We are not enthused: regional roots of a peeve

A slight sidetrack: I just ran into a bygone usage peeve - or at least one that ought to be bygone - via a review of Bertha Thomas's 1913 Picture Tales from Welsh Hills., in which the Dial reviewer takes umbrage at "enthuse".

S&W stupidity savaged again

Professor Geoffrey Pullum, co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), has attacked Strunk & White's iconic The Elements of Style before (50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice). Now, in a vigorous reprise at Language Log, Bad advice on being a good writer, he summarises the central errors in "Strunk's dreadful little book of drivel".

Grammatical iconoclasm

Some pleasant bits of grammatical iconoclasm I just ran into:
Firstly, on Language Log - The English passive: an apology - the linguistics professor Geoffrey K Pullum has posted a link to his new paper, "Fear and Loathing of the English Passive", an enjoyable demolition of long-standing beliefs about the passive voice. A brief reminder:

Very essential and a bit unnecessary

I spotted on the Voices page of yesterday's i newspaper (5 August 2013, #840) a letter that exemplifies a few linguistic phenomena of the more tiresome sort.

MWDEU gone from Google Books!

I just had a major bibliographic disappointment: I find that Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, which for years has been available in full on Google Books, has been removed.

Alongside the full Oxford English Dictionary (which I can access via Devon Library Services) MWDEU is probably my favourite reference book. As the introduction says, it arranges in dictionary format a collection of "common problems of confused or disputed English usage" from a historical background and present-day usage. Despite being an American reference, it covers US and UK usage equally, and the neat aspect of it is that it's resolutely descriptive, often with page-long lists of citations to well-known authors to demonstrate that an allegedly wrong usage has actually been used widely by writers who knew their craft.

I've noted over the years a few examples:

• Its demonstration that a list of notable writers - Swift, Byron, Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Robert Frost, Noam Chomsky - have used "if I was" for the hypothetical form where traditional grammar says it should be "if I were".
• The evidence of many respectable writers using the non-possessive form ("Do you mind me eating chips?") rather than the 'possessive with gerund' ("Do you mind my eating chips?").
  The construction, both with and without the possessive, has been used in writing for about 300 years. Both forms have been used by standard authors. Both forms have been called incorrect, but neither is.
• The evidence, with a long list of prestigious examples, of the use of "whose" for inanimate entities.
  The notion that "whose" may not properly be used of anything except persons is a superstition: it has been used by innumerable standard authors from Wycliffe to Updike, and is entirely standard as an alternative to "of which the" in all varieties of discourse.
• A description of the use of "off of":
  "Off of" is an innocuous idiom ... that has been in use since the 16th century ... Ayres 1881 seems to have been the first to question the phrase ... It is an idiom that occurred naturally in the speech of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Harry S. Truman, and James Thurber, among others. If it is part of your personal idiom and you are not writing on an especially elevated plane, you have no reason to avoid "off of".
• The evidence on preposition stranding:
  recent commentators — at least since Fowler 1926 — are unanimous in their rejection of the notion that ending a sentence with a preposition is an error.
• An analysis of the equal correctness, depending on register, of "It is me" and "It is I" (where traditional grammar says "It is I" is solely correct):
  Clearly, both the "it is I" and "it's me" patterns are in reputable use and have been for a considerable time. "It is I" tends to be used in more formal or more stuffy situations; "it's me" predominates in real and fictional speech and in a more relaxed writing style.
• On the use of "oldest" for one of two:
  The rule requiring the comparative [for two] has a dubious basis in theory and no basis in practice.
• Split infinitive:
  the objection to the split infinitive has never had a rational basis.
• The evidence for the use of "that" for people:
  In current usage, "that" refers to people or things.
• On the idea that it's wrong to use "can" to ask permission:
  we are dealing with a pedagogical tradition. The "can"/"may" distinction is a traditional part of the American school curriculum. The fact that the distinction is largely ignored by people once out of school is also a tradition.
• On the vague perception of wrongness that attaches to the verb "to get":
  One of the more important verbs in English, "get" is handled with considerable diffidence in the handbooks. Part of the problem, as the handbooks see it, is the large number of vigorously expressive idioms get enters into; the "Choice English" — to use the term of Roberts 1954 — that college freshmen are expected to cultivate much prefers colorlessness to vigor. Vigorous expressions are often suspected by usage critics of being "colloquial" — that is, slightly improper in some way or other not easily specified. If you are writing with the idea of getting your point across, however, you will not avoid the rich fund of idomatic phrases with "get".
• and so on ...

MWDEU is a brilliant and extensively-researched work, invaluable to any beleaguered descriptivists looking for confirmation based on solid evidence (it features quotations from some 20,000 authors). Its Wikipedia entry mentions endorsements from the linguistics blogger Stan Carey (In praise of a reference book: MWDEU) and top linguist Geoffrey Pullum (Don't put up with usage abuse). Pullum says:

MWCDEU explains what actually occurs, shows you some of the evidence, tells you what some other usage books say, and then leaves you to make your own reasoned decision. It won't tell you either that you should split infinitives, or that you shouldn't. But it will give you a number of examples of writers who do, and point out that the construction has always occurred in English literature over the last six or seven centuries, and that nearly all careful usage books today agree it is entirely grammatical, and it will then leave you to decide.

I'm not sure this is strictly true; though it's ostensibly neutral, at times its studied acerbic commentaries quietly drip with hostility toward the prescriptivist position. It's a delight to read.

I don't know why it's been removed from Google Books - perhaps too many people like me were using it rather than buying the print version? - but it's a loss.

- Ray

Addendum: Stan Carey has commented that he's told that the issue appears to be at Google Books' end. More on this later, perhaps.

Fake prescriptive poppycock

Cosmo (a he-cat) and Phoebe (a she-cat)
- or, being neutered, are they both it-cats? -
are pissed off at my joke at their expense

Via a post by Geoff Pullum at Language Log - Newly invented fake prescriptive poppycock - a nice diversion from the Lingua Franca column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In honour of the long history of grammatical discourse being poisoned by bogus rules invited by peevologists, the MacMurray professor Allan Metcalf invites readers to come up with new but venerable-sounding bogus rules. See A New Contest, Centered Around Usage.

It's not great, but I came up with:

"He" and "she" are not appropriate as pronouns for animals; as they are of an entirely non-human class, all animals should be "it".

If it's necessary to specify the sex, use either the precise and long-standing term for the particular animal of that sex ("Where is Kittikins? The tom is on the mat") or expand the definition ("Where is Kittikins? It, the male, is on the mat" - or "The he-cat is on the mat").

I possibly could have woven into the yarn Cordwainer Smith's nice constructions to designate names of animal-derived underpeople in his Instrumentality mythos, where a prefix designates the animal origin: C'Mell is of cat stock, B'Dikkat of bull stock, and the eagle-derived E'telekeli.

Addendum: Ever since I posted this, I've had a horrible nagging feeling that my rule is stupid enough for someone to have actually proposed it in real life. A quick search of Google Book suggests not. But the sexist personification rules for animal gender in Richard Hiley's 1837 English Grammar and Style are almost as silly when you think them through:

c. When speaking of animals, the sex of which is not regarded by us, we frequently assign to them gender suited to their particular characteristic properties. The strong and bold ones being considered the masculine, and the weak and timid of the feminine gender; thus, we say of the horse, that he is a useful animal; of the hare, that she is timorous.
d. Insects, small quadrupeds, birds, and fishes, are frequently spoken of as neuter.

- page 21, Richard Hiley, English Grammar and Style: To which is Added Advice to the Student, on the Allainment and Application of Knowledge, 1837

The mind boggles at the semantic difficulties in deciding if a particular species of animal is macho enough to be a "he".

Hiley was a Leeds schoolmaster, with, like many authors of "me too" grammar books in the 1800s, no particular qualifications for commenting on English grammar other than wanting to correct what he saw as deficiencies in Lindley Murray's English Grammar. Although his aim was nominally descriptive, he nevertheless completely failed to understand fundamental linguistic points such as the inevitability of usage change. This led him to diss the grammatical correctness of earlier highly-educated and well-known writers, rather than recognising them as data points for the mainstream correctness conditions of their time, a century or more before Hiley was writing.

But, if a knowledge of Latin and Greek does induce a habit of correct English diction, how comes it to pass that the writings of many distinguished classical scholars of the last century are lamentably deficient in grammatical accuracy? Dr. Bentley is a well-known instance. Nor will it be difficult to point out numerous violations ot grammar in the pages of Addison and Swift. Who, in these days, would admire, as specimens of graceful composition, the once reputed elegant pages of Locke, Barrow, and Tillotson? Yet these men had, in addition to their classical attainments, frequented the best company, and had attended, as far as the low state of grammatical knowledge would then allow, to correctness of expression.
- preface, page v, English Grammar and Style.

- Ray

More on Lindley Murray

Lindley Murray - frontispiece,
Memoirs of the life and writings

Further to the previous post, Comic Grammars, here's a bit more about the 18th-19th century grammarian Lindley Murray. He's an interesting character: an American Quaker who left the USA, due to illness, after the Revolution and settled in York, which had a large Quaker community, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

It has, historically, been a slight puzzle why his massively influential English Grammar became so completely eclipsed by the late 19th century. Francis Austin's essay Whatever happened to Lindley Murray? a study of some of the grammar textbooks used in the early teacher training colleges (Paradigm, Vol 2 (7), December, 2003) argues that he simply wasn't influential in the right places: that while his book was well known to the literati, it didn't get a foothold in the early teacher training colleges at the beginning of the 19th century - they wrote their own grammar texts - and had become obsolete by the time the state school system was established in the 1870s.

The latest biography of Murray - Lindley Murray (1745–1826), Quaker and Grammarian (Lyda Fens-de Zeeuw, Utrecht: Lot Dissertation Series, 2011) is extremely good, and findable online: PDF here. It looks at Murray's life in general, the debilitating illness that left him unable to walk more than a few paces (the author argues post-polio syndrome), Murray as a Quaker, his letters, and his English Grammar (with a particular look at how his grammatical prescriptions often differed from his own usage in his letters).

Murray's own memoirs are also online: Memoirs of the life and writings of Lindley Murray, in a series of letters (1827, Internet Archive memoirsoflifewri00murrrich) along with his other works.

Upgraded from a comment to the previous post:

"Hydatius" writes:

I used to live close to the house in which Lindley Murray lived and wrote his Grammar. It has been, I think, turned into flats but close by there is a Lindley Street and a Murray Street, named in his honour. I believe a school nearby, a Quaker foundation, took custody of some of his furniture and personal effects after his death. In Bishophill the burial ground where he and other prominent Quakers were interred now has flats built upon it but there is a small adjacent garden where some grave markers sit with a prominent plaque outside.

Thanks! I just checked out the places connected with Murray. According to the listed building site, Holgate House, where Murray lived, is at what is now 163 Holgate Road. Murray Street and Lindley Street are nearby (here), as is the school Hydatius mentions: now Mount School, Dalton Terrace. The school has his writing desk and wheeled armchair, and the summerhouse where he wrote his Grammar now stands in the school grounds and can be visited by arrangement; see Name That Shed: Lindley Murray summerhouse and British Listed Buildings.

The Bishophill burial ground is on Cromwell Road, York, in the grounds of a residential development called Tuke House, named after the Quaker family who owned the original house on the site, and you can see the plaque from Google Maps Street View here. It reads:

In the gardens of this house,

a former Quaker burial ground,

are the graves of many Friends,

including

JOHN WOOLMAN, WILLIAM ALEXANDER,

WILLIAM AND ESTHER TUKE

and LINDLEY MURRAY

Friends who wish may visit them.

- Ray

Comic Grammars

Frontispiece: The Comic English Grammar

I mentioned a few months back - see Henry Sweet - the phenomenon of 19th century grammar books, a huge market - Ian Michael, referenced below, counted 856 - driven by the continuing growth and social anxieties of the middle class that gave rise to English prescriptivism in the first place.

Most grammars of English published in Britain during the 19th century are dull ... There were a great many grammars, issued in very large numbers. They were repetitive; many were merely commercial ventures, scholastically naive ... The vast number of grammars contrasts with the uniformity of their contents. Of all the subjects in the school curriculum English grammar was the most rigid and unchanging ... Teachers had insisted, for two centuries, on writing grammars which added little or nothing to what had gone before.
- Michael, I. (1991), "More than enough English grammars", in G. Leitner, English Traditional Grammars. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 11-26.

One of the most influential - and most reprinted well into the 19th century - was the 1795 English Grammar by the American ex-patriot Lindley Murray.  As described in this review - Two Hundred Years of Lindley Murray - it was classically prescriptive, based on the practice of the best writers (in Murray's view), and appeals to logic, clarity of communication, and aesthetics (again in Murray's view). Much of it comes across as highly pompous and deeply subjective.

It's pleasing to find that even in the 19th century, some readers found Murray's approach ridiculous, and I just spotted David A Reibel's 1996 compilation, Lindley Murray's grammar in caricature: four parodies, which introduces a set of more or less barbed ripostes to Murray. They are: The Comic English Grammar: a new and facetious introduction to the English tongue (1840, Percival Leigh, illus. John Leech); The Illustrated English Grammar, or, Lindley Murray simplified (c. 1843, Anon.); The Comic Lindley Murray; or, The Grammar of Grammars (1871, Anon.); and The Pictorial Grammar (1842, "Alfred Crowquill").

