulations."
[ Growth and Struc-
ture of the English Language,
page 16]
Without an official academy to guide us, the English-speaking world has long relied on self-appointed authorities such as the
THE MOTHER TONGUE
brothers H. W. and F. G. Fowler and Sir Ernest Gowers in Britain and Theodore Bernstein and William Safire in America, and of course countless others. These figures write books, give lectures, and otherwise do what they can (i.e., next to nothing) to try to stanch (not staunch) the perceived decline of the language. They point out that there is a useful distinction to be observed between
uninterested
and
disinterested,
between
imply
and
infer, flaunt
and
flout, fortunate
and
fortuitous, forgo
and
forego,
and
discom-
fort
and
discomfit
(not forgetting
stanch
and
staunch).
They point out that
fulsome,
properly used, is a term of abuse, not praise, that
peruse
actually means to read thoroughly, not glance through, that
data
and
media are
plurals. And from the highest offices in the land they are ignored.
In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter betrayed a flaw in his linguistic armory when he said: "The government of Iran must realize that it cannot flaunt, with impunity, the expressed will and law of the world community."
Flaunt
means to show off; he meant
flout.
The day after he was elected president in 1988, George Bush told a television reporter he couldn't believe the enormity of what had happened. Had President-elect Bush known that the primary meaning of
enormity
is wickedness or evilness, he would doubtless have selected a more apt term.
When this process of change can be seen happening in our life-times, it is almost always greeted with cries of despair and alarm.
Yet such change is both continuous and inevitable. Few acts are more salutary than looking at the writings of language authorities from recent decades and seeing the usages that heightened their hackles. In 1931, H. W. Fowler was tutting over
racial,
which he called "an ugly word, the strangeness of which is due to our in-stinctive feeling that the termination -al has no business at the end of a word that is not obviously Latin." (For similar reasons he disliked
television
and
speedometer.)
Other authorities have variously—and sometimes hotly—attacked
enthuse, commentate,
emote, prestigious, contact
as a verb,
chair as a
verb, and scores of others. But of course these are nothing more than opinions, and, as is the way with other people's opinions, they are generally ignored.
So if there are no officially appointed guardians for the English
GOOD ENGLISH AND BAD
language, who sets down all those rules that we all know about from childhood—the idea that we must never end a sentence with a preposition or begin one with a conjunction, that we must use
each other
for two things and
one another
for more than two, and that we must never use
hopefully in an
absolute sense, such as
"Hopefully it will not rain tomorrow"? The answer, surprisingly often, is that no one does, that when you look into the background of these "rules" there is often little basis for them.
Consider the curiously persistent notion that sentences should not end with a preposition. The source of this stricture, and several other equally dubious ones, was one Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose A
Short Intro-
duction to English Grammar,
published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly influential life both in his native England and abroad. It is to Lowth we can trace many a pedant's most treasured notions: the belief that you must say
different
from rather than
different to
or
different than,
the idea that two negatives make a positive, the rule that you must not say "the heaviest of the two objects," but rather "the heavier," the distinction between
shall
and
will,
and the clearly nonsensical belief that
between
can apply only to two things and
among
to more than two. (By this reasoning, it would not be possible to say that St. Louis is between New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, but rather that it is among them, which would impart a quite different sense.) Perhaps the most remark-able and curiously enduring of Lowth's many beliefs was the con-viction that sentences ought not to end with a preposition. But even he was not didactic about it. He recognized that ending a sentence with a preposition was idiomatic and common in both speech and informal writing. He suggested only that he thought it generally better and more graceful, not crucial, to place the prep-osition before its relative "in solemn and elevated" writing. Within a hundred years this had been converted from a piece of question-able advice into an immutable rule. In a remarkable outburst of literal-mindedness, nineteenth-century academics took it as read that the very name
pre-position
meant it must come before something—anything.
But then this was a period of the most resplendent silliness,
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when grammarians and scholars seemed to be climbing over one another (or each other; it doesn't really matter) in a mad scramble to come up with fresh absurdities. This was the age when, it was gravely insisted, Shakespeare's
laughable
ought to be changed to
laugh-at-able
and
reliable
should be made into
relionable.
Dozens of seemingly unexceptionable words—lengthy,
standpoint, inter-
national, colonial,
brash—were attacked with venom because of some supposed etymological deficiency or other. Thomas de Quincey, in between bouts of opium taking, found time to attack the expression
what on earth.
Some people wrote
mooned
for
lunatic
and
foresayer
for
prophet
on the grounds that the new words were Anglo-Saxon and thus somehow more pure. They roundly castigated those ignoramuses who impurely combined Greek and Latin roots into new words like
petroleum
(Latin
petro
+ Greek
oleum).
