Why should not the proof-readers do it for themselves—and also for the whole English-speaking world?
CHAPTER VII.
AUTHORITATIVE STUMBLING-BLOCKS IN THE STUDY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
WRITERS for publication ought to write just as their matter should appear in print, but often they do not. Though every educated English-speaking person is expected to know how to use his own language correctly, no one needs such knowledge more than the proof-reader does. Very commonly matters of form, as punctuation, capitalization, compounding, and almost entirely the division of words at the ends of lines, are left to the proof-reader’s decision. How shall he decide reasonably if he have not the requisite knowledge? And how shall he have knowledge without study? And how shall he succeed in his study if he use not close thought and wise discretion?
The proof-reader, like every one else, must get at least the foundation of his knowledge through the medium of books. His practical use of knowledge, his faculty for instant perception of error, and his equally useful faculty for merely challenging what an author may wish to keep unchanged—all these must be acquired or confirmed by experience; but books must furnish the groundwork. One who desires thorough equipment as a proof-reader may never cease studying.
Good books on the English language are plentiful, but even the best of them contain statements that are not beyond question. It is our purpose here to note a few questionable teachings, by way of warning against acceptance of anything simply because it is found in any book, and our most prominent example is from a work really good and really authoritative.
An incident will illustrate the aim of the warning. A customer in a New York store, taking up a book treating of word-forms, asked, “Does it follow Webster?” Information that its author had not closely followed any one dictionary, but had made the work for the special purpose of selecting the best forms from all sources, caused instant and almost contemptuous dropping of the book. Evidently that person had no idea that anything in language could be right if not according to Webster. Undoubtedly there are to-day thousands who would instantly decide such a matter in just this way. Each of them has always been accustomed to refer to some one authority, and to think that what is found there must be right. Indeed, so far is this species of hero-worship carried that a critic, reviewing the book on word-forms mentioned above, could hardly find words strong enough to express his condemnation of its author, theretofore unknown to the literary world, for daring to criticise statements made by noted scholars. It is amusing to recall the fact that one of the heroes of this champion’s worship began his career in exactly the way objected to, having devoted a large part of his first book to severe condemnation of some famous grammarians for doing something that he did himself, namely, copying and preserving errors.
Even yet we have not gone back to the earliest recorded condemnation of such hero-worship. One of the most famous of the grammarians scored by our preceding hero was Lindley Murray, and his stated reason for writing on grammar was identical with that of his critic—the work of his predecessors was not sufficiently accurate. Long before Murray’s time, also, “peremptory adhesion unto authority,” as Sir Thomas Brown wrote in the seventeenth century, had been “the mortallest enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution upon truth.”
Where can “peremptory adhesion unto authority” be found better exemplified than in children’s persistence in believing what they are first taught? Impressions made in childhood days certainly retain a strong hold long afterward, and this should be a powerful incentive toward giving them true impressions. One of the most popular language books now in use in primary schools, if not the most popular, has conversations between teacher and pupil. Here is one: “T.—When I say, falling leaves rustle, does falling tell what is thought of leaves? P.—No. T.—What does falling do? P.—It tells the kind of leaves you are thinking and speaking of.” Is it not simply astounding that our children must learn in school that falling leaves means a kind of leaves?
There is plenty of the same quality in books at the other extreme of schooling—the very popular university grammar, for instance, William Chauncey Fowler’s “English in its Elements and Forms,” which says: “While language has power to express the fine emotions and the subtle thoughts of the human mind with wonderful exactness, still it must be admitted that it is imperfect as a sign of thought. It is imperfect because the thing signified by a term in a proposition either does not exist at all in the mind of the hearer, or because it exists under different relations from what it does in the mind of the speaker. In other words, language is imperfect because the term in a proposition, if it has any meaning in the mind of the speaker, has a different one from what it has in the mind of the hearer. Hardly any abstract term has precisely the same meaning in any two minds; when mentioned, the term calls up different associations in one mind from what it does in another.... The phrase ‘beast of burden’ might, to one mind, mean a horse; to another, a mule; to another, a camel.... It should be added that there is great vagueness in the common use of language, which, in practice, increases its imperfection as a medium of thought.”