Author: George P. Klimowicz
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

1. Character of the New Nation

The English of the United States thus began to be recognizably differentiated from the English of England, both in vocabulary and in pronunciation, by the opening of the nineteenth century, but as yet its growth was hampered by two factors, the first being the lack of a national literature of any expanse and dignity and the second being an internal political disharmony which greatly conditioned and enfeebled the national consciousness. During the actual Revolution common aims and common dangers forced the Americans to show a united front, but once they had achieved political independence they developed conflicting interests, and out of those conflicting interests came suspicions and hatreds which came near wrecking the new confederation more than once. Politically, their worst weakness, perhaps, was an inability to detach themselves wholly from the struggle for domination then going on in Europe. The surviving Loyalists of the revolutionary era—estimated by some authorities to have constituted fully a third of the total population in 1776—were ardently in favor of England, and such patriots as Jefferson were as ardently in favor of France. This engrossment in the quarrels of foreign nations was what Washington warned against in his Fare-well Address. It was at the bottom of such bitter animosities as that between Jefferson and Hamilton. It inspired and perhaps excused the pessimism of such men as Burr. Its net effect was to make it difficult for the people of the new nation to think of themselves, politically, as Americans. Their state of mind, vacillating, uncertain, alternately timorous and pugnacious, has been well described by Henry Cabot Lodge in his essay on “Colonialism in America.” 1 Soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed, someone referred to the late struggle, in Franklin’s hearing, as the War for Independence. “Say, rather, the War of the Revolution,” said Franklin. “The War for Independence is yet to be fought.”

1

“That struggle,” adds Lossing, “occurred, and that independence was won, by the Americans in the War of 1812.” 2 In the interval the new republic had passed through a period of Sturm und Drang whose gigantic perils and passions we have begun to forget—a period in which disaster ever menaced, and the foes within were no less bold and pertinacious than the foes without. Jefferson, perhaps, carried his fear of “monocrats” to the point of monomania, but under it there was undoubtedly a body of sound fact. The poor debtor class (including probably a majority of the veterans of the Revolution) had been fired by the facile doctrines of the French Revolution to demands which threatened the country with bankruptcy and anarchy, and the class of property-owners, in reaction, went far to the other extreme. On all sides, indeed, there flourished a strong British party, and particularly in New England, where the so-called codfish aristocracy (by no means extinct today) exhibited an undisguised Anglomania, and looked forward confidently to a rapprochement with the mother country. 3 This Anglomania showed itself, not only in ceaseless political agitation, but also in an elaborate imitation of English manners. We have already seen how it even extended to the pronunciation of the language.

2

In our own time, with the renewal of the centuries-old struggle for power in Europe, there has been a revival of the old itch to take a hand, with results almost as menacing to the unity and security of the Republic as those visible when Washington voiced his warning. But in his day he seems to have been heard and heeded, and so colonialism gradually died out. The first sign of the dawn of a new national order came with the election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency in 1800. The issue in the campaign was a highly complex one, but under it lay a plain conflict between democratic independence and the European doctrine of dependence and authority; and with the Alien and Sedition Laws about his neck, so vividly reminiscent of the issues of the Revolution itself, Adams went down to defeat. Jefferson was violently anti-British and pro-French; he saw all the schemes of his political opponents, indeed, as English plots; he was the man who introduced the bugaboo into American politics. His first acts after his inauguration were to abolish all ceremonial at the court of the republic, and to abandon spoken discourses to Congress for written messages. That ceremonial, which grew up under Washington, was an imitation, he believed, of the formality of the abhorrent Court of St. James; as for the speeches to Congress, they were palpably modelled upon the speeches from the throne of the English kings. 4 Both reforms met with wide approval; the exactions of the English, particularly on the high seas, were beginning to break up the British party. But confidence in the solidarity and security of the new nation was still anything but universal. The surviving doubts, indeed, were strong enough to delay the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for more direct elections of President and Vice-President, until the end of 1804, and even then three of the five New England states rejected it, 5 and have never ratified it, in fact, to this day. Democracy was still experimental, doubtful, full of gun-powder. In so far as it had actually come into being, it had come as a boon conferred from above. Jefferson, its protagonist, was the hero of the populace, but he was not of the populace himself, nor did he ever quite trust it.

3

It was reserved for Andrew Jackson, a man genuinely of the people, to lead and visualize the rise of the lower orders. Jackson, in his way, was the archetype of the new American—ignorant, pushful, impatient of restraint and precedent, an iconoclast, a Philistine, an Anglophobe in every fibre. He came from the extreme backwoods and his youth was passed, like that of Abraham Lincoln after him, amid surroundings but little removed from downright savagery. 6 Thousands of other young Americans of the same sort were growing up at the same time—youngsters filled with a vast impatience of all precedent and authority, revilers of all that had come down from an elder day, incorrigible libertarians. They swarmed across the mountains and down the great rivers, wrestling with the naked wilderness and setting up a casual, impromptu sort of civilization where the Indian still menaced. Schools were few and rudimentary; there was not the remotest approach to a cultivated society; any effort to mimic the amenities of the East, or of the mother country, in manner or even in speech, met with instant derision. It was in these surroundings and at this time that the thoroughgoing American of tradition was born; blatant, illogical, elate, “greeting the embarrassed gods” uproariously and matching “with Destiny for beers.” Jackson was unmistakably of that company in his every instinct and idea, and it was his fate to give a new and unshakable confidence to its aspiration at the Battle of New Orleans. Thereafter all doubts began to die out; the new republic was turning out a success. And with success came a vast increase in the national egoism. The hordes of pioneers rolled down the western valleys and on to the great plains. 7 American began to stand for something quite new in the world—in government, in law, in public and private morals, in customs and habits of mind, in the minutiæ of social intercourse. And simultaneously the voice of America began to take on its characteristic twang, and the speech of America began to differentiate itself boldly and unmistakably from the speech of England. The average Philadelphian or Bostonian of 1790 had not the slightest difficulty in making himself understood by a visiting Englishman. But the average Ohio boatman of 1810 or plainsman of 1815 was already speaking a dialect that the Englishman would have shrunk from as barbarous and unintelligible, and before long it began to leave its mark upon and to get direction and support from a distinctively national literature.

4

That literature, however, was very slow in coming to a dignified, confident and autonomous estate. Down to Jefferson’s day it was almost wholly polemical, and hence lacking in the finer values; he himself, an insatiable propagandist and controversialist, was one of its chief ornaments. “The novelists and the historians, the essayists and the poets, whose names come to mind when American literature is mentioned,” says a recent literary historian, “have all flourished since 1800.” 8 Pickering, so late as 1816, said that “in this country we can hardly be said to have any authors by profession,” and Justice Story, three years later, repeated the saying and sought to account for the fact. “So great,” said Story, “is the call for talents of all sorts in the active use of professional and other business in America that few of our ablest men have leisure to devote exclusively to literature or the fine arts.… This obvious reason will explain why we have so few professional authors, and those not among our ablest men.” All this was true, but a new day was dawning; Irving, in fact, had already published “Knickerbocker” and Bryant had printed “Thanatopsis.” Difficulties of communication hampered the circulation of the few native books that were written. “It is much to be regretted,” wrote Dr. David Ramsay, of Charleston, S. C., to Noah Webster in 1806, “that there is so little intercourse in a literary way between the states. As soon as a book of general utility comes out in any state it should be for sale in all of them.” Ramsay asked for little; the most he could imagine was a sale of 2,000 copies for an American work in America. But even that was far beyond the possibilities of the time. Nor was there, indeed, much reading of English books; the Americans, as in colonial days, were faithful to a few sober works, and cared little for belles lettres. “There is at this moment,” said an English observer in 1833, 9 “nothing in the United States worthy of the name of library. Not only is there an entire absence of learning, in the higher sense of the term, but an absolute want of the material from which alone learning can be extracted. At present an American might study every book within the limits of the Union, and still be regarded in many parts of Europe—especially in Germany—as a man comparatively ignorant. Why does a great nation thus voluntarily continue in a state of intellectual destitution so anomalous and humiliating?” According to this critic, the value of the books imported from Europe during the fiscal year 1829-30 for public institutions came to but $10,829.

5

But nevertheless English periodical literature seems to have been read, at least by the nascent intelligentsia, and its influence undoubtedly helped to keep the national literature imitative and timorous in those early and perilous days. “Before the Revolution,” says Cairns, 10 “colonists of literary tastes prided themselves on reading the Gentlemen’s Magazine or the London Magazine, and it is probable that the old tradition retained for these and similar publications many subscribers.… Letters from American readers appear occasionally in British magazines [of the period], and others imply the existence of a considerable American constituency.… It is certain, at all events, that the chief American [obviously a misprint for British] critical journals were received by American editors, and important criticisms of American writings were often reprinted in this country.” The extraordinary animosity of the English and Scottish reviewers, then at the height of their pontifical authority, to all locutions that had an American smack was described in the last chapter; as everyone knows, that animosity extended to the content of American works as well as to the style. All things American, indeed, were under the ban in England after the War of 1812, and Sydney Smith’s famous sneer—“In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?”—was echoed and re-echoed in other planes. The Yankee, flushed with victory, became the pet abomination of the English, and the chief butt of the incomparable English talent for moral indignation. There was scarcely an issue of the Quarterly Review, the Edinburgh, the Foreign Quarterly, the British Review or Blackwood’s, for a generation following 1812, in which he was not stupendously assaulted. Gifford, Sydney Smith and the poet Southey became specialists in this business; it almost took on the character of a holy war; even such mild men as Wordsworth had a hand in it. It was argued that the Americans were rogues and swindlers, that they lived in filth and squalor, that they were boors in social intercourse, that they were poltroons and savages in war, that they were depraved and criminal, that they were wholly devoid of the remotest notion of decency or honor. “See what it is,” said Southey in 1812, “to have a nation to take its place among civilized states before it has either gentlemen or scholars! They [the Americans] have in the course of twenty years acquired a distinct national character for low and lying knavery; and so well do they deserve it that no man ever had any dealings with them without having proofs of its truth.” The Quarterly, summing up in January, 1814, accused them of a multitude of strange and hair-raising offenses: employing naked colored women to wait upon their tables; kidnapping Scotchmen, Irishmen, Welshmen and Hollanders and selling them into slavery; fighting one another incessantly under rules which made it “allowable to peel the skull, tear out the eyes, and smooth away the nose”; and so on, and so on. Various Americans, after a decade of this snorting, went to the defense of their countrymen, among them Irving, Cooper, Timothy Dwight, J. K. Paulding, John Neal, Edward Everett and Robert Walsh. Paulding, in “John Bull in America, or, the New Munchausen,” published in 1825, attempted satire. Even a Briton, James Sterling, warned his fellow-Britons that, if they continued their intolerant abuse, they would “turn into bitterness the last drops of good-will toward England that exist in the United States.” But the denunciation kept up year after year, and there was, indeed, no genuine relief until 1914, when the sudden prospect of disaster caused the English to change their tune, and even to find all their own great virtues in the degraded and disgusting Yankee, now so useful as a rescuer. This new enthusiasm for him was tried very severely by his slowness to come into the war, but in the main there was politeness for him so long as the emergency lasted, and all the British talent for horror and invective was concentrated, down to 1919 or thereabout, upon the Prussian.

6

How American-English appeared to an educated English visitor of Jackson’s time is well indicated in the anonymous “Men and Manners in America” that I have already quoted. “The amount of bad grammar in circulation,” said the author, “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,” explained the critic, “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.” He 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 shew (showed) me his pictures.” Such words as oratory and dilatory are pronounced with the penult syllable long and accented; missionary becomes missionairy, angel, ângel, danger, dânger, 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 and (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, 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.

7

This Briton, as usual, was as full of moral horror as of grammatical disgust, and put his denunciation upon the loftiest of grounds. “I will not go on with this unpleasant subject,” he concluded, “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.” 11

8

Such extravagant denunciations, in the long run, were bound to make Americans defiant, but while they were at their worst they produced a contrary effect. That is to say, they made all the American writers of a more delicate aspiration extremely self-conscious and diffident. The educated classes, even against their will, were daunted by the torrent of abuse; they could not help finding in it an occasional reasonableness, an accidental true hit. The result, despite the efforts of Channing, Knapp and other such valiant defenders of the native author, was uncertainty and skepticism in native criticism. “The first step of an American entering upon a literary career,” says Lodge, writing of the first quarter of the century, “was to pretend to be an Englishman in order that he might win the approval, not of Englishmen, but of his own countrymen.” Cooper, in his first novel, “Precaution,” chose an English scene, imitated English models, and obviously hoped to placate the critics thereby. Irving, too, in his earliest work, showed a considerable discretion, and his “History of New York,” as everyone knows, was first published anonymously. But this puerile spirit did not last long. The English onslaughts were altogether too vicious to be received lying down; their very fury demanded that they be met with a united and courageous front. Cooper, in his second novel, “The Spy,” boldly chose an American setting and American characters, and though the influence of his wife, who came of a Loyalist family, caused him to avoid any direct attack upon the English, he attacked them indirectly, and with great effect, by opposing an immediate and honorable success to their derisions. “The Spy” ran through three editions in four months; it was followed by his long line of thoroughly American novels; in 1834 he formally apologized to his countrymen for his early truancy in “Precaution.” Irving, too, soon adopted a bolder tone, and despite his English predilections, he refused an offer of a hundred guineas for an article for the Quarterly Review, made by Gifford in 1828, on the ground that “the Review has been so persistently hostile to our country that I cannot draw a pen in its service.”

9

The same year saw the publication of the first edition of Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, and a year later followed Samuel L. Knapp’s “Lectures on American Literature,” the first history of the national letters ever attempted. Knapp, in his preface, thought it necessary to prove, first of all, that an American literature actually existed, and Webster, in his introduction, was properly apologetic, but there was no real need for timorousness in either case, for the American attitude toward the attack of the English was now definitely changing from uneasiness to defiance. The English critics, in fact, had overdone the thing, and though their clatter was to keep up for many years more, they no longer spread their old terror or had as much influence as of yore. Of a sudden, as if in answer to them, doubts turned to confidence, and then into the wildest sort of optimism, not only in politics and business, but also in what passed for the arts. Knapp boldly defied the English to produce a “tuneful sister” surpassing Mrs. Sigourney; more, he argued that the New World, if only by reason of its superior scenic grandeur, would eventually hatch a poetry surpassing even that of Greece and Rome. “What are the Tibers and Scamanders,” he demanded, “measured by the Missouri and the Amazon? Or what the loveliness of Illysus or Avon by the Connecticut or the Potomack?”

10

In brief, the national feeling, long delayed at birth, finally leaped into being in amazing vigor. “One can get an idea of the strength of that feeling,” says R. O. Williams, “by glancing at almost any book taken at random from the American publications of the period. Belief in the grand future of the United States is the keynote of everything said and done. All things American are to be grand—our territory, population, products, wealth, science, art—but especially our political institutions and literature. The unbounded confidence in the material development of the country which now characterizes the extreme northwest of the United States prevailed as strongly throughout the eastern part of the Union during the first thirty years of the century; and over and above a belief in, and concern for, materialistic progress, there were enthusiastic anticipations of achievements in all the moral and intellectual fields of national greatness.” 12 Nor was that vast optimism wholly without warrant. An American literature was actually coming into being, and with a wall of hatred and contempt shutting in England, the new American writers were beginning to turn to the Continent for inspiration and encouragement. Irving had already drunk at Spanish springs; Emerson and Bayard Taylor were to receive powerful impulses from Germany, following Ticknor, Bancroft and Everett before them; Bryant was destined to go back to the classics. Moreover, Cooper and John P. Kennedy had shown the way to native sources of literary material, and Longfellow was making ready to follow them; novels in imitation of English models were no longer heard of, the ground was preparing for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Finally, Webster himself, as Williams demonstrated, worked better than he knew. His American Dictionary was not only thoroughly American: it was superior to any of the current dictionaries of the English, so much so that for a good many years it remained “a sort of mine for British lexicography to exploit.”

11

Thus all hesitations disappeared, and there arose a national consciousness so soaring and so blatant that it began to dismiss all British usage and opinion as puerile and idiotic. William L. Marcy, when Secretary of State under Pierce (1853-57), issued a circular to all American diplomatic and consular officers, loftily bidding them employ only “the American language” in communicating with him. The legislature of Indiana, in an act approved February 15, 1838, establishing the state university at Bloomington, 13 provided that it should instruct the youth of the new commonwealth (it had been admitted to the Union in 1816) “in the American, learned and foreign languages … and literature.” Such grandiose pronunciamentos well indicate and explain the temper of the era. 14 It was a time of expansion and braggadocio. The new republic would not only produce a civilization and a literature of its own; it would show the way for all other civilizations and literatures. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, the enemy of Poe, rose from his decorous Baptist pew to protest that so much patriotism amounted to insularity and absurdity, but there seems to have been no one to second the motion. The debate upon the Oregon question gave a gaudy chance to the new breed of super-patriots, and they raged unchecked until the time of the Civil War. Thornton, in his Glossary, quotes a typical speech in Congress, the subject being the American eagle and the orator being the Hon. Samuel C. Pomeroy, of Kansas. I give a few strophes:

The proudest bird upon the mountain is upon the American ensign, and not one feather shall fall from her plumage there. She is American in design, and an emblem of wildness and freedom. I say again, she has not perched herself upon American standards to die there. Our great western valleys were never scooped out for her burial place. Nor were the everlasting, untrodden mountains piled for her monument. Niagara shall not pour her endless waters for her requiem; nor shall our ten thousand rivers weep to the ocean in eternal tears. No, sir, no! Unnumbered voices shall come up from river, plain, and mountain, echoing the songs of our triumphant deliverance, wild lights from a thousand hill-tops will betoken the rising of the sun of freedom.

12

The vast shock of the Civil War, with its harsh disillusions, unhorsed the optimists for a space, and little was heard from them for some time thereafter. But while the Jackson influence survived and the West was being conquered, it was the unanimous conviction of all good Americans that “he who dallies is a dastard, and he who doubts is damned.”

13

Note 1.  In Studies in History; Boston, 1884. [back]

Note 2.  Benson J. Lossing: Our Country…; New York, 1879. [back]

Note 3.  The thing went, indeed, far beyond mere hope. In 1812 a conspiracy was unearthed to separate New England from the republic and make it an English colony. The chief conspirator was one John Henry, who acted under the instructions of Sir John Craig, Governor-General of Canada. [back]

Note 4.  It is curious to note that the revival of the spoken message in our own time was made by a President whose foreign policy was chiefly marked by its violent Anglomania, i. e., its colonialism. During his administration practically all of the ideas that entered into Jefferson’s politics, from suspicion of England to free speech, were abandoned. [back]

Note 5.  Maine was not separated from Massachusetts until 1820. [back]

Note 6.  Vide Andrew Jackson…, by William Graham Summer; Boston, 1883, pp. 2-10. [back]

Note 7.  Indiana and Illinois were erected into territories during Jefferson’s first term, and Michigan during his second term. Kentucky was admitted to the union in 1792, Tennessee in 1796, Ohio in 1803. Lewis and Clarke set out for the Pacific in 1804. The Louisiana Purchase was ratified in 1803, and Louisiana became a state in 1812. [back]

Note 8.  Barrett Wendell: A Literary History of America; New York, 1900. [back]

Note 9.  The anonymous author of Men and Manners in America; Edinburgh, 1833. See also Carl Van Doren’s The American Novel; New York, 1921, ch. i. [back]

Note 10.  British Criticisms of American Writings, 1783–1815; p. 20. [back]

Note 11.  For further diatribes of the same sort, see As Others See Us, by John Graham Brooks; New York, 1908, ch. vii. Also, The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, pp. 205–8. [back]

Note 12.  Our Dictionaries and Other English Language Topics; New York, 1890, pp. 30–31. [back]

Note 13.  It is curious to note that the center of population of the United States, according to the census of 1910, was “in southern Indiana, in the western part of Bloomington city, Monroe county.” Cf. The Language We Use, by Alfred Z. Reed, New York Sun, March 13, 1918. [back]

Note 14.  Support also came from abroad. Czar Nicholas I, of Russia, smarting under his defeat in the Crimea, issued an order that his own state papers should be prepared in Russian and American—not English. [back]

2. The Language in the Making

All this jingoistic bombast, however, was directed toward defending, not so much the national vernacular as the national belles lettres. True enough, an English attack upon a definite American locution always brought out certain critical minute-men, but in the main they were anything but hospitable to the racy neologisms that kept crowding up from below, and most of them were eager to be accepted as masters of orthodox English and very sensitive to the charge that their writing was bestrewn with Americanisms. A glance through the native criticism of the time will show how ardently even the most uncompromising patriots imitated the Johnsonian jargon then fashionable in England. Fowler and Griswold followed pantingly in the footsteps of Macaulay; their prose is extraordinarily self-conscious, and one searches it in vain for any concession to colloquialism. Poe, the master of them all, achieved a style so ornate that many an English leader-writer must have studied it with envy. A few bolder spirits, as we have seen, spoke out for national freedom in language as well as in letters—among them, Channing—but in the main the Brahmins of the time were conservatives in this department and it is difficult to imagine Emerson or Irving or Bryant sanctioning the innovations later adopted so easily by Howells. Lowell and Walt Whitman, in fact, were the first men of letters, properly so called, to give specific assent to the great changes that were firmly fixed in the national speech during the half century between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. Lowell did so in his preface to the second series of “The Biglow Papers.” Whitman made his declaration in “An American Primer.” In discussing “Leaves of Grass,” he said: “I sometimes think that the entire book is only a language experiment—that it is an attempt to give the spirit, the body and the man, new words, new potentialities of speech—an American, a cosmopolitan (for the best of America is the best cosmopolitanism) range of self-expression.” And then: “The Americans are going to be the most fluent and melodious-voiced people in the world—and the most perfect users of words. The new world, the new times, the new people, the new vistas need a new tongue according—yes, what is more, they will have such a new tongue—will not be satisfied until it is evolved.” 15 According to Louis Untermeyer, a diligent and enthusiastic Whitmanista, old Walt deserves to be called “the father of the American language.” 16 He goes on:

This, in spite of its grandiloquent sound, is what he truly was. When the rest of literary America was still indulging in the polite language of pulpits and the lifeless rhetoric of its libraries, Whitman not only sensed the richness and vigor of the casual word, the colloquial phrase—he championed the vitality of slang, the freshness of our quickly assimilated jargons, the indigenous beauty of vulgarisms. He even predicted that no future native literature could exist that neglected this racy speech, that the vernacular of people as opposed to the language of literati would form the living accents of the best poets to come. One has only to observe the contemporary works of Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, James Oppenheim, Edgar Lee Masters, John Hall Wheelock, Vachel Lindsay and a dozen others to see how Whitman’s prophecy has been fulfilled.

Words, especially the neglected words regarded as too crude and literal for literature, fascinated Whitman. The idea of an enriched language was scarcely ever out of his mind.… This interest … grew to great proportions; it became almost an obsession.

1

Whitman himself spoke of “An American Primer” as “an attempt to describe the growth of an American English enjoying a distinct identity.” He proposed an American dictionary containing the actual everyday vocabulary of the people. To quote him again:

The Real Dictionary will give all words that exist in use, the bad words as well as any. The Real Grammar will be that which declares itself a nucleus of the spirit of the laws, with liberty to all to carry out the spirit of the laws; even by violating them, if necessary.

Many of the slang words are our best; slang words among fighting men, gamblers, thieves, are powerful words.… Much of America is shown in these and in newspaper names, and in names of characteristic amusements and games.…

Our tongue is full of strong words, native or adopted, to express the blood-born passion of the race for rudeness and resistance, as against mere polish.… These words are alive and sinewy—they walk, look, step with an air of command.…

Ten thousand native idiomatic words are growing, or are already grown, out of which vast numbers could be used by American writers, with meaning and effect—words that would give that taste of identity and locality which is so dear in literature—words that would be welcomed by the nation, being of the national blood.

2

As everyone knows, Whitman delighted in filling his poetry and prose with such new words, among them, the verbs to promulge, to eclaircise, to diminute, to imperturbe, to effuse and to inure, the adjectives ostent and adamic, the adverb affetuoso, and the nouns camerado, romanza, deliveress, literatus, acceptress and partiolist. Many of his coinages were in Spanish metal; he believed that American should not be restricted to the materials of English. I have heard it argued that he introduced finale into everyday American; the evidence is dubious, but certainly the word is much oftener used in the United States than in England. Most of his coinages, alas, died with him, just as ridiculosity died with its inventor, Charles Sumner, who announced its invention to the Senate with great formality, and argued that it would be justified by the analogy of curiosity. But These States has survived.

3

Meanwhile, though conservatism lingered on the planes above Whitman, there was a wild and lawless development of the language on the planes below him, among the unfettered democrats of his adoration, and in the end the words and phrases thus brought to birth forced themselves into recognition, and profited by the literary declaration of independence of their very opponents. “The jus et norma loquendi,” says W. R. Morfill, the English philologist, “do not depend upon scholars.” Particularly in a country where scholarship is still new and wholly cloistered, and the overwhelming majority of the people are engaged upon novel and highly exhilarating tasks, far away from schools and with a gigantic cockiness in their hearts. The remnants of the Puritan civilization had been wiped out by the rise of the proletariat under Jackson, and whatever was fine and sensitive in it had died with it. What remained of an urbane habit of mind and utterance began to be confined to the narrowing feudal areas of the south and to the still narrower refuge of the Boston Brahmins, now, for the first time, a definitely recognized caste of intelligentsia, self-charged with carrying the torch of culture through a new Dark Age. The typical American, in Paulding’s satirical phrase, became “a bundling, gouging, impious” fellow, without either “morals, literature, religion or refinement.” Next to the savage struggle for land and dollars, party politics was the chief concern of the people, and with the disappearance of the old leaders and the entrance of pushing upstarts from the backwoods, political controversy sank to an incredibly low level. Bartlett, in the introduction to the second edition of his Glossary, described the effect upon the language. First the enfranchised mob, whether in the city wards or along the western rivers, invented fantastic slang-words and turns of phrase; then they were “seized upon by stump-speakers at political meetings”; then they were heard in Congress; then they got into the newspapers; and finally they came into more or less good usage. Much contemporary evidence is to the same effect. Fowler, in listing “low expressions” in 1850, described them as “chiefly political.” “The vernacular tongue of the country,” said Daniel Webster, “has become greatly vitiated, depraved and corrupted by the style of the congressional debates.” Thornton, in the appendix to his Glossary, gives some astounding specimens of congressional oratory between the 20’s and 60’s, and many more will reward the explorer who braves the files of the Congressional Globe. This flood of racy and unprecedented words and phrases beat upon and finally penetrated the retreat of the literati, but the purity of speech cultivated there had little compensatory influence upon the vulgate. The newspaper was enthroned, and belles lettres were cultivated almost in private, and as a mystery. It is probable, indeed, that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Ten Nights in a Bar-room,” both published in the early 50’s, were the first contemporary native books, after Cooper’s day, that the American people, as a people, ever read. Nor did the pulpit, now fast falling from its old high estate, lift a corrective voice. On the contrary, it joined the crowd, and Bartlett denounced it specifically for its bad example, and cited, among its crimes against the language, such inventions as to doxologize and to funeralize. To these novelties, apparently without any thought of their uncouthness, Fowler added to missionate and consociational.

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As I say, the pressure from below broke down the defenses of the purists, and literally forced a new national idiom upon them. Pen in hand, they might still achieve laborious imitations of Johnson and Macaulay, but their mouths began to betray them. “When it comes to talking,” wrote Charles Astor Bristed for Englishmen in 1855, “the most refined and best educated American, who has habitually resided in his own country, the very man who would write, on some serious topic, volumes in which no peculiarity could be detected, will, in half a dozen sentences, use at least as many words that cannot fail to strike the inexperienced Englishman who hears them for the first time.” Bristed gave a specimen of the American of that time, calculated to flabbergast his inexperienced Englishman; you will find it in the volume of Cambridge Essays, already cited. His aim was to explain and defend Americanisms, and so shut off the storm of English reviling, and he succeeded in producing one of the most thoughtful and persuasive essays on the subject ever written. But his purpose failed and the attack kept up, and eight years afterward the Very Rev. Henry Alford, D.D., dean of Canterbury, led a famous assault. “Look at those phrases,” he said, “which so amuse us in their speech and books; at their reckless exaggeration and contempt for congruity; and then compare the character and history of the nation—its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man; its open disregard of conventional right where aggrandisement is to be obtained; and I may now say, its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world.” 17 In his American edition of 1866 Dr. Alford withdrew this reference to the Civil War and somewhat ameliorated his indignation otherwise, but he clung to the main counts in his indictment, and most Englishmen, I daresay, still give them a certain support. The American is no longer a “vain, egotistical, insolent, rodomontade sort of fellow”; America is no longer the “brigand confederation” of the Foreign Quarterly or “the loathsome creature, … maimed and lame, full of sores and ulcers” of Dickens; but the Americanism is yet regarded with a bilious eye, and pounced upon viciously when found. Even the friendliest English critics seem to be daunted by the gargantuan copiousness of American inventions in speech. Their position, perhaps, was well stated by Capt. Basil Hall, author of the celebrated “Travels in North America,” in 1827. When he argued that “surely such innovations are to be deprecated,” an American asked him this question: “If a word becomes universally current in America, why should it not take its station in the language?” “Because,” replied Hall in all seriousness, “there are words enough in our language already.”

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Note 15.  An American Primer was not printed until 1904, long after Whitman’s death. As originally written in the 50’s and 60’s, it consisted of notes for a lecture. Among Whitman’s papers, Horace Traubel found this alternative title: The Primer of Words: For American Young Men and Women, For Literati, Orators, Teachers, Judges, Presidents, etc. [back]

Note 16.  Whitman and the American Language, New York Evening Post, May 31, 1919. [back]

Note 17.  A Plea for the Queen’s English; London, 1863; 2nd ed., 1864; American ed., New York, 1866. [back]

A glance at some of the characteristic coinages of the time, as they are revealed in the Congressional Globe, in contemporary newspapers and political tracts, and in that grotesque small literature of humor which began with Judge Thomas C. Haliburton’s “Sam Slick” in 1835, is almost enough to make one sympathize with Dean Alford. Bartlett quotes to doxologize from the Christian Disciple, a quite reputable religious paper of the 40’s. To citizenize was used and explained by Senator Young, of Illinois, in the Senate on February 1, 1841, and he gave Noah Webster as authority for it. To funeralize and to missionate, along with consociational, were contributions of the backwoods pulpit; perhaps it also produced hell-roaring and hellion, the latter of which was a favorite of the Mormons and even got into a sermon by Henry Ward Beecher. To deacon, a verb of decent mien in colonial days, signifying to read a hymn line by line, responded to the rough humor of the time, and began to mean to swindle or adulterate, e. g., to put the largest berries at the top of the box, to extend one’s fences sub rosa, or to mix sand with sugar. A great rage for extending the vocabulary by the use of suffixes seized upon the corn-fed etymologists, and they produced a formidable new vocabulary in -ize, -ate, -ify, -acy, -ous and -ment. Such inventions as to obligate, to concertize, to questionize, retiracy, savagerous, coatee (a sort of diminutive for coat) and citified appeared in the popular vocabulary and even got into more or less good usage. Fowler, in 1850, cited publishment and releasement with no apparent thought that they were uncouth. And at the same time many verbs were made by the simple process of back formation, as, to resurrect, to excurt, to resolute, to burgle 18 and to enthuse. 19

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Some of these inventions, after flourishing for a generation or more, were retired with blushes during the period of æsthetic consciousness following the Civil War, but a large number have survived to our own day, and are in good usage. Not even the most bilious purist would think of objecting to to affiliate, to endorse, to collide, to jeopardize, to predicate, to progress, to itemize, to resurrect or to Americanize today, and yet all of them gave grief to the judicious when they first appeared in the debates of Congress, brought there by statesmen from the backwoods. Nor to such simpler verbs of the period as to corner (i. e., the market), to boss and to lynch. 20 Nor perhaps to to boom, to boost, to kick (in the sense of to protest), to coast (on a sled), to engineer, to chink (i. e., logs), to feaze, to splurge, to bulldoze, to aggravate (in the sense of to anger), to yank and to crawfish. These verbs have entered into the very fibre of the American vulgate, and so have many nouns derived from them, e. g., boomer, boom-town, bouncer, kicker, kick, splurge, roller-coaster. A few of them, e. g., to collide and to feaze, were archaic English terms brought to new birth; a few others, e. g., to holler 21 and to muss, were obviously mere corruptions. But a good many others, e. g., to bulldoze, to hornswoggle and to scoot, were genuine inventions, and redolent of the soil.

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With the new verbs came a great swarm of verb-phrases, some of them short and pithy and others extraordinarily elaborate, but all showing the true national talent for condensing a complex thought, and often a whole series of thoughts, into a vivid and arresting image. Of the first class are to fill the bill, to fizzle out, to make tracks, to peter out, to plank down, to go back on, to keep tab, to light out and to back water. Side by side with them we have inherited such common coins of speech as to make the fur fly, to cut a swath, to know him like a book, to keep a stiff upper lip, to cap the climax, to handle without gloves, to freeze on to, to go it blind, to pull wool over his eyes, to have the floor, to know the ropes, to get solid with, to spread one’s self, to run into the ground, to dodge the issue, to paint the town red, to take a back seat and to get ahead of. These are so familiar that we use them and hear them without thought; they seem as authentically parts of the English idiom as to be left at the post. And yet, as the labors of Thornton have demonstrated, all of them are of American nativity, and the circumstances surrounding the origin of some of them have been accurately determined. Many others are palpably the products of the great movement toward the West, for example, to pan out, to strike it rich, to jump or enter a claim, to pull up stakes, to rope in, to die with one’s boots on, to get the deadwood on, to get the drop, to back and fill, to do a landoffice business and to get the bulge on. And in many others the authentic American is no less plain, for example, in to kick the bucket, to put a bug in his ear, to see the elephant, to crack up, to do up brown, to bark up the wrong tree, to jump on with both feet, to go the whole hog, to make a kick, to buck the tiger, to let it slide and to come out at the little end of the horn. To play possum belongs to this list. To it Thornton adds to knock into a cocked hat, despite its English sound, and to have an ax to grind. To go for, both in the sense of belligerency and in that of partisanship, is also American, and so is to go through (i. e., to plunder).

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Of adjectives the list is scarcely less long. Among the coinages of the first half of the century that are in good use today are non-committal, highfalutin, well-posted, down-town, two-fer, played-out, flat-footed, whole-souled and true-blue. The first appears in a Senate debate of 1841; highfalutin in a political speech of the same decade. Both are useful words; it is impossible, not employing them, to convey the ideas behind them without circumlocution. The use of slim in the sense of meagre, as in slim chance, slim attendance and slim support, goes back still further. The English use small in place of it. Other, and less respectable contributions of the time are brash, bogus, brainy, peart, locoe (d), pesky, picayune, scary, well-heeled, hardshell (e. g., Baptist), low-flung, codfish (to indicate opprobrium) and go-to-meeting. The use of plumb as an adjective, as in plumb crazy, is an English archaism that was revived in the United States in the early years of the century. In the more orthodox adverbial form of plump it still survives, for example, in “she fell plump into his arms.” But this last is also good English.

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The characteristic American substitution of mad for angry goes back to the eighteenth century, and perhaps denotes the survival of an English provincialism. Witherspoon noticed it and denounced it in 1781, and in 1816 Pickering called it “low” and said that it was not used “except in very familiar conversation.” But it got into much better odor soon afterward, and by 1840 it passed unchallenged. Its use is one of the peculiarities that Englishmen most quickly notice in American colloquial speech today. In formal written discourse it is less often encountered, probably because the English marking of it has so conspicuously singled it out. But it is constantly met with in the newspapers and in the Congressional Record, and it is not infrequently used by such writers as Howells and Dreiser. In the familiar simile, as mad as a hornet, it is used in the American sense. But as mad as a March hare is English, and connotes insanity, not mere anger. The English meaning of the word is preserved in mad-house and mad-dog, but I have often noticed that American rustics, employing the latter term, derive from it a vague notion, not that the dog is demented, but that it is in a simple fury. From this notion, perhaps, comes the popular belief that dogs may be thrown into hydrophobia by teasing and badgering them.

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It was not, however, among the verbs and adjectives that the American word-coiners of the first half of the century achieved their gaudiest innovations, but among the substantives. Here they had temptation and excuse in plenty, for innumerable new objects and relations demanded names, and here they exercised their fancy without restraint. Setting aside loan words, which will be considered later, three main varieties of new nouns were thus produced. The first consisted of English words rescued from obsolescence or changed in meaning, the second of compounds manufactured of the common materials of the mother-tongue, and the third of entirely new inventions. Of the first class, good specimens are deck (of cards), gulch, gully and billion, the first three old English words restored to usage in America and the last a sound English word changed in meaning. Of the second class, examples are offered by gum-shoe, mortgage-shark, carpet-bagger, cut-off, mass-meeting, dead-beat, dug-out, shot-gun, stag-party, wheat-pit, horse-sense, chipped-beef, oyster-supper, buzz-saw, chain-gang and hell-box. And of the third there are instances in buncombe, greaser, conniption, bloomer, campus, galoot, maverick, roustabout, bugaboo and blizzard.

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Of these coinages perhaps those of the second class are most numerous and characteristic. In them American exhibits one of its most marked tendencies: a habit of achieving short cuts in speech by a process of agglutination. Why explain laboriously, as an Englishman might, that the notes of a new bank (in a day of innumerable new banks) are insufficiently secure? Call them wild-cat notes and have done! Why describe a gigantic rain storm with the lame adjectives of everyday? Call it a cloud-burst and immediately a vivid picture of it is conjured up. Rough-neck is a capital word; it is more apposite and savory than the English navvy, and it is over-whelmingly more American. 22 Square-meal is another. Fire-eater is yet another. And the same instinct for the terse, the eloquent and the picturesque is in boiled-shirt, blow-out, big-bug, claim-jumper, spread-eagle, come-down, back-number, claw-hammer (coat), bottom-dollar, poppy-cock, cold-snap, back-talk, back-taxes, calamity-howler, fire-bug, grab-bag, grip-sack, grub-stake, pay-dirt, tender-foot, stocking-feet, ticket-scalper, store-clothes, small-potatoes, cake-walk, prairie-schooner, round-up, snake-fence, flat-boat, under-the-weather, on-the-hoof, and jumping-off-place. These compounds (there must be thousands of them) have been largely responsible for giving the language its characteristic tang and color. Such specimens as bell-hop, semi-occasional, chair-warmer and down-and-out are as distinctively American as baseball or the quick-lunch.

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The spirit of the language appears scarcely less clearly in some of the coinages of the other classes. There are, for example, the English words that have been extended or restricted in meaning, e. g., docket (for court calendar), betterment (for improvement to property), collateral (for security), crank (for fanatic), jumper (for tunic), tickler (for memorandum or reminder), 23 Carnival (in such phrases as carnival of crime), scrape (for fight or difficulty), 24 Flurry (of snow, or in the market), suspenders, diggings (for habitation) and range. Again, there are the new assemblings of English materials, e. g., doggery, rowdy, teetotaler, goatee, tony and cussedness. Yet again, there are the purely artificial words, e. g., sockdolager, hunky-dory, scalawag, guyascutis, spondulix, slumgullion, rambunctious, scrumptious, to skedaddle, to absquatulate and to exfluncticate. 25 In the use of the last-named coinages fashions change. In the 40’s to absquatulate was in good usage, but it has since disappeared. Most of the other inventions of the time, however, have to some extent survived, and it would be difficult to find an American of today whom did not know the meaning of scalawag and rambunctious and who did not occasionally use them. A whole series of artificial American words groups itself around the prefix ker, for example, ker-flop, ker-splash, ker-thump, ker-bang, ker-plunk, ker-slam and ker-flummux. This prefix and its onomatopœic daughters have been borrowed by the English, but Thornton and Ware agree that it is American. Several of my correspondents suggest that it may have been suggested by the German prefix ge- —that it may represent a humorous attempt to make German words by analogy, e. g., geflop, gesplash, etc. I pass on this guess for what it is worth. Certainly such American-German words must have been manufactured frequently by the earliest “Dutch” comedians, and it is quite possible that some of them got into the language, and that the ge- was subsequently changed to ker-.

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In the first chapter I mentioned the superior imaginativeness revealed by Americans in meeting linguistic emergencies, whereby, for example, in seeking names for new objects introduced by the building of railroads, they surpassed the English plough and crossing-plate with cow-catcher and frog. That was in the 30’s. Already at that day the two languages were so differentiated that they produced wholly distinct railroad nomenclatures. Such commonplace American terms as box-car, caboose and air-line are unknown in England. So are freight-car, flagman, towerman, switch, switching-engine, switch-yard, switchman, track-walker, engineer, baggage-room, baggage-check, baggage-smasher, accommodation-train, baggage-master, conductor, express-car, flat-car, hand-car, way-bill, expressman, express-office, fast-freight, wrecking-crew, jerk-water, commutation-ticket, commuter, round-trip, mileage-book, ticket-scalper, depot, limited, hot-box, iron-horse, stop-over, tie, rail, fish-plate, run, train-boy, chair-car, club-car, diner, sleeper, bumpers, mail-clerk, passenger-coach, day-coach, railroad-man, ticket-office, truck and right-of-way, not to mention the verbs, to flag, to express, to dead-head, to side-swipe, to stop-over, to fire (i. e., a locomotive), to switch, to side-track, to railroad, to commute, to telescope and to clear the track. These terms are in constant use in America; their meaning is familiar to all Americans; many of them have given the language everyday figures of speech. 26 But the majority of them would puzzle an Englishman, just as the English luggage-van, permanent-way, goods-waggon, guard, carrier, booking-office, railway-rug, R. S. O. (railway sub-office), tripper, line, points, shunt, metals and bogie would puzzle the average untraveled American.

