English as She Will Be Spoke
I
THE problem of the perfect language has busied philosophers and philologists from time immemorial. Its conditions can be very simply stated. They are: an alphabet consisting of symbols and diacritic signs representing every sound used in speech, no symbol representing more than one sound or variation in sound; a vocabulary supplying a name for every object, action, state, quality, or relation, with a complete absence of ambiguities, and also of synonyms or homonyms; a grammatical structure of absolute regularity combined with the greatest attainable simplicity.
Judged by this standard, English is a very imperfect language indeed. To begin with, the spelling of English words is traditional and accidental rather than rational and scientific. In the course of time some change in the direction of simplified spelling is inevitable. As a matter of fact, the ideal English phonetic alphabet already exists and has now been employed for many years, especially by enlightened English teachers of foreign students who make use of the works of Henry Sweet. Its adoption in schools and eventual compulsory use by all printers are but a matter of time, but of a very long time; for a nation that still resists, and will continue to resist, the metric system is not likely to give an enthusiastic welcome to what may be called a metric alphabet.
The triumph of the phonetic system will bring nearer the day when English, already the auxiliary language of a great part of the civilized world, will become the normal speech of the more or less uncivilized hordes for whom their own vernacular has no literary associations, no roots in history or tradition. Still further in the future we may imagine the complete replacement of the world’s languages by some artificial speech, or, which is more probable, by ‘pidgin English.’
The change in spelling will hardly be as abrupt as it might be in countries privileged to possess a Soviet or a Mustapha Kemal. The approach will be Fabian, and the attainment of the ideal, as of other ideals which we associate with that word, belongs to an age which some of us feel, with some thankfulness, we shall not live to see. Long-needed reforms, which we must acknowledge to be logical and inevitable, are usually unpleasant. They are forced by the few and eager on an inert or reluctant majority, and this particular reform is perhaps delayed by the intemperate zeal of its advocates, who seem to claim that all our problems, from unemployment to over-fruitful multiplying, could at once be solved by the adoption of a simplified alphabet. For most of us the traditional spelling has strong unconscious associations. To take a simple example, we know that the h of ‘ghost’ is due to Caxton’s having learned his art in Flanders, where the corresponding word is spelled ‘ghecst,’ but, to me personally, it has always seemed that this intrusive letter makes a ‘ghost’ all the more ‘ghostly.’
Before leaving the question of reformed spelling I would point out that two tremendous difficulties have first to be overcome — namely, our abnormal wealth of homonyms and our uncertain pronunciation. Owing to our extensive borrowings from foreign languages, our telescopic methods of pronunciation, and our gradual dropping of unaccented prefixes and weak endings, English finds itself in possession of a phenomenal number of unrelated words identical in form and sound. There is, so far as I know, no parallel in other European languages to the thirteen ‘bays’ or the fifteen ‘racks’ recorded, defined, and exemplified by the Oxford Dictionary. Some of these, it is true, are obsolete or archaic, but any of them may confront us in the literature of the present or the past. Not only will homonyms remain identical when spelled phonetically, but their serried ranks will be swelled by reënforcements from our numerous homophones, The past tense of ‘may’ will become identical with the widow’s contribution and the inhabitant of a ripe cheese, a youthful male with a floating seamark, a ditch round a fortress with a speck of dust in the eye, and a translucent gem with a decoction of beer and bitter herbs, not to mention various less familiar ‘purls.’
A stock argument put forward by the opponents of simplified spelling is that any phonetic alphabet would, in course of time, require gradual modification to correspond with gradual changes in pronunciation. Johnson, in his Preface, comments on the impossibility of making orthography follow speech by ‘imitating those changes which again will be changed while imitation is employed in observing them,’ The counter argument is that such an alphabet would stabilize pronunciation and that the laws of sound change would cease to operate. There is no doubt that a great move toward the standardization and stabilization of spoken English is being brought about by the British Broadcasting Corporation. In its official periodical, the Listener, for August 26, 1931, Sir Robert Donald writes: ‘While philologists and lexicographers never agreed, the B.B.C. is in the fortunate position of a dictator. In a few years the standard of pronunciation set by the B. B. C. will be accepted in all English-speaking countries.’ This is an awful thought. Quite recently some of us have heard, via the B. B. C., a Scottish Prime Minister discussing the state of the ‘wuruld’ and a Yorkshire Chancellor of the Exchequer emphasizing the importance of balancing the ‘boodget.’ Is it possible that ‘ in a few years ’ these refreshing dialect characteristics will disappear?
And then there is the still larger problem of America. As is well known, the serious New York stage regards ‘received English,’ whatever that may be, as its ideal, but to talk ‘received English’ in intercourse with the average American might invite sarcasm. How will it be possible to impose English pronunciation on America or vice versa? Theoretically a compromise could be effected; for example, if the American would consent to order ‘ half’ a pint instead of ‘ half’ a pint, the Englishman might consent to make ‘tomato’ rhyme with ‘potato’; but such arrangements do not find a place in the history of language. As Dr. Johnson observes, in considering the apparent irregularities of English pronunciation, ‘to change all would be too much, and to change one is nothing.’
Again, will Americans tolerate the English pronunciation of polysyllables, which, according to Dr. Greig (Breaking Priscian’s Head, or ‘English As She Will Be Spoke and Wrote’), are ‘accented on the first syllable and then shuffled off as though what remained of the word did n’t matter a damn,’ or will they brace themselves with memories of Lexington and Bunker Hill and continue to say ‘nec’es-sa’ry’ and ‘ter’ri-to’ry’? All this also applies to Canadian English, which is being more and more assimilated to that of the United States. If Canada forsakes the characteristic flat a, which it shares with the States and with the northern English dialects, there will no longer be any point in the Canadian’s subtle gibe at the British tenderfoot when he says that ‘though a “ranch” may not pay, a “rănch” does.’ It would seem also impossible to fix intonation by a phonetic spelling or even by the example of the B. B. C. This is a feature which, far more than the pronunciation of individual words, divides races and classes, nor is it easy to see how a compromise can be effected ‘in a few years’ between the tone of voice which prevails, say, at Oxford and that which is associated with the Middle West of North America.
This is all very frivolous, but it is necessary to point out the immense difficulties which stand in the way of phonetic spelling, a reform only to be accomplished by the unification of actual speech. That much has, to my mind most regrettably, been accomplished in the second task is undeniable, and it may be regarded as certain that the prevailing tendency, which confirms Dr. Johnson’s preference for the ‘regular and solemn’ rather than the ‘cursory and colloquial,’ will continue. ’The most elegant speakers,’ says the Doctor, ‘deviate the least from the written word.’ So think also the B. B. C. and the schoolmaster, the two most potent factors for linguistic good or evil. The natural and historically justified pronunciation of English may linger for a time among the aristocracy and peasantry, but is already making way for an artificial and machine-made product which is not yet a century old. It is even possible that the ‘ boat-swain ’of the twentyfirst century will refer to the anterior part of a ship as the ‘fore-castle.’
II
A special feature of our so diversified pronunciation is the great uncertainty, even of many educated people, as to how the vowels or consonants of certain words — in fact, quite a large number — should be sounded. This difficulty does not, to my knowledge, exist in other European languages. We are all, I suppose, conscious now and then of a cowardly shrinking from the vocal use of words which we write down without a qualm. Personally, I should always hesitate to use in public the Arab name for an Arab chief, and, though I periodically consult the authorities, I never can remember with confidence what Eugene Aram really wore upon his wrist (‘And Eugene Aram walked between, with gyves upon his wrist’). Nor do I feel happy as to the accentuation of the word that denotes a place for chemical experiment and research. Mr. Fowler (Modern English Usage) gives five possible pronunciations of ‘contumely,’ with the comment that Shakespeare’s accentuation — ’The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely’ (Hamlet, III. i) — is very unpopular except with ‘professors and the like.’
