forms which plainly show that it is the spirit of the language to
regard /self/, not as an adjective, which it is historically, but as a
noun. This confusion goes back to Anglo-Saxon days; it originated at a
time when both the adjectives and the nouns were losing their old
inflections. Such forms as /Petrussylf/ (=/Peter's self/), /Cristsylf/
(=/Christ's self/) and /Icsylf/ (=/I/, /self/) then came into use, and
along with them came combinations of /self/ and the genitive, still
surviving in /hisself/ and /theirselves/ (or /theirself/). Down to the
sixteenth century these forms remained in perfectly good usage. "Each
for /hisself/," for example, was written by Sir Philip Sidney, and is
to be found in the dramatists of the time, though modern editors
always change it to /himself/. How the dative pronoun got itself
[Pg225] fastened upon /self/ in the third person masculine and neuter
is one of the mysteries of language, but there it is, and so, against
all logic, history and grammatical regularity, /himself/, /themselves/
and /itself/ (not /its-self/) are in favor today. But the American, as
usual, inclines against these illogical exceptions to the rule set by
/myself/. I constantly hear /hisself/ and /theirselves/, as in "he
done it /hisself/" and "they don't know /theirselves/." Sometimes
/theirself/ is substituted for theirselves, as in "they all seen it
/theirself/." Also, the emphatic /own/ is often inserted between the
pronoun and the noun, as in "let every man save his /own/ self."
The American pronoun does not necessarily agree with its noun in
number. I find "I can tell each one what /they/ make," "each fellow
put /their/ foot on the line," "nobody can do what /they/ like" and
"she was one of /these/ kind of people" in Charters, and "I am not the
kind of man that is always thinking about /their/ record," "if he was
to hit a man in the head ... /they/ would think /their/ nose tickled"
in Lardner. At the bottom of this error there is a real difficulty:
the lack of a pronoun of the true common gender in English,
corresponding to the French /soi/ and /son/. /His/, after a noun or
pronoun connoting both sexes, often sounds inept, and /his-or-her/ is
intolerably clumsy. Thus the inaccurate plural is often substituted.
The brothers Fowler have discovered "anybody else who have only
/themselves/ in view" in Richardson and "everybody is discontented
with /their/ lot" in Disraeli, and Ruskin once wrote "if a customer
wishes you to injure /their/ foot." In spoken American, even the most
careful, /they/ and /their/ often appear; I turn to the /Congressional
Record/ at random and in two minutes find "if anyone will look at the
bank statements /they/ will see."[70] In the lower reaches of the
language the plural seems to get into every sentence of any
complexity, even when the preceding noun or pronoun is plainly
singular. [Pg226]
§ 5
/The Adverb/--All the adverbial endings in English, save /-ly/, have
gradually fallen into decay; it is the only one that is ever used to
form new adverbs. At earlier stages of the language various other
endings were used, and some of them survive in a few old words, though
they are no longer employed in making new words. The Anglo-Saxon
endings were /-e/ and /-lice/. The latter was, at first, merely an
/-e/-ending to adjectives in /-lic/, but after a time it attained to
independence and was attached to adjectives not ending in /-lic/. In
early Middle English this /-lice/ changes to /-like/, and later on to
/-li/ and /-ly/. Meanwhile, the /-e/-ending, following the
/-e/-endings of the nouns, adjectives and verbs, ceased to be
pronounced, and so it gradually fell away. Thus a good many adverbs
came to be indistinguishable from their ancestral adjectives, for
example, /hard/ in to /pull hard/, /loud/ in /to speak loud/, and
/deep/ in /to bury deep/ (=Anglo-Saxon, /dĕop-e/). Worse, not a few
adverbs actually became adjectives, for example, /wide/, which was
originally the Anglo-Saxon adjective /wid/ (=/wide/) with the
adverbial /-e/-ending, and /late/, which was originally the
Anglo-Saxon adjective /laet/ (=/slow/) with the same ending.
