Grammarians

WHETHER we have ever heard the word or not, we cannot escape having a certain attitude toward the grammar of our speech. Many of us, indeed, go through at least four stages in our grammatical progress. Stage One is blissful ignorance; Stage Two is uneasy consciousness; Stage Three is assured confidence; and Stage Four, renewed dubiety. There are probably further alternations of assurance and misgiving that might be designated Stages Five and Six, but the first four at least are so clearly marked as to admit of no doubt. Let me demonstrate how they operate in a particular instance — say the question of ‘ I feel bad’ or ‘I feel badly.’

In our happy early childhood, before consciousness of sin and adverbs has come to blight our lives, we say, if the sorrowful occasion ever arises, ‘I feel bad.’ This is Stage One. It is a felicitous and complete solution of the problem, simply denying its existence; but, alas, it is too good to last. We are instructed in the error of our ways by parents and school-teachers who have met, if they have not conquered, adverbs, and we acquire the following impression: an adverb is a word ending in -ly. Hence we say, ‘I feel badly.’ This is Stage Two.

Of the teacher’s responsibility in producing the state of mind just described, I can speak from bitter experience. I recall — quite my earliest recollection of school days — being told in so many words that an adverb was a word that ended in -ly; then I was asked for an example. When, in perfect good faith, I offered the suggestion ‘fly,’ I was admonished to use whatever common sense I possessed — apparently very little. (Perhaps this episode explains why I have been somewhat confused about adverbs ever since.) It should perhaps be added that in certain cases Stage Two succeeds Stage One at an earlier age than has been implied. My four-year-old daughter asked, the other day, ‘Are we going soonly?’ At such an early age one may be what the advertising man would call adverb-conscious. Whether at four or at fourteen, however, there conies a time when ‘I feel bad’ will not do and ‘I feel badly’ sounds decidedly elegant. We have passed from Stage One to Stage Two.

There, of course, the matter does not rest. The study of grammar is now somewhat outmoded; modern education — or rather Education, for the difference is enormous — believes that grammatical lore should not be taught, but should rather be absorbed by the pupil directly from the circumambient ether. In our youth, however, Education had not yet reared its head. Perhaps mistakenly (in more than one sense), grammar was still taught. At any rate, we learned that there are such things as copulative verbs and that the verbs of the sensations are, to put it briefly, peculiar. With reference to the phrase under discussion, we were told that ‘I feel badly ’ had no meaning other than ‘My sense of touch is impaired.’ We were told this, and we thoroughly believed it. Forthwith we discarded ‘I feel badly’ and went back to ‘I feel bad.’ Stage Three.

The full tale of ‘I feel bad(ly),’ unfortunately, is not yet told. Uneasy doubts as to what is the sanction of grammar begin to assail us. Language, after all, is democratic. ‘I feel bad,’ we come to fear, is too correct, — merely theoretical, in fact, in its correctness, — and hence not correct at all. The great majority of the educated (if the term be not too strictly interpreted) do say, ’I feel badly.’ And perhaps, — a more subtle kind of doubt, — perhaps the logic that dictated ’I feel bad’ was wrong after all; perhaps the verbs of the sensations are not so excessively peculiar. Authorities, it is no comfort to know, disagree. Professor Curme, in his recent and monumental Syntax, condemns ‘I feel badly’; but Professor Malone, in a learned review of the book, condemns the condemnation. Professor Curme, the critic observes, ‘outlaws badly in the common locution I feel badly, without giving his reasons, but, no doubt, on the usual puristic grounds.’ And what are they, and what is a purist? ‘An unlovely name,’ says still another authority, Professor Krapp, ‘for an unlovely kind of being.’ Perhaps, after all, we had better say, ‘I feel badly.’ And so we arrive at Stage Four.

Similar oscillations on other points of grammar might easily be recounted — the ‘who’ and ‘whom’ distinction, for instance. There is first, to outline the matter briefly, the blithe unconsciousness of case distinctions with which we all begin, when ‘who’ does uncritical service for all occasions. (Stage One.) ‘Whom,’ however, is discovered and somewhat indiscriminately admired, so that at one time even ‘Whom are you?’ may ravish our untutored ears. (Stage Two.) When we reach Stage Three and differentiate between ‘Whom do you take him to be? and ‘Who do you think he is?’ we feel that, as grammarians, we have indeed arrived. But again our satisfaction is evanescent. We observe, for example, that Professor Jespersen, in The Philosophy of Grammar, justifies the ‘whom’ in such an expression as ‘We feed children whom we think are hungry,’ and we feel once more at sea: the familiar but disquieting symptoms of Stage Four.

Do others, we wonder, experience these vacillations? More specifically (to return to our original worriment), do the educated have difficulty in sorting out adverbs and adjectives? Are they puzzled by ‘I feel bad(ly)’? How grammatical are the educated, anyway? Mrs. Gerould, we recall, has written an essay entitled ‘What Constitutes an Educated Person To-Day.’ Does she say anything about it? Indeed she does. ‘An educated person cannot be illiterate.’ As we read on, we come to something more definite, and infinitely more dismaying: ‘I maintain that no man is educated whose grammar is shaky. He may be a Ph. D. from any place you like; but if he confuses adverbs and adjectives [italics of course mine], he is not an educated man.’

STUART ROBERTSON