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In two other familiar fields very considerable differences between English and American are visible; in both fields they go back to the era before the Civil War. They are politics and that department of social intercourse which has to do with drinking. Many characteristic American political terms originated in revolutionary days and have passed over into English. Of such sort are caucus and mileage. But the majority of those in common use today were coined during the extraordinarily exciting campaigns following the defeat of Adams by Jefferson. Charles Ledyard Norton has devoted a whole book to their etymology and meaning; 27 the number is far too large for a list of them to be attempted here. But a few characteristic specimens may be recalled, for example, the simple agglutinates: omnibus-bill, banner-state, favorite-son, anxious-bench, gag-rule, executive-session, mass-meeting, office-seeker and straight-ticket; the humorous metaphors: pork-barrel, pie-counter, wire-puller, land-slide, carpet-bagger, lame-duck and on the fence; the old words put to new uses: plank, pull, platform, machine, precinct, slate, primary, floater, repeater, bolter, stalwart, filibuster, regular and fences; the new coinages: gerrymander, heeler, buncombe, roorback, mugwump and to bulldoze; the new derivatives: abolitionist, candidacy, boss-rule, per-diem, to lobby and boodler; and the almost innumerable verbs and verb-phrases: to knife, to split a ticket, to go up Salt River, to bolt, to eat crow, to boodle, to divvy, to grab and to run. An English candidate never runs; he stands. To run, according to Thornton, was already used in America in 1789; it was universal by 1820. Platform came in at the same time. Machine was first applied to a political organization by Aaron Burr. The use of mugwump is commonly thought to have originated in the Blaine campaign of 1884, but it really goes back to the 30’s. Anxious-bench (or anxious-seat) at first designated only the place occupied by the penitent at revivals, but was used in its present political sense in Congress so early as 1842. Banner-state appears in Niles’ Register for December 5, 1840. Favorite-son appears in an ode addressed to Washington on his visit to Ports-mouth, N. H., in 1789, but it did not acquire its present ironical sense until it was applied to Martin Van Buren. Thornton has traced bolter to 1812, filibuster to 1863, roorback to 1844, and split-ticket to 1842. Regularity was an issue in Tammany Hall in 1822. 28 There were primaries in New York city in 1827, and hundreds of repeaters voted. In 1829 there were lobby-agents at Albany, and they soon became lobbyists; in 1832 lobbying had already extended to Washington. All of these terms are now as firmly imbedded in the American Vocabulary as election or congressman.

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In the department of conviviality the imaginativeness of Americans was shown both in the invention and in the naming of new and often highly complex beverages. So vast was the production of novelties in the days before Prohibition, in fact, that England borrowed many of them and their names with them. And not only England: one buys cocktails and gin-fizzes to this day in “American bars” that stretch from Paris to Yokohama. Cocktail, stone-fence and sherry-cobbler were mentioned by Irving in 1809; 29 by Thackeray’s time they were already well-known in England. Thornton traces the sling to 1788, and the stinkibus and anti-fogmatic, both now extinct, to the same year. The origin of the rickey, fizz, sour, cooler, skin, shrub and smash, and of such curious American drinks as the horse’s neck, Mamie Taylor, Tom-and-Jerry, Tom-Collins, John-Collins, bishop, stone-wall, gin-fix, brandy-champarelle, golden-slipper, hari-kari, locomotive, whiskey-daisy, blue-blazer, black-stripe, white-plush and brandy-crusta remains to be established; the historians of alcoholism, like the philologists, have neglected them. 30 But the essentially American character of most of them is obvious, despite the fact that a number have gone over into English. The English, in naming their drinks, commonly display a far more limited imagination. Seeking a name, for example, for a mixture of whiskey and soda-water, the best they could achieve was whiskey-and-soda. The Americans, introduced to the same drink, at once gave it the far more original name of high-ball. So with ginger-ale and ginger-pop. 31 So with minerals and soft-drinks. Other characteristic Americanisms (a few of them borrowed by the English) are red-eye, corn-juice, eye-opener, forty-rod, squirrel-whiskey, phlegm-cutter, moon-shine, hard-cider, apple-jack and corpse-reviver, and the auxiliary drinking terms, speak-easy, boot-legger, sample-room, blind-pig, barrel-house, bouncer, bung-starter, dive, doggery, schooner, moonshine, shell, stick, duck, straight, hooch, saloon, finger and chaser. Thornton shows that jag, bust, bat and to crook the elbow are also Americanisms. So are bar-tender and saloon-keeper. To them might be added a long list of common American synonyms for drunk, for example, piffled, pifflicated, awry-eyed, tanked, snooted, stewed, ossified, slopped, fiddled, edged, loaded, het-up, frazzled, jugged, soused, jiggered, corned, jagged and bunned. Farmer and Henley list corned and jagged among English synonyms, but the former is probably an Americanism derived from corn-whiskey or corn-juice, and Thornton says that the latter originated on this side of the Atlantic also.

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Note 18.  J. R. Ware, in Passing English of the Victorian Era, says that to burgle was introduced to London by W. S. Gilbert in The Pirates of Penzance (April 3, 1880). It was used in America 30 years before. [back]

Note 19.  This process, of course, is philologically respectable, however uncouth its occasional products may be. By it we have acquired many every-day words, among them, to accept (from acceptum), to exact (from exactum), to darkle (from darkling), and pea (from pease=pois). [back]

Note 20.  All authorities save one seem to agree that this verb is a pure Americanism, and that it is derived from the name of Charles Lynch, a Virginia justice of the peace, who jailed many Loyalists in 1780 without warrant in law. The dissentient, Bristed, says that to linch is in various northern English dialects, and means to beat or maltreat. [back]

Note 21.  The correct form of this appears to be halloo or holloa, but in America it is pronounced holler and usually represented in print by hollo or hollow. I have often encountered holloed in the past tense. But the Public Printer frankly accepts holler. Vide the Congressional Record, May 12, 1917, p. 2309. The word, in the form of hollering, is here credited to “Hon.” John L. Burnett, of Alabama. There can be no doubt that the hon. gentleman said hollering, and not holloaing, or holloeing, or hollowing, or hallooing. Hello is apparently a variation of the same word. [back]

Note 22.  Rough-neck is often cited, in discussions of slang, as a latter-day invention, but Thornton shows that it was used in Texas in 1836. [back]

Note 23.  This use goes back to 1839. [back]

Note 24.  Thornton gives an example dated 1812. Of late the word has lost its final e and shortened its vowel, becoming scrap. [back]

Note 25.  Cf. Terms of Approbation and Eulogy, by Elsie L. Warnock, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, part 1, 1913. Among the curious recent coinages cited by Miss Warnock are scallywampus, supergobosnoptious, hyperfirmatious, and scrumdifferous. [back]

Note 26.  E. g., single-track mind, to jump the rails, to collide head-on, broad-gauge man, to walk the ties, blind-baggage, underground-railroad, tank-town. [back]

Note 27.  Political Americanisms …: New York and London, 1890. [back]

Note 28.  Gustavus Myers: The History of Tammany Hall; 2nd ed.; New York, 1917, ch. viii. [back]

Note 29.  Knickerbocker’s History of New York; New York, 1809, p. 241. [back]

Note 30.  Extensive lists of such drinks, with their ingredients, are to be found in The Hoffman House Bartender’s Guide, by Charles Mahoney, 4th ed.; New York, 1916; in The Barkeeper’s Manual, by Raymond E. Sullivan, 4th ed.; Baltimore, n.d., and in Wehman Brothers’ Bartenders’ Guide; New York, 1912. An early list, from the Lancaster (Pa.) Journal of Jan. 26, 1821, is quoted by Thornton, vol. ii, p. 985. The treatise by Prof. Sullivan (whose great talents I often enjoyed at the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore before the Methodist hellenium) is particularly interesting. The sale of all such books, I believe, is now prohibited, but they may be consulted by scholars in the Library of Congress. [back]

Note 31.  An English correspondent writes: “Did the Americans invent ginger-ale and ginger-pop? Then why don’t they make some that is drinkable? Do you know of a decent unimported dry ginger? Ginger-pop, in England, is ginger-beer, an article rarely seen in America. Stone-ginger is the only temperature drink worth a damn, perhaps because, properly made, it contains a certain amount of alcohol. It is brewed, not charged with CO2. Where in America can I buy stone-ginger; that is to say, ginger-beer from a brewery, sold in stone bottles? We say pop in England, but not ginger-pop.” [back]

The Indians of the new West, it would seem, had little to add to the contributions already made to the American vocabulary by the Algonquins of the Northwest. The American people, by the beginning of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, knew almost all they were destined to know of the aborigines, and they had names for all the new objects thus brought to their notice and for most of the red man’s peculiar ceremonials. A few translated Indian terms, e. g., squaw-man, Great White Father, Father of Waters, and happy-hunting ground, represent the meagre fresh stock that the western pioneers got from him. Of more importance was the suggestive and indirect effect of his polysynthetic dialects, and particularly of his vivid proper names, e. g., Rain-in-the-Face, Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Wife and Voice-Like-Thunder. These names, and other word-phrases like them, made an instant appeal to American humor, and were extensively imitated in popular slang. One of the surviving coinages of that era is Old-Stick-in-the-Mud, which Farmer and Henley note as having reached England by 1823.

1

Contact with the French in Louisiana and along the Canadian border, and with the Spanish in Texas and further West, brought many more new words. From the Canadian French, as we have already seen, prairie, batteau, portage and rapids had been borrowed during colonial days. To these French contributions bayou, picayune, levee, chute, butte, crevasse and lagniappe were now added, and probably also shanty and canuck. The use of brave to designate an Indian warrior, almost universal until the close of the Indian wars, was also of French origin. From the Spanish, once the Mississippi was crossed, and particularly after the Mexican war, there came a swarm of novelties, many of which have remained firmly imbedded in the language. Among them were numerous names of strange objects: lariat, lasso, ranch, loco (weed), mustang, sombrero, canyon, desperado, poncho, chapparal, corral, broncho, plaza, peon, cayuse, burro, mesa, tornado, presidio, sierra and adobe. To them, as soon as gold was discovered, were added bonanza, eldorado, placer and vigilante. Cinch was borrowed from the Spanish cincha in the early Texas days, though its figurative use did not come in until much later. Ante, the poker term, though the etymologists point out its obvious origin in the Latin, probably came into American from the Spanish. Thornton’s first example of its use in its current sense is dated 1857, but Bartlett reported it in the form of anti in 1848. Coyote came from the Mexican dialect of Spanish; its first parent was the Aztec coyotl. Tamale had a similar origin, and so did frijole and tomato. None of these is good Spanish. 32 As usual, derivatives quickly followed the new-comers, among them peonage, broncho-buster, hot-tamale, ranchman and ranch-house, and such verbs as to ranch, to lasso, to corral, to ante up and to cinch. To vamose (from the Spanish vamos, let us go), came in at the same time. So did sabe. So did gazabo in the American sense.

2

This was also the period of the first great immigrations, and the American people now came into contact, on a large scale, with peoples of divergent race, particularly Germans, Irish Catholics from the South of Ireland (the Irish of colonial days “were descendants of Cromwell’s army, and came from the North of Ireland”), 33 and, on the Pacific Coast, Chinese. So early as the 20’s the immigration to the United States reached 25,000 in a year; in 1824 the Legislature of New York, in alarm, passed a restrictive act. 34 The Know-Nothing movement of the 50’s need not concern us here. Suffice it to recall that the immigration of 1845 passed the 100,000 mark, and that that of 1854 came within sight of 500,000. These new Americans, most of them Germans and Irish, did not all remain in the East; a great many spread through the West and Southwest with the other pioneers. Their effect upon the language was a great deal more profound than most of us think. The Irish, speaking the English of Cromwell’s time, greatly reinforced its usages in the United States, where it was beginning to yield to the schoolmasters, who were inclined to follow contemporary English precept and practice. “The influence of Irish-English,” writes an English correspondent, “is still plainly visible all over the United States. About nine years ago, before I had seen America, a relative of mine came home after twelve years’ farming in North Dakota, and I was struck by the resemblance between his speech and that of the Irish drovers who brought cattle to Norwich market.” 35 We shall see various indications of the Irish influence later on, not only on the vocabulary, but also upon pronunciation and idiom. The Germans also left indelible marks upon American, and particularly upon the spoken American of the common people. The everyday vocabulary is full of German words. Sauerkraut and noodle, as we have seen, came in during the colonial period, apparently through the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, i. e., a mixture, much debased, of the German dialects of Switzerland, Suabia and the Palatinate. The later immigrants contributed pretzel, pumpernickel, hausfrau, lager-beer, pinocle, wienerwurst (often reduced to wiener or wienie), frankfurter, bock-beer, schnitzel, leberwurst (sometimes half translated as liverwurst), blutwurst, rathskeller, schweizer (cheese), delicatessen, hamburger (i. e., steak), kindergarten and katzenjammer. 36 From them, in all probability, there also came two very familiar Americanisms, loafer and bum. The former, according to the Standard Dictionary, is derived from the German laufen; another authority says that it originated in a German mispronunciation of lover, i. e., as lofer. 37 Thornton shows that the word was already in common use in 1835. Bum was originally bummer, and apparently derives from the German bummler. 38 Both words have produced derivatives: loaf (noun), to loaf, cornerloafer, common-loafer, to bum, bum (adj.) and bummery, not to mention on the bum. Loafer has migrated to England, but bum is still unknown there in the American sense. In England, indeed, bum is used to designate an unmentionable part of the body and is thus not employed in polite discourse.

3

Another example of debased German is offered by the American Kriss Kringle. It is from Christkindlein, or Christkind’l, and properly designates, of course, not the patron saint of Christmas, but the child in the manager. A German friend tells me that the form Kriss Kringle, which is that given in the Standard Dictionary, and the form Krisking’l, which is that most commonly used in the United States, are both quite unknown in Germany. Here, obviously, we have an example of a loan-word in decay. Whole phrases have gone through the same process, for example, nix come erous (from nichts kommt heraus) and ’rous mit ’im (from heraus mit ihm). These phrases, like wie geht’s and ganz gut, are familiar to practically all Americans, no matter how complete their ignorance of correct German. So are such slang phrases, obviously suggested by German, as ach Louie and on the Fritz. So is the use of dumb for stupid, a borrowing from the German dumm. Most of them know, too, the meaning of gesundheit, k¨mmel, seidel, wanderlust, stein, speck, männerchor, schützenfest, sängerfest, turn-verein, hoch, yodel, zwie-back and zwei (as in zwei bier). I have found snitz (=schnitz) in Town Topics. 39 Prosit is in all American dictionaries. 40 Bower, as used in cards, is an Americanism derived from the German bauer, meaning the jack. The exclamation, ouch! is classed as an Americanism by Thornton, and he gives an example dated 1837. The New English Dictionary refers it to the German autsch, and Thornton says that “it may have come across with the Dunkers or the Mennonites.” Ouch is not heard in English, save in the sense of a clasp or buckle set with precious stones (=OF nouche), and even in that sense it is archaic. Shyster is very probably German also; Thornton has traced it back to the 50’s. 41 Rum-dumb is grounded upon the meaning of dumb borrowed from the German; it is not listed in the English slang dictionaries. 42 Bristed says that the American meaning of wagon, which indicates almost any four-wheeled, horse-drawn vehicle in this country but only the very heaviest in England, was probably influenced by the German wagen. He also says that the American use of hold on for stop was suggested by the German halt an, and White says that the substitution of standpoint for point of view, long opposed by all purists, was first made by an American professor who sought “an Anglicized form” of the German standpunkt. The same German influence may be behind the general facility with which American forms compound nouns. In most other languages, for example, Latin and French, the process is rare, and even English lags far behind American. But in German it is almost unrestricted. “It is,” says L. P. Smith, “a great step in advance toward that ideal language in which meaning is expressed, not by terminations, but by the simple method of word position.”

4

The immigrants from the South of Ireland, during the period under review, exerted an influence upon the language that was vastly greater than that of the Germans, both directly and indirectly, but their contributions to the actual vocabulary were probably less. They gave American, indeed, relatively few new words; perhaps shillelah, colleen, spalpeen, smithereens and poteen exhaust the unmistakably Gaelic list. Lallapalooza is also probably an Irish loan-word, though it is not Gaelic. It apparently comes from allay-foozee, a Mayo provincialism, signifying a sturdy fellow. Allay-foozee, in its turn, comes from the French allez-fusil, meaning “Forward the muskets!”—a memory, according to P. W. Joyce, 43 of the French landing at Killala in 1798. Such phrases as Erin go bragh and such expletives as begob and egorry may perhaps be added: they have got into American, though they are surely not distinctive Americanisms. But of far more importance, in the days of the great immigrations, than these few contributions to the vocabulary were certain speech habits that the Irish brought with them—habits of pronunciation, of syntax and even of grammar. These habits were, in part, the fruit of efforts to translate the idioms of Gaelic into English, and in part, as we have seen, survivals from the English of the age of James I. The latter, preserved by Irish conservatism in speech 44 came into contact in America with habits surviving, with more or less change, from the same time, and so gave those American habits an unmistakable reinforcement. The Yankees had lived down such Jacobean pronunciations as tay for tea and desave for deceive, and these forms, on Irish lips, struck them as uncouth and absurd, but they still cling, in their common speech, to such forms as h’ist for hoist, bile for boil, chaw for chew, jine for join, 45 sass for sauce, heighth for height, rench for rinse and lep for leaped, and the employment of precisely the same forms by the thousands of Irish immigrants who spread through the country undoubtedly gave them support, and so protected them, in a measure, from the assault of the purists. And the same support was given to drownded for drowned, oncet for once, ketch for catch, ag’in for against and onery for ordinary. Grandgent shows that the so-called Irish oi-sound in jine and bile was still regarded as correct in the United States so late as 1822, though certain New England grammarians, eager to establish the more recent English usage, had protested against it before the end of the eighteenth century. 46 The Irish who came in in the 30’s joined the populace in the war upon the reform, and to this day some of the old forms survive. Certainly it would sound strange to hear an American farmer command his mare to hoist her hoof; he would invariably use hist, just as he would use rench for rinse.

5

Certain usages of Gaelic, carried over into the English of Ireland, fell upon fertile soil in America. One was the employment of the definite article before nouns, as in French and German. An Irishman does not say “I am good at Latin,” but “I am good at the Latin.” In the same way an American does not say “I had measles,” but “I had the measles.” There is, again, the use of the prefix a before various adjectives and gerunds, as in a-going and a-riding. This usage, of course, is native to English, as aboard and afoot demonstrate, but it is much more common in the Irish dialect, on account of the influence of the parallel Gaelic form, as in a-n-aice=a-near, and it is also much more common in American. There is, yet again, a use of intensifying suffixes, often set down as characteristically American, which was probably borrowed from the Irish. Examples are no-siree and yes-indeedy, and the later kiddo and skiddoo. As Joyce shows, such suffixes, in Irish-English, tend to become whole phrases. The Irishman is almost incapable of saying plain yes or no; he must always add some extra and gratuitous asseveration. 47 The American is in like case. His speech bristles with intensives; bet your life, not on your life, well I guess, and no mistake, and so on. The Irish extravagance of speech struck a responsive chord in the American heart. The American borrowed, not only occasional words, but whole phrases, and some of them have become thoroughly naturalized. Joyce, indeed, shows the Irish origin of scores of locutions that are now often mistaken for native Americanisms, for example, great shakes, dead (as an intensive), thank you kindly, to split one’s sides (i. e., laughing), and the tune the old cow died of, mot to mention many familiar similes and proverbs. Certain Irish pronunciations, Gaelic rather than archaic English, got into American during the nineteenth century. Among them, one recalls bhoy, which entered our political slang in the middle 40’s and survived into our own time. Again, there is the very characteristic American word ballyhoo, signifying the harangue of a ballyhoo-man, or spieler 48 (that is, barker) before a cheap show, or, by metaphor, any noisy speech. It is from Ballyhooly, the name of a village in Cork, once notorious for its brawls. Finally, there is shebang. Schele de Vere derives it from the French cabane, but it seems rather more likely that it is from the Irish shebeen.

6

The propagation of Irishisms in the United States was helped, during many years, by the enormous popularity of various dramas of Irish peasant life, particularly those of Dion Boucicault. So recently as 1910 an investigation made by the Dramatic Mirror showed that some of his pieces, notably “Mavourneen,” “The Colleen Bawn” and “The Shaugraun,” were still among the favorites of popular audiences. Irish plays of that sort, at one time, were presented by dozens of companies, and a number of actors, among them Andrew Mack, Joe Murphy, Chauncey Olcott and Boucicault himself, made fortunes appearing in them. An influence also to be taken into account is that of Irish songs, once in great vogue. But such influences, like the larger matter of American borrowings from Anglo-Irish, remain to be investigated. So far as I have been able to discover, there is not a single article in print upon the subject. Here, as elsewhere, our philologists have wholly neglected a very interesting field of inquiry.

7

From other languages the borrowings during the period of growth were naturally less. Down to the last decades of the nineteenth century, the overwhelming majority of immigrants were either Germans or Irish; the Jews, Italians, Scandinavians, and Slavs were yet to come. But the first Chinese appeared in 1848, and soon their speech began to contribute its inevitable loan-words. These words, of course, were first adopted by the miners of the Pacific Coast, and a great many of them have remained California localisms, among them such verbs as to yen (to desire strongly, as a Chinaman desires opium) and to flop-flop (to lie down), and such nouns as fun, a measure of weight. But a number of others have got into the common speech of the whole country, e. g., fan-tan, kow-tow, chop-suey, ginseng, joss, yok-a-mi and tong. Contrary to the popular opinion, dope and hop are not from the Chinese. Neither, in fact, is an Americanism, though the former has one meaning that is specially American, i. e., that of information or formula, as in racing-dope and to dope out. Most etymologists derive the word from the Dutch doop, a sauce. In English, as in American, it signifies a thick liquid, and hence the viscous cooked opium. Hop is simply the common name of the Humulus lupulus. The belief that hops have a soporific effect is very ancient, and hop-pillows were brought to America by the first English colonists.

8

The derivation of poker, which came into American from California in the days of the gold rush, has puzzled etymologists. It is commonly derived from primero, the name of a somewhat similar game, popular in England in the sixteenth century, but the relation seems rather fanciful. It may possibly come, indirectly, from the Danish word pokker, signifying the devil. Pokerish, in the sense of alarming, was a common adjective in the United States before the Civil War; Thornton gives an example dated 1827. Schele de Vere says that poker, in the sense of a hobgoblin, was still in use in 1871, but he derives the name of the game from the French poche (=pouche, pocket). He seems to believe that the bank or pool, in the early days, was called the poke. Barrère and Leland, rejecting all these guesses, derive poker from the Yiddish pochger, which comes in turn from the verb pochgen, signifying to conceal winnings or losses. This pochgen is probably related to the German pocher (=boaster, braggart). There were a good many German Jews in California in the early days, and they were ardent gamblers. If Barrère and Leland are correct, then poker enjoys the honor of being the first loan-word taken into American from the Yiddish. But more likely it is from the German direct. “There is a little-known German card game,” says a correspondent, “which goes by the name of poch. It resembles poker in a number of ways. Its name is derived from the fact that at one stage of the game the players in turn declare the state of their hands by either passing or opening. Those who pass, signify it by saying, ‘Ich poche,’ or ‘Ich poch.’ This is sometimes indicated realistically by knocking on the table with one’s knuckles.” I leave the problem to the etymologists of the future.

9

Note 32.  Many such words are listed in Félix Ramos y Duarte’s Diccionario de Mejicanismos, 2nd ed., Mexico City, 1898; and in Miguel de Toro y Gisbert’s Americanismos; Paris, n. d. [back]

Note 33.  Prescott F. Hall: Immigration.…; New York, 1913, p. 5. [back]

Note 34.  Most of the provisions of this act, however, were later declared unconstitutional. Several subsequent acts met the same fate. [back]

Note 35.  This same correspondent adds: “I find very little trace of Scotch on this continent. One might expect to find it in Toronto, the Presbyterian Lhassa, where slot machines are removed from the streets on Sunday, but the speech of Toronto is actually not distinguishable from that of Buffalo. That is to say, it is quite Irish. The Scotch are not tenacious of their dialect, in spite of the fuss they make about it. It disappears in the second generation. I have met Prince Edward Islanders who speak Gaelic and American, but not Scotch. The affinity between Scotch and French, by the way, is noticeable nowhere more than in the Province of Quebec, where I have met Macdonalds who couldn’t speak English. The Scotch surrender their speech customs more readily than the English, and the Irish, it seems to me, are most tenacious of all.” [back]

Note 36.  The majority of these words, it will be noted, relate to eating and drinking. They mirror the profound effect of German immigration upon American drinking habits and the American cuisine. In July, 1921, despite the current prejudice against all things German, I found sour-braten on the bill-of-fare at Delmonico’s in New York, and, more surprising still, “braten with potato-salad.” It is a fact often observed that loan-words, at least in modern times, seldom represent the higher aspirations of the creditor nation. French and German have borrowed from English, not words of lofty significance, but such terms as beefsteak, roast-beef, pudding, grog, jockey, tourist, sport, five-o’clock tea, cocktail and sweepstakes, and from American such terms as tango, foxtrot, one-step and canoe (often spelled kanu). “The contributions of England to European civilization, as tested by the English words in Continental languages,” says L. P. Smith, “are not, generally, of a kind to cause much national self-congratulation.” See also The English Element in Foreign Language, by the same author, in English, March, 1919, p. 15 et seq. Nor would a German, I daresay, be very proud of the German contributions to American. [back]

Note 37.  Vide a paragraph in Notes and Queries, quoted by Thornton. [back]

Note 38.  Thornton offers examples of this form ranging from 1856 to 1885. During the Civil War the word acquired the special meaning of looter. The Southerners thus applied it to Sherman’s men. Vide Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. xii, p. 428; Richmond, 1884. Here is a popular rhyme that survived until the early 90’s:

Isidor, psht, psht!

Vatch de shtore, psht, psht!

Vhile I ketch de bummer

Vhat shtole de suit of clothes!

Bummel-zug is common German slang for slow train. [back]

Note 39.  Jan. 24, 1918, p. 4. [back]

Note 40.  Nevertheless, when I once put it into a night-letter a Western Union office refused to accept it, the rules requiring all night-letters to be in “plain English.” Meanwhile, the English have borrowed it from American, and it is actually in the Oxford Dictionary. It is German student Latin. [back]

Note 41.  The word is not in the Oxford Dictionary, but Cassell gives it and says that it is German and an Americanism. The Standard Dictionary does not give its etymology. Thornton’s first example, dated 1856, shows a variant spelling, shuyster, thus indicating that it was then recent. All subsequent examples show the present spelling. It is to be noted that the suffix -ster is not uncommon in English, and that it usually carries a deprecatory significance. [back]

Note 42.  Dumb-head, obviously from the German dummkopf, appears in a list of Kansas words collected by Judge J. C. Ruppenthal, of Russell, Kansas. (Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. v, 1916, p. 322.) It is also noted in Nebraska and the Western Reserve, and is very common in Pennsylvania. Uhrgucker (=uhr-gucken) is also on the Kansas list of Judge Ruppenthal. [back]

Note 43.  English As We Speak It in Ireland, 2nd ed.; London and Dublin, 1910, pp. 179–180. [back]

Note 44.  “Our people,” says Dr. Joyce, “are very conservative in retaining old customs and forms of speech. Many words accordingly that are discarded as old-fashioned—or dead and gone—in England, are still flourishing—alive and well, in Ireland. [They represent] … the classical English of Shakespeare’s time.” Pp. 6-7. [back]

Note 45.  Pope rhymed join with mine, divine and line; Dryden rhymed toil with smile. William Kenrick, in 1773, seems to have been the first English lexicographer to denounce this pronunciation. Tay survived in England until the second half of the eighteenth century. Then it fell into disrepute, and certain purists, among them Lord Chesterfield, attempted to change the ea-sound to ee in all words, including even great. Cf. the remarks under boil in A Desk-Book of Twenty-five Thousand Words Frequently Mispronounced, by Frank H. Vizetelly; New York, 1917. Also, The Standard of Pronunciation in English, by T. S. Lounsbury; New York, 1904, pp. 98-103. [back]

Note 46.  Old and New, p. 127. [back]

Note 47.  Amusing examples are to be found in Donlevy’s Irish Catechism. To the question, “Is the Son God?” the answer is not simply “Yes,” but “Yes, certainly He is.” And to the question, “Will God reward the good and punish the wicked?” the answer is “Certainly; there is no doubt He will.” [back]

Note 48.  Spieler, of course, is from the German spiel [back]

Noah Webster, as we saw in the last chapter, sneered at the broad a, in 1789, as an Anglomaniac affectation. In the course of the next 25 years, however, he seems to have suffered a radical change of mind, for in “The American Spelling Book,” published in 1817, he ordained it in ask, last, mass, aunt, grass, glass and their analogues, and in his 1829 revision he clung to this pronunciation, besides adding master, pastor, amass, quaff, laugh, craft, etc., and even massive. His authority was sufficient to safeguard the broad a in the speech of New England, and it has remained there ever since, though often showing considerable variations from the true English a. Between 1830 and 1850, according to Grandgent, 49 it ran riot through the speech of the region, and was even introduced into such words as handsome, matter, apple, caterpiller, pantry, hammer, practical and satisfaction. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in 1857, protested against it in “The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table,” but the great majority of New England schoolmasters were with Webster, and so the protest went for naught. There is some difficulty, at this distance and in the absence of careful investigation, about determining just what sound the great lexicographer advocated. His rival, Worcester, in 1830, recommended a sound intermediate between ah and the flat a. “To pronounce the words fast, last, glass, grass, dance, etc.,” he said, “with the proper sound of short a, as in hat, has the appearance of affectation; and to pronounce them with the full Italian sound of a, as in part, father, seems to border on vulgarism.” Grandgent says that this compromise a never made much actual progress—that the New Englanders preferred the “Italian a” recommended by Webster, whatever it was. Apparently it was much nearer to the a in father than to the a in all. A quarter of a century after Webster’s death, Richard Grant White distinguished clearly between these a’s, and denounced the former as “a British peculiarity.” Frank H. Vizetelly, writing in 1917, still noted the difference, particularly in such words as daunt, saunter and laundry; some Americans, pronouncing these words, use one a, and some use the other. At the present time, says Grandgent, “the broad a of New Englanders, Italiante though it be, is not so broad as that of Old England.… Our grass really lies between the grahs of a British lawn and the grass of the boundless prairies.” In the cities, he adds, it has been “shaken by contact with the Irish,” and is now restricted to “a few specific classes of words—especially those in which an a (sometimes an au) is followed by a final r, by an r that precedes another consonant, by an m written lm, or by the sound of f, s, or th: as far, hard, balm, laugh, pass, rather, path. In the first two categories, and in the word father, ah possesses nearly all the English-speaking territory; concerning the other classes there is a wide divergence, although flat a appears everywhere to be disappearing from words like balm. Uankeedom itself is divided over such combinations as ant, can’t, dance, example, in which a nasal and another consonant follow the vowel; anut, however, always has broad a. Ah, in this region, is best preserved in rural communities and among people of fashion, the latter being more or less under British influence.”

1

But the imprimatur of the Yankee Johnson was not potent enough to establish the broad a outside New England. He himself, compromising in his old age, allowed the flat a in stamp and vase. His successor and rival, Lyman Cobb, decided for it in pass, draft, and dance, though he advocated the ah-sound in laugh, path, daunt and saunter. By 1850 the flat a was dominant everywhere west of the Berkshires and south of New Haven, save for what Grandgent calls “a little ah-spot in Virginia,” and its sound had even got into such proper names as Alabama and Lafayette. 50 “In the United States beyond the Hudson—perhaps beyond the Connecticut,” says Grandgent, “the flat a prevails before f, s, th, and n.”

2

Webster failed in a number of his other attempts to influence support American pronunciation. His advocacy of deef for deaf had popular support while he lived, and he dredged up authority for it out of Chaucer and Sir William Temple, but the present pronunciation gradually prevailed, though deef remains familiar in the common speech. Joseph E. Worcester and other rival lexicographers stood against many of his pronunciations, and he took the field against them in the prefaces to the successive editions of his spelling-books. Thus, in that to “The Elementary Spelling Book,” dated 1829, he denounced the “affectation” of inserting a y-sound before the u in such words as gradual and nature, with its compensatory change of d into dj and of t into ch. The English lexicographer, John Walker, had argued for this “affectation” in 1791, but Webster’s prestige, while he lived, remained so high in some quarters that he carried the day, and the older professors at Yale, it is said, continued to use natur down to 1839. He favored the pronunciation of either and neither as ee-ther and nee-ther, and so did most of the English authorities of his time. The original pronunciation of the first syllable, in England, probably made it rhyme with bay, but the ee-sound was firmly established by the end of the eighteenth century. Toward the middle of the following century, however, there arose a fashion of an ai-sound, and this affectation was borrowed by certain Americans. Gould, in the 50’s, put the question, “Why do you say i-ther and ni-ther?” to various Americans. The reply he got was: “The words are so pronounced by the best-educated people in England.” This imitation still prevails in the cities of the East. “All of us,” says Lounsbury, “are priviledged in these latter days frequently to witness painful struggles put forth to give to the first syllable of these words the sound of i by those who who have been brought up to give it the sound of e. There is apparently an impression on the part of some that such a pronunciation establishes on a firm foundation an otherwise doubtful social standing.” 51 But the overwhelming majority of Americans continue to say ee-ther and not eye-ther. White and Vizetelly, like Lounsbury, argue that they are quite correct in so doing. The use of eye-ther, says White, is no more than “a copy of a second-rate British affectation.”

3

Note 49.  Old and New, p. 139. The two essays in this book, Fashion and the Broad A, and New England Pronunciation, contain the best discussion of the subject that I have ever encountered. [back]

Note 50.  Richard Meade Bache denounced it, in Lafayette, during the 60’s. Vide his Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech, 2nd ed., Philadelphia, 1869, p. 65. [back]

Note 51.  The Standard of Pronunciation in English, pp. 109-112. [back]

1. The Two Vocabularies

By way of preliminary to an examination of the American of today, here is a list of terms in everyday use that differ in American and English:

American

English

ash-can
dust-bin

ash-cart
dust-cart

ashman
dustman

backyard
garden

baggage
luggage

baggage-car
luggage-van

ballast (railroad)

metal

barbershop
barber’s-shop

bath-robe
dressing-gown

bath-tub
bath

beet
beet-root

bid (noun)

tender

bill-board
hoarding

boarder
paying-guest

boardwalk (seaside)

promenade

boot
high-boot

brakeman
brakesman

bumper (car)

buffer

bureau
chest of drawers

calendar (court)

cause-list

campaign (political)

canvass

can (noun)

tin

candy
sweets

cane
stick

canned-goods
tinned-goods

car (railroad)

carriage, van or waggon

checkers (game)

draughts

chicken-yard
fowl-run

chief-clerk
head-clerk

chief-of-police
chief-constable

city-editor
chief-reporter

city-ordinance
by-law

clipping (newspaper)

cutting

closed-season
close-season

coal
coals

coal-oil
paraffin

collar-button
stud

commission-merchant
factor, or commission-agent

commutation-ticket
season-ticket

conductor (of a train)

guard

corn
maize, or Indian corn

corner (of a street)

crossing

corn-meal

Indian meal

counterfeiter
coiner

cow-catcher
plough

cracker
biscuit

crazy-bone
funny-bone

cross-tie
sleeper

crystal (watch)

watch-glass

department-store
stores

derby (hat)

bowler

dime-novel
penny-dreadful

district (political)

division

druggist
chemist

drug-store
chemist’s shop

drummer
bagman

dry-goods-store
draper’s-shop

editorial (noun)

leader, or leading-article

elevator
lift

elevator-boy
lift-man

enlisted-man
private-soldier

excursionist
tripper

ferns
bracken

filing-cabinet
nest-of-drawers

fire-department
fire-brigade

fish-dealer
fishmonger

floor-walker
shop-walker

fraternal-order
friendly-society

freight
goods

freight-agent
goods-manager

freight-car
goods-waggon

freight-elevator
hoist

frog (railway)

crossing-plate

garters (men’s)

sock-suspenders

gasoline
petrol

grade (railroad)

gradient

grain
corn

grain-broker
corn-factor

groceries
stores

hardware-dealer
ironmonger

headliner
topliner

hod-carrier
hodman

hog-pen
piggery

hood (automobile)

bonnet

hospital (private)

nursing-home

huckster
coster (monger)

hunting
shooting

Indian

Red Indian

Indian Summer

St. Martin’s Summer

instalment-business
credit-trade

instalment-plan
hire-purchase plan

internal-revenue
inland-revenue

janitor
caretaker, or porter

laborer
navvy

legal-holiday
bank-holiday

letter-box
pillar-box

letter-carrier
postman

locomotive engineer
engine-driver

long-distance-call
trunk-call

lumber
deals

lumber-yard
timber-yard

mad
angry

mantelpiece
chimney-piece

Methodist

Wesleyan

molasses
treacle

monkey-wrench
spanner

moving-picture-theatre
cinema, or picture-palace

necktie
tie

news-dealer
news-agent

newspaper-man
pressman, or journalist

notions
small-wares

oatmeal
porridge

officeholder
public-servant

orchestra (seats in a theatre)

stalls

outbuildings (farm)

offices

overcoat
great-coat

package
parcel

parlor
drawing-room

parlor-car
saloon-carriage

patrolman (police)

constable

pay-day
wage-day

peanut
monkey-nut

pen-point
nib

period (punctuation)

full-stop

pitcher
jug

plant (industrial)

works

poorhouse
workhouse

post-paid
post-free

potpie
pie

prepaid
carriage-paid

press (printing)

machine

program (of a meeting)

agenda

public-school
board-school

quotation-marks
inverted-commas

railroad
railway 1

railroad-man
railway-servant

rails
line

rare (of meat)

underdone

receipts (in business)

takings

Rhine-wine

Hock

road-bed (railroad)

permanent-way

road-repairer
road-mender

roast
joint

roll (of films)

spool

roll-call
division

rooster
cock

round-trip-ticket
return-ticket

saleswoman
shop-assistant

saloon
public-house

scarf-pin
tie-pin

scow
lighter

sewerage
drains

shirtwaist
blouse

shoe
boot

shoemaker
bootmaker

shoe-shine
boot-polish

shoestring
bootlace

shoe-tree
boot-tree

sick
ill

sidewalk
footpath, or pavement

silver (collectively)

plate

sled
sledge

sleigh
sledge

soft-drinks
minerals

smoking-room
smoke-room

spigot (or faucet)

tap

sponge (surgical)

tap

stem-winder
keyless-watch

stockholder
shareholder

stocks
shares

store-fixtures
shop-fittings

street-cleaner
crossing-sweeper

street-railway
tramway

subway
tube, or underground

suspenders (men’s)

braces

sweater
jersey

switch (noun, railway)

points

switch (verb, railway)

shunt

taxes (municipal)

rates

taxpayer (local)

ratepayer

tenderloin (of beef)

under-cut, or fillet

ten-pins
nine-pins

terminal (railroad)

terminus

thumb-tack
drawing-office

ticket-office
booking-office

tinner
tinker

tin-roof
leads

track (railroad)

line

trained-nurse
hospital-nurse

transom (of door)

fanlight

trolley-car
tramcar

truck (vehicle)

lorry

truck (of a railroad car)

bogie

typewriter (operator)

typist

typhoid-fever
enteric

undershirt
vest

vaudeville-theatre
music-hall

vest
waistcoat

warden (of a prison)

governor

warehouse
stores

wash-rag
face-cloth

wash-stand
wash-hand-stand

waste-basket
waste-paper-basket

whippletree
splinter-bar

witness-stand
witness-box

1

Note 1.  Railway, of course, is sometimes used in the United States. But all the English dictionaries call railroad an Americanism. [back]

The differences here listed, most of them between words in everyday employment, are but examples of a divergence in usage which extends to every department of daily life. In his business, in his journeys from his home to his office, in his dealings with his family and servants, in his sports and amusements, in his politics and even in his religion the American uses, not only words and phrases, but whole syntactical constructions, that are unintelligible to the Englishman, or intelligible only after laborious consideration. A familiar anecdote offers an example in miniature. It concerns a young American woman living in a region of prolific orchards who is asked by a visiting Englishman what the residents do with so much frut. Her reply is a pun: “We eat all we can, and what we can’t we can.” This answer would mystify most Englishmen, for in the first place it involves the use of the flat American a in can’t and in the second place it applies an unfamiliar name to the vessel that the Englishman knows as a tin, and then adds to the confusion by deriving a verb from the substantive. There are no such tings as canned-goods in England; over there they are tinned. The can that holds them is a tin; to can them is to tin them.… And they are counted, not as groceries, but as stores, and advertised, not on bill-boards but on hoardings. And the cook who prepares them for the table is not Nora or Maggie, but Cook, and if she does other work in addition she is not a girl for general housework, but a cook-general, and not help, but a servant. And the boarder who eats them is often not a boarder at all, but a paying-guest. And the grave of the tin, once it is emptied, is not the ash-can, but the dust-bin, and the man who carries it away is not the garbage-man or the ash-man or the white-wings, but the dustman.

