"I Didn't Do Nothing"

Dickens used like as a conjunction; Winston Churchill says "This is me"; and authors from Shakespeare to Shaw have followed everyone with a they. Meredith wrote "Who has he come for?" and Dryden said "these kind of thoughts." Byron was forever using don't with a singular subject ("She will come round--mind if she don't"), and Lytton Strachey apparently never mastered the difference between lie and lay.

Unfortunately, .says Professor Thomas Pyles of the University of Florida, the average educated American has mastered the rules of grammar, and his speech is "frequently dry, dull, tedious, overprecise . . ." In a new book called Words and Ways of American English (Random House; $3.50), Pyles argues that American speech is much too prissy. It long ago shunned the rough & tumble language of the farm, and it also discarded the "careless elegance" of the 18th century drawing room. Instead it adopted "the tortured precision prescribed by the grammarians who served as arbiters of language for the 'new men' created by the Industrial Revolution--the sons of the bourgeoisie . . . who needed a linguistic Emily Post . . ."

To a certain degree, says Pyles, this was true of Britain. But America, "with its ideologically classless society and its idealistically highfalutin notions of equality, was particularly receptive to such ideas. One of the implications of prescriptive grammar is that anyone may talk and write as well as anyone else provided he follows the prescriptions laid down by the authority. Good usage was no longer the prerogative of a hereditary aristocracy; the grammarians had put it within the reach of every man."

In their desire for democratic uniformity, even the republic's most eminent men approached prissiness. Franklin crusaded against such verb forms as to notice, opposed to, to progress and to advocate. Editor William Cullen Bryant forbade his reporters to use lengthy, presidential, and to legislate. Meanwhile, John Adams proposed a national institution to provide "a public standard for all persons ... to appeal to." The institution that the nation eventually got was Noah Webster.

"If Noah Webster had not been born," says Pyles, "we should have had to invent him," for he became the very symbol of the new schoolmarm tradition. "He thought of himself, with uncharacteristic modesty, as the Prompter, 'the man who . . . sits behind the scenes, looks over the rehearser, and with a moderate voice corrects him when wrong . . .' More than any other single person, he shaped the course of American English, for he supplied us with the schoolmaster's authority which we needed for linguistic self-confidence."

With Webster's spellers and dictionaries, the reign of "purity by prescription" began. On a completely arbitrary appeal to logic, the vigorous "I didn't do nothing" gave way to the weaker "I didn't do anything."

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