American Language (55 page)

The English have relatively few aliens in their midst, and in consequence they have developed nothing comparable to our huge repertory of opprobrious names for them. They have borrowed our
dago
for Italian, and they have been calling Frenchmen
frogs
or
froggies
since the Napoleonic wars
¹⁶⁹
but they quickly dropped the
war-time
hun
and
boche
for German, they have devised nothing more unpleasant to designate a Scotsman than
Sandy
, and their worst name for the damned Yankee is simply
Yankee
. To match these feeble efforts the American language offers:

The paucity of aliens in England also makes it unnecessary for the English to pay as much heed as we do to the susceptibilities of organized (and sometimes extremely self-assertive) foreign groups. Thus they are free to laugh at stage Irishmen without bringing down the dudgeon of the Knights of Columbus, and they continue to use the word
Jew
freely, and even retain the verb
to jew
in their vocabulary. In the United States, according to Richard Grant White, certain Jews petitioned the publishers of Webster’s and Worcester’s Dictionaries, so long ago as the early 70’s, to omit their definitions of
to jew
, and the publishers of Worcester’s complied. “Webster’s New International” (1934) still includes the verb, but with the saving observation that it is “used opprobriously in allusion to practices imputed to the Jews by those who dislike them.”
To jew down
is listed, but it is dismissed as slang. In the Standard Dictionary both
to jew
and
to jew down
are called slang. But in the Oxford Dictionary
to jew
gets the more respectable rank of a colloquialism. White says that there were also protests from Jews in the early 70’s, both in England and in the United States, against the use of
Jew
as an adjective in reference to criminals. Both the New York
Times
and the London
Pall Mall Gazette
, he says, apologized for using it, and promised to sin no more. To this he objected, saying,

But in the United States certain Jews carry on a continuous campaign against the use of
Jew,
and most American newspapers, in order to get rid of their clamor, commonly use
Hebrew
instead. Thus, one often encounters such forms as
Hebrew comedian, Hebrew holidays
and even
Hebrew rabbi
.
¹⁸²
Some years ago a number
of American Jews, alarmed by such incongruities, issued a “Note on the Word
Jew
” for the guidance of editors. From it I take the following:

Dr. Solomon Solis Cohen of Philadelphia calls my attention to the fact that the American Jews themselves are not consistent in their use of
Jew
and
Hebrew
. They have Young Men’s
Hebrew
Associations all over the country, but they also have a Council of
Jewish
Women and many
Jewish
Community Centers. They have both a
Hebrew
Union College and a
Jewish
Theological Seminary. Their principal weekly is called the
American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune
. The distinction between the religious significance of
Jew
and the national significance of
Hebrew
is by no means always clear. Abraham, says Dr. Solis Cohen, was a
Hebrew
(’
Ibri
), but in the course of time his descendants divided into two moieties, the
Israelites
and the
Judeans
, and it is from
Judeans
that we get our word
Jew
. “When the Northern Kingdom was destroyed by Shalmaneser the
name
Israel
, as a territorial designation, disappeared except from poetry and prayer, until it was recently revived by the Zionists, who speak of all Palestine as
Erez Israel
”
¹⁸³
Dr. Solis Cohen suggests that the superior respectability of
Hebrew
in the United States may have been helped by the fact that it was a term of honor among the early Puritan divines, who studied the
Hebrew
language, and venerated the
Hebrew
scriptures. The word
Jew
has been given a dubious significance by “The Merchant of Venice,” by the verb
to jew
, and by various other unpleasant associations. Whatever the fact, the sort of Jew who devotes himself to visiting editors seems to prefer
Hebrew
. Even in the advertisements of
kosher
hotels in the Jewish papers the old term,
Jewish cooking
, has been abandoned. But I have never observed the use of
Hebrew cooking
in its place: the popular term seems to be the somewhat incredible
Hungarian cuisine
. Jewish cookery is actually mainly German, with certain Russian and Polish fancies added. In New York the adjective
Jewish
seems to be regarded as less offensive than the noun
Jew
. Thus
Jewish boy
is often used as a sort of euphemism for
Jew
. The Jews listed in “Who’s Who in America” sometimes write
Jewish religion
in their autobiographical sketches instead of
Jew
, but most of them omit all direct reference to their faith. Among the Cohens in the volume for 1934–35 I find one who describes himself as a
Hebrew
, one (only partly Jewish) who says he is an Episcopalian, one who puts down
Jewish religion
, and eight who are silent.

