American Language (8 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
This echo of Noah Webster is itself echoed frequently by other English publicists and philologians. There is, indeed, a school of English thought which holds that the United States is not only drifting away from the mother country linguistically, but is fundamentally differentiated from it on wider cultural grounds. “Those who have had to do with Americans,” said Geoffrey Grigson in the London
Morning Post
for February 13, 1934, “will not mistake them for our intimate cousins, our near psychic relations.” He continued:
They are linked to us by many strands of sympathy, but they are a different people, or a number of different peoples. Their language, their real literature — witness Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, James, Ransom, Macleish, Hemingway — are different; and one might say even that the more they are English the more they are alien. The New Englander, for example, feels and thinks differently; his communal, political, and person “mythology” — to use a convenient word for those bodies of fiction and “belief” which unite each social entity — differentiates him completely from an Englishman. I am not sure, in fact, that we cannot more easily get to understand the soul of Frenchman, Italian, German, Spaniard even. After all, we belong geographically and spiritually to the European cultural
bloc
.
The late Cecil Chesterton was saying something to the same general effect in the London
New Witness
so long ago as 1915. “I do not believe,” he wrote, “that nations ever quarrel merely because
they feel that they do not understand each other. That attitude of mind of itself tends to produce a salutary humility on the one side and a pleasantly adventurous curiosity on the other. What really produces trouble between peoples is when one is quite certain that it understands the other — and in fact doesn’t. And I am perfectly certain that that has been from the first one of the primary causes of trouble between England and America.”
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To which may be added the following from an article by Herbert Agar in the
New Statesman
for August 8, 1931:
The English should try to cope with their philological ignorance. They should train themselves to realize that it is neither absurd nor vulgar that a language which was once the same should in the course of centuries develop differently in different parts of the world. If such were not the case, we should all still be speaking a sort of Ur-Sanskrit. Just as French and Italian may be described as divergent forms of modern Latin, so it would be helpful to think of the language of Oxford and the language of Harvard as divergent forms of modern English. It is perhaps a pity, from the point of view of international good feeling, that the two forms have not diverged a little further. At any rate, when the Englishman can learn to think of American as a language, and not merely as a ludicrously unsuccessful attempt to speak as he himself speaks, when he can learn to have for American only the normal intolerance of the provincial mind for all foreign tongues, then there will come a great improvement in Anglo-American relations. For even though Americans realise the absurdity of the English attitude toward their language, nevertheless they remain deeply annoyed by it. This is natural, for a man’s language is his very soul. It is his thoughts and almost all his consciousness. Laugh at a man’s language, and you have laughed at the man himself in the most inclusive sense.
But not all Englishmen, of course, indulge themselves in the derision that Mr. Agar denounces. The prevailing tone of English opinion remains loftily anti-American, in linguistic as in other matters, but there have arisen in late years two factions which take a more moderate position, the one contending that American speech is really not the barbaric jargon it is commonly thought to be, and the other arguing boldly that its peculiarities, though maybe somewhat uncouth, nevertheless have a merit of their own. A representative spokesman of the first faction is Sir Charles Strachey, M.C.M.G., a former official of the Foreign and Colonial Offices. On May 2, 1931, he wrote to the London
Times
to protest against the assumption that the argot of Chicago gunmen is the official language of the
United States. “American diplomatic correspondence,” he said, “is always a model of correct English, and it would be a gross error to suppose that the United States Ambassador calls revenue the
dough
or the
berries
, and refers to his Italian colleagues as a
wop
.” But this Strachey faction is not large, and as a general thing even the language of American diplomacy grates on English nerves, as I was lately noting in the case of H. N. Brailsford’s objection to the style of Woodrow Wilson.
