newspapers will show a great many other American pollutions of the
well of English. The argot of politics is full of them. Many beside
/caucus/ were introduced by Joseph Chamberlain, a politician skilled
in American campaign methods and with an American wife to prompt him.
He gave the English their first taste of /to belittle/, one of the
inventions of Thomas Jefferson. /Graft/ and /to graft/ crossed the
ocean in their nonage. /To bluff/ has been well understood in England
for 30 years. It is in Cassell's and the Oxford Dictionaries, and has
been used by no less a magnifico than Sir Almroth Wright.[8] /To
stump/, in the form of /stump-oratory/, is in Carlyle's "Latter-Day
Pamphlets," /circa/ 1850, and /caucus/ appears in his "Frederick the
Great;"[9] though, as we have seen on the authority of Ware, it did
not come into general use in England until ten years later. /Buncombe/
(usually spelled /bunkum/) is in all the later English dictionaries.
In the London stock market and among English railroad men various
characteristic Americanisms have got a foothold. The meaning of
/bucket-shop/ and /to water/, for example, is familiar to every London
broker's clerk. English trains are now /telescoped/ and carry
/dead-heads/, and in 1913 a rival to the Amalgamated Order of Railway
/Servants/ was organized under the name of the National Union of
/Railway Men/. The beginnings of a movement against the use of
/servant/ are visible in other directions, and the American /help/
threatens to be substituted; at all events, /Help Wanted/
advertisements are now occasionally encountered in English newspapers.
But it is American verbs that seem to find the way into English least
difficult, particularly those compounded with prepositions and
adverbs, such as /to pan out/ and /to swear off/. Most of them, true
enough, [Pg136] are still used as conscious Americanisms, but used
they are, and with increasing frequency. The highly typical American
verb /to loaf/ is now naturalized, and Ware says that /The Loaferies/
is one of the common nicknames of the Whitechapel workhouse.
It is curious, reading the fulminations of American purists of the
last generation, to note how many of the Americanisms they denounced
have not only got into perfectly good usage at home but even broken
down all guards across the ocean. /To placate/ and /to antagonize/ are
examples. The Oxford Dictionary distinguishes between the English and
American meanings of the latter: in England a man may antagonize only
another man, in America he may antagonize a mere idea or thing. But,
as the brothers Fowler show, even the English meaning is of American
origin, and no doubt a few more years will see the verb completely
naturalized in Britain. /To placate/, attacked vigorously by all
native grammarians down to (but excepting) White, now has the
authority of the /Spectator/, and is accepted by Cassell. /To donate/
is still under the ban, but /to transpire/ has been used by the
/London Times/. Other old bugaboos that have been embraced are
/gubernatorial/, /presidential/ and /standpoint/. White labored long
and valiantly to convince Americans that the adjective derived from
/president/ should be without the /i/ in its last syllable, following
the example of /incidental/, /regimental/, /monumental/,
/governmental/, /oriental/, /experimental/ and so on; but in vain, for
/presidential/ is now perfectly good English. /To demean/ is still
questioned, but English authors of the first rank have used it, and it
will probably lose its dubious character very soon.
The flow of loan-words in the opposite direction meets with little
impediment, for social distinction in America is still largely
dependent upon English recognition, and so there is an eager imitation
of the latest English fashions in speech. This emulation is most
noticeable in the large cities of the East, and particularly in what
Schele de Vere called "Boston and the Boston dependencies." New York
is but little behind. The small stores there, if they are of any
pretentions, are now almost invariably called /shops/. Shoes for the
well-to-do are no longer [Pg137] /shoes/, but /boots/, and they are
sold in /bootshops/. One encounters, too, in the side-streets off
Fifth avenue, a multitude of /gift-shops/, /tea-shops/ and
/haberdashery-shops/. In Fifth avenue itself there are several
/luggage-shops/. In August, 1917, signs appeared in the New York
surface cars in which the conductors were referred to as /guards/.
This effort to be English and correct was exhibited over the sign
manual of Theodore P. Shonts, president of the Interborough, a
gentleman of Teutonic name, but evidently a faithful protector of the
king's English. On the same cars, however, painted notices, surviving
from some earlier régime, mentioned the guards as /conductors/. /To
Let/ signs are now as common in all our cities as /For Rent/ signs. We
all know the /charwoman/, and have begun to forget our native
modification of /char/, to wit, /chore/. Every apartment-house has a
/tradesmen's-entrance/. In Charles street, in Baltimore, some time
ago, the proprietor of a fashionable stationery store directed me, not
to the elevator, but to the /lift/.
Occasionally, some uncompromising patriot raises his voice against
these importations, but he seldom shows the vigorous indignation of
the English purists, and he seldom prevails. White, in 1870, warned
Americans against the figurative use of /nasty/ as a synonym for
/disagreeable/.[10] This use of the word was then relatively new in
England, though, according to White, the /Saturday Review/ and the
/Spectator/ had already succumbed. His objections to it were
unavailing; /nasty/ quickly got into American and has been there ever
since. In 1883 Gilbert M. Tucker protested against /good-form/,
/traffic/ (in the sense of travel), /to bargain/ and /to tub/ as
Briticisms that we might well do without, but all of them took root
and are perfectly sound American today. There is, indeed, no
intelligible reason why such English inventions and improvements
should not be taken in, even though the motive behind the welcome to
them may occasionally cause a smile. English, after all, is the mother
of American, and the child, until lately, was still at nurse. The
English, confronted by some of our fantastic innovations, may well
regard them as impudences to be put down, but what they [Pg138] offer
in return often fits into our vocabulary without offering it any
outrage. American, indeed, is full of lingering Briticisms, all
maintaining a successful competition with native forms. If we take
back /shop/ it is merely taking back something that /store/ has never
been able to rid us of: we use /shop-worn/, /shoplifter/, /shopping/,
/shopper/, /shop-girl/ and /to shop/ every day. In the same way the
word /penny/ has survived among us, despite the fact that there has
been no American coin of that name for more than 125 years. We have
/nickel-in-the-slot/ machines, but when they take a cent we call them
/penny-in-the-slot/ machines. We have /penny-arcades/ and
/penny-whistles/. We do not play /cent/-ante, but /penny/-ante. We
still "turn an honest /penny/" and say "a /penny/ for your thoughts."
The pound and the shilling became extinct a century ago, but the penny
still binds us to the mother tongue.
§ 2
/Points of Difference/--These exchanges and coalescences, however,
though they invigorate each language with the blood of the other and
are often very striking in detail, are neither numerous enough nor
general enough to counteract the centrifugal force which pulls them
apart. The simple fact is that the spirit of English and the spirit of
American have been at odds for nearly a century, and that the way of
one is not the way of the other. The loan-words that fly to and fro,
when examined closely, are found to be few in number both relatively
and absolutely: they do not greatly affect the larger movements of the
two languages. Many of them, indeed, are little more than temporary
borrowings; they are not genuinely adopted, but merely momentarily
fashionable. The class of Englishmen which affects American phrases is
perhaps but little larger, taking one year with another, than the
class of Americans which affects English phrases. This last class, it
must be plain, is very small. Leave the large cities and you will have
difficulty finding any members of it. It is circumscribed, not because
there is any very formidable prejudice against English locutions as
such, [Pg139] but simply because recognizably English locutions, in a
good many cases, do not fit into the American language. The American
thinks in American and the Englishman in English, and it requires a
definite effort, usually but defectively successful, for either to put
his thoughts into the actual idiom of the other.
The difficulties of this enterprise are well exhibited, though quite
unconsciously, by W. L. George in a chapter entitled "Litany of the
Novelist" in his book of criticism, "Literary Chapters."[11] This
chapter, it is plain by internal evidence, was written, not for
Englishmen, but for Americans. A good part of it, in fact, is in the
second person--we are addressed and argued with directly. And
throughout there is an obvious endeavor to help out comprehension by a
studied use of purely American phrases and examples. One hears, not of
the /East End/, but of the /East Side/; not of the /City/, but of
/Wall Street/; not of /Belgravia/ or the /West End/, but of /Fifth
avenue/; not of /bowler/ hats, but of /Derbys/; not of idlers in
/pubs/, but of /saloon loafers/; not of /pounds/, /shillings/ and
/pence/, but of /dollars/ and /cents/. In brief, a gallant attempt
upon a strange tongue, and by a writer of the utmost skill--but a
hopeless failure none the less. In the midst of his best American,
George drops into Briticism after Briticism, some of them quite as
unintelligible to the average American reader as so many Gallicisms.
