TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
Original spelling and grammar has mostly been retained. Many
inconsistencies in the use of hyphens and character accents have been
retained; some of these were probably intentional. Footnotes were
moved to the ends of chapters. The original pagination of this 1919
edition is shown in square brackets, e.g. [Pg009]. There are an awful
lot of italics in this book. In this simple text version, /italics are
marked with the solidus/. Text that was originally small caps is
shown in uppercase.
Further details are provided in the TRANSCRIBER ENDNOTE.
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
[Illustration]
OF THE FIRST EDITION OF
THIS BOOK FIFTEEN HUNDRED
COPIES HAVE BEEN PRINTED
AND THE TYPE DISTRIBUTED
THIS IS NUMBER 1434
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
/A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development
of English in the United States/
BY
H. L. MENCKEN
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
MCMXIX
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PREFACE
The aim of this book is best exhibited by describing its origin. I am,
and have been since early manhood, an editor of newspapers, magazines
and books, and a critic of the last named. These occupations have
forced me into a pretty wide familiarity with current literature, both
periodical and within covers, and in particular into a familiarity
with the current literature of England and America. It was part of my
daily work, for a good many years, to read the principal English
newspapers and reviews; it has been part of my work, all the time, to
read the more important English novels, essays, poetry and criticism.
An American born and bred, I early noted, as everyone else in like
case must note, certain salient differences between the English of
England and the English of America as practically spoken and
written--differences in vocabulary, in syntax, in the shades and
habits of idiom, and even, coming to the common speech, in grammar.
And I noted too, of course, partly during visits to England but more
largely by a somewhat wide and intimate intercourse with English
people in the United States, the obvious differences between English
and American pronunciation and intonation.
Greatly interested in these differences--some of them so great that
they led me to seek exchanges of light with Englishmen--I looked for
some work that would describe and account for them with a show of
completeness, and perhaps depict the process of their origin. I soon
found that no such work existed, either in England or in America--that
the whole literature of the subject was astonishingly meagre and
unsatisfactory. There were several dictionaries of Americanisms, true
enough, but only one of them made any pretension to scientific method,
and even that one was woefully narrow and incomplete. The one more
general treatise, the work of a man foreign to both England and
America in race and education, was more than 40 years old, and full of
palpable errors. For the rest, there was only a fugitive and
inconsequential literature--an almost useless mass of notes and
essays, chiefly by the minor sort of pedagogues, seldom illuminating,
save in small details, and often incredibly ignorant and inaccurate.
On the large and important subject of American pronunciation, for
example, I could find nothing save a few casual essays. On American
spelling, with its wide and constantly visible divergences from
English usages, there was little more. On American grammar there was
nothing whatever. Worse, an important part of the poor literature that
I unearthed was devoted to absurd efforts to prove that no such thing
as an American variety of English existed--that the differences I
constantly encountered in English and that my English friends
encountered in American were chiefly imaginary, and to be explained
away by denying them.
Still intrigued by the subject, and in despair of getting any
illumination from such theoretical masters of it, I began a collection
of materials for my own information, and gradually it took on a rather
formidable bulk. My interest in it being made known by various
articles in the newspapers and magazines, I began also to receive
contributions from other persons of the same fancy, both English and
American, and gradually my collection fell into a certain order, and I
saw the workings of general laws in what, at first, had appeared to be
mere chaos. The present book then began to take form--its preparation
a sort of recreation from other and far different labor. It is
anything but an exhaustive treatise upon the subject; it is not even
an exhaustive examination of the materials. All it pretends to do is
to articulate some of those materials--to get some approach to order
and coherence into them, and so pave the way for a better work by some
more competent man. That work calls for the equipment of a first-rate
philologist, which I am surely not. All I have done here is to stake
out the field, sometimes borrowing suggestions from other inquirers
and sometimes, as in the case of American grammar, attempting to run
the lines myself.
That it should be regarded as an anti-social act to examine and
exhibit the constantly growing differences between English and
American, as certain American pedants argue sharply--this doctrine is
quite beyond my understanding. All it indicates, stripped of
sophistry, is a somewhat childish effort to gain the approval of
Englishmen--a belated efflorescence of the colonial spirit, often
commingled with fashionable aspiration. The plain fact is that the
English themselves are not deceived, nor do they grant the approval so
ardently sought for. On the contrary, they are keenly aware of the
differences between the two dialects, and often discuss them, as the
following pages show. Perhaps one dialect, in the long run, will
defeat and absorb the other; if the two nations continue to be
partners in great adventures it may very well happen. But even in that
case, something may be accomplished by examining the differences which
exist today. In some ways, as in intonation, English usage is plainly
better than American. In others, as in spelling, American usage is as
plainly better than English. But in order to develop usages that the
people of both nations will accept it is obviously necessary to study
the differences now visible. This study thus shows a certain utility.
