the Verband Deutscher Amateurphotographen-Vereine was moved to issue
the following warning: "Es gibt kein deutschen /Kodaks/. /Kodak/, als
Sammelname für photographische Erzeugnisse ist falsch und bezeichnet
nur die Fabrikate der Eastman-/Kodak/-Company. Wer von einem /Kodak/
spricht und nur allgemein eine photographische Kamera meint, bedenkt
nicht, dass er mit der Weiterverbreitung dieses Wortes die deutsche
Industrie zugunsten der amerikanisch-englischen schädigt."
[68] /Cf./ Word-Coinage and Modern Trade Names, by Louise Pound,
/Dialect Notes/, vol. iv, pt. i, 1913, pp. 29-41. Most of these
coinages produce derivatives, /e. g./, /bevo-officer/, /to kodak/,
/kodaker/.
[69] This conscious shortening, of course, is to be distinguished from
the shortening that goes on in words by gradual decay, as in
/Christmas/ (from /Christ's mass/) and /daisy/ (from /day's eye/).
[70] The Science of Language, vol. ii, p. 339.
[71] Daniel Jones: The Pronunciation of English, 2nd ed.; Cambridge,
1914, p. 1. Jones is lecturer in phonetics at University College,
London.
[72] /Vide/ his Handbook of Phonetics, p. xv, /et seq./
[73] It is given in Ellis' Early English Pronunciation, p. 1293 /et
seq./ and in Sayce's The Science of Language, vol. i, p. 353 /et seq./
[74] Every-Day English, p. 29.
[75] Robert J. Menner: The Pronunciation of English in America,
/Atlantic Monthly/, March, 1915, p. 366.
[76] Words and Their Uses, p. 58.
[77] The following passage from Kipling's American Notes, ch. i, will
be recalled: "Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the Yankee schoolmarm,
the cider and the salt codfish of the Eastern states are responsible
for what he calls a nasal accent. I know better. They stole books from
across the water without paying for 'em, and the snort of delight was
fixed in their nostrils for ever by a just Providence. That is why
they talk a foreign tongue today."
[78] Lecture xxx. The English Language in America.
[79] Modern English, p. 166. /Cf./ A Desk-Book of 25,000 Words
Frequently Mispronounced, by Frank H. Vizetelly, p. 652.
[80] Lexilogus, 2nd ed.; Berlin, 1860, p. 239. An English translation
was published in London in 1846.
[81] A Desk-Book of 25,000 Words Frequently Mispronounced, p. xvi.
[82] The Pronunciation of English, p. 17.
[83] The Pronunciation of English in America, /op. cit./, p. 362.
[84] The Question of Our Speech, p. 29 /et seq./
[85] /Cf./ The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv, p.
487.
[86] Robert Bridges: A Tract on the Present State of English
Pronunciation; Oxford, 1913.
[87] An interesting discussion of this peculiarity is in Some Variant
Pronunciations in the New South, by William A. Read, /Dialect Notes/,
vol. iii, pt. vii, 1911, p. 504 /et seq./
[88] Hugh Mearns: Our Own, Our Native Speech, /McClure's Magazine/,
Oct., 1916.
[89] The American actor imitates, not only English pronunciation in
all its details, but also English dress and bearing. His struggles
with such words as /extraordinary/ are often very amusing.
[90] /Cf./ Duncan Mackintosh: Essai Raisonné sur la Grammaire et la
Pronunciation Anglais; Boston, 1797.
[91] Fashion and the Broad /A/, /Nation/, Jan 7, 1915.
[92] High School Circular No. 17, June 19, 1912.
[93] Every-Day English, p. 243.
[94] Open Boats, by Alfred Noyes, New York, 1917, pp. 89-91.
[95] P. 30.
[96] The Science of Language, vol. i, p. 259.
[97] B. MacDonald Hastings, /New York Tribune/, Jan. 19, 1913.
[98] Various minor differences between English and American
pronunciation, not noted here, are discussed in British and American
Pronunciation, by Louise Pound, /School Review/, vol. xxiii, no. 6,
June, 1915.
