Correcting English Josephine Turck Baker (1873–1942) and the early American usage guide tradition

The later stages of language standardisation (Milroy & Milroy 1999) are characterised by an emphasis on maintaining and prescribing the norms already established through the process of codification (1999: 22-23) .Uusage guides have been a peculiar product and a pivotal site of norm prescription. The “first usage guide proper” was Robert Baker’s Reflections on the English Language (1770) (Tieken 2011: 256-7). On the other side of the Atlantic similar works started being produced and this chapter discusses the work of a lesser known and arguably the first female American prescriptivist, Josephine Turck Baker (1873-1942). In the period between 1899 and 1942, Truck Butler singlehandedly wrote and published more than twenty grammar books, dictionaries, style guides and drill books, all devoted to teaching the general public how to use language correctly. This chapter focuses on one of her later usage guides, The Correct Word, How to Use It (1938), and attempts to situate it the linguistic and social norms of the period. An analysis of the ‘errors’ and the different usage problems that she discusses reveal different levels of prescriptivism and prescriptive value judgements in her work.