The result of this movement toward identity in form was a confusion
between the two classes of words, and from the time of Chaucer down to
the eighteenth century one finds innumerable instances of the use of
the simple adjective as an adverb. "He will answer /trewe/" is in Sir
Thomas More; "and /soft/ unto himself he sayd" in Chaucer; "the
singers sang /loud/" in the Revised Version of the Bible (Nehemiah
xii, 42), and "/indifferent/ well" in Shakespeare. Even after the
purists of the eighteenth century began their corrective work this
confusion continued. Thus, one finds, "the people are /miserable/
poor" in Hume, "how /unworthy/ you treated mankind" in /The
Spectator/, and "/wonderful/ silly" in Joseph Butler. To this day the
grammarians battle with the barbarism, still without complete success;
every new volume of rules and regulations for those who would speak by
the book is full of warnings against it. Among [Pg227] the great
masses of the plain people, it goes without saying, it flourishes
unimpeded. The cautions of the school-marm, in a matter so subtle and
so plainly lacking in logic or necessity, are forgotten as quickly as
her prohibition of the double negative, and thereafter the adjective
and the adverb tend more and more to coalesce in a part of speech
which serves the purposes of both, and is simple and intelligible and
satisfying.
Charters gives a number of characteristic examples of its use:
"wounded very /bad/," "I /sure/ was stiff," "drank out of a cup
/easy/," "he looked up /quick/." Many more are in Lardner: "a chance
to see me work /regular/," "I am glad I was lucky enough to marry
/happy/," "I beat them /easy/," and so on. And others fall upon the
ear every day: "he done it /proper/," "he done himself /proud/," "she
was dressed /neat/," "she was /awful/ ugly," "the horse ran /O. K./,"
"it /near/ finished him," "it sells /quick/," "I like it /fine/," "he
et /hoggish/," "she acted /mean/," "they keep company /steady/." The
bob-tailed adverb, indeed, enters into a large number of the commonest
coins of vulgar speech. /Near-silk/, I daresay, is properly
/nearly-silk/. The grammarians protest that "run /slow/" should be
"run /slowly/." But /near-silk/ and "run /slow/" remain, and so do "to
be in /bad/," "to play it up /strong/" and their brothers. What we
have here is simply an incapacity to distinguish any ponderable
difference between adverb and adjective, and beneath it, perhaps, is
the incapacity, already noticed in dealing with "it is /me/," to
distinguish between the common verb of being and any other verb. If
"it /is/ bad" is correct, then why should "it /leaks/ bad" be
incorrect? It is just this disdain of purely grammatical reasons that
is at the bottom of most of the phenomena visible in vulgar American,
and the same impulse is observable in all other languages during
periods of inflectional decay. During the highly inflected stage of a
language the parts of speech are sharply distinct, but when
inflections fall off they tend to disappear. The adverb, being at best
the step-child of grammar--as the old Latin grammarians used to say,
"/Omnis pars orationis migrat in adverbium/"--is one of the chief
victims of this anarchy. John Horne Tooke, despairing of bringing it
to any [Pg228] order, even in the most careful English, called it, in
his "Epea Ptercenta," "the common sink and repository of all
heterogeneous and unknown corruptions."
Where an obvious logical or lexical distinction has grown up between
an adverb and its primary adjective the unschooled American is very
careful to give it its terminal /-ly/. For example, he seldom confuses
/hard/ and /hardly/, /scarce/ and /scarcely/, /real/ and /really/.
These words convey different ideas. /Hard/ means unyielding; /hardly/
means barely. /Scarce/ means present only in small numbers; /scarcely/
is substantially synonymous with /hardly/. /Real/ means genuine;
/really/ is an assurance of veracity. So, again, with /late/ and
/lately/. Thus, an American says "I don't know, /scarcely/," not "I
don't know, /scarce/"; "he died /lately/," not "he died /late/." But
in nearly all such cases syntax is the preservative, not grammar.
These adverbs seem to keep their tails largely because they are
commonly put before and not after verbs, as in, for example, "I
/hardly/ (or /scarcely/) know," and "I /really/ mean it." Many other
adverbs that take that position habitually are saved as well, for
example, /generally/, /usually/, /surely/, /certainly/. But when they
follow verbs they often succumb, as in "I'll do it /sure/" and "I seen
him /recent/." And when they modify adjectives they sometimes succumb,
too, as in "it was /sure/ hot." Practically all the adverbs made of
adjectives in /-y/ lose the terminal /-ly/ and thus become identical
with their adjectives. I have never heard /mightily/ used; it is
always /mighty/, as in "he hit him /mighty/ hard." So with /filthy/,
/dirty/, /nasty/, /lowly/, /naughty/ and their cognates. One hears "he
acted /dirty/," "he spoke /nasty/," "the child behaved /naughty/," and
so on. Here even standard English has had to make concessions to
euphony. /Cleanlily/ is seldom used;, /cleanly/ nearly always takes
its place. And the use of /illy/ is confined to pedants.
