American Language (12 page)

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 —
there they are in full possession, and cannot be turned out.” In conclusion he thus philosophized:

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,”
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there were two streams of American humor from the beginnings of the national letters — “the one following 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 assuming a character as new to the world as the country that produced it.” To the first stream belonged the writings of Franklin, the Hartford 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 Downing”) 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,”
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it was a vague and
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
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.”
⁹³
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.”

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.

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.”
⁹⁴
As everyone knows, Whitman was an assiduous word-coiner himself, and many of his inventions will be recalled — for example, the verbs
to promulge, 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, habitan, savant, ma femme, mon cher, militaire, rapport
and
éclaircissement
, and of such Spanish and pseudo-Spanish terms as
libertad, camerado, vaquero
and
Americano
.
⁹⁵
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).
⁹⁶

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,
“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.”
⁹⁷

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.”
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