But its chief excuse is its human interest, for it prods deeply into
national idiosyncrasies and ways of mind, and that sort of prodding is
always entertaining.
I am thus neither teacher, nor prophet, nor reformer, but merely
inquirer. The exigencies of my vocation make me almost completely
bilingual; I can write English, as in this clause, quite as readily as
American, as in this here one. Moreover, I have a hand for a
compromise dialect which embodies the common materials of both, and is
thus free from offense on both sides of the water--as befits the
editor of a magazine published in both countries. But that compromise
dialect is the living speech of neither. What I have tried to do here
is to make a first sketch of the living speech of These States. The
work is confessedly incomplete, and in places very painfully so, but
in such enterprises a man must put an arbitrary term to his labors,
lest some mischance, after years of diligence, take him from them too
suddenly for them to be closed, and his laborious accumulations, as
Ernest Walker says in his book on English surnames, be "doomed to the
waste-basket by harassed executors."
If the opportunity offers in future I shall undoubtedly return to the
subject. For one thing, I am eager to attempt a more scientific
examination of the grammar of the American vulgar speech, here
discussed briefly in Chapter VI. For another thing, I hope to make
further inquiries into the subject of American surnames of non-English
origin. Various other fields invite. No historical study of American
pronunciation exists; the influence of German, Irish-English, Yiddish
and other such immigrant dialects upon American has never been
investigated; there is no adequate treatise on American geographical
names. Contributions of materials and suggestions for a possible
revised edition of the present book will reach me if addressed to me
in care of the publisher at 220 West Forty-second Street, New York. I
shall also be very grateful for the correction of errors, some perhaps
typographical but others due to faulty information or mistaken
judgment.
In conclusion I borrow a plea in confession and avoidance from Ben
Jonson's pioneer grammar of English, published in incomplete form
after his death. "We have set down," he said, "that that in our
judgment agreeth best with reason and good order. Which
notwithstanding, if it seem to any to be too rough hewed, let him
plane it out more smoothly, and I shall not only not envy it, but in
the behalf of my country most heartily thank him for so great a
benefit; hoping that I shall be thought sufficiently to have done my
part if in tolling this bell I may draw others to a deeper
consideration of the matter; for, touching myself, I must needs
confess that after much painful churning this only would come which
here we have devised."
MENCKEN.
Baltimore, January 1, 1919.
CONTENTS
I. BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION, 1
1. The Diverging Streams, 1
2. The Academic Attitude, 4
3. The View of Writing Men, 12
4. Foreign Observers, 18
5. The Characters of American, 19
6. The Materials of American, 29
II. THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN, 36
1. In Colonial Days, 36
2. Sources of Early Americanisms, 40
3. New Words of English Material, 44
4. Changed Meanings, 51
5. Archaic English Words, 54
6. Colonial Pronunciation, 58
III. THE PERIOD OF GROWTH, 63
1. The New Nation, 63
2. The Language in the Making, 72
3. The Expanding Vocabulary, 76
4. Loan-Words, 86
5. Pronunciation, 94
IV. AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY, 97
1. The Two Vocabularies, 97
2. Differences in Usage, 102
3. Honorifics, 117
4. Euphemisms and Forbidden Words, 124
V. TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN, 131
1. International Exchanges, 131
2. Points of Difference, 138
3. Lost Distinctions, 143
4. Foreign Influences Today, 149
5. Processes of Word Formation, 159
6. Pronunciation, 166
VI. THE COMMON SPEECH, 177
1. Grammarians and Their Ways, 177
2. Spoken American As It Is, 184
3. The Verb, 192
4. The Pronoun, 212
5. The Adverb, 226
6. The Noun and Adjective, 229
7. The Double Negative, 231
8. Pronunciation, 234
VII. DIFFERENCES IN SPELLING, 242
1. Typical Forms, 242
2. General Tendencies, 245
3. The Influence of Webster, 247
4. Exchanges, 255
5. Simplified Spelling, 261
6. Minor Differences, 264
VIII. PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA, 268
1. Surnames, 268
2. Given Names, 283
3. Geographical Names, 286
4. Street Names, 298
IX. MISCELLANEA, 301
1. Proverb and Platitude, 301
2. American Slang, 304
3. The Future of the Language, 312
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 323
LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES, 340
GENERAL INDEX, 368
[Pg001]
I
By Way of Introduction
§ 1
/The Diverging Streams/--Thomas Jefferson, with his usual prevision,
saw clearly more than a century ago that the American people, as they
increased in numbers and in the diversity of their national interests
and racial strains, would make changes in their mother tongue, as they
had already made changes in the political institutions of their
inheritance. "The new circumstances under which we are placed," he
wrote to John Waldo from Monticello on August 16, 1813, "call for new
words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects.
An American dialect will therefore be formed."
