speech by all who have discussed it are, first, its general uniformity
throughout the country, so that, dialects, properly speaking, are
confined to recent immigrants, to the native whites of a few isolated
areas and to the negroes of the South; and, secondly, its impatient
disdain of rule and precedent, and hence its large capacity
(distinctly greater than that of the English of England) for taking in
new words and phrases and for manufacturing new locutions out of its
own materials. The first of these characters has struck every
observer, native and foreign. In place of the local dialects of other
countries we have a general /Volkssprache/ for the whole nation, and
if it is conditioned [Pg020] at all it is only by minor differences
in pronunciation and by the linguistic struggles of various groups of
newcomers. "The speech of the United States," said Gilbert M. Tucker,
"is quite unlike that of Great Britain in the important particular
that here we have no dialects."[37] "We all," said Mr. Taft during his
presidency, "speak the same language and have the same ideas."
"Manners, morals and political views," said the /New York World/,
commenting upon this dictum, "have all undergone a standardization
which is one of the remarkable aspects of American evolution. Perhaps
it is in the uniformity of language that this development has been
most noteworthy. Outside of the Tennessee mountains and the back
country of New England there is no true dialect."[38] "While we have
or have had single counties as large as Great Britain," says another
American observer, "and in some of our states England could be lost,
there is practically no difference between the American spoken in our
4,039,000 square miles of territory, except as spoken by foreigners.
We, assembled here, would be perfectly understood by delegates from
Texas, Maine, Minnesota, Louisiana, or Alaska, or from whatever walk
of life they might come. We can go to any of the 75,000 postoffices in
this country and be entirely sure we will be understood, whether we
want to buy a stamp or borrow a match."[39] "From Portland, Maine, to
Portland, Oregon," agrees an English critic, "no trace of a distinct
dialect is to be found. The man from Maine, even though he may be of
inferior education and limited capacity, can completely understand the
man from Oregon."[40]
No other country can show such linguistic solidarity, nor any approach
to it--not even Canada, for there a large part of the population
resists learning English altogether. The Little Russian of the Ukraine
is unintelligible to the citizen of Petrograd; [Pg021] the Northern
Italian can scarcely follow a conversation in Sicilian; the Low German
from Hamburg is a foreigner in Munich; the Breton flounders in
Gascony. Even in the United Kingdom there are wide divergences.[41]
"When we remember," says the New International Encyclopaedia[42] "that
the dialects of the countries (/sic/) in England have marked
differences--so marked, indeed that it may be doubted whether a
Lancashire miner and a Lincolnshire farmer could understand each
other--we may well be proud that our vast country has, strictly
speaking, only one language." This uniformity was noted by the
earliest observers; Pickering called attention to it in the preface to
his Vocabulary and ascribed it, no doubt accurately, to the
restlessness of the Americans, their inheritance of the immigrant
spirit, "the frequent removals of people from one part of our country
to another." It is especially marked in vocabulary and grammatical
forms--the foundation stones of a living speech. There may be slight
differences in pronunciation and intonation--a Southern softness, a
Yankee drawl, a Western burr--but in the words they use and the way
they use them all Americans, even the least tutored, follow the same
line. One observes, of course, a polite speech and a common speech,
but the common speech is everywhere the same, and its uniform vagaries
take the place of the dialectic variations of other lands. A Boston
street-car conductor could go to work in Chicago, San Francisco or New
Orleans without running the slightest risk of misunderstanding his new
fares. Once he had picked up half a dozen localisms, he would be, to
all linguistic intents and purposes, fully naturalized.
Of the intrinsic differences that separate American from English the
chief have their roots in the obvious disparity between the
environment and traditions of the American people since the
seventeenth century and those of the English. The latter have lived
under a stable social order, and it has impressed upon their souls
their characteristic respect for what is customary and of [Pg022]
good report. Until the war brought chaos to their institutions, their
whole lives were regulated, perhaps more than those of any other
people save the Spaniards, by a regard for precedent. The Americans,
though largely of the same blood, have felt no such restraint, and
acquired no such habit of conformity. On the contrary, they have
plunged to the other extreme, for the conditions of life in their new
country have put a high value upon the precisely opposite qualities of
curiosity and daring, and so they have acquired that character of
restlessness, that impatience of forms, that disdain of the dead hand,
which now broadly marks them. From the first, says a recent literary
historian, they have been "less phlegmatic, less conservative than the
English. There were climatic influences, it may be; there was surely a
spirit of intensity everywhere that made for short effort."[43] Thus,
in the arts, and thus in business, in politics, in daily intercourse,
in habits of mind and speech. The American is not, in truth, lacking
in a capacity for discipline; he has it highly developed; he submits
to leadership readily, and even to tyranny. But, by a curious twist,
it is not the leadership that is old and decorous that fetches him,
but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He will resist
dictation out of the past, but he will follow a new messiah with
almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of
economics, religion, morals and speech. A new fallacy in politics
spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and
so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new
means of killing time, or a new metaphor or piece of slang.
Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language
as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers
can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that
it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it
meet the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the
bold and imaginative. The characteristic American habit of reducing
complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations was already noticeable
in colonial times, [Pg023] and such highly typical Americanisms as
/O. K./, /N. G./, and /P. D. Q./, have been traced back to the first
days of the republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these early
tendencies invisible today, for the country is still in process of
growth, and no settled social order has yet descended upon it.
Institution-making is still going on, and so is language-making. In so
modest an operation as that which has evolved /bunco/ from /buncombe/
and /bunk/ from /bunco/ there is evidence of a phenomenon which the
philologist recognizes as belonging to the most primitive and lusty
stages of speech. The American vulgate is not only constantly making
new words, it is also deducing roots from them, and so giving proof,
as Prof. Sayce says, that "the creative powers of language are even
now not extinct."[44]
But of more importance than its sheer inventions, if only because much
more numerous, are its extensions of the vocabulary, both absolutely
and in ready workableness, by the devices of rhetoric. The American,
from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians.
His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has
been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest as
much upon brilliant phrases as upon logical ideas. And in small things
as in large he exercises continually an incomparable capacity for
projecting hidden and often fantastic relationships into arresting
parts of speech. Such a term as /rubber-neck/ is almost a complete
treatise on American psychology; it reveals the national habit of mind
more clearly than any labored inquiry could ever reveal it. It has in
it precisely the boldness and disdain of ordered forms that are so
characteristically American, and it has too the grotesque humor of the
country, and the delight in devastating opprobriums, and the acute
feeling for the succinct and savory. The same qualities are in
/rough-house/, /water-wagon/, /near-silk/, /has-been/, /lame-duck/ and
a thousand other such racy substantives, and in all the great stock of
native verbs and adjectives. There is, indeed, but a shadowy boundary
in these new coinages between the various parts of speech. /Corral/,
borrowed [Pg024] from the Spanish, immediately becomes a verb and the
father of an adjective. /Bust/, carved out of /burst/, erects itself
into a noun. /Bum/, coming by way of an earlier /bummer/ from the
German /bummler/, becomes noun, adjective, verb and adverb. Verbs are
fashioned out of substantives by the simple process of prefixing the
preposition: /to engineer/, /to chink/, /to stump/, /to hog/. Others
grow out of an intermediate adjective, as /to boom/. Others are made
by torturing nouns with harsh affixes, as /to burglarize/ and /to
itemize/, or by groping for the root, as /to resurrect/. Yet others
are changed from intransitive to transitive: a sleeping-car /sleeps/
thirty passengers. So with the adjectives. They are made of
substantives unchanged: /codfish/, /jitney/. Or by bold combinations:
/down-and-out/, /up-state/, /flat-footed/. Or by shading down suffixes
to a barbaric simplicity: /scary/, /classy/, /tasty/. Or by working
over adverbs until they tremble on the brink between adverb and
adjective: /right/ and /near/ are examples.
All of these processes, of course, are also to be observed in the
English of England; in the days of its great Elizabethan growth they
were in the lustiest possible being. They are, indeed, common to all
languages; they keep language alive. But if you will put the English
of today beside the American of today you will see at once how much
more forcibly they are in operation in the latter than in the former.
