Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/38

16 been done by those who came before us, and we enter into the fruits of their labours. It is only the first man, before whom every beast of the field and every fowl of the air must present itself, to see what he will call it; whatever he calls any living creature, that is the name thereof, not to himself alone, but to his family and descendants, who are content to style each as their father had done before them

Our acquisition of English, however, has as yet been but partially and imperfectly described.

In the first place, the English which we thus learn is of that peculiar form or local variety which is talked by our instructors and models. It is, indeed, possible that one may have been surrounded from birth by those, and those only, whose speech is wholly conformed to perfect standards; then it will have been, at least, his own fault if he has learned aught but the purest and most universally accepted English. But such cases cannot be otherwise than rare. For, setting aside the fact that all are not agreed as to whose usage forms the unexceptionable standard, nothing can be more certain than that few, on either side of the ocean, know and follow it accurately. Not many of us can escape acquiring in our youth some tinge of local dialect, of slang characteristic of grade or occupation, of personal peculiarities, even, belonging to our initiators into the mysteries of speech. These may be mere inelegancies of pronunciation, appearing in individual words or in the general tone of utterance, like the nasal twang, and the flattening of ou into ău, which common fame injuriously ascribes to the Yankee; or they may be ungrammatical modes of expression, or uncouth turns and forms of construction; or favourite recurrent phrases, such as I guess, I calculate, I reckon, I expect, you know, each of which has its own region of prevalence; or colloquialisms and vulgarisms, which ought to hide their heads in good English society; or words of only dialectic currency, which the general language does not recognize. Any or all of these or of their like we innocently learn along with the rest of our speech, not knowing how to distinguish the evil from the good. And often, as some of us know to our cost, errors and infelicities are thus so thoroughly