Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 802
The same pronoun one is used in British journalism, not in ours in North America, as a fitting form for the use of interviewers, reporters, writing up an occasion or a person, and, as it were, remaining themselves in a sort of mist of obscurity or anonymity.
One entered the great man’s room. One felt oneself at once in the presence of a man of exception. Here was one whom one felt was born to command, etc....
This form may be dictated by self-effacement. But I see little to recommend it. The Japanese ‘humble worm’ is better.
But the difficulties connected with the use of pronouns are only one case of what has been called the ‘common perplexities’ of our everyday language. As with the pronouns, many of these perplexities resolve themselves on examination into a struggle between pedantry and common sense. If ‘pedantry’ is too harsh a word let us call it orthodoxy.
Consider such so-called errors as ‘Have you got any money?’
‘We haven’t got the time!’
‘What have you got?’ Authority tries to cast out the word got from such sentences as a policeman turns out a loafer; but in vain; its friends bring it back and insist on keeping it. ‘Don’t you see,’ says the pedant, ‘that all you need say is “Have you any money?”’The word got isn’t necessary, or, if you like a longer word for it, it is ‘pleonastic.’ Whereon the pedant warms to his task with a whole section on pleonasm and tautology (Greek for too much and the same thing over again). After which people go on using got, because they haven’t got any faith in the rule.
The people are in this case, I think, quite right. It is true that the verb have possesses a full meaning of its own in the sense of possess or hold.
Now, infidel, I have thee on the hip.
But a thousand years ago, in English as in French, it also acquired a weaker use as an auxiliary, meaning an assistant word. Thus in Latin, as the language ‘broke down into French, instead of saying I killed him, they could say I have him killed. This marked off a new tense with gradations of meaning not indicated before. We can appreciate these gradations by considering the difference between ‘I have him licked’ and ‘I have licked him.’
But in language as elsewhere one can’t be master and servant both. In proportion as have served for an auxiliary it lost force as an independent unit. It needed support itself. Hence it drew to it the word ‘got’ and kept it in a pleonastic partnership. ‘I have got some money’ meant at first ‘obtained some money’ and then simply, ‘I have some money.’ Note again the shading that lies between ‘Have you got your money?’ and ‘Have you got your railway ticket?’ This latter query could mean purchased or obtained, and so it stands even more easily, half on its own feet, half leaning.
The conclusion is that in many expressions the addition of got lends force or emphasis. Common sense justifies it.
To take another example. All the text books warn us that the word ‘like’ must not be used as a conjunction. We are allowed to say, ‘He is like his father,’ but we must not say ‘He talks like his father talks.’ We are not to say, ‘I wish I could play the ukulele like John does.’ We are to say ‘I wish I could play the ukulele as John does.’ Either that or not wish at all — and don’t play the ukulele. If we insist on doing so we must find some different way of expressing the same thing. Thus in the first illustration above we would be told, ‘He talks as his father talks’ would not sound complete and that it would be better to use some such phrase as, ‘His manner of talking is similar to that usual with his father.’ This everlasting desire to ‘recast’ things for the sake of grammatical rule reminds me of the quaint attitude towards the French language adopted by one of my Upper Canada College pupils of fifty years ago. He appeared deeply impressed with the feebleness of French speech. ‘How do you say in French’ I asked him, ‘Give me some bread?’
‘You can’t say it,’ he answered, ‘You have to say something else.’
So with the grammarians and such terms as like as a conjunction; you have to say something else. Yet as a matter of fact most people, and even grammarians on a vacation, use like in this way all the time. So do the best authors, at least the ones with the keenest sense of what words mean as apart from rules as to what they ought to mean. Here is Charles Pickens writing to his friend John Forster (Jan. 7, 1841) in regard to the death (at his own hands, or rather at his own pen) of his Little Nell— ‘Nobody will miss her like I shall.’ If you had told Dickens that he ought to write, ‘Nobody will miss her as I shall,’ he would have objected at once, would have said that it wasn’t strong enough.
The reason is not far to seek. Like is a living word, with a meaning in it. As is a dead word, a mere convention, a symbol. Once, no doubt, as was a living word — no doubt one could find a meaning for it in an Anglo-Saxon dictionary, but not for us. But like is not only alive, but is a word that has carried down with it through the centuries an intensity of significance. It means originally ‘a corpse,’ it still does in German (Leichnam). The little gate with a roof in front of English country churches is called a lych gate (corpse gate). There rested the corpse, waiting for the clergyman. To realize how ‘corpse’ turned to ‘like’ consider such phrases as the dead image of a person. This is the dead image of John. This is John’s like. This is like John.
No wonder then that people instinctively use such a phrase, such as ‘to write like Shakespeare does.’ They can feel the comparison in the word.
One of the latest victims to fall into disrepute with the rule-makers is the word only. We are told that we must not say, I only had ten cents. We are told that only must stand before the particular word or phrase which it numerically qualifies. Washington had only three thousand men.... The laundry comes only on Friday. But as a matter of fact ordinary people are apt to distribute only much more freely. In many cases indeed the varying position of the only marks a varying shade of sense which the speaker, or writer, instinctively feels. At times it falsifies the true meaning to put only in what looks at first sight its qualifying place. Compare: This is a tale only told to children and This is a tale told only to children. In the first case told-to-children becomes one solidified idea and the arrangement has more meaning. Compare again: This out of the way village is only explored by snow-shoe clubs. Here it would be quite wrong to put is explored only by snow-shoe clubs. In reality it is not explored at all. The point of the sentence is the arrangement, meaning that snow- shoe-clubs come upon it as explorers might come upon something.
Similarly a great deal of over-sweeping condemnation is directed against the so-called split infinitive, meaning the insertion of words in between to and the infinitive verb with which it is associated. Thus Hamlet might have said, ‘To be or to not be,’ but he had evidently taken first-year English at the Court of Denmark and said, ‘to be or not to be.’ But in and of itself there is nothing erroneous or ill-sounding or illogical about a split infinitive. Many of our actual verbs are in themselves split infinitives, as when we say ‘to undertake’ and ‘to overthrow.’ In daily speech people split infinitives as readily as they split profits. Many of us who write books are quite willing to split an infinitive or to half split it or quite split it according to effect. We might even be willing to sometimes so completely, in order to gain a particular effect, split the infinitive as to practically but quite consciously run the risk of leaving the to as far behind as the lost caboose of a broken freight train. All we need admit is that many split infinitives are clumsy and purposeless and need bandaging.
But taking things all in all the student who wishes to write need pay but little attention to the question of grammar. Such rules mainly consist in telling us what not to say. No writer can get far on that. Eloquent silence is not literature.
Far different is the matter of the choice of words and of the construction of sentences. A first requisite and a constant aid to good writing is the cultivation of a feeling towards the words we use, an appreciation of their significance, of the distinctions of their meanings and of the peculiar colour, the shades of meaning, that surround so many of them. This last is the most important of all.
CHAPTER THREE. THE MYSTERY AND MAGIC OF WORDS
THE SUPERIORITY OF English to all dead, half-dead and living languages — Its troubled history — The Saxon base and the lawyers laid over it — Saxon for simplicity, for home and hearth and love in the gloaming — Norman French for cuisine and chivalry — Church Eatin for saints and the devil — book Eatin for the printer’s devil — Greek for metaphysics — The world’s tribute of words: Dutch yachts, China tea and Moslem muslin — All elements still active, as when a lounge-lizard speaks over the telephone to a piece of calico.
OUR English is a beautiful language. It is as far superior to the other languages as those who speak it, British and American, are to other peoples. It has had a long and troubled history. Those who spoke it in its earlier form were overwhelmed by foreigners; their language was submerged but survived. It had thus all the advantages of early adversity. The French say that one must suffer in order to be beautiful, and this may be applied to languages. English, after foreign mishandling of its elaborate suffixes and its clumsy forms, emerged into the beauty of its present simplicity.
Everybody knows something of the origins of English, and there are admirable manuals available for its study. We need here only refer to it in outline. Our language in its earliest form, as spoken by Angles and Saxons, was a part of the great Aryan or Indo-European speech that swept slowly across Europe in the centuries before our written history begins. As it moved it broke and disintegrated into many varieties, nor did the division of language necessarily keep on corresponding with race in the physical sense. Language was often superimposed on a conquered people or acquired by an alien one. The notion that the language of Europe corresponded to physical races is as old as the German philologist, Max Muller, and as forgotten. We might as well infer from the talk of negroes that they are a black branch of the Anglo-Saxons. Thus the Normans were Norsemen who acquired French in Normandy and Italian in Lombardy. A fringe of Western European people were not even Aryan at all. Certain broken fragments, languages like the Basque, remain to prove it.
It used to be the general understanding that the Angles and Saxons invaded England under Hengist and Horsa in A.D. 449. But modern scholarship is now inclined to class Hengist with Romulus and Remus, and Damon and Pythias, as types, not men. But at any rate the Angles and Saxons came. The Romans had already left. The Britons were driven westward and northward in an unending war of centuries. There was no amalgamation of languages. The Angles and Saxons took over here and there words left by the Romans. Some of these were names for things they didn’t have at home, such as street and camp and Ivine. Others were place- names, many of which became so battered in the course of centuries that the original Latin can no longer be recognized on the surface. Eboracum turned to Eborcum, Borcum, Bore, York. After the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, priests from Rome brought in the Latin that went with the service of the Church — minister and angel and the devil. The Britons kept their own language which the Saxons called Welsh (it means foreign), and still to-day the Welsh with true British persistency go on talking British. But the Gaelic group of languages that occupied our islands before the Saxons (Welsh, Cornish, Gaelic, Erse) have had hardly any influence on English and what they have had has been only the addition of single words but not in structure. Whisky is their leading contribution to our speech.
The partial conquest of England by the Danes and the occupation of the North had a more real effect on the language by blending it with a cognate tongue. The blend was a peculiar one. The languages were so closely alike that Danish words, even pronouns, could slip into English on their merits. They, their and them are Danish. So, too, very many common words, elementary words such as sky and skull and wing, etc. Strangely enough the verb die is Danish. The Saxons couldn’t die in three letters, so the snappy Danish word beat out the Saxon which degenerated into our starve. The Danes spread over the country (they ruled two-thirds of it) a lot of place-names, ending in by (Whitby) and dale and thorpe, etc. The greatest change came from the Norman Conquest. Even before 1066 the court of the Saxon King, Edward the Confessor, was filled with Frenchmen, and French was acquiring its peculiar status as a polite language which it still kept in the Victorian drawing-rooms and the diplomatic intercourse of yesterday. It is odd how long English carried the opprobium of its lowly origin and French the affectation of its excellence.
There were about two million English in England in 1066. Not enough Normans ever came over to teach them French. Nor did the Normans want to, nor contrariwise. French was the language of the court not the castle, Latin of the Church and the government, English of the people. For obvious reasons the situation gradually changed; of necessity and by force of numbers and circumstance the English language worked its way up. No one, so far as I know, has ever traced in full the vanishing of French. It seems settled that for nearly 200 years it kept its isolated superiority. But its hold was shaken by the tyranny of King John, which jumbled the people together, and utterly lost by the long wars (the Hundred Years War) with France (1338-1453). It is understood that by 1350 all people whose children enjoyed the benefit of school teaching wanted their children taught in English. Then came men of genius — a genius for language — such as notably Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400), and showed how English could be cultivated and elevated and refashioned into a wonderful medium of writing. A little later the Tudor and Elizabethan writers carried the process further, until we reach the plays of Shakespeare and the English of King James’s Bible — an English practically our own.
But English when it thus came back was, like Dido’s husband when a ghost, greatly changed from its former self. Its elaborate old endings and suffixes were all gone or going. Very few have survived. An anglo-Saxon primer shows us nouns with separate endings for separate cases, numbers and genders as in German to-day. Not only did the noun carry a string of needless variations, but the articles and the adjectives shared them. In English we say ‘the good, old red wine’ and that’s the whole of it. But in Anglo-Saxon, as in German to-day, they had half a dozen ways of saying it. They named it in the nominative and drank it in the accusative, joined it up with suffixes that coupled it up like a train of box cars. The sheer waste of human effort involved can only be compared to the still more appalling waste of our English spelling, and would be about as hard to terminate — that is, nominally very simple, practically just about impossible. If the Germans have the good luck to be as completely conquered as the Saxons were they may have their language improved for them in the same way as with Saxon English.
For the conquerors who presently took over English speech never learned to distinguish its elaborate suffixes except a few of the simple ones. To them good, old red wine was good, old red wine. There were a few outstanding survivals, such as our use of’s for a possessive case — John’s hat. Even that can be replaced by ‘of’ — the reign of John. There is also the use of s or es to indicate the plural to which practically all English words are now assimilated. There survive a few old plurals in n — oxen, children — some of them almost vanished — hosen, shoon — or plurals from the old Anglo-Saxon made by changing the vowels in the word as when mouse becomes mice, or with both the vowel change and the final n, as in kine and brethren. Gone also, and this a specially good riddance, are the confused primitive genders that persist in French and German and most European languages whereby a whole mass of inanimate things are male and female, with masculine and feminine adjectives to ‘agree’ with them. In French a bicycle is she, in German a girl is it; in some European languages (French) an army is she, in others it, and in others he. All this useless muddle of meaningless form comes down to us as a survival of primitive thought which animated all things, saw a spirit in fire and a demon in smoke.
These gender forms broke down in the re-making of Saxon into English and left us with no other distinction than that of male and female, animate or lifeless — he, she and it, with the plurals all lumped as they. The use of the neuter it spreads commonly over all the animate world of plants, and at will over animals — a horse is he or it.
An odd anomaly exists in modern English whereby we talk of all ships and vessels as she. This is not a legacy of Saxon or Danish times. It is easy to see that it connects with the idea of a vessel as a thing of life and movement. But even at that, why not he? How strange it would seem to English people, how natural to French people, to search the horizon for an approaching ship, and say, ‘I see him, there he is.’ This feminine gender for ships spread with the machine age to all kinds of engines and machines. A locomotive is ‘she’ to her engineer. Even a lawnmower is she to the mechanic who ‘oils her up good.’
Fancy may renew and poetry may revive the gender forms, as when the violet droops her head, or the sun shoots his angry beams. But this is only in connection with the make-believe of personification, and adds a power to English not known to a language like French where the violet is always she even when sold in a bunch, and the sun is always he, whether angry or astronomical.
Casting out its worn-out and valueless suffixes the English language developed in their stead an extensive use of prepositions to indicate relations between things. These also came to be used to modify the meaning of a verb, in such a way that a simple root from take or do or break could enter into a large number of combinations with varying shades of meaning. Think of all that we can do with break by combining it with prepositions used in this adverbial way. Thieves break in. Fire breaks out. A. meeting breaks up when a speaker breaks down and has to break off. All languages possess this faculty in some degree, but English is pre-eminent.
This great development came to us by the mingling of Norman French with English, or rather by submerging Norman French into the plastic base of English that lay below it. But the process was carried further when the revival of learning brought a new infusion of Latin, and presently of Greek forms, into the English language, quite apart from a Latin element that had been brought by the Church, or had come indirectly with the French language and the forms of law. A countless number of words, those of a rounded dignity and evenness of syllables, were thus dragged over bodily from the Latin, like the prisoners in the children’s game of prisoners’ base — as when we indicate subordinate positions for extinct animals — their number is legion. With them, with more inertia, as if reluctantly, came the Greek forms, or Greek that had passed through Latin, when a philanthropic philosopher apologises for megalomania.
