1. in_ernet_dli_2015_169487_2015_169487_The-American-Language-An-Inquiry-Into-The-Development-Of-English-In-The-United-States

THE TEXT IS FLY WITHIN THE BOOK ONLY

SELECTED PREJUDICES A BOOK OF BURLESQUES A BOOK OF PREFACES IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN NOTES ON DEMOCRACY TREATISE ON THE GODS TREATISE ON RIGHT AND WRONG

lr. Mencken has also written

: has translated THE ANTICHRIST BY F. W. NIETZSCHE

e has written introductions to VENTURES IN COMMON SENSE BY E. W. HOWE MAJOR CONFLICTS BY STEPHEN CRANE THE AMERICAN DEMOCRAT BY JAMES FENIMORE COOPER CANCER: WHEN EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IT BY JAMES A. TOBEY

These are BORZOI BOOKS published by Alfred A Knopf

THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

THE

American Language

AN INQUIRY

INTO THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH

IN THE UNITED STATES

BY

H. L. Mencken

1936

ALFRED A. KNOPF

NEW YORK

out permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper.

PUBLISHED March, 1919

REVISED EDITION published December, 1921

THIRD EDITION again revised published February, 1923

FOURTH EDITION corrected, enlarged, and rewritten published April, 1936

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO THE FOURTH EDITION

The first edition of this book, running to 374 pages, was published in March, 1919. It sold out very quickly, and so much new matter came in from readers that a revision was undertaken almost at once. This revision, however, collided with other enterprises, and was not finished and published until December, 1921. It ran to 492 pages. In its turn it attracted corrections and additions from many correspondents, and in February, 1923, I brought out a third edition, revised and enlarged. This third edition has been reprinted five times, and has had a large circulation, but for some years past its mounting deficiencies have been haunting me, and on my retirement from the editorship of the American Mercury at the end of 1933 I began to make plans for rewriting it. The task turned out to be so formidable as to be almost appalling. I found myself confronted by a really enormous accumulation of notes, including hundreds of letters from correspondents in all parts of the world and thousands of clippings from the periodical press of the British Empire, the United States and most of the countries of Continental Europe. Among the letters were many that reviewed my third edition page by page, and suggested multitudinous additions to the text, or changes in it. One of them was no less than 10,000 words long. The clippings embraced every discussion of the American language printed in the British Empire since the end of 1922 – at all events, every one that the singularly alert Durrant Press-Cutting Agency could discover. Furthermore, there were the growing files of American Speech, set up in October, 1925, and of Dialect Notes, and a large number of books and pamphlets, mostly in English but some also in German, French and other foreign languages, including even Japanese. It soon became plain that this immense mass of new material made a mere revision of the third edition out of the question. What was

needed was a complete reworking, following to some extent the outlines of the carlier editions, but with many additions and a number of emendations and shortenings. That reworking has occupied me, with two or three intervals, since the beginning of 1934. The present book picks up bodily a few short passages from the third edition, but they are not many. In the main, it is a new work.

The reader familiar with my earlier editions will find that it not only presents a large amount of matter that was not available when they were written, but also modifies the thesis which they set forth. When I became interested in the subject and began writing about it (in the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1910), the American form of the English language was plainly departing from the parent stem, and it seemed at least likely that the differences between American and English would go on increasing. This was what I argued in my first three editions. But since 1923 the pull of American has become so powerful that it has begun to drag English with it, and in consequence some of the differences once visible have tended to disappear. The two forms of the language, of course, are still distinct in more ways than one, and when an Englishman and an American meet they continue to be conscious that each speaks a tongue that is far from identical with the tongue spoken by the other. But the Englishman, of late, has yielded so much to American example, in vocabulary, in idiom, in spelling and even in pronunciation, that what he speaks promises to become, on some not too remote tomorrow, a kind of dialect of American, just as the language spoken by the American was once a dialect of English. The English writers who note this change lay it to the influence of the American movies and talkies, but it seems to me that there is also something more, and something deeper. The American people now constitute by far the largest fraction of the English-speaking race, and since the World War they have shown an increasing inclination to throw off their old subservience to English precept and example. If only by the force of numbers, they are bound to exert a dominant influence upon the course of the common language hereafter. But all this I discuss at length, supported by the evidence now available, in the pages following.

At the risk of making my book of forbidding bulk I have sought to present a comprehensive conspectus of the whole matter, with references to all the pertinent literature. My experience with the

Preface to the Fourth Edition

three preceding editions convinces me that the persons who are really interested in American English are not daunted by biblio-

graphical apparatus, but rather demand it. The letters that so many of them have been kind enough to send to me show that they delight

in running down the by-ways of the subject, and I have tried to assist them by setting up as many guide-posts as possible, pointing

into every alley as we pass along. Thus my references keep in step with the text, where they are most convenient and useful, and I

have been able to dispense with the Bibliography which filled 32 pages of small type in my third edition. I have also omitted a few

illustrative oddities appearing in that edition – for example, speci-

mens of vulgar American by Ring W. Lardner and John V. A. Weaver, and my own translations of the Declaration of Independ-

ence and Lincoln’s Gettsyburg Address. The latter two, I am sorry to say, were mistaken by a number of outraged English critics for

examples of Standard American, or of what I proposed that Standard American should be. Omitting them will get rid of that misappre-

hension and save some space, and those who want to consult them will know where to find them in my third edition.

I can’t pretend that I have covered the whole field in the present volume, for that field has become very large in area. But I have at

least tried to cover those parts of it of which I have any knowledge, and to indicate the main paths through the remainder. The Diction-

ary of American English on Historical Principles, now under way at the University of Chicago under the able editorship of Sir Wil-

liam Craigie, will deal with the vocabulary of Americanisms on a scale impossible here, and the Linguistic Atlas in preparation by

Dr. Hans Kurath and his associates at Brown University will simi-

larly cover the large and vexatious subject of regional differences in usage. In the same way, I hope, the work of Dr. W. Cabell Greet

and his associates at Columbia will one day give us a really compre-

hensive account of American pronunciation. There are other in-

quiries in progress by other scholars, all of them unheard of at the time my third edition was published. But there are still some regions

into which scholarship has hardly penetrated – for example, that of the vulgar grammar –, and therein I have had to disport as grace-

fully as possible, always sharply conscious of the odium which attaches justly to those amateurs who, “because they speak, fancy

they can speak about speech.” I am surely no philologian, and my

viii The American Language

inquiries and surmises will probably be of small value to the first successor who is, but until he appears I can only go on accumulating materials, and arranging them as plausibly as possible.

In the course of the chapters following I have noted my frequent debt to large numbers of volunteer aides, some of them learned in linguistic science but the majority lay brothers as I am. My contacts with them have brought me many pleasant acquaintanceships, and some friendships that I value greatly. In particular, I am indebted to Dr. Louise Pound, professor of English at the University of Nebraska and the first editor of American Speech, whose interest in this book has been lively and generous since its first appearance; to Mr. H. W. Seaman, of Norwich, England, whose herculean struggles with the chapter on "American and English Today" deserve a much greater reward than he will ever receive on this earth; to Dr. Kemp Malone, professor of English at the Johns Hopkins, who was kind enough to read the chapter on "The Common Speech"; to the late Dr. Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate of England and founder of the Society for Pure English, who was always lavish of his wise and stimulating counsel; to Professor Dr. Heinrich Spies of Berlin, who published a critical summary of my third edition in German, under the title of "Die amerikanische Sprache," in 1927; and to the late Dr. George Philip Krapp, professor of English at Columbia, who allowed me the use of the manuscript of his excellent "History of the English Language in America" in 1922, and was very obliging in other ways down to the time of his lamented death in 1934. Above all, I am indebted to my secretary, Mrs. Rosalind C. Lohrfinck, without whose indefatigable aid the present edition would have been quite impossible. The aforesaid friends of the philological faculty are not responsible, of course, for anything that appears herein. They have saved me from a great many errors, some of them of a large and astounding character, but others, I fear, remain. I shall be grateful, as in the past, for corrections and additions sent to me at 1524 Hollins street, Baltimore.

Baltimore, 1936 H. L. M.

Table of Contents

I. THE TWO STREAMS OF ENGLISH

1. The Earliest Alarms

3

2. The English Attack

12

3. American “Barbarisms”

23

4. The English Attitude Today

28

5. The Position of the Learned

49

6. The Views of Writing Men

67

7. The Political Front

79

8. Foreign Observers

85

II. THE MATERIALS OF THE INQUIRY

1. The Hallmarks of American

90

2. What is an Americanism?

97

III. THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN

1. The First Loan-Words

104

2. New Words of English Material

113

3. Changed Meanings

121

4. Archaic English Words

124

IV. THE PERIOD OF GROWTH

1. A New Nation in the Making

130

2. The Expanding Vocabulary

140

3. Loan-Words and Non-English Influences

150

V. THE LANGUAGE TODAY

1. After the Civil War

164

2. The Making of New Nouns

168

3. Verbs

191

4. Other Parts of Speech

201

5. Foreign Influences Today

212

x

Table of Contents

VI. AMERICAN AND ENGLISH

1. The Infiltration of English by Americanisms

223

2. Surviving Differences

232

3. English Difficulties with American

255

4. Briticisms in the United States

264

5. Honorifics

271

6. Euphemisms

284

7. Forbidden Words

300

8. Expletives

311

VII. THE PRONUNCIATION OF AMERICAN

1. Its General Characters

319

2. The Vowels

334

3. The Consonants

348

4. Dialects

354

VIII. AMERICAN SPELLING

1. The Influence of Noah Webster

379

2. The Advance of American Spelling

388

3. The Simplified Spelling Movement

397

4. The Treatment of Loan-Words

408

5. Punctuation, Capitalization, and Abbreviation

413

IX. THE COMMON SPEECH

1. Outlines of its Grammar

416

2. The Verb

427

3. The Pronoun

447

4. The Noun

461

5. The Adjective

463

6. The Adverb

464

7. The Double Negative

468

8. Other Syntactical Peculiarities

471

X. PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA

1. Surnames

474

2. Given-Names

505

3. Place-Names

525

4. Other Proper Names

544

Table of Contents

xi

XI. AMERICAN SLANG

1. The Nature of Slang

555

2. Cant and Argot

575

XII. THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

1. The Spread of English

590

2. English or American?

607

APPENDIX. NON-ENGLISH DIALECTS IN AMERICA

1. Germanic

616

f. Lithuanian

669

a. German

616

g. Polish

673

b. Dutch

621

4. Finno-Ugrian

675

c. Swedish

624

a. Finnish

675

d. Dano-Norwegian

627

b. Hungarian

680

e. Icelandic

631

5. Celtic

682

f. Yiddish

633

a. Gaelic

682

2. Latin

636

6. Semitic

683

a. French

636

a. Arabic

683

b. Italian

640

7. Greek

685

c. Spanish

647

a. Modern Greek

685

d. Portuguese

652

8. Asiatic

688

e. Rumanian

653

a. Chinese

688

3. Slavic

655

b. Japanese

691

a. Czech

655

9. Miscellaneous

693

b. Slovak

659

a. Armenian

693

c. Russian

662

b. Hawaiian

693

d. Ukrainian

663

c. Gipsy

696

e. Serbo-Croat

667

LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES

INDEX

THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

I

THE TWO STREAMS OF ENGLISH

I. THE EARLIEST ALARMS

The first American colonists had perforce to invent Americanisms, if only to describe the unfamiliar landscape and weather, flora and fauna confronting them. Half a dozen that are still in use are to be found in Captain John Smith's 'Map of Virginia,' published in 1612, and there are many more in the works of the New England annalists. As early as 1621 Alexander Gill was noting in his 'Logonomia Anglica' that maize and canoe were making their way into English.1 But it was reserved for one Francis Moore, who came out to Georgia with Oglethorpe in 1735, to raise the earliest alarm against this enrichment of English from the New World, and so set the tone that English criticism has maintained ever since. Thus he described Savannah, then a village only two years old:

It stands upon the flat of a Hill; the Bank of the River (which they in barbarous English call a bluff) is steep, and about forty-five foot perpendicular.2

John Wesley arrived in Georgia the same year, and from his diary for December 2, 1737, comes the Oxford Dictionary's earliest example of the use of the word. But Moore was the first to notice it, and what is better to the point, the first to denounce it, and for that pioneering he must hold his honorable place in this history. In colonial times, of course, there was comparatively little incitement to hostility to Americanisms, for the stream of Englishmen coming to America to write books about their sufferings had barely begun to flow, and

1 British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, 1933, p. 313.

2 A Voyage to Georgia, Begun in the Year 1735; London, 1744, p. 24. Moore was something of an adventurer. He went to West Africa for the Royal Africa Company in 1730,

and got into obscure difficulties on the river Gambia. But when he came to Georgia in 1735 it was in the prosaic character of store-keeper to the colony. He arrived late in the year and remained until July, 1736. In 1738 he was back, staying this time until 1743. His subsequent career is unknown.

4 The American Language

the number of American books reaching London was very small. But by 1754 literary London was already sufficiently conscious of the new words arriving from the New World for Richard Owen Cambridge, author of “The Scribleriad,” to be suggesting 1 that a glossary of them would soon be in order, and two years later the finicky and always anti-American Samuel Johnson was saying, in a notice of Lewis Evans’s “Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical, and Mechanical Essays,” 2 substantially what many English reviewers still say with dogged piety:

This treatise is written with such elegance as the subject admits, tho’ not without some mixture of the American dialect, a tract [i.e., trace] of corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed.

As the Revolution drew on, the English discovered varieties of offensiveness on this side of the ocean that greatly transcended the philological, and I can find no record of any denunciation of Americanisms during the heat of the struggle itself. When, on July 20, 1778, a committee appointed by the Continental Congress to arrange for the “publick reception of the sieur Gerard, minister plenipotentiary of his most christian majesty,” brought in a report recommending that “all replies or answers” to him should be “in the language of the United States,” 3 no notice of the contumacy seems to have been taken in the Motherland. But a few months before Cornwallis was finally brought to heel at Yorktown the subject was resumed, and this time the attack came from a Briton living in America, and otherwise ardently pro-American. He was John Witherspoon (1723-94), a Scottish clergyman who had come out in 1769 to be president of Princeton in partibus infidelium.

Witherspoon took to politics when the war closed his college, and was elected a member of the New Jersey constitutional convention. In a little while he was promoted to the Continental Congress, and in it he sat for six years as its only member in holy orders. He

1 In the World, No. 102, Dec. 12, 1754. Quoted by Read. 2 The Literary Magazine, Sept.-Oct., 1756. Evans’s book was published in Philadelphia in 1755 by Benjamin Franklin and D. Hall. It was accompanied by the author’s General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America. 3 Secret Journals of the Continental Congress, Vol. II, p. 95. In the earlier

editions of the present book I said that these instructions were issued to Franklin on his appointment as Minister to France. Where I picked up the error I don’t recall. It was corrected by the late Fred Newton Scott in the Saturday Review of Literature, Oct. 11, 1924. The instructions to Franklin, dated Oct. 12, 1778, contained no mention of language.

The Two Streams of English

5

signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, and was a member of the Board of War throughout the Revolution. But though his devotion to the American cause was thus beyond question, he was pained by the American language, and when, in 1781, he was invited to contribute a series of papers to the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser of Philadelphia, he seized the opportunity to denounce it, albeit in the politic terms proper to the time. Beginning with the disarming admission that "the vulgar in America speak much better than the vulgar in England, for a very obvious reason, viz., that being much more unsettled, and moving frequently from place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology," he proceeded to argue that Americans of education showed a lamentable looseness in their "public and solemn discourses."

I have heard in this country, in the senate, at the bar, and from the pulpit, and see daily in dissertations from the press, errors in grammar, improprieties and vulgarisms which hardly any person of the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain.

Witherspoon's mention of "the senate" was significant, for he must have referred to the Continental Congress, and it is fair to assume that at least some of the examples he cited to support his charge came from the sacred lips of the Fathers. He divided these "errors in grammar, improprieties and vulgarisms" into eight classes, as follows:

1. Americanisms, or ways of speaking peculiar to this country.

2. Vulgarisms in England and America.

3. Vulgarisms in America only.

4. Local phrases or terms.

5. Common blunders arising from ignorance.

6. Cant phrases.

7. Personal blunders.

8. Technical terms introduced into the language.1

By Americanisms, said Witherspoon,

I understand an use of phrases or terms, or a construction of sentences, even among people of rank and education, different from the use of the same terms

1 Witherspoon's papers appeared under the heading of The Druid. This list and the foregoing quotation are from No. V, printed on May 9, 1781. The subject was continued in No. VI on May 16, and in No. VII (in two parts) on May 23 and 30.

All the papers are reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, edited by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931. They are also to be found in Witherspoon's Collected Works, edited by Ashbel Green, Vol. IV; New York, 1800-01.

6

The American Language

or phrases, or the construction of similar sentences in Great Britian. It does not follow, from a man's using these, that he is ignorant, or his discourge upon the whole inelegant; may, it does not follow in every case that the terms or phrases used are worse in themselves, but merely that they are of American and not of English growth. The word Americanism, which I have coined for the purpose, is exactly similar in its formation and significance to the word Scotticism.

Witherspoon listed twelve examples of Americanisms falling within his definition, and despite the polite assurance I have just quoted, he managed to deplore all of them. His first was the use of either to indicate more than two, as in "The United States, or either of them." This usage seems to have had some countenance in the England of the early Seventeenth Century, but it had gone out there by Witherspoon's day, and it has since been outlawed by the school-marm in the United States. His second caveat was laid against the American use of to notify, as in "The police notified the coroner." "In English," he said somewhat prissily, "we do not notify the person of the thing, but notify the thing to the person." But to notify, in the American sense, was simply an example of archaic English, preserved like so many other archaisms in America, and there was, and is, no plausible logical or grammatical objection to it.1 Witherspoon's third Americanism was fellow countrymen, which he denounced as "an evident tautology," and his fourth was the omission of to be before the second verb in such constructions as "These things were ordered delivered to the army." His next three were similar omissions, and his remaining five were the use of or instead of nor following neither, the use of certain in "A certain Thomas Benson" (he argued that "A certain person called Thomas Benson" was correct), the use of incident in "Such bodies are incident to these evils," and the use of clever in the sense of mad in the sense of angry.

It is rather surprising that Witherspoon found so few American-isms for his list. Certainly there were many others, current in his day, that deserved a purist's reprobation quite as much as those he singled out, and he must have been familiar with them. Among the verbs a large number of novelties had come into American usage since the middle of the century, some of them revivals of archaic

1 The Oxford Dictionary's first example is dated 1440. After 1652 all the examples cited are American,

until 1843, when the usage reappears in England.

English verbs and others native inventions – to belittle, to advocate, to progress, to notice, to table, to raise (for to grow), to deed, to locate, to ambition, to deputize, to compromit, to appreciate (in the sense of increase in value), to eventuate, and so on. Benjamin Franklin, on his return to the United States in 1785, after nine years in France, was impressed so unpleasantly by to advocate, to notice, to progress and to oppose that on December 26, 1789 he wrote to Noah Webster to ask for help in putting them down, but they seem to have escaped Witherspoon. He also failed to note the changes of meaning in the American use of creek, shoe, lumber, corn, barn, team, store, rock, cracker and partridge. Nor did he have anything to say about American pronunciation, which had already begun to differ materially from that of Standard English.

Witherspoon's strictures, such as they were, fell upon deaf ears, at least in the new Republic. He was to get heavy support, in a little while, from the English reviews, which began to belabor everything American in the closing years of the century, but on this side of the ocean the tide was running the other way, and as the Revolution drew to its victorious close there was a widespread tendency to reject English precedent and authority altogether, in language no less than in government. In the case of the language, several logical considerations supported that disposition, though the chief force at the bottom of it, of course, was probably only national conceit. For one thing, it was apparent to the more astute politicians of the time that getting rid of English authority in speech, far from making for chaos, would encourage the emergence of home authority, and so help to establish national solidarity, then the great desideratum of desiderata. And for another thing, some of them were far-sighted enough to see that the United States, in the course of the years, would inevitably surpass the British Isles in population and wealth, and to realize that its cultural independence would grow at the same pace.

Something of the sort was plainly in the mind of John Adams when he wrote to the president of Congress from Amsterdam on September 5, 1780, suggesting that Congress set up an academy for “correcting, improving and ascertaining the English language.” There were such academies, he said, in France, Spain and Italy, but the English had neglected to establish one, and the way was open for the United States. He went on:

8 The American Language

It will have a happy effect upon the union of States to have a public standard for all persons in every part of the continent to appeal to, both for the signification and pronunciation of the language. . . . English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age. The reason of this is obvious, because the increasing population in America, and their universal connection and correspondence with all nations will, aided by the influence of England in the world, whether great or small, force their language into general use, in spite of all the obstacles that may be thrown in their way, if any such there should be.1

Six years before this, in January, 1774, some anonymous writer, perhaps also Adams, had printed a similar proposal in the Royal American Magazine. That it got some attention is indicated by the fact that Sir John Wentworth, the Loyalist Governor of New Hampshire, thought it of sufficient importance to enclose a reprint of it in a dispatch to the Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies, dated April 24. I quote from it briefly:

The English language has been greatly improved in Britain within a century, but its highest perfection, with every other branch of human knowledge, is perhaps reserved for this land of light and freedom. As the people through this extensive country will speak English, their advantages for polishing their language will be great, and vastly superior to what the people of England ever enjoyed. I beg leave to propose a plan for perfecting the English language in America, thro' every future period of its existence; viz: That a society for this purpose should be formed, consisting of members in each university and seminary, who shall be stiled Fellows of the American Society of Language; That the society . . . annually publish some observations upon the language, and from year to year correct, enrich and refine it, until perfection stops their progress and ends their labor.2

Whether this article was Adams's or not, he kept on returning to the charge, and in a second letter to the president of Congress, dated September 30, 1780, he expressed the hope that, after an American Academy had been set up, England would follow suit.

This I should admire. England will never more have any honor, excepting now and then that of imitating the Americans. I assure you, Sir, I am not altogether in jest. I see a general inclination after English in France, Spain and Holland, and it may extend throughout Europe. The population and commerce of America will force their language into general use.3

1 The letter is reprinted in full in The Beginnings of American English, before cited, pp. 41-43. 2 The full text is in The Beginnings of American English, just cited. 3 For this letter I am indebted to George Philip Krapp: The English Language in America, Vol. I, p. 7.

The Two Streams of English

9

In his first letter to the president of Congress Adams deplored the fact that " it is only very lately that a tolerable dictionary [of English] has been published, even by a private person,1 and there is not yet a passable grammar enterprised by any individual." He did not know it, but at that very moment a young schoolmaster in the backwoods of New York was preparing to meet both lacks. He was Noah Webster. Three years later he returned to Hartford, his birthplace, and brought out his " Grammatical Institute of the English Language," and soon afterward he began the labors which finally bore fruit in his " American Dictionary of the English Language " in 1828.2 Webster was a pedantic and rather choleric fellow — someone once called him " the critic and cockcomb-general of the United States " — , and his later years were filled with ill-natured debates over his proposals for reforming English spelling, and over the more fanciful etymologies in his dictionary. But though, in this enlightened age, he would scarcely pass as a philologian, he was extremely well read for his time, and if he fell into the blunder of deriving all languages from the Hebrew of the Ark, he was at least shrewd enough to notice the relationship between Greek, Latin and the Teutonic languages before it was generally recognized. He was always at great pains to ascertain actual usages, and in the course of his journeys from State to State to perfect his copyright on his first spelling-book 3 he accumulated a large amount of interesting and valuable material, especially in the field of pronunciation. Much of it he utilized in his " Dissertations on the English Language, " published at Boston in 1789.

In the opening essay of this work he put himself squarely behind Adams. He foresaw that the new Republic would quickly outstrip England in population, and that virtually all its people would speak English. He proposed therefore that an American standard be set up, independent of the English standard, and that it be inculcated in the schools throughout the country. He argued that it should be determined, not by " the practise of any particular class of people," but by " the general practise of the nation," with due regard, in cases

1 His reference, of course, was to Johnson's Dictionary, first published in 1755.

2 His Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, a sort of trial balloon, was published in 1806. There

is a brief but good account of his dictionary-making in A Survey of English Dictionaries, by M. M. Mathews; London, 1933, pp. 37-45.

3 Published in 1783. There was no national copyright until 1790.

10

The American Language

where there was no general practise, to "the principle of analogy."

He went on:

As an independent narion, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted,1 and her language on the decline. But if it were not so, she is at too great a distance to be our model, and to instruct us in the principles of our own tongue. . . . Several circumstances render a future separation of the American tongue from the English necessary and unavoidable. . . . Numerous local causes, such as a new country, new associations of people, new combinations of ideas in arts and sciences, and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe, will introduce new words into the American tongue. These causes will produce, in a course of time, a language in North America as different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one another: like remote branches of a tree springing from the same stock, or rays of light shot from the same center, and diverging from each other in proportion to their distance from the point of separation. . . . We have therefore the fairest opportunity of establishing a national language and of giving it uniformity and perspicuity, in North America, that ever presented itself to mankind. Now is the time to begin the plan.2

What Witherspoon thought of all this is not recorded. Maybe he never saw Webster's book, for he was going blind in 1789, and lived only five years longer. Webster seems to have got little support for what he called his Federal English from the recognized illuminati of the time;3 indeed, his proposals for a reform of American spelling,

1 Later on in the same essay Webster sought to support this doctrine by undertaking an examination of Johnson, Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Home, Kaims and Blair. Of Johnson he said: "His style is a mixture of Latin and English; an intolerable composition of Latinity, affected smoothness, scholastic accuracy, and roundness of periods." And of Gibbon: "It is difficult to comprehend his meaning and the chain of his ideas, as fast as we naturally read. . . . The mind of the reader is constantly dazzled by a glare of ornament, or charmed from the subject by the music of the language."

2 The successive parts of the quotation are from pp. 20, 22, 22-3, and 36.

3 The members of the Philological Society of New York, organized in 1788, were for him, but they were

young men of little influence, and their society lasted only a year or so. Webster became a member on March 17, 1788, but on Dec. 20 he left New York. The president was Josiah O. Hoffman and among the members were William Dunlap, the painter and dramatist, and Samuel L. Mitchell. On Aug. 27 Ebenezer Hazard, then Postmaster-General of the Confederation, wrote to a friend in Boston that Webster was "the monarch" of the society. In April, 1788 Webster printed in his American Magazine a notice saying that its purpose was that of "ascertaining and improving the American tongue." On July 4, 1788 the society passed a resolution approving the first part of his Gram-matical Institute. See The Philological Society of New York, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, April, 1934.

set forth in an appendix to his “Dissertations,” were denounced roundly by some of them, and the rest were only lukewarm. He dedicated the “Dissertations” to Franklin, but Franklin delayed acknowledging the dedication until the last days of 1789, and then ventured upon no approbation of Webster’s linguistic Declaration of Independence. On the contrary, he urged him to make war upon various Americanisms of recent growth, and perhaps with deliberate irony applauded his “ zeal for preserving the purity of our language.”

A year before the “Dissertations” appeared, Dr. Benjamin Rush anticipated at least some of Webster’s ideas in “A Plan of a Federal University,” 1 and they seem to have made some impression on Thomas Jefferson, who was to ratify them formally in 1813; 2 but the rest of the contemporaneous sages held aloof, and in July, 1800, the Monthly Magazine and American Review of New York printed an anonymous denunciation, headed “On the Scheme of an American Language,” of the notion that “ grammars and dictionaries should be compiled by natives of the country, not of the British or English, but of the American tongue.” The author of this tirade, who signed himself C, displayed a violent Anglomania. “ The most suitable name for our country,” he said, “ would be that which is now appropriated only to a part of it: I mean New England.” While admitting that a few Americanisms were logical and necessary — for example, Congress, president and capitol —, he dismissed all the rest as “ manifest corruptions.” A year later, a savant using the nom de plume of Aristarcus delivered a similar attack on Webster in a series of articles contributed to the New England Palladium and reprinted in the Port Folio of Philadelphia, the latter “ a notoriously

1 Contributed to the American Museum for 1788. Under the heading of Philology he said: “Instruction in this branch of literature will become the more necessary in America as our intercourse must soon cease with the bar, the stage and the pulpit of Great Britain, from whence [ sic ] we received our knowledge of the pronunciation of the English language. Even modern English books should cease to be the models of style in the United States. The present is the age of simplicity of writing in America. The turgid style of Johnson, the purple glare of Gibbon, and even the studied and

thick-set metaphors of Junius are all equally unnatural and should not be admitted into our country.”

2 In a letter from Monticello, August 16, to John Waldo, author of Rudiments of English Grammar. On August 12, 1801 Jefferson wrote to James Madison: “I view Webster as a mere pedagogue, of very limited understanding and very strong prejudices and party passion,” but this was with reference to a political matter. In his letter to Waldo, Jefferson adopted Webster’s ideas categorically, and professed to believe that “ an American dialect will be formed.”

12

The American Language

Federalistic and pro-British organ. "If the Connecticut lexicographer," he said, "considers the retaining of the English language as

a badge of slavery, let him not give us a Babylonish dialect in its stead, but adopt, at once, the language of the aborigines." 1

But if the illuminati were thus chilly, the plain people supported Webster's scheme for the emancipation of American English heartily

enough, though very few of them could have heard of it. The period from the gathering of the Revolution to the turn of the

century was one of immense activity in the concoction and launching of new Americanisms, and more of them came into the language

than at any time between the earliest colonial days and the rush to the West. Webster himself lists some of these novelties in his

"Dissertations," and a great many more are to be found in Richard H. Thornton's "American Glossary" 2 - for example, black-eye

(in the sense of defeat), block (of houses), bobolink, bookstore, bootee (now obsolete), breadstuffs, buckeye, buckwheat-cake, bull-

snake, bundling and buttonwood, to go no further than the b's. It was during this period, too, that the American meanings of such

words as shoe, corn, bug, bureau, mad, sick, creek, barn and lumber were finally differentiated from the English meanings, and that

American peculiarities in pronunciation began to make themselves felt. Despite the economic difficulties which followed the Revolu-

tion, the general feeling was that the new Republic was a success, and that it was destined to rise in the world as England declined.

There was a widespread contempt for everything English, and that contempt extended to the canons of the mother-tongue.

2. THE ENGLISH ATTACK

But the Jay Treaty of 1794 gave notice that there was still some life left in the British lion, and during the following years the

troubles of the Americans, both at home and abroad, mounted at so appalling a rate that their confidence and elation gradually oozed

out of them. Simultaneously, their pretensions began to be attacked

1 See Towards a Historical Aspect of American Speech Consciousness, by Leon Howard, American Speech, April, 1930.

2 Published in two volumes; Philadelphia and London, 1912. Thornton, who died in 1925, left a large amount of additional material, and its publication was begun in Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. III, 1931.

with pious vigor by patriotic Britishers, and in no field was the fervor of these brethren more marked than in those of literature and language. To be sure, there were Englishmen, then as now, who had a friendly and understanding interest in all things American, including even American books, and some of them took the trouble to show it, but they were not many. The general tone of English criticism, from the end of the Eighteenth Century to the present day, has been one of suspicion, and not infrequently it has been extremely hostile. The periods of remission, as often as not, have been no more than evidences of adroit politicking, as when Oxford, in 1907, helped along the graceful liquidation of the Vene- zuelan unpleasantness of 1895 by giving Mark Twain an honorary D.C.L.. In England all branches of human endeavor are alike bent to the service of the state, and there is an alliance between society and politics, science and literature, that is unmatched anywhere else on earth. But though this alliance, on occasion, may find it profitable to be polite to the Yankee, and even to conciliate him, there remains an active aversion under the surface, born of the incurable rivalry between the two countries, and accentuated perhaps by their common tradition and their similar speech. Americanisms are forcing their way into English all the time, and of late they have been entering at a truly dizzy pace, but they seldom get anything properly describable as a welcome, save from small sects of iconoclasts, and every now and then the general protest against them rises to a roar. As for American literature, it is still regarded in England as something barbaric and below the salt, and the famous sneer of Sydney Smith, though time has made it absurd in all other respects, is yet echoed complacently in many an English review of American books.1

There is an amusing compilation of some of the earlier diatribes

1 "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses?!, or eats from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow- creatures may buy, and sell and torture." All this was a part of a review of Adam Seybert's Statistical Annals of the United States, Edinburgh Review, Jan.-May, 1820.

in William B. Cairns's "British Criticisms of American Writings,

1783-1815." 1 Cairns is not so much concerned with linguistic mat-

ters as with literary criticism, but he reprints a number of extracts

from the pioneer denunciations of Americanisms, and they surely

show a sufficient indignation. The attack began in 1787, when the

European Magazine and London Review fell upon the English of

Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia," and especially

upon his use of to belittle, which, according to Thornton, was his

own coinage. "Belittle!" it roared. "What an expression! It may

be an elegant one in Virginia, and even perfectly intelligible; but

for our part, all we can do is to guess at its meaning. For shame,

Mr. Jefferson! Why, after trampling upon the honour of our coun-

try, and representing it as little better than a land of barbarism -

why, we say, perpetually trample also upon the very grammar of

our language, and make that appear as Gothic as, from your descrip-

tion, our manners are rude? - Freely, good sir, will we forgive all

your attacks, impotent as they are illiberal, upon our national char-

acter; but for the future spare - O spare, we beseech you, our

mother-tongue! " The Gentleman's Magazine joined the charge in

May, 1798, with sneers for the "uncouth . . . localities" [sic] in

the "Yankey dialect" of Noah Webster's "Sentimental and Humor-

ous Essays," and the Edinburgh followed in October, 1804, with a

patronizing article upon John Quincy Adams's "Letters on Silesia."

"The style of Mr. Adams," it said, "is in general very tolerable

English; which, for an American composition, is no moderate

praise." The usual American book of the time, it went on, was full

of "affectations and corruptions of phrase," and they were even to

be found in "the enlightened state papers of the two great Presi-

dents." The Edinburgh predicted that a "spurious dialect " would

prevail, "even at the Court and in the Senate of the United States,"

and that the Americans would thus "lose the only badge that is still

worn of our consanguinity." The appearance of the five volumes

of Chief Justice Marshall's "Life of George Washington," from

1804 to 1807, brought forth corrective articles from the British

Critic, the Critical Review, the Annual, the Monthly, and the Eclec-

tic. The Edinburgh, in 1808, declared that the Americans made "it

1 University of Wisconsin Studies in

Language and Literature, No. 1;

Madison, Wis., 1918.

The Two Streams of English

15

a point of conscience to have no aristocratical distinctions - even in their vocabulary." They thought, it went on, "one word as good as another, provided its meaning be as clear." The Monthly Mirror, in March of the same year, denounced "the corruptions and barbarities which are hourly obtaining in the speech of our transatlantic colonies [sic]," and reprinted with approbation a parody by some anonymous Englishman of the American style of the day. Here is an extract from it, with the words that the author regarded as Americanisms in italics:

In America authors are to be found who make use of new or obsolete words which no good writer in this country would employ; and were it not for my destitution of leisure, which obliges me to hasten the occlusion of these pages, as I progress I should bottom my ascertation on instances from authors of the first grade; but were I to render my sketch lengthy I should illy answer the purpose which I have in view.

The British Critic, in April, 1808, admitted somewhat despairingly that the damage was already done - that "the common speech of the United States has departed very considerably from the standard adopted in England." The others, however, sought to stay the flood by invective against Marshall, and, later, against his rival biographer, the Rev. Aaron Bancroft. The Annual, in 1808, pronounced its anathema upon "that torrent of barbarous phraseology" which was pouring across the Atlantic, and which threatened "to destroy the purity of the English language." In Bancroft's "Life of George Washington" (1808), according to the British Critic, there were "new words, or old words in a new sense," all of them inordinately offensive to Englishmen, "at almost every page," and in Joel Barlow's "The Columbiad" (1807; reprinted in England in 1809) the Edinburgh found "a great multitude of words which are radically and entirely new, and as utterly foreign as if they had been adopted from the Hebrew or Chinese," and "the perversion of a still greater number of English words from their proper use or signification, by employing nouns substantive for verbs, adjectives for substantives, &c." The Edinburgh continued:

We have often heard it reported that our transatlantic brethren were beginning to take it amiss that their language should still be called English; and truly we must say that Mr. Barlow has gone far to take away that ground of reproach. The groundwork of his speech, perhaps may be English, as that of the Italian is Latin; but the variations amount already to more than a change of dialect; and really make a glossary necessary for most untravelled readers.

Some of Barlow's novelties, it must be granted, were fantastic enough - for example, to vagrated and to amecd among the verbs,

imkeeleed and homicidious among the adjectives, and coloniarck among the nouns. But many of the rest were either obsolete words

whose use was perfectly proper in heroic poetry, or nonce-words of obvious meaning and utility. Some of the terms complained of

by the Edinburgh are in good usage at this moment - for example, to utilize, to bill, to breeze, to spade (the soil), millenial, crass, and

scow.1 But to the English reviewers of the time words so unfamiliar were not only deplorable on their own account; they were also

proofs that the Americans were a sordid and ignoble people with no capacity for prose, or for any of the other elegances of life.2 " When

the vulgar and illiterate lose the force of their animal spirits," observed the Quarterly in 1814, reviewing J. K. Paulding's " Lay of

the Scottish Fiddle " (1813), "they become mere clods. . . . The founders of American society brought to the composition of their

nation few seeds of good taste, and no rudiments of liberal science."

To which may be added Southey's judgment in a letter to Landor in 1812: "See what it is to have a nation to take its place among

civilized states before it has either gentlemen or scholars! They have in the course of twenty years acquired a distinct national character

for low and lying knavery; and so well do they deserve it that no man ever had any dealings with them without having proofs of its

truth." Landor, it should be said, entered a protest against this, and on a somewhat surprising ground, considering the general view,

"Americans," he said, "speak our language; they read 'Paradise Lost.' " But he hastened to add, "I detest the American character

as much as you do."

The War of 1812 naturally exacerbated this animosity, though when the works of Irving and Cooper began to be known in Eng-

land some of the English reviewers moderated their tone. Irving's " Knickerbocker " was not much read there until 1815, and not much talked about until " The Sketch-Book " followed it in 1819,

1 See A Historical Note on Ameri-

can English, by Leon Howard,

American Speech, Sept., 1927.

2 Cairns says that the Edinburgh, the

Anti-Jacobin, the Quarterly, and

the European Magazine and London

Review were especially virulent. He

says that the Monthly, despite my

quotations, was always "kindly to-

ward America " and that the Eclec-

tic was, " on the whole, fair." The

Literary Magazine and British Re-

view he describes as enthusiastically

pro-American, but it lived only a

short time.

but Scott had received a copy of it from Henry Brevoort in 1813,

and liked it and said so. Byron mentioned it in a letter to his pub-

lisher, Murray, on August 7, 1821. We are told by Thomas Love

Peacock that Shelley was “especially fond of the novels of Charles

Brockden Brown, the American,” but Cairns says there is no men-

tion of the fact, if it be a fact, in any of Shelley’s own writings, or

in those of his other friends. “Knickerbocker” was published in

1809, the North American Review began in May, 1815, Bryant’s

“Thanatopsis” was printed in its pages in 1817, and Paulding’s “The

Backwoodsman,” with an American theme and an American title,

came out a year later, but Cooper’s “Precaution” was still two years

ahead, and American letters were yet in a somewhat feeble state.

John Pickering, so late as 1816, said that “in this country we can

hardly be said to have any authors by profession,” and Justice Story,

three years later, repeated the saying and sought to account for the

fact. “So great,” said Story, “is the call for talents of all sorts in the

active use of professional and other business in America that few of

our ablest men have leisure to devote exclusively to literature or the

fine arts. . . . This obvious reason will explain why we have so fèw

professional authors, and those not among our ablest men.” In 1813

Jefferson, anticipating both Pickering and Story, had written to

John Waldo:

We have no distinct class of literati in our country. Every man is engaged

in some industrious pursuit, and science is but a secondary occupation, always

subordinate to the main business of life. Few, therefore, of those who are

qualified have leisure to write.

Difficulties of communication hampered the circulation of such

native books as were written. “It is much to be regretted,” wrote

Dr. David Ramsay, of Charleston, S. C., to Noah Webster in 1806,

“that there is so little intercourse in a literary way between the

States. As soon as a book of general utility comes out in any State

it should be for sale in all of them.” Ramsay asked for little; the most

he could imagine was a sale of 2,000 copies for an American work in

America. But even that was apparently beyond the possibilities of

the time. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the Ameri-

cans eschewed reading altogether; on the contrary, there is some

evidence that they read many English books. In 1802 the Scot’s

Magazine reported that at a book-fair held shortly before in New

York the sales ran to 520,000 volumes, and that a similar fair was

18

The American Language

projected for Philadelphia. Six years before this the London book-seller, Henry Lemoin, made a survey of the American book trade for the Gentleman's Magazine.1 He found that very few books were being printed in the country, and ascribed the fact to the high cost of labor, but he encountered well-stocked bookstores in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, and plenty of customers for their importations. He went on:

Their sales are very great, for it is scarcely possible to conceive the number of readers with which every little town abounds. The common people are on a footing, in point of literature, with the middle ranks in Europe; they all read and write, and understand arithmetic. Almost every little town now furnishes a small circulating-library. . . . Whatever is useful sells, but publications on subjects merely speculative, and rather curious than important, controversial divinity, and voluminous polemical pieces, as well as heavy works on the arts and sciences, lie upon the importer's hands. They have no ready money to spare for anything but what they find useful.

But other visitors were much less impressed by the literary gusto of the young Republic. Henry Wansey, who came out in 1794, reported in his "Excursion to the United States of North America"2 that the American libraries were "scanty," that their collections were "almost entirely of modern books," and that they were deficient in "the means of tracing the history of questions, . . . a want which literary people felt very much, and which it will take some years to remedy." And Captain Thomas Hamilton, in his "Men and Manners in America,"3 said flatly that "there is . . . nothing in the United States worthy of the name of library. Not only is there an entire absence of learning, in the higher sense of the term, but an absolute want of the material from which alone learning can be extracted. At present an American might study every book within the limits of the Union, and still be regarded in many parts of Europe - especially in Germany - as a man comparatively ignorant. Why

1 November, 1796. I take what follows from Cairns.

2 Salisbury, 1796. Wansey stayed but two months, and his journey was confined to the region between Boston and Philadelphia.

3 Published in Edinburgh in 1833, and reprinted in Philadelphia the same year. The book did not bear Hamilton's name, but was ascribed on the title page to "the author of 'Cyril Thornton.'" Hamilton was a

younger brother to Sir William Hamilton, the metaphysician, and a friend to Sir Walter Scott. He was himself a frequent contributor to Blackwood's. "Cyril Thornton," published in 1827, was a successful novel, and remained in favor for many years. Hamilton died in 1842. "Men and Manners in America" was translated into French and twice into German.

does a great nation thus voluntarily continue in a state of intellectual destitution so anomalous and humiliating?" According to Hamilton, all the books imported from Europe for public institutions during the fiscal year 1829–30 reached a value of but $10,829.

But whatever the fact here, there can be no doubt that the Americans were quickly aware of every British aspersion upon their culture, whether it appeared in a book or in one of the reviews. If nothing else was read, such things were certainly read, and they came with sufficient frequency, and were couched in terms of sufficient offensiveness, to keep the country in a state of indignation for years.

The flood of books by English visitors began before the end of the Eighteenth Century, and though many of them were intended to be friendly, there was in even the friendliest of them enough of what Cairns calls “the British knack for saying gracious things in an ungracious way” to keep the pot of fury boiling. At the other extreme the thing went to fantastic lengths. The Quarterly Review, summing up in 1814, accused the Americans of a multitude of strange and hair-raising offenses – for example, employing naked colored women to wait upon them at table, kidnapping Scotsmen, Welshmen and Hollanders and selling them into slavery, and fighting one another incessantly under rules which made it “allowable to peel the skull, tear out the eyes, and smooth away the nose.” In this holy war upon

in 1797–98, and after 1809 the first editor of the Quarterly, played an extravagant part,1 but he was diligently seconded by Sydney Smith, Southey, Thomas Moore and many lesser lights. “If the [English] reviewers get hold of an American publication,” said J. K. Paulding in “Letters From the South” in 1817, “it is made use of merely as a pretext to calumniate us in some way or other.” There is an instructive account of the whole uproar in the fifth volume of John Bach McMaster's “History of the People of the United States From the Revolution to the Civil War.” McMaster says that it

1 Gifford was a killer in general practice, and his onslaughts on Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats are still remembered. He retired from the Quarterly in 1824 with a fortune of £25,000 – the first magazine editor in history to make it pay. On his death in 1826 he was solemnly buried in Westminster Abbey. The Quarterly, despite its anti-Ameri-

can ferocity, was regularly reprinted in Boston. But when its issue for July, 1823 appeared, with an extraordinarily malignant review of William Faux's Memorable Days in America (London, 1823) the American publishers were warned that it contained a libel on “a distinguished individual at Washington,” and accordingly withheld it.

was generally believed that the worst calumniators of the United

States were subsidized by the British government, apparently in an

effort to discourage emigration. He goes on:

The petty annoyances, the little inconveniences and unpleasant incidents

met with in all journeys, were grossly exaggerated and cited as characteristic

of daily life in the States. Men and women met with at the inns and taverns,

in the stage-coaches and far-away country towns, were described not as so

many types, but as the typical Americans. The abuse heaped on public men

by partisan newspapers, the charges of corruption made by one faction against

the other, the scandals of the day, were all cited as solemn truth.

Even the relatively mild and friendly Captain Hamilton con-

descended to such tactics. This is what he had to say of Thomas

Jefferson:

The moral character of Jefferson was repulsive. Continually puling about

liberty, equality, and the degrading curse of slavery, he brought his own

children to the hammer, and made money of his debaucheries.1

Such violent assaults, in the long run, were bound to breed defi-

ance, but while they were at their worst they produced a contrary

effect. “The nervous interest of Americans in the impressions

formed of them by visiting Europeans,” says Allan Nevins,2 “and

their sensitiveness to British criticism in especial, were long regarded

as constituting a salient national trait.” The native authors became

extremely self-conscious and diffident, and the educated classes, in

general, were daunted by the torrent of abuse: they could not help

finding in it an occasional reasonableness, an accidental true hit. The

result was uncertainty and scepticism in native criticism. “The first

step of an American entering upon a literary career,” said Henry

Cabot Lodge, writing of the first quarter of the century,3 “was to

1 See also The Cambridge History of

American Literature, Vol. I; New

York, 1917, pp. 205-8; As Others

See Us, by John Graham Brooks;

New York, 1909, Ch. VII; James

Kirke Paulding, by Amos L. Her-

old; New York, 1926, Ch. IV;

American Social History as Re-

corded by British Travellers, by

Allan Nevins; New York, 1923, pp.

3-26 and pp. 111-138; One Hun-

dred Years of Peace, by Henry

Cabot Lodge: New York, 1913, pp.

41-55; and The English Traveller

in America, 1785-1835, by Jane

Louise Mesick; New York, 1922,

pp. 241-45. There is a brief but

comprehensive view of the earlier

period in British Recognition of

American Speech in the Eighteenth

Century, by Allen Walker Read,

Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, 1933.

A bibliography of British books of

American travel is in The Cam-

bridge History of American Litera-

ture, Vol. I, pp. 468-90, and an-

other, annotated, in Nevins, pp.

555-68.

2 American Social History as Re-

corded by British Travelers; New

York, 1923, p. 3.

3 In his essay, Colonialism in America,

in Studies in History; Boston, 1884.

pretend to be an Englishman in order that he might win the approval, not of Englishmen, but of his own countrymen." Cooper, in his first novel, "Precaution," (1820) chose an English scene, imitated English models, and obviously hoped to placate the English critics thereby. Irving, too, in his earliest work, showed a considerable discretion, and his "Knickerbocker" was first published anonymously. But this puerile spirit did not last long. The English libels were altogether too vicious to be received lying down; their very fury demanded that they be met with a united and courageous front. Cooper, in his second novel, "The Spy" (1821), boldly chose an American setting and American characters, and though the influence of his wife, who came of a Loyalist family, caused him to avoid any direct attack upon the English, he attacked them indirectly, and with great effect, by opposing an immediate and honorable success to their derisions. "The Spy" ran through three editions in four months, and was followed by a long line of thoroughly American novels. In 1828 Cooper undertook a detailed reply to the more common English charges in "Notions of the Americans," but he was still too cautious to sign his name to it: it appeared as "by a Travelling Bachelor." By 1834, however, he was ready to apologize formally to his countrymen for his early truancy in "Precaution." Irving, who was even more politic, and suffered moreover from Anglomania in a severe form, nevertheless edged himself gradually into the patriot band, and by 1828 he was brave enough to refuse the Quarterly's offer of a hundred guineas for an article on the ground that it was "so persistently hostile to our country" that he could not "draw a pen in its service."

The real counter-attack was carried on by lesser men - the elder Timothy Dwight, John Neal, Edward Everett, Charles Jared Ingersoll, J. K. Paulding, and Robert Walsh, Jr., among them. Neal went to England, became secretary to Jeremy Bentham, forced his way into the reviews, and so fought the English on their own ground. Walsh set up the American Review of History and Politics, the first American critical quarterly, in 1811, and eight years later published "An Appeal From the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America." Everett performed chiefly in the North American Review (founded in 1815), to which he contributed many articles and of which he was editor from 1820 to 1824. Wirt published his "Letters of a British Spy" in 1803, and Ingersoll followed

with "Inchiquin the Jesuit's Letters on American Literature and Politics" in 1811. In January, 1814 the Quarterly reviewed "Inchiquin" in a paticularly violent manner, and a year later Dwight replied to the onslaught in "Remarks on the Review of Inchiquin's Letters Published in the Quarterly Review, Addressed to the Right Honorable George Canning, Esq." Dwight ascribed the Quarterly diatribe to Southey. He went on:

Both the travelers and the literary journalists of [England] have, for reasons which it would be idle to inquire after and useless to allege, thought it proper to caricature the Americans. Their pens have been dipped in gall; and their representations have been, almost merely, a mixture of malevolence and falsehood.

Dwight rehearsed some of the counts in the Quarterly's indictment - that "the president of Yale College tells of a conflagrative brand," that Jefferson used to belittle, that to guess was on the tongues of all Americans, and so on. "You charge us," he said, "with making some words, and using others in a peculiar sense. . . . You accuse us of forming projects to get rid of the English language; 'not,' you say, 'merely by barbarizing it, but by abolishing it altogether, and substituting a new language of our own.'" His reply was to list, on the authority of Pegge's "Anecdotes of the English Language," 105 vulgarisms common in London - for example, potecary for apothecary, chimly for chimney, saace for sauce, kiver for cover, nowheres for nowhere, scholard for scholar, and hisn for his - to accuse "members of Parliament" of using diddled and gullibility 1 and to deride the English provincial dialects as "unintelligible gabble."

But in this battle across the ocean it was Paulding who got in the most licks, and the heaviest ones. In all he wrote five books dealing with the subject. The first, "The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan" (1812) was satirical in tone, and made a considerable popular success. Three years later he followed it with a more serious work, "The United States and England," another reply to the Quarterly review of "Inchiquin." The before-mentioned "Letters From the South" came out in 1817, and in 1822

1 At that time both words were neologisms. The Oxford Dictionary's first example of gullibility is dated 1793. So late as 1818 it was denounced by the Rev. H. J. Todd,

one of the improvers of Johnson's Dictionary, as "a low expression, sometimes used for cullibility." The Oxford's first example of to diddle is dated 1806.

Paulding resumed the attack with “ A Sketch of Old England,” a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the current English books of America can travels. He had never been to England, and the inference was that many of the English travelers had never been to America. Finally, in 1825, he resorted to broad burlesque in “ John Bull in America, or The New Munchausen.”1 Now and then some friendly aid came from the camp of the enemy. Cairns shows that, while the Quarterly, the European Magazine and the Anti-Jacobin were “ strongly anti-American ” and “ deliberately and dirtly bitter,” three or four of the lesser reviews displayed a fairer spirit, and even more or less American bias. After 1824, when the North American Review gave warning that if the campaign of abuse went on it would “ turn into bitterness the last drops of good-will toward England that exist in the United States,” even Blackwood’s became somewhat conciliatory.

3. AMERICAN “ BARBARISMS ”

But this occasional tolerance for things American was never extended to the American language. Most of the English books of travel mentioned Americanisms only to revile them, and even when they were not reviled they were certainly not welcomed. The typical attitude was well set forth by Captain Hamilton in “ Men and Manners in America,” already referred to as denying that the United States of 1833 had any libraries. “ The amount of bad grammar in circulation,” he said, “ is very great; that of barbarisms [i.e., Americanisms] enormous.” Worse, these “ barbarisms ” were not confined to the ignorant, but came almost as copiously from the lips of the learned.

I do not now speak of the operative class, whose massacre of their mother-tongue, however inhuman, could excite no astonishment; but I allude to the great body of lawyers and traders; the men who crowd the exchange and the hotels; who are to be heard speaking in the courts, and are selected by their fellow-citizens to fill high and responsible offices. Even by this educated and respectable class, the commonest words are often so transmogrified as to be placed beyond recognition of an Englishman.

1 This book, like John Bull and Brother Jonathan, seems to have had readers for a generation or more. So late as 1867 the Scribners brought out a new edition of the two in a single volume, under the title of The Bulls and Jonathans, with a preface by William I. Paulding. It still makes amusing reading.

24

The American Language

Hamilton then went on to describe some of the prevalent "barbarisms" :

The word does is split into two syllables, and pronounced do-es. Where, for some incomprehensible reason, is converted into whare, there into thare; and I remember, on mentioning to an acquaintance that I had called on a gentleman of taste in the arts, he asked "whether he shew (showed) me his pictures." Such words as oratory and dilatory are pronounced with the penult syllable long and accented: missionary becomes missionairy, angel, ângel, danger, dânger, etc.

But this is not all. The Americans have chosen arbitrarily to change the meaning of certain old and established English words, for reasons they cannot explain, and which I doubt much whether any European philologist could understand. The word clever affords a case in point. It has here no connexion with talent, and simply means pleasant or amiable. Thus a good-natured blockhead in the American vernacular is a clever man, and having had this drilled into me, I foolishly imagined that all trouble with regard to this word, at least, was at an end. It was not long, however, before I heard of a gentleman having moved into a clever house, of another succeeding to a clever sum of money, of a third embarking in a clever ship, and making a clever voyage, with a clever cargo; and of the sense attached to the word in these various combinations, I could gain nothing like a satisfactory explanation. . . .

The privilcge of barbarizing the King's English is assumed by all ranks and conditions of men. Such words as slick, kedge and boss, it is true, are rarely used by the better orders; but they assume unlimited liberty in the use of expect, reckon, guess and calculate, and perpetrate other conversational anomalies with remorseless impunity.

This Briton, as usual, was as full of moral horror as of grammatical disgust, and put his denunciation upon the loftiest of grounds. He concluded:

I will not go on with this unpleasant subject, nor should I have alluded to it, but I feel it something of a duty to express the natural feeling of an Englishman at finding the language of Shakespeare and Milton thus gratuitously degraded. Unless the present progress of change be arrested by an increase of taste and judgment in the more educated classes, there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman, and that the nation will be cut off from the advantages arising from their participation in British literature. If they contemplate such an event with complacency, let them go on and prosper; they have only to progress in their present course, and their grandchildren bid fair to speak a jargon as novel and peculiar as the most patriotic American linguist can desire.1

All the other English writers of travel books took the same line, and so did the stay-at-homes who hunted and abhorred Americanisms from afar. Mrs. Frances Trollope reported in her "Domestic

1 The quotations are from pp. 127-9.

Manners of the Americans" (1832) that during her whole stay in the Republic she had seldom "heard a sentence elegantly turned and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American": there was "always something either in the expression or the accent" that jarred her feelings and shocked her taste. She concluded that "the want of refinement" was the great American curse. Captain Frederick Marryat, in "A Diary in America" (1839) observed that "it is remarkable how very debased the language has become in a short period in America," and then proceeded to specifications - for example, the use of right away for immediately, of mean for ashamed, of clever in the senses which stumped Captain Hamilton, of bad as a deprecant of general utility, of admire for like, of how? instead of what? as an interrogative, of considerable as an adverb, and of such immoral verbs as to suspicion and to opinion. Marryat was here during Van Buren's administration, when the riot of Americanisms was at its wildest, and he reported some really fantastic specimens. Once, he said, he heard "one of the first men in America" say, "Sir, if I had done so, I should not only have doubled and trebled, but I should have fourbled and fivebled my money." Unfortunately, it is hard to believe that an American who was so plainly alive to the difference between shall and will, should and would, would have been unaware of quadrupled and quintupled. No doubt there was humor in the country, then as now, and visiting Englishmen were sometimes taken for rides.

Captain Basil Hall, who was here in 1827 and 1828, and published his "Travels in North America" in 1829, was so upset by some of the novelties he encountered that he went to see Noah Webster, then seventy years old, to remonstrate. Webster upset him still further by arguing stoutly that "his countrymen had not only a right to adopt new words, but were obliged to modify the language to suit the novelty of the circumstances, geographical and political, in which they were placed." The lexicographer went on to observe judicially that "it is quite impossible to stop the progress of language - it is like the course of the Mississippi, the motion of which, at times, is scarcely perceptible; yet even then it possesses a momentum quite irresistible. Words and expressions will be forced into use, in spite of all the exertions of all the writers in the world."

"But surely," persisted Hall, "such innovations are to be deprecated?"

26

The American Language

"I don't know that," replied Webster. "If a word becomes universally current in America, where English is spoken, why should it not take its station in the language?"

To this Hall made an honest British reply. "Because," he said, "there are words enough already."

Webster tried to mollify him by saying that "there were not fifty words in all which were used in America and not in England" - an underestimate of large proportions -, but Hall went away muttering.

Marryat, who toured the United States ten years after Hall, was chiefly impressed by the American verb to fix, which he described as "universal" and as meaning "to do anything." It also got attention from other English travelers, including Godfrey Thomas Vigne, whose "Six Months in America" was printed in 1832, and Charles Dickens, who came in 1842. Vigne said that it had "perhaps as many significations as any word in the Chinese language," and proceeded to list some of them - "to be done, made, mixed, mended, bespoken, hired, ordered, arranged, procured, finished, lent or given." Dickens thus dealt with it in one of his letters home to his family:

I asked Mr. Q. on board a steamboat if breakfast be nearly ready, and he tells me yes, he should think so, for when he was last below the steward was fixing the tables - in other words, laying the cloth. When we have been writing and I beg him . . . to collect our papers, he answers that he'll fix 'em presently. So when a man's dressing he's fixing himself, and when you put yourself under a doctor he fixes you in no time. T'other night, before we came on board here, when I had ordered a bottle of mulled claret, and waited some time for it, it was put on the table with an apology from the landlord (a lieutenant-colonel) that he fear'd it wasn't properly fixed. And here, on Saturday morning, a Western man, handing his potatoes to Mr. Q. at breakfast, inquired if he wouldn't take some of "these fixings" with his meat.1

In another letter, written on an Ohio river steamboat on April 15, 1842, Dickens reported that "out of Boston and New York" a nasal drawl was universal, that the prevailing grammar was "more than doubtful," that the "oddest vulgarisms" were "received idioms," and that "all the women who have been bred in slave States speak more or less like Negroes." His observations on American speech

1 The letter appears in John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens; London, 1872-74; Book III, Chapter V. It is reprinted in Allan Nevins's American Social History as Recorded by

British Travelers; New York, 1923, p. 268. It was written on a canal-boat nearing Pittsburgh, and dated March 28, 1842.

The Two Streams of English

27

habits in his “American Notes” (1842) were so derisory that they drew the following from Emerson:

No such conversations ever occur in this country in real life, as he relates. He has picked up and noted with cagerness each odd local phrase that he met with, and when he had a story to relate, has joined them together, so that the result is the broadest caricature.1

Almost every English traveler of the years between the War of 1812 and the Civil War was puzzled by the strange signs on American shops. Hall couldn’t make out the meaning of Leather and Finding Store, though he found Flour and Feed Store and Clothing Store self-explanatory, albeit unfamiliar. Hamilton, who followed in 1833, failed to gather “the precise import” of Dry-Goods Store, and was baffled and somewhat shocked by Coffin Warehouse (it would now be Casketeria!) and Hollow Ware, Spiders, and Fire-Dogs. But all this was relatively mild stuff, and after 1850 the chief licks at the American dialect were delivered, not by English travelers, most of whom had begun by then to find it more amusing than indecent, but by English pedants who did not stir from their cloisters. The climax came in 1863, when the Very Rev. Henry Alford, D.D. dean of Canterbury, printed his “Plea for the Queen’s English.” 2 He said:

Look at the process of deterionration which our Queen’s English has undergone at the hands of the Americans. Look at those phrases which so amuse us in their speech and books; at their reckless exaggeration and contempt for congruity; and then compare the character and history of the nation – its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man; its open disregard of conventional right when aggrandisement is to be obtained; and I may now say, its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world.

1 Journal, Nov. 25, 1842.

2 A second edition followed in 1864, and an eighth was reached by 1880. There was also an American edition. In October, 1864, an American resident in England, G. Washington Moon by name, brought out a counterblast, The Dean’s English. This reached a seventh edition by 1884. Moon employed the ingenious device of turning Alford’s pedantries upon him. He showed that the dean was a very loose and careless writer, and often violated his own rules. Another American, Edward

S. Gould, bombarded him from the same ground in Good English, or Popular Errors in Language; New York, 1867. Alford was a favorite scholar of the time. He wrote Latin odes and a history of the Jews before he was ten years old, and in later life was the first editor of the Contemporary Review and brought out a monumental edition of the New Testament in Greek. He was born in 1810, served as dean of Canterbury from 1857 to 1871, and died in the latter year.

28 The American Language

It will be noted that Alford here abandoned one of the chief counts in Sydney Smith's famous indictment, and substituted its exact opposite. Smith had denounced slavery, whereas Alford, by a tremendous feat of moral virtuosity, was now denouncing the war to put it down! But Samuel Taylor Coleridge had done almost as well in 1822. The usual English accusation at that time, as we have seen, was that the Americans had abandoned English altogether and set up a barbarous jargon in its place. Coleridge, speaking to his friend Thomas Allsop, took the directly contrary tack. " An American," he said, " by his boasting of the superiority of the Americans generally, but especially in their language, once provoked me to tell him that ' on that head the least said the better, as the Americans presented the extraordinary anomaly of a people without a language. [Allsop's italics] That they had mistaken the English language for baggage (which is called plunder in America), and had stolen it.' " And then the inevitable moral reflection: " Speaking of America, it is believed a fact verified beyond doubt that some years ago it was impossible to obtain a copy of the Newgate Calendar, as they had all been bought up by the Americans, whether to suppress the blazon of their forefathers, or to assist in their genealogical researches, I could never learn satisfactorily." 1

4. THE ENGLISH ATTITUDE TODAY

Smith, Alford and Coleridge have plenty of heirs and assigns in the England of today. There is in the United States, as everyone knows, a formidable sect of Anglomaniacs, and its influence is often felt, not only in what passes here for society, but also in the domains of politics, finance, pedagogy and journalism, but the corresponding sect of British Americophils is small and feeble, though it shows a few respectable names. It is seldom that anything specifically American is praised in the English press, save, of course, some new manifestation of American Anglomania. The realm of Uncle Shylock remains, at bottom, the " brigand confederation " of the Foreign Quarterly, and on occasion it becomes again the " loathsome creature, . . . maimed and lame, full of sores and ulcers," of Dickens.

1 Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, edited by Thomas Allsop; London, 1836.

The Two Streams of English

In the field of language an Americanism is generally regarded as obnoxious ipso facto, and when a new one of any pungency begins to force its way into English usage the guardians of the national linguistic chastity belabor it with great vehemence, and predict calamitous consequences if it is not put down. If, despite these alarms, it makes progress, they often switch to the doctrine that it is really old English, and search the Oxford Dictionary for examples of its use in Chaucer's time, or even in the Venerable Bede's;1 but while it is coming in they give it no quarter. Here the unparalleled English talent for discovering moral obliquity comes into play, and what begins as an uproar over a word sometimes ends as a holy war to keep the knavish Yankee from undermining and ruining the English Kultur and overthrowing the British Empire. The crusade has abundant humors. Not infrequently a phrase denounced as an abominable Americanism really originated in the London music-halls, and is unknown in the United States. And almost as often the denunciation of it is sprinkled with genuine Americanisms, unconsciously picked up.

The English seldom differentiate between American slang and Americanisms of legitimate origin and in respectable use: both belong to what they often call the American slanguage.2 It is most unusual for an American book to be reviewed in England without some reference to its strange and (so one gathers) generally unpleasant diction. The Literary Supplement of the London Times is especially alert in this matter. It discovers Americanisms in the writings of even the most decorous American authors, and when none can be found it notes the fact, half in patronizing approbation and half in incredulous surprise. Of the 240 lines it gave to the first two volumes of the Dictionary of American Biography, 31 were devoted to animadversions upon the language of the learned authors.3 The Man-

"This dichotomy," says Allen Walker Read in 'British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, 1933, p. 331, "runs through most British writing on American speech . . . : on the one hand the Americans are denounced for introducing corruptions into the language, and on the other hand those very expressions are eagerly claimed as of British origin to show that the British deserve the credit for them."

2 According to American Speech (Feb. 1930, p. 250) this term was invented in 1925 or thereabout. At that time the English war debt to the United States was under acrimonious discussion, and Uncle Sam became Uncle Shylock.

3 Aug. 29, 1929. The passage is perhaps worth quoting in full: "The literary style of the articles is, in

30 The American Language

chester Guardian and the weeklies of opinion follow dutifully. The Guardian, in a review of Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick's "As I See Religion," began by praising his "telling speech," but ended by deploring sadly his use of the "full-blooded Americanisms which sometimes make even those who do not for a moment question America's right and power to contribute to the speech which we use in common wince as they read." 1 One learns from J. L. Hammond that the late C. P. Scott, for long the editor of the Guardian, had a keen nose for Americanisms, and was very alert to keep them out of his paper. Says Hammond:

He would go bustling into a room, waving a cutting or a proof, in which was an obscure phrase, a preciosity, or an Americanism. "What does he mean by this? He talks about a final showdown? An Americanism, I suppose. What does it mean? Generally known? I don't know it. Taken from cards? I never heard of it." 2

This war upon Americanisms is in progress all the time, but it naturally has its pitched battles and its rest-periods between. For

most instances, suitable to their purpose. Some of them afford obvious indications of their country of origin, as when we read that Bishop Asbury was at no time a well man, or that Chester A. Arthur's chief did not uphold the power of the Conkling crowd, or that Robert Bacon announced his candidacy for the Senate, or that Governor Altheld protested the action of President Cleveland, or that Dr. W. Beaumont, when a doctor's apprentice, learned to fill prescriptions, or that J. G. Blaine raised a family of seven children, or that Prof. B. P. Bowne tested the progress of his pupils by a written quiz. The article on Blaine contains a curious illustration of the peculiar American use of the word politician. We read that 'however much Blaine was a politician, it seems to be the fact that from 1876 he was the choice of the majority, or of the largest faction, of Republicans.' One naturally wonders why it should be thought surprising for a politician to win popular support within his own party. The explanation is that

politician is here very nearly a synonym for wire-puller or intriguer, and the point the writer wishes to make is that Blaine's influence was not wholly due to his adroit manipulation of the political machine." The following is from the Times' review of Hervey Allen's Toward the Flame (Literary Supplement, June 7, 1934):

"Mr. Allen may or not feel complimented by the statement that, apart from military terms which appear strange to us, there is not an Americanism in his strong and supple prose; but the fact adds to an English reader's pleasure. Yet one would like to know what were the functions of the individual called the colonel's striker." The English term for striker, as the reviewer might have discovered by consulting the Oxford Dictionary, is batman. Both signify a military servant.

1 Weekly edition, Aug. 26, 1932, p. 175. 2 C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian; London, 1934, p. 314.

The Two Streams of English

31

months there may be relative quiet on the linguistic Western front, and then some alarmed picket fires a gun and there is what the German war communiqué's used to call a sharpening of activity. As a general thing the English content themselves with artillery practise from their own lines, but now and then one of them boldly invades the enemy's country. This happened, for example, in 1908, when Charles Whibley contributed an extremely acidulous article on "The American Language" to the Bookman (New York) for January. "To the English traveller in America," he said, "the language which he hears spoken about him is at once a puzzle and a surprise. It is his own, yet not his own. It seems to him a caricature of English, a phantom speech, ghostly yet familiar, such as he might hear in a land of dreams." Mr. Whibley objected violently to many characteristic American terms, among them, to locate, to operate, to antagonize, transportation, commutation and proposition. "These words," he said, "if words they may be called, are hideous to the eye, offensive to the ear, meaningless to the brain." The onslaught provoked even so mild a man as Dr. Henry W. Boynton to action, and in the Bookman for March of the same year he published a spirited rejoinder. "It offends them [the English]," he said, "that we are not thoroughly ashamed of ourselves for not being like them." Mr. Whibley's article was reprinted with this counterblast, so that readers of the magazine might judge the issues fairly. The controversy quickly got into the newspapers, and was carried on for months, with American patriots on one side and Englishmen and Anglomaniacs on the other.

I myself once helped to loose such an uproar, though quite unintentionally. Happening to be in London in the Winter of 1929-30, I was asked by Mr. Ralph D. Blumenfeld, the American-born editor of the Daily Express, to do an article for his paper on the progress of Americanisms in England since my last visit in 1922. In that article I ventured to say:

The Englishman, whether he knows it or not, is talking and writing more and more American. He becomes so accustomed to it that he grows unconscious of it. Things that would have set his teeth on edge ten years ago, or even five years ago, are now integral parts of his daily speech. . . . In a few years it will probably be impossible for an Englishman to speak, or even to write, without using Americanisms, whether consciously or unconsciously. The influence of 125,000,000 people, practically all headed in one direction, is simply too great to be resisted by any minority, however resolute.

The question whether or not this was sound will be examined in Chapters VI and XII. For the present it is sufficient to note that my article was violently arraigned by various volunteer correspondents of the Express and by contributors to many other journals. One weekly opened its protest with “That silly little fellow, H. L. Mencken, is at it again” and headed it “The American Moron,” and in various other quarters I was accused of a sinister conspiracy against the mother-tongue, probably political or commercial in origin, or maybe both. At this time the American talkie was making its first appearance in England, and so there was extraordinary interest in the subject, for it was obvious that the talkie would bring in far more Americanisms than the silent movie; moreover, it would also introduce the hated American accent. On February 4, 1930 Sir Alfred Knox, a Conservative M.P., demanded in the House of Commons that the Right Hon. William Graham, P.C., then president of the Board of Trade, take steps to “protect the English language by limiting the import of American talkie films.” In a press interview he said:

I don’t go to the cinema often, but I had to be present at one a few days ago, when an American talkie film was shown. The words and accent were perfectly disgusting, and there can be no doubt that such films are an evil influence on our language. It is said that 30,000,000 [British] people visit the cinemas every week. What is the use of spending millions on education if our young people listen to falsified English spoken every night?1

There had been another such uproar in 1927, when an International Conference on English was held in London, under the presidency of the Earl of Balfour. This conference hardly got beyond polite futilities, but the fact that the call for it came from the American side2 made it suspect from the start, and its deliberations

1 According to the Associated Press, Mr. Graham pointed to the Cinematographic Act as designed to encourage British films, but added: “I’m not prepared to place direct restrictions on the importations of American talking films into this country.”

and Letters; John Livingston Lowes of Harvard; John M. Manly of the University of Chicago; Charles G. Osgood of Princeton, and the late Fred Newton Scott of the University of Michigan. A reply was received in October, 1922, from an English committee consisting of the Earl of Balfour, Dr. Robert Bridges and Sir Henry Newbolt, but it was not until five years later that the conference was actually held. It will be referred to again a bit later on.

2 It was issued in March, 1922, and was signed by the late James W. Bright, then professor of English at the Johns Hopkins; Charles H. Grandgent of Harvard; Robert Underwood Johnson, secretary of the American Academy of Arts

The Two Streams of English

33

met with unconcealed hostility. On June 25, 1927, the New Statesman let go with a heavy blast, rehearsing all the familiar English objections to Americanisms. It said:

It is extremely desirable, to say the least, that every necessary effort should be made to preserve some standard of pure idiomatic English. But from what quarter is the preservation of such a standard in any way threatened? The answer is "Solely from America." Yet we are asked to collaborate with the Americans on the problem; we are to make bargains about our own tongue; there is to be a system of give and take. . . . Why should we offer to discuss the subject at all with America? We do not want to interfere with their language; why should they seek to interfere with ours? That their huge population of which only a small minority are even racially Anglo-Saxons should use English as their chief medium of intercommunication is our misfortune, not our fault. They certainly threaten our language, but the only way in which we can effectively meet that threat is by assuming - in the words of the authors of "The King's English" 1 that "Americanisms are foreign words and should be so treated."

The proposal that a permanent Council of English be formed, with 50 American members and 50 from the British Empire, brought the New Statesman to the verge of hysterics. It admitted that such a council "might be very useful indeed," but argued that it "ought not to include more than one Scotsman and one Irishman, and should certainly not include even a single American." Thus it reasoned:

The American language is the American language, and the English language is the English language. In some respects the Americans may fairly claim superiority. Sidewalk, for example, is a better word than pavement, and fall an infinitely better word than autumn. If we do not adopt these better words it is simply because of their "American flavor"; and the instinct which makes us reject them, though unfortunate in certain cases, is profoundly right. The only way to preserve the purity of the English language is to present a steadily hostile resistance to every American innovation. From time to time we may adopt this word or that, or sometimes a whole vivid phrase. But for all serious lovers of the English tongue it is America that is the only dangerous enemy. She must develop her own language and allow us to develop ours.

The other English journals were rather less fierce in their denunciation of the council and its programme, but very few of them greeted either with anything approaching cordiality.2 The Times,

1 By H. W. and F. G. Fowler; Oxford, 1908.

2 There is an account of their attitude, with quotations, by Dr. Kemp Malone of the Johns Hopkins, who was an American delegate to the conference, in American Speech, April, 1928, p. 261. The conference held two sessions, both at the quarters of the Royal Society of Literature. On the first day Lord Balfour presided, and on the second day Dr. Johnson. The speakers on the first day were Lord

34

The American Language

obviously trying to be polite, observed that " without offense it may be said that no greater assaults are made on the common language than in America," and the Spectator ventured the view that in the United States English was departing definitely from the home standard, and was greatly "imposed upon and influenced by a host of immigrants from all the nations of Europe." This insistence that Americans are not, in any cultural sense, nor even in any plausible statistical sense, Anglo-Saxons is to be found in many English fulminations upon the subject. During the World War, especially after 1917, they were hailed as blood-brothers, but that lasted only until the first mention of war-debts. Ever since 1920 they have been mongrels again, as they were before 1917, and most discussions of Americanisms include the objection that yielding to them means yielding to a miscellaneous rabble of inferior tribes, some of them, by English standards, almost savage. There was a time when the American in the English menagerie of comic foreigners was Hiram Q. Simpkins or Ulysses X. Snodgrass, a Yankee of Puritan, and hence of vaguely English stock, but on some near tomorrow he will probably be Patrick Kraus, Rastus O'Brien, Ole Ginzberg, or some other such fantastic compound of races.

The complaint that Americanisms are inherently unintelligible to civilized Christians is often heard in England, though not as often as in the past. It is a fact that they frequently deal with objects and ideas that are not familiar to the English, and that sometimes they make use of metaphors rather too bold for the English imagination. In consequence, there has been a steady emission of glossaries since the earliest days, some of them on a large scale. The first seems to have been that of the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, which was probably drawn up before 1800, but was not published until 1832, when it

Balfour, Dr. Canby, George Bernard Shaw, Prof. Lloyd Jones of the British Broadcasting Corporation, Sir Israel Gollancz, Dr. Lowes, and Dr. Johnson. Those on the second day were Dr. Canby, Dr. Louise Pound of the University of Nebraska, Professor F. S. Boas, Dr. Lowes, Sir Henry Newbolt, and J. C. Squire. In addition to the speakers, those in attendance were Dr. Scott, Dr. George Philip Krapp,

Prof. W. H. Wagstaff, Prof. J. Dover Wilson, Prof. A. Lloyd James, Dr. W. A. Craigie, and John Bailey. The conference was financed by the Commonwealth Fund, with some aid from Thomas W. Lamont. Later on the support of the Commonwealth Fund was withdrawn, and so the project to form a permanent Council of English fell through.

appeared in the second edition of his “Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words.”1 It was followed by that of David Humphreys, one of the Hartford Wits, which was printed as an appendix to his play, “The Yankey in England,” in 1815.2 A year later came John Pickering's “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America.” Pickering got many of his words from the current English reviews of American books, and his purpose was the double, and rather contradictory, one of proving to the English reviewers that they were good English, and of dissuading Americans from using them.3 Robley Dunglison's glossary followed in 1829–30, John

1 Boucher, who was born in England in 1737, came out to Virginia in 1759 as a private tutor. In 1762 he returned home to take holy orders, but was soon back in Virginia as rector of Hanover parish. He also conducted a school, and one of his pupils was young John Parke Custis, Washington's stepson. Boucher made the most of this connection. In 1770 he became rector at Annapolis, and soon afterward he married an heiress and bought a plantation on the Maryland side of the Potomac. His Loyalist sentiments got him into difficulties as the Revolution approached, and in 1775 he returned to England, where he died in 1804. In 1797 he published A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution, a series of thirteen sermons. After his death his friends began the publication of his Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words, on which he had been engaged for thirty years. The first part, covering part of the letter A, came out in 1807. In 1832 the Rev. Joseph Hunter and Joseph Stevenson undertook to continue the work, but it got no further than

torally, of the rural swains) inhabiting the Banks of the Potomac, in Maryland.” Boucher accused the Americans of “making all the haste they conveniently can to rid themselves of” the English language. “It is easy to foresee,” he said, “that, in no very distant period, their language will become as independent of England as they themselves are, and altogether as unlike English as the Dutch or Flemish is unlike German, or the Norwegian unlike the Danish, or the Portuguese unlike Spanish.” Absence is reprinted in Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VII, 1933, with a commentary by Allen Walker Read.

2 It is reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931, pp. 56–63. About 280 terms are listed. They are mainly New England dialect forms, but one finds a few Americanisms that were in general use, and have survived, e.g., breadstuffs, spook, nip (a measure of drink), to boost, to stump, and tarnation.

Bl. Boucher's brief glossary of Americanisms appeared in the introduction to this second edition. It listed but 38 words. With it was printed Absence: a Pastoral; “drawn from the life, from the manners, customs and phraseology of planters (or, to speak more pas-

3 Pickering's long introductory essay, but not his vocabulary, is reprinted in Mathews, pp. 65–76. On March 18, 1829, Dr. T. Romeyn Beck, a New York physician and antiquary, read a paper on the Pickering book before the Albany Institute. It was published in the Transactions of the Institute for 1830, and is reprinted by Mathews, pp. 78–85.

Mason Peck's in 1834,1 J. O. Halliwell-Phillips's "Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms, Containing Words Now Obsolete in England, All of Which Are Familiar and in Common Use in America" in 1850, John Russell Bartlett's "Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States" (about 3725 terms) in 1848, A. L. Elwin's "Glossary of Supposed Americanisms" (about 465 terms) in 1859, Maximilien Schele de Vere's "Americanisms" (about 4000 terms) in 1872, John S. Farmer's "Americanisms Old and New" (about 5000 terms) in 1889, Sylva Clapin's "New Dictionary of Americanisms" (about 5250 terms) in 1902, and Richard H. Thornton's "American Glossary" (about 3700 terms) in 1912. These were mainly the work of philological amateurs, and only Thornton's two volumes had any scientific value.

So long ago as 1913 Sir Sidney Low, who had lived in America and had a sound acquaintance with Americanisms, suggested ironically in an article in the Westminster Gazette that American be taught in the English schools. This was before the movie invasion, and he reported that the English business man was "puzzled by his ignorance of colloquial American" and "painfully hampered" thereby in his handling of American trade. He went on:

In the United States the study of the English tongue forms part of the educational scheme. . . . I think we should return the compliment. We ought to learn the American language in our schools and colleges. At present it is strangely neglected by the educational authorities. They pay attention to linguistic attainments of many other kinds, but not to this. How many thousands of youths are at this moment engaged in puzzling their brains over Latin and Greek grammar only Whitehall knows. Every well-conducted seminary has some instructor who is under the delusion that he is teaching English boys and girls to speak French with a good Parisian accent. We teach German, Italian, even Spanish, Russian, modern Greek, Arabic, Hindustani. For a moderate fee you can acquire a passing acquaintance with any of these tongues at the Berlitz Institute and the Gouin Schools. But even in these polyglot establishments there is nobody to teach you American. I have never

1 Dunglison's glossary, dealing with about 190 terms, was published in three instalments in the Virginia Literary Museum. It was reprinted in Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. X, 1927, with a commentary by Allen Walker Read. Peck's appeared in his Emigrant's Guide and Gazetteer of the State of Illinois, first published in 1834, and reissued with revisions in 1836 and 1837. See John

Mason Peck and the American Language, by Elrick B. Davis, American Speech, Oct., 1926. "An examination of the vocabulary of the 1837 edition," says Davis, "shows that out of 648 specific words used in strategic positions only 313 show a history in the Oxford Dictionary complete in Peck's use of them before 1789, the year of his birth."

The Two Streams of English

seen a grammar of it or a dictionary. I have searched in vain at the booksellers for “How to Learn American in Three Weeks” or some similar compendium. Nothing of the sort exists. The native speech of one hundred millions of civilized people is as grossly neglected by the publishers as it is by the schoolmasters. You can find means to learn Hausa or Swahili or Cape Dutch in London more easily than the expressive, if difficult, tongue which is spoken in the office, the barroom, the tramcar, from the snows of Alaska to the mouths of the Mississippi, and is enshrined in a literature that is growing in volume and favor every day.

Low quoted an extract from an American novel then appearing serially in an English magazine – an extract including such Americanisms as side-stepper, saltwater-taffy, Prince-Albert (coat), boob, bartender and kidding, and many characteristically American extravagances of metaphor. It might be well argued, he said, that this strange dialect was as near to “ the tongue that Shakespeare spoke ” as “ the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton,” but that philological fact did not help to its understanding. “You might almost as well expect him [the British business man] to converse freely with a Portuguese railway porter because he tried to stumble through Caesar when he was in the Upper Fourth at school.”

At the time Low published his article the invasion of England by Americanisms was just beginning in carnest, and many words and phrases that have since become commonplaces there were still strange and disquieting. Writing in the London Daily Mail a year or so later W. G. Faulkner thought it necessary to explain the meanings of hobo, hoodlum, bunco-steerer, dead-beat, flume, dub, rubber-neck, drummer, sucker, dive (in the sense of a thieves’ resort), clean up, graft and to feature, and another interpreter, closely following him, added definitions of hold-up, quitter, rube, shack, bandwagon, road-agent, cinch, live-wire and scab.1 This was in the early days of the American-made movie, and Faulkner denounced its terminology as “ generating and encouraging mental indiscipline.”

As Hollywood gradually conquered the English cinema palaces,2

1 In Thornton’s American Glossary hobo is traced to 1891, hold-up and bunco to 1887, dive to 1882, dead-beat to 1877, hoodlum to 1872, road-agent to 1866, drummer to 1836, and flume to 1792.

2 The first American films reached England in 1907, but until 1915 they came in such small numbers that they were not separated, in the customs returns, from “optical supplies and equipment.” In 1915 their total value was fixed at £47,486. But the next year it leaped to £349,-919, and thereafter it mounted, with occasional recessions, to the peak of £ 880,240 in 1927. These values represented, of course, only the cost of the actual films, not that of the productions. In 1927 the Cinematograph Films Act was passed. It provided that all English exhibitors

38

The American Language

such warnings became more frequent and more angry, and in 1920 the London Daily News began a formal agitation of the subject, with the usual pious editorials and irate letters from old subscribers. I quote a characteristic passage from one of the latter:

I visited two picture theaters today for the express purpose of collecting slang phrases and of noticing the effect of the new language on the child as well as on the adult. What the villain said to the hero when the latter started to argue with him was, "Cut out that dope," and a hundred piping voices repeated the injunction. The comic man announced his marriage to the Bell of Lumbertown by saying, "I'm bitched."

On January 22, 1920 the London bureau of the Associated Press made this report:

England is apprehensive lest the vocabularies of her youth become corrupted through incursions of American slang. Trans-Atlantic tourists in England note with interest the frequency with which resort is made to "Yankee talk" by British song and play writers seeking to enliven their productions. Bands and orchestras throughout the country when playing popular music play American selections almost exclusively. American songs monopolize the English music hall and musical comedy stage. But it is the subtitle of the American moving picture film which, it is feared, constitutes the most menacing threat to the vaunted English purity of speech.

When the American talkie began to reinforce the movie, in 1929 there was fresh outburst of indignation, but this time it had a despairist undertone. Reinforced by the spoken word, Americanisms were now coming in much faster than they could be challenged and disposed of. "Within the past few years," said Thomas Anderson in the Manchester Sunday Chronicle for January 12, 1930, "we have

would have to show at least 5% of English-made films after Sept. 30, 1928, 7½ % after the same date in 1930, 10% after 1931, 12½ % after 1932, 15% after 1933, and 20% from Sept. 30, 1935 onward. The English duty is id. a foot on positives and 5d. on negatives. I am indebted for these figures and for those following to Mr. Lynn W. Meekins, American commercial attaché in London, and Mr. Henry E. Stebbins, assistant trade commissioner.

£130,847 in 1932. In part this was due to the operation of the Cinematograph Films Act, but in larger part it was produced by a change in trade practice. In the silent days many positives were sent to England, but since the talkie came in the film companies have been sending negatives and duplicating them in England. Thus the total annual footage is probably but little less than it was in 1929. Of the 476 imported films shown in England, Scotland and Wales in 1933, 330 were American, and according to Henry J. Gibbs, writing in the Blackshirt, "their value was 90 to 95% of the total."

The Two Streams of English

39

gradually been adopting American habits of speech, American business methods, and the American outlook." To which Jameson Thomas added in the London Daily Express for January 21:

One must admit that we write and speak Americanisms. So long as Yankeeisms came to us insidiously we absorbed them carelessly. They have been a valuable addition to the language, as nimble coppers are a valuable addition to purer currency. But the talkies have presented the American language in one giant meal, and we are revolted.

But this revolt, in so far as it was real at all, was apparently confined to the aged: the young of the British species continued to gobble down the neologisms of Hollywood and to imitate the Hollywood intonation. "Seldom do I hear a child speak," wrote a correspondent of the London News Chronicle on June 15, 1931, "who has not attached several Americanisms to his vocabulary, which are brought out with deliberation at every opportunity." During the next few years the English papers printed countless protests against this corruption of the speech of British youth, but apparently to no avail. Nor was there any halt when Col. F. W. D. Bendall, C.M.G., M.A., an inspector of the Board of Education, began stumping the country in an effort to further the dying cause of linguistic purity.1 Nor when the chief constable - i.e., chief of police - of Wallasey, a suburb of Liverpool, issued this solemn warning in his annual report:

I cannot refrain from commenting adversely on the pernicious and growing habit of . . . youths to use Americanisms, with nasal accompaniment, in order to appear, in their own vernacular, tough guys.

1 The following is from the Denby Herald's report of an address by Col. Bendall before the Dudley Literary Society on January 31, 1931: "He suggested that though it was true that American had a remarkable capacity for growth, there was no need to suppose that it would eventually settle the form which English must take. Such a result either in a wider divergence between literary and spoken English or in literary English becoming affected. The former position would lead to a loss of subtlety in spoken English and to literature's

becoming unintelligible to the masses, while to illustrate how deplorable the latter would be, the speaker read a part of Mr. Mencken's translation of the Declaration of Independence into modern American." The colonel's apparently grave acceptance of my burlesque as a serious specimen of "modern American" was matched by a sage calling himself John O'London in Is It Good English?; London, 1924, p. 92. After quoting the opening paragraph of my version, he said solemnly, "I hope 'these States' will suppress all such translations."

40

The American Language

my officers going to search him, a young housebreaker told him to "Lay off, cop." Oh-yeahs are frequent in answer to charges, and we are prom- ised shoots up in the burg [sic] and threatened to be bumped off.1

Parallel with this alarmed hostility to the jargon of the movies and the talkies, much of it borrowed from the American under- world, there has gone on in England a steady opposition to the more decorous varieties of American. I have already mentioned the Times' sneering review of the first two volumes of the Dictionary of American Biography. Back in 1919 H. N. Brailsford, the well- known English publicist, who has been in the United States many times and often contributes to American magazines, actually ob- jected to the vocabulary of the extremely precious and Angloman- iacal Woodrow Wilson, then in action in Versailles. "The irruption of Mr. Wilson upon our scene," he wrote in the London Daily Herald on August 20, "threatens to modify our terminology. If one knew the American language (as I do not)," and so on.2 A little while before this a leading English medical journal had been protesting against the Americanisms in an important surgical mono- graph.3 Translations done in the United States are so often denounced that denouncing them has become a sort of convention. There was a storm of unusual violence, in 1925, over the plays of Luigi Pirandello. Their merit had been recognized in America earlier than in England – indeed, some of them had been forbidden, at least in English, by the English censor –, and in consequence the first translations were published in this country. What followed when they reached England was thus described by the London cor- respondent of the Bookman (New York) in its issue for September, 1925:

A strange situation has arisen over the Pirandello translations. These were made in America, and they contain phraseology which is peculiarly

1 Chief Constable's Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1932; Wallasey, 1933, p. 13. the word obligate. We said at once that it could not be done."

2 In the London Times for June 15, 1927, George Bernard Shaw was reported as saying: "When Presi- dent Wilson came to this country he gave us a shock by using the word obligate instead of oblige. It showed that a man could become President in spite of that, and we asked ourselves if a man could be- come King of England if he used

3 Review in the Medical Press, Sept. 17, 1919, of an article by MacCarty and Connor in Surgery, Gynecol- ogy and Obstetrics. "In the study of the terminology of diseases of the breast," said the reviewer, " [the authors] suggest a scheme which seems simple, but unfortunately for British understanding, it is written in American."

The Two Streams of English

American. As a consequence they have been generally condemned in the English press as being translations from one foreign tongue into another. . . . It will be understood that when an English reader is used to calling comfits sweets and finds them called candies he feels he is not getting an English equivalent of the Italian author's word.

This correspondence was signed Simon Pure; its actual author, I am informed, was Rebecca West. She expressed the opinion that English translations of foreign books were frequently offensive to Americans, and for like reasons. “It seems to me to be a pity,” she continued, “that the habit should have grown up among Continental authors of selling ‘world rights in the English language.’ If the English translation does not satisfy the Americans, and the American translation does not please the English, it would surely be far better that there should be two translations.” In a long reply to this, published in the Saturday Review of Literature (New York) for December 26, 1925, Ernest Boyd – himself a translator of wide experience, born in Ireland, educated there and in England, for seven years a member of the British consular service, and resident in New York since 1920 – denied that there was any hostility to English translations in this country. “English translators,” he said, “are accepted at their own – or their publishers' – valuation in America,” but American translators “are received with prejudice and criticized with severity” in England. The American edition of Pirandello's plays consisted of two volumes, one translated by Dr. Arthur Livingston of Columbia University, and the other by Edward Storer, an Englishman. Said Mr. Boyd:

Dr. Livingston, the American, is taken to task though his Italian scholarship is well authenticated and beyond dispute. Mr. Storer, on the contrary, is an Englishman, and his translations are so defective in places as to show a complete misunderstanding of the text, but no complaints have been raised on that score. . . . One might have thought that the proper claim would be that a competent person, and only a competent person, irrespective of nationality, should translate. But British nationality is more important than American scholarship, apparently.

The ensuing debate ran on for several years; in fact, it is still resumed from time to time, with the English champions holding stoutly to the doctrine that there can be but one form of English pure and undefiled, and that it must, shall and will be the Southern English variety. Thus Raymond Mortimer in the Nation and Athenaeum for July 28, 1928:

42 The American Language

It is most unfortunate that American publishers should be able to buy the English as well as the American rights of foreign books. For the result usually is that these books remain permanently closed to the English reader.1

The English objection is not alone to the American vocabulary; it is also to the characteristic American style, which begins to differ appreciably from the normal English style. In every recent discussion of the matter the despairist note that I was mentioning a few paragraphs back is audible. There was a time when the English guardians of the mother-tongue tried to haul American into conformity by a kind of force majeure, but of late they seem to be resigned to its differentiation, and are concerned mainly about the possibility that Standard English may be considerably modified by its influence. As I have noted, H. W. and F. G. Fowler, in "The King's English," were deciding so long ago as 1906 that "Americanisms are foreign words, and should be so treated." They admitted that American had its points of superiority - "Fall is better on the merits than autumn, in every way; it is short, Saxon (like the other three season names), picturesque; it reveals its derivation to everyone who uses it, not to the scholar only, like autumn" - , but they protested against taking even the most impeccable Americanisms into English. "The English and the American language and literature," they argued, "are both good things, but they are better apart than mixed." In

1 Many more examples might be added, some of them not without their humors. Back in 1921 J. C. Squire (now Sir John) was protesting bitterly because an American translator of the Journal of the Goncourts "spoke of a pavement as a sidewalk." See the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, July 23, 1921. In Dostoevsky: Letters and Reminiscences, translated from the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky and J. Middleton Murry (New York, 1923; American binding of English sheets) there is this note, p. 282: "Saltykov, Mihail Efgrafovich (who used the pseudonym N. Schedrin), author of the 'Golovlevs, one of the greatest of Russian novels, which has been translated into French and American, but not yet into English." Such sneers are now answered by defiance as often as with humility.

When Dr. Edgar J. Goodspeed, professor of Biblical and patristic Greek at the University of Chicago, published his new version of the New Testament (Chicago, 1923) he boldly called it "an American translation," and in it he as boldly employed Americanisms in place of the English forms of the Authorized Version. Thus corn, meaning wheat in England but maize in America, was changed to wheat in Mark II, 23, Mark IV, 28, and Matthew XII, 1. Similarly, when Ezra Pound published Ta Hio: the Great Learning (University of Washington Chapbooks, No. 14; Seattle, 1928) he described it on the title-page as "newly rendered into the American language." See American and English translations of "The Oppermanns," by Edmund E. Miller, American Speech, Oct., 1935.

The Two Streams of English

1910 the Encyclopædia Britannica (Eleventh Edition) admitted that this falling apart had already gone so far that it was “ not uncommon to meet with American newspaper articles of which an untravelled Englishman would hardly be able to understand a sentence.” “ The fact is,” said the London Times Literary Supplement for January 21, 1926, in a review of G. P. Krapp’s “ The English Language in America,” “ that in spite of the greater frequency of intercourse the two idioms have drifted apart; farther apart than is, perhaps, generally recognized. . . . A British visitor in America, if he has any taste for the niceties of language, experiences something of the thrills of contact with a foreign idiom, for he hears and reads many things which are new to him and not a few which are unintelligible.” “ If the American temperament, despite its general docility, persists in its present attitude towards a standardized language,” said Ernest Weekley in “ Adjectives – and Other Words” (1930), “ spoken American must eventually become as distinct from English as Yiddish is from classical Hebrew.” Or, added Professor J. Y. T. Greig of Newcastle in “ Breaking Priscian’s Head” (1929), as “ Spanish is from Portugucse.”

This echo of Noah Webster is itself echoed frequently by other English publicists and philologians. There is, indeed, a school of English thought which holds that the United States is not only drifting away from the mother country linguistically, but is fundamentally differentiated from it on wider cultural grounds. “ Those who have had to do with Americans,” said Geoffrey Grigson in the London Morning Post for February 13, 1934, “ will not mistake them for our intimate cousins, our near psychic relations.” He continued:

They are linked to us by many strands of sympathy, but they are a different people, or a number of different peoples. Their language, their real literature – witness Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, James, Ransom, Macleish, Hemingway – are different; and one might say even that the more they are English the more they are alien. The New Englander, for example, feels and thinks differently; his communal, political, and person “ mythology ” – to use a convenient word for those bodies of fiction and “ belief ” which unite each social entity – differentiates him completely from an Englishman. I am not sure, in fact, that we cannot more easily get to understand the soul of Frenchman, Italian, German, Spaniard even. After all, we belong geographically and spiritually to the European cultural bloc.

The late Cecil Chesterton was saying something to the same general effect in the London New Witness so long ago as 1915. “ I do not believe,” he wrote, “ that nations ever quarrel merely because

they feel that they do not understand each other. That attitude of

mind of itself tends to produce a salutary humility on the one side

and a pleasantly adventurous curiosity on the other. What really

produces trouble between peoples is when one is quite certain that

it understands the other—and in fact doesn’t. And I am perfectly

certain that that has been from the first one of the primary causes

of trouble between England and America."1 To which may be

added the following from an article by Herbert Agar in the New

Statesman for August 8, 1931:

The English should try to cope with their philological ignorance. They

should train themselves to realize that it is neither absurd nor vulgar that

a language which was once the same should in the course of centuries de-

velop differently in different parts of the world. If such were not the case,

we should all still be speaking a sort of Ur-Sanskrit. Just as French and

Italian may be described as divergent forms of modern Latin, so it would

be helpful to think of the language of Oxford and the language of Harvard

as divergent forms of modern English. It is perhaps a pity, from the point

of view of international good feeling, that the two forms have not diverged

a little further. At any rate, when the Englishman can learn to think of

American as a language, and not merely as a ludicrously unsuccessful at-

tempt to speak as he himself speaks, when he can learn to have for Ameri-

can only the normal intolerance of the provincial mind for all foreign

tongues, then there will come a great improvement in Anglo-American

relations. For even though Americans realise the absurdity of the English

attitude toward their language, nevertheless they remain deeply annoyed

by it. This is natural, for a man’s language is his very soul. It is his thoughts

and almost all his consciousness. Laugh at a man’s language, and you have

laughed at the man himself in the most inclusive sense.

But not all Englishmen, of course, indulge themselves in the

derision that Mr. Agar denounces. The prevailing tone of English

opinion remains loftily anti-American, in linguistic as in other mat-

ters, but there have arisen in late years two factions which take a

more moderate position, the one contending that American speech

is really not the barbaric jargon it is commonly thought to be, and

the other arguing boldly that its peculiarities, though maybe some-

what uncouth, nevertheless have a merit of their own. A representa-

tive spokesman of the first faction is Sir Charles Strachey, M.C.M.G.,

a former official of the Foreign and Colonial Offices. On May 2,

1931, he wrote to the London Times to protest against the assump-

tion that the argot of Chicago gunmen is the official language of the

1 The article is summarized, with

long extracts, in the Literary Digest

for June 19, 1915, p. 1468.

The Two Streams of English

United States. “ American diplomatic correspondence,” he said, “ is always a model of correct English, and it would be a gross error to suppose that the United States Ambassador calls revenue the dough or the berries, and refers to his Italian colleagues as a wop.” But this Strachey faction is not large, and as a general thing even the language of American diplomacy grates on English nerves, as I was lately noting in the case of H. N. Brailsford's objection to the style of Woodrow Wilson.

The revolutionary theory that the American language actually has some merit seems to have been launched by William Archer, a Scotsman, in an article entitled “ American Today,” printed somewhat prudently, not in England, but in Scribner's Magazine for February, 1899. “ New words,” he said, “ are begotten by new conditions of life; and as American life is far more fertile of new conditions than ours, the tendency toward neologism cannot but be stronger in America than in England. American has enormously enriched the language, not only with new words, but (since the American mind is, on the whole, quicker and wittier than the English) with apt and luminous colloquial metaphors.” Twenty years later Archer returned to the matter, this time on English soil, in an article written for the Westminster Gazette.1 In it he protested vigorously against the English habit of “ pulling a wry face over American expressions, not because they are inherently bad, but simply because they are American. The vague and unformulated idea behind all such petty cavillings,” he continued, “ is that the English language is in danger of being corrupted by the importation of Americanisms, and that it behooves us to establish a sort of quarantine in order to keep out the detrimental germs. This notion is simply one of the milder phases of the Greater Stupidity.”

Two years before this, Frank Dilnot, an English journalist with American experience, had come out for American in a large way. “ Show me the alert Englishman,” he wrote,2 “ who will not find a stimulation in those nuggety word-groupings which are the commonplaces in good American conversation. They are like flashes of crystal. They come from all kinds of people—who are brilliantly innocent of enriching the language. . . . The American tongue, written or spoken with its alteration from the English of England,

1 Reprinted in the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, July 23, 1921. 2 The New America; New York, 1919, Ch. III.

is a potent and penetrating instrument, rich in new vibrations, full

of joy as well as shocks for the unsuspecting visitor." In May, 1920,

Richard Aldington joined the American party in an article con-

tributed to Poetry (Chicago). In it he made an eloquent plea for

American linguistic independence, and praised the development of

a characteristically American idiom by the American poets and

novelists of the day. "Are Americans," he demanded,

to write the language which they speak, which is slowly but inevitably

separating itself from the language of England, or are they to write a devital-

ized idiom learned painfully from books or from a discreet frequentation of

London literary cliques? . . . Englishmen of letters and literary journalists

may publish these exhortations and practise their refinements: in vain -- a vast

world will ignore them. Another century may see English broken into a

number of dialects or even different languages, spoken in Canada, Australia,

South Africa, the United States and England. The result may eventually be

similar to the break-up of Latin.

This pro-American party is still small, but it can show some well-

known names. The late Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate and founder

of the Society for Pure English, was in sympathy with it,1 and it

has got support from Wyndham Lewis, Edward Shanks, Virginia

1 The Society was organized in 1913,

but the intervention of the war sus-

pended its proceedings until 1918.

The first of its Tracts was issued

in October, 1919. The original com-

mittee consisted of Dr. Bridges,

Henry Bradley, Sir Walter Raleigh

and L. Pearsall Smith, the last-

named an American living in Eng-

land. In Tract No. I one of its

purposes was stated to be the en-

couragement of "those who possess

the word-making faculty," and an-

other was the enrichment of Stand-

ard English with dialectic and

"democratic" forms and usages. In

Tract No. XXIV, 1926, Dr. Bridges

protested against an allegation that

the Society was "working for uni-

formity and standardization against

idiom and freedom. Our readers,

he went on, "know that this is not

what we intend or desire; indeed

teachers, who as a class advocate

standardization of speech as the

necessary basis for general tuition,

sometimes complain of us as mis-

chief-makers because we do not

support them more thoroughly."

In 1922 Dr. Bridges wrote to Dr.

H. S. Canby: "We desire as many

American subscribers as possible, in

order to make our Society seem as

much American as it is English.

[His italics.] There is a great and

natural prejudice in America against

English dictation in the matter of

our language, and that followed, I

think, as a protest against the in-

sular contempt which the English

felt a couple of generations ago for

American forms of speech. We now

in England feel very differently

and the S.P.E. would certainly treat

American usages and preferences

with full respect" (Literary Re-

view, May 20, 1922). "The S.P.E.,

says J. Y. T. Greig in Breaking Pris-

cian's Head (London, 1929), "de-

spite its inauspicious name, has done

a great deal of splendid work, but

only because it happened to be

founded by, and to have remained

under, the control of men like Dr.

The Two Streams of English

47

Woolf and Sir John Foster Fraser. “The Americans,” said Mrs. Woolf in the Saturday Review of Literature on August 1, 1925, “are doing what the Elizabethans did – they are coining new words. They are instinctively making the language adapt itself to their needs.” She continued:

In England, save for the impetus given by the war, the word-coining power has lapsed; our writers vary the metres of their poetry, remodel the rhythms of prose, but one may search English fiction in vain for a single new word. It is significant that when we want to freshen our speech, we borrow from American – poppycock, rambunctious, flip-flop, booster, good mixer. All the expressive, ugly, vigorous slang which creeps into use among us, first in talk, later in writing, comes from across the Atlantic.

In February, 1925, H. E. Moore printed an elaborate defense of Americanisms in the English Review, then edited by Austin Harrison. He contrasted the tendency to academic tightness in Standard English with the greater naturalness of American, and gave high praise to some of the salient characters of the latter – its hospitality to neologisms, its fertility in effective metaphor, its “fluid” spelling. “As this divergence of English and American,” he said, “has proceeded through strata of English derision and American defiance it has tended to become deliberate and constructive. England and academic America generally have asserted the old criteria. But they have been swept aside by America’s egalitarian millions, and established changes have now made any acceptance of literary Southern English impossible.” “I have never found it possible,” said Mr. Shanks in the London Evening Standard in 1931,

to understand why with so many people there should be an automatic objection to anything that can be called an Americanism. An Americanism is an expression adopted by those who speak our common language but who live in the United States. There are more of them than there are of us, and so one would suppose, on democratic principles, that their choice was entitled at least to our serious consideration. There are, in fact, more of them than of all the other English-speaking peoples put together, and a majority vote on the question to whom the language really belongs would certainly give a verdict against us. Yet, for many of us “Americanism” is simply a term of abuse. . . . The facts that we ought to realise and that we ignore when we talk loftily about “Americanisms” are that America is making a formidable contribution to the development of our language and that all our attempts to reject that contribution will in the long run be vain – quite apart from the other fact

Bridges, Mr. L. P. Smith, and Mr. H. W. Fowler. This was a fortunate and very rare accident. In wrong hands it would have long ago become a dreadful curse, a veritable Inquisition and Congregation of the Propaganda rolled into one.”

48

The American Language

that we ought to rejoice in this proof that the language is still alive and capable of learning from experience.

Writing a year later, Sir John Fraser 1 made a vigorous attack upon the dominant anti-American party, and accused it of trying absurdly to halt a process of inevitable change. He said:

Quite respectable people, very refined, even literary gents and prelates, would faint were they not so angry at the Americanization of our ways, and particularly the degradation of our speech. Why? If we take up the position that because we are British we must be right there is no argument. But if the Anglicization of the world is good, why is the Americanization of England bad? . . . Is our language to remain staid and dignified like a piece of furniture made when good Victoria was Queen, or, as we live in swiftly shifting times, aeroplanes and record-smashing cars, is there something to be said for adapting our ways of speech to the newer generations? . . . . Then there is the other school, which is called the Oxford manner, though mostly adopted by people who know nothing about Oxford. With their stuffiy, roof-of-the-mouth inflections [sic] they have developed a speech of their own. . . . I prefer slangy American.

In Life and Letters for April, 1934, Wyndham Lewis argued at length that, even if it were rational, it was too late for the English to stem the advance of American. He said:

While England was a uniquely powerful empire-state, ruled by an aristocratic caste, its influence upon the speech as upon the psychology of the American ex-colonies was overwhelming. But today that ascendancy has almost entirely vanished. The aristocratic caste is nothing but a shadow of itself, the cinema has brought the American scene and the American dialect nightly into the heart of England, and the Americanizing process is far advanced. . . . There has been no reciprocal movement of England into the United States; indeed, with the New American nationalism, England is deliberately kept out. . . . So the situation is this, as far as our common language is concerned: the destiny of England and the United States is more than ever one, but it is now the American influence that is paramount. The tables have effectively been turned in this respect.

Finally, I extract a few sentences of sage advice from a radio speech to his fellow-countrymen by Alistair Cooke, of the British Broadcasting Corporation:

When you hear an expression that seems a little odd to you, don’t assume it was invented by a music-hall comedian trying to be smart. It was probably spoken by Lincoln or Paul Jones. . . . And when you hear a strange pronunciation remember you are not hearing a chaotic speech that anyone has deliberately changed. . . . It is the cultivated speech of a New England gentleman of 1934, and it happens in essentials also to be the cultivated speech you would have heard in London over two hundred years ago.2

1 London Sunday Graphic, Jan. 3, 1932. 2 Printed as That Dreadful American, Listener, Jan. 30, 1935.

The Two Streams of English

5. THE POSITION OF THE LEARNED

But these witnesses to the virtues and glories of the American language are not to be taken as representative of English opinion; nor even as spokesmen for any considerable part of it. In general, it remains almost as hostile to Americanisms as it was in the Golden Age of the critical reviews. Nor does its hostility go without support in the United States. On the contrary there has been, since the early Eighteenth Century, a party of Americans vowed to the strict policing of the national speech habits, usually with the English example in mind, and it has always had a formidable body of adherents. In 1724 Hugh Jones, professor of mathematics at William and Mary College, expressed the wish that a “ Publick Standard were fix'd ” to “ direct Posterity, and prevent Irregularity, and confused Abuses and Corruptions in our Writings and Expressions.” 1 In Section 1 of the present chapter I have mentioned John Adams's keen interest in a project to set up an American Academy to “ correct, enrich and refine ” the language, “ until perfection stops their progress and ends their labor.” In 1806 a bill to establish such an academy was actually introduced in the Senate by Senator George Logan of Pennsylvania and given a favorable report by a committee of which John Quincy Adams was a member, but some irreverent member moved that the word national be stricken out of the title, and when this motion was carried the enterprise died. Soon afterward an American Academy of Arts and Sciences was formed in Boston, and in 1820 an American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres followed in New York, with John Quincy Adams as president. The latter appointed a committee headed by the Rev. John M. Mason, provost of Columbia College and later president of Dickinson College, “ to collect throughout the United States a list of words and phrases, whether acknowledged corruptions or words of doubtful authority, which are charged up as bad English, with a view to take the best practical course for promoting the purity and uni-

1 An Accidence to the English Tongue; London, 1724. This was the first English grammar written in America. For the reference to it I am indebted to American Projects For an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1935. For part of what follows I am also indebted to Mr. Read.

50 The American Language formity of our language." And the former received from one of its members, John Pickering, that " Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America " (1816) which I have already noticed.

Pickering's professional career was made in the law, with occasional ventures into politics, but he passed for a scholar in his time, he was offered the chair of Oriental languages at Harvard in 1806 and that of Greek in 1814, and he published a Greek-English lexicon in 1826. The preface to his Vocabulary was largely devoted to a defense of the English reviewers. " It cannot be denied," he said, " that we have in several instances deviated from the standard of the language, as spoken and written in England at the present day.

[His italics.] By this I do not mean that so great a deviation has taken place as to have rendered any considerable part of our language unintelligible to Englishmen, but merely that so many corruptions have crept into our English as to have become the subject of much animadversion and regret with the learned of Great Britain." Pickering then proceeded to argue that these animadversions and regrets were well founded, and called upon his erring countrymen to " imitate the example of the learned and modest Campbell," 1 who, though he had devoted a great part of a long life to the study of the English language, " yet thought it no disgrace to make an apology for his style," and to remember the similar diffidence of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lugdunum (Lyons) in Gaul, who prefixed a similar " apology " for his shaky provincial Latin to his " Adversus Haereses." Thus Pickering summed up:

Upon an impartial consideration of the subject, therefore, it seems impossible to resist the conclusion that, although the language of the United States has perhaps changed less than might have been expected, when we consider how many years have elapsed since our ancestors brought it from England, yet it has in so many instances departed from the English standard that our scholars should lose no time in endeavoring to restore it to its purity, and to prevent further corruption. . . . As a general rule, we should undoubtedly avoid all those words which are noticed by English authors of reputation as expressions with which they are unacquainted, for although we might produce some English authority for such words, yet the very circumstance of their being thus noticed by well-educated Englishmen is a proof that they are not in use at this day in England, and, of course, ought not to be used elsewhere by those who would speak correct English.

1 George Campbell (1719–96), a Scottish theologian who published a New Translation of the Gospels in 1778. He is best known, how- ever, for his Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1776. Pickering's reference is to the preface to the Gospels.

The Two Streams of English

Again I follow Pickering's italization. His theory is still entertained by multitudes of American pedagogues. They believe as he did that the natural growth of the language is wild and wicked, and that it should be regulated according to rules formulated in England. To this end they undertake periodical crusades against “bad grammar,” the American scheme of pronunciation, and the general body of Americanisms - in the classroom, by means of hortatory pamphlets and leaflets, and over the air. In 1915 the National Council of Teachers of English, following that hopeful American custom which gave the nation Mothers’ Day, and Safety-First, Paint-Up-Clean-Up and Fat-More-Cheese Wecks, proposed to make the first seven days of November Better-Speech Week. Ten years later the General Federation of Women's Clubs joined the movement, and for some unknown reason the time was changed to the last week in February. For while Better-Speech Week was much discussed in the newspapers, and it is still observed, I believe, in parts of the country. Some of the schoolmarms, despairing of effecting a whole-sale reform, concentrated their efforts upon various specific crimes against their canons, and among the subsidiary weeks thus launched were Ain't-less Week and Final-G Week. They also established a Tag Day, and hung derisory tags on youngsters guilty of such indeccencies as “I have got ” and “It's me.” 1 This missionary effort was not confined to school-children. Efforts were also made to perfect the speech of their parents and of the public in general, and even the newspapers were besought to mend their linguistic ways. In 1925, a Los Angeles schoolmarm went about Southern California inducing women's clubs to pass the following resolution:

Whereas, we believe that if newspaper comic strips and jokes use English free from grammatical errors (except for decided character rôles) they will become more attractive to many readers, and

Whereas, we believe that this effort on the part of the newspapers will be of invaluable aid in raising the standard of American speech, therefore

Be it resolved, that we request editors of newspapers and comic writers to eliminate grammatical errors in the comic strips and jokes except for decided character rôles.2

The object of attack here, of course, was the grotesque slang that appears from nowhere, has its brief day, and then vanishes. But the

1 The Baltimore Evening Sun reported that this was a new project in the Baltimore public-schools on Jan. 21, 1925.

2 American Speech, Jan., 1926, p. 250.

American pedagogues, with few exceptions, seem to be opposed also to more decorous Americanisms, and many of them devote themselves to teaching a pronunciation that is quite foreign to the country, and to inculcating grammatical niceties that were concocted during the earnest but innocent days when English grammar was assumed to be a kind of Latin grammar - niceties that have been long since abandoned by the English themselves. The influence of Samuel Johnson is thus still more or less potent in the American public schools, though Noah Webster was denouncing it so long ago as 1789. On this melancholy theme I shall discourse at greater length in Chapter IX.

The higher varieties of gogues are somewhat less naïve, but they nevertheless show a considerable reluctance to deal with American as the living language of a numerous and puissant people, making its own rules as it goes along and well worthy of scientific study. Very few American philologians have specialized in it, and such study of it as has been undertaken has been carried on by amateurs quite as often as by professionals. It is rare for any discussion of it to appear in such journals as Modern Language Notes, Modern Philology, Language, the American Philological Journal, the English Journal, and the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, or for it to be undertaken seriously at the annual meetings of the philological associations.¹ Dialect Notes, the first journal to be devoted to it, was not set up until 1890, and American Speech did not follow until 1925. Both have had very meager support. Dialect Notes was launched by the American Dialect Society, which had been organized at Harvard

¹ For example, in Modern Language Notes, Vol. XLVIII, 1933, there is but one reference to it and that is in a review of H. C. Wyld's Universal Dictionary, 1932, by Kemp Malone. In Modern Philology, Vol. XXXII, 1933-34, there is no mention of American. In Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. XLVIII, 1933, which runs to 1400 pages, there is only a brief note by Sir William Craigie, editor of the Dictionary of American English, calling on American philologists for aid. In the annual bibliography of philological papers for 1932, p. 1342 ff., 45 articles on American English are listed, but 31 of them appeared in American Speech, 6 in Dialect Notes, 6 in popular magazines, and only 2 in professional journals. The Modern Language Association has a Present-Day Speech Section, but it shows little effective activity. The association, which was founded in 1883, had 4,132 members in 1932. "Under the protection of our ægis," said Dr. A. H. Thorndike in his presidential address in 1927, "are gathering languages whose applications for membership not even the secretary can read." Perhaps American will one day be one of them.

University in 1889, with the late Professor Francis J. Child, the authority on English and Scottish ballads, as its first president.1 It made very slow progress. Though there were, at that time, fully 5,000 teachers of English in the United States, including at least 500 in the colleges,2 it started off with but 140 members, and the publication of the first volume of Dialect Notes, running to 497 pages, dragged through six years. When the second volume was completed, in 1904, the society had 310 members, but many of them failed to pay their dues, and by 1912 successive purges had reduced the roll to 219. The income was then less than $400 a year. By 1926 the membership had grown to 266 and by 1932 the income was $776.38. Neither membership nor income appears to have increased since, for Dialect Notes now comes out only at long intervals, and its average issue is very thin. Yet its files contain a very large amount of invaluable matter, as my frequent references to them will show, and it long offered the only outlet for the work of that small minority of American scholars who took the national language seriously, and gave it scientific study – among them, Drs. Percy W. Long, C. H. Grandgent and E. S. Sheldon of Harvard, E. H. Bab-bitt of Columbia, George Hempl of Michigan, George T. Flom of Iowa, E. H. Sturtevant of Yale, O. F. Emerson of Western Reserve, C. S. Northrup of Cornell, J. W. Carr of Maine, L. W. Payne, Jr., of Texas, William A. Read of Louisiana, Josiah Combs of Texas Christian, John M. Manly and Allen Walker Reed of Chicago, and Louise Pound of Nebraska.

The work of Dr. Pound has been especially productive, for whereas most of the other members of the Dialect Society have

1 The original members included C. H. Grandgent, E. S. Sheldon, George L. Kittredge and J. M. Manly of Harvard, James W. Bright and A. Marshall Elliott of the Johns Hopkins, Eugene H. Bab-bitt of Columbia, O. F. Emerson and Benjamin Ide Wheeler of Cornell, W. D. Whitney and W. R. Harper of Yale, and F. A. March of Lafayette. James Russell Lowell was also a member.2 Just how many are in practise to-day I do not know, but it must be a very large number. L. J. O'Rourke, in Rebuilding the Eng-

lish-Usage Curriculum; Washington, 1934, p. 4, says that "more than 40,000 teachers of English" aided him in his inquiry – all of them, it appears, teaching in gradeschools. The Educational Lists Company of New York and Chicago, which supplies the names and addresses of teachers to advertisers, offers a list of 18,000 names of high-school teachers teaching "English language, literature, drama and public speaking," and one of 5,750 "English teachers" in the colleges and normal-schools. Some of these, of course, also teach other subjects.

confined their investigations to the regional dialects of American, she and her pupils have studied the general speechways of the country. She took her doctorate at Heidelberg under the distinguished Anglicist, Johannes Hoops, and soon afterward joined the English faculty of the University of Nebraska. Her first contribution to Dialect Notes was published in 1905; thereafter, for twenty years, she or her pupils were represented in almost every issue. In 1925, in association with Dr. Kemp Malone of the Johns Hopkins and Dr. Arthur G. Kennedy of Stanford, she founded American Speech, becoming its first editor. She continued in that capacity until 1933, when she was succeeded by Dr. William Cabell Greet of Barnard College, Columbia University. American Speech, even more than Dialect Notes, has encouraged the study of American: its files constitute a rich mine of instructive and often very amusing stuff. But it has got but little more support from American teachers of English than its predecessor. Though its first issues contained many articles addressed to them directly, they refused to be interested, and during its later years its pages have been supplied largely by lay students of the language. During its first five years its subscription list never reached 1500 names, and at the beginning of its sixth year it had but 329 subscribers. When Dr. Pound retired in 1933 it was taken over by the Columbia University Press. Today it continues to be published at a loss, though Dr. Greet and his associates make it a very useful journal.1 Beginning as a monthly, it is now a quarterly.

This failure of support has greatly hampered the work of the American Dialect Society. It projected an American Dialect Dictionary immediately after its organization in 1889, and by 1930 its collection of materials embraced more than 30,000 words and phrases. But so far the lack of funds has prevented the completion of the work,2 and it has had to give place to two more recent enterprises.

