[In the following essay, Dougherty compares Pepys's language in the Diary with contemporary English, and concludes that most of the differences are insignificant.]

The diary that Samuel Pepys kept from the first day of 1660 till he thought he was losing his eyesight eight and a half years later can tell us a lot about how the English language has changed or remained more or less constant over the last three and a half centuries. There may be other sources equally rich in examples for comparison, but there can hardly be another that is at the same time so much fun to read and accessible. Moreover, the Restoration period when Pepys kept his diary is a good time to compare with ours, because by then the basis of modern English had been laid down by the Elizabethans.

For a mechanical and therefore objective lexical comparison I did a spelling check with my Q&A software on the first two paragraphs of Time's August 7, 1989, cover story on anchor woman Diane Sawyer and on the slightly longer first entry in Pepys's Diary, dated January 1, 1660. Except for proper names, the spelling checker stopped on two words in the Time paragraphs that were not in its lexicon: show-biz and credentialed. Likewise two words in Pepys's entry gave pause to the checker, though they are not so much lost words as obsolete forms of words: hath and doth. I should add that where Pepys phonetically wrote then he meant than and that he used the adjective handsome to describe his financial condition, as we would rarely do today. Nevertheless, the spelling-check test provides some indication that English vocabulary has not discarded as many words over the past three centuries as one might expect. Our vocabulary has rather been swollen by these centuries of technological breakthroughs and social and political revolutions.

Though such words as betimes and whither and such forms as doth and hath have dropped out of ordinary usage, today's English-speaking reader of average education can read most of the Diary without encountering any word that would send him to his dictionary. In fact, so rapidly does our vocabulary continue to expand by the addition of such technical neologisms as AIDS or star wars and such borrowings as zaftig and ayatollah that a reader of our day could well be more taxed to know the meanings of all the words in yesterday's newspaper than to understand all of the Diary.

Besides the lexicon, grammar—especially syntax—has changed somewhat, too, though again not so much as to be incomprehensible to the average modern reader. On the one hand, Pepys's English may seem slightly stilted or Biblical by modern standards, with frequent absolute constructions and the use of do as an auxiliary for affirmative verbs where no emphasis is intended, as, for example, in his entry for August 31, 1662, where he thanks “Almighty God, who doth most manifestly bless me in my endeavors to do the duty of my office—I now saving money, and my expenses being very little.” This casual use of the auxiliary do seems to be creeping back into English usage, especially among waiters for some reason, who are increasingly wont to announce, “As the catch of the day, we do have red snapper. …” Ordinarily, though, in American speech the auxiliary do is reserved for negative or interrogative statements as in Don’t do it or Do you do it? or for emphasis, particularly in rebuttal, as in But I do do it! We have gained a handy distinction here. On the other hand, Pepys's English, while familiar enough to us, may sound slightly nonstandard, as where past-tense forms and past participles are coalesced. Pepys writes, just as we might say but ought not write, “… running up and down … with their arses bare … being beat by the watch.” (October 23, 1668)

The progressive tense occurs in Pepys's Diary, as for example in his entry for February 3, 1665: “She was dressing herself by the fire … and there took occasion to show me her leg”; but he uses it much less than we do. For us it has practically replaced the future tense, as when we say, “I’m going to town tomorrow.” Contractions are even rarer in the Diary but do occur, for example in his entry for September 9, 1667: “Says that Knepp won’t take pains enough …”

More surprising than evident but relatively insignificant differences between the language in Pepys's Diary and our everyday language are the words and expressions that have persisted in English for more than three centuries without having ever gained full acceptance. For instance, take I when compounded with another pronoun or a noun in the objective case, as in: Between you and I. … Even educated speakers nowadays often use I in combinations where me is prescribed. There is an academic legend that this solecism is a hypercorrection forced into our American English when generations of schoolmarms pounded into the heads of generations of schoolchildren that they must not say me in such combinations as me and Johnny done it. Not so. Samuel Pepys, never confused by an American schoolmarm, invariably, so far as I have found, used I instead of me when the pronoun was combined with another pronoun or noun as the object of a verb or preposition. To cite a few examples: “… did take my wife and I to the Queenes presence-Chamber …” (November 22, 1660); “… who pleased my wife and I …” (December 27, 1660); “… Mrs. Sarah talking with my wife and I …” (October 20, 1663); “… if God send my wife and I to live …” (May 8, 1667); and “This morning up, with mighty kind words between my poor wife and I” (November 20, 1668). Pepys does not use they and its inflected forms as an indefinite singular pronoun nearly as commonly as we do in such constructions as “Everyone on their feet!”, but in his entry for March 20, 1668, he writes “… everybody endeavouring to excuse themselfs.” And in his entry for October 14, 1667, we find “… till they send for me” where the subject is no one in particular. Similarly, who in the objective case appears to have been on the threshold of acceptance into standard English for more than three hundred years. Pepys repeatedly uses the pronoun so, for instance: “… Burroughs, who I took in and drank with” (August 6, 1667). However, in his entry for August 7, 1668, we find: “… whom I was pleased with all the day. …” As for lay for lie, whose force of usage has by now almost won acceptance into the standard language, we find in Pepys's entry for June 22, 1667: “… found not a man on board her [a ship] (and her laying so near them was a main temptation to them to come on).” (Compare this with Kipling's “Where the old Flotilla lay” where lay is the past tense of lie.)

There are also in Pepys's Diary words and phrases that have been admitted to our standard language but that still sound a bit colloquial. This is me, which we find in his entry for October 31, 1667, has finally been accepted into standard English, though it took three centuries and Winston Churchill's fiat to do it. When Pepys writes mad, usually he means angry, just as Americans do today: “… which makes our merchants mad” (February 9, 1664). Telling of annoyances on October 10, 1667, he twice writes: “… which did make me mad,” as well as: “I begun heartily to sweat and be angry …” Today this meaning of mad is more at home in American than in British English. The same can be said of certain other of Pepys's locutions, for example the past participle gotten instead of got: “… who were by this time gotten most of them drunk” (June 2, 1666).

In general, one tends to find confirmed in the language of the Diary the relative conservatism of American as contrasted with British standard English. So far as dialects are concerned, I know British dialects too little to say. But there is in the Diary a locution that I have encountered only there, I believe in Shakespeare, and commonly, though less and less, in the speech of West Texas farmers: like(d) to … as in “That ol’ boy like to of killed hisself” or in Pepys's entry for April 14, 1660: “… the purser … had like to have been drowned had it not been for a rope.”

In the three hundred years since Pepys the general drift of English has been toward a Chinese kind of grammar with loss and confusion of inflection and with phrases used as words. A carelessness about inflection in Pepys's day is shown above with the examples of the objective I and who. Rarer back then was the use of whole phrases as single words as, for instance: to quickly and efficiently do this job, where the verb and two adverbs are treated together as a so-called split infinitive marked by to, instead of the prescribed to do this job quickly and efficiently, where only do is the infinitive marked as such by to and modified by two adverbs. So it comes as something of a surprise to find a clause in the 1662 Diary that sounds like wording in a television commercial: “I saw the so much by me desired picture of my Lady Castlemayne. …” (October 20). Pepys also has a tendency to omit subject pronouns, reminding one of television commercials: “Had a bowl of Whamo this morning. Feel great!” a trim, muscular type in a TV commercial might exclaim, sounding rather like Pepys when he wrote over three centuries ago, “Dined with Mr. Stephens …” (July 3, 1660) or “Lay long in bed …” (July 15, 1660).

Pepys's Diary owes its eventual status as a classic to its candor and the author's privileged position as an observer of Restoration England. But he did have a style of his own that should be taken into consideration in any evaluation of the language of his Diary. His English, as suits the diary of so exuberant and impatient a man and a stenographer among other things, strikes us as almost telegraphic in its compression. It is doubtful that in conversation he would ever remark, “Up early …” or “Up betimes …,” the phrases with which he so often begins his diary entries. But allowing that the language is well adapted to a stenographer's very private diary and of its particular time and place, we find little that is obscurely archaic in its style. Despite such interesting differences as are noted above, the language of Pepys's journal, however dated, is not generically unlike what we might expect to find in a secret journal kept by a yuppie bureaucrat of our times.

Note

Reference throughout this essay is to The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970.