Farewells to Grammar

THE author of a ‘Farewell to Grammar,’ in the Contributors’ Club of the recent September issue, is an endearing and enduring type. For the language of England bade farewell to grammar six or eight centuries ago. It emerged from the welter of AngloSaxon, French, and Latin a marvel and a mess, a something called ‘analytic’ because it does not hang together, as illogical and efficient as a tree — and as grammarless, at least to the purview of whoever comes to it from Latin or Greek, or even from most modern European languages. Irregularity seems to be its characteristic. It is not difficult, except for its chaos of pronunciation. It has no wilderness of genders, no conjugations or declensions, except some fragmentary remainders inexplicably here and there, pieces of paradigms preposterously perpetuated.

Why should pronouns have accusatives which nouns do admirably without? Why should I have me, us, and we; he have him, them, and they; while you plays its lone hand, sufficient for any emergency? We cling to our pronouns. Our tears fall over the vestiges of the subjunctive. Our farewells linger and are never done. We keep on saying them all down the road. They are sad, but endearing. One does not seem to find them at all distasteful.

I once had the emancipating privilege of studying under a man who was not only distinguished among linguists for his erudition but peculiar among linguists for his horse sense — Thomas R. Lounsbury. I can still see him, when (almost whenever) some exception was taken to some questionable usage, beginning to roll to and fro his venerable head, and hear his somewhat falsetto voice: ‘I have yet to discover any standard author wherein that phrase, or the same in principle, does not occur,’ following up with a limpid flow of quotation all the way from Chaucer to Tennyson.

There are three attitudes toward a questionable usage — the linguist’s, the purist’s, and the stylist’s. The linguist’s test is historical. The purist’s is what he has learned in youth, or acquired by select reading, or been told by those who seemed to be authoritative. The stylist’s is what he likes or dislikes, what speaks to his sense of form, efficiency, value, what strikes him as the personality of a word or phrase.

My reactions and sorrows over those instances of disappearing grammar which give pain to the Atlantic’s contributor differ here and there from his reactions and sorrows. His first instance is a wayside sign: ‘School — Drive Slow,’ of which school he sadly presumes that the pupils say, ‘It’s me.‘ Personally, being something of a purist as all respectable people are, I write ‘ slowly.’ So did Lounsbury. But I should not have liked to argue with him that ‘slow ’ was illiterate. There is somewhere in one of his books an appalling list of adjectives used as adverbs, and I doubt not there was in one of his innumerable lettered boxes a sheet of quotations from standard authors in which ‘slow’ was used instead of ‘slowly.’

As a purist, I do not write, ‘It is me.’ But neither do I write, ‘It is I,’ if I can avoid it. The opinion of most linguists is that ‘It is me’ will soon, or sometime, be correct, since most respectable languages have already escaped from ‘It is I.’ Whether or not Germans or Frenchmen ever said,

‘ Es ist ich,‘ or ‘C’est je,‘ they do not say it now. The stylist’s opinion is that, whether it will be or not, it ought to be. Some way or other, ‘ It is I’ ’ is bad style, and it is no credit to English that it is so slow to feel the badness of it.

‘None of them are here.’ Is ‘none’ in the process now of leaving ‘no one’ dimly behind it and setting up an independent plurality? On the whole I hope it is. Stylistically I like it better than ‘not any.’

‘In hopes of seeing you.’ Here the contributor is really bromidic. If I have several hopes of persuading him that his native tongue is more venturesome than he seems to think, — hopes differing in kind and quality, some vivid and some dim, one based on my powers of cogent reasoning, another on his unquestionable intelligence, — must I be content with an indistinctive singular, balked of my discriminating plural by the convention of a more common phrase? What grammar forbids me to say, ’I am in hopes,’ when I am in the happy possession of more than one hope? If such grammar there be, ‘there ain’t no sense in it.’ (The stylist is aware that there is a something called grammar which forbids him that double negative, but he asks the purist to observe how this grammar thereby forbids him to vary his emphasis. He asks if that is a good kind of prohibition and the proper functioning of law.)

’I wish I was wonderful.’ The stylist has two reactions here. One is due to a preference per se for the queer little anomalous subjunctive, ‘were.’ He is fond of it. There are too many s’s in English anyway. But it is more than that. There is an illusive sidestepping in ‘ I were ’ that defies definition. His second reaction is to what the Atlantic contributor appears not to have noticed at all — namely, the beauty of this incorrect appeal. It holds within it the essence of romance. The heart of youth wants to be wonderful more than it wants anything whatever in this world. In point of fact, it is wonderful. But note that that ‘was’ is the perfect touch, the pathetic illiterate, the little mournful droop. The sigh of a million dreamers is all there: ‘I wish I was wonderful.’

The linguist has a different comment. ‘ Is not Laurence Sterne supposed to have written good English?’ he inquires. ‘Sterne writes in Tristram Shandy: “Was I left, like Sancho Panza, to choose my kingdom, it should not be maritime.” Should,’ the linguist goes on, ‘is, as John Selden said of equity law, a roguish thing. So is were.’ ‘So was Sterne,’ interjects the stylist. ‘And the English language is a rogue in grain, a tricksy sprite, an Autolycus, a Harlequin, a thing of shreds and patches, a veritable Yorick, a fellow of infinite jest,—“A poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once,”— a shrewd, humorous, slovenly slattern. And how wonderfully she does muddle through!’

‘That was the reason for me leaving school. (A darned good reason, too!)’ says the contributor parenthetically. But was not this delinquent possibly an æsthetic student of John Synge and W. B. Yeats, touched by the soft beauties of Celtic idiom? And the teacher who fired the incipient poet, was he not perhaps a mere pachydermatous Philistine, a grim Puritan purist who thought he smelled Popery?

‘It is liable to snow to-night.’ ‘Liable’ and ‘reliable’ have been often indicted, and with cause, for they are trespassers. They have broken loose from their legal moorings, from the ties which their etymology declares, and become derelicts, constantly encroaching on the connotations of other words. But if the Oxford Dictionary sanctions as one definition of ‘liable,’ ‘apt to do something undesirable,’ and if Sir James Murray has superseded Lindley on the bench — why may not one say ‘ liable to snow,’ under that august protection, provided, of course, he means to imply that he would rather it did not?

We cannot all be linguists. It is a steep and toilsome climb. The way down into slipshod English is too easy, a facilis descensus. Everyone who considers his language is a purist to some extent. But for him, too, there is a facilis descensus. He easily drops into dogma, and there some linguist can, may, and should ‘make him look like thirty cents’ (a beautiful bit of slang, probably obsolete, but admired by stylists for its mystical atmosphere: you know what it means, but not by what means it means it). If he leans on Lindley Murray, Lindley gives way to Sir James, who turns out to be a knight of erudition and horse sense, graduated out of grammar into language, one who looks down through tolerant, calm spectacles from the battlements of Oxford on the timid inhibitions of Massachusetts.

The stylist, on the other hand, has the advantage that he knows his feet are on the void and dogma is not for him. He has no support but his own rainbow wings. The sweet variations of synonyms make him glad. He rejoiceth in the stinging savor of new slang, which he delicately encloseth in quotation marks. His taste is his test, and the proof of his pudding is his eating. If his taste is insensitive, unintelligent, uncultivated, illiterate; if he perceiveth not the distinctions of pudding from pudding; if he knoweth not, for example, that precision is as æsthetic a thing as any value in the decalogue and ritual of art — then his style doubtless will be indifferent. But that is ‘up to him.’ He is delicately enclosed in his own problem, whose solution is the only salvation he cares for.