[Pg177]toc
§ 1
Grammarians and Their Ways—So far, in the main, the language examined has been of a relatively pretentious and self-conscious variety—the speech, if not always of formal discourse, then at least of literate men. Most of the examples of its vocabulary and idiom, in fact, have been drawn from written documents or from written reports of more or less careful utterances, for example, the speeches of members of Congress and of other public men. The whole of Thornton's excellent material is of this character. In his dictionary there is scarcely a locution that is not supported by printed examples.
It must be obvious that such materials, however lavishly set forth, cannot exhibit the methods and tendencies of a living speech with anything approaching completeness, nor even with accuracy. What men put into writing and what they say when they take sober thought are very far from what they utter in everyday conversation. All of us, no matter how careful our speech habits, loosen the belt a bit, so to speak, when we speak familiarly to our fellows, and pay a good deal less heed to precedents and proprieties, perhaps, than we ought to. It was a sure instinct that made Ibsen put "bad grammar" into the mouth of Nora Helmar in "A Doll's House." She is a general's daughter and the wife of a professor, but even professor's wives are not above occasional bogglings of the cases of pronouns and the conjugations of verbs. The professors themselves, in truth, must have the same habit, for sometimes they show plain signs of it in print. More than once, plowing through profound and interminable treatises of grammar and syntax in[Pg178]preparation for the present work, I have encountered the cheering spectacle of one grammarian exposing, with contagious joy, the grammatical lapses of some other grammarian. And nine times out of ten, a few pages further on, I have found the enchanted purist erring himself.[1]The most funereal of the sciences is saved from utter horror by such displays of human malice and fallibility. Speech itself, indeed, would become almost impossible if the grammarians could follow their own rules unfailingly, and were always right.
But here we are among the learned; and their sins, when detected and exposed, are at least punished by conscience. What are of more importance, to those interested in language as a living thing, are the offendings of the millions who are not conscious of any wrong. It is among these millions, ignorant of regulation and eager only to express their ideas clearly and forcefully, that language undergoes its great changes and constantly renews its vitality. These are the genuine makers of grammar, marching miles ahead of the formal grammarians. Like the Emperor Sigismund, each man among them may well say: "Ego sum ... super grammaticam." It is competent for any individual to offer his contribution—his new word, his better idiom, his novel figure of speech, his short cut in grammar or syntax—and it is by the general vote of the whole body, not by the verdict of a small school, that the fate of the innovation is decided. As Brander Matthews says, there is not even representative government in the matter; theposse comitatusdecides directly, and despite the sternest protest, finally. The ignorant, the rebellious and the daring come forward with their brilliant barbarisms; the learned and conservative bring up their objections. "And when both sides have been heard, there is a show of hands; and by this the irrevocable decision of the community itself is rendered."[2]Thus it was that the Romance languages were fashioned out of the wreck of Latin, the vast[Pg179]influence of the literate minority to the contrary notwithstanding. Thus it was, too, that English lost its case inflections and many of its old conjugations, and that ouryescame to be substituted for thegea-se(=so be it) of an earlier day, and that we got rid ofwhomaftermaninthe man I saw, and that our stark pronoun of the first person was precipitated from the Germanich. And thus it is that, in our own day, the language faces forces in America which, not content with overhauling and greatly enriching its materials, now threaten to work changes in its very structure.
Where these tendencies run strongest, of course, is on the plane of the vulgar spoken language. Among all classes the everyday speech departs very far from orthodox English, and even very far from any recognizable spoken English, but among those lower classes which make up the great body of the people it gets so far from orthodox English that it gives promise, soon or late, of throwing off its old bonds altogether, or, at any rate, all save the loosest of them. Behind it is the gigantic impulse that I have described in earlier chapters: the impulse of an egoistic and iconoclastic people, facing a new order of life in highly self-conscious freedom, to break a relatively stable language, long since emerged from its period of growth, to their novel and multitudinous needs, and, above all, to their experimental and impatient spirit. This impulse, it must be plain, would war fiercely upon any attempt at formal regulation, however prudent and elastic; it is often rebellious for the mere sake of rebellion. But what it comes into conflict with, in America, is nothing so politic, and hence nothing so likely to keep the brakes upon it. What it actually encounters here is a formalism that is artificial, illogical and almost unintelligible—a formalism borrowed from English grammarians, and by them brought into English, against all fact and reason, from the Latin. "In most of our grammars, perhaps in all of those issued earlier than the opening of the twentieth century," says Matthews, "we find linguistic laws laid down which are in blank contradiction with the genius of the language."[3]In brief, the American[Pg180]school-boy, hauled before a pedagogue to be instructed in the structure and organization of the tongue he speaks, is actually instructed in the structure and organization of a tongue that he never hears at all, and seldom reads, and that, in more than one of the characters thus set before him, does not even exist.
The effects of this are two-fold. On the one hand he conceives an antipathy to a subject so lacking in intelligibility and utility. As one teacher puts it, "pupils tire of it; often they see nothing in it, because thereisnothing in it."[4]And on the other hand, the school-boy goes entirely without sympathetic guidance in the living language that he actually speaks, in and out of the classroom, and that he will probably speak all the rest of his life. All he hears in relation to it is a series of sneers and prohibitions, most of them grounded, not upon principles deduced from its own nature, but upon its divergences from the theoretical language that he is so unsuccessfully taught. The net result is that all the instruction he receives passes for naught. It is not sufficient to make him a master of orthodox English and it is not sufficient to rid him of the speech-habits of his home and daily life. Thus he is thrown back upon these speech-habits without any helpful restraint or guidance, and they make him a willing ally of the radical and often extravagant tendencies which show themselves in the vulgar tongue. In other words, the very effort to teach him an excessively tight and formal English promotes his use of a loose and rebellious English. And so the grammarians, with the traditional fatuity of their order, labor for the destruction of the grammar they defend, and for the decay of all those refinements of speech that go with it.
The folly of this system, of course, has not failed to attract the attention of the more intelligent teachers, nor have they failed to observe the causes of its failure. "Much of the fruitlessness of the study of English grammar," says Wilcox,[5]"and[Pg181]many of the obstacles encountered in its study are due to 'the difficulties created by the grammarians.' These difficulties arise chiefly from three sources—excessive classification, multiplication of terms for a single conception, and the attempt to treat the English language as if it were highly inflected." So long ago as the 60's Richard Grant White began an onslaught upon all such punditic stupidities. He saw clearly that "the attempt to treat English as if it were highly inflected" was making its intelligent study almost impossible, and proposed boldly that all English grammar-books be burned.[6]Of late his ideas have begun to gain a certain acceptance, and as the literature of denunciation has grown[7]the grammarians have been constrained to overhaul their texts. When I was a school-boy, during the penultimate decade of the last century, the chief American grammar was "A Practical Grammar of the English Language," by Thomas W. Harvey.[8]This formidable work was almost purely synthetical: it began with a long series of definitions, wholly unintelligible to a child, and proceeded into a maddening maze of pedagogical distinctions, puzzling even to an adult. The latter-day grammars, at least those for the elementary schools, are far more analytical and logical. For example, there is "Longmans' Briefer Grammar," by George J. Smith,[9]a text now in very wide use. This book starts off, not with page after page of abstractions, but with a well-devised examination of the complete sentence, and the characters and relations of the parts of speech are very simply and clearly developed. But before the end the author begins to succumb to precedent, and on page 114 I find[Pg182]paragraph after paragraph of such dull, flyblown pedantry as this:
Some Intransitive Verbs are used to link the Subject and some Adjective or Noun. These Verbs are called Copulative Verbs, and the Adjective or Noun is called the Attribute.The Attribute always describes or denotes the person or thing denoted by the Subject.Verbals are words that are derived from Verbs and express action or being without asserting it. Infinitives and Participles are Verbals.
Some Intransitive Verbs are used to link the Subject and some Adjective or Noun. These Verbs are called Copulative Verbs, and the Adjective or Noun is called the Attribute.
The Attribute always describes or denotes the person or thing denoted by the Subject.
Verbals are words that are derived from Verbs and express action or being without asserting it. Infinitives and Participles are Verbals.
And so on. Smith, in his preface, says that his book is intended, "not so much to 'cover' the subject of grammar as toteachit," and calls attention to the fact, somewhat proudly, that he has omitted "the rather hard subject of gerunds," all mention of conjunctive adverbs, and even the conjugation of verbs. Nevertheless, he immerses himself in the mythical objective case of nouns on page 108, and does not emerge until the end.[10]"The New-Webster-Cooley Course in English,"[11]another popular text, carries reform a step further. The subject of case is approached through the personal pronouns, where it retains its only surviving intelligibility, and the more lucidobject formis used in place ofobjective case. Moreover, the pupil is plainly informed, later on, that "a noun has in reality but two case-forms: a possessive and a common case-form." This is the best concession to the facts yet made by a text-book grammarian. But no one familiar with the habits of the pedagogical mind need be told that its interior pull is against even such mild and obvious reforms. Defenders of the old order are by no means silent; a fear seems to prevail that grammar, robbed of its imbecile classifications, may collapse entirely. Wilcox records how the Council of English Teachers of New Jersey, but a few years ago, spoke out boldly for the recognition of no less than five cases[Pg183]in English. "Why five?" asks Wilcox. "Why not eight, or ten, or even thirteen? Undoubtedly because there are five cases in Latin."[12]Most of the current efforts at improvement, in fact, tend toward a mere revision and multiplication of classifications; the pedant is eternally convinced that pigeon-holing and relabelling are contributions to knowledge. A curious proof in point is offered by a pamphlet entitled "Reorganization of English in Secondary Schools," compiled by James Fleming Hosic and issued by the National Bureau of Education.[13]The aim of this pamphlet is to rid the teaching of English, including grammar, of its accumulated formalism and ineffectiveness—to make it genuine instruction instead of a pedantic and meaningless routine. And how is this revolutionary aim set forth? By a meticulous and merciless splitting of hairs, a gigantic manufacture of classifications and sub-classifications, a colossal display of professorial bombast and flatulence.
I could cite many other examples. Perhaps, after all, the disease is incurable. What such laborious stupidity shows at bottom is simply this: that the sort of man who is willing to devote his life to teaching grammar to children, or to training school-marms to do it, is not often the sort of man who is intelligent enough to do it competently. In particular, he is not often intelligent enough to grapple with the fluent and ever-amazing permutations of a living and rebellious speech. The only way he can grapple with it at all is by first reducing it to a fixed and formal organization—in brief, by first killing it and embalming it. The difference in the resultant proceedings is not unlike that between a gross dissection and a surgical operation. The difficulties of the former are quickly mastered by any student of normal sense, but even the most casual of laparotomies calls for a man of special skill and address. Thus the elementary study of the national language, at least in America, is almost monopolized by dullards. Children are taught it by men and women who observe it inaccurately and expound it ignorantly. In most other fields the pedagogue meets a certain corrective competition and[Pg184]criticism. The teacher of any branch of applied mathematics, for example, has practical engineers at his elbow and they quickly expose and denounce his defects; the college teacher of chemistry, however limited his equipment, at least has the aid of text-books written by actual chemists. But English, even in its most formal shapes, is chiefly taught by those who cannot write it decently and who get no aid from those who can. One wades through treatise after treatise on English style by pedagogues whose own style is atrocious. A Huxley or a Stevenson might have written one of high merit and utility—but Huxley and Stevenson had other fish to fry, and so the business was left to Prof. Balderdash. Consider the standard texts on prosody—vast piles of meaningless words—hollow babble about spondees, iambics, trochees and so on—idiotic borrowings from dead languages. Two poets, Poe and Lanier, blew blasts of fresh air through that fog, but they had no successors, and it has apparently closed in again. In the department of prose it lies wholly unbroken; no first-rate writer of English prose has ever written a text-book upon the art of writing it.
§ 2
Spoken American As It Is—But here I wander afield. The art of prose has little to do with the stiff and pedantic English taught in grammar-schools and a great deal less to do with the loose and lively English spoken by the average American in his daily traffic. The thing of importance is that the two differ from each other even more than they differ from the English of a Huxley or a Stevenson. The school-marm, directed by grammarians, labors heroically, but all her effort goes for naught. The young American, like the youngster of any other race, inclines irresistibly toward the dialect that he hears at home, and that dialect, with its piquant neologisms, its high disdain of precedent, its complete lack of self-consciousness, is almost the antithesis of the hard and stiff speech that is expounded out of books. It derives its principles, not from the subtle logic[Pg185]of learned and stupid men, but from the rough-and-ready logic of every day. It has a vocabulary of its own, a syntax of its own, even a grammar of its own. Its verbs are conjugated in a way that defies all the injunctions of the grammar books; it has its contumacious rules of tense, number and case; it has boldly re-established the double negative, once sound in English; it admits double comparatives, confusions in person, clipped infinitives; it lays hands on the vowels, changing them to fit its obscure but powerful spirit; it disdains all the finer distinctions between the parts of speech.
This highly virile and defiant dialect, and not the fossilized English of the school-marm and her books, is the speech of the Middle American of Joseph Jacobs' composite picture—the mill-hand in a small city of Indiana, with his five years of common schooling behind him, his diligent reading of newspapers, and his proud membership in the Order of Foresters and the Knights of the Maccabees.[14]Go into any part of the country, North, East, South or West, and you will find multitudes of his brothers—car conductors in Philadelphia, immigrants of the second generation in the East Side of New York, iron-workers in the Pittsburgh region, corner grocers in St. Louis, holders of petty political jobs in Atlanta and New Orleans, small farmers in Kansas or Kentucky, house carpenters in Ohio, tinners and plumbers in Chicago,—genuine Americans all, hot for the home team, marchers in parades, readers of the yellow newspapers, fathers of families, sheep on election day, undistinguished norms of theHomo Americanus. Such typical Americans, after a fashion, know English. They can read it—all save the "hard" words,i. e., all save about 90 per cent of the words of Greek and Latin origin.[15]They can understand perhaps two-thirds of it as it comes from the lips of a political orator or clergyman. They have a feeling that it is, in some recondite sense, superior to the common speech of their kind. They recognize a fluent command of it as the salient mark of a "smart" and[Pg186]"educated" man, one with "the gift of gab." But they themselves never speak it or try to speak it, nor do they look with approbation on efforts in that direction by their fellows.
In no other way, indeed, is the failure of popular education made more vividly manifest. Despite a gigantic effort to enforce certain speech habits, universally in operation from end to end of the country, the masses of the people turn almost unanimously to very different speech habits, nowhere advocated and seldom so much as even accurately observed. The literary critic, Francis Hackett, somewhere speaks of "the enormous gap between the literate and unliterate American." He is apparently the first to call attention to it. It is the national assumption that no such gap exists—that all Americans, at least if they be white, are so outfitted with sagacity in the public schools that they are competent to consider any public question intelligently and to follow its discussion with understanding. But the truth is, of course, that the public school accomplishes no such magic. The inferior man, in America as elsewhere, remains an inferior man despite the hard effort made to improve him, and his thoughts seldom if ever rise above the most elemental concerns. What lies above not only does not interest him; it actually excites his derision, and he has coined a unique word,high-brow, to express his view of it. Especially in speech is he suspicious of superior pretension. The school-boy of the lower orders would bring down ridicule upon himself, and perhaps criticism still more devastating, if he essayed to speak what his teachers conceive to be correct English, or even correct American, outside the school-room. On the one hand his companions would laugh at him as a prig, and on the other hand his parents would probably cane him as an impertinent critic of their own speech. Once he has made his farewell to the school-marm, all her diligence in this department goes for nothing.[16]The boys with whom he plays baseball speak a tongue that is not the one taught in school, and so do the youths with whom he will begin learning a trade tomorrow, and the girl he will marry later on, and the saloon-keepers, star pitchers, vaudeville comedians, business[Pg187]sharpers and political mountebanks he will look up to and try to imitate all the rest of his life.
So far as I can discover, there has been but one attempt by a competent authority to determine the special characters of this general tongue of themobile vulgus. That authority is Dr. W. W. Charters, now head of the School of Education at the University of Illinois. In 1914 Dr. Charters was dean of the faculty of education and professor of the theory of teaching in the University of Missouri, and one of the problems he was engaged upon was that of the teaching of grammar. In the course of this study he encountered the theory that such instruction should be confined to the rules habitually violated—that the one aim of teaching grammar was to correct the speech of the pupils, and that it was useless to harass them with principles which they already instinctively observed. Apparently inclining to this somewhat dubious notion, Dr. Charters applied to the School Board of Kansas City for permission to undertake an examination of the language actually used by the children in the elementary schools of that city, and this permission was granted. The materials thereupon gathered were of two classes. First, the teachers of grades III to VII inclusive in all the Kansas City public-schools were instructed to turn over to Dr. Charters all the written work of their pupils, "ordinarily done in the regular order of school work" during a period of four weeks. Secondly, the teachers of grades II to VII inclusive were instructed to make note of "all oral errors in grammar made in the school-room and around the school-building" during the five school-days of one week, by children of any age, and to dispatch these notes to Dr. Charters also. The result was an accumulation of material so huge that it was unworkable with the means at hand, and so the investigator and his assistants reduced it. Of the oral reports, two studies were made, the first of those from grades III and VII and the second of those from grades VI and VII. Of the written reports, only those from grades VI and VII of twelve typical schools were examined.
The ages thus covered ran from nine or ten to fourteen or fifteen, and perhaps five-sixths of the material studied came from[Pg188]children above twelve. Its examination threw a brilliant light upon the speech actually employed by children near the end of their schooling in a typical American city, and,per corollary, upon the speech employed by their parents and other older associates. If anything, the grammatical and syntactical habits revealed were a bit less loose than those of the authenticVolkssprache, for practically all of the written evidence was gathered under conditions which naturally caused the writers to try to write what they conceived to be correct English, and even the oral evidence was conditioned by the admonitory presence of the teachers. Moreover, it must be obvious that a child of the lower classes, during the period of its actual study of grammar, probably speaks better English than at any time before or afterward, for it is only then that any positive pressure is exerted upon it to that end. But even so, the departures from standard usage that were unearthed were numerous and striking, and their tendency to accumulate in definite groups showed plainly the working of general laws.[17]
Thus, no less than 57 per cent of the oral errors reported by the teachers of grades III and VII involved the use of the verb, and nearly half of these, or 24 per cent, of the total, involved a confusion of the past tense form and the perfect participle. Again, double negatives constituted 11 per cent of the errors, and the misuse of adjectives or of adjectival forms for adverbs ran to 4 per cent. Finally, the difficulties of the objective case among the pronouns, the last stronghold of that case in English, were responsible for 7 per cent, thus demonstrating a clear tendency to get rid of it altogether. Now compare the errors of these children, half of whom, as I have just said, were in grade III, and hence wholly uninstructed in formal grammar, with the errors made by children of the second oral group—that is, children of grades VI and VII, in both of which grammar is studied. Dr. Charters' tabulations show scarcely any difference in the[Pg189]character and relative rank of the errors discovered. Those in the use of the verb drop from 57 per cent of the total to 52 per cent, but the double negatives remain at 7 per cent and the errors in the case of pronouns at 11 per cent.
In the written work of grades VI and VII, however, certain changes appear, no doubt because of the special pedagogical effort against the more salient oral errors. The child, pen in hand, has in mind the cautions oftenest heard, and so reveals something of that greater exactness which all of us show when we do any writing that must bear critical inspection. Thus, the relative frequency of confusions between the past tense forms of verbs and the perfect participles drops from 24 per cent to 5 per cent, and errors based on double negatives drop to 1 per cent. But this improvement in one direction merely serves to unearth new barbarisms in other directions, concealed in the oral tables by the flood of errors now remedied. It is among the verbs that they are still most numerous; altogether, the errors here amount to exactly 50 per cent of the total. Such locutions asI had wentandhe seendiminish relatively and absolutely, but in all other situations the verb is treated with the lavish freedom that is so characteristic of the American common speech. Confusions of the past and present tenses jump from 2 per cent to 19 per cent, thus eloquently demonstrating the tenacity of the error. And mistakes in the forms of nouns and pronouns increase from 2 per cent to 16: a shining proof of a shakiness which follows the slightest effort to augment the vocabulary of everyday.
The materials collected by Dr. Charters and his associates are not, of course, presented in full, but his numerous specimens must strike familiar chords in every ear that is alert to the sounds and ways of thesermo vulgus. What he gathered in Kansas City might have been gathered just as well in San Francisco, or New Orleans, or Chicago, or New York, or in Youngstown, O., or Little Rock, Ark., or Waterloo, Iowa. In each of these places, large or small, a few localisms might have been noted—oisubstituted for ur in New York,you-allin the South, a few Germanisms in Pennsylvania and in the upper Mississippi[Pg190]Valley, a few Spanish locutions in the Southwest, certain peculiar vowel-forms in New England—but in the main the report would have been identical with the report he makes. That vast uniformity which marks the people of the United States, in political doctrine, in social habit, in general information, in reaction to ideas, in prejudices and enthusiasms, in the veriest details of domestic custom and dress, is nowhere more marked than in language. The incessant neologisms of the national speech sweep the whole country almost instantly, and the iconoclastic changes which its popular spoken form are undergoing show themselves from coast to coast. "He hurthisself," cited by Dr. Charters, is surely anything but a Missouri localism; one hears it everywhere. And so, too, one hears "she invitedhimandI," and "it hurtterrible," and "Isetthere," and "thishereman," and "no, Inever, neither", and "heain'there," and "where is heat?" and "it seemslikeI remember," and "if Iwasyou," and "usfellows," and "hegiveher hell." And "hetakenand kissed her," and "heloanedme a dollar," and "the man wasfoundtwo dollars," and "the beestanghim," and "Iwoulddathought," and "canI have one?" and "he gothisn," and "the bosslefthim off," and "the babyetthe soap," and "themare the kind I like," and "hedon'tcare," and "no one hastheirticket," and "howisthe folks?" and "if you wouldof gottenin the car you couldof rodedown."
Curiously enough, this widely dispersed and highly savory dialect—already, as I shall show, come to a certain grammatical regularity—has attracted the professional writers of the country almost as little as it has attracted the philologists. There are foreshadowings of it in "Huckleberry Finn," in "The Biglow Papers" and even in the rough humor of the period that began with J. C. Neal and company and ended with Artemus Ward and Josh Billings, but in those early days it had not yet come to full flower; it wanted the influence of the later immigrations to take on its present character. The enormous dialect literature of twenty years ago left it almost untouched. Localisms were explored diligently, but the general dialect went virtually unobserved. It is not in "Chimmie Fadden"; it is not in[Pg191]"David Harum"; it is not even in the pre-fable stories of George Ade, perhaps the most acute observer of average, undistinguished American types, urban and rustic, that American literature has yet produced. The business of reducing it to print had to wait for Ring W. Lardner, a Chicago newspaper reporter. In his grotesque tales of base-ball players, so immediately and so deservedly successful and now so widely imitated,[18]Lardner reports the common speech not only with humor, but also with the utmost accuracy. The observations of Charters and his associates are here reinforced by the sharp ear of one specially competent, and the result is a mine of authentic American.
In a single story by Lardner, in truth, it is usually possible to discover examples of almost every logical and grammatical peculiarity of the emerging language, and he always resists very stoutly the temptation to overdo the thing. Here, for example, are a few typical sentences from "The Busher's Honeymoon":[19]
I and Florriewasmarried the day before yesterday justlikeI told you wewasgoing to be.... Youwaswise to get married in Bedford, wherenot nothingis nearly half so dear.... The sum of what I havewrotedown is $29.40.... Allen told me Ishould oughtto give the priest $5.... I neverseenhim before.... I didn't used to eatnolunch in the playing season except when IknowedI was not going to work.... I guess the mealshascost me all together about $1.50, and I haveeatvery little myself....I was willing to tell her all aboutthemtwo poor girls.... They must not benomistake about who is the boss in my house. Some menletstheirwiferun all over them.... Allen haswentto a college football game. One of the reportersgivehim a pass.... He called up and said hehadn'tonly the one pass, but he was not hurting my feelingsnone.... The flat across the hall from thishereone is for rent.... If we shouldof boughtenfurniture it would cost us in the neighborhood of $100, even withoutnopiano.... I consider myself lucky tooffound out about this before it was too late and somebody else hadofgotten the tip.... It will always beourn, even when we move away.... Maybe you couldof didbetter if you hadof wentat it in a different way.... Bothherand youiswelcome at my house.... I neverseenso much winedrankin my life....
I and Florriewasmarried the day before yesterday justlikeI told you wewasgoing to be.... Youwaswise to get married in Bedford, wherenot nothingis nearly half so dear.... The sum of what I havewrotedown is $29.40.... Allen told me Ishould oughtto give the priest $5.... I neverseenhim before.... I didn't used to eatnolunch in the playing season except when IknowedI was not going to work.... I guess the mealshascost me all together about $1.50, and I haveeatvery little myself....
I was willing to tell her all aboutthemtwo poor girls.... They must not benomistake about who is the boss in my house. Some menletstheirwiferun all over them.... Allen haswentto a college football game. One of the reportersgivehim a pass.... He called up and said hehadn'tonly the one pass, but he was not hurting my feelingsnone.... The flat across the hall from thishereone is for rent.... If we shouldof boughtenfurniture it would cost us in the neighborhood of $100, even withoutnopiano.... I consider myself lucky tooffound out about this before it was too late and somebody else hadofgotten the tip.... It will always beourn, even when we move away.... Maybe you couldof didbetter if you hadof wentat it in a different way.... Bothherand youiswelcome at my house.... I neverseenso much winedrankin my life....
[Pg192]
Here are specimens to fit into most of Charters' categories—verbs confused as to tense, pronouns confused as to case, double and even triple negatives, nouns and verbs disagreeing in number,havesoftened toof,nmarking the possessive instead ofs,likeused in place ofas, and the personal pronoun substituted for the demonstrative adjective. A study of the whole story would probably unearth all the remaining errors noted in Kansas City. Lardner's baseball player, though he has pen in hand and is on his guard, and is thus very careful to writewould notinstead ofwouldn'tand evenam notinstead ofain't, offers a comprehensive and highly instructive panorama of popular speech habits. To him the forms of the subjunctive mood have no existence, andwillandshallare identical, and adjectives and adverbs are indistinguishable, and the objective case is merely a variorum form of the nominative. His past tense is, more often than not, the orthodox present tense. All fine distinctions are obliterated in his speech. He uses invariably the word that is simplest, the grammatical form that is handiest. And so he moves toward the philological millennium dreamed of by George T. Lanigan, when "the singular verb shall lie down with the plural noun, and a little conjugation shall lead them."
§ 3
The Verb—A study of the materials amassed by Charters and Lardner, if it be reinforced by observation of what is heard on the streets every day, will show that the chief grammatical peculiarities of spoken American lie among the verbs and pronouns. The nouns in common use, in the overwhelming main, are quite sound in form. Very often, of course, they do not belong to the vocabulary of English, but they at least belong to the vocabulary of American: the proletariat, setting aside transient slang, calls things by their proper names, and pronounces those names more or less correctly. The adjectives, too, are treated rather politely, and the adverbs, though commonly transformed into adjectives, are not further mutilated. But the verbs and pronouns undergo changes which set off the common speech very[Pg193]sharply from both correct English and correct American. Their grammatical relationships are thoroughly overhauled and sometimes they are radically modified in form.
This process is natural and inevitable, for it is among the verbs and pronouns, as we have seen, that the only remaining grammatical inflections in English, at least of any force or consequence, are to be found, and so they must bear the chief pressure of the influences that have been warring upon all inflections since the earliest days. The primitive Indo-European language, it is probable, had eight cases of the noun; the oldest known Teutonic dialect reduced them to six; in Anglo-Saxon they fell to four, with a weak and moribund instrumental hanging in the air; in Middle English the dative and accusative began to decay; in Modern English they have disappeared altogether, save as ghosts to haunt grammarians. But we still have two plainly defined conjugations of the verb, and we still inflect it for number, and, in part, at least, for person. And we yet retain an objective case of the pronoun, and inflect it for person, number and gender.
Some of the more familiar conjugations of verbs in the American common speech, as recorded by Charters or Lardner or derived from my own collectanea, are here set down:
[Pg198]
A glance at these conjugations is sufficient to show several general tendencies, some of them going back, in their essence, to the earliest days of the English language. The most obvious is that leading to the transfer of verbs from the so-called strong conjugation to the weak—a change already in operation before the Norman Conquest, and very marked during the Middle English period. Chaucer usedgrowedforgrewin the prologue to "The Wife of Bath's Tale," andrisedforroseandsmitedforsmoteare in John Purvey's edition of the Bible,circa1385.[40]Many of these transformations were afterward abandoned, but a large number survived, for example,climbedforclombas the preterite ofto climb, andmeltedformoltas the preterite ofto melt. Others showed themselves during the early part of the Modern English period.Comedas the perfect participle ofto comeanddiggedas the preterite ofto digare both in Shakespeare, and the latter is also in Milton and in the Authorized Version of the Bible. This tendency went furthest, of course, in the vulgar speech, and it has been embalmed in the English dialects.I seenandI knowed, for example, are common to many of them. But during the seventeenth century it seems to have been arrested, and even to have given way to a contrary tendency—that is, toward strong conjugations. The English of Ireland, which preserves many seventeenth century forms, shows this plainly.Pedforpaid,gotherforgathered, andruzforraisedare still in use there, and Joyce says flatly that the Irish, "retaining the old English custom [i. e., the custom of the period of Cromwell's invasion,circa1650], have a leaning toward the strong inflection."[41]Certain verb forms of the American colonial period, now reduced to the estate of localisms, are also probably survivors of the seventeenth century.
"The three great causes of change in language," says Sayce, "may be briefly described as (1) imitation or analogy, (2) a wish to be clear and emphatic, and (3) laziness. Indeed, if we choose to go deep enough we might reduce all three causes to the general one of laziness, since it is easier to imitate than to say[Pg199]something new."[42]This tendency to take well-worn paths, paradoxically enough, is responsible both for the transfer of verbs from the strong to the weak declension, and for the transfer of certain others from the weak to the strong. A verb in everyday use tends almost inevitably to pull less familiar verbs with it, whether it be strong or weak. Thusfedas the preterite ofto feedandledas the preterite ofto leadpaved the way forpledas the preterite ofto plead, androdeas plainly performed the same office forglode, andrungforbrung, anddrovefordoveandhove, andstolefordole, andwonforskun. Moreover, a familiar verb, itself acquiring a faulty inflection, may fasten a similar inflection upon another verb of like sound. Thushet, as the preterite ofto heat, no doubt owes its existence to the example ofet, the vulgar preterite ofto eat. So far the irregular verbs. The same combination of laziness and imitativeness works toward the regularization of certain verbs that are historically irregular. In addition, of course, there is the fact that regularization is itself intrinsically simplification—that it makes the language easier. One sees the antagonistic pull of the two influences in the case of verbs ending in-ow. The analogy ofknewsuggestssnewas the preterite ofto snow, and it is sometimes encountered in the American vulgate. But the analogy ofsnowedalso suggestsknowed, and the superior regularity of the form is enough to overcome the greater influence ofknewas a more familiar word thansnowed. Thussnewgrows rare and is in decay, butknowedshows vigor, and so dogrowedandthrowed. The substitution ofheerdforheardalso presents a case of logic and convenience supporting analogy. The form is suggested bysteered,fearedandcheered, but its main advantage lies in the fact that it gets rid of a vowel change, always an impediment to easy speech. Here, as in the contrary direction, one barbarism breeds another. Thustaken, as the preterite ofto take, has undoubtedly helped to make preterites of two other perfects,shakenandforsaken.
But in the presence of two exactly contrary tendencies, the one in accordance with the general movement of the language[Pg200]since the Norman Conquest and the other opposed to it, it is unsafe, of course, to attempt any very positive generalizations. All one may exhibit with safety is a general habit of treating the verb conveniently. Now and then, disregarding grammatical tendencies, it is possible to discern what appear to be logical causes for verb phenomena. Thatlitis preferred tolightedandhungtohangedis probably the result of an aversion to fine distinctions, and perhaps, more fundamentally, to the passive. Again, the use offoundas the preterite ofto fineis obviously due to an ignorant confusion offineandfind, due to the wearing off of-dinfind, and that oflitas the preterite ofto alightto a confusion ofalightandlight. Yet again, the use oftreadas its own preterite in place oftrodis probably the consequence of a vague feeling that a verb ending withdis already of preterite form.Shedexhibits the same process. Both are given a logical standing by such preterites asbled,fed,fled,led,read,deadandspread. But here, once more, it is hazardous to lay down laws, forshredded,headed,dreaded,threadedandbreadedat once come to mind. In other cases it is still more difficult to account for preterites in common use.Drugis wholly illogical, and so areclumandfriz. Neither, fortunately, has yet supplanted the more intelligible form of its verb, and so it is not necessary to speculate about them. As forcrew, it is archaic English surviving in American, and it was formed, perhaps, by analogy withknew, which has succumbed in American toknowed.
Some of the verbs of the vulgate show the end products of language movements that go back to the Anglo-Saxon period, and even beyond. There is, for example, the disappearance of the finaltin such words ascrep,slep,lep,swepandwep. Most of these, in Anglo-Saxon, were strong verbs. The preterite ofto sleep(slâepan), for example, wasslēp, and that ofto weepwasweop. But in the course of time bothto sleepandto weepacquired weak preterite endings, the first becomingslâepteand the secondwepte. This weak conjugation was itself degenerated. Originally, the inflectional suffix had been-deor-edeand in some cases-ode, and the vowels were always pronounced. The wearing down process that set in in the twelfth century disposed[Pg201]of the finale, but in certain words the other vowel survived for a good while, and we still observe it in such archaisms asbelovéd. Finally, however, it became silent in other preterites, andloved, for example, began to be pronounced (and often written) as a word of one syllable:lov'd.[43]This finald-sound now fell upon difficulties of its own. After certain consonants it was hard to pronounce clearly, and so the sonant was changed into the easier surd, and such words aspushedandclippedbecame, in ordinary conversation,pushtandclipt. In other verbs thet-sound had come in long before, with the degenerated weak ending, and when the finalewas dropped their stem vowels tended to change. Thus arose such forms asslept. In vulgar American another step is taken, and the suffix is dropped altogether. Thus, by a circuitous route, verbs originally strong, and for many centuries hovering between the two conjugations, have eventually become strong again.
The case ofheltis probably an example of change by false analogy. During the thirteenth century, according to Sweet,[44]"dwas changed totin the weak preterites of verbs [ending] inrd,ldandnd." Before that time the preterite ofsende(send) had beensende; now it becamesente. It survives in our modernsent, and the same process is also revealed inbuilt,girt,lent,rentandbent. The popular speech, disregarding the fact thatto holdis a strong verb, arrives atheltby imitation. In the case oftole, which I almost always hear in place oftold, there is a leaping of steps. Thedis got rid of without any transitional use oft. So also, perhaps, inswole, which is fast displacingswelled.Attacktedanddrowndedseem to be examples of an effort to dispose of harsh combinations by a contrary process. Both are very old in English.Boughtenanddreampt[Pg202]present greater difficulties. Lounsbury says thatboughtenprobably originated in the Northern [i. e., Lowland Scotch] dialect of English, "which ... inclined to retain the full form of the past participle," and even to add its termination "to words to which it did not properly belong."[45]I recorddreamptwithout attempting to account for it. I have repeatedly heard a distinctp-sound in the word.
The general tendency toward regularization is well exhibited by the new verbs that come into the language constantly. Practically all of them show the weak conjugation, for example,to phone,to bluff,to rubber-neck,to ante,to bunt,to wireless,to insurgeandto loop-the-loop. Even when a compound has as its last member a verb ordinarily strong, it remains weak itself. Thus the preterite ofto joy-rideis notjoy-rode, nor evenjoy-ridden, butjoy-rided. And thusbust, fromburst, is regular and its preterite isbusted, thoughburstis irregular and its preterite is the verb itself unchanged. The same tendency toward regularity is shown by the verbs of thekneel-class. They are strong in English, but tend to become weak in colloquial American. Thus the preterite ofto kneel, despite the example ofto sleepand its analogues, is notknel', nor evenknelt, butkneeled. I have even heardfeeledas the preterite ofto feel, as in "Ifeeledmy way," though herefeltstill persists.To spreadalso tends to become weak, as in "hespreadeda piece of bread." Andto peepremains so, despite the example ofto leap. The confusion between the inflections ofto lieand those ofto layextends to the higher reaches of spoken American, and so does that betweenlendandloan. The proper inflections ofto lendare often given toto loan, and soleanedbecomeslent, as in "Ilenton the counter." In the same wayto sethas almost completely supersededto sit, and the preterite of the former,set, is used in place ofsat. But the perfect participle (which is also the disused preterite) ofto sithas survived, as in "I havesatthere."To speedandto shoehave become regular, not only because of the general tendency toward the weak conjugation, but also for logical reasons. The prevalence of speed contests[Pg203]of various sorts, always to the intense interest of the proletariat, has brought such words asspeeder,speeding,speed-mania,speed-maniacandspeed-limitinto daily use, andspeededharmonizes with them better than the strongersped. As forshoed, it merely reveals the virtual disappearance of the verb in its passive form. An American would never say that his wife was wellshod; he would say that she wore good shoes.To shoesuggests to him only the shoeing of animals, and so, by way ofshoeingandhorse-shoer, he comes toshoed. His misuse ofto learnforto teachis common to most of the English dialects. More peculiar to his speech is the use ofto leaveforto let. Charters records it in "Washingtonleftthem have it," and there are many examples of it in Lardner.Spit, in American, has become invariable; the old preterite,spat, has completely disappeared. Butslit, which is now invariable in English (though it was strong in Old English and had both strong and weak preterites in Middle English), has become regular in American, as in "sheslittedher skirt."
In studying the American verb, of course, it is necessary to remember always that it is in a state of transition, and that in many cases the manner of using it is not yet fixed. "The history of language," says Lounsbury, "when looked at from the purely grammatical point of view, is little else than the history of corruptions." What we have before us is a series of corruptions in active process, and while some of them have gone very far, others are just beginning. Thus it is not uncommon to find corrupt forms side by side with orthodox forms, or even two corrupt forms battling with each other. Lardner, in the case ofto throw, hears "if he hadthrowed"; my own observation is thatthrewis more often used in that situation. Again, he uses "the rottenest I ever seengave"; my own belief is thatgiveis far more commonly used. The conjugation ofto give, however, is yet very uncertain, and so Lardner may report accurately. I have heard "Igiven" and "I would ofgave," but "Igive" seems to be prevailing, and "I would ofgive" with it, thus reducingto giveto one invariable form, like those ofto cut,to hit,to put,to cost,to hurtandto spit. My table of verbs shows[Pg204]various other uncertainties and confusions. The preterite ofto hearisheerd; the perfect may be eitherheerdorheern. That ofto domay be eitherdoneordid, with the latter apparently prevailing; that ofto drawisdrewif the verb indicates to attract or to abstract anddrawedif it indicates to draw with a pencil. Similarly, the preterite ofto blowmay be eitherblowedorblew, and that ofto drinkoscillates betweendrankanddrunk, and that ofto fallis still usuallyfell, thoughfallenhas appeared, and that ofto shakemay be eithershakenorshuck. The conjugation ofto winis yet far from fixed. The correct English preterite,won, is still in use, but against it are arrayedwanandwinned.Wanseems to show some kinship, by ignorant analogy, withranandbegan. It is often used as the perfect participle, as in "I havewan$4."
The misuse of the perfect participle for the preterite, now almost the invariable rule in vulgar American, is common to many other dialects of English, and seems to be a symptom of a general decay of the perfect tenses. That decay has been going on for a long time, and in American, the most vigorous and advanced of all the dialects of the language, it is particularly well marked. Even in the most pretentious written American it shows itself. The English, in their writing, still use the future perfect, albeit somewhat laboriously and self-consciously, but in America it has virtually disappeared: one often reads whole books without encountering a single example of it. Even the present perfect and the past perfect seem to be instinctively avoided. The Englishman says "Ihavedined," but the American says "Iam throughdinner"; the Englishman says "Ihadslept," but the American often says "Iwas donesleeping." Thus the perfect tenses are forsaken for the simple present and the past. In the vulgate a further step is taken, and "Ihave beenthere" becomes "Ibeenthere." Even in such phrases as "hehasn'tbeen here,"ain't(=am not) is commonly substituted forhave not, thus giving the present perfect a flavor of the simple present. The step from "Ihave taken" to "I taken" was therefore neither difficult nor unnatural, and once it had been made the resulting locution was supported by the greater[Pg205]apparent regularity of its verb. Moreover, this perfect participle, thus put in place of the preterite, was further reinforced by the fact that it was the adjectival form of the verb, and hence collaterally familiar. Finally, it was also the authentic preterite in the passive voice, and although this influence, in view of the decay of the passive, may not have been of much consequence, nevertheless it is not to be dismissed as of no consequence at all.
The contrary substitution of the preterite for the perfect participle, as in "I havewent" and "he hasdid," apparently has a double influence behind it. In the first place, there is the effect of the confused and blundering effort, by an ignorant and unanalytical speaker, to give the perfect some grammatical differentiation when he finds himself getting into it—an excursion not infrequently made necessary by logical exigencies, despite his inclination to keep out. The nearest indicator at hand is the disused preterite, and so it is put to use. Sometimes a sense of its uncouthness seems to linger, and there is a tendency to give it anen-suffix, thus bringing it into greater harmony with its tense. I find thatboughten, just discussed, is used much oftener in the perfect than in the simple past tense;[46]for the latterboughtusually suffices. The quick ear of Lardner detects various other coinages of the same sort, among themtooken, as in "little Al might oftookensick."[47]Haddenis also met with, as in "I would ofhadden." But the majority of preterites remain unchanged. Lardner's baseball player never writes "I havewritten" or "I havewroten," but always "I havewrote." And in the same way he always writes, "I havedid,ate,went,drank,rode,ran,saw,sang,wokeandstole." Sometimes the simple form of the verb persists through all tenses. This is usually the case, for example, withto give. I have noted "Igive" both as present and as preterite, and "I havegive," and even "I hadgive." But even here "I havegave" offers rivalry to "I havegive," and usage is not settled. So, too, withto come. "I havecome" and "I havecame" seem to be almost equally[Pg206]favored, with the former supported by pedagogical admonition and the latter by the spirit of the language.
Whatever the true cause of the substitution of the preterite for the perfect participle, it seems to be a tendency inherent in English, and during the age of Elizabeth it showed itself even in the most formal speech. An examination of any play of Shakespeare's will show many such forms as "I havewrote," "I ammistook" and "he hasrode." In several cases this transfer of the preterite has survived. "I havestood," for example, is now perfectly correct English, but before 1550 the form was "I havestonden."To holdandto sitbelong to the same class; their original perfect participles were notheldandsat, butholdenandsitten. These survived the movement toward the formalization of the language which began with the eighteenth century, but scores of other such misplaced preterites were driven out. One of the last to go waswrote, which persisted until near the end of the century.[48]Paradoxically enough, the very purists who performed the purging showed a preference forgot(though not forforgot), and it survives in correct English today in the preterite-present form, as in "I havegot," whereas in American, both vulgar and polite, the elder and more regulargottenis often used. In the polite speechgottenindicates a distinction between a completed action and a continuing action,—between obtaining and possessing. "I havegottenwhat I came for" is correct, and so is "I havegotthe measles." In the vulgar speech, much the same distinction exists, but the perfect becomes a sort of simple tense by the elision ofhave. Thus the two sentences change to "Igottenwhat I come for" and "Igotthe measles," the latter being understood, not as past, but as present.
In "I havegotthe measles"gotis historically a sort of auxiliary ofhave, and in colloquial American, as we have seen in the examples just given, the auxiliary has obliterated the verb.To have, as an auxiliary, probably because of its intimate relationship with the perfect tenses, is under heavy pressure, and[Pg207]promises to disappear from the situations in which it is still used. I have heardwasused in place of it, as in "before the Elkswascome here."[49]Sometimes it is confused ignorantly with a distinctof, as in "she wouldofdrove," and "I wouldofgave." More often it is shaded to a sort of particle, attached to the verb as an inflection, as in "he would 'atole you," and "who could 'atook it?" But this is not all. Having degenerated to such forms, it is now employed as a sort of auxiliary to itself, in the subjunctive, as in "if you hadofwent," "if it hadofbeen hard," and "if I hadofhad."[50]I have encountered some rather astonishing examples of this doubling of the auxiliary: one appears in "I wouldn't had 'awent." Here, however, theamay belong partly tohadand partly towent; such forms asa-goingare very common in American. But in the other cases, and in such forms as "I had 'awanted," it clearly belongs tohad. Sometimes for syntactical reasons, the degenerated form ofhaveis put beforehadinstead of after it, as in "I couldofhad her if I hadofwanted to."[51]Meanwhile,to have, ceasing to be an auxiliary, becomes a general verb indicating compulsion. Here it promises to displacemust. The American seldom says "Imustgo"; he almost invariably says "Ihaveto go," or "Ihave gotto go," in which last case, as we have seen,gotis the auxiliary.
The most common inflections of the verb for mode and voice are shown in the following paradigm ofto bite: