Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

118 Forbidden Words
In his own private correspondence, however, Robert Lowth constantly
flouted this grammatical rule. In a letter to his wife, he stated: ‘My Last was
wrote in a great hurry’, and later in the same letter ‘whose faces and names
I have forgot’. 28 Lowth’s preferred epistolary practice was clearly not best
practice, so what was he thinking of ? People have confused past tense and
past participle forms of strong verbs since the beginning of the medieval
period. 29 Lowth (and other codifiers) condemned the confusion and regulated
it by fiat. The standardization process necessarily involves removing
variation. There is no room for linguistic options. Lowth’s grammatical rule
makes it possible to put a tick or a cross beside any strong verb form:
speakers cannot vacillate between begun and began – only one choice has
the stamp of approval. In reality, language usage is not an absolute matter
of assigning a tick or a cross. It is much more complicated and far more
interesting, as Lowth’s own practice shows. It was probably not deliberate
hypocrisy: we cannot know why in his letters to his wife he violated
his own theoretical prescriptions; it is possible that they were too formal for
his intimate correspondence, but most likely that he simply did not notice
that what he wrote in private correspondence contradicted his public pontificating.
Language is not amenable to being forced into a standard
mould, and anyone who attempts to do so will find themselves bemired in
contradiction.
Speech communities are complex, and language has to cover a huge range
of social behaviour. Yet variability and mutability – qualities intrinsic to any
linguistic system – do not sit happily within the classifications of a ‘pure’ and
consistent standard variety. The label ‘standard’ entails not only ‘best practice’,
but also ‘uniform practice’. This is only practical in the context of the
written language, more especially formal written language. The conscious
self-censorship that accompanies the writing process has a straitjacket effect
that safeguards the language, to some extent, from the flux and variance that
is found in the spoken language. Publishers and editors who supposedly value
linguistic uniformity follow different guidelines from one another in their
editing practices; they maintain different standards, and will continue to do so
to because the social aspects of language work against homogeneity. What
one group condemns, another cherishes; so there is unlikely ever to be a
uniform set of publishing conventions. This is because Standard English is a
myth, an abstraction or, more exactly, an ideal to strive for.
The arbiters of linguistic goodness
Another factor that energetically works against uniformity is language
change. As soon as he had produced his dictionary, Samuel Johnson recognized
the futility of his original aim; namely, to ‘ascertain’ or ‘embalm’ the