Authors: H.L. Mencken
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:
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.
50
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 Farley
over a news item dealing with a meeting of the Sacred College.
Drive
. Any concerted and public effort to achieve anything.
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.
51
The shorter compounds are also used heavily,
e.g., clean-up, fire-bug, come-back
and
pre-war
.
52
Onomatopeia, of course, frequently enters into the
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
53
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, meeou, 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
onomatopeic forms of an older date are listed in the Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary as Americanisms,
e.g., blah, wow, bust
and
flipflop
.
54
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.
55
“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 English
56
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.”
57
“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.”
58
The old American faculty for making picturesque compounds
shows no sign of abating today. Many of them come in on the latitude of slang,
e.g., road-louse, glad-hand, hop-head, rahrah-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, comeback, 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
59
and
rubber-neck (c
. 1890),
60
loan-shark (c
. 1900),
high-brow
and
low-brow (c
. 1905),
61
hot-dog (c
. 1905),
62
joy-ride (c
. 1908),
love-nest
and
jay-walker (c
. 1920), and
brain-trust
(1932).
63
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
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, hash-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.
64
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
,
65
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
.
66
When the talking-pictures came in, in 1924, they were first called
speakies
, but
talkies
quickly displaced it.
67
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
.