On page after page they display the practical impossibility of the
enterprise: /back-garden/ for /back-yard/, /perambulator/ for
/baby-carriage/, /corn/-market for /grain/-market, coal-/owner/ for
coal-/operator/, /post/ for /mail/, and so on. And to top them there
are English terms that have no American equivalents at all, for
example, /kitchen-fender/.
The same failure, perhaps usually worse, is displayed every time an
English novelist or dramatist essays to put an American into a novel
or a play, and to make him speak American. However painstakingly it is
done, the Englishman invariably falls into capital blunders, and the
result is derided by Americans as Mark Twain derided the miners' lingo
of Bret Harte, and for the same reason. The thing lies deeper than
vocabulary and [Pg140] even than pronunciation and intonation; the
divergences show themselves in habits of speech that are fundamental
and almost indefinable. And when the transoceanic gesture is from the
other direction they become even plainer. An Englishman, in an
American play, seldom shows the actual speech habit of the Sassenach;
what he shows is the speech habit of an American actor trying to
imitate George Alexander. "There are not five playwrights in America,"
said Channing Pollock one day, "who can write English"--that is, the
English of familiar discourse. "Why should there be?" replied Louis
Sherwin. "There are not five thousand people in America who can
/speak/ English."[12]
The elements that enter into the special character of American have
been rehearsed in the first chapter: a general impatience of rule and
restraint, a democratic enmity to all authority, an extravagant and
often grotesque humor, an extraordinary capacity for metaphor[13]--in
brief, all the natural marks of what Van Wyck Brooks calls "a popular
life which bubbles with energy and spreads and grows and slips away
ever more and more from the control of tested ideas, a popular life
with the lid off."[14] This is the spirit of America, and from it the
American language is nourished. Brooks, perhaps, generalizes a bit too
lavishly. Below the surface there is also a curious conservatism, even
a sort of timorousness; in a land of manumitted peasants the primary
trait of the peasant is bound to show itself now and then; as Wendell
Phillips once said, "more than any other people, we Americans are
afraid of one another"--that is, afraid of opposition, of derision, of
all the consequences of singularity. But in the field of language, as
in that of politics, this suspicion of the new is often transformed
into a suspicion of the merely unfamiliar, and so its natural tendency
toward conservatism is overcome. It is of the essence of democracy
that it remain a government by amateurs, and under a government by
amateurs it is precisely the expert who is most questioned--and it is
the expert [Pg141] who commonly stresses the experience of the past.
And in a democratic society it is not the iconoclast who seems most
revolutionary, but the purist. The derisive designation of /high-brow/
is thoroughly American in more ways than one. It is a word put
together in an unmistakably American fashion, it reflects an habitual
American attitude of mind, and its potency in debate is peculiarly
national too.
I daresay it is largely a fear of the weapon in it--and there are many
others of like effect in the arsenal--which accounts for the far
greater prevalence of idioms from below in the formal speech of
America than in the formal speech of England. There is surely no
English novelist of equal rank whose prose shows so much of colloquial
looseness and ease as one finds in the prose of Howells: to find a
match for it one must go to the prose of the neo-Celts, professedly
modelled upon the speech of peasants, and almost proudly defiant of
English grammar and syntax, and to the prose of the English themselves
before the Restoration. Nor is it imaginable that an Englishman of
comparable education and position would ever employ such locutions as
those I have hitherto quoted from the public addresses of Dr.
Wilson--that is, innocently, seriously, as a matter of course. The
Englishman, when he makes use of coinages of that sort, does so in
conscious relaxation, and usually with a somewhat heavy sense of
doggishness. They are proper to the paddock or even to the dinner
table, but scarcely to serious scenes and occasions. But in the United
States their use is the rule rather than the exception; it is not the
man who uses them, but the man who doesn't use them, who is marked
off. Their employment, if high example counts for anything, is a
standard habit of the language, as their diligent avoidance is a
standard habit of English.
A glance through the /Congressional Record/ is sufficient to show how
small is the minority of purists among the chosen leaders of the
nation. Within half an hour, turning the pages at random, I find scores
of locutions that would paralyze the stenographers in the House of
Commons, and they are in the speeches, not of wild mavericks from the
West, but of some of the chief men of the two Houses. Surely no Senator
occupied a more conspicuous [Pg142] position, during the first year of
the war, than Lee S. Overman, of North Carolina, chairman of the
Committee on Rules, and commander of the administration forces on the
floor. Well, I find Senator Overman using /to enthuse/ in a speech of
the utmost seriousness and importance, and not once, but over and over
again.[15] I turn back a few pages and encounter it again--this time in
the mouth of General Sherwood, of Ohio. A few more, and I find a fit
match for it, to wit, /to biograph/.[16] The speaker here is Senator L.
Y. Sherman, of Illinois. In the same speech he uses /to resolute/. A
few more, and various other characteristic verbs are unearthed: /to
demagogue/,[17] /to dope out/[18] /to fall down/[19] (in the sense of
to fail), /to jack up/,[20] /to phone/,[21] /to peeve/,[22] /to come
across/,[23] /to hike/, /to butt in/,[24] /to back pedal/, /to get
solid with/, /to hooverize/, /to trustify/, /to feature/, /to insurge/,
/to haze/, /to reminisce/, /to camouflage/, /to play for a sucker/, and
so on, almost /ad infinitum/. And with them, a large number of highly
American nouns, chiefly compounds, all pressing upward for recognition:
/tin-Lizzie/, /brain-storm/, /come-down/, /pin-head/, /trustification/,
/pork-barrel/, /buck-private/, /dough-boy/, /cow-country/. And
adjectives: /jitney/, /bush/ (for rural), /balled-up/,[25] /dolled-up/,
/phoney/, /tax-paid/.[26] And phrases: /dollars to doughnuts/, /on the
job/, /that gets me/, /one best bet/. And back-formations: /ad/,
/movie/, /photo/. And [Pg143] various substitutions and Americanized
inflections: /over/ for /more than/, /gotten/ for /got/ in the present
perfect,[27] /rile/ for /roil/, /bust/ for /burst/. This last, in
truth, has come into a dignity that even grammarians will soon hesitate
to question. Who, in America, would dare to speak of /bursting/ a
broncho, or of a /trust-burster/?[28]
§ 3
/Lost Distinctions/--This general iconoclasm reveals itself especially
in a disdain for most of the niceties of modern English. The American,
like the Elizabethan Englishman, is usually quite unconscious of them
and even when they have been instilled into him by the hard labor of
pedagogues he commonly pays little heed to them in his ordinary
discourse. The English distinction between /will/ and /shall/ offers a
salient case in point. This distinction, it may be said at once, is
far more a confection of the grammarians than a product of the natural
forces shaping the language. It has, indeed, little etymological
basis, and is but imperfectly justified logically. One finds it
disregarded in the Authorized Version of the Bible, in all the plays
of Shakespeare, in the essays of the reign of Anne, and in some of the
best examples of modern English literature. The theory behind it is so
inordinately abstruse that the Fowlers, in "The King's English,"[29]
require 20 pages to explain it, and even then they come to the
resigned conclusion that the task is hopeless. "The idiomatic use [of
the two auxiliaries]," they say, "is so complicated that those who are
not to the manner born can hardly acquire it."[30] Well, even those
who are to the manner born seem to find [Pg144] it difficult, for at
once the learned authors cite blunder in the writings of Richardson,
Stevenson, Gladstone, Jowett, Oscar Wilde, and even Henry Sweet,
author of the best existing grammar of the English language. In
American the distinction is almost lost. No ordinary American, save
after the most laborious reflection, would detect anything wrong in
this sentence from the /London Times/, denounced as corrupt by the
Fowlers: "We must reconcile what we would like to do with what we can
do." Nor in this by W. B. Yeats: "The character who delights us may
commit murder like Macbeth ... and yet we will rejoice in every
happiness that comes to him." Half a century ago, impatient of the
effort to fasten the English distinction upon American, George P.
Marsh attacked it as of "no logical value or significance whatever,"
and predicted that "at no very distant day this verbal quibble will
disappear, and one of the auxiliaries will be employed, with all
persons of the nominative, exclusively as the sign of the future, and
the other only as an expression of purpose or authority."[31] This
prophecy has been substantially verified. /Will/ is sound American
"with all persons of the nominative," and /shall/ is almost invariably
an "expression of purpose or authority."[32]
And so, though perhaps not to the same extent, with /who/ and /whom/.
Now and then there arises a sort of panicky feeling that /whom/ is
being neglected, and so it is trotted out,[33] but in the [Pg145]
main the American language tends to dispense with it, at least in its
least graceful situations. Noah Webster, always the pragmatic
reformer, denounced it so long ago as 1783. Common sense, he argued,
was on the side of "/who/ did he marry?" Today such a form as "/whom/
are you talking to?" would seem somewhat affected in ordinary
discourse in America; "/who/ are you talking to?" is heard a thousand
times oftener--and is doubly American, for it substitutes /who/ for
/whom/ and puts a preposition at the end of a sentence: two crimes
that most English purists would seek to avoid. It is among the
pronouns that the only remaining case inflections in English are to be
found, if we forget the possessive, and even here these survivors of
an earlier day begin to grow insecure. Lounsbury's defense of "it is
/me/,"[34] as we shall see in the next chapter, has support in the
history and natural movement of the language, and that movement is
also against the preservation of the distinction between /who/ and
/whom/. The common speech plays hob with both of the orthodox
inflections, despite the protests of grammarians, and in the long run,
no doubt, they will be forced to yield to its pressure, as they have
always yielded in the past. Between the dative and accusative on the
one side and the nominative on the other there has been war in the
English language for centuries, and it has always tended to become a
war of extermination. Our now universal use of /you/ for /ye/ in the
nominative shows the dative and accusative swallowing the nominative,
and the practical disappearance of /hither/, /thither/ and /whither/,
whose place is now taken by /here/, /there/ and /where/, shows a
contrary process. In such wars a /posse comitatus/ marches ahead of
the disciplined army. American stands to English in the relation of
that posse to that army. It is incomparably more enterprising, more
contemptuous of precedent and authority, more impatient of rule.
A shadowy line often separates what is currently coming into sound
usage from what is still regarded as barbarous. No self-respecting
American, I daresay, would defend /ain't/ as a substitute [Pg146] for
/isn't/, say in "he /ain't/ the man," and yet /ain't/ is already
tolerably respectable in the first person, where English countenances
the even more clumsy /aren't/. /Aren't/ has never got a foothold in
the American first person; when it is used at all, which is very
rarely, it is always as a conscious Briticism. Facing the alternative
of employing the unwieldy "am I not in this?" the American turns
boldly to "/ain't/ I in this?" It still grates a bit, perhaps, but
/aren't/ grates even more. Here, as always, the popular speech is
pulling the exacter speech along, and no one familiar with its
successes in the past can have much doubt that it will succeed again,
soon or late. In the same way it is breaking down the inflectional
distinction between adverb and adjective, so that "I feel /bad/"
begins to take on the dignity of a national idiom, and /sure/, /to go
big/ and /run slow/[35] become almost respectable. When, on the
entrance of the United States into the war, the Marine Corps chose
"treat 'em /rough/" as its motto, no one thought to raise a
grammatical objection, and the clipped adverb was printed upon
hundreds of thousands of posters and displayed in every town in the
country, always with the imprimatur of the national government. So,
again, American, in its spoken form, tends to obliterate the
distinction between nearly related adjectives, /e. g./, /healthful/
and /healthy/, /tasteful/ and /tasty/. And to challenge the somewhat
absurd text-book prohibition of terminal prepositions, so that "where
are we /at/?" loses its old raciness. And to dally with the double
negative, as in "I have no doubt /but/ that."[36]