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| Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993. |
| Introduction |
Standard American Usage Standard American English usage is linguistic good manners, sensitively and accurately matched to context—to listeners or readers, to situation, and to purpose. But because our language is constantly changing, mastering its appropriate usage is not a one-time task like learning the multiplication tables. Instead, we are constantly obliged to adjust, adapt, and revise what we have learned. Our language can always serve us effectively if we use its resources wisely; to keep itself ready to serve us it continually changes and varies to meet our needs. If we are a practical and hard-headed people, it will come to reflect that fact; if we become technologically and scientifically venturesome, our language will change to meet that need; if we become poets, it will change to accommodate the demands of our poetry; and if we are filled with prejudice or hatred, our language will reflect that too. | 1 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Failing to keep our usage—our words, meanings, pronunciations, spellings, grammatical structures, and idiomatic expressions—abreast of changing and varying standards may earn us moderate disapproval if a usage is doubtful, vigorous disapproval or outright rejection if it is wholly inappropriate, substandard, or taboo. Nor is there just one immutable standard, one unvarying code of manners. Influential people fully in command of the standard language speak and write it at different levels to meet the demands of different contexts. A great many of us use American English, and we differ a good deal in what we wish to communicate to one another. Furthermore, we use this language in a wide range of situations and for many different purposes. Pillow talk between couples differs from the ways each talks to children, neighbors, colleagues, friends, acquaintances, complete strangers, or to groups of all kinds and sizes. Our vocabulary, our syntax, and every other aspect of our usage vary with the person or persons we are addressing, with the purpose of our utterance, with the situation, and indeed with the entire context: an address from the podium of a convention hall filled with political partisans demands language very different from that required for a relaxed discussion among a few close friends. Our speech can vary considerably between the social chatter before the meeting and the business discussion in the meeting itself. | 2 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| What is true of contextual variation in our speech is just as true of contextual variation in our writing: to whom, when, where, under what circumstances, and for what purpose we write can make many differences in what we write and how the reader understands it. The note to the package delivery driver, the love letter or the letter of condolence, the letter to the editor, and the committee report require different language. Writing for publication has its variations too: because we rarely ever meet our readers, we must try to imagine accurately what they are like and try to anticipate and meet their expectations. | 3 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Most of the words, meanings, and grammatical structures we use belong to everybody’s English usage. All English—British, Canadian, or American; Standard, Common, or Vulgar—has dogs and cats, verbs and direct objects. But the differences, although relatively few when measured against the size of the whole language, stand out clearly and sometimes even leap out at us. Most of us know a few of the “funny” expressions the British and the Australians use; many of us are aware of the “funny” way many Canadians say schedule. But perhaps because relative to the whole they are so few, these differences can be fiercely significant. It is not just dialectal variations such as those between American trucks and molasses and British lorries and treacle; even more important to us are the everyday variations within American English itself: What makes southerners sound so different from the rest of us? (The Southern and South Midland regional dialects differ importantly from each other as well as from other American dialects.) How should we view ain’t? (Standard English can use it, but only in strictly limited contexts.) And is irregardless a word or not? (It is, but its inadvertent use in Standard English can mean real trouble for the user.) | 4 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hence our need to know which locutions must be limited to casual contexts in the spoken language only, which ones should be limited mainly to pulpit or platform, which ones are appropriate in all spoken and written contexts, and which ones should be restricted to use at, say, formal written levels only: Mr. and Mrs. John Robert Smith request the pleasure of your company at a reception in honor of their daughter, Mary Jane Smith is no more the appropriate way to write an informal invitation than is the party of the first part suitable for reaching oral agreement on the stakes in a friendly card game. We must match the level of our language to the context in which we use it. When we blunder in our choices or misread the tastes and expectations of those we are addressing, we can raise eyebrows, cause misunderstandings, or even shock our listeners or readers to a point where they truly cannot hear whatever it is we intend to convey. Any small inappropriateness in usage may hamper effectiveness, and a single big blunder can destroy it. And remember: when we assess the experience, temper, tastes, and expectations of our listeners or readers, their receptivity will vary just as our own can; some of them will be linguistically conservative, some linguistically liberal, and some in between. Best advice on this score is still Alexander Pope’s, expressed in his famous comparison of fashions in dress and other manners with fashions in language:
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The Columbia Guide This guide to Standard American usage tries to help you keep up with the new and keep track of the old, so that you can make your language fit all the contexts you encounter whenever you speak or write. It seeks to help you make some of the choices Standard users must make if their usage is to be what they want it to be and what their listeners and readers expect it to be. There are many variables at work, and answers can only infrequently be both simple and accurate. Much more often, the accurate answer to a usage question begins, “It depends.” And what it depends on most often is where you are, who you are, who your listeners or readers are, and what your purpose in speaking or writing is. | 6 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Most usage guides address themselves primarily or even exclusively to writers and problems of writing and thus may inadvertently lead us to infer that we should try to speak the language exactly as our best writers write it. But neither our best writers nor most of the rest of us really talk like books; some of our language must of course be suitable for use in books, but usage problems are by no means limited to those we encounter in writing for publication. Most of us do most of our communicating orally—face to face or over the telephone—and much of the rest of it in informally written notes, letters, and memos. Being able to match our spoken levels of usage to these differing contexts is every bit as important as is being able to match our formal written English to the demands of its contexts. | 7 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Commentators have long argued the virtues and defects of prescriptive and descriptive methods of treating Standard usage. This guide prescribes whenever real rules make prescription a sensible way of proceeding. But for most grammatical and usage questions description-based generalizations, not rules, provide better answers (see the entry RULES AND GENERALIZATIONS), because they take into account both the changes and the variations that are always in progress in a living language. For further discussion of how best to interpret the advice this guide offers, see the entry PRESCRIPTIVE AND DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR AND USAGE and the entries CONSERVATIVE USAGE and LIBERAL USAGE. | 8 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English is unique in showing systematically how today’s language is appropriately used in five levels of Standard American speech, ranging from the most relaxed conversation to the most elevated public address, and in three levels of Standard American writing, ranging from the most informal of personal notes to the most formal of printed publications. The figure schematically displays these levels of speech and writing and indicates the relative relationships among them and the cluster labels under which some of them fall. It is based on the work of two linguists. Martin Joos, in a very influential little book, The Five Clocks (1962, 1967), described five distinctive context-related “styles” that we employ when we use our language. H. A. Gleason, Jr., in his Linguistics and English Grammar (1965), expanded and revised Joos’s scheme, describing these contexts as five “keys” (rather than “styles”) particularly applicable to the usage variations in our spoken language. He also described three somewhat broader categories against which to measure variations in the standard written language. | 9 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| My system owes much to Joos’s scheme and even more to Gleason’s elaboration and refinement of it. I have substituted the term levels for Gleason’s “keys,” because levels seems to have embedded itself in the national consciousness when we talk of usage, and I have applied it to both spoken and written usage in order to suggest some of the connections between them. I have used the labels Impromptu and Planned for Gleason’s “consultative” and “deliberative,” seeking to make them readily accessible to general reader and language professional alike. I have also added the cluster labels Conversational and Edited English. | 10 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Many words, idiomatic expressions, meanings, pronunciations, spellings, and grammatical and rhetorical structures are found at every level of speech and writing and are appropriate in every context. The verb goes in The family goes to Maine in August is one such. Other uses of that word, however, may be appropriate only in limited Standard contexts, as is the noun go in We’ll have a go at it, which is Standard only at Conversational levels or in the Informal or Semiformal writing that imitates them. And still other uses of go are inappropriate anywhere in Standard spoken or written English: for example, the uninflected dialectal third person singular verb go in She go to school at Central High is Substandard. | 11 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In this guide, any entry containing no explicit label describes a Standard usage. Some entries, on the other hand, may cover sets of words or phrases, variously labeled Standard, Nonstandard (marked by usages found in and characteristic of Common English and some regional dialects), and Substandard English (marked by and characteristic primarily of Vulgar English). Some items may be described as being in divided usage. Words and meanings may be further identified with labels such as slang (normally restricted to Impromptu speech or Informal writing), jargon (appropriate usually only in special speech communities), profanity (limited to severely restricted contexts), and obscenity (usually taboo), or with labels indicating the current status of the locution (archaic, obsolescent, and obsolete). Words and locutions may also be defined in terms of their acceptability to conservatives or purists, whose attitudes to the language contrast so strongly with those of liberals, for whom permissiveness, with all its implications for good and ill, is often the mode. | 12 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Each of the labels just mentioned, as well as those in the figure, has its own full entry in this guide, as do level, context, and nearly all other language-related terms that appear in the advice given in the guide’s roughly sixty-five hundred usage entries. Whenever you encounter a language-related term of which you are unsure, seek the entry for it. | 13 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The entry words are of two sorts: those in all capital letters define, explain, and illustrate most of the grammatical and other linguistic terminology used throughout this guide. The entry words printed in lowercase letters are the usage items themselves—the words, phrases, spellings, pronunciations, combined forms, meanings, and idioms about which there are questions or division of opinion among Standard users, expressions about which problems of appropriateness frequently arise. Cross-references—of which there are many—appear in all small capital letters, most often at the end of entries. Cross-references generally consist of entry words up to the first mark of punctuation, coded with numbers for clarity where necessary. Variant pronunciations and variant spellings are presented with the version judged most frequent in Standard American English given first, the least frequent last. | 14 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Guide to Pronunciations Where clear rhyme words will guide, they are provided: snood rhymes with food. Pronunciations are printed in italics: ahead is pronounced uh-HED. Hyphens separate syllables: implicit (im-PLIS-it) has three syllables, separated by the two hyphens. A syllable in all capital letters has a heavy, usually primary, stress: knitted is pronounced NIT-id. When a word has both primary and secondary or tertiary stresses, the syllable that receives primary stress is in boldface italic capital letters: boldfaced is pronounced BOLD-FAIST; commander in chief is pronounced kuh-MAND-uhr-in-CHEEF; secondary and tertiary stressed syllables in such words are in italic capital letters. So-called weak or unstressed syllables are in italic lowercase letters: sofa is pronounced SO-fuh. Transcription of Stressed Vowel Sounds 1
Transcription of Unstressed Vowel Sounds 1
Transcription of Certain Vowels plus R 1
Transcription of Consonant Sounds 1
1. The sounds under discussion here are in boldface for clarity; in the guide proper, boldface type in pronunciations generally denotes primary stress, except in certain instances where it highlights a particular sound under discussion. 2. See the entry for MERRY, MARY, MARRY for comment on certain regional variations. 3. Some Standard dialects pronounce which as a homophone of witch. 4. Note that the voiced th sound in thy is underlined, to distinguish it from the voiceless th sound in thigh, which is not underlined. | 15 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. Copyright © 1993 Columbia University Press. |
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