Describing Prescriptivism

Usage Guides and Usage Problems in British and American English

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429558146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Describing Prescriptivism provides a topical and thought-provoking analysis of linguistic prescriptivism in British and American English, from a historical as well as present-day perspective. Focusing on usage guides and usage problems, the book takes a three-fold approach to present an in-depth analysis of the topic, featuring:

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• a detailed study of the advice provided in usage guides over the years;

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• an authoritative comparison of this advice with actual usage as recorded in British and American corpora, including the HUGE (Hyper Usage Guide of English) database – developed specifically to enable this line of study – as well as more mainstream corpora such as COCA, COHA and the BNC;

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• a close analysis of the attitudes to particular usage problems among the general public, based on surveys distributed online through the "Bridging the Unbridgeable" research project's blog.*

With extensive case studies to illustrate and support claims throughout, this comprehensive study is key reading for students and researchers of prescriptivism, the history of English and sociolinguistics.

*Found at https://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/

Chapter 1

Introduction

Language rules – usage problems – usage guides

How many usage problems are there in the English language? Chapman (2017) calculated that there must be at least 10,000 of them, and perhaps many more. He based this figure on Jack Lynch’s book The Lexicographer’s Dilemma (2009: 13), which reads that “one estimate places the count around 3,500”. These, however, are general rules of grammar, which do not necessarily reflect usage problems like the question whether it is I or it is me is correct, and whether only may be used as a clause modifier, as in He only had one chapter to write, or whether it should appear immediately next to the noun phrase it modifies, one chapter, in this example. An inventory of the first four letters of H.W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) produced over 1,000 items alone.¹ Moreover, many usage problems dealt with by Fowler, according to Paul Bennett, cannot easily be found in the book because they do not have independent entries but are scattered throughout in the work. Another problem with Fowler’s book is that it contains entries like “Pairs and snares” – not very helpful for readers looking for guidance on specific usage questions. Bennett therefore produced a so-called Wordfinder for the second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1965), as a “handy companion to … the world’s most famous book on modern English usage” (1996: title-page). The document covers well over 9,000 features, in addition to the ones in Modern English Usage itself. Chapman’s estimate may therefore well be correct.

Usage problems can be identified for all levels of language use – spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, grammar (syntax and morphology) and style. They are items of language that are perceived as problematical by the general public because they show variation in usage and therefore make people insecure about which variant to select (cf. Algeo 1991a: 3–4). One of them is generally believed to be more correct than the other, which, it is believed, must consequently be avoided. Usage problems are dealt with in usage guides like Fowler’s Modern English Usage or its predecessor The King’s English (1906), published two decades earlier with his brother Frank. “Fowler”, as Modern English Usage is often referred to,² was by no means the first usage guide to be published. For many people it is a kind of archetypal usage guide, which is believed to have given birth to the usage advice manual (cf. Algeo 1991a: 6), but usage guides are actually much older than that. They originated in England during the late eighteenth century, and subsequently made their appearance in America during the 1840s. In both countries, usage guides became very popular. S.A. Leonard, in The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage (1929), for instance, notes that “handbooks of abuses and corrections … were … freely produced in the nineteenth century” (1929: 35) (cf. Finegan 1998: 564), and this has continued ever since. At present, the most recently published usage guides include Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style (2014), which first appeared in the US and shortly afterwards in the UK, and Oliver Kamm’s Accidence Shall Will Happen: The ^non-pedantic Guide to English Usage, published in the UK in 2015. In the same year, another American usage guide appeared: Stephen Spector’s May I Quote You on That? A Guide to Grammar and Usage.

Older authoritative titles are reissued as well, and recent examples, all published by Oxford University Press (OUP), include the facsimile reprint of the “Classic First Edition” of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2009), with a preface by David Crystal; a fourth edition of Fowler by Jeremy Butterfield (2015); and another fourth edition, this time of Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage, now called Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016).³ The revised title suggests the end result of a gradual usurpation of Fowler’s former position of authority: from A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (1998; cf. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 1926), through Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed., 2009, cf. Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 3rd ed. by Burchfield) to, finally, Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016). This looks like a battle for the market (with OUP engaging in a competition with itself), but it also looks as if Garner (or his publisher) adopted the role of a one-man academy (cf. Edwards 2012: 21). Spector (2015) was likewise published by OUP. Another revised and updated edition of a usage guide, Sir Ernest Gowers’s Complete Plain Words (1954), was produced by his great-granddaughter Rebecca Gowers in 2014. The book was published by Penguin (under the imprint of Particular Books), as was Pinker’s The Sense of Style. Penguin also reissued Kingsley Amis’s The King’s English in 2011, which had originally been published posthumously in 1997 by HarperCollins. The new edition of the book includes an introduction by the author’s son, the novelist Martin Amis, evidently with a view to drawing attention to the book in the media – which it did: the introduction was published in The Guardian on 28 May 2011, a month before the new edition was scheduled to appear. The publisher of Oliver Kamm’s Accidence Will Happen is Weidenfeld & Nicolson: different publishers have a clear interest in usage guides, which have proved to be a highly marketable product.

Usage guides and their readers

But who reads these usage guides? David Crystal read Fowler’s Modern English Usage from cover to cover when preparing his introduction for the OUP facsimile reprint,⁴ and so did Paul Bennett while compiling his Wordfinder as a practical companion to the book’s second edition. But Crystal and Bennett hardly comprise the book’s intended readership, since it was not practical advice they were seeking. To find out who actually used Fowler, I carried out a brief survey in December 2007 among the members of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas for a paper in 2008 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Fowler’s birth. The return of the questionnaire was very poor indeed: only sixteen people completed it. What is more, most of the respondents reported that they didn’t use Fowler, while others said they only used the book for the purpose of academic research. One – tongue-in-cheek – comment read that the informant’s in-laws owned a copy which they frequently drew upon during linguistic arguments. Another informant, not part of the original Henry Sweet Society questionnaire population, similarly wrote that she only consulted the book “to win tedious arguments about grammar”.⁵ One of the Henry Sweet Society informants, a native speaker of English and still a PhD student at the time, said that he regularly consulted the first edition of the book if he had questions concerning linguistic correctness. This raises the issue of whether buyers of OUP’s reissue of Fowler’s Classic First Edition, which dates back to 1926, will actually consult the book to obtain usage advice as well, even though the recommendations date back almost a hundred years.

Fowler’s Modern English Usage came out in three subsequent editions, by Sir Ernest Gowers in 1965, by Robert Burchfield in 1996 and most recently by Jeremy Butterfield in 2015. Gowers left the second edition largely unchanged, since OUP wished “to keep as much of Fowler as possible”, and according to D.M. Davin, assistant secretary to the delegates of the Press at the time, he only engaged in “removing purely lexicographical matter in order to save space; pruning out dead wood …; ceasing to flog any dead horses; removing false prophecies; and inserting fresh abuses which would have qualified for reprobation had they existed in Fowler’s time” (as cited in Scott 2009: 191). The third edition, however, was updated considerably. Burchfield considered the original work a “fossil”, a kind of “monument to all that was linguistically acceptable in the standard English of the southern counties of England in the first quarter of the twentieth century” (1996: xi). As for the fourth edition, Robin Straaijer (2016a), in his review of the book, cites Butterfield saying that Modern English Usage has been “thoroughly revised and updated to reflect how English speakers the world over use the language now, in the twenty-first century” (Butterfield 2015: vii). If readers today consult the book’s first edition, they will therefore be drawing on a norm of correctness that was considered outdated even by Burchfield’s time. But doing so may after all be intentional.

With the occasional exception, then, linguists, and perhaps academics in general, are not part of the typical reading public of usage guides like Fowler. Checking among her students, as Anne Curzan did while writing Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History (2014), to assess the popularity of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (2003), she found that many of them indeed hadn’t read it (2014: 41). Fowler’s Modern English Usage lacks a preface in which he might have outlined his intended readership, explaining who he expected to benefit from his usage advice. Burchfield, however, in his introduction to the third edition, quotes from a letter by Fowler to his publisher which describes the work’s intended readers as “the half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities who wants to know Can I say …” (1996: vii). Burchfield himself provides a somewhat more detailed glimpse of the kind of reader interested in Fowler at the time he was working on the new edition, mentioning that people “looked anxious” when he told them about the project. “People of all kinds,” he wrote,

continue to tell me that they use it “all the time”, and that “it never lets them down”. In the space of three weeks a judge, a colonel, and a retired curator of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum told me on separate social occasions that they have the book close at hand at all times.

(Burchfield 1996: ix)

Whether this is indeed a reference to real people or not, these readers all seem typically middle class and fairly well-educated, members of the professional classes but who are not quite familiar with what constitutes the norm of correctness in English usage.

An example of an actual person consulting Fowler is Sir Winston Churchill, who is frequently quoted as having uttered the words “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put”, thus allegedly avoiding the stigmatised stranded preposition. On the final page of her biography of Henry Fowler, Jenny McMorris writes: “Churchill, planning the invasion of Normandy, snapped at an aide to check a word in ‘Fowler’” (2001: 217). She based this on Churchill’s own book, The Second World War (1948–1963), so the account is most likely true.⁶ Though a member of the aristocracy, Churchill was not highly educated in an academic sense,⁷ so he may have felt insecure about questions of linguistic correctness. His famous attempt at avoiding a stranded preposition, however, is argued by Ben Zimmer in Language Log (2004) to be a misattribution: the source is Gowers’s Plain Words (1948), which reads: “It is said that Mr. Winston Churchill once made this marginal comment against a sentence that clumsily avoided a prepositional ending” (1948: 73). Gowers’s words suggest that already at the time, shortly after the war, the story was indeed no more than that.⁸

Presenting usage advice

Usage guides are reference works, and many of them are presented like that, with the items listed in alphabetical order. Fowler’s Modern English Usage is an example of this, and so are the very first American usage guide, Seth T. Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector; or Vocabulary of the Common Errors of Speech (1847); Partridge’s Usage and Abusage (1947);⁹ Gowers’s ABC of Plain Words (1951); Current English Usage by Frederick T. Wood (1962); and The Queen’s English by Harry Blamires (1994). Reference works like these are not meant to be read from cover to cover but to be consulted on individual search questions. The very first English usage guide, according to S.A. Leonard (1929: 35), Robert Baker’s Reflections on the English Language (1770), however, was not presented alphabetically: its 127 rules of usage, which mostly concern vocabulary and grammar, are listed in no apparent order, though occasionally one rule inspired another. Baker’s book therefore must have been meant to be read in its entirety if readers wished to profit from its usage advice, as is also suggested by its lengthy preface, a “rambling” piece of text (Baker 1770: xxvi) that is completely unrelated to the subject of the book. The King’s English by Fowler and Fowler (1906) and Gowers’s Plain Words (1948) and his Complete Plain Words (1954) are not in alphabetical order either, and there are many other examples like that. Of the most recent ones, the sections containing usage advice in Pinker (2014) and Kamm (2015) are presented alphabetically. Usage guides thus clearly have different purposes: they may be used for mere consultation, in the case of debated usage items or to solve an instance of linguistic insecurity on the part of the reader, or they may serve as textbooks in teaching. This is how Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (1959) originated, by far the most popular English usage guide ever (Pullum 2010a: 34). See the introduction to th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The origin of the usage guide
• 3. The usage guide – and the HUGE database
• 4. The writers and the publishers
• 5. Usage problems pet linguistic peeves
• 6. The language of prescriptivism
• 7. Public awareness of prescriptivism
• 8. The end of prescriptivism?
• Appendix 1: Feedback on a blogpost (January 2015)
• Appendix 2: Usage problems in the HUGE database
• Appendix 3: Usage guide writers interviewed
• Appendix 4: Usage guide writers’ credentials
• Appendix 5: The metalinguistic categories from Sundby et al. (1991)
• References
• Index