American Language (13 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
The literature of the subject has taken on large proportions in recent years, and contributions to it have been made by authors as diverse as Vachel Lindsay and Rupert Hughes, Ernest Boyd and Richard Burton. For one article on Americanisms in the philological journals there are at least fifty in the popular magazines. Burton, with a long career as a teacher of English behind him, is convinced that the pedagogical effort to police the national speech will fail. “The pundit, the pedant, and the professor,” he says, “who are fain to stem the turbid tide of the popular vernacular may suffer pain; but they can have little influence on the situation. Even college-bred folk revert to type and use people’s speech — when they are from under the restraining, corrective monitions of academic haunts — in a way to shock, amuse, or encourage, according to the point of view.”
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Hughes has written on the subject more than once, and always with great vigor. “Could anyone imagine an English author,” he says, “hesitating to use a word because of his concern as to the ability of American readers to understand it and approve it?… Why should he permit the survival of the curious notion that our language is a mere loan from England, like a copper kettle that we must keep scoured and return without a dent?”
Americans who try to write like Englishmen are not only committed to an unnatural pose, but doomed as well to failure, above all among the English; for the most likeable thing about the English is their contempt for the hyphenated imitation Englishmen from the States, who only emphasize their nativity by their apish antics. The Americans who have triumphed among them have been, almost without exception, peculiarly American.… Let us sign a Declaration of Literary Independence and formally begin to write, not British, but Unitedstatish. For there is such a language, a brilliant, growing, glowing, vivacious, elastic language for which we have no specific name.… Whatever we call it, let us cease to consider it a vulgar dialect of English, to be used only with deprecation. Let us study it in its splendid efflorescence, be proud of it, and true to it. Let us put off livery, cease to be the butlers of another people’s language, and try to be the masters and the creators of our own.
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Lindsay, who gave the subtitle of “Rhymes in the American Language” to “The Golden Whales of California,” published in 1920, had his say on the subject under the heading of “The Real American Language” in the
American Mercury
for March, 1928. He began by recounting “a few delusions in regard to the United States language.” One of them, he said, “is that it came in with the
ultra-flappers and the most saxophonish of the jazz, after Armistice Day.” Another is that “the United States language is a New York novelty.”
It is really a new vocabulary arranged on an old British framework. It is true that the new vocabulary pours every day into our growing dictionaries, but this vocabulary is apt to mislead one. A smart phrase or new word is not the United States language. The very framework is as old as the writings of Captain John Smith of Virginia.… Wherever there is a touch of Virginia left, there is the United States language. The United States language is Virginia with the
r
put back into it.… When you reach the land of “Old Dan Tucker” and “Clementine” and the places where they sing the song, “Tell Me the Tale That I Once Held So Dear,” you are getting into the region of the United States language in its essential fluency.… Mark Twain writes Virginian with the
r
put back into his alphabet when speaking in his own person.
The Irish brethren naturally range themselves on the side of autonomy for American English, and are firm believers in its merits: not many of them show any trace of Anglomania. Whenever the English reviews and newspapers begin one of their periodical denunciations of Americanisms, these Celts rush to the rescue. Thus Murray Godwin of Detroit sought the hospitality of the
Irish Statesman
in 1926 to flog and flay two English critics of American speech-ways, one writing in the
Quarterly Review
and the other in the Manchester
Guardian Weekly
. In the following burning words he paid his respects to the former:
The author of this particular piece of refined skullduggery … quotes … a personal notice written by a Jewish clothing merchant, and containing some characteristic Yiddish English, to prove that grammar is no longer honored even in the written language of American business men. Of course we have come to expect such tactics on the part of our British step-cousins, whose reputation for fair play has been so firmly established by tradition that it has no longer any need to be supported by example.… Though I feel touched damn nigh to tears when I picture this noble Briton in the throes of molding and milling this length of literary leadpipe with which to bash the blinking Yank, I shall not pass up the chance to point out that his implication that English is a pure and integrated growth, while American is a nondescript tangle of underbrush, would seem to stem from a scholarly logic turned sour by contact with the viewpoint of an intestinally-constricted and malicious if unmuscular nitwit.
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To which may be added a few calmer reflections by Ernest Boyd:
The time has passed when the English language could be claimed as the exclusive idiom of Britain, much less of any restricted area of England. Today
it is the tongue of millions who have no other language, but have also no other tie with the country from which English came. There is no authority which can enforce the recognition of a Standard English that does not exist, save in the imagination of a few people in London. When these people write or speak they betray their place of origin as definitely as a native of New York or Edinburgh. Their assumption that, while the latter are strange and provincial, they are standard and authoritative, is merely an illustration of self-complacent provincialism. It is an assumption which the great English-speaking world does not and cannot admit.
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The American newspapers labor the subject constantly, but not often with much perspicacity. In general, they favor freedom for American from English-imposed rules, but there is a minority that pleads for conformity. Now and then politicians looking for popularity raise the banner of independence, and propose to give it reality by the characteristic American device of passing a law, but such plans seldom get beyond the stage of tall talk. They go back to the earliest days of the Republic. William Gifford, the bitterly anti-American editor of the
Quarterly Review
, is authority for the story that at the close of the Revolution certain members of Congress proposed that the use of English be formally prohibited in the United States, and Hebrew substituted for it.
