Never Commit Verbicide

...Burchfield comes down on the side of diachronism, as befits an editor of the greatest historical dictionary in any language...

...Onions, the last surviving editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (or OED...

...But what a world this is where you cannot go a minute without hearing "We'll be landing at Kennedy Airport momentarily," "When will you stop living off of me...

...We get brief, helpful discussions of the methods of older and newer grammarians, among the latter especially those of Professor Sir Randolph Quirk (nomen est omen) and his determiners, predeterminers and postdeterminers...

...Or pronounces the verb influence so as to rhyme with ruins...

...In Unlocking, Burchfield writes, "nearly all the linguistic tendencies of the present day have been displayed in earlier centuries, and it is self-evident that the language has not bled to death through change...

...Burchfield, now Sir Robert, retired from lexicography and switched to the field most demanding succor: English grammar...

...nobody corrects grammatical errors in a student essay, a newspaper, a book...

...Still, it is something worth striving for...

...but Englishmen and Americans, unlike the French, never will be slaves to a body of linguistic legislators...

...There is the merely utilitarian talk, contemptuously equated by Mallarmé with pressing a coin into someone else's hand and receiving one in return...

...Further, R.B...

...It doesn't much matter in the case of the orpharion—few of us strum it nowadays—but other errors have proved costlier...

...Me and my [sic] Gal" (the correct title of the musical is Me and My Girl...

...Human beings, however, are getting worse and worse as simple, basic speakers—never mind elegant conversationalists...

...Personally, I sympathize with the sentiments of Jonathan Swift, who, as Burchfield quotes him, wrote of the English language that "if it were once refined to a certain Standard, perhaps there might be ways found to fix it forever...

...In either discipline, the grandmasters thrive on rules...

...conveys a relationship to certain minor art forms such as interior decoration and gardening, as in "Let's put the sofa against the wall," and "I'll put the rose bushes in that corner...

...His conclusion, if the book can be said to have one, is the hope "that the process of sifting and resifting the English of past centuries will be allowed to continue...

...Uncertainty prevails...

...And the speaker in the poem is a professor of English...

...As if the lapses of famous writers— or statesmen or journalists or college presidents (Nathan Pusey of Harvard is usually cited in defense of the impersonal hopefully)—excused a mistake...

...Suffice it to say that R.B...

...For this, of course, an Academy was needed, and Swift advocated it...

...Thank you for inviting my wife and I," "Don't let me influence you, and countless other oral borborygms...

...In 1957 his tenure ended...

...Significantly, it is the enlightened amateurs and literati who care about upholding the tradition, while academics care only about the dictionary's "inclusiveness and upto-dateness...

...It begins with the four T.S...

...Note, incidentally, R.B.'s frequent use of imagery drawn from the sciences, possibly from a conscious or unconscious desire to elevate language to their plane, or at least to make language more palatable to a predominantly scientific age...

...A modern version of this linguistic position has been well expressed by C.S...

...My one quarrel with him is that he tries too hard to be open-minded and fair to the linguists he clearly and rightly has no use for...

...The book is as accessible as it is learned, and should be of interest and use to the most banausic readers...

...There is no better way of communicating the scope of the book than adducing its table of contents...

...Unlocking the English Language is a gathering of Burchfield's more recent essays and addresses on lexicography, grammar and the history of the English language, some of them touching on his work as the editor of the OEDS...

...that capability and godlike reason," Hamlet thought, prevented one from being "a beast, no more...

...correct speech is a membership card in a select club, the Club of Right Speakers...

...And, God knows, the French Academy, too, has long since begun to lose its grip...

...is for including offensive words, so long as they are or were in general use...

...We had better look to our rule books, if such can still be made sense of in the era of Sir Randolph Quirk, Rodney Huddleston, Noam Chomsky, and the rest with their impermeably opaque but politically correct approaches to linguistics...

...A person's speech and writing, even more than the cleanness of his fingernails, is a sure indication of his sensitivity and refinement...

...Again: "All grammatical areas are vulnerable...

...All that the much too gentle Burchfield permits himself to say about the phenomenon is, "Why such migrations occur is uncertain, but occur they do...

...So let me say instead that, because a woman usually wears nail polish, you can't tell what lurks under her fingernails...

