In George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, Fred Vincy explains to his sister that ‘All choice of words is slang’. ‘It marks a class’, he says, and then adds, rather brilliantly: ‘correct English is the slang of prigs’. The word slang dates from the mid eighteenth century. It started as a low term for low terms—an example of what it named. But by the 1870s, when Middlemarch was published, its meaning had widened in line with Fred Vincy’s definition, so that it could also be used to suggest the special vocabulary of a particular group—what Elizabeth Griffith, back in 1766, had referred to as a ‘privileged Dialect’.
We shall not detain ourselves here with how the prigs managed to nab the labels ‘correct’ and ‘good’ for their particular form of slang. The fact is that they did. And it is in a spirit of dauntless righteousness that they continue to dismiss the English of others as uneducated, convoluted, genteel, abominable, and so on. John Humphrys, in Lost for Words, speaks with unabashed good spirits of a use that ‘we’ shun because ‘it would make us sound common’. Simon Heffer, as we have seen, condemns a grammatical norm exemplified by Louis Armstrong on the grounds that it is ‘vulgar’. But a linguist would agree with Fred Vincy’s thesis that Louis Armstrong’s English is one sort of slang or dialect, and that of Messrs Humphrys and Heffer, another.**
A person could simply try to ignore the stresses and strains of worrying about this sensitive aspect of usage. And sure enough, most people, most of the time, comfortably do. But if you are ready to take on the gripers, and would rather not fight blind, what follows?
In the shadow of this question lie the great, fraught realms of ‘register’.
Our choice of verbal register is, in the most general sense (as register has for some decades been interpreted), our choice of the type and grade of our language in relation to the circumstance in which we are using it. This may see us conforming to an understood dialect of a sort: ‘journalese’, ‘teen-speak’, ‘business English’. It may also require us to pay close attention to the degree of formality we employ, on a scale usually depicted as running from high to low. And most of us are attuned to numerous registers (going with the loose definition above), whether we recognise this in ourselves or not. So it is that we juggle our words to fit the occasion, making them hyperbolic, cagey, crude, vague, obsequious, American, and so on, as somehow feels appropriate—or as feels productively inappropriate.
Because we can draw these distinctions, it is possible to set up a clash for effect. Two radically contrasting registers are captured by the OED in the definition it gives for its undated third sense of the verb to bog. Picture the exercised lexicographer writing that to bog is a ‘low word, scarcely found in literature, however common in coarse colloquial language’. ‘Low’, ‘common’, ‘coarse’ and ‘colloquial’! Unusually for the OED, no supporting quotation is given to illustrate this gutter-bound use of bog, from ‘literature’ or anywhere else; all we get is the withering assertion that it means to ‘exonerate the bowels’, or ‘defile with excrement’. The meaning of ‘defile with excrement’ couched in the register of bog itself would seem to be to ‘shit on’. Meanwhile, use of the verb exonerate to mean ‘discharge’ is clearly marked elsewhere in the OED as long obsolete. Evidently, scaling the heights of language register by means of a rarefied archaism allowed the lexicographer to ‘exonerate’ the dismay of having to work on bog at all; or, put another way, it apparently gave this person the comforting sense of having bogged bog.
Questions of register can be more subtle than this. The Economist Style Guide advises its readers not to use participate in: ‘use take part in, with more words but fewer syllables’, it says. On the facing page it gives the advice to avoid come up with, proposing as an acceptable substitute originate. If a consistent standard of judgement had been applied, it would have been necessary here to say the exact opposite: ‘with more syllables but fewer words’. Why the contradiction? What the guide sees no need to explain—indeed, might find it hard to explain—is that, in the register of English that it favours, come up with, but not take part in, ranks as too informal, while participate in, but not originate, sounds a shade prim.
