American Language (39 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
The largest body of loan-words in American is that from the Spanish, with that from the German following hard upon it. Both have been discussed in the last chapter. Since the Civil War the chief contribution of German has been the domestication of the suffix
-fest
. It came in with
sängerfest
and
turnfest
in the early 50’s, but the manufacture of American analogues did not begin until 1900 or thereabout. I have encountered, among others, the following:
talk-fest, swatfest
(a baseball game marked by many hits),
hoochfest, slugfest
(prizefight),
smokefest, walkfest, gabfest,
177
sobfest, egofest, spooffest, eatfest, stuntfest, ananiasfest, blarneyfest, smilefest, gossipfest, batfest
(baseball),
bloodfest
(war),
crabfest, gabblefest, jawfest, singfest, lovefest, bullfest, boozefest, bookfest
and
applefest
.
178
When,
on the repeal of Prohibition, American legislators began to search for euphemisms for
saloon
, one of the words they hit upon was the German
stube
, signifying, alone, simply a room, but often combined with
bier
(beer) or
wein
(wine) in
bierstube
or
weinstube
. According to Sir William Craigie,
beer-garden
, which came in about 1870, is “clearly from the German,”
i.e.
, from
biergarten
.
The suffixes
-heimer
and
-bund
had brief vogues in 1900 or thereabout, but the former survives only in
wiseheimer
and the latter only in
plunderbund
and
moneybund
, the former of which is listed in “Webster’s New International Dictionary” (1934).
Wanderlust
seems to have come in since 1900; it is also known in England, but is used much more frequently in the United States along with its derivatives,
wanderluster
(Eng.
rambler), woanderlusting
and
wanderlust-club
(Eng.
rambler-society
).
179
Like
sauerkraut
, it was under a patriotic ban during the World War, but recovered promptly.
Living-room
may have been suggested by the German
wohnzimmer
. The Oxford Dictionary cites a single use of it in England in 1825, but in the sense of “the room usually occupied during the day” it is called an Americanism in the Oxford Supplement, and assigned to 1867.
Blizzard
has been often listed among Americanisms of German origin, with that origin assigned variously to
blitzen
(lightning) or
blitzartig
(lightning-like), but the researches of Allen Walker Read reveal that it was in use to designate a violent blow (as with the fist) long before it came to mean a storm. It is probably onomatopeic.
180
So-long
, the phrase of parting, has been credited similarly to the German
so lange
(and also to the Yiddish
sholom
), but it is actually of English origin, and does not appear to be an Americanism. In a letter from Bayard Taylor to Edmund Clarence Stedman, dated June 16, 1865,
and how
is laid to “the Germans,”
181
but no other evidence that it was borrowed seems to be available. On equally dubious evidence
rubber-neck
has been derived from a probably mythical German
gummihals
, and
it listens well
, a phrase of affirmation popular twenty years ago, has been linked with the Berlinese adage,
Et jinge woll, aber et jeht nicht. Junge
(from
klingen
) actually means to sound; the German verb for
to listen
is
horchen
. In all probability,
it listens well
was introduced by the German comedians who flourished before the World War. Like their Irish and Yiddish colleagues, they enriched the current slang with many fantastic locutions. The influence of Charles Godfrey Leland’s “Hans Brietmann’s Ballads” and other books also helped to familiarize Americans with many German and pseudo-German words and phrases.
182
Phooey
, which plainly comes from the German (and Yiddish)
pfui
, seems to have been introduced by Walter Winchell,
c
. 1930. The barbecues which began to dot the country with the rise of the automobile soon offered
chickenburgers
as well as
hamburgers
, and there are even reports of
clamburgers
.
183
In 1930, for some reason to me unknown, Swift & Company, the Chicago packers, changed the name of their
frankfurters
to
frankfurts
, and introduced a substitute for
leberwurst
under the style of
livercheese
. The American
Gelehrten
, who began to resort to German universities in large number in the 80’s, brought back
festschrift, seminar, semester, anlage
and
diener
and still cling to them, and it is possible that
outstanding
, the favorite counter-word of pedagogues lower in the scale, was suggested by
ausstehend
184
.
The majority of the numerous Spanish loan-words in American came in before the Civil War, but the Spanish-American War added
insurrecto, trocha, junta, ladrone, incommunicado, ley fuga, machete, manaña
and
rurale
, some of which are already obsolete; and the popularity of Western movies and fiction has brought in a few more,
e.g., rodeo, hoosegow
(from
juzgado
, the past participle of
juzgar
, to judge)
185
and
wrangler
(from
caballerango
, a horse-groom), and greatly increased the use of others.
Chile con carne
did not enter into the general American dietary until after 1900. The suffix
-ista
came in during the troubles in Mexico, following the downfall of Porfirio Díaz in 1911. The case of
cafeteria
I have dealt with in Section 2 of this chapter. From the Indian languages the only recent acquisitions seem to be
chautauqua
and
hooch
. The latter goes back to the American occupation of Alaska in 1867. The first soldiers sent there were forbidden to have any spirituous liquors, so they set up stills and manufactured a supply of their own, of sugar and flour. The product was called
hoocheno
or
hoochino
by the natives, and it continued to bear that name until the Klondike gold-rush in 1897.
186
Then it was shortened to
hooch. Chautauqua
was borrowed from the name of the county and lake in Southwestern New York. The first
chautauqua
was opened on the shore of the lake on August 4, 1874, but the word did not come into general use until the end of the century. It was borrowed in the first place from the language of the Senecas, and it is reported, variously, to have meant the place of easy death, the place where one was lost, the foggy place, a place high up, two moccasins tied in the middle, and a pack tied in the middle. The French spelled it
tchadakoin
, and in early maps and books it appeared also as
tjadakoin, chataconit, chadakoin, chautauque, shatacoin, judaxque
and
jadaqua
. In 1859, by a resolution of the county
board of supervisors, the present spelling was made official.
187
At the start
chautauqua
meant a Summer-school, permanently housed and of some pedagogical pretensions. But toward 1900 it began to signify a traveling show, often performing under canvas, and including vaudeville acts as well as lectures.
In the Concise Oxford Dictionary, which is on every literate Englishman’s desk,
spaghetti
is italicized as a foreign word; in America it is familiar to every child. But not many other Italian loan-words have got into American, probably because the great majority of Italian immigrants have been poor folk, keeping much to themselves. I can think of
chianti
(more generally known as
dago-red), ravioli, minestrone, mafia
and
black-hand
(from
mano negra
), and that is about all.
188
Even the argot of roguery has been but little enriched by Italian words, though there have been many eminent Italian gunmen. It has been suggested that
and how
may owe something to the Italian
e come
, and that
sez you
may be a translation of
si dice
,
189
but there is no evidence in either case. It may be that
ambish
and its analogues were suggested by Italian difficulties with English, but that also is only a surmise. At the time of the Russian-Japanese War (1904–5) the suffix
-ski
or
-sky
had a popular vogue, and produced many words,
e.g., dunski, darnfoolski, smartski, devilinsky, allright-sky
and
buttinski
, but of these only
buttinski
seems to have survived.
190
1
Henry Cabot Lodge says in his essay, Colonialism in the United States, printed in his Studies in History (1884), that “the luxurious fancies which were born of increased wealth, and the intellectual tastes which were developed by the advances of the higher education … revived the dying spirit of colonialism.” This spirit was confined largely to “young men who despised everything American and admired everything English.” Such persons, says Lodge, “flatter themselves with being cosmopolitans, when in truth they are genuine colonists, petty and provincial to the last degree.”
2
Gould was born at Litchfield, Conn., in 1805, and died in New York in 1885. He lectured, contributed to the magazines, and wrote books and plays. In 1836 he published his Lectures Delivered Before the Mercantile Library Association, apparently as a counterblast to Samuel Lorenzo Knapp’s Lectures on American Literature (1829). In this book he deplored the whooping up of American authors, and argued for the superiority of the British.
