Richard Grant White
Just off the phone with Erin McKean, talking Oxford University Press
business, during which I suggested that someone should write about the
life and works of Richard Grant White, the great American grammar ranter of the
19th century. White turns out to be an even more interesting
character than I'd imagined.
I came across RGW in the "Brief History of English Usage" essay at the
beginning of
MWDEU.
From p. 9a:
The most popular of
American 19th-century commentators was Richard Grant White, whose Words and Their Uses, 1870, was...
compiled from previously published articles. [The book went
through dozens of editions.] He did not deign to mention earlier
commentators except to take a solitary whack at Dean Alford for his
sneer at American English. His chapters on "misused words" and
"words that are not words" hit on many of the same targets as [Edward
S.] Gould's chapters on "misused words" and "spurious words," but
White's chapters are longer. Perhaps his most entertaining
sections deal with his denial that English has a grammar, which is
introduced by a Dickensian account of having been rapped over the
knuckles at the age of five and a half for not understanding his
grammar lesson. White, who was not without intellectual
attainments--he had edited Shakespeare--was nevertheless given to
frequent faulty etymologizing, and for some reason he was so upset by
the progressive passive is being
built that he devoted a whole chapter to excoriating it.
To my mind, RGW's chapter on the progressive passive is definitely the
high point of the book. Delicious stuff. I do a little
performance about it for my sophomore seminars on prescriptivism.
(I am indebted to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky for finding a copy of
Words and Their Uses for me a few
years ago.)
RGW was not only a Shakespearean scholar and a loose cannon on the
grammar front, but also clearly a man of culture. He was a
cellist, and founded a string quartet (named after him) that survived
into the 1930s.
In addition, he was the father of Stanford White, who is famous for
being the great architect of the Gilded Age in America and for having
been shot dead in 1906, on the roof garden of Madison Square Garden
(which White designed), by Harry Thaw, whose wife, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw,
White had been having an affair with. (See
Ragtime for a fictionalized version
of some of this story.)
RGW came back to my attention last week when I finally laid hands on a
copy of J. Lesslie Hall's
English
Usage (1917) -- more on Hall and his book in a later posting --
and discovered that Hall spends a lot of space critiquing RGW, not at
all kindly; one of Hall's longer sections is on the progressive
passive, in fact.
In any case, RGW deserves a book.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at February 22, 2006 06:02 PM