William Rodney Herring

Dennis E. Baron. Grammar and Good Taste. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.

In Grammar and Good Taste, Baron treads little new ground. In fact, he repeats some of the same examples and makes some of the same observations as Edward Finegan in Attitudes Toward English Usage. Both books helped me tremendously in my search for primary 19th Century sources and in reviewing some of those sources. However, both Baron’s and Finegan’s projects amount to histories of ideas (in grammatical criticism). They treat everything from spelling reformation movements to linguistic treatises to grammar textbooks to usage and pronunciation manuals. In other words, they both paint with fairly broad strokes, and that’s okay for their purposes: in Baron’s case, it’s examining “the history of language planning and reform in America” (3).

Aside from describing the major works of linguistic criticism in the 18th and 19th Centuries—primarily in the English speaking world—Baron notices two major publication trends. First and expectedly, there’s the school of thought that suggests a little (or lot) more education will save American usage from slipping into a unrespectable state of chaos (chapter 8). Grammarians such as Lindley Murray, Samuel Kirkham, Goold Brown, George Washington Moon, and Edward Gould all paid some lip service to usage as a guide to acceptable forms of speech, but in the end, each of these men favored some set of traditional rules, whether derived from etymology, from analogy between English and another language, or inferred from rules of logic. Hence, they could only reason that speakers had better learn etymology, the principles of other languages, or the rules each of these men offered—that is, speakers had better study these authors’ grammars—if they wanted to speak properly and avoid dragging the English language down into barbarism. Gould, especially, blamed the “partially-educated” (197), those aware enough of their ignorance to be linguistically insecure, but also aware enough of possibilities around them to try (and fail) at unfamiliar constructions. On particulars, many of these men disagreed, but on the whole, they reflect what might be called the intellectual crowd of grammar.

The second or anti-intellectual crowd comes at the problem from the other angle. They find grammarians and grammars to be the problem. Richard Grant White, for instance, brags of being “unversed in the rules of English grammar (so called)” (qtd at 202) because, he argues, English has no grammar of its own, only rules imported from classical languages. He also opposes dictionaries and especially etymologies, which he considers comprehensible only to scholars (203). John Bechtel, on the other hand, targets popular audiences—readers who want to fill in gaps in their linguistic understanding; he considers his work superior to grammars for this purpose, since no one reads the latter (216).

Many usage manuals such as Bechtel’s Slips of Speech compiled common errors and corrected them, with little or no explanation. The issue of audience is interesting here because, according to Baron, such manuals became popular among readers who could admit they needed a little help. Put another way, these texts enjoyed upwardly mobile audiences, while the grammars with more intellectual pretension aimed at the firmly bourgeois who had no doubts about their position—but who liked to look down fretfully at the language abuse beneath them or to look back wistfully at the golden age of standard usage behind.