The Mother Tongue (21 page)

easing out the old spellings of
catalogue, dialogue,
and
omelette, at
least in America. Two hundred years ago there were scores of words that could be spelled in two or more ways, but today the list has shrunk to a handful—ax/axe, gray/grey, inquire/enquire, and (outside North America)
jail/gaol—but
even here there is a clear tendency in every English-speaking country to favor one form or the other, to move towards regularity.

Even so, there is still, on the face of it, a strong case for spelling reform. Anyone who has tried to explain to an eight-year-old, or even a teenager, the difference between wring and ring or be-tween
meet, meat,
and
mete,
or why we spell
hinder
with an
e
but
hindrance
without, or why
proceed
has a double
e
but
procedure
doesn't, or why we spell
enough, biscuit,
and
pneumonia in
the very peculiar ways that we do will very probably appreciate that.

But calls for spelling reform inevitably overlook certain intractable problems. One is that the old spellings are well established—so well established that most of us don't notice that words like
bread,
thought,
and
once are
decidedly unphonetic. Attempts to simplify and regularize English spelling almost always hav a sumwut strinj and ineskapubly arbitrary hak abowt them, and ov cors they kawz most reederz to stumbl. There is a great deal to be said for the fa-miliarity of our spellings, even if they are not always sensible.

What simplified spelling systems gain in terms of consistency they often throw away in terms of clarity.
Eight may
be a pecu-liar way of spelling the number that follows seven, but it cer-tainly helps to distinguish it from the past tense of
eat.
Similarly, the syllable
seed can
be spelled a variety of ways in English—

seed, secede, proceed, supersede—but
if in our quest for consis-tency we were to fix on the single spelling of, say,
seed,
we

-wouldn't be able to distinguish between
reseed
and
recede. Fis-
sure
would become
fisher; sew
and
sow
would be
so.
There would be no way to distinguish between
seas
and
seize, flees
and
fleas, aloud
and
allowed, chance
and
chants, air
and
heir, wrest
and
rest, flu, flue,
and
flew, weather, whether,
and
wether,
and countless others. Perplexity and ambiguity would reign (or rain or rein).

And who would decide which pronunciations would be supreme?

S PELLING

Would we write
eether
or
eyther?
As we have already seen, pro-nunciations often bear even less relation to spellings than we appreciate. In spoken American English, many millions of people—perhaps the majority—say
medal
for
metal, hambag
for
handbag,
frunnal
for
frontal, tally
for
totally, forn
for
foreign,
and
nookular
for
nuclear.
Shall our spellings reflect these? The fact is, especially when looked at globally, most of our spellings cater to a wide vari-ation of pronunciations. If we insisted on strictly phonetic render-ings,
girl
would be
gull in
most of America (though perhaps
goil in
New York),
gel in
London and Sydney,
gull
in Ireland,
gill
in South Africa,
gairull
in Scotland. Written communications between na-tions, and even parts of nations, would become practically impos-sible. And that, as we shall see in the next chapter, is a problem enough already.

9.

GOOD ENGLISH

AND BAD

CONSIDER THE PARTS OF SPEECH. IN

Latin, the verb has up to
120
inflections. In English it never has more than five (e.g.,
see, sees, saw, seeing, seen)
and often it gets by with just three
(hit, hits, hitting).
Instead of using loads of different verb forms, we use just a few forms but employ them in loads of ways. We need just five inflections to deal with the act of propelling a car—drive,
drives, drove,
driving, and driven—yet with these we can express quite complex and subtle variations of tense: "I drive to work every day," "I have been driving since I was sixteen," "I will have driven
20,000
miles by the end of this year."

This system, for all its ease of use, makes labeling difficult. Ac-cording to any textbook, the present tense of the verb drive is
drive.
Every junior high school pupil knows that. Yet if we say, "I used to drive to work but now I don't," we are clearly using the present tense
drive in
a past tense sense. Equally if we say, "I will drive you to work tomorrow," we are using it in a future sense. And if
we
say, "I would drive if I could afford to," we are using it in a conditional sense. In fact, almost the only form of sentence in which we cannot use the present tense form of
drive
is, yes, the present tense. When we need to indicate an action going on right now, we must use the participial form
driving.
We don't say, "I drive the car now," but rather "I'm driving the car now." Not to put too fine a point on it, the labels are largely meaningless.

We seldom stop to think about it, but some of the most basic concepts in English are naggingly difficult to define. What, for instance, is a sentence? Most dictionaries define it broadly as a group of words constituting a full thought and containing, at a
GOOD ENGLISH AND BAD

minimum, a subject (basically a noun) and predicate (basically a verb). Yet if I inform you that I have just crashed your car and you reply, "What!" or "Where?" or "How!" you have clearly ex-pressed a complete thought, uttered a sentence. But where are the subject and predicate? Where are the noun and verb, not to mention the prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and other com-ponents that we normally expect to find in a sentence? To get around this problem, grammarians pretend that such sentences contain words that aren't there. "What!" they would say, really means "What are you telling me—you crashed my car?" while

"Where?" is a shorthand rendering of "Where did you crash it?"

and "How?" translates as "How on earth did you manage to do that, you old devil you?" or words to that effect. The process is called
ellipsis
and is certainly very nifty. Would that I could do the same with my bank account. Yet the inescapable fact is that it is possible to make such sentences conform to grammatical pre-cepts only by bending the rules. When I was growing up we called that cheating.