[Pg177]
VI
The Common Speech
§ 1
/Grammarians and Their Ways/--So far, in the main, the language
examined has been of a relatively pretentious and self-conscious
variety--the speech, if not always of formal discourse, then at least
of literate men. Most of the examples of its vocabulary and idiom, in
fact, have been drawn from written documents or from written reports
of more or less careful utterances, for example, the speeches of
members of Congress and of other public men. The whole of Thornton's
excellent material is of this character. In his dictionary there is
scarcely a locution that is not supported by printed examples.
It must be obvious that such materials, however lavishly set forth,
cannot exhibit the methods and tendencies of a living speech with
anything approaching completeness, nor even with accuracy. What men
put into writing and what they say when they take sober thought are
very far from what they utter in everyday conversation. All of us, no
matter how careful our speech habits, loosen the belt a bit, so to
speak, when we speak familiarly to our fellows, and pay a good deal
less heed to precedents and proprieties, perhaps, than we ought to. It
was a sure instinct that made Ibsen put "bad grammar" into the mouth
of Nora Helmar in "A Doll's House." She is a general's daughter and
the wife of a professor, but even professor's wives are not above
occasional bogglings of the cases of pronouns and the conjugations of
verbs. The professors themselves, in truth, must have the same habit,
for sometimes they show plain signs of it in print. More than once,
plowing through profound and interminable treatises of grammar and
syntax in [Pg178] preparation for the present work, I have
encountered the cheering spectacle of one grammarian exposing, with
contagious joy, the grammatical lapses of some other grammarian. And
nine times out of ten, a few pages further on, I have found the
enchanted purist erring himself.[1] The most funereal of the sciences
is saved from utter horror by such displays of human malice and
fallibility. Speech itself, indeed, would become almost impossible if
the grammarians could follow their own rules unfailingly, and were
always right.
But here we are among the learned; and their sins, when detected and
exposed, are at least punished by conscience. What are of more
importance, to those interested in language as a living thing, are the
offendings of the millions who are not conscious of any wrong. It is
among these millions, ignorant of regulation and eager only to express
their ideas clearly and forcefully, that language undergoes its great
changes and constantly renews its vitality. These are the genuine
makers of grammar, marching miles ahead of the formal grammarians.
Like the Emperor Sigismund, each man among them may well say: "/Ego
sum ... super grammaticam/." It is competent for any individual to
offer his contribution--his new word, his better idiom, his novel
figure of speech, his short cut in grammar or syntax--and it is by the
general vote of the whole body, not by the verdict of a small school,
that the fate of the innovation is decided. As Brander Matthews says,
there is not even representative government in the matter; the /posse
comitatus/ decides directly, and despite the sternest protest,
finally. The ignorant, the rebellious and the daring come forward with
their brilliant barbarisms; the learned and conservative bring up
their objections. "And when both sides have been heard, there is a
show of hands; and by this the irrevocable decision of the community
itself is rendered."[2] Thus it was that the Romance languages were
fashioned out of the wreck of Latin, the vast [Pg179] influence of
the literate minority to the contrary notwithstanding. Thus it was,
too, that English lost its case inflections and many of its old
conjugations, and that our /yes/ came to be substituted for the
/gea-se/ (=/so be it/) of an earlier day, and that we got rid of
/whom/ after /man/ in /the man I saw/, and that our stark pronoun of
the first person was precipitated from the German /ich/. And thus it
is that, in our own day, the language faces forces in America which,
not content with overhauling and greatly enriching its materials, now
threaten to work changes in its very structure.
