Declining or Just Changing?

If you think you know your English, Ammon Shea’s Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation might make you question your most cherished notions. The book has a lot to offer grammar sticklers with open minds, but it will challenge—and enrage—most traditionalists.

People who care about language tend to deplore the slovenly habits of their contemporaries. The feeling persists that English is in an unprecedented state of decline. For a little perspective, consider this: “Our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities; and, that in many Instances, it offends against every Part of Grammar.”

It has been three hundred years since Jonathan Swift wrote those words. Swift’s dismay has been echoed by grammarians in every succeeding generation. “The idea that there must be a way to get all the right-thinking people together to do something about the abuse of English,” Shea says, “is an idea that has almost five hundred years of failure under its belt.”

The point of Bad English is that despite all the wailing, “English is not dying. It is behaving exactly as it should, which is to say it is changing. [But] while many people accept that our language is subject to change, they want to dictate what sort of changes will take place.”

And this: “There is no aspect of the English language that has been immune to change. Meanings and spellings shift, word order changes, and punctuation comes and goes.” Bad English starts with the assumption that “prescribing how people should and should not use their language” is both futile and reprehensible.

That premise will upset many readers. But Shea is a language scholar of impeccable credentials, and he makes his case with daunting and compelling historical evidence. Shakespeare wrote “between you and I” (should be between you and me). Thomas Jefferson used it’s to mean “belonging to it” (should be its). And Jonathan Swift used ain’t.

Shea is an agitator. The book is peppered with seeming “mistakes” that Shea seems to have planted to provoke fussbudgets. For instance, he wastes no time using and defending the singular they, stating in the introduction, “I have opted to use the gender-neutral they in the singular.” But Shea is just getting started.

See if this bothers you: “It is hard to not admire Lienau’s rhetorical flourishes.” Note the deliberate use of the hideous to not, so beloved by grammar-challenged Millennials, so abhorred by their elders. Shea uses to not any time he has the chance, and it seems downright perverse. To not may be technically grammatical, but it is coarse and jarring. The traditional not to simply sounds better.

Shea baits the reader elsewhere with “a dog who” (instead of a dog that), “for he who utters” (instead of for him who utters), “each were” (instead of each was), among many others. To language watchdogs, these are so obviously wrong that one might wonder if Shea’s editors failed him. Alas, it’s probably worse: one gets the queasy feeling that the author is predicting what “good English” will look like in another generation or two.

Shea ends Bad English with a twenty-eight-page list of everyday words that “have been frowned upon at some point in the past few hundred years.” Some examples: anyhow, celebrity, donate, drapes, escalate, hospitalize, lesser, mansion, ovation, reliable, underprivileged. Shea’s point is clear: these words no longer bother anyone, and it seems odd that they ever did so.

We pedants have to be more philosophical and less churlish as we realize that many of our cherished rules are becoming obsolete. Like it or not, if enough people say “They is coming,” it will become acceptable and, eventually, unremarkable.

—a book report by our late writer and editor Tom Stern

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