American Language (14 page)

Despite this ringing appeal to the red-blooded Americanism of Congress, the Hon. Mr. McCormick was never able to rescue his bill from the dungeons of the Judiciary Committee, and there it died the
Heldentod
at the end of the session. The Hon. Frank Ryan, a member of the Illinois State Senate from Chicago, was more fortunate, for his bill “establishing the American language as the official language of the State of Illinois,” introduced on January 10, 1923, became a law on June 19, albeit with certain discreet changes. In its original form it was as follows:

The newspapers of the time reported that only three of the Hon. Mr. Ryan’s fellow Senators voted against his bill, but it seems to have had harder sledding in the lower House, despite the aid of Mayor Big Bill Thompson of Chicago, who was then in the midst of his campaign to keep the snout of King George V out of his bailiwick. At all events, it lost two of its whereases, suffered changes in two others, and gained two new ones. Those expunged were the second, third, and sixth. In place of the second and third, when the bill was finally passed and approved by the Governor, appeared the following:

In addition, the word
psychological
was inserted before
influence
in the fourth whereas, apparently in deference to the Freudian thought of the time, and the examples were stricken out of the fifth. The sixth disappeared without leaving a trace. This statute is still on the books of Illinois as Chapter 127, Section 178 of the Acts of 1923. But all the similar bills introduced in other Legislatures seem to have failed of passage. The one brought up in Minnesota (H.F. 993, March 8, 1923) was sponsored by two members of the House of Representatives, N. T. Moen and J. N. Jacobson, both of them apparently of Scandinavian origin. It was supported by two enthusiasts, John M. Leonard, president of “the American Foundation” of St. Paul, and A. J. Roberts, editor of the
American National Language Magazine
, published in the same city. But though the mighty Magnus Johnson also gave it some help, and it had a favorable report from the Committee on Education, it got no further. In 1908 the American-Language Legion was launched in New York “to secure popular
use and statutory recognition of the name, the American language, as the exclusive designation of the official language of the United States and its dependencies.” It issued a sticker bearing the word
American
in six sizes of type, and many times repeated. The idea was that “whenever friends of this movement encounter, in any of their books, any name sought to be relegated by the American-Language Legion,
American
in a corresponding size of type may be sheared from this sheet and pasted over, making it read: the American language.” But this ingenious scheme seems to have come to nothing also.

Meanwhile, the plain people of England and the United States, whenever they come into contact, find it difficult to effect a fluent exchange of ideas. This was made distressingly apparent during the World War. When the American troops began to pour into France in 1917, fraternizing with the British was impeded, not so much because of hereditary animosities as because of the wide divergence in vocabulary and pronunciation between the doughboy and Tommy Atkins — a divergence interpreted by each as low mental visibility in the other. There was very little movement of slang from one camp to the other, and that little ran mainly from the American side to the British. The Y.M.C.A., always pathetically eager for the popularity that it could never gain, made a characteristic effort to turn the feeling of strangeness among the Americans to account. In the Chicago
Tribune’s
Paris edition of July 7, 1917, I find a large advertisement inviting them to make use of the Y.M.C.A. clubhouse in the Avenue Montaigne, “where
American
is spoken.” At about the same time an enterprising London tobacconist, Peters by name, affixed a sign bearing the legend “
American
spoken here” to the front of his shop, and soon he was imitated by hundreds of other London, Liverpool and Paris shopkeepers. Such signs are still familiar all over Europe, and they have begun to appear in Asia.
¹⁰⁵