Vulgar American, like all the higher forms of American and all save
the most precise form of written English, has abandoned the old
inflections of /here/, /there/ and /where/, to wit, /hither/ and
/hence/, /thither/ and /thence/, /whither/ and /whence/. These fossil
remains of dead cases are fast disappearing from the language.
[Pg229] In the case of /hither/ (=/to here/) even the preposition has
been abandoned. One says, not "I came /to here/," but simply "I came
/here/." In the case of /hence/, however, /from here/ is still used,
and so with /from there/ and /from where/. Finally, it goes without
saying that the common American tendency to add /-s/ to such adverbs
as /towards/ is carried to full length in the vulgar language. One
constantly hears, not only /somewheres/ and /forwards/, but even
/noways/ and /anyways/. Here we have but one more example of the
movement toward uniformity and simplicity. /Anyways/ is obviously
fully supported by /sideways/ and /always/.
§ 6
/The Noun and Adjective/--The only inflections of the noun remaining
in English are those for number and for the genitive, and so it is in
these two regions that the few variations to be noted in vulgar
American occur. The rule that, in forming the plurals of compound
nouns or noun-phrases, the /-s/ shall be attached to the principal
noun is commonly disregarded, and it goes at the end. Thus, "I have
two /sons-in-law/" is never heard; one always hears "I have two
/son-in-laws/." So with the genitive. I once overheard this: "that
umbrella is /the young lady I go with's/." Often a false singular is
formed from a singular ending in /s/, the latter being mistaken for a
plural. /Chinee/, /Portugee/ and /Japanee/ are familiar; I have also
noted /trapee/, /tactic/ and /summon/ (from /trapeze/, /tactics/ and
/summons/). Paradoxically, the word /incidence/ is commonly misused
for /incident/, as in "he told an /incidence/." Here /incidence/ (or
/incident/) seems to be regarded as a synonym, not for /happening/,
but for /story/. I have never heard "he told /of/ an incidence." The
/of/ is always omitted. The general disregard of number often shows
itself when the noun is used as object. I have already quoted
Lardner's "some of the men has brung their /wife/ along"; in a popular
magazine I lately encountered "those book ethnologists ... can't see
what is before their /nose/." Many similar examples might be brought
forward.
The adjectives are inflected only for comparison, and the [Pg230]
American commonly uses them correctly, with now and then a double
comparative or superlative to ease his soul. /More better/ is the
commonest of these. It has a good deal of support in logic. A sick man
is reported today to be /better/. Tomorrow he is further improved. Is
he to be reported /better/ again, or /best/? The standard language
gets around the difficulty by using /still better/. The American
vulgate boldly employs /more better/. In the case of /worse/, /worser/
is used, as Charters shows. He also reports /baddest/, /more queerer/
and /beautifulest/. /Littler/, which he notes, is still outlawed from
standard English, but it has, with /littlest/, a respectable place in
American. The late Richard Harding Davis wrote a play called "The
/Littlest/ Girl." The American freely compares adjectives that are
incapable of the inflection logically. Charters reports /most
principal/, and I myself have heard /uniquer/ and even /more uniquer/,
as in "I have never saw nothing /more uniquer/." I have also heard
/more ultra/, /more worse/, /idealer/, /liver/ (that is, /more
alive/), and /wellest/, as in "he was the /wellest/ man you ever
seen." In general, the /-er/ and /-est/ terminations are used instead
of the /more/ and /most/ prefixes, as in /beautiful/, /beautifuller/,
/beautifullest/. The fact that the comparative relates to two and the
superlative to more than two is almost always forgotten. I have never
heard "the /better/ of the two," but always "the /best/ of the two."
Charters also reports "the /hardest/ of the two" and "my brother and I
measured and he was the /tallest/." I have frequently heard "it ain't
so /worse/," but here a humorous effect seems to have been intended.
Adjectives are made much less rapidly in American than either
substantives or verbs. The only suffix that seems to be in general use
for that purpose is /-y/, as in /tony/, /classy/, /daffy/, /nutty/,
/dinky/, /leery/, etc. The use of the adjectival prefix /super-/ is
confined to the more sophisticated classes; the plain people seem to
be unaware of it.[71] This relative paucity of adjectives appears to
be common to the more primitive varieties of speech. E. J. [Pg231]
Hills, in his elaborate study of the vocabulary of a child of two,[72]
found that it contained but 23 descriptive adjectives, of which six
were the names of colors, as against 59 verbs and 173 common nouns.
Moreover, most of the 23 minus six were adjectives of all work, such
as /nasty/, /funny/ and /nice/. Colloquial American uses the same
rubber-stamps of speech. /Funny/ connotes the whole range of the
unusual; /hard/ indicates every shade of difficulty; /nice/ is
everything satisfactory; /bully/ is a superlative of almost limitless
scope.
The decay of /one/ to a vague /n/-sound, as in /this'n/, is matched by
a decay of /than/ after comparatives. /Earlier than/ is seldom if ever
heard; composition reduces the two words to /earlier'n/. So with
/better'n/, /faster'n/, /hotter'n/, /deader'n/, etc. Once I overheard
the following dialogue: "I like a belt /more looser'n/ what this one
is." "Well, then, why don't you unloosen it /more'n/ you got it
unloosened?"
§ 7
/The Double Negative/--Syntactically, perhaps the chief characteristic
of vulgar American is its sturdy fidelity to the double negative. So
freely is it used, indeed, that the simple negative appears to be
almost abandoned. Such phrases as "I see nobody" or "I know nothing
about it" are heard so seldom that they appear to be affectations when
encountered; the well-nigh universal forms are "I /don't/ see nobody"
and "I /don't/ know nothing about it." Charters lists some very
typical examples, among them, "he ain't /never/ coming back /no/
more," "you /don't/ care for nobody but yourself," "couldn't be /no/
more happier" and "I /can't/ see nothing." In Lardner there are
innumerable examples: "they was /not/ no team," "I have /not/ never
thought of that," "I can't write /no/ more," "no chance to get /no/
money from /nowhere/," "we /can't/ have nothing to do," and so on.
Some of his specimens show a considerable complexity, for [Pg232]
example, "Matthewson was /not/ only going as far as the coast,"
meaning, as the context shows, that he was going as far as the coast
and no further. /Only/ gets into many other examples, /e. g./, "he
hadn't /only/ the one pass" and "I don't work nights no more, /only/
except Sunday nights." This latter I got from a car conductor. Many
other curious specimens are in my collectanea, among them: "one
swaller don't make /no/ summer," "I /never/ seen nothing I would of
rather saw," and "once a child gets burnt once it /won't/ never stick
its hand in /no/ fire /no/ more," and so on. The last embodies a
triple negative. In "the more faster you go, the sooner you /don't/
get there" there is an elaborate muddling of negatives that is very
characteristic.
Like most other examples of "bad grammar" encountered in American the
compound negative is of great antiquity and was once quite
respectable. The student of Anglo-Saxon encounters it constantly. In
that language the negative of the verb was formed by prefixing a
particle, /ne/. Thus, /singan/ (=/to sing/) became /ne singan/ (=/not
to sing/). In case the verb began with a vowel the /ne/ dropped its
/e/ and was combined with the verb, as in /naefre/ (never), from
/ne-aefre/ (=/not ever/). In case the verb began with an /h/ or a /w/
followed by a vowel, the /h/ or /w/ of the verb and the /e/ of /ne/
were both dropped, as in /naefth/ (=/has not/), from /ne-haefth/
(=/not has/), and /nolde/ (=/would not/), from /ne-wolde/. Finally, in
case the vowel following a /w/ was an /i/, it changed to /y/, as in
/nyste/ (=/knew not/), from /ne-wiste/. But inasmuch as Anglo-Saxon
was a fully inflected language the inflections for the negative did
not stop with the verbs; the indefinite article, the indefinite
pronoun and even some of the nouns were also inflected, and survivors
of those forms appear to this day in such words as /none/ and
/nothing/. Moreover, when an actual inflection was impossible it was
the practise to insert this /ne/ before a word, in the sense of our
/no/ or /not/. Still more, it came to be the practise to reinforce
/ne/, before a vowel, with /nā/ (=/not/) or /naht/ (=/nothing/), which
later degenerated to /nat/ and /not/. As a result, there were fearful
and wonderful combinations of negatives, some of them fully matching
the best efforts of Lardner's baseball player. Sweet [Pg233] gives
several curious examples.[73] "Nān ne dorste nān thing āscian,"
translated literally, becomes "/no/ one dares /not/ ask /nothing/."
"Thaet hus nā ne feoll" becomes "the house did /not/ fall /not/." As
for the Middle English "he /never/ nadde /nothing/," it has too modern
and familiar a ring to need translating at all. Chaucer, at the
beginning of the period of transition to Modern English, used the
double negative with the utmost freedom. In "The Knight's Tale" is
this:
He /nevere/ yet /no/ vileynye /ne/ sayde
In al his lyf unto /no/ maner wight.
By the time of Shakespeare this license was already much restricted,
but a good many double negatives are nevertheless to be found in his
plays, and he was particularly shaky in the use of /nor/. In "Richard
III" one finds "I never was /nor never/ will be"; in "Measure for
Measure," "harp not on that /nor/ do /not/ banish treason," and in
"Romeo and Juliet," "thou expectedst not, /nor/ I looked not for."
This misuse of /nor/ is still very frequent. In other directions, too,
the older forms show a tendency to survive all the assaults of
grammarians. "/No/ it /doesn't/," heard every day and by no means from
the ignorant only, is a sort of double negative. The insertion of
/but/ before that, as in "I doubt /but/ that" and "there is no
question /but/ that," makes a double negative that is probably
full-blown. Nevertheless, as we have seen, it is heard on the floor of
Congress every day, and the Fowlers show that it is also common in
England.[74] Even worse forms get into the /Congressional Record/. Not
long ago, for example, I encountered "without /hardly/ an exception"
in a public paper of the utmost importance.[75] There are, indeed,
situations in which the double negative leaps to the lips or from the
pen almost irresistibly; even such careful writers as Huxley, Robert
Louis Stevenson and Leslie Stephen have [Pg234] occasionally dallied
with it.[76] It is perfectly allowable in the Romance languages, and,
as we have seen, is almost the rule in the American vulgate. Now and
then some anarchistic student of the language boldly defends and even
advocates it. "The double negative," said a writer in the /London
Review/ a long time ago,[77] "has been abandoned to the great injury
of strength of expression." Surely "I won't take nothing" is stronger
than either "I will take nothing" or "I won't take anything."
"Language begins," says Sayce, "with sentences, not with single
words." In a speech in process of rapid development, unrestrained by
critical analysis, the tendency to sacrifice the integrity of words to
the needs of the complete sentence is especially marked. One finds it
clearly in American. Already we have examined various assimilation and
composition forms: /that'n/, /use' to/, /would'a/, /them 'ere/ and so
on. Many others are observable. /Off'n/ is a good example; it comes
from /off of/ and shows a preposition decaying to the form of a mere
inflectional particle. One constantly hears "I bought it /off'n/
John." /Sort'a/, /kind'a/ and their like follow in the footsteps of
/would'a/. /Usen't/ follows the analogy of /don't/ and /wouldn't/.
/Would 've/ and /should 've/ are widely used; Lardner commonly hears
them as /would of/ and /should of/. The neutral /a/-particle also
appears in other situations, especially before /way/, as in /that'a
way/ and /this'a way/. It is found again in /a tall/, a liaison form
of /at all/.[78]
§ 8
/Pronunciation/--Before anything approaching a thorough and profitable
study of the sounds of the American common speech is possible, there
must be a careful assembling of the materials, and this, unfortunately,
still awaits a philologist of sufficient enterprise and equipment. Dr.
William A. Read, of the State University of Louisiana, has made some
excellent examinations [Pg235] of vowel and consonant sounds in the
South, Dr. Louise Pound has done capital work of the same sort in the
Middle West,[79] and there have been other regional studies of merit.
But most of these become misleading by reason of their lack of scope;
forms practically universal in the nation are discussed as dialectical
variations. This is the central defect in the work of the American
Dialect Society, otherwise very industrious and meritorious. It is
essaying to study localisms before having first platted the
characteristics of the general speech. The dictionaries of Americanisms
deal with pronunciation only casually, and often very inaccurately; the
remaining literature is meagre and unsatisfactory.[80] Until the matter
is gone into at length it will be impossible to discuss any phase of it
with exactness. No single investigator can examine the speech of the
whole country; for that business a pooling of forces is necessary. But
meanwhile it may be of interest to set forth a few provisional ideas.