...with the 12 volumes of the OED...

...This is the method that bypasses illustrative quotations from literary and other reputable printed sources in favor of popular media, paraliterary sources, and made-up examples of one's own...

...In the end, Burchfield had to settle for a colorless and unhelpful geographic definition...

...Let me state my own tenets...

...But if hopelessness were enough to make a task look daunting, books on language that are not simply descriptive would never get written...

...Eliot, the great poetic-linguistic paragon, could be wrong, and that the large 17th-century lute he called the opherion is in fact the orpharion, Burchfield describes this as "a classic example of the kind of linguistic flaw found in the workof most major writers...

...So, as he makes his current move from lexicography into grammar, he feels "more like a shipwrecked sailor than a pioneer, in a strange country of warring tribes, each one declaring that there is no real alternative to its system...

...More damaging to Burchfield is this example Bryson found in The English Language: "A range of sentences forming statements, commands, questions and exclamations cause us to draw on a more sophisticated battery of orderings and arrangements," where the predicate, to agree with the singular subject, range, should be causes, not cause...

...is switching from lexicographer to grammarian), and "The OED: Past and Present" (a retrospect on Burchfield and his team's lexicographical achievement...

...The scholarship of grammar...

...Now, if you wonder why I just wrote, in good male chauvinist fashion, "his fingernails" rather than "his or her fingernails, I could give you an elaborate diachronic answer about "his" being grammatically a unisex word, and about how, stylistically, "his or her" is clumsy, no matter how politically correct...

...The early grammarians "were looking at the language with a telescope from a high hill...

...Fowler and two of his brothers, and how Modern English Usage became a bible for English speakers and readers until it was, in turn, challenged by the descriptivists), "The Genealogy of Dictionaries" (about how they crib from one another, usually without acknowledgment), "The Oxford English Dictionary and Its Historical Principles," "The End of the Alphabet: Last Exit to Grammar" (about why and how R.B...

...Tolkien, and was amanuensis to C.T...

...Burchfield, with justifiable pride, holds up alongside the achievements of the OED those of the OEDS under his captaincy...

...It's no use saying that Shakespeare's grammar, too, is unacceptable to pedants, yet surely the Bard knew best...

...Thence it proceeds to eight discrete essays: "The Treatment of Controversial Vocabulary in the Oxford English Dictionary," "The Turn of the Screw: Ethnic Vocabulary and Dictionaries" (about the political pressures exerted on lexicographers), "The Point of Severance: British and American English," "The Fowlers: Their Achievements in Lexicography and Grammar" (about H.W...

...Nor can it reasonably be argued that correct English is a straitjacket to self-expression: Are the rules of chess an impediment to chess players...

...Vulgarity finds its antidote...

...They occur, obviously, when enough people, high and low, writing or speaking, give us me for /, making it the vox populi, vox dictionarii...

...In the preceding volume, he expressed it more succinctly: "The English language is like a fleet of juggernaut trucks that goes on regardless...

...is still at an 18th-century stage of evolution," Burchfield observes...

...Lindley Murray-type self-canceling expressions...

...So the hostility to prescriptivism dates back to the very beginning of our century...

...Again, Bryson catches Burchfield in flagrante delicto with "as when Malory or Sir Philip Sidney were writing," where the or demands was, not were...

...Montague Summers, the English literary eccentric, gave as one of his hobbies talking to intelligent dogs...

...Lewis in Studies in Words (1960): "I am not suggesting that we can by archaizing purism repair any of the losses that have already occurred...

...He had already been appointed secretary to the Early English Text Society, but Dan Davin, a fellow New Zealander and the representative of the Delegates of the Oxford University Press, invited him to assume the editorship of a new and much-needed Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (or OEDS), which meant also becoming editor-in-chief of various other Oxford English dictionaries...

...It is, for instance, chilling to read the objections to successive definitions ?? Palestinian in his dictionaries...

...A terribly modest expectation when you consider that, as he says elsewhere, "A century is a very short time in syntax...

...Nobody learns good English any more, partly because nobody teaches it any more...

...We know they exist, but we are not quite sure how they help to interpret the cruel asymmetrical facts of a given language...

...the truly curious and concerned should learn a lot from it, besides enjoying the fun of occasionally disagreeing...

...The most beautiful poetic expression can be undermined by solecism, catachresis, misspelling, mispronunciation...

...The gap between man and beast is closing...

...Wearier even than Burchfield realizes...

...It is similarly comforting to find out that T.S...

...suffer from a strange inability to put aside their Fowler, and take up Quirk and Chomsky instead...

...They seduce the recipient's consciousness rather than rape it or leave it cold...

...True, Fowler's Modern English Usage, to whose genesis Burchfield devotes some of his liveliest pages, is a work that has helped, and probably will keep helping, more people than any other (with the possible exception of Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage), precisely because it is so staunchly, unapologetically prescriptive, yet with a sense of humor to endear its fiats...

...THREE strands in Unlocking the English Language finally reveal themselves as the figure in the carpet...

...His basic point is simple and solid: "Synchronic treatment of words inevitably resembles attempts to reconstruct the true shape of ancient hominids from fossilized remains found by chance in scattered caves and gorges...

...Second, language, when used properly, expressively, imaginatively, becomes an esthetic achievement, a source of artistic pleasure to the speaker or writer...

...Grammarians have gone descriptive on us: Whatever is good English in a dialect, aCreole, apidgin—in the mouth of the People (capital P)—is good English...

...Robert Burchfield, whatever his other shortcomings, is not one of those, makinghis new book, Unlocking the English Language(Hill and Wang, 202 pp., $18.95) a pleasure to peruse, not merely read...

...but" (for "not only...

...A well-turned sentence or paragraph provides—granted, to a more modest degree—the same sort of prideful satisfaction the artist derives from creating a work of art...

...I have been attacked for asserting that the main reasons for linguistic change are ignorance and stupidity: The liberal view holds that the language belongs to all the native speakers who make it up as they go along...

...old crudities become softened with time...

...Or, as Burchfield put it in the earlier work, "Stability of meaning is rare in any language...

...Snodgrass writes in "April Inventory," an otherwise lovely poem, "The tenth time, just ayear ago,/ I made myself a little list / Of all the things I'd ought to know," that/'d, insteadof the correct /, is a hard lump to swallow...

...Correctness alone is not enough, of course, but inspiration without initiation in the rules of syntax is a slap in our faces...

...This is the linguistic equivalent of Alexander Pope's moral-critical precept, "Be not the first by whom the new are tried, / Nor yet the last to lay the old aside...

...It may not, however, be entirely useless to resolve that we ourselves will never commit verbicide...

...But that may well be a mere typo that eluded today's deficient—or nonexistent—proofreaders...

...As he notes cannily, "scholars in every discipline but that of modern linguistics and linguistic philosophy...

...The third thread running through the book is an omnipresent concern with the state and future of the English language...

...Burchfield, by contrast, does not have —cannot have today—the confident optimism that informs Fowler's handbook...

...The defending troops are becoming a little weary of the battle...

...Eliot Memorial Lectures (1988): "Linguistic Milestones," "The Naming of Parts" (whose title slyly alludes to Henry Reed's famous parody of Eliot), "The Boundaries of English Grammar," and "Words and Meanings in the Twentieth Century...

...Only in the area, or arena, of politics was Burchfield ultimately defeated...

...but which, until then, I had scarcely if ever consulted...

...Don't be put off by the fact that it is a collection of diverse pieces...

...Truly good sentences enchant the ear and eye...

...tries to include hapax legomena (nonce words) whenever their creator is truly creative, be he Shakespeare or Lewis Carroll...

...Third—and if this is snobbery so be it (what striving for excellence isn't snobbery in today's benighted world...

...For example, when W.D...

...And what about those of us who are not geniuses or even college presidents...

...This may explain, for example, why "the first-person pronouns have moved into an area of uncertainty," making "It is me" much more widespread than "It is I," and by no w generally preferred, even though this makes no grammatical sense...

...Just about every aspect of dictionarymaking is covered, but the two recurrent issues are historicity (diachronism) versus contemporaneity (synchronism), and inclusion versus exclusion...

...Not only antiquated authority, but also, alas, the current one of many writers and speakers, famous or otherwise, whose errors get enshrined and become widely imitated...