3
A book made up of articles contributed to the New York
Galaxy
in 1867, 1868 and 1869.
4
White was born in 1821 and died in 1885. He studied both medicine and law, but preferred journalism, and later had a political job in New York. He edited the Riverside Shakespeare, which is still in print. He was extremely dogmatic, and a chronic controversialist. Perhaps his chief claim to fame is the fact that he was the father of Stanford White, the architect, whose assassination in 1906 made a famous sensation. His pedantic effort to limit the field of Americanisms has been described in
Chapter I
, Section 5.
5
He was born at Troy, N. Y. in 1825, and educated at Harvard. He then went to India in search of a runaway brother. Settling there, he undertook the study of Sanskrit, and soon mastered it sufficiently to be made professor of it at Benares. He printed many learned editions of the Indian classics. In 1860 Oxford made him a D.C.L. and in 1862 he became professor of Sanskrit, Hindustani and Indian jurisprudence at King’s College, London. In 1864 he became examiner in Hindustani for the British Civil Service Commission, and in 1880 he succeeded Max Müller as examiner in Sanskrit. He not only had an important hand in the Oxford Dictionary, but was also a collaborator in Joseph Wright’s monumental English Dialect Dictionary (1896–1905). He died in 1901, much honored in England but hardly known in his own country.
6
That Whitman, Howells and Mark Twain were acutely conscious of the changes that were occurring in American I have shown by quotations from them in Chapter I, Section 6. Howells, by an almost incredible paradox, was praised by White and denounced by Hall. White, in Words and Their Uses, spoke of his “unobtrusive and seemingly unconscious mastery of idiomatic English,” but Hall, in Recent Exemplifications of False Philology, said that “among American writers of rising fame whose English is noticeably bad, Mr. Howells stands somewhat eminent.” He then proceeded to belabor Howells’s use of
to aggravate, on
the street,
to anecdote, muletress, mutual
friends,
to discommode, to experience, reliable
and
unrivaledest
. Some of these were obviously only nonce-words, used with humorous intent. Others were perfectly good American, and so remain. Hall’s onslaught is hardly to be taken seriously; he was simply using Howells as a club to beat White. On p. 106 he belabored Howells for using
to experience
and
reliable
, but on p. 31 he defended the former vigorously against White, and on p. 100 he defended the latter. Such are the follies of the learned!
7
Among them, Jonathan Swift. In the
Tatler
, Sept. 28, 1710, he contended that “monosyllables are the disgrace of our land.” “We cram one syllable,” he continued, “and cut off the rest, as the owl fattened her mice after she had bit off their legs, to prevent them running away. If ours be the same reason for maiming our words, it will certainly answer the end; for I am sure no other nation will desire to borrow them.”
8
There is an interesting discussion of such words in Otto Jespersen’s Growth and Structure of the English Language, 3rd ed.; Leipzig, 1919, pp. 170–2. See also Stunts in Language, by Louise Pound,
English Journal
, Vol. IX, No. 2, Feb., 1920; Essays on English, by Brander Matthews; New York, 1921, p. 107
ff
; Neuenglische Kurzformbil-dungen, by Leo Müller; Giessen, 1923; and Clipped Words: A Convenience and a Custom, in Do You Talk Like That?, by Richard Burton; Indianapolis, 1929, p. 213
ff
.
9
This etymology for
mutt
is supported by Bud Fisher, creator of Mutt and Jeff. See the
Editor and Publisher
, April 17, 1919, p. 21.
10
In the Thorndike-Century Junior Dictionary; Chicago, 1935, edited by Dr. E. L. Thorndike, of Teachers College, Columbia, for the use of the young, the following are listed without any indication that they are not in good usage:
coon, pike, phone, gas, photo, movie, diner, sleeper, auto, smoker, bum, drape
and
knicker
. But
possum
is stated to be in use only “in common talk,” and
cuss, draw, talkie, flu, pep
and
memo
are omitted altogether.