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Bristed, in his essay, “The English Language in America,” makes the proposed tongue Greek, and reports that the change was rejected on the ground that “it would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it is, and make the English speak Greek.” How a committee of the Continental Congress, in 1778, recommended that “the language of the United States” be used in all “replies or answers” to the French ambassador I have already noted. Seventy-six years later a similar order was issued by the celebrated William L. Marcy, author of the political maxim, “To the victor belong the spoils.” After a long career in the Senate, Marcy became Secretary of War in the Cabinet of Polk and then Secretary of State in that of Pierce. While holding
the latter post he issued a circular to all American diplomatic and consular officers, instructing them to employ only “the American language” in communicating with him. That was in 1854. After another septuagenarian interval, on May 9, 1927, Andrew W. Mellon, as Secretary of the Treasury, ordered that the redemption call for the Second Liberty Loan be advertised “in every daily paper printed in the American language throughout the United States.”
In the
North American Review
for April, 1820, Edward Everett printed “a
jeu d’esprit
which has fallen in our way, under the name of ‘Report of Resolutions to be proposed in the House of Representatives’ … to return the compliment paid to us by the Marquis of Lansdowne, in the session [of Parliament] of 1819, in moving for an inquiry into the conduct of General Jackson.” I can find no record that these resolutions were ever actually introduced in the House; indeed, they were probably written by Everett himself, or by one of his collaborators on the
North American
. But they fell in very well with the temper of the time, and if any member had dropped them into the basket it is certain that they would have received a large number of votes. They began with long satirical whereases directed at the English reviewers, and proceeded to deplore the corruption of the language in the Motherland, “to the degree that the various dialects which prevail, such as those in Yorkshire, Somersetshire and Cumberland, at the same time that they are in themselves utterly uncouth and hideous, are unintelligible to anyone but a person born and educated in these counties respectively.” Then came this:
The House farther regards, as still more pernicious,… that barbarity which from various causes is fast creeping into the language of the highest and best educated classes of society in England …; an affectation, at one time, of forgotten old words, and at another of pedantic new ones, each equally unauthorized in a pure and chaste style of writing and of speaking; the perpetual recurrence of the plural number, instead of the singular, as
charities, sympathies, tendencies
, &c, a phraseology which tends in a high degree to weaken a language, by leading writers and speakers to place that emphasis in the grammatical plurality, which ought to reside in the term itself; an unwise attempt to ennoble such words as
clever, you know, vastly
, &c. which are pardonable only in colloquial use, and unworthy the dignity of grave and sustained discourse; an adoption by noblemen, gentlemen, and clergymen, of the terms of horse-jockeys, boxers and shooters, to the degree that a great number of vulgar and cant terms are heard in what are called the best circles;… and lastly, an alarming prevalence of profane and obscene language,… which, though it is unhappily a vice too common in
all countries, the House has unquestioned information prevails in England to an unparalleled and odious extent, reaching into the societies which consider themselves the most polite and best bred.
Finally, after a sonorous declaration that in the United States the language has been “preserved in a state of admirable purity” and was, “by the blessing of God, quite untainted with most of the above mentioned vulgarities prevalent in the highest English circles,” the resolutions concluded:
Resolved
, in consideration of these premises, that the nobility and gentry of England be courteously invited to send their elder sons, and such others as may be destined to appear as public speakers in church or state, to America, for their education; that the President of the United States be requested to concert measures with the presidents and heads of our colleges and schools for the prompt reception and gratuitous instruction of such young persons, and to furnish them, after the expiration of a term of — years, certificates of their proficiency in the English tongue.
The Middle West has always been the chief center of linguistic chauvinism, and so early as February 15, 1838, the Legislature of Indiana, in an act established the State university at Bloomington, provided that it should instruct the youth of the new Commonwealth (which had been admitted to the Union in 1816) “in the American, learned and foreign languages … and literature.” Nearly a century later, in 1923, there was a violent upsurging of the same patriotic spirit, and bills making the American language official (but never clearly defining it) were introduced in the Legislatures of Illinois, North Dakota, Minnesota and other States. At the same time the Hon. Washington Jay McCormick, then a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Montana, offered a similar bill in Congress. It ran as follows:
A BILL
To define the national and official language of the Government and people of the United States of America, including the Territories and dependencies thereof.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled
, That the national and official language of the Government and people of the United States of America, including Territories and dependencies thereof, is hereby defined as and declared to be the American language.
Sec. 2. That all Acts and parts of Acts of Congress, including regulations of the departments of Government, wherein the speaking, reading, writing, or knowledge of the English language is set forth as a requirement for purposes of naturalization, immigration, official, legal, or other like use, shall be deemed
emended to the extent of substituting in the text for the word
English
the word
American
.
Sec. 3. That, until Congress shall make specific provision for the official and more particular standardization of the American language, words and phrases generally accepted as being in good use by the people of the United States of America shall constitute a part of the American language for all legal purposes.
Sec. 4. That this Act shall be in full force and effect six months after its passage and approval.
The Hon. Mr. McCormick thus explained the purposes behind his bill:
I might say I would supplement the political emancipation of ’76 by the mental emancipation of ’23. America has lost much in literature by not thinking its own thoughts and speaking them boldly in a language unadorned with gold braid. It was only when Cooper, Irving, Mark Twain, Whitman, and O. Henry dropped the Order of the Garter and began to write American that their wings of immortality sprouted. Had Noah Webster, instead of styling his monumental work the American Dictionary of the English Language, written a Dictionary of the American Language, he would have become a founder instead of a compiler. Let our writers drop their top-coats, spats, and swagger-sticks, and assume occasionally their buckskin, moccasins, and tomahawks.
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