The further back we go, we must conclude, the less we meet with these admirable qualities of simplicity and orderliness in speech. They seem not to be original gifts, but in so far as we have them, they are acquisitions. There never was a golden age in speech, never any age more golden than the present in whatever day we may choose to think of the present. For speech, so long as it has been in existence, has been the plaything and the \ instrument of living men and women, and as such has shared in the perfections and imperfections of living men and women. Judging from his speech, mankind seems always to have had by nature a controlling instinct for \ disorderliness with a saving passion for orderliness. There is comfort in the thought, therefore, that if English seems untidy today, it has always been so. Perhaps we may go still further and find a guiding principle in the conclusion that a living feeling for a language with all its sins upon it is a safer foundation to build upon than a neat and perfect theory.

V

A TOUCHSTONE FOR ENGLISH

THOUGH no apple contains in itself a perfect and complete combination of all the characteristics that may appear in apples, yet a person eating an apple is never in doubt that any particular apple is an apple. So also, although no aspect of English is the absolute and essential language, nevertheless any individual manifestation of English is immediately recognizable as English. What is the test, the touchstone, in this infinite variety, by which one determines that a particular form of speech is or is not a part of the English language?

The statement that English is immediately recognizable as English, calls for a little qualification. There may be crude and contaminated dialects, the speech of foreigners learning English or of children not yet at home in their native speech, which might seem doubtfully English or not English. But these are not stable forms of speech. They are only in process of development, and given time they will inevitably grow into something which is definitely and recognizably English of some sort, or into something which falls unmistakably beyond the limits of English.

Bilingual persons also who dwell in communities in which two languages are currently spoken may use either of the two languages, as in parts of Switzerland the natives speak French and German indifferently, or may mix the two in proportions which make it doubtful whether the resulting language belongs on one side of the Rhine or on

the other. So also in Pennsylvania a speech may be heard which seems to hover uncertainly between English and German. But this doubt applies only to the general proportions of the mixture. All the separate details of these mixed dialects are recognizably either French or English or German, and the genuine Frenchman and the genuine Englishman and the genuine German each selects with decision the parts that are his own and leaves the rest.

When the English language appears in what may be called its full flower and flavor, it becomes one of the surest expressions of a cultural unity that extends far beyond language itself. In this unity, as we must continually insist, there is room for very wide diversity. The unity of the English language by no means implies an identity of practice among all those who are accustomed to use the English tongue. One of the rhetoricians' requirements for good English is that it must be national English, that is, the English of a large group of persons. This is not an unreasonable requirement, but how can there be such a thing as national English unless the term national is broad enough to include the speech of all those who together make the nation? The touchstone by which one tests a national English must therefore have not a single facet but many facets.

Obviously, therefore, it will not do to dispose of any particular word or phrase which happens not to be in one's own dialect, or in the dialect that one approves, by saying That isn't English. The touchstone of English must be one that will do more than draw to it, like al magnet, only speech of a single kind. What I approve or what I disapprove in speech may be an important matter in determining my chosen relations to my fellowmen, but

my choices do not exhaust the possible choices of the language. Even ungrammatical and incorrect English | is still English, and the person who chooses these ungrammatical and incorrect forms of speech, whether he does so knowingly or unknowingly, cannot be pushed completely beyond the circle that marks the limits of the English language.

A more adequate touchstone for English may perhaps be sought in the term idiomatic English. English is said to\ be genuinely English when it is idiomatic. Now the terms "idiom" and "idiomatic" call for a moment's examination. A very common notion of idioms is that they are forms of the language which lie beyond grammatical/ explanation. The great body of the language, according to this conception, is grammatically explicable, but here and there crop up peculiar phrases and constructions as unaccountable as the whims and fancies that appear in the personal characters of our friends. And these idioms, being so individual, so racy of the life of the language, are just the parts that express most fully the essential nature of the language, just as one may know one's friends best by their foibles and eccentricities.

But this is an imperfect and shallow understanding of the term "idiom." For in the first place there are no forms of the language which are beyond interpretation in the sense that they are the expression of an uncontrolled and unregulated and irresponsible genius in the language. All forms of speech have originated in the minds of individuals, and the mental processes which have produced them can all be analyzed and placed under grammatical categories, if the categories of grammar are only made wide and subtle enough.

The fact that a particular form of speech does not fall readily into place under the wide and obvious generalizations of conventional grammar is no reason for regarding it as abnormal. Thus a sentence like He stood in awe of them may seem at first thought to satisfy the definition of an idiom as something unanalyzable. It is also peculiar to English, for the other languages of Europe related to, English have no construction parallel to this. It might \ thus be regarded as a phrase that one must take as it is, without too much examination, for if one stops to reflect, it seems grotesque to speak of standing in awe. What is awe that one can stand in it?

There is needed, however, in considering this and other supposedly unexplainable idioms of the language, a conception of the grammar of the language broad enough to include the historical origins not only of the simple and obviously regular features of the language, but also of its less frequent peculiarities. Historically considered the sentence He stood in awe of them is not at all beyond grammatical analysis. Its earliest form in Old English would have been something like Him stood awe of them, in which awe is the subject of stood, and him is in the dative case. The verb stood also had an Old English meaning of motion, not of stationary position, as it may still have in certain Modern English constructions, as when a ship stands out to sea, or in the command Stand by to go about, or when one is bidden to stand from under a dangerous place. So the original Old English construction might be paraphrased Awe of them rose up in him, as anger swells in the breast. But this paraphrase does not give the customary order of words of the sentence in Old English. Ordinarily in Old English the dative came first in the emphatic position,