Shakespeare has Volumnia, mother of Coriolanus, urge him to placate his enemies by using whatever words will do the job, no matter, she says, that the required words happen to be ‘but bastards and syllables / Of no allowance to your bosom’s truth’. Perhaps you have a greater respect for your bosom’s truth than Volumnia had for Coriolanus’s; and perhaps you find that you express yours best in words our advisers reject. If so, you may wish to ask yourself who exactly these gripers are to try to limit what you can say.
There are, however, plenty of people who get by pretty well without using the sorts of words that sit on the average griper’s lexical disposition matrix. And naturally some of these Good English speakers, finding no need of the extra words, dismiss them out of hand, perhaps agreeing wanly and unscientifically with Swift’s conclusion, formed in 1712, that when it comes to the English language, ‘its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions’.**
Even if Swift had happened to be right, we all know that out of the apparent swill of new corruptions come numerous words and uses destined to be adopted across the board, so that even the modern gripers whose views we have been consulting brighten their tomes here and there with ‘few authorities continue to insist that’, ‘only the ultra-finicky would deplore’, ‘not to seem mincingly donnish’,** and so on.
And after all, it would be inconsistent of those who rue the misuses that serve to shrink our language if they were to respond with horror to every last novelty calculated to expand it. The association of error with new possibilities was the point of a remark made by Elizabeth Griffith, when she wrote to her husband in 1766 reporting on the critic of his prose: ‘I told him I dared answer for it that you never confounded Grammar, though I owned you sometimes puzzled a Dictionary, — and might hereafter enrich one’. (He did. And as a matter of fact, so did she.)
Most of the guardians of what they declare to be Good English advocate a style that is calm, lucid, direct. They do not always achieve these qualities themselves, but we must surely sympathise with them if, in this, their reach exceeds their grasp. It is harder to feel sympathy when, convinced of their own rectitude, they abandon the very civility that they are arguing their Good English is ideally formed to convey. On pedants, Addison concluded in 1711—and sadly here the evidence would seem to bear him out—that ‘a great deal of Knowledge, which is not capable of making a Man wise, has a natural Tendency to make him Vain and Arrogant’. This might explain why our gripers declaim on rules when in truth they are discussing fashions, and why they appeal to logic where no detectable logic applies.
In the introduction to this book, we encountered some of the ideas of Richard Grant White, discusser of ‘words that are not words’. Expanding on his theme, he wrote: ‘Words that are not words sometimes die spontaneously; but many linger, living a precarious life on the outskirts of society, uncertain of their position, and a cause of great discomfort to all right thinking, straightforward people’. Anyone stilled by the social presumption in this remark of 1870 should be aware that a similar attitude underlies much of what is found in popular style guides to this day.
In the span of time between a novel word or use becoming modestly commonplace and its being so widely circulated that only the mincingly donnish would dream of rejecting it, its standing among those who declaim on the language will mysteriously change. At first it will be dismissed by those who like to get cross about misuses as a product of ‘our modern Blunderland’.** But when it is no longer a cause of discomfort to most people, or to even the most resolute of gripers, the gripers will not only accept, all of a sudden, any amount of rule-breaking or illogic in its make-up, but will positively congratulate themselves on being able to celebrate its quaintly idiomatic nature.
There may be a want of coherence to this, and yet the repressive displays put on by our gripers keep many people of a meeker disposition enthralled. If you have ever been advised that you harbour in your English an incorrect use, then you know what it is to be swept up in the great forward march of language change. You could, receiving this wisdom from on high, respond as though stung, and attempt to purify your vocabulary. Or you could decide that there are horrible words you fancy, consider useful and are ready to defend. Why not dot them about the place on purpose? Though you may send the old guard reeling, you will at the same time be contributing to nudging the communal ear. And after all, it is the masses ‘in unvanquishable number’ who do the real sifting of English; who in the end determine which uses are fated to become serviceable and good. Victorian writers can be found regretting civilisation, unaccountable and humiliating; A. P. Herbert called motivate, reactionary and characterise ‘horrible’, ‘filthy’, and so on. These words may not inspire uniform warmth even now, but is anyone still repelled by them?
Each corruption of today that is accepted and absorbed into tomorrow’s Good English will be one corruption the less. The threat it currently poses to a griper of inducing apoplexy will be gone; and the menace of griperish contempt for those who favour the misuse will vanish too. Put another way, though if you place yourself among the advance guard you may take some flak, your horrible words will be a gift to your children, your children’s children and their children to come.
Before you started reading this little book, you were perhaps not quite clear about the battle lines drawn by our advisers—with all their talk of what is vulgar, abominable and barbaric. And should you find, having surveyed the field, that you have no wish to think further on this subject, you are unlikely to come to any great harm. But the English language is as much yours as it is anyone’s: it is one of the wonders of the world that is free. If you choose to, you can play your part in style.