The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. 2000.
Usage in The American Heritage Dictionary
Geoffrey Nunberg
Viewed in retrospect, controversies over usage usually seem incomprehensibly trivial. It is hard for us to fathom why Swift should have railed against the shortening of mobile vulgus to mob, why Benjamin Franklin should have written to Noah Webster complaining about the use of improve to mean “ameliorate,” or why Victorian grammarians should have engaged in acrimonious exchanges over whether the possessive of one should be one’s or his. Even comparatively recent controversies have a quaint air about them: most people under 50 would be hard-put to understand what in the world critics of the 1960s had in mind when they described the verb contact as an “abomination” and a “lubricious barbarism.”
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This does not necessarily mean that there was never any substance to these controversies—or that there is nothing of importance at stake in the issues that modern critics worry over, even if it is certain that most of them will strike our successors as no less trivial than Swift’s and Franklin’s complaints seem to us. In his time, Swift may have been within his rights to complain about mob, which began as an affectation of aristocratic swells. The fact that the word later settled into middle-aged respectability doesn’t retroactively excuse its youthful flippancy. And contact started as business jargon before it was generally adopted as a useful verb. Perhaps current jargon like incentivize will develop along the same lines, but it doesn’t follow that critics have no justification for objecting to it now.
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Past controversies should put us on our guard against viewing these disputes too narrowly. Disputes about usage are always proxy wars. What is important is not the particular words and expressions that critics seize on at a given moment but the underlying mental vices that they (often temporarily) exemplify—for example, foppery, pretension, or foggy thinking. Language criticism is instructive only when it takes words as its occasion rather than as its object.
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After all, even if you set out to violate every stricture in the most comprehensive usage guide you could find, your derelictions would affect only a small proportion of your vocabulary and would make only the tiniest dent in the overall quality of your prose. This Dictionary contains over 500 Usage Notes and comments that deal with several thousand words and usages. That is a good deal more than are found in most dictionaries and usage handbooks, but at a conservative estimate an educated speaker of English knows around 100,000 words and constructions. These can be combined in an infinite number of ways, almost all of them infelicitous—for there are many more ways of getting a word wrong than of getting it right. The number of possible English mistakes is inexhaustibly vast, and no one could hope to catalog them all.
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So usage criticism has had to provide critical methods rather than lists. As a matter of convenience, these methods are usually demonstrated in discussions of a body of canonical rules and dicta. When readers with an interest in these matters pick up a new usage book or a dictionary containing usage guidance, they invariably turn first to the entries dealing with the modification of unique, the proper use of disinterested, the distinction between shall and will, and the like. But a book that contents itself with giving the “right” answer on each of these canonical issues can have little claim on the attention of serious readers. Usage is not like orthography, and usage debates are not adjudicated like spelling bees. Quite the contrary: the most “authoritative” writers on usage have usually been indifferent to the dictates of received wisdom. H.W. Fowler had no patience with the rules stating that none must be singular or that whose should not be used with an inanimate antecedent, and he saw no reason why aggravate should not be used to mean “irritate.” Most of his contemporaries would have disagreed, and so too would many modern critics. But it is not Fowler’s judgments that readers venerate; it is his skill as a litigant.
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Still, modern controversies about usage are different from these earlier discussions in important ways. The 18th- and 19th-century grammarians may have argued heatedly about particular points of usage, but they were usually in tacit agreement about the central premise of language criticism: that some forms of expression are preferable to others. Today that assumption is itself controversial. Modern debates about usage often take the form of engagements in a battle between ostensibly irreconcilable philosophical camps. On one side of the field is ranged the party of science, the “descriptivists,” who hold that all standards are ultimately based on the facts of use, and that the business of dictionaries and usage books is simply to record those facts in a neutral way. On the other side stand the “prescriptivists,” who insist that language is subject to a higher morality and that people who care about the state of the language have an obligation to defend traditional values in the face of growing laxity and permissiveness.
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As with most total wars, this one has tended to devastate the territory it has been fought over, obliterating the individual features of the landscape. Either one maintains that the entire enterprise of language criticism is simply a disguised reflex of elitism and class oppression, or one defends the tenets of grammatical orthodoxy with indiscriminate tenacity. Yet for all the passionate intensity of the partisans, most concerned onlookers have watched the battle with a certain bemusement, for each party does seem to be partly right—and partly wrong.
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Clearly there was much to criticize in traditional usage writing. A lot of it was mere pedantry (“the unseasonable ostentation of learning,” as Dr. Johnson once defined it). Certainly it is hard to discern any critical content at all in the ritualized version of prescriptivism that was incorporated into schoolroom lore. Then too, prescriptivism has unquestionably been sullied by a strain of snobbery. A large part of usage writing has been dedicated to demonstrating that the speech forms of Standard English—the variety that happens to have been adopted by the educated middle classes—are inherently superior to the forms found in other varieties. The chief effect of all this has been not just to visit unwarranted humiliation on speakers of nonstandard varieties but to damage the credit of serious language criticism. There is a strong case to be made for using Standard English as the common medium of public communication of all types, but the point can be made without stooping to what Raymond Williams described as “the vulgar insolence of telling [people] that they do not know how to speak their own language.”
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But language criticism was not originally conceived as an apology for the speech of the ruling orders. The 18th-century founders of the tradition were champions of a new class of writers freed from a direct dependence on aristocratic patronage by an expanded reading public. The object of their criticism, whether of language, literature, or life, was to usurp the authority of the court and aristocracy as a source of social values. Hence their insistence that the spoken language must defer to the written, and that custom must sometimes defer to criticism—for in that era custom was simply another name for the practices of the privileged. And serious language criticism since then has been more often than not an arm of traditional liberalism, which reserves its sternest admonitions for the transgressions of the educated and the powerful.
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Usage doctrines must change with the times, of course. We may still read an early-20th-century usage writer like H.W. Fowler sympathetically, but only by making the same kind of allowances that we extend to a novel by John Galsworthy. It is not just that the language has changed in the interval—who now would object to the use of meticulous to mean “painstaking” rather than “timid”? But the underlying presumptions of criticism must also change. The fundamental linguistic virtues—simplicity, clarity, intelligibility—are unassailable, but they must be constantly reinterpreted against an evolving social and linguistic background. English today is used for new purposes and in new media, and its discourses have been opened to groups that were linguistically disenfranchised in the past. A responsible program of language criticism must take all of this into account. The language is too important to be left to nostalgic reveries. But it is also too important to be exempt from critical review.
