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By Root 421 0

the precise value of what troubled me. I was losing my grip on what the problem was, besides the fact that I had one. The media’s repetition of that why question had jostled any hope of certainty right out of my head. First I reassured Jane that my mission (an idea I’d come up with before even meeting her) could not ever measure up to time devoted exclusively to her. That accomplished, I stared out the window at sere grass and thought about prescriptivists, aka the Grammar Hawks, who loved to perpetuate the notion that English had a “pure” form. This monolithic set of rules about spelling and grammar, cemented in an ancient age, had supposedly remained unchallenged and unassailed until recent times, when ignorant barbarians besieged its gates with their poor spelling and lazy constructions. History shows this not to be the case.

First, it’s important to note that this complaint about the corruption of the English language is not new—it is very, very old. Perhaps the first professional Hawk was Giraldus Cambrensis (or, more familiarly, Gerald of Wales), a chronicler in the late twelfth century. In his Descriptio Cambriae (Description of Wales), he proclaimed the English spoken in the county of Devon as the purest form of the language, and lamented how the dastardly Danes and Norwegians were corrupting English dialects everywhere else. (Giraldus also had the distinction of being one of the first anti-Irish bigots on record.) A couple hundred years later, in the late fourteenth century, John of Trevisa made the same complaint—but this time the corrupting culprits were the Norman French. As the son of an Anglo-Norman baron, Giraldus would have disputed this. And the English language of, say, the early-to-mid-twentieth century—the version seen by current Hawks as the pure form to defend from today’s orthographic miscreants—would give both John and Giraldus the most terrible night sweats.

Who’s corrupting whom? Who is/was the guardian of the pure version, the right version of English? The situation gets very mucky when you consider the whole patchwork journey of the language. Old English, spoken for about seven hundred years by shepherds and reformed pillagers, was phonetic in its written form. You spelled the way you talked, and any kind of consistency—even on the same page—could go jump in the moat. Dictionaries weren’t even a glint in a scrivener’s eye. So much for stylistic uniformity, and the language’s ethnic purity had hardly maintained its chastity, either. Even at this early stage, outside influences poured in, not just from the Germanic tribes that had mashed the language together in the first place, but also Latin (from the remnants of the Roman Empire), and Viking marauders (the ones that Giraldus Cambrensis had complained so bitterly about). Then came the Norman invasion in 1066, and French began its long hold on English, shaping it into Middle English over the centuries. Only in the early 1400s do we see the beginnings of standardization, as legal and governmental clerks agreed upon a common written form (known as Chancery Standard) that kings and Parliament could use to address the whole nation. Even then, that was just the unified language of The Man; the lower classes of society preserved English, and the literate among them had neither cause nor desire to fix up their own spelling and grammar, which was still heavily regionalized.

It wasn’t until the seventeenth century that people cobbled together the first dictionaries, and those were aimed first at listing words as a reference, and then at defining all these new words flooding into English, plus of course the heaps of words that already existed. They hadn’t agreed upon the exact spelling of those words quite yet. That would take a whole other debate among the nation’s literate and influential that often turned rancorous. For the first time, the Grammar Hawks surfaced in real numbers, arguing that the language should be peeled back to its purest state—in this case arguing for the old Germanic form as the purest. Obviously they didn’t win out, but a later,