American Language (16 page)

42
Weekly edition, Aug. 26, 1932, p. 175.

43
C. P. Scott of the Manchester
Guardian
; London, 1934, p. 314.

44
According to the Associated Press, Mr. Graham pointed to the Cinematographic Act as designed to encourage British films, but added: “I’m not prepared to place direct restrictions on the importations of American talking films into this country.”

45
It was issued in March, 1922, and was signed by the late James W. Bright, then professor of English at the Johns Hopkins; Charles H. Grandgent of Harvard; Robert Underwood Johnson, secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; John Livingston Lowes of Harvard; John M. Manly of the University of Chicago; Charles G. Osgood of Princeton, and the late Fred Newton Scott of the University of Michigan. A reply was received in October, 1922, from an English committee consisting of the Earl of Balfour, Dr. Robert Bridges and Sir Henry Newbolt, but it was not until five years later that the conference was actually held. It will be referred to again a bit later on.

46
By H. W. and F. G. Fowler; Oxford, 1908.

47
There is an account of their attitude, with quotations, by Dr. Kemp Malone of the Johns Hopkins, who was an American delegate to the conference, in
American
Speech
, April, 1928, p. 261. The conference held two sessions, both at the quarters of the Royal Society of Literature. On the first day Lord Balfour presided, and on the second day Dr. Johnson. The speakers on the first day were Lord Balfour, Dr. Canby, George Bernard Shaw, Prof. Lloyd Jones of the British Broadcasting Corporation, Sir Israel Gollancz, Dr. Lowes, and Dr. Johnson. Those on the second day were Dr. Canby, Dr. Louise Pound of the University of Nebraska, Professor F. S. Boas, Dr. Lowes, Sir Henry Newbolt, and J. C. Squire. In addition to the speakers, those in attendance were Dr. Scott, Dr. George Philip Krapp, Prof. W. H. Wagstaff, Prof. J. Dover Wilson, Prof. A. Lloyd James, Dr. W. A. Craigie, and John Bailey. The conference was financed by the Commonwealth Fund, with some aid from Thomas W. Lamont. Later on the support of the Commonwealth Fund was withdrawn, and so the project to form a permanent Council of English fell through.

48
Boucher, who was born in England in 1737, came out to Virginia in 1759 as a private tutor. In 1762 he returned home to take holy orders, but was soon back in Virginia as rector of Hanover parish. He also conducted a school, and one of his pupils was young John Parke Custis, Washington’s stepson. Boucher made the most of this connection. In 1770 he became rector at Annapolis, and soon afterward he married an heiress and bought a plantation on the Maryland side of the Potomac. His Loyalist sentiments got him into difficulties as the Revolution approached, and in 1775 he returned to England, where he died in 1804. In 1797 he published A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution, a series of thirteen sermons. After his death his friends began the publication of his Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words, on which he had been engaged for thirty years. The first part, covering part of the letter A, came out in 1807. In 1832 the Rev. Joseph Hunter and Joseph Stevenson undertook to continue the work, but it got no further than Bl. Boucher’s brief glossary of Americanisms appeared in the introduction to this second edition. It listed but 38 words. With it was printed Absence: a Pastoral; “drawn from the life, from the manners, customs and phraseology of planters (or, to speak more pastorally, of the rural swains) inhabiting the Banks of the Potomac, in Maryland.” Boucher accused the Americans of “making all the haste they conveniently can to rid themselves of” the English language. “It is easy to foresee,” he said, “that, in no very distant period, their language will become as independent of England as they themselves are, and altogether as unlike English as the Dutch or Flemish is unlike German, or the Norwegian unlike the Danish, or the Portuguese unlike Spanish.” Absence is reprinted in
Dialect Notes
, Vol. VI, Pt. VII, 1933, with a commentary by Allen Walker Read.

49
It is reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931, pp. 56–63. About 280 terms are listed. They are mainly New England dialect forms, but one finds a few Americanisms that were in general use, and have survived,
e.g., breadstuffs, spook, nip
(a measure of drink),
to boost, to stump
, and
tarnation
.

50
Pickering’s long introductory essay, but not his vocabulary, is reprinted in Mathews, pp. 65–76. On March 18, 1829, Dr. T. Romeyn Beck, a New York physician and antiquary, read a paper on the Pickering book before the Albany Institute. It was published in the
Transactions
of the Institute for 1830, and is reprinted by Mathews, pp. 78–85.

51
Dunglison’s glossary, dealing with about 190 terms, was published in three instalments in the
Virginia Literary Museum
. It was reprinted in
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Pt. X, 1927, with a commentary by Allen Walker Read. Peck’s appeared in his Emigrant’s Guide and Gazetteer of the State of Illinois, first published in 1834, and reissued with revisions in 1836 and 1837. See John Mason Peck and the American Language, by Elrick B. Davis,
American Speech
, Oct., 1926. “An examination of the vocabulary of the 1837 edition,” says Davis, “shows that out of 648 specific words used in strategic positions only 313 show a history in the Oxford Dictionary complete in Peck’s use of them before 1789, the year of his birth.”

52
In Thornton’s American Glossary
hobo
is traced to 1891,
hold-up
and
bunco
to 1887,
dive
to 1882,
dead-beat
to 1877,
hoodlum
to 1872,
road-agent
to 1866,
drummer
to 1836, and
flume
to 1792.

53
The first American films reached England in 1907, but until 1915 they came in such small numbers that they were not separated, in the customs returns, from “optical supplies and equipment.” In 1915 their total value was fixed at £47,486. But the next year it leaped to
£
349,-919, and thereafter it mounted, with occasional recessions, to the peak of £880,240 in 1927. These values represented, of course, only the cost of the actual films, not that of the productions. In 1927 the Cinematograph Films Act was passed. It provided that all English exhibitors would have to show at least 5% of English-made films after Sept. 30, 1928, 7½ after the same date in 1930, 10% after 1931, 12½% after 1932, 15% after 1933, and 20% from Sept. 30, 1935 onward. The English duty is id. a foot on positives and 5d. on negatives. I am indebted for these figures and for those following to Mr. Lynn W. Meekins, American commercial attache in London, and Mr. Henry E. Stebbins, assistant trade commissioner.

54
After the introduction of the talkie the imports of American films showed a great decline in value. They dropped from
£
861,592 in 1929, to £506, 477 in 1930, and to
£
130,847 in 1932. In part this was due to the operation of the Cinematograph Films Act, but in larger part it was produced by a change in trade practise. In the silent days many positives were sent to England, but since the talkie came in the film companies have been sending negatives and duplicating them in England. Thus the total annual footage is probably but little less than it was in 1929. Of the 476 imported films shown in England, Scotland and Wales in 1933, 330 were American, and according to Henry J. Gibbs, writing in the
Blackshirt
, “their value was 90 to 95% of the total.”

55
The following is from the Denby
Herald
’s report of an address by Col. Bendall before the Dudley Literary Society on January 31, 1931: “He suggested that though it was true that American had a remarkable capacity for growth, there was no need to suppose that it would eventually settle the form which English must take. Such a state of affairs would necessarily result either in a wider divergence between literary and spoken English or in literary English becoming affected. The former position would lead to a loss of subtlety in spoken English and to literature’s becoming unintelligible to the masses, while to illustrate how deplorable the latter would be, the speaker read a part of Mr. Mencken’s translation of the Declaration of Independence into modern American.” The colonel’s apparently grave acceptance of my burlesque as a serious specimen of “modern American” was matched by a sage calling himself John O’London in Is It Good English?; London, 1924, p. 92. After quoting the opening paragraph of my version, he said solemnly, “I hope ‘these States’ will suppress all such translations.”

56
Chief Constable’s Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1932; Wallasey, 1933, p. 13.

57
In the London
Times
for June 15, 1927, George Bernard Shaw was reported as saying: “When President Wilson came to this country he gave us a shock by using the word
obligate
instead of
oblige
. It showed that a man could become President in spite of that, and we asked ourselves if a man could become King of England if he used the word
obligate
. We said at once that it could not be done.”

