exerts no such pressure upon the national language as that exerted
upon an immigrant language by the native, but nevertheless his
linguistic habits and limitations have to be reckoned with in dealing
with him, and the concessions thus made necessary have a very
ponderable influence upon the general speech. In the usual sense, as
we have seen, there are no dialects in American; two natives, however
widely their birthplaces may be separated, never have any practical
difficulty understanding each other. But there are at least
quasi-dialects among the immigrants--the Irish, the German, the
Scandinavian, the Italian, the Jewish, and so on--and these
quasi-dialects undoubtedly leave occasional marks, not only upon the
national vocabulary, but also upon the general speech habits of the
country, as in the case, for example, of the pronunciation of /yes/,
already mentioned, and in that of the substitution of the diphthong
/oi/ for the /ur-/sound in such words as /world/, /journal/ and
/burn/--a Yiddishism now almost universal among the lower classes of
New York, and threatening to spread.[56] More important, however, is
the support given to a native tendency by the foreigner's incapacity
for employing (or even comprehending) syntax of any complexity, or
words not of the simplest. This is the tendency toward succinctness
[Pg159] and clarity, at whatever sacrifice of grace. One English
observer, Sidney Low, puts the chief blame for the general
explosiveness of American upon the immigrant, who must be communicated
with in the plainest words available, and is not socially worthy of
the suavity of circumlocution anyhow.[57] In his turn the immigrant
seizes upon these plainest words as upon a sort of convenient Lingua
Franca--his quick adoption of /damn/ as a universal adjective is
traditional--and throws his influence upon the side of the underlying
speech habit when he gets on in the vulgate. Many characteristic
Americanisms of the sort to stagger lexicographers--for example,
/near-silk/--have come from the Jews, whose progress in business is a
good deal faster than their progress in English. Others, as we have
seen, have come from the German immigrants of half a century ago, from
the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch (who are notoriously ignorant and
uncouth), and from the Irish, who brought with them a form of English
already very corrupt. The same and similar elements greatly reinforce
the congenital tendencies of the dialect--toward the facile
manufacture of compounds, toward a disregard of the distinctions
between parts of speech, and, above all, toward the throwing off of
all etymological restraints.
§ 5
/Processes of Word Formation/--Some of these tendencies, it has been
pointed out, go back to the period of the first growth of American,
and were inherited from the English of the time. They are the products
of a movement which, reaching its height in the English of Elizabeth,
was dammed up at home, so to speak, by the rise of linguistic
self-consciousness toward the end of the reign of Anne, but continued
almost unobstructed in the colonies. For example, there is what
philologists call the habit of back-formation--a sort of instinctive
search, etymologically unsound, for short roots in long words. This
habit, in Restoration days, precipitated a quasi-English word,
/mobile/, from the Latin [Pg160] /mobile vulgus/, and in the days of
William and Mary it went a step further by precipitating /mob/ from
/mobile/. /Mob/ is now sound English, but in the eighteenth century it
was violently attacked by the new sect of purists,[58] and though it
survived their onslaught they undoubtedly greatly impeded the
formation and adoption of other words of the same category. But in the
colonies the process went on unimpeded, save for the feeble protests
of such stray pedants as Witherspoon and Boucher. /Rattler/ for
/rattlesnake/, /pike/ for /turnpike/, /draw/ for /drawbridge/, /coon/
for /raccoon/, /possum/ for /opossum/, /cuss/ for /customer/, /cute/
for /acute/, /squash/ for /askutasquash/--these American
back-formations are already antique; /Sabbaday/ for /Sabbath-day/ has
actually reached the dignity of an archaism. To this day they are
formed in great numbers; scarcely a new substantive of more than two
syllables comes in without bringing one in its wake. We have thus
witnessed, within the past two years, the genesis of scores now in
wide use and fast taking on respectability; /phone/ for /telephone/,
/gas/ for /gasoline/, /co-ed/ for /co-educational/, /pop/ for
/populist/, /frat/ for /fraternity/, /gym/ for /gymnasium/, /movie/
for /moving-picture/, /prep-school/ for /preparatory-school/, /auto/
for /automobile/, /aero/ for /aeroplane/. Some linger on the edge of
vulgarity: /pep/ for /pepper/, /flu/ for /influenza/, /plute/ for
/plutocrat/, /pen/ for /penitentiary/, /con/ for /confidence/ (as in
/con-man/, /con-game/ and /to con/), /convict/ and /consumption/,
/defi/ for /defiance/, /beaut/ for /beauty/, /rep/ for /reputation/,
/stenog/ for /stenographer/, /ambish/ for /ambition/, /vag/ for
/vagrant/, /champ/ for /champion/, /pard/ for /partner/, /coke/ for
/cocaine/, /simp/ for /simpleton/, /diff/ for /difference/. Others are
already in perfectly good usage: /smoker/ for /smoking-car/, /diner/
for /dining-car/, /sleeper/ for /sleeping-car/, /oleo/ for
/oleomargarine/, /hypo/ for /hyposulphite of soda/, /Yank/ for
/Yankee/, /confab/ for /confabulation/, /memo/ for /memorandum/,
/pop-concert/ for /popular-concert/. /Ad/ for /advertisement/ is
struggling hard for recognition; some of its compounds, /e. g./,
/ad-writer/, /want-ad/, /display-ad/, /ad-card/, /ad-rate/,
/column-ad/ and /ad-man/, are already accepted in technical
terminology. /Boob/ for /booby/ promises to become sound American in a
few years; its synonyms are no more respectable than it is. At
[Pg161] its heels is /bo/ for /hobo/, an altogether fit successor to
/bum/ for /bummer/.[59]
A parallel movement shows itself in the great multiplication of common
abbreviations. "Americans, as a rule," says Farmer, "employ
abbreviations to an extent unknown in Europe.... This trait of the
American character is discernible in every department of the national
life and thought."[60] /O. K./, /C. O. D./, /N. G./, /G. O. P./ (get
out and push) and /P. D. Q./, are almost national hall-marks; the
immigrant learns them immediately after /damn/ and /go to hell/.
Thornton traces /N. G./ to 1840; /C. O. D./ and /P. D. Q./ are
probably as old. As for /O. K./, it was in use so early as 1790, but
it apparently did not acquire its present significance until the 20's;
originally it seems to have meant "ordered recorded."[11] During the
presidential campaign of 1828 Jackson's enemies, seeking to prove his
illiteracy, alleged that he used it for "oll korrect." Of late the
theory has been put forward that it is derived from an Indian word,
/okeh/, signifying "so be it," and Dr. Woodrow Wilson is said to
support this theory and to use /okeh/ in endorsing government papers,
but I am unaware of the authority upon which the etymology is based.
Bartlett says that the figurative use of /A No. 1/, as in /an A No. 1
man/, also originated in America, but this may not be true. There can
be little doubt, however, about /T. B./ (for /tuberculosis/), /G. B./
(for /grand bounce/), /23/, /on the Q. T./, and /D. & D./ (/drunk and
disorderly/). The language breeds such short forms of speech
prodigiously; every trade and profession has a host of them; they are
innumerable in the slang of sport.[61]
What one sees under all this, account for it as one will, is a double
habit, the which is, at bottom, sufficient explanation of the gap
which begins to yawn between English and American, particularly on the
spoken plane. On the one hand it is a habit of verbal economy--a
jealous disinclination to waste two words on what can be put into one,
a natural taste for the brilliant and [Pg162] succinct, a disdain of
all grammatical and lexicographical daintiness, born partly, perhaps,
of ignorance, but also in part of a sound sense of their imbecility.
And on the other hand there is a high relish and talent for
metaphor--in Brander Matthews' phrase, "a figurative vigor that the
Elizabethans would have realized and understood." Just as the American
rebels instinctively against such parliamentary circumlocutions as "I
am not prepared to say" and "so much by way of being,"[62] just as he
would fret under the forms of English journalism, with its reporting
empty of drama, its third-person smothering of speeches and its
complex and unintelligible jargon,[63] just so, in his daily speech
and writing he chooses terseness and vividness whenever there is any
choice, and seeks to make one when it doesn't exist. There is more
than mere humorous contrast between the famous placard in the
wash-room of the British Museum: "These Basins Are For Casual
Ablutions Only," and the familiar sign at American railroad-crossings:
"Stop! Look! Listen!" Between the two lies an abyss separating two
cultures, two habits of mind, two diverging tongues. It is almost
unimaginable that Englishmen, journeying up and down in elevators,
would ever have stricken the teens out of their speech, turning
/sixteenth/ into simple /six/ and /twenty-fourth/ into /four/; the
clipping is almost as far from their way of doing things as the
climbing so high in the air. Nor have they the brilliant facility of
Americans for making new words of grotesque but penetrating tropes, as
in /corn-fed/, /tight-wad/, /bone-head/, /bleachers/ and /juice/ (for
/electricity/); when they attempt such things the result is often
lugubrious; two hundred years of schoolmastering has dried up their
inspiration. Nor have they the fine American hand for devising new
verbs; /to maffick/ and /to limehouse/ are their best specimens in
twenty years, and both have an almost pathetic flatness. Their
business with the language, indeed, is not in this department. They
are [Pg163] not charged with its raids and scoutings, but with the
organization of its conquests and the guarding of its accumulated
stores.
