American Language (110 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
165
Pronunciation of the Word
Missouri
, by Allen Walker Read,
American Speech
, Dec., 1933.
166
I am indebted here to Mr. Marshall Ballard, editor of the New Orleans
Item
, and to Mr. H. F. Kretchman, editor of the Coeur d’Alene
Press
.
167
Private communication from Miss Miriam Allen de Ford of San Francisco.
168
So far as I can find, no one has ever investigated the local abbreviations for town-names. A few suggest themselves:
Jax
for
Jacksonville, Balto
for
Baltimore, Philly
for
Philadelphia, K. C
. for
Kansas City
, and
Chi
for
Chicago
. In the familiar ballad, Casey Jones,
Casey
was originally
K. C.
169
I am indebted here to Dr. Joseph M. Prendergast, of Burlingame, Calif.
170
Spanish Place-Names in Colorado, by Eleanor L. Ritchie,
American Speech
, April, 1935, and Some Spanish Place-Names of Colorado, by George L. Trager, the same, Oct., 1935. See also Arizona Place-Names, by W. C. Barnes; Tucson, 1935.
171
Trends in the Pronunciation of the Spanish Place-Names of California,
American Speech
, Aug., 1931, p. 461.
172
For a list of other changes see Scandinavian Place-Names in the American Danelaw, by Roy W. Swanson,
Swedish-American Historical Bulletin
(St. Peter, Minn.), Aug., 1929, p. 16.
173
The Pennsylvania Germans, in return, make a frightful hash of certain familiar “American” names. In an appendix, to his Dictionary of the Non-English Words of the Pennsylvania-German Dialect; Lancaster, Pa., 1924, M. B. Lambert lists
Nei Jarrick
for
New York, Baer-ricks
for
Berks, Daerm
for
Durham, Iesdaun
for
Easton, Heio
for
Ohio, Lenggeschder
for
Lancaster, Phil-delphi
for
Philadelphia, Redden
for
Redding
, and
Tschaertschi
for
Jersey
, In New York, according to Arthur Livingston (La Merica San-emagogna,
Romanic Review
, Vol IX, No. 2, April–June, 1918), the Italians convert
Jersey City
into
Gerseri, Hoboken
into
Obochino
, and
Flatbush
into
Flabussce
. In Canada, according to Adjutor Rivard (Études sur les Parlers de France au Canada; Quebec, 1914, p. 167) the French-Canadians change
Somerset
to
Saint-Moris-sette, Sutherland
to
Saint-Irlande
, and
Sandy Brook’s Point
to
Saint-
Abroussepoil. In Cleveland, so I am told by Dr. Joseph Remény of Cleveland College, the Hungarians call the
Buckeye road
the
Bakrud
, which has a silly meaning in Hungarian, where
baka
is a soldier and
rud
is a pole.
174
A curious bastard form is
Anaheim
, the name of a town near Santa Ana. It was founded by a German winegrower in the 80’s. In Pennsylvania such forms as
Schultzville
and
Schaefferstown
are common.
175
Our Street Names,
Lippincott’s Magazine
, Aug., 1897, P.264.
176
New York, 1891, Ch. I.
177
Here Kipling made two errors. The
the
would never be omitted before
corner
, and Sutter and Sixteenth streets do not meet.
178
But I am reminded by Mrs. Pieter Juiliter, of Scotia, N. Y., that “true Oxonians always speak of
the Broad, the High, the Turl
and
the Corn
instead of
Broad street, High street, Turl street
, and
Cornmarket
street.” The article, however, is always used; it is never used in the United States.
179
London, 1930, p. 25.
180
Why Piccadilly?; London, 1935.
181
See the Chapter on London Street-Names in Adjectives — and Other Words, by Earnest Weekley; London, 1930. A brief bibliography is appended.
182
Naming the Bungalow, by Ida M. Mellen,
American Speech
, March, 1927.
183
I am informed by Miss Miriam Allen de Ford that
Broadway street
appears on some street signs in San Francisco, and also in San Diego. This suggests that
Broadway
is recent on the Pacific Coast.
184
For aid here I am indebted to Mr. Maurice K. Weil of New Orleans.
185
See Dunn and
Indianan
, by Jacob P. Dunn, Indianapolis
News
, Aug. 11, 1922. Mr. Dunn, forgetting
Canadian
, argues that
Indianian
is just as absurd as
Texian
or
Cubian
. But Mr. Julian Hall, editor of the Dothan (Ala.)
Eagle
, prefers
Ala-bamian
on the ground of long usage. “If there is any merit,” he says, “in the rule of spelling a proper name just as the possessor spells it, then we are
Alabamians.
”
186
In the Canal Zone the Americans commonly call the people of Panama
Panamanians
, with the first syllable showing a Latin
a
, but the third rhyming with
cane
.
187
Names For Citizens,
American Speech
, Feb., 1934, p. 78.
188
Moscowite
or
Moscovian?
, Moscow
Star-Mirror
, April 22, 1935. I am indebted here to Mr. Louis A. Boas, editor of the
Star-Mirror
.
189
“So far as we are aware,” says Kenneth A. Fowler, in The Town Crier, Yonkers
Herald Statesman
, April 25, 1935, “there is no official designation. The most common word is probably
Yonkersite
, with
Yonkers man
another quite frequently used phrase. The more tony term of
Yonkersonian
is seldom if ever heard.”
190
This is used in Richmond, Va. In Richmond, Ind.,
Richmondite
is preferred.
191
Private Communication, June 15, 1935.
192
For help here I am indebted to Mrs. Jessie I. Miller of Cairo, Ill.; Miss Jean E. Riegel, of Bethlehem, Pa.; Miss Helen Merrill Bradley, of Toronto; Mrs. F. M. Hanes, of Durham, N. C; Miss Katherine Ferguson, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Miss Nan Strum, of Rocky Mount, N. C; Mrs. Carolina Penna Hyman, of Los Altos, Calif.; Miss Mable E. Bontz, of Sacramento, Calif.; Mrs. Alicia L. Rooney, of San Antonio, Tex.; Messrs. Maury Maverick, of San Antonio, Tex.; Mahlon N. Haines, of York, Pa.; Harry Allard, of Cape Girardeau, Mo.; S. H. Abramson, of Montreal; J. S. Cree-gan, of Albuquerque, N. Mex.; Wilson O. Clough, of Laramie, Wyo.; E. L. Clark, of Providence, R. I.; Henry Broderick, of Seattle, Wash.; J. A. Macdonald, of Vancouver, B. C; Rowland Thomas, of Little Rock, Ark.; Philip G. Quinn, of Fall River, Mass.; Herman Baradinsky, of New York; Alfred C. Booth, of East Orange, N. J.; Israel Bloch, of Lynn, Mass.; N. R. Callender, of Benton Harbor, Mich.; Harry Corry, of Davenport, Iowa; John William Cummins, of Wheeling, W. Va.; Henry Ware Allen, of Wichita, Kansas; Marshall Ballard, of New Orleans; James Doolittle, of Grand Rapids, Mich.; J. A. Coneys, of Engle-wood, N. J.; Carl J. Ruskowski, of Schenectady, N. Y.; Charles Stewart Lake, of Columbus, O.; Duncan Aikman, of Los Angeles, Calif.; Eugene Davidson, of New Haven, Conn.; J. G. Sims, Jr., of Fort Worth, Tex.; J. L. Meeks, of Florence, Ala.; Gerald W. Johnson, of Baltimore; Leigh Toland, of La Crosse, Wis.; A. C. Ross, of Rochester, N. Y.; Folger McKinsey, of Baltimore; Virginius Dabney, of Richmond, Va.; Irving C. Hess, of San Diego, Calif.; Morris Fletcher Atkins, of Montpelier, Vt.; Donald L. Cherry, of Watsonville, Calif.; R. R. Peters, of Bucyrus, O.; L. M. Feeger, of Richmond, Ind.; Charles F. Eichenauer, of Quincy, Ill.; Otto Stabell, of Passaic, N. J.; J. W. Spear, of Phoenix, Ariz.; Torrey Fuller, of Poughkeepsie, N. Y.; Raymond Fields, of Guthrie, Okla.; James Q. Dealey, of Dallas, Tex.; Charles P. Manship, of Baton Rouge, La.; Paul R. Kelty, of Portland, Ore.; Edwin M. Shanklin, of Des Moines, Iowa; Julian Hall, of Dothan, Ala.; C. Oliver Power, of Carthage, Mo.; J. E. Barbey, of Reading, Pa.; Samuel Grafton, of New York, and Clyde K. Hyder, of Lawrence, Kansas; Col. Patrick H. Callahan, of Louisville; Lieut. Col. E. L. M. Burns, of Ottawa; Monsignor J. B. Dudek, of Oklahoma City, Okla.; Dr. J. A. Kostalek, of the University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho; Dr. W. L. Frazier, of Boise, Idaho; Dr. H. K. Croessmann, of DuQuoin, Ill.; Dr. D. C. Alldredge, of Berkeley, Calif.; Dr. J. Christopher O’Day, of Honolulu; and Messrs. Theodore W. Noyes and Philander Johnson, of Washington, D. C.
193
In Columbus, Ind.,
Columbusite
is used only rarely, but
Columbusonian
even more rarely. “I don’t believe,” says Mr. Melvin Lostutter, editor of the Columbus
Evening Republican
, “you would be accurate in applying a local designation to our citizenry.”
194
Mr. L. K. Bronson, managing editor of the Oshkosh
Northwestern
, tells me that
Oshkoshian
has been used, but only rarely. “
Oshkosh man
,” he says, “is the more common description.”
195
Miss Harriet E. Matthison, of the Rutland
Herald
, says that there is “no recollection” in the
Herald
office “of hearing Rutland people called by any particular name.” “The secretary of the Chamber of Commerce,” she adds, “informs me that she would think
Rutlander
preferable to
Rutlandite.
”
196
See On the Difficulty of Indicating Nativity in the United States, by Miriam Allen de Ford,
American Speech
, April, 1927, and Comments, by Miles L. Hanley,
American Speech
, Oct., 1933, p. 78.
197
Chicagorilla
is the invention of Walter Winchell.
Baltimoron
was coined by Harry C. Black, of the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, and first appeared in that paper, Feb. 15, 1922.
198
A list of those currently in use is printed annually in the
World
Almanac.
199
See Nicknames of the States; a Note on Walt Whitman, by John Howard Birss,
American Speech
, June, 1932, p. 389.
200
See The Origin of the Term
Hoosier
, by O. D. Short,
Indiana Magazine of History
, June, 1929. See also
Tar Heels
(anonymous),
American Speech
, March, 1926.
201
Kalamazoo, which was settled in 1829 and chartered as a city in 1884, remained a joke-town down to the end of the century. A set of derisive verses, credited to the Denver
News
, circulated through the newspapers about 1900. Its refrain was:
O Kalamazozle — mazizzle — Mazazzle-mazeezle- mazoo!
That liquid, harmonious, easy, euphonious
Name known as Kalamazoo!
It will be noted that
k
is prominent in the names of all the towns cited by Dr. Krapp.
202
The English Language in America; New York, 1925, p. 176.
203
See The Locus of
Podunk
, by Louise Pound,
American Speech
, Feb., 1934, p. 80.
204
For Dr. Pound see the paper just cited. Mr. Hess’s paper,
Poduck
in Southeast Missouri, is in
American Speech
, Feb., 1935, p. 80.
AMERICAN SLANG
I. THE NATURE OF SLANG
Slang is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “language of a highly colloquial type, considered as below the level of standard educated speech, and consisting either of new words or of current words employed in some special sense.” The origin of the word is unknown. Ernest Weekley, in his “Etymological Dictionary of Modern English,” 1921, suggests that it may have some relation to the verb
to sling
, and cites two Norwegian dialect words, based upon the cognate verb
slenge
or
slengje
, that appear to be its brothers:
slengjeord
, a neologism, and
slengjenamn,
a nickname. But he is not sure, so he adds the note that “some regard it as an argotic perversion of the French
langue
, language.” A German philologian, O. Ritter, believes that it may be derived, not from
langue
, but from
language
itself, most probably by a combination of blending and shortening, as in
thieve
(
s’ lang
)
uage, beggar
(
s’ lang)uage
, and so on.
1
“Webster’s New International,” 1934, follows somewhat haltingly after Weekley. The Oxford Dictionary, 1919, evades the question by dismissing
slang
as “a word of cant origin, the ultimate source of which is not apparent.” When it first appeared in English, about the middle of the Eighteenth Century,
2
it was employed as a synonym of
cant
, and so designated “the special vocabulary used by any set of persons of a low or disreputable character”; and half a century later it began to be used interchangeably with
argot
, which means the vocabulary special to any group, trade or profession. But
during the past fifty years the three terms have tended to be more or less clearly distinguished. The jargon of criminals is both a kind of slang and a kind of argot, but it is best described as
cant
, a word derived from the Latin
cantus
, and going back, in its present sense, to
c
, 1540. One of the principal aims of cant is to make what is said unintelligible to persons outside the group, a purpose that is absent from most forms of argot and slang. Argot often includes slang, as when a circus man calls his patrons
suckers
and speaks of refunding money to one full of complaints as
squaring the beef
, but when he calls the circus grounds the
lot
and the manager’s quarters the
white wagon
, he is simply using the special language of his trade, and it is quite as respectable as the argot of lawyers or diplomats. The essence of slang is that it is of general dispersion, but still stands outside the accepted canon of the language. It is, says George H. McKnight,
3
“a form of colloquial speech created in a spirit of defiance and aiming at freshness and novelty.… Its figures are consciously farfetched and are intentionally drawn from the most ignoble of sources. Closely akin to profanity in its spirit, its aim is to shock.” Among the impulses leading to its invention, adds Henry Bradley,
4
“the two more important seem to be the desire to secure increased vivacity and the desire to secure increased sense of intimacy in the use of language.” “It seldom attempts,” says the London
Times
, “to supply deficiencies in conventional language; its object is nearly always to provide a new and different way of saying what can be perfectly well said without it.”
5
What chiefly lies behind it is simply
a kind of linguistic exuberance, an excess of word-making energy. It relates itself to the standard language a great deal as dancing relates itself to music. But there is also something else. The best slang is not only ingenious and amusing; it also embodies a kind of social criticism. It not only provides new names for a series of everyday concepts, some new and some old; it also says something about them. “Words which produce the slang effect,” observes Frank K. Sechrist,
6
“arouse associations which are incongruous or incompatible with those of customary thinking.”