If few people fret ceaselessly over just how to pitch what they say, most will from time to time put some thought into the matter, not least because English so often supplies us with a choice of more than one word for more or less the same thing.** The shades of difference between overlapping terms can be slight. For instance, little distinguishes fury from rage. Yet what of intestines, entrails and guts? If you were to stab a knife into any of these you would cause identical harm; but that does not mean that these three words, in what they refer to, do the identical job. The 1858 original of Gray’s Anatomy is full of uses of intestines but has not a single use of either entrails or guts. And though the text does carry the odd allusion to ‘the gut’, it never uses the word gut in a heading. At the other end of the scale, has anyone ever acted on ‘intestine instincts’? Could a person ‘bust an entrail’ to finish a job on time?
There are other words that overlap in meaning with the three above: innards, vitals, bowels and viscera, for example, as well as splanchnic (usually an adjective) and, in origin, pluck of the kind a brave person can be said to show (pluck being a term for the guts ‘plucked’ from a butchered carcass). This gives us more ways of naming the digestive tract, and potentially some other stuff inside the torso, than most of us seem to require; and indeed, splanchnic would probably elicit from the average person today, ‘Sorry—what?’ In a 1382 translation of the Bible, two Old English words are formed into a compound to create yet another term for our list: 1 Sam. v. 9 is given as ‘the arsroppis of hem goynge out stonken’. Even disregarding the quotation’s religious source, it is pretty startling today to read this unapologetic reference to someone’s ‘arse-ropes’ going out stinking.** But these many words, with their shifting connotations, all have, or have had, their uses, and can be compared for usefulness now—the trouble being that not everyone faced with a choice of overlapping terms will come to the same conclusion about how each is best used.
Another squib from Alfred Crowquill’s 1854 Electric Telegraph of Fun (whose ‘don’ting’ we met in Chapter 5) concerns pitiful qualms in this very area. Under the mocking title ‘Elegance’, Crowquill writes, ‘A lady who wished some stuffing from a roast duck, which a gentleman was carving at a public table, requested him to transfer from the deceased fowl to her plate some of its artificial intestines’. Elsewhere in his compendium, Crowquill ridicules a second lady—who might as well be sister to the first—for chiding her little son when he seeks to read a ‘tale’ out of the newspaper, not a ‘narrative’. The boy promptly urges the nearby house-dog Sancho to stop ‘ “shaking his narrative!” ’
It is a similar scene in Middlemarch, of domestic speech being policed, that provokes Fred Vincy into making the declaration given at the head of these remarks, that ‘correct’ English is no more than its own form of slang (‘the slang of prigs’). He throws out this quip because his sister, Rosamond, has just reproved their mother for referring, not to the ‘best’ of the young men of Middlemarch, but to the ‘pick’ of them—pick classed by Rosamond as ‘vulgar’. The 1956 film High Society has an exchange conducted in much the same spirit, when a conservative matron scolds her daughter for saying that she is ‘pooped’ rather than ‘enervated’: the moviegoer is left in no doubt that the kid is pooped. Has anything changed now that the twenty-first century is well under way? In what was a widely reported story, the powers that be at Harris Academy, Upper Norwood, felt themselves compelled in 2013 to produce a list of words ‘banned’ from use in the school’s classrooms and corridors. They included like, extra, a throat-clearing basically and the terminal yeah.
You may well fully grasp the difference between pooped and enervated, and yet find yourself in a slight fog about how to use register in your campaign to broaden the scope of Good English. It is true that here matters do become mildly confusing. After all, if the gripers deem more than one register to be unpleasant, as they do—yielding what they consider to be gross failures of style—does it not follow that there must be more than one wrong register for a dedicated misuser of English to choose from?
It most certainly does! Indeed, there will always and in every circumstance be many more wrong registers available to you than it is possible to count, so that we could hardly dream of studying them all even if we wanted to. Happily for us, however, no such course of study is here required. Instead, we shall confine ourselves to looking at the handful of registers that our advisers appear to hate the most. Which of these you might then like to attempt, and when, will be up to you.