11
See College Words and Phrases, by E. H. Babbitt,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. II, Pt. I, 1900.
12
A long list of such forms is in Clipped Words, by Elisabeth Witt-mann,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Pt. II, 1914.
13
In 1918 William C. D’Arcy, then president of a national association of advertising clubs, condemned the use of
ad
in high, astounding terms. “It is,” he said, “the language of bootblacks, and is beneath the dignity of men of the advertising profession.” In 1925 Robert H. Cornell, executive secretary of an advertising men’s convention held at Houston, Tex., “asked for the cooperation of the newspapers of Houston, the local advertisers, and all local organizations that have anything to do with the convention to avoid use of the abbreviation in all printed matter and letters going out in connection with the convention.” See
Associated Advertising
, Jan., 1925. But
Associated Advertising
was forced to add that “many advertising clubs throughout the United States are commonly called
Ad-Clubs
, some of them even using the abbreviation on their letterheads, in their constitutions and bylaws, and in literature which they send out.”
14
Bunk
seems to have come in about 1910. It was first listed in the Addendum to Webster’s New International Dictionary in 1918. The definite article often precedes it.
15
See
Boost
, by Klara H. Collitz,
American Speech
, Sept., 1926. Thornton traced
boost
to 1825 and
to boost
to 1826.
16
Aframerican
was invented by Sir Harry Johnston, but remains a rarity in England.
Amerind
, which preceded it, was first used in the publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology,
c
. 1900. Dr. Robert H. Lowie tells me that he has heard that “it developed from merging the two abbreviations,
Amer
. and
Ind.
, which figured on the labels of specimens in the National Museum.” Dr. Frank H. Vi-zetelly says in How to Use English; New York, 1932, p. 70, that it was coined by Major J. W. Powell of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1899, first as
Amerindian
and then in the contracted form.
17
Burton Holmes, the lecturer, wrote to me as follows on Jan. 16, 1935: “In 1904 we planned an invasion of London with our
lectures
— a word that repels the ticket-buyer. My late manager, Louis Francis Brown, worried himself sick over the problem. When he came out of his pneumonia delirium he murmured weakly, ‘Eureka!
Travelogue!
’, and we proceeded to broadcast the word in our publicity. Later, the late Dr. [R. R.] Bowker [1848–1933] wrote us that he was the coiner of the word, and submitted circulars of an earlier date in which it was used thus: ‘Each of Dr. Bowker’s lectures is a complete
travelogue of
–––.’ He had never used the word in any other way. We never saw it in print until he sent his circular. We were the first to give it any important publicity. Then everybody borrowed it, and we dropped it for
travel-revue, screen-journey
, and other inventions of our own. I have heard
pianologues, naturelogues
and other shockers.” To these
organlog
, used in the movies, may be added. Mr. Holmes seems to have made an error of a year in the date of his début in London. The Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary gives the following from the London
Daily Chronicle
of April 16, 1903: “Mr. Burton Holmes, an American entertainer new to London, delivered last evening the first of a series of
travelogues.
”
18
The oil men seem to be especially fond of such blends. See Trade Names in the Petroleum Industry, by Dora Lee Brauer,
American Speech
, April, 1935.
19
See Blends: Their Relation to English Word Formation, by Louise Pound; Heidelberg, 1914; Some New Portmanteau Words, by Robert Withington,
Philological Quarterly
, April, 1930; More Portmanteau Coinages, by the same,
American Speech
, Feb., 1932; Dick-ensian and Other Blends, by the same,
American Speech
, Oct., 1933; Blends, by Steven T. Byington,
American Speech
, Oct., 1927; Blend-Words in English, by Harold Wentworth; Ithaca, N. Y., 1933; Iteratives, Blends and Streckformen, by F. A. Wood,
Modern Philology
, Oct., 1911; Some English Blends, by the same,
Modern Language Notes
, June, 1912; On Blendings of Synonymous or Cognate Expressions in English, by G. A. Berg-ström, Lund (Sweden), 1906.
