McWhorter - “Little Women” and the art of breaking grammatical rules
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In an evolving language, it ain’t always clear — or important — what’s correct
By John McWhorter
A few weeks ago I wrote on the grand old rule about not ending sentences with prepositions, which is, quite simply, a long-lived hoax we’d best relegate to history. In that light, I’d like to dismantle the powerful but hopeless idea that language is something to be judged rather than observed. It can be hard to process, within the bounds of our lifetimes, the randomness of our take on what “proper” language is.
I’m thinking of this now as I finally read “Little Women,” which everybody but me seems to have read and which seems to generate another movie version every 10 minutes.
Of course I always notice how characters talk, and one thing that sticks out about the March sisters is how often these ladies use “ain’t,” in ways that their modern New England equivalents would not.
They are literate and status-conscious people, and yet especially in moments of excitement, they pop off with lines like Amy’s, “You’ll be sorry for this, Jo March, see if you ain’t!” Note also that Amy is especially prim and proper among the four. There are lots of “don’ts” in place of “doesn’ts,” as well — even in calmer moments. Meg to Laurie at a ball says, “Take care my skirt don’t trip you up.”
With ain’t and don’t, the March girls often seem to turn on a dime from “The Age of Innocence” to “The Grapes of Wrath.” You hear it in British literature of the same period. In Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now,” Lord Nidderdale — note, Lord; these are not Dickensian urchins — often tosses off lines like “But then she don’t want me, and I ain’t quite sure that I want her.”
Ain’t had a different status for many English speakers in the 19th century than it does for us today. In 1961 there was a media kerfuffle when Webster’s Third New International Dictionary deigned to even include ain’t. Life magazine and The New Yorker condemned the choice. The Times called the volume “disastrous.” In The Atlantic, Wilson Follett called it “a very great calamity.” But to Meg March and Lord Nidderdale, “ain’t” was about as ordinary in casual speech as it is now to say “the funnest party I went to” or to use sunk in place of sank.
Some, to be sure, hear that usage of sunk as an egregious mistake, but there comes a point when a usage is so common that we must consider it not slovenliness but change. Sunk is now quite often used as the past tense form, such as recently on National Public Radio. Nor is this just a recent phenomenon: A magazine cartoon of 1902 depicted a tour guide saying: “That depression down there is where New York City stood. But with all its sky-scrapers and underground tunnels it suddenly sunk one day.”
Then, one might retort, the fact that people have been saying something for a long time doesn’t make it correct. But the question is just what “correct” is, when change is as inherent to language as it to cloud patterns. Which cloud pattern is the “right” one as long as eventually it rains? Sunk replacing sank is just how language always changes. It was Robert Lowth, the author of the 1762 volume “A Short Introduction to English Grammar,” who taught us not to end sentences with a preposition. He also taught that the past participle of spit was not spat but spitten. Who misses that, much less holp as the past tense of help?
Nothing sobers one up about language peeves more than seeing what people did not like back in the day. In that same 19th century, for example, one was often taught that it was wrong to say “the first two men” unless the sum of the men were divided into pairs; otherwise, the “proper” usage was “the two first.” Um, OK! Also in this era there were pedants who cringed to hear “balcony” pronounced the way we do, preferring “bal-KOH-nee,” and preaching that despicable should be pronounced “DESS-pickable.”
As it happens, the linguist Anne Curzan has just gifted us with the best book I currently know of on language peeves and why we have to get over them, “Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words.” With both empathy and reason, she gets to pretty much everything that bothers people these days about usage and ushers us into the awareness, first disorienting but ultimately liberating, that language does not fall apart.
Curzan notes, for example, that the use of “literally” to exaggerate is no recent anomaly but rather goes back to, for example, our “Little Women,” in which Louisa May Alcott has it that at a gathering “the land literally flowed with milk and honey.” The March girls, also, would have said sneaked where, since just the 1970s as Curzan charts, we have been increasingly likely to say snuck. Are you a little irked by the youngs saying “based off of” rather than “based on”? That one threw me when I started hearing my students saying it about 15 years ago; Curzan calms us down and demonstrates how ordinary and even logical it is. Curzan is also good on the use of “hopefully” to mean “It is hoped.” This became a punching bag only in the 1960s — until then not even grammar scolds cared, too busy complaining that, for example, the “proper” meaning of obnoxious is “subject to harm.”
When a peeve settles in, it helps to ask three questions.
First, is this really new? (Literally as exaggeration is first documented in 1769.)
Second, if it isn’t new, did centuries go by before anybody cared about it? (Curzan notes that complaints about literally emerged only in 1909, with perhaps the first sally from cranky Ambrose Bierce.)
Third, whether it’s old or new, are there things just like my current peeve that don’t bother me? (If “Hopefully they’ll get here” is wrong, why doesn’t “Certainly they’ll get here” mean “They will get here feeling certain”?)
Those three questions almost always at least reduce the swelling and probably clear things up completely. The peeve most resistant to treatment is the idea that it’s wrong to say, “Me and Billy went home” because you wouldn’t say, “Me went home.” That one requires, roughly, a patient book chapter to address — such as in a book I am finishing up now. Stay tuned.
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