ENGLISH USAGE, OLD AND NEW

These are the times that try English majors’ souls. The sacred rules we were taught, and struggled to grasp and live by, are violated in the daily papers, not to mention radio. Doesn’t anyone these days know the difference between may and might?

I grant there are gray areas where either can be argued. But there are some areas that aren’t gray: “I might go to the movies tonight.”

I don’t want to seem priggish about this. I may wince inwardly at a split infinitive, and I try (with some strain) never to split one myself, but I don’t complain when others do it. The old taboo against the split infinitive was wrong, a bogus rule that violated idiomatic English. Nor need we be too fussy about who and whom. Different than may be better than different from, depending on the situation.

Likewise the taboo against ending a sentence with a preposition. A preposition can be a fine thing to end a sentence with. If you take all the old rules of proper usage seriously, Shakespeare will drive you nuts — a sure sign you’re taking refinement too far.

Shakespeare uses the English language with great subtlety, but also with idiomatic ease. He’s never haunted by rules. In some respects the English of his day was more emphatic than ours. I like him not, where the crucial adverb is climactic, has more power than the modern I do not like him, where the adverb gets buried in the middle of the sentence. Why have English-speakers abandoned this fine old form? Well, these things happen.

We should be annoyed by superfluous words, especially those meant to sound “official” — a real vice of our times. Many people now say “prior to” when “before” will do. The same sort of people say “despite the fact that” rather than “although.”

Modern Ideologies have imposed some onerous new rules. We are supposed to say “he or she” when he is perfectly clear, lest some touchy feminist throw a hissy fit. Samuel Johnson’s famous observation — “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” — would now have to be amended to “When a man or woman is tired of London, he or she is tired of life”; an “improvement” that destroys the simple vigor of Johnson’s sentence.

That goes for many old sayings about “man”: “What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world ... ” What is gained by changing that to “a man or a woman”?

The new rules are often bad for the same reason many of the old rules were: People don’t spontaneously talk that way, and their speech and writing lose force when they try to. Unless formality is called for, it’s more natural and more eloquent to speak of “man” than to speak of “the human race.”

“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” The same is true of language. When rules of usage impede simple expression, there is usually something wrong with them.

The new taboo on man is also a sign of another baneful modern tendency — toward abstraction and generalization, in preference to the concrete, the symbolic, the metaphorical. The simplest truths, as George Orwell observed, now tend to be stated in long-winded formulas.

Ideology has also burdened us with such neologisms as racist. Just what does this word mean? We hear it all the time, but nobody defines or explains it. How did Shakespeare and the King James Bible — and, in fact, all the great masters of the language — do without it?

An even sillier ideological coinage is homophobic. It signifies another unexplained disapproval, begging some obvious questions. What does it say that couldn’t be said with simple nouns and verbs? And again, how did the language survive so long without it?

Even stranger, if possible, is the word judgmental. To call someone “judgmental” is to accuse him of disapproving of something. But the word itself expresses disapproval. Methinks this calls for explanation too.

For all their defects, the rigid old rules of usage encouraged us to think critically about the words we use. That’s an excellent habit to cultivate. Without it, we find ourselves with too many rules and not enough reasons.

You think that`s bad, you should see it here in NYC. They can`t even READ! Ten years ago I worked for one company in Brooklyn New York that one day decided they were going to have a required class on driver safety for all employees, bosses included. The teacher they hired came in and right away made the foolish mistake of having people take turns reading aloud from the safety manual.

These guys were NOT foriegners reading by the way, not someone in their teens, but grown men in their 20`s, 30`s and 40`s raised and taught right here in good old liberal NYC and hardly ANY of them could read. "D-dri-vay s-saf-tay..." This teachers face was as red as a stop light, Im` telling you, just total shock until he made the smart move of deciding to take over the reading himself.

The board of ed here in NYC is a total joke, they graduate kids no matter what. And it`s not just NYC, also in Long Island. They no longer teach kids to write in script. My mother got a thank you letter from her friends son a few years back when he was 15 after she sent him a present for his birthday, and she couldn`t understand why he wrote the letter in block letters. It`s because they did away with penmanship and script in the schools. Isn`t that lovely? So when he grows up and wants to impress that girl or that boss, he`ll be writing personal letters that will look like they were written by a psychopath.

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you busy, Suzy
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation -- think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

For the most part, we do write and speak the English of 100 years ago. Granted, some of the idioms have changed, but the Language hasn't.

Shakespeare wrote in Modern English. He did not write in Old English, which is the language of Beowulf. I love to see signs that begin "Ye," as a sign of old English. That letter "Y" comes to English from the Vikings and Danes taking over England. It is normally drawn with a line through it, and pronounced like "th". Hence, "Ye" rightfully should be pronounced "The"

Shakespeare did not write in Middle English, which is the language of Chaucer.

Shakespeare's English was our English, with a few rules changed a bit and before all the great Shakepearean usages and axiom had entered the language.

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