Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/231

 in Standard English, says Wyld, were synchronous with the appearance of new "classes of the population in positions of prominence and power in the state, and the consequent reduction in the influence of the older governing classes." He lists some of the events that produced such shifts in the balance of power: "the break-up of the feudal system; the extinction of most of the ancient baronial families in the War of the Roses; the disendowment of the monasteries, and the enriching of the king's tools and agents; the rise of the great merchants in the towns; the Parliamentary wars and the social upheaval of the Protectorate; the rise of banking during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." These changes, he said, brought forward an authority which ranged itself against both "the mere frivolities of fashion, the careless and half-incoherent babble of the fop" and "the lumbering and uncouth utterance of the boor." Precision in speech thus became the hall-mark of those who had but recently arrived. Obviously, the number of those who have but recently arrived has always been greater in the United States than in England, not only among the aristocracy of wealth and fashion but also among the intelligentsia. The average American schoolmarm, the chief guardian of linguistic niceness in the Republic, does not come from the class that has a tradition of culture behind it, but from the class of small farmers and city clerks and workmen. This is true, I believe, even of the average American college teacher. Such pedants advocate and practise precision because it conceals their own cultural insecurity; if they are still oafs at heart they can nevertheless speak English in what they conceive to be the proper manner of professors, and so safeguard their dignity. From them come most of the gratuitous rules and regulations that afflict schoolboys and harass the writers of America. They are the chief discoverers and denouncers of "bad English" in the books of such men as Mark Twain, Dreiser and Hergesheimer.

But in discussing such influences, of course, it is well to remember that they are very complex, and that one conceals and modifies another. "Man frage nicht warum," says Philipp Karl Buttmann. "Der Sprachgebrauch lasst sich nur beobachten." Meanwhile, the greater distinctness of American utterance, whatever its genesis