The revolutionary theory that the American language actually has some merit seems to have been launched by William Archer, a Scotsman, in an article entitled “American Today,” printed somewhat prudently, not in England, but in
Scribner’s Magazine
for February, 1899. “New words,” he said, “are begotten by new conditions of life; and as American life is far more fertile of new conditions than ours, the tendency toward neologism cannot but be stronger in America than in England. American has enormously enriched the language, not only with new words, but (since the American mind is, on the whole, quicker and wittier than the English) with apt and luminous colloquial metaphors.” Twenty years later Archer returned to the matter, this time on English soil, in an article written for the
Westminster Gazette.
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In it he protested vigorously against the English habit of “pulling a wry face over American expressions, not because they are inherently bad, but simply because they are American. The vague and unformulated idea behind all such petty cavillings,” he continued, “is that the English language is in danger of being corrupted by the importation of Americanisms, and that it behooves us to establish a sort of quarantine in order to keep out the detrimental germs. This notion is simply one of the milder phases of the Greater Stupidity.”
Two years before this, Frank Dilnot, an English journalist with American experience, had come out for American in a large way. “Show me the alert Englishman,” he wrote,
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“who will not find a stimulation in those nuggety word-groupings which are the commonplaces in good American conversation. They are like flashes of crystal. They come from all kinds of people — who are brilliantly innocent of enriching the language.… The American tongue, written or spoken with its alteration from the English of England,
is a potent and penetrating instrument, rich in new vibrations, full of joy as well as shocks for the unsuspecting visitor.” In May, 1920, Richard Aldington joined the American party in an article contributed to
Poetry
(Chicago). In it he made an eloquent plea for American linguistic independence, and praised the development of a characteristically American idiom by the American poets and novelists of the day. “Are Americans,” he demanded,
to write the language which they speak, which is slowly but inevitably separating itself from the language of England, or are they to write a devitalized idiom learned painfully from books or from a discreet frequentation of London literary cliques?… Englishmen of letters and literary journalists may publish these exhortations and practise their refinements: in vain — a vast and increasingly articulate part of the English-speaking and English-writing world will ignore them. Another century may see English broken into a number of dialects or even different languages, spoken in Canada, Australia, South Africa, the United States and England. The result may eventually be similar to the break-up of Latin.
This pro-American party is still small, but it can show some well-known names. The late Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate and founder of the Society for Pure English, was in sympathy with it,
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and it has got support from Wyndham Lewis, Edward Shanks, Virginia
Woolf and Sir John Foster Fraser. “The Americans,” said Mrs. Woolf in the
Saturday Review of Literature
on August 1, 1925, “are doing what the Elizabethans did — they are coining new words. They are instinctively making the language adapt itself to their needs.” She continued:
In England, save for the impetus given by the war, the word-coining power has lapsed; our writers vary the metres of their poetry, remodel the rhythms of prose, but one may search English fiction in vain for a single new word. It is significant that when we want to freshen our speech, we borrow from American —
poppycock, rambunctious, flip-flop, booster, good mixer
. All the expressive, ugly, vigorous slang which creeps into use among us, first in talk, later in writing, comes from across the Atlantic.
In February, 1925, H. E. Moore printed an elaborate defense of Americanisms in the
English Review
, then edited by Austin Harrison. He contrasted the tendency to academic tightness in Standard English with the greater naturalness of American, and gave high praise to some of the salient characters of the latter — its hospitality to neologisms, its fertility in effective metaphor, its “fluid” spelling. “As this divergence of English and American,” he said, “has proceeded through strata of English derision and American defiance it has tended to become deliberate and constructive. England and academic America generally have asserted the old criteria. But they have been swept aside by America’s egalitarian millions, and established changes have now made any acceptance of literary Southern English impossible.” “I have never found it possible,” said Mr. Shanks in the London
Evening Standard
in 1931,
to understand why with so many people there should be an automatic objection to anything that can be called an Americanism. An Americanism is an expression adopted by those who speak our common language but who live in the United States. There are more of them than there are of us, and so one would suppose, on democratic principles, that their choice was entitled at least to our serious consideration. There are, in fact, more of them than of all the other English-speaking peoples put together, and a majority vote on the question to whom the language really belongs would certainly give a verdict against us. Yet, for many of us “Americanism” is simply a term of abuse.… The facts that we ought to realise and that we ignore when we talk loftily about “Americanisms” are that America is making a formidable contribution to the development of our language and that all our attempts to reject that contribution will in the long run be vain — quite apart from the other fact
that we ought to rejoice in this proof that the language is still alive and capable of learning from experience.
Writing a year later, Sir John Fraser
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made a vigorous attack upon the dominant anti-American party, and accused it of trying absurdly to halt a process of inevitable change. He said:
Quite respectable people, very refined, even literary gents and prelates, would faint were they not so angry at the Americanization of our ways, and particularly the degradation of our speech. Why? If we take up the position that because we are British we must be right there is no argument. But if the Anglicization of the world is good, why is the Americanization of England bad?… Is our language to remain staid and dignified like a piece of furniture made when good Victoria was Queen, or, as we live in swiftly shifting times, aeroplanes and record-smashing cars, is there something to be said for adapting our ways of speech to the newer generations?… Then there is the other school, which is called the Oxford manner, though mostly adopted by people who know nothing about Oxford. With their stuffy, roof-of-the-mouth inflections [
sic
] they have developed a speech of their own.… I prefer slangy American.
In
Life and Letters
for April, 1934, Wyndham Lewis argued at length that, even if it were rational, it was too late for the English to stem the advance of American. He said:
While England was a uniquely powerful empire-state, ruled by an aristocratic caste, 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 deliberately kept out.… So the situation is this, as far as our common language is concerned: the destiny of England and the United States is more than ever one, but it is now the American influence that is paramount. The tables have effectively been turned in this respect.
Finally, I extract a few sentences of sage advice from a radio speech to his fellow-countrymen by Alistair Cooke, of the British Broadcasting Corporation:
When you hear an expression that seems a little odd to you, don’t assume it was invented by a music-hall comedian trying to be smart. It was probably spoken by Lincoln or Paul Jones.… And when you hear a strange pronunciation remember you are not hearing a chaotic speech that anyone has deliberately changed.… It is the cultivated speech of a New England gentleman of 1934, and It happens in essentials also to be the cultivated speech you would have heard in London over two hundred years ago.
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But these witnesses to the virtues and glories of the American language are not to be taken as representative of English opinion; nor even as spokesmen for any considerable part of it. In general, it remains almost as hostile to Americanisms as it was in the Golden Age of the critical reviews. Nor does its hostility go without support in the United States. On the contrary there has been, since the early Eighteenth Century, a party of Americans vowed to the strict policing of the national speech habits, usually with the English example in mind, and it has always had a formidable body of adherents. In 1724 Hugh Jones, professor of mathematics at William and Mary College, expressed the wish that a “Publick Standard were fix’d” to “direct Posterity, and prevent Irregularity, and confused Abuses and Corruptions in our Writings and Expressions.”
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In Section 1 of the present chapter I have mentioned John Adams’s keen interest in a project to set up an American Academy to “correct, enrich and refine” the language, “until perfection stops their progress and ends their labor.” In 1806 a bill to establish such an academy was actually introduced in the Senate by Senator George Logan of Pennsylvania and given a favorable report by a committee of which John Quincy Adams was a member, but some irreverent member moved that the word
national
be stricken out of the title, and when this motion was carried the enterprise died. Soon afterward an American Academy of Arts and Sciences was formed in Boston, and in 1820 an American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres followed in New York, with John Quincy Adams as president. The latter appointed a committee headed by the Rev. John M. Mason, provost of Columbia College and later president of Dickinson College, “to collect throughout the United States a list of words and phrases, whether acknowledged corruptions or words of doubtful authority, which are charged up as bad English, with a view to take the best practical course for promoting the purity and uniformity
of our language.” And the former received from one of its members, John Pickering, that “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America” (1816) which I have already noticed.