I couldn't find The Illustrated English Grammar online, but the other three are. The Pictorial Grammar (Internet Archive pictorialgramma00crowgoog) is a nice little book, not exactly a parody. It's a perfectly straight grammar, written and illustrated by the Punch contributor Alfred Henry Forrester, but one given a pleasantly droll spin by the drawings - dignitaries, matrons, degenerates and eccentrics - accompanying each example. For instance, "Each of his brothers is in a pleasant situation" has a picture of two criminals in the stocks. The Comic Lindley Murray (Internet Archive comiclindleymurr00dubliala) I found a little laboured; Dublin-published, it's a self-mocking Irish take on English grammar.

The Pluperfect Tense represents a thing as doubly past; that is,
as past previously to some other point of time also past; as,
"I fell in love before I had arrived at years of discretion."
The Comic English Grammar.

But as Reibel's Introduction says, the highlight of the bunch, also written and drawn by veteran Punch contributors, has to be The Comic English Grammar (Internet Archive comicenglishgram00inleig). Part of the joke is that it closely emulates Murray's book, but with a Sellar & Yateman style mixing facts with pseudo-facts and jokes, and partly extends the analysis to a variety of social classes: Cockney, genteel, servants, rustics, and so on.  While it could be accused of classism in mostly holding up the language of the lower classes to ridicule, it's generally an affectionate ridicule, and doesn't omit the affectations and social mannerisms of middle and upper-class speakers. And the cartoons are great fun!

See the following post for More on Lindley Murray.

- Ray

Henry Sweet

Yesterday I mentioned the predominantly prescriptive approach of 19th century grammar books. There was a hungry market for such books, driven by the continuing growth and social anxieties of the middle class that gave rise to English prescriptivism in the first place. The sheer awfulness of them was summarised by Ian Michael, who catalogued 856, and concluded:

Most grammars of English published in Britain during the 19th century are dull ... There were a great many grammars, issued in very large numbers. They were repetitive; many were merely commercial ventures, scholastically naive ... The vast number of grammars contrasts with the uniformity of their contents. Of all the subjects in the school curriculum English grammar was the most rigid and unchanging ... Teachers had insisted, for two centuries, on writing grammars which added little or nothing to what had gone before.
- Michael, I. (1991), "More than enough English grammars", in G. Leitner, English Traditional Grammars. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 11-26.

However, a radical exception to the bunch was that by the English philologist, phonetician and grammarian Henry Sweet. Among other works ranging through Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic and phonetics, his 1891 A New English Grammar is unusual in taking a robust descriptivist stance:

... it must be borne in mind that the rules of grammar have no value except as statements of facts: whatever is in general use in a language is for that very reason grammatically correct.

Pullum & Huddleston's 2005 A Student's Introduction to English Grammar comments:

The prescriptive grammars of the twentieth century might have been more useful if they had paid more attention to Sweet instead of simply trying to transmute personal prejudice into authority.

Sweet's work is commemorated by The Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas, and all his works are online at the Internet Archive (search on "Henry Sweet"), including A New English Grammar (Vol 1 / Vol 2). His 1890 A Primer of Spoken English (adapted from his 1885 Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch) is particularly interesting as the first phonetically notated description of educated Southern English (what's now called Received Pronunciation). It contains observations from 120 years ago of features of RP, such as that of intrusive/linking r below, that are commonly thought to be recent:

The fact is that the statements of ordinary educated people about their own pronunciation are generally not only valueless, but misleading. Thus I know as a fact that most educated speakers of Southern English insert an r in idea(r) of, India(r) office etc. in rapid speech, and I know that this habit, so far from dying out, is spreading to the Midlands; and yet they all obstinately deny it. The associations of the written language, and inability to deal with a phonetic notation, make most people incapable of recognizing a phonetic representation of their own pronunciation.
- A Primer of Spoken English, 1890, Preface, page viii.

Sweet's expertise in philology and accents, plus highly abrasive personality, made him a strong influence in the character of Henry Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion. The preface to Pygmalion - A Professor of Phonetics - describes Sweet as a talented scholar with a major chip on his shoulder about academia, and especially Oxford.

Pygmalion Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible; still, as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in the play. With Higgins's physique and temperament Sweet might have set the Thames on fire. As it was, he impressed himself professionally on Europe to an extent that made his comparative personal obscurity, and the failure of Oxford to do justice to his eminence, a puzzle to foreign specialists in his subject. I do not blame Oxford, because I think Oxford is quite right in demanding a certain social amenity from its nurslings (heaven knows it is not exorbitant in its requirements!); for although I well know how hard it is for a man of genius with a seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the best places for less important subjects which they profess without originality and sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect them to heap honors on him.

Actually there are more than "touches" of Sweet in Pygmalion; Bertrand M Wainger's paper Henry Sweet - Shaw's Pygmalion (Studies in Philology, Vol. 27, No. 4, Oct., 1930) notes strong similarities:

It is evident that Shaw took Sweet as a model for some of the major lineaments of the portrait of the Professor Higgins of the play. It was Sweet who invented the Broad Romic system of phonetic notation; it was Sweet who sent postcards in that script and in his shorthand script to his friends; it was Sweet who was able to pronounce distinctly seventy-two vowel sounds. Sweet would often turn his back on a group of speakers and jot down a phonetic record of their conversation; Sweet was engrossed in his studies - as is Professor Higgins - to the exclusion of the social amenities; and Sweet alone, in England, was sufficiently the master of the science of phonetics to have been able to transmute Liza into Miss Doolittle.

Sweet's grievance may well have been to do with getting a fourth-class degree from Oxford (effectively a "fail"). Accounts of him in later life variously describe his "cantankerousness and embittered attitudes" (page 421, The History of the University of Oxford: The Nineteenth Century, Volume 7, Part 2) and his "embittered isolation, which developed virtually into a form of persecution mania in the years before his death in 1912" (page 48, The real Professor Higgins: the life and career of Daniel Jones).  See Against the establishment: Sidelines on Henry Sweet for more of the same.

It's tempting to suspect that Sweet's emphasis on descriptivism was somewhat driven by his hatreds: its opposite, prescriptivism, is heavily associated with the Establishment (a point argued by Geoffrey Pullum in the paper Ideology, Power and Linguistic Theory). Nevertheless, Sweet's contribution to the study of linguistics was immense, paving the way to the "Great Tradition" of 20th century descriptive linguistics; he was an inspiring teacher for those who weren't on his hate list, and Otto Jespersen (see previously) was one of his pupils.

- Ray

I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest

I've just been reading Jens Otto Harry Jespersen's 1905 Growth and Structure of the English Language (see the Internet Archive, ID growthstructureoesp00jrich). Though Danish-born, Jespersen was one of the classic documenters of the English language at the start of the 20th century, and a founder of the "Great Tradition" of descriptive linguistics that broke away from the predominantly prescriptive approach of the 19th century.