...So the Fowler brothers were absolutely right in giving, in their words, "no quarter to masterful in the sense of masterly, as the OED is obliged to do because there is antiquated authority for it...

...that time past and time present will also be present in time future...

...without them, chess would not be chess, and English would be any idiot's idiolect...

...Note, by the way, the informality of that regardless...

...If modern critical usage seems to be initiating a process which might finally make adolescent and contemporary mere synonyms for bad and good—and stranger things have happened—we should banish them from our vocabulary...

...Burchfield, I believe, would subscribe to this view...

...Note who makes a face when his interlocutor peppers his speech with likes, you knows and I means...

...Already in his previous collection, The English Language, Burchfield declared that "linguistic systems are so complex that they cannot be completely analyzed even by the greatest grammarians, lexicographers and philosophers...

...These errors—as he neglects to mention—enter the dictionaries and forthwith become law...

...two babies of one year old...

...all the pieces in the book are of equal interest, but all contain fascinating incidental information...

...Had Burchfield said "Malory and Sidney," the plural would have been correct...

...If I read Burchfield correctly, he stands for a kind of bifocalism that would use both methods judiciously, never one to the exclusion of the other...

...Perfect English, I repeat, is probably not to be attained, except perhaps by computers, those frequent objects of Burchfield's scorn, and most likely not even by them...

...Unpredictable environmental factors of one kind or another disturb meanings, as well as spellings and other linguistic aspects...

...In 198 6 the fourth and last volume of the Supplemen r came out, and the computers promptly set to work integrating the OEDS (originally planned as one volume...

...and "numerous others that stood like stars in a distant heaven...

...Meanwhile animals—notably dolphins, whales, apes, and certain parrots—have been found to be more articulate than we realized, either in their own speech or in imitating ours...

...Well, yes, all the native speakers—that is what I mean by ignorance and/or stupidity...

...Americans, such as Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, and Chomsky, get shorter shrift...

...then there is the sublime set of constructs conveying poetry, philosophy and exquisitely cadenced rhythmic, polyphonic prose—a far cry from "Pass the butter...

...It means, to change tropes, knowing one's tools so well that one doesn't drop, manhandle, break them...

...In the new book, we read that brittleness "is a component of the language as a whole, in its guarded as well as in its unguarded moments...

...In his book The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson delights in finding faults in the experts, and quotes Burchfield as writing resistable for resistible...

...And again: "Itallseems to be something of a losing battle...

...also Rodney Huddleston and his epistemic and deontic modes...

...the subject is always English, its glories and puzzlements, or the lives and work of those who toiled amid, with and for its treasure trove of words...

...The warring factions he keeps referring to are, of course, the descriptivists and prescriptivists, the permissivists and the conservationists...

...Shakespeare did not have the benefit (some will say the disadvantage, but they are wrong) of the codification wrought by later grammarians...

...Genius is restraint, perimeters, the gentlemen's agreement known as grammar, and the working of sharable miracles within it...

...Language, though, has two almost antithetical modes...

...In the profoundest sense, though, to publish a book about English is a perfectly hopeless undertaking, as these essays repeatedly state or imply...

...But even literary language can surpass itself by being lexically, grammatically, idiomatically correct...

...It will be of great interest to see whether Burchfield can make good on his modestly stated yet epic enterprise of cleaning up this Augean stable...

...Those smilers and grimacers are members of the Club...

...In Unlocking the English Language, Burchfield writes: "a distraction of indescribable proportions" (for dimensions or, better, magnitude...

...not only...

...His position is the sensible and oft-quoted one first formulated by Dr...

...First, there is lexicography, proper or improper, past and present, with an added glance into its probable future...

...They experience a well-earned sense of superiority as aristocrats of the language...

...Worse yet, they are fascists...

...His hope is that the hopeless tangle into which English grammar has got itself, thanks to grammarians too arcane and populaces too illiterate (we are dealing here with English-speaking peoples throughout the world), can be at least partly disentangled by a logical, straightforward and, above all, diachronic (i.e., historical) approach to grammar, rather than a synchronic (i.e., descriptive) one...

...Observe who among a roomful of people exchanges a knowing smile with a neighbor when someone else misuses hopefully or infer, or reveals his ignorance of the distinction between amount and quantity, between fewer and less...