Nearly a quarter of a century before this, another great American, and
one with an expertness in the matter that the too versatile Jefferson
could not muster, had ventured upon a prophecy even more bold and
specific. He was Noah Webster, then at the beginning of his stormy
career as a lexicographer. In his little volume of "Dissertations on
the English Language," printed in 1789 and dedicated to "His
Excellency, Benjamin Franklin, Esq., LL.D., F.R.S., late President of
the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," Webster argued that the time for
regarding English usage and submitting to English authority had
already passed, and that "a future separation of the American tongue
from the English" was "necessary and unavoidable." "Numerous local
causes," he continued, "such as a new country, new associations of
people, new combinations of ideas in arts and sciences, and some
intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe, will introduce new
words into the American tongue. These causes will produce, in a course
of time, a language in [Pg002] North America as different from the
future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are
from the German, or from one another."[1]
Neither Jefferson nor Webster put a term upon his prophecy. They may
have been thinking, one or both, of a remote era, not yet come to
dawn, or they may have been thinking, with the facile imagination of
those days, of a period even earlier than our own. In the latter case,
they allowed far too little (and particularly Webster) for factors
that have worked powerfully against the influences they saw so clearly
in operation about them. One of these factors, obviously, has been the
vast improvement in communications across the ocean, a change scarcely
in vision a century ago. It has brought New York relatively nearer to
London today than it was to Boston, or even to Philadelphia, during
Jefferson's presidency, and that greater proximity has produced a
steady interchange of ideas, opinions, news and mere gossip. We
latter-day Americans know a great deal more about the everyday affairs
of England than the early Americans, for we read more English books,
and have more about the English in our newspapers, and meet more
Englishmen, and go to England much oftener. The effects of this
ceaseless traffic in ideas and impressions, so plainly visible in
politics, in ethics and aesthetics, and even in the minutae of social
intercourse, are also to be seen in the language. On the one hand
there is a swift exchange of new inventions on both sides, so that
much of our American slang quickly passes to London and the latest
English fashions in pronunciation are almost instantaneously imitated,
at least by a minority, in New York; and on the other hand the
English, by so constantly having the floor, force upon us, out of
their firmer resolution and certitude, a somewhat sneaking respect for
their own greater conservatism of speech, so that our professors of
the language, in the overwhelming main, combat all signs of
differentiation with the utmost diligence, and safeguard the doctrine
that the standards of English are the only reputable standards of
American.
This doctrine, of course, is not supported by the known laws of
[Pg003] language, nor has it prevented the large divergences that we
shall presently examine, but all the same it has worked steadily
toward a highly artificial formalism, and as steadily against the
investigation of the actual national speech. Such grammar, so-called,
as is taught in our schools and colleges, is a grammar standing
four-legged upon the theorizings and false inferences of English
Latinists, eager only to break the wild tongue of Shakespeare to a
rule; and its frank aim is to create in us a high respect for a book
language which few of us ever actually speak and not many of us even
learn to write. That language, heavily artificial though it may be,
undoubtedly has notable merits. It shows a sonority and a stateliness
that you must go to the Latin of the Golden Age to match; its "highly
charged and heavy-shotted" periods, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, serve
admirably the obscurantist purposes of American pedagogy and of
English parliamentary oratory and leader-writing; it is something for
the literary artists of both countries to prove their skill upon by
flouting it. But to the average American, bent upon expressing his
ideas, not stupendously but merely clearly, it must always remain
something vague and remote, like Greek history or the properties of
the parabola, for he never speaks it or hears it spoken, and seldom
encounters it in his everyday reading. If he learns to write it, which
is not often, it is with a rather depressing sense of its
artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, bred in the colloquial
Onmun, may master the literary Korean-Chinese, but he never thinks in
it or quite feels it.
This fact, I daresay, is largely responsible for the notorious failure
of our schools to turn out students who can put their ideas into words
with simplicity and intelligibility. What their professors try to
teach is not their mother-tongue at all, but a dialect that stands
quite outside their common experience, and into which they have to
translate their thoughts, consciously and painfully. Bad writing
consists in making the attempt, and failing through lack of practise.
Good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberately
throwing overboard the principles so elaborately inculcated, or, as in
the case of Lincoln, in standing unaware of them. Thus the study of
the language he is [Pg004] supposed to use, to the average American,
takes on a sort of bilingual character. On the one hand, he is
grounded abominably in a grammar and syntax that have always been
largely artificial, even in the country where they are supposed to
prevail, and on the other hand he has to pick up the essentials of his
actual speech as best he may. "Literary English," says Van Wyck
Brooks,[2] "with us is a tradition, just as Anglo-Saxon law with us is
a tradition. They persist, not as the normal expressions of a race,
... but through prestige and precedent and the will and habit of a
dominating class largely out of touch with a national fabric
unconsciously taking form out of school." What thus goes on out of
school does not interest the guardians of our linguistic morals. No
attempt to deduce the principles of American grammar, or even of
American syntax, from the everyday speech of decently spoken Americans
has ever been made. There is no scientific study, general and
comprehensive in scope, of the American vocabulary, or of the
influences lying at the root of American word-formation. No American
philologist, so far as I know, has ever deigned to give the same sober
attention to the /sermo plebeius/ of his country that he habitually
gives to the mythical objective case in theoretical English, or to the
pronunciation of Latin, or to the irregular verbs in French.