1 This lack of academic interest in the American language was for many years matched by a lack of interest in American literature, but since the setting up of the quarterly, American Literature, at Duke University in 1929, partly as a result of the activities of the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Association, there has been something of an awakening. The old neglect of Whitman, Melville

and Clemens will be recalled. The first professorship of American literature seems to have been established at the Pennsylvania State College in 1894, with Dr. Fred Lewis Pattee as the incumbent. The chair is still a rare one in the American colleges.

2 Another enterprise of the Dialect Society that has suffered from inadequate support is its publication of the third volume of R. H. Thorn-

The Two Streams of English

55

prises, both of which seem to be adequately financed, and promise to give the study of American English great encouragement, and to set it, in combination, upon a scientific foundation. The first is the Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, now going forward at the University of Chicago under the direction of Sir William Craigie, one of the editors of the New English Dictionary (now called the Oxford English Dictionary); the other is the Linguistic Atlas of the United States, in charge of Dr. Hans Kurath of Brown University and sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies. The first fascicle of the former appeared early in 1936, and the first map of the latter shortly afterward. Both will require years for their completion. Sir William and Dr. Kurath are alike of foreign birth, the former being a Scotsman and the latter an Austrian.1

ton's American Glossary. Before his death Thornton deposited his manuscript in the Widener Library, and in 1931 its publication was begun in Dialect Notes under the editorship of Percy W. Long. The first instalment ran to 112 pages, and it was hoped to complete the work by December, 1933. But the failure of expected aid caused such a slackening of pace that by that time only J had been reached. Thornton's first two volumes came out in England in 1912 in a modest edition of 300 copies. Of these, 250 were imported by an American publisher. Selling them was slow work, and when they were exhausted at last no more were imported. In this connection it may be recalled that George Philip Krapp's The English Language in America; New York, 1925, a work of very high value, failed to find a commercial publisher, and had to be brought out "for the Modern Language Association of America" at the cost of the Carnegie Corporation. Thornton's somewhat pathetic account of his difficulties is to be found in Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. II, 1919. "Early in 1917," he said, "I made an appeal to a large number of wealthy Americans - this was before we were in the war - to help

the venture financially. To their lasting infamy, they were uniformly too unappreciative to respond."

1 On Oct. 18, 1924 the Chicago Tribune announced Sir William's appointment under these headlines:

MIDWAY SIGNS LIMEY PROF. TO DOPE YANK TALK

He was born at Dundee in 1867 and was educated at St. Andrews and at Oxford. He joined the staff of the New English Dictionary in 1897, and became joint editor in 1901. His specialty is Scandinavian, but he has also written on Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, Scottish and modern English. He was knighted in 1928, but, rather curiously, this fact is not noted in Who's Who in America. Dr. Kurath was born in Austria in 1891 and came to America in 1907. He studied at the Universities of Wisconsin, Texas and Chicago, and took his Ph.D. at the last-named. His specialty is the comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages. He was assistant professor of German at Northwestern, 1920–27, and professor of German at Ohio State, 1927– 32. In 1932 he became professor of German at Brown.

56

The American Language

Sir William described the origin of the Dictionary of American English in the English Journal (Chicago) for January, 1926. The dictionaries hitherto published in the United States, he said,

have commonly noted the different usage of the two countries, in respect both of the words and of their pronunciation. In none of these dictionaries, however, has there been any attempt to make the language of the United States the sole, or even main, basis of the matter they contain. Even Webster, although he patriotically called for a “national language” as well as a national government, contented himself, when he published “An American Dictionary of the English Language,” with having cited American authors as well as English. All subsequent dictionaries which have appeared in this country have adhered to the same principle – their American material is merely an addition (sometimes a very restricted addition) to that drawn from English or British sources. . . . So far as I am aware, this fact had not clearly presented itself to anyone until it occurred to me one day in the Summer of 1924, in Chicago, while I was reading some proofs of the Oxford English Dictionary. I observed that in the case of two or three words beginning with the prefix un- the older quotations (from the Seventeenth Century) were from English sources, while the later (of the Eighteenth Century) were all American. From the evidence it seemed probable that the use of the words had continued later in this country than at home. It then occurred to me that it would be interesting to know how far back the words could be traced in American use; and that thought immediately brought me up against the fact that we had no means of ascertaining this point, for the simple reason that no effort had yet been made to trace the whole vocabulary which had been in use on this side of the ocean from the Seventeenth Century to the present day. It was then a simple matter to draw the natural conclusion that what was required was a new dictionary.1

“As soon as the idea had presented itself to me,” he continued, “I communicated it to Professor [John M.] Manly, [head of the department of English at Chicago], who at once took steps to interest the University of Chicago in the project.” The upshot was that Sir William was made professor of English in the university, and provided with a competent staff of assistants at the cost of the General Education Board. Before sailing for the United States to

1 In an article in Tract No. XXVII of the Society for Pure English, 1927, Dr. Craigie noted that his idea had been anticipated, though not his plan. He said: “It is possible that this idea has occurred to more than one of those who have given their attention to the subject, but until very recently I have found it clearly expressed only in a review of a part of the Oxford Dictionary, written in 1913 by Dr. C. W. Ernst of Boston. ‘The

American bonanza,’ he wrote, ‘is in the hands of squatters; it is yet to be worked scientifically. That is impossible at Oxford; it must be done here, whether in Washington or the University of Texas is immaterial; only let it be done. It will take at least twenty-five years to gather the materials, and twenty-five more to digest them properly. And neither dogma nor cash can help us; the thing needed is grace.’

The Two Streams of English

57

take up his work, in June, 1925, he said to the London correspondent

of the North American Newspaper Alliance:

The United States is now at a period in the national development which

corresponds closely to the Elizabethan age in England. It is a period of intel-

lectual creativeness and invention. The extraordinary facility that you, as a

people, exhibit in the coining of picturesque and expressive slang is only

one of many manifestations of this. I thoroughly approve of American slang.

It is often carried to an excess, but on the other hand many of your cur-

rent colloquial phrases are extremely apt, and win the admiration of even

the most strict purist. In America slang gets into general conversation much

more widely than in England, and is therefore more likely to win a place in

permanent usage. The real test of slang is its utility. If a slang phrase fills a

long-felt want it will get into the language. There are some American expres-

sions of comparatively recent vintage which have already been adopted

wherever English is spoken, and they are so particularly apt and expressive

that one wonders how the idea was expressed before they were invented.

One instance of this is the phrase, it’s up to you.

The Dictionary of American English is of course confined to the

written language. Its staff has been engaged since 1926 in a laborious

search of all available American records, whether printed or in

manuscript. While the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary was

similarly engaged, from 1859 to 1928, it had the aid of a large corps

of volunteer searchers, and some of its most valuable material came

from them, but Dr. Craigie and his collaborators, James Root Hul-

bert, George Watson, M. M. Mathews and Allen Walker Read,

have had relatively little such help. In order to keep the dictionary

within reasonable bounds its plan had to be made somewhat narrow.

According to Dr. Louise Pound,1 it will deal with the following

classes of words only:

1. Those descriptive of the physical features of the country, as backwoods,

bluff, canyon, prairie.

2. Words connected with the material development of the country, as

frame-house, log-cabin, canoe, steamboat, turnpike, railroad.

3. Terms of administration, politics, religion, trade and other activities, as

Senate, caucus, Mormon, lumber, elevator.

4. Colloquialisms and slang, so far as they are specially American in origin

or in later use.

But the bounds of these classes will be elastic, and not only words

and phrases originating in this country will be included, but also,

as Sir William Craigie has explained, “every one which has a clear

1 The New Dictionary of American

English, American Mercury, July,

connection with the development of the country and its inhabitants. The most ordinary word may call for insertion on the latter ground, as having not only a real but often a vital connection with the life of the settlers and their descendants." No words will be included for which records before 1900 do not exist, and examples of the use of admitted words will not be carried beyond 1925. Slang and colloquialisms will be dealt with fully down to 1875, but after that date only terms that have come into literary use will be included. The work will be in no sense a dictionary of slang. Soon or late, said Dr. Craigie in 1927, it " must be supplemented by a dialect dictionary and a slang dictionary; otherwise the record will be either defective or ill balanced."

The Linguistic Atlas seems to have been first proposed by a committee of the Modern Language Association in 1924, but it owes its actual launching to Dr. E. H. Sturtevant of Yale, who interested the American Council of Learned Societies in the project in 1928. A conference of philologists was held at Yale on August 2 and 3, 1929, in connection with the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America, and on its recommendation the Council appointed a committee to make definite plans. The chairman of this committee was Dr. Kurath, then of Ohio State University, who remains as director of the work, with his headquarters moved to Brown.1 He has a staff of seven assistants, headed by Dr. Miles L. Hanley, secretary of the American Dialect Society,2 and the collection of materials is being furthered by other members of the society and by a small number of outside volunteers. The project has received grants from the Carnegie Corporation, the General Education Board and the Rockefeller Foundation. It proposes eventually to publish maps covering the whole country, but so far it has concentrated most of its attention upon New England. The reasons for this are thus stated:

1. The dialects of New England are primary as compared with those of the more Western areas, such as the Ohio region. . . .

1 The other members of the committee were Drs. Leonard Bloomfield of Chicago, C. H. Carruthers of McGill, C. H. Grandgent of Harvard, Miles L. Hanley of Wisconsin, Marcus L. Hansen of Illinois, John S. Kenyon of Hiram College, George P. Krapp of Columbia, Eduard Prokosch of Yale, and G. Oscar Russell of Ohio State.

Dr. Krapp, author of The English Language in America, died in 1934, and Dr. William A. Read of Louisiana has been added to the committee.

2 It is perhaps worth noting that five of the seven bear non-English surnames - Hansen, Hultzén, Lowman, Bloch and Penzl.

The Two Streams of English

59

2. New England has striking geographical dialects; the class dialects are perhaps more distinct than in any other part of the country; there are clear urban and rural dialects; there are large elements of the population that have been only recently assimilated or that are in part still unassimilated.

3. The fact that we possess more information regarding the present linguistic situation in New England than we have for any other area will shorten and simplify the important task of selecting the dialect features that are to be recorded in all the communities selected for study.

4. There is already available a considerable body of reliable information regarding the history of the population. . . . Thus a more scientific choice of representative communities is possible.

How many maps will be published in all is not yet determined, but the number will probably run to thousands. Each will show all the reported occurrences and permutations of a given locution, and in that way the dispersion of typical words and phrases, and of characteristic pronunciations, throughout the United States and Canada will be indicated. The Atlas will cover “all phases of the spoken language — pronunciation, accentuation (intonation and stress), the inflections, syntactical features, and vocabulary.” The speech of all strata of society is being investigated, and an attempt is being made to differentiate between the vocabularies of the educated and the uneducated, the young and the old, men and women. In addition to the Atlas, the Council will publish a series of monographs showing “the influence on the spoken language of movements of population, of topography and arteries of communication, of the stratification of society and the rise of the lower classes to positions of importance in their communities, of political, religious, and racial particularism, of the schools, and of cultural centers.” In particular, an effort will be made to find out to what extent the early immigrations to the West carried the speech habits of the older settlements with them. Finally, phonograph records are being collected, and copies of them will be available to persons interested.

These manifestations of a new interest in the scientific study of American English among American philologists are gratifying, but it would be a mistake to assume that that interest is widespread. It seems to be confined mainly, as collaboration in Dialect Notes and American Speech has always been confined, to a relatively small group of scholars, most of them either foreigners by birth or under foreign influences. The typical native teacher of English, now as in the past, fights shy of American, and can see in it only an unseemly corruption of English. Just as the elaborate obfuscations of Eight-

eenth Century law have been preserved in American law long after their abandonment in England, so the tight rules of the Eighteenth Century purists, with their absurd grammatical niceties, their fanciful etymologies and their silly spelling-pronunciations, tend to be preserved. Noah Webster protested against this pedantry nearly a century and a half ago, but it continues to be cherished among the rank and file of American pedagogues, from the kindergarten up to the graduate school. In the American colleges and high-schools there is no faculty so weak as the English faculty. It is the common catch-all for aspirants to the birch who are too lazy or too feeble in intelligence to acquire any sort of exact knowledge, and the professional incompetence of its typical ornament is matched only by his hollow cocksureness. Most of the American philologists, so-called, of the early days - Witherspoon, Whitney, Worcester, Fowler, Cobb and their like - were uncompromising advocates of conformity to English precept and example, and combated every indication of a national independence in speech with the utmost vigilance. One of their company, true enough, stood out against the rest. He was George Perkins Marsh, and in his “Lectures on the English Language,”1 he argued that “in point of naked syntactical accuracy, the English of America is not at all inferior to that of England.” But even Marsh expressed the hope that Americans would not, “with malice prepense, go about to republicanize our orthography and our syntax, our grammars and our dictionaries, our nursery hymns [sic] and our Bibles” to the point of actual separation. Moreover, he was a philologian only by courtesy; the regularly ordained brethren were all against him. The fear voiced by William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, that Americans might “break loose from the laws of the English language”2 altogether,

1 They were delivered at Columbia College during the Winter of 1858-9, and were published in New York in 1859. They had reached a fourth edition by 1861. Marsh was educated for the law and went into politics. He was successively a member of the Vermont Legislature, a member of the Supreme Executive Council of the State, a Congressman, minister at Constantinople, special envoy to Greece, railroad commissioner in Vermont, and minister to Italy. Born in 1801,

he died at romantic Vallombrosa in 1882. He was an amateur philologian of considerable repute in his day, and in addition to his Lectures published The Origin and History of the English Language; New York, 1862.

2 The English Language: New York, 1850; rev. ed., 1855. This was the first American text-book of English for use in colleges. Before its publication, according to Fowler himself (rev. ed., p. xi), the language was studied only “superficially”

The Two Streams of English

was echoed by the whole fraternity, and so the corrective bastinado was laid on.

It remained, however, for two sages of a later day to preach the doctrine that the independent growth of American was not only immoral, but a sheer illusion. They were Richard Grant White, for long the leading American writer upon language questions, at least in popular esteem, and Thomas R. Lounsburry, for thirty-five years professor of the English language and literature in the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, and an indefatigable controversialist. Both men were of the utmost industry in research, and both had wide audiences. White's "Words and Their Uses," published in 1872, was a mine of more or less authentic erudition, and his "Everyday English," following eight years later, was another. True enough, Fitz- edward Hall, the Anglo-Indian-American philologist, disposed of some of his etymologies and otherwise did execution upon him,1 but in the main his contentions were accepted. Lounsburry was also an adept and favorite expositor. His attacks upon certain familiar follies of the grammarians were penetrating and effective, and his two books, "The Standard of Usage in English" and "The Standard of Pronunciation in English," not to mention his excellent "History of the English Language" and his numerous magazine articles, showed a sound knowledge of the early history of the language, and an admirable spirit of free inquiry. But both of these laborious scholars, when they turned from English proper to American English, displayed an unaccountable desire to deny its existence altogether, and to the support of that denial they brought a critical method that was anything but scientific. White devoted not less than eight long articles in the Atlantic Monthly 2 to a review of the fourth edition of John Russell Bartlett's "American Glossary" (1877) and when he came to the end he had disposed of nine-tenths of Bartlett's specimens and called into question the authenticity of at least half the remainder. And no wonder, for his method was simply that of erecting tests so difficult and so arbitrary that only the exceptional word or phrase could pass them, and then only by

and "in the primary schools." He goes on: "Afterward, when older in the academy, during their preparation for college, our pupils perhaps despised it, in comparison with the Latin and the Greek; and in the college they do not systemati- cally study the language after they come to maturity."

1 In Recent Exemplifications of False Philology; London, 1872.

2 Americanisms, parts i-viii, April, May, July, Sept., Nov., 1878; Jan., March, May, 1879.

62 The American Language

a sort of chance. "To stamp a word or a phrase as an Americanism," he said, "it is necessary to show that (1) it is of so-called 'Ameri-can' origin - that is, that it first came into use in the United States of North America, or that (2) it has been adopted in those States from some language other than English, or has been kept in use there while it has wholly passed out of use in England." Going further, he argued that unless "the simple words in compound names" were used in America "in a sense different from that in which they are used in England" the compound itself could not be regarded as an Americanism. The absurdity of all this is apparent when it is remembered that one of his rules would bar out such obvious Americanisms as the use of sick in place of ill, of molasses for treacle, and of fall for autumn, for all these words, while archaic in England, are by no means wholly extinct; and that another would dispose of that vast category of compounds which includes such unmistakably characteristic Americanisms as joy-ride, rake-off, show-down, up-lift, out-house, rubber-neck, chair-warmer, fire-eater and back-talk.

Lounsbury went even further. In the course of a series of articles in Harper's Magazine, he laid down the dogma that "cultivated speech . . . affords the only legitimate basis of comparison between the language as used in England and in America," and then went on:

In the only really proper sense of the term, an Americanism is a word or phrase naturally used by an educated American which under similar conditions would not be used by an educated Englishman. The emphasis, it will be seen, lies in the word "educated."

This curious criterion, fantastic as it must have seemed to Euro-pean philologians, was presently reinforced, for in his fourth article Lounsbury announced that his discussion was "restricted to the written speech of educated men." The result, of course, was a whole-sale slaughter of Americanisms. If it was not possible to reject a word, like White, on the ground that some stray English poet or other had once used it, it was almost always possible to reject it on the ground that it was not admitted into the vocabulary of a college professor when he sat down to 'compose formal book-English. What remained was a small company, indeed - and almost the whole field of American idiom and American grammar, so full of interest for the less austere explorer, was closed without even a peek into it.

Despite its absurdity, Lounsbury's position was taken by most of the American Gelehrten of his heyday. Their heirs and assigns have

receded from it somewhat, but have yet to go to the length of abandoning it altogether. They admit, in despondent moments, that an American dialect of English really exists, but they still dream of bringing it into harmony with what they choose to regard as correct English. To the latter purpose the humorless omphalophysites of the American Academy of Arts and Letters address themselves periodically, and with great earnestness. Not many of them show any capacity for sound writing, whether in English or in American, but they nevertheless propose in all solemnity to convert themselves into a sort of American counterpart of the Académie Française, and to favor the country, from time to time, with authoritative judgments in matters of speech.1 In 1916 the Academy was given $3,000 by Mrs. E. H. Blashfield to help it “determine its duty regarding both the preservation of the English language in its beauty and integrity, and its cautious enrichment by such terms as grow out of the modern conditions.” The brethren laid out this money by paying one another honoraria for reading essays on the subject at plenary sessions, and in 1925 nine of these essays were printed in a book.2 It begins with a declaration of fealty to England and ends with a furious assault upon Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg – and a grave bow to Don Marquis! The general theory under-

1 The Académie itself pretends to no such omniscience. In the preface to the first edition of its dictionary (1694) it disclaimed any purpose “to make new words and to reject others at its pleasure.” In the preface to the second edition (1718) it confessed that “ignorance and corruption often introduce manners of writing” and that “convenience establishes them.” In the preface to the third edition (1740) it admitted that it was “forced to admit changes which the public has made,” and so on. Says D. M. Robertson, in A History of the French Academy (London, 1910): “The Academy repudiates any as-sumption of authority over the language with which the public in its own practise has not first clothed it. So much, indeed, does it confine itself to an interpretation merely of the laws of language that its decisions are sometimes contrary to its own judgment of what is either desirable or expedient.” But despite this, its natural leaning is toward tradition, and that leaning has greatly diminished its authority. Even some of its own members repudiate its judgments. “There are,” says J. C. Tressler in the English Journal, College Ed., April, 1934, p. 296, “two French languages: the Academy's and the people's. In France, as in the United States, slang has flourished and has on the whole enriched, enlivened, and invigorated the language. In France, as in other countries, the language has evolved in its own way.”

2 Academy Papers: Addresses on Language Problems by Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; New York, 1925. The contributors were Paul Elmer More, William M. Sloane, William C. Brownell, Brander Matthews, Bliss Perry, Paul Shorey, Henry van Dyke, and Robert Underwood Johnson.

64

The American Language

lying it seems to be divided into two halves. The first half is to the effect that the only sound models of English are to be found in the thunderous artificialities of Eighteenth Century England, and the second teaches that the only remedy for “entire abandonment to the loose-lipped lingo of the street” is “a little study of Latin, and translation of Cicero and Virgil.” It should be added in fairness that some of the contributors dissent from this two-headed theory, but even so the book presents a sufficiently depressing proof of the stupidity of the learned.1

On June 13, 1923, there was a Conference of British and American Professors of English at Columbia University. Under the leadership of Henry van Dyke and Fred Newton Scott 2 its deliberations quickly resolved themselves into a violent assault upon every evidence of Americanism in the national speech. Dr. van Dyke, unconsciously echoing Witherspoon after 142 years, denounced “the slovenly way” in which the mother-tongue was spoken in this country, “not only in the streets, but also in the pulpit, on the stage, and even in the classroom.” Such “lazy, unintelligible, syncopated speech,” he continued, “is like a dirty face.” Apparently as an answer to a possible accusation of Anglomania – for he had been one of the most vociferous of English propagandists during the World War –, he added that he had also “heard some folks talk in Lunnon

1 An instructive account of some forerunners of the Academy, all of them dismal failures, is to be found in American Projects For an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1935.

2 Scott, who died in 1930, was one of the signers of the call for the International Conference on English held in London in 1927. He was, in his day, a great academic dignitary, and served as president of both the Modern Language Association and the National Council of Teachers of English. He was also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the British Association. He wrote many books, including an English grammar, a treatise on literary criticism, and another on æsthetics. His Standards of American Speech, and Other Papers, published in 1925, offers a good gauge of his mentality. One of its chapters is devoted to proving that “of the 10,565 lines of ‘Paradise Lost,’ 670, or 6.3% contain each two or more accented alliterating vowels,” and another to proving that in such doublets as rough and ready 68% put the monosyllable first. On January 2, 1925 he read a paper on British and American Idiom before the Committee on Philological Sciences of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1926 he contributed a paper on American Slang to Tract No. XXIV of the Society for Pure English. In Tract No. XXVII, 1927, some of his definitions were disputed by an anonymous American.

The Two Streams of English

65

who were hard to understand," but after this he returned to his mut-

tons, and closed with the dictum that "the proposal to make a new

American language to fit our enormous country may be regarded

either as a specimen of American humor or as a serious enormity."

Dr. Scott, going further, allowed that it was "for Americans not a

matter of ridicule, but for the hair shirt and the lash, for tears of

shame and self-abasement."

That Anglomania may have actually colored the views of both Dr.

van Dyke and Dr. Scott is suggested by the case of their Corps-

bruder, Dr. Brander Matthews. Before the war Matthews was a dili-

gent collector of Americanisms, and often wrote about them with a

show of liking them. But during the war he succumbed to a great

upsurge of love for the Motherland, and took up a position almost

identically with that of Lounsbury. Thus he once wrote in the in-

tensely pro-English New York Times.

We may rest assured that the superficial evidences of a tendency toward

the differentiation of American-English and British-English are not so sig-

nificant as they may appear to the unreflecting, and that the tendency itself

will be powerless against the cohesive force of our common literature, the

precious inheritance of both the English-speaking peoples. . . . So long as the

novelists and the newspaper men on both sides of the ocean continue to eschew

Briticisms and Americanisms, and so long as they indulge in these localisms

only in quotation marks, there is no danger that English will ever halve itself

into a British language and an American language.

After the war Matthews did some wobbling. He undoubtedly

noticed that quotation marks were no longer being used to tag

Americanisms, but so late as the time of his contribution to Academy

Papers, c. 1923, he continued to believe that "the divergences of

speech between the United States and Great Britain are not impor-

tant, and are not more marked than those between . . . Boston and

Wyoming." To this he added a sort of hurrah in the form of a

solemn declaration, in his character of scholar, that "to the rest of

the world German is still an uncouth tongue." But by 1926 he had

so far returned to his first love that he was praising Logan Pearsall

Smith, albeit somewhat cautiously, for speaking kindly of Ameri-

canisms in "Words and Idioms." I quote:

I have called attention more particularly to Mr. Pearsall Smith's friendly

attitude toward American words and phrases, usages and idioms, because I

find here evidence of a change of heart in our kin across the sea. Time was

when to stigmatize a verbal novelty as an Americanism was to condemn it

66

The American Language

utterly. Most of those who took on themselves the duty of defending our common tongue did not doubt that the English language belonged exclusively to the British. They felt—and the feeling was natural enough—that the language was the exclusive possession of the inhabitants of the island where it had come into being. It is pleasant to see signs that this jealousy is now dying a natural death. It was pleasant indeed, to behold our right to our linguistic heritage cordially recognized in the review of Mr. Pearsall Smith's book in the Literary Supplement of the London Times.1

If any speaker arose at the Columbia Conference to defend American speechways, the fact did not appear in the published reports. Apparently, all the assembled “professors of English,” whether actual Englishmen or only American colonials, were of like mind with Drs. Scott and van Dyke. On the lower levels of pedagogy there is the same general attitude. As I have noted, the National Council of Teachers of English, like the American Academy of Arts and Letters, frequently toys with the project of setting up machinery for “purifying” the language, and there are innumerable minor bands of schoolmarms, male and female, consecrated to the same end. But there is a party in the National Council, as in the American Academy, that dissents. One of its spokesmen is J. C. Tressler, head of the English department of the Richmond Hill High-School, New York City. Writing in the English Journal, College Edition, in April, 1934, he said:

Although thousands of English teachers [i.e., in the United States] with the blood of crusaders and martyrs in their veins have for decades fought heroically against the corruption and utter ruin of English, their warfare has had by and large slight effect on the language. . . . It's hardly wise for the National Council at this late date to attempt to confine it in a strait-jacket.

1 The Literary Digest International Book Review, March, 1926. Apparently, Matthews forgot here that Smith was not an Englishman. Actually he was born in Philadelphia, and did not migrate to England until after passing through Haverford and Harvard. His Words and Idioms was published in London in 1925. Matthews's war-time Anglomania was not taken seriously by the English. His belief that American novelists and newspaper men would “continue to eschew Americanisms” was derided by the London Saturday Review, a bit later on, as “obviously a war hope, like hanging the Kaiser.” There is what may be called a blanket sneer at “Anglomaniac professors of English” in Breaking Priscian's Head, by J. Y. T. Greig, of Armstrong College, Newcastle (1929). “Some of them,” says Professor Greig, “to judge by their obiter dicta, are as scholastically minded as the dismalest snob of a housemaster in an English public school.”

The Two Streams of English

67

6. THE VIEWS OF WRITING MEN

The great majority of American writers have always held out against the dominant pedagogical opinion, in this as in other matters.

In every age, of course, there have been pedantic fellows who out-schoolmarmed the schoolmarms in their devotion to grammatical, syntactical and lexicographical niceties – Ambrose Bierce suggests himself as a good example1 –, and in every age there have been Anglomaniacs of great earnestness – for example, Washington Irving and Henry James,2 not to mention Matthews, van Dyke, and the other faithful colonials of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, already mentioned.

But not many writers of the first distinction have belonged to either faction, and among the lesser ranks there has always been an active movement in the other direction.

After the War of 1812, after the Civil War, and again after the World War there were deliberate efforts, among the literati as well as among the folk, to throw off English precept and example altogether, and among the authors concerned were such respectable figures as J. Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis.

So long ago as 1820, in the twenty-seventh number of the North American Review, Edward Everett sought to turn the fire of the English reviews by arguing that the common language was not only spoken better in America than in England, but also better written.

He said:

We challenge any critic who shall maintain the corruption of the English language in America to assume whatever standard he shall choose of the English, the standard of dictionaries, or of good writers, or of good company; and whatever standard be taken, we engaged to detect in English writers of

1

Bierce was especially hostile to slang, but in 1909 he published a little book called “Write It Right,” full of denunciations of common American idioms.

His own writing, though cramped by his self-imposed rules, yet managed to be fluent, colorful and even melodious.

It is possible that he was influenced by the fact that he spent nearly ten years of his early manhood in England.

2

In Afternoon Neighbors; New York, 1934, p. 43, Hamlin Garland

reports that John S. Sargent once told him of James: “Henry became excessively English in his later years and resented all Americanisms in speech.

I once heard him reproving his niece.

She said: ‘Uncle Henry, if you will tell me how you like your tea I will fix it for you.’

To this James replied: ‘Pray, my dear young lady, what will you fix it with and what will you fix it to?’ ”

respectable standing, and in respectable English society, more provincialisms, more good words in false acceptations, and more newly coined words, than can be found in an equal number of American writers, or in American society, of the same relative respectability. We think we should begin such a comparison with the number of the Edinburgh Review for March, 1817. . . . For in the first article of that number we fell upon forty-six words not authorized by the standards of our language. The English language corrupted in America! What are the Columbiads, or Webster's Dictionaries, or any other name of American innovation, compared with the lucubrations of Jeremy Bentham!

In the North American for July, 1821, in a review of an anti-American article in the New London Monthly Magazine for February of the same year, Everett returned to the subject, arguing that "on the whole, the English language is better spoken here than in England," and that "there is no part of America in which the corruption of the language has gone so far as in the heart of the English counties." He did not advocate a severance of American from English, but he insisted that, in the cases of many differences already noticeable, the American practise was better than the English. "We presume," he concluded somewhat loftily, "that the press set up by the American missionaries in the Sandwich Islands will furnish a good deal better English than Mr. Bentham's Church-of-Englandism."

Everett was supported by a number of other authors of the time, including, as I have already noted, Paulding, Timothy Dwight, and J. Fenimore Cooper, whose early Anglomania was by then only a memory. In the second volume of his "Notions of the Americans," printed anonymously in 1828, but quickly recognized as his and acknowledged by him, Cooper argued stoutly against the artificial English standards, mainly out of the Eighteenth Century, that the contemporary grammarians were trying to impose upon American, and contended that it should be left to its own devices, with due regard, of course, for reason, analogy, and any plausible indigenous authority that might develop. He went on:

This we are daily doing, and I think the consequence will be that in another generation or two far more reasonable English will be used in this country than exists here now. . . . I think it will be just as much the desire of England then to be in our fashion as it was our desire twenty years ago to be in hers.

In "The American Democrat," published in 1838, Cooper set himself up as the indigenous authority he had anticipated ten years

The Two Streams of English

before. By this time the American language was far gone upon the grand bust that had begun with the Jackson uprising, and there was a tremendous flow of neologisms from the West. The “common faults” of the popular speech, according to Cooper, were “an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.” He denounced the democratic substitution of boss for master, and of help for servant, and preached a smug sermon upon the true meaning of lady and gentleman. “To call a laborer, one who has neither education, manners, accomplishments, tastes, associations, nor any one of the ordinary requisites, a gentleman,” he said, “is just as absurd as to call one who is thus qualified a fellow. . . . [A true gentleman] never calls his wife his lady, but his wife, and he is not afraid of lessening the dignity of the human race by styling the most elevated and refined of his fellow creatures men and women.” Waspish words, but they at least avoided the pedantry of the pedagogues, and yielded no more than its just due to English precedent.

The first really full-length defense of American by an American appeared in a volume of “Cambridge Essays, Contributed by Members of the University,” published in London in 1855. Its author was Charles Astor Bristed, a grandson of John Jacob Astor and one of the forgotten worthies of his era. He was graduated from Yale in 1839 and then went to Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1845. After that he devoted himself to literary endeavor, and during the next thirty years lived chiefly at Washington. There he gathered a small coterie of dilettanti about him, and became a sort of forerunner of Henry Adams. In 1852 he published “Five Years in an English University,” and three years later he was asked to contribute to the aforesaid volume of “Cambridge Essays.” His contribution bore the title of “The English Language in America”; it remains to this day, despite a few aberrations, the most intelligent brief discussion of the subject ever printed. He began by denouncing the notion, prevalent then as now, that the study of American was somehow undignified, and proceeded to argue that it was really worth any scholar’s while “to investigate the course of a great living language, transplanted from its primitive seat, brought into contact and rivalry with other civilized tongues, and exposed to various influences, all having a prima facie tendency to modify it.” He then proceeded to dispose of the familiar arguments against the existence of an American form of English, later to be reassembled and reinforced by Lounsbury –

70 The American Language

(1) that most Americanisms "can be traced to an English source," (2) that "the number of actually new words invented in America is very small," (3) that "the deviations from standard English which occur in America are fewer and less gross than those which may be found in England herself," and so on. Here is a specimen passage from his caveat to the first two propositions, which he grouped together as embodying a single argument:

We admit this argument to be true, so far as it goes; but it does not go so far, by any means, as its supporters imagine. They seem to forget that there is such a thing as applying a new meaning to existing words, and of this novelty the examples in America are sufficiently numerous. Thus creek is a perfectly legitimate English word, but its legitimate English meaning is "a small arm of the sea," whereas in America it is invariably used to designate a small river, except when it happens to be used to designate a large one. Draw is an old-established English verb, but the Americans have further employed it as a noun, and made it do duty for draw-bridge.

The third proposition Bristed answered thus:

This is the line of argument which sometimes develops itself into the amusingly paradoxical assertion that the Americans speak better English than the English themselves. But such reasoning is on a par with that of one who should consider himself to have demonstrated that the upper classes of America were richer than those of England by showing that the lower classes of England were poorer than those of America, or that the average wealth of the American population per head was greater than that of the English. There is no inconsistency in admitting that the worst English patois may be less intelligible than the worst American, and yet maintaining that the best currently spoken American contains appreciable deviations from the true English standard. The English provincialisms keep their place; they are confined to their own particular localities, and do not encroach on the metropolitan model. The American provincialisms are most equally distributed through all classes and localities, and though some of them may not rise above a certain level of society, others are heard everywhere. The senate or the boudoir is no more sacred from their intrusions than the farm-house or the tavern.

Bristed argued boldly that in many ways American usage was already superior to English. He defended, for example, the American use of sick, and the American practise, borrowed from the Northern British dialects, of sounding the h in such words as which and wheel. In any case, he said, the Americans were perfectly free to modify their language as they pleased, and no conceivable pressure could dissuade them. Many American inventions had already "settled down into and become established in the language. Talented is a familiar example. It is of little use to inveigh against such words --

The Two Streams of English

there they are in full possession, and cannot be turned out." In con-

clusion he thus philosophized:

Possibly, some of the American expressions are in themselves, abstractly

and philosophically considered, better than the English; but this is not all

that the jus et norma loquendi demands. Every language contains idioms and

phrases philosophically reprehensible, as is clearly shown by the fact that

the most ordinary phrases of one language become unmeaning or ludicrous

absurdities when translated literally into another. All languages contain terms

which have nothing but usage to plead in their favor. In English conversa-

tion, the panegyrical adjective of all-work is nice, in America it is fine. Both

people often use their pet adjective inappropriately; perhaps the Americans

do so in fewer cases than the English.

It was naturally the humorous writers who first began to turn

Americanisms to literary uses, for many of the new locutions that

came in between the War of 1812 and the Civil War showed a

grotesque fancy. As Will D. Howe says in "The Cambridge History

of American Literature,"1 there were two streams of American hu-

mor from the beginnings of the national letters — "the one follow-

ing closely English models, especially Addison, Steele, Defoe, and

Goldsmith in the Eighteenth Century, and Lamb, Hood, Jerrold,

and Dickens in the Nineteenth Century; the other springing from

American soil and the new conditions of American life, and assum-

ing a character as new to the world as the country that produced

it." To the first stream belonged the writings of Franklin, the Hart-

ford Wits, Paulding, Irving and Holmes; to the second that of Seba

Smith, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Joseph G. Bailey, Mrs. Frances

M. Whicher, Charles G. Halpine, George H. Derby, Henry Wheeler

Shaw, David R. Locke, Charles Farrar Browne, and Samuel L.

Clemens (Mark Twain). The pioneers of a really indigenous humor

were mainly dialect writers. Smith discovered the riches of the New

England dialect ("The Life and Writings of Major Jack Down-

ing") in 1830; he was followed by Thomas C. Haliburton ("The

Clockmaker, or The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick") in 1837,

and by James Russell Lowell ("The Biglow Papers") in 1848. The

Negro dialect, as we know it today, seems to have been formulated

by the song-writers for minstrel shows; it did not appear in literature

until the time of the Civil War; before that, as George Philip Krapp

shows in "The English Language in America,"2 it was a vague and

1 Vol. II, p. 148.

2 New York, 1925; Vol. I, p. 246ff. Krapp gives some curious examples

of early attempts at reducing Negro American to writing. His essay also deals with the Yankee,

artificial lingo which had little relation to the actual speech of the Southern blacks. The Civil War period also saw the rise of the Irish dialect, which seems to have been invented (or discovered) by Halpine, whose Miles O'Reilly sketches began to appear in 1862, and of the German dialect, which first took form in Charles Leland's "Hans Breitmann's Ballads" a year or two later. The dialect of the frontier was foreshadowed in Longstreet's "Georgia Scenes" in 1835, and in Baldwin's "Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi" in 1853, but it did not displace the Yankee dialect as the typical American patois until Clemens published "The Jumping Frog" in 1867, and John Hay followed with "Pike County Ballads" in 1871.

These humorists, and their successors after them, were keenly conscious of the rich treasures lying in American speech, and whenever they discussed it seriously they argued for its autonomy. Clemens, who employed Americanisms with great freedom, even when he was attempting elegant writing, hailed "the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains" in "Roughing It" in 1872, and ten years later he printed an essay, "Concerning the American Language," in "The Stolen White Elephant," with a footnote describing it as "part of a chapter crowded out of 'A Tramp Abroad'" (1880). It is in the form of a dialogue with an Englishman met on a train. "The languages," says Mark, "were identical several generations ago, but our changed conditions and the spread of our people far to the South and far to the West have made many alterations in our pronunciation, and have introduced new words among us and changed the meaning of many old ones. . . . A nation's language is a very large matter. It is not simply a manner of speech obtaining among the educated handful; the manner obtaining among the vast uneducated multitude must be considered also. . . . I could pile up differences until I not only convinced you that English and American are separate languages, but that when I speak my native tongue in its utmost purity an Englishman can't understand me at all." Another American humorist, George Ade, came to

Southwestern, Hoosier, and Indian dialects. "The New England dialect as a literary form," he says, "is mainly popular or illiterate American English with a very occasional splash of genuine local color." Krapp reprints Lowell's seven rules for writing this dialect, as given in the introduction to Series I of The Biglow Papers, and C. Alphonso Smith's seven rules for writing "the Southern literary dialect." See also Notes on Negro Dialect in the American Novel to 1821, by Tremaine McDowell, American Speech, April, 1930.

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the same conclusion a quarter of a century later. "The American," he said in his book of travel, "Pastures New," in 1906, "must go to England in order to learn for a dead certainty that he does not speak the English language. . . . This pitiful fact comes home to every American when he arrives in London - that there are two languages, the English and the American. One is correct; the other is incorrect. One is a pure and limpid stream; the other is a stagnant pool, swarming with bacilli."

Of the more serious American writers, the first to explore the literary possibilities of the national language was Walt Whitman. Once, in conversation with his fidus Achates, Horace Traubel, he described his "Leaves of Grass" as "only a language experiment - an attempt to give the spirit, the body, the man, new words, new potentialities of speech - an American . . . range of self-expression. The new world, the new times, the new peoples, the new vistas," he went on, "need a tongue according - yes, what is more, will have such a tongue - will not be satisfied until it is evolved."1 During the early 50's, before the first publication of the "Leaves," Whitman began the preparation of a lecture entitled "An American Primer," the burden of which is indicated by an alternative title that he toyed with but finally rejected: "The Primer of Words, For American Young Men and Women, For Literati, Orators, Teachers, Musicians, Judges, Presidents, &c." This lecture was apparently never delivered, and the manuscript remained unpublished at Whitman's death in 1892. Twelve years later, in April, 1904, it was printed in the Atlantic Monthly, with a prefatory note by Traubel. It was an eloquent plea for national independence in language, and in particular for the development of an American style, firmly grounded upon the speech of everyday. "The Americans," said Whitman, "are going to be the most fluent and melodious voiced people in the world - and the most perfect users of words."

I see that the time is nigh when the etiquette of salons is to be discharged from that great thing, the renovated English speech in America. The occasions of the English speech in America are immense, profound - stretch over ten thousand vast cities, over through thousands of years, millions of miles of meadows, farms, mountains, men. The occasions of salons are for a coterie, a bon soir or two - involve waiters standing behind chairs, silent, obedient, with backs that can bend and must often bend. . . . Ten thousand native

1 The Fight of a Book for the World, by W. S. Kennedy; West Yarmouth, Mass., 1926, pref.

idiomatic words are growing, or are today already grown, out of which vast numbers could be used by American writers, with meaning and effect - words that would be welcomed by the nation, being of the national blood, - words that would give that taste of identity and locality which is so dear in literature.

Whitman ranged himself squarely against the pedagogues who, then as now, were trying to police American English, and bring it into accord with literary English. "Nobody ever actually talks," he said, "as books and plays talk." He argued that there should be a dictionary of the common speech, and that some attempt should be made to ascertain its grammar.

The Real Dictionary will give all the words that exist in use, the bad words as well as any. The Real Grammar will be that which declares itself a nucleus of the spirit of the laws, with liberty to all to carry out the spirit of the laws, even by violating them, if necessary. . . . These States are rapidly supplying themselves with new words, called for by new occasions, new facts, new politics, new combinations. Far plenter additions will be needed, and, of course, will be supplied. . . . Many of the slang words are our best; slang words among fighting men, gamblers, thieves, are powerful words. . . . The appetite of the people of These States, in popular speeches and writings, is for unhemmed latitude, coarseness, directness, live epithets, expletives, words of opprobrium, resistance. This I understand because I have the taste myself as large, as largely, as any one. I have pleasure in the use, on fit occasions, of - traitor, coward, liar, shyster, skulk, doughface, trickster, mean cuss, backslider, thief, impotent, lickspittle. . . . I like limber, lasting, fierce words. I like them applied to myself - and I like them in newspapers, courts, debates, Congress. Do you suppose the liberties and the brawn of These States have to do only with delicate lady-words? with gloved gentleman words? Bad Presidents, bad judges, bad chefts, bad editors, owners of slaves, and the long ranks of Northern political suckers (robbers, traitors, suborned), monopolists, infidels, . . . shaved persons, supplejacks, ecclesiastics, men not fond of women, women not fond of men, cry down the use of strong, cutting, beautiful, rude words. To the manly instincts of the People they will be forever welcome.

At a time, says Louis Untermeyer, "when the rest of literary America was still indulging in the polite language of pulpits and the lifeless rhetoric of its libraries, Whitman not only sensed the richness and vigor of the casual word, the colloquial phrase - he championed the vitality of slang, and freshness of our quickly assimilated jargons, the indigenous beauty of vulgarisms. He even predicted that no future native literature could exist that neglected this racy speech, that the vernacular of people as opposed to the language of literati would form the living accents of the best poets to come. One has only to observe the contemporary works of Carl Sandburg,

Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay and a dozen others to see how his prophecy has been fulfilled. Words, especially the neglected words regarded as too crude and literal for literature, fascinated Whitman. The idea of an enriched language was scarcely ever out of his mind. . . . This interest . . . grew to great proportions; it became almost an obsession."1 As everyone knows, Whitman was an assiduous word-coiner himself, and many of his inventions will be recalled - for example, the verbs to promulgate, to eclaircise, to diminute, to imperturbe, to effuse, and to inure, the adjectives ostent, omnigenous, and adamic, the adverb affetuoso, and the nouns presidentiad, deliveress, civilizee, literat, acceptress, yawp, and partiolist. A large number of his coinages were in foreign, and especially in Romance metal; he believed that American should not be restricted to the materials of English, and he made frequent use of such French terms as allons, feuillage, habitant, savant, ma femme, mon cher, militaire; rapport and éclarcissement, and of such Spanish and pseudo-Spanish terms as libertiad, camerado, vaquero and Americano.2 I have heard it argued that he introduced finale into common American usage; the evidence is dubious, but certainly the word is much oftener employed in the United States than in England. Most of his coinages, alas, died with him, but yawp and These States have survived. Among his literary remains were many notes upon American speechways, and he often discussed the subject with Traubel. In November, 1885, he printed an article on "Slang in America" in the North American Review, and afterward included it in "November Boughs" (1888).3

Whitman got support in his time from James Russell Lowell and John Fiske, and a little later from William Dean Howells. Lowell undertook the defense of Americanisms in his preface to the first series of "The Biglow Papers" (1848). "The English," he said,

1 Whitman and the American Language, New York Evening Post, May 31, 1919. Mr. Untermeyer has himself made vigorous propaganda to the same end. Since 1932 or thereabout he has been delivering a lecture entitled A New Language For a New Generation which embodies a review of the gradual separation of American from English, and a valuable discussion of the present differences.

2 See Walt Whitman and the French Language, by Louise Pound, American Speech, May, 1926, and Walt Whitman's Neologisms, by the same, American Mercury, Feb., 1925.

3 See Walt Whitman and the American Language, by Leon Howard, American Speech, Aug., 1930.

" have complained of us for coining new words. Many of those so stigmatized were old ones by them forgotten, and all make now an unquestioned part of the currency, wherever English is spoken. Undoubtedly, we have a right to make new words as they are needed by the fresh aspects under which life presents itself here in the New World; and, indeed, wherever a language is alive, it grows. It might be questioned whether we could not establish a stronger title to the ownership of the English tongue than the mother-islanders themselves. Here, past all question, is to be its great home and center. And not only is it already spoken here in greater numbers, but with a far higher popular average of correctness than in Britain." Fiske, writing home from England in 1873, reported that the English pronunciation grated upon his sensibilities. "The English," he said, " talk just like Germans. So much guttural is very unpleasant, especially as half the time I can't understand them, and have to say, 'I beg your pardon?' ' Our American enunciation is much pleasanter to the ear." 1

Howells, in 1886, made a plea in Harper's for a concerted effort to put American on its own legs. "If we bother ourselves," he said, " to write what the critics imagine to be 'English,' we shall be priggish and artificial, and still more so if we make our Americans talk 'English.' . . . It has always been supposed by grammarians and purists that a language can be kept as they find it, but languages, while they live, are perpetually changing. God apparently meant them for the common people, . . . and the common people will use them freely, as they use other gifts of God. On their lips our continental English will differ more and more from the insular English, and we believe that this is not deplorable, but desirable. . . . We have only to leave our studies, editorial or other, and go into the shops and fields to find the 'spacious times of great Elizabeth ' again." In the same article Howells advised the young American novelists of the day to give their ears to regional speechways, and quoted what Alphonse Daudet once said of Turgenev: "What a luxury it must be to have a big untrodden barbarian language to wade into! " "We hope," he concluded, "that our inherited English may be constantly freshened and revived from the native sources which literary decentralization will help to keep open." 2

1 The Life and Letters of John Fiske, by John Spencer Clark; Boston, 1917, Vol. I, p. 431. 2 The Editor's Study, Harper's Magazine, Jan., 1886.

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The literature of the subject has taken on large proportions in recent years, and contributions to it have been made by authors as diverse as Vachel Lindsay and Rupert Hughes, Ernest Boyd and Richard Burton. For one article on Americanisms in the philological journals there are at least fifty in the popular magazines. Burton, with a long career as a teacher of English behind him, is convinced that the pedagogical effort to police the national speech will fail. “The pundit, the pedant, and the professor,” he says, “who are fain to stem the turbid tide of the popular vernacular may suffer pain; but they can have little influence on the situation. Even college-bred folk revert to type and use people’s speech – when they are from under the restraining, corrective monitions of academic haunts – in a way to shock, amuse, or encourage, according to the point of view.”1 Hughes has written on the subject more than once, and always with great vigor. “Could anyone imagine an English author,” he says, “hesitating to use a word because of his concern as to the ability of American readers to understand it and approve it? . . . Why should he permit the survival of the curious notion that our language is a mere loan from England, like a copper kettle that we must keep scoured and return without a dent?”

Americans who try to write like Englishmen are not only committed to an unnatural pose, but doomed as well to failure, above all among the English; for the most likeable thing about the English is their contempt for the hyphenated imitation Englishmen from the States, who only emphasize their nativity by their apish antics. The Americans who have triumphed among them have been, almost without exception, peculiarly American. . . . Let us sign a Declaration of Literary Independence and formally begin to write, not British, but Unitedstatish. For there is such a language, a brilliant, growing, glowing, vivacious, elastic language for which we have no specific name. . . . Whatever we call it, let us cease to consider it a vulgar dialect of English, to be used only with deprecation. Let us study it in its splendid efflorescence, be proud of it, and true to it. Let us put off livery, cease to be the butlers of another people’s language, and try to be the masters and the creators of our own.2

Lindsay, who gave the subtitle of “Rhymes in the American Language” to “The Golden Whales of California,” published in 1920, had his say on the subject under the heading of “The Real American Language” in the American Mercury for March, 1928. He began by recounting “a few delusions in regard to the United States language.” One of them, he said, “is that it came in with the

1 English As She is Spoken, Bookman, July, 1920. 2 Our Statish Language, Harper’s Magazine, May, 1920.

ultra-flappers and the most saxophonish of the jazz, after Armistice Day." Another is that " the United States language is a New York novelty."

It is really a new vocabulary arranged on an old British framework. It is true that the new vocabulary pours every day into our growing dictionaries, but this vocabulary is apt to mislead one. A smart phrase or new word is not the United States language. The very framework is as old as the writings of Captain John Smith of Virginia. . . . Wherever there is a touch of Virginia left, there is the United States language. The United States language is Virginia with the r put back into it. . . . When you reach the land of "Old Dan Tucker" and "Clementine" and the places where they sing the song, "Tell Me the Tale That I Once Held So Dear," you are getting into the region of the United States language in its essential fluency. . . . Mark Twain writes Virginian with the r put back into his alphabet when speaking in his own person.

The Irish brethren naturally range themselves on the side of autonomy for American English, and are firm believers in its merits: not many of them show any trace of Anglomania. Whenever the English reviews and newspapers begin one of their periodical denunciations of Americanisms, these Celts rush to the rescue. Thus Murray Godwin of Detroit sought the hospitality of the Irish Statesman in 1926 to flog and flay two English critics of American speechways, one writing in the Quarterly Review and the other in the Manchester Guardian Weekly. In the following burning words he paid his respects to the former:

The author of this particular piece of refined skulduggery . . . quotes . . . a personal notice written by a Jewish clothing merchant, and containing some characteristic Yiddish English, to prove that grammar is no longer honored even in the written language of American business men. Of course we have come to expect such tactics on the part of our British step-cousins, whose reputation for fair play has been so firmly established by tradition that it has no longer any need to be supported by example. . . . Though I feel touched damn nigh to tears when I picture this noble Briton in the throes of molding and milling this length of literary leadpipe with which to bash the blinking Yank, I shall not pass up the chance to point out that his implication that English is a pure and integrated growth, while American is a nondescript tangle of underbrush, would seem to stem from a scholarly logic turned sour by contact with the viewpoint of an intestinally-constricted and malicious if unmuscular nitwit.1

To which may be added a few calmer reflections by Ernest Boyd:

The time has passed when the English language could be claimed as the exclusive idiom of Britain, much less of any restricted area of England. Today

1 The American Slanguage, Irish Statesman, Oct. 9, 1926.

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it is the tongue of millions who have no other language, but have also no other tie with the country from which English came. There is no authority which can enforce the recognition of a Standard English that does not exist, save in the imagination of a few people in London. When these people write or speak they betray their place of origin as definitely as a native of New York or Edinburgh. Their assumption that, while the latter are strange and provincial, they are standard and authoritative, is merely an illustration of self-complacent provincialism. It is an assumption which the great English-speaking world does not and cannot admit.1

7. THE POLITICAL FRONT

The American newspapers labor the subject constantly, but not often with much perspicacity. In general, they favor freedom for American from English-imposed rules, but there is a minority that pleads for conformity. Now and then politicians looking for popularity raise the banner of independence, and propose to give it reality by the characteristic American device of passing a law, but such plans seldom get beyond the stage of tall talk. They go back to the earliest days of the Republic. William Gifford, the bitterly anti-American editor of the Quarterly Review, is authority for the story that at the close of the Revolution certain members of Congress proposed that the use of English be formally prohibited in the United States, and Hebrew substituted for it.2 Bristed, in his essay, "The English Language in America," makes the proposed tongue Greek, and reports that the change was rejected on the ground that "it would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it is, and make the English speak Greek." How a committee of the Continental Congress, in 1778, recommended that "the language of the United States" be used in all "replies or answers" to the French ambassador I have already noted. Seventy-six years later a similar order was issued by the celebrated William L. Marcy, author of the political maxim, "To the victor belong the spoils." After a long career in the Senate, Marcy became Secretary of War in the Cabinet of Polk and then Secretary of State in that of Pierce. While holding septentrionale in 1786. (English translation in two volumes; London, 1787; New York, 1828). See The Philological Society of New York, 1788, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, April, 1934, p. 131.

1 Translations, Saturday Review of Literature, Dec. 26, 1925.

2 Gifford seems to have picked up this story from the Marquis François Jean de Chastellux, who made a tour of America in 1780-82, and printed Voyages dans l'Amérique

the latter post he issued a circular to all American diplomatic and consular officers, instructing them to employ only “the American language” in communicating with him. That was in 1854. After another septuagenarian interval, on May 9, 1927, Andrew W. Mellon, as Secretary of the Treasury, ordered that the redemption call for the Second Liberty Loan be advertised “in every daily paper printed in the American language throughout the United States.”

In the North American Review for April, 1820, Edward Everett printed “a jeu d'esprit which has fallen in our way, under the name of ‘Report of Resolutions to be proposed in the House of Representatives’ . . . to return the compliment paid to us by the Marquis of Lansdowne, in the session [of Parliament] of 1819, in moving for an inquiry into the conduct of General Jackson.” I can find no record that these resolutions were ever actually introduced in the House; indeed, they were probably written by Everett himself, or by one of his collaborators on the North American. But they fell in very well with the temper of the time, and if any member had dropped them into the basket it is certain that they would have received a large number of votes. They began with long satirical whereases directed at the English reviewers, and proceeded to deplore the corruption of the language in the Motherland, “to the degree that the various dialects which prevail, such as those in Yorkshire, Somersetshire and Cumberland, at the same time that they are in themselves utterly uncouth and hideous, are unintelligible to anyone but a person born and educated in these counties respectively.” Then came this:

The House farther regards, as still more pernicious, . . . that barbarity which from various causes is fast creeping into the language of the highest and best educated classes of society in England . . . ; an affectation, at one time, of forgotten old words, and at another of pedantic new ones, each equally unauthorized in a pure and chaste style of writing and of speaking; the perpetual recurrence of the plural number, instead of the singular, as charities, sympathies, tendencies, &c., a phraseology which tends in a high degree to weaken a language, by leading writers and speakers to place that emphasis in the grammatical plurality, which ought to reside in the term itself; an unwise attempt to ennoble such words as clever, you know, vastly, &c. which are pardonable only in colloquial use, and unworthy the dignity of grave and sustained discourse; an adoption by noblemen, gentlemen, and clergymen, of the terms of horse-jockeys, boxers and shooters, to the degree that a great number of vulgar and cant terms are heard in what are called the best circles; . . . and lastly, an alarming prevalence of profane and obscene language, . . . which, though it is unhappily a vice too common in

The Two Streams of English

all countries, the House has unquestioned information prevails in England to an unparalleled and odious extent, reaching into the societies which consider themselves the most polite and best bred.

Finally, after a sonorous declaration that in the United States the language has been “preserved in a state of admirable purity” and was, “by the blessing of God, quite untainted with most of the above mentioned vulgarities prevalent in the highest English circles,” the resolutions concluded:

Resolved, in consideration of these premises, that the nobility and gentry of England be courteously invited to send their elder sons, and such others as may be destined to appear as public speakers in church or state, to America, for their education; that the President of the United States be requested to concert measures with the presidents and heads of our colleges and schools for the prompt reception and gratuitous instruction of such young persons, and to furnish them, after the expiration of a term of — years, certificates of their proficiency in the English tongue.

The Middle West has always been the chief center of linguistic chauvinism, and so early as February 15, 1838, the Legislature of Indiana, in an act established the State university at Bloomington, provided that it should instruct the youth of the new Commonwealth (which had been admitted to the Union in 1816) “in the American, learned and foreign languages . . . and literature.”

Nearly a century later, in 1923, there was a violent upsurge of the same patriotic spirit, and bills making the American language official (but never clearly defining it) were introduced in the Legislatures of Illinois, North Dakota, Minnesota and other States. At the same time the Hon. Washington Jay McCormick, then a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Montana, offered a similar bill in Congress. It ran as follows:

A BILL

To define the national and official language of the Government and people of the United States of America, including the Territories and dependencies thereof.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the national and official language of the Government and people of the United States of America, including Territories and dependencies thereof, is hereby defined as and declared to be the American language.

Sec. 2. That all Acts and parts of Acts of Congress, including regulations of the departments of Government, wherein the speaking, reading, writing, or knowledge of the English language is set forth as a requirement for purposes of naturalization, immigration, official, legal, or other like use, shall be deemed

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The American Language

emended to the extent of substituting in the text for the word English the word American.

Sec. 3. That, until Congress shall make specific provision for the official and more particular standardization of the American language, words and phrases generally accepted as being in good use by the people of the United States of America shall constitute a part of the American language for all legal purposes.

Sec. 4. That this Act shall be in full force and effect six months after its passage and approval.

The Hon. Mr. McCormick thus explained the purposes behind his bill:

I might say I would supplement the political emancipation of '76 by the mental emancipation of '23. America has lost much in literature by not thinking its own thoughts and speaking them boldly in a language unadorned with gold braid. It was only when Cooper, Irving, Mark Twain, Whitman, and O. Henry dropped the Order of the Garter and began to write American that their wings of immortality sprouted. Had Noah Webster, instead of styling his monumental work the American Dictionary of the English Language, written a Dictionary of the American Language, he would have become a founder instead of a compiler. Let our writers drop their top-coats, spats, and swagger-sticks, and assume occasionally their buckskin, moccasins, and tomahawks.1

Despite this ringing appeal to the red-blooded Americanism of Congress, the Hon. Mr. McCormick was never able to rescue his bill from the dungeons of the Judiciary Committee, and there it died the Heldentod at the end of the session. The Hon. Frank Ryan, a member of the Illinois State Senate from Chicago, was more fortunate, for his bill “ establishing the American language as the official language of the State of Illinois,” introduced on January 10, 1923, became a law on June 19, albeit with certain discreet changes. In its original form it was as follows:

Whereas, Since the creation of the American Republic there have been certain Tory elements in our country who have never become reconciled to our republican institutions and have ever clung to the tradition of King and Empire; and

Whereas, The assumed dominance of this Tory element in the social, business and political life of America tends to force the other racial units, in self-defense, to organize on racial lines, thus creating nations without a nation and fostering those racial and religious differences which lead to disunion and disintegration; and

Whereas, The supreme problem of American statesmen, and supreme desire of American patriots, is to weld the racial units into a solid American nation in the sense that England, France and Germany are nations; and

Whereas, The name of the language of a country has a powerful influence in stimulating and preserving the national ideal; and

1 Nation, April 11, 1923.

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Whereas, The languages of other countries bear the name of the countries to which they belong, the language of Germany being called German; of France, French; of England, English; and so on; and

Whereas, Our government, laws, customs and ideals as well as our language differ materially from those of England, now therefore;

Sec. 1. Be it enacted by the People of the State of Illinois, represented in the General Assembly: The official language of the State of Illinois shall be known hereafter as the “American” language, and not as the “English” language.

The newspapers of the time reported that only three of the Hon. Mr. Ryan’s fellow Senators voted against his bill, but it seems to have had harder sledding in the lower House, despite the aid of Mayor Big Bill Thompson of Chicago, who was then in the midst of his campaign to keep the snout of King George V out of his bailiwick. At all events, it lost two of its whereases, suffered changes in two others, and gained two new ones. Those expunged were the second, third, and sixth. In place of the second and third, when the bill was finally passed and approved by the Governor, appeared the following:

Whereas, America has been a haven of liberty and place of opportunity for the common people of all nations; and

Whereas, These strangers within our gates who seek economic betterment, political freedom, larger opportunities for their children and citizenship for themselves, come to think of our institutions as American and our language as the American language.

In addition, the word psychological was inserted before influence in the fourth whereas, apparently in deference to the Freudian thought of the time, and the examples were stricken out of the fifth. The sixth disappeared without leaving a trace. This statute is still on the books of Illinois as Chapter 127, Section 178 of the Acts of 1923. But all the similar bills introduced in other Legislatures seem to have failed of passage. The one brought up in Minnesota (H.F. 993, March 8, 1923) was sponsored by two members of the House of Representatives, N. T. Moen and J. N. Jacobson, both of them apparently of Scandinavian origin. It was supported by two enthusiasts, John M. Leonard, president of “the American Foundation” of St. Paul, and A. J. Roberts, editor of the American National Language Magazine, published in the same city. But though the mighty Magnus Johnson also gave it some help, and it had a favorable report from the Committee on Education, it got no further. In 1908 the American-Language Legion was launched in New York “ to secure popu-

84 The American Language

lar use and statutory recognition of the name, the American language, as the exclusive designation of the official language of the United States and its dependencies." It issued a sticker bearing the word American in six sizes of type, and many times repeated. The idea was that " whenever friends of this movement encounter, in any of their books, any name sought to be relegated by the American-Language Legion, American in a corresponding size of type may be sheared from this sheet and pasted over, making it read: the American language." But this ingenious scheme seems to have come to nothing also.

Meanwhile, the plain people of England and the United States, whenever they come into contact, find it difficult to effect a fluent exchange of ideas. This was made distressingly apparent during the World War. When the American troops began to pour into France in 1917, fraternizing with the British was impeded, not so much because of hereditary animosities as because of the wide divergence in vocabulary and pronunciation between the doughboy and Tommy Atkins - a divergence interpreted by each as low mental visibility in the other. There was very little movement of slang from one camp to the other, and that little ran mainly from the American side to the British. The Y.M.C.A., always pathetically eager for the popularity that it could never gain, made a characteristic effort to turn the feeling of strangeness among the Americans to account. In the Chicago Tribune's Paris edition of July 7, 1917, I find a large advertisement inviting them to make use of the Y.M.C.A. clubhouse in the Avenue Montaigne, " where American is spoken." At about the same time an enterprising London tobacconist, Peters by name, affixed a sign bearing the legend " American spoken here " to the front of his shop, and soon he was imitated by hundreds of other London, Liverpool and Paris shopkeepers. Such signs are still familiar all over Europe, and they have begun to appear in Asia.1

1 Peters, it appears, had a remote forerunner in one Proctor, who was in practise as a teacher of English in Paris at the end of the Eighteenth Century. Mr. H. A. Larrabee of Cambridge, Mass., calls my attention to the following reference to him in John G. Alger's Paris in 1789-94: "In October, 1794, Proctor advertised that he taught the English and American languages - there had been no advertisements of lessons in foreign languages during the Terror - and he was still doing this in 1802." Apparently the strained relations between France and the United States in 1797-1800 did not force Proctor to suspend the teaching of American.

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8. FOREIGN OBSERVERS

The continental awareness of the growing differences between English and American is demonstrated by the fact that some of the popular German Sprachführer now appear in separate editions, Amerikanisch and Englisch. This is true, for example, of the Metoula-Sprachführer and of the Polyglott Kuntze books.1 The American edition of the latter starts off with the doctrine that “Jeder, der nach Nord-Amerika oder Australien will, muss Englisch können,” but a great many of the words and phrases that appear in its examples would be unintelligible to many Englishmen — e.g., free-lunch, real-estate agent, buckwheat, corn (for maize), conductor and popcorn — and a number of others would suggest false meanings or otherwise puzzle — e.g., saloon, wash-stand, water-pitcher and apple-pie.2 In the “Neokosmos Sprachführer durch England-Amerika ”3 there are many notes calling attention to differences between American and English usage, e.g., baggage-luggage, car-carriage, conductor-guard. The authors are also forced to enter into explanations of the functions of the boots in an English hotel and of the clerk in an American hotel, and they devote a whole section to a discourse upon the nature and uses of such American beverages as whisky-sours, Martini-cocktails, silver-fizzes, John-Collinses, and ice-cream sodas.4 There are many special guides to the American language in German — for example, “The Little Yankee,” by Alfred D. Schoch and R. Kron (Freiburg, 1912), “Uncle Sam and His English,” by W. K. Pfeiler and Elisabeth Wittmann (Berlin,

1 Metoula-Sprachführer; Englisch von Karl Blattner; Ausgabe für Amerika; Berlin-Schöneberg. Polyglott Kuntze; Schnellste Erlernung jeder Sprache ohne Lehrer; Amerikanisch; Bonn a. Rh.

2 Like the English expositor of American Slang (See Chapter VI, Section 3), this German falls into several errors. For example, he gives cock for rooster, boots for shoes, braces for suspenders and postman for letter-carrier, and lists ironmonger, joiner and linen-draper as American terms. He also spells wagon in the English manner, with two g’s, and translates Schweine-füsse as pork-feet. But he spells such words as color in the American manner and gives the pronunciation of clerk as the American klörk, not as the English klark.

3 By Carlo di Domizio and Charles M. Smith; Munich, n.d.

4 Like the Metoula expositor, they make mistakes. Certainly no American bartender ever makes a Hock-cup; he makes a Rhine-wine-cup. They list several drinks that are certainly not familiar in America, e.g., the knickebein and the white-lion. Yet worse, they convert julep into jules.

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The American Language

1932); and “Spoken American,” by S. A. Nock and H. Mutschmann (Leipzig, 1930). It is also dealt with at length in various more general guides - for example, “Hauptfragen der Amerikakunde,” by Walther Fischer (Bielefeld, 1928); “The American Wonderland,” by S. A. Nock and G. Kamitsch (Leipzig, 1930); and “America of Today,” by Frau Voigt-Goldsmith and D. Borchand (Berlin, 1929). Nor is it overlooked by pedagogues. I have before me a circular of the Lessing Hochschule in Berlin, offering courses in both Amerikanisch and Englisch - two for Anfänger, one for Vorgebildete, and one for Fortgeschrittene - each of eight weeks, and at a fee of ten marks. The American language also gets attention in a number of French, Italian and Scandinavian guide-books for immigrants and travelers; in one of them ¹ I find definitions of buttermilk, cat-boat, clawhammer, co-ed, craps, dago, dumb-waiter, faker, freeze-out, gusher, hard-cider, hen-party, jitney, mortician, panhandle, patrolman, sample-room, shyster, sleuth, wet (noun), dry (noun), lead-cheese and overhead-expenses. The standard guide-books for tourists always call attention to the differences between the English and American vocabularies. Baedeker's “United States” has a glossary for Englishmen likely to be daunted by such terms as cl, European-plan and sundae, and in Muirhead's “London and Its Environs” there is a corresponding one for Americans, warning them that bug means only bed-bug in England, that a clerk there is never a shopman, and that homely means domestic, unpretending, homelike, never plain-looking, and giving them the meanings of trunk-call, boarding, goods-train, spanner and minerals.

From the earliest days the peculiarities of American have attracted the attention of Continental philologians, and especially of the Germans. The first edition of Bartlett's Glossary (1848) brought forth a long review in the Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen (Braunschweig) by Dr. Felix Flügel, and in 1866 Dr. Friedrich Köhler published a “Wörterbuch der Amerikanismen,” based on it. In subsequent volumes of the Archiv and in the other German philological journals there have been frequent discussions of the subject by Ludwig Herrig, Karl Knortz, Johannes Hoops, Hermann U. Meysenberg, Ed. O. Paget, Paul Heyne, Georg Kartzke, Walther Fischer, Fritz Karpf, Martin Pawlik and H.

¹ De Forenede Stater, by Evald Kristensen; Omaha, Neb., 1921, Vol. I, pp. 207-219. For a translation of this chapter I am indebted to the kindness of Dr. A. Th. Dorf of Chicago.

Lüdeke. It has also been discussed at length in the German lay press,

especially by C. A. Bratter, Friedrich Schönemann and Arnold

Schöer. It is common in German for translations of American books

to bear the words aus dem Amerikanischen on their title-pages, and

the term is frequently in use otherwise.1 Like his German colleagues,

Dr. Otto Jespersen of Copenhagen, perhaps the first living authority

on modern English, is greatly interested in Americanisms, and at

one time contemplated doing a book on them. The third edition of

the present work was translated into German with a commentary

by Dr. Heinrich Spies of Berlin in 1927,2 and the same scholar has

lectured on the subject at Berlin, Greifswald and elsewhere. Vari-

ous Dutch and Belgian philologians, among them Barentz, Keijzer,

Aronstein, Zandvoort, Peeters, and van der Voort, have published

studies of American, and so have various Frenchmen and Italians;

and at the University of Paris, in 1921, Ray P. Bowen was appointed

lecteur d'américain. At Tartu-Dorpat in Estonia Dr. Heinrich

Mutschmann, professor of English in the university there, has

printed an excellent Glossary of Americanisms (1931) - in fact, a

much better one than any that has come out in America since

Thornton's. Two other foreign scholars who show more interest in

American English than is usually displayed at home are Professor

Wincenty Lutoslawski, of the University of Wilna in Poland, and

Professor Sanki Ichikawa, of the Imperial University at Tokyo.

The early editions of the present work brought me into pleasant

contact with these gentlemen, and I have received valuable sug-

gestions from both. Says Dr. Ichikawa:

It is a great question with us teachers of English in Japan whether we

should teach American English or British English. We have more opportuni-

ties for coming into contact with Americans than for meeting Englishmen,

but on the other hand books on phonetics are mostly done by English

scholars. As to the vocabulary, we are teaching English and American in-

discriminately - many of us, perhaps, without knowing which is which.

The literature on Americanisms in Japanese is already of some

weight. It includes an excellent formal treatise, "English and Ameri-

1 For example, the following appears on the invitations to farewell din-

ners on Hamburg-Amerika Line ships (1935): "Einem geehrten

Bordpublico kund und zu wissen:

Dass das fröhliche Bord-Glöcklin, so

in amerikanishchen Sprach dinner-

bell geheisten ist," etc.

2 Die Amerikanische Sprache (Das Englisch der Vereinigten Staaten),

von H. L. Mencken; Deutsch Bear-

beitung von Heinrich Spies; Leip-

zig, 1917. Dr. Spies is also the au-

thor of Kultur und Sprach in

neuen England; Leipzig, 1925.

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The American Language

can of Today," by G. Tomita (Tokyo, 1930), and a number

of smaller studies. Such monographs as "Japanized English " by

S. Aarkawa (Tokyo, 1930) and "English Influence on Japanese,"

by Dr. Ichikawa (Tokyo, 1928) give a great deal of attention to

American forms. The Russians are also conscious of the difference

between the two languages, and there is a party at Moscow which

holds that American should be taught in the schools, not English.

As yet this party does not seem to have prevailed, but so long ago

as March, 1930, it was bold enough to propose the following resolu-

tions at a conference of teachers of language at Moscow:

1. Oxford English is an aristocratic tongue purposely fostered by the

highest British governing and land-holding classes in order to maintain their

icy and lofty exclusiveness.

2. It is not used by the majority of the residents in Great Britain and

certainly not by its intelligent working class elements.

3. It is not used by the majority of English-speaking peoples the world

over.

4. The aristocracy is introducing all sorts of affectations, such as the

chopping short of syllables and the swallowing of the terminations of words,

in order to make it all the more difficult for anyone else to speak the lan-

guage in their manner.

5. The American language is more democratic, for the employing classes

speak no differently from their employes. It is more standard, due originally

to the settlement of the West by Easterners, and lately due to the radio and

talkies.

6. The American language is more alive and picturesque, tending more

to simplification both as to spelling and grammar.

7. Linguist "purity" is mere fiction for language does not grow out

of the air, but is determined by particular social conditions and in a measure

is a reflex of these conditions. Language purity at best reflects a pedantic

attitude and at worst an attitude either aristocratic or chauvinistic.

8. Since American engineers are preferred by the Soviet authorities to

the English, since the latest industrial technique finds its highest developinent

in the United States, good American English serves Soviet purposes best.1

The apparent feeling of so many American philologians that giv-

ing serious study to the common speech of their country would be

beneath their dignity is not shared by their European colleagues. In

England the local dialects have been investigated for many years,

and there is a formidable literature on slang, stretching back to the

Sixteenth Century and including a glossary in seven large volumes.

In France, as in Germany, Italy and Japan, a linguistic atlas has been

1 See The American Language Fights for Recognition in Moscow,

by Eli B. Jacobson, American Mercury, Jan., 1931.

published,1 and the Société des Parlers de France makes diligent inquiries into changing forms; moreover, the Académie itself is endlessly concerned with the subject. There is, besides, a constant outpouring of books by private investigators, of which “Le Langage populaire,” by Henry Banche, is a good example. In Germany, amid many other such works, there are admirable grammars of all the dialects. In Sweden there are several journals devoted to the study of the vulgate, and the government has granted a subvention of 7500 kronor a year to an organization of scholars called the Undersökningen av Svenska Folkmål, formed to investigate it systematically. In Norway there is a widespread movement to overthrow the official Dano-Norwegian, and substitute a national language based upon the speech of the peasants.2 In Spain the Real Academia Española de la Lengua is constantly at work upon its great Diccionario, Ortografía and Gramática, and revises them at frequent intervals, taking in all new words as they appear and all new forms of old ones. And in Latin-America, to come nearer to our own case, the native philologists have produced a large literature on the matter closest at hand, and one finds in it excellent studies of the Portuguese dialect of Brazil, and the variations of Spanish in Mexico, the Argentine, Chili, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay and even Honduras and Costa Rica.3

1 L'Atlas linguistique de la France, by J. Gillieron and E. Edmont; Paris, 1902–08. The German Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reiches was edited by Wenker and appeared ten years earlier. The Japanese atlas, Dai Nippon Hogen Chidzu, was prepared by M. Tojo.

2 This movement owes its start to Ivar Aasen (1813–96), who published a grammar of the landsmaal, or peasant speech, in 1848, and a dictionary in 1850. It won official recognition in 1885, when the Storthing passed the first of a series of acts designed to put the landsmaal on an equal footing with the official Dano-Norwegian. Four years later, after a campaign going back to 1874, provision was made for teaching it in the schools for the training of primary teachers. In 1899 a professorship of it was established in the University of Christiania. The school boards in the case of primary schools, and the pupils in the case of middle and high schools are now permitted to choose between the two languages, and the landsmaal has been given official status by the State Church. The chief impediment to its wider acceptance lies in the fact that it is not, as it stands, a natural language, but an artificial amalgamation of peasant dialects. See The Linguistic Development of Ivar Aasen's New Norse, by Einar Haugen, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. XLVIII, Pt. 1, 1933.

3 There is a bibliography of this literature in the third edition of the present work; New York, 1923, pp. 460–61; and a better one in Estudios Sobre el Español de Nuevo Méjico, by Aurelio M. Espinosa; Buenos Aires, 1930, p. 24 ff.

II

THE MATERIALS OF INQUIRY

I. THE HALLMARKS OF AMERICAN

The characters chiefly noted in American English by all who have discussed it are, first, its general uniformity throughout the country; second, its impatient disregard for grammatical, syntactical and phonological rule and precedent; and third, its large capacity (distinctly greater than that of the English of present-day England) for taking in new words and phrases from outside sources, and for manufacturing them of its own materials.

The first of these characters has struck every observer, native and foreign. In place of the discordant local dialects of all the other major countries, including England, we have a general Volkssprache for the whole nation, and if it is conditioned at all it is only by minor differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, and by the linguistic struggles of various groups of newcomers. No other country can show such linguistic solidarity, nor any approach to it— not even Canada, for there a large minority of the population resists speaking English altogether. The Little Russian of the Ukraine is unintelligible to the citizen of Moscow; the Northern Italian can scarcely follow a conversation in Sicilian; the Low German from Hamburg is a foreigner in Munich; the Breton flounders in Gascony. Even in the United Kingdom there are wide divergences.1 “When we remember,” says the New International Encyclopedia, “that the dialects of the counties in England have marked differences— so marked, indeed, that it may be doubted whether a Lancashire miner and a Lincolnshire farmer could understand each other— we may well be proud that our vast country has, strictly speaking, only one language.” There are some regional peculiarities in pronunciation and intonation, and they will be examined in some detail

1 W. W. Skeat distinguishes 9 principal dialects in Scotland, 3 in Ireland and 30 in England and Wales. See his English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day; Cambridge, 1911, p. 107 ff.

in Chapter VII, but when it comes to the words they habitually use and the way they use them all Americans, even the less tutored, follow pretty much the same line. A Boston taxi-driver could go to work in Chicago or San Francisco without running any risk of misunderstanding his new fares. Once he had flattened his a's a bit and picked up a few dozen localisms, he would be, to all linguistic intents and purposes, fully naturalized.

Of the intrinsic differences that separate American from English the chief have their roots in the obvious disparity between the environment and traditions of the American people since the Seventeenth Century and those of the English. The latter have lived under a relatively stable social order, and it has impressed upon their souls their characteristic respect for what is customary and of good report. Until the World War brought chaos to most of their institutions, their whole lives were regulated, perhaps more than those of any other people save the Spaniards, by a regard for precedent. The Americans, though partly of the same blood, have felt no such restraint, and acquired no such habit of conformity. On the contrary, they have plunged to the other extreme, for the conditions of life in their country have put a high value upon the precisely opposite qualities of curiosity and daring, and so they have acquired that character of restlessness, that impatience of forms, that disdain of the dead hand, which now broadly marks them. From the first, says a literary historian, they have been “less phlegmatic, less conservative than the English. There were climatic influences, it may be; there was surely a spirit of intensity everywhere that made for short effort.” 1 Thus, in the arts, and thus in business, in politics, in daily intercourse, in habits of mind and speech. The American is not, of course, lacking in a capacity for discipline; he has it highly developed; he submits to leadership readily, and even to tyranny. But, by a curious twist, it is not the leadership that is old and decorous that commonly fetches him, but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He will resist dictation out of the past, but he will follow a new messiah with almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of economics, religion, morals and speech. A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation

1 F. L. Pattee: A History of American Novel, by Carl Van Doren; can Literature Since 1870; New York, 1916. See also The Ameri- New York, 1921.

of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new shibboleth, or metaphor, or piece of slang. Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of the schoolmarm can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meets the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative. The characteristic American habit of reducing complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations was already noticeable in colonial times, and such highly typical Americanisms as O.K., N.G., and P.D.Q., have been traced back to the early days of the Republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these tendencies invisible today, for institution-making is yet going on, and so is language-making. In so modest an operation as that which has evolved bunco from buncombe and bunk from bunco there is evidence of a phenomenon which the philologian recognizes as belonging to the most lusty stages of speech.

But of more importance than the sheer inventions, if only because much more numerous, are the extensions of the vocabulary, both absolutely and in ready workableness, by the devices of rhetoric. The American, from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians. His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest far more upon brilliant phrases than upon logical ideas. And in small things as in large he exercises continually an incomparable capacity for projecting hidden and often fantastic relationships into arresting parts of speech. Such a term as rubberneck is almost a complete treatise on American psychology; it reveals the national habit of mind more clearly than any labored inquiry could ever reveal it. It has in it precisely the boldness and contempt for ordered forms that are so characteristically American, and it has too the grotesque humor of the country, and the delight in devastating opprobriums, and the acute feeling for the succinct and savory. The same qualities are in rough-house, water-wagon, has-been, lame-duck, speed-cop and a thousand other such racy substantives, and in all the great stock of native verbs and adjectives. There is indeed, but a shadowy boundary in these new coinages between the various parts of speech. Corral, borrowed from the Spanish, immediately becomes a verb and the father of an adjective. Bust, carved out of burst, erects itself into a noun. Bum, coming by way of an earlier

bummer from the German, becomes noun, adjective, verb and adverb. Verbs are fashioned out of substantives by the simple process of prefixing the preposition: to engineer, to stump, to hog, to style, to author. Others grow out of an intermediate adjective, as to boom. Others are made by torturing nouns with harsh affixes, as to burglarize and to itemize, or by groping for the root, as to resurrect and to jell. Yet others are changed from intransitive to transitive; a sleeping-car sleeps thirty passengers. So with the adjectives. They are made of substantives unchanged: codfish, jitney. Or by bold combinations: down-and-out, up-state, flat-footed. Or by shading down suffixes to a barbaric simplicity: scary, classy, tasty. Or by working over adjectives until they tremble on the brink between adverb and adjective: right, sure and near are examples.

All these processes, of course, are also to be observed in the history of the English of England; at the time of its sturdiest growth they were in the most active possible being. They are, indeed, common to all tongues; “the essence of language,” says Dr. Jespersen, “is activity.” But if you will put the English of today beside the American of today you will see at once how much more forcibly they are in operation in the latter than in the former. The standard Southern dialect of English has been arrested in its growth by its purists and grammarians, and burdened with irrational affectations by fashionable pretension. It shows no living change since the reign of Samuel Johnson. Its tendency is to combat all that expansive gusto which made for its plaincy and resilience in the days of Shakespeare.1 In place of the old loose-footedness there is set up a preciosity which, in one direction, takes the form of clumsy artificialities in the spoken

1 Rather curiously, the two authorities who were most influential, during the Nineteenth Century, in keeping it to a rigid pattern were both Americans. They were Lind-ley Murray (1745-1826) and Joseph E. Worcester (1784-1865). Murray, a Pennsylvanian, went to England after the Revolution, and in 1795 published his Grammar of the English Language. It had an extraordinary sale in England, and was accepted as the court of last resort in usage down to quite recent times. Worcester’s Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language, 1846, divided the honors of

authority in England with B. H. Smart’s Dictionary, published during the same year. It was extensively pirated. Thus, says Thomas R. Lounsbury (The Standard of Pronunciation in English; New York, 1904, p. 220), “the Londoner frequently got his pure London pronunciation from a citizen of this country who was never outside of New England for more than a few months of his life.” Worcester was also accepted at Harvard and at the University of Virginia, but elsewhere in the United States Webster prevailed.

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language, and in another shows itself in the even clumsier Johnsonese of so much current English writing—the Jargon denounced by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his Cambridge lectures. This “ infirmity of speech ” Quiller-Couch finds “ in parliamentary debates and in the newspapers; . . . it has become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought, and so voice the reason of their being.” Distinct from journalese, the two yet overlap, “ and have a knack of assimilating each other's vices.” 1

American, despite the gallant efforts of the pedagogues, has so far escaped any such suffocating formalization. We, too, of course, have our occasional practitioners of the authentic English Jargon, but in the main our faults lie in precisely the opposite direction. That is to say, we incline toward a directness of statement which, at its greatest, lacks restraint and urbanity altogether, and toward a hospitality which often admits novelties for the mere sake of their novelty, and is quite uncritical of the difference between a genuine improvement in succinctness and clarity, and mere extravagant raciness. “ The tendency,” says one English observer, “ is . . . to consider the speech of any man, as any man himself, as good as any other.” 2 The Americans, adds a Scots professor, “ are determined to hack their way through the language, as their ancestors through forests, regardless of the valuable growths that may be sacrificed in blazing the trail.” 3 But this Scot dismisses the English neologisms of the day, when ranged beside the American stock, as “ dwiny, feeble stuff ”; “ it is to America,” he admits, “ that we must chiefly look in future for the replenishment and freshening of our language.” I quote one more Briton, this time an Englishman steeped in the public school tradition:

The English of the United States is not merely different from ours; it has a restless inventiveness which may well be founded in a sense of racial

1 See the chapter, Interlude on Jargon, in Quiller-Couch's On the Art of Writing; New York, 1916. Appropriately enough, large parts of the learned critic's book are written in the very Jargon he attacks. See also Ch. VI of Growth and Structure of the English Language, by O. Jespersen, 3rd ed., rev.; Leipzig, 1919, especially p. 143 ff. See also

Official English, in English, March, 1919, p. 7; April, p. 45, and Aug., p. 135, and The Decay of Syntax, in the London Times Literary Supplement, May 8, 1919, p. 1.

2 Alexander Francis: Americans: An Impression; New York, 1900.

3 Breaking Priscian's Head, by J. Y. T. Greig; London, 1929.

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95

discomfort, a lack of full accord between the temperament of the people and the constitution of their speech. The English are uncommunicative; the Americans are not. In its coolness and quiet withdrawal, in its prevailing sobriety, our language reflects the cautious economies and leisurely assurance of the average speaker. We say so little that we do not need to enliven our vocabulary and underline our sentences, or cry "Wolf!" when we wish to be heard. The more stimulating climate of the United States has produced a more eager, a more expansive, a more decisive people. The Americans apprehend their world in sharper outlines and aspire after a more salient rendering of it.1

This revolt against conventional bonds and restraints is most noticeable, of course, on the lower levels of American speech; in the regions above there still linger some vestiges of Eighteenth Century tightness. But even in those upper regions there are rebels a-plenty, and some of them are of such authority that it is impossible to dismiss them. I glance through the speeches of the late Dr. Woodrow Wilson, surely a conscientious purist and Anglomaniac if we have ever had one, and find, in a few moments, half a dozen locutions that an Englishman in like position would certainly hesitate to use, among them we must get a move on,2 to hog,3 to gum-shoe,4 onery in place of ordinary,5 and that is going some.6 I turn to the letters of that most passionate of Anglomanics, Walter Hines Page, and find to eat out of my hand, to lick to a frazzle, to cut no figure, to go gunning for, nothin' doin', for keeps, and so on. I proceed to Dr. John Dewey, probably the country's most respectable meta-physician, and find him using dope for opium.7 In recent years certain English magnicoes have shown signs of going the same route, but whenever they yield the corrective bastinado is laid on, and nine times out of ten they are accused, and rightly, of succumbing to American influence.

Let American confront a novel problem alongside English, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious. Movie is better than cinema; and the English begin to admit the fact by adopting the word; it is not only better American, it is better English. Bill-board is better than boarding. Office-holder is

1 Pomona, or The Future of English, by Basil de Sélincourt; London, 1929.

2 Speech before the Chamber of Commerce Convention, Washington, Feb. 19, 1916.

3 Speech at a workingman's dinner, New York, Sept. 4, 1912.

4 Wit and Wisdom of Woodrow Wilson, comp. by Richard Linthicum; New York, 1916, p. 54.

5 Speech at Ridgewood, N. J., April 22, 1910.

6 Wit and Wisdom . . . p. 56.

7 New Republic, Dec. 24, 1919, p. 116, col. 1.

more honest, more picturesque, more thoroughly Anglo-Saxon than public-servant. Stem-winder somehow has more life in it, more fancy and vividness, than the literal keyless-watch. Turn to the terminology of railroading (itself, by the way, an Americanism): its creation fell upon the two peoples equally, but they tackled the job independently. The English, seeking a figure to denominate the wedge-shaped fender in front of a locomotive, called it a plough; the Americans, characteristically, gave it the far more pungent name of cow-catcher. So with the casting which guides the wheels from one rail to another. The English called it a crossing-plate; the Americans, more responsive to the suggestion in its shape, called it a frog. American is full of what Bret Harte called the “saber-cuts of Saxon”; it meets Montaigne’s ideal of “a succulent and nervous speech, short and compact, not as much delicated and combed out as vehement and brusque, rather arbitrary than monotonous, not pedantic but soldierly, as Suetonius called Cæsar’s Latin.” One pictures the common materials of English dumped into a pot, exotic flavorings added, and the bubblings assiduously and expectantly skimmed. What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it comes into contact with what is new and vivid. “When we Americans are through with the English language,” says Mr. Dooley, “it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.”

All this boldness of conceit, of course, makes for vulgarity. Unrestrained by any critical sense—and the critical sense of the pedagogues counts for little, for they cry wolf too often—it flowers in such barbaric inventions as tasty, alright, go-getter, he-man, go-aheadativeness, tony, goof, semi-occasional, and to doxologize. But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions, and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy language-making. The history of English, like the history of American and of every other living tongue, is a history of vulgarisms that, by their accurate meeting of real needs, have forced their way into sound usage, and even into the lifeless catalogues of the grammarians. The purist performs a useful office in enforcing a certain logical regularity upon the process, and in our own case the omnipresent example of the greater conservatism of the English restrains, to some extent, our native tendency to go too fast, but the process itself is as inexorable in its workings as the precession of the equinoxes, and if we yield to it

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more eagerly than the English, it is only a proof, perhaps, that the future of what was once the Anglo-Saxon tongue lies on this side of the water. Standard English now has the brakes on, but American continues to leap in the dark, and the prodigality of its movement is all the indication that is needed of its intrinsic health, its capacity to meet the ever-changing needs of a restless and emotional people, inordinately mongrel, and disdainful of tradition. Language, says A. H. Sayce,

is not artificial product, contained in books and dictionaries and governed by the strict rules of impersonal grammarians. It is the living expression of the mind and spirit of a people, ever changing and shifting, whose sole standard of correctness is custom and the common usage of the community. . . . The first lesson to be learned is that there is no intrinsic right or wrong in the use of language, no fixed rules such as are the delight of the teacher of Latin prose. What is right now will be wrong hereafter; what language rejected yesterday she accepts today.1

2. WHAT IS AN AMERICANISM?

John Pickering was the first to attempt to draw up a schedule of Americanisms. In his “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America” (1816) he divided them into three categories, as follows:

1. “We have formed some new words.”

2. “To some old ones, that are still in use in England, we have affixed new significations.”

3. “Others, which have been long obsolete in England, are still retained in common use among us.”

1 Introduction to the Science of Language, 4th ed.; London, 1900, Vol. II, pp. 33-4. All this, of course, had been said long before Sayce. “Language,” said Quintilian in his Institutiones Oratorias, I (c. 95), “is like money, which becomes current when it receives the public stamp.” “Custom,” said Ben Jonson in his Grammar (1640) “is the most certain mistress of language.” “Language,” said George Campbell in The Philosophy of Rhetoric, II (1776), “is purely a species of fashion, in which by the general,

but tacit, consent of the people of a particular state or country, certain sounds come to be appropriated to certain things as their signs.” “Established custom,” said Hugh Blair in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), “is the standard to which we must at last resort for determining every controverted point in language.” To which Noah Webster added in his Dissertations on the English Language (1789): “The general practice of a nation is the rule of propriety.”

98 The American Language

John Russell Bartlett, in the second edition of his "Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States" (1859), increased these three classes to nine:

1. Archaisms, i.e., old English words, obsolete, or nearly so, in England, but retained in use in this country.

2. English words used in a different sense from what they are in England. "These include many names of natural objects differently applied."

3. Words which have retained their original meaning in the United States, though not in England.

4. English provincialisms adopted into general use in America.

5. New coined words, which owe their origin to the productions or to the circumstances of the country.

6. Words borrowed from European languages, especially the French, Spanish, Dutch and German.

7. Indian words.

8. Negroisms.

9. Peculiarities of pronunciation.

Some time before this, but after the publication of Bartlett's first edition in 1848, William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, devoted a brief chapter to "American Dialects" in "The English Language" (1850) and in it one finds the following formidable classification:

1. Words borrowed from other languages.

a. Indian, as Kennebec, Obio, Tombigbee, sagamore, quabaug, succotash.

b. Dutch, as boss, kruller, stoop.

c. German, as spuke [?], sauerkraut.

d. French, as bayou, cache, chute, crevasse, levee.

e. Spanish, as calaboose, chaparral, hacienda, rancho, ranchero.

f. Negro, as buckra.

2. Words "introduced from the necessity of our situation, in order to express new ideas."

a. Words "connected with and flowing from our political institutions," as selectman, presidential, congressional, caucus, mass-meeting, lynch-law, help (for servants).

b. Words "connected with our ecclesiastical institutions," as associational, consociational, to fellowship, to missionate.

c. Words "connected with a new country," as lot, diggings, betterments, squatter.

3. Miscellaneous Americanisms.

a. Words and phrases become obsolete in England, as talented, offset (for set-off), back and forth (for backward and forward).

b. Old words and phrases "which are now merely provincial in England," as hub, whap [?], to wilt.

c. Nouns formed from verbs by adding the French suffix -ment, as publisbment, releasement, requirement.

d. Forms of words “which fill the gap or vacancy between two words which are approved,” as obligate (between oblige and obligation) and variate (between vary and variation).

e. “Certain compound terms for which the English have different compounds,” as bank-bill (bank-note), book-store (bookseller's shop), bottom-land (interval-land), clapboard (pale), sea-board (sea-shore), side-hill (hill-side).

f. “Certain colloquial phrases, apparently idiomatic, and very expressive,” as to cave in, to flare up, to flunk out, to fork over, to hold on, to let on, to stave off, to take on.

g. Intensives, “often a matter of mere temporary fashion,” as dreadful, might, plaguy, powerful.

h. “Certain verbs expressing one's state of mind, but partially or timidly,” as to allot upon (for to count upon), to calculate, to expect (to think or believe), to guess, to reckon.

i. “Certain adjectives, expressing not only quality, but one's subjective feelings in regard to it,” as clever, grand, green, likely, smart, ugly.

j. Abridgments, as stage (for stage-coach) turnpike (for turnpike-road), spry (for sprightly), to conduct (for to conduct one's self).

k. “Quaint or burlesque terms,” as to tote, to yank, bumbug, loafer, muss, plunder (for baggage), rock (for stone).

l. “Low expressions, mostly political,” as slang-whanger, loco foco, hunker, to get the hang of.

m. “Ungrammatical expressions, disapproved by all,” as do don't, used to could, can't come it, Universal preacher (for Universalist), there's no two ways about it.

Alfred L. Elwyn, in his “Glossary of Supposed Americanisms” (1859), attempted no classification. He confined his glossary to archaic English words surviving in America, and sought only to prove that they had come down “from our remotest ancestry” and were thus undeserving of the reviling lavished upon them by English critics. Schele de Vere, in his “Americanisms” (1872), followed Bartlett, and devoted himself largely to words borrowed from the Indian dialects, and from the French, Spanish and Dutch. But John S. Farmer, in his “Americanisms New and Old” (1889), ventured upon a new classification, prefacing it with the following definition:

An Americanism may be defined as a word or phrase, old or new, employed by general or respectable usage in America in a way not sanctioned by the best standards of the English language. As a matter of fact, however, the term has come to possess a wider meaning, and it is now applied not only to words and phrases which can be so described, but also to the new and legitimately born words adapted to the general needs and usages, to the survivals of an older form of English than that now current in the mother country, and to the racy, pungent vernacular of Western life.

He then proceeded to this classification:

100

The American Language

1. Words and phrases of purely American derivation, embracing words originating in:

a. Indian and aboriginal life.

b. Pioneer and frontier life.

c. The church.

d. Politics.

e. Trades of all kinds.

f. Travel, afloat and ashore.

2. Words brought by colonists, including:

a. The German element.

b. The French.

c. The Spanish.

b. The Dutch.

e. The Negro.

f. The Chinese.

3. Names of American things, embracing:

a. Natural products.

b. Manufactured articles.

4. Perverted English words.

5. Obsolete English words still in good use in America.

6. English words, American by inflection and modification.

7. Odd and ignorant popular phrases, proverbs, vulgarisms, and colloquialisms, cant and slang.

8. Individualisms.

9. Doubtful and miscellaneous.

Sylva Clapin, in his “New Dictionary of Americanisms” (1902), reduced these categories to four:

1. Genuine English words, obsolete or provincial in England, and universally used in the United States.

2. English words conveying, in the United States, a different meaning from that attached to them in England.

3. Words introduced from other languages than the English: – French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Indian, etc.

4. Americanisms proper, i.e., words coined in the country, either representing some new idea or peculiar product.

Richard H. Thornton, in his “American Glossary” (1912), substituted the following:

1. Forms of speech now obsolete or provincial in England, which survive in the United States, such as allow, bureau, fall, gotten, guess, likely, professor, shoat.

2. Words and phrases of distinctly American origin, such as belittle, lengthy, lightning-rod, to darken one's doors, to bark up the wrong tree, to come out at the little end of the horn, blind tiger, cold snap, gay Quaker, gone coon, long sauce, pay dirt, small potatoes, some pumpkins.

3. Nouns which indicate quadrupeds, birds, trees, articles of food, etc., that are distinctively American, such as ground-hog, hang-bird, hominy, live-oak, locust, opossum, persimmon, pone, succotash, wampum, wigwam.

4. Names of persons and classes of persons, and of places, such as Buck-eye, Cracker, Greaser, Hoosier, Old Hickory, the Little Giant, Dixie, Gotham, the Bay State, the Monumental City.

5. Words which have assumed a new meaning, such as card, clever, fork, help, penny, plunder, raise, rock, sack, ticket, windfall.

In addition, Thornton added a provisional class of “words and phrases of which I have found earlier examples in American than in English writers; . . . with the caveat that further research may reverse the claim ”—a class offering specimens in alarmist, capitalize, eruptiveness, horse of another colour [sic!], the jig's up, nameable, omnibus bill, propaganda and whitewash.

Gilbert M. Tucker, in his “American English” (1921) attempted to reduce all Americanisms to two grand divisions, as follows:

1. Words and phrases that originated in America and express something that the British have always expressed differently if they have mentioned it at all.

2. Words and phrases that would convey to a British ear a different meaning from that which they bear in this country.

To this he added seven categories of locution not to be regarded as Americanisms, despite their inclusion in various previous lists, as follows:

1. Words and phrases stated by the previous compiler himself to be of foreign (i.e., chiefly of English) origin, like Farmer's hand-me-downs.

2. Names of things exclusively American, but known abroad under the same name, such as moccasin.

3. Names of things invented in the United States, like drawing-room car.

4. Words used in this country in a sense hardly distinguishable from that they bear in England, like force for a gang of laborers.

5. Nonce words, like Mark Twain's cavalieress.

6. Perfectly regular and self-explanatory compounds, like office-holder, planing-machine, ink-slinger and fly-time.

7. Purely technical terms, such as those employed in baseball.

Only a glance at these discordant classifications is needed to show that they hamper the inquiry by limiting its scope—not so much, to be sure, as the extravagant limitations of White and Lounsbury, noted in Chapter I, Section 5, but still very seriously. They leave out of account some of the most salient characters of a living language. Only Bartlett and Farmer establish a separate category of Americanisms produced by the shading of consonants and other such phonological changes, though even Thornton, of course, is

obliged to take notice of such forms as bust and bile, and even Tucker lists buster. It must be obvious that many of the words and phrases excluded by his Index Expurgatorius are quite genuine Americanisms. Why should he bar out such a word as moccasin on the ground that it is also known in England? So is caucus, and yet he includes it. He is also far too hostile to such characteristic American compounds as office-holder and fly-time. True enough, their materials are good English, and they involve no change in the meaning of their component parts, but it must be plain that they were put together in the United States and that an Englishman always sees a certain strangeness in them. Pay-dirt, panel-house, passage-way, patrolman, night-rider, low-down, know-nothing, hoe-cake and hog-wallow are equally compounded of pure English metal, and yet he lists all of them. Again, he is too ready, it seems to me, to bar out archaisms, which constitute one of the most interesting and authentic of all the classes of Americanisms. It is idle to prove that Chaucer used to guess. The important thing is that the English abandoned it centuries ago, and that when they happen to use it today they are always conscious that it is an Americanism. Baggage is in Shakespeare, but it is not often in the London Times. Here Mr. Tucker allows his historical principles to run away with his judgment. His book represents the labor of nearly forty years and is full of shrewd observations and persuasive contentions, but it is sometimes excessively dogmatic.1

The most scientific and laborious of all these collections of Americanisms, until the Dictionary of American English got under way, was Thornton's. It presents an enormous mass of quotations, and they are all very carefully dated, and it corrects most of the more obvious errors in the work of earlier inquirers. But its very dependence upon quotations limits it chiefly to the written language, and so the enormously richer materials of the spoken language are passed over, and particularly the materials evolved during the past

1 Tucker falls into a number of rather astonishing errors. P.D.Q. is defined as an abbreviation of "pretty deuced quick," which it certainly is not. Passage (of a bill in Congress) is listed as an Americanism; it is actually very good English and is used in England every day. Standee is defined as

"standing place"; it really means one who stands. Sundae (the soda-fountain mess) is misspelled sunday; it was precisely the strange spelling that gave the term vogue. Mucker, a brilliant Briticism, unknown in America save in college slang, is listed between movie and muckraker.

generation. In vain one searches the two fat volumes and their pedestrian appendix for such highly characteristic forms as near-accident and buttinski, the use of sure as an adverb, and the employment of well as a sort of general equivalent of the German also. These grammatical and syntactical tendencies lay beyond the scope of Thornton's investigation, and some of them lie outside the field of the American Dictionary, but it is plain that they must be prime concerns of any future student who essays to get at the inner spirit of the American language. Its difference from Standard English is not merely a difference in vocabulary, to be disposed of in an alphabetical list; it is also a difference in pronunciation, in intonation, in conjugation and declension, in metaphor and idiom, in the whole fashion of using words. Some of the aspects of that difference will be considered in the following pages. The vocabulary, of course, must be given first attention, for in it the earliest American divergences are embalmed and it tends to grow richer and freer year after year, but attention will also be paid to materials and ways of speech that are less obvious, and in particular to certain tendencies in vulgar American, the great reservoir of the language, and perhaps the forerunner of what it will be on higher levels, at least in one detail or another, in the years to come.

III

THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN

I. THE FIRST LOAN-WORDS

The earliest Americanisms were probably words borrowed bodily from the Indian languages - words, in the main, indicating natural objects that had no counterparts in England. Thus, in Captain John Smith's "True Relation," published in 1608, one finds mention of a strange beast described variously as a rahaugcum and a raugrough-cum. Four years later, in William Strachey's "Historie of Trevaile Into Virginia Britannia" it became an aracoone, "much like a badger," and by 1624 Smith had made it a rarowcun in his "Virginia." It was not until 1672 that it emerged as the raccoon we know today. Opossum has had much the same history. It first appeared in 1610 as apossoun, and two years later Smith made it opassom in his "Map of Virginia," at the same time describing the animal as having "an head like a swine, a taile like a rat, and is of the bigness of a cat." The word finally became opossom toward the end of the Seventeenth Century, and by 1763 the third o had changed to u. In the common speech, as everyone knows, raccoon is almost always reduced to coon, and opossum to possum. Thornton traced the former to 1839 and the latter to 1705. Moose is another American primitive. It is derived from the Narragansett Indian word moosu, meaning "he trims or cuts smooth" - an allusion, according to the Oxford Dictionary, "to the animal's habit of stripping the lower branches and bark from trees when feeding." It had become mus by 1613, mose by 1637, and moose by 1672.

To the same category belong skunk, hickory, squash, caribou, pecan, paw-paw, chinkapin, persimmon, terrapin, menhaden, and catalpa. Skunk is from an Indian word variously reported to have been segankw or segongu, and on its first appearance in print, in William Wood's "New England's Prospect" (1643) it was spelled squunck, but it had got its present form by 1701. Hickory, in the form of po-

hickery, has been traced to 1653, and persimmon, in the form of putchamin, is in Captain John Smith's "Map of Virginia" (1612). In its early days the stress in persimmon was on the first or third syllables, not on the second, as now. Caribou came into American from the French in Canada during the Eighteenth Century, but it is most probably of Indian origin. In the same way pecan came in through the Spanish: down to Jefferson's time it was spelled paccan. Paw-paw, in the form of papaios, is to be found in Purchas's "Pilgrimage" (1613, a compilation of traveler's tales), and terrapin, in the form of torope, is in Whitaker's "Good Newes From Virginia" (1613). Menhaden seems to be derived from an Indian word, munna-what-tecug, which appears as a verb, munnohquahtean, meaning to fertilize, in John Eliot's Indian Bible (completed 1638). The Indians used menhaden to manure their corn, and the fish is still used for fertilizer. Catalpa comes from one of the Indian languages of the South; it was adopted into American in the Eighteenth Century. Most such words, of course, were shortened like munna-what-tecug, or otherwise modified, on being taken into colonial English. Thus, chinkapin was originally checkinqumin, and squash appears in early documents as isqoutersquash, and squantersquash. But William Penn, in a letter dated August 16, 1683, used the latter in its present form. These variations show a familiar effort to bring a new and strange word into harmony with the language. By it the French route de roi has become Rotten Row in English, écrevisse has become crayfish and the English howsprit has become beau pré (beautiful meadow) in French. Woodchuck originated in the same way. Its origin is to be sought, not in wood and chuck, but in the Cree word otchock, used by the Indians to designate the animal. In addition to the names of natural objects, the early colonists, of course, took over a great many Indian place-names, and a number of words to designate Indian relations and artificial objects in Indian use. To the latter division belong hominy, pone, toboggan, pemmican, mackinaw, moccasin, papoose, sachem, powwow, tomahawk, wigwam, succotash and squaw, all of which were in common circulation by the middle of the Eighteenth Century. Thornton has traced hominy to 1629, pone to 1634, moccasin to 1612, moccasin-flower to 1705, moccasin-snake to 1784, powwow to 1613, and wigwam to 1705. Finally, new words were made during the period by translating Indian terms, whether real or imaginary - for example,

106

The American Language

war-path, war-paint, pale-face, big-chief, medicine-man, pipe-of-

peace, fire-water, and to bury the hatchet -, and by using the word

Indian, as a prefix, as in Indian-Summer, Indian-file and Indian-giver.

The total number of borrowings, direct and indirect, was larger

than now appears, for with the recession of the Red Man from the

popular consciousness the use of loan-words from his dialects has

diminished. In our own time papoose, sachem, tepee, samp, quahaug

and wampum have begun to drop out of everyday use;1 at an earlier

period the language sloughed off ocelot, manitee, calumet, sagamore,

supawn and many others after their kind, or began to degrade them

to the estate of provincialisms.2 A curious phenomenon is presented

by the case of maize, which came into the colonial speech from some

West Indian dialect, apparently by way of the Spanish, went over

into orthodox English, and from English into French, German and

other Continental languages, and was then abandoned by the Ameri-

cans, who substituted corn, which commonly means wheat in Eng-

land. Mugwump, which is now obsolescent, is also an Indian loan-

word, but its meaning has been narrowed. It was originally spelled

mugquomp, and signified a chief. When the Rev. John Eliot trans-

lated the Old Testament into the Algonquian language, in 1663, he

used it in place of the duke which appears so often in Genesis xxxvi

in the Authorized Version. During the following century it began to

work its way into American, and by the beginning of the Nineteenth

Century it was in common use to designate a high and mighty fel-

low, and especially one whose pretensions were not generally con-

1 A number of such Indian words are preserved in the nomenclature of

Tammany Hall and in that of the

Improved Order of Red Men, an

organization with more than 500,-

000 members. The Red Men, bor-

rowing from the Indians, thus name

the months, in order: Cold Moon,

Snow, Worm, Plant, Flower, Hot,

Buck, Sturgeon, Corn, Travelers',

Beaver and Hunting. They call their

officers incobonee, sachem, wam-

pum-keeper, etc. But such terms, of

course, are not in general use.

2 Sylva Clapin lists 110 Indian loan-

words in his New Dictionary of

Americanisms; New York, c. 1902,

and Alexander F. Chamberlain lists

132 in Algonquin Words in Ameri-

can English, Journal of American

Folk-Lore, Vol. XV. But only 24 of

Clapin's words would have any

meaning to the average American

today. The rest either survive only

as proper names, e.g., tupelo,

tuckahoe, tammany, michigouen,

sing-sing, netop, catamba, or are ob-

solete altogether. An elaborate dic-

tionary of Indian loan-words, com-

piled by the late W. R. Gerard, is

in the possession of the Smithsonian

Institution, but it remains in manu-

script. Parts of it are almost unin-

telligible, and there is little likeli-

hood that it will ever be printed.

The literature of the subject is

rather meager. Probably the best

discussion of it is in the first chapter

of Schele de Vere's Americanisms;

New York, 1872.

ceded. Its political use began in 1884, when James G. Blaine received the Republican nomination for the Presidency, and many influential Republicans, including Theodore Roosevelt, refused to support him. Most of these rebels were in what we now call the higher income-tax brackets, and so it was natural for the party journals to hint that they suffered from what we now call superiority complexes. Thus they came to be called mugwumps, and soon they were wearing the label proudly. “I am an independent—a mugwump,” boasted William Everett in a speech at Quincy, Mass., on September 13, 1884. “I beg to state that mugwump is the best of American. It belongs to the language of the Delaware Indians; it occurs many times in Eliot’s Indian Bible; and it means a great man.” Until the end of the century any American who took an independent course in politics was a mugwump, but after that the word began to fade out, and we have developed nothing that quite takes its place.

Caucus is probably also an Indian loan-word. John Pickering, in his “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States” (1816), hazarded the guess that it might be “a corruption of caulkers’, the word meetings being understood,” but for this there was no ground save the fact that caulkers, like other workingmen, sometimes had meetings. In 1872 Dr. J. H. Trumbull, one of the earlier American specialists in Indian philology, suggested that the word was more probably derived from the Algonquian noun caucauasu, meaning one who advises, urges or encourages. Caucauasu is to be found in Captain John Smith’s “General Historie of Virginia” (1624) in the formid able form of cawcawaassough—but Smith was notoriously weak at spelling, whether of English or of Indian words. Trumbull’s suggestion is now generally accepted by etymologists, though with the prudent reservation that it has yet to be proved. Caucauasu is said to have given rise to another early American word, now obsolete. This was cockarouse, signifying a chief or other person of importance. Caucus apparently came in very early in the Eighteenth Century. The Rev. William Gordon, in his “History of the Rise and Independence of the United States” (London, 1788), said that “more than fifty years ago [that is, before 1738] Mr. Samuel Adams’s father and twenty others, one or two from the north of the town where the ship business is carried on, used to meet, make a caucus, and lay their plans for introducing certain persons into places of

108 The American Language

trust and power." Down to 1763 a caucus seems to have been called a caucus-club, for it so appears in John Adams's diary for that year. "Caucusing," explained Gordon, "means electioneering."

From the very earliest days of English colonization the language of the settlers also received accretions from the languages of the other colonizing nations. The French word portage, for example, was already in use before the end of the Seventeenth Century, and soon after came chowder, cache, voyageur, and various words that, like the last-named, have since become localisms or disappeared altogether.1 Before the Revolution bureau,2 battau and prairie were added, and soon afterward came gopher, bogus and flume. Carry-all is also French in origin, despite its English sound. It comes, by folk-etymology, from the French carriole. So is brave, in the sense of an Indian warrior. But the French themselves borrowed it from the Italian bravo. Other French terms came in after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. They will be noticed in the next chapter.

The contributions of the New Amsterdam Dutch during the half century of their conflicts with the English included cruller, cole-slaw,3 cookey, stoop, sleigh, span (of horses), dope, spook, to snoop, pit (as in peach-pit), waffle, hook (a point of land), scow, patroon, boss, smearcase and Santa Claus.4 Schele de Vere credits them with hay-barrack, a corruption of hooiberg. That they established the use of bush as a designation for back-country is very probable; the word has also got into South African English and has been borrowed by Australian English from American. In American it has produced a number of familiar derivatives, e.g., bush-whacker, bush-town, bush-league, busher, bush-ranger and bush-fighting. Dutch may have also given us boodle, in the sense of loot. There is an old English

1 Clapin lists 131 loan-words from the French in his Dictionary, but not more than 20 of them would be generally recognized today. Most of the rest survive only along the Canadian border. A curious obsolesism is movey-star, from the French mauvaises terres. It is still used in the translated form of bad-lands, but movey-star went out many years ago.

2 (a) A chest of drawers, (b) a government office. In both senses the word is rare in England, though its use by the French is familiar. In the United States its use in (b) has been extended, e.g., in employment-bureau.

3 Cole-slaw was quickly converted into cold-slaw by folk etymology. Thornton's first example of the latter is dated 1794, but it must have appeared earlier. Later on a warm-slaw was invented to keep cold-slaw company.

4 From Sant Klaas (Saint Nicholas). Santa Claus has also become familiar to the English, but the Oxford Dictionary still calls it an Americanism. It is always pronounced, of course, Santy Claws.

word, buddle or boodle, signifying a crowd or lot, and it remains

familiar in the phrase, whole kit and boodle or whole kit and ca-

boodle, but boodle in the opprobrious American sense is unknown

in England save as an Americanism. It may have come from the

Dutch boedel, meaning an estate or possession. Dutch also influenced

Colonial American in indirect ways, e.g., by giving reinforcement

to the Scotch dominie, signifying a clergyman. It may have shared

responsibility with the German of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch

for the introduction of dumb in the sense of stupid - dom in Dutch

and dumm in German - a meaning almost unknown in England.

Certain etymologists have also credited it with statehouse (from

stadhuis) but Albert Matthews has demonstrated1 that the word

was in use in Virginia in 1638, fifteen years before a stadhuis was

heard of in New Amsterdam. George Philip Krapp suggests in “ The

English Language in America ” that the peculiar American use of

scout, as in good scout, may have been suggested by the Dutch. He

offers quotations from various authorities to show that in New

Amsterdam the schout was a town officer who combined the duties

of mayor, sheriff and district attorney. He was thus dreaded by the

lower orders of the population, and “a good scout was notable

chiefly because of his rarity.” On this I attempt no judgment. Dutch,

like German, French and Spanish, naturally had its largest influence

in those areas where there were many settlers who spoke it as

their native tongue. It was taught in the schools of New York until

the end of the Dutch occupation in '64, and it was used in the

Dutch Reformed churches of the town for a century afterward. Up

the Hudson it survived even longer, and Noah Webster heard Dutch

sermons at Albany so late as 1786. Many Dutch terms are still to be

found in the geographical nomenclature of the Hudson region, e.g.,

dorp, kill and hook, and in isolated communities in the Catskills there

is still a considerable admixture in the common speech, e.g., clove

(ravine), killfish, pinkster (a variety of azalea), speck (fat), fly

(swamp), blummie (flower), grilly (chilly), sluck (a swallow of

liquid), and wust (sausage).2

1 The Term State-House, Dialect

Notes, Vol. II, Pt. IV, 1902.

2 Dutch Contributions to the Vo-

cabulary of English in America,

by William H. Carpenter, Mod-

ern Philology, July, 1908. Mr. Karl

von Schlider of Hackensack, N. J.,

sends me a list of curious forms

encountered near Kingston, N. Y.

It includes pietje-kamaakal (un-

reasonable), surallikus (so-so),

zwok (soft, slippery), connalyer

(crowd), klainzaric (untidy), hai-

dang (nothing), onnozel (outland-

Perhaps the most notable of all the contributions of Knicker-bocker Dutch to American is the word Yankee. The earlier etymologists, all of them amateurs, sought an Indian origin for it. Thomas Anbury, a British officer who served in the Revolution with Burgoyne, argued in his “Travels” (1789, Ch. II) that it came from a Cherokee word, eankke, meaning a coward or slave; Washington Irving, in “Knickerbocker's History of New York” (1809, Ch. VII) derived it (probably only humorously) from yanokies, “which in the Mais-Tschusaeg or Massachusetts language signifies silent men”; and the Rev. John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder, a learned Moravian missionary who published “An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States” in 1822, maintained therein that it was simply a product of the Indians' unhappy effort to pronounce the word English, which they converted, he said, into Yengees. Noah Webster accepted this guess, but other contemporary authorities held that the word the Indians were trying to pronounce was not English but the French Anglais. There were, however, difficulties in the way of all forms of this theory, for investigation showed that Yankee was apparently first applied, not to the English but to the Dutch. So early as 1683, it was discovered, Yankey was a common nickname among the buccaneers who then raged along the Spanish Main, and always the men who bore it were Dutchmen. Apparently it was derived either from Janke, a diminutive of the common Dutch given name Jan, or from Jankees (pronounced Yon-case), a blend of Jan and Cornelis, two Dutch names which often appear in combination. Analogues in support of the former hypothesis are to be found in the use of dago (Diego) to indicate any Spaniard (and now, by extension, any Italian), and of Heinie or Fritz, Sandy and Pat to indicate any German, Scotsman or Irishman, respectively;

ish), poozly (whining), feaselick (undesirable), kanapie (child), aislick (no-account), briggbity (impudent), and babay, (confusion). That all of these are of Dutch origin is not certain, but some of them seem to be duplicated in the Jersey Dutch once spoken in Bergen and Passaic counties, New Jersey. See The Jersey Dutch Dialect, by J. Dyneley Prince, Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Pt. IV, 1910. Krapp

in The English Language in America, adds a few Long Island obsolesisms, e.g., scule, from fiskaal, meaning a public prosecutor (Hempstead Records, 1675-84); morgen, a measure of land (do. 1658); schepel, a bushel (do. 1658); and mutsjie, a liquid measure (do. 1673). Morgen survived until 1869, and is to be found in the annual report of the Federal Commissioner of Agriculture for that year.

and for the latter there is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese, tactic from tactics, and specie from species. But how did this nickname for Dutchmen ever come to be applied to Englishmen, and particularly to the people of New England, male and female alike? To this day no satisfactory answer has been made. All that may be said with any certainty is that it was already in use by 1765 as a term of derision, and that by 1775 the Yankees began to take pride in it. In the latter year, in fact, John Turnbull spoke of it in his “McFingal” as connoting “distinction.” But he neglected to explain its transfer from Dutch pirates to New England Puritans, and no one has done so to this day. During the Civil War, as everyone knows, Yankee became a term of disparagement again, applied by the people of the South to all Northerners. But its evil significance began to wear off after the turn of the century, and when in 1917 the English began applying it to the men of the A.E.F., Southerners and Northerners alike, the former seem to have borne the affliction philosophically. At that time a characteristic clipped form, Yank, came into popularity at home, launched by its use in George M. Cohan’s war song, “Over There.” But Yank was not invented by Cohan, for it has been traced back to 1778, and the Confederates often used it during the Civil War. Incidentally, the verb to yank, in the sense of to jerk, is also an Americanism, and its origin is almost as mysterious as that of Yankee. That the two have any connection is doubtful. It seems more probable that the verb comes from a Scottish noun, yank, meaning a sharp, sudden blow.1

The Spanish contributions to the American vocabulary are far more numerous than those of any other Continental language, but most of them have come in since the Louisiana Purchase, and notices of them will be deferred to the next chapter. There was relatively little contact between the first English settlers and the Spaniards to the southward; it remained for the great movement across the plains, begun by Zebulon M. Pike’s expedition in 1806, to make Spanish the second language in a large part of the United States.

The first Spanish loan-words were mainly Spanish adaptations of

1 Of the 46 Dutch loan-words listed by Clapin in his Dictionary only a dozen or so remain in general use. See also A Dictionary of the Low-Dutch Element in the English Vocabulary, by J. F. Bense; Oxford, 1926; and The Dutch Influence on the English Vocabulary, by G. N. Clark, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XLIV, 1935.

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Indian terms, picked up by the early adventurers in the West Indies. Of such sort were tobacco, hammock, tomato, tapioca, chocolate, barbecue and canoe. But with them also came some genuinely Spanish words, and of these sarsaparilla and sassafras have been traced to 1577, alligator to 1568, creole to 1604, pickaninny to 1657, key (islet) to 1697, and quadroon to the first years of the Eighteenth Century. A good many Spanish words, or Spanish adaptations of native words, went into English during the Sixteenth Century without any preliminary apprenticeship as Americanisms, for example, mosquito, chocolate, banana and cannibal. But cockroach (from the Spanish cucaracha, assimilated by folk etymology to cock and roach) is first heard of in Captain John Smith's 'General Historic of Virginia' (1624), and most of the Oxford Dictionary's early examples of mosquito are American. Mosquito suffered some fantastic variations in spelling. The original Spanish was mosquito, a diminutive of mosca, a fly, but in Hakluyt's 'Voyages' (c. 1583) it became musketa, in Whitbourne's 'Newfoundland' (1623) muskeito, in Hughes's 'American Physician' (1672) muscato, in Cotton Mather's 'Magnalia' (finished in 1697 and published in 1702) moscheto, and at the hands of Benjamin Franklin (1747) musqueto. The jerked in jerked-beef was fashioned by folk-etymology out of a Spanish word which was in turn borrowed from one of the Peruvian dialects. The noun barbecue came from a Haitian word, bacoa, signifying a frame set up to lift a bed off the ground. But it got the meaning of a frame used for roasting meat soon after it appeared in Spanish, and the derivative word has had its present sense in American since about 1660.

