A history of the English Language

189.
“Ascertainment.”
Eighteenth-century attempts to codify the English language and to direct its course fall, 
we may repeat, under three main heads: (1) to reduce the language to rule and set up a 
standard of correct usage; (2) to refine it—that is, to remove supposed defects and 
introduce certain improvements; and (3) to fix it permanently in the desired form. 
The appeal to authority, 1650-1800 241

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As pointed out in the preceding section, one of the chief defects of English that people 
became acutely conscious of in the latter part of the seventeenth century was the absence 
of a standard, the fact that the language had not been reduced to a rule so that one could 
express oneself at least with the assurance of doing so correctly. Dryden sums up this 
attitude in words: “we have yet no prosodia, not so much as a tolerable dictionary, or a 
grammar, so that our language is in a manner barbarous.”
3
That is, the language did not 
possess the character of an orderly and well-regulated society. One must write it 
according to one’s individual judgment and therefore without the confidence that one 
might feel if there were rules on which to lean and a vocabulary sanctioned by some 
recognized authority. It was a conviction of long standing with him. In his dedication of 
Troilus and Cressida
to the earl of Sunderland (1679) he says: “how barbarously we yet 
write and speak, your lordship knows, and I am sufficiently sensible in my own English. 
For I am often put to a stand, in considering whether what I write be the idiom of the 
tongue, or false grammar.” And he adds: “I am desirous, if it were possible, that we might 
all write with the same certainty of words, and purity of phrase, to which the Italians first 
arrived, and after them the French; at least that we might advance so far, as our tongue is 
capable of such a standard.” The ideal was expressed many times in the earlier part of the 
eighteenth century, perhaps nowhere more accurately than in the words “we write by 
guess, more than any stated rule, and form every man his diction, either according to his 
humour and caprice, or in pursuance of a blind and servile imitation.”
4
In the eighteenth century the need for standardization and regulation was summed up 
in the word 
ascertainment
. The force of this word then was some-what different from that 
which it has today. To 
ascertain
was not so much to
3 
Discourse concerning Satire 
(1693). 
4 
Thomas Stackhouse, 
Reflections on the Nature and Property ofLanguage in General, on the 
Advantages, Defects, andManner oflmproving the English Tongue in Particular
(1731), p. 187. 
A history of the english language 242

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learn by inquiry as to settle a matter, to render it certain and free from doubt. Dr. Johnson 
defined 
ascertainment
as “a settled rule; an established standard”; and it was in this sense 
that Swift used the verb in his 
Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the 
English Tongue
.
5
When reduced to its simplest form the need was for a dictionary that 
should record the proper use of words and a grammar that should settle authoritatively the 
correct usages in matters of construction. How it was proposed to attain these ends we 
shall see shortly.