Parts of Speech: Essays on English

by Brander Matthews

That ample speech! That subtle speech!
Apt for the need of all and each;
Strong to endure, yet prompt to bend
Wherever human feelings tend.
Preserve its force; expand its powers;
And through the maze of civic life,
In Letters, Commerce, even in Strife,
Forget not it is yours and ours.

The English language is the most valuable possession of the peoples that speak it, and that have for their chief cities, not London alone, or Edinburgh or Dublin, but also New York and Chicago, Calcutta and Bombay, Melbourne and Montreal. The English language is one and indivisible, and we need not fear that the lack of a local standard may lead it ever to break up into fragmentary dialects. There is really no danger now that English will not be uniform in all the four quarters of the world, and that it will not modify itself as occasion serves. We can already detect divergencies of usage and of vocabulary; but these are only trifles. The steamship and the railroad and the telegraph bring the American and the Briton and the Australian closer together nowadays than were the users of the Midland dialect when Chaucer set forth on his pilgrimage to Canterbury; and then there is the printing-press, whereby the newspaper and the school-book and the works of the dead-and-gone masters of our literature bind us together with unbreakable links.

These divergencies of usage and of vocabulary—London from Edinburgh, and New York from Bombay—are but evidences of the healthy activity of our tongue. It is only when it is dead that a language ceases to grow. It needs to be constantly refreshed by new words and phrases as the elder terms are exhausted. Lowell held it to be part of Shakspere’s good fortune that he came when English was ripe and yet fresh, when there was an abundance of words ready to his hand, but none of them yet exhausted by hard work. So Mr. Howells has recently recorded his feeling that any one who now employs English “to depict or to characterize finds the phrases thumbed over and worn and blunted with incessant use,” and experiences a joy in the bold locutions which are now and again “reported from the lips of the people.”

“From the lips of the people”;—here is a phrase that would have sadly shocked a narrow-minded scholar like Dr. Johnson. But what the learned of yesterday denied—and, indeed, have denounced as rank heresy—the more learned of to-day acknowledge as a fact. The real language of a people is the spoken word, not the written. Language lives on the tongue and in the ear; there it was born, and there it grows. Man wooed his wife and taught his children and discussed with his neighbors for centuries before he perfected the art of writing. Even to-day the work of the world is done rather by the spoken word than by the written. And those who are doing the work of the world are following the example of our remote ancestors who did not know how to write; when they feel new needs they will make violent efforts to supply those needs, devising fresh words put together in rough-and-ready fashion, often ignorantly. The mouth is ever willing to try verbal experiments, to risk a new locution, to hazard a wrenching of an old term to a novel use. The hand that writes is always slow to accept the result of these attempts to meet a demand in an unauthorized way. The spoken language bristles with innovations, while the written language remains properly conservative. Few of these oral babes are viable, and fewer still survive; while only now and again does one of these verbal foundlings come of age and claim citizenship in literature.

In the antiquated books of rhetoric which our grandfathers handed down to us there are solemn warnings against neologisms—and neologism was a term of reproach designed to stigmatize a new word as such. But in the stimulating study of certain of the laws of linguistics, which M. Bréal, one of the foremost of French philologists, has called ‘Semantics,’ we are told that to condemn neologisms absolutely would be most unfortunate and most useless. “Every progress in a language is, first of all, the act of an individual, and then of a minority, large or small. A land where all innovation should be forbidden would take from its language all chance of development.” And M. Bréal points out that language must keep on transforming itself with every new discovery and invention, with the incessant modification of our manners, of our customs, and even of our ideas. We are all of us at work on the vocabulary of the future, ignorant and learned, authors and artists, the man of the world and the man in the street; and even our children have a share in this labor, and by no means the least.

Among all these countless candidates for literary acceptance, the struggle for existence is very fierce, and only the fittest of the new words survive. Or, to change the figure, conversation might be called the Lower House, where all the verbal coinages must have their origin, while literature is the Upper House, without whose concurrence nothing can be established. And the watch-dogs of the treasury are trustworthy; they resist all attempts of which they do not approve. In language, as in politics, the power of the democratic principle is getting itself more widely acknowledged. The people blunders more often than not, but it knows its own mind; and in the end it has its own way. In language, as in politics, we Americans are really conservative. We are well aware that we have the right to make what change we please, and we know better than to exercise this right. Indeed, we do not desire to do so. We want no more change in our laws or in our language than is absolutely necessary.

We have modified the common language far less than we have modified the common law. We have kept alive here many a word and many a meaning which was well worthy of preservation, and which our kin across the seas had permitted to perish. Professor Earle of Oxford, in his comprehensive volume on ‘English Prose,’ praises American authors for refreshing old words by novel combinations. When Mr. W. Aldis Wright drew up a glossary of the words, phrases, and constructions in the King James translation of the Bible and in the Book of Common Prayer, which were obsolete in Great Britain in the sense that they would no longer naturally find a place in ordinary prose-writing, Professor Lounsbury pointed out that at least a sixth of these words, phrases, and constructions are not now obsolete in the United States, and would be used by any American writer without fear that he might not be understood. As Lowell said, our ancestors “unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakspere’s,” and by good fortune we have kept alive some of the Elizabethan boldness of imagery. Even our trivial colloquialisms have often a metaphoric vigor now rarely to be matched in the street-phrases of the city where Shakspere earned his living. Ben Jonson would have relished one New York phrase that an office-holder gives an office-seeker, “the glad hand and the marble heart,” and that other which described a former favorite comedian as now having “a fur-lined voice.”

When Tocqueville came over here in 1831, he thought that we Americans had already modified the English language. British critics, like Dean Alford, have often animadverted upon the deterioration of the language on this side of the Atlantic. American humorists, like Mark Twain, have calmly claimed that the tongue they used was not English, but American. It is English as Mark Twain uses it, and English of a force and a clarity not surpassed by any living writer of the language; but in so far as American usage differs from British, it was according to the former and not according to the latter. But they differ in reality very slightly indeed; and whatever divergence there may be is rather in the spoken language than in the written. That the spoken language should vary is inevitable and advantageous, since the more variation is attempted, the better opportunity the language has to freshen up its languishing vocabulary and to reinvigorate itself. That the written language should widely vary would be the greatest of misfortunes.

Of this there is now no danger whatever, and never has been. The settlement of the United States took place after the invention of printing; and the printing-press is a sure preventive of a new dialect nowadays. The disestablishment of the local standard of London leaves English free to develop according to its own laws and its own logic. There is no longer any weight of authority to be given to contemporary British usage over contemporary American usage—except in so far as the British branch of English literature is more resplendent with names of high renown than the American branch. That this was the case in the nineteenth century—that the British poets and prose-writers outnumber and outvalue the American—must be admitted at once; that it will be the case throughout the twentieth century may be doubted. And whenever the poets and prose-writers of the American branch of English literature are superior in number and in power to those of the British branch, then there can be no doubt as to where the weight of authority will lie. The shifting of the center of power will take place unconsciously; and the development of English will go on just the same after it takes place as it is going on now. The conservative forces are in no danger of overthrow at the hands of the radicals, whether in the United States or in Great Britain or in any of her colonial dependencies.

Perhaps the principle which will govern can best be stated in another quotation from M. Bréal: “The limit within which the right to innovate stops is not fixed by any idea of ‘purity’ (which can always be contested); it is fixed by the need we have to keep in contact with the thought of those who have preceded us. The more considerable the literary past of a people, the more this need makes itself felt as a duty, as a condition of dignity and force.” And there is no sign that either the American or the British half of those who have our language for a mother-tongue is in danger of becoming disloyal to the literary past of English literature, that most magnificent heritage—the birthright of both of us.