| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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Introduction
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| THIS book is designed to inform you about current problems in English usage so you can make intelligent decisions when communicating. When confronted with a choice about a usage, you may ask yourself a number of questions: Has this usage been criticized for some reason in the past? If so, are these criticisms substantial? What are the linguistic and social issues involved? Have people frequently applied this usage in the past, and for how long? What do well-respected writers think of the usage today? You will find answers to these and many other questions in this book. | 1 |
| We have organized the book by subject—instead of presenting a single alphabetical list of entries—so you can explore issues that interest you in some depth. At the same time we have organized individual chapters alphabetically in an effort to make it easy to find what you are looking for. | 2 |
The Usage Panel and Usage Ballots |
| For many of these problems, it is hard to know what to think. People sometimes do one thing, sometimes another. What should you do? To help you decide we present the opinions of the American Heritage Usage Panel, a group of successful people whose work involves writing or speaking effectively. The Usage Panel has been in existence since 1964. The current panel consists of 158 members, of whom 93 (59 percent) are men and 59 (41 percent) are women. | 3 |
| We periodically send the panel members ballots containing usage questions. While the ballots are not scientific surveys in that they are not conducted under controlled circumstances with stringent questioning criteria, they are nonetheless very carefully worded to get useful responses. The examples we use in the questions are actual citations from our files or are sentences that we have adapted from actual citations. For most issues we present a number of examples, giving a specific usage in a variety of different linguistic environments. Many usage issues have a number of faces, and experience has shown us that the panel’s opinions about a usage can vary considerably. | 4 |
| Once the ballots have been returned, we tabulate the results and present the findings in the usage notes we write. Over the years we have amassed a valuable collection of information on many usage issues, and we present this information whenever we feel it can help in adjudicating an issue. In fact, with ballot responses going back to the 1960s, we are confronted with the problem of historical perspective. In this book, when we refer to the panel’s current opinions, we are using results from surveys done in 1987 and later. The phrase in an earlier survey refers to one of the surveys done before 1987. | 5 |
Acceptability |
| In most of our ballot questions we ask the panelists whether they find a particular word or construction to be acceptable or not in formal Standard English. By this we mean not whether the panelists would use a particular usage in their own writing but whether the panelists find that the usage violates some notion of propriety that they consider inherent to formal Standard English. We realize that there are many shades of acceptability. What one panelist approves enthusiastically, another may accept only grudgingly. But in surveys of this kind, it is not practical to differentiate degrees of approval or disapproval. For certain controversial usages we add to the question the option of indicating acceptability in informal contexts. Sometimes we ask panelists to indicate their own preferences or to provide alternative ways of saying something. | 6 |
| Acceptability is thus not really a matter of grammaticality but rather a broader notion of appropriateness. It can entail a sense of aesthetics, as when a panelist rejects a grammatical sentence for faulty parallelism. It may involve a concern about pretentiousness, as when a panelist rejects a term that has been borrowed from the technical vocabulary of a particular field of science. In some cases, the notion of appropriateness involves issues of social justice, as when panelists allow the pronoun their to refer to a singular noun in order to avoid using the masculine his to stand for both men and women. In such instances, these panelists choose to supersede the dictums of traditional grammar with what they feel is the overriding need to avoid an injustice. | 7 |
The Power of Precedent |
| When unsure of the status of a given expression, you might find yourself wondering whether—or for how long—the expression has been used by other writers, particularly by respected writers. The fact that a word has a lengthy history of use by many of our finest writers provides a compelling argument for its continued use today. If it was good enough for Milton, Swift, Austen, and Wharton, you might think, then it ought to be good enough for me. But sometimes historical precedent clashes with contemporary attitudes. On occasion, the Usage Panel frowns on usages that have appeared in the works of our most esteemed writers. In these cases, we present both sides of the controversy, and we sometimes suggest that historical precedent should outweigh the judgments of the majority of our panelists. On the other hand, some expressions have become so stigmatized and elicit such a resounding chorus of disapproval from the panel that even the weight of history may not save them from provoking a negative response in a good portion of your readers. In these cases, we provide you with fair warning about the consequences of using a stigmatized usage. | 8 |
Levels of Usage |
| In this book we use a number of terms to indicate different levels of usage to give you an idea under what circumstances a given usage will be appropriate. | 9 |
| | | Standard English Standard English is the language we use for public discourse. It is the working language of our social institutions. The news media, the government, the legal profession, and the teachers in our schools and universities all aim at Standard English as a norm of communication, primarily in expository and argumentative writing, but also in public speaking. Standard English is thus different from what we normally think of as speech in that Standard English must be taught, whereas children learn to speak naturally without being taught. Of course, Standard English shares with spoken English certain features common to all forms of language. It has rules for making grammatical sentences, and it changes over time. The issues of pronunciation discussed in this book mainly involve how to pronounce specific written words or written letters, such as ch or g, in different words. The guidance to pronunciation is not meant to standardize or correct anyone’s naturally acquired form of spoken English. | 10 |
| The name Standard English is perhaps not the best, since it implies a standard against which various kinds of spoken English are to be measured, and this is hardly a fair comparison. A better name might be Institutional English, Conventional English, Commercial English, or Standardized English for Writing and Public Speaking, but these names all have their own negative connotations and shortcomings. So, since Standard is what this brand of English has been called for generations, we use the name here. | 11 |
| | | Nonstandard English There are many expressions and grammatical constructions that are not normally used in Standard English. These include regional expressions, such as might could, and other usages, such as ain’t and it don’t, that are typically associated with dialects used by people belonging to less prestigious social groups. These nonstandard varieties of English are no less logical or systematic than Standard English. In this book an expression labeled nonstandard is not wrong; it is merely inappropriate for ordinary usage in Standard English. | 12 |
| | | Formal English On some occasions it is important to adhere to the conventions that characterize serious public discourse and to avoid expressions that we might use in more casual situations. Formal writing and speaking are characterized by the tendency to give full treatment to all the elements that are required for grammatical sentences. Thus in formal English you might hear May I suggest that we reexamine the problem? where both clauses have a subject and verb and the subordinate clause is introduced by the conjunction that. Of course, formal English has many other features. Among these are the careful explanation of background information, complexity in sentence structure, explicit transitions between thoughts, and the use of certain words such as may that are reserved chiefly for creating a formal tone. Situations that normally require formal usage would include an article discussing a serious matter submitted to a respected journal, an official report by a group of researchers to a government body, a talk presented to a professional organization, and a letter of job application. | 13 |
| | | Informal English This is a broad category applied to situations in which it is not necessary, and in many cases not even desirable, to use the conventions of formal discourse. Informal language incorporates many of the familiar features of spoken English, especially the tendency to use contractions and to abbreviate sentences by omitting certain elements. Where formal English has May I suggest that we reexamine the manuscript? in informal English you might get Want to look this over again? Informal English tends to assume that the audience shares basic assumptions and background knowledge with the writer or speaker, who therefore alludes to or even omits reference to this information, rather than carefully explaining it as formal discourse requires. Typical informal situations would include a casual conversation with classmates, a letter to a close friend, or an article on a light topic written for a newspaper or magazine whose readership shares certain interests of the writer. | 14 |
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| Of course, these functional categories are not hard and fast divisions of language; rather they are general tendencies of usage. People use language over a spectrum that shifts from intimate situations to public discourse, and a given piece of writing may have a mixture of formal and informal elements. We use the labels formal and informal in this book as guideposts to give you a clearer notion about when it is appropriate to use a particular usage. | 15 |
| It is important to remember that formal and informal refer to styles of expression, not standards of correctness. Informal English has its own rules of grammar and is just as logical as formal English. You can be serious using informal English, just as you can be comical using formal English. The two styles are simply used for different occasions. | 16 |
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| In this book, we offer advice that we hope will seem reasonable and worth serious consideration. But as any experienced writer knows, there are occasions when even the best advice may not apply. The demands of writing for different audiences, with different purposes, on different subjects, at different levels of formality are so varied that they cannot begin to be anticipated in a book like this, and we recognize that what is appropriate for one piece of writing may not be appropriate for another. In most cases, you will want to avoid ambiguity at all costs so as not to leave your words open to misinterpretation. But if you are interested in making a joke, ambiguity may be just what you need. In these and similar situations, you will be better off being aware of the effects that certain usages can have on a reader. And it is here that this book can help. | 17 |
| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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