1

An Englishman, entering his home, does not walk in upon the first floor, but upon the ground floor. What he calls the first floor (or, more commonly, first storey, not forgetting the penultimate e!) is what we call the second floor, and so on up to the roof—which is covered not with tin, but with slate, tiles or leads. He does not take a paper; he takes in a paper. He does not ask his servant, “Is there any mail for me?” but “Are there any letters for me?” for mail, in the American sense, is a word that he seldom uses, save in such compounds as mail-van, mail-train and mail-order. He alwaus speaks of it as the post. The man who brings it is not a letter-carrier but a postman. It is posted, not mailed, at a pillar-box, not at a mail-box. It never includes postal-orders but only post-cards, never money-orders, but only postal-orders or postoffice-orders. 2 The Englishman dictates his answers, not to a typewriter, but to a typist; a typewriter is merely the machine. If he desires the recipient to call him by telephone he doesn’t say, “ ’phone me at a quarter of eight,” but “ring me up at a quarter to eight.” And when the call comes he says “are you there?” When he gets home, he doesn’t find his wife waiting for him in the parlor or living-room, 3 but in the drawing-room or in her sitting-room, and the tale of domestic disaster that she has to tell does not concern the hired-girl but the scullery-maid. He doesn’t bring her a box of candy, but a box of sweets. He doesn’t leave a derby hat in the hall, but a bowler. His wife doesn’t wear shirtwaists, but blouses. When she buys one she doesn’t say “charge it,” but “put it down.” When she orders a tailor-made suit, she calls it a costume or a coat-and-skirt. When she wants a spool of thread she asks for a reel of cotton. 4 Such things are bought, not in the department-stores, but at the stores, which are substantially the same thing. In these stores calico means a plain cotton cloth; in the United States it means a printed cotton cloth. Things bought on the instalment plan in England are said to be bought on the hire-purchase plan or system; the instalment business itself is the credit-trade. Goods ordered by post (not mail) on which the dealer pays the cost of transportation are said to be sent, not postpaid or prepaid, but postfree or carriage-paid.

2

An Englishman does not wear suspenders, but braces. Suspenders are his wife’s garters; his own are sock-suspenders. The family does not seek sustenance in a rare tenderloin but in an underdone undercut or fillet. It does not eat beets, but beet-roots. The wine on the table, if white and German, is not Rhine wine, but Hock. Yellow turnips, in England, are called Swedes, and are regarded as fit food for cattle only; when rations were short there, in 1916, the Saturday Review made a solemn effort to convince its readers that they were good enough to go upon the table. The English, of late, have learned to eat another vegetable formerly resigned to the lower fauna, to wit, American sweet corn. But they are still having some difficulty about its name, for plain corn in England, as we have seen, means all the grains used by man. Some time ago, in the Sketch, one C. J. Clive, a gentleman farmer of Worcestershire, was advertising sweet corn-cobs as the “most delicious of all vegetables,” and offering to sell them at 6s. 6d. a dozen, carriage-paid. Chicory is something else that the English are unfamiliar with; they always call it endive. By chicken they mean any fowl, however ancient. Broilers and friers are never heard of over there. Neither are crawfish, which are always crayfish. 5 The classes which, in America, eat breakfast, dinner and supper, have breakfast, dinner and tea in England; supper always means a meal eaten late in the evening. No Englishman ever wears a frock-coat or Prince-Albert, or lives in a bungalow; he wears a morning-coat and lives in a villa or cottage. His wife’s maid, if she has one, is not Ethel, or Maggie but Robinson, and the nurse-maid who looks after his children is not Lizzie but Nurse. 6 So, by the way, is a trained nurse in a hospital, whose full style is not Miss Jones, but Nurse Jones or Sister. And the hospital itself, if private, is not a hospital at all, but a nursing-home, and its trained nurses are plain nurses, or hospital nurses, or maybe nursing sisters. And the white-clad young gentlemen who make love to them are not studying medicine but walking the hospitals. Similarly, an English law student does not study law, but reads the law.

3

If an English boy goes to a public school, it is not a sign that he is getting his education free, but that his father is paying a good round sum for it and is accepted as a gentleman. A public school over there corresponds to our prep school; it is a place maintained chiefly by endowments, wherein boys of the upper classes are prepared for the universities. What we know as a public school is called a board school or council school in England, not because the pupils are boarded but because it is managed by a school board or county council. The boys in a public (i. e., private) school are divided, not into classes, or grades, but into forms, which are numbered, the lowest being the first form. The benches they sit on are also called forms. An English boy whose father is unable to pay for his education goes first into a babies’ class (a kindergarten is always a private school) in a primary or infants’ school. He moves thence to class one, class two, class three and class four, and then into the junior school or public elementary school, where he enters the first standard. Until now boys and girls have sat together in class, but hereafter they are separated, the boy going to a boys’ school and the girl to a girls’. He goes up a standard a year. At the third or fourth standard, for the first time, he is put under a male teacher. He reaches the seventh standard, if he is bright, at the age of 12, and then goes into what is known as the ex-seventh. If he stays at school after this he goes into the ex-ex-seventh. But many leave the public elementary school at the ex-seventh and go into the secondary school, which is what Americans call a high-school. “The lowest class in a secondary school,” says an English correspondent, “is known as the third form. In this class the boy from the public elementary school meets boys from private preparatory schools, who usually have an advantage over him, being armed with the Greek alphabet, the first twenty pages of ‘French Without Tears,’ the fact that Balbus built a wall, and the fact that lines equal to the same line are equal to one another. But usually the public elementary school boy conquers these disabilities by the end of his first high-school year, and so wins a place in the upper fourth form, while his wealthier competitors grovel in the lower fourth. In schools where the fagging system prevails the fourth is the lowest form that is fagged. The lower fifth is the retreat of the unscholarly. The sixth form is the highest. Those who fail in their matriculation for universities or who wish to study for the civil service or pupil teachers’ examinations go into a thing called the remove, which is less a class than a state of mind. Here are the Brahmins, the contemplative Olympians, the prefects, the lab. monitors. The term public elementary school is recent. It was invented when the old board school system was abolished about 1906. But the term standard is ancient.” The principal of an English public (i. e., private) school is a head-master or head-mistress, but in a council school he or she may be a principal. The lower pedagogues used to be ushers, but are now assistant masters (or mistresses). The titular head of a university is a chancellor or rector. 7 He is always some eminent public man, and a vice-chancellor or vice-rector performs his duties. The head of a mere college may be a president, principal, master, warden, rector, dean or provost.

4

At the universities the students are not divided into freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, as with us, but are simply first-year-men, second-year-men, and so on, though a first-year-man is sometimes a fresher. Such distinctions, however, are not as important in England as in America; members of the university (they are called members, not students) do not flock together according to seniority, and there is no regulation forbidding an upper classman, or even a graduate, to be polite to a student just entered. An English university man does not study; he reads. He knows nothing of frats, class-days, senior-proms and such things; save at Cambridge and Dublin he does not even speak of a commencement. On the other hand his daily speech is full of terms unintelligible to an American student, for example, wrangler, tripos, head, pass-degree and don.

5

The upkeep of council-schools in England comes out of the rates, which are local taxes levied upon householders. For that reason an English municipal taxpayer is called a ratepayer. The functionaries who collect and spend money are not office-holders, but public-servants. The head of the local police is not a chief of police, but a chief constable. The fire department is the fire brigade. The street-cleaner is a crossing-sweeper. 8 The parish poorhouse is a workhouse. If it is maintained by two or more parishes jointly it becomes a union. A pauper who accepts its hospitality is said to be on the rates. A policeman is a bobby familiarly and a constable officially. He is commonly mentioned in the newspapers, not by his name, but as P. C. 643 A—i. e., Police Constable No. 643 of the A Division. The fire-laddie, the ward executive, the wardman, the roundsman, the strong-arm squad, the third-degree, and other such objects of American devotion are unknown in England. An English saloon-keeper is officially a licensed victualler. His saloon is a public house, or, colloquially, a pub. He does not sell beer by the bucket or can or growler or schooner, but by the pint. He and his brethren, taken together, are the licensed trade. His back-room is a parlor. If he has a few upholstered benches in his place he usually calls it a lounge. He employs no bartenders. Barmaids do the work, with maybe a barman to help.

6

The American language, as we have seen, has begun to take in the English boot and shop, and it is showing hospitality to head-master, haberdasher and week-end, but subaltern, civil servant, porridge, moor, draper, treacle, tram and mufti are still rather strangers in the United States, as bleachers, picayune, air-line, campus, chore, stogic and hoodoo are in England. A subaltern is a commissioned officer in the army, under the rank of captain. A civil servant is a public servant in the national civil service; if he is of high rank, he is usually called a permanent official. Porridge, moor, scullery, draper, treacle and tram, though unfamiliar, still need no explanation. Mufti means ordinary male clothing; an army officer out of uniform (American: in cits, or in citizen’s clothes) is said to be in mufti. To this officer a sack-suit or business-suit is a lounge-suit. He carries his clothes in a box. He does not miss a train; he loses it. He does not ask for a round-trip ticket, but for a return ticket. If he proposes to go to the theatre he does not reserve or engage seats; he books them. If he sits down-stairs, it is not in the orchestra, but in the stalls. If he likes vaudeville, he goes to a music-hall, where the head-liners are top-liners. If he has to stand in line, he does it, not in a line, but in a queue. If he goes to see a new play, he says that it has just been put up, not put on.

7

In England a corporation is a public company or limited liability company. The term corporation, over there, is commonly applied only to the mayor, aldermen and sheriffs of a city, as in the London corporation. An Englishman writes Ltd. after the name of a limited liability (what we would call incorporated) bank or trading company, as we write Inc. He calls its president its chairman or managing director. Its stockholders are its shareholders, and hold shares instead of stock in it. The place wherein such companies are floated and looted—the Wall Street of London—is called the City, with a capital C. Bankers, stock-jobbers, promoters, directors and other such leaders of its business are called City men. The financial editor of a newspaper is its City editor. Government bonds are consols, or stocks, or the funds. 9 To have money in the stocks is to own such bonds. As Englishman hasn’t a bank-account, but a banking-account. He draws cheques (not checks), not on his bank but on the bankers. 10 In England there is a rigid distinction between a broker and a stock-broker. A broker means, not a dealer in securities, as in our Wall Street broker, but a dealer in second-hand furniture. To have the brokers 11 in the house means to be bankrupt, with one’s very household goods in the hands of one’s creditors. For a City man to swindle a competitor in England is not to do him up or to do him, but to do him in. When any English business man retires he does not actually retire; he declines business. 12

8

Tariff reform, in England, does not mean a movement toward free trade, but one toward protection. The word Government, meaning what we call the administration, is always capitalized and plural, e. g., “The Government are considering the advisability, etc.” Vestry, committee, council, ministry and even company are also plural, though sometimes not capitalized. A member of Parliament does not run for re-election; he stands. He does not make a campaign, but a canvass. 13 He does not represent a district, but a division or constituency. He never makes a stumping trip, but always a speaking tour. When he looks after his fences he calls it nursing the constituency. At a political meeting (they are often rough in England) the bouncers are called stewards; the suffragettes used to delight in stabbing them with hatpins. A member of Parliament is not afflicted by the numerous bugaboos that menace an American congressman. He knows nothing of lame ducks, pork barrels, gag-rule, junkets, pulls, gerrymanders, omnibus-bills, snakes, niggers in the woodpile, Salt river, crow, bosses, ward heelers, men higher up, silk-stockings, repeaters, steam-rollers, ballot-box stuffers and straight and split tickets (he always calls them ballots or voting papers). He has never heard, save as a report of far-off heresies, of direct primaries, the recall, or the initiative and referendum. A roll-call in Parliament is a division. A member speaking is said to be up or on his legs. When the house adjourns it is said to rise. A member referring to another in the course of a debate does not say “the gentleman from Manchester,” but “the honorable gentleman” (written hon. gentleman) or, if he happens to be a privy councillor, “the right honorable gentleman,” or, if he is a member of one of the universities, or a member of one of the learned professions, “the honorable and learned gentleman.” If the speaker refers to a member of his own party he may say “my honorable friend.”

9

In the United States a pressman is a man who runs a printing press; in England he is a newspaper reporter, or, as the English usually say, a journalist. 14 This journalist works, not at space rates, but at lineage rates. A printing press is a machine. An editorial in a newspaper is a leading article or leader. An editorial paragraph is a leaderette, or par. A newspaper clipping is a cutting. A pass to the theatre is an order. The room-clerk of a hotel is the secretary. A real-estate agent or dealer is an estate-agent. The English keep up most of the old distinctions between physicians and surgeons, barristers and solicitors. A barrister is greatly superior to a solicitor. He alone can address the higher courts and the parliamentary committees; a solicitor must keep to office work and the inferior courts. A man with a grievance goes first to his solicitor, who then instructs or briefs a barrister for him. If that barrister, in the course of the trial, wants certain evidence removed from the record, he moves that it be struck out, not stricken out, as an American lawyer would say. Only barristers may become judges. An English barrister, like his American brother, takes a retainer when he is engaged. But the rest of his fee does not wait upon the termination of the case: he expects and receives a refresher from time to time. A barrister is never admitted to the bar, but is always called. If he becomes a King’s Counsel, or K. C. (a purely honorary appointment), he is said to have taken silk. In the United States a lawyer tries a case and the judge hears it; in England the judge tries it. In the United States the court hands down a decision; in England the court hands it out. In the United States a lawyer probates a will; in England he proves it, or has it admitted to probate.

10

The common objects and phenomena of nature are often differently named in England and America. As we saw in a previous chapter, such Americanisms as creek and run, for small streams, are practically unknown in England, and the English moor and downs early disappeared from American. The Englishman knows the meaning of sound (e. g., Long Island Sound), but he nearly always uses channel in place of it. In the same way the American knows the meaning of the English bog, but rejects the English distinction between it and swamp, and almost always uses swamp or marsh (often elided to ma’sh). The Englishman seldom, if ever, describes a severe storm as a hurricane, a cyclone, a tornado, or a blizzard. He never uses cold-snap, cloudburst or under the weather. He does not say that the temperature is 29 degrees (Fahrenheit) or that the thermometer or the mercury is at 29 degrees, but that there are three degrees of frost. He calls ice water iced-water. He knows nothing of blue-grass country or of the pennyr’yal. 15 What we call the mining regions he knows as the black country. He never, of course, uses down-East or up-State. Many of our names for common fauna and flora are unknown to him save as strange Americanisms, e. g., terrapin, moose, June-bug, persimmon, gumbo, egg-plant, alfalfa, catnip, sweet-potato and yam. Until lately he called the grapefruit a shaddock. He still calls the rutabaga a mangelwurzel. He is familiar with many fish that we seldom see, e. g., the turbot. He also knows the hare, which is seldom heard of in America. But he knows nothing of devilled-crabs, crab-cocktails, seafood-dinners, clam-chowder or oyster-stews, and he never goes to oyster-suppers, clam-bakes or burgoo-picnics. He doesn’t buy peanuts when he goes to the circus. He calls them monkeynuts, and to eat them publicly is infra dig. The common American use of peanut as an adjective of disparagement, as in peanut politics, is incomprehensible to him.

11

In England a hack is not a public coach, but a horse let out at hire, or one of similar quality. A life insurance policy is usually not an insurance policy at all, but an assurance policy. What we call the normal income tax is the ordinary tax; what we call the surtax is the supertax. 16 An Englishman never lives on a street, but always in it. 17 He never lives in a block of houses, but in a row; it is never in a section of the city, but always in a district. The business-blocks that are so proudly exhibited in all small American towns are quite unknown to him. He often calls an office-building (his are always small) simply a house, e. g., Carmelite House. Going home by train he always takes the down-train, no matter whether he be proceeding southward to Wimbleton, westward to Shepherd’s Bush, northward to Tottenham or eastward to Noak’s Hill. A train headed toward London is always an up-train, and the track it runs on is the up-line. Eastbound and westbound tracks and trains are unknown in England, and in general the Englishman has a much less keen sense of the points of the compass than the American. He knows the East End and the West End, but he never speaks of the north-east corner of two streets. When an Englishman boards a ’bus, in fact, it is not at a corner at all, but at a crossing, though he is familiar with such forms as Hyde Park Corner. The place he is bound for is not three squares or blocks away, but three turnings. Square, in England, always means a small park. A backyard is a garden. A subway is always a tube, or the underground. But an underground passage for pedestrians is a subway. English streets have no sidewalks; they always call them pavements or foot-paths or simply paths. An automobile is always a motor-car or motor. Auto is almost unknown, and with it to auto. So is machine.

12

An Englishman always calls russet, yellow or tan shoes brown shoes (or, if they cover the ankle, boots). He calls a pocketbook a purse, and gives the name of pocketbook to what we call a memorandum-book. His walking stick is always a stick, never a cane. By cord he means something strong, almost what we call twine; a thin cord he always calls a string; his twine is the lightest sort of string. When he applies the adjective homely to a woman he means that she is simple and home-loving, not necessarily that she is plain. He uses dessert, not to indicate the whole last course at dinner, but to designate the fruit only; the rest is ices or sweets. He uses vest, not in place of waistcoat, but in place of undershirt. Similarly, he applies pants, not to his trousers, but to his drawers. An Englishman who inhabits bachelor quarters is said to live in chambers; if he has a flat he calls it a flat, and not an apartment, which term he reserves for a single room. 18 Flat-houses are often mansions. The janitor or superintendent thereof is a care-taker or porter. The scoundrels who snoop around in search of divorce evidence are not private detectives, but private enquiry agents.

13

The Englishman is naturally unfamiliar with baseball, and in consequence his language is bare of the countless phrases and metaphors that it has supplied to American. Many of these phrases and metaphors are in daily use among us, for example, fan, rooter, bleachers, batting-average, double-header, grand-stand-play, Charley-horse, pennant-winner, gate-money, busher, minor-leaguer, glass-arm, to strike out, to foul, to be shut out, to play ball, on the bench, on to his curves and three strikes and out. The national game of draw-poker has also greatly enriched American with terms that are either quite unknown to the Englishman, or known to him only as somewhat dubious Americanisms, among them, cold-deck, kitty, full-house, jack-pot, four-flusher, ace-high, pot, penny-ante, divvy, a card up his sleeve, three-of-a-kind, to ante up, to stand pat, to call (a bluff), to pony up, to hold out, to cash in, to go it one better, to chip in and for keeps. But the Englishman uses many more racing terms and metaphors than we do and he has got a good many phrases from other games, particularly cricket. The word cricket itself has a definite figurative meaning. It indicates, in general, good sports-manship. To take unfair advantage of an opponent is not cricket. The sport of boating, so popular on the Thames, has also given colloquial English some familiar terms, almost unknown in the United States, e. g., punt and weir. Contrariwise, pungy, batteau and scow are unheard of in England, and canoe is not long emerged from the estate of an Americanism. 19 The game known as ten-pins in America is called nine-pins in England, and once had that name over here. The Puritans forbade it, and its devotees changed its name in order to evade the prohibition. 20 Finally, there is soccer, a form of football that is still relatively little known in the United States. What we call simply football is Rugby or Rugger to the Englishman. The word soccer is derived from association; the rules of the game were established by the London Football Association. Soccer is one of the relatively few English experiments in portmanteau words. Another is to be found in Bakerloo, the name of one of the London underground lines, from Baker-street and Waterloo, its termini.

14

But though the English talk of racing, football, cricket and golf a great deal, they have developed nothing comparable to the sporting argot used by all American sporting reporters. When, during the war, various American soldier nines played baseball in England, some of the English newspapers employed visiting American reporters to report the games, and the resultant emission of wild and woolly technicalities interested English readers much more than the games themselves. An English correspondent, greatly excited, sent me the following report from the Times of May 26, 1919:

The pastime was featured by the heavy stick work of Wallace, former Harvard University man, who slammed out a three-bagger and a clean home-run in three trys with the willow. The brand of twirling for both teams was exceptionally good, and the fielding not at all bad considering the chances the A. E. F. boys have had to practise since crossing the deep to join the bigger game over here. For the first three frames both teams hung tough and allowed no scoring, and both Shawenecy and Thomas appeared to have everything necessary, with Shawenecy holding the edge. Fourth innings netted a brace for the home lads. Ives clouted one to centre and Richards let the sphere slip; Eagle watched four bad ones go by, and, after Ives was tagged trying to steal home, was pushed over for the first tally when Williams leaned against one for two sacks. Shawenecy went bad here and gave Storey a free ticket, and Wallace came through with a three station bingle that shoved Williams and Storey across. Brown ended the agony by missing three.

In the sixth, Cambridge made an effort to close the gap when Shawenecy kissed the leather for a bingle. Richards picked a double, and Myers followed up with a safe swat which brought the count within one. Looked good for another after Myers swiped the second stop, but Thorngate and Hart both carved the breeze. Oxford wasn’t going to let them feel too good about it though, so they slipped up a few more to convince the crowd it wasn’t visitors’ day. Eagle went to first on Myers’ error. Gammell took a stroll, and both were forced at the third corner by Williams and Storey. Cobb Wallace stepped into a nice one for the washout drive and was well over the platter before the pill was relayed in. Shawenecy was here yanked to give Clarke a chance to use his slants, and after singling through second, Brown was nabbed off the first pillow.

Cambridge came back strong in the eighth when Shawenecy singled. Richards was given a lift by a muff on third, and both scored with the help of a two-timer from Myers and a nifty sacrifice by Thorngate, but the combined efforts of Hart and Beal could not push the anxious Myers over and scoring for the day was no more.

15

This jargon, as I say, flabbergasted England, but it would be hard to find an American who could not understand it. As a set-off to it—and to nineteenth hole, the one American contribution to the argot of golf, if African golf for craps be omitted—the English have an ecclesiastical vocabulary with which we are almost unacquainted, and it is in daily use, for the church bulks large in public affairs over there. Such terms as vicar, canon, verger, prebendary, primate, curate, nonconformist, dissenter, convocation, minster, chapter, crypt, living, presentation, glebe, benefice, locum tenens, suffragan, almoner, dean and pluralist are to be met with in the English newspapers constantly, but on this side of the water they are seldom encountered. Nor do we hear much of matins, lauds, lay-readers, ritualism and the liturgy. The English use of holy orders is also strange to us. They do not say that a young man is studying for the ministry, but that he is reading for holy orders. They do not say that he is ordained, but that he takes orders. Save he be in the United Free Church of Scotland, he is never a minister, though the term appears in the Book of Common Prayer; save he be a nonconformist, he is never a pastor; a clergyman of the Establishment is always either a rector, a vicar or a curate, and colloquially a parson. 21

16

In American chapel simply means a small church, usually the branch of some larger one; in English it has acquired the special sense of a place of worship unconnected with the Establishment. Though three-fourths of the people of Ireland are Catholics (in Munster and Connaught, more than nine-tenths), and the Protestant Church of Ireland has been disestablished since 1871, a Catholic place of worship in that country is still a chapel and not a church. 22 So is a Methodist wailing-place in England, however large it may be, though now and then tabernacle is substituted. Chapel, of course, is also used to designate a small church of the Establishment, as St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. A Methodist, in Great Britain, is not ordinarily a Methodist, but a Wesleyan. Contrariwise, what the English call simply a churchman is an Episcopalian in the United States, what they call the Church (always capitalized!) is the Protestant Episcopal Church, 23 what they call a Roman Catholic is simply a Catholic, and what they call a Jew is usually softened (if he happens to be an advertiser) to a Hebrew. The English Jews have no such idiotic fear of the plain name as that which afflicts the more pushing and obnoxious of the race in America. 24 “News of Jewry” is a common headline in the London Daily Telegraph, which is owned by Lord Burnham, a Jew, and has had many Jews on its staff, including Judah P. Benjamin, the American. The American language, of course, knowns nothing of dissenters. Nor of such gladiators of dissent as the Plymouth Brethren, nor of the nonconformist conscience, though the United States suffers from it even more damnably than England. The English, to make it even, get on without circuit-riders, holy-rollers, Dunkards, hard-shell Baptists, United Brethren, Seventh Day Adventists and other such American ferœ naturœ and are born, live, die and go to heaven without the aid of either the uplift or the chautauqua.

17

In music the English cling to an archaic and unintelligible nomenclature, long since abandoned in America. Thus they call a double whole note a breve, a whole note a semibreve, a half note a minim, a quarter note a crotchet, an eighth note a quaver, a sixteenth note a semi-quaver, a thirty-second note a demisemiquaver, and a sixty-fourth note a hemidemisemiquaver, or semidemisemiquaver. If, by any chance, an English musician should write a one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth note he probably wouldn’t know what to call it. This clumsy terminology goes back to the days of plain chant, with its longa, brevis, semi-brevis, minima and semiminima. The French and Italians cling to a system almost as confusing, but the Germans use ganze, halbe, viertel, achtel, etc. I have been unable to discover the beginning of the American system, but it would seem to be borrowed from the German. Since the earliest times a great many of the music teachers in the United States have been Germans, and some of the rest have had German training.

18

In the same way the English hold fast (though with a gradual slacking of the grip of late) to a clumsy and inaccurate method of designating the sizes of printers’ types. In America the simple point system makes the business easy; a line of 14-point type occupies exactly the vertical space of two lines of 7-point. But the English still indicate differences in size by such arbitrary and confusing names as brilliant, diamond, small pearl, pearl, ruby, ruby-nonpareil, nonpareil, minion-nonpareil, emerald, minion, brevier, bourgeois, long primer, small pica, pica, English, great primer and double pica. They also cling to a fossil system of numerals in stating ages. Thus, an Englishman will say that he is seven-and-forty, not that he is forty-seven. This is probably a direct survival, preserved by more than a thousand years of English conservatism, of the Anglo-Saxon seofan-and-feowertig. He will also say that he weighs eleven stone instead of 154 pounds. A stone is 14 pounds, and it is always used in stating the heft of a man. He employs such designations of time as fortnight and twelve-month a great deal more than we do, and has certain special terms of which we know nothing, for example, quarter-day, bank-holiday, long-vacation, Lady Day and Michaelmas. Per contra, he knows nothing whatever of our Thanksgiving, Arbor, Labor and Decoration Days or of legal holidays, or of Yom Kippur. Finally, he always says “a quarter to nine,” not “a quarter of nine.” If it is 8.35 he usually says that it is five-and-twenty minutes to nine. But he never inverts any other number; it is twenty-three minutes to and twenty-seven minutes past. He rarely says fifteen minutes to; nearly always he uses quarter to. He never says a quarter hour or a half hour; he says a quarter of an hour and half an hour.

19

In English usage, to proceed, the word directly is always used to signify immediately; in American a contingency gets into it, and it may mean no more than soon. In England quite means “completely, wholly, entirely, altogether, to the utmost extent, nothing short of, in the fullest sense, positively, absolutely”; in America it is conditional, and means only nearly, approximately, substantially, as in “he sings quite well.” An Englishman does not say “I will pay you up” for an injury, but “I will pay you back.” He doesn’t look up a definition in a dictionary; he looks it out. He doesn’t say, being ill, “I am getting on well,” but “I am going on well.” He doesn’t use the American “different from” or “different than”; he uses “different to.” He never adds the pronoun in such locutions as “it hurts me,” but says simply, “it hurts.” He never “catches up with you” on the street; he “catches you up.” He never says “are you through?” but “have you finished?” He never uses to notify as a transitive verb; an official act may be notified, but not a person. He never uses gotten as the perfect participle of get; he always uses plain got. 25 An English servant never washes the dishes; she always washes the dinner or tea things. She doesn’t live out, but goes into service. Her beau is not her fellow, but her young man. She does not keep company with him but walks out with him. She is never hired, but always engaged; only inanimate things, such as a hall or cab, are hired. When her wages are increased she does not get a raise, but a rise. When her young man goes into the army he does not join it; he joins up.

20

That an Englishman always calls out “I say!” and not simply “say!” when he desires to attract a friend’s attention or register a protestation of incredulity—this perhaps is too familiar to need notice. His hear, hear! and oh, oh! are also well known. He is much less prodigal with good-bye than the American; he uses good-day and good-afternoon far more often. A shop-assistant would never say good-bye to a customer. To an Englishman it would have a subtly offensive smack; good-afternoon would be more respectful. Various very common American phrases are quite unknown to him, for example, over his signature, on time and planted to corn. The first-named he never uses, and he has no equivalent for it; an Englishman who issues a signed statement simply makes it in writing. He knows nothing of our common terms of disparagement, such as kike, wop, yap and rube. His pet-name for a tiller of the soil is not Rube or Cy, but Hodge. When he goes gunning he does not call it hunting, but shooting; hunting is reserved for the chase of the fox. When he goes to a dentist he does not have his teeth filled, but stopped. He knows nothing of European plan hotels, or of day-coaches, or of baggage-checks.

21

An intelligent Englishwoman, coming to America to live, told me that the two things which most impeded her first communications with untraveled Americans, even above the gross differences between English and American pronunciation and intonation, were the complete absence of the general utility adjective jolly from the American vocabulary, and the puzzling omnipresence and versatility of the verb to fix. In English colloquial usage jolly means almost anything; it intensifies all other adjectives, even including miserable and homesick. An Englishman is jolly bored, jolly hungry or jolly well tired; his wife is jolly sensible; his dog is jolly keen; the prices he pays for things are jolly dear (never steep or stiff or high: all Americanisms). But he has no noun to match the American proposition, meaning proposal, business, affair, case, consideration, plan, theory, solution and what not: only the German zug can be ranged beside it. 26 And he has no verb in such wide practise as to fix. In his speech it means only to make fast or to determine. In American it may mean to repair, as in “the plumber fixed the pipe”; to dress, as in “Mary fixed her hair”; to prepare, as in “the cook is fixing the gravy”; to bribe, as in “the judge was fixed”; to settle, as in “the quarrel was fixed up”; to heal, as in “the doctor fixed his boil”; to finish, as in “Murphy fixed Sweeney in the third round”; to be well-to-do, as in “John is well-fixed”; to arrange, as in “I fixed up the quarrel”; to be drunk, as in “the whiskey fixed him”; to punish, as in “I’ll fix him”; and to correct, as in “he fixed my bad Latin.” Moreover, it is used in all its English senses. An Englishman never goes to a dentist to have his teeth fixed. He does not fix the fire; he makes it up, or mends it. He is never well-fixed, either in money or by liquor. 27 The American use of to run is also unfamiliar to Englishmen. They never run can hotel, or a railroad; they always keep it or manage it.

22

The English use quite a great deal more than we do, and, as we have seen, in a different sense. Quite rich, in American, means tolerably rich, richer than most; quite so, in English, is identical in meaning with exactly so. In American just is almost equivalent to the English quite, as in just lovely. Thornton shows that this use of just goes back to 1794. The word is also used in place of exactly in other ways, as in just in time, just how many and just what do you mean? Two other adverbs, right and good, are used in American in senses strange to an Englishman. Thornton shows that the excessive use of right, as in right away, right good and right now, was already widespread in the United States early in the last century; his first example is dated 1818. He believes that the locution was “possibly imported from the southwest of Ireland.” Whatever its origin, it quickly attracted the attention of English visitors. Dickens noted right away as an almost universal Americanism during his first American tour, in 1842, and poked fun at it in the second chapter of “American Notes.” Right is used as a synonym for directly, as in right away, right off, right now and right on time; for moderately, as in right well, right smart, right good and right often, and in place of precisely, as in right there. Some time ago, in an article on Americanisms, an English critic called it “that most distinctively American word,” and concocted the following dialogue to instruct the English in its use:

How do I get to —?

Go right along, and take the first turning (sic) on the right, and you are right there.

Right?

Right.

Right! 28

23

But this Englishman failed in his attempt to write correct American, despite his fine pedagogical passion. No American would ever say “take the first turning”; he would say “turn at the first corner.” As for right away, R. O. Williams argues that “so far as analogy can make good English, it is as good as one could choose.” Nevertheless, the Concise Oxford Dictionary admits it only as an Americanism, and avoids all mention of the other American uses of right. Good is almost as protean. It is not only used as a general synonym for all adjectives and adverbs connoting satisfaction, as in to feel good, to be treated good, to sleep good, but also as a reinforcement to other adjectives and adverbs as in “I hit him good and hard” and “I am good and tired.” Of late some has come into wide use as an adjective-adverb of all work, indicating special excellence or high degree, as in some girl, some sick, going some, etc. It is still below the salt, but threatens to reach a more respectable position. One encounters it in the newspapers constantly and in the Congressional Record, and not long ago a writer in the Atlantic Monthly  29 hymned it ecstatically as “some word—a true super-word, in fact” and argued that it could be used “in a sense for which there is absolutely no synonym in the dictionary.” It was used by the prim Emily Dickinson forty or more years ago. 30 It will concern us again in Chapter IX.

24

It would be easy to pile up words and phrases that are used in both America and England, but with different meanings. I have already alluded to tariff-reform. Open-shop is another. It means, in England, what an American union man (English: trades-unionist) calls a closed-shop. And closed-shop, in England, means what an American calls an open-shop! Finally, there is the verb-phrase, to carry on. In the United States it means to make a great pother; in England it means to persevere.… But the record must have an end.

25

Note 2.  However, the English send money-orders abroad. [back]

Note 3.  It is possible that the American living-room was suggested by the German wohnzimmer. [back]

Note 4.  Spool of thread is Irish. [back]

Note 5.  The verb to crawfish, of course, is also unknown in England. [back]

Note 6.  The differences between the nursery vocabulary in English and American deserve investigation, but are beyond the jurisdiction of a celibate inquirer. I have been told by an Englishman that English babies do not say choo-choo to designate a railroad train, but puff-puff. [back]

Note 7.  This title has been borrowed by some of the American universities, e. g., Chancellor Day of Syracuse. But the usual title remains president. On the Continent it is rector. [back]

Note 8.  However, the street-cleaner is beginning to appear in some of the English cities. He is commonly employed by the Urban Sanitary Authority, and so the letters “U.S.A.” appear upon his cart—a shock to visiting Americans. The old-time crossing-sweeper was a free lance. He had his pitch at a crossing, and kept it clean; his income came from the free-will offerings of passers-by. As the English cities grow cleaner and official street-cleaning departments are set up he tends to disappear. [back]

Note 9.  This form survives in the American term city-stock, meaning the bonds of a municipality. But state and federal securities are always called bonds. [back]

Note 10.  Cf. A Glossary of Colloquial Slang and Technical Terms in Use in the Stock Exchange and in the Money Market, by A. J. Wilson; London, 1895. [back]

Note 11.  Or bailiffs. [back]

Note 12.  This was formerly good American. Vide Rufus King: Life and Correspondence; New York, 1894-1900, vol. i, p. 132. [back]

Note 13.  But he is run by his party organization. Cf. The Government of England, by A. Lawrence Lowell; New York, 1910, vol. ii, p. 29. Canvass was formerly good American. Cf. Autobiography of Martin Van Buren; Washington, 1920, p. 8. [back]

Note 14.  Until a few years ago no self-respecting American newspaper reporter would call himself a journalist. He always used newspaper man, and referred to his vocation, not as a profession, but as the newspaper business. This old prejudice, however, now seems to be breaking down. Cf. Don’t Shy at Journalist, The Editor and Publisher and Journalist, June 27, 1914. [back]

Note 15.  The herb, of course, is used in England. It is popularly regarded as an effective abortifacient. [back]

Note 16.  Cf. a speech of Senator La Follette, Congressional Record, Aug. 27, 1917, p. 6992. [back]

Note 17.  Of late in has come into use in America, but only in relation to minor streets. Thus a man may be said to live in Sixty-first street, but his office is on Broadway. [back]

Note 18.  According to the New International Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Art. Apartment House), the term flat “is usually in the United States restricted to apartments in houses having no elevator or hall service.” In New York such apartments are commonly called walk-up-apartments or walk-ups. Even with the qualification, apartment is felt to be better than flat. [back]

Note 19.  Canoeing was introduced into England by John MacGregor in 1866, and there is now a Royal Canoe Club. In America the canoe has been familiar from the earliest times, and in Mme. Sarah Kemble Knight’s diary (1704) there is much mention of cannoos. The word itself is from an Indian dialect, probably the Haitian, and came into American through the Spanish, in which it survives as canoa. [back]

Note 20.  “An act was passed to prohibit playing nine-pins; as soon as the law was put in force, it was notified everywhere, ‘Ten-pins played here.’”—Capt. Marryat: Diary in America, vol. iii, p. 195. [back]

Note 21.  I am informed by the Rev. W. G. Polack, of Evansville, Ind., that certain Lutherans in the United States, following German usage, employ vicar to designate “a theological student, not yet ordained, who is doing temporary supply-work in a mission congregation.” The verb, to vicar, means to occupy such a pulpit. Mr. Polack is occupied with an interesting inquiry into the American ecclesiastical vocabulary. He believes that mission-festival, common in the Middle West, comes from the German missionsfest. So with agenda, used by some of the Lutheran churches to designate their Book of Common Prayer. He says that it is not the English term, but the German agende. He notes the use of services to indicate a single service (this is common throughout the United States); the decay of reverend to revernor, reverner, revenor or revener; the use of confirmand to designate a candidate for confirmation; the use of to announce to indicate notifying a pastor of an intention to partake of communion (Ger. sich anmelden); and the use of confessional-address (beichtrede.) All these terms are used by English-speaking Lutherans. [back]

Note 22.  “The term chapel,” says Joyce, in English as We Speak It in Ireland, “has so ingrained itself in my mind that to this hour the word instinctively springs to my lips when I am about to mention a Catholic place of worship; and I always feel some sort of hesitation or reluctance in substituting the word church. I positively could not bring myself to say, ‘Come, it is time now to set out for church.’ It must be either mass or chapel.” [back]

Note 23.  Certain dissenters, of late, show a disposition to borrow the American usage. Thus the Christian World, organ of the English Congregationalists, uses Episcopal to designate the Church of England. [back]

Note 24.  So long ago as the 70’s certain Jews petitioned the publishers of Webster’s and Worcester’s dictionaries to omit their definitions of the verb to jew, and according to Richard Grant White, the publisher of Worcester’s complied. Such a request, in England, would be greeted with derision. [back]

Note 25.  But nevertheless he uses begotten, not begot. [back]

Note 26.  This specimen is from the Congressional Record of Dec. 11, 1917: “I do not like to be butting into this proposition, but I looked upon this post-office business as a purely business proposition.” The speaker was “Hon.” Homer P. Snyder, of New York. In the Record of Jan. 12, 1918, p. 8294, proposition is used as a synonym for state of affairs. See also a speech by Senator Norris on Feb. 21, 1921, Congressional Record, p. 3741 et seq. He uses proposition in five or six different senses. See also a speech by Senator Borah, Congressional Record, May 13, 1921, p. 1395, col. 1. [back]

Note 27.  Already in 1855 Bristed was protesting that to fix was having “more than its legitimate share of work all over the Union.” “In English conversation,” he said, “the panegyrical adjective of all work is nice; in America it is fine.” This was before the adoption of jolly and its analogues, ripping, stunning, rattling, etc. Perhaps to fix was helped into American by the German word. [back]

Note 28.  I Speak United States, Saturday Review, Sept. 22, 1894. [back]

Note 29.  Should Language Be Abolished? by Harold Goddard, July, 1918, p. 63. [back]

Note 30.  Quoted by Gamaliel Bradford in the Atlantic Monthly, Aug., 1919, p. 219. [back]

Among the honorifics in everyday use in England and the United States one finds many notable divergences between the two languages. On the one hand the English are almost as diligent as the Germans in bestowing titles of honor upon their men of mark, and on the other hand they are very careful to withhold such titles from men who do not legally bear them. In America every practitioner of any branch of the healing art, even a chiropodist or an osteopath, is a doctor ipso facto, but in England a good many surgeons lack the title and it is not common in the lesser ranks. Even physicians may not have it, but here there is a yielding of a usual meticulous exactness, and it is customary to address a physician in the second person as Doctor, though his card may show that he is only Medicinœ Baccalaureus, a degree quite unknown in America. Thus an Englishman, when he is ill, always sends for the doctor, as we do. But a surgeon is usually plain Mr., 31 and prefers to be so called, even when he is an M. D. An English veterinarian or dentist or druggist or masseur is never Dr.

