American Language (19 page)

All these processes, of course, are also to be observed in the history of the English of England; at the time of its sturdiest growth they were in the most active possible being. They are, indeed, common to all tongues; “the essence of language,” says Dr. Jespersen, “is activity.” But if you will put the English of today beside the American of today you will see at once how much more forcibly they are in operation in the latter than in the former. The standard Southern dialect of English has been arrested in its growth by its purists and grammarians, and burdened with irrational affectations by fashionable pretension. It shows no living change since the reign of Samuel Johnson. Its tendency is to combat all that expansive gusto which made for its pliancy and resilience in the days of Shakespeare.
³
In place of the old loose-footedness there is set up a preciosity which, in one direction, takes the form of clumsy artificialities in the spoken
language, and in another shows itself in the even clumsier Johnsonese of so much current English writing — the Jargon denounced by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his Cambridge lectures. This “infirmity of speech” Quiller-Couch finds “in parliamentary debates and in the newspapers;… it has become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought, and so voice the reason of their being.” Distinct from journalese, the two yet overlap, “and have a knack of assimilating each other’s vices.”
⁴

American, despite the gallant efforts of the pedagogues, has so far escaped any such suffocating formalization. We, too, of course, have our occasional practitioners of the authentic English Jargon, but in the main our faults lie in precisely the opposite direction. That is to say, we incline toward a directness of statement which, at its greatest, lacks restraint and urbanity altogether, and toward a hospitality which often admits novelties for the mere sake of their novelty, and is quite uncritical of the difference between a genuine improvement in succinctness and clarity, and mere extravagant raciness. “The tendency,” says one English observer, “is … to consider the speech of any man, as any man himself, as good as any other.”
⁵
The Americans, adds a Scots professor, “are determined to hack their way through the language, as their ancestors through forests, regardless of the valuable growths that may be sacrificed in blazing the trail.”
⁶
But this Scot dismisses the English neologisms of the day, when ranged beside the American stock, as “dwiny, feeble stuff”; “it is to America,” he admits, “that we must chiefly look in future for the replenishment and freshening of our language.” I quote one more Briton, this time an Englishman steeped in the public school tradition:

This revolt against conventional bonds and restraints is most noticeable, of course, on the lower levels of American speech; in the regions above there still linger some vestiges of Eighteenth Century tightness. But even in those upper regions there are rebels a-plenty, and some of them are of such authority that it is impossible to dismiss them. I glance through the speeches of the late Dr. Woodrow Wilson, surely a conscientious purist and Anglomaniac if we have ever had one, and find, in a few moments, half a dozen locutions that an Englishman in like position would certainly hesitate to use, among them
we must get a move on
,
⁸
to hog
,
⁹
to gum-shoe
,
¹⁰
onery
in place of
ordinary
,
¹¹
and
that is going some
.
¹²
I turn to the letters of that most passionate of Anglomaniacs, Walter Hines Page, and find
to eat out of my hand, to lick to a frazzle, to cut no figure, to go gunning for, nothin’ doin’, for keeps
, and so on. I proceed to Dr. John Dewey, probably the country’s most respectable metaphysician, and find him using
dope
for
opium
.
¹³
In recent years certain English magnificoes have shown signs of going the same route, but whenever they yield the corrective bastinado is laid on, and nine times out of ten they are accused, and rightly, of succumbing to American influence.

Let American confront a novel problem alongside English, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious.
Movie
is better than
cinema
; and the English begin to admit the fact by adopting the word; it is not only better American, it is better English.
Bill-board
is better than
hoarding. Office-holder
is
more honest, more picturesque, more thoroughly Anglo-Saxon than
public-servant. Stem-winder
somehow has more life in it, more fancy and vividness, than the literal
keyless-watch
. Turn to the terminology of
railroading
(itself, by the way, an Americanism): its creation fell upon the two peoples equally, but they tackled the job independently. The English, seeking a figure to denominate the wedge-shaped fender in front of a locomotive, called it a
plough
; the Americans, characteristically, gave it the far more pungent name of
cow-catcher
. So with the casting which guides the wheels from one rail to another. The English called it a
crossing-plate
; the Americans, more responsive to the suggestion in its shape, called it a
frog
. American is full of what Bret Harte called the “saber-cuts of Saxon”; it meets Montaigne’s ideal of “a succulent and nervous speech, short and compact, not as much delicated and combed out as vehement and brusque, rather arbitrary than monotonous, not pedantic but soldierly, as Suetonius called Caesar’s Latin.” One pictures the common materials of English dumped into a pot, exotic flavorings added, and the bubblings assiduously and expectantly skimmed. What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it comes into contact with what is new and vivid. “When we Americans are through with the English language,” says Mr. Dooley, “it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.”

All this boldness of conceit, of course, makes for vulgarity. Unrestrained by any critical sense — and the critical sense of the pedagogues counts for little, for they cry wolf too often — it flowers in such barbaric inventions as
tasty, alright, go-getter, he-man, go-aheadativeness, tony, goof, semi-occasional
, and
to doxologize
. But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions, and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy language-making. The history of English, like the history of American and of every other living tongue, is a history of vulgarisms that, by their accurate meeting of real needs, have forced their way into sound usage, and even into the lifeless catalogues of the grammarians. The purist performs a useful office in enforcing a certain logical regularity upon the process, and in our own case the omnipresent example of the greater conservatism of the English restrains, to some extent, our native tendency to go too fast, but the process itself is as inexorable in its workings as the precession of the equinoxes, and if we yield to it
more eagerly than the English, it is only a proof, perhaps, that the future of what was once the Anglo-Saxon tongue lies on this side of the water. Standard English now has the brakes on, but American continues to leap in the dark, and the prodigality of its movement is all the indication that is needed of its intrinsic health, its capacity to meet the ever-changing needs of a restless and emotional people, inordinately mongrel, and disdainful of tradition. Language, says A. H. Sayce,

John Pickering was the first to attempt to draw up a schedule of Americanisms. In his “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America” (1816) he divided them into three categories, as follows:

John Russell Bartlett, in the second edition of his “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States” (1859), increased these three classes to nine:

Some time before this, but after the publication of Bartlett’s first edition in 1848, William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, devoted a brief chapter to “American Dialects” in “The English Language” (1850) and in it one finds the following formidable classification: