American Language (9 page)

Pickering’s professional career was made in the law, with occasional ventures into politics, but he passed for a scholar in his time, he was offered the chair of Oriental languages at Harvard in 1806 and that of Greek in 1814, and he published a Greek-English lexicon in 1826. The preface to his Vocabulary was largely devoted to a defense of the English reviewers. “It cannot be denied,” he said, “that we have in several instances deviated from the standard of the language, as
spoken and written in England at the present day
. [His italics.] By this I do not mean that so great a deviation has taken place as to have rendered any considerable part of our language unintelligible to Englishmen, but merely that so many corruptions have crept into
our English
as to have become the subject of much animadversion and regret with the learned of Great Britain.” Pickering then proceeded to argue that these animadversions and regrets were well founded, and called upon his erring countrymen to “imitate the example of the learned and modest Campbell,”
⁶⁷
who, though he had devoted a great part of a long life to the study of the English language, “yet thought it no disgrace to make an apology for his style,” and to remember the similar diffidence of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lugdunum (Lyons) in Gaul, who prefixed a similar apology for his shaky provincial Latin to his “Adversus Hæreses.” Thus Pickering summed up:

Again I follow Pickering’s italization. His theory is still entertained by multitudes of American pedagogues. They believe as he did that the natural growth of the language is wild and wicked, and that it should be regulated according to rules formulated in England. To this end they undertake periodical crusades against “bad grammar,” the American scheme of pronunciation, and the general body of Americanisms — in the classroom, by means of hortatory pamphlets and leaflets, and over the air. In 1915 the National Council of Teachers of English, following that hopeful American custom which gave the nation Mothers’ Day, and Safety-First, Paint-Up-Clean-Up and Eat-More-Cheese Weeks, proposed to make the first seven days of November Better-Speech Week. Ten years later the General Federation of Women’s Clubs joined the movement, and for some unknown reason the time was changed to the last week in February. For awhile Better-Speech Week was much discussed in the newspapers, and it is still observed, I believe, in parts of the country. Some of the schoolmarms, despairing of effecting a wholesale reform, concentrated their efforts upon various specific crimes against their canons, and among the subsidiary weeks thus launched were
Ain’t
-less Week and Final-
G
Week. They also established a Tag Day, and hung derisory tags on youngsters guilty of such indecencies as “I have
got
” and “It’s
me
”
⁶⁸
This missionary effort was not confined to school-children. Efforts were also made to perfect the speech of their parents and of the public in general, and even the newspapers were besought to mend their linguistic ways. In 1925, a Los Angeles schoolmarm went about Southern California inducing women’s clubs to pass the following resolution:

The object of attack here, of course, was the grotesque slang that appears from nowhere, has its brief day, and then vanishes. But the
American pedagogues, with few exceptions, seem to be opposed also to more decorous Americanisms, and many of them devote themselves to teaching a pronunciation that is quite foreign to the country, and to inculcating grammatical niceties that were concocted during the earnest but innocent days when English grammar was assumed to be a kind of Latin grammar — niceties that have been long since abandoned by the English themselves. The influence of Samuel Johnson is thus still more or less potent in the American public schools, though Noah Webster was denouncing it so long ago as 1789. On this melancholy theme I shall discourse at greater length in Chapter IX.

The higher varieties of gogues are somewhat less naïve, but they nevertheless show a considerable reluctance to deal with American as the living language of a numerous and puissant people, making its own rules as it goes along and well worthy of scientific study. Very few American philologians have specialized in it, and such study of it as has been undertaken has been carried on by amateurs quite as often as by professionals. It is rare for any discussion of it to appear in such journals as
Modern Language Notes, Modern Philology, Language
, the
American Philological Journal
, the
English Journal
, and the
Journal of English and Germanic Philology
, or for it to be undertaken seriously at the annual meetings of the philological associations.
⁷⁰
Dialect Notes
, the first journal to be devoted to it, was not set up until 1890, and
American Speech
did not follow until 1925. Both have had very meager support.
Dialect Notes
was launched by the American Dialect Society, which had been organized at Harvard
University in 1889, with the late Professor Francis J. Child, the authority on English and Scottish ballads, as its first president.
⁷¹
It made very slow progress. Though there were, at that time, fully 5,000 teachers of English in the United States, including at least 500 in the colleges,
⁷²
it started off with but 140 members, and the publication of the first volume of
Dialect Notes
, running to 497 pages, dragged through six years. When the second volume was completed, in 1904, the society had 310 members, but many of them failed to pay their dues, and by 1912 successive purges had reduced the roll to 219. The income was then less than $400 a year. By 1926 the membership had grown to 266 and by 1932 the income was $776.38. Neither membership nor income appears to have increased since, for
Dialect Notes
now comes out only at long intervals, and its average issue is very thin. Yet its files contain a very large amount of invaluable matter, as my frequent references to them will show, and it long offered the only outlet for the work of that small minority of American scholars who took the national language seriously, and gave it scientific study — among them, Drs. Percy W. Long, C. H. Grandgent and E. S. Sheldon of Harvard, E. H. Babbitt of Columbia, George Hempl of Michigan, George T. Flom of Iowa, E. H. Sturtevant of Yale, O. F. Emerson of Western Reserve, C. S. Northrup of Cornell, J. W. Carr of Maine, L. W. Payne, Jr., of Texas, William A. Read of Louisiana, Josiah Combs of Texas Christian, John M. Manly and Allen Walker Reed of Chicago, and Louise Pound of Nebraska.

The work of Dr. Pound has been especially productive, for whereas most of the other members of the Dialect Society have
confined their investigations to the regional dialects of American, she and her pupils have studied the general speechways of the country. She took her doctorate at Heidelberg under the distinguished Anglicist, Johannes Hoops, and soon afterward joined the English faculty of the University of Nebraska. Her first contribution to
Dialect Notes
was published in 1905; thereafter, for twenty years, she or her pupils were represented in almost every issue. In 1925, in association with Dr. Kemp Malone of the Johns Hopkins and Dr. Arthur G. Kennedy of Stanford, she founded
American Speech
, becoming its first editor. She continued in that capacity until 1933, when she was succeeded by Dr. William Cabell Greet of Barnard College, Columbia University.
American Speech
, even more than
Dialect Notes
, has encouraged the study of American: its files constitute a rich mine of instructive and often very amusing stuff. But it has got but little more support from American teachers of English than its predecessor. Though its first issues contained many articles addressed to them directly, they refused to be interested, and during its later years its pages have been supplied largely by lay students of the language. During its first five years its subscription list never reached 1500 names, and at the beginning of its sixth year it had but 329 subscribers. When Dr. Pound retired in 1933 it was taken over by the Columbia University Press. Today it continues to be published at a loss, though Dr. Greet and his associates make it a very useful journal.
⁷³
Beginning as a monthly, it is now a quarterly.

This failure of support has greatly hampered the work of the American Dialect Society. It projected an American Dialect Dictionary immediately after its organization in 1889, and by 1930 its collection of materials embraced more than 30,000 words and phrases. But so far the lack of funds has prevented the completion of the work,
⁷⁴
and it has had to give place to two more recent enterprises,
both of which seem to be adequately financed, and promise to give the study of American English great encouragement, and to set it, in combination, upon a scientific foundation. The first is the Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, now going forward at the University of Chicago under the direction of Sir William Craigie, one of the editors of the New English Dictionary (now called the Oxford English Dictionary); the other is the Linguistic Atlas of the United States, in charge of Dr. Hans Kurath of Brown University and sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies. The first fascicle of the former appeared early in 1936, and the first map of the latter shortly afterward. Both will require years for their completion. Sir William and Dr. Kurath are alike of foreign birth, the former being a Scotsman and the latter an Austrian.
⁷⁵

Sir William described the origin of the Dictionary of American English in the
English Journal
(Chicago) for January, 1926. The dictionaries hitherto published in the United States, he said,

“As soon as the idea had presented itself to me,” he continued, “I communicated it to Professor [John M.] Manly, [head of the department of English at Chicago], who at once took steps to interest the University of Chicago in the project.” The upshot was that Sir William was made professor of English in the university, and provided with a competent staff of assistants at the cost of the General Education Board. Before sailing for the United States to
take up his work, in June, 1925, he said to the London correspondent of the North American Newspaper Alliance: