Describing Prescriptivism: Usage Guides and Usage Problems in British and American English 9780367207182, 0367207184

Table of contents :
Preface --
Abbreviations --
1. Introduction --
2. The origin of the usage guide --
3. The usage guide and the HUGE database --
4. The writers and the publishers --
5. Usage problems: Pet linguistic peeves --
6. The language of prescriptivism --
7. Public awareness of prescriptivism --
8. The end of prescriptivism? --
Appendix 1. Feedback on a blogpost (January 2015) --
Appendix 2. Usage problems in the HUGE database --
Appendix 3. Usage guide writers interviewed --
Appendix 4. Usage guide writers' credentials --
Appendix 5. The metalinguistic categories from Sundby et al. (1991) --
References --
Index.

Citation preview

“A welcome volume on an ever-topical matter – how to avoid the censure of self-appointed guardians of style – by a world authority on the subject. This book can be recommended to everyone interested in the background to widespread ideas about correctness in language.” Raymond Hickey, University of Duisburg and Essen, Germany

Describing Prescriptivism

Describing Prescriptivism provides a topical and thought-provoking analysis of linguistic prescriptivism in British and American English, from a historical as well as present-day perspective. Focusing on usage guides and usage problems, the book takes a three-fold approach to present an in-depth analysis of the topic, featuring: • •

•

a detailed study of the advice provided in usage guides over the years; an authoritative comparison of this advice with actual usage as recorded in British and American corpora, including the HUGE (Hyper Usage Guide of English) database – developed specifically to enable this line of study – as well as more mainstream corpora such as COCA, COHA and the BNC; a close analysis of the attitudes to particular usage problems among the general public, based on surveys distributed online through the “Bridging the Unbridgeable” research project’s blog.

With extensive case studies to illustrate and support claims throughout, this comprehensive study is key reading for students and researchers of prescriptivism, the history of English and sociolinguistics. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade is Chair in English Sociohistorical Linguistics, University of Leiden, The Netherlands, and has published extensively on the latter end of the English standardisation process.

Describing Prescriptivism

Usage Guides and Usage Problems in British and American English

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade The right of Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid, author. Title: Describing prescriptivism : usage guides and usage problems in British and American English / Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019017175| ISBN 9780367207182 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429263088 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: English language–Usage. | English language– Standardization. | Standard language–Great Britain. | Standard language–United States. Classification: LCC PE1460 .T54 2019 | DDC 428.1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017175 ISBN: 978-0-367-20718-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-26308-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

Contents

Preface Abbreviations

x xiv

1

Introduction Language rules – usage problems – usage guides 1 Usage guides and their readers 3 Presenting usage advice 5 Writers of usage guides 6 Studying usage guides and usage problems 7 Prescriptivism and the standardisation process 9 Studying prescriptivism 13 Usage guides: their birth and popularity 15 Usage problems and the general public 17 Analysing usage guides 18

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The origin of the usage guide No English Academy 21 Taking over the role of an academy 22 From criticism of “our best Authors” to “old chestnuts” 24 Baker and Lowth 27 The rise of prescriptivism 29 The origin of the usage guide tradition in America 31 The early American usage guides’ intended audience 33 Usage guides criticised 36

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The usage guide – and the HUGE database A style guide hitting the news 38 Style manuals and usage guides 39 Defining the usage guide 41

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Contents

Intended readers 43 Collecting and selecting usage guides 47 The HUGE database: usage guides 54 The HUGE database: usage problems 58 Exploring the database: some examples 62 4

The writers and the publishers Publishers’ projects 69 Popular – and other – authors writing usage guides 70 Usage guide writers as language experts 73 Age and profession 76 Motivations for publishing 80 Other credentials 87 The final tally: who has the most credentials? 91 The publishers 99

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Usage problems: pet linguistic peeves Presentation and selection 105 People’s pet peeves 109 Analysing usage problems 117 Could of – likely – the placement of only 119 Flat adverbs and try and 137 Pet peeves for all 146

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The language of prescriptivism Normative metalanguage 149 Metalinguistic commentary in the usage guides 153 Usage criticism by survey respondents 161 The Harper Dictionary panellists’ metalinguistic commentary 168 A continuous tradition of disapproval? 176

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Public awareness of prescriptivism 181 Prescriptivism and popular culture 181 Usage problems in English literature 186 Letters to the editor and other expressions of linguistic awareness 197 Age, social class and linguistic awareness 203 Usage guides and actual usage 205

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The end of prescriptivism? The linguists and the novelists 210 The linguists and the general public 214 The end of the standard, the end of prescriptivism? 216 Alive and well 218

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Appendix 1: Feedback on a blogpost (January 2015) Appendix 2: Usage problems in the HUGE database Appendix 3: Usage guide writers interviewed Appendix 4: Usage guide writers’ credentials Appendix 5: The metalinguistic categories from Sundby et al. (1991) References Index

220 222 224 231 248 250 267

Preface

“Describing prescriptivism” seems a contradiction in terms. Descriptive and prescriptive approaches to language are usually seen as irreconcilable opposites or, at best, as occupying two distant ends on a scale of language study, and linguists are not often engaged in both fields at the same time. And yet, this is exactly what this book sets out to do. It studies prescriptivism from a linguistic – more specifically a sociolinguistic – perspective, by analysing what Milroy and Milroy (2012) describe as the final stage of the English standardisation process, prescription. It was this stage that gave rise to a new type of publication, the usage guide or language advice manual, that served to advise socially mobile people on how to adapt their language use to that of the groups of speakers they wished to integrate with. This happened at different points in time in England and America and for different reasons, but the usage guide became equally popular in both countries. What is more, its popularity has grown considerably over the years, a phenomenon that is not self-evident from the many titles already available, and given the existence of easily accessible language advice websites and fora online. English, according to Milroy and Milroy (2012), has a complaint tradition, which makes people write letters to newspapers or, in this day and age, post so-called “below-the-line” comments whenever newspapers like The Guardian write about linguistic issues online. The usage guide as a text type is part of the same tradition, originating from usage criticism in reviews published in the public press during the 1750s and 1760s as discussed by Carol Percy (2008, 2009). Well over two hundred years later, Robert Burchfield published The Spoken Word (1981) on the basis of complaints the BBC had been receiving from its listeners about perceived errors in the language of newsreaders (1981: 7–8). Later still, Grammar Girl, a popular interactive online usage advice website, took to responding to queries from readers relating to usage problems like whether it is alright (all right?) to use a split infinitive. Morana Lukač (2018) calls this phenomenon “grassroots prescriptivism”. All this provides the raw material for this book: usage guides and their contents, from the earliest days of the tradition onwards, as well as the

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general public’s linguistic comments, often on the same features. There is a strong connection between the two in other ways as well. More often than not, usage guides are produced by writers who are not linguists, and although they have become more descriptive in the course of time, a prescriptive approach continues to be taken by usage guide writers even today. Such usage guides are very popular because they offer clear and straightforward usage advice on questions of linguistic correctness. The market thus proves an important factor in this respect. What is more, the metalanguage adopted by writers of usage guides and people who complain about language use is often remarkably similar; with both groups, emotions run high when language correctness is at stake. And language professionals – editors, translators, text writers, teachers – tend to be caught by the need to guard a standard of correctness. All this deserves to be analysed. This book is not, however, about the standard language ideology – or ideologies, because they differ on both sides of the Atlantic as Lesley Milroy (2001) has shown – since such studies have been produced by others already (e.g. Cameron 1995; Ager 2003). Instead, it focuses on the main product of that ideology, the usage guide, its function, its approach to contested usage features, its popularity, the authority (or lack of it) of its authors, and their generally assumed influence on the language. In addition, it will draw upon attitudes by the general public to usage problems like the placement of only or the choice between try to and try and, for the purpose of which various usage attitude surveys were conducted. This study is thus empirical in nature, and draws on methods tested in earlier publications to analyse the different types of data collected. While making use of corpora for evidence of actual usage in relation to the pre and proscription of language features, this book is not a corpus linguistic study as such – corpus data is primarily drawn upon to offer a wider perspective on pronouncements of presumed linguistic correctness. The book, moreover, aims to stimulate further research in the field, and to this end, various case studies are presented of particular usage problems as they are treated by usage guides as well as in the light of attitudes to their contested nature found among the general public, always against the background of actual usage. In the course of the book, I will argue that prescriptivism represents a further stage in the English standardisation process as described by the Milroys, emerging from what first set out to be the fairly neutral, final prescription stage. This further stage is characterised on the one hand by what might be called prescriptive activism, as most recently illustrated by people like the Bristol Grammar Vigilante, widely discussed in the press in April 2017, who assume authority and correct language errors accordingly. In its most extreme form this attitude has led to death threats uttered in response to suggestions for abolishing certain ineffective usage rules, as Kate Burridge experienced (2010). At the same time, there is a new tendency among the general public to oppose the need to adhere to age-old

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prescriptions like the avoidance of end-placed prepositions, as well as the continuing spread of linguistic features that used to be strongly stigmatised and are thus proscribed in the usage guides. The unbounded spread of the split infinitive is a good example of this, and Kostadinova (2018a) shows that, for American English at least, this feature is currently ceasing to be a usage problem. For all that, prescriptivism is alive and well, as witness the proliferation of usage guides today, even though it finds expression in ways that are different from what we find in earlier works. The general public in any case is more involved in the tradition than ever before. Research for this book was done within the project Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public, funded by NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, which ran from 2011 to 2016 at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. The project included the development of a tool for doing the kind of research that will be reported on here, the HUGE database of usage guides and usage problems (Straaijer 2014a), and it has resulted in various publications by its members: Carmen Ebner, Viktorija Kostadinova, Morana Lukač, Robin Straaijer and myself. The project was, moreover, an attempt at trying to interact through the social media with the different groups specified in its title. To this end, the project’s blog has proved invaluable, for my own work in particular. Blog posts with queries and research findings have brought us into contact with many people interested in prescriptivism, and to an important extent this book is the result of a collaborative effort in this respect. Starting with David Crystal, whose help was invaluable in obtaining permission to make some of the copyrighted material for the HUGE database publicly available, I would therefore like to gratefully acknowledge (to use a split infinitive) the assistance of all those who, in one way or another, contributed to the project. In addition to those already mentioned, along with the other people involved in the project – Rob Goedemans, Cynthia Lange, Inge Otto, Emily Maas and Lyda Fens-de Zeeuw – I am grateful to all those whose expertise I was able to draw upon, or whose help I profited from in multiple ways: Frances Austin, Joan Beal, Paul Bennett, Cyprian Blamires, Cath Bromwich, Ulrich Busse, Jeremy Butterfield, Martin Cutts, Andrew Delahunty, Malcolm Edwards, Ed Finegan, Tim and Rebecca Gowers, Mike Hannay, Robert Lacey, Bernard Lamb, Zachary Leader, Matthew Mansfield and Scott Morton from Nielsen BookScan, Sarah Marriott, Nicola McLelland, Christine Mummery, Patricia O’Conner, Jonathon Owen, Alicia Parks, Tony Parr, Carol Percy, Steven Pinker, Graham Pointon, Lizi Richards, John Sadler, Kay Sayce-Powell, Anne Schröder, Susan de Smit, Matthijs Smits, Adrian Stenton, Caroline Taggart, Wim Tigges, Clive Upton, Tim Waller and Kate Wild. Hopefully no-one got left out. Grateful acknowledgement also goes to NWO for funding the project as well as to the referees of the book proposal submitted to Routledge and to Francesca McGowan, Nadia Seemungal-Owen and Lizzie Kent, and my absolutely

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indispensable copy-editor Andrew Melvin, for seeing the book through the publishing process. But also to the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics for hosting the project and the many events we organised, as well as for granting me a semester of teaching relief after the project was formally completed, to enable me to complete this book. My final words here concern my dedication of this book to Noel Osselton, my PhD supervisor at the time, who told me in 1982, when he exchanged Leiden for Newcastle, to buy a copy of Mittins et al.’s Attitudes to English Usage (1970) because he thought I would be interested in the subject. How right he was. Searching for the word “Mittins” in the present book produces forty-six hits: the book has both been a major source for the Bridging the Unbridgeable project and for the book that follows. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Leiden/The Hague, Spring 2019

Abbreviations

ANB BBC BNC COCA COD COHA ECCO EFL HUGE MEU MLA NCTE ODNB OED OUP SEU

American National Biography British Broadcasting Corporation British National Corpus Corpus of Contemporary American English The Concise Oxford Dictionary Corpus of Historical American English Eighteenth Century Collections Online English as a Foreign Language Hyper Usage Guide for English Modern English Usage (Fowler 1926) Modern Language Association National Council for Teachers of English Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford English Dictionary Oxford University Press Survey of English Usage

Chapter 1

Introduction

Language rules – usage problems – usage guides How many usage problems are there in the English language? Chapman (2017) calculated that there must be at least 10,000 of them, and perhaps many more. He based this figure on Jack Lynch’s book The Lexicographer’s Dilemma (2009: 13), which reads that “one estimate places the count around 3,500”. These, however, are general rules of grammar, which do not necessarily reflect usage problems like the question whether it is I or it is me is correct, and whether only may be used as a clause modifier, as in He only had one chapter to write, or whether it should appear immediately next to the noun phrase it modifies, one chapter, in this example. An inventory of the first four letters of H.W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) produced over 1,000 items alone.1 Moreover, many usage problems dealt with by Fowler, according to Paul Bennett, cannot easily be found in the book because they do not have independent entries but are scattered throughout in the work. Another problem with Fowler’s book is that it contains entries like “Pairs and snares” – not very helpful for readers looking for guidance on specific usage questions. Bennett therefore produced a so-called Wordfinder for the second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1965), as a “handy companion to … the world’s most famous book on modern English usage” (1996: title-page). The document covers well over 9,000 features, in addition to the ones in Modern English Usage itself. Chapman’s estimate may therefore well be correct. Usage problems can be identified for all levels of language use – spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, grammar (syntax and morphology) and style. They are items of language that are perceived as problematical by the general public because they show variation in usage and therefore make people insecure about which variant to select (cf. Algeo 1991a: 3–4). One of them is generally believed to be more correct than the other, which, it is believed, must consequently be avoided. Usage problems are dealt with in usage guides like Fowler’s Modern English Usage or its predecessor The

2

Introduction

King’s English (1906), published two decades earlier with his brother Frank. “Fowler”, as Modern English Usage is often referred to,2 was by no means the first usage guide to be published. For many people it is a kind of archetypal usage guide, which is believed to have given birth to the usage advice manual (cf. Algeo 1991a: 6), but usage guides are actually much older than that. They originated in England during the late eighteenth century, and subsequently made their appearance in America during the 1840s. In both countries, usage guides became very popular. S.A. Leonard, in The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage (1929), for instance, notes that “handbooks of abuses and corrections … were … freely produced in the nineteenth century” (1929: 35) (cf. Finegan 1998: 564), and this has continued ever since. At present, the most recently published usage guides include Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style (2014), which first appeared in the US and shortly afterwards in the UK, and Oliver Kamm’s Accidence Shall Will Happen: The non-pedantic Guide to English Usage, published in the UK in 2015. In the same year, another American usage guide appeared: Stephen Spector’s May I Quote You on That? A Guide to Grammar and Usage. Older authoritative titles are reissued as well, and recent examples, all published by Oxford University Press (OUP), include the facsimile reprint of the “Classic First Edition” of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2009), with a preface by David Crystal; a fourth edition of Fowler by Jeremy Butterfield (2015); and another fourth edition, this time of Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage, now called Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016).3 The revised title suggests the end result of a gradual usurpation of Fowler’s former position of authority: from A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (1998; cf. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 1926), through Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed., 2009, cf. Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 3rd ed. by Burchfield) to, finally, Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016). This looks like a battle for the market (with OUP engaging in a competition with itself), but it also looks as if Garner (or his publisher) adopted the role of a one-man academy (cf. Edwards 2012: 21). Spector (2015) was likewise published by OUP. Another revised and updated edition of a usage guide, Sir Ernest Gowers’s Complete Plain Words (1954), was produced by his great-granddaughter Rebecca Gowers in 2014. The book was published by Penguin (under the imprint of Particular Books), as was Pinker’s The Sense of Style. Penguin also reissued Kingsley Amis’s The King’s English in 2011, which had originally been published posthumously in 1997 by HarperCollins. The new edition of the book includes an introduction by the author’s son, the novelist Martin Amis, evidently with a view to drawing attention to the book in the media – which it did: the introduction was published in The Guardian on 28 May 2011, a month before the new edition was scheduled to appear. The publisher of Oliver Kamm’s Accidence Will Happen is Weidenfeld &

Introduction

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Nicolson: different publishers have a clear interest in usage guides, which have proved to be a highly marketable product.

Usage guides and their readers But who reads these usage guides? David Crystal read Fowler’s Modern English Usage from cover to cover when preparing his introduction for the OUP facsimile reprint,4 and so did Paul Bennett while compiling his Wordfinder as a practical companion to the book’s second edition. But Crystal and Bennett hardly comprise the book’s intended readership, since it was not practical advice they were seeking. To find out who actually used Fowler, I carried out a brief survey in December 2007 among the members of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas for a paper in 2008 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Fowler’s birth. The return of the questionnaire was very poor indeed: only sixteen people completed it. What is more, most of the respondents reported that they didn’t use Fowler, while others said they only used the book for the purpose of academic research. One – tongue-in-cheek – comment read that the informant’s in-laws owned a copy which they frequently drew upon during linguistic arguments. Another informant, not part of the original Henry Sweet Society questionnaire population, similarly wrote that she only consulted the book “to win tedious arguments about grammar”.5 One of the Henry Sweet Society informants, a native speaker of English and still a PhD student at the time, said that he regularly consulted the first edition of the book if he had questions concerning linguistic correctness. This raises the issue of whether buyers of OUP’s reissue of Fowler’s Classic First Edition, which dates back to 1926, will actually consult the book to obtain usage advice as well, even though the recommendations date back almost a hundred years. Fowler’s Modern English Usage came out in three subsequent editions, by Sir Ernest Gowers in 1965, by Robert Burchfield in 1996 and most recently by Jeremy Butterfield in 2015. Gowers left the second edition largely unchanged, since OUP wished “to keep as much of Fowler as possible”, and according to D.M. Davin, assistant secretary to the delegates of the Press at the time, he only engaged in “removing purely lexicographical matter in order to save space; pruning out dead wood …; ceasing to flog any dead horses; removing false prophecies; and inserting fresh abuses which would have qualified for reprobation had they existed in Fowler’s time” (as cited in Scott 2009: 191). The third edition, however, was updated considerably. Burchfield considered the original work a “fossil”, a kind of “monument to all that was linguistically acceptable in the standard English of the southern counties of England in the first quarter of the twentieth century” (1996: xi). As for the fourth edition, Robin Straaijer (2016a), in his review of the book, cites Butterfield saying that Modern

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English Usage has been “thoroughly revised and updated to reflect how English speakers the world over use the language now, in the twenty-first century” (Butterfield 2015: vii). If readers today consult the book’s first edition, they will therefore be drawing on a norm of correctness that was considered outdated even by Burchfield’s time. But doing so may after all be intentional. With the occasional exception, then, linguists, and perhaps academics in general, are not part of the typical reading public of usage guides like Fowler. Checking among her students, as Anne Curzan did while writing Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History (2014), to assess the popularity of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (2003), she found that many of them indeed hadn’t read it (2014: 41). Fowler’s Modern English Usage lacks a preface in which he might have outlined his intended readership, explaining who he expected to benefit from his usage advice. Burchfield, however, in his introduction to the third edition, quotes from a letter by Fowler to his publisher which describes the work’s intended readers as “the half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities who wants to know Can I say …” (1996: vii). Burchfield himself provides a somewhat more detailed glimpse of the kind of reader interested in Fowler at the time he was working on the new edition, mentioning that people “looked anxious” when he told them about the project. “People of all kinds,” he wrote, continue to tell me that they use it “all the time”, and that “it never lets them down”. In the space of three weeks a judge, a colonel, and a retired curator of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum told me on separate social occasions that they have the book close at hand at all times. (Burchfield 1996: ix) Whether this is indeed a reference to real people or not, these readers all seem typically middle class and fairly well-educated, members of the professional classes but who are not quite familiar with what constitutes the norm of correctness in English usage. An example of an actual person consulting Fowler is Sir Winston Churchill, who is frequently quoted as having uttered the words “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put”, thus allegedly avoiding the stigmatised stranded preposition. On the final page of her biography of Henry Fowler, Jenny McMorris writes: “Churchill, planning the invasion of Normandy, snapped at an aide to check a word in ‘Fowler’” (2001: 217). She based this on Churchill’s own book, The Second World War (1948–1963), so the account is most likely true.6 Though a member of the aristocracy, Churchill was not highly educated in an academic sense,7 so he may have felt insecure about questions of linguistic correctness. His famous attempt at avoiding a stranded

Introduction

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preposition, however, is argued by Ben Zimmer in Language Log (2004) to be a misattribution: the source is Gowers’s Plain Words (1948), which reads: “It is said that Mr. Winston Churchill once made this marginal comment against a sentence that clumsily avoided a prepositional ending” (1948: 73). Gowers’s words suggest that already at the time, shortly after the war, the story was indeed no more than that.8

Presenting usage advice Usage guides are reference works, and many of them are presented like that, with the items listed in alphabetical order. Fowler’s Modern English Usage is an example of this, and so are the very first American usage guide, Seth T. Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector; or Vocabulary of the Common Errors of Speech (1847); Partridge’s Usage and Abusage (1947);9 Gowers’s ABC of Plain Words (1951); Current English Usage by Frederick T. Wood (1962); and The Queen’s English by Harry Blamires (1994). Reference works like these are not meant to be read from cover to cover but to be consulted on individual search questions. The very first English usage guide, according to S.A. Leonard (1929: 35), Robert Baker’s Reflections on the English Language (1770), however, was not presented alphabetically: its 127 rules of usage, which mostly concern vocabulary and grammar, are listed in no apparent order, though occasionally one rule inspired another. Baker’s book therefore must have been meant to be read in its entirety if readers wished to profit from its usage advice, as is also suggested by its lengthy preface, a “rambling” piece of text (Baker 1770: xxvi) that is completely unrelated to the subject of the book. The King’s English by Fowler and Fowler (1906) and Gowers’s Plain Words (1948) and his Complete Plain Words (1954) are not in alphabetical order either, and there are many other examples like that. Of the most recent ones, the sections containing usage advice in Pinker (2014) and Kamm (2015) are presented alphabetically. Usage guides thus clearly have different purposes: they may be used for mere consultation, in the case of debated usage items or to solve an instance of linguistic insecurity on the part of the reader, or they may serve as textbooks in teaching. This is how Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (1959) originated, by far the most popular English usage guide ever (Pullum 2010a: 34). See the introduction to the book, which reads: At the close of the first World War, when I [E.B. White] was a student at Cornell, I took a course called English 8. My professor was William Strunk Jr. A textbook required for the course was a slim volume called The Elements of Style, whose author was the professor himself. The year was 1919. The book … had been privately printed by the author. (Strunk and White 1979: xi)

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Introduction

The book is probably also the most controversial usage guide ever published, as may be clear from Geoffrey Pullum’s article “50 years of stupid grammar advice” in The Chronicle of Higher Education of 17 April 2009 (see also Pullum 2010a). For all that, it continues to be widely used (cf. Hinrichs et al. 2015: 812). Providing usage advice is a serious matter, and some writers are very much aware of this. Henry Fowler, Jenny McMorris writes, fretted in his letters to Oxford [i.e. OUP, the publisher of The King’s English] about the tone of the book, … for he and [his brother] Frank were beginning to fear that it would be ‘more serious reading’ than they had intended: ‘We try to throw in a little elegant flippancy here & there, but grammar is a very solemn theme …’. (McMorris 2001: 59) Similar “elegant flippancy” may be found in Modern English Usage, but it was one of the book’s characteristics that suffered from Burchfield’s editing for the third edition. Lynne Truss likewise adopted a light-hearted approach, though this is one of the things Eats, Shoots & Leaves has been both praised and criticised for.10 A humorous approach may have ensured that the book was indeed read, but whether it had any effect on actual usage is a different matter. That it influenced at least some readers, who took the apostrophe correction kit that came with the book too seriously, is clear from a story reported in the Independent on Sunday in August 2008 and recounted by Joan Beal (2010). Two American young men, who roamed across America using marker pens and Tipp-Ex to correct bad spelling and grammar on less-than-literate signs, went a little too far when they amended a historic, hand-painted noticeboard at Grand Canyon National Park. They were arrested, given probation, ordered to pay a $3,035 (£1,640) repair bill, and banned from all US national parks. (as quoted by Beal 2010: 60)

Writers of usage guides Lynne Truss is described on Wikipedia as “an English writer, journalist and professional pedant”, and she was in her late forties when she published Eats, Shoots & Leaves.11 The American writer Bill Bryson published a usage guide too, called The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words (1984), well before he became a well-known travel writer. Born in 1951, he was much younger than Truss when he wrote the book, and this is unusual. Writers of usage guides tend to be middle-aged, as in the case of Fowler (b. 1858), Strunk (b. 1869) and Gowers (b. 1880). E.B. White, born in 1899, was sixty when his revised version of Strunk’s

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Elements of Style came out. White is probably best known in America for his children’s novel Charlotte Web (New York, 1952) (Lange 2013), but in the American National Biography (ANB) he is also described as a literary journalist. Simon Heffer (b. 1960), the author of Strictly English: The Correct Way to Write … and Why it Matters (2010) and its alphabetical version Simply English: An A–Z of Avoidable Errors (2014), is described on the website of The Telegraph as having held “the posts of chief leader writer, political correspondent, parliamentary sketchwriter, comment editor and deputy editor”.12 Mignon Fogarty (b. 1967), the writer behind the popular online usage advice website Grammar Girl,13 used to be a science writer; Caroline Taggart, the author of two guides on English usage, one published in 2008 with J.A. Wines and the other in 2010, describes herself on her website as “a freelance editor … focusing on adult nonfiction”;14 Kingsley Amis was a novelist, and so is Rebecca Gowers. To be sure, there are linguists, too, who published usage guides: examples are David Crystal; Pam Peters, who published two usage guides, one for English generally (2004) and the other for Australian English (2007); and Steven Pinker, though he is a psycholinguist – or psychologist according to Bauer and Trudgill (1998: xv) – rather than a descriptive linguist like Peters. Usage guides are therefore a peculiar product, since you don’t have to be a linguist to be able to write one, and they have been so from the earliest days onwards: Robert Baker was a hack writer, who hit upon the idea of publishing a usage guide because he believed a book like that might sell (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2010: 16). Henry Fowler started his career as a teacher, Sir Ernest Gowers was a civil servant, and Oliver Kamm is a journalist writing for The Times. Usage guides are largely the domain of the non-linguist, and not only at the receiving end, as I argued above. In this respect they are not very different from the normative grammars produced in the eighteenth century: eighteenth-century grammarians included clergymen, scientists and lawyers as well as teachers (female ones, too). In the absence of an academy like the Académie française in France or the Real Academia in Spain, authoritative English dictionaries, grammars and, indeed, usage guides were published, as it were, from below, by whoever felt inclined or entitled to write one. In this process, publishers played a major role because they were the ones who recognised usage guides – and normative grammars 250 years earlier – as a marketable product, thus identifying a niche in the market. And the role of publishers in the process has continued to this very day, despite the easy access to online usage advice that we now have.

Studying usage guides and usage problems Especially the latter point suggests that further exploration of usage guides is called for, and this was one of the aims of the research project Bridging

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the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public. In this project we studied English usage guides and usage problems as well as attitudes to English usage, focussing in particular on British and American English (cf. Mair 2006, which does likewise). To this end, the Hyper Usage Guide for English (HUGE) was created, a database of selected usage guides and usage problems which was launched in 2014 (Straaijer 2014a; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2018b). As a tool for research HUGE is also available to users outside the project,15 such as linguists doing research on the topic, but also other people interested in prescriptivism or correctness in language use – teachers, editors, text writers and translators, but also writers of usage guides themselves. In addition, we hope to interest the “General Public” in our work: anyone with an interest in usage in general, perhaps to win linguistic battles, as in the instances mentioned above, or those who wish to form their own opinions in the usage debate by taking the wider – historical – perspective offered by the database. The HUGE database, in short, offers information for anyone interested in particular questions of linguistic correctness, whether for research purposes or to obtain genuine usage advice. At the same time, the Bridging the Unbridgeable project has been in touch with the general public – in addition to linguists and language professionals – to obtain feedback on questions of linguistic correctness. “Laypeople”, as Deborah Cameron calls them in Verbal Hygiene (1995), care “about questions of right and wrong, good and bad, the ‘use and abuse of language’” (1995: x). In our blog, http://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/, we posted questions and surveys, inviting readers to participate and thus interact with us for the purpose of our research. In addition, we ran an interactive feature on questions of English usage in English Today between 2014 and 2016, such as on the acceptability of have went, about which we wished to find out whether it was a feature of non-standard English or an actual usage problem; on flat adverbs; the plural of octopus; the non-literal meaning of literally; and the dangling free adjunct, as in Pulling the trigger, the gun went off. This example sentence was taken from Mittins et al. (1970), who investigated the feature’s acceptability in the late 1960s, finding an overall acceptability at the time of only 17% (1970: 14) (calculated across the different styles analysed: informal speech, informal writing, formal speech, and formal writing). Dangling adjuncts have long been treated as a usage problem because the subject of the verb in the subclause, pulling, differs from that of the main clause, went off, so that grammatically speaking the sentence doesn’t make sense. We were interested in finding out if usage had become more acceptable over the years, though we found that of the four features analysed in Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Ebner (2017) – try and, the placement of only, the split infinitive and the dangling participle – acceptability had increased least since the late 1960s. Much in this book, but also in our other work, has thus profited from input from

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readers of the blog, who generously supplied feedback on the posts and surveys we published online for that purpose.

Prescriptivism and the standardisation process If the word prescriptivist in the Bridging the Unbridgeable project’s title was employed as a catch-all term to refer to language professionals, the word prescriptivism carries strong negative overtones, particularly for linguists, and this is also true for the term “prescriptive” (Leech et al. 2009: 263). Chalker and Weiner (1994: 265) note in the Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar that prescriptive is generally used “pejoratively”, while Edwards (2012: 17) even calls it a new “four-letter word”. This is why Deborah Cameron coined the allegedly more neutral expression “verbal hygiene”, which she defined very generally as “the urge to meddle in matters of language” (1995: vii). That the word prescriptivISM has such a strongly negative ring to it is due to the generally disparaging connotations of all words ending in -ism. Modern formations like racism, sexism, ageism, classism, weightism and, recently, accentism, reflect a “belief in the superiority of one [group of people] over another” or show “discrimination or prejudice against [groups of people] on the basis of [age, weight, accent and so on]” (OED, s.v. ism; -ism). The word prescriptivism is only some seventy years old, with the first quotation dating from 1948 and the first recorded user being the Czech linguist Ivan Poldauf: 1948 I. POLDAUF On Hist. Probl. Eng. Gram. 118 Prescriptivism is the form of authoritarianism characteristic of the English … grammarians of the latter half of the 18th century. (OED, s.v. prescriptivism n.) For the attribution of the next quotation, we need to engage in some detective work, since the OED only provides the source, not the author: 1953 Mod. Lang. Notes 68 580 Linguists..object not so much to prescriptivism per se..as to those hoary handbook prescriptions which have no basis in actual cultivated usage. (OED, s.v. prescriptivism n.) Searching the relevant issue of Modern Language Notes takes us to the American linguist Thomas Pyles, who published Words and Ways of American English (1952) and The Origins and Developments of the English Language (1964). Pyles was a professor of English at various American universities, according to his obituary in American Speech by John Algeo (1981). The OED quotation in which Pyles used the word prescriptivism is from a review he wrote of the book British and American English since

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1900 by Eric Partridge and John W. Clark (1951) (the quotation refers to the part of the book written by Clark). The link with Partridge is of interest in that he was the author of Usage and Abusage (1947), a usage guide which has already been mentioned, and its contents might well meet with Pyles’s characterisation as “hoary handbook prescriptions” in the OED quotation above. We do find Pyles’s name mentioned in the OED in relation to the first attestation of the noun prescriptivist: 1952 T. PYLES Words & Ways Amer. Eng. xi. 272 He is likely not to see any reason why absolute uniformity, the desideratum of the prescriptivist, should be any particular concern of the student of language even if it were possible of attainment. (OED, s.v. prescriptivist, A.n.) Whether Pyles can also be credited as the first user of the adjective prescriptivist is unclear; here, again, the OED provides only the journal, not the author, as the source for the word: 1954 College Eng. 15 396/1 Two of the three objectionable forms..are older than the prescriptivist objection to them. (OED, s.v. prescriptivist, B. adj.) College English is a journal issued by the American National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE). Searching for the words prescriptivism and prescriptivist in the British National Corpus (BNC), a 100-million-word collection of spoken and written British English covering the period 1980–1993, suggests that the words made it to the UK only in the 1990s. Using the Google Ngram viewer, an interface developed to search Google Books, to trace the history of these words suggests that usage of prescriptivism and prescriptivist, and particularly that of the first word, increased significantly in the 1960s in American English, while British English was to follow only two decades later. This suggests that both words, and possibly prescriptivism as such as well, first obtained a relatively firm footing in the US before spreading to the UK. The word prescriptive, however, was in use much earlier, and despite the absence of any precise data on the first linguistic use of the word in the OED, the linguist Otto Jespersen is cited as having used prescriptive, alongside descriptive, which had already been used in a linguistic sense in the late 1880s, in a translation from a German book by the Neogrammarian Hermann Paul: 1933 O. JESPERSEN Essent. Eng. Gram. i. 19 Of greater value, however, than this prescriptive grammar is a purely descriptive grammar. (OED, s.v. prescriptive, 1a.)

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1888 H. A. STRONG tr. H. Paul Princ. Hist. Lang. i. 2 Descriptive Grammar has to register the grammatical forms and grammatical conditions in use at a given date within a certain community speaking a common language. (OED, s.v. descriptive, 3b.) Prescriptivism, however, is not quite the same thing as “prescription”: Leech et al. (2009: 263) consider prescription a “fairly neutral term”, and, historically speaking, it is the final stage of the English standardisation process as described by Milroy and Milroy in Authority in Language (2012). Prescription followed upon the Codification stage in this process, when rules of the language were laid down in normative grammars and dictionaries, largely during the eighteenth century. The most authoritative works that contributed to this stage in the process were Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Robert Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) and John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791) (Beal 2003: 84). The authority which particularly the works by Johnson and Lowth acquired is largely due to efforts of their publishers: Johnson’s Dictionary has been described as a publishers’ project (Reddick 1996: 20), and, though Lowth’s grammar did not actually originate as such, the Short Introduction owes much of its popularity to the careful marketing by its publisher, Robert Dodsley (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2011). As a stage in the English standardisation process, prescription follows naturally upon the codification of the rules that were considered to make up standard English, and Milroy and Milroy explain the rise of the new stage by the fact that “speakers then have access to dictionaries and grammar-books, which they regard as authorities” (2012: 22). Prescription as such is therefore indeed neutral enough as Leech at al. claim, and as a stage in the standardisation process it led to the birth of usage guides as a new text type, which is the topic of this book.16 That prescription gave rise to prescriptivism, in the sense defined by the OED as “The practice or advocacy of prescriptive grammar; the belief that the grammar of a language should lay down rules to which usage must conform” (OED, s.v. prescriptivism n.), may be viewed as the result of the popular belief, or ideology, that “the ‘language’ is enshrined in these books [i.e. normative grammars and dictionaries, and later in usage guides] … rather than in the linguistic and communicative competence of the millions who use the language every day” (Milroy and Milroy 2012: 22–23). According to the account presented by the Milroys, the final stages of the English standardisation process are based on the popular conviction that a language can be adapted to make it better and more correct, much in line with early eighteenth-century ideas like those expressed by Jonathan Swift in his “Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue” (1712). One way of doing so, it is thought, would be by making the

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language invariable and uniform and by eliminating all undesirable variants from it. Milroy and Milroy, however, argue that since language cannot be fixed permanently, unlike, say, weights or measures, linguistic standardisation is a never-ending process. Consequently, in their view, the prescription stage will never end, and this goes a long way towards explaining why usage guides have continued to be published since the early days of this stage in the English standardisation process. What this view does not explain is why usage guides are published in increasing numbers during the twentieth century with peaks appearing (for the UK in any case) in the 1950s and 1980s (see Chapter 3), and why publication continues even when newer and more accessible forms of obtaining usage advice are readily available online or in other electronic forms. Prescriptivism should therefore in my view be seen as yet another stage in the standardisation process, following upon the prescription stage in the model presented in Milroy and Milroy (2012). With the words prescriptivist and prescriptivism being only relatively recent additions to the English language, the phenomenon of language prescription acquired the negative overtones that are enshrined in these terms and that has culminated in the kind of public activism described by Beal (2010) and that hit the public press in the case of the Bristol Grammar Vigilante mentioned in the Preface. As I will discuss in Chapter 7, it is also evident in the more general public engagement with the subject. According to this view, and as I argue in The Bishop’s Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism (2011), the eighteenth century should no longer be seen as the age of prescriptivism (cf. Beal 2004: 105; Auer 2009): it is only in the course of the nineteenth century that prescriptivism takes off in full earnest. During the prescriptivism stage speakers and writers of English feel increasing pressure to adhere to the rules that were codified in English grammars and were subsequently collected in usage guides for the purpose of maintaining the standard, inspiring a strong sense of linguistic insecurity. Since there never was any institutional force at work in the form of an English Academy that would impose a standard of correctness on the language user, the pressure came – and continues to do so – from below, from individual writers and publishers who all had something to gain in the process, though none of their publications ever managed to acquire the definitive stamp of authority in matters of linguistic correctness. Linguists may want to argue that prescriptivism is a stage in the English standardisation process which the language user is trapped in. As Cameron (1995: 3–5) notes, for linguists prescriptivism is a “bad or wrong thing”, and, as Leech et al. explain, “any attempt to prescribe correct usage (or proscribe incorrect usage) is a throwback to earlier generations, when doctrinaire linguistic attitudes (often ill-informed) were rife, and understanding of language and language change was obscured by bigotry” (2009: 263). For all that, as will

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become clear in the course of this book, the tide seems to be turning, and there is evidence that prescriptivism is taking a different direction.

Studying prescriptivism Prescriptivism has had an enormous influence on the language user, particularly in shaping their attitudes to the language. This may be seen in literature but also, more recently, in popular culture, as I will show in Chapter 7. And as Chapter 6 will demonstrate, the way in which the general public condemns particular instances of debated usage is very similar to what we find in many usage guides, even very recent ones. Linguists, however, do not as a rule show an interest in prescriptivism. Traditionally, according to Cameron (1995), many introductions to linguistics open by stating that linguistics is a science which takes a descriptive, not a prescriptive approach. This is evident from the OED quotation from Jespersen (1933) cited above for the word prescriptive, but also from John Lyons’s Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, which includes a section headed “Linguistics is a descriptive, not a prescriptive, science” (1968: 42–44). There, Lyons points out: The linguist’s first task is to describe the way people actually speak (and write) their language, not to prescribe how they ought to speak and write. In other words, linguistics … is descriptive, not prescriptive (or normative). (1968: 43) Lyons here proposes the term “normative” as an alternative to “prescriptive”, not a very helpful suggestion, since it reflects the rather oversimplified view that has been responsible for the condemnation of the eighteenth-century normative grammars as being, by definition, prescriptive (cf. the quotation from Poldauf cited above). A more nuanced view is provided by Emma Vorlat, who proposes a threefold distinction that allows us to do greater justice to the work of the eighteenth-century grammarians: (1) descriptive registration of language, without value judgments and including ideally […] all language varieties; (2) normative grammar, still based on language use, but favoring the language of one or more social or regional groups and more than once written with a pedagogical purpose; (3) prescriptive grammar, not based on usage but on a set of logical (or other) criteria. (Vorlat 1979: 129; see also Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2000: 877) Curzan (2014) argues that prescriptivism should be treated as a topic within the field of sociolinguistics. Thus far, the only general introduction

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to sociolinguistics I have indeed come across that deals with the topic is Introducing Sociolinguistics by Mesthrie et al. (2009). I, too, believe that prescriptivism is part of sociolinguistics (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2011), not only because prescriptivism evolved as an ideological expression from the final stage in the English standardisation process onwards or because people concerned with usage problems and writers of usage guides form a distinct sociolinguistic category, but also because “sociolinguistic considerations”, as Edmund Weiner calls them (1988: 173), play a major role in the identification of usage problems by authors of usage guides. A good example of this is the origin of the proscription of the split infinitive, which is often illustrated with the phrase “to boldly go where no man has been before”, from the beginning of the popular science fiction series Star Trek. The feature is criticised because the infinitive in English is constructed with to (as in to go), which is considered to be inseparable from the verb, largely since the verb as a category, like all parts of speech, has been adopted directly from the Latin grammatical tradition (cf. ire, “to go”). The term “split infinitive” refers to verb phases in which to + verb is broken up by the insertion of an adverb. Split infinitives have been in the English language since at least the fourteenth century (Mittins et al. 1970: 70), but usage came to be associated with “uneducated persons” in 1834 in the New-England Magazine according to R.W. Bailey in NineteenthCentury English (1996: 248). The construction thus came to be listed as a usage problem in usage guides, first in the American Live and Learn (1856) and subsequently in Henry Alford’s The Queen’s English, published in England in 1864. Why only some non-standard usages developed into usage problems while others did not, or why this happened differently in different varieties of English, as with have went, which is only an American usage problem and not a British English one (Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Kostadinova 2015) – these are important questions that need to be studied in detail. Edmund Weiner, who is one of the editors of the OED, also wrote a usage guide, The Oxford Guide to English Usage. The book first came out in 1983, and a second edition was published ten years later, revised jointly with Andrew Delahunty. Weiner wrote an article, “On editing a usage guide” (1988), which appeared in a Festschrift for Robert Burchfield on the occasion of the latter’s sixty-fifth birthday. Burchfield had recently completed the four-volume Supplement to the OED (1972–1986) and had just embarked upon a revision of Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Weiner’s article provides an important model for the classification of entries in usage guides (cf. Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2015), and will accordingly be used here as well. Weiner is, furthermore, of interest in that he is a linguist (more specifically a lexicographer) who produced a usage guide, the type of book that is typically associated with non-linguists. Weiner is not an exceptional case: I’ve already mentioned other examples of linguists

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involved in giving usage advice in usage guides, one of them being Pam Peters. Like Weiner, Peters wrote an important article for our work within the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, reviewing the developments usage guides underwent in the course of time (Peters 2006). In her account she detects considerable progress in the selection and discussion of usage problems, which ranges from a predominantly personal, ipse dixit, approach, through reliance on usage panels, to writers drawing on language corpora to describe usage. Peters herself set up a series of questionnaires when she was engaged on her own usage guide, which investigated the general user’s views on particular usage problems, but this is by no means the way all modern writers of usage guides collect their data today. Pinker, for instance, writes in The Sense of Style that his final chapter, called “Telling right from wrong”, is “a judicious guide to a hundred of the most common issues of grammar, diction (word choice), and punctuation” (2014: 200), but without explaining how this choice was made, nor, for that matter, how he arrived at the views presented in his discussion of these items. The notion of ipse dixit authority seems to be at work here, too. While he does deal with the split infinitive and with items like less/fewer, his list doesn’t include, for instance, the placement of only (he only had/had only one chapter to write); does that mean that this is not a usage problem in his eyes any longer? Peters notes the “lack of lateral referencing” as a typical characteristic of usage guides, by which she means the use of secondary source material in the writing of usage guides; she interprets this as “a reluctance to refer … to the work of other usage commentators” (2006: 761). Fowler (1926), indeed, doesn’t provide any references, nor did Baker (1770) or the author of Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence (1856), but Hall (1917), Partridge (1947), Amis (1997), Heffer (2010) and others do, so this is not as general a characteristic of usage guides as Peters suggests.

Usage guides: their birth and popularity While usage guides form the domain of prescriptivists, the general public, as the third group identified in the Bridging the Unbridgeable project’s subtitle, is a major player in the field of prescriptivism, too. Joan Beal argues in her book English in Modern Times (2004) that the eighteenth-century grammarians “have left us a legacy of ‘linguistic insecurity’” (2004: 123). Again, this identifies the normative grammarians of the period as the source of the current negative views on prescriptivism, in agreement with how modern linguists view them, but I believe that the situation is a little more complicated. It is not so much the grammarians themselves that are to blame as the fact that, due to a lack of what Curzan calls “institutional prescriptivism”, there developed in the course of the history of English a strong strand of “individual prescriptivism”.17 When it became clear in

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the early eighteenth century that England would not have an academy like the one in France, private individuals took it upon themselves to produce the type of reference work that would have been the main product of an English Academy, a normative grammar of English (see Chapter 2). Around the same time, we see the beginning of “error hunting”: criticism in the public press of grammatical and other errors in newly published books (Percy 2008, 2009). The practice not only left its trace on Lowth’s grammar (1762), which exposed the grammatical errors committed by “our best Authors”, but it also led to Baker’s Reflections on the English Language (1770). This work was the first usage guide proper, because of its primary purpose to identify linguistic mistakes and correct them. During the 1760s, the publishers discovered that normative grammars were a marketable product, largely emerging from a demand from readers who were beginning to profit from changing social opportunities due to the early effects of the Industrial Revolution (see Fitzmaurice 1998; Beal 2004: 5–6). Though in the early days the publication of usage guides was very much a process driven by individuals like Baker, who thought they might try their luck on the publishing market, by the time Fowler published his Dictionary of Modern English Usage in 1926 this had changed. The book was part of a project initiated by Henry and his brother Frank, which, as they wrote in a letter to Charles Cannan, the secretary to the board of Delegates of OUP, was to result in “a sort of English composition manual, from the negative point of view, for journalists and amateur writers” (as cited in McMorris 2001: 58). This led to The King’s English, which came out in a first print run of 3,000 copies in 1906. Despite considerable criticism when the book appeared, it sold very well and a second edition was produced almost at once (McMorris 2001: 65). A shortened version of The King’s English was published two years later, which, McMorris writes, was so popular that it “outlive[d] its authors by many years, being finally put out of print in 1969 after fourteen impressions and sales of 40,000 copies” (2001: 92). Modern English Usage, published nearly twenty years later but compiled by Henry alone because Frank had died in 1918, proved an even greater success: “more than 10,000 copies were sold in the first three months and 60,000 in the first year” (McMorris 2001: 178). Sir Ernest Gowers, who published a revised edition of the work in 1965, “estimate[d] that more than half a million copies had been sold by 1957”, according to Tony Bex (1999: 93). Gowers’s own Plain Words, too, proved immediately popular upon publication in 1948: though intended as a usage manual for civil servants, Ann Scott writes in her grandfather’s biography that the book “became an almost instant best-seller, running to seven reprints in the first year alone” (2009: 176). As with cookery books, today’s publishers have discovered that manuals providing usage advice sell very well, even though, as I will discuss in Chapter 4, sales figures are never quite as high as they used to be. In the absence of an officially

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designated authority that could have imposed a single, not necessarily quite uniform, model of linguistic correctness, the initiative fell to “entrepreneurs” with an interest in the subject (cf. Finegan 1998: 121). Though it is of course the writers of usage guides who produce the actual books, I will show that it was the publishers who played a major role in the process: just as with the eighteenth-century normative grammars, they are the real entrepreneurs in the usage advice business. Rather than the normative grammarians from the eighteenth century it is therefore first and foremost today’s publishers who feed the insecurity of the common speaker and writer by continuing to bring out new usage guides or new editions of older usage guides: after all, as Ulrich Busse, the author (with Anne Schröder) of several studies of usage problems in English, once said, “insecurity sells”.

Usage problems and the general public The publication of Harry Ritchie’s book English for the Natives in 2013, however, suggests that the tide is turning. Ritchie, who is a writer and journalist, just like quite a few authors of usage guides, provides an informed account both of the history of the English language and of its grammar. His main aim is to show that there is more to English grammar than the standard variety alone, and with his book he tries to do what he accuses linguists of not doing: meet the challenge posed by the fact that “traditional grammars and language guides continue to be churned out, full of bilge …” (2013: 6). He argues, for instance, that innit “has been lambasted as a sign of the decline of our once noble language/moral standards/western civilisation” because it is associated with usage by speakers “who are non-white, working class and young”. It therefore is “a prime example”, he continues, “of a supposedly linguistic judgement being based entirely, entirely on social prejudice”. Innit thus meets the requirements of being considered a usage problem, and it does indeed occur in some – not all – usage guides I have studied. The Oxford A–Z of English Usage, for instance, describes innit as “an informal way of saying ‘isn’t it’” (Butterfield 2007: 85), while Lamb, in The Queen’s English and How to Use It (2010), calls it “a slovenly way of saying isn’t it?” (2010: 23), which is a common way of denouncing what is believed to constitute bad grammar (L. Milroy 1998). The difference between these two descriptions, moreover, shows that usage guides have not generally become more descriptive in the course of time. I will show in the course of this book that two trends can be distinguished in this respect, with usage guides on the one hand becoming more descriptive, while on the other hand usage guides like Lamb’s continue to be produced as well. Oliver Kamm is a journalist, too, and he writes a column on issues of prescriptivism in The Times. As he explains in his book Accidence Will Happen (2015) (a rather more descriptive usage guide than Lamb’s) as well as in the podcast

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“Between you and I the English language is going to the dogs” (2014), prescriptive rules are primarily the result of conventions, and like Ritchie he aims to reassure English native speakers that there is no need to feel intimidated by the outpour of usage guides telling them how poor their language is. Writers like Ritchie and Kamm have accepted the challenge to try and fight linguistic insecurity in this respect. Our regular invitations to readers of the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog to provide feedback on usage problems should be seen in the same light: we were (and are) interested in finding out what speakers and writers of English think about particular instances of disputed usage in order to obtain insights into the tensions that are known to exist between the prescriptions found in usage guides and actual usage. To give an example of such tensions: Ritchie, despite arguing that “English grammar is actually quite happy to split infinitives”, advises his readers to avoid the construction simply because “the no-split-infinitives regulation is still established” (2013: 177, 180), and this is indeed the attitude taken by many editors and translators (and even teachers like myself). Readers of the blog, however, argue that language is changing – “evolving”, as they often put it – and that usage advice should reflect this, with one reader saying that the split infinitive creates “new, more intense” verb phrases, like permanently delete instead of the simple verb delete.18 Posting usage surveys on the blog has also allowed us to test relatively informally to what extent the attitudes to the usage problems analysed by Mittins et al. in the late 1960s have changed over the years (see Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Ebner 2017). We can thus say with a fair amount of confidence that very unique, which was the least acceptable of the usage problems analysed by Mittins et al., has increased in acceptability over the years, rising from an average general acceptability of 11% in the late 1960s (1970: 14) to a rating of only 4.4% “unacceptable under any circumstances” today.19 Findings like these can be used for further, more systematic analysis by anyone with an interest in prescriptivism.

Analysing usage guides This book takes a descriptive approach to prescriptivism, and in doing so it draws on the information on usage guides and usage problems in the HUGE database (along with the literature on these subjects), on responses to surveys posted on the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog and on research done on the subject in recent years. For a detailed account of the present state of the study of prescriptivism in English (with a special focus on American English), for instance, see Kostadinova (2018a, Chapter 2). In The Stories of English, David Crystal writes: “We are coming towards the close of a linguistically intolerant era” (2004: 525). Anne Curzan

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doesn’t agree with this, thinking that, should Crystal be right, there may be different developments going on in the UK compared to the US, where prescriptivism is still very much alive (2014: 171). But it is not true for the UK either (cf. Beal 2018). Both countries witness a steady stream of new and revised older usage guides. In both countries prescriptivism is a frequent topic in the press, and in both countries the general public has strong attitudes towards particular features that to them represent usage problems (see Ebner 2017 on British and Kostadinova 2018a on American English). There are differences in these attitudes, and, as the chapters below will demonstrate, also with respect to the criticism of features in these two language varieties, as well as in what lies behind the strong prescriptive attitudes in both countries. Prescriptivism, moreover, has been gaining considerable academic interest in recent years. While in 1988 Edmund Weiner was still able to say that the usage guide was a “neglected genre” (1988: 171), this can no longer be said today: recent collections of papers regularly include studies of prescriptivism (e.g. Dossena 2015; Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Percy, 2017), while my own English Usage Guides: History, Advice, Attitudes (2018) and the special issue of English Today (2018c) are entirely devoted to the subject. Serious academic interest, finally, is also evident from the fact that well-established linguists like Steven Pinker, and David Crystal and Pam Peters before him, did not consider it beneath themselves to provide usage advice, even though usage guides have largely been the domain of non-linguists. They continue to be published by non-linguists as well: in this respect there has been an ongoing tradition since their earliest days, one that doesn’t, as I will demonstrate in this book, show the expected descriptive progress across the board. Usage guides are a most peculiar type of publication that is well worth looking at in more detail.

Notes 1 Kaunisto (2017: 206), basing himself on an analysis of ten usage guides, notes: “Garner [(2003)] contains over 9,000 entries, Fowler [(1926)] over 6,000 and Peters [(2004)] over 4,000, whereas Crystal [1984] (2000)] is the smallest, with 376 entries in 127 pages”. Garner’s fourth edition (2016), however, is advertised as containing “over 6,000 entries, essays, and citations”, but whether this entails a significant reduction compared to the work’s earlier editions is unclear: cf. Straaijer (2018a), who comments on the growth of Garner’s book with every new edition. 2 In September 2017, the word was finally given a place in the OED (see https:// bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/2011/09/16/fowler-into-the-oed/). 3 Throughout the present book, bold type is used for emphasis. 4 This he explained at the workshop “Normative Linguistics”, ISLE-1, Freiburg, 2008. 5 Tony Bex likewise writes that “many of my contemporaries are familiar with [Fowler’s Modern English Usage], but largely as a volume that occupied the family bookshelf alongside the Bible and a dictionary” (1999: 93).

20

Introduction

6 Another example of Churchill drawing on Fowler is reported by Sir Ernest Gowers: one of Churchill’s members of staff was directed to Modern English Usage when confusing intensively and intensely (Bex 1999: 93). 7 For much of the biographical information about people referred to in this book, and unless stated otherwise, I will draw on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) for British writers and the American National Biography (ANB) for American ones. In the case of Churchill, the ODNB reads that he was believed to be “not clever enough for university”. 8 Ritchie (2013: 205), too, calls it an “urban legend”. The anecdote is retold in several British and American usage guides in the HUGE database: Crystal ([1984] 2000), Mager and Mager (1993), Brians (2003), The American Heritage Guide (2005), Sayce (2006) and Lamb (2010). 9 The work was first published in America, in 1942. The first British edition dates from 1947. 10 See del Rosario Medina Sánchez (2013). Caroline Taggart, in Appendix 3, relates the same experience. 11 See www.lynnetruss.com/. 12 See www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/comment/columnists/simonheffer/?show PageNumber=2. 13 See www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl. 14 See www.carolinetaggart.co.uk/about. 15 Access is provided upon request. See the project website for further information: http://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/. Due to copyright restrictions, however, unfortunately not all material in the database is open to outside users. 16 The term “text type” is used in my discussion of usage guides as having “specific functions and recurring linguistic features” and as being characterised by the “writer’s’ intentions and the readers’ expectations” (Görlach 2004: 8). 17 For these terms, see Curzan (2014: 16–18). Crystal (2004: 523) uses the term “institutionalized prescriptivism” in the narrower sense of referring to the traditional methods of teaching grammar in the schools, down to, in the UK at least, the 1960s and 1970s. 18 See the discussion following the post “To boldly go where no man has been before”, 15 November 2011 (http://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/2011/11/15/toboldly-go-where-no-man-has-one-before/). 19 The Mittins survey was repeated in eleven usage polls on the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog at https://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/usage-polls/. The question on very unique is part of the 4th Usage Poll. Since the polls have remained open, the figures may be slightly different from those presented here, which represent the state of affairs at the time of writing this book.

Chapter 2

The origin of the usage guide

No English Academy The full title of the first English usage guide, by Robert Baker, reads: Reflections on the English Language, in the Nature of Vaugelas’s Reflections on the French. Vaugelas’s book was a usage guide, which had been published in France in 1647 under the auspices of the Académie française, and in his own book Baker explained why he thought something similar would be useful for English as well. He did so in a 32-page public letter to King George III, where we find the following quotation: My … Proposal is that your Majesty would at some leisure Hour take it into Consideration whether it might not be proper to establish in London an Academy of the Nature of that of the Belles Lettres at Paris, and of several in Italy. This seems to be a Thing extremely wanted among us. Our Language, as has been often observed, is manly and expressive: but our Writers abound with Incorrectnesses and Barbarisms: for which such an Establishment might in a great Measure be a Cure. (1770: i–ii) Invoking the King as the intended patron of his proposed project is in line with attempts at seeking to establish an institution that would impose a system of linguistic correctness from above, but his suggestion of setting up an English Academy along the example of the French and Italian academies comes rather late in the day.1 There had been a veritable clamour for an English Academy around the turn of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, starting with Dryden in 1679 and continued by Addison, Swift and Defoe – all of them well-established and popular literary authors (see, for example, Lynch 2009). The proposals would have met with success if Queen Anne, much in favour of an academy and a potential patron of the project, hadn’t died in 1714. Anne Curzan’s distinction between institutional and individual prescriptivism, referred to in Chapter 1, is useful to explain what happened next:

22

The origin of the usage guide

when attempts failed that would have led to the establishment of an officially sanctioned institution that could regulate the language from above by publishing an authoritative grammar and dictionary, private individuals stepped in. This is, indeed, the traditional account of what happened, and confirmation has been looked for in the large-scale increase in the publication of English grammars during the second half of the eighteenth century. Scholars don’t cease to be amazed by the differing numbers of grammars listed in Alston’s Bibliography of the English Language (1965) between the first and second halves of the century: grammatical activity increased considerably, with only 32 titles being listed for the eighteenth century down to 1750 and about five times as many for the second half of the century. This suggests that it took a while for individual prescriptivism to get going on any kind of scale; in reality, we first see the after-effects of the original idea that an academy might be made responsible for imposing a norm of correctness, followed by the identification by the publishers, rather than individual writers, of a market for normative grammars. We first find evidence of all this in a pamphlet from 1712 called Bellum Grammaticale, where we can identify the influence of individuals other than grammar writers foreshadowing the role later to be played by the publishers – or booksellers, as they used to be called.

Taking over the role of an academy The Bellum Grammaticale was published anonymously. It describes three grammars that had recently appeared, A Grammar of the English Tongue (1711), also published anonymously but attributed to John Brightland (d. 1717), James Greenwood’s Essay towards a Practical English Grammar (1711) and The English Grammar by Michael Maittaire (1712). Focussing primarily on the first two works, the author of the pamphlet argues that the Brightland grammar is the superior of the two. Astrid BuschmannGöbels (2008) believes that the author of the pamphlet must have been Charles Gildon, who is described in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) as “a versatile professional writer, producing translations, biographies, essays, plays, verse, fictional letters, tales, and criticism as required”. The ODNB entry, moreover, reads that “Gildon believed that Swift had plagiarized his own scheme for an English academy”, so here we have another advocate of the academy project. Buschmann-Göbels also provides convincing arguments to show that Gildon was actually the author of Brightland’s grammar: there is a hidden reference to his name in the book (“(G) is hard before (i) in the following Words; as, Argyle, begin, gibberish, … Gilbert, gild, gilder, Gildon, a Sirname”, 1711: 40), while parts of the grammar also appeared in another book by Gildon, The Complete Art of Poetry (1718). What, then, was his relationship with John Brightland, and why was the grammar attributed to Brightland rather than

The origin of the usage guide

23

Gildon? Brightland’s name does appear on the grammar’s title-page: the book was published “for John Brightland”, thus suggesting that Brightland had sponsored its publication rather than being the actual author. Publishing grammars anonymously was far from unusual at the time: even Lowth’s grammar did not bear his name on the title-page (that is, of the regular editions of the book), and there were many other such grammars. Gildon, the ODNB informs us, worked for Brightland as a clerk and as the editor of the journal of an insurance company where Brightland worked as a manager. Brightland does not have an entry in the ODNB, but some information about him can be found by searching for him in the database Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). This collection includes some 200,000 books published during the eighteenth century, and it allows for different kinds of searches, including looking for information in the books’ front matter. Books at the time could be published through subscription, which meant that people paid part of the price of the book beforehand in exchange for having their names mentioned in subscription lists that would be included in the book. Brightland’s name appears in seven books published between 1706 and 1715, and in several of these he is identified as a vintner from Southwark. As a London merchant with money to spare, and recognising the need to publish an English grammar (possibly suggested to him by his employee Charles Gildon), Brightland was thus instrumental in the publication of this book. So it is indeed “Brightland’s grammar”, but in a different sense than commonly supposed (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2012a). The book contains a dedication to Queen Anne, in which the French Academy is mentioned as having produced a French grammar as its “First Labour”. Gildon evidently hoped to interest this potential patron of the English Academy in his own grammar, seeking to acquire the ultimate stamp of authority for his work, and this is what he was aiming for when publishing the Bellum Grammaticale, the purpose of which was to promote his own grammar. Though Gildon’s grammar never acquired official authority, it was still fairly popular. Alston (1965) mentions eight editions before the 1760s in his bibliography of English grammars. Its popularity even spread abroad: we know of at least one Dutch user of the grammar, a clergyman who translated Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa (1747–1748), called Johannes Stinstra. Stinstra owned several reference works to help him with his translation work, including the sixth edition of Gildon’s Grammar of the English Tongue (1735) (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2012b: 311–312). Ironically, however, the popularity of this grammar was eclipsed by the work Gildon had attempted to disparage in favour of his own: James Greenwood’s two grammars, published in 1711 and 1737, were issued in five and nine editions respectively, so it is Greenwood’s grammars which proved most popular during the first half of the eighteenth century, not Gildon’s.

24

The origin of the usage guide

The title of Greenwood’s second grammar, The Royal English Grammar, shows that he, too, sought royal patronage, and he dedicated his grammar to the Princess of Wales, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, the wife of Frederick, the eldest son of George II. Gildon and Greenwood can thus both be seen as vying for recognition of their respective grammars as the most authoritative text in the field, both seeking royal support in the process. It still remained for a dictionary to be published, as indeed was recognised by the historian and political pamphleteer John Oldmixon (see ODNB). Oldmixon, according to Baugh and Cable (2002) in their History of the English Language, was an opponent of the academy scheme. However, he was not so much against having an English Academy as against the potential role of Swift in the project, who, he believed, would not be a “fit person to suggest standards for the language” (Baugh and Cable 2002: 262).2 In view of the authoritative grammar and dictionary that the English Academy was expected to deliver if the project had met with success, Oldmixon’s comment that “two English Grammars hav[e] been publish’d within this Twelvemonth, and it remains … to add a Dictionary worthy those Immortal Labours” (1712: 10) is of particular interest. Not only had Oldmixon expected an academy to produce a grammar and a dictionary, he also recognised the potential status in this respect of the grammars by Gildon and Greenwood, the two grammars that had been published the previous year. Michael Maittaire’s English Grammar (1712), the third grammar discussed in the Bellum Grammaticale, was never reissued and so never acquired any kind of recognition compared to the other two. It would, however, be a while yet for the authoritative dictionary that Oldmixon called for to see the light of day, and for this another entrepreneur needed to step in: the publisher Robert Dodsley.

From criticism of “our best Authors” to “old chestnuts” Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) was by far the most important grammar of the eighteenth century. It appeared in many editions and reprints throughout the century,3 even well beyond his death in 1787, and it was pirated – reprinted in editions unauthorised by Lowth or his publishers – both in England and abroad, translated into German, and plagiarised by numerous grammarians after him, a not uncommon phenomenon among English grammar writers during this period (TiekenBoon van Ostade 1996a). Lowth’s influence on the grammatical tradition, in other words, was considerable. But he had read none of the above grammars, nor was he concerned with acquiring the kind of institutional support that Gildon and Greenwood had been after, or even with making his grammar sell.4 The Short Introduction had originated as a private project, to teach English grammar to his son Thomas Henry before the boy would

The origin of the usage guide

25

go to school and had to learn the grammar of Latin. This, Lowth believed, would give his son a head start in life. The grammar would be published after one of Lowth’s patrons had expressed an interest in it for his own son. To this end, Lowth approached Robert Dodsley, the publisher of his earlier book The Life of William of Wykeham (1758), and Dodsley immediately recognised the grammar’s potential. He had earlier taken the initiative for the publication of an authoritative dictionary of English by proposing to Samuel Johnson that he might compile such a work. The dictionary had sold well, and by publishing what promised to be an authoritative grammar as well, Dodsley, as a publisher, in effect did what would have been expected of an English Academy 50 years previously. To adapt the grammar to a wider public, the original text had to be revised, which Lowth did upon receiving comments from James Harris, the author of the well-known work on language called Hermes (1751). From the correspondence between them, it becomes clear that the feature in the grammar that would make it extremely popular, the critical footnotes which highlighted linguistic errors committed by the best authors, had been added as part of the revision of the work, and that Lowth was aware of its innovative nature (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2012c). “I am very glad to find You approve of my giving instances of Barbarism’s [sic] from our most celebrated Authors,” he wrote in a letter to Harris on 14 February 1760,5 adding: I am inclined to think this will really be the most useful part of the whole. What I have hitherto collected, are for the most part such as I have met with casually of late: I imagine this part may be much enlarged; as well as the Syntax; both wch. will require much leisure for reading with that particular view. This part of the grammar anticipated the birth of the usage guide a decade later. The grammar’s immediate success in the eyes of the general public is already evident on 26 February 1762, when a certain Thomas Fitzmaurice wrote to Adam Smith, who was later to publish Wealth of Nations (1776): Pray have you seen Dr Louths English Grammar which is just come out? It is talk’d of much. Some of the ingenious men with whom this University [i.e. Oxford] overflows, are picking faults and finding Errors in it at present. Pray what do you think of it? I am going to read Harris’s Hermes now, having read this Grammar. (Mossner and Ross 1987, Letter 64) Fitzmaurice continued by expressing similar linguistic criticism to what he had found in Lowth’s chapter on syntax, on a sentence he had come across in a book by Smith published a few years before: “I heard lately an objection

26

The origin of the usage guide

to an Expression in your Book, which I think has some foundation. […] the Expression is a Haunch Button, which is not, I imagine exactly English”. The book was Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Searching for the phrase in ECCO shows that it occurs only in this book; Fitzmaurice’s label of it as being “not exactly English” is therefore quite accurate. Identifying a usage as “not English” or as “not a word” is typically done in usage guides today as well, as I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 6. Caroline Taggart, for instance, writes in Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English that worser “is not a word in modern English” (2010: 30). Searching for “not English” in the HUGE database produced sixteen usage guides, ranging from Baker’s Reflections on the English Language (1770) on the use of adjectives for adverbs, different than, and have went instead of have gone, to The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style (2005) on the use of singular they (e.g. Everyone has their offdays; see Mittins et al. 1970: 9). Lowth, like Taggart, condemned the use of worser as well, thinking it more problematical than lesser, also in effect a double comparative, and calling it “more barbarous, only because it has not been so frequently used” (1762: 43). The use of adjectives for adverbs, as in extreme elaborate and marvelous graceful, which would all be expected to have forms in -ly instead (extremely, marvelously), was likewise condemned by Lowth (1762: 125). Singular they did not become a usage problem until the early nineteenth century; the earliest usage guide in HUGE to discuss the issue is The Vulgarities of Speech Corrected ([1826] 1829). Many usage problems came to have a remarkably stable presence in usage guides, and this was already anticipated by Lowth’s grammar, though it wasn’t a usage guide. Such usage problems are referred to as “old chestnuts” (Weiner 1988: 173; Peters 2006: 760), and other examples that we already find in Lowth’s grammar are because for that (the reason is because), fly/flee, the gerund (him/he descending), it is I/me, who/whom, lie/lay, nouns of multitude with a plural verb, than I/me and whose/of which (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006: 553–555). Because many of these usage problems originated with the Short Introduction, Lowth’s grammar acquired iconic status as a usage guide avant-la-lettre. His reputation as an arch-prescriptivist is so strong that certain usage problems are even attributed to his grammar despite the fact that they originated much later. A good example of this is the split infinitive, which as a usage problem goes back only to the 1830s (see Chapter 1). Simon Heffer, in Strictly English (2010), however, boldly asserts that criticism of the split infinitive “began with Latinists, notably Lowth” (2010: 62). And though Caroline Taggart doesn’t mention Lowth by name, his grammar may have been foremost in her mind when she wrote in Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English that “clarity and Elegance are far more important than eighteenthcentury edicts and that to scrupulously avoid splitting an infinitive and thereby produce a clumsy sentence is to take pedantry too far” (2010: 38).

The origin of the usage guide

27

Heffer and Taggart prove to be in good company, for even Steven Pinker, in The Language Instinct, claimed that the split infinitive originated as a shibboleth in the eighteenth century (1994: 374).6 Another example of a usage guide blaming Lowth for the origin of grammatical strictures, in this case preposition stranding (i.e. ending a sentence with a preposition, as in Who is this for?) and double negation, is Patricia O’Conner’s Woe is I. In this book the author equally outrightly claims that “[w]e can blame an eighteenth-century English clergyman named Robert Lowth for this one. He wrote the first grammar book to say that a preposition … shouldn’t go at the end of a sentence” (1996: 183). Preposition stranding, as YáñezBouza (2008) has shown, was in fact a staple item in eighteenth-century grammars, and the origin of the stricture against it can be traced back to a seventeenth-century treatise on poetry. On the condemnation of the double negative O’Conner tells the reader: “Blame the clergyman and grammarian Robert Lowth, the same guy who decided we shouldn’t put a preposition at the end of a sentence” (1996: 188). One wonders where all this confidence comes from, for Lowth was neither the first to condemn the use of double negation nor that of preposition stranding (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2011: 11, 117–118; Yáñez-Bouza 2008). Like any myth, Lowth’s reputation as a prescriptivist proves hard to kill.

Baker and Lowth Someone who was unaware of Lowth’s reputation, which was already very strong in the 1760s, was Robert Baker. In the preface to his Reflections, he wrote that he had been unfamiliar with Johnson’s authoritative Dictionary of the English Language, though published fifteen years previously, until his own book was about ready to go to the press (1770: iv–v). Baker, moreover, hadn’t consulted any grammars either when writing his book. “Such as my Work is,” he wrote, “it is entirely my own … Not being acquainted with any Man of Letters, I have consulted Nobody” (1770: iv). That he doesn’t mention Lowth’s Short Introduction or indeed any other grammar here shows that he was no expert in the field he was venturing into, something which, as I will discuss in Chapter 4, is true for many other usage guide writers, too. Baker also wrote in his preface that he was “entirely ignorant of the Greek, and but indifferently skilled in the Latin”; for all that, he did not consider this lack of formal education a problem, for he added: “why should this incapacitate a Man for writing his Mother-tongue with Propriety?” (1770: ii). This is indeed an argument frequently put forward by writers on language who have no claim to linguistic authority: John Simon, the author of Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and its Decline (1980), for instance, elaborately discusses his linguistic credentials in the introduction to the book, concluding that his “coming to English relatively late” – born in Hungary, he came to the US at the age of

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The origin of the usage guide

sixteen – should be taken as “a distinct advantage” rather than as problematical for someone writing on language (1980: xiii). Lynne Truss, too, presents herself as a non-expert: I am not a grammarian. To me a subordinate clause will for ever be (since I heard the actor Martin Jarvis describe it thus) one of Santa’s little helpers. A degree in English language is not a prerequisite for caring about where a bracket is preferred to a dash, or a comma needs to be replaced by a semicolon. (2003: 32) For all her lack of linguistic expertise, she decided to write a book about punctuation, expecting that such a publication would appeal to large numbers of people. As it did, for it became “the best-selling non-fiction book of 2003 in the UK”, according to Joan Beal (2010: 60). In 1779, Baker published an expanded edition of his Reflections on the English Language, this time comprising 244 rules. In the meantime, he had learnt of the existence of Lowth’s grammar, explaining in the preface to this second edition how it had been brought to his attention: I here declare, as in the Preface to the first edition, that the performance is entirely my own. I have had no assistance from any friend; nor have I borrowed from any work. I even did not know, till the late Dr. Salter shewed me the Introduction to the English Grammar, that any thing of the kind had ever appeared among us. (1779: xxiii) The statement confirms Baker’s lack of formal expertise in the field, but it makes another point which is relevant to the status of usage problems and of usage guides. While on the face of it asserting that he had not plagiarised any grammars or other books on language, the point he makes shows that there was a common core of features in the language that proved problematical for the general user. These would in time develop into what we now refer to as old chestnuts, and Baker’s claim not to have plagiarised Lowth (“nor have I borrowed from any work”) confirms their status already at the beginning of the usage guide tradition: I then perceived that some (not many) of the observations I had made, had been already made by the author of that work. On the other hand, there are observations in a subsequent edition of the Introduction, which I had made in my first edition. But I have no suspicion that any of those observations were borrowed from me. Whoever will give himself the trouble to compare the two books will, indeed, be

The origin of the usage guide

29

inclined to wonder that they do not oftener detect the same [in]correctnesses than they actually do. (1779: xxiii) Baker, too, dealt with the reason is because, fly/flee, lie/lay and the proper use of whom, while we find many other items in his book that would show up in later usage guides, like arrant/errant, sew/sow, set/sit, imminent/eminent and the use of mutual for common. The problem of mutual used for common (as in That person is our mutual/common friend) is found in usage guides dating from 1770 to 1988, and many such “confusables”, as Taggart (2010) calls them, were to gain a fixed place in usage guides as well, as such pairs are considered to be particularly problematical to users.

The rise of prescriptivism During the second half of the eighteenth century, there was a clear increase in the interest in prescription among grammarians, as becomes clear from a study by Bertil Sundby, Anne Kari Bjørge and Kari Haugland called A Dictionary of English Normative Grammar 1700–1800 (1991). The book is an inventory of all metalinguistic, primarily proscriptive commentary identified in eighteenth-century grammars and other works on the English language. Examples of such metalinguistic terms are “has no meaning”, “ridiculous”, “unintelligible”, “barbarous”, “inaccurate”, “extremely awkward”, “too much used by tradesmen” and, of course, “not English” (see above). Like “not English”, many of these labels are still used as terms of disapproval in usage guides today, so here, too, we have a continuous tradition of the ways in which critical ideas are expressed since the eighteenth century, and not only, as we will see in Chapter 6, by writers of usage guides. Sundby et al. list the works studied according to the number of metalinguistic labels attested. The list is not headed by Lowth, as Figure 2.1 below illustrates, but by Knowles (1796) (Kn96), which thus confirms that Lowth’s status as a prescriptivist is no more than iconic. Knowles (1796) is an enlarged edition of The Principles to English Grammar, originally published in 1785. The 1796 edition includes a fifteen-page section called “Of verbal criticism”, which lists a large number of usage problems with advice on how to correct them. Some examples are shown in Table 2.1 below. Knowles’s list, like Lowth’s grammar, thus overlaps with the usage guide as a text type as well. Lowth (Lo62 in Figure 2.1) occupies the seventeenth position in the complete list in Sundby et al., and since eleven of the grammars before him were published during the final two decades of the eighteenth century, it is clear that the later the grammars were published, the more prescriptive their approach became. One of these is Po95, Richard Postlethwaite’s Grammatical Art Improved (1795). The work’s subtitle, In which the Errors

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The origin of the usage guide

800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0

Figure 2.1 Metalinguistic comments (200 or more) in eighteenth-century grammars, based on Sundby et al. (1991).7

Table 2.1 Examples of usage problems Improper expressions

Proper

I cannot by no Means allow it Ye were averse to or for Study He reasons exceeding forcibly It is equally the same Thing No less than twenty Persons He has a new Pair of shoes He shall seldom err who remembers

Any From Exceedingly Delete Fewer Pair of new Will

of Grammarians and Lexicographers are Exposed, illustrates Postlethwaite’s approach in writing his grammar. One of the grammarians Postlethwaite criticised was Lowth, and his book can be read as a kind of dialogue between himself and Lowth’s grammar (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2014). Postlethwaite aimed to outdo Lowth’s popular grammar by pointing out errors he had encountered in the work – an approach which characterised the early stages of the usage guide tradition as well, according to Straaijer (2018b). The Grammatical Art Improved actually proves to be a grammar and usage guide in one, for apart from dealing with the structure of English grammar, it includes many items that anticipated the later old chestnuts: double negation, lesser, different to/from, lie/lay, adjectives used as adverbs, and the placement of only. If we compare Postlethwaite with Lowth as represented in Figure 2.1, the book is only marginally more prescriptive than Lowth’s grammar: according to Sundby et al., it includes 275 metalinguistic comments, while we find 243 with Lowth. Postlethwaite’s interest in prescription is also clear from his “General Index”,

The origin of the usage guide

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a table of contents to the book which includes three overt references to usage problems: Each, either, and every – the Meaning of, and shown to be Singular Lay and lie – the great Difference between them “I thought to have written” – proved to be absurd But the work was never reprinted, since it was eclipsed by the publication of Lindley Murray’s phenomenally popular English Grammar in the same year, 1795. Murray’s grammar (Mu95) occupies the sixth highest position on the list in Figure 2.1. Like its Abridgement, published two years later but not included in the list in Sundby et al., it outdid all other grammars of the period in popularity. Of the grammar itself, 52 editions (or reprints) appeared down to 1832, while 133 editions of the Abridgement were published before 1845, and it has been estimated that the grammar sold 1.5–2 million copies altogether (Monaghan 1996: 39; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1996b: 9). The grammar was not a very original piece of work, which earned Murray the reputation of a plagiarist (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1996a). Much of it was based on Lowth, and some rules, like those on double negation and preposition stranding, are straightforward copies from that grammar. In the process of adopting these rules, however, Murray made them more prescriptive, as when he added to Lowth’s discussion of double negation his advice to avoid the form: “But it is better to express an affirmation by a regular affirmative than by two negatives” (1795: 121). The rule on preposition stranding he left as he had found it, though he did correct Lowth’s tongue-in-cheek “This is an idiom our language is strongly inclined to” into the more grammatically correct “This is an idiom to which our language is strongly inclined” (1795: 122), thus missing the joke. Like Postlethwaite, Murray added a table of contents to the grammar, and this table of contents similarly includes headings focussing explicitly on usage problems, like “Of Nouns of Multitude” and “Of two Negatives”. With 363 metalinguistic comments, Murray’s grammar occupies a place much higher in the prescriptive league table in Figure 2.1 than Lowth; still, this number of comments comes nowhere near Knowles’s 722.

The origin of the usage guide tradition in America Murray’s grammar became extremely popular in America as well, which may have been due to its function as a grammar as such but also, as with Lowth’s grammar in England, to its prescriptive approach to language. It would still be a while though, before the first American usage guide appeared: Seth T. Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector (1847). I have been unable to find any information on Hurd, so we have to rely on the book itself to

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learn more about him and his reasons for writing it. In the preface Hurd describes himself as “a public lecturer upon the Grammar of the English Language … in [which] capacity, he visited successively almost every section of the United States” (1847: v). Having worked “in a different profession” for thirteen years, he added, he had collected almost two thousand “common errors and peculiarities of speech”, an activity he had been engaged upon for “almost a quarter of a century”. Hurd claimed in the preface to his book that nothing like it “has ever been published” – a bold statement to make, but grounded in a thorough analysis of English and American dictionaries, glossaries and grammars, listed in a three-page overview of “Authorities consulted” (1847: ix–xi). Hurd’s list includes Johnson’s dictionary as well as Lowth’s grammar, so he was much better informed of the relevant literature on the English language than his predecessor Robert Baker had been. Unlike Baker, Hurd was therefore extremely knowledgeable on the subject he wrote about, and consequently needed no excuse to explain his motivations for writing the book given his expertise. His motivation for doing so was inspired by the variable state of the language, something he had noticed during his activities as a lecturer on the subject when travelling around the country. Hurd’s list of references, however, does not include Baker’s Reflections, nor a later English usage guide called Vulgarities of Speech Corrected, published anonymously in London in 1826. The books may simply not have been available to him, which made him blissfully ignorant of the fact that he wasn’t the first to compile a usage guide. For all that, the Grammatical Corrector was the first such publication in America; furthermore, Hurd’s elaborate overview of reference works published both in England and America forms a kind of bridge between the two language varieties as far as views on linguistic correctness are concerned. There are many references to local usage in the book, which makes it particularly valuable for historical linguists today, but Hurd doesn’t condemn any particularly British practices with a view to promoting American English as a variety in its own right. The usage guide in America, in other words, did not develop directly out of the text type that had already been around in England for more than 70 years: similar to the origin of the tradition in England, the American usage guide arose as the result of an individual’s private interest in the variability of the language he had noticed, and who was drawn to the kind of problems that might arise as a result. In writing about the subject, Hurd took a scholarly interest in language, which is outstanding at this stage in the tradition, especially when compared to his English predecessor Baker. The tradition continued in both countries because there was a clear need for usage advice, one that publishers recognised as a potentially profitable business. Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector was followed by several other publications on the subject: two anonymous works, Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence (1856) and Live and Learn: A Guide for All, who Wish to Speak and Write Correctly (1856?), as well as Goold Brown’s

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Grammar of English Grammars (1851) and Edward Gould’s Good English, or Popular Errors in Language (1867). That these books, between them, treat many of the same old chestnuts found in earlier (British) English works – like different than/from, flat adverbs, less/fewer, lie/lay, singular they, shall/will – confirms the existence of a common set of usage problems in both varieties of English, even at a time when American English was just beginning to differentiate itself from usage in England; these usage problems have continued to be part of the two usage guide traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. For all that, Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector also contains a list of Americanisms – a valuable source in showing which words and expressions already differed between these two varieties at the time.

The early American usage guides’ intended audience The title-page of Hurd’s book specifies that it was intended “for the use of schools and private individuals”. Whether the Grammatical Corrector was indeed used as a schoolbook or whether it became popular with the general public is unclear. A search on WorldCat, an online tool that provides information on library holdings throughout the world, produced only one reprint, published in 1848, so the book may not have been very popular.8 Another very early American English usage guide, possibly the second one written specifically for an American reading public, is Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence, published in 1856 and with many more editions or reprints than Hurd’s book. WorldCat lists a 32nd edition published in New York in 1873 as well as two later ones dated 1875 and 1882, so the book enjoyed considerable popularity. WorldCat identifies the author as Walton Burgess (cf. Baron 1982: 213–215), but since the name does not appear on the title-page, Burgess may not have been the author. The titlepage, however, reads that the publisher of the book was Daniel Burgess, who was Walton’s father (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2015). Walton Burgess’s name does occur on the reverse side of the title-page, but as the copyright holder (dated 1855), which need not imply that he was also the author of the book. According to an obituary notice in the New York Times of 25 December 1890, Walton Burgess’s year of birth was 1833, which would have made him 23 when Five Hundred Mistakes was published – very young for a usage guide writer, as we will see in Chapter 4. I therefore believe that Walton Burgess may have been the author of the introduction, which must have written independently of the main part of the book as it contains more many additional (and sometimes identical) usage problems, but not of the usage guide itself, so its real author remains anonymous. Paul Nance (2016) found a reference to a pamphlet called Mistakes of Daily Occurrence in Speaking, Writing and Pronunciation Corrected, and published in London a year earlier, in 1855, and he notes that according to Hitchings (2011: 175), Five Hundred Mistakes is an expanded version of it.

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Nance, however, argues that the pamphlet was more likely to have been the source of Live and Learn (1856?), another usage guide, which overlaps considerably with Five Hundred Mistakes (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2015). The book’s title-page contains no date of publication, and the only way of dating it is the presence of the date of copyright on the reverse page, 1856, which makes it later than Five Hundred Mistakes. Could Five Hundred Mistakes have been based on the London pamphlet, with Live and Learn being derived from either of the two earlier publications? Whatever the answer, Walton Burgess, apart from being the copyright owner of Five Hundred Mistakes, can only have been the book’s editor, not its author, adding an introduction to it along with quite a few usage problems of his own, and possibly adapting the book’s contents to a different audience (though many references to England still remain). Unlike Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector, Five Hundred Mistakes was not intended as a schoolbook, for the preface reads that it was prepared to meet the wants of persons … who from deficiency of education, or from carelessness of manner, are in the habit of misusing many of the most common words of the English language, distorting its beauty, and corrupting its purity. (1856: iii) We will see in Chapter 4 that the same arguments for publishing a usage guide are still often provided today, as shown by the title of Caroline Taggart’s Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010), for instance, by which the intended audience is hinted at as well as the author’s motivations for publishing the book concerned. The preface to Five Hundred Mistakes continues by saying that the book was expected “to render great service to those who need to improve their usual modes of expression, and to be more discriminating in their choice of words” (1856: iv). There is, however, some internal evidence that suggests that the author – or editor – had a more specific purpose for the book. This evidence throws some light on the question of why usage guides arose around this time in America. About halfway through, Five Hundred Mistakes includes a peculiar entry, which highlights a typical feature of Irish pronunciation, that of the PRICE vowel:9 ‘The Duke of Wellington was an Irishman, but knew nothing of the Irish language:’ beware of saying Ierishman for Irishman, or Ierish for Irish; a very common mistake, which the ‘Know-Nothings’ are quick to detect. (1856: item 277) The entry may be read as more than mere advice to avoid features typical of Irish pronunciation: the reference to the “Know-Nothings” indicates that it

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actually is a warning against using stigmatised features like this. The KnowNothings were “a primarily anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, pro-temperance secret society” (Mazo 2011: 242), which as a movement was extremely popular between 1854 and 1856, the time when Five Hundred Mistakes was produced. According to Mazo, the party had at one time as many as 1 million members and 40 seats in Congress. Irishmen were among the largest groups of immigrants into America during this period, particularly after the potato famine that occurred during the 1840s (Daniels 1991: 126–127), which created strong anti-immigrant, anti-Irish feelings. Five Hundred Mistakes also contains many features that are associated with the language of Cockney speakers; besides Irishmen and other Europeans, many English immigrants entered the country as well. The book includes two references to instances of Cockney pronunciation that were considered undesirable: the use of what is called “haitch” insertion (but also h-dropping), as in “’Ow ’appens it that Henglishmen so hoften misplace their haitches?” (item 428), and the rendering of /s/ as sh, as in “‘A nishe young man,’ ‘What makesh you laugh?’ ‘If he offendsh you, don’t speak to him,’ ‘Ash you please,’ ‘Not jush yet,’ ‘We always passh your house in going to call on Missh Yatesh’” (item 448). Many other features in Five Hundred Mistakes, though also common in other varieties of English, are typically found in the Cockney speech of the period as well, like the use of know’d for knew (item 43), them books (item 48), the relatives what and as for who (items 52 and 53), of a morning for on a morning (item 121) and the pronunciation of radishes as redishes and of cucumber as cowcumber (item 143) (see Matthews 1938). So whereas Hurd’s usage guide had been inspired by grammatical and other differences in usage which the author had encountered during his travels and which he aimed to eradicate in the interest of achieving uniformity in the highly variable language of the time, Five Hundred Mistakes focussed on problems encountered in the language of American immigrants. The popularity of the book suggests that this approach filled a great demand among readers. Whereas the rise of the usage guide tradition in England can be associated with the effects of the Industrial Revolution in that country, in America it was the consequences of large-scale immigration that gave rise to the need for advice on language use (cf. Milroy and Milroy 2012: 158−159). Another explanation of the early popularity of usage guides in America is similar to the one that accounts for the success of Lindley Murray’s grammar in the United States. This was to a large extent due to the desire among New Englanders during the first half of the nineteenth century to educate themselves (Charvat 1959). This desire may have been motivated by their upward social mobility, as a result of which they came to emancipate themselves from their original status as colonists (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1996b: 15). The large numbers of immigrants arriving in the country during the nineteenth century further strengthened such motivations, and the rise of the usage guide as a new

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tool to achieve this ensured its immediate popularity. There must, in other words, have been a considerable market for usage guides at the time, as is suggested by the close succession in which Five Hundred Mistakes and Live and Learn were published, both of them in New York.

Usage guides criticised Usage guides continued to appear in America during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and in great numbers, as Leonard’s use of “so” suggests when he referred to their popularity at the time: “those handbooks of abuses and corrections which were so freely produced in the nineteenth century” (1929: 35). They have continued to be popular in America ever since. The HUGE database comprises 37 American usage guides, published between 1847 and 2008, like Goold Brown’s Grammar of English Grammars (1851); Alfred Ayres’s The Verbalist ([1881] 1911); William Strunk’s The Elements of Style (1918), later reissued as Strunk and White (1959); Wilson Follett’s Modern American Usage, published posthumously in 1966;10 and Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage (1998; 4th ed., 2016), and Kostadinova (2018a, 2018b) includes several more of them. But the list also includes female authors of American usage guides, the first one being Josephine Turck Baker, who according to Kostadinova (2018c) made a career out of providing usage advice. Turck Baker wrote many books on usage after starting a monthly journal called Correct English: How to Use It in 1899. Another early female writer of a usage guide, called Good English (1928) and published in Chicago, is Virginia (Cleaver) Bacon.11 More recent female writers of usage guides in America are Patricia O’Conner (1996) and Mignon Fogarty (2008), the author of “Grammar Girl”. Kostadinova (2018a) calls the twentieth century the age of American prescriptivism proper, and the increase of usage guides in America during the first half of that century coincides with the adoption of the terms “prescriptivism” and “prescriptivist” by Thomas Pyles in the 1950s, discussed in Chapter 1, as well as with his condemnation of usage problems as “hoary handbook prescriptions which”, Pyles claimed, “have no basis in actual cultivated usage”. The point had already been made much earlier, in a review of the anonymous Mistakes of Daily Occurrence in Speaking, Writing and Pronunciation Corrected, published in London in 1855 and referred to above as a possible source for Five Hundred Mistakes and Live and Learn. This book, according to Rita Queiroz de Barros (2017: 131), was severely criticised for “rais[ing] ungrammatical ghosts for the mere fun of laying them” (Payn 1857: 205). The point about a lack of agreement between particular usage guides and actual usage is, as I will discuss in Chapter 5, still true for many usage guides that are published today, not only in America but also in Britain, where the usage guide tradition continued to flourish as well. But before going into any of this, I will first

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describe how the HUGE database of usage guides and usage problems came about and what it includes (Chapter 3), on the basis of which I will be able to provide a more detailed account of the nature of the language commentary found in usage guides as well as elsewhere in Chapters 5 and 6. The following chapters will help us understand why usage guides have become so controversial but nevertheless extremely popular both in America and in Britain.

Notes 1 Even later proposals for an English Academy are sometimes found. Honey (1997: 168), for instance, suggests that such an institution might help put a stop to the “invasion” and spread of Estuary English. 2 Swift’s status as a writer was indeed controversial at the time: see Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2011: 130). 3 An edition differs from a reprint in that in the case of a new edition “more than half the type [must have] been reset” (Gaskell 1972: 313). Accordingly, many eighteenth and nineteenth-century grammars or usage guides that are announced as new editions are mere reprints. This is the case with Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence for instance, for the later “editions” listed in WorldCat never comprise more than the 73 pages of the first edition. Describing later reprints as “new editions” was clearly a marketing strategy (TiekenBoon van Ostade 2011). 4 See Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2011) for a detailed account of the publication history of the book. 5 Hampshire Archives (Winchester), MSS 9M73 G347 107 and G514. 6 Lynch (2009: 99). In The Sense of Style Pinker cites Theodore Bernstein, the author of The Careful Writer (1965), saying: “There is nothing wrong with splitting an infinitive … except that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammarians, for one reason or another, frowned on it” (2014: 199). 7 For the identification of these grammars, see the bibliography in Sundby et al. (1991). The figures provided are absolute ones that are impossible to normalise in relation to the amount of text in the works cited. For all that, they signal a considerable, and indeed very likely growing, interest in prescriptivism at the time. 8 Though a very useful tool, WorldCat has its limitations: see Chapter 4 for some illustrations of this. 9 The term “PRICE vowel” refers to “lexical sets” that are used to indicate the pronunciation of vowels (Wells 1982). On the pronunciation of Irish English vowels, see Hickey (2004: 57). 10 Follett “devoted his last years to composing a book on the subject he had studied all his life – American usage” (1966: vi). When he died, the book was about two-thirds finished, and it was completed by Jacques Barzun and several others. Like many writers on usage, however, Barzun, was not a linguist. 11 The book is not part of the HUGE database, nor of Kostadinova’s additional set of American usage guides.

Chapter 3

The usage guide – and the HUGE database

A style guide hitting the news In July 2014, The Guardian reported an interesting piece of news: the CIA style manual had been leaked. As a news item this was peculiar, because why would it be surprising that the CIA employs a style manual? The Guardian itself has one, too, which it shares with The Observer, and so does the BBC. The CIA might have advised its writers and editors to make use of the MLA Style Manual, for instance, which is widely used worldwide. Instead, it felt the need to provide rather more specific guidelines of usage for its employees, as they have their own specific problems relating to the question of what is correct language use. This is clear from entries in the manual’s chapter called “Spelling and Compound Words List” (2012: 69–143), which include terms like border posts(s), defense-industrial, highprecision, hostage taking, safehouse keeping, Tomahawk-class missile(s) and many other words and phrases that are specific to the organisation. The manual serves a well-defined community of users with their own specific requirements, comprising, as the preface reads, “the creators and the processors of intelligence analysis” and “the writers and editors of their analyses”. The BBC publishes its own style guide as well, rather than making its journalists and news writers draw on already existing and authoritative usage guides like Fowler’s Modern English Usage for the same reason (Allen 2018). But more fundamentally, since it was already the eighth edition of the CIA’s Style Manual & Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications, having been “approved for release” on 28 February 2012, why all the fuss? The manual is freely available online, but perhaps no-one had ever thought of googling for “CIA” and “style manual” before. To report it as having been “leaked” is therefore a gross exaggeration, which may only reflect the current general interest in prescriptivism in the UK. For the purposes of this book the most relevant part of the CIA Style Manual is the chapter called “Word Watchers List” (2012: 145–175), which includes 30 pages of usage problems that occur in usage guides as well, many of which have been around since their early days. So we find

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confusables like adverse/averse, affect/effect, continual/continuous, defuse/diffuse and principal/principle, all of which occur in Caroline Taggart’s Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010), too. The list also includes grammatical features, like the reason is because, the dangling participle, data is/are, different from/than, fewer/less, the use of sentence initial hopefully, the placement of only, lie/lay, shall/will, that/which, who/whom and whose and, of course, the split infinitive. On the latter construction the manual reads that “[n]o one insists any more that all split infinitives must be shunned”, though, as this comment illustrates, it still has its place in what Vorlat (1996) calls the prescriptive canon. This is a collection of usage problems many of which originated in eighteenth-century normative grammars like Lowth (1762) and Priestley (1761, 1768), and that were carried over into usage guides subsequently (Chapter 2). Though the contents of the prescriptive canon are flexible – usage problems come and go, new usage problems arise while others cease to be considered problematical – quite a few of them do go back to the eighteenth century. The split infinitive, perhaps the most iconic of usage problems, however, did not. Having first been criticised in the mid-1830s, it made its way into usage guides some twenty years later, and came to stay: it is discussed in as many as 62 out of the 77 usage guides in the HUGE database, published down to 2010, and it continues to occur in later publications like Pinker (2014) and Kamm (2015). No usage guide is believed to be complete without it, and it is even the only grammatical feature dealt with by Cherry Chappell in her letter-writing manual (another popular text type since the mid-eighteenth century), called How to Write Better Letters (2006). Already in 1985, David Crystal called the obsession with this usage problem a “syndrome”, and it still is today. The CIA’s Style Manual, and presumably its “Word Watchers List” as well, is “derived from many sources, including the works of Barzun, Bernstein, Copperud, Follett, Fowler, the Morrises, Strunk and White, Gregg, and other recognized arbiters of English usage” (preface),1 and it might be worthwhile to see which of these the CIA manual’s authors took their enlightened view on the split infinitive from.

Style manuals and usage guides All the grammatical usage problems listed in the preceding paragraph are included in the HUGE database of usage guides and usage problems, and many more besides. The CIA Style Manual, however, is not part of the database. The reason for this was not that we learnt about it too late in the database’s compilation process, which includes a selection of usage guides published before 2010, but because the manual is primarily a style guide rather than a usage guide. For the same reason we would not have included Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style either, since the book also presents itself as a style guide despite the fact that it includes, like the CIA’s

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Style Manual, a chapter on usage problems. What then are the differences between style manuals and usage guides? As text types they are often not distinguished, as in Anne Curzan’s Fixing English (2014) when it treats the question of when to use which or that in relative clauses by drawing on the Fowlers’ The King’s English, Henry Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, the Associated Press Stylebook and Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage (2014: 90–91): all these we would consider to be usage guides, except for the AP style guide. Mohammed Albakry (2007) does not distinguish between the two either in his analysis of the influence of the proscription of particular usage items in the language of modern newspapers. His overview of usage guides, as he terms them collectively, includes both Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989) and the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (Siegel and Connolly, 1999), along with several other works. Albakry may not have wished to make the distinction because of his aim to test the effect of usage advice in general on a corpus of newspaper articles compiled from the New York Times and USA Today. Style manuals are exclusively focussed on by Karen Bennett (2009) in her study of the question whether a single style can be distinguished within English academic writing. To analyse this question she made a selection of textbooks on the subject, the “sheer number” of which, she writes, “is staggering” (2009: 44). Bennett’s selection of titles, however, which range from 1985 to 2007, does not include any of the books mentioned so far. Her analysis focuses on topics like textual structure, including paragraph length and paragraph structure, and coherence and cohesion, as well as stylistic issues like sentence length and sentence structure, the use of personal and impersonal forms of writing and the distinction between the use of present and past tense verb forms. As for lexical issues, Bennett deals with formal and technical diction in a general sense. Her study, in other words, deals with aspects of usage at a higher level of writing than the type of usage problems I am concerned with in this book, which all have to do with grammatical, lexical and other (at times stylistic) features that have somehow, in the course of history, drawn criticism for being faulty in one way or other. Features like those analysed by Bennett are typically found in style manuals, including Pinker’s The Sense of Style (2014): style manuals primarily focus on a higher discourse level than that in which grammatical or lexical features mainly play a role. Style guides therefore constitute a text type of their own; that is, they are distinct from usage guides like Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Along with usage guides they are part of the wider genre field of language advice literature, but the distinction is not always easy to make given the occasional overlap between the two subcategories. Sometimes this overlap is implemented deliberately, so that writers – and more likely publishers – are able to reach a wider reading public. Pam Peters and Wendy Young (1997), in contrast to Bennett, looked primarily at usage guides in order to address a different question than

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Albakry, namely, if the rules and strictures in these manuals have become more descriptive since the 1950s, their point of departure. For this analysis they selected 40 “usage books” published between 1953 and 1995: twenty British, fourteen American and six Australian ones. The list includes The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (1981), thus suggesting that Peters and Young did not distinguish between the two categories either. Peters and Young do provide a very useful definition of the term “style guide”: style guides are “editorial manuals on what is commonly known as house style, put out by publishers, newspapers, and government authorities” (1997: 317–318; see also Ebner 2016). This definition would indeed cover the CIA’s Style Manual as well as The BBC News Style Guide (Allen 2003). But what about Strunk and White’s Elements of Style? Or a book like Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline published by John Simon in 1980? The latter book, which is also part of the analysis by Peters and Young, is, however, a collection of columns on usage problems published between 1976 and 1979 in Esquire and More for entertainment rather than to offer actual guidance in matters of usage.

Defining the usage guide In the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, as discussed in Chapter 1, we have been interested in the interplay – or lack of it – between different groups of people concerned with language use: linguists, language professionals like editors, text writers, translators and teachers, and the general public. We were, moreover, particularly interested in the concern with linguistic correctness as a social phenomenon, like the question of why constructions like the split infinitive or singular they have become usage problems (or are ceasing to be regarded as such).2 Usage advice is not only given in style manuals or usage guides; I have already mentioned the presence of the split infinitive in Cherry Chappell’s How to Write Better Letters (2006). Usage problems are also discussed in etiquette books: Paul Nance (2015), for instance, noticed the presence of lie/lay, who/whom, sit/set and it was me/it was I in John H. Young’s Our Deportment: or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society (1881), and that of shall/will, lie/lay and he don’t/he doesn’t in Vogue’s Book of Etiquette (1925). In our project, however, and accordingly in this book, we decided to focus on usage guides only, despite the fact that there is at times a certain, and sometimes even considerable, amount of overlap between usage guides and style guides, or that usage problems are dealt with in non-linguistic types of advice literature like letter-writing manuals and etiquette books as well. The overlap with eighteenth-century normative grammars, as signalled in Chapter 2, has likewise been left out of consideration here, as well as that with nineteenth-century normative grammars (see, for example, Anderwald 2016).

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Historically speaking, the usage guide originated as a text type produced by non-specialists who gave linguistic advice to the general user; in other words, they resulted from private enterprise rather than from any kind of institutional prescriptivism by which a particular norm of correctness would be imposed upon users (Chapter 1). If we follow the definition of style guides provided by Peters and Young (1997), it is to the latter type of prescriptivism that the CIA Style Manual and the Guardian and BBC style guides belong. In the course of their history, usage guides came to be written by linguists as well, so it may indeed be said that the text type professionalised itself (Straaijer 2018b: 21–22) – though again this development resulted from private rather than institutionalised initiatives. Peters and Young conclude that Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989) is the most objective usage guide they studied, which leads the authors to propose that there is a “need for a similar usage book now in Britain” (1997: 324). Less than a decade later, Peters’s Cambridge Guide to English Usage (2004) came out, a work whose reputation appears to have lived up to this earlier promise, as I will argue below. Three years later, Peters published the Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage (2007), another book for which the article possibly suggested there might be a market. Peters is not the only linguist who wrote a usage guide, but non-linguists have nevertheless continued to dominate the field. Nevertheless, as I will argue in Chapter 4, even non-linguists (in the strict sense of the word) – journalists and writers of literature and other genres – may be regarded as language professionals, sometimes even having a better notion of the needs of the general language user than linguists,3 but it will also be shown that, because usage guides have proved highly marketable, publishers play an important role in the continuing outpour of such advice manuals. The OED defines usage guides as “book[s] of instruction or information relating to the conventionally accepted use of (esp. formal written) language and grammar” (s.v. usage, n, compounds, C2). (The term “style guide” does not at the moment have an entry in the dictionary.) The quotations illustrating usage guide, the first from a 1951 issue of the journal College Composition & Communication published by NCTE and the second from the Toronto newspaper The Globe & Mail, from 2007, suggests that the term has a Northern American origin and is also in general use there today. Though these quotations should perhaps be taken as merely exemplifying usage of the term, the earliest instance from an American source from 1951 ties in with the rise of prescriptivism in the US during this time, as discussed in Chapter 1 on the basis of the attestation of the first instances of the words prescriptivism and prescriptivist.4 But usage guide must have ceased to be a purely American term, for Oxfordborn Edmund Weiner used it, too, in the title of his article “On editing a usage guide” published in 1988 (see Chapter 1). Weiner lists examples of the term from the OED Supplement edited by Robert Burchfield, though

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the quotations didn’t make it into the second edition of the dictionary or survived the OED’s subsequent revision process (the entry usage, n., where the above quotations were found, was updated in June 2011). The first of Weiner’s examples, from 1972, has an Australian source and the second, from 1980, is from the journal American Speech. Perhaps, therefore, we owe the term’s spread to British English to Weiner; the date of his article in any case coincides with the increase of the word prescriptivism in the UK during the 1980s, as discussed in Chapter 1. Weiner’s article contains a very useful description of the scope of the usage guide, which, he writes, is “as broad as the English language, covering spelling, punctuation, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexis, and involving sociolinguistic considerations” (1988: 173). The audience of usage guides, Weiner adds, “are native speakers or advanced learners” of English. Ulrich Busse and Anne Schröder describe the usage guide as being neither a grammar nor a dictionary, though it has characteristics of both. They define the usage guide as “an integrative all-in-one reference work written for educated lay people that bridges the traditional divide between a grammar and a dictionary” (2009: 72). Both grammar and dictionary are regularly used in the titles of usage guides, though in the usage guides in the HUGE database dictionary occurs more frequently: it is found in eleven of the 77 works included, ranging from Fowler (1926) to Garner (1998), with Bill Bryson’s Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words (1984) and Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989) coming in between. Grammar is found in five titles only, from Goold Brown’s Grammar of English Grammars (1851) to Ann Batko’s When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People (2004), though in the latter title the word is used in a more general sense. This difference in the self-identification of usage guides has to do with the fact that the alphabetical arrangement of usage items lends itself naturally to a reference book like a dictionary, though as we will see, this is not how the material is presented predominantly. At the same time, usage guides cover both lexical features, which are commonly found in dictionaries, and grammatical ones. The latter type of items may be presented alphabetically, but also topically, as with the eleven “Elementary Rules of Usage” that make up Strunk and White’s Chapter 1.5 Since we are drawing on Weiner’s definition of usage guides in our research on the topic in the project, Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003) will not be studied here, as it deals with only one aspect of language use, punctuation.

Intended readers Busse and Schröder’s claim that the intended readers of usage guides are “educated lay people” agrees with the type of readers of Fowler’s Modern English Usage as identified by Burchfield in the preface to his third edition of the book: a “judge, colonel and retired curator of Greek and Roman antiquities at the

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British Museum” (Chapter 1). It also agrees with Randolph Quirk’s identification of the kind of people inclined to make linguistic mistakes – a writer in The Times, a journalist in the Daily Mail and a judge reported upon by the Daily Telegraph. This list is from Quirk’s introduction to The Longman Guide to English Usage by Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut (1988: ix), where Quirk also mentions that he is frequently consulted on questions of linguistic correctness by “people in all walks of life: accountants, local government officers, teachers, clergymen, bank managers, secretaries, journalists, broadcasters, trade union officials, doctors” (1988: iv). As the intended readers of usage guides, this group is very similar to the kind of people described as being in need of usage advice in an article from 1857, called “Our P’s and Q’s”, by the novelist and journal editor James Payn and published in Charles Dickens’s journal Household Words. Reviewing the usage guide Mistakes of Daily Occurrence (1855), Payn writes: mistakes in speech are of continual occurrence, and are perpetrated in all classes of society. Our neighbour, the barrister […]; the M.P. over the way […]; the author in our second-floor […]: and the clergyman at the chapel. (Payn 1857: 204, as quoted by Queiroz de Barros 2017: 131) These nineteenth-century barristers, MPs, writers and clergymen all make up the same class of fairly well-educated, typically middle-class speakers that Burchfield identified as being in need of usage advice, self-declared or otherwise, and that thus form a stable readership over the years. Weiner’s reference to “native speakers or advanced learners”, presumably of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), as the typical readers of usage guides is rather too general, so what type of audience do usage guide writers themselves have in mind for their books? Quite a few writers, however, do not specify their intended reading public, like Partridge (1947) or the authors of Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989). Fowler (1926) lacks a preface altogether. We only know about the kind of readers he had in mind – “the half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities who wants to know Can I say …” – from Burchfield’s preface to the third edition of Modern English Usage. Lack of education, as mentioned by Fowler, is also a characteristic of the intended readership identified in the preface to Five Hundred Mistakes (1856): This book … was prepared to meet the wants of persons – numbered by multitudes in even the most intelligent and refined communities – who from deficiency of education, or from carelessness of manner, are in the habit of misusing many of the most common words of the English language, distorting its grammatical forms, destroying its beauty, and corrupting its purity. (1856: iii)

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“Deficiency of education” is one of the motives presented by R.L. Trask to explain why he published Mind the Gaffe: The Penguin Guide to Common Errors in English (2001): “The purpose of this book is to help you with your written English.” The need for such help, he writes, is that “in recent years schools in most English-speaking countries have pulled back from teaching this material”, by which he means the teaching of “standard written English”, which “has to be acquired … by formal education” and a mastery of which “is a requirement for many professions, and it is highly desirable in many others”. Trask adds: “even university graduates with good degrees often find themselves with a command of standard English that is at best inadequate and at worst distressing”. He therefore believes his book to be filling an important gap in this respect (2001: 1–2). Giving advice to “those who wish to write good English” is likewise mentioned by Frederick T. Wood (1962: v) as a reason for publishing Current English Usage (1962). English writers, Fowler and Fowler had already claimed in The King’s English in 1906, “seldom look into a grammar or composition book” (1906: 3). Strunk’s Elements of Style (1918) and its later version, updated and expanded by White (1959), originated as just such a composition manual, and Pinker, whose aim is to provide a modern equivalent to Strunk and White’s usage guide (2014: 6), designed his own book for people who know how to write and want to write better … includ[ing] students who hope to improve the quality of their papers, aspiring critics and journalists who want to start a blog or column or series of reviews, and professionals who seek a cure for their academese, bureaucratese, corporatese, legalese, medicalese, or officialese. (2014: 7) Several writers leave their intended readers unspecified, and merely write, as Baker (1770: iii) did, that “I flatter myself that my Performance may be of some use”; Kingsley Amis thus said that “[t]he most that can be offered is some guidance for those who may want it” (1997: ix), and a similar general motivation is provided by John Bailie and Moyna Kitchin in The Essential Guide to English Usage: their book serves “to help people to express themselves clearly and to communicate more easily in both speech and writing through a better understanding of the English language” (1988: 6). In his own usage guide, The Oxford Guide to English Usage, Weiner was more explicit about his intended readers than in his article on the writing of usage guides: his book is intended “for anyone who needs simple and direct guidance about the formation and use of English words … and who cannot claim any specialist training in these subjects” (1983: v). Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut (1988) similarly write that The Longman Guide to English Usage is intended for “those wanting advice on standard British English” (1988: xiii) –

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“ordinary people”, in other words, Weiner (1983: v) writes, who are “constantly” asking questions about English usage. Burchfield makes the same point: his new edition of Fowler is meant “to guide readers to make sensible choices in linguistically controversial areas of words, meanings, grammatical constructions, and pronunciations” (1996: xi). All these comments suggest that writers of usage guides themselves consider their publications to be of use for anyone seeking guidance in questions of linguistic correctness, particularly writers, so not just, as Busse and Schröder write, “educated laypeople”. Usage guide writers across the years perceived this need for linguistic guidance among the general public because of what they consider to be inadequate teaching of English in the schools (a point made by Trask above; see also below), which consequently creates a market for their books. As we will see in Chapter 5, usage problems are often branded by the general public as signs of a lack of education. The point is also made in the introduction to Wilson Follett’s Modern American Usage, where the intended readers of the book are identified as “[t]he poorly taught, the foreign-born, the ambitious young aiming at the professions, the unassuming men of business, the mothers whose minds are not given over to total permissiveness in child-rearing” (1966: 29). The role assigned here to mothers as language guardians is interesting from a sociolinguistic perspective, though the epithet “unassuming men of business” we would now call patronising. That the book is aimed at upwardly mobile young professionals is in line with what we see during the very early days of the text type, which, as discussed in Chapter 2, originated in England to offer guidance to newly socially mobile people in the latter decades of the eighteenth century. Though Follett’s book was first published in New York – with an edition appearing in the same year in London as well – the designation of “the foreign-born” as a group in need of linguistic guidance agrees with the rise of the usage guide in America during the mid-nineteenth century, in response to large-scale immigration into the country at that time (Jasso and Rosenzweig 2006: 341–342), but it is interesting to see that usage guides eventually came to have the same function in America as they originally had in England. Martin Manser’s Good Word Guide (1997) is a British publication, and its introduction, by Betty Kirkpatrick, explicitly raises the point of linguistic insecurity, in relation to the lack of attention to the subject in the schools at the time: “Grammar is a cause of nervousness in many, mostly because they have never been taught the rudiments of it” (1997: xii). The point is drawn upon more elaborately by Caroline Taggart in Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English. Many native speakers of English, she writes, are aware that they have little formal knowledge of grammar or punctuation and fear that other people are going to despise them if they ‘get it wrong’. They use words they do not completely understand in

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an attempt to appear better educated than they are; and they become agitated about whether to say lunch or dinner in case they betray what they see as their own humble origins. The purpose of this book is quite simply to allay some of these fears. (2010: 7) Taggart sees social-class membership as the main factor accounting for people’s linguistic insecurity: they feel insecure about their language use because of their “humble origins”. This view is obviously inspired by her approach to the topic – writing through the persona of “her Ladyship” – but social class is also, as we will see in Chapter 7, an important factor in discussions about correctness in language use in Britain today, although it is something in which British and American attitudes to usage differ significantly (Milroy 2001).

Collecting and selecting usage guides The above account is largely based on my own collection of usage guides, which I acquired over the years by browsing through second-hand bookshops and market stalls, in the UK but also in The Netherlands; other usage guides, like Five Hundred Mistakes and Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector, I acquired through eBay. Baker’s Reflections is available through ECCO. All these titles are included in the HUGE database except for Manser’s Good Word Guide (1997) and Weiner’s Oxford Guide to English Usage (1983). Of the latter work, its second edition, by Weiner and Delahunty (1994), was included instead. As for Manser (1997), HUGE contains only a selection of the many usage guides that were published, particularly since the 1950s. While Pam Peters describes the production of usage guides as a “publishing industry” (2006: 775), the number of usage guides is not actually as large as that of style guides. Bennett (2009: 44) mentions nearly 12,000 hits when she searched Amazon.com for “academic writing”, but my own searches for usage guides produced a figure that fell far short of this. For all that, the number of usage guides that have been published through the ages is still very large, and for practical reasons, dictated by the time span of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, we included only a selection of usage guides – as well as of usage problems. To be able to make this selection, first an inventory of usage guide titles was made up. Searching systematically for usage guides is, however, a complicated affair. Due to the use of imaginative and tongue-in-cheek titles of some books, like Woe is I (O’Conner 1996), Sleeping Dogs don’t Lay (Leder and Dowis, 1999), Between You and I (Cochrane, 2003), My Grammar and I (or Should that Be “Me”?) (Taggart 2008) and Mind the Gaffe (Trask 2001), it isn’t easy to identify relevant titles by performing systematic library searches. What is more, many usage guides have been

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reissued over time, sometimes under different titles; these suggest new publications, though they are often merely revised editions of earlier works. Godfrey Howard’s Guide to English in the Twenty-first Century (2002), for instance, originally appeared as A Guide to Good English in the 1980’s in 1985, and John Bailie and Moyna Kitchin’s Essential Guide to English Usage (1988) had appeared in 1979 with the shorter title Guide to English Usage. For its second edition, Bryson’s usage guide was retitled Troublesome Words (Bryson 1984). Some selection criteria had to be defined before we were able to engage on the process itself. Usage guides are not only published for the British and American markets. I have already mentioned Pam Peters’s Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage (2007), and my search for English usage guides also produced a Guide to Canadian English Usage (Fee and McAlpine, 2007) and Ax or Ask? The African American Guide to Better English (McClendon, 2004). There are usage guides for other varieties of English as well, as well as for the use of English by native speakers of other languages. Examples are William Branford’s Structure, Style and Communication: An English Language Manual (1980) and P.N. Parashar’s Correct English Usage (2003). Stewart Clark’s Getting your English Right (2000) was published for Norwegian speakers of English. Due to the vast size of the topic, we decided to restrict ourselves in the Bridging the Unbridgeable project to British and American English and to usage guides written for speakers of those varieties only. Research within the project, moreover, included studying attitudes to usage problems among British and American speakers (see Ebner 2017 and Kostadinova 2018a, respectively), and the usage problems studied in this context were primarily the kind of old chestnuts that are dealt with in most usage guides (though as a result of the surveys and interviews conducted within the project other usage problems came up as well – see Chapter 5). However, even the decision to restrict ourselves to usage guides that deal with British and American English produced more material than we could handle, so a further selection had to be made as to which usage guides were to be included or not. But first an inventory had to be made. The start of my inventory was a list compiled by Ulrich Busse and Anne Schröder for a paper they gave on Fowler’s Modern English Usage in 2008 and which was kindly made available to me. Because of the topic of their paper – Fowler and the popularity of his usage guides – the list only included titles published after The King’s English (1906). Representing work in progress, it comprised 46 titles at the time. Next, I browsed the catalogue of Cambridge University Library for more titles when I was a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 2011. Cambridge University Library is a legal deposit library, which entitled it to request copies of every book published in the UK; for this reason, and also because I could check the books physically at the time, this library seemed a good resource

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for obtaining an overview of usage guides published in the UK at least. The library catalogue was searched systematically by using the terms “Usage (Guide)”, “Good English”, “Better English”, “Best English”, “Current English”, “Clear English”, “Correct English”, “Idiom(s)”, “King’s English” and “Queen’s English”. Some of these terms, however, proved deceptive: while G.H. Vallins’s Good English: How to Write It (1951) was indeed a usage guide according to our definition, his later book The Best English, published posthumously in 1960, was not. With the starting date set to 1864, the date of publication of Henry Alford’s Queen’s English, this produced 144 titles. Merging this list with the one compiled by Busse and Schröder, which had meanwhile been extended with new titles identified by Ulrich Busse, resulted in some 190 items, including seven usage guides published before Alford. The list contained new titles only; new editions of earlier titles were not included, with the exception of the two later editions of Fowler’s Modern English Usage.6 Collating the list with the one in Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009: 925–935) to be able to supplement the list with American usage guides produced a significant number of additional titles: 163; Garner’s list, however, includes many other works besides usage guides, and sifting them through was no mean job. As said, titles alone are not always a good indication of what a book is about, and though many of the works were available online for checking, often enough googling for a title not accessible to me otherwise merely produced a reference to Garner. What is more, Garner’s list lacks titles – several British ones, for instance – that do occur on my own list: though he claims to have identified “the corpus of literature on English usage”, Garner cannot realistically have hoped to arrive at a comprehensive overview – nor can I, since new titles keep showing up.7 My identification of the titles found as usage guides should therefore be considered tentative at best. For all that, the figures give a good indication of the growing interest in usage guides from the 1770s onwards. The grand total, then, comprises nearly 350 titles, published between 1770 and 2010,8 though it must be said that the expectation that this list is complete is unrealistic. Continued reading on the topic keeps producing hitherto unidentified titles, like Metcalfe (1963), The Right Way to Improve your English, drawn upon by Milroy and Milroy (2012);9 another example is Comma Sutra, an American usage guide published in 2005 which I happened to learn about in 2015. Its author is Laurie Rozakis, who is described on Wikipedia as “a writer of the Complete Idiot’s books and an expert on writing, grammar, usage, test preparation, and coaching writers” – a professional writer of advice literature in other words, including usage guides. While reading Oliver Kamm’s Accidence Will Happen, I encountered Grammar and Style for Examination Candidates and Others (1993) by the British philosopher Michael Dummett, and the more recent Gwynne’s Grammar: The Ultimate Introduction to Grammar and the Writing

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of Good English (2013).10 And while writing Chapter 8, I came across Keith Waterhouse’s English our English (and How to Sing It), published in 1991. The book hadn’t surfaced before because its title wasn’t covered by any of the search terms used, but even if it had, I wouldn’t have identified it as a usage guide. It proved to include a chapter called “Confusions”, which comprises about 40 usage problems, including lie/lay, who/whom and disinterested/uninterested – all old chestnuts. To be able to identify differences between the British and American usage guide traditions, I subdivided the list of titles according to where they were published. This resulted in 129 British titles (6 of which were published in Scotland and 1 in Ireland) and 216 American ones. Several titles proved hard to classify according to language variety: Trask’s Mind the Gaffe (2001), for instance, was published by Penguin, and the author describes himself in the preface as “an American who works in Britain” (2001: 3). His Say What You Mean was published four years later in Boston with the subtitle A Troubleshooter’s Guide to English Style and Usage. In the analysis below, I left the book unclassified. Another title that was hard to classify was Robert Allen’s Pocket Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1999); since it is based on Fowler, I decided to include it among the British titles. Richard Palmer’s Write in Style: A Guide to Good English (2002) was published by Routledge, not, it seems, either for British or American readers specifically. Though included in the grand total, it was not further classified for language variety (and in the end was not included in the HUGE database). Partridge (1947) on the other hand was classified as a British usage guide despite the fact that it was originally published in the US, because it had been the author’s intention, as the foreword to Usage and Abusage reads, to “supplement … and to complement” Fowler (1947: 5). The American focus, moreover, was secondary, and in the British edition the American annotations occur within square brackets. Peters’s Cambridge Guide to English Usage (2004), finally, was published in the UK, but doesn’t only deal with British English: Kaunisto (2017: 204) notes that it is based on the BNC as well as the American section of the Cambridge International Corpus. Though we have no way of knowing if the list I compiled is complete – and most likely is not – it was nevertheless used as a basis for the compilation of the HUGE database. Split up into British and American publications, the collected usage guides may be presented chronologically in two graphs, with the one in Figure 3.1 showing the British usage guides and the one in Figure 3.2 the American ones. Doing so allows us to try and identify different trends in the history of the text type across the years for these varieties of English, in addition to the different starting dates of the tradition already discussed in Chapter 2.

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25 20 15 10

British usage guides

5 0

Figure 3.1 Chronological overview of British usage guides published down to the 2000s (129 titles)

Though both figures show an overall increase in the publication of usage guides over the years, the British picture is messier than the American one. There is a clear peak for the 1980s, which continues into the 1990s. It very likely reflects the increased linguistic insecurity among speakers and writers of British English two or three decades after the teaching of grammar was taken out of the British school curriculum in the 1960s and 1970s, a subject dealt with in detail by Cameron (1995) (see also Beal 2018). This in effect led to what Keith (1990) called “grammarless” speakers, who are no longer familiar with formal grammatical concepts like auxiliaries, prepositions or conjunctions (see Ebner 2017: 372), and it is this group of people for whom Trask (2001) said he wrote his usage guide (see above). A good example of such a person – self-proclaimed, as discussed in Chapter 2 – is Lynne Truss, who has already been quoted for repeating Martin Jarvis’s joke about the subordinate clause being “one of Santa’s little helpers” (2003: 32). Truss was born in 1955, and might accordingly have suffered from the lack of English grammar teaching when she went to school in the 1960s, but Jarvis, who was born in 1941, shouldn’t have done so. His joke rather looks like an attempt at generating cheap laughs from later grammarless generations, and Truss’s repetition of it aims to do the same. With many people, perhaps including Lynne Truss, the lack of grammatical knowledge created a strong sense of linguistic insecurity, as is also evident from the type of response we received on the surveys conducted in the project (see Chapter 5). It is this insecurity that led to the increase in usage guides, a marketable commodity in the eyes both of writers and publishers, as offering the kind of grammatical knowledge alongside specific linguistic advice that many people felt ought to have been provided in school. In this light, the drop in Figure 3.1 for the 2000s may be

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35 30 25 20 15

American usage guides

10 5 0

Figure 3.2 Chronological overview of American usage guides published down to the 2000s (216 titles)

interpreted as a kind of stabilisation of the market, not because people had become less insecure, but because there already were many usage guides around. The much smaller but still distinct peak for the 1950s may well reflect the expansion of the Civil Service after World War II. Tony Bex discusses the immediate effect of “the growth of the executive following the Second World War” (1999: 101), upon which the group from which civil servants were usually recruited, public school and Oxbridge educated men like Ernest Gowers (Scott 2009), had to be significantly extended, and, since these new recruits often lacked the linguistic background of their older colleagues, they had to be provided with “specific advice to write business letters and other official documents” (Bex 1999: 103). This explains why Gowers’s own Complete Plain Words (1954) was so successful at this time, but it also accounts for the popularity of other well-known usage guides like Good English: How to Write It (1951) and Better English ([1953] 1955), both by G.H. Vallins, and A.S. Hornby’s Guide to Pattern and Usage in English (1954) as well as the publication of a concise edition of Partridge’s Usage and Abusage (1954). The overall rather more stable picture for the diachronic increase of American usage guides does show two troughs for the 1950s and 1970s; possibly, these are the result of gaps in the search results, which, as explained, cannot be claimed to be comprehensive. The 2000s show a drop here, too, as in the case of the British figures, and this may be the result of the beginning of competition from online language forums and podcasts, like the one by Mignon Fogarty, which has been running since 2006 (Lukač 2018: 70), and Paul Brians’s website “Common Errors in English Usage”, which had been up for nearly ten years by that time already (Brians 2003: vii). For all that, both authors published actual books with usage advice as well, Fogarty in 2008 and Brians in 2003. From the fact

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that usage guides continue to be published, and are reissued in the form of new editions as well, it appears that online language advice has not supplanted the more traditional type of usage advice, like that provided by actual books on the subject. The slow start of the American tradition as shown in Figure 3.2, similarly to that for British English (Figure 3.1), however, does not in the end warrant S.A. Leonard’s observation, discussed in Chapter 2, that American usage guides were produced in great numbers during the nineteenth century: the only peak (if we can call it that) for that period was for the 1880s, but it comprises eight titles only. Other discernible trends in the two traditions will be discussed below on the basis of the contents of the HUGE database. Because the 2010s are still in progress at the time of writing, that decade was not included in the above tables (Garner’s list, moreover, only runs to 2008). Usage guides continue to be published as discussed in Chapter 1: the year 2010 alone saw the publication of three British works, by Simon Heffer, Bernard Lamb and Caroline Taggart, and more recent new ones include Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style (2014), though in its final chapter only; Kamm’s Accidence Will Happen (2015); and Spector’s May I Quote You on That? (2015). Down to the end of 2013 some twenty new titles appeared altogether, primarily in Britain (5) and America (14). Before going into the general characteristics of usage guides in the next section (based on our selection for the HUGE database), some comments may be made on the different titles of British and American publications, which are either straightforward, like Quick Solutions to Common Errors in English (Burt, 2009) and Cambridge Guide to English Usage (Peters 2004), or contain tongue-in-cheek references to the topic. A classic example is of course Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003), which gave rise to The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot and Left (2006a) by David Crystal but also to the parodic Eats, Shites & Leaves: Crap English and How to Use it (Parody 2004). But such titles are found well before Truss’s book appeared: examples are Miss Nomer’s Guide to Painfully Incorrect English (Axelrod 1998), Get it Write (Tuten and Swanson 2002), The Grouchy Grammarian (Parrish 2002), Sleeping Dogs Don’t Lay (and That’s No Lie) (Lederer and Dowis 1999), and Comma Sutra (Rozakis 2005). That these five usage guides were all published in America is no coincidence: humorous titles are typical of American publications particularly. As Ann Batko explains in Appendix 3, the title of her book When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People (2004) came to her “almost as a joke – I was thinking of Harold Kushner’s famous book (famous in the US at least), When Bad Things Happen to Good People [(1981)]”. In this light, the title of Trask’s Mind the Gaffe – but also Kamm’s Accidence Will Happen (2015) – fits in better with the American than the British usage guide tradition. The titles of Caroline Taggart’s usage guides, My Grammar and I (or Should that Be “Me”?) (2008, with J.A. Wines) and Her

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Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010) are likewise exceptional in this respect. The adoption of “her Ladyship” as a persona representing a standard of correctness in usage allows Taggart to take a lighthearted approach to the topic; in reality, however, the lightheartedness is only superficial, since “her Ladyship” makes sternly normative comments on usage throughout the book. This is similarly the case with the American titles: no matter how playful they might be, they don’t hide the fact that the books deal with what everybody agrees is a serious topic. Taking an apparently humorous approach to the question of correct usage, in effect, seems no more than a selling device.

The HUGE database: usage guides Earlier on in this chapter, I discussed the process by which we collected as many usage guides as possible, published in Britain and in America, for the purpose of setting up the HUGE database. As explained, the resulting list is most likely incomplete as well as limited in time: it ends in 2010, while usage guides have continued to appear. For all that, it served as a good starting point for the compilation of the database. Given the constraints imposed upon us by time, it was unfeasible to try and include all 350 or so works in the database – an impossible job to begin with anyway – so a selection was made. A major requirement for this was the works’ availability, either electronically or in such a form that they could be cut up and scanned, which, however, proved not always to be the case. The final selection for the database comprises 77 usage guides, ranging from 1770, when the first one, Robert Baker’s Reflections on the English Language, was published, to 2010, the year which marked the end of the selection process. HUGE consequently includes almost one quarter of the total collection. For all that, Robin Straaijer, who created the database and later filled it together with three student assistants, estimates that coverage of the eighteenth (1 title only: the 2 editions of Baker’s Reflections on the English Language) and nineteenth centuries (9 titles) is as complete as we could hope for (Straaijer 2018b).11 An example of a book that was unavailable for the database was Anglophil’s The Queen’s English? Up to Date (1892), of which there is only a hard copy in the Cambridge University Library; another example is Rosaline Masson’s Use and Abuse of English (Masson [1896] 1929).12 The real selection process therefore concerned the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Style guides were excluded for reasons already discussed. To achieve a certain measure of overall coverage, titles were selected as far as possible to represent all decades of the twentieth century. Though the twenty-first century is only about two decades old, the proportion of usage guides for the 2000s is so large – making up nearly 10% of all usage guides on the collective list – that a selection had to be

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made for this period as well. For the closing year of the database, 2010, all three usage guides published in that year (as far as we know) – Bernard Lamb’s The Queen’s English, Simon Heffer’s Strictly English and Caroline Taggart’s Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English – were included. Another criterion was that usage guides by well-known writers had to be included. To try and avoid being too subjective in our selection here, we asked the general public what their favourite usage guides were. This was done in a Bridging the Unbridgeable blog post just after the start of the project, and respondents suggested the second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (Gowers 1965), Gowers’s Plain Words, Partridge, Vallins, and Strunk and White – all of them well-known usage guides. All these were therefore included in the HUGE database. Peters and Young (1997) studied 40 usage guides, only about 20% of the titles published from the 1950s onwards on our own list. Their intention, however, probably never was to engage in a comprehensive analysis of the text type, and availability played a role in their choice of works as well (1997: 317). In only sixteen instances is there an overlap between their collection and ours, though not always the same editions were used – again for reasons of availability. Partly, this relatively small amount of overlap is due to the fact that Peters and Young didn’t distinguish as strictly as we do between usage guides and style guides, while they also included a book like International English Usage (Todd and Hancock, 1986), as well six Australian usage guides. Peters and Young did include John Simon’s collection of language columns (see Chapter 2). His Paradigms Lost (1980) does deal with usage problems like lie/lay, like for as and uninterested/disinterested, but the book offers linguistic entertainment rather than actual usage advice (though the one might well inform the other). There are many other such books about, British and American ones alike, which we did not include either, like William Safire’s Watching My Language (1997), John Humphrys’ Lost For Words (2001) and Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (2015 – “autobiographical narrative”, according to Morana Lukač (2015), interrupted by exposés on usage problems including which vs. that (it depends on the context), dangling participles (they’re not always wrong), singular they (don’t use it), between you and I (barbaric), whom (let’s keep it), and apostrophes (hang on to them). The remaining works analysed by Peters and Young were on our original list as well, but were not included in the database, either because the decades in question were already represented by other titles, or because the books proved unavailable to us, whether in digitised form or as hard copies that could be digitised.

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Two additional categories of usage guide writers we wished to include were linguists and women. The latter group is underrepresented on the HUGE list, which includes only 25 female authors, all, except for Josephine Turck Baker ([1910] 1938), Gertrude Payne (1911) and Wilma Ebbitt (Ebbitt and Ebbitt [1939] 1978),13 from the 1950s onwards. Usage guides started out as a typically male text type, just as early grammars and dictionaries did, so this need not be surprising. A call on the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog for works by female authors like Rosaline Masson (see above) produced no results. Later writers, like Patricia O’Conner, Angela Burt, Mignon Fogarty, Pam Peters and Janet Whitcut, could be included in the database along with quite a few others. Laurie Rozakis’s Comma Sutra (2005) was found too late in the selection process. Whether women take a different perspective on the question of what is correct usage we don’t know, but, since gender is known to correlate with attitudes to standard usage (see Chapter 6), it is a topic that can now be studied with the help of the HUGE database. As for the presence in the HUGE database of linguists as authors of usage guides, I’ve already mentioned that usage guides originated as a product by non-specialists, more specifically non-linguists.14 Weiner, in his article “On editing a usage guide”, claims that usage guide writers are linguists, more specifically lexicographers and grammarians (1988: 179), but it is of course impossible to make too much of this when considering the early stages of the tradition, since usage guides began to be published well before linguistics had developed into an academic discipline. Baker, for instance, as already discussed in Chapter 1, was merely a hack writer. I will therefore go more deeply into the question of what makes writers of usage guides specialists in usage in Chapter 4. HUGE classifies authors according to their professions (or occupations), and being a “linguist” is one of them, as is “lexicographer”. Two examples of linguists whose usage guides are included in the database are David Crystal and Pam Peters. Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989), moreover, was compiled by a team of writers – Stephen J. Perrault, Kathleen M. Doherty, David B. Justice, Madeline L. Novak and E. Ward Gilman – who are all referred to in the preface as lexicographers (1989: 11a). We expect linguists to take a different approach to the question of linguistic prescription than nonlinguists, and this can now be studied systematically through the HUGE database. The HUGE database comprises the following usage guides:15 • • •

1770s (2 Br): Baker (1770), Baker (1779) 1820s (1 Br): Vulgarities of Speech Corrected ([1826] 1829) 1840s (1 Am): Hurd (1847)

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• • • • • • • • • • • • •

•

• •

57

1850s (3 Am): Brown (1851), Five Hundred Mistakes (1856), Live and Learn (1856) 1860s (2 Br, 1 Am): Alford (1864), Gould (1867), Moon (1868) 1870s (1 Am): White (1870) 1880s (1 Am): Ayres ([1881] 1911) 1900s (1 Br, 2 Am): Fitzgerald (1901), Fowler and Fowler (1906), Vizetelly ([1906] 1920)16 1910s (4 Am): Payne (1911), Turck Baker ([1910] 1938), Hall (1917), Strunk (1918) 1920s (1 Br, 1 Am): Fowler (1926), Krapp (1927) 1930s (1 Br, 2 Am): Horwill (1935), Treble and Vallins (1936), Ebbitt and Ebbitt ([1939] 1978) 1940s (2 Br): Partridge (1947), Gowers (1948) 1950s (2 Br, 2 Am): Vallins (1951), Vallins ([1953] 1955), Evans and Evans (1957), Nicholson (1957) 1960s (2 Br, 1 Am): Wood (1962), Fowler2 (= Gowers) (1965), Follett (1966) 1970s (2 Am): Morris and Morris (1975), The Written Word (1977) 1980s (8 Br, 6 Am): Swan (1980), Burchfield (1981), Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (1981), Vermes (1981), Weiner (1983), Bryson (1984), Crystal ([1984] 2000), Dear (1986), Bailie and Kitchin (1988), Booher ([1988] 1992), Carter and Skates ([1988] 1990), Greenbaum and Whitcut (1988), Randall (1988), Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989) 1990s (9 Br, 7 Am): de Vries (1991), Marriott and Farrell (1992), Howard (1993), Mager and Mager (1993), Wilson (1993), Blamires (1994), New York Public Library Writer’s Guide (1994), Weiner and Delahunty [1994] 1993), Ayto (1995), Cutts (1995), Burchfield (= Fowler3) (1996), O’Conner (1996), Amis (1997), Stilman (1997), Garner (1998), Allen (1999) 2000s (4 Br, 4 Am; Trask): Burt ([2000] 2002), Trask (2001), Brians (2003), Batko (2004), Peters (2004), American Heritage Guide (2005), Sayce (2006), Butterfield (2007), Fogarty (2008) 2010s (3 Br): Taggart (2010), Lamb (2010), Heffer (2010).

The classification into British or American usage guides is primarily based on place of publication, which puts Peters (2004) into the category of British usage guides. As for the language variety the book offers usage advice for, it has been classified in the HUGE database as both British and American (though the book may presumably be consulted for other varieties of English as well).17 Classification according to place of publication avoids dealing with potentially unclear cases, as with the latest edition of Garner’s usage guide discussed in Chapter 1, which now aims at a general English market (Straaijer 2018a). As for Trask (2001), the work was left unclassified as to language variety because, as discussed above, it is unclear whether it was meant for the British or American market. Having lived in

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9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

British usage guides American usage guides

Figure 3.3 A chronological overview of the 77 usage guides (British and American) in HUGE (Trask 2001 excluded)

England for 30 years or so when he published Mind the Gaffe, his views on language may have been affected accordingly – another good topic to investigate further. As for Garner’s usage guide, we included the book’s first edition (1998) in the database because this version was freely available online. Figure 3.3 presents a chronological overview of the works in the HUGE database, according to the linguistic variety for which they were classified. For both varieties the peaks for the 1980s and 1990s are well represented (cf. Figures 3.1 and 3.2). Though the individual numbers per decade are usually small, the historical angle to the HUGE database allows for the study of the – expected – development from a largely prescriptive to a rather more descriptive approach in the treatment of usage problems, a development in which linguists may have played an important role.

The HUGE database: usage problems HUGE is also a database of usage problems, and its primary usefulness as a tool for research is to study how usage problems have been treated in usage guides over the years.18 Each usage problem has its own history: they come and go, and have a life span of their own. Why usage problems came to be perceived as problematical or why they ceased to be regarded as such are questions well worth studying, and the HUGE database allows for developing more accurate insights into why particular linguistic features became socially stigmatised. Many prejudices about usage problems have proved extremely persistent over the years, such as the popular assumption that the split infinitive had its origin as a usage problem in the eighteenth century. Even Pam Peters writes in The Cambridge Guide to English Usage that the split infinitive “became the bête noire of C18 and C19 grammarians” (2004: 512). Not only will linguists,

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moreover, be able to study changing attitudes to particular usage problems by drawing on the database, new writers of usage guides and writers about usage problems in general will be able to profit from its contents. The acronym HUGE stands for Hyper Usage Guide of Usage, and this is in effect what it is – a kind of umbrella usage guide that also allows copy editors, translators and text writers as well as members of the general public to acquire their own views on the changing or current status of a particular usage problem. The number of usage problems in the database likewise had to be limited, so to begin with we restricted our selection to grammatical usage problems, despite the fact that for the general public, usage problems are often lexical issues like the difference between imply and infer or the question of whether it should be due to or owing to. As a starting point we took David Crystal’s “Grammatical Top Ten”, a list of usage problems Crystal collected in 1986 on the basis of an interactive BBC Radio 4 programme on the subject of prescriptivism, as discussed in his Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995: 194). The list includes between you and I (instead of me), the split infinitive, the placement of only, none followed by a singular or plural verb, variation between different(ly) to/ from/than, preposition stranding, the use of shall/will with the first person to express future tense, hopefully as a sentence/initial clause modifier, the use of who for whom, and double negation. We next expanded the list by including the usage problems discussed in Attitudes to English Usage (Mittins et al. 1970). Not all the items in this book, however, are of a grammatical nature: item 4, for instance, Traditional and contemporary furniture do not go well together, deals with a lexical issue (contemporary used in the sense of “present-day”), as does item 50, They will loan you the glasses (i.e. lend). At times, the distinction between lexical and grammatical features is not clear cut. It might be argued, for instance, that lie/lay reflects a lexical rather than a grammatical problem, which is how it is classified by Robert Burchfield in The Spoken Word (1981), a usage manual he drew up for the BBC. To my mind, it could equally well have been classified as a grammatical problem because the confusion between the two verbs is due to the fact that the past tense of lie is lay, which is a verb in its own right. I don’t agree either with Burchfield’s classification of data is/are as a lexical issue, because the question of whether data requires a singular or a plural verb form is obviously a grammatical one. As with our selection of usage guides for the database, we consulted the general public to find out what their pet “linguistic peeves” were and what we might additionally include in the database. Moreover, we wrote about different usage problems on the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog, and many of these discussions provoked responses that concerned other usage problems as well. One item that came up again and again was what is often referred to as “the new like”, which many of our respondents take issue

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with. An example of a critical comment may be found in the response to a call issued in January 2015: Oh, and excessive use of "like." I don't notice it if it is sprinkled lightly in the senses of "I read in like Newsweek [although it might have been Time]" or "And I was like 'are you insane,' although of course I didn't say that," but when it gets too heavy it grates, and makes me think negative things about the speaker. (see further Appendix 1) This use of like, which in fact illustrates different functions of the word, including quotative like and the use of like as a discourse particle, has been extensively studied by linguists like D’Arcy (2007), but it is only beginning to have the status of a usage problem. In HUGE we found references to two of the four functions distinguished by D’Arcy (2007: 392): Peters (2004: 323) discusses discourse marker and quotative like, while Taggart condemns quotative like (“And I’m, like, yeah, whatever …”) as a “distressing colloquialism” (2010: 76). Kostadinova (2018a), focussing on American English, identified like as a usage problem in several more usage guides, so the feature may still be perceived more as an American than a British usage problem. Another feature that came up in several informants’ comments was have went: this feature does have a presence in usage guides, though primarily in American ones (Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Kostadinova 2015). Usage problems that were mentioned in comments on the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog, usually in response to other items we discussed, include (in alphabetical order) ain’t, alternate/alternative, apostrophe placement, begging the question, between/among, could of/have, get/have, gonna, healthy/healthful, heterogenous/heterogeneous, -ize/ise, less/fewer, like, unmodified likely, the metaphorical use of literally, more easy/easier, per/ prospective, singular they, the split infinitive, I was stood/sat, that/which, thusly, toward/towards, try and/to, have went, who/whom, and the spelling of homophones like there/they’re/their and you’re/your. Not all these features are grammatical issues, and from this list, only ain’t, initial and, apostrophe placement, between/among, disinterested/uninterested, have went, sentence initial hopefully, I for me and me for I, -ic/ical, less/fewer, unmodified likely, literally, of for have (could of), preposition stranding, singular they, the split infinitive, that/which, thusly, try and/to and who/whom are included in the database. The majority of the usage problems in HUGE, 113 out of the total number of 123 (see Appendix 2), are indeed grammatical items; one (a/an) belongs to the field of spelling, while others are semantic or lexical problems (contemporary, decimate, affect/effect, farther/further, gay, infer/imply, learn/teach, lend/loan, mutual).

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How does this figure compare with the number of grammatical usage problems dealt with by usage guides in general? To try and assess the number of grammatical features against the – unknown – total number of usage problems that seem to be in existence (see Chapter 1), I compared the number of grammatical items in HUGE to some randomly selected usage guides. The results are presented in Table 3.1.19 These figures indicate that Baker’s Reflections includes the largest number of grammatical usage problems, while that for Five Hundred Mistakes is also considerably higher than that for the later works I analysed. In all the other usage guides the proportion of grammatical usage problems is fairly small, smallest in Burchfield (1981) (though see my comment on his classification above), and, apart from Baker (1770), smaller than the figure supplied by Algeo (1991a: 12), i.e. 36%. Compiling a usage guide, as will become clear from Chapter 4, is very much a private undertaking, and has been so from the earliest days on, which obviously influences the selection of usage problems in a major way. There are, it appears, no objective criteria by which to determine what linguistic features qualify as usage problems, since their status and association with particular groups of speakers is largely a matter of personal inclination. We cannot therefore claim that the number of grammatical usage problems we included in the HUGE database is either sufficient or representative of the usage problems known to be in existence. We nevertheless can, I think, make a careful claim towards stating that the number of grammatical items included in our database, 113, is not small per se. The usage problems do provide enough material to be able to study trends and developments both in the usage guide as a text type and in the treatment of usage problems over the years.20

Table 3.1 Proportions of grammatical usage problems discussed in selected usage guides Author

Title

Date

Total no of items

Grammatical items

Baker Anon. Fowler

Reflections 500 Mistakes Modern English Usage (letters A, B, C, D, E – partly) The Spoken Word King’s English Her Ladyship’s Guide The Sense of Style Accidence Will Happen

1770 1856 1926

127 49921 1093

88 (69.3%) 197 (39.5%) 245 (22.4%)

1981 1997 2010 2014 2015

200 257 ca. 40022 113 162

26 (13.0%) 52 (20.3%) 49 (ca. 11%) 19 (16.8%) 42 (25.9%)

Burchfield Amis Taggart Pinker Kamm

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Exploring the database: some examples The HUGE database allows for many different kinds of searches, which are specified by the different tabs on the interface – Usage Guides, Entries, References, Usage Problems and Persons (for full details, see the user manual compiled by Robin Straaijer (2015)). Because HUGE provides bibliographical information on the usage guides included, one search question, for the names of publishers of usage guides, showed that most of the major publishing houses – André Deutsch, Cambridge University Press, HarperCollins, Longman, OUP, Penguin, Prentice Hall, Random House – brought out usage guides over the years, but also that OUP published the largest number. Usage guides may be selected according to the variety they have been classified for, British or American, but also according to how their contents is presented, alphabetically or by topic (or both). This shows that the first American English usage guide, Hurd (1847), was arranged alphabetically but that the first British one, Baker (1770), was not, though some of Hurd’s material is arranged by topic as well. Usage guides in which the material is presented according to topic are found between 1829 (The Vulgarities of Speech Corrected, [1826] 1829) and 2010 (Heffer, Taggart and Lamb). This kind of information allows us to see whether there was any historical development in the presentation of usage guides (cf. Straaijer 2018b). Other searches for bibliographical information may include year of publication, title and author (or editor). Thus, searching for the year 1993 produces three hits,23 while a search for “king’s” in the title brings up two items: the Fowlers’ The King’s English (1906) but also the usage guide by Kingsley Amis (1997) which carries the same title (see further Chapter 4). Searching for authors – and editors – can be done by name, but also through occupation and nationality; this allows us to study the question of whether linguists became more involved as writers of usage guides in the course of time and also how many British or American authors are represented in the HUGE database. Selecting “Problem Term” under the tab Usage Guides identifies all usage problems included in the database from all usage guides. Choosing Baker (1770) and clicking on “show” produces a list of 21 items, and 25 for the expanded second edition (Baker 1779). The immediate output for all search questions contains a number of columns by default; more columns can be selected, depending on the nature of the query (under Alter Query, choose Columns to Display). Selecting “Entry Text” under the tab Entries and clicking on the empty box produces the total number of entries in the database: 6,330 of them altogether, taken from 77 usage guides. Selecting the option “Guide Title” will provide information on where in the books concerned the items can be found. (The titles can be arranged alphabetically or chronologically by clicking on the arrows in the header of

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the relevant columns.) The tab Entries allows searching for the text of the usage problems; such full-text searches are the more powerful types of search options of the database. Selecting “Entry Text” and keying in “hopefully”, for instance, produces all text passages in the database (so not merely the usage guide entries) in which the word “hopefully” occurs. This feature makes it possible to study the metalanguage used in describing usage problems. Doing a full-text search for “barbarous”, for instance, a common term expressing deprecation in eighteenth-century normative grammars (see Chapter 6), shows that it is still used as late as in 2010 by Simon Heffer, whose Strictly English reads: This tiresome usage [hopefully] is now so ubiquitous that those who object to it are sometimes dismissed as pedants. It remains wrong, and only a barbarous writer with a low estimation of his readers would try to pass it off as respectable prose. (Heffer 2010: 84−85) The passage, moreover, shows that “barbarous” is not the only negative term adopted by Heffer to signal his disapproval of this much contested usage. Other full-text searches that produce interesting results are the following. Searching for “Lowth” produced results for eleven of the 77 usage guides, some of which quote him or his grammar more than once – Brown (1851) for four usage problems and Hurd (1847), Hall (1917) and O’Conner (1996) for two each, while Webster’s Dictionary (1989) includes as many as 23 references to Lowth, always to provide a historical context to the items discussed. In the usage guides, Lowth is most frequently mentioned in relation to preposition stranding, a usage problem his name is often associated with (see Chapter 2). He is, moreover, often referred to as “Bishop Lowth”, despite the fact that he didn’t become a bishop until a few years after his grammar had been published, while Bryson’s (1984) comment that Lowth’s grammar was “curiously influential” is part of the same myth that attributes the proscription of the split infinitive and that of double negation to Lowth. Searching for Churchill, the reputed source of the “famous witticism” (Brians 2003) “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put” (see Chapter 1), shows that this apocryphal story is frequently repeated uncritically: we first find it in Gowers (1948) and after that in Morris and Morris (1975), Crystal ([1984] 2000), Mager and Mager (1993), Burchfield (1996), Garner (1998), Brians (2003), Peters (2004), The American Heritage Guide (2005), Sayce (2006), Butterfield (2007) and Heffer (2010) (cf. Lukač 2018: 96–97). All this suggests that Lowth’s status as a prescriptivist and the Churchill anecdote are both part of the same kind of “received wisdom” that is responsible for the continued presence of old chestnuts even in the most recent usage guides (Bex 1999: 95). But searching for Churchill in the database also shows that he is often cited for

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making what are considered to be grammatical mistakes, like his use of it is me, data has rather than have, ain’t, singular they, like for as and, most famously, future shall rather than intentional will in the famous sentence “We shall never surrender”. The criticism of Churchill’s use of ain’t is of particular interest: this form (used for isn’t or hasn’t) is highly stigmatised in British as well as American English (see Kostadinova 2018a). It was labelled as a “vulgarism” as early as in Vulgarities of Speech Corrected ([1826] 1829), the first usage guide in HUGE that deals with the form, which also mentions that it occurs in both varieties of English. It is not merely a dialectal or otherwise non-standard variant, for David Crystal encountered it in a cartoon in Punch, dated 1873, which satirises its use by the upper classes long before Churchill’s days. That Churchill used it is therefore not remarkable as such. Crystal’s “Index of linguistic topics discussed in Punch (1841−1901)” (in Crystal 2018) is of further interest in that it includes quite a few instances of Americanisms, like recuperate, to claim, burgled and enjoyable, which shows that the adverse influence of American usage on British English is a far from recent phenomenon. Finegan (1998: 569) already cites Alford (1864) for this. Today, according to Anya Luscombe in her study of BBC News writing between 1966 and 2006, Americanisms are among the “top four ‘pet hates’” of BBC News writers and journalists (Luscombe 2012: 150).24 Doing a full-text search in HUGE for the term “Americanism” produced fifteen hits, ranging from Ayres (1881) to Heffer (2010). Words and expressions labelled as Americanisms by the usage guides include very pleased and very delighted (Ayres 1881); like for as (Vallins [1953] 1955, Webster’s Dictionary 1989); loan/lend (Evans and Evans 1957, Webster’s Dictionary 1989); I wouldn’t know (Fowler2/Gowers 1965); hopefully (Greenbaum and Whitcut 1988, Webster’s Dictionary 1989); periphrastic do with possessive have, as in I don’t have indigestion (Weiner 1983; Dear 1986); ain’t and imply/infer (Webster’s Dictionary 1989); gay (Wilson 1993); different than (Howard (1993); sneaked/snuck (New York Public Library Writer’s Guide 1994); pled/pleaded (Garner 1998); intensifier real (Allen 1999); and kinda (Peters 2004). Heffer (2010) includes quite a list of Americanisms, including Can I get a beer, on the weekend, in school and many others. Not all usage guides mentioned here are British publications, and it is interesting to see some of the American ones defending particular instances against the charge of being called Americanisms. Evans and Evans (1957), for instance, write about the use of the verb loan: Actually, it is a very respectable verb. It has been in existence for almost eight hundred years and was used in an act of Parliament in 1542. It is thoroughly acceptable in the United States, especially when used by bankers or in speaking about money. (1957: 281)

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Howard (1993), a British publication, similarly counters the dismissal, as he puts it, of different than as “an ungrammatical Americanism” by citing many British authors who use it. Carmen Ebner (2017), however, found that the form was already condemned by Baker in 1770, which thus predates the existence of American English as an independent variety of English. Busse and Schröder (2010a: 96–99), moreover, show that, with different from being the most frequent form in both British and American English, different than was only secondarily preferred as an American variant, at a much lower frequency than different from (different to was the secondarily most preferred variant for British English). Heffer is most critical of Americanisms, asserting that they “change the idioms of our language to no apparent purpose” (2010: 182). The term “Britishism” does not occur in the HUGE database, but “Briticism” does: it is found with three American usage guides – Hall (1917), saying that two first + noun for first two represents British usage; Morris and Morris (1975), citing one of the Harper Dictionary’s usage panel members describing aren’t I as “a conscious Briticism” which would sound “hopelessly affected” in American English; and Webster’s Dictionary (1989), referring to an early-twentieth-century writer who claimed that like for as is “a Briticism, [that is] ‘very prevalent’ among both the educated and the uneducated”. The influence of British on American usage was fairly recently the focus of considerable interest, in an article in the New York Times of 10 October 2012 headlined “Americans are Barmy over Britishisms” (Williams 2012b). The article uses the word “Anglocreep” to refer to the increasing use in American English of words like cheers for thank you, brilliant as an intensifier, loo for bathroom, and many others. This looks like an instance of the New World beginning to strike back, and it will be interesting to see whether comments on Britishisms (or Briticisms) in usage guides will increase within the next few years. Many more examples could be given of how to search for information in the database and of the kind of results such searches will produce; an exhaustive account of what HUGE as a research tool could produce is, apart from being well-nigh impossible in a single study, not the purpose of the present book, which instead aims to encourage further research along the lines indicated – or indeed very different ones. Three tabs remain to be mentioned here: the one called Usage Problems provides direct access to the 123 usage problems, and the tab Persons offers information about all the writers in the database. The last remaining tab, References, includes selected publications on usage guides and usage problems: nearly 300 titles altogether, ranging from 1916 to 2010. Searching the list shows, for instance, that many articles on topics related to prescriptivism appeared in The English Journal and in American Speech. Activating the column “Guide List” under Columns to Display produces “Show” buttons which indicate the usage guides dealt with. Clicking on the “Show” button next to Mittins et al. (1970) produces a list of usage

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guides that are mentioned in this book ranging from Baker (1770) down to Follett (1966). More detailed questions can be asked more directly as well: searching for “hopefully” under “Problem Term” under References, for instance, produces fourteen publications on this topic, dated between 1983 and 2010. Hopefully is indeed a relatively new usage problem, usage of which drastically increased during the early 1960s (Busse and Schröder 2010a: 94), due, it is believed, to American influence on British English usage. Busse and Schröder write that “the new use of hopefully” was first discussed in the second edition of Gowers’s Plain Words, edited by Sir Bruce Fraser (1973), who expected it to “establish itself as a new idiom” (as quoted by Busse and Schröder 2010a: 95). Checking the treatment of hopefully in the HUGE database, however, shows an earlier attestation: Follett (1966). The usage item thus appears to have found its way into the usage guides fairly quickly. For the next three chapters I will draw primarily on the HUGE database. To end the present chapter, it might be said at this point that the usefulness of the database is evident for one thing already, that is, in correcting Burchfield’s claim that The King’s English by Fowler and Fowler (1906) and Modern English Usage by Fowler (1926) “are usage manuals written in a tradition mainly inherited from two works of the nineteenth century, one British (Alford 1864) and the other American (White 1871) [sic]” (1991: 94). Busse and Schröder (2006, 2010b), too, seem to proceed from the assumption that the usage guide tradition originated with Alford’s The Queen’s English in 1864 and the publications of Fowler brothers after that (Peters, too, calls the Fowler brothers “pioneers”, 2018: 32). Usage guides, both British and American ones, were produced well before Alford and White, and even though the HUGE database is based on a selection of usage guides, particularly for the twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, the earlier stages in the tradition can now be taken into account in any study of prescriptivism more fully than before. As the above discussion on hopefully has shown, a more accurate account of the usage problems included in the database can now be made than was done by Peters and Young (1997), Albakry (2007), Kaunisto (2017) and others who based themselves on a relatively small selection of usage guides. Despite its limitations, the database will prove a useful tool in providing better insight into the text type as well as the history of English usage problems, and this will improve our current knowledge of prescription and prescriptivism in many useful ways.

Notes 1 Garner’s Modern American Usage (1998 or later) is conspicuous by its absence here. 2 In 2016, The American Dialect Society proclaimed singular they as the winner of their word-of-the-year competition (www.americandialect.org/2015-word-ofthe-year-is-singular-they). By thus gaining official recognition, singular they

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3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12

13

14

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may eventually cease to be a usage problem (see Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Ebner 2017). I therefore do not agree with Lynch (2009: 116), who thinks this is problematical. A Google Ngram search for usage guide, too, produced different patterns of usage between British and American English: the term is attested about twenty years earlier in American than in British English, and while usage peaked for both varieties around the 1990s, there was a subsequent drop in usage for both languages, and an increase in the 2000s, but for American English only. The original (1918) edition contained only eight such rules. Doing so allows for checking if there were any significant differences between the editions of this iconic usage guide. Two further titles were added on the basis of a separate inventory made by Kostadinova (2018a), while a few more titles were added from a private collection donated to us. Excluded from this list are books on synonymy, composition, spelling and style; teaching manuals (like exercises on bad English); English grammars; general works on grammar and usage; general manuals for writers; works on Plain English and manuals addressing specific audiences like businessmen and college students – like the CIA manual, they would sooner be style guides than usage guides. Apart from Fowler, this is the only usage guide Milroy and Milroy discuss, which raises the question of why they selected this particular work. Beal (2018) notes that Gwynne “is a former chartered accountant” (par. 28), which puts him into the same category as other writers of usage guides who are not linguists (see Chapter 4). See Straaijer (2015) on the construction of the database as well as its coverage. Straaijer also produced short videos of this production process: www.youtube.com/ user/usageguides. The book and its author may be well worth studying in further detail, since Rosaline Masson appears to have been the first female writer of a usage guide (https://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/2015/05/29/rosaline-masson-first-femalebritish-usage-guide-writer/). We were unable to locate the first edition of this book, so referring to 1939 as the date of Ebbitt and Ebbitt (as done throughout), may not always be accurate. Occasionally, however, there is an indication that some of the information in the version we used for the database (Ebbitt and Ebbitt [1939] 1978), e.g. on past tense snuck, may indeed date back to 1939 (see Chapter 8). Perhaps the same applies to the discussion of drug (see Chapter 5). But I also found evidence to the contrary: the presence of hopefully as a usage problem in the book, for instance, suggests that this part dates from the 1970s rather than from the 1930s (see Chapter 3) because hopefully entered the usage guide tradition only relatively late (Busse and Schröder 2010a). The 1978 edition thus includes a mixture of original and later information, confirming the note in the introduction that the book was “largely rewritten” (Ebbitt and Ebbitt [1939] 1978: v). Outside the field of linguistics, the term “linguist” is often used to refer to someone who knows many languages (cf. OED, linguist, n., 1.a); see, for example, Len Deighton (1988: 228) and Zachary Leader when writing that “Amis was no linguist” (2006: 334). In Deaf Sentence (2008), whose protagonist is a professor of Linguistics, David Lodge draws on the distinction as follows: “‘I’m a linguist,’ I said [to his GP]. ‘Oh, are you? What languages?’ ‘Only the

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15 16

17

18 19 20

21 22

23 24

The usage guide – and the HUGE database one,’ I said. (It’s a common mistake.)” (2008: 20). As an alternative, also outside the field of linguistics proper, the word “linguistician” is found, as when Amis in The King’s English identifies himself as “not a professional or even a trained linguist or linguistician” (1997: xv). Square brackets in the dates of publication refer to the works’ first editions. When we were unable to access these, later editions or reprints were used for the database. Though born in London, Vizetelly’s career, after he moved to New York in 1891, took place in the US. According to the ANB, moreover, he was “no admirer of ‘Oxford English’”. His usage guide has therefore been classified as American. There are frequent references in the book to Standard English, but it is unclear if such references include British as well as American English. The data for the book, as the Preface discusses, have been drawn from corpora of British and American English. The work also includes encyclopedic entries on different varieties of English, including American, Australian, British, Canadian, New Zealand, South African and International English. See, for example, Ebner (2017), Straaijer (2018b) and Kostadinova (2018a) on how this has been done for selected British and American usage problems. The items in Fowler’s Modern English Usage were classified by Emily Maas and those in Kamm (2015) by Carmen Ebner. Permission for excerpting the passages containing the selected usage problems was obtained from the majority of the publishers concerned. For some usage guides, such as The Cambridge Guide to English Usage, access to the text was restricted to the members of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project. Despite its title, the usage guide contains only 499 items: item 450 is missing from the book, very likely due to a typesetting problem since the preceding feature, numbered 449, occurs at the turn of pages 66 to 67. This total figure is somewhat imprecise since the book contains both detailed lists of features (“Confusables”) and instances treated under a general heading, like “-ant/-ent”. Not all instances listed in the category have been counted separately. To access the original date of publication of usage guides (first edition), activate the search term “guide year, original” under Columns to Display. Attitudes to particular Americanisms among British speakers today are also studied in Ebner (2017).

Chapter 4

The writers and the publishers

Publishers’ projects “This book was the idea of Nigel Wilcockson, my publisher at Random House.” With these words Simon Heffer opens the acknowledgements in his book Strictly English: The Correct Way to Write … and Why it Matters (2010). Strictly English has been very strongly criticised, by David Crystal in The New Statesman (2010a) and by Geoffrey Pullum in Times Higher Education. Pullum even concludes by saying that “Heffer should be ashamed of himself, and Random House should be ashamed of this book” (2010b). Crystal and Pullum are linguists, while Heffer is not. His Wikipedia entry identifies him as a journalist, writer and political commentator, so what made him write a usage guide, and why did Random House publish the book, even inviting him to write it? What is Heffer’s expertise on usage that made Random House suggest that he could write the book to begin with? Heffer’s case is not unique: Sir Ernest Gowers is another, well-known example, who had been asked by the Treasury, where he worked, “to write a pamphlet on official English, for training purposes, after the war” (Scott 2009: 129). I have already mentioned the need for such instruction due to the increase of civil servants just after World War II in Chapter 3, but that Plain Words (1948) would become so popular was quite unexpected. A more recent example is Bernard Lamb, the President of the Queen’s English Society and the author of The Queen’s English and How to Use It (2010). The website of the Queen’s English Society describes Lamb as a geneticist; so again the questions arise: what makes a geneticist want to publish a usage guide, and what is his expertise on language? Like Heffer, Lamb opens his acknowledgements by stating that he is “very grateful to Michael O’Mara [his publisher] for suggesting the book”. At first sight it would seem that Lamb was invited to write the book because of his status as President of the Queen’s English Society, but that doesn’t necessarily make him an expert on language. Yet another example in which a publisher suggested an author to write a usage guide is Patricia O’Conner’s Woe is I (1996). The publisher was Putnam (New York), and

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O’Conner had been an editor for twenty years with newspapers including the New York Times and the New York Times Book Review (see Appendix 3 for details about her career). In the course of her work as an editor, the publisher must have thought, she would have acquired the expertise for such a book, and very likely she had. A case where a publisher had an even greater hand in the production of a usage guide is The King’s English by Kingsley Amis. The book was published in 1997 by HarperCollins, a year after Amis’s death. At the time of his death, however, the book was, according to Amis’s biographer Zachary Leader, no more than “an unordered pile of … sheets” (2006: 819), so that the actual creation of the book from this pile of language notes was the work of the publisher, who also thought of the title (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2018a). The main reason why the book was published at all was that, just before Amis’s death, HarperCollins had paid a substantial sum of money for the right to publish two books, something Amis didn’t live to achieve (Leader 2006: 800). Only one of his novels would be published by HarperCollins in the end, The Biographer’s Moustache (1995), which came out a year before his death – not, as it happens, one of his best books (Leader 2006: 800). The decision to publish the unfinished manuscript on language must have suggested itself as a good opportunity: Amis was, after all, still quite well known as a writer, so another book might still sell.1 Linking the book to Fowler through its title and subtitling it A Guide to Modern Usage, moreover, suggests that the publisher was trying to aim for a market interested in usage advice at the same time. The contents of the book – and assuming that the preface was indeed written by Amis himself – suggest that the notes were always meant to be made into a book, but its actual publication made it into a publisher’s project.

Popular – and other – authors writing usage guides Deborah Cameron, in Verbal Hygiene (1995), writes that the idea for Bill Bryson’s book Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States (1994), too, had come from his publishers, so drawing on the popularity of well-established writers is no uncommon phenomenon. The publishers “had noticed,” Cameron explains, “that while [Bryson’s] travel books did poorly in the US, an earlier book on language had ‘sold rather well’” (1995: viii). This earlier book on language was a usage guide, Bryson’s Troublesome Words (1984). If Bryson was a popular travel writer, what made him an expert on language as well? Scott P. Richert, in his biography of Bryson, writes that the usage guide had been “drawn from Bryson’s own experience as a subeditor” (2011: 17). Bryson, however, was born in 1951, which is unusually young for a usage guide writer. Fowler was 68 when Modern English Usage came out (The King’s English had come out twenty years earlier), and so

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was Gowers (b. 1880) when Plain Words was first published in 1948. Amis appears to have started to work on his language notes during the mid-1980s (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2018a), when he was likewise in his sixties, and Pinker (b. 1954), too, was 60 when The Sense of Style was published. Usage guides therefore typically seem the kind of books that are produced by older writers. An author’s age, in other words, may well be a factor in someone’s decision to produce a usage guide. Age, as I will discuss in Chapters 5 and 6, is generally a factor that explains why people start criticising particular linguistic features they encounter at a certain time in their lives. That the language is going to the dogs is a frequently heard comment among the middle-aged (cf. J. Milroy 1998), and this makes people write letters to the editor, as Morana Lukač (2018: Chapter 2) discusses, or to the BBC, which, as an institution financed by taxpayers’ money, is often seen as a guardian of the language. Others, like Patricia O’Conner, Kay Sayce and Caroline Taggert, as they explain in Appendix 3, decided to write a usage guide based on their expertise as editors, as a result of which they had obtained a pretty good notion of how language works. The same applies to journalists and text writers, or teachers like Bernard Lamb – also quoted in Appendix 3 – and Paul Brians, and William Strunk long before them. Alongside the popularity of particular authors, Kingsley Amis and Simon Heffer for instance, this assumed linguistic expertise appears to be an important reason for publishers familiar with the demand for linguistic guidance to encourage well-known writers to produce a usage guide. As experienced writers, they may be very knowledgeable about language use, but this doesn’t necessarily make them formal experts on language. The case of Heffer illustrates that linguists don’t always think so. In any case, Robert Baker, the earliest English usage guide writer we know of, was not (by his own admission) an expert on language, nor was his Reflections on the English Language (1770) a publisher’s product. He published the book on his own initiative: as a hack writer, he simply hoped to earn more money than from his earlier book, Witticisms and Strokes of Humour (1766) (1770: xlii). The Reflections itself did fairly well, as is suggested by the appearance in 1779 of a second, expanded edition (with the same publisher and no longer anonymously). The title-page of a later publication, Observations on the Pictures Now in Exhibition at the Royal Academy, Spring Gardens, and Mr. Christie’s (1771), advertises the book as having been written “by the author of the Remarks on the English Language”, so by this time Baker had made something of a name for himself. But we know nothing about how old he was at the time he became a usage guide writer. He was, however, quite frank about his lack of expertise on the subject: as discussed in Chapter 2, he had consulted none of the standard grammars or dictionaries of the period, and his book, he consequently

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asserted with a great deal of confidence, was “entirely [his] own”. His only claim to expertise was that English was his mother tongue. The first American English usage guide, Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector (1847), too, was published on the author’s own initiative, but according to the information in WorldCat, it was never reprinted. In contrast to Baker, Hurd took great pains, both in the preface and by providing a long list of “Authorities Consulted”, to establish his expertise in the subject he wrote about. The anonymous Five Hundred Mistakes (1856) presents a different case: as explained in Chapter 2, the idea for this book possibly originated with its publisher, Daniel Burgess, since the copyright was registered in the name of his son Walton. Walton was very likely not the book’s author, his very young age as well as several other indications in the book speaking against him. Hurd, by comparison, had been collecting material for his book for many years as he noted in the preface, in the course of which he had also produced an impressive list of usage problems – almost 2,000 of them. Setting himself up as an expert on usage, as Hurd thus appears to have done, took time. Since Baker, by his own admission, was not an expert on language, it is perhaps not surprising that his knowledge of grammar was not very impressive (Vorlat 2001: 393−394). The grammatical expertise of the author of Five Hundred Mistakes does appear to have been quite good, so, whoever he was, he may at least have had a grammar school education as a boy (Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Kostadinova 2015: 60−61). One of the reasons for the critical reception of Heffer’s Strictly English is likewise his poor command of English grammar. As Pullum (2010b) comments, Heffer’s errors “aren’t minor, forgivable slips; they are outrageous, whales-arefish howlers”, and he illustrates them with the following examples: Volcanologists warn that an eruption is imminent is ungrammatical, [Heffer] warns firmly (p.xxix). So is If he kissed me I would scream (p.66), and It’s only me (p.62), and I walked into a lamp-post. (p.119) He holds (p.71) that the modal verb can has only the physical ability meaning (so if anyone capable of motion asks “Can I kiss you?” the correct answer must be “Yes”). He thinks not John is a negated noun. (p.56) Other examples can be found quite easily. Heffer appears to believe that it is easy for native speakers of English to learn their mother tongue because the language doesn’t have grammatical gender (2010: 3–4), while he also asserts that the passive voice is “part of the language of evasion” (2010: 12). What, then, did Heffer’s expertise consist of that made his publisher want him to write a usage guide, one might ask. According to John

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Edwards, the book is “a sort of scaled-down Fowler” (2012: 19). If it is, Heffer at least drew on a reputable source, but if he made use of the 1926 edition, as his bibliography suggests, his usage advice is hardly up to date. Apart from drawing on Fowler, Heffer writes that he consulted Partridge’s Usage and Abusage (revised edition 1973) and Sir Bruce Fraser’s revised edition of Gowers’s Complete Plain Words (1973), but he also says that he “scoured An ABC of English Usage by HA Treble and GH Vallins” (2010: 307−308) – a book which was originally published in 1936. All Heffer’s sources, in other words, are seriously outdated, but drawing on such sources may have been part of his attempt to maintain a conservative approach to linguistic correctness in view of what he perceived as falling standards in this respect. One of the ways to assess the popularity of usage guides is by looking at their number of editions or reprints: two in Baker’s case and only one in that of Hurd, while I’ve already referred to the 32nd of Five Hundred Mistakes. As for Bryson’s Troublesome Words (1984), WorldCat lists only 1987, 2002 and 2009 as later publication dates of the book, while for Amis’s The King’s English, there were only two American reprints, dated 1998 and 2001, in addition to the 2011 Penguin reprint of the book with an introduction by his son Martin. What you really would like to know is the size of the print runs for books like these, but such information is not readily disclosed by publishers. For all that, it will be useful to assess the authority of the different usage guide writers that are the focus of this book in other ways, as this may explain to some extent the popularity of their publications, while this will also allow us some insight into the reliability of their usage advice.

Usage guide writers as language experts The title of this section was borrowed from an article by Don Chapman published in 2008, called “The eighteenth-century grammarians as language experts”. In the eighteenth century, there were as yet no professional linguists, and a method seemed called for by which grammarians could be evaluated with respect to their linguistic expertise. These people usually came from diverse backgrounds and often had what today we would consider unlikely professions as scientists, lawyers or clergymen (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2000). In his article, Chapman developed a model to assess the qualifications of well-known grammarians like Robert Lowth (a clergyman) and Joseph Priestley (a scientist) but also less influential ones like Daniel Fenning (a teacher), whose New Grammar of the English Language was published in 1771, and the literary author-turned-lexicographer Samuel Johnson (whose dictionary included a grammar as well). To this end Chapman selected a number of “explicit credentials” on which he rated the grammarians, comprising pre-university education, possession of a university degree, position at

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a university, occupation, membership of a learned society, and previous publications. Some grammarians proved to score higher than others on these credentials; Lowth and Priestley, for instance, did considerably better than Fenning. Johnson’s credentials, however, were not very high: he had been invited by the publisher Robert Dodsley to compile the dictionary largely on the grounds of his literary reputation (see Chapter 2) – a clear parallel, in other words, with Heffer, Lamb and O’Conner discussed above. Johnson eventually turned into an excellent lexicographer; his Dictionary of the English Language remained the most authoritative English dictionary until well into the nineteenth century (Lynch 2009, Chapter 4). This, I expect, may be true for writers of usage guides without any formal linguistic training as well, some of whom, as we will see below, likewise turned into lexicographers subsequently. What is more, expertise in language may be acquired through writing or through other highly specialised linguistic activities like editing and translating. Journalists, according to Jack Lynch in The Lexicographer’s Dilemma, to mention one category of usage guide writers, may likewise be expected to have “a good practical grasp of the language” (2009: 113), and Albakry (2007: 30) writes that “most journalists like to perceive themselves as guardians of standard English”; this will apply to experienced editors like Patricia O’Conner as well. To assess the linguistic expertise of the usage guide writers in HUGE, most of whom, just like the eighteenth-century grammarians, were not linguists in the strict sense of the word either, I will adopt Chapman’s “explicit credentials”, to which I added age at the time of publication of the usage guide in question since, as argued above, advancing age contributes to the development of a critical attitude towards language use (see also Lynch 2009: 24). Occupation or profession may be of particular relevance in the assessment, since being a teacher or editor may have contributed to someone’s motivations for writing a usage guide. Some of the usage guide writers in HUGE, moreover, like Vermes (1981), Booher (1988) and de Vries (1991), were writers of general advice literature, with language being merely one of the topics concerned. The list of authors analysed according to Chapman’s model is shorter than the number of usage guides in the database: for obvious reasons, anonymous publications were excluded, and I likewise excluded usage guides produced by editors or teams of writers. I have, for instance, been unable to find any information on the team responsible for the writing of Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989) other than that they are described in the preface as lexicographers. This left me with a list of 71 writers altogether, including co-authors (see Table 4.2 below). To find biographical information on these writers I consulted the ODNB, the ANB, and Wikipedia when other sources were lacking; in addition, I searched for the personal websites of living authors, and, if none of these sources produced any relevant information, I resorted to WorldCat. Though an excellent bibliographical tool, information from

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WorldCat should be treated with some care: to give one example, this integrated online library catalogue mentions that the novelist and educationist Maria Edgeworth was the author of the anonymous Vulgarity of Speech Corrected (1826). That this is wrong appears from the second edition of the book (dated 1829), which includes a dedication to Maria Edgeworth. Another example is Walton Burgess, who was very likely not the author of Five Hundred Mistakes Corrected (1856), despite the information provided in WorldCat. Some of the sources I drew upon, however, proved surprisingly incomplete: Alford’s The Queen’s English (1864), for instance, is not mentioned in the ODNB, but fortunately his authorship of this publication (specified on the title-page) is too widely known to miss. Additionally, I looked for information about the authors and their credentials in the usage guides’ prefaces (as in the case of Robert Baker and Seth T. Hurd), though it is remarkable that quite frequently not much information in this respect could be found there either. In several cases I even contacted writers personally, while I also invoked the help of the readers of the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog. This informed me about the fact Kenneth Wilson (Columbia Guide to Standard American English, 1993) was a teacher of English at the University of Connecticut between 1952 and 1967 (see also Mair 2006: 18). My correspondence with Kay Sayce (now Powell), reproduced in Appendix 3, is an example of the type of contact that was established after I published the blogpost “Who is Kay Sayce? Who is Ann Batko?”, to which Kay Sayce subsequently replied, as, eventually, did Ann Batko. Appendix 3 presents detailed information which I received from both of them, as well as from Martin Cutts, Andrew Delahunty, Bernard Lamb, Patricia O’Conner and Caroline Taggart, who all answered my questions concerning their motivations for writing their usage guides. Posting queries on the blog of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project also put me in touch with the relatives of Harry Blamires and Janet Whitcut, who helped me obtain information by which I was able to assess their respective linguistic authority. Both, however, sadly died while this book was in progress. Unfortunately there were some usage guide writers about whom I was unable to find any (or barely any) information at all: Margaret Nicholson (Dictionary of American-English Usage, 1957), John Bailie and Moyna Kitchin (The Essential Guide to English Usage, 1988), Godfrey Howard (The Good English Guide, 1993), Anne Stilman (Grammatically Correct, 1997) and Angela Burt (The A to Z of Correct English, [2000] 2002). In attempting to classify these authors along the lines discussed I therefore had to make do with very limited material. An overview of all the HUGE authors’ “explicit credentials” may be found in Appendix 4. In addition, I will classify their motivations for publishing their usage guides, in far as

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far as these could be ascertained, but first I will look at their age around the time of publication as well as their professions.

Age and profession In quite a few cases, no exact information could be found about the authors’ dates of birth, so that their age at the time their usage guide was published could not be established or had to be reconstructed based on the available evidence. For 51 of the authors I managed to do so, though only approximately so for the two writers whose usage guides were published posthumously (Follett and Amis). Wilma (b. 1919) and David Ebbitt only became involved in the revision process of the sixth edition of Writer’s Guide and Index to English ([1939] 1978), the author of which had been Porter G. Perrin (who had died in 1962), so I placed Wilma Ebbitt in the Fifties category. I have been unable to find any information on her coauthor and namesake David. In the case of Kingsley Amis, who was born in 1922, I have argued elsewhere (2018a) that he must have been collecting his language notes since the mid-1980s, by which time he was in his sixties. As for Wilson Follett, who was born in 1887, if he was working on Modern American Usage (1966) around the time of his death in 1963, he would have been in his seventies, and I have classified him accordingly. Those who published more than one usage guide – Henry Fowler, G.H. Vallins – were classified according to their age at the time of their first usage guide. The picture that emerges is presented in Table 4.1. This table, as well as Table 4.2, classifies the authors according to their nationality, not according to where their usage guides were published (cf. Chapter 3); for an overview of their dates of birth, see Appendix 4. The eldest usage guide writer in the list is Harry Blamires, who was 78 when The Queen’s English (1994) came out,4 and the youngest are Edmund Weiner and Bill Bryson (both 33). The majority of the usage guide writers in the HUGE database were in their forties, fifties and sixties – relatively middle-aged in other words. But if we go by the OED’s definition of this term, “The period of life between young adulthood and old age, now [i.e. 2002, the date of the entry] usually regarded as between about forty-five and sixty”, Stilman (42), Vizetelly (42), Swan (44), Crystal (43), Garner (40) and Fogarty (41) would not come into this category. Rearranging the authors into the age categories Young (30−45), Middle (46−60) and Old (61−80), no matter how arbitrary the cut-off point between, say, 59 (Wilma Ebbitt, Treble, Greenbaum), 60 (Brown) and 61 (Hall, Brians), we end up with seventeen authors in the first category and fourteen in the third, with the rest, 21 authors, coming in the middle. We may therefore conclude that usage guides are not a text type that is typically produced by young(er) writers. Since age, as Carmen Ebner (2017) found in her analysis of British

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Table 4.1 Writers’ age when their usage guides were published Age of writers

Number of writers

Writers’ names and dates of publication of their usage guides

Twenties Thirties

– 6 (4 Br, 2 Am)

Forties

15 (7 Br, 8 Am)

Fifties

15 (9 Br, 5 Am; Trask)

Sixties

10 (4 Br, 5 Am, 1 Aus)

Seventies

4 (1 Br, 3 Am) 1 (Am) 51

– Turck Baker ([1910] 1938), Vallins (1936, 1951, 1953), Delahunty (1994), Weiner (1983), Bryson (1984), Marriott (1992) Moon (1868), White (1870), H.W. Fowler (1906, 1926), Vizetelly ([1906] 1920), Strunk (1918), Partridge (1947), F.G. Fowler (1906), Swan (1980), Crystal ([1984] 2000), Cutts (1995), O’Conner (1996), Stilman (1997), Garner (1998), Batko (2004), Fogarty (2008) Alford (1864), Ayres (1881), Krapp (1927), Treble (1936), Bergen Evans (1957), Cornelia Evans (1957), Wood (1962), Ebbitt and Ebbitt ([1939] 1978), Burchfield (1981, 1996), Greenbaum (1988), Trask (2001), Sayce (2006), Butterfield (2007), Heffer (2010), Taggart (2010) Brown (1851), Hall (1917), Gowers (1948), Morris and Morris (1975), Whitcut (1988), Wilson (1993), Amis (†1997), Brians (2003), Peters (2004), Lamb (2010) Horwill (1935),2 Follett (†1966), S. Mager (1993),3 Blamires (1994) N. Mager (1993)

Eighties Total

attitudes to usage problems, plays a role in the assessment of the acceptability of usage problems by members of the general public, this may very likely have affected the views of the writers of guides as well, many of whom are non-specialists. Older usage guide writers may therefore be expected to express more conservative views on what constitutes linguistic correctness in their view, a topic well worth investigating. Drawing on the information provided in Chapter 3, I’ve also correlated the ages of the usage guide writers with whether their works were published in Britain or in America. If we proceed from the same three age groups outlined here, it appears that there are fewer American than British writers in the category Young (10 Br – 7 Am) while the Middle category comprises almost as many British as American writers (10 Br – 11 Am). The category Old includes more American than British writers (5 Br – 8 Am – 1 Aus). Apart from the category Old, there is not much difference between the usage guide writers in the HUGE database in this respect.

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Table 4.2 Usage guide writers in the HUGE database classified according to profession or occupation Teachers (17) – 6 Br, 11 Am

Hurd (1847), Brown (1851), Gould (1867), Payne (1911), Strunk (1918), Krapp (1927), H.W. Fowler (1906, 1926), Vallins (1936), Wilma Ebbitt ([1939] 1978), Bergen Evans (1957), Carter (1988), Skates (1988), Farrell (1992), Marriott (1992), Blamires (1994), Brians (2003), Lamb (2010) Writers (scholarly, literary, hand- Baker (1770), Moon (1868), White (1870), Hall books) (16) – 5 Br, 11 Am (1917), Turck Baker ([1910] 1938), Horwill (1935), Treble (1936), Gowers (1948), Cornelia Evans (1957), Follett 1966, Vermes (1981), Booher (1988), de Vries (1991), Nathan Mager (1993), Sylvia Mager (1993), Amis 1997 Lexicographers (9) – 6 Br, 3 Am Vizetelly ([1906] 1920),5 Partridge (1947), Morris and Morris (1975), Burchfield (1981, 1996), Delahunty (1994), Weiner (1983), Ayto (1995), Butterfield (2007) Linguists (EFL, writer on language) Ayres (1881), Wood (1962), Swan (1980), Crystal (11) – 7 Br, 3 Am, 1 Aus ([1984] 2000), Greenbaum (1988), Whitcut (1988), Howard (1993), Wilson (1993), Burt ([2000] 2002), Trask (2001), Peters (2004) Editors (10) – 3 Br, 7 Am Fitzgerald (1901), Bryson (1984), Randall (1988), Cutts (1995), O’Conner (1996), Stilman (1997), Batko (2004), Sayce (2006), Fogarty (2008), Taggart (2010) Journalists (1) – 1 Br, 0 Am Heffer (2010) Translators (1) – 1 Br, 0 Am F.G. Fowler (1906) Other (2) – 1 Br, 1 Am Alford (1864), Garner (1998) Unknown (4) – 2 Br, 2 Am David Ebbitt (1939), Nicholson (1957), Bailie (1988), Kitchin (1988) Total 71 (32 Br, 38 Am, 1 Aus)

If we classify the authors according to their professions or occupations at the time they published their usage guides (see Appendix 4), we see in the overview presented in Table 4.2 that the majority may be described as teachers and writers. Brown (1851) has been classified as a teacher because he mentions in the preface of his book that he had been “instructing youth in four different languages” (1851: iii), and Henry Fowler (1906, 1926) had been a teacher before embarking on the publishing career with his brother Frank that resulted in The King’s English (1906) and the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1911). Modern English Usage would have been their next major project together, had it not been for Frank’s death in 1918. If Henry Fowler is described in the ODNB as a lexicographer and grammarian, he was

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a teacher first, which would have prepared him well for his subsequent career. As Head of English at King Alfred’s College, a teacher training college (now Winchester University) in Winchester, UK, it seems unlikely that Blamires was never involved in teaching the subject as well, and Lamb, though a geneticist by training and profession, “spent an enormous amount of time correcting [his students’] English as well as their genetics” since, as he put it, their poor English – spelling, actually – “was spoiling their genetics” (Appendix 3). Paul Brians, according to the website of Washington State University, where he worked before his retirement in 2008, wrote about literature and the history of ideas before he published his usage guide in 2003. But rather than classifying him as a writer of scholarly texts, I placed him into the category Teachers since he informed me that he “taught freshman composition early in my career, but don’t consider myself a writing teacher”. For all that, he did produce a usage guide. That usage guide writers are sometimes hard to classify may be illustrated by the case of Sarah Marriott, who told me that she used to be a journalist as well as a teacher of EFL when her name was put forward as one of the authors for what became Common Errors in English (1992).6 The category Writers includes a hack writer (Baker 1770); a writer of administrative documents (Gowers 1948); handbook writers (Vermes 1981; Booher 1988; de Vries 1991); a clergyman who wrote on the American Constitution, the gospel and on studying Latin and Greek (Horwill 1935); scholars (White 1870; Follett 1966); and a novelist (Amis 1997). With eleven authors, the category Linguists is the next largest category, followed by Lexicographers (10 authors) and Editors (9). Alfred Ayres has been classified as a linguist because of his publication of The Orthoëpist (1880), a manual on pronunciation, published a year before The Verbalist (1881). Wilson was classified as a linguist rather than a teacher, because upon his return to teaching after working as a university administrator for sixteen years, he was so struck by the changes the language appeared to have undergone in the meantime that he published a book called Van Winkle’s Return: Changes in American English, 1966–1986 (1987) (Mair 2006: 18). This book must have given him the inspiration for the usage guide studied here (1993). The list includes only one journalist, Heffer (2010), though, since he published books on historical and political topics, he could also have been classified as a writer, and one translator, F.G. Fowler (1906), who was classified accordingly on the basis of his first joint publication with his brother Henry, a translation of the works of Lucian of Samosata (1905). At first sight, Alford (1864) and Garner (1998) fit into none of these categories, nor does Batko (2004). Henry Alford is described by the ODNB as “Dean of Canterbury and biblical scholar”, and Bryan Garner is a lawyer who only later became a lexicographer. Ann Batko has “always been in advertising/marketing/communications! So … I came to the work on grammar indirectly”, but in writing a usage guide she had been

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encouraged by her father (who had planned to set up a usage advice project before), who knew she could write since she had earlier “done some editing work for him over the summers during college” (Appendix 3). I have therefore placed her in the category Editors. There are only four authors whose professions or occupations I was unable to ascertain, so they have been left unclassified. If we look at the distinction between British and American usage guide writers in Table 4.2, we see a different distribution of writers over the different categories in that those classified as teachers, writers and editors are predominantly American, while those in the categories Lexicographers and Linguists tend to be British; the usage guide writers classified as a journalist and a translator are British as well.

Motivations for publishing Why would anyone write a usage guide? Edmund Weiner, who was in his early thirties when the Oxford Guide to English Usage was first published in 1983, discusses two reasons for this in his article “On editing a usage guide” (1988). In the first place, he argues, writers of usage guides are people who are “attracted to controversial variations in usage”, and who engage in offering usage advice from a “taste for controversy and polemic”. Alternatively, and this possibly reflects his own situation, there are people for whom the motivation to compile a usage guide is “genuinely educational” (1988: 175). Angela Burt, for instance, published several textbooks on English grammar, spelling and punctuation for the use in schools, including Language in Action (1999) and (with William Vandyck) Grammar Repair Kit (1999). Kay Sayce (now Powell) describes a similar reason for producing What Not to Write (2006): “I created ‘house style sheets’ for many development aid agencies in the 1990s, was aware of dropping standards in English usage in the workplace in general, and then realised the sheets could form the basis of a book” (Appendix 3). There are other reasons, too, for wanting to produce a usage guide, one of which is linguistic. Usage guide writers who were classified in Table 4.2 as lexicographers, linguists or teachers may well have been inspired by their professional linguistic interests in wishing to compile a usage guide. Examples of such writers are William and Mary Morris, who both, sometimes jointly, published several dictionaries before their Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage came out in 1975. Closely related to this linguistic motivation may be an author’s particular interest in correct language use inspired by their profession or earlier experiences as a writer or editor. Follett (1966), for instance, while editing the work of Stephen Crane (1925–1927), may similarly have become interested in correct usage. A final reason for publishing a usage guide may be taking (or accepting) a publishing opportunity.

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Baker (1770) is a very good example of this, since, inspired by Vaugelas’s Remarques sur la langue Françoise, he decided to produce something similar for English (Chapter 2). Being invited – or “commissioned”, in Lamb’s case (Appendix 3) – by a publisher to produce a usage guide, puts Heffer into the same category, and Sir Ernest Gowers likewise. Ann Batko explains in Appendix 3 that she wrote her usage guide when she was in-between jobs in advertising in order to complete, as mentioned above, an earlier audio project of her father. His agent had “suggested that perhaps [the project] would be better positioned as a book”. The results of my classification of the various usage guide writers’ motivations are presented in Table 4.3, which also lists the five authors whose motivation I was unable to ascertain (Unknown).7 Some authors were harder to classify than others. The title of Moon’s work, The Bad English of Lindley Murray and Other Writers (1868), for instance, suggests a polemical approach; equally polemical was the earlier The Queen’s English (1864) by Henry Alford, as appears, for instance, from references in the book itself to Americanisms being the cause of the deterioration of the English language or to controversy arising over mistakes in his own English (1864: 6, 9). In the same passage Alford refers to his relationship with “Mr Moon”, who was “working on the same material, and for the same purpose”, and whose book was to appear four years later. Gould (1867) has been classified by Straaijer (2018b) as another polemical work, but in the preface to Good English; or, Popular Errors in Language Gould wrote that he lectured on elocution; his book may therefore have arisen from his experiences as a teacher, so I placed him into the Educational category. The case of Amis is likewise somewhat ambiguous, in that his usage guide might equally well have fitted into the category Interest in language; I didn’t place him there because his son Martin, in the preface to The King’s English’s second edition, refers to the many discussions with his father about usage problems, many of which found a place in the book. Both Gowers (1948) and Brians (2003) were classified under Publishing opportunity. In Gowers’s case I did so because he had been invited to produce Plain Words, even though the work had a clear teaching objective. As for Brians, his book is based on a website which has been online since 1997 (one of the first of its kind), and which proved so successful that it seemed worthwhile turning his usage advice into a book as well. The same applies to Fogarty (2008). That a third edition of Brians’s book came out ten years later suggests that the decision proved a good one. So though the original motivation for publishing usage advice was educational, this only applies to the website; his reason for producing an actual book in 2003 was different. Hurd (1847) was easier to classify since his occupation, as he wrote in the preface, was that of “a public lecturer upon the Grammar of the English Language” (1847: v), in the course of which he collected the usage

Table 4.3 Writers classified according to their motivations for publishing a usage guide Motivation Taste for controversy/ polemic (3) (3 Br, 0 Am) Educational/English language teaching (14) (5 Br, 9 Am)

Authors (usage guides classified per decade)

1860s (2): Alford (1864), Moon (1868) 1990s (1): Amis (†1997) 1840s (1): Hurd (1847) 1850s (1): Brown (1851) 1860s (1): Gould (1867) 1910s (2): Payne (1911), Strunk (1918) 1920s (1): Krapp (1927) 1930s (1): Ebbitt and Ebbitt ([1939] 1978) 1950s (1): B. Evans (1957) 1980s (3): Swan (1980), Weiner (1983), 1990s (2): Wilson (1993), Cutts (1995) 2000s (2): Burt ([2000] 2002), Sayce (2006) Linguistic (14) 1930s (2): Treble (1936), Vallins (1936, 1951, [1953] 1955) (11 Br, 2 Am; Trask 2001) 1940s (1): Partridge (1947) 1970s (2): Morris and Morris (1975) 1980s (4): Burchfield (1981, 1996), Crystal ([1984] 2000), Greenbaum (1988), Whitcut (1988) 1990s (1): Ayto (1995), Delahunty (1994) 2000s (3): Trask (2001), Peters (2004), Butterfield (2007) Interest in language (9) 1870s (1): White (1870) (1 Br, 8 Am) 1880s (1): Ayres (1881) 1900s (1): Fitzgerald (1901) 1910s (1): Hall (1917) 1950s (1): C. Evans (1957) 1960s (1): Follett (†1966) 1980s (1): Randall (1988) 1990s (3): Blamires (1994), Stilman (1997) Publishing opportunity 1770s (1): Baker (1770) (27) 1900s (3): H.W. Fowler (1906, 1926), F.G. Fowler (1906), (12 Br, 15 Am) Vizetelly ([1906] 1920) 1910s (1): Turck Baker ([1910] 1938) 1930s (1): Horwill (1935) 1940s (1): Gowers (1948) 1950s (1): Nicholson (1957) 1980s (5): Vermes (1981), Bryson (1984), Booher (1988), Carter and Skates ([1988] 1990) 1990s (8): de Vries (1991), Marriott and Farrell (1992), Howard (1993), Mager and Mager (1993), O’Conner (1996), Garner (1998) 2000s (3): Brians (2003), Batko (2004), Fogarty (2008) 2010s (3): Heffer (2010), Lamb (2010), Taggart (2010) Unknown (4) 1930s (1): D. Ebbitt (1939) (3 Br, 1 Am) 1960s (1): Wood (1962) 1980s (2): Bailie (1988), Kitchin (1988) Total 71

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problems which he later incorporated into his Grammatical Corrector. Goold Brown was likewise placed into the Educational category because he had written two English grammars before his Grammar of English Grammars (1851) came out. He describes the book as “not a mere work of criticism”, so his motivation was not solely polemical, contrary to that of some of his contemporaries. Since he also mentioned his work as a teacher (see above), I took his motivation to be primarily educational. Some writers produced usage guides because they were teachers of English composition; Strunk (1918) is a well-known example (see Chapter 1), and a similar case is Gertrude Payne: the title-page of her Everyday Errors in Pronunciation, Spelling, and Spoken English (1911) reads that she was a “Teacher of Reading and Composition, in the State Normal School, San Jose, California”. Though we have no other information about her, it seems likely that this gave her the inspiration for the book. George Philip Krapp had published an earlier book on usage, called Good English: Its Growth and Present Use (1909), and he is described as an English teacher at a Teachers College which was part of Columbia University (ANB). Wilma Ebbitt, as the website of Pennsylvania State University informs us, taught English composition there, too (since 1975). On David Ebbitt I’ve been unable to find any information at all, so I placed him into the category Unknown. Bergen Evans became an English teacher at Northwestern University in 1932 (Wikipedia); his co-author of A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957) was Cornelia Evans, his sister (Lynch 2009: 216). WorldCat lists an earlier book by her on the Bering Sea, so I classified her as a writer in Table 4.2; possibly, her experience as a writer may have served as inspiration for the usage guide she engaged on with her brother. Michael Swan’s own website describes him as a freelance writer, and it specifies poetry and applied linguistics as topics he wrote about. The website also mentions that he began “writing and publishing English language teaching and reference materials” when he was a teacher. The case of Weiner has already been discussed, as has that of Sayce. Kenneth Wilson was a teacher of English between 1952 and 1967 (his usage guide came out in 1993); Burt, as already mentioned, likewise appears to have been a teacher of English and may have compiled a usage guide for educational purposes. The category Linguistic in the above classification includes writers who had already earned their spurs in the field of lexicography and grammar, or who are linguists by profession (see Table 4.2). A.H. Treble and G.H. Vallins had written several books together on English grammar before their A.B.C. of English Usage (1936) came out. Vallins is described on Wikipedia as “an English schoolmaster, grammarian and author”, but whether he was a teacher before he became a grammarian is unclear. Treble doesn’t have an entry on Wikipedia – neither of them is in the ODNB – but because of their earlier publications on English grammar I placed them both into this category. An earlier book by Eric Partridge is

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A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937). This, and other publications on language from the 1930s, places him firmly into the Linguistic category. The case of Morris and Morris has already been discussed. Burchfield had been working on the OED supplement when, as he writes in the preface, he was invited to produce The Spoken Word for the BBC (1981: 5). David Crystal is a linguist by profession, and his First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (1980) predates the usage guide which we included in the HUGE database, Who Cares about English Usage? ([1984] 2000). Sidney Greenbaum’s case is similar: in 1969, he published a monograph on English adverbial usage. Janet Whitcut was a freelance lexicographer, and since, together with Sidney Greenbaum, she was responsible for the revision of Sir Ernest Gowers’s Complete Plain Words which came out two years before their Longman Guide to English Usage (1988), I placed her, as well as Andrew Delahunty, co-author (with Edmund Weiner) of The Oxford Guide to English Usage (1994), into the Linguistic category. John Ayto published The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang in 1992 (with John Simpson), so he was already a lexicographer before embarking upon Good English! (1995). Trask’s biographical introduction in the Penguin edition of Mind the Gaffe (2001) lists his interests as “historical linguistics, grammar and the Basque language” – so he was a linguist, in other words. Peters, whose name has already come up many times, is likewise a linguist. Jeremy Butterfield describes himself on his website as a teacher of EFL, but since he also writes that “as Editor-in-Chief of Collins dictionaries, I commissioned, edited and compiled dozens of dictionaries and grammars of English and other languages”,8 I placed him into the Linguistic category as well. The category Interest in language, which is the most general of all, comprises scholars who published on literary topics, like Richard Grant White (Shakespeare), John Lessley Hall (Beowulf), Wilson Follett (Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad) and Harry Blamires, a novelist who also wrote about Milton, James Joyce and other writers. Cornelia Evans has already been mentioned. These authors may have developed such an interest in writing as a specific literary skill that they decided to produce a usage guide. Joseph Fitzgerald and Bernice Randall were editors before they turned into usage guide writers – as were Patricia O’Conner, Mignon Fogarty and Sarah Marriott, though they were all placed in the category Publishing opportunity (see below). The writer hardest to categorise was Alfred Ayres; however, from his preface it appears that he was well read on the topic he wrote about. This reflects a genuine and well-informed interest in usage, and until more can be learnt about him, he seems to fit best in this category. The final category in Table 4.3 comprises writers for whom their usage guides formed what I have called a publishing opportunity, either for themselves or for publishers with an eye for the market. Baker’s case has

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already been described above, as has that of Brians, but the Fowler brothers, too, were looking for an opportunity to make money with their first usage guide, The King’s English (1906); the success of the book gave rise to Modern English Usage twenty years later, though written by Henry Fowler alone (McMorris 2001). For Josephine Turck Baker publishing about usage advice, as already discussed in Chapter 2, made up her career, and so it does for Bryan Garner. Rather than classifying Garner as a professional lexicographer (Linguistic), the speed with which new editions of his Modern American Usage are published – four editions in less than twenty years – as well as the fact that the titles of the different editions very closely echo those of the different editions of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, suggests that publishing usage guides forms a main interest for him. The case of Sir Earnest Gowers is similar to those of Heffer, Lamb and O’Conner discussed earlier, in that he had been asked in 1946 “to write a pamphlet on official English for the Civil Service” (Scott 2009: 172). This resulted in Plain Words a year later. H.W. Horwill, who published an Anglo-American phrase book four years after his Dictionary of Modern American Usage (1935), had published on the American Constitution (1925), on a religious topic (1894) and on studying Greek and Latin (1887) before that, so he was classified as a writer in Table 4.2. Publishing a usage guide may have seemed another publishing opportunity to him, though his preface suggests that he compiled the book out of a genuine interest in American English and a wish to inform his readers about its characteristics. The publication by Margaret Nicholson of A Dictionary of AmericanEnglish Usage: Based on Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1957) similarly seems in line with her earlier book A Manual of Copyright Practice for Writers, Publishers and Agents (1956), also published by OUP (New York). Frank Vizetelly presents a comparable case with his earlier book called The Preparation of Manuscripts for the Printer (1905). Jean Vermes, Bill Bryson, Godfrey Howard, Nathan and Sylvia Mager, Dianna Booher and Caroline Taggart all have in common that their usage guides are among the many other books they wrote and were expected to sell well, though in Bryson’s case, Troublesome Words (1984) was published very early in his career. Another usage guide that was published when at least one of its authors was very young was Chambers Common Errors in English by Sarah Marriott and Barrie Farrell (1992). As Sarah Marriott informed me, her name had been put forward as a potential author of a usage guide by a former colleague “working as an editor with the publishers” – this book may therefore likewise have come into being as a publisher’s initiative. About Vermes it is perhaps worth mentioning that most of her publications are in the field of advice literature aimed at secretaries, like books on letter writing, business etiquette and even physical fitness. For her, correct language use apparently came into the same category. Mary Ann de Vries likewise published many books on business, law, correspondence and

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management as well as guides for secretaries (WorldCat). Booher, who wrote “46 books on business and personal development topics”, is described on Wikipedia as a “communication expert”. The question arising is whether such a qualification would also make her an expert on grammar and usage. Other practical handbook writers are Bonnie Carter and Craig Skates, who earlier published a guide book on technical writing (1983), followed by their Rinehart Handbook for Writers (1990). Fogarty started podcasting as Grammar Girl in 2006 (Lukač 2018: 70), and her subsequent usage guide of 2008 makes her fit into the category as well. Because none of the writers in this category can be considered actual linguists, it would be most interesting to see how their language advice relates to that of the authors in the other categories discussed so far. This is indeed one of the topics that can be studied on the basis of the material provided by the HUGE database. For four authors I have been unable to discover their possible motivations for publishing a usage guide (the category Unknown in Table 4.3): David Ebbitt, Wood, Bailie and Kitchin. Frederick T. Wood wrote several works on English, but only after he published Current English Usage (1962); his case is therefore similar to those of Horwill and Weiner. Blamires, too, became a writer of usage guides after he retired, and he wrote several more such works after The Queen’s English came out in 1994. The categorisation presented in Table 4.3 shows that the largest number of the authors in the HUGE database (27 in all) published a usage guide not for polemical or educational reasons as Weiner suggested, but because compiling a usage guide presented a publishing opportunity. Comprising only three authors, the Polemical category is in fact the smallest of all; these are all British publications, so this may be a more typically British than American approach to language use. The remaining three categories, Educational (15), Linguistic (14) and Interest in language (9), are all more or less well represented, though the third least of the three. As for different tendencies between usage guides published in Britain or America, here we clearly see different motivational trends among the authors analysed: while the three usage guides in the Polemical category are all British, the majority of the authors in the Educational category are American (9 out of 15), which is also the case for the authors in the categories Publishing opportunity (15 out of 27) and Interest in language (8 out of 9). The ones in the Linguistic category, however, are predominantly British (11 out of 14). Trask, unclassified for nationality, too, would belong to the category of British linguists publishing a usage guide: after all, most of his career was spent in the UK. If for some of the authors analysed here, British and American ones alike, writing a usage guide proved a stepping-stone in their subsequent careers as lexicographers or writers on usage, it is also of interest to see that there arose what appear to have been small networks of – British – lexicographers writing

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on usage who also revised earlier usage guides: Whitcut and Greenbaum revised Sir Ernest Gowers’s Complete Plain Words (1986), Whitcut by herself revised Partridge’s Usage and Abusage (1994), and Burchfield revised Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1996) twelve years later, while the previous edition of Fowler had been revised by Gowers. The existence of such a network is also evident from the fact that Weiner’s article “On editing a usage guide” (1988) appeared in a Festschrift for Robert Burchfield; it may have been intended to offer the recipient of the Festschrift advice for his own work on Fowler which he was engaged on at the time. Burchfield, however, in his article on Fowler published three years later, did not reciprocate by referring to Weiner’s article written in his honour. A question that will come up in the next chapter is to what extent these writers’ usage advice was similar, and also whether the revision of older usage guides by other usage guide writers brought earlier views more in line with those of the new editors. In this respect, it might be concluded that Fowler’s Modern English Usage represents a very different case from the work’s American counterpart, the four different editions of which all derive from the same writer, Bryan Garner. While Garner himself revised his own work, in Fowler’s case different writers were involved in the later editions of the book: Gowers, Burchfield and Butterfield. Smits (2017) in any case shows that Garner’s advice on three selected usage problems, different to/from/ than, hopefully and snuck, remained unchanged over the years, but Straaijer (2018a) has identified a number of differences between the fourth edition and earlier ones. Table 4.3, finally, also contains a historical dimension: it lists the usage guides (classified by the authors’ motivations for writing them) according to the decades in which they were published. This shows that, with thirteen publications for the two decades together, the motivation Publishing opportunity was strongest during the 1980s and 1990s. With three of the usage guides in the HUGE database dating from the 2000s (Brians 2003; Batko 2004; Fogarty 2008) and all three from 2010 coming into this same category, this confirms the point made at the beginning of this chapter that usage guides appear to have developed a strong publishers’ interest over recent decades. If we look at place of publication, it appears that this motivation plays the most important role with the American usage guides: all except two coming out in the 1980s and 1990s, i.e. Marriott and Farrell (1992) and Howard (1993), are American. The three books from the 2000s are all American, and the three usage guides from 2010 are all British, but this may well reflect a selection bias for the HUGE database (cf. Figures 3.1 and 3.2).

Other credentials The credentials proposed by Chapman that I haven’t dealt with yet are the authors’ pre-university education, whether they possessed a university degree, whether they held a position at a university and whether they were

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members of a learned (or other relevant) society. For the first of these, information has been impossible to ascertain for most of the usage guides in HUGE. The only comment that might be relevant here in view of the general criticism of their linguistic expertise (by Vorlat of Baker for instance, or by Crystal and Pullum of Heffer) is that it seems unlikely that Baker (1770) had a great deal of formal – in his day, grammar school – education, while it is remarkable in view of the linguistic criticism levelled at him that Heffer did have a grammar school education. Heffer would consequently be expected to possess considerable expertise on the subjects of linguistic structure and grammatical classification in general as a result of having studied Latin and possibly Greek in school, but the lack of such expertise is precisely what he is criticised for. Another striking feature, though no more than that, is that Henry Fowler and Gowers both attended Rugby School, one of the oldest public schools in England. Henry’s brother Frank, according to Darryl Ogier in an article called “A Petrean in Guernsey” (2006/7), attended St Paul’s School in London, but was “said by his Classics master to be ‘thoroughly and desperately lazy’” (Ogier 2006/7: 75). Afterwards, Henry Fowler and Gowers both went on to university to study Classics – Fowler at Balliol College, Oxford, and Gowers at Clare College, Cambridge. Frank studied Classics at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Indirectly, in these three cases, it was the study of Classics – despite Frank Fowler’s original lack of interest in the topic – that must have paved the way to their status as writers of usage guides. In Gowers’s case, it was his degree from the University of Cambridge which made him eligible for a career as a civil servant, and it was during this career that he developed the sense for clear and unambiguous writing that led to the invitation to write Plain English at the end of his career. His identification in the ODNB as a “public servant and writer of reference works” – the entry is by Robert Burchfield – puts too much emphasis on what was not really part of his career as such, though Gowers’s biographer Ann Scott notes that her grandfather is, indeed, “best known for Plain Words” (2009: xiii). Other writers who are known to have attended grammar school are Alford (1864), Partridge (1947), Blamires (1994) and Butterfield (2007) (see Appendix 4). The latter writer cites this fact as an explicit credential on his website, along with having studied Classics at the University of Oxford, like the Fowler brothers. Having studied “a couple of living [languages] – Spanish and Italian” and having been a teacher of EFL and a translator, he claims, is what made him “understand language so well”. Possessing a relevant university degree – in Linguistics, English language teaching or even English in a wider sense, including the study of literature – is not something one will find with the very earliest usage guide writers on my list. For quite a few other authors with a university degree I have been unable to identify the subject of their degrees. Alford (1864), for instance, had an MA but also a Bachelor’s as well as a doctoral degree in divinity.

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Would these degrees have served as relevant qualifications for a usage guide writer? The same question applies to the study of classical languages, as in the case of the Fowler brothers, Gowers and Butterfield, but as discussed in the previous paragraph, it was not only their university backgrounds as such which made them develop into experts on language. Greenbaum studied Hebrew and Aramaic at University College London; his subsequent work on the Survey of English Usage would have been significant for his developing expertise in English as well. With a BSc as well as a PhD in science, Lamb (2010), however, cannot be said to possess any formal qualifications for the job in this respect. Of some writers we know that they at least possessed BAs or MAs (sometimes both), but in most cases, looking at their respective professions helped solving the problem: Hall (1917) and Krapp (1927) both had PhDs from Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD), and while Hall taught English Language and Literature at the College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, VA), Krapp taught English at a teachers’ college at Columbia University (New York, NY); Strunk (1918), with a BA and a PhD, taught Mathematics as well as English; Ebbitt and Ebbitt ([1939] 1978) taught English Composition at Pennsylvania State University (Pennsylvania, PA); Bergen Evans (1957), who held a BA, an MA and a PhD, taught English at Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.); Weiner (1983), who has an MA from the University of Oxford, taught Old English, Middle English and History of the English Language at Christ Church, Oxford; Burchfield (1981, 1996), too, studied at Oxford, subsequently becoming a lecturer in English Language at that university; and Brians (2003), also with a BA, an MA and a PhD, was a professor of English at Washington State University until 2008, when he retired. About Vallins (1936, 1951, [1953] 1955) we only know that he possessed a degree from King’s College London, and he is described on Wikipedia as an English schoolmaster, grammarian and author; all this prepared him well for the job of writing usage guides. The case of Trask (2001) is different, and similar to that of Greenbaum: he had a PhD from University College London and taught linguistics at the University of Sussex; his fields of interest were historical linguistics and Basque rather than anything relating to English. There are a few other usage guide writers whose precise university education I was unable to ascertain as being – in one way or another – relevant for the job in hand: Turck Baker ([1910] 1938) had an MA from the Boston School of Oratory; Partridge (1947) studied French and English at the University of Queensland (Australia) and Swan (1980) Modern Languages at Oxford; Crystal ([1984] 2000) studied English at University College London; Booher (1988) obtained an MA in English Literature from the University of Houston; Whitcut (1988) studied English Literature at Cambridge; Blamires (1994) first studied Music and then English Literature at University College, Oxford; and Fogarty (2008) has a BA in English

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(though she later went on to study Biology). Though Taggart (2010) studied French and Spanish at the University of Sheffield, she became an editor, a job which eventually turned her into, as she herself calls it, “a wordsmith” (Appendix 3). The case of O’Conner (1996) is similar to that of Taggart in that after a BA in Philosophy she became a writer on language as well as an editor, an experience which appears to have qualified her for her monthly appearance as “word maven” on a radio talk show (Wikipedia). Sarah Marriott has a BA in Politics and an MA in Journalism, and Kay Sayce a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences, and she subsequently had a career in writing and publishing (Appendix 3). The most exceptional case is perhaps that of Garner (1998), who became a lawyer after having obtained a BA from the University of Texas. His interest in English usage, as he records somewhat dramatically on his website, was inspired by the discovery, one “wintry evening” at the age of sixteen, of Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage, a book that led him to Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which “turned out to be even better”. Writers for whom I was unable to find any information about their education are Follett 1966, Nathan and Sylvia Mager (1993),9 Blamires (1994) and Burt ([2000] 2002). About Bryson (1984), Scott P. Richert notes that he did not complete his university studies (2011: 14). What all these people have in common, except for Blamires and Burt (who was an English teacher: see Appendix 4), is that they were writers or, in the case of Bryson, editors. Though they may not possess a university degree, this puts them into the same category as Taggart and O’Conner, whose experience as editors made them interested in usage problems. The same is true for Fogarty, who was a science writer and editor before embarking upon her career as Grammar Girl. Three final writers should be mentioned: Hurd (1847), Brown (1851) and Ayres ([1881] 1911), who all lived at a time before it was common to get any of the university degrees that later usage guide writers obtained. The three men, however, all proved to be exceptionally well read on the subject they wrote about, so like Baker, who was equally widely read, they might be termed self-made usage guide writers. As many as 24 of the writers in the HUGE database were classified in Appendix 4 as having a position at university, though some of them (Alford, Partridge and Swan) only briefly so as far as I know, and others (Greenbaum and Whitcut) not as teachers but as scholars taking part in a major research project, the Survey of English Usage. This project would have made them eminently suitable for embarking upon a usage guide. Some of the writers are linguists (e.g. Weiner, Crystal, Trask and Peters, but also Ayres; Table 4.2) while others were lecturers or teachers of English (Krapp, Bergen Evans and Burchfield) or taught writing (Strunk and Wilma Ebbitt) in a university. Blamires was Head of English at a teacher training college. Bryson’s chancellorship of the University of Durham was a non-academic position; besides, he occupied this position twenty years after his Troublesome Words (1984) was

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published, so the two events are unconnected. Fogarty obtained a university position in 2014 (a chair in Media Entrepreneurship at the Reynolds School of Journalism of the University of Nevada), so after she became a professional writer on usage, and due not to her work on language but to her expertise in web publishing. Lamb’s position at Imperial College London, finally, was in his own academic field, genetics. His case is the single example of a usage guide writer whose membership of a society, the Queen’s English Society, is the only relevant formal credential for his authority in the field of usage, alongside an earlier publication on punctuation, The Queen’s English Practical Guide to Punctuation (2008); in addition, there was his keen interest in correcting the language of his genetics students, as he explains in Appendix 3. Other relevant society memberships were identified for Turck Baker ([1910] 1938), who founded the International Society for Universal English and for nearly 40 years published its journal, Correct English (Kostadinova 2018c), and Peters (2004), who has been a member of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Standing Committee of Spoken English since 1996. Baker would have been unable to write his Reflections on the English Language (1770) if he hadn’t been a member of a circulating library, while for Hurd (1847) it was only possible to have access to certain books he needed for the Grammatical Corrector thanks to “the kindness and courtesy of booksellers, and the officers of various public libraries” (1847: ix), but library membership as such cannot be taken as a credential under the present heading. But since libraries are often popularly called “the poor man’s university”, and since for neither of these men pursuing a university education would have been feasible in their days, this might well be added as an informal credential under the heading University degree. The same is true for Brown (1851), who, like Hurd and Ayres, was exceptionally well read on the subject of language and usage. The final credential from Chapman’s list is relevant publications on grammar or usage dating before the publication of the usage guides concerned. In contrast to the category Profession/occupation, in the discussion of which I allowed for the possibility that expertise on usage might have been gained through other aspects than being a linguist or a teacher of English, I will only consider – earlier – writings on the subject of language as adding to a writer’s expertise as a usage guide writer. Appendix 4 (last column) lists the writers’ earlier publications on English language or linguistics (or style sheets, as in the case of Sayce), and the list shows that 37 of the 71 writers analysed had publications that would have qualified them as authors of a usage guide.

The final tally: who has the most credentials? Having applied Chapman’s list of formal credentials to the writers of usage guides in the HUGE database, I will now present the results in order to try and determine who carries the greatest authority on the subject they

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wrote about. Based on the previous section and the information provided in Appendix 4, Table 4.4 shows an overview of the 71 HUGE authors’ credentials. I only included positive counts for credentials about which I found specific information (if information was lacking, this was indicated in Appendix 4 as “Unknown”); consequently, the final results might have been higher for several authors if more relevant information had been available. Because writers will only score better should more information come to light, the ratings presented in Table 4.4 should be interpreted as being relatively conservative. Writers were awarded positive credentials for Profession/occupation if they were classified as linguists, writers (even of general advice literature), editors, journalists, (literary) scholars or teachers before publishing their usage guides. Gowers has been rated positively for this point because as a civil servant he wrote governmental and other administrative texts; it was his particular skill at this that led to the invitation to write Plain Words for the benefit of other civil servants. Two other points should be made: writers were rated positively for the category Preuniversity education if according to my information they had a traditional grammar school education. As argued above, knowledge of classical grammar would have contributed to their skill in English grammar as well (though, as also illustrated, such an educational background does not guarantee accurate advice on English usage). The second point concerns the category University degree: though the usage guide writers’ university degrees – if any – proved quite variable, I awarded positive credentials for this point even if the degrees were in languages other than strictly English alone; I also did so for degrees in English literature on the assumption that literary studies involve learning to identify fine discriminations of usage, too. In effect, the only type of degrees I did not give any credit for were the science degree held by Lamb (2010), Sayce’s (2006) degree in Social Sciences, Marriott’s (1992) in Politics and Journalism, and O’Conner’s (1996) in Philosophy. The latter’s university degree, however, also includes a minor in English (see Appendix 3), which does allow for a credential for University degree in her case. Square brackets in the table indicate credentials that strictly speaking could not formally be awarded (according to Chapman’s classification system) but that nevertheless must have contributed to an author’s expertise on language, like wide reading or having given lectures on elocution. The data in Table 4.4 show that the credentials the usage guide writers score highest on are Relevant profession/occupation (63 [64]), University degree (40 [50]), Earlier publications (36) and Position at university (23 [26]). Only in fourteen instances have I been able to ascertain whether the authors concerned had enjoyed a grammar school education (or at least studied classical languages as part of their secondary school curriculum). The credential with the lowest score, only five in all, is Membership of

University degree [+] [+] [+] + − − + [+] − − + + + − + + + + − +

Pre-university

− − − + −

− − − − − + + − − − − − [+] − −

Baker (1770) Hurd (1847) Brown (1851) Alford (1864) Gould (1867)

Moon (1868) White (1870) Ayres (1881) Fitzgerald (1901) Vizetelly (1906) F. Fowler (1906) H. Fowler (1906, 1926) Turck Baker (1910) Payne (1911) Hall (1917) Strunk (1918) Krapp (1927) Horwill (1935) Treble (1936) Vallins (1936, 1951, 1953)

Author

Table 4.4 The HUGE usage guide writers’ credentials

− − − Briefly [elocution lectures] − − − − − − − − − + + + − − −

University position

− + − + + + + + + + + + − + +

+ + + − +

Relevant profession/ occupation

− − − − − − − + − − − − − − −

− − − − −

Membership society

+ − + + + − – + − − − + − + +

− − + − −

Earlier publications on language

(Continued )

1 2 1 [1] 2 2 3 310 4 1 3 3 4 1 [1] 2 3

1 [1] 1 [1] 2 [1] 3 1 [1]

Total

D. Ebbitt (1939) Partridge (1947) Gowers (1948) Nicholson (1957) B. Evans (1957) C. Evans (1957) Wood (1962) Follett (†1966) W. Morris (1975) M. Morris (1975) W. Ebbitt (1939) Bailie (1988) Kitchin (1988) Swan (1980) Vermes (1981) Burchfield (1981, 1996) Weiner (1994) Delahunty (1994) Bryson (1984)

Author

Table 4.4 (Cont.) University degree − + + − + + − + + − + − − + − + + + [+]

Pre-university

− + + − − − − − + − − − − − − − − + −

− Briefly − − + − − + − − + − − Briefly − + + − −

University position − + + + + + + + + + + – – + + + + + +

Relevant profession/ occupation − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − −

Membership society − + − − − − + − + + + − − + − + − + −

Earlier publications on language

(Continued )

0 5 3 1 3 2 2 3 4 2 4 0 0 4 1 4 3 4 1 [1]

Total

Crystal (1984) Booher (1988) Greenbaum (1988) Whitcut (1988) Carter (1988) Skates (1988) Randall (1988) de Vries (1991) Marriott (1992) Farrell (1992) Wilson (1993) Howard (1993) N. Mager (1993) S. Mager (1993) Blamires (1994) Ayto (1995) Cutts (1995) O’Conner (1996) Stilman (1997) Amis 1997 Garner (1998) Burt (2000) Trask (2001)

+ − [+] − − − − − + − − − − − + − − − − + − − −

+ + + + − − − − [+] − + − − + + + + [+] − + + [+] +

+ − SEU SEU + + − − [journalism] − + − − − + [+] − − − + − − +

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

− − − − − − − − + − + − − − − − + − − − − − − + − + + + + − − − − + + − − − + + − − − + + +

(Continued )

5 2 4 [1] 4 3 3 1 1 2 [2] 1 5 2 1 2 4 3 [1] 4 1 [1] 1 4 3 2 [1] 4

Brians (2003) Peters (2004) Batko (2004) Sayce (2006) Butterfield (2007) Fogarty (2008) Taggart (2010) Lamb (2010) Heffer (2010) Total (71)

Author

Table 4.4 (Cont.) University degree + + + [+] + + + [+] + 40 + [10]

Pre-university

− + − − + − + − + 14 + [3] + + − − − − − [Science] − 23 + [3]

University position + + + + + + + [+] + 63 + [1]

Relevant profession/ occupation − + − − − − − + − 5

Membership society

+ + − + + + + + − 36

Earlier publications on language

4 6 2 2 [1] 4 3 4 2 [3] 3

Total

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a relevant society. The assigned credentials allow me to classify the HUGE authors as follows: 6 credentials (1) – Peters (2004) 5 credentials (3) + (2) – Partridge (1947), Crystal (1984), Wilson (1993) 4 + [1] (1) – Greenbaum (1988) 2 + [3] (1) – Lamb (2010) 4 credentials (14) + (2) – Turck Baker (1910), Krapp (1927), W. Morris (1975), W. Ebbitt ([1939] 1978), Swan (1980), Burchfield (1981, 1996), Whitcut (1988), Blamires (1994), Cutts (1995), Amis (†1997), Trask (2001), Brians (2003), Butterfield (2007), Taggart (2010) 3 + [1] (2) Marriott (1992), Ayto (1995) 3 credentials (15) + (3) – Alford (1864), F. Fowler (1906), H. Fowler (1906), Hall (1917), Strunk (1918), Vallins (1936, 1951, 1953), Gowers (1948), B. Evans (1957), Follett (†1966), Weiner (1983), Carter (1988), Skates (1988), Garner (1998), Fogarty (2008), Heffer (2010) 2 + [1] (3) – Brown (1851), Burt (2000), Sayce (2006), 2 credentials (12) + (6) – White (1870), Fitzgerald (1901), Vizetelly (1906), Treble (1936), C. Evans (1957), Wood (1962), M. Morris (1975), Booher (1988), Howard (1993), S. Mager (1993), O’Conner (1996), Batko (2004) 1+ [1] credentials (6) – Baker (1770), Hurd (1847), Gould (1867), Ayres (1881), Horwill (1935), Bryson (1984) 1 (known) credential (9) – Moon (1868), Payne (1911), Nicholson (1957), Vermes (1981), Randall (1988), de Vries (1991), Farrell (1992), N. Mager (1993), Stilman (1997) no (known) credentials (3) – D. Ebbitt ([1939] 1978), Bailie (1988), Kitchin (1988) Two things in the above categorisation are immediately striking: the low number of writers with the highest credentials (4 only) and the number of those without any (known) formal credentials – according to Chapman’s model – at all (3 writers); it should, however, be stressed that some of them may have possessed relevant credentials that I was unable to identify. At best, therefore, this classification is tentative for those authors for whom little biographical information has been retrieved. If we add this to the fact that quite a few writers on the HUGE list don’t have any more than one or two (known) formal credentials – 30 writers altogether (40%) – we must conclude that the usage guide is a text type that typically attracts non-specialists. The category of true specialists, with four or more formal credentials (22 authors), is relatively small: just over 30%. This characteristic is indeed recognised by Paul Brians, who comments in the preface to Common Errors of English (2003):

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“Because of current trends in English studies, the folks you find patrolling the usage beat are not likely to be trained linguists these days”, adding: and I’m no exception. I have a Ph.D. in comparative literature, not in English composition. But I love good writing and encourage it in my students. I first got the idea of writing about usage while studying the mangled language on restaurant menus, and you’ll find several examples of that sort of thing in this book. (2003: vii) For all that, with four credentials he scored well enough on the basis of Chapman’s classification system. An interest in the English language, though no formal qualification as such, seems to be what all writers on usage have in common, though with quite a few of them, as I’ve argued above, publishing motives and the expectation that publishing a usage guide might prove a lucrative business must have played a role, too. The latter motivation clearly coincides with the publishers’ interest in bringing out usage guides. For the classification presented here I drew upon a model using formal credentials only which had been developed to assess the credentials of eighteenth-century grammar writers. Today, we are able to draw on additional ones, like Patricia O’Conner’s (1996) twenty years of editorial experience, which led to a publisher’s invitation to compile a usage guide. In effect, this would have put her into the same category as Gowers, if it hadn’t been for the fact that she didn’t study Latin in school (Appendix 3). She did take modern languages in school and in college (French and German) as well as learning Italian privately, in addition to studying English alongside Philosophy in university. Together, these would in my opinion be excellent credentials for someone wishing (or being invited) to become a usage guide writer, and the same applies to Bill Bryson, whose Troublesome Words (1984) had a basis in previous editorial work. In his case, his age at the time argues against his potential expertise. That experience as a writer alongside increasing knowledge of the subject may produce new insights is seen with Pinker, whose discussion of the split infinitive in The Sense of Style no longer includes a reference to the eighteenth century (Chapter 2). Nathan and Sylvia Mager (1993) also had experience as writers and editors before publishing their usage guide. Vermes (1981) and de Vries (1991) had published handbooks on a variety of topics before publishing their usage guides; for Vizetelly (1906), too, it may have been a small step from publishing a book on manuscript preparation for printers to publishing a usage guide. Kay Sayce used to write “house style sheets”, work that made her realise that there might well be a market for a book on usage, as she explains in Appendix 3. The same applies to Lamb (2010), whose Queen’s English Society Practical Guide to Punctuation had come out two years earlier.

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The publishers The usage guides by the writers with the highest credentials – Peters (2004), Crystal ([1984] 2000), Partridge (1947) and Wilson (1993) – were published by Cambridge University Press, Penguin, Hamish Hamilton and Columbia University Press, respectively. The HUGE database contains one other usage guide by Penguin, Trask (2001), but none by the other three publishers. Penguin is the publisher that also reissued Amis (1997) in 2011, in line with the publishing practice relating to all Amis’s books, which were reissued a year after their original publication as Penguin editions. But Penguin publishes under different imprints as well: the title of Bryson (1984) is The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words, published by Allen Lane, and WorldCat lists a reprint by Viking, dated 2009. OUP is the publisher of the largest number of usage guides in the HUGE database: Burchfield (1996) and Allen’s Pocket Fowler (1999), Horwill (1935), Nicholson (1957), Swan (1980), Dear (1986), Ayto (1995), Cutts (1995), Garner (1998) and Butterfield (2007) (OUP); and Fowler and Fowler (1906), Fowler (1926), Treble and Vallins (1936) and the anonymous Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (1981) (Clarendon Press). If we look at the publishers of the fourteen usage guides in HUGE published since the 1980s that were classified in Table 4.3 under Publishing opportunity (either for the authors themselves or, in the case of O’Conner (1996), Heffer (2010) and Lamb (2010), for their publishers), we see many different publishers:11 Vermes (1981) Parker Publishing Company Bryson (1984) Allen Lane (Penguin) Booher ([1988] 1992) Fawcett (Random House) Carter and Skates ([1988] 1990) Holt, Rinehart and Winston de Vries (1991) Prentice Hall Howard (1993) Macmillan Mager and Mager (1993) Prentice Hall O’Conner (1996) Riverhead Books (Penguin Putnam) Garner (1998) OUP Brians (2003) William, James & Co. Batko (2004) Career Press Fogarty (2008) St. Martin’s Griffin Heffer (2010) Windmill Books (Random House) Lamb (2010) Michael O’Mara Books Taggart (2010) The National Trust Taggart (2010) was reissued in 2016 along with four other “Her Ladyship’s Guide” books by Batsford, an imprint of Pavilion Books. All this confirms that many publishers besides OUP and Penguin have spotted the potential of the market as well, both in the UK and in the US.

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But how well do usage guides sell? “Sales information is confidential,” I was informed by the Wylie Agency, which handles Kingsley Amis’s estate, and Martin Cutts, the author of The Plain English Guide (1995), writes that his publishers “always said I shouldn’t reveal how many copies of the Guide have been sold, so I’ll need to stick with that” (Appendix 3). Kay Sayce did provide figures for her book, some 28,000 copies sold altogether, “mostly in Asia but also in the UK” (Appendix 3), and so did Pam Peters, who informed me that the Cambridge Guide’s “original hardback has sold well over 15,000 copies”. According to Sarah Marriott, Common Errors in English “sold about 10,000 copies, mainly in the UK” (personal communication), and Caroline Taggart’s Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010), too, has been selling very well, no doubt because at the time it had just come out, the book was prominently available in National Trust shops all over the UK at a very affordable price, thus ensuring a wide potential readership. Sales figures for books can be obtained from Nielsen BookScan, a commercial book sales analysis service. For the present purposes, however, these figures are unreliable, because not all publishers supply data to the service,12 while for those that do, figures are only included from the moment a publisher links up with the service, so that they do not reflect the full picture. For all that, those that were supplied to me in November 2015 do show the immediate popularity of Heffer (2010), which sold about 27,000 copies, for the hardback and paperback versions combined. Its contemporary Lamb (2010), as Table 4.5 shows, sold nearly 10,000 copies of the hardback edition alone, while two older usage guides, Allen (1999) and Trask (2001), sold over 16,500 and 13,700 copies of the hardback and paperback editions, respectively. These figures are much lower compared with the immediate and immense popularity of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) or Gowers’s Plain Words (1948), as discussed in Chapter 1, which may well be due to the fact that nowadays many more usage guides are competing for the market for usage advice. For all that, the number of copies sold of Heffer’s book is nevertheless very high. As an editor of the Daily Mail and before

Table 4.5 Best-selling usage guides according to Nielsen BookScan Usage guide

Format

International sales

Total

Allen (1999)

Hb (1999) + Pb (2002) + Pb (2004) + Pb (2008) Hb (2001) + Pb (2002) Hb (2010) + Pb (2011) Hb (2010) + Pb (2015)

2,903 + 2,559 + 4,966 + 6,220 2,432 + 11,352 18,270 + 8,765 9,479 + 969

16,648

Trask (2001) Heffer (2010) Lamb (2010)

13,784 27,035 10,448

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that of the Daily Telegraph and as the author of biographies of the historian Thomas Carlyle, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and the politician Enoch Powell, Heffer is a well-known writer in the UK, and this may have influenced the sales figures of his usage guide as well, despite its questionable linguistic quality – in the eyes of linguists at least. That the popularity of Allen’s Pocket Fowler (1999) steadily increased upon the publication of different reprints of the paperback edition, as the above figures suggest, may have been due to the presence of the name “Fowler” in the title: Fowler, as Crystal notes in the introduction his facsimile reprint of Modern English Usage (2009), is a household name, and adopting his name in the book’s title must lend authority to discussions on usage. Trask’s (2001) popularity, particularly when the paperback edition appeared, may to some extent likewise be due to the presence of the word Penguin in the title. Other important advertising ploys, no doubt contributing to the popularity of usage guides, are the identification on the cover of The Queen’s English (2010) of Lamb as the president of the well-known Queen’s English Society, and the reference to large number of entries in a book – over 4,000 in the case of Peters’s Cambridge Guide to English Usage (2004). The latter tactic is found from the early days of the tradition onwards, as the title of Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence (1856) suggests. Prepublication of parts of usage guides that are about to appear is another well-known advertising device, as in the case of the 2011 reprint of Amis’s The King’s English (Chapter 1) and in that of Rebecca Gowers’s most recent book Horrible Words (2016): less than a week before publication on 31 March 2016, a list of usage features she discusses in the book appeared in The Guardian online.13 Media attention to usage guides is generally expected to boost sales, and when an author is a well-known figure, this will influence the speed with which reviews are produced: in Steven Pinker’s case, reviews came out when the book had barely come off the press, and positive reviews like Henry Hitchings’ in The Guardian (2014) or Robin Straaijer’s in the Washington Post (2014b) would result in large sales of the book. With less well-known writers, like Caroline Taggart, things are sometimes very different. A search for Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010) in Factiva, an online database of newspapers and other published documents which allows for full-text searches on any conceivable topic, produced only three references to the book and not a single review. This lack of attention to the book stands in stark contrast not only with the reception of The Sense of Style, but also with Taggart’s own earlier usage guide My Grammar and I (or Should that Be “Me”?) (2008, with J.A. Wines), which was discussed much more frequently in the press when it came out. But the poor reception in the media of Her Ladyship’s Guide need not have resulted in poor sales, due to the fact that its publisher was the National Trust. Table 4.5 does not contain any figures for Brians (2003) or Fogarty (2008). The popularity of Brians’s book, however, is evident from the fact

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a third edition came out ten years later, in 2013, while if Fogarty’s book is popular among American readers, as I would expect it to be, this would be due to the popularity of her Grammar Girl website, of which it was a spinoff. Upon conducting a survey as to which online usage sites are most frequently resorted to for language advice, Lukač found that Grammar Girl came seventh on the list (2018: 75). The different editions of Garner’s Modern American [now English] Usage have already been discussed; published within the space of only twenty years, the case seems unprecedented, for the UK at least. The fourth edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage took about 90 years to appear, and before the new edition of Gowers’s Plain Words came out in 2014, 60 years after the book’s original publication, two revised editions were published, by Bruce Fraser in 1973 and Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut in 1986, again a much longer period than in the case of Garner or, indeed, Brians. Peters’s Cambridge Guide to English Usage (2004) has so far only seen a single edition, while the second edition of Amis (1997) is not a new edition but a reprint of the original edition with a new introduction by the author’s son. Possibly, with a much larger potential buying public in the US, there is a greater demand for usage guides in that country, and authors and publishers appear to cater for this by regularly bringing out updated editions even of not-so-old usage guides. The popularity of Strunk and White in America is evident from the fact that, about ten years ago, book collector Jerry Morris posted a display of 37 copies (editions and reprints) of the book.14 According to Pullum (2018: 190), the book “was recently found to be required in more syllabi in American colleges and universities than any other book”. Peters’s usage guide is also available in the form of “multiple e-book versions”, as she informed me, and so is The Queen’s English according to Lamb (Appendix 3), and possibly many other usage guides are, too. A final indication of a usage guide’s popularity is whether it has been translated into other languages. This is the case for Bill Bryson’s Troublesome Words, which was translated into Chinese (2008, 2012) and Hungarian (2013) (see WorldCat), and Bernard Lamb’s The Queen’s English (2010), which has come out in French and Italian (Appendix 3). According to Pam Peters, her Cambridge Guide to English Usage (2004) was reissued in “a special Italian edition, a much larger one for South East Asia (Singapore and India); and a complete Chinese translation of it (2011)” (personal communication). Ann Batko’s When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People, too, appeared in Chinese, in 2006 (Appendix 3). In the early months of 2016 Pinker’s The Sense of Style (2014) was reissued in a Dutch version – a somewhat curious publishing decision, since the English skills of Dutch writers are generally quite good (Edwards 2016), so readers could have done well enough by the English version of the book. The decision to publish the book in Dutch may therefore be interpreted as the result of Pinker’s popularity as a writer, possibly coupled with a general

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interest in English in The Netherlands, rather than as a sign of the popularity of the book as a usage guide in the first place. Translations into Chinese and Hungarian or French and Italian are therefore very likely a different matter. Finally, I came across a version in braille of Partridge’s Usage and Abusage, published in 1989 by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (WorldCat). It seems unlikely that publishers, both at home and abroad, would wish to engage in the publication of a type of books the success of which was not in one way or another guaranteed. This in itself is remarkable, particularly because of the fact that usage advice is increasingly and much more easily available online. But even if usage guides continue to be published, and assuming that many of them do indeed continue to sell well, the question is whether they are read, and whether as a consequence the usage advice they provide has any effect on language use. This is a question I will take up in Chapter 7. First, however, I will look into the way in which usage problems are treated in usage guides, and in doing so in the next chapter I will also consider the question as to what makes usage problems find a place in usage guides and in the usage canon as such to begin with.

Notes 1 Thanks to John Sadler, Malcolm Edwards and Robert Lacey, who worked at HarperCollins at the time, for confirming this account. 2 Herbert William Horwill was born and educated in England, and moved to the US after his retirement (www.croucherconsult.co.uk/Genealogyold/Horwill/ Herbert1.htm). Though his Dictionary of Modern American Usage (1935) was published in Oxford, it will be classified as an American publication because of its particular focus on American English. In his preface, Horwill explains that the title of the book was inspired by Fowler’s. The book is the result of material he collected in the course of 30 years, six of which spent in the US. As a specific group of readers he mentions English people visiting the US. Lynch (2009: 203) writes that the book “got little attention”, but WorldCat lists two editions and many reprints (down to 1977). 3 Sylvia and her husband Nathan are classified here according to the date of the second edition of their usage guide since information on the book’s first edition is lacking. The editor of the second edition, John Domini, was 42 at the time of publication. 4 According to his son Cyprian, Harry Blamires wrote several usage guides (see also WorldCat). After his earliest publication, The Queen’s English (1994), which we included in the HUGE database, Blamires published Correcting Your English (Bloomsbury, 1996), The Cassell Guide to Common Errors in English (1998, published, or reissued, by Book Club Associates), and Compose Yourself and Write Good English (Penguin 2004) and The Penguin Guide to Plain English (2004). 5 For reasons provided in Chapter 3, Vizetelly has been classified as an American here. 6 Relatively arbitrary though such as decision may seem, I decided to weigh the classification in favour of her teaching experience rather than that of her

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7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

The writers and the publishers experience as an editor in view of her age (31 at the time she published the usage guide): O’Conner, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, for instance, had been an editor for twenty years before embarking on her usage guide. In contrast to Tables 4.1 and 4.2, the classification into British or American in this table is based on the place of publication of the usage guides because the focus here is on their publications rather than the authors’ personal backgrounds. The website, http://jeremybutterfield.com/, is no longer available. The editor of the second edition of their book, John Domini, taught writing at Harvard and other educational institutions, and wrote fiction and non-fiction. For Modern English Usage, which followed upon The King’s English, his expertise would have been higher, i.e. rating 5 rather than 3. The editions listed are those that were used for the HUGE database. The sales figures from the National Trust, for instance, do not appear to have been included in the overall figures provided for Taggart (2010) (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2018b: 4). “From alright to zap: an A−Z of horrible words”, www.theguardian.com/ books/2016/mar/25/epic-fail-to-hotdesk-guesstimate-an-a-z-of-horrible-words. See http://biblioresearching.blogspot.nl/2009/05/my-elements-of-style-collection. html.

Chapter 5

Usage problems: pet linguistic peeves

Presentation and selection One of the most amazing things about English usage guides is that no two of them are the same. On the one hand this has to do with presentation: alphabetical for easy reference or according to topic (Chapter 3). Sometimes we find a mixture of the two: Strunk and White (1959), for instance, includes various chapters that deal with rules of usage, composition and style, but there is also one called “Words and expressions commonly misused” that lists the kind of grammatical features I am interested in here – e.g. among/between, different than, less/fewer – in alphabetical order. At the same time, there are usage guides that present their material in no apparent order: two early examples of this are Baker’s Reflections on the English Language (1770) and the anonymous Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence (1856). But an alphabetical arrangement of entries does not represent the more modern approach, since we already find it, in part of the book anyway, in Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector (1847). There are 26 more such usage guides in HUGE, all of them American, compared to 21 British ones. We can see differences between the British and American traditions in this respect: the earliest alphabetical arrangement found in the HUGE collection for British English usage guides is Fowler (1926), so arranging usage problems alphabetically was a later development in the UK than in the US. Within the UK, Fowler must therefore be regarded as a pioneer in this respect, all the more so since the earlier King’s English (1906), produced together with his brother, shows an arrangement according to subject matter. The change in presentation makes Fowler (1926) into a rather more straightforward reference work than its predecessor. Usage guides that present their material in non-alphabetical order invite the reader to study the material rather than consult the work in hand on particular usage questions only. In this light it is striking to see that none of the most recent usage guides in the database, Heffer (2010), Lamb (2010) and Taggart (2010), show a single alphabetical arrangement. These books were published to be read, perhaps even studied, from cover to cover, or, in Taggart’s case, from chapter to chapter.

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Another reason why usage guides differ from each other is the selection of the material they include. None of the books in HUGE contain all 123 usage problems included in the database (see Appendix 2). The usage problem that is most frequently dealt with, by 65 usage guides altogether, published between 1826 (Vulgarities of Speech Corrected) and 2010 (Heffer and Lamb), is shall/ will, while there are two, momentarily and the way/in the way, that are each dealt with only once, by Randall (1988) and Weiner (1983), respectively. These, in Chapman’s terms, are “one-offs”, in the sense that “apparently no other usage book thinks them worth repeating” (2010: 141). By contrast, shall/will may rightly be called an old chestnut (see Chapter 2), even though it wasn’t part of the usage canon from the start. Another usage problem that is treated by very few of the HUGE usage guides is the phrase evenings and Sundays (cf. in the evenings, on Sundays): it occurs only in four usage guides, published between 1868 and 1888, and yet it was selected as one of the 55 items tested for their acceptability by Mittins et al. (1970). Why would any of these usage problems have been selected to be discussed in usage guides or, indeed, for analysis by Mittins et al. in their attitudes survey? The rule for shall/will (shall in the first persons singular and plural, and will in all other persons when expressing future tense) goes back to the seventeenth century, and it continues to have its place in subsequent normative English grammars. But why did it become a usage problem only in the 1820s? It first enters the tradition in a British usage guide, The Vulgarities of Speech Corrected (1826), but the next title in the HUGE list is Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector (1847), the first American usage guide. Hurd does not mention The Vulgarities of Speech Corrected, but his list of “Authorities Consulted” does include Lowth’s grammar of 1762, which deals with shall/will, so this is where he may have encountered it. Shall/will is also listed in Pinker’s The Sense of Style (2014), as one of the 100 usage problems discussed in the chapter called “Telling right from wrong”. Pinker did not have access to HUGE because the database was not yet publicly available when he was working on the book, but since he refers to several usage guides, he may have picked it up anywhere. But what about the other items he discusses – why would he have included those? To determine whether these, too, are old chestnuts, I compared Pinker’s list with three randomly selected usage guides from the HUGE database, Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence (1856), Amis (†1997) and Taggart (2010), none of which were consulted by Pinker. In addition, I checked which of the items in Pinker (2014) were part of the survey conducted by Mittins et al. (1970), were mentioned by David Crystal’s radio informants (resulting in his Grammatical Top Ten – see Chapter 3) and are included in the HUGE database. The results are presented in Table 5.1. There are a few additional items, not included in the table, which Pinker mentions but does not discuss in detail, but which also occur in some of the other sources consulted: double negation (500 Mistakes, Taggart, Crystal and HUGE), mischievious and nucular, also dealt with by Taggart.1

Table 5.1 Overlap between Pinker (2014) and some selected usage guides and usage surveys (numbers compared to the total numbers of items in the works consulted) Usage problems Pinker (2014) (99)2

500 Mistakes (10/499)

Amis (†1997) (26/258)

Taggart (2010) (49/ca. 400)

Mittins et al. (1970) (18/55)

adverse, affect/effect, aggravate, ain’t, anticipate, anxious, appraise, as far as, beg the question, bemused, between/among, between you and I, can/may, cliché, comprise, convince, credible, credulous, crescendo, criteria, critique, dangling participle, data is/are, decimate, depreciate, dichotomy, disinterested/uninterested, due to/owing to, effect (n.), enervate, enormity, flat adverbs, flaunt/flout, flounder, fortuitous, Frankenstein, fulsome, gerund, graduate, healthy, homogeneous, hone, hopefully, hot button, hung, if/then, initial and/but, intern (v.), intrigue, ironic, irregardless, lie/lay, like for as/such as, literally, livid, loan, luxuriant, masterful, meretricious, mitigate, momentarily, nauseous, New Age, noisome, nonplussed, opportunism, parameter, phenomena, politically correct, possessive antecedents, practicable, preposition stranding, presently, proscribe/prescribe, protagonist, quote, raise, refute, reticent, shall/will, shrunk/sprung/ stunk/sunk, simplistic, singular they/sex-indefinite he, split infinitive, staunch, subjunctive, tense sequence, than for as, that/ which, tortuous, transpire, unexceptionable, untenable, urban legend, verbal, verbs from nouns, while, who/whom, whose between/among, between you and I, flat adverbs, lie/lay, possessive antecedents, shall/will, shrunk/sprung/stunk/sunk, singular they/sex-indefinite he, subjunctive, who/whom between you and I, dangling participle, data is/are, decimate, disinterested/uninterested, due to/owing to, enormity, flaunt/ flout, fortuitous, Frankenstein, homogeneous, less/fewer, like for as, noisome, preposition stranding, protagonist, shall/will, simplistic, split infinitive, that/which, tense sequence, transpire, verbs from nouns, very unique, who/whom, whose adverse, affect/effect, aggravate, anticipate, appraise, between/among, between you and I, can/may, comprise, convince, credible/credulous, crescendo, criteria, critique (v.), dangling participle, decimate, disinterested/uninterested, effect (n.), effect (v.), enormity, flat adverbs, flounder, fortuitous, fulsome, gerund, hopefully, hung/hanged, irregardless, less/fewer, lie/lay, like for as/such as, literally, meretricious, momentarily, noisome, phenomena (sg.), practicable, proscribe, protagonist, quote (n.), raise for rear, split infinitive, that/which, tortuous, unexceptionable, verbs from nouns, very unique, who/whom, whose between/among, between you and I, dangling participle, data is/are, disinterested/uninterested, due to/owing to, flat adverbs, gerund, less/fewer, like for as, literally, loan for lend, (Continued )

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Table 5.1 (Cont.) Usage problems shall/will, singular they/sex-indefinite he, split infinitive, subjunctive, very unique, who/whom Crystal’s Grammatical Top Ten (1995) (7/10) HUGE database (32/123)

between you and I, hopefully, none is/are, preposition stranding, shall/will, split infinitive, who/whom affect/effect, aggravate, ain’t, between/among, as far as, between you and I, can/may dangling participle, data is/are, decimate, due to/owing to, disinterested/uninterested, effect (v.), flat adverbs, flaunt/flout, gerund, hopefully, initial and/but, less/ fewer, lie/lay, like for as/as such, literally, none is/are, preposition stranding, shall/will, singular they/sex-indefinite he, split infinitive, subjunctive, that/which, very unique, who/whom, whose

The above overview is based on the usage problems discussed by Pinker, but compared to Five Hundred Mistakes the amount of overlap between the two books, ten items only, is minimal. Amis’s The King’s English includes many more items than Pinker, and so does Taggart (2010), with 258 and ca. 400 items, respectively. There is only about 25% overlap between Amis and Pinker, but considerably more with Taggart (some 50%). When asked, Pinker informed me that he aimed to present popular usage problems, and that he had based himself on the American Heritage Dictionary, of whose Usage Panel he is the chairman (Pinker 2014: 189), but that inevitably, in the light of the many usage problems in existence, he had to make a selection. He evidently used other sources as well, for when discussing the split infinitive, he quotes from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged online dictionary, the Encarta World English Dictionary and the Random House Dictionary, and in addition from Theodore Bernstein’s The Careful Writer (1965), Joseph Williams’s Style: Towards Clarity and Grace (1990) and Roy Copperud’s American Usage and Style: The Consensus (1980). (None of the latter three are in the HUGE database – Williams and Copperud because they are style manuals rather than usage guides.) The most curious instance of overlap between Pinker and the selected usage guides is the occurrence of Frankenstein as an entry found in Pinker and Amis. It is an unusual feature to decide to include (cf. Chapman 2010: 153), particularly with Pinker saying that he had to make a selection from the many usage problems in existence. One wonders who the other “purists” were who condemned the figurative use of the word, according to Pinker in his discussion of the item (2014: 265). Perhaps he did consult Amis after all. Amis claimed that he based himself on Fowler’s Modern English Usage – “The present book was written with the 1926 work open beside the typewriter” (1997: xiv) – but a comparison with two of the later editions of the book, by Gowers (1965) and Burchfield (1996), suggests that this might not be entirely

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true. As I’ve shown elsewhere (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2018a), there is considerable overlap between the items on Amis’s own list of usage problems and those in the three editions of Fowler (1926). Amis did not have access to Burchfield’s edition because he died the year before it was published, but he may well have drawn on Gowers’s edition instead of on the original first edition: the two do not greatly differ from each other (Busse and Schröder 2009: 74; though see Chapter 6 below). The items overlapping with the third edition of Modern English Usage may well be the result of what were at that time recent so-called pet peeves shared by Burchfield and Amis. But Amis, like Pinker, consulted other sources as well: The King’s English by Fowler and Fowler (1906), Follett’s Modern American Usage (1966), Gowers’s Complete Plain Words (1954), the much more recent Grammar and Style by Michael Dummett (1993) and the Daily Mirror’s style manual from the 1980s (Amis 1997: xiv). But what, in the end, made Pinker and Amis, or indeed other usage guide writers, select the usage problems they chose to discuss? Fowler, in whichever edition of the work, is among the most elaborate usage guides is existence, and Pinker’s main source, the American Heritage Dictionary, is considerably more extensive in its treatment of usage problems than The Sense of Style. What selection principles did usage guide writers apply – if any at all? And if, as the inclusion of Frankenstein by Amis and Pinker suggests, usage guide writers had their own particular pet peeves – a very likely possibility given the fact that usage guides are essentially private undertakings – how about those of the general public? Do today’s usage guide writers cater to the public demand in their selection principles, and is this why they sell so well?

People’s pet peeves One usage guide writer who mentions trying to find out what usage problems people were bothered by is Robert Burchfield. In his article of 1991, “The Fowler brothers and the tradition of usage handbooks”, he reports on a rather casual attempt at eliciting such features: In the course of a single day at three separate social occasions in Oxford in early June 1989, two of them garden parties for academic members of the University of Oxford and the third a dinner party, I noted down the various points of usage that ‘worried’ the guests that I met. Readers of the present article will not be surprised to hear that they were between you and I (and similar pronominal constructions), different from/to/than, lay/lie, may/might, shall/will, and split infinitives. I mentioned that these points of usage had been in dispute since at least the time of Henry Alford’s The Queen’s English (1864). No one was particularly impressed nor showed that their ‘worry’ was therefore in any way diminished. (1991: 109)

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All the items mentioned by Burchfield’s informants are included in the HUGE database, where we can see that they are in fact much older than Burchfield told his academic friends, but the point of the above quotation is that, when asked directly, people rarely come up with anything new. This is also clear from Crystal’s Grammatical Top Ten (Table 5.1), which includes items that have been part of the prescriptive canon for many years. Most of the items selected for analysis by Mittins et al. (1970) were similarly longestablished usage problems. There was at the time – as there still isn’t today – no systematic study that might have advised the authors in their selection process, so the question is on what grounds Mittins et al. made the selection for their survey. Christian Mair, in Twentieth-Century English (2006), argues that usage problems like different to/from/than are part of “a body of folk-linguistic knowledge”. This body of folk-linguistic knowledge includes what has been identified as the “prescriptive canon” (Chapter 2), and many of its items that acquired the status of old chestnuts within the usage guide tradition. Mair calls these old chestnuts examples of “anecdotal observations … [which] are repeated again and again, gaining a life of their own … whose truth is taken for granted and no longer challenged even in scholarly publications” (2006: 18). Accordingly, scholars like Mittins et al. as well as members of the general public like Burchfield’s academic friends come up with age-old usage problems that they think are worth looking into. The selection process for most usage guides, ranging from the very earliest ones to Taggart (2010) and Pinker (2014), may well have occurred along the same lines. Taggart, indeed, explains in Appendix 3 the personal nature of her selection, explaining that she “basically wrote about the things that amused or annoyed me”. In this light it is striking that the Mittins survey includes features that are only rarely discussed in the usage guides included in the HUGE database: the way/in the way (1 usage guide only), at (the) university (4), evenings and Sundays (4) and complements with when, as in Intoxication is when … (8). At a general acceptance rate of 45, 67, 46 and 37% for these four features respectively (Mittins et al. 1970: 13–14), the outcome of the survey showed that these items were indeed subject to a fair amount of criticism at the time, though not as much as very unique, imply/infer or like for as if, which were the least accepted of the usage items investigated (with an average acceptance rate of 11%–12% only). Burchfield may have conducted his informal survey because he was working on his revision of Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Despite the fact that many of the usage problems mentioned in his article are among the oldest of old chestnuts, people clearly continued to perceive them as problematical, and as language items which they would seek advice on. The 250-year-old tradition of usage guides, as we will see in Chapter 7, did not have any substantial effect on the language in the sense of ridding it of the kind of problems that continue to be found in usage guides, nor did the many usage guides published over the years manage to put an end to people’s insecurities in these matters. Instead, the steady stream of new publications does the opposite, by fuelling linguistic

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insecurity among the general public, which is something that, in particular, the writers of popular usage guides, and their publishers, are doing well by. In the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, we, too, tried to identify new usage problems, if only to find out why items that show variation in usage develop into actual problems. To this end we employed different methods. One of these, as discussed in Chapter 3, was to ask people directly, which at times produced very elaborate replies, like the email in Appendix 1. Apart from the long list of usage problems she discusses, the writer, who is not a linguist, also explains how she hit upon the project’s blog: “I was chasing around the internet trying to find the best slam dunk on the ‘singular they’ issue, which my dad had just said something stupid about.” This, in other words, is another example of why usage guides, or in this case the World Wide Web, are consulted – not as general reference works, but, as discussed in Chapter 1, “to win tedious arguments about grammar”. In addition, we posted a survey on the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog to elicit data on the acceptability of the flat adverb (as in go slow for go slowly) in 2015 (see Lukač and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2019; Lukač 2018: Chapter 6). The query which asked for informants’ other pet peeves produced 74 responses, 46 of which came from speakers who identified themselves as native speakers of English. Between them, these informants listed 48 features, most of which dealt with grammar, lexis and spelling: less for fewer (6), nouns turned into verbs (5) and verbs into nouns (3), initial so (4), between you and I (3), of for have as in “I could of …” (3), their/there/they’re, your/you’re and two/to/too (3), amount for number (2), its/it’s (2), lie for lay (2), discourse particle like as in “this was, like, a really great idea” (2), and what was seen as past tenses used as present participles (2) (was sat “was sitting” and was stood “was standing”). Other items included absolutely (in reply to a question), the use of acronyms, alright/ all right, compared to/with, cunt as an insult (the use of Jeremy Hunt as rhyming slang), doing lunch, “dropping the g” in -ing, the disappearance of the subjunctive, going forward in the sense of “from now on”, like for such as, the plural apostrophe, beg the question, bored of, could/couldn’t care less, if followed by a conditional, the new use of because (as in because reasons, because awesome),3 borrow/lend, the dangling participle, double modals (I might could go to the grocery store), mistakes in the perfect, the peculiarity of had had, starting sentences with a conjunction, superfluous prepositions (e.g. reduced down), the simple present used in a historical context, the use of thusly, therefore, thereupon, thereafter, upon, inter alia in translations, uninterested/disinterested, that for which, you guys, and yourself for you. Though the survey was about the acceptability of the flat adverb, three informants mentioned this item as well, illustrating it with I’m good and real bad/nice. Real bad is indeed an example of a flat adverb (real used for really), but the case of I’m good is somewhat different. Kamm (2015: 193) treats the issue as an example of a flat adverb, concluding that today I’m good is a standard alternative for I’m well, but the comment was possibly motivated by the increasing use of I’m good in

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reply to the question How are you?, which in the past would have elicited I’m fine instead. It is the change in observed frequency between these two forms that informants may have been struck by. The informants, moreover, also commented on features not dealt with by the Bridging the Unbridgeable project: the so-called High-Rise Terminal, also referred to as “uptalk” or “upspeak” (mentioned five times) and what is known as “creaky voice”. Together with “the new like” these features are all associated with the language of young women.4 A particularly striking phenomenon, moreover, that emerged from the survey is that informants commented on the need to avoid particular usage problems (preposition stranding) rather than on the problems themselves, on the current strong objection to some of them (initial hopefully), and on the overuse of whom, about which the informant in Appendix 1 also wrote that using it is fine … if you are in the objective case and are trying to sound like a snob, but otherwise say who. I won't say who directly after a preposition, but I do re-write sentences to avoid being in that position. It's lovely to have that as an option for when you do (for whatever reason) want to sound like a snob, but only then. With the overuse of whom even when it is strictly speaking grammatically correct acquiring connotations of snobbery, comments like this suggest that the tide is turning against prescriptivism. Asking informants directly is risky because answers may be determined by an awareness of what is being looking for. Thus, when Marilyn Hedges (2011), in her study of changed attitudes to the use of like for as and as if, asked whether informants could mention any other linguistic features they strongly disliked, many people mentioned “the new like”. Ideally, informants produce their pet peeves spontaneously, but since this would be virtually impossible to achieve within a relatively limited space of time,5 we experimented with different ways of eliciting information about attitudes to particular questions of usage more indirectly (see Ebner 2017; Kostadinova 2018a). I myself developed a less direct method based on the work of James Pennebaker. Pennebaker, who is not a linguist but a social psychologist, is the author of A Secret Life of Pronouns (2011), in which he describes his method of analysing his patients’ disorders and their states of mind by studying their language use. To this end he developed the digital tool Language Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), with which he analysed texts produced by his patients but also by other writers, like the presidential candidates in the American elections of 2008. LIWC performs simple statistical counts of the frequency of particular words and word classes in relation to the text as a whole, like first person pronouns, definite and indefinite articles, words indicating social relationships (mate, daughter, neighbour) or expressing positive or negative

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emotions (love, hate, kill, sad), cognitive verbs (know, think, guess) and words that are longer than six letters (“big” words). High frequencies of first person pronouns, for instance, were interpreted as expressing insecurity or depression, while a frequent use of the indefinite article was taken to be a sign of more dynamic thinking than usage of definite articles (categorical thinking). The approach adopted from Pennebaker was to invite informants to write short pieces of text about three sentences which contained different types of usage problems:6 1. 2. 3.

I could of gone to that party. Their errors will likely be in their use of style words. He only had one chapter to finish.

Unlike in the attitudes survey by Mittins et al., however, the features concerned were not highlighted to avoid biased responses. The point was after all to elicit pieces of texts that could be analysed rather than explicit statements of like or dislike (which I received as well). Consequently, several informants failed to identify the usage problem in sentence (2). The first example was included because the aim of the study was to elicit the kind of emotional response that is frequently evoked by discussions of debated usages (cf. the “tedious arguments of grammar” referred to above). The inspiration for the sentence was the discovery by the sixteen-year-old daughter of a British colleague that of in could of was not a preposition but an auxiliary verb. As expected, the item produced the strongest expressions of disapproval. The second sentence, which had been taken from the book by Pennebaker (2011: 29), contains a usage (likely for very likely) that is more common in the US than in the UK, at least according to Burchfield in his edition of Modern English Usage: “in standard [British?] English [adverbial likely] is almost always qualified by another adv., esp. more, most, quite, or very but just as often stands without an adverbial prop in AmE” (1996: 460).7 The third sentence is one of the survey sentences from Mittins et al. (1970); I included it as an example of an old chestnut, the placement of only (He had only/only had one chapter to finish). Usage already had an overall acceptability of 45% in the late 1960s, so acceptance was expected to have increased, which indeed it had. One of the informants’ comments, “Actually, I have always regarded the idea that ONLY must precede the constituent it modifies as prescriptive trash”, confirms the point made above about the increasing backlash against the influence of prescriptivism. The survey did indeed elicit emotional responses, as I will discuss in Chapter 6, but it also produced references to other usage problems, even though I had not asked for them explicitly. The most striking of these was that four informants falsely identified the usage problem in the third sentence as a “split infinitive” (“it’s probably the split infinitive?”) even though the two items are in no

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way related. One of the panellists whose views are drawn upon for the analysis of usage problems in the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (Morris and Morris 1975), a subject I will go into in more detail in Chapter 6, too, associates the use of first two rather than two first for unclear reasons with the “awkward ring of a split infinitive”. The panellist in question, Heywood Hale Brown, though a well-educated author, sportswriter and commentator (Wikipedia), was clearly not enough of a linguist to be able to identify a proper split infinitive. All this confirms the iconic nature of the split infinitive commented upon in Chapter 3. Another iconic usage problem that was mentioned by two informants is the so-called greengrocer’s or misplaced apostrophe, about which one of them noted that he “used to think that [it] (‘potato’s’) was as bad as it gets”. Misplaced apostrophes, which were also mentioned as a problem in the flat adverb survey referred to above, are traditionally associated with greengrocers’ advertisements for fruit and vegetables (banana’s, orange’s, asparagu’s; Beal 2010: 58). They are an easy target for prescriptivists because of their pervasiveness in the linguistic landscape (cf. Heyd 2014), and not only among greengrocers, as Figures 5.1 and 5.2 (from my own collection) show:

Figure 5.1 Sign in a London park (Ealing) in 2011 (note the attempt at obliterating the apostrophe in decendant’s)

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Figure 5.2 A shop advertisement in Edinburgh (North Bridge) (above) and a conference dinner announcement in a restaurant in Alton (next page) (2012)

It is, moreover, striking how in the public mind features that concern spelling or punctuation are often identified as “incorrect grammar”.8 The word “grammar” clearly has a different meaning for linguists than for members of the general public; Agha (2003: 241), discussing the popular notion of “accent” as something people think they either do or do not have, calls such instances “folk-terms”.

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Figure 5.2 (Continued).

One final source of information on new usage problems are the so-called “below-the-line comments” made by readers of online articles on prescriptivism. An example of such an article is Catherine Bennett’s “Modern tribes: the grammar pedant”, published in The Guardian online in February 2015. Within three days, the piece generated 430 comments. While Bennett in her article merely discussed old chestnuts like less/fewer, historic/ historical, disinterested/uninterested, refute/reply, who/whom, the split infinitive and the greengrocer’s apostrophe, the comments covered a wide array of usage issues: the ambiguity of working day, of used for have, of/off, looser/loser, nouns used as verbs (dooring, versing), initial and, the coinage of verbs like prebook and preheat, the verb obsess, the use of went for gone (should of went), loth/loathe, Arthur and me/I, gunna, tire/tyre, the use of gift as a verb, more than he/him, between/among, amongst, born and bred (for “raised”), preposition stranding, either end of the room, initial hopefully and sadly, team used as a plural noun, invite used as a noun, hung/ hanged, misplaced apostrophes and misspelt/spelled. The list suggests that respondents to the article tend to be concerned with category change (verbs used as nouns and vice versa). This might well be a new usage

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problem, even though as a linguistic phenomenon it is as old as Shakespeare (cf. Crystal 2008: 148−150). But it is also striking that the above list includes many old chestnuts: old usage problems though they may be, they clearly continue to bother people.

Analysing usage problems None of the usage problems, new or otherwise, that were supplied by our informants include the use of snuck for sneaked or drug for dragged, which are dealt with by Camilla Horslund (2014). In the article, Horslund analyses British and American English usage of snuck and drug as variant past tense and past participle forms alongside the regular forms sneaked and dragged. Both forms are heavily stigmatised, though they are nevertheless on the increase, particularly among younger speakers. Horslund’s study draws on corpus data obtained from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which currently includes over 560 million words of text dating from 1990 down to 2017,9 as well as its historical counterpart COHA (Corpus of Historical American English), which is slightly smaller but still contains a huge number of words (400 million, 1810–2009). For evidence of British usage, Horslund consulted the BNC.10 Since the data in these corpora are categorised according to register – including, for instance, fictional, newspaper and academic usage as well as spoken data – she was able to see that snuck and drug (though much less common than snuck) largely represent informal usage, which is not surprising given their stigmatisation. The HUGE database was not publicly available at the time Horslund wrote her article, but we are now able to see that both snuck and drug are dealt with in English usage guides, British as well as American ones, though mostly so in the latter type; evidently, they are considered usage problems (cf. Smits 2017). Drug is found in four usage guides, all of them American. To start with the latter ones, Krapp (1927), Ebbitt and Ebbitt ([1939] 1978), Vermes (1981) and Garner (1998): the first two only mention that drug is used dialectally, while Ebbitt and Ebbitt note that as a dialect word it “would not ordinarily be written” ([1939] 1978: 304). Vermes calls drug incorrect, along with a set of other forms which “should be avoided” (1981: 58–59). Garner mentions that the form is common in the south of the US, and that “linguistic authorities” label it dialectal, illiterate and non-standard (1998: 225). He concludes that even though the form is in common use, he found “no shadow of an authority even in those dictionaries that record ‘dove’ as a colloquial possibility for the past tense of ‘dive’”. (Garner also has an entry for dived, considering it preferable to dove, despite the fact that this form is similarly “fairly common in AmE”.) He thus agrees with Vermes that drug should be avoided, and perhaps not only in writing. If we look at Horslund’s data from COHA, the frequency of drug is only minimal compared to that of dragged, with the only

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instances recorded dating from the decades 1880−1890, 1910−1930 and 1980−2000 (Horslund 2014: 56). It is during this middle period that the form is first criticised in usage guides, in Krapp (1927) and Ebbitt and Ebbitt ([1939] 1978), though for Ebbitt and Ebbitt we do not know if it was already discussed the first edition (see Chapter 3). Horslund found no instances at all of drug in the BNC, so there doesn’t appear to have been any reason for it to be treated by British usage guides. As for snuck, the feature is treated by more usage guides in the HUGE database than drug, thirteen of them altogether, published between 1939 and 2007; nine of them are American. As with drug, it is uncertain whether snuck was already considered a usage problem in the 1930s (but see Chapter 7). Webster’s Dictionary (1989), however, notes in its historical account of snuck that as snuk the form had already caught the attention of Krapp (1927), but it is suggested that he probably hadn’t seen the form in print. If we take frequency of occurrence as an important factor in drawing the attention to a feature of usage by writers of usage guides – Robert Ilson argues that one of the reasons for instances of variable usage to qualify as usage problems is their “fairly widespread occurrence” (1985: 167) – the figures presented by Horslund for the increase of snuck in American English suggest the 1970s as a likely time for this to have happened (2014: 55). The list of usage guides in HUGE, in addition to the 1978 edition of Ebbitt and Ebbitt, also includes Morris and Morris (1975) and The Written Word (1977). Usage in the 1970s, as Horslund’s data indicate, showed a small decline, to be followed by a steep increase down to the 2000s. It is therefore not surprising that subsequent usage guides – Vermes (1981), Webster’s Dictionary (1989), the New York Public Library Writer’s Guide (1994), Garner (1998), Brians (2003) and the American Heritage Guide (2005) – all discuss the feature. What is more, snuck also makes its appearance as a usage problem in British English usage guides. This happened during the late 1980s, in Greenbaum and Whitcut (1988) and after that in Burchfield’s edition of Fowler (1996), Peters (2004) and Butterfield (2007). Snuck is not yet discussed in Weiner’s earlier Oxford Guide to English Usage (1983), so it must have been a new feature at the time. With only ten instances, snuck is not very frequent in the BNC, whose data range from the 1980s to 1993. Greenbaum and Whitcut, indeed, label snuck as “American English only” (1988: 659). That the form may be gaining in frequency in British English, too, is suggested by the fact that seven of the ten instances in the 1.6 billion-word Hansard Corpus of speeches given in the British Parliament between 1803 and 200511 occur in the final decade of the corpus. Butterfield is therefore right in commenting that despite the form’s American origin – something almost all usage guides in the HUGE database concur with – snuck is “sneaking into British English in a big way too” (2007: 147). Though this usage guide takes a descriptive approach here, as do Greenbaum and Whitcut (1988), Webster’s Dictionary

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(1989), Burchfield (1996), Garner (1998), Peters (2004) and the American Heritage Guide (2005), the comment seems implicitly negative and would have a proscriptive effect. Brians (2003) still advises against the usage, in line with the older usage guides (Ebbitt and Ebbitt [1939] 1978; Morris and Morris 1975, The Written Word, 1977; Vermes 1981). In this light it is striking to see that the traditional usage guides had little effect in producing a decrease in frequency (apart possibly from the small drop after the 1970s noted by Horslund). What we witness here is found with other usage problems too: irrespective of the advice to avoid particular usage problems, the features are still alive and well, and are in fact growing rather than declining in frequency, as might be expected if usage guides were to have any effect on actual usage. I will return to the effect of usage pre- or proscription in Chapter 7. Having adopted a corpus linguistic approach, Horslund also refers to attitudes to snuck and drug, drawing on Murray (1998) and Creswell (1994) for this. In our work within the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, and in contrast with the approach normally taken in studies that deal with usage problems (e.g. Mair 2006; Kaunisto 2017), we take a three-pronged approach that involves not only attitude studies, for the purpose of which surveys were conducted and interviews held with selected informants, and analyses of relevant corpus data, but also studying the treatment of usage problems in the usage guides in the HUGE database (see Ebner 2017; Kostadinova 2018a). By taking such an approach we are able to undertake a more comprehensive study of usage problems that will help us understand why features of contested usage came to be stigmatised (cf. Algeo 1991a: 5). Adding to Horslund’s study in relation to the latter aspect has already shown the value of taking such a broader perspective. In the remainder of this chapter I will therefore deal with five selected usage problems along the lines sketched here, the three that I focussed on in my 2012 Survey – could of, likely (for very likely) and the placement of only – and the flat adverb and try and.12 Analysing these usage problems will allow me to demonstrate ongoing trends in the prescriptive tradition from its early stages at the end of the eighteenth century onwards; further studies undertaken along similar lines will, I expect, do the same. In the next section, I will analyse the first three features mentioned, while the remaining two will be dealt with in the one after that.

Could of – likely – the placement of only When setting up the survey on could of, likely and the placement of only, I only expected the latter item, as an old chestnut, to have the status of a usage problem. The placement of only is indeed found in 62 of the 77 usage guides in the HUGE collection, ranging from 1770 to 2010, while it is at the same time the only item that is dealt with by Mittins et al. (1970)

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in their survey (Item 24). At the time, it received a rating of 45% overall acceptability. Repeating the Mittins survey online13 confirmed my expectations that since the late 1960s, acceptance would have increased considerably: less than 1% of the votes indicated that the sentence He only had one chapter to finish is considered “unacceptable under any circumstances”.14 In this light it is surprising to see that the placement of only is still considered a usage problem today. Lamb (2010) calls only a “tricky word”, while Taggart (2010) and Heffer (2010) note, in almost exactly the same words, that “only should be positioned … as closely as possible to the word it qualifies” (Taggart 2010: 54). The only difference between them is Heffer’s use of “close” for “closely” here (by which he in effect adopts a flat adverb: see my discussion of this feature below), while he adds: “otherwise it will qualify a word the writer does not intend it to” (2010: 93). Lamb’s treatment of the issue is somewhat different from that of his two contemporaries. Though saying that only should “normally be placed directly before the word it qualifies”, Lamb provides a fairly detailed account of how “misplacing only” can cause ambiguity. He adds, however, that this so-called misplacement of only is “normal spoken English”. His account, therefore, is not merely prescriptive, as with Taggart and Heffer, but shows a mixture of descriptive and prescriptive elements. Other usage guides, like Baker, take a proscriptive perspective (“THERE are innumerable Instances of the wrong placing these Words. Only, by not being in its proper Place, gives a Sense not intended”; 1770: 124), while we also find descriptive accounts, as in Butterfield, which notes that “[t]he traditional view is that the adverb only should be placed next to the word or words whose meaning it restricts”, while adding that “[t]he result is, in fact, hardly ever ambiguous” (2007: 118). Combined pre- and proscriptive advice occurs as well, as in Payne: “It is safe to place only immediately before the word it modifies. Not ‘I have only been here a few days,’ but ‘been here only a few days’” (1911: 44). To see whether there is a development over the years from the proscriptive approach found in Baker (1770) to a more descriptive one, as might be expected given the increased acceptance of the feature, I have classified the 62 usage guides in the HUGE database that deal with the placement of only according to whether their approach is proscriptive, prescriptive, or descriptive, or shows a mixture of these. The results are presented in Table 5.2, where I have also indicated whether the usage guides were published in the UK or the US, to see if, as in the case of sneaked/snuck and dragged/drug, different treatments of these two varieties of English could be identified. The overview in Table 5.2 shows that the placement of only has been discussed from the very early days of the usage guide tradition onwards, both in England and America. Only Hurd (1847) is absent from the list of earliest American publications. Given the overall acceptance of the feature today, it is surprising to see that the advice to place only close to the

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Table 5.2 Usage guides classified according to their approach (prescriptive, proscriptive, descriptive or a combination) to the placement of only Proscriptive (6) 4 Am, 2 Br Prescriptive (26) 17 Am, 8 Br, Trask 2001

Descriptive (12) 5 Am, 7 Br

Pre/proscriptive (3) 1 Am, 2 Br Pre/descriptive (14) 2 Am, 12 Br

Baker 1770/Br, 500 Mistakes 1856/Am, Gould 1867/Am, Ayres [1881] 1911/Am, Fitzgerald 1901/Am, Vallins [1953] 1955/Br Live and Learn 1856/Am, Vizetelly [1906] 1920/Am, Turck Baker [1910] 1938/Am, Krapp 1927/Am, Ebbitt and Ebbitt [1939] 1978/Am, Gowers 1948/Br, Evans and Evans 1957/Am, Follett 1966/Am, Written Word 1977/Am, Bryson 1984/Am, Greenbaum and Whitcut 1988/Br, Carter and Skates [1988] 1990/Am, de Vries 1991/Am, Marriott and Farrell 1992/Br, Mager and Mager 1993/Am, Blamires 1994/Br, Ayto 1995/Br, O’Conner 1996/Am, Garner 1998/Am, Burt [2000] 2002/Am, Trask 2001, Brians 2003/Am, Sayce 2006/Br, Fogarty 2008/Am, Taggart 2010/Br, Heffer 2010/Br Moon 1868/Br, Hall 1917/Am, Vallins 1951/Br, Morris and Morris 1975/Am, Crystal [1984] 2000/Br, Randall 1988/Am, Webster’s Dictionary 1989/Am, Wilson 1993/Am, Howard 1993/ Br, Amis 1997/Br, Peters 2004/Br, Oxford A−Z 2007/Br Baker 1779/Br, Payne 1911/Am, Burchfield 1981/Br

Alford 1864/Br, Fowler 1926/Br, Treble and Vallins 1936/Br, Nicholson 1957/Am, Wood 1962/Br, Fowler 1965/Br, Bailie and Kitchin 1988/Br, Swan 1980/Br, Weiner [1983] 1994/Br, Oxford English 1986/Br, Burchfield 1996/Br, Allen 1999/Br, AmHer Guide 2005/Am, Lamb 2010/Br Total: 62 (29 Am, 32 Br, Trask 2001)

constituent it modifies still occurs in all three of the most recent (British) publications, and in Fogarty (2008) as well. The feature is clearly part of the “received wisdom” that makes up the English prescriptive canon (see above). If somewhat more British than American usage guides deal with the problem, it is interesting to see that the American usage guides have been predominantly prescriptive over the years, while British publications tend to combine a prescriptive with a descriptive approach in discussing the feature. Hall (1917), an American work, takes an early descriptive approach, which is evident from his list of “104 authors misplacing only in over 400 passages”, some of whom, though classified as “offenders”, he calls “pretty high authorities” (1917: 189–190). Though among these we find American writers like Franklin, Jefferson and Washington, most of his sources are British. His aim in any case, whether based on British or American evidence, is to show that there is no real reason for condemning the allegedly incorrect construction. If we look at the usage guides’ treatment of the feature, we see that the misplacement of only is no longer proscribed after the 1950s – with one

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exception only, i.e. Burchfield (1981) (pre/proscriptive). In his later discussion of the feature, Burchfield shows greater lenience, so his case is an example of how writers, even within a short space of time, may change their opinions with respect to the acceptability of a usage problem. Possibly, he adapted his view of the issue on the basis of its increased acceptance, though his advice in effect is still prescriptive. A last point to be noted here is that during the 1990s and 2000s few usage guides in the HUGE database are wholly descriptive in their treatment of only. This goes against the expectation that usage guides became more descriptive over the years. Why would usage guides continue to prescribe placing only close to the constituent it modifies when most of the informants who filled in the online usage poll no longer find the usage unacceptable? To discover what users actually think it is possible to draw on the results from the attitudes survey I carried out in 2012. The only sentence produced responses from 171 informants. These comprised native and non-native speakers, men and women aged between 16 and 91 from a wide range of professions. Since, as discussed in Chapter 3, usage guides are primarily written for native speakers of English, I will focus on that part of the survey population only (129), two-thirds of whom are women, while 70% of them are British (91/ 129 informants; 28 Americans; ten filled in “other”). Not all informants filled in their ages; of those who did, 47 were in their sixties, 23 in their fifties and 28 in their seventies. Only ten informants are below 30. Thirty-five informants considered the sentence He only had one chapter to finish acceptable, some of them calling it merely “Fine!”, while 42 specified the context they considered the sentence to be acceptable in or not, as in: “This sounds perfectly OK to me, and I would use it. 'He had only one chapter …' sounds a bit more formal, so I might write it that way round – but I'd certainly say it the first way.” Fifty-five informants explained that they were familiar with the rule prescribing the correct placement of only: We learn at school that we should place the "only" before the relevant phrase or clause ("he had only one chapter … ", but I find that many people, including myself, feel the compulsion to insert the "only" earlier, typically before the verb, and so I think that I and many colleagues would note the solecism, but not worry unduly.15 The sentence was rejected by 31 informants; fourteen of them were in their seventies, nine in their sixties and five in their fifties; the three remaining ones were 91, 42 and 17 years old. Since the fourteen informants who rejected the sentence make up 50% of the seventies group, compared to only 19 and 23% for the sixties and fifties groups, respectively, it appears that age plays a role in the rejection of the sentence. The youngest informant (female, British), however, also belongs to this category, though she

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claimed not to misplace only herself. The argument about the grammatical correctness of the sentence she used in her response – “I wouldn't use it myself, but grammatically it is correct I think. There could be mad[e] use of it” – suggests uncertainty about the issue. The 91-year-old informant, the eldest in the population, condemned the sentence by stating: “Only in this case refers to 'he' Should be: 'He had only one chapter to finish', 'only' referring to chapter. Too many people would use it! I think and hope I would not.” The high condemnation rate among the eldest informants (50%) does not differ greatly from the overall acceptability figure resulting from the Mittins survey (45%). Younger generations of speakers in my own survey show considerably greater tolerance of the usage, which thus reflects the process by which usage gained acceptability over the years. About a quarter of the British respondents rejected the sentence (24/91), compared to about 18% of Americans (5/28), though the figures for this last category are small. For all that, the placement of only may be considered more of a usage problem by – older – British than American speakers, which agrees with the prescriptive comments found in Taggart (2010), Heffer (2010) and Lamb (2010), all three after all being British publications. Two of these authors, as discussed in the previous chapter, belong to the age category Middle, and one, Lamb, to Old, which may confirm their conservative attitude to the feature. Possibly, as in the case of the respondents, it was their age which played a role in taking a conservative attitude towards the feature, though it is striking to see that the eldest among them, Lamb, treats the feature also from a descriptive perspective. In any case, “only snooping” is no longer “the popular sport” it used to be in Gowers’s time (Crystal [1984] 2000: 19–22). To compare the informants’ attitudes and the treatment of the placement of only in the usage guides with actual usage, I conducted a corpus search of the construction. Since only is a high-frequency adverb, I limited the search to only had and had only (cf. the survey sentence he only had one chapter to finish), excluding all instances which did not match the construction looked for, such as he had only recently been transferred and the family found that not only had their son’s appendix been retained, but … The corpora I used were the BNC and the Hansard Corpus for British English, and COCA and the TIME Magazine Corpus for American English. All corpora are accessible through the Brigham Young University corpus interface. While the Hansard corpus includes 1.6 billion words, ranging in time between 1803 and 2005, the TIME corpus comprises 100 million words, and spans the period 1923–2006. To limit the amount of material retrieved, I decided to include data only from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s for the Hansard and TIME corpora, and from COCA only from the years 2013–2015. The BNC data retrieved were included altogether. The data will be interpreted according to these differences.

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Table 5.3 Had only/only had in four selected corpora (BNC, Hansard, COCA, TIME) Corpus British English BNC 100 million 1980s–1993 Hansard 1,600 million 1803–2005 American English COCA 520 million 1990–2015 TIME 100 million 1923–2006

Data selected

had only

only had

total

all data

672 (46%)

780 (54%)

1,452

1980s–2000s

1980s – 518 (89%) 1990s – 476 (89%) 2000s – 215 (90%)

1980s – 65 (11%) 1990s – 57 (11%) 2000s – 23 (10%)

1980s – 583 1990s – 533 2000s – 238

2013–2015

2013–109 (48%) 2014–107 (49%) 2015–110 (49%) 1980s – 97 (73%) 1990s – 77 (77%) 2000s – 35 (56%)

2013–116 (52%) 2014–111 (51%) 2015–114 (51%) 1980s – 36 (27%) 1990s – 23 (23%) 2000s – 28 (44%)

2013–225 2014–218 2015–224 1980s – 133 1990s – 100 2000s – 63

1980s–2000s

In view of the increased acceptability of the placement of only outside the constituent it modifies, it is striking to see that the traditionally prescribed variant, had only, is by far the preferred form in the Hansard corpus during the final three decades which I consulted the corpus for. We find the same pattern in the TIME corpus, though the figures are less high as well as less uniform over the years. It seems that in the final decade analysed, though the number of instances are lower because the decade is still in progress, usage tends to become more divided, with a figure approaching a 50–50 balance between the two forms. TIME, as a published journal, contains edited material, and it seems that the prescription of had only has become less strict over the past few years, which would agree with the greater tolerance of the form found in the usage survey, something which is not reflected by the usage guides. The question presents itself whether the style guide employed by TIME editors – assuming that it contains the kind of detailed linguistic advice that we find in usage guides – became more tolerant from the beginning of the twenty-first century. The consistently high figure for the prescribed form in the Hansard corpus may be due to the formality of the situation in which the speeches are produced: formal speeches as delivered in Parliament. Searching the corpus also produced an instance showing the speaker’s linguistic awareness of another well-established usage problem:

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4. power to provide overseas technical assistance where before we had only "inferred or implied" powers, uncertainty, and a reliance on a liberal interpretation of (1993) Since the use of imply or infer which the speaker in (4) is playing upon is another old usage chestnut, he or she may well have been aware of the only problem as well. While the Hansard and TIME corpora are single-genre corpora, the BNC and COCA include data from multiple genres. Studying the variation between had only and only had allows us to see whether there are any genre-specific preferences. The breakdown of the figures in Table 5.3 may accordingly be found in Table 5.4. The figures in this table show that in British English the criticised variant, only had, is more typical of spoken usage and least so, though not entirely avoided either, in academic writing (the category Miscellaneous was left out of consideration because of its varied nature). Though the figures from COCA are smaller but also more recent than those from the BNC, we see that in American English (today), too, only had is the preferred spoken variant, though much less so than in British English (at the time). The two main differences between these two sets of figures is that in American academic writing only had is more frequent, while in the categories News and Magazine, only had is used proportionally less frequently in American than in British English.

Table 5.4 Variation between had only and only had in BNC and COCA according to genre BNC – 100 million words, 1980s–1993 (all data) Genres

had only (672)

only had (780)

total (1,452)

Spoken Fiction Magazine News Non-Academic Academic Miscellaneous

9 (4%) 191 (48%) 33 (42%) 76 (48%) 137 (65%) 89 (68%) 137 (52%)

205 (96%) 203 (52%) 46 (58%) 83 (52%) 74 (35%) 41 (32%) 128 (48%)

214 394 79 159 211 130 265

COCA – 520 million words (1990–2015) (data for 2013, 2014, 2015 only) Genres

had only (326)

only had (351)

total (677)

Spoken Fiction Magazine News Academic

24 (34%) 114 (40%) 78 (62%) 74 (71%) 36 (51%)

71 (76%) 169 (60%) 47 (38%) 30 (29%) 34 (49%)

95 283 125 104 70

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Possibly, American news and magazine writing is more subject to editing than British English writing in these categories. Perhaps this is why British usage guides like Heffer (2010) and Taggart (2010) (both prescriptive) but also Lamb (2010) (pre/descriptive), as Table 5.2 shows, still predominantly suggest using had only rather than only had: their views may thus respond to considerable currency of constructions like had only in printed prose. Likely, as in Their errors will likely be in their use of style words, is another high-frequency adverb. As already discussed, quite a few informants failed to identify the problem in the sentence. One of them (British), for instance, noted that she considered the sentence ungrammatical because she had “never heard the combination, style words”, while another (American) wrote that “[t]he phrase 'style words' is annoying, though I can't tell you why”, and continued by irrelevantly commenting on the split infinitive. Altogether 135 responses were submitted for this sentence – 105 of them by English native speakers (British, American or “other”) – which is lowest of the items in the survey. Variation between likely and very likely clearly did not present itself as a usage problem to the survey respondents, which is confirmed by the online usage poll on the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog: the votes, 361 altogether, showed a fairly even spread across the different registers, though just over 30% of the informants considered the sentence unacceptable.16 For all that, searching the HUGE database for “likely” as a usage problem produced twenty hits, ranging from 1926 (Fowler) to 1999 (Allen). Whether subsequent usage guides actually drew on Fowler (1926) or not is hard to say, but quite a few them stated in more or less similar words that when used as an adverb likely “must be preceded by more, most, or very”, some of them adding quite, and that usage “without the qualifying adverb is standard only in American English” (Weiner and Delahunty 1994: 147). Half the usage guides concerned are British and the other half American publications, so it is striking to see that even American usage guides repeat Fowler’s stricture on the use of unmodified likely: Krapp (1927); Nicholson (1957), though referring only to British usage; Evans and Evans (1957), Morris and Morris (1975), The Written Word (1977), Bryson (1984) and O’Conner (1996). Three of them stand out for a number of reasons: Wilson (1993) for noting that both variants are “equally Standard”, in spite of “the insistence of some commentators that [likely] should never appear without [a modifier]” (1993: 272); Randall (1988), who makes the same point, for adding that usage advice is divided because the Washington Post style guide allows for unmodified likely while the Los Angeles Times “insists that likely … be accompanied by very” (1988: 209); and Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989) because of its elaborate historical account of the feature. Webster’s thus notes that unmodified likely was first objected to by Ambrose Bierce in Write it Right ([1909] 1937) – not included in the HUGE database – and

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that the stricture was subsequently adopted by others during the 1920s. The stricture is therefore a typically twentieth-century one, though we no longer find it after the 1990s; moreover, as said, some of the survey informants didn’t even recognise it as a usage problem. It is therefore of interest to see that in February 1996, John Honey, the author of two highly controversial British publications, The Language Trap (1983) and Language is Power: The Story of Standard English and its Enemies (1997), wrote a letter to Frances Austin, at that time the author of an interactive section in the journal English Studies which dealt with usage issues and invited readers to submit comments on them. Honey responded to Austin’s call published in the first issue of that year (1996, 77/1: 97–103) about the use of unmodified likely as follows: On likely, I meet the adverbial use every week, now that I listen regularly to CNN’s and ABC’s (TV) news bulletins from the USA, which are received here [i.e. in Japan] several times a day. I began by recording instances of adverbial likely, but gave up as they were so frequent and I assumed that this is completely standard in AmE. Just before I sat down to write to you, I noted this: ‘Even if it had no nutritional value it would likely be just as popular’ – item on eating of chili in Mexico. CNN 15.2.96 Uses in the UK might be either the influence of dialect, or yet another example of the pervasive influence of AmE.17 From Austin’s discussion of the question a year later (English Studies 1997, 78/1: 68), it appears that Honey had been the only respondent, which thus confirms that unmodified likely was not widely considered a usage problem in the later 1990s. Remarkably, neither Austin nor Honey thought of consulting usage guides on the question (as explained in Chapter 1, usage guides are not a text type for linguists), for Honey’s view that the usage represents an Americanism is far from new, as it is already found in British usage guides published from Gowers’s edition of Fowler (1965) onwards: Weiner (1983), Greenbaum and Whitcut (1988), Burchfield (1996) and Allen’s Pocket Fowler (1999). Even the American Bryson noted that the usage was “more common in America than elsewhere” (1984: 90–91). The comment made in the British work Bailie and Kitchin (1988) confirms Honey’s observation in somewhat stronger terms: it “sounds quaint to our ears and is not generally accepted” (1988: 179). That the usage is seen as typical of American English is confirmed by the survey responses: seventeen of the native-speaker informants mentioned this, and one example is the following: I find this sentence both ugly and hard to understand. First, 'likely be' sounds American. I would never use this construction myself. [I might

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say something like, 'are likely to be'.] From an American mouth it would be acceptable, as being normal speech for them. But if spoken or written by a British person it would not seem normal and, for that reason, would not be very acceptable. Second, I don't really know what 'style words' are … The writer is a 54-year-old Brit, and his strong condemnation of the sentence, “ugly and hard to understand”, stands out. In Chapter 6, I will show that the use of such negative metalanguage is not unusual, neither in surveys like this one nor in usage guides. Usage is not only considered to be typical of American English by British informants, as the following comment from a 62-year-old American female English teacher illustrates: This sounded a little awkward to me, but I checked the OED and in one meaning "likely" can be equivalent to "probably," esp. in N. America, which is where I am. Still, it doesn't sound quite comfortable to me; it’s a little dandified. "Likely" sounds better with other OED alternatives: "it is likely that" or "I am likely to." I don't remember if I've heard or read it, or where; it's not that noticeable. Calling the usage “dandified” suggests that she considers it typical of the language of affected young men. If unmodified likely is a feature of American English, is this reflected by actual usage today? The use of very likely proved equally common in British and American English, as the figures from the BNC and COCA demonstrated: my search yielded 315 instances from the BNC and 1,679, or 323 per hundred million words, from COCA. To find data for unmodified likely is rather more complicated due to the word’s high frequency (101,579 hits in COCA, for instance), so, proceeding from the survey sentence – as with the placement of only discussed above – I searched for variation between will likely be and will very/most/quite likely be in the same four corpora (cf. Table 5.3). Most and quite were included along with very as these modifiers were mentioned by the usage guides in addition to very; more was listed as well, but I excluded it to avoid retrieving sentences like The cause of ending Saddam Hussein’s aggression will more likely be damaged than enhanced by an Israeli military response (Hansard). The results are presented in Table 5.5. As expected, the American data show a considerable preference for unmodified likely. But so does the BNC – why this should be so will need further analysis, based on larger numbers of instances. The Hansard results, however, do confirm the difference reported on by the usage guides and the informants as to usage in the different varieties of English studied here. The attitudes to the differences in usage between British and American English are therefore to a considerable extent confirmed by the corpus

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Table 5.5 Likely/very likely in British and American English in four selected corpora (BNC, Hansard, COCA, TIME) (will likely – very/most/quite likely be) Corpus British English BNC 100 million 1980s–1993 Hansard 1,600 million 1803–2005 American English COCA 520 million 1990–2015 TIME 100 million 1923–2006

Data selected

likely

very/most/quite likely

Total

all data

19 (68%)

3, 8, 1 – 12 (32%)

31

1980s–2000s

14 (6%)

132, 72, 4 – 208 (94%)

222

2013–2015

1005 (86%)

25, 144, 1 – 170 (14%)

1,175

1980s–2000s

53 (74%)

1, 18, 0 – 19 (26%)

72

data (though not for the earlier data retrieved from the BNC), and if informants continue to identify differences in usage along the lines of different linguistic varieties, as they did in the survey discussed here, usage may very likely stay divided like this, even if the issue no longer represents a real usage problem. If we look at the distribution of the instances from BNC and COCA across different genres, as presented in Table 5.6, we see that unmodified likely is primarily found in non-academic contexts. The figures for very/ most/quite likely in the BNC are so low that further analysis is pointless. The figures for COCA are fairly similar across the difference genres, except for the Fiction sub-corpus, though the number of instances recorded there is very small, something that is of interest in its own right when compared to the other genres. The third survey sentence, I could of gone to that party, proved the most contested of the three: 350 informants commented on the usage, half the number of comments received for the entire survey (669). From these, 266 identified themselves as native speakers of English, 163 of British English and 79 of American English, and the remaining 24 as “other”. Could of, according to Cheshire et al. (1993: 66), “derives from the phonetic reduction in informal spoken English of unstressed have to/əv/, which is phonetically identical to unstressed of”, and it only becomes problematical when converted into writing. One of the informants, a 51-year-old linguist, explains how this works:

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Table 5.6 Variation between likely and very/most/quite likely in BNC and COCA according to genre (will likely – very/most/quite likely be) BNC – 100 million words, 1980s–1993 (all data) Genres

likely (19)

very/most/quite likely (12)

total (31)

Spoken Fiction Magazine News Non-Academic Academic Miscellaneous/Other

0 0 0 2 15 (75%) 0 2

0, 0, 0 – 0 0, 0, 0 – 0 0, 0, 0 – 0 0, 1, 0 – 1 2, 2, 1 – 5 (25%) 0, 4, 0 – 4 1, 1, 0 – 2

0 0 0 3 20 4 4

COCA – 520 million words (1990–2015) (the data for 2013, 2014, 2015 combined) Genres

likely (1005)

very/most/quite likely (170)

total (1175)

Spoken Fiction Magazine News Academic

130 (86%) 15 (68%) 314 (88%) 302 (89%) 244 (80%)

5, 16, 0 – 21 (14%) 0, 7, 0 – 7 (32%) 5, 37, 0 – 42 (12%) 4, 34, 1 – 39 (11%) 11, 50, 0 – 61 (20%)

151 22 356 341 305

In written form [of] is completely incorrect, but also rather understandable, since the abbreviated form of have "ve" is how it is often said "I could've gone to that party." There's virtually no phonetic difference between the contraction and the preposition, and since "of" is perhaps more cognatively available, it gets substituted for the contraction. Another respondent, also a linguist, distinguishes between different contexts in which the form might be acceptable or not: I would accept this in both formal and informal spoken English. In written English I would consider this completely wrong in both formal and informal English. I would expect to see this however in lesser educated (dialect) speakers who have folk etymologically reinterpreted the /əv/ of the verb HAVE with the preposition OF. I would not consider this form to be sloppy or lazy but rather to reflect the ignorance of a prescriptive grammatical/spelling rule. What is of interest here is this second informant’s reference to a “prescriptive grammar/spelling rule”, and a search in the HUGE database produced twenty hits for “could of” between 1975 (Morris and Morris)

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and 2007 (Butterfield). As a usage problem, could of is thus a very recent phenomenon, but not one that appears to have bothered the three usage guide writers of 2010. Eleven of the twenty usage guides identified are American and eight British; the total is made up by Trask (2001), which was not assigned to either variety. The use of could of, as well as should of and similar forms, therefore seems more or less equally problematical in both varieties. Several writers note that the form is common in rapid or running speech (e.g. Weiner 1983, and still in 1994; Carter and Skates [1988] 1990; Ayto 1995; Garner 1998; Burt [2000] 2002; Brians 2003; the American Heritage Guide, 2005), and recommend using the full form could have in writing. Others, like Morris and Morris (1975), Vermes (1981) and Batko (2004), think it should not be used at all, neither in speech nor in writing, thus betraying ignorance of some of the more essential linguistic differences between these two media. If we look at how these authors were classified in terms of their formal credentials as writers of usage guides, it is perhaps no surprise to see that Vermes received a rating of only one, and Batko only two credentials; William and Mary Morris received four and two credentials, respectively, in Table 4.4. Quite a few writers label could of and similar forms as “illiterate”: the New York Public Library Writer’s Guide (1994), for instance, as well as Burchfield (1996); Garner (1998), who uses the term “semiliterate”; and Allen’s Pocket Fowler (1999), which echoes Burchfield (1996). Burchfield notes that the form is typically found in children’s writing and in that of “poorly educated adults” (1996: 186). Webster’s Dictionary is the only usage guide that notes that could of is “[s]ometimes … used intentionally”, i.e. in fiction (1989: 301), and Wilson (1993) similarly writes that, though “aberrant”, “[t]he of spellings also appear in eye dialect”, the representation in writing of “the way our speech sometimes sounds” (1993: 394). Sayce (2006), having noted that it is “now common (but incorrect) in spoken English”, adds that usage is “creeping into written English”. Don’t use it, is her advice (2006: 76). According to Butterfield, “[t]he error was recorded as early as 1837” (2007: 74), though he doesn’t specify by whom. In my own research on Late Modern English, I have come across an example of should of in Betsy Sheridan’s diary in 1785: “I should not of known her” (ed. Lefanu 1986: 69). Here, we have to do with an example of rapid writing, not speech, not untypical of unedited texts like private letters, or, as here, diaries. Contrary to what Cheshire et al. (1993: 66) suggest, the form is therefore clearly not “of relatively recent origin”. Should of, Cheshire et al. note, is, moreover, extremely common in Britain. But asking readers’ opinion about their attitudes to the usage is of interest, and doing so showed that most people still think it is “unacceptable under any circumstances” (47 out of 78 votes), but that it is also sometimes considered acceptable in netspeak, the language used while chatting or texting messages (9 votes). A final comment that may be mentioned here is Peters (2004) saying that “[t]he problem is easily identified by computer grammar

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checkers, or a simple computer search” (2004: 243). In other words, it is not really a problem. To analyse the British and American native speakers’ comments, I made use of the concordancing program WordSmith Tools in order to be able to compile wordlists of texts, alphabetical as well as frequency lists, and to analyse the use of words in the context in which they occur. WordSmith also enables keyword analyses, of words in a text whose relative frequency is computed in relation to another, usually much larger, reference text or collection of texts. To give an example, comparing the comments from the British informants to the BNC,18 I found that I occurred highest on the keyword list, despite the fact that it is not the most frequent word in the English language.19 This may be explained by the personal nature of the comments (e.g. “I would never use 'of' in this way”). In addition, the keyword analysis produced the words “unacceptable”, “written”, “spoken” and “uneducated” (and several others). These were all relatively more frequent compared to usage in the BNC, which is due to the topic concerned: could of is considered unacceptable in written English, less so in spoken English, and usage is often attributed to uneducated people. Studying the alphabetical wordlist for the British informants produced words that illustrate strong disapproval, like abomination, annoying (and variants of the verb), angry, atrocious, careless, dreadful, execrable, hideous, horrible, irritating, lazy, nonsense, objectionable, sloppy, substandard, ugly, unacceptable/not acceptable – attributable to the phrasing of the instructions (“We are interested in … Is it acceptable in English today?”) – and wrong. The form jars on their ears, informants shudder or grit their teeth when they hear it, and several of them think could of is an increasingly common usage, even attributing it – as in the case of all undesirable changes to British English (see Chapter 3) – to American influence: “To me it sounds like sloppy informal American English when you see it written down”, “I think it is more readily accepted in American usage”, “A hideous Americanism. Often found in demotic speech in American novels”. Usage is attributed to lack of education, as this British 24-year-old linguist writes: “If I see someone using it, I instantly assume that they don't have a high level of education”. The phrase poorly educated or poor education occurs six times, and searching for uneducated produced eighteen hits, while illiterate was found three times (“This sentence looks illiterate to me”). Some informants attribute the usage to “younger people who were not taught grammar at school”, and one 35-yearold teacher places this problem into a wider educational context by saying: I'd argue that scrapping the systematic teaching of grammar in UK state schools in the 1970s was the beginning of the end, and there's no way we can ever recover from that … my generation onward have essentially learned English by ear, and in my view the sample sentence in question is a prime example of that.

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The informant is an example of the group of people that were described as being “grammarless” in Chapter 3, and this comment shows how severely the educational changes of the time have affected the younger generations of English speakers in the UK. Another British informant, a 76-year-old former teacher, consequently expresses her worry about the grammatical skills of such people when they become teachers, and the effect an insufficient command of English grammar will have on the language: Many British primary – even secondary – school teachers are themselves on very shaky ground here, as since the 1960s the correction of children's grammar in state schools was increasingly seen as 'demeaning' of the child's 'home' speech. If a young person is not helped to understand how the language works either at home or at school, it is unlikely that s/he will be able to analyses the problem her- or himself, and it will be perpetuated. Social class is another issue raised by the British informants, as illustrated by the following quotation from a 62-year-old male business consultant: When I hear this language mis-use it not only hurts my ears but immediately tells me something about that persons educational/social background. This reaction is not snobbish in anyway. In England people are instantly judged and classified as to their 'class' and 'social' background based on the way they speak. Another commenter, also male and of about the same age (65), wrote that he “would note their lack of education and file them as of a lower class than me”, and a teacher aged 57 wrote that she would “object more if a middle class person used the form simply out of laziness and indifference to correctness”. One retired informant explained in detail why she objects to the use of could of by drawing on her own lower-class origins: I object to English being spoken and written with such bad grammatical mistakes. I had a working class background and parents who left school aged 14, but was taught correct grammar as a child and feel very sad that so much bad grammar is heard and read today and seems acceptable, which indicates poor teaching standards. I have often heard British resident people saying sentences like this, often young people though also older people if they did not have good education in the past, and it always grates on me as I think it sloppy to speak one's own native language poorly. Once people have left education they are unlikely to correct these failings so I feel more emphasis should be given in schools to respect for our own language and teaching standards need to rise.

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Yet another informant associates the form with the language of chavs (a group of young people defined by the OED as typically showing “brash and loutish behaviour and […] wearing … designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear)” and having “a low social status” (s.v. chav, n.). The informant in question, a 55-year-old male British accountant and part-time translator, doesn’t mince his words (“A truly horrible example of chav-speak at its worst”), which is something I will return to in the next chapter. If we look at the attitudes expressed by the American informants, we find the following critical metalinguistic words in the alphabetical wordlist generated by WordSmith Tools: awkward, a bastardization, clunky, colloquial, crude, harsh(ly), incorrect, irks, jarring, lazy, peeved, squirm, unacceptable/not acceptable, unclear, and wrong. This list suggests that the American informants use less harshly condemnatory words than the British ones. Could this reflect a national difference between the two groups? Despite their reputation for politeness, it looks as though British informants tend to let go of this when it comes to language use that they consider deplorable. As I will discuss in Chapter 7, England (the UK?), according to Milroy and Milroy (2012) is characterised by a complaint tradition, which makes people write letters to the editor and seek other means of voicing their linguistic complaints; very likely, asking them to express their opinions in an attitudes survey like the one I carried out in 2012 serves the same purpose. Another difference between the two national varieties I’m studying here is that, whereas social class plays an important role in the condemnation of could of by the British informants, the only “American” informant who mentions class identifies herself as a Canadian: Is this an acceptable sentence? Well it is and it isn't. It isn't because it's obviously grammatically incorrect and very colloquial. I associate this type of sentence with teen-speak, although perhaps because it also refers to a party. Having said that, that's what makes it acceptable in certain circumstances. For instance, it would be right at home in a screenplay or a work of fiction in which it was important to reflect how a group belonging to a certain demographic or perhaps socio-economic background talk. I could see this sentence being spoken by lower to middle-class high school kids. BTW, I'm Canadian in case you would like to be more specific in terms of varieties of English. What we do find, in accordance with Lesley Milroy’s discussion of the differences between the US and the UK in this respect (Milroy 2001), is a reference to ethnic origin of the people who use could of (“I think people from various social, ethnic, and economic backgrounds would use this sentence in spoken English”), as well as two informants identifying the usage with regional differences (“a regional error, and not heard as much in more

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educated regions”), though dialect is also referred to several times in the British comments (“Have come across this use a lot in London”). Education – or lack of education – as a factor influencing the use of could of is often mentioned by the American informants as well: “A poorly educated student might write that sentence,” one informant wrote, and another responded: “Anyone who uttered such a sentence is either not a native speaker or has been poorly educated”. No one mentioned the problem raised by some of the British informants about grammar no longer being taught as a formal school subject since the 1970s and 1980s, so this, too, may be an important difference between the two language varieties. One woman in her early sixties does explain her interest in grammatical correctness by a reference to her upbringing: “Raised by a grammarian father, I am very peeved by grammar errors like these”. Four informants associated the use of could of with teenagers (“I can see many teens and other young people using it”), as did several British informants. “I definitely object to this usage,” added a 26-year-old female librarian attributing the usage to teenagers. Both groups of informants note that could of is “[t]ypically something I see on internet” (American) or that they “tend to read it on internet forums” (British), but one 44-year-old American female translator notes that even there she finds it unacceptable: “To me in general, unacceptable. Not even in net speak”. While some British informants consider could of an Americanism, one 18-year-old American student wrote that she “wonder[ed] if it is also used in British English?” Both groups think usage is increasing. I’ve already quoted a British informant saying this, but so do some of the Americans, as in the following quotation: The use of "of", which is the pronounced sound rather than the actual grammatical word construction, irks me. I hear it used often, and in fact the pronunciation is drifting further and further, so that the contraction "ve" portion of would've and could've and so on is done as a separate syllable rather than a secondary syllable of the contraction. To find out if could of is used as much in British English as in American English, and whether usage in general is indeed on the increase, I will draw on the same corpora I used for the other two usage problems from my 2012 Survey. Since could of is a typically spoken language feature that is, moreover, associated with the language use of young people, I would not expect to find it in either the Hansard corpus of parliamentary speeches or in the edited prose included in the TIME corpus. Because of in the string could of more often than not represents a real preposition, as in of which the house could of course form its own judgment (Hansard), I decided to search for could of gone/done/been to be able to retrieve relevant data for the analysis.

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Table 5.7 Could of/could have in four selected corpora (BNC, Hansard, COCA, TIME) (could of gone/done/been) Corpus British English BNC 100 million 1980s–1993 Hansard 1,600 million 1803–2005 American English COCA 520 million 1990–2015 TIME 100 million 1923–2006

Data selected

could of

could have

total

all data

118 (4%)

3,086 (96%)

3,204

1980s–2000s

0

46,350 (100%)

46,350

2013–2015

17

14,112 (ca. 100%)

14,129

1980s–2000s

1

1,740 (ca. 100%)

1,741

The results, presented in Table 5.7, show that in all four corpora, could of is very rare, so rare in most cases that usage can be considered negligible in the light of the overwhelming frequency of could have. As expected, searching the Hansard corpus produced no instances, while the single instance found in the TIME corpus, The electric man … could of been puttin’ me on the bus …, represents direct speech, as do most of the instances retrieved from the other two corpora. Those retrieved from COCA are primarily (15/17) found in fiction, which confirms the point made by Webster’s Dictionary (1989) about its usage (see above). Most of the instances from the BNC in one way or another reflect conversation (including those labelled “classroom”, “courtroom” and “meeting”), but none of them represents fictional usage. The four instances labelled “miscellaneous” in that corpus prove to be from a collection of poems by the Scottish writer Liz Lochhead, called True Confessions and New Cliches (1985); Lochhead’s poetry, according to Wikipedia, “is alive with vigorous speech idioms”, as the BNC instances confirm. Whether could of is becoming more frequent, as some of the British and American informants suggest, is impossible to prove on the basis of the above corpus data. Searching COHA produced 40 instances only, five of could of gone, sixteen of could of done and nineteen of could of been. The peak for the latter two strings lies in the 1950s and 1960s, respectively, so if anything, this would suggest a decrease rather than an increase in usage. Again, since could of is a spoken language feature, these corpora, which include written data, even

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if at times speech-based, may not be the right corpora to use here. Whether the usage is an Americanism is not born out by the data either: usage in the BNC is more frequent than that in COCA. The answer that may be given here to the question from one of the American survey respondents who wondered whether could of actually occurs in British English is an unqualified yes: in conversation, that is, though not, as far as the data suggest, as a feature of eye dialect in fiction. My own, rather unsystematic, search for the form in English literature has thus far produced no British examples:20 the instance I encountered in Elizabeth George’s For the Sake of Elena (1992) possibly may not form an exception, since the author is of American origin, which must be taken as potentially influencing her language use, no matter how good her linguistic ear may be. We do, however, find could of in the poetry of at least one British writer: Liz Lochhead.

Flat adverbs and try and Many more features may be singled out for analysis along the above lines, but for this chapter, I will take only two more usage problems, the flat adverb and try and/try to. Both are part of the Mittins survey, which for the flat adverb even included two sentences (Item 32: He did it quicker/ more quickly and Item 53: You’d better go slow/slowly), but only for he did it quicker and try and was the full scale of registers (formal speech/writing, informal speech/writing) taken into consideration, something which the authors eventually came to regret (1970: 4). The authors had assumed that flat adverbs like slow for slowly would not occur in formal contexts, whether written or spoken – wrongly as it happens, and as they came to realise themselves. Consequently, the acceptability of the flat adverb in this construction could only be assessed in the Mittins study for informal speech and writing: it amounted to 40% (1970: 20), about as high as the average acceptability of quicker for more quickly (42%). These figures are much higher than the acceptability shown by the Bridging the Unbridgeable informants for the two constructions, which was only 3% for go slow in formal writing and 8% in the same context for quicker. The total number of votes for go slow in the online poll, however, was (at the time of writing) only 131 and that for he did it quicker only about half that number (64), so in themselves these figures are not very reliable. For all that, it is surprising to see a decrease of acceptability of the flat adverb in the course of time rather than an increase, as would be expected in view of the process of colloquialisation which, according to Mair (2006), characterised the development of the English language in the course of the twentieth century. According to this process, one would expect features which used to be considered only relatively acceptable in informal registers to have become more widely acceptable in other registers as well. This is indeed

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what we found for quite a few of the Mittins et al. features whose acceptability we looked at after 40 to 50 years’ time (see also Ebner 2017). As for try and, Item 19 in the Mittins survey, many more people responded in the online survey, which received 356 votes altogether. This feature originally had a rather low general acceptability in Mittins et al., and is placed 39 among the 50 items studied (27% general acceptability). In the repeated survey, try and was considered most acceptable in informal speech (31.7%), followed by netspeak (23.6%) and informal writing (22.2%). Netspeak as a register had obviously not been available yet at the time of the Mittins survey, but the figures for this new but very important register show that usage often comes in between informal speech and writing, as also found by Ebner (2017) for several other items (cf. Crystal 2010b). In the formal registers usage was considered much less acceptable (10.7% for formal speech and 7% for formal writing), and there were even seventeen people who voted the usage to be “unacceptable under any circumstances”. Why that should be so calls for further analysis. Since the flat adverb (go slow) has been part of the usage guide tradition from the earliest days onwards (1770 and 1847 for British and American English, respectively), it can be considered an “old chestnut”. The discussion of quicker for more quickly is found in far fewer usage guides: fourteen altogether, published between 1864 and 2005. Try and is likewise dealt with in a large number of usage guides, but it entered the tradition somewhat later than the flat adverb: it was first criticised during the 1860s, in an article called “The Queen’s English” published in Every Boy’s Magazine (1864) (see Ross 2014: 124), and within only a few years’ time it became a feature in English usage guides. For all that, it counts as an old chestnut as well, given its extensive treatment, in both British and American usage guides, down to 2010. The issue concerning this feature is whether it should be try and or try to, and, as we will see, usage shows considerable differences between British and American English. The problem with the flat adverb, which is also reflected in the usage advice literature, is twofold. To begin with, adverbs in English can appear either with or without the suffix -ly, as in I felt really bad about that, in which both really and bad are adverbs. That adverbs should be marked with -ly has been part of the English grammatical system since the early days of the normative tradition, which naturally – since no other model was available (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2011) – drew on Latin grammar by adopting similar descriptive categories for English, even if such categories might not be entirely relevant. Bad, for instance, in the above sentence, functions as an adverb even if it is not marked as such. To say therefore, as Baker (1770) did, that “bad is only an Adjective. The Adverb is badly” ignores the fact that bad can function both as an adjective and as an adverb in different types of sentences, and also that badly can be used in a different sense from bad. To explain the difference, Fogarty (2008), for instance, contrasts the sentence I smell

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bad, meaning “I stink”, with I smell badly, which means that there is something wrong with my sense of smell. At the same time, real can function as an adverb, too: I wanted to get a mandolin real bad is an example sentence from Webster’s Dictionary (1989). Such usage is, however, not considered acceptable, and Batko, for instance, calls it an error, and advises against using it (“Don’t say … Say instead …”; 2004: 123). The second problem with the flat adverb is that, historically speaking, the suffix -ly (-lic in Old English) is not an adverbial marker but a marker of adjectives; examples are friendly, lovely, lowly and silly. In Old English, adverbs were marked by the suffix -e, so that -lice would mark such adjectives for their adverbial function. Modern -ly is therefore both an adjectival marker and a reduced form of Old English -lice at the same time, and this has led to discussions from the eighteenth century onwards about whether the correct adverbial forms of such words shouldn’t be friendlily or sillily (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2011: 244–246). This discussion has continued in the usage guide tradition down to this day. There is yet a third problem in connection with the flat adverb, as noted by several usage guides, which is that monosyllabic adverbs like much, thus, hard and bad are often marked with -ly to indicate their adverbial status – thus reflecting the operation of hypercorrection, according to Webster’s Dictionary (1989), and often ignoring the fact that hardly is nowadays restricted in meaning to “scarcely” or “barely” (OED, s.v. hardly, 8a). Particularly the use of thusly, which is on the increase today, has met with a lot of criticism, as I will discuss below. To find out how the flat adverb and try and/to are treated in the usage guides, whether we can detect any differences between British and American approaches in this, and how treatment in the usage guides compares both with actual usage and with current attitudes to the usage problems, I will analyse their treatment in the usage guides in the HUGE database. Starting with the flat adverb, one difference may be mentioned straight away: while the term “flat adverb”, according to the OED, was first coined in 1871 by the Oxford professor of Old English John Earle (OED, s.v. flat, adj, adv., and n.3, 12C), it is mostly found in the US, according to Pam Peters in an article on “dual adverbs” in Australian English (2015: 179). This is reflected in the usage guides as well, for searching for the term in the HUGE database produced only three hits, all of them indeed American publications: Randall (1988), Webster’s Dictionary (1989) and Wilson (1993). Twenty-four of the 50 guides in HUGE that discuss flat adverbs are British publications and 25 American; Trask (2001) discusses the feature, too (these data were retrieved by searching for slow/slowly). Flat adverbs are therefore of common concern to both British and American writers of usage guides. Treatment of the feature differs considerably: it ranges from being very short – eight words only in Live and Learn: “‘He speaks slow,’ should be, ‘He speaks slowly.’” (1856: 185) – to very elaborate, with the

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most extensive treatment being found in Peters (2004: 3,445 words) and Webster’s Dictionary (1989: 4,669 words). Apart from the different length of the entries, treatment also differs in that some usage guides present problematical flat adverbs as independent entries, while others discuss the feature in general sections. Thus, we find an entry labelled “Flat adverbs” in Webster’s Dictionary (1989) and one on “Zero adverbs” in Peters (2004). Vallins ([1953] 1955: 187) discusses the issue in a section called “Telegraphic English”, in which he comments on drive slow, the use of which he identifies as a stage in the progressive shortening of Please drive slowly to Slow. Perhaps the most interesting passage may be found in Taggart (2010: 52), who provides the label “sports commentator’s adverb” for the flat adverb. Having first defined both the function and the formal characteristics of adverbs (“often formed by adding -ly to the adjective”) and having provided two examples, she adds: In recent years, however, many sports commentators have chosen to ignore this distinction and say such things as Federer is serving beautiful or Woods drove his tee shot perfect. In fact, this usage has become so common that it may almost be considered the norm. But only if one is a sports commentator. For anyone else, it is ungrammatical and unacceptable. By rightly or wrongly associating the usage of flat adverbs with a particular social group, sports commentators in this case, she places this usage problem into a similar category as the greengrocer’s apostrophe and the footballer’s perfect (he’s hardly/he hardly touched the goalkeeper; Walker 2008). As noted by Weiner (1988: 173), such “sociolinguistic considerations” are typical of the discussion of usage problems; they are found from the earliest days of the text type onwards, as Baker’s label for the phrase of themselves and Families as “mere Shopkeepers Cant” (1770: 118) illustrates. Other entries are labelled “-lily” (Fowler 1926 and later editions); “Adverbs, vexatious” (Follett 1966: 50), which reads that “[t]he belief that adverbs should end in -ly is hard to down in the mistaken purist, and one often meets the tone of reprobation about the short forms”; and “Unidiomatic -ly” (Fowler 1926 and later editions). The Fowler section discusses the words muchly, which is described as “a recognized symbol of the mildly jocose talker”, and hardly, which is substituted in print for the idiomatic hard neither seldom nor with any burlesque intention, but seemingly in ignorance. Ignorance that hard can be an adverb seems incredible when one thinks of It froze hard, Hit him hard, Work hard, Try hard, & so forth; the ignorance must be of idiom rather than of grammar. (Fowler 1926: 679)

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Muchly is discussed in five usage guides: the Fowler editions (1926, 1965, 1996) call its use facetious and rare, while Allen writes that though “once a serious adverb, [it] is now only used humorously” (1999: 411); Webster’s Dictionary qualifies the form as “supernumerary”, adding that it is “often criticized as hypercorrect” (1989: 451). It makes the same comment on thusly, which, from Krapp (1927) onwards, is a frequent item in the usage guides in HUGE, 26 in all. All of these treat thusly very critically, with Garner even calling it a “nonword” and considering its usage a “serious lapse” (1998: 654). The form is considered unnecessary, several writers argue, since we already have thus. The American Heritage Guide thinks its use typical of the “poorly educated”, and notes that it “has … gained some currency in educated usage, but it has long been deplored by usage commentators as a ‘nonword’” (2005: 464). Quite a few usage guides present individual adverbs as separate usage problems. An example is Mager and Mager (1993), which includes the following independent entries: livelily Though rare, this is the correct adverb form before an adjective. The dance, livelily executed … NOT lively. slow Usage allows as an adverb. Drive slow. surly (adj.); surlily (adv.). thusly AVOID. These four items illustrate some of the problems concerning the flat adverb noted above, that adjectives in -ly should be marked for adverbial function (livelily, surlily), though slow for slowly has become quite acceptable, while thusly should not be used at all. This particular example also illustrates that there is no hard and fast rule that tells readers always to use -ly to indicate adverbial function, while pointing to the role of usage in the advice given, though in a somewhat contradictory way: slow is now common, and even if livelily is rare, it is still the prescribed form. I will return to this below. The number of adverbial pairs that are discussed, however, differs considerably: it ranges from one (ill/illy in Hurd 1847; slow/slowly in Live and Learn 1856; and real/really in Payne 1911) to as many as 22 in Allen (1999), 33 in Greenbaum and Whitcut (1988) and 34 in Swan (1980). The same phenomenon has been observed by Kaunisto (2017: 206–207) for the treatment of “rival” pairs of words ending in -ic/ ical (e.g. historic/historical) or -ive/ory (e.g. recriminative/recriminatory) and Straaijer (2018b), who focussed on -ic/ical as well, drawing on HUGE for his analysis. In the context of the present study, it is striking that such swelling of the contents of usage guides – since the items could have been treated under a general entry as well – seems more typical of British than American usage guides: in contrast to the ones listed here, Webster’s Dictionary (1989) includes only five items separately (bad/badly, friendly/friendlily, loud/loudly, slow/slowly, thus/thusly), Garner (1998) eight (bad/badly,

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direct/directly, low/lowly, near/nearly, quick/quickly, slow/slowly, thus/thusly, wrong/wrongly) and the American Heritage Guide (2005) five as well (bad/ badly, seldom/seldomly, slow/slowly, thus/thusly, tight/tightly). Some adverbial pairs are discussed in more usage guides than others, and the ones that are treated most frequently are slow/slowly (26), thus/ thusly (16) and bad/badly (13). Other high-frequency flat adverbs discussed in the usage guides in HUGE are clean, clear, close, direct, fast, first, flat, friendly, hard, high, just, large, loud, low, most, much, near, quick, real, right, sound, sure, tight and wrong. Most of these are monosyllabic, and by giving usage advice on these adverbs, the usage guides in question illustrate the uncertainty among speakers as to when, or indeed whether at all, to use -ly as an adverbial marker, as Fowler did in his section “Unidiomatic -ly”. Apart from friendlily many other adverbs in -lily are discussed in the usage guides: cowardlily, ghastlily, heavenlily, holily, jollily, kindlily, livelily, lonelily, lovelily, lowlily, manlily, mannerlily, masterlily, ruffianlily, scholarlily, sillily, statelily, surlily, timelily, uglily, unlikelily and wilily. Would usage guides seriously recommend these forms, which are after all technically correct even if rather awkward? And do they actually occur outside the usage guides, that is, in actual language use? To be able to answer these questions I checked all the usage guides in HUGE to assess their views on these -lily adverbs; in addition, I studied their occurrence in the four corpora drawn upon in the previous section, as well as in the OED. Strikingly, the forms primarily proved to be discussed in British rather than American usage guides. Exceptions are Krapp (1927), who discusses cowardlily, friendlily and manlily, saying that they “are no longer in use and are avoided as awkward”; Nicholson (1957), though this is largely an American clone of Fowler (1926) and thus discusses the same -lily adverbs; Mager and Mager (1993), already quoted; and Wilson (1993), whose comment “friendlily seems unlikely at best, and unlikelily is even more so” seems merely tongue-incheek: no instances of unlikelily were found in the corpora consulted. Other adverbs I found no usage evidence for are cowardlily, heavenlily, mannerlily, ruffianlily and scholarlily. In not having a life outside the usage guides, these are ghost words, though technically their use would be possible. Krapp and Weiner and Delahunty call these words “awkward” and “deservedly rare” respectively (1927: 635; [1984] 1993: 198–199). Words for which I found quotations in the OED are ghastlily, livelily, lovelily, lowlily, manlily and statelily: these words may once have had some currency but this is no longer supported by recent evidence (though the OED cites usage for statelily down to 2003). For all that, Partridge claims that lovelily is “good English” (1947: 176). Since the 1940s, opinions on the word have become more negative, and Trask calls lovelily “unacceptably clumsy and hard to pronounce” (2001: 180). Ghastlily, too, seems to have lost currency, since I only found two instances in the Hansard corpus, dating from the 1870s, while the evidence from the OED

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(though not yet updated) does not go beyond the early 1880s either. Burchfield (1996) advises to avoid it “for reasons of euphony”. For lonelily, only COCA yielded an instance (from 1992), and for masterlily, and timelily and wilily only TIME (1980s) and the Hansard corpus (1960s), respectively. Despite evidence from the OED, these forms can hardly be said to be “current English”, as Burchfield (1996: 460) claims for wilily (“listed as current English in C[oncise] O[xford] D[ictionary] (1995)”). Only the following words were found to have any currency according to the corpora consulted: friendlily (17): 16 instances in Hansard (mostly from the 1950s and 60s), 1 in COCA (2006) kindlily (9): in Hansard only (3 instances each in the 1960s and 1970s, 2 for the 1980s and 1 for the 1950s) sillily (9): 3 instances each in the BNC, Hansard (before the 1990s) and COCA (1990s, 2000s) jollily (7): 3 instances in the BNC, 3 in COCA (2000s) 1 in TIME (1960s) surlily (7): 2 instances in the BNC, 3 in Hansard (before the 1930s), and 1 each in COCA (1990s) and TIME (1950s) holily (5): 3 instances in Hansard (before the 1950s), 2 in COCA (1990s) uglily (4): 1 instance each in the BNC and TIME (1930s) and 2 in Hansard (before the 1980s) Usage, as the above list shows, is so rare that it is hard to distinguish any differences between British and American English. What is more, very few instances illustrate recent usage at all. Most usage guides advise to avoid the forms and to “us[e] a phrase such as in a holy manner or in a slovenly fashion” instead (Bailie and Kitchin 1988: 17). Ebbitt and Ebbitt ([1939] 1978) are more proscriptive when calling the use of kindlily “a blunder” ([1939] 1978: 398). Mager and Mager, on the other hand, have already been quoted for stating that surlily is the adverbial form of surly (1993: 369). Weiner and Delahunty (1994) and Burchfield (1996) do not greatly object to holily, for which they may be basing themselves on Fowler (1926), who commented that “avoidance is not always called for”. Nevertheless, avoidance of the form is what appears to be general practice, since the word barely occurs today. Usage guide writers are most divided on the word friendlily, about which Partridge (1947) says: “when we become accustomed to the sound, we shall no longer find friendlily inferior to in a friendly manner, than which, obviously, it is much more economical”. Weiner and Delahunty (1994), however, think that adverbs like this “tend to have an unpleasant jingling sound”. Peters (2004), too, thinks the word’s “awkwardness [ … ] obvious”, and claims – contrary to the above evidence – that “it makes no showing in contemporary British or American

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databases”. In Webster’s Dictionary (1989), however, we are able to read that “the Merriam-Webster files indicate that in the twentieth century, the use of friendlily is preferred to the use of friendly, at least in edited prose”. This may reflect a difference between British and American usage after all, though this is not confirmed by the corpus data presented above. The addition in the Webster entry of “at least in edited prose” is significant in its own right. Lamb (2010), finally, advises against its use, noting that it “looks peculiar and can be replaced”. What informants’ attitudes to these forms are is something I have not tested. In my corpus searches I did come across one metalinguistic comment on the use of sillily: 5. that most distinguished of American dramatists, is being seriously silly. Or is it sillily serious? Sillily – that can’t be right. Isn’t that one of … (COCA; New York Times, 2008). The comment clearly suggests awareness of the prescriptive rule according to which adverbs should be marked by -ly. For a paper we wrote on the flat adverb, Morana Lukač and I did carry out an attitudes survey for the two Mittins sentences He did it quicker (more quickly) and You’d better go slow (slowly) (Lukač and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2019). In addition, we asked informants for their opinions on thusly, which, as noted above, is treated very critically in the usage guides, in contrast to go slow. Our analysis focussed on the usage guides’ treatment of these forms, and we found that some writers call go slow idiomatic, while others suggest that it is more acceptable in speech and informal writing than in other styles. Burchfield (1996) is the only writer after Live and Learn (1856) who still proscribes go slow, though the label “American English” for go slow in the British usage guides by Swan (1980) and Greenbaum and Whitcut (1988) will have had a proscriptive effect on their (British) users, too. The item quicker/more quickly is treated in more British than American usage guides (10 versus 4), and these, too, advise distinguishing in usage between different stylistic registers. Variation between the two forms is not considered to be much of a usage problem for American English. This is confirmed by our corpus data (retrieved from BNC and COCA), which showed that quicker overall is somewhat less frequent in American than in British English, where it was much more frequently attested in spoken than in written English. Though go slow/slowly proved to be not a high-frequency item in the corpora consulted, Morana Lukač and I did find for both varieties of English that go slow is a typically spoken language feature, and also that usage is indeed more characteristic of American than of British English. The same applies to thusly, for which we encountered hardly any data for British English. The only two instances in the BNC were from a novel by Robert Rankin, called The Suburban Book of the Dead (1993). For thusly we also checked the TIME corpus,

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where usage was much less frequent than in COCA, and virtually negligible when compared to the occurrence of thus in that corpus. In view of its highly stigmatised status, as shown by the treatment of thusly in the usage guides, the editorial process which TIME articles are subjected to is possibly responsible for this (cf. the above comment from Webster’s Dictionary with respect to friendlily). As for our informants’ attitudes to the usage problems discussed here, we found that the acceptability of the two Mittins sentences has increased considerably over the years. To be sure, there were still a number of informants who considered the two sentences “unacceptable under any circumstances”, though more of them ticked this option for the sentence with quicker than for go slow. Many more of them, however, considered the use of thusly unacceptable, though with differences being attested in this respect between British and American speakers and between different age groups (see also Lukač 2018: Chapter 6). If go slow is fairly acceptable today, thusly divides speakers according to nationality, with British speakers being more critical of the form than Americans, as well as according to age: younger speakers showed themselves to be least critical of this highly stigmatised usage. In contrast to go slow, try and has not increased in acceptability over the years. For this feature, too, there are differences in usage between British and American English: according to Hommerberg and Tottie (2007), usage of try and is more typical of British English, while American English shows a preference for try to. In this light it is peculiar to see that the first usage guide in the HUGE database to condemn the feature is a British publication, Moon (1868). (The database includes 53 usage guides that deal with the item, 24 of them British and 28 American; Trask 2001 treats it, too.) A year earlier, the American usage guide writer Edward Gould (1867) had merely observed that it “is a very common substitute for try to, in contemporaneous literature and in conversation”, which suggests that both variants were considered equally acceptable in American English at the time. Proscription of try and in British English has continued, as Carmen Ebner and I found in a study of prescriptive attitudes in English that focussed on a select number of usage problems, one of which was try and (Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Ebner 2017) – in fact, down to the last three of the usage guides in the HUGE database, Taggart (2010), Heffer (2010) and Lamb (2010). “Try to remember,” Taggart advises her readers, “I shall try and be there on time is incorrect. Ask the question, ‘I shall try what?’ Answer: ‘To be there on time’. And is meaningless here” (2010: 51). American usage guides proscribe the feature as well, from Ayres ([1881] 1911) down to Fogarty (2008) – nine of them altogether, compared to six British publications. Fogarty explains that she is “bothered” by try and because all her sources write that “try and is an accepted informal idiom that means ‘try to’” (2008: 45). Because she believes that this is “obviously

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wrong”, she places try and firmly on her “list of pet peeves”. This raises the question of whether just stating that one is “bothered” by a particular usage is enough of an explanation to advise the general reader against using it. Fogarty’s explicit credentials as a usage guide writer are not very high, as shown in Table 4.4, which agrees with what must be classified as an ipse dixit pronouncement here, but this approach, subjective though it is, will very likely appeal to her readers. Far fewer usage guides in the database, spread fairly equally across the two varieties (3 British, 4 American), prescribe try to, and an example is Turck Baker, who wrote: “Instead of saying ‘I will try and come’ one properly says, ‘I will try to come’” ([1910] 1938: 189). Turck Baker doesn’t offer any explanation either, so that her advice is not really any different from Fogarty’s much later. Given the different patterns of usage in British and American English, I think it is peculiar to see that British usage guides, too, turn against a pattern of usage that seems to be well established and is considered quite acceptable, as Hommerberg and Tottie (2007) suggest. Perhaps, indeed, the tide is about to turn, for Anja Luscombe, in her analysis of 40 years of BBC Radio news, shows that try and is one of the “top four ‘pet hates’” of the BBC journalists she interviewed. That the alternative try to might be considered an Americanism may not have occurred to these journalists – in addition to try and, concede defeat/victory and go(ne) missing, Americanisms make up the fourth item in the list (Luscombe 2012: 150).

Pet peeves for all Searching the HUGE database for the expression “pet peeves” produced only one usage guide, Fogarty (2008), and two usage problems: try and and what Fogarty calls “Repetitive Redundancy” (2008: 168), illustrated with the reason is because (rather than that), a feature that is dealt with by 41 usage guides altogether between 1770 and 2010. Anja Luscombe’s BBC journalists had particular pet peeves too (see above), and so did our informants. Our surveys, as reported on earlier in this chapter, produced quite a number of them, many of which are not dealt with in the usage guides we have access to through the HUGE database. Whether these features will enter the usage guide tradition, as well they may, the future will show, since usage guides continue to be published and usage advice is increasingly published online – “usage guides 2.0”, as Morana Lukač (2018: Chapter 4) designates them. For all we know, new usage problems will continue to be added in the process. But if usage guide writers as well as the general user, but also professional writers like BBC journalists, are united in having their own special likes and dislikes of usage features, no matter how common they are or whether or not they deserve to have a place in the usage advice literature, these groups of people are also united in the way in which they express their disapproval. This is a topic that will

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be taken up in the next chapter, which will show that especially the proscriptive metalanguage we find today – with usage being described, for instance, as making a “jingling sound” or as being “awkward” – is very similar to that found in the normative grammars and other works on language from the eighteenth century onwards. In this respect, too, there is a continuous tradition within the history of English. But since we find similar critical voices among the general public, this confirms the primarily personal approach taken to usage criticism by many of the usage guide writers analysed.

Notes 1 On nucular as an American usage problem, see Chapman (2012). As for British English, nucular dates back to the 1980s (Burchfield 1981; Greenbaum and Whitcut 1988). 2 The items “apostrophes” and “question marks” were excluded. 3 Cf. the website of the American Dialect Society (www.americandialect.org/ because-is-the-2013-word-of-the-year). 4 See e.g. Mesthrie et al. (2009: 68–69), Warren (2016) and Yuasa (2010). As for like, D’Arcy (2007) argues that popular perceptions concerning its use, including its alleged newness, have all the characteristics of a linguistic myth. 5 Spontaneous elicitation does occur, if rarely, as in the correspondence arising between members of the general public and John Honey upon the widespread media coverage of his highly controversial publication The Language Trap (1983) (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2018c). Severin (2017), too, identified a good source for the analysis of spontaneously produced attitudes to prescriptivism. 6 The survey was distributed both online on the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog and through personal (British and American) contacts, one of whom sent the survey on to website of the (British) University of the Third Age (www.u3a.org.uk/). Though this may have ensured a somewhat more equal distribution among different age groups – counteracting potential overrepresentation in a web-based survey of younger informants – the results of the survey are very likely not representative of any speech community as such. Elderly people tend to be more concerned with the preservation of former standards of – linguistic – correctness (Luscombe 2012: 170; Ebner 2017). See further Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2013). 7 Rosaline Masson, in her usage guide Use and Abuse of English, considers unmodified likely a Scotticism (1896: 44). 8 Cf. I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar (Nichols 2009), which primarily presents spelling and punctuation mistakes. 9 Horslund used an earlier version of the corpus, which at that time included 425 million words. For my own analysis, I am similarly drawing on an earlier version of COCA (450 million words). 10 Though considerably smaller than COCA or COHA, and being a static rather than a dynamic corpus, BNC nevertheless offers enough material for analysis, and will be drawn upon throughout the present chapter as well. All three corpora (alongside several others used here) are available at http://corpus.byu.edu/. 11 The corpus is available at www.hansard-corpus.org/. 12 In discussing these features I will draw on Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2013) as well as my own contributions to Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Kostadinova

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13

14

15

16 17 18 19 20

Usage problems: pet linguistic peeves (2015), Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Ebner (2017) and Lukač and TiekenBoon van Ostade (2019). The Mittins survey was posted on the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog at the start of the project in 2011, five features at a time. For the sake of comparison, we kept the same stylistic categories, though following Hedges (2011), we added the category netspeak, defined as “internet usage or chat language, texting” (cf. Crystal 2006b: 402). At the very beginning, however, informants asked for an additional category, unacceptable under any circumstances, which was added accordingly. At the time of writing, the poll has received 286 votes altogether; multiple votes were possible. Only three people indicated that they considered usage to be unacceptable. All polls discussed here continue to be open, so that when checked, the actual figures may be slightly different. The survey was conducted anonymously. Whenever relevant I will refer to the informants by the biodata provided (e.g. a 35-year-old female American teacher). In citing from the survey responses, I left the comments unedited, except when indicating emphasis (in bold). See https://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/2012/03/23/likely-adverb-or-adjective/. Many thanks to Frances Austin for presenting me with the original of the letter. The BNC reference list is provided for analysis on the WordSmith Tools website (http://lexically.net/downloads/BNC_wordlists/downloading%20BNC.htm); the page also includes an American reference word list. See “Most common words in English” (Wikipedia), which shows on the basis of an analysis of the Oxford English Corpus that the is most frequent. See https://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/2012/03/31/could-of/.

Chapter 6

The language of prescriptivism

Normative metalanguage Usage advice can be proscriptive or prescriptive, as seen in the previous chapter, but it can also be a mixture of this, which is how Ann Batko structured her entries in When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People (2004): Don’t Say: This is a problem for Ellen and I to solve. Say Instead: This is a problem for Ellen and me to solve. Here’s Why: Let’s apply the rule that pronoun cases are supposed to agree with their roles in the sentence. (2004: 59) Proscribing the use of subject pronouns in object position (“Don’t say”), she proceeds by giving the correct form (“Say instead”), followed by an explanation (“Here’s why”) as well as, in many instances, a practical “tip”, in this case: “Ask yourself what form of the pronoun you’d pick if you took the other person out, just like we did when we dumped poor Ellen”. In using the verb “say”, Batko appears to be focussing exclusively on the spoken language in her usage advice – unusual, as well as unwarranted, since speech allows for more variability as well a less strict application of normative rules than writing; ignoring this is something usage guide writers are frequently criticised for. However, her discussion of shall/will shows a more carefully phrased view of what might be considered correct language use: “Just keep in mind that in formal (American) speech or writing, ‘shall’ is the correct form of ‘to be’ for the first person (‘I’ or ‘we’) in the future and future perfect tenses” (2004: 91). Her use of “say”, therefore, should not be taken literally. Apart from Batko’s use of “Don’t”, the two items referred to here, labelled “between you and I” and “shall/will” in the HUGE database, contain no negative metalanguage, so her treatment of these usage problems is fairly neutral. Other usage guides do use negative metalanguage, like Garner (1998), who, as discussed in the previous chapter, condemns thusly for being a “nonword”, a view he maintained in the fourth edition of the work, despite a considerable increase in usage in the meantime. For all this, Garner claims

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that “it remains a lapse” (2016, s.v. thus). If we check the entries from Garner in the HUGE database, we see that ain’t is labelled a “nonword” as well, which similarly stands in stark contrast to its widespread currency, both in British and American English. Another example of a usage guide denying the existence of a particular word is Heffer (2010: 119), who claims, for instance, that onto “does not exist”, and that therefore the question of whether it should be onto or on to does not constitute a usage problem. Checking the corpora I drew upon in Chapter 5, it is easy to demonstrate (see Table 6.1) that Heffer is wrong in denying the existence of the word: the figures show that onto is actually quite frequent, in British and American English, in parliamentary speeches as well as in edited text. It thus seems that writers like Garner and Heffer did not base their pronouncements discussed here on actual usage data, which suggests there has in fact not been as much improvement in the way in which usage problems have been dealt with over the years, in contrast to what Peters (2006) claims. In her article on what she calls “the lexicography of usage”, she distinguishes three trends within the tradition: the ipse dixit approach, the assumed right by writers like Baker (1770), Hurd (1847) and many others, also later ones, “to pass their own judgments on usage”; the reliance on usage panels, as in the case of Morris and Morris (1975) and the American Heritage Guide (2005); and the use of corpus data, which, along with the usage panel approach, she considers “the only methodological approach among the usage guides” she and Wendy Young (1997) analysed (2006: 764–765). Algeo, however, is critical

Table 6.1 Onto in four selected corpora (BNC, Hansard, COCA, TIME) Corpus British English BNC 100 million 1980s–1993 Hansard 1,600 million 1803–2005 American English COCA 520 million 1990–2015 TIME 100 million 1923–2006

Data selected

Onto

Normalised per million words

all data

5,955

59.6

1990s–2000s

1,705 (11.95 million words)

141.7

2013–2015

57,598

110.8

1990s–2000s

1,128 (16.1 million words)

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of usage panels, saying that results obtained through consulting them “were useful for marketing the dictionary, but revealed nothing reliable about usage” (1991a: 5). Of the usage panel drawn upon by Morris and Morris (1975), for instance, he says that it is “inclined to deliver emotional jeremiads” (Algeo 1994: 101) (cf. Baron 1982: 232–239). Moreover, the examples of Garner (1998) and Heffer (2010), but also Taggart (2010), show that these innovative approaches did not replace the earlier subjective approach, at least not across the board. That Heffer was wrong in thinking that variation between onto and on to does not constitute a usage problem is shown by Robin Straaijer: the issue is discussed in as many as 34 usage guides in the HUGE database.1 The publication dates of these usage guides range from [1906] 1920 (Vizetelly) to 2010 (Heffer and Lamb), and fifteen of them are American. The question whether it should be onto or on to is therefore seen as both a British and an American issue. Fowler (1926) approved of the form, and so do “otherwise conservative usage guide writers as Patricia O’Conner in Woe is I (1996) and Bernard Lamb of the Queen’s English Society in The Queen’s English and How to Use It (2010)”, according to Straaijer. Rebecca Gowers, in her introduction to Horrible Words (2016), claims that “[t]he term non-word was first dreamt up by philosophical Victorians hoping to hint at something mysterious” (2016: 3). For this, she probably based herself on the OED, which indeed gives 1893 as the first date of usage for the word, though this earliest quoted source is not Victorian – British – but American (The Atlantic Monthly). However, even if perhaps non-word (or nonword) as such is not any older than that, the idea that words and expressions were “non-existent” or never used (“we can’t/do not/never say/write”) is something we already find in the normative grammars of the eighteenth century. Denying the existence of words and expressions that are in actual use and that have long been part of the prescriptive canon is thus an age-old strategy of trying to rid the language of what are considered undesirable elements. Sundby et al. (1991) have already been quoted in Chapter 2 for their analysis of the prescriptive metalanguage found in grammars and other works on language from that period. Their list of metalinguistic comments comprises some ten pages, and includes very strong terms of disapproval, like “absurd”, “barbarism”, “improper” and “unpleasant”. Such terms were resorted to for the same purpose as calling a word a “non-word”. Searching the HUGE database showed that these terms still occur in the most recent usage guides included. “Absurd/ absurdity” was found in Heffer (2010) and Taggart (2010) to condemn every boy and girl had a present given to him or her (Heffer) and I was literally devastated (Taggart); Amis (1997) considers alright in the phrase It’ll be Alright on the Night, the title of a television show at the time, “a conscious barbarism”; Brians (2003) writes that the use of as well as for and is

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“improper”; and Wilson (1993) calls sentence initial and “unpleasantly garrulous and mechanical” (1993: 30). The list in Sundby et al. (1991) also includes metalinguistic terms that identify particular groups of users who are condemned for the usage criticised. Some examples are “the jest of strangers”, “ladyisms”, “mere shopkeepers’ cant”, “childish phrases”, “a common fault, especially in our poets” and “not infrequent among the inferior orders of the community”. Identifying groups of users like this is one of the characteristics of the discussion of usage problems (Weiner 1988: 173): writers of usage guides typically engage in such comments when disapproving of usages that they rightly or wrongly associate with particular groups of speakers, thus socially stigmatising them in the process. The “greengrocer’s apostrophe” is probably one of the best known examples of this (see Beal 2010), but so are the “footballer’s perfect” (Walker 2008) and Taggart’s “sports commentator’s adverb” discussed in Chapter 5. Taggart (2010) mentions two more such categories: “the estate agent’s pronoun” (as in I’d be delighted to show it to yourselves) and “the television presenter’s demonstrative pronoun”, a term she uses to designate the “commonly heard tautology … these ones or those ones” (2010: 56–57). One obvious difference between the sociolinguistic categories found on the list in Sundby et al. and a group that is often targeted for having influenced British English is usage by Americans. Americanisms did not become a usage issue until the 1860s (see Chapter 3), as has recently been confirmed by David Crystal (2018), who demonstrated that they were parodied in Punch around the same time. In Chapter 5 I reported on a survey conducted in 2012 to elicit attitudes to three contested usages, citing the critical comments of some of the respondents to the survey. These informants used very similar negative metalanguage as that found in eighteenth-century normative texts on language. “Not acceptable in writing. I have seen it but view it as substandard usage, often used by less well-educated/poorer people,” is how a 63-yearold male British copywriter commented on the could of sentence, indicating that he considered the feature typical of uneducated users in particular. Responses to the column “Modern tribes: the grammar pedant” by Catherine Bennett have also been mentioned in Chapter 5, as a potential source of new usage problems. Bennett herself condemns features using terms like “not OK” (less for fewer), “appalling” (Shakespeare’s grammar, as in “Who woulds’t thou serve?”) and “misuse” (enormity). Her many respondents use different but equally strong terms of disapproval, like “horror” or “stupidity”. In this chapter I will compare the negative metalanguage adopted when usage problems are discussed, and I will do so by looking at three different categories of commenters. First, I will focus on writers of usage guides, drawing on the five usage features analysed in the previous chapter, followed by the critical language use of the respondents to my survey of 2012. Third, I will look at the language use of the usage panel

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consulted by Morris and Morris for the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (1975). The panel includes well-known writers, Americans but also occasionally British ones, like Isaac Asimov, Anthony Burgess and Jessica Mitford, who are considered authorities on usage and whose opinions were asked on usage problems like all right/alright and among/between (cf. Kaunisto 2017: 203). “Typical comments”, as Morris and Morris put it, are included in the dictionary, and were retrieved from HUGE for analysis in as far as they were part of the usage problems in the database. It will be of interest to see whether the panellists use similar proscriptive terminology as that found in eighteenth-century normative writings studied by Sundby et al. (1991) on the one hand, and as that used by usage guide writers and by my survey informants as members of the general public on the other.

Metalinguistic commentary in the usage guides Many usage guide writers, as discussed in Chapter 4, are not linguists, and several of them continue to take the ipse dixit approach that, according to Peters (2006), characterised the earlier works in the tradition (cf. Algeo 1991a: 11). It is in these usage guides that I expect to find most proscriptive language, similar to that of the eighteenth-century normative grammars. For my analysis of this negative metalanguage I collected the discussions of the five features dealt with in Chapter 5: the placement of only, the use of likely for very likely, could of, the flat adverb and try and/ try to. For each of these I compiled alphabetical wordlists with the help of WordSmith Tools, for the purpose of identifying the use of metalinguistic terms. The results were classified according to the categories distinguished by Sundby et al. (1991), 33 in all (see Appendix 5). These categories are catch-all terms. The label Absurd, for instance, includes “absurd” itself, but also “does not make sense”, “foolish”, “non-existent” and “we never say”. Some categories are no longer relevant today, like the influence from Italian or Greek, which is not viewed as a source of criticism in usage guides any more, while “solecism”, defined by the OED as “[a]n impropriety or irregularity in speech or diction; a violation of the rules of grammar or syntax; properly, a faulty concord”, is a typical eighteenth-century term of disapproval, so we may not come across it in more recent usage guides. (We will, as it happens.) At the same time, new categories were added to the list from Sundby et al. to reflect types of criticism that arose since the eighteenth century. I’ve already mentioned the influence of American English on British English, which is widely perceived as negative. Another new category is one that I have labelled “Purism”, which reflects a type of language criticism that only arose since around the beginning of the prescription stage in the English standardisation process, of which the usage guide is the typical project. The earliest references to this type of criticism date from the nineteenth century, and an example is the treatment of the

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placement of only in Hall (1917: 187): “the pedant would compel us to say ‘I saw only a man’”. In the same passage, Hall cited Alford (1864). Despite Peters’s (2006) claim to the contrary (see Chapter 3), drawing on secondary references is thus clearly not unusual at all, with Webster’s Dictionary (1989) being the one that does so most frequently by far. For all that, there are many usage guides that do not engage in “lateral referencing” (Peters’s term), like Five Hundred Mistakes (1856) and the three usage guides published in 2010, and, as we saw in Chapter 5, this ipse dixit approach continues, as Fogarty’s treatment of try and illustrated. A final addition to the list of categories distinguished by Sundby et al. is one that I labelled “Specific registers/use” in order to be able to accommodate critical terms that were not covered by categories like Childish or Poetical in the original list. The metalinguistic terminology encountered in the usage guides will be discussed for each of the usage problems separately according to the size of the texts retrieved from the HUGE database: the flat adverb (ca. 37,700 words), the placement of only (ca. 22,180 words), try and/try to (ca. 9600 words), likely (ca. 2840 words) and could of (ca. 2600 words). The size of these texts is determined by the age and nature of the usage problems: the flat adverb and the placement of only are old chestnuts and have always been part of the usage guide tradition, while try and/try to only entered the tradition during the 1860s, likely during the 1900s, and could of not until the mid-1970s. Likely and could of, moreover, are not treated as staple features in usage guides: likely was only found in the HUGE collection down to 2005 and could of until 2007 (see Table 6.2). The longest and invariably the most elaborate discussions of these five usage problems were those found in Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989): the entries read more like individual articles on the history of the usage problems in question, providing elaborate evidence of usage as well as summarising earlier treatment of the features, than like simple pieces of usage advice. To start with the flat adverb, though producing the most text, it is not dealt with by the largest number of usage guides (Table 6.2). Discussions that most

Table 6.2 The five selected usage problems as treated in the HUGE database Usage problem

Number of usage guides

Date range

Amount of text

Flat adverb Placement of only Try and/try to Likely/very likely Could of

48 62 53 20 20

1770–2010 1770–2010 1867–2010 1906–2005 1975–2007

37,700 22,180 9,600 2,840 2,600

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often contain negative metalanguage can be categorised as Erroneous (91), followed by Colloquial (57), Offensive (35), Inelegant (30), Censurable (29), Absurd (25), Rare (23) and Vulgar (22). The other categories from Sundby et al. are either much less frequent or are not found at all (cf. Appendix 5). Some of these categories can be called neutral in that they describe the status quo with respect to the use of or attitudes towards the flat adverb: Colloquial and Rare are examples of such descriptive categories. Others reflect strong disapproval, like Offensive, Absurd and Vulgar. These are categories we would sooner associate with eighteenth-century normative grammar writing or early usage guides, but we find references that belong to these categories (numbers indicated below in brackets) in modern publications, too:2 Offensive Absurd Vulgar

1920s (3), 1940s (2), 1960s (7), 1970s (5), 1980s (8), 1990s (4), 2000s (4) 1770s (4), 1860s (1), 1920s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (1), 1980s (5), 1990s (6), 2000s (4) 1920s (4), 1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1960s (5), 1970s (3), 1980s (4), 1990s (2), 2000s (2)

This overview shows that the category Absurd is represented throughout the tradition, ranging from 1770 (Baker) to 2010 (Heffer and Taggart). It covers absurd itself, but also nonsense, ridiculous and nonword (the latter term is even a separate entry in Garner 1998, as well as in its fourth edition of 2016, and is used in the American Heritage Guide, 2005). Offensive and Vulgar as categories are only found from the 1920s onwards. The metalinguistic terminology classified as Offensive is mixed in ranging from relatively neutral words like “people condemn” and “complaint” to very strong terms of condemnation, like “monstrosities”, “preposterous”, “bothersome” (all found in Follett 1966), “stilted” (Randall 1988) and even “god awful” (a panel member in Morris and Morris 1975). The category Vulgar doesn’t include vulgar itself, but we do find vulgarism – in Fowler (1965). Though as the second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage Gowers’s version is said not to differ greatly from the original, the entry on eas(il)y where vulgarism is found (“Easy as an adverb, instead of the normal easily, survives only as a vulgarism and in a few phrases, mostly colloquial”; 1965: 143) does not occur in Fowler (1926). The condemnation must therefore be attributed to Gowers himself. Vulgar and vulgarism occur in other entries from Gowers (1954) in the HUGE database as well, six times altogether: “aggravate, aggravation”, “all right”, “learn”, “like in questionable constructions”, “negative mishandling” and “possessive puzzles”. Only in the entries on aggravate/aggravation and like did Gowers draw on the original edition; the other instances are his own additions to the work. Gowers did not use vulgar or vulgarism in Plain Words (1948), so he only adopted them when revising Fowler (1926). In the entry on like (for as if),

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we see vulgar being coupled with slovenly; as well as that, the terms are used to define the perpetrators of this particular disputed usage: “It remains to give a few newspaper examples so that there may be no mistake about what the ‘vulgar or slovenly’ use in its simplest form” (1965: 335). The quotation shows that Gowers didn’t think very highly of the language of newspapers, just like his predecessor (Burchfield 1996: vii–viii). The modern category Purism (see above) includes 16 comments, two of which (Webster’s Dictionary 1989, Burchfield 1996) cite earlier works discussing the flat adverb: Purism

1920s (3), 1960s (4), 1970s (4), 1980s (2), 1990s (2), 2000s (1)

Fowler, with all three instances for the 1920s, was the first to adopt terms from this category, followed by Fowler (1965), after which the category gained somewhat greater – but not too great – currency. Examples from these usage guides are “muchly was a modern facetious formation, perhaps meant to burlesque the ultra-grammatical” (Fowler 1926: 679; 1965: 664) and “‘Kiss me quick’ hats3 ought really to say ‘Kiss me quickly’, though that is perhaps unduly pedantic in that context” (Heffer 2010: 14). For the placement of only, the categories with the largest numbers of metalinguistic comments are Erroneous (127), Colloquial (59), Imprecise (59), Purism (56), and, at some distance, Censurable (27) and Inaccurate (23). Rather more categories than in the case of the flat adverb contain very few comments or none at all. Looking in more detail at the critical rather than merely descriptive categories produced the following figures: Imprecise

1770s (3), 1910s (4), 1920s (3), 1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1950s (4), 1960s (2), 1980s (19), 1990s (12), 2000s (10) Inaccurate 1920s (4), 1950s (4), 1960s (6), 1980s (2), 1990s (4), 2000s (3) Apart from the 1770s, represented by Baker’s two editions (1770, 1779), both categories are characteristic of twentieth-century commentary, as in the case of Vulgar and Offensive for the flat adverb discussed above. In contrast with that usage problem, however, the placement of only is not criticised in the same strong terms: there is only one comment in the category Vulgar, i.e. “It may be that because the conjunction is sometimes found in dialectal contexts, some may feel it is not standard” (Webster’s Dictionary 1989); I placed it there because of the original connotations in Sundby et al. of “non-standard” with “not polite”, “rough”, “rude” and “ungenteel”, all of which (originally eighteenth-century) labels used to connotate with “vulgar” but would now cover non-standard usage (“nonstandard” as a linguistic label, according to the OED, is not found until the early twentieth century). For the category Offensive, I only came across

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relatively mild criticism, as in the case of Ebbitt and Ebbitt ([1939] 1978: 568) who advise that so long as it [i.e. the precise placement of only] isn’t insisted on where it sounds stilted and unnatural, it can at least prevent silly statements like ‘He only had a face that [better: He had a face that only] a mother could love’. Their use of stilted and unnatural to qualify the wrong placement of only was classified as Offensive (see above) and Erroneous, respectively. A tongue-in-cheek comment which I likewise classified as Offensive is the one found in Crystal ([1984] 2000: 19), which reads that the placement of only is “a grammatical point which regularly causes people to send up distress rockets, and demand linguistic lifejackets”. The tone adopted is in line with his general attempt at a light treatment of usage problems, as exemplified by the heading of this feature, “S.O.S. I. It’s only only”, which opens by explaining that “S.O.S., as everyone knows, stands for ‘Save Our Syntax’” ([1984] 2000: 19). One difference between the discussion in the usage guides of the flat adverb and the placement of only is the many references to what Webster’s Dictionary (1989: 692) refers to as “the disparity between rule and practice”; this occurred eighteen times compared to only once for the flat adverb (classified, following Sundby et al., as Erroneous). These comments agree with the general acceptance of the placement of only outside the constituent it is meant to modify as discussed in Chapter 5, and though it has drawn the attention of many usage guide writers, usage isn’t as a rule criticised very strongly. The large number of comments in the category Purism (56) suggests an awareness of the nature of the reason for criticising the usage: Purism

1860s (1), 1910s (6), 1920s (7), 1930s (1), 1940s (2), 1950s (7), 1960s (8), 1970s (5), 1980s (12), 1990s (5), 2000s (2)

It should be pointed out that the high figures for the 1950s and 1960s (as elsewhere in the overviews provided) largely reflect the comments made by Fowler (1926), of which Nicholson (1957) is almost a straightforward copy, with only occasional additions on American English; Gowers (1954) is, as also noted earlier on in this chapter, very similar to the first edition of Modern English Usage. Comments on only, which include condemnations like “self-styled purists” and “fussily over precise” (Morris and Morris 1975: 442), “There are purists who deny that ‘we only live once’ and insist ‘we live only once’” (Howard 1993: 294), and “Many usage sticklers view this policy as a rule that should always be followed” (American Heritage Guide 2005: 332), confirm that the insistence on correctly placing only in the sentence is not generally supported by the usage guide writers studied

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here. Finally, a reference to pedantry in this respect is already found in Alford (1864), and his point of view is cited 50 years later by Hall (1917). In this case, Purism as a category does not start with Fowler (1926). For try and/try to the most frequent metalinguistic comments are found in the categories Colloquial (42), Erroneous (41) and Censurable (22). None were found in most of the other categories distinguished by Sundby et al. (1991), and very few of them in other categories: Imprecise, Improper, Inelegant, New, Offensive and Solecism. This last category is of interest since, as noted above, it seems rather more typical of eighteenth-century proscriptive commentary than of that found today. The comment may be found in Wood (1962: 241): TRY. Try and do something, instead of try to do, is often condemned as a solecism, but it is well established and can be defended, first on the ground of usage, and secondly on that of meaning; it expresses greater urgency or determination than try to do. Wood (1962) is a British usage guide, and as discussed in Chapter 5, there is a different preference for try and and try to between British and American usage. This, too, is noted in Peters (2004), and awareness of the difference is also evident from the fact that Fogarty (2008), being American, expresses her annoyance with try and. In this light it is peculiar that the British writer Heffer (2010: 100) calls the use of try and “sloppy”. Worth commenting on is also the fact that Webster’s Dictionary (1989), Howard (1993) and O’Conner (1996) note that try and is becoming more common in spoken usage. Such a comment would be less surprising coming from American usage guides like Webster’s Dictionary and O’Conner, but in view of the differences in usage between these varieties it is striking to see that Howard, a British writer, says the same, and also that though “try and may become standard usage … in the meantime you would avoid criticism if you try to avoid it, at least in formal writing” (1993: 393). Allen (1999) and Peters (2004) both note that usage is variable, though according to Peters try and is more typically found in British English. As for the category Purism, finally, it is only “stuffy grammarians”, the American Randall (1988: 57) writes, who resist the use of try and. Likely and could of are the least significant usage problems analysed here. The use of likely, for very likely, does not receive very strong negative criticism from the usage guides in the HUGE database, apart from Krapp (1927), though the negative metalanguage used in the entry (“crudity”, “the curse”) does not reflect his own opinion but that of “some critics” (1927: 259). Krapp makes similar attributions in his entries (as represented in HUGE) on the use of friendly as an adverb and full in the sense of “satisfied with food” or “intoxicated”, but it is unclear who the critics he alludes to are. Such general and unspecified references are quite common

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in usage criticism, according to Chapman (2017): a full-text search for some critics in the HUGE database produced ten usage guides (though in one, the phrase was part of a quotation), ranging from 1851 to 2005, some of them with multiple attestations. Krapp (1927) is an American usage guide, and his condemnation of unmodified likely is striking since differences in acceptability between British and American English are remarked upon by eight usage guides, only two of which are American (Randall 1988, Webster’s Dictionary 1989). The first usage guide to mention that unmodified likely is typical of American English was Fowler (1926). We find the comment almost verbatim in Gowers (1954), though with the addition that it is also found in Scottish and Irish spoken usage, which thus makes this feature one of the rare instances that can be classified as a Scotticism according to the list from Sundby et al. (1991). Fowler (1926), moreover, followed by Nicholson (1957) and Gowers (1954), calls it a “poetic archaism” (1926: 337), which is likewise a unique classification among the five usage problems analysed. Bailey and Kitchin (1988), also a British publication, may be drawing on Gowers (1954) (without saying so explicitly) when they note that unmodified likely is found “[o]nly in dialect or archaic speech, especially in Scotland and Ireland”, arguing that it “sounds quaint to our ears and is not generally acceptable” (1988: 179). Quaint as a metalinguistic comment I had originally classified as “uncouth”, one of the entries on the list of Sundby et al. (1991). However, checking the term’s appearance elsewhere in the usage guides in the HUGE database suggests that it probably merely means “old-fashioned” here, “Now the usual sense”, according to the OED. “Sounds quaint and old-fashioned” is the comment found in Morris and Morris (1975: 514) on had rather (instead of would rather), while Burchfield (1996: 842) calls whence, as used by Tennyson, “a quaint and poetic way of saying” from where. I haven’t come across any puristic comments on the use of unmodified likely, nor in the case of could of, the most recent of the five usage problems discussed here. Criticism of could of started in the US with Morris and Morris (1975: 434), who – erroneously – call could of, should of and would of “illiterate mispronunciations”, condemning the usage in strong terms: “we have often bewailed this increasingly common debasement of language”. Webster’s Dictionary (1989: 679) notes that usage is typical of the language of schoolchildren, adding that “the habit must be difficult to eradicate, because warnings against could of and its relatives are carried in most schoolbooks and college handbooks”; the book lists scores of such publications since 1917 that have attempted to do so, but all evidently to no good (cf. Meyers 1994: 132). Burchfield (1996: 186), too, calls it “illiterate” and comments that it is “found depressingly often in children’s letters and essays, and in the written work of poorly educated adults”. As discussed in Chapter 5, the use of could of is indeed a problematical feature only when it comes to writing. Classifying the

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usage as “illiterate” would place the usage guide comments into the category “Vulgar” according to the list in Sundby et al. (1991): Vulgar

1970s (1), 1980s (4), 1990s (4), 2000 (1).

Taggart’s (2010) proscription of could of – “of is a preposition” which “should never, ever be used” as an auxiliary (2010: 29) – might have come into the same category: her adoption of the persona of a lady (Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English) suggests that those who use the form are poorly educated, illiterate, ignorant, or unlettered, to adopt labels found in the Vulgar category. No differences are noted in the usage guides between British and American usage of could of or similar forms. To conclude this section, it may be of interest to see which of the five features analysed contains the largest number of metalinguistic terms in their discussions. To this end I calculated the normalised frequencies of the total number of such terms attested in the usage guides (cf. Table 6.2): Table 6.3 Normalised frequencies of metalinguistic terminology in the treatment of five selected usage problems

Flat adverb Placement of only Try and/try to Likely/very likely Could of

Number of words

Metalinguistic terms

Normalised/1,000 words

37,700 22,180 9,600 2,840 2,600

415 309 125 59 106

11.1 13.9 13.0 20.8 40.8

The figures in Table 6.3 show there is not much difference in the amount of metalinguistic terminology found for the flat adverb, the placement of only and try and/try to in the usage guides in the HUGE database. Though the possibility of distortion because of the differently sized amounts of text should always be reckoned with, it appears that could of is the most strongly condemned feature. This, as we will see below, is also the case with the survey respondents’ comments of this feature. Could of is the youngest of the usage problems discussed in this chapter, but it inspired the strongest negative criticism, even if, as Morris and Morris (1975) write, or perhaps because condemnation in usage advice literature has had very little effect. Usage guides are clearly fighting a rear-guard battle in this respect, and for could of this is still the case today, more than 40 years later.

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Table 6.4 Native speaker respondents to the 2012 Survey and the amounts of text produced

Could of Placement of only Likely/very likely

Number of responses

Native speakers only

Amount of text

337 171 134

260 131 106

16,756 7,339 5,749

Usage criticism by survey respondents The usage survey which I held in 2012 only dealt with three of the usage problems discussed in the previous section: the placement of only, likely/ very likely and could of. Most of the 642 responses that came in concerned could of (337), followed by 171 for the placement of only and 134 for likely/very likely (see also Chapter 5). For the present analysis, I collected only the responses to these usage problems from native speakers (British and American speakers as well as those labelled as “Other”); these informants made up the majority of the respondents, as shown in Table 6.4. The amounts of text for each usage problem will be analysed for the presence of metalinguistic terminology according to the same method adopted for my analysis of the usage guides in the previous section. The purpose of this is to see how the discussion of the three features by the 2012 Survey respondents compares with that found in the usage guides. To this end, I will first compile an alphabetical list of the words used in each respective collection with the help of WordSmith Tools, which I will then compare with the metalinguistic terms as classified by Sundby et al. (1991), using the same categories. Before doing so, two points should be made. To begin with, the analysis of the survey data is complicated by the occurrence of many misspellings of words (granatically, lzy, mispelling, mroe, pronounciation, seriopusl, wtitten, etc.), which are typically found in online texts. A second complication is that informants were invited to write pieces of text in response to the survey questions that were meant to serve as inspiration for their comments on the three sentences presented to them. The text provided may have prompted informants to use similar metalinguistic terminology: We are interested in what you think about this sentence. Is it acceptable in English today, would you use it yourself ? If so, where and when? If not, why not? If you think the sentence is unacceptable, why would that be the case? Do you ever hear (or see) people using it? What kind of people? Do you object to anyone using it?

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As the results below will show, words like “not acceptable/unacceptable” and “object” do indeed occur frequently in the responses received, thus in effect distorting the data. However, the problem applies to all three sentences equally, and as these words were also used as part of the negative metalanguage found in the usage guides analysed above, I decided not to try and solve the problem by reducing the number of instances of the words in question (which would have been impossible to begin with), or by omitting them altogether (which would have been unfortunate). That these words may potentially skew the results of the comparison with the usage guide data is, therefore, something that needs to be reckoned with. In discussing the informants’ views on the three sentences I will focus on the most striking patterns that can be found, and comment on how these patterns compare with the findings for the usage guides as discussed in the preceding section. To start with the feature that received the largest number of comments, could of, it is perhaps not very remarkable that the collective texts produced an almost identical amount of metalinguistic terminology as those found in the usage guides: 48.6 terms per 1,000 words of text (Table 6.3). The usage guide writers that dealt with the issue over the years 1975–2007 thus neatly represent the critical attitudes to the usage problem that are still held by the general public today. The category Erroneous received the

Table 6.5 Most frequent survey categories compared with the usage guides (could of) 2012 survey (N and %) Erroneous Vulgar Childish Colloquial Censurable Offensive Imprecise Total

357 78 66 61 46 44 43 695

51.4 11.2 9.5 8.8 6.6 6.3 6.2

Usage guides (N and %) 51 13 8 21 5 1 5 104

49 12.5 7.7 20.2 4.8 0.9 4.8

highest number of metalinguistic comments for this feature, as in the case of the usage guides analysed. Other high-frequency categories are Vulgar (78), Childish (66), Colloquial (61), Censurable (46), Offensive (44) and Imprecise (43). If we compare these figures with those from the usage guides we see that there are only relatively marginal differences between

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the two sets except for the categories Vulgar, Colloquial and Offensive (Table 6.5). The word vulgar today has different connotations from those in the eighteenth century, when it was used primarily in the etymological sense of referring to the common people (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2011: 111). But since Sundby et al. used it as a cover term for labels like “illiterate”, and as “uneducated” did not occur in their overview, I have included references in the survey to lack of education as a characteristic of people who are allegedly prone to using could of instead of could have in this category as well. Class-related references in the survey texts, like chav-speak, lower and working class, but also Common, in the negative sense, have been included in this category as well, following Sundby et al. (cf. “not unfrequent among the inferior orders of the community”, 1991: 52). That this category is more strongly represented in the overview of the usage guides (12.3% vs. 9.6% in the 2012 Survey) possibly has to do with the fact that usage guides aim to advise against the use of could of, while the survey respondents merely express their attitudes to the usage. This may also explain the different figures for the category Colloquial, which usage guide writers condemn more frequently than the survey respondents (19.8% vs. 7.5%), advising against using a feature that is colloquial in more formal written contexts. Since the aim of the survey was to elicit attitudes to a usage feature whose acceptability was debatable, the respondents proved particularly outspoken on why they considered the usage offensive; the category Offensive thus includes very strong condemnations of the form: could of is an abomination; informants cringe, dislike, shudder, squirm and grit their teeth when encountering it; and it grates, irks, jars and hurts their ears. They find the usage annoying, dreadful, irritating, pathetic, ugly and even a joke. The category Childish is of interest, too. While in Sundby et al. (1991) it only includes “childish phrases”, the survey respondents’ comments were far more elaborate. Apart from providing general labels like sounds childish, a sign of immaturity and a children’s mistake, quite a few informants indicated that usage is typical of the language of teenagers: “My nieces and nephews (students/teenagers) certainly speak like this,” one female British respondent in her early sixties wrote. “I see this mostly among younger people (teens to twenties), although I have occasionally come across older people who use it too,” according to a 42-year-old female editor (nativespeaker category Other), and this is confirmed by an American female “evaluator”, aged 61, who noted that could of is “usually a mistake made by people half my age”. The category should thus be taken more broadly, to include the language use of younger people in general (from the perspective of elderly informants, that it), even including speakers in their thirties, rather than merely children. These quotations also indicate that could of is not typical of either British or American usage: informants report that it is common in both varieties of English. For all that, it is striking to see that

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quite a few informants identified usage with American English, some of them calling could of an example of sloppy informal American English and even a hideous Americanism. The informants who made these comments are both British, and since could of, as a common written feature, is not more typical of American than of British English (see Table 5.7), something else must be at play here. We also see in the survey comments that could of is regularly associated with the language of foreigners, with “persons who don’t speak English very well”. It is, however, more likely a native than a non-native-speaker variant, since learners of English as a foreign language would not be taught linguistic features that are considered incorrect. I therefore believe that the labelling of could of as an instance of American English, or indeed as typical of the language of foreigners, should rather be seen as an attempt among British speakers to dissociate themselves from a usage that is highly stigmatised, and that in doing so they invoke every available argument. Could of is wrong, it is not English, not acceptable, improper, an abomination, should be avoided, and so on. Calling it an Americanism, it seems, is, at least among the general public, just a common way of branding any perceived negative influence on the English language, even if, as in this case, such a label is inaccurate. “Americanism” has thus become a proscriptive label that is readily – and of course typically – invoked by speakers from the UK,4 just like “not English”, which, as I’ve discussed above, often reflects mere emotional disagreement with the usage in question rather than having an actual basis in usage. One final comment to be made here is that several informants mentioned that they consider could of to be characteristic of language use found in social media. In this context it is also relevant that several informants called could of a “misspelling”. The placement of only received far fewer negative comments from the survey respondents than could of: 28.3 per 1,000 words compared to 48.6. But whereas the figure for could of agreed with that for the usage guides, that for only is much higher: the usage guide passages contained only 13.9 metalinguistic terms per 1,000 words. So while in the usage guides, especially the more recent ones, the placement of only is no longer treated as a serious usage problem (see Chapter 5), the general public clearly thinks differently. The category Erroneous includes the largest number of metalinguistic terms: 83. With only six comments, the category Childish is much less represented in the comments than for could of, which is generally regarded as typical of the language of teenagers, but it is nevertheless here that we find a clue for the discrepancy between the views of the usage guides and the attitudes expressed by the survey respondents. “I used to make such [a] mistake when I was young,” one informant writes, and for many of them, awareness of the existence of the rule for the proper placement of only seems to lie behind their condemnation of the survey sentence. “It is perfectly natural word order even if it does not abide by

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prescriptive rules,” says another informant, and yet another calls the rule “prescriptive trash”. The informant in question is a 60-year-old British linguist, and he is not alone in pointing out that condemning or correcting the wrong placement of only is typically done by pedants. The category Purism includes 14 comments to this effect, and one of them refers to “the protestations of John Humphreys [sic] and others”, saying that in spite of these, she “do[es] think that this sort of sentence is becoming acceptable in British English today”. John Humphrys is a well-known British radio presenter, and the author of two books on language, one of them, Lost for Words (2004), bearing the subtitle The Mangling and Manipulating of the English Language. Humphrys was in his early sixties when he published this book, while the informant cited here is 46. Age, as Carmen Ebner shows in her study of attitudes to British usage (Ebner 2017), plays a crucial role in the question of whether or not speakers feel inclined to condemn an old chestnut like the placement of only. If we look at the age of the informants who contributed to the 2012 Survey, we see that quite a few of them are indeed over 40, with the largest number of them being in their sixties, as shown in Figure 6.1. The category New from Sundby et al. reflects the recognition that what was formerly seen as the misplacement of only is now becoming more acceptable: it “sounds more natural nowadays” and “has become mainstream English” are two of the comments offered. One informant, a British woman in her mid-fifties, identifies what she sees as the source of the increasing popularity of pre-verbal only: “popmusic’s ‘I only have eyes for you’”, a popular song by well-known singers like Frank Sinatra. Another informant attributes increased usage to Irish people working in London:

60 50 40 30 20 10 0 teens

20s

30s

40s

50s

60s

70s

80s

90s

Figure 6.1 Age categories of the 2012 Survey respondents (N=171) (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2013: 7)

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I have the feeling that this is due to an Irish influence – I remember growing up in London that the Irish cleaners who used to work in our offices used 'only' liberally sprinkled throughout their sentences and this seems to have taken hold in British English. Whether this 56-year-old British translator is right in making this attribution is unlikely, since the misplacement of only has received criticism from the 1770s onwards. Usage, moreover, is far from new: referring to the OED, Mittins et al. (1970: 58) note that it goes back all the way to the fifteenth century. It is only recently that criticism has died down, which is confirmed by the informants’ responses to the sentence. That people should wish to attribute the usage to particular groups of speakers, Irish working class in this case, is similar to calling undesirable features in the language Americanisms or typical of the language of foreigners in the case of could of, as discussed above. One informant indeed calls the misplacement of only a “common Americanism”, while another notes that it “can be observed from daily conversation from oriental students” and consequently calls it “Chinglish”. As we see here, “other speakers”, whether socially or geographically so, tend to get blamed for what are perceived to be errors or undesirable features in the language. Finally, the discrepancy between the extent to which the misplacement of only is disapproved of by the survey informants and proscriptive advice in the usage guides seems due to an awareness of the old prescriptive rule, particularly among the elderly. As one informant, a 29-year-old American linguist, says: “It is perfectly natural word order even if it does not abide by prescriptive rules”. One striking response to the question on the use of likely in the third survey sentence, Their errors will likely be in their use of style words, is the suggestion that it might be Dutch usage, despite the fact that, as explained in Chapter 5, the sentence originates from an American publication. No doubt, these comments were inspired by the Dutch context in which the acceptability survey was performed: the Bridging the Unbridgeable project was after all carried out in The Netherlands. Many informants (28 out of 134) did identify the usage as being more typical of American than British English, thus confirming the findings presented in the previous chapter. Others noted that it was characteristic of non-native speakers, or “learners”, as one informant put it, since it “does not sound like an expression any English speaker would use”. A 28-year-old editor and translator suggested that the sentence with unmodified likely “is a bit rarer and maybe therefore harder for NNS [non-native speakers]”. Whether it is or isn’t depends on which variety is taught to or acquired by such English language learners. The sentence is, however, treated much more critically than either of the other two sentences discussed in this section: it received a total score of 55.5 metalinguistic comments per 1,000 words, which is much higher than

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that for the placement of only (28.3/1,000 words). The score is even higher than the one for the could of sentence (48.6/1,000 words), which produced the largest number of comments in the 2012 Survey, and which I therefore took to be the most controversial of the three sentences tested. The figure was also considerably higher than that for the discussion of likely/very likely in the usage guides (20.8/1,000 words). One explanation for this high score is not so much disapproval of the construction – the category Erroneous includes 125 comments (125/319: 39.2%), which is not after all very different from the figures for the placement of only (83/208: 39.9%) or could of (357/815: 43.8%) – as the respondents’ insecurity about how the sentence was to be interpreted. Since the item was presented along with two more overtly problematical sentences, informants must have expected something to be similarly wrong with this one, but since the problem concerned (unmodified likely) had not been overtly marked (see Chapter 5), many people felt insecure about what they were expected to comment on. If we look at the category Censurable, we see that the comments range from “not sure whether it is acceptable”, “not terribly wrong” and “a bit ‘off’” to “annoying”, “complete gobbledegook” and, as the most evocative comment I encountered in the survey, “it sounds, to me, like a pram being pushed downstairs!”. Quite a few informants indicated that they thought the sentence confusing or unclear, and one of them, an 84-year-old retired British teacher, noted that the sentence was difficult to understand out of context, adding: “What are ‘style words’?” If informants expressed criticism of the sentence, this criticism may therefore not have been directed specifically at the absence of a modifier of likely. The category Offensive, which included as many as 44 proscriptive comments for could of, thus has no more than eight of them for this feature; this figure is still twice as high as that for the placement of only, but the amount of text produced for this least offensive of the three usage problems tested was very low to begin with (Table 6.4). Six of the 134 informants who filled in the question about likely noted that usage was increasing in British English – “creeping in here”, is how one of them put it, though adding that “it does not irritate me much”. This informant, too, is in her eighties, but she must clearly be more sensitive to language change than the octogenarian quoted above who evidently hadn’t identified the use of unmodified likely as potentially censurable. What is more, if the increase in usage of the construction may be due to American influence on British English, it is clear that not all of the informants see this as reprehensible. Others, as already noted above, do object to this, and one 77-year-old retired British university administrator writes that she “do[es] not like the increasing Americanisation of British English!” Another informant, also in his seventies, notes that “the likely users would be young, educated, and influenced by American-English”. That the usage is identified as new by these survey respondents stands in stark contrast

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with three informants regarding it as old-fashioned: “arch”, is how a 39year-old British “web-creative” calls it, adding that “it feels more 1800s than 1900s or 2000s”. The informant also proposed correcting likely into probably, and others similarly suggested changing the sentence: “replace 'will likely be' with 'are likely to be' for correct English usage”, “British English would be 'will most likely be in …' or 'are likely to be in …' or 'will probably be in …'” and “I would either say 'that is a likely error' (i.e. likely as an adjective) or 'it's likely THAT their errors will be …')” are some of the suggestions received, all three of them by British informants. It is not, however, the case that only British informants found the sentence unacceptable. Twelve of the 25 American informants considered it acceptable, and the others either called it unacceptable or noted that they thought the sentence unclear or ambiguous. Several more suggestions for improvement were offered, most of these concerning features other than unmodified likely. One informant suggested replacing will with would, while adding “I haven’t got a clue as to what 'style words' are”. This latter comment confirms once again that the problem with the analysis of this sentence is that many people, British and Americans informants alike, failed to identify what usage problem they were asked to comment on. There would therefore be something to be said for highlighting the issue tested after all, as had been done in the Mittins survey.

The Harper Dictionary panellists’ metalinguistic commentary Whether the usage panellists consulted by Morris and Morris for their Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (1975) used similar metalanguage as the usage guide writers and the 2012 Survey informants is the final question I will deal with in this chapter. To study this I collected all the material from the Harper Dictionary in the HUGE database. This produced text from the discussion of as many as 26 usage problems, including lexical features like aggravate (for annoy), decimate, flaunt/flout and imply/infer. Examples of grammatical usage problems in the Harper panel collection are ain’t, all right/ alright, the flat adverb, that/which, and the question of whether intensifiers like unique can be modified. Because the material covers quite a few different usage problems altogether, the metalinguistic comments collected will be less specific than those discussed in the two previous sections, but the more general question is to what extent we still find similar metalinguistic comments as identified by Sundby et al. (1991) for the eighteenth century, and thus whether we can see a continuation in the terms of disapproval across time. The “Usage panel questions” in the Harper Dictionary served to reach a verdict on whether the usage problems discussed could be considered acceptable or not, and consequently to offer readers guidance on whether it would be advisable to use a particular form or construction. As discussed

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above, Peters (2006) argues that this approach in the presentation of usage advice shows a distinct advantage compared to the ipse dixit statements found earlier (though still common in usage guides today), even if it should be realised that the panellists selected to pronounce their views on issues of disputed correctness do not represent a cross-section of the public at large.5 The Harper Dictionary panellists’ opinions are often summarised in the form of percentages expressing the acceptability of the items discussed (frequently separating views regarding usage in casual speech and in writing), and an example of this is the discussion of ain’t, which was rejected at 96% for writing and 59.3% for speech. These results thus show greater tolerance at the time of usage in spoken than in written (American) English. The panellists were more divided on the question of whether the flat adverb slow (for slowly) was acceptable (in general, that is, since no distinction between speech and writing is mentioned in the entry): only 37% accepted the use of slow. A typical passage from the dictionary looks like the one below, which shows the responses to the question of whether it should be all right or alright, with the panellists being asked to give their opinions on the contested form’s acceptability: Isaac Asimov: “No. ‘Alright’ looks funny.” W.H. Auden: “I might use it – but I don’t.” Stewart Beach: “I don’t think the spelling of any English word should be a precedent for the accepted spelling of any other English word. To me ‘alright’ is crude as well as unjustified. To those who would accept it, I would use that manly phrase ‘I’m alright, Jack’ – but restore the twoword preface.” Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (1975: 27) Note the condemnation “crude as well as unjustified” of alright, which expresses both a condemnation (“crude”) and a general reason for disapproving of the form (“unjustified”). The amount of text retrieved, which I cleaned up by removing the names of the panellists as well as all “editors’ notes”, came down to ca. 11,300 words. To analyse the panellists’ metalinguistic comments I adopted the same method as in the two previous sections: using WordSmith Tools, I drew up an alphabetical wordlist in which I identified all the metalinguistic terms used, which I subsequently classified according to the list from Sundby et al. The panellists’ opinions, collected in the form of “ballots” held from April 1971 onwards (Morris and Morris 1975: x), were reproduced in the dictionary with the panellists being listed in alphabetical order. The texts bear informal, almost speech-like characteristics, since the most frequent word found in the collection is I, while and and but, coordinators that are typical of the spoken language, occur very high on the WordSmith Tools frequency list (#9 and #11, respectively) as well. The same applies to no (#10) and yes

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(#17), which usually render the panellists’ immediate responses, as in the following – anonymised – passage from the discussion on between you and I/me: “No, no, no!” “No!!!” “A thousand times no! Nor that cowardly evasion ‘myself neither.’” Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (1975: 73) Sentences are often very short and we also come across imprecations like God forbid!, O, my God! and God help me and exclamations like aha and alas, as well as good-natured banter, as in the following comments on flaunt/flout: “But I fear that we will never extricate the two from their entangled embrace.” “Yes … Members of the Mixed Flouters and Flaunters Society to the contrary.” “I flout those who flaunt their ignorance.” Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (1975: 253) Straightforward condemnation is regularly found as well, producing some strong proscriptive metalanguage, as in the following opening lines on sentence initial hopefully: “No. Slack-jawed, common, sleazy.” “This particular usage grates on me.” “Jargon.” “I have fought this for some years, will fight it till I die. It is barbaric, illiterate, offensive, damnable, and inexcusable.” Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (1975: 311) My inventory of the panellists’ prescriptive metalanguage amounted to 460 instances, or 40.7 instances per 1,000 words of text. This figure is quite high, and, as I will discuss in more detail below, is more similar to what I found in the survey responses to two of the three sentences analysed than to the proscriptive metalanguage used in the usage guides (could of excepted). The categories with the highest number of proscriptive comments are Erroneous (89), Offensive (83) and Censurable (56). That the first and third of these categories should receive such high scores is not surprising: the panellists were after all expected to approve or disapprove of the usage problems. But the category Offensive likewise received a very high score, amounting to 18% (83/460) of the total number of comments recorded. This figure is much higher than that for the survey respondents or the usage guides, the highest of which was 8.4% (35/ 415) for the flat adverb as discussed in the usage guides. Which usage problems

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did the panellists find particularly offensive? The comments in this category apply to nineteen of the 26 usage problems for which HUGE contains any data, but in a different measure. The feature most frequently considered offensive was hopefully (15 comments), followed by one … he (13), media is/are (11) and between you and I (10). One panellist, the American historian Thomas Harry Williams, indeed called hopefully “[t]he most horrible usage of our time” (1975: 312). Sentence initial hopefully, as discussed in Chapter 3, was a relatively new usage problem, which has been criticised since the mid-1960s and first entered the usage guide tradition in the 1970s. It is often labelled an Americanism (as in Weiner and Delahunty 1994), and in this light Williams’s comment is of interest: it clearly wasn’t just British English speakers who disapproved of the use. Another usage problem which was similarly called “the worst of all American solecisms and it makes me boil” (1975: 189) is disinterested/uninterested; this item, however, only received five proscriptive comments in the category Offensive. The panellist in question was the well-known writer Anthony Burgess, and that his strong disapproval was not mirrored by the other panellists confirms the personal nature of language criticism – disinterested/uninterested was evidently a pet peeve of his – that was also found in the selection of usage problems by writers of usage guides (Chapter 5). What I found surprising in my analysis of the category Offensive was that ain’t received only seven strongly proscriptive comments. Its usage in writing was after all rejected almost categorically by the panellists, while the form became iconic of all usage criticism during the controversy that arose over the publication of the third edition of Webster’s Dictionary in 1961 (Drake 1977: 51–52). I would therefore have expected ain’t to rank among the usage items labelled most offensive. Burgess called disinterested/uninterested an “American solecism”, a term that is usually, as discussed above, associated with eighteenthcentury normative grammars, and in that light it is surprising to see it still coming up in the 1970s. I also encountered it in two usage guides, one British (Wood 1962) and one American (Webster’s Dictionary 1989), on the discussion of try and (see above). But three of the 2012 Survey respondents used it as well, all of them British and all of them in their mid-sixties or older. Burgess, too, was approaching the age of 60 by the time the Harper Dictionary was published, so it may well be that this old-fashioned proscriptive term has survived particularly with elderly language commenters. Age is an important factor in the question of approving or disapproving of particular usage features, and, as we found in several studies undertaken within the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, informants prove to be more critical of usage problems the older they are (Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Ebner 2017; Ebner 2017; and Lukač and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2019). Burgess was not the only older panellist consulted by Morris and Morris: Williams (cited above)

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was 66 when the Harper Dictionary came out in 1975, Asimov 55 and Auden had died two years previously at the age of 66. Peters (2006: 764) raises the same issue in relation to the panel consulted by the American Heritage Dictionary (1969), whose “members’ average age [is] estimated at 61+”.6 What is more, most of the Harper Dictionary panellists who contributed their views on the 26 usage problems discussed here, 116 in all, were men. In all, I counted eight women only, most of whom similarly belonged to the 61+ category at the time: Elizabeth Janeaway, Helen L. Kaufmann, Phyllis McGinley, Jessica Mitford, Jean Stafford and Barbara Tuchman. Shana Alexander and Judith Viorst are the only younger ones. Women’s language use tends to be less conservative than that of men (cf. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 110) and this may be reflected in their attitudes to usage, too. So if few women are included in a usage panel like this one, this, too, will contribute to the representation of a more conservative view on language – which may, after all, have been intentional at the time. For many compilers at least, the function of usage guides is to keep old standards of correctness alive. With more modern usage panels things seem to have improved. Though Steven Pinker, who is currently the chairman of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary (Chapter 5), is in his early sixties, too, the gender factor seems to have been taken into account in the constitution of the panel well enough to ensure more widely representative views: a look at the current list of panel members shows that women take up a considerably larger share of the panel than in the case of the Harper Dictionary panel 40 years ago.7 The American Heritage Dictionary panel members, however, are still all professionally involved with writing, so the general public has not been given a voice in this panel either. Other categories that are more readily associated with eighteenth-century normative grammars than with usage criticism during the mid-1970s are Barbarous (3 proscriptive comments) and Vulgar (30), while as noted above Purism (18) represents a more recent category. The condemnation “barbarity” is used as a term of disapproval for disinterested/uninterested, while “barbaric” and “barbarism” are used to condemn hopefully. As for the comments categorised under Vulgar, most of them refer to speakers that are called “illiterate” (9) or “ignorant” (7). Even “the illiterate” are considered as a group of speakers of their own (5 references, classified under “Specific categories of users”). Some comments are particularly denigrating, as in “I might use ‘ain’t’ in speech when speaking to friendly illiterates” and “‘Slowly’ [for slow] would distract the illiterate”. The labels “vulgar” and “vulgarism” are found as well, for from whence, hopefully, like for as, and me/I/myself. The category Vulgar also includes speakers who are considered “boobs” (unique), “dirty old men” (bad/badly), “hucksters” (like for as) and “non-Latin scholars” (decimate) as well as butchers (aggravate – cf. the greengrocer’s apostrophe); the same speaker mentions “in-laws” as a category of speakers whose language used to

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“aggravate” him, thus confirming his subjective views on the instance discussed. While the alleged misuse of decimate can indeed be attributed to unfamiliarity with Latin, it is unclear what would have given rise to the other categories of speakers. Perhaps the panellists in question made these specific associations on the grounds of personal encounters with the usage problems they were are asked to give their verdicts on, as in the case of the in-laws. This is at odds with their status as experts or authorities on language, which is after all their raison d’être as usage panellists. Other categories of users whose language was criticised include “Madison Avenue illiterates” (imply/infer), ministers (from whence), the White House (media are), judges (disinterested/ uninterested), and television personalities and announcers (hopefully, unique); in other words, all of them people invested with considerable social status in life in the eyes of the panellists and hence considered reprehensible for committing the linguistic errors identified. The category Purism includes comments that largely reflect criticism of purists insisting on the correct application of grammatical rules even when usage is accepted as being divided. “Stupid grammarians”, says one panellist (two first/first two), and “pedantic nitpicking” another (preposition stranding), while the objection to one … he is criticised as “pseudo-sexist (or pseudolibertarian) nit-picking. The ‘he’ here is really no more masculine than the ‘son’ in ‘chacun à son goût’”. These comments were made by Isaac Asimov, Elizabeth Janeaway and Erich Segal, respectively. Since Segal, in his midthirties at the time, is the youngest of the panellists quoted so far, it is surprising to see that he does not take a more tolerant stand in this particular question. Another fairly young panellist who, like Asimov and Janeaway, calls the rules of purists into question is the journalist Charles Kuralt: “However much purists may object, the fact is, ‘datum’ ain’t an English word,” he stated facetiously. Here, it seems, age plays a role as well, in that some of the younger panellists seem inclined to be critical of an over-purist approach to usage problems. Two of the panellists who identify themselves as purists or pedants are Hal Borland (“we purists”) and Daniel Schorr (“my pedant credentials”) – both of them, indeed, belong to the class of elderly usage commentators. To conclude this section, it is worth comparing the views of the Harper Dictionary panellists with those of the informants who participated in the Mittins et al. survey during the late 1960s. There is some overlap between the sets of usage questions commented on by the two groups, and since the inventories were held almost simultaneously, this presents a unique opportunity to compare the views of what were considered to be usage experts – “authors, journalists and broadcasters” in the case of the Harper Dictionary panellists (Kaunisto 2017: 203) and primarily teachers and examiners in the Mittins survey (1970: 5–6) – on issues of divided usage, contrasting American with British insights in the process. The usage problems concerned and the opinions given as to their acceptability are presented in Table 6.6. Since Mittins et al. provide figures for the average acceptability

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Table 6.6 Acceptability rates of usage problems discussed by the Harper Dictionary panellists and Mittins et al. (1970) Harper Dictionary panellists’ acceptability votes

Mittins et al. – informants’ average acceptability ratings

all right/alright

alright – 14%

between you and I

In casual speech: 3% In writing: 2% Averaged: 2.5% In casual speech: 65% In writing: 49% Averaged: 57% Q: do you observe the distinction? In casual speech: 90% yes In writing: 91% yes Averaged: 90.5% infer – 28% Q: do you observe the distinction? In speech: 76% yes In writing: 85% yes Averaged: 80.5% In casual speech: 28% In writing: 12% Averaged: 20% In casual speech: 16% In writing: 12% Averaged: 14% slow – 37%

alright – 56% (not tested for speech) 22% (not tested for formal writing)

data is

disinterested/ uninterested

imply/infer less/fewer

like/as

me/I/myself

slow/slowly unique

In casual speech: 24% In writing: 11% Averaged: 17.5%

69% disinterested – 34%

inferred – 37% less – 35%

like – 24% myself for me – 33% slow – 40% (not tested for formal styles) very unique – 11%

of the items tested, i.e. for relative formality in speech and writing, I’ve provided average figures for the Harper Dictionary data, whenever available, as well. Despite the differences between the elicitation methods adopted – the Harper Dictionary panellists were usually, though not always, asked to indicate acceptability in speech and writing only and were at times merely queried as to whether they “observed the distinction” (which I have assumed to mean expressing disapproval of the contested variants: disinterested for uninterested and less for fewer), while the Mittins informants had to distinguish, though not in all instances, between formality of usage as well – some differences between the two language varieties can be noted. In two instances, like for as

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and slow/slowly, acceptability is similar. In only one instance, very unique, is the acceptability among the American informants higher, though particularly so for casual speech, than among the British ones. In all other instances the features tested are always considered less acceptable by the Americans than by the Brits. Sometimes the difference is fairly small, as with data is (57% vs. 69%), imply/infer (28% vs. 37%) and me/I/myself (14% vs. 33%), while in other instances it is much larger: between you and I (2.5% vs. 22%); in three cases the different acceptability rates can be called considerable: all right/alright (14% vs. 56%), less/fewer (80.5% vs. 35%) and disinterested/uninterested (90.5% vs. 34%). Not only can we therefore conclude that the American informants were more critical on the whole in their attitudes to the usage problems investigated than their British counterparts, we also see a stronger discrepancy in these attitudes for some features than for others. This seems to reflect different national preferences in this respect – at the time, that is. Whether these differences are still in evidence today, nearly 50 years later, is something which I can only check for slow/slowly and less/fewer for British English since these features were part of the attitudes survey carried out by Carmen Ebner among speakers from the so-called “Golden Triangle” (London, Oxford, Cambridge) (Ebner 2017). For slow/slowly, which in the Mittins study was only tested for informal speech and writing, her data show acceptability rates ranging from 18.8% in formal writing to 74.1% for informal speaking (though with 19.6% for “unacceptable”) (2017: 216); when looking at the average acceptability rate for this feature, we see that at 43.9% this is not very different from the acceptability for informal styles found by Mittins et al. in the late 1960s (Table 6.6). Separating the formal from the informal styles in Ebner’s findings, however, shows a greater discrepancy: 25.6% (formal) vs. 62.2% (informal). We could therefore conclude that for British English, at an increase from 40 to 62.2%, go slow has become more acceptable today. The same is true for less/fewer, the average acceptability of which in Ebner’s data is 40.2%, somewhat higher than in the Mittins data (Table 6.6); the acceptability figures, however, still vary considerably between formal and informal usage, ranging 22.3% for formal writing to 60.7% for informal speaking, though with 28.6% marked as “unacceptable”. As for changed attitudes to the features in American English, these are a little harder to assess on the basis of the results obtained by Viktorija Kostadinova (2018a), largely due to the different approach taken in this study. Thus, for what she refers to as “object I”, as in between you and I, the only feature that shows any overlap with those studied in this section (Table 6.6), her findings show that usage is rated more positively in her attitudes survey than the use of ain’t, which in turn is evaluated more negatively than the non-literal use of literally and the split infinitive (2018a: §7.8). None of these, however, are included in the Harper Dictionary panellists’ list of features, so that no similar comparison can be made. All this suggests that further research on the features discussed here seems well worth undertaking.

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A continuous tradition of disapproval? If we compare the three different types of sources drawn upon for my analysis of the use of metalinguistic commentary in this chapter, the usage guides (5 items), the survey conducted in 2012 (3 contested sentences) and the views of the Harper Dictionary panellists (on 26 items combined), so nine sets of data altogether, we see that the survey question on could of attracted the largest number of comments (815) (compared to only 106 in the usage guides), followed at a considerable distance by the overall comments from the panellists (460). The lowest number of comments was found in the usage guides’ discussion of likely, though it should be taken into consideration that likely was discussed as a usage problem in the smallest number of usage guides in the HUGE database (20 only). Likely received many more comments in the 2012 Survey (319), but as already explained, this was quite possibly due to the uncertainty as to what exactly the respondents were expected to comment on. The panellists’ account, however, though with the second highest number of comments, is different from the other sets of comments since it deals with a collected number of usage problems while the other sets all contain comments on single usage problems only. What is more, none of the usage problems dealt with in the 2012 Survey (the placement of only, likely/very likely and could of) or the analysis of the usage guides (the flat adverb, the placement of only, try and, likely/very likely and could of) were part of the panel discussions extracted from the HUGE database. Another difference between the three sets of data analysed here is that the survey comments represent a snapshot of views held by the informants during the early 2010s and are representative of a more varied population, in age and social background as well as gender, while those from the panellists date from around the mid1970s and are from people who were selected for their alleged authority on language use. The greater majority of the panellists, moreover, were men and, as professional writers, not representative of the voice of the general public. This makes their views very likely different from those of the survey informants, who were all self-selected and more representative of the wider population, rather than having been hand-picked as in the case of the Harper Dictionary panel. For all that, the metalinguistic comments collected from the panel discussions present useful information from a comparative perspective. The main question I was interested in for this chapter was after all whether the metalinguistic comments found in eighteenth-century normative grammars and other works on language continue into the present age. If we look at the comments as they were assigned to the different categories from Sundby et al. (1991), I found that some categories no longer have any attestations (French, Greek, Italian and Uncouth), while others are represented only once (Barbarous, Burlesque, Corrupt, Harsh, Latin, Poetical, Scotticism) or twice (Affected, Rare, Unidiomatic) in the different sets of comments analysed. If usage problems are no longer attributed to the influence of languages

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like French, Greek, Italian, Latin or Scottish – the single instance in which Latin is invoked in the panel discussions has to do with decimate, whose original meaning “to kill, destroy, or remove one in every ten of” (OED, s.v. decimate 1.b) is no longer widely recognised – it is interesting to see a different language variety taking their place, among British speakers at least: American English. The feature most associated with American English usage is likely, both by the usage guides (9/59 comments: 15.3%) and the survey informants (18/319 comments: 8.8%). Rightly or wrongly, the use of could of is likewise attributed to American influence by British informants (17/815 comments: 2.1%). Conversely, the (primarily) American panellists condemn forms like aren’t I as “a conscious Briticism” or “a British nicety” and ain’t as sounding “affected” or “facetious” in British English. There are only three other categories that have comments for all nine comment sets analysed: Censurable, Colloquial, Erroneous. The latter category received the highest relative scores, ranging from 48.1 and 43.8% for could of (the survey at 357/815 and the usage guides at 51/106, respectively) to only 6.8% (4/59) for the usage guides’ treatment of likely. This low score for likely may be due to the fact that this feature received the lowest total score of all and was treated by only twenty usage guides, so possibly these figures are less reliable than those for the other features. That the category Erroneous should receive such high scores is something I’ve already tried to explain in my discussion of the panellists’ views on the usage problems selected for HUGE: the survey respondents must have felt that to criticise the features in question was what was expected of them (in the case of the panellists, this category scored highest of all – 19.3% or 89/460). The majority of the usage guides over the years, too, treated the items concerned critically. The attitudes to the placement of only in this respect did not differ greatly between the survey respondents and the usage guides: 39.9% (83/208) and 41.1% (127/ 309), respectively. The figures for the categories Censurable (which is similar to Erroneous) and Colloquial are much lower. Those in Censurable are highest, in both cases with the usage guides, for likely (14/57: 23.7%) and try and (22/125: 17.4%), while likely only scored 7.8% of the metalinguistic comments in the survey (25/319) (try and was not a survey question). Could of received almost equal scores in the survey comments and the usage guides (46/815 or 5.6% and 5/106 or 4.7%, respectively). The placement of only, however, showed different scores in these two categories, highest in the usage guides (27/309: 8.7% vs. 7/208: 3.4%). This difference may be explained by the fact that the figure for the usage guides is based on a historical account while, as discussed above, the data from the survey respondents, as a snapshot of present-day usage, showed that the placement of only is no longer seen as a real usage problem today. Try and shows the highest relative score in the category Colloquial (42/124: 33.9%), and likely the lowest, both with the survey respondents and in the usage guides (22/319: 6.9% and 4/59: 6.9%, respectively), closely followed by

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could of (61/815: 7.5%). The latter finding is, I think, surprising in view of the feature’s speech-like characteristic, but as the very high survey figure for this feature in the category Erroneous shows, usage of could of as such is not considered acceptable, even if that is the way the form would normally be pronounced. The informants condemning this feature clearly failed to see this. This misunderstanding is also evident in the highest of all scores for could of for the category Childish, both with the survey respondents (66/815: 8.1%) and in the usage guides (8/106: 7.5%): pronouncing could have as could’ve in rapid speech is not necessarily a feature that is typical of the language of children. The same is true for the informants who considered the form characteristic of the language of dialect speakers (20/814: 2.5%). It is only when the form is rendered in writing that could of becomes problematical, as indeed some of the informants rightly remarked. That the category Colloquial received scores in all sets of data is not surprising: as a covering label, “colloquial” need not be a negative qualification per se, as comments like “acceptable in speech”, “spoken English” and “day-to-day conversation” indicate. Such comments merely suggest that the features concerned are not acceptable in (formal) writing. The category Offensive, with the second highest number of comments from the Harper Dictionary panellists (83/460: 18%), received much lower scores with the survey respondents for could of (44/815: 5.4%) and likely (8/319: 2.5%) (cf. 4/208: 19% for only) – does this suggest that respondents have become milder over the years? Or do these figures reflect the different survey populations commented on above? Do professional language commenters feel they should express themselves particularly strongly on contested language features? Did the American commenters – largely older men from the early 1970s – feel they had to express themselves more strongly when voicing their attitudes to usage problems? These questions are well worth going into further, particularly in view of the more balanced composition, though only in terms of gender, of a usage panel like the one for the American Heritage Guide (2005). Other strong categories are Absurd and Vulgar. The first of these is only represented in four of the nine comment sets, with the highest score being only 6.3% (26/415) for the flat adverb as discussed by the usage guides, a figure which may be explained by the historical angle of the data collected. The category Vulgar, by contrast, is attested in as many as seven of the nine sets. The highest scores within this category were found for could of, both from the survey respondents (78/815: 9.6%) and in the usage guides (13/ 106: 12.3%), which is in line with the other highly proscriptive comments found for this usage problem. The typically eighteenth-century labels vulgar or vulgarism themselves, however, have become rare over the years: I encountered them five times with the panellists, once in a usage guide from around the same time (Wood 1962), as well as with the survey informants. There, however, I found a new term, chav (see Chapter 5), which seems the modern (British) equivalent of vulgar. Another typically eighteenth-century label that has virtually disappeared is barbarous, which I only found three

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times in the panellists’ comments (barbarity, barbaric, barbarism – once for disinterested/uninterested and twice for hopefully). None of the usage guide writers studied for this chapter used it, and when I checked the rest of the HUGE database for the occurrence of this label, only one usage guide showed up: Amis (1997), where we find it four times, with the usage problems all right, like for as, shall/will and the split infinitive. As a proscriptive label we can, I think, conclude that it has all but disappeared. As for the remaining categories, with far fewer metalinguistic comments overall, no patterns suggested themselves, except that some of the categories, like Imprecise, Improper, Inaccurate, New, Obsolete, Rare, Redundant, Unidiomatic and Ungrammatical, seem to reflect explanations for why a particular feature would be classed as Erroneous or Censurable. It was, for instance, only to be expected that the placement of only would receive relatively high scores in the categories Imprecise (59/309: 19.1%) and Inaccurate (25/309: 8.1%), as these are the reasons why the usage problem tends to be condemned. The category Bad similarly indicates – subjectively – why a feature should cause offense or should be considered censurable. One very rare category is Poetical: it only received four comments, and all of them on likely. Three of these were from Fowler (1926) and its successors Nicholson (1957) and Gowers (1954), with the most recent usage guide being Bailie and Kitchin (1988). Why likely (for very likely) should be considered a poetical archaism or characteristic of poetic speech is unclear; today, its use seems to have become quite general. The category Poetical is one of the originally eighteenth-century categories distinguished by Sundby et al. (1991) that no longer applies to usage commentary today. But the comments obtained from my analyses produced references to other registers which were not as yet available at the time. These include references to traffic signs or telegraphese, as criticism of go slow advanced by the Harper Dictionary panellists, as well as online usage (texting, SMS, message boards) as an explanation for the use of could of or likely (“media speak”). One of the survey respondents considered the use of likely to be typical of “translatorese”, while another said likely could be regularly heard on radio and television. I’ve already mentioned television announcers and personalities as specifically designated groups of speakers whose language comes in for criticism. Other specific user categories mentioned by the survey respondents are non-native speakers and dyslexics, who are all believed to err regularly in the use of could of – again, this reflects the mistaken impression that could of doesn’t or indeed should not occur. Try and, too, is considered by some informants to be typical of foreign speakers of English (“oriental students”) as well as Irish cleaners – equally wrongly, as it happens, since try and is a well-established (British) English idiom. Likely, finally, is similarly considered typical of the use of non-native speakers of English. Though the usage is also regularly identified as an Americanism by the survey respondents, we have identified here a new development in usage criticism: non-native speakers – immigrants? – come in for criticism of perceived errors in usage. Finally, Purism,

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another new category I added to the Sundby list, is not very strongly represented among the comments in the different sets as a whole apart from the criticism of the placement of only in the usage guides, where it received just over one-fifth of the metalinguistic comments (63/309: 20.4%). The next highest figure in the category is for only with the survey respondents (14/208: 6.7%). Those who condemn the wrong placement of only, usage guide writers and survey respondents alike, do so because they believe that the correct placement of this modifier, next to the constituent it modifies, is more precise as well as more accurate. So to answer the question whether there has been a continuous tradition in the use of metalinguistic commentary since the eighteenth century: yes, this is very much the case, though we inevitably see differences in the categories originally distinguished by Sundby et al. (1991). Due to changing social, cultural and political circumstances, we no longer see criticism of the influence of particular languages (French and Italian, for instance), while the influence of one variety of English upon the other (American on British and vice versa) has become a new phenomenon. We also see new registers coming in for criticism, particular since the advent of radio and television and more recently of the internet and social media, as well as different categories of speakers coming in for language criticism – “chav-speak” replacing the poor language use of the “vulgar” – and non-native speakers. For all that, such speakers may not actually be the real perpetrators of the grammatical errors commented on; they may only be perceived as such, largely because they are external to the class of speakers who posit themselves as language guardians: usage guide writers (though by no means all of them any longer) and older speakers. Age, as I discussed above, is an important factor in usage criticism in the attempt to keep the old standard alive, and as I have shown in this chapter, this is true for all categories of commenters, the (older) survey informants, the (traditional) usage guide writers and the (older) Harper Dictionary panellists.

Notes 1 See https://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/2015/03/23/onto-doesnt-exist/. 2 In the figures presented for all five usage problems, I have excluded references that represent overt citations from earlier works. It also needs to be noted that the usage guide representing the 1930s for the category Vulgar in this list is Ebbitt and Ebbitt ([1939] 1978) (for the problem of dating this usage guide, see above). 3 Images of such hats can be found online. 4 Lukač (2018: Chapter 2), too, found that letters to the editor addressed to The Times more typically complain about Americanisms than those to the New York Times, which focus more on politically correct language use instead. 5 The panel, according to Morris and Morris, consisted of 136 people (1975: v–viii), who had been selected “for their demonstrated ability to use the language carefully and effectively”. 6 Drake (1977: 74) calls their behaviour “neo-genteel”. 7 See www.ahdictionary.com/word/usagepanel.html.

Chapter 7

Public awareness of prescriptivism

Prescriptivism and popular culture One of the items advertised by a British online shop called the Literary Gift Company is a Grammar Grumble Mugs Set.1 The set includes six mugs with that refer to well-known usage problems: They’re there for their afternoon tea. I am figuratively dying for a cuppa. The caffeine effect can affect us all. Less milk and fewer sugar lumps. Don’t lose the loose-leaf tea! I’m going to add two sugars too. These statements are curious for a number of reasons. To start with, only one of them (less/fewer) actually represents a grammatical problem. Apart from the one with figuratively, which as a usage problem concerns word meaning, the others are all instances of spellings that are frequently confused: all four are indeed listed in Caroline Taggart’s chapter “Confusables” (2010: 94–122). I’ve already commented on the fact that for the general public, the word “grammar” has a different meaning than for linguists or other people professionally engaged with language (see Chapter 5), and the mugs illustrate this as well. What is more, the statements would have been funnier if they had included the grammatical/lexical/spelling errors in their original form. Moreover, I’m literally dying for a cuppa is what people actually say, and to have these glaring – in the eyes of some – linguistic errors exposed like this would have had the same effect. The statements serve to make people aware of correct language use, raising discussions over coffee or tea in the process, as appears to be the purpose behind these pedantic mugs to begin with. Instead, they function like a kind of wagging finger, telling the recipient of the gift to beware of making mistakes in these constructions, perhaps pointing out that they make them all the time, hence the reminder. The set, for all I know, may

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be popular as a gift (cf. Beal 2018, par. 31), and if they are, this would be another example of how, as Pullum argues, people like to be bullied – “dominated, humiliated, and punished” (2018: 177) – about language and the insecurities resulting from the insistence on correct language use. “The usage game,” according to Pullum, “is catering to perverts.” Other online shops sell t-shirts reading “Grammar pedant” or “Grammar. The difference between knowing your shit and you’re shit”. The latter example does not show an instance of a grammar problem either, but it is at least more of a tongue-in-cheek attempt at highlighting issues of prescriptivism than the mugs described above. The comment can also be found in the form of an e-card. Linguistic e-cards usually spell out problems with the apostrophe or punctuation, as in “Mother’s Day is a sobering reminder that our generation still can’t use an apostrophe correctly” and “Commas Make a Difference: Enjoy your Thanksgiving, turkeys! vs. Enjoy your Thanksgiving turkeys”. These examples show that misplaced apostrophes or the absence of punctuation marks can be made into an object of fun, which is a very different approach to criticising language errors from that of groups like the Apostrophe Protection Society, founded in 2001 by the journalist John Richards to expose instances of illiteracy.2 Morana Lukač mentions some more such platforms (2018: chapter 3): Apostrophe Abuse, whose online archives go back to July 2005, and Apostrophe Catastrophes, which started in 2008. A more recent example is the Bristol “Grammar [sic] Vigilante” referred to in Chapter 1, who was reported on the BBC News website in April 2017 as being in the habit of “correcting bad punctuation on Bristol shop fronts”.3 Another popular source of linguistic fun circulating on the internet are memes – images that are “typically humorous in nature, [and are] copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations” (OED, s.v. meme, n.2) – many of which have prescriptive issues as their subject as well. A random search produced these examples: “Wait, you used ‘whom’ in a text” (i.e. a text message) and “I split infinitives to specifically annoy you”. In neither case is the issue spelled out on the assumption that the message is clear enough as it is, while the statements are attributed to a koala bear in the first example and a llama in the second. Both are cuddly animals, which thus mitigates the force of the message, turning it into an object of fun at the same time. But we can also buy t-shirts online containing the highly stigmatised form thusly (see Chapter 5), not in a form of a prescriptive comment but as part of the sentence “I have informed you thusly” and accompanied by a picture of Sheldon Cooper, the protagonist of the popular American television series The Big Bang Theory. According to the entry on Sheldon Cooper in Wikipedia, this fictional character is portrayed as a “stereotypical ‘geek’” who is “extremely intelligent, socially inept, and rigidly logical”, showing off his lack of common sense and suffering from a superiority complex. This is expressed in his language use, as in the thusly example, which is a supposedly more formal version of “I told you so”, as well as in his reaction to another character’s use of the

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intensifier literally: “Literally? Literally a million years?”4 The Big Bang Theory is not the only television series playing with attitudes to well-established usage problems like this: Robin Straaijer has shown that current prescriptive attitudes to literally are also exploited in the – likewise – American sitcom Parks and Recreation.5 Googling for images with the word literally, moreover, similarly produces t-shirts with texts like “Misuse of literally makes me figuratively insane”, as well as memes, e-cards and a host of comics. Prescriptivism, as these examples show, is everywhere these days, particularly, if you look for it, on the internet, where it is primarily exploited as an object of fun. In television series – perhaps primarily American ones – it is similarly drawn upon, both as a source of humour and as a means of characterisation. Being able to do so assumes familiarity among the general public with notions of linguistic correctness in general and with the existence of old chestnuts in usage advice literature in particular. Wearing t-shirts that show off such linguistic awareness, moreover, reflects a deliberate flaunting of a new attitude to prescriptivism, confirming what Morana Lukač and I found when analysing the comments on thusly in the survey we conducted in 2015 (Lukac and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2019). Thusly, despite heavy stigmatisation, particularly in the usage guides we analysed, is on the increase, primarily in the language of younger people. If usage guides are expected to have an effect on usage – their main purpose after all – here, we found the opposite. Similarly, as discussed in Chapter 6, it turned out that, when asked about their pet peeves, several survey informants mentioned the insistence on applying prescriptive rules rather than offensive language features themselves. They were saying, in other words, that they no longer wish to be reminded of having to apply such rules, most likely because of the rules’ ineffectiveness when compared to actual language use. After all, many of them said, the language is “evolving”, and this entails accepting what in the past tended to receive criticism. Using whom nowadays is therefore said to sound pedantic (even when grammatically speaking correct), as is confirmed by the meme quoted above as well as the feedback reproduced in Appendix 1; split infinitives are used all the time by all kinds of people, and avoiding them as well as avoiding preposition stranding produces stilted prose. If writers of traditional usage guides like Taggart (2010) and Heffer (2010), that keep insisting on applying prescriptive and proscriptive linguistic rules, expect to have any influence on usage, this is not what is happening. This very likely explains why such usage guides continue to be published, even though others are produced at the same time that take a more leniently descriptive view to usage problems. The question, however, is whether those are the kind of publications the general public wants. At the same time, usage guides are parodied as well as satirised. One example is the publication of Eats, Shites & Leaves in 2004, subtitled Crap English and How to Use it (2004), by an apparently fictitious author

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identifying himself as A. Parody. The book’s title echoes Lynne Truss’s popular book published a year earlier, and is more obviously funny than the subtitle of David Crystal’s The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (2006a), which has quite a serious purpose. Eats, Shites & Leaves, however, actually parodies the usage guide in general, since it is not merely about punctuation but includes lists of unlikely confusables like language/langwidge and tough/tuff (2004: 37) alongside “rules of good writing” like “Eschew obfuscation” and – inevitably – “It is wrong to ever split an infinitive” (2004: 29). More recently, Rebecca Gowers published Horrible Words (2016), facetiously subtitled A Guide to the Misuse of English. The tongue-in-cheek attitude to usage taken in the book, which was published as a satirical companion piece to the fourth edition of her great-grandfather’s Plain Words (2014), was not recognised by Lynne Truss in her review of the book (Gowers 2018: 51–52). That the book’s satire was misunderstood is perhaps not surprising, given that people like Lynne Truss have a vested interest in the text type. “You know you’ve made it when you get parodied,” Clara Chow wrote in a review in the Straits Times (2004) of Truss’s book. That may be true for Truss’s book, but not for usage guides in general. In my view, when a text type or author is parodied or satirised, it means that their heydays are over. This was clear when Lindley Murray’s enormously popular grammar was parodied in 1840 in a book called The Comic English Grammar, attributed to Percival Leigh (Noordegraaf 1996). By this time, Murray’s grammar itself was no longer reprinted as often as it had been before. Punch subsequently ridiculed him with outstanding frequency, as Fens-de Zeeuw (2011) and Crystal (2018) have shown, satirising its prescriptive approach to grammar. Over the years, the usage guide has split into two subcategories, with modern publications showing a more tolerant, descriptive approach on the one hand (which are not only written by linguists, as Oliver Kamm’s Accidence Will Happen has shown) and a continuous outpouring of the traditional pre- and proscriptive type (not by linguists) on the other. It is the latter type that is parodied, though it nevertheless continues to sell well. All these developments show the effects of prescriptivism – on linguists, who have taken to writing usage guides as well (if in a more descriptive way); language professionals like journalists, writers and editors who have long been engaged in the field (and at times take a more tolerant approach to usage criticism, too); and the general public, who are beginning to show signs of getting tired of prescriptivism. This latter part of the population, which still appears to be ignored in prestigious language panels seeking usage advice, as I argued in Chapter 6, has found a new way of expressing their criticism of prescriptivism – online and in public, by making fun of old chestnuts and of prescriptivism in general in the form of e-cards, memes, cartoons and t-shirts. The general public seems more aware of prescriptivism than ever, and has been successful in finding an outlet for their criticism.

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But awareness of prescriptivism among the general public also takes different forms in English, and it has done so for quite a while, dating back to a time well before the tide started to turn against it, as it is doing today. The general public’s awareness of prescriptivism is evident in two rather different ways, which will be discussed in this chapter: in the form of letters to the editor and as metalinguistic comments and linguistic characterisation practices in English literature.6 Milroy and Milroy (2012: 30–32) argue that English (by which they seem to be referring to England or the UK) is characterised by a complaint tradition which finds expression in the form of letters to newspapers aiming to try and maintain the ideology of the standard. These letters have been around for quite a while, at least since the late-eighteenth century, according to Sturiale (2016). Letters to the editor are more of a British than American phenomenon, since Morana Lukač, when analysing letters to the editor addressed to The Times and the New York Times between 2000 and 2010, found twice as many of them in the British than in the American paper (Lukač 2018: Chapter 2). The letters are a text type in their own right: they usually begin with “Sir”, relatively succinctly voice their complaints (linguistic or otherwise), and end with the name of the author, either real or as a pseudonym, as in the example given by Milroy and Milroy where the author identifies himself as “Have went”, as well as their place of origin (here, Saintfield, Northern Ireland). Letters to the editor even acquired the stock phrase “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”. The expression is used for people, “usually with strongly conservative political views, who write letters to newspapers or the BBC in a tone of moral outrage” (Wikipedia), and Tunbridge Wells typifies a middle-class town in the South East of England where, proverbially, nothing happens. As a noun, disgusted even has a place in the OED: “a member of the public who writes anonymously to a newspaper expressing outrage about a particular issue” (s.v. disgusted, n.). The phrase sometimes occurs in a variant form with “appalled” instead of “disgusted” (Crystal 2004: 178; Edwards 2010: 111). Edwards uses the term “appalled of Tunbridge Wells” with reference to Kingsley Amis, explaining, quite wrongly as it happens, that Amis is not a typical member of the class of the disgusted or the appalled who send their complaints to newspapers: as I will show below, he actually did so with great frequency. But Edwards also mentions Amis’s The King’s English (1997) in this context, which has been part of the usage guides analysed in the preceding chapters. In the next section, I will show that many of the usage problems in the book have an origin in his novels, and also that Amis wasn’t alone in drawing on instances of prescriptivism for the purpose of his writing. In the section after that I will discuss how the general public goes about trying to maintain the ideology of the standard by writing to the press as well as to institutions like the BBC, which, in the UK at least, is credited with the role of language guardian, but also how they took advantage of

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a linguistic controversy in the press, largely fuelled by letters to the editor, in trying to engage in a discussion with the protagonist in the controversy about linguistic correctness. The case in question is the reception of John Honey’s The Language Trap (1983) (cf. Chapter 5). In the third section I will consider the question which is often put as to whether usage guides have any influence on actual language use.

Usage problems in English literature If usage problems are nowadays treated as an object of fun, as a popular reaction to the enormous increase in language advice literature, both in the form of usage guides and online, they also play a role in English literature. One very moving example is the short story “Mother Tongue” (2001) by the British writer Ian McEwan. The story is a tribute to McEwan’s demented mother, and it describes the linguistic tribulations she suffered as a result of the upward social mobility she experienced after her second marriage. McEwan himself suffered from similar linguistic insecurities, particularly after going to school. There, he had to unlearn the language he had acquired at home, saying did for done and pronouncing words like nothink, somethink, cestificate (“certificate”), skelington (“skeleton”) and chimley correctly. Much later, after he had become a writer, he was once more confronted with a linguistic gaffe he had committed. The case in question was an indignant letter to the editor he had written, which started off with “Sir, having destroyed my meaning with dishonestly juxtaposed quotation, I find myself perplexed by your reviewer’s sudden concession to …”. The inadvertently used dangling adjunct “still makes me smile and wince, and remains a caution”, he confessed. Language is also a topic in McEwan’s novel Solar (2010). In the book, he regularly refers to the High-Rise Terminal (see Chapter 5), a feature he calls “uptalk” (“What linguists call uptalk, so he had recently learnt”, 2010: 115) and which (as an author) he assigns to the language of postdocs but also to an American hotel clerk (2010: 209). McEwan makes these metalinguistic comments through the persona of his main character, the elderly physicist Michael Beard, who is described as someone who had “[l]ately … become something of a language snob, an inverted language snob, whose age and limited connections prevented him from understanding much about accent and status in England these days” (2010: 115). Beard – who in an instance of interior monologue is made to use whom where who might have been more appropriate given the context (“The year before, he had begun an affair with a London waitress whom he took to be the lively feral creature of some forsaken housing estate”) – comments on the use of glottal stops, too (2010: 115), as well as on the use of local accents by speakers from Norfolk (saying loike, 2010: 25) and Ulster. Postdocs are not supposed to have a rural accent, is what all this suggests, and

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he similarly disapproves of what he calls Cockney (2010: 241), which he considers “unusual in a woman at university in those days” (2010: 198). It may not actually be the use of Cockney itself McEwan is criticising here through his protagonist, but rather Estuary English, a term which, as a non-linguist, McEwan may not have been familiar with (see Agha 2003: 265, footnote). Grammatical features commented on are was sat (for was sitting) and double negation (2010: 255). While double negation is an old chestnut, was sat, along with was stood, was also mentioned as a pet peeve in the online survey from 2015 discussed in Chapter 5. Usage is common in the North and West of England, though it is possibly “more widespread than this”, according to Cheshire et al. (1993: 71). The linguistic features McEwan deploys in Solar for characterisation purposes may similarly represent his own pet peeves. Attributing these features to specific social groups makes the novel particularly informative from a sociolinguistic perspective, and the features must have been familiar enough for his readers to recognise what they were meant to convey. McEwan himself was in his early sixties when Solar was published, which is, as I discussed in Chapter 4, the age at which many of the usage guide writers discussed in this book produced their usage guides. This is also the age at which people in general tend to be critical of the language use of the younger generations, so it is fitting that McEwan voices these language criticisms through his elderly main character. Awareness of language use and language correctness grows with advancing age, and writers like McEwan may be especially sensitive to them, drawing on what they identify as new features in the language of the young for the purpose of characterisation. In the novels of another writer, Len Deighton, we likewise find a considerable amount of metalinguistic concern. The first novel in my collection of notes on his work that shows evidence of this is Funeral in Berlin (1964), which includes two metalinguistic comments, one on the use of whom and the other on like used for as: 1.

2.

‘But not Dorf,’ I said, ‘especially not Edmond Dorf [the main character’s alias]. I don’t feel like an Edmond Dorf.’ ‘Now don’t go metaphysical on me,’ said Jean [his secretary]. ‘Whom do you feel like?’ I liked that ‘whom’ – you’ve got to pay real money these days to get a secretary that could say that. (1964: 20–21) They wouldn’t let us offer [him] a job partly because he was foreign, and partly because I wore woollen shirts and said ‘like’ instead of ‘as though’. (1964: 312)

But the main character wasn’t just in the habit of saying like for as if as in (2), for on page 266 of the novel we find an example of a non-standard past participle, began for begun:

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I had already began to fall back.

All three features are old chestnuts that have been commented on since the earliest days of the usage guide tradition in the case of who/whom (and going back to the normative grammars before that) and since the mid-nineteenth century in the case of like for as if (since Hurd 1847) and participial began for begun (first found in Five Hundred Mistakes, 1856). Deighton’s interest in language continues in several of his later novels, all from the 1980s: Berlin Game (1983), Mexico Set (1984), Spy Hook (1988) and Spy Line (1989). Again, the use of who/whom is commented on in Berlin Game: 4.

‘Security from who?’ I said. ‘Or, as you might put it, from whom?’ (1983: 223)

Another comment has to do with accentuation, particularly of the name Bernard, which is pronounced, Deighton explains, with the stress on the last syllable (1983: 52). The same point is made in Spy Hook (1988: 151). “Accentuation” is the title of an entry in Kingsley Amis’s The King’s English (1997), which includes the following note: my father had a friend called Mr Barrel or Barrell who understandably stressed his surname on its second syllable. Bernard, forename and surname, is perhaps a more typical case: Bernárd in USA, Bérnard in UK, though the surname is tending to follow US conventions over here and the BBC lays it down. (Amis 1997: 2) Amis read Deighton’s novels, as we know from a letter he wrote to his friend Philip Larkin dated 18 June 1985, which reads: “Actually, Len Deighton’s quite good if you stop worrying about what’s going on” (Leader 2000: 999). Perhaps he was reading Berlin Game at the time he was compiling the language notes for The King’s English: the example he gives there seems more than accidental. Another feature Amis shares with Deighton is their attitude to English people speaking French. In Spy Hook we find the following comment: his accent was unimaginable. The only people who can understand an Englishman speaking French are people who have been taught French in England. (1988: 89) The King’s English has a four-page section called “French expressions”, in which readers are advised to “avoid any attempt at exact French pronunciation, which can hinder the flow of talk” (1997: 78). And like Amis, as

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I will show below, Deighton in his novels comments on accents other than that of Standard English. In Spy Hook (1988) he mentions a character’s “singsong Welsh accent” and another’s Northern accent (1988: 21, 32). A strong Welsh accent also features in Spy Line (1989: 22), where we find references to American English (an American woman in her mid-thirties is described as “affecting” a “strident candied-yams and black-eyed peas accent”, as well as comments on public school English (1989: 170, 16). In the preceding novel in this “Hook, Line & Sinker trilogy”, Deighton comments on a character’s “almost accentless and fluent” English, adding that “his syntax had only the imperfections of the natives” (1988: 86). Deighton’s age – he was in his late fifties to early sixties when writing the trilogy – is less of an explanation for his interest in language than in the case of Ian McEwan. To begin with, acquiring a language perfectly was essential in the world of spies, in which language could be resorted to as a means of disguise, and this may have inspired an interest in language use generally with Deighton. This linguistic interest was, moreover, already evident in Funeral in Berlin (1964), which he wrote as a relatively young author. But in Berlin Game (1983) we also see that social class is an issue as far as language is concerned, for on page 302 we read: “It was the tone of voice she sometimes used to criticize Werner [one of the main characters], my grammar, my accent, my suits, my old girlfriends”. The critic of the novel’s main character, Bernard Samson, is his upper-class wife Fiona, and social criticism of pronunciation, such as the loss and insertion of h, continues in the next novel in the series, Mexico Set (1984: 327). As discussed above, social class, or at any rate the relationship between “accent and status in England”, plays an important role in McEwan’s novel Solar, too. Both McEwan and Deighton clearly have an excellent ear for language, and both exploited this in their novels. But neither of them – so far – has produced a usage guide, unlike Amis, even if this was only achieved posthumously (Chapter 4). So to see whether there was any relationship between the novels and The King’s English – Amis’s biographer Zachary Leader claims that Amis “record[ed] his observations and opinions about language on odd sheets of paper, in breaks between novel-writing” (2006: 819) – I read them all with this question in mind.7 Amis’s first novel, Lucky Jim, dates from 1954, and his last one was The Biographer’s Moustache (1995); most of the novels, one way or another, have language as one of their topics, The Green Man (1969) possibly being the only exception. Some of Amis’s other writings are about language, too. The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954–1990 (1990) includes nine essays about language, written between 1972 and 1988, and in these he discussed usage problems as well, like hopefully (Amis 1980), which does not have an independent entry in The King’s English.8 Analysing Amis’s metalinguistic comments, I found that they mostly concern accent (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2018a): northern and west-

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country accents, including Welsh English. American English is frequently commented on, too, and usually negatively so, as in (5) and (6): 5. 6.

… dropping for the moment into his harrowing version of an American accent (You Can’t Do Both, 1994: 190). ‘I’m sorry, dear boy, of course I adore Americans and feel at home with everything about them except the way they speak. I can never make out what their rules are for choosing between pronouncing every single syllable, as in tempo-rarily, and swallowing as much of a word as possible’ (The Biographer’s Moustache, 1995: 32).

Amis was no particular fan of the country or its language, as appears from his many comments on American lexis and grammar in One Fat Englishman (1963), which narrates an Englishman’s experiences in the US, as in (7). Example (8) is from I Want It Now (1968), in which you all is parodied as being typically American English: 7. 8.

‘Darling, I wish you’d give these ghastly American idioms a rest’ (One Fat Englishman, 1963: 113). ‘He-all may have been [to the South] for all I know but I-all never have and neither of us-all have ever been to this bloody place and now you-all must excuse me’ (I Want It Now, 1968: 131).

Sociolects play an important role in Amis’s novels as well. Example (9) is a more general comment, while (10) and (11) show features of nonstandard usage that provide sociolinguistic commentary: … the voice … or rather its accent, came from somewhere a rung or two down the social ladder from his (The Folks that Live on the Hill, 1990: 21). 10. He don’t have a secretary, not full-time (The Crime of the Century, 1987: 49). 11. … two kinds of napkin, or rather serviette (Difficulties with Girls, 1988: 254).

9.

The speaker in (10) is described as a “man in hall-porter’s uniform”, and the distinction made in (11) between napkin and serviette is, according to Alan Ross in a classic early article on sociolinguistics reproduced in Nancy Mitford’s Noblesse Oblige, “perhaps the best known of all the linguistic class-indicators of English” (1956: 27). Amis regularly refers to cultured or posh accents (e.g. someone “with … a posher accent than the Queen’s”, Stanley and the Women, 1984: 69) and to BBC (or, as he calls them, TV) accents (Take a Girl Like You, 1960: 45; The Crime of the Century, 1987: 39; The Biographer’s Moustache, 1995: 84), while we also find particular social classes being represented through

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their language use, as in the references to “officer-class accents” (The Folks that Live on the Hill, 1990: 39) and “older speakers’ upper-class [accent], with even a scintilla of hyah about the word here” (I Like It Here, 1958: 64). Several novels describe the main characters’ encounters with members of the upper classes, which are not always positive and which either produce uncertainties or are used as an occasion for parody. In the Welsh novel That Uncertain Feeling (1955), Lewis, the protagonist, describes his “familiar embarrassed defensiveness at talking to a member of the anglicised upper classes” (1955: 14), and an example of a comment on upper-class pronunciation habits in general may be found in (12), from The Biographer’s Moustache (1995: 163): 12.

It was also the case that the duke spoke indistinctly, touching only lightly on or near most consonants. Whether he did so because he was upperclass or because he was drunk or for some other, hidden reason …

An example that refers to the language of the working classes is the following: 13.

A cheerful lad got up like a labourer had opened the door to them. ‘Come to see Sir Stephen, have you?’ He spoke like a labourer too, which was unexpected (The Russian Girl, 1992: 127).

In many of his novels, though in some more than in others, the interplay between the social classes is an important topic, and language for Amis was clearly an instrument which he enjoyed exploiting to this end. This may have something to do with his own background, which Leader describes as “lower middle class and suburban” (2006: 10). Amis depicts his characters as being as sociolinguistically self-conscious as he himself may have been, and one example is the fourteen-year-old Peter Furneaux in The Riverside Villas Murder (1973) self-correcting his use of you into one: 14.

One moment they’re a child and the next they’re older than you, than one, I mean (The Riverside Villas Murder, 1973: 52).

Leader believes that the novel is a “thinly disguised portrait of [Amis’s] childhood and youth” (2006: 3–4), and Peter is presented as growing up in an environment where proper language was the subject of close scrutiny. Very early in the novel we find Peter’s father criticising got in a book Peter was reading (the troopers got their sturdy little ponies into a gallop): 15.

‘… Got. No educated man ever says got, not in print, anyway. That’s the kind of rubbish errand-boys read, always assuming they can read. Board-school boys. Not a lad at Blackfriars Grammar’ (The Riverside Villas Murder, 1973: 9).

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Peter “very mildly” retorted: “Mr Taylor [his teacher] says you can say got. Write it as well, I mean. He says there’s no rule says you can’t”, but without much effect: 16. ‘Does he, now? Does he, indeed? And how old is your Mr Taylor?’ ‘I don’t know. About twenty-five or thirty.’ ‘A young man, in fact.’ ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ ‘And no doubt he considers he knows everything.’ ‘Well, he doesn’t go on as if he does.’ ‘In that case, given his age, he’s by way of being a rarity,’ said Captain Furneaux with conviction. ‘A jewel of goodly price. Mr Taylor won’t get very far in the world of today’ (The Riverside Villas Murder, 1973: 10). Whether fictional or not, the story is recounted as an actual experience from his youth in The King’s English, in the entry “Get, got”: In my schooldays, [get, got] were suspect words, not exactly erroneous in themselves but vulgar. I’ll get it or he’s got it were said to be expressions lazy/stupid people fell back on because they were too stupid/lazy to think of or to know genteel words like obtain or possess. (1997: 87) Though these uses of get/got – I will get it, he has got it – are not the same as in the example that sparked off the above discussion (got the ponies into a gallop: “made them start galloping”), have got to is a usage problem. With get/got being first attested in the HUGE database in 1847 (Hurd), Fowler (1926), for instance, writes that “[h]ave got for possess or have is good colloquial but not good literary English” (1926: 217). As a usage problem it is still discussed in Jeremy Butterfield’s Oxford A–Z of English Usage (2007), which provides an explanation for its disputed status: This may stem from the fact that many people were told at school not to write get at all, even though that was really only justifiable in relation to informal uses such as I got a bike for my birthday, and not standard expressions such as he fought to get his breath back. (2007: 69) The story in The Riverside Villas Murder illustrates Butterfield’s point about the unjustifiable and uncritical need to avoid a particular feature of usage that represents acceptable English usage to begin with. This is a clear effect of the adverse influence of prescriptivism on uninformed users like Peter’s father, who represents the larger part of the general public commenting on usage problems.

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Of particular interest from the perspective of the present study is that apart from get/got, there are many other linguistic features which Amis satirised in his novels that found their way into The King’s English, and also that some of these antedate their status as usage problems: 17. two well-dressed but berkish young men (The Folks that Live on the Hill, 1990: 10) → Berks and wankers (1997: 23). 18. ‘Walking the bone street in the blood and hair town,’ he said, ‘your eyes of time and ash make me rubble …’ ‘Those, we’ll agree to call them lines[,] also contain a solecism. Grammatically it must be …’ (Difficulties with Girls, 1988: 188) → Danglers, floaters (1997: 39–40). 19. This last brought a brief and perfunctory return to the Jimmie [“a stupendous social snob”, according to Leader (2006: 799)] accent. ‘Hopefully.’ (The Biographer’s Moustache, 1995: 32) → Political words (1997: 158–159). 20. He was uncapping his ballpoint to slash at an improper use of the verb ‘infer’ when the doorbell gave its repulsive chime (Difficulties with Girls, 1988: 31) → Imply, infer (1997: 107–108). 21. The girl, who was dressed like – rather than as, I supposed – a Victorian governess, kept her face lowered (Girl,20, 1971: 14) → (1997: 126–127). The sentence criticised in (18) is an example of a dangling adjunct, but calling it a “solecism” was no longer very common at the time (see Chapter 6), even though the term was still used by one of the informants of my 2012 Survey, a 69-year-old male British translator (see Chapter 5). Searching the entries from Amis’s The King’s English in the HUGE database shows that Amis used the term in his section on the dangling adjunct as well, commenting on two other usage problems as he went along: This kind of solecism has begun to attract the dreadful fame of the split infinitive and the ending of a sentence with a preposition. This time, however, it is what I (from a lofty pinnacle) would call a real solecism. (Amis 1997: 39) Example (19) is perhaps the most subtle of all, in that it provides a metalinguistic comment only visually, through the use of italics: Amis evidently expected his readers to recognise this. In his article “Getting it wrong” he discussed hopefully in a manner that reminds us of the humorous style of his novels, a style which characterises many of the entries in The King’s English as well: Floating hopefully, once German, then become English in the U.S., is now establishing itself in the UK. Its misuse in the way illustrated is

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a matter of function rather than of meaning. … I know … about languages having to change if they are not to die … Floating hopefully was the most widely and loudly denounced import to the U.K. in living memory until Japanese motorcars came along, and now it and they are everywhere. People who use floating hopefully aren’t the ones who read articles on good and bad English. (Amis 1980: 32–33) Amis’s attention to this feature dates from before what is to my knowledge the first treatment of hopefully in a linguistic study, i.e. Whitley (1983). The passage in “Getting it wrong” also discusses the “popular misuse” of refute in the sense of “deny” (1980: 32), and this usage problem, too, found its way into The King’s English, in the entry Political words, and so did various other usage items discussed in the article (e.g. avid, crescendo, jejune, oblivious, pristine). All these examples demonstrate that Amis was already engaged on his collection of language notes during the 1980s, and was entertaining the idea of producing a usage guide, perhaps as an update of his much-admired Fowler. And though in the latter purpose he was defeated by Burchfield’s third edition, which must have been conceived around the same time, it is very much in the spirit of Amis’s interest in language in general and in usage problems in particular that HarperCollins decided to finish the project for him after his death, no matter what economic reasons they must have had for this (Chapter 4). Amis’s parody of the American use of you all (see example (8)) dates back to 1968. You all is not, to my knowledge, an actual usage problem yet, though I did find two references to this plural pronoun in the HUGE database (though not discussed as a usage item). Evans and Evans (1957: 547–548) call it “a makeshift plural pronoun”, only showing disapproval of yous, while Burt ([2000] 2002: 159) lists you all as the plural form for the second person in her paradigm for should/would, thus clearly accepting its use. Emily Maas, in a blogpost from 2014, cites figures from Biber et al.’s Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al. 1999: 330) that show that you all and y’all are three times more frequent in American than in British spoken English,9 and during his stay in America in 1967–1968 Amis must already have between struck by the difference. About ten years earlier he had spent a year teaching at Princeton, an experience which was “thinly fictionalised”, according to Leader (2006: 420), in One Fat Englishman (1963). In his novel Jake’s Thing (1978) Amis shows himself very critical of Americans (Leader 2006: 386) as well as of their language, as is illustrated by (22). Among several Americanisms, the passage includes two instances of the discourse particle like (D’Arcy 2007: 392), a usage which is popularly attributed to American young women. Another example is found in (23).

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22. ‘Right,’ he snarled, … ‘got this guy made of like brass, see, buried somewheres for a coon’s age, okay, comes like an earthquake or explosion or whatever, right, anyways he done get gotten dug up, see, this old like parchment says any motherfucker digs me up gets to done get gotten fucked up good, okay’ (Jake’s Thing 1978: 32). 23. ‘I mean, you know, like really believe it?’ (Jake’s Thing 1978: 211). Parodied by Amis in a novel from the 1970s, this so-called “new like” is thus, as D’Arcy (2007) indeed argues, not so new after all, nor is it used here by a young woman. In The King’s English, Amis only focusses on like used for as, and apart from a casual reference in Taggart (2010) to quotative like, another function of this much-maligned word according to D’Arcy (2007: 392) (Chapter 3), like doesn’t appear to have a well-established position in the usage guide tradition yet. Kostadinova (2018a), however, did find several American usage guides that deal with the issue, and since several informants, as shown in Chapter 5, commented on the usage, it may soon show up in British usage guides, too. A final typical feature of American syntax that Amis comments on is the mandative subjunctive (see, for instance, Mair 2006: 84), an example of which we find in (24): 24. ‘I am resolute that he be able to be present’ (The Biographer’s Moustache, 1995: 241). This use of the subjunctive does not have an entry in The King’s English, but is mentioned in the book’s glossary, where Amis advises against it: “Be careful with any American writings, which often indulge in subjunctive forms … Do not imitate them. If necessary, mentally translate them into familiar indicative English” (1997: 260). Deborah Cameron, in the only study of Amis’s language that I have come across, comments on his “talent for verbal mimicry” (2009: 146), and the above examples illustrate his extremely fine ear for language. Particularly interesting here is how his use of these linguistic features as well as his metalinguistic comments eventually ended up in his own usage guide, sometimes even antedating their entry into the usage guide tradition to begin with. More detailed analysis of the linguistic characterisation in Amis’s novels might show, for instance, how some of his characters are depicted as users of the split infinitive, a feature about which he says in The King’s English that “[t]here is no grammatical reason whatever against [it]” (1997: 217), but whose problematical nature, as discussed above, he nevertheless recognised. There are many other such instances in the novels (it is I/me, older than he/him, you was, double negation, different to/from/ than and so on). Deborah Cameron attributes Amis’s interest in language to his lowermiddle-class background (2009: 146). His grandfather, according to Leader

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(2006), “had been a prosperous glass merchant”, living in style accordingly and having his sons well educated (though not at university). Amis’s father was only a clerk in the office of a London mustard factory, and “acutely conscious of having come down in the world” (2006: 13–14). It is this feeling that very likely fostered the linguistic awareness that forms the basis of the anecdote on got recounted in The Riverside Villas Murder. It is also this awareness that would have made Amis “sensitive[e] to small linguistic differences” (Cameron 2009: 146), and the above examples show his extreme sensitivity to features of language that might reveal a speaker’s social origins, to linguistic shibboleths, in other words. Cameron also refers to the “ideological belief” – also evident in Amis – “that mastery of proper English holds the key to upward mobility and social status” (2009: 145). In other words, for Amis, the norms of correctness of English, quite simply, “can be mastered”, and he was impatient with anyone who, for instance, could not spell (2009: 148). Such people he referred to as “berks” – according to the OED a slang word for “fool” – while he called people guilty of linguistic affectation, frequently represented in his novels as the above examples illustrate, “wankers”. Wanker is another slang word, meaning “one who masturbates” or “an objectionable or contemptible person”, and one of the quotations in the OED is from Jake’s Thing (1978) (OED, s.v. wanker). In this novel, Amis plays upon both meanings of the word, as when Jake asks, upon a series of abuses shouted at a demonstration: 25. ‘Damon, what’s a wanker?’ … ‘These days [Damon replied] a waster, a shirker, someone who’s fixed himself a soft job or an exalted position by means of an undeserved reputation on which he now coasts.’ ‘Oh. Nothing to do with tossing off then?’ ‘Well, connected with it, yes, but more metaphorical than literal’ (Jake’s Thing, 1978: 123). Example (17) shows that the word berkish occurs in The Folks that Live on the Hill (1990). “Berks and wankers” is the title of a section in The King’s English where the two classes of people are defined in terms of language, berks as careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one’s own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops and many mistakes in grammar (possibly the equivalent of today’s chavs) and wankers as prissy, fuzzy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one’s own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin. (1997: 23).

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Pedants, in other words, are linguistic snobs, who nevertheless betray themselves by hypercorrecting their use of h. Cameron’s article places Amis in the context of the Movement, a group of writers from the 1950s that included Amis, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, Donald Davie and others. Apart from their poetry and other writings, Cameron sees a link between them in the way in which they “chose to express their views on language directly, explicitly and often at some length” (2009: 139). Amis, as I have tried to show, is a clear exponent of this, and like Amis, according to Cameron, the Movement writers had non-elite origins; she consequently sees prescriptivism as a “prominent strand in the Movement writers’ writing about language” (2009: 143). For them, “[l]anguage was a metaphor for other things – lack of order, moral and social” (2009: 142), something that came to invest, as she discussed at considerably greater length in Verbal Hygiene (1995), the standard language debate in English schools in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s (see Chapter 3), and that produced the “grammarless” generations of today. The Movement writers, and Amis in particular, belonged to a different generation than Ian McEwan, who was born in 1948, or Len Deighton (b. 1929), who is closer in age with Amis (b. 1922), but their interest in standard and non-standard English as well as the way they draw upon the differences between these varieties for the purpose of characterisation in their novels is something which they share. McEwan describes his lower-class origins and the linguistic problems he consequently experienced in “Mother Tongue”, but Deighton, too, came from a lower-class background. His life hasn’t been as extensively documented as those of the other two writers, but his entry in Wikipedia reveals that his father was a chauffeur and mechanic, and his mother a cook. He did attend grammar school, so he may well have experienced similar linguistic problems as those described by McEwan, and this may similarly have inspired his interest in language and skill at linguistic characterisation (cf. Abbassiyannejad et al. 2012). As Cameron argues, there is a very strong link in Britain between language and social class, and as I’ve shown in this chapter, this is strongly evident in the fictional writings of the three writers discussed.

Letters to the editor and other expressions of linguistic awareness In “Mother Tongue”, Ian McEwan describes his embarrassment at having made a grammatical error in a letter to the editor. Showing the letter to his friends, he received not the support he had hoped for, but “general silence, then some throat clearing, and a move to change the subject”, until someone “murmured kindly in my ear ‘There’s a dangler in the first sentence’”. The letter was about “some slight I thought I had received in its pages [of The Spectator] the week before. Generally a mistake to

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complain,” he added, “but I hadn’t learned that yet.” Someone who did not think it a mistake to make linguistic or other complaints by writing letters to the editor is Kingsley Amis. Cameron mentions one such letter, addressed to the Daily Telegraph and written some time in 1974, in which Amis “mus[es] on ‘the political distribution of corrupters and preservers of our language’” (2009: 151). Checking Zachary Leader’s edition of Amis’s correspondence (2000), I found 59 letters to the editor altogether, written between 1947 and 1995. At first Amis wrote anonymously, signing off as “I am, etc., UNDERGRADUATE Oxford” (Leader 2000: 138), but he used his own name after Lucky Jim (1954) had been published. His second letter to the editor, to The Spectator, likewise begins with an adjunct, but unlike the one in McEwan’s letter, it didn’t dangle (“As last week’s new great poet, I was very glad to see …”, 29 January 1954, 366). Many more were to follow, addressed to a variety of papers, including The Spectator (14), the Daily Telegraph (12), The Times (8), The Observer (4) and the Sunday Telegraph (3). The letters vary greatly in length, and deal with many different topics: politics, economics, the Church, literature, music, and himself being misrepresented in some publication or other, but also language. In one letter, just by way of an aside, he complained of the “hideous jargon [the New Statesman] write[s] these days” (12 April 1968; Leader 2000: 696), and in another, addressed to Teachers World, he commented on the absence of an apostrophe in the journal’s name, saying “I suppose it is safer to drop it if you aren’t too sure where it should go”. The editor replied, saying that “Lucky Jim, that happy-go-lucky academic iconoclast, would have welcomed its omission”, but this reply provoked another letter – summarised in a footnote in Leader’s edition of Amis’s correspondence – in which Amis expressed his disapproval of the editor’s reason for not using the apostrophe, namely “modern design reasons”, referring to Lloyds and Barclays, which had similarly dropped their apostrophes. In the same letter Amis calls the sentence “What’s it got to do with the price of cheese?” in the original article “a salty Australianism” (2000: 716). The letter referred to by Cameron, of 3 April 1974, is about the educational system, which had undergone changes in the curriculum (about which Cameron wrote at length in Verbal Hygiene, 1995; see Chapter 3) that, as Amis puts it in his letter, “have done much to undermine literacy and thereby to render users of English more vulnerable to the admittedly damaging assaults of Madison Avenue” (2000: 763).10 On 26 August 1975, Amis wrote to The Times to complain about what he calls “the intrusive or initial glottal stop” in phrases like the idea ʔof and India ʔOffice, which he attributes to German influence. The glottal stop (ʔ), Leader adds in a footnote (2000: 783), would find its way into The King’s English, where Amis notes in the section “Pronunciation in general” that he “first heard the glottal stop in standard English speech in 1946, though it can be traced back to American

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broadcasting in the 1930s” (1997: 177). Whether or not its use in English had a German origin, as Amis claims, he sees its spread in standard (or, it seems, UK) English as another deplorable Americanism, a topic which was given a lengthy, independent entry in The King’s English. On 16 March 1978, Amis wrote to The Times in reaction to an article on “low educational standards” (Leader 2000: 844–845). In the letter he criticised the writer of the article on three points: the omission of a question mark in a sentence (“Don’t you know that direct questions should end with a question-mark?”), the spelling of the word unmistakeable (“a most eccentric spelling to say the least and one not given in the OED”), and the meaning of bereft, which “isn’t just a classy synonym for ‘not in possession’; it means ‘robbed, deprived’”. “Next time,” he concludes, “get it right.” None of these items are usage problems or received treatment in The King’s English, but they show Amis at his most pedantic. “A bit of a pedant” is what the editor of Teachers World had said Lucky Jim had turned into (Leader 2000: 715, footnote), while Amis himself had called him “a true conservative” in the letter on the educational system to the Daily Telegraph quoted above. And this is what characterises usage guide writers like Amis: their aim is to try and preserve an old standard of correctness. Two more of Amis’s letters to the editor deal with language. On 2 March 1985 he wrote a short letter to The Spectator criticising the use of infamous (Leader 2000: 993). Calling attention to the word, Amis refers to himself as “a spotter of popular catachreses”, which is another term for “pedant”, “stickler (for correctness)” or “usage pundit”. Infamous did find its way into The King’s English, where the entry reads that “quite recently, perhaps not before the 1980s” – Amis’s letter to The Spectator dates from the middle of that decade – “the adjective weakened in severity to something on the level of ‘notorious’” (1997: 111), and this may be why he criticised the phrase “infamous howlers” in the “semi-literate account of Mrs Thatcher’s first ten years as leader of the Conservative Party” which provoked his letter to The Spectator. Amis’s final letter to the editor that deals with language, also to The Spectator, dates from 9 September 1995, and it is surely significant, given Amis’s interest in language in general and in poor language use in particular, that this is the last letter by him that has come down to us. In the letter he corrects the use of “we don’t” in “if we had anything to communicate, but we don’t” into “we haven’t”, calling don’t have an Americanism. He suggests that “don’t” was used here to avoid “haven’t got”, which, he claims, “was invented to avoid the word ‘got’, once a bugbear of refined grammarians” (2000: 1136). I’ve already referred to his discussion of got in The King’s English as an echo of the anecdote from The Riverside Villas Murder (1973). The letter to The Spectator thus not only concludes Amis’s collected correspondence, or his lifelong battle with newspaper articles – he was to die exactly six weeks later, on 22 October 1995 – but also his more than twenty-year-old obsession

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with this particular Americanism (and Americanisms in general), and it is therefore only fitting that got found its way into The King’s English. McEwan and Amis represent different attitudes in what Milroy and Milroy (2012) call the “complaint tradition”: while the one gave up writing letters of complaint to the papers, the other continued to do so throughout his writing career. There are people who can be called virtual professionals in this respect, writing to complain not only to newspapers, as Amis did, but to any company – the BBC, for instance – or institution with the purpose of rectifying mistakes. I’ve come across one such writer in the collection of letters received by John Honey on the occasion of the publication of The Language Trap in 1983, and which is currently in my possession. This highly controversial pamphlet made a plea for the teaching of standard English in the schools in order to give children from all social classes the best opportunities in life, something which raised protests from linguists, particularly sociolinguists, who argued that focussing on standard English in the educational system would be detrimental to children from non-standard English-speaking backgrounds. Much of the debate inspired by The Language Trap took place in the form of letters to the editor published in various newspapers, primarily The Guardian, The Times and the Times Education Supplement (Graddol and Swann 1988), which was not greatly facilitated by the fact that the pamphlet was hard to come by. In their eagerness to contribute to the debate, quite a few writers did so without actually having read the pamphlet, something for which Honey rightly berated them, both privately and in public. In addition to the public side of the debate, which was mostly conducted by linguists writing to the press, there was also a more private side to it, consisting of members of the general public writing to Honey directly after having read the articles and letters about The Language Trap in the papers or after having heard him on the radio. Honey received so many letters – the file in my possession, labelled “Reactions to L. Trap”, includes 108 letters, notes and postcards as well as his replies to most of these – that he regularly complained of the “huge mailbag” he had to deal with (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2018c). The letters from the general public came from a variety of people. One of these, by someone identifying himself as “a retired craft teacher”, is written in mock Cornish, and, having heard Honey on the “waireless”, criticises Honey for his use of have got (cf. Amis’s views on this verb discussed above): Do yew no ee sed ‘av got tu’ [“have got to”] three or for toimes? Now us hoo was lerned tu speek prapper yeers an yeers ago wus telled NEVER tu sey ‘av got tu’ as ‘av tu’ [“have to”] was quoite suffishunt, so be yew rite, or be those old teechers? Ye baint got an anser as yew? (14 February 1983, JH/23a)

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Other letter writers, in as far as they could be identified, included a retired head teacher, a former teacher of mathematics, a former grammar school teacher, an unemployed English graduate teacher, a retired secondary school headmaster, a Local Education Authority adviser, a “teacher of 27 years’ experience, and a student of Linguists [sic]”, someone whose husband taught English and German in France and who sought Honey’s advice on their own project of teaching modern languages, a private teacher of French, a country drama adviser, a Head of Careers at a grammar school, a head teacher from a village school who had taken early retirement, a 77-year-old engineer, a medical professor and many others. Many letter writers used to be teachers, and consequently expressed their agreement with Honey’s point of view. The most heart-breaking letter came from a former teacher who had to give up her job for health reasons, as a result of being forced to join in with new, “trendy” ways of teaching. “My own Headmaster,” she wrote, “who is qualified in P.E. and Art tells me my English teaching is wrong”. Instead of “teaching grammar in the ‘old-fashioned way’”, as she used to do, and successfully so, she complained: What is required? Creative writing, creative writing and more creative writing! … What about formal teaching now? That is something I must not do. No grammar, no spelling, no comprehension – just creative writing! To emphasise his point, the Headteacher [who, as she pointed out, had no qualification in English] removed all my English textbooks from my classroom. (14 February 1983, JH/68a) The letter illustrates the extent to which the teaching profession felt itself divided between the different sides of the debate: if no formal grammar was supposed to be taught, the emphasis was to be on creative writing only, something which, according to this same letter writer, teachers in Cheshire called the “drapes and driftwood approach, … for the emphasis is not upon teaching but upon display and teachers are called upon to make displays of curtain drapes and pieces of driftwood etc.”. There are several letters that, like the one referred to above on have got, deal with language features that the writers ask Honey’s advice about. Apart from Honey’s own language use, the points raised include American influence on British English and the language of broadcasters. A 70-year-old Scot wrote to Honey to tell him that though he thought the use of American billion acceptable “for the sake of misunderstanding & brevity”, he “shudder[ed] to think that the golfer should become TAHM WAHTSON as it is pronounced by [the American sports agent] Mark M’Cormick or that we should lose the T from the language because Americans & pop singers convert waiting into wading” (1 April 1983, JH/75). In an earlier

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letter, the Scotsman had complained about the use of plural verbs with words like number, couple and group, and a fictitious example sentence in the letter (’e don’t know no f – g better) suggests that he was critical of h-dropping, he don’t, double negation and the use of fucking as an intensifier as well. Someone from Somerset, identifying himself as “a former grammarschool teacher brought up on the grammar of English, French and Latin” (15 February 1983, JH/21b.a), had read about The Language Trap in the Daily Telegraph on 14 February, when the publication was first widely announced in the press, and, having heard Honey on Radio 3 the next day, wrote to say that he had been struck by Honey pronouncing “the indefinite article ‘a’ to rhyme with ‘day’ instead of with ‘the’ and in this you are certainly in line with practically every public speaker nowadays on radio and TV”. He thought the usage a “barbarism” (cf. Chapter 6), and believed it to be “one of those importations from the U.S.A. that sweep this country and become fashionable, like ‘basically’ and ‘a — situation’ both of which one can count on hearing in every ‘public’ speaker’s opening sentence”. Honey replied to say that he agreed with the writer, though noting that having listened to “the tape recording my wife made of my interview”, he had heard “only two such examples out of a score or so uses of the definite article”, adding that such “infelicities” were merely natural when “fluent speakers … ‘think aloud’”. He did agree, though, that “the practice must be fought!” American influence on British English also comes up in a reply from Honey to a letter by a former local government employee from Manchester, who complained about one of his superiors saying you was and they was, as well as about the use of have got which he said he regularly heard on the radio, and which he considered “ugly words because in most contexts they are superfluous” (14 March 1983, JH/143a). A usage he claimed to be “sick of hearing” is the phrase sort of, which he had noted in particular with the English actor James Fox. Another relevant comment made by this writer from Manchester is that he failed to understand “how the accent used by royalty, the public schools and the BBC ever came to be accepted as correct”. He himself greatly favoured the accent common in Lancashire, where speakers do not say oda for “other”, “bawth wota” [bath water], or “Radio foe [Radio 4]”. On the subject of get and got Honey replied that “British English is yielding to American English”, but that we have “[s]o far … flinched from yielding to the American form ‘gotten’”. As for the question of one accent being superior to another, he explained that there was at the time “a great dispute among specialists in phonetics and sociolinguists” about this, by which he may well have been alluding to the linguistic criticism The Language Trap had been subjected to in the press. The same letter writer reiterated his views about the BBC in a letter dated 28 March 1983, saying that he would

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prefer a good regional accent to that of the BBC and the public schools. It has been said that sex is what posh people have coal delivered in. How an accent which fails to distinguish between the ‘e’ in ‘sex’ and the ‘a’ in ‘sacks’ came to be regarded as correct is a mystery to me. Another letter criticised a colleague who was unable to spell, “frequently uses ‘guy’ for ‘man’, and … has a tendency to interject ‘like’ ungrammatically into descriptive accounts” (15 February 1983, JH/29a). No example is given, but the comment, dating from around the same time that this use of like had drawn the attention of Kingsley Amis – see examples (22) and (23) – suggests that usage was spreading in the UK at the time, even to the extent of coming in for criticism by this member of the general public as well. A final letter worth quoting here is from someone from Bradford who, to judge by the reverse sides of the multi-page document she sent to Honey, was one of those inveterate commenters on whatever she happened to find fault with that I mentioned above. This time, she addressed a linguistic issue, inspired, like many of Honey’s other correspondents, by his appearance on Radio 4 on the day the publication of The Language Trap was officially announced in the press – “♡day” or Valentine’s Day, she noted (14 February 1983, JH/21c). The letter is a multicoloured document that is not easy to read, but that deals with the use of cos for “because” which she disapproved of even though “a lot of Politicians do it … THE QUEEN does it THE D. of Ed does it … Newly Royal Weds DO IT!!!!!” In addition, she commented on the use of TH-fronting by “unemployed teenagers up here [who] seem to say ‘FINK’ a lot Wonder why cos its COCKNEY!!! is it NOT”. The writer identified herself as “an ex Inf[ant]s and N[ursery school] Head Teacher (retired)” and concluded: “What a task we have!!!! Prof Honey – Keep at it Do – !!!” Honey did keep at it, for about 25 years later, he wrote in another much-criticised book, Language is Power (1997), that “we must seek ways of trying to bring this new tendency in spoken standard English under control” (1997: 168). This variety is Estuary English (1997: 166), of which T-glottaling (as noted by Ian McEwan) and TH-fronting (discussed by the retired teacher from Bradford) are perhaps the most striking characteristics in the eyes of the general public.

Age, social class and linguistic awareness Like the retired teacher from Bradford, many of Honey’s other letter writers belonged to the teaching profession, and many of them were similarly of an advanced age. Linguistic awareness is not something that is only typically found among the elderly, as Jenny Cheshire and Viv Edwards (1993) discovered from their survey of British dialect grammar, much input for which came from school children. In their study, moreover, they

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encountered “little evidence of […] linguistic insecurity”, though perhaps this is something that develops later (1993: 46). However, I’ve already quoted Joan Beal in Chapter 1 saying that we owe this linguistic insecurity to the normative grammarians of the eighteenth century, and to the market for usage guides that developed subsequently, while school children as a rule do not write letters to the editor or to the BBC to complain about poor grammar in the papers or on radio or television. According to Anja Luscombe, BBC Radio 4 listeners are typically Southern, older and middle class (2012: 170). People generally tend to see the BBC as an informal language guardian (see also Ebner 2016), and it is these people who, according to John Allen (2018), think of themselves as a volunteer force committed to defending the citadel of quality English … complain[ing] very loudly about such issues as split infinitives, the dangling of participles and the infiltration of vulgar American terms into our blessed tongue. (2018: 128) A relatively advanced age also characterises many of the usage guide writers discussed in Chapter 4, as well as the conservative attitudes to usage problems among the general public, as shown in Ebner (2017, 2018). It this respect, as discussed in Chapter 7, it is significant that members of usage panels tend to be older as well. But as I’ve argued in this chapter, social class plays an important role as well in language awareness – in the UK anyway. One of Honey’s correspondents complained of his poshness, and Amis believed that learning the rules of linguistic correctness wouldn’t be such a hard thing to do for any aspiring writer or socially ambitious person, something with which Ian McEwan clearly agreed. Knowing the rules of grammar was in any case something they found they could exploit in their novels for the purpose of linguistic characterisation. And there are – elderly – members of the general public who think likewise, as one of the informants of my 2012 Survey wrote in response to the question about the acceptability of I could of gone to that party: To me this is very basic English grammar and I object to English being spoken and written with such bad grammatical mistakes. I had a working class background and parents who left school aged 14, but was taught correct grammar as a child and feel very sad that so much bad grammar is heard and read today and seems acceptable, which indicates poor teaching standards. I have often heard British resident people saying sentences like this, often young people though also older people if they did not have good education in the past, and it always grates on me as I think it sloppy to speak

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one’s own native language poorly. Once people have left education they are unlikely to correct these failings so I feel more emphasis should be given in schools to respect for our own language and teaching standards need to rise. The person concerned is a British retired 64-year-old secretary, of workingclass origins, who probably, like McEwan, acquired the rules of standard English the hard way. Whether she ever wrote any letters to the editor to complain about linguistic errors in the press I don’t know, but she did take the time to voice her opinions in my questionnaire. That linguistic complaints are usually associated with the elderly may explain why the fifteen-year-old Albert Gifford hit the news in 2014 when complaining about Tesco’s breach of grammar: the company had advertised its orange juice as being “most tastiest” (Lukač 2018: 27). “Schoolboy forces Tesco to change ungrammatical packaging”, The Guardian’s headline read on 13 March that year.11 Does that mean that the times are changing, and that the young are entering the usage debate as well? Perhaps, but the issue here is, I think, a little more complicated. Tesco’s decision to advertise its orange juice with the help of a double superlative may have been deliberate, inspired by similar usage on the social media, a platform that is largely dominated by younger users. Googling for most tastiest, most cutest, most prettiest produced quite a few results, and not only referring (in the case of most tastiest) to the Tesco controversy. My search even produced the title of an album called Most Hardest MC Project by the rapper Styles P. Double superlatives were once proscribed by the normative grammarians (González Díaz 2008), but they are back in the language of the younger pop generations. Tesco may well very cleverly have drawn upon the modern status of the double superlative to accommodate to this group of buyers, which it is after all catering for, rather than the more upmarket Sainsbury’s or, indeed, Waitrose. Like the increase of thusly, the popularity of forms like most tastiest is another example of the flaunting of what were once proscribed and stigmatised features of English grammar – an unexpected though nevertheless real instance of the effect prescriptivism is having today. Pedants, no matter their age, are fighting a rearguard battle.

Usage guides and actual usage Finally, the question may be raised here as to the influence of usage guides on actual usage. People are indeed familiar with their existence at the very least: David Lodge, for instance, refers to Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003) in his novel Deaf Sentence while having a discussion with his son-in-law (2008: 82), and we saw a similar awareness of the existence of usage guides among some of the Harper Dictionary panellists earlier. Amis, too, referred to Fowler in The Biographer’s Moustache (1995), on the

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pronunciation of h in weak forms like her and him (1995: 61), but, as discussed above, his case is exceptional. Fowler’s biographer, Jenny McMorris, discusses a novel by Elinor Glyn, Sooner or Later (1934), in which “the young heroine anxiously studied ‘Genteelisms’ in Henry’s book” (2001: 217), and I’ve already quoted McMorris in Chapter 1 with reference to Churchill’s use of Fowler. The references to Truss and Fowler in the fictional writings of David Lodge and Elinor Glyn, respectively, suggest that usage guides are actually consulted, and this was confirmed by some of the responses I received on my initial survey on the popularity of Fowler carried out ten years ago, as well as by the story of the two young men correcting punctuation problems when travelling in the US (see Chapter 1). But did these usage guides have any actual influence on usage in that there are changes in the language that can be ascribed to them? Systematic studies analysing such influences are hard to find, perhaps because they are very difficult to undertake since it is not easy to try and prove that changes in language use can be attributed to the influence of usage guides (cf. Kostadinova 2018a). One example of such a study is Albakry (2007), an article which set out to analyse the effect of the proscription of five usage problems, i.e. starting a sentence with a coordinator (and, but, or), preposition stranding, the split infinitive, functional shift (nouns turned into verbs, as with to impact) and the modifying of absolute adjectives (e.g. very unique). To study the occurrence of these items, Albakry compiled a corpus of newspaper articles published between 2001 and 2005 in the New York Times and USA Today. The first item he searched the corpus for proved to be common in both newspapers, while the occurrence of preposition stranding and the split infinitive reflected different stylistic preferences in the two newspapers. As for functional shift and combinations like very unique, however, Albakry identified very few instances for these features – perhaps not surprisingly so, since the rareness of these items may have been due to the requirements of the newspapers’ stylesheets, since both features are subject to strong proscriptive attitudes. Morana Lukač and I encountered the same phenomenon when we looked for thusly in the TIME Magazine Corpus (Lukac and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2019): we found so few instances that we concluded that this highly stigmatised adverb must have been edited out of the articles before publication (cf. the discussion of only had/had only in TIME in Chapter 5). If Albakry had wanted to find evidence of the actual influence of usage guides, he should have started out from baseline data comprising unedited texts. Instead, his analysis only provides an insight into whether or not the usage problems selected occur in the newspapers he studied, and whether different preferences can be detected between them. Peters (2006) is another study that looked at the influence of prescriptive linguistic advice, but this study doesn’t draw on baseline data either. The items Peters looked at are the mandative subjunctive, as illustrated

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in example (24) above, the use of like for as if, variation in pronoun use in the gerund (e.g. my/me being there) and the use of shall or will as auxiliaries of the future. We owe the rule for shall/will to John Wallis’s grammar of 1653 and the one for the gerund possibly to Lowth, who prescribed the form as preceded by an article (and thus by extension with a possessive pronoun) since he viewed the verb form as having the function of a “Substantive” (1762: 111–114), a rule which he nevertheless did not always observe himself in his own letters (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2011: 230–231). Various studies have already shown that Wallis’s rule for shall/will didn’t at the time, and still doesn’t today, reflect actual practice (see e.g. Facchinetti 2000), so it is surprising to see that it still is a regular feature in usage guides today. Peters doesn’t say whether usage was ever affected by Wallis’s rule and the subsequent prescriptions, but the Mittins et al. survey published in 1970 already showed a 56% general acceptability of the future use of I will (1970: 13); as our own repeated survey has shown, acceptance has only increased since then (with only 2.3% votes for “unacceptable under any circumstances” at the time of writing). As for the remaining three features, Peters found that in spite of Fowler’s proscription of the use of the mandative subjunctive – maintained by Amis 70 years later, as discussed above – usage in British English has increased sharply, that the use of like for as if is considered more acceptable by American than by British writers, and that despite Fowler’s recommendation of the use of my with the gerund this rule is only observed in American English, not in British, Australian or New Zealand English. That Fowler’s prescriptions – or at least some of them – have proved ineffective, for British English in any case, may be illustrated by other instances as well. His rule for the use of that and which in restrictive and non-restrictive relative sub-sentences, for instance, which reads “[t]he two kinds of relative clause, to one of which that & to the other of which which is appropriate, are the defining & the non-defining” (1926: 635), has never taken root in British English, where who/which and that have continued to be used interchangeably in restrictive clauses, with that not being used in non-restrictive ones. American usage shows a different pattern, following Fowler’s prescription (repeated almost verbally in Nicholson 1957: 648–649) but also that found in more recent American usage guides like Strunk and White (“That is the defining, or restrictive pronoun, which the nondefining, or nonrestrictive”, [1959] 1979: 59) and Grammar Girl (“use that before a restrictive clause and which before everything else”12). This difference in national preferences has led to an interesting – if indeed absurd – case, recounted by Cameron (1995: 50–51), in which conflict arose between British authors and American editors over the insistence on applying the rule as prescribed by the Chicago Manual of Style for the use of that in restrictive and which in non-restrictive relative clauses. The issue

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in general has led to what has come to be known as “which-hunting” (e.g. Hinrichs et al. 2015), and this leads to frequent complaints from nonnative writers of English when they have their language corrected by American copy-editors. A similar term is “only snooping”, first used by Gowers in Plain Words (retained in the fourth edition, 2014: 173; see Crystal [1984] 2000: 20), but which, given the general acceptance today of the placement of only outside the constituent it immediately modifies (Chapter 5), seems no longer to be engaged in today. Elsewhere, on the analogy of “whichhunting”, I coined the term “be-hunt” to describe what Pullum (2009) calls a “bias against the passive”, which he attributes to the pervasive influence on American writers of Strunk and White’s stricture “Use the active voice” (1979: 18–19) (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2019). I’ve already discussed Pullum’s condemnation of Strunk and White for the book’s “stupid grammar advice” in Chapter 1, which he illustrates by showing the futility of some of the rules in Elements of Style. The book’s stricture against starting a sentence with and, for instance, one of the features studied by Albakry (2007), Pullum demonstrates to have no basis in the usage of well-known literary authors. In contrast to Fowler in the UK, then, Strunk and White did have a great deal of influence on language users in America, creating as one of its side effects a lot of insecurity among language instructors who, in their uncertainty of what exactly a passive is, tend to place an indiscriminate ban, Pullum writes, on any instance of a form of be as it occurs in student papers. A final example of Fowler’s lack of influence is the frequent occurrence of the word forecasted. In 1926, Fowler still wrote that he hoped that “we may … thankfully rid ourselves of the ugly forecasted” (1926: 187), but according to data retrieved through the Google Ngram interface, usage has steadily increased since the 1950s after an initial drop following the publication of Fowler’s Modern English Usage during the mid-1920s. We see this development taking place both in British and American English, despite the fact that a (British) usage guide like Weiner and Delahunty (1994) still considers forecast the only acceptable past tense or past participle form. The increased acceptance of forecasted is evident from a weather app I used to have on my laptop (downloaded from Win7Gadgets.com), and which never failed to surprise me whenever I checked the Leiden weather forecast. Proscribing forecasted, Fowler’s Modern English Usage thus only briefly appears to have had any effect. Prescriptivism, as Viktorija Kostadinova found in her study of attitudes to usage compared with actual usage in American English (Kostadinova 2018a), only tends to have a limited amount of influence.

Notes 1 See www.theliterarygiftcompany.com/products/grammar-grumble-mugs-set. 2 See www.apostrophe.org.uk/. Note the comment on the website’s homepage. 3 See www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-39459831/meet-the-grammar-vigilante-of-bristol.

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4 See Jasper Spierenburg’s blog post on the subject (https://bridgingtheunbridge able.com/2014/07/29/when-literally-means-literally/). On attitudes to the use of literally by speakers of American English, see Kostadinova (2018d). 5 See his blogpost https://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/2014/03/08/these-areliterally-my-favourite-expressions/. 6 See also Honey (1989: 10). The only novelist cited by Honey, though, is Len Deighton (see below). 7 The only novels I haven’t read are The Egyptologists (1965), The Anti-Death League (1966), The Alteration (1976) and Russian Hide and Seek (1980). 8 The entry “Political Words” does include a comment on hopefully (1997: 158–159). 9 See https://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/2014/08/25/you-guys-or-yall/. 10 Cf. the comments from around the same time by the Harper Dictionary panellists on the illiteracies committed by writers working for American advertising agencies (Chapter 6). 11 See www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/mar/13/schoolboy-forces-tesco-changeungrammatical-packaging. 12 See www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/which-versus-that-0.

Chapter 8

The end of prescriptivism?

The linguists and the novelists Linguists, as I discovered when I did my Henry Sweet Society survey in 2007, do not read usage guides; that is, if they make use of them, it is for the purposes of research, not for advice on usage. Nor do linguists tend to participate in usage surveys: they formed the smallest group of participants in the survey I carried out in 2012 to elicit attitudes to three selected usage problems. And if they did fill in the survey, they rarely complied with my request to produce a piece of text describing their opinions on the contested sentences, often merely supplying very short comments like “Acceptable”, “Just fine”, “Totally fine to me, no comments”, “Of should be have” or “This is perfectly acceptable”. But if linguists are not interested in prescriptivism, the general public is, since they filled in my survey in large numbers, especially people in the age range 50–70. Prescriptivists, or rather language professionals, the third groups of informants we studied in the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, are naturally interested in prescriptivism: people like editors or copywriters need to make sure that texts do not raise any linguistic antagonism when controversial language features occur which might take away the readers’ attention from the contents. As one American copy-editor wrote in her comment on the sentence with likely (see Chapter 5): “I would correct it to 'is likely to be' in any text I was editing”, and another American editor wrote on the sentence with a misplaced only: “I'm sure I use it in speech, but I always correct it in print.” Literary authors are of course language professionals too. They are the ones who, as Crystal (2006b: 397) puts it, “listen most carefully”: as I demonstrated in the previous chapter, there is a category of fiction writers (Ian McEwan, Len Deighton, Kingsley Amis) that draws on specific old chestnuts like who/whom or like for as, as well as other debated language features, for the purpose of characterisation. We also regularly find metalinguistic comments in their works that demonstrate not only an awareness of prescriptivism but also a keen interest in the topic, an interest which sometimes precedes that of linguists. I’ve provided quotations from

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various novels by Kingsley Amis which parody the use of you all in the 1960s or exploit the use of “the new like” in the late 1970s, well before linguists started publishing on these phenomena.1 What is more, Amis wrote about hopefully a few years before linguists did (Chapter 7). Another gap between linguists’ interests in certain features of prescriptivism and evidence of the same features in English novels may be found in two articles published by Joan Beal published in 2009 and 2010, respectively. In the first, Beal comments on the appearance of an advertisement called “Shamed by your English?” in various newspapers, broadsheets and tabloids alike, which she saw as evidence of a renewed interest in prescriptivism, here focussing specifically on accent (2009: 42–43). Identifying a possible reference to the same advertisement in David Crystal’s The Fight for English (2006a), she notes that Crystal probably first saw the advertisement around some 25 years earlier, in the mid-1980s. But well before the advertisement drew the attention of these linguists, we find a reference to it in the novel Talking It Over by Julian Barnes, published in 1991. Oliver, one of the novel’s three main characters, writes: I have a dream. … The transfiguration of Oliver. … I’m planning a mega-turnaround as per the advertisement. No Pension at 45? Which is Your Type of Baldness? Shamed By Your English? I’m getting that pension, having that crown-weave. And I’m not shamed by my English, so that’s one fewer fomenter of cafard [i.e. depression]. (1991: 95) In the same novel, we find as many as three references to the greengrocer’s apostrophe, the topic of Beal’s article of 2010. I will cite only one of them, from Gillian, another of the main characters: On the way to the station … there’s a greengrocer’s shop. It’s where I bought the sweet potatoes. Or rather, I bought the SWEET POTATO’S. … very carefully, without ever missing, he puts an apostrophe into everything he sells. APPLE’S PEAR’S CARROT’S LEEK’S … SWEDE’S TURNIP’S and SWEET POTATO’S. … suddenly I didn’t find it at all funny any more. CAULI’S COX’S SPROUT’S I just found it so sad it went right through me. … Sad because he got it wrong … Either someone’s told him and he didn’t believe it, or else in all the years he’s been a greengrocer, nobody’s told him. (1991: 152) The passage illustrates Barnes’s early fascination with the topic. Beal cites the OED’s first references to the “greengrocer’s apostrophe” as dating to the same time, with the novelist Keith Waterhouse being quoted as first paying attention to the issue in his book English our English, published in

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the same year as Barnes’s novel (Waterhouse 1991: 43–44). Waterhouse, according to Beal, was antedated in his interest in the phenomenon by the historical linguist and lexicographer Noel Osselton, who mentioned the greengrocer’s apostrophe in his inaugural lecture at the University of Leiden in 1970. Beal also cites a letter to the editor (without providing the date) by the novelist Philip Hensher, who protested against the stigmatisation of greengrocers as being uneducated because they couldn’t spell: Hensher’s father, who had “worked in the fruit and vegetable trade” all his working life, knew more Latin and Greek than he himself had had to study for his O-levels (Beal 2010: 62). In January 2012 an article by the same Philip Hensher appeared in The Telegraph Online, called “Leave the apostrophe alone – it makes sense” (Hensher 2012). (As usual, the article generated a lot of below-the-line comments, with readers not only voicing their opinions but also listing their own pet peeves.) Campaigning for the preservation of the apostrophe, as Hensher does here, was evidently a subject worth reporting on in the news. To return to Barnes, Stuart, the novel’s third protagonist, comments on another old chestnut, singular they, reporting a discussion he had on the subject with the other two, Oliver and Gillian: “I don’t know what you think about everyone followed by their … but we had this argument. Oliver, Gillian and me. We each had a different opinion.” He proceeds by setting down these opinions in the form of the minutes of a meeting (Barnes 1991: 2–4). Though already studied in great detail by Ann Bodine in 1975, singular they was elected the American Dialect Society’s word of the year in January 2016. The reason for this choice was its “emerging use as a pronoun to refer to a known person, often as a conscious choice by a person rejecting the traditional gender binary of he and she” (see Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Ebner 2017). Its emergence, as Bodine had already showed 40 years ago, can hardly be called “emerging”, but its current usefulness – leading to renewed discussions of its grammatical appropriateness – in the LGTB+ quest for gender neutrality makes it particularly relevant today. Another linguistic issue that is hardly new is the discussion of the split infinitive, which, like the greengrocer’s apostrophe, is an icon of prescriptivism (Chapter 5). The earliest reference to the split infinitive cited in the HUGE database under the tab References is a letter to the editor of the English Journal from the 1920s, followed by an article in American Speech by George O. Curme, who notes that, having studied the phenomenon “[f]or many years”, “from time to time” he published his views on the construction in various places (1927: 341). Possibly, therefore, the linguistic study of the split infinitive originated in the US. Kostadinova (2018a) shows that the study of the phenomenon was resumed in earnest in the early 2000s, but we see its appearance as a linguistic issue in Marilyn French’s My Summer with George, published in 1996. In this novel, French narrates a quarrel reported by one of the characters that took place

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among a group of [newspaper] editors, about a split infinitive. He wondered how I felt about split infinitives; he seemed seriously interested. So I, too, treated it seriously, explaining that being of the old school, of course I disapprove of split infinitives; they invariably hit my ear as crude and déclassé. (French 1996: 205) Would the epithet “crude and déclassé” reflect Marilyn French’s own opinion? If so, the novelist Raymond Chandler thought differently about this old chestnut. His biographer Tom Williams reports an argument between Chandler and the copy-editor of his novel Farewell My Lovely, published in 1940: proofreading the book, Williams writes, Chandler “was very specific about points of grammar (‘When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split …’ he told a subeditor who had the temerity to correct his language)”, adding drily that “the emendations took time” (2012: 156). Marilyn French is an American writer, and Raymond Chandler, too, had been born in the US, but he had had a public-school education in the UK. According to Williams, Chandler throughout his life felt caught between being poor and having been public-school educated, as well as between being British and American. Could their different social backgrounds be responsible for these opposing views on to the split infinitive, even though voiced more than 50 years apart? Chandler in any case was an early advocate of the split infinitive, preferring its use at a time when the form still received a lot of criticism, and when copy-editors were trained to correct sentences that contained the feature. An illuminating comment in this respect may be found in the American usage guide by Ebbitt and Ebbitt ([1939] 1978): The split infinitive gets more attention than it deserves. Many people have been taught to avoid it scrupulously; and sometimes there is good reason to do so. Certainly, long intervening elements are awkward and should be moved, often to the end of the sentence: After a while he was able to, although not very accurately, distinguish good customers from disloyal ones. On principle, moreover, formal writing does rather consistently avoid the split infinitive, even when the adverb cannot be placed at the end of the clause. ([1939] 1978: 639) Whatever the precise date of the comment (as discussed above), the conflict between Chandler and his editor was clearly a stylistic issue, in Chandler’s eyes at any rate. A novel should be allowed to reflect informal writing, and it is interesting to see that this also affected the use of the split infinitive at

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such an early time. The editor may, however, have done no more than he was expected to do.

The linguists and the general public Linguists, as the above examples suggest, might want to read more novels, since novelists, especially the ones discussed here, tend to have a good ear for language and draw on distinct features of language use for the purpose of linguistic characterisation. Raymond Chandler makes a policeman say he done and they was (1940: 52), to distinguish him socially from the main character, Philip Marlowe. Marlowe himself varies in usage between snuck and sneaked (e.g. 1940: 24, 74): this is a usage problem today, as discussed in Chapter 5, but may not yet have been so at the time (cf. Ebbitt and Ebbitt [1939] 1978: 604). Chandler knew what he was doing from a sociolinguistic perspective, as is confirmed by his argument with his copy-editor, and so did the other novelists discussed here. Some novelists, indeed, like Kingsley Amis and Rebecca Gowers, wrote usage guides, while Keith Waterhouse and Anthony Burgess wrote books on language as well. But linguists should listen to members of the general public, too. Beal (2009: 50) discusses TH-fronting, a feature associated with Estuary English but also with chav-speak (cf. Chapters 5 and 6), and in doing so refers to two fairly recent sociolinguistic studies saying that the feature was “found to be spreading throughout Britain, particularly among young, workingclass males”. But in 1983, one of John Honey’s correspondents, coming from Bradford, informed him that “unemployed teenagers up here seem to say ‘FINK’”. Honey’s interests were in promoting standard English in the schools, not in describing the early spread of a phenomenon which the letter writer associated with Cockney, and he would later suggest that the variety since then generally referred to as Estuary English was to be fought. Though interested in language use, Honey was not a descriptive linguist. The letters he received from the general public, which contain a lot of material on language use as well as on attitudes to language that were prevalent in the early 1980s, are unique in this respect, since they were all produced spontaneously. Eliciting such data for the purpose of analysis is complicated, since this needs to be done without making informants aware of what is being looked for. As discussed in Chapter 5, informants, when invited to produce new contested usages, produced similar constructions to those that were being discussed, as well as familiar usage problems. As part of the surveys carried out within the Bridging the Unbridgeable project we routinely asked for people’s pet peeves, and these sometimes produced information on language features that are not, or not yet, part of the usage guide tradition but that informants for one reason or other felt bothered by, often because they associate them with particular social

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groups. In this light, it would be worthwhile to analyse below-the-line comments on publications like the article on apostrophes by Philip Hensher in The Telegraph Online mentioned above. A quick scan of the comments produced within two days of the publication of Hensher’s article shows that one commenter complains about the use of in terms of for with respect to, period of time for period, redundant do in I do wish you would stop that, insightful for perceptive and others; another mentions know what I mean, innit and text speak in general, and a third was or were sat, allegedly used even by educated speakers. The BBC, too, is regularly criticised here on matters of pronunciation, like “‘crate’ for ‘create’, ‘sekertree’ for ‘secretary’, ‘argably’ for ‘arguably’, ‘reconise’ for ‘recognise’, ‘meterfer’ for ‘metaphor’, ‘retric’ for ‘rhetoric’, ‘claps’ for ‘collapse’ and many more!”. These comments confirm the current process of colloquialisation discussed in Chapter 5, and they address sloppy pronunciation, the use of conversational fillers, grammatical and other redundancies, the use of non-standard grammar and changing word meaning. These are the type of features that have drawn the attention of usage guide writers since the beginning of the prescriptive tradition as well, though attention to individual instances has clearly changed over time. The BBC has been subject to linguistic criticism for a long time, as we’ve seen in my discussion of Amis’s novels and the Honey correspondence from 1983 in Chapter 7, and this led to Burchfield’s The Spoken Word (1981) with usage advice on pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar (including advice on how to pronounce words like recognise and secretary). There is a long tradition of BBC style guides, a list of which, produced between 1967 and 2008, is presented in Luscombe (2012: 144) (see also Ebner 2016; Allen 2018). Was/were sat (for was/were sitting) was employed by McEwan in his novel Solar (2010), and one of our own informants of the survey from 2015 commented on it as well. The only usage guide in the HUGE database commenting on the usage is Wood (1962: 136), a British publication, which compares was sat with regional was laid. Wood calls the usage a mistake, alongside was stood (also mentioned by one of the 2015 Survey respondents), and Cheshire et al. (1993: 71) note that it was also labelled unacceptable by Burchfield in his BBC guide for spoken English (1981: 29). A Google Ngram search shows that was sat is relatively more frequent in British than in American English, and also that its use has been increasing in British English since the mid1970s. Cheshire et al. write on the basis of their survey on dialect grammar conducted in British schools that the usage is much more widespread than was believed to be the case by earlier sociolinguistic studies. If the feature continues to draw the attention of the informants referred to here, who note that usage appears to be spreading from non-standard into standard, even educated usage, it may be a feature worth studying in greater detail than has been done so far, and this may be true for other features criticised by members of the general public as well.

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The end of the standard, the end of prescriptivism? One of the commenters on the piece on the apostrophe by Philip Hensher in The Telegraph Online said that he objected to text speak, and another mentioned that “computer-speak” was having a detrimental effect on the language. Text speak and computer-speak are part of what David Crystal calls “netspeak” (2006b: 402) (see also Chapter 5). As a new medium, he defines it as “not [being] like traditional writing … [n]or … like traditional speech”, and as “blend[ing] properties of traditional written and spoken language”, and this has been confirmed by Carmen Ebner’s findings in Proper English Usage (2017). Adopting netspeak as an additional register in the language polls conducted in the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, we found that acceptance of particular usage problems in this medium often occupied a mid-position between traditional formal or informal written or spoken registers (Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Ebner 2017). Though, as seen here, some people object to netspeak and to the influence it has on the language today, Crystal thinks differently: rather than seeing the language deteriorating, and despite or perhaps because of the fact that what is published on the internet is often unedited, he identifies a “rapid emergence and consolidation of local group norms of usage”, with a “whole new range of Internet-mediated regional written standards [being] the likely outcome” (2006b: 405; see also Severin 2017). This would suggest that we have come to the end of the standardisation process as outlined by Milroy and Milroy (2012), for if standardisation has as its aim the reduction of variability in language, the proliferation of new norms of usage must be taken to have the opposite effect. This would also entail the end of prescriptivism, the stage in the standardisation process which, as suggested above, comes after the final prescription stage in the Milroys’ account. Crystal argues that “the prescriptive tradition is still very much part of the language consciousness of older members of society” (2006b: 408). While in the Bridging the Unbridgeable project we have indeed seen that older speakers tend to have less favourable attitudes towards particular usage problems, with the younger generations being more tolerant of the old usage chestnuts, recent research into prescriptivism on the social media, e.g. by Vriesendorp (2016) and Severin (2017), shows that interest in prescriptivism is still very much alive today. Though age as a factor is hard to ascertain on the basis of the data these scholars had access to, the comments analysed by Severin in particular suggest that those who engage in usage discussions do not necessarily belong to the youngest generations. In the Bridging the Unbridgeable project we also encountered reactions against prescriptivism, with informants saying they were tired of having to conform to the old rules of correctness and of prescriptivism in general, with younger generations of speakers publicly flaunting this anti-prescriptivism through an overt preference in their

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language use for formerly stigmatised features of usage. The increased use of thusly is a good example of this, and so is the presence of prescriptivism within popular culture, as shown in Chapter 8. Prescriptivism, moreover, is openly criticised by media celebrities like Stephen Fry, in his video “Kinetic typography – language” (Fry n.d.). We have also seen that usage guides, a typical product of the age of prescriptivism, are being parodied, which is something that generally signals the end of the text type. At the same time, usage guides are being published in greater numbers than ever, and Straaijer argues that “during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the genre [has] mature[d] and become increasingly professional” (2018b: 21). Examples of the most elaborate and very likely best documented usage guides we have studied within the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, both in terms of secondary literature consulted and usage data studied as a basis for their usage advice, are Webster’s Dictionary of Usage (1989) and the Cambridge Guide to English Usage (Peters 2004). Algeo (1991a: 11) labels Webster’s “queen of the usage books”, and notes elsewhere that, though it “is more complete for American usage than for British”, it sets “a standard for others to aim at” (1991b: 55). Peters, moreover, was proved to possess the highest number of credentials of all writers analysed in Chapter 4, which confirms her authority as a writer of usage guides. However, these two works are scholarly studies of usage problems, and as such, because of their format and their elaborate discussion of usage, not very accessible for the general public, who usually seek quick-and-ready usage advice. As Algeo confirms, “the fullness of [Webster’s] articles may be more than some users want” (1991b: 53). Accordingly, we have identified in the course of its history two diverging strands in the English usage guide tradition: one that has become more professional and more descriptive (along with the requirements of modern linguistics) and another that largely remains proscriptive and aims to provide accessible usage advice for the general public. Such usage guides will continue to cater for people like Albert Gifford, discussed in Chapter 7, who, no matter how young they are, are either conservative in their views on language use and linguistic change or are insecure at being confronted with variable usage and want advice on linguistic choices to make. In Britain, such attitudes to language use are closely tied up with social class, since using the wrong grammar, like done as a past tense verb or double negation and even the dangling participle, might serve as an indication that the speaker (not to mention writer!) is possibly a member of the lower classes. In America, where according to Lesley Milroy (2001) ethnic origin is much more important than social class membership when it comes to language use and attitudes to language, we have seen in one case that correct language use appears to be linked to the fear of being identified as a speaker of African-American Vernacular English (Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Kostadinova 2015). There may well be other instances like that.

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Alive and well Prescriptivism, in other words, is not dead. Born in England during the final decades of the eighteenth century, arriving in America during the 1840s, growing into a text type in its own right and finally maturing during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the usage guide, as its main product, is very much alive, too. At the development of the internet as an online medium for providing usage advice, the usage guide only received a further boost. Online language advice fora like Grammar Girl and Paul Brians’s website Common Errors in English Usage even led to physical publications (Brians 2003; Fogarty 2008). Books on usage are still seen as profitable forms of publication: the new medium has not succeeded in killing off the old one. Standard English, Morana Lukač (2018: 172) argues, will consequently not disappear, though she detects what may be a shift in the type of audience that needs language advice, as now also including learners of English as a foreign or second language worldwide, a very fast growing group of speakers. So in view of all these publishing activities, both in paper and online, and with more usage guides being around than ever before, would there still be room for another one? I believe so. The popularity of usage guides like Taggart (2010) and Heffer (2010) shows that the general public is still interested in obtaining readily accessible usage advice, so usage guides might still profitably be published – however, only if produced by true language professionals, whether linguists or journalists, former editors and the like, and if based on a proper analysis of what it is that the general public wants usage advice on. The placement of only, for instance, is no longer a usage problem, and usage of another old chestnut, the split infinitive, is so widespread that users need no longer be told to avoid it (though they might still want to be warned about its controversial status, particular in the eyes of older, more conservative readers). Selection principles for usage guides today are never explicitly stated, and writers all too often rely on the undocumented prescriptive canon in setting up their language advice manuals. A good example of what such a new type of usage guide might look like comes from The Netherlands, despite the fact that it doesn’t have a usage guide (or indeed complaint) tradition like that in the UK or US. In 2017, a book was published by the well-known publisher of dictionaries, Van Dale, written by Wouter van Wingerden, a language adviser and editor who formerly worked for the Dutch Genootschap Onze Taal, a prestigious professional organisation that issues the popular magazine Onze Taal and offers linguistic advice, both online and in person. The book is called “Maar Zo heb ik het Geleerd!” De Waarheid achter 50 Taalkwesties (“‘But this is what I have been taught!’2 The truth behind fifty usage problems”), and it is based on the usage attitudes elicited from as many as some 17,000 informants, of all ages and professions and coming both from

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The Netherlands and Belgium (Flanders). Its format is simple: starting with a sentence containing a usage problem, it presents the survey responses to questions like “Which of these variants do you find acceptable? On what grounds?” or “Which of the variants do you prefer?” The survey results, in which data from different language users are distinguished according to age, nationality and profession, are followed by sections called “What do the experts say?”, “What it is all about”, and, finally, “Remember this”, thus providing specific usage advice. The approach, in other words, is both well-informed from a sociolinguistic perspective and based on meticulously performed scholarly research on the 50 issues treated. The lighthearted style, the presence of comical illustrations and the absence of scholarly footnotes and annotations make this affordable book eminently suitable for a general readership. A usage guide like this has the advantage of being both readable and informative while at the same time having a thorough grounding in proper linguistic research and representing current attitudes to topical usage problems. Should a similar publication be produced for the English language, I expect that it would fill a gap in the market. For such a publication, particularly if it aims to focus on grammar, the HUGE database would be an indispensable tool. It was after all compiled for the purpose of linguists like myself and the other members of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, and for anyone else who wishes to have access to it, to be able to do research on usage guides and usage problems (as in the case of the present study) but also for anyone intending to form their own opinion on what is recommended and on what (historical or other) grounds. Hence its full title: Hyper Usage Guide of English.

Notes 1 Cf. Blyth et al. (1990), Romaine and Lange (1991) and Meehan (1991) on like. As for you all/y’all, however, Wright (1997) draws on a very early study from 1927 on the different plural forms of you (Hills 1927). 2 This is a frequently heard argument in studies of prescriptivism (cf. Severin 2017).

Appendix 1 Feedback on a blogpost (January 2015)

Anonymised feedback upon the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog post "How many usage problems are there, Emily?" (reproduced with permission from the writer, a female native speaker of American English): I'm afraid I don't remember which website I found your link on. I was chasing around the internet trying to find the best slam dunk on the "singular they" issue, which my dad had just said something stupid about. I'd be happy to look at your new survey if you give me the link. As far as the other, no I don't own a Fowler. If I have a question about usage I just poll a few people whose taste in language I find generally reliable. Or I'll read it out loud a couple different ways and see which one sounds best. But mostly I just trust my intuition. Pet peeves … Literally, of course. One that I'm pretty sure I'm in the wrong about, but can't stop an involuntary twitch when I hear, is "legendary." I don't like it being applied to living people and factual events. I want it reserved for big foot and historical figures whose reputation has expanded over time. I think this may date to childhood trauma about the distinction between mythic and mythical. Jargon bothers me. Legalese and business babble and so forth. Can't think of any examples, though. People who say "hung" when referring to actions involving nooses. That makes me twitch, even if on the other hand it makes more sense and part of me assumes that's the natural course of the language and the sooner we get there the better. The use of whom. It's fine to use it if you are in the objective case and are trying to sound like a snob, but otherwise say who. I won't say who directly after a preposition, but I do re-write sentences to avoid being in that position. It's lovely to have that as an option for when you do (for whatever reason) want to sound like a snob, but only then.

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"With which" et al to avoid ending a clause with a preposition likewise. I'll use it if the clause is too long and people are likely to get lost, but it sounds pretentious. Again, it's nice to have the option when one wants that effect. Oh, and excessive use of "like." I don't notice it if it is sprinkled lightly in the senses of "I read in like Newsweek [although it might have been Time]" or "And I was like 'are you insane,' although of course I didn't say that," but when it gets too heavy it grates, and makes me think negative things about the speaker. I've got a coworker who does some very peculiar things with past tenses and plurals, although he was born in the US and went to school a few miles from me in upper-middle-class suburban Maryland, where he would have heard about as standard of American English as could be found. His parents are immigrants, but still. Some of the things he says puts my teeth on edge, but I think that is mostly because it's him doing them, and he's the kind of aggressively stupid coworker who would make Mother Theresa fantasize about euthanasia. People who mix up infer and imply. There's some other pair like that I don't like, but I can't recall which. Borrow vs lend I've concluded is a dialect problem and accepted, although it irritates that I have to stop and figure out what's going on. Convince vs persuade I don't care about. I think decimate should indicate a destruction rate between 40 and 90%. It sounds stupid in the case of 10% destruction, but I don't approve of it used in cases of 100% destruction. Can't off hand think of words that make me grumpy when mispronounced, although I feel like there are some. I tend to do nucular myself. It's just easier in the mouth. Oh. I find feb-Ru-a-ry pretentious, but I can't stop myself saying it that way. Oh, god, right. Lozenger. Where the hell is that R supposed to have come from? Read the effing package! In writing … My boss is unaware of the existence of the comma key, and reading her emails involves entering a dreamlike state, but that's a different issue. People who mix up there/their/they're, to/two/too or your/you're. It's vs its I don't notice when I read. Writers who use the word chuckle, or the word fellow in settings other than victorian era upper class. I just don't think those are words real people use.

Appendix 2 Usage problems in the HUGE database

The 123 usage problems in the HUGE database, taken from 77 selected British and American English usage guides (example sentences can be retrieved from the HUGE database): • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

’d rather (not) as/so far as -ic/-ical -lily adverbs a/an aggravate ain’t all that/so easy alright/all right alternative apostrophe as well (as) … or better than at (the) university at/in averse to/from between/among both … and But/And can/may comma splice compare with compound subject contemporary corporeal/corporal could of dangling participle dare data is/are

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

decimate demonstrative them different to/than/from disinterested/uninterested double negatives double passive due to/owing to each other/one another effect/affect either … or … or either is/are either of them/each of them equally as evenings and Sundays false attraction family is/are farther/further flaunt/flout foreign plurals former/latter from thence gay get thither have to/have got to have went hisself hoi polloi hopefully

Appendix 2

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

I for me if/whether in/into in/under circumstances infer/imply it is I/it is me lay/lie learn/teach lend/loan less/fewer less/least like/as like/as if like/the way likely literally may/might me/myself me for I meet with/meet up with momentarily more warmer most perfect mutual neither … nor … are/is none in plural context nouns of multitude off/from off of omission of relative pronoun on to/onto one … one/he one of those who only

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

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preposition at end of sentence pretty providing/provided quicker/more quickly than reason is because shall/will singular they slow/slowly snuck and dove split auxiliaries split infinitive spoonsful subject-complement superlative comparison than I/me thankfully that/which the two first the way/in the way them/their + Ving there’s this/these sort of thusly try and/to upon very/much amused very unique was/were when who/whom who(m)/which/that whose/of which your/you’re

Appendix 3 Usage guide writers interviewed

Selected usage guide writers (Ann Batko, Martin Cutts, Andrew Delahunty, Bernard Lamb, Patricia O'Conner, Kay Sayce and Caroline Taggart) interviewed (by email) on their personal backgrounds as well as on their motivations for writing a usage guide for the purpose of classifying them for their linguistic expertise in Chapter 4 (reproduced with the authors' consent): 1.

Ann Batko (b. 1962), When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People (2004), 13 September 2017

Yes, I am an American. I had a traditional US public school education up through high school (grade 12). I learned no Latin, but had plenty of english grammar as part of the regular language arts/English curriculum, and also had French classes in middle school through high school. I then went to college at Saint Mary's College of California, and graduated with a BA, summa cum laude in liberal arts. I was in a special four-year, non elective great books program based on the seven traditional liberal arts. I studied Greek and language theory as part of that program. My late father, Anthony Batko, was the founder and long-time president of Vocab Incorporated, a producer of educational materials–what we would today call a content developer. His focus was vocabulary, and he was fascinated with how student acquire, retain, and use vocabulary in their learning. One of his best-selling products from the 1960's through the 1990's was The Bergen Evans Vocabulary Development Program, which broke new ground in vocabulary instruction by adding an audio component and by putting the study words in context. The "context" was a series of masterful, often wry, sentences composed by Bergen Evans himself. I don't know if Evans's A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage is part of your database, but I assume it may be. Although most of my father's products related to vocabulary development, he had an idea, somewhere back in the 1980's, I think, to put together what he called a "101 Common Errors in English" program. Initially, he envisioned this as an audio product, a series of cassette

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tapes one could listen to, accompanied by a manual. But he back-burnered the project for various reasons and never did much with it. Fast forward to 1994. I was in advertising, a field I entered right out of college, but was between jobs. My father, knowing I could write–I had done some editing work for him over the summers during college–suggested maybe he could put me to work bringing the Common Errors In English program to life by writing the manual on which the recordings would be based. He had an idea about what the 101 errors should be, but that was about it. Happy for the work, I went out and bought every grammar and usage book I could find, and began researching. I wrote "the manual" over the course of 4–5 months before finding my next advertising job. My father spent years trying to find a publisher for Common Errors as an audio program, and was unsuccessful. Somewhere along the way, his agent suggested that perhaps it would be better positioned as a book. And in 2003, I think, the publisher Career Press signed on. They suggested titles that we didn't care for, and we struggled to come up with something we liked better. I finally suggested When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People almost as a joke–I was thinking of Harold Kushner's famous book (famous in the US at least), When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Career Press loved that, and used it. I'm afraid I don't really have a sense for how many units the book sold. I think it was well enough that they did additional printings, but modest overall. As for me, I have always been in advertising/marketing/communications! So unlike most, if not all, of those in your database, I came to the work on grammar indirectly. 2.

Martin Cutts (b. 1954), The Plain English Guide (1995), 28 February to 15 March 2017 Director, Plain Language Commission. British.

Educated at a State primary school and then at an independent school, Scarborough College, north Yorkshire. Eleven O-levels including English Language and English Literature. Four A-levels including English Literature. University: Liverpool, 1972 to 1974. Combined Studies: English Language and Literature, Psychology, Italian. BA honours degree. I've never been employed by a university. Jobs: editor and graphic designer for the Liverpool News […], for about three years including during my final year at university, when I was also

226

Appendix 3

editor of the student newspaper and co-editor of the arts magazine. These were all non-sabbatical posts, so I was keeping busy. Before 1995, I was a member of Clarity, the Information Design Association, and PLAIN. I joined the Statute Law Society around that time. Not sure when. From 1989 when I quit Plain English Campaign, I was running my own editing and writing-skills training business. This was first called Words at Work and then became Plain Language Commission (1994). By the way, I've not had any dealings with Plain English Campaign since 1990. At the time, there wasn't another book like it and "plain English" had been in the news, on and off, since Plain English Campaign began in 1979. The other guides that had "plain words" or "plain English" in their titles didn't seem to me to be about plain English as I understood it. They were mainly guides to using English well and I felt they were too high flown (ie, patrician, high register and up in the clouds) for most of the people I trained on my writing-skills courses (ie, officials in public services or companies who wrote stuff for the public). So I wanted to write about more basic things – particularly how those officials could make their business documents (forms, leaflets, bills, contracts) clearer for the mass of people who might have only an average or below-average level of reading skill. That audience (the mass of people) had always been my focus since editing the Liverpool News and writing and designing some of the early plain-English forms in the 1970s. Naturally I also wanted to lay down a personal marker to help make my name in the field, to get a slice of any fame and glory that might be going, and to make a little money. The cover price of the guide has always been among the lowest of OUP's formidably large output because the book is so short (a serious drawback of my habit of being concise). So the word "little" is correct here. But OUP has been brilliant in keeping the book in print for 21 years so far, and it has sold quite well. I had a lot of interest from Penguin and Bloomsbury in 1994/5 as well as OUP, but David Crystal – whom I'd met on radio programmes – advised me to go with OUP as they'd keep it in print longer – and he was proved right. They've always said I shouldn't reveal how many copies of the Guide have been sold, so I'll need to stick with that. 3.

Andrew Delahunty, The Oxford Guide to English Usage, 2nd ed., 1994, 30 September 2015

In 1983 I joined the Cobuild project in Birmingham, where I was trained as a lexicographer and was one of the senior compilers on the first Cobuild

Appendix 3

227

dictionary, published by Collins in 1987. I have worked in lexicography and English language reference publishing ever since. After I left Cobuild I worked in-house as a reference book editor/publisher first at Routledge and then at Longman, before going freelance in 1991. Since then I have written, edited, and contributed to a wide variety of dictionaries and reference books for learners of English, children (at both primary and secondary level) and native-speaker adults. I have authored/co-authored several books, including dictionaries of nicknames, allusions, and sporting terms. I was hired by OUP in 1992 to assist Edmund Weiner on the revision of his 1983 Oxford Miniguide (as it was then called) to English Usage. As far as I remember, my task was to review each entry in the light of the usage recommendations given in the most recent editions of certain Oxford dictionaries (Concise, Pocket etc.) and to ensure that the guidance offered was by and large consistent. I think part of my job was also to suggest where the text could be made a little more user-friendly and the style loosened up. The aim was to make the text slightly less prescriptive and to distinguish more clearly between usages that are simply incorrect and those that are less recommended or to be used only in informal contexts. We also added some new material, making use of corpus support and additional citational evidence. The core of the book, though, and its arrangement, were very much Edmund's, and it always struck me as remarkably generous (on both his part and that of OUP) that I was given a full co-author credit on OGEU [Oxford Guide to English Usage]. So I was already a fairly experienced lexicographer when I worked on OGEU, though it's fair to say that this was my first book specifically on English usage. A year or two later I was consultant editor on the Hutchinson Concise Dictionary of English Usage (Helicon 1995) and the Pocket version of the same title. Rather than contributing to usage guides per se, however, I am more likely to myself incorporating usage notes into dictionaries I'm working on, e.g. various editions of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Oxford School Dictionary. For lexicographers, usage is often not a separate topic, but closely bound up in the treatment of such matters as meaning, grammar, and register. […] To answer some of your other questions: I was born in 1959 in Manchester, where I attended Xaverian College, a Catholic grammar school. I did study Latin up to O Level, but not Greek. I studied English Literature at Bangor University in North Wales (1977–1980), and after graduating I stayed on to complete an MA (1982). 4.

Bernard Lamb (b. 1942), The Queen's English (2010), 8 and 12 March 2017

I was born […] in London To Tiffin School, Kingston-upon-Thames, then won an open scholarship to Bristol University where I got the prize for the best

228

Appendix 3

degree in any biological subject. I was at Imperial College London from 1968 to 2008 teaching and doing research in genetics. I am Emeritus Reader in Genetics at Imperial College London. My students poor English was spoiling their genetics, with meaning-changes errors such as effect for affect (poor diet effects a woman's pregnancy), semen/ seamen and complimentary (genes)/complementary. I spent an enormous amount of time correcting their English as well as their genetics. I found that the overseas students made three times fewer errors in English than the home students. I wrote a punctuation guide for my students. In 2009, Michael O'Mara commissioned me to write "The Queen's English and How to Use It", which came out in hardback in 2010, and now is in ebook, paperback and French and Italian translations. I want people of any age to improve their English and to enjoy English through understanding it better, preferably using my book, which is meant to be very approachable and practical. It is suitable for anyone age 11 upwards. The standards of English are very poor here, in children, adults, and often in the media too. I wrote three books in the 1990s based on research surveys for the Queen's English Society, one on UK undergraduates' standards of English, one on the communication skills of young entries to industry and commerce, and one on the opinions and practices of teachers of English. These surveys, which received a lot of publicity, showed up a great need for better teaching of English grammar, spelling, punctuation, vocabulary and style. 5.

Patricia O'Conner, author of Woe is I (1996), 25 September 2015

As an undergraduate (Grinnell College in Iowa) I majored in philosophy and minored in English. I earned a BA in 1971. I had the necessary credits to major in English and could have taken a double degree, but at the time I imagined an academic future in philosophy. (That didn't happen.) In graduate school, I worked toward (but did not finish) a master's degree in urban journalism. I went to work, first as a newspaper reporter, then as a newspaper editor, and eventually wound up in 1982 at the New York Times, where I worked on various news desks before eventually becoming an editor of the New York Times Book Review. (Note "an" editor, not "the" editor.) I edited reviews and sometimes wrote them as well. While at the Book Review, I was approached by a publisher who asked me to write a lighthearted, accessible book on grammar and usage. This became my first book Woe Is I.

Appendix 3

229

In writing the book, I gathered, categorized, and analyzed the errors and problem constructions that I always found myself correcting in the work of reporters as well as writers of book reviews – who are often quite distinguished academics. In explaining the reasons for various edits, I always used simple English, since writers were not always familiar with technical grammar terms. What I tried to do in the book was use this same approach in explaining grammar and usage problems with the general reader. In short, it was my 20+ years of experience as an editor, correcting and rewriting news copy and book reviews, that qualified me to write my first book. I merely applied the principles I had learned on the job. After I left the Times, in 1997, I returned to give seminars to copy editors, and I also did such seminars for other news organizations and companies. I also continued to write books, and eventually my husband and I started writing our blog: www.grammarphobia.com/blog Unfortunately, I did not learn Latin and Greek; I did, however, study French and German in public school, French in college, and later Italian in independent classes and private lessons. I have never belonged to a society like the one you mention. 6.

Kay Sayce (Katherine Powell) (b. 1949), What Not to Write (2006) (answers in italics), 1 May 2016

So I wonder if you could let me have answers to a number of questions, including your date of birth […], whether you went to grammar school or not (government school in Zimbabwe), if you have a university degree (BA Hon Social Sciences), what your current occupation is (semi-retired; my career was in book publishing; I still do some freelance work, but most of my energies in this field are now focused on my husband's work – he is a novelist, published by Orion, Penguin and Picador) and whether you ever held a university position – (no), if you are a member of a professional organisation (like one for teachers, the Pure English Society, that kind of thing – no) and what other books you published (A Town called Victoria – social history; Perceptions and Practice – third world development; Serving Secretly – political memoir, I was the ghost writer; and many titles when I ran a publishing company in Zimbabwe in the 1980s called Quest) Are you British? (yes) And what made you decide to write a usage guide to begin with? (I created "house style sheets" for many development aid agencies in the 1990s, was aware of dropping standards in English usage in the workplace in general, and then realised the sheets could form the basis of a book; I enjoyed writing and publishing it, but not the marketing, and so sold it to a publisher based in Singapore, Talisman, and now I just update it from time to time).

230

Appendix 3

What I'd also be interested in is if you could give me some idea of how well your book sold (I sold about 3000 copies in the UK – mainly to large law firms – before selling the book to Talisman, who have since sold c 25,000 copies, mostly in Asia but also in the UK). 7.

Caroline Taggart (b. 1954), Her Ladyship's Guide to the Queen's English (2010), 24 February to 25 September 2015

This sort of book (and certainly My Grammar and I) is often picked up by local newspapers and also by those magazines that are published just before Christmas and suggest bright ideas for presents. My experience, both of reviews and of the occasional letter from a reader, is that they compliment me on my clear way of expressing myself and/or my humorous tone, and then point out a mistake or raise an issue on which they disagree! As for selection principles, […] this is a very dignified name for the process I went through! I read Nancy Mitford's Noblesse Oblige and considered which of her examples were appropriate today; then I looked at several more serious and comprehensive guides to English and chose examples (of "confusibles", for example) that appealed to me. And I mentioned it to friends, many of whom came up with examples of expressions or confusions that annoyed them. But it was very personal – I basically wrote about the things that amused or annoyed me. […] I was brought up in New Zealand but returned to the UK at the age of 15 and finished my schooling here. I then did a BA (Hons) at Sheffield University – joint honours in French and Spanish, graduating in 1976. I got my first job in publishing in 1978, moved to Elm Tree Books (now defunct, but part of Hamish Hamilton) in 1981, became an editor there and left to go freelance in 1989. I have been a freelance editor ever since, with the occasional foray into writing in the 1990s (The Handbook for Mature Students and a couple of books about dogs), but these were oddities that arose out of other people's personal circumstances. I really started writing with I Used to Know That, which was published in 2008 and have written or co-written 19 other books since (they should all be on my website if you want to look further). So my career as a wordsmith (like much of my career) is an accidental one, based on decades of experience of using the language and helping to improve other people's use of it, rather than any formal training in it. I did Latin till first year university. Not Greek.

Appendix 4 Usage guide writers’ credentials

Information retrieved for the usage guide writers discussed in the present book (in chronological order) for their classification in Chapter 4, Table 4.4, based on the ODNB, the ANB, Wikipedia and other online resources like the authors’ own websites, WorldCat (on the usage guides’ publication histories) and, in some cases, private communication with the authors concerned (see Appendix 3) (for many older writers relevant information was drawn from their works’ prefaces; other sources are provided in the footnotes1):

Unknown

Unknown

60

54

1770

1847

1851

1864

1867

1868

Baker (fl. 1766−1799)2

Hurd (fl. 1834−1847)3

Brown (1791−1857)

Alford (1810−1871)4

Gould (fl. 1867)

Moon (1823−1909)

45

Unknown

Age at writing

Date usage guide

Author

University degree

Unknown

Private school; grammar school Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

MA, BD, DD Cambridge

[Spent a few Unknown years in France] [member of circulating library] Unknown Unknown [well read; access to public libraries] Unknown Unknown [well read]

Pre-university education

Unknown

Unknown

Cambridge, 1841−1842

Unknown

Unknown

No

University position

Unknown

Unknown

“Instructing youth in four languages” Dean of Canterbury; biblical scholar Lectured on elocution

[Fellow, Royal Society of Literature]

[Founded a choral society] Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Membership society

Public lecturer on English grammar

Hack writer

Relevant profession/ occupation

[Work on history; “previous essays”] [Poetry] The Dean’s English, 1864

[Poetry]

Two earlier English grammars

Unknown

[Various books, none on language]

Earlier publications on language

48

55

Unknown

42

1870

1881

1901

1906

White (1822−1885)5

Ayres (1826−1927)6

Fitzgerald (fl. 1895−1901)

Vizetelly (1864−1938)7

Unknown [well read on the topic: references in preface] Unknown

No Christian brothers school St. Servan, Brittany; Lycée Baudard, Nogent-surMarne; Lansdowne School (Brighton) and Arnold College (Eastbourne)

Unknown

Unknown

Bristol College, MA PA New York University; studied medicine and law

No

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown; “admitted to Bar in 1845”

Unknown

[Vice-President of the New Shakespeare Society of London]

Assistant Unknown editor of North American Review and Forum Lexicographer Unknown and editor; “radio broadcasting pioneer”

Literary and musical critic; Shakespearean scholar; mathematician; journalist; social critic; lawyer Unknown

(Continued )

Contributed to Standard Dictionary of the English Language, 1894; published The Preparation of Manuscripts for the Printer, 1905

Pitfalls in English, 1895

The Orthoëpist, 1880

[Many publications on Shakespeare before 1870]

Date usage guide

1906 1926

1906

1910

1911

Author

Fowler, H.W.8 (1858−1933)

Fowler, F.G.9 (1871−1918)

Turck Baker10 (1873−1942)

Payne (fl. 1911)

(Cont.)

Unknown

37

36

48 68

Age at writing Oxford (Balliol), Classics

University degree

Unknown

Unknown

BA Milwaukee-Downer College (1895), MA Boston School of Oratory (1897); two honorary PhDs Unknown

St Paul’s Cambridge School, London (Peterhouse), Classics

Rugby

Pre-university education

Unknown

No

No

No

University position

Earlier publications on language

Unknown

[Various publications, also on language; COD, 1911 (with F.G. Fowler)] No [Publications with H.W. Fowler; COD, 1911] Established Magazine Correct International English, textSociety for books [plays, Correct English poetry, a novel]

No

Membership society

Unknown Teacher of reading and composition in the State Normal School, San Jose, CA

Author; publisher [composer]

Translator

Teacher; writer; translator

Relevant profession/ occupation

1917

1918

1927

1935

Hall (1856−1928)

Strunk (1869−1946)

Krapp11 (1872−1934)

Horwill (1864−1952)

71

54

49

61

Possibly (see final column)

Wittenberg College

Unknown

Randolph Macon College

Unknown

No

“Educated at Oxford”

Clergyman

Instructor in “Philologist and Unknown English, man of letters” Teachers College, Columbia University

(Continued )

[Literary editions: Macauley & Johnson, Dryden, Shakespeare, Cynewulf] [Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records] Good English: Its Growth and Present Use, 1909 [Rise of English Literary Prose] [Wrote on the gospel, 1894; on studying Greek and Latin, 1887; on the American Constitution, 1925]

“Educator and grammarian” Unknown

[Translated Beowulf, 1897]

Literary scholar Unknown and poet, university lecturer

PhD Johns Hopkins

Lecturer in English language and literature, College of William and Mary BA University Taught mathof Cincinnati; ematics; PhD Cornell instructor in English at Cornell

PhD Johns Hopkins University

39 54 56

59

1936 1951 1953

[1939] 1978

Vallins (1897−1956)

Ebbitt, Wilma R.12 (b. 1919)

59

1936

Treble (b. 1877)

Age at writing

Date usage guide

Author

(Cont.)

Unknown

Beckenham County School (Kent)

Unknown

Pre-university education

University of Chicago; PhD Brown University

King’s College, London

Unknown

University degree

Pennsylvania State University; English Faculty: composition director (1970s)

No

Unknown

University position

Unknown

Unknown

Membership society

Teacher of Eng- Unknown lish composition

English schoolmaster; grammarian; author

Writer; grammarian

Relevant profession/ occupation

English Prose, 1916; The Gateway to English, 1927 (with Vallins) [Everyday Life in Rome, 1930 (with K.M. King); Narrative Essays (with Vallins); other joint literary publications] The Gateway to English, 1926 (with Treble) [Narrative Essays (with Treble); other joint literary publications] Index to English, 1965 (with David Ebbitt); other books on English [dissertation on Margaret Fuller]

Earlier publications on language

48

53

56

1942

1948

1957

1957

1957

Partridge (1894−1979)

Gowers13 (1880−1966)

Nicholson (fl. 1956−1957)

Evans, Bergen14 (1904−1978)

Evans, Cornelia (1901–1986)15

Unknown

68

Unknown

Ebbitt, David R. (fl. 1939−1978)

Lasell Seminary for Young Women; Wellesley College (Massachusetts)

Unknown

Unknown

Rugby

Toowoomba grammar school (NZ)

Unknown

Columbia University, New York City

BA Miami University; MA, PhD Harvard

Unknown

No

No

Writer of articles, essays, short novels

“Public servant, writer of reference works” Unknown Author of manual (see final column) Northwestern English teacher; University, TV host professor of English

[Index to English, 1965 (with Wilma Ebbitt)] Words, Words, Words, 1933; published on slang, punctuation, Shakespeare’s bawdy language

(Continued )

[Royal Institute [Revised MEU, of British 1966] Architects] Unknown [Manual of Copyright Practice, 1956] Unknown [Word-A-Day Vocabulary Builder, 1963; Dictionary of Quotations, 1969] Unknown [Book on the Bering Sea, 1944]

“Lexicographer Unknown and etymologist”; teacher

Briefly: universities of Manchester, London

French and English, University of Queensland; MA in eighteenth-century English literature; poetry; Oxford BLitt Clare College, Cambridge

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Published posthumously

62

1966

1975

Follett (1887−1963)

Morris, William16 (1913–1980)

57

1962

Wood (b. 1905)

Age at writing

Date usage guide

Author

(Cont.)

Unknown

University degree

Phillips Exeter Academy [taught Latin]

BA Harvard

Public schools BA Harvard in North Attle- (major in boro, MA English)

Unknown

Pre-university education

Taught English at Texas Agricultural & Mechanical College; Dartmouth College; Brown University Unknown

Unknown

University position

Unknown

“Author and editor”; teacher of English

Lexicographer; Unknown teacher of English, Latin and American history; dictionary editor

Unknown

Membership society

Grammarian; writer

Relevant profession/ occupation

Editor of American Heritage Dictionary, 1969, and other dictionaries; Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, 1962 (with Mary Morris); “wrote many books on language and usage”

Outline History of the English Language, before 1950; The Groundwork of English Grammar, 1961 [Wrote on Joseph Conrad, 1915; edited The Work of Stephen Crane, 1925–1928]

Earlier publications on language

1975

1988

1980

1981

1981 1984 1996

Morris, Mary (d. 1986)

Bailie (fl. 1979−1983) Kitchin (fl. 1979−1988)

Swan17 (b. 1936)

Vermes (fl. 1959−1991)

Burchfield (1923−2004)

58 61 76

Unknown

Wanganui Technical College (NZ)

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

44

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Visiting professor St Mary’s University College, Twickenham Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Victoria Uni- Lecturer in versity, Wel- English lington (NZ); Magdalen College, Oxford

Unknown

Modern Languages at Oxford

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Handbook writer (secretarial skills), advice literature Lexicographer; scholar; writer

Unknown

Unknown

Writer on Eng- Unknown lish Language teaching; applied linguist

Unknown

Unknown

Lexicographer

(Continued )

OED Supplement, 1972−1986

[Books on letter writing, business etiquette, fitness]

[Choosing a Name, 1979; A Name for Your Baby, 1981] Various ELT books since 1970s; scholarly publications since 1985

Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, 1962 (with William Morris) Unknown

Date usage guide

1983 1994

1994

1984

1984

Author

Weiner (1950−)

Delahunty (b. 1959)

Bryson18 (1951−)

Crystal (1941−)19

(Cont.)

43

33

35

33

Age at writing

St Mary’s College, Liverpool

Unknown

Xaverian College, O-level Latin

Unknown

Pre-university education

Relevant profession/ occupation

Linguist

Sub-editor at the Times, writer

Lecturer in Lexicographer OE, ME and English linguistic history, Christ Church, Oxford No Lexicographer

University position

Drake Univer- No sity (two years); honorary doctorate King’s College London English at Bangor UniUCL versity, Reading University

MA English Literature, Bangor University (North Wales)

Kellogg College, Oxford

University degree

Fellow British Academy (2000)

Unknown

No

Unknown

Membership society

Books on a wide variety of linguistic topics

One of the compilers of the Cobuild dictionary; wrote many dictionaries and reference books for learners of English [The Book of Blunders, 1982]

–

Earlier publications on language

1988

1988

1988

1988

1988

Booher (fl. 1979−2015)

Greenbaum (1929−1996)

Whitcut20 (1926−2016)

Carter21 (fl. 1983−1990)

Skates (fl. 1983−1990)

Unknown

Unknown

62

59

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

BA North Texas State University; MA English literature, University of Houston Left school at BA University 15; admitted to of London, Jews’ College Hebrew and Aramaic; BA in English; PhD “Home Literature at schooled”; University of attended Cambridge; school in St London Andrews School of Economics, London University Unknown Unknown

Unknown Writer of advice literature

University of Southern Mississippi University of Southern Mississippi

Handbook writers (on writing) Handbook writers (on writing)

Research with Linguist; grammarian Randolph Quirk at UCL, Survey of English Usage; founded ICE No Writer on usage; (freelance) lexicographer

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

[Jewish Historical Society, Society for Jewish Studies]

Unknown

(Continued )

Technical Writing, 1983

Technical Writing, 1983

Learning with LDOCE, 1979; revised Gowers, 1954, with Greenbaum

Many publications on English language (grammar and usage) prior to 1988

[Many books on business and personal development topics since the early 1980s]

1988

1991

1992

Randall (fl. 1988−1991)

De Vries (fl. 1970−2000)

Marriott22 (b. 1961)

Farrell (fl. 1990s) 1992 Wilson23 1993 (1924–2003)

Date usage guide

Author

(Cont.)

Unknown 69

31

Unknown

Unknown

Age at writing

Unknown Unknown

Grammar school

Unknown

Unknown

Pre-university education

Unknown BA Albion College, MI; MA and PhD University of Michigan

BA in politics, MA in journalism

Unknown

Unknown

University degree

Unknown “the first sixteen years of his working life”

MA lecturer in journalism

Unknown

Unknown

University position

Journalist (writer, sub-editor); EFL teacher EFL teacher Teacher; linguist

Practical handbook writer

Editor; teacher of other editors; collector of citations from voluminous reading

Relevant profession/ occupation

Unknown MLA; NCTE

No

Unknown Co-author of Harbrace Guide to Dictionaries, 1963; Van Winkle’s Return: Changes in

[Since 1970s: many books on business, law, correspondence, management; secretaries’ guides] –

–

Unknown

Unknown

Earlier publications on language

Membership society

78

Unknown

1994

1995

1995

Blamires (1916−2017)26

Ayto (fl. 1982−)27

Cutts (b. 1954)

41

77

1993

Mager, Sylvia25 (b. 1916)

Unknown

80

1993

Mager, Nathan24 1993 (b. 1913)

Howard (fl. 1980−2002)

Four A-levels incl. English literature

Grange Grammar School, Bradford Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Writer on language

Unknown

Editor

“Author, editor and publisher for over 40 years” Unknown “Writer, editor, researcher, newspaper and magazine columnist” Head of Eng- Theologian; litlish, Winches- erary critic; ter University novelist Taught Lexicographer courses at Surrey University [unknown when]

Unknown

BA Hons Eng- No lish, Psychology, Italian

Medieval English, Durham University

Studied at Oxford

Hunter College

Unknown

Unknown

Dictionary of Word Origins, 1982; The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, 1992; and other books

[Novels and other books]

[Various items of advice literature]

(Continued )

Various books Plain English Campaign (until on language 1989); Plain Language Commission

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

American English, 1966–1986 (1987) A Guide to Good English in the 1980s, 1985 [Various publications, advice literature]

1998

2000

2001

Burt (fl. 2000–)

Trask (1944−2004)

Posthumous (since his 60s) 40

1997

Garner (1958−)

42

1997

Stilman (b. 1955) Amis28 (1922−1995)

57

Unknown

47

1996

O’Conner (1949−)

Age at writing

Date usage guide

Author

(Cont.)

(in America)

Unknown

Unknown

University position

PhD UCL

Liverpool, Sussex

BA University Unknown of Texas; Law school [Very likely] Unknown

Swansea, Peterhouse (Cambridge)

BA philosophy No Grinnell College Unknown Unknown

University degree

City of London BA Oxford School

Unknown

Unknown

Pre-university education

Membership society

Unknown

Unknown

[Garrick Club]

Historical linUnknown guist (grammar, Basque)

Lawyer; lexicographer; teacher Teacher of English

Novelist; poet; critic; teacher

Editor of Unknown New York Times Book Review Editor Unknown

Relevant profession/ occupation

Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, 1987 Language in Action, 1999; (with William Vandyck) Grammar Repair Kit, 1999 A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics, 1995

[26 novels and other writings (poetry, essays)]

Unknown

–

Earlier publications on language

2003

2004

2004

2006

2007

Brians (b. 1942)

Peters (1942–)

Batko (b. 1962)

Sayce (b. 1949)

Butterfield (b.1951)29

56

57

42

62

61

Grammar school

Government school

Public school

Knowledge of Latin

College

Classical languages at Oxford

BA Hons English and Latin; MA Old Norse BA Liberal Arts St Mary’s College of California; Greek, language theory BA Hons Social Sciences

Yes

Unknown

EFL teacher; translator; Editor-in-Chief of Collins Dictionaries; lexicographer

Writer and publisher

Advertising; marketing; communication

–

No

Linguist

Unknown

No

ABC standing committee on spoken English (since 1996) No

(Emeritus) Pro- [The Quarter fessor of Century Club English of WSU]

Retired from Macquarie University

Washington State University (retired 2008)

(Continued )

“House style sheets” for development aid agencies in the 1990s Dictionaries and grammars of English

[Books since 1975] website Common Errors in English Usage since 1997 Publications on language and linguistics since 1985 –

Date usage guide

2008

2010

2010

2010

Author

Fogarty (b. 1967)

Taggart (1954−)

Lamb30 (b. 1942)

Heffer (b. 1960)

(Cont.)

50

68

56

41

Age at writing BA in English; MS in biology

University degree

Grammar school

Imperial College London (retired)

No

[Not at the time]

University position

MA English No CCC, Cambridge; PhD in History

BA Hons French and Spanish, Sheffield University Tiffin School, BSc, PhD, DSc Kingston-upon- Bristol Thames University

Latin in school until first year university

Unknown

Pre-university education

Many books on popular topics; one earlier usage guide with J.A. Wines Punctuation guide [publications on genetics]

Grammar Girl since 2006

Unknown

Unknown

Earlier publications on language

Membership society

President of the Queen’s English Society (since 2007); life member since 1981 [Fellow Society of Biology; Royal Society of Medicine] Journalist; Unknown [Books on hisauthor; political torical and politcommentator ical topics]

Geneticist; teacher

Science writer, online; editor; magazine writer; technical writer Editor

Relevant profession/ occupation

Appendix 4

247

Notes 1 Information between square brackets provides additional biographical information and other context on the authors concerned. 2 Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2010). 3 Cf. Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2015). 4 Surprisingly, the ODNB does not mention The Queen’s English (cf. Busse 2015: 80). 5 Cf. Busse (2015). 6 “Alfred Ayres” is the pseudonym of Thomas Embley Osmun (Finegan 1998: 573). 7 Cf. “A word a day man: A biography”, https://web.archive.org/web/20110810163333/ http://french.chass.utoronto.ca/sable/recherche/catalogues/Vizetelly/Frankbiography. htm. 8 McMorris (2001). 9 McMorris (2001) and Ogier (2006/7). 10 Evanston Women’s History Database (formerly at www.epl.org/ewhp/display .php?bioid=35) and Kostadinova (2018c). 11 Cf. Finegan (1998: 576). 12 Information retrieved from www.psuaeir.org/home/our-history (no longer accessible). 13 Scott (2009). 14 Their book produced a television spin-off, called The Last Word (1957−1959). 15 www.totleyhistorygroup.org.uk/people-of-interest/evans-family/. 16 See his obituary in the New York Times, 4 January 1994 (www.nytimes.com/ 1994/01/04/obituaries/william-morris-dictionary-editor-and-word-columnist-diesat-80.html). 17 Cf. Michael Swan’s own website: https://mikeswan.net/as well as personal communication. 18 Richert (2011). 19 Cf. www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2017/10-november/features/interviews/inter view-david-crystal-linguistics-scholar-and-writer-on-the-english-language. 20 https://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/2013/12/28/who-was-is-janet-whitcut/and https://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/2016/01/07/happy-birthday-janet-whitcut/. 21 Carter and Skates ([1988] 1990: title-page). 22 On the website of Plain English, Ireland (www.plainenglish.ie/about-us/), Sarah Marriott identifies herself as a journalist (writer and sub-editor), lecturer in journalism, teacher of English as a foreign language and the author of Common Errors in Written English (1992); at the time of writing the usage guide, she informed me, she and her co-author Barrie Farrell were both teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). 23 See his obituary notice at http://advance.uconn.edu/2003/030317/03031704.htm; see also Mair (2006, p. 18). 24 Revised by John Domini (b. 1951). 25 See previous footnote. 26 www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2017/8-december/gazette/obituaries/obituaryharry-blamires. 27 www.atanet.org/chronicle-online/highlights/interview-with-john-ayto-lexicog rapher/#sthash.aYpEt5Xp.dpbs. 28 Leader (2006). 29 Personal communication. 30 Cf. http://queens-english-society.org/.

Appendix 5 The metalinguistic categories from Sundby et al. (1991)

The 33 categories distinguished by Sundby et al. (1991: 44–53) (illustrated with random examples of the metalinguistic terms attested):

Absurd Affected Bad Barbarous Burlesque Cant Censurable Childish Colloquial Corrupt Dialectal Erroneous French Greek Harsh Imprecise Improper Inaccurate Inelegant Italian Latin New Obsolete Offensive Poetic Rare Redundant

absurdity, does not make sense, preposterous affected modes of speech, artificial, ladyisms bad English, intolerably bad, not good English barbarity, (flagrant) barbarism confined to the burlesque style cant phrases, mere shopkeepers’ cant inadmissible, intolerable, very blameable childish phrases careless, familiar, jocular, slovenly corrupted, very great corruption dialect, in some places they say, provincial idiom blunder, common fault, gross mistake, unnatural French expression, imitation of the French idiom Grecism, Greek cacophony, disagreeable, troublesome, unpleasant ambiguous, apt to confound, contradictory, incoherent great impropriety, we cannot say with propriety exceedingly inaccurate, familiar/grammatical inaccuracy awkward, feeble, tedious, ungraceful Italian Latin lately introduced, new-coined, novelty ancient, disused, not now in use, old-fashioned bad taste, despicable, disgusting, odious especially in verse, hardly allowable in poetry, poetical infrequent, seldom used dispensable, expletive, useless

Appendix 5

Scotticism Solecism Uncouth Ungrammatical Undiomatic Vulgar

peculiar to Scotland, Scottish use (glaring/gross) solecism extremely uncouth, uncouthness contrary to grammar rules, not proper grammar apt to be used by foreigners, not English coarse, execrable vulgarism, illiterate

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Index

Note: The usage guide writers’ life dates may be found in Appendix 4. ABC of Plain Words (1951) 5; see also Gowers, Sir Ernest; Complete Plain Words, The; Plain Words Academy, English 5, 16, 21–24, 25 adjectives for adverbs 26, 139 Age of informants 122–123, 133, 145, 165, 171, 172, 210; see also usage guides: authors of, age ain’t 60, 64, 107–108, 150, 168–169, 171, 172, 175, 177, 222 Alford, Henry 79, 81, 88, 90, 93, 97 Allen, Robert: Pocket Fowler (1999) 50, 57, 99, 100–101, 121, 127, 131, 140, 141, 158 American English 19, 32, 60, 64, 65, 117–119, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 132, 136, 138, 143, 144, 145, 146, 150, 159, 164, 177, 189–190, 202, 207, 208, 215; see also COCA; COHA; TIME corpus American Heritage Dictionary (1969) 108, 109, 172 American Heritage Guide (2005) 26, 57, 63, 118–119, 131, 141–142, 150, 155, 157, 178 Americanisms 64, 65, 81, 127, 132, 135, 136–137, 146, 152, 163–164, 166, 171, 179, 194, 199–200 Amis, Kingsley 7, 45, 76, 78, 79, 82, 95, 97, 185, 195–197, 203, 244; language in the novels 189–191, 193–196, 203, 205–206, 210–211; letters to the editor 185, 198–200

apostrophe placement 6, 60, 111, 114, 116, 140, 152, 172, 182, 198, 211–212, 215, 222 attitudes surveys: 2012 survey 119, 122, 134, 135, 152, 161–163, 165, 171, 176, 193, 204, 210; Mittins et al. (1970) 8, 18, 59, 106, 110, 113, 119–120, 123, 137, 138, 168, 173–174, 175, 207 attitudes to usage 13, 18, 19, 56, 112, 119, 123, 128–129, 134, 139, 145, 155, 162, 165, 172, 175, 177, 178, 183, 204, 206, 208, 214, 216, 217, 218–219; see also usage surveys Ayres, Alfred 78, 79, 82, 84, 90, 91, 93, 97, 233; Verbalist, The (1881) 36, 57, 64, 77, 121, 145 Ayto, John 78, 82, 84, 95, 97, 243; Good English (1995) 57, 99, 121, 131 Bailie, John 78, 82, 94, 97, 239; Essential Guide to English Usage (1988) 48, 57, 75, 121, 127, 143, 179; see also Kitchin, Moyna Baker, Robert 7, 16, 28, 32, 56, 71, 72, 78, 80–81, 82, 88, 90–91, 93, 97, 233; Reflections on the English Language (1770) 5, 15, 16, 21, 26, 27–29, 45, 54, 56, 61, 62, 73, 105, 120–121, 138, 140, 150, 155, 156; Reflections on the English Language 2nd ed. (1779) 28–29, 56, 62, 71, 121, 156 Barnes, Julian (b. 1946) 211–212 Barzun, Jacques 37, 39

268

Index

Batko, Ann 53, 75, 77, 78, 81, 82, 96, 97, 224–225, 245; When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People (2004) 43, 53, 57, 79, 99, 102, 131, 139, 149 BBC 38, 64, 71, 146, 190, 202–203, 204, 215; style guides 41, 42, 59, 215; see also Burchfield, Robert Bellum Grammaticale (1712) 22–24 between you and I 55, 59, 107–108, 109, 111, 149, 170–171, 174, 175 Blamires, Harry 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 95, 97, 243; Queen’s English (1994) 5, 57, 121 BNC (British National Corpus) 10, 50, 117–118, 123–125, 128–130, 132, 136–137, 143, 144, 150 Booher, Dianna 78, 79, 82, 85–86, 89, 95, 97, 241; Good Grief, Good Grammar (1988) 57, 74, 99 Brians, Paul 71, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 89, 96, 97–98, 245; Common Errors in English (2003) 52, 57, 63, 99, 101–102, 118, 119, 121, 131, 151–152; Website 52, 81, 218; see also online usage advice Brightland’s grammar (1711) 22–23 Briticisms/Britishisms 65, 177 British English 10, 14, 19, 50, 51, 53, 64, 65, 66, 117, 118, 124–126, 129, 132, 135–137, 143, 144, 145, 146, 150, 152, 158, 159, 164, 166, 167, 175, 177, 201, 202, 207, 208, 215; see also BNC; Hansard corpus Brown, Goold 76, 77, 78, 82–83, 90, 91, 93, 97, 232; Grammar of English Grammars (1851) 32–33, 36, 43, 57, 63 Bryson, Bill 70, 76, 77, 78, 82, 90–91, 94, 97, 240; Troublesome Words (1984) 43, 48, 57, 63, 70, 73, 85, 98, 99, 102, 121, 126, 127 Burchfield, Robert 14, 66, 77, 78, 82, 84, 87, 88, 90, 94, 97, 109–110, 239; Modern English Usage (1996) 3–4, 6, 14, 43–44, 46, 57, 63, 87, 89, 99, 108–109, 110, 113, 118, 119, 121, 127, 131, 140, 143, 144, 156, 159, 194; Spoken Word (1981) 11, 57, 59, 61, 89, 121–122, 215 Burgess, Anthony 171, 214 Burgess, Walton 33–34, 75; see also Five Hundred Mistakes

Burt, Angela 53, 78, 80, 82, 83, 90, 95, 97, 244; A to Z of Correct English ([2000] 2002) 56, 57, 75, 121, 131, 194 Butterfield, Jeremy 77, 78, 82, 84, 89, 96, 97, 245; Modern English Usage (2015) 2, 3–4, 87, 102; Oxford A–Z of English Usage (2007) 17, 57, 63, 88, 99, 118, 120, 131, 192 Carter, Bonny 78, 86, 95, 97, 241; Rinehart Guide to Grammar and Usage ([1988] 1990) 57, 82, 99, 121, 131; see also Skates, Craig Chandler, Raymond (1888–1959) 213–214 Churchill, Sir Winston (1874–1965) 4–5, 63–64 CIA Style Manual 38–39, 42 COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) 117, 123, 124–125, 128, 129–130, 136–137, 143, 144–145, 150 Cockney 35, 187, 203 COHA (Corpus of Historical American English) 117, 136 complaint tradition 10, 134, 185, 200; see also Amis, Kingsley; letters to the editor; McEwan, Ian Complete Plain Words, The: 1st ed. Sir Ernest Gowers (1954) 5, 52, 84, 155, 157, 159, 179; 2nd ed. Fraser (1973) 66, 73, 102; 3rd ed. Greenbaum and Whitcut (1986) 87, 102; 4th ed. Rebecca Gowers (2014) 2; see also Gowers, Sir Ernest corpora as a source for usage data see BNC COCA COHA Hansard corpus TIME corpus Crystal, David 7, 18–19, 39, 53, 56, 59, 64, 69, 76, 77, 78, 82, 84, 88, 89, 90, 95, 97, 99, 106, 108, 110, 184, 211, 216, 226, 240; Modern English Usage (1926 [2000]) 2, 3, 101; Who Cares about English Usage? ([1984] 2000) 57, 63, 121, 123, 157, 208 Cutts, Martin 75, 77, 78, 82, 95, 97, 225–226; Plain English Guide (1995) 57, 99, 100 dangling adjunct 8, 39, 55, 107–108, 111, 186, 193, 204, 217, 222 data is/are 39, 59, 107–108, 174–175, 222

Index Dear, I.C.B.: Oxford English (1986) 57, 64, 99 Deighton, Len (b. 1929) 187–189, 197, 210 Delahunty, Andrew 75, 77, 78, 82, 84, 94, 226–227, 240; see also Weiner, Edmund descriptive 10–11 descriptive approach xi, 7, 17, 19, 41, 58, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 139, 155, 183, 184, 217; descriptive vs. prescriptive 13, 120, 121 dialect 117, 135, 178, 203–204, 215 different to/from/than 30, 65, 87, 110, 195, 222 double negation 15, 27, 30, 31, 59, 63, 106, 187, 195, 202, 217, 222; drug/ dragged 117–119, 120 Ebbitt, David R. 76, 78, 82, 83, 86, 94, 97, 237; see also Ebbitt, Wilma R. Ebbitt, Wilma R. 56, 76, 78, 82, 83, 90, 94, 97, 236; Writer’s Guide and Index to English ([1939] 1978) 56, 57, 77, 89, 117–119, 121, 143, 157, 213, 214; see also Ebbitt, David R. education, lack of 44–45, 46, 132–133, 135, 163, 204–205 Estuary English 187, 203, 214 Evans, Bergen 77, 78, 82, 83, 89, 90, 94, 97, 224, 237; A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957) 57, 64, 121, 126, 194; see also Evans, Cornelia Evans, Cornelia 77, 78, 82, 83, 94, 97, 237; see also Evans, Bergen Farrell, Barrie 78, 82, 95, 97, 242; see also Marriott, Sarah first American usage guide see Hurd, Seth T. first British usage guide see Baker, Robert Fitzgerald, J. 78, 82, 84, 93, 97, 233; Word and Phrase (1901) 57, 121 Five Hundred Mistakes (1856) 15, 32, 33–36, 44, 47, 57, 61, 72, 75, 101, 105, 106, 108, 154, 188; see also Burgess, Walton

269

flat adverbs 8, 33, 107–108, 111, 119, 137–142, 144, 153, 154–156, 160, 168, 169, 170, 176, 178 Fogarty, Mignon 7, 36, 52, 56, 76, 77, 78, 81, 82, 84, 86, 87, 89–91, 96, 97, 246; Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing (2008) 52, 57, 99, 102, 121, 138–139, 145–146, 154, 158, 218; see also Grammar Girl Follett, Wilson 76, 79, 80, 82, 84, 90, 94, 97, 238; Modern American Usage (1966) 36, 39, 46, 57, 66, 76, 77, 78, 109, 121, 140, 155 foreigners’ influence on usage 163, 164, 166 Fowler, F.G. 77, 78, 79, 82, 85, 88–89, 93, 97, 234; see also Fowler, H.W.; King’s English, The (1906) Fowler, H.W. 3, 6, 7, 76, 77–78, 82, 85, 88–89, 93, 97, 234 ; see also Allen, Robert; Amis, Kingsley; Fowler, F.G.; Garner, Bryan ; King’s English, The (1906); Modern English Usage; Nicholson, Margaret Fraser, Sir Bruce see Complete Plain Words, The Garner, Bryan 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 85, 87, 90, 95, 97, 102, 244; see also Modern American Usage gender of informants 56, 172, 176, 178 Gildon, Charles (1665–1724) 22–24 Gould, Edward S. 57, 78, 82, 93, 97, 232; Good English (1867) 33, 57, 81, 121, 145 Gowers, Sir Ernest 6, 7, 52, 71, 78, 79, 81, 82, 88–89, 94, 97, 237; see also ABC of Plain Words; Complete Plain Words, The; Plain Words Gowers, Rebecca 7, 101, 151, 184, 214; see also Complete Plain Words, The grammar teaching in schools 46, 51, 132–133, 200, 201, 204–205, 228 Grammar Girl 7, 10, 86, 90, 102, 207, 218; see also Fogarty, Mignon; online usage advice Greenbaum, Sidney 76, 77, 78, 82, 84, 89, 90, 95, 97, 241; Longman Guide to English Usage (1988) 44, 45–46, 57, 64, 118, 121, 127, 141, 144; see also Gowers, Sir Ernest; Plain Words; Whitcut, Janet

270

Index

greengrocer’s apostrophe see apostrophe placement Greenwood, James (c. 1683–1737) 22, 23–24 Hall, J. Lesslie 77, 78, 82, 84, 93, 97, 235; English Usage (1917) 15, 57, 63, 65, 89, 121, 154, 158 Hansard Corpus 123, 124–125, 128, 129, 135–136, 142–143, 150 have went 14, 26, 60, 222 Heffer, Simon 7, 71, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 88, 96, 97, 101, 246; see also Strictly English (2010) Honey, John (1933–2001) 127, 204, 214; Language Trap (1983) 127, 186, 200, 202, 203; letters on language 200–203, 214, 215 hopefully 39, 59, 60, 64, 66, 87, 107–108, 112, 116, 170, 171, 172, 173, 179, 189, 193–194, 211, 222 Horwill, Herbert W. 77, 78, 79, 82, 85, 93, 97, 235; Dictionary of Modern American Usage (1935) 57, 99 Howard, Godfrey 78, 82, 85, 95, 97, 243; Good English Guide (1993) 48, 57, 64, 65, 75, 87, 99, 121, 157, 158 HUGE database (Hyper Usage Guide of English) xii, 8, 219; manual 62; searching in 26, 62–66, 86, 99, 119–137, 137–146, 151, 153–160, 168–175, 212; selection principles 47, 54–58, 87; usage guides included 36, 39, 43, 50, 53, 56–57, 58, 108, 118; usage problems included 39, 58–61, 108, 110; see also Appendix 2; Appendix 4; usage guides; usage problems (items) Humphrys, John 165 Hurd, Seth T. 32, 72, 78, 81–82, 90, 91, 93, 97, 232; Grammatical Corrector (1847) 5, 31, 32, 33, 47, 56, 62, 63, 72, 105, 106, 120, 141, 150, 188, 192

King’s English, The (1906) 5, 6, 15, 40, 45, 57, 66, 70, 99, 109; see also Fowler, F.G.; Fowler, H.W. King’s English, The (1997) 2, 15, 57, 61, 62, 70, 73, 76, 77, 79, 102, 107–109, 121, 151, 179, 185, 188–189, 193–195, 200; publishing history 70–71, 99, 194; see also Amis, Kingsley Kitchin, Moyna 78, 82, 94, 97, 239; see also Bailie, John Krapp, George Philip 77, 78, 82, 83, 89, 90, 93, 97, 235; Comprehensive Guide to Good English, A (1927) 57, 117–118, 121, 126, 141, 142, 158–159

Johnson, Samuel (1709–1784) 25, 74; Dictionary of the English Language, A (1755) 11, 27, 32, 73, 74

Lamb, Bernard 69, 71, 77, 78, 79, 82, 89, 91, 92, 96, 97, 98, 101, 227–228, 246; Queen’s English (2010) 53, 57, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 120, 121, 123, 126, 144, 145, 151 language professionals xi, 8, 9, 42, 184, 210, 218 Leonard, S.A. 2, 5, 36, 52 less/fewer 15, 30, 33, 60, 105, 107–108, 111, 116, 174–175, 181, 223 letters to the editor 71, 134, 185–186, 197–203, 204; see also complaint tradition lie/lay 26, 29, 30, 33, 39, 41, 50, 55, 59, 107–108, 223 like (discourse particle) 59, 60, 111, 112, 194–195, 211 like for as 55, 64, 107–108, 110, 112, 172, 174, 179, 187, 188, 207, 210, 223 likely, unmodified 60, 113, 119, 126–130, 154, 158–159, 160–161, 166, 167, 176, 177–178, 179, 210, 223 -lily adverbs 139, 140–144, 222 literally 60, 107–108, 151, 175, 181, 183, 220, 223 Live and Learn (1856?) 32, 34, 36, 57, 121 Lodge, David (b. 1935) 205, 206 Lowth, Robert (1710–1787) 25, 63; Short Introduction to English Grammar, A (1762) 11, 16, 23, 24, 26, 27–28, 30–31, 31–32, 39, 63, 73–74, 106, 207

Kamm, Oliver 7, 17; Accidence Will Happen (2015) 2, 5, 40, 49, 52, 53, 61, 111–112, 184

Mager, Nathan H. 77, 78, 82, 85, 90, 95, 97, 98, 243; Prentice Hall Encyclopedic Dictionary of English

it is I/me 26, 195, 223

Index Usage (1993) 57, 63, 99, 121, 141, 142, 143; see also Mager, Sylvia K. Mager, Sylvia K. 77, 78, 82, 85, 90, 95, 97, 98, 243; see also Mager, Nathan H. Marriott, Sarah 77, 78, 79, 82, 84, 85, 90, 92, 95, 97, 242; Chambers Common Errors in English (1992) 57, 85, 87, 100, 121; see also Farrell, Barrie Masson, Rosaline (1867–1949): Use and Abuse of English ([1896] 1929) 54, 56 McEwan, Ian (b. 1948) 186–187, 189, 197–198, 200, 203, 204–205, 210, 215 metalinguistic terminology 29, 30–31, 134, 144, 151, 152, 153–160, 161–168, 168–175, 175–180, 185, 186–187, 189–190, 193, 195, 210, 248–249 Modern American Usage: 1st ed. (1998) 2, 36, 40, 43, 49, 52, 57, 58, 63, 64, 99, 117–119, 121, 131, 141, 149–150, 151, 155; 2nd ed. (2003) 2; 3rd ed. (2009) 2; 4th ed. (2016) 2, 57 Modern English Usage: 1st ed. Fowler (1926) 1, 4, 5, 6, 16, 39, 40, 43, 44, 48, 50, 57, 61, 66, 70, 73, 85, 87, 99, 105, 108, 121, 126, 140, 142, 143, 151, 155, 156, 157, 159, 179, 192, 194, 205–206, 207, 208; 2nd ed. Gowers (1965) 1, 3, 16, 55, 57, 64, 85, 87, 108, 109, 121, 127, 140, 155–156; 3rd ed. Burchfield (1996) 3–4, 6, 14, 43–44, 46, 57, 63, 87, 99, 108–109, 110, 113, 118, 119, 121, 127, 131, 140, 143, 144, 156, 159, 194; 4th ed. Butterfield (2015) 2, 3–4, 87, 102; index on 2nd ed. 1, 3; popularity of 1st ed. 2, 3, 38, 48, 90, 101, 220 Moon, George Washington 77, 78, 81, 82, 93, 97, 232; Bad English of Lindley Murray (1868) 57, 81, 121, 145 Morris, Mary 77, 78, 80, 82, 94, 97, 131, 239; see also Morris, William Morris, William 77, 78, 80, 82, 94, 97, 131, 238; Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (1975) 39, 57, 63, 65, 114, 118, 119, 121, 126, 130, 131, 150, 151, 157, 159, 160; see also Morris, Mary; panels, usage Murray, Lindley (1745–1826) 31; English Grammar (1795) 31, 35, 184 myself for I or me 172, 174, 223

271

New York Public Library Writer’s Guide to Style and Usage, The (1994) 57, 64, 118, 131 Nicholson, Margaret 78, 82, 94, 97, 237; Dictionary of American Usage, A (1957) 57, 75, 85, 99, 121, 126, 142, 157, 159, 179, 207 non-standard English 8, 189, 199, 200; see also dialect norm of correctness 4, 22, 42 normative grammars 7, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 22, 39, 41, 63, 147, 151, 153, 155, 171–172, 176, 188, 204, 205; see also Lowth, Robert; Murray, Lindley; Priestley, Joseph O’Conner, Patricia 70, 74, 75, 77, 78, 82, 84, 90, 92, 95, 97, 98, 228–229, 244; Woe is I (1996) 27, 36, 47, 56, 57, 63, 69, 99, 121, 126, 151, 158 of for have 60, 111, 113, 119, 129, 130–137, 153, 154, 158, 159–160, 160–164, 166–167, 176, 177–179, 204, 222 online usage advice ix, 7, 12, 52, 102, 103, 116, 146, 186, 218; see also Brians, Paul; Grammar Girl only, placement of xi, 8, 15, 30, 39, 59, 113, 119–126, 154, 156–157, 160–161, 164, 165–167, 176, 177, 179, 180, 208, 218, 223 onto 150, 151, 223 Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (1981) 41, 57, 99 panels, usage 15, 65, 108, 150–151, 152–153, 155, 168–175, 176, 178, 179, 184, 204; members 108, 114, 169, 171–173, 180, 184, 204 Partridge, Eric 10, 77, 78, 82, 83–84, 88, 89, 90, 94, 97, 237; Usage and Abusage (1947) 5, 15, 44, 50, 52, 55, 57, 73, 90, 99, 103, 142, 143; see also Whitcut, Janet 87 Payne, Gertrude 78, 82, 93, 97, 234; Everyday Errors (1911) 57, 83, 120, 121, 141 Peters, Pam 7, 15, 20, 48, 56, 77, 78, 82, 84, 91, 96, 97, 245; Cambridge Guide to English Usage (2004) 42, 50, 53, 57, 58, 60, 63, 64, 99, 100, 101,

272

Index

102, 118, 119, 121, 139, 140, 143, 158, 217 Pinker, Steven (b. 1954) 7, 19, 71, 106, 172; Language Instinct (1995) 27; Sense of Style (2014) 2, 5, 15, 39, 40, 45, 53, 61, 98, 101, 102–103, 106, 107–108, 109, 110 Plain Words: Gowers, Sir Ernest (1948) 5, 55, 57, 63, 77, 81, 121, 155, 208; origin 69, 85; popularity 16, 52, 100; see also ABC of Plain Words (1951); Complete Plain Words, The; Gowers, Sir Ernest; Modern English Usage Postlethwaite, Richard (fl. 1795) 29–31 preposition stranding 27, 31, 59, 60, 63, 107–108, 112, 116, 173, 183, 206, 223 prescriptive 9, 10, 13 prescriptive: activism xi, 12, 182; approach x, xi, 13, 29, 31, 58, 120, 121, 122, 126, 149, 182, 184; attitudes 19, 123, 145, 182, 183; canon 39, 110, 121, 151, 218; metalanguage 151, 170; rules 18, 30, 31, 144, 164, 166, 183, 184; tradition 119, 215; see also descriptive approach; metalinguistic terminology; prescriptivism prescription 11 prescription vs. prescriptivism x, xi, 11, 12; see also standardisation process prescriptivism 9, 10, 12, 42 prescriptivism xii, 9–13, 13–15, 17, 19, 38, 65, 66, 182; age of 12, 36, 217; backlash 113, 184, 216; individual 15, 21–22; influence 13, 113, 184, 192, 205, 206; interest in 13, 29, 30, 38, 210, 211, 216; institutional 12, 15, 21–22, 42; and popular culture 181–186, 217; rise of 12, 29–31, 42; see also Amis, Kingsley; Chandler, Raymond; Deighton, Len; Lodge, David; McEwan, Ian; usage problems (items) prescriptivist 9, 10, 12, 42 Priestley, Joseph (1733–1804) 39, 73–74 proscriptive: advice 120, 143, 149, 166, 167, 183, 184; approach 29, 120, 121; attitudes 206; effect 119, 144, 164; metalanguage 146, 153, 158, 170, 171, 172, 178–179; tradition 217; see also metalinguistic terminology

Queen’s English (1864) 14, 49, 57, 64, 66, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81–82, 109, 121, 154, 158, 232 Randall, Bernice 78, 82, 84, 95, 97, 160, 242; Webster’s New World Guide (1988) 57, 106, 121, 126, 139, 155, 158, 159 Sayce, Kay 71, 75, 77, 78, 80, 82, 90, 92, 96, 97, 98, 229–230, 245; What not to Write (2006) 57, 63, 100, 121, 131 shall/will 33, 39, 41, 59, 106, 107–108, 109, 149, 179, 207, 223 Simon, John 27–28; Paradigms Lost (1980) 27, 41, 55 singular they 26, 33, 41, 55, 60, 64, 107–108, 212, 220, 223 Skates, Craig 78, 82, 86, 95, 97, 241; see also Carter, Bonny snuck/sneaked 64, 87, 117–119, 214, 223 social class 47, 133, 134, 189, 190–191, 196, 200, 203–205, 217; see also Amis, Kingsley; Chandler, Raymond; Deighton, Len; Lodge, David; McEwan, Ian split infinitives x, xii, 8, 14, 15, 18, 26, 27, 39, 41, 58, 59, 60, 63, 98, 107–108, 109, 113, 114, 116, 126, 175, 179, 183, 193, 195, 204, 206, 212, 213, 218, 223 Standard English 45, 200, 205, 214, 218; see also non-standard English standardisation process x, xi, 9–13, 14, 153, 216; codification 11; prescription 10, 11–12, 29, 30–31, 56, 153, 216; see also normative grammars; prescriptivism stigmatisation 117, 183, 212 Stilman, Anne 76, 77, 78, 82, 95, 97, 244; Grammatically Correct (1997) 57, 75 Strictly English (2010) 15, 26, 52, 55, 57, 62, 63, 64, 65, 99, 100, 105, 106, 120, 121, 123, 126, 145, 151, 155, 156, 158, 183, 218; criticised 69, 72–73, 150, 151; see also Heffer, Simon Strunk, William 6, 71, 77, 78, 82, 83, 89, 90, 93, 97, 235; Elements of Style (1918) 36, 45, 57; Elements of Style (1959) 5, 6–7, 36, 39, 40, 41, 43, 55, 102, 105, 207, 208; see also White, E.B.

Index style guides (manuals) 38, 124, 126; definition 41–47; and usage guides 39–41, 47, 54, 55; see also BBC, style guides; CIA Style Manual surveys see attitudes surveys usage surveys Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745) 11, 21, 22, 24 Taggart, Caroline 2, 47, 53–54, 75, 77, 78, 82, 85, 90, 96, 97, 110, 229–230, 246; Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010) 26, 29, 34, 39, 46–47, 52, 55, 57, 60, 61, 62, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 107–108, 120, 121, 123, 126, 140, 145, 151, 152, 155, 160, 181, 183, 195, 218 there/they’re/their 60, 111, 181, 221 thusly 60, 111, 139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 149, 182, 183, 206, 217, 223 TIME Corpus 123, 124, 125, 135, 136, 144 Trask, R.L. 45, 46, 51, 77, 78, 82, 84, 86, 89, 90, 95, 97, 244; Mind the Gaffe (2001) 47, 50, 53, 57, 99, 100, 101, 121, 139, 142, 145 Treble, H.A. 76, 77, 78, 82, 83, 93, 97, 236; A.B.C. of English Usage, An (1936) 57, 73, 83, 99, 121; see also Vallins, G.H. Truss, Lynne 28, 51, 184; Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003) 4, 6, 51, 53, 184, 205–206 try and/to xi, 8, 60, 119, 137, 138, 145–146, 153, 154, 158, 160, 171, 176, 177, 179, 223 Turck Baker, Josephine 36, 56, 77, 78, 82, 85, 89, 91, 93, 234; Correct Word ([1910] 1938) 36, 57 unique, very 107–108, 110, 168, 172, 173, 174, 206, 223 usage: American 64, 65, 124, 125, 129, 130, 136, 163, 207; British 124, 125, 129, 130, 136, 163, 207; British vs. American usage 144, 158, 160; see also attitudes to usage; Briticisms; usage problems (items); usage surveys usage guides: American tradition 5, 31, 32, 33–36, 50, 52–53, 58, 87, 121, 126, 141, 142, 144; arrangement of entries 43, 62, 105; audience 33–36, 43,

273

44–47, 218; British tradition 50, 51, 53, 58, 121, 141, 142, 144, 146; characteristics 54–58; chronology 51, 52; contents 15, 106–109, 218; critical reception 36; definition 41–43; historical development 15, 42, 87, 105; influence 183, 205–208; ipse dixit approach 15, 146, 150, 153, 169; the market 2, 36, 42, 46, 48, 51–52, 70, 98, 100–101; online usage advice 52; parodied 183–184; personal preferences for selection of entries 109, 145, 230; popularity 16, 33, 35–36, 48, 52, 73, 100–103, 218; publishers 7, 12, 16–17, 33, 42, 70, 73, 99–103; as publishers’ projects 69–70; related genres 40, 41, 55, 85; translated 102–103, 228; see also style guides usage guides, authors of: age 72, 74, 76–77, 98, 123, 204; education 73, 87, 88, 89–90, 91, 92, 93–96; expertise 28, 32, 69–70, 71–72, 73–75, 88, 89, 91, 92, 98; motivation 32, 34, 35, 45, 74, 75–76, 80–87, 98; profession 56, 74, 78, 80, 81, 83, 93–96; see also Appendix 3; Appendix 4; individual author names in this index usage labels see metalinguistic terminology usage polls (online) 122, 126, 131, 137, 146, 216 usage problems: and American English 14, 19, 117, 177, 183; and British English 14, 19, 164, 181, 186–197; canon 26, 39, 41, 50, 60–61, 106–109, 110, 116; criticism 112, 161–168, 173, 182, 183, 216, 221; definition 1, 59, 118; new 111, 116, 146, 152, 216; types of users 14, 43, 140, 152, 190; see also Amis, Kingsley; Appendix 1; Appendix 2; panels, usage; usage problems (items); usage survey usage problems (items) see individual items; Appendix 2 usage surveys 3, 8, 18, 48, 51, 102, 111–113, 114, 119–120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127–128, 129, 134, 135, 138, 146, 152–153, 161–168, 170, 171, 176, 177–178, 179–180, 183, 187, 193, 204, 206, 207, 210, 214, 215; see also

274

Index

attitude surveys; panels, usage; usage polls Vallins, G.H. 55, 76, 77, 78, 82, 83, 89, 93, 97, 236; Better English ([1953] 1955) 52, 57, 64, 99, 121, 140; Good English (1951) 57, 121; see also Treble, H.A. Vermes, Jean C. 74, 78, 79, 82, 85, 94, 97, 98, 131, 239; Secretary’s Modern Guide to English Usage (1981) 57, 99, 117, 118, 119, 131 Vizetelly, Frank H. 76, 77, 78, 82, 85, 93, 97, 98, 233; Desk-Book of Errors ([1906] 1920) 57, 121, 151 de Vries, Mary A. 74, 78, 79, 82, 85–86, 95, 97, 98, 242; Complete Word Book (1991) 57, 99, 121 Vulgarities of Speech Corrected ([1826] 1829) 26, 32, 56, 62, 64, 106 Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989) 42, 43, 44, 56, 57, 63, 64, 65, 74, 118–119, 121, 126, 131, 136, 139–140, 140–141, 144, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 171, 217 Weiner, Edmund 77, 78, 82, 89, 95, 97, 240; Oxford Guide to English Usage (1983) 14, 45, 47, 80,

118, 121; 2nd ed. with Delahunty (1994) 14, 47, 57, 84, 126, 142, 143, 171, 208 which/that 207, 223 Whitcut, Janet 56, 75, 77, 78, 82, 84, 87, 89, 90, 95, 97, 241; see also Complete Plain Words, The; Greenbaum, Sidney White, E.B. 5, 6–7, 45; see also Strunk, William White, Richard Grant 77, 78, 79, 82, 84, 93, 97, 233; Words and their Uses (1870) 57, 66 who/whom 26, 29, 39, 41, 50, 55, 59, 60, 107–108, 112, 116, 182, 183, 186, 187, 188, 210, 220, 223 whose 26, 39, 107–108, 223 Wilson, Kenneth G. 77, 78, 79, 82, 83, 95, 97, 242; The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993) 57, 64, 75, 99, 121, 126, 131, 139, 142, 152 Wood, Frederick T. 45, 77, 78, 82, 86, 94, 97, 238; Current English Usage (1962) 5, 57, 121, 158, 215 Written Word, The (1977) 57, 118, 119, 121, 126 you’re/your 60, 111, 182, 221, 223