§ 2
/The Academic Attitude/--This neglect of the vulgate by those
professionally trained to investigate it, and its disdainful dismissal
when it is considered at all, are among the strangest phenomena of
American scholarship. In all other countries the everyday speech of
the people, and even the speech of the illiterate, have the constant
attention of philologists, and the laws of their growth and variation
are elaborately studied. In France, to name but one agency, there is
the Société des Parlers de France, with its diligent inquiries into
changing forms; moreover, the Académie itself is endlessly concerned
with the [Pg005] subject, and is at great pains to observe and note
every fluctuation in usage.[3] In Germany, amid many other such works,
there are the admirable grammars of the spoken speech by Dr. Otto
Bremer. In Sweden there are several journals devoted to the study of
the vulgate, and the government has recently granted a subvention of
7500 /kronen/ a year to an organization of scholars called the
Undersökningen av Svenska Folkmaal, formed to investigate it
systematically.[4] In Norway there is a widespread movement to
overthrow the official Dano-Norwegian, and substitute a national
language based upon the speech of the peasants.[5] In Spain the
Academia is constantly at work upon its great Diccionario, Ortografía
and Gramática, and revises them at frequent intervals (the last time
in 1914), taking in all new words as they appear and all new forms of
old ones. And in Latin-America, to come nearer to our own case, the
native philologists have produced a copious literature on the matter
closest at hand, [Pg006] and one finds in it very excellent works
upon the Portuguese dialect of Brazil, and the variations of Spanish
in Mexico, the Argentine, Chili, Peru, Ecuador, Uraguay and even
Honduras and Costa Rica.[6] But in the United States the business has
attracted little attention, and less talent. The only existing formal
treatise upon the subject[7] was written by a Swede trained in Germany
and is heavy with errors and omissions. And the only usable dictionary
of Americanisms[8] was written in England, and is the work of an
expatriated lawyer. Not a single volume by a native philologist,
familiar with the language by daily contact and professionally
equipped for the business, is to be found in the meagre bibliography.
I am not forgetting, of course, the early explorations of Noah
Webster, of which much more anon, nor the labors of our later
dictionary makers, nor the inquiries of the American Dialect
Society,[9] nor even the occasional illuminations of such writers as
Richard Grant White, Thomas S. Lounsbury and Brander Matthews. But all
this preliminary work has left the main field almost uncharted.
Webster, as we shall see, was far more a reformer of the American
dialect than a student of it. He introduced radical changes into its
spelling and pronunciation, but he showed little understanding of its
direction and genius. One always sees in him, indeed, the teacher
rather than the scientific inquirer; the ardor of his desire to
expound and instruct was only matched by his infinite capacity for
observing inaccurately, and his profound ignorance of elementary
philological principles. In the preface to the first edition of his
American Dictionary, published in 1828--the first in which he added
the qualifying adjective to the title--he argued eloquently for the
right of Americans to shape their own speech without regard to
English [Pg007] precedents, but only a year before this he had told
Captain Basil Hall[10] that he knew of but fifty genuine
Americanisms--a truly staggering proof of his defective observation.
Webster was the first American professional scholar, and despite his
frequent engrossment in public concerns and his endless public
controversies, there was always something sequestered and almost
medieval about him. The American language that he described and argued
for was seldom the actual tongue of the folks about him, but often a
sort of Volapük made up of one part faulty reporting and nine parts
academic theorizing. In only one department did he exert any lasting
influence, and that was in the department of orthography. The fact
that our spelling is simpler and usually more logical than the English
we chiefly owe to him. But it is not to be forgotten that the majority
of his innovations, even here, were not adopted, but rejected, nor is
it to be forgotten that spelling is the least of all the factors that
shape and condition a language.
The same caveat lies against the work of the later makers of
dictionaries; they have gone ahead of common usage in the matter of
orthography, but they have hung back in the far more important matter
of vocabulary, and have neglected the most important matter of idiom
altogether. The defect in the work of the Dialect Society lies in a
somewhat similar circumscription of activity. Its constitution,
adopted in 1889, says that "its object is the investigation of the
spoken English of the United States and Canada," but that
investigation, so far, has got little beyond the accumulation of
vocabularies of local dialects, such as they are. Even in this
department its work is very far from finished, and the Dialect
Dictionary announced years ago has not yet appeared. Until its
collections are completed and synchronized, it will be impossible for
its members to make any profitable inquiry into the general laws
underlying the development of American, or even to attempt a
classification of the materials common to the whole speech. The
meagreness of the materials accumulated in the five slow-moving
volumes of /Dialect Notes/ shows clearly, indeed, how little the
American philologist is [Pg008] interested in the language that falls
upon his ears every hour of the day. And in /Modern Language Notes/
that impression is reinforced, for its bulky volumes contain
exhaustive studies of all the other living languages and dialects, but
only an occasional essay upon American.
Now add to this general indifference a persistent and often violent
effort to oppose any formal differentiation of English and American,
initiated by English purists but heartily supported by various
Americans, and you come, perhaps, to some understanding of the
unsatisfactory state of the literature of the subject. The pioneer
dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1816 by John Pickering, a
Massachusetts lawyer,[11] was not only criticized unkindly; it was
roundly denounced as something subtly impertinent and corrupting, and
even Noah Webster took a formidable fling at it.[12] Most of the
American philologists of the early days--Witherspoon, Worcester,
Fowler, Cobb and their like--were uncompromising advocates of
conformity, and combatted every indication of a national independence
in speech with the utmost vigilance. One of their company, true
enough, stood out against the rest. He was George Perkins Marsh, and
in his "Lectures on the English Language"[13] he argued that "in point
of naked syntactical accuracy, the English of America is not at all
inferior to that of England." But even Marsh expressed the hope that
Americans would not, "with malice prepense, go about to republicanize
our orthography and our syntax, our grammars and our dictionaries, our
nursery hymns (/sic/) and our Bibles" to the point of actual
separation.[14] Moreover, he was a philologist only by courtesy; the
regularly ordained school-masters were all against him. The fear
voiced by William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, that
Americans might "break loose from the laws of the English
language"[15] altogether, was [Pg009] echoed by the whole fraternity,
and so the corrective bastinado was laid on.
It remained, however, for two professors of a later day to launch the
doctrine that the independent growth of American was not only immoral,
but a sheer illusion. They were Richard Grant White, for long the
leading American writer upon language questions, at least in popular
esteem, and Thomas S. Lounsbury, for thirty-five years professor of
the English language and literature in the Sheffield Scientific School
at Yale, and an indefatigable controversialist. Both men were of the
utmost industry in research, and both had wide audiences. White's
"Words and Their Uses," published in 1872, was a mine of erudition,
and his "Everyday English," following eight years later, was another.
True enough, Fitzedward Hall, the Anglo-Indian-American philologist,
disposed of many of his etymologies and otherwise did execution upon
him,[16] but in the main his contentions held water. Lounsbury was
also an adept and favorite expositor. His attacks upon certain
familiar pedantries of the grammarians were penetrating and effective,
and his two books, "The Standard of Usage in English" and "The
Standard of Pronunciation in English," not to mention his excellent
"History of the English Language" and his numerous magazine articles,
showed a profound knowledge of the early development of the language,
and an admirable spirit of free inquiry. But both of these laborious
scholars, when they turned from English proper to American English,
displayed an unaccountable desire to deny its existence altogether,
and to the support of that denial they brought a critical method that
was anything but unprejudiced. White devoted not less than eight long
articles in the /Atlantic Monthly/[17] to a review of the fourth
edition of John [Pg010] Russell Bartlett's American Glossary,[18] and
when he came to the end he had disposed of nine-tenths of Bartlett's
specimens and called into question the authenticity of at least half
of what remained. And no wonder, for his method was simply that of
erecting tests so difficult and so arbitrary that only the exceptional
word or phrase could pass them, and then only by a sort of chance. "To
stamp a word or a phrase as an Americanism," he said, "it is necessary
to show that (1) it is of so-called 'American' origin--that is, that
it first came into use in the United States of North America, or that
(2) it has been adopted in those States from some language other than
English, or has been kept in use there while it has /wholly/ passed
out of use in England." Going further, he argued that unless "the
simple words in compound names" were used in America "in a sense
different from that in which they are used in England" the compound
itself could not be regarded as an Americanism. The absurdity of all
this is apparent when it is remembered that one of his rules would bar
out such obvious Americanisms as the use of /sick/ in place of /ill/,
of /molasses/ for /treacle/, and of /fall/ for /autumn/, for all of
these words, while archaic in England, are by no means wholly extinct;
and that another would dispose of that vast category of compounds
which includes such unmistakably characteristic Americanisms as
/joy-ride/, /rake-off/, /show-down/, /up-lift/, /out-house/,
/rubber-neck/, /chair-warmer/, /fire-eater/ and /back-talk/.
Lounsbury went even further. In the course of a series of articles in
/Harper's Magazine/, in 1913,[19] he laid down the dogma that
"cultivated speech ... affords the only legitimate basis of comparison
between the language as used in England and in America," and then went
on:
In the only really proper sense of the term, an Americanism is a word
or phrase naturally used by an educated American which under similar
conditions would not be used by an educated Englishman. The emphasis,
it will be seen, lies in the word "educated."
This curious criterion, fantastic as it must have seemed to [Pg011]
European philologists, was presently reinforced, for in his fourth
article Lounsbury announced that his discussion was "restricted to the
/written/ speech of educated men." The result, of course, was a
wholesale slaughter of Americanisms. If it was not impossible to
reject a word, like White, on the ground that some stray English poet
or other had once used it, it was almost always possible to reject it
on the ground that it was not admitted into the vocabulary of a
college professor when he sat down to compose formal book-English.
What remained was a small company, indeed--and almost the whole field
of American idiom and American grammar, so full of interest for the
less austere explorer, was closed without even a peek into it.
White and Lounsbury dominated the arena and fixed the fashion. The
later national experts upon the national language, with a few somewhat
timorous exceptions, pass over its peculiarities without noticing
them. So far as I can discover, there is not a single treatise in type
upon one of its most salient characters--the wide departure of some of
its vowel sounds from those of orthodox English. Marsh, C. H.
Grandgent and Robert J. Menner have printed a number of valuable
essays upon the subject, but there is no work that co-ordinates their
inquiries or that attempts otherwise to cover the field. When, in
preparing materials for the following chapters, I sought to determine
the history of the /a/-sound in America, I found it necessary to plow
through scores of ancient spelling-books, and to make deductions,
perhaps sometimes rather rash, from the works of Franklin, Webster and
Cobb. Of late the National Council of Teachers of English has
appointed a Committee on American Speech and sought to let some light
into the matter, but as yet its labors are barely begun and the
publications of its members get little beyond preliminaries. Such an
inquiry involves a laboriousness which should have intrigued
Lounsbury: he once counted the number of times the word /female/
appears in "Vanity Fair." But you will find only a feeble dealing with
the question in his book on pronunciation. Nor is there any adequate
work (for Schele de Vere's is full of errors and omissions) upon the
influences felt by American through contact with the languages of our
millions [Pg012] of immigrants, nor upon our peculiarly rich and
characteristic slang. There are several excellent dictionaries of
English slang, and many more of French slang, but I have been able to
find but one devoted exclusively to American slang, and that one is a
very bad one.
§ 3
/The View of Writing Men/--But though the native /Gelehrten/ thus
neglect the vernacular, or even oppose its study, it has been the
object of earnest lay attention since an early day, and that attention
has borne fruit in a considerable accumulation of materials, if not in
any very accurate working out of its origins and principles. The
English, too, have given attention to it--often, alas, satirically, or
even indignantly. For a long while, as we shall see, they sought to
stem its differentiation by heavy denunciations of its vagaries, and
so late as the period of the Civil War they attached to it that
quality of abhorrent barbarism which they saw as the chief mark of the
American people. But in later years they have viewed it with a greater
showing of scientific calm, and its definite separation from correct
English, at least as a spoken tongue, is now quite frankly admitted.
The Cambridge History of English Literature, for example, says that
English and American are now "notably dissimilar" in vocabulary, and
that the latter is splitting off into a distinct dialect.[20] The
Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, going further, says
that the two languages are already so far apart that "it is not
uncommon to meet with [American] newspaper articles of which an
untravelled Englishman would hardly be able to understand a
sentence."[21] A great many other academic authorities, including A.
H. Sayce and H. W. and F. G. Fowler, bear testimony to the same
effect.
On turning to the men actually engaged in writing English, and
particularly to those aspiring to an American audience, one finds
nearly all of them adverting, at some time or other, to the growing
difficulties of intercommunication. William Archer, [Pg013] Arnold
Bennett, H. G. Wells, Sidney Low, the Chestertons and Kipling are some
of those who have dealt with the matter at length. Low, in an article
in the /Westminster Gazette/[22] ironically headed "Ought American to
be Taught in our Schools?" has described how the latter-day British
business man is "puzzled by his ignorance of colloquial American" and
"painfully hampered" thereby in his handling of American trade. He
continues:
In the United States of North America the study of the English tongue
forms part of the educational scheme. I gather this because I find
that they have professors of the English language and literature in
the Universities there, and I note that in the schools there are
certain hours alloted for "English" under instructors who specialize
in that subject. This is quite right. English is still far from being
a dead language, and our American kinsfolk are good enough to
appreciate the fact.
But I think we should return the compliment. We ought to learn the
American language in our schools and colleges. At present it is
strangely neglected by the educational authorities. They pay
attention to linguistic attainments of many other kinds, but not to
this. How many thousands of youths are at this moment engaged in
puzzling their brains over Latin and Greek grammar only Whitehall
knows. Every well-conducted seminary has some instructor who is under
the delusion that he is teaching English boys and girls to speak
French with a good Parisian accent. We teach German, Italian, even
Spanish, Russian, modern Greek, Arabic, Hindustani. For a moderate
fee you can acquire a passing acquaintance with any of these tongues
at the Berlitz Institute and the Gouin Schools. But even in these
polyglot establishments there is nobody to teach you American. I have
never seen a grammar of it or a dictionary. I have searched in vain
at the book-sellers for "How to Learn American in Three Weeks" or
some similar compendium. Nothing of the sort exists. The native
speech of one hundred millions of civilized people is as grossly
neglected by the publishers as it is by the schoolmasters. You can
find means to learn Hausa or Swahili or Cape Dutch in London more
easily than the expressive, if difficult, tongue which is spoken in
the office, the bar-room, the tram-car, from the snows of Alaska to
the mouths of the Mississippi, and is enshrined in a literature that
is growing in volume and favor every day.
Low then quotes an extract from an American novel appearing [Pg014]
serially in an English magazine--an extract including such
Americanisms as /side-stepper/, /saltwater-taffy/, /Prince-Albert/
(coat), /boob/, /bartender/ and /kidding/, and many characteristically
American extravagances of metaphor. It might be well argued, he goes
on, that this strange dialect is as near to "the tongue that
Shakespeare spoke" as "the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton," but that
philological fact does not help to its understanding. "You might
almost as well expect him [the British business man] to converse
freely with a Portuguese railway porter because he tried to stumble
through Caesar when he was in the Upper Fourth at school."
In the /London Daily Mail/, W. G. Faulkner lately launched this
proposed campaign of education by undertaking to explain various terms
appearing in American moving-pictures to English spectators. Mr.
Faulkner assumed that most of his readers would understand /sombrero/,
/sidewalk/, /candy-store/, /freight-car/, /boost/, /elevator/, /boss/,
/crook/ and /fall/ (for /autumn/) without help, but he found it
necessary to define such commonplace Americanisms as /hoodlum/,
/hobo/, /bunco-steerer/, /rubber-neck/, /drummer/, /sucker/, /dive/
(in the sense of a thieves' resort), /clean-up/, /graft/ and /to
feature/. Curiously enough, he proved the reality of the difficulties
he essayed to level by falling into error as to the meanings of some
of the terms he listed, among them /dead-beat/, /flume/, /dub/ and
/stag/. Another English expositor, apparently following him, thought
it necessary to add definitions of /hold-up/, /quitter/, /rube/,
/shack/, /road-agent/, /cinch/, /live-wire/ and /scab/,[23] but he,
too, mistook the meaning of /dead-beat/, and in addition he misdefined
/band-wagon/ and substituted /get-out/, seemingly an invention of his
own, for /get-away/. Faulkner, somewhat belated in his animosity,
seized the opportunity to read a homily upon the vulgarity and
extravagance of the American language, and argued that the
introduction of its coinages through the moving-picture theatre
(/Anglais, cinema/) "cannot be regarded without serious [Pg015]
misgivings, if only because it generates and encourages mental
indiscipline so far as the choice of expressions is concerned." In
other words, the greater pliability and resourcefulness of American is
a fault to be corrected by the English tendency to hold to that which
is established.
Cecil Chesterton, in the /New Witness/, recently called attention to
the increasing difficulty of intercommunication, not only verbally,
but in writing. The American newspapers, he said, even the best of
them, admit more and more locutions that puzzle and dismay an English
reader. After quoting a characteristic headline he went on:
I defy any ordinary Englishman to say that that is the English
language or that he can find any intelligible meaning in it. Even a
dictionary will be of no use to him. He must know the language
colloquially or not at all.... No doubt it is easier for an
Englishman to understand American than it would be for a Frenchman to
do the same, just as it is easier for a German to understand Dutch
than it would be for a Spaniard. But it does not make the American
language identical with the English.[24]
Chesterton, however, refrained from denouncing this lack of identity;
on the contrary, he allowed certain merits to American. "I do not want
anybody to suppose," he said, "that the American language is in any
way inferior to ours. In some ways it has improved upon it in vigor
and raciness. In other ways it adheres more closely to the English of
the best period." Testimony to the same end was furnished before this
by William Archer. "New words," he said, "are begotten by new
conditions of life; and as American life is far more fertile of new
conditions than ours, the tendency toward neologism cannot but be
stronger in America than in England. America has enormously enriched
the language, not only with new words, but (since the American mind
is, on the whole, quicker and wittier than the English) with apt and
luminous colloquial metaphors."[25]
The list of such quotations might be indefinitely prolonged. [Pg016]
There is scarcely an English book upon the United States which does
not offer some discussion, more or less profound, of American
peculiarities of speech, both as they are revealed in spoken discourse
(particularly pronunciation and intonation) and as they show
themselves in popular literature and in the newspapers, and to this
discussion protest is often added, as it very often is by the reviews
and newspapers. "The Americans," says a typical critic, "have so far
progressed with their self-appointed task of creating an American
language that much of their conversation is now incomprehensible to
English people."[26] On our own side there is almost equal evidence of
a sense of difference, despite the fact that the educated American is
presumably trained in orthodox English, and can at least read it
without much feeling of strangeness. "The American," says George Ade,
in his book of travel, "In Pastures New," "must go to England in order
to learn for a dead certainty that he does not speak the English
language.... This pitiful fact comes home to every American when he
arrives in London--that there are two languages, the English and the
American. One is correct; the other is incorrect. One is a pure and
limpid stream; the other is a stagnant pool, swarming with
bacilli."[27] This was written in 1906. Twenty-five years earlier Mark
Twain had made the same observation. "When I speak my native tongue in
its utmost purity in England," he said, "an Englishman can't
understand me at all."[28] The languages, continued Mark, "were
identical several generations ago, but our changed conditions and the
spread of our people far to the south and far to the west have made
many alterations in our pronunciation, and have introduced new words
among us and changed the meanings of old ones." Even before this the
great humorist had marked and hailed these differences. Already in
"Roughing It" he was celebrating "the vigorous new vernacular of the
[Pg017] occidental plains and mountains,"[29] and in all his writings,
even the most serious, he deliberately engrafted its greater liberty
and more fluent idiom upon the stem of English, and so lent the
dignity of his high achievement to a dialect that was as unmistakably
American as the point of view underlying it.
