Authors: H.L. Mencken
93
The Fight of a Book for the World, by W. S. Kennedy; West Yarmouth, Mass., 1926,
pref
.
94
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.
95
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.
96
See Walt Whitman and the American Language, by Leon Howard,
American Speech
, Aug., 1930.
97
The Life and Letters of John Fiske, by John Spencer Clark; Boston, 1917, Vol. I, p. 431.
98
The Editor’s Study, Harper’s Magazine, Jan., 1886.
99
English As She is Spoken,
Bookman
, July, 1920.
100
Our Statish Language,
Harper’s Magazine
, May, 1920.
101
The American Slanguage,
Irish
Statesman
, Oct. 9, 1926.
102
Translations,
Saturday Review of
Literature, Dec. 26, 1925.
103
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 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.
104
Nation
, April 11, 1923.
105
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.
106
Metoula-Sprachführer; Englisch von Karl Blattner; Ausgabe für Amerika; Berlin-Schöneberg. Polyglott Kuntze; Schnellste Erlernung jeder Sprache ohne Lehrer; Amerikanisch; Bonn a. Rh.
107
Like the English expositors 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
iron-monger, joiner
and
linen-draper
as American terms. He also spells
wagon
in the English manner, with two gr’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
.
108
By Carlo di Domizio and Charles M. Smith; Munich, n.d.
109
Like the Metoula expositor, they make mistakes. Certainly no American bartender ever makes a
Hock
-cup; he makes a
Rbine-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
.
110
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.
111
For example, the following appears on the invitations to farewell dinners on Hamburg-Amerika Line ships (1935): “Einem geehrten Bordpublico kund und zu wissen: Dass das fröliche Bord-Glöcklin, so in
amerikanischen
Sprach
dinner-bell
geheisten ist,” etc.
112
Die Amerikanische Sprache (Das Englisch der Vereinigten Staaten), von H. L. Mencken; Deutsch Bear-beitung von Heinrich Spies; Leipzig, 1917. Dr. Spies is also the author of Kultur und Sprach in neuen England; Leipzig, 1925.
113
See The American Language Fights for Recognition in Moscow, by Eli B. Jacobson,
American Mercury
, Jan., 1931.
114
L’Atlas linguistique de la France, by J. Gillieron and E. Edmont; Paris, 1902–08. The German Sprach-atlas des Deutschen Reiches was edited by Wenker and appeared ten years earlier. The Japanese atlas, Dai Nippon Hogen Chidzu, was prepared by M. Tojo.
115
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 Einas Haugen,
Publications of the Modern Language Association
, Vol. XLVIII, Pt. 1, 1933.
116
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.
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
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.”
2
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
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 adverbs until they tremble on the brink between adverb and adjective:
right, sure
and
near
are examples.