The man in the street: Papers on American topics

by Meredith Nicholson

THE POOR OLD ENGLISH LANGUAGE

IN the whole range of human endeavor no department is so hospitable to the amateur as education. Here the gates are always open. Wide is the field and many are the fools who disport therein.

Politics we are all too prone to forget between campaigns; literature and the graphic arts engage only our languid attention and science interests us only when our imaginations are mightily stirred. But we all know how the young idea should be taught to shoot. We are either reactionaries, lamenting the good old times of the three r’s and the little red schoolhouse, or we discuss with much gravity such weighty problems as the extension or curtailment of the elective system, or we fly to the defense or demolition of the ideas of Dewey and other reformers. It is folly not to hold opinions where no one is sure of anything and every one is free to strut in the silken robes of wisdom. Many of us receive at times flattering invitations to express opinions touching the education of our youth. Though my own schooling was concluded at the algebra age, owing to an inherent inability to master that subject or even comprehend what it was all about, I have not scrupled to contribute to educational symposia at every opportunity. Perhaps I answer the riddles of the earnest critics of education the more cheerfully from the very fact of my benightedness. When the doors are closed and the potent, grave, and reverend signiors go into committee of the whole to determine why education does not indeed educate—there, in such a company, I am not only an eager listener but, with the slightest encouragement, I announce and defend my opinions.

Millions are expended every year for the public enlightenment, and yet no one is satisfied either with the method or the result. Some one is always trying to do something for culture. It seems at times that the efforts of the women of America to increase the remnant that is amiably disposed toward sweetness and light cannot fail, so many and so zealous are the organizations in which they band themselves for this laudable purpose. A little while ago we had a nation-wide better-English week to encourage respect among the youth of this jazzy age for the poor old English language.

I shall express without apology my opinion that in these free States we are making no marked headway in the attempt to improve spoken or written English. Hardly a day passes that I do not hear graduates of colleges confuse their pronouns; evil usages are as common as the newspapers. And yet grammar and rhetoric are taught more or less intelligently by a vast army of overworked and underpaid teachers, according to the text-books fashioned by specialists who really do try to make themselves intelligible.

My attitude toward this whole perplexing business is one of the greatest tolerance. I doubt seriously whether I could pass an examination in English grammar. A Japanese waiter in a club in my town used to lie in wait for me, when I visited the house at odd hours in search of seclusion, for the purpose of questioning me as to certain perplexing problems in grammar. He had flatteringly chosen me from the club roster as a lettered person, and it was with astonishment that he heard my embarrassed confession that I shared his bewilderment. To any expert grammarians who, inspired by this revelation, begin a laborious investigation of these pages in pursuit of errors, I can only say that I wish them good luck in their adventure. At times I do manifestly stumble, and occasionally the blunder is grievous. A poem of my authorship once appeared in a periodical of the most exacting standards with a singular noun mated to a plural verb. For proof-readers as a class I entertain the greatest veneration. Often a query courteously noted on the margin of a galley has prevented a violence to my mother tongue which I would not consciously inflict upon it.

To add to the fury of the grammar hounds, I will state that at times in my life I have been able to read Greek, Latin, Italian, and French without ever knowing anything about the grammar of either of these languages beyond what I worked out for myself as I went along. This method or lack of method is not, I believe, original with me, for there are, or have been, inductive methods of teaching foreign languages which set the student at once to reading and made something rather incidental of the grammar. This is precisely what I should do with English if I were responsible for the instruction of children at the age when it is the fashion to begin hammering grammar into their inhospitable minds. Ignorant of grammar myself, but having—if I may assume so much—an intuitive sense of the proper and effective manner of shaping sentences, there would be no text-books in my schoolroom. All principals, trustees, inspectors, and educational reformers would be excluded from my classes, and I should insist on protection from physical manifestations of their indignation on my way to and from the schoolhouse. The first weeks of my course would be purely conversational. I should test the students for their vulgarities and infelicities, and such instances, registered on the blackboard, would visualize the errors as long as necessary. The reading of indubitably good texts in class would, of course, be part of the programme, and the Bible I should use freely, particularly drawing upon the Old Testament narratives.

I should endeavor to make it appear that clean and accurate speech is a part of good manners, an important item in the general equipment for life. When it came to writing, I should begin with the familiar letter, leaving the choice of subject to the student. These compositions, read in the class, would be criticised, as far as possible, by the students themselves. I should efface myself completely as an instructor and establish the relation of a fellow-seeker intent upon finding the best way of saying a thing. If there were usages that appeared to be common to a neighborhood, or intrusions of dialect peculiar to a State or a section, I might search out and describe their origin, but if they were flavorsome and truly of the soil I should not discourage their use. Self-consciousness in these early years is to be avoided. The weaknesses of the individual student are only discernible where he is permitted to speak and write without timidity.

When a youngster is made to understand from a concrete example that a sentence is badly constructed, or that it is marred by a weak word or a word used out of its true sense, the rules governing such instances may be brought to his attention with every confidence that he will understand their point. My work would be merely a preparation for the teaching of grammar, if grammar there must be; but I should resent such instruction if my successor failed to relate my work to his.

I consider the memorizing of short passages of verse and prose an important adjunct to the teaching of English by any method. “Learn it by heart” seems to have gone out of fashion in late years. I have recently sat in classes and listened to the listless reading, paragraph by paragraph, of time-honored classics, knowing well that the students were getting nothing out of them. The more good English the student carries in his head the likelier he is to gain a respect for his language and a confidence and effectiveness in speaking and writing it.

Let the example precede the rule! If there is any sense in the rule the example will clarify it; if it is without justification and designed merely to befuddle the student, then it ought to be abolished anyhow. The idea that children should be seen and not heard belongs to the period when it was believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. Children should be encouraged to talk, to observe and to describe the things that interest them in the course of the day. In this way they will form the habit of the intelligent reporter who, on the way to his desk from an assignment, plans his article, eager to find the best way of telling his story. Instead of making a hateful mystery of English speech it should be made the most natural thing in the world, worthy of the effort necessary to give it accuracy, ease, and charm.

The scraps of conversation I overhear every day in elevators, across counters, on the street, and in trolley-cars are of a nature to disturb those who view with complacency the great treasure we pour into education. The trouble with our English is that too much is taught and not enough is learned. The child is stuffed, not fed. Rules crammed into him for his guidance in self-expression are imperfectly assimilated. They never become a part of him. His first contacts with grammar arouse his hostility, and seeing no sense in it he casts it aside with the disdain he would manifest for a mechanical toy that refused to work in the manner promised by the advertisement.

FOOTNOTE:

[A] This gentleman again captured the Republican nomination for mayor of Indianapolis in the May primary, 1921.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.