...He stresses "the importance of rejecting Guralnikism," a reference to the editor-in-chief of Webster's New World Dictionary, David B. Guralnik, who "excluded words like dago, kike, wog, and wop...

...Is the day at hand when dogs will enjoy conversing with the better educated human beings...

...Burchfield certainly isn't...

...At the same time, it is nice to find out that Webster's Third, that recklessly permissive dictionary, lifted a great deal from the OED without attribution, althoughnot quite so much as the Collins Dictionary of the English Language appropriated from the (not much better) Random House Dictionary, likewise without acknowledging it...

...Ours is the century of the zoom lens and the electron microscope...

...First, language is what we reach other people through, hence cultivating it is not some esoteric predilection, but a courtesy to one's fellow human beings, indeed asocial responsibility...

...Thus sexually, racially and religiously "objectionable" words are granted asylum over all manner of protests, lawsuits and death threats, as Burchfield amusingly relates...

...Distinctions, both those that are useful and those that are burdensome, flourish and die, reflourish and die again...

...But it confers on its members the exhilarating feeling of power over words and verbal constructs, of negotiating the tricky slalom of correct English without knocking do wn any gates...

...This club has no clubhouse, no restaurant, no billiard or pool tables...

...He worked on the re-editing of a medieval text under J.R...

...Those prescribing otherwise are political reactionaries and pop grammarians who do not realize that the same "errors" they rail against were committed by, say, Chaucer, Dickens and William Carlos Williams...

...Here again Burchfield tries, ever so cautiously, to dissociate himself from the more grandiose pundits: "One must pay all due regard to such primary statements of philosophical belief as those of Wittgenstein and Strawson, but once accepted, such statements tend to recede into a kind of black hole...

...recalls that the publication of Webster's Third in 1961 "was hailed by most academic reviewers and damned by nearly every journalist who reviewed it...

...in today's America this error, listed by Fowler among his genteelisms, has become endemic...

...but also...

...As to Burchfield's principles of inclusion and exclusion, they are too manifold and complex for discussion here...

...The second main theme of these pages is grammar, a particularly knotty, indeed thorny, matter...

...I hope," he writes, "that for at least a century to come the ability to read and understand the A[uthorized] Viersion] and the Book of Common Prayer will be regarded as a test of literacy...

...it looks like being ineradicable...

...Not that anyone is perfect...

...Why the sudden shift from that to which...

...In der Beschrenkung zeigt sich erst der Meister," as Goethe put it in masterly fashion...

...Thus it is sobering to learn that by the 1760s the grammarian Joseph Priestley was inveighing against the misplaced nominative in "the chaplain intreated my comrade and I," on which Burchfield comments, "It is sad to think that after two centuries of condemnation the erroneous use is still very widespread...

...On the other hand, the English language looks after itself, with no need for experts to guide it...

...Speaking of the Fowlers and Modern English Usage, it is enlightening to read that the Fowlers' precursor to that epochal rule book, The King's English, was attacked when it appeared in 1906 for allegedly deepening the division between colloquial and written English, for being pedantic and inflexible, for imposing rules that would hobble a writer's originality...

...He continues: "Nearly 30 years on, the battle is unresolved...

...Burchfield concludes wryly, "This is an epistemic and deontic age, an age characterized by plain sentences filleted into complex metalanguages, and one in which literary works have become banned books in the studies of Professors of Linguistics...

...Burchfield is a New Zealander who came to Oxford as a young lecturer in English linguistics on a five-year appointment...

...Johnson vis-àvis irresistible change: to "retard what we cannot repel [and] palliate what we cannot cure...

...Plus ça change...

...But as a true feminist or liberal, you would not be satisfied with such an answer...

...The very expression "How well this is put...

...These protests were made to look as if coming from individuals, but were actually campaigns by various pressure groups, either Arabs or Jews, and culminated in boycotts or bans by Arab countries...

...also regionalisms from the many Englishes spoken all over the world...

...Ah, yes, thehand that fashioned the fearful symmetry of Blake's tiger recedes before the still more fearful asymmetry of the makers and users of today's language...

...At best, there are only working hypotheses...