The State of the Language
‘It is of vital importance that we should be able to distinguish between growth and decay. For the difference between growth and decay in language there is fortunately a convenient test, and that test is meaning, the purpose for which language was originally invented.’
LORD DUNSANY
I
THE beloved Dean Briggs, when teaching teachers, used to remind his hearers that, young boys grow somewhat as colts do, ‘one end at a time’ — a remark which he repeated for his readers in a wise and unconventional little book, College Life. The saying applies with equal aptness to some other young and growing things, and preëminently to the vital language which we inherit.
For the English tongue, looked at in one way, is still in the formative gristle of its youth. It alone of the world’s languages is making rapid and prodigious gains in all parts of the world. When Shakespeare was born, English was spoken by few if any more than 4,000,000 persons — about the population of New Jersey — and by many of them it was spoken in dialectal forms so various that groups living thirty miles apart could hardly understand each other’s speech. Two centuries later English was spoken, and spoken with general intelligibility, by more than that number in England’s North American colonies alone. To-day, less than another two centuries later, English is either a native or an acquired language of close to 200,000,000 persons — nearly twice as many as use its nearest competitor among the Western tongues. Manifestly it is in process of becoming the international language. In still another two centuries, at the present rate, a working knowledge of English can hardly be much short of universal. We who speak it to-day are heirs, but we arc also ancestors.
It is not to be imagined that this future increase can take place, any more than the past increase has done, without noticeable changes throughout the structure and vocabulary of the language. These changes, in so far as they serve the ends of mutual intelligibility, will be growth, and they will prove once more the seemingly unlimited capacity of English for the renewal of its youth.
But in so far as they fail to serve that end of intelligibility they will be decay. And in some particulars English is observably decaying even while it grows. Young it may be, but it is old enough to exhibit both processes going on at once. It is decaying in the precise sense of the motto which I have borrowed from Lord Dunsany: that is, by the test of meaning, the purpose of language. And it is decaying as it has grown, one end at a time. Specific abuses of the language spring up everywhere at once for no decipherable reason and rage like epidemics for a period of years or decades. Every period develops its own characteristic vagaries in the use of English. They spread unchecked until they are as inescapable as a fashionable piece of slang or the season’s newest popular tune.
II
The New York Times, take it month in and month out, is about the best edited and the most nearly proofread of the larger metropolitan dailies in these States. As such a paper, it is constantly administering pleasant electric shocks of surprise to the reader who notices not only what is said in print, but also how it is said. One of these gratifying little surprises turns up in ‘The News of the Week in Review,’ issue of August 9, 1936, in the summary of the third week of civil war in Spain. It occurs in a passing reference to ‘one of the few uncensored dispatches that have come from that section of rebellion-torn Spain which is controlled by the government’ — a piece of English at which I, for one, stare with astonishment and almost with incredulity.
You notice nothing especially odd or noteworthy about it? Then you must be one of those fortunate and equable persons who, while they read, are plagued by no borrowed troubles or ulterior associations. There is, I assure you, something very remarkable about the locution which I have quoted (and of which, incidentally, I have inserted an exact parallel in the sentence preceding this one). What is remarkable about it is that it is grammatically correct — a technical old-fashioned way of asserting that it says exactly what it means.
Look back at the quotation for a moment. Focus your attention on the bearings of the word ‘have.’ ‘One of the few uncensored dispatches that have come . . . ’ There are fifty chances to one, possibly fifty chances to a fraction of one, that this quite correct plural ‘have’ was first written as an incorrect singular ‘has.’ That it was not finally so printed in the Times must strike the observant as a rhetorical marvel of its week. It is a phenomenon almost in the class of white blackbirds. For the logical-grammatical construction involved is so commonly mishandled in current American speech and print that no one has a right to anticipate anything but mishandling of it. As an actuary might put it, the normal expectancy of correctness is nil.
Please do not imagine that I am indulging myself in a bit of fantastic exaggeration here, in a lame attempt to be funny. As a wide, miscellaneous, professionally observant reader I am testifying with all sobriety (a) that I sometimes go for weeks without coming upon a single correct specimen of the sort I have quoted from the Times’s Sunday editorial section, and (b) that when I do find one among the hundreds of corrigenda I never fail to notice it and rub my eyes to make sure. (Such a thing it is to be equipped, or cursed, with the proofreading eye.) Perpend, now: —
In the same week to which I have referred, some twoscore leading antiNew Deal Democrats gathered in Detroit to fulminate a policy for the 1936 presidential campaign. The invitation which brought them was sponsored by a former Governor of Massachusetts, a former Senator of Missouri, a former Secretary of State of the United States, and other notables. It said in part: ‘We are agreed . . . that the reëlection of President Roosevelt and his perseverance in his collectivist policies presents [present?] one of the gravest problems which has [i.e., have] ever confronted the free American citizen.’ (The italics, here and below, are mine except as noted.)
I pick up, after everybody else has laid it down, that overwhelming demonstration of the abiding popular love of life and long novels, Anthony Adverse. In Book One, Chapter One, the second sentence, I read: ‘To stand south of this ridge looking up at the highway flowing over the skyline is to receive one of those irrefutable impressions from landscape which requires [i.e., require] more than a philosopher to explain.’
And here is Philo Vance, the ‘puckishly pedantic’ amateur detective created a decade ago by S. S. Van Dine (Mr. Willard Huntington Wright). His annual feats of insight have been followed by breathless hundreds of thousands of us. Vance is an Egyptologist, a linguist, a connoisseur of the arts, a general æsthetician, an apostle of Oxford culture to the cisatlantic heathen. As a grammarian he carries his puckish pedantry to the extreme of saying: ‘There has [not ‘have’] been any number of precedents.’ He is a perpetual rebuke to every form of mental slovenliness. Well — to nearly every form. In that one of the stories which the creator of Vance has chosen as his own favorite the ineffable Philo illuminates the benightedness of the professional sleuth in these words: ‘The altered technic of our elusive culprit when dealing with Ada is one of the things that is [meaning ‘are’] obscure.’ Elsewhere he reports: ‘It was just beneath one of the racks which holds Professor Garden’s assortment of chemicals.’ (There are several racks of chemicals, as has been previously explained.) And so he speaks in various other contexts, habitually though not invariably.
By the majority vote of what is being printed — a criterion which either Vance or his inventor would be quick to despise — he is quite right to speak so. If you are going to read current writing at all, you are going constantly to read about one of the most beneficial policies that has been formulated during the depression, one of the most amazing historical novels that has appeared for a generation, one of the few economic axioms that still defies assault, one of those outstanding achievements that distinguishes modern surgery, one of those exceptions that proves the rule, and so forth and so following. The weekly news magazine Time is conspicuously addicted to this particular solecism, though it contains some of the most skillful if mannered reportorial writing now being done in America. You will find instances in almost any issue of the metropolitan dailies, from the Times of New York to the Times of Los Angeles. You will find them in the Evening Transcript of Boston, in Mr. William Allen White’s Emporia Gazette, and in fact about anywhere you care to look, including some of the most respectable weekly and monthly magazines and many books published by houses supposed to be distinguished for exacting editorial standards. Translators are even prone to introduce this grammatical vagary in rendering passages logically and correctly written in the original — a clear enough demonstration of the clutch the wrong usage has on our way of thinking, or not thinking.
For it is the thinking behind the sentence that is clearly at fault. A Washington political commentator writes: ‘This is one of the most crucial dilemmas that has [i.e., have] ever confronted the American electorate.’ A trifle of analysis would show that he really intends two assertions: (1) Dilemmas have confronted the electorate, and (2) This is one of the most crucial of them. He is describing a plural class (the most crucial dilemmas) and placing the present situation in that class (this is one). The pattern of his thought becomes instantly clear if we recast the sentence thus: ‘Of the dilemmas which have confronted the American electorate, this is one of the most crucial.’ But does the writer pause for that trifle of analysis? Very seldom. For the most part he leaves it to you and me, his readers, to sort out the confusion between (1) his plural subject (in this case ‘dilemmas that’), which he has left hanging in mid-air by forgetting to give it any verb which can possibly go with it, and (2) his singular subject (‘one’), which has stuck in his mind and illogically overridden the other subject’s verb in addition to its own. The result is a shining example of what a great rhetorician has called ‘words thrown out in a general direction.’ When you inspect that result with care you discover that its sole rational meaning is that which you supply for yourself. The words as they stand mean nothing.
III
The error to which we have just been paying our respects seems to be uniquely dominant among the stigmata of our own immediate time — a good enough reason for putting it first and devoting some attention to it.
There are, to be sure, verbal breaches of sense and meaning which occur far more frequently in printed matter of the day; but none that I know of occurs with such stupefying uniformity. It is, for instance, a much more common mistake to use the word ‘apparent’ (applicable to that which seems true whether it is or not) in place of ‘ evident ’ (used of that which both seems to be and is true); but the correct distinction between them is also very common and therefore calls no attention to itself when made. The chance to confuse ‘apparent’ with ‘evident’ or ‘infer’ with ‘imply’ probably occurs a thousand times while the chance to make the mistake we have dissected is occurring a hundred; but the point is that the first chance is accepted only five hundred times out of the thousand, whereas the second is accepted ninetynine times out of the hundred. The difference is that between a common locution rather often mishandled and a not so common one mishandled pretty nearly always. Of the two, it is obviously the second which points to the more serious disintegration of thought, and hence of language.
We have been dealing, in fact, with one of those solecisms which betray (not ‘betrays,’ if you please) a weak spot in the mind itself— a fault not so much of mere ignorance as of functional atrophy. Speaking in a general way and allowing for exceptions, we can affirm that just that difference exists as a rule between mistakes in the choice of words — diction — and mistakes in the combination of words, or what used to be called grammar. The wrong word most often denotes only a broken link in one’s acquired information; but the wrong grammar usually denotes a lack of either intelligence or the will to use intelligence. It is the record of a mental blind spot.
An obvious and frequent exception springs from the attempt to add degrees of comparison to words which, being already absolute in meaning, do not lend themselves to comparison. The commonest such word, no doubt, is ‘unique,’ properly applicable to that which is deemed to be the only one of its kind. Nevertheless, ‘a crime so contradictory, so baffling, so ingenious, so unique,’ writes S. S. Van Dine. Nothing can very well be onlier than only. The implacable Ambrose Bierce paid his respects to another such absolute word, ‘immortal’ — and at the same time said his say about the chronic overexuberance of many a book reviewer — in his remarks about The Christian, Hall Caine’s best seller of a quaint forgotten day. The Christian, Bierce proclaimed, was regarded by many thousands of his fellow citizens as ‘ a distinctly immortaler work than the immortalest work of the week immediately preceding the date of its publication.’ ‘Unparalleled,’ ‘unexampled,’ ‘incomparable,’ ‘omnipotent,’ ‘omnipresent,’ and ‘ opposite ’ are, by their very nature, similarly defiant of logical comparison. ‘ Singular ’ is an example of such a word long ago so chipped and defaced by careless handling that it is of virtually no use to a careful writer; that is, one who takes pains to say what he means and seriously desires to be understood. ‘Singular’ has come to mean anything from unique (its basic sense) to fairly striking. What debases such words is the lack, not merely of mental furniture, but of a mental process — the same deficit which produces ‘ bad grammar.’
Both sorts of error represent, of course, linguistic decay. Both, in the degree of their prevalence, turn a spotlight on language at some point where it is tending to slough off meaning. And their prevalence is getting to be a very widespread phenomenon indeed. Also, it is increasing at an unheard-of rate, or so I am admonished by a lifelong habit of attentive observation. At no time since English became a fully modern language, with dictionaries and codifiable standards of usage, has there been so high a percentage of slovenliness, laxity, and downright anarchy in its public use.
The appalling per capita production of printed matter increases beyond all possibility of exercising any adequate supervision over more than a tiny fraction of it. A larger and larger share is turned out by incompetents or by competents working in too great haste for care. Copy is ground out by thousands of long tons for reasons which would have made little sense to anyone a short span of history ago — for instance, that newspaper and magazine advertising may have a certain proportion of ostensible reading matter to dilute it. Proofreading becomes a lost science, and editorial standards once taken for granted as the decent minima by every reputable publisher survive to-day in but a few places as brilliant and conspicuous exceptions. It is still possible to find happy paragraphs, columns, pages, chapters, and whole volumes written in clean, clear English, without a trace of jargon, fumbling, or other debasement; but — the incriminating fact — it is no longer possible to take them for granted or to come upon them without a certain gratified surprise. To produce or to demand sound English means, as never before, to stand fast against the general tendency of the time. The very texts of the English classics are often so carelessly followed in popular reprints that they come to the reader reeking with corruptions. No one is supposed to notice, and, as a matter of fact, hardly anyone protests.
If at this juncture you will glance back to the excellent motto at the head of these paragraphs, you may find yourself looking down a long, lighted vista of reasons why it is well for it to be there.
IV
Inspect at random a few typical consequences of what it costs the language to teach it to a whole generation of its users on the system of leaving out its entire underpinning of concrete, teachable facts and principles.
How long is it since you have encountered the expression ‘the lion’s share’ in the only meaning which makes a grain of sense? The lion in the fable took all there was to take, according to the inveterate nature of lions. But when we see the phrase in print to-day it is ten to one that we construe it as meaning merely the larger share, or anything over half. A recent volume of miscellaneous information (Uncommon Knowledge, by George W. Stimpson) listed ‘the lion’s share’ in its legitimate meaning, and a reviewer in the New York Times Book Review cited the item as a fascinating oddity. There you have the perfect obituary of a once useful and vivid allusion.
Perhaps we cannot insist that the young shall not go through the eighth grade until someone has rubbed their noses in the world’s classic fables. But why should eight, twelve, or sixteen years of schooling produce a graduate still capable of breezy familiarities with lions he is not acquainted with? It should be second nature to him not to allude at all without knowing what it is that he alludes to. If his education in English has not done that for him, one may reasonably ask what, then, it has done and wherein it is entitled to the name of education.
Common on editorial pages and elsewhere are references to a dilemma described as being ‘between the devil and the deep,’ to which, as often as not, the words ‘blue sea’ are added. In most minds there is probably evoked the image of a monster with horns, barbed tail, and devil’s pitchfork; in fact, pert writers often play such knowing variations on the phrase as ‘between His Satanic Majesty and the cerulean profound.’ A popular author, Mr. Arthur Somers Roche, wrote a serial story entitled The Devil to Pay, and a Hollywood corporation bought the title to use with an entirely different story. In both connections it was intended to have, and no doubt did have for most persons, the same innocuously profane suggestion. ‘The devil to pay’ is mostly used to point to untoward consequences; it has about the same force as ‘a peck of trouble.’ Sometimes it is rendered as ‘hell to pay’ — which is supposed to be more vigorous, but is really the most grotesque of mistranslations. For this ‘devil’ has no connection at all with hell, and ‘pay’ is not the verb we meet in the phrase ‘ to pay the piper.’ ‘Pay’ is Old French peier, Latin picare, and it means to smear with pitch, to seal with tar and oakum, or the like. ‘Devil’ is nothing more infernal than a seam, peculiarly difficult of access and peculiarly subject to leaks, along the waterline of a wooden vessel’s hull. The full nautical expression is ‘the devil to pay and no pitch hot.’ It signifies, not unpleasant impending consequences at all, but an already hopeless situation — a virtual impossibility, like having to make bricks without straw. A close enough translation would be: ‘It has got to be done, but there is no way of doing it.’ Similarly, ‘between the devil and the deep’ means, not a dilemma or choice of evils, but a desperate predicament. The man is already overboard and drowning.
Language of nautical origin seems, indeed, uncommonly liable to perversion when fetched ashore, especially if it dates from the era of wooden ships and iron men. ‘Knot’ is used at least half the time, even by ship reporters, as if it were a unit of distance; ‘The speed was reduced to seventeen knots an hour,’ we constantly read. But the knot is essentially a rate of speed per hour. (Any description of the oldfashioned log line in a nautical glossary will tell you precisely how and why it became so.) Saying ‘seventeen knots an hour’ is like saying ‘seventeen per cent per hundred.’
Landlubbers continue to ‘cast’ twoton anchors — good Scriptural English, but a relic of the time when most vessels were so small that their mud hooks could be tumbled overside by hand. (See ‘Emblems of Hope,’ in Conrad’s Mirror of the Sea.) Modern anchors are simply ‘let go.’ There is also a picturesque quasi-nautical saying, used to characterize any cramped space, ‘not room enough to swing a cat.’ Dickens based a famous humoristic passage on a landlubber’s misapprehension of ‘cat.’ He succeeded so amazingly that the misapprehension is now all but universal. Probably few but seamen hear the phrase without visualizing a feline animal held by the hind legs. The sort of cat intended was, of course, that which has not nine lives but nine tails.
Again, in 1935 when Mr. Sopwith’s Endeavour was raising an old international issue with the Rainbow, we were treated in at least two great metropolitan dailies to the spectacle of expert special writers repeatedly calling the starboard tack the port tack and vice versa. It is perhaps natural enough for the landlubber to think that a vessel beating under sail is on the starboard tack when she is headed to starboard of the wind; but, alas for intelligent conjecture, it was decided by seamen centuries ago the other way about. She is on the starboard tack when the wind is to starboard of her — that is, when she is going to port of it.
Vice versa itself, by the way, is subject to some fairly queer mismanagement. (E.g., ‘The company may either take up the option or vice versa’ — which means, presumably without intending to, that the company may take up the option or the option may take up the company.) But probably the most curious fate which has overtaken any of the Anglo-Latin expressions is that of reductio ad absurdum. Let it not be said that such phrases, being Latin, have nothing to do with the correct use of English. They are indeed Latin, but they are also English; and reductio ad absurdum is the one clear, terse, standard designation in English for a certain indispensable logical process, a method of proof.
As everyone with a smattering of plane geometry knows, reductio ad absurdum is the formula which names all the logical possibilities of a given case and then disproves all but one of them, which one, being insusceptible of disproof, must be the truth. Reductio ad absurdum is, then, reduction to a surd — that is, to the irreducible. But it is oftenest warped, by reason of a false verbal association, to mean ‘reduction to an absurdity.’ It has, in fact, been so often subjected to that distortion as actually to be listed in Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary with that meaning and no other. It is commonly misapplied to the process of showing that statements are self-contradictory or mutually destructive, and hence absurd and untrue. But the reductio ad absurdum, properly so-called, is a reduction not to nonsense but to sense. It is a method of ascertaining truth, not of ridiculing error.
Even this wresting of a good locution from a useful purpose is outdone by the popular treatment of another quasiproverbial piece of Latin, Exceptio probat regulam — ‘The exception proves the rule.’ The meaning of ‘proves’ here is, of course, that of the Apostle when he adjures us to prove (that is, test, search, weigh, appraise) all things and hold fast that which is good. A less ambiguous rendering for modern purposes would be ‘The exception tests the law’ or ‘The test of a law is whether it has exceptions.’ In other words, the supposed law which turns out to have valid exceptions is no valid law. (Note in passing that the modern newspaperheadline use of ‘probe’ has almost exactly revived the sense of its Latin original, probo.) But the saying has been stood squarely on its head as a result of confusing the older, primary meaning of ‘prove’ with its later, more familiar secondary meaning of attest, confirm, establish. Result: a generation which actually believes that laws derive a sort of mysterious extra sanction from being violated — that a rule is hardly worth its salt unless one can adduce a few lawless phenomena which fail to conform to it.
This way of blurring clear issues has infected the mental life of our time at a hundred points besides our shiftless irresponsibility about language. The only cure is some form of educational discipline capable of escorting a whole generation of us at once out of the muddled state in which exceptions confirm the rule and into the lucid state in which they shatter it.
V
The foregoing handful of expressions are strictly typical of an enormous class, and they represent what is being done to our language on a colossal scale. Every one of them has a basic meaning which is clear-cut, sensible, useful, and, one might almost say, inherently inevitable. This basic meaning is in every instance entirely communicable by teacher to pupil, by writer to reader, by speaker to audience — by anyone who happens to know to anyone who happens not to. Yet every one of the expressions cited has been wrested with wanton carelessness from the meaning which it fits like a new glove and forced on to some opposite meaning which it fits like a stolen coat. And our official mentors in English as a professional group have done a good deal less to check the damage than the best of them as individuals would have liked to do. The teacher has been for the most part too enmeshed in grandiose theories of his task — theories most ly forced upon him — to find much time or strength for these lowly realities which merely affect the future integrity of the language.
If we are not to look to public education in language for the training of a generation grounded in civilized awareness of clear, cogent English, there is nowhere at all for us to look. But education can never produce this allimportant result without committing itself to two basic necessities, both now very much out of fashion. The first is to concentrate its teaching on simple, precise, concrete facts and principles which can actually bo taught to everyone who is teachable, with plenty of old-fashioned practical attention to the blunders which are commonly made. The second, vastly the more important, is to demand throughout the mental attitude which despises all vague half-knowledge as the most insidious and repulsive form of ignorance.
Bring a youngster to the point where it is a mental impossibility for him to parrot ‘the lion’s share’ without instinctively asking himself ‘What lion am I talking about, and what was his share?’ and you have that youngster essentially educated in his attitude not only toward language but also toward other matters of some importance. You have fortified him in a habit and a principle which will still be with him when he is a journalist, a public speaker, a dictator of business letters, a writer, a teacher in his turn, or simply a citizen whose influence on linguistic standards is that of one belonging to a generation of (we trust) more discriminating consumers. Do that for him, and you can see and measure what you have done and know that it is good. Do it for a school generation, and you can presently read your self-justification in the improved general average of public utterance, printed and spoken.
The schools, in so far as they fail to produce this result, fall short of the very smallest attainment which has any right to be called success, however startling may be their proficiency in coaxing adolescents to have precocious bright thoughts about the ethics of Ibsen. Instruction in English becomes yearly more pretentious, ornate, highflown, and costly; the general standard of published English becomes yearly more decadent and down-at-heel; and the contradiction seems to strike hardly anyone as odd, incriminating, or even suggestive.
The more advanced liberalists even jeer at Lord Dunsany’s distinction between decay and growth. They actually defend and welcome the first as if it were the second. They tell the objector: ‘There is no standard of correctness except the consensus of usage. English has always grown by sloughing off old meanings and constructions and taking on new. More than half its growth has come from popular sources, through the very processes which you classify as ignorant error. Why should we care what a given expression once meant or what some hidebound purist thinks it ought to mean? If practically everybody has adopted a certain way of speech, is not that the best possible argument for using it without apology? ’ To which question the answer is, of course: ‘Not when that certain way of speech happens to destroy without replacing sense and meaning.’
English changes, to be sure; it coins new meanings which replace or supplement the old. ‘Resentment,’ for instance, meant to Sir Thomas Browne a warmly responsive recognition, and ‘resent’ had nearly the modern sense of ‘appreciate.’ That primary meaning has abdicated in favor of a more specific secondary meaning. But the growth brought no confusion, for the new meaning was generally understood before the old one vanished. Writers did not use the word to mean nothing whatever, or not half knowing what they meant, as important educators and publicists use words to-day when they remark airily on exceptions that ‘prove’ rules, or as the 1936 Republican platform and candidate do when they refer to acts which ‘flaunt’ (flout?) the Supreme Court. Nonsense does not become sense either by illustrious personal sanction or by wide popular adoption. ‘Heat Wave Grips East’ would still show the same inherent absurdity, that of saying that a wave is a fist, even if every writer in Christendom should suddenly take to muddling his metaphors.
So long as English is English its legitimate development (which nobody wants to curtail) is bound to take place within an articula ted framework of law and tradition. This framework can be called a set of limitations and a useless interference with evolution by anyone minded to hunt up perverse names for it. (So, for that matter, might the skeleton of the human body be called.) The point is simply that this framework, always slowly changing in details, is there. A subject plural in sense still clamors for a verb plural in form, and meaning is unsatisfied until it gets it. Pronouns demand antecedents and a measure of agreement with them. Metaphors profit just as much by consistency as in Whately’s day, or Quintilian’s. Literary or historical allusions continue to make sense when based on something, and lunacy when based on nothing or the wrong thing. Words fall short of communication, the purpose of words, when employed on the Wonderland system of making them mean whatever you choose. Nouns and verbs make just as poor adjectives as if the modern newspaper headline had never been devised.
The changes which occur within this framework of idiom and tradition are growth. The changes which ignore or defy it are decay. And the test of tests for any specific change or threat of change continues to be what it has always been: Does it temper and sharpen language as an apt instrument for the expression of meanings, or does it soften and blunt it?
VI
A question of the greatest moment for the times is this: What has the teaching of English been doing with its unparalleled opportunity to make itself count against this alarming erosion of standards?
Why, it has chosen this of all times to cast off its moorings and let itself drift away into a false liberalism, thereby encouraging the very tendencies against which it ought to be making brisk headway. In the existing situation there is just one way in which the teaching of English could give a good account of itself. That way is by bending every energy on the training of a new generation equipped to know good English when it sees it, revolted by the dearth of it, and quick to abet it as both consumers and producers. In no other conceivable fashion can linguistic decay be arrested. The goal is a perfectly practicable as well as an obvious one; but teaching has fallen into the hands of theorists who adopt other views of its function.
English is now more and more an ‘inspirational’ subject, and most of its professors are ingeniously engaged in supplying lessons in the theory of flight to those who have not yet learned to walk. Pupils who cannot be trusted to give a plural subject a plural verb are now coached in the tricks of dramatic construction, the aesthetics of literary criticism, the canons of the short story, and the composition of free verse, all in the name of ‘self-expression.’ Exact information which really can be taught is despised as soul-deadening and discarded in favor of subtle discriminations which cannot be taught to most and do not need to be taught to the few. Grammar, instead of being revitalized as the indispensable science of saying what one wishes to say, is flung out bodily for no better reason than that some pedagogues once taught it as a kind of dismal algebra of language and made it an arid drill in parsing.
The inevitable result is a wholesale production of illiterates with certificates of culture. The liberal idea in education has now been dominant for long enough to bring a generation of American readers and writers from the schoolroom to active maturity. It is, I think, no mere coincidence that their arrival has been signalized by a general decay of standards in written and spoken thought — a decay the like of which, for rapidity and diffusion, was never seen before.
We pay, and the superb language we inherit pays, a heavy penalty for the fact that, educationally, the American mind has gone soft where it most needs to be hard — that is, in the linguistic and other cultural studies. In more and more classrooms English is treated as a subject about which everything is to be felt and nothing known. Until some force reverses that emphasis, nothing can make an end of the present disastrous confusion between linguistic growth and linguistic decay.