Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

the house is building

I recently bought a copy of Alfred Ayres’ The Verbalist, a 19th-century Strunk & White kind of prescriptive grammar in smallish octavo pocketbook size. It’s structured pretty straightforwardly as an alphabetized list of short entries, except that halfway through, there comes a huge 10 to 20 page section on the progressive passive construction. It’s called is being built, and evidently its subject was a huge concern of Victorian grammar mavens. The entry starts with huge undigested quotations from other mid-19th-century grammarians (e.g., Bullions, Grant White, et al.). I’m embarassed to admit that I had never run across this 150-year-old controversy. It seems that starting in the late 18th century, the older passive construction the house is building began to be replaced by the one we have now (uncontroversially) the house is being built. About the only remnant of the older construction that I still have in my linguistic ragbag is Time she is a-wasting. (And I’ve always wondered what that reduced vowel represented.) This degradation of the Anglic tongue seems to have dropped entirely off the radar screen of the John Simonses of the world. How sad.

There is properly no passive form, in English corresponding to the progressive form in the active voice, except where it is made by the participle ing, in a passive sense; thus, ‘The house is building’; ‘The garments are making’; ‘Wheat is selling,’ etc. An attempt has been made by some grammarians, of late, to banish such expressions from the language, thought they have been used in all time past by the best writers, and to justify and defend a clumsy solecism, which has been recently introduced chiefly through the newspaper press, but which has gained such currency, and is becoming so familiar to the ear, that it seems likely to prevail, with all its uncouthness and deformity. I refer to such expressions as ‘The house is being built’; ‘The letter is being written’; ‘The mine is being worked’; ‘The news is being telegraphed,’ etc., etc.