Mark Twain's languages : discourse, dialogue, and linguistic variety |
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3. The Gilded Age and the Corruption
of Language |
 | Mark Twain's languages : |  |
3. The Gilded Age and the Corruption
of Language
Bolinger's penetrating analysis of verbal shamanism makes up
the first chapter of his Language—the Loaded Weapon: The Use and
Abuse of Language Today (London: Longman, 1980).
Leonard Bloomfield, "Secondary and Tertiary Responses to
Language," Language 20 (1944): 45. For the influence and importance
of White, see H. L. Mencken, The American Language, 4th ed. (New
York: Knopf, 1936), pp. 61-62.
Richard Grant White, Words and Their Uses, Past and Present: A
1892), p. 3. (Further references in this chapter are to this edition and
are incorporated in the text.) Richard Grant White (1821-1885), a
critic and editor of Shakespeare, wrote on questions of language as a
self-admitted amateur. Like his counterparts in our own day, he thoroughly
opposed the latitudinarianism of professional linguists.
White writes, "The . . . confusion of like and as . . . is common
with careless speakers. Thus, for instance, He don't do it like you do,
instead of as you do" (p. 137). Twain's belief that shall and will were
confused more often in the South can also be found in Words and
Their Uses: "The distinction between these words . . . is liable to be
disregarded by persons who have not had the advantage of early intercourse
with educated English people. I mean English in blood and
breeding; for . . . in New England it is noteworthy that even the boys
and girls playing on the commons use shall and will correctly; . . .
while by Scotchmen and Irishmen, even when they are professionally
men of letters, and by the great mass of the people of the Western
and Southwestern States, the words are used without discrimination"
(p. 264).
Twain's copy of Words and Their Uses was an 1872 edition signed
"Mark Twain, 1873" (see Gribben, Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction,
2 vols. [Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980], 2:762). Twain had probably
seen at least a few of the original articles since he published his first
article in the Galaxy in 1868 and became a regular contributor, over
sixty of his pieces appearing there during 1870 and 1871.
The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson
et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971-), 1:20.
Review of Words and Their Uses, North American Review 112
(1871): 470. The distrust of the "foreign element" evident in the concluding
triumvirate looks forward to The Question of Our Speech by
Henry James. Compare the scorn of a writer in the Biblical Repository:
"Custom is undoubtedly high authority. . . . But the custom
of whom do we accept as the standard? Of children? of the ignorant
and uncultivated? Or does the voice even of the majority of those
who are educated determine grammatical rules? Or is it the usage of
the best speakers and writers? Really it seems almost childish to ask
these questions" (quoted in George Washington Moon, Learned
Men's English: The Grammarians [London: Routledge, 1892], p. 211).
Samuel L. Clemens, "The Curious Republic of Gondour," in
The Curious Republic of Gondour and Other Whimsical Sketches (New
York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), pp. 1, 3-4.
Sociolinguist William Labov has made a similar polemical
charge in our own day: "Our work in the speech community makes it
painfully obvious that in many ways working-class speakers are
more effective narrators, reasoners, and debaters than many middle-class
mass of irrelevant detail. Many academic writers try to rid themselves
of that part of middle-class style that is empty pretension. . . .
But the average middle-class speaker that we encounter makes no
such effort; he is enmeshed in verbiage, the victim of sociolinguistic
factors beyond his control" ("The Logic of Nonstandard English," in
Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular
[Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972], pp. 213-14).
The first chapter of Edward S. Gould's Good English; or, Popular
Errors in Language (1867) is entitled "Who Is Responsible?" (for the
corruption of language). His answer: "Among writers, those who do
the most mischief are the original fabricators of error, to wit: the men
generally who write for the newspapers" (6th ed. [New York: Widdleton,
1875], p. 7). Gould goes on to quote Dean Alford's extensive criticism
of the British press, which begins: "The language . . . is undergoing
a sad and rapid process of deterioration. Its fine manly Saxon
is getting diluted into long Latin words not carrying half the meaning.
This is mainly owing to the vitiated and pretentious style which
passes current in our newspapers" (Henry Alford, The Queen's English:
A Manual of Idiom and Usage [1864; reprint, London: George
Bell, 1895], p. 179).
Twain had already complained about the pretentious display
of foreign words, notably in chapter 23 of The Innocents Abroad. The
closest precursor to the scene in The Gilded Age is a signed sketch in
the Buffalo Express, 4 December 1869, recounting the inanities of a
pair of Americans "Back from 'Yurrup.' " They pretend to have spoken
French so long that English comes "dreadful awkward," and
they flounder through a conversation in "barbarous French . . . and
neither one of them ever by any chance understanding what the
other was driving at" (FM, 141-44).
Although the bulk of the chapter in which this passage occurs
is unquestionably Twain's, the section that contains it appears on stylistic
grounds to be Warner's. As a matter of fact, Laura's speech does
not really "betray itself," in this chapter or elsewhere; even when
Laura is still a girl in Missouri—in chapter 10 of the first volume, one
of Twain's—her speech is elegant. The important point, however, is
that Twain and Warner both mean us to understand Laura as a superbly
manipulative woman who is superior to even practiced Washingtonians
at establishing and maintaining a facade that will procure
influence.
Jean-Joseph Goux, Economie et symbolique (Paris: Seuil, 1973),
p. 182. See also Goux, Les Monnayeurs du langage (Paris: Galilée,
1984); and Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978), and Money, Language, and Thought
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
The biblical echoes here are general, but two passages from
the New Testament are especially relevant: "Lay not up for yourselves
treasures upon earth . . . but lay up for yourselves treasures
in heaven" (Matt. 6: 19-20), and "[In God and Christ] are hid all the
treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Col. 2:3).
Twain had just handled the themes of inflation and wild
speculation in Roughing It. Chapter 29, for instance, describes how
miners in the Humboldt region owned a multitude of mines with impressive
names whose wealth was wholly prospective. Chapter 44
describes in detail the rise and fall of stock in wildcat mines.
"Random remarks here and there, being pieced together gave
Laura a vague impression of a man of fine presence, about forty-three
or forty-five years of age, with dark hair and eyes, and a slight
limp in his walk. . . . And this indistinct shadow represented her father"
(WMT 5:97).
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