American Language (50 page)

Here, finally, is the effort of the advertising agent of the Morris motor-car to do an advertisement in the American manner:

Colloquial English is just as unfathomable to most Americans as colloquial American is to Englishmen. Galsworthy not only puzzled his American readers with his bogus Americanisms; he also puzzled them with his attempts at English slang. When “The Silver Spoon”
was published in this country, in 1926, Harry Hansen was moved to print the following caveat:

The last word here, I suspect, was actually a typographical error for
phiz
. But Galsworthy was too austere a man to write slang, and Mr. H. W. Seaman tells me that he is also baffled by some of the phrases that baffled Mr. Hansen. In the following passage from Mrs. Joseph Conrad’s cook-book (1923) there were no visible blunders, yet to most American housewives it must have been almost unintelligible:

Nor would it be easy to find Americans able, without some pondering, to comprehend such news items as the following:

Even ordinary business correspondence between Englishmen and Americans is sometimes made difficult by differences in the two vocabularies. In 1932 the publisher of the Decatur, Ill.,
Review
wrote to the London
Times
, asking what its practice was in the matter of stereotyping half-tones. The reply of its chief engineer was not downright unintelligible, but it contained so many strange words and phrases that the
Review
was moved to print an editorial about
them.
⁸³
In England, it appeared, stereotypers’ blankets were called
packing
, mat-rollers were
mangles
, mats (matrices) were
flongs
, and
to underlay a cut
was
to bump a block. To underlay
has since been adopted in England, but
cut
is seldom used. As we have seen in Chapter I, Section 4, the English often have difficulty understanding American books, and protest against their strange locutions with great bitterness. When my series of “Prejudices” began to be reprinted in London in 1921, many of the notices they received roundly denounced my Americanisms. But when, five years later, I translated the text from American into Standard English for a volume of selections, it was reviewed very amiably, and sold better than any of the books from which its contents were drawn.
⁸⁴
At about the same time William Feather of Cleveland, the editor of a syndicated house-organ, sold the English rights thereto to Alfred Pemberton, a London advertising agent. Mr. Feather writes excellent English, as English is understood in this country, but for British consumption many of his articles had to be extensively revised. In
American Speech
he later printed two amusing papers listing some of the changes made.
⁸⁵
I content myself with parallel passages from the American and English version of an article describing an ideal weekend in the country:

Similar changes are frequently made in American short stories reprinted in English magazines,
⁸⁷
and American advertisements are commonly rewritten for English use.
⁸⁸
In 1930 the Department of Commerce issued a business handbook of the United Kingdom
⁸⁹
giving warning that the American “sales-promoter will have to use British English in his sales drive” in the British Isles. “While American exporters and advertisers doing business in Britain,” it continued, “find it is of distinct advantage that English is the common language of the two countries, it is not by any means on as common a basis as it is widely assumed to be.” There followed a list of trade-terms differing in England and the United States. In the early days of the movie invasion the titles in American films were commonly translated into English,
⁹⁰
but as the flood mounted that effort had to be abandoned as hopeless, and today the talkies pour a constant stream of American neologisms into English. Not infrequently they are puzzling at first blush, and to the end that they may be understood, glossaries are often printed in the English newspapers.
⁹¹
Similar glossaries
are sometimes attached to American books, or inserted in the programmes of American plays. When James Gleason’s “Is Zat So?” was presented in London in 1926, Hal O’Flaherty, the correspondent of the Chicago
Tribune
, cabled to his paper as follows:

This glossary
⁹²
included definitions of
goof, applesauce, to crab, to can
(to dismiss),
to frame, gorilla, hick, hooch, to lamp, pippin, to stall, sucker, wise-crack
and
to wise up
, most of which have since entered into the English slang vocabulary. When Carl Sandburg’s “Collected Poems” were reprinted in London a similar word-list was given in the introduction, with definitions of
bunk-shooter, con-man, dock-walloper, honky-tonk, floozy, yen, cahoots, leatherneck, mazuma
and
flooey
, and when Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt” was published there in 1922, there was added a glossary defining about 125 American terms, including
bellhop, booster, to bulldoze, burg, dingus, flivver, frame-house, getaway, hootch, jeans, kibosh, lounge-lizard, nut, once-over, pep, plute, room-mate, saphead, tinhorn, wisenheimer
and
yeggman
. Nearly all of these are now understood in England.
⁹³
In 1927 the Oxford University Press brought out an American edition, revised by George Van Santvoord, a former Rhodes scholar, of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary of F. G. and H. W. Fowler. It gave American spellings and pronunciations, and listed a great many words not to be found in the original English edition,
e.g., jitney, goulash, chop-suey
and
drug-store
. In 1934 there followed a new edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, revised by H. G. LeMesurier and H. W. Fowler, with an appendix largely devoted to American terms,
e.g., alfalfa, attaboy, bad-lands, bingle, bohunk, boloney
(in the Al Smith sense),
boob, bourbon, burg, calaboose, campus, chaps, chiropractic, co-ed, cole-slaw, con-niption
,
coon, craps, third-degree, crackerjack, to doll up, to dope out, to fade out, to frame
and
to get away with
. “The cinema, now vocal,” says Mr. LeMesurier, “has made [the Englishman] familiar with many Americanisms at the meaning of which he has often to guess.”