Growth and Structure of the English Language is very readable as an early account, essentially modern in approach, of the roots of English. The introduction, however, goes overboard with its highly Anglo-centric praise of the merits of English, and is remarkable for the number of sexual and national stereotypes that get an airing.

Jespersen writes:

My plan will be, first to give a rapid sketch of the language of our own days, so as to show how it strikes a foreigner — a foreigner who has devoted much time to the study of English, but who feels that in spite of all his efforts he is only able to look at it as a foreigner does, and not exactly as a native would ...
...
it seems to me positively and expressly masculine, it is the language of a grown-up man and has very little childish or feminine about it ... .In dealing with the English language one is often reminded of the characteristic English hand-writing; just as an English lady will nearly always write in a manner that in any other country would only be found in a man's hand, in the same manner the language is more manly than any other language I know.
...
First I shall mention the sound system. The English consonants are well defined; voiced and voiceless consonants stand over against each other in neat symmetry, and they are, as a rule, clearly and precisely pronounced. You have none of those indistinct or half-slurred consonants that abound in Danish ...
...
Besides these characteristics, the full nature of which cannot, perhaps, be made intelligible to any but those familiar with phonetic research, but which are still felt more or less instinctively by everybody hearing the language spoken, there are other traits whose importance can with greater ease be made evident to anybody possessed of a normal ear.
...
I select at random, by way of contrast, a passage from the language of Hawaii: 'T kona hiki ana aku ilaila ua hookipa ia mai la oia me ke aloha pumehana loa.' Thus it goes on, no single word ends in a consonant, and a group of two or more consonants is never found. Can any one be in doubt that even if such a language sound pleasantly and be full of music and harmony, the total impression is childlike and effeminate? You do not expect much vigour or energy in a people speaking ouch a language; it seems adapted only to inhabitants of sunny regions where the soil requires scarcely any labour on the part of man to yield him everything he wants, and where life therefore does not bear the stamp of a hard struggle against nature and against fellow-creatures.
...
7. The Italians have a pointed proverb: "Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi." If briefness, conciseness and terseness are characteristic of the style of men, while women as a rule are not such economizers of speech, English is more masculine than most languages.
...
Business-like shortness is also seen in such convenient abbreviations of sentences as abound in English ...
...
This cannot be separated from a certain sobriety in expression. As an Englishman does not like to use more words or more syllables than are strictly necessary, so he does not like to say more than he can stand to. He dislikes strong or hyperbolical expressions of approval or admiration ... An Englishman does not like to commit himself by being too enthusiastic or too distressed, and his language accordingly grows sober, too sober perhaps, and even barren when the object is to express emotions. There is in this trait a curious mixture of something praiseworthy, the desire to be strictly true without exaggerating anything or promising more than you can perform, and on the other hand of something blameworthy, the idea that it is affected, or childish and effeminate, to give vent to one's feelings, and the fear of appearing ridiculous by showing strong emotions. But this trait is certainly found more frequently in men than in women, so I may be allowed to add this feature of the English language to the signs of masculinity I have collected.
...
It is worth observing, for instance, how few diminutives the language has and how sparingly it uses them ... The continual recurrence of these endings [in other European languages] without any apparent necessity cannot but produce the impression that the speakers are innocent, childish, genial beings with no great business capacities or seriousness in life ... Then, of course, there is -y, -ie
(Billy, Dicky, auntie, birdie, etc.) which corresponds exactly to the fondling-suffixes of other languages; but its application in English is restricted to the nursery and it is hardly ever used by grown-up people except in speaking to children. Besides, this ending is more Scotch than English, and the Scotch with all their deadly earnestness, especially in religious matters, are, perhaps, in some respects more childlike than the English.
...
The business-like, virile qualities of the English language also manifest themselves in such things as word-order. Words in English do not play at hide-and-seek, as they often do in Latin, for instance, or in German, where ideas that by right belong together are widely sundered in obedience to caprice or, more often, to a rigorous grammatical rule.
...
No language is logical in every respect, and we must not expect usage to be guided always by strictly logical principles. It was a frequent error with the older grammarians that whenever the actual grammar of a language did not seem conformable to the rules of abstract logic they blamed the language and wanted to correct it. Without falling into that error we may, nevertheless, compare different languages and judge them by the standard of logic, and here again I think that, apart from Chinese, which has been described as pure applied logic, there is perhaps no language in the civilized world that stands so high as English.
...
In praising the logic of the English language we must not lose sight of the fact that in most cases where, so to speak, the logic of facts or of the exterior world is at war with the logic of grammar, English is free from the narrow-minded pedantry which in most languages sacrifices the former to the latter or makes people shy of saying or writing things which are not 'strictly grammatical'.
...
The French language is like the stiff French gardens of Louis XIV, while the English is like an English park, which is laid out seemingly without any definite plan, and in which you are allowed to walk everywhere according to your own fancy without having to fear a stern keeper enforcing rigorous regulations. The English language would not have been what it is if the English had not been for centuries great respecters of the liberties of each individual and if everybody had not been free to strike out new paths for himself.
...
This is seen, too, in the vocabulary. In spite of the efforts of several authors of high standing, the English have never suffered an Academy to be instituted among them like the French or Italian Academies, which had as one of their chief tasks the regulation of the vocabulary so that every word not found in their Dictionaries was blamed as unworthy of literary use or distinction. In England every writer is, and has always been, free to take his words where he chooses, whether from the ordinary stock of everyday words, from native dialects, from old authors, or from other languages, dead or living.
...
Now, it seems to be characteristic of the two sexes in their relation to language that women move in narrower circles of the vocabulary, in which they attain to perfect mastery so that the flow of words is always natural and, above all, never needs to stop, while men know more words and always want to be more precise in choosing the exact word with which to render their idea, the consequence being often less fluency and more hesitation ... Teachers of foreign languages have many occasions to admire the ease with which female students express themselves in another language after so short a time of study that most men would be able to say only few words hesitatingly and falteringly,but if they are put to the test of translating a difficult piece either from or into the foreign language, the men will generally prove superior to the women. With regard to their native language the same difference is found, though it is perhaps not so easy to observe. At any rate our assertion is corroborated by the fact observed by every student of languages that novels written by ladies are much easier to read and contain much fewer difficult words than those written by men. All this seems to justify us in setting down the enormous richness of the English vocabulary to the same masculinity of the English nation which we have now encountered in so many various fields.

To sum up: The English language is a methodical, energetic, business-like and sober language, that does not care much for finery and elegance, but does care for logical consistency and is opposed to any attempt to narrow-in life by police regulations and strict rules either of grammar or of lexicon. As the language is, so also is the nation,

For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within. (Tennyson.)

Phew... The Flanders & Swan song sprang to mind:

The English, the English, the English are best.
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest.
- The English, Flanders & Swan

- Ray

Stupid: comparatives

A while back - More fierce and most fierce of all... - I mentioned Professor Arnold Zwicky's Language Log posts on comparatives (Inflected Adj/Adv and commoner) which looked at disputes over comparatives of adjectives.

To recap: comparative and superlatives can take two forms. If we have a hypothetical adjective "zonky", it can either take the 1) inflected form (zonky / zonkier, zonkiest) or 2) the periphrastic form (zonky, more zonky, most zonky).  Some adjectives take form 1, some take form 2, and some can take either. The difficulty is which form to choose. For a particular adjective, you find that different grammatical authorities, and even different individual speakers, disagree strongly.

A case in point: I ran recently into a query about the situation for the adjective "stupid". To me at least, the quickest way to answer this was a corpus check using Google Books Ngram Viewer.  Here are the results:

"stupider"/"more stupid" - UK English / US English
"stupidest" / "most stupid" - UK English / US English

The data shows them to be long-standing co-existing forms. Within the time slot covered, in both UK and US English, "stupider" has always been a less common form than "more stupid", though in US English, over the past 30 years, the two have come to be used about equally. "Stupidest" and "most stupid", in contrast, have been used about equally since 1860, though again in US English, over the past few decades the inflected form "stupidest" has risen to be the dominant one.

Here, furthermore, are examples of "stupider" used by writers of impeccable credentials:

• The stupider I am, myself, the stupider I think books ... - John Ruskin
• You have liked many a stupider person - Jane Austen
• His father was certainly the stupider of my two brothers ... - Algernon Swinburne
• I have seen a duke (No matter which) turn politician stupider - Lord Byron
• ... only in my obstinate persistence, like a man trying to dig though up to the neck in mud, grew stupider and stupider! - Thomas Carlyle
• the stupider and clumsier they grew ; till at last they were past all cure - Charles Kingsley
• Do not do an unjust thing now, and imagine Kanaka legislatures do stupider things than other similar bodies. - Mark Twain
• I think that most modern people are much stupider than those in the age of my father - GK Chesterton
• both your husbands have run away from you to much plainer and stupider women - George Bernard Shaw 
• It was also found that the stupider animals, such as the sheep, hens, and ducks, were unable to learn the Seven Commandments by heart. - George Orwell
• I might have made a tolerably good buffoon, if I were a little stupider and a little more high-spirited - Aldous Huxley
• How much stupider! Michaelis knew at once he had made an impression on her. - DH Lawrence
• On the other hand he is in many respects stupider than the animals - CG Jung
• Besides, Lord Lambeth's no stupider than any one else - Henry James
• But at the next lower level he is replaced by a stupider homunculus ... - John R Searle 

All this data I imagine would be lost on the author of Literally, the Best Language Book Ever: Annoying Words and Abused Phrases You Should Never Use Again (Paul Yeager, Perigee Books, 2008). On his associated weblog post - Stupid Grammar Error - Paul's associate (or partner?) Sherry Coven states categorically that "stupider" and "stupidest" are wrong. It's a classic piece of "nothing is relevant" prescriptivism, with its dismissal of dictionary inclusion ...

finding a word in a modern dictionary doesn’t make it legitimate, standard English

... and irrelevant appeal to logic and comparison:

Stupid is just like lucid (same -id ending) ... In fact, in general, -id words use more and most instead of –er and –est.

This may well be the case for "-id" words in general, and Google Books Ngram Viewer shows that for "lucid", the inflected forms are very rare (see "lucider" / "more lucid" ... "lucidest" / "most lucid"). However, there's no reason, beyond wanting language to be tidy, why "stupid" should behave the same way as "lucid", and the observed print usage shows that it doesn't now and never has.

The reality is that the choice between inflectional and periphrastic comparatives is a very complex matter, and research has shown that it varies not only with time and between speakers, but also with register (situation and subject matter).  Papers and books have been written about it: see, for instance, Competing forms of adjective comparison in modern English: What could be more quicker and easier and more effective? by Merja Kytö and Suzanne Romaine; and English adjective comparison: a historical perspective by Victorina González-Díaz. The idea that such a subtlety can be summed up with a blanket statement that "form X is the only correct one" is quite bizarre. As Gabe Doyle at Motivated Grammar puts it - see You don’t really get language, do you? - it springs from a centrally mistaken and counterfactual assumption that there is One Right Way for any usage situation.

- Ray

Enquire within ... if I mistake not

I've just been browsing a print copy of the 1870 edition of Enquire Within Upon Everything, a how-to book for domestic life, first published in 1856 by Houlston and Sons of Paternoster Square in London. As the intro says, its brief was:

Whether You Wish to Model a Flower in Wax; to Study the Rules of Etiquette; to Serve a Relish for Breakfast or Supper; to Plan a Dinner for a Large Party or a Small One; to Cure a Headache; to Make a Will; to Get Married; to Bury a Relative; Whatever You May Wish to Do, Make, or to Enjoy, Provided Your Desire has Relation to the Necessities of Domestic Life, I Hope You will not Fail to 'Enquire Within.'

This guidance extended to language, and it's a prime example of Victorian prescriptivism. In part it offers 256 hints on correct forms of phraseology (see page 54 onward - Rules and Hints for Correct Speaking), and in part it classifies and ridicules various forms of lower-class and dialect speech such as Low Cockney, Genteel Cockney, Provincial Brogues, and so on (see page 63). The social-climbing subtext of prescriptivism couldn't be more blatant.

It is at once absurdly prim, hyper-correct and extremely supercilious about popular usage. Imitation of the 'educated' is the key to success. The most reprehensible errors reside in dialect, especially Cockney.
- Visions of the people: industrial England and the question of class 1848-1914, Patrick Joyce, 1993

As with all prescriptivism, it's a mix of generally-agreed grammatical advice and completely arbitrary edicts based on the uncredited author's personal tastes. For example, the advice on "who" and "whom" is perfectly standard for a formal register of English even nowadays, but many more examples are totally subjective. Just a few:

41. Instead of "I had better go," say "It were better that I should go."
45. Instead of "It is raining very hard," say "It is raining very fast."
55. It is better to say "Bred and born," than "Born and bred."
65. Instead of "If I am not mistaken," say "If I mistake not."
66. Instead of "You are mistaken," say "You mistake."
67. Instead of "What beautiful tea!' say "What good tea!"
115. Instead of "Captain Reilly was killed by a bullet," say "Captain Reilly was killed with a bullet."
123. Instead of "In its primary sense," say "In its primitive sense."
133. Instead of "I lifted it up" say I lifted it."
174. Instead of "The very best," or "The very worst," say "The best, or the worst."
226. Instead of "You will some day be convinced," say "You will one day be convinced."
244. Instead of "Is Lord Palmerston in?" say "Is Lord Palmerston within?"
251. Instead of "The weather is hot," say "The weather is very warm."

The section on Rules of Pronunciation (page 65) is potentially interesting, because it's moderately uncommon to find explicit lists of historical pronunciations. However, as with grammar, in Enquire within it's near-impossible to work out whether the writer is promoting real educated pronunciation of the time or some weird private affectation. Many of the examples - see section 184 - don't seem to reflect even Upper Received Pronunciation.

— age, not idge, as cabbage, courage, postage, village.
— el, not l, model, not modl; novel, not novl.
— ed, not id, or ud, as wicked, not wickid, or wickud.

- Ray

The baffled readers were we

Occasionally Yahoo! Answers gives a glimpse into bizarreness that is being taught as English grammar, commonly in ESL contexts, but not always. The asker of a question I saw today quoted a homework sheet about predicate pronouns (pronouns in object position that refer to the subject of the sentence).

Here are some points to remember about predicate pronouns.
1. Predicate pronouns follow linking verbs such as am, is, are, was, were, shall be, and will be.
2. A predicate pronoun renames, or refers to, the subject of the sentence.
3. A sentence with a predicate pronoun will usually make sense if the subject and the predicate pronoun are reversed.

The kicker was HE.
HE was the kicker.

Always use subject forms of pronouns for subjects and predicate pronouns.

INCORRECT: The runner was HER.
CORRECT: The runner was SHE

Based on that, the sheet evidently expected these ludicrously archaic and unidiomatic answers:

2. The most excited spectators were we.
7. The dog trainer we admired the most was she.
10. The best hockey player on the team was she.
12. The man slicing green beans for dinner is he.

Those are pretty weird, and I doubt any native English speaker on Planet Earth would spontaneously use such sentences. Nearly a decade ago, Pullum & Huddleston's The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language recently came out vigorously against forms such as "It is I" that use nominative pronouns in object position, noting them to be stuffy and highly formal to the majority of speakers. The sheet, however, falls into exactly the prescriptive error described in their A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (see pages 4-5): teaching an unusually formal (if not sufficiently unidiomatic to be outright wrong) construction as simply "correct".

As far as I can tell, in the USA at least, the prescriptive rule on predicate pronouns was stated most explicitly in grammar texts of the late 19th and very early 20th century, notably in the 1899 A First Manual of Composition and the 1902 A Text-book of Applied English Grammar by the prolific writer and rhetorician Edwin Herbert Lewis (Ph. D., LL. D.,. Professor of English, Lewis Institute, Chicago).

It's I. / It's they.
It's he. / It's who.
It's she. / I thought it was he.
It's we. / I fear it's I whom you mean.

So the subject-pronouns and the predicate-pronouns are the same.

In conversation it is permissible to say It's me, but It's I is better.
- A First Manual of Composition

In answer to the question "Who is it?" we are permitted to say " It's me," instead of "It is I." But it is just as simple to answer merely the word "I." Such questions as "Was it I that you wanted?" are very common among correct speakers, and are not pretentious. But even if we allow ourselves to say "It's me," we must not allow ourselves to say "it's him," "it's her," "it's them." These are vulgarisms.
- A Text-book of Applied English Grammar

Now, a over century later, this advice is hopelessly outdated. As the press release for The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language put it:

Myth: Expressions like "It was me" and "She was taller than him" are incorrect; the correct forms are "It was I" and "She was taller than he."

Pullum responds: The forms with nominative pronouns sound ridiculously stuffy today. In present-day English, the copular verb takes accusative pronoun complements and so does "than." My advice would be this: If someone knocks at your door, and you say "Who's there?" and what you hear in response is "It is I," don't let them in. It's no one you want to know.
- Monumental New English Book Helps Debunk Grammar "Rules"

Googling tracks the content of the worksheet in question to this document on the TeachersWeb site for the Language Arts department of Bella Vista Middle School, California. The fine print credits it to "McDougal, Littell & Company" - now merged into Holt McDougal, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

- Ray

Style wars - Part 4 - prescriptivism as meme

Dennis Baron, Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois, just posted a rather depressing piece at the Oxford University Press OUPblog, It’s time for English teachers to stop teaching that the earth is flat.

It reports how many English teachers (in the USA) are simply ignoring all they've been taught in training about English and grammar.

Prospective teachers get a healthy dose of sociolinguistics, transformational grammar, and the history of English.
...
But when they get their own classrooms, many of these same teachers reject such knowledge in favor of the simplistic language model they absorbed when they were in school, a model that ignores the complexities of the language people use every day in favor of a few prescriptive rules that can be memorized and tested, but that have little connection with what really happens when we talk or write.

I don't know if the same applies to UK teaching, but it certainly concurs with my experience of the Yahoo! Answers Languages and Words & Wordplay sections, where school-age askers regularly mention their teachers having told them the old prescriptivist rules ("Don’t split infinitives", "Don’t end sentences with prepositions", "Don’t use contractions", "Don't start sentences with And or But", and so on).

Why do these non-rules persist despite repeated debunking? I think because they're memes: ideas that carry powerful cultural baggage. That baggage is, at heart, to do with class anxiety - "use construct X and you are in a better class than people who don't use it" - and this goes right back to the origins of prescriptivism in the 18th century, when it was closely linked with the rise of the middle class. A while back (see Style Wars - Part 3 - redeeming Lowth) I mentioned the Codifiers project at the University of Leiden, set up to study the pundits who pronounced on language in the 18th century. Its members have produced some very interesting books and papers on prescriptivism, many of them previewable on Google Books. For example:

• The Bishop's Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism (Ingrid Tieken-boon Van Ostade, Oxford University Press, 2011. This looks an extremely nice book, which debunks the common belief that Lowth as a prime mover of prescriptivism.
• Current Issues in Late Modern English (ed. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Wim van der Wurff, Peter Lang, 2009). Papers from the Third Late Modern English Conference, held at the University of Leiden in 2007. Joan C Beal's Three hundred years of prescriptivism (and counting) charts prescriptivism from its beginnings to the current "new prescriptivism" exemplified by writers such as Lynne Truss and John Humphrys, finding resonances between past and present such as fear of the underclass.
• Perspectives on prescriptivism (ed. Joan C. Beal, Carmela Nocera, Massimo Sturiale, pub. Peter Lang, 2008). Papers from the colloquium Perspectives on Prescriptivism (20-22 April 2006), hosted by the University of Catania. The Codifiers and the History of Multiple Negation in English, or, Why Were the 18th-century Grammarians so Obsessed with Double Negation? is particularly interesting; it asks why grammarians had a downer on a construct that was no longer in general usage. It concludes that it was a social shibboleth, a marker of the language used by servants and other lower-class people, and therefore to be avoided by anyone with social aspirations.

So much for the information carried. As to the propagation process, Professor Baron's line about the "simplistic language model they absorbed when they were in school" says it all. Students are taught prescriptive grammar rules as hard fact at a young age, and when they're exposed later to the more subtle - and often directly contradictory - picture of descriptive grammar, the new information hits a barrier of cognitive dissonance (resistance to revising an idea - in thise case, one interlinked with the holder's self-worth about their social status). This situation leads to extraordinary convolutions of logic to explain why such rules are correct against evidence to the contrary. For instance, if multiple acclaimed writers use some construct disobeying a prescriptive rule, it's not viewed as evidence that the rule is wrong, but dismissed as "good writers knowing when to break the rules".

If, as Professor Baron describes, these memes are effectively hijacking the educational process, how do you break the cycle?

- Ray

Dilemna

I don't often read the Daily Mail, apart from the puzzle page; however, a few days back I spotted an interesting reader's letter from a correspondent who recalled having been taught, in his very traditional Scottish school, a misspelling of "dilemma" as "dilemna".

No doubt of it: "dilemma" - etymologically from Greek δί-λημμα ("double proposition") - is correct, and the Oxford English Dictionary - quoted at the discussion at Wordwizard - confirms this. But a look on the Web finds many other people with a distinct recollection of having been taught otherwise.

I believe them, because this seems more than just an occasional misspelling: on Google Books "dilemna" gets 8,870 hits to 2,333,000 for "dilemma" (i.e it accounts for about 0.4% of occurrences in published books), and Google Ngram Viewer finds it to be long-standing (British English / American English). It's not limited to low-quality publications; examples include scholarly texts (e.g. here and here); Punch magazine (here); the works of William Pitt (here); the works of Washington Irving (here); and English classics such as Fielding's Amelia (here), Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (here), Swift's Gullliver's Travels (here) and Smollett's The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (here).  It's hard in particular to believe that the last batch of writers, and their proofreaders, would all make the same spelling mistake, so I can only conclude "dilemna" to be a genuine variant spelling that has been propagating, undocumented,.for centuries.

How it arose is hard to say. The earliest book examples I can find are in Latin texts in the 1500s (dilemna / dilemma), which is the same period, according the the OED, when "dilemma" itself entered English.  I rather wonder if it originated as a misreading from Gothic script. In some of its forms, as in the above example from Medieval Writing and Scripts, words tended to consist of horizontally-condensed and very similar verticals: "mm" and "mn" wouldn't look much different.

Alternatively, maybe the error crept across from mathematics teaching.  Euclid's Elements in Latin was a standard text that persisted long after Henry Billingsley's first English edition came out in 1570.  The Dutch-printed 1692 edition by Henrik Coets spells "lemma" - a mathematical proposition - as "lemna" (examples).

(There is, by the way, a Greek word "lemna" - but it's duckweed).

- Ray

Very extreme adjectives

Prescriptivism again. One of the recurring issues in prescriptivist grammar - the attempt to formally dictate language - is its tendency to firm up 'fuzzy' areas of observed usage into hard rules. An example might be the choice between using "more adjective" and "adjective-er" for comparatives, as discussed in Arnold Zwicky's Language Log post Inflected Adj/Adv. There are adjectives where the inflected "-er" version is impossible. But for others it's merely uncommon; prescriptivists, however, often inflate that observation into a rule that the "-er" inflected form shouldn't be used at all for that adjective.

I just noticed a similar example with "extreme adjectives". This is a fairly new descriptive category - at least in linguistics - dating from the work of D Allan Cruse, who called them "implicit superlatives" in his book Lexical Semantics (see page 216). Extreme adjectives are ones that powerfully emphasise the quality they describe: for instance, "large" is a normal - or 'gradable' - adjective expressing size, but "colossal", "vast" and "humungous" are extreme adjectives.

The central descriptive observation of Cruse and others is that an adjective's "extremeness" influences what modifiers can be applied to that adjective. For example, if "pleasant" and "fabulous" represent normal and extreme adjectives referring to degrees of niceness, "very pleasant" and "absolutely fabulous" are idiomatic, but "absolutely pleasant" and "very fabulous" aren't. This is a probabilistic thing, however. As described in detail in Marcin Morzycki's review paper Degree Modification of Extreme Adjectives and in Extreme Degree Modification, it manifests not as anything clear-cut, but as a "resistance", varying between speakers, to using particular forms in particular cases. Morzycki also observes a difference in the behaviour of "lexical" and "contextual" extreme adjectives. For instance, one overall trend is toward an increasing resistance to using the modifier "very" as the adjective becomes more extreme - but with considerable fluidity according to context.

All such subtlety is lost on the prescriptivists, however. If you Google "extreme adjectives", you'll find any number of guidelines that inflate this variable quality into a simplistic hard diktat that the modifer "very" must never be used with extreme adjectives. It seems to have taken particular root in ESL (English as a second language) teaching.

The problem is, it's a rule that in many cases is completely at variance with actual usage. A few examples:

English in Mind Level 3A Combo Teacher's Book (Cambridge University Press, 2007) claims "very tiny" is wrong. However, large numbers of news items and published books show it to be perfectly normal usage.

"Fascinating already means 'very interesting', so we can't say 'very fascinating'"
- Language in use: Intermediate. Teacher's book (CUP, 1994)

Can't we? See news and books again. It was good enough for Charles Dickens, as in The Old Curiosity Shop ("It is to be remarked of his trade that it is a very fascinating one") and David Copperfield ( "And you mean to say the little thing is very fascinating, I suppose?").

"Extreme adjectives are synonyms, which because they already have an absolute meaning, cannot be qualified with words like very..."
- L'inglese in pratica, Volume 2 (Alpha Test, 2001)

It's interesting to compare Google Books hits for "very *" forms of the adjectives the above book lists: exhausted (15,000), tiny (170,000)/ minute (994,000), disgusted (4,930)/ appalled (97), infuriated (142), delicious (42,900), invaluable (411), soaking (27), boiling (141), astonishedamazed (1,560), petrified (34), horrified (258), fascinating (71,000), agonising (278), thrilled (4,560), huge (15,300), enormous (8,680), marvellous (14,600), fantastic (10,500), delighted (13,400), unforgettable (142). These show the rule to be a sweeping generalisation that's sometimes accurate, but in other cases wrongly rejects constructs that are in widespread usage. I'll make a particular point of citing this counterexample ...

Speaking about this specialised group, he said: "This extraordinary breed of farmer manages to produce food - and very delicious food indeed - in some of the harshest conditions; the weather is extreme, the soil is poor and the topography is some of the most challenging."

... because the speaker is Prince Charles. While I'm not the guy's number one fan, he's useful as a data point. It can reasonably be assumed that if the future king of England uses the phrase "very delicious", it's throughly respectable English. Back to this non-rule and ESL:

"The thing is – You can say very bad, but not very dreadful."
- Pavlionka, teaching English at English Baby!

Nope: news and books contradict again. It may be a trifle archaic, but not enough to be wrong.

"Extreme adjectives can not be preceded by very ..."
- English Learners online educational magazine / Extreme Adjectives:

Google hits again for the extreme adjectives cited: hilarious (966), boiling (141), delicious (42,900), amazed (1,560), filthy (21,200), huge (15,300), terrified (1,430), delighted (13,400), freezing (291), exhausted (15,000), spotless (150), furious (14,600). Again, the list mixes genuinely rare usages with perfectly commonplace ones.

"In contrast, 'ridiculous', 'astonished', astounded, ancient (very old) and boiling (very hot) are not gradable"
- Rachel Wicaksono, at the BBC World Service's Learning English site, Sunday, 09 July 2006:

"Boiling", agreed. But "very ancient" gets a solid 938,000 book hits, and it's hardly an unusual construct. It's not difficult to find respectable current examples. For instance:

The researchers believe the fossil to be around 3,000 years old, but say the species itself could be very ancient.
- BBC News, Divers find ancient monkey fossil, July 21, 2010

I'm very astonished that this very ridiculous rule managed to get a foothold in language teaching.

- Ray

Style Wars - Part 3 - redeeming Lowth

Further to the previous post, I ran into some interesting detail on a character who figures prominently in the descriptivism/prescriptivism debate. Robert Lowth (1710-1787) generally appears as one of the chief villains in the story, often cited as a prime originator of prescriptivist poppycock. Here's a typical description:

However, there were other eighteenth-century purists whose influence may have equalled that of Johnson, but whose statements and strictures were related not to usage, but to their own assumptions and prejudices. The most notable of these was Robert Lowth, Bishop of London. A prominent Hebraist and theologian, with fixed and eccentric opinions about language, he wrote A short introduction to English grammar (1762), which had a surprising influence, perhaps because of his own high status. Indeed, many schoolroom grammars in use to this day have laws of ‘good usage’ which can be traced directly to Bishop Lowth’s idiosyncratic pronouncements as to what was ‘right’ and what was ‘wrong’. His grammar is bespattered with pompous notes in which he deplores the lamentable English of great writers. He set out to put matters right by laying down ‘rules’, which were often based on currently fashionable or even personal stylistic preferences. For example, contrary to general usage, he urged that prepositions at the end of sentences should be avoided
...
In brief, Lowth’s influence was profound and pernicious because so many of his strictures were based on his own preconceived notions. In retrospect, it is quite astonishing that he should have felt so confident about his prescriptions. Did he believe that, as a bishop, he was divinely inspired? It is also curious that his dogmatic statements were so widely accepted among educated Englishmen. It seems that, as a prominent religious leader, no one questioned his authority.

- Chapter 1, Language Change: Progress or Decay?, Jean Aitchison, 1991

However, it appears that the whole topic of prescriptivism origins has its urban myths and garblings, and even among seemingly authoritative texts there are conflicting stories about, for instance, who coined the rule against split infinitives. In that vein, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade has compiled Prejudices, errors, misconceptions about Lowth and his grammar, a debunking of many of the claims about Lowth. For example, contrary to general belief, he said nothing about split infinitives: grammar pundits only started raising this point some 50 years after his death. He was evidently not a figure who expounded his grammatical views from the pulpit; the grammar was written before he became a bishop, and was originally written for his son. Nor were his opinions presented as hard rules; for example, his view on prepositions at the end of a sentence explicitly states that it's a matter of 'house style' rather than a command never to use the construct:

The Preposition is often separated from the Relative which it governs, and joined to the verb at the end of the Sentence ... as, ‘Horace is an author, whom I am much delighted with’ ... This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style of writing; but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful,as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated style.

The list comes from Robertlowth.com, Professor Tieken's 1 website relating to Lowth and her forthcoming book The Bishop's Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism , due out at the end of 2010. From the blurb:

* Definitively dispels the myth of Lowth as the icon of prescriptivism.
* An in-depth account of the author of the most important eighteenth-century English grammar.
* Gives the publication history of Lowth's grammar and shows how it was plagiarized by later grammarians.
* The primary basis of the book is an unpublished collection of Lowth's correspondence.
* 2010 is the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Lowth.
* Lowth was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford 1741-51 and Bishop of Oxford 1766-77 and London 1777-87.
* Lowth's doctoral dissertation, De Sacra Poesie Hebraeorum Praelectiones, was published in 1753 by the Clarendon Press.
...
Given the widespread current prejudices about Lowth and his grammar this book is likely to arouse passionate arguments for and against his ideas. Professor Geoffrey Pullum (Edinburgh) and John Humphries would be pro and Professor David Crystal and Melvin Bragg likely to be anti. The book will appeal to scholars and students of the history of English and linguistic historiography and to all those interested in questions of linguistic correctness.

It looks fascinating (even if the price is daunting). Meanwhile, Lowth's A short introduction to English grammar is available in full via Google Books. If you just read the introduction and the footnotes, he does come across as a rather curmudgeonly decline-of-English grump, but Professor Tieken's point is that the book needs taking as a whole, and as such it's an extremely creditable attempt to descriptively analyse, concisely and clearly, the grammar of English.

Of connected interest, see the home page for The Codifiers and the English Language and its associated weblog. It raises interesting questions about the "codifiers", the pundits who pronounced on language in the 18th century:

Where did the eighteenth-century codifiers find the linguistic norm they advocated in their grammars? How did their own language compare with the norms of correctness they formulated? What was the effect of normative writing on actual usage?

In hindsight, their efforts can't have been that effective; even with a privileged fast-track into grammar books in the educational system, they were unable to gain universal acceptance of their views. English, it seems, was far too robust to be remodelled by a few pet peeves. But it did give rise a schism: a viral thread that propagated many of these memes among some educated people, to coexist in permanent tension with the views of other educated people who didn't swallow them.

Addendum: Ingrid (Professor Tieken) added in the comments that

The Bishop's Grammar was published a few days before what would have been Lowth's 300th birthday, on 27 November 2010. To commemorate this anniversary, a symposium was held at Winchester College (Lowth is an "old boy" from the College), where first copies were presented to the Master of the College and to Anthony Lowth, one of the bishop's descendants.

Thanks!

- Ray

PS Irrelevant aside: something about the image of Lowth was familiar. I just realised what: he has a remarkable resemblance to Jeffrey Jones as Reverend Steenwyck in the Tim Burton film Sleepy Hollow.

1. I think this is the correct form; apologies if not.

- Ray