American Language (10 page)

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 Hulbert, 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,
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it will deal with the following classes of words only:

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
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 philologians 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.
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He has a staff of seven assistants, headed by Dr. Miles L. Hanley, secretary of the American Dialect Society,
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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:

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 philologians 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 Eighteenth
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,”
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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”
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altogether,
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. Lounsbury, 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, Fitzedward Hall, the Anglo-Indian-American philologist, disposed of some of his etymologies and otherwise did execution upon him,
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but in the main his contentions were accepted. Lounsbury 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
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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
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 ‘American’ 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:

This curious criterion, fantastic as it must have seemed to European 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 wholesale 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.
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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.
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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 underlying
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.
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