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I. Literate and illiterate speech in a language like English are plainly different. We find it easy, aside from occasional points of detail, to judge of "incorrect" or "faulty" locutions, "bad grammar," "mispronunciation," and the like. This, in fact, is the layman's chief interest in linguistics.

When we try, however, to define what we mean by these judgments, to state the causes of the "mistakes," or to set up a standard, we run into great difficulties. The popular explanation of these matters is certainly wrong; scientific students of language have dealt little with them explicitly, somewhat more by implication, and never in a satsifactory way. In this paper I shall give some facts from a speech community where conditions differ from ours to so great an extent as to provide a kind of check, and shall try to draw conclusions; I may say at the outset that these conclusions are neither decisive nor complete enough to be satisfactory.

II. The popular explanation of "correct" and "incorrect" speech reduces the matter to one of knowledge versus ignorance. There is such a thing as correct English. An ignorant person does not know the correct forms; therefore he cannot help using incorrect ones. In the process of education one learns the correct forms and, by practice and an effort of will ("careful speaking"), acquires the habit of using them. If one associates with ignorant speakers,or relaxes the effort of will ("careless speaking"), one will lapse into the incorrect forms.

It would be easy, but would require much space, to show that these notions do not correspond to the facts. There is no fixed standard of "correct" English; one need only recall that no two persons speak alike, and that, take it as a whole, every language is constantly changing. At the time when we learn to speak we are all ignroant babies, yet many children of five or six years speak "correct" English. Even some ignorant adults speal "good" English; on the other hand, there are highly educated people, even teachers and professors, who speak "bad" English. All speaking, good or bad, is careless; only for a few minutes at a time can one speak "carefully," and when one does so, the result is by no means pleasing. In fatiguing effect and in ungracefullness, "careful" speaking is like walking a chalk-line or a tight-rope.

If we leave aside all this, there is one error in the popular view which is of special interest. The incorrect forms cannot be a result of ignorance or carelessness, for they are by no means haphazard, but, on the contrary, very stable. For instance, if a person is so ignorant as to not know how to say I see it in past time, we might expect him to use all kinds of chance forms, and, especially, to resort to easily formed locutions, such as I did see it, or to the addition of the regular past-time suffix: I seed it. But instead, these ignorant people quite consistently say I seen it. Now, it is evident that one fixed and consistent form will be no more difficult than another: aperson who has learned I see as the past of I see has learned just as much as one who says I saw. He has simply learned something different. Although most of the people who say I seen are ignorant, their ignorance does not account for this form of speech. On the other hand, I once knew a school-teacher who, when she spoke carefully, sometimes said I have saw it: in normal speech she said I have seen it. In short what we find is not well-informed and regulated activity opposed to ignorance and carelessness, but rather a conflict of definite, fixed locutions, one of which, for some reason, is "good," while the others are "bad."

Mistaken as are the popular notions on this subject, they are interesting because they throw some light on our attitude to language. The popular explanation of incorrect language is simply the explanation of incorrect writing, taken over, part and parcel, to serve as an explanation of incorrect speech. It is the writing of every word for which a single form is fixed and all others are obviously wrong. It is the spelling of words that ignorant people, or better, unlettered people, do not know. It is writing that may be done carefully or carelessly, with evident results as to correctness. With all this it accords that popular comment on a wrong form of speech is often given in terms that properly apply to writing, not to speech.; for instance, he who says git instead of get, or ketch instead of catch, is popularly said to be substituting one letter for another, to be mistaking the spelling of the word. In sum, the popular ideas about language apply very well to writing, but are irrelevant to speech.