I am surprised I didn’t come across this much earlier. Jonathan Swift, a very renowned essayist, poet, satirist, popularly known as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, wrote:
If you want to read it yourself, you can do so here, but I would advise against it. There isn’t much to be gained, and he’s written too much. Jonathan Swift was an intelligent man, and a pretty good writer, so read up his other stuff if you want. You could start with his satire, A Modest Proposal.
Anyhow, the moment I saw this article, I knew I was in for a laugh. I will just mention two or three of his peeves. You will see how laughable they are in retrospect.
I have never known this great Town without one or more _Dunces_ of Figure, who had Credit enough to give Rise to some new Word, and propagate it in most Conversations, though it had neither Humor, nor Significancy. If it struck the present Taste, it was soon transferred into the Plays and current Scribbles of the Week, and became an Addition to our Language; while the Men of Wit and Learning, instead of early obviating such Corruptions, were too often seduced to imitate and comply with them.
To cut a long para short, Swift doesn’t like new words to be created. At least, not words without any humor or significance. He deplored the fact that many of these words, once they began to be liked by the common masses make their way into plays and into general usage and become an addition to the language. His anger was against men who were of wit and learning, smart and educated men, that is, who, instead of nipping such nonsense in the bud, ended up condoning it and supporting it.
Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg’d, Disturb’d, Rebuk’t, _Fledg’d,_ and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain.
I haven’t pasted the whole paragraph, but Swift is basically whining against, wait for it, words we currently use as regular past forms of verbs. Back then, the pronunciation had a vowel between the last two consonants, which began to be slowly dropped, giving rise to the present standard forms we all use. Do these sounds jar our ears? Or are they very difficult to utter?
This perpetual Disposition to shorten our Words, by retrenching the Vowels, is nothing else but a tendency to lapse into the Barbarity of those _Northern_ Nations from whom we are descended, and whose Languages labour all under the same Defect. For it is worthy our Observation, that the Spaniard, the French, and the Italians, although derived from the same _Northern_ Ancestors with our selves, are, with the utmost Difficulty, taught to pronounce our Words, which the _Suedes_ andDanes, as well as the _Germans_ and the Dutch, attain to with Ease, because our Syllables resemble theirs in the Roughness and Frequency of Consonants.
Again, the basic argument is that English syllabic structure matches that of German, Danish or other Germanic languages, which is hardly surprising, considering English _is_ a Germanic language. He doesn’t like vowels being removed from words, and laments this lapse into barbarity.
The sad thing is that trying to force language to align to your personal preferences and dogmas or believing that your version of the language is more mellifluous, beautiful or just plain better than other peoples’ is not a recent practice. It’s been going on since centuries. The good thing is that nobody cared then, and nobody cares now. The practices he considered horrible are now standard English (the version that prescriptivists of today declare as mellifluous and logical), and luckily, the minister he wrote to was too busy to take notice. As I have mentioned here, here and in comments on this blog, languages don’t need regulatory bodies. Languages are self-evolving and self-regulatory. Language regulation is a failed enterprise. English, the language of Chaucer, considered as the greatest poet of the Middle Ages was very different from the English of Shakespeare which is different from the English we speak today. Live with it.
The market for books and manuals where you can broadcast your peeves and insist that others align your way is of course large—good writing is a very subtle and elusive thing, and can’t be learnt in a grammar class, so people get duped into buying books which are useless at best and harmful at worst. Grammar, for the most part, is rather definite and innate. We all learn the grammar of our native language _before_ joining school, and retain it despite grammar education. But this doesn’t get us closer to writing well, which is an issue of style, not of correctness or grammaticality. But what takes us even further from writing well is putting our trust in badly written style manuals and taking grammar advice from someone who doesn’t know his verbs from his nouns but wants to force you to stop using the passive.
Last week, I was forced to attend a “How to communicate effectively and blah blah” session, for which I had to pay Rs. 200/-. Among other things, the facilitator (Hons. in English Literature) taught us that “each sentence in English must have a subject, an object and a verb.” He proceeded to give an example. “I am going,” he said, has I as the subject, _am_ as the verb, and _going_ as the object. He then dragged Noam Chomsky into the whole thing, claiming that all this was said by _him._ He then explained how Basically has 2 syllables—Bay-sick-ly. Not only is all this patent nonsense, it’s useless information for someone who wants to learn how to talk in an interview. A person who takes the above seriously will be spending his time counting verbs and nouns and syllables that he can’t correctly identify and then worrying over whether he has filled in enough of each kind to make his sentence correct.
My suggestion. Don’t listen to self-proclaimed guardians of language. Invest in a good usage guide—the Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage is a brilliant piece of work. It’s now available for free on Google Books. It does what a good usage manual should do. Gives you relevant information, hard facts, and lets you decide. It doesn’t prescribe or proscribe. It merely informs you and trusts your intelligence.