“While England was a uniquely powerful empire-state, ruled by an aristocratic caste,” said Wyndham Lewis in 1934,
⁹⁴
“its influence upon the speech as upon the psychology of the American ex-colonies was overwhelming. But today that ascendancy has almost entirely vanished. The aristocratic caste is nothing but a shadow of itself, the cinema has brought the American scene and the American dialect nightly into the heart of England, and the Americanizing process is far advanced.… There has been no reciprocal movement of England into the United States; indeed, with the new American nationalism, England is kept out.” This is certainly true in the field of language. It is most unusual for an English neologism to be taken up in this country, and when it is, it is only by a small class, mainly made up of conscious Anglomaniacs. To the common people everything English, whether an article of dress, a social custom or a word or phrase has what James M. Cain has called “a somewhat pansy cast.” That is to say, it is regarded as affected, effeminate and ridiculous. The stage Englishman is never a hero, and in his rôle of comedian he is laughed at with brutal scorn. To the average red-blooded he-American his tea-drinking is evidence of racial decay, and so are the cut of his clothes, his broad
a
, and his occasional use of such highly un-American locutions as
jolly, awfully
and
ripping
. The American soldiers who went to France in 1917 and 1918 did not develop either admiration or liking for their English comrades; indeed, they were better pleased with the French, and reserved their greatest fondness for the Germans. As we shall see in Chapter XI, Section 1, one of the evidences of their coolness toward Tommy Atkins was that they borrowed very little of his slang. They found him singing a number of American songs — for example, “Casey Jones,” “John Brown” and “We’re Here Because We’re Here”–
but they adopted only one of his own, to wit, “Mademoiselle from Armenteers.”
⁹⁵
In an elaborate vocabulary of American soldiers’ slang compiled by E. A. Hecker and Edmund Wilson, Jr.,
⁹⁶
I can find very few words or phrases that seem to be of English origin.
To carry on
retains in American its old American meaning of to raise a pother, despite its widespread use among the English in the sense of to be (in American)
on the job
. Even
to wangle
, perhaps the best of the new verbs brought out of the war by the English, and
wowser
⁹⁷
an excellent noun, have never got a foothold in the United States, and would be unintelligible today to nine Americans out of ten. As for
blighty, cheerio
and
righto
they would strike most members of the American Legion as almost as unmanly as
tummy
or
pee-pee
. After the success of “What Price Glory?” by Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson, in 1924,
what price
had a certain vogue, but it quickly passed out.

On higher and less earthly planes there is a greater hospitality to English example. Because the United States has failed to develop anything properly describable as a Court, or a native aristocracy of any settled position and authority, persons of social pretensions are thrown back upon English usage and opinion for guidance, and the vocabulary and pronunciation of the West End of London naturally flavor their speech. Until the beginning of the present century the word
shop
, in American, always meant a workshop, but in 1905 or thereabout the small stores along the Fifth avenues of the larger American cities began turning themselves into
shops
. Today the word has the special meaning of a store dealing in a limited range of merchandise, as opposed to a department-store; indeed,
shop
and
specialty-shop
are used interchangeably. Every American town of any pretensions now has
gift-shops
(or
shoppes
),
⁹⁸
book-shops, hat-shops, tea-shops, luggage-shops
and
candy-shops
. But the plain people continue to call a
shop
a
store
, though they use
shopping
and
shopper
. The effort, made at the time
shop
came in, to substitute
boot
for
shoe
did not get very far, and there are not many
boot-shops
left, and even fewer
boot-makers
, save in the strict American sense.
Bootery
and
toggery
did not last long. But
tradesmen’s-entrance
fared better, and so did
charwoman
, which has now pretty well supplanted
scrubwoman
, and, in the cities at least, caused Americans to forget their native modification of
char
, to wit,
chore. Hired-girls
began to vanish from the cities so long ago as the second Cleveland administration, and now they are all
maids. Drawing-room
, always used in the South, began to challenge the Northern
parlor
about 1895, but by the turn of the century both encountered stiff competition from
living-room. To Let
signs, once conscious affectations, are now almost as common, at least in the New York area, as
For Rent
signs,
postman
seems to be making some progress against
letter-carrier
, the tunnels under the Hudson are
tubes, flapper
is now good American, and
nursing-home
has got some lodgment. In August, 1917, signs appeared in the New York surface cars in which the conductors were referred to as
guards
; all of them are now
guards
on the elevated lines and in the subways save the forward men, who remain
conductors
officially. During the war even the government seemed inclined to substitute the English
hoarding
for the American
billboard
.
⁹⁹
In the Federal Reserve Act (1913) it borrowed the English
governor
to designate the head of a bank,
¹⁰⁰
and in 1926 the Weather Bureau formally adopted the English
smog
for a mixture of smoke and fog.
¹⁰¹
How and when the National
Biscuit
Company acquired its name I don’t know. What it manufactures
are
biscuits
in England, but
crackers
in the United States. Evacustes A. Phipson, an Englishman, says that
railway
came into American as “a concession to Anglomania,”
¹⁰²
but about that I am uncertain. In any case, the number of such loans is small, and not many of them are of any significance. More interesting is the Briticism
penny
, which survives in American usage despite the fact that we have no coin bearing that name officially, and the further fact that the
cent
to which it is applied is worth only half an English penny. It occurs in many compounds,
e.g., penny-bank
and
penny-in-the-slot
, and has even produced Americanisms,
e.g., penny-ante
and
penny-arcade
. In 1928 the Legislature of South Carolina considered a bill providing that in certain prosecutions for criminal libel the culprit should “be fined a
penny
and the costs, and no more.”
¹⁰³