20
Vaseline
was coined by Robert A. Chesebrough in 1870 or thereabout. It was made of the German
wasser
, meaning water, and the Greek
elaion
, meaning oil. Mr. Chesebrough was of the opinion that “petroleum is produced by the decomposition of water in the earth, and the union of the hydrogen thus evolved with the carbon of certain rocks, under the influence of heat and pressure.” (Private communication from Mr. T. J. Dobbins, secretary of the Chesebrough Manufacturing Company, March 15, 1935).
Vaseline
now appears in all the German and French dictionaries, but all rights to the name are still vested in the Chesebrough Company. Its original trade-mark was renewed on July 25, 1905, and upheld by a decree of the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, May 26, 1933. It was similarly upheld in England by the Court of Appeal in 1902.
Vaseline
is now in most of the Continental languages.
21
Listerine
, of course, is derived from the name of Lord Lister, the English surgeon who brought in aseptic surgery, but it was coined in the United States. Lord Lister objected to the use of his name, but in vain.
22
Kodak
was coined by George Eastman, inventor of the camera, and he registered it as a trademark on Sept. 4, 1888. Its origin is described in George Eastman, by Carl W. Ackerman; New York, 1930. The
k
was suggested by the fact that it was the first letter of his mother’s family name.
Kodak
has got into all the Continental languages. In October, 1917, the Verband Deutscher Amateurphotographen-Vereine was moved to issue the following warning: “Wer von einem
Kodak
spricht und nur allgemein eine photographische Kamera meint, bedenkt nicht, dass er mit der Weiterver breitung dieses Wortes die deutsche Industrie zugunsten der amerikanisch-englischen schädigt.” Despite this warning,
kodak
is in all the more recent German (and French) dictionaries. In American there are a number of familiar derivatives,
e.g., to kodak, kodaker, kodak-fiend
.
23
Word-Coinage and Modern Trade Names,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Pt. I, 1913. See also Robots of Language, by Henry Bellamann,
Yale Review
, Sept., 1929.
24
In Trade-Name Suffixes,
American Speech
, July, 1927, Walter E. Myers calls attention to the popularity of
-ex
and
-tex
. He cites, among other familiar trade-terms,
cutex, pyrex, kleenex
, and
celotex
. He surmises that
-tex
may owe something to
texture
. The etymology of some of these names is obvious, but others are somewhat puzzling.
Pyrex
, a name for glass ovenware, was not suggested by the Greek
pyra
, a hearth, but by the humble English word
pie
. The first baking-dish brought out was a pie-plate. For this I am indebted to Mr. William H. Curtiss, vice-president of the Corning Glass Works, Corning, N. Y.
25
The Advertiser’s Artful Aid,
Bookman
, Feb., 1919. See also Word-Coinage, by Leon Mead; New York, n.d., and Burgess Unabridged, by Gelett Burgess; New York, 1914.
26
Late in 1923 Delcevare King, a rich Prohibitionist of Quincy, offered a prize of $200 for the best word to apply to “the lawless drinker to stab awake his conscience.” Mr. King received more than 25,000 suggestions. The announcement that
scofflaw
, suggested by both Mr. Shaw and Miss Butler, had won was made on Jan. 15, 1924. The word came into immediate currency, and survived until the collapse of Prohibition.
27
For example, A. E. Sullivan wrote to the London
Daily Telegraph
, March 2, 1935: “The origin of
to debunk
is doubtless the same as that of American jargon in general — the inability of an ill-educated and unintelligent democracy to assimilate long words. Its intrusion in our own tongue is due partly to the odious novelty of the word itself, and partly to the prevailing fear that to write exact English nowadays is to be put down as a pedant and a prig.”