In doing so, they failed to note that the very word with which they described themselves,
grammarians,
is itself a hybrid made of Greek and Latin roots, as are many other words that have lived unexceptionably in English for centuries. They even attacked
handbook
as an ugly Germanic compound when it dared to show
its
face in the nineteenth century, failing to notice that it was a good Old English word that had simply fallen out of use. It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions—like
trusteeship,
which consists of a Nordic stem
(trust),
combined with a French affix (ee), married to an Old English root
(ship).
Other languages cannot do this. We should be proud of ourselves for our ingenuity and yet even now authorities commonly attack almost any new construction as ugly or barbaric.
Today in England you can still find authorities attacking the construction
different than as a
regrettable Americanism, insisting that a sentence such as "How different things appear in Washing-ton than in London" is ungrammatical and should be changed to
"How different things appear in Washington from how they appear in London." Yet
different than
has been common in England for centuries and used by such exalted writers as Defoe, Addison, Steele, Dickens, Coleridge, and Thackeray, among others. Other
GOOD ENGLISH AND BAD
authorities, in both Britain and America, continue to deride the absolute use of
hopefully. The New York Times Manual of Style
and Usage flatly
forbids it. Its writers must not say, "Hopefully the sun will come out soon," but rather are instructed to resort to a clumsily passive and periphrastic construction such as "It is to be hoped that the sun will come out soon." The reason? The author-ities maintain that
hopefully in
the first sentence is a misplaced modal auxiliary—that it doesn't belong to any other part of the sentence. Yet they raise no objection to dozens of other words being used in precisely the same unattached
way—admittedly,
mercifully, happily, curiously,
and so on. No doubt the reason
hopefully
is not allowed is that somebody at
The New York Times
once had a boss who wouldn't allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because
his
father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because
he
had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning . . . and so on.
Considerations of what makes for good English or bad English are to an uncomfortably large extent matters of prejudice and con-ditioning. Until the eighteenth century it was correct to say "you was" if you were referring to one person. It sounds odd today, but the logic is impeccable.
Was
is a singular verb and
were a
plural one. Why should you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer—surprise, surprise—is that Robert Lowth didn't like it. "I'm hurrying, are I not?" is hopelessly ungrammat-ical, but "I'm hurrying, aren't I?"—merely a contraction of the same words—is perfect English.
Many
is almost always a plural (as in "Many people were there"), but not when it is followed by a, as in "Many a man was there." There's no inherent reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar.
They are because they are.
Nothing illustrates the scope for prejudice in English better than the issue of the split infinitive. Some people feel ridiculously strongly about it. When the British Conservative politician Jock Bruce-Gardyne was economic secretary to the Treasury in the early ig8os, he returned unread any departmental correspondence con-taining a split infinitive. (It should perhaps be pointed out that a
THE MOTHER TONGUE
split infinitive is one in which an adverb comes between
to
and a verb, as in
to quickly look.)
I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive.
1. Because you feel that the rules of English ought to conform to the grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago.
2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affectation of usage that is without the support of any recognized authority of the last zoo years, even at the cost of composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and patently contorted.
It is exceedingly difficult to find any authority who condemns the split infinitive—Theodore Bernstein,
H.
W. Fowler, Ernest Gow-ers, Eric Partridge, Rudolph Flesch, Wilson Follett, Roy H. Cop-perud, and others too tedious to enumerate here all agree that there is no logical reason not to split an infinitive. Otto Jespersen even suggests that, strictly speaking, it isn't actually possible to split an infinitive. As he puts it: " 'To' . . . is no more an essential
part
of an infinitive than the definite article is an essential part of a nominative, and no one would think of calling 'the good man' a split nominative. -
[Growth and Structure of the English Language,
page 222]
Lacking an academy as we do, we might expect dictionaries to take up the banner of defenders of the language, but in recent years they have increasingly shied away from the role. A perennial argument with dictionary makers is whether they should be pre-scriptive (that is, whether they should prescribe how language should be used) or
descriptive
(that is, merely describe how it is used without taking a position). The most notorious example of the descriptive school was the 1961
Webster's Third New International
Dictionary
(popularly called
Webster's Unabridged),
whose editor, Philip Gove, believed that distinctions of usage were elitist and artificial. As a result, usages such as imply as a synonym for
infer
and
flout
being used in the sense of flaunt were included without comment. The dictionary provoked further antagonism, particu-larly among members of the U.S. Trademark Association, by re-fusing to capitalize trademarked words. But what really excited
GOOD ENGLISH AND BAD