Before the Revolution a few German words worked their way into American, but not many. Sauerkraut has been traced by Thornton to 1789 and is probably much older; so are noodle and pretzel. But lager, bockbeer, sangerfest, kindergarten, wienerwurst, rats-keller, zwieback, turnverein and so on belong to the period after 1848, and will be noticed later. Beer-soup (probably from biersuppe) goes back to 1799, but beer-garden (from biergarten) has not been found before 1870. As I have suggested, German probably helped Dutch to put dumb, in the sense of stupid, into the American vocabulary. It also, I suppose, gave some help to smearcase. The native languages of the Negro slaves, rather curiously, seem to have left few marks upon American. Buckra is apparently of Negro origin, but it was

The Beginnings of American

never peculiar to America, and has long since gone out. Gumbo seems to be derived from an Angolan word, 'ngombo, but it came into American relatively late, and may have been introduced by way of Louisiana French. Okra, which means the same thing, was first used in the West Indies, and may have had a Spanish transition form. Yam is not Negro, but apparently Spanish or Portuguese. Banjo is simply a Negro perversion of bandore, which was also of Latin origin. Whether goober and juba are Negro loan-words is unknown. Thornton's first example of the latter is dated 1834, Webster's New International (1934) ascribes the former, somewhat improbably, to a Congo source, 'nguba, and it may have come from jubilee. Voodoo was borrowed from the Dahoman tovôdoun, still in use in West Africa, but it seems to have come in through the French. Its Ameri- can corruption, boodoo, probably owes nothing to the Negroes; moreover, the earliest use of it recorded by Thornton is dated 1889. The early slaves, of course, retained many words and phrases from their native languages, but they have all disappeared from the speech of their descendants today, save for a few surviving in the Gullah dialect of the South Carolina coast.1

2. NEW WORDS OF ENGLISH MATERIAL

Of far more importance than such small borrowings was the great stock of new words that the early colonists coined in English metal - words primarily demanded by the "new circumstances under which they were placed," but also indicative, in more than one case, of a delight in the business for its own sake. The American, even in the Seventeenth Century, already showed many of the character- istics that were to set him off from the Englishman later on - his bold and somewhat grotesque imagination, his contempt for digni-

1 "The commonest there," says Reed Smith, in Gullah, Bulletin of the University of South Carolina, Nov. 1, 1926, "are the exclamation ki (or kai) to express wonder or to add emphasis to a statement, and buckra for white man. . . . To these may be added nyam, oona, swanga (or swongger), du-du, goober, pinder, cooter, okra, gee- chy, cymbi, bakalungo (obsoles- cent), guffer, penepne, da, da-da. Malafee for whiskey has been noted on St. Helena Island." How many of these are actually African I don't know. See also Gullah: a Negro Patois, by John Bennett, South Atlantic Quarterly, Oct., 1908, and Jan., 1909; and The Black Border, by Ambrose E. Gonzalez; Columbia, S. C., 1922. The latter contains a Gullah glossary.

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fied authority, his lack of æsthetic sensitiveness, his extravagant humor. Among the first settlers there were a few men of education, culture and gentle birth, but they were soon swamped by hordes of the ignorant and illiterate, and the latter, cut off from the corrective influence of books, soon laid their hands upon the language. It is hard to imagine the austere Puritan divines of Massachusetts inventing such verbs as to cowhide and to logroll, or such adjectives as no-account and stumped, or such adverbs as no-how and lickety-split, or such substantives as bull-frog, hog-wallow and hoe-cake; but under their eyes there arose a contumacious proletariat which was quite capable of the business, and very eager for it. In Boston, so early as 1628, there was a definite class of blackguard roisterers, chiefly made up of sailors and artisans; in Virginia, nearly a decade earlier, John Pory, secretary to Sir George Yeardley, Deputy Governor, lamented that “ in these five months of my continuance here there have come at one time or another eleven sails of ships into this river, but fraughted more with ignorance than with any other marchansize.” In particular, the generation born in the New World was uncouth and iconoclastic;1 the only world it knew was a rough world, and the virtues that environment engendered were not those of niceness, but those of enterprise and resourcefulness.

Upon men of this sort fell the task of bringing the wilderness to the ax and the plow, and with it went the task of inventing a vocabulary for the special needs of the great adventure. Out of their loutish ingenuity came a great number of picturesque names for natural objects, chiefly boldly descriptive compounds.: bull-frog, mud-hen, cat-bird, cat-fish, musk-rat, razor-back, garter-snake, ground-hog and so on. And out of an inventiveness somewhat more urbane came such coinages as live-oak, potato-bug, turkey-gobbler, sweet-potato, canvas-back, poke-weed, copper-head, eel-grass, reed-bird, egg-plant, blue-grass, katy-did, pea-nut, pitch-pine, cling-stone (peach), June-bug, lightning-bug, and butter-nut. Live-oak appears in a document of 1610; bull-frog was familiar to Beverley in 1705; so was James-town weed (later reduced to Jimson weed, as the English hurtleberry or whortleberry was reduced to huckleberry). These early Americans were not botanists. They were often ignorant of the names of the plants that they encountered, even when those

1 See The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 14 and 22.

The Beginnings of American

plants already had English names, and so they exercised their fancy upon new ones. So arose Johnny-jump-up for the Viola tricolor, and basswood for the common European linden or lime-tree (Tilia), and locust for the Robinia pseudacacia and its allies. The Jimson weed itself was anything but a novelty, but the pioneers apparently did not recognize it as the Datura stramonium, and so we find Beverley reporting that “some Soldiers, eating it in a Salad, turn’d natural Fools upon it for several Days.” The grosser features of the landscape got a lavish renaming, partly to distinguish new forms and partly out of an obvious desire to attain a more literal descriptiveness. I have mentioned key and hook, the one borrowed from the Spanish and the other from the Dutch. With them came branch, fork, run (stream), bluff, cliff, neck, barrens, bottoms, watershed, foot-hill, hollow, water-gap, under-brush, bottom-land, clearing, notch, divide, knob, riffle, rolling-country and rapids, and the extension of pond from artificial pools to small natural lakes, and of creek from small arms of the sea to shallow feeders of rivers. Such common English topographical terms as down, weald, wold, fen, bog, fell, chase, combe, dell, tarn, common, heath and moor disappeared from the colonial tongue, save as fossilized in a few localisms and proper names.1 So did bracken.

With the new landscape came an entirely new mode of life – new foods, new forms of habitation, new methods of agriculture, new kinds of hunting. A great swarm of neologisms thus arose, and, as in the previous case, they were chiefly compounds. Back-woods, back-street, back-lane, back-land, back-log, back-country, back-field, back-line and back-settler were all in common use before the Revolution. Back-log was used by Increase Mather in 1684, and back-street has been traced to 1638.2 Log-house appears in the Maryland Archives for 1669.3 Hoe-cake, Johnny-cake (originally Shawnee-cake or -bread), pan-fish, corn-dodger, roasting-ear, corn-crib, and pop-corn all belong to the colonial period. So do pine-knot, snow-plow, cold-snap, land-slide, ash-can, bob-sled, fox-grape, apple-

1 For example, Chevy Chase, Boston them of American origin. In addition, there is a list of eleven peculiarly American uses of back as a verb, and five of its uses as an adjective. Common, the Back Bay Fens, and cranberry-bog.

2 A long list of compounds based on back, from the collection of the editorial board of the Dictionary of American English, is to be found in American Speech, Oct., 1930. It runs to no less than 120 terms, all of

3 Log-cabin came later. Thornton’s first quotation is dated 1818. The Log-Cabin campaign was in 1840.

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butter, salt-lick, prickly-beat, shell-road, worm-fence and cane-brake. Shingle, in the American sense, was a novelty in 1705, but one S. Symonds wrote to John Winthrop, of Ipswich, about a clap-boarded house in 1637. Frame-house seems to have come in with shingle. Selectman is first heard of in 1685, displacing the English alderman. Mush had displaced porridge in general use by 1671. Hired-man is to be found in the Plymouth town records of 1737, and hired-girl followed soon after. So early as 1758, as we find in the diary of Nathaniel Ames, the second-year students at Harvard were already called sophomores, though for a while the spelling was often made sophimores. Camp-meeting was later; it did not appear until 1799. But land-office was familiar before 1700, and side-walk, spelling-bee, bee-line, moss-back, crazy-quilt, stamping-ground and a hundred and one other such compounds were in daily use before the Revolution. After that great upheaval the new money of the confederation brought in a number of new words. In 1782 Gouverneur Morris proposed to the Continental Congress that the coins of the Republic be called, in ascending order, unit, penny-bill, dollar and crown. Later Morris invented the word cent, substituting it for the English penny. In 1785 Jefferson, after playing with such terms as pistarine and piece-of-eight, proposed mill, cent, disme, dollar and eagle, and this nomenclature was made official by the Act Establishing a Mint, approved April 2, 1792. Jefferson apparently derived disme from the French word dixième, meaning a tenth, and the original pronunciation seems to have been deem. But dime soon supplanted it.1

Various nautical terms peculiar to America, or taken into English from American sources, came in during the Eighteenth Century, among them, schooner, cat-boat, mud-scow and pungy. According to an historian of the American merchant marine,2 the first schooner even seen was launched at Gloucester, Mass., in 1713. The word, it appears, was originally spelled scooner. To scoon was a verb rowed by the New Englanders from some Scotch dialect, and meant

1 I am indebted here to Mr. Maury Maverick, of San Antonio, Tex., a diligent searcher of the early laws of the Republic. A thorough investigation of them might yield materials of value to the philologian. Some of the early town-records were explored by George Philip Krapp (The English Language in America, Vol. II), but his interest was in pronunciation rather than in vocabulary. There are leads to other material in E. G. Swem's monumental Virginia Historical Index; Roanoke Va., 1934, which indexes words as well as names.

2 Willian Brown Meloney: The Heritage of Tyre, New York, 1916, p. 15.

to skim or skip across the water like a flat stone. As the first schooner left the ways and glided out into Gloucester harbor, an enraptured spectator shouted: “Oh, see how she scoons!” “A scooner let her be!” replied Captain Andrew Robinson, her builder – and all boats of her peculiar and novel fore-and-aft rig took the name thereafter. The Scotch verb came from the Norse skunda, to hasten, and there are analogues in Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon and Old High German. The origin of cat-boat, bug-eye and pungy I have been unable to determine. Perhaps the last-named is related in some way to pung, a one-horse sled or wagon. Pung was once widely used in the United States, but later sank to the estate of a New England provincialism. Longfellow used it, and in 1857 a writer in the Knickerbocker Magazine reported that pungs filled Broadway, in New York, after a snow-storm.

The early Americans showed that spacious disregard for linguistic nicety which has characterized their descendants ever since. They reduced verb-phrases to simple verbs, turned verbs into nouns, nouns into verbs, and adjectives into either or both. Pickering, in his Vocabulary (1816) made a belated protest against the reduction of the English law-phrase, to convey by deed, to to deed, and argued solemnly that no self-respecting attorney would employ it, but American attorneys had actually been employing it for years, and they continue to do so to this day. So with to table for to lay on the table. To tomahawk appeared before 1650, and to scalp must have followed soon after. Within the next century and a half they were reinforced by many other such verbs, and by such adjectives made of nouns as no-account and one-horse, and such nouns made of verbs as carry-all and goner, and such adverbs as no-how. In particular, the manufacture of new verbs went on at a rapid pace. In his letter to Webster in 1789 Franklin deprecated to advocate, to progress and to oppose – a vain caveat, for all of them are now in perfectly good usage. To advocate, indeed, was used by Thomas Nashe in 1589, and by John Milton half a century later, but it seems to have been reinvented in America. In 1822 and again in 1838 Robert Southey, then Poet Laureate, led two belated attacks upon it, as a barbarous Americanism,1 but its obvious usefulness preserved it, and it remains

1 Despite his implacable hostility to American innovations, Southey was himself a busy inventor of uncouth neologisms. In The Doctor (1834- 37), says George H. McKnight in Modern English in the Making, he used agathokakological, cacodemoniacal, dendanthropology, gelastics,

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in good usage on both sides of the Atlantic today - one of the earliest of the English borrowings from America. In the end, indeed, even so ardent a purist as Richard Grant White adopted it, as he did to placate.

Webster, though he agreed with Franklin in opposing to advocate, gave his imprimatur to to appreciate (i.e., to rise in value) and to obligate and is credited by Sir Charles Lyell 1 with having himself claimed the invention of to demoralize. In a letter to Thomas Dawes, dated August 5, 1809,2 he said that he had also "enriched the vocabulary" with absorbable, accompaniment, acidulous, achromatic, adhesiveness, adjutancy, admissibility, advisory, amendable, animalize, aneurismal, antithetical, appellor, appreciate, appreciation, arborescent, arborization, ascertainable, bailee, bailment, indorser, indorsee, prescriptive, inscriptible, statement, insubordination, expenditure, subsidize, "and other elegant and scientific terms, now used by the best writers in Great Britain and America." But most of these, though he could not find them in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755), were already in English before he began to write dictionaries himself, and some were very old.3 To antagonize seems to have been given currency by John Quincy Adams, to immigrate by John Marshall, to eventuate by Gouverneur Morris, and to derange by George Washington. Jefferson, as we saw in Chapter I, Section 2, used to belittle in his "Notes on Virginia," and Thornton thinks that he coined it. Many new verbs were made by the simple process of prefixing the preposition to common nouns, e.g., to clerk, to dicker, to dump, to negative, to blow (i.e., to bluster or boast), to cord (i.e., wood), to stump, to room and to shin. Others arose as metaphors, e.g., to whitewash (figuratively) and to squat (on unoccupied land). Others were made by hitching suffixes to nouns, or by groping for roots, e.g., to deputize, to locate, to legislate, to infract, to com-

kittenship, magnisonant and criti-kin, and even in the Quarterly Review, the very G.H.Q. of anti-American pedantry, he used donivorous, bumgig, frizzigig and evan-gelizationer.

3 The Oxford Dictionary traces amendable to 1589, antithetical to 1583, inscriptible to 1562, bail-ee to 1528 and ap-pellor to c. 1400. The following were also in use before Webster's time: absorbable, 1779; admissibility, 1778; statement, 1769; achromatic, 1766; aneurismal, 1757; accompaniment, 1756; indorsee, 1754; animalize, 1741; arborescent, 1675.

1 In his Travels in North America in the Years 1841-42; London, 1845; New York, 1852, p. 53.

2 It is reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931, p. 48 ff.

promit and to happify. Yet others seem to have been produced by onomatopœia, e.g., to fizzle, or to have arisen by some other such spontaneous process, so far unintelligible, e.g., to tote. With them came an endless series of verb-phrases, e.g., to draw a bead, to face the music, to darken one's doors, to take to the woods, to fly off the handle, to go on the war-path and to saw wood - all obvious products of pioneer life. Many coinages of the pre-Revolutionary era later disappeared. Jefferson used to ambition, but it dropped out nevertheless. So did conflagrative, though a president of Yale gave it his imprimatur. So did to compromit (i.e., to compromise), to homologize and to happify.1 Fierce battles raged round some of these words, and they were all violently derided in England. Even so useful a verb as to locate, now in quite respectable usage, was denounced in the third volume of the North American Review, and other purists of the times tried to put down to legislate.

The young and tender adjectives had quite as hard a row to hoe, particularly lengthy. The British Critic attacked it in November, 1793, and it also had enemies at home, but John Adams had used it in his diary in 1759 and the authority of Jefferson and Hamilton was behind it, and so it survived. By 1816, indeed, Jeremy Bentham was using it in England. Years later James Russell Lowell spoke of it as " the excellent adjective," 2 and boasted that American had given it to English. Dutiable also met with opposition, and moreover it had a rival, customable; but Marshall wrote it into his historic decisions, and thus it took root. The same anonymous watchman of the North American Review who protested against to locate pronounced his anathema upon " such barbarous terms as presidential and congressional," but the plain need for them kept them in the language. Gubernatorial had come in long before this, and is to be found in

1 Thornton's last example of the use of to compromit is dated 1842; of to happify, 1857, and of to ambition, 1861. So far as I know, no one has ever attempted to compile anything approaching a complete list of obsolete Americanisms, but a number are given in The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp, Vol. I, Ch. II. They include spong, a strip of meadow; bolts, timber cut into lengths; while in the sense of until; bole, a synonym of spong (it survives in a few geographical names, e.g., Woods Hole); shruffe, the undergrowth of a swamp; cohoss, a bend in a river; folly, a word of undetermined meaning, maybe from the Dutch vallje, a little valley; seater, a settler; and crickthatch, salt-water grass. Some of these were old English words that survived in America longer than in England.

2 The Biglow Papers, Series II, 1866, pref.

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the New Jersey Archives of 1734. Influential was denounced by the Rev. Jonathan Boucher and by George Canning, who argued that influent was better,1 but it was ardently defended by William Pinkney, of Maryland, and gradually made its way. Handy, kinky, law-abiding, chunky, solid (in the sense of well-to-do), evincive, complected, judgemental, underpinned, blooded and cute were also already secure in revolutionary days. So with many nouns. Jefferson used breadstuffs in his Report of the Secretary of State on Commercial Restrictions, December 16, 1793. Balance in the sense of remainder, got into the debates of the First Congress. Mileage was used by Franklin in 1754, and is now sound English.2 Elevator, in the sense of a storage house for grain, was used by Jefferson and by others before him. Draw, for drawbridge, comes down from revolutionary days. So does slip, in the sense of a berth for vessels. So docs addition, in the sense of a suburb. So, finally, does darky.

The history of these Americanisms shows how vain is the effort of grammarians to combat the normal processes of language development. I have mentioned the opposition to dutiable, influential, presidential, lengthy, to locate, to oppose, to advocate, to legislate and to progress. Bogus, reliable and standpoint were attacked with the same academic ferocity. All of them are to be found in William Cullen Bryant's celebrated Index Expurgatorius (c. 1870),3 and

1 In a letter to his sister Hannah, dated May 30, 1831, Macaulay told her of a visit to Holland House and a conversation with Lady Holland, who objected to various words, beginning with constituency, and going on to influential, talented and gentlemanly. Macaulay argued in favor of talented, saying that its root "first appeared in theological writing," and was taken from the Parable of the Talents. "She seemed surprised by this theory," he wrote to his sister, "never having, so far as I could judge, heard of the parable." Talented is sometimes listed as an Americanism, but it actually arose in England, c. 1825.

2 Franklin, incidentally, also invented the harmonica and its name. But his harmonica was not the mouth-organ that we know today, but a sort of improvement on the old musical-glasses. Moreover, he called it the armonica, not the harmonica.

This was in 1762. The term went over into English very quickly, and had ceased to be an Americanism before 1800. Later it seems to have become changed to harmonicon. But the prevalent present form is harmonica, and it now designates not only a mouth-organ, but also one of the organ-stops. The Oxford Dictionary's first example of mouth-organ is dated c. 1668. In Germany, where most mouth-organs come from, the instrument is called the harmonika. Whether the name was borrowed from Franklin or invented independently I do not know.

3 Reprinted in Helpful Hints in Writing and Reading, comp. by Grenville Kleiser; New York, 1911, pp. 15–17.

reliable was denounced by Bishop Coxe as “that abominable barbarism” so late as 1886.1 Edward S. Gould, another uncompromising purist, said of standpoint that it was “the bright particular star . . . of solemn philological blundering” and “the very counterpart of Dogberry’s non-com.”2 Gould also protested against to jeopardize, leniency and to demean, though the last named was very old in English in the different sense of to conduct oneself, and Richard Grant White joined him in an onslaught upon to donate. But all these words are in good usage in the United States today, and some of them have gone over into English.

3. CHANGED MEANINGS

The early Americans also made a great many new words by changing the meaning of old ones. The cases of pond and creek I have already mentioned. To squat, in the sense of to crouch, had been sound English for centuries, but they gave it the meaning of to settle on land without the authority of the owner, and from it the noun squatter quickly emanated. Of another familiar Americanism Krapp says:

The method of portioning out the common lands to the townsmen of the first New England communities has led to the general American use of lot to designate a limited section of land. . . . The town of Lunenburg (1721) paid for “Travil and Expenc When The Lotts Were Drawn at Concord,” and the records contain a list of all the lots in the town with “the names of those That first Drew them.”. . . In the Norwalk Records (1671) the agreement is recorded that “all those men that now draw lots with their neighbors shall stand to their lots that now they draw.”. . . From this usage was derived also the popular saying, to cut across lots.3

1 A. Cleveland Coxe: Americanisms in England, Forum, Oct., 1886.

2 Edward S. Gould: Good English, or Popular Errors in Language; New York, 1867, pp. 25-27. So recently as 1918 an Anglophil reviewer denounced me for using it in a book, and hinted that I had borrowed it from the German standpunkt.

3 The English Language in America Vol. I, pp. 85-6. Lott appears in the Connecticut Code of 1650. See the edition of Andrus: Hartford, 1822. On page 35 is “their landes,

lotts and accommodations.” On page 46 is “meadow and home lotts.” American conveyancers, in describing real property, still usually speak of “all that lot or parcel of land,” though in the Southwest, so I am told by Mr. Maury Maverick, the more prosaic “the following described real estate” is coming in. Lot has begotten a number of derivations, e.g., back-lots, building-lot, front-lot, side-lot, pasture-lot, garden-lot, house-lot and house and lot.

Other examples of the application of old words to new purposes are afforded by freshet, barn and team. A freshet, in Eighteenth Century English, meant any stream of fresh water; the colonists made it signify an inundation. A barn was a house or shed for storing crops; in the colonies the word came to mean a place for keeping cattle also. A team, in English, was a pair of draft horses; in the colonies it came to mean both horses and vehicle, though the former meaning, reinforced, survived in the tautological phrase, double team. The process is even more clearly shown in the history of such words as corn and shoe. Corn, in orthodox English, means grain for human consumption, and especially wheat, e.g., the Corn Laws. The earliest settlers, following this usage, gave the name of Indian corn to what the Spaniards, following the Indians themselves, had called maiz. The term appears in Bradford's "History of Plimouth Plantation" (1647) and in Mourt's "Relation" (1622). But gradually the adjective fell off, and by the middle of the Eighteenth Century maize was called simply corn and grains in general were called breadstuffs. Thomas Hutchinson, discoursing to George III in 1774, used corn in this restricted sense, speaking of "rye and corn mixed." "What corn?" asked George. "Indian corn," explained Hutchinson, "or, as it is called in authors, maize." 1 So with shoe. In English it meant (and still means) a toeless article of footwear, but the colonists extended its meaning to varieties covering the ankle, thus displacing the English boot, which they reserved for foot coverings reaching at least to the knee. To designate the English shoe they began to use the word slipper. This distinction between English and American usage still prevails, despite the fashion which has sought to revive boot in the United States, and with it its derivatives, boot-shop and boot-maker.

Store, shop, lumber, pie, dry-goods, cracker, rock and partridge among nouns and to haul, to jew, to notify and to heft among verbs

1 Hutchinson's Diary, Vol. I, p. 171; London, 1883-6. A great many derivatives go back to the same era, e.g., corn-busk, corn-shuck, corn-crib, corn-stalk, corn-broom, corn-brake, corn-fritter, corn-fodder, corn-grater, corn-book, corn-juice, corn-knife, corn-starch, pop-corn, corn-cob, corn-cake, corn-pone, corn-cutter, corn-dodger, corn-fed, corn-meal, corn-snake. Some of these have since become obsolete. "The American colonists," says Allen Walker Read in The Comment of British Travelers on Early American Terms Relating to Agriculture, Agricultural History, July, 1933, "have never taken kindly to the word [maize]. . . . Even today [it] is wholly a book word in America."

offer further examples of changed meanings. Down to the middle of the Eighteenth Century shop continued to designate a small retail establishment in America, as it does in England to this day. Store was applied only to a large establishment – one showing, in some measure, the character of a warehouse. But in 1774 a Boston young man was advertising in the Massachusetts Spy for “a place as a clerk in a store” (three Americanisms in a row!). Soon afterward shop began to acquire its special American meaning of a factory, e.g., machine-shop. Meanwhile store completely displaced shop in the English sense, and it remained for a late flowering of Anglo-mania, as in the case of boot and shoe, to restore, in a measure, the status quo ante. Lumber, in Eighteenth Century English, meant disused goods, and this is its common meaning in England today, as is shown by lumber-room. But the colonists early employed it to designate cut timber, and that use of it is now universal in America. Its familiar derivatives, e.g., lumber-yard, lumber-man, lumber-jack, greatly reinforce this usage. Dry-goods, in England, means, “non-liquid goods, as corn” (i.e., wheat); in the United States the term means “textile fabrics, cottons, woolens, linens, silks, laces, etc.”1 The difference had appeared before 1725. Rock, in English, always means a large mass; in America it may mean a small stone, as in rock-pile and to throw a rock. The Puritans were putting rocks into the foundations of their meeting houses so early as 1712.2 Cracker began to be used for biscuit before the Revolution. Tavern displaced inn at the same time. In England partridge is applied only to the true partridge (Perdix perdix) and its nearly related varieties, but in the United States it is also often used to designate the ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus), the common quail (Colinus virginianus), and various other tetraonid birds. This confusion goes back to colonial times. So with rabbit. Zoölogically speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped the word hare out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which, curiously enough, is not a hare at all, but a

1 The definitions are from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1914) and Webster's New International Dictionary (1934), respectively.

2 Samuel Sewall: Diary, April 14, 1712: “I lay'd a Rock in the Northeast corner of the Foundation of the Meeting-House.”

true rabbit. Bay and bayberry early acquired special American meanings. In England bay is used to designate the bay-tree (Laurus nobilis); in America it designates a shrub, the wax myrtle (Myrica cerifera). Both the tree and the shrub have berries, and those of the latter are used to make the well-known bayberry candles. Other botanical and zoölogical terms to which the colonists gave new significances are blackbird, beech, hemlock, lark, laurel, oriole, swallow and walnut.

To haul, in English, means to move by force or violence; in the colonies it came to mean to transport in a vehicle, and this meaning survives in American. To jew, in English, means to cheat; the colonists made it mean to haggle, and devised to jew down to indicate an effort to work a reduction in price. To heft, in English, means to lift up; the early Americans made it mean to weigh by lifting, and kept the idea of weighing in its derivatives, e.g., hefty. Finally, there is the vulgar American misuse of Miss or Mis’ (pro. miz) for Mrs. It was so widespread by 1790 that on November 17 of that year Webster denounced it as “a gross impropriety” in the American Mercury. The schoolmarm has made war on it ever since, but it survives unscathed in the speech of the common people.

4. ARCHAIC ENGLISH WORDS

Most of the colonists who lived along the American seaboard in 1750 were the descendants of immigrants who had come in fully a century before; after the first settlements there had been much less fresh immigration than many latter-day writers have assumed. According to Prescott F. Hall, “the population of New England . . . at the date of the Revolutionary War . . . was produced out of an immigration of about 20,000 persons who arrived before 1640,” 1 and we have Franklin’s authority for the statement

1 Immigration, 2nd ed.; New York, 1913, p. 4. Sir J. R. Seeley says, in The Expansion of England (2nd ed.; London, 1895, p. 84) that the emigration from England to New England, after the meeting of the Long Parliament (1640), was so slight for a full century that it barely balanced “the counter-movement of colonists quitting the colony.” Richard Hildreth, in his History of the United States, Vol. I, p. 267, says that the departures actually exceeded the arrivals. See also The Founding of New England, by James Truslow Adams; Boston, 1921, p. 221 ff.

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that the total population of the colonies in 1751, then about 1,000,-

000, had been produced from an original immigration of less than

80,000. Even at that early day, indeed, the colonists had begun to

feel that they were distinctly separated, in culture and customs,

from the mother country, and there were signs of the rise of a new

native aristocracy, entirely distinct from the older aristocracy of

the royal governors' courts.1 The enormous difficulties of communi-

cation with England helped to foster this sense of separation. The

round trip across the ocean occupied the better part of a year, and

was hazardous and expensive; a colonist who had made it was a

marked man - as Hawthorne said, "the petit maître of the colonies."

Nor was there any very extensive exchange of ideas, for though

most of the books read in the colonies came from England, the great

majority of the colonists, down to the middle of the century, seem

to have read little save the Bible and biblical commentaries, and in

the native literature of the time one seldom comes upon any refer-

ence to the English authors who were glorifying the period of the

Restoration and the reign of Anne. "No allusion to Shakespeare,"

says Bliss Perry,2 "has been discovered in the colonial literature of

the Seventeenth Century, and scarcely an allusion to the Puritan

poet Milton." Benjamin Franklin's brother, James, had a copy of

Shakespeare at the New England Courant office in Boston, but Ben-

jamin himself seems to have made little use of it, for there is not

a single quotation from or mention of the bard in all his voluminous

works.3 "The Harvard College Library in 1723," says Perry, "had

1 Sydney George Fisher: The True Story of the American Revolution;

Phila. and London, 1902, p. 27. See also John T. Morse's Life of

Thomas Jefferson in the American Statesmen series (Boston and New

York, 1898), p. 2. Morse points out that Washington, Jefferson and

Madison belonged to this new aristocracy, not to the old one.

2 The American Spirit in Literature; New Haven, 1918, p. 61.

3 Since this statement appeared in my last edition Mr. Meyer Isenberg of

Chicago has called my attention to what may be an echo of Shakespeare

in Poor Richard's Almanac, 1735: "A ship under sail and a big-bellied

woman are the handsomest things that can be seen in common." Mr.

Isenberg believes that this may have been suggested by Titania's speech

in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Sc. 1, beginning "Set your

heart at rest." But even if this be true, Franklin may have encoun-

tered the idea at second hand. He said in his Autobiography: "At the

time I established myself in Phila-

delphia (1723) there was not a good bookseller's shop in any of the

colonies to the southward of Boston. In New York and Philadelphia

the printers were indeed stationers, but they sold only paper, almanacs, bal-

lads, and a few common schoolbooks. Those who loved reading

were obliged to send for their books to England."

nothing of Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope and Swift, and had only recently obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare. . . . Franklin reprinted 'Pamela' and his Library Company of Philadelphia had two copies of 'Paradise Lost' for circulation in 1741, but there had been no copy of that work in the great library of Cotton Mather.' Moreover, after 1760, the eyes of the colonists were upon France rather than upon England, and Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire and the Encyclopedists began to be familiar names to thousands who were scarcely aware of Addison and Steele, or even of the great Elizabethans.1

During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries England was wracked by a movement to standardize the language, alike in vocabulary, in pronunciation and in spelling, and it went far enough to set up artificial standards that still survive.2 The great authority of Samuel Johnson gave heavy support to this movement, though he was wise enough in the preface to his Dictionary (1735) to admit somewhat sadly that 'sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints' and that 'to enchain syllables, and to lash the winds, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.' But Johnson could never resist the temptation to pontificate, and so he thundered idiotically against to wobble, to bamboozle, to swap, to budge, to coax, touchy, stingy, swimmingly, fib, banter, fop, row (in the sense of a disturbance) and even fun and chaperon, all of them then somewhat novel.3 He also permitted himself to read the death-warrants of many archaisms that were not really archaisms at all, for example, glee, jeopardy and to smoulder.

The Americans, in the main, were cut off from this double policing, and in consequence they went on making new words freely and cherishing old ones that had come under the ban in England. A minority along the coast, to be sure, tried to keep up with the latest

1 See The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, p. 119. Francis Jeffrey, writing on Franklin in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1806, hailed him as a prodigy who had 'arisen 'in a society' where there was no relish and no encouragement for literature.'

2 There is a detailed and excellent account of it in Modern English in the Making, by George H. McKnight; New York, 1928, Ch. XI ff.

3 See Adjectives - and Other Words, by Ernest Weekley; London, 1930, p. 37. Also, McKnight, pp. 372 and 412. McKnight says that among the other words 'branded at one time or another by Eighteenth Century purists either as cant or as slang or as 'low'' were banter, cocksure, dumbfounded, enthusiasm, extra, flimsy, flippant, flirtation, gambling, helter-skelter, humbug, jilt, mob, nervous, pell-mell, prig, quandary, shabby, sham, shuffle, topsy-turvy, touchy, turtle and twang.

The Beginnings of American

dictates of English fashion, but it was never large, and its speech habits had but small influence upon those of the majority. There was obviously only rhetoric in James Russell Lowell's saying that " our ancestors, unhappily, could bring over no English better than Shakespeare's," for relatively few of them had ever heard of Shakespeare, and to even fewer was he anything more than a vague name;1 but it is nevertheless a fact that their way of using the language had something in it of his glorious freedom and spaciousness.2 If they had any written guide it was the King James Bible (1611). Whenever an English reform or innovation percolated to them they were inclined to remain faithful to the sacred text, not only because of its pious authority but also because of the superior pull of its imminent and constant presence. Thus when fashionable prudery in English ordered the abandonment of the Anglo-Saxon sick for the later and more elegant ill, the colonists refused to follow, for sick was in both the Old Testament and the New;3 and that refusal remains in force to this day.

A large number of words and phrases, many of them now ex-

1 Sir William Craigie discusses this matter in The Study of American English, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXVII, 1927, p. 199 ff. "The colonists," he says, "were too few in number, and many of them too unlettered, to bring with them the whole of that marvellous language of which even Shakespeare could not exhaust the riches. It may safely be said that no colony ever carries with it the whole of its mother tongue, and this is all the more certain when that tongue has attained a high level of literary development. . . . It is necessary to draw a distinction between the potential and actual possession of the colonists and their immediate descendants. They had a heritage which was larger than they were able to occupy to the full."

2 McKnight, Ch. X, deals with Shakespeare's English at length. It was by no means untutored; in fact, the Bard was a consummate master of the rhetoric fashionable in the London of his time. But his genius was too vast to endure its bonds, and so he helped himself

to the riches of the common speech. "The effect produced" says McKnight, "is like that of the renewed metaphors to be heard in modern times in the speech of the frontier, where, free from the blighting influence of learning, forms of language are created afresh." All the characters that purists complain of in modern American are to be found in full flower in Elizabethan English - the bold interchange of parts of speech, the copious coinage of neologisms, the disregard of nice inflections, the free use of prepositions, and the liking for loan-words. "The general impression," says McKnight, "is that of a language little governed as yet by rules, but on account of its very irregularity, flexible, and, therefore, adaptable to the expression of varied meaning." See also Shakespeare's English, by George Gordon, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXIX, 1928.

3 Examples of its use in the American sense are to be found in Gen. XLVIII, 1; II Kings VIII, 7; John XI, 1, and Acts IX, 37.

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The American Language

clusively American, are similar survivals from the English of the Seventeenth Century, long since obsolete or merely provincial in

England. Among nouns Thornton notes fox-fire, flap-jack, jeans,

molasses, shoat, beef (to designate the live animal), chinch, cord-

wood and home-spun; Halliwell1 adds andiron, bay-window, cess-

pool, clodhopper, cross-purposes, greenhorn, loop-hole, ragamuffin

and trash; and other authorities cite stock (for cattle), fall (for

autumn), offal, din, underpinning and adze. Bub, used in addressing

a boy, is very old English, but survives only in American. Flap-jack

goes back to “Piers Plowman,” but has been obsolete in England

for two centuries. Muss, in the sense of a row, is also obsolete over

there, but it is to be found in “Antony and Cleopatra.” Char, as a

noun, disappeared from Standard English long ago, save in the com-

pound, charwoman, but it survives in American as chore. Among

the verbs similarly preserved are to whittle, to wilt and to approbate.

To guess, in the American sense of to suppose, is to be found in

“Henry VI”:

Not all together; better far, I guess,

That we do make our entrance several ways.

In “Measure for Measure” Escalus says “I guess not” to Angelo.

The Oxford Dictionary offers examples much older – from Chaucer,

Wycliffe and Gower. To loan, in the American sense of to lend, is

in 34 and 35 Henry VIII, but it dropped out of use in England

early in the Eighteenth Century, and all the leading dictionaries,

in both English and American, now call it an Americanism. To

fellowship, once in good American use but now reduced to a

provincialism, is in Chaucer. Even to hustle, it appears, is ancient.

Among adjectives, homely was used in its American sense of plain-

featured by both Shakespeare and Milton. Other such survivors are

burly, catty-conered, likely, deft, copious, scant and ornate. Per-

haps clever also belongs to this category, that is, in the American

sense of amiable.

Most of the English archaisms surviving in American seem to be

derived from the dialects of Eastern and Southern England, from

which regions, in fact, a large percentage of the original English

1 J. O. Halliwell (Phillips): A Dic-tionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms, Containing Words Now Obsolete in England All of Which are Familiar and in Common Use

in America, 2nd ed.; London, 1850. See also Gilbert M. Tucker's Ameri-can English; New York, 1921, p. 39 ff.

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129

settlers came. Sir William Craigie says1 that in New England three areas are chiefly represented – Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, East Anglia, and the Southwestern counties. The Rev. Edward Gepp, of Colchester, who has made comparative studies of the Essex dialect and the common speech of the United States, says that the latter shows a “striking absence of words and forms characteristic of Scotland, and of the North and West of England.”2 Since the early colonial period there has been an accession of Northern forms, chiefly through the so-called Scotch-Irish influence, but the older archaisms are nearly all Southern or Eastern. Another English observer, the Rev. H. T. Armfield, has found many Essex place-names in New England, among them, Hedingham, Topsfield, Wethersfield, Braintree, Colchester, Haverhill and Billerica.3 Among the vulgar forms now common in the United States which still survive in the Essex dialect Mr. Gepp notes kilter, kiver, yarb, ary, nary, ellum, tonguey, pesky, snicker, bimeby, cowcumber, invite (for invitation) and hoss, and the verbs to argify, to slick up and to scrimp. His word-lists also show a number of words that are now good American, e.g., chump, given-name and heft. But such archaisms are naturally most common on the lower levels of speech, and in remote and uncultured settlements. “It is a commonplace of the study of cultural history,” says George Philip Krapp,4 “that isolated communities tend to remain relatively stable. They retain their customs, their occupations, their speech, all their cultural traditions, very much as they were at the time when the members of the community seated themselves within the confines of the prison house which they call their home.” Thus it is no wonder that the American spoken by the mountaineers of Appalachia shows an unusually large admixture of ancient forms, usually English but often Scottish, not only in its vocabulary, but also in its syntax and pronunciation. Archaic forms continue to flourish in such remote regions just as the Rheno-Franconian dialect of the Seventeenth Century survives among the more bucolic Germans of the lower counties of Pennsylvania. We shall encounter some of them in Chapter VII.

1 The Study of American English, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXVII, 1927, p. 201. 3 Transactions of the Essex Archæological Society, Vol. IV, N.S., 1893.

2 A Contribution to an Essex Dialect Dictionary, Supplement III; Colchester, 1922. 4 Is American English Archaic?, Southwest Review, Summer, 1927, p. 296.

IV

THE PERIOD OF GROWTH

I. A NEW NATION IN THE MAKING

Sufficient evidence has been set forth, I take it, to show that the English of the United States had begun to be recognizably differentiated from the English of England by the opening of the Nineteenth Century. But as yet its free proliferation was impeded by two factors, the first being the lack of a national literature of any expanse and dignity and the second being an internal political disharmony which greatly conditioned and enfeebled the national solidarity. During the actual Revolution common aims and common dangers forced the Americans to show a more or less united front, but once they had achieved political independence they developed conflicting interests, and out of those conflicting interests came suspicions and hatreds which came near wrecking the new Confederation more than once. Politically, their worst weakness, perhaps, was an inability to detach themselves wholly from the struggle for domination then going on in Europe. The surviving Loyalists of the revolutionary era – estimated by some authorities to have constituted fully a third of the total population in 1776 – were ardently in favor of England, and such patriots as Jefferson were as ardently in favor of France. This engrossment in the rivalries of foreign nations was what Washington warned against in his Farewell Address. It was at the bottom of such bitter animosities as that between Jefferson and Hamilton. It inspired and perhaps excused the pessimism of such men as Burr. Its net effect was to make it difficult for the people of the new nation to think of themselves, politically and culturally, as Americans pure and simple.

1 According to R. E. Spiller (The American in England During the First Half Century of Independence; New York, 1926), Benjamin Silliman's Journal of Travels in England, Holland, and Scotland, and of Two Passages Over the Atlantic, in the Years 1805 and 1806; New York, 1810, was “the first book of travels by an American which at-

130

The Period of Growth

131

state of mind, vacillating, uncertain, alternately timorous and pugnacious, has been well described by Henry Cabot Lodge in his essay on “Colonialism in America.”1 Soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed, someone referred to the late struggle, in Franklin’s hearing, as the War for Independence. “Say, rather, the War of the Revolution,” said Franklin. “The War for Independence is yet to be fought.”

“That struggle,” adds B. J. Lossing in “Our Country” (1873), “occurred, and that independence was won, by the Americans in the War of 1812.” In the interval the New Republic had passed through a period of Sturm und Drang whose gigantic perils and passions we have begun to forget – a period in which disaster ever menaced, and the foes within were no less bold and pertinacious than the foes without. Jefferson, perhaps, carried his fear of “monocrats” to the point of monomania, but under it there was undoubtedly a body of sound fact. The poor debtor class (including probably a majority of the veterans of the Revolution) had been fired by the facile doctrines of the French Revolution to demands which threatened the country with bankruptcy and anarchy,2 and the class of property-owners, in reaction, went far to the other extreme. On all sides, indeed, there flourished a strong British party, and particularly in New England, where the so-called codfish aristocracy (by no means extinct today) exhibited an undisguised Anglomania, and looked forward confidently to a rapprochement with the mother country.3 This Anglomania showed itself, not only

tempted to describe and discuss England as though she were actually a foreign land.”

1 In Studies in History; Boston, 1884. Lodge says that Franklin, Hamilton and Noah Webster were brilliant exceptions. Franklin’s autobiography, he says, was “American in feeling, without any taint of English colonialism.” Hamilton’s “intense eagerness for a strong national government made him the deadliest foe of the colonial spirit.” As for Webster, he “went into open rebellion against British tradition. He was snubbed, laughed at, and abused. He was regarded as little better than a madman to dare to set himself up against Johnson and

his successors. But the hard-headed New Englander pressed on, and finally brought out his dictionary – a great work, which has fitly preserved his name.”

2 The best brief account of this uprising that I have encountered is not in any history book, but in Mr. Justice Sutherland’s dissenting opinion in Home Building & Loan Ass’n vs. Blaisdell et al, 54 Supreme Court Reporter, p. 244ff.

3 The thing went, indeed, far beyond mere hope. In 1812 a conspiracy was unearthed to separate New England from the Republic and make it an English colony. The chief conspirator was one John Henry, who acted under the instructions of Sir

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The American Language

in ceaseless political agitation, but also in an elaborate imitation of English manners.

The first sign of the dawn of a new national order came with the election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency in 1800. The issue in the campaign was a highly complex one, but under it lay a plain conflict between democratic independence on the one hand and subservience to English precept and example on the other; and with the Alien and Sedition Laws about his neck, so vividly reminiscent of the issues of the Revolution itself, Adams went down to defeat. Jefferson was violently anti-British and pro-French; he saw all the schemes of his political opponents, indeed, as English plots; he was the man who introduced the bugaboo into American politics. His first acts after his inauguration were to abolish all ceremonial at the court of the Republic, and to abandon spoken discourses to Congress for written messages. That ceremonial, which grew up under Washington, was an imitation, he believed, of the formality of the abhorrent Court of St. James; as for the speeches to Congress, they were palpably modeled upon the speeches from the throne of the English kings. Both reforms met with wide approval; the exactions of the English, particularly on the high seas, were beginning to break up the British party. But confidence in the solidarity and security of the new nation was still anything but universal. The surviving doubts, indeed, were strong enough to delay the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for more direct elections of President and Vice-President, until the end of 1804, and even then three of the five New England States rejected it,1 and have never ratified it, in fact, to this day. Democracy was still experimental, doubtful, full of gunpowder. In so far as it had actually come into being, it had come as a boon conferred from above. Jefferson, its protagonist, was the hero of the populace, but he was not a part of the populace himself, nor did he ever quite trust it.

It was reserved for Andrew Jackson, a man genuinely of the people, to lead the rise of the lower orders and give it dramatic effectiveness. Jackson was the archetype of the new American who appeared after 1814 – ignorant, pushful, impatient of restraint and precedent, an iconoclast, a Philistine, an Anglophobe in every fiber.

John Craig, Governor-General of Canada. 1 Maine was not separated from Massachusetts until 1820.

The Period of Growth

"He was," says his biographer, James Parton, "the most American of Americans - an embodied Declaration of Independence - the Fourth of July incarnate." He came from the extreme backwoods, and his youth was passed, like that of Abraham Lincoln after him, amid surroundings but little removed from savagery. Thousands of other young Americans of the same sort were growing up at the same time - youngsters filled with a vast impatience of all precedent and authority, revilers of all that had come down from an elder day, incorrigible libertarians. They swarmed across the mountains and down the great rivers, wrestling with the naked wilderness and setting up a casual, impromptu sort of civilization where the Indian still menaced. Schools were few and rudimentary; there was not the remotest approach to a cultivated society; any effort to mimic the amenities of the East, or of the mother country, in manner or even in speech, met with instant derision. It was in these surroundings and at this time that the thoroughgoing American of tradition was born; "blatant, illogical, elate," "greeting the embarrassed gods"uproariously, and matching "with Destiny for beers." Jackson was unmistakably of that company in every instinct and idea, and it was his fate to give a new and unshakable confidence to its aspiration at the Battle of New Orleans. Thereafter all doubts began to die out; the new Republic was turning out a success. And with success came a great increase in the national egoism. The hordes of pioneers rolled down the Western valleys and on to the great plains.1 America began to stand for something quite new in the world - in government, in law, in public and private morals, in customs and habits of mind, in the minutiæ of social intercourse. And simultaneously the voice of America began to take on its characteristic tone-colors, and the speech of America began to differentiate itself unmistakably from the speech of England. The average Philadelphian or Bostonian of 1790 had not the slightest difficulty in making himself understood by a visiting Englishman. But the average Ohio boatman of 1810 or plainsman of 1815 was already speaking a dialect that the Englishman would have shrunk from as barbarous and unintelligible, and before long it began to leave its marks, at first only faintly but

1 Indiana and Illinois were erected into Territories during Jefferson's first term, and Michigan during his second. Kentucky was admitted to the Union in 1792, Tennessee in 1796, Ohio in 1803. Lewis and Clarke set out for the Pacific in 1804. The Louisiana Purchase was ratified in 1803, and Louisiana became a State in 1812.

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The American Language

in the end very clearly, upon a distinctively national literature. That literature, however, was very slow in coming to a dignified, confident and autonomous estate. Down to Jefferson's day it was predominantly and indeed almost wholly polemical, and hence lacking in anything properly describable as æsthetic value; he himself, an insatiable propagandist and controversialist, was one of its chief ornaments. " The novelists and the historians, the essayists and the poets, whose names come to mind when American literature is mentioned," said Barrett Wendell, "have all flourished since 1800." 1

But when a beginning was made at last, it was made with what might almost be described as a whoop. The violent reviling of the English reviewers, described at length in Chapter I, had at last overshot its mark. Abashed and alarmed by it for years, the American literati were goaded, in the end, into meeting it with defiance, and that defiance both supported and got support from the rising national feeling. The same year, 1828, which saw the beginning of Jackson's first term also saw the publication of Noah Webster's " American Dictionary of the English Language," and a year later followed Samuel Lorenzo Knapp's " Lectures on American Literature," the first formal treatise on the national letters ever written. Knapp, by that time, had enough materials at hand to make a very creditable showing - for example, Bryant's " Thanatopsis " (published in the North American Review in 1817); Irving's " Knickerbocker " (1809), " The Sketch-Book " (1819), " Bracebridge Hall " (1822), " Tales of a Traveller " (1824) and " Columbus " (1828); Cooper's " The Spy " (1821), " The Pilot " (1823) and " The Prairie " (1826); Hawthorne's " Fanshaw " (1828); and Poe's " Tamerlane and Other Poems " (1827); not to mention Schoolcraft's " Through the Northwest " (1821) and " Travels in the Mississippi Valley " (1825), Kent's " Commentaries " (1826), Marshall's " Washington " (1804) and Audubon's " Birds of America " (1827).

But Knapp was not content to put these new pearls in array; he must also deliver himself of Jacksonian exultations. Where in all England, he demanded, was there a " tuneful sister " comparable to Mrs. Lydia Sigourney, whose

strains of poetic thought are as pure and lovely as the adjacent wave [of the Connecticut river] touched by the sanctity of a Sabbath's morn? . . . What

1 A Literary History of America; New York, 1900.

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are the Tibers and Scamanders, measured by the Missouri and the Amazon? Or what the loveliness of Illyssus or Avon, by the Connecticut or the Potomack? The waters of these American rivers are as pure and sweet, and their names would be as poetical, were they as familiar to us in song as the others, which have been immortalized for ages. Whenever a nation wills it, prodigies are born. . . . In the smiles of publick favor poets will arise, yea, have already arisen, whose rays of mental fire will burn out the foul stain upon our reputation, given at first by irritated and neglected genius, and continued by envy and malice. . . . All things have become well settled upon true principles among us, and the agitation and bustle of their establishment having passed away, some of the first minds will gratify their ambition by literary distinction.

In brief, the national feeling, long delayed in appearing, leaped into being at last in truly amazing vigor. “One can get an idea of the strength of that feeling,” says R. O. Williams,

by glancing at almost any book taken at random from the American publications of the period. Belief in the grand future of the United States is the keynote of everything said and done. All things American are to be grand—our territory, population, products, wealth, science, art—but especially our political institutions and literature. Unbounded confidence in the material development of the country . . . prevailed throughout the . . . Union during the first thirty years of the century; and over and above a belief in, and concern for, materialistic progress, there were enthusiastic anticipations of achievements in all the moral and intellectual fields of national greatness.1

Nor was that vast optimism wholly without warrant. An American literature was actually taking form, and with the memory of old wrongs still shutting them off from England, the new American writers turned to the Continent for inspiration and encouragement. Irving had already drunk at Spanish springs; Emerson and Bayard Taylor were to receive powerful impulses from Germany, following Ticknor, Bancroft and Everett before them; Bryant was destined to go back to the classics. Moreover, Irving, Cooper, John P. Kennedy and many another had shown the way to native sources of literary material, and Longfellow was making ready to follow them; novels in imitation of English models were no longer heard of; the ground was preparing for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Finally, Webster himself, as Williams shows, worked better than he knew. His American Dictionary was not only thoroughly American: it was superior to any of the current dictionaries of the English, so much so that

1 Our Dictionaries and Other English Language Topics; New York, 1890, pp. 30–31. See also, for an excellent account of the spirit of the time, Localism in American Criticism, by Carey McWilliams, Southwest Review, July, 1934.

136 The American Language

for a good many years it remained “a sort of mine for British lexicography to exploit.”

Thus all hesitations disappeared, and there arose a national consciousness so soaring and so blatant that it began to dismiss every British usage and opinion as puerile and idiotic. The new Republic would not only produce a civilization and a literature of its own; it would show the way for all other civilizations and literatures. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, the enemy of Poe, rose in his decorous Baptist pulpit to protest that so much patriotism amounted to chauvinism and absurdity, but there seems to have been no one to second the motion. The debate upon the Oregon question gave a gaudy chance to the new breed of super-patriots, and they raged unchecked until the time of the Civil War. Thornton, in his Glossary, quotes a typical speech in Congress, the subject being the American eagle and the orator being the Hon. Samuel C. Pomeroy, of Kansas.

I give a few strophes:

The proudest bird upon the mountain is upon the American ensign, and not one feather shall fall from her plumage there. She is American in design, and an emblem of wildness and freedom. I say again, she has not perched herself upon American standards to die there. Our great Western valleys were never scooped out for her burial place. Nor were the everlasting, untrodden mountains piled for her monument. Niagara shall not pour her endless waters for her requiem; nor shall our ten thousand rivers sweep to the ocean in eternal tears. No, sir, no! Unnumbered voices shall come up from river, plain, and mountain, echoing the songs of our triumphant deliverance, wild lights from a thousand hill-tops will betoken the rising of the sun of freedom.

This tall talk was by no means reserved for occasions of state; it decorated the everyday speech of the people, especially in the Jackson country to the southward and beyond the mountains. It ran, there, to grotesque metaphors and far-fetched exaggerations, and out of it came a great many Americanisms that still flourish. Thornton gives a specimen from a Florida newspaper, c. 1840, the speaker being a local fee-faw-fo-fum:

This is me, and no mistake! Billy Earthquake, Esq., commonly called Little Billy, all the way from the No’th Fork of Muddy Run! . . . Whoop! won’t nobody come out and fight me? Come out, some of you, and die decently, for I’m spiling for a fight. . . . I’m a poor man, it’s a fact, and smell like a wet dog, but I can’t be run over. . . . Maybe you never heard of the time the horse kicked me, and put both his hips out of jint — if it ain’t true, cut me up for catfish bait! W-h-o-o-p! I’m the very infant that refused its milk before its eyes were open, and called out for a bottle of old rye. . . . Talk about grinning the bark off a tree — ’tain’t nothing; one squint of mine at

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a bull's heel would blister it. Oh, I'm one of your toughest sort - live forever, and then turn to a white-oak post. I'm the ginewine article, a real double-acting engine, and I can out-run, out-jump, out-swim, chaw more tobacco and spit less, and drink more whiskey and keep soberer than any man in these localities.

Another noble example comes from Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi," the time being c. 1852:

Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw! Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the smallpox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattle-snakes and a dead body when I'm ailing. I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen, and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm 'bout to turn myself loose!

To which may be added the testimony of Dr. Thomas L. Nichols, an American who left the United States for England in 1861, and published "Forty Years of American Life" there in 1864:

The language [of the West], like the country, has a certain breadth and magnificence. A Western man "sleeps so sound, it would take an earthquake to wake him" . . . "Stranger," he says, "in b'ar hunts I am numerous." . . . "He tells of a person "as cross as a b'ar with two cubs and a sore tail." He "laughs like a hyena over a dead nigger." He "walks through a fence like a falling tree through a cobweb." He "goes the whole hog." . . . "Bust me wide open," he says, "if I didn't bulge into the creek in the twinkling of a bedpost, I was so thunderin' savageous."1

This extravagance of metaphor, with its naïve bombast, had but little influence, of course, upon the more decorous native literati. It was borrowed eagerly by the humorous writers, and especially by those who performed regularly in the newspapers, and at the end of the period it was to leave its marks upon two literary artists of the highest quality, Whitman and Mark Twain, but the generality of American authors eschewed it very diligently. Most of them, in fact, looked back toward Addison, or, perhaps more accurately, toward Johnson. The dominant critics of the time - of whom the

1 I borrow this example from Tall Talk in American Sixty Years Ago, by Mamie Meredith, American Speech, April, 1929. See also Big Talk, by Dorothy Dondore, American Speech, Oct., 1930; Frontier

Tall Talk, by William F. Thompson, American Speech, Oct., 1934; and Tall Tales of the Southwest, 1830-60, by F. J. Meine; New York, 1930.

138 The American Language

Baptist, Griswold, was a good example – followed Eighteenth Century models, and one searches their sonorous periods for even the slightest concession to colloquialism. The grand master of them all, Poe, achieved a style so rotund and ornate that many a contemporary English leader-writer must have envied it. Nor was there any visible yielding to the sermo vulgaris in Emerson, Irving, Bryant, Cooper and Longfellow. “Whatever differences there may be,” says Sir William Craigie,1 “between the language of Longfellow and Tennyson, of Emerson and Ruskin, they are differences due to style and subject, to a personal choice or command of words, and not to any real divergence in the means of expression.” But meanwhile, says Sir William, there was going on

a rise and rapid growth within the United States of new types of literature which would either give fuller scope to the native element by mingling it with the conventional, or would boldly adopt it as a standard in itself. . . . The runnels of popular speech, which had trickled underground for a century or more, come again to the light of day; they are joined by many more, which have sprung up in the same obscurity; and together they swell into a stream which at its highest flood may well seem to change and obliterate the old banks and landmarks of the language.

Henry James, in “The Question of Our Speech,” had said much the same thing a quarter of a century before (1905):

Keep in sight the interesting historical truth that no language, so far back as our acquaintance with history goes, has known any such ordeal, any such stress and strain, as was to await the English in this huge new community it was so unsuspectingly to help, at first, to father and mother. It came over, as the phrase is, came over originally without fear and without guile – but to find itself transplanted to spaces it had never dreamed, in its comparative humility, of covering, to conditions it had never dreamed, in its comparative innocence, of meeting; to find itself grafted, in short, on a social and political order that was both without precedent and example and incalculably expansive.

Thus, on the levels below the Olympians, a wild and lawless development of the language went on, and many of the uncouth words and phrases that it brought to birth gradually forced themselves into more or less good usage. “The jus et norma loquendi,” says W. R. Morfill, the English philologian, “do not depend upon scholars.” Particularly in a country where scholarship is strange, cloistered and timorous, and the overwhelming majority of the people are engaged upon new and highly exhilarating tasks, far

1 The Study of American English, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXVII, 1927, p. 203.

away from schools and with a gigantic cockiness in their hearts. The old hegemony of the Tidewater gentry, North and South, had been shaken by the revolt of the frontier under Jackson, and what remained of an urbane habit of mind and utterance began to be confined to the narrowing feudal areas of the South and the still narrower refuge of the Boston Brahmins, who were presently recognized as a definite caste of intelligentsia, self-charged with carrying the torch of culture through a new Dark Age. The typical American, in Paulding's satirical phrase, became "a bundling, gouging, impious" fellow, without either "morals, literature, religion or refinement." Next to the savage struggle for land and dollars, party politics was the chief concern of the people, and with the disappearance of the old leaders and the entrance of pushing upstarts from the backwoods, political controversy sank to an incredibly low level.

Bartlett, in the introduction to the second edition of his Glossary, described the effect upon the language. First the enfranchised mob, whether in the city wards or along the Western rivers, invented fantastic slang-words and turns of phrase; then they were "seized upon by stump-speakers at political meetings"; then they were heard in Congress; then they got into the newspapers; and finally they came into more or less good repute. Much contemporary evidence is to the same effect. W. C. Fowler, in listing "low expressions" in 1850, described them as "chiefly political." "The vernacular tongue of the country," said Daniel Webster, "has become greatly vitiated, depraved and corrupted by the style of the congressional debates." Thornton, in the appendix to his Glossary, gives some astounding specimens of congressional oratory between the 20's and 60's, and many more will reward the explorer who braves the files of the Congressional Globe.

This flood of racy and unprecedented words and phrases beat upon and finally penetrated the austere retreat of the literati, but the dignity of speech cultivated there had little compensatory influence upon the vulgate. The newspaper was enthroned, and belles lettres were cultivated almost in private, and as a mystery. It is probable, indeed, that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Ten Nights in a Bar-room," both published in the early 50's, were the first contemporary native books, after Cooper's day, that the American people, as a people, ever really read. Nor did the pulpit, now fast falling from its old high estate, lift a corrective voice. On the contrary, it joined the crowd, and

Bartlett denounced it specifically for its bad example, and cited, among its crimes against the language, such inventions as to doxologize and to funeralize. To these novelties, apparently without any thought of their uncouthness, Fowler, who was professor of rhetoric at Amherst, added to missionate and consociational.

This pressure from below eventually broke down the defenses of the purists, and forced the new national idiom upon them. Pen in hand, they might still achieve laborious imitations of the hated English reviewers, but their mouths began to betray them. "When it comes to talking," wrote Charles Astor Bristed for Englishmen in 1855, "the most refined and best educated American, who has habitually resided in his own country, the very man who would write, on some serious topic, volumes in which no peculiarity could be detected, will, in half a dozen sentences, use at least as many words that cannot fail to strike the inexperienced Englishman who hears them for the first time."

2. THE EXPANDING VOCABULARY

A glance at some of the characteristic coinages of the time, as they are revealed in the Congressional Globe, in contemporary newspapers and political tracts, and in that grotesque literature of humor which began with Thomas C. Haliburton's "Sam Slick" in 1835, is almost enough to make one sympathize with the pious horror of Dean Alford. To citizenize was used and explained by Senator Young, of Illinois, in the Senate on February 1, 1841, and he gave Noah Webster as authority for it. Bartlett quotes to doxologize from the Christian Disciple, a quite reputable religious paper of the 40's. To funeralize 1 and to pastor, along with the aforesaid to missionate and consociational, were other contributions of the evangelical pulpit; perhaps it also produced hell-roaring and hellion, the latter of which was a favorite of the Mormons and even got into a sermon by Henry Ward Beecher. To deacon, a verb of decent mien in

1 The Oxford Dictionary quotes an example of its use in the sense of to render sad or melancholy from Thomas Browne's Urn Burial (1658). But in the sense of to conduct a funeral the verb seems to

be American. It thus appears in the diary of Moses Waddel, president of the University of Georgia; 1825. See College Life in the Old South, by E. Merton Coulter; New York, 1928, p. 197.

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141

colonial days, signifying to read a hymn line by line, responded to

the rough humor of the time, and began to mean to swindle or

adulterate, e.g., to put the largest berries at the top of the box, to

extend one's fences sub rosa, or to mix sand with sugar. A great

rage for extending the vocabulary by the use of suffixes seized upon

the corn-fed etymologists, and they produced a formidable new

vocabulary, in -ize, -ate, -ify, -acy, -ous and -ment. Such inventions

as to concertize, to questionize, retiracy, savagerous, coatee (a sort

of diminutive for coat) and citifyd appeared in the popular vocabu-

lary and even got into more or less respectable usage. Fowler, in

1850, cited publishment and releasement with no apparent thought

that they were uncouth. And at the same time many verbs were

made by the simple process of back formation, as, to resurrect, to

excurt, to resolute, to burgle1 and to enthuse.

Some of these inventions, after flourishing for a generation or

more, were retired with blushes during the period of plush elegance

following the Civil War, but a large number have survived to our

own day. Not even the most meticulous purist would think of

objecting to to affiliate, to endorse, to collide, to jeopardize, to predi-

cate, to itemize, to resurrect or to Americanize today, and yet all

of them gave grief to the judicious when they first appeared in the

debates of Congress, brought there by statesmen from the back-

woods. Nor to such simpler verbs of the period as to corner (i.e.,

the market) and to lynch.2 Nor perhaps to to boom, to boost, to

kick (in the sense of to protest), to coast (on a sled), to engineer, to

chink (i.e., logs), to feaze, to splurge, to bulldoze, to aggravate (in

1 J. R. Ware, in Passing English of

the Victorian Era; London, n.d.,

says that to burgle was introduced

to London by W. S. Gilbert in The

Pirates of Penzance, 1880. On Nov.

14, 1874 the London Standard was

speaking of it as one of the "new

words with which the American

vocabulary has lately been en-

riched," but it probably goes back

to the 40's or 50's.

2 The origin of to lynch was long

in dispute, but it now appears to be

established that it was derived from

the name of Captain (or Colonel)

Charles Lynch, of Pittsylvania

county, Virginia, a primeval 100%

American who devoted himself to

harassing Loyalists before and dur-

ing the Revolution. He was a mem-

ber of the House of Burgessess, but

seems to have paid little heed to

the statutes. In 1782 the Virginia

Assembly purged him of charges

that he had 'illegally imprisoned cer-

tain Loyalists in 1780. For an ac-

count of him, probably somewhat

inaccurate in detail, see Rope and

Faggott, by Walter White; New

York, 1929, p. 83. See also the art.

Lynch law in the Supplement to

the Oxford Dictionary; London,

1933. A useful article on the sub-

ject was printed in the Lynchburg

(Va.) News, July 30, 1922.

142 The American Language

the sense of to anger), and to crawfish. These verbs have entered into the very fiber of the American language, and so have many nouns derived from them, e.g., boomer, boom-town, bouncer, kicker, kick, lynching-bee, splurge, roller-coaster. A few of them, e.g., to collide and to feaze, were archaic English terms brought to new birth; a few others, e.g., to holler 1 and to muss, were obviously mere corruptions. But a good many others, e.g., to bulldoze, to canoodle, to honeyfogle, to hornswoggle and to scoot, were genuine inventions, and redolent of the soil.

Along with these new verbs came a great swarm of verb-phrases, some of them short and pithy and others extraordinarily elaborate, but all showing the national talent for condensing a complex thought, and often a whole series of thoughts, into a vivid and arresting image. To the first class belong to fill the bill, to fizzle out, to make tracks, to peter out, to plank down, to go back on, to keep tab, to light out and to back water. Side by side with them we have inherited such common coins of speech as to make the fur fly, to cut a swath, to know him like a book, to keep a stiff upper lip, to cap the climax, to handle without gloves, to freeze on to, to go it blind, to pull wool over his eyes, to have the floor, to know the ropes, to get solid with, to spread oneself, to run into the ground, to dodge the issue, to paint the town red, to take a back seat and to get ahead of. These are so familiar that we use them and hear them without thought; they seem as authentically parts of the English idiòm as to be left at the post. And yet, as the labors of Thornton have demonstrated, all of them appear to be of American nativity, and the circumstances surrounding the origin of some of them have been accurately determined. Many others are as certainly products of the great movement toward the West, for example, to pan out, to strike it rich, to jump or enter a claim, to pull up stakes, to rope in, to die with one's boots on, to get the deadwood on, to get the drop, to back and fill, to do a land-office business and to get the bulge on. And in many others the authentic American flavor is no less plain, for example, in to kick the bucket, to put a bug in his ear, to see the elephant, to

1 The spelling of this word shows large variations. The Oxford Dictionary gives holow (1542), holow (1599), holloe (1642), holo (1654), holloa (1769), holla (1842), and holler (1883). In the United States the common pronunciation is holler, and this form has been accepted by the Public Printer. See the Congressional Record, May 12, 1917, p. 2309.

crack up, to do up brown, to bark up the wrong tree, to jump on with both feet, to go the whole hog, to make a kick, to buck the tiger, to let it slide and to come out at the little end of the horn. To play possum belongs to this list. To it Thornton adds to knock into a cocked hat, despite its English sound, and to have an ax to grind. To go for, both in the sense of belligerency and in that of partisanship, is also American, and so is to go through (i.e., to plunder).

Of adjectives the list is scarcely less long. Among the coinages of the first half of the century that are still in use today are non-committal, highfalutin, well-posted, down-town, two-fer, played-out, down-and-out, semi-occasional, under-the-weather, on-the-fence, flat-footed, whole-souled and true-blue. The first appears in a Senate debate of 1841;1 highfalutin in a political speech of 1848. Both are useful words; it is impossible, not employing them, to convey the ideas behind them without circumlocution. The use of slim in the sense of meager, as in slim chance, slim attendance and slim support, goes back still further. The English commonly use small in place of it. Other, and less respectable contributions of the time are brash, brainy, peart, scary, beatingest, well-heeled, hardshell (e.g., Baptist), low-flung, codfish (to indicate opprobrium) and go-to-meeting. The use of plumb as an adverb, as in plumb crazy, is an English archaism that was revived in the United States in the early years of the century. In the more orthodox adverbial form of plump it still survives, for example, in “she fell plump into his arms.” But this last is also good English. The characteristic American substitution of mad for angry appeared in the Eighteenth Century, and perhaps shows the survival of an English provincialism. Witherspoon noticed it and denounced it in 1781, and in 1816 Pickering called it “low” and said that it was not used “except in very familiar conversation.” But it got into much better odor soon afterward, and by 1840 it was passing unchallenged. Its use is one of the peculiarities that Englishmen most quickly notice in American colloquial speech today. In formal written discourse it is less often encountered, probably because the English marking of it has so conspicuously singled it out. But it is constantly met with in the newspapers and in the Congressional

1 It quickly bred two nouns, non-committal and non-committalism, and the latter had the political significance of straddling in the 50's, but both seem to have gone out. An adverb, non-committally, has survived, and the Oxford Dictionary quotes it from W. D. Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1885.

144 The American Language

Record. In the familiar simile, as mad as a hornet, it is used in the American sense, but as mad as a March hare is English, and connotes insanity, not mere anger. The English meaning of the word is preserved in mad-house and mad-dog, but I have often noticed that American rustics, employing the latter term, derive from it a vague notion, not that the dog is demented, but that it is in a simple fury.

It was not, however, among the verbs and adjectives that the American word-coiners of the first half of the century achieved their gaudiest innovations, but among the substantives. Here they had temptation and excuse in plenty, for innumerable new objects and relations demanded names, and they exercised their fancy without restraint. As in the colonial and revolutionary periods, three main varieties of new nouns were thus produced. The first consisted of English words rescued from obsolescence or changed in meaning, the second of compounds manufactured of the common materials of the mother tongue, and the third of entirely new inventions. Of the first class, good specimens are deck (of cards), gulch, gully and billion, the first three old English words restored to usage in America and the last a sound English word changed in meaning. Of the second class, examples are offered by gum-shoe, mortgage-shark, carpet-bagger, cut-off, mass-meeting, dead-beat, dug-out, shot-gun, stag-party, wheat-pit, horse-sense, chipped beef, oyster-supper, buzz-saw, chain-gang and hell-box. And of the third there are instances in buncombe, conniption, bloomer, campus, galoot, maverick, roustabout, bugaboo and blizzard. Of these coinages perhaps those of the second class are most numerous and characteristic. In them American exhibits one of its most marked tendencies; a habit of achieving short cuts by bold combinations. Why describe a gigantic rain storm with the lame adjectives of everyday? Call it a cloud-burst and immediately a vivid picture of it is conjured up. Rough-neck is a capital word; it is more apposite and savory than any English equivalent, and it is unmistakably American.1 The same instinct for the terse, the vivid and the picturesque appears in boiled-shirt, blow-out, big-gun, claim-jumper, home-stretch, spread-eagle, come-down, back-number, bed-spread, claw-hammer (coat), bottom-dollar, poppycock,2 cold-snap, back-talk, back-taxes, corn-belt,

1 Rough-neck often appears in lists of recent slang terms, but Thornton shows that it was used in Texas so long ago as 1836. 2 This innocent compound has given a great deal of concern to etymologists. The Standard Dictionary (1893) derives it from the verb

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145

calamity-howler, fire-bug, grab-bag, grip-sack, grub-stake, pay-dirt, tender-foot, stocking-feet, moss-back, crazy-quilt, ticket-scalper, store-clothes, small-potatoes, cake-walk, prairie-schooner, round-up, worm-fence, snake-fence, flat-boat and jumping-off place. Such compounds (there are thousands of them) have been largely responsible for giving the American vulgate its characteristic tang and color. Bell-hop, square-meal and chair-warmer, to name three charming specimens, are as distinctively American as jazz or the quick-lunch.

The spirit of the language also appears clearly in some of the coinages of the other classes. There are, for example, the English words that have been extended or restricted in meaning, e.g., docket (for court calendar), betterment (for improvement to property), collateral (for security), crank (for fanatic), jumper (for tunic), backbone (for moral courage), tickler (for memorandum or reminder),1 carnival (in such phrases as carnival of crime), scrape penders, diggings (for habitation) and range. Again, there are the new workings of English materials, e.g., doggery, rowdy, teetotaler, goatee, tony and cussedness. Yet again, there are the purely artificial words, e.g., sockdolager, bunkydory, scalawag, guyascutis, spondulix, slumgullion, rambunctious, scrumptious, to skedaddle, to absquatulate and to exfluncticate.3 In the use of the last-named coinages fashions change. In the 40's to absquatulate was in good usage, but it has since disappeared. Most of the other inventions of the time, however, have to some extent survived, and it would be difficult to find an American of today who did not know the meaning of scalawag, rambunctious, to hornswoggle and to skedaddle,4 and

to pop and the noun cock, which seems very far-fetched. The Oxford Dictionary, attempting no etymology, dismisses it as "U. S. slang." Webster's New International (1934) derives it from "Colloq. D. pappekak, lit. soft dung," which seems silly.

1 This use goes back to 1839.

2 Thornton gives an example dated 1812.

3 See Terms of Approbation and Eulogy, by Elsie L. Warnock, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. I, 1913. Among the curious recent coinages

cited by Miss Warnock are scallywampus, supergobosnoptious, byperfirmatious, and scrumdifferous. See also Language and Nonce-Words, by Francis A. Wood, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. I, 1913.

4 The origin of this noble word remains mysterious. Its first appearance in print seems to have been in 1861, but Ernest Weekley says in his Etymological Dictionary of Modern English that it "appeared earlier in a Northern English dialect in the sense of to spill," and Webster's New International fol-

146

The American Language

did not occasionally use them. A whole series of artificial American words groups itself around the prefix ker-, for example, ker-flop, ker-bim, ker-splash, ker-thump, ker-bang, ker-plunk, ker-swash, ker-swosh, ker-slap, ker-whut, ker-chunk, ker-souse, ker-slam and ker-flummux. This prefix and its daughters have been borrowed by the English, but Thornton and Ware agree that it is American, and all of the Oxford Dictionary's examples down to 1875 are of American provenance. Several of my correspondents suggest that it may have been derived from the German prefix ge- - that it may represent a humorous attempt to make German verbs by analogy, e.g., geflop and gesplash. Color is given to this theory by the fact that some of the Oxford Dictionary's earliest examples (Supplement, 1933) make the prefix che-, ca- or co-, which are all rather closer to ge- than ker- is. I offer these speculations for whatever they are worth. Certainly many ge- words must have been made by the early “Dutch” co-medans in the United States, just as they are still made by college students.1

In Chapter II, Section 1, I mentioned the superior imaginativeness revealed by Americans in meeting linguistic emergencies, whereby, for example, in seeking names for new objects introduced by the building of railroads, they surpassed the English plough and crossing-plate with cow-catcher and frog. That was in the 30's. Already at that day the two languages were so differentiated that they produced wholly distinct railroad nomenclatures. Such commonplace American terms as box-car, caboose and air-line are still strangers in England. So are freight-car, flagman, towerman, switch, switch-engine, switch-yard, switchman, track-walker, baggage-room, baggage-check, baggage-smasher, baggage-master, accommodation-train, conductor, express-car, flat-car, hand-car, gondola, way-bill, express-man, express-office, fast-freight, wrecking-crew, jerk-water, com-

lows him. The Oxford Dictionary says that “there is some slight evidence” to that effect, but remains in doubt. It rejects the suggestion that the word is of Danish or Swedish genesis, made in the Webster of 1864. In 1927 the following appeared in the Dayton, O., Daily News: “[The word is] a corruption of skedannumi, a Greek word meaning to scatter: General Giles W. Shurtleff, a professor at Oberlin

College, commanded a regiment of Negroes [in the Civil War], and many of his subordinates were from Oberlin, where students knew their Greek. Corrupting the Greek word, officers and Negroes alike evolved skedaddle.” (Reprinted in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Aug. 26, 1927).

1 See American Intensives in Ka-, Ke-, and Ker-, by Exha Akins Sadilek, American Speech, Dec., 1931.

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mutation-ticket, commuter, round-trip, mileage-book, ticket-scalper, depot, limited, hot-box, iron-horse, stop-over, tie, fish-plate, run, train-boy, chair-car, club-car, bumpers, mail-clerk, passenger-coach, day-coach, railroad-man, ticket-office, truck and right-of-way, and the verbs to flag, to express, to dead-head, to side-swipe, to stop-over, to fire (i.e., a locomotive), to switch, to side-track, to railroad, to commute and to clear the track. These terms are in constant use in Americay; their meaning is familiar to all Americans; many of them have given the language everyday figures of speech.1 But the majority of them would puzzle an Englishman, just as the English luggage-van, permanent-way, goods-waggon, guard, carrier, booking-office, railway-rug, tripper, line, points, shunt, metals and bogie would puzzle the average untraveled American.2

In two other familiar fields very considerable differences between English and American are visible; in both fields they go back to the gaudy era before the Civil War. They are politics and that department of social intercourse which has to do with drinking. Many characteristic American political terms originated in revolutionary days and have passed over into English. Of such sort are caucus and mileage. But the majority of those in common use today were coined during the extraordinarily exciting campaigns following the defeat of Adams by Jefferson. Charles Ledyard Norton has devoted a whole book to their etymology and meaning;3 the number is far too

1 E.g., Single-track mind, to jump the rails, to collide head-on, broad-gauge man, to walk the ties, blind-baggage, underground-railroad, tank-town.

2 Some of the early American railroad terms are already obsolete. Depot is seldom used today; it has been displaced by station or terminal. The use of cars to designate a railroad train was universal down to the Civil War era, but today it survives only in the signs occasionally seen at grade-crossings; "Look Out for the Cars," and in the verb-phrase, to change cars. The Pullman palace-car is now extinct, and the Pullman Palace-Car Company, incorporated in 1867, is now simply the Pullman Company. Even parlor-car has been elbowed out by Pullman. Incidentally, tele-

gram was suggested in the Albany Evening Journal, April 6, 1852, by E. Peshine Smith of Rochester, N. Y., and seems to have been his invention. It quickly ousted telegraphic dispatch and telegraphic communication.

3 Political Americanisms; New York, 1890. "In America," said Walt Whitman in An American Primer, Atlantic Monthly, April, 1904, "an immense number of new words are needed to embody the new political facts, the compact of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Constitution - the union of the States - the new States - the Congress - the modes of election - the stump speech - the ways of electioneering - addressing the people - stating all that is to be said in modes that fit the life and experi-

148 The American Language

large for a list of them to be attempted here. But a few characteristic specimens may be recalled; for example, the simple compounds: omnibus-bill, banner-state, favorite-son, anxious-bench, gag-rule, executive-session, spoils-system, mass-meeting, steering-committee, office-seeker and straight-ticket; the humorous metaphors: pork-barrel, pie-counter, land-slide, dark-horse, carpet-bagger, lame-duck and on-the-fence; the old words put to new uses: plank, pull, platform, ring, machine, wheel-horse, precinct, primary, floater, repeater, bolter, filibuster, regular and fences; the new coinages: gerrymander, buncombe, roorback, mugwump and bulldozing; the new derivatives: abolitionist, candidacy, boss-rule, per-diem and boodler; and the almost innumerable verbs and verb-phrases: to knife, to straddle, to crawfish, to split a ticket, to go up Salt River, to bolt, to lobby, to eat crow, to boodle, to divvy, to grab and to run. An English candidate doesn't run; he stands. To run, according to Thornton, was already used in America in 1789; it was universal by 1820. Platform came in at the same time. Machine was first applied to a political organization by Aaron Burr. Anxious-bench (or anxious-seat) at first designated only the place occupied by the penitent at revivals, but was used in its present political sense in Congress so early as 1842. Banner-state appears in Niles' Register for December 5, 1840. Favorite-son appears in an ode addressed to Washington on his visit to Portsmouth, N. H., in 1789, but it did not acquire its present ironical sense until it was applied to Martin Van Buren. Thornton has traced filibuster to 1836, roorback to 1844, split-ticket to 1842, and bolter to 1812. Regularity was an issue in Tammany Hall in 1822. There were primaries in New York City in 1827, and hundreds of repeaters voted. In 1829 there were lobby-agents at Albany, and they soon became lobbyists; in 1832 lobbying had already extended to Washington. All of these terms are now as firmly imbedded in the American vocabulary as election or congressman.1

In the department of conviviality the imaginativeness of Americans was early shown both in the invention and in the naming of new and often highly complex beverages. So vast was the production of novelties during the Nineteenth Century that England borrowed many of them and their names with them. And not only England:

ence of the Indianian, the Michig-ganian, the Vermonter, the men of Maine."

1 See American Political Cant, by Lowry Charles Wimberly, American Speech, Dec., 1926.

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one buys cocktails and gin-fizzes to this day in American bars that stretch from Paris to Yokohama. Cocktail, stone-fence and sherry-cobbler were mentioned by Washington Irving in “ Knickerbocker ” (1809);1 by Thackeray's time they were already well-known in England. Thornton traces the sling to 1788, and the stinkibus and anti-fogmatic, both now extinct, to the same year. The origin of the ric key, fizz, sour, cooler, skin, shrub and smash, and of such curious American drinks as the horse's neck, Mamie Taylor, Tom-and-Jerry, Tom Collins, John Collins, bishop, stone-wall, gin-fix, brandy-cham-parelle, golden-sipper, hari-kari, locomotive, whiskey-daisy, blue-blazer, black-stripe, white-plush and brandy-crusta remains to be established; the historians of the booze arts, like the philologists, differ in their theories. But the essentially American character of most of them is obvious, despite the fact that a number have gone over into English. The English, in naming their own somewhat meager inventions, commonly display a far more limited imagination. Seeking a name, for example, for a mixture of whiskey and soda-water, the best they could achieve was whiskey-and-soda. The Americans, introduced to the same drink, at once gave it the far more original name of high-ball. So with soda-water and pop. So with minerals and soft-drinks. Other characteristic Americanisms (a few of them borrowed by the English) are red-eye, corn-juice, eye-opener, forty-rod, squirrel-whiskey, phlegm-cutter, hard-cider, apple-jack and corpse-reviver, and the auxiliary drinking terms, boot-legger, sample-room, blind-pig, barrel-house, bouncer, bung-starter, dive, doggery, schooner, stick, duck, straight, hooch, saloon,

1 The etymology of cocktail has long engaged the learned, but without persuasive result. It is thus set forth by William Henry Nugent in Cock Fighting Today, American Mercury, May, 1929, p. 80: “Feeding is an important thing in the process [of conditioning game-cocks]. The old-time English and Irish trainers made a specially prepared bread of flour and stale beer or ale. They also added white wine or sack, gin, whiskey or other spirits, and a whole materia medica of seeds, plants, roots, barks, and leaves. In sampling this concoction before pouring it into the dough they

found it an appetizing tonic, not only for pit fowl, but also for man. They named it cock-bread ale or cock ale, and in the spelling of the time it became cock ail. Americans knew a variant of this beverage, as early as 1800, as the cocktail. Some-how a t had got into the mixture.” Early in 1926 Marcel Boulenger printed an article in Le Figaro Heb-domadaire (Paris) arguing that cocktail was derived from coquetel, the name of a drink known for cen-turies in the vicinity of Bordeaux. See Cocktail French Invention, Baltimore Evening Sun, Feb. 11, 1926.

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finger and chaser. Thornton shows that jag, bust, bat and to crook the elbow are also Americanisms. So are bartender and saloon-keeper.

It would be possible, too, to compile a formidable roster of theological and ecclesiastical Americanisms, e.g., anxious bench, or seat (first noted in 1839), mourners' bench, amen corner, hard-shell (1842), camp-meeting (1801), circuit-rider (1838), come-outer (1840), deacon-seat (1851), desk, for pulpit (1770), blue-law (1775), book-concern (1851), go-to-meeting, hell-rober, experience-meeting, foot-wash, donation-party, pounding, pastorium, and the verbs, to pastor, to missionate, to get (or experience) religion, to fellowship and to shout.

3. LOAN-WORDS AND NON-ENGLISH INFLUENCES

The Indians of the Far West, it would seem, had little to add to the contributions already made to the American vocabulary by the Algonquians of the Northeast. Most of the new loan-words that were picked up west of the Mississippi came in either through the Spanish, e.g., coyote, or through the Chinook trade-jargon of the Columbia river region,1 e.g., cayuse.2 There was also some translation of terms supposed to be in use among the Indians, e.g., squaw-man, heap big chief, Great White Father, Father of Waters, and happy hunting-grounds, but most of these, I suspect, owed more to the imagination of the pioneers than to the actual usage of the Indians. In the Oregon country Chinook is still understood by many Indians, and terms borrowed from it are heard as localisms, e.g., tillicum (friend), cultus (worthless, evil), tumtum (literally heart, used to signify belief, opinion, hunch), potlatch (feast, public meeting), skookum (strong, majestic, splendid), namitch (a journey),

1 An amalgam of Chinook proper and various other Indian languages, e.g., Nootka, Chehalis, Klickitat and Wasco, with contributions from French, English and probably also Russian. A good account of it, with a vocabulary, is in Gill's Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, 15th ed.; Portland, Ore., 1909. It was in use all over the Northwest, from the Cascade Mountains to the coast. The Indian languages differed so greatly that they were mutually unintelligible. See also the Chinook Jargon, by Douglas Leechman, American Speech, July, 1926, and the Chinook Jargon, by E. H. Thomas, the same, June, 1927.

2 According to the Oxford Dictionary, cayuse is "said to be from the language of the Chinook Indians of Oregon," but Mr. H. L. Davis believes that it is from the French cailloux (pebbles).

and koksbut (used up, worn out, ruined).1 It is possible that hike is derived from the Chinook hyak (to hurry), but this remains uncertain. In the Southwest many loan-words from the local Indian languages are similarly in more or less general use, e.g., hogan (an Indian habitation), kiva (the central building of a pueblo), sambuke (a musical instrument), tombé (another), katchina (a spirit), tiswin (an intoxicant), and tegua (a sandal).2

Contact with the French in Louisiana and along the Northwestern border, and with the Spanish in Texas and farther West, brought in many new words. From the Canadian French, as we have seen in Chapter III, Section 1, prairie, bateau, portage and rapids had been borrowed during colonial days. To these French contributions bayou, depot, picayune, levee, chute, butte, crevasse, lagniappe and coulee3 were now added, and probably also shanty4 and canuck.5

Prairie begat an enormous progeny during the great movement into the West. In 1828 Noah Webster omitted it altogether from his “American Dictionary of the English Language,” but Thornton shows that its use to designate the Western steppes was already common before the Revolution, and that prairie-hen and prairie-dog had come in by 1805. By 1857, according to Sir William Craigie,6 “ at least thirty other combinations of the same type had been employed in the works of explorers and other writers.” The Century Dictionary (1889-91) records thirty-four prairie combinations, the Oxford Dictionary (1909) sixty-three, and Webster’s New International, Second Edition (1934), seventy-nine.

1 I am indebted here to Mr. H. L. Davis, author of Honey in the Horn, and to Mr. Lewis A. McArthur of Portland, secretary to the Oregon Geographic Board.

2 For a longer list, see The English Language in the Southwest, by T. M. Pearce, New Mexico Historical Review, July, 1932.

3 Coulee, from the French coulée, running or flowing, is applied to deep valleys or ravines. It is commonly debased to colly, as in the title of Hamlin Garland’s book, Rose of Dutchers Coolly (1895). Its use is confined to the Northwest.

4 Shanty is apparently derived from the French chantier, the camp of a gang of loggers. A lumberman is often called a shantyman, and the word has spawned other derivatives, e.g., Shanty Irish (title of a book by Jim Tully, 1928), shanty-town and to shanty. Shanty has been traced to 1820. Folk etymology has assimilated chantey to it, but the two words are distinct in derivation and meaning. Chantey is from the French chantez, the imperative of chanter, to sing, and is not American.

5 Thornton’s first example of canuck is dated 1855.

6 The Study of American English, S.P.E. Tracts No. XXVII, 1927, p. 208.

From Spanish, once the Mississippi was crossed, and particularly during and after the Mexican War, there came a swarm of novelties, many of which have remained firmly imbedded in the language. Among them were numerous names of strange personages and objects: rancho, alfalfa, mustang, sombrero, canyon, desperado, poncho, chaparral, corral, bronco, plaza, peon, alcalde, burro, mesa, tornado, presidio, patio, sierra and adobe. To them, as soon as gold was discovered, were added bonanza, eldorado, placer and vigilante. Some of the borrowings of the time underwent phonetic change. The Spanish cincho, meaning a saddle girth, quickly became cinch, and in a little while took on a figurative significance that still clings to it. Vamos, the first person plural of the Spanish “let's go,” became vamose or vamoose in American, and presently begat an American verb, to mosey. Chigre, which the English had borrowed from the Spanish in the Seventeenth Century, making it chigoe (the Oxford Dictionary still credits it to “the West Indies and South America ”), was borrowed anew by the Western pioneers, and converted into the more American chigger or jigger. The Spanish chinche, which had been likewise borrowed by English in the Seventeenth Century but later abandoned, was reborrowed by American on the frontier, and became the still familiar chinch, a bedbug. Estampida was converted into stampede, frijol into frijole (pro. freholay), tamal into tamale, tortilla into tortillia, and vaquero into buckaroo.1 Chile, a pepper, came in with frijole and tamale, and at the same time the pioneers became acquainted with the Mexican beverages, mescal,2 pulque and tequila. Such words as señor, señorita, padre, siesta, sabe, poncho, pinto, yerba, hombre, casa and arroyo began to bespatter their speech. They converted calabozo into calaboose, (la)reata into lariat, lazo into lasso, rancho into ranch, and chaparejos into chaps, made free use of such words and phrases as poco, pronto and quien sabe?, and outfitted many Spanish loan-words with derivatives, e.g., ranchman, rancher, ranch-house, to ranch, to lasso, to corral, to cinch, hot-tomale, bronc, box-canyon, peonage, burro-load, -weed, -train and -trail, loco-weed (Sp. loco,

1 Vaquero means cowboy, and is used in that sense in Argentina. In the American West it quickly acquired the special sense of a Mexican cowboy, and that sense it retains. Buckaroo seems to have dropped out. The American cowboy is always

a cow-puncher, a cow-hand, or simply a cowboy.

2 Mescal like chile, tamale, chocolate, coyote, mesquite, zarape, tobacco and tomato, is of Indian origin, but like all of them it came into the language by way of the Spanish.

crazy), locoed, and so on. It is possible that they borrowed coon, in the sense of a Negro, from the Spanish barracón (commonly pronounced barracóon by the Americans), a rude shelter used by slaves. In the East coon was commonly applied to whites down to the Civil War, and especially to the adherents of Tyler in 1840. The precise history of its transfer to Negroes remains to be investigated.

Most of the terms that I have rehearsed came into the speech of the Western plainsmen and mountain-men before the Civil War, but some of them did not reach the East until the beginning of the movement to pacify and settle the Indian lands, toward the end of the 60's. Many others, in common use by the pioneers, have since sunk to the estate of Westernisms, or dropped out altogether. To the latter class belong adelantado, a military governor; borracho, a drunkard; capitan; comisario, a policeman; ayuntamiento, a city council; and lepero, a beggar. To the former belong amigo, a friend; camino, a road; chico and chiquito, small; campo santo, a cemetery; hacienda, a landed estate; buero, a blond; jornada, a desert; mesa, a tableland; mocho, bob-tailed; mozo, a servant; pinto, piebald; zarape, a cloak; paseo, a trip; and sala, a room. But the effect of Western fiction, of the movies and talkies, of the popularity of pseudo-Spanish bungalow architecture, and of the constant invasion of Southern California by transient visitors has been to keep a large number of Spanish loan-words alive in American speech. Thus most Americans know what a patio is, and a pinto pony, and a hombre. Such words are not often used save in the Southwest, but nevertheless they are understood almost everywhere.1

The period saw the beginning of the great immigrations, and the American people now came into contact, on a large scale, with peo-

1 The best study of Spanish loan-words is to be found in A Dictionary of Spanish Terms in English, With Special Reference to the American Southwest, by Harold W. Bentley; New York, 1932. This admirable work discusses the Spanish influence upon American at length, and with historical insight, and presents a vocabulary of about 400 terms. In addition there is a list of Indian words that came in through the Spanish, and a long list of Spanish place-names in the United States. There is a brief bibliography. See also Geographical Terms in the Far West, by Edward E. Hale, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. IV, 1932; A Contribution Towards a Vocabulary of Spanish and Mexican Words Used in Texas, by H. Tallichet, Dialect Notes, Pt. IV, 1892 (with addenda in Pt. V, 1893, and Pt. VIII, 1894); Geographical Terms From the Spanish, by Mary Austin, American Speech, Oct., 1933; and The English Language in the Southwest, by T. M. Pearce, New Mexico Historical Review, July, 1932.

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ples of divergent race, particularly Germans, Irish Catholics from the South of Ireland (the Irish of colonial days " were descendants of Cromwell's army, and came from the North of Ireland "),1 and, on the Pacific Coast, Chinese. So early as the 20's the immigration to the United States reached 25,000 in a year; in 1824 the Legislature of New York, in alarm, passed a restrictive act.2 The Know-Nothing movement of the 50's need not concern us here. It is enough to recall that the immigration of 1845 passed the 100,000 mark, and that that of 1854 came within sight of 500,000. These new Americans, most of them Germans and Irish, did not all remain in the East; a great many spread through the West and Southwest with the other pioneers. Their effect upon the language was a great deal more profound than most of us think. The Irish, speaking the English of Cromwell's time, greatly reinforced its usages in the United States, where it was beginning to yield to the schoolmarm. " The influence of Irish-English," writes an English correspondent, " is still plainly visible all over the United States. Some years ago, before I had seen America, a relative of mine came home after twelve years' farming in North Dakota, and I was struck by the resemblance between his speech and that of the Irish drovers who brought cattle to Norwich market."3 The Germans also left indelible marks upon American, and particularly upon the spoken American of the common people. The everyday vocabulary shows many German words and turns of

1 Prescott F. Hall: Immigration; New York, 1913, p. 5. Even in co-lonial days there were more such non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants than is commonly assumed. Says Frederick J. Turner, in The Frontier in American History, pp. 22-23: "The Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans, or Pennsylvania Dutch, furnished the dominant element in the stock of the colonial frontier. . . . Such examples teach us to beware of misinterpreting the fact that there is a common English speech in America into the belief that the stock is also English." 2 Most of the provisions of this act, however, were later declared unconstitutional. Several subsequent acts met the same fate. 3 The same correspondent adds: "I find very little trace of Scotch on this continent. One might expect to

find it in Toronto, the Presbyterian Lhassa, where slot-machines are removed from the streets on Sunday, but the speech of Toronto is actually not distinguishable from that of Buffalo. That is to say, it is quite Irish. The Scotch are not tenacious of their dialect, in spite of the fuss they make about it. It disappears in the second generation. I have met Prince Edward Islanders who speak Gælic and American, but not Scotch. The affinity between Scotch and French, by the way, is noticeable nowhere more than in the Province of Quebec, where I have met Macdonalds who couldn't speak English. The Scotch surrender their speech customs more readily than the English, and the Irish, it seems to me, are most tenacious of all."

phrase. Sauerkraut and noodle, as we have seen in Chapter III, Section 1, came in during the colonial period, apparently through the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, i.e., a mixture, somewhat debased, of the German dialects of Switzerland, Suabia and the Palatinate. The immigrants who came in after 1848 contributed pumpernickel, hausfrau, beer-garden (biergarten), lager-beer, wienerwurst (often reduced to wiener or wienie), frankfurter, bock-beer, sauerbraten, schnitzel, leberwurst (sometimes half translated as liverwurst), blutwurst, dachshund, zwieback, stein (drinking vessel), rathskeller, schweizer (cheese), delicatessen, hamburger (steak), kindergar-ten and katzenjammer.1 Some of these words did not really lodge in the American vocabulary until after the second great German immigration began in 1870, but nevertheless they were heard before the Civil War. From the Germans, in all probability, there also came two very familiar Americanisms, loafer and bum. The etymology of the former is still to be worked out, but practically all authorities agree that it is of German origin. James Russell Lowell suggested that it was derived from the German laufen (in various dialects, lofen), meaning to run, but this seems improbable, and the Oxford

1 The majority of these words, it will be noted, relate to eating and drinking. They mirror the profound effect of German immigration upon American drinking habits and the American cuisine. In July, 1921, despite the current prejudice against all things German, I found sauerbraten on the bill-of-fare at Delmonico's in New York, and, more surprising still, “braten with potato-salad.” The effort to substitute liberty-cabbage for sauerkraut, made by professional patriots in 1918, was a complete failure. It is a fact often observed that loan-words, at least on the level of the common speech, seldom represent the higher aspirations of the creditor nation. French and German mainly have borrowed from English such terms as beefsteak, roast-beef, pudding, grog, jockey, tourist, sport, five-o'clock tea and sweepstakes, and from American such terms as tango, jazz, fox-trot, one-step, cocktail and canoe (often kanu). “The contributions of England to European civilization, as

tested by the English words in Continental languages,” says L. P. Smith, “are not, generally, of a kind to cause much national self-congratulation.” See The English Element in Foreign Language, by the same author, in English, March, 1919. Also English and American Sport Terms in German, by Theodore McClintock, American Speech, Dec., 1933. But on higher levels a more decorous interchange goes on. From German, for example, both English and American have borrowed many scientific words, e.g., psychology, morphology, teleology, oceanography, ecology, spectroscope and statistics; many medical and chemical words, e.g., morphine, laudanum, bacillus, bacterium, ether, creosote, pepsin, protozoa and aniline; and a number of terms in everyday use, e.g., masterpiece, dollar, veneer, homesickness, taximeter, waltz and dablia. See The German Influence on the English Vocabulary, by Charles T. Carr, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XLII, 1934.

Dictionary rejects the derivation. A much more likely prototype is to be found in the German noun landläufer, meaning a tramp, and this etymology is favored by Ernest Weekley in his “Etymological Dictionary of Modern English ” (1921). Thornton's first example is taken from the title of a sketch by Cornelius Matthews, “ The Late Ben Smith, Loafer,” printed in the Knickerbocker Magazine, for July, 1835. R. H. Dana, in “Two Years Before the Mast ” (1840) spoke of loafer as “ the newly invented Yankee word ”; his book was an expansion of notes made in 1834-6. In 1855, in “ Leaves of Grass,” Whitman used to loaf in a phrase that seems destined to live: “ I loafe [note the original spelling] and invite my soul.” Bum was originally bummer, and apparently comes from the German word bummler.1 Both loafer and bummer have provided numerous derivatives: loaf (noun), to loaf, loafing-place, corner-loafer, common-loafer, town-loafer. to bum, bum as an adjective (as in bum steer and bum food), bum's-rush, bumming-place and bummery, not to mention to go (or be) on the bum. Loafer has migrated to England, but bum is still unknown there in the American sense. In England an old English word, bum, dating from the Fourteenth Century, is used to designate the buttocks, and is thus not heard in polite discourse.

Another example of debased German is offered by the American Kriss Kringle. It is from Christkindlein, or Christkind'l, and properly designates, of course, not the patron saint of Christmas, but the child in the manger. A German friend tells me that the form Kriss Kringle, which is that given in “Webster's New International Dictionary,” and the form Krisking'l, which is that most commonly used in the United States, are both unknown in Germany. Here,

1 Thornton offers examples of bummer ranging from 1856 to 1892. Strangely enough, he does not list bum, which has now supplanted it. During the Civil War bummer acquired the special meaning of looter, and was applied by the Southerners to the men of Sherman's army of invasion. Here is a popular rhyme which survived until the early 90's: Isidor, psht, psht! Vatch de shtore, psht, psht! Vile I ketch de bummer Vhat shtole de suit of clothes!

Bummler has bred many derivatives in German, e.g., bummelci, meaning dawdling or laziness; bummelig, unpunctual, careless; bummeln, to waste time, to take it easy; bummelleben, a life of ease; bummelzug, a slow train. Einen bummeln machen means to take a leisurely stroll. Once, in Bremen, when my baggage came near missing a train, the portier of my hotel explained that a porter had gotten delivering it.

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obviously, we have an example of a loan-word undergoing phonetic change. Whole phrases have gone through the same process, for example, nix come erous 1 (from nichts kommt heraus) 2 and 'rous mit 'im (from heraus mit ihm). These phrases, like wie geht's and ganz gut, are familiar to practically all Americans, no matter how complete their ignorance of correct German. Most of them know, too, the meaning of gesundheit, kümmel, seidel, spitzbub, gemütlich, männerchor, schützenfest, sängerfest, turnverein, hoch, yodel and zwei (as in zwei bier). I once found snitz (Ger. schnitz) in the elegant pages of Town Topics. 3 Prosit is in all American dictionaries. 4 Bower, as used in cards, is an Americanism derived from the German bauer (peasant), meaning the jack. Poker, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is probably derived from pochspiel, " a similar bluffing card-game of considerable age, from pochen, to boast, brag, literally to knock, rap." From a correspondent I have a somewhat different account of this game. "Its name," he says, "is derived from the fact that at one stage of the play the players in turn declare the state of

1 Lincoln used nix come erous in a letter dated Nov. 11, 1854. It is quoted in Lincoln the Man, by Edgar Lee Masters; New York, 1931, p. 226.

2 Whether nix came into American direct from the German or by way of the English thieves' argot I do not know. The Oxford Dictionary's first example, dated 1789, is from George Parker's Life's Painter. "How they have brought a German word into cant," says Parker, "I know not, but nicks means nothing in the cant language." Bartlett, Farmer and Thornton fail to list it. A great many English criminals came to the United States between 1800 and the Civil War, and they brought some of their argot with them. Perhaps nix was included. Whatever the fact, the word bred a derivative, nixie, which seems to be peculiar to American. In the United States Official Postoffice Guide for 1885 nixie was defined as " a term used in the railway mail service to denote matter of domestic origin, chiefly of the second and first class, which is unmailable because addressed to places

which are not postoffices, or to States, etc., in which there is no such postoffice as that indicated in the address." Its meaning has since been extended to include all mail "so incorrectly, illegibly, indefinitely or insufficiently addressed that it cannot be transmitted." (Sec. 1639, Postal Laws and Regulations.) The Postoffice informs me that it has no record showing when the word was introduced. Nicht is also at the bottom of nit, aber nit, nixy and nitsky, but most of them came in after the period under review. See Substitutes for No, by T. J. S., American Speech, Aug., 1927. In some of the German dialects nicht becomes nöt or nit, and nichts becomes nix.

3 Jan. 24, 1918, p. 4.

4 Nevertheless, when I once put it into a night-letter a Western Union office refused to accept it, the rules then requiring all night-letters to be in "plain English." Meanwhile, the English have borrowed it from American, and it is in the Oxford Dictionary. It comes originally from student Latin, but has been in German for centuries.

their hands by either passing or opening. Those who pass, signify it by saying 'Ich poche' or 'Ich poch.' This is sometimes indicated by knocking on the table with one's knuckles." But poker remains an enigma, and many other theories to account for the origin of the name have been advanced. In the Fourteenth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1929) R. F. Foster, author of several well-known card manuals, says that the game is of Persian origin, and reached the United States by way of New Orleans. Its Persian name is as nas, "but owing to its resemblance to the French game of poque and the German game of pochen, the French colonists called it poque, and this spelling was mispronounced by the English-speaking players as po-que, easily converted into po-ker." Schele de Vere, in his "Americanisms" (1872) derived poker from the French poche, a pocket, but apparently on very shaky grounds.

The exclamation ouch is classed as an Americanism by Thornton, and he gives an example dated 1837. The Oxford Dictionary refers it to the German autsch, and Thornton says that " it may have come across with the Dunkers or the Mennonites." All of the Oxford's examples are American, for ouch is seldom used in English, save in the sense of a clasp or buckle set with precious stones (from the Old French nouche), and even in that sense it is archaic. Shyster Rum-dumb is grounded upon the meaning of dumb borrowed from the Germans; it is not listed in the English slang dictionaries. Bristed says that the American meaning of wagon, which indicates almost any four-wheeled, horse-drawn vehicle in this country but only the very heaviest in England, was probably influenced by the German wagen. He also suggests that the American use of hold on for stop was influenced by the German halt an, and White says that the substitution of standpoint for point of view, long opposed by purists, was first made by an American professor who sought " an Anglicized form " of the German standpunkt. Other etymologists, professional and amateur, have discerned German influences in the peculiarly American use of fresh in the sense of saucy or impudent (Ger. frech); in gee-whiz (Ger. gewiss - but this is hardly convincing); in the American preference for shoe as against the English boot

1 Thornton's first example shows a variant spelling, shuyster. All subsequent examples show the present spelling. It is to be noted that the suffix -ster is not uncommon in English, and that it usually carries a deprecatory significance.

(Ger. schub); in the common use of Bladder as a derisory title for a small and bad newspaper (Ger. käseblatt); in stunt (Ger. stunde, hour - another one hard to believe); in the American bub, once commonly used in addressing a boy (Ger. bube); in the American use of check instead of the English bill to designate a restaurant reckoning (Ger. zeche); and in such phrases as it is to laugh, and five minutes of three (instead of the English to three). German influence may also have something to do with the extraordinary facility with which American forms compound nouns. In most other modern languages the process is rare, and English itself lags far behind American. But in German it is almost unrestricted. “It is,” says Logan Pearsall Smith, “a great step in advance toward that ideal language in which meaning is expressed, not by terminations, but by the simple method of word-position.”

German, like Dutch, Spanish and French, has naturally left its most salient traces in those areas with the largest population of German-speaking immigrants. In the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch regions of Pennsylvania and in some of the Western States a great many Germanisms are in circulation. In the former, says W. H. Allen,1 “many words and constructions are obviously of German origin. That equals so that, as in ‘We like our mince-pie piping hot that it steams inside.’ A tut or a paper tut is a paper bag. Verdrübt means sad. The freinschaft is the relationship. All is all gone, as in ‘The butter is all.’ Look means be fitting, as in ‘It doesn’t look for two girls to go there alone.’” Mr. Allen lists many other localisms, among them, glick, to come out right (Ger. glück); siffer, a heavy drinker (Ger. säufer); and ritschi, a frozen pond used for sliding (Ger. rutschen, to slide). Santa Claus, in such areas, is usually Belsnickel, as indeed he was among the Germans of Baltimore when I was a boy.2 A. W. Meyer has assembled some curious examples from the Middle West,3 for example, brickstein for brick (Ger. backstein), heurack for hayrack (Ger. heu, hay), and büchershelf for bookshelf (Ger. bücher, books). Plunder is still often used in meaning a witch, is in common use there, and in 1930 the sensational trial of a York county hex-doctor made the term familiar throughout the United States.

1 In Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. II, 1914, p. 157. 2 See also Linguistic Substrata in Pennsylvania and Elsewhere, by R. Whitney Tucker, Language, March, 1934. Dr. Tucker discusses the phonology of the American spoken in lower Pennsylvania. Hex, 3 Some German-Americanisms from the Middle West, American Speech, Dec., 1926.

160 The American Language

that part of the country to designate baggage, a usage probably sug-

gested by the identical German word, and going back to the first

years of the Nineteenth Century. A peculiar intonation is remarked

by visitors to the Pennsylvania German towns. “The voice,” says

Mr. Allen, “is raised at the beginning of a question and lowered at

the end.” Whether this is due to German influence I do not know,

but it is also noticeable when the native speaker is using what passes

locally for German. Mr. Allen goes on:

Questions frequently contain an ain't: “You'll do that, ain't you will?”

“You won't do that, ain't you won't?” “He's been gone a long time, ain't

he has?” If one asks “Have you any good apples?” the answer is “I do.”

“Don't you think?” with a falling inflection is often added to questions. The

most striking idiom is the use of till (and until) as a conjunction meaning

by the time, and as a preposition meaning at or on (temporarily). “It will be

raining till we get home.” “We were tired till we were there.” “We'll be

back till (at) six.” A sort of genitive of time is found in this sentence: “She

came Saturdays and left Mondays.” In each instance this means one particular

day. An ethical dative is often heard: “Little Thomas ran away for his mother

yesterday.”

The immigrants from the South of Ireland, during the period

between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, exerted an influence

upon the language that was vastly greater than that of the Germans,

both directly and indirectly, but their contributions to the actual

vocabulary were probably less. They gave American, indeed, very

few new words; perhaps speakeasy, shillelah and smithereens exhaust

the list. Lallapalooza may also be an Irish loan-word, though it is

not Gaelic, nor even English. It apparently comes from allay-foozlee,

a Mayo provincialism, signifying a sturdy fellow. Allay-foozlee, in

its turn, comes from the French allez-fusil, meaning “Forward the

muskets!” - a memory, according to P. W. Joyce,1 of the French

landing at Killala in 1798. Such phrases as Erin go bragh and such

expletives as begob and begorry may perhaps be added: they have

got into American understanding, though they are surely not dis-

tinctive Americanisms. But of far more importance, in the days of

the great immigrations, than these few contributions to the vocabu-

lary were certain speech habits that the Irish brought with them -

habits of pronunciation, of syntax, and even of grammar. These

habits were, in part, the fruit of efforts to translate the idioms of

Gaelic into English, and in part survivals from the English of the

1 English As We Speak It in Ireland,

2nd ed.; London, 1910, pp. 179-180.

age of James I. The latter, preserved by Irish conservatism in speech,

came into contact in America with habits surviving, with more or

less change, from the same time, and so gave those American habits

an unmistakable reinforcement. The Yankees have lived down such

Jacobean pronunciations as tay for tea and desave for deceive, and

these forms, on Irish lips, strike them as uncouth and absurd, but

they still cling, in their common speech, to such forms as h’ist for

hoist, bile for boil, chaw for chew, jine for join, sass for sauce,

heighth for height, rench for rinse and lep for leaped, and the em-

ployment of precisely the same forms by the thousands of Irish

immigrants who spread through the country undoubtedly gave

them support, and so protected them, in a measure, from the assault

of the purists. And the same support was give to drowned for

drowned, oncet for once, ketch for catch, ag’in for against and onery

for ordinary. C. H. Grandgent shows in “Old and New” (1920)

that the so-called Irish oi- sound in jine and bile was still regarded

as correct in the United States so late as 1822, though certain New

England grammarians, eager to establish the more recent English

usage, had protested against it before the end of the Eighteenth

Century. The Irish who came in in the 30’s joined the populace in

the war upon the reform, and to this day some of the old forms

survive on the lower levels of the national speech.

Certain usages of Gælic, carried over into the English of Ireland,

fell upon fertile soil in America. One was the employment of the

definite article before nouns, as in French and German. An Irish-

man does not say “I am good at Latin,” but “I am good at the Latin.”

In the same way an American does not say “I had measles,”

but “I had the measles.” There is, again, the use of the prefix a be-

fore various continuing verbs, as in a-going and a-riding. This usage,

of course, is native to English, but it is much more common in the

Irish dialect, on account of the influence of the parallel Gælic form,

and it is also much more common in American. There is, yet again, a

use of intensifying prefixes and suffixes, often set down as character-

istically American, which may have been borrowed from the Irish.

Examples of such stretch-forms are no-siree, yes-indeedy, teetotal.

The Irishman is almost incapable of saying plain yes or no; he must

always add some extra and gratuitous asseveration.¹ The American

1 Amusing examples are to be found in Donlevy’s Irish Catechism. To

the question, “Is the Son God?” the answer is not simply “Yes,” but

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The American Language

is in like case. His speech bristles with intensives, so the Irish extravagance of speech struck a responsive chord in the American heart, and American borrowed, not only occasional words, but whole phrases, and some of them have become thoroughly naturalized. Joyce shows the Irish origin of many locutions that are now often mistaken for native inventions, for example, dead as an intensive, not to mention many familiar similes and proverbs. Certain Irish pronunciations, Gaelic rather than archaic English, got into American during the early Nineteenth Century, often with humorous effect. Among them, one recalls bboy, which entered our political slang in the middle 40's but has since passed out.

From other languages the borrowings during the period of growth were naturally less. Down to the last decades of the Nineteenth Century, the overwhelming majority of immigrants were either Germans or Irish; the Jews, Italians, Scandinavians and Slavs were yet to come. But the first Chinese appeared in 1848, and soon their speech began to contribute its inevitable loan-words. These words were first adopted by the argonauts of the Pacific Coast, and a great many of them have remained Western localisms. A number of others have got into the common speech of the whole country. Of such sort are the verbs to yen (meaning to desire strongly, as a Chinaman is supposed to desire opium), to flop (meaning to sleep or lie down), and to kowtow, and the nouns joss, chow, yok-a-mi, fantan, chop-suey, chow-mein 1 and tong. Joss-house, flophouse, tong-war, and chopsuey-joint are familiar derivatives. Contrary to what seems to be a popular opinion, hop is not Chinese. It is simply the common name of the Humulus lupulus, which, in English folklore, has long been held to have a soporific effect. Hop-pillows were brought to American by the first English colonists. Neither is high-binder a

"Yes, certainly He is." And to the question, "Will God reward the good and punish the wicked?" the answer is "Certainly; there is no doubt He will."

1 The newspapers often report the discovery that neither chop-suey or chow-mein is a Chinese dish. This is probably true of the former. I have been told that it is a mixture of Chinese dishes, concocted for the American palate, and that the

name, in Chinese, means slops. But according to Joe Lin, national secretary of the On Leong Chinese Merchants Association (quoted in the Minneapolis Star, April 19, 1929), chow-mein is actually Chinese, though it has been "a bit flavored up for Western palates." I am indebted here to Mr. R. S. Kelly, of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

The Period of Growth

163

translation from a Chinese term, as seems to be commonly believed.

So long ago as 1840 Edgar Allan Poe wrote in his Marginalia:

As to high-binder which is so confidently quoted as modern (“not in use, certainly, before 1819,”) I can refute all that is said by referring to a journal in my own possession – the Weekly Inspector, for Dec. 27, 1806 – published in New York:

“On Christmas Eve, a party of banditti, amounting, it is stated, to forty or fifty members of an association, calling themselves high-binders, assembled in front of St. Peter’s Church, in Barclay-street, expecting that the Catholic ritual would be performed with a degree of pomp and splendor which has usually been omitted in this city. These ceremonies, however, not taking place, the high-binders manifested great displeasure.”

In a subsequent number, the association are called hide-binders. They were Irish.

V

THE LANGUAGE TODAY

I. AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

The general characteristics of American English have been sufficiently described in the preceding chapters. It has maintained them unbrokenly since Jackson's day, though there was a formidable movement to bring it into greater accord with English precept and example during the years following the Civil War. This movement was led by such purists as Edward S. Gould, William D. Whitney and Richard Grant White, and seems to have got its chief support from schoolmarms, male and female, on the one hand, and from Anglomaniacs on the other.1 Gould, in 1867, brought out his "Good English," the first of what was to be a long series of hortatory desk-books, by himself and other sages.2 He began by arguing that English, "within the last quarter of a century, through the agency of good writers, critics and lexicographers," had been "in many respects greatly improved," but lamented that there had also gone on a compensatory deterioration, and "in greater proportion." He said that he was not opposed, in principle, to "the fabrication of new words, and the new use of old words," but he maintained that such changes should be undertaken only by "educated men," each of

1 Henry Cabot Lodge says in his essay, Colonialism in the United States, printed in his Studies in History (1884), that "the luxurious fancies which were born of increased wealth, and the intellectual tastes which were developed by the advances of the higher education . . . revived the dying spirit of colonialism." This spirit was confined largely to "young men who despised everything American and admired everything English." Such persons, says Lodge, "flatter themselves with being cosmopolitans, when in truth they are genuine col-

onists, petty and provincial to the last degree."

2 Gould was born at Litchfield, Conn., in 1805, and died in New York in 1885. He lectured, contributed to the magazines, and wrote books and plays. In 1836 he published his Lectures Delivered Before the Mercantile Library Association, apparently as a counterblast to Samuel Lorenzo Knapp's Lectures on American Literature (1829). In this book he deplored the whooping up of American authors, and argued for the superiority of the British.

164

them capable of assuming "the burden of proof in support of his innovation." For the inventions of the "ignorant" he had only contumely, and in the forefront of the ignorant he put "the men generally who write for the newspapers." He then proceeded to denounce some of the familiar bugaboos of the English Americophobes, including to jeopardize (he agreed with Noah Webster that to jeopard was better), controversialist (though it had been used by Macaulay), leniency (though it had been used by Coleridge and even by the Edinburgh Review), underhanded, to donate, standpoint, to demean, over his signature, to open up, and try and.

White, like Gould, pretended to a broad tolerance, and even went to the length of admitting that "language is rarely corrupted, and is often enriched, by the simple, unpretending, ignorant man, who takes no thought of his parts of speech." More, he argued in the third chapter of his "Words and Their Uses" (1870)1 that the English spoken and written in the United States was at least as good as that spoken and written in England. But at once it appeared that he was assuming that the Boston dialect was Standard American. "Next," he said, "to that tone of voice which, it would seem, is not to be acquired by any striving in adult years, and which indicates breeding rather than education, the full, free, unconscious utterance of the broad ah sound of a is the surest indication in speech of social culture which began at the cradle." He then proceeded to denounce most of the Americanisms in Gould's Index Expurgatorius, with the addition of gubernatorial, presidential, reliable, balance (remainder), editorial, real-estate, railroad (he preferred the English railway), telegrapher (he preferred -ist), dirt (as in dirt-road: he believed it should be restricted to its English sense of filth), ice-water (he preferred iced), and the verbs to locate ("a common Americanism, insufferable to ears at all sensitive"), to enthuse, to aggravate, and to resurrect.2

1 A book made up of articles contributed to the New York Galaxy in 1867, 1868 and 1869. 2 White was born in 1821 and died in 1885. He studied both medicine and law, but preferred journalism, and later had a political job in New York. He edited the Riverside Shakespeare, which is still in print.

He was extremely dogmatic, and a chronic controversialist. Perhaps his chief claim to fame is the fact that he was the father of Stanford White, the architect, whose assassination in 1906 made a famous sensation. His pedantic effort to limit the field of Americanisms has been described in Chapter I, Section 5.

Gould's pedantries were attacked by G. Washington Moon, the antagonist of Dean Alford, in "Bad English Exposed" (c. 1868; 4th ed., 1871; 8th ed., 1882), and with the same weapon that had proved so effective against the dean - that is, by showing that Gould himself wrote very shaky English, judged by his own standards. White was belabored by Fitzedward Hall in "Recent Exemplifications of False Philology" (1872) and again in "Modern English" (1873). Hall was a man of extraordinary learning and knew how to use it.1 As one of the collaborators in the Oxford Dictionary he had access to its enormous store of historical material, then still unpublished, and that material he flung at White with great precision and effect. In particular, he brought heavy batteries to bear upon White's reverence for the broad a of Boston, and upon the doctrine, set forth in "Words and Their Uses," that "the authority of general usage, or even of the usage of great writers, is not absolute in language" - that "there is a misuse of words which can be justified by no authority, however great, by no usage, however general." He said:

The critic neglects to furnish us with any criterion, or set of criteria, his own mandates and ordinances excepted, by which to decide when the misuse of a word becomes impossible of justification. His animadversions, where original, are, I believe, in almost every case, founded either on caprice, or defective information, or both. . . . We shall search in vain - for all the world as if he had been bred at Oxford - to find him conceding, as within the compass of the credible, the fallibility of his private judgments, or the inexhaustiveness of his meagre deductions.

Here, it will be noted by the judicious, Hall's righteous indignation ran away with his pen, and he wrote inexhaustiveness when he meant its opposite. His two books, with their close-packed and almost endless footnotes, presented a vast amount of philological

1 He was born at Troy, N. Y. in 1825, and educated at Harvard. He then went to India in search of a runaway brother. Settling there, he undertook the study of Sanskrit, and soon mastered it sufficiently to be made professor of it at Benares. He printed many learned editions of the Indian classics. In 1860 Oxford made him a D.C.L. and in 1862 he became professor of Sanskrit, Hindustani and Indian jurisprudence at King's College, London. In 1864 he became examiner in Hindustani for the British Civil Service Commission, and in 1880 he succeeded Max Müller as examiner in Sanskrit. He not only had an important hand in the Oxford Dictionary, but was also a collaborator in Joseph Wright's monumental English Dialect Dictionary (1896-1905). He died in 1901, much honoured in England but hardly known in his own country.

knowledge, and should have been sufficient to destroy the baleful influence of White, whose learning was mainly only pretension. But, as George H. Knight says in “Modern English in the Making,” Hall was undone by his very virtues. His scholarly approach and forbidding accumulation of facts repelled more readers than they attracted, and so he failed to prevail against his “amateurish rivals and opponents,” though “the soundness of his methods has been generally recognized by the expert.” Gould and White thus had it all their own way, and their pedantries were accented with complete gravity by the pedagogues of the 70's and 80's. White's “Words and Their Uses,” in fact, is still in print and still enjoys a considerable esteem, and there are many latter-day imitations of it, most of them as cocksure as it is, and as dubious.

But the effort made by the authors of such works to police the language, though it has always had the ardent support of certain eminent American literati and of almost the whole body of pedagogues, has never really impeded the natural progress of American. It has gone on developing in spite of them, and in innocent accord with its native genius. The collections amassed for the “Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles” show that in the very heyday of White a large number of New Americanisms of characteristic vigor and vulgarity were coming in, and coming in to stay – among them, wire-puller and to strike oil in 1867, and boom and to boom a few years after. A glance through Thornton, Bartlett and the Oxford Dictionary and Supplement turns up many another of the same pungent sort – claw-hammer (coat, 1869), mule-skinner. and jack-rabbit (1870), tangle-foot (whiskey, 1871), cuss-word (Mark Twain, 1872), hoodlum (1872), dead-beat (Petroleum V. Nasby, 1872), jam and jig-saw (1873), sand (courage, Bret Harte, 1875), grub-stake and hold-up (both c. 1875), freeze-out and slate (political, 1877), beeler (c. 1877), stalwart (political) and crook (1878), set-back, joint (a low den) and spellbinder.(c. 1880). To them may be added the adverbs to a frazzle (General John B. Gordon to General Robert E. Lee, 1865) and concededly (1882), and the verbs to itemize (Webster, 1864), to go through (to plunder, 1867), to go back on (1868), to suicide (1871), to guy (1872), to light out (1878), to side-track (1880) and to injunct (1880). Many of these novelties were either invented or given currency by the emerging authors of the new American school – Walt Whitman,

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The American Language

Bret Harte, Mark Twain, W. D. Howells,1 and the lesser humorists. Others popped up in the newspapers and in the debates in Congress. Some lasted for no more than a few brief months, or even weeks, and then joined the innumerable caravan of obsolete Americanisms; others got no higher in the vocabulary than the level of slang or argot, and linger there yet; still others gradually made their way into standard usage. It is, indeed, very difficult, dealing with neologisms, to know how to rate them. The most seemly, etymologically speaking, are often rejected in the long run, and the most grotesque are accepted. Many more go on dwelling in a twilight region, ordinarily disdained but summoned out for service on special occasions. In that twilight region are large numbers of the words that everyone who investigates the American language must discuss.

2. THE MAKING OF NEW NOUNS

All of the processes for the formation of new words that are distinguished by philologians have been in active operation in the United States since Jackson's time, and after the Civil War their workings took on a new impetus. It would take us beyond the range of the present work to attempt to trace those workings in any detail, but a few typical examples may be examined. Consider, for instance, the process called clipping, back-shortening, or back-formation - a sort of instinctive search for short roots in long words. This habit, in Restoration days, precipitated a quasi-English word, mobile, from

1 That Whitman, Howells and Mark Twain were acutely conscious of the changes that were occurring in American I have shown by quotations from them in Chapter I, Section 6. Howells, by an almost incredible paradox, was praised by White and denounced by Hall. White, in Words and Their Uses, spoke of his "unobtrusive and seemingly unconscious mastery of idiomatic English," but Hall, in Recent Exemplifications of False Philology, said that "among American writers of rising fame whose English is noticeably bad, Mr. Howells stands somewhat eminent." He then proceeded to belabor Howells's use of to aggravate, on the street, to anecdote, mulettress, mutual friends, to discommode, to experience, reliable and unrivaledest. Some of these were obviously only nonce-words, used with humorous intent. Others were perfectly good American, and so remain. Hall's onslaught is hardly to be taken seriously; he was simply using Howells as a club to beat White. On p. 106 he belabored Howells for using to experience and reliable, but on p. 31 he defended the former vigorously against White, and on p. 100 he defended the latter. Such are the follies of the 'learned!

the Latin 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 purists then in eruption,1 and though it survived their onslaught they undoubtedly greatly impeded the formation and adoption of other words of the same category. There are, however, many more in Standard English, e.g., patter from paternoster, van from caravan, spats from spatterdashes, wig from periwig, cab from cabriolet, gin from geneva, curio from curiosity, and pun from pundigrion.2 In Eighteenth Century America, save for a few feeble protests from Witherspoon and Boucher, they went unchallenged, and as a result they multiplied. Rattler for rattlesnake, pike for turnpike, coon for raccoon, possum for opossum, cuss for customer, squash for askutasquash — these American clipped forms are already antique; Sabbaday for Sabbath-day has actually reached the dignity of an archaism, as has the far later chromo for chromolithograph. They are still formed in great numbers, and scarcely a new substantive of more than two syllables comes in without bringing one in its wake. We have thus, in recent years, witnessed the genesis of phone for telephone, gas for gasoline, photo for photograph, movie for moving picture, and auto for automobile. Some of these newcomers linger below the salt, e.g., pep for pepper, plute for plutocrat, pug for pugilist, vamp for vampire, pen for penitentiary, defi for defiance, ambish for ambition, pash for passion, beaut for beauty, steno or stenog for stenographer, loot for lieutenant, champ for champion, simp for simpleton, sap for saphead, mutt for muttonhead3 and jit for jitney, but many others, once viewed askance, are now in more or less decorous usage, e.g., smoker for smoking-car,

1 Among them, Jonathan Swift. In the Tatler, Sept. 28, 1710, he contended that “monosyllables are the disgrace of our land.” “We cram one syllable,” he continued, “and cut off the rest, as the owl fatened her mice after she had bit off their legs, to prevent them running away. If ours be the same reason for maiming our words, it will certainly answer the end; for I am sure no other nation will desire to borrow them.”

2 There is an interesting discussion of such words in Otto Jespersen’s Growth and Structure of the Eng-

lish Language, 3rd ed.; Leipzig, 1919, pp. 170-2. See also Stunts in Language, by Louise Pound, English Journal, Vol. IX, No. 2, Feb., 1920; Essays on English, by Brander Matthews; New York, 1921, p. 107 ff; Neuenglische Kurzformbildungen, by Leo Müller; Giessen, 1923; and Clipped Words: A Convenience and a Custom, in Do You Talk Like That?, by Richard Burton; Indianapolis, 1929, p. 213 ff.

3 This etymology for mutt is supported by Bud Fisher, creator of Mutt and Jeff. See the Editor and Publisher, April 17, 1919, p. 21.

170 The American Language diner for dining-car, sleeper for sleeping-car, pa for papa, ma for mamma, flu for influenza, drapes for draperies, bronc for bronco, memo for memorandum, quotes for quotation-marks and knicker for knickerbocker.1 Back-formations often originate in college slang, e.g., prof for professor, prom for promenade (dance), grad for graduate (noun), co-ed from the adjective co-educational, medic for medical-student, frat for fraternity, gym for gymnasium, dorm for dormitory, U for university, Y for Y.M.C.A., plebe for plebeian,2 or in other varieties of slang, argot or dialect, e.g., skeeter or skeet for mosquito, cap for captain, con for convict, coke for cocaine, doc for doctor, foots for footlights, hon for honey, pard for partner, rube for Reuben, sarge for sergeant, snap for snapshot, diff for difference, ham for hamfatter, pop for populist, spec for speculation, typo for typographer, secesh for secession and prelim for preliminary.3 Ad for advertisement is struggling hard for recognition; some of its compounds, e.g., ad-writer, want-ad, display-ad, ad-rate and ad-man are already accepted.4 Boob for booby promises to become sound American in a few years; its synonyms are no more respectable than it is. At its heels are bo for bobo, and bunk for buncombe,5 two altogether fit successors to bum for bummer.

1 In the Thorndike-Century Junior Dictionary; Chicago, 1935, edited by Dr. E. L. Thorndike, of Teachers College, Columbia, for the use of the young, the following are listed without any indication that they are not in good usage: coon, pike, phone, gas, photo, movie, diner, sleeper, auto, smoker, bum, drape and knicker. But possum is stated to be in use only "in common talk," and cuss, draw, talkie, flu, pep and memo are omitted altogether.

2 See College Words and Phrases, by E. H. Babbitt, Dialect Notes, Vol. II, Pt. I, 1900.

3 A long list of such forms is in Clipped Words, by Elisabeth Wittmann, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. II, 1914.

4 In 1918 William C. D'Arcy, then president of a national association of advertising clubs, condemned the use of ad in high, astounding terms. "It is," he said, "the language of bootblacks, and is beneath the dig-

nity of men of the advertising profession." In 1925 Robert H. Cornell, executive secretary of an advertising men's convention held at Houston, Tex., "asked for the coöperation of the newspapers of Houston, the local advertisers, and all local organizations that have anything to do with the convention to avoid use of the abbreviation in all printed matter and letters going out in connection with the convention." See Associated Advertising, Jan., 1925. But Associated Advertising was forced to add that "many advertising clubs throughout the United States are commonly called Ad-Clubs, some of them even using the abbreviation on their letterheads, in their constitutions and bylaws, and in literature which they send out."

5 Bunk seems to have come in about 1910. It was first listed in the Adendum to Webster's New International Dictionary in 1918. The definite article often precedes it.

for trial, as in “He made a try at it,” is also making progress, though only, so far, on the lower levels.

All the other historical processes of word-formation are to be observed among the new American nouns. There is, for example, a large stock of blends in the current vocabulary. A number of such words, of course, are in Standard English, e.g., Lewis Carroll’s chortle (from chuckle and snort), squawk (from squeak and squall), dumbfound (from dumb and confound) and luncheon (from lunch and nuncheon, the first going back to the Sixteenth Century and the second to the Fourteenth), but American began to make contributions at an early date, e.g., gerrymander (from Gerry and salamander, c. 1812), and it has been supplying English with others ever since, e.g., cablegram (from cable and telegram) and electrolier (electric and chandelier). A few additional examples will suffice: boost (boom and boist, and maybe boast),1 Aframerican (African and American), Amerind (American and Indian),2 hellenium (Hell and millennium), pulmotor (pulmonary and motor) and travelogue (travel and monologue).3 Many words of this class are trade names,

1 See Boost, by Klara H. Collitz, American Speech, Sept., 1926. Thornton traced boost to 1825 and to boost to 1826.

2 Aframerican was invented by Sir Harry Johnston, but remains a rarity in England. Amerind, which preceded it, was first used in the publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, c. 1900. Dr. Robert H. Lowie tells me that he has heard that “it developed from merging the two abbreviations, Amer. and Ind., which figured on the labels of specimens in the National Museum.” Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly says in How to Use English; New York, 1932, p. 70, that it was coined by Major J. W. Powell of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1899, first as Amerindian and then in the contracted form.

3 Burton Holmes, the lecturer, wrote to me as follows on Jan. 16, 1935: “In 1904 we planned an invasion of London with our lectures — a word that repels the ticket-buyer. My late manager, Louis Francis Brown, worried himself sick over the problem. When he came out of his pneumonia delirium he murmured weakly, ‘Eureka! Travelogue!’, and we proceeded to broadcast the word in our publicity. Later, the late Dr. [R. R.] Bowker [1848–1933] wrote us that he was the coiner of the word, and submitted circulars of an earlier date in which it was used thus: ‘Each of Dr. Bowker’s lectures is a complete travelogue of ——.’ He had never used the word in any other way. We never saw it in print until he sent his circular. We were the first to give it any important publicity. Then everybody borrowed it, and we dropped it for travel-revue, screen-journey, and other inventions of our own. I have heard pianologues, naturelogues and other shockers.” To these organlog, used in the movies, may be added. Mr. Holmes seems to have made an error of a year in the date of his début in London. The Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary gives the following from the London Daily Chronicle of April 16, 1903: “Mr.

172

The American Language

made of initials or other parts of corporation names, e.g., socony (Standard Oil Company of New York),1 ampico (American Piano Company), nabisco (National Biscuit Company), or by other devices, e.g., bromo-seltzer (bromide and seltzer) and japalac (Japanese and lacquer).2 To the same class belong such blends as Bancamerica and Bancorporation. The American advertiser is also a very diligent manufacturer of wholly new terms, and many of his coinages, e.g., vaseline,3 cellophane, carborundum, pianola, kotex, victrola, uneeda, listerine,4 postum, lux, and kodak5 are quite as familiar

Burton Holmes, an American entertainer new to London, delivered last evening the first of a series of travelogues."

1 The oil men seem to be especially fond of such blends. See Trade Names in the Petroleum Industry, by Dora Lee Bruner, American Speech, April, 1935.

2 See Blends: Their Relation to English Word Formation, by Louise Pound; Heidelberg, 1914; Some New Portmanteau Words, by Robert Withington, Philological Quarterly, April, 1930; More Portmanteau Coinages, by the same, American Speech, Feb., 1932; Dickensian and Other Blends, by the same, American Speech, Oct., 1933; Blends, by Steven T. Byington, American Speech, Oct., 1927; Blend-Words in English, by Harold Wentworth; Ithaca, N. Y., 1933; Iteratives, Blends and Streckformen, by F. A. Wood, Modern Philology, Oct., 1911; Some English Blends, by the same, Modern Language Notes, June, 1912; On Blendings of Synonymous or Cognate Expressions in English, by G. A. Bergström, Lund (Sweden), 1906.

3 Vaseline was coined by Robert A. Chesebrough in 1870 or thereabout. It was made of the German wasser, meaning water, and the Greek elaion, meaning oil. Mr. Chesebrough was of the opinion that "petroleum is produced by the decomposition of water in the earth, and the union of the hydrogen thus evolved with the carbon of certain rocks, under the influence of heat and pressure." (Private communication from Mr. T. J. Dobbins, secretary of the Chesebrough Manufacturing Company, March 15, 1935).

Vaseline now appears in all the German and French dictionaries, but all rights to the name are still vested in the Chesebrough Company. Its original trade-mark was renewed on July 25, 1905, and upheld by a decree of the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, May 26, 1933. It was similarly upheld in England by the Court of Appeal in 1902. Vaseline is now in most of the Continental languages.

4 Listerine, of course, is derived from the name of Lord Lister, the English surgeon who brought in aseptic surgery, but it was coined in the United States. Lord Lister objected to the use of his name, but in vain.

5 Kodak was coined by George Eastman, inventor of the camera, and he registered it as a trademark on Sept. 4, 1888. Its origin is described in George Eastman, by Carl W. Ackerman; New York, 1930. The k was suggested by the fact that it was the first letter of his mother's family name. Kodak has got into all the Continental languages. In October, 1917, the Verband Deutscher Amateurphotographen-Vereine was moved to issue the following warning: "Wer von einem Kodak spricht und nur allgemein eine photographische Kamera meint, bedenkt nicht, dass er mit der Weiterver-

The Language Today

173

to all Americans as tractor or soda-mint, and have come into general acceptance as common nouns. Dr. Louise Pound has made an interesting study of these artificial trade-names.1 They fall, she finds, into a number of well-defined classes. There are those that are simply derivatives from proper names, e.g., listerine, postum; the blends, e.g., jap-a-lac, locomobile, cuticura; the extensions with common suffixes, e.g., alabastine, protectograph, dictograph, orangeade, crispette, pearline; the extensions with new or fanciful suffixes, e.g., resinol, thermos, shinola, sapolio, lysol, neolin, crisco; the diminutives, e.g., cascaret, wheatlet, chiclet; the simple compounds, e.g., palmolive, spearmint, peptomint, autocar; the blends made of proper names, e.g., oldsmobile, hupmobile, valspar; the blends made of parts of syllables or simple initials, e.g., reo, nabisco; the terms involving substitutions, e.g., triscuit; and the arbitrary formations, e.g., kodak, tiz, kotex,2 vivil. Brander Matthews once published an Horatian ode, of unknown authorship, made up of such inventions:

Chipeco thermos dioxygen, temco sonora tuxedo

Resinol fiat bacardi, camera ansco wheatena;

Antiskid pebeco calox, oleo tyco barometer

Postum nabisco!

Prestolite arco congoleum, karo aluminum kryptok,

Crisco balopticon lysol, jello bellans, carborundum!

Ampico clysmic swoboda, pantasote necco britannica

Encyclopaedia?3

One of the words here used is not American, but Italian, i.e., fiat, a blend made of the initials of Fabbrica Italiano Automobili Torino,

breitung dieses Wortes die deutsche Industrie zugunsten der amerikan- isch-englischen schädigt." Despite this warning, kodak is in all the more recent German (and French) dictionaries. In American there are a number of familiar derivatives, e.g., to kodak, kodaker, kodak-fiend.

1 Word-Coimage and Modern Trade Names, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. I, 1913. See also Robots of Language, by Henry Bellamann, Yale Review, Sept., 1929.

2 In Trade-Name Suffixes, American Speech, July, 1927, Walter E. Myers calls attention to the popularity of -ex and -tex. He cites, among other familiar trade-terms, cutex, pyrex, kleenex, and celotex. He sur-

mises that -tex may owe something to texture. The etymology of some of these names is obvious, but others are somewhat puzzling. Pyrex, a name for glass ovenware, was not suggested by the Greek pyra, a hearth, but by the humble English word pie. The first baking-dish brought out was a pie-plate. For this I am indebted to Mr. William H. Curtiss, vice-president of the Corning Glass Works, Corning, N. Y.

3 The Advertiser's Artful Aid, Bookman, Feb., 1919. See also Word-Coinage, by Leon Mead; New York, n.d., and Burgess Unabridged, by Gelett Burgess; New York, 1914.

but most of the others are quite familiar to all Americans. Says Matthews:

Only a few of them would evoke recognition from an Englishman; and what a Frenchman or a German would make out of the eight lines is beyond human power even to guess. Corresponding words have been devised in France and in Germany, but only infrequently; and apparently the invention of trade-mark names is not a customary procedure on the part of foreign advertisers. The British, although less affluent in this respect than we are, seem to be a little more inclined to employ the device than their competitors on the Continent. Every American, traveling on the railways which converge upon London, must have experienced a difficulty in discovering whether the station at which his train has paused is Stoke Poges or Bovril, Chipping Norton or Mazzawattee. None the less it is safe to say that the concoction of a similar ode by the aid of the trade-mark words invented in the British Isles would be a task of great difficulty on account of the paucity of terms sufficiently artificial to bestow the exotic remoteness which is accountable for the aroma of the American “ode.”

New words, of course, are no more produced by the folk than are new ballads: they are the inventions of concrete individuals, some of whom can be identified. The elder Roosevelt was responsible, either as coiner or as propagator, for many compounds that promise to survive, e.g., strenuous-life, nature-faker, pussy-footer, weasel-word, 100% American, hyphenated-American, Ananias-Club, big-stick and embalmed-beef. Scofflaw was coined simultaneously in 1924 by Henry Irving Shaw, of Shawsheen Village, Mass., and Miss Kate L. Butler, of Dorchester in the same State.1 Debunking, and its verb, to debunk, were launched by William F. Woodward in his book, “Bunk,” in 1923. Both have been taken over by the English, though protests against them, often bitter in tone, still appear occasionally in the English newspapers.2 Moron was proposed by Dr. Henry H. Goddard in 1910 to designate a feeble-minded person of a mental age

1 Late in 1923 Delcevare King, a rich Prohibitionist of Quincy, offered a prize of $200 for the best word to apply to “the lawless drinker to stab awake his conscience.” Mr. King received more than 25,000 suggestions. The announcement that scofflaw, suggested by both Mr. Shaw and Miss Butler, had won was made on Jan. 15, 1924. The word came into immediate currency, and survived until the collapse of Prohibition.

2 For example, A. E. Sullivan wrote to the London Daily Telegraph, March 2, 1935: “The origin of to debunk is doubtless the same as that of American jargon in general – the inability of an ill-educated and unintelligent democracy to assimilate long words. Its intrusion in our own tongue is due partly to the odious novelty of the word itself, and partly to the prevailing fear that to write exact English nowadays is to be put down as a pedant and a prig.”

of from eight to twelve years; it was formally adopted by the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-minded in May of that year, and immediately came into wide use. In Chicago, at the time of the Leopold-Loeb trial in 1924, the local newspapers began to misuse it in the sense of sexual pervert, and it has retained that meaning locally ever since.1 Many new words, launched with impressive ceremony, have only short lives as nonce-words, or fail altogether. In his “Fifty Suggestions” (c. 1845) Edgar Allan Poe proposed that suspectful be used to differentiate between the two meanings of suspicious, one who suspects and one to be suspected, but though the word is in “Webster's New International” (1934) it is marked “now rare,” and no one uses it. Most of Walt Whitman's inventions went the same way. On March 6, 1926, the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals awarded a prize to Mrs. M. McIlvaine Bready, of Mickleton, N. J., for pitilacker, and tried to establish it in the sense of one cruel to animals, but it failed to make the success of scofflaw. In “The Mighty Medicine” (1929) the late Dr. Franklin H. Giddings proposed taboobery and tomtomery, but neither seized the public fancy. During the heyday of the I.W.W. (1912-1920) one of its chief propagandists was a writer calling himself T-Bone Slim; he wrote for most of the fugitive organs of the movement, but especially for the Industrial Worker. He invented many neologisms, and some of them were popular for a time, but only brisanality, signifying a platitudinous utterance by Arthur Brisbane of the Hearst papers (or, at all events, one thought to be platitudinous by radicals), has survived. In February, 1927, the Forum issued a general call for new words, and during the months following many were proposed by its readers, but not one of them seems to have got into the American vocabulary.2

The formation of artificial words of the scalawag, lallapaloosa and rambunctious class goes on constantly. Some of them are blends: grandificent (from grand and magnificent) and sodalicious (from

1 Moron is the name of a character in Molière's La Princesse d'Elide, 1664. But Dr. Goddard got it from the Greek.

at Springfield, Mass., by the publishers of Webster's New International Dictionary, and edited by Max J. Herzberg of Newark, N. J.) were invited to send in invented words. Some of those received were cacogen (an anti-social person) pajambooree, and Gersteinian (from Gertrude Stein).

2 Some of them deserved a better fate, e.g., sothers (brothers and sisters), megaphonia (the habit of talking too loud), hesh (for he and she), and radiorator. In Nov., 1935 the readers of Word Study (published

176 The American Language

soda and delicious); others are made up of common roots and gro-tesque affixes: whangdoodle, splendiferous and peacharino; others are arbitrary reversals, as sockdolager from doxologer, and yet others are stretch-forms or mere extravagant inventions: scallywampus, dingus, doodad, supergobslopitious and floozy.1 Many 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, e.g., whangdoodle and monkey-doodle, hint at German influences, and those in -ino may owe something to Italian or maybe to Spanish. Such suffixes are sometimes worked heavily. The first to come into fashion in the United States was apparently -ery, which appeared in printery in 1638. When beanery followed it I do not know, but it must have been before the end of the next century. Grocery (for grocery-store) has been traced back to 1806, and groggery to 1822. Bakery and bindery also seem to be American. In late years many congeners have appeared, e.g., boozery, bootery and breadery. Con-densery is used in the West to indicate a place where milk is condensed. Creamery, though it has now got into English, is listed in the Oxford Dictionary as “first used in U. S.” Dr. Louise Pound reports hashery, drinkery and drillery, the last signifying a cramming-school for the Civil Service, and E. S. Hills adds cakery, car-washery, dough-nutery, lunchery, mendery (a place where clothes are mended), and eatery.2 In Three Rivers, Mich., so I am told by a correspondent, there is a shoe-fixery. In Pasadena, Calif., there is a battery; in South Pasadena a cyclery, in Los Angeles a nuttery and a chowmeinery, and near San Francisco a squabery.3

Cafeteria, as everyone knows, has produced an enormous progeny, and some of its analogues are very curious. From the discussions of the word that have appeared in American Speech since 1926 I cull the following: restauranteria, garmenteria, shaveteria (a place where shaving utensils are supplied to wayfarers), shoeteria, resteteria (a

1 See Some English Stretch-Forms, by Louise Pound, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. I, 1913. Also, Terms of Approbation and Eulogy in Ameri-can Dialect Speech, by Elsie L. Warnock, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. I, 1913, and Notes on the Ver-nacular, by Louise Pound, Ameri-can Mercury, Oct., 1924, p. 236. 2 Vogue Affixes in Present-Day Word Coinage, by Louise Pound, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. I, 1918; The Irradiation of Certain Suffixes, by E. C. Hills, American Speech, Oct., 1925. 3 American Speech, April, 1935, p. 154.

rest-room), chocolateria, sodateria, fruiteria, radioteria, bobateria (where hair is bobbed), valeteria, marketeria, caketeria, candyteria, casketeria (an undertaker's shop), drugteria, basketeria, cleaneteria, groceteria (with the variants grocerteria and groceryteria), healtheria, farmateria, mototeria (a grocereteria on wheels), cashateria, wrecketeria (a bone-yard for old motor-cars), luncheteria, haberteria, hatateria, kalfeteria or kafateria,1 honeyteria, smoketeria, and even drygoodsteria. A watchful correspondent, Dr. Harley K. Croessmann, reports a millinteria on Sheridan road in Chicago and a scarferia in Randolph street, and I myself, in 1928, encountered a spaghetteria in West 46th street, New York. Cafeteria is probably of Spanish origin, but when and where it got into American is still in dispute. Phillips Barry has found it in a dictionary of Cuban-Spanish published in 18622 and other investigators point to analogues in Standard Spanish, in common use along the Mexican border, e.g., barberia (barber-shop), carniceria (butcher-shop) and panaderia (baker-shop). In Cuban-Spanish the word means “a shop where coffee is sold.” It did not get into any American dictionary until 1918, but it had been in general use in Southern California for at least ten years before. I have, however, received a caveat to the California claim to priory from a Chicago correspondent whose name I have unfortunately mislaid. “A Chicago man,” he says, “was planning to open a new lunchroom in that city, with the new feature of the guests serving themselves. He wanted a new and appropriate name for it and applied to my cousin, who had lived in Buenos Aires. This cousin suggested cafeteria, which was adopted. It should be accented on the penultimate, but the patrons immediately moved the accent one place forward. This was about the year 1900.” Another correspondent, Mr. Herbert Spencer Jackson, of Los Angeles, informs me that he remembers seeing a cafeteria in South LaSalle street, Chicago, “about 1895.” There has been an extensive discussion of the word in American Speech and elsewhere, but some gaps in its history remain.3

1 At first glance I suspect that the kalf- and kaf- came from kaif, an interesting and instructive American form of café. But diligent inquiry revealed the fact that their origin was in calf. Both words indicate a shoe-store.

2 Cafeteria, American Speech, Oct., 1927. The dictionary is E. Pichardo's Diccionario Provincial . . . de Vozes Cubanas, published at Havana.

3 See especially Basketeria and the Meaning of the Suffix -teria, by J. M. Steadman, Jr., American Speech, June, 1930. Mr. Steadman distin-

Other suffixes that have produced interesting forms are -ette, -dom, -ster, -ite, -ist, -itis, -ician, -orium, -ogist and -or.1 Cellarette has been in English for more than a century, but kitchenette is American, and so are farmerette, conductorette, officerette and a number of other analogous words. Logan Pearsall Smith says in “The English Language” (1912) that -dom is being replaced in English by -ness, and that the effort made by Thomas Carlyle and others to revive it during the Nineteenth Century was so far a failure that only boredom (c. 1850) made any headway. But in the United States the affix retains a great deal of its old life, and has produced a long list of words, e.g., sportdom, moviedom, flapperdom, dogdom, turfdom, newspaperdom, Elkdom, filmdom and crookdom.2 Now, as in the past, -ster has an opprobrious significance, and so its chief products are such words as gangster, mobster, dopester, ringster, funster, shy-ster and speedster. From -ist we have monologist, receptionist, columnist, trapezist, manicurist, electragist, behaviorist and a number of others.3 From -ician we have the lovely mortician and its

guishes three meanings for -teria: 1. A place where articles are sold on the self-service plan; 2. A place where certain articles are sold without the self-service feature; and 3. A place where certain services are rendered - by others, not by the customer himself. Other interesting notes on the word are in the Barry paper just quoted, and in The Pronunciation of Cafeteria, by E. C. Hills, American Speech, Nov., 1926; More Cafeteria Progeny, by Mamie Meredith, the same, Dec., 1927; Barberia, by Phillip Davis, the same, Aug., 1928; and The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp, Vol. I; New York, 1925, p. 143. 1 Of these, -ite and -ist go back to the Sixteenth Century, and -ette to the Fifteenth. See English Words With Native Roots and With Greek, Latin, or Romance Suffixes, by George A. Nicholson, University of Chicago Linguistic Studies in Germanic, No. III, 1916. 2 In Three Hard-Worked Suffixes, American Speech, Feb., 1927, Jo-sephine M. Burnham says that -dom has acquired four significances in

American. First, it means “realm or jurisdiction,” as in bookdom, playdom and traveldom. Second, it means “state or condition,” as in pauperdom, stardom and gypsy-dom. Third, it means “those of a certain type or character,” as in fandom, flapperdom and crookdom. And fourth, it means “those interested in a given thing,” as in Shrine-dom, flowerdom and puzzledom. 3 Receptionist is used by English theologians to denote one who believes that “the bread and wine remain only bread and wine after consecration, but that, together with them, the faithful communicant really receives the body and blood of Christ.” In the sense of one who receives the customers of a photographer or the patients of a physician or dentist it is American only. See the New York Times, Section 9, Oct. 5, 1924. Manicurist appeared in American in the 90’s; it is still rare in England, where manicure is preferred. Behaviorist seems to have been invented by Dr. John B. Watson, 1913. Electragist is defined in Webster’s New International (1934) as “one who installs

brothers,1 beautician, cosmetician and bootician, to say nothing of whooptician, a college cheer-leader. In Hollywood they also speak of dialogicians. From -itis come motoritis, golfitis, radioitis, Ameri-

canitis and others after their kind.2 From -orium we have beautorium, healthatorium, preventorium, barberatorium, bobatorium (ap-

parently a more refined form of bobateria), lubritorium (a place where motor-cars are greased), infantorium, hatatorium, motor-

torium, odditorium (a side-show), pantorium or pantatorium (a pants-pressing parlor), printorium, restoratorium or restorium, shava-

torium, suitatrium and pastorium.3 And from -ogist and -or come boyologist (a specialist in the training or entertainment of boys),

truckologist, mixologist (a bartender), clockologist and hygiologist,4 and realtor, furnitor, chiropractor, avigator5 and merchantor (a member of the Merchants’ Bureau of a Chamber of Commerce). In

the case of motorcade, autocade, camelcade and aerocade, all sug-

electrical apparatus and sells electrical goods, and who is a member of the Association of Electragists International.” It is thus a brother to realtor, noticed in Chapter VI,

Section 6. See American Speech, April, 1928, p. 351, and March, 1926, p. 350. A recent novelty is canitist, apparently from the Latin

canities, signifying grey hair. It is used by beauticians who specialize in “tinting hair for discriminating women.” I owe its discovery and

its etymology to Dr. Isaac Goldberg.

1 It is dealt with at length in Chapter VI, Section 6.

2 Josephine M. Burnham, in Three Hard-Worked Suffixes, above cited, gives some appalling specimens, e.g., conventionitis, headlineitis, crosswordpuzzleitis, ain't-supposed-to-itis, let-George-do-it-itis, and Phi-Beta-Kappa-itis.

3 Pastorium is widely used in the South, especially among the Baptists, in place of parsonage. According to Bernard M. Peebles (Pastorium, American Speech, Dec., 1926,

p. 159) the word was invented, c. 1898, by the Rev. Morton Bryan Wharton, D.D., pastor of the Free-mason Street Baptist Church, Nor-

folk, Va. “News reports on the invention,” says Mr. Peebles, “brought forth editorial approval in several leading Baptist journals.

One hardy brother attacked it in the Baltimore Baptist, only to be squelched by a ‘scholarly article’ from Professor Carroll, then of the

Johns Hopkins.” I am unable to identify Professor Carroll. In 1898 Dr. Wharton published a book of poems, “Pictures From A Pastorium,” the first poem in which was called “The Pastorium.” I quote one stanza:

The place where congregations meet We style an auditorium; The place where pastors make their seat Should, then, be called pastorium.

See also Irradiations of Certain Suffixes, by E. C. Hills, American Speech, Oct., 1925.

4 For boyology see American Speech, Sept., 1927, p. 515. For clockologist see the same, June, 1927, p. 408.

5 For avigator see American Speech, Aug., 1928, p. 450. See also Avigation, by J. R. Killian, Jr., the same, Oct., 1928.

gested by cavalcade, a new suffix, -cade, seems to have come in.1 Others have also begun to show themselves, e.g., -naper (from kidnaper), as in dognaper; -mobile (from automobile), as in health-mobile (a motor-car driven about the country by health officers to instruct the yokelry in the elements of hygiene); -iat, as in professoriat; -ee, as in donee, draftee and honoree;2 and -thon (from marathon), as in walkathon, dancethon, reducathon and speedathon.3 The suffix -ine came in during the middle 80's, and seems to have been first hitched to dude, itself an American invention of 1883. But both dude and dudine are now obsolete save in the Far West, where they survive to designate the Easterners who come out to cavort on dude-ranches under the guidance of dude-wranglers. During the World War patrioteer, which had been in use in England at least as early as 1913, brought in various words in -eer, but only fictioneer shows any sign of surviving. About the same time -ine had a brief revival, producing doctorine, actorine, chorine, etc., but only the two last named are ever heard today.4 Certain prefixes have come in for heavy service of late, e.g., anti-, super-, semi- and near-. Words in anti- are numerous in English, but they seem to be even more numerous in American, especially in the field of politics. “If it were possible to collect the

1 It is denounced by R. S. G. in American Speech, Aug., 1930, p. 495. A letter by Garth Cate, printed in F. P. Adams’s column in the New York Herald Tribune, June 29, 1931, ascribes the coining of motor-cade to Lyle Abbott, automobile editor of the Phoenix (Ariz.) Republician, and fixes the date at 1912 or 1913. See The Earliest Motor-cade, by W. L. Werner, American Speech, June, 1932, p. 388. Other notes on motorcade are in American Speech, Dec., 1930, p. 155; April, 1931, pp. 254 and 313, and Aug., 1931, p. 189; in Modern Language Notes, March, 1925, p. 189, and in Notes and Queries, April 19, 1924.

2 I am indebted here to Professor Atcheson L. Hench, of the University of Virginia, and to Vogue Af-fixes in Present-Day Word-Coinage, by Louise Pound, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. I, 1918.

3 The first use of dance marathon to

designate a long-distance dancing-match was in 1927. After a while the promoters introduced rest-periods, during which the dancers were free to walk about. In 1930 a promotor in Des Moines called such an ameliorated contest a walkathon, and the word quickly spread. I am indebted for this to Mr. Hal J. Ross of St. Louis, and to Mr. Don King, endurance-shows editor of the Billboard (Cincinnati). I have been informed by other authorities that the use of walkathon was encouraged by the passage of laws in some of the States forbidding dancing for more than eight hours on end. The cops, it appears, were easily persuaded that a walkathon was really a walking-match, which had no time limit.

4 See Chorine, by Louise Pound, American Speech, June, 1928, p. 368, and Dudine, by M. H. Dresen, the same, Aug., 1928.

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material completely,” says Allen Walker Read, “ a ‘History of Opposition Movements in America’ could be written.”1 Read offers dozens of examples, beginning with anti-Episcopalian (1769) and anti-Federalist (1788) and running down to the present day. The list includes, of course, anti-suffragist (1886), which suffered the curious accident, in 1913 or thereabout, of losing its root and becoming simply anti. The numerous words in near- began to appear about 1900. George Horace Lorimer was writing of near-seal in “ Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son ” in 1902, and soon thereafter the advertisements in the newspapers bristled with analogues, e.g., near-silk, near-antique, near-leather, near-mahogany, near-silver and near-porcelain. A logical extension quickly produced near-accident, near-champion, near-finish and others after their kind, and in 1920 came near-beer, to flourish obscenely for thirteen long years and then sink into happy obsolescence. Super- has been very popular since 1920 or thereabout. It got a great lift when the movie press-agents began writing about super-productions and super-films, and various analogues have followed, e.g., super-highway, super-cabinet, super-criminal, super-gang and super-love. The last signifies a kind of amour perfected by the virtuosi of Hollywood: it partakes of the characters of riot, delirium tremens and mayhem. Sometimes super- is employed to strengthen adjectives, as in super-perfect and super-American. H. W. Horwill, in his “ Dictionary of Modern American Usage,” says that semi- “ is in much more frequent use in America than in England.” He cites semi-annual (Eng. half-yearly), semi-centennial (Eng. jubilee), semi-panic, semi-wild, semi-open-air, semi-national and semi-occasional. There has been, of late, a heavy use of air-, as in the adjectives air-cooled, air-conditioned, air-conscious and air-minded, and the nouns air-liner, air-rodeo and air-hostess.2 During the thirteen years of Prohibition pre-Volstead and pre-war threatened to bring in a flock of novelties in pre-, but the prefix seems to have died out of popularity.

All such neologisms, of course, find ready customers in the headline writers of the newspapers. But the exigencies of their arduous craft force them to give preference to the shorter ones, and they thus propagate back-formations more often than compounds. A veteran of the copy-desk has described their difficulties as follows:

1 The Scope of the American Dictionary, American Speech, Oct., 1933, p. 14.

2 Here I am again indebted to Professor Hench.

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The American Language

In writing the headline, the copy-reader must say what he has to say in a definite number of letters and spaces. If the headline has one or more lines - and this is the case at least 90% of the time - each line must balance so that it may be typographically pleasing to the reader's eye. The size of type and the width of column are also important considerations. Further, what is known as newspaper style may offer difficulties. Each newspaper has a set of rules peculiar to itself. On some papers each line of the head must end in a word of more than two letters and can never begin with a verb. No paper permits the splitting of a word from one line to another.1

The copy-reader accordingly makes heavy use of very short words, e.g., mob, probe, crash, pact, blast, chief and quiz, and these words tend to be borrowed by the reporters who must submit to his whims and long for his authority and glory. Their way into the common speech thus comes easy. To most Americans, in fact, a legislative inquiry is no longer an investigation but a probe, and a collision is not a collision but a crash. So, again, any sort of contest or combat is a clash or bout, any reduction in receipts or expenditures is a cut, and all negotiations are parleys or deals. Fiends are so common in American criminology simply because the word itself is so short. English is naturally rich in very short nouns, but the copy-readers are not content with them as they stand: there are constant extensions of meaning. For example:

Ace. In the sense of expert or champion it came in during the World War. It has since been extended to mean any person who shows any ponderable proficiency in whatever he undertakes to do. I have encountered ace lawyers, ace radio-crooners and ace gynecologists in headlines.

Aid. Its military sense has been extended to include the whole field of human relations. Any subordinate is now an aid.

Balm. It now means any sort of indemnity or compensation. A derivative, love-balm, means damages paid to a deceived and deserted maiden.

Ban. All prohibitions are now bans.

Blast. It has quite displaced explosion in the headlines.

Boat. It now means any sort of craft, from the Queen Mary to a mud-scow.

Cache. This loan-word, one of the earliest borrowings of American from French, now signifies any sort of hidden store.

Car. It is rapidly displacing all the older synonyms for automobile, including even auto.

Chief. Any headman, whether political, pedagogical, industrial, military or ecclesiastical. I once encountered the headline Church Chiefs Hold Parley over a news item dealing with a meeting of the Sacred College.

Drive. Any concerted and public effort to achieve anything.

1 Headline Words, by Harold E. Rockwell, American Speech, Dec., 1926.

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Edict. An almost universal synonym for command, order, injunction or mandate.

Envoy. It now signifies any sort of superior agent. Ambassador and minister are both too fat for the headlines.

Fete. Any celebration.

Gem. Any jewel.

Head. It means whatever chief means.

Hop. Any voyage by air.

Mecca. Any center of interest. Mecca has an m in it, and is thus troublesome to copy-readers, but it is still shorter than any other word signifying the same thing.

Plea. It means request, petition, application, prayer, suit, demand or appeal.

Row. Any sort of dispute.

Slate. Any programme, agenda, or list.

Snag. Any difficulty or impediment.

Solon. Any member of a law-making body.

Talk. Any discussion or conference.

In addition to these naturally short nouns many clipped forms are used constantly in headlines, e.g., ad, confab, duo, exam, gas, isle, mart, photo and quake (for earthquake). A Japanese is always a Jap, and the Emperor of Japan is very apt to shrink to Jap Chief. A Russian is often a Russ, and Serb commonly displaces Serbian. In the same way Turk displaces Turkish, Norse displaces Norwegian, and Spaniard becomes don. After Hitler's advent Nazi took the place of German. The popularity of Hun during the World War was no doubt largely due to its convenient brevity.1 The shorter compounds are also used heavily, e.g., clean-up, fire-bug, come-back and pre-war.2 Onomatopoeia, of course, frequently enters into the

1 It might be interesting to inquire how far the popularity of politicians and other public figures runs in proportion to the shortness of their names. I suspect that Mr. Eden, the English Foreign Secretary (1936), owes something to the fact that his name is not Cholmondelay or Donoughmore. The English newspapers have headlines more elastic than ours, but their contents-bills are just as crowded. In the case of politicians with long names abbreviations usually come into newspaper use, e.g., T.R. (the elder Roosevelt), F.D.R. (the younger), C.B. (Campbell Bannerman), and L.G. (Lloyd George). Sometimes nicknames take their place, e.g., Cal (Coolidge), G.O.M. (Grand Old

Man, i.e., Gladstone), and Al (Smith). Movie performers are commonly designated by their given names, or by abbreviations thereof, e.g., Gloria (Swanson), Mary (Pickford) and Doug (Fairbanks).

2 More than 100 headline nouns are discussed in detail in Scribes Seek Snappy Synonyms, by Maurice Hicklin, American Speech, Dec., 1930. See also Newspaper English, by Francis F. Beirne, American Speech, Oct., 1926; The Art of the Copy-Reader, by Kittredge Wheeler, American Mercury, July, 1932; The Attributive Noun Becomes Cancerous, by Steven T. Byington, American Speech, Oct., 1926; and Newspaper Headlines, by George O. Curme, American

184 The American Language

matter. “Hemmed in by many restrictions,” says Mr. Rockwell, “ and ever seeking a way out, the copy-reader, in addition to his constant use of short words, his peculiar phrasing, his bizarre syntax, and his lopping off of all unnecessary sentence members, has adopted, whenever possible, words which not only express the meaning which he wishes to convey but also connote the quality of sound. He believes that crash or smash will signify more to the reader than accident. So with slash, blast, clash, flay, flit, fling, flee, hurtle, hurl, plunge, ram and spike.” This explosive headline terminology seems so natural today that we forget it is of recent growth. It did not come in, in fact, until the era of the Spanish-American War, and the memorable fight for circulation between Joseph Pulitzer and William R. Hearst. The American newspaper headline of the 70’s and 80’s was very decorous. The aim of its writer was to keep all its parts within the bounds of a single sentence, and inasmuch as it sometimes ran halfway down the column he was inevitably forced to resort to long words and a flowery style. That same flowery style appeared in the text of what was printed below it. Dean Alford’s denunciation of the Newspaper English of 1870 1 described Newspaper American also. “ You never read,” he said, “ of a man, or a woman, or a child. A man is an individual, or a person, or a party; a woman is a female, or, if unmarried, a young person; a child is a juvenile, and children en masse are expressed by that most odious term, the rising generation.” It was against such gaudy flowers of speech that William Cullen Bryant’s famous Index Expurgatorius was mainly directed. We owe their disappearance, in part, to Charles A. Dana, of the New York Sun, who produced the first newspaper on earth that was decently written, but also, in part, to Pulitzer and Hearst, who not only brought in the fire-alarm headline-writer, but also the comic-strip artist. The latter has been a very diligent maker of terse and dramatic words. In his grim comments upon the horrible calamities which befall his characters he not only employs many ancients of English speech, e.g., slam, bang, quack, meow, smash and bump, but also invents novelties of his own, e.g., zowie, bam, socko, yurp, plop, wow, wam, glug, oof, ulk, whap, bing, flooie and grrr. Similar

Speech, April, 1929. In Newspaper Headlines: A Study in Linguistic Methods, by Heinrich Straumann; London, 1935, the grammar of headline English is discussed with abys- mal learning. Unfortunately, the author deals only with English headlines. 1 The Queen’s English, 3rd ed., 1870.

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onomatopœic forms of an older date are listed in the Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary as Americanisms, e.g., blah, wow, bust and flipflop.1 All these, and a great many like words, are familiar to every American schoolboy. Their influence, and that of the headline vocabulary, upon the general American vocabulary must be very potent, and no doubt they also have some influence upon American ways of thinking. Says a recent writer:

I am morally certain that probes would not be so important a part of the activities of our government if the headline writers had not discovered that word. People generally do not become excited about a thing called an investigation, an inquiry, a hearing, or whatever other name such an interrogatory affair might be called by. But a probe is an interesting thing. The newspapers, which seek what is interesting, play up the probe, and the prober spends his time thinking up new probes, so that he can get into the headlines.2

“The headline,” said the late E. P. Mitchell, for many years editor of the New York Sun, “is more influential than a hundred chairs of rhetoric in the shaping of future English3 speech. There is no livelier perception than in the newspaper offices of the incalculable havoc being wreaked upon the language by the absurd circumstance that only so many millimeters of type can go into so many millimeters’ width of column. Try it yourself and you will understand why the fraudulent use of so many compact but misused verbs, nouns and adjectives is being imposed on the coming generation. In its worst aspect, headline English is the yellow peril of the language.”4 “This,” says G. K. Chesterton, “is one of the evils produced by that passion for compression and compact information which possesses so many ingenious minds in America. Everybody can see how an entirely new system of grammar, syntax, and even language has been invented to fit the brevity of headlines. Such brevity, so far from being the soul of wit, is even the death of meaning; and certainly the death of logic.”5

The old American faculty for making picturesque compounds

1 See Exclamations in American Speech, by E. C. Hills, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. VII, 1924. This is an almost exhaustive and very valuable paper. See also The English of the Comic Cartoon, by Helen Trace Tysell, American Speech, Feb., 1935, especially p. 50. 2 Ex Libris, by The Bookman, Baltimore Evening Sun, June 16, 1923. The Bookman is Hamilton Owens, editor of the paper. 3 He meant, of course, American. 4 Quoted by Brander Matthews in Newspaper English, 1920, reprinted in Essays on English; New York, 1921. 5 G.K.’s Weekly (London), May 2, 1931.

186 The American Language

shows no sign of abating today. Many of them come in on the latitude of slang, e.g., road-louse, glad-hand, hop-head, rabrah-boy, coffin-nail (cigarette), hot-spot, bug-house, hang-out and pin-head, and never attain to polite usage, but others gradually make their way, e.g., chair-warmer, canned-music, sob-sister, bell-hop, come-back, white-wings and rabble-rouser, and yet others are taken into the language almost as soon as they appear, e.g., college-widow (1887), sky-scraper.1 and rubber-neck (c. 1890),2 loan-shark (c. 1900), high-brow and low-brow (c. 1905),3 hot-dog (c. 1905),4 joy-ride (c. 1908), love-nest and jay-walker (c. 1920), and brain-trust (1932).5 Steam-roller, in the political sense, was first used by Oswald F. Schuette, then Washington correspondent of the Chicago Inter-Ocean, to describe the rough methods used to procure the nomination of W. H. Taft as the Republican presidential candidate in 1908. Spell-binder, which came in during the 80's, is simply a derivative of an old English verb, to spellbind. Fat-cat, signifying a rich man

1 "Sky-scraper," says Charles White in a letter to the London Morning Post, Jan. 26, 1935, "was applied to Queen Anne's Mansions [an apartment-house in Queen Anne's Gate, London, near St. James's Park] in the early 80's, before American cities had any structures of their present variety." But this seems to have been a nonce-use, not generally imitated. The Oxford Dictionary's first quotation is from the Boston (Mass.) Journal, Nov., 1891. Sky-scraper had been used to designate a sky-sail (1794), a tall horse (1826), an exaggerated story (1841), and a tall man (1857).

2 Rubber-neck is described by Prof. J. Y. T. Greig, the Scottish philologist, in Breaking Priscian's Head; London, 1929, p. 83, as "one of the best words ever coined."

3 The date here is a guess. The first example in the Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary is dated 1908. Low-brow followed soon afterward. Mezzo-brow and mixzen-brow came later.

4 This is another guess. The inventor of the hot-dog was the late Harry Mozely Stevens, caterer at the New York Polo Grounds. The sale of

sausages in rolls was introduced in this country many years ago, but Stevens was the first to heat the roll and add various condiments. According to his obituary in the New York Herald Tribune, May 4, 1934, this was in 1900. But sausages in rolls were then called simply wienies or frankfurters. Stevens himself used to say that the late T. A. Dorgan (Tad), the sports cartoonist, coined hot-dog, but he was apparently uncertain about the date. The name was suggested, of course, by the folk-belief that wienies were made of dog-meat. In 1913 the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce passed a resolution forbidding the use of hot-dog on signs at Coney Island. See The Hot-Dog Mystery (editorial) in the New York Herald Tribune, June 2, 1931.

5 According to Henry F. Pringle (New Yorker, June 30, 1934) brain-trust "was invented by James M. Kiernan of the New York Times in the Summer of 1932 to describe the economists and other experts who were active in the [presidential] campaign " of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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willing to make a heavy contribution to a party campaign fund, appeared in 1920 or thereabout, and is still struggling for recognition. Many of the most popular of American compounds are terms of disparagement, e.g., bone-head, clock-watcher, bash-slinger, four-flusher, rough-neck (which goes back to David Crockett's time, and was used by him in "Colonel Crockett in Texas," 1836, but did not come into popularity until the beginning of the present century), leather-neck, gospel-shark, back-number, cheap-skate, cow-college, stand-patter, lounge-lizard, do-gooder, kill-joy, lame-duck and chin-music. Most of these linger below the salt, but now and then one of them edges its way into more or less decorous usage.

The etymology and history of many common American nouns remain undetermined. Phoney, which is both a noun and an adjective, offers an example. Some of the earlier editions of Webster sought to relate it to funny, but in "Webster's New International" (1934) it is simply put down as "slang," without any attempt to guess at its origin. Again, its sources have been sought in telephone, but this seems very far-fetched. The most probable etymology derives it from Forney, the name of a manufacturer of cheap jewelry. He made a specialty of supplying brass rings, in barrel lots, to street peddlers, and such rings, among the fraternity, came to be known as Forney rings. The extension of the designation to all cheap jewelry and its modification to phoney followed. Today, anything not genuine is phoney in the common American speech, and a person suspected of false pretenses is a phoney. The first example of movie in the Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary is dated 1913, but the word was already six or seven years old by that time. Who invented it no one knows. In those days, as now, the magnates of the movie industry disliked the word, and sought to find some more dignified substitute for it. In 1912 the Essanay Company offered a prize of $25 for such a substitute, and it was won by Edgar Strakosch with photoplay. But though photoplay became the title of a very successful fan magazine, it never displaced movie. When the talking-pictures came in, in 1924, they were first called speakies, but talkies

1 See Terms of Disparagement, by Marie Gladys Hayden, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. III, 1906.

2 "A statement is phoney," said an editorial in the Boston Traveler, Feb. 20, 1922, "if it is like the prac-

tical jokes and false impersonations that are so frequently perpetrated over the telephone."

3 See Movie Jargon, by Terry Ram-saye, American Speech, April, 1926.

188 The American Language

quickly displaced it.1 The early movie houses were usually called parlors, but in a little while theatres was substituted, and about 1920 the larger ones began to be designated cathedrals, or, by scoffers, mosques, synagogues or filling-stations.

There have been bitter etymological battles over a number of American nouns, some of them coming into good usage, e.g., bally-hoo, hobo, hokum, jazz, jitney, maverick, sundae and wobbly. The dictionaries try to connect ballyhoo with the name of Ballyholly, a village in County Cork, Ireland, and I did the same in my last edition, but no relationship has ever been demonstrated. George Milburn, who has spent much time in an investigation of circus words, tells me that old circus men say that it is a blend of ballet and whoop, but this also sounds somehow improbable. Another correspondent, Charles Wolverton, has it from an old-time carnival man, W. O. Taylor, that ballyhoo originated on the Midway of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and is an imitation of the cry of the dervishes in the Oriental Village, to wit, b'Allah hoo, meaning " Through God it is." " Webster's New International Dictionary " (1934) and Ernest Weekley in his " Etymological Dictionary of Modern English " (1921) say that the origin of hobo is unknown, and the Oxford Dictionary attempts no etymology. The Oxford's first example of its use is from an article by Josiah Flynt in the Contemporary Review for August, 1891. In that article Flynt simply said that " the tramp's name for himself and his fellows is hobo." The word was hardly new at that time; a verb, to hobo, followed soon afterward. In American Speech for June, 1929, Captain H. P. Wise, apparently an Army officer, suggested that it might be from an identical Japanese word, the plural of ho (side), and meaning, in the plural, all sides or everywhere. This suggestion is given some color by the fact that the term seems to have originated on the Pacific Coast, where there are many Japanese. If it is sound, then hobo is the one and only word that the Japanese immigrants' have given to the American language. " Webster's New International " refers hokum to hocus, but without saying flatly that they are related, and the Oxford Supplement calls it " a blending of hocus-pocus and bunkum," but with a saving question-mark. Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly reports that " theorizing devotees in etymology " have

1 On Nov. 8, 1924 the New York Evening Sun reported that speakies had recently appeared in Film Fun, a fan magazine.

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sought to derive it from the Hebrew word chakham (a wise man),

the Arabic and Hindustani hakim (of the same meaning), and the

American Indian words hoquiam, hokium and hoquium, all of them

proper names.1 The late Walter J. Kingsley, an ardent amateur

lexicographer, favored the theory that hokum originated in England.

"Once upon a time," he said, "a retired Cockney sea-captain man-

aged the Middlesex Music-Hall in London, and whenever a comedian

lacked a consecutive routine or continuity, as they say in the movies,

he informed him that there was a hole in his act, and that he should

plug it up with 'a bit of oakum,' which he pronounced hoakum."2

But Kingsley's etymologies were always far more ingenious than

convincing. Dr. Vizetelly says that hokum came in about 1920. All

the dictionaries report correctly that maverick comes from the

name of Samuel A. Maverick (?–1870), a Texan who neglected to

brand his calves, and so invited their bootleg branding by his neigh-

bors. But when the word is discussed in the newspapers, which is

not infrequently, it is sometimes stated that the thing ran the other

way, and that Maverick himself did the stealthy branding. In No-

vember, 1889, one of his descendants, George M. Maverick of San

Antonio, set the matter right in a letter to the St. Louis Republic,

and some years later that letter, along with other documents in

point, was reprinted as a pamphlet.3 But old libels die hard. "Web-

ster's New International" says that jitney may "possibly" come

from the French jeton (a counter, or metal disk), from the verb

jeter (to throw). The Oxford Supplement (1933) says that its

origin is unknown, but quotes a statement in the Nation for Feb. 4,

1915, that the word "is the Jewish slang term for a nickel," and

another from the same journal for March 18, 1915, that it means

"the smallest coin in circulation in Russia." But nothing resembling

jitney is to be found in any Yiddish word-book that I have access to,

and I recall hearing it used to designate a five-cent piece long before

there was any considerable immigration of Eastern Jews. It began

to be used to designate a cheap automobile bus in 1914. "Webster's

New International" says that jazz is a Creole word, and probably

of African origin, but goes no further. The Oxford says that its

origin is unknown, but that it is "generally said to be Negro."

1 Hokum, New York World, March 28, 1923. The same facts are given

in The Lexicographer's Easy Chair, Literary Digest, May 5, 1923.

2 New York World, Oct. 21, 1925.

3 Ye Maverick; San Antonio, 1905.

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The American Language

Amateur etymologists have made almost countless efforts to run it down, or, more accurately, to guess at its history. The aforesaid Kingsley tried to connect it with Jasper, the name of a dancing slave on a plantation near New Orleans, c. 1825.1 Vincent Lopez sought its origin in Chaz, the stable-name of Charles Washington, an eminent ragtime drummer of Vicksburg, Miss., c. 1895.2 Other searchers produced even more improbable etymologies.3 The effort to trace the word to Africa has failed, though it has been established that it was used by the Negroes in the Mississippi river towns long before it came into general use. But the meaning they attached to it was that of sexual intercourse. Its extension to the kind of music it now designates was perhaps not unnatural, but when, where and by whom that extension was made is not yet known.4 Sundae remains almost as mysterious. All the dictionaries connect it with Sunday, but none of their ventures to trace the steps. The first use of the word cited by the Oxford Supplement was in the New York Evening Post for May 21, 1904, and it was there spelled sundi. A popular etymology runs thus: In 1902 or thereabout there was a sudden craze for enforcing the Blue Laws in Virginia (or some other Southern State), and selling ice-cream soda on Sunday became hazardous. An ingenious druggist, seeking to baffle the police, decided to give the beverage a new appearance and a new name, and so added a few berries to it and called it a sundae, in occult reference to the day.5 I offer this for what it is worth, which is probably not much. The origin of wobbly is thus given by Mortimer Downing, a member of the I.W.W. in its heyday:

In Vancouver, in 1911, we had a number of Chinese members, and one restaurant keeper would trust any member for meals. He could not pronounce the letter w, but called it wobble, and would ask: “You I. Wobble Wobble?” and when the card was shown credit was unlimited. Thereafter the laughing term among us was I. Wobbly Wobbly.6

1 New York World, Oct. 25, 1925. Kingsley had previously dealt with the matter in the New York Sun in 1917, and his lucubrations were reprinted in the Literary Digest for Aug. 25 of that year.

2 Where is Jazz Leading America? Etude, July, 1924.

3 Some of them are rehearsed in Jazz, by Henry Osborne Osgood, American Speech, July, 1926.

4 See a somewhat guarded discussion of its original meaning by Clay Smith, Etude, Sept., 1924, p. 595.

5 This etymology is given in Sundae, by John Fairweather, London Sunday Times, Aug. 25, 1928, on the authority of “Miss Anna C. Mitchell, librarian to the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey, U. S. A.”

6 Quoted in How Wobbly Originated, by Richard W. Hogue, Nation, Sept. 5, 1923, p. 242.

"Webster's New International" gives this etymology, but without formally accepting it. To me it seems unlikely. Perhaps the truth about the origin of wobbly, and with it the truth about the origins of ballyhoo, bobo, bokum, jazz, jitney and sundae, will be unearthed by the learned brethren now at work upon the "Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles." Maybe they will also solve some other vexing problems of American lexicography. For example, who was the first to use graft in its political sense, who was the first to make nouns of the adjectives wet and dry, and who was the first to make a noun of the verb release, signifying something to be published or otherwise made available on a given date? The latter is in wide use in movie, radio and newspaper circles, and has also spread afield. The history of baseball terms also deserves to be investigated, for many of them have entered the common speech of the country, e.g., fan, rooter, bleachers, circus-catch, home-run, homer, pinch-hitter, pennant-winner, batting-average, double-header, grandstand-play, charley-horse, gate-money, bush-leaguer or minor-leaguer, and three-strikes-and-out, not to mention the verbs, to strike out, to bunt, to knock out of the box, to put it (or one) across (or over), to root, to be shut out and to play ball, and the adjectival phrases, on the bench and on to his curves. There are, too, the nouns borrowed from poker, e.g., kitty, cold-deck, full-house, jack-pot, four-flusher, ace-high, pot, show-down, penny-ante, divvy and three-of-a-kind, along with the verbs and verb-phrases, to call (a bluff), to ante up, to stand pat, to pony up, to hold out, to cash in, to chip in, to see (a bet, or any other challenge), and it's up to you.

3. VERBS

The common verbs of vulgar American will be examined at length in Chapter IX, Section 2. On more decorous levels of speech they are notable chiefly for the facility with which new ones are made. Consider, for example, the process of back-formation. In Chapter III, Section 2, I have already described the appearance of such forms as to locate and to legislate in the earliest days of differentiation; in our own time many more have gradually attained to something resembling respectability, e.g., to auto, to jell, to phone,

192 The American Language

to taxi, to commute, to typewrite, to electrocute,1 and to tiptoe (for to walk tiptoe). Others are still on probation, e.g., to reminisce, to insurge, to innovate, to vamp, to razz (from raspberry), to enthuse, to combust,2 to divvy, to reune, to resolute, to housekeep, to peeve, to orate, to bach (i.e., to live in bachelor quarters), and to emote;3 and yet others remain on the level of conscious humor, e.g., to plumb (from plumber), to jan (from janitor), to barb (from barber), to chauf (from chauffeur), to crise (from crisis), to gondole (from gondola), to elocute, to burgle, to ush, to perc (to make coffee in a percolator), to sculp, to butch, to buttle and to boheme. “There is a much greater percentage of humorous shortenings among verbs,” says Miss Wittman, “than among other parts of speech. Especially is this true of verbs shortened from nouns and adjectives by subtracting what looks like a derivative suffix, e.g., -er, -or, -ing, -ent from nouns, or y from adjectives. Many clipped verbs have noun parallels, while some are simply clipped nouns used as verbs.”4 A great many new verbs are also made in the United States by other devices. Some of them are nouns unchanged, e.g., to author, to service, to auto, to demagogue, to wassermann, to interview5 and to debut; others are formed by adding -ize to nouns

1 The first State to electrocute criminals was New York. The act substituting electrocution for hanging became effective Jan. 1, 1889, and the first criminal electrocuted was William Kemmler, on Aug. 6, 1900. To electrocute, at the start, had a rival in to electrize, but soon prevailed.

2 To combust seems to be an invention of dealers in heating apparatus, or, as they prefer to call themselves, beating-engineers. I find the following in an advertisement in the Chicago Herald and Examiner, Sept. 16, 1923: “There’d be no warning of exhausted coal deposits if fuel were properly combusted.”

3 I say these verbs are still on probation, but if their constant use in the debates of Congress gives them countenance they are quite sound American. My earliest example of to enthuse comes from a solemn war-time speech by the late Senator Lee S. Overman of North Carolina, made in the Senate on March 26,

1918. He used it not once, but over and over again. See the Congressional Record for that date, pp. 4376-7. To resolute was used by Senator L. Y. Sherman of Ohio on Jan. 14, 1918, and by Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana on May 16, 1921. To peeve was used by Mr. Borland of Missouri in the House Jan. 29, 1918, and has been used by other Representatives countless times since. So have to reminisce, to orate and to insurge.

4 Clipped Words, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. II, 1914, p. 137.

5 There is an old English verb, to interview, meaning to meet, but it has been obsolete since the Seventeenth Century. The modern verb seems to have arisen in the United States soon after the Civil War, along with its noun. The latter has gone into French, and in 1923 the Académie Française voted to include it in the next edition of its Dictionary. On Dec. 31, 1884, in the course of a review of the year, the

or adjectives, e.g., to simonize, to slenderize, to winterize, to vacationize, to hospitalize and to picturize; yet others by adding the old English suffix -en to nouns, adjectives and even other verbs, e.g., to mistaken, to thinnen, to safen and to loaden.1 Those of the last-named class, of course, belong mainly to the vulgar speech, but examples of the other classes are to be found on higher levels. Two days after the first regulations of the Food Administration were issued, in 1917, to hooverize appeared spontaneously in scores of newspapers, and it retains sufficient repute to be in “Webster's New International Dictionary” (1934). To bryanize, to fletcherize and to oslerize came in just as promptly, the first in 1896, the second in 1904 or thereabout, and the third in 1905, following Dr. William Osler's famous address at Baltimore.2 I reach into my collection at random and draw forth such monstrosities as to backwardize, to fordize, to belgiumize, to respectablize, to scenarioize, to moronize, to customize, to featurize, to expertize, to powerize, to sanitize, to manhattanize and to cohanize; I suppose I could dredge up at least a hundred more. Some of these, of course, are only nonce-words, but certainly not all. To expertize, apparently suggested by the French noun expertise, meaning a survey or valuation by experts, is in universal use among American art and antique dealers, but it does not appear to prevail in England (though the French noun does), and the Oxford Dictionary's only example of it is taken from Harper's Magazine for February, 1889. To respectablize I find in a book review in the Portland Oregonian: “The Modern Library has respectablized Casanova.” To backwardize comes from the Farm Journal, a very sedate periodical, for March, 1926; I have since encountered it frequently in Variety. To slenderize is used by nearly all the vendors of reducing-salts and other such quackeries. As for

Pall Mall Gazette (London) said that “among the permanent gains of the year the acclimatization of the interview in English journalism certainly should be mentioned.”

1 See Loadened, by J. D., American Speech, Aug., 1930. The author calls attention to the fact that verbs properly in -en sometimes take a double past participle, e.g., awestricken and ladened. For to safen see American Speech, April, 1931, p. 305. It appears in the sentence: “Let us safen your brakes.”

2 To oslerize quickly acquired a meaning that greatly embarrassed Dr. Osler. What he said was: “Study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.” But to oslerize came to mean to put a man to death as useless, and the age recommended was commonly understood to be forty.

194 The American Language to sanitize, it was described by the Associated Press, on July 6, 1934, as the invention of Dr. Leon Henderson, one of the economic advisers to the NRA, and its meaning was given as “to put sanity and sanitation in[to] business.”1 The only prefix that seems to be commonly used for making verbs is de-, which has produced to debunk, to delouse, to dewax, to defjelly, to debamboozle and various other forms. The list of American verbs made of simple nouns is almost endless. The process has been normal in English for a great many years, and at all periods it has produced forms that have survived, e.g., to house (Old English), to shackle (c. 1400) and to waltz (c. 1790). But it is carried on in the United States with a freedom which England has not seen since Elizabethan times, and though many of its products pass out almost as fast as they come in, others remain in the vocabulary, and rise slowly to respectable usage. A large number are succinct substitutes for verb phrases, and so give evidence of the American liking for short cuts in speech, e.g., to service for to give service,2 to intern for to serve as intern, to style for to cut in accord with the style, to biograph for to write the biography of,3 to chamois (or, perhaps more often, to shammy) for to polish with chamois, to model for to act as a model, to taxpay for to pay taxes on,4 to momentum for to give momentum to, to contact for to make

1 I had hardly got this paragraph on paper when someone sent me a copy of the Literary Supplement of the London Times for June 7, 1934, with the ghastly verb to obituarize marked with a red circle. Worse, I discovered on investigation that it was in the Oxford Dictionary, credited to the London Saturday Review for Oct. 17, 1891. If I may intrude my private feelings into a learned work I venture to add that seeing a monster so suggestive of American barbarism in the Times affected me like seeing an arch-bishop wink at a loose woman. 2 To service was used by R. L. Stevenson in Catriona (1893), but it remained a nonce-word until American garages began servicing cars, c. 1910. It is now in almost universal use among the persons who keep machinery and fixtures in repair. See American Speech, Nov., 1926, p. 112, and Jan., 1927, p. 214. Used by Mr. Justice Roberts, it appears in the decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in N. Y., N. H. & H. R. R. vs. Bezue, Jan. 25, 1932 (52 Supreme Court Reporter, 206). 3 Senator L. Y. Sherman of Illinois, Congressional Record, Jan. 4, 1918, p. 903. 4 After the passage of the War Revenue Act of 1917 cigar-boxes began to bear this inscription: “The contents of this box have been taxed-paid . . . as indicated by the Internal Revenue tax stamp affixed.” A year or so later taxed-paid was changed to taxpaid. Prosecutions for the sale, transportation or possession of untaxpaid alcoholic beverages are now common in the Federal courts.

The Language Today 195

contact with,1 to ready for to make ready, to protest for to protest against, to vacation, to holiday or to week-end for to take a vacation or holiday or to go on a week-end trip, and to yes for to say yes to.2 There is another class of verbs that may be called “regular” substitutes for the forms that differ from the corresponding nouns or adjectives, e.g., to loan for to lend,3 to author for to write,4 to host for to entertain, and to signature for to sign.5 Of verbs made freely and fancifully of simple nouns, whether simple or compound, there is a huge stock and it is enough to cite a few, some of them only nonce-words but others in more or less good usage: to gesture, to racketeer, to gravel, to reunion, to park,6 to waste-basket, to lobby-display,7 to press-agent, to clearance,8 to railroad, to grand

1 During the heyday of Babbittry (c. 1905-29) to contact was one of its counter-words. In 1931 Mr. F. W. Lienau, an official of the Western Union, forbade its use by employes of the company. “Somewhere,” he said, “there cumbers this fair earth with his loathsome presence a man who, for the common good, should have been destroyed in early childhood. He is the originator of the hideous vulgarism of using contact as a verb. So long as we can meet, get in touch with, make the acquaintance of, be introduced to, call on, interview or talk to people, there can be no apology for ‘contact.’ See the Commonweal, Dec. 9, 1931, p. 145. But Mr. Lienau’s indignation had no effect, and to contact is still widely used.

2 To yes seems to have originated in Hollywood, where every movie personage is surrounded by a suite of sycophants. These sycophants are called yes-men.

3 To loan was once good English, and the Oxford Dictionary gives examples going back to c. 1200, but it has been supplanted in England by to lend and the Oxford calls it “now chiefly U. S.” Here it rages almost unchallenged. It has even got into the text of laws. See Congressional Record, Dec. 19, 1921, p. 592, col. 2.

4 To author, I suspect, was first used

in Variety. But I have found it in the Editor and Publisher (Aug. 27, 1927, p. 7, col. 4).

5 To signature apparently has the imprimatur of the Postoffice. See Observations on the Duties of Contact Men As Applied to the Postoffice Department Organization, by John H. Bartlett, First Assistant Postmaster General; Cleveland (Postoffice Printing Department), 1924, p. 1.

6 To park is in Piers Plowman, C-Text, 143, c. 1390: “Among wives and widows I am wont to sit, y-parked in pews.” But as Dr. Louise Pound points out in American Speech, May, 1927, it then meant to be enclosed, shut up, confined. In the sense of to arrange artillery or wagons in a park it came into English during the Napoleonic wars, apparently influenced by French example. Its modern vogue, and great extension of meaning, came in with the automobile. In the United States, as Dr. Pound says, one may now park a child with a neighbor, or a suitcase in a cloak-room, or jewelry in a vault.

7 Used in the theatre in the sense of to display photographs or lithographs in a theatre lobby.

8 Used by department-stores in the sense of to sell at a clearance sale. See American Speech, Dec., 1926, p. 163.

196

The American Language

marshal,1 to New Thought,2 to accession,3 to demagogue, to belly-ache, to propaganda, to S.O.S., to steam-roller, to pan, to janitor,4 to bible,5 to census,6 and so on. Some of these, of course, be-long to various argots, but practically all of them would be intelligible to any alert American, and it would scarcely shock him to see them in his newspaper.7 The use of to room in the sense of to supply with a room is common, and it has brought in to meal and to sleep.8 The movement toward simplicity is also responsible for the triumph of to graduate over to be graduated and of to operate over to operate on. The latter is denounced regularly by the Journal of the American Medical Association and other medical authorities, but it makes steady headway.9 To chiropract is another sweet flower

1 New York World-Telegram, March 11, 1932, under the heading of Mayor Won't Ride Horse.

2 From New Thought, the name of a curious mixture of faith-healing, amateurish psychology and pseudo-oriental "philosophy," much patronized by persons moving either in or out of Christian Science. From its organ, the Nautilus for Jan., 1926, American Speech for April, 1926 quotes: "So I lost no time in trying to New Thought our way out of debt."

3 To accession, used by American librarians in the sense of to acquire a book, is said to have been invented by the late Melvil Dewey (1851-1931). See a letter signed J. W. R. on the editorial page of the New York Times, March 27, 1932.

4 Semi-Centennial Anniversary Book, University of Nebraska; Lincoln, Neb., 1919, p. 43. The verb seems to be making headway in competition with the more raffish to janit and to jan.

5 Used by the Gideon Society, an organization of pious traveling salesmen, to denote the act of outfitting a hotel with Bibles for the consolation of its guests.

6 I find the following in the New International Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., Vol. XIV, p. 674, col. 1, 1917: "The aboriginal tribes are chiefly Bhils, who are animists, though many have been censused as Hindus." The

editors of the second edition of the New International were Talcott Williams, dean of the School of Journalism at Columbia University, and the well-known essayist, Frank Moore Colby.

7 Mr. John S. Grover, of the Portland, Ore., Journal, sends in an ad-dition that may be with us to-morrow. It is to monoxide, meaning to poison with carbon monoxide gas. In August, 1935, one Wells sued an automobile company in the Circuit Court for Multnomah county, Oregon, on the ground that he had been monoxided through its care-lessness in repairing the heater on his car. Another likely candidate is to stench, meaning to empty a movie theatre by setting off stink-bombs. It is a device often em-ployed by moving-picture opera-tors on strike.

8 See Mealed, by Anne E. Perkins, American Speech, June, 1928, p. 434, and Roomed, by Willa Roberts, American Speech, Oct., 1927, p. 25. Another analogue, to-subsist, meaning to provide provender, is to be found in Flying Boats and Sea-Planes, by Rear Admiral W. A. Moffett, U. S. N., Liberty, Aug. 18, 1928, p. 46.

9 See The Art and Practise of Medi-cal Writing, by George H. Sim-mons, editor emeritus of the Jour-nal, and Morris Fishbein, its present editor; Chicago, 1925, p. 43. The

The Language Today

197

of American speech 1 and to it, perhaps, to goose 2 should be added. When to broadcast began to be used widely, in 1925, there was a debate among American grammarians over its preterite. Should it be broadcast or broadcasted? The majority of them appear to have preferred broadcasted, as more regular, and they were supported by the English grammarian, H. W. Fowler,3 but broadcast seems to have prevailed. It has bred the inevitable noun. Daily the newspapers announce that “His speech was broadcast last night” or that “A nation-wide broadcast has been arranged for tomorrow.”

The common American tendency to overwork a favorite verb has been often noted by English observers. How those of an early day were affected by to fix I have reported in Chapter I, Section 3. In our own time to get has done the heaviest service. Says Ernest Weekley in “Adjectives – and Other Words” (1930):

It has become a verb of motion, commonly used in the imperative, and a euphemism for kill, as when the gunman gets the sleuth or the sleuth gets the gunman. The successful yeggman makes his getaway, and the successful artist gets away with it, while comprehension of a speaker’s meaning can be conveyed by the formula, “I get you, Steve.”

Dr. Weekley might have added to get going, to get it over, to get wise, to get off (to publish or utter), to get religion, to get back at, to get behind, to get there, to get together, it gets me, to get by, to get the bulge (or drop) on, to get ahead of, to get solid, to get sore,

learned authors explain that to operate a patient really means to work him, and that the connotations thereof are embarrassing to the profession. But Marion L. Morse shows in The Verb Operate, American Speech, April, 1930, that they explain in vain. Miss Morse investigated the usage of nurses. Of those “doing their work out of hospitals for about five years or more,” only 12% used to operate; the rest used to operate on or upon. But of those still in training, 50% used to operate, thus showing the trend of hospital usage. The medical brethren, in general, reveal a fondness for new verbs. Nearly all of them use to intern and to special (signifying service as a special nurse), to wassermann and to cystoscope, and many also use to

blood count and to x-ray. Drs. Simmons and Fishbein report the use of to obstetricate, and I have myself encountered to diagnose. (Weekly Bulletin, New York City Department of Health, May 22, 1926, p. 81.)

1 The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin for March 10, 1926 reports its use in court proceedings that day by District Attorney Charles Edwin Fox, and says that he thereby “coined a new word.” But it was actually used before 1926. The proper chiropractic term is to adjust.

2 To goose does not appear in any of the dictionaries in its common American sense, which is known to every schoolboy.

3 In S.P.E. Tracts, No. XIX, 1925.

to make a get-away, to get on to, and scores of other verb-phrases, all of them in everyday American use. Most of them, it will be noted, are made by the simple device of adding a preposition or adverb to the verb. American, especially on the colloquial level, is very rich in such compounds,1 and the differences in meaning between them and the verbs they come from are often great. Compare, for example, to give and to give out, to go back and to go back on, to light and to light out, to bawl and to bawl out, to butt and to butt in, to turn and to turn down, to go2 and to go big, to show and to show up, to put and to put over, to pass and to pass out, to call and to call down, to run and to run in, to wind and to wind up. To check has bred a whole series, e.g., to check up, to check in, to check out, to check with, to check against and to check over. Sometimes, to be sure, the addition seems to be only rhetorical, and many of the resultant forms strike an Englishman as redundant. Hurry up, in the imperative, is common in England, but to hurry up in the indicative is used less than the simple to hurry. Brush your hat off would seem American there, and so would to stop over, to open up, to beat up, to try out, to start off, to finish up, to average up, to lose out, to start in (or out), and to stay put. But such forms are almost innumerable in this country, and most of them, if they lack the sanction of the Yale Review, at least have that of the Congressional Record.3 Not a few of the characteristic American verb-phrases embody very bold and picturesque metaphors, e.g., to go haywire, to muscle in, to turn up missing, to spill the beans, to shoot the chutes, to put the skids under, to do a tailspin, to eat crow, to chew the rag, to hit the ceiling, to play possum, to hand him a lemon, to kick in, to show a yellow streak, to saw wood, to throw a scare into, and to come out at the little end of the horn. And some of the simple verbs show

1 They are common in English, too, and Samuel Johnson called attention to them in the preface to his Dictionary, but they are much more numerous in American. See Thought and Language, by P. B. Ballard; London, 1934, p. 167. 2 Mr. L. G. Lederer of Baltimore calls my attention to a rather curious transitive use of to go, noted in the Baltimore Post for Sept. 1, 1925: “Next Summer we'll probably see traffic cops stopping and going the entrants.” 3 To dope out: Mr. Hamlin of Mis-souri in the House, Jan. 19, 1918, p. 1154. To fall down: Mr. Kirby of Arkansas in the Senate, Jan. 24, 1918, p. 1291, and Mr. Lewis of Illinois, in the Senate, June 6, 1918, p. 8024. To jack up: Mr. Weeks of Massachusetts in the Senate, Jan. 17, 1918, p. 988. To come across: Mr. Borland of Missouri in the House, May 4, 1917, p. 1853. To butt in: Mr. Snyder of New York in the House, Dec. 11, 1917.

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199

equally bold and picturesque transfers of meaning, e.g., to fire (in the sense of to dismiss), to can (in the same sense), to star, to neck, and so on.1

Verbs of the last-named class are heavily patronized by the headline writers, partly because they are pungent but mainly because most of them are very short. The favorite verbs of the newspaper copy-desk are those of three letters, e.g., to air (which serves to indicate any form of disclosure), to cut, to net, to set, to bar, to aid, to map, to nab, to hit, to rap, to vie and to ban. It has revived an archaism, to ire, and has produced to null from to nullify by clipping. Gassed is always used in place of asphyxiated. To admit is used as a substitute for to confess, to acknowledge, to concede, to acquiesce and to recognize. To cut is a synonym for every verb signifying any sort of opposition to enhancement. To back is to give any sort of support or recognition, to ban indicates any sort of prohibition, and to hit connotes every variety of criticism. A few of the headline verbs are of five letters, e.g., to claim, to photo, to blame, to quash, to speed and to score, and some are even of six letters, e.g., to attack, to debunk and to battle, but that is only because the researches of the copy-desk Websters have not, as yet, discovered shorter synonyms. Their preference, after their three-letter favorites, runs to four letter verbs, e.g., to best, to cite, to curb, to flay, to loom, to lure, to name, to oust, to push, to quit, to rule, to spur and to void, and among them, as among the nouns, their first choice is for those of onomatopoeic tang.2

Writing in the late 60's of the last century, Richard Grant White said that " in New England . . . even the boys and girls playing on the commons " used the auxiliary verbs will and shall " correctly," which is to say, in accord with Southern English practice, and that " even in New York, New Jersey, and Ohio, in Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina, fairly educated people of English stock " did the same.3 But that was more than two generations ago, and the chances are that it wasn't actually true even then. Today the distinction between will and shall has become so muddled in all save

1 See Simile and Metaphor in Ameri-can Speech, by B. Q. Morgan, American Speech, Feb., 1926.

2 See Scribes Seek Snappy Synonyms, by Maurice Hicklin, American Speech, Dec., 1930. Mr. Hick-lin lists 70 headline verbs.

3 Words and Their Uses, new ed.; New York, 1876, p. 264. This book was made up of articles contributed to the New York Galaxy during 1867, '68 and '69.

200

The American Language

the most painstaking and artificial varieties of American that it may almost be said to have ceased to exist.1 Save for emphasis, shall and should are seldom used in the first person, and all of the confusions in other situations that are listed by H. W. Fowler in “Modern English Usage” 2 and by Fowler and his brother in “The King’s English” 3 are encountered in the United States every day. 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.” When Leonard and Moffett submitted “Will you be at the Browns’ this evening?” to a committee made up principally of American philologians, seven of them called it perfectly sound English, eighteen put it down as “cultivated informal English,” and only four dismissed it as “uncultivated.” Two thought it was American, not English, but the Fowlers’ evidence shows that they were in error.4 In “The King’s English,” the Fowlers admit that the idiomatic use of the two auxiliaries, “while it comes by nature to Southern Englishmen, . . . is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it.” In Scotland and Ireland, as in the United States, the difference between them is largely disregarded, and no doubt Northern English example is at least partly responsible for American usage.5 As Leonard once said,6 “The whole mass of

1 In 1929 N. R. French, C. W. Carter, Jr., and Walter Koenig, Jr., of the staff of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, undertook a statistical study of the words used in telephone conversations. Their material embraced 79,390 words used in 1900 conversations. They reported that will was used as an auxiliary 1,305 times in 402 conversations, but that shall was used but 6 times in 6 conversations. See a discussion of the matter in Grammar and Usage in Textbooks on English, by Robert C. Pooley; Madison, Wis., 1933, p. 60. The French-Carter-Koenig report has been published as The Words and Sounds of Telephone Conversa-

tions, Bell System Technical Journal, April, 1930.

2 Oxford, 1926, p. 526.

3 2nd ed., Oxford, 1908, pp. 133-154.

4 Current Definition of Levels in English Usage, by S. A. Leonard and H. Y. Moffett, English Journal, May, 1927,

5 P. W. Joyce says flatly in English As We Spoke It in Ireland, 2nd ed.; London, 1910, p. 77, that, “like many another Irish idiom this is also found in American society chiefly through the influence of the Irish.” At all events, the Irish example must have reinforced it. In Ireland “Will I light the fire, ma’am?” is colloquially sound.

6 Shall and Will, American Speech,

pronouncements about the matter in text-books is of very little importance now, since the future in English is most commonly expressed by neither shall nor will, but by the much commoner construction 'll, and by the forms is to go, about to go, is going to, and the whole range of auxiliary verbs which mean both past and future."1 More than two generations ago, impatient of the effort to fasten an arbitrary English distinction upon American, George P. Marsh attacked the differentiation of shall from will 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."2 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."

4. OTHER PARTS OF SPEECH

The schoolmarm, in fact, has virtually abandoned her old effort to differentiate between the two auxiliaries, but she continues the heroic task of trying to make her young charges grasp the difference between who and whom. Here, alas, the speechways of the American people seem to be again against her. The two forms of the pronoun are confused magnificently in the debates in Congress, and in most newspaper writing, and in ordinary discourse the great majority of Americans avoid whom diligently, as a word full of snares. When they employ it, it is often incorrectly, as in

Aug., 1929, p. 498. He quotes The Rules of Common School Grammars, by C. C. Fries, Publications of the Modern Language Association, March, 1927, to the effect that "the first statement that will is differently used in the first person and in the second and third is in a grammar of English written in Latin by Johannis Wallis and first published in 1653. From this book it was copied frequently by the imitative grammarians of the Eighteenth Century, and has been swallowed with eyes shut by most of the writers of common-school grammars, handbooks of correct English, and the like ever since."1 In her Tendencies in Modern American Poetry; New York, 1917, Amy Lowell takes Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters to task for constantly using will for shall, and says that they share the habit "with many other modern American writers." See also Text, Type and Style, by George B. Ives; Boston, 1921, p. 289 ff. 2 Lectures on the English Language, 4th ed.; New York, 1870, p. 659.

202 The American Language

"Whom is your father?" and "Whom spoke to me?" Noah Webster, always the pragmatic reformer, denounced it as usually useless 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 very affected to most Americans; they might write it, but they would never speak it.1 The use of me instead of I in "It's me" is also almost universal in the United States, but here it is the objective form that is prevailing, not the nominative, as in the case of who and whom. "It's me" will be discussed at length in Chapter IX, Section 3.

A shadowy line often separates what is currently coming into sound usage from, what is still regarded as barbarous. No American of any pretensions, I assume, would defend ain't as a substitute 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.2 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 in bad begins to take on the dignity of a national idiom, and sure, to go big and run slow3 become almost respectable. When, on the entrance of the United States into the World War, the Tank 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

1 Compare Matthew XVI, 13: "When Jesus came into the coasts of Cesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?" See also Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, above cited, p. 723, and Chapters on English, by Otto Jespersen; London, 1918, p. 52. 2 For an interesting discussion of aren't see a letter by H. E. Boot in English, June, 1920, p. 376, and one by Daniel Jones in the same periodical, Aug.-Sept., 1920, p. 399. 3 A common direction to drivers and locomotive engineers. The English form is slow down. I note, however, that "drive slowly" is in the taxi-cab shed at the Pennsylvania Station, in New York. See also Chapter IX, Section 6.

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. And to challenge the somewhat absurd textbook prohibition of terminal prepositions, so that "Where are we at?" loses its old raciness. And to substitute as though for as if. And to split infinitives in a wholesale and completely innocent manner.1 And to daily lavishly with a supererogatory but, as in "I have no doubt but that." The last occurs very frequently in the Congressional Record, and though it was denounced by Edward S. Gould so long ago as 18672 it seems to be very firmly lodged in colloquial American, and even to have respectable standing in the standard speech. It was used often by the highly correct Henry Cabot Lodge,3 and has been written into a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States by Charles Evans Hughes.4 The one-he combination, so offensive to purists (among whom, in this case, I venture to include myself), is now so common in the United States that putting it down becomes quite hopeless. In 1921, when the late Warren Gamaliel Harding, LL.D., used it in his Inaugural Address, I mocked it in the Nation, but in vain, for most of the correspondents who wrote to me afterward argued for it. Of the twenty-nine philologians who voted on it in the Leonard-Moffett inquiry,5 six called it good "literary or formal English" and sixteen thought it was "cultivated, informal English." It is, of course, not English at all, as Fowler observes in "Modern English Usage," though it is used by "a small minority of modern British writers." But in this

1 This splitting is defended eloquently by one of the most distinguished of American grammarians, George O. Curme, in The Split Infinitive, American Speech, May, 1927. He argues that it often helps to clarify the meaning. Thus "He failed completely to understand it" differs in meaning from "He failed to completely understand it." "Grammatical instruction in our schools," says Dr. Curme sagely, "might become a power and mighty interesting to students if it ceased to be a study of rules and became a study of the English language as something fashioned by the English people and still being shaped by the present generation. It will give a thrill to English-

speaking students to discover that the English language does not belong to the school teacher but belongs to them and that its future destiny will soon rest entirely in their hands." See also Syntax, by Dr. Curme; Boston, 1931, p. 455 ff, and The Split Infinitive, by H. W. Fowler, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XV, 1923.

2 Good English, p. 59.

3 For example, see the Congressional Record, May 14, 1918, p. 6996.

4 Principality of Monaco vs. State of Mississippi, May 21, 1934. (54 S. Ct. R., 748 note).

5 Current Definition of Levels in English Usage, cited in Section .3, above.

204 The American Language

country its use is almost universal, and I have even found it in a serious treatise on the national letters by a former editor of the Atlantic Monthly, edited by a posse of Yale professors and published by the University Press.1 The appearance of a redundant s at the end of such words as downward, somewhere and forward has been long marked in American. “In modern Standard English,” says Logan Pearsall Smith,2 “though not in the English of the United States, a distinction which we feel, but many of us could not define, is made between forward and forwards; forwards being used in definite contrast to any other direction, as ‘If you move at all, you can only move forwards,’ while forward is used where no such contrast is implied, as in the common phrase, ‘to bring a matter forward.’”3 This distinction, pace Smith, retains some force in the United States too, but in general our usage allows the s in cases where English usage would certainly be against it. Gould, in the 50's, noting its appearance at the end of such words as somewhere and anyway, denounced it as vulgar and illogical, and White, in the late 60's, was against it even in towards. But towards, according to Fowler, is now prevailing even in England. Thornton traced anyway back to 1842 and showed that it was an archaism, and to be found in the Book of Common Prayer (c. 1560); perhaps it has been preserved by analogy with sideways. Henry James attacked “such forms of impunity as somewheres else and nowheres else, a good ways on and a good ways off” as “vulgarisms with which a great deal of general credit for ‘what we good-naturedly call ‘refinement’ appears so able to coexist,”4 but his shrill complaint seems to have fallen upon sound-proofed ears. Perhaps he would have been even more upset, on his so unhappy American tour, if he had encountered no place and some place, which show some sign of dislodging no-wheres and somewheres.

The general American liking for short cuts in speech, so plainly visible in the incessant multiplication of compounds and back-formations, is also shown in the popularity of abbreviations. They are employed in the United States, says John S. Farmer, “to an American would use “to take a matter up.”

1 The American Spirit in Literature, by Bliss Perry; New Haven, 1918, p. 117. 2 The English Language; New York, 1912, p. 79. 3 Common, that is, in England. An 4 The Question of Our Speech; Boston, 1905, p. 30. See also Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. I, 1913, p. 48.

extent unknown in Europe. Life, they say, is short and the pace is quick; brevity, therefore, is not only the soul of wit, but the essence of business capacity as well. This trait of the American character is discernible in every department of the national life and thought — even slang being curtailed at times." 1 O.K., C.O.D., N.G. and P.D.Q. are American masterpieces; the first has been borrowed by all the languages of Western Europe and some of those of Asia, and in the days of the great immigrations the immigrants learned all four immediately after hell and damn. Thornton has traced N.G. to 1840, and C.O.D. and P.D.Q. are probably quite as old. The earliest use of O.K. that has been recorded in the dictionaries is dated 1840 also, and the story generally credited is that it originated in Champaign county, Ohio, during the presidential campaign of that year. The Whig candidate was William Henry Harrison, an Ohioan, and on September 15 there was a rally in his interest in a grove belonging to John A. Ward, father of J. Q. A. Ward the sculptor, at Urbana. In the parade preceding the speech-making there were 42 farm-wagons, each freighted with a small log-cabin. One of these wagons was driven by John Rock, a nearby farmer. It was drawn by 24 horses, and had 36 young women as passengers, all dressed in white. On it was a streamer bearing the words "The People is Oll Korrect," painted by Thomas Daniels, the local handy-man. The story is to the effect that Daniels's error was seized upon by Harrison's opponents, but that his friends, seeing the popular appeal in it, took it over themselves and made "The People is O.K." their battle-cry. Unluckily, Mr. H. J. Carr, of the Urbana Citizen, has discovered that O.K. had appeared in Samuel Medary's Ohio Statesman, published at Columbus, on September 11, four days before the Urbana meeting.2 More, it had been used in the Boston Transcript on April 15, five months before the meeting,3 and again in the Boston Atlas on June 20.4

1 Americanisms Old and New; London, 1889, p. 1. 2 Mr. Carr published an account of his discovery in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nov. 20, 1934 3 See O.K. at Ninety-Five, Boston Transcript (editorial), April 15, 1935. It occurred in a report of a Democratic meeting in New York, in the interest of Martin Van Buren's renomination for a second term. The Transcript's correspondent said that " the tail of the Democratic party, the roarers, butt-enders, ringleaders, O.K.'s . . . and indomitables talked strong Nullification and all that." "The allusion," says the Transcript editorial of 1935, "was probably to those who put their O.K. on the nomination of Van Buren." 4 In a report of a Whig convention held at Worcester on June 19.

206 The American Language

There are many rival etymologies for the abbreviation. One derives it from the initials of one Obediah Kelly, an early railway freight-agent, who signed them to bills of lading. Another derives it from Keokuk, the name of an Indian chief from whom the town of Keo-kuk, Iowa, was named. His admirers called him Old Keokuk, and usually added “ He’s all right! ”, and so Old Keokuk, and finally the simple initials, came to mean the same thing.1 A third etymology derives O.K. from omnis korrecta, supposed to have been once used by schoolmasters in marking examination-papers.2 A fourth seeks its origin in Aux Cayes, the name of a port in what is now Haiti, whence the best rum came in the early days. A fifth holds that it was borrowed from the terminology of the early shipbuilders, who fash-ioned the timbers of their ships under cover, marked each one for identification, and then began the actual building by laying O.K. (i.e., outer keel) No. 1.3 A sixth contends that O.K. was invented by the early telegraphers, along with many other abbreviations, e.g., G.M. (good morning), G.A. (go ahead) and N.M. (no more).4 A seventh credits O.K. to the elder John Jacob Astor, “ who marked it on bills presented to him for credit.” 5 An eighth seeks its origin in the archaic English word hoacky or horkey, meaning the last load brought in from the fields at harvest.6 A ninth derives it from a Choctaw word, okeh, signifying “ it is so.” “ Webster’s New International Dictionary ” (1934) accepts this last, though adding a saving “ probably, ” but the Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary

Barre, ” said the Atlas, “ rode in a stage which had a barrel of hard-cider on the baggage-rack, marked with large letters O.K. – oll kor-rect. ”

1 I take this from the Louisville Herald-Post, Feb. 26, 1932.

2 This comes from a letter signed L. M., dated Calgary, March 4, 1935, and published in the Van-couver Sun. For it I am indebted to Mr. J. A. Macdonald, of the Sun staff.

3 For this I am indebted to Mr. John D. Forbes, of San Francisco.

4 See Topical Tittle-tattle, by Tadler, Sidmouth (England) Observer, March 27, 1935, and O.K. – Time Saver, by John Galt, New York American, March 22, 1935. Unfor-tunately for this theory, there were no telegraph operators until 1844, and O.K., as we have seen, had been used in 1840.

5 O.K. No Mystery, by Frank A. Kellman, New York American, March 20, 1935.

6 Derivation of O.K., by Wilfrid White, London Daily Telegraph, March 7, 1935. Mr. White quotes an anonymous poem, Poor Robin, of 1676: “ Hoacky is brought home with Hollwin ” [Hallowe’en]. “ There is also, ” he says, “ a long poem by Herrick, entitled The Hock Cart, or Harvest Home. It seems but a short step from hoacky, signifying the satisfactory comple-tion of harvesting, to the snappy O.K. of today. ”

(1933) rejects it, saying that “it does not agree with the evidence.” There is yet a tenth etymology, whereby O.K. is made to originate in a libel of Andrew Jackson by Seba Smith (Major Jack Downing), who is said to have alleged, c. 1832, that he saw Jackson’s endorsement “O.K., Amos,” on the elegant pronunciamentoes drawn up for him by his literary secretary, Amos Kendall. Says a floating newspaper paragraph:

Possibly the general did use this endorsement, and it may have been used by other people also. But James Parton has discovered in the records of the Nashville court of which Jackson was a judge, before he became President, numerous documents endorsed O.R., meaning Order Recorded. He urges, therefore, that it was a record of that court with some belated business which Major Downing saw on the desk of the Presidential candidate.1 However this may be, the Democrats, in lieu of denying the charge, adopted the letters O.K. as a sort of party cry and fastened them upon their banners.

This last theory, it seems to me, deserves more investigation than it has got. Certainly O.K. must have been in familiar use before 1840, and equally certainly it had some connection with Democrats. But Woodrow Wilson, himself the most eminent Democrat of his day, accepted the Choctaw etymology, and used okeh in approving official papers. His use of the form made it popular, and it became the name of a series of popular phonograph records, and of many shoe-shining parlors, lunch-rooms and hot-dog stands. An Okey Hosiery Company survives in New York along with an Okay Electric Company, an Okay Food Sales Company, an Okay Manufacturing Company, and an Okay Supply Company. O.K. has gone into English,2 and also into all the Continental languages. Some years ago the British Privy Council decided solemnly that it was good English. Ba Maw, manager of a rice mill in Burma, had written O.K. on certain bills to indicate that they had been checked and found correct. The Privy Council agreed that his understanding of the meaning of the term was sound, and in doing so set aside a decree of the High Court of Rangoon, which had ruled that O.K. was not English. English or not, it has become the symbol for “we agree” in the code of the International Telecommunication Convention, signed by the dele-

1 Presidential candidate is probably an error for President. Jackson was elected for his first term in 1828. Smith did not begin to write his Letters of Major Downing until the early 30’s.

2 “What has been my horror,” wrote Mrs. Nicholas Murray Butler to the London Daily Telegraph, March 6, 1935, “to hear O.K. used in an English drawing-room, and, worse still, to find it in the Oxford Dictionary!”

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The American Language

gates to the International Radio Conference at Madrid, December 9, 1932. “It is estimated,” says a recent newspaper writer, “ that

O.K. is used [in the United States] not less than a million times a day,

even by the most high-hatted of auditors and certified public accountants. It is used in official business at Washington and in the

Army and Navy, in the Ford plant, on the railroads, and in the American sections of London and Paris. Regardless of its possible

illegitimacy, it has a convincing and captivating ring, and it is undoubtedly the most popular of all American slang or idiom.”1 The

figure mentioned by this writer seems to be too modest. According to James A. Bohannon, president of the Peerless Motor Car Corporation, “ a half million O.K.’s are included in every motor-car built.”2

A back-formation, oke, appeared about 1930.

Many other abbreviations are in common use in the United States. I have mentioned C.O.D., N.G. and P.D.Q. The first-named has

been borrowed by the English, but they always understand it to mean cash on delivery, not collect on delivery. G.O.P. was formerly

popular as a designation for the Republican party (Grand Old Party), and also, in the days of the horse-cars, as an abbreviation of

get out and push, but it seems to be fading. It was probably suggested by the English G.O.M. for Grand Old Man (W. E. Gladstone,

1882). A No. 1, as in an A No. 1 car, is also an Americanism of English parentage: it is borrowed from A 1, used in Lloyd’s Register

to designate ships in first-class condition. Other familiar Americanisms are G.B. (grand bounce), F.F.V. (first families of Virginia),

F.O.B. (free on board), G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic), S.A. (sex-appeal), D. & D. (drunk and disorderly), on the Q.T. (on

the quiet), T.B. (tuberculosis), L (elevated-railway), and B.V.D., the trade-name for a brand of men’s underwear, but now in such

wide use that it is applied indiscriminately to the product of other manufacturers.3 Perhaps Q-room (cue-room, i.e., billiard-room),

1 Butte (Mont.) Standard, Oct. 11, 1929.

of the late mysterious Isidor Fisch, Hauptmann’s tubercular friend, has learned to say okay. It is now his

2 Cincinnati Enquirer, Oct. 6, 1929. See also Okeb: Legenden um ein Modewort, by A. J. Storfer, Vossische Zeitung (Berlin), Sept. 3,

answer for everything.”

1933. For the sake of the record I add the following from the New York World-Telegram’s report of

the Hauptmann-Lindbergh trial, Jan. 23, 1935: “Pincus Fisch, brother

3 Under date of March 29, 1933 I received the following from Mr. P. B. Merry of the B.V.D. Company, Inc.: “From the standpoint

of business psychology and because of the great public curiosity as to the meaning of our trademark, we

While-U-wait, and Bar-B-Q (barbecue), all of them familiar signs, should be added. There are many secret and semi-secret abbreviations, especially in college slang and other argots,1 and nonce-forms often appear, e.g., w.k. (well-known). The World War brought in a great many novelties, headed by A.E.F. (American Expeditionary Force) and a.w.o.l. (absent without leave). There was a similar abundance of new forms in England: of them D.O.R.A. (Defense of the Realm Act) and wren (a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service) are examples. After the war the Russians contributed a large number, e.g., cheka (Chrezvychainaya Komissiya, i.e., Extraordinary Commission), N.E.P. (New Economic Plan), and Gay-pay-oo (Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie, i.e., Government Political Administration), which last somehow became Ogpu in the Western world. To these was presently added Nazi (National-sozialistische) from Germany. The effect was to encourage the invention of similar forms in America, and when the New Deal dawned, in 1933, scores began to appear, e.g., N.R.A. or Nira (National Recovery Administration), T.V.A. (Tennessee Valley Authority), F.E.R.A. (Federal Emergency Relief Administration), C.C.C. (Civilian Conservation Corps), A.A.A. (Agricultural Adjustment Administration), and so on —enough, in fact, to induce Alfred E. Smith to describe the government as submerged in a bowl of alphabetical soup.2 The advertising brethren are fertile inventors of abbreviations. They seem to have produced I.X.L. many years ago, and of late they have added XLent (a brand of salmon), E.Z. (for easy: part of the name of a brand of shoes), Fits-U (a brand of eye-glasses), and many other combinations of U, e.g., Uneeda, Uneedme (a chair-pad), U-Put-It-On (a weather-strip), U-Rub-It-In (an ointment), While-U-Wait, and “R.U. interested in”—

would not care to have you publish any information regarding its origin, but for your personal use, if you request it, we will be glad to tell you the history of B.V.D." I did not request it. 1 See Semi-Secret Abbreviations, by Percy W. Long, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. III, 1915, and Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916. Dr. Long lists, among others, c. & s. (Navy: clean and sober), G.b.F. (among teachers: God bless Friday), c.o.p. (department-stores: customer's own property), r.b. (tailors: round back), b.d.t. (college: back-door trot), g.p. (medical men: grateful patient), G.o.k. (medical men: God only knows), f.b.b. (general: family hold back), and b.s. (college: euphemistically explained by Dr. Long as meaning bovine excrecence). 2 Alphabetical soup is itself an Americanism. It designates a noodle-soup in which the noodles are stamped out in the form of letters of the alphabet.

210 The American Language whatever happens to be for sale.1 On the Pacific Coast the barbecues and hot-dog stands run to such signs as Sit 'N Eat, Park 'N Dine and so on.2 In college slang the common abbreviation W.C. (water-closet) is sometimes expanded, ironically, to Wesley chapel. In a similar way sporting writers expand K.O. (knockout) to kayo.

One of the characteristics of slang, as we shall see in Chapter XI, Section 1, is that its novelties are sometimes worked so hard and in so many situations that they lose all definite meaning. This is also true of certain popular words on higher levels: philologists call them vogu-words or counter-words. The common adjectives and adverbs of intensification offer examples e.g., grand, dreadful, nice and awfully, and we have seen another in the verb to fix (Chapter I, Section 3) and yet another in the verb to get (Chapter V, Section 3). The noun proposition began to take on wide and often preposterous significances in American during the 90's, and was soon in a lamentably swollen state.

It meant a problem, proposal, person, parallel, premiss, postulate, parley, phenomenon, point, policy, philosophy, prospect, process, petition, paradox or possibility, to mention only a few of its meanings under its own first letter.3 It went into English with the movies, and was denounced by H. W. Fowler in "Modern English Usage," but it remained distinctively American there, and is now fading out of both languages, at least in its character of counter-word.

In 1910 or thereabout the more incompetent newspaper reporters of the United States began to use angle in the sense of any aspect of a person or an event,4 and ten years later they adopted alibi as a synonym for any word signifying an explanation or excuse. Both wore out very quickly, but not, alas, quickly enough.

Other counter-words that have flourished since the beginning of the century are gesture, service, reaction, complex, analysis, plus and dingus, the verbs to function and to claim,5 and the adjectives outstanding,

1 See Notes on the Vernacular, by Louise Pound, American Mercury, Oct., 1924, p. 237. years later. For examples of its use there see The Supplement to the O.E.D., by George G. Loane, Literary Supplement to the London Times, March 8, 1934, p. 162.

2 See Showing Hollywood, by Cecelia Ager, Variety, July 23, 1930, p. 49.

3 In a speech in the Senate by Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska, on Feb. 21, 1921, it was used in five or six distinct senses. The speech may be found in the Congressional Record of the same date, p. 374 ff. 4 Angle got into English about 15

5 In 1906, according to Enid C. Dauncey, Living Age, Dec. 15, to claim was "employed in the most inhuman fashion to do the work of a dozen healthy, willing substitutes," e.g., to allege, assert, protest, profess, advance, propound, depose, avow.

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211

meticulous, exciting, conscious and consistent. Some of them began in the argot of a relatively small class, and then extended to the common tongue, e.g., service, which seems to have been launched by the visionaries of Rot ary c. 1910. Outstanding began its career among the pedagogues, and they still overwork it cruelly,1 but it is now also used by politicians, the rev. clergy, newspaper editorial writers, and other such virtuosi of bad writing. Consistent came in c. 1925 as an adjective designating every sort of harmony or continuity, and for a while drove out a whole flock of better words. Exciting apparently arose in the jargon of art criticism, but in 1933 it was borrowed by the writers of book reviews, and presently had a great run in publishers’ advertising, especially on the slip-covers of books. Plus seems to have been the child of advertisement writers; it was noticed in American Speech for December, 1927, as in high favor among them. Classic followed a year or so later.2 Dingus seems to have originated in the English of South Africa, but it has been in heavy use in the United States since the automobile and the radio brought in a host of novel contraptions, and with it have flourished a number of congeners, e.g., jigger, gadget and doodad.3 Complex, of course, owed its vogue, c. 1915, to the popularity of the Freudian rumble-bumble. The use of gesture as a general indicator of any sort of action, movement, offer, threat or deed began in 1925 or thereabout. The late George Philip Krapp believed that it was suggested by the French beau geste, the title of a popular movie of the period.4

1 I find it used no less than five times on a single page of American Writers, by Edwin L. Miller, assistant superintendent of schools of Detroit; Philadelphia, 1934, p. 676. See Educational Lingo, by Olivia Pound, American Speech, March, 1926. Miss Pound makes some amusing comments upon the platitudinous and cliché-studded English of the gogues. When outstanding got to England it hatched an adverb, outstandingly. See English, Feb., 1920, p. 286, and Speech Degeneracy, by M. V. P. Yeaman, American Speech, Nov., 1925.

2 See Classic, by R. G. Lewis, American Speech, June, 1928, p. 433.

3 The Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary suggests that dingus is derived from the Dutch ding (a thing). The earliest quotation given is dated 1898. See American Indefinite Names, by Louise Pound, American Mercury, Oct., 1924, p. 236.

4 A Comprehensive Guide to Good English; Chicago, 1927, p. 269. See also Beau Geste?, by J. M. Steadman, Jr., American Speech, June, 1928.

The great flow of European immigration to the United States, perhaps the most significant event in human history since the close of the Middle Ages, began with the Irish potato famine of 1847 and the German political disturbances of the two years following. Between 1776 and 1846, a stretch of more than two generations, less than 1,600,000 immigrants from overseas had come into the country, though its population had increased nearly sevenfold, from 3,000,000 to 20,000,000. But after 1850 the movement began in earnest, and thereafter it continued for sixty-five years, with only two considerable interruptions, the first caused by the Civil War and the second by the Depression of 1893. In each of the years 1905, 1906, 1907, 1910, 1913 and 1914 more than a million immigrants were admitted, and by 1927 the total number arriving since 1820 reached 37,000,000. In 1930 there were 13,366,407 white persons in the United States who had been born in foreign countries, 16,999,221 whose parents were both foreign-born, and 8,361,965 of mixed parentage - a total of 38,727,593, or more than 35% of the whole white population. In addition, there were perhaps 200,000 Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Hindus and Koreans who were either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents, and nearly 1,500,000 Mexicans.1

With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1921 the flow of immigration was considerably reduced, and when the Immigration Act of 1924 followed it was virtually halted. Both acts were qualitative as well as quantitative in purpose and effect. The first limited the annual immigration from each country to 3% of "the number of foreign-born persons of such nationality resident in the United States" in 1910, and the second reduced the quota to 2% and changed the year to 1890. The aim of the latter amendment was to diminish the relative number of immigrants from Eastern and South-

1 The Census Bureau explains somewhat lamely (Fifteenth Census: Population, Vol. II, Washington, 1933, p. 27) that "by reason of its growing importance, the Mexican element was given a separate classification in 1930," though it had been "included for the most part with the white population at prior censuses." The instruction given to enumerators was that "all persons born in Mexico, or having parents born in Mexico, who are not definitely white, Negro, Indian, Chinese or Japanese, should be returned as Mexicans." Under this instruction, 1,422,533 Mexicans were returned in 1930, besides 65,968 "persons of Mexican birth or parentage returned as white."

ern Europe. Down to 1890 the overwhelming majority of entrants had come from Great Britain, Germany and the Scandinavian countries, but after that year those from Italy, Russia and the Austrian dominions had taken the lead. In 1914, for example, 383,738 came in from Italy, 255,660 from Russia and 278,152 from Austria-Hungary, whereas the arrivals from Germany were but 35,734, from Scandinavia 29,391, and from the United Kingdom and Ireland 73,417. It was generally felt that immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were harder to assimilate than those from the West and North, and that the country already had enough of them, and to spare. So the number of Italians admitted annually was reduced from 42,128 under the Act of 1921 to 3,845 under the Act of 1924, and the number of Poles from 30,977 to 5,977. A certain amount of anti-Semitism also got into the matter, for a large proportion of the immigrants from Eastern Europe were Jews. The two acts worked so well that by 1930 the year's immigration was reduced to 241,700, and by 1933 to 23,068. Indeed, since 1930 the number of immigrants coming in annually has been more than once surpassed by the number of former immigrants returning home, and from 1930 to 1935 the total excess amounted to 229,363.1

Of the 13,366,407 foreign-born whites in the country in 1930,2 13,216,928 were ten years old or older, and of this number only 3,907,021 spoke English as their native language. Nevertheless, all save 869,865 of the remainder managed to convince the census enumerators that they had acquired a workable command of the language. No doubt most of them spoke it badly, but at all events they tried to speak it, and their children were being taught it in the schools. The immigrants of the older immigrations had naturally made the most progress. The Scandinavians, about half of whom arrived before 1900, made the best showing, with hardly more than 2% of them unable to speak English, and less than 1% of the males. Next came the Germans: 58.3% of them arrived before 1900, and all save 2.9% (1.8% of males) could speak English. The Poles, Russians,

1 Congressional Record, Feb. 19, 1935, p. 2290. 2 Including Negroes, Mexicans and Asiatics, the total number was 14,204,149. Of these, 7,919,536 were naturalized, 1,266,419 had taken out their first papers, 4,518,341 had made no move to be naturalized, and 499,853 were of uncertain status. It was estimated in 1934 that the number of the unnaturalized had shrunk to 3,600,000. Very often the statement is made that there are also millions of unrecorded aliens in the country, but for this there is no evidence.

214 The American Language

Italians, Greeks and Czechs, and the Baltic and Balkan peoples, most of whom came in between 1900 and 1914, fell much behind. Of the Poles, for example, 12.8% were still unable to speak English in 1930 (7.7% of males and 18.7% of females) and of the Italians 15.7% (8.9% and 25.1%). Here something more than mere duration of residence in the country seems to have had some influence, for though 12.7% of the Germans came in after 1925, only 2.9% were without English in 1930. These late-coming Germans were, on the whole, much better educated than the Eastern and Southern Europeans who arrived at the same time, and large numbers of them had probably received some instruction in English at home. Moreover, they dispersed themselves throughout the country, and did not collect in ghettos, like a majority of the Italians, Slavs and Jews. Of the 1,808,289 Italians here in 1930 more than 1,500,000 were crowded into relatively few cities, and of the 1,222,658 Jews who reported Yiddish as their native language all save 19,000 were living in cities.1

This concentration of foreign-speaking people in limited areas has naturaly influenced the American of those areas, if only on its lower levels. Now that immigration has been virtually cut off, that influence will diminish, but how long it may be exerted is to be observed in the so-called Pennsylvania-Dutch region of Pennsylvania, where a dialect of German is still a living speech after more than 200 years of settlement, and the local dialect of English shows plain traces of it, both in vocabulary and in pronunciation. In the same way, the everyday speech of lower Louisiana is full of French terms not in use elsewhere, e.g., brioche, praline, lagniappe, armoir, kruxingiol (croquignole), pooldoo (poule d'eau), jambalaya, bogue, gris-gris and briqué.2

1 These figures, it should be noted, do not show the total number of foreign-born Jews in the country. "Many Jews of foreign birth," says the Census Bureau (Fifteenth Census: Population, Vol. II; Washington, 1933, p. 342), "report German, Russian or other languages as their mother tongue."

2 See New Orleans Word-List, by E. Riedel, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. IV, 1916; Louisiana, by James Routh, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916; and Terms From Louisiana, by James Routh and E. O. Barker, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. VI, 1917. Appended to the last-named is a long list of Louisiana names for birds and animals, many of them French, e.g., aigle tête blanche (the bald eagle), becassine (a species of snipe), biorque (the bittern), carencro (vulture), corbigeau (plover), dindon fa-rouché or dindon sauvage (wild turkey), gros-bec (heron), paper bleu (finch), and bassaris (civet cat). The word ofay, which may have come from the French au fait (signifying mastery), is in general

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215

In Minnesota and the adjacent States many Swedish terms are in common use, e.g., lutfisk (a fish delicacy), lingon (a berry), lefse (a potato pancake), fattigmand (a pastry), spruts (another), lag (an association of Swedes from the same province), and midsommarfest (commonly Anglicized to midsummer-feast). There is also a considerable borrowing of Swedish idioms, as in to cook coffee (koka kaffee), forth and back (fram och tillbaka), and to hold with in place of to agree with (håller med). A recent observer collected the following among “English-speaking high-school and college graduates of Swedish descent” in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois:

The Expression Heard

She poured up the coffee

The sour hen

I cooked soup on that bone

I studied for him

They call him for a fool

I read for the minister

Ready till Christmas

I am freezing so

Standard English

She poured the coffee

The setting hen

I made soup with that bone

I studied under him

They call him a fool

I studied with the minister

Ready by Christmas

I am so cold

The Swedish Original

Hon hällde upp kaffet

Den sura hön a

Jag kokte soppa på detta ben

Jag studerade för honom

De kallade honom för en narr

Jag läste för prästen

Färdigt till jul

Jag fryser 1

To this list a correspondent 2 adds the following:

The English of Swedish children often influences the English of their American playmates. A colleague who is a New Englander tells me that his Minnesota-born children used to say, “I want to go with ” (Jag vill gå med). A Swedishism frequently heard is “It stands in the paper” (Det står i tidningen). “A couple, three dollars” apparently comes from Ett par, tre dollar.

use in the Negro press of the United States to designate a white person. It is possible that it originated in New Orleans. Its popularity, I suspect, is at least partly due to its brevity, which makes it a good headline word. Most of the more recent American borrowings from French have come in through English, e.g., garage, gigolo and hangar, or have entered the two languages simultaneously, but rôtisserie, with the accent omitted, seems to be an Americanism. It

signifies an eating-house wherein chickens and butcher’s meat are roasted at a charcoal-grill, usually in the show-window of the establishment. It has been in use in New York since 1900 or thereabout, but is encountered only infrequently elsewhere.

1 Twenty Idioms Illustrating the Influence of Swedish on English, by Thorvald E. Holter, American Speech, Feb., 1931.

2 Mr. Roy W. Swanson, of the editorial staff of the St. Paul Dispatch.

216 The American Language

I once heard a second-generation university man use the sentence, "He will not live over it," meaning "He will not get over it." The Swedish is Det kommer han inte att överleva.

In the same way Czech words have got into American and Czech idioms have influenced usage in the regions wherein Bohemian immigrants are numerous. One of the former is listed in "Webster's New International Dictionary" (1934). It is kolach, and it is defined as "variety of kuchen made esp. by Bohemians." Why the German word kuchen is used in this definition I don't know. Kolach is the Czech kolác, with its accent lost in the melting-pot. Other Czech loan-words and phrases that are in local use are roblik (a roll brushed with egg-yolk, salted, and sometimes sprinkled with caraway or poppy seeds), povidla (a prune marmalade), buchta (a coffee-cake), počkij (wait, hold on), sokol (literally, a falcon, but used to designate an athletic association), na zdar (good luck), and to soc (from the verb sočiti, meaning to scold or grumble). Another is pantáta (literally, Mr. Father, and signifying a father-in-law). This last was apparently in use in New York at the time of the Lexow investigation to designate a corrupt police-captain, but it has gone out.1 In Bristol county, Massachusetts, where there are many Portuguese immigrants, a number of Portuguese loan-words are encountered, e.g., cabeca (head), lingreese (Port. lingüiça, a sausage), and jick or jickie (Englishman).2 If cuspidor is actually an Americanism, which seems probable, then it most likely came from the Portuguese verb cuspir (to spit). The Oxford Dictionary's first example of its use (spelled cuspadore) is taken from Forrest's "Voyage to New Guinea," dated 1779, but after that there is no quotation until 1871, at which time an Englishman named Heath took out a patent for "an improvement in cuspidores." The word seems to have been in general use in the United States before 1870.3 In New York City the high density of Eastern Jews in the population has made almost every New Yorker familiar with a long list of Yiddish words, e.g., kosher, shadchan, matzoth, mazuma,4 yom kippur, meshuggah and

1 See Czech Influence Upon the American Vocabulary, by Monsignor J. B. Dudek, Czecho-Slovak Student Life (Lisle, Ill.), June, 1928.

2 I am indebted here to Mr. Charles J. Lovell. The prevalence of Dutch loan-words in the Hudson river region has been remarked in Chap-

ter III, Section 1, and of Spanish loan-words in the Southwest in Chapter IV, Section 3.

3 I am indebted here to Mr. Arthur R. Coelho.

4 According to H. Heshin (American Speech, May, 1926, p. 456) mazuma is derived from a Chal-

gefilte-fisch, and many non-Jewish New Yorkers have added others that are not generally familiar, e.g., schul, bar-mitzva, blintzes, kad-dish, trepa, dayyan, goy, dokus, schochet, schmus, schicker, schiksa, mohel, get, hesped, kishkes, kittl, meshummad and pesach.

The Yiddish exclamation, oi-yoi, is common New Yorkese, and the Yiddish greetings, mazel tov and scholom aleichim, are pretty well known and understood. There is also some translation of Yiddish idioms, as in “That’s something else again” and “Did I say no?” In 1915 or thereabout “I should worry” came into use in New York, and quickly spread throughout the country. It was said at the time to be a translation of a Yiddish phrase, ish ka bibble, but about this there is still some mystery. The common Yiddish saying is actually “Es is mein daige” (It is my worry).1 There are not a few Yiddish loan-words in German, and some of them have probably been helped into American by that fact, e.g., kosher, mazuma (money), matzoth, meshuggah (crazy), and dokus (backside). I find mazuma in a word list from Kansas.2 Contrariwise, there are many German words in Yiddish, and one of them, kibitzer, has come into American by the Yiddish route. In German kiebitz signifies the peewit or lapwing (Vanellus cristallus), and has long been in figurative use to designate a looker-on at cards, and especially one who offers unsolicited advice.3 The word apparently acquired the agent suffix, -er, on coming into American. Yiddish has greatly enriched the vocabulary of those trades in which Jews are numerous. In the retail shoe business, “a customer who shops from store to store, trying on shoes but not buying, is known as a schleper. In Yiddish the word means a mean fellow. Those who bargain in a one-price store are called schnorrers,

dean word, m’zumon, “meaning in literal translation the ready necessity.” Gefilte, of course, is the German gefüllte (stuffed).

1 Here I am indebted to Mr. Albert Kaplan.

2 In the collectanea of Judge J. C. Ruppenthal, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916, p. 326.

3 The following is from a letter signed Philologist in the New York Evening Post, Feb. 15, 1929: “Any one who has ever visited drowsy little inns of the German countryside remembers the grotesque portrait of the chap with a topheavy,

huge and red nose, possibly be-haired, on the tip of which a fat fly takes it easy. In order that the guests may not mistake it for a likeness of Cyrano, an invariable legend cautions energetically: ‘Ki-bitz, halts maul!’ (Kibitzer, keep your mouth shut).” Another correspondent, Hermann Post, wrote on the same day: “The eggs of the peewit are very much sought after for their delicious taste. They are laid on the ground. The bird, to protect the eggs, flies frantically around the heads of people looking for them.”

from the Yiddish for a beggar. The most derogatory of all terms in shoe lingo is the word momzer, also derived from the Yiddish and meaning a bastard. A momzer is one who, after working the sales- man to death, decides to buy in a store down the block." 1 The in- stalment furniture stores have also borrowed from the Yiddish. They are called by their salesmen borax-houses, and the borax apparently comes from the Yiddish borg, meaning credit. "When business is bad it's shofle, and a sucker is always a schnookel." When the credit department offers a customer such unfavorable terms that the sale is killed, it is said to be schmiessed.2 In the garment trade Yiddish is probably used more than English, and such English as is employed is full of Yiddish terms.3

The largest body of loan-words in American is that from the Spanish, with that from the German following hard upon it. Both have been discussed in the last chapter. Since the Civil War the chief contribution of German has been the domestication of the suffix -fest. It came in with sängerfest and turnfest in the early 50's, but the manufacture of American analogues did not begin until 1900 or thereabout. I have encountered, among others, the following: talk- fest, swatfest (a baseball game marked by many hits), hoochfest, slugfest (prizefight), smokefest, walkfest, gabfest,4 sobfest, egofest, spooffest, eatfest, stuntfest, ananiasfest, blarneyfest, smilefest, gossip- fest, batfest (baseball), bloodfest (war), crabfest, gabblefest, jawfest, singfest, lovefest, bullfest, boozefest, bookfest and applefest.5 When,

1 Lingo of the Shoe Salesman, by David Geller, American Speech, Dec., 1934.

2 The Borax House, by Louise Conant, American Mercury, June, 1929.

3 I am indebted in Yiddish matters to Mr. B. H. Hartogensis of Balti- more, who has undertaken an ex- tensive study of Loan-Words From the Hebrew in the American Lan- guage, not yet published.

4 A writer in the Editor and Pub- lisher for Dec. 25, 1919, p. 30, credits the first use of gabfest to the late Joseph S. McCullagh, edi- tor of the St. Louis Globe-Demo- crat. He says: "McCullagh coined the word while writing a comment upon an unusually prolonged and empty debate in Congress. No

other word in the dictionary or out of it seemed to fit the case so well, and as a great percentage of the readers of the Globe-Democrat throughout the Central West were of German birth or origin, gabfest was seized upon with hearty zest, and it is today very generally ap- plied to any protracted and par- ticularly loquacious gathering." In the Supplement to the Oxford Dic- tionary the first quoted use of the word is from the Grand Rapids (Mich.) Evening Express, July 30, 1904.

5 The "first annual bookfest and movie star rummage sale" of the League of American Penwomen was held at the Hotel Marion, Little Rock, Ark., Jan. 13-14, 1924. An applefest was held at the Mar-

The Language Today

219

on the repeal of Prohibition, American legislators began to search for euphemisms for saloon, one of the words they hit upon was the German stube, signifying, alone, simply a room, but often combined with bier (beer) or wein (wine) in bierstube or weinstube. According to Sir William Craigie, beer-garden, which came in about 1870, is "clearly from the German," i.e., from biergarten.

The suffixes -heimer and -bund had brief vogues in 1900 or thereabout, but the former survives only in wiseheimer and the latter only in plunderbund and moneybund, the former of which is listed in "Webster's New International Dictionary" (1934). Wanderlust seems to have come in since 1900; it is also known in England, but is used much more frequently in the United States along with its derivatives, wanderluster (Eng. rambler), wanderlusting and wanderlust-club (Eng. rambler-society).1 Like sauerkraut, it was under a patriotic ban during the World War, but recovered promptly.

Living-room may have been suggested by the German wohnzimmer. The Oxford Dictionary cites a single use of it in England in 1825, but in the sense of "the room usually occupied during the day" it is called an Americanism in the Oxford Supplement, and assigned to 1867. Blizzard has been often listed among Americanisms of German origin, with that origin assigned variously to blitzen (lightning) or blitzartig (lightning-like), but the researches of Allen Walker Read reveal that it was in use to designate a violent blow (as with the fist) long before it came to mean a storm. It is probably onomatopoeic.2 So-long, the phrase of parting, has been credited similarly to the German so lange (and also to the Yiddish sholom), but it is actually of English origin, and does not appear to be an Americanism. In a letter from Bayard Taylor to Edmund Clarence Stedman, dated June 16, 1865, and how is laid to "the Germans,"3

ble Collegiate Church, New York City, in Dec., 1922. The North Side Community Choral Club, a Negro organization, held a sangerfest (without the umlaut) in Pitts-burgh in April, 1927. (Pittsburgh Courier, April 9.) See Domestication of the Suffix -fest, by Louise Pound, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916.

1 American Speech, April, 1935, p. 155, reports a punning analogue, squanderlust, and ascribes it to

Louis Ludlow, a member of Congress from Indiana.

2 See The Word Blizzard, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, Feb., 1928, and Blizzard Again, by the same, American Speech, Feb., 1930.

3 The letter is to be found in The Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, by Marie Hansen Taylor; Boston, 1884. I am indebted for the reference to And How, by J. R. Schultz, American Speech, Dec., 1933, p. 80.

220 The American Language

but no other evidence that it was borrowed seems to be available. On equally dubious evidence rubber-neck has been derived from a probably mythical German gummihals, and it listens well, a phrase of affirmation popular twenty years ago, has been linked with the Berlinese adage, Et jinge woll, aber et jeht nicht. Junge (from klin-gen) actually means to sound; the German verb for to listen is horchen. In all probability, it listens well was introduced by the German comedians who flourished before the World War. Like their Irish and Yiddish colleagues, they enriched the current slang with many fantastic locutions. The influence of Charles Godfrey Leland’s “Hans Brietmann’s Ballads” and other books also helped to familiarize Americans with many German and pseudo-German words and phrases.1 Phooey, which plainly comes from the German (and Yiddish) pfuï, seems to have been introduced by Walter Winchell, c. 1930. The barbecues which began to dot the country with the rise of the automobile soon offered chickenburgers as well as hamburgers, and there are even reports of clamburgers.2 In 1930, for some reason to me unknown, Swift & Company, the Chicago packers, changed the name of their frankfurters to frankfurts, and introduced a substitute for leberwurst under the style of livercheese. The American Gelehrten, who began to resort to German universi-ties in large number in the 80’s, brought back festschrift, seminar, anlage and diener and still cling to them, and it is possible that outstanding, the favorite counter-word of pedagogues lower in the scale, was suggested by ausstehend.3

The majority of the numerous Spanish loan-words in American came in before the Civil War, but the Spanish-American War added

1 See The Cambridge History of American Literature; New York, 1921; Ch. IX; p. 23ff. 2 New Yorker, Feb. 16, 1935. 3 I am informed by the Rev. W. G. Polack, of Evansville, Ind., that certain Lutherans in the United States, following German usage, employ vicar to designate “a theological student, not yet ordained, who is doing temporary supply-work in a mission congregation.” The verb to vicar means to occupy such a pulpit. Mr. Polack believes that mission-festival, common in the Middle West, comes from the German missionsfest. So with

agenda, used by some of the Lutheran churches to designate their Book of Common Prayer. He says that it is not the English term, but the German agende. He notes also the use of confirmand to designate a candidate for confirmation; of to announce to indicate notifying a pastor of an intention to partake of communion (Ger. sich anmel-den); and of inner-mission (Ger. innere mission) instead of the usual home-mission; and of confes-sional-address (beichtrede). All these terms are used by English-speaking Lutherans.

The Language Today

insurrecto, trocha, junta, ladrone, incomunicado, ley fuga, machete, mañana and rurale, some of which are already obsolete; and the

popularity of Western movies and fiction has brought in a few more, e.g., rodeo, hoosegow (from juzgado, the past participle of juzgar, to judge) 1 and wrangler (from caballerango, a horse-groom), and

greatly increased the use of others. Chile con carne did not enter into the general American dietary until after 1900. The suffix -ista came in during the troubles in Mexico, following the downfall of

Porfirio Díaz in 1911. The case of cafeteria I have dealt with in Section 2 of this chapter. From the Indian languages the only recent acquisitions seem to be chautauqua and hooch. The latter goes back

to the American occupation of Alaska in 1867. The first soldiers sent there were forbidden to have any spirituous liquors, so they set up stills and manufactured a supply of their own, of sugar and flour.

The product was called hoocheno or hoochino by the natives, and it continued to bear that name until the Klondike gold-rush in 1897.2 Then it was shortened to hooch. Chautauqua was borrowed from the

name of the county and lake in Southwestern New York. The first chautauqua was opened on the shore of the lake on August 4, 1874, but the word did not come into general use until the end of the century. It was borrowed in the first place from the language of the

Senecas, and it is reported, variously, to have meant the place of easy death, the place where one was lost, the foggy place, a place high up, two moccasins tied in the middle, and a pack tied in the middle.

The French spelled it tchadakoin, and in early maps and books it appeared also as tjadakoin, chataconit, chadakoin, chautauque, shata-coin, judaxque and jadaqua. In 1859, by a resolution of the county

1 For the following I am indebted to Mr. Leon L. Kay, for six years a correspondent of the United Press in Latin America: "The lower classes always slur the consonant in the regular ending, -ado, of Spanish participles, and so do the upper classes in rapid speech or unguarded moments. Furthermore, the final o is sounded so lightly as to make a virtual diphthong of ao, equivalent to ou in mouth. Peons, never able to, are seldom asked to pay fines. To them, to be juzgado (sencenced) means simply to be jailed. When Felipe or José, after the usual week-end drunk, is missed

and inquired after, the answer to 'Where is he?' is 'Juzgado.' The first Americans, seeking missing ranch-hands, no doubt took this to be a Spanish word for jail, and so hoosegow was born. Apart from shifting the stress to the first from the penultimate syllable, the South-westerners have achieved an almost perfect transliteration." The Spanish j is pronounced like our b, the Spanish u like our oo, and the Spanish ado like our ou.

2 Dearborn Independent, March 3, 1923: "It is said that one quart was sufficient to craze the brains of ten Indians."

222 The American Language

board of supervisors, the present spelling was made official.1 At the start chautauqua meant a Summer-school, permanently housed and of some pedagogical pretensions. But toward 1900 it began to signify a traveling show, often performing under canvas, and including vaudeville acts as well as lectures.

In the Concise Oxford Dictionary, which is on every literate Englishman’s desk, spaghetti is italicized as a foreign word; in America it is familiar to every child. But not many other Italian loan-words have got into American, probably because the great majority of Italian immigrants have been poor folk, keeping much to themselves. I can think of chianti (more generally known as dago-red), ravioli, minestrone, mafia and black-hand (from mano negra), and that is about all.2 Even the argot of rogvery has been but little enriched by Italian words, though there have been many eminent Italian gunmen. It has been suggested that and how may owe something to the Italian e come, and that sez you may be a translation of si dice,3 but there is no evidence in either case. It may be that ambish and its analogues were suggested by Italian difficulties with English, but that also is only a surmise. At the time of the Russian-Japanese War (1904-5) the suffix -ski or -sky had a popular vogue, and produced many words, e.g., dunski, darnfoolski, smartski, devilinsky, allright-sky and buttinski, but of these only buttinski seems to have survived.4

1 See Chautauqua Notes, by J. R. Schultz, American Speech, Oct., 1934, p. 232.

2 The word policy, which was used in the United States from about 1885 to 1915 to designate the form of gambling now called numbers, was from the Italian polizza. But it apparently came in by way of English, though with a change in

meaning, and it is now virtually obsolete.

3 By M. H. Palmer in the London Morning Post, Feb. 9, 1935.

4 See the following notes by Louise Pound, all in Dialect Notes; Vol. IV, Pt. IV, 1916, p. 304; Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916, p. 354; Vol. V, Pt. I, 1918, p. 11.

VI

AMERICAN AND ENGLISH

I. THE INFILTRATION OF ENGLISH BY AMERICANISMS

The English travelers and reviewers whose pious horror of Americanisms has been recorded in Chapters I and III were able, for a while, to shut off their flow into Standard English, but only for a while. The tide began to turn, according to Sir William Craigie,1 in 1820, and soon thereafter a large number of Yankee neologisms that had been resisted with heroic dudgeon came into common use in England, e.g., reliable, influential, talented and lengthy. Charles Dickens was credited by Bishop Coxe2 with responsibility for the final acceptance of all four words: he put them into his “American Notes” in 1842 and Coxe believed that he thus naturalized them. But as a matter of fact they had all come in before this. Coleridge used reliable in 1800 and influential in 1833, and though he was still denouncing talented as “that vile and barbarous vocable” in 1832, and it was dismissed as a word “proper to avoid” by Macaulay even in 1842,3 it had been used by the critic and philologian, William Taylor, in 1830, by Sir William Herschel, the astronomer, in 1829, and by no less an Americophobe than Robert Southey in 1828. Southey, in his turn, sneered at lengthy in 1812 and again in 1834, but it was used by Jeremy Bentham so early as 1816, by Scott in 1827 (though still as a conscious Americanism), and by Dickens himself in “Pickwick” in 1837, five years before the publication of “American Notes.” Talented had become so respectable by 1842 that it was accepted by E. B. Pusey, leader of the Oxford Movement,4 and fifteen years later it received the imprimatur of Gladstone.

1 S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXVII, 1927, p. 208.

2 Americanisms in England, by A. Cleveland Coxe, Forum, Oct., 1886.

3 Letter to Macvey Napier, April 18, 1842, printed in The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, by G. Otto Trevelyan; New York, 1877, Vol. II, p. 100.

4 Here, as in so many other places, I am indebted to the Oxford Dictionary for its dated quotations.

224

The American Language

stone. Along with reliable, influential and lengthy it now appears in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, published by the brothers Fowler in 1911, and of the four words, only lengthy is noted as "originally an Americanism." 1 All are listed in Cassell's Dictionary without remark. During the half century following 1820 many other Americanisms also made their way into English. Even to belittle, which had provoked an almost hysterical outburst from the European Magazine and London Review when Thomas Jefferson ventured to use it in 1787,2 was so generally accepted by 1862 that Anthony Trollope admitted it to his chaste vocabulary.

John S. Farmer says 3 that the American humorists who flourished after the Civil War broke down most of the remaining barriers to Americanisms. The English purists continued to rage against them, as they do even to this day, but the success in England of such writers as Charles Godfrey Leland (Hans Breitmann), Charles Heber Clark (Max Adeler), Charles Farrar Browne (Artemus Ward), David R. Locke (Petroleum V. Nasby) and Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) made the English public familiar with the pungent neologisms of the West, and many of them were taken into the language. George F. Whicher says that Leland and Clark "became better known in England than in the United States;" 4 as for Browne, he was so popular in London that he moved there in 1866, and died on English soil a year later. The influence of these men, according to Farmer, was still strong in the late 80's; they had popularized "American peculiarities of speech and diction to an extent which, a few years since, would have been deemed incredible." He continued:

Even our newspapers, hitherto regarded as models of correct literary style, are many of them following in their wake; and both in matter and phraseology are lending countenance to what at first sight appears a monstrously crude and almost imbecile jargon; while others, fearful of a direct plunge, modestly intro-

1 The Fowlers call reliable "an established word avoided by purists as of irregular formation." It has actually been in good usage in England since the 60's. In 1871, when the United States claimed a large sum from England as indemnity for the depredations of the Confederate cruiser Alabama, Punch suggested that the injury England had suffered through the introduction of the word was sufficient compensation.

2 See Chapter I, Section 2, for the text of its denunciation.

3 Americanisms Old and New; London, 1889, p. vii.

4 Cambridge History of American Literature; New York, 1921, Vol. III, p. 26.

duce the uncouth banthings with a saving clause. The phrase, as the Americans say, might in some cases be ordered from the type-foundry as a logotype, so frequently does it do introduction duty.1

But before the great invasion of England by American movies, beginning in the first years of the World War, Americanisms commonly had to linger in a sort of linguistic Alsatia a long while before they were accepted, and even then they were sometimes changed in meaning. The cases of caucus and buncombe are perhaps typical. The former, as we have seen in Chapter III, Section 1, was borrowed from an Indian word so early as 1624, and was in general use in the American colonies before 1738, but in 1818 Sydney Smith was dismissing it as “the cant word of the Americans,” and even in 1853 Bulwer-Lytton, using it in “My Novel,” was conscious that it was a somewhat strange Americanism. It was not until 1878 that it came into general use in England, and then, in the words of the Oxford Dictionary, it was “grossly misapplied.” In the United States it had the settled meaning of a meeting of some division, large or small, of a political or legislative body for the purpose of agreeing upon a united course of action in the main assembly, but in England it was applied to what we would call the organization. It was used by Benjamin Disraeli to designate the faction of Birmingham Liberals otherwise known as the Six Hundred, and in this sense was used thereafter by the Times and other English newspapers. It retains that meaning to this day; it signifies the managing committee of a party or faction – something corresponding to our national committees, our State committees, or to the half-forgotten congressional caucuses of the 1820's. It thus has a disparaging connotation, and the London Saturday Review, in 1888, denounced what it called a caucuser as “a machine politician.” Caucuser is a derivative concocted in England; it is never used in the United States, and does not appear in “Webster's New International Dictionary” (1934). Nor does caucusdom, which appeared in England in 1885. Buncombe got into Standard English just as slowly as caucus, and suffered a change too, though it was of a different kind. The word has been in use in the United States since the beginning of the last century, and was spoken of as “old and common at Washington” by a writer

1 Americanisms Old and New, above cited, p. vii.

226

The American Language

in Niles's Register on September 27, 1827, but it did not come into general use in England until the late 1850's, and then its spelling was changed to bunkum.

But when the American clipped form bunk arose toward the end of the World War it began to appear in England almost instantly, for it had the influence of the American movies behind it, and when the verb to debunk followed ten years later it got into use quite as quickly. Hundreds of other saucy Americanisms have followed it, often in successful competition with English neologisms. Thus, when the English police began to patrol the roads on motorcycles they were called, officially, mobile police, but in a little while an alternative name for them was speed-cops, borrowed from the American movies and talkies.1 This invasion is resisted valiantly by swarms of volunteer guardians of the national linguistic chastity, and at irregular intervals they break out into violent crusades against this or that American novelty,2 but many of the more colorful ones now get into circulation very rapidly. H. W. Horwill, in his “Dictionary of Modern American Usage,”3 notes a large number that have “become naturalized since the beginning of the present cen-

1 London letter in the Boulevardier (Paris) April, 1931. In July, 1932 (News of the World, July 24), the Assistant Bishop of Guildford, Dr. Cyril Golding-Bird, appeared before the Farnham (Surrey) magazine on a charge of dangerous driving. The policeman who arrested him testified that, on being overhauled, he demanded “Are you a speed-cop?” His Lordship, evidently in fear that the use of an Americanism by one of his exalted station would prejudice the bench against him, stoutly declared that he “ was not sufficiently colloquial ” to have used it. But the magistrates, taking a serious view of the matter, fined him £10 and costs and suspended his driving license for three months.

2 In the Spring of 1935, for example, Major Brooke Heckstall-Smith, yachting correspondent to the London Daily Telegraph, raised a holy war against to debunk in the columns of his paper, and was presently joined by other viewers with

alarm. One of them, A. E. Sullivan (March 2), ascribed its origin to “ the inability of an ill-educated and unintelligent democracy to assimilate long words.” But it was defended by Hubert Furst (March 2), author of a book entitled Art Debunked, and by Pearl Freeman (March 4), who called it “a full-blooded descriptive word.” On March 2 radio was put at the head of a list of “ bastard American expressions ” by John C. Mellis (with O.K., sez you, nerts, cute and bigfella following), but on March 6 it was defended by Jan Stewer as “ a beautiful coinage,” and its English equivalent, wireless, denounced as “ an abomination.”

3 Oxford, 1935. Horwill excludes foreign loan-words in American, and words spelled differently in American and English, and his book naturally reveals a great many omissions; nevertheless, he manages to list nearly 3000 words and phrases that differ in the two languages.

tury," e.g., the compounds hot-air, bed-rock, come-back, filling-station, high-brow, jay-walker, round-up and foot-wear, the simple nouns crook (a criminal), boom, kick (a powerful effect), publicity (advertising) and conservatory (musical), the verbs to park (auto-mobile), to rattle and to boom, and the verb-phrases to put across, to blow in (to turn up), to get away with, to make good, to get a move on, to put over and to turn down; and an even larger number that are “ apparently becoming naturalized," e.g., the compounds bargain-counter, bell-boy, schedule-time, speed-way, chafing-dish, carpet-bagger, come-down, joy-ride, hold-up, horse-sense, soap-box, frame-up dance-hall, key-man, close-up, close-call, rough-house, gold-brick, log-rolling and money-to-burn, the simple nouns rally, bromide, cub, cut (in the sense of a reduction), engineer (locomotive), fan (enthusiast), pep, machine (political), quitter, pull (political), pointer, mixer and cereal (breakfast-food), the simple verbs to ditch, to feature, to fire (dismiss), to pass (a dividend) and to hustle, the verb-phrases to bank on, to get busy, to come to stay, to crowd out, to fall down (or for), to try out, to pick on, to hand-pick, to iron out, to see the light, to deliver the goods, to soft-pedal, to sand-bag, to sit up and take notice, to snow under, to stay put, to side-step, to side-track, to stand for and to win out, and the miscellaneous idioms good and, on the side, up to and up against.

Many of these, of course, belong to slang but some of them are nevertheless making their way into relatively decorous circles. The late Dr. Paul Shorey, professor of Greek at the University of Chicago, used to amuse himself by collecting instances of the use of thumping Americanisms by English authors of dignified standing. He found to make good and cold feet in John Galsworthy, rubber-neck in Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge!), nothing doing in Lowes Dickinson, proposition “ as a word of all work ” in Mrs. Humphrey Ward, to cough up in John Masefield, the limit in Archibald Marshall, and up against a tough proposition in William J. Locke.1 Such literati seldom if ever adorn their discourse with the current slang of their own country, save of course in depicting low or careless characters. But they are fetched by the piquancy of Americanisms, and employ them for their pungent rhetorical effect. The same consideration influences

1 Academy Papers; New York, 1925, p. 150.

228 The American Language

English politicians too, and “ a veteran Parliamentarian ” was lately saying:

Every time the House [of Commons] meets things are said in a phraseology that would shock and baffle Mr. Gladstone. . . . Even Mr. Baldwin, one of the few authorities on the King’s English in the House, used in his speech yesterday the expressions backslider, best-seller and party dog-fight. I have heard him use to deliver the goods. The House is undoubtedly Americanized in some of its phrases. I have heard whoopee and debunked in the debating chamber, and oh, yeah! and you’re telling me in the lobby. To pass the buck is a well-known House expression and it is often used.1

The argot of English politics has naturalized many Americanisms beside caucus and buncombe. Graft, wrote Harold Brighouse in 1929, “ is acclimatized in England.” 2 So is gerrymander. So are plat-form, carpet-bagger, wire-puller, log-rolling, on the fence, cam-paign,3 to stump, and to electioneer.4 In other fields there has been the same infiltration. 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, there is an Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, and in 1913 a rival to the Amalgamated Order Of Railway Servants was organized under the name of the National Union of Railway Men. A move-ment against the use of the ignominious servant is visible in other directions, and the American help threatens to be substituted; at all events, Help Wanted advertisements are occasionally printed in English newspapers. The American to phone is now in general use over there, and “ Hello ” has displaced “ Are you there? ” as the standard telephone greeting. English journalists are ceasing to call themselves pressmen, and have begun to use the American news-paper men. They begin to write editorials instead of leaders. The English theaters continue to have dress-circles where ours have balconies, but there are balconies in the movie-houses. Since England began to grow sugar-beets the English beet-root has succumbed to the American (and earlier English) beet, and the American can seems to be ousting the English tin. Sky-scraper, strap-hanger and fool-proof were naturalized long ago,5 and I have encountered cafe-teria, kitchen-cabinet, filing-cabinet, nut-sundae, soda-fountain, ice-

1 Sunderland Echo, Oct. 31, 1934. 2 Manchester Guardian, April 5. 3 For example, Gladstone’s Mid-lothian campaign of 1880. 4 The Study of American English, by W. A. Craigie, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXVII, 1927, p. 208. 5 See British English and American English, by Thomas G. Tucker, Scribner’s, Dec., 1921.

American and English

229

cream-soda and popp-corn on shop signs in London, chain-store in a headline in a 100%, British provincial newspaper,1 junk in the London Daily Telegraph 2 and sticker instead of the English sticky-back or tab in another great London journal,3 all within the space of a few days. On December 8, 1934, Miss Julia Hogan, of 245 Lord street, Southport, was advertising in the Southport Visitor 4 that she was a beautician, and a few months later J. A. Watson was reporting in the London Daily Telegraph 5 that “those truly loathsome transatlantic importations,” to help make, worth-while, nearby and colorful, were “spreading like plague.” No less a lexicographical dignitary than Dr. C. T. Onions, one of the editors of the Oxford Dictionary, is authority for the news that to make good “no longer gives the impression of being an alien idiom” in England, that “the American applications of the word dope have generally commended themselves and have obtained a wide currency,” and that yep and nope “have penetrated even into the speech of the educated of the younger generation.” 6 “Twenty years ago,” said S. K. Ratcliffe in 1935,7 “no one in England started in, started out or checked up; we did not stand for or fall for, as we do today. . . . We have learned from the American to try out, but not as yet to curse out, and when we make out we are still deciphering something, and not, as the American is, doing something fairly well.” 8 Sometimes an Americanism that has long ceased to be a novelty in this country is suddenly taken up in England, and becomes popular almost overnight. Thus shyster, in use here since the 1850’s, was introduced by Robert Louis Stevenson in “The Wrecker” in 1892; 9 Indian-Summer which goes back to Colonial days, was given a start by John Galsworthy’s use of it in the title of “The Indian Summer of a Forsyte” (1918); and the Prince of Wales popularized the Rooseveltian bully by using it in a speech to Leicestershire huntsmen in 1930. O.K. has been known

1 Eastern Evening News (Norwich), March 27, 1935. 2 March 28, 1935. 3 News-Chronicle, March 21, 1935. 4 Note the archaic spelling here. Jane Austen used it in Pride and Prejudice, and in 1756 there was a newspaper in London called the Universal Visiter. 5 March 6, 1935. 6 Is English Becoming Too American?, London Evening News, Nov. 19, 1931. It is curious to note what such bigwigs accept and reject. Dr. Onions, after accepting — or, at all events, condoning — dope, repudiates witness-stand and to measure up to the standard. 7 The American Language, New Statesman and Nation, July 27, p. 131. 8 See also American Prepositions, London Times (Weekly Ed.), Feb. 16, 1933. 9 Harold Brighouse in the Manchester Guardian, April 5, 1929.

and understood in England for at least thirty years, but it was not until 1932 that it came into general use.1 The movies and talkies are now responsible for most such introductions, whether of new Americanisms or old ones, but they get active help from the radio, the stage and even the English newspapers. In 1933 Henry Hall broadcast from London a list of the songs most popular in Great Britain since 1919, estimated on the basis of the sales of sheet music and phonograph records. Of the sixteen he mentioned, all save five were American.2 The English newspapers of wide circulation make a heavy use of Americanisms in their headlines and their more gossipy articles,3 and in the popular magazines “a large number of the stories are set in American situations, or are at least written from an American viewpoint, in semi-American language.” 4

It is curious, reading the fulminations of American purists of the last generation, to note how many of the Americanisms they denounced have broken down all guards across the ocean. To placate and to antagonize are examples. The Concise Oxford and Cassell distinguished 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 things. 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. Other old bugaboos

1 The London bureau of the United Press reported on April 28: “The American O.K. is rapidly displacing the British righto in everyday conversation in Great Britain, despite the opposition of educators. . . . One English columnist the other day made four telephone calls to different numbers and in each case the conversation ended with O.K. from the person at the other end.”

2 The Most Popular Songs of a Decade, World Almanac, 1934, p. 800.

3 In Notes on the Way, Time and Tide, Dec. 8, 1934, Humbert Wolfe denounced this “baboon-jargon that we have prudly borrowed from across the Atlantic.” The London Daily Express has lifted

the whole vocabulary of the American news-weekly, Time, and adopted even its eccentric syntax. (See, for example, These Names Make News, Aug. 28, 1935.) I once encountered Bible Belt in a headline in the London Times, but I have unfortunately forgotten the date. For the use of but that in a leading article in the Times I point sadly to Two More Days of Pilgrimage, July 13, 1934. Other lexicographical pathologists tell me they have found high-brow and the limit in the same great newspaper.

4 The Invasion From U. S. A., by Ellis Healey, Birmingham Gazette, April 11, 1932.

that have been embrased are to donate, reliable, gubernatorial, presi-

dential and standpoint. White labored long and valiantly to convince

Americans that the adjective derived from president should be with-

out the i before 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 engineer, to collide,1 to corner, to obligate, and to lynch are in

Cassell with no hint of their American origin, and so are home-spun,

out-house, cross-purposes, green-horn, blizzard, tornado, cyclone,

hurricane, excursionist, wash-stand and wash-basin, though wash-

hand-stand and wash-hand-basin are also given. Drug-store is making

its way in England; the firm known as Boots’ the Chemists (formerly

Boots Cash Chemists) uses the term to designate its branches. But

it is not yet listed by either Cassell or the Concise Oxford, though

both give druggist. Tenderfoot is in general use, though the English

commonly mistake it for an Australianism; it is used by the English

Boy Scouts just as our own Boy Scouts use it. Scalawag has got into

English with an extra l, making it scallawag or scallywag. J. Y. T.

Greig, in “Breaking Priscian’s Head,”2 prints a long list of Ameri-

canisms that have become firmly lodged in English, and says that

“few of us who have not taken the trouble to go into the matter

are aware how many of our common expressions derive from the

United States.” His list includes, besides the words mentioned above,

the compounds back-woods, chewing-gum, cold-snap, dug-out, half-

breed, hot-cake, mass-meeting, beach-comber, six-shooter, bee-line,

indignation-meeting and pow-wow, the simple nouns blizzard, bluff,

boodle, boss, caboodle, canyon, collateral (in the Stock Exchange

sense), combine (noun), crank (eccentric person), cuss, dago, fili-

buster, fix (in a fix), floor (in the sense of to have, yield or hold the

floor), flurry, goner, gulch, hustler, mileage, misstep, mugwump,

palceface, persimmon, porterhouse (steak), ranch, rowdy, school-

marm, scrap (fight), shack, shanty, shyster, snag (in a river, and

figuratively), splurge, spook, squatter and stampede, the adjectives

blue, bogus, colored (Negro), governmental, highfalutin, low-down,

non-commital, pesky, pivotal, played-out, previous (too previous),

rattled, slick and whole-souled, the verbs to bluff, to boost, to

1 To collide is barred by many Eng-

lish newspapers, which prefer to

come in collision. But the aim here

is simply to avoid any direct im-

putation of agency, and so head off

possible libel suits.

2 London, 1929, p. 79 ff.

232 The American Language

bullyrag, to enthuse, to eventuate, to itemize, to jump (a claim), to lobby, to locate, to lynch, to negative, to run (for office), to scoot, to splurge, to tote and to vamose, the verb-phrases to take the cake, to bury the hatchet, to cut no ice, to draw a bead on, to keep one's eye peeled, to fizzle out, to freeze out, to go back on, to go it blind, to go one better, to go the whole hog, to go under, to get the hang of, to hold up, to keep a stiff upper lip, to monkey with, to play possum, to pull up stakes, to put it through, to raise Cain, to shin up, to size up, to spread oneself, to go on the stump and to trade off, the adverb plumb, and the phrases best bib and tucker, not my funeral, true inwardness, for keeps, no flies on, no two ways about it, on time, no slouch and under the weather. “It is difficult now,” says Ernest Weekley,1 “to imagine how we got on so long without the word stunt, how we expressed the characteristics so conveniently summed up in dope-fiend or high-brow, or any other possible way of describing that mixture of the cheap pathetic and the ludicrous which is now universally labelled sob-stuff.” “Every Englishman listening to me now,” said Alistair Cooke in a radio broadcast from London,2 “uses thirty or forty Americanisms a day.” “We seem to offer less and less resistance,” said Professor W. E. Collinson of the University of Liverpool,3 “to the new importations.”

2. SURVIVING DIFFERENCES

For each of the three earlier editions of this book I prepared a list of couplets showing variations between the everyday vocabularies of England and the United States, and in every instance that list had become archaic in some of its details before it could be got into print. The English reviewers had a great deal of sport demonstrating that a number of my Americanisms were really in wide use in England, but all they proved, save in a few cases of undeniable blundering, was that the exotic had at last become familiar. Others undertook to show that some term I had listed was not only accepted current English, but also discoverable in the works of Shakespeare, of Chaucer, or even of King Alfred, but as a rule the

1 Adjectives – and Other Words; London, 1930, p. 182. 2 Printed as English on Both Sides of the Atlantic, Listener, April, 1935. 3 Contemporary English: a Personal Speech Record; Leipzig, 1927, p. 114.

most they could actually prove was that it had been good English once, but had fallen out of currency, and had then been taken back from the United States, where it had survived all the while. From those reviews I learned that opinions often differ as to whether a given word or phrase is in general use. Sometimes, two reviewers would differ sharply over a specimen, one arguing that every Englishman knew it and used it, and the other maintaining that it was employed only by traitorous vulgarians under the spell of the American movies.

Nevertheless, it is still possible to draw up an impressive roster of common terms that remain different in England and the United States, and so I attempt the business once more,1 beginning with some words from everyday home life:

American English alcohol-lamp spirit lamp apartment flat apartment-hotel block of service-flats apartment-house block of flats ash-can dust-bin ash-cart (or truck) dust-cart ashman dustman2 atomiser scent-spray automobile motor-car baby-carriage perambulator, or pram baggage luggage bakery bake-house, or baker's shop bank-account banking-account bathing-suit swim-suit bathtub bath bedbug or chinch bug bill (money) banknote, or note billboard hoarding biscuit scone, or tea-cake boot high-boot, or Wellington

1 I am indebted here to various English acquaintances, and to a number of Americans resident in England, but most of all to Mr. H. W. Seaman, of Norwich. Mr. Seaman is an English journalist with ten years of American experience behind him, and so he is peculiarly alert to differences in usage. Moreover, he is greatly interested in linguistics, and has done some valuable writing upon the subject. My debt to his friendly patience is enormous; he has willingly answered scores of questions, some of them difficult. But I hasten to add that he is not to be held responsible for anything that follows. The inevitable errors are my own.

2 Here, almost at the start of my list, I must file a caveat against it myself, for Mr. Seaman tells me that garbage, in England as in the United States, is coming to be applied to all sorts of refuse.

234

The American Language

American

English

broiled (meat)

grilled

candy

sweets

candy-store

sweet-shop

can-opener

tin-opener, or key 1

chain-store

multiple-shop

charged (goods bought)

put down

cheese-cloth

butter-muslin

chicken-yard

fowl-run

chores

odd jobs

cigarette-butt

cigarette-end

clothes-pin

clothes-peg

coal-oil

paraffin

collar-button

collar-stud

cook-book

cookery-book

cook-stove

cooking-stove

cookie

biscuit

corn

maize, or Indian corn

cornmeal

Indian meal

corn-starch

corn-flour

cotton (absorbent)

cotton-wool

cracker

biscuit (unsweetened)

custom-made (clothes)

bespoke, or made to measure

daylight time

Summer time

derby (hat)

bowler, or hard hat

dishpan

washing-up bowl

drawers (men's)

pants

druggist

chemist

drug-store

chemist's-shop 2

drygoods-store

draper's-shop

elevator

lift

elevator-boy

liftman

fish-dealer

fishmonger

five-and-ten (store)

bazaar

floorwalker

shopwalker

frame-house

wooden-house

fruit-seller (or dealer)

fruiterer

fruit-store

fruiterer's

garbage-incinerator

destructor

garters (men's)

sock-suspenders

groceries

stores

hardware

ironmongery

huckster

coster, costermonger, or hawker

1 In the London Daily Mail, June 25, 1935, I found the heading: Key to the Can. It would have cost the job of any American copy-reader who wrote it. But in England it was a proper heading for a news story dealing with Treasury regulations for the importation of can-openers with canned-goods.

2 But drug-store, as we have seen in Section I, is coming in. I am indebted to an English correspondent, Mr. H. R. Rutter, that "the scientific chemists of England have for some time been agitating for the withdrawal of the designation chemist from the pharmacist, and the substitution of druggist."

American

instalment-plan

janitor

junk

kindergarten

letter-box

letter-carrier

living-room

long-distance (telephone)

marriage-certificate

molasses

monkey-wrench

mucilage

necktie

oatmeal (boiled)

package

phonograph

pie (fruit)

pitcher

play-room

push-cart

raincoat

recess (school)

roast (of meat)

roomer

rooster

rubbers

run (in a stocking)

sack-suit (or business-suit)

scarf-pin

second floor

sewerage (house)

shoe

shoestring

sidewalk

silverware

sled

soda-biscuit (or cracker)

spigot (or faucet)

spool (of cotton)

stairway

stem-winder

string-bean

sugar-bowl

suspenders (men's)

syrup

taffy

taxes (municipal)

taxpayer (local)

1 But living-room appears to be coming in.

English

hire-purchase system, or hire system

caretaker, or porter

rubbish, or odds and ends

infants'-school, or nursery-school

pillar-box

postman

sitting-room 1

trunk

marriage-lines

black treacle

screw-spanner

gum

tie

porridge

parcel

gramophone

tart

jug

nursery

barrow

mackintosh, or mac

interval, or break

joint

lodger

cock, or cockerel

overshoes, goloshes, or galoshes

ladder

lounge-suit

tie-pin

first floor

drains

boot

bootlace, or shoelace

footpath, or pavement

plate

sledge

cream-cracker

tap

reel

staircase, or stairs

keyless-watch

French-bean

sugar-basin

braces

treacle

toffee

rates

ratepayer

236

The American Language

American

tenderloin (of beef)

tinner

transom (of door)

undershirt

union-suit

wash-bowl

wash-rag

washstand

waste-basket

water-heater

window-shade

English

under-cut or fillet 1

tinker, or tinsmith

fanlight

vest, or singlet

combinations

wash-basin

face-cloth

wash-hand stand

waste-paper basket

geyser

blind

Let us now turn to the field of sports and pastimes, and attempt another list of differences:

American

aisle (theatre)

bartender

battery (automobile)

beach

bouncer

bowling-alley

bung-starter

carom (billiards)

caroussel

checkers (game)

closed season (for game)

deck (of cards)

detour (road)

fender (automobile)

gasoline, or gas

gear-shift (automobile)

generator (automobile)

ground-wire (radio)

headliner (vaudeville)

highball

hood (automobile)

hunting

English

gangway

barman, or potman

accumulator

seaside

chucker-out

skittle-alley

beer-mallet

cannon

runabout

draughts

close season

pack

road diversion

wing, or mud-guard

petrol

gear-lever

dynamo

earth-wire

topliner

whiskey-and-soda

bonnet

shooting

1 There are many other differences between the names of cuts of meat in the two countries. I am indebted to Mr. H. Kendall Kidds of San Francisco, who is at work on a book on the butchering craft, for what follows. Our porterhouse steak is the sirloin in England, but porterhouse is coming in, with the prefix Yankee. Our sirloin is the rump, or middle-rump. The bot-tom-round is called the silverside in England, and the top-round is the top-side. The rump is known as the H-bone piece or shellbone. The part that contains the shoul-der-blade is the chuck, as it is here. A leg of mutton or lamb cut with the hip-bone attached is called a haunch in England. If the hip-bone is left on the loin and cut into chops, they are known as chump-bone chops. What we call the rib chops are the best end of the neck or best end. Under the shoulder, which is raised in England, the chops are called the middle-neck, while the rest is the scrag-end.

American and English 237

American English

intermission (at play or concert) interval

lap-robe carriage-rug

legal holiday bank holiday

lobby (theatre) foyer, or entrance-hall

low-gear (automobile) first speed

movie-house cinema, or picture-house

muffler (automobile) silencer

oil-pan (automobile) sump

orchestra (seats in a theatre) stalls

pool-room billiards-saloon

race-track race-course

roadster (automobile) two-seater

roller-coaster switchback-railway

rumble-seat dickey-seat

saloon public-house, or pub

sedan (automobile) saloon-car

shock-absorber (automobile) anti-bounce clip

shot (athletics) weight

sight-seeing-car or rubberneck-wagon char-a-banc

soft-drinks minerals

spark-plug sparking-plug

sporting-goods sports-requisites

ten-pins nine-pins

stein (beer) pint

top (automobile) hood

vacation holiday

vaudeville variety 1

vaudeville-theatre music-hall

windshield (automobile) windscreen 2

Similar lists might be prepared to show differences in a great many other fields - business, finance, government, politics, education, ecclesiastical affairs, and most of the arts and sciences, including even cookery. Despite their steady gobbling of Americanisms, the English continue faithful to many words and phrases that are quite unknown in this country, and so the two languages remain recognizably different, especially in their more colloquial forms. An

1 Variety, of course, is known and understood in the United States. Indeed, the chief theatrical paper of New York is called Variety. But in its columns it commonly refers to the thing itself as vaudeville, or vaude, or vaud. Some years ago a German movie, done into English, was called Variety here and Vaudeville in England. In both countries it thus carried an exotic flavor.

Nomenclature, American Speech, Sept., 1926, p. 686; The Automobile and American English, by Theodore Hornberger, the same, April, 1930; English Theatrical Terms and Their American Equivalents, by Henry J. Heck, the same, Aug., 1930; and British and American Fishing Terms, by Frederick White, Outdoor Life, Aug., 1934.

238 The American Language

Englishman, walking into his house, does not enter upon the first floor as we do, but upon the ground floor. He may also call it the first storey (not forgetting the penultimate e), but when he speaks of the first floor he means what we call the second floor, and so on up to the roof, which is covered, not with tin or shingles, but with tiles or leads. He does not ask his servant, “Is there any mail for me?” but “Are there any letters for me?” for mail, in the American sense, is a word that he uses much less often than we do. There are mail-trains in his country, and they carry mail-bags (more often called post-bags) that are unloaded into mail-vans bearing signs reading “Royal Mail,” but in general he reserves the word mail for letters going to or from foreign countries, and he knows nothing of the compounds so numerous in American, e.g., mail-car, -matter, -man, -box, and -carrier. He uses post instead. The man who brings his post or letters is not a letter-carrier or mailman, but a postman. His outgoing letters are posted, not mailed, at a pillar-box, not at a mail-box. If they are urgent they are sent, not by special delivery, but by express post. Goods ordered by post on which the dealer pays the cost of transportation are said to arrive, not postpaid or prepaid, but post-free or carriage-paid. The American mail-order, however, seems to be coming in, though as yet the English have developed no mail-order firms comparable to Montgomery-Ward or Sears-Roebuck. To the list of railroad terms differing in the two countries, given in Chapter IV, Section 2, a number of additions might be made. The English have begun to use freight in our sense, though they prefer to restrict it to water-borne traffic, and they have borrowed Pullman, ballast and track, and begin to abandon left-luggage room for cloak-room, but they still get in or out of a train, not on or off it, and their only way of expressing what we mean by commuter is to say a season-ticket-holder.1 They say a train is up to time, not on time, they designate what we call a station-agent by the more sonorous station-master, they call a ticket-agent a booking-clerk, a railway bill-of-lading a consignment-note, a bureau-of-information an inquiry-office, a bumper a buffer,2 a caboose a brake-van, and the aisle of a Pullman its corridor, and they know nothing, according to Horwill, of way-stations, flag-stops, box-cars, chair-cars, check-

1 I am indebted here to suggestions by Messrs. H. F. Rutter, P. H. Muir and J. Dwight Francis of London, Dr. Ernest Wignall of the Rockefeller Institute, and Mr. George H. Mather of Moose Jaw, Canada.

2 But it is a bumper on a motor-car.

rooms, ticket-choppers, claim-agents, grade-crossings, classification-yards, flyers, long- and short-hauls, trunk-lines and tie-ups. An English guard (not conductor)1 does not bellow “All aboard!” but “Take your seats, please!” Railroad itself is, to all intents and purposes, an Americanism; it has been little used in England for fifty years. In the United States the English railway is also used, but not as commonly as railroad. It has acquired the special sense of a line of rails for light traffic, as in street-railway (Eng. tramway), but it has been employed, too, to designate large railroad systems, and to differentiate between bankrupt railroad corporations and their more or less solvent heirs and assigns.2 To return to the mails, the kind we call domestic is inland in England and the kind we call foreign is overseas. Our division of the mails into first, second, third and fourth classes is unknown there. The English internal revenue is the inland revenue.

An Englishman does not wear suspenders but braces, his under-shirt is a vest or singlet, and his drawers are pants. He carries, not a billfold, but a note-case. His crazy-bone is his funny-bone. His watch-crystal is his watch-glass, though English jewelers, among themselves, sometimes use crystal. A stem-winder is a keyless-watch, a Derby hat is a bowler, an elevator is a lift, a fraternal-order is a friendly- or mutual-society, an insurance-adjuster is a fire-assessor, a lunch-counter is a snack-bar, a pen-point is a nib, the programme of a meeting is the agenda, a realtor is an estate-agent, the room-clerk in a hotel is the reception-clerk, a white-collar job is black-coated, a labor scab is a blackleg, a street-cleaner is a road-sweeper, a thumb-tack is a drawing-pin, a militia-armory is a drill-hall, a sham-fight is a sham-battle, what we call a belt (as in Cotton Belt, Corn Belt, Bible Belt) is a zone, a bid or proposal is always a tender (an Englishman bids only at auctions or cards), a traffic blockade is a block, a pay-roll is a wage-sheet, a weather-bureau is a meteorological-office, an eraser is usually an india-rubber, a newspaper clipping is a cutting, a grab-bag is a lucky-dip, hand-me-downs are reach-me-downs, a navy-yard is a dock-yard or naval-yard, a scratch-pad is a scribbling-block, a boy’s sling-shot is a catapult, a laborer on the roads or railroads is a navvy, a steam-shovel is a crane-navvy, and instead of signs reading “Post No Bills” the English put up signs reading “Stick No Bills.”

1 But the commander of an omnibus is a conductor.

2 See The Sins of the Railroad Period, by F. Walker Pollock, American Speech, Feb., 1927, p. 248.

An Englishman, as we have seen, does not seek sustenance in a tenderloin but in an undercut or fillet. The wine on the table, if white and German, is not Rhine wine, but Hock. Yellow turnips, in England, are called Swedes, and are regarded as fit food for cattle only; when rations were short there, in 1916, the Saturday Review made a solemn effort to convince its readers that they were good enough to go upon the table. The English, of late, have become more or less aware of another vegetable formerly resigned to the lower fauna, to wit, American sweet corn. But they are still having some difficulty about its name, for plain corn, in England, means all the grains used by man. Some time ago, in the London Sketch, one C. J. Clive, a gentleman farmer of Worcestershire, was advertising sweet corn-cobs as the “most delicious of all vegetables,” and offering to sell them at 6s.6d. a dozen, carriage-paid. By chicken the English can mean any fowl, however ancient. Broilers and friers are never heard of over there. The classes which, in America, eat breakfast, dinner and supper have breakfast, dinner and tea in England; supper always means a meal eaten late in the evening. The American use of lunch to designate any irregular meal, even at midnight, is strange in England. An Englishwoman’s personal maid, if she has one, is not Ethel or Maggie but Robinson, and the nurse-maid who looks after her children is not Lizzie but Nurse. A general servant, however, is addressed by her given-name, or, as the English always say, by her Christian name. English babies do not use choo-choo to designate a locomotive, but puff-puff; a horse is a gee-gee. A nurse in a hospital is not addressed by her name, but as Nurse, and her full style is not Miss Jones, but Nurse Jones or Sister. The hospital itself, if it takes pay for entertaining the sick, is not a hospital at all, but a nursing-home, and its trained or registered nurses (as we would say) are plain nurses, or hospital nurses, or maybe nursing sisters. And the white-clad young gentlemen who make love to them are not studying medicine but walking the hospitals. Similarly, an English law student does not study law in his Inn of Court, but reads the law, though if he goes to a university to seek a doctorate in law he may be said to study it.

If an English boy goes to a public school, it is not a sign that he is getting his education free, but that his father is paying a good round sum for it and is accepted as a gentleman. A public school over there corresponds to the more swagger sort of American prep school; it

is a place maintained chiefly by endowments, wherein boys of the upper classes are prepared for the universities. What we know as a public school is called a council-school in England, because it is in the hands of the education committee of the County Council; it used to be called a board-school, because before the Education Act of 1902 it was run by a school-board. The boys in a public (i.e., private) school are divided, not into classes, or grades, but into forms, which are numbered, the highest usually being the sixth. The benches they sit on are also called forms. An English boy whose father is unable to pay for his education goes first into a babies' class in a primary or infants' school. He moves thence to class one, class two, class three and class four, and then into the junior school, where he enters the first standard. Until now boys and girls have sat together in class, but hereafter they are separated, the boy going to a boys' school and the girl to a girls'. The boy goes up a standard a year. At the third or fourth standard, for the first time, he is put under a male teacher. He reaches the seventh standard, if he is bright, at the age of twelve and then goes into what is known as the ex-seventh. If he stays at school after this he goes into the ex-ex-seventh. But some leave the public elementary school at the ex-seventh and go into the secondary-school, which, in this sense, is what Americans commonly call a high-school. But the standard system is being gradually replaced by a form system, imitating that of the more swagger schools. A grammar-school, in England, always means a place for the sons of the relatively rich. Grade-schools are unknown.

The principal of an English public (i.e., private) school or elementary-school is a head-master or head-mistress, but in a secondary-school he or she may be a principal. Only girls' schools have head-mistresses. The lower pedagogues used to be ushers, but are now masters or assistant masters (or mistresses). The titular head of a university is a chancellor;1 he is commonly a bigwig elected by the resident graduates for ornamental purposes only, and a vice-chancellor does the work.2 Some of the universities also have pro-chancellors, who are bigwigs of smaller size; they have deputy-pro-chancellors,

1 This title has been borrowed by some of the American universities, e.g., Syracuse, but the usual title is president. On the Continent it is rector.

2 He serves for three years, and the heads of the various colleges take the office in rotation.

chancellors or pro-vice-chancellors to discharge their theoretical functions. Most English universities have deans of faculties much like our own, and some of them have lately laid in deans of women, and even advisers to women students. They have minor dignitaries of kinds unknown in the United States, e.g., proctors, orators and high stewards. In Scotland the universities also have rectors, who are chosen by election, and, like the chancellors, are mainly only ornaments.1 The head of a mere college may be a president, principal, master, warden, rector, dean or provost. In the solitary case of the London School of Economics he is a director. The students are not divided into freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, as with us, but are simply first-year-men, second-year-men, and so on, though a first-year-man is sometimes a freshman or fresher. Such distinctions, however, are not so important in England as in America; undergraduates (they are seldom called students) do not flock together according to seniority, and there is no regulation forbidding an upper classman, or even a graduate, to be polite to a student just entered. The American hierarchy of assistant instructors, instructors, assistant professors, associate professors, adjunct professors and full professors is unknown in the English universities; they have only readers or lecturers and professors. If his chair happens to have been endowed by royalty, a professor prefixes regius to his title. A student, though technically a member of the university, has few rights as such until he is graduated (or, in some cases, until he takes his M.A.); then he may vote in the election which chooses his university's representative (or representatives) in Parliament, and so enjoy double representation there. To hold this right he must pay dues to his college, which is a constituent part of the university, with rights and privileges of its own. The professors, lecturers and readers of a college or university do not constitute a faculty, but a staff,2 and they are called collectively, its dons, though all teachers are not, necessarily, dons (i.e., fellows). An English university student does not study; he reads — whether for a pass-degree, which is easy, or for honours, which give him seriously to think. He knows nothing of frats, class-days, rushes, credits, points, majors, semesters, senior-proms and other such things; save at Cambridge and Dublin he does not even speak of a commencement; elsewhere he calls it degree-day

1 See The Yearbook of the Universities of the Empire, edited by T. S. Sterling; London, annually. 2 But faculty is used to designate the staff of a special school, e.g., of theology, medicine or law.

American and English

243

or speech-day. On the other hand his speech is full of terms unintelligible to an American student, e.g., wrangler, tripos, head, greats and mods. If he is expelled he is said to be sent down. There are no college boys in England, but only university-men. Alumni are graduates, and the graduates of what we would call prep-schools are old-boys.

The upkeep of council-schools in England, save for some help from the Treasury, comes out of the rates, which are local taxes levied upon householders. For that reason an English municipal tax-payer is called a rate-payer. The functionaries who collect and spend the money are not office-holders or job-holders, but public-servants, or, if of high rank, civil-servants. The head of the local police is not a chief of police, but a chief constable. The fire department is the fire-brigade, and a fire-alarm box is a fire-call. A city ordinance is a by-law, and a member of a City Council is a councillor. The parish poorhouse is colloquially a workhouse, but officially a poor-law institution. A policeman is a bobby familiarly and a constable officially, though the American cop seems to be making progress. His club or espantoon is his truncheon. He is sometimes mentioned in the newspapers, not by his name, but as P.C. 643 A — i.e., Police Constable No. 643 of the A Division. When he belongs to what we call the traffic division he is said to he on point duty. There are no police lieutenants or captains; the one rank between sergeant and superintendent is inspector. The blotter at a police-station is the charge-sheet. A counterfeiter is a coiner, a fire-bug is a fire-raiser, and a porch-climber is a cat-burglar. The warden of a prison is the governor, and his assistants are warders. There is no third-degree and no strong-arm-squad, though both have been made familiar in England by American movies. An English saloon-keeper is officially a licensed victualler. His saloon is a public house, or, colloquially, a pub. He does not sell beer by the bucket, can, growler, shell, seidel, stein or schooner, but by the pint, half-pint or glass. He and his brethren, taken together, are the licensed trade, or simply the trade. He may divide his establishment into a public-bar, a saloon-bar and a private-bar, the last being the toniest, or he may call his back room a parlour, snug or tap-room. If he has a few upholstered benches in his place he may call it a lounge. He employs no bartenders. Barmaids do the work, with maybe a barman, potman or cellarman to help. Beer, in most parts of Great Britain, means only the thinnest

244 The American Language

and cheapest form of malt liquor; better stuff is commonly called bitter. When an Englishman speaks of booze he means only ale or beer; for our hard liquor (a term he never uses) he prefers spirits. He uses boozer to indicate a drinking-place as well as a drinker. What we call hard cider is rough cider to him. He never uses rum in the generic sense that it has acquired in the United States, and knows nothing of rum-hounds, rum-dumbs, rum-dealers, the rum-trade, and the rum-evil, or of the Demon Rum. The American bung-starter is a beer-mallet in England, and, as in this country, it is frequently used for assault and homicide.

In England corporation commonly designates a municipal or university corporation, or some other such public body, e.g., the British Broadcasting Corporation; what we commonly think of when we hear of the corporations is there called a public company or limited liability company. But the use of the word in its American sense seems to be gaining ground, and in 1920 Parliament passed an act (10 & 11 Geo. V, Ch. 18) levying a corporation-profits tax. An Englishman writes Ltd. after the name of a limited liability (what we would call incorporated) bank or trading company, as we write Inc. He calls its president its chairman if a part-timer, or its managing director if a full-timer.1 Its stockholders are its shareholders, and hold shares instead of stock in it. Its bonds are called debentures, and the word is not limited in meaning, as in the United States, to securities not protected by a mortgage. The place where such companies are floated and footed—the Wall Street of London—is called the City, with a capital C. Bankers, stockjobbers, promoters, directors and other such leaders of its business are called City men. The financial editor of a newspaper is its City editor. Government bonds are consols, or stocks,2 or the funds. To have money in the stocks is to own such bonds. An Englishman hasn't a bank-account, but a banking-account. His deposit-slip is a paying-in-slip, and the stubs of his cheque-book (not check-book) are the counterfoils. He makes a rigid distinction between a broker and a stockbroker. A broker means, not only a dealer in securities, as in our Wall Street broker, but also "a person licensed to sell or appraise distrained goods." To have the brokers (or bailiffs) in means to be bankrupt, with one's

1 But the London, Midland and Scottish Railway has a president.

2 This form survives in the American term city-stock, meaning the

bonds of a municipality. But State and Federal securities are almost always called bonds.

very household goods in the hands of one's creditors.1 What we call a grain-broker is a corn-factor.

Tariff reform, in England, does not mean a movement toward free trade, but one toward protection. The word Government, meaning what we call the administration, is always capitalized and usually plural, e.g., “The Government are considering the advisability, etc.” Vestry, committee, council, ministry and even company are also plural, though sometimes not capitalized. A member of Parliament, if he be one who respects the integrity of his mother-tongue, does not run for office; he stands. But of late the American to run has been coming in, and not long ago an M.P. wrote to me: “If I think of my own candidature (candidacy), I say ‘I ran,’” etc. An English candidate is not nominated, but adopted. If he stands successfully, he sits at Westminster, and is a sitting member. When it is said of a man that he is nursing a constituency, it means that he is attending fairs, subscribing to charities, and otherwise flattering and bribing the voters, in the hope of inducing them to return him. Once returned, he does not represent a district, but a division or constituency. At a political meeting (they are often rough in England) the ushers and bouncers are called stewards; the pre-war suffragettes used to delight in stabbing them with hatpins. An M.P. is not afflicted by most of the bugaboos that poison the dreams of an American Congressman. He has never heard, save as a report of far-off heresies, of direct primaries, the recall, or the initiative and referendum. A roll-call in Parliament is a division, and an appropriation is a vote. A member speaking is said to be up or on his legs. When the House adjourns it is said to rise. The word politician has no opprobrious significance in England; it is applied to themselves by statesmen of the first eminence. Cabinet is used as with us, but it has a synonym in ministry, and a member of it may be called a minister. A contested election, in England, is simply one in which there is more than one candidate; the adjective has no relation to charges of fraud.

The English keep up most of the old distinctions between physicians and surgeons, barristers and solicitors. A barrister is greatly superior to a solicitor. He alone can address the higher courts and the parliamentary committees; a solicitor must keep to office work

1 A Glossary of Colloquial Slang and Technical Terms in Use in the Stock Exchange and in the Money Market, by A. J. Wilson; London, 1895.

and the inferior courts. A man with a grievance goes first to his solicitor, who then instructs or briefs a barrister for him. If that barrister, in the course of the trial, wants certain evidence removed from the record, he moves that it be struck out, not stricken out, as an American lawyer would usually say. Only barristers may become judges. An English barrister, like his American brother, takes a retainer when he is engaged, but the rest of his fee does not wait upon the termination of the case: he expects and receives a refresher from time to time. A barrister is never admitted to the bar, but is always called. If he becomes a King's Counsel, or K.C. (a mainly honorary appointment though it carries some privileges, and usually brings higher fees), he is said to have taken silk. In the United States a lawyer tries a case and the judge either tries or hears it; in England it is the judge who tries it, and the barrister pleads it. The witness-stand is the witness-box. In the United States the court hands down a decision; in England the court hands it out. In the United States a lawyer probates a will; in England he proves it, or has it admitted to probate. The calendar of a court is a cause-list, and a lawyer's brief-case is an attaché-case. The brief in it is not a document to be filed in court, as with us, but a solicitor's instructions to a barrister. What we call a brief is called pleadings. A corporation-lawyer, of course, is a company-lawyer. Ambulance-chasers are unknown.

The common objects and phenomena of nature are often differently named in England and America. The Englishman knows the meaning of sound (e.g., Long Island Sound), but he nearly always uses channel in place of it. Contrariwise, the American knows the meaning of the English bog, but rejects the English distinction between it and swamp, and almost always uses swamp or marsh (often elided to ma'sh). The Englishman, instead of saying that the temperature is 29 degrees (Fahrenheit) or that the thermometer or the mercury is at 29 degrees, sometimes says there are three degrees of frost. He never, of course, uses down-East or up-State, nor does he use downtown or uptown. Many of our names for common fauna and flora are unknown to him save as strange Americanisms heard in the talkies, e.g., terrapin, ground-hog, poison-ivy, persimmon, gumbo, eggplant, catnip, sweet-potato and yam. He calls the ruta-baga a mangelwurzel. He is familiar with many fish that we seldom see, e.g., the turbot, and eats some that we reject, e.g., the ray, which he calls the skate. He also knows the hare, which is seldom heard of

in America. But he knows nothing of devilled-crabs, crab-cocktails, club-sandwiches, clam-chowder or oyster-stews, and he never goes to oyster-suppers, sea-food (or shore) dinners, clam-bakes or barbecues, or eats boiled-dinners.

An Englishman never lives on a street, but always in it, though he may live on an avenue or road. He never lives in a block of houses, but in a row of them or in a block of flats (not apartments); an apartment, to him, is a room. His home is never in a section of the city, but always in a district. The business-blocks that are so proudly exhibited in all small American towns are quite unknown to him.

He often calls an office-building simply a house, e.g., Lever House. Going home from London by train he always takes the down-train, no matter whether he be proceeding southward to Wimbledon, westward to Shepherd's Bush, northward to Tottenham, or eastward to Noak's Hill. A train headed toward London is always an up-train, and the track it runs on (the left-hand track, not the right-hand one, as in the United States) is the up-line.

Oxford men also speak of up- and down-trains to and from Oxford. In general, the Englishman seems to have a much less keen sense of the points of the compass than the American. He knows the East End and the West End, but the names of his streets are never preceded by north, east, south or west, and he never speaks of the north-east corner of two of them.

But there are eastbound and westbound trains in the London tubes. English streets have no sidewalks; they are always called pavements or foot-paths or simply paths. Sidewalk, however, is used in Ireland. A road, in England, is always a road, and never a railway.

A car means a tram-car or motor-car; never a railway-carriage. A telegraph-blank is a telegraph-form. The Englishman does not usually speak of having his shoes (or boots) shined; he has them blacked.

He always calls russet, yellow or tan shoes brown shoes (or, if they cover the ankle, boots). He calls a pocketbook a purse or wallet, and gives the name of pocketbook or pocket-diary to what we call a memorandum-book.

By cord he means something strong, almost what we call twine; a thin cord he always calls a string; his twine is the lightest sort of string. He uses dessert, not to indicate the whole last course at dinner, but to designate the fruit only; the rest is the sweet.

If he inhabits bachelor quarters he commonly says that he lives in chambers. Flat-houses are often mansions. The janitor or superintendent thereof is a care-taker or porter.

248 The American Language

The Englishman is naturally unfamiliar with baseball, and in consequence his language is bare of the countless phrases and metaphors that it has supplied to American. But he uses more racing terms and metaphors than we do, and he has got a good many phrases from other games, particularly cricket. The word cricket itself has a definite figurative meaning to him. It indicates, in general, good sportsmanship. To take unfair advantage of an opponent is not cricket. The sport of boating, once so popular on the Thames, has also given colloquial English some familiar terms, almost unknown in the United States, e.g., punt and weir. The game known as ten-pins in America is called nine-pins in England, and once had that name over here. The Puritans forbade it, and its devotees changed its name in order to evade the prohibition.1 Bowls, in England, means only the lawn game; the alley game is called skittles, and is played in a skittle-alley. The English vocabulary of racing differs somewhat from ours. When the odds are 2 to 1 in favor of a horse we say that its price is 1 to 2; the Englishman says that it is 2 to 1 on. We speak of backing a horse to win, place or show; the Englishman uses each way instead, meaning win or place, for place, in England, means both second and third. Though the English talk of racing, football, cricket and golf a great deal, they have developed nothing comparable to the sporting argot used by American sporting reporters. When, during the World War (which Englishmen always call the Great War), American soldier nines played baseball in England, some of the English newspapers employed visiting American reporters to report the games, and the resultant emission of technicalities interested English readers much more than the games themselves. One of the things that puzzled them was the word inning, as in second inning; in England it is always plural.

As a set-off to American sports-page jargon, the English have an ecclesiastical vocabulary with which we are almost unacquainted, and it is in daily use, for the church bulks much larger in public affairs over there than it does here. Such terms as vicar, canon, verger, prebendary, primate, curate, nonconformist, dissenter, convocation, minster, chapter, crypt, living, presentation, glebe, benefice, locum tenens, suffragan, almoner, tithe, dean and pluralist are to be met

1 "An act was passed to prohibit playing nine-pins; as soon as the law was put in force, it was notified everywhere, 'Ten-pins played here.'" - Capt. Frederick Marryat: A Diary in America; London, 1839, Vol. II, p. 195.

with in the English newspapers constantly, but on this side of the water they are seldom encountered. Nor do we hear much of mat-

tins (which has two t's in England), lauds, lay-readers, ritualism and the liturgy. The English use of holy orders is also strange to us. They

do not say that a young man aspiring to sacerdotal ease under the Establishment is studying for the ministry, but that he is reading for

holy orders, though he may do the former if he is headed for the dissenting pulpit. Indeed, save he be a nonconformist, he is seldom

called a minister at all, though the term appears in the Book of Com-

mon Prayer, and never a pastor; a clergyman of the Establishment is always either a rector, vicar or curate, or colloquially a parson.

According to Horwill, the term clergyman is seldom applied to any other kind of preacher. In American chapel simply means a small

church, usually the dependant of some larger one; in English it has acquired the special sense of a place of worship unconnected with

the Establishment. Though three-fourths of the people of Ireland are Catholics (in Munster and Connaught, more than nine-tenths),

and the Protestant Church of Ireland has been disestablished since 1871, a Catholic place of worship in that country is still legally a

chapel and not a church.2 So is a Methodist wailing-place in England, however large it may be, or any other dissenting house of worship.

But here custom begins to war with the law, and in a current issue of the London Times I find notices of services in Presbyterian, Con-

gregational, Baptist, Christian Science and even Catholic churches. Chapel, of course, is also used to designate a small house of worship

of the Establishment when it is neither a parish church nor a cathedral, e.g., St. George's Chapel, Windsor, and King's College Chapel,

Cambridge. What the English call simply a churchman is an Episcopalian in the United States, what they call the Church (always capitalized) is the Protestant Episcopal Church, what they call a Roman

Catholic is simply a Catholic, and what they call a Jew is usually softened to a Hebrew. The American language, of course, knows

nothing of nonconformists or dissenters. Nor of such gladiators of dissent as the Plymouth Brethren and the Methodist New Connexion,

1 "The term "chapel," says P. W. Joyce, in English as We Speak It in Ireland, 2nd ed.; London, 1910,

"has so ingrained itself in my mind that to this hour the word instinctively springs to my lips when I am about to mention a Catholic place

of worship; and I always feel some sort of hesitation or reluctance in substituting the word church. I positively could not bring myself

to say, 'Come, it is time now to set out for church.' It must be either mass or chapel."

nor of the nonconformist conscience, though the United States suffers from it even more damnably than England. The English, to make it even, get on without holy-rollers, Dunkards, hard-shell Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists and other such American alarmers of God, and they give a mourners'-bench the austere name of penitent-seat or form. The Salvation Army, which is of English origin uses penitent-form even in America.

In music the English cling to an archaic and unintelligible nomenclature, long since abandoned over here. Thus, they call a double whole note a breve, a whole note a semibreve, a half note a minim, a quarter note a crotchet, an eighth note a quaver, a sixteenth note a semi-quaver, a thirty-second note a demisemiquaver, a sixty-fourth note a hemidemisemiquaver, or semidemisemiquaver, and a hundred and twenty-eighth note a quasihemidemisemiquaver. This clumsy terminology goes back to the days of plain chant, with its longa, brevis, minima and semiminima. The French and Italians cling to a system almost as confusing, but the Germans use ganze, halbe, viertel, achtel, etc. I have been unable to discover the beginnings of the American system, but it would seem to be borrowed from the German, for since the earliest times a great many of the music teachers in the United States have been Germans, and some of the rest have had German training. In the same way the English hold fast (though with a slacking of the grip of late) to a clumsy method of designating the sizes of printers' types.

In America the point-system makes the business easy; a line of 14-point type occupies exactly the vertical space of two lines of 7-point. But the more old-fashioned English printers still indicate differences in size by such arbitrary and confusing names as brilliant, diamond, small pearl, pearl, ruby, ruby-nonpareil, nonpareil, minion-nonpareil, emerald, minion, brevier, bourgeois, long primer, small pica, pica, English, great primer and double pica. The English also cling to various archaic measures. Thus, an Englishman will commonly say that he weighs eleven stone instead of 154 pounds. A stone, in speaking of a man, is fourteen pounds, but in speaking of beef on the hoof it is only eight pounds. Instead of saying that his back-yard is fifty feet long, an Englishman will say that his back-garden is sixteen yards, two feet long. He employs such designations of time as fortnight and twelve-month a great deal more than we do. He says 'a quarter to nine,' not 'a quarter of nine.' He rarely says fifteen minutes to

or ten thirty; nearly always he uses quarter to and half past ten. He never says a quarter hour or a half hour; he says a quarter of an hour or half an hour. To him, twenty-five minutes is often five-and-twenty minutes.

In Standard English usage directly is always used to signify immediately; "in the American language, generally speaking," as Mark Twain once explained, "the word signifies after a little."1 In England, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, quite means "completely, wholly, entirely, altogether, to the utmost extent, nothing short of, in the fullest sense, positively, absolutely"; in America it is conditional, and means only nearly, approximately, substantially, as in "He sings quite well." An Englishman doesn't say, being ill, "I am getting on well," but "I am going on well." He never adds the pronoun in such locutions as "It hurts me," but says simply, "It hurts." He never "catches up with you" on the street; he "catches you up." He never says "Are you through?" but "Have you finished?" or "Are you done?" He never uses gotten as the perfect participle of get; he always uses plain got, and he is usually more careful than the American to insert it after have. Said Mark Twain to an Englishman encountered on a train in Germany:

You say, "I haven't got any stockings on," "I haven't got any memory," "I haven't got any money in my purse"; we usually say "I haven't any stockings on," "I haven't any memory," "I haven't any money in my purse." You say out of window; we always put in a the. If one asks "How old is that man?" the Briton answers, "He will be about forty"; in the American language we should say "He is about forty."2

In the United States homely always means ill-favored; in England it may also mean simple, friendly, home-loving, folksy. Drages, the furniture-dealer in Oxford street, London, advertises that his wares are for "nice, homely people." St. John Ervine reports that on his first visit to the Republic he got into trouble by praising a gracious female as homely.3 Sick is in common use attributively in England, as in sick-leave, sick-bed and sick-room, but in the predicative situation it has acquired the special meaning of nauseated, and so ill is usually used in place of it. The English never apply sick to specific organs, as in the American sick-nerves, sick-kidneys and sick-teeth.

1 Concerning the American Language, in The Stolen White Elephant; Hartford, 1882. 2 Concerning the American Language, just cited. 3 London Observer, Jan. 13, 1929.

When an Englishman takes a bath it is in a tub (or in the dishpan that he sometimes uses for a tub); when he goes for one in a swimming-pool, a river or the ocean it is a bathe. The use of of following all, as in " All of the time," still strikes him as American; he prefers " All the time." He prefers, again, behind to in back of. He seldom speaks of a warm day; he prefers to call it hot. The American use of to jibe, in the sense of to chime in with, is unknown to him, though he knows the word (as gibe) in the sense of to make game of. He seldom uses to peek in the sense of to peep, and the Oxford Dictionary marks peek-a-boo as " now chiefly U. S." The same mark is given to to pry in the sense of to raise or move by leverage; the Englishman always uses to prize or to prise. He knows the verb to skimp, but prefers to scrimp. He likewise knows to slew, but prefers to swerve, and is unacquainted with slew-foot. "The English newspapers," says H. W. Seaman,1 " used to be very careful to avoid such Americanisms as lifeboat for ship's-boat, life-preserver for lifebelt, and lifeguard for the fellow on the beach who looks out for sharks, etc. Strictly, a lifeboat in England is a boat kept ready to go to the help of ships at sea, a life-preserver is a club or truncheon, and a lifeguard is a soldier in the Life Guards. In the last few years, however, this strictness has gone and the American usages have been generally adopted. We have only recently had lifeguards at beaches and pools, and since the idea came from America, we use the American name for them."

That an Englishman calls out "I say!" and not simply "Say!" when he desires to attract a friend's attention or register a protestation of incredulity - this perhaps is too familiar to need notice. The movies, however, have taught his children the American form. His hear, hear! and oh, oh! are also well known. He is much less prodigal with good-bye than the American; he uses good-day and good-afternoon far more often. Various very common American phrases are quite unknown to him, for example, over his signature. This he never uses, and he has no equivalent for it; an Englishman who issues a signed statement simply makes it in writing. His pet-name for a tiller of the soil is not Rube or Cy, but Hodge. When he goes gunning he does not call it hunting, but shooting; bunting is reserved for the chase of the fox, deer or otter. An intelligent Englishwoman,

1 In a private communication, April 26, 1935.

coming to America to live, once told me that the two things which most impeded her first communications with untraveled Americans, even above the differences between English and American pronunciation and intonation, were the complete absence of the general utility adjective jolly from the American vocabulary, and the puzzling omnipresence and versatility of the verb to fix. I marveled that she did not also notice the extravagant American use of just, right and good. In American just is almost equivalent to the English quite, as in just lovely. Thornton shows that this use of it goes back to 1794. The word is also used in place of exactly in other ways, as in just in time, just how many? and just what do you mean? Thornton shows that the use of right in right away, right good and right now was already widespread in the United States early in the last century; his first example is dated 1818. He believes that the locution was “possibly imported from the Southwest of Ireland.” Whatever its origin, it quickly attracted the attention of English visitors. Dickens noted right away as an almost universal Americanism during his first American tour, in 1842, and poked fun at it in Chapter II of “American Notes.” Right is used as a synonym for directly, as in right away, right off, right now and right on time; for moderately, as in right well, right smart, right good and right often, and in place of precisely or certainly, as in right there and “I’ll get there all right.” More than a generation ago, in an article on Americanisms, an English critic called it “that most distinctively American word,” and concocted the following dialogue to instruct the English in its use:

How do I get to ——?

Go right along, and take the first turning on the right, and you are right there.

Right?

Right.

Right! 1

But this Englishman failed in his attempt to write correct American, despite his fine pedagogical passion. No American would ever use take the first turning; he would use turn at the first corner. As for right away, R. O. Williams argues that “so far as analogy can make good English, it is as good as one could choose.” 2 Nevertheless, the Concise Oxford Dictionary admits it only as an Americanism, and avoids all mention of the other American uses of right. Good is

1 I Speak United States, London Saturday Review, Sept. 22, 1894.

2 Our Dictionaries; New York, 1890, p. 86.

254 The American Language

almost as protean. It is not only used as a general synonym for all adverbs connoting satisfaction, as in to feel good, to be treated good, to sleep good, but also as an adjectival reinforcement to adjectives, as in "I hit him good and hard" and "I am good and tired." The American use of some as an adjective indicating the superlative, as in "She is some girl," is now common in England, but its employment as an adverb to indicate either moderation or intensification, as in "I play golf some" and "That's lying some," is still looked upon as an Americanism there. The former usage has respectable English precedents, but the latter seems to be American in origin. Thornton has traced it to 1785. It enjoyed a revival during the World War, and produced a number of counter-phrases, e.g., going some. In 1918 a writer in the Atlantic Monthly hailed some as "some word - a true super-word." 1 But a year later an Englishman writing in English (London) was denouncing it as "a pure vulgarism, which answers no real need." 2 The same word often has different meanings in the United States and England. Thus, a davenport, which is a couch here, is a desk or escritoire there; a dumb-waiter, which is an elevator here, is a revolving-table there; and a bureau, which is a chest of drawers here, is a desk or writing-table with drawers there. Haberdashery, in the United States, means men's wear (excluding shoes and outer clothes); in England it designates what we call notions. A guy, in England, is a ridiculous figure, and the word is thus opprobrious; in the United States the word is hardly more than an amiable synonym for fellow. The English guy owes its origin to the effigies of Guy Fawkes, leader of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which used to be burnt in public on November 5; the American word seems to be derived from the guy-rope of a circus tent, and first appeared in the complimentary form of head-guy. When G. K. Chesterton made his first visit to the United States he was much upset when an admiring reporter described him as a regular guy. But the English sense of the word is preserved in the American verb to guy. In this country luggage is coming to have the special meaning of the bags in which baggage is packed; in England it means their contents, though baggage is still used by military men. A lobbyist, in England, is not a legislative wire-puller, but a journalist who frequents the lobby of

1 Should Language Be Abolished? by Harold Goddard, July, 1918, p. 63. 2 Words on Trial, by T. Michael Pope, Sept., 1919, p. 151.

the House of Commons, looking for news and gossip.1 A veteran

always means a soldier of long service; not, as with us, any ex-soldier.

Pussyfoot, according to Horwill, means "a temperance propagandist" in England, obviously because of a misunderstanding of the

nickname of William E. (Pussyfoot) Johnson, who set up shop in

London in 1916 and proposed to convert the English to Prohibition.

In the United States, of course, the word has a quite different meaning, and Johnson himself explains in "Who's Who in America" that

it was applied to him "because of his catlike policies in pursuing law-

breakers in the Indian Territory," 1906–7. The English use the same

measures that we do, but in many cases their values differ. Their

bushel, since 1826, has contained 2,218.192 cubic inches, whereas we

retain the old Winchester bushel of 2,150.42 inches. Their peck, of

course, follows suit. So with their gallon, quart, pint and gill, all of

which are larger than ours. Their hundredweight is 112 pounds,

whereas ours is 100 pounds. Of their quarter of wheat we know

nothing, nor have we their quartern-loaf or their quarter-days. A

billion, in England, is not 1,000,000,000, but 1,000,000,000,000; for

the former the word is milliard. According to Alistair Cooke, it is

these words of differing meaning in England and the United States

that give a visiting Englishman most trouble. He says:

If an Englishman reads "The floorwalker says to go to the notion counter,"

he knows at least one word he does not understand. If he reads a speech of

President Roosevelt declaring that "our industries will have little doubt of

black-ink operations in the last quarter of the year," he is at least aware of a

foreign usage, and may be trusted to go off and discover it. But if I write

"The clerk gave a biscuit to the solicitor," he will imagine something precise,

if a little odd. The trouble is that, however lively his imagination, what he

imagines may be precise but is bound to be wrong. For he is confronted with

three nouns which mean different things in the United States and in England.2

3. ENGLISH DIFFICULTIES WITH AMERICAN

Very few English authors, even those who have made lengthy

visits to the United States, ever manage to write American in a real-

istic manner. At the time the American movies were first terrorizing

English purists the late W. L. George undertook a tour of this coun-

1 In St. Bride's Church, Fleet Street,

there is a tablet in memory of

"Alfred Robbins, Kt., Lobbyist in

the Palace of Westminster & Lon-

don; Letter Writer in the Parish of

St. Bride."

2 The American Language, Specta-

tor, Sept. 6, 1935.

256 The American Language

try, and on his return home wrote a paper dealing with his observations.1 George was a very competent reporter, and he had no prejudice against Americanisms; on the contrary, he delighted in them. But despite his diligent effort to write them he dropped into many Briticisms, some almost as unintelligible to the average American reader as so many Gallicisms. On page after page of his paper 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, petrol for gaso-line, and so on. And to top them there were English terms that had no American equivalents at all, for example, kitchen-fender. Every English author who attempts to render the speech of American char-acters makes the same mess of it. H. G. Wells's American in “ Mr. Britling Sees It Through ” is only matched by G. K. Chesterton's in “ Man Alive.” Even Kipling, who submitted the manuscript of “ Captains Courageous ” to American friends for criticism, yet managed to make an American in it say: “ He's by way of being a fisher-man now.” 2 The late Frank M. Bicknell once amassed some amusing examples of this unanimous failing.3 Sir Max Pemberton, in a short story dealing with an American girl's visit to England, made her say: “ I'm right glad . . . You're as pale as spectres, I guess . . . Fancy that, now! . . . You are my guest, I reckon, . . . and here you are, my word! ” C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, in depicting a former American naval officer, made him speak of saloon-corner men (corner-loaf-ers?). E. W. Hornung, in one of his “ Raffles ” stories, introduced an American prize-fighter who went to London and regaled the popu-lace with such things as these: “ Blamed if our Bowery boys ain't cock-angels to scum like this . . . By the holy tinker! . . . Blight and blister him! . . . I guess I'll punch his face into a jam pudding . . . Say, sonny, I like you a lot, but I sha n't like you if you're not a good boy. ” The American use of way and away seems to have daunted many of the authors quoted by Mr. Bicknell; several of

1 Reprinted as Litany of the Novelist in his Literary Chapters; London, 1918.

2 On July 31, 1935 the Associated Press reported that the manuscript of an American movie version of Kipling's The Light That Failed was to be presented to the British Museum, and that it showed some

corrections of Americanisms in the author's hand. Thus he struck out to measure up and inserted to match, as better English, and substituted private for personal in “ He had some important personal busi-ness. ”

3 The Yankee in British Fiction, Outlook, Nov. 19, 1910.

them agree on forms that are certainly never heard in the United

States. Thus H. B. Marriott Watson makes an American character

say: “You ought to have done business with me away in Chicago,”

and Walter Frith makes another say: “He has gone way off to Hol-

born,” “I stroll a block or two way down the Strand,” “I'll drive

him way down home by easy stages,” and “He can pack his grip and

be way off home.” The American use of gotten also seems to present

difficulties to English authors. For example, in “Staying with Rela-

tions” (1930), by Rose Macaulay, American characters are made

to say “The kid's the only one who's gotten sense,” “You've gotten

but one small grip apiece,” “That about uses up all the energy

they've gotten,” and “That's what's wrong with Mexico, they've

gotten no public spirit.”1

“No Englishman,” says Bruce Bliven, “really understands our

native tongue; interpreters are ever so much more needed than they

are between French or Germans and ourselves. That is why British

authors never put into the mouth of an American character anything

other than weird gibberish – presumably deriving from a faint, in-

correct memory of Bret Harte and George Ade, with a touch of erro-

neous Josh Billings.”2 The late John Galsworthy, who frequently

visited the United States, never came within miles of writing

sound American. His stock device for indicating American char-

acters was to lard his dialogue with I judge, gee, cats (as an exclama-

tion), vurry (for very), dandy and cunning. He almost invariably

confused have got and have gotten, the latter of which is used by

Americans only in the sense of have acquired, received or become,

not in the sense of simple have. Rather curiously, he sometimes put

good American phrases into the mouths of English characters, e.g.,

good egg and to say a mouthful.3 Arnold Bennett, like Galsworthy,

was fond of making American he-men use lovely in such sentences

as “It was a lovely party.” Another shining offender was the late

Edgar Wallace, and yet another was the late Sir Arthur Conan

Doyle, whose American, Bill Scanlon, in “Maracot Deep” has been

described as “ one of the most extraordinary linguists ever known to

fiction; the Bowery, Vermont, Whitechapel, Texas: all of these

1 See A British Misconception, by Stuart Robertson, American Speech, April, 1931, p. 314.

2 British Notes, New Republic, Feb. 24, 1926, p. 16.

3 American Speech According to Galsworthy, by Stuart Robertson, American Speech, April, 1932, p. 297.

258 The American Language

tongues are his, not to mention a few fragments of Pennsylvania Dutch."1 "Mannerisms of speech that to an American would identify the speaker as from the Middle West, South, Boston, or Philadelphia," says Miss Mildred Wasson,2 "are mixed freely in the speeches of American characters as interpreted by English writers. Ridiculous uses of words, never to be heard from the tongue of an American man, are invariably ascribed to him." She continues:

Granted that it is difficult for a stranger to understand our regional differences without years of residence in each part of this country, it is still more difficult for him to grasp that we have social lines of demarkation in speech as definite as those in England and France. There are horizontal lines which are not shown on the map. To sense those intangible lines, separating stratum from stratum in society and education, one must know America. To ignore them stamps a writer, to Americans at least, as being a bit off his ground. An American writing of an English lord and making him speak music-hall cockney would go just as far astray.

Miss Anna Branson Hillyard once offered publicly, in an article in the London Atheneum,3 to undertake the revision of English manu-scripts dealing with American people and speech for “fees carefully and inversely scaled by the consultant’s importance.” Miss Hillyard, in the same article, cited a curious misunderstanding of American by Rupert Brooke. When Brooke was in the United States he sent a letter to the Westminster Gazette containing the phrase “You bet your —.” The editor, unable to make anything of it, inserted the word boots in place of the dash. Brooke thereupon wrote a letter to a friend, Edward Marsh, complaining of this botching of his Americanism, and Marsh afterward printed it in his memoir of the poet. Miss Hillyard says that she was long puzzled by this alleged Americanism, and wondered where Brooke had picked it up. Finally, “light dawned by way of a comic cartoon. It was the classic phrase, you betcha (accent heavily on the bet) which Brooke was spelling conventionally! ” And, as Miss Hillyard shows, incorrectly, as usual, for you betcha is not a collision form of you bet your but a collision form of you bet you — an imitative second person of I bet you, which in comic-cartoon circles is pronounced and spelled I betcha.4

1 If You Know What I Mean, by C. W. M., Independent, March 17, 1928. 2 Cockney American, American Speech, April, 1932. 3 American Written Here, Dec. 19, 1919, p. 1362. 4 To this Brooke anecdote a correspondent adds: “An Englishman, confronted by the puzzling American phrase, ‘ Where am I at? ’, interpreted it as a doubly barbarous form of ‘Where is me ‘at? ’ ”

American and English

259

When they venture to deal with Americanisms humorously the British literati do even worse. The contributors to Punch often try their hands at the business, and with melancholy results. From their efforts an American pathologist of language has recovered the following:

He heard foot noises of quite a bunch.

I reckon to work through that programme twice a day, and I garntee them bears gets to know eighty barrel oil leaving Central daily under my tabs.

They greased for the trolley.

Young split, your lil jaunt soaks me twelve dollar seventy-five.1

Here, finally, is the effort of the advertising agent of the Morris motor-car to do an advertisement in the American manner:

Say, bud, jest haow do you calculate to buy an automobile? Do you act pensive after you've bought, or do you let a few facts form fours on your grey matter before you per-mit the local car agent to take a hack at your bank balance?

F'rinstance, what horse-power class do you aim to get into? Will your pocket bear a 20 h.p., and, if not, will a 10 h.p. bear your family? That's the first problem, and the best way to answer it is to think what old friend Solomon would have done and cut th' trouble in half by making your car an 11.9 - safe both ways up.

Wal, after you've laid out your cash an' folded its arms on its little chest, there are just two people who are liable to hold you up for ransom; the tax-collector and th' policeman. Per-sonally, I give a policeman just nuthin' and a tax-collector as little as George and Mary will let me. If I'm in the 11.9 h.p. class I can send the kids to school with th' tax balance. Get me? 2

Colloquial English is just as unfathomable to most Americans as colloquial American is to Englishmen. Galsworthy not only puzzled his American readers with his bogus Americanisms; he also puzzled them with his attempts at English slang. When "The Silver Spoon "

1 If You Know What I Mean, by C. W. M., above cited. See also Speak the Speech, Nation, May 15, 1935, p. 562. The writer of the latter calls attention to the innocent way in which the brethren of Punch mix old and new American slang. A New York gangster, he says, is made to use I swan in the same sentence with gun-moll and he bets dollars to doughnuts and thinks that something beats the Dutch only a few seconds before he calls the object of his affection a hot patootie who refused to middle-aisle it with him because he is a palooka. He also refers to a fried [boiled?] shirt, and speaks of someone as dead from the hoofs up, and of a gazissey [sic] with a dial like a painted doormat." The Nation writer says that when Berton Braley once protested to Sir Owen Seaman, editor of Punch, against such manhandling of American he got the reply: "In caricature it is more essential to give what our clientele will recognize as a familiar likeness than to follow the very latest portrait from life."

2 Autocar (London), Feb. 4, 1922, p. 55.

260 The American Language

was published in this country, in 1926, Harry Hansen was moved to print the following caveat:

When a character says, “I shall break for lunch now ” we understand what he means, but how are we to know what is meant by bees too bee busy, and again, bee weak-minded, which apparently is not a typographical error. Mr. Galsworthy’s characters take a lunar, and enjoy the prospect of getting tonked. They are hit on the boko. “It’s not my business to queer the pitch of her money getting,” says one, and of another the author writes: “ What was his image of her but a phlizz? ” 1

The last word here, I suspect, was actually a typographical error for phiz. But Galsworthy was too austere a man to write slang, and Mr. H. W. Seaman tells me that he is also baffled by some of the phrases that baffled Mr. Hansen. In the following passage from Mrs. Joseph Conrad’s cook-book (1923) there were no visible blunders, yet to most American housewives it must have been almost unintelligible:

We shall need several enameled basins of various sizes, a fish-slice, a vegetable-slice, a wire salad-basket, one or two wooden spoons, two large iron ones, a good toasting-fork, a small Dutch oven to hang in front of the fire.2

Nor would it be easy to find Americans able, without some pondering, to comprehend such news items as the following:

Lewis had driven the horse and trap laden with milk-churns to a collecting-stage on the main road, and to do so he had to cross Wood Green level-crossing. . . . He apparently failed to see a train approaching around a bend. . . . The driver of the train pulled up promptly. . . .3

Even ordinary business correspondence between Englishmen and Americans is sometimes made difficult by differences in the two vocabularies. In 1932 the publisher of the Decatur, Ill., Review wrote to the London Times, asking what its practice was in the matter of stereotyping half-tones. The reply of its chief engineer was not downright unintelligible, but it contained so many strange words and phrases that the Review was moved to print an editorial about

1 The First Reader, New York World, July 9, 1926. runner-beans, lima-beans were

2 This cook-book was reviewed in the Baltimore Evening Sun, April 14, by a writer who had recently returned from a long sojourn in England. “What we Americans called endive,” he said, “the Kentish gardener called chicory. Chicory was our endive. Romaine lettuce was cos, string-beans were broad-beans, and so on.” “ What is here [in England], “known as a bush,” said Eugene Field in Sharps and Flats; New York, 1900, p. 210, “we should call a stew, and what we call a hash is here known as a mince.” Field printed a list of about 30 terms differing in English and American.

3 News of the World, Sept. 10, 1932.

them.1 In England, it appeared, stereotypers’ blankets were called

packing, mat-rollers were mangles, mats (matrices) were flongs, and

to underlay a cut was to bump a block. To underlay has since been

adopted in England, but cut is seldom used. As we have seen in Chap-

ter I, Section 4, the English often have difficulty understanding

American books, and protest against their strange locutions with

great bitterness. When my series of “Prejudices” began to be re-

printed in London in 1921, many of the notices they received roundly

denounced my Americanisms. But when, five years later, I trans-

lated the text from American into Standard English for a volume of

selections, it was reviewed very amiably, and sold better than any

of the books from which its contents were drawn.2 At about the

same time William Feather of Cleveland, the editor of a syndicated

house-organ, sold the English rights thereto to Alfred Pemberton,

a London advertising agent. Mr. Feather writes excellent English,

as English is understood in this country, but for British consump-

tion many of his articles had to be extensively revised. In American

Speech he later printed two amusing papers listing some of the

changes made.3 I content myself with parallel passages from the

American and English version of an article describing an ideal week-

end in the country:

Feather's American

The interior essentials are several

lamps, a large supply of logs, a blaz-

ing fire, and a table loaded with

broiled Spring chicken, steaming

Golden Bantam corn, young string-

beans, a pitcher of fresh milk, a pot

of black coffee, and perhaps a large

peach shortcake, with whipped cream.

1 We Translate a Letter From Lon-

don, April 17, 1932.

2 When Herman Melville's Moby

Dick was brought out in England,

c. 1885, many changes were made

in the text in order to get rid of

Americanisms and American spell-

ings. “In Ch. XVI alone there are

106 variations.” See Some Ameri-

canisms in Moby Dick, by William

S. Ament, American Speech, June,

1932, and Bowdler and the Whale,

by the same, American Literature,

March, 1932.

Pemberton's English

The interior essentials are several

lamps, a large supply of logs, a blaz-

ing fire, and a table loaded with roast

pheasant and bacon, steaming hot

spinach, crisp potatoes, and bread

sauce, a jug of cream, a pot of black

coffee, and perhaps a large Stilton

cheese and a jug of old ale.4

3 Anglicizing Americanisms, Feb.,

1926, and Anglicizings, Jan., 1927.

4 Claude de Crespigny, an English-

man resident in the United States,

objected to some of Mr. Pember-

ton's Anglicizations in Peculiar

Anglicizing, American Speech,

July, 1926, and was answered by

Mr. Pemberton in Anglicizing

Americanisms, American Speech,

Jan., 1927.

Similar changes are frequently made in American short stories reprinted in English magazines,1 and American advertisements are commonly rewritten for English use.2 In 1930 the Department of Commerce issued a business handbook of the United Kingdom3 giving warning that the American “sales-promoter will have to use British English in his sales drive ” in the British Isles. “ While American can exporters and advertisers doing business in Britain,” it continued, “ find it is of distinct advantage that English is the common language of the two countries, it is not by any means on as common a basis as it is widely assumed to be.” There followed a list of trade-terms differing in England and the United States. In the early days of the movie invasion the titles in American films were commonly translated into English,4 but as the flood mounted that effort had to be abandoned as hopeless, and today the talkies pour a constant stream of American neologisms into English. Not infrequently they are puzzling at first blush, and to the end that they may be understood, glossaries are often printed in the English newspapers.5

1 See Another Language, by Anna R. Baker, Writer's Digest, Sept., 1934. Miss Baker describes the revision of a story called Try to For- get Me, by Sewell Peaslee Wright, first published in the Woman's Home Companion for Feb., 1934. In the English reprint to go over big was changed to be successful, sure-fire to popu- lar, to boss around to to boss about, grip to control, all set to ready, and so on. Altogether, Miss Baker notes 74 changes, including a few in spelling.

2 Addressing American advertisers in Anglo-American Trade (London), Jan., 1928, Paul E. Derrick, vice- president of the American Chamber of Commerce in London, said: “I strongly advise Americans who aim to cultivate the British market to have their American advertis- ing translated into idiomatic Eng- lish by trained English advertising writers. I know, from my long and wide experience, that the distribu- tors and consumers in both Britain and America are distracted from concentration upon the message by every unfamiliar word and expres- sion they encounter. . . . It is time

that both Britons and Americans came to know, and to accept the fact, that they do not speak in the same idiom.”

3 The United Kingdom: an Indus- trial, Commercial and Financial Handbook (Trade Promotion Se- ries No. 94). My quotations are from Ch. XXVI: Selling American Merchandise in the United King- dom. I am indebted for the refer- ence to Mr. R. M. Stephenson, chief of the European Section, Division of Regional Information, Depart- ment of Commerce.

4 Sometimes with sad results. In 1923 D. L. Blumenfeld wrote to the Cinema (London, June 5): “The other day I saw an American film in which one of the characters was made to say, in a rough-house scene, “ 'Ere you −.'op it! ”— which is tantamount to making an Englishman in similar circum- stances say “ G'wan, you big stiff − beat it!”

5 For example, American Without Tears, by Hamilton Eames, Lon- don Times, May 6, 1931. Mr. Eames undertook to define 118 terms, ranging from alky-cooking to yen.

saries are sometimes attached to American books, or inserted in the programmes of American plays. When James Gleason's “Is Zat So? ” was presented in London in 1926, Hal O'Flaherty, the correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, cabled to his paper as follows:

From the first act to the last the English section of the audience was forced to refer incessantly to a printed glossary of American slang words and phrases. Even then, when they learned that to moyder a skoyt meant to kill a girl, they found themselves three or four sentences behind the actors.

This glossary 1 included definitions of goof, applesauce, to crab, to can (to dismiss), to frame, gorilla, hick, hooch, to lamp, pippin, to stall, sucker, wise-crack and to wise up, most of which have since entered into the English slang vocabulary. When Carl Sandburg's “ Collected Poems ” were reprinted in London a similar word-list was given in the introduction, with definitions of bunk-shooter, con-man, dock-walloper, honky-tonk, floozy, yen, cahoots, leatherneck, mazuma and flooey, and when Sinclair Lewis's “ Babbitt ” was published there in 1922, there was added a glossary defining about 125 American terms, including bellhop, booster, to bulldoze, burg, dingus, flivver, frame-house, getaway, hootch, jeans, kibosh, loungelizard, nut, once-over, pep, plute, room-mate, saphead, tinhorn, wisenheimer and yeggman. Nearly all of these are now understood in England.2 In 1927 the Oxford University Press brought out an American edition, revised by George Van Santvoord, a former Rhodes scholar, of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary of F. G. and H. W. Fowler. It gave American spellings and pronunciations, and listed a great many words not to be found in the original English edition, e.g., jitney, goulash, chop-suey and drug-store. In 1934 there followed a new edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, revised by H. G. LeMesurier and H. W. Fowler, with an appendix largely devoted to American terms, e.g., alfalfa, attaboy, bad-lands, bingle, bohunk, boloney (in the Al Smith sense), boob, bourbon, burg, calaboose, campus, chaps, chiropractic, co-ed, cole-slaw, con-

1 It was reprinted in American Speech, May, 1926, p. 462, and again in the same, Dec., 1927, p. 167.

2 The Lewis glossary was made by Montgomery Belgion, an Englishman who once lived in New York. Despite his American experience, he made a number of errors. Thus he defined to buck as to cheat, bum as a rotter, flipflop as rot, bigh-

binder as an extravagant person, and roustabout as a revolutionary. The glossaries printed in the English newspapers are usually full of howlers. Even the otherwise accurate Hamilton Eames, whose contribution to the London Times has just been cited, defined panhandler as a swindler. It means, of course, a street beggar.

264 The American Language

niption, coon, craps, third-degree, crackerjack, to doll up, to dope out, to fade out, to frame and to get away with. “The cinema, now vocal,” says Mr. LeMesurier, “has made [the Englishman] familiar with many Americanisms at the meaning of which he has often to guess.”

4. BRITICISMS IN THE UNITED STATES

“While England was a uniquely powerful empire-state, ruled by an aristocratic caste,” said Wyndham Lewis in 1934,1 “its influence upon the speech as upon the psychology of the American ex-colonies was overwhelming. But today that ascendancy has almost entirely vanished. The aristocratic caste is nothing but a shadow of itself, the cinema has brought the American scene and the American dialect nightly into the heart of England, and the Americanizing process is far advanced. . . . There has been no reciprocal movement of England into the United States; indeed, with the new American nationalism, England is kept out.” This is certainly true in the field of language. It is most unusual for an English neologism to be taken up in this country, and when it is, it is only by a small class, mainly made up of conscious Anglomaniacs. To the common people everything English, whether an article of dress, a social custom or a word or phrase has what James M. Cain has called “a somewhat pansy cast.” That is to say, it is regarded as affected, effeminate and ridiculous. The stage Englishman is never a hero, and in his rôle of comedian he is laughed at with brutal scorn. To the average red-blooded he-American his tea-drinking is evidence of racial decay, and so are the cut of his clothes, his broad a, and his occasional use of such highly un-American locutions as jolly, awfully and ripping. The American soldiers who went to France in 1917 and 1918 did not develop either admiration or liking for their English comrades; indeed, they were better pleased with the French, and reserved their greatest fondness for the Germans. As we shall see in Chapter XI, Section 1, one of the evidences of their coolness toward Tommy Atkins was that they borrowed very little of his slang. They found him singing a number of American songs – for example, “Casey Jones,” “John Brown” and “We're Here Because We're Here” –

1 The Dumb Ox, Life and Letters, April, 1934, p. 42.

but they adopted only one of his own, to wit, "Mademoiselle from Armenteers."1 In an elaborate vocabulary of American soldiers' slang compiled by E. A. Hecker and Edmund Wilson, Jr.,2 I can find very few words or phrases that seem to be of English origin. To carry on retains in American its old American meaning of to raise a pother, despite its widespread use among the English in the sense of to be (in American) on the job. Even to wangle, perhaps the best of the new verbs brought out of the war by the English, and wowser3 an excellent noun, have never got a foothold in the United States, and would be unintelligible today to nine Americans out of ten. As for blighty, cheero and righto they would strike most members of the American Legion as almost as unmanly as tummy or pee-pee. After the success of "What Price Glory?" by Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson, in 1924, what price had a certain vogue, but it quickly passed out.

On higher and less earthly planes there is a greater hospitality to English example. Because the United States has failed to develop anything properly describable as a Court, or a native aristocracy of any settled position and authority, persons of social pretensions are thrown back upon English usage and opinion for guidance, and the vocabulary and pronunciation of the West End of London naturally flavor their speech. Until the beginning of the present century the word shop, in American, always meant a workshop, but in 1905 or thereabout the small stores along the Fifth avenues of the larger American cities began turning themselves into shops. Today the word has the special meaning of a store dealing in a limited range of merchandise, as opposed to a department-store; indeed, shop and

1 Eric Partridge, in his introduction to Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, 1914-1918; London, 1930, p. 6, says that it appeared in 1915, and (p. 48) that its tune was borrowed from the French music-halls. 2 I have had access to it through the courtesy of Mr. Wilson. Unfortunately, it remains unpublished. 3 Wowser is of Australian origin, and was in use in Australia at least as early as 1908, but it did not come into use in England until it was introduced by the Australian troops in 1915. Its etymology is uncertain. I am told by Mr. J. A. B. Foster, of Hobart, Tasmania, that it was

invented by one John Norton, who defined it as "a fellow who is too niggardly of joy to allow the other fellow any time to do anything but pray." Mr. Roger C. Hackett, of Cristobal, C. Z., says he has heard that it represents the initials of a slogan employed by a reform organization in Australia (or New Zealand), c. 1900, viz.: "We only want social evils righted." I tried to introduce it in the United States after the World War, but without success. It was used by Dr. William Morton Wheeler in the Scientific Monthly, Feb., 1920, p. 116.

specialty-shop are used interchangeably. Every American town of any pretensions now has gift-shops (or shoppes),1 book-shops, hat-shops, tea-shops, luggage-shops and candy-shops. But the plain people continue to call a shop a store, though they use shopping and shopper. The effort, made at the time shop came in, to substitute boot for shoe did not get very far, and there are not many boot-shops left, and even fewer boot-makers, save in the strict American sense. Bootery and toggery did not last long. But tradesmen's-entrance fared better, and so did charwoman, which has now pretty well supplanted scrubwoman, and, in the cities at least, caused Americans to forget their native modification of char, to wit, chore. Hired-girls began to vanish from the cities so long ago as the second Cleveland administration, and now they are all maids. Drawing-room, always used in the South, began to challenge the Northern parlor about 1895, but by the turn of the century both encountered stiff competition from living-room. To Let signs, once conscious affectations, are now almost as common, at least in the New York area, as For Rent signs, postman seems to be making some progress against letter-carrier, the tunnels under the Hudson are tubes, flapper is now good American, and nursing-home has got some lodgment. In August, 1917, signs appeared in the New York surface cars in which the conductors were referred to as guards; all of them are now guards on the elevated lines and in the subways save the forward men, who remain conductors officially. During the war even the government seemed inclined to substitute the English boarding for the American billboard.2 In the Federal Reserve Act (1913) it borrowed the English governor to designate the head of a bank,3 and in 1926 the Weather Bureau formally adopted the English smog for a mixture of smoke and fog.4 How and when the National Biscuit Company acquired its name I don't know. What it manufactures

1 Whether this form is English or American I don't know, but certainly it is much oftener encountered in the United States than in England. It is sometimes pronounced as spelled, i.e., shoppy. In 1934, in the town of Rabat, Morocco, I heard it so pronounced by a native guiding Americans through the bazaars. Sometimes it is combined with the archaic ye, as in "Ye Olde Tea Shoppe." In such cases ye is often pronounced as

spelled, though it is simply an abbreviation for the.

2 See p. 58 of The United States at War, a pamphlet issued . by the Library of Congress, 1917. The compiler of this pamphlet was a savant bearing the fine old British name of Herman H. B. Meyer.

3 He is addressed as Governor, and is commonly referred to as Hon.

4 This was announced in an Associated Press dispatch from Washington, Feb. 7, 1926.

are biscuits in England, but crackers in the United States. Evacustes A. Phipson, an Englishman, says that railway came into American as " a concession to Anglomania," 1 but about that I am uncertain. In any case, the number of such loans is small, and not many of them are of any significance. More interesting is the Briticism penny, which survives in American usage despite the fact that we have no coin bearing that name officially, and the further fact that the cent to which it is applied is worth only half an English penny. It occurs in many compounds, e.g., penny-bank and penny-in-the-slot, and has even produced Americanisms, e.g., penny-ante and penny-arcade. In 1928 the Legislature of South Carolina considered a bill providing that in certain prosecutions for criminal libel the culprit should " be fined a penny and the costs, and no more." 2

In the days when the theater bulked large in American life it supplied non-traveled Americans of Anglophil leanings with a steady supply of Briticisms, both in vocabulary and in pronunciation. Of plays dealing with fashionable life, most of those seen in the United States were of English origin, and many of them were played by English companies. Thus the social aspirants of provincial towns became familiar with the Standard English pronunciation of the moment and with the current English phrases. It was by this route, I suppose, that the use of sorry in place of the traditional American excuse me got in. The American actors, having no Court to imitate, contended themselves by imitating their English colleagues. Thus an American of fashionable pretensions, say in Altoona, Pa., or Athens, Ga., learned how to shake hands, eat soup, greet his friends, enter a drawing-room and pronounce the words path, secretary, melan-choly and necessarily in a manner that was an imitation of some American actor's imitation of an English actor's imitation of what was done in Mayfair - in brief, an imitation in the fourth degree. The American actor did his best to mimic the pronunciation and intonation of the English, but inasmuch as his name, before he became Gerald Cecil, was probably Rudolph Goetz or Terence Googan, he frequently ran upon laryngeal difficulties. Since the decay of the theater this influence has vanished. The movie actors in Hollywood, with a few exceptions, make no effort to imitate the

1 Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Pt. IX, p. 432.

2 Freedom of the Press (editorial), Savannah News, Jan. 15, 1928.

English pronunciation, and the dialogue put into their mouths seldom contains recognizable Briticisms. To the English it sounds like a farrago of barbaric Americanisms, and on frequent occasions they arise to denounce it with pious indignation.

The Protestant Episcopal Church, on account of its affiliation with the Church of England and its generally fashionable character, is a distributing-station for Anglomania in the United States, but its influence upon the language seems to be very slight. Most of its clergy, in my experience, use sound American in their pulpits, and not long ago, at the funeral orgies of a friend, I heard one of the most Anglophil of them pronounce amen in the best Middle Western manner. The fashionable preparatory schools for boys, most of which are under Protestant Episcopal control, have introduced a number of Briticisms into the vocabulary of their art and mystery, e.g., head-master, chapel (for the service as well as the building), housemaster, monitor, honors, prefect and form. The late Dr. J. Milnor Coit, while rector of the fashionable St. Paul's School at Concord, N. H., diligently promoted this Anglicization. He encouraged the playing of cricket instead of baseball, and “introduced English schoolroom nomenclature to the American boy.” But his successors suffered a relapse into Americanisms, and while “St. Paul's still has forms, the removes, evensong and matins, and even the cricket of Dr. Coit's time are now forgotten.”1 At Groton, the most swagger of all the American prep-schools, the boys are divided into forms and there are prefects, masters and a headmaster, but an examination of the catalogue shows few other imitations of English nomenclature. The staff is actually called the faculty, and the headmaster, a Protestant Episcopal clergyman, is listed as Rev., without the.

Occasionally some American patriot launches an attack upon the few Briticisms that seep in, but it is not done often, for there is seldom any excuse. Richard Grant White, in 1870,2 warned his followers against the figurative use of nasty as a synonym for disagreeable.

1 American Private Schools, by Porter E. Sargent; Boston, 1920. Mr. Sargent says that the young boys at St. Paul's sleep in “alcoves in the dormitories similar to the cubicles of many of the English public-schools.” It is curious to note that Dr. Coit, for all his Anglomania, was born at Harrisburg, Pa., began life as the manager of a tube works at Cleveland, and retired to Munich on resigning the rectorate of St. Paul's.

2 Words and Their Uses; New York, p. 198.

agreeable. 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.1 Gilbert M. Tucker, in 1883,2 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 sound American today. The locutions that are more obviously merely fashionable slang have a harder time of it, and seldom get beyond a narrow circle. When certain advertisers in New York sought to appeal to snobs by using such Briticisms as swagger and topping in their advertisements, the town wits, led by the watchful Franklin P. Adams (though he then served the Tribune, which Clement K. Shorter once called “more English than we are English ”), fell upon them, and quickly routed them. To the average American of the plain people, indeed, any word or phrase of an obviously English flavor has an offensive smack. To call him old dear would be almost as hazardous as to call him Percy, and bah Jove and my word some-how set his teeth on edge. But in consciously elegant circles there is less aversion to such forms, and even fed-up, rotter, priceless, swank, top-hole, cheerio, tosh, and no-end are tolerated. Fashionable mothers teach their children to call them Mummy, and fox-hunters call a leaper a lepper.3

The grotesque errors that English authors fall into every time they essay to write American, referred to a few pages back, are matched by the blunders of Americans who try to write colloquial English. Some years ago, St. John Ervine, the Anglo-Irish playwright and critic, discussed the matter at length in Vanity Fair.4 He said:

When I was in Chicago two years ago, I read in one of the newspapers of that city an account of a jewel theft. . . . A young Englishman, belonging to the aristocracy, had married an American girl, and while they were on their honeymoon, thieves stole some of her jewels. A reporter hurried from Chicago to get a story out of the affair. He interviewed the young husband who

1 But the meaning of the word now differs somewhat in the two countries. In America it connotes disgusting as well as mere unpleasant. Dean W. R. Inge called attention to this difference in The English Language, London Evening Standard, Nov. 24, 1921.

2 American English, North American Review, April.

3 Noah Webster denounced this last so long ago as 1789, in his Dissertations on the English Language, II.

4 English Dialect and American Ears, June, 1922, p. 53.

270

The American Language

was reported to have said something like this: “Hav, haw, yaas, by Jove! Isn't it awf'lly jolly rotten, what? They stole the bally jewels, haw, haw! . . .” I cannot remember the exact words put into this young man's mouth by the reporter, but they were not less foolish than those I have set out. . . . The reporter had either decided before the interview that all Englishmen of aristocratic birth speak like congenital idiots, and therefore could not listen accurately to what was being said to him, or he was too lazy or incompetent to do his work properly, and trusted to conventional caricature to cover up his own deficiencies.

Mr. Ervine then proceeded to a detailed analysis of a book called “Full Up and Fed Up,” by Whiting Williams, an American who lived as a workingman in England, Wales and Scotland during 1920, and sought to report the conversations of the native workingmen among whom he worked. He recorded the speech of an English laborer as follows:

If Hi wuz you, Hi'd walk right in ter the fountain-head o' these steel works 'ere, and sye, “Hi wants ter see the manager!” - just like thot. With wot you've done in Hamerica, you'll get on fine 'ere.

And that of an English soldier thus:

Hi never seen a ranker make a good hofficer yet - awnd Hi've 'ad 'em over me a lot - hadjutants and all. In the hexercises and heverywhere it's allus “Hi've been there meself, boys, and it cawn't be done. Hi'm too wise, boys.” You know 'ow it is. No, sir, never one.

Said Mr. Ervine of these alleged specimens of Cockney English:

I have lived in England for twenty-one years and I know the country, North and South, East and West, country and town, far better than Mr. Williams can ever hope to know it. I have lived among working-people in London, in provincial towns, and in villages, and I have never heard any Englishman speak in that style. I have been in the Army, as a private soldier and as an officer, and I tell Mr. Williams that if he imagines he heard a soldier saying hexercises and heverywhere, then he simply has not got the faculty of hearing. The dropped h is common, but the sounding of it where it ought not to be sounded has almost ceased. I have never heard it sounded in a city, and only on one occasion have I heard it sounded in the country, where an old-fashioned fisherman, with whom I used to go sailing, would sometimes say haccident when he meant accident. This man's younger brother never misplaced the h at all in this way, though he often elided it where it ought to have been sounded. The h is more likely to be dropped than sounded because of the natural laziness of most people over language. . . . A considerable effort is necessary in order to sound it in words where there is no such letter, and this fact, apart altogether from the results of compulsory education, makes it unlikely that Mr. Williams heard anyone in England saying Hi for I and Hamerica for America.

Mr. Ervine continued:

I imagine that most Americans form their impressions about English dialect from reading Dickens, and do not check these impressions with the facts of contemporary life. . . . A popular novel will fix a dialect in the careless mind, and people will continue to believe that men and women speak in that particular fashion long after they have ceased to do so. Until I went to America, I believed that all Negroes spoke like the characters in “Uncle Tom's Cabin.” Mr. John Drinkwater clearly thought so, too, when he wrote “Abraham Lincoln.” I expected to hear a Negro saying something like “Yaas, massa, dat am so!” when he meant, “Yes, sir, that is so!” I daresay there are many Negroes in America who do speak in that way; in fact, Mr. T. S. Stribling's notable story, “Birthright,” makes this plain. But all Negroes do not do so, and perhaps the most correct English I heard during my short visit to the United States two years ago came from the mouth of a red-cap in Boston.

5. HONORIFICS

The honorifics in everyday use in England and the United States show some notable divergences. On the one hand the English are almost as diligent as the Germans in bestowing titles of honor upon their men of mark, but on the other hand they are very careful to withhold such titles from men who do not legally bear them. In America every practitioner of any branch of the healing art, even a chiropodist or an osteopath, is a doctor ipso facto,1 but in England a good many surgeons lack the title and even physicians may not have it. It is customary there, however, to address a physician in the second person as Doctor, though his card may show that he is only medicinae baccalaureus, a degree quite unknown in America. Thus an Englishman, when he is ill, always consults a doctor, as we do. But a surgeon is usually plain Mr.,2 and

1 On April 1, 1926 the New York Times printed a warning by Assistant District Attorney Michael A. Ford that practitioners of the following non-Euclidean healing schemes were calling themselves doctor in New York: ærotherapy, astral-healing, autothermy, bio-dynamo-chromatic-therapy, chro-mo-therapy, diet-therapy, electro-homeopathy, electro-napro-therapy, geo-therapy, irido-therapy, mech-ano-therapy, neuro-therapy, napra-pathy, photo-therapy, physic-ther-apy, quartz-therapy, sanitratorism, spondylotherapy, spectro-chrome-therapy, spectra-therapy, tropho-vitopathy, zodiac-therapy, zonet-therapy and Zoroastrianism.

2 In the appendix to the Final Report of the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases, London, 1916, p. iv, I find the following: “Mr. C. J. Symonds, F.R.C.S., M.D.; Mr. F. J. McCann, F.R.C.S., M.D.; Mr. A. F. Evans, F.R.C.S.” Mr. Symonds is consulting surgeon to

272 The American Language

prefers to be so called, though he may have M.D. on his card, along with F.R.C.S. (fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons). A physician (or surgeon), if he manages to cure the right patients, is not infrequently knighted, in which event he becomes Sir Basil and ceases to be either Dr. or Mr. If royalty patronizes him he may even become Lord Bolus. The Englishman uses the word physician less than we do; he prefers medical man. But with women doctors increasing in number, medical man becomes inconvenient, and medical woman would seem rather harsh to the English, whose natural tendency would be to say medical lady, a plain impossibility. The late Henry Bradley proposed to get round the difficulty by reviving the archaic word leech,1 but it has never been adopted. An English dentist or druggist or veterinarian is never Dr. Nor is the title frequent among pedagogues, for the Ph.D. is an uncommon degree in England, and it is seldom if ever given to persons trained in the congeries of quackeries which passes, in the American universities, under the name of “education.” According to William McAndrew, once superintendent of schools in Chicago and famous as the antagonist of Mayor Big Bill Thompson, every school principal in Boston and New York “has secured a general usage of getting himself called doctor.”2

Professor, like doctor, is worked much less hard in England than in the United States. In all save a few of our larger cities every male pedagogue is a professor, and so is every band leader, dancing master, and medical consultant. Two or three generations ago the title was given to horse-trainers, barbers, bartenders, phrenologists, caterers, patent-medicine vendors, acrobats, ventriloquists, and pedagogues and champions of all sorts.3 Of late its excessive misuse has brought it into disrepute, and more often than not it is applied satirically.4 The real professors try hard to get rid of it. In 1925 those at the University of Virginia organized a society “for the

Guy’s Hospital, Mr. McCann is an eminent London gynecologist, and Mr. Evans is a general surgeon in large practice. All would be called Doctor in the United States.

1 The Skilful Leech, S.P.E. Tracts, No. IV, 1920, p. 33.

2 Speaking of This and That, Chicago School Journal, Sept., 1925, p. 1.

3 See Professor or Professional, by Mamie Meredith, American Speech, Feb., 1934, p. 71, and Professor Again, by C. D. P., American Speech, June, 1929, p. 422.

4 See The Title Professor, by N. R. L., American Speech, Oct., 1927, p. 27, and Professor Again, by Charles L. Hanson, American Speech, Feb., 1928, p. 256.

encouragement of the use of Mister as applied to all men, profes-

sional or otherwise." In England professor is used less lavishly, and

is thus better esteemed. In referring to any man who holds a pro-

fessorship in a university it is almost always employed. But when

he acquires a secular title, that title takes precedence. Thus it was

Professor Almroth Wright down to 1906, but Sir Almroth after-

ward. Huxley was always called Professor until he was appointed

to the Privy Council. This appointment gave him the right to have

Right Honourable put before his name, and thereafter it was cus-

tomary to call him simply Mr. Huxley, with the Right Honourable,

so to speak, floating in the air. The combination, to an Englishman,

was more flattering than Professor, for the English always esteem

political dignities more than the dignities of learning. This explains,

perhaps, why their universities distribute so few honorary degrees.

In the United States every respectable Protestant clergyman, save

perhaps a few in the Protestant Episcopal Church, is a D.D.,1 and

it is almost impossible for a man to get into the papers as a figure in

anything short of felony without becoming an LL.D., but in Eng-

land such honors are granted only grudgingly.2 So with military

titles. To promote a war veteran from sergeant to colonel by ac-

clamation, as is often done in the United States, is unknown over

there. The English have nothing equivalent to the gaudy tin soldiers

of our Governors' staffs, nor to the bespangled colonels and generals

of the Knights Templar and Patriarchs Militant, nor to the non-

descript captains and majors of our country towns.3 An English

railroad conductor (railway guard) is never Captain, as he often is

in the United States. Nor are military titles used by the police. Nor

is it the custom to make every newspaper editor a colonel, as used

1 Canon law among the Baptists, who

are numerous in the South, per-

mits any congregation to confer

the degree. It is often given to a

pastor as a solatium when he is

dismissed from his post. In both

England and America every Catho-

lic and Church of England bishop

is made a D.D. on his elevation.

2 But in Scotland any clergyman

over fifty, never caught red-handed

in simony or adultery, is likely to

be a D.D.

3 In late years the creation of colo-

nels and generals by State Gov-

ernors has diminished, but it

continues in Kentucky, where

Governor Ruby Laffoon (glori-

ously he, despite his given-name)

made thousands between 1931 and

1935. Col. Patrick H. Callahan of

Louisville who owes his title to a

former Governor, argues that mili-

tary rank is conducive, at least in

Kentucky, to easy social inter-

course. "Colonel," he says, "is not

much more than a nickname, like

Tom, Dick or Harry, and is used

and appreciated mostly on that ac-

count."