1

Nor Professor. In all save a few large cities of America every male pedagogue is a professor, and so is every band leader, dancing master and medical consultant. But in England the title is very rigidly restricted to men who hold chairs in the universities, a necessarily small body. Even here a superior title always takes precedence. Thus, it used to be Professor Almroth Wright, but now it is always Sir Almroth Wright. Huxley was always called Professor Huxley until he was appointed to the Privy Council. This appointment gave him the right to have Right Honourable put before his name, and thereafter it was customary to call him simply Mr. Huxley, with the Right Honourable, so to speak, floating in the air. The combination, to an Englishman, was more flattering than Professor, for the English always esteem political dignities far more than the dignities of learning. This explains, perhaps, why their universities distribute so few honorary degrees. In the United States every respectable Protestant clergyman is a D. D., and it is almost impossible for a man to get into the papers without becoming an LL. D., 32 but in England such honours are granted only grudgingly. So with military titles. To promote a war veteran from sergeant to colonel by acclamation, as is often done in the United States, is unknown over there. The English have nothing equivalent to the gaudy tin soldiers of our governors’ staffs, nor to the bespangled colonels and generals of the Knights Templer and Patriarchs Militant, nor to the nondescript captains and majors of our country towns. An English railroad conductor (railway guard) is never Captain, as he often is in the United States. Nor are military titles used by the police. Nor is it the custom to make every newspaper editor a colonel, as is done south of the Potomac. (In parts of the South even an auctioneer is a colonel!) Nor is an attorney-general or consul-general or postmaster-general called General. Nor are the glories of public office, after they have officially come to an end, embalmed in such clumsy quasi-titles as ex-United States Senator, ex-Judge of the Circuit Court of Appeals, ex-Federal Trade Commissioner and former Chief of the Fire Department.

2

But perhaps the greatest difference between English and American usage is presented by the Honorable. In the United States the title is applied loosely to all public officials of apparent respectability, from senators and ambassadors to the mayors of fifth-rate cities and the members of state legislatures, and with some show of official sanction to many of them, especially congressmen. But it is questionable whether this application has any actual legal standing, save perhaps in the case of certain judges, who are referred to as the Hon. in their own court records. Even the President of the United States, by law, is not the Honorable, but simply the President. In the First Congress the matter of his title was exhaustively debated; some members wanted to call him the Honorable and others proposed His Excellency and even His Highness. But the two Houses finally decided that it was “not proper to annex any style or title other than that expressed by the Constitution.” Congressmen themselves are not Honorables. True enough, the Congressional Record, in printing a set speech, calls it “Speech of Hon. John Jones” (without the the before the Hon.—a characteristic Americanism), but in reporting the ordinary remarks of a member it always calls him plain Mr. Nevertheless, a country congressman would be offended if his partisans, in announcing his appearance on the stump, did not prefix Hon. to his name. So would a state senator. So would a mayor or governor. I have seen the sergeant-at-arms of the United States Senate referred to as Hon. in the records of that body. More, it has been applied in the same place to Sam Gompers, the labor agitator. Yet more, the prefix is actually usurped by the Superintendent of State Prisons of New York. 33

3

In England the thing is more carefully ordered, and bogus Hons. are unknown. The prefix is applied to both sexes and belongs by law, inter alia, to all present or past maids of honor, to all justices of the High Court during their term of office, to the Scotch Lords of Session, to the sons and daughters of viscounts and barons, to the younger sons and all daughters of earls, and to the members of the legislative and executive councils of the colonies. But not to members of Parliament, though each is, in debate, an hon. gentleman. Even a member of the cabinet is not an Hon., though he is a Right Hon. by virtue of membership in the Privy Council, of which the Cabinet is legally merely a committee. This last honorific belongs, not only to privy councillors, but also to all peers lower than marquesses (those above are Most Hon.), to Lord Mayors during their terms of office, to the Lord Advocate and to the Lord Provosts of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Moreover, a peeress whose husband is a Right Hon. is a Right Hon. herself.

4

The British colonies follow the jealous usage of the mother-country. Even in Canada the lawless American example is not imitated. I have before me a “Table of Titles to be Used in Canada,” laid down by royal warrant, which lists those who are Hons. and those who are not Hons. in the utmost detail. Only privy councillors of Canada (not to be confused with imperial privy councillors) are permitted to retain the prefix after going out of office, though ancients who were legislative councillors at the time of the union, July 1, 1867, may still use it by a sort of courtesy, and former speakers of the Dominion Senate and House of Commons and various retired judges may do so on application to the King, countersigned by the governor-general. The following are lawfully the Hon., but only during their tenure of office: the solicitor-general, the speaker of the House of Commons, the presidents and speakers of the provincial legislatures, members of the executive councils of the provinces, the chief justice, the judges of the Supreme Courts of Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan and Alberta, the judges of the Courts of Appeal of Manitoba and British Columbia, the Chancery Court of Prince Edward Island, and the Circuit Court of Montreal—these, and no more. A lieutenant-governor of a province is not the Hon., but His Honor. The governor-general is His Excellency, and so is his wife, but in practise they usually have superior honorifics, and do not forget to demand their use.

5

But though an Englishman, and, following him, a colonial, is thus very careful to restrict the Hon. to its proper uses, he always insists, when he serves without pay as an officer of any organization, upon indicating his volunteer character by writing Hon. meaning honorary, before the name of his office. If he leaves it off it is a sign that he is a hireling. Thus, the agent of the New Zealand government in London, a paid officer, is simply the agent, but the agents at Brisbane and Adelaide, in Australia, who serve for the glory of it, are hon. agents. In writing to a Briton of condition one must be careful to put Esq., behind his name, and not Mr., before it. The English make a clear distinction between the two forms. Mr., on an envelope, indicates that the sender holds the receiver to be his inferior; one writes to Mr. John Jackson, one’s green-grocer, but to James Thompson, Esq., one’s neighbor. Any man who is entitled to the Esq. is a gentleman, by which an Englishman means a man of sound connections and what is regarded as dignified occupation—in brief, of ponderable social position. Thus a dentist, a shop-keeper or a clerk can never be a gentleman in England, even by courtesy, and the qualifications of an author, a musical conductor, a physician, or even a member of Parliament have to be established. But though he is thus enormously watchful of masculine dignity, an Englishman is quite careless in the use of lady. He speaks glibly of lady-clerks, lady-typists, lady-doctors and lady-inspectors. In America there is a strong disposition to use the word less and less, as is revealed by the substitution of saleswoman and salesgirl for the saleslady of yesteryear. But in England lady is still invariably used instead of woman in such compounds as lady-golfer, lady-secretary and lady-champion. The women’s singles, in English tennis, are always ladies’ singles; women’s wear, in English shops, is always ladies’ wear. Perhaps the cause of this distinction between lady and gentleman has been explained by Price Collier in “England and the English.” In England, according to Collier, the male is always first. His comfort goes before his wife’s comfort, and maybe his dignity also. Gentleman-clerk or gentleman-author would make an Englishman howl, though he uses gentleman-rider and gentleman-player in place of our amateur. So would the growing American custom of designating successive members of a private family bearing the same given name by the numerals proper to royalty. John Smith 3rd and William Simpson 4th are gravely received at Harvard; at Oxford they would be ragged unmercifully.

6

An Englishman, in speaking or writing of public officials, avoids those long and clumsy combinations of title and name which figure so copiously in American newspapers. Such locutions as Assistant-Secretary of the Interior Jones, Fourth Assistant Postmaster-General Brown, Inspector of Boilers Smith, Judge of the Appeal Tax Court Robinson, Chief Clerk of the Treasury Williams and Collaborating Epidermologist White 34 are quite unknown to him. When he mentions a high official, such as the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, he does not think it necessary to add the man’s name; he simply says “the Secretary for Foreign Affairs” or “the Foreign Secretary.” And so with the Lord Chancellor, the Chief Justice, the Prime Minister, the Bishop of Carlisle, the Chief Rabbi, the First Lord (of the Admiralty), the Master of Pembroke (College), the Italian Ambassador, and so on. Certain ecclesiastical titles are sometimes coupled to surnames in the American manner, as in Dean Stanley, and Canon Wilberforce, but Prime Minister Lloyd-George would seem heavy and absurd. But in other directions the Englishman has certain clumsinesses of his own. Thus, in writing a letter to a relative stranger he sometimes begins it, not My dear Mr. Jones but My dear John Joseph Jones. He may even use such a form as My dear Secretary of War in place of the American My dear Mr. Secretary. In English usage, incidentally, My dear is more formal than Dear. In America this distinction tends to be lost, and such forms as My dear John Joseph Jones appear only as conscious imitations of English usage.

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I have spoken of the American custom of dropping the definite article before Hon. It extends to Rev. and the like, and has the authority of very respectable usage behind it. The opening sentence of the Congressional Record is always: “The Chaplain, Rev. —, D. D., offered the following prayer.” When chaplains for the army or navy are confirmed by the Senate they always appear in the Record as Revs., never as the Revs. I also find the honorific without the article in the New International Encyclopædia, in the World Almanac, and in a widely-popular American grammar-book. 35 So long ago as 1867, Gould protested against this elision as barbarous and idiotic, and drew up the following reductio ad absurdum:

At last annual meeting of Black Book Society, honorable John Smith took the chair, assisted by reverend John Brown and venerable John White. The office of secretary would have been filled by late John Green, but for his decease, which rendered him ineligible. His place was supplied by inevitable John Black. In the course of the evening eulogiums were pronounced on distinguished John Gray and notorious Joseph Brown. Marked compliment was also paid to able historian Joseph White, discriminating philosopher Joseph Green, and learned professor Joseph Black. But conspicuous speech of the evening was witty Joseph Gray’s apostrophe to eminent astronomer Jacob Brown, subtle logician Jacob White, etc., etc. 36

8

Richard Grant White, a year or two later, joined the attack in the New York Galaxy, and William Cullen Bryant included the omission of the article in his Index Expurgatorius, but these anathemas were as ineffective as Gould’s irony. The more careful American journals, of course, incline to the the, and I note that it is specifically ordained on the Style-sheet of the Century Magazine, but the overwhelming majority of American newspapers get along without it, and I have often noticed its omission on the sign-boards at church entrances. 37 In England it is never omitted. 38

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Note 31.  In the Appendix to the Final Report of the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases, London, 1916, p. iv, I find the following: “Mr. C. J. Symonds, F.R.C.S., M.D.; Mr. F. J. McCann, F.R.C.S., M.D.; Mr. A. F. Evans, F.R.C.S. Mr. Symonds is consulting surgeon to Guy’s Hospital, Mr. McCann is an eminent London gynecologist, and Mr. Evans is a general surgeon in large practice. All would be called Doctor in the United States. See also Tract IV, of the Society for Pure English; Oxford, 1920, p. 33. [back]

Note 32.  I have before me an invitation to a dinner given by the Society of Arts and Letters in New York. On the invitation committee are Charles M. Schwab, LL.D., Otto H. Kahn, LL.D., and Abram I. Elkus, LL.D. Billy Sunday, the evangelist, is a D.D. In the South every negro preacher is ex officio a D.D., and is commonly addressed as Doctor. This enables white Southerners to show a decent respect for his sacred office, and yet avoid the solecism of calling him Mister. [back]

Note 33.  See, for the sergeant-at-arms, the Congressional Record, May 16, 1918, p. 7147. For Gompers, the Congressional Record, July 19, 1919, p. 3017. For the superintendent of prisons his annual reports, printed at Sing Sing Prison. This perhaps is not the worst. I sometimes receive letters from a United States Senator. Almost invariably his secretary makes me Hon. on the envelope. [back]

Note 34.  I encountered this gem in Public Health Reports, a government publication, for April 26, 1918, p. 619. [back]

Note 35.  For the Record see any issue. For the New International Encyclopædia see the article on Brotherhood of Andrew and Philip. For the World Almanac see the ed. of 1921, p. 195. The grammar-book is Longman’s Briefer Grammar; New York, 1908, p. 160. The editor is George J. Smith, a member of the board of examiners of the New York City Department of Education. [back]

Note 36.  Edwin S. Gould: Good English; New York, 1867, pp. 56-57. [back]

Note 37.  Despite the example of Congress, however, the Department of State inserts the the. Vide the Congressional Record, May 4, 1918, p. 6552. But the War Department, the Treasury and the Post office omit it. Vide the Congressional Record, May 11, 1918, p. 6895 and p. 6914 and May 14, p. 7004, respectively. So, it appears, does the White House. Vide the Congressional Record, May 10, 1918, p. 6838. [back]

Note 38.  I wrote this in 1918. In 1914 the Society for Pure English had been organized in England, with the Poet Laureate, Dr. Henry Bradley, A. J. Balfour, Edmund Gosse, George Saintsbury, and other eminent purists among its charter members. In October, 1919, it issued its first tract—and on page 12 I found Rev., Very Rev. and Rt. Hon. without the the! [back]

But such euphemisms as lady-clerk are, after all, much rarer in English than in American usage. The Englishman seldom tries to gloss menial occupations with sonorous names; on the contrary, he seems to delight in keeping their menial character plain. He says servants, not help. Even his railways and banks have servants; the chief trades-union of the English railroad men is the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants. He uses employé in place of clerk, workman or laborer much less often than we do. True enough he often calls a boarder a paying-guest, but that is probably because even a lady may occasionally take one in. Just as he avoids calling a fast train the limited, the flier or the cannon-ball, so he never calls an undertaker a funeral director or mortician, 39 or a dentist a dental surgeon or odontologist, or a real estate agent a realtor, or a press-agent a publicist, or a barber shop (he always makes it barber’s shop) a tonsorial parlor, or a common public-house a café, a restaurant, an exchange, a buffet or a hotel, or a tradesman a storekeeper or merchant, or a fresh-water college a university. A university, in England, always means a collection of colleges. 40 He avoids displacing terms of a disparaging or disagreeable significance with others less brutal, or thought to be less brutal, e.g., ready-to-wear, ready-tailored, or ready-to-put-on for ready-made, used or slightly-used for second-hand, popular priced for cheap, 41 mahoganized for imitation mahogany, aisle manager for floor-walker (he makes it shop-walker), loan-office for pawn-shop. 42 Also he is careful not to use such words as rector, deacon and baccalaureate in merely rhetorical senses. 43 Nor does he call mutton lamb, or milk cream. Nor does he use cuspidor for spittoon, or B. V. D.’s as a euphemism for underwear, or butterine for oleomargarine.

1

“Business titles,” says W. L. George, 44 “are given in America more readily than in England. Men are distinguished by being called president of a corporation. I know one president whose staff consists of two typists. Many firms have four vice-presidents. Or there is a press-representative, or a purchasing-agent. In the magazines you seldom find merely an editor; the others need their share of honor, so they are associate (not assistant) editors. A dentist is called a doctor. The hotel valet is a tailor. Magistrates of police-courts are judges instead of merely Mr. I wandered into a university, knowing nobody, and casually asked for the dean. I was asked, ‘Which dean?’ In that building there were enough deans to stock all the English cathedrals. The master of a secret society is royal supreme knight commander. Perhaps I reached the extreme at a theatre in Boston, when I wanted something, I forget what, and was told that I must apply to the chief of the ushers. He was a mild little man, who had something to do with people getting into their seats, rather a come-down from the pomp and circumstance of his title. Growing interested, I examined my program, with the following result: It is not a large theatre, but it has a press-representative, a treasurer (box-office clerk), an assistant treasurer (box-office junior clerk), an advertising-agent, our old friend the chief of the ushers, a stage-manager, a head-electrician, a master of properties (in England called props), a leader of the orchestra (pity this—why not president?), and a matron (occupation unknown).” George might have unearthed some even stranger magnificoes in other play-houses. I once knew an ancient bill-sticker, attached permanently to a Baltimore theatre, who boasted the sonorous title of chief lithographer.

2

I have already spoken of the freer use of Jew in England. In American newspapers it seems likely to be displaced by Hebrew, largely through the influence of Jewish advertisers who, for some strange reason or other, look upon Bebrew as more flattering. The Jews in England—that is, those of enough public importance to make themselves heard—are in the main of considerable education, and so they are above any silly shrinking from the name of Jew. But in the United States there is a class of well-to-do commercial Jews of a peculiarly ignorant and obnoxious type—chiefly department-store owners, professional Jewish philanthropists, and their attendant rabbis, lawyers, doctors, and so on—and the great majority of newspapers are disposed to truckle to their every whim. Along about the year 1900 they began to protest against the use of the word Jew to differentiate Jewish law-breakers from the baptized, and, soon thereafter, to be on the safe side, the newspapers began to employ Hebrew whenever it was necessary to designate an institution or individual of the Chosen. Thus, one often encounters such absurdities as Hebrew congregation, Hebrew rabbi and Hebrew holidays. A few years ago a number of more cultured American Jews, alarmed by the imbecility into which the campaign was falling, issued a “Note on the Word Jew” for the guidance of newspapers. From this document I extract the following:

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1. The words Jew and Jewish can never be objectionable when applied to the whole body of Israel, or to whole classes within that body, as for instance, Jewish young men.

2. There can be no objection to the use of the words Jew and Jewish when contrast is being made with other religions: “Jews observe Passover and Christians Easter.”

3. The application of the word Jew or Jewish to any individual is to be avoided unless from the context it is necessary to call attention to his religion; in other words, unless the facts have some relation to his being a Jew or to his Jewishness.… Thus, if a Jew is convicted of a crime he should not be called a Jewish criminal; and on the other hand, if a Jew makes a great scientific discovery he should not be called an eminent Jewish scientist.

4. The word Jew is a noun, and should never be used as an adjective or verb. To speak of Jew girls or Jew stores is both objectionable and vulgar. Jewish is the adjective. The use of Jew as a verb, in to Jew down, is a slang survival of the medieval term of opprobrium, and should be avoided altogether.

5. The word Hebrew should not be used instead of Jew. As a noun it connotes rather the Jewish people of the distant past, as the ancient Hebrews. As an adjective it has an historical rather than a religious connotation; one cannot say the Hebrew religion, but the Jewish religion.

Unfortunately this temperate and intelligent pronunciamento seems to have had but little effect. Potash and Perlmutter still insist that the papers they support refer to them as Hebrews, and the thing is docilely done. In the vaudeville journal, Variety, which is owned and edited by a Jew, Hebrew is invariably used. I have often observed references to Hebrew comedians, Hebrew tragedians, the Hebrew drama, the Hebrew holidays and even the Hebrew church. For an American newspaper to refer to Jewry would be almost as hazardous as for it to refer to the ghetto. When the New York papers desire to discuss the doings of the Jewish Socialists on the East Side, they are forced to retire behind East side agitators or soap-boxers. Years ago, being city editor of a newspaper in a large city, I employed a reporter to cover the picturesque and often strikingly dramatic life of the Russian and Polish Jews in its slums. He staggered along for two or three months, trying in vain to invent terms to designate them that would not offend the large Jewish advertisers. Finally, the business office bombarded me with so many complaints that I instructed him to abandon the Jews, and devote himself to the Italians and Bohemians, who were all poor and without influential compatriots uptown.

4

Save in this one particular I believe that the American newspapers have made appreciable progress toward the use of plain English in recent years. The gaudy style of a generation ago has perished, and with it have vanished its euphemisms—casket for coffin, obsequies for funeral, nuptial ceremony for wedding, happy pair for bridal couple, and consigned to earth for buried. A death notice offers an excellent test of a reporter; if he is an idiot he will invariably show it when he writes one. Save in the small towns and in some of the cities of the South—where an aged Methodist sister still “goes to her heavenly father” or “falls asleep in the arms of Jesus”—the newspapers of the Republic now deal with death in a simple and dignified manner. On account of their sharp differentiation between news and editorial opinion, they even avoid the “we regret to announce” with which all English journals begin their reports of eminent dissolutions. Nine-tenths of them are now content to open proceedings by saying baldly that “John Smith died yesterday.” Nor do they slobber as they used to over weddings, balls, corner-stone layings and other such ceremonies.

5

The use of Madame as a special title of honor for old women of good position survived in the United States until the 70’s. It distinguished the dowager Mrs. Smith from the wife of her eldest son; today the word dowager, imitating the English usage, is frequently employed in fashionable society. 45 Madame survives among the colored folk, who almost always apply it to women singers of their race, and often to women hairdressers, dressmakers and milliners also. It is felt to be a shade more distinguished than Miss or Mrs., and is applied to married and unmarried women indiscriminately.

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Note 39.  In the 60’s an undertaker was often called an embalming surgeon in America. [back]

Note 40.  In a list of American “universities” I find the Christian of Canton, Mo., with 125 students; the Lincoln, of Pennsylvania, with 184; the Southwestern Presbyterian, of Clarksville, Tenn., with 86; and the Newton Theological, with 77. Most of these, of course, are merely country high-schools. [back]

Note 41.  Compare the German civile preise. [back]

Note 42.  The Australians use the French mont-de-piété. Australian euphemisms deserve to be investigated. No doubt the presence of so many convicts among the early settlers caused a great number to be invented. [back]

Note 43.  The Rev. John C. Stephenson in the New York Sun, July 10, 1914; … “that empty courtesy of addressing every clergyman as Doctor…. And let us abolish the abuse of … baccalaureate sermons for sermons before graduating classes of high schools and the like.” [back]

Note 44.  Hail, Columbia!; New York, 1921, pp. 92-3. [back]

Note 45.  Mrs. Washington was often called Lady Washington during her life-time. But this title seems to have died with her. [back]

When we come to words that, either intrinsically or by usage, are improper, a great many curious differences between English and American reveal themselves. The Englishman, on the whole, is more plain-spoken than the American, and such terms as bitch, mare and on foal do not commonly daunt him, largely, perhaps, because of his greater familiarity with country life; but he has a formidable index of his own, and it includes such essentially harmless words as sick, stomach, bum and bug. The English use of ill for sick I have already noticed, and the reasons for the English avoidance of bum. Sick, over there, means nauseated, and when an Englishman says that he was sick he means that he vomited, or, as an American would say, was sick at the stomach. The older (and still American) usage, however, survives in various compounds. Sick-list, for example, is official in the navy, 46 and sick-leave is known in the army, though it is more common to say of a soldier that he is invalided home. Sick-room and sick-bed are also in common use, and sick-flag is used in place of the American quarantine-flag. But an Englishman hesitates to mention his stomach in the presence of ladies, though he discourses freely about his liver. To avoid the necessity he employs such euphemisms as Little Mary. As for bug, he restricts its use very rigidly to the Cimex lectularius, or common bed-bug, and hence the word has highly impolite connotations. All other crawling things he calls insects. An American of my acquaintance once greatly offended an English friend by using bug for insect. The two were playing billiards one summer evening in the Englishman’s house, and various flying things came through the window and alighted on the cloth. The American, essaying a shot, remarked that he had killed a bug with his cue. To the Englishman this seemed a slanderous reflection upon the cleanliness of his house. 47

1

The Victorian era saw a great growth of absurd euphemisms in England, including second wing for the leg of a fowl, but it was in America that the thing was carried farthest. Bartlett hints that rooster came into use in place of cock as a matter of delicacy, the latter word having acquired an indecent significance, and tells us that, at one time, even bull was banned as too vulgar for refined ears. In place of it the early purists used cow-creature, male-cow and even gentleman-cow. 48 Bitch, ram, boar, stallion, buck and sow went the same way, and there was a day when even mare was prohibited. Bache tells us that pismire was also banned, antmire being substituted for it. To castrate became to alter. In 1847 the word chair was actually barred out and seat was adopted in its place. 49 These were the palmy days of euphemism. The delicate female was guarded from all knowledge, and even from all suspicion, of evil. “To utter aloud in her presence the word shirt,” says one historian, “was an open insult.” 50 Mrs. Trollope, writing in 1832, tells of “a young German gentleman of perfectly good manners” who “offended one of the principal families … by having pronounced the word corset before the ladies of it.” 51 The word woman, in those sensitive days, became a term of reproach, comparable to the German mensch: the uncouth female took its place. 52 In the same way the legs of the fair became limbs and their breasts bosoms, and lady was substituted for wife. Stomach, under the ban in England, was transformed, by some unfathomable magic, into a euphemism denoting the whole region from the nipples to the pelvic arch. It was during this time that the newspapers invented such locutions as interesting (or delicate) condition, criminal operation, house of ill (or questionable) repute, disorderly-house, sporting-house, statutory offense, fallen woman and criminal assault. Servant girls ceased to be seduced, and began to be betrayed. Syphilis became transformed into blood-poison, specific blood-poison and secret disease, and it and gonorrhea into social diseases. Various French terms, enceinte and accouchement among them, were imported to conceal the fact that careless wives occasionally became pregnant and had lyings-in.

2

White, between 1867 and 1870, launched several attacks upon these ludicrous gossamers of speech, and particularly upon enceinte, limb and female, but only female succumbed. The passage of the Comstock Postal Act, in 1873, greatly stimulated the search for euphemisms. Once that amazing law was upon the statute-book and Comstock himself was given the inquisitorial powers of a post-office inspector, it became positively dangerous to print certain ancient and essentially decent English words. To this day the effects of that old reign of terror are still visible. We yet use toilet, retiring-room and public comfort station in place of better terms, 53 and such idiotic forms as red-light district, disorderly-house, social disease and white slave ostensibly conceal what every flapper is talking about. The word cadet, having a foreign smack and an innocent native meaning, is preferred to the more accurate procurer; even prostitutes shrink from the forthright pimp, and employ a characteristic American abbreviation, P. I.—a curious brother to S. O. B. and 2 o’clock. Nevertheless, a movement toward honesty is getting on its legs. The vice crusaders, if they have accomplished nothing else, have at least forced many of the newspapers to use the honest terms, syphilis, prostitute and venereal disease, albeit somewhat gingerly. It is, perhaps, significant of the change going on that the New York Evening Post recently authorized its reporters to use street-walker. 54 But in certain quarters the change is viewed with alarm, and curious traces of the old prudery still survive. The Department of Health of New York City, in April, 1914, announced that its efforts to diminish venereal disease were much handicapped because “in most newspaper offices the words syphilis and gonorrhea are still tabooed, and without the use of these terms it is almost impossible to correctly state the problem.” The Army Medical Corps, in the early part of 1918, encountered the same difficulty: most newspapers refused to print its bulletins regarding venereal disease in the army. One of the newspaper trade journals venereal sought the opinions of editors upon the subject, and all of them save one declared against the use of the two words. One editor put the blame upon the Post-office, which still cherishes the Comstock tradition. Another reported that “at a recent conference of the Scripps Northwest League editors” it was decided that “the use of such terms as gonorrhea, syphilis, and even venereal diseases would not add to the tone of the papers, and that the term vice diseases can be readily substituted.” 55 The Scripps papers are otherwise anything but distinguished for their “tone,” but in this department they yield to the Puritan habit. They are not alone; even some of the New York papers remain squeamish. On April 29, 1919, for example, the New York Tribune printed an article quoting with approbation a declaration by Major W. A. Wilson, of the Division of Venereal Control in the Merchant Marine, that “the only way to carry on the campaign (i.e., against venereal disease) is to look the evil squarely in the face and fight it openly,” and yet the word venereal was carefully avoided throughout the article, save in the place where Major Wilson’s office was mentioned. Whereupon a medical journal made the following comment:

The words “the only way to carry on the campaign is to look the evil squarely in the face and fight it openly” are true, but how has the Tribune met the situation? Its subhead speaks of preventable disease; in the first paragraph social diseases are mentioned; elsewhere it alludes to certain dangerous diseases, communicable diseases and diseases, but nowhere in the entire article does it come out with the plain and precise designation of syphilis and gonorrhea as venereal diseases. The height of absurdity is reached in the Tribune’s last paragraph. Presumably it wants to say that venereals are being kept in France until cured; but being too polite to say what it means, it makes a very sweeping statement indeed. Flat feet are a preventable disease, but the Tribune can hardly suppose that no soldier with flat feet is allowed to return home until he has been cured. 56

3

Alas, even medical men yet show some of the old prudery. I am informed by Dr. Morris Fishbein, of the Journal of the American Medical Association, that not a few of them, in communications to their colleagues, still state the fact that a patient has syphilis by saying that he has a specific stomach or a specific ulcer, and that the Journal lately received a paper discussing the question, “Can a positive woman have a negative baby?”—i.e., can a woman with a positive Wassermann, indicating syphilis, have a baby free from the disease? But a far more remarkable example of American prudery—this time among laymen—came to my notice in Philadelphia some years ago. A one-act play of mine, “The Artist,” was presented at the Little Theatre there, and during its run, on February 26, 1916, the Public Ledger reprinted some of the dialogue. One of the characters in the piece is A Virgin. At every occurrence a change was made to A Young Girl. Apparently, even virgin is still regarded as too frank in Philadelphia. 57 Fifty years ago the word decent was indecent in the South: no respectable woman was supposed to have any notion of the difference between decent and indecent. To this day many essentially harmless words and phrases are avoided in conversation because they have acquired obscene significances. The adjective knocked up, so common in England, means pregnant in America, and is thus not used politely. American women use unwell in a certain indelicate significance, and hence avoid its use generally. In Kansas, I am informed, even bag is under the ban; when they hear it out there they always think of scrotum. 58

4

In their vocabularies of opprobrium and profanity English and Americans diverge sharply. The English mucker, rotter and blighter are practically unknown in America, and there are various American equivalents that are never heart in England. A guy, in the American vulgate, simply signifies a man; there is not necessarily any disparaging significance. But in English, high or low, it means one who is making a spectacle of himself. When G. K. Chesterton toured the United States, in 1920-21, “some reporter in the West referred to him as a regular guy. At first Mr. Chesterton was for going after the fellow with a stick. Certainly a topsy-turvy land, the United States, where you can’t tell opprobrium from flattering compliment.” 59 The American derivative verb, to guy, is unknown in English; its nearest equivalent is to spoof, which is used in the United States only as a conscious Briticism. The average American, I believe, has a larger profane vocabulary than the average Englishman, and swears rather more, but he attempts an amelioration of many of his oaths by softening them to forms with no apparent meaning. Darn (= dern = durn) for damn is apparently of English origin, but it is heard ten thousand times in America to once in England. So is dog-gone. Such euphemistic written forms as damphool, helluva and damfino are also far more common in this country. 60 All-fired for hell-fired, gee-whiz for Jesus, tarnal for eternal, tarnation for damnation, cuss for curse, holy gee for holy Jesus, cussword for curse-word, goldarned for God-damned, by gosh for by God, great Scott for great God, and what’ell for what the hell are all Americanisms; Thornton has traced all-fired to 1835, tarnation to 1801 and tarnal to 1790; Tucker says that blankety is also American. By golly has been found in England so early as 1843, but it probably originated in America; down to the Civil War it was the characteristic oath of the negro slaves. Such terms as bonehead, pinhead and boob have been invented, perhaps, to take the place of the English ass, which has a flavor of impropriety in America on account of its identity in sound with the American pronunciation of arse. 61 At an earlier day ass was always differentiated by making it jackass. Another word that is improper in America but not in England is tart, a clipped form of sweetheart. To a Londoner the word connotes sweetness, and so, if he be of the lower orders, he may apply it to his best girl. But to the American it signifies a prostitute, or, at all events, a woman of too ready an amiability. However, it is also of a disparaging significance in several of the English provincial dialects.

5

An English correspondent, resident in the United States for half a dozen years, tells me that many American expletives seem to him to be of Irish origin. Son-of-a-bitch, and its euphemistic American daughter, son-of-a-gun, are very seldom heard in England. “True oaths,” says this correspondent, “are rather rare among the English. There are a number of ugly words, probably descendants of true religious oaths, and a few that are merely dirty, and beyond that practically nothing. Sound rather than significance, it appears, gives a word evil qualities. Men have been put in jail for using meaningless words. There is, however, the same tendency to euphemism as in America. Just as God damn becomes gol darn here, Christ becomes crikey there. God damn is rare in England, and Englishmen say ‘I don’t care a damn’ much more often than ‘I don’t give a damn.’ Jesus is never used as an oath, and I never met any of the charming ones beginning with ‘Holy, jumping, bandy-legged, sacrificing …’ until I came to America. A Trinity College man here tells me the Irish don’t say Jesus; but he is the son of a schoolmaster. Without Jesus there could be no bejabers. In England, as I say, damn usually stands alone. God damn seemed as quiant as egad or odsblood when I heard it first. I had climbed into a hayloft without a ladder, and my dear father remarked that one of these days I would break my God damned neck. I think my father, too, realized the quaintness of the oath; usually he, like any Englishman, would have said bloody. The word Christer has two meanings in England. It is used by printers to designate an exclamation point, and by other people in a sense which I can best explain by illustration. A Harvard professor, an Englishman, was discussing a certain English journalist then in this country, and he said to me: ‘Oh, he’s a simply fearful Christer; preaches in chapel every Sunday, and all that.”’ Dirt, to designate earth, and closet, in the sense of a cupboard are seldom used by an Englishman. The former always suggests filth to him, and the latter has obtained the limited sense of water-closet.

6

But the most curious disparity between the profane vocabulary of the two tongues is presented by bloody. This word is entirely without improper significance in America, but in England it is regarded as the vilest of indecencies. The sensation produced in London when George Bernard Shaw put it into the mouth of a woman character in his play, “Pygmalion,” will be remembered. “The interest in the first English performance,” said the New York Times, 62 “centered in the heroine’s utterance of this banned word. It was waited for with trembling, heard shudderingly, and presumably, when the shock subsided, interest dwindled.” But in New York, of course, it failed to cause any stir. Just why it is regarded as profane and indecent by the English is one of the mysteries of the language. It came in during the latter half of the seventeenth century, and remained innocuous for 200 years. Then it suddenly acquired its present abhorrent significance. Two etymologies have been proposed for it. By the one it is held to be synonymous with “in the manner of a blood,” i. e., of a rich young roisterer; this would make bloody drunk equivalent to as drunk as a lord. The other derives it from by our Lady. 63 But both theories obviously fail to account for its present disrepute. As drunk as a lord would certainly not offend English susceptibilites, and neither would by our Lady. An Englishwoman once told me that it grated upon her ears because it somehow suggested catamenia; perhaps this affords a clue to the current aversion to it among the polite. It is used incessantly by the English lower classes; they have even invented an intensive, bleeding. So familiar has it become, in fact, that it is a mere counter-word, without intelligible significance. A familiar story illustrates this. Two Yorkshire miners are talking. “What do they mean,” asks one, “by one man, one bloody vote.”

7

So far no work devoted wholly to the improper terms of English and American has been published, but this lack will soon be remedied by a compilation made by a Chicago journalist. It is entitled “The Slang of Venery and Its Analogues,” and runs to two large volumes. A small edition, mimeographed for private circulation, was issued in 1916. I have examined this work and found it of great value.

8

Note 46.  Cf. Dardanelles Commission Report; London, 1916, p. 56, § 47. [back]

Note 47.  Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug” is called “The Golden Beetle” in England. Twenty-five years ago an Englishman named Buggey, laboring under the odium attached to the name, had it changed to Norfolk-Howard, a compound made up of the title and family name of the Duke of Norfolk. The wits of London at once doubled his misery by adopting Norfolk-Howard as a euphemism for bed-bug. [back]

Note 48.  A recent example of the use of male-cow was quoted in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Nov. 17, 1917, advertising page 24. [back]

Note 49.  The New York Organ (a “family journal devoted to temperance, morality, education and general literature”), May 29, 1847. One of the editors of this delicate journal was T. S. Arthur, author of Ten Nights in a Bar-room. [back]

Note 50.  John Graham Brooks: As Others See Us; New York, 1908, p. 11. [back]

Note 51.  Domestic Manners of the Americans, 2 vols.; London, 1832; vol. i, p. 132. [back]

Note 52.  Female, of course, was epidemic in England too, but White says that it was “not a Briticism,” and so early as 1839 the Legislature of Maryland expunged it from the title of a bill “to protect the reputation of unmarried females,” substituting women, on the ground that female “was an Americanism in that application.” [back]

Note 53.  The French pissoir, for instance, is still regarded as indecent in America, and is seldom used in England, but it has gone into most of the Continental language, though the French themselves avoid it in print, and use the inane Vespasien in place of it. But all the Continental languages have their euphemisms. Most of them, for example, use W. C., an abbreviation of the English water-closet, as a euphemism. The whole subject of national pruderies, in both act and speech, remains to be investigated. [back]

Note 54.  Even the Springfield Republican, the last stronghold of Puritan Kultur, printed the word on Oct. 11, 1917, in a review of New Adventures, by Michael Mohahan. [back]

Note 55.  Pep, July, 1918, p. 8. [back]

Note 56.  Social Hygiene Bulletin, May, 1919, p. 7. [back]

Note 57.  Perhaps the Quaker influence is to blame. At all events, Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world. Early in 1918, when a patriotic moving-picture entitled “To Hell with the Kaiser” was sent on tour under government patronage, the word hell was carefully toned down, on the Philadelphia billboards, to h—. [back]

Note 58.  I do not go into nursery euphemisms. They are very numerous, and deserve investigation. It is my observation that they differ considerably in different parts of the country. [back]

Note 59.  Murray Hill Bids Mr. Chesterton Goodby, Bookman, June 21, 1921, p. 309. [back]

Note 60.  Both of the great American telegraph companies have rules strictly forbidding the acceptance of telegrams containing profane words. Some time ago a telegram if mine containing the harmless adjective damndest was refused by both. I appealed to the higher authorities of the Western Union. After I had solemnly filed a brief in defense of the term, Mr. T. W. Carroll, general manager of the Eastern Division, as solemnly decided that the company “must take the position that, if there is any question or doubt on the subject, the safest plan is to request the sender to so modify his language as to make his message acceptable.” In other words, any locution which happens to scratch the prudery of a telegraph clerk (however imbecile) must be omitted. [back]

Note 61.  Cf. R. M. Bache: Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech; Phila., 1869, p. 34 ff. [back]

Note 62.  April 14, 1914. In 1920 the English Licenser of Stage Plays ordered bloody expunged from a play dealing with labor. Cf. English, Oct., 1920, p. 403. [back]

Note 63.  Swift, in his Journal to Stella, says: “It grows by ’r Lady cold, and I have no waistcoat on.” [back]

1. Americanisms in England

More than once, during the preceding chapters, we encountered Americanisms that had gone over into English, and English locutions that had begun to get a foothold in the United States. Such exchanges are made frequently and often very quickly, and though the guardians of English, as we saw in Chapter I, Section 3, still attack every new Americanism vigorously, even when, as in the case of scientist, it is obviously sound, or, as in the case of joy-ride, it is irresistibly picturesque, they are often routed by public pressure, and have to submit in the end with the best grace possible.

1

For example, consider caucus. It originated in Boston at some indeterminate time before 1750, and remained so peculiarly American for more than a century following that most of the English visitors before the Civil War remarked its use. But, according to J. Redding Ware, 1 it began to creep into English political slang about 1870, and in the 80’s it was lifted to good usage by the late Joseph Chamberlain. Ware, writing in the first years of the present century, said that the word had become “very important” in England, but was “not admitted into dictionaries.” But in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, dated 1914, and in Cassell’s New English Dictionary, published five years later, it is given as a sound English word, though its American origin is noted. The English, however, use it in a sense that has become archaic in America, thus preserving an abandoned American meaning in the same way that many abandoned British meanings have been preserved on this side. In the United States the word means, and has meant for years, a meeting of some division, large or small, of a political or legislative body for the purpose of agreeing upon a united course of action in the main assembly. In England it means the managing committee of a party or fraction—something corresponding to our national committee, or state central committee, or steering committee, or to the half-forgotten congressional caucuses of the 20’s. It has a disparaging significance over there, almost equal to that of our words organization and machine. Moreover, it has given birth to two derivatives of like quality, both unknown in America—caucusdom, meaning machine control, and caucuser, meaning a machine politician. 2

2

A good many other such Americanisms have got into good usage in England, and new ones are being exported constantly. Farmer describes the process of their introduction and assimilation. American books, newspapers and magazines, especially the last, circulate in England in large number, and some of their characteristic locutions strike the English fancy and are repeated in conversation. Then they get into print, and begin to take on respectability. “The phrase, ‘as the Americans say,’ ” he continues, “might in some cases be ordered from the type foundry as a logotype, so frequently does it do introduction duty.” 3 Ware shows another means of ingress: the argot of sailors. Many of the Americanisms he notes as having become naturalized in England, e. g., boodle, boost and walk-out, are credited to Liverpool as a sort of half-way station. Travel brings in still more: England swarms with Americans, and Englishmen themselves, visiting America, are struck by the new and racy phrases that they hear, and afterward take them home and try them on their friends. The English authors who burden every west-bound ship, coming here to lecture, have especially sharp ears for such neologisms, and always use them when they get home—often, as we shall see, inaccurately. Dickens was the first of these visitors to carry back that sort of cargo; according to Bishop Coxe 4 he gave currency in England, in his “American Notes,” to reliable, influential, talented and lengthy. Bristed, writing in 1855, said that talented was already firmly fixed in the English vocabulary by that time. All four words are in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and only lengthy is noted as “originally an Americanism.” Cassell lists them without any remark at all; they have been thoroughly assimilated. Finally, there is the influence of American plays and moving pictures. Hundreds of American films are shown in England every week, and the American words and phrases appearing in their titles, sub-titles and other explanatory legends thus become familiar to the English. “The patron of the picture palace,” says W. G. Faulkner, in an article in the London Daily Mail, “learns to think of his railway station as a depot; he has alternatives to one of our newest words, hooligan, in hoodlum and tough; he watches a dive, which is a thieves’ kitchen or a room in which bad characters meet, and whether the villain talks of dough or sugar he knows it is money to which he is referring. The musical ring of the word tramp gives way to the stodgy hobo or dead-beat. It may be that the plot reveals an attempt to deceive some simple-minded person. If it does, the innocent one is spoken of as a sucker, a come-on, a boob, or a lobster if he is stupid in the bargain.”

3

Mr. Faulkner goes on to say that a great many other Americanisms are constantly employed by Englishmen “who have not been affected by the avalanche… which has come upon us through the picture palace.” “Thus today,” he says, “we hear people speak of the fall of the year, a stunt they have in hand, their desire to boost a particular business, a peach when they mean a pretty girl, a scab— a common term among strikers—the glad-eye, junk when they mean worthless material, their efforts to make good, the elevator in the hotel or office, the boss or manager, the crook or swindler; and they will tell you that they have the goods—that is, they possess the requisite qualities for a given position.” The venerable Frederic Harrison, writing in the Fortnightly Review in the Spring of 1918, denounced this tendency with a vigor recalling the classical anathemas of Dean Alford and Sydney Smith. 5 “Stale American phrases,…” he said, “are infecting even our higher journalism and our parliamentary and platform oratory…. A statesman is now out for victory; he is up against pacificism…. He has a card up his sleeve, by which the enemy are at last to be euchred. Then a fierce fight in which hundreds of noble fellows are mangled or drowned is a scrap…. To criticise a politician is to call for his scalp…. The other fellow is beaten to a frazzle.” And so on. “Bolshevism,” concluded Harrison sadly, “is ruining language as well as society.” Other watchmen have often sounded the same alarm, sometimes in very acrimonious terms. “Thou callest trousers pants,” roared Samuel Butler in his “Psalm to Montreal,” “whereas I call them trousers; therefore thou art in hell-fire and may the Lord pity thee!” 6

4

But though there are many such protests, the majority of Englishmen make borrowings from the tempting and ever-widening American vocabulary, and many of these loan-words take root, and are presently accepted as sound English, even by the most squeamish. The two Fowlers, in “The King’s English,” separate Americanisms from other current vulgarisms, but many of the latter on their list, in the sense indicated, are actually American in origin, though they do not seem to know it—for example, to demean and to transpire. More remarkable still, the Cambridge History of English Literature lists backwoodsman, know-nothing and yellow-back as English compounds, apparently in forgetfulness of their American origin, and adds skunk, squaw and toboggan as direct importations from the Indian tongues, without noting that they came through American, and remained definite Americanisms for a long while. 7 It even adds musquash, a popular name for the Fiber zibethicus, borrowed from the Algonquin muskwessu but long since degenerated to muskrat in America. Musquash has been in disuse in this country, indeed, since the middle of the last century, save as a stray localism, but the English have preserved it, and it appears in the Oxford Dictionary. 8

5

A few weeks in London or a month’s study of the London newspapers will show a great many other American pollutions of the well of English. The argot of politics is full of them. Many beside caucus were introduced by Joseph Chamberlain, a politician skilled in American campaign methods and with an American wife to prompt him. He gave the English their first taste of to belittle, one of the inventions of Thomas Jefferson. Graft and to graft crossed the ocean in their nonage. To bluff has been well understood in English for 30 years. It is in Cassell’s and the Oxford Dictionaries, and has been used by no less a magnifico than Sir Almroth Wright. 9 To stump, in the form of stump-oratory, is in Carlyle’s “Latter-Day Pamphlets,” published in 1850, and caucus appears in his “Frederick the Great,” 10 though, as we have seen on the authority of Ware, it did not come into general use in England until ten years later. Buncombe (usually spelled bunkum) is in all the later English dictionaries. Gerrymander is in H. G. Wells’ “Outline of History.” 11 In the London stock market and among English railroad men various characteristic Americanisms have got a foothold. The meaning of bucket-shop and to water, for example, is familiar to every London broker’s clerk. English trains are now telescoped and carry dead-heads, and in 1913 a rival to the Amalgamated Order of Railway Servants was organized under the name of the National Union of Railway Men. The beginnings of a movement against the use of servant are visible in other directions, and the American help threatens to be substituted; at all events, Help Wanted advertisements are now occasionally encountered in English newspapers. But it is American verbs that seem to find the way into English least difficult, particularly those compounded with prepositions and adverbs, such as to pan out and to swear off. Most of them, true enough, are still used as conscious Americanisms, but used they are, and with increasing frequency. The highly typical American verb to loaf is now naturalized, and Ware says that The Loaferies is one the common nicknames of the Whitechapel workhouse. Both the Concise Oxford and Cassell list to loaf without mentioning its American origin. The former says that its etymology is “dubious” and the latter that it is “doubtful.”

6

It is curious, reading the fulminations of American purists of the last generation, to note how many of the Americanisms they denounced have not only got into perfectly good usage at home but even broken down all guards across the ocean. To placate and to antagonize are examples. The Concise Oxford and Cassell distinguish between the English and American meanings of the latter: in England a man may antagonize only another man, in America he may antagonize a mere idea or thing. But, as the brothers Fowler show, even the English meaning is of American origin, and no doubt a few more years will see the verb completely naturalized in Britain. To placate, attacked vigorously by all native grammarians down to (but excepting) White, now has the authority of the Spectator, and is accepted by Cassell. To donate is still under the ban, but to transpire has been used by the London Times. Other old bugaboos that have been embraced are gubernatorial, presidential and standpoint. White labored long and valiantly to convince Americans that the adjective derived from president should be without the i before its last syllable, following the example of incidental, regimental, monumental, governmental, oriental, experimental and so on; but in vain, for presidential is now perfectly good English. To demean is still questioned by purists, but Cassell accepts it. English authors of the first rank have used it, and it will probably lose its dubious character very soon. To engineer, to collide, to corner, to aggravate, to obligate, and to obligate, and to lynch are in Cassell with no hint of their American origin, and so are home-spun, out-house, cross-purposes, green-horn, blizzard, excursionist, wash-stand and wash-basin, though wash-hand-stand and wash-hand-basin are also given. To boom, to boost and to boss are listed as Americanisms; so are highfalutin, skeedaddle and flat-footed. But to donate and to feature are not there at all, and neither are non-committal, bay-window, semi-occasional, square-meal, back-number, spondulix, back-yard, stag-party, derby (hat) and trained-nurse. Drug-store is slowly making its way in England; the firm known as Botts Cash Chemists uses the term to designate its branches. But it is not yet listed by either Cassell or the Concise Oxford, though both give druggist. L. Pearsall Smith adds platform (political), interview, faith-healing, co-education and cake-walk. 12 Cassell says that letter-carrier is obsolete in England and that pay-day is used only on the Stock Exchange there. Tenderfoot is creeping in, though the English commonly mistake it for an Australianism; it is used by the English Boy Scouts just as our own Boy Scouts use it. Scalawag, characteristically, has got into English with an extra l, making it scallawag. Rambunctious is not in any of the new English dictionaries, but in Cassell I find rumbustious, probably its father.

7

It is easy to overestimate the importance of these exportations, and of the transient slang-phrases that go with them. It takes a long while for one of them to become thoroughly naturalized in England, and even then the business is commonly achieved only at the cost of a change in meaning or spelling. To the Englishman Americanisms continue to show an abhorrent quality, even after he has begun to use them; he never feels quite at ease in their use, and so he seldom uses them correctly. When, a few years ago, the English borrowed the highly characteristic American phrase, I should worry (probably borrowed by American, in turn, from the Yiddish), they changed it absurdly into I should not worry. In the same way they confused the two Americanisms, gink and jinx, and so produced the bastard ginx. 13 Perhaps their inability to understand the generality of Americanisms or to enter naturally into the spirit of the language helps to explain the common American notion that they are dull-pated and unable to appreciate a joke. Certain it is that very few of their authors, even after the most careful preparation, show any capacity for writing American in a realistic manner. A proof of it is offered by the English novelist, W. L. George, in a chapter entitled “Litany of the Novelist” in his book of criticism, “Literary Chapters.” 14 George has been in the United States, knows many Americans, and is here addressing Americans and trying to help out their comprehension by a studied use of purely American phrases. One hears, not of the East End, but of the East Side; not of the City, but of Wall Street; not of Belgravia or the West End, but of Fifth avenue; not of bowler hats, but of derbys; not of idlers in pubs, but of saloon loafers; not of pounds, shillings and pence, but of dollars and cents. In brief, a gallant attempt upon a strange tongue, and by a writer of the utmost skill—but a hopeless failure none the less. In the midst of his best American, George drops into Briticism after Briticism, some of them quite as unintelligible to the average American reader as so many Gallicisms. On page after page they display the practical impossibility of the enterprise: back-garden for back-yard, perambulator for baby-carriage, corn-market for grain-market, coal-owner for coal-operator, post for mail, and so on. And to top them there are English terms that have no American equivalents at all, for example, kitchen-fender. In other chapters of the same book his blunders are even worse: petrol and cruet most certainly puzzle many of his American readers.

8

Nor is he alone. Every English author who attempts to render the speech of American characters makes a mess of it. H. G. Wells’ American in “Mr. Britling Sees It Through” is only matched by G. K. Chesterton’s in “Man Alive.” Even Kipling, who submitted the manuscript of “Captain Courageous” to American friends for criticism, yet managed to make an American in it say “He’s by way of being a fisherman now.” The late Frank M. Bicknell once amassed some amusing examples of this unanimous failing. 15 Max Pemberton, in a short story dealing with an American girl’s visit to England, makes her say: “I’m right glad…. You’re as pale as spectres, I guess…. Fancy that, now! … You are my guest, I reckon, … and here you are, my word!” C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, in depicting a former American naval officer, makes him speak of saloon-corner men (corner-loafers?). E. W. Hornung, in one of his “Raffles” stories, introduces an American prize-fighter who goes to London and regales the populace with such things as these: “Blamed if our Bowery boys ain’t cock-angels to scum like this …. By the holy tinker! … Blight and blister him! … I guess I’ll punch his face into a jam pudding …. Say, sonny, I like you a lot, but I sha’n’t like you if you’re not a good boy.” The American use of way and away seems to have daunted many of the authors quoted by Mr. Bicknell; several of them agree on forms that are certainly never heard in the United States. Thus H. B. Marriott Watson makes an American character say: “You ought to have done business with me away in Chicago,” and Walter Frith makes another say: “He has gone way off to Holborn,” “I stroll a block or two way down the Strand,” “I’ll drive him way down home by easy stages,” and “He can pack his grip and be way off home.”

9

Various other American critics have noted similar and even worse solecisms in the current English novels, and one of them, Miss Anna Branson Hillyard, once offered publicly in the Athenæum 16 to undertake the revision of English manuscripts for “fees carefully and inversely scaled by the consultant’s importance.” Miss Hillyard, in this article, cited a curious misunderstanding of American by the late Rupert Brooke. When Brooke was in the United States he sent a letter to the Westminster Gazette containing the phrase “You bet your—.” The editor, unable to make anything of it, inserted the word boots in place of the dash. Brooke thereupon wrote a letter to a friend, Edward Marsh, complaining of this mauling of his Americanism, and Marsh afterward printed it in his memoir of the poet. Miss Hillyard says that she was long puzzled by this alleged Americanism, and wondered where Brooke had picked it up. Finally, “light dawned by way of a comic cartoon. It was the classic phrase, you betcha (accent heavily on the bet) which Brooke was spelling conventionally!” And, as Miss Hillyard shows, incorrectly, as usual, for you betcha is not a collision form of “you bet your” but a collision form of “you bet you”—an imitative second person of “I bet you,” which in comic-cartoon circles is pronounced and spelled “I betcha.” 17

10

I doubt that the war gave much new currency to Americanisms among the English. The fact is that the American and British troops were seldom on the best of terms, and so fraternized very little. Cassell’s New English Dictionary, published in 1919, lists a number of words borrowed by the British from the Americans, among them cold-feet, delicatessen, guy (noun), high-brow, hobo, jitney, hot-stuff, jazz, joy-ride, milk-shake, movies, pronto, tangle-foot, to make good, to hike, and to frazzle, but not many of them were in general use. Cassell lists chautauquan but not chautauqua, and converts the American dub into dud. A correspondent who was an officer in the American army writes:

I was with an American division brigaded with the British. The chief result seemed to be the adoption of a common unit of swearing, but probably even this had been arrived at independently. The passage of all the American troops that went through Liverpool, which was near-American before the war, didn’t make much difference. I had to get some shoes while I was on furlough there after the armistice, and although I was in my American uniform, a fact that should have made the nature of the shoes demanded doubly sure, they brought out a pair of low shoes.

11

Note 1.  Passing English of the Victorian Era; London, n. d., p. 68. [back]

Note 2.  The Concise Oxford Dictionary and Cassell, following the late J. H. Trumbull, the well-known authority on Indian languages, derive the word from the Algonquin cau-cau-as-u or kaw-kaw-asu, one who advises. But most other authorities, following Pickering, derive it from caulkers. The first caucuses, it would appear, were held in a caulkers’ shop in Boston, and were called caulkers’ meetings. The Rev. William Gordon, in his History of the Rise and Independence of the United States, Including the Late War, published in London in 1788, said that “more than fifty years ago Mr. Samuel Adams’ father and twenty others, one or two from the north end of the town [Boston], where the ship business is carried on, used to meet, make a caucus and lay their plans for introducing certain persons into places of trust and power.” [back]

Note 3.  Americanisms Old and New; p. vii. [back]

Note 4.  A. Cleveland Coxe: Americanisms in England, Forum, Oct., 1886. [back]

Note 5.  Reprinted, in part, in the New York Sun, May 12, 1918. [back]

Note 6.  The Note-Books of Samuel Butler; New York, 1917, p. 389. [back]

Note 7.  Vol. xiv, pp. 507, 512. [back]

Note 8.  In this connection it is curious to note that, though the raccoon is an animal quite unknown in England, there was, during the Great War, a destroyer called the Raccoon in the British Navy. This ship was lost with all hands off the Irish coast, Jan. 9, 1918. [back]

Note 9.  The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage; London, 1913, p. 9. To bluff has also gone into other languages. During the Cuban revolution of March, 1917, the newspapers of Havana, objecting to the dispatches sent out by American correspondents, denounced the latter as los blofistas. It has also got into German, and has been used in a formal speech by Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg. Meanwhile, to bluff was once shouldered out in the country of its origin, at least temporarily, by a verb borrowed from the French, to camouflage. This first appeared in the Spring of 1917. It was, however, quickly done to death, and so to bluff was revived. [back]

Note 10.  Book iv, ch. iii. The first of the six volumes was published in 1858 and the last in 1865. [back]

Note 11.  Vol. i, p. 496; New York, 1920. [back]

Note 12.  English, Oct., 1919, p. 177. He also adds table-turning and yellow-press. The first is a characteristic modification of the American table-tapping and the latter of yellow-journalism. See also Words on Trial, by T. Michael Pope, English, Sept., 1919, pp. 150–1. [back]

Note 13.  English, Sept., 1919, p. 151. [back]

Note 14.  Boston, 1918, pp. 1–43. [back]

Note 15.  The Yankee in British Fiction, Outlook, Nov. 19, 1910. [back]

Note 16.  American Written Here, Dec. 19, 1919, p. 1362. [back]

Note 17.  See also Novelists Far Afield, New York Evening Post (editorial), May 6, 1919. [back]

Nor did the American troops pick up many Briticisms during their year and a half in France, save temporarily. In an exhaustive and valuable vocabulary of soldiers’ slang compiled by E. A. Hecker and Edmund Wilson, Jr., I can find few words or phrases that seem to be certainly English in 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 most popular of all the new verbs brought out of the war by the English, has never got a foothold in the United States, and would be unintelligible to nine Americans out of ten.

1

It is on far higher and less earthly planes that Briticisms make their entry into American, and are esteemed and cultivated. Because the United States has failed to develop a native aristocracy of settled position and authority, there is still an almost universal tendency here, among folk of social pretensions, to defer to English usage and opinion. 18 The English court, in fact, still remains the only fount of honor that such persons know, and its valuations of both men and customs take precedence of all native valuations. I can’t imagine any fashionable American who would not be glad to accept even so curious an English aristocrat as Lord Reading or Lord Birkenhead at his face value, and to put him at table above a United States Senator. This emulation is visible in all the minutiæ of social intercourse in America—in the hours chosen for meals, in the style of personal correspondence, in wedding customs, in the ceremonials incidental to entertaining, and in countless other directions. It even extends to the use of the language. 19 We have seen how, even so early as Webster’s time, the intransigent Loyalists of what Schele de Vere calls “Boston and the Boston dependencies” imitated the latest English fashions in pronunciation, and how this imitation continues to our own day. New York is but little behind, and with the affectation of what is regarded as English pronunciation there goes a constant borrowing of new English words and phrases, particularly of the sort currently heard in the West End of London. The small stores in the vicinity of Fifth avenue, for some years past, have all been turning themselves into shops. Shoes for the persons who shop in that region are no longer shoes, but boots, and they are sold by bootmakers in bootshops. One encounters, too, in Fifth avenue and the streets adjacent, a multitude of gift-shops, tea-shops, haberdashery-shops, book-shops, luggage-shops, hat-shops and print-shops. Every apartment-house in New York has a trades-men’s entrance. To Let signs have become almost as common, at least in the East, as For Rent signs. Railway has begun to displace railroad. 20 Charwoman has been adopted all over the country, and we have begun to forget our native modification of char, to wit, chore. Long ago drawing-room was borrowed by the haut ton to take the place of parlor, and hired girls began to be maids. Whip for driver, stick for cane, top-hat for high-hat, and to tub for to bathe came in long ago, and guard has been making a struggle against conductor in New York for years. In August, 1917, signs appeared in the New York surface cars in which the conductors were referred to as guards; all of them are guards on the elevated lines and in the subways save the forward men, who remain conductors officially. In Charles street in Baltimore, some time ago, the proprietor of a fashionable stationery store directed me, not to the elevator but to the lift. During the war even the government seemed inclined to substitute the English hoarding for the American billboard. 21 In the Federal Reserve Act it actually borrowed the English governor to designate the head of a bank.

2

The influence of the stage is largely responsible for the introduction and propagation of such Briticisms. Of plays dealing with fashionable life, most of those seen in the United States are of English origin, and many of them are played by English companies. Thus the social aspirants of the towns become familiar with the standard English pronunciation of the moment and with the current English phrases. It was by this route, I suppose, that old top and its analogues got in. The American actors, having no court to imitate, content themselves by imitating their English colleagues. Thus an American of fashionable pretensions, say in Altoona, Pa., or Athens, Ga., shakes hands, eats soup, greets his friends, enters a drawing-room and pronounces the words path, secretary, melancholy and necessarily in a manner that is an imitation of some American actor’s imitation of an English actor’s imitation of what is done in Mayfair—in brief, an imitation in the fourth degree. No wonder it is sometimes rather crude. This crudity is especially visible in speech habits. The American actor does his best to imitate the pronunciation and intonation of the English, but inasmuch as his name, before he became Gerald Cecil, was probably Rudolph Goetz or Terence Googan, he frequently runs aground upon laryngeal impossibilities. Here we have an explanation of the awful fist that society folk in Des Moines and Little Rock make of pronouncing the test words in the authentic English manner. All such words are filtered through Gaelic or Teutonic or Semitic gullets before they reach the ultimate consumer.

3

The influence of the Protestant Episcopal Church is also to be taken into account. It was the center of Loyalism during the Revolution, and it has fostered a passionate and often excessive Anglomania ever since. In the larger American cities entrance into it is the aim of all social pushers—including, of late, even the Jews 22—and once they get in they adopt, in so far as they are able, the terminology of its clergy, whose eagerness to appear English is traditional. The fashionable preparatory schools for boys and finishing schools for girls, many of which are directly controlled by this sect, are also very active centers of Anglomania, and have firmly established such Briticisms as headmaster, varsity, chapel (for the service as well as the building), house-master, old boy, monitor, honors, prefect and form, at least in fashionable circles. The late Woodrow Wilson, during his term as president of Princeton, gave currency to various other English academic terms, including preceptor and quad, but the words died with his reforms. At such schools as Groton and Lawrenceville the classes are called forms, and elaborate efforts are made in other ways to imitate the speech of Eton and Harrow. Dr. J. Milnor Coit, while rector of the fashionable St. Paul’s School, at Concord, N. H., gave a great impetus to this imitation of English manners. Says a leading authority on American private schools: “Dr. Coit encouraged cricket rather than baseball. The English schoolroom nomenclature, too, was here introduced to the American boy. St. Paul’s still has forms, but the removes, evensong and matins, and even the cricket of Dr. Coit’s time are now forgotten. Most boys of the three upper forms have separate rooms. The younger boys have alcoves in the dormitories similar to the cubicles of many of the English public schools.” 23

4

Occasionally some uncompromising patriot raises his voice against such importations, but he seldom shows the vigorous indignation of the English purists. White, in 1870, warned Americans against the figurative use of nasty as a synonym for disagreeable. The use of the word was then relatively new in England, though, according to White, the Saturday Review and the Spectator had already succumbed. His objections to it were unavailing; nasty quickly got into American and has been there ever since. In 1883 Gilbert M. Tucker protested against good-form, traffic (in the sense of travel), to bargain and to tub as Briticisms that we might well do without, but all of them took root and are perfectly sound American today. The locutions that are more obviously merely fashionable slang have a harder time of it, and seldom gain lodgment. When certain advertisers in New York sought to appeal to snobs by using such Briticisms as swagger and topping in their advertisements, the town wits, led by the watchful Franklin P. Adams (though he serves the Tribune, which Clement K. Shorter once called “more English than we are English”), fell upon them, and quickly routed them. To the average American of the plain people, indeed, any word or phrase of an obviously English flavor appears to be subtly offensive. To call him old dear would be almost as hazardous as to call him Claude or Clarence. He associates all such terms, and the English broad a no less, with the grotesque Britons he sees in burlesque shows. Perhaps this feeling entered into the reluctance of the American soldier to borrow British war slang.

5

I incline to think that both the grand dialects of English would be the better for a somewhat freer interchange, and fully endorse the doctrine laid down by Prof. Gordon Hall Gerould, of Princeton, who argues that it would be a sensible thing for Americans to adopt the English lift and tram in place of the more cumbersome elevator and trolley-car, and that the English, in their turn, would find the communication of ideas easier if they borrowed some of our American neologisms. 24 “Logophobia,” he says, “has usually been a sign, in men of our race, of a certain thinness of blood. The man of imagination and the man with something to say have never been afraid of words, even words that have rung strangely on the ear. It has been the finicking person, not very sure of himself, who has trod delicately between alternatives, and used the accepted and time-worn word in preference to the newer coinage, out of his abhorrence born of fear …. I do not wish to urge … the wiping out of those peculiarities of vocabulary by which one region of the English-speaking world is made to seem slightly exotic to the visitor from another. Without such differences of idiom, the common speech of the race would be the poorer, as the waters from many rivulets are needed to feed the river. Let him who says naturally a pail of water say so still, and him to whom a bucket is more familiar rejoice in his locution. Let my English friend call for his jug, while I demand my pitcher; for he will—if he be not afflicted with logophobia—enjoy what seems to him the fine archaic flavor of my word. What I would commend is a generous reciprocity in vocabulary, as between section and section, commonwealth and commonwealth, country and country. If it should become convenient for us Americans to use a word now peculiar to Great Britain, I hope we should not be so silly as to stop it at the tongue’s end out of national pride or chauvinistic delicacy. It is evident that any ‘American’ language which might be evolved by the sedulous fostering on our part of native idioms would still retain a good deal of the original English language. Why, then, should we shut ourselves off from the good things in words that have been invented or popularized in Great Britain since the Pilgrims sailed? And why, on the other hand, should the Englishman disdain the ingenious locutions that have come to light on this side the Atlantic?”

6

A correspondent makes the suggestion that such exchanges, if they were more numerous, would greatly enrich each language’s stock of fine distinctions. A loan-word, he says, does not usually completely displace the corresponding native word, but simply puts a new distinction beside it. Unquestionably, this often happens. Consider, for example, the case of shop. As it is now used in the American cities it affords a convenient means of distinguishing between a large store offering various lines of merchandise and a small establishment specializing in one line. The old-fashioned country store remains a store and so does the department-store. To call either a shop would seem absurd. Shop is applied exclusively to smaller establishments, and almost always in combination with some word designating the sort of stock they carry. Shop, indeed, has always been good American, though its current application is borrowed from England. We have used shop-worn, shoplifter, shopping, pawn-shop, shopper, shop-girl and to shop for years. In the same way the word penny continues to flourish among us, despite the fact that there has been no American coin of that name for more than 125 years. We have nickel-in-the-slot machines, but when they take a cent we call them penny-in-the-slot machines. We have penny-arcades and penny-whistles. We do not play cent-ante, but penny-ante. We still “turn an honest penny” and say “a penny for your thoughts.” The pound and the shilling became extinct legally a century ago, 25 but the penny still binds us to the mother-tongue. But an American knows nothing of pence. To him two pennies are always pennies.

7

Exchanges in spelling, some of them very important, are discussed in Chapter VIII.

8

Note 18.  The curious who desire to pursue this subject will find it discussed at greater length in the essay, The National Letters, in my Prejudices: Second Series; New York, 1920, and in my preface to The American Credo, by George Jean Nathan and me; New York, 1920. [back]

Note 19.  Sometimes this colonialism goes to amusing lengths. During the Summer of 1921 a reviewer in the London Times was troubled by the word hick, used in a book by my associate, George Jean Nathan. At once an American woman novelist, Roof by name, dispatched a long letter to the Times, denouncing this hick as “middle class” slang from the West, hinting that such barbarisms were deliberately given circulation by “the German-speaking Jewish population of New York,” assuring the editor that her own ancestors “came to America in 1620,” and offering him a pledge that she would never cease to “adhere to the King’s English.” This letter, which appeared in the Times on July 14, was quoted with approbation by the Christian Science Monitor, the organ of New England Kultur, on Aug. 14. But already on July 21 the Times had printed a letter from William Archer showing that hick was actually perfectly sound English, and that it could be found in Steele’s comedy, “The Funeral.” Two weeks later, a Norwegian philologist, S. N. Baral, followed with a letter showing that hick was connected with the Anglo-Saxon haeg, indicating a menial or lout, and that it had cognates in all the ancient Teutonic languages, and even in Sanskrit! [back]

Note 20.  Evacustes A. Phipson, an Englishman, says in Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 432, that railway “appears to be a concession to Anglomania.” [back]

Note 21.  See p. 58 of The United States at War, a pamphlet issued by the Library of Congress, 1917. The compiler of this pamphlet was a savant bearing the fine old British name of Herman H. B. Meyer. [back]

Note 22.  Jews desiring to abandon Moses formerly embraced Christian Science, but of late the more wealthy of them have been taking bold headers into the Anglican communion, especially in New York. I am informed that one of the most fashionable Episcopal churches there has several Jews in its vestry. When I asked for a list of its vestrymen the rector refused it. [back]

Note 23.  Porter E. Sargent: American Private Schools; Boston, 1920. It is curious to note that Dr. Coit, despite his Anglomania, was born in Harrisburg, Pa., began life as manager of a tube works at Cleveland, and retired to Munich on resigning the rectorate of St. Paul’s. [back]

Note 24.  In Reciprocity in Words, Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, Feb. 21, 1921. Dr. Gerould incidentally accuses me of attempting to drive a wedge between English and American, and hints that I indulge in “special pleading based on special interests.” What those special interests may be he does not say. Probably he has in mind the interests of the Wilhelmstrasse. If so, I am glad to oblige him by seconding him again. [back]

Note 25.  A correspondent assures me, however, that the York shilling, worth 12½ cents, survived in New York City until 1865. [back]

1. General Characters

The elements that enter into the special character of American have been rehearsed in the first chapter: a general impatience of rule and restraint, a democratic enmity to all authority, an extravagant and often grotesque humor, an extraordinary capacity for metaphor 1—in brief, all the natural marks of what Van Wyck Brooks calls “a popular life which bubbles with energy and spreads and grows and slips away ever more and more from the control of tested ideas, a popular life with the lid off.” 2 This is the spirit of America, and from it the American language is nourished. “The wish to see things afresh and for himself,” says Dr. Harry Morgan Ayres, 3 “is so characteristic of the American that neither in his speech nor his most considered writing does he need any urging to seek out ways of his own. He refuses to carry on his verbal traffic with the well-worn counters; he will always be new-writing them. He is on the lookout for words that say something; he has a sort of remorseless and scientific efficiency in the choice of epithets! … The American … has an Elizabethan love of exuberant language.” Brooks, perhaps, generalizes a bit too lavishly; Ayres calls attention to the fact that below the surface there is also a curious conservatism, even a sort of timorousness. In a land of manumitted peasants the primary trait of the peasant is bound to show itself now and then; as Wendell Phillips once said, “more than any other people, we Americans are afraid of one another”— that is, afraid of isolation, of derision, of all the consequences of singularity. But in the field of language, as in that of politics, this suspicion of the new is often transformed into a suspicion of the merely unfamiliar, and so its natural tendency toward conservatism is overcome. It is of the essence of democracy that it remain a government by amateurs, and under a government by amateurs it is precisely the expert who is most questioned—and it is the expert who commonly stresses the experience of the past. And in a democratic society it is not the iconoclast who seems most revolutionary, but the purist. The derisive designation of high-brow is thoroughly American in more ways than one. It is a word put together in an unmistakably American fashion, it reflects an habitual American attitude of mind, and its potency in debate is peculiarly national too.

1

I daresay it is largely a fear of the weapon in it—and there are many others of like effect in the arsenal—which accounts for the far greater prevalence of idioms from below in the formal speech of America than in the formal speech of England. There is surely no English novelist of equal rank whose prose shows so much of colloquial looseness and ease as one finds in the prose of Howells: to find a match for it one must go to the prose of the neo-Celts, professedly modelled upon the speech of peasants, and almost proudly defiant of English grammar and syntax, and to the prose of the English themselves before the Restoration. Nor is it imaginable that an Englishman of comparable education and position would ever employ such locutions as those I have hitherto quoted from the public addresses of Dr. Wilson—that is, innocently, seriously, as a matter of course. The Englishman, when he makes use of coinages of that sort, does so in conscious relaxation, and usually with a somewhat heavy sense of doggishness. They are proper to the paddock or even to the dinner table, but scarcely to serious scenes and occasions. But in the Unitel States their use is the rule rather than the exception; it is not the man who uses them, but the man who doesn’t use them, who is marked off. Their employment, if high example counts for anything, is a standard habit of the language, as their diligent avoidance is a standard habit of English.

A glance through the Congressional Record is sufficient to show how small is the minority of purists among the chosen leaders of the nation. Within half an hour, turning at random the pages of the war issues, when all Washington was on its best behavior, I find scores of locutions that would paralyze the stenographers in the House of Commons, and they are in the speeches, not of wild mavericks from the West, but of some of the chief men of the two Houses. Surely no Senator occupied a more conspicuous position during the first year of the war than “Hon.” Lee S. Overman, of North Carolina, chairman of the Committee on Rules, and commander of the administration forces on the floor. Well, I find Senator Overman using to enthuse in a speech of the utmost seriousness and importance, and not once, but over and over again.  4 I turn back a few pages and encounter it again—this time in the mouth of General Sherwood, of Ohio. A few more, and I find a fit match for it, to wit, to biograph. 5 The speaker here is Senator L. Y. Sherman, of Illinois. In the same speech he uses to resolute. 6 A few more, and various other characteristic verbs are unearthed; to demagogue, 7to dope out, 8 to fall down 9 (in the sense of to fail), to jack up, 10 to phone, 11 to peeve, 12 to come across, 13 to hike, to butt in, 14 to back pedal, to get solid with, to hospitalize, 15 to hooverize, to propaganda, 16 to trustify, to feature, to insurge, to haze, to reminisce, to camouflage, to play for a sucker, and so on almost ad infinitum. And with them, a large number of highly American nouns, chiefly compounds, all pressing upward for recognition: tin-Lizzie, brain-storm, come-down, pin-head, trustification, pork-barrel, buck-private, dough-boy, cow-country. And adjectives: jitney, bush (for rural), balled-up, 17 dolled-up, phoney, pussy-footed, tax-paid. 18 And picturesque phrases: dollars to doughnuts, on the job, that gets me, one best bet. And back-formations: ad, movie, photo. And various substitutions and Americanized inflections: over for more than, gotten for got in the present perfect, 19 rile for roil, bust for burst. This last, in truth, has come into a dignity that even grammarians will soon hesitate to question. Who, in America, would dare to speak of bursting a broncho, or of a trustburster? 20

2

Turn to any issue of the Congressional Record and you will find examples of American quite as startling as those I have exhumed—and some a good deal more startling. I open the file for 1919 at random, and at once discover “they had put it on the market in a condition in which it could be drank as a beverage.” 21 A moment later I find, from the same lips, “The evidence disclosed that Jacobs had drank 28 bottles of lemon extract.” A few pages further on, and I come to “It will not take but a few minutes to dispose of it.” 22 I take up another volume and find the following curious letter written by a Senator and inserted in the Record at his request:

3

Hon. Edgar E. Clark,
Chairman Interstate Commerce Commission,
Washington, D. C.

My dear Mr. Chairman: It has been brought to my attention by many people in Georgia and those whom I see here that the present high passenger and freight rates are doing more to decrease the amount of income received by the railroads than if a lower rate was in effect, which would cause more freight to move and more people to travel. In other words, the railroads are not carrying an average maximum of freight and passengers since the increase in rates. Of course, the commission doubtless has figures on this question which throw more light than I can by general observations.
It is needless for me to point out to you and the commission that the railroad situation is a problem which has not been solved to any great degree by the transportation act of 1920. The thing which I am greatly interested in is the matter of freight and passenger rates to be placed within reach of the average person, and at the same time give the railroads a reasonable income for their investment. Both the public and the roads deserve an honest living, but I fear that both are now suffering. Because of high freight rates there are products in my State which are now being shipped in such small quantities in comparison with production and demand.
I hope that an adjustment can soon be made which will bring down the rates, and I would thank you to let me have any information on the matter at your convenience which may have been gathered or published by the commission.
With high esteem, I am,

Very sincerely yours,

WM. J. HARRIS 23

I leave the analysis of the American political style here displayed to grammarians. They will find plenty of further clinical material in the speeches of Mr. Harding—the one-he combination in the first sentence of his inaugural address, illy in the fourth sentence of his first message to Congress, and many other choice specimens in his subsequent state papers. Nor are politicians the only Americans who practise the flouting of the purists. In a serious book on literature by a former editor of the Atlantic Monthly, 24 edited by a committee of Yale professors and published by the university press, I find the one-he combination in full flower, and in a book of criticism by Francis Hackett, of the New Republic, I find pin-head used quite innocently and to do him proud topping it. 25 Hackett is relatively conservative. The late Horace Traubel, disciple of Whitman, went much further. All his life he battled valiantly for the use of dont (without the apostrophe) with plural subjects!

4

Note 1.  An interesting note on this characteristic is in College Words and Phrases, by Eugene H. Babbitt, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, pt. i, p. 11. [back]

Note 2.  America’s Coming of Age; p. 15. [back]

Note 3.  Art. The English Language in America, Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. iv, p. 570. [back]

Note 4.  March 26, 1918, pp. 4376--7. [back]

Note 5.  Jan. 14, 1918, p. 903. [back]

Note 6.  It is used again by Mr. Walsh, Congressional Record, May 16, 1921, p. 1468, col. 2. [back]

Note 7.  Mr. Campbell, of Kansas, in the House, Jan. 19, 1918, p. 1134. [back]

Note 8.  Mr. Hamlin, of Missouri, in the House, Jan. 19, 1918, p. 1154. [back]

Note 9.  Mr. Kirby, of Arkansas, in the Senate, Jan. 24, 1918, p. 1291; Mr. Lewis, of Illinois, in the Senate, June 6, 1918, p. 8024. [back]

Note 10.  Mr. Weeks, of Massachusetts, in the Senate, Jan. 17, 1918, p. 988. [back]

Note 11.  Mr. Smith, of South Carolina, in the Senate, Jan. 17, 1918, p. 991. [back]

Note 12.  Mr. Borland, of Missouri, in the House, Jan. 29, 1918, p. 1501. [back]

Note 13.  May 4, 1917, p. 1853. [back]

Note 14.  Mr. Snyder, of New York, Dec. 11, 1917. [back]

Note 15.  Senator Walsh, of Massachusetts, May 27, 1921, p. 1835. [back]

Note 16.  Used in the form of propagandaed by Mr. Bland, of Indiana, in the House, May 16, 1921, p. 1481, col. 1. [back]

Note 17.  Balled-up and its verb, to ball up, were once improper, no doubt on account of the slang significance of ball, but of late they have made steady progress toward polite acceptance. [back]

Note 18.  After the passage of the first War Revenue Act cigar-boxes began to bear this inscription: “The contents of this box have been taxed paid as cigars of Class B as indicated by the Internal Revenue stamp affixed.” Even tax-paid, which was later substituted, is obviously better than this clumsy double inflection. [back]

Note 19.  Mr. Bankhead, of Alabama, in the Senate, May 14, 1918, p. 6995. [back]

Note 20.  Bust seems to be driving out burst completely when used figuratively. Even in a literal sense it creeps into more or less respectable usage. Thus I find “a busted tire” in a speech by Gen. Sherwood, of Ohio, in the House, Jan. 24, 1918. The familiar American derivative, buster, as in Buster Brown, is unknown to the English. [back]

Note 21.  Mr. Tincher, of Kansas, in the House, July 19, 1919, p. 3009. [back]

Note 22.  Mr. Blanton, of Texas, in the House, Aug. 12, 1919, p. 4057. [back]

Note 23.  Of Georgia. Congressional Record, Feb. 21, 1921, p. 3755. [back]

Note 24.  The American Spirit in Literature, by Bliss Perry; New Haven, 1918, p. 117. “If one habitually prints the words, … one may do it because he is a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the chances are that he is neither.” [back]

Note 25.  The Invisible Censor; New York, 1921, pp. 6 and 60 respectively. All by her lonesome is in Horizons; New York, 1918, by the same author, p. 53. [back]

This general iconoclasm reveals itself especially in a disdain for most of the niceties of modern English. The American, like the Elizabethan Englishman, is usually quite unconscious of them and even when they have been instilled into him by the hard labor of pedagogues he commonly pays little heed to them in his ordinary discourse. The distinction between each other and one another offers a salient case in point; all the old effort to confine the first to two persons or objects and the latter to more than two seems to be breaking down. 26 So with the very important English distinction between will and shall. This last, it may be said at once, is far more a confection of the grammarians than a product of the natural forces shaping the language. It has, indeed, little etymological basis, and is but imperfectly justified logically. One finds it disregarded in the Authorized Version of the Bible, in all the plays of Shakespeare, in the essays of the reign of Anne, and in some of the best examples of modern English literature. The theory behind it is so inordinately abstruse that the Fowlers, in “The King’s English,” 27 require 20 pages to explain it, and even then they come to the resigned conclusion that the task is hopeless. “The idiomatic use [of the two auxiliaries],” they say, “is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it.” 28 Well, even those who are to the manner born seem to find it difficult, for at once the learned authors cite blunders in the writings of Richardson, Stevenson, Gladstone, Jowett, Oscar Wilde, and even Henry Sweet, author of the best existing grammar of the English language. In American the distinction is almost lost. No ordinary American, save after the most laborious reflection, would detect anything wrong in this sentence from the London Times, denounced as corrupt by the Fowlers: “We must reconcile what we would like to do with what we can do.” Nor in this by W. B. Yeats: “The character who delights us may commit murder like Macbeth … and yet we will rejoice in every happiness that comes to him.” Half a century ago, impatient of the effort to fasten the English distinction upon American, George P. Marsh attacked it as of “no logical value or significance whatever,” and predicted that “at no very distant day this verbal quibble will disappear, and one of the auxiliaries will be employed, with all persons of the nominative, exclusively as the sign of the future, and the other only as an expression of purpose or authority.” 29 This prophecy has been substantially verified. Will is sound American “with all persons of the nominative,” and shall is almost invariably an “expression of purpose or authority.” 30

1

And so, though perhaps not to the same extent, with who and whom. Now and then there arises a sort of panicky feeling that whom is being neglected, and so it is trotted out, 31 but in the main the American language tends to dispense with it, at least in its less graceful situations. Noah Webster, always the pragmatic reformer, denounced it so long ago as 1783. Common sense, he argued, was on the side of “who did he marry?” Today such a form as “whom are you talking to?” would seem somewhat affected in ordinary discourse in America; “who are you talking to?” is heard a thousand times oftener, and is doubly American, for it substitutes who for whom and puts a preposition at the end of a sentence: two crimes that most English purists would seek to avoid. It is among the pronouns that the only remaining case inflections in English are to be found, if we forget the possessive, and even here these survivors for an earlier day begin to grow insecure. Lounsbury’s defense of “it is me,” 32 as we shall see in the next chapter, has support in the history and natural movement of the language, and that movement is also against the preservation of the distinction between who and whom. The common speech plays hob with both the orthodox inflections, despite the protests of grammarians, and in the long run, no doubt, they will be forced to yield to its pressure, as they have always yielded in the past. Between the dative and accusative on one side and the nominative on the other there has been war in the English language for centuries, and it has always tended to become a war of extermination. Our now universal use of you for ye in the nominative shows the dative and accusative swallowing the nominative, and the practical disappearance of hither, thither and whither, whose place is now taken by here, there and where, shows a contrary process. In such wars a posse comitatus marches ahead of the disciplined army. American stands to English in the relation of that posse to that army. It is incomparably more enterprising, more contemptuous of precedent and authority, more impatient of rule.

2

A shadowy line often separates what is currently coming into sound usage from what is still regarded as barbarous. No self-respecting American, I daresay, would defend ain’t as a substitute for isn’t, say in “he ain’t the man,” and yet ain’t is already tolerably respectable in the first person, where English countenances the even more clumsy aren’t. Aren’t has never got a foothold in the American first person; when it is used at all, which is very rarely, it is always as a conscious Briticism. Facing the alternative of employing the unwieldy “am I not in this?” the American turns boldly to “ain’t I in this?” It still grates a bit, perhaps, but aren’t grates even more. 33 Here, as always, the popular speech is pulling the exacter speech along, and no one familiar with its successes in the past can have much doubt that it will succeed again, soon or late. In the same way it is breaking down the inflectional distinction between adverb and adjective, so that “I feel bad” begins to take on the dignity of a national idiom, and sure, in bad, to go big and run slow 34 become almost respectable. When, on the entrance of the United States into the late war, the Tank Corps chose “Treat’ em rough” as its motto, no one thought to raise a grammatical objection, and the clipped adverb was printed upon hundreds of thousands of posters and displayed in every town in the country, always with the imprimatur of the national government. So again, American, in its spoken form, tends to obliterate the distinction between nearly related adjectives, e. g., healthful and healthy, tasteful and tasty. And to challenge the somewhat absurd text-book prohibition of terminal prepositions, so that “where are we at?” loses its old raciness. And to dally with the double negative, as in “I have no doubt but that.” 35

3

But these tendencies, or at least the more extravagant of them, belong to the next chapter. How much influence they exert, even indirectly, is shown by the American disdain of the English precision in the use of the indefinite pronoun, already noticed. I turn to the Saturday Evening Post, and in two minutes find: “one feels like an atom when he begins to review his own life and deeds.” 36 The error is very rare in English; the Fowlers, seeking examples of it, could get them only from the writings of a third-rate woman novelist, Scotch to boot. But it is so common in American that when Mr. Harding used it in the first sentence of his inaugural address even his Democratic editorial enemies failed to notice it, and when I denounced it in the Nation it was vigorously defended. The appearance of a redundant S in such words as towards, downwards, afterwards and heavenwards is equally familiar. In England this S is used relatively seldom, and then it usually marks a distinction in meaning, as it does on both sides of the ocean between beside and besides. “In modern standard English,” says Smith, 37 “though not in the English of the United States, a distinction which we feel, but many of us could not define, is made between forward and forwards; forwards being used in definite contrast to any other direction, as ‘if you move at all, you can only move forwards,’ while forward is used where no such contrast is implied, as in the common phrase ‘to bring a matter forward.’ ” 38 This specific distinction, despite Smith, probably retains some force in the United States too, but in general our usage allows the S in cases where English usage would certainly be against it. Gould, in the 50’s, noted its appearance at the end of such words as somewhere and anyway, and denounced it as vulgar and illogical. Thornton traces anyways back to 1842 and shows that it is an archaism, and to be found in the Book of Common Prayer (circa 1560); perhaps it has been preserved by analogy with sideways. Henry James, in “The Question of Our Speech,” attacked “such forms of impunity as somewheres else and nowheres else, a good ways on and a good ways off” as “vulgarisms with what a great deal of general credit for what we good-naturedly call ‘refinement’ appears so able to coexist.” 39 Towards and afterwards, though frowned upon in England, are now quite sound in America. I find the former in the title of an article in Dialect Notes, which plainly gives it scholastic authority.  40 More (and with no little humor), I find it in the deed of a fund given to the American Academy of Arts and Letters to enable the gifted philologs of that sanhedrin “to consider its duty towards the conservation of the English language in its beauty and purity.” 41 Both towards and afterwards, finally, are included in the New York Evening Post’s list of “words no longer disapproved when in their proper places,” along with over for more than, and during for in the course of.

4

Note 26.  “Among the first acquaintances I made was one with Mr. Blackmon. We had offices close to one another.” Mr. Venable, of Mississippi, in the House, Congressional Record, Feb. 20, 1921, p. 3730. [back]

Note 27.  Pp. 133--154. [back]

Note 28.  L. Pearsall Smith, in The English Language, p. 29, says that “the differentiation is … so complicated that it can hardly be mastered by those born in parts of the British Islands in which it has not yet been established,” e. g., all of Ireland and most of Scotland. [back]

Note 29.  Quoted by White, in Words and Their Uses, pp. 264--5. White, however, dissented vigorously and devoted 10 pages to explaining the difference between the two auxiliaries. Most of the other authorities of the time were also against Marsh—for example, Richard Meade Bache (see his Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech, p. 92 et seq.). Sir Edmund Head, governor-general of Canada from 1854 to 1861, wrote a whole book upon the subject: Shall and Will, or Two Chapter on Future Auxiliary Verbs; London, 1856. In her Tendencies in Modern American Poetry; New York, 1917, Amy Lowell takes Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters to task for constantly using will for shall, and says that they share the habit “with many other modern American writers.” See also Text, Type and Style, by George B. Ives; Boston, 1921, p. 289 ff. [back]

Note 30.  The probable influence of Irish immigration upon the American usage is not to be overlooked. Joyce says flatly (English As We Speak It in Ireland, p. 77) that, “like many another Irish idiom this is also found in American society chiefly through the influence of the Irish.” At all events, the Irish example must have reinforced it. In Ireland “Will I light the fire, ma’am?” is colloquially sound. [back]

Note 31.  Often with such amusing results as “whom is your father?” and “whom spoke to me?” For these, alas, there is eminent authority. Cf. Matthew xvi, 13: “When Jesus came into the coasts of Cesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?” See also Otto Jespersen: Chapters on English; London, 1918, p. 52. [back]

Note 32.  “It is I” is quite as unsound historically. The correct form would be “it am I” or “I am it.” Compare the German “ich bin es,” not, “es ist ich.” [back]

Note 33.  For an interesting discussion of aren’t see a letter by H. E. Boot in English, June, 1920, p. 376, and one by Daniel Jones in the same periodical, Aug.-Sept., 1920, p. 399. [back]

Note 34.  A common direction to motormen and locomotive engineers. The English form is “slow down.” I note, however, that “drive slowly” is in the taxicab shed at the Pennsylvania Station, in New York. [back]

Note 35.  I have already noticed the use of the double negative by a Texas Congressman. Here I quote from a speech made by Senator Sherman, of Illinois, in the Senate on June 20, 1918. Vide Congressional Record for that day, p. 8743. Two days later, “There is no question but that” appeared in a letter by John Lee Coulter, A.M., Ph.D., dean of West Virginia University. It was read into the Record of June 22 by Mr. Ashwell, one of the Louisiana representatives. Even the pedantic Senator Henry Cabot Lodge uses but that. Vide the Record for May 14, 1918, p. 6996. See also Senator Borah’s use of it, Record, May 14, 1921, p. 1434. [back]

Note 36.  June 15, 1918, p. 62. [back]

Note 37.  The English Language, p. 79. [back]

Note 38.  This phrase, of course, is a Briticism, and seldom used in America. The American form is “to take a matter up.” [back]

Note 39.  The Question of Our Speech, p. 30. He might have been even more eloquent had he tackled no place and some place, latter-day substitutes for nowheres and somewheres. Or the common American habit of treating such plurals as woods, falls, links, works, yards, grounds, etc., as singulars. See Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. i, p. 48 (1913). [back]

Note 40.  A Contribution Towards, etc., by Prof. H. Tallichet, vol. i, pt. iv. But the s is omitted in the index to Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 459. [back]

Note 41.  Yale Review, April, 1918, p. 545. [back]

Some of the tendencies visible in American—e. g., toward the facile manufacture of new compounds, toward the transfer of words from one part of speech to another, and toward the free use of suffixes and prefixes and the easy isolation of roots and pseudoroots—go back to the period of the first growth of a distinct American dialect and are heritages from the English of the time. They are the products of a movement which, reaching its height in the English of Elizabeth, was dammed up at home, so to speak, by the rise of linguistic self-consciousness toward the end of the reign of Anne, but continued almost unobstructed in the colonies.

1

For example, there is what philologists call the habit of clipping or back-formation—a sort of instinctive search, etymologically un-sound, for short roots in long words. This habit, in Restoration days, precipitated a quasi-English word, mobile, from the Latin mobile vulgus, and in the days of William and Mary it went a step further by precipitating mob from mobile. Mob is now sound English, but in the eighteenth century it was violently attacked by the new sect of purists, 42 and though it survived their onslaught they undoubtedly greatly impeded the formation and adoption of other words of the same category. There are, however, many more such words in standard English, e. g., patter from paternoster, van from caravan, wig from periwig, cab from cabriolet, brandy from brandy-wine (=brandewyn), pun from pundigrion, grog from grogram, curio from curiosity, canter from Canterbury, brig from brigantine, bus from omnibus, bant from Banting and fad from fadaise. 43 In the colonies there was no such opposition to them as came from the purists of the English universities; save for a few feeble protests from Witherspoon and Boucher they went unchallenged. As a result they multiplied enormously. Rattler for rattle-snake, pike for turnpike, draw for drawbridge, coon for raccoon, possum for opossum, cuss for customer, cute for acute, squash for askutasquash—these American back-formations are already antique; Sabbaday for Sabbath-day has actually reached the dignity of an archaism, as has the far later chromo for chromolithograph. To this day they are formed in great numbers; scarcely a new substantive of more than two syllables comes in without bringing one in its wake. We have thus witnessed, within the past few years, the genesis of scores now in wide use and fast taking on respectability: phone for telephone, gas for gasoline, co-ed for co-educational, pop for populist, frat for fraternity, gym for gymnasium, movie for moving picture, plane for air-plane, prep-school for preparatory-school, auto for automobile, aero for aeroplane and aeronautical. Some linger on the edge of vulgarity: pep for pepper, flu for influenza, plute for plutocrat, vamp for vampire, pen for penitentiary, con for confidence (as in con-man, con-game and to con), convict and consumption, defi for defiance, beaut for beauty, rep for reputation, stenog for stenographer, ambish for ambition, vag for vagrant, champ for champion, pard for partner, coke for cocaine, simp for simpleton, diff for difference, grass for asparagus, mum for chrysanthemum, mutt for muttonhead, 44 wiz for wizard, rube for Reuben, hon for honey, barkeep for barkeeper, divvy for dividend or division, jit for jitney. Others are already in good usage: smoker for smoking-car, diner for dining-car, sleeper for sleeping-car, oleo for oleomar-garine, hypo for hyposulphite of soda, Yank for Yankee, confab for confabulation, memo for memorandum, pop-concert for popular-concert, gator for alligator, foots for footlights, ham for hamfatter (actor), sub for substitute, knicker for knickerbocker. Many back-formations originate in college slang, e. g., prof for professor, prom for promenade, soph for sophomore, grad for graduate (noun), lab for laboratory, dorm for dormitory, plebe for plebeian. 45 Ad for advertisement is struggling hard for general recognition; some of its compounds, e. g., ad-writer, want-ad, display-ad, ad-card, ad-rate, column-ad and ad-man, are already accepted in technical terminology. Boob for booby promises to become sound American in a few years; its synonyms are no more respectable than it is. At its heels are bo for hobo, and hoak for hoakum, two altogether fit successors to bum for bummer. Try for trial, as in “He made a try at it,” is also making progress but perhaps try-out, a characteristically American combination of verb and preposition, will eventually displace it. This production of new words by clipping, back-formation and folk-etymology is quite as active among the verbs as among the nouns. I have already described the appearance of such forms as to locate in the earliest days of differentiation and the popularity of such forms as to enthuse and to phone today. Many more verbs of the same sort have attained to respectability, e. g., to jell, to auto, to commute, to typewrite, to tiptoe (for to walk tiptoe). Others are still on probation, e. g., to reminisce, to insurge, to vamp, to peeve, to jubilate, to taxi, to orate, to bach (i. e., to live in bachelor quarters), to emote. Yet others are still unmistakably vulgar or merely waggish, e. g., to plumb (from plumber), to barb (from barber), to chauf (from chauffeur), to ready (from to make ready), to elocute, to burgle, to ush, to sculp, to butch, to con (from confidence-man), to buttle, to barkeep, to dressmake, to housekeep, to boheme, to photo, to divvy. Such forms seem to make an irresistible appeal to the American; he is constantly experimenting with new ones. “There is a much greater percentage of humorous shortenings among verbs,” says Miss Wittmann, “than among other parts of speech. Especially is this true of verbs shortened from nouns and adjectives by subtracting what looks like a derivative suffix, e. g., -er, -or, -ing, -ent from nouns, or -y from adjectives. Many clipped verbs have noun parallels, while some are simply clipped nouns used as verbs.” 46 Miss Wittmann calls attention to the curious fact that very few adjectives are clipped in American; there are actually more of them in British English. Sesech (from secessionist, really a noun, but often used as an adjective) is one of the few familiar examples. Adjectives are made copiously in American, but most of them are made by other processes.

2

Another popular sort of neologism is the blend- or portmanteau- word. Many such words are in standard English, e. g., Lewis Carroll’s chortle (from chuckle and snort), dumbfound (from dumb and confound), luncheon (lunch+nuncheon), blurt (blare+spurt). American contributed gerrymander (Gerry+salamander) so long ago as 1812, and in more recent years has produced many blends that have gone over into standard English, e. g., cablegram (cable+telegram), electrocute (electricity+execute), electrolier (electricity+chandelier, Amerind (American+Indian), doggery (dog+groggery), riffle (in a stream) (probably from ripple and ruffle). Perhaps travelogue (travel+monologue), Luther Burbank’s pomato (potato+tomato), slanguage (slang+language), and thon (that+one) 47 will one day follow. Boost (boom+hoist) is a typical American blend. I have a notion that blurb is a blend also. So, perhaps, is flunk; Dr. Louise Pound says that it may be from fail and funk. 48 Aframerican, which is now very commonly used in the Negro press, is not American, but was devised by Sir Harry Johnston. 49 Allied with the portmanteau words are many blends of a somewhat different sort, in which long compounds are displaced by forms devised by analogy with existing words. Printery (for printing-office) appeared very early, and in late years it has been reinforced by many analogues, e. g., beanery, bootery, boozery, toggery. Condensery is used in the West to indicate a place where milk is condensed. I have encountered breadery in Baltimore; Dr. Pound reports hashery and drillery. 50 Somewhat similar are the words suggested by cafeteria, once a California localism. 51 Among other strange forms I have encountered haberteria (for haberdashery) and groceriteria (for grocery-store). The wide use of the suffix -ette in such terms as farmerette, conductorette, kitchenette, cellarette, featurette, leatherette, flannelette, crispette, usherette and huskerette, is due to the same effort to make one word do the work of two. In Baltimore, in 1918, the street railways company appealed to the public to drop conductorette and go back to woman conductor, but the new word survived. 52 I suspect that the popularity of near- as a prefix has much the same psychological basis. Near-beer is surely simpler than imitation beer or non-alcoholic beer, and near-silk is better than the long phrase that would have to be used to describe it accurately. So with the familiar and numerous terms in -ee, -ite, -ster, -ist, -er, -dom, -itis, -ism, -ize, etc., e. g., draftee, Kreislerite, dopester, chalkologist, soap-boxer, picturedom, golfitis, Palmerism, to hooverize, and so on. They all represent efforts to condense the meaning of whole phrases into simple and instantly-understandable words. “The great majority of shortened forms,” says Miss Wittmann, “are clearly made for convenience; their speakers employ them to save time and trouble.” 53 Here, incidentally, the influence of newspaper head-lines is not to be overlooked. The American head-line writer faces peculiar difficulties; he must get clearly explanatory phrases into very small space, and almost always he is handicapped by arbitrary regulations as to typographical arrangement—regulations which do not oppress his English colleague. As a result he is an ardent propagandish gandish for short words, e. g., probe (for investigation), grab, steal, haul, wed (for wedded), hello-girl (for telephone-girl), soul-mate, love-nest, love-pirate, and so on. He constantly uses up in the something’s up sense, e. g., “Dry QuestionUp in Legislature.” The popularity of Hun, during the War, was no doubt largely due to the exigencies of his calling. He never uses a long word when a short one will answer, and he never uses articles when they can be avoided. Possibly the omission of the article in such American phrases as up street, all year and all Sunday (the Englishman would probably say all day on Sunday) is largely due to his influence. Certainly, he is an eager merchant of all such neologisms as sub-deb, stand-pat, try-out, co-ed, gym, auto, defi and phone. 54

3

The same motives show themselves in the great multiplication of common abbreviations in America. “Americans, as a rule,” says Farmer, “employ abbreviations to an extent unknown in Europe. … This trait of the American character is discernible in every department of the national life and thought.” O. K., C. O. D., N. G., G. O. P. (get out and push) and P. D. Q. are almost national hall-marks; the immigrant learns them immediately after damn and go to hell. Thornton traces N. G. to 1840; C. O. D. and P. D. Q. are probably almost as old. As for O. K., it was in use so early as 1790. “In colonial days,” says a floating newspaper paragraph, “the best rum and tobacco were imported from Aux Cayes, in Santo Domingo. Hence the best of anything came to be known locally as Aux Cayes, or O. K. The term did not, however, come to be generally used until the Presidential campaign of 1828, when the supposed illiteracy of Andrew Jackson, sometimes known as the founder of Democracy, was the stock in trade of his Whig opponents. Seba Smith, the humorist, writing under the name of ‘Major Jack Downing,’ started the story that Jackson endorsed his papers O. K., under the impression that they formed the initials of Oll Korrect. Possibly the General did use this endorsement, and it was used by other people also. But James Parton has discovered in the records of the Nashville court of which Jackson was a judge, before he became President, numerous documents endorsed O. R., meaning Order Recorded. He urges, therefore, that it was a record of that court with some belated business which Major Downing saw on the desk of the Presidential candidate. However this may be, the Democrats, in lieu of denying the charge, adopted the letters O. K. as a sort of party cry and fastened them upon their banners.” There is, however, a rival etymology for O. K., whereby it is derived from an Indian word, okeh, signifying “so be it.” Dr. Woodrow Wilson supported this derivation, and used okeh in approving papers to him as President; it also appears as the name of a popular series of phonograph records. Bartlett says that the figurative use of A No. 1, as in an A No. 1 man, also originated in America, but this may not be true. There can be little doubt, however, about T. B. (for tuberculosis), G. B. (for grand bounce), 23, on the Q.T., f.o.b., D. & D. (drunk and disorderly) and the army verb, to a. w. o. l. (to be absent without leave). The language breeds such short forms of speech prodigiously; every trade and profession has a host of them; they are innumerable in the slang of sport. 55 Often they represent the end-products of terms long in decay, e.g., elevated railway: elevated: el: L.

4

What one sees under all this is a double habit that sufficiently explains the gap which begins to yawn between English and American, particularly on the spoken plane. On the one hand it is a habit of verbal economy—a jealous disinclination to waste two words on what can be put into one, a natural taste for the brilliant and succinct, a disdain of all grammatical and lexicographical daintinesses, born partly, perhaps, of ignorance, but also in part of a sound sense of their imbecility. And on the other hand there is a high relish and talent for metaphor—in Brander Matthews’ phrase, “a figurative vigor that the Elizabethans would have realized and understood.” Just as the American rebels instinctively against such parliamentary circumlocutions as “I am not prepared to say” and “so much by way of being,” 56 just as he would fret under the forms of English journalism, with its reporting empty of drama, its thirdperson smothering of speeches and its complex and unintelligible jargon, just so, in his daily speech and writing he chooses terseness and vividness whenever there is any choice, and seeks to make one when it doesn’t exist. There is more than mere humorous contrast between the famous placard in the wash-room of the British Museum: “These Basins Are For Casual Ablutions Only,” and the familiar sign at American railroad-crossings: “Stop! Look! Listen!” Between the two lies an abyss separating two cultures, two habits of mind, two diverging tongues. It is almost unimaginable that Englishmen, journeying up and down in elevators, would ever have stricken the teens out of their speech, turning sixteenth into simple six and twenty-fourth into four; the clipping is almost as far from their way of doing things as the climbing so high in the air. Nor have they the brilliant facility of Americans for making new words of grotesque but penetrating tropes, as in corn-fed, tight-wad, bone-head, bleachers and juice (for electricity); when they attempt such things the result is often lugubrious; two hundred years of school-mastering has dried up their inspiration. Nor have they the fine American hand for devising new verbs; to maffick, to limehouse, to strafe and to wangle are their best specimens in twenty years, and all have an almost pathetic flatness. Their business with the language, indeed, is not in this department. They are not charged with its raids and scoutings, but with the organization of its conquests and the guarding of its accumulated stores.

5

For the student interested in the biology of language, as opposed to its paleontology, there is endless material in the racy neologisms of American, and particularly in its new compounds and novel verbs. Nothing could exceed the brilliancy of such inventions as joy-ride, high-brow, road-louse, sob-sister, frame-up, loan-shark, nature-faker, stand-patter, lounge-lizard, hash-foundry, buzz-wagon, has-been, end-seat-hog, shoot-the-chutes and grape-juice diplomacy. They are bold; they are vivid; they have humor; they meet genuine needs. Joy-ride is already going over into English, and no wonder. There is absolutely no synonym for it; to convey its idea in orthodox English would take a whole sentence. And so, too, with certain single words of metaphorical origin: barrel for large and illicit wealth, pork for unnecessary and dishonest appropriations of public money, joint for illegal liquor-house, tenderloin for gay and dubious neighborhood. 57 Many of these, and of the new compounds with them, belong to the vocabulary of disparagement, e. g., bone-head, skunk, bug, jay, lobster, boob, mutt, gas (empty talk), geezer, piker, baggage-smasher, hash-slinger, clock-watcher, four-flusher, coffin-nail, chin-music, batty and one-horse. Here an essential character of the American shows itself: his tendency to combat the disagreeable with irony, to heap ridicule upon what he is suspicious of or doesn’t understand. 58

6

The rapidity with which new verbs are made in the United States is really quite amazing. Two days after the first regulations of the Food Administration were announced, to hooverize appeared spontaneously in scores of newspapers, and a week later it was employed without any visible sense of its novelty in the debates of Congress and had taken on a respectability equal to that of to bryanize, to fletcherize and to oslerize. To electrocute appeared inevitably in the first public discussion of capital punishment by electricity; to taxi came in with the first taxicabs; to commute no doubt accompanied the first commutation ticket; to insurge attended the birth of the Progressive balderdash. Of late the old affix -ize, once fecund of such monsters as to funeralize, has come into favor again, and I note, among its other products, to belgiumize, to vacationize, to picturize, to scenarioize, to cohanize, 59 to citizenize and to institutionalize. But often the noun or adjective is used in its original form, without any attempt at explanatory inflection. Thus, I have encountered to census, 60 to wassermann, to major (i. e., to make this or that subject a major study in college), to debut, to author, to press-agent, to sacrilege, to house-clean, to reunion, 61 to headquarters, to pendulum, to janitor, 62 and to vacation. Many such verbs are in the vocabularies of the arts and crafts. American librarians say that a new book has been accessioned, trained nurses speak of specialing, firemen use siamesed hoses, uplifters report that they have contacted with cases, 63 dealers in kitchen appliances promise to service them (i. e., to keep them in repair for a definite time), and the managers of a well-known chain of hotels advertise that they are Statler-operated. The theatrical magazine, Variety, always brilliant with novel Americanisms, uses many such verbs, e. g., to lobby-display (i. e., to display photographs of a performer in a theatre lobby). A great boldness shows itself in the making of these new verbs. To demote, when it came in during the war, was scarcely challenged. To renig, a few years before, had been fashioned, as a matter of course, from renegade by back-formation. To knock, to rattle, to roast and to pan, when they appeared, were accepted without question as quite regular. I have found to s o s, in the form of its gerund. 64 To loan, still under the ban in England, has been long in very respectable use in the United States. I have observed its employment by a vice-president of the National City Bank of New York, 65 by the dramatic critic of the Nation, 66 and by the secretary of the Poetry Society of America. 67 Where a verb differs etymologically from its corresponding noun or is otherwise felt to be clumsy or pedantic, the tendency seems to be to dispose of the difference by manufacturing a new verb. Examples are afforded by to injunct, to steam-roller and to operate (transitive). To injunct, I note, has begun to crowd out to enjoin; it is obviously more in harmony with its noun, injunction. To steam-roller early displaced to steam-roll. 68 As for to operate, the Journal of the American Medical Association wars upon it in vain. More and more, surgeons report that they operated a patient, not on him.

7

This last example, however, violates one tendency almost as clearly as it shows another. In general, the English habit of hitching a preposition to a verb is carried to even greater lengths in America than it is in England. The colloquial language is very rich in such compounds, and some of them have come to have special meanings. Compare, for example, to give and to give out, to go back and to go back on, to beat and to beat it, to light and to light out, to butt and to butt in, to turn and to turn down, to show and to show up, to put and to put over, to wind and to wind up. Sometimes, however, the addition seems to be merely rhetorical, as in to start off, to finish up, to open up, to beat up (or out), to try out, to stop over (or off), and to hurry up. To hurry up is so commonplace in America that everyone uses it and no one notices it, but it remains rare in England. Up seems to be essential to many of these latter-day verbs, e. g., to pony up, to doll up, to ball up; without it they are without significance. Sometimes unmistakable adverbs are substituted for prepositions, as in to stay put and to call down. “Brush your hat off” would seem absurd to an Englishman; so would “The Committee reported out the bill.” Nearly all of these reinforced verbs are supported by corresponding adjectives and nouns, e. g., cut-up, show-down, kick-in, come-down, hand-out, start-off, wind-up, run-in, balled-up, dolled-up, bang-up, turn-down, frame-up, stop-over, jump-off, call-down, buttinski.

8

The rapidity with which words move through the parts of speech must be observed by every student of American. The case of bum I have already cited: it is noun, adjective, verb and adverb. The adjective lonesome, in “all by her lonesome,” becomes a sort of pronoun. The verb to think, in “he had another think coming,” becomes a noun. Jitney is an old American noun lately revived; a month after its revival it was also an adjective, and before long it will be a verb. To lift up was turned tail first and made a substantive, and is now also an adjective and a verb. Joy-ride became a verb the day after it was born as a noun. So did auto and phone. So did the adjective, a. w. o. l. Immediately the Workmen’s Compensation Act began to appear on the statute-books of the States, the adjective compensable was born. Other adjectives are made by the simple process of adding -y to nouns, e. g., classy, tasty, tony. And what of livest? An astounding inflection, indeed—but with quite sound American usage behind it. The Metropolitan Magazine, of which Col. Roosevelt was an editor, announces on its letter paper that it is “the livest magazine in America,” and Poetry, the organ of the new poetry movement, used to print at the head of its contents page the following encomium from the New York Tribune: “the livest art in America today is poetry, and the livest expression of that art is in this little Chicago monthly.”

9

We have seen how readily new prefixes and affixes are adopted in America. Often a whole word is thus put to service, and such amalgamations produce many new words. Thus smith threatens to breed a long series of new agent nouns, e. g., ad-smith, joke-smith; and fiend (a characteristic American hyperbole) has already produced a great many, e. g., movie-fiend, drug-fiend, bridge-fiend, golf-fiend, coke-fiend, kissing-fiend. Moreover, there is no impediment to their almost infinite multiplication. If some enterprising shoe-repairer began calling himself a shoe-smith tomorrow no one would think to protest against the neologism, and if some new game were introduced from abroad, say the German Skat, the corresponding fiend would come with it. Always the effort is to dispose of a long explanatory phrase by substituting a succinct and concrete term. This effort is responsible for many whole classes of compounds, e. g., the hospital series: doll-hospital, china-hospital, camera-hospital, pipe-hospital, etc. It is responsible, too, for many somewhat startling derivatives, e. g., mixologist and tuberculogian. 69 And it lies behind the invention of many words that are not compounds, but boldly put forth new roots, many of them etymologically unintelligible, e. g., jazz, jinx, hobo, 70 woozy, goo-goo (eyes), hoakum, sundae. A large number of characteristic Americanisms are deliberate inventions, devised to designate new objects or to clothe old objects with a special character. The American advertiser is an extraordinarily diligent manufacturer of such terms, and many of his coinages, e. g., kodak, vaseline, listerine, postum, carborundum, klaxon, jap-a-lac, pianola, victrola, dictagraph and uneeda are quite as familiar to all Americans as tractor or soda-mint, and have come into general acceptance as common nouns. The Eastman Kodak Company, indeed, has sometimes had to call attention to the fact that kodak is its legal property, and in the same way the Chesebrough Manufacturing Company has had to protect vaseline. 71 Dr. Louise Pound has made an interesting study of these artificial trade-names. 72 They fall, she finds, into a number of well defined classes. There are the terms that are simple derivatives from proper names, e. g., listerine, postum, klaxon; the shortenings, e. g., jell-o, jap-a-lac; the extensions with common suffixes, e. g., alabastine, protectograph, dictograph, orangeade, crispette, pearline, electrolier; the extensions with new or fanciful suffixes, e. g., resinol, thermos, grafanola, shinola, sapolio, lysol, neolin, crisco; the diminutives, e. g., cascaret, wheatlet, chiclet; the simple compounds, e. g., palmolive, spearmint, peptomint, auto-car; the blends, e. g., cuticura, damaskeene, locomobile, mobiloil; the blends made of proper names, e. g., Oldsmobile, Hupmobile, Valspar; the blends made of parts of syllables or simple initials, e. g., Reo, nabisco; the terms involving substitution, e. g., triscut; and the arbitrary formations, e. g., kodak, tiz, clysmic, vivil. Dr. Brander Matthews once published an Horatian ode, of unknown authorship, made up of such inventions. 73 I transcribe it for the joy of connoisseurs:

Chipeco thermos dioxygen, temco sonora tuxedo

Resinol fiat bacardi, camera ansco wheatena;

Antiskid pebeco calox, oleo tyco barometer

Postum nabisco!

Prestolite arco congoleum, karo aluminum kryptok,

Crisco balopticon lysol, jello bellans, carborundum!

Ampico clysmic swoboda, pantasote necco britannica

Encyclopædia?

10

One of the words here used is not American, but Italian, i. e., fiat, a blend made of the initials of Fabbrica Italiano Automobili Torino; most of the others are quite familiar to all Americans. “But only a few of them,” says Dr. Matthews, “would evoke recognition from an Englishman; and what a Frenchman or a German would make out of the eight lines it is beyond human power even to guess. Corresponding words have been devised in France and in Germany, but only infrequently; and apparently the invention of trade-mark names is not a customary procedure on the part of foreign advertisers. The British, although less affluent in this respect than we are, seem to be a little more inclined to employ the device than their competitors on the continent. Every American, traveling on the railways which converge upon London, must have experienced a difficulty in discovering whether the station at which his train has paused is Stoke Pogis or Bovril, Chipping Norton or Mazzawattee. None the less it is safe to say that the concoction of a similar ode by the aid of the trade-mark words invented in the British Isles would be a task of great difficulty on account of the paucity of terms sufficiently artificial to bestow the exotic remoteness which is accountable for the aroma of the American ‘ode’.”

11

Of analogous character are artificial words of the scalawag and rambunctious class, the formation of which constantly goes on. Some of them are telescope forms: grandificent (from grand and magnificent), sodalicious (from soda and delicious) and warphan (age) (from war and orphan [age]). Others are made up of common roots and grotesque affixes: swelldoodle, splendiferous and peacharino. Yet others are stretch forms or mere extravagant inventions: scallywampus, supergobsloptious and floozy. 74 Many of these are devised by advertisement writers or college students and belong properly to slang, but there is a steady movement of selected specimens into the common vocabulary. The words in -doodle hint at German influences, and those in -ino owe something to Italian or maybe to Spanish.

12

Note 42.  Vide Lounsbury: The Standard of Usage in English, pp. 65-7. [back]

Note 43.  An interesting discussion of such words is in Otto Jespersen’s Growth and Structure of the English Language, 3rd ed.; Leipzig, 1919, pp. 170--2. See also Clipped Words, by Elisabeth Wittmann, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. ii (1914), pp. 115 ff., and Stunts in Language, by Louise Pound, English Journal, vol. ix, no. 2 (Feb., 1920), pp. 88 ff. [back]

Note 44.  This etymology for mutt is supported by Budd Fisher, creator of Mutt and Jeff. See Editor and Publisher, April 17, 1919, p. 21. [back]

Note 45.  Some of these college forms are very picturesque, e. g., weir for weird (Dartmouth), dent for dental student (University of Minnesota), and psych for psychology (Vassar). See College Words and Phrases, by E. H. Babbitt, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, pt. i, p. 3 ff. [back]

Note 46.  Clipped Words, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. ii, p. 137. [back]

Note 47.  Thon was first proposed by C. C. Converse, of Erie, Pa., in 1858, as a substitute for the clumsy he-and (or) -she and him-and (or) -her. [back]

Note 48.  Blends; Heidelberg, 1914, p. 25. (Anglistische Forschungen, heft 42.) See also her Stunts in Language, English Journal, Feb., 1920, p. 91 ff. [back]

Note 49.  “He uses it,” writes James W. Johnson, the Negro poet, “in his The Negro in the New World, 1910. He may have used it in some earlier publication also.” [back]

Note 50.  Vogue Affixes in Present-Day Word-Coinage, Dialect Notes, vol. v, pt. i (1918), p. 10. [back]

Note 51.  A correspondent tells me, however, that the first cafeteria was in Chicago. He says: “A Chicago man was planning to open a new lunchroom in that city with the new feature of the guests serving themselves. He wanted a new and appropriate name for it, and applied to my cousin, who had lived in Buenos Aires. This cousin suggested cafeteria, which was adopted. It should be accented on the penultimate, but the patrons immediately moved the accent one place forward. This was about the year 1900.” [back]

Note 52.  Baltimore Trolley News, June 16, 1918. [back]

Note 53.  Clipped Words, op. cit., p. 116. [back]

Note 54.  An amusing article on the influence of headlines upon American speechhabits, by Philip Littell, will be found in the New Republic, July 27, 1921. [back]

Note 55.  Cf. Semi-Secret Abbreviations, by Percy W. Long, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. iii, 1915. [back]

Note 56.  The classical example is in a parliamentary announcement by Sir Robert Peel: “When that question is made to me in a proper time, in a proper place, under proper qualifications, and with proper motives, I will hesitate long before I will refuse to take it into consideration.” [back]

Note 57.  This use oftenderloin is ascribed to Alexander (alias “Clubber”) Williams, a New York police captain. Vide the New York Sun, July 11, 1913. Williams, in 1876, was transferred from an obscure precinct to West Thirtieth Street. “I’ve been having chuck steak ever since I’ve been on the force,” he said, “and now I’m going to have a bit of tenderloin.” “The name”, says theSun, “has endured more than a generation, moving with the changed amusement geography of the city, and has been adopted in all parts of the country.” [back]

Note 58.  Cf. Terms of Disparagement, by Marie Gladys Hayden, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. iii, pp. 194 ff. Also Terms of Disparagement in the Dialect Speech of High School Pupils in California and New Mexico, by Elsie L. Warnock, Dialect Notes, vol. v, pt. ii, pp. 60 ff. [back]

Note 59.  Apparently a deliberate invention by George M. Cohan, who uses it in his advertising. It means to embellish a musical piece with the characteristic Cohan touches. In the same way the manufacturers of Neolin, a substitute for leather, have sought to popularize to neolinize. [back]

Note 60.  New International Encyclopedia, vol. xiv, p. 674. [back]

Note 61.  Freeman, May 12, 1920, p. 211, col. 1. [back]

Note 62.  Semi-Centennial Anniversary Book, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Neb., 1919, p. 43. [back]

Note 63.  See a statement by the Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board, Congressional Record, June 28, 1919, p. 2105, col. 1. [back]

Note 64.  New York Evening Mail, Feb. 2, 1918, p. 1. [back]

Note 65.  George E. Roberts, Nation’s Business, Oct., 1920, p. 2, col. 1. [back]

Note 66.  Ludwig Lewisohn, in his translation of Wassermann’s The World’s Illusion; New York, 1920. [back]

Note 67.  Jessie B. Rittenhouse, Poetry, Jan., 1921, p. 229. [back]

Note 68.  Similarly the agent noun derived from the New Thought is not New Thinker but New Thoughter. [back]

Note 69.  I encounter this in The Campaign, a magazine published by the Health Department of Iowa. [back]

Note 70.  An etymology for hobo is suggested by H. R. Jeffrey in Dialect Notes, vol. v, pt. iii (1920), p. 86. As for jazz, see English, May-June, 1919, p. 90. [back]

Note 71.  Kodak had even got into the Continental languages. In October, 1917, the Verband Deutscher Amateurphotographen-Vereine was moved to issue the following warning: “Es giebt keine deutschen Kodaks. Kodak, als Sammelname fu¨r photographische Erzeugnisse, ist falsch und bezeichnet nur die Fabrikate der Eastman-Kodak-Company. Wer von einem Kodak spricht und nur allgemein eine photographische Kamera meint, bedenkt nicht, dass er mit der Weiterverbreitung dieses Wortes die deutsche Industrie zugunsten der amerikanischenglischen scha¨digt.” In American there are a number of familiar derivatives, e. g., to kodak, kodaker, kodak-fiend. [back]

Note 72.  Word-Coinage and Modern Trade Names, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. i (1913), pp. 29--41. [back]

Note 73.  The Advertiser’s Artful Aid, Bookman, Feb., 1919, p. 659 ff. See also Word-Coinage, by Leon Mead; New York, n. d., and Burgess Unabridged, by Gelett Burgess; New York, 1914. [back]

Note 74.  Cf. Some English “Stretch Forms,” by Louise Pound, Dialect Notes, vol. iv pt. i, p. 52. Also Terms of Approbation and Eulogy, by Elsie L. Warnock, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. i, p. 13 ff. [back]

The extent of such influences as those last noted upon the development of American, and particularly spoken American, is often underestimated. In no other large nation of the world are there so many aliens, nor is there any other in which so large a proportion of the resident aliens speak languages incomprehensible to the native. Since 1820 nearly 35,000,000 immigrants have come into this country, and of them probably not 10,000,000 brought any preliminary acquaintance with English with them. The census of 1910 showed that nearly 1,500,000 persons then living permanently on American soil could not speak it at all; that more than 13,000,000 had been born in other countries, chiefly of different language; 75 and that nearly 20,000,000 were the children of such immigrants, and hence under the influence of their speech habits. No other country houses so many aliens. In Great Britain the alien population, for a century past, has never been more than 2 per cent of the total population, and since the passage of the Aliens Act of 1905 it has tended to decline steadily. In Germany, in 1910, there were but 1,259,873 aliens in a population of more than 60,000,000, and of these nearly half were German-speaking Austrians and Swiss. In France, in 1906, there were 1,000,000 foreigners in a population of 39,000,000 and a third of them were French-speaking Belgians, Luxembourgeois and Swiss. In Italy, in 1911, there were but 350,000 in a population of 35,000,000.

1

This large and constantly reinforced admixture of foreigners has naturally exerted a constant pressure upon the national language, for the majority of them, at least in the first generation, have found it quite impossible to acquire it in any purity, and even their children have grown up with speech habits differing radically from those of correct English. The effects of this pressure are obviously two-fold; on the one hand the foreigner, struggling with a strange and difficult tongue, makes efforts to simplify it as much as possible, and so strengthens the native tendency to disregard all niceties and complexities, and on the other hand he corrupts it with words and locutions from the language he has brought with him, and sometimes with whole idioms and grammatical forms. We have seen, in earlier chapters, how the Dutch and French of colonial days enriched the vocabulary of the colonists, how the German immigrants of the first half of the nineteenth century enriched it still further, and how the Irish of the same period influenced its everyday usages. The same process is still going on. The Italians, the Slavs, and above all, the Russian Jews, make steady contributions to the American vocabulary and idiom, and though these contributions are often concealed by quick and complete naturalization their foreignness to English remains none the less obvious. I should worry, 76 In its way, is correct English, but in essence it is as completely Yiddish as kosher, ganof, schadchen, oi-yoi, or mazuma. 77

2

The extent of such influences remains to be studied; in the whole literature I can find but one formal article upon the subject. That article 78 deals specifically with the suffix -fest, which came into American from the German and was probably suggested by familiarity with sängerfest. There is no mention of it in any of the dictionaries of Americanisms, and yet, in such forms as talkfest, gabfest, 79 swatfest and hoochfest, it is met with almost daily. So with -heimer, -inski and -bund. Several years ago -heimer had a great vogue in slang, and was rapidly done to death. But wiseheimer remains in colloquial use as a facetious synonym for smart-aleck, and after awhile it may gradually acquire dignity. Far lowlier words, in fact, have worked their way in. Buttinski, perhaps, is going the same route. As for the words in -bund, many of them are already almost accepted. Plunder-bund is now at least as good as pork-barrel and slush-fund, and money-bund is frequently heard in Congress. 80 Such locutions creep in stealthily, and are secure before they are suspected. Current slang, out of which the more decorous language dredges a large part of its raw materials, is full of them. Nix and nixy, for no, are debased forms of the German nicht; aber nit, once as popular as camouflage, is obviously aber nicht. And a steady flow of nouns, all needed to designate objects introduced by immigrants, enriches the vocabulary. The Hungarians not only brought their national condiment with them; they also brought its name, paprika, and that name is now thoroughly American, as is goulash. 81 In the same way the Italians brought in camorra, pad-rone, spaghetti, chianti, and other substantives, 82 and the Jews made contributions from Yiddish and Hebrew and greatly reinforced certain old borrowings from German. Once such a loan-word gets in it takes firm root. During the first year of American participation in the World War an effort was made on patriotic grounds to substitute liberty-cabbage for sauer-kraut, but it quickly failed, for the name had become as completely Americanized as the thing itself, and so liberty-cabbage seemed affected and absurd. In the same way a great many other German words survived the passions of the time. Nor could all the ardor of the professional patriots obliterate that German influence which has fastened upon the American yes something of the quality of ja, or prevent the constant appearance of such German loan-forms as “it listens well” and “I want out.” Many American loan-words are of startlingly outlandish origin. Hooch, according to a recent writer, 83 is from a northwestern Indian language, and so is skookum. Cuspidor, a typical Americanism, is from the Portuguese cuspador, one who spits. 84

3

Constant familiarity with such immigrants from foreign languages and with the general speech habits of foreign peoples has made American a good deal more hospitable to loan-words than English, even in the absence of special pressure. Let the same word knock at the gates of the two languages, and American will admit it more readily, and give it at once a wider and more intimate currency. Examples are afforded by café, vaudeville, revue, employé, boulevard, cabaret, exposé, kindergarten, dépât, fête, and menu. Café, in American, is a word of much larger and more varied meaning than in English and is used much more frequently, and by many more persons. So is employé, in the naturalized form of employee. So is toilet: we have even seen it as a euphemism for native terms that otherwise would be in daily use. So is kindergarten: during the war I read of a kindergarten for the elementary instruction of conscripts. Such words are not unknown to the Englishman, but when he uses them it is with a plain sense of their foreignness. In American they are completely naturalized, as is shown by the spelling and pronunciation of most of them. An American would no more think of attempting the correct French pronunciation of depot (though he always makes the final t silent), or of putting the French accents upon it than he would think of spelling toilet with the final te or of essaying to pronounce Münchner in the German manner. Often curious battles go on between such loan-words and their English equivalents, and with varying fortunes. In 1895 Weber and Fields tried to establish music-hall in New York, but it quickly succumbed to vaudeville-theatre, as variety had succumbed to vaudeville before it. In the same way lawn-fete (without the circumflex accent, and sometimes, alas, pronounced feet) has elbowed out the English garden-party. But now and then, when the competing loanword happens to violate American speech habits, a native term ousts it. The French crèche offers an example; it has been entirely displaced by day-nursery.

4

The English, in this matter, display their greater conservatism very plainly. Even when a loan-word enters both English and American simultaneously a sense of foreignness lingers about it on the other side of the Atlantic much longer than on this side, and it is used with far more self-consciousness. The word matinée offers a convenient example. To this day the English commonly print it in italics, give it its French accent, and pronounce it with some attempt at the French manner. But in America it is entirely naturalized, and the most ignorant man uses it without any feeling that it is strange. Often a loan-word loses all signs of its original foreignness. For example, there is shimmy, a corruption of both chemise and chemin (de fer), the name of a card game: it has lost both its original forms and, in one sense, its original meaning. 85 The same lack of any sense of linguistic integrity is to be noticed in many other directions—for example, in the freedom with which the Latin per is used with native nouns. One constantly sees per day, per dozen, per hundred, per mile, etc., in American newspapers, even the most careful, but in England the more seemly a is almost always used, or the noun itself is made Latin, as in per diem. Per, in fact, is fast becoming an everyday American word. Such phrases as “as per your letter (or order) of the 15th inst.” are met with incessantly in business correspondence. The same greater hospitality is shown by the readiness with which various un-English prefixes and affixes come into fashion, for example, super- and -itis. The English accept them gingerly; the Americans take them in with enthusiasm, and naturalize them instanter. 86

5

The pressure of loan-words, of course, is greatest in those areas in which the foreign population is largest. In some of these areas it has given rise to what are almost distinct dialects. Everyone who has ever visited lower Pennsylvania must have observed the wide use of German terms by the natives, and the German intonations in their speech, even when they are most careful with their English. 87 In the same way, the English of everyday life in New Orleans is full of French terms, e.g., praline, brioche, lagniappe, armoir, kruxingiol (= croquignole), pooldoo (= poule d’eau), 88 and the common speech of the Southwest is heavy with debased Spanish, e.g., alamo, arroyo, chaparral, caballero, comino, jornada, frijole, presidio, serape, hombre, quien sabe, vamose. 89 As in the early days of settlement, there is a constant movement of favored loan-words into the general speech of the country. Hooch, from the Chinook, was for long a localism in the Northwest; suddenly it appeared everywhere. So with certain Chinese and Japanese words that have, within late years, entered the general speech from the speech of California. New York has been the port of entry for most of the new Yiddish and Italian loan-words, as it was the port of entry for Irishisms seventy years ago. In Michigan the natives begin to borrow from the Dutch settlers and may later on pass on their borrowings to the rest of the country; in the prairie states many loan-words from the Scandinavian languages are already in use; in Kansas there are even traces of Russian influence. 90

6

In the Philippines and in Hawaii American naturally shows even greater hospitality to loan-words; in both places distinct dialects have been developed, quite unintelligible to the newcomer from home. Maurice P. Dunlap 91 offers the following specimen of a conversation between two Americans long resident in Manila:

Hola, amigo.

Komusta kayo.

Porque were you hablaing with ese senorita?

She wanted a job as lavandera.

Cuanto?

Ten cents, conant, a piece, so I told her no kerry.

Have you had chow? Well, spera, till I sign this chit and I’ll take a paseo with you.

7

Here we have an example of Philippine American that shows all the tendencies of American Yiddish. It retains the general forms of American, but in the short conversation, embracing but 41 different words, there are eight loan-words from the Spanish (hola, amigo, porque, ese, senorita, lavandera, cuanto and paseo), two Spanish locutions in a debased form (spera for espera and no kerry for no quiero), two loan-words from the Tagalog (komusta and kayo), 92 two from Pidgin English (chow andchit), one Philippine-American localism (conant), and a Spanish verb with an English inflection (hablaing).

8

The American dialect developed in Hawaii is thus described by a writer in the Christian Science Monitor: 93

Honolulu, despite the score or more of races which intermingle in absolute harmony, is a strictly American community. English is the language which predominates; and yet there are perhaps a hundred or more Hawaiian words which are used by everyone, almost exclusively, in preference to those English words of similar meaning.

Are you pau?” asks the American housekeeper of her Japanese yard man.

“All pau,” he responds.

The housekeeper has asked if the yard man is through. He has replied that he is. She would not think of asking, “Are you through?” Pau—pronounced pow—as used in Honolulu conveys just as much meaning to the Honolulan as the English 94 word through. It is one of the commonest of the Hawaiian words used today.

In Honolulu one does not say “the northwest corner of Fort and Hotel Streets.” One says “the makai-ewa corner.” Makai means toward the sea. Ewa means toward the north or in the direction of the big Ewa plantation which lies toward the north of Honolulu. Thus the makai-ewa corner means that corner which is on the seaward side and toward Ewa. Instead of saying east or the direction in which the sun rises, Honolulans say mauka, which means toward the mountains. To designate south, they say waikiki, which means toward Diamond Head or Waikiki Beach.

One often hears a little boy say he has a puka in his stocking. The housekeeper directs the yard man to put the rubbish in the puka. It is a simple Hawaiian word meaning hole. Another common word is lanai. In English it means porch or veranda. One never says, “Come out on the porch,” but “Come out on the lanai.”

The two words pahea oe are used as a term of greeting. In the States they say, “How do you do?” “How are you?” or “Good day.” In Honolulu, “Pahea oe?” conveys the same meaning. The response is Maikai no, or “Very good,” or “All right.”

On the mainland the word aloha is not new. It is used as a word of greeting or as a word of farewell. “Aloha oe” may mean “Farewell to you,” “How are you?” or “Good day.” The word is not as common among the Americans as some of the others, but is used to a more exclusive extent by the Hawaiians.

A large number of Americans have an entirely wrong interpretation of the word kanaka. In its truest and only sense it means man. It can be interpreted in no other way. In Hawaiian a man is a kanaka, a woman a wahine. The word kane is also often used as man, and coupled with the word keiki—keiki kane—means boy. The Hawaiians have often been referred to as kanakas, which on the mainland has developed into more or less of a slang word to designate the people of the Hawaiian race. This, however, is totally incorrect.

The kamaaina, or old-timer, usually refers to his hat as his papale. His house is his hale, and his food is usually designated as kaukau, although this is not a Hawaiian word. There are perhaps a hundred other such words which are used daily in preference to those which mean the same in English.

9

The immigrant in the midst of a large native population, of course, exerts no such pressure upon the national language as that exerted upon an immigrant language by the native, but nevertheless his linguistic habits and limitations have to be reckoned with in dealing with him, and the concessions thus made necessary have a very ponderable influence upon the general speech. Of much importance is the support given to a native tendency by the foreigner’s incapacity for employing (or even comprehending) syntax of any complexity, or words not of the simplest. This is the tendency toward succinctness and clarity, at whatever sacrifice of grace. One English observer, Sidney Low, puts the chief blame for the general explosiveness of American upon the immigrant, who must be communicated with in the plainest words available, and is not socially worthy of the suavity of circumlocution anyhow. 95 In his turn the immigrant seizes upon these plainest words as upon a sort of convenient Lingua Franca—his quick adoption of damn as a universal adjective is traditional—and throws his influence upon the side of the underlying speech habit when he gets on in the vulgate. Many characteristic Americanisms of the sort to stagger lexicographers—for example, near-silk—have come from the Jews, whose progress in business is a good deal faster than their progress in English.

10

Note 75.  As I write the 1920 returns are not complete. But a preliminary bulletin shows there were 13,703,987 foreign-born whites in the country that year, of whom less than 3,000,000 came from countries of English speech. [back]

Note 76.  In Yiddish, ish ka bibble. The origin and meaning of the phrase have been variously explained. One theory is to the effect that it is a Yiddish corruption of the German nicht gefiedelt (=not fiddled=not flustered). But this seems to me to be fanciful. To the Jews ish is probably the first personal pronoun and ka appears to be a corruption of kann. As for bibble, I suspect that it is the off-spring of bedibbert (=embarrassed, intimidated). The phrase thus has an ironical meaning, I should be embarrassed, almost precisely equivalent to I should worry. [back]

Note 77.  All of which, of course, are coming into American, along with many other Yiddish words. These words tend to spread far beyond the areas actually settled by Jews. Thus I find mazuma in a Word-List from Kansas, from the collectanea of Judge J. C. Ruppenthal, of Russell, Kansas, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. v, 1916, p. 322. [back]

Note 78.  Louise Pound: Domestication of the Suffix -fest, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. v, 1916. Dr. Pound, it should be mentioned, has also printed a brief note on -inski. [back]

Note 79.  A writer in The Editor and Publisher for Dec. 25, 1919, p. 30, credits the first use of gabfest to the late Joseph S. McCullagh, editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. He says: “McCullagh coined the word while writing a comment upon an unusually prolonged and empty debate in Congress. No other word in the dictionary or out of it seemed to fit the case so well, and as a great percentage of the readers of the Globe-Democrat throughout the Central West were of German birth or origin, gabfest was seized upon with hearty zest, and it is today very generally applied to any protracted and particularly loquacious gathering.” [back]

Note 80.  For example, see the Congressional Record for April 3, 1918, p. 4928. [back]

Note 81.  Paprika is in the Standard Dictionary, but I have been unable to find it in any English dictionary. Another such word is kimono, from the Japanese. [back]

Note 82.  Including, so Dr. Arthur Livingston tells me, policy (the name of the gambling game). Dr. Livingston believes that policy is from polizza, which is immigrant Italian for the ticket used in a lottery. [back]

Note 83.  Writer’s Monthly, March, 1921, p. 251. [back]

Note 84.  A correspondent tells me that it was introduced by James Connolly, of New York, a manufacturer of spittoons. [back]

Note 85.  Cf. The Jocularization of French Words and Phrases in Present Day American Speech, by Louise Pound, Dialect Notes, vol. v, p. iii, 1920. [back]

Note 86.  Cf. Vogue Affixes in Present-Day Word-Coinage, by Louise Pound, Dialect Notes, vol. v, pt. i, 1918. Dr. Pound ascribes the vogue of super-to German influences. See also The Cult of Super, Boston Globe, Aug. 31, 1921. [back]

Note 87.  See Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 157; ibid., p. 337. [back]

Note 88.  See Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 268; ibid., p. 346; ibid., p. 420. [back]

Note 89.  See three articles by the late Prof. H. Tallichet in Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 185, p. 243 and p. 324. [back]

Note 90.  Cf. Russian Words in Kansas, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 161. [back]

Note 91.  What Americans Talk in the Philippines, American Review of Reviews, Aug., 1913. [back]

Note 92.  But here komusta may be borrowed from the Spanish como está (= how are you?). [back]

Note 93.  Unluckily, I have been unable to determine the writer’s name or the date. [back]

Note 94.  That is, American; through, in this sense, is seldom used by the English. [back]

Note 95.  The American People, 2 vols.; New York, 1909--11, vol. ii, pp. 449--50. For a discussion of this effect of contact with foreigners upon a language see also Beach-la-Mar, by William Churchill; Washington, 1911, p. 11 ff [back]

1. General Characters

“Language,” said Sayce, in 1879, “does not consist of letters, but of sounds, and until this fact has been brought home to us our study of it will be little better than an exercise of memory.”  1 The theory, at that time, was somewhat strange to English grammarians and etymologists, despite the investigations of A. J. Ellis and the massive lesson of Grimm’s law; their labors were largely wasted upon deductions from the written word. But since then, chiefly under the influence of German philologists, they have turned from orthographical futilities to the actual sounds of the tongue, and the latest and best grammar, that of Sweet, is frankly based upon, the spoken English of educated Englishmen—not, remember, of conscious purists, but of the general body of cultivated folk. Unluckily, this new method also has its disadvantages. The men of a given race and time usually write a good deal alike, or, at all events, attempt to write alike, but in their oral speech there are wide variations. “No two persons,” says a leading contemporary authority upon English phonetics,  2 “pronounce exactly alike.” Moreover, “even the best speaker commonly uses more than one style.” The result is that it is extremely difficult to determine the prevailing pronunciation of a given combination of letters at any time and place. The persons whose speech is studied pronounce it with minute shades of difference, and admit other differences according as they are conversing naturally or endeavoring to exhibit their pronunciation. Worse, it is impossible to represent a great many of these shades in print. Sweet, trying to do it,  3 found himself, in the end, with a preposterous alphabet of 125 letters. Prince L.-L. Bonaparte more than doubled this number, and Ellis brought it to 390.  4 Other phonologists, English and Continental, have gone floundering into the same bog. The dictionary-makers, forced to a far greater economy of means, are brought into obscurity. The difficulties of the enterprise, in fact, are probably unsurmountable. It is, as White says, “almost impossible for one person to express to another by signs the sound of any word.” “Only the voice,” he goes on, “is capable of that; for the moment a sign is used the question arises, What is the value of that sign? The sounds of words are the most delicate, fleeting and inapprehensible things in nature. …. Moreover, the question arises as to the capability to apprehend and distinguish sounds on the part of the person whose evidence is given.”  5 Certain German orthoëpists, despairing of the printed page, have turned to the phonograph, and there is a Deutsche Grammophon-Gesellschaft in Berlin which offers records of specimen speeches in a great many languages and dialects, including English. The phonograph has also been put to successful use in language teaching by various American correspondence schools.

1

In view of all this it would be hopeless to attempt to exhibit in print the numerous small differences between English and American pronunciation, for many of them are extremely delicate and subtle, and only their aggregation makes them plain. According to a recent and very careful observer  6 the most important of them do not lie in pronunciation at all, properly so called, but in intonation. In this direction, he says, one must look for the true characters of “the English accent.” Despite the opinion of Krapp, a very competent authority, that “the American voice in general starts on a higher plane, is normally pitched higher than the British voice,”  7 I incline to agree with White that the contrary is the case. The nasal twang which Englishmen observe in the vox Americana, though it has high overtones, is itself not high pitched, but rather low pitched, as all constrained and muffled tones are apt to be. The causes of that twang have long engaged phonologists, and in the main they agree that there is a physical basis for it—that our generally dry climate and rapid changes of temperature produce and actual thickening of the membranes concerned in the production of sound.  8 We are, in brief, a somewhat snuffling people, and much more given to catarrhs and coryzas than the inhabitants of damp Britain. Perhaps this general impediment to free and easy utterance, subconsciously apprehended, is responsible both for the levelness of tone of American speech, noted by Krapp, and for the American tendency to pronounce the separate syllables of a word with much more care than an Englishman bestows upon them. “To British ears,” says Krapp,  9 “American speech often sounds hesitating, monotonous and indecisive, and British speech, on the other hand, is likely to seem to Americans abrupt, explosive and manneristic.” The American, in giving extraordinary six careful and distinct syllables instead of the Englishman’s grudging four, may be seeking to make up for a natural disability. Marsh, in his “Lectures on the English Language,” sought two other explanations of the fact. On the one hand, he argued that the Americans of his day read a great deal more than the English, and were thus much more influenced by the spelling of words, and on the other hand he pointed out that “our flora shows that the climate of even our Northern States belongs … to a more Southern type than that of England,” and that “in Southern latitudes … articulation is generally much more distinct than in Northern regions.” In support of the latter proposition he cited the pronunciation of Spanish, Italian and Turkish, as compared with that of English, Danish and German—rather unfortunate examples, for the pronunciation of German is at least as clear as that of Spanish. Swedish would have supported his case far better: the Swedes debase their vowels and slide over their consonants even more markedly than the English. Marsh believed that there was a tendency among Southern peoples to throw the accent toward the ends of words, and that this helped to bring out all the syllables. A superficial examination shows a number of examples of that movement of accent in American: advertisement, paresis, pianist, primarily, telegrapher, temporarily. The English invariably accent all of these words on the first syllable; Americans usually accent primarily and telegrapher on the second, and temporarily on the third, and paresis and pianist on the second. Again there are frontier and harass. The English accent the first syllables; we accent the second. Yet again there is the verb, to perfect. Tucker says  10 that its accentuation on the second syllable, “bringing it into harmony with perfume, cement, desert, present, produce, progress, project, rebel, record, and other words which are accented on the final syllable when used as verbs, originated in this country.” But when all these examples have been marshalled, the fact remains that there are just as many examples, and perhaps many more, of an exactly contrary tendency. The chief movement in American, in truth, would seem to be toward throwing the accent upon the first syllable. I recall mamma, papa, inquiry, ally, recess, details, idea, alloy, deficit, armistice and adult; I might add defect, excess, address, magazine, decoy and romance.

2

Thus it is unsafe, here as elsewhere, to generalize too facilely, and particularly unsafe to exhibit causes with too much assurance. “Man frage nicht warum,” says Philipp Karl Buttmann. “Der Sprachgebrauch lässt sich nur beobachten.”  11 But the greater distinctness of American utterance, whatever its genesis and machinery, is palpable enough in many familiar situations. “The typical American accent,” says Vizetelly, “is often harsh and unmusical, but it sounds all of the letters to be sounded, and slurs, but does not distort, the rest.”  12 An American, for example, almost always sounds the first l in fulfill; an Englishman makes the first syllable foo. An American sounds every syllable in extraordinary, literary, military, dysentery, temporary, necessarily, secretary and the other words of the -ary-group;  13 an Englishman never pronounces the a of the penultimate syllable. Kindness, with the d silent, would attract notice in the United States; in England, according to Jones,  14 the d is “very commonly, if not usually” omitted. Often, in America, commonly retains a full t; in England it is actually and officially offen. Let an American and an Englishman pronounce program (me). Though the Englishman retains the long form of the last syllable in writing, he reduces it in speaking to a thick triple consonant, grm; the American enunciates it clearly, rhyming it with damn. Or try the two with any word ending in -g, say sporting or ripping. Or with any word having r before a consonant, say card, harbor, lord or preferred. “The majority of Englishmen,” says Menner, “certainly do not pronounce the r …; just as certainly the majority of educated Americans pronounce it distinctly.”  15 Henry James, visiting the United States after many years of residence in England, was much harassed by this persistent r-sound, which seemed to him to resemble “a sort of morose grinding of the back teeth.”  16 So sensitive to it did he become that he began to hear it where it was actually non-existent, save as an occasional barbarism, for example, in Cuba-r, vanilla-r and California-r. He put the blame for it, and for various other departures from the strict canon of contemporary English, upon “the American school, the American newspaper, and the American Dutchman and Dago.” Unluckily for his case, the full sounding of the r came into American long before the appearance of any of these influences. The early colonists, in fact, brought it with them from England, and it still prevailed there in Dr. Johnson’s day, for he protested publicly against the “rough snarling sound” and led the movement which finally resulted in its extinction.  17 Today, extinct, it is mourned by English purists, and the Poet Laureate denounces the clergy of the Established Church for saying “the sawed of the Laud” instead of “the sword of the Lord.”  18

3

But even in the matter of elided consonants American is not always the conservator. We cling to the r, we preserve the l in almond, we are relatively careful about the final g, we give nephew a clear f-sound instead of the clouded English v-sound, and we boldly nationalize trait and pronounce its final t, but we drop the second p from pumpkin and change the m to n, we change the ph (=f) sound to plain p in diphtheria, diphthong and naphtha,  19 we relieve rind of its final d, we begin to neglect the d in landlady, handsome, grandmother, etc., and, in the complete sentence, we slaughter consonants by assimilation. I have heard Englishmen say brand-new, but on American lips it is almost invariably bran-new. So nearly universal is this nasalization in the United States that certain American lexicographers have sought to found the term upon bran and not upon brand. Here the national speech is powerfully influenced by Southern dialectical variations, which in turn probably derive partly from French example and partly from the linguistic limitations of the negro. The latter, even after two hundred years, has great difficulties with our consonants, and often drops them. A familiar anecdote well illustrates his speech habit. On a train stopping at a small station in Georgia a darkey threw up a window and yelled “Wah ee?” The reply from a black on the platform was “Wah oo?” A Northerner aboard the train, puzzled by this inarticulate dialogue, sought light from a Southern passenger, who promptly translated the first question as “Where is he?” and the second as “Where is who?” A recent viewer with alarm  20 argues that this conspiracy against the consonants is spreading, and that English printed words no longer represent the actual sounds of the American language. “Like the French,” he says, “we have a marked liaison—the borrowing of a letter from the preceding word. We invite one another to c’ meer (=come here) …. Hoo-zat? (=who is that?) has as good a liaison as the French vous avez.” This critic believes that American tends to abandon t for d, as in Sadd’y (=Saturday) and siddup (=sit up), and to get rid of h, as in ware-zee? (=where is he?). But here we invade the vulgar speech, which belongs to Chapter IX. Even, however, in the standard speech there is a great slaughter of vowels. A correspondent of education, accustomed to observing accurately, sends me the following specimens of his own everyday conversation:

We mus’n’ b’lieve all th’ts said.

Wh’n y’ go t’ gi’ ch’ hat, please bring m’ mine.

Le’s go.

Would’n’ stay if’ could.

Keep on writin’ t’ll y’ c’n do ’t right.

4

But here, of course, we come upon the tendency to depress all vowels to the level of a neutral e—a tendency quite as visible in English as in American, though there are differences in detail. The two languages, however, seem to proceed toward phonetic decay on paths that tend to diverge more and more, and the divergences already in effect, though they may seem slight separately, are already of enough importance in the aggregate to put serious impediments between mutual comprehension. Let an Englishman and an American (not of New England) speak a quite ordinary sentence, “My aunt can’t answer for my dancing the lancers even passably,” and at once the gap separating the two pronunciations will be manifest. Add a dozen everyday words—military, schedule, trait, hostile, been, lieutenant, patent, laboratory, nephew, secretary, advertisement, and so on—and the strangeness of one to the other is augmented. “Every Englishman visiting the States for the first time,” said an English dramatist some time ago, “has a difficulty in making himself understood. stood. He often has to repeat a remark or a request two or three times to make his meaning clear, especially on railroads, in hotels and at bars. The American visiting England for the first time has the same trouble.”  21 Despite the fact that American actors always imitate English pronunciation to the best of their skill, this visiting Englishman asserted that the average American audience is incapable of understanding a genuinely English company, at least “when the speeches are rattled off in conversational style.” When he presented one of his own plays with an English company, he said, many American acquaintances, after witnessing the performance, asked him to lend them the manuscript, “that they might visit it again with some understanding of the dialogue.”  22 American speech is just as difficult for Englishmen.

5

Note 1.  The Science of Language, vol. ii, p. 339. [back]

Note 2.  Daniel Jones: The Pronunciation of English, 2nd ed.; Cambridge, 1914, p. 1. Jones is lecturer in phonetics at University College, London. [back]

Note 3.  Vide his Handbook of Phonetics, p. xv ff. [back]

Note 4.  It is given in Ellis’ Early English Pronunciations, p. 1293 ff. and in Sayce’s The Science of Language, vol. i, p. 353 ff. [back]

Note 5.  Every-Day English, p. 29. [back]

Note 6.  Robert J. Menner: The Pronunciation of English in America, Atlantic Monthly, March, 1915, p. 366. [back]

Note 7.  The Pronunciation of Standard English in America; New York, 1919, p. 50. For White, see Words and Their Uses, p. 58. [back]

Note 8.  The following passage from Kipling’s American Notes, ch. i, will be recalled: “Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the Yankee schoolmarm, the cider and the salt codfish of the Eastern states are responsible for what he calls a nasal accent. I know better. They stole books from across the water without paying for ’em, and the snort of delight was fixed in their nostrils forever by a just Providence. That is why they talk a foreign tongue today.” [back]

Note 9.  The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, p. 50. For Marsh, following, see lecture xxx, The English Language in America. [back]

Note 10.  American English, p. 33. [back]

Note 11.  Lexilogus, 2nd ed.; Berlin, 1860, p. 239. [back]

Note 12.  A Desk-Book of 25,000 Words Frequently Mispronounced, p. xvi. [back]

Note 13.  With the exception of cemetery; here the careful pronunciation of the last two syllables is a vulgarism. Cf. also the -oly and -ory groups, e. g., melancholy and laboratory. [back]

Note 14.  The Pronunciation of English, p. 17. [back]

Note 15.  The Pronunciation of English in America, op. cit., p. 362. See also On English Homophones, by Robert Bridges; Oxford, 1919, and Peetickay, by Wilfrid Perrett; Cambridge, 1920, p. 64 ff. Bridges’ word-lists show how far the elision of the r has gone in England. He gives the following, for example, as homophones: alms-arms, aunt-aren’t, balm-barm, board-bored-bawd, hoar-whore-haw, lorn-lawn, pore-paw, source-sauce, saw-soar-sore, stalk-stork, taut-taught-tort, father-farther, ah-are, ayah-ire, bah-bar-baa, taw-tore, raw-roar, more-maw, floor-flaw. [back]

Note 16.  The Question of Our Speech, p. 29 ff. [back]

Note 17.  Cf. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv, p. 487. [back]

Note 18.  Robert Bridges: A Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation; Oxford, 1913. [back]

Note 19.  An interesting discussion of this peculiarity is in Some Variant Pronunciations in the New South, by William A. Read, Dialect Notes, vol. iii, pt. vii, 1911, p. 504 ff. [back]

Note 20.  Hugh Mearns: Our Own, Our Native Speech, McClure’s Magazine, Oct., 1916. [back]

Note 21.  B. MacDonald Hastings, New York Tribune, Jan. 19, 1913. [back]

Note 22.  Various minor differences between English and American pronunciation, not noted here, are discussed in British and American Pronunciation, by Louise Pound, School Review, vol. xxiii, No. 6, June, 1915. [back]

In Chapters II and III, I have already discussed historically the pronunciation of a in the United States—not, I fear, to much effect, but at all events as illuminatingly as the meagre materials so far amassed permit. The best study of the pronunciation of the letter today is to be found in George Philip Krapp’s excellent book, “The Pronunciation of Standard English in America,” from which I have, already quoted several times. This work is the first adequate treatise upon American phonology to be published, and shows very careful observation and much good sense. Unluckily, Krapp finds it extremely difficult, like all other phonologists, to represent the sounds that he deals with by symbols. He uses, for example, exactly the same symbol to indicate the a-sound in cab and the a-sound in bad, though the fact that they differ very greatly must be obvious to everyone. In the same way he grows a bit vague when he tries to represent the compromise a-sound which lies somewhere between the a of father and the a of bad. “It is heard … chiefly,” he says, “in somewhat conscious and academic speech,” as a compromise between the former, “which is rejected as being too broad,” and the latter, “which is rejected as being too narrow or flat.” This compromise a, he says, “is cultivated in words with a, sometimes au, before a voiceless continuant, or before a nasal followed by a voiceless stop or continuant, as in grass, half, laugh, path (also before a voiced continuant, as in paths, calves, halves, baths, when the voiced form is a variant, usually the plural, of a head form with a voiceless sound), aunt, branch, can’t, dance, fancy, France, shan’t, etc.” Later on he says that this compromise a-sound is the same that occurs in heart, star, large and Clarke, but this, it seems to me, is not quite accurate; there is a perceptible difference. The usual sound of a in heart is far nearer to that of a in father.

1

In any case, as Krapp says, this a-sound is commonly an affectation, save in New England, and, as we have seen, it originated as an affectation even there. The flat a, on the contrary, is “widely distributed over the whole country,” and may be regarded as the normal American a, as the a of father is the normal English a. No other difference separates the two dialects more sharply. Krapp notes “the purist tendency to condemn [the flat a]” and goes on:

The result has been to give to [the compromise a] extraordinary dictionary and academic prestige in the face of a strongly opposing popular usage. The reasons for this are several: first, that standard British speech and some forms of New England speech have [a broad a] in the words in question; second, that New England has exerted, and to some extent continues to exert, a strong influence upon formal instruction and upon notions of cultivation and refinement throughout the country; and third, that [the flat a] is often prolonged, or drawled, and nasalized in a way that makes it seem not merely American, but provincially American. To steer between the Scylla of provincialism and the Charybdis of affectation and snobbishness, many conscientious speakers in America cultivate [the compromise a]. The writer has tested this sound on many different groups of speakers from various sections of the country, and has never found one who used the sound who did not do so with a certain degree of self-consciousness. If the cult of this sound continues long enough, it may in time come to be a natural and established sound in the language. In the meantime, it seems a pity that so much effort and so much time in instruction should be given to changing a natural habit of speech which is inherently just as good as the one by which the purist would supplant it. Especially in public school instruction it would seem to be wiser to spend time on more important matters in speech than the difference between half and haalf.  23

2

Meanwhile, “the dictionary and academic prestige” of the broad a, whatever its precise form, has established it pretty generally in the United States in certain words which formerly had the flat a. Those in which it is followed by lm offer examples: psalm, palm, balm and calm. They were once pronounced to rhyme with ram and jam, but their pronunciation that way has begun to seem provincial and ignorant. Krapp says that the a has likewise broadened in alms, salmon and almond, but it is my own observation that this is not yet generally true. The first syllable of salmon, true enough, does not quite rhyme with ham, but it is nevertheless still very far from bomb. The broad a, by a fashionable affectation, has also got into vase, drama, amen and tomato—in the last case probably helped by the example of Southern speech, in which a few words, notably master, tomato and tassel, have shown the broad a for many years. Its intrusion into tomato has been vigorously denounced by an Englishman, Evacustes A. Phipson. “It is really distressing,” he says, “to a cultivated Briton visiting America to find people there who … follow what they suppose to be the latest London mannerism, regardless of accuracy. Thus we find one literary editress advocating the pedantic British pronunciation tomahto in lieu of the good English tomato, rhyming with potato, saying it sounds so much more `refined.’ I do not know whether she would be of the same opinion if she heard one of our costermongers bawling out: `’Ere’s yer foine termarters, lydy, hownly tuppence a pahnd.’ Similarly, we sometimes hear Anglomaniac Americans saying vahz for vase. Why not also bahz, and cahz?”  24 Another Englishman calls my attention to an even more curious use of the broad a in America, to wit, in piano. In England the flat a is invariably used in this word. But here, perhaps, a mistaken Anglomania is not to blame. The majority of the better sort of music-teachers in the United States are Continental Europeans, chiefly Germans, and no doubt they teach their pupils to say piahno as they teach them the correct Continental pronunciations of such words as scherzo, lied and ètude. The introduction of the broad a into drama is a pure affectation, and first showed itself, I believe, at the beginning of the heavily self-conscious movement which culminated in the organization of the Drama League of America, a society largely composed of college professors and social pushers. Amen, with the broad a, is a symptom of the movement of social pushers into the Protestant Episcopal Church, which serves, as I have hitherto noted, as the chief center of Anglomania in all parts of the country. E. W. Howe tells a story of a little girl whose mother, on acquiring social aspirations, entered this church from the Methodist Church. The father remaining behind, the little girl had to learn to say amen with the flat a when she went to church with her father and amen with the broad a when she went to church with her mother.  25 In Canada, despite the social influence of English usage, the flat a has conquered, and along the Canadian-New England border it is actually regarded as a Canadianism, especially in such words as calm and aunt. The broad a, when heard at all, is an affectation, and, as in Boston, is sometimes introduced into words, e. g., piano and amass, which actually have the flat a in England.

3

A broad a, though somewhat shorter than the a of father (a correspondent compares it aptly to the a in the German mann) is very widely substituted, in the United States, for the o in such words as got, hot, rob, nobby, prophet, stock and chocolate. The same correspondent suggests that it shows itself clearly in the sentence: “On top of the log sat a large frog.” To his English ears, this sentence, from American lips, sounds like “Ann tahp uv thu laug sat a lahrge fraug.” The same a is also occasionally heard in dog, doll, horrid, hog, orange, coffee and God, though it has a rival in the au-sound of audience.  26 Here, as Krapp observes, there is a considerable variation in usage, even in the same speaker. The man who uses the first a in God may use the au-sound in dog. I believe that the former is generally looked upon as more formal. I have often noticed that a speaker who puts the au-sound into God in his ordinary profane discourse, will switch to the purer a-sound when he wants to show reverence. The broad a in father seems to have very little influence upon cognate words. Save in New England one never hears it in gather, lather and blather, and even there it is often abandoned for the flat a by speakers who are very careful to avoid the latter in palm, dance and aunt. Krapp says that the broad a is used in “some words of foreign origin,” notably lava, data, errata, bas-relief, spa, mirage and garage. This is certainly not true of the first three, all of which, save exceptionally, have the flat a. Garage, as one time, threatened to acquire the flat a, too, and so became a rhyme for carriage, but I believe that a more correct pronunciation is prevailing. In a number of other classes of words the pronunciation of the a varies. In patriot and its derivatives, for example, the a is sometimes that of hat and sometimes that of late. In radish the a is sometimes that of cab and sometimes a sort of e, hard to distinguish from that of red. In such proper names as Alabama, Montana, Nevada and Colorado the flat a is commonly heard (especially in the states themselves), but a broad a is not unknown. The usual pronunciation of again and against gives them a second a indistinguishable from the e of hen, but the influence of the schoolmarm has launched a pronunciation employing the a of lane.

4

The other vowels present fewer variations from standard English. A spelling pronunciation often appears in pretty, making the first syllable rhyme with set; it always rhymes with sit in standard English. The use of the long e in deaf, though ardently advocated by Noah Webster, has almost disappeared from cultivated speech; it persists, however, in the vulgate, and is noted in Chapter IX. In the same way the i-sound, as in sit, has disappeared from get, yet, chest and instead; even the vulgate is losing it. So, again, the old ai-sound, as in laid, has vanished from egg, peg, leg and their cognates, though here the vulgate preserves it. As Krapp shows, the neutral e, toward which all our vowels seem to be tending,  27 shows signs of itself disappearing. This is particularly noticeable, in American, in such words as moral, quarrel and real, which become mor’l, quar’l and re’l, each a single syllable. In the vulgar speech this neutral e is also dropped from other words, notably poem, diary, violet and diamond, which become pome, di’ry, vi’let and di’mond. Even in the standard speech it grows shadowy in the second syllable of fertile, hostile, servile, fragile, agile, reptile, etc. In standard English these words are pronounced with the second syllable clearly rhyming with vile. The long e-sound in creek is maintained in standard American, but changed to the short i-sound of sit in the vulgate. Sleek has divided into two words, slick and sleek, the former signifying cunning and ingratiating and the latter referring especially to appearance. Of late there has been a strong tendency to abandon the old e-sound in such terms as bronchitis and appendicitis for an ai-sound, as in pie and buy; this is a senseless affectation, but it seems to be making progress. A contrary movement to abandon the old ai-sound in iodine, quinine, etc., for an e-sound, as in sleep, has better support in etymology, but is apparently less popular. Chlorine is always pronounced with the e-sound, but iodine continues to be iodyne, and kin-een for quinine still sounds strange. In two other familiar words the ai-sound has been supplanted in American: in sliver by the short i of liver, and in farina by an e-sound. Both have the ai-sound in standard English. Been, in America, almost always is bin; bean never appears save as a conscious affectation. But in England bean is invariably heard, and in a recent poem an English poet makes it rhyme with submarine, queen and unseen.  28

5

I have already mentioned the displacement of o by ah or au in such words as dog and God. “Whenever the o-sound is fully stressed and long, and especially when it is final, it tends,” says Krapp, “to become diphthongal, starting with o and closing with [the] u [of bush], as in dough, doe, toe, tow, flow, floe, château, etc.”  29 But in British speech a greater variety of diphthongal shadings occur, “some of them familiar in the exaggerated representations of Englishmen and their speech on the American stage. In the speech of many, perhaps of most, Americans there is scarcely any trace of diphthongal quality in the sound.” Usage in the pronunciation of u still differs widely in the United States. The two sounds, that of oo in goose and that of u in bush, are used by different speakers in the same word. The oo-sound prevails in aloof, boot, broom, food, groom, proof, roof, rood, room, rooster, root, soon, spook, spoon and woof, and the u-sound in butcher, cooper, hoof, hoop, nook, rook and soot, but there are educated Americans who employ the oo-sound in coop, hoof and hoop. In hooves I have heard both sounds, but in rooves only the oo-sound. Rooves seems to be extinct in the written speech as the plural of roof, but it certainly survives in spoken American. In words of the squirrel, syrup and stirrup class Americans commonly substitute a u-sound for the e-sound used by Englishmen, and squirrel becomes a monosyllable, squr’l. In words of the com class, save company, Americans substitute a broad a for the u used by Englishmen; even compass often shows it. The English are far more careful with the shadowy y preceding u in words of the duty class than Americans. The latter retain it following m, f, v and p, and usually before r, but they are careless about it following n and g, and drop it following l, r, d, t, th and s. Nyew, nyude, dyuke, enthyusiasm and syuit would seem affectations in most parts of the United States, and ryule and blyue would be impossible.  30 Schoolmasters still battle valiantly for dyuty, but in vain. In 1912 the Department of Education of New York City warned all the municipal high-school teachers to combat the oo-sound  31 but it is doubtful that one pupil in a hundred was thereby induced to insert the y in induced. In figure, however, Americans retain the y-sound, whereas the English drop it. In courteous the English insert an o-sound, making the first syllable rhyme with fort; Americans rhyme it with hurt. In brusque the English give the first syllable an oo-sound; Americans rhyme it with tusk. In clerk, as everyone knows, the English change the e into a, and make the word rhyme with lark; in the United States it rhymes with lurk. Finally, there is lieutenant. The Englishman pronounces the first syllable left; the American invariably makes it loot. White says that the prevailing American pronunciation is relatively recent. “I never heard it,” he reports, “in my boyhood.”  32 He was born in New York in 1821.