The same tendency is plainly visible in William Dean Howells. His
novels are mines of American idiom, and his style shows an undeniable
revolt against the trammels of English grammarians. In 1886 he made a
plea in /Harper's/ for a concerted effort to put American on its own
legs. "If we bother ourselves," he said, "to write what the critics
imagine to be 'English,' we shall be priggish and artificial, and
still more so if we make our Americans talk 'English.' ... On our lips
our continental English will differ more and more from the insular
English, and we believe that this is not deplorable but
desirable."[30] Howells then proceeded to discuss the nature of the
difference, and described it accurately as determined by the greater
rigidity and formality of the English of modern England. In American,
he said, there was to be seen that easy looseness of phrase and gait
which characterized the English of the Elizabethan era, and
particularly the Elizabethan hospitality to changed meanings and bold
metaphors. American, he argued, made new words much faster than
English, and they were, in the main, words of much greater daring and
savor.
The difference between the two tongues, thus noted by the writers of
both, was made disconcertingly apparent to the American troops when
they first got to France and came into contact with the English.
Fraternizing was made difficult by the wide divergence in vocabulary
and pronunciation--a divergence interpreted by each side as a sign of
uncouthness. The Y. M. C. A. made a characteristic effort to turn the
resultant feeling of strangeness and homesickness among the Americans
to account. In the /Chicago Tribune's/ Paris edition of July 7, 1917,
I find a large advertisement inviting them to make use of the Y. M. C.
A. [Pg018] clubhouse in the Avenue Montaigue, "where /American/ is
spoken." Earlier in the war the /Illinoiser Staats Zeitung/, no doubt
seeking to keep the sense of difference alive, advertised that it
would "publish articles daily in the /American/ language."
§ 4
/Foreign Observers/--What English and American laymen have thus
observed has not escaped the notice of continental philologists. The
first edition of Bartlett, published in 1848, brought forth a long and
critical review in the /Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen
und Literaturen/ by Prof. Felix Flügel,[31] and in the successive
volumes of the /Archiv/, down to our own day, there have been many
valuable essays upon Americanisms, by such men as Herrig, Koehler and
Koeppel. Various Dutch philologists, among them Barentz, Keijzer and
Van der Voort, have also discussed the subject, and a work in French
has been published by G. A. Barringer.[32] That, even to the lay
Continental, American and English now differ considerably, is
demonstrated by the fact that many of the popular German
/Sprachführer/ appear in separate editions, /Amerikanisch/ and
/Englisch/. This is true of the "Metoula Sprachführer" published by
Prof. F. Lanenscheidt[33] and of the "Polyglott Kuntz" books.[34] The
American edition of the latter starts off with the doctrine that
"/Jeder, der nach Nord-Amerika oder Australien will, muss Englisch
können/," but a great many of the words and phrases that appear in its
examples would be unintelligible to many Englishmen--/e.g./,
/free-lunch/, /real-estate agent/, /buckwheat/, /corn/ (for /maize/),
/conductor/, /pop-corn/ and /drug-store/--and a number of others would
suggest false meanings or otherwise puzzle--/e. g./, /napkin/,
/saloon/, /wash-stand/, /water-pitcher/ and /apple-pie/.[35] To
[Pg019] these pedagogical examples must be added that of Baedeker, of
guide-book celebrity. In his guide-book to the United States, prepared
for Englishmen, he is at pains to explain the meaning of various
American words and phrases.
A philologist of Scandinavian extraction, Elias Molee, has gone so far
as to argue that the acquisition of correct English, to a people grown
so mongrel in blood as the Americans, has become a useless burden. In
place of it he proposes a mixed tongue, based on English, but
admitting various elements from the other Germanic languages. His
grammar, however, is so much more complex than that of English that
most Americans would probably find his artificial "American" very
difficult of acquirement. At all events it has made no progress.[36]
§ 5