Brief Intermission Four
HOW TO AVOID BEING A PURIST
Life, as you no doubt realize, is complicated enough these days. Yet
puristic textbooks and English teachers with puristic ideas are
striving to make it still more complicated. Their contribution to the
complexity of modern living is the repeated claim that many of the
natural, carefree, and popular expressions that most of us use every
day are “bad English,” “incorrect grammar,” “vulgar,” or “illiterate.”
In truth, many of the former restrictions and “thou shalt nots” of
academic grammar are now outmoded—most educated speakers
quite simply ignore them.
Students in my grammar classes at Rio Hondo College are
somewhat nonplused when they discover that correctness is not
determined by textbook rules and cannot be enforced by
schoolteacher edict. They invariably ask: “Aren’t you going to draw
the line somewhere?”
It is neither necessary nor possible for any one person to “draw
the line.” That is done—and quite effectively—by the people
themselves, by the millions of educated people throughout the
nation.
Of course certain expressions may be considered “incorrect” or
“illiterate” or “bad grammar”—not because they violate puristic
rules, but only because they are rarely if ever used by educated
speakers.
Correctness, in short, is determined by current educated usage.
The following notes on current trends in modern usage are
intended to help you come to a decision about certain controversial
expressions. As you read each sentence, pay particular attention to
the italicized word or words. Does the usage square with your own
language patterns? Would you be willing to phrase your thoughts in
just such terms? Decide whether the sentence is “right” or “wrong,”
then compare your conclusions with the opinions given after the
test.
TEST YOURSELF
1. Let’s not walk any further right now.
RIGHT WRONG
2. Some people admit that their principle goal in life is to become
wealthy.
RIGHT WRONG
3. What a nice thing to say!
RIGHT WRONG
4. He’s pretty sick today.
RIGHT WRONG
5. I feel awfully sick.
RIGHT WRONG
6. Are you going to invite Doris and I to your party?
RIGHT WRONG
1. Let’s not walk any further right now.
RIGHT. In the nineteenth century, when professional grammarians
attempted to Latinize English grammar, an artificial distinction was
drawn between farther and further, to wit: farther refers to space,
further means to a greater extent or additional. Today, as a result,
many teachers who are still under the forbidding influence of
nineteenth-century restrictions insist that it is incorrect to use one
word for the other.
To check on current attitudes toward this distinction, I sent the
test sentence above to a number of dictionary editors, authors, and
professors of English, requesting their opinion of the acceptability of
further in reference to actual distance. Sixty out of eighty-seven
professors, over two thirds of those responding, accepted the usage
without qualification. Of twelve dictionary editors, eleven accepted
further, and in the case of the authors, thirteen out of twenty-three
accepted the word as used. A professor of English at Cornell
University remarked: “I know of no justification for any present-day
distinction between further and farther”; and a consulting editor of
the Funk and Wagnalls dictionary said, “There is nothing
controversial here. As applied to spatial distance, further and farther
have long been interchangeable.”
Perhaps the comment of a noted author and columnist is most to
the point: “I like both further and farther, as I have never been able
to tell which is which or why one is any farther or further than the
other.”
2. Some people admit that their principle goal in life is to become
wealthy.
WRONG. In speech, you can get principal and principle confused as
often as you like, and no one will ever know the difference—both
words are pronounced identically. In writing, however, your
spelling will give you away.
There is a simple memory trick that will help you if you get into
trouble with these two words. Rule and principle both end in -le—
and a principle is a rule. On the other hand, principal contains an a,
and so does main—and principal means main. Get these points
straight and your confusion is over.
Heads of schools are called principals, because they are the main
person in that institution of learning. The money you have in the
bank is your principal, your main financial assets. And the stars of a
play are principals—the main actors.
Thus, “Some people admit that their principal (main) goal in life is
to become wealthy,” but “Such a principle (rule) is not guaranteed to
lead to happiness.”
3. What a nice thing to say!
RIGHT. Purists object to the popular use of nice as a synonym for
pleasant, agreeable, or delightful. They wish to restrict the word to its
older and more erudite meaning of exact or subtle. You will be
happy to hear that they aren’t getting anywhere.
When I polled a group of well-known authors on the acceptability
in everyday speech of the popular meaning of nice, their opinions
were unanimous; not a single dissenting voice, out of the twenty-
three authors who answered, was raised against the usage. One
writer responded: “It has been right for about 150 years …”
Editors of magazines and newspapers questioned on the same
point were just a shade more conservative. Sixty out of sixty-nine
accepted the usage. One editor commented: “I think we do not have
to be nice about nice any longer. No one can eradicate it from
popular speech as a synonym for pleasant, or enjoyable, or kind, or
courteous. It is a workhorse of the vocabulary, and properly so.”
The only valid objection to the word is that it is overworked by
some people, but this shows a weakness in vocabulary rather than in
grammar.
As in the famous story of the editor who said to her secretary:
“There are two words I wish you would stop using so much. One is
‘nice’ and the other is ‘lousy.’ ”
“Okay,” said the secretary, who was eager to please. “What are
they?”
4. He’s pretty sick today.
RIGHT. One of the purist’s pet targets of attack is the word pretty as
used in the sentence under discussion. Yet all modern dictionaries
accept such use of pretty, and a survey made by a professor at the
University of Wisconsin showed that the usage is established
English.
5. I feel awfully sick.
RIGHT. Dictionaries accept this usage in informal speech and the
University of Wisconsin survey showed that it is established English.
The great popularity of awfully in educated speech is no doubt
due to the strong and unique emphasis that the word gives to an
adjective—substitute very, quite, extremely, or severely and you
considerably weaken the force.
On the other hand, it is somewhat less than cultivated to say “I
feel awful sick,” and the wisdom of using awfully to intensify a
pleasant concept (“What an awfully pretty child”; “That book is
awfully interesting”) is perhaps still debatable, though getting less
and less so as the years go on.
6. Are you going to invite Doris and I to your party?
WRONG. Some people are almost irresistibly drawn to the pronoun I
in constructions like this one. However, not only does such use of I
violate a valid and useful grammatical principle, but, more
important, it is rarely heard in educated speech. The meaning of the
sentence is equally clear no matter which form of the pronoun is
employed, of course, but the use of I, the less popular choice, may
stigmatize the speaker as uneducated.
Consider it this way: You would normally say, “Are you going to
invite me to your party?” It would be wiser, therefore, to say, “Are
you going to invite Doris and me to your party?”