Those who believe in the manifest destiny of the English language to become, if not the eventual supplanter of all other languages, at any rate the lingua franca of the world point out that when once our spelling is reformed the richness of our vocabulary and simplicity of our grammar give us claims that no other language can put forward. It is, however, arguable that great richness is rather a drawback in a language which claims to be the most suitable for world dominion. The shades of meaning in our unparalleled wealth of approximate synonyms are mysterious to the foreigner and often a matter of dispute among natives. Many are the pitfalls of what Mr. Wells calls ‘our beautiful but abundant and perplexing language.’ Our lack of precision in sense was often a trial to Joseph Conrad, though he wrote English as no other foreigner has ever written it.
As for grammar, I suppose that the essentially practical and thoroughly illogical temper of the English mind is reflected in our gradual rejection of forms and inflections to which other languages still cling. But this very simplicity has its snares. Our grammar is so tenuous that we arc ceasing to be aware of its existence. It is hardly possible to read through a book printed in English, whether the author be a great name in literature or merely a journeyman producer of thrillers, without coming across sentences that shock a student of language and would be impossible from the pen of an educated Frenchman or German. The great mass of the people is consciously uncertain. The columns of what may be called our middle-brow press are full of discussions as to whether this or that construction is grammatically correct, and week by week booklets appear which claim to teach the young author, not how to write, but how not to write. In a language of exact grammatical structure all such cautions should be superfluous.
So, in considering possible improvements in English grammar, the first possible improvement that occurs to one is a movement in the direction of making English grammar a subject of general instruction, which apparently it is not at present. The trouble is of comparatively recent origin. A century ago practically all who wrote were people who had received something of a classical education. They were, in fact, products of the ‘grammar school.’ This steadying influence no longer exists, and there is a real danger that average English, both spoken and written, may gradually degenerate till it falls to the level of the idiom used by Mr. Babbitt and his friends, a tongue which, from the grammatical point of view, may be described as English in an advanced state of decomposition. It is difficult to control the spoken language, but it should be in the power of an educated minority to brake to some extent the grammatical decay of English. Draconic legislation against the printing of ungrammatical matter is hardly possible in face of the opposition of the whole publishing trade, which would thereby be threatened with immediate bankruptcy.
It must be acknowledged that what grammar we still possess is, like everything connected with us, largely illogical, and that this residuum is very exasperating to foreigners. One may instance the ‘shall’ and ‘will’ complex, stigmatized by Dr. Greig as ‘wiredrawn academic flapdoodle.’ Or our three relative pronouns, two of which are superfluous. Or our anomalous verbs such as ‘dare’ and ‘need.’ Why should we say ‘He needs help,’ but ‘He need not worry’? Why should we make ‘use’ into two separate verbs, as far as their pronunciation is concerned — for example, ‘Since then I have used no other,’ but ‘Heused to play the fiddle’? Are our complicated progressive tenses, such as ‘He would still have been working,’ really necessary? Other languages are not inconvenienced by the absence of corresponding forms, nor are they found in Biblical and Shakespearean English.
Many students of English have advocated the creation of a new neutral pronoun and possessive which would save us from such complications as ‘ Each of us would be ready to give up part of his or her personal comfort, if he or she were convinced that his or her fellow citizens as a whole would benefit by his or her sacrifice.’ Here I would recommend a bold reversion to the state of mind, still general on the Continent, which regarded the masculine as ‘worthier’ than the feminine. Another complication which has gradually dominated English is the quite unnecessary use of the auxiliary ‘do,’ in the interrogative and negative constructions of all but a few verbs. It would be quite as logical to say ‘Know you Smith?’ as it is to say ‘Are you ill?’ or ‘I know not Smith’ as ‘I have not time.’ It would simply be reverting to the practice of the Bible translators.
III
Such changes as these could hardly be brought about arbitrarily, except as the result of a determined and continuous effort by the broadcasting authorities, but that such changes may come about gradually and unconsciously is shown by the quite recent revival of the subjunctive mood, which, except in a few stereotyped and optative expressions, had practically disappeared from English. It is not, it is true, always used in conformity with the history of language, but is instinctively adopted to distinguish the actual from the hypothetical or as a substitute for the rather clumsy ‘shoulds’ and ‘mights’ of ordinary English. In the Times Literary Supplement for September 8 we read: ‘Mr. Sisson took it upon himself to cable the State Department, suggesting that Mr. Francis be recalled.’ At a recent inquest, counsel, after an altercation with a police inspector, concluded: ‘Unless you be silent, I must ask that you be removed.’
This revival began in America. In reading the letters of the late Walter Hines Page I was struck by its recurrence on almost every page. Here is an example: ‘I am going down to Garden City till the President send for me; or, if he do not send for me, I’m going to his house and sit on his front steps till he come out.’ It will have been noticed that in the example quoted from the Times Literary Supplement the sequence of tenses is violated. This is the regular American construction, partly due, I imagine, to German influence. It is curious that we should be reviving this archaic mood just at the time when French is slackening the rigidity of its subjunctive rules.
Altogether the American influence, chiefly exerted via the talkies, is becoming more and more intense. The peaceful penetration that has been going on, almost unobserved, for a century now threatens to become a conquering invasion. Syntactical constructions of incredible ugliness and quite remote from any historical justification are becoming part of colloquial English and thence percolating steadily into the popular press. In fact, the fear has recently been expressed by an eminent divine that ‘the English language is in danger of being destroyed altogether.’ It may be possible that English grammar, so continuously simplified in the past, could be still further simplified to its advantage, but few of us look forward with eagerness to the day when such a sentence as ‘Them guys ain’t got no pep’ will cease to strike the ear as incorrect.
It need hardly be said that simplification is also possible in our elementary accidence. If we really aim at enticing the whole world to speak English, it is obvious that we must do away with ‘oxen’ and ‘children,’ ‘feet’ and ‘teeth,’ ‘mice’ and ‘geese.’ The process by which the three forms of strong verbs are popularly reduced to two, as in ‘He’s been took ill’ or ‘I seen him doing it,’ will be accelerated, and, in fact, the strong verbs must disappear. This may seem fantastic and uncouth, but we know that a similar evolution went on steadily during the Middle English and early Tudor period and was only checked abruptly by the diffusion of printed books and the consequent establishment of some vague standard of correctness.
Finally, there is one feature of English, partly grammatical, partly a question of vocabulary, which makes it particularly unfit to serve as a world language. I mean its favorite device of combining a verb with an adverb so as to form what is to all intents and purposes a compound verb. This feature is really one of many which combine to make English the most expressive and flexible of European languages, but to the foreigner it is an almost insurmountable barrier. The Oxford Dictionary records and illustrates more than sixty meanings of the combination ‘to set up.’ I confess that I see no possibility of eliminating this difficulty except by legislation forbidding the use of this and similar constructions. Naturally our favorite construction of ‘preposition at end’ must go the same way, and no future Thomas Hardy will be allowed to write of Wessex as a region ‘which people can go to, take a house in, and write letters from.’
IV
While changes in the spelling, pronunciation, and grammar of a language are brought about slowly, but till recent times continuously, by a kind of communal instinct, changes of vocabulary take place with much greater rapidity, often spasmodically, and occasionally as the result of individual effort. As far back as we can study the history of languages, we find the greater minds dissatisfied with the instrument at their command. The word has always lagged behind the idea. At periods of great activity, whether literary, scientific, practical, or theological, vocabularies become enriched to an extent which sometimes threatens to throw their machinery out of gear. The enrichment takes the form of new creation, direct borrowing from other languages, or the elaboration of existing material.
The tendencies have always been very divergent, according as the inadequacy of speech to represent thought, or perhaps rather the inability of man to make proper use of the instrument, has presented itself to divergent types of mind. On one side we have the man of science, and with him, as a rule, the philosopher, demanding an instrument of exact and unambiguous expression; on the other the poet, hampered by the commonplace associations of the words from which he has to weave his fantasies. Anatole France praises Maupassant’s prose for possessing the three great qualities of the French writer — first, clearness; again, clearness; finally, clearness. Baudelaire, on the other hand, finds ‘indispensable obscurity ’ as the chief element in great poetry.
Then we have the fight between the patriotic point of view, hostile to all that is new and foreign, and the contrasted eagerness to enrich language by wholesale importation and new creation. Or, again, the antiquarian enthusiast, striving since Spenser’s time to save the obsolescent and revive the archaic, and the modernist who regards the lexicographer as one whose duty it is, in Johnson’s words, to ‘clear away rubbish,’ or, as Howell says of the French Academy, ‘to refine the language of all pedantic and old words.’ Finally we have the practical man, who, for practical purposes, would thin out our vocabulary till only ’basic English’ is left, with its 600-700 indispensable terms, and the word lover who rejoices in the tropical luxuriance of outvast realm of words. But each and all feel the inadequacy of words, or their own inadequacy in linking the word with the thought.
Everybody who puts pen to paper knows the irritating labor of composition, the feeling of disappointment and exasperation when it is realized how imperfectly the paragraph represents what was in the writer’s mind. As Mr. Christopher Morley has lately put it, ‘I honor words and they come with difficulty.’ Some happy few, such as Mr. Bernard Shaw, seem to have the gift of perfect and unforced expression. Others, despairing, as bad workmen will, of the tools they have to use, take refuge in an impressionism contemptuous of conventional speech. Among such are, I gather, Miss Gertrude Stein and Mr. James Joyce, whose works I am so far not privileged to have studied.
At various periods of great intellectual activity deliberate and successful attempts have been made to supply languages with needed words. But for Cicero’s Latin renderings of Greek abstractions we should not now possess the words ‘moral’ and ‘quality.’ Our attitude toward the purveyor of neologisms is quite simple. He should be left alone. If his article answers to a real want, it will sell. Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘antediluvian’ was a useful contribution to speech. Whewell was as well advised in suggesting the introduction of the word ‘scientist’ as Huxley was with ‘agnostic.’ In another realm of ideas Mr. Arthur Roberts gave us ‘spoof.’ This expresses in a monosyllable what would otherwise require an explanatory phrase, just as ‘moron,’ for a person of arrested mental development, — the coinage of Dr. H. H. Goddard, of Columbus, Ohio, — seems now to describe quite naturally the majority of our fellow men.
On the other hand, reactionary attempts to purify the language by the restoration of archaic native words seem doomed to failure, unless there is really a gap to be filled. Enthusiastic Anglo-Saxonists may write obstinately about ‘starcraft’ or ‘leech,’ instead of ‘astronomy’ and ‘doctor,’ but the language feels that it is already adequately supplied. We may regret that young people are no longer ‘ betrothed,’ ‘plighted,’ or ‘affianced,’ and that these beautiful words are replaced by ‘engaged’; but the word has established itself in an impregnable position. A recent. American modernized version of the Bible even replaces ‘ Joseph . . . was minded to put her away’ by ‘Joseph . . . thought of breaking off the engagement.’ When, however, at a period of great interest in popular antiquities, W. J. Thoms, the founder of Notes and Queries, proposed ‘folklore’ as a comprehensive term for all such activities, he gave us a needed word and one that has become European. Quite unnecessary is the modern ‘foreword’ for preface, coined, according to the late Professor Phillimore, ‘by some Germanizing fool who found other fools to imitate him.’ I am afraid this Germanizing fool was my old friend Dr. Furnivall.
V
The entry of new words into language is curiously accidental. ‘Demarcation’ dates from the Papal bull of 1493 which divided the New World between the Spaniards and the Portuguese; ‘propaganda,’ with its family of derivatives, from the Congregatio de propaganda fide, set up in 1622 by Gregory XV. It is doubtful whether the indispensable ‘optimism’ would have become European if Voltaire had not written Candide. ‘Mascot’ dates from Audran’s operetta La Mascotte, produced in 1880, and, if my memory serves, soon brought to London. ‘Robot,’ a Bohemian word for slave, now essential to our vocabulary, began to appear in the papers soon after Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) attracted the attention of Europe. Both ‘mascot’ and ‘robot’ have lived because they have filled empty places, like the newly discovered chemical elements of which we hear now and then; the same might be said of the war word ‘camouflage.’
Then we have the native ‘diddle,’ a back formation from Jeremy Diddler, a character in a forgotten farce (Kenney’s Raising the Wind, 1803), and Mrs. Grundy, from a play that not one person in a thousand has ever heard of and not one in a million has read. A curious example of an insignificant origin is ‘sheik,’ now current American for a ‘lady-killer,’ and not unknown in England in the same sense. It comes from a contemporary novel which, I am credibly informed, has no great literary merit. Neologisms of purely scientific origin do not concern us here. They are not so much words as algebraical expressions. The enrichment of language by misprints, mistranslations, and misunderstandings is a curious chapter of word history, but its consideration would take me too far from our subject.
Just as the poet instinctively plays variations on the notes of a conventional instrument and builds ever-new combinations, so also the man in the street seeks instinctively for words which will cover all the aspects of a concept vaguely present in his brain. It would need a whole sentence to express the ideas contained in ‘stunt,’ and ‘wangle,’ words which have some vague kind of prehistory, or ‘dud’ and ‘blurb,’ which seem to have sprung all armed from the head of some anonymous benefactor of language, but which have at once become indispensable. Their excellence is really reflected in the resistance they offer to concise and exact definition.
Then we have the new connotations which mass instinct gives to existing words. We may dislike the vogue of the Gallicism ‘gesture’ and of ‘slogan,’ a Gaelic word which has crossed to the United States and recrossed the Atlantic with a transformed sense; but we must admit that they have acquired a useful significant content which corresponds to a modern attitude of mind. There is even something to be said for the rather distressing word ‘meticulous.’ The same applies to direct borrowing of foreign words. It would, I suppose, be possible to describe Professor Hotson as having a ‘keen nose’ for documentary evidence, but the French flair expresses the idea more simply, while at the same time suggesting qualities other than the purely nasal.
The late Henry Bradley was of opinion that many words of untraceable history had come into existence by the instinct for phonetic fitness. In discussing, in the Oxford Dictionary, the mysterious word ‘struggle,’ he concludes, ‘Possibly the word may be due to phonetic symbolism.’ How else can we explain ‘blurb’ except by saying that our instinct accepts it as exactly right? The same craving for expression which leads the great poet to enrich the vocabulary is felt by Mr. Polly. When this typical Wellsian hero describes his bicycling excursions as ‘exploratious menanderings,’ he is, within his limits, ‘Joycean,’ and the same may be said of the imaginative showman who invented the word ‘phantasmagoria.’ The survival, even among the most uneducated, of such a purely Greek word as ‘paraphernalia’ seems to be due to a similar instinct. This natural tendency to add body and content to words is possibly prehistoric and may account for much that seems unaccountable. It is thus that the Middle English ‘contekous,’ in the sense of quarrelsome, has gradually evolved into the admirable word ‘cantankerous,’ and a crude example of this persisting instinct is offered by the contemporary ‘ abso-bloody-lutely.’
VI
What will be, in the future, the attitude of standardized English to such importations and neologisms? And how, also, will it deal with the stream of new metaphor which enters the language with each new step in material progress? People are now apt to ‘fade out’ instead of departing, and it is becoming a commonplace for the literary critic to describe a biography as a ‘close-up.’ An irate millionaire in one of Mr. Wodehouse’s stories, who treads on a golf ball left lying in an entrance hall, is described as making a ‘forced landing’ against the diningroom door. Twenty years ago nobody ever ‘parked’ anything. Now even chewing gum can be temporarily ‘parked’ by the provident. New scientific devices of which we now have no idea must add continually their figurative elements to our stock of metaphors and thus militate against linguistic stability. What will the judges of language do about it? Experience has already shown, in another region of human life, the futility of prohibition.
All this matter of our ever-increasing vocabulary may seem beside the mark, but in reality it is germane to the question of grammar. The great influence now being exercised on the English vocabulary is that of America, and a wholesale importation of vocabulary can hardly take place unaccompanied by some influence on construction. In fact the American invasion is distinguished from earlier raids in that it concerns idiom as well as vocabulary. I have already noted the striking example of the revived subjunctive. There is also the influence of the cinema, with its illiterate captions and dialogue, from which the great mass of democracy now draws the more expressive part of its speech. Personally I must confess to a weakness for terse Americanisms in moderation — say in about the proportion which gives so subtle a flavor to my favorite author, Mr. P. G. Wodehouse. Most of us are grateful for ‘ brass tacks, pep, boom, slump, sob stuff,’ and so on, and I cannot suppress an indecent chuckle when Mr. Wooster delivers himself of the opinion, ‘There, Jeeves, you spoke an imperial quart.’ Unfortunately, ‘refined’ American is also penetrating peacefully, and I confidently expect that the English undertaker will soon describe himself as a ‘mortician,’ a description which appears to be modeled, by a natural association, on ‘physician.’
Is there any hope of stemming the flood? As long as democracy remained illiterate, it spoke historic English dialects, only slightly, and naturally, affected by foreign elements. Now that democracy is no longer illiterate (I mean, of course, in a purely technical sense), it seizes eagerly on every linguistic novelty and shows a marked preference for the puerile and the tasteless. Our language, even in its colloquial form, is largely the creation of two mighty factors — namely, the Authorized Version of the Bible and Shakespeare. The chief influence now being exercised upon it is that of the film magnates, who advertise their goods in such language as the following description of a film entitled ‘A Miracle City’: ‘The glamour, ecstasy, and heroism of Hollywood, hiding its own heartbreak to inspire the world with glorious illusion.’ Two demons are fighting for the soul of our language, the broadcasting demon of standardization and the cinema demon of vulgarity. The experience of history suggests that democracy will choose, in the matter of language, the wide gate and broad way that lead to destruction.
And yet the question suggests itself whether even chaos may not be better than entering in at the strait gate of standardization. For from chaos may be evolved a new harmony, but petrifaction is final. If, and when, all the imaginative elements have been squeezed out of our language, when the dialects, which, in the past, have supplied to literature so much that is racy of the soil, have finally given way to a standard speech, we shall have the perfect instrument of practical life. One thinks inevitably of the broad racing tracks that are steadily replacing our winding tree-shaded country lanes. Their practical value is undeniable, and future generations may find beauty in them. May we conjecture that the possible transformation of English will have as a result the creation of a new ideal in literature and poetry, a kind of ‘hammer and sickle’ conception of artistic composition in harmony with a new conception of life?
The idea that a language can be ‘ improved’ by deliberate effort is fantastic. It can only be standardized — that is, emasculated and bled white. Language is idiom. Standardization must gradually kill idiom and degrade language to the level of the Morse code. The student of language has no illusions about this. He knows that the only possible attitude for the educated is a prudent defensive, and that the most heroic defensive must in the end give way to the big battalions.