58
Review in the
Medical Press
, Sept. 17, 1919, of an article by MacCarty and Connor in
Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics
. “In the study of the terminology of diseases of the breast,” said the reviewer, “[the authors] suggest a scheme which seems simple, but unfortunately for British understanding, it is written in American.”

59
Many more examples might be added, some of them not without their humors. Back in 1921 J. C. Squire (now Sir John) was protesting bitterly because an American translator of the Journal of the Goncourts “spoke of a
pavement
as a
sidewalk
.” See the
Literary Review
of the New York
Evening Post
, July 23, 1921. In Dostoevsky: Letters and Reminiscences, translated from the Russian by S. S. Ko-telinansky and J. Middleton Murry (New York, 1923; American binding of English sheets) there is this note, p. 282: “Saltykov, Mihail Efgrafovich (who used the pseudonym N. Schedrin), author of the Golovlevs, one of the greatest of Russian novels, which has been translated into French and American, but not yet into English.” Such sneers are now answered by defiance as often as with humility. When Dr. Edgar J. Goodspeed, professor of Biblical and patristic Greek at the University of Chicago, published his new version of the New Testament (Chicago, 1923) he boldly called it “an American translation,” and in it he as boldly employed Americanisms in place of the English forms of the Authorized Version. Thus
corn
, meaning wheat in England but maize in America, was changed to
wheat
in Mark II, 23, Mark IV, 28, and Matthew XII, 1. Similarly, when Ezra Pound published Ta Hio: the Great Learning (
University of Washington Chapbooks
, No. 14; Seattle, 1928) he described it on the title-page as “newly rendered into the American language.” See American and English translations of “The Oppermanns,” by Edmund E. Miller,
American Speech
, Oct., 1935.

60
The article is summarized, with long extracts, in the
Literary Digest
for June 19, 1915, p. 1468.

61
Reprinted in the
Literary Review
of the New York
Evening Post
, July 23, 1921.

62
The New America; New York, 1919, Ch. III.

63
The Society was organized in 1913, but the intervention of the war suspended its proceedings until 1918. The first of its Tracts was issued in October, 1919. The original committee consisted of Dr. Bridges, Henry Bradley, Sir Walter Raleigh and L. Pearsall Smith, the last-named an American living in England. In Tract No. I one of its purposes was stated to be the encouragement of “those who possess the word-making faculty,” and another was the enrichment of Standard English with dialectic and “democratic” forms and usages. In Tract No. XXIV, 1926, Dr. Bridges protested against an allegation that the Society was “working for uniformity and standardization against idiom and freedom. Our readers,” he went on, “know that this is not what we intend or desire; indeed teachers, who as a class advocate standardization of speech as the necessary basis for general tuition, sometimes complain of us as mischief-makers because we do not support them more thoroughly.” In 1922 Dr. Bridges wrote to Dr. H. S. Canby: “We desire as many American subscribers as possible,
in order to make our Society seem as much American as it is English
. [His italics.] There is a great and natural prejudice in America against English dictation in the matter of our language, and that followed, I think, as a protest against the insular contempt which the English felt a couple of generations ago for American forms of speech. We now in England feel very differently and the S.P.E. would certainly treat American usages and preferences with full respect” (
Literary Review
, May 20, 1922). “The S.P.E.,” says J. Y. T. Greig in Breaking Priscian’s Head (London, 1929), “despite its inauspicious name, has done a great deal of splendid work, but only because it happened to be founded by, and to have remained under, the control of men like Dr. Bridges, Mr. L. P. Smith, and Mr. H. W. Fowler. This was a fortunate and very rare accident. In wrong hands it would have long ago become a dreadful curse, a veritable Inquisition and Congregation of the Propaganda rolled into one.”

64
London
Sunday Graphic
, Jan. 3, 1932.

65
Printed as That Dreadful American,
Listener
, Jan. 30, 1935.

66
An Accidence to the English Tongue; London, 1724. This was the first English grammar written in America. For the reference to it I am indebted to American Projects For an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read,
Publications of the Modern Language Association
, 1935. For part of what follows I am also indebted to Mr. Read.