American Language (5 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
The real counter-attack was carried on by lesser men — the elder Timothy Dwight, John Neal, Edward Everett, Charles Jared Ingersoll, J. K. Paulding, and Robert Walsh, Jr., among them. Neal went to England, became secretary to Jeremy Bentham, forced his way into the reviews, and so fought the English on their own ground. Walsh set up the
American Review of History and Politics
, the first American critical quarterly, in 1811, and eight years later published “An Appeal From the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America.” Everett performed chiefly in the
North American Review
(founded in 1815), to which he contributed many articles and of which he was editor from 1820 to 1824. Wirt published his “Letters of a British Spy” in 1803, and Ingersoll followed
with “Inchiquin the Jesuit’s Letters on American Literature and Politics” in 1811. In January, 1814 the
Quarterly
reviewed “Inchiquin” in a particularly violent manner, and a year later Dwight replied to the onslaught in “Remarks on the Review of Inchiquin’s Letters Published in the
Quarterly Review
, Addressed to the Right Honorable George Canning, Esq.” Dwight ascribed the
Quarterly
diatribe to Southey. He went on:
Both the travelers and the literary journalists of [England] have, for reasons which it would be idle to inquire after and useless to allege, thought it proper to caricature the Americans. Their pens have been dipped in gall; and their representations have been, almost merely, a mixture of malevolence and falsehood.
Dwight rehearsed some of the counts in the
Quarterly’s
indictment — that “the president of Yale College tells of a
conflagrative
brand,” that Jefferson used
to belittle
, that
to guess
was on the tongues of all Americans, and so on. “You charge us,” he said, “with making some words, and using others in a peculiar sense.… You accuse us of forming projects to get rid of the English language; ‘not,’ you say, ‘merely by barbarizing it, but by abolishing it altogether, and substituting a new language of our own.’ ” His reply was to list, on the authority of Pegge’s “Anecdotes of the English Language,” 105 vulgarisms common in London — for example,
potecary
for apothecary,
chimly
for chimney,
saace
for sauce,
kiver
for cover,
nowheres
for nowhere,
scholard
for scholar, and
hisn
for his — to accuse “members of Parliament” of using
diddled
and
gullibility
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and to deride the English provincial dialects as “unintelligible gabble.”
But in this battle across the ocean it was Paulding who got in the most licks, and the heaviest ones. In all he wrote five books dealing with the subject. The first, “The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan” (1812) was satirical in tone, and made a considerable popular success. Three years later he followed it with a more serious work, “The United States and England,” another reply to the
Quarterly
review of “Inchiquin.” The before-mentioned “Letters From the South” came out in 1817, and in 1822
Paulding resumed the attack with “A Sketch of Old England,” a sort of
reductio ad absurdum
of the current English books of American travels. He had never been to England, and the inference was that many of the English travelers had never been to America. Finally, in 1825, he resorted to broad burlesque in “John Bull in America, or The New Munchausen.”
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Now and then some friendly aid came from the camp of the enemy. Cairns shows that, while the
Quarterly
, the
European Magazine
and the
Anti-Jacobin
were “strongly anti-American” and “deliberately and dirtily bitter,” three or four of the lesser reviews displayed a fairer spirit, and even more or less American bias. After 1824, when the
North American Review
gave warning that if the campaign of abuse went on it would “turn into bitterness the last drops of good-will toward England that exist in the United States,” even
Blackwood’s
became somewhat conciliatory.
But this occasional tolerance for things American was never extended to the American language. Most of the English books of travel mentioned Americanisms only to revile them, and even when they were not reviled they were certainly not welcomed. The typical attitude was well set forth by Captain Hamilton in “Men and Manners in America,” already referred to as denying that the United States of 1833 had any libraries. “The amount of bad grammar in circulation,” he said, “is very great; that of barbarisms [
i.e.
, Americanisms] enormous.” Worse, these “barbarisms” were not confined to the ignorant, but came almost as copiously from the lips of the learned.
I do not now speak of the operative class, whose massacre of their mother-tongue, however inhuman, could excite no astonishment; but I allude to the great body of lawyers and traders; the men who crowd the exchange and the hotels; who are to be heard speaking in the courts, and are selected by their fellow-citizens to fill high and responsible offices. Even by this educated and respectable class, the commonest words are often so transmogrified as to be placed beyond recognition of an Englishman.
Hamilton then went on to describe some of the prevalent “barbarisms”:
The word
does
is split into two syllables, and pronounced
do-es. Where
, for some incomprehensible reason, is converted into
whare, there
into
thare
; and I remember, on mentioning to an acquaintance that I had called on a gentleman of taste in the arts, he asked “whether he
sheiv
(showed) me his pictures.” Such words as
oratory
and
dilatory
are pronounced with the penult syllable long and accented:
missionary
becomes
missionary, angel, ângel, dânger, danger
, etc.
But this is not all. The Americans have chosen arbitrarily to change the meaning of certain old and established English words, for reasons they cannot explain, and which I doubt much whether any European philologist could understand. The word
clever
affords a case in point. It has here no connexion with talent, and simply means pleasant or amiable. Thus a good-natured blockhead in the American vernacular is a
clever
man, and having had this drilled into me, I foolishly imagined that all trouble with regard to this word, at least, was at an end. It was not long, however, before I heard of a gentleman having moved into a
clever
house, of another succeeding to a
clever
sum of money, of a third embarking in a
clever
ship, and making a
clever
voyage, with a
clever
cargo; and of the sense attached to the word in these various combinations, I could gain nothing like a satisfactory explanation.…
The privilege of barbarizing the King’s English is assumed by all ranks and conditions of men. Such words as
slick, kedge
and
boss
, it is true, are rarely used by the better orders; but they assume unlimited liberty in the use of
expect, reckon, guess
and
calculate
, and perpetrate other conversational anomalies with remorseless impunity.
This Briton, as usual, was as full of moral horror as of grammatical disgust, and put his denunciation upon the loftiest of grounds. He concluded:
I will not go on with this unpleasant subject, nor should I have alluded to it, but I feel it something of a duty to express the natural feeling of an Englishman at finding the language of Shakespeare and Milton thus gratuitously degraded. Unless the present progress of change be arrested by an increase of taste and judgment in the more educated classes, there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman, and that the nation will be cut off from the advantages arising from their participation in British literature. If they contemplate such an event with complacency, let them go on and prosper; they have only to
progress
in their present course, and their grandchildren bid fair to speak a jargon as novel and peculiar as the most patriotic American linguist can desire.
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All the other English writers of travel books took the same line, and so did the stay-at-homes who hunted and abhorred Americanisms from afar. Mrs. Frances Trollope reported in her “Domestic
Manners of the Americans” (1832) that during her whole stay in the Republic she had seldom “heard a sentence elegantly turned and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American”: there was “always something either in the expression or the accent” that jarred her feelings and shocked her taste. She concluded that “the want of refinement” was the great American curse. Captain Frederick Marry at, in “A Diary in America” (1839) observed that “it is remarkable how very debased the language has become in a short period in America,” and then proceeded to specifications — for example, the use of
right away
for immediately, of
mean
for ashamed, of
clever
in the senses which stumped Captain Hamilton, of
bad
as a deprecant of general utility, of
admire
for like, of
how?
instead of
what?
as an interrogative, of
considerable
as an adverb, and of such immoral verbs as
to suspicion
and
to opinion
. Marryat was here during Van Buren’s administration, when the riot of Americanisms was at its wildest, and he reported some really fantastic specimens. Once, he said, he heard “one of the first men in America” say, “Sir, if I had done so, I should not only have doubled and trebled, but I should have
fourbled
and
fivebled
my money.” Unfortunately, it is hard to believe that an American who was so plainly alive to the difference between
shall
and
will, should
and
would
, would have been unaware of
quadrupled
and
quintupled
. No doubt there was humor in the country, then as now, and visiting Englishmen were sometimes taken for rides.
