Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/38



T the present day one meets occasionally in newspapers such a locution as "he would better do so and so." It is of course not absolutely impossible that this corruption may come in time to be accepted as proper; for the users of our speech have more than once accomplished feats fully as difficult. Now, however, it is as ungrammatical as it is unidiomatic. What the one who employs it really says—going on the assumption that he says anything—is that he would do so and so better than something else. What he is trying to say is that it would be better for him to do so and so instead of something else.

A locution of this sort is the invention of the purists in speech,—who, it is quite needless to remark, are beings essentially distinct from the pure in speech. In every period are to be found persons who can never be sincerely happy unless they can parse every word of every expression they use. To their eyes had better do presents insuperable difficulties. It matters nothing that they constantly come across it, or locutions like it, in the writings of great authors—never so often, indeed, as of late years. This fact satisfies the ordinary man; it does not satisfy them. Before they are willing to accept authority for any idiom, it must be reconciled to their reason—or what they choose to call their reason. If in this they fail, they are ready to sacrifice sense to any method of expression which they fancy to be consistent with grammar. Hence has originated the substitution of would better for had better.

This latter is not the only locution of the sort which has fallen under censure. There is a similar one contained in a favorite text of the Bible which has excited as much grammatical heart-burning as various other texts of that book have theological. "I had rather be a door-keeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness," says the Psalmist. It is fair to observe in behalf of those who take exception to the idiom found here that the explanation of it does not lie on the surface. It presents a very genuine difficulty which has perplexed generations of men. The hostility to it is in consequence no new thing. To many lexicographers and grammarians in the past it has been both a stumbling-block and an offence. Further, though its nature had been previously pointed out, no exhaustive study of its exact character and early history was ever made until nearly a quarter of a century ago. Then the task was accomplished by Fitzedward Hall, who so effectually demolished the myths pertaining to the junction of the particle to with the infinitive. Accordingly, in telling the story of these locutions, much that is said here is based primarily upon the results of his investigations and upon the materials he collected.

There have existed and still exist in our tongue three idioms of essentially this same character. They are had liefer (or liever), had rather, and had better. The order in which they have been mentioned is the order in which they came into general use. At the outset it may be said that none of them goes back to the earliest period of the speech. At that time the regular expression for the first of these locutions which presented itself was made up of the comparative of lief, "dear," the dative of the personal pronoun, and the preterite subjunctive of the substantive verb. Instead of I had liefer, men said me were liefer—that is, "it would be dearer to me." The words are modernized, nor was this the order in which they always appeared; but essentially it is the original idiom.

It was towards the close of the thir-