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By Root 1067 0

is also unfortunate. The kind of permissiveness that permeates 3 (the kind that a decade or two ago was more common in progressive schools than it is now) results, oddly, in less rather than more individuality, since the only way an individual can “express himself” is in relation to a social norm—in the case of language, to standard usage. James Joyce’s creative distortions of words were possible only because he had a perfect ear for orthodox English. But if the very idea of form, or standards, is lacking, then how can one violate it? It’s no fun to use knowed for known if everybody thinks you’re just trying to be standard.

Counting cite slips is simply not the way to go about the delicate business of deciding these matters. If nine-tenths of the citizens of the United States were to use inviduous, the one-tenth who clung to invidious would still be right, and they would be doing a favor to the majority if they continued to maintain the point. It is perhaps not democratic, according to some recent users, or abusers, of the word, to insist on this, and the question comes up of who is to decide at what point change—for language does indeed change, as the Structural Linguists insist—has evolved from slang, dial., erron., or substand. to standard. The decision, I think, must be left to the teachers, the professional writers, and the lexicographers, and they might look up Ulysses’s famous defense of conservatism in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:

The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre

Observe degree, priority and place,

Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,

Office and custom in all line of order....

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets

In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores

And make a sop of all this solid globe.

Strength should be lord of imbecility

And the rude son should strike his father dead.

Force should be right, or rather right and wrong

(Between whose endless jar justice resides)

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

Then every thing includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite

And appetite, a universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce a universal prey

And, last, eat up himself....

Dr. Johnson, a dictionary-maker of the old school, defined lexicographer as “a harmless drudge.” Things have changed. Lexicographers may still be drudges, but they are certainly not harmless. They have untuned the string, made a sop of the solid structure of English, and encouraged the language to eat up himself.

[1] “You may have imported the word lib-lab,” writes John K. Jessup of Wilton, Conn., “but you were anticipated in Waldo R. Browne’s dictionary of labor terminology (Huebsch, 1921, p. 299). Thob was created by a rhetoric master at Taft School named Henshaw (“Pimp”) Ward, who retired from teaching as soon as he began to get royalties from his book.” Miriam Allen deFord, writing from San Francisco, gives the title of the book as Builders of Delusion and notes that thobbing occurs in Chapter XI.

[2] The logical lunacy to which this nose-counting approach to usage can be carried is illustrated by a possibly apocryphal anecdote. There is an outfit in New York which uses vocabulary tests to determine aptitude. Several years ago the compilers of 3 asked them if they would mind listing the words which were most commonly confused. They did so, with some trouble, and sent the results to Springfield, Massachusetts, the home of 3. They then discovered that Dr. Gove and his colleagues had wanted the list not in order to warn readers against these confusions but so they could enter the words as synonyms. When they protested, they were told that when an error is common enough, it is no longer an error. The language has changed. It is curious, by the way, that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the not very perspicacious Goveites that to decide that an error has become so firmly entrenched as to be standard is just as much an exercise