Captain Basil Hall, who was here in 1827 and 1828, and published his “Travels in North America” in 1829, was so upset by some of the novelties he encountered that he went to see Noah Webster, then seventy years old, to remonstrate. Webster upset him still further by arguing stoutly that “his countrymen had not only a right to adopt new words, but were obliged to modify the language to suit the novelty of the circumstances, geographical and political, in which they were placed.” The lexicographer went on to observe judicially that “it is quite impossible to stop the progress of language — it is like the course of the Mississippi, the motion of which, at times, is scarcely perceptible; yet even then it possesses a momentum quite irresistible. Words and expressions will be forced into use, in spite of all the exertions of all the writers in the world.”
“But surely,” persisted Hall, “such innovations are to be deprecated?”
“I don’t know that,” replied Webster. “If a word becomes universally current in America, where English is spoken, why should it not take its station in the language?”
To this Hall made an honest British reply. “Because,” he said, “there are words enough already.”
Webster tried to mollify him by saying that “there were not fifty words in all which were used in America and not in England” — an underestimate of large proportions —, but Hall went away muttering.
Marryat, who toured the United States ten years after Hall, was chiefly impressed by the American verb
to fix
, which he described as “universal” and as meaning “to do anything.” It also got attention from other English travelers, including Godfrey Thomas Vigne, whose “Six Months in America” was printed in 1832, and Charles Dickens, who came in 1842. Vigne said that it had “perhaps as many significations as any word in the Chinese language,” and proceeded to list some of them — “to be done, made, mixed, mended, bespoken, hired, ordered, arranged, procured, finished, lent or given.” Dickens thus dealt with it in one of his letters home to his family:
I asked Mr. Q. on board a steamboat if breakfast be nearly ready, and he tells me yes, he should think so, for when he was last below the steward was
fixing
the tables — in other words, laying the cloth. When we have been writing and I beg him … to collect our papers, he answers that he’ll
fix
’em presently. So when a man’s dressing he’s
fixing
himself, and when you put yourself under a doctor he
fixes
you in no time. T’other night, before we came on board here, when I had ordered a bottle of mulled claret, and waited some time for it, it was put on the table with an apology from the landlord (a lieutenant-colonel) that he fear’d it wasn’t properly
fixed
. And here, on Saturday morning, a Western man, handing his potatoes to Mr. Q. at breakfast, inquired if he wouldn’t take some of “these
fixings
” with his meat.
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In another letter, written on an Ohio river steamboat on April 15, 1842, Dickens reported that “out of Boston and New York” a nasal drawl was universal, that the prevailing grammar was “more than doubtful,” that the “oddest vulgarisms” were “received idioms,” and that “all the women who have been bred in slave States speak more or less like Negroes.” His observations on American speech
habits in his “American Notes” (1842) were so derisory that they drew the following from Emerson:
No such conversations ever occur in this country in real life, as he relates. He has picked up and noted with eagerness each odd local phrase that he met with, and when he had a story to relate, has joined them together, so that the result is the broadest caricature.
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Almost every English traveler of the years between the War of 1812 and the Civil War was puzzled by the strange signs on American shops. Hall couldn’t make out the meaning of
Leather and Finding Store
, though he found
Flour and Feed Store
and
Clothing Store
self-explanatory, albeit unfamiliar. Hamilton, who followed in 1833, failed to gather “the precise import” of
Dry-Goods Store
, and was baffled and somewhat shocked by
Coffin Warehouse
(it would now be
Casketeria!
) and
Hollow Ware, Spiders
, and
Fire-Dogs
. But all this was relatively mild stuff, and after 1850 the chief licks at the American dialect were delivered, not by English travelers, most of whom had begun by then to find it more amusing than indecent, but by English pedants who did not stir from their cloisters. The climax came in 1863, when the Very Rev. Henry Alford, D.D. dean of Canterbury, printed his “Plea for the Queen’s English.”
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He said: