Host is a noun, not a verb. People are healthy; foods are healthful. You lie down to sleep and lay down your pencil. A dilemma involves two choices. Usage rules like these, especially if we learned them young, tend to have the ring of eternal truth. We rarely ask ourselves which ones reflect centuries of actual practice and which are as (relatively) newfangled as airplanes and frozen peas.
And after all, why would we? We still read Conrad, Austen and Swift, a century or three later, without much difficulty; it’s reasonable to assume that the usage nits of their times were more or less the ones we’re still picking today.
Reasonable but not true, as Ambrose Bierce recently taught me. Bierce, the American journalist, satirist and Civil War memoirist, is as readable today as he was when he published “The Devil’s Dictionary” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” But his advice on English usage — published in 1909 as “Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults” — is often mysterious, perverse and bizarre.
Why was run a business “vulgar — hardly better than slang,” and dirt (for earth) “disagreeable,” and expectorate “offensive,” and electrocution “disgusting”? For a 100th-anniversary edition of the book, I set out to track down (as far as possible) the reasons behind the rules that seemed so important in 1909. Many of those rules are still in circulation, but a surprising number will probably be unfamiliar even to veteran sticklers.
A sampling:
“I am afraid it will rain.” Wrong, said Bierce: the proper expression was, “I fear it will rain.” He gave no reason, but the rule appeared at least half a century earlier, in Walton Burgess’s “Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence in Speaking, Pronouncing and Writing the English Language, Corrected.” And Burgess did have a reason: he explained that fear was the correct verb, because “afraid expresses terror; fear may mean only anxiety.” Unfortunately, that was simply false. Afraid did not imply terror for Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens or Jane Austen: “When you have seen more of this country, I am afraid you will think you have overrated Hartfield,” Austen’s Emma tells Mrs. Elton. Though several other usage mavens repeated Burgess’s and Bierce’s advice, there’s no sign that it ever made an impression on the wider public.
Talented. Coleridge kicked off the 19th-century campaign against talented, denouncing it in 1832 as a “vile and barbarous vocable.” The word was ill formed, the critics agreed, because there is no verb “to talent.” “If Nature did not talent a person, the person is not talented,” wrote Bierce. But by then, the battle was over; talented was in all the dictionaries, and some commentators welcomed it. Gilbert M. Tucker, in “Our Common Speech” (1895), suggested that “a tongue that already includes diseased, gifted, lettered, bigoted, turreted, landed, skilled . . . will hardly suffer much by admitting other formations of the same kind.”
Graduated/was graduated. During the 19th century, the older passive form — “Joe was graduated from college” — was being elbowed out by today’s standard phrasing — “Joe graduated from college.” In 1906, the lexicographer Frank Vizetelly said that the newer usage “has been condemned by purists but is now well established.” Bierce remained staunchly among the purists, though, and he was far from the last; as late as the 1980s, some usage writers insisted on was graduated. And then along came “Joe graduated college,” and usagists, scrambling to save the preposition in graduated from, abandoned all hope of reviving was graduated.
Some of Bierce’s most entertaining crotchets, however, appear to have been his own inventions. I couldn’t find anyone else who objected to tantamount (“It is not only illegitimate, but ludicrously suggests catamount”) or who disliked forebears (“It should be spelled forebeers”) or who thought a coat of paint should really be a coating. Certainly no other authority had argued that spending time was a nonsense phrase because time, unlike money, “goes from us against our will.”
Whether traditional or quirky, though, most usage advice shares one striking feature: its lack of demonstrable effect. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage points out, usage bans often come in response to surges in a word’s popularity, when it may already be too late. It was only when unique caught on in the 19th century, for instance, that extended senses and uses like very unique became noticeable enough to rate a smackdown. Yes, some upstarts (like irregardless) are kept at bay, and others are banished to lists of “skunked terms,” as Garner’s Modern American Usage labels them. But when did you last make a distinction between necessities and necessaries, or various and several? Half of our pet peeves could seem equally arcane by 2109 — and we don’t know which half.
That doesn’t mean we should give up trying to write (and edit and teach) better English. But it does suggest that it is a waste of everyone’s time to nag friends and strangers about whether gone missing makes sense or a fun party is grammatical or I could care less is logical. Our great-grandchildren may scratch their heads at our stylebooks, but they’ll still be able to read our best literature — and who would want it the other way around?
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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23FOB-onlanguage-t.html