English has been arrested in its growth by its purists and
grammarians. It shows no living change in structure and syntax since
the days of Anne, and very little modification in either pronunciation
or vocabulary. Its tendency is to conserve that which is established;
to say the new thing, as nearly as possible, in the old way; to combat
all that expansive gusto which made for its pliancy and resilience in
the days of Shakespeare. In place of the old loose-footedness there is
set up a preciosity which, in one direction, takes the form of
unyielding affectations in the spoken language, and in another form
shows itself in the heavy Johnsonese of current English writing--the
Jargon denounced by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his Cambridge
lectures. This "infirmity of speech" Quiller-Couch finds "in
parliamentary debates and in the newspapers"; [Pg025] ... "it has
become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils,
Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as
well as the conclusions of their thought, and so voice the reason of
their being." Distinct from journalese, the two yet overlap, "and have
a knack of assimilating each other's vices."[45]
American, despite the gallant efforts of the professors, has so far
escaped any such suffocating formalization. We, too, of course, have
our occasional practitioners of the authentic English Jargon; in the
late Grover Cleveland we produced an acknowledged master of it. But in
the main our faults in writing lie in precisely the opposite
direction. That is to say, we incline toward a directness of statement
which, at its greatest, lacks restraint and urbanity altogether, and
toward a hospitality which often admits novelties for the mere sake of
their novelty, and is quite uncritical of the difference between a
genuine improvement in succinctness and clarity, and mere extravagant
raciness. "The tendency," says one English observer, "is ... to
consider the speech of any man, as any man himself, as good as any
other."[46] "All beauty and distinction," says another,[47] "are
ruthlessly sacrificed to force." Moreover, this strong revolt against
conventional bonds is by no means confined to the folk-speech, nor
even to the loose conversational English of the upper classes; it also
gets into more studied discourse, both spoken and written. I glance
through the speeches of Dr. Woodrow Wilson, surely a purist if we have
one at all, and find, in a few moments, half a dozen locutions that an
Englishman in like position would never dream of using, among them /we
must get a move on/,[48] /hog/ as a verb,[49] /gum-shoe/ as an
adjective with [Pg026] verbal overtones,[50] /onery/ in place of
/ordinary/,[51] and /that is going some/.[52] From the earliest days,
indeed, English critics have found this gipsy tendency in our most
careful writing. They denounced it in Marshall, Cooper, Mark Twain,
Poe, Lossing, Lowell and Holmes, and even in Hawthorne and Thoreau;
and it was no less academic a work than W. C. Brownell's "French
Traits" which brought forth, in a London literary journal, the dictum
that "the language most depressing to the cultured Englishman is the
language of the cultured American." Even "educated American English,"
agrees the chief of modern English grammarians, "is now almost
entirely independent of British influence, and differs from it
considerably, though as yet not enough to make the two dialects
--American English and British English--mutually unintelligible."[53]
American thus shows its character in a constant experimentation, a
wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid
forms. No other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and
phrases more readily; none is more careless of precedents; none shows
a greater fecundity and originality of fancy. It is producing new
words every day, by trope, by agglutination, by the shedding of
inflections, by the merging of parts of speech, and by sheer
brilliance of imagination. It is full of what Bret Harte called the
"sabre-cuts of Saxon"; it meets Montaigne's ideal of "a succulent and
nervous speech, short and compact, not as much delicated and combed
out as vehement and brusque, rather arbitrary than monotonous, not
pedantic but soldierly, as Suetonius called Caesar's Latin." One
pictures the common materials of English dumped into a pot, exotic
flavorings added, and the bubblings assiduously and expectantly
skimmed. What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it
comes into contact with what is new and vivid. Let American confront a
novel problem alongside [Pg027] English, and immediately its superior
imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious. /Movie/ is better
than /cinema/; it is not only better American, it is better English.
/Bill-board/ is better than /hoarding. Office-holder/ is more honest,
more picturesque, more thoroughly Anglo-Saxon that /public-servant/.
/Stem-winder/ somehow has more life in it, more fancy and vividness,
than the literal /keyless-watch/. Turn to the terminology of
railroading (itself, by the way, an Americanism): its creation fell
upon the two peoples equally, but they tackled the job independently.
The English, seeking a figure to denominate the wedge-shaped fender in
front of a locomotive, called it a /plough/; the Americans,
characteristically, gave it the far more pungent name of
/cow-catcher/. So with the casting where two rails join. The English
called it a /crossing-plate/. The Americans, more responsive to the
suggestion in its shape, called it a /frog/.
This boldness of conceit, of course, makes for vulgarity. Unrestrained
by any critical sense--and the critical sense of the professors counts
for little, for they cry wolf too often--it flowers in such barbaric
inventions as /tasty/, /alright/, /no-account/, /pants/,
/go-aheadativeness/, /tony/, /semi-occasional/, /to fellowship/ and
/to doxologize/. Let it be admitted: American is not infrequently
vulgar; the Americans, too, are vulgar (Bayard Taylor called them
"Anglo-Saxons relapsed into semi-barbarism"); America itself is
unutterably vulgar. But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a
yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions,
and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy
language-making. The history of English, like the history of American
and every other living tongue, is a history of vulgarisms that, by
their accurate meeting of real needs, have forced their way into sound
usage, and even into the lifeless catalogues of the grammarians. The
colonial pedants denounced /to advocate/ as bitterly as they ever
denounced /to compromit/ or /to happify/, and all the English
authorities gave them aid, but it forced itself into the American
language despite them, and today it is even accepted as English and
has got into the Oxford Dictionary. /To donate/, so late as 1870, was
dismissed by Richard Grant White as ignorant and [Pg028] abominable
and to this day the English will have none of it, but there is not an
American dictionary that doesn't accept it, and surely no American
writer would hesitate to use it.[54] /Reliable/, /gubernatorial/,
/standpoint/ and /scientist/ have survived opposition of equal
ferocity. The last-named was coined by William Whewell, an Englishman,
in 1840, but was first adopted in America. Despite the fact that
Fitzedward Hall and other eminent philologists used it and defended
it, it aroused almost incredible opposition in England. So recently as
1890 it was denounced by the /London Daily News/ as "an ignoble
Americanism," and according to William Archer it was finally accepted
by the English only "at the point of the bayonet."[55]
The purist performs a useful office in enforcing a certain logical
regularity upon the process, and in our own case the omnipresent
example of the greater conservatism of the English corrects our native
tendency to go too fast, but the process itself is as inexorable in
its workings as the precession of the equinoxes, and if we yield to it
more eagerly than the English it is only a proof, perhaps, that the
future of what was once the Anglo-Saxon tongue lies on this side of
the water. "The story of English grammar," says Murison, "is a story
of simplification, of dispensing with grammatical forms."[56] And of
the most copious and persistent enlargement of vocabulary and mutation
of idiom ever recorded, perhaps, by descriptive philology. English now
has the brakes on, but American continues to leap in the dark, and the
prodigality of its movement is all the [Pg029] indication that is
needed of its intrinsic health, its capacity to meet the ever-changing
needs of a restless and iconoclastic people, constantly fluent in
racial composition, and disdainful of hampering traditions.
"Language," says Sayce, "is no artificial product, contained in books
and dictionaries and governed by the strict rules of impersonal
grammarians. It is the living expression of the mind and spirit of a
people, ever changing and shifting, whose sole standard of correctness
is custom and the common usage of the community.... The first lesson
to be learned is that there is no intrinsic right or wrong in the use
of language, no fixed rules such as are the delight of the teacher of
Latin prose. What is right now will be wrong hereafter, what language
rejected yesterday she accepts today."[57]
§ 6
/The Materials of American/--One familiar with the habits of
pedagogues need not be told that, in their grudging discussions of
American, they have spent most of their energies upon vain attempts to
classify its materials. White and Lounsbury, as I have shown, carried
the business to the limits of the preposterous; when they had finished
identifying and cataloguing Americanisms there were no more
Americanisms left to study. The ladies and gentlemen of the American
Dialect Society, though praiseworthy for their somewhat deliberate
industry, fall into a similar fault, for they are so eager to
establish minute dialectic variations that they forget the general
language almost altogether.
Among investigators of less learning there is a more spacious view of
the problem, and the labored categories of White and Lounsbury are
much extended. Pickering, the first to attempt a list of Americanisms,
rehearsed their origin under the following headings:
1. "We have formed some new words."
2. "To some old ones, that are still in use in England, we have
affixed new significations."
3. "Others, which have long been obsolete in England, are still
retained in common use among us."
Bartlett, in the second edition of his dictionary, dated 1859,
increased these classes to nine;
1. Archaisms, /i. e./, old English words, obsolete, or nearly so, in
England, but retained in use in this country.
2. English words used in a different sense from what they are in
England. These include many names of natural objects differently
applied.
3. Words which have retained their original meaning in the United
States, though not in England.
4. English provincialisms adopted into general use in America.
5. Newly coined words, which owe their origin to the productions or
to the circumstances of the country.
6. Words borrowed from European languages, especially the French,
Spanish, Dutch and German.
7. Indian words.
8. Negroisms.
9. Peculiarities of pronunciation.
Some time before this, but after the publication of Bartlett's first
edition in 1848, William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst,
devoted a brief chapter to "American Dialects" in his well-known work
on English[58] and in it one finds the following formidable
classification of Americanisms:
1. Words borrowed from other languages.
a. Indian, as /Kennebec/, /Ohio/, /Tombigbee/; /sagamore/,
/quahaug/, /succotash/.
b. Dutch, as /boss/, /kruller/, /stoop/.
c. German, as /spuke/ (?), /sauerkraut/.
d. French, as /bayou/, /cache/, /chute/, /crevasse/, /levee/.
e. Spanish, as /calaboose/, /chapparal/, /hacienda/, /rancho/,
/ranchero/.
f. Negro, as /buckra/.
2. Words "introduced from the necessity of our situation, in order
to express new ideas."
a. Words "connected with and flowing from our political
institutions," as /selectman/, /presidential/, /congressional/,
/caucus/, /mass-meeting/, /lynch-law/, /help/ (for /servants/).
b. Words "connected with our ecclesiastical institutions," as
/associational/, /consociational/, /to fellowship/, /to
missionate/.
c. Words "connected with a new country," as /lot/, /diggings/,
/betterments/, /squatter/.
3. Miscellaneous Americanisms.
a. Words and phrases become obsolete in England, as /talented/,
/offset/ (for /set-off/), /back and forth/ (for /backward and
forward/).
b. Old words and phrases "which are now merely provincial in
England," as /hub/, /whap/ (?), /to wilt/.
c. Nouns formed from verbs by adding the French suffix /-ment/,
as /publishment/, /releasement/, /requirement/.
d. Forms of words "which fill the gap or vacancy between two
words which are approved," as /obligate/ (between /oblige/ and
/obligation/) and /variate/ (between /vary/ and /variation/).