American Newspaper Interest in English Language Problems

Abstract

HE PRESENT inquiry was undertaken in the belief that it might throw some light on a subject of linguistic investigation which has hitherto received little attention from students of the language, namely, on the kind and degree of interest which American newspapers and newspaper readers show in problems affecting the English language. For this purpose the files of three New York newspapers-the Times, the Herald-Tribune, and the World-Telegram-were examined for periods ranging from six months to one full year, for news items, special articles, editorials, and readers' letters on matters of language. It should, perhaps, be pointed out at once that these three newspapers represent an obvious selection as to the type of journalism subjected to this inquiry; an examination of a larger and more heterogeneous group of papers might yield somewhat different results in number and quality. Moreover, of the three newspapers mentioned, one, the New York Times, has consistently and over a period of many years shown a greater concern with problems of English usage than either of the other two. A fuller reader response to language matters is therefore to be expected from that newspaper. The writer believes, however, that the basic facts about the interest of American editors and readers in English language matters brought out by an examination of these three papers will prove equally true of a very much larger sampling of newspapers. The method followed in this investigation was simple: the editorial, magazine, and news pages of the newspapers were scrutinized-the former carefully, the latter two in more cursory fashion-for news items, articles, or expressions of opinion on the English language. Book reviews and miscellaneous literary notes containing comment on the English language were excepted, as were also incidental and occasional references to the English language in other articles. The items collected were then arranged under the following heads: vocabulary, etymology, pronunciation, spelling, semantics, grammatical usage, and miscellaneous. News items and special articles dealing with some phase of English were classified separately as falling into a somewhat different category from editorial comment and readers' opinion.'