The Adventure of English (25 page)

It is fascinating that across the Atlantic Mark Twain would embrace and celebrate even less “correct” dialect but in London the author of
Gulliver
wanted to eradicate it. Swift is mostly worried about innovations of the past twenty years. He detested words that were clipped: “rep” (for “reputation”), “pos” (for “positive”), mob, penult, and others (this seems to have been no temporary fad; look at the clipped words of today: phone, bus, taxi, ad). He did not like verbs to be contracted, as in “drudg'd,” “disturb'd,” “rebuk'd,” “fledg'd,” “where by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable,” he wrote, “we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain.” He hated words he thought merely fashionable — “sham,” “banter,” “bubble,” “bully,” “cutting,” “shuffling” and “palming” — the language of the Mohocks.

In the early eighteenth century on the streets of London there were the Mohocks (the posh thugs with their high slang) and the bullies (the common thugs with their coarse slang). One of their “new inventions” was to roll persons down Snow Hill in a tub; another was to overturn coaches on rubbish heaps. They were said to be armed with razors and knives and “scared our maids and wives.” As often, it was what they did as much as what they said which caused their language to be disliked and the object of exclusion. The upper classes, the aristocracy, or rather their Mohock sons, were to be of no use in the battle for purification.

It was these aristocratic “bloods,” maybe even a Mohock at the end of the seventeenth century, who had introduced the word “bloody” as an emphatic, an intensifier. It quickly infected the lower orders. Shakespeare had used the word descriptively: “What bloody man is that?” but this usage turned it into “a horrid word.” “Bloody drunk,” i.e. drunk as a blood (cf. drunk as a lord) seems to have diverted it towards obscenity and soon it colonised the mouths of those wishing to be or unable not to be coarse. It alarmed the ears of the polite. Its association with the ancient blasphemy “Christ's blood” or “'sblood” probably helped it along, as did its gory relationship to battle and butchery. Literature, always on the lookout, published it early: in 1684, Dryden writes of bullies who enter “bloody drunk”; in 1742, Richardson wrote, “He is bloody passionate. I saw that at the Hill”; in 1743, Fielding, sometimes called the Father of the English Novel after
Tom Jones
and
Joseph Andrews,
wrote, “This is a bloody positive old Fellow.” Even Swift, in his later years, answered the question “Are you not sick, my dear?” with “Bloody sick.”

Swift saw no salvation in the aristocracy and so he turned to his fellow writers, part of that stratum of middle-class talent which was embarking on the remarkable journey of turning the damp little offshore islands of Europe into the centre of trade, science, philosophy, commerce and industry for the entire planet.

To do this, Swift was happy to play politics and appeal, directly, to Queen Anne herself. A stable language, he pointed out, would “very much contribute to the Glory of Her Majesty's Reign.” If the task of fixing the language were not completed, he argued, then it is possible that future generations would not know of the queen's glory since the texts which record history will be incomprehensible due to changes in the language. If history is not recorded “in Words more durable than Brass and such as Posterity may read a thousand Years hence” then it cannot be guaranteed that “Memory shall be preserved above an Hundred Years, further than by imperfect Tradition.”

There is more than one way to interpret this: you could say it was a cynical manoeuvre to get the crown on his side in the fight for his pet project; you could accuse him of overweening ambition in his almost mad attempt to “fix” something as unfixable as the meaning of words; you could say he was simply besotted by a dubious comparison with classical authors whose reach for posterity depended on circumstances very different from the restless history of English. Or you can, as I do, see it as something of a cry of pain that his words, his life's work, the visible evidence of his racked life and relentless imagination, should be at the mercy of a language whose changes would dilute it, obscure it, finally even bury it alive. He looked on his mighty works and despaired.

His friend Addison, of the
Spectator,
the essayist so influential on so many writers of his time on both sides of the Atlantic (Benjamin Franklin used him as a model for his prose), rolled up in support of Swift. In 1711 he wrote:

Needless to say, we were at war with the French again. Addison used the war as an example of the pestilence he abhorred: “When we have won Battels which may be described in our own Language, why are our Papers filled with so many unintelligible Exploits, and the French obliged to lend us a Part of their Tongue before we can know how they are Conquered?” (Addison must have known that both the above assertions are laced with words derived from French — for instance: “liberties,” “commerce,” “language,” “current,” “valuable.”)

What was happening was that the young men, perhaps even the young bloods, over in the wars were having a high old time sending letters home full of new words designed to show off their new knowledge and to baffle, perhaps to provoke, their parents. They wrote of a “Morass” and a “reconnoitre,” of “pontoons” and “fascines,” spoke of “hauteur” of the “Corps de Reserve” and a “Charte Blanche” — and many of these, of course, the home tongue quietly digested and served up new as English. Even Addison, even with the fashionable and influential
Spectator
magazine behind him, was unable to dam up the torrent.