The continental awareness of the growing differences between English and American is demonstrated by the fact that some of the popular German
Sprachführer
now appear in separate editions,
Amerikanisch
and
Englisch
. This is true, for example, of the Metoula-Sprachführer and of the Polyglott Kuntze books.
¹⁰⁶
The American edition of the latter starts off with the doctrine that
“Jeder, der nach Nord-Amerika oder Australien will, muss Englisch können
,” but a great many of the words and phrases that appear in its examples would be unintelligible to many Englishmen —
e.g., free-lunch, real-estate agent, buckwheat, corn
(for maize),
conductor
and
popcorn —
and a number of others would suggest false meanings or otherwise puzzle —
e.g., saloon, wash-stand, water-pitcher
and
apple-pie
.
¹⁰⁷
In the “Neokosmos Sprachfuhrer durch England- Amerika”
¹⁰⁸
there are many notes calling attention to differences between American and English usage,
e.g., baggage-luggage, car-carriage, conductor-guard
. The authors are also forced to enter into explanations of the functions of the
boots
in an English hotel and of the
clerk
in an American hotel, and they devote a whole section to a discourse upon the nature and uses of such American beverages as
whiskey-sours, Martini-cocktails, silver-fizzes, John-Collinses
, and
ice-cream sodas
.
¹⁰⁹
There are many special guides to the American language in German — for example, “The Little Yankee,” by Alfred D. Schoch and R. Kron (Freiburg, 1912), “Uncle Sam and His English,” by W. K. Pfeiler and Elisabeth Wittmann (Berlin,
1932); and “Spoken American,” by S. A. Nock and H. Mutschmann (Leipzig, 1930). It is also dealt with at length in various more general guides — for example, “Hauptfragen der Amerikakunde,” by Walther Fischer (Bielefeld, 1928); “The American Wonderland,” by S. A. Nock and G. Kamitsch (Leipzig, 1930); and “America of Today,” by Frau Voight-Goldsmith and D. Borchard (Berlin, 1929). Nor is it overlooked by pedagogues. I have before me a circular of the Lessing Hochschule in Berlin, offering courses in both Amerikanisch and Englisch — two for
Anfanger
, one for
Vorgebildete
, and one for
Fortgeschrittene
— each of eight weeks, and at a fee of ten marks. The American language also gets attention in a number of French, Italian and Scandinavian guide-books for immigrants and travelers; in one of them
¹¹⁰
I find definitions of
butterine, cat-boat, clawhammer, co-ed, craps, dago, dumb-waiter, faker, freeze-out, gusher, hard-cider, hen-party, jitney, mortician, panhandle, patrolman, sample-room, shyster, sleuth, wet
(noun),
dry
(noun),
headcheese
and
overhead-expenses
. The standard guide-books for tourists always call attention to the differences between the English and American vocabularies. Baedeker’s “United States” has a glossary for Englishmen likely to be daunted by such terms as
el, European-plan
and
sundae
, and in Muirhead’s “London and Its Environs” there is a corresponding one for Americans, warning them that
bug
means only
bed-bug
in England, that a
clerk
there is never a shopman, and that
homely
means domestic, unpretending, homelike, never plain-looking, and giving them the meanings of
trunk-call, hoarding, goods-train, spanner
and
minerals
.

From the earliest days the peculiarities of American have attracted the attention of Continental philologians, and especially of the Germans. The first edition of Bartlett’s Glossary (1848) brought forth a long review in the
Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen
(Braunschweig) by Dr. Felix Flügel, and in 1866 Dr. Friedrich Köhler published a “Wörterbuch der Americanismen,” based on it. In subsequent volumes of the
Archiv
and in the other German philological journals there have been frequent discussions of the subject by Ludwig Herrig, Karl Knortz, Johannes Hoops, Hermann U. Meysenberg, Ed. O. Paget, Paul Heyne, Georg Kartzke, Walther Fischer, Fritz Karpf, Martin Pawlik and H.
Lüdeke. It has also been discussed at length in the German lay press, especially by C. A. Bratter, Friedrich Schonemann and Arnold Schöer. It is common in German for translations of American books to bear the words
aus dem Amerikanischen
on their title-pages, and the term is frequently in use otherwise.
¹¹¹
Like his German colleagues, Dr. Otto Jespersen of Copenhagen, perhaps the first living authority on modern English, is greatly interested in Americanisms, and at one time contemplated doing a book on them. The third edition of the present work was translated into German with a commentary by Dr. Heinrich Spies of Berlin in 1927,
¹¹²
and the same scholar has lectured on the subject at Berlin, Greifswald and elsewhere. Various Dutch and Belgian philologians, among them Barentz, Keijzer, Aronstein, Zandvoort, Peeters, and van der Voort, have published studies of American, and so have various Frenchmen and Italians; and at the University of Paris, in 1921, Ray P. Bowen was appointed
lecteur d’américain
. At Tartu-Dorpat in Estonia Dr. Heinrich Mutschmann, professor of English in the university there, has printed an excellent Glossary of Americanisms (1931) — in fact, a much better one than any that has come out in America since Thornton’s. Two other foreign scholars who show more interest in American English than is usually displayed at home are Professor Wincenty Lutoslawski, of the University of Wilna in Poland, and Professor Sanki Ichikawa, of the Imperial University at Tokyo. The early editions of the present work brought me into pleasant contact with these gentlemen, and I have received valuable suggestions from both. Says Dr. Ichikawa:

The literature on Americanisms in Japanese is already of some weight. It includes an excellent formal treatise, “English and American
of Today,” by G. Tomita (Tokyo, 1930), and a number of smaller studies. Such monographs as “Japanized English” by S. Aarkawa (Tokyo, 1930) and “English Influence on Japanese,” by Dr. Ichikawa (Tokyo, 1928) give a great deal of attention to American forms. The Russians are also conscious of the difference between the two languages, and there is a party at Moscow which holds that American should be taught in the schools, not English. As yet this party does not seem to have prevailed, but so long ago as March, 1930, it was bold enough to propose the following resolutions at a conference of teachers of language at Moscow: