A History of English Language

The english language in america
373
labeled “nonstandard”) stirred editorial responses of extraordinary emotion and hostility.
When the New York Times announced that it would continue to use the Second
International edition of 1934, Bergen Evans pointed out that the very issue of the Times
which made the announcement used 153 separate words, phrases, and constructions listed
in the Third International but not in the Second and nineteen others that are condemned
in the Second. Evans concluded: “Anyone who solemnly announces in the year 1962 that
he will be guided in matters of English usage by a dictionary published in 1934 is talking
ignorant and pretentious nonsense.” 59 It is no more reasonable to look to a past, or a
supposed past, in American lexicography for guidance in the current use of the language
than to look across the ocean. The purist ideal is a manifestation of the same temperament
in America as elsewhere in the world. In the United States it has been guided in past
years by a considerable respect for English opinion and usage, and in recent times by
what seems to be self-confident introspection. 60 In all periods, the purist ideal has made
the answers to difficult questions rather easier than they actually are. The judgments that
can be asserted for lists of words taken without regard to context, audience, or expository
intent imply falsely that linguistic forms have a certain value once and for all, and that the
keys to effective writing and speaking can be found in the mastery of a few, clear,
permanent proscriptions.
253. Present Differentiation of Vocabulary.
Except in pronunciation the distance that the English language in America has traveled in
its separation from that of England is chiefly measured in its vocabulary. It is easy to
exaggerate the
59
“But What’s a Dictionary For?” Atlantic (May 1962), p. 62; reprinted in an instructive collection
of reviews and essays on the subject, Dictionaries and That Dictionary, ed. James Sledd and Wilma
R.Ebbitt (Chicago, 1962), p. 248.
60
As, for example, in Dwight Macdonald, “The String Untuned,” The New Yorker (March 10,
1962), pp. 130–34, 137–40, 143–50, 153–60; reprinted in Sledd and Ebbitt, pp. 166–88.