For the student interested in the biology of language, as opposed to its
paleontology, there is endless material in the racy neologisms of
American, and particularly in its new compounds and novel verbs. Nothing
could exceed the brilliancy of such inventions as /joy-ride/,
/high-brow/, /road-louse/, /sob-sister/, /nature-faker/, /stand-patter/,
/lounge-lizard/, /hash-foundry/, /buzz-wagon/, /has-been/,
/end-seat-hog/, /shoot-the-chutes/ and /grape-juice-diplomacy/. They are
bold; they are vivid; they have humor; they meet genuine needs.
/Joy-ride/, I note, is already going over into English, and no wonder.
There is absolutely no synonym for it; to convey its idea in orthodox
English would take a whole sentence. And so, too, with certain single
words of metaphorical origin: /barrel/ for large and illicit wealth,
/pork/ for unnecessary and dishonest appropriations of public money,
/joint/ for illegal liquor-house, /tenderloin/ for gay and dubious
neighborhood.[64] Most of these, and of the new compounds with them,
belong to the vocabulary of disparagement. Here an essential character
of the American shows itself: his tendency to combat the disagreeable
with irony, to heap ridicule upon what he is suspicious of or doesn't
understand.
The rapidity with which new verbs are made in the United States is
really quite amazing. Two days after the first regulations of the Food
Administration were announced, /to hooverize/ appeared spontaneously
in scores of newspapers, and a week later it was employed without any
visible sense of its novelty in the debates of Congress and had taken
on a respectability equal to that of /to bryanize/, /to fletcherize/
and /to oslerize/. /To electrocute/ appeared inevitably in the first
public discussion of capital [Pg164] punishment by electricity; /to
taxi/ came in with the first taxi-cabs; /to commute/ no doubt
accompanied the first commutation ticket; /to insurge/ attended the
birth of the Progressive balderdash. Of late the old affix /-ize/,
once fecund of such monsters as /to funeralize/, has come into favor
again, and I note, among its other products, /to belgiumize/, /to
vacationize/, /to picturize/ and /to scenarioize/. In a newspaper
headline I even find /to s o s/, in the form of its gerund.[65] Many
characteristic American verbs are compounds of common verbs and
prepositions or adverbs, with new meanings imposed. Compare, for
example, /to give/ and /to give out/, /to go back/ and /to go back
on/, /to beat/ and /to beat it/, /to light/ and /to light out/, /to
butt/ and /to butt in/, /to turn/ and /to turn down/, /to show/ and
/to show up/, /to put/ and /to put over/, /to wind/ and /to wind up/.
Sometimes, however, the addition seems to be merely rhetorical, as in
/to start off/, /to finish up/, /to open up/ and /to hurry up/. /To
hurry up/ is so commonplace in America that everyone uses it and no
one notices it, but it remains rare in England. /Up/ seems to be
essential to many of these latter-day verbs, /e. g./, /to pony up/,
/to doll up/, /to ball up/; without it they are without significance.
Nearly all of them are attended by derivative adjectives or nouns;
/cut-up/, /show-down/, /kick-in/, /come-down/, /hang-out/,
/start-off/, /run-in/, /balled-up/, /dolled-up/, /wind-up/, /bang-up/,
/turn-down/, /jump-off/.
In many directions the same prodigal fancy shows itself--for example,
in the free interchange of parts of speech, in the bold inflection of
words not inflected in sound English, and in the invention of wholly
artificial words. The first phenomenon has already concerned us. Would
an English literary critic of any pretensions employ such a locution
as "all by her /lonesome/"? I have a doubt of it--and yet I find that
phrase in a serious book by the critic of the /New Republic/.[66]
Would an English M. P. use "he has another /think/ coming" in debate?
Again I doubt it--but even more anarchistic dedications of verbs and
adjectives to substantival use are to be found in the /Congressional
Record/ every day. /Jitney/ is an old American substantive lately
[Pg165] revived; a month after its revival it was also an adjective,
and before long it may also be a verb and even an adverb. /To lift up/
was turned tail first and made a substantive, and is now also an
adjective and a verb. /Joy-ride/ became a verb the day after it was
born as a noun. And what of /livest/? An astounding inflection,
indeed--but with quite sound American usage behind it. The
/Metropolitan Magazine/, of which Col. Roosevelt is an editor,
announces on its letter paper that it is "the /livest/ magazine in
America," and /Poetry/, the organ of the new poetry movement, prints
at the head of its contents page the following encomium from the /New
York Tribune/: "the /livest/ art in America today is poetry, and the
/livest/ expression of that art is in this little Chicago monthly."
Now and then the spirit of American shows a transient faltering, and
its inventiveness is displaced by a banal extension of meaning, so
that a single noun comes to signify discrete things. Thus /laundry/,
meaning originally a place where linen is washed, has come to mean
also the linen itself. So, again, /gun/ has come to mean fire-arms of
all sorts, and has entered into such compounds as /gun-man/ and
/gun-play/. And in the same way /party/ has been borrowed from the
terminology of the law and made to do colloquial duty as a synonym for
/person/. But such evidences of poverty are rare and abnormal; the
whole movement of the language is toward the multiplication of
substantives. A new object gets a new name, and that new name enters
into the common vocabulary at once. /Sundae/ and /hokum/ are late
examples; their origin is dubious and disputed, but they met genuine
needs and so they seem to be secure. A great many more such
substantives are deliberate inventions, for example, /kodak/,
/protectograph/, /conductorette/, /bevo/, /klaxon/, /vaseline/,
/jap-a-lac/, /resinol/, /autocar/, /postum/, /crisco/, /electrolier/,
/addressograph/, /alabastine/, /orangeade/, /pianola/, /victrola/,
/dictagraph/, /kitchenette/, /crispette/, /cellarette/, /uneeda/,
/triscuit/ and /peptomint/. Some of these indicate attempts at
description: /oleomargarine/, /phonograph/ and /gasoline/ are older
examples of that class. Others represent efforts to devise
designations that will meet the conditions of advertising psychology
and the trade-marks law, to wit, that they [Pg166] be (/a/) new,
(/b/) easily remembered, and (/c/) not directly descriptive. Probably
the most successful invention of this sort is /kodak/, which was
devised by George Eastman, inventor of the portable camera so called.
/Kodak/ has so far won acceptance as a common noun that Eastman is
often forced to assert his proprietary right to it.[67] /Vaseline/ is
in the same position. The annual crop of such inventions in the United
States is enormous.[68] The majority die, but a hearty few always
survive.
Of analogous character are artificial words of the /scalawag/ and
/rambunctious/ class, the formation of which constantly goes on. Some
of them are shortened compounds: /grandificent/ (from /grand/ and
/magnificent/), /sodalicious/ (from /soda/ and /delicious/) and
/warphan/(/age/) (from /war/ and /orphan/(/age/)).[69] Others are made
up of common roots and grotesque affixes: /swelldoodle/,
/splendiferous/ and /peacharino/. Yet others are mere extravagant
inventions: /scallywampus/, /supergobsloptious/ and /floozy/. Most of
these are devised by advertisement writers or college students, and
belong properly to slang, but there is a steady movement of selected
specimens into the common vocabulary. The words in /-doodle/ hint at
German influences, and those in /-ino/ owe something to Italian, or at
least to popular burlesques of what is conceived to be Italian.
§ 6
/Pronunciation/--"Language," said Sayce, in 1879, "does not consist of
letters, but of sounds, and until this fact has been brought home to
us our study of it will be little better than an [Pg167] exercise of
memory."[70] The theory, at that time, was somewhat strange to English
grammarians and etymologists, despite the investigations of A. J.
Ellis and the massive lesson of Grimm's law; their labors were largely
wasted upon deductions from the written word. But since then, chiefly
under the influence of Continental philologists, and particularly of
the Dane, J. O. H. Jespersen, they have turned from orthographical
futilities to the actual sounds of the tongue, and the latest and best
grammar of it, that of Sweet, is frankly based upon the spoken English
of educated Englishmen--not, remember, of conscious purists, but of
the general body of cultivated folk. Unluckily, this new method also
has its disadvantages. The men of a given race and time usually write
a good deal alike, or, at all events, attempt to write alike, but in
their oral speech there are wide variations. "No two persons," says a
leading contemporary authority upon English phonetics,[71] "pronounce
exactly alike." Moreover, "even the best speaker commonly uses more
than one style." The result is that it is extremely difficult to
determine the prevailing pronunciation of a given combination of
letters at any time and place. The persons whose speech is studied
pronounce it with minute shades of difference, and admit other
differences according as they are conversing naturally or endeavoring
to exhibit their pronunciation. Worse, it is impossible to represent a
great many of these shades in print. Sweet, trying to do it,[72] found
himself, in the end, with a preposterous alphabet of 125 letters.
Prince L.-L. Bonaparte more than doubled this number, and Ellis
brought it to 390.[73] Other phonologists, English and Continental,
have gone floundering into the same bog. The dictionary-makers, forced
to a far greater economy of means, are brought into obscurity. The
difficulties of the enterprise, in fact, are probably unsurmountable.
It is, as White says, "almost impossible for one person to express to
another by signs the [Pg168] sound of any word." "Only the voice," he
goes on, "is capable of that; for the moment a sign is used the
question arises, What is the value of that sign? The sounds of words
are the most delicate, fleeting and inapprehensible things in
nature.... Moreover, the question arises as to the capability to
apprehend and distinguish sounds on the part of the person whose
evidence is given."[74] Certain German orthoepists, despairing of the
printed page, have turned to the phonograph, and there is a Deutsche
Grammophon-Gesellschaft in Berlin which offers records of specimen
speeches in a great many languages and dialects, including English.
The phonograph has also been put to successful use in language
teaching by various American correspondence schools.
In view of all this it would be hopeless to attempt to exhibit in
print the numerous small differences between English and American
pronunciation, for many of them are extremely delicate and subtle, and
only their aggregation makes them plain. According to a recent and
very careful observer,[75] the most important of them do not lie in
pronunciation at all, properly so called, but in intonation. In this
direction, he says, one must look for the true characters "of the
English accent." I incline to agree with White,[76] that the pitch of
the English voice is somewhat higher than that of the American, and
that it is thus more penetrating. The nasal twang which Englishmen
observe in the /vox Americana/, though it has high overtones, is
itself not high pitched, but rather low pitched, as all constrained
and muffled tones are apt to be. The causes of that twang have long
engaged phonologists, and in the main they agree that there is a
physical basis for it--that our generally dry climate and rapid
changes of temperature produce an actual thickening of the membranes
concerned in the production of sound.[77] We are, in brief, a somewhat
snuffling [Pg169] people, and much more given to catarrhs and coryzas
than the inhabitants of damp Britain. Perhaps this general impediment
to free and easy utterance, subconsciously apprehended, is responsible
for the American tendency to pronounce the separate syllables of a
word with much more care than an Englishman bestows upon them; the
American, in giving /extraordinary/ six distinct syllables instead of
the Englishman's grudging four, may be seeking to make up for his
natural disability. Marsh, in his "Lectures on the English
Language,"[78] sought two other explanations of the fact. On the one
hand, he argued that the Americans of his day read a great deal more
than the English, and were thus much more influenced by the spelling
of words, and on the other hand he pointed out that "our flora shows
that the climate of even our Northern States belongs ... to a more
Southern type than that of England," and that "in Southern latitudes
... articulation is generally much more distinct than in Northern
regions." In support of the latter proposition he cited the
pronunciation of Spanish, Italian and Turkish, as compared with that
of English, Danish and German--rather unfortunate examples, for the
pronunciation of German is at least as clear as that of Italian.
Swedish would have supported his case far better: the Swedes debase
their vowels and slide over their consonants even more markedly than
the English. Marsh believed that there was a tendency among Southern
peoples to throw the accent back, and that this helped to "bring out
all the syllables." One finds a certain support for this notion in
various American peculiarities of stress. /Advertisement/ offers an
example. The prevailing American pronunciation, despite incessant
pedagogical counterblasts, puts the accent on the penult, whereas the
English pronunciation stresses the second syllable. /Paresis/
illustrates the same tendency. The English accent the first syllable,
but, as Krapp says, American usage clings to the [Pg170] accent on
the second syllable.[79] There are, again, /pianist/, /primarily/ and
/telegrapher/. The English accent the first syllable of each; we
commonly accent the second. In /temporarily/ they also accent the
first; we accent the third. Various other examples might be cited. But
when one had marshalled them their significance would be at once set
at naught by four very familiar words, /mamma/, /papa/, /inquiry/ and
/ally/. Americans almost invariably accent each on the first syllable;
Englishmen stress the second. For months, during 1918, the publishers
of the Standard Dictionary, advertising that work in the street-cars,
explained that /ally/ should be accented on the second syllable, and
pointed out that owners of their dictionary were safeguarded against
the vulgarism of accenting it on the first. Nevertheless, this free
and highly public instruction did not suffice to exterminate /al´ly/.
I made note of the pronunciations overheard, with the word constantly
on all lips. But one man of my acquaintance regularly accented the
second syllable, and he was an eminent scholar, professionally devoted
to the study of language.