LINGUIST List 17.156
Tue Jan 17 2006
Sum: Miss Fidditch
Editor for this issue: Amy Renaud
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1. Pius
ten Hacken,
Miss Fidditch
Message 1: Miss Fidditch
Date: 16-Jan-2006
From: Pius ten Hacken <p.ten-hackenswansea.ac.uk>
Subject: Miss Fidditch
Regarding query: http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-3527.html#1
Summary Miss Fidditch
In Linguist-List 16.3527 I asked
In his ''Two Models of Grammatical Description'' (Word 10 (1954) 210-231), Charles Hockett writes:
''The description must also be prescriptive, not of course in the Fidditch sense, but in the sense that by following the statements one must be able to generate any number of utterances in the language, above and beyond those observed in advance by the analyst?new utterances most, if not all, of which will pass the test of casual acceptance by a native speaker.''
Could anyone give me some background about the expression ''Fidditch''? Is this a real person, a fictional character or something else? Any information greatly appreciated.
From the many, largely overlapping answers I conclude that Miss Fidditch is the mythical American school teacher representing the prescriptive tradition in grammar teaching. She was often evoked by the Post-Bloomfieldians as representing the opposite to their own view of language.
A number of people pointed me to Martin Joos and more in particular his "The Five Clocks". The Oxford English Dictionary gives "Miss Fidditch" in the entry for "Miss", with Joos's Five Clocks as the source of the first quotation. However, this work dates from 1962, i.e. eight years after my quotation from Hockett. The expression must have been around before 1954, because Hockett assumes his readers know it. In a preface to Joos's "Five Clocks" that the OED dates to 1967, Albert H. Marckwardt gives the following information about its origin:
''Although Joos mentions Shaw, Goethe, and Wolfram and ignores Ovid, what he has written is one of the Metamorphoses. He begins with Miss Fidditch, a character originally named by Henry Lee Smith, Jr., in one of his more devastating moments but described by H. L. Mencken two decades earlier as one the old-maid schoolteachers who would rather parse than eat. As she is described here, 'Webster is one Webster, and Miss Fidditch is his prophet.' At the end she emerges as Candida, and if she has not quite acquired the divine insight of her prototype, she has begun to distinguish between reality on the one hand and follies, illusions, and vanity on the other. ... '' (p.xiv)
I have not been able to find "Miss Fidditch" in Mencken's "The American Language" but I might have overlooked it. I am not sure whether H.L. Smith published what Marckwardt refers to, but if anyone has additional information, in particular a quotation from before Hockett, I would be happy if they could let me know.
I would like to thank the following people for their replies: Wayles Browne, Ed Burstynsky, Paul Chapin, Peter T. Daniels, Scott DeLancey, Stefan Dyla, Harry Feldman, Nancy Frishberg, Clyde Hankey, Earl M. Herrick, Claire Hiscock, John M Lawler, Stuart Luppescu, Geoff Nathan, Marc Picard, Amara Prasithrathsint, Harold F. Schiffman, Michael Silverstein, Herbert F.W. Stahlke, N. Wiedenmann, Job M.van Zuijlen. Special thanks are due to Michael Silverstein for the quote from Joos, which is not in our library, and to Wayles Browne who pointed me to the OED.
Linguistic Field(s): History of Linguistics
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