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The American Language

to be done south of the Potomac.1 Nor is an Attorney-General or Postmaster-General or Consul-General called General. Nor are the glories of public office, after they have officially come to an end, embalmed in such clumsy quasi-titles as ex-United States Senator, ex-Judge of the Circuit Court of Appeals, ex-Federal Trade Commissioner and former Chief of the Fire Department.2 Nor does every college swarm with deans. Nor is every magistrate a judge. This American fondness for hollow titles goes back to colonial days. An English traveler, Edward Kimber, wrote in 1746: “Where-ever you travel in Maryland (as also in Virginia and Carolina) your ears are constantly astonished at the number of colonels, majors and captains that you hear mentioned: in short, the whole country seems at first to you a retreat of heroes.” Two years earlier the Scottish physician, Alexander Hamilton, traveling along the Hudson, found an immense number of colonels. “It is a common saying here,” he wrote, “that a man has no title to that dignity unless he has killed a rattlesnake.” After the Revolution many of the discharged soldiers opened inns, and large numbers of them blossomed out as captains, majors and colonels.3 Every successive war brought in a swarm of new military titles, and after the Civil War they were almost innumerable. During the Grant Era it also became common for wives to borrow their husbands’ titles in the German-Scandinavian fashion, and the historian, Edward A. Freeman, who made a lecture tour of the United States in 1881–82, reported when he got home that he had seen Mrs. Professor on a woman’s visiting card and had read in a newspaper of Mrs. ex-Senator. A. Freeman was almost always called either Professor or Doctor by the Americans he encountered. “In some parts,” he said, “a stranger is commonly addressed as Colonel or Judge.” He called attention to an American peculiarity that is still observable: the overuse of Mister. “I noticed,” he said, “that men who were thoroughly intimate with one another, men who were old friends and colleagues, spoke of and to one another

1 “In Nebraska,” according to Dr. Louise Pound, American Speech, April, 1935, p. 158, “auctioneers customarily take to themselves the title of Colonel.” They do so also in Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and parts of the South. See “Auctioneer Colonels Again,” by Dr. Pound, American Speech, Oct., 1935.

2 The use of former in place of ex- is an Americanism, and Horwill says that it is unknown in England.

3 For these references I am indebted to Words Indicating Social Status in America in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, Oct., 1934.

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275

with handles to their names, in a way which men in the same case would not do [in England].” 1 The leap in the United States is often directly from Mister to Jack. This use of the given-name was popularized by Rotary, the members of which so address one another, and no doubt was also fostered by the advent of the Hon. James A. Farley, whose greeting to all comers was “ Call me Jim.” 2

But perhaps the greatest difference between English and American usage is presented by the Honorable. In the United States the title is applied loosely to all public officials of any apparent respectability, and with some show of official sanction to many of them, especially Congressmen, but it is questionable whether this application has any actual legal standing, save perhaps in the case of certain judges, who are referred to as the Hon. in their own court records. Even the President of the United States, by law, is not the Honorable, but simply the President. In the First Congress the matter of his title was exhaustively debated; some members wanted to call him the Honorable and others proposed His Excellency and even His Highness. But the two Houses finally decided that it was “ not proper to annex any style or title other than that expressed by the Constitution.” Congressmen themselves are not Honorables. True enough, the Congressional Record, in printing a set speech, calls it “ Speech of Hon. John Jones ” (without the the before the Hon. — a characteristic Americanism), but in reporting the ordinary remarks of a member it always calls him plain Mr. Nevertheless, a country Congressman would be offended if his partisans, in announcing his appearance on the stump, did not prefix Hon. to his name. So would a Mayor or Governor. I have seen the sergeant-at-arms of the United States Senate referred to as Hon. in the records of that body,3 and the title is also accorded there to all former members of either House, to State Governors, to Ambassadors, to members of the Cabinet, past or present, and all their principal assistants, to all State officials of any dignity, and to a miscel-

1 Some Impressions of the United States: New York, 1888. The pertinent passages are reprinted in American Social History as Recorded by British Travelers, by Allan Nevins; New York, 1923, p. 481.

2 “ Members of the United States Senate,” says an editorial in the

Dayton (O.) News, Jan. 5, 1934, “ largely address each other, in private at least, by their first names. The President of the United States, to hundreds of his friends, is simply Frank.”

3 Congressional Record, May 16, 1918, p. 7147.

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The American Language

laneous rabble of other notables, including newspaper editors.1 In February, 1935, an Interstate Assembly of various State officials was held at Washington. In the official report of it,2 the following functionaries, among others, were set down as Hons.: State tax commissioners and assessors, State treasurers, comptrollers and auditors, the deputies and assistants of all these, and all members of State Legislatures.

In England the thing is more carefully ordered, and bogus Hons. are unknown. The prefix is applied to both sexes and belongs by law, inter alia, to all present or past maids of honor, to all justices of the High Court during their term of office, to the Scotch Lords of Session, to the sons and daughters of viscounts and barons, to the younger sons of earls, and to the members of the legislative and executive councils of the colonies. But not to members of Parliament, though each is, in debate, the hon. member, or the hon. gentleman. Even a member of the cabinet is not an Hon., though he is a Right Hon. by virtue of membership in the Privy Council, of which the Cabinet is legally merely a committee. This last honorific be-

1 For the sake of the record I append a few examples. Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta Constitution appears as Hon. in the Record for June 15 (all dates are 1935), p. 9811, and the chief editorial writer of another Southern paper on Sept. 10, p. 15335. Jeremiah T. Mahoney, president of the Athletic Union of the United States appears on Aug. 23, p. 14790; Norman Hapgood on May 23, p. 8405; Harry L. Hopkins on July 17, p. 11733; Rexford G. Tugwell on Sept. 10, p. 15253; Frederic A. Delano, President Roosevelt’s uncle, Aug. 21, p. 14439; Leo T. Crowley, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, on June 5, p. 9051; Chester C. Davis, administrator of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, on Aug. 14, p. 13618; Robert Fechner, director of Emergency Conservation Work, on Aug. 15, 13812; former Secretary of the Navy Charles Francis Adams on June 11, p. 9418; an ex-Assistant Postmaster-General on May 29, p. 8728; an Assistant Secretary of State on July 23, p. 12211; a former

Attorney-General of Massachusetts on Aug. 6, p. 13061; the Attorney-General of Indiana on Aug. 16, p. 13980; Knud Wefald, a member of the Minnesota Railroad and Warehouse Commission, on Aug. 23, p. 14778; a special assistant to the Postmaster-General on June 21, p. 10298; a resident commissioner from the Philippines on July 17, p. 11805; a Works Progress director for Idaho on July 17, p. 11733; the solicitor of the Postoffice on July 11, p. 11493; and Frank Delaney, general counsel of Investors and Policyholders, Inc., on Aug. 19, p. 14213. I sometimes receive letters from members of Congress. Almost invariably they make me Hon. on the envelope. Some time ago I received an invitation from a Senator who was giving a luncheon to another Senator. It was in the third person, and both the host and the guest of honor appeared as the Hon.

2 Printed in State Government, the organ of the American Legislators’ Association, April, 1935, p. 89.

longs, not only to privy councillors, but also to all peers lower than marquesses (those above are Most Hon.), to Lord Mayors during their terms of office, to the Lord Advocate and to the Lord Provosts of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Moreover, a peeress whose husband is a Right Hon. is a Right Hon. herself.¹ The British colonies follow the jealous usage of the mother-country. Even in Canada the lawless American example is not imitated. I have before me a “Table of Titles to be Used in Canada,” laid down by royal warrant, which lists those who are Hons. and those who are not Hons. in the utmost detail. Only privy councillors of Canada (not to be confused with imperial privy councillors) are permitted to retain the prefix after going out of office, though ancients who were legislative councillors at the time of the union, July 1, 1867, if any survive, may still use it by sort of courtesy, and former Speakers of the Dominion Senate and House of Commons and various retired judges may do so on application to the King, countersigned by the Governor-General. The following are lawfully the Hon., but only during their tenure of office: the Solicitor-General, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Presidents and Speakers of the provincial Legislatures, members of the executive councils of the Provinces, the Chief Justice, the judges of the Supreme Courts of Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan and Alberta, the judges of the Courts of Appeal of Manitoba and British Columbia, the Chancery Court of Prince Edward Island, and the Circuit Court of Montreal – these, and no more. A Lieutenant-Governor of a Province is not the Hon., but His Honor. The Governor-General is His Excellency, and his wife is Her Excellency, but in practise they usually have superior honorifics, and do not forget to demand their use. In Australia, it would seem, the Hon. is extended to members of the Federal Parliament; at least one of them, to my personal knowledge, has the title engraved upon his visiting-card.²

1 The proper use of titles in England is so complicated a matter that it has produced a large literature. Perhaps the best textbook is Titles and Forms of Address (anonymous); 2nd ed.; London, 1929.

2 In the Crown Colony of Hong Kong all members of the Legislative Council are Hons. and it is customary to add Mr. after the title, even when Christian names or initials follow. It is said to have been first inserted by order of Sir Matthew Nathan, a former Governor. See Marriage at 6 A.M., by Tom Clarke; London, 1934. I am indebted here to Mr. F. H. Tyson of Hong Kong.

But though an Englishman, and, following him, a colonial, is thus very careful to restrict the Hon. to its legal uses, he always insists, when he serves without pay as an officer of any organization, upon indicating his volunteer character by writing hon. meaning honorary, before the name of his office. If he leaves it off it is a sign that he is a hireling. Thus, the agent of the New Zealand government in London, a paid officer, is simply the agent, but the agents at Brisbane and Adelaide, in Australia, who serve for the glory of it, are hon. agents. In writing to a Briton of condition one had better be careful to put Esq. behind his name, and not Mr. before it. The English have long made a distinction between the two forms. Mr., on an envelope, indicates that the sender holds the receiver to be his inferior; one writes to Mr. John Jackson, one's green-grocer, but to James Thompson, Esq., one's neighbor. But if one encloses an envelope for a reply, addressed to one's self, one's name on it must be preceded by Mr., not followed by Esq. Any man who is entitled to the Esq. is a gentleman, by which an Englishman means a man of sound connections and what is regarded as dignified occupation — in brief, of ponderable social position. But in late years these distinctions have been losing force.1 In colonial America Esq. seems to have been confined to justices of the peace, who acquired thereby the informal title of Squire, but inasmuch as every lawyer of any dignity became a justice almost automatically it was eventually applied to most members of the bar.2 It is common to so apply it to this day. Lawyers, like judges, are often designated Esq. in court papers, and when one of them appears on a list of speakers at a political meeting he is usually distinguished from the general, especially in the South, by adding Esq. to his name.

The English in speaking or writing of public officials, avoid those long and clumsy combinations of title and name which figure so copiously in American newspapers. Such locutions as Assistant Secretary of the Interior Jones, Fourth Assistant Postmaster-General Brown, Inspector of Boilers Smith, Judge of the Appeal Tax Court

1 An English friend tells me that he might, “without grievous solecism,” address his tailor as Esq. — on the ground that a tailor, like a lawyer, doctor or horse-dealer, renders his bill, not in pounds, but in guineas! In Etiquette, by Emily Post; New York, 1922, p. 459, we are told that “formal invitations are always addressed to Mr. Stanley Smith,” but that “all other personal letters may be addressed to Stanley Smith, Esq.”

2 I am indebted here to Dr. S. E. Morison.

Robinson, Chief Clerk of the Treasury Williams and Collaborating Epidemiologist White 1 are quite unknown to him. When an Englishman mentions a high official, such as the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, he does not think it necessary to add the man's name; he simply says the Secretary for Foreign Affairs or the Foreign Secretary. And so with the Lord Chancellor, the Chief Justice, the Prime Minister, the Bishop of Carlisle, the Chief Rabbi, the First Lord (of the Admiralty), the Master of Pembroke (College), the Italian Ambassador, and so on. But certain ecclesiastical titles are sometimes coupled to surnames in the American manner, as in Dean Inge and Canon Wilberforce.

A lawyer appearing in court before a judge of the English higher courts addresses him as My Lord, and speaks of him in his presence as His Lordship. In the United States the form is Your Honor, which is also proper for county judges in England. A letter to an English high court judge is superscribed The Hon. Mr. Justice –. In America, in speaking to a judge outside his court, it is customary to say simply Judge –, or, if he is a member of the Supreme Court of the United States (or of one or two other courts) Mr. Justice without the surname, or Mr. Chief Justice. A justice of the peace in England is His Worship, and so is a Mayor, and the latter is the Right Worshipful on an envelope. In the United States a Mayor is sometimes called His Honor, but the form seems to have no warrant in law. The Governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire are Your Excellency by statute. In England an Ambassador is His Excellency, and so are colonial Governors. But the intricacies of British titles are so vast that I can't go into them here.

I have spoken of the American custom of dropping the definite article before Hon. It extends to Rev. and the like, and has the authority of very respectable usage behind it. The opening sentence of the Congressional Record is always: “The Chaplain, Rev. –, D.D., offered the following prayer.” When chaplains for the Army or Navy are confirmed by the Senate they always appear in the Record as Revs., never as the Revs. I also find the honorific without the article in the New International Encyclopædia, in a widely-popular American grammar-book, and in the catalogue of Groton, the fashionable prep-school, whose headmaster must always be

1 I encountered this gem in Public Health Reports, a government publication, for April 26, 1918, p. 619.

280 The American Language

a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church.1 So long ago as 1867, Edward S. Gould protested against this elision as barbarous and idiotic, and drew up the following reductio ad absurdum:

At the last annual meeting of Black Book Society, honorable John Smith took the chair, assisted by reverend John Brown and venerable John White. The office of secretary would have been filled by late John Green, but for his decease, which rendered him ineligible. His place was supplied by inevitable John Black. In the course of the evening eulogiums were pronounced on distinguished John Gray and notorious Joseph Brown. Marked compliment was also paid to able historian Joseph White, discriminating philosopher Joseph Green, and learned professor Joseph Black. But conspicuous speech of the evening was witty Joseph Bray's apostrophe to eminent astronomer Jacob Brown, subtle logician Jacob White, etc., etc.2

This reductio ad absurdum (which sounds curiously like an extract from the Time of today) was ratified by Richard Grant White in “Words and Their Uses” (1870), and William Cullen Bryant included the omission of the article in his Index Expurgatorius, but their anathem as were as ineffective as Gould’s irony. The Episcopalians in the United States, at least those of the High Church variety, usually insert the the, but the rest of the Protestants omit it, and so do the Catholics; as for the Jews, they get rid of it by calling their rabbis Dr. Now and then some evangelical purist tries to induce the Methodists and Baptists to adopt the the, but always in vain. Throughout rural America it is common to address an ecclesiastic viva voce as Reverend. This custom is also denounced by the more delicate clergy, but equally without effect upon the prevailing speech habit. Some years ago one of the suffering brethren was thus moved to protest in verse:

Call me Brother, if you will; Call me Parson — better still. Or if, perchance, the Catholic frill Doth your heart with longing fill — Though plain Mister fills the bill, Then even Father brings no chill Of hurt or rancor or ill-will.

To no D.D. do I pretend, Though Doctor doth some honor lend, Preacher, Pastor, Rector, Friend, Titles almost without end

1 For the Record see any issue. For the New International Encyclopædia see the article on Brotherhood of Andrew and Philip. The grammar-book is Longman’s Briefer Grammar; New York, 1908, p. 160. 2 Good English; New York, 1867, p. 57.

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Never grate and ne'er offend;

A loving ear to all I bend.

But how the man my heart doth rend,

Who blithely calls me Reverend!1

To which may be added a denunciation of Reverend in direct address which shows, incidentally, that the author, a Methodist bishop, does not object to the omission of the the in writing:

She was well dressed. Her manner was womanly. Her voice was gentle. She seemed intelligent and cultured. She approached me and said, "Is this Rev. Moore? " I was amazed at such a transgression against good usage. Anyone should know better than to say Rev. Moore or Rev. Smith. That word Rev. cannot be attached in speech or writing to a surname; it can be used only with the given name, or the initials, or with some title such as Mister, Doctor, Professor or Bishop. One may say Rev. Mr. Smith, or Rev. Dr. Smith, or Rev. Prof. Smith, or Rev. G. W. Smith, but never Rev. Smith. It is discreditable to transgress such usage.2

When it came into use in England, in the Seventeenth Century,3 Rev. was commonly written without the article, and immediately preceding the surname. Thus, Bishop Joseph Hall (1574-1656) did not hesitate to write Reverend Calvin. But at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century the and the given-name began to be added, and by the end of the century that form was almost universal in England.

1 Alabama Christian Advocate (Birmingham), Nov. 7, 1929. The poem was clipped from the Richmond Christian Advocate, which had clipped it in turn from "an Atlanta church paper." Its author was said to be "an Episcopal rector."

2 Do You Speak English?, by Bishop John M. Moore, Christian Index (Jackson, Tenn.), Aug. 9, 1928. Dr. Moore is a Ph.D. of Yale, and also pursued ghostly studies at Leipzig and Heidelberg.

3 Dr. S. E. Morison tells me that the Mathers were probably the first American divines to call themselves Rev. Increase Mather seems to have picked up the title during his visit to England, 1688-92. Before that time American clergymen were simply Mr., an abbreviation of Master. This was an indication that they were masters of arts. During the Middle Ages bachelors

of arts were addressed as Dominus, which was Englished as Sir. That is why clergymen, in Shakespeare's time, were often called Sir - always with their surnames, not with their given names, which last form distinguished knights. The usage crossed the Atlantic, and persisted at Harvard and Yale down to 1800 or thereabout. It explains the belief of many Americans of today that their colonial ancestors were knights. There were relatively few D.D.'s in America before 1800, for the degree was seldom given by the American universities. But any clergyman who had published an edifying work could obtain it from one of the Scottish universities on payment of a fee, and in the middle of the Eighteenth Century it was not unusual for an admiring congregation to pass the hat to help its shepherd obtain the degree.

Here, as in many other cases, American usage is archaic.1 It should be added that English practice, in late years, has been somewhat corrupted, maybe by American example. In the list of members printed in the first tract of the Society for Pure English (1919) Rev., Very Rev., Hon. and Rt. Hon. appeared without the the, and it is commonly omitted by the English Methodists and Baptists. In the United States there has arisen recently a habit of omitting it before the names of corporations. It is, in many cases, not a legal part thereof, and is thus properly omitted in bonds, stock certificates and other such documents, but its omission in other situations makes for a barbaric clumsiness. Among news-agents and advertising agents the article is likewise omitted before the names of magazines, and on Broadway it is omitted before the words show business.2

The use of the plural, Revs., denounced by H. W. Fowler in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) is quite common in this country. A somewhat curious English custom, unknown here, is that of using Messrs. before single names designating firms. Thus, the Literary Supplement of the London Times often announces that Messrs. Jonathan Cape are about to publish this or that book.

In general, ecclesiastical titles are dealt with somewhat loosely in the United States. In England an archbishop of the Established Church is the Most Rev. and His Grace, and a bishop is the Right Rev. and His Lordship, but there are no archbishops in the American Protestant Episcopal Church and the bishops are seldom called His Lordship. The Methodists, in writing of their ordinaries, often omit the Right, contenting themselves with the simple Rev. Among the Catholics, by a decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, dated December 31, 1930,3 an archbishop who is not a cardinal is now the Most Rev. and His Excellency (Excellentia Reverendissima), and so is a bishop. Formerly an archbishop was the Most Rev. and His Grace, and a bishop was the Right Rev. and His Lordship. A cardinal, of course, remains His Eminence. Before the decree it was the custom to address all monsignori as the Right Rev., but now they are divided into two sections, those who are protonotaries apostolic

1 See The Use of the Abbreviation Rev. in Modern English, by Edward C. Ehrensperger, American Speech, Oct., 1931.

2 This last seems to have been introduced by Variety, which has a magnificent disdain for all the ordinary usages of the language. In 1926 Thyra Samter Winslow printed a volume of short stories called Show Business, without the article.

3 The text is in the Acta Apostolicæ Sedis, Jan. 15, 1931.

or domestic prelates remaining the Right Rev.1 and those of inferior rank, e.g., papal chamberlains, becoming the Very Rev. The Ameri- can bishops and archbishops display a dubious Latinity by their as- sumption of the Most Rev. Reverendissimus, to be sure, is a superla- tive, but in the situation in which it is used Latin superlatives are understood only in the sense of very, e.g., altissimus mons means a very high mountain, not the highest mountain. Moreover, if the bishops and archbishops are entitled to be called the Most Rev., then so are the monsignori, for Rome applies reverendissimus to all of them alike. But the puissant brethren of the American hierarchy arrogate the Most Rev. to themselves, and the monsignori must be content with the lesser designations.2

In the Salvation Army honorifics follow a somewhat strange pat- tern. The ordinary member of the Army is called a soldier, and his status in his post is identical with that of a communicant in a church. He is forbidden to belong to any other church. He supports himself at whatever trade he knows, and pays a tenth of his income into the post funds. If he aspires to become an officer he is called a candidate and is sent to a training college, where he becomes a cadet. On his graduation he is made, if unmarried, a probationary lieutenant, or, if married, a probationary captain. He must serve a year in the field before he may hope for promotion to full rank. Above the captaincy the ranks are those of adjutant, major, brigadier (not brigadier-gen- eral), lieutenant-colonel, colonel, lieutenant-commissioner, commis- sioner and general. All ranks are open to women. A married woman always takes her husband's rank, and is known as Mrs. Major, Mrs. Colonel, and so on. If he dies, her own future promotions begin where his left off. No unmarried officer, whether male or female, may marry anyone save another officer without resigning from the corps of officers. Virtually every officer, after ten years' service, is promoted to adjutant. But this promotion, and others following it, may come sooner, and an exceptionally useful officer may be put in command of colleagues of higher rank.3

The use of Madame as a special title of honor for old women of

1 Abbots are also Right Rev. but in the United States they are not monsignors.

2 See Right Reverend, by Prelatus Domesticus, Commonweal, Oct. 18, 1935.

3 I am indebted here to Major Vin- cent Cunningham, editor of the War Cry (Southern edition).

284 The American Language good position survived in the United States until the 70's. It distinguished the dowager Mrs. Smith from the wife of her eldest son. After the Civil War madame became the designation of brothel-keepers, and so fell into bad repute. But it survives more or less among the colored folk, who often apply it to women singers of their race, and sometimes to the more pretentious sort of hairdressers, dressmakers and milliners. Mrs. Washington was commonly called Lady Washington during her life-time, but the title seems to have died with her. When women began to go into politics, after the proclamation of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1920, the widows of male politicians frequently became candidates for their dead husband's jobs. One of the first of these ambitious relicts, the Hon. Nellie Taylor Ross of Wyoming, made her campaign under the style of Ma, and the title was soon extended to others of her kind.1 Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Assistant Attorney-General in charge of prosecutions under the Volstead Act, was generally know as Ma during her days in office, 1921-29. But the title now seems to be in decay.

6. EUPHEMISMS The American, probably more than any other man, is prone to be apologetic about the trade he follows. He seldom believes that it is quite worthy of his virtues and talents; almost always he thinks that he would have adorned something far gaudier. Unfortunately, it is not always possible for him to escape, or even for him to dream plausibly of escaping, so he soothes himself by assuring himself that he belongs to a superior section of his craft, and very often he invents a sonorous name to set himself off from the herd. Here we glimpse the origin of a multitude of characteristic American euphemisms, e.g., mortician for undertaker, realtor for real-estate agent, electragist for electrical contractor, aisle manager for floor-walker, beautician for hairdresser, exterminating engineer for rat-catcher, and so on. Realtor was devised by a high-toned

1 La Ross's husband, the Hon. William B. Ross, died in office as Governor of Wyoming on Oct. 2, 1924, and she was elected his successor and went into office on Jan. 5, 1925. A few days before this another Ma, Ferguson by name, became Governor of Texas. Her husband, James E. Ferguson, had been impeached and removed from the governorship in 1917.

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285

real-estate agent of Minneapolis, Charles N. Chadbourn by name. He thus describes its genesis:

It was in November, 1915, on my way to a meeting of the Minneapolis Real Estate Board, that I was annoyed by the strident peddling of a scandal sheet: “All About the Robbery of a Poor Widow by a Real Estate Man.” The “real estate man” thus exposed turned out to be an obscure homme with desk-room in a back office in a rookery, but the incident set me to thinking. “Every member of our board,” I thought, “is besmirched by this scandal article. Anyone, however unworthy or disreputable, may call himself a real estate man. Why do not the members of our board deserve a distinctive title? Each member is vouched for by the board, subscribes to its Code of Ethics, and must behave himself or get out.” So the idea incubated for three or four weeks, and was then sprung on the local brethren.1

As to the etymology of the term, Mr. Chadbourn says:

Real estate originally meant a royal grant. It is so connected with land in the public mind that realtor is easily understood, even at a first hearing. The suffix -or means a doer, one who performs an act, as in grantor, executor, sponsor, administrator.

The Minneapolis brethren were so pleased with their new name that Mr. Chadbourn was moved to dedicate it to the whole profession. In March, 1916, he went to the convention of the National Association of Real Estate Boards at New Orleans, and made a formal offer of it. It was accepted gratefully, and is now defined by the association as follows:

A person engaged in the real estate business who is an active member of a member board of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and as such, an affiliated member of the National Association, who is subject to its rules and regulations, who observes its standards of conduct, and is entitled to its benefits.2

In 1920 the Minneapolis Real Estate Board and the National Association of Real Estate Boards applied to Judge Joseph W. Molyneaux of Minneapolis for an injunction restraining the Northwestern Telephone Exchange Company from using realtor to designate some of its hirelings, and on September 10 the learned judge duly granted this relief. Since then the National Association has obtained similar injunctions in Virginia, Utah and other States. Its general counsel is heard from every time realtor is taken in vain, and when, in 1922, Sinclair Lewis applied it to George F. Babbitt, there was an uproar. But when Mr. Chadbourn was appealed to he decided that Babbitt

1 Private communication, Sept. 28, 1935. Chicago (National Association of

2 Realtor: Its Meaning and Use; Real Estate Boards), 1925.

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The American Language

was "fairly well described," for he was "a prominent member of

the local board and of the State association," and one could scarcely

look for anything better in "a book written in the ironic vein of

the author of 'Main Street.' "1 Mr. Chadbourn believes that realtor

should be capitalized, "like Methodist or American,"2 but so far it

has not been generally done. In June, 1925, at a meeting of the

National Association of Real Estate Boards in Detroit, the past

presidents of the body presented him with a gold watch as a token

of their gratitude for his contribution to the uplift of their profes-

sion. On May 30, 1934, the following letter from Nathan William

MacChesney, general counsel of the National Association, appeared

in the New Republic:

[Realtor] is not a word, but a trade right, coined and protected by law

by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and the term is a part of

the trade-mark as registered in some forty-four States and Canada. Something

over $200,000 has been spent in its protection by the National Association of

Real Estate Boards in attempting to confine its use to those real estate men who

are members of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, subject to its

code for ethics and to its discipline for violation. It has been a factor in making

the standards of the business generally during the past twenty years, and the

exclusive right of the National Association of Real Estate Boards has been

sustained in a series of court decisions, a large number of injunctions having

been issued, restraining its improper use.

In 1924 the Realtors' Bulletin of Baltimore reported that certain

enemies of realtric science were trying to show that realtor was

derived from the English word real and the Spanish word tor, a

bull, and to argue that it thus meant real bull. But this obscenity

apparently did not go far; probably a hint from the alert general

counsel was enough to stop it. During the same year I was informed

by Herbert U. Nelson, executive secretary of the National Associa-

tion, that "the real-estate men of London, through the Institute of

Estate Agents and Auctioneers, after studying our experience in

this respect, are planning to coin the word estator and to protect

it by legal steps." This plan, I believe, came to fruition, but estator

never caught on, and I can't find it in the Supplement to the Oxford

Dictionary. Realtor, however, is there—and the first illustrative

quotation is from "Babbitt"! In March, 1927, J. Foster Hagan, of

1 Letter to W. A. Frisbie, editor of

the Minneapolis Daily News. This

was in 1922. The letter was sub-

scribed "Yours realtorially." A

copy was sent to Mr. Lewis, who

preserves it in his archives.

2 Private communication, Sept. 4,

Ballston, Va., reported to American Speech that he had encountered realtress on the window of a real-estate office there, but this charming derivative seems to have died a-bornin'. In 1925 or thereabout certain ambitious insurance solicitors, inflamed by realtor, began to call themselves insurors, but it, too, failed to make any progress.

Electragist, like realtor, seems to be the monopoly of the lofty technicians who affect it: “it is copyrighted by the Association of Electragists International, whose members alone may use it.”1 But mortician is in the public domain. It was proposed by a writer in the Embalmers' Monthly for February, 1895, but the undertakers, who were then funeral-directors, did not rise to it until twelve years later. On September 16, 1916, some of the more eminent of them met at Columbus, O., to form a national association, on the lines of the American College of Surgeons, the American Association of University Professors, and the Society of the Cincinnati, and a year later they decided upon National Selected Morticians as its designation.2 To this day the association remains so exclusive that, of the 24,000 undertakers in the United States, only 200 belong to it. But any one of the remaining 23,800 is free to call himself a mortician, and to use all the other lovely words that the advance of human taxidermy has brought in. Mortician, of course, was suggested by physician, for undertakers naturally admire and like to pal with the resurrection men, and there was a time when some of them called themselves embalming surgeons. A mortician never handles a corpse; he prepares a body or patient. This business is carried on in a preparation-room or operating-room, and when it is achieved the patient is put into a casket3 and stored in the repos-ing-room or slumber-room of a funeral-home. On the day of the funeral he is moved to the chapel therein for the last exorcism, and then hauled to the cemetery in a funeral-car or casket-coach.4 The old-time shroud is now a né-

1 Electragist, by Corniel Ridderhof, American Speech, Aug., 1927, p. 477. It means, according to Mr. Ridderhof, “ a combined electrical dealer and contractor.”

2 I am indebted here to Mr. W. M. Krieger, executive secretary of the organization, the headquarters of which are in Chicago.

3 Casket seems to have come in during the Civil War period. In 1863 Nathaniel Hawthorne denounced

it in Our Old Home as “a vile modern phrase, which compels a person . . . to shrink . . . from the idea of being buried at all.” At the start it had a rival in case. The latter was used in the Richmond Examiner's report of the funeral of Gen. J. E. B. Stuart, May 13, 1864. But the Examiner, in the same report, used corpse and hearse.

4 Mortuary Nomenclature, Hygeia, Nov., 1925, p. 651.

288 The American Language

gligé or slumber-shirt or slumber-robe, the mortician's work-truck is an ambulance, and the cemetery is fast becoming a memorial-park. In the West cemeteries are being supplanted by public mausoleums, which sometimes go under the names of cloisters, burial-abbeys, etc.1 To be laid away in one runs into money. The vehicle that morticians use for their expectant hauling of the ill is no longer an ambulance, but an invalid-coach. Mortician has been a favorite butt of the national wits, but they seem to have made no impression on it. In January, 1932, it was barred from the columns of the Chicago Tribune. " This decree goes forth," announced the Tribune, " not for lack of sympathy with the ambition of undertakers to be well regarded, but because of it. If they haven't the sense to save themselves from their own lexicographers, we shall not be guilty of abetting them in their folly." 2 But mortician not only continues to flourish; it also begets progeny, e.g., beautician, cosmetician, radiotrician and bootician.3 The barbers, so far, have not devised a name for themselves in -ician, but they may be trusted to do so anon. In my youth they were tonsorial artists, but in recent years some of them have been calling themselves chirotonsors.4 Practically all American press-agents are now public relations counsel, contact-managers or publicists, all tree-trimmers are tree-surgeons, all milk-wagon and bakery-wagon drivers have become salesmen, nearly all janitors are superintendents, many gardeners have become landscape-architects (in England even the whales of the profession are simple landscape-gardeners), cobblers are beginning to call themselves shoe-rebuilders,5 and the corn-doctors, after a generation as chiropodists, have burst forth as podiatrists. The American fondness for such sonorous appellations arrested the interest of W. L. George, the English novelist, when he visited the United States in 1920. He said:

1 The Mortician, by Elmer Davis, American Mercury, May, 1927. (Reprinted in the Baltimore Evening Sun, April 4, 1927.) On July 23, 1931, according to the Associated Press, a man arrested in Chicago, on being asked his profession, answered proudly that he was a bootician.

2 Editor and Publisher, Jan. 30, 1932.

3 I proposed the use of bootician to designate a high-toned big-city bootlegger in the American Mercury, April, 1925, p. 450. The term met a crying need, and had considerable success. In March, 1927, the San José Mercury-Herald said: " Our bootleggers are now calling themselves booticians. It seems that bootlegger has some trace of odium about it, while bootician has none."

4 In 1924 representatives of 3000 of them met in Chicago, and voted for chirotonsor. See the Commonweal, Nov. 26, 1924, p. 58.

5 There is a Shoe Rebuilders' Association in Baltimore. See the Baltimore Evening Sun, Oct. 17, 1935.

American and English

289

Business titles are given in America more readily than in England. I know one president whose staff consists of two typists. Many firms have four vice-presidents. In the magazines you seldom find merely an editor; the others need their share of honor, so they are associate (not assistant) editors. A dentist is called a doctor. I wandered into a university, knowing nobody, and casually asked for the dean. I was asked, “Which dean?” In that building there were enough deans to stock all the English cathedrals. The master of a secret society is royal supreme knight commander. Perhaps I reached the extreme at a theatre in Boston, when I wanted something, I forgot what, and was told that I must apply to the chief of the ushers. He was a mild little man, who had something to do with people getting into their seats, rather a come-down from the pomp and circumstance of his title. Growing interested, I examined my programme, with the following result: It is not a large theatre, but it has a press-representative, a treasurer (box-office clerk), an advertising-agent, our old friend the chief of the ushers, a stage-manager, a head-electrician, a master of properties (in England called props), a leader of the orchestra (pity this – why not president?), and a matron (occupation unknown).1

George might have unearthed some even stranger magnificoes in other playhouses. I once knew an ancient bill-sticker, attached to a Baltimore theatre, who boasted the sonorous title of chief lithographer. Today, in all probability, he would be called a lithographic-engineer. For a number of years the Engineering News-Record, the organ of the legitimate engineers, used to devote a column every week to just such uninvited invaders of the craft, and some of the species it unearthed were so fantastic that it was constrained to reproduce their business cards photographically in order to convince its readers that it was not spoofing. One of its favorite exhibits was a bedding manufacturer who first became a mattress-engineer and then promoted himself to the lofty dignity of sleep-engineer. No doubt he would have called himself a morphician if he had thought of it. Another exhilarating specimen was a tractor-driver who advertised for a job as a caterpillar-engineer. A third was a beautician who burst out as an appearance-engineer. In an Atlanta department-store the News-Record found an engineer of good taste – a young woman employed to advise newly-married couples patronizing the furniture department, and elsewhere it unearthed display-engineers who had been lowly window-dressers until some visionary among them made the great leap, demolition-engineers who were once content to be house-wreckers, and sanitary-engineers who had an earlier incarnation as garbage-men. The wedding-engineer is a technician employed

1 Hail, Columbia!; New York, 1921, pp. 92-3.

290

The American Language

by florists to dress churches for hymeneal orgies. The commence-ment-e. arranges college and high-school commencements; he has lists of clergymen who may be trusted to pray briefly, and some sort of fire-alarm connection, I suppose, with the office of Dr. John H. Finley, the champion commencement orator of this or any other age. The packing-e. is a scientist who crates clocks, radios and china-ware for shipment. The correspondence-e. writes selling-letters guaranteed to pull. The income-e. is an insurance solicitor in a new false-face. The dwelling-e. replaces lost keys, repairs leaky roofs, and plugs up rat-holes in the cellar. The vision-e. supplies spectacles at cut rates. The deborning-e. attends to bulls who grow too frisky. The Engineering News-Record also discovered a printing-e., a fur-niture-e., a photographic-e., a financial-e. (a stock-market tipster), a paint-e., a clothing-e., a wrapping-e. (a dealer in wrapping-paper), a matrimonial-e. (a psychoanalyst specializing in advice to the love-lorn), a box-e. (the packing-e. under another name), an automotive-painting-e., a blasting-e., a dry-cleaning-e., a container-e., a furnish-ing-e., a socio-religious-e. (an uplifter), a social-e. (the same), a feed-plant-e., a milk-e., a surface-protection-e., an analyzation-e., a fiction-e., a psychological-e. (another kind of psychoanalyst), a casement-window-e., a shingle-e., a fumigating-e., a laminated-wood-e., a package-e. (the packing-e. again), a horse-e., a pediatric-e. (a corn-doctor), an ice-e., a recreation-e., a tire-e., a paint-mainte-nance-e., a space-saving-e., a film-e. (or filmgineer), a criminal-e. (a criminologist), a diet-kitchen-e., a patent-e., an equipment-e., a floor-covering-e., a society-e., a window-cleaning-e., a dust-e., a hospital-ization-e., a baking-e., a directory-e., an advertising-e., a golf-e. (a designer of golf-courses), a human-e. (another variety of psychoanalyst), an amusement-e., an electric-sign-e., a household-e., a pageant-e., an idea-e., a ballistics-e., a lace-e. and a sign-e.1 Perhaps the prize should go to the dansant-e. (an agent supplying dancers and musicians to night-clubs), or to the hot-dog-e.2 The exterminat-

1 Many other varieties of engineers have been unearthed by other fanciers. On Oct. 19, 1935 the New Yorker announced the discovery of a persuasion-e. – “a man sent somewhere by his company to try and sell somebody an idea that would be of advantage to the company.” A few months before this the Professional Engineer found a

pajama-e. in the New Yorker’s ad-vertising columns. For this last I am indebted to Mr. M. E. McIver, secretary of the American Association of Engineers. In Popular Science, Aug., 1935 a contributor called himself a coffee-e.

2 A curious anticipation of the American misuse of engineer, by an Englishman, is to be found in a

ing-engineers have a solemn national association and wear a distin-

guishing pin; whether or not they have tried to restrain non-member

rat-catchers from calling themselves engineers I do not know. In

1923 the Engineering News-Record printed a final blast against all

the pseudo-engineers then extant, and urged its engineer readers to

boycott them. But this boycott apparently came to nothing, and

soon thereafter it abated its indignation and resorted to laughter.1

Next to engineer, expert seems to be the favorite talisman of Ameri-

cans eager to augment their estate and dignity in this world. Very

often it is hitched to an explanatory prefix, e.g., housing-, planning-,

bog-, erosion-, marketing-, boll-weevil-, or sheep-dip-, but some-

times the simple adjective trained- suffices. When the Brain Trust

came into power in Washington, the town began to swarm with

such quacks, most of them recent graduates of the far-flung colleges

of the land. One day a humorous member of Congress printed an

immense list of them in the Congressional Record, with their salaries

and academic dignities. He found at least one whose expertness was

acquired in a seminary for chiropractors. During the John Purroy

Mitchel “reform” administration in New York City (1914-18)

so many bogus experts were put upon the pay-roll that special desig-

memorandum submitted to Henry

Dundas, first Viscount Melville, by

Charles Stuart at the end of 1793.

Dundas was Home Secretary from

1791 to 1794, and as such was in

charge of the government's rela-

tions with the press. “I firmly be-

lieve, without any vanity,” wrote

Stuart, “that I know as much in the

engineering of the press as any

press engineer in Britain.” See The

History of the Times; London,

1925, p. 66. But Stuart's attempt to

make the manipulation of the press

a branch of engineering was not

imitated, and there is no mention

of pseudo-engineers in any of the

English dictionaries.

1 See the issue for Jan. 15, 1925. Also,

Some “Engineers” I Have Known,

by a Civil Engineer, Engineering

News-Record, April 19, 1923, p.

701. The engineers themselves have

grossly misused the term designating them. In The Structure of

the Engineering Profession, by

Theodore J. Hoover, dean of the

School of Engineering at Stanford

University, Journal of Engineering

Education, Jan., 1935, appears an

exhaustive report upon what the

10,542 listed in “Who's Who in

Engineering” call themselves. Mr.

Hoover finds 2518 different titles,

including such absurdities as

sales-e., sales-promotion-e., promo-

tion-e., application-e., college-e., so-

cial-e., technical-publicity-e., bank-

management-e., and export-e. He

advocates a complete reform of

professional nomenclature, but

when I last heard from him he

didn't seem to have much hope.

On Feb. 21, 1935 the Associated

Press reported that the National

Society of Professional Engineers

was trying to induce the American

railroads to call their locomotive-

engineers enginemen. The New

York Central and the Pennsylvania,

it was said, were already doing so,

292 The American Language

nations for them ran out, and in prodding through the Mitchel records later on Bird S. Coler discovered that a number had been carried on the books as general experts.

Euphemisms for things are almost as common in the United States as euphemisms for avocations. Dozens of forlorn little fresh-water colleges are called universities, and almost all pawn-shops are loan-offices. When movie-cathedral came in a few scoffers snickered, but by the generality of fans it was received gravely. City, in England, used to be confined to the seats of bishops, and even today it is applied only to considerable places, but in the United States it is commonly assumed by any town with paved streets, and in the statistical publications of the Federal government it is applied to all places of 8000 or more population. The American use of store for shop, like that of help for servant, is probably the product of an early effort at magnification. Before Prohibition saloons used to be sample-rooms, buffets, exchanges, cafés and restaurants; now they are taverns, cocktail-rooms, taprooms, American-bars, stubes and what not. Not long ago the Furnished-Room Guide undertook to substitute hotelette for rooming-house,1 and in 1928 President E. L. Robins of the National Fertilizer Association proposed that the name of that organization be changed to the National Association of Plant Food Manufacturers or the American Plant Food Association.2 In Pasadena the public garbage-wagons bear the legend: Table-Waste Disposal Department. The word studio is heavily overworked; there are billiard-studios, tonsorial-studios, candy-studios, and even shoe-studios.3 Nor is this reaching out for sweet and disarming words confined to the lowly. Some time ago, in the Survey, the trade journal of the American uplifters, Dr. Thomas Dawes Eliot, associate professor of sociology in Northwestern University, printed a solemn argument in favor of abandoning all such harsh terms as reformatory, house of refuge, reform school and jail. “Each time a new phrase is developed,” he said, “it seems to bring with it, or at least to be accompanied by, some measure of permanent gain, in standards or in viewpoint, even though much of the old may continue to masquer-ade as the new. The series, alms, philanthropy, relief, rehabilitation, case work, family welfare, shows such a progression from cruder to

1 See the New Yorker, Jan. 9, 1935, p. 74. The New Yorker expressed a waggish preference for furnished-roomateria.

2 United Press report, Nov. 13, 1928.

3 See Studio, by John T. Krumpelmann, American Speech, Dec., 1926, p. 158.

more refined levels of charity." Among the substitutions proposed

by the learned professor were habit-disease for vice, psycho-neurosis

for sin, failure to compensate for disease, treatment for punishment,

delinquent for criminal, unmarried mother for illegitimate mother,

out of wedlock for bastard, behavior problem for prostitute, colony

for penitentiary, school for reformatory, psychopathic hospital for

insane asylum, and house of detention for jail.1 Many of these terms

(or others like them) have been actually adopted. Practically all

American insane asylums are now simple hospitals, many reforma-

tories and houses of correction have been converted into homes or

schools, all almshouses are now infirmaries, county-farms or county-

homes, and most of the more advanced American penologists now

speak of criminals as psychopathic personalities. By a law of New

York it is provided that "in any local law, ordinance or resolution,

or in any public or judicial proceeding, or in any process, notice,

order, decree, judgment, record or other public document or paper,

the term bastard or illegitimate child shall not be used, but the term

child born out of wedlock shall be used in substitution therefor, and

with the same force and effect."2 Meanwhile, such harsh terms as

second-hand and ready-made disappear from the American vocabu-

lary. For the former the automobile dealers, who are ardent euphe-

mists, have substituted reconditioned, rebuilt, repossessed and used,

and for the latter department-stores offer ready-tailored, ready-to-

wear and ready-to-put-on. For shop-worn two of the current euphe-

misms are store-used and slightly-second.

The English euphemism-of-all-work used to be lady. Back in the

Seventeenth Century the court-poet Edmund Waller thought it

quite proper to speak of actresses, then a novelty on the English

stage, as lady-actors, and even today the English newspapers fre-

quently refer to lady-secretaries, lady-doctors, lady-inspectors, lady-

golfers and lady-champions. Women's wear, in most English shops,

is ladies' wear. But this excessive use of lady seems to be going out,

and I note women's singles and women's ice hockey on the sports

pages of the London Daily Telegraph.3 The Times inclines the same

way, but I observe that it still uses Ladies' International to designate

a golf tournament, ladies' round and ladies' championship (golf and

1 A Limbo for Cruel Words, Sur-

vey, June 15, 1922.

2 Laws of 1925, Ch. 515, in force

April 9, 1925. I have to thank Mr.

Sylvan Baruch of the New York

Bar for calling my attention to this

statute.

3 March 29, 1935.

294 The American Language

fencing).1 In the United States lady is definitely out of favor. The salesladies of yesteryear are now all saleswomen or salesgirls, and the female superintendent of a hospital is not the lady-superintendent, but simply the superintendent. When women were first elected to Congress, the question as to how they should be referred to in debate engaged the leaders of the House of Representatives. For a while the phrase used was “the lady from So-and-so,” but soon “the gentlewoman” was substituted, and this is now employed almost invariably. Its invention is commonly ascribed to the late Nicholas Longworth; if he actually proposed it, it was probably jocosely, for gentlewoman is clumsy, and in some cases, as clearly inaccurate as lady. The English get round the difficulty by using the hon. member in speaking of women M.P.'s, though sometimes the hon. lady is used.2 A member who happens to be a military or naval officer is always, by the way, the hon. and gallant member, and a legal officer, say the Attorney-General or Solicitor-General, or a lawyer member in active practise, is the hon. and learned member. The English use gentleman much more carefully than we do, and much more carefully than they themselves use lady. Gentleman-author or gentleman-clerk would make them howl, but they commonly employ gentleman-rider and gentleman-player in place of our amateur, though amateur seems to be gaining favor. Here the man referred to is always actually a gentleman by their standards.

The English have relatively few aliens in their midst, and in consequence they have developed nothing comparable to our huge repertory of opprobrious names for them. They have borrowed our dago for Italian, and they have been calling Frenchmen frogs or froggies since the Napoleonic wars 3 but they quickly dropped the

1 April 12, 1935, p. 6.

2 I am indebted for the following to Mr. James Bone, London editor of the Manchester Guardian: “When a Minister answers a question in the House he says Yes, sir or No, sir, whether the question is asked by a man or a woman M.P. The reason is that he is supposed to be addressing the Speaker. There was some laughter among young members when a Minister replied Yes, sir to a question by Lady Astor, but elderly members wrote to the papers at once, rebuking them and

explaining the procedure.” Some time ago I heard the trial of a case in one of the London Law Courts, with the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Hewart, on the bench. There were two women on the jury, but when they finished their labors he said “Thank you, gentlemen.”

3 Frog was picked up by the Americans during the World War, and is occasionally heard in the United States. Its origin is uncertain. Farmer and Henley say that it comes from the French, and

American and English

295

war-time bun and boche for German, they have devised nothing more unpleasant to designate a Scotsman than Sandy, and their worst name for the damned Yankee is simply Yankee. To match these feeble efforts the American language offers:

For Canadian: canuck.1

For Chinese: chink and yellow-belly.

For Czech: bohoe, bohick, bohee, bobunk, bootchkey and cheskey.2

For Englishman: lime-juicer or limey.3

For Filipino: gu-gu.

For German: dutchie, squarehead, heinie, kraut, pretzel and limberger.

For Greek: grease-ball.

For Hungarian: bohunk, bunk and bunkie.

For Irishman: mick, harp and turk.4

For Italian: dago, wop, guinea and ginzo.5

For Japanese: skibby.6

For Jew: kike, sheenie, arab, goose and yid.7

formerly meant a Parisian, “the shield of whose city bore three toads, while the quaggy state of the streets gave point to a jest common at Versailles before 1791: Qu'en disent les grenouilles? i.e., What do the Frogs (the people of Paris) say?” But this seems fanciful. In most Englishmen’s minds, I believe, the term is connected with the fact that the French eat frogs, which are regarded as inedible in England, or, at all events, are not commonly eaten. The Oxford Dictionary shows that it was applied to Jesuits in 1626 and to Dutchmen in 1652, and Farmer and Henley that it was applied to policemen during the 80’s of the last century.

1 Thornton’s earliest example is dated 1855.

2 In The Čechs (Bohemians) in America; Boston, 1912, Thomas Čapek says that bohoe is obsolete. He calls bohunk a portmanteau word that originated in a confusion between Bohemians and Hungarians. Cheskey is simply the Czech adjective český, mistaken for a noun. Bootchkey is the Czech počkej (wait, hold on), a cry used by Czech boys at play. See also Czech Influence Upon the American Vocabulary, by Monsignor J. B. Dudek, Czech-Slovak Stu-

dent Life (Lisle, Ill.) June, 1927, p. 16.

3 A term borrowed from Navy slang. It refers to the fact that, beginning in 1795, lime-juice was issued in the British Navy (and later in the merchant marine) as an anti-scorbutic.

4 See Some Current Substitutes for Irish, by W. A. McLaughlin, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. II, 1914. Mr. McLaughlin discusses harp, mick, Paddy, Turk and Tad. Turk is commonly used among the Roman Catholic clergy in the United States to designate a priest or bishop of Irish blood, and especially one born in Ireland. The Irish are thought to be too adept at ecclesiastical politics, and to get an undue proportion of ecclesiastical promotions.

5 Gilbert Tucker says that dago goes back to 1832. It is probably a corruption of Diego; it was first applied to Mexicans. The etymologies of wop and guinea are uncertain, and frequently disputed.

6 This is used only on the Pacific Coast. It originally meant a Japanese loose woman, but is now applied to all persons of the race.

7 Kike is used to distinguish a Russian, Polish or other Eastern Jew from the German Jews. The origin

296 The American Language

For Latin-American: spiggoty and spick.1 For Mexican: greaser.2 For Negro: nigger, coon, shine, jigabo, jigaboo, spade, Zulu, skunk, jig, jit, buffalo, boogie, dinge, smoke, moke and snowball.3 For Pole: polack. For Scandinavian: scowegian, scowoogian, scoovy, sowegian, scandiboovian, scandinoovian, squarehead, snooser and herring choker.4

of the word is uncertain. J. H. A. Lacher, in Kike, American Speech, March, 1926, says it was suggested by the fact that the names of many of the early Eastern Jewish immigrants ended in -ki or -ky. The German Jews called them kikis and this gradually changed to kike. Webster's New International Dictionary (1934) hints that the word may have some relation to keek, a term used in the clothing trade to designate one employed to spy out the designs of rival manufacturers. Keek is an ancient English verb, now confined to Northern dialects, signifying to peep. Its past tense form appears in Chaucer's Miller's Tale (c. 1386) as kiked. 1 Spiggoty, of which spick is a variant, originated at Panama and now means a native of any Latin-American region under American protection, and in general any Latin-American. It is Navy slang, but has come into extensive civilian use. It is a derisive daughter of "No spik Ingles." The Marines in Nicaragua called the natives gooks. Those of Costa Rica are sometimes called goo-goos.

2 Thornton quotes 'from Ruxton's Life in the Far West, 1849: "The Mexicans are called . . . greasers from their greasy appearance." 3 The Oxford Dictionary's first example of nigger is dated 1786, but the word must be older. The American Negroes have many words of their own to designate shades of color, e.g., brown-skin, high-brown and high-yellow. As I have noted in Chapter V, Section 4, they use ofay to designate whites. But this usage is confined to the sophisticates. In 1919, Dr. P. P. Claxton, United States Com-

missioner of Education, devised a Code of Honorable Names to be subscribed to by the Boy Scouts, whereby they agreed to avoid all opprobrious terms for immigrants. But he omitted the Negroes, and the fact brought forth a protest from them. See Offensive Nicknames, by James W. Johnson, New York Age, Feb. 1, 1919. 4 The effects of race antagonism upon language are still to be investigated. The etymology of slave indicates that the inquiry might yield interesting results. The word French, in English, is largely used to suggest sexual perversion. In German anything Russian is bar-barous, and English education hints at flaggellation. The French, for many years, called a certain contra-band appliance a capote Anglaise, but after the entente cordiale they changed the name to capote Al-lemande. The common English name to this day is French letter. See The Criminal, by Havelock Ellis; London, 1910, p. 208. In France a sharper is called a Greek, as drunk as a Pole is a common phrase, and one of the mainstays of low comedy is le truc du brési-lien. In most of the non-Prussian parts of Germany cockroaches are called Preussen; in Prussia they are Franzosen; in some places they are Schwaben. Finally, it will be recalled that Benvenuto Cellini, in his autobiography, says that he was accused in a French court of using one of his mistresses in "the Italian manner." See International Libels, by William Power, Glasgow (Scotland) Record, April 10, 1929, and Calling Names in Any Language, by Joachim Joesten, American Mercury, Dec., 1935.

American and English

297

The paucity of aliens in England also makes it unnecessary for the English to pay as much heed as we do to the susceptibilities of organized (and sometimes extremely self-assertive) foreign groups. Thus they are free to laugh at stage Irishmen without bringing down the dudgeon of the Knights of Columbus, and they continue to use the word Jew freely, and even retain the verb to jew in their vocabulary. In the United States, according to Richard Grant White, certain Jews petitioned the publishers of Webster's and Worcester's Dictionaries, so long ago as the early 70's, to omit their definitions of to jew, and the publishers of Worcester's complied. "Webster's New International" (1934) still includes the verb, but with the saving observation that it is "used opprobriously in allusion to practices imputed to the Jews by those who dislike them." To jew down is listed, but it is dismissed as slang. In the Standard Dictionary both to jew and to jew down are called slang. But in the Oxford Dictionary to jew gets the more respectable rank of a colloquialism. White says that there were also protests from Jews in the early 70's, both in England and in the United States, against the use of Jew as an adjective in reference to criminals. Both the New York Times and the London Pall Mall Gazette, he says, apologized for using it, and promised to sin no more. To this he objected, saying,

The Jews are a peculiar people, who, in virtue of that strongly-marked and exclusive nationality which they so religiously cherish, have outlived the Pharaohs who oppressed them. . . . When they are mentioned as Jews no allusion is meant to their faith, but to their race. A parallel case to those complained of would be the saying that a Frenchman or a Spaniard had committed a crime, at which no offense is ever taken. A Jew is a Jew, whether he holds to the faith of his fathers or leaves it.1

But in the United States certain Jews carry on a continuous campaign against the use of Jew, and most American newspapers, in order to get rid of their clamor, commonly use Hebrew instead. Thus, one often encounters such forms as Hebrew comedian, Hebrew holidays and even Hebrew rabbi.2 Some years ago a number

1 Words and Their Uses, new ed.; 1873 he organized the Union of New York, 1876, p. 131.

2 Mr. Maximilian Hurwitz tells me that this movement originated among the so-called Reform Jews, most of whom were from Germany or Austria. Its leader was the Rev. Isaac M. Wise. In 1854 he established the American Israelite, in

and in 1875 he founded the Hebrew Union College. The Jews' Hospital of New York changed its name to Mount Sinai, and in 1874, when a merger of Jewish eleemosynary institutions was effected, it took the name of the United Hebrew Chari-

298

The American Language

of American Jews, alarmed by such incongruities, issued a “Note on the Word Jew” for the guidance of editors. From it I take the following:

1. The words Jew and Jewish can never be objectionable when applied to the whole body of Israel, or to whole classes within the body, as, for instance, Jewish young men.

2. There can be no objection to the use of the words Jew and Jewish when contrast is being made with other religions: “Jews observe Passover and Christians Easter.”

3. The application of the word Jew or Jewish to any individual is to be avoided unless from the context it is necessary to call attention to his religion; in other words, unless the facts have some relation to his being a Jew or to his Jewishness. . . . Thus, if a Jew is convicted of a crime he should not be called a Jewish criminal; and on the other hand, if a Jew makes a great scientific discovery he should not be called an eminent Jewish scientist.

4. The word Jew is a noun, and should never be used as an adjective or verb. To speak of Jew girls or Jew stores is both objectionable and vulgar. Jewish is the adjective. The use of Jew as a verb, in to jew down, is a slang survival of the medieval term of opprobrium, and should be avoided altogether.

5. The word Hebrew should not be used instead of Jew. As a noun it connotes rather the Jewish people of the distant past, as the ancient Hebrews. As an adjective it has an historical rather than a religious connotation; one cannot say the Hebrew religion, but the Jewish religion.

Dr. Solomon Solis Cohen of Philadelphia calls my attention to the fact that the American Jews themselves are not consistent in their use of Jew and Hebrew. They have Young Men’s Hebrew Associations all over the country, but they also have a Council of Jewish Women and many Jewish Community Centers. They have both a Hebrew Union College and a Jewish Theological Seminary. Their principal weekly is called the American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune. The distinction between the religious significance of Jew and the national significance of Hebrew is by no means always clear. Abraham, says Dr. Solis Cohen, was a Hebrew ('Ibri), but in the course of time his descendants divided into two moieties, the Israelites and the Judeans, and it is from Judeans that we get our word Jew. “When the Northern Kingdom was destroyed by Shalmaneser the

ties. The Eastern Jews, who began to flock in in the early 80’s, objected to the abandonment of Jew and Jewish and began to call the German Jews Yekudi in derision. They were influential enough by 1916 to cause a new amalgamation of Jewish charities to be called the

Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies of New York. The theatrical weekly, Variety, which is owned and mainly staffed by Jews, takes a poke at Hebrew by reducing it to Hebe.

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name Israel, as a territorial designation, disappeared except from poetry and prayer, until it was recently revived by the Zionists, who speak of all Palestine as Erez Israel.1 Dr. Solis Cohen suggests that the superior respectability of Hebrew in the United States may have been helped by the fact that it was a term of honor among the early Puritan divines, who studied the Hebrew language, and venerated the Hebrew scriptures. The word Jew has been given a dubious significance by “The Merchant of Venice,” by the verb to jew, and by various other unpleasant associations. Whatever the fact, the sort of Jew who devotes himself to visiting editors seems to prefer Hebrew. Even in the advertisements of kosher hotels in the Jewish papers the old term, Jewish cooking, has been abandoned. But I have never observed the use of Hebrew cooking in its place: the popular term seems to be the somewhat incredible Hungarian cuisine. Jewish cookery is actually mainly German, with certain Russian and Polish fancies added. In New York the adjective Jewish seems to be regarded as less offensive than the noun Jew. Thus Jewish boy is often used as a sort of euphemism for Jew. The Jews listed in “Who’s Who in America” sometimes write Jewish religion in their autobiographical sketches instead of Jew, but most of them omit all direct reference to their faith. Among the Cohens in the volume for 1934-35 I find one who describes himself as a Hebrew, one (only partly Jewish) who says he is an Episcopalian, one who puts down Jewish religion, and eight who are silent.

The Jews are not the only indignant visitors to American editorial offices. In Chicago, in the heyday of Al Capone and his assassins, the local Italians made such vociferous objection to the use of Italian in identifying gunmen that the newspapers began to use Sicilian instead. Apparently, the complaints had come chiefly from Northern Italians, and most of the gunmen were actually Sicilians or Neapolitans. But there were also thousands of Sicilians and Neapolitans in the Chicago region who were not gunmen, and why they did not protest in their turn I do not know. The Negroes everywhere carry on a double campaign — first, against the use of nigger, and secondly, for the capitalization of Negro. On March 7, 1930, when the New York Times announced that it would capitalize Negro thereafter, there was jubilation in the Negro press. The Association for the

1 Private communication, April 10, 1925.

Advancement of Colored People had been advocating the change for a long while, but it was a letter from Major R. R. Moton, president of Tuskegee Institute, that moved the Times. It reported on March 9 that Negro was being used by most of the principal American magazines, and by a number of leading newspapers, including the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, the Durham (N. C.) Sun, the Columbus (Ga.) Ledger, and the Raleigh (N. C.) News in the South. The rejoicing among the dark brethren was not shared by George S. Schuyler, the Negro iconoclast, who argued in the Pittsburgh Courier 1 that Negro meant a black man, and that but 20% of the Aframericans were actually black. “The truth is,” he said, “that the American Negro is an amalgam of Caucasian, Amerindian and African. . . . Geographically, we are neither Ethiopians nor Africans, but Americans. Culturally, we are Anglo-Saxons.” But the prevailing view in Aframerica was set forth three years later by the Negro poet and publicist, James Weldon Johnson, as follows:

Many white people, when they wish to be especially considerate, are in doubt about the term most acceptable to Negroes. There are indeed puzzlingly subtle distinctions, to which colored people are more or less sensitive. The adjective colored and the generic designations Negroes, the Negro, and the Negro race are always in order, but a Negro man, a Negro woman, etc. are somewhat distasteful. Negress is considered unpardonable.2

7. FORBIDDEN WORDS

The American people, once the most prudish on earth, took to a certain defiant looseness of speech during the World War, and when Prohibition produced its antinomian reaction they went even further. Today words and phrases are encountered everywhere — on the screen, in the theatres, in the comic papers, in the newspapers, on the floor of Congress, and even at the domestic hearth — that were reserved for use in saloons and bagnios a generation ago. A good example is nerts, in its sense of denial or disparagement. When it came in, in 1925, its etymology must have been apparent to everyone old enough to vote, yet it seems to have met with no opposition from guardians of the national morals, and in a little while it rivalled

1 March 15, 1930.

2 Along This Way; New York, 1933, p. 375.

wham and wow for popularity in the comic strips. My researches indicate that it was coined in Hollywood, that great fountain of American neologisms. There arose there, in the early 20's, a fashion for using openly the ancient four-letter words that had maintained an underground life since the Restoration. It was piquant, for a while, to hear them from the lovely lips of movie beauties, but presently the grand dames of Hollywood society prohibited them as a shade too raw, and they were succeeded by euphemistic forms, made by changing the vowel of each to e and inserting r after it. Nuts was not one of these venerable words, but it had connotations that made it seem somewhat raw too, so it was changed to nerts, and in that form swept the country. At the same time the college boys and girls launched bushwah, hospice, horse's caboose and a number of other such thinly disguised shockers, and there appeared a considerable amelioration of the old American antipathy to bull, bitch, cock, stallion, and so on. Even pregnant returned to good society.

Victoria was not crowned in England until 1838, but a Victorian movement against naughty words had been in full blast in this country since the beginning of the century. In 1830 or thereabout, as Mrs. Frances Trollope tells us, "a young German gentleman of perfectly good manners . . . offended one of the principal families . . . by having pronounced the word corset before the ladies of it." 1 James Flint, in his "Letters from America," 2 reported that rooster had been substituted for cock (the latter having acquired an indelicate anatomical significance) by 1821; indeed there is a quotation in Thornton's "American Glossary" which indicates that it may have come in by 1809. At the same time haystack began to supplant hay-cock, and roach to supplant cockroach, and a bit later a young man in Judge T. C. Haliburton's "Sam Slick" was telling a maiden that her brother had become a rooster-swain in the Navy. Bartlett, in his Glossary, says that this excessive delicacy was not most marked among the survivors of the New England Puritans, but in the West. He goes on (c. 1847):

The essentially English word bull is refined beyond the mountains, and perhaps elsewhere, into cow-creature, male-cow, and even gentleman-cow. A friend who resided many years in the West has told me of an incident where a gray-headed man of sixty doffed his hat reverently and apologized to a clergy-

1 Domestic Manners of the Americans; London, 1832, Vol. I, p. 132. 2 Edinburgh, 1822.

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man for having used inadvertently in his hearing the plain Saxon term. Male-sheep, male-hog, etc. are of a piece with the preceding, to which we may add rooster, he-biddy, game-chicken, etc.1

When Captain Frederick Marryat, the author of “ Mr. Midship-man Easy,” came to the United States in 1837, he got into trouble like Mrs. Trollope’s German. Gazing upon the wonders of Niagara Falls with a young woman acquaintance, he was distressed to see her slip and bark her shin. As she limped home he asked, “ Did you hurt your leg much? ” She turned from him “ evidently much shocked or much offended,” but presently recovered her composure and told him gently that a leg was never mentioned before ladies: the proper word was limb.2 Even chickens ceased to have legs, and another British traveler, W. F. Goodmane, was “ not a little confused on being requested by a lady, at a public dinner-table, to furnish her with the first and second joint.” 3 In the same way pantaloons became nether-garments or inexpressibles, stockings yielded to hose, antmire was substituted for pismire, breast became bosom, lady took the place of the too frankly sexual wife, bull became not only cow-creature (more commonly, cow-critter) but also seed-ox and Jonathan, shirt was forbidden, to go to bed became to retire, servant girls ceased to be seduced and began to be betrayed, and stomach, then under the ban in England, was transformed, by some unfathomable magic, into a euphemism for the whole region from the nipples to the pelvic arch. The 30’s and 40’s saw the Golden Age of euphemism. Bitch, ram, boar, stallion, buck and sow virtually disappeared from the written language, and even mare was looked upon as rather racy. The biblical ass, because the prevailing American pronunciation made it identical with arse, was displaced by jackass, jack or donkey, and to castrate became to change, to arrange or to alter, even on the farm. Chair was abandoned for seat, which presently began to be used for backside too, and so became obscene itself. To use the word shirt in the presence of a woman was “ an open insult.” 4 The very

1 A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States; New York, 1848, intro.

2 A Diary in America; Phila., 1839. The passage is reprinted in American Social History as Recorded by British Travellers, by Allan Nevins; New York, 1923, p. 245.

3 Seven Years in America; London, 1845, p. 16. I borrow this from Noah Webster as a Euphemist, by Allen Walker Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VIII, 1934.

4 John Graham Brooks: As Others See Us; New York, 1908, p. 11.

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word woman became a term of reproach, comparable to the German mensch, and the uncouth female took its place.1 But even female, after a while, acquired a bad name, and when Vassar was established in 1861, under the name of Vassar Female College, the redoubtable Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book, protested loudly, and female was expunged.2 Any hint of sex, in those delicate days, was forbidden. Even the word decent, if applied to a woman was indecent.3 The Americans, according to Mrs. Trollope, rejected Shakespeare as obscene, and one of them said to her: “If we must have the abomination of stage plays, let them at least be marked by the refinement of the age in which we live.”4 When she mentioned Pope's “The Rape of the Lock” he muttered “The very title! ” In 1833 Noah Webster actually undertook to bowdlerize the Bible. His version substituted breast for teat, in embryo for in the belly, peculiar members for stones (Leviticus xxi, 20), smell for stink, to nurse or to nourish for to give suck, lewdness for fornication, lewd woman or prostitute for whore, to go astray for to go a-whoring, and impurities, idolatries and carnal connection for whoredom. He got rid of womb by various circumlocutions, and expunged many verses altogether, as beyond the reach of effective bowdlerization.5 This mania for the chaste affected even the terminology of the arts and sciences. For example, the name of the device in which the percussion-cap of a muzzle-loading gun was fixed and exploded was changed from nipple to cone. It so appeared in “The Prairie Traveler,” by Randolph B. Marcy (1859) – greatly to the indignation of Sir Richard Burton, who brought out an English edition of the book in 1863. “The American cone,” he explained in a footnote, “is the English nipple. Beg pardon for the indelicacy! Our cousins, as we term them, so far

1 Female, of course, was epidemic in England too, but White says that it was “not a Briticism,” and so early as 1839 the Legislature of Maryland expunged it from the title of a bill “to protect the reputation of unmarried females,” substituting women, on the ground that female “was an Americanism in that application.”

2 The Lady of Godey's, by Ruth E. Finley; Phila., 1931, p. 205.

3 See Squeamish Cant, in Words and

Their Uses, by Richard Grant White; new ed.; New York, 1876, p. 176 ff. Also, Inexpressibles, Unmentionables, Unwhisperables, and Other Verbal Delicacies of Mid-Nineteenth Century Americans, by Mamie Meredith, American Speech, April, 1930.

4 Domestic Manners of the Americans, quoted by Nevins, p. 162.

5 Noah Webster as a Euphemist, by Allen Walker Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VIII, 1934.

304 The American Language from calling a spade a spade, explain a cock by rooster, a cockchafer by chafer, and a cockroach by roach.1 After the Civil War there was a recurrence of delicacy, and many euphemisms that still adorn the American newspapers came into use, e.g., interesting (or delicate) condition, criminal operation, house of ill (or questionable) repute, disorderly house, sporting house, statutory offense, fallen woman, felonious attack, serious charge and criminal assault. Syphilis became transformed into blood-poison, specific blood-poison and secret disease, and it and gonorrhea into social diseases. Various French terms, enceinte and accouchement among them, were imported to conceal the fact that careless wives occasionally became pregnant and had lyings-in. Richard Grant White, between 1867 and 1870, launched several attacks upon these ludicrous gossamers of speech, and particularly upon enceinte, limb and female, but only female succumbed. The passage of the Com- stock Postal Act, in 1873, greatly stimulated the search for euphemisms. Once that amazing law was upon the statute-book and Com- stock himself was given the inquisitorial powers of a post-office inspector, it became positively dangerous to print certain ancient and essentially decent English words. To this day the effects of that old reign of terror are still visible. We yet use toilet, retiring-room, wash- room and public comfort station in place of franker terms,2 and such idiotic terms as red-light district, statutory offense and criminal oper- ation are daily encountered. Now and then a really amusing curiosity turns up. I am informed by a correspondent that in 1933 the pious Los Angeles Times printed sow-bosom in lieu of sow-belly. In 1931 the Chattanooga police, on arresting a man for picking up a street- walker on the street, announced that he was charged with “ walking the streets accompanied by a woman,” and it was so reported in the local papers.3 In 1925 or thereabout the Atlantic Monthly gave a cruel blow to the moribund Puritan Kultur by printing the word

1 p. 109. I am indebted here to Mr. Bernard De Voto. 2 The French pissoir is still regarded as indecent in America, and is seldom used in England, but it has gone into most of the Continental languages, though the French themselves avoid it in print, and use the inane Vespasian in place of it. But all the Continental languages have their euphemisms. Most of them, for example, use W.C., an abbreviation of the English water- closet, as a euphemism. The whole subject of national pruderies, in both act and speech, remains to be investigated. 3 Euphemism, Monroe (Mich.) Evening News, Nov. 21, 1931. See also A Note on Newspaper English, by Nelson Antrim Crawford, Kansas Magazine (an annual), 1935.

whore (as I recall it, in an article by Stuart Pratt Sherman), but when, in 1934, a play called “Within the Gates” was presented in New York, with one of its characters appearing simply as “The Young Whore,” three of the local papers changed the designation, and another avoided it by omitting the cast. The Sun changed it to “The Young Prostitute,” the World-Telegram to “The Young Harlot,” and the American to “A Young Girl Who Has Gone Astray.” It should be added that the Times, Post and Telegraph printed it boldly, and that the Herald-Tribune, which omitted the cast, gave the word in the third paragraph of its review.1 Back in 1916 even virgin was a forbidden word, at least in Philadelphia. On February 26 of that year a one-act play of mine, “The Artist,” was presented at the Little Theatre there, and the same day the Public Ledger printed specimens of the dialogue. One of the characters was called “A Virgin,” but the Ledger preferred “A Young Girl.” 2 In September, 1933, at the time of the Brain Trust's unfortunate effort to reduce the hog population of the Middle West, the Iowa Farmers’ Union met at Des Moines and passed a resolution condemning “the scheme to raise livestock prices by slaughtering pigs and enceinte sows.” 3 Hollywood, always under heavy pressure from official and volunteer censors, has its own Index Expurgatorius, augmented from time to time. It includes, as permanent fixtures, broad (for woman), chippy, cocotte, courtesan, eunuch, fairy (in the sense of homosexual), floozy, harlot, hot mamma, buzzy, madam (in the sense of brothel-keeper), nance, pansy, slut, trollop, tart and wench, and, of course, whore. Sex is also forbidden, as is the adjective sexual. Jew may be used only in complimentary connotations, and kike, yid, dago and nigger are prohibited altogether. God must be used circumspectly, and Gawd is under the ban. So are Lord (“when used profanely”), Christ, guts, hell, bellcat, Jesus, Geez, son-of-a- —, S.O.B.,4 louse and punk. Traveling salesman may

1 See The Theatre, by Robert Benchley, New Yorker, Nov. 3, 1934, reprinted in American Speech, Feb., 1935, p. 76. 2 Perhaps because of the Quaker influence, Philadelphia has always been one of the most Pecksniffian of American cities. Early in 1918, when a patriotic moving-picture entitled To Hell With the Kaiser was sent on tour under government patronage, the word hell was carefully toned down, on the Philadelphia billboards, to b—.

3 Associated Press dispatch, Sept. 21, I have to thank Mr. Lewis Hawkins of the Atlanta Constitution for calling my attention to it. 4 This prohibition of two euphemistic forms of son-of-a-bitch, of course, includes the term itself.

not be used " where reference is made to a farmer's daughter," and liar is reserved for scenes " in a light comedy vein." Even the word virtuous is to be avoided, as is bum.1 The radio is almost as prudish as Hollywood. Late in 1934 its syndics actually forbade the verb to do in songs, feeling that it was " a bit too suggestive." 2

Ever since the beginning of the Sex Hygiene movement, c. 1910, syphilis and gonorrhea have been struggling for recognition, but they work their way into the newspapers only slowly. At intervals vigorous protests against this prudery come from medical men. In 1918 the Army Medical Corps complained that the newspapers emasculated its bulletins regarding venereal disease in the Army by using euphemisms. One of the newspaper trade journals thereupon sought the opinions of editors upon the subject, and all of them save one declared against the use of the two words. One editor put the blame upon the Postoffice. Another reported that " at a recent conference of the Scripps Northwest League editors " it was decided that " the use of such terms as gonorrhea, syphilis, and even venereal diseases would not add to the tone of the papers, and that the term vice diseases can be readily substituted." 8 On April 29, 1919 the New York Tribune printed an article quoting with approbation a declaration by Major W. A. Wilson, of the Division of Venereal Control in the Merchant Marine, that " the only way to carry on the campaign [i.e., against venereal disease] is to look the evil squarely in the face and fight it openly," and yet the word venereal was carefully avoided throughout the article, save in the place where Major Wilson's office was mentioned. Whereupon a medical journal made the following comment:

The words " the only way to carry on the campaign is to look the evil squarely in the face and fight it openly " are true, but how has the Tribune met the situation? Its subhead speaks of preventable disease; in the first paragraph social diseases are mentioned; elsewhere it alludes to certain dangerous diseases, communicable diseases and diseases, but nowhere in the entire article does it come out with the plain and precise designation of syphilis and gonorrhea as venereal diseases.4

1 See The Silver Screen, by Roger Whately, Jack O'Donnell and H. W. Hanemann; Los Angeles, 1935, p. 244. I suspect that the prohibition of bum is due to the fact that the word is obscene in England.

2 Rudy Vallee's Music Notebook, Radioland, March, 1935, p. 35. Mr. Vallee says that he was thus deprived of the use of one of his " greatest stage and radio vehicles, Let's Do It." He adds that Do It Again and You Do Something to Me were also prohibited.

3 Pep, July, 1918, p. 8.

4 Social Hygiene Bulletin, May, 1919, p. 7.

In 1933 the newspapers were full of articles about improvements in the use of malaria for treating tertiary syphilis, but few if any of them mentioned the name of the disease. According to the Nation,1 the New York Times spoke of it “only as ‘a dread form of insanity’ caused by ‘a blood disease.’ ” The radio shares this prudery, and in 1934 it was belabored for it by Dr. Thomas Parran, Jr., health commissioner of New York State, who resigned from the public health committee of the National Advisory Council on Radio in Education as an earnest of his dudgeon. In the manuscript of an address that he had planned to deliver from Station CBS on November 19 the word syphilis was stricken out by the station Comstocks.2 When the rejuvenation quackery began to engage the newspapers, in 1924 or thereabout, they found it necessary to invent a new set of euphemisms. So far as I have been able to discover, not one of them ever printed the word testicles. A few ventured upon gonads, but the majority preferred glands or interstitial glands, with sex glands as an occasional variation.3 Even among medical men there is a faction which hesitates to violate the national canons of delicacy. Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, tells me that not a few of them, in communications to their colleagues, still state the fact that a patient has syphilis by saying that he has a specific stomach or a specific ulcer, and that the Journal once received a paper discussing the question, “Can a positive woman have a negative baby?” — i.e., can a woman with a positive Wassermann, indicating syphilis, have a baby free from the disease? In all matters relating to the human body, of course, euphemisms are common and some of them are very old. The tendency to conceal the disagreeable under Latin names, which began with Chaucer’s use of hernia for rupture, shows itself in our own time in the invention of such terms as halitosis. Sometimes French is used instead, as in the following advertisement in the New York Times:

“What can I wear that will make me flat enough for the new suits?” This question is most frequently asked by women who have large derrières. And we have a very specific answer for their problem. It takes a panelled corset with clever fashioning at the hips and waist to do the trick. To flatten the rear without making you look broad.4”

1 May 31, 1933, p. 599. 2 Variety, Nov. 27, 1934, p. 37. 3 Hygeia, Feb., 1925, p. 107. Interstitial glands, of course, was used inaccurately. 4 Oct. 2, 1935. The advertiser was Bonwit Teller.

But outside the fields of anatomy, physiology and pathology, in which concepts of the disgusting may reinforce concepts of the indecent, the prudery once so universal in the United States has been abating since the World War. In speech, if not in writing, words and phrases are used freely that were formerly under a strict ban, even in bordellos. I have given some examples in the first part of this section. Even the unutterable four-letter words, as I have shown, have begun to edge back in thin disguises. A learned and extremely interesting discussion of the most infamous of them, with sidelights on the others, by Allen Walker Read, of the staff of the “Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles,” was published in American Speech in 1934.1 To find the hyper-delicacy of the Grant Era in full flower one must resort to the remoter and more backward parts of the country — for example, the Ozark region. Mr. Vance Randolph reports that among the Ozarkians, bull, boar, buck, ram, jack and stallion are still taboo, and that even such harmless compounds as bullfrog and buckshot are regarded askance. So are all words involving cock, e.g., cock-eyed, cock-sure and even the proper names, Cox and Hitchcock. A cock, to the hillmen, is either a rooster or a crower. A stallion is a stable-horse, a bastard is a woodscolt, and a bull is a cow-brute. Certain everyday words are avoided whenever possible, e.g., stone, maiden, virgin, piece, bed, decent, bag, leg, stocking, tail, breast: for one reason or another they suggest blushful ideas. “Even love,” says Mr. Randolph, “is considered more or less indecent, and the mountain people never use the term in its ordinary sense, but nearly always with some degrading or jocular connotation. If a hillman does admit that he loved a woman he means only that he caressed and embraced her — and he usually says that he loved her up.” But

a woman who would be highly insulted if the word bull was used in her presence will employ Gawd-a-mighty and Jesus Christ freely as expletives; these words are not regarded as profane, and are used by the most staunch Christians

1 An Obscenity Symbol, Dec., 1934, p. 264 ff. Mr. Read is also the author of Lexical Evidence From Folk Epigraphy in Western North America; Paris, 1935, a sober and very interesting study of the written obscenity encountered on the walls of filling-station “rest-rooms” during “an extensive sight-seeing trip throughout the Western United States and Canada in the Summer of 1928.” The four-letter words are treated very warily in the dictionaries. Even the great Oxford omits those of sexual significance, though it lists all those relating to excretions. Webster’s New International admits arse and piss (the latter of which occurs seven times in the King James Bible), but bars all the rest.

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in the backwoods districts. Women of the very best families give tittie to their babies in public, even in church, without the slightest embarrassment. Such inelegant terms as spit and belch are used freely by the hill women, and I have heard the wife of a prominent man tell her daughter to git a rag an' snot thet young-un, meaning to wipe the child's nose. . . . This same woman never uses leg and breast in the presence of strange men.1

Elsewhere in the Bible Belt the old taboos seem to be breaking down. In 1934 Dr. J. M. Steadman, Jr., of Emory University, Atlanta, Ga., undertook a study of the degree of prudery surviving among the students there incarcerated, most of them Georgians and probably a majority Methodists or Baptists. Altogether, 166 males and 195 females were examined, or 361 in all. Two of them proved their evangelical upbringing by listing the word obscene as itself "coarse or obscene," and five added rotten, but the remarkable thing about the inquiry was the high degree of tolerance that it revealed. Thus, of the 361, only 24 banned whore as coarse or obscene, though two others thought it "of a sinister or unpleasant suggestion." Some of the other votes were: against ass, 10; against bull, 5; against knocked-up, 2; against pimp, 2; against garter, 2; against harlot, 3; against teat or tit, 2. Rather curiously, the merely vulgar words got the highest adverse votes, e.g., belch, 25; sweat, 33; puke, 51; guts, 59; stink, 69; belly, 87. Unfortunately, Dr. Steadman allowed his subjects to make up their own lists, and so the more delicate of them omitted the worst words altogether; moreover, he himself expunged a few words in his report. Nevertheless, it shows a considerable ad-.

vance in antinomianism in the heart of the Gospel country. "The fear of using words of an indecent meaning or suggestion," he says, "is opposed, in different degrees for different students, by another powerful factor in the student's language consciousness, the fear of appearing affected or sissy by avoiding the blunt, direct word for even repulsive acts or ideas."2 The inclusion of euphemisms in some of the lists was of considerable significance. Thus, nerts got six adverse votes, halitosis got five, to pet got two, to neck got eight, and bussy got fourteen. To burp and to lay do not seem to have been

1 Verbal Modesty in the Ozarks, 1935. See also the chapter on Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. I, 1928. This paper is reprinted in Mr. Randolph's The Ozarks; New York, 1931, p. 78 ff. 2 A Study of Verbal Taboos, American Speech, April, 1935, and Language Taboos of American College 'Students, English Studies, June,

New York, 1901, and the chapter on Euphemism and Hyperbole in English Words and Their Background, by George H. McKnight; New York, 1923.

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included; maybe they had not yet reached Georgia. Euphemisms, says Dr. Leonard Bloomfield in “Language,” 1 “may in time become too closely associated with the meaning, and in turn become taboo. Our word whore, cognate with the Latin carus (dear), must have been at one time a polite substitute for some word now lost.”

An American visiting England discovers quickly that different words are under the ban on the two sides of the ocean. Knocked-up, which means pregnant in the United States and is avoided as vulgar even where pregnant itself would be tolerated, has only the harmless significance of exhausted in England. Screw, in England, means pay. But bum means the backside, and is thus taboo, though the English use bum-bailiff. An Englishman restricts the use of bug to the Cimex lectularius, or common bedbug, and hence the word has highly improper connotations. All other crawling things he calls insects. An American of my acquaintance once greatly offended an English friend by using bug for insect. The two were playing billiards one Summer evening in the Englishman’s house, and various flying things came through the window and alighted on the cloth. The American, essaying a shot, remarked that he had killed a bug with his cue. To the Englishman this seemed a slanderous reflection upon the cleanliness of his house.2 Not so long ago stomach was in the English Index, and such euphemisms as tummy and Little Mary were used in its place, but of late it has recovered respectability. Dirt, to designate earth, and closet, in the sense of a cupboard, are seldom used by an Englishman. The former always suggests filth to him, and the latter has obtained the limited sense of water-closet. The more important English newspapers, compared to their American analogues, are very plain-spoken, but the popular sheets have a repertory of euphemisms to match those in use on this side of the ocean. The sheet of “Don’ts For Reporters and Sub-Editors” of the London Daily Express, for example, ordains that was cited as corespondent is to be used to avoid adultery, and that betrayed or deceived is to be used in place of seduced. Here are some other specimens, all dredged up from the News of the World:

1 New York, 1933, p. 401. I take this reference from Steadman.

2 On June 26, 1862, an Englishman named Joshua Bug, laboring under the odium attached to the name, advertised in the London Times that he had changed it to Norfolk-Howard, a compound made up of the title and family name of the Dukes of Norfolk. The wits of London at once doubled his misery by adopting Norfolk-Howard as a Euphemism for bedbug.

American and English

311

For prostitute: woman of a certain class.

For pregnant: in a certain condition.

For performing an abortion: producing a certain state.

For pandering: having, for purposes of gain, exercised influence over the movements of the girl victim.

For homosexuality: improper assault.

For rape: improper assault or to interfere with.

Finally, there is the euphemistic address which begins every letter. In the United States, says Mrs. Emily Post,1 “the most formal beginning of a social letter is My dear Mrs. Smith,” but “in England Dear Mrs. Smith is more formal.” Archibald Marshall, the English novelist, says that when he first visited the United States My dear struck him “as effusive coming from strangers,” and Dear “seemed slightly chilling from intimate friends,” but that on reflection he concluded “that our usage must have precisely the same effect upon Americans.”2 But in this matter the rules are not rigid, and though the more conservative English seldom use the American forms, the English forms are not uncommonly encountered in this country.3

8. EXPLETIVES

Perhaps the most curious disparity between the vocabulary of the two tongues is presented by bloody. This word is entirely without improper significance in America, but in England it is regarded as indecent, with overtones of the blasphemous. The sensation produced in London when George Bernard Shaw put it into the mouth of the elegant Mrs. Patrick Campbell in his play, “Pygmalion,” will be remembered. “The interest in the first English performance,” said the New York Times,4 “centered in the heroine's utterance of this banned word. It was waited for with trembling, heard shudderingly, and presumably, when the shock subsided, interest dwindled.” But in New York, of course, it failed to cause any stir. Just why it is viewed so shudderingly by the English is one of the mysteries of the

able book. Unfortunately, using it is made a burden by the lack of an index.

1 Etiquette; New York, 1922, p. 455.

2 Dear and My Dear, London Mercury, Sept., 1922.

3 For the history of such forms in England since 1418 see A History of Modern Colloquial English, by H. C. Wyld; London, 1920, p. 379. This is a very interesting and valu-

4 April 14, 1914. In 1920 the English Licenser of Stage Plays ordered bloody expunged from a play dealing with labor. See English, Oct., 1920, p. 403.

312 The American Language

language. It came in during the latter half of the Seventeenth Century, and remained innocuous for nearly a hundred years. Various amateur etymologists have sought to account for its present evil fame by giving it loathsome derivations, sometimes theological and sometimes catamenial, but the professional etymologists all agree that these derivations are invalid, though when it comes to providing a better one they unhappily disagree. Some hold that bloody was born of the rich young bloods who broke windows, upset sedan-chairs and beat up watchmen in the reign of Anne. Others argue that it goes back to the infancy of the Germanic languages, and is a brother to the German blut, often used in such combinations as blutarm, meaning bloody poor. And yet others think it is a degenerate form of either 's blood or by 'r Lady, both of them favorite oaths in Shakespeare's day, and then thought of as quite harmless. But none of these derivations justifies the present infamy of the word. Richard Henry Dana, who loved saline speech, put it into "Two Years Before the Mast" in 1840, but it failed to catch on in this country. In the Motherland, however, it has continued a lush life under cover, and the more it is denounced by the delicate, the more it is cherished by the vulgar. It is in constant use as a counterword, and has become a general intensive with no ponderable meaning - in Dean W. R. Inge's phrase, simply a sort of notice that a noun may be expected to follow.1

In England frequent efforts have been made to put down profanity, as distinct from obscenity. There was one so long ago as the first quarter of the Seventeenth Century, and B. A. P. Van Dam, in his study of the text of "Hamlet," shows that it even went to the length of bowdlerizing Shakespeare. The early versions of "Hamlet," published during the Bard's lifetime, were liberally besprinkled with the oaths of the time, but in the First Folio, printed seven years after his death, many of them were greatly toned down. Thus God was changed to Heaven (i.e., Heaven), 's wounds (God's wounds) was changed to come, and 's bloud (God's blood) to why. 'S wounds and 's bloud were regarded as innocuous when Shakespeare wrote them: like bloody, they had lost all literal significance. By 1623 both were under the ban. Later on 's wounds enjoyed a revival in the shape of zounds, to flourish for a century and a half and then disappear.

1 See A Note on Bloody, by Robert Withington, American Speech, Oct., 1930, and Children of Linguistic Fashion, by the same author, American Speech, Dec., 1934.

pear. By 1823, according to an anonymous author of the time, quoted by George H. McKnight in “ Modern English in the Making,” 1 the only oath surviving in English circles having “any pretension to fashion ” was by Jove. But on lower levels bloody was already making its way. In the United States, probably because of the decay of the legal concept of blasphemy, there has been little organized opposition to profanity. The New England Puritans attempted to punish it, but only half-heartedly; for, as one of the earliest English travelers in America, Ned Ward, reported in 1699, they were themselves, “ notwithstanding their sanctity, . . . very profane in their common dialect.” In the more southerly colonies there must have been an even more lavish use of cuss-words. The Rev. Jonathan Boucher wrote home from Maryland on August 7, 1759, that visitors there were forced “ to hear obscene conceits and broad expressions, and from this there are times w’n no sex, no rank, no conduct can exempt you,” and on September 12, 1744, Dr. Alexander Hamilton, a Scottish physician then lodged in a New Jersey inn, recorded in his diary:

I was waked this morning before sunrise with a strange bawling and hallowing without doors. It was the landlord ordering his Negroes, with an imperious and exalted voice. In his orders the known term or epithet of son-of-a-bitch was often repeated.2

The Holy Name Society, which has flourished among American Catholics since the 1870’s, has hardly done more than discourage the use of Jesus by its members; they appear to employ hell and damn for their daily occasions quite as freely as the admittedly damned. In this they follow the example of the Father of His Country, who was extremely skillful in the use of these expletives. In 1931, writing in American Speech, L. W. Merryweather observed that “ hell fills so large a part in the American vulgate that it will probably be worn out in a few years more,” and in anticipation of this catastrophe he suggested that the divines of the land be invited to propose a suitable successor to it.3 But it continues in daily use, and there is every reason to believe that it will go on indefinitely. It is not

1 New York, 1928, p. 506. 2 For these references I am indebted to British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, July, 1933, p. 328. 3 Hell in American Speech, American can Speech, Aug., 1931. See also a commentary on the foregoing by J. R. Schultz, American Speech, Feb., 1933, p. 81, and Hellion, by Willa Roberts, American Speech, Feb., 1932, p. 240.

only employed constantly in its naked form; it is also a part of almost countless combinations, many of them unknown to the English. Mr. Merryweather printed a long list of such combinations, and others have been published since by other philologians. Hell-bent, hell-bender, hell-roaring, hell-raiser, hellion - all these are Americanisms, and the English dictionaries know them not. The use of hell in such phrases as "He ran like hell" is apparently an English invention, but when like hell is put first, as in "Like hell you will," the form is American. So is "The hell you say." So is the use of hell as a verb, as in "to hell around." So is the adjective hellishbing, as "He was in a hellishing hurry." So is the general use of hell as an intensive, without regard to its logical meaning, as in "It was colder than hell," "The pitcher was wilder than hell," "What in hell did you say?" and "Hell, yes." So is its use as a common indicator of inferiority or disagreeableness, as in "A hell of a drink," "A hell of a note," and "A hell of a Baptist." Hell also appears in many familiar American phrases - for example, "till hell freezes over," "from hell to break-fast," "hell-bent for election," "there was hell to pay," "hell and high water," "hell and red niggers," and "like a snowbird in hell." I turn to Farmer and Henley's monumental dictionary of English slang, and find only such flabby forms as to give hell, hell-for-leather, to play (or kick up) hell, and hell and scissors (this last, God save us all, credited falsely to the United States!). An American list would be much longer, and on it there would be a great many lovely specimens, most of them known to every American schoolboy.

Robert Graves, in his "Lars Porsena, or The Future of Swearing," published in 1927,1 reported sadly that there was then "a notable decline of swearing and foul language" in England. The lower classes, he said, found bloody sufficient for all ordinary purposes, with bastard and three obscene auxiliaries to help out on great occasions. One of these auxiliaries resembles bloody in that it is not generally considered obscene in the United States. It is bugger. When I was a small boy my father used it often, as an affectionate term for any young male, and if it shows any flavor of impropriety today, the fact must be due to English influence. All three auxiliaries are discussed at length in "Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, 1914-1918," by John Brophy and Eric Partridge.2 They say of one of them, a word of sexual significance:

1 London and New York.

2 London, 1930, p. 15ff.

From being an intensive to express strong emotion it became a merely conventional excrescence. By adding -ing and -ingwell an adjective and an adverb were formed and thrown into every sentence. It became so common that an effective way for the soldier to express emotion was to omit this word. Thus, if a sergeant said, “Get your ---ing rifles!” it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said “Get your rifles!” there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger.

All expletives tend to be similarly dephlogisticated by over-use. “Less than a generation ago, when I was at school,” says H. W. Seaman, “blast was accounted a most corrosive blasphemy, and I once did a hundred lines for using it vainly. Today it is as innocent as blow or bother, and only a trifle stronger.”¹ Bloody seems to be going the same way, though the English still profess to be shocked by it. There are many stories in point. One concerns two workmen who stopped before a poster set up in one of David Lloyd-George's pre-war campaigns. It read “One Man, One Vote.” “What does that mean?” asked one workman of the other. “It means,” said the other, “one bloody man, one bloody vote.” The explanation somehow sufficed. The two bloodys were essentially meaningless, but they translated the sentiment into a familiar pattern, and so helped to its comprehension. There has been no revival of the old English oaths in England since Mr. Graves printed his plaint. In a former and more spacious day Goddam was used so freely by Englishmen that they were known as Goddams all over the Continent, but now the term is so rare among them that when it is heard the police take a serious view of it. It went out in Victorian days, and an English friend in the middle forties tells me that he was greatly shocked when, as a boy of ten, he heard his father use it. He says it seemed as quaint to him as egad or ods-blood. The American custom of inserting goddam into other words, to give them forensic force, is generally believed by the learned to have been launched by the late Joseph Pulitzer, of the New York World, a great master of profanity in three languages. The story current is that he resorted to it in order to flabbergast the managing editor of the World, Foster Coates. “The trouble with you, Coates,” he is said to have roared, “is that you are too indegoddampendent!” Another version makes Coates the inventor. According to it, Pulitzer sent out an unwelcome order, and Coates replied to his catchpoll: “Tell Mr. Pulitzer that

1 Let's Stick To Our Own Bad Language, London Sunday Chronicle, Jan. 26, 1930. Mr. Seaman, in this article, discusses “the growing use of American swear-words by British swearers.”

I'm under no obloddamnation to do that, and I won't."1 This ingenious device has been borrowed by the Australians, who are great admirers of the American language, but they use bloody instead of goddam, no doubt as a concession to Empire solidarity. Mr. David B. Dodge of San Francisco sends me this specimen: "It is immaterial to me." It will be observed that the ma is duplicated, probably for the sake of euphony. The insertion of infixes into Jesus Christ also seems to be an American invention. The common form is Jesus H. Christ, but for special emphasis Jesus H. Particular Christ is sometimes used. Holy jumping Jesus is also heard.

Swearing, of course, is not the prerogative of all men. Many lack the natural gift for it, and others are too timorous. For such toters of inferiority complexes there is a repertory of what may be called denaturized profanity. For spoken discourse there are darn, goldarn, doggone, jiminy, gosh, golly, gee-whiz, holy gee, son-of-a-gun and their congeners, and for written discourse damphool, damfino, helluva and s.o.b., by the Y.W.C.A. out of the tea-shoppe.2 All-fired for hell-fired, gee-whiz for Jesus, tarnal for eternal, tarnation for damnation, cuss for curse, holy gee for holy Jesus, goldarned for God-damned, by golly for by God, great Scott for great God, and what'ell for what the hell are all Americanisms, but by gosh and by gum are English. Toronton has traced all-fired to 1835, tarnal to 1801 and tarnal to 1790; Tucker says that blankety is also American. By golly has been found in England so early as 1843, but it probably originated in America; down to the Civil War it was the characteristic oath of the Negro slaves - at all events in the literature of the time. The English have a number of euphemistic surrogates for bloody - among them, bleeding, sanguinary and ruddy. These, in their turn, have become somewhat raffish, and it would be a grave breach of etiquette to use any of them in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. So long ago as 1887 W. S. Gilbert shocked the more

1 See Reporters Become of Age, by Isabelle Keating, Harper's Magazine, April, 1935, p. 601.

2 Both of the American telegraph companies have rules strictly forbidding the acceptance of telegrams containing profane words. Some time ago a telegram of mine containing the harmless adjective damndest was refused by both. I appealed to the higher authorities

of the Western Union. After I had solemnly filed a brief in defense of the term, Mr. T. W. Carroll, general manager of the Eastern Division, as solemnly decided that the company "must take the position that, if there is any question or doubt on the subject, the safest plan is to request the sender to so modify his language as to make his message acceptable."

refined moiety of London theatre-goers by calling one of his operas “Ruddigore.” Darn and doggone are both American inventions. They came into use during the first half of the last century. The late Professor George Philip Krapp gave over a long essay to proving, as he thought, that darn comes from dierne, an early English adjective signifying secret, dark, lamentable,1 but Dr. Louise Pound has disposed of his case in a paper that is shorter but far more convincing.2 She shows that the origin of the term is actually to be sought in tarnal, a corruption of eternal very common at the end of the Eighteenth Century. From tarnal arose tarnation, and presently tarnation was wedded to damnation, and the offspring of the union was darned, a virtuous sister to damned. Sometimes darned appears as derned. The English form used to be demmed, but it survives only historically, in deminition bow-wows. Used today, it would sound as archaic as zounds. Doggone seems to be a blend form of dog on it; in fact, it is still often used with it following. It is thus a brother to the old English phrase, “a pox upon it,” but is considerably more decorous.

But darn and doggone are hardly more than proofs that profanity is not an American art. The chief national reliances are still hell and damn, both of them badly shop-worn. To support them we have nothing properly describable as a vocabulary of indecency. Our maid-of-all-work in that department is son-of-a-bitch, which seems as pale and ineffectual to a Slav or a Latin as fudge does to us. There is simply no lift in it, no shock, no sis-boom-ah. The dumbest policeman in Palermo thinks of a dozen better ones between breakfast and the noon whistle. The term, indeed, is so flat, stale and unprofitable that, when uttered with a wink or a dig in the ribs, it is actually a kind of endearment, and has been applied with every evidence of respect by one United States Senator to another. Put the second person pronoun and the adjective old in front of it, and scarcely enough bounce is left in it to shake up an archedeacon. Worse, it is frequently toned down to s.o.b., or transmogrified into the childish son-of-a-gun. The latter is so lacking in punch that the Italians among us have borrowed it as a satirical name for an American: la sanemagogna is what they call him, and by it they indicate their contempt for his backwardness in the art that is one of their great

1 The English Language in America; New York, 1925, Vol. I, p. 118 ff. 2 The Etymology of an English Expletive, Language, June, 1927.

318 The American Language

glories. In Standard Italian there are no less than forty congeners of son-of-a-bitch, and each and every one of them is more opprobrious, more brilliant, more effective. In the Neapolitan dialect there are thousands.1

1 For a long list of euphemistic substitutes for God, Jesus, Christ, Lord, saints, devil, hell and damn see Exclamations in American English, by E. C. Hills, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. VII, 1924.

VII

THE PRONUNCIATION OF AMERICAN

I. ITS GENERAL CHARACTERS

"Language," said A. H. 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 exercise of memory."1 The theory, at that time, was somewhat strange to English and American grammarians and etymologists; their labors were largely wasted upon deductions from the written word. But since then, chiefly under the influence of Continental philologians, they have turned from orthographical futilities to the actual sounds of the tongue, and a number of the more recent grammar-books are based upon the spoken language of educated persons - not, remember, of conscious purists, but of the general body of cultivated folk.2 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,3 "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 differences, and admit other differences according to as they are conversing

1 Introduction to the Science of Language, 4th ed., London, 1900, Vol. II, p. 339.

2 For example, A Grammar of Spoken English, by H. E. Palmer; Cambridge, 1922. George O. Curme's College English Grammar; Richmond, Va., 1925, a popular text by a distinguished American

philologian, is founded on "the English language as spoken and written today," p. iv.

3 Daniel Jones: The Pronunciation of English, 2nd ed.; Cambridge, 1914, p. 1. Jones is a professor of phonetics at University College, London.

319

320

The American Language

naturally or endeavouring to exhibit their pronunciation. Worse, it is impossible to represent a great many of these shades in print. Sweet, trying to do it, found himself, in the end, with an alphabet of 125 letters. Prince L.-L. Bonaparte more than doubled this number, and A. J. Ellis brought it to 390.1 During the late 80's of the last century the unwieldy Ellis alphabet was taken in hand by P. E. Passy, a French phonetician, and reduced to a workable compass. In its new form it was adopted by the Association Internationale Phonétique, which Passy had founded, and today, under the name of the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, it is in general use. It suffices for recording most of the sounds commonly encountered in the Western European languages, but every time it is put to some new use defects in it are discovered, and when it was adopted by the Practical Phonetics Group of the Modern Language Association in 1927 a new character had to be added to represent the vowel in the American pronunciation of burt. Unfortunately, its 50-odd characters include twenty or more that do not occur in any normal modern alphabet, and so it is readily interpreted only by phonologists, and the makers of dictionaries avoid it.2 What Richard Grant White wrote in 1880, that "it is almost impossible for one person to express to another by signs the sound of any word," is still more or less true. He went on:

Only the voice 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; far more so than the tones of music, whether made by the human voice or by instruments. Moreover, the question arises as to the capability to apprehend and distinguish sounds on the part of the person whose evidence is given.3

Some years ago certain German phonologists, despairing of the printed page, turned to the phonograph, and there is now a Deutsche

1 It is given in Ellis's Early English Pronunciation, p. 1293 ff., and in Sayce's The Science of Language, Vol. I, p. 353 ff. 2 It is given on p. xxii of Webster's New International Dictionary, 1934, but a simpler if less scientific system of indicating pronunciations is used in the body of the work. See The International Phonetic Alphabet, by John S. Kenyon, American Speech, April, 1929, p. 324 ff. 3 Every-Day English; Boston, 1881, p. 29. The difficulty is discussed,

with examples, in Standards of Speech, by Elizabeth Avery, American Speech, April, 1926. One phonetic symbol is commonly used to represent the e in met, led and sell, yet the vowel differs in the three words. So with the k in key, kaffir and kumquat. "It is difficult if not impossible," says W. Cabell Greet in Southern Speech (in Culture in the South, Chapel Hill, N. C., 1934, p. 601) "to obtain an idea of speech from phonetic symbols."

The Pronunciation of American

Grammophon Gesellschaft in Berlin which offers to supply records of a great many languages and dialects, including English. The phonographograph has also been adopted for teaching foreign languages by some of the American correspondence schools.1 In 1924, at the request of the Present Day English Group of the Modern Language Association, Dr. Harry Morgan Ayres of Columbia University began to make phonograph records of American speech at the New York studios of the Columbia Phonograph Company. In 1927 he was joined by Dr. W. Cabell Greet, now editor of American Speech, and since then a machine for recording on aluminum disks has been installed at Columbia University, and under Dr. Greet's direction nearly 2500 records of about 3500 different speakers have been accumulated (1936). Approximately two thirds of them preserve recordings of a little story called “Arthur the Rat,” so that minute comparisons are easily made. All parts of the country, save the Pacific Coast, are well represented. The same method has been employed by other phonologists, and it was used in accumulating material for the Linguistic Atlas. Transcriptions of Dr. Greet's records, in the IPA, have been printed in every issue of American Speech since February, 1933.2 Of late efforts have been made to record speech by the oscillograph, which has already proved its usefulness in the investigation of the singing voice. It seems to be very likely that, in the near future, the study of oscillograph records on motion picture films will provide a means of distinguishing minute differences in pronunciation with great precision.3 The lead in this work has been taken by Dr. E. W. Scripture, the American-born profes-

1 The first experiments were made in New York at the turn of the century. In 1901 the method was adopted by the International Correspondence Schools at Scranton, Pa. The director of their School of Languages, Mr. J. Navas, tells me that it is still in use, and has been a great success.

2 For an account of the early stages of the work of Drs. Ayres and Greet see their article, American Speech Records at Columbia University, American Speech, June, 1930.

3 The method employed is described by C. E. Parmenter and S. N. Treviño in The Length of the Sounds

of a Middle Westerner, American Speech, April, 1935. The subject's voice, picked up by a microphone, causes the oscillograph to vibrate, and the vibrations are photographed on a strip of film moving at the rate of two feet a second. Simultaneously, the vibrations of a 1000-cycle oscillator are recorded on the same film, to serve as a timer. In A Study of Dialect Differences, by H. E. Atherton and Darrell L. Gregg, American Speech, Feb., 1929, there is a comparison between Southern English and the pronunciation of North Carolina by a modification of this method.

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The American Language

sor of experimental phonetics at the University of Vienna; by Dr. S. N. Treviño of the University of Chicago; and by the acoustical engineers of the Bell Telephone System laboratories. The x-rays have also been employed, especially by Dr. G. Oscar Russell of Ohio State University.1

In view of the foregoing it would be hopeless to attempt to exhibit in print all the differences between English and American pronunciation, for many of them are extremely small and subtle, and only their aggregation makes them plain. According to Dr. R. J. Menner of Yale,2 the most important of them do not lie in pronunciation at all, properly so called, but in intonation. It is in this direction, he says, that one must look for the true characters of “the English accent.” Virtually all other observers agree. “What does an Englishman first notice on landing in America,” asks Hilaire Belloc, “as the contrast between the two sides of the Atlantic so far as the spoken language is concerned?” The answer is: “The first thing which strikes him is the violent contrast in intonation.”3 “Though they use the same words,” says John Erskine, “the Englishman and the American do not speak the same tune.”4 In general, the speech-tunes of the Englishman show wider melodic curves than those of the American, and also more rapid changes. The late Fred Newton Scott attempted to exhibit the difference by showing how the two speak the sentence, “The weather is rather warm to-day.” The American, beginning at the tonic, “ascends gradually for about a major fourth to, and through the word warm, and then drops back

1 The method used is described by C. E. Parmenter and C. A. Bevans in Analysis of Speech Radiographs, American Speech, Oct., 1933. See also Speech and Voice, by Dr. Russell; New York, 1931.

2 The Pronunciation of English in America, Atlantic Monthly, March, 1915, p. 366.

3 A Note on Language, in The Contrast; New York, 1924, p. 219. Most of this chapter was printed in Columbia, Oct., 1924, under the title of The American Language.

4 Do Americans Speak English?, New York Nation, April 15, 1925, p. 410. “All speech, even the commonest speech,” said Thomas Carlyle in Heroes and Hero-Worship,

“has something of song in it. . . . Accent is a kind of chanting.” “If somebody asks you a question,” says P. B. Ballard in Thought and Language; London, 1934, p. 70, “and you reply ‘I don’t know’ you do not say the words at a dead level; you give them a tune. Sometimes, indeed, you give the tune without the words; you just hum them. And you are understood just the same.” See Pitch Patterns in English, by Kemp Malone, Studies in Philology, July, 1926: Zur amerikanischen Intonation, by Fritz Karpf, Die neueren Sprachen, Sept., 1926, and English Intonation, by H. E. Palmer; Cambridge, England, 1922.

in the word to-day to the tonic." But the Englishman follows a

much more complicated pattern. His voice drops below the tonic

in enunciating weather, then rises sharply to the beginning of warm,

then drops again, and finally turns upward on -day.1 As a result of

his use of such speech-patterns his talk sounds " abrupt, explosive and

manneristic," 2 to American ears, and shows what has been called

" a somewhat pansy cast " 3 and " a mauve, Episcopalian ring." 4 His

range of intonation, says Daniel Jones, " is very extensive. . . . It is

not unusual for a man with a voice of ordinary pitch to have a range

of over two octaves, rising to or even higher, and going

down so low that the voice degenerates into a kind of growl which

can hardly be regarded as a musical sound at all." 5 Such coloratura

is surely not common among Americans. " Usually," says Scott,

" their words will be spoken unemotionally, perhaps in a sort of

recitative, with a rather dry, sharp articulation, especially if the

speaker is from the Middle West." Erskine describes their speech as

" horribly monotonous - it hasn't tune enough," and Krapp says

that it sounds " hesitating, monotonous and indecisive " to an Eng-

lishman. Nevertheless, Krapp holds that " the American voice starts

on a higher plane, is normally pitched higher than the British

voice." 6 Here I incline to agree with Richard Grant White that the

contrary is normally the case.7 The nasal twang which Englishmen

detect in vox Americana, though it has some high overtones, is itself

not high pitched, but rather low pitched. The causes of that twang

have long engaged phonologists, and there is respectable opinion in

favor of the theory that our generally dry climate and rapid changes

of temperature produce an actual change in the membranes con-

cerned in the production of sound. Perhaps some such impediment

to free and easy utterance is responsible both for the levelness of

tone of American speech, and for the American tendency to pro-

1 The Standard of American Speech; Boston, 1926, p. 16.

2 George Philip Krapp in The Pronunciation of Standard English in America; New York, 1919, p. 36.

3 James M. Cain in Paradise, American Mercury, March, 1933, p. 269.

4 H. W. Seaman in The Awful English of England, American Mercury, Sept., 1933, p. 75.

5 The Pronunciation of English, above cited p. 60.

6 The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, above cited, p. 50.

7 " The pitch of the British Englishman's voice," he said in Words and Their Uses, new ed., New York, 1876, p. 57, " is higher and more penetrating than the American Englishman's." " His inflections are more varied than the other's," he added, " because they more frequently rise."

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The American Language

nounce the separate syllables of a word with much more care than an Englishman bestows upon them. The American, in giving ex-traordinary six careful and distinct syllables instead of the English-man’s grudging four, and two stresses instead of the Englishman’s one, may be seeking to cover up a natural disability. George P. Marsh, in his “Lectures on the English Language,” sought two other explanations of the fact. On the one hand, he pointed out that the Americans of his day read a great deal more than the English, and were thus much more prone to spelling pronunciations, and on the other hand he argued that “our flora shows that the climate of even our Northern States belongs . . . to a more Southern type than that of England,” and “in Southern latitudes . . . articulation is generally much more distinct than in Northern regions.”1 In sup-port of the latter proposition Marsh cited the pronunciation of Spanish, Italian and Turkish, as compared with that of English, Danish and German — rather unfortunate examples, for the pro-nunciation of German is at least as clear as that of Spanish. 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 toward the ends of words, and that this helped to bring out all the syllables. A superficial examination shows a number of examples of that movement of accent in American: advertisement, primárily, telégrapher, temporárily. The English ac-cent all of these words on the first syllable except advertisement, which is accented on the second; Americans usually accent primarily and telegrapher on the second, and temporarily and advertisement2 on the third. Again there are frontier and harass. The English accent

1 Lectures on the English Language, 4th ed.; New York, 1870, p. 671. Marsh had been anticipated here, though he probably didn’t know it, by the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, who, in his glossary of American-isms, printed in 1832, had said: “One striking peculiarity in Ameri-can elocution is a slow, drawling unemphatic and unimpassioned manner; this, it is probable, is to be attributed, in general, to the heat of their climates, which is such as to paralyze all active exertion, even in speaking.” Boucher did not say

directly that this languid style of speech made for clear utterance, but that inference may be fairly drawn from his other remarks on the English spoken in America. 2 Webster’s New International Dic-tionary, 1934, prefers advértisement, but admits that advertisement is American. Old Noah himself ar-gued for the latter on the analogy of amusement, refinement and so on. See his Dissertations on the English Language; Boston, 1789, p. 138.

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325

the first syllables; we commonly accent the second. Kilómeter seems to be gaining ground in the United States, and on the level of the vulgar speech there are théâtre, déficit, mischievous and exquisite.1 But when all such examples have been marshaled, the fact remains plain that there are just as many, and perhaps more, of an exactly contrary tendency. The chief movement in American, in truth, would seem to be toward throwing the accent upon the first syllable. I recall mámma, pápa, ínquiry, céntenary, álly, récess, ídea, álloy and ádult; I might add défect, éxcess, áddress, súrvey, mágazine, mústache, résearch and rómance. All these words are accented on the second syllable in the Concise Oxford Dictionary.2 Perhaps the notion that American tends to throw the accent back has been propagated by the fact that it retains a secondary accent in many words that have lost it in English. Most of these end in -ary, -ery or -ory, e.g., necessary, monastery and preparatory. In American the secondary accent in necessary, falling upon ar, is clearly marked; in English only the primary accent on nec is heard, and so the word becomes nécess’ry. In laboratory, which the English accent on the second syllable, the secondary accent on the fourth, always heard in American, is likewise omitted, and the word becomes something like labórat’ry. The same difference in pronunciation is to be observed in certain words of the -ative and -mony classes, and in some of those of other classes. In American the secondary accent on at in operative is always heard, but seldom in English. So with the secondary accent on mon in ceremony: the third syllable is clearly enunciated in American, but in English everything after cer becomes a kind of glissando. So, finally, in melancholy: in English it sounds like mélanc’ly. Until relatively recently the English accented adumbrate, compensate, concentrate, confiscate, demonstrate, illustrate, exculpate, objurgate, and some of their congeners on the second syllable; indeed, enervate is still so accented by the Concise Oxford. But during the third quarter of the Nineteenth Century the accent

1 There is an interesting discussion of such vulgarisms in Our Agile American Accents, by John L. Haney, American Speech, April, 1926.

2 In a letter to the New York Times, Dec. 20, 1931, Charlton Andrews complained that the New York radio announcers were accenting

rebound, detour, cigarette, curator, narrator, acclimated, decoy, promulgate, recluse, respiratory, insane, inclement, entire and tribunal on the first syllable. The Concise Oxford accents the second syllable of all save promulgate and respiratory.

326

The American Language

moved forward to the first syllable. This movement, I believe, began in the United States earlier than in England.1 Whether the colorless and monotonous American manner of speech promoted the survival of the secondary accent or the secondary accent helped to flatten out the American speech-tune is a problem that has not been solved. Krapp was inclined to choose the former hypothesis 2 but it may be that the thing worked both ways.

Another factor which may have had something to do with the retention of the secondary accent, and with the general precision of American speech, is discussed at length by H. C. Wyld.3 It has operated in England too, but during the past century it has probably exerted greater influence in this country. It may be described briefly as the influence of a class but lately risen in the social scale and hence a bit unsure of itself - a class intensely eager to avoid giving away its vulgar origin by its speech habits. The great historical changes in Standard English, says Wyld, were synchronous with the appearance of new “ classes of the population in positions of prominence and power in the state, and the consequent reduction in the influence of the older governing classes.” He lists some of the events that produced such shifts in the balance of power: “ the break-up of the feudal system; the extinction of most of the ancient baronial families in the War of the Roses; the disendowment of the monasteries, and the enriching of the King's tools and agents; the rise of the great merchants in the towns; the Parliamentary wars and the social upheaval of the Protectorate; the rise of banking during the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries.” These changes, he said, brought forward an authority which ranged itself against both “ the mere frivolities of fashion, the careless and half-incoherent babble of the fop ” and “ the lumbering and uncouth utterance of the boor.” Precision in speech thus became the hall-mark of those who had but recently arrived. Obviously, the number of those who have but recently arrived has always been greater in the United States than in England, not only among the aristocracy of wealth and fashion but also among the intelligentsia. The average American schoolmarm, the chief guardian of linguistic niceness in

1 See American Pronunciation, by J. S. Kenyon; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1932, p. 159 ff, for a long list of words pronounced differently in England and the United States.

2 See his discussion of the matter in The English Language in America; New York, 1925, Vol. II, p. 14.

3 A History of Modern Colloquial English; London, 1920, p. 18 ff.

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327

the Republic, does not come from the class that has a tradition of culture behind it, but from the class of small farmers and city clerks and workmen. This is true, I believe, even of the average American college teacher. Such persons do not advocate and practise precision in speech on logical grounds alone; they are also moved, plainly enough, by the fact that it tends to conceal their own cultural insecurity. From them come most of the gratuitous rules and regulations that afflict schoolboys and harass the writers of the country. They are the chief discoverers and denouncers of “bad English ” in the books of such men as Whitman, Mark Twain and Howells. But it would be a mistake to think of their influence as wholly, or even as predominantly evil. They have thrown themselves valiantly against the rise of dialects among us, and with such success that nothing so grossly unpleasant to the ear as the cockney whine or so lunatic as the cockney manhandling of the h is now prevalent anywhere in the United States. And they have policed the general speech to such effect that even on its most pretentious levels it is virtually free from the silly affectations which still mark Standard English. There was a time when they tried to saddle the Boston a upon the country, but that time is past. The Standard American that seems to be gathering form today is principally Western, and Dr. J. S. Kenyon, the author of the best existing textbook of American usage, did well to base it on “the cultivated pronunciation of his own locality – the Western Reserve of Ohio.” 1

In England the standard commonly recognized is, in the words of Daniel Jones, “ the pronunciation which appears to be most usually employed by Southern English persons who have been educated at the great public boarding-schools.” 2 Dr. Jones calls it Standard Pronunciation (StP) or Public School Pronunciation (PSP). H. C. Wyld prefers to call it Received Standard English (RS), but agrees that it owes its dominance to “ the custom of sending youths from

1 American Pronunciation, above cited, p. iv. But Dr. Kenyon, of course, makes no claim that this Western American is better than any other kind. See his very wise discussion of the point in Correct Pronunciation, American Speech, Dec., 1928, p. 150. In Practical Phonetics of the American Language, by Ralph S. Boggs; San Juan, P. R., 1927, a text prepared for students at the University of Porto Rico, “ the pronunciation of the well-educated people of the Middle West in normal conversation ” is accepted as “ the standard of American pronunciation.”

2 The Pronunciation of English, above cited, p. 1.

certain social strata to the great public schools."1 Wyld says that "it is not any more the English of London, as is sometimes mistakenly maintained, than it is that of York, or Exeter, or Cirencester, or Oxford, or Chester, or Leicester; . . . it is spoken everywhere, allowing for individual idiosyncrasies, to all intents and purposes, in precisely the same way." He believes that it is "the best kind of English," and in particular commends its vowels.2 Nevertheless, there are plenty of Britons who dislike it heartily, and especially that form of it prevailing at Oxford. The late Robert Bridges delivered an onslaught upon it in Tract No. II of the Society for Pure English (1919) and drew up a formidable list of its absurdities and inconveniences, e.g., the confusion, amounting to identification in pronunciation, of lord and laud, maw and more, flaw and floor, alms and arms, source and sauce, ah and are, root and route, tray and trait, bean and been. He also belabored such pronunciations as ikstrodnry for extraordinary, intrist for interest, and pictsher for picture. Dr. J. Y. T. Greig, in "Breaking Priscian's Head," 3 calls it "that silliest and dwabliest of all the English dialects," and argues that it is "artificial, slovenly to a degree, absurdly difficult for foreigners to acquire, and except to ears debased by listening to it, inharmonious." He continues:

It obliterates distinctions, tends to reduce all unstressed vowels to the same natural grunt, and then - as if by some obscure process of psychical compensation - diphthongizes and breaks up vowels that in other Standards are cleanly and simply articulated. . . . It needs to be taken out into the open air, and buffeted by trans-Atlantic winds.

Dr. Greig is a Scotsman, and his indignation may be discounted on that ground. But the following is by an Englishman born in East Anglia:

I speak for millions of Englishmen when I say that we are as sick and tired of this so-called English accent as you Americans are. It has far less right to be called Standard English than Yorkshire or any other country dialect has - or than any American dialect. It is as alien to us as it is to you. True, some of my neighbors have acquired it - for social and other reasons -, but then some of the Saxon peasants took pains to acquire Norman French, which was also imposed on them from above. The advantages to be gained from its acquisition, if not wholly imaginary, are of specious value. Boys from the great public schools, the cradles of snobbery, find that their speech is a passport to jobs in motor showrooms in Great Portland street

1 A History of Modern Colloquial Standard English; London, 1920, p. 3. 2 The Superiority of Received Standard English, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXXIX, 1934. 3 London, 1929.

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329

and the Euston road, but even there its function is mainly decorative. As soon as the customer has been well slavered and purred over, he is passed on to a salesman who, whether he speaks broad Cockney or broad Northumbrian, knows something about cars.1

In 1925, when the announcers of the B.B.C., the government radio monopoly, began loosing this PSP over the air, there were many protests, and some of them were even leveled at the use of the broad a in dance, which most Americans think of as typically English. In consequence, the B.B.C. administration appointed an Advisory Committee on Spoken English, headed by Dr. Bridges and including Dr. Jones, Sir Johnston Forbes-Roberston, George Bernard Shaw and the American-born Logan Pearsall Smith, and handed over to it the difficult business of deciding disputes over pronunciation. This committee has been enlarged since, and now (1936) includes representatives of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1928 it issued a pamphlet for the guidance of announcers, dealing with 332 words; in 1932 there was a new edition, covering 503; and in 1935 there followed a third, covering 779.2 This list, rather curiously, shows some concessions to American example, e.g., the throwing forward of the accent in adult, but in general it follows the canons of PSP. George Bernard Shaw, a member of the advisory committee, has apparently dissented from most of its judgments. On January 25, 1934, he said in a letter to the London Times:

An Oxford accent is considered by many graduates of that university to be the perfection of correct English; but unfortunately over large and densely populated districts of Great Britain it irritates some listeners to the point of switching off, and infuriates others so much that they smash their wireless sets because they cannot smash the Oxonian. The best English today is literally the King's English. Like his Royal grandmother before him, King

1 The Awful English of England, by H. W. Seaman, American Mercury, Sept., 1933, p. 73. Perhaps the testimony of a Briton of Welsh name should be added, to complete the circle. "English as spoken in America," said Wyndham Lewis, in The Dumb Ox, Life and Letters, April, 1934, p. 41, "is more vigorous and expressive than Oxford English, I think. It is easy to mistake a native from the wilds of Dorsetshire for an American, I have found: and were 'educated'

English used upon a strong reverberant Devonshire basis, for instance, it would be all to the good, it is my opinion. Raleigh, Drake, and the rest of them, must have talked rather like that."

2 Broadcast English. I. Recommendations to Announcers Regarding Certain Words of Doubtful Pronunciation, with an introduction by A. Lloyd James, professor of phonetics, School of Oriental Studies, London; London, 1935.

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George is the best speaker in his realm; and his broadcasts are astonishingly effective in creating loyalty. If he delivered a single broadcast in an Oxford accent his people would rise up that very day and proclaim a republic.

But not many of the Britons who object to the PSP join Professor Greig and Mr. Lewis in commending American pronunciation. Its monotonous speech-tunes commonly seem unpleasantly drawling to their ears, and they are jarred by its frequent nasalization of vowels. As a Cockney once said after suffering an American talkie, "It ain't so much their bleedin' lengwidge; it's their blawsted neysal tweng." "The Englishman," says Philip R. Dillon, "squirms at the sounds of American English; they are strange to him, grate on him, offend his sense of harmony. The Dublin Irishman and the Edinburgh Scotsman also dislike and criticise American spoken English, but they have more humor than the Londoner, and refrain from being rude about it."1 This aversion began to show itself soon after the War of 1812, and many of the English travelers of the decades following denounced the American accent as well as the American vocabulary. Thus Frances Trollope in her "Domestic Manners of the Americans" (1832):

I very seldom during my whole stay in the country heard a sentence elegantly turned and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American. There is always something either in the expression or the accent that jars the feelings and shocks the taste.

The patriots of the time met these sneers with claims that the American accent was not only quite as good as the English, but much better. Said J. Fenimore Cooper in "Notions of the Americans" (1828):2

The people of the United States, with the exception of a few of German or French descent, speak, as a body, incomparably better English than the people of the mother country. . . . In fine, we speak our language, as a nation, better than any other people speak their language. When one reflects on the immense surface of the country that we occupy, the general accuracy, in pronunciation and in the use of words, is quite astonishing. . . . The voices of the American females are particularly soft and silvery.3

1 English, Spoken and Written, in his Diary in America; Philadelphia, 1839, thus summed it up: Paris Herald, April 9, 1925.

2 "By a Travelling Bachelor," but later acknowledged by Cooper. It was published in London, in two volumes. The quotations are from Vol. II, Letter VII.

3 Many similar exultations might be quoted. Captain Frederick Marryat,

"The Americans boldly assert that they speak English better than we do." He dissented, of course. "It is remarkable," he said piously, "how very debased the language has become in a short period in America."

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331

Cooper's views are generally held by Americans today. Unconscious of the monotony of their speech-tunes, and of the nasalization which offends Englishmen, they believe that their way of using English is clearly better than the English way. In consequence, there is little imitation of English usage in this country. The relatively few Americans who have lived in England sometimes acquire the PSP accent, and it is mimicked by a small sect of Anglomaniacs, but the average American regards it as effeminate and absurd, and will thus have none of it. The broad a that the American schoolmarm formerly tried to propagate was not the English a, but the Boston a. What moved her to favor it was hardly a liking for English speech-habits, but rather a respect for the cultural preëminence of New England, and especially of Boston, now no more. This a survives in the more fashionable finishing-schools, but hardly anywhere else. There was a time when all American actors of any pretensions employed a dialect that was a heavy imitation of the dialect of the West End actors of London. It was taught in all the American dramatic schools, and at the beginning of the present century it was so prevalent on the American stage that a flat a had a melodramatic effect almost equal to that of damn. But the rise of the movies broke down this convention. They attracted actors from all parts of the world, to many of whom English was a foreign language, and when the talkies followed it was found that most of these newcomers had picked up ordinary American. Moreover, the native-born recruits were mainly without formal professional training, so the majority of them also spoke the vulgate. From time to time Hollywood has made some effort to model its speech on that of its English-born luminaries, but never with much success. Nor has the American Academy of Arts and Letters got far in the same direction, though it has given gold medals and other gauds to actors equipped with the PSP accent, e.g., Edith Wynne Matthison, Julia Marlowe and George Arliss. The ideal of Broadway now seems to be what Kerry Conway has called a denationalized accent. It is, he explains, “ clear, rounded speech, smacking neither of England nor of America, and free from the repugnant localisms of both countries. The late Holbrook Blinn achieved it. Walter Hampden and Arthur Byron employ it. It graces the utterance of the Canadian-born Margaret Anglin.”1

1 God's Patience and the King's English, New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 8, 1929.

On April 26, 1931, it was reported by the Chicago Radio Weekly that the two big American radio chains, the Columbia and the N.B.C., were forcing their announcers to use “English as she is spoke in England.” On inquiry I found that this was a canard. “What we try to get,” I was told by Mr. Walter C. Stone of the N.B.C., “is decent American pronunciation, affected as little as possible by localisms.” 1 Columbia, at the same time, announced that it had appointed Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly to advise its announcers in matters of pronunciation, and called attention to the fact that Dr. Vizetelly described himself as “a man ever ready to help in spreading the best traditions of American speech, which does not suppress its consonants, nor squeeze all the life out of its vowels.” 2 Nevertheless, there are American announcers who affect what they think is English usage, and they have been belabored heartily for it by Dr. Josiah Combs. 3 As for the schoolmarms, they have been warned by Dr. Louise Pound. “My first caution,” she says, “is, do not rely too far on British dictionaries, in these days. It is of interest to consult them, but they are no longer to be cited as authoritative for American English.” 4 The extent to which this differentiation has gone is but little appreciated. In Palmer, Martin and Blandford's “Dictionary of English Pronunciation with American Variants” 5 no less than 28% of the words listed show differing pronunciations in England and the United States. The authors classify the major American variants in twelve categories, and add fourteen categories of minor ones.

The historical study of American pronunciation was put on a solid basis by the publication of the second volume of the late George Philip Krapp's “The English Language in America” in 1925. There had been scattering investigations on the subject before then, but Dr. Krapp was the first to undertake an exhaustive examination of the available material – the early dictionaries, grammars and spelling

1 In a letter dated May 26, 1931. 2 Letter from Jesse S. Butcher, director of public relations, May 22, 1931. 3 In Broadcasting and Pronunciation, American Speech, June, 1930, and again in The Radio and Pronunciation, the same, Dec., 1931. 4 Pronunciation in the Schools, English Journal, Oct., 1922. See also Dr. Pound's British and American Pronunciation, School Review, June, 1915, and The Pronunciation of English in America, by Robert J. Menner, Atlantic Monthly, March, 1915. 5 Cambridge (England), 1926; 2nd ed., 1935. Palmer is linguistic adviser to the Japanese Ministry of Education and a leading phonologist.

The Pronunciation of American

books, the attempts at devising phonetic alphabets, and the records

of the Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York towns, many of

them made by unlearned men and written phonetically. One of his

conclusions was that most of the peculiarities of American pronun-

ciation have historical precedents in England, and that many of

them may be found to this day in the English dialects. Even the

nasalization which Englishmen always mark in American speech “is

by no means exclusively American.” It was charged to the English

Puritans by their critics, and is denounced in “Hudibras,” Part I,

Canto III. Dr. Krapp believed that “differences of practise among

standard American speakers, that is, among members of good stand-

ing in the community, were formerly much more numerous than

they are today,” and that they “continue to show an increasing

tendency to disappear in an all-embracing uniformity.” He demon-

strated that many forms now confined to isolated speech-islands, for

example, in rural New England or the remoter parts of the South,

were once almost universal. He showed that the type of American

prevailing in the Boston area and in the tidewater regions of the

South is closely related historically to the Southern type of English,

and that Western America is derived, at least in large part, from

Northern English.1

1 Other studies of interest and value

are Early American Pronunciation

and Syntax, by Henry Alexander,

American Speech, Dec., 1925,

which ante-dated the Krapp book,

and Early New England Pronun-

ciation, by Anders Orbeck; Ann

Arbor, Mich., 1927, which Krapp

saw in MS. A bibliography of

American and English pronuncia-

tion to the end of 1922 will be

found in Arthur G. Kennedy’s

Bibliography of Writings on the

English Language; Cambridge,

Mass., 1927. For the period since

1922 the bibliographies published

in each issue of American Speech

and annually in Publications of the

Modern Language Association may

be consulted. Alexander J. Ellis’s

On Early English Pronunciation,

4 vols.; London, 1869–89, is still in-

valuable, though in parts it has be-

gun to date. Other useful works on

the changes in spoken English are

A History of English Sounds, by

Henry Sweet; London, 1876; The

Sounds of English, by the same;

Oxford, 1908; The English Pro-

nunciation at Shakespeare’s Time,

by R. E. Zachrisson; Upsala,

Sweden, 1927; Pronunciation of

English Vowels, 1400–1700, by the

same; Göteborg, Sweden, 1913;

Select Studies in Colloquial English

of the Late Middle Ages, by Gösta

Langenfelt; Lund, Sweden, 1933;

English Pronunciation From the

Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Cen-

tury, by Constance Davies; Lon-

don, 1934; and English Pronuncia-

tion as Described in Shorthand Sys-

tems of the Seventeenth and Eigh-

teenth Centuries, by Helge Kökeritz,

Studia Neophilologica, 1935. A

history of Modern Colloquial Eng-

lish, by H. C. Wyld; London, 1920,

gives an excellent account of the

changes in English since 1450.

2. THE VOWELS

One of the most noticeable differences between Standard English and Standard American lies in the varying pronunciation of a in about 150 words in everyday use. The English, in general, prefer the broad a of dark before f, ft, m, nch, nd, nt, sk, sp, ss, st and th, as in laugh, draft ca(l)m, branch, command, chant, ask, clasp, grass, last and path, whereas most Americans use the flat a of that.1 But these preferences are not invariable. There are many Englishmen, otherwise quite orthodox in their speech habits, who incline toward the flat a before n and f and before s followed by a consonant,2 and nearly all of them use it in fancy, despite a general American belief, promoted by haw-haw types on the stage, that they always say fahrcy. They also use it in stamp, though they cling to the broad a in example. Again, they prefer the flat a of rack in amass, elastic, gas, lass, mass, massive, masticate and plastic. Finally, they pronounce the verb can just as we do, though they sound the broad a in can't.3 Contrariwise, most Americans use the broad a before (l)m, as in palm, and virtually all use it before r, or r and a consonant, as in bar, cart, park, harm, etc., and before th in father. Moreover, it is used in most of the English situations in the Boston area, though with a slight change in value, and in a number of words in the South, e.g., master, aunt, tomato, tassel.4

It used to be believed that the broad a was historically the more respectable, and that the flat a had come into American and into some of the English dialects as a corruption, but the exhaustive researches of Krapp have disposed of that notion.5 During most of the

1 This a, of course, is really two a's, the first that of that and the other that of ham. They differ, however, only in length, and for the present purpose they may be regarded as substantially identical. For a discussion of the situations in which either the one or the other is used see The Pronunciation of Short A in American Standard English, by George L. Trager, American Speech, June, 1930.

2 The Pronunciation of English, by Daniel Jones; Cambridge, 1914, p. 38.

3 Pronunciation, a Practical Guide to American Standards, by Thor-leif Larsen and Francis C. Walker; London, 1930, p. 23 ff.

4 J. S. Kenyon has calculated (Flat A and Broad A, American Speech, April, 1930, p. 324) that the number of situations in which the English and American a's differ amounts to 14% of the total situations in which a occurs.

5 His conclusions are set forth at length in The English Language in America, Vol. II, p. 36 ff.

Eighteenth Century, in fact, a broad a was regarded in both England and America as a rusticism, and careful speakers commonly avoided it. When Thomas Sheridan published his “General Dictionary of the English Language” in London in 1780 he actually omitted it from his list of vowels. He had room for an a approximating aw, as in ball, but none for the a sounding like ah, as in barn. He gave the pronunciation of papa as if both its a’s were that of pap, and even ordained the same flat a before r, as in car and far. Benjamin Franklin, whose “Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling” was published in Philadelphia in 1768, was in complete accord with Sheridan. He favored the flat a, not only in all the words which now carry it in American, but also in calm, far, hardly and even what, which last was thus made to rhyme with hat. Franklin’s pronunciations were presumably those of the best circles in the London of his time, and it seems likely that they also prevailed in Philadelphia, then the center of American culture. But the broad a continued common in the folk-speech of New England, as it was in that of Old England, and in 1780 or thereabout it suddenly became fashionable in Standard London English. How and why this fashion arose is not known, nor is it known what influence it had upon the educated speech of New England. It may be that the New Englanders picked it up, as they picked up so many other English fashions, or it may be that they simply yielded to the folk-speech of their region. Whatever the fact, they were using the broad a in many words at the time Noah Webster published his “Dissertations on the English Language” at Boston in 1789. In it he gave quality, quantity and quash the sound of a in hat, but he gave advance, after, ask, balm, clasp and grant the a of arm. In subsequent editions of “The American Spelling Book” he favored the broad a before a final r or before r followed by a consonant, e.g., bar, depart; before (l)m, e.g., embalm; before a final s or s followed by a consonant, e.g., pass, ask; before f, e.g., staff, half; before th, e.g., path; before lv, e.g., salve, calves; before n followed by ch, s or t, e.g., blanch, dance, ant; in words spelled au before s, e.g., sauce; in words spelled au before n followed by ch, d or t, e.g., staunch, jaundice, aunt; and in a number of other words, e.g., chamber, slander, gape.1 He even advocated the broad a in bracelet, though in his “Dictionary of the English Language Compiled for the Use of the Com-

1 I am indebted here to Krapp, p. 67.

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The American Language

mon Schools in the United States" (1807) he abandoned it for the flat a.

Webster's immense authority was sufficient to implant the broad a firmly in the speech of the Boston area. Between 1830 and 1850, according to C. H. Grandgent,1 it ran riot, and was used even in such words as handsome, matter, apple, caterpillar, pantry, hammer, practical, Saturday and satisfaction. Oliver Wendell Holmes protested against it in "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" in 1857, but it survived his onslaught. It has been somewhat modified in sound with the passing of the years. Says Grandgent: "The broad a of New Englanders, Italianate though it be, is not so broad as that of Old England. . . . Our grass really lies between the grabs of a British lawn and the grass of the boundless prairies." In the New England cities, he adds, it has been "shaken by contact with the Irish," and is now restricted, in the main to

a few specific classes of words - especially those in which an a (sometimes an au) is followed by a final r, by an r that precedes another consonant, by an m written lm, or by the sound of f, s, or th: as far, hard, balm, laugh, pass, rather, path. In the first two categories, and in the word father, ah possesses nearly all the English-speaking territory; concerning the other classes there is a wide divergence, although flat a appears everywhere to be disappearing from words like balm. Yankeedom itself is divided over such combinations as ant, can't, dance, example, in which a nasal and another consonant follow the vowel; aunt, however, always has broad a.2

The imprimatur of the Yankee Johnson was not sufficient to establish the Boston a outside New England. His rival and bitter critic, Lyman Cobb, whose "Just Standard For Pronouncing the English Language" appeared in 1821, allowed it before th and lv and in words wherein it appeared as au, but ordained the flat a in class, clasp, fast, ask, asp, branch, dance, chaff, raft and their congeners. Webster's other great antagonist, Joseph E. Worcester, whose "Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language" appeared in 1830, set up a distinction between the true British broad a and the modified New England a described above by Grandgent, and frowned upon the former. "His hesitation with respect to words like ask, dance, chaff, etc.," says Krapp, "was due not to the fear that the sound which he advocated might seem too near [the a of hat], but too near [the a of bard]. In

1 Fashion and the Broad A in Old and New; Cambridge, Mass., 1920, pp.25-30.

2 This gradual decay of the Boston a is also discussed in Observations on the Broad A, by Miles L. Hanley, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. VIII, 1925.

other words, the vulgar extreme which was to be avoided was [the latter and not the former].” William Russell, who published a number-

ber of popular textbooks during the second quarter of the century, advocated the flat a in all words of the glass, grasp, past, graft, grant,

dance, branch, chant, rather and bland classes. By 1850 it was domi-

nant everywhere west of the Berkshires and south of New Haven,

save for what Grandgent calls “ a little ah-spot in Virginia,” and its

sound had even got into such proper names as Alabama and Lafa-

yette.1 “In the United States beyond the Hudson - perhaps beyond

the Connecticut,” says Grandgent, “the flat a prevails before f, s,

th, and n.” Nevertheless, the broad a has got into a few words, if

not many. Those in which it is followed by lm I have mentioned.

They were once pronounced to rhyme with ram and jam, but their

pronunciation that way has begun to seem provincial and ignorant.

Knapp says that the a has likewise broadened in alms, salmon and

almond,2 but it is my own observation that this is not yet generally

true. The first syllable of salmon, true enough, does not quite rhyme

with ham, but it is nevertheless still very far from palm. The broad

a, by a fashionable affectation, has also appeared in vase, drama,

amen and tomato — in the last case probably helped by the example

of Southern speech. This intrusion has been vigorously denounced

by an Englishman, Evacustes A. Phipson. He says:

It is really distressing to a cultivated Briton visiting America to find people there who . . . follow what they suppose to be the latest London manner-

ism, regardless of accuracy. Thus we find one literary editress advocating

the pedantic British pronunciation tomabto in lieu of the good English

tomato, rhyming with potato, saying it sounds so much more “refined.” I

do not know whether she would be of the same opinion if she heard one

of our costermongers bawling out “'Ere's yer foine ter marters, lyde, hownly

tuppence a pahnd.” Similarly, we sometimes hear Anglomaniac Americans

saying vahz for vase. Why not bahz, and cabz? 3

Amen, with the broad a, seems to be making progress. E. W. Howe

tells a story of a little girl in Kansas whose mother, on acquiring

social aspirations, entered the Protestant Episcopal Church from the

Methodist Church. The father remaining behind, the little girl had

1 Richard Meade Bache denounced it in Lafayette, in his Vulgarisms

and Other Errors of Speech, 2nd ed., Philadelphia, 1869, p. 65.

2 The Pronunciation of Standard

English in America, above cited,

p. 60.

3 New York Nation, Aug. 30, 1919,

p. 290. See also Vays, Vayz or

Vabz, by Janet R. Aiken, North

American Review, Dec., 1929.

338

The American Language

to learn to say amen with the a of rake when she went to church with her father and amen with the a of car when she went to church with her mother.1 In Canada, despite the social influence of English usage, the flat a has conquered, and along the Canadian-New England border it is actually regarded as a Canadianism, especially in such words as calm and aunt. The broad a, when heard at all, is an affectation, and, as in Boston, is sometimes introduced into words, e.g., stamp, which actually have the flat a in England. In the United States, save in the Boston area, one never hears it in gather, lather and blather, and even in Boston it is often abandoned for the flat a by speakers who are very careful to avoid the latter in palm, dance and aunt. Krapp says that it is used in "some words of foreign origin," notably lava, data, errata, bas-relief, spa, mirage and garage, but this is certainly not true of the first three, all of which, save exceptionally, have the flat a. So has piano, though the Italian i is preserved, and pyano is now only a vulgarism. Patent, in American, always has the a of cat, but in English the a of late is often heard when the word is used in the sense of a license or monopoly. In England mater, a common synonym for mother, has the same a, but in the American alma mater, which is seldom used in England, the second and third a's are that of bard, though the first is commonly that of pal. In English the second a of apparatus is always that of late, but in the United States it is often that of cat. The same difference is to be noted in the pronunciation of data, gratis, status and strata. In phalanx it runs the other way, with the English preferring, for the first syllable, the a of rack, and Americans that of mate. In radio the usual American pronunciation shows the a of mate, but the plain people of New York City apparently prefer the a of rack, and Alfred E. Smith's use of it in 1928 attracted nation-wide attention, and inspired some imitation. There were pundits at the time who argued that Al was right, and cited the analogy of radical. The English use a broad a in the final syllables of charade and promenade,

low the same plan. Their denominational papers print frequent notices that amen should have the long a in hymns but the short a in ordinarv speech. See, for example, the Baptist and Commoner (Little Rock, Ark.), Jan. 2, 1928, and the Western Recorder (Louisville, Ky.), Oct. 2, 1924.

1 The Rev. W. G. Polack, of Evansville, Ind., who has made a valuable inquiry into ecclesiastical terminology in America, tells me that among the Lutherans of the Middle West, amen has the flat a when spoken and the broad a when sung. So with the first syllable of hallelujah, though the last a is always broad. The Baptists appear to fol-

The Pronunciation of American

339

but most Americans prefer the a of mate. In the second syllable of asphalt the English always use the a of rack, but Americans sometimes use the aw of bawl. In England the a of patriotism is always the a of rack, but in the United States it is often that of late.1 Larsen and Walker 2 say that the latter a is used by Americans in ignoramus, tornado and ultimatum, but I often hear the a of dram in ignoramus, and either that of rack or that of bar in tornado and ultimatum. In radish the a is sometimes that of cab and sometimes a sort of e, hard to distinguish from that of red. In such proper names as Alabama, Alaska, Montana, Nevada and Colorado the flat a of has is often heard, especially in the States themselves, but a broad a is certainly not unknown. The usual pronunciation of again and against gives them a second a indistinguishable from the e of hen, but there is also a spelling pronunciation employing the a of lame. In the years before the Civil War the plain people converted the a of care into the a of car in bear, dare, hair and where, into a short i in the verb can, into a short e in catch, and into a long e in care, scarce and chair, thus producing bar, dar, har, whar, kin, ketch, keer, skeerce and cheer. They flattened the long a of marsh and omitted the r, making the word rhyme with lash, and they reduced sauce to sass, saucy to sassy and because to becuz or bacaze. The e of learn, serve, mercy, certain and eternal became a broad a, producing larn, sarve, marcy, sartin and tarnal; the a of caught was flattened, producing catcht or ketch; and the a of drain was turned into a long e, producing dreen. Some of these toyings with a survive, but not all. The rest have been exterminated by the schoolmarm, or forced into exile among the remoter dialects.3

There are some differences between the pronunciation of e in English and American, but not many. The English use a long e, like that of bee, in the first syllable of evolution, which is always short

1 In his Dissertations on the English Language, 1789, Webster said that the English then made the a of patriotism long and the Americans made it short. How the double reversal came about I don't know. "In all these cases, where the people are not uniform," said Webster, "I should prefer the short sound, for it appears to me the most analogous." He was probably thinking of cat and rat.

2 Pronunciation, above cited, p. 24.

3 A long list of the vulgarisms of the late 40's is in the introduction to J. R. Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms, 2nd ed.; Boston, 1859. Many of those of a somewhat earlier period are in the glossary attached to The Yankey in England, by David Humphreys; Hartford, 1815. This glossary is reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, edited by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931.

340

The American Language

in American. They also prefer a long e in epoch, but in the United States it is often short. Contrariwise, the English use a short e in penalize, lever and egoist, whereas most Americans prefer a long one. The English are always careful to make the first syllable of seamstress sem and that of cleanly clen, but Americans commonly stick to the e of the stems. In the United States a spelling pronunciation often appears in pretty, making the first syllable rhyme with set; it always rhymes with sit in English. The use of the long e in deaf, though historically very respectable and ardently advocated by Noah Webster,1 has disappeared from cultivated American speech; it persists, however, in the vulgate. In the same way the i-sound, as in sit, has disappeared from get, yet, general, steady, chest and instead; Benjamin Franklin defended it, but now even the vulgate is losing it: This pronunciation, according to Menner,2 was correct in Seventeenth Century England, and perhaps down to the middle of the next century. It is probable that the colonists clung to such disappearing usages longer than the English. The latter, according to Webster, were unduly responsive to illogical fashions set by the exquisites of the court and by popular actors. He blames Garrick, in particular, for many innovations, most of them not followed in the colonies. But Garrick was surely not responsible for the displacement of mercy by marcy, which Webster ascribed somewhat lamely to the fact that the letter r is called ar: he proposed to dispose of it by changing the ar to er. In his time the a of lame was generally heard in egg, peg, leg and so on, but it too is now confined to the vulgate, as is the a of bag in keg. As Krapp shows, the neutral e that has taken its place, and toward which all our vowels seem to be tending,3 shows signs of itself disappearing. This is particularly

1 The following is from his Dissertations on the English Language, 1789, p. 128. “Deaf is generally pronounced deef. It is the universal practice in the Eastern States; and it is general in the Middle and Southern; though some have adopted the English pronunciation, def. The latter is evidently a corruption; for the word is in analogy with leaf and sheaf, and has been from time immemorial.” Always his analogies! 2 The Pronunciation of English in America, Atlantic Monthly, March, 1915, p. 361. 3 This tendency is not confined to English. The same e is encountered in languages as widely differing otherwise as Arabic, French and Swedish. “Its existence,” says Sayce, in The Science of Language, Vol. I, p. 259, “is a sign of age and decay; meaning has become more important than outward form, and the educated intelligence no longer demands a clear pronunciation in order to understand what is said.”

The Pronunciation of American

341

noticeable, in American, in such words as moral, quarrel and real, which become mor'l, quar'l and reel, each a single syllable. In the vulgar speech this neutral e is also dropped from other words, notably poem, diary, violet and diamond, which become pome, di'ry, vi'let and di'mond. Even in Standard American it grows shadowy in the second syllables of fertile, hostile, docile, servile, agile, reptile, etc. In Standard English these words are pronounced with the second syllables rhyming with vile, but the English use a short i in fragile and facile. They also use it in senile, which commonly shows the long i in American. The long e-sound in creek and creature is maintained in Standard American, but changed to the short i of sit in the vulgate. Sleek has divided into two words, slick and sleek, the former signifying cunning and ingratiating, and the latter referring especially to appearance. Of late there has been a strong tendency to abandon the old e-sound in such terms as bronchitis and appendicitis for an ai-sound, as in pie and buy; this is a senseless affectation, but it seems to be making progress. A contrary movement to abandon the old ai-sound in iodine, quinine, etc., for an e-sound, as in sleep, has better support in etymology, but is apparently less popular. Chlorine and vaccine are always pronounced with the e-sound, but iodine continues to be iodyne, strychnine is still usually strychnyné, and kin-een for quinine still sounds strange. In two other familiar words the ai-sound has been supplanted in American: in sliver by the short i of liver, and in farina by an e-sound. Both have the ai-sound in Standard English. Dynasty, in American, has a first syllable like dine, but in English it is din. Isolate is always eye-solate in English, but sometimes it is iss-solate in American. Tribunal and simultaneous have the y-sound in American, the short i in English. Misogynist has the short i in American but the long one of mice in English. Been, in American, is almost always bin or ben; bean never appears save as a conscious affectation. But in England bean is preferred.

Webster, in his “Dissertations on the English Language,” favored the pronunciation of either and neither as ee-ther and nee-ther, and so did most of the other authorities of the time, whether American or English. But the pronunciation of the words as eye-ther and nye-ther has been common in New England for a century or more, and at an earlier date they had been pronounced ay-ther and nay-ther, a usage still surviving in the English of Ireland. How the fashion

342

The American Language

for the eye-pronunciation arose is not known, but it was raging on both sides of the ocean by the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and is still in force. It was resisted stoutly by all the contemporary American virtuosi of language, including Edward S. Gould, W. D. Whitney and Richard Grant White. Said Gould in the middle 60's:

A common reply, in the United States, to the question, "Why do you say i-ther and ni-ther?" is, "The words are so pronounced by the best educated people in England." But that reply is not true. That is to say, a majority of the best English usage is not on that side of the question. All that any man in the United States can gain by the pronunciation of i-ther and ni-ther is the credit, or the discredit, of affectation, or ostentation, — as who should say, "I know how they do it in England"; for assuredly, that pronunciation is not sanctioned by a majority of our best-educated men.1

Whitney, in 1867, admitted the eye-ther and nye-ther were spreading in the United States, but denounced them as "the deliberate choice of persons who fancy that there is something more recherché, more English " in them.2 Seven years later he called the fashion for them " a relentless and senseless infection, which can only be condemned and ought to be stoutly opposed and put down," and said that those Americans who had succumbed to it "ought to realize with shame the folly of which they have been guilty, and reform." 3 White, who was ordinarily something of an Anglomaniac, and strongly favored the broad a, nevertheless declared in 1870 that there was "no authority, either of analogy or of the best speakers, for eye-ther and nye-ther," and called their use "an affectation, and in this country, a copy of a second-rate British affectation." 4 But they continued to make headway in both England and the United States.

The Oxford Dictionary, in 1897, gave the preference to ee-ther and nee-ther, but admitted that eye-ther and nye-ther were "somewhat more prevalent in educated English speech." H. W. Fowler, in "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage" (1926), predicted that they would "probably prevail," though adding that they were "not more correct" than ee-ther and nee-ther. "Webster's New International" (1934) held out for the latter, but gave eye-ther and nye-ther as variants. It used to be believed that they came into use in

1 Good English; New York, 1867, pp. 42–43. This book was a reprint of articles contributed to the New York Evening Post, then edited by William Cullen Bryant.

2 Language and the Study of Language; New York, 1867, p. 43.

3 The Elements of English Pronunciation, in Oriental and Linguistic Studies; New York, 1874, p. 221.

4 Words and Their Uses; New York, 1876. My quotations are from the revised edition, 1876, pp. 263–4.

The Pronunciation of American

343

England on the accession of George I, who, speaking English badly, gave the diphthong its German value, but Dr. Louise Pound has demonstrated that this theory was nonsense.1

Hilaire Belloc has said that "every vowel sound without exception " has taken in the United States "some different value from what it has" in England.2 This is an exaggeration, but there is sufficient truth in it to give it a certain plausibility. Even the a of such common words as cab, back and hand differs in the two countries: when Englishmen speak them rapidly they often sound, to American ears, like keb, beck and hend. In the United States, in keeping with our generally more precise habits of speech, they are pronounced more clearly. The differences between the English o in rock and the American o in the same word have long engaged phonologists. The former is described by Larsen and Walker3 as " a lightly rounded vowel, not usually found in General American Speech, though it is close to the short form of the American aw heard in the opening syllables of authentic and autocracy "; the latter is " the shortened ah-sound usually heard in what, not, as pronounced in General American Speech." They go on:

Cultivated English speakers do not recognize this ab-sound in the words commonly spelled in o, e.g., not, rod, rock, fog, hop, rob, pomp, on, beyond, novel; English phoneticians indeed condemn it as dialectal in these words, and recognize only the first sound described above. In American, on the other hand, both sounds are heard in all these words, the shortened ab-sound being preferred in all positions. Both sounds are heard in American speech also in the wa words, e.g., wander, want, wash, watch, swamp, swan, quarrel, squander, squalid; but here too the shortened ab-sound is preferred.

Yet a third sound is sometimes heard in these wa words - it is a downright aw. One encounters it in water, wash, swamp, swan and squalid, which become, roughly, wawter, wawsh, swawmp, swawn and squawlid. It also appears in God, which may be variously God

1 On the Pronunciation of Either and Neither, American Speech, June, 1932. A very informing and amusing paper. Dr. Pound quotes the following from The Lady Buyer, by Frances Anne Allen, American Mercury, Feb., 1928: "[The department-store lady buyer] may say Eye-talian even after having been sent abroad for her firm, she may write formally for formerly and shamme for

chamois, and may unashamedly flaunt a dozen grammatical errors, but always standing her in good stead, and ready at the tip of her tongue, is her crystal-clear British pronunciation of either. . . . Nothing on earth could make her whisper ee-ther in the darkest corner of the stock-room."

2 The Contrast; New York, 1924, p. 225.

3 Pronunciation, above cited, p. 46.

(rhyming with nod), Gahd or Gawd. The first of the three, I believe, is commonly regarded as the most formal, and I have often noticed that a speaker who says Gawd in his ordinary discourse will switch to God (or maybe Gahd) when he wants to show reverence. Miss Sarah T. Barrows of the State Teachers College at San José, Calif., once determined the practice of 268 university students, all born in Iowa, in the pronunciation of watch, water and wash. She found that 156 preferred the ah-sound in watch, 96 the aw-sound and 16 the English o-sound. In water their preferences ran 128, 80 and 80, and in wash 165, 58 and 45.1 In the Eighteenth Century, as Krapp's researches show;2 it was not unheard of for the a of care to be used in such words. Thus, the poets of the time rhymed war not only with care, but also with air, dare, glare, forbear, spare, share, blare, snare, despair, bear, bare and prepare. But the rhymes of poets are not always to be trusted, and it is to be noted that those examined by Krapp also occasionally rhymed war with car, mar, far, jar, scar and tar. In any case, it began to be rhymed with more after the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. At the present time its a is substantially equivalent to the o of story, but ah is also heard. In words containing au, aw or ou the sound is usually aw, but in the vulgar speech a flat a like that of land gets into haunt, jaundice and sometimes launch. Laundry may be lawndry, lahndry or londry. Aunt, of course, is ant to the plain people everywhere, save in the Boston area and parts of the South.

Usage in the pronunciation of u still differs widely in the United States. Two sounds, that of oo in goose and that of u in bush, are used by different speakers in the same word. The oo-sound prevails in aloof, boot, broom, food, groom, proof, roof, rood, room, rooster, root, soon, spook, spoon and woof, and the u-sound in butcher, cooper, hoof, hoop, nook, rook and soot, but there are educated Americans who employ the oo-sound in coop, hoof and hoop. In hooves and rooves I have heard both sounds. Rooves seems to be extinct in the written speech as the plural of roof, but it certainly survives in spoken American. In words of the com-class, save company, Americans substitute ah for the u used by Englishmen; even compass often shows it. So do constable and conjure. The English are far more careful with the shadowy y preceding u in words of

1 Watch, Water, Wash, American Speech, April, 1929. 2 The English Language in America, Vol. II, p. 83.

The Pronunciation of American

345

the duty class than Americans. The latter retain it in the initial position and in the medial position when unstressed, but omit it in almost all other situations. Nyew, nyude, dyuke, Tuesday, enthyusiasm, styupid and syuit would seem affectations in most parts of the United States.1 The schoolmarm still battles valiantly for dyuty, but in vain. In 1912 the Department of Education of New York City warned all the municipal high-school teachers to combat the oo-sound 2 but it is doubtful that one pupil in a hundred was thereby induced to insert the y in induced. In figure, however, Americans retain the y-sound, whereas the English drop it. Noah Webster was violently against it in all situations. The English lexicographer, John Walker, had argued for it in his “Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language,” 1791, but Webster's prestige, while he lived, remained so high in some quarters that he carried the day, and the older professors at Yale, it is said, continued to use natur down to 1839. In the South a y is sometimes inserted before a, i or o, especially following k, e.g., in cyard, Cyarter, kyind, cyow. This intrusion of the y was formerly common in New England also, and as Krapp says, “ is not yet wholly extinct.” In lieutenant the Englishman pronounces the first syllable lef or lev; the American makes it loo. White says that the prevailing American pronunciation is relatively recent. “ I never heard it,” he reports, “ in my boyhood.”3 He was born in New York in 1821. Nevertheless, it was advocated by Walker in 1793. The word was originally French, and loo comes closer to the original pronunciation than lef or lev. How the latter form arose is uncertain.4

In Middle English the diphthong oi was pronounced like the oy of boy, but during the early Modern English period the pronunciation became assimilated with that of ī in wine, and this usage prevailed at the time of the settlement of America. The colonists thus brought it with them, and at the same time it lodged in Ireland, where it still prevails. But in England, during the late Eighteenth Century

1 A woman teacher of English, born in Tennessee, tells me that the y-sound is much more persistent in the South than in the North. “ I have never,” she says, “ heard a native Southerner fail to retain the sound in new. The same is true of duke, stew, due, duty and Tues-day. But it is not true of blue and true.”

2 High School Circular No. 17, June 19, 1912.

3 Every-Day English; Boston, 1881, p. 243.

4 There is an inconclusive discussion of the question in the Oxford Dictionary, under lieutenant.

346 The American Language this i-sound was displaced in many words by the original oi-sound, not by historical research but by deduction from the spelling, and that new pronunciation soon extended to the polite speech of America. In the common speech, however, the i-sound persisted, and down to the time of the Civil War it was constantly heard in such words as boil, boist, oil, join, spoil, joist, pennyroyal, poison and roil, which thus became bile, hist, ile, jine, spile, jist, pennyr'y al, pisen and rile. Even brile for broil was sometimes noted. Since then the schoolmarm has combated the i-sound with such vigor that it has begun to disappear, and such forms as pisen, bile and ile are seldom heard. But in certain other words, perhaps supported by Irish influence, the i-sound still persists. Chief among them are hoist and roil. An unlearned American, wishing to say that he was enraged, never says that he was roiled, but always that he was riled. Desiring to examine the hoof of a horse, he never orders the animal to hoist but always to hist. In the form of booze-hister, the latter is almost in good usage. In the coal-mines of Southern Illinois hoist is pronounced correctly in hoisting-engineer, but he always hists the coal.1 Jine as a verb has retired to certain dialects, but the noun jiner, signifying a man given to joining fraternal orders, is still in common use. Most of the other vowel changes in vulgar American are also to be encountered in the British dialects. A flat a displaces the long e in rear (e.g., as a horse) and the short e of thresh and wrestle, producing rare, thrash and wrassle. In the days before the Civil War a short i displaced o in cover and e in chest and kettle, producing kiver, chist and kittle, but now only kittle is heard. Jedge for judge and empire for umpire survive more or less, but jest and jist for just are almost extinct. So are leetle for little, fust for first, sech for such, and tech for touch. But shet for shut is still in use and so is gal for girl. The substitution of guardeen and champeen for guardian and champion is very common. So is that of snoot for snout. So is that of muss for mess. In jaundice not only is the a flattened, but the final syllable becomes -ers. One stamps a letter but stomps with the foot. This last differentiation seems to have a number of parallels in English: the case of strap and (razor)-strop suggests itself at once. In vulgar American a horse chomps its bit, but champ remains a good shortened form of champeen. Similarly, a cow tromps her fodder,

1 I am indebted here to Dr. H. K. Croessmann, of Du Quoin, Ill.

The Pronunciation of American

347

but a vagrant remains a tramp. By assimilation cartoon (a drawing) has been substituted for carton (a cardboard package). The last syllables of engine and genuine often rhyme with line. Webster said in his "Dissertations on the English Language" (1789) that mought for might was then "heard in most of the States, but not frequently except in a few towns." It has now gone out, but the American Freemasons still use the archaic mote for may in their occult ceremonies.

I have spoken of the American pronunciation of a few foreign words, e.g., piano, tornado, alma mater, the medical terms in -itis and the chemical terms in -ine. George O. Curme, a distinguished authority, says that in the plural of Latin words in -a the final -ae is "pronounced as e in react"1 but it is my observation that -ay is more often heard, and Larsen and Walker give it as a variant. Certainly vertebray is commoner than vertebree, and alumnay is at least as common as alumnee. On the level of refined discourse some effort is made in the United States to approximate the correct pronunciation of loan-words from living languages, and it would be unusual to hear an American medical man pronounce röntgenogram as if the first two syllables were runtgen - the pronunciation recommended to English radio announcers in "Broadcast English." Even among the plain people loan-words brought in by word of mouth are commonly pronounced more or less plausibly, e.g., kosher, cabaret, buffet, chauffeur, chiffon, chef, négligé,frau, seidel, gesundheit, mannerchor and café. I have, however, heard kaf for café, and among the words first apprehended in print brasseer is common for brassière, porteer for portière, jardeneer for jardinère, ratskiller for ratskeller, buffbrow for hofbräu, vawdvil for vaudeville, dash'und for dachshund, camoofladge for camouflage, shammy for chamois, fyancy for fiancée, massoor for masseur, de-bút for début, likkare for liqueur, nee for née, premeer for première, meenoo for menu, switser for schweizer, ródeo for rodéo, and coop for coupé. In the Hinterwald the musical terms brought it by wandering performers undergo a radical transformation. Prélude becomes prelood, berceuse becomes bersoose, étude becomes ee-tude, scherzo becomes shirt-so, and träumerei becomes trowmerai. Some years ago the word protégé had a brief vogue in fistic circles, and was often used by

1 Parts of Speech and Accidence; Boston, 1935, p. 119.

348

The American Language

announcers at prize-fights. They always pronounced it proteege. I once heard a burlesque show manager, in announcing a French dancing act, pronounce M. and Mlle. as Em and Milly. And who doesn't remember

As I walked along the Boys Boo-long

With an independent air

and

Say aw re-vore,

But not good-by!

Charles James Fox, it is said, called the red wine of France Bordeaux to the end of his days. He had an American heart; his great speeches for the revolting colonies were more than mere oratory. John Bright, another kind friend in troubled days, had one too. He always said Bordeaux and Calass.

3. THE CONSONANTS

The generally more distinct utterance of Americans preserves a number of consonants that have begun to decay in Standard English. The English have not only made a general slaughter of r; they also show a tendency to be careless about l, d, g and t, at least in certain situations, and even on the level of the best usage they drop a few h's. An American always sounds the first l in fulfill; an Englishman commonly makes the first syllable foo. An American sounds the d in kindness; an Englishman doesn't. An American sounds the final t in trait, and usually the t in often also; an Englishman makes the first word homologous with tray and reduces the second to off'n. In the United States the final g in the -ing words is usually sounded clearly, at least by speakers of any education; in England it often disappears, and indeed its omission is fashionable, and a mark of social status.1 Next after the use of the broad a, the elision of r before consonants and in the terminal position is the thing that Americans

1 "Why a dropped g should be considered to be good English," says St. John Ervine in "The Curse of 'Refanement,'" London Daily Mail, Aug. 30, 1926, "when a dropped h is considered to be a sign of ill-breeding I cannot imagine; but seemingly if those who drop their final g's took to dropping their initial h's, while those

who drop their h's took to dropping their g's instead, h-dropping would be 'the best English' and g-dropping would be damnable. The 'best people,' whoever they may be, have fashions of speech that are as vulgar as that of 'the worst people.'" Krapp shows that the change of ng to n was probably common in early American.

The Pronunciation of American

349

are always most conscious of in English speech. In 1913 the late Robert Bridges belabored the English clergy for saying "the sawed of the Laud" instead of "the sword of the Lord" 1 and six years later he drew up a list of homophones, showing that the following pairs and triplets were pronounced exactly alike by his countrymen:alms-arms, aunt-arent, balm-barm, board-bored-bawd, hoar-whore-haw, lorn-lawn, pore-paw, source-sauce, saw-soar-sore, stalk-stork,taut-taught-tort, father-farther, ah-are, bah-bar-baa, taw-tore, raw-roar, more-maw, floor-flaw.2 "The majority of educated English-men," says Robert J. Menner, "certainly do not pronounce the r before a consonant. Just as certainly the majority of educated Ameri-cans pronounce it distinctly."3 John S. Kenyon estimates that two-thirds of all Americans do so.4 The violent Anglophile, Henry James, revisiting the United States after many years in England, was so distressed by this clear sounding of r that he denounced it as "a

morose grinding of the back teeth," 5 and became so sensitive to it that he began to hear it where it was actually non-existent, save as an occasional barbarism, e.g., in Cuba-r, vanilla-r and California-r. He put the blame for it, and for various other departures from the strict canon of Oxford English, upon "the American school, the Ameri-can newspaper, and the American Dutchman and Dago," and went on piously:

There are, you see, sounds of a mysterious intrinsic meanness, and there are sounds of a mysterious intrinsic frankness and sweetness; and I think the recurrent note I have indicated - fatherr and motherr and otberr, waterr and matterr and scatterr, harrd and barrd, parrt, startr, and (dreadful to say) arrt (the repetition it is that drives home the ugliness), are signal specimens of what becomes of a custom of utterance out of which the principle of taste has dropped.

James's observations must have been made west of the Connecti-cut river and north of the Potomac, for in the Boston area and in all of the South save the mountain region r is elided in something

John Walker, in his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language; London,1791, argued for dropping the g in the final syllables of participles of verbs ending in g, e.g., singing and ringing.

1 A Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation; Oxford,1913.

2 On English Homophones; Oxford,1919.

3 The Pronunciation of English in America, Atlantic Monthly, March,1915, p. 362.

4 Some Notes on American R, American Speech, March, 1926, p. 333.

5 The Question of Our Speech; Boston, 1905, p. 29.

350

The American Language

resembling the English manner.1 H. C. Wyld offers evidences 2 that

it was lost before consonants “at least as early as the Fifteenth Cen-

tury,” and especially before -s and -sh, as in sca’cely and ma’sh.

Krapp gives many examples from the early American town records,

and calls attention to the fact that there are survivals in vulgar

American, as in cuss, bust, passel (for parcel) and hoss.3 Toward the

end of the Eighteenth Century it became fashionable in England to

omit the r and Samuel Johnson helped that fashion along by de-

nouncing the “rough snarling letter.” It is now omitted in the

middle of words before all consonants, and at the end of words un-

less the following word of the sentence begins with a vowel. It is

retained, says Wyld, “initially, and when preceded by another con-

sonant, before vowels,” as in run and grass; “in the middle of words

between vowels,” as in starry and bearing; and usually, “at the end

of words when the next word begins with a vowel, and there is no

pause in the sentence between the words,” as in for ever, over all and

her ear. But Wyld admits that even in the last-named situation “the

younger generation” denies it clear utterance. In the American

South it is boldly omitted. No Tidewater Virginian says over all; he

says ovah all. Krapp speculates somewhat inconclusively regarding

the preservation of the r in General American. He says that the emi-

gration to the West was largely made up of New Englanders from

west of the Connecticut, and that in that region the r was always

sounded. He alludes, too, to the probable influence of Scottish and

Irish immigrants. “Perhaps also,” he adds,

formal instruction in the schools and the habit of reading have not been with-

out influence in the Western pronunciation of r. New England has also had

its schools and its readers, but students of language are frequently called upon

to observe that only in unsettling social circumstances, such as migration, do

forces which may long have been present exert their full power.4

1 In the New York dialect it is lost

between the neutral vowel and a

consonant, as in thoid, boid, goil,

etc., but that is only on the vulgar

level.

2 A History of Modern Colloquial

English; London, 1920, p. 298.

3 The English Language in America,

Vol. II, p. 220.

4 The English Language in America,

p. 231. There is a long and interest-

ing discussion of the variations in

the American r in Some Notes on

American R, by John S. Kenyon,

American Speech, March, 1926. See

also The Dog’s Letter, by C. H.

Grandgent, in Old and New;

Cambridge, Mass., 1920; Loss of R

in English through Dissimilation,

by George Hempl, Dialect Notes,

Vol. I, Pt. VI, 1893, and The

Humorous R, by Louise Pound,

American Mercury, Oct., 1924,

p. 233 ff. Dr. Pound deals with

such forms as dorg, purp, school-

marm, orter and orf. She shows

The Pronunciation of American

351

The majority of Americans seem to have early abandoned all effort to sound the h in such words as when and where. It is still supposed to be sounded in England, and its absence is often denounced as an American barbarism, but as a matter of fact few Englishmen actually sound it, save in the most formal discourse. Some time ago the English novelist, Archibald Marshall, published an article in a London newspaper arguing that it was a sheer physical impossibility to sound the h correctly. "You cannot pronounce wh," he said, "if you try. You have to turn it into hw to make it any different from w." Nevertheless, Mr. Marshall argued, with true English orthodoxy, that the effort should be made. "Most words of one syllable beginning with wh," he said, "and many of two syllables have a corresponding word, but of quite different meaning, beginning with w alone. When-wen, whether-weather, while-wile, whither-wither, wheel-weal. If there is a distinction ready to hand it is of advantage to make use of it." That is to say, to make use of hwen, hwether, hwile, hwither and hweel. The Americans do not sound the h in heir, honest, honor, hour and humour and their derivatives, and frequently omit it in herb, humble and humility. In the vulgar speech herb is often yarb. In Standard English h is openly omitted from hostler, even in spelling, and is seldom clearly sounded in hotel and hospital. Certain English words in which it is now sounded apparently betray its former silence by the fact that not a but an is commonly put before them. It is still good English usage to write an hotel and an historical.1

1 In Concerning the American Language, which Mark Twain included in The Stolen White Elephant; Hartford, 1882, and described as "part of a chapter crowded out of A Tramp Abroad," he represented himself as saying to an Englishman met on a train in Germany: "If the signs are to be trusted even your educated classes used to drop the h. They say bumble now [with the clear h], and beroic, and bis- toric, etc., but I judge that they used to drop those h's because your

writers still keep up the fashion of putting an an before those words instead of an a. This is what Mr. Darwin might call a 'rudimentary' sign that an was justifiable once, and useful - when your educated classes used to say 'umble, and 'eroic, and 'istorical. Correct writers of the American language do not put an before those words." But a correspondent sends me the following argument for the use of an: "My sense of euphony (and, I believe, the genius of the English language) requires something between the a and the b-sound in all such cases. Witness the absence of English words showing such a combination. I believe that all English words beginning with a, in which

352 The American Language where it doesn't belong, a familiar characteristic of Cockney English, is unknown in any of the American dialects. The authority of Webster was sufficient to establish the American pronunciation of schedule. In England the sch is always given the soft sound, but Webster decided for the hard sound as in scheme. The name of the last letter of the alphabet, which is always zed in England, is often made zee in the United States. Thornton shows that this Americanism arose in the Eighteenth Century. Americans give nephew (following a spelling pronunciation, historically incorrect) a clear f-sound instead of the clouded English v-sound. They show some tendency to abandon the ph(f)-sound in diphtheria, diphthong and naphtha, for a plain p-sound.1 English usage prefers a clear s-sound in such words as issue and sensual, but in America the sound is commonly that of sh. English usage prefers a clear tu-sound in actual, punctuate, virtue, and their like, but in America the tu tends to become choo. On the vulgar level amateur is always amachoor, and picture is pitchur or pitcher. Literature is literater in elegant Ameri-can and litrachoor among the general; in England it is litrachua or litrichua. The American plain people have some difficulty with t and d. They add a t to close, wish and once, and displace d with t in hold, which becomes holt. In told and old they abandon the d alto-gether, preferring tole and ole. Didn't is pronounced di'n’t, and find becomes indistinguishable from fine. The same letter is often dropped before consonants, as in bran(d)-new, goo(d)-sized and corne(d)-beef. The old ax for ask is now confined to a few dialects; in the current vulgate ast is substituted for it. The t is dropped in bankrup, kep, slep, crep, quanity and les (let's). The l is omitted from a'ready and gent'man, and the first g from reco'nize. As in Standard English, there is a frequent dropping of g in the -ing words, but it is usually preserved in anything and everything.2 The

a syllable beginning with h follows, are dissyllables. That is to say, the h-syllable is accentuated. Witness abead, aboy, abem. See Text, Type and Style, by George B. Ives; Boston, 1921, p. 269, and A and An Before H and Certain Vowels, by Louis Feipel, American Speech, Aug., 1929. 1 See Some Variant Pronunciations in the New South, by William A. Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Pt. VII, 1911, p. 504 ff. 2 The late Ring Lardner once said: "I used, occasionally, to sit on the players' bench at baseball games, and it was there that I noted the exceptions made in favor of these two words. A player, returning to the bench after batting, would be asked, 'Has he got anything in there?' ('He - in there' always

substitution of th for t in heigth, like the addition of t to once,

seems to be an heirloom from the English of two centuries ago, but

the excrescent b, as in chimbley and fambly, is apparently native.

There are many parallels for the English butchery of extraordinary;

for example, bound'ry, pro'bition, int'res', gover'ment, chrysan-

the'um, Feb'uary, hist'ry, lib'ry and prob'ly. Ordinary is commonly

enunciated clearly, but it has bred a degenerated form, onry or

onery, differentiated in meaning.1 Consonants are misplaced by me-

tathesis, as in prespiration, hunderd, brethern, childern, interduce,

calvary, govrenment, and modren. Ow is changed to er, as in piller,

swaller, beller and holler, or to a, as in fella, or to i as in minni (min-

now). Words are given new syllables, as in ellum, fillum, reality

(realty), lozenger, athaletic, bronichal, blasphemious, mischievious,

Cubéan, mountainious, tremendous, mayorality and municipial, or

new consonants, as in overhall and larcensy.2 In yes the terminal con-

sonant is often omitted, leaving the vowel, which is that of desk,

unchanged. This form is sometimes represented in print by yeah,

which suggests yay and is inaccurate. But there are many other forms

of yes, and Dr. Louise Pound once gathered no less than 37 in a

single group of students at the University of Nebraska.3 St. John

Ervine, the Anglo-Irish critic, who is ordinarily extremely hospitable

to Americanisms, has carried on a crusade against these American

yeses, and especially against the one which omits the s and the one

usually represented by yep, which last, he says, “ can sometimes be

heard on English tongues.” He has denounced both as “ disgusting.” 4

“These variations of a single English word,” he says, “ are inevitable

in a country with a polyglot population. . . . When an American

immigrant says yab or yep he is probably trying to say yes, just as

a baby when it mispronounces a word is trying to pronounce it cor-

means the pitcher.) The answer would be ‘He's got everything.’

On the other hand, the player might return and (usually after

striking out) say, ‘He ain't got nothin’’. And the manager: ‘Looks

like he must have somethin’.’

1 This word, when written, often appears as ornery, but it is almost

always pronounced on'ry, with the first syllable rhyming with don.

2 Not infrequently such forms are used by the sophisticated, especially

in the halls of learning. for humor-

ous effect. See Intentional Mispronunciations, by Margaret Reed,

American Speech, Feb., 1932. But

in a headline in the San Francisco

Chronicle, June 29, 1931, mayorality

was printed quite seriously, and in

Baltimore there is an Autogenius

Company which does autogenous

welding.

3 Popular Variants of Yes, American Speech, Dec., 1926.

4 English – According to American Skedule, London Evening Stand-

ard. Sept. 27, 1920.

354 The American Language

rectly." 1 He says that the yes without the s sounds as if the speaker " had started out to say yes, but had suddenly contracted a violent pain in his stomach and was unable to sound the sibilant." No sometimes picks up a terminal p, and becomes nope.

4. DIALECTS

All the early writers on the American language remarked its strange freedom from dialects. The first of them to deal with it at length, the Rev. John Witherspoon, thus sought to account for the fact:

The vulgar in America speak much better than the vulgar in Great Britain for a very obvious reason, viz., that being much more unsettled, and moving frequently from place to place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology. There is a greater difference in dialect between one county and another in Britain than there is between one State and another in America.2

Timothy Dwight and John Pickering took the same line. " In the United States," said Dwight in 1815, "there is not, I presume, a descendant of English ancestors whose conversation is not easily and perfectly intelligible to every other." 3 " It is agreed," said Pickering a year later, "that there is a greater uniformity of dialect throughout the United States (in consequence of the frequent removals of people from one part of the country to another) than is to be found in England." 4 The Rev. Jonathan Boucher, whose glossary was published in 1832, was of the same mind. " There is, properly speaking," he said, "no dialect in America . . . unless some scanty remains of the croaking, guttural idioms of the Dutch, still observable in New York; the Scotch-Irish, as it used to be called, in some of the back settlers of the Middle States; and the whining, canting drawl brought by some republican, Oliverian and Puritan emigrants from the West of England, and still kept up by their un-

1 Quoted from the London Spectator in American Speech, June, 1927, p. 413. 2 The Druid, No. V, May 9, 1781, reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931, p. 16. For the testimony of other early observers see British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, July, 1933. 3 Remarks on the Review of Inchiquin's Letters, Published in the Quarterly Review; Boston, 1815. 4 A Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America; Boston, 1816, prefatory essay. It is reprinted in Mathews, just cited.

The Pronunciation of American

355

regenerated descendants of New England – may be called dialects."1

J. Fenimore Cooper, already quoted in praise of American speech in

Section 1 of this chapter, agreed thoroughly with Witherspoon,

Pickering and Boucher. He said in 1828:

If the people of this country were like the people of any other country

on earth we should be speaking at this moment a great variety of nearly

unintelligible patois, but . . . there is not, probably, a man (of English de-

scent) born in this country who would not be perfectly intelligible to all

whom he should meet in the streets of London, though a vast number of

those he met would be nearly unintelligible to him. . . . This resemblance in

speech can only be ascribed to the great diffusion of intelligence, and to

the inexhaustible activity of the people which, in a manner, destroys space.2

Cooper added that such meager dialects as were to be encountered

in the United States were fast wearing down to uniformity. The

differences between New England, New York and Pennsylvania

speech, he said, “were far greater twenty years ago than they are

now.” A generation later George P. Marsh reported that this iron-

ing out had been arrested. “I think no Eastern man,” he said, “can

hear a native of the Mississippi Valley use the o vocative, or observe

the Southern pronunciation of ejaculatory or other emphatic phrases,

without perceiving a very marked though often indescribable dif-

ference between their and our utterance of the same things.” But

Marsh was still convinced that American was singularly uniform.

He said:

Not only is the average of English used here, both in speaking and writ-

ing, better than that of the great mass of the English people; but there are

fewer local peculiarities of form and articulation in our vast extent of

territory than on the comparatively narrow soil of Great Britain. In spite of

disturbing and distracting causes, English is more emphatically one in America

than in its native land.3

A great many other authorities might be quoted, all supporting

the same doctrine. I choose two, both from the year 1919. The first

is the anonymous Englishman who edited the monthly called Eng-

lish, now defunct.4 In his issue for October he said:

The citizen of the United States can travel from the Atlantic seaboard to

the Pacific, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, without experiencing

1 A Supplement to Johnson’s Dic-

tionary of the English Language;

London, 1832–33.

2 Notions of the Americans; London,

1828, Vol. II, pp. 164–5.

3 Lectures on the English Language;

New York, 1860; 4th ed., 1870,

Lecture XXX, pp. 666–67 and

674–75.

4 It was set up in London in March,

1919, and ran for about two years.

356

The American Language

any change in the pronunciation that can be taken as evidence of dialect; but

in England one cannot go from one county to another, and in many cases not

from the West to East end of a single town, without noticing a most marked

difference in the pronunciation of words. Many a Londoner has been hope-

lessly baffled when for the first time he has asked a Liverpool policeman or a

Glasgow newsboy to direct him, and if an Essex laborer were suddenly to find

himself in the bar-parlor of a Dartmoor inn, or at a meeting of Yorkshire

miners, he would be scarcely more able to follow the conversation than if he

were in Petrograd.

The other authority is the late George Philip Krapp, professor of

English at Columbia and the author of two standard works on Ameri-

can pronunciation.1 He said:

Relatively few Americans spend all their lives in one locality, and even if

they do, they cannot possibly escape coming into contact with Americans

from other localities. . . . We can distinguish with some certainty Eastern

and Western and Southern speech, but beyond this the author has little con-

fidence in those confident experts who think they can tell infallibly, by the

test of speech, a native of Hartford from a native of Providence, or a native

of Philadelphia from a native of Atlanta, or even, if one insist on infallibility, a

native of Chicago from a native of Boston.

Krapp was discussing Standard American, but on the plane of the

vulgate the leveling is quite as apparent. That vast uniformity which

marks the people of the United States, in political theory, in social

habit, in general information, in reaction to new ideas, in deep-lying

prejudices and enthusiasms, in the veriest details of domestic custom

and dress, is nowhere more marked than in their speech habits. The

incessant neologisms of the national dialect sweep the whole coun-

try almost instantly, and the iconoclastic changes which its popular

spoken form is constantly undergoing show themselves from coast

to coast.

Nevertheless, there are dialectical differences in spoken American,

and they have been observed and recorded by a multitude of pho-

nologists, both professional and lay. The organization of the Ameri-

can Dialect Society in 1889, the continuous, if somewhat infrequent,

appearance of Dialect Notes ever since, and the preparation of a Lin-

guistic Atlas of the country are sufficient evidences that American

dialects really exist. Disregarding local peculiarities, there are three

of them. The most important is that which a leading authority, Dr.

Hans Kurath, calls Western American: it is the tongue that the over-

1 The Pronunciation of Standard

English in America; New York,

1919, and The English Language in

America; New York, 1925, the

second volume of which is devoted

almost wholly to pronunciation.

The quotation is from the former,

p. viii.

The Pronunciation of American

357

whelming majority of Americans speak, and the one that Englishmen always have in mind when they discuss American English. Its territory includes all of New England west of the Connecticut river, the whole of the Middle Atlantic area save the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland and lower Delaware, and all the region west of the Cotton Belts of Texas and Arkansas and north of Central Missouri. In Ohio, Indiana and Illinois it comes down close to the Ohio river, and in the South it includes parts of the mountain country. It is also spoken east of the Connecticut river, in parts of Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine, and by many persons in Boston. No other form of American is so widespread, and none other is still spreading. The so-called New England dialect, once spoken all over the territory east of the Hudson, is now pretty well confined to the Boston area, and even there it is decaying. The Southern form of American occupies the area south of the Potomac and west to the Mississippi river, with extensions into Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, parts of Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and the lower counties of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. Dr. Kurath believes that these divisions in American English were produced by the character of the immigration settling the different parts of the country, and in this theory most other authorities agree with him. The early settlers of Eastern New England and the Tidewater region of the South came chiefly from the Southern parts of England,1 and they brought with them those characters of Southern English speech that are still marked today in Standard English and separate the dialects of the Boston area and of the South from the speech of the rest of the United States, e.g., the use of the broad a and the elision of r before consonants and in the terminal position. But the western parts of New England and the uplands of the South were settled mainly by immigrants speaking Northern varieties of English – many of them the so-called Scotch-Irish – and so were New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland. When the movement into the West began there were two streams. The one, starting from the Tidewater South, carried Southern English into the cotton lands of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, into parts of Texas, Arkansas and Missouri, and into all save the mountainous parts of Kentucky; the other, starting from Western New England and

1 Including not only the London area, but also East Anglia and the Southwestern counties of Devon, Dorset and Somerset – in short, the

whole region south of a line drawn from the mouth of the Severn to the Wash, but excluding Cornwall.

358 The American Language

the Middle Atlantic region, carried Northern English into New York State, the Appalachian region down to the North Carolina-Tennessee border, and virtually the whole of the Middle and Far West. Thus the dialect of the Boston area and that of the South are closely allied. Both are forms of Southern English. But there is much less apparent influence of Southern English in the Western American which now dominates the country. It is, in many ways, nearer related to Lowland Scotch.1

The chief characters of Western, or General American and of New England and Southern American have been indicated in the preceding sections of this chapter. All three show local variations, and in the midst of the areas of each of them there are islands of one or another of the other forms. The literature dealing with some of the regional forms is very extensive; indeed, it is almost as extensive as the literature dealing with American pronunciation in general. This is true, especially, of the dialect of Appalachia, which includes the area of the Ozarks. It is interesting because the people speaking it have been isolated for many years, and have thus preserved speech-forms that have become archaic elsewhere. They are also, in the main, of low economic status, and it is among the poor that ancient forms are least affected by pedagogy and fashion. The dialect of Appalachia is based primarily upon the Southern English of the late Seventeenth Century, but it has been considerably modified by the Northern English brought in by the Scotch-Irish. The mountain folk are fond of thinking of themselves as the only carriers of pure Anglo-Saxon blood in America, but as a matter of fact many of them are Celts, as an examination of their surnames quickly shows. Their dialect was put to extensive literary use 2 before it got much attention from philologians, but since an account of it by Dr. Josiah Combs appeared in 19168 it has been investigated at

1 Dr. Kurath discusses all these points at length in American Pronunciation, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXX, 1928, and The Origin of the Dialectical Differences in Spoken American English, Modern Philology, May, 1928. See also The English Language in America, by G. P. Krapp, above cited, Vol. II, pp. 29-30, and Scotland and Americanisms, by William Craigie, an address delivered before the Institute of Medicine, Chicago, Dec. 4, 1928.

2 For example, by Mary N. Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock) (1850-1922) and John W. Fox (1863-1919). Miss Murfree's first book of mountain stories, In the Tennessee Mountains, was published in 1884. Mr. Fox's Hell For Sartain, 1897, was an immense success in its day.

3 Old Early and Elizabethan English in the Southern Mountains, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. IV, 1916. Dr. Combs has also published Early English Slang Survivals in

The Pronunciation of American

359

some length. The Ozark form has been the special province of Vance Randolph, a native of the region where it is spoken, and he has published a number of valuable studies of it.1

In his book, "The Ozarks," he gives the following specimen:

Lee Yancey allus was a right work-brickel feller, clever an' biddable as all git-out, but he aint got nary smidgin' o' mother-wit, an' he aint nothin' on'y a tie-whackin' sheer-crapper noways. I seed him an' his least chaps a-bustin' out middles down in ol' man Price's bottom t'other ev'nin', a-whoopin' an' a-blaggardin' an' a-spewin' ambeer all over each an' ever', whilst thet 'ar pore susy hippoed woman o' hisn was a-pickin' boogers out'n her yeller tags, an' a-scunchin' cheenches on th' puncheon with a antiganglin' noodle-hook. D'rectly Lee he come a-junin' in all narvish-like an' tetchous, an' rid th' pore ol' trollop a bug-huntin' - jes' plum bodacious hipped an' ruinated her. They never did have nothin' on'y jes' a heap o' poke salat an' a passel o' these hyar hawg-mollies, but he must a got hisse'f a bait o' vittles some'ers, 'cause come can'le-light he geared up his ol' piedy cribber an' lit as huck fer Gotham Holler. The danged ol' durgen - he should orter be bored fer th' simples'.

The pronunciation of this dialect, according to Mr. Randolph,2 is very much like that of general vulgar American as noted in Sections 2 and 4 of the present chapter, but it preserves many early forms that have fallen out of use elsewhere, and reinforces and exaggerates most of those that remain. The short a is so much favored that it appears even in balm and gargle, but in narrow and barrel a broad a is substituted, so that they become nabrr' and babr'l. In other situations the broad a is turned into a u, as in whut, fur and ruther for what, far and rather. In have and gather the a becomes e, making

the Mountains of Kentucky, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. IV, 1921, and The Language of the Southern Highlanders, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1931. There is a criticism of some of Combs's conclusions by J. M. Steadman, Jr., in Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916.

1 A summary of his observations is in The Ozark Dialect, in The Ozarks: an American Survival of Primitive Society; New York, 1931. He has also published A Word-List From the Ozarks, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. IX, 1926; The Ozark Dialect in Fiction, American Speech, March, 1927; More Words From the Ozarks, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. X, 1927; The Grammar of the Ozark Dia-

lect, American Speech, Oct., 1927; Pronunciation in the Ozark Dialect (with Anna A. Ingleman), the same, June, 1928; Literary Words in the Ozarks, the same, Oct., 1928; A Possible Source of Some Ozark Neologisms, the same, Dec., 1928; Is There an Ozark Dialect?, the same, Feb., 1929; A Third Ozark Word-List, the same, Oct., 1929; Dialectical Survivals in the Ozarks (with Patti Sankee), the same, Feb., April, and June, 1930; Recent Fiction and the Ozark Dialect, the same, Aug., 1931; and A Fourth Ozark Word-List, the same, Feb., 1933.

2 Pronunciation in the Ozark Dialect (with Anna A. Ingleman), American Speech, June, 1928.

360 The American Language

her and gether. A final unstressed a often becomes y, as in Clary, alfalfy and pneumony. Certain is nearly always sartain, and celery is salery. The u is seldom pronounced correctly. Brush is bresh, such is sich, sure is shore, until is ontíl, gum is goom and ewe is yo. The au-sound is usually changed. Saucy, as in the general vulgate, becomes sissy, and jaundice is janders. In addition, haunt is hant and aunt is either ant or something like ain't. The difficulties that all untutored Americans have with t are multiplied. "Such nouns as post and nest," says Mr. Randolph, "drop the t in the singular, but in the plural the t is pronounced distinctly and an unaccented syllable added - nests and postes. T replaces the final d in words like salad, ballad, killed, errand, scared and held, so that they are best rendered salat, ballat, kilt, errant, skeert and helt. Occasionally the final t is replaced by a k-sound, as when vomit is turned into vomick." An excrescent t is added to many words beside the familiar once, wish and close; thus sudden becomes suddint, trough is trought, cliff is clift and chance is chanct. An intrusive y appears in hear and ear, which become hyar and yhar. The sk of muskrat and muskmelon is changed to sh. "The -ing ending is always pronounced in, with the short i-sound very distinct. . . . The Ozarker says sleepin' - never sleep'n'. . . . Sometimes the g is dropped from the middle of a word also, as in strength and length, which are nearly always pronounced stren'th and len'th." In many words the accent is thrown forward; thus, catarh, guitar, insane, harangue, relapse, police and burrah are accented on the first syllable. The Ozarker borrows a cockneyism in hit for it, but he uses it "only at the beginning of a clause, or when unusual emphasis is desired." 1

In most ways the pronunciation of the hillmen of the main Appalachian range is identical with Ozarkian usage, but it shows a stronger influence of Tidewater Southern. There are, of course, many local variations, due to the extreme isolation of the mountain communities. Maristan Chapman discerns three chief sub-dialects - the first spoken in the Cumberlands of Kentucky and Tennessee, the second in the Great Smokies, and the third in the Blue Ridge of Virginia and West

1 On the Ozark Pronunciation of It, by Vernon C. Allison, American Speech, Feb., 1929. Word-lists from the Ozark dialect are to be found in A List of Words From Northwest Arkansas, by J. W. Carr, Dia- lect Notes, Vol. II, Pt. VI, 1904; Vol. III, Pt. I, 1905; Pt. II, 1906; Pt. III, 1907; Pt. V, 1909; and in Snake County Talk [McDonald county, Mo.], by Jay L. B. Taylor, the same, Vol. V, Pt. VI, 1923.

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361

Virginia.1 Differences are to be found, not only in pronunciation, but also in vocabulary, and Mr. Chapman gives some curious examples. In the Cumberlands a small portion of anything is a smidgen, in the Great Smokies it is a canch, and in the Blue Ridge it is a tididy-bit. In the Cumberlands a cow is a cow-beast, in the Great Smokies she is a cow-brute, and in the Blue Ridge she is a she-cow. In the Ozarks, it may be added, cow-brute is a euphemism for bull. But these differences are yielding to good roads and the automobile, and in another generation the mountain folk, for the most part, will probably be speaking the general vulgate.2 The mountain type of speech is not confined to the actual mountains. It has been taken to the Piedmont by hill-folk going to work in the cotton-mills, and Dr. W. Cabell Greet says that it is “well fixed on the Southwestern plains and in cities like Fort Worth and Dallas,” and has echoes on the Delmarva Peninsula and on the islands of Chesapeake Bay. He adds that “it is often slower than the speech of the lowlands, where rapid speech is more common than slow speech ”; also, that it is “often nasal and high pitched.”3

The popular belief ascribes some of the characters of General Southern American – for example, the elision of the r before consonants and the intrusion of the y before certain vowels – to Negro influence. This belief is not of recent origin, for on April 15, 1842, Charles Dickens, who was then in the United States, wrote home to his wife: “ All the women who have been bred in slave States speak

1 American Speech as Practised in the Southern Highlands, Century, March, 1929.

Virginia Dialect by Lowry Axley, the same, Aug., 1928; Elizabethan America, by Charles M. Wilson, Atlantic Monthly, Aug., 1929; How the Wood Hicks Speak, by Paul E. Pendleton, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. II, 1930; Folk Speech in the Kentucky Mountain Cycle of Percy Mackaye, by B. A. Botkin, American Speech, April, 1931; Folk Speech of the Cumberlands, by Bess Alice Owens, the same, Dec., 1931; Remnants of Archaic English in West Virginia, by Charles Carpenter, West Virginia Review, Dec., 1934; Southern Mountain Accent, by C. G., American Speech, Dec., 1934.

2 See Variation in the Southern Mountain Dialect, by Charles Carpenter, American Speech, Feb., 1933. Mr. Carpenter says that the dialect of Northern and Central West Virginia has been much modified by the opening of coal-mines. The literature down to the end of 1922 is listed in A Bibliography of Writings on the English language, by Arthur G. Kennedy, above cited, pp. 413–16. See also The Southern Mountaineer and His Homeland, by John C. Campbell; New York, 1921; Dialect Words and Phrases From West-Central West Virginia, by Carey Woofter, American Speech, May, 1927; West

3 Southern Speech, in Culture in the South; Chapel Hill, N. C., 1934, p. 614.

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more or less like Negroes, from having been constantly in their childhood with black nurses." But Dr. Greet, in a notable essay,1 argues convincingly that the thing has really run the other way. "When the slaves were brought to America," he says, "they learned the accent of their masters. There is literally no pronunciation common among Negroes, with possible exceptions in Gullah, that does not occur generally in vulgar or old-fashioned American speech." In this judgment two other students of Negro speech agree completely. One is Cleanth Brooks, Jr., of Louisiana State University, who says:

In almost every case, the specifically Negro forms turn out to be older English forms which the Negro must have taken originally from the white man, and which he has retained after the white man has begun to lose them.2

The other is the late George Philip Krapp, who wrote in "The English Language in America ":

The Negroes omitted their r's because they heard no r's in the speech of their white superiors. Since they were entirely dependent upon hearing in learning the sounds of speech, their sounds could not be affected by the visual impressions of spelling, and for this reason their pronunciation of words with r final before consonants may seem broader, may seem fuller and franker, than that of educated white speakers. Even this difference, however, is likely to be an illusion on the part of the critical hearer, who is inclined to hear the speech of educated persons in terms of conventional spelling but of uneducated persons in terms of illiterate spelling.3

In another place 4 Dr. Krapp argued that the common belief that the voice of the Negro differs from that of the white man is also unsupported by the facts. There is a slight difference, he said, in speech tunes, but not much. Put a Negro and a white man, both from the same part of rural Georgia and both on the same economic

1 Southern Speech, just cited. It is the best general survey of Southern American so far published. Other papers that will be found useful are The Vowel System of the Southern United States, by William A. Read, Englische Studien, Vol. XLI, 1910; The Southern R, by the same, Louisiana State University Bulletin, Feb., 1910; Some Variant Pronunciations in the New South, by the same, Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Pt. VII, 1911; Who Lost the Southern R? by H. P. Johnson, American Speech, June, 1928; Southern American Dialect, by C. M. Wise, the same, April, 1933; Southern Standards, by Katherine E. Wheatley,

the same, Feb., 1934; Some Unrecorded Southern Vowels, by George P. Wilson, the same, Oct., 1934; Southern Long I, by Medford Evans, the same, Oct., 1935; and Another Note on the Southern Pronunciation of Long I, by William B. Edgerton, the same, Oct., 1935.

2 The Relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialects of Great Britain, Louisiana State University Studies, No. XX, 1935.

3 Vol. I, p. 226.

4 The English of the Negro, American Mercury, June, 1924.

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363

level, behind a screen and bid them speak the same words, and it will be difficult if not impossible to distinguish one from the other. Dr. Krapp was even indisposed to grant that the use of I is for I am among the lower orders of Negroes is a true Negroism: he tracked it down in Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary; and found that it was common in England so long ago as the Thirteenth Century.1 Nevertheless, there is a conventionalized Negro dialect, perhaps launched by the minstrel shows of the past generation, that all Americans recognize, and it plays a large part in American literature.2 Perhaps the Negro himself has imitated this dialect: nature, as Oscar Wilde once said, always imitates art. Walt Whitman not only believed in its existence, but saw vast potentialities in it. “The nigger dialect,” he said in “An American Primer,”3 “has hints of the future theory of the modification of all the words of the English language, for musical purposes, for a native grand opera in America, leaving the words just as they are for writing and speaking, but the same words so modified as to answer perfectly for musical purposes, on grand and simple principles.” But it is not certain that Walt knew precisely what he was talking about here.4

Dr. Greet, in the essay above mentioned, says that there are “ many

1 The prevailing conjugation, according to Bertram H. Brown (American Mercury, May, 1933, p. 116) is I is, you is, he is; us is, you-all (or y'all) is, they is. Mr. Brown says that he am is never heard.

2 Dr. Krapp traces its literary development in The English Language in America, above cited, Vol. I, p. 246 ff. See also Notes on Negro Dialect in the American Novel to 1821, by Tremaine McDowell, American Speech, April, 1930; The Use of Negro Dialect by Harriet Beecher Stowe, by the same, the same, June, 1931; and The Vocabulary of the American Negro as Set Forth in Contemporary Literature, by Nathan Van Patten, the same, Oct., 1931.

3 Atlantic Monthly, April, 1904.

4 Negro speech has been little investigated by philologists. Kennedy lists but nine discussions of it before 1922, and only three of them are of any interest. There are some intelligent remarks upon it in the

preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals, by James Weldon Johnson; New York, 1925. See also The Study of the Alabama-Georgia dialect by Cleanth Brooks, Jr., above cited; The Negro Dialects along the Savannah River, by Elisha K. Kane, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. VIII, 1925; Negro Dialect, by C. M. Wise, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Nov., 1933; and Aesop in Negro Dialect, American Speech, June, 1926. Gullah, spoken on the Sea Islands and along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, has been described by Reed Smith in Gullah, Bulletin of the University of South Carolina, Nov. 1, 1926, and there is a glossary of it in The Black Border, by Ambrose E. Gonzales; Columbia, S. C., 1922. See also Folk Culture on St. Helena Island, S. C., by Guy B. Johnson; Chapel Hill, N. C., 1930, pp. 3 ff, and The Old Types Pass, by Marcellus S. Whaley; Boston, 1925. The dialect of Hatteras Island was

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varieties of speech in the South, all closely related to speech in other parts of the country." He distinguishes three main varieties: the Virginia Tidewater type, the General Southern lowland type, and the Southern hill type. The first named prevails along the coast from the Delmarva Peninsula to South Carolina, and has colonies in the northern Shenandoah region and in the vicinity of Charlottesville. Its territory includes Richmond. The General Southern lowland type prevails everywhere else save in the mountains. In the Virginia Piedmont it is modified by the Tidewater type. The latter is, in general, more "Southern" than the other two: it embodies most of the peculiarities that Northerners associate with sub-Potomac speech, e.g., the intrusion of a y-sound before a after g or k, as in gyarden and cyar. "Elsewhere in the South and Southwest, hill and plain," says Dr. Greet, "y often appears before [i, the short e of get and the flat a of hat], but never before [broad a]." Even in the Tidewater region the y is not often heard in "the speech of business and professional men, if we except Episcopal ministers," but "certain gentlemen of the old school, many ladies of the old families, débutantes who have attended Episcopal institutions, professional Virginians, and parvenues are fond of the sound." Before a as in gate, a as in carry, e as in get and i as in gift, however, it "has no social merit," and before o as in cow it is "a real faux pas." But it is favored before the ir in girls. "I am sufficiently under the influence of the sentimental South and speech snobbery," says Dr. Greet, "to think that gyirls is a very fine pronunciation. Every man to his own choice."1

The New England variety of American is anything but a homo-

described by one signing himself Marcel in the Nation, 1865, pp. 744-5, and his observations were reprinted in Lectures on the Science of Language, by F. Max Müller, 6th ed.; London, 1871, Vol. I, p. 75 ff. 1 There have been many studies of local pronunciation in the South, mainly divided (somewhat irrationally) by States. Most of them will be found in the files of Dialect Notes. The following are of special interest: Georgia: Provincialisms, in A Gazetteer of the State of Georgia, by Adiel Sherwood, 3rd ed.; Washington, 1837, reprinted in The Beginnings of American English,

by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931; Tales of the Okefinokee, by Francis Harper, American Speech, May, 1926 (a study of the dialect of a remote comer of Georgia); North Carolina: Early English Survivals on Hatteras Island, by Collier Cobb, University of North Carolina Magazine, Feb., 1910; South Carolina: Charleston Provincialisms, by Sylvester Primer, American Journal of Philology, Vol. IX, 1888; The Huguenot Element in Charleston's Pronunciation, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. IV, 1889; Tennessee: A Tennesseean's Pronunciation in 1841, by Rebecca W. Smith, American Speech,

geneous whole. In its coastal form, centering in Boston, it is very

like the Standard English of Southern England, but as one moves

westward it gradually loses itself in General American. The New

England dialect that has been put to such heavy use in American

literature since the close of the Eighteenth Century is the lingo of

untutored vokels, and has many points in common with ordinary

vulgar American. In other ways it suggests the dialect of the Appa-

lachian hillmen. It made its first appearance in print, according to

Krapp, in Royall Tyler's play, “The Contrast ” (1787), and it prob-

ably reached its apogee in Lowell's “Biglow Papers” (1848, 1866).

In an address “ To the Indulgent Reader” prefixed to the First Series

of the latter Lowell printed “general rules” for its compounding,

as follows:

1. The genuine Yankee never gives the rough sound to the r when he can

help it, and often displays considerable ingenuity in avoiding it even before a

vowel.

2. He seldom sounds the final g, a piece of self-denial, if we consider his

partiality for nasals. The same of the final d, as han' and stan' for hand and

stand.

3. The h in such words as while, when, where, he omits altogether.

4. In regard to a, he shows some inconsistency, sometimes giving a close

and obscure sound, as hev for have, hendy for handy, ez for as, thet for that,

and again giving it the broad sound it has in father, as hânsome for handsome.

5. To ou he prefixes an e (hard to exemplify otherwise than orally).

6. Au, in such words as daughter and slaughter, he pronounces ah.

7. To the dish thus seasoned add a drawl ad libitum.

Krapp argues that, of these rules, only the fourth and sixth show

any genuine differentiation from ordinary vulgar American.1 Other

experts have wrestled with the peculiarities of this somewhat formal-

ized Yankee more successfully than Lowell; it is best described, per-

Dec., 1934; Virginia: Word-Book of Virginia Folk-Speech, by Bennett

W. Green; Richmond, 1899; new ed., 1912; English Pronunciation in

Virginia, by Edwin F. Shewmake;

Charlottesville, Va., 1927; Philip Vickers Fithian's Observations on

the Language of Virginia (1774),

by Claude M. Newlin, American Speech, Dec., 1929; A Phonographic

Expedition to Williamsburg, Va.,

by W. Cabell Greet, the same, Feb.,

1931; Dialect Notes on Records of Folk-Songs From Virginia, by A.

K. Davis, Jr. and A. A. Hill, the same, Dec., 1933. The literature

down to the end of 1922 is listed in Kennedy's Bibliography, above

cited. For the period since 1922 the

bibliographies in American Speech

are useful, though they are by no

means complete. It is a pity that

no one has ever investigated Tide-

water Southern American histori-

cally, on the plan of Krapp's investi-

gation of New England American.

The way to some promising ma-

terial is pointed in E. G. Swem's

Virginia Historical Index; Roanoke,

1 The English Language in America,

above cited, Vol. I, p. 233.

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The American Language

haps, by Grandgent in “New England Pronunciation.”1 An extensive literature deals with its local forms, and especially with differences in the vocabulary.2 The appearance of the Linguistic Atlas, the first sheets of which deal with New England, will make most of this literature useless. On the history of the coastal dialect the most useful work is “Early New England Pronunciation,” by Anders Orbeck, which is based upon an examination of the town records of Plymouth, Watertown, Dedham and Groton, Mass., for the period 1636-1707.3 Dr. Orbeck discusses at length the probable sources of this coastal dialect. He finds that 73% of the early settlers of the region where it is used came from the Eastern counties of England, including London. He reviews at length the previous speculations of G. F. Hoar, T. W. Higginson, Joseph L. Chester, H. T. Noël-Armfield and Edward Gepp, and exposes their errors.4

Various authorities have sought to include New York City and Long Island in the New England speech area, but this is hardly justified by the facts. In a study made forty years ago B. S. Monroe found that there was some dropping of the terminal r in New York City and Kings, Queens, Suffolk, Westchester and Rensselaer counties, but that it was by no means general and was not accompanied by any significant use of the broad a in grass, path and laugh.5 The

1 A chapter in Old and New; Cambridge, Mass., 1920.

2 For publications down to the end of 1922 see Kennedy's Bibliography, above cited, pp. 413-16. Most of those of later date are to be found in either Dialect Notes or American Speech. The following are of special interest: New England Dialect, by Windsor P. Daggett, Billboard, March 3, 1928 (a guide for actors cast for Yankee parts); The Real Dialect of Northern New England, by George A. England, Writer's Monthly, March, 1926 (a guide for writers of fiction); Vanishing Expressions of the New England Coast, by Anne E. Perkins, American Speech, Dec., 1927; New England Words for the Earthworm, by Rachel S. Harris, the same, Dec., 1933; New England Expressions For Poached Eggs, by Herbert Penzl, the same, April, 1934.

3 Ann Arbor, Mich., 1927.

4 Other publications worth consulting are A Sideliight on Eighteenth Century American English, by Henry Alexander, Queen's Quarterly (Kingston, Ont.) Nov., 1923; Early American Pronunciation and Syntax, by the same, American Speech, Dec., 1925; A Comparison of the Dialect of The Biglow Papers with the Dialect of Four Yankee Plays, by Marie Killheffer, the same, Feb., 1928; The Language of the Salem Witchcraft Trials, by Henry Alexander, the same, June, 1928; Die Volkssprache im Nordosten der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika dargestellt auf Grund der Biglow Papers von James Russell Lowell, by J. A. Heil; Breslau, 1927.

5 The Pronunciation of English in New York State, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Pt. IX, 1896.

The Pronunciation of American

broad a actually heard in the metropolitan region is confined to a very small class of persons, chiefly of social pretensions, and among them it is not the Boston a that is used but the English one. In the rest of the State the flat a of General or Western American prevails, and the r is not elided.1 The common people of New York City have a dialect of their own, first described scientifically by Dr. E. H. Babbitt of Columbia in 1896.2 Its most notable peculiarity lies in the pronunciation of the e-sound before r, as in bird, third, first, nerve, work, earnest, curve, girl, perfect and pearl, which become something that is usually represented as boid, thoid, foist, noive, woik, oinest, coive, goil, poifect and poil. Contrariwise, the true oi-sound, as in oyster, noise and Boyd, gets a touch of the r, and in print these words are often given as erster, nerz and Byrd. Dr. Henry Alexander says that the true sound is the same in both cases, and lies between oi and er. To a person unfamiliar with it, it sounds like oi in the er-words and like er in the oi-words. Dr. Alexander thus explains the process:

Given two familiar sounds, a and b, and one unfamiliar sound, x, which, acoustically and phonetically, is intermediate between a and b. If a speaker is in the habit of substituting x for both a and b, then an untrained hearer will interpret x as b in words in which he expects to hear a, and x as a in words in which he expects to hear b.3

At the time the New York vulgar dialect first appeared in literature, in the early 90's,4 this confusion between oi and er was not stressed; instead, the salient mark of the dialect was thought to be substitution of t and d for the unvoiced and voiced forms of th, respectively, as in wit and dat for with and that. This substitution, said Dr. Babbitt in 1896, “does not take place in all words, nor in the speech of all persons, even of the lower classes; but the tendency exists beyond doubt.” It is my observation that it has declined in late

1 See The Ithaca Dialect, by O. F. Emerson; Boston, 1891; Dialect of Northeastern New York, by Gerald Crowninshield, American Speech, April, 1933; Pronunciation in Up-state New York, by C. K. Thomas, the same, April and Oct., 1935. Word-lists have appeared in Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Pt. VI, 1910, and Pt. VIII, 1912, and there is a list of colloquial expressions from Madison county in American Speech, Dec., 1929.

2 The English of the Lower Classes in New York City and Vicinity, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Pt. IX, 1896.

3 Soiving the Erstern, American Speech, Feb., 1926. See also Popular Phonetics, by Robert J. Menner, the same, June, 1929, and Standards of Pronunciation in New York City, by C. K. Thomas, Quarterly Journal of Speech, April, 1935.

4 For example, in the Chimmie Fadden stories of E. W. Townsend.

years, probably through the labors of the schoolmarm. But she has not been able to stamp out foist and thoid, if, indeed, she has been sufficiently conscious of them to make the attempt. Their use by Alfred E. Smith during his campaign for the Presidency in 1928 made the whole country conscious of the New York oi. I have frequently noted it in the speech of educated New Yorkers, and it is very common in that of the high-school graduates who make up the corps of New York stenographers. It extends into New Jersey and up Long Island Sound into Connecticut. The origin of the New York dialect has not yet been accounted for with any plausibility. Its current peculiarities seem to have been unobserved until toward the end of the last century. Perhaps it owes something to the influence of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Its oi-sound is certainly heard in Yiddish, and since 1900 the Jews have constituted the largest racial bloc in the boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx, and probably also in that of Manhattan. At least one observer sees its genesis in a revolt of the submerged masses against their oppressors. He says:

This New York dialect, like its prototype in London [i.e., Cockney], represents a class-protest, largely unconscious, against a life of terrible sounds, sights, smells and contracts. These exploitees would be as their masters, but they can not. Resisting all instruction, they take on this speech, which is the precise opposite of the speech of their masters. "Look what you made us," they all seem to say, "but since you will not let us have what we want, we will pretend to glory in what we have, and will make ourselves as objectionable as possible to you in a way which you can not effectively penalize."1

This theory sounds so dubious to me that I marvel that it has not been embraced by the proletarian Aristoles of the New Republic and New Masses. Among those New Yorkers to whom Yiddish is native there are forms reported in use that have not got into the general vulgate of the town, e.g., the interchange of e and flat a, as in baker for beggar and kettle for cattle; the interchange of k and g, as in glass for class and locker for lager; the interchange of b and p, as in bowl for pole and mop for mob; the interchange of long e and short i, as in dip for deep and beeg for big; the interchange of t and d, as in lid for lit and lift for lived. But these interchanges may be more apparent than real: perhaps what occurs in each case is a median sound, resembling that described by Dr. Alexander as lying between oi and er.2

1 The Origin of a Dialect, by Howard K. Hollister, Freeman, June, 1923. 2 The speech of the New York Jews is discussed in Jewish Dialect and the New York Dialect, by C. K.

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369

In the other Middle Atlantic States, General or Western American prevails, save only for a small part of New Jersey adjacent to New York City, where the New York vulgate has some footing, and the lower part of the Delmarva Peninsula, where, as I have noted, something resembling Tidewater Southern is used. Most of the early observers of American speech-ways thought that the pronunciation of the Western Shore of Maryland was especially euphonious and correct. " When you get as far South as Maryland," said J. Fenimore Cooper in 1828,1 " the softest, and perhaps as pure an English is spoken as is anywhere heard." Two years earlier Mrs. Anne Royall said that " the dialect of Washington, exclusive of the foreigners, is the most correct and pure of any part of the United States I have ever yet been in." 2 Noah Webster also liked the pronunciation of this region, though he added that a t was added to once and twice by " a class of very well educated people, particularly in Philadelphia and Baltimore." 3 In parts of Pennsylvania, as we have seen in Chapter IV, Section 3, the German influence has not only introduced a number of words that are not commonly heard elsewhere, but has also established some peculiar speech-tunes. The Pennsylvania voice, indeed, is recognized instantly in the adjacent States. In the sentence " Are you going now," for example, there is a sharp rise on go and a fall on now. For the rest, Pennsylvania speaks General or Western American. " The true Western Pennsylvanian," says E. K. Maxfield, " pronounces a decidedly flat a . . . and his r gives him especial

Thomas, American Speech, June, 1932; in Re Jewish Dialect and New York Dialect, by Robert Sonkin, the same, Feb., 1933, and More on New York Jewish Dialect, by C. K. Thomas, the same, Oct., 1933. " None of the Jews who supplied my data," says Mr. Thomas in the last article, " were immigrants; all were at least second generation, the children, in some cases the grandchildren, of immigrants; yet they retain the dialect. On the other hand, the second Gentile generation ordinarily has no trace of its fathers' foreign dialect." The Yiddo-American of New York has produced a considerable literature, the chief contributors to which have been Montague Glass, Milt Gross and Arthur Kober. Its

peculiarities were amusingly exaggerated in various Notes For an East Side Dictionary, written for the New Yorker during 1934 and 1935 by John J. Holzinger over the signature of J. X. J. There was a time when it was heard often on the comic stage, but it has gone out of fashion there, along with the German, Irish and Scandinavian dialects. See Yiddish in American Fiction, by Alter Brody, American Mercury, Feb., 1926.

1 Notions of the Americans, Vol. II, p. 175.

2 Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the United States; New Haven, 1826, p. 58.

3 Dissertations on the English Language; Boston, 1789, II.

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The American Language

pride and a sense of superiority over both East and South."1 This flat a and conspicuous r are also sounded in Philadelphia, save perhaps by a small faction of the élite.2 The speech of New Jersey, save in the New York suburbs, is likewise General American, but the vocabulary of the State is rich in local terms.3 General American itself hardly needs any description here; it is the speech with which the present volume mainly deals. It has, of course, many minor variations, but they have to do principally with its vocabulary. In regions where there are ponderable minorities speaking non-English languages many loan-words are taken in – Spanish in the Southwest, German in parts of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and Scandinavian in Minnesota and the adjacent States. Some of these local borrowings have been noted in Chapter IV, Section 3, and Chapter V, Section 5. They are of small importance, for in pronunciation and intonation, as in the major part of its vocabulary, General American is singularly uniform.4

1 The Speech of South-Western Pennsylvania, American Speech, Oct., 1931.

2 See also Provincialisms of the Dutch Districts of Pennsylvania, by Lee L. Grumbine, Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. XVII, 1886; Dialectical Peculiarities in the Carlisle, Pa., Vernacular, by William Prettyman, German-American Annals, Vol. IX, 1907; Dialects of the Western Pennsylvania Frontier, by Claude M. Newlin, American Speech, Dec., 1928; The English of the Pennsylvania Germans, by George G. Struble, the same, Oct., 1935.

3 See Jerseyisms, by F. B. Lee, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Pt. VII, 1894, and some notes correcting and enlarging the foregoing, the same, Pt. VIII, 1895.

4 The literature dealing with localisms, down to the end of 1922, is listed in Kennedy's Bibliography, above cited, pp. 414-10. Later publications worth consulting include the following: Indiana: Eggleston's Notes on Hoosier Dialect, by Margaret Bloom, American Speech, Dec., 1934 (a reprint of the short glossary published with the 1899 edition of The Hoosier Schoolmaster, by Edward Eggleston); Iowa: Some Iowa Locutions, by Katherine Buxbaum, American Speech, April, 1929; Kansas: Jottings From Kansas, by J. C. Ruppenthal, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. VI, 1923; Missouri: “It's In St. Louis That Americanese is Spoken,” New York World, Nov. 9, 1928; The Strategic Position of Missouri in Dialect Study, by Allen Walker Read, Missouri Alumni, April, 1932; Missouri Folk-Speech in Missouri, by the same, Arcadian Magazine, June, 1932; Nebraska: Nebraska Sandhill Talk, by Melvin Van den Bark, American Speech, Dec., 1928; Expressions From Boyd County, Neb., by M. A. Burwell, the same, Feb., 1931; Nebraska Pioneer English, by Melvin Van den Bark, American Speech, April and Oct., 1931, Feb., 1932, and Dec., 1933; Oregon: Wallowa County, Ore., Expressions, by T. Josephine Hausen, the same, Feb., 1931. The following more general discussions are also of interest: Westernisms, by Kate Mullen, American Speech, Dec., 1925; Some Observations Upon Middle Western Speech, by Josephine M. Burnham, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. IX, 1926; The Eng-

In Canada it prevails everywhere west of Montreal, and even to the eastward, as we have seen in Section 2, the flat a is dominant along the American border. The so-called Bluenose dialect of " the whole of New Brunswick and the greater part of Nova Scotia outside Halifax " 1 has affinities with the common speech of rural New England, but the early settlers of Ontario came mainly from New York and Pennsylvania, and those of the western regions have been principally American Middle Westerners, with admixtures of Germans, Scandinavians, Finns and Russians. In Ontario, the broad a " is never heard in aunt and rather," but the flat a is occasionally heard even in father.2 Throughout Canada, of course, the American vocabulary is dominant. Its neologisms are frequently denounced by patriotic Canadians with an eye on London, but even the statesmen of the Dominion now employ it in their deliberations. Said the Ottawa Journal in a recent editorial on the subject:

With the disappearance of Gladstonian haberdashery and frock coats, pontificators of language could no longer be properly sustained, and now antiquarians can trace but the faintest vestiges in the Senate chamber. The stimulus of Burke's orations and classical English speech has given place to the stimulus of Hollywood and the air waves.3

In Bermuda, rather curiously, the General American flat a is used by the upper classes, and is a sign of social consequence, whereas the Negroes employ the broad English a and are looked down upon for doing so. Says Dr. Harry Morgan Ayres:

I am not prepared to draw with precision the line demarking socially the distribution of this sound. I can only say that my hostess used [the flat a] consistently, even in calm, and her Negro maid, aged nineteen, used [the broad

lish Language in the Southwest, New Mexico Historical Review, July, 1932; The Length of the Sounds of a Middle Westerner, by C. E. Parmenter and S. N. Treviño, American Speech, April, 1935.

1 Canadian English, by W. D. Lighthall, Toronto Week, Aug. 16, 1889.

2 Ontario Speech, by Evelyn R. Ahrend, American Speech, April, 1934. The first treatise on Canadian English was written by A. S. Geikie and appeared in the Canadian Journal so long ago as 1857. There have been few additions to the literature since. Those appearing down to the end of 1922 are

listed in Kennedy's Bibliography, above cited, p. 404. Among the later ones, all fragmentary, are Newfoundland Dialect Items, by George Allen England, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. VIII, 1925; Montreal English, by Helen C. Munroe, American Speech, Oct., 1929; A Note on Canadian English, by W. S. W. McLay, the same, April, 1930 (a correction of errors by Miss Munroe); Terms From the Labrador Coast, by Mary S. Evans, the same, Oct., 1930; More Labrador Survivals, by W. D. Strong, the same, April, 1931.

3 Parliament Goes Hollywood, April 7, 1934.

a] with a distribution historically absolutely accurate. How far up the social

scale [the broad a] has penetrated I cannot say; I suspect it has gone further

in St. George than elsewhere in the islands. In this respect Bermuda presents

us with an exact picture of what it is necessary to suppose English of the

Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries to have been. It presumably rep-

resents the distribution of the sounds which the settlers brought with them,

and which they only among English emigrant communities have preserved.1

The r is sounded in Bermuda before consonants and in the terminal

position by all classes, save in a few words, e.g., shirker, stern, per-

fectly, first and further. “It appears to be present in sufficient quan-

tity,” says Dr. Ayres, “to require belief that the English immigrants

brought it with them, as they brought it likewise to the American

Continent.” In the West Indies, including the Bahamas, an exag-

gerated form of Southern English prevails among the blacks, with

a very broad a dominant. Their white overlords speak Southern

English too, but in a more restrained manner, and with touches, now

and then, of Lowland Scotch.

In Hawaii there has arisen a dialect of American that is confined

to the islands, and is full of interesting peculiarities. Its basis seems

to be Beach-la-Mar, the common trade speech of the Western Pacif-

ic, in which, for many years past, there have been a number of

terms of American origin, e.g., alligator, boss, pickaninny, schooner

and tomahawk,2 but since English began to be taught in the Hawaï-

ian schools in 1853, and especially since the American annexation

of the islands in 1898, this crude jargon has moved in the direction

of Standard American, and today it is very far from its humble

beginnings. The original Beach-la-Mar, considerably changed by

Chinese influence, still survives,3 but it is spoken only by “ the im-

migrant generation of Orientals and Latins, and some elderly native

Hawaiians.” 4 The other non-American inhabitants, whether Japa-

nese, Chinese, Koreans, Portuguese, Porto Ricans, Filipinos or native

Hawaiians, speak the dialect aforesaid, in varieties ranging from

something rising but little above Beach-la-Mar to something hard to

distinguish from the speech of native Americans.5 It is used, in one

1 Bermudian English, American Speech, Feb., 1933.

2 See Beach-la-Mar, by William Churchill; Washington, 1911.

3 There is a good account of it in Pidgin English in Hawaii, by Wil-

liam C. Smith, American Speech, Feb., 1933.

4 The English Dialect of Hawaii, by John E. Reinecke and Aiko Toki-

masa, American Speech, Feb., 1934, p. 50.

5 For what follows I am chiefly indebted to the paper by Mr.

Reinecke and Miss Tokimasa, just cited. It appeared in American

The Pronunciation of American

373

form or other, by probably two-thirds of the people of the islands. It resembles vulgar American in its disregard of grammatical niceties, but its vocabulary differs considerably from the speech of the mainland. Many familiar words and phrases, e.g., to pitchfork, small potatoes and to go the whole hog, are omitted because the objects to which they refer are unfamiliar in Hawaii; other common expressions have been changed in meaning, e.g., bogus has come to mean boastful or a boaster, meat signifies only beef, and by a confusion between laboratory and lavatory, lab has come to mean the latter. There are, of course, many loan-words from Hawaiian and the non-English immigrant languages, e.g., aloha (farewell), haole (a white of Germanic blood), kuleana (a small land-holding) and wikiwiki (quickly) from the Hawaiian; jabon (the shaddock), bekka (a popular stew), and mama-san (an old Japanese woman) from the Japanese; stay (from esta, meaning is) from the Portuguese; kaukau (food) from the Chinese; and bagoong (a shrimpy sauce) from one of the Filipino languages. In addition, there are a number of survivals from Beach-la-Mar, still in wide use, e.g., the use of been as "the common device to express past time of action," the use of one as the indefinite article, and the use of bum-bug in the sense of bother. The different races speaking the dialect have borrowed or invented various more or less opprobrious names for one another, e.g., dog-eater for Hawaiian, baccaliaos (codfish) for a Portuguese, yabo (from the Japanese) for a Korean. A recent Japanese immigrant is a Japan jack, and his brother from China is a China jack. The reduplication of words for intensification has been taken over from Hawaiian, e.g., talk-talk and fight-fight. In a number of cases words of similar sound have been confused, with resulting change in the meaning of one or both. Thus slide is commonly pronounced sly, to sly is to slide, and as an adjective sly means slippery. Similarly, to bob has been related (not illogically) to barber, and transformed

Speech in two parts, Feb. and April, 1934. The two authors, who are husband and wife, are teachers in Hawaii. Mr. Reincke, who is an American, went there in 1926. Miss Tokimasa, who is a Japanese, was educated at the Honolulu Normal School. I am also indebted to the Rev. Henry P. Judd, associate secretary of the Board of the

Hawaiian Evangelical Association, who kindly answered a number of questions; to Mr. Frederick B. Withington, who gave me access to his paper, The Hawaiian Language: Its Modern History as a Means of Communication; and to Mr. N. B. Beck, assistant professor of English in the University of Hawaii.

374 The American Language

into to barb. The parts of speech are often interchanged, e.g., taxi signifies the driver as well as his vehicle, a stupid person is a dumb, hungry is used in place of hunger, and politeness serves as adjective instead of polite. Within the confines of any given part of speech there is a disregard of small shades of difference in meaning. Thus, "there was much people, but they had few money."

The tendency to reduce all the tenses of the verb to a sort of historical present, so marked in vulgar American, goes the full way in the Hawaiian dialect. The auxiliaries been and stay, taken over from Beach-la-Mar and borrowed from Portuguese respectively, serve in lieu of tense inflections, at least in the easier sorts of discourse. Thus, "I been eat" means "I have eaten," and "Us stay sweating" means "We are sweating" or "We were sweating," according to the context. The final s is commonly omitted from the third person singular in the present tense, there is a hopeless confusion between the preterite and perfect participle, and to is often dropped before the infinitive, as in "I like go." In the use of the pronoun all the confusions between case-forms that occur in vulgar American are encountered, and in addition two forms are sometimes joined, as in "Me I will go." There is also some confusion in number, as in "Take these flowers and put it in a vase." The noun, in the genitive, seldom shows the final 's. The common form is "They stayed at Hirata," not "at Hirata's." The noun also loses s in the plural. The article is frequently omitted altogether, and one is often used in place of a. Sometimes a is used in the plural. Among the prepositions there is chaos. Sometimes a preposition is omitted, as in "The horse stepped [on] him"; sometimes it is put where it doesn't belong, as in "I attend to school"; and sometimes the wrong one is used, as in "We walked till Haina." The adverbs also suffer severely. Both adverbs and adjectives are placed before the subject when emphasis is desired, and after the interrogatives what and where the verb also precedes the subject. Conjunctions are often omitted between two members of a series, and when a sentence closes with a preposition the preposition is sometimes forgotten. The articulation of those who speak this dialect is reasonably clear, but they have a habit of prolonging stressed vowels, and of clipping unstressed vowels and all consonants. "Sometimes it is difficult for an ear trained to Mainland American speech to catch words because of the comparative rapidity of utterance. There is little drawling, even where there

The Pronunciation of American

is hesitation; the speed and pitch of utterance remind us more of the British norm than of the American." 1 But British influence upon the dialect, of course, is actually infinitesimal. It is a form of American English, and in the course of time it will probably come closer and closer to everyday vulgar American. Since 1896 all the public schools of the islands have been conducted in American English, and every other language currently in use, including Hawaiian, shows signs of dying out.

Those Filipinos who have acquired American English in the public schools of the archipelago do it less violence than the Hawaiians, but nevertheless they make changes in it. It is most unusual for one of them to speak it well. For one thing, they learn it mainly, not by hearing it, but out of books, and under the tutelage of teachers who have learned it in the same way.2 For another thing, it is full of sounds that are strange to their lips, and are not easily mastered, e.g., those of th, sh, f, v, j and z. Thus they commonly convert there into dare, thin into tin, she into see, flea into plea, verb into herb, jelly into chelly, zig-zag into sig-sog, is into iss, and has into hass. They are unable to pronounce combinations of s with t, p, l or k without prefixing e, so that student becomes estudent, space becomes espace, sleep becomes esleep, and skate becomes eskate. The word Filipino, as they utter it, sounds much like Pilipino. The combination of m or n with d is also difficult for them, as is the combination of l and d, so they commonly omit the d in such words as blamed, chained and failed. The r is always heavily trilled. The vowels are easier for them, save the flat a of am, but they often confuse one with another, and in writing they give all the vowels Spanish values, so that chick becomes cheek and shed becomes shade.3 According to Dr. H. Otley Beyer, professor of ethnology in the University of the Philippines, the Filipinos speak no less than 87 languages and dialects, but nearly all of them belong to the Tagala branch of the

1 Reinecke and Tokimasa, above cited, Art. II, p. 130.

2 During the first years of the American occupation a great many American teachers went to the islands, but by 1925 they had been reduced in number to 305 in a corps of 25,530. The survivors taught only in the high-schools. In the primary grades virtually all the teachers of English were na-

tives. See Bamboo English, by George G. Struble, American Speech, April, 1929, pp. 277-78.

3 I am indebted here and below to Struble, just cited, to The English Language in the Philippines, by Emma Sarepta Yule, American Speech, Nov., 1925, and to A. Little Brown Language, by Jerome B. Barry, the same, Oct., 1927.

376

The American Language

Malayo-Polynesian family, and show the same general characters. For example, they all put the accent on the penultimate syllable in many common words. Inasmuch as Spanish does the same the natives are inclined to carry that accent into English, and in consequence they often say probábly, charácter and distribúting. Even when they do not push the accent all the way, they move it a step, thus producing such forms as dyséntery and vegétable. They also carry many Tagala idioms into English. Thus, the answer to a negative question is an affirmative, e.g., “Have you no bananas?” “Yes.” The affirmative is also used in answering a question embodying alternatives, and applies to the one mentioned last, e.g., the reply to “Do you prefer meat or fish” is “Yes,” meaning “I prefer fish.” This Filipino English will probably not long survive the American withdrawal from the islands. It is “essentially a bookish language, a language of learning, somewhat in the sense that Latin was the language of learning in the Middle Ages,” and not many natives have ever got sufficient command of it to speak it voluntarily and naturally.1 Article XIII, Section 3 of the Philippine Constitution provides that it is to be supplanted as soon as possible, along with Spanish, by “a common national language based on one of the existing native languages.”

The American spoken by Americans in the Philippines shows a large admixture of Spanish and Tagala words and phrases, just as the American spoken in Hawaii is shot through with terms borrowed from Hawaiian. But in both cases it is pronounced according to the General American pattern, and there are no changes in its grammar and syntax. Here is a specimen from Manila:

Hola, amigo.

Komusta kayo.

Porque were you bablaing with ese señorita?

She wanted a job as lavandera.

Cuanto?

Ten cents, conant, a piece, so I told her no kerry.

Have you had chow? Well, spera, till I sign this chit and I'll take a paseo with you.2

In this brief dialogue there are eight loan-words from the Spanish (hola, amigo, porque, ese, señorita, lavandera, cuanto and paseo), two Spanish locutions in a debased form (spera for espera and no

1 Struble, above cited, p. 284.

2 This is borrowed from What Americans Talk in the Philippines,

by Maurice P. Dunlap, Review of Reviews, Aug., 1913.

The Pronunciation of American

377

kerry for no quierp), two loan-words from the Tagala (komusta and kayo),1 two from the Pidgin English of the China coast (chow and chit), one Philippine-American localism (conant), and a Spanish verb with an English inflection (hablaing). The following is from an article on Hawaiian English in the Christian Science Monitor:2

"Are you pau?" asks the American housekeeper of her Japanese yard-man.

"All pau," he responds.

The housekeeper has asked if the yard-man is through. He has replied that he is. Pau - pronounced pow - conveys just as much meaning to the Honolulan as the English3 word through.

In Honolulu one does not say "the northwest corner of Fork and Hotel streets." One says "the makai-ewa corner." Makai means toward the sea. Ewa means toward the north or in the direction of the big Ewa plantation which lies toward the north of Honolulu. Thus the makai-ewa corner means that corner which is on the seaward side and toward Ewa. Instead of saying east or the direction in which the sun rises, Honoluluans say mauka, which means toward the mountains. To designate south, they say waikiki, which means toward Diamond Head or Waikiki Beach.

One often hears a little boy say he has a puka in his stocking. The house-keeper directs the yard-man to put the rubbish in the puka. It is a Hawaiian word meaning hole. Another common word is lanai. In English it means porch or veranda. The two words pabea oe are used as a term of greeting. In the States they say, "How do you do?" "How are you?" or "Good Day." In Honolulu, "Pabea oe?" conveys the same meaning. The response is "Makai no," or "Very good," or "All right."

At two other places under the American flag dialects of English flourish. One is Key West and the other is the Virgin Islands. The Key West dialect is Southern American showing the influence of Bahaman English and Cuban Spanish. The i is frequently given its Spanish sound, especially in proper names, so that Olivia becomes Oleevia. The a, before g, is transformed into a short i, so that bag becomes big and rag becomes rig. The w and v are exchanged, so that west becomes vest, and visit becomes wisit. The h is treated in the Cockney manner, so that horse becomes orse and the letter l is called bell. Ain't is often used in place of won't or haven't. The -ed ending is omitted from the past tense forms of the verbs. Many Spanish idioms are translated literally, e.g., Quantos años tiene? which becomes "How many years you got?" There are many loan-

1 But here komusta may be borrowed from the Spanish como está (how are you?).

3 That is, American; through, in this sense, is seldom used by the English.

2 Unfortunately, I have mislaid my memorandum of the date and the author's name.

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The American Language

words from the Spanish, and the inhabitants have invented the usual opprobrious terms for one another, e.g., conch (a West Indian), and saw (a native of Nassau).1 The Virgin Islands dialect, of course, is not American, but English. Basically, it is simply the English of the late Seventeenth Century, but there are many Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and Danish loan-words, and some vestiges of the West Coast African dialects. The phonology shows Danish influence. Among the special characters are the omission of s before consonants, so that stocking becomes tocking, and the use of a collective pronoun, a-wee, corresponding to the Southern American us-all.2 This jargon is spoken not only in the Virgin Islands, but also in the British Lesser Antilles, in Dutch Saba and in French St. Martin, of course with local variations. A somewhat analogous dialect, but much less like Standard English, is spoken in Dutch Guiana, on the South American mainland.3

1 I am indebted here to A Philologist's Paradise, by Thomas R. Reid, Jr., Opportunity, Jan., 1926.

2 For a specimen of the dialect see Negro Dialect of the Virgin Islands, by Henry S. Whitehead, American Speech, Feb., 1932.

3 See Surinam Negro-English, by John Dyneley Prince, American Speech, Oct., 1934, and Colonial Survivals in Bush-Negro Speech, by A. G. Barnett, the same, Aug., 1932. The dialects spoken in Australia, India and South Africa lie outside the bounds of the present inquiry, but some reference to the literature may be useful. All of it down to the end of 1922 is listed in Kennedy's Bibliography, above cited, pp. 404-5. The following, too late for Kennedy or overlooked by him, are also of interest: South African English Pronunciation, by David Hopwood; Cape Town, 1928; The Pronunciation of English in South Africa, by W. E. C. Clarke; Johannesburg, 1913; Cockney English and Kitchen Dutch, by C. M. Drennan; Johannesburg, 1920; Some Notes on Indian English, by R. C. Goffin, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XLI, 1934; The Australian Accent, Triad (Sydney, N. S. W.), Nov. 10, 1920; How English is Spoken Here, by B. Sc., Sydney Evening News, May 5, 1925; Words, Words, Words, by Guy Innes, Melbourne Herald, Nov. 11, 1933. Vulgar Australian-English shows the Cockney whine, and is altogether a dreadful dialect. The vocabulary is heavy with loans from American, but there are also some picturesque native inventions, e.g., wowser (a kill-joy), bullsh (a false report), to go hostile (to become angry), and woop-woop (a country district). There is a brief glossary of it in Slang Today and Yesterday, by Eric Partridge, 2nd ed.; London, 1935. The Australian dialect is uniform throughout the country. In New Zealand a form of Southern English free from Cockney vowels is spoken.

VIII

AMERICAN SPELLING

I. THE INFLUENCE OF NOAH WEBSTER

At the time of the first English settlements in America the rules of English orthography were beautifully vague, and so we find the early documents full of spellings that seem quite fantastic today. Aetaernall, for eternal, is in the Acts of the Massachusetts General Court for 1646, adjoin is spelled adioyne in the Dedham Records for 1637, February is Febrewarie in the Portsmouth, R. I. Records for 1639-97, and general is generall in the Hartford Town Votes for 1635-1716.1 There had been attempts in England since the middle of the Sixteenth Century to put the spelling of the language upon a more or less rational basis,2 but their effects were only slowly realized. It was not, indeed, until about 1630, nearly a quarter of a century after the landing at Jamestown, that English printers began to differentiate clearly between u and v, i and j. The two pairs were still confused in the First Folio of Shakespeare, printed in 1623, and Sir John Cheke, one of the first English spelling reformers, was quite content to write mjn for mine and vnmixt for unmixed. The redundant final e, usually a relic of a long-lost inflection, was much oftener encountered then than now, and a glance through almost any Seventeenth Century American public document will show toune for town, balfe for half, smale for small, and yeare for year.

There were no dictionaries in those days - or, at all events, none of any generally admitted authority - but as printing increased, a movement toward uniformity in spelling, if not toward rationality,

1 Dr. Miles L. Hanley of the University of Wisconsin, with the aid of various other scholars, has unearthed a large number of such forms from 'forty diaries and ten sets of town and parish records, . . . chiefly from Massachusetts and Connecticut.' His list of them was mimeographed in June, 1935, and he has kindly placed a copy at my disposal.

2 They are described in George H. McKnight's Modern English in the Making; New York, 1928, especially pp. 119-20, 191-2, and 229.

380 The American Language

began to show itself. By the beginning of the Eighteenth Century all the principal English authors were spelling pretty much alike, and by 1711, when the first number of the Spectator appeared, they were spelling substantially as we spell now. But it was not until the publication of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, in 1755, that the English had a real guide to orthography, of universal acceptance. Johnson, in the presence of conflicting usages, always took the conservative side. He preferred what he called "Saxon" spellings for what he conceived to be old English words, and thus ordained that music, critic and even prosaic should have a final k, though all three were actually borrowings from the Latin through the French. He decided for the -our ending in words of the honor class, and it remains in rogue in England to this day. When there was doubt, he proceeded with "a scholar's reverence for antiquity," and gave his imprimatur to many spellings based upon false etymologies and pointless analogies. Naturally enough, he fell into a number of contradictions, and it was easy for Lindley Murray to point them out, e.g., such pairs as deceit and receipt, moveable and immovable, sliness and slyly, deign and disdain. Even among the -our words he permitted exteriour to slip in alongside interiour, and posterior alongside anteriour. He also undertook occasional reforms that failed to make their way, e.g., the reduction of final -ll to -l, leading to such forms as downhil, catcal, unrol and forestal. But on the whole, his professed respect for "the genius of the language" showed a very keen feeling for it, and his decisions ratified what had become customary usage far oftener than they sought to change it. His influence was tremendous, both in England and in America.

There is no evidence that his mandates were ever challenged on this side of the water until the Revolution. In 1768, to be sure, the ever busy and iconoclastic Benjamin Franklin had published "A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling," and induced a Philadelphia type-founder to cut the six new characters that it demanded, but this project was too extravagant to be adopted anywhere, or to have any appreciable influence.1 It was

1 The Scheme is reprinted in Franklin's Words, edited by John Bigelow; New York, 1887-8; Vol. IV, p. 198 ff. The six new characters were a modified a for the long a in ball, an b upside down for the u in unto, a combination of long s and i for the sh in wish, a y with a curled tail for ng, an h with a curled tail for the th in think, and a somewhat similar h, but with a wavy appendage at the top, for the th of thy. Franklin expunged c, w, y and j from the alphabet as un-

Noah Webster who finally achieved a divorce between English precept and example and American practice. In his "Grammatical Institute of the English Language," published in Hartford in 1783, he was content to follow and even to praise Johnson's spellings, e.g., in the -our words, but soon thereafter he was launched upon his grandiose plan to establish an independent "Federal" language in the new Republic, and in 1786 he approached Franklin and Timothy Pickering 1 with a project for reducing its orthography "to perfect regularity, with as few new characters and alterations of the old ones as possible." Franklin was receptive, and Webster seems to have submitted his ideas to the other "distinguished characters" of the time, including Washington and Jefferson. During the succeeding three years he carried on his campaign with his usual pertinacity, but it does not appear that he made many converts. In 1789 he published his "Dissertations on the English Language," and in an appendix thereto he printed his proposals in some detail. They were as follows:

1. The omission of all superfluous or silent letters; as a in bread. Thus bread, head, give, breast, built, meant, realm, friend would be spelt bred, hed, giv, brest, bilt, ment, relm, frend. Would this alteration produce any inconvenience, any embarrassment or expense? By no means. On the other hand, it would lessen the trouble of writing, and much more, of learning the language; it would reduce the true pronunciation to a certainty; and while it would assist foreigners and our own children in acquiring the language, it would render the pronunciation uniform, in different parts of the country, and almost prevent the possibility of changes.

2. A substitution of a character that has a certain definite sound for one that is more vague and indeterminate. Thus by putting ee instead of ea or ie, the words mean, near, speak, grieve, zeal would become meen, neer, speek, greev, zeel. This alteration could not occasion a moment's trouble; at the same time it would prevent a doubt respecting the pronunciation; whereas the ea and ie, having different sounds, may give a learner much difficulty. Thus greef should be substituted for grief; kee for key; beleeve for believe; laf for laugh; dawter for daughter; plow for plough; tuf for tough; proov for

necessary. He proposed that the vowels be differentiated by using one letter for the short ones and two for the long ones. He made trial of his new alphabet in a letter to Miss Stephenson of London, apparently a bluestocking of the time. She replied on Sept. 26, 1768, saying that she could si meni in-kanviiniensis in it. He defended it in a letter from Kreven striit, London, Sept. 28.

1 For his letter to Pickering, dated May 12, see American Projects for an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1936. He said: "The idea is well received in New York, and many of the most discerning gentlemen in Congress are its warmest advocates." Timothy Pickering (1745–1829) was the father of John Pickering.

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The American Language

prove; blud for blood; and draft for draught. In this manner ch in Greek derivatives should be changed into k; for the English ch has a soft sound, as in cherish, but k always a hard sound. Therefore character, chorus, cholic, architecture, should be written karakter, korus, kolic, arkitecture; and were they thus written, no person could mistake their true pronunciation. Thus ch in French derivatives should be changed into sh; machine, chaise, chevalier should be written masheen, shaze, shevaleer; and pique, tour, oblique should be written peek, toor, obleek.

3. A trifling alteration in a character, or the addition of a point, would distinguish different sounds, without the substitution of a new character. Thus a very small stroke across th would distinguish its two sounds. A point over a vowel, in this manner: à, or ò, or ï, might answer all the purposes of different letters. And for the diphthong ow, let the two letters be united by a small stroke, or both engraven on the same piece of metal, with the left hand line of the w united to the o.

These changes, said Webster, “with a few other inconsiderable alterations, would answer every purpose, and render the orthography sufficiently correct and regular.” They would “diminish the number of letters about one sixteenth or eighteenth,” they would tend to “render the pronunciation of the language as uniform as the spelling in books,” and they would “facilitate the learning of the language.” The greatest argument, however, was the patriotic one:

A capital advantage of this reform in these States would be that it would make a difference between the English orthography and the American. This will startle those who have not attended to the subject; but I am confident that such an event is an object of vast political consequence.

The alteration, however small, would encourage the publication of books in our own country. It would render it, in some measure, necessary that all books should be printed in America. The English would never copy our orthography for their own use; and consequently the same impressions of books would not answer for both countries. The inhabitants of the present generation would read the English impressions; but posterity, being taught a different spelling, would prefer the American orthography.

Besides this, a national language is a band of national union. Every engine should be employed to render the people of this country national; to call their attachments home to their own country; and to inspire them with the pride of national character. However they may boast of Independence, and the freedom of their government, yet their opinions are not sufficiently independent; an astonishing respect for the arts and literature of their parent country, and a blind imitation of its manners, are still prevalent among the Americans. Thus an habitual respect for another country, deserved indeed and once laudable, turns their attention from their own interests, and prevents their respecting themselves.

But, as Dr. George Philip Krapp points out in “The English Language in America,” 1 Webster was “above all a practical, not a

1 New York, 1925, Vol. I, p. 332 ff.

theoretical reformer," and in consequence he was slow himself to adopt the reforms he advocated. When in 1783, he republished the first part of his " Grammatical Institute " as the first edition of his famous " American Spelling Book," he used the orthodox English spelling of the time, and not only gave the -our words their English ending, but even commended it. And so late as 1806, in the preface to his first Dictionary, he tried somewhat disingenuously to disassociate himself from Franklin's scheme to reform the alphabet. Indeed, in all the editions of the Spelling Book printed before 1806 he avoided noticeable novelties in spelling, though after 1798 he noted, in his preface, his conviction that " common sense and convenience "

hiz, giv, det, ruf and wel for publick, favour, neighbour, head, prove, phlegm, his, give, debt, rough and well. But in his Dictionary of 1806, despite his coolness to Franklin's alphabet, he used Franklin's saying that " those people spell best who do not know how to spell " -i.e., who spell phonetically - as a springboard for a wholesale assault upon the authority of Johnson. He made an almost complete sweep of whole classes of silent letters - the u in the -our words, the final e in determine and requisite, the silent a in thread, feather and steady, the silent b in thumb, the s in island, the o in leopard, and the redundant consonants in traveler, wagon, jeweler, etc. (Eng. traveller, waggon, jeweller). He lopped the final k from frolick, physick and their analogues, and transposed the e and the r in many words ending in re, such as theatre, lustre, centre and calibre. More, he changed the c in all words of the defence class to s. Yet more, he changed ph to f in words of the phantom class, ou to oo in words of the group crowd, porpoise to porpess, acre to aker, sew to soe, woe to wo, soot to sut, gaol to jail and plough to plow. Finally, he antedated the simplified spellers by inventing a long list of boldly phonetic spellings, ranging from tung for tongue to wimmen for women, and from bainous for heinous to cag for keg.

Some of these new spellings, of course, were not actually Webster's inventions. For example, the change from -our to -or in words of the honor class was a mere echo of an earlier English uncertainty. In the first three folios of Shakespeare, 1623, 1632 and 1663-6, honor and honour were used indiscriminately and in almost equal proportions; English spelling, as we have seen, was then still fluid, and the -our-form was not used consistently until the Fourth Folio of 1685.

Moreover, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, is authority for the statement that the -or-form was “ a fashionable impropriety ” in England in 1791. But the great authority of Johnson stood against it, and Webster was surely not one to imitate fashionable improprieties. He deleted the u for purely etymological reasons, going back to the Latin honor, favor and odor without taking account of the intermediate French honneur, faveur and odeur. And where no etymological reasons presented themselves, he made his changes by analogy and for the sake of uniformity, or for euphony or simplicity, or because it pleased him, one guesses, to stir up the academic animals. Webster, in fact, delighted in controversy, and was anything but free from the national yearning to make a sensation.

Many of his innovations, of course, failed to take root, and in the course of time he abandoned some of them himself. Among them were the dropping of the silent letter in such words as head, give, built and realm, making them hed, giv, bilt and relm; the substitution of doubled vowels for apparent diphthongs in such words as mean, zeal and near, making them meen, zeel and neer; and the substitution of sh for ch in such French loan-words as machine and chevalier, making them masheen and shevaleer. He had once declared for stile in place of style, and for many other such changes, but now quietly abandoned them. The successive editions of his Dictionary show still further concessions. Croud, fether, groop, gil-lotin, iland, insted, leperd, soe, sut, steddy, thret, thred, thum and wimmen appear only in the 1806 edition. In his “ American Dictionary of the English Language ” (1828), the father of all the Websters of today, he went back to crowd, feather, group, island, instead, leopard, sew, soot, steady, thread, threat, thumb and women, and changed gillotin to guillotin, and in addition, he restored the final e in determine, discipline, requisite, imagine, etc. In 1838, revising the “ American Dictionary,” he abandoned a good many spellings that had appeared even in his 1828 edition, e.g., maiz for maize, suveran 1 for sovereign and guillotin for guillotine, but he stuck manfully to a number that were quite as revolutionary — e.g., aker for acre, cag for keg, grotesk for grotesque, hainous for heinous, porpess for por-poise and tung for tongue — and they did not begin to disappear until the edition of 1854, issued by other hands and eleven years after

1 I find soveran in the London Times Literary Supplement for Aug. 5, 1920, p. 1, art. Words for Music, but it seems to have no support elsewhere.

his death. Three of his favorites, chimist for chemist, neger for negro and zeber for zebra, are incidentally interesting as showing changes in American pronunciation. He abandoned zeber in 1828, but remained faithful to chimist and neger to the last.

But though he was thus forced to give occasional ground, and in more than one case held out in vain, Webster lived to see many of his reforms adopted by his countrymen. The influence of his Spelling Book was really stupendous. It took the place in the schools of Dilworth's “ Aby-sel-pha,” the favorite of the Revolutionary generation, and maintained its authority for nearly a century. Until Lyman Cobb entered the lists with his “ New Spelling Book,” its innumerable editions had no really formidable rivalry, and even then it held its own. I have a New York edition, dated 1848, which contains an advertisement stating that the annual sale at that time was more than a million copies, and that more than 30,000,000 copies had been sold since 1783. In the late 40's the publishers, George F. Cooledge & Bro., devoted the whole capacity of the fastest steam press in the United States to the printing of it. This press turned out 525 copies an hour, or 5,250 a day. It was “ constructed expressly for printing Webster's ‘ Elementary Spelling Book ’ [the name had been changed in 1829] at an expense of $5,000.” Down to 1865, 42,000,000 copies had been sold, and down to 1889, 62,000,- 000. The appearance of Webster's first Dictionary, in 1806, greatly strengthened his influence. Four other dictionaries had been published in the United States since 1798 — Samuel Johnson, Jr.'s, John Elliott's, Caleb Alexander's and William Woodridge's — but Noah's quickly dominated the popular field, and in those days dictionaries were accepted even more gravely than they are today.1 Thus he left

1 Their influence was described by Allen Walker Read in The Development of Faith in the Dictionary in America, a paper read before the Present Day English Section of the Modern Language Association at Philadelphia, Dec. 29, 1934. So late as 1851 the deputy superintendent of the common schools of Massachusetts reported after he had made a tour through the State: “ In many towns the dictionary was the only authoritative judge and umpire in literary matters.” Webster's and its rivals were sold very

cheaply. The following is from a letter by Bemis and Ward, booksellers of Canandaigua, N. Y., Jan. 16, 1833: “ We published Walker's until last year, but . . . the market was crowded with them at 20 to 25 cents. Our country merchants get their supplies of them in the cities, and we have sold our plates, not being able or willing to make the book poor enough to compete with such editions. We retail Webster's [School Dictionary] at 87 cents — Walker's at 50. The poorer editions are probably sold at 37½.”

the ending in -or triumphant over the ending in -our, he shook the security of the ending in -re, he rid American spelling of a great many doubled consonants, he established the s in words of the de- fense group, and he gave currency to many characteristic American spellings, notably jail, wagon, plow, mold and ax. These spellings still survive, and are practically universal in the United States today; their use constitutes one of the most obvious differences between written English and written American. Moreover, they have founded a general tendency, the effects of which reach far beyond the field actually traversed by Webster himself. His reforms, of course, did not go unchallenged by the guardians of tradition. A glance at the literature of the first years of the Nineteenth Century shows that most of the more pretentious authors of the time ignored them, though they were quickly adopted by the newspapers. For example, the Rev. Aaron Bancroft's "Life of Washington" (1807) contains -our endings in all such words as honor, ardor and favor. Washington Irving, who began to publish in the same year, also inclined toward them, and so did William Cullen Bryant, whose "Thanatopsis" came out in 1817, and most of the other literary bigwigs of the era followed suit. After the appearance of the "American Dictionary" in 1828 a formal battle was joined, with Lyman Cobb and Joseph E. Worcester as the chief formal opponents of the reformer. His in- consistencies gave them a handy weapon for use against him - until it began to be noticed that the orthodox English spelling was quite as inconsistent. He sought to change acre to aker, but left lucre un- pontiff, but left it in distaff. He changed c to s in words of the offense class, but left the c in fence. He changed the ck in frolick, physick, etc., into a simple c, but restored it in such derivatives as frolicksome. He deleted the silent u in mould, but left it in court. These slips were made the most of by Cobb in a furious pamphlet in excessively fine print, printed in 1831.1 He also detected Webster in the frequent faux pas of using spellings in his definitions and explanations that conflicted with the spellings he advocated. Various other purists joined in the attack, and it was carried on with great fury on the appearance of Worcester's Dictionary, in 1846, three years

1 A Critical Review of the Orthography of Dr. Webster's Series of Books . . . ; New York, 1831. A modern and more moderate review of Webster's inconsistences is in A Linguistic Patriot, by Kemp Malone, American Speech, Oct., 1925.

American Spelling

after Webster's death. The partisans of conformity rallied round

Worcester, and for a while the controversy took on all the rancor

of a personal quarrel. According to McKnight,1 Harvard Univer-

sity required candidates for matriculation to follow Worcester's

spellings "as late as the last decade of the Nineteenth Century."

Both Cobb and Worcester, in the end, accepted the -or ending

and so surrendered on what was really the main issue, but various

other champions arose to carry on the war. Edward S. Gould, in

a once famous essay,2 denounced the whole Websterian orthography

with the utmost fury, and Bryant, reprinting this philippic in the

Evening Post, said that on account of Webster "the English lan-

guage has been undergoing a process of corruption for the last

quarter of a century," and offered to contribute to a fund to have

Gould's denunciation "read twice a year in every school-house in

the United States, until every trace of Websterian spelling disappears

from the land." But Bryant was forced to admit that, even in 1856,

the chief novelties of the Connecticut schoolmaster "who taught

millions to read but not one to sin " were "adopted and propagated

by the largest publishing house, through the columns of the most

widely circulated monthly magazine, and through one of the ablest

and most widely circulated newspapers in the United States" —

which is to say, the Tribune under Greeley. The last academic attack

was delivered by Bishop A. C. Coxe in 1886, and he contented him-

self with the resigned statement that "Webster has corrupted our

spelling sadly." T. R. Lounsbury, with his active interest in spelling

reform, ranged himself on the side of Webster, and effectively dis-

posed of the controversy by showing that the great majority of his

spellings were supported by precedents quite as respectable as those

behind the fashionable English spellings. In Lounsbury's opinion, a

great deal of the opposition to them was no more than a symptom

of antipathy to all things American among certain Englishmen and

of subservience to all things English among certain Americans.3

Thus Webster gradually conquered the country, and many,

though certainly not most, of the reformed spellings he advocated

1 Modern English in the Making,

p. 490.

2 Democratic Review, March, 1856.

In Good English New York, 1867,

p. 145 ff, Gould gloated over the

fact that in the Webster's Diction-

aries of 1854 and 1866, brought out

after Webster's death, many of his

spellings were withdrawn, or re-

duced to the estate of variants.

3 See his English Spelling and Spell-

ing Reform; New York, 1909,

p. 229.

388

The American Language

at one time or another are the American standard today. Moreover, not a few of them have been adopted in England, and others seem to be making headway there. This invasion, of course, does not go without resistance, and every now and then there is an uproar in the English papers against American orthography, matching in virulence the perennial uproars against American slang. Back in 1892 Brander Matthews noted sadly “the force, fervor and frequency of the objurgations in the columns of the Saturday Review and of the Atheneum.” 1 Those objurgations continue to be launched in the more finicky section of the English press to this day. Here is a specimen from a letter in the Literary Supplement of the London Times, the object of the assault being an edition of Walter Pater’s “ Marius the Epicurean ” with certain somewhat gingery concessions to American usage:

Hardly a page but is blistered with hideous vulgarisms such as offenses, skillful, fiber, theater, somber, traveling, moldering, marvelous, jeweler, wor-shiper, esthetic; things which to Pater, one feels, would have been merely horrible. Nor is there even the grace of consistency in evil-doing; since we get mouldering on page 49, and moldering on page 143, favour on page 69 with favor four pages farther on, and traveller on dust-cover and title-page against traveler throughout the book.

The reason? Small doubt that these monstrous hybrids in “English ” publications of “English ” literature are bred by mass-production out of Copyright Law; making the best of both worlds by slipping into an English series-cover a book printed from stereo-plates made in U.S.A.

Surely the re-issue of English classics in the “nu spelling” from “America” might be left to American publishers. And if it pays London to cater for U.S.A. readers, one might at least expect some warning for those who prefer the King's English undefiled: such as asterisks in the list against those volumes in which the “nu speling” is used, or the use of the “nu speling” itself in the covers, title-pages, and advertisements.2

2. THE ADVANCE OF AMERICAN SPELLING

But such uncompromising defenders of English spelling lead a forlorn hope. Not only is there a general movement toward American forms in the newspapers — including the Times itself —; there is also a general yielding by English “authorities.” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Brothers Fowler, which came out in

1 Americanisms and Briticisms; New 2 This Nu Spelling, by C. R. Prance; York, 1892, p. 37. London Times, April 24, 1930.

American Spelling

1914, offers plenty of examples. The authors say in their preface that they “stop short of recognizing forms that at present strike every reader as Americanisms,” but they surely go far enough. In all the words ending in -ise and -isation the English s is changed to the American z. They prefer leveler to leveller and riveted to rivetted, though clinging sentimentally to traveller. They retain the first e in judgement, but omit it from likeable, and even go ahead of American usage by omitting it from mileage. They dismiss the -or ending as “entirely non-British,” but concede that it is necessary in horror and torpor. Finally, they swap the English y for the American i in tire, cider and siphon, recognize a as a variant for y in pyjama, concede that jail is as good as gaol, prefer the American asphalt to the English asphalte, toilet to toilette, and balk to baulk, and admit program, wagon, check (on a bank) and skeptic without precisely endorsing them. The monumental Oxford Dictionary upon which the Concise Oxford is grounded shows many silent concessions, and quite as many open yieldings — for example, in the case of ax, which is admitted to be “better than axe on every ground.” Moreover, many English lexicographers tend to march ahead of it, outstripping the liberalism of its editor, the late Sir James A. H. Murray. In 1914, for example, Sir James was still protesting against dropping the first e from judgement, but two years earlier the “Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary,” edited by Horace Hart,1 Controller of the Oxford University Press, had dropped judgement altogether. “The Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary” was, and is, an authority approved by the Master Printers’ and Allied Trades’ Association of London, the Edinburgh Master Printers’ Association, the Belfast Printing Trades Employers’ Association, and the executive committee of the London Association of Correctors of the Press, i.e., proofreaders. Hart is now dead, but the seventh edition (1933), revised by some unnamed hand, continues to show a great many characteristic American spellings. For example, it recommends the use of jail and jailer in place of the English gaol and gaoler, drops the final e from asphalte and stye, changes the y to i in cyder, cypher and syren, and advocates the same change in tyre, drops the redundant t from nett, changes burthen to burden, spells wagon with one g, prefers fuse to fuze, and takes the e out of

1 Authors’ & Printers’ Dictionary . . . an attempt to codify the best typographical practices of the present day, by F. Howard Collins; 4th ed., revised by Horace Hart; London, 1912.

390 The American Language

storey. "Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford," also edited by Hart (with the advice of Sir James Murray and Dr. Henry Bradley) is another very influential English authority.1 It gives its imprimatur to bark (a ship), cipher, siren, jail, story, tire and wagon, and even advocates kilogram, tiro and omelet. Cassell's New English Dictionary - goes quite as far. Like the "Authors' and Printers' Dictionary " and the Concise Oxford it clings to the -our and -re endings and to the redundant a in such words as æsthete and anæsthesia, but it prefers jail to gaol, net to nett, story to storey, asphalt to asphalte, tire to tyre, wagon to waggon, vial to phial, and pygmy to pigmy.

There is, however, much confusion among these authorities; the English are still unable to agree as to which American spellings they will adopt and which they will keep under the ban for a while longer. The Concise Oxford and the "Authors' and Printers' Dictionary " prefer bark to barque and the late Poet Laureate, Dr. Robert Bridges,3 adopted it boldly, but Cassell still clings to barque. Cassell favors baritone; the Oxford and the A. and P. are for barytone. The Oxford is for czar; Cassell and the A. and P. for tsar. The Oxford admits program; Cassell and the A. and P. stick to programme. Cassell and the A. and P. adopt the American scimitar; the Oxford retains the English scimetar. All three have abandoned enquire for inquire, but they remain faithful to encumbrance, endorse and enclose, though the Oxford and Cassell list indorsation and the Oxford also gives indorse. Both the Oxford and Cassell have abandoned æther for ether, but they cling to æsthetic and ætiology. Neither gives up plough, cheque, connexion, mould, mollusc or kerb, and Cassell even adorns the last-named with an astounding compound credited to "American slang," to wit, kerbstone broker. All the English authorities that I have consulted prefer the -re and -our endings; nevertheless, the London Nation adopted the -or ending in 1919,4 and George Bernard Shaw had adopted it years before,5 as had Walter Savage

1 Horace Hart: Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford: 23rd ed.; London, 1914. I am informed by Mr. Humphrey Davy, of the London Times, that, with one or two minor exceptions, the Times observes the rules laid down in this book.

2 Edited by Dr. Ernest A. Baker; London, 1919.

3 On English Homophones; S.P.E. Tracts, No. II, 1919, p. 7.

4 This note appeared in English, May-June, 1919, p. 88: "By the way, the Nation now spell labor, honor, favor." Note the plural verb.

5 Shaw is, in general, an advanced speller. He was spelling program without the final -me when it still

Landor before him. The British Board of Trade, in attempting to fix the spelling of various scientific terms, has often come to grief. Thus, it detaches the final -me from gramme in such compounds as kilogram and milligram, but insists upon gramme when the word stands alone. In American usage gram is now common, and scarcely challenged. A number of spellings, some of them American, are trembling on the brink of acceptance in both countries. Among them is rime (for rhyme). This spelling was correct in England until about 1530, but its recent revival was of American origin. It is accepted by the Concise Oxford, by the editors of the “Cambridge History of English Literature,” and by many English periodicals, including Notes and Queries, but not by Cassell. Grewsome has got a footing in both countries, but the weight of English opinion is still against it. Develop (instead of develope) has gone further in both. So has engulf, for engulph. And most English newspapers have begun to drop the redundant a in medieval, esophagus, etc. But they still spell bologna (sausage) balony, thus rivaling but not imitating Al Smith's baloney.

There is not much movement of English spellings in this direction; the traffic, as in the case of neologisms, runs heavily the other way. At Bar Harbor, in Maine, a few of the more Anglophil Summer residents are at pains to put harbour instead of harbor on their stationery, but the local postmaster still continues to stamp all mail Bar Harbor, the legal name of the place.1 In the same way American haberdashers of the more doggy sort sometimes advertise pyjamas instead of pajamas, just as they advertise braces instead of suspenders, and boots instead of shoes. But this benign folly does not go very far. Even the most fashionable jewelers in Fifth avenue still deal in jewelry, not jewellery. The English ketchup has made some progress against the American catsup, and cheque has come into use of late among American accountants, but only as a convenient means of distinguishing between a bank check (to which it is applied) and

seemed barbaric in England, and he also prefers catalog, toilet and etiquet. But he clings to to shew (as in The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet), though it is going out, and the Authors' and Printers' Dictionary recommends to show “except in Sc. law, and Bib. and Prayer Book citations.”

1 In Christopher Morley's Thunder on the Left; New York, 1925, the name of Deep Harbor, a place supposed near New York City, is spelled Harbour. This natural slip by a Rhodes scholar is rebuked by Clifford H. Bissell in Is It Pedantry?, Saturday Review of Literature, Aug. 13, 1927.

392

The American Language

check in the sense of a verification. Sometimes an American book, intended also for circulation in England, is printed in what American printers call English spelling. This English spelling, at best, is a somewhat lame compromise, and seems to be passing out. As used at the Riverside Press,1 it embraced until a few years ago, all the -our endings and the following further forms:

cheque chequered connexion dreamt faggot forgather forgo grey inflexion jewellery leapt premiss (in logic) waggon

But in the latest edition of the Riverside Press's Handbook of Style 2 all save the -our endings have been omitted, and I am informed by Mr. Henry A. McLaughlin of the Press that English spellings are used "only when we are doing books by English authors, and the English author prefers to have us follow the English usage rather than our own." Another great American press, that of the J. S. Cushing Company, follows a list which includes both the -our endings and these words:

behove briar cheque connexion drily enquire gaiety gaol gipsy inflexion instal judgment lacquey moustache nought pigmy postillion reflexion shily slily staunch storey (floor) verandah waggon 3

This list, along with the -our endings, appears also in the style-book of the Macmillan Company, the largest of the English-Ameri- can publishing firms.4 It would seem to need revision, for, as we have seen, the English themselves have begun to abandon gaol, storey, waggon, judgement and pigmy, and are showing a considerable

1 Handbook of Style in Use at the Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass.; Boston, 1913. 2 Boston, 1930. 3 Preparation of Manuscript, Proof Reading, and Office Style at J. S. Cushing Company's; Norwood, Mass., n.d. Under date of Sept. 19, 1935, Mr. Robert T. Barr, one of the directors of the company, writes: "In practically all of the new books that are now being pub- lished we have been requested by the several publishers to follow the new Webster's International Dictionary (1934) in regard to spelling. With the few English books we have been doing lately our orders have been to follow copy." 4 The Authors' Book; New York, 1925. I am indebted here to Mr. H. S. Latham, vice-president of the Macmillan Co.

uncertainty about enquire. "The Authors' and Printers' Dictionary," indeed, now prefers the American brier to the English briar, dryly to drily, install to instal, lackey to lacquey, naught to nought, postilion to postillion, shyly to shily and veranda to verandah, and allows reflection for reflexion. Thus there is little of English spelling left save the -our and -re words and the charges of fraud. The Government Printing Office at Washington has followed "Webster's New International" since 1864, when the Superintendent of Public Printing (he became the Public Printer in 1895) was authorized by law to determine " the forms and style in which the printing . . . ordered by any of the departments shall be executed." He issued his first Style Manual in 1887 and it has been revised a number of times since. Down to 1929 it was edited by a board of employes of the Government Printing Office, but in that year representatives of the State, Commerce, Agriculture and Interior Departments and of the Smithsonian Institution were invited to participate. A copy of this work is in the proofroom of nearly every American magazine and newspaper. It favors American spelling in all cases, and its rules are generally observed. The Atlantic Monthly, alone among American magazines of wide circulation, is inclined to be more conservative, probably under the influence of Worcester. It uses the -re ending in words of the center class, retains the u in mould, moult and mous-tache, retains the redundant terminal letters in such words as gramme, programme and quartette, retains the final e in axe and adze, and clings to the double vowels in such words as mediaeval and anaes-thesia. In addition, it uses the English plough, whiskey, clue and grue-some, differentiates between the noun practise and the verb to practise, and makes separate words of to ensure, to make certain, and to insure, to protect or indemnify.1

But American spelling is plainly better than English spelling, and in the long run it seems sure to prevail. The superiority of jail to gaol is made manifest by the common mispronunciation of the latter by Americans who find it in print, making it rhyme with coal. Other changes also carry their own justification. Hostler is obviously better English, etymologically speaking, than ostler, and cozy is more nearly phonetic than cosy. Curb has analogues in curtain, curdle, cur-

1 Text, Type and Style: A Compendium of Atlantic usage, by George B. Ives; Boston, 1921.

394

The American Language

few, curl, currant, curry, curve, curtesy, curse, currency, cursory, cur, curt and many other common words: kerb has very few, and of them only kerchief and kernel are in general use. Moreover, the English themselves use curb as a verb and in all noun sense save that shown in kerbstone. Such forms as monolog and dialog still offend the fastidious, but their merit is not to be gainsaid. Nor would it be easy to argue logically against gram, toilet, mustache, ax, caliber, gayety, gray, anesthetic, draft and tire. Something may be said, even, for chlorid, brusk, lacrimal, gage, eolian, niter, sulfite and phenix,1 which still wait for general recognition. A number of anomalies remain. The American retention of e in forego and whiskey is not easily explained, nor the unphonetic substitution of s for z in fuse, nor the persistence of the y in gypsy and pygmy, nor the occasional survival of a foreign form, as in cloture.2 Here we have plain vagaries, surviving in spite of attack by orthographers. Webster, in one of his earlier books, denounced the k in skeptic as a "mere pedantry," but later on he adopted it. In the same way pygmy, gray and mollusk have been attacked, but they still remain sound American. The English themselves have many more such illogical forms to account for. They have to write offensive and defensive (nouns), despite their fidelity to the c in offence and defence.3 They hesitate to abandon programme, but never think of using diagramme or telegramme. Worst of all, they are inconsistent in their use of the -our ending, the chief glory of orthodox English orthography.4 In American the u appears only in Saviour and then

still cloture, though with the loss of the circumflex accent, and this form is generally retained by American newspapers - that is, when they do not use gag.

1 This form is used by the Chatham and Phenix National Bank, in New York. But the Phenix Insurance Company, of Hartford, Conn., retains the old spelling. About 100 corporations having the word in their names are listed in the New York telephone directory. A fifth of them use phenix.

2 The Fowler's in The King's English, 2nd ed.; London, 1908, p. 23, say that "when it was proposed to borrow from France what we [i.e., the English] now know as the closure, it seemed certain for some time that with the thing we should borrow the name, cloture; a press campaign resulted in closure." But in the Congressional Record it is

3 Webster's New International prefers offense and defense. In license, advice, device, prophecy, practise, etc. the English rule is that the nouns shall take c and the verbs s. But the American Medical Association Press "has always spelled practice with c, whether for noun or verb." Journal of the American Medical Association, April 26, 1930, p. 1342.

4 Says H. W. Fowler in Modern English Usage; Oxford, 1926, p. 415: "The American abolition of

only when the word is used in the biblical sense. In England it is used in most words of that class, but omitted from agent nouns, e.g., ambassador, emperor and progenitor, and also from various other words, e.g., horror and torpor. It is commonly argued in defense of it over there that it serves to distinguish French loan-words from words derived directly from the Latin, but Gilbert Tucker shows1 that this argument is quite nonsensical, even assuming that the distinction has any practical utility. Ancestor, bachelor, error, exterior, governor, metaphor, mirror, senator, superior, successor and torpor all came into English from the French, and yet British usage sanctions spelling them without the u. On the other hand it is used in arbour, behaviour, clangour, flavour and neighbour, " which are not French at all." Tucker goes on:

Even in ardour, armour, candour, endeavour, favour, honour, labour, odour, parlour, rigour, rumour, saviour, splendour, tumour and vapour, where the u has some color of right to appear, it is doubtful whether its insertion has much value as suggesting French derivation, for in the case of twelve of these words the ordinary reader would be quite certain to have in mind only the modern spelling - ardeur, armure, candeur, faveut, bonneur, labeur, odeur, rigueur, rumeur, splendeur, tumeur and vapeur - which have the u indeed but no o (and why should not one of these letters be dropped as well as the other?) - while endeavour, parlour and saviour come from old French words that are themselves without the u - devoir, parleor and saveor. The u in all these words is therefore either useless or positively misleading. And finally in the case of colour, clamour, fervour, humour, rancour, valour and vigour, it is to be remarked that the exact American orthography actually occurs in old French! "Finally," I said, but that is not quite the end of British absurdity with these -our -or words. Inconsistent as our transatlantic cousins are on writing arbour, armour, clamour, clangour, colour, dolour, flavour, honour, humour, labour, odour, rancour, rigour, savour, valour, vapour and vigour, and " most unpleasant " as they find the omission of the excrescent u in any of these words, they nevertheless make no scruple of writing the derivatives in the American way - arboreal, armory, clamorons, clangorous, colorific, dolorous, flavorous, honorary, humorous, laborious, odorous, rancorous, rigorous, savory, valorous, vaporize and vigorous - not inserting the u in the second syllable of any one

-our in such words as honour and favour has probably retarded rather than quickened English progress in the same direction. Our first notification that a book we are reading is not English but American is often, nowadays, the sight of an -or. 'Yankee ' we say, and congratulate ourselves on spelling like gentlemen; we wisely decline to regard it as a matter for argument; the English way cannot but be better than the American way; that is enough. Most of us, therefore, do not come to the question with an open mind." "The Americans," says Basil de Sélincourt in Pomona, or The Future of English; London, 1928, p. 40, "have dropped a u out of humour and other words; possibly we should have done so, if they had not." My italics.

1 American English; New York, 1921, p. 37.

396

The American Language

of these words. The British practice is, in short and to speak plainly, a jumble of confusion, without rhyme or reason, logic or consistency; and if anybody finds the American simplification of the whole matter “unpleasant,” it can be only because he is a victim of unreasoning prejudice against which no argument can avail.

If the u were dropped in all derivatives, the confusion would be less, but it is retained in many of them, for example, colourable, favourite, misdemeanour, coloured and labourer. The derivatives of honour exhibit clearly the difficulties of the American who essays to write correct English. Honorary, honorarium and honorific drop the u, but honourable retains it. Furthermore, the English make a distinction between two senses of rigor. When used in its pathological sense (not only in the Latin form of rigor mortis, but as an English word) it drops the u; in all other senses it retains the u.

In Canada the two orthographies, English and American, flourish side by side. By an Order-in-Council of 1890, official correspondence must show the English spelling, and in 1931 the Canadian Historical Association, the Canadian Geographical Society and the Royal Society of Canada joined in urging its use by every loyal Canadian.1 But though it is ordained in all the -our words in “Preparation of Copy For the Printer,” issued by the King’s Printer at Ottawa,2 there are, in that pamphlet, various other concessions to American usage. The English aluminium, for example, is to be used in scientific documents, but the American aluminum is permitted in commercial writing. Ccipber, dryly, jail, net, program and wagon are to be spelt in the American manner, and even alright is authorized. Nearly all the Canadian newspapers use the American spelling and it is also taught in most of the public schools, which are under the jurisdiction, not of the Dominion government, but of the provincial ministers of education. In Australia the English spelling is official, but various American forms are making fast progress. According to the Triad (Sydney), “horrible American inaccuracies of spelling are coming into common use” in the newspapers out there; worse, the educational authorities of Victoria authorize the use of the American -er ending. This last infamy has been roundly denounced by Sir Adrian Knox, Chief Justice of the Commonwealth, and the Triad has displayed a good deal of colonial passion in supporting

1 Canada Won’t Even Import American Spelling, Baltimore Evening Sun, Aug. 5, 1931. 2 5th ed., 1928.

him. “Unhappily,” it says, “we have no English Academy to guard

the purity and integrity of the language. Everything is left to the

sense and loyalty of decently cultivated people.” But even the Triad

admits that American usage, in some instances, is “correct.” It is,

however, belligerently faithful to the -our ending. “If it is correct

or tolerable in English,” it argues somewhat lamely, “to write labor

for labour, why not boddy for body, steddy for steady, and yot for

yacht?” Meanwhile, as in Canada, the daily papers slide into the

Yankee orbit.

3. THE SIMPLIFIED SPELLING MOVEMENT

Franklin’s “Scheme For a New Alphabet and Reformed Mode of

Spelling” was by no means the first attempt to revise and rationalize

English orthography. So long ago as the beginning of the Thirteenth

Century a monk named Ormin tried to reform the spelling of the

Middle English of his time. The chief difficulty then encountered

was in distinguishing between long vowels and short ones, and Ormin

proposed to get rid of it by doubling the consonants following the

latter. Thus he spelled fire, fir, and fir, firr. His proposal got no sup-

port, and the manuscript in which he made it lay in obscurity for six

centuries, but when it was exhumed at last it turned out to be very

useful to philologians, for it threw a great deal of light upon early

Middle English pronunciation. Thus, the fact that Ormin spelled

God as we do showed that the word was then rhymed with load,

and the fact that he spelled goddspell (gospel) with two d’s showed

that a shorter o was beginning to prevail in the derivative.

Ormin was followed after three and a half centuries by Sir John

Cheke (1514-57), the first regius professor of Greek at Cambridge.

Middle English had passed out by that time, and Modern English

was in, but many survivals of the former were still encountered,

including a host of now-useless final e’s. Sir John proposed to ampu-

tate all of them. He also proposed to differentiate between the short

and long forms of the same vowels by doubling the latter. Finally,

he proposed to get rid of all silent consonants, thus making doubt,

for example, dout, and turning fault into faut, for it was so pro-

nounced at that time.1 Cheke was supported in his reforms by a

1 He was in favor of what he called

opposed the excessive use of loan-

a “clean and pure” English, and

words, then very popular. In a

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The American Language

number of influential contemporaries, including Roger Ascham, but English went on its wild way. In 1568 another attempt to bring it to rule was made by Sir Thomas Smith, one of his friends and colleagues at Cambridge. Smith's proposals were published in a Latin work entitled "De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicanae Scriptione," and the chief of them was that the traditional alphabet be abandoned and a phonetic alphabet substituted. A century later the Rev. John Wilkins, then Dean of Ripon and later Bishop of Chester, came forward with another phonetic alphabet -- this time of about 450 characters! But though Wilkins argued for it very learnedly on physiological grounds, printing many engravings to show the action of the tongue and palate, it seems to have made no impression on his contemporaries, and is now forgotten save by antiquarians. Nor was any greater success made by his numerous successors. They framed some very apt and pungent criticisms of English orthography and projected a number of quite reasonable reforms, but they had little hand in the determination of actual spelling practise. That was mainly the work of printers, and after 1650 their rules began to be accepted by English authors, and most of them remain in force to this day.1 Since Franklin's time the literature of the subject has taken on large proportions, and contributions to it have been made by all sorts of persons, ranging from scientific philologians to fanatics of the sort who project new religions and new political economies.2 In the last century the most noise was made by Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of the system of shorthand bearing his name. In the early 40's, in association with Alexander J. Ellis, he proposed a new phonetic alphabet of forty letters, and during the years following

translation of the Gospel of Mark, published in 1550, he substituted bunderder for centurion, and crossed for crucified.

1 A good account of the early reformers is in Every-Day English, by Richard Grant White; Boston, 1881, Ch. X. See also Introduction to the Science of Language, by A. H. Sayce, 4th ed.; London, 1900, p. 330 ff; Modern English in the Making, by George H. McKnight; New York, 1928, p. 117 ff and the various passages listed under Spelling in his index; The Development

of Modern English, by Stuart Robertson; New York, 1934, pp. 271-80; and Handbook of Simplified Spelling; New York, 1920, p. 5.

2 A partial list of the books on the subject printed in the United States between 1807 and 1860 is in The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp; New York, 1925, Vol. I, p. 330. Most of those printed down to the end of 1922 are listed in Arthur G. Kennedy's Bibliography of Writings on the English Language; Cambridge (Mass.), 1927.

he made vigorous propaganda for it in his Phonographic Journal, and through the Phonetic Society, which he organized in 1843.

But the real father of the Simplified Spelling movement was probably Noah Webster. The controversy over his new spelling, described in the last section, aroused a great deal of public interest in the subject, and in the early 70's even the dons of the American Philological Association began to give it some attention. In 1875 they appointed a committee consisting of Professors Francis A. March of Lafayette College, W. D. Whitney and J. Hammond Trumbell of Yale, S. S. Haldeman of the University of Pennsylvania, and F. J. Child of Harvard to look into it, and in 1876 this committee reported that a revision of spelling was urgent and that something should be done about it. Specifically, they proposed that eleven new spellings be adopted at once, to wit, ar, catalog, definit, gard, giv, hav, infinit, liv, tho, thru and wish't.

During the same year there was an International Convention for the Amendment of English Orthography at Philadelphia, with several delegates from England present, and out of it grew the Spelling Reform Association, which immediately endorsed the eleven new spellings of the five professors. Three years later a similar body was organized in England, with A. H. Sayce, deputy professor of comparative philology at Oxford as its president, and Charles Darwin, Alfred Tennyson, Sir Isaac Pitman, Sir John Lubbock, and such eminent philologists as J. A. H. Murray, W. W. Skeat and Henry Sweet among its vice-presidents.

The Philological Society of England and the American Philological Association kept a friendly watch upon the progress of events. In 1880 the former issued a pamphlet advising various "partial corrections of English spellings," and in 1886 the latter followed with recommendations affecting about 3500 words, and falling under ten headings. Most of the new forms listed had been put forward years before by Webster, and some of them had entered into unquestioned American usage in the meantime, e.g., the deletion of the u from the -our words, the substitution of er for re at the end of words, and the reduction of traveller to traveler.

The trouble with the others was that they were either too uncouth to be adopted without a long struggle or likely to cause errors in pronunciation. To the first class belonged tung for tongue, ruf for rough, batl for battle and abuv for above, and to the second such

forms as cach for catch and troble for trouble. The result was that the whole reform received a setback: the public dismissed the reformers as a pack of lunatics. Twelve years later the National Education Association revived the movement with a proposal that a beginning be made with a very short list of reformed spellings, and nominated the following twelve changes by way of experiment: tho, altho, thru, throut, thoro, thoroly, thorofare, program, prolog, catalog, pedagog and decalog. Then, in 1906, came the organization of the Simplified Spelling Board, with a subsidy of $15,000 a year from Andrew Carnegie (later increased to $25,000 a year), and a formidable list of members and collaborators, including Henry Bradley, F. I. Furnivall, C. H. Grandgent, W. W. Skeat, T. R. Louns- bury and F. A. March. The board at once issued a list of 300 revised spellings, new and old, and in August, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered their adoption by the Government Printing Office. But this effort to hasten matters aroused widespread opposition, and in a little while the spelling reform movement was the sport of the national wits. The Government Printing Office resisted, and so did most of the departments, and in the end the use of the twelve new spellings was confined to the White House. Not many American magazines or newspapers adopted them, and they were seldom used in printing books. When, in 1919, Carnegie died, his subsidy ceased,1 and since then the Simplified Spelling Board has moved from the glare of Madison avenue, New York, to the rural retirement of Lake Placid, and there has been a serious decline in its activities. During Carnegie’s lifetime it issued a great many bulletins and circulars, but since 1924 it has published nothing save a small magazine called Spelling – three issues in 1925 and four in 1931.2 In its heyday the board claimed that 556 American newspapers and other periodicals, with a combined circulation 18,000,000, were using the twelve simplified spellings of the National Education Association’s list and “ most of the 300 simpler spellings ” recommended by its own first list, and that 460 universities, colleges and normal-

1 First and last, he is said to have spent $283,000 on the movement. 2 In 1920 it organized a Simplified Spelling Leag [sic] to raise funds. Members were asked to contribute $10 a year and associates $1. A fel- low made a single payment of $100, and a patron one of $1000. But apparently not many customers came to the cashier’s desk, and the Leag now seems to be moribund.

American Spelling

schools were either using most of these spellings "in their official publications and correspondence," or permitting "students to use them in their written work." 1 But not many of these publications or educational institutions were of much importance. The Literary Digest led the very short list of magazines of national circulation, and the Philadelphia North American led the newspapers. With regard to the colleges, the situation in Massachusetts was perhaps typical. Three institutions had adopted the new spelling – Clark College, Emerson College and the International Y.M.C.A. College. But Harvard was missing, and so were the Massachusetts Tech, Wellesley, Smith and Boston University.

The board issued various lists of reformed spellings from time to time, and in 1919 it brought out a Handbook of Simplified Spelling summarizing its successive recommendations. They were as follows:

1. When a word begins with or includes æ or œ substitute e: esthetic, medieval, subpena. But retain the dipthong at the end of a word: alumne

2. When bt is pronounced t, drop the silent b: det, dettor, dout.

3. When ceed is final spell it cede: excede, procede, succeede.

4. When ch is pronounced like hard c, drop the silent h except before e, and y: caracter, clorid, corus, cronic, eco, epoc, mecanic, monarc, scoloar, scool, stomac, tecnical. But retain architect, chemist, monarchy.

5. When a double consonant appears before a final silent e drop the last two letters: bizar, cigaret, creton, gavot, gazet, giraf, gram, program, quartet, vaudevil.

6. When a word ends with a double consonant substitute a single consonant: ad, bil, bluf, buz, clas, dol, dul, eg, glas, les, los, mes, mis, pas, pres, shal, tel, wil. But retain ll after a long vowel: all, roll. And retain ss when the word has more than one syllable: needless.

7. Drop the final silent e after a consonant preceded by a short stressed vowel: giv, hav, liv.

8. Drop the final silent e in the common words are, gone and were: ar, gon, wer.

9. Drop the final silent e in the unstressed final short syllables, ide, ile, ine, ise, ite and ive: activ, bromid, definit, determin, practis, hostil.

10. Drop the silent e after lu and rv: involu, twelv, carv, deserv.

11. Drop the silent e after v or z when preceded by a digraph representing a long vowel or a diphthong: achiev, freez, gauz, sneez.

12. Drop the e in final oe when it is pronounced o: fo, ho, ro, to, wo. But retain it in inflections: foes, hoed.

13. When one of the letters in ea is silent drop it: bred, brekfast, hed, hart, harth.

14. When final ed is pronounced d drop the e: cald, carrid, employd,

1 Reasons and Rules For Simplified Spelling, April, 1919.

402 The American Language

marrid, robd, snee zd, struggld, wrongd. But not when a wrong pronuncia-tion will be suggested: bribd, cand, fild (for filed), etc.

15. When final ed is pronounced t substitute t: addrest, shipt, hel pt, in-dorst. But not when a wrong pronunciation will be suggested: bakt, fact (for faced), etc.

16. When ei is pronounced like ie in brief sub stitute ie: conciet, deciev, wierd.

17. When a final ey is pronounced y drop the e: barly, chimny, donky, mony, vally.

18. When final gh is pronounced f sub stitute f and drop the silent letter of the preceding digraph: enuf, laf, ruf, tuf.

19. When gh is pronounced g drop the silent h: agast, gastly, gost, goul.

20. When gm is final drop the silent g: apothem, diafram, flem.

21. When gue is final after a consonant, a short vowel or a digraph rep-resenting a long vowel or a diphthong drop the silent ue: tung, catalog, barang, leag, sinagog. But not when a wrong pronunciation would be sug-gested: rog (for rogue), vag (for vague), etc.

22. When a final ise is pronounced ize sub stitute ize: advertize, advize, franchize, rize, wize.

23. When mb is final after a short vowel drop b: bom, crum, dum, lam, lim, thum. But not when a wrong pronunciation would be suggested: com (for comb), tom (for tomb), etc.

24. When ou before l is pronounced o drop u: mold, sholder. But not sol (for soul).

25. When ough is final spell o, u, ock, or up, according to the pronuncia-tion: altho, boro, dont, furlu, tho, thoro, thru, bock, biccup.

26. When our is final and ou is pronounced as a short vowel drop u: color, honor, labor.

27. When ph is pronounced f sub stitute f: alfabet, emfasis, fantom, fono-graf, fotograf, sulfur, telefone, telegraf.

28. When re is final after any consonant save c sub stitute er: center, fiber, meter, theater. But not lucer, mediocer.

29. When rh is initial and the h is silent drop it: retoric, reumatism, rime, rubarb, ritbm.

30. When sc is initial and the c is silent drop it: senery, sented, septer, sience, sissors.

31. When u is silent before a vowel drop it: bild, condit, garantee, gard, ges, gide, gild.

32. When y is between consonants sub stitute i: analis is, fisic, gipsy, paralize, rime, silvan, tipe.

Obviously, this list was too long to have much chance of being accepted quickly. Some of the spellings on it, to be sure, were already in good American usage, brought in by Webster, but others were un-couth and even ridiculous. Worse, there were many exceptions to the rules laid down —for example, in rules 1, 4, 6, 12, 14, 15 and 21. The board, as if despairing of making any headway with so many words, brought out simultaneously a much shorter list, and leaflets arguing for it were distributed in large numbers. It was as follows:

American Spelling

ad

addrest

anser(d)

ar

askt

bil(d)

buro

catalog

det

engin

enuf

fil(d)

fixt

giv

hav

insted

liv(d)

program

reciet

revier(d)

shal

shipt

tel

telefone

(al)tho

thoro(ly, -fare, etc.)

thru(out)

twelv

wil

yu

On the reverse of this leaflet was the following:

When yu hav by practis familiarized yourself with the 30 WORDS, why not, for the sake of consistency, apply the principles exemplified by their spellings to other words? For instance, if yu write addrest, anserd, askt, bild, fild, fixt, livd, recievd, shipt, why not write advanst, announst, cald, carrid, delayd, doubld, examind, followd, indorst, involst, pleasd, preferd, signd, travld, troubld, wisht, etc.? telefone, why not write telegraf, fotograf, fonograf, alfabet, etc.? ar, engin, giv, hav, liv, reciev, twelv, why not write activ, comparativ, definit, determin, examin, favorit, genuin, hostil, imagin, infinit, nativ, opposit, positiv, practis, promis, textil, believ, curv, resolv, serv, etc.? ad, bil, fil, shal, wil, why not write od, eg, bel, wel, nil, bluf, stuf, pur, dres, les, buz, etc.? catalog, why not write prolog, sinagog, etc.? det, why not write dout, etc.? insted, why not write bred, brekfest, ded, hed, red, helth, plesure, wether, etc.? program, why not write gram, cigaret, quartet, gazet, bagatel, quadril, vaudevil, etc.? reciev, why not write deciev, conciet, etc.? thoro, why not write boro, furlo, etc. enuf, why not write ruf, tuf, laf, cof, etc.?

But this list also failed to win any considerable public support. On the contrary, its clumsy novelties gave the whole spelling reform movement a black eye. In the Summer of 1921 the National Education Association, which had launched the campaign for reform in 1898, withdrew its endorsement, and during the years following most of the magazines and newspapers that had adopted its twelve new spellings went back to the orthodox forms. So long ago as 1909, when W. H. Taft succeeded Roosevelt as President, the New York

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The American Language

Sun announced the doom of the movement in an editorial of one word: thru. This was somewhat premature, for Carnegie’s money was still paying for a vigorous propaganda, but his death ten years later, as I have said, put an end to large-scale crusading, and since then spelling reform has been promoted mainly by individuals, no two of whom agree. Some of their schemes are extremely simple – for example, that of William McDevitt, a San Francisco bookseller, who simply drops out all the neutral vowels and silent consonants. Thus, the becomes th, writer is riter, because is becaus, would is woud, and after is aftr. Other current proposals involve changes in the values of the alphabet, and are thus more complicated. Dr. H. Darcy Power, an English-born professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany, proposes that x, c and q, which are redundant, be given the new values of th, ch and qw respectively, and that the different values of the vowels be indicated by drawing lines either above or below them, e.g., ā for the a in hate, a for that in car, and a without any mark for that in bat. In order to distinguish between the two sounds of th he proposes that x be used in thy and x̄ in thigh. The neutral vowel he disposes of by either dropping it altogether or displacing it with an apostrophe. Here is a specimen of his fonetic spelling, prepared by himself:

Sir C. P. Hunter [names are not as yet modified], spēking as a reprēzentativ biznes man, said he had long strōngli objēkted tu x wāst ov tim and muni in our skuls and x sakrifis ov praktikl and intelektuāl efishensi dū tu x tim spent and wāsted in lurning our unnesesarili difikult speling. Xat muni, and wot wos mor importnt, tim, kud be put tu infinitli mor praktikl ūs if it wer devōted tu rēl edukāshn. Our irashunl and difikult speling wos a hindrns and a handikap tu x impruvment ov our trād and komers.1

It will be noted that Dr. Power, like most spelling reformers, is not quite faithful to his own system, for he spells said, not as sed, but in the orthodox manner. Another revolutionist, Frederick S. Wingfield of Chicago, proposes in his fwnetik orthqgrafi to employ the redundant c, j, q, w and y to represent the vowels in at, eat, ah, oh and ooze respectively, and to make various other changes in the values of the letters. Here is the Lord’s Prayer according to his system:

Qur Fqdhr, hy qrt in hevn: hclwd bj dhqi neim. Dhqi kizdm kam, dhqiuil bj dan, on rth cz it iz in hevn. Giv as dhis dei qur deili bred, cnd forgiv

1 The English Alphabet: What It Is, What I Should Be – and What It Could Be; Freiburg i. B., 1930.

as qur dets cz uj forgivn qur detrz. Cdn ljd as nqt intu temteishn, bat djlivr as frqm jvl. For dhquin iz dhj kixdm, dhj pquar, cnd dhj glwrì forevr. Eimen.1

American Spelling

405

A somewhat similar scheme is that of Dr. R. E. Zachrisson, professor of English in the University of Upsala, Sweden. He calls it Anglic, and it seems to be backed by enthusiasts with plenty of cash, for a monthly magazine in advocacy of it was launched at Upsala in 1930, an illustrated fortnightly followed in 1931, and there are textbooks and phonograph records. Its rules fill nine pages of the official textbook,2 and seem to be somewhat complicated. The consonants, with few exceptions, have their ordinary values, but there are many changes in the vowels, some of which are doubled or provided with modifying vowels. This clustering of vowels tends to be confusing, so italics or bold-face type are used to distinguish stressed syllables, e.g., in kreaet (create) the ae is so distinguished. Here is the first sentence of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in Anglic:

Forskor and sevn yeerz agoe our faadherz braut forth on this kontinent a nue naeshon, konseevd in liberty, and dedikaeted to the propozishon that aul men ar kreaeted eequal.3

In 1927 the late Dr. Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate of England and founder of the Society for Pure English, began publishing a series of prose pamphlets embodying some new spellings and a few new letters. One of the latter was a symbol for the sound represented by i, ic, ie, ei, y, ye, ig, igh, eigh, uy, ay, ai, ey and eye in the words I, indictment, tie, eider, fly, dye, sign, sigh, height, buy, ay, aisle, eyeing and eye. It was an ı with a hook attached to its right side, making it a sort of b with a dot over it. Another was a symbol for the ng of sing. It was an n with a similar hook. Dr. Bridges also used a script a to distinguish the broad a of father from the flat a of cat, and a script g to distinguish the soft g of gentle from the hard g of thing. Further, he omitted the final mute e in most situations, though retaining it when it indicated a long preceding vowel, as in finite, and when it occurred at the end of a syllable “which has a long vowel, and can

1 Among Spelling Reformers, by Frederick S. Wingfield, American Speech, Oct., 1931. Mr. Wingfield also gives specimens of the spelling of other reformers.

2 Anglic: A New Agreed Simplified English Spelling, final rev. ed.; Upsala, 1931.

3 There is a brief but cogent criticism of Anglic, and of all like systems, in a review of the Anglic textbook in American Speech, June, 1931, p. 378 ff. It is signed A. G. K. and is apparently by Dr. Arthur G. Kennedy. Another devastating criticism is in Or Shall We Go Anglic?, by Janet Rankin Aiken, Bookman, Feb., 1931.

406 The American Language

be recognized only as a whole, as love." 1 These reforms got no sup-

port in England, and seem to have passed out with their distinguished

author, who died in 1930.

On January 28, 1935, the Chicago Tribune announced out of a

clear sky that it had adopted twenty-four simplified spellings and

was preparing to add others from time to time. Its first list was

rather cautious - catalog for catalogue, cotilion for cotillion, con-

trolled for controlled, fantom for phantom, hocky for hockey, skilful

for skillful, advertisment for advertisement, harken for hearken, and

so on. Many of these, in fact, were already in more or less general

use. But when, in its second list, dated February 11, it added agast

for aghast, aile for aisle, bagatel for bagatelle, bailif for bailiff, buro-

cracy for bureaucracy, crum for crumb and missil for missile, it got

into wilder waters, and when, in subsequent announcements, it pro-

ceeded to genuinly for genuinely, befer for beifer, herse for hearse,

staf for staff, warant for warrant, doctrin for doctrine, iland for

island, lether for leather, trafic for traffic and yern for yearn, it was

far out upon the orthographical deep.2 Its innovations met with a

mixed reception. Some of its readers applauded, but others protested,

and in a little while it was constrained to abandon iland. Its list did

not include such favorites of the Simplified Spelling Board as thro,

thru and filosofy.

But despite the fact that the activities of the board, as its secretary,

Dr. Godfrey Dewey, admits sadly, have “slowed down almost to the

stopping point,” 3 it has probably had some influence upon the

course of American spelling. It failed to bring in tho and thoro, but it

undoubtedly aided the general acceptance of catalog, program and

their congeners. The late George Philip Krapp of Columbia, who

was certainly no Anglophobe, believed that fonetic, fonograf, fosfate,

fotograf and the like were “bound to be the spelling of the future ” in

this country.4 Such forms as burlesk, nabor, naborhood, nite,5 foto,

sox, hi, lite, bolsum, biskit, ho-made, thanx and kreem, though they

1 Collected Essays, Papers, Etc.; Hindburg Line, dated “ 14 Je 34.”

London, 1927, pref. 4 Modern English; New York, 1910,

2 All of the articles announcing and p. 181.

arguing for these changes were written by James O’Donnell Ben-

nett. The dates of two have been given. The others appeared on Feb.

25, March 4, March 18 and March 25.

3 In a letter from the Lake Placid 5 Nite, says Blanche Jennings

Thompson in Our Vanishing Vocabulary, Catholic World, Aug.,

1934, “connotes speakeasies, gin, cheapness and vulgarity.” Night

“suggests quiet, rest and beauty.”

still lack the imprimatur of any academic authority, are used freely by the advertising writers, and by such advance-agents of change as the contributors to Variety. The former try to get rid of the twelve ways of representing the k-sound by employing k itself whenever possible, e.g., in kar, klothes, klassy, kwality, kosy, kollege-hat, butter-krust, keen-klutter, kutlery, kleen, kake, and so on.1 They also introduce many other novelties, e.g., uneeda, trufit (shoes), wilcut (knives), veribest, dalite (alarm clocks), staylit (matches), az-nu (second-hand), shur-on (eye-glasses), slipova (covers), nota-seme (hosiery), kant-leek (water-bottle), and the like. Most of these, of course, rise and fall with the commodities they designate, and thus have only the dignity of nonce-words, but in their very number there is some sign of a tendency. Meanwhile the advertisement writers and authors combine in an attempt to naturalize alright, a compound of all and right, made by analogy with already and almost. In my days as a magazine editor I found it in American manuscripts very often, and it not seldom gets into print.2 So far no dictionary supports it, but in “Webster's New International” (1934) it is listed as “commonly found.” It has already migrated to England and has the imprimatur of a noble lord.3 Another vigorous newcomer is sox for socks. The White Sox are known to all Americans; the White Socks would seem strange, and the new plural has got into the Congressional Record.4 Yet another is slo, as in go slo. And there are also someway, someplace, etc., drive urself (automobiles for hire),5 nuf sed, and naptha.6

1 The Craze for K, by Louise Pound, American Speech, Oct., 1925; Spelling-Manipulation and Present-Day Advertising, by the same, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. VI, 1923; and Word-Coinage and Modern Trade-Names, by the same, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. I, 1913, especially p. 35. 2 For example, in Teepee Neighbors, by Grace Coolidge; Boston, 1917, p. 220; Duty and Other Irish Comedies, by Seumas O'Brien; New York, 1916, p. 52; Salt by Charles G. Norris; New York, 1918, p. 135, and The Ideal Guest, by Wyndham Lewis, Little Review, May, 1918, p. 3. O'Brien is an Irishman and Lewis an Englishman, but the printer in each case was American. I find allright, as one word but with two l's, in Diplomatic Correspondence with Belligerent Governments, etc. European War, No. 4; Washington, 1918, p. 214. 3 Viscount Harberton, in How to Lengthen Our Ears, London, 1917, p. 28. 4 May 16, 1921, p. 1478, col. 2. 5 In Why Not U for You?, American Speech, Oct., 1929, Donald M. Alexander of Ohio Wesleyan University argues seriously that this substitution should be made, just as I has been substituted for various earlier forms of the first person pronoun. 6 See The Spelling of Naptha, by J. J. Jones, American Speech, Dec.,

408

The American Language

4. THE TREATMENT OF LOAN-WORDS

In the treatment of loan-words English spelling is much more conservative than American. This conservatism, in fact, is so marked that it is frequently denounced by English critics of the national speech usages, and it stood first among the “tendencies of modern taste” attacked by the Society for Pure English in its original prospectus in 1913 – a prospectus prepared by Henry Bradley, Dr. Robert Bridges, Sir Walter Raleigh and L. Pearsall Smith,1 and signed by many important men of letters, including Thomas Hardy, A. J. Balfour, Edmund Gosse, Austin Dobson, Maurice Hewlett, Gilbert Murray, George Saintsbury and the professors of English literature at Cambridge and London, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and W. P. Ker. I quote from this caveat:

Literary taste at the present time, with regard to foreign words recently borrowed from abroad, is on wrong lines, the notions which govern it being scientifically incorrect, tending to impair the national character of our standard speech, and to adapt it to the habits of classical scholars. On account of these alien associations our borrowed terms are now spelt and pronounced, not as English, but as foreign words, instead of being assimilated, as they were in the past, and brought into conformity with the main structure of our speech. And as we more and more rarely assimilate our borrowings, so even words that were once naturalized are being now one by one made un-English, and driven out of the language back into their foreign forms; whence it comes that a paragraph of serious English prose may be sometimes seen as freely sprinkled with italicized French words as a passage of Cicero is often interlarded with Greek. The mere printing of such words in italics is an active force toward degeneration. The Society hopes to discredit this tendency, and it will endeavour to restore to English its old recreative energy; when a choice is possible we should wish to give an English pronunciation and spelling to useful foreign words, and we would attempt to restore to a good many words the old English forms which they once had, but which are now supplanted by the original foreign forms.2

1930, p. 154. Mr. Jones prints the following letter from Fels and Company of Philadelphia, manufacturers of Fels-Naptha soap: “Fels-Naptha has been manufactured for almost forty years, and since the very beginning, when we wedded the name Fels and the word naptha we recognized that the first b was superfluous, and we merely discarded it. Since that time our spelling of naptha has found favor and it is now listed in all large and up-to-date dictionaries.” This last seems to have been an exaggeration. I can’t find naptha in Webster’s New International (1934). The decay of ph to p is discussed in Chapter VII, Section 3. 1 Smith is an expatriate American. 2 S.P.E. Tracts, No. 1, Preliminary Announcement and List of Members, Oct., 1919, p. 7. The Literary Supplement of the London

American Spelling

409

Since this was written, and probably at least partly because of it, there has been some change in England,1 but the more pretentious English papers continue to accent, and often italicize, words that have been completely naturalized in this country, e.g., café, début, portière, éclat, naïveté, régime, rôle, soirée, protégé, élite, gemütlichkeit, tête-à-tête, porte-cochère, divorcée, fiancée and dénouement. Even loan-words long since naturalized are sometimes used in their foreign forms, e.g., répertoire for repertory, muslim for moslem, crêpe for crape, and légion d'honneur for legion of honor. The dictionaries seldom omit the accents from recent foreign words. Cassell's leaves them off régime and début, but preserves them on practically all the other terms listed above; the Concise Oxford always uses them. In the United States usage is much looser. Dépôt became depot immediately it entered the language, and the same rapid naturalization has overtaken employé, matinée, débutante, négligée, exposé, résumé, hofbräu, and scores of other loan-words. Café is seldom seen with its accent, nor is señor or divorcée or attaché. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly twenty years ago, Charles Fitzhugh Talman said that “the omission of the diacritic is universal. Even the English press of French New Orleans ignores it.”2 Mr. Talman listed some rather astonishing barbarisms, among them, standchen for ständchen in Littell's Living Age, and gave an amusing account of the struggles of American newspapers with thé dansant, then a novelty. He said:

Put this through the hopper of the typesetting machine, and it comes forth, “the the dansant” - which even Oshkosh finds intolerable. The thing was, however, often attempted when thés dansant came into fashion, and with various results. Generally the proof-reader eliminates one of the the's, making dansant a quasi-noun, and to this day one reads of people giving or attending

Times supported the Society in a leading article on Jan. 8, 1920. “Of old,” it said, “we incorporated foreign words rapidly and altered their spelling ruthlessly. Today we take them in and go on spelling them and pronouncing them in a foreign way. Rendezvous is an example, régime is another. They have come to stay; the spelling of the first, and at least the pronunciation of the second, should be altered; and a powerful organization of schoolmasters and journalists could secure changes which the

working classes are in process of securing with the words (more familiar to them) garridge and shofer.” See also A Few Practical Suggestions, by Logan Pearsall Smith, S.P.E. Tracts, No. III, 1920, especially Sections I, II and III.1 In later Tracts the Society printed lists of proposed new spellings. In No. XIII (1923) it advocated rencounter for rencontre, role for rôle, tamber for timbre, intransigent for intransigeant, and malease for malaise.

1 Accents Wild, Dec., 1915, p. 807 ff.2

410

The American Language

dansants. Latterly the public taste seems to favor dansante, which doubtless

has a Frenchier appearance, provided you are sufficiently ignorant of the

Gallic tongue. Two other solutions of the difficulty may be noted:

Among those present at the "the dansant";

Among those present at the the-dansant; that is, either a hyphen or quota-

tion marks set off the exotic phrase.

There has been some improvement in recent years, but not much.

Even in the larger cities, the majority of American newspapers man-

age to get along without using foreign accents. They are even omit-

ted from foreign proper names, so that Bülow becomes Bulow and

Poincaré becomes Poincare. For a number of years the Baltimore

Evening Sun was the only Eastern daily that, to my knowledge, had

linotype mats for the common French and German accents. The

New York American did not acquire a set until late in 1934, when

they were laid in to print some short lexicographical articles that I

was then writing for the paper. Even when they are in stock they

are seldom used correctly, for American copy-readers take a high

professional pride in their complete ignorance of foreign languages,

as they do in their ignorance of the terminology of all the arts and

sciences. For the former they have the example of Walt Whitman,

who, according to Dr. Louise Pound, often omitted accents in "his

manuscript notes and in early editions," and used them incorrectly in

his later editions.1 The Congressional Record avoids them as much

as possible, and the State Department, ordinarily very conservative

and English, has abandoned visé for visa, though it is faithful to

charge. With this iconoclasm the late Dr. Brander Matthews was in

hearty sympathy. Writing in 1917, and dealing with naïve and

naïveté, which he welcomed into the language because there were

no English equivalents, he argued that they would "need to shed

their accents and to adapt themselves somehow to the traditions of

our orthography." He went on:

After we have decided that the foreign word we find knocking at the doors

of English [he really meant American, as the context shows] is likely to be

useful, we must fit it for naturalization by insisting that it shall shed its ac-

cents, if it has any; that it shall change its spelling, if this is necessary; that it

shall modify its pronunciation, if this is not easy for us to compass; and that

it shall conform to all our speech-habits, especially in the formation of the

plural.2

1 Walt Whitman and the French

Language, American Speech, May,

1926, p. 423.

guage?, Delineator, Nov., 1917,

p. 12. See also his French Words

2 Why Not Speak Or Own Lan-

in the English Language, S.P.E.

Tracts, No. V, 1921.

American Spelling

This counsel is needed by many patriotic Americans. So far as I can find, bozart (for beaux-arts) is not in any dictionary, but it is used as the name of “America’s second-largest verse magazine,” published at Box 67, Station E, Atlanta, Ga., as the name of a lead-pencil very popular in the South, and in the titles of a number of business firms, including one with quarters in Radio City, New York.1 Exposé long since lost its accent and is now commonly pronounced to rhyme with propose. Schmierkäse has become smear-kase, and the sauer in sauer-kraut and sauer-braten is often spelled sour.2 Coleslaw, by folk-etymology, has become cold-slaw. Führer is fubrer, cañon is canyon, and vaudeville is sometimes vodvil. I have even seen jonteel, in a trade name, for the French gentil, and parfay for parfait. In derivatives of the Greek haima it is the almost invariable American custom to spell the root syllable hem, but the more conservative English make it hœm — e.g., in hœmorrhage and hœmophilia. In an exhaustive list of diseases issued by the United States Public Health Service3 the hœm- form does not appear once. In the same way American usage prefers esophagus, diarrhea and etiology to the English œsophagus, diarrhœa and ætiology. In the style-book of the Journal of the American Medical Association I find many other spellings that would shock an English medical author, among them curet for curette, cocain for cocaine, gage for gauge, intern for interne, lacrimal for lachrymal, and a whole group of words ending in -er instead of in -re.4

American newspapers seldom distinguish between the masculine and feminine forms of common loan-words. Blond and blonde are used indiscriminately. The majority of papers, apparently mistaking

1 To compensate for this a firm in Hollysburg, N. Y. calls itself Beaux-Artes, Inc., thus giving the plural of art a complimentary e. 2 It is to be found thus in the 1852 edition of Webster’s American Dictionary, edited by his son-in-law, Chauncey A. Goodrich, and in Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad; New York, 1869, p. 94. But sauer-kraut is given in the Standard Dictionary (1906), and Webster’s New International (1934). 3 Nomenclature of Diseases and Conditions, prepared by direction of the Surgeon General; Washington, 1916. 4 American Medical Association Style Book; Chicago, 1915. At the 1921 session of the American Medical Association in Boston an English gynecologist read a paper and it was printed in the Journal. When he received the proofs he objected to a great many of the spellings, e.g., gonorrheal for gonorrhoeal, and fallopian for Falloppian. The Journal refused to agree to his English spellings, but when his paper was reprinted separately they were restored.

blond for a simplified form of blonde, use it to designate both sexes. So with employée, divorcée, fiancée, etc. Here the feminine form is preferred; no doubt it has been helped into use in the case of the -ee words by the analogy of devotee.1 In all cases, of course, the accents are omitted. In the formation of the plural American adopts native forms much more quickly than English. All the English authorities that I have consulted advocate retaining the foreign plurals of most of the loan-words in daily use, e. g., sanatoria, appendices, indices, virtuosi, formulæ, libretti, media, thés-dansants, monsignori. But American usage favors plurals of native design, and sometimes they take quite fantastic forms. I have observed delicatessens, monsignors, virtuosos, rathskellers, vereins, nucleuses and appendixes. Banditti, in place of bandits, would seem an affectation to an American, and so would soprani for sopranos and soli for solos. Both English and American labor under the lack of native plurals for the two everyday titles, Mister and Missus. In the written speech, and in the more exact forms of the spoken speech, the French plurals, Messieurs and Mesdames, are used, but in the ordinary spoken speech, at least in America, they are avoided, whenever possible, by circumlocution. When Messieurs has to be spoken it is pronounced messers, and in the same way Mesdames becomes mezdames, with the first syllable rhyming with sez and the second, which bears the accent, with games. In place of Mesdames a more natural form, Madames, seems to be gaining ground in America. Thus, I have found Dames du Sacré Coeur translated as Madames of the Sacred Heart in a Catholic paper of wide circulation,2 and the form is apparently used by American members of the community.

Dr. Louise Pound3 notes that a number of Latin plurals tend to become singular nouns in colloquial American, notably curricula, data, dicta, insignia and strata, and with them a few Greek plurals, e.g., criteria and phenomena. She reports hearing the following uses of them: “The curricula of the institution is being changed,” “This data is very significant,” “The dicta, ‘Go West,’ is said to have come from Horace Greeley,” “What is that insignia on his sleeve? ”, “This may be called the Renaissance strata of loan-words,” “That is no criteria,” and “What a strange phenomena!” -all by speakers

1 See Words From the French (-é, -ée), by Matthew Barnes, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXX, 1928. 2 Irish World, June 26, 1918. 3 The Pluralization of Latin Loan-Words in Present-Day American Speech, Classical Journal, Dec., 1919.

American Spelling

413

presumed to be of some education. The error leads to the creation of double plurals, e.g., curriculas, insignias, stratas, stimulis, alumnis, bacillis, narcissis. The Latin names of plants lead to frequent blunders. Cosmos and gladiolus are felt to be plurals, and from them, by folk-etymology, come the false singulars, cosma and gladiola. Dr. Pound notes many other barbarous plurals, not mentioned above, e.g., antennas, cerebras, alumnas, alumnuses, narcissuses, apparatuses, em-poriums, opuses, criterions, amcebas, cactuses, phenomenons.

5. PUNCTUATION, CAPITALIZATION, AND ABBREVIATION

In capitalization the English are much more conservative than we are. They invariably capitalize such terms as Government, Prime Minister, Church and Society, when used as proper nouns; they capitalize Press, Pulpit, Bar, etc., almost as often. Some of the English newspapers, in their leading articles (Am.: editorials), print all names of persons in capitals and small capitals, e.g., Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, and also such titles as the King and the Prime Minister. In the London Times this is also done in news articles. But in the United States only the New York Times appears to do so, and it confines the practise to its editorials. In the Eighteenth Century there was a fashion for reducing all capitals to small letters, and Lord Chesterfield thus denounced it in a letter to his son, April 13, 1752:

It offends my eyes to see rome, france, caesar, henry the fourth, etc. begin with small letters; and I do not conceive that there can be any reason for doing it half so strong as the reason of long usage to the contrary. This is an affectation below Voltaire.

But Thomas Jefferson thought otherwise, and in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence nature and creator, and even god are in lower case.1 During the 20's and 30's of the succeeding century, probably as a result of French influence, the movement against the capitals went so far that the days of the week were often spelled with small initial letters, and even Mr. became mr. Curiously enough, the most striking exhibition of this tendency of late years is offered by an English work of the highest scholarship, the Cambridge History of English Literature. It uses the lower case for all

1 A correspondent tells me that, in the manuscripts of Jefferson's let-

ters, even sentences are begun with small letters.

414

The American Language

titles, even baron and colonel, before proper names, and also avoids capitals in such words as presbyterian, catholic and christian, and in the second parts of such terms as Westminster abbey and Atlantic ocean.

There are also certain differences in punctuation. The English, as everyone knows, usually put a comma after the street number of a house, making it, for example, 34, St. James's Street.1 They insert a comma instead of a period after the hour when giving the time in figures, e.g., 9,27, and omit the o when indicating less than 10 minutes, e.g., 8,7 instead of 8.07. They do not use the period as the mark of the decimal, but employ a dot at the level of the upper dot of a colon, as in 3·1416. They commonly write 8th October instead of October 8th, and when they write 8/10/35 they mean October 8, 1935, not August 10, 1935, as we should usually mean. They cling to the hyphen in to-day, to-night and to-morrow; it is fast disappearing in America.2 They are far more careful than we are to retain the apostrophe in possessive forms of nouns used in combination, e.g., St. Mary's Church, ladies' room. In geographical names they sometimes use it and sometimes omit it; in the United States the Geographic Board endeavors to obliterate it, and most American newspapers do so. The English newspapers usually spell out street, avenue, etc., print them as separate words, and give them capital initials, but in the United States they are commonly abbreviated and printed in small letters, and sometimes they are hooked to the preceding proper names with hyphens. "Some of our papers," says the Scripps-Howard Style Book, "abbreviate streets and avenues thus: Prospect-st., Euclid-av., Bulkley-blvd., Wanamaker-pl. Notwithstanding certain objections, we approve of this abbreviated style, for space reasons." Many papers abbreviate county and company in the same way, e.g., Grady-co. and Pullman-co. The Chicago Tribune does not abbreviate such words, but it prints them in lower case, and treats even ball, house, mansion, building, park and palace likewise.3

1 This custom is sometimes imitated by American Anglophiles, but it is certainly not general in the United States.

2 Mr. David H. Dodge of San Francisco reminds me that the Western Union used to charge for each of these words as two words. But now it counts only one. It also counts good-bye as one, though Webster's

New International gives it a hyphen. In England good-bye has a hyphen but good night is two words.

3 Many American newspapers and chains of newspapers print style books for the use of their staffs. That of the Scripps-Howard group I have just quoted. Among the most elaborate are The Style Book of the Detroit News, edited by

American Spelling

There remains a class of differences that may as well be noticed under spelling, though they are not strictly orthographical. Specialty, aluminum and alarm offer examples. In English they are speciality, aluminium and alarum, though alarm is also an alternative form. Specialty, in America, is always accented on the first syllable; speciality, in England, on the third. The result is two distinct words, though their meaning is identical. How aluminium, in America, lost its fourth syllable I have been unable to determine, but all American authorities now make it aluminum and all English authorities stick to aluminium. Perhaps the boric-boracic pair also belongs here. In American boric is now almost universally preferred, but it is also making progress in England. How the difference between the English behove and the American behoove arose I do not know.

A. L. Weeks; Detroit, 1918; Style Book of the New York Herald Tribune; New York, 1929; Rules of Composition For the Use of Editors, Copy Readers, Operators and Proof Readers (Chicago Tribune); Chicago, 1934; and General Style Book (New York News); New York, 1931. Such books are not for sale, though copies usually may be obtained by persons interested. There are discussions of capitalization and abbreviation in virtually all the current desk-books of "good" English. For English usage see Modern English Punctuation, by Reginald Skelton; London, 1933.

IX

THE COMMON SPEECH

I. OUTLINES OF ITS GRAMMAR

The American common speech, of course, is closely related grammatically to the vulgar dialects of the British Isles, and in many ways it is identical with them. In both one encounters the double negative, the use of the adjective as an adverb, the confusion of cases in the pronoun and of tenses in the verb, and various other violations of the polite canon. But these similarities are accompanied by important differences. For one thing, vulgar American is virtually uniform throughout the country, whereas the British dialects differ so greatly that some of them are mutually unintelligible. There are, as we have seen in Chapter VII, certain group and regional peculiarities in the United States, but virtually all of them have to do with pronunciation and vocabulary, and are thus of no importance to grammar. A Boston taxicab-driver who moved to San Francisco would find the everyday speech of his fellows, save for a few vowel sounds and a few localisms, very like his own, and he would encounter little more difficulty in communicating with them if he moved to Chicago, New Orleans or Denver. For another thing, vulgar American shows the same tendency to ready change that characterizes the standard language, and is thus given to taking in new forms and abandoning old ones more rapidly than any of the English dialects. I myself remember when the use of the present form of the verb for the preterite, as in he give, began to develop into a wholesale adoption of a sort of historical present, as in he win a dollar, I say to him, and so on. And various observers have noted the disappearance of forms that were common only a generation or two ago, or their descent to the dialects, e.g., sot (for sat), riz, driv, clomb, see’d, and gin (for given).1 The English dialects have changed too, as one may

1 See The Verbs of the Vulgate, by Robert J. Menner, American Speech, Jan., 1926, p. 239, and The Verbs of the Vulgate in Their Historical Relations, by Henry Alexander, the same, April, 1929:

416

The Common Speech

417

discover by comparing the Cockney of Dickens with the Cockney of today, but they have apparently changed less than vulgar Ameri-can, and the changes occurring in some of them have affected others hardly at all.

For many years the indefatigable schoolmarm has been trying to put down the American vulgate, but with very little success. At great pains she teaches her pupils the rules of what she conceives to be correct English, but the moment they get beyond reach of her constabulary ear they revert to the looser and more natural speech-habits of home and work-place. They acquire, after a fash-ion, a reading knowledge of her correct English, and can even make shift to speak it on occasion, or, at all events, something colorably resembling it, but for all ordinary purposes they prefer a tongue that is easier, if less elegant. The schoolmarm's heroic struggles to dissuade them have got little aid from her professional superiors.

They have provided her with a multitude of textbooks, most of them hopelessly pedantic, though others are sensible enough,1 and they have invented a wealth of teaching methods, mostly far more magical than scientific, but they have not thrown much light upon the psychological problem actually before her. In particular, they have failed to make an adequate investigation of the folk-speech she tries to combat, seeking to uncover its inner nature and account for its vitality. American philologians have printed admirable studies of many of the other languages spoken in the United States, including the most obscure Indian tongues,2 but incredible as it may seem,

1 An excellent account of the con-tents of these books is to be found in Grammar and Usage in Text-books on English, by Robert C. Pooley; Madison, Wis., 1933. The bad ones recall a dictum of Noah Webster in his Dissentations on the English Language; Boston, 1789, pref., p. vii: “Our modern grammars have done much more hurt than good. The authors have labored to prove, what is obviously absurd, viz., that our language is not made right; and in pursuance of this idea, have tried to make it over again, and persuade the English to speak by Latin rules, or by arbitrary rules of their own. Hence they have rejected many phrases

of pure English, and substituted those which are neither English nor sense.”

2 If there were a Pulitzer Prize for such works it would undoubtedly go to Dr. Morris Swadesh's mono-graph, The Phonetics of Chiti-macha, Language, Dec., 1934, p. 345 ff. Chitimacha is an Indian tongue that is now spoken by but two people, and “they employ slightly different phonemic sys-tems.” Thus Dr. Swadesh was forced to deal with one form as the standard language, and the other as a dialect. His immensely patient and exhaustive inquiry was carried on during the Summers of 1932 and 1933 on a grant from the Com-

they have yet to produce a grammar of the daily speech of nearly 100,000,000 Americans. It was not until 1908, indeed, that any serious notice of it was taken in academic circles,1 and not until 1914 that an investigation of it was undertaken on an adequate scale and by an inquirer of adequate equipment. That inquirer was Dr. W. W. Charters, then professor of the theory of teaching at the University of Missouri, and now (1936) director of the Bureau of Educational Research at Ohio State University. One of the problems he found himself engaged upon in 1914 was that of the teaching of the grammar of Standard English in the public elementary schools. In the course of his investigation he encountered the theory that such instruction should be confined to the rules habitually violated - that the one aim of teaching grammar was to correct the speech of the pupils, and that it was useless to harass them with principles which they already observed. Apparently inclining to this somewhat dubious notion, Dr. Charters applied to the School Board of Kansas City for permission to undertake an examination of the language actually used by the children in the elementary schools of that city, and that permission was granted.

The materials he gathered were of two classes. First, the teachers of grades III to VII inclusive in twelve Kansas City public schools were instructed to turn over to Dr. Charters all the written work of their pupils, " ordinarily done in the regular order of school work " during a period of four weeks. Secondly, the teachers of grades II to VII inclusive in all the city schools, together with the principals, were instructed to make note of "all oral errors in grammar made in the school-rooms and around the school-buildings" during the five school-days of one week, by children of any age, and to dispatch these notes to Dr. Charters also. The ages thus covered ran from nine or ten to fourteen or fifteen, and perhaps five-sixths of the material studied came from children above twelve. Its examination

mittee on Research in American Native Languages. His report occupied no less than eighteen pages in Language.

1 The pioneer study seems to have been a brief investigation of the oral errors made by public-school children in Connersville, Ind. It was undertaken by G. M. Wilson, and his observations were printed in the report of the Connersville

School Board for 1908. Unluckily, I am informed by Mr. Edwin C. Dodson, superintendent of schools at Connersville, that a fire destroyed the board's copy of this report, and I have been unable to find one elsewhere. But in Dec., 1909, Mr. Wilson printed a paper on Errors in the Language of Grade-Pupils, based upon the Connersville material, in the Educator-Journal.

The Common Speech

419

threw a brilliant light upon the speech actually employed by children near the end of their schooling in a typical American city, and per corollary, upon the speech employed by their parents and other older associates. If anything, the grammatical and syntactical habits revealed were a bit less loose than those of the authentic Volkssprache, for practically all of the written evidence was gathered under conditions which naturally caused the writers to try to write what they thought to be correct English, and even the oral evidence was conditioned by the admonitory presence of the teacher, by her probably frequent failure to note errors, and by her occasional incapacity to detect them. Moreover, it must be obvious that a child of the lower classes, during the period of its actual contact with pedagogy, probably speaks better English than at any time before or afterward, for it is only then that any positive pressure is exerted upon it to that end. But even so, the departures from standard usage that were unearthed were numerous and striking, and their tendency to accumulate in definite groups appeared to show the working of general laws.1

The materials accumulated by Dr. Charters were so large that a complete Virchovian autopsy upon them was impracticable, and in consequence he confined his examination to parts of them. He chose (a) the oral errors “reported by the teachers of grades III and VII and by the principals”; (b) the oral errors made by another group consisting of the children of grades VI and VII; and (c) the written errors made by children of the last-named in twelve schools. The children of grade III had had no formal instruction in grammar, but it was in the curricula of grades VI and VII. He classified the oral errors of his (d) group as follows:

Error

Illustration

Percentage of the Total Errors

1. Subject of verb not in nominative case.

Us girls went.

4

2. Predicate nominative not in nominative case.

They were John and him. It is me.

2

3. Object of verb or preposition not in objective case.

She gave it to Martha and I.

1

4. Wrong form of noun or pronoun.

Sheeps; theirselves. The problem what is –

2

1 Dr. Charters’s report appears as Vol. XVI, No. 2, University of Missouri Bulletin, Education Series No. 9, Jan., 1915. He was aided in his inquiry by Edith Miller, teacher of English in one of the St. Louis high-schools.

420

The American Language

Error

Illustration

Percentage of

the Total Errors

5. First personal pronoun standing first in a series.

Me and him.

2

6. Failure of the pronoun to agree with its noun in number, person and gender.

Nobody can do what they like.

0

7. Confusion of demonstrative adjective and personal pronoun.

Them things.

3

8. Failure of verb to agree with its subject in number and person.

There is six. You was.

14

9. Confusion of past and present tenses.

She give us four. He ask me.

2

10. Confusion of past tense and past participle.

I seen, I have saw.

24

11. Wrong tense form.

Attackted; had ought.

5

12. Wrong verb.

Lay for lie; ain't got; confusion of can and may, shall and will.

12

13. Incorrect use of mood.

If I was in your place.

0

14. Incorrect comparison of adjectives.

Joyfulest; beautifuler; more better; worser.

1

15. Confusion of comparatives and superlatives.

She is the tallest (of two).

0

16. Confusion of adjectives and adverbs.

He looked up quick. That there book.

4

17. Misplaced modifier.

He only went two miles.

0

18. Double negative.

He isn't hardly old enough.

11

19. Confusion of preposition and conjunction.

He talks like he is sick.

0

20. Syntactical redundance.

Mother she said so. Where is it at?

10

21. Wrong part of speech due to similarity of sound.

I would of known; they for there.

1

It will be noted that 57% of the total errors discovered involved the use of the verb, and that nearly half of these, or 24% of the total, involved a confusion between the preterite and the perfect participle. Difficulties with pronouns accounted for 14%, double negatives for 11% and the confusion of adjectives and adverbs for 4%. The (b) group, composed of children of grades VI and VII, in both of which grammar was studied, made almost the same errors, and in substantially the same proportions. Those in the use of the verb dropped from 57% to 52%, but those in the use of pronouns remained at 14%, and those involving the double negative remained at 11%. In the written work of the (c) group certain changes appeared, but they were hardly significant. The percentage of errors

The Common Speech

421

in the use of verbs dropped to 50, and those involving the double negative to 1, but those in the use of pronouns rose to 24.

Dr. Charters, of course, confined himself to a comparative study of errors actually made and observed, and no attempt was made to relate them statistically to instances of correct usage. Twelve years later Dr. Robert J. Menner of Yale argued that this method was "likely to produce an exaggerated impression of the frequency of errors" 1 - obviously, a plausible contention. Since then several efforts have been made to investigate the material quantitatively, but so far without results that meet every critical standard. The most ambitious of these attempts was that of Dr. L. J. O'Rourke and his associates in 1930-33. With the coöperation of 40,000 teachers they sought to test the grammatical knowledge of 1,500,000 public-school children, ranging from the third grade to the thirteenth, in the forty-eight States of the Union, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Porto Rico and the Philippines. Their test-papers included three categories of questions. The first had to do with such essentials as Charters covered in his inquiry; their second concerned more delicate matters, and their third included points properly belonging to style rather than to grammar, e.g., the use of he or his following one as a pronoun. The percentages of children passing the tests of the first category, in the grades from the seventh to the thirteenth, were as follows:

7 34.7 9 52.8 11 69.5

8 44.7 10 61.5 12 74.3 2

These figures, if they are to be depended upon as reasonably accurate, show that the schoolmarm's efforts to inculcate "good grammar" have some effect, but they also show that more than half the school-children of the country speak the vulgate at least up to the first year of high-school. And what they speak, of course, is simply what they hear at home.3 Indeed, Dr. Menner's own inquiries indi-

1 The Verbs of the Vulgate, above cited, p. 231.

2 The report of Dr. O'Rourke is summarized in English Use and Misuse, by Paul S. Schilles, New York Times, July 10, 1934. A more extensive account of the investigation is in Rebuilding the English-Usage Curriculum to Insure Greater Mastery of Essentials, by Dr. O'Rourke himself; Washington,

1934. It was made on a grant from the Psychological Corporation, with aid from the Carnegie Corporation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and among its sponsors were Dr. Charles H. Judd of the University of Chicago and Dr. Edward L. Thorndike of Teachers College, Columbia.

3 In O'Rourke and Leonard, by Janet

422 The American Language

cate that many of the errors on Dr. O'Rourke's list are common among persons presumably educated. His observations were made on the speech of about forty men and women, divided into three classes, described by him as follows:

1. People trained in some special profession (usually with college degrees), but with little general culture, and little literary background.

2. The average product of American high-schools.

3. People with little education and no background.

He found that individuals of his second class sometimes used begin, come, done, give, sit and run as preterites, and broke, drank, rode and threw as perfect participles, and that even those of his first class, "trained in some special profession (usually with college degrees)," occasionally resorted to begin, come, done and give, broke and drank. "The most meticulous speakers," he said, "occasionally lapse into carelessness, just as the most illiterate sometimes attempt to speak elegantly." This tendency, naturally enough, is chiefly found among educated persons living in close association with uncultured groups. The "bad grammar" of the Southern whites was noted by the earliest travelers below the Potomac, and it is still observable there, even in the loftiest circles. All of us, on occasion, slip easily into the circumambient speech habits, if only to enjoy their pleasant looseness, just as an educated German sometimes slips into the Mundart of his province. And what is thus borrowed from below not infrequently finds more or less secure lodgment above, as the frequent appearance of it's me, rile, broke and bust in perfectly good American usage well demonstrates.1

Rankin Aiken, American Speech, Dec., 1934, Dr. O'Rourke is criticized sharply for assuming that the "bad grammar" he unearthed is really bad. "The more people make a given mistake," she says, "the less it should be corrected. This fundamental principle, recognized by lexicographers and the more liberal grammarians, must be the basis of our thinking on the subject. Unlike arithmetic, where the more frequent an error is, the more attention it needs, the linguist must insist that speech errors proved to be very frequent are thereby proved to be not errors at all." As an example, Dr. Aiken cites the use of who in "Do you know who they were waiting for this morning?" See also the preface to George O. Curme's Syntax; Boston, 1931, p. vi.

1 Logan Pearsall Smith, in Words and Idioms; London, 1925, p. 149, points out that there are no less than four distinct varieties of Standard English. The first is "the language of colloquial talk, with its expletives, easy idioms, and a varying amount of slang." Second comes "the vernacular of good conversation, more correct, more dignified, and entirely, or almost entirely, free from slang." Then comes written prose, "which is richer in vocabulary and somewhat more old-fashioned in construction

Dr. Menner argues that any list of conjugations of the verbs of the vulgate should include a “liberal intersprinkling of normal principal parts, at least as alternatives.” But it must be manifest that this intersprinkling would be of little significance unless it were accompanied by statistical evidence as to the prevalence of the varying forms in a typical section of the general population. That evidence is still lacking, but meanwhile one may certainly give some credit to the testimony of one’s ears. The vulgar, to be sure, occasionally say I saw, but no one who has ever listened to their speech attentively can doubt that they usually say I seen, just as, at the other end of the scale the illuminati occasionally say I done,1 but usually say I did. If the study of dialects had to include the investigation of all shadings up to the purest form of the standard speech, then the study of dialects would be vain, and indeed absurd. As Dr. Menner himself says, there are verbs which the people of his lowest class conjugate improperly “without exception,” e.g., to come and to run. These, at least, need not be outfitted with alternatives. In the case of other verbs, usage among the humble is not fixed, and both the standard preterites and perfect participles and their vulgar variants are heard. In yet other cases, all persons not downright illiterate reveal a distaste for certain forms, e.g., brung, fit and druv, and seldom employ them save in conscious attempts at waggishness. But all these verbs, save only those of the third class, actually belong to the vulgate, though they may not be used invariably, and their grammatical and syntactical history and relations deserve a great deal more patient study than they have got so far. The same thing is true of the pronouns of the common speech, and of all its other contents. The theory that it is somehow infra dig to investigate them is one that American scholarship can hardly entertain much longer.2

than the spoken language,” and finally there is the language of poetry. “If we examine this linguistic ladder,” says Mr. Smith, “we will find that its lowest rung is fixed close to the soil of popular and vulgar speech.” The vulgar speech has like varieties. Its written form differs considerably from its spoken form, and the latter ranges from an almost simian gabble to something closely approximating ordinary colloquial American.

1 Menner, p. 232. 2 A bibliography of the very meager literature of the subject from 1908 to 1930, running to but 33 items, is to be found in The Most Common Grammatical Errors, by Henry Harap, English Journal, June, 1930. Mr. Harap lists the errors usually observed, but makes no attempt to estimate either their relative or their absolute frequency. He avoids the question, he says, because “of the lack of uniformity in recording

Rather curiously, the sermo vulgus was for long as diligently neglected by the professional writers of the country as by the philologians. There are foreshadowings of it in "The Biglow Papers," in "Huckleberry Finn" and in some of the frontier humor of the years before the Civil War, but the enormous dialect literature of the later Nineteenth Century left it almost untouched. Localisms in vocabulary and pronunciation were explored at length, but the general folk-speech went virtually unobserved. It is not to be found in "Chimmie Fadden"; it is not in "David Harum"; it is not even in the fables of George Ade. It began to appear in the stories of Helen Green during the first years of the century, but the business of reporting it with complete accuracy had to wait for Ring Lardner, a Chicago newspaper reporter, who began experimenting with it in 1908 or thereabout. In his grotesque but searching tales of baseball-players, pugilists, movie queens, song-writers and other such dismal persons he set down common American with the utmost precision, and yet with enough imagination to make his work a contribution of genuine and permanent value to the national literature. In any story of his taken at random it is possible to unearth almost every grammatical peculiarity of the vulgar speech, and he always resisted very stoutly the temptation to lay on its humors too thickly. Here, for example, are a few typical sentences from "The Busher's Honeymoon":

I and Florrie was married the day before yesterday just like I told you we was going to be. . . . You was to get married in Bedford, where not nothing is nearly half so dear. . . . The sum of what I have wrote down is $29.40. . . . Allen told me I should ought to give the priest $5. . . . I never seen him before. . . . I didn't used to eat no lunch in the playing season except when I knowed I was not going to work. . . . I guess the meals has cost me all together about $1.50, and I have eat very little myself. . . . I was willing to tell her all about them two poor girls. . . . They must not be no mistake about who is the boss in my house. Some men lets their wife run all over them. . . . Allen has went to a college foot-ball game. One of the reporters give him a pass. . . . He called up and said he hadn't only the one pass, but he was not hurting my feelings none. . . . The flat across the hall from this here

them by various investigators." Learning of English Expression;

Some later studies are summarized No. V: Grammar, by Percival M.

in A Critical Summary of Selective Symonds and Eugene M. Hinton,

Research in Elementary School Teachers College Record, Feb.,

Composition, Language, and Grammar, by W. S. Guiler and E. A. 1932.

Betts, Elementary English Review, 1 Saturday Evening Post, July 11,

March-June, 1934. Of these, the 1914. Reprinted in You Know Me,

most interesting is Studies in the Al; Garden City, L. I., 1915.

one is for rent. . . . If we should of boughten furniture it would cost us in

the neighborhood of $100, even without no piano. . . . I consider myself

lucky to of found out about this before it was too late and somebody else

had of gotten the tip. . . . It will always be ourn, even when we move

away. . . . Maybe you could of did better if you had of went at it in a

different way. . . . Both her and you is welcome at my house. . . . I never

seen so much wine drank in my life. . . .

Here are specimens to fit into most of Charters's categories -

verbs confused as to tense, pronouns confused as to case, double and

even triple negatives, nouns and verbs disagreeing in number, have

softened to of, n marking the possessive instead of s, like used in

place of as, and so on. A study of the whole story would probably

unearth all the remaining errors noted by Charters in Kansas City.

Lardner's baseball player, though he has pen in hand and is on his

guard, and is thus very careful to write would not instead of

wouldn't and even am not instead of ain't, provides us with a com-

prehensive and highly instructive panorama of popular linguistic

habits. To him the forms of the subjunctive mood in the verb have

no existence, so that shall has almost disappeared from his vocabu-

lary, and adjectives and adverbs are indistinguishable, and the objec-

tive case in the pronoun is indicated only by word order. He uses

the word that is simplest, the grammatical pattern that is handiest.

And so he moves toward the philological millennium dreamed of by

George T. Lanigan, when " the singular verb shall lie down with the

plural noun, and a little conjunction shall lead them." 1 This vulgar

American is a very fluent and even garrulous fellow, and he com-

1 Lardner died on Sept. 25, 1933, at

the early age of 48. My own debt

to him was very large. The first

edition of the present work, pub-

lished in 1919, brought me into

contact with him, and for the sec-

ond edition, published in 1921, he

prepared two amusing specimens

of the common speech in action.

At that time, and almost until his

death, he made penetrating and

valuable suggestions. His ear for

the minor peculiarities of vulgar

American was extraordinarily keen.

Once, sitting with him, I used the

word feller. " Where and when,"

he demanded, " did you ever hear

anyone say feller?" I had to ad-

mit, on reflection, that the true

form was fella, though it is almost

always written feller by authors.

But never by Lardner. So far as I

can make out, there is not a single

error in the whole canon of his

writings. His first book of stories,

You Know Me, Al, was published

in 1915. He had many imitators,

notably Edward Streeter, author

of Dere Mable; New York, 1918;

H. C. Witwer, who published more

than a dozen books between 1918

and his death in 1929; and Will

Rogers, who contributed a daily

dispatch to a syndicate of news-

papers, written partly in Standard

English but partly in the vulgate,

from 1930 to 1935. He also pro-

vided inspiration for the writers of

popular songs and of captions for

comic-strips. See Stabilizing the

Language Through Popular Songs,

by Sigmund Spaeth, New Yorker,

426

The American Language

monly pronounces his words distinctly, so that his grammatical felonies shine forth clearly. In the conversation of a London Cockney, a Yorkshire farm-laborer or a Scots hillman precisely similar attentats upon the canon are obscured by phonological muddiness, but the Americano gives his consonants their full values and is kind to his vowels. His vocabulary is much larger than his linguistic betters commonly assume. They labor under a tradition that the lowly manage to get through life with a few hundred or a few thousand words. That tradition, according to a recent writer on the subject,1 “ originated with two English clergymen, one of whom stated that ‘some of the laborers in his parish had not three hundred words in their vocabulary,’ while the other, Archdeacon Farrar, said he ‘once listened for a long time together to the conversation of three peasants who were gathering apples among the boughs of an orchard, and as far as I could conjecture, the whole number of words they used did not exceed a hundred.’ ” The famous Max Müller gave imprudent support to this nonsense, and it was later propagated by Wilhelm Wundt, the psychologist, by Barrett Wendell, and by various other persons who should have known better. It has now been established by scientific inquiry that even children of five or six years have vocabularies of between 2000 and 3000 words, and that even the most stupid adults know at least 5000. The average American, indeed, probably knows nearly 5000 nouns. As for the educated, their vocabularies range from 30,000 words to maybe as many as 70,000.2

July 7, 1934, and The English of the Comic Cartoons, by Helen Trace Tysell, American Speech, Feb., 1935. But these disciples never attained to Lardner’s virtuosity.

1 Margaret Morse Nice, in On the Size of Vocabularies, American Speech, Oct., 1926.

2 The results of various investigations are set forth in Mrs. Nice’s article, just cited. See also Measuring the Vocabulary of High-School Pupils, by H. L. Neher, School and Society, Sept. 21, 1918; Says Average Man Uses 8,000 Words (an interview with Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly), New York Times, July 15, 1923; The Speech of Five Hundred College Women, by Sara M. Stinchfield, Journal of Applied Psychology, June, 1925; Contemporary English, by W. E. Collinson; Leipzig, 1927 (an account of the growth of the author’s vocabulary); A Vocabulary Study of Children in a Foreign Industrial Community, by Alice M. Jones, Psychological Clinic, March, 1928; Statistics of Vocabulary, by E. A. Condon, Science, March 16, 1928; Extent of Personal Vocabularies and Cultural Control, by J. M. Gillette, Scientific Monthly, Nov., 1929; and Vocabulary of Children’s Letters Written in Life Outside School, by J. A. Fitzgerald, Elementary School Journal, Jan., 1934. I list only a few studies. The literature of the subject is very large.

The Common Speech

2. THE VERB

The chief grammatical peculiarities of vulgar American lie, as Charters shows, among the verbs and pronouns. The nouns in common use, in the main, are quite sound in form. Very often, of course, they do not belong to the vocabulary of English, but they at least belong to the vocabulary of American: the proletariat, setting aside transient slang, calls things by their proper names, and pronounces those names more or less correctly. The adjectives, too, are treated rather politely, and the adverbs, though commonly transformed into the forms of their corresponding adjectives, are not further mutilated. But the verbs and pronouns undergo changes which set off the common speech very sharply from both correct English and correct American. This process, of course, is only natural, for it is among the verbs and pronouns that nearly all the remaining inflections in English are to be found, and so they must bear the chief pressure of the influences that have been warring upon every sort of inflection since the earliest days. The hypothetical Indo-European language is assumed to have had eight cases of the noun; in Old English they fell to four, with a moribund instrumental, identical in form with the dative, hanging in the air; in Middle English the dative and accusative began to decay; in Modern English they have disappeared altogether, save as ghosts to haunt grammarians. But we still have two plainly defined conjugations of the verb, and we still inflect it, in part at least, for number and person. And we yet retain an objective case of the pronoun, and inflect it for person, number and gender.

Following are paradigms showing the conjugation of some of the more interesting verbs of the vulgate, with notes on variants:

Present Preterite Perfect Participle

am 1 was 2 been 3

1 The subjunctive be, of course, is extinct. In the plural, are is commonly used correctly. The use of is in the second and third persons singular and in all persons of the plural is a Negroism, though it is also observed occasionally among the lowest classes of Southern whites. There is a familiar story

illustrating its use. A customer goes into a store and asks, "You-all ain't got no aigs, is you?" The storekeeper replies, "I ain't said I ain't," whereupon the customer retorts in dudgeon, "I ain't axed you is you ain't; I axed you is you is. Is you?" In the negative, whether singular or plural, ain't is em-

428

The American Language

Present Preterite Perfect Participle

attack attackted 1 attackted

beat beaten,2 or beat beat

become 3 become became

begin begun 4 began

bend bent bent

bet bet bet

bind bound bound

ployed almost universally; am not, is not and are not are used only for emphasis, and aren't is unknown.

2 The use of were in the first person singular occurs in certain English dialects, and was once not uncommon in vulgar American, but it has passed out. Today was is often used in the second and third persons plural. In the Eighteenth Century you was was used in the singular and you were in the plural. George Philip Krapp, in The English Language in America, Vol. II, p. 261, quotes "Was you fond of seeing," etc., from a letter of John Adams, 1759.

3 Usually pronounced bin, but sometimes ben, and often appearing without have, as in "I bin there myself." The English bean is never heard.

1 In The Druid, No. VI, May 16, 1781, the Rev. John Witherspoon listed attackted among his "vulgarisms in America only."

2 R. J. Menner, in The Verbs of the Vulgate, American Speech, Jan., 1926, argues that beaten and its analogues, bitten, broken, forsaken, bidden, ridden, shaken, taken, fallen, forgotten and gotten, are preterites only in certain regional dialects. He says: "Taken appears in lists of dialectical peculiarities from Tennessee, Southern Ohio, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Alabama and Virginia, and often occurs in stories written in a Southern dialect. But it is not characteristic of New England, New York and Pennsylvania; if it occurs in the North, it occurs exceptionally, and cannot be considered a preterite of the vulgar speech." This was writ-

ten in 1926. Since then, I believe, the form has made progress, and Mr. Charles J. Lovell tells me that he has heard it very frequently in Bristol county, Mass. There is a discussion of it in The Grammar of the Ozark Dialect, by Vance Randolph, American Speech, Oct., 1927, p. 2.

3 Become is seldom heard in the present tense. Getting is usually substituted, as in "I am getting old." But become is often used as a preterite, as in "What become of him?"

4 In Old English, according to Menner, began(n) was the preterite singular and begunnon the preterite plural. When this distinction began to fade, both began and begun came into good usage, and both were recognized by Ben Jonson in his Grammar, 1640. Henry Alexander, in The Verbs of the Vulgate in Their Historical Relations, American Speech, April, 1929, gives examples of begun from Easton's Relation of the Indian Warr, 1675, and Madam Knight's Journal, 1704. Noah Webster preferred it to began in his Grammar of the English Language, 1807. In 1928 or thereabout the National Council of Teachers of English submitted a long list of current usages to a committee consisting of authors, editors, linguists, teachers and business men, and asked their judgment. Only 5% of them approved begun as the preterite, but all of those who did so were persons specially trained in English philology. See Current English Usage, by Sterling Andrus Leonard; Chicago, 1932, p. 116.

The Common Speech

Present

Preterite

Perfect Participle

bite

bitten 1

bit

bleed

bled

bled

blow

blowed, or blew, or blown 2

blowed, or blown

break

broke, or broken 3

broken, or broke

bring

brought, brung or brang 4

brought, or brung

build

built

built

burn

burnt 5

burnt

bust 6

busted, or bust 7

busted

buy

bought, or boughten

bought, or boughten 8

cast

casted

casted

catch

caught, or catched 9

caught, or catched

choose

chose, or chosen

chosen, or chose 10

1 See the note under beaten, above.

I have even heard "He bitten off more than he could chew."

2 Here usage seems to be uncertain.

I have heard "The whistle blew," "He blew in his money," and "They blown into town."

3 Alexander quotes brake from Samuel Sewall's Diary, 1673.

It was frequently used in those days, apparently under the influence of the King James Bible, in which it occurs 63 times.

But it never got into the common speech.

Broke is always used in the passive.

One hears "I was broke" but never "I was broken."

Broke was once in good usage as a participial adjective.

The Oxford Dictionary gives examples running from c. 1230 to 1647.

4 Menner argues that brung belongs only to the lowest levels of the vulgate.

He says: "Everyone knows that many a person who regularly says I sung or I begun would be horrified at the thought of saying I brung."

He adds that "some speakers who habitually say I have did and I have saw regard I brung as merely childish or humorous."

But he finds brung as a preterite in Artemus Ward, c. 1865, and in John Neal's The Down-Easters, 1833, and reports it used as a perfect participle in the last-named and in J. G. Holland's The Bay Path, 1857.

It appears in a list of Appalachian Mountain words in Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. X, 1927, p. 470.

5 Burned, with a distinct d-sound, is almost unknown to the vulgate.

6 Burst is seldom heard.

In combinations, e.g., on a bust, bust-head and trust-buster, bust is almost Standard American.

7 The use of bust as the preterite is probably promoted by the fashion for a crude historical present, mentioned in Section 1.

8 Boughten is in common use as a participial adjective, as in boughten bread.

9 Catched, which was good English in the Eighteenth Century, is in Lardner, and also in Huckleberry Finn, The Biglow Papers and Thomas C. Haliburton's The Clockmaker, 1837, but I incline to believe that it is now used relatively seldom.

Cotched is heard only in the South, and mainly among Negroes.

It appears in the vocabulary of provincialisms printed in Adiel Sherwood's Gazetteer of the State of Georgia, 3rd ed., 1837, and was condemned by Noah Webster in his Dissertations on the English Language; Boston, 1789, p. 111, as "frequent" and "barbarous."

As we have seen in Chapter VIII, Section 2, catch is usually pronounced ketch.

10 Alexander reports finding chose as the past participle in a military diary of 1774, and choosen, now

430

The American Language

Present Preterite Perfect Participle

climb clumb 1 clumb

cling (to hold fast) clung, or clang clung

cling (to ring) clang clung, or clang

come come 2 come, or came

creep crep, or crope crope

crow crew crowed

cuss 3 cussed cussed

cut cut cut

dare dared, or dast 4 dared

deal dole dealt

dig dug dug

dive dove 5 dived

do done 6 done, or did

drag drug drug

draw drawed drawed, or drew

dream drempt, or dremp 7 drempt, or dremp

drink drunk, or drank 8 drank

obsolete, in the town records of Jamaica, L. I., 1695. He says that the former was used as the participle of to choose so early as the Fourteenth Century, and that it survived in good usage until the days of Southey. Choosed is in Sherwood's Georgia Vocabulary, 1837.

1 Climb is in Lardner, and also in Huckleberry Finn and The Biglow Papers. Clomb was in good usage down to the end of the Seventeenth Century, and has survived as a poetical archaism.

2 Come as the preterite is very old, but came as the past participle is apparently recent.

3 To curse is used only when the act shows a certain formality and solemnity. "The blind man cursed the guy what robbed him" would be heard, but not "He cursed his wife." In the latter situation to cuss would be used, most often followed by out. Bartlett, in his Dictionary of Americanisms, 1848, listed to cuss as then "common to various parts of the Union."

4 Dast is more common in the negative, as in "He dasn't do it." It was originally a form of the present, and is sometimes still used.

5 Dove seems to be making its way into Standard American, apparently supported by drove. It occurs in Theodore Roosevelt's Hunting the Grizzly; New York, 1905, p. 111, and in Amy Lowell's Legends; Boston, 1921, p. 4. The judges appointed by the National Council of Teachers of English decided against it, but there was apparent among them a trend toward accepting it. See Leonard, above cited, p. 117. In 1926 Leonard submitted it to a committee of 26 eminent academic authorities on English. Five of them approved it unreservedly, and 11 called it sound "cultivated, informal English." Dîv is reported from the Ozarks, in Snake County Talk, by Jay L. B. Taylor, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. VI, 1923, p. 205.

6 Menner reports hearing done used as the preterite by persons belonging to all three of his classes. But he heard did as the past participle only among "people with little education and no background."

7 Vance Randolph, in The Grammar of the Ozark Dialect, American Speech, Oct., 1927, says that dremp is the usual form in the Ozarks. But elsewhere, I believe, drempt is more common.

8 Drinked is in The Biglow Papers and in Artemus Ward, but it seems to have gone out, save maybe in

The Common Speech 431

Present Preterite Perfect Participle drive drove 1 drove drown drowned 2 drowned eat et, or eat 3 eat, ate, or et 4 fall fell, or fallen fell feed fed fed feel felt felt fetch 5 fetched fetched fight fought 6 fought find found found fine found 7 found fling flung, or flang flung

remote areas. The committee of judges appointed by the National Council of Teachers of English condemned the preterite use of drunk, but "linguists and members of the Modern Language Association, probably because of their awareness of the historical justification for the form, placed it higher than the other groups." See Leonard, above cited, p. 116. Menner reports the use of drank as the perfect participle by persons of all three categories.

1 Driv and druv seem to survive only in humorous use, save maybe in the remoter rural parts. Both, as past participles, are in The Biglow Papers, and Bartlett, in his Dictionary of Americanisms, 1848, listed druv as a preterite then in common use. Driv was denounced as a New England provincialism by T. G. Fessenden in The Ladies' Monitor; Bellows Falls, Vt., 1818, p. 171.

2 This in the active voice. In the passive, I think, drowned is more common. "This is so common," said the Rev. John Witherspoon in The Druid, No. VI, May 16, 1781, "that I have known a gentleman reading in a book to a company, though it was printed drowned, read drowned."

3 Ate, in my observation, is seldom used as the preterite, though it appears in Lardner, and is reported by Menner. The use of eat as its own preterite was formerly sound in English, and still survives more or less on relatively decorous levels.

I find it in Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham; New York, 1915, p. 24. It is encountered plentifully in Shakespeare. According to Leonard, above cited, p. 118, et as the preterite is "entirely correct in England, incorrect in the United States." It is so given in Broadcast English; London, 1935, and H. W. Fowler, in Modern English Usage; Oxford, 1926, actually condemns ate as "wrong."

4 Eaten is seldom used. In The Vulgar Mercury, Dec., 1927, Wallace Rice says that eat was used as the perfect participle by Shakespeare, Fletcher, Fuller, Evelyn, Mary II, Purchas, J. Collins, Arbuthnot, Pope, Malmesbury, Johnson, Prior, Coleridge, Jane Austen, Marryat, Tennyson, Dickens and Thackeray. He says that the Imperial Dictionary; London, 1892, prefers eat to eaten, and that it has been approved by various American grammarians.

5 Fotch seems to be mainly confined to the Appalachian mountain dialect, though I have heard Lowland Negroes use it. Noah Webster, in his Dissertations on the English Language; Boston, 1789, p. 111, says that it was then "very common in several States, but not among the better classes of people."

6 Fit appears to have gone out. It is in Congreve's The Way of the World, 1700, and was apparently in good usage then. Thornton gives American examples running from 1825 to 1869.

7 "He was found $2 " is much more

432

The American Language

Present Preterite Perfect Participle

flow flew flowed

fly flew flew

forbid forbid forbid

forget forgot, or forgotten forgotten

forsake forsaken forsook

freeze frozen, or froze 1 froze

get 2 got, or gotten gotten,3 or got

give give, or given 4 give, or gave

glide glode 5 glode

go went went, or gone

grope grope 6 grope

grow growed growed

hang hung 7 hung

have had had, or hadden

hear heerd, or hern heerd, or hern

heat 8 het, or heaten het, or heaten

heave hove hove

common than "He was fined." The pull of the preterite of to find is obvious.

1 Friz seems to be archaic. It occurs in The Biglow Papers.

2 There was a time when get was almost invariably pronounced git, but the standard pronunciation is now more common. In "Do you get me?" the e is never i. Gotten is rare in England, save in ill-gotten.

3 Leonard says, in Current English Usage, p. 118: "Both linguists and dictionaries testify that this form is acceptable in the United States, although it is nearly obsolete in England." In the late Eighteenth Century gotten was fashionable in both countries, and Noah Webster, in his Dissertations, 1789, listed it among the affectations of "young gentlemen who have gone through a course of academical studies, and received the usual honors of a university." Got, as everyone knows, is a verb of all work in the vulgate. Its excessive use was denounced by the editor of the English Journal, March, 1927. See Get and Got, by Wallace Rice, American Speech, April, 1932. Also, Gotten, by George O. Curme, the same, Sept., 1927.

4 Gin and guv are archaic. The former, marked rare, appears in a

Maine word-list compiled by E. K. Maxfield, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. IX, 1926, p. 387. It was in common use from about 1800 to the Civil War, and is listed in Fessen-den's Georgia Vocabulary, and in the glossary printed with David Humphrey's The Yankee in Eng-land; Boston, 1815. Lardner uses both give and gave as the perfect participle. Menner reports that he found give in use as the preterite among all three of his classes, but that give and gave as the perfect participle were confined to "people with little education and no background." Henry Harap lists give as the preterite among The Most Common Grammatical Errors, English Journal, June, 1930, p. 441.

5 Glode once enjoyed a certain respectability in the United States, as in England. It is to be found in the Knickerbocker Magazine for April, 1856. It is also in Shelley's The Revolt of Islam, 1818.

6 Almost invariably followed by around.

7 The literary hanged is never heard. "The man was hung," not hanged.

8 To beat is seldom heard. The common form is to beaten. When het is used it is always followed by up. Webster favored it as the preterite, and Krapp says (The English Lan-

Present Preterite Perfect Participle

help helped, or help helped, or help

hide hidden 1 hid

hist 2 histed histed

hit hit hit

hold held held, or held

holler hollered hollered

hurt hurt hurt

keep kep kep, or kept

kneel kneeled kneeled, or knelt

know knowed knew, or knowed 3

lay laid, or lain lain, or laid

lead led led

lean lent lent

leap lep lep

learn lernt lernt

lend 4 loaned loaned

let left 5 left

lie (to falsify) lied lied

lie (to recline) 6 laid, or lain lain, or laid

light lit lit

loosen 7 loosened loosened

lose lost lost

make made made

mean ment ment

meet met met

mow mown mowed

pay paid paid

plead pled pled

prove proven, or proved proven 8

quit quit quit

guage in America, Vol. II, p. 258), that it "only just failed to be accepted into good general use."

1 See the note under beat, above.

2 Hoist is seldom heard.

3 Both forms appear in Lardner, and both are reported by Menner.

4 To lend is being displaced by to loan. The standard preterite, lent, is seldom heard save as noted below. Harap notes in The Most Common Grammatical Errors, English Journal, June, 1930, p. 442, that to lend has begun to display to borrow. Certainly, "I lent a dollar from him," meaning "I borrowed a dollar," is now common.

5 To let is being supplanted by to leave, as in "Leave me be," but this substitution has probably gone furthest in the preterite. "He let me have it" is seldom heard; the usual form is "He left me."

6 Seldom used; lay takes its place. To lay was condemned by 93% of the judges appointed by the National Council of Teachers of English, but one of them, a linguist, noted that it "was good in the Eighteenth Century." See Leonard, above cited, p. 113.

7 To loose is very seldom heard. Even to loosen seems to be going out. The popular form is to unloosen, which is conjugated like to loosen.

8 The linguists, authors and editors on the committee of the National Council of Teachers of English placed proven "among the disputable usages; the other groups of judges regarded it as established.

434 The American Language

Present Preterite Perfect Participle

raise raised 1 raised

recognize 2 recognize recognize

rench 3 renched renched

ride ridden 4 rode 5

rile 6 riled riled

ring rung rang

rise rose, or riz 7 rose, or riz

run run ran

sass 8 sassed, or sass sassed, or sass

say sez, said, or say said

see seen, see, or seed saw, or see 9

set 10 set sat

shake shaken, or shuck shook

shine (to polish) shined shined

shoe shoed shoed

show shown shown

shut 11 shut shut

sing sung sang

sink sunk sank

skin skun, or skan skun

sleep slep slep, or slept

slide slid slid

sling slung, or slang slang, or slang

lished." See Leonard, before cited, p. 119. 8 To sass is always used in place of to sauce, which would seem a schoolmarmish affectation to the vulgar Americano. The adjective is sassy.

1 Riz as the preterite of to raise is now confined to the rural regions. Various contributors to Dialect Notes report it from States as far apart as Connecticut and Louisiana.

2 Pronounced recognize in all three situations.

3 Used in place of rinse. In New England rench is sometimes rense. See Dialect Notes, Part II, 1890, p. 63.

4 Rid is in Artemus Ward, but it is seldom heard today.

5 Menner reports that he has heard rode by persons who are "the average product of American highschools."

6 Always used in place of roil.

7 Riz seems to be going out as the preterite of to rise, though it is still heard. To rise, says Menner, "is a rare verb in the vulgate. Get up (of people) and come up (of the sun) are substituted for it." But bread still rises. In her Journal, 1704, Sarah Kemble Knight used riss as the preterite.

9 Lardner gives seen, see and seed as the preterite, and saw and see as the perfect participle. See as the preterite is in the New Haven Records (1639), the Easthamption Records (1654), the Huntington Records (1681), and the Journal of Sarah Kemble Knight (1704). It is denounced by the Rev. John Witherspoon in The Druid, No. VI, May 16, 1781, and he says that it was then "common in both England and the United States."

10 Used almost always in place of sit. The preterite sot, once in wide use, is now rarely heard.

11 Bartlett, in his Dictionary of Americanisms, 1848, listed shet as then in common use. It is still heard, but shut seems to be prevailing. Sometimes shutted appears as the preterite, as in "You bet he shutted up."

The Common Speech

435

Present

smell

sneak

speak

speed

spell

spill

spin

spit

spoil

spring

steal

sting

stink

strike

sweat

sweep

swell

swim

swing

take

teach 4

tear

tell

tend 6

think

throw

wake

Preterite

smelt

snuck

spoke, or spoken

speeded

spelt

spilt

span

spit

spoilt

sprung

stole

stang

stank

struck

sweat 2

swep

swole

swum

swang

taken, or tuck

taught

torn

tole 5

tended, tend, or tent

thought 7

throwed, or thrown

woke

Perfect Participle

smelt

snuck

spoke 1

speeded

spelt

spilt

span, or spun

spit

spoilt

sprang

stole

stung

stunk, or stank

struck

sweat

swep

swollen

swam

swung

took,3 or tuck

taught

tore

tole