The Jews are not the only indignant visitors to American editorial offices. In Chicago, in the heyday of Al Capone and his assassins, the local Italians made such vociferous objection to the use of
Italian
in identifying gunmen that the newspapers began to use
Sicilian
instead. Apparently, the complaints had come chiefly from Northern Italians, and most of the gunmen were actually Sicilians or Neapolitans. But there were also thousands of Sicilians and Neapolitans in the Chicago region who were not gunmen, and why they did not protest in their turn I do not know. The Negroes everywhere carry on a double campaign — first, against the use of
nigger
, and secondly, for the capitalization of
Negro
. On March 7, 1930, when the New York
Times
announced that it would capitalize
Negro
thereafter, there was jubilation in the Negro press. The Association for the
Advancement of Colored People had been advocating the change for a long while, but it was a letter from Major R. R. Moton, president of Tuskegee Institute, that moved the
Times
. It reported on March 9 that
Negro
was being used by most of the principal American magazines, and by a number of leading newspapers, including the Montgomery (Ala.)
Advertiser
, the Durham (N. C.)
Sun
, the Columbus (Ga.)
Ledger
, and the Raleigh (N. C.)
News
in the South. The rejoicing among the dark brethren was not shared by George S. Schuyler, the Negro iconoclast, who argued in the Pittsburgh
Courier
¹⁸⁴
that
Negro
meant a black man, and that but 20% of the Aframericans were actually black. “The truth is,” he said, “that the American Negro is an amalgam of Caucasian, Amerindian and African.… Geographically, we are neither Ethiopians nor Africans, but Americans. Culturally, we are Anglo-Saxons.” But the prevailing view in Aframerica was set forth three years later by the Negro poet and publicist, James Weldon Johnson, as follows:

The American people, once the most prudish on earth, took to a certain defiant looseness of speech during the World War, and when Prohibition produced its antinomian reaction they went even further. Today words and phrases are encountered everywhere — on the screen, in the theatres, in the comic papers, in the newspapers, on the floor of Congress, and even at the domestic hearth — that were reserved for use in saloons and bagnios a generation ago. A good example is
nerts
, in its sense of denial or disparagement. When it came in, in 1925, its etymology must have been apparent to everyone old enough to vote, yet it seems to have met with no opposition from guardians of the national morals, and in a little while it rivalled
wham
and
wow
for popularity in the comic strips. My researches indicate that it was coined in Hollywood, that great fountain of American neologisms. There arose there, in the early 20’s, a fashion for using openly the ancient four-letter words that had maintained an underground life since the Restoration. It was piquant, for a while, to hear them from the lovely lips of movie beauties, but presently the grand dames of Hollywood society prohibited them as a shade too raw, and they were succeeded by euphemistic forms, made by changing the vowel of each to
e
and inserting
r
after it.
Nuts
was not one of these venerable words, but it had connotations that made it seem somewhat raw too, so it was changed to
nerts
, and in that form swept the country. At the same time the college boys and girls launched
bushwah, hospice, horse’s caboose
and a number of other such thinly disguised shockers, and there appeared a considerable amelioration of the old American antipathy to
bull, bitch, cock, stallion
, and so on. Even
pregnant
returned to good society.

Victoria was not crowned in England until 1838, but a Victorian movement against naughty words had been in full blast in this country since the beginning of the century. In 1830 or thereabout, as Mrs. Frances Trollope tells us, “a young German gentleman of perfectly good manners … offended one of the principal families … by having pronounced the word
corset
before the ladies of it.”
¹⁸⁶
James Flint, in his “Letters from America,”
¹⁸⁷
reported that
rooster
had been substituted for
cock
(the latter having acquired an indelicate anatomical significance) by 1821; indeed there is a quotation in Thornton’s “American Glossary” which indicates that it may have come in by 1809. At the same time
haystack
began to supplant
haycock
, and
roach
to supplant
cockroach
, and a bit later a young man in Judge T. C. Haliburton’s “Sam Slick” was telling a maiden that her brother had become a
rooster-swain
in the Navy. Bartlett, in his Glossary, says that this excessive delicacy was not most marked among the survivors of the New England Puritans, but in the West. He goes on (
c
. 1847):