37. Good English and Bad (Part-3)

Without an official academy to guide us, the English-speaking world has long

relied on self-appointed authorities such as the 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 discomfort 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 lifetimes, 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 instinctive 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 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 Introduction 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 remarkable and curiously enduring of Lowth's many beliefs

was the conviction 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 preposition before its relative "in solemn and elevated" writing.

Within a hundred years this had been converted from a piece of questionable

advice into an immutable rule. In a remarkable outburst of literal-mindedness,

nineteenth-century academics took it as read that the very name preposition

meant it must come before something—anything.

But then this was a period of the most resplendent silliness, 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 . Dozens of seemingly unexceptionable words—lengthy, standpoint, international, 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.