American Language (7 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
The complaint that Americanisms are inherently unintelligible to civilized Christians is often heard in England, though not as often as in the past. It is a fact that they frequently deal with objects and ideas that are not familiar to the English, and that sometimes they make use of metaphors rather too bold for the English imagination. In consequence, there has been a steady emission of glossaries since the earliest days, some of them on a large scale. The first seems to have been that of the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, which was probably drawn up before 1800, but was not published until 1832, when it
appeared in the second edition of his “Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words.”
48
It was followed by that of David Humphreys, one of the Hartford Wits, which was printed as an appendix to his play, “The Yankey in England,” in 1815.
49
A year later came John Pickering’s “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America.” Pickering got many of his words from the current English reviews of American books, and his purpose was the double, and rather contradictory, one of proving to the English reviewers that they were good English, and of dissuading Americans from using them.
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Robley Dunglison’s glossary followed in 1829–30, John
Mason Peck’s in 1834,
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J. O. Halliwell-Phillips’s “Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms, Containing Words Now Obsolete in England, All of Which Are Familiar and in Common Use in America” in 1850, John Russell Bartlett’s “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States” (about 3725 terms) in 1848, A. L. Elwin’s “Glossary of Supposed Americanisms” (about 465 terms) in 1859, Maximilien Scheie de Vere’s “Americanisms” (about 4000 terms) in 1872, John S. Farmer’s “Americanisms Old and New” (about 5000 terms) in 1889, Sylva Clapin’s “New Dictionary of Americanisms” (about 5250 terms) in 1902, and Richard H. Thornton’s “American Glossary” (about 3700 terms) in 1912. These were mainly the work of philological amateurs, and only Thornton’s two volumes had any scientific value.
So long ago as 1913 Sir Sidney Low, who had lived in America and had a sound acquaintance with Americanisms, suggested ironically in an article in the
Westminster Gazette
that American be taught in the English schools. This was before the movie invasion, and he reported that the English business man was “puzzled by his ignorance of colloquial American” and “painfully hampered” thereby in his handling of American trade. He went on:
In the United States the study of the English tongue forms part of the educational scheme.… I think we should return the compliment. We ought to learn the American language in our schools and colleges. At present it is strangely neglected by the educational authorities. They pay attention to linguistic attainments of many other kinds, but not to this. How many thousands of youths are at this moment engaged in puzzling their brains over Latin and Greek grammar only Whitehall knows. Every well-conducted seminary has some instructor who is under the delusion that he is teaching English boys and girls to speak French with a good Parisian accent. We teach German, Italian, even Spanish, Russian, modern Greek, Arabic, Hindustani. For a moderate fee you can acquire a passing acquaintance with any of these tongues at the Berlitz Institute and the Gouin Schools. But even in these polyglot establishments there is nobody to teach you American. I have never
seen a grammar of it or a dictionary. I have searched in vain at the booksellers for “How to Learn American in Three Weeks” or some similar compendium. Nothing of the sort exists. The native speech of one hundred millions of civilized people is as grossly neglected by the publishers as it is by the schoolmasters. You can find means to learn Hausa or Swahili or Cape Dutch in London more easily than the expressive, if difficult, tongue which is spoken in the office, the barroom, the tramcar, from the snows of Alaska to the mouths of the Mississippi, and is enshrined in a literature that is growing in volume and favor every day.
Low quoted an extract from an American novel then appearing serially in an English magazine — an extract including such Americanisms as
side-stepper, saltwater-taffy, Prince-Albert
(coat),
boob, bartender
and
kidding
, and many characteristically American extravagances of metaphor. It might be well argued, he said, that this strange dialect was as near to “the tongue that Shakespeare spoke” as “the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton,” but that philological fact did not help to its understanding. “You might almost as well expect him [the British business man] to converse freely with a Portuguese railway porter because he tried to stumble through Caesar when he was in the Upper Fourth at school.”
At the time Low published his article the invasion of England by Americanisms was just beginning in earnest, and many words and phrases that have since become commonplaces there were still strange and disquieting. Writing in the London
Daily Mail
a year or so later W. G. Faulkner thought it necessary to explain the meanings of
hobo, hoodlum, bunco-steerer, dead-beat, flume, dub, rubberneck, drummer, sucker, dive
(in the sense of a thieves’ resort),
clean up, graft
and
to feature
, and another interpreter, closely following him, added definitions of
hold-up, quitter, rube, shack, bandwagon, road-agent, cinch, live-wire
and
scab
.
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This was in the early days of the American-made movie, and Faulkner denounced its terminology as “generating and encouraging mental indiscipline.” As Hollywood gradually conquered the English cinema palaces,
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such warnings became more frequent and more angry, and in 1920 the London
Daily News
began a formal agitation of the subject, with the usual pious editorials and irate letters from old subscribers. I quote a characteristic passage from one of the latter:
I visited two picture theaters today for the express purpose of collecting slang phrases and of noticing the effect of the new language on the child as well as on the adult. What the villain said to the hero when the latter started to argue with him was, “
Cut out
that
dope
” and a hundred piping voices repeated the injunction. The comic man announced his marriage to the Bell of Lumbertown by saying, “I’m
hitched.
”
On January 22, 1920 the London bureau of the Associated Press made this report:
England is apprehensive lest the vocabularies of her youth become corrupted through incursions of American slang. Trans-Atlantic tourists in England note with interest the frequency with which resort is made to “Yankee talk” by British song and play writers seeking to enliven their productions. Bands and orchestras throughout the country when playing popular music play American selections almost exclusively. American songs monopolize the English music hall and musical comedy stage. But it is the subtitle of the American moving picture film which, it is feared, constitutes the most menacing threat to the vaunted English purity of speech.
When the American talkie began to reinforce the movie, in 1929
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there was fresh outburst of indignation, but this time it had a despairist undertone. Reinforced by the spoken word, Americanisms were now coming in much faster than they could be challenged and disposed of. “Within the past few years,” said Thomas Anderson in the Manchester
Sunday Chronicle
for January 12, 1930, “we have
gradually been adopting American habits of speech, American business methods, and the American outlook.” To which Jameson Thomas added in the London
Daily Express
for January 21:
One must admit that we write and speak Americanisms. So long as Yankeeisms came to us insiduously we absorbed them carelessly. They have been a valuable addition to the language, as nimble coppers are a valuable addition to purer currency. But the talkies have presented the American language in one giant meal, and we are revolted.
But this revolt, in so far as it was real at all, was apparently confined to the aged: the young of the British species continued to gobble down the neologisms of Hollywood and to imitate the Hollywood intonation. “Seldom do I hear a child speak,” wrote a correspondent of the London
News Chronicle
on June 15, 1931, “who has not attached several Americanisms to his vocabulary, which are brought out with deliberation at every opportunity.” During the next few years the English papers printed countless protests against this corruption of the speech of British youth, but apparently to no avail. Nor was there any halt when Col. F. W. D. Bendall, C.M.G., M.A., an inspector of the Board of Education, began stumping the country in an effort to further the dying cause of linguistic purity.
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Nor when the chief constable —
i.e.
, chief of police — of Wallasey, a suburb of Liverpool, issued this solemn warning in his annual report:
I cannot refrain from commenting adversely on the pernicious and growing habit of … youths to use Americanisms, with nasal accompaniment, in order to appear, in their own vernacular,
tough guys
. On one of
my officers going to search him, a young housebreaker told him to
“Lay off, cop.” Oh-yeahs
are frequent in answer to charges, and we are promised
shoots up in the burg
[
sic
] and threatened to be
bumped off
.
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Parallel with this alarmed hostility to the jargon of the movies and the talkies, much of it borrowed from the American underworld, there has gone on in England a steady opposition to the more decorous varieties of American. I have already mentioned the
Times
’ sneering review of the first two volumes of the Dictionary of American Biography. Back in 1919 H. N. Brailsford, the well-known English publicist, who has been in the United States many times and often contributes to American magazines, actually objected to the vocabulary of the extremely precious and Anglomaniacal Woodrow Wilson, then in action in Versailles. “The irruption of Mr. Wilson upon our scene,” he wrote in the London
Daily Herald
on August 20, “threatens to modify our terminology. If one knew the American language (as I do not),” and so on.
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A little while before this a leading English medical journal had been protesting against the Americanisms in an important surgical monograph.
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Translations done in the United States are so often denounced that denouncing them has become a sort of convention. There was a storm of unusual violence, in 1925, over the plays of Luigi Pirandello. Their merit had been recognized in America earlier than in England — indeed, some of them had been forbidden, at least in English, by the English censor —, and in consequence the first translations were published in this country. What followed when they reached England was thus described by the London correspondent of the
Bookman
(New York) in its issue for September, 1925:
A strange situation has arisen over the Pirandello translations. These were made in America, and they contain phraseology which is peculiarly
American. As a consequence they have been generally condemned in the English press as being translations from one foreign tongue into another.… It will be understood that when an English reader is used to calling comfits
sweets
and finds them called
candies
he feels he is not getting an English equivalent of the Italian author’s word.
This correspondence was signed Simon Pure; its actual author, I am informed, was Rebecca West. She expressed the opinion that English translations of foreign books were frequently offensive to Americans, and for like reasons. “It seems to me to be a pity,” she continued, “that the habit should have grown up among Continental authors of selling ‘world rights in the English language.’ If the English translation does not satisfy the Americans, and the American translation does not please the English, it would surely be far better that there should be two translations.” In a long reply to this, published in the
Saturday Review of Literature
(New York) for December 26, 1925, Ernest Boyd — himself a translator of wide experience, born in Ireland, educated there and in England, for seven years a member of the British consular service, and resident in New York since 1920 — denied that there was any hostility to English translations in this country. “English translators,” he said, “are accepted at their own — or their publishers’ — valuation in America,” but American translators “are received with prejudice and criticized with severity” in England. The American edition of Pirandello’s plays consisted of two volumes, one translated by Dr. Arthur Livingston of Columbia University, and the other by Edward Storer, an Englishman. Said Mr. Boyd:
Dr. Livingston, the American, is taken to task though his Italian scholarship is well authenticated and beyond dispute. Mr. Storer, on the contrary, is an Englishman, and his translations are so defective in places as to show a complete misunderstanding of the text, but no complaints have been raised on that score.… One might have thought that the proper claim would be that a competent person, and only a competent person, irrespective of nationality, should translate. But British nationality is more important than American scholarship, apparently.
The ensuing debate ran on for several years; in fact, it is still resumed from time to time, with the English champions holding stoutly to the doctrine that there can be but one form of English pure and undefiled, and that it must, shall and will be the Southern English variety. Thus Raymond Mortimer in the
Nation and Athenaeum
for July 28, 1928:
It is most unfortunate that American publishers should be able to buy the English as well as the American rights of foreign books. For the result usually is that these books remain permanently closed to the English reader.
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The English objection is not alone to the American vocabulary; it is also to the characteristic American style, which begins to differ appreciably from the normal English style. In every recent discussion of the matter the despairist note that I was mentioning a few paragraphs back is audible. There was a time when the English guardians of the mother-tongue tried to haul American into conformity by a kind of
force majeure
, but of late they seem to be resigned to its differentiation, and are concerned mainly about the possibility that Standard English may be considerably modified by its influence. As I have noted, H. W. and F. G. Fowler, in “The King’s English,” were deciding so long ago as 1906 that “Americanisms are foreign words, and should be so treated.” They admitted that American had its points of superiority — “
Fall
is better on the merits than
autumn
, in every way; it is short, Saxon (like the other three season names), picturesque; it reveals its derivation to everyone who uses it, not to the scholar only, like
autumn” —
, but they protested against taking even the most impeccable Americanisms into English. “The English and the American language and literature,” they argued, “are both good things, but they are better apart than mixed.” In
1910 the Encylopædia Britannica (Eleventh Edition) admitted that this falling apart had already gone so far that it was “not uncommon to meet with American newspaper articles of which an untravelled Englishman would hardly be able to understand a sentence.” “The fact is,” said the London
Times Literary Supplement
for January 21, 1926, in a review of G. P. Krapp’s “The English Language in America,” “that in spite of the greater frequency of intercourse the two idioms
have
drifted apart; farther apart than is, perhaps, generally recognized.… A British visitor in America, if he has any taste for the niceties of language, experiences something of the thrills of contact with a foreign idiom, for he hears and reads many things which are new to him and not a few which are unintelligible.” “If the American temperament, despite its general docility, persists in its present attitude towards a standardized language,” said Ernest Weekley in “Adjectives — and Other Words” (1930), “spoken American must eventually become as distinct from English as Yiddish is from classical Hebrew.” Or, added Professor J. Y. T. Greig of Newcastle in “Breaking Priscian’s Head” (1929), as “Spanish is from Portuguese.”