Founding Grammars by Rosemarie Ostler

Author:Rosemarie Ostler
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466846289
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

6.

The Science of Grammar

The title of Richard Grant White’s June 1871 Galaxy article—“Words and Their Uses: The Author’s Humble Apology for Having Written His Book”—must have startled his regular readers. A quick scan of the first paragraph, however, would have reassured them. The “apology” was actually a determined defense of his work. White seldom needed to take such a step. As he explains in the article, his book has provoked much “intelligent and decided” discussion, nearly all of it positive. A glaring exception has recently come to his notice—a series of hostile articles that appeared in the Yale College Courant from November 19, 1870, through January 28, 1871.

The articles were signed “X,” but White knew they were written by a Yale professor named Thomas Lounsbury, with substantial input from his colleague William Dwight Whitney. With mock humility, White tells his Galaxy readers that he takes it as a great compliment that “two of that famous faculty felt that it was prudent for them to unite their forces for the demolition of the work of a poor dabbler … like me.”1

“Demolition” is a strong word, but it’s not an exaggeration. The professors had not merely given White’s book a poor review. They had spent ten weeks and several thousand words blasting away at it. (Why Lounsbury and Whitney chose to use a pseudonym for their articles is unclear. Signing controversial commentary with a false name—usually Roman or Greek—was common practice earlier in the century, but unusual by the 1870s.)

The College Courant articles opened a new front in America’s ongoing usage war. Grammarians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whatever their differences, agreed on their basic goals. While they might quibble over details—and radicals like Webster and Fowle might reject certain traditional rules and labels—they all believed that an ideal of elegant English existed and could be captured in the right kind of grammar book. In the end, they all produced familiar-looking volumes that combined precedent with their own judgment and taste.

The Courant authors viewed grammar from a far different vantage point. Unlike earlier generations of usage warriors, they were not schoolteachers or popular writers. They were scholars of language. Lounsbury was a professor of English literature with a comprehensive knowledge of early English and Whitney was a professor in the new field of philology—the systematic study of language. Lounsbury and Whitney’s approach to grammar and usage was one of scientific inquiry. They didn’t believe that personal taste had any place in grammar discussions.

The professors were not against grammar teaching—several years after the Courant articles appeared Whitney himself would author a grammar book—but they believed in researching the history and development of words and phrases before making pronouncements on their use. White relied on reason and his own preferences to decide what was correct. He passed judgment on usage standards, while Lounsbury and Whitney explored actual use.

The clash between the verbal critic and the professors drew the battle lines for a fight over the nature of grammar that’s still going strong.

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