In English, in short, we possess a language in which the parts of speech are almost entirely notional. A noun is a noun and a verb is a verb largely because the grammarians say they are. In the sen-tence "I am suffering terribly"
suffering
is a verb, but in "My suffering is terrible," it is a noun. Yet both sentences use precisely the same word to express precisely the same idea.
Quickly
and
sleepily are
adverbs but
sickly
and
deadly are
adjectives.
Breaking
is a present tense participle, but as often as not it is used in a past tense sense ("He was breaking the window when I saw him").

Broken,
on the other hand, is a past tense participle but as often as not it is employed in a present tense sense ("I think I've just broken my toe") or even future tense sense ("If he wins the next race, he'll have broken the school record"). To deal with all the anomalies, the parts of speech must be so broadly defined as to be almost meaningless. A noun, for example, is generally said to be a word that denotes a person, place, thing, action, or quality. That would seem to cover almost everything, yet clearly most actions are verbs and many words that denote qualities—brave,
foolish,
good—are
adjectives.

THE MOTHER TONGUE

The complexities of English are such that the authorities them-selves often stumble. Each of the following, penned by an expert, contains a usage that at least some of his colleagues would consider quite wrong.

"Prestige is one of the few words that has had an experience opposite to that described in 'Worsened Words.' " (H. W.

Fowler,
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,
second edition) It should be "one of the few words that
have
had."

"Each of the variants indicated in boldface type count as an entry."
(The Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage)
It should be "each . . .
counts."

"It is of interest to speculate about the amount of dislocation to the spelling system that would occur if English dictionaries were either proscribed or (as when Malory or Sir Philip Sidney were writing) did not exist." (Robert Burchfield,
The English
Language)
Make it
"was
writing."

"A range of sentences forming statements, commands, ques-tions and exclamations cause us to draw on a more sophisticated battery of orderings and arrangements." (Robert Burchfield,
The
English Language)
It should be "causes."

"The prevalence of incorrect instances of the use of the apos-trophe . . . together with the abandonment of it by many busi-ness firms . . . suggest that the time is close at hand when this moderately useful device should be abandoned." (Robert Burch-field,
The English Language)
The verb should be
suggests.

"If a lot of the available dialect data is obsolete or almost so, a lot more of it is far too sparse to support any sort of reliable conclusion." (Robert Claiborne,
Our Marvelous Native Tongue)
Data
is a plural.

"His system of citing examples of the best authorities, of in-dicating etymology, and pronunciation, are still followed by lex-
GOOD ENGLISH AND BAD

icographers." (Philip Howard,
The State of the Language)
His system are?

"When his fellowship expired he was offered a rectorship at Boxworth . . . on condition that he married the deceased rector's daughter." (Robert McCrum, et al.,
The Story of English)
A misuse of the subjunctive: It should be "on condition that he marry."

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin—a language with which it has precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn't, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel be-cause they weren't available to the Romans. Making English gram-mar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity. But once this insane notion became established grammarians found themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies. As Burchfield notes in
The
English Language,
one authority, F. Th. Visser, found it necessary to devote
200
pages to discussing just one aspect of the present participle. That is
as
crazy as it is amazing.

The early authorities not only used Latin grammar as their model, but actually went to the almost farcical length of writing English grammars in that language, as with Sir Thomas Smith's
De
Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione Dialogus
(1568), Alexander Gil's
Logonomia Anglica
(1619), and John Wallis's
Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae
of 1653 (though even he accepted that the grammar of Latin was ill-suited to English). For the long-est time it was taken entirely for granted that the classical lan-guages
must
serve as models. Dryden spoke for an age when he boasted that he often translated his sentences into Latin to help him decide how best to express them in English.

THE MOTHER TONGUE

In 166o, Dryden complained that English had "not so much as a tolerable dictionary or a grammar; so our language is in a manner barbarous." He believed there should be an academy to regulate English usage, and for the next two centuries many others would echo his view. In 1664, the Royal Society for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy formed a committee "to improve the En-glish tongue," though nothing lasting seems to have come of it.

Thirty-three years later in his
Essay Upon Projects,
Daniel Defoe was calling for an academy to oversee the language. In 1712, Jonathan Swift joined the chorus with a
Proposal for Correcting,
Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue.
Some indication of the strength of feeling attached to these matters is given by the fact that in 1780, in the midst of the American Revolution, John Adams wrote to the president of Congress appealing to him to set up an academy for the purpose of "refining, correcting, improving and ascertaining the English language" (a title that closely echoes, not to say plagiarizes, Swift's pamphlet of sixty-eight years before).

In 1806, the American Congress considered a bill to institute a national academy and in 182o an American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres, presided over by John Quincy Adams, was formed, though again without any resounding perpetual benefits to users of the language. And there were many other such proposals and assemblies.

The model for all these was the Academie Francaise, founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635. In its youth, the academy was an am-bitious motivator of change. In 1762, after many years of work, it published a dictionary that regularized the spellings of some 5,000

words—almost a quarter of the words then in common use. It took the
s
out of words like
estre
and
fenestre,
making them
etre
and
fenetre,
and it turned roy and boy into
roi
and
loi.
In recent dec-ades, however, the academy has been associated with an almost ayatollah-like conservatism. When in December 1988 over 90 per-cent of French schoolteachers voted in favor of a proposal to in-troduce the sort of spelling reforms the academy itself had introduced zoo years earlier, the forty venerable members of the academy were, to quote the London Sunday
Times,
"up in apo-plectic arms" at the thought of tampering with something as sacred
GOOD ENGLISH AND BAD