Today’s pet peeve is often tomorrow’s standard usage. Nineteenth-century grammarians railed against the use of the word campaign to denote an electoral contest, arguing it was an inappropriate use of a military term. C.W. Bardeen’s 1883 volume Verbal Pitfalls: A Manual of 1500 Words Commonly Misused is a trove of similarly silly and often unintentionally hilarious advice. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Etymology of Campaign”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. If you need proof that rules about usage and grammar change over time, just take a look at some of the books by language mavens from the late 19th century.
Writers like Richard Grant White, who was a prominent Shakespearean scholar, and another guy named C.W. Bardeen, who wrote a book called Verbal Pitfalls, a manual of 1,500 words commonly misused. For example, one of the things that stopped me in my tracks when I was reading is that both of those writers disdain the term campaign when you’re talking about a presidential campaign. Why? Because it’s appropriating military language. They’re saying that the word that you should use is contest rather than campaign because that’s associated with the military.
White wrote that using campaign in that way is inflamed newspaper English masquerading as eloquence. And then he went on and said, I do like that.
I know, right?
Even though I don’t agree with the rule, I do like that.
Yeah, he writes, is it not time that we had done with this nauseous talk about campaigns and standard bearers and glorious victories and all the bloated army bumming bombast? An election has no manner of likeness to a campaign or a battle. It is a mere comparison.
Oh, boy.
Isn’t that great?
And Bardeen says that its use is indefensible.
That’s super interesting, but it kind of underscores the problem with a lot of this language mavenry, which is that 99 times out of 100, it is someone passing off their personal prejudices and preferences as some kind of universal rule.
And Richard Grant White, he did damage for a long time. Many of his rules, you can hear the air quotes, I hope, many of his rules were borrowed into many other books and taught by teachers. And even today, show up in a variety of different places in the training of teachers.
And it’s a problem.
He didn’t like it. Therefore, it’s a rule. And somehow he got respect for it. And it’s just his own opinion.
I know.
It’s kind of morbidly fascinating to read these manuals from back then. And I’m going to share some examples later in the show because they’re kind of unintentionally funny at this point.
Right.
Today’s peeve, you know, is tomorrow’s standard.
Yeah, exactly.
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