A History of English Language

The appeal to authority, 1650-1800 277
expressing an idea, we may rest assured that a way will be found. But it is interesting
to note that even so useful a construction was at first resisted by many as an unwarranted
innovation. Although supported by occasional instances in Coleridge, Lamb, Landor,
Shelley, Cardinal Newman, and others, it was consciously avoided by some (Macaulay,
for example) and vigorously attacked by others. In 1837 a writer in the North American
Review condemned it as “an outrage upon English idiom, to be detested, abhorred,
execrated, and given over to six thousand penny-paper editors.” And even so enlightened
a student of language as Marsh, in 1859, noted that it “has widely spread, and threatens to
establish itself as another solecism.” “The phrase ‘the house is being built’ for ‘the house
is building’, “he says, “is an awkward neologism, which neither convenience,
intelligibility, nor syntactical congruity demands, and the use of which ought therefore to
be discountenanced, as an attempt at the artificial improvement of the language in a point
which needed no amendment.” 56 Artificial it certainly was not. Nothing seems to have
been more gradual and unpremeditated in its beginnings. But, as late as 1870 Richard
Grant White devoted thirty pages of his Words and Their Uses to an attack upon what
still seemed to him a neologism. Although the origin of the construction can be traced
back to the latter part of the eighteenth century, its establishment in the language and
ultimate acceptance required the better part of a century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
For a well-rounded introduction to the quantity and variety of seventeenth-century publication see
Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600–1660 2nd ed.
(Oxford, 1962). On the incidence of literacy, David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order:
Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, UK, 1980) is the standard work.
Barbara J.Shapiro’s Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton,
1983) provides the essential background for understanding the impact of the new learning on
controversies about the English language. Brian Vickers, “The Royal Society and English Prose
Style: A Reassessment,” in Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985) is of central
importance to an ongoing debate. Linguistic aspects of the issues raised may be approached
through the essays of Hans Aarsleff, collected in From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study
of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis, MN, 1982) and in the studies of various
scholars edited by Joseph L.Subbiondo, John Wilkins and 17th-Century British Linguistics
(Amsterdam, 1992). Robert Adolph, in The Rise of Modern Prose Style (Cambridge, MA,
1968), argues that a utilitarian plain style achieved ascendancy during the Restoration period.
The appeal to authority and its reflection in the efforts to set up an academy are discussed in
detail by H.M.Flasdieck, Der Gedanke einer englischen Sprachakademie (Jena, Germany,
1928), where references to the previous literature will be found. D.M.Robertson, A History of
the French Academy (London, 1910), treats the model which Swift and others had most in mind.
The fullest study of Johnson’s dictionary, by James H.Sledd and Gwin J.Kolb, Dr. Johnson’s
Dictionary: Essays in the Biography of a Book (Chicago, 1955) can be complemented by Allen
Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–1773 (Cambridge, UK, 1990), which
56
George P.Marsh, Lectures on the English Language (4th ed., New York, 1872), p. 649.