Where these tendencies run strongest, of course, is on the plane of
the vulgar spoken language. Among all classes the everyday speech
departs very far from orthodox English, and even very far from any
recognizable spoken English, but among those lower classes which make
up the great body of the people it gets so far from orthodox English
that it gives promise, soon or late, of throwing off its old bonds
altogether, or, at any rate, all save the loosest of them. Behind it
is the gigantic impulse that I have described in earlier chapters: the
impulse of an egoistic and iconoclastic people, facing a new order of
life in highly self-conscious freedom, to break a relatively stable
language, long since emerged from its period of growth, to their novel
and multitudinous needs, and, above all, to their experimental and
impatient spirit. This impulse, it must be plain, would war fiercely
upon any attempt at formal regulation, however prudent and elastic; it
is often rebellious for the mere sake of rebellion. But what it comes
into conflict with, in America, is nothing so politic, and hence
nothing so likely to keep the brakes upon it. What it actually
encounters here is a formalism that is artificial, illogical and
almost unintelligible--a formalism borrowed from English grammarians,
and by them brought into English, against all fact and reason, from
the Latin. "In most of our grammars, perhaps in all of those issued
earlier than the opening of the twentieth century," says Matthews, "we
find linguistic laws laid down which are in blank contradiction with
the genius of the language."[3] In brief, the American [Pg180]
school-boy, hauled before a pedagogue to be instructed in the
structure and organization of the tongue he speaks, is actually
instructed in the structure and organization of a tongue that he never
hears at all, and seldom reads, and that, in more than one of the
characters thus set before him, does not even exist.
The effects of this are two-fold. On the one hand he conceives an
antipathy to a subject so lacking in intelligibility and utility. As
one teacher puts it, "pupils tire of it; often they see nothing in it,
because there /is/ nothing in it."[4] And on the other hand, the
school-boy goes entirely without sympathetic guidance in the living
language that he actually speaks, in and out of the classroom, and
that he will probably speak all the rest of his life. All he hears in
relation to it is a series of sneers and prohibitions, most of them
grounded, not upon principles deduced from its own nature, but upon
its divergences from the theoretical language that he is so
unsuccessfully taught. The net result is that all the instruction he
receives passes for naught. It is not sufficient to make him a master
of orthodox English and it is not sufficient to rid him of the
speech-habits of his home and daily life. Thus he is thrown back upon
these speech-habits without any helpful restraint or guidance, and
they make him a willing ally of the radical and often extravagant
tendencies which show themselves in the vulgar tongue. In other words,
the very effort to teach him an excessively tight and formal English
promotes his use of a loose and rebellious English. And so the
grammarians, with the traditional fatuity of their order, labor for
the destruction of the grammar they defend, and for the decay of all
those refinements of speech that go with it.
The folly of this system, of course, has not failed to attract the
attention of the more intelligent teachers, nor have they failed to
observe the causes of its failure. "Much of the fruitlessness of the
study of English grammar," says Wilcox,[5] "and many of the obstacles
encountered in its study are due to 'the difficulties created by the
grammarians.' These difficulties arise chiefly from three
sources--excessive classification, multiplication of terms for a
single conception, and the attempt to treat the English language as if
it were highly inflected." So long ago as the 60's Richard Grant White
began an onslaught upon all such punditic stupidities. He saw clearly
that "the attempt to treat English as if it were highly inflected" was
making its intelligent study almost impossible, and proposed boldly
that all English grammar-books be burned.[6] Of late his ideas have
begun to gain a certain acceptance, and as the literature of
denunciation has grown[7] the grammarians have been constrained to
overhaul their texts. When I was a school-boy, during the penultimate
decade of the last century, the chief American grammar was "A
Practical Grammar of the English Language," by Thomas W. Harvey.[8]
This formidable work was almost purely synthetical: it began with a
long series of definitions, wholly unintelligible to a child, and
proceeded into a maddening maze of pedagogical distinctions, puzzling
even to an adult. The latter-day grammars, at least those for the
elementary schools, are far more analytical and logical. For example,
there is "Longmans' Briefer Grammar," by George J. Smith,[9] a text
now in very wide use. This book starts off, not with page after page
of abstractions, but with a well-devised examination of the complete
sentence, and the characters and relations of the parts of speech are
very simply and clearly developed. But before the end the author
begins to succumb to precedent, and on page 114 I find [Pg182]
paragraph after paragraph of such dull, flyblown pedantry as this:
Some Intransitive Verbs are used to link the Subject and some
Adjective or Noun. These Verbs are called Copulative Verbs, and the
Adjective or Noun is called the Attribute.
The Attribute always describes or denotes the person or thing denoted
by the Subject.
Verbals are words that are derived from Verbs and express action or
being without asserting it. Infinitives and Participles are Verbals.
And so on. Smith, in his preface, says that his book is intended, "not
so much to 'cover' the subject of grammar as to /teach/ it," and calls
attention to the fact, somewhat proudly, that he has omitted "the
rather hard subject of gerunds," all mention of conjunctive adverbs,
and even the conjugation of verbs. Nevertheless, he immerses himself
in the mythical objective case of nouns on page 108, and does not
emerge until the end.[10] "The New-Webster-Cooley Course in
English,"[11] another popular text, carries reform a step further. The
subject of case is approached through the personal pronouns, where it
retains its only surviving intelligibility, and the more lucid /object
form/ is used in place of /objective case/. Moreover, the pupil is
plainly informed, later on, that "a noun has in reality but two
case-forms: a possessive and a common case-form." This is the best
concession to the facts yet made by a text-book grammarian. But no one
familiar with the habits of the pedagogical mind need be told that its
interior pull is against even such mild and obvious reforms. Defenders
of the old order are by no means silent; a fear seems to prevail that
grammar, robbed of its imbecile classifications, may collapse
entirely. Wilcox records how the Council of English Teachers of New
Jersey, but a few years ago, spoke out boldly for the recognition of
no less than five cases [Pg183] in English. "Why five?" asks Wilcox.
"Why not eight, or ten, or even thirteen? Undoubtedly because there
are five cases in Latin."[12] Most of the current efforts at
improvement, in fact, tend toward a mere revision and multiplication
of classifications; the pedant is eternally convinced that
pigeon-holing and relabelling are contributions to knowledge. A
curious proof in point is offered by a pamphlet entitled
"Reorganization of English in Secondary Schools," compiled by James
Fleming Hosic and issued by the National Bureau of Education.[13] The
aim of this pamphlet is to rid the teaching of English, including
grammar, of its accumulated formalism and ineffectiveness--to make it
genuine instruction instead of a pedantic and meaningless routine. And
how is this revolutionary aim set forth? By a meticulous and merciless
splitting of hairs, a gigantic manufacture of classifications and
sub-classifications, a colossal display of professorial bombast and
flatulence.
I could cite many other examples. Perhaps, after all, the disease is
incurable. What such laborious stupidity shows at bottom is simply
this: that the sort of man who is willing to devote his life to
teaching grammar to children, or to training school-marms to do it, is
not often the sort of man who is intelligent enough to do it
competently. In particular, he is not often intelligent enough to
grapple with the fluent and ever-amazing permutations of a living and
rebellious speech. The only way he can grapple with it at all is by
first reducing it to a fixed and formal organization--in brief, by
first killing it and embalming it. The difference in the resultant
proceedings is not unlike that between a gross dissection and a
surgical operation. The difficulties of the former are quickly
mastered by any student of normal sense, but even the most casual of
laparotomies calls for a man of special skill and address. Thus the
elementary study of the national language, at least in America, is
almost monopolized by dullards. Children are taught it by men and
women who observe it inaccurately and expound it ignorantly. In most
other fields the pedagogue meets a certain corrective competition and
[Pg184] criticism. The teacher of any branch of applied mathematics,
for example, has practical engineers at his elbow and they quickly
expose and denounce his defects; the college teacher of chemistry,
however limited his equipment, at least has the aid of text-books
written by actual chemists. But English, even in its most formal
shapes, is chiefly taught by those who cannot write it decently and
who get no aid from those who can. One wades through treatise after
treatise on English style by pedagogues whose own style is atrocious.
A Huxley or a Stevenson might have written one of high merit and
utility--but Huxley and Stevenson had other fish to fry, and so the
business was left to Prof. Balderdash. Consider the standard texts on
prosody--vast piles of meaningless words--hollow babble about
spondees, iambics, trochees and so on--idiotic borrowings from dead
languages. Two poets, Poe and Lanier, blew blasts of fresh air through
that fog, but they had no successors, and it has apparently closed in
again. In the department of prose it lies wholly unbroken; no
first-rate writer of English prose has ever written a text-book upon
the art of writing it.
§ 2
/Spoken American As It Is/--But here I wander afield. The art of prose
has little to do with the stiff and pedantic English taught in
grammar-schools and a great deal less to do with the loose and lively
English spoken by the average American in his daily traffic. The thing
of importance is that the two differ from each other even more than
they differ from the English of a Huxley or a Stevenson. The
school-marm, directed by grammarians, labors heroically, but all her
effort goes for naught. The young American, like the youngster of any
other race, inclines irresistibly toward the dialect that he hears at
home, and that dialect, with its piquant neologisms, its high disdain
of precedent, its complete lack of self-consciousness, is almost the
antithesis of the hard and stiff speech that is expounded out of
books. It derives its principles, not from the subtle logic [Pg185]
of learned and stupid men, but from the rough-and-ready logic of every
day. It has a vocabulary of its own, a syntax of its own, even a
grammar of its own. Its verbs are conjugated in a way that defies all
the injunctions of the grammar books; it has its contumacious rules of
tense, number and case; it has boldly re-established the double
negative, once sound in English; it admits double comparatives,
confusions in person, clipped infinitives; it lays hands on the
vowels, changing them to fit its obscure but powerful spirit; it
disdains all the finer distinctions between the parts of speech.
This highly virile and defiant dialect, and not the fossilized English
of the school-marm and her books, is the speech of the Middle American
of Joseph Jacobs' composite picture--the mill-hand in a small city of
Indiana, with his five years of common schooling behind him, his
diligent reading of newspapers, and his proud membership in the Order
of Foresters and the Knights of the Maccabees.[14] Go into any part of
the country, North, East, South or West, and you will find multitudes
of his brothers--car conductors in Philadelphia, immigrants of the
second generation in the East Side of New York, iron-workers in the
Pittsburgh region, corner grocers in St. Louis, holders of petty
political jobs in Atlanta and New Orleans, small farmers in Kansas or
Kentucky, house carpenters in Ohio, tinners and plumbers in
Chicago,--genuine Americans all, hot for the home team, marchers in
parades, readers of the yellow newspapers, fathers of families, sheep
on election day, undistinguished norms of the /Homo Americanus/. Such
typical Americans, after a fashion, know English. They can read
it--all save the "hard" words, /i. e./, all save about 90 per cent of
the words of Greek and Latin origin.[15] They can understand perhaps
two-thirds of it as it comes from the lips of a political orator or
clergyman. They have a feeling that it is, in some recondite sense,
superior to the common speech of their kind. They recognize a fluent
command of it as the salient mark of a "smart" and [Pg186] "educated"
man, one with "the gift of gab." But they themselves never speak it or
try to speak it, nor do they look with approbation on efforts in that
direction by their fellows.
In no other way, indeed, is the failure of popular education made more
vividly manifest. Despite a gigantic effort to enforce certain speech
habits, universally in operation from end to end of the country, the
masses of the people turn almost unanimously to very different speech
habits, nowhere advocated and seldom so much as even accurately
observed. The literary critic, Francis Hackett, somewhere speaks of
"the enormous gap between the literate and unliterate American." He is
apparently the first to call attention to it. It is the national
assumption that no such gap exists--that all Americans, at least if
they be white, are so outfitted with sagacity in the public schools
that they are competent to consider any public question intelligently
and to follow its discussion with understanding. But the truth is, of
course, that the public school accomplishes no such magic. The
inferior man, in America as elsewhere, remains an inferior man despite
the hard effort made to improve him, and his thoughts seldom if ever
rise above the most elemental concerns. What lies above not only does
not interest him; it actually excites his derision, and he has coined
a unique word, /high-brow/, to express his view of it. Especially in
speech is he suspicious of superior pretension. The school-boy of the
lower orders would bring down ridicule upon himself, and perhaps
criticism still more devastating, if he essayed to speak what his
teachers conceive to be correct English, or even correct American,
outside the school-room. On the one hand his companions would laugh at
him as a prig, and on the other hand his parents would probably cane
him as an impertinent critic of their own speech. Once he has made his
farewell to the school-marm, all her diligence in this department goes
for nothing.[16] The boys with whom he plays baseball speak a tongue
that is not the one taught in school, and so do the youths with whom
he will begin learning a trade tomorrow, and the girl he will marry
later on, and the saloon-keepers, star pitchers, vaudeville comedians,
business [Pg187] sharpers and political mountebanks he will look up
to and try to imitate all the rest of his life.