A Dictionary of Cont..

Boston 68
In U. S. political usage, the term boss for one
who controls the party organization is standard.
Boston accent. Our grandfathers, particularly
those living in and around Boston, were of the
opinion that the English spoken in Boston was
the “purest” in the who!e country. Aside from
civic pride and Yankee self-assurance, this may
have been based on the distinguished literary
figures that flourished there, the proximity of
Harvard College, or the assumption that the
Cabots, in speaking to God, would naturally
employ an impeccable diction.
The idea is not wholly extinct. Miss Theresa
A. Dacey, Director of speech improvement for
the Boston School Department, was quoted in
the Boston Herald for March 10, 1948 as saying
that “Bostonians speak the purest cultural
English of any section of the country” and that
their so doing made them objects of undisguised
admiration throughout the land. She herself, she
recollected, had been “loudly applauded” by a
group of New York high-school students for the
purity of her diction. She attributed her own
and her fellow townsmen’s superiority of speech
to their “geographic location near the ocean.”
“The salt in the air,” she said, “makes our speech
more forceful, gives it more strength.”
Waiving such facts as that Bostonians are not
alone in living near the ocean, that the effect of
salt on the vocal cords is conjectural, that there
are several Boston accents and that certain surly
folk might be found who refuse to be enraptured
by any of them, there still remains room for
doubt.
Philologists-at least those who do not live so
near Scollay Square as to be prejudiced-maintain
that in pronunciation, as in spelling and
meaning, usage is the last court of appeal. There
is no “correct” or “perfect” pronunciation of
any language, in the absolute sense. A language
is as it is spoken, and by a happy dispensation
most groups are inclined to regard their own
twang or drawl or slur as divinely ordained and
all deviations from it as deserving of contempt
and even death. Were not forty and two thousand
Ephraimites slain at the passages of the
Jordan because they mispronounced the first
syllable of Shibboleth? Did not Jack Straw and
his following, roaming London during the
Peasants’ Rebellion, kill any man who pronounced
bread and cheese otherwise than they
did? And did not thousands of Americans vote
for Hoover because AI Smith said raddio?
Yet a very slight acquaintance with literature
suffices to show us that some dreadful mispronunciations
(by Boston’s standards) have had
their day. Shakespeare rhymed halter with
daughter and Pope rhymed tea with obey and
ioin with line. Even in Boston ti in such words
as attention and pronunciation is pronounced
“sh,” though it was not always so pronounced.
The inhabitants of Baltimore refer to their beloved
city as Bol’m’r and who shall say that
they are wrong? We are amused at Cockney
“dropping” of h’s and putting them in where
they don’t “belong”; but only an illiterate would
pronounce the h in heir; and not aspirating the
h in humble, hotel and historical is with some
the very touchstone of refinement.
The question of man’s “natural” and “proper”
speech has long been agitated. It is said that
James I of Scotland (author of The Kingis
Quair) sought to settle the matter by having
two children reared on an island in the care
of a deaf mute-and was vastly pleased when
his emissaries reported that the children were
speaking Hebrew. He was happy because he
was of the opinion that God spoke Hebrew
and the children’s reported performance showed
that Hebrew was our “natural” language.
A similar story is told of various other rulers,
among them Psammetichus of Egypt who by the
same experiment in the fifth century B.C. (so
Herodotus tells us) found the original language
to have been Phrygian.
In modern times the problem has not been
taken so seriously but there have been several
minor conjectures. De Lawd in Marc Connelly’s
The Green Pastures spoke with a Negro accent,
with the intent of suggesting that the colored
folk conceived of God as one of themselves.
But this, though dramatically sound, is psychologically
questionable. It is more likely that God
is always conceived of as belonging to the dominant
group. If He no longer speaks in Hebrew
or Latin, He at least has a Boston accent.
both may be used as an adjective, as in both
houses are old, or as a pronoun, as in both have
been remodeled. When used in these ways, both
means two and only two. But it can also be used
as a conjunction, as in both Mary and Don. In
this construction both may refer to more than
two, as in he prayeth well who loveth well, both
man and bird and beast.
In current English, both follows any isolated
(that is, any single) pronoun that it qualifies,
except a possessive pronoun, as in we both went
and we saw them both. Formerly, it often preceded
the pronoun, as in both they went. This
construction is now obsolete except in the case
of both which, which is seldom heard any more
but is still acceptable English.
As a rule, both precedes a single noun that it
qualifies, as in both children laughed. However,
if the noun is also qualified by a definitive adjective,
such as the, these, those, a possessive
pronoun, or another noun in the genitive, both
may either stand before the definitive adjective
or immediately after the noun itself, as in both
the children laughed or the children both
laughed. To place both between a definitive
word and its noun, as in the both children, his
both hands, is not standard today. When it is
placed after the noun, both is made emphatic.
When both qua.lifies two words joined by and,
it ordinarily stands before the first word, even
when this is a pronoun, as in both he and I saw
it. However, when two words joined by and
are the subject of the same verb, both may stand
immediately after the second word, as in men