American Language (31 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
39
Prescott F. Hall: Immigration; New York, 1913, p. 5. Even in colonial days there were more such non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants than is commonly assumed. Says Frederick J. Turner, in The Frontier in American History, pp. 22–23: “The Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans, or Pennsylvania Dutch, furnished the dominant element in the stock of the colonial frontier.… Such examples teach us to beware of misinterpreting the fact that there is a common English speech in America into the belief that the stock is also English.”
40
Most of the provisions of this act, however, were later declared unconstitutional. Several subsequent acts met the same fate.
41
The same correspondent adds: “I find very little trace of Scotch on this continent. One might expect to find it in Toronto, the Presbyterian Lhassa, where slot-machines are removed from the streets on Sunday, but the speech of Toronto is actually not distinguishable from that of Buffalo. That is to say, it is quite Irish. The Scotch are not tenacious of their dialect, in spite of the fuss they make about it. It disappears in the second generation. I have met Prince Edward Islanders who speak Gælic and American, but not Scotch. The affinity between Scotch and French, by the way, is noticeable nowhere more than in the Province of Quebec, where I have met Macdonalds who couldn’t speak English. The Scotch surrender their speech customs more readily than the English, and the Irish, it seems to me, are most tenacious of all.”
42
The majority of these words, it will be noted, relate to eating and drinking. They mirror the profound effect of German immigration upon American drinking habits and the American cuisine. In July, 1921, despite the current prejudice against all things German, I found
sourbraten
on the bill-of-fare at Delmonico’s in New York, and, more surprising still, “
braten
with potato-salad.” The effort to substitute
liberty-cabbage
for
sauerkraut
, made by professional patriots in 1918, was a complete failure. It is a fact often observed that loanwords, at least on the level of the common speech, seldom represent the higher aspirations of the creditor nation. French and German mainly have borrowed from English such terms as
beefsteak, roast-beef, pudding, grog, jockey, tourist, sport, five-o’clock tea
and
sweep stakes
, and from American such terms as
tango, jazz, fox-trot, one-step, cocktail
and
canoe
(often
kanu
). “The contributions of England to European civilization, as tested by the English words in Continental languages,” says L. P. Smith, “are not, generally, of a kind to cause much national self-congratulation.” See The English Element in Foreign Language, by the same author, in
English
, March, 1919. Also, English and American Sport Terms in German, by Theodore McClintock,
American Speech
, Dec, 1933. But on higher levels a more decorous interchange goes on. From German, for example, both English and American have borrowed many scientific words,
e.g., psychology, morphology, teleology, oceanography, ecology, spectroscope
and
statistics
; many medical and chemical words,
e.g., morphine, laudanum, bacillus, bacterium, ether, creosote, pepsin, protozoa
and
aniline
; and a number of terms in everyday use,
e.g., masterpiece, dollar, veneer, homesickness, taximeter, waltz
and
dahlia
. See The German Influence on the English Vocabulary, by Charles T. Carr,
S.P.E. Tracts
, No. XLII, 1934.
43
Thornton offers examples of
bummer
ranging from 1856 to 1892. Strangely enough, he does not list
bum
, which has now supplanted it. During the Civil War
bummer
acquired the special meaning of looter, and was applied by the Southerners to the men of Sherman’s army of invasion. Here is a popular rhyme which survived until the early 90’s:
Isidor, psht, psht!
Vatch de shtore, psht, psht!
Vile I ketch de
bummer
Vhat shtole de suit of clothes!
Bummler
has bred many derivatives in German,
e.g., bummelei
, meaning dawdling or laziness;
bummelig
, unpunctual, careless;
bummeln
, to waste time, to take it easy;
bummelleben
, a life of ease;
bummelzug
, a slow train.
Einen bummeln machen
means to take a leisurely stroll. Once, in Bremen, when my baggage came near missing a train, the portier of my hotel explained that a porter had
gebummelt
delivering it.
44
Lincoln used
nix come erous
in a letter dated Nov. 11, 1854. It is quoted in Lincoln the Man, by Edgar Lee Masters; New York, 1931, p. 226.
45
Whether
nix
came into American direct from the German or by way of the English thieves’ argot I do not know. The Oxford Dictionary’s first example, dated 1789, is from George Parker’s Life’s Painter. “How they have brought a German word into cant,” says Parker, “I know not, but
nicks
means
nothing
in the cant language.” Bartlett, Farmer and Thornton fail to list it. A great many English criminals came to the United States between 1800 and the Civil War, and they brought some of their argot with them. Perhaps
nix
was included. Whatever the fact, the word bred a derivative,
nixie
, which seems to be peculiar to American. In the United States Official Post-office Guide for 1885
nixie
was defined as “a term used in the railway mail service to denote matter of domestic origin, chiefly of the second and first class, which is un-mailable because addressed to places which are not postoffices, or to States, etc., in which there is no such postoffice as that indicated in the address.” Its meaning has since been extended to include all mail “so incorrectly, illegibly, indefinitely or insufficiently addressed that it cannot be transmitted.” (Sec. 1639, Postal Laws and Regulations.) The Postoffice informs me that it has no record showing when the word was introduced.
Nicht
is also at the bottom of
nit, aber nit, nixy
and
nitsky
, but most of them came in after the period under review. See Substitutes for
No
, by T. J. S.,
American Speech
, Aug., 1927. In some of the German dialects
nicht
becomes
nöt
or
nit
, and
nichts
becomes
nix
.
46
Jan. 24, 1918, p. 4.
47
Nevertheless, when I once put it into a night-letter a Western Union office refused to accept it, the rules then requiring all night-letters to be in “plain English.” Meanwhile, the English have borrowed it from American, and it is in the Oxford Dictionary. It comes originally from student Latin, but has been in German for centuries.
48
Thornton’s first example shows a variant spelling,
shuyster
. All subsequent examples show the present spelling. It is to be noted that the suffix
-ster
is not uncommon in English, and that it usually carries a deprecatory significance.
49
In
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Pt. II, 1914, p. 157.
50
See also Linguistic Substrata in Pennsylvania and Elsewhere, by R. Whitney Tucker,
Language
, March, 1934. Dr. Tucker discusses the phonology of the American spoken in lower Pennsylvania.
Hex
, meaning a witch, is in common use there, and in 1930 the sensational trial of a York county
hex-doctor
made the term familiar throughout the United States.
51
Some German-Americanisms from the Middle West,
American Speech
, Dec., 1926.
52
English As We Speak It in Ireland, 2nd ed.; London, 1910, pp. 179–180.
53
Amusing examples are to be found in Donlevy’s Irish Catechism. To the question, “Is the Son God?” the answer is not simply “Yes,” but “Yes, certainly He is.” And to the question, “Will God reward the good and punish the wicked?” the answer is “Certainly; there is no doubt He will.”
54
The newspapers often report the discovery that neither
chop-suey
or
chow-mein
is a Chinese dish. This is probably true of the former. I have been told that it is a mixture of Chinese dishes, concocted for the American palate, and that the name, in Chinese, means slops. But according to Joe Lin, national secretary of the On Leong Chinese Merchants Association (quoted in the Minneapolis
Star
, April 19, 1929),
chow-mein
is actually Chinese, though it has been “a bit flavored up for Western palates.” I am indebted here to Mr. R. S. Kelly, of the Honolulu
Star-Bulletin
.
THE LANGUAGE TODAY
I. AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
The general characteristics of American English have been sufficiently described in the preceding chapters. It has maintained them unbrokenly since Jackson’s day, though there was a formidable movement to bring it into greater accord with English precept and example during the years following the Civil War. This movement was led by such purists as Edward S. Gould, William D. Whitney and Richard Grant White, and seems to have got its chief support from schoolmarms, male and female, on the one hand, and from Anglomaniacs on the other.
1
Gould, in 1867, brought out his “Good English,” the first of what was to be a long series of hortatory desk-books, by himself and other sages.
2
He began by arguing that English, “within the last quarter of a century, through the agency of good writers, critics and lexicographers,” had been “in many respects greatly improved,” but lamented that there had also gone on a compensatory deterioration, and “in greater proportion.” He said that he was not opposed, in principle, to “the fabrication of new words, and the new use of old words,” but he maintained that such changes should be undertaken only by “educated men,” each of
them capable of assuming “the burden of proof in support of his innovation.” For the inventions of the “ignorant” he had only contempt and contumely, and in the forefront of the ignorant he put “the men generally who write for the newspapers.” He then proceeded to denounce some of the familiar bugaboos of the English Americophobes, including
to jeopardize
(he agreed with Noah Webster that
to jeopard
was better),
controversialist
(though it had been used by Macaulay),
leniency
(though it had been used by Coleridge and even by the
Edinburgh Review), underhanded, to donate, standpoint, to demean, over his signature, to open up
, and
try and
.
White, like Gould, pretended to a broad tolerance, and even went to the length of admitting that “language is rarely corrupted, and is often enriched, by the simple, unpretending, ignorant man, who takes no thought of his parts of speech.” More, he argued in the third chapter of his “Words and Their Uses” (1870)
3
that the English spoken and written in the United States was at least as good as that spoken and written in England. But at once it appeared that he was assuming that the Boston dialect was Standard American. “Next,” he said, “to that tone of voice which, it would seem, is not to be acquired by any striving in adult years, and which indicates breeding rather than education, the full, free, unconscious utterance of the broad
ah
sound of
a
is the surest indication in speech of social culture which began at the cradle.” He then proceeded to denounce most of the Americanisms in Gould’s
Index Expurgatorius
, with the addition of
gubernatorial, presidential, reliable, balance
(remainder),
editorial, real-estate, railroad
(he preferred the English
railway), telegrapher
(he preferred
-ist), dirt
(as in
dirt-road:
he believed it should be restricted to its English sense of
filth), ice-water
(he preferred
iced
), and the verbs
to locate
(“a common Americanism, insufferable to ears at all sensitive”),
to enthuse, to aggravate
, and
to resurrect
.
4
Gould’s pedantries were attacked by G. Washington Moon, the antagonist of Dean Alford, in “Bad English Exposed” (
c
. 1868; 4th ed., 1871; 8th ed., 1882), and with the same weapon that had proved so effective against the dean — that is, by showing that Gould himself wrote very shaky English, judged by his own standards. White was belabored by Fitzedward Hall in “Recent Exemplifications of False Philology” (1872) and again in “Modern English” (1873). Hall was a man of extraordinary learning and knew how to use it.
5
As one of the collaborators in the Oxford Dictionary he had access to its enormous store of historical material, then still unpublished, and that material he flung at White with great precision and effect. In particular, he brought heavy batteries to bear upon White’s reverence for the broad
a
of Boston, and upon the doctrine, set forth in “Words and Their Uses,” that “the authority of general usage, or even of the usage of great writers, is not absolute in language” — that “there is a misuse of words which can be justified by no authority, however great, by no usage, however general.” He said:
The critic neglects to furnish us with any criterion, or set of criteria, his own mandates and ordinances excepted, by which to decide when the misuse of a word becomes impossible of justification. His animadversions, where original, are, I believe, in almost every case, founded either on caprice, or defective information, or both.… We shall search in vain — for all the world as if he had been bred at Oxford — to find him conceding, as within the compass of the credible, the fallibility of his private judgments, or the inexhaustiveness of his meagre deductions.
Here, it will be noted by the judicious, Hall’s righteous indignation ran away with his pen, and he wrote
inexhaustiveness
when he meant its opposite. His two books, with their close-packed and almost endless footnotes, presented a vast amount of philological
knowledge, and should have been sufficient to destroy the baleful influence of White, whose learning was mainly only pretension. But, as George H. Knight says in “Modern English in the Making,” Hall was undone by his very virtues. His scholarly approach and forbidding accumulation of facts repelled more readers than they attracted, and so he failed to prevail against his “amateurish rivals and opponents,” though “the soundness of his methods has been generally recognized by the expert.” Gould and White thus had it all their own way, and their pedantries were accented with complete gravity by the pedagogues of the 70’s and 80’s. White’s “Words and Their Uses,” in fact, is still in print and still enjoys a considerable esteem, and there are many latter-day imitations of it, most of them as cocksure as it is, and as dubious.