Abstract
Stephen Mennell met Hermínio Martins at Harvard in 1966. He reminisces how both were new to America and America new to them. Both began to strive to understand how Americans thought and how they perceived the world. How they spoke was one part of that. In this essay, Mennell takes Norbert Elias’s ‘Excursus on the modelling of speech at court’ to show how differences between American and British usage are related to social and international power ratios. A discussion of ‘the politics of euphemism’ and the functions of abstraction is related to American wars and violence. The emergence of ‘middling styles’ is related to more general processes of informalisation of manners. Finally, this in turn is related to shifts in power in the academic world and the emergence of the neo-liberal university that Martins so deplored.
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Notes
- 1.
Strictly speaking, in one of those periods—the middle one, I think—I was technically hosted by Theodore Zeldin, but I saw more of Hermínio.
- 2.
His claim to that status was disputed by George Homans, who told me (and no doubt many other people) that ‘The trouble with Talcott is that he’s a fine empirical sociologist, but he’s no good at theory!’.
- 3.
The Vietnam protest movement was just getting going in 1966–67; I was involved in a very minor way.
- 4.
Quoted from the Academy’s website (www.academie-francaise.fr, 28 January 2005). In this context, the word fixer is used in the sense of to stabilise—not the American sense of mending or remedying something, although perhaps it amounts to the same thing.
- 5.
Thus ‘RP’ may be seen to have fulfilled a similar function in imperial Britain to that of Satisfaktionsfähigkeit—being judged of adequate social rank to give satisfaction in a duel—which, according to Elias (2013: 49–134), played a part in the formation of a unified upper class in imperial Germany.
- 6.
The ‘Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands’ discussed by Goudsblom (1988) is one example. Goudsblom’s main thesis is that ABN is a model, serving the two purposes of communication and distinction, which are sometimes at odds. Its history reflects the increasing integration of the Dutch state. Both pronunciation and vocabulary demonstrate its continuously changing characteristics. Current developments correspond to the ‘diminishing contrasts, increasing varieties’ formula of Elias (2012: 422–427).
- 7.
A similar proposal was actually debated by the US Senate in 1806 but was defeated. The American Academy of Arts and Letters was to take upon itself the task of linguistic policeman early in the twentieth century but pursued it only intermittently and half-heartedly (Mencken 1936: 49, 63).
- 8.
Peter Burke (personal communication) points out that there is similar uniformity in Australia and Brazil, and he is ‘tempted to assume that immigration was a key factor, a sort of melting-pot effect, and 500 years (maximum) is not enough for regional accents to develop’. I am uncertain whether that assumption is compatible with the fact that a distinctively Australian accent—different from any British regional accent—was noted as early as the 1820s, only three or four decades after the First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay.
- 9.
David Hackett Fischer (1988) tried to demonstrate—not to all critics’ satisfaction (see Bryson 1994: 45−46)—that elements of seventeenth and eighteenth-century British regional dialects have recognisably persisted to this day in certain regions of the USA. Krapp (1925) also argued that Western American English was largely derived from Northern English. See the symposium on Fischer’s book in the William and Mary Quarterly, 3/48:2, 1991: 223−308.
- 10.
A modern example of this might be the confusion that now prevails between ‘uninterested’ (taking no interest) and ‘disinterested’ (being detached or objective or having no pecuniary interest) —although the Oxford English Dictionary shows that the two meanings have exchanged places more than once. A second, more specifically American, might be the fusion of ‘exhibit’ (a particular item on display) and ‘exhibition’ (a display of many exhibits)—so that ‘exhibit’ in the singular, British, sense becomes difficult to express in American. Or, again, the disappearance in American English of the distinction between ‘alternate’ and ‘alternative’.
- 11.
One clear exception in the list is ‘sick’ versus ‘ill’, the latter (at least at that time) being the British usage in all social classes. The distinction between U (for upper class) and non-U, introduced by Ross (1954) and taken up by Mitford (1956), attracted much attention in 1950s Britain. Baltzell’s list of distinctions rather resembles Ross’s, although interestingly the social connotations of lavatory and toilet were reversed in Britain.
- 12.
It should be noted that when Baltzell spoke of the ‘middle class’, he meant roughly what a British speaker would mean—as opposed to the American usage now current, which has expanded to include at least the ‘respectable’ working class in steady employment.
- 13.
In this, trends in linguistic usage are symptomatic of many wider cultural trends. For example, in one of his essays on modern trends in the regulation of sexuality, Wouters (2014) speaks of ‘the significance of American upper classes losing a cultural battle to the middle classes and to peer groups’ and highlights how the social regulation of teenage sexuality is connected with patterns of social competition and mobility. Wouters’s reference to peer groups relates to peer group pressure in colleges across the country, which, he has argued, helps explain the spread of relatively uniform sexual mores across the USA and by extension (in a personal communication) the relative uniformity in American speech.
- 14.
This euphemism is especially poignant in view of the remarks about mercenary soldiers in the Declaration of Independence.
- 15.
However, one still occasionally hears ‘amn’t’ among educated people in Ireland.
- 16.
Mencken (1936: 419−420) lists examples of grammatical mistakes identified in studies of American schoolchildren in the early twentieth century. The grammatical standards by which they were judged were astonishingly demanding by comparison with the standards of a century later; they include, for instance, the failure to use the subjunctive, saying If I was instead of If I were.
- 17.
Social moulding of handwriting may be mentioned alongside that of language. Thornton (1996) traces the teaching of penmanship from the various styles considered appropriate in colonial days to gentlemen, merchants, and women, to the stress in nineteenth-century schools on uniformity of writing in order to produce model, uniform citizens. Writing instructors even went so far as to use truss-like appliances to force the hand into the proper writing position. To this day, the handwriting of American students is far more uniform than that of their British or Irish counterparts.
- 18.
‘Functional democratisation’ is a term used by Norbert Elias to distinguish the process from political democratisation; the two may be imperfectly correlated (and, in the short term, not necessarily at all). The concept has nothing to do with functionalism in the old sense. For Elias, functional democratisation is a possible feature of chains of interdependence of all types, and refers to a broad trend towards the power ratios between categories of people becoming gradually less unequal.
- 19.
I am indebted to Johan Goudsblom for this almost Hegelian turn of phrase.
- 20.
For an historical account of the phases of this discussion from c.1970 to the present, see Wouters and Mennell (2015).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Bridget Fowler and Cas Wouters for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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Mennell, S. (2018). The ‘Modelling of Speech’ in America and Britain. In: Castro, J., Fowler, B., Gomes, L. (eds) Time, Science and the Critique of Technological Reason. St Antony's Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71519-3_15
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