Swift wanted an academy — such as French (1635) and Italian (1582) had already — in order to ascertain (in the sense of “fix”) the language. Dryden and Evelyn had suggested it some years earlier but they had not got very far: even forming a committee seemed beyond them. Swift goes on the offensive. He wants the academy to formulate rules for grammar, to discard improprieties, to make corrections and to set up a permanent standard. In 1712, he wrote a
Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue.
“Ascertaining” was the big word. He wanted the language fixed so that (unlike Chaucer) it would be easily and correctly readable for centuries to come. “I see no absolute Necessity why any Language should be perpetually changing,” he wrote. He wanted it to be as fixed as classical Latin and Greek, even though they themselves had changed hugely in their development and only became fixed when the written form had become a “dead” language. In
Gulliver,
Swift ridicules and caricatures attempts to change the language.

Like Wilkins' unused “original” language, Swift's academy did not catch on. As a riposte to Swift's proposal, John Oldmixon spoke for many empirical English speakers when he said that he would rejoice if the language could be fixed but it can't be: “the Doctor [Swift] may as well set up a Society to find out the Grand Elixir, the perpetual motion, the Longitude and other such discoveries, as to fix our Language beyond our own times . . .” Oldmixon was wrong about longitude.

And observers noticed that the French, for instance, still changed their language despite their academy. In 1714, Queen Anne died, Swift's Tory supporters were replaced by Whigs in office and the throne was taken by a German with little English and very little interest in it. The idea of the academy crumbled before a stone had been laid.

There is also a telling phrase in John Oldmixon's objection — “
our
Language.” Many of the English were very proud of “
our
Language.” They saw their character stamped on the words and they were right. They believed it embodied, preserved and encouraged the English spirit of individual liberty, of a resistance to central regulation, of not liking being told what to do. If anyone were to make “the first major attempt to impose order on the language” (David Crystal's phrase), it would have to be an individual and a rare, almost superhumanly knowledgeable, bloody-minded, determined, prodigiously energetic individual. That was what English wanted: a champion, but one who understood the uniqueness as they saw it of the language they relished.

Came the hour, came Dr. Samuel Johnson, an intimidating scholar, the monarch of London wits, a beacon of his age, a savage melancholic and, like Newton, an effortless eccentric.

In 1755, Johnson's
Dictionary
was published in two folio volumes. It was the result of seven years' work with little assistance. Forty members of the Académie Française took about fifty-five years in compiling
Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française
(1694) and spent another eighteen years revising it. In a conversation with John Adams, Johnson calculated his position with regard to the inevitably envied and denigrated French and their forty members and concluded that three Englishmen were worth at least a hundred Frenchmen. This went down very well. (There's an even more flattering figure — 1:500! Forty Frenchmen times forty years divided by one Englishman in three years.) Despite the boast, Johnson's achievement remains awe-inspiring. He rounded up forty-three thousand words and defined them. He pointed out what he had omitted and why, and whatever the occasional prejudices, blunders and blemishes, it set the mark for English dictionaries. It was the first time there had been a dictionary with illustrative quotations, and this was central to its importance. And as he pointed out on the title page, he was careful to use only the “best writers.”

He began, as his initial plan shows, very much on the side of the Swift–Addison party. His idea was to make “a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained and its duration lengthened.” Which seems very much like Swift's academy but within two volumes rather than four walls.

But after he had worked on the dictionary and come to write the preface in 1755, his pragmatism and his honesty in face of the force and life of English saw a rueful but radical change of mind:

With that calm sentence English bade farewell to any serious idea of an academy: just as in its eleventh-century vernacular written form it had been leagues ahead of its “European” rivals, so now through its non-elected word keeper, Dr. Johnson, it declared it would be for ever leagues behind any elected word-fixers. In both cases there is something to celebrate. English would never be lashed down and the power of its freedom gave it, I think, an extra cylinder when it came up against the obstacle or the opposition of other languages. In a sense, Johnson's admission of defeat by the language says as much for English as Alfred's insistence on its powers after his victory. The 1755 preface goes on:

Game, set and match to English. The masters had been mastered by it. It would yield to an alphabetical order but to nothing else. To fix pronunciation, as Johnson had said he would do, was equally impossible: “sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints.”

He made many rules for himself. These included the omission of “all words which have relation to proper names . . .” such as “Calvinist,” “Benedictine,” “Mahometan.” Foreign words introduced, in his opinion, through ignorance, “vanity or wantonness, by compliance with fashion or lust of innovation, I have registered as they occurred though commonly only to censure them.” This first comprehensive dictionary in our language continues on its individual way with such dictates as “compounded or double words I have seldom noted . . . of thieflike or coach-driver no notice was needed.” He goes on: “the verbal nouns in ‘ing,' such as the keeping of the castle, the leading of the army, are always neglected.” Participles are usually omitted. Obsolete words are admitted when they are found in authors not obsolete and also included if they deserve revival. He confesses to omitting words he has never found in books and words which “I cannot explain, because I do not understand them.” On he goes in a manner which enraged, amazed or struck dumb all future lexicographers and pleased so many general readers. “That many terms of art and manufacture are omitted,” he says, “must be frankly acknowledged; but for this defect I may boldly allege that it was unavoidable: I could not visit caverns to learn the miner's language, nor take a voyage to perfect my skill in the dialect of navigation, nor visit the warehouses of merchants, and shops of artificers, to gain the names of wares, tools and operations, of which no mention is found in books.”