6

Note 23.  The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, p. 64. [back]

Note 24.  Nation, Aug. 30, 1919, p. 290. [back]

Note 25.  The Rev. W. G. Polack, of Evansville, Ind., who has made a valuable inquiry into ecclesiastical terminology in America, tells me that among the Lutherans of the Middle West, amen has the flat a when spoken and the broad a when sung. So with the first syllable of hallelujah, though the last a is always broad. [back]

Note 26.  Krapp says (The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, p. 82) that he also hears this a-sound in project, process, produce and provost, but it is my observation that they are nearly always given a true o-sound. Prohduce is surely commoner than prahduce, and prohject is commoner than prawject. But problem, prospect, proverb, product and progress undoubtedly have the a-sound of father. Henry James denounces gawd, dawg, sawft, lawft, gawne, lawst and frawst as a “flat-drawling group” in The Question of Our Speech, p. 30, but, as usual, he is somewhat extravagant. [back]

Note 27.  This tendency is not confined to English. The same neutral e is encountered in languages as widely differing otherwise as Arabic, French and Swedish. “Its existence,” says Sayce, in The Science of Language, vol. i, p. 259, “is a sign of age and decay; meaning has become more important than outward form, and the educated intelligence no longer demands a clear pronunciation in order to understand what is said.” Here, of course, decay means phonetic decay; the word has no reference to the general vigor of the language. [back]

Note 28.  Open Boats, by Alfred Noyes; New York, 1917, pp. 89--91. [back]

Note 29.  The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, p. 81 ff. [back]

Note 30.  A woman teacher of English, born in Tennessee, tells me that the y-sound is much more persistent in the South than in the North. “I have never,” she says, “heard a native Southerner fail to retain the sound in new. The same is true of duke, stew, due, duty and Tuesday. But it is not true of blue and true.” [back]

Note 31.  High School Circular No. 17, June 19, 1912. [back]

Note 32.  Every-Day English, p. 243. [back]

1. The Two Orthographies

The chief changes made in the standard English spelling in the United States may be classified as follows:

1

1. The omission of the penultimate u in words ending in -our:

American

English

arbor
arbour

armor
armour

behavior
behaviour

candor
candour

clamor
clamour

clangor
clangour

color
colour

demeanor
demeanour

endeavor
endeavour

favor
favour

fervor
fervour

flavor
flavour

glamor
glamour

harbor
harbour

honor
honour

humor
humour

labor
labour

neighbor
neighbour

odor
odour

parlor
parlour

rancor
rancour

rigor
rigour

rumor
rumour

savor
savour

splendor
splendour

succor
succour

tumor
tumour

valor
valour

vapor
vapour

vigor
vigour

2

2. The reduction of duplicate consonants to single consonants:

American

English

councilor
councillor

counselor
counsellor

fagot
faggot

jewelry
jewellery

net (adj.)

nett

traveler
traveller

wagon
waggon

woolen
woollen

3

3. The omission of a redundant e:

annex (noun)

annexe

asphalt
asphalte

ax
axe

form (printer’s)

forme

good-by
goodbye

intern (noun)

interne

peas (plu. of pea)

pease

story (of a house)

storey

4

4. The change of terminal -re into -er:

caliber
calibre

center
centre

fiber
fibre

liter
litre

meter
metre

saltpeter
saltpetre

theater
theatre

5

5. The omission of unaccented foreign terminations:

catalog
catalogue

envelop 1
envelope

epaulet
epaulette

gram
gramme

program
programme

prolog
prologue

toilet
toilette

veranda
verandah

6

6. The omission of u when combined with a or o:

balk (verb)

baulk

font (printer’s)

fount

gantlet (to run the—)

gauntlet

mold
mould

molt
moult

mustache
moustache

stanch
staunch

7

7. The conversion of decayed diphthongs into simple vowels:

American

English

anemia
anæmia

anesthetic
anæsthetic

encyclopedia
encyclopædia

diarrhea
diarrhœa

ecology
œcology

ecumenical
œcumenical

edema
œdema

eon
æon

esophagus
œsophagus

esthetic
æsthetic

estival
æstival

etiology
ætiology

hemorrhage
hæmorrhage

medieval
mediæval

septicemia
septicæmia

8

8. The change of compound consonants into simple consonants:

bark (ship)

barque

burden (ship’s)

burthen

check (bank)

cheque

draft (ship’s)

draught

picket (military)

piquet

plow
plough

vial
phial

9

9. The change of o into a:

naught
nought

pudgy
podgy

slug (verb)

slog

slush
slosh

taffy
toffy (or toffee)

10

10. The change of e into i:

inclose
enclose

indorse
endorse

inquire
enquire

jimmy (burglar’s)

jemmy

scimitar
scimetar

11

11. The change of y into a, ia or i:

ataxia
ataxy

baritone
barytone

cachexia
cachexy

cider
cyder

pajamas
pyjamas

siphon
syphon

siren
syren

tire (noun)

tyre

12

12. The change of c into s:

American

English

defense
defence

offense
offence

pretense
pretence

vise (a tool)

vice

13

13. The substitution of s for z:

advertisement
advertizement

fuse
fuze

14

14. The substitution of k for c:

mollusk
mollusc

skeptic
sceptic

15

15. The insertion of a supernumerary e:

forego
forgo

foregather
forgather

16

16. The substitution of ct for x:

connection
connexion

inflection
inflexion

17

17. The substitution of y for i:

dryly
drily

gayety
gaiety

gypsy
gipsy

pygmy
pigmy

18

18. Miscellaneous differences:

alarm (signal)

alarum

behoove
behove

brier
briar

buncombe
bunkum

catsup
ketchup

cloture
closure

cozy
cosy

cutlas
cutlass

czar
tsar

gasoline
gasolene

gray
grey

hostler
ostler

jail
gaol

maneuver
manœuvre

pedler
pedlar

show (verb)

shew

snicker
snigger

stenosis
stegnosis

19

This list might be very much extended by including compounds and derivatives, e. g., coloured, colourist, colourless, colour-blind, colour-line, colour-sergeant, colourable, colourably, neighbourhood, neighbourly, neighbourliness, favourite, favourable, slogger, kilogramme, kilometre, amphitheatre, centremost, baulky, anæsthesia, plough-boy, dreadnought, enclosure, endorsement, and by including forms that are going out of use in England, e. g., fluxation 2 for fluctuation, surprize for surprise, and forms that are still but half established in the United States, e. g., chlorid, brusk, cigaret, lacrimal, rime, gage, quartet, eolian, dialog, lodgment, niter, sulfite, phenix. According to a recent writer upon the subject, “there are 812 words in which the prevailing American spelling differs from the English.” 3 But enough examples are given here to reveal a number of definite tendencies. American, in general, moves toward simplified forms of spelling more rapidly than English, and has got much further along the road. Redundant and unnecessary letters have been dropped from whole groups of words, simple vowels have been substituted for degenerated diphthongs, simple consonants have displaced compound ones, and vowels have been changed to bring words into harmony with their analogues, as in tire, cider and baritone (cf. wire, rider, merriment). Clarity and simplicity are served by substituting ct for x in such words as connection and inflection, and s for c in words of the defense group. The superiority of jail to gaol is made manifest by the common mispronunciation of the latter by Americans who find it in print, making it rhyme with coal. The substitution of i for e in such words as indorse, inclose and jimmy is of less patent utility, but even here there is probably a slight gain in euphony. Of more obscure origin is what seems to be a tendency to avoid the o-sound, so that the English slog becomes slug, podgy becomes pudgy, slosh becomes slush, toffee becomes taffy, and so on. Other changes carry their own justification. Hostler is obviously better American than ostler, though it may be worse English. Show is more logical than shew. 4 Cozy is more nearly phonetic than cosy. Curb has analogues in curtain, curdle, curfew, curl, currant, curry, curve, curtsey, curse, currency, cursory, curtain, cur, curt and many other common words: kerb has very few, and of them only kerchief and kernel are in general use. Moreover, the English themselves use curb as a verb and in all noun senses save that shown in kerbstone. Such forms as monolog and dialog still offend the fastidious, but their merit is not to be gainsaid. Nor would it be easy to argue logically against gram, toilet, mustache, anesthetic, draft and tire.

20

But a number of anomalies remain. The American substitution of a for e in gray is not easily explained, nor is the retention of e in forego, nor the unphonetic substitution of s for z in fuse, nor the persistence of the y in gypsy and pygmy, nor the occasional survival of a foreign form, as in cloture. 5 Here we have plain vagaries, surviving in spite of attack by orthographers. Webster, in one of his earlier books, denounced the k in skeptic as a “mere pedantry,” but later on he adopted it. In the same way pygmy, gray and mollusk have been attacked, but they still remain sound American. The English themselves have many more such illogical forms to account for. They have to write offensive and defensive, despite their fidelity to the c in offence and defence. They have begun to drop the duplicate consonant from riveter, leveled and biased, despite their use of traveller and jewellery. 6 They cling to programme, but never think of using diagramme or telegramme. Worst of all, they are wholly inconsistent in their use of the -our ending, the chief hallmark of orthodox English orthography. In American the u appears only in Saviour and then only when the word is used in the biblical sense. In England it is used in most words of that class, but omitted from a very respectable minority, e. g., horror, torpor, ambassador. It is commonly argued in defense of it over there that it serves to distinguish French loan-words from words derived directly from the Latin, but Tucker shows 7 that this argument is quite nonsensical, even assuming that the distinction has any practical utility. Ambassador, ancestor, bachelor, editor, emperor, error, exterior, governor, inferior, metaphor, mirror, progenitor, senator, superior, successor and torpor all came into English from the French, and yet British usage sanctions spelling them without the u. On the other hand it is used in arbour, behaviour, clangour, flavour and neighbour, “which are not French at all.” Tucker goes on:

Even in ardour, armour, candour, endeavour, favour, honour, labour, odour, parlour, rigour, rumour, saviour, splendour, tumour and vapour, where the u has some color of right to appear, it is doubtful whether its insertion has much value as suggesting French derivation, for in the case of twelve of these words the ordinary reader would be quite certain to have in mind only the modern spelling—ardeur, armure, candeur, faveur, honneur, labeur, odeur, rigneur, rumeur, splendeur, tumeur and vapeur—which have the u indeed but no o (and why should not one of these letters be dropped as well as the other?)—while endeavour, parlour and saviour come from old French words that are themselves without the u—devoir, parleor and saveor. The u in all these words is therefore either useless or positively misleading. And finally in the case of colour, clamour, fervour, humour, rancour, valour and vigour, it is to be remarked that the exact American orthography actually occurs in old French! “Finally,” I said, but that is not quite the end of British absurdity with these -our -or words. Insistent as our transatlantic cousins are on writing arbour, armour, clamour, clangour, colour, dolour, flavour, honour, humour, labour, odour, rancour, rigour, savour, valour, vapour and vigour, and “most unpleasant” as they find the omission of the excrescent u in any of these words, they nevertheless make no scruple of writing the derivatives in the American way—arboreal, armory, clamorous, clangorous, colorific, dolorous, flavorous, honorary, humorous, laborious, odorous, rancorous, rigorous, savory, valorous, vaporize and vigorous—not inserting the u in the second syllable of any one of these words. The British practice is, in short and to speak plainly, a jumble of confusion, without rhyme or reason, logic or consistency; and if anybody finds the American simplification of the whole matter “unpleasant,” it can be only because he is a victim of unreasoning prejudice against which no argument can avail.

21

If the u were dropped in all derivatives, the confusion would be less, but it is retained in many of them, for example, colourable, favourite, misdemeanour, coloured and labourer. The derivatives of honour exhibit clearly the difficulties of the American who essays to write correct English. Honorary, honorarium and honorific drop the u, but honourable retains it! Furthermore, the English make a distinction between two senses of rigor. When used in its pathological sense (not only in the Latin form of rigor mortis, but as an English word) it drops the u; in all other senses it retains the u.

22

Note 1.  The English dictionaries make a distinction between the verb, to envelop, and the noun, envelope. This distinction seems to be disappearing in the United States. [back]

Note 2.  I find “fluxation of the rate of exchange” in the New Witness, Feb. 4, 1921. Cassell marks it obsolete; the Concise Oxford gives only fluctuation. [back]

Note 3.  Richard P. Read: The American Language, New York Sun. March 7, 1918. [back]

Note 4.  To shew has completely disappeared from American, but it still survives in English usage. Cf. The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, by George Bernard Shaw. The word, of course, is pronounced show, not shoe. Shrew, a cognate word, still retains the early pronunciation of shrow on the English stage, though not in common usage. It is now phonetic in American. [back]

Note 5.  Fowler and Fowler, in The King’s English, p. 23, say that “when it was proposed to borrow from France what we [i. e., the English] now know as the closure, it seemed certain for some time that with the thing we should borrow the name, clôture; a press campaign resulted in closure.” But in the Congressional Record it is still cloture, though with the loss of the circumflex accent, and this form is generally retained by American newspapers. [back]

Note 6.  See the preface to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, p. vi. [back]

Note 7.  American English; New York, 1921, p. 37. [back]

At the time of the first settlement of America the rules of English orthography were beautifully vague, and so we find the early documents full of spellings that seem quite fantastic today. Aetaernall (for eternal) is in the Acts of the Massachusetts General Court for 1646. But now and then a curious foreshadowing of later American usage is encountered. On July 4, 1631, for example, John Winthrop wrote in his journal that “the governour built a bark at Mistick which was launched this day.” During the eighteenth century, however, and especially after the publication of Johnson’s dictionary, there was a general movement in England toward a more inflexible orthography, and many hard and fast rules, still surviving, were then laid down. It was Johnson himself who established the position of the u in the -our words. Bailey, Dyche and other lexicographers before him were divided and uncertain; Johnson declared for the u, and though his reasons were very shaky 8 and he often neglected his own precept, his authority was sufficient to set up a usage which still defies attack in England. Even in America this usage was not often brought into question until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. True enough, honor appears in the Declaration of Independence, but it seems to have got there rather by accident than by design. In Jefferson’s original draft it is spelled honour. So early as 1768 Benjamin Franklin had published his “Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling, with Remarks and Examples Concerning the Same, and an Enquiry into its Uses” and induced a Philadelphia typefounder to cut type for it, but this scheme was too extravagant to be adopted anywhere, or to have any appreciable influence upon spelling. 9

1

It was Noah Webster who finally achieved the divorce between English example and American practise. He struck the first blow in his “Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” published at Hartford in 1783. Attached to this work was an appendix bearing the formidable title of “An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to the Pronunciation,” and during the same year, at Boston, he set forth his ideas a second time in the first edition of his “American Spelling Book.” The influence of this spelling-book was immediate and profound. It took the place in the schools of Dilworth’s “Aby-sel-pha,” the favorite of the generation preceding, and maintained its authority for fully a century. Until Lyman Cobb entered the lists with his “New Spelling Book,” in 1842, its innumerable editions scarcely had any rivalry, and even then it held its own. I have a New York edition, dated 1848, which contains an advertisement stating that the annual sale at that time was more than a million copies, and that more than 30,000,000 copies had been sold since 1783. In the late 40’s the publishers, George F. Cooledge & Bro., devoted the whole capacity of the fastest steam press in the United States to the printing of it. This press turned out 525 copies an hour, or 5,250 a day. It was “constructed expressly for printing Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book [the name had been changed in 1829] at an expense of $5,000.” Down to 1889, 62,000,000 copies of the book had been sold.

2

The appearance of Webster’s first dictionary, in 1806, greatly strengthened his influence. The best dictionary available to Americans before this was Johnson’s in its various incarnations, but against Johnson’s stood a good deal of animosity to its compiler, whose implacable hatred of all things American was well known to the citizens of the new republic. John Walker’s dictionary, issued in London in 1791, was also in use, but not extensively. A home-made school dictionary, issued at New Haven in 1798 or 1799 by one Samuel Johnson, Jr.—apparently no relative of the great Sam—and a larger work published a year later by Johnson and the Rev. John Elliott, pastor in East Guilford, Conn., seem to have made no impression, despite the fact that the latter was commended by Simeon Baldwin, Chauncey Goodrich and other magnificoes of the time and place, and even by Webster himself. The field was thus open to the laborious and truculent Noah. He was already the acknowledged magister of lexicography in America, and there was an active public demand for a dictionary that should be wholly American. The appearance of his first duodecimo, according to Williams, 10 thereby took on something of the character of a national event. It was received, not critically, but patriotically, and its imperfections were swallowed as eagerly as its merits. Later on Webster had to meet formidable critics, at home as well as abroad, but for nearly a quarter of a century he reigned almost unchallenged. Edition after edition of his dictionary was published, each new one showing additions and improvements. Finally, in 1828, he printed his great “American Dictionary of the English Language,” in two large octavo volumes. It held the field for half a century, not only against Worcester and the other American lexicographers who followed him, but also against the best dictionaries produced in England. Until the appearance of the Concise Oxford in 1914, indeed, America remained far ahead of England in practical dictionary making.

3

Webster had declared boldly for simpler spellings in his early spelling books; in his dictionary of 1806 he made an assault at all arms upon some of the dearest prejudices of English lexicographers. Grounding his wholesale reforms upon a saying by Franklin, that “those people spell best who do not know how to spell”—i. e., who spell phonetically and logically—he made an almost complete sweep of whole classes of silent letters—the u in the -our words, the final e in determine and requisite, the silent a in thread, feather and steady, the silent b in thumb, the s in island, the o in leopard, and the redundant consonants in traveler, wagon, jeweler, etc. (English: traveller, waggon, jeweller). More, he lopped the final k from frolick, physick and their analogues. Yet more, he transposed the e and the r in many words ending in re, such as theatre, lustre, centre and calibre. Yet more, he changed the c in all words of the defence class to s. Yet more, he changed ph to f in words of the phantom class, ou to oo in words of the group class, ow to ou in crowd, porpoise to porpess, acre to aker, sew to soe, woe to wo, soot to sut, gaol to jail, and plough to plow. Finally, he antedated the simplified spellers by inventing a long list of boldly phonetic spellings, ranging from tung for tongue to wimmen for women, and from hainous for heinous to cag for keg.

4

A good many of these new spellings, of course, were not actually Webster’s inventions. For example, the change from -our to -or in words of the honor class was a mere echo of an earlier English uncertainty. In the first three folios of Shakespeare, 1623, 1632 and 1663-6, honor and honour were used indiscriminately and in almost equal proportions; English spelling was still fluid, and the -our-form was not consistently adopted until the fourth folio of 1685. Moreover, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, is authority for the statement that the -or-form was “a fashionable impropriety” in England in 1791. But the great authority of Johnson stood against it, and Webster was surely not one to imitate fashionable improprieties. He deleted the u for purely etymological reasons, going back to the Latin honor, favor and odor without taking account of the intermediate French honneur, faveur and odeur. And where no etymological reasons presented themselves, he made his changes by analogy and for the sake of uniformity, or for euphony or simplicity, or because it pleased him, one guesses, to stir up the academic animals. Webster, in fact, delighted in controversy, and was anything but free from the national yearning to make a sensation.

5

A great many of his innovations, of course, failed to take root, and in the course of time he abandoned some of them himself. In his early “Essay on the Necessity, Advantage and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling” he advocated reforms which were already discarded by the time he published the first edition of his dictionary. Among them were the dropping of the silent letter in such words as head, give, built and realm, making them hed, giv, bilt, and relm; the substitution of doubled vowels for decayed diphthongs in such words as mean, zeal and near, making them meen, zeel and neer; and the substitution of sh for ch in such French loan-words as machine and chevalier, making them masheen and shevaleer. He also declared for stile in place of style, and for many other such changes, and then quietly abandoned them. The successive editions of his dictionary show still further concessions. Croud, fether, groop, gillotin, iland, instead, leperd, soe, sut, steddy, thret, thred, thum and wimmen appear only in the 1806 edition. In 1828 he went back to crowd, feather, group, island, instead, leopard, sew, soot, steady, thread, threat, thumb and women, and changed gillotin to guillotin. In addition, he restored the final e in determine, discipline, requisite, imagine, etc. In 1838, revising his dictionary, he abandoned a good many spellings that had appeared in either the 1806 or the 1828 edition, notably maiz for maize, suveran 11 for sovereign and guillotin for guillotine. But he stuck manfully to a number that were quite as revolutionary—for example, aker for acre, cag for keg, grotesk for grotesque, hainous for heinous, porpess for porpoise and tung for tongue—and they did not begin to disappear until the edition of 1854, issued by other hands and eleven years after his death. Three of his favorites, chimist for chemist, neger for negro and zeber for zebra, are incidentally interesting as showing changes in American pronunciation. He abandoned zeber in 1828, but remained faithful to chimist and neger to the last.

6

But though he was thus forced to give occasional ground, and in more than one case held out in vain, Webster lived to see the majority of his reforms adopted by his countrymen. He left the ending in -or triumphant over the ending in -our, he shook the security of the ending in -re, he rid American spelling of a great many doubled consonants, he established the s in words of the defense group, and he gave currency to many characteristic American spellings, notably jail, wagon, plow, mold and ax. These spellings still survive, and are practically universal in the United States today; their use constitutes one of the most obvious differences between written English and written American. Moreover, they have founded a general tendency, the effects of which reach far beyond the field actually traversed by Webster himself. New words, and particularly loanwords, are simplified, and hence naturalized in American much more quickly than in English. Employè has long since become employee in our newspapers, and asphalte has lost its final e, and manœuvre has become maneuver, and pyjamas has become pajamas. Even the terminology of science is simplified and Americanized. In medicine, for example, the highest American usage countenances many forms which would seem barbarisms to an English medical man if he encountered them in the Lancet. In derivatives of the Greek haima it is the almost invariable American custom to spell the root syllable hem, but the more conservative English make it hæm—e. g., in hæmorrhage and hæmiplegia. In an exhaustive list of diseases issued by the United States Public Health Service 12 the hæm- form does not appear once. In the same way American usage prefers esophagus, diarrhea and gonorrhea to the English æsophagus, diarrhæa and gonorrhæa. In the style book of the Journal of the American Medical Association I find many other spellings that would shock an English medical author, among them curet for curette, cocain for cocaine, gage for gauge, intern for interne, lacrimal for lachrymal, and a whole group of words ending in -er instead of in -re. 13

7

Webster’s reforms, it goes without saying, have not passed unchallenged by the guardians of tradition. A glance at the literature of the first years of the nineteenth century shows that most of the serious authors of the time ignored his new spellings, though they were quickly adopted by the newspapers. Bancroft’s “Life of Washington” contains -our endings in all such words as honor, ardor and favor. Washington Irving also threw his influence against the -or ending, and so did Bryant and most of the other literary big-wigs of that day. After the appearance of “An American Dictionary of the English Language,” in 1828, a formal battle was joined, with Lyman Cobb and Joseph E. Worcester as the chief opponents of the reformer. Cobb and Worcester, in the end, accepted the -or ending and so surrendered on the main issue, but various other champions arose to carry on the war. Edward S. Gould, in a once famous essay, 14 denounced the whole Websterian orthography with the utmost fury, and Bryant, reprinting this philippic in the Evening Post, said that on account of Webster “the English language has been undergoing a process of corruption for the last quarter of a century,” and offered to contribute to a fund to have Gould’s denunciation “read twice a year in every school-house in the United States, until every trace of Websterian spelling disappears from the land.” But Bryant was forced to admit that, even in 1856, the chief novelties of the Connecticut schoolmaster “who taught millions to read but not one to sin” were “adopted and propagated by the largest publishing house, through the columns of the most widely circulated monthly magazine, and through one of the ablest and most widely circulated newspapers in the United States”—which is to say, the Tribune under Greeley. The last academic attack was delivered by Bishop Coxe in 1886, and he contented himself with the resigned statement that “Webster has corrupted our spelling sadly.” Lounsbury, with his active interest in spelling reform, ranged himself on the side of Webster, and effectively disposed of the controversy by showing that the great majority of his spellings were supported by precedents quite as respectable as those behind the fashionable English spellings. In Lounsbury’s opinion, a good deal of the opposition to them was no more than a symptom of antipathy to all things American among certain Englishmen and of subservience to all things English among certain Americans. 15

8

Webster’s inconsistencies gave his opponents a formidable weapon for use against him—until it began to be noticed that the orthodox English spelling was quite as inconsistent. He sought to change acre to aker, but left lucre unchanged. He removed the final f from bailiff, mastiff, plaintiff and pontiff, but left it in distaff. He changed c to s in words of the offense class, but left the c in fence. He changed the ck in frolick, physick, etc., into a simple c, but restored it in such derivatives as frolicksome. He deleted the silent u in mould, but left it in court. These slips were made the most of by Cobb in a furious pamphlet in excessively fine print, printed in 1831. 16 He also detected Webster in the frequent faux pas of using spellings in his definitions and explanations that conflicted with the spellings he advocated. Various other purists joined in the attack, and it was renewed with great fury after the appearance of Worcester’s dictionary, in 1846. Worcester, who had begun his lexicographical labors by editing Johnson’s dictionary, was a good deal more conservative than Webster, and so the partisans of conformity rallied around him, and for a while the controversy took on all the rancor of a personal quarrel. Even the editions of Webster printed after his death, though they gave way on many points, were violently arraigned. Gould, in 1867, belabored the editions of 1854 and 1866 17 and complained that “for the past twenty-five years the Websterian replies have uniformly been bitter in tone, and very free in the imputation of personal motives, or interested or improper motives, on the part of opposing critics.” At this time Webster himself had been dead for twenty-two years. Schele de Vere, during the same year, denounced the publishers of the Webster dictionaries for applying “immense capital and a large stock of energy and perseverance” to the propagation of his “new and arbitrarily imposed orthography.” 18

9

Note 8.  Cf. Lounsbury: English Spelling and Spelling Reform; p. 209 et seq. Johnson even advocated translatour, emperour, oratour and horrour. But, like most other lexicographers, he was often inconsistent, and the conflict between interiour and exterior, and anteriour and posterior, is his dictionary, laid him open to much criticism. [back]

Note 9.  In a letter to Miss Stephenson, Sept. 20, 1768, he exhibited the use of his new alphabet. The letter is to be found in most editions of his writings. [back]

Note 10.  R. O. Williams: Our Dictionaries; New York, 1890, p. 30. See also S. A. Steger: American Dictionaries; Baltimore, 1913. [back]

Note 11.  I find soveran in the London Times Literary Supplement for Aug. 5, 1920, p. 1, art. Words for Music, but it seems to have no support elsewhere. Cassell and the Concise Oxford do not list it. [back]

Note 12.  Nomenclature of Diseases and Conditions, prepared by direction of the Surgeon General; Washington, 1916. [back]

Note 13.  American Medical Association Style Book; Chicago, 1915. At the 1921 session of the American Medical Association in Boston an English gynecologist read a paper and it was printed in the Journal. When he received the proofs he objected to a great many of the spellings, e. g., gonorrheal for gonorrhæal, and fallopian for Falloppian. The Journal refused to agree to his English spellings, but when his paper was reprinted separately they were restored. [back]

Note 14.  Democratic Review, March, 1856. [back]

Note 15.  Vide English Spelling and Spelling Reform, p. 229. [back]

Note 16.  A Critical Review of the Orthography of Dr. Webster’s Series of Books …; New York, 1831. [back]

Note 17.  Good English; p. 137 et seq. [back]

Note 18.  Studies in English; pp. 64.5. [back]

The logical superiority of American spelling is well exhibited by its persistent advance in the face of all this hostility at home and abroad. The English objection to our simplifications, as Brander Matthews once pointed out, is not wholly or even chiefly etymological; its roots lie, to borrow James Russell Lowell’s phrase, in an esthetic hatred burning “with as fierce a flame as ever did theological hatred.” There is something inordinately offensive to English purists in the very thought of taking lessons from this side of the water, particularly in the mother-tongue. The opposition, transcending the academic, takes on the character of the patriotic. “Any American,” said Matthews in 1892, “who chances to note the force and the fervor and the frequency of the objurgations against American spelling in the columns of the Saturday Review, for example, and of the Athenœum, may find himself wondering as to the date of the papal bull which declared the infallibility of contemporary British orthography, and as to the place where the council of the Church was held at which it was made an article of faith.” 19 But that, as I say, was in 1892. Since then there has been an enormous change, and though the editors of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, so recently as 1914, pointedly refrained from listing forms that would “strike every reader as Americanisms,” they surrendered in a wholesale manner to forms quite as thoroughly American in origin, among them, ax, alarm, tire, asphalt, program, toilet, balk, wagon, vial, inquire, advertisement, pygmy and czar. The monumental New English Dictionary upon which the Concise Oxford is chiefly based shows many silent concessions, and quite as many open yieldings—for example, in the case of ax, which is admitted to be “better than axe on every ground.” Moreover, practical English lexicographers tend to march ahead of it, outstripping the liberalism of its editor, Sir James A. H. Murray. In 1914, for example, Sir James was still protesting against dropping the first e from judgement, a characteristic Americanism, but during the same year the Concise Oxford put judgment ahead of judgement, and two years earlier the Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary, edited by Horace Hart, 20 had dropped judgement altogether. Hart is Controller of the Oxford University Press, and the Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary is an authority accepted by nearly all of the great English book publishers and newspapers. Its last edition shows a great many American spellings. For example, it recommends the use of jail and jailer in place of the English gaol and gaoler, says that ax is better than axe, drops the final e from asphalte and forme, changes the y to i in cyder, cypher and syren and advocates the same change in tyre, drops the redundant t from nett, changes burthen to burden, spells wagon with one g, prefers fuse to fuze, and takes the e out of storey. “Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford,” also edited by Hart (with the advice of Sir James Murray and Dr. Henry Bradley), is another very influential English authority. 21 It gives its imprimatur to bark (a ship), cipher, siren, jail, story, tire and wagon, and even advocates kilogram and omelet. Cassell’s New English Dictionary 22 goes quite as far. Like Hart and the Oxford it clings to the -our and -re endings and to the diphthongs in such words as œsthete and anœsthesia, but it prefers jail to gaol, net to nett, story to storey, asphalt to asphalte, tire to tyre, wagon to waggon, inquiry to enquiry, vial to phial, advertise to advertize, baritone to barytone, and pygmy to pigmy.

1

There is, however, much confusion among these authorities; the English are still unable to agree as to which American spellings they will adopt and which they will keep under the ban for a while longer. The Concise Oxford prefers bark to barque and the Poet Laureate 23 adopts it boldly, but Cassell still clings to barque. Cassell favors baritone; the Oxford declares for barytone. The Oxford is for czar; Cassell is for tsar. The Oxford admits program; Cassell sticks to programme. Both have abandoned enquire for inquire, but they remain faithful to encumbrance, endorse and enclose, though they list indorsation and the Oxford also gives indorsee. Hart agrees with them. 24 Both have abandoned œther for ether, but they cling to œsthetic and œtiology. Neither gives up plough, cheque, connexion, mould, pease, mollusc or kerb, and Cassell even adorns the last-named with an astounding compound credited to “American slang,” to wit, kerb-stone broker. Both favor such forms as surprise and advertisement, and yet I find surprized, advertizement and to advertize in the prospectus of English, a magazine founded to further “the romantic and patriotic study of English,” and advertize and advertizing are in the first number. 25 All the English authorities that I have consulted prefer the -re 26 and -our endings; nevertheless the London Nation adopted the -or ending in 1919, 27 and George Bernard Shaw had adopted it years before. The British Board of Trade, in attempting to fix the spelling of various scientific terms, has often come to grief. Thus it detaches the final -me from gramme in such compounds as kilogram and milligram, but insists upon gramme when the word stands alone. In American usage gram is now common, and scarcely challenged. A number of spellings, nearly all American, are trembling on the brink of acceptance in both countries. Among them is rime (for rhyme). This spelling was correct in England until about 1530, but its recent revival was of American origin. It is accepted by the Concise Oxford and by the editors of the Cambridge History of English Literature, but not by Cassell. It seldom appears in an English journal. The same may be said of grewsome. It has got a footing in both countries, but the weight of English opinion is still against it. Develop (instead of develope) has gone further in both countries. So has engulf, for engulph.

2

Note 19.  Americanisms and Briticisms; New York, 1892, p. 37. [back]

Note 20.  Authors’ & Printers’ Dictionary … an attempt to codify the best typographical practices of the present day, by F. Howard Collins; 4th ed., revised by Horace Hart; London, 1912. [back]

Note 21.  Horace Hart: Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford: 23rd ed.; London, 1914. I am informed by Mr. Humphrey Davy, of the London Times, that, with one or two minor exceptions, the Times observes the rules laid down in this book. [back]

Note 22.  Edited by Dr. Ernest A. Baker; London, 1919. [back]

Note 23.  English Homophones; Oxford, 1919, p. 7. [back]

Note 24.  Even worse inconsistencies are often encountered. Thus enquiry appears on p. 3 of the Dardanelles Commission’s First Report; London, 1917; but inquiring is on p. 1. [back]

Note 25.  London, March, 1919. [back]

Note 26.  Caliber is now the official spelling of the United States Army. Cf. Description and Rules for the Management of the U. S. Rifle, Caliber 30, Model of 1903; Washington, 1915. But calibre is still official in England. [back]

Note 27.  Cf. English, May-June, 1919, p. 88. [back]

American imitation of English orthography has two impulses behind it. First, there is the colonial spirit, the desire to pass as English—in brief, mere affectation. Secondly, there is the wish among printers, chiefly of books, to reach a compromise spelling acceptable in both countries, thus avoiding expensive revisions in case sheets are printed for publication in England. 28 The first influence need not detain us. It is chiefly visible among folk of fashionable pretensions, and is not widespread. At Bar Harbor, in Maine, some of the summer residents are at great pains to put harbour instead of harbor on their stationery, but the local post-master still continues to stamp all mail Bar Harbor, the legal name of the place. In the same way American haberdashers sometimes advertise pyjamas instead of pajamas, just as they advertise braces instead of suspenders and boots instead of shoes. But this benign folly does not go very far. Beyond occasionally clinging to the -re ending in words of the theatre group, all American newspapers and magazines employ the native orthography, and it would be quite as startling to encounter honour or traveller in one of them as it would be to encounter gaol or waggon. Even the most fashionable jewelers in Fifth avenue still deal in jewelry, not in jewellery.

1

The second influence is of more effect and importance. In the days before the copyright treaty between England and the United States, one of the standing arguments against it among the English was based upon the fear that it would flood England with books set up in America, and so work a corruption of English spelling. 29 This fear, as we have seen, had a certain plausibility; there is not the slightest doubt that American books and American magazines have done valiant missionary service for American orthography. But English conservatism still holds out stoutly enough to force American printers to certain compromises. When a book is designed for circulation in both countries it is common for the publisher to instruct the printer to employ “English spelling.” This English spelling, at the Riverside Press, 30 embraces all the -our endings and the following further forms:

cheque
grey

chequered
inflexion

connexion
jewellery

dreamt
leapt

faggot
premiss (in logic)

forgather
waggon

forgo

2

It will be noted that gaol, tyre, storey, kerb, asphalte, annexe, ostler, mollusc and pyjamas are not listed, nor are the words ending in -re. These and their like constitute the English contribution to the compromise. Two other great American book presses, that of the Macmillan Company and that of the J. S. Cushing Company, 31 add gaol and storey to the list, and also behove, briar, drily, enquire, gaiety, gipsy, instal, judgement, lacquey, moustache, nought, pygmy, postillion, reflexion, shily, slily, staunch and verandah. Here they go too far, for, as we have seen, the English themselves have begun to abandon enquire and judgement, and lacquey is also going out over there. The Riverside Press, even in books intended only for America, prefers certain English forms, among them, anæmia, axe, mediæval, mould, plough, programme and quartette, but in compensation it stands by such typical Americanisms as caliber, calk, center, cozy, defense, foregather, gray, hemorrhage, luster, maneuver, mustache, theater and woolen. The Government Printing Office at Washington follows Webster’s New International Dictionary, 32 which supports many of the innovations of Webster himself. This dictionary is the authority in perhaps a majority of American printing offices, with the Standard and the Century supporting it. The latter two also follow Webster, notably in his -er endings and in his substitution of s for c in words of the defense class. The Worcester Dictionary is the sole exponent of English spelling in general circulation in the United States. It remains faithful to most of the -re endings, and to manæuvre, gramme, plough, sceptic, woollen, axe and many other English forms. But even Worcester favors such characteristic American spellings as behoove, brier, caliber, checkered, dryly, jail and wagon. The Atlantic Monthly, which is inclined to be stiff and British, follows Webster, but with certain reservations. Thus it uses the -re ending in words of the center class, retains the u in mould, moult and moustache, retains the redundant terminal letters in such words as gramme, programme and quartette, retains the final e in axe and adze, and clings to the double vowels in such words as mediæval, anæsthesia, homœopathy, and diarrhæa. In addition, it uses the English plough, whiskey, clue and gruesome, differentiates between the noun practice and the verb to practise, and makes separate words of to ensure, to make certain, and to insure, to protect or indemnify. It also prefers entrust to intrust. It follows the somewhat arbitrary rule laid down by Webster for the doubling of consonants in derivatives bearing such suffixes as -ed, -ing, -er, and -ous. This rule is that words ending in l, p, r and t, when this last letter is preceded by a vowel, double the consonant before such suffixes, but only if the words are monosyllables or polysyllables accented on the last syllable. Thus dispelled has two l’s but traveled has one, equipped has two p’s but worshiper one, occurred has two r’s but altered one, and petted has two t’s but trumpeter one. 33

3

There remains a twilight zone in which usage is still uncertain in both England and America. The words in it are chiefly neologisms, e. g., airplane. In 1914 or thereabout the London Times announced that it had decided to use airplane in place of aëroplane, but three weeks later it went back to the original form. The Concise Oxford sticks to aeroplane (without the dieresis) and so does Cassell’s, though it lists airplane among war terms. The majority of English newspapers follow these authorities, but in the United States airplane is in steadily increasing use. Some confusion is caused by the fact that the French, who originated practically all of our aeronautical terms, use aeroplane, but omit the final e from biplan, monoplan, etc. A correspondent calls my attention to the fact that the two terminations are not the same etymologically. The plan of biplan is a word meaning “a plane, a plane surface”; while the plane of aeroplane is a formation taken from the verb planer, to soar, to glide. Hence aeroplane means “ce qui plane dans l’air,” while biplan means “ce qui a deux plans.” In the United States the current forms are biplane and monoplane.

4

In Canada the two orthographies, English and American, flourish side by side. By an Order-in-Council of 1890, all official correspondence must show the English spelling, but practically all of the newspapers use the American spelling and it is also taught in most of the public schools, which are under the jurisdiction, not of the Dominion government, but of the provincial ministers of education. In Australia the English spelling is official, but various American forms are making fast progress. According to the Triad, the leading Australian magazine, 34 “horrible American inaccuracies of spelling are coming into common use” in the newspapers out there; worse, the educational authorities of Victoria authorize the use of the American -er ending. This last infamy has been roundly denounced by Sir Adrian Knox, Chief Justice of the Commonwealth, and the Triad displays a good deal of colonial passion in supporting him. “Unhappily,” it says, “we have no English Academy to guard the purity and integrity of the language. Everything is left to the sense and loyalty of decently cultivated people.” But even the Triad admits that American usage, in some instances, is “correct.” It is, however, belligerently faithful to the -our-ending. “If it is correct or tolerable in English,” it argues somewhat lamely, “to write labor for labour, why not boddy for body, steddy for steady, and yot for yacht?” Meanwhile, as in Canada, the daily papers slide into the Yankee orbit.

5

Note 28.  Mere stupid copying may perhaps be added. An example of it appears on a map printed with a pamphlet entitled Conquest and Kultur, compiled by two college professors and issued by the Creel press bureau during the Great War. (Washington, 1918.) On this map, borrowed from an English periodical called New Europe without correction, annex is spelled annexe. In the same way English spellings often appear in paragraphs reprinted from the English newspapers. As compensation in the case of annexe I find annex on pages 11 and 23 of A Report on the Treatment by the Enemy of British Prisoners of War Behind the Firing Lines in France and Belgium; Miscellaneous No. 7 (1918). When used as a verb the English always spell the word annex. Annexe is only the noun form. [back]

Note 29.  Vide Matthews: Americanisms and Briticisms, pp. 33--34. [back]

Note 30.  Handbook of Style in Use at the Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass.; Boston, 1913. [back]

Note 31.  Notes for the Guidance of Authors; New York, 1918; Preparation of Manuscript, Proof Reading, and Office Style at J. S. Cushing Company’s Norwood, Mass., n. d. [back]

Note 32.  Style Book, a Compilation of Rules Governing Executive, Congressional and Departmental Printing, Including the Congressional Record, ed. of Feb., 1917; Washington, 1917. A copy of this style book is in the proof-room of nearly every American daily newspaper and its rules are generally observed. [back]

Note 33.  Text, Type and Style, a Compendium of Atlantic Usage, by George B. Ives; Boston, 1921, p. 186 ff. [back]

Note 34.  May 10, 1921, p. 5. [back]

The current movement toward a general reform of English-American spelling is of American origin, and its chief supporters are Americans today. Its actual father was Webster, for it was the long controversy over his simplified spellings that brought the dons of the American Philological Association to a serious investigation of the subject. In 1875 they appointed a committee to inquire into the possibility of reform, and in 1876 this committe reported favorably. During the same year there was an International Convention for the Amendment of English Orthography at Philadelphia, with several delegates from England present, and out of it grew the Spelling Reform Association. 35 In 1878 a committee of American philologists began preparing a list of proposed new spellings, and two years later the Philological Society of England joined in the work. In 1883 a joint manifesto was issued, recommending various general simplifications. Among those enlisted in the movement were Charles Darwin, Lord Tennyson, Sir John Lubbock and Sir J. A. H. Murray. In 1886 the American Philological Association issued independently a list of recommendations affecting about 3,500 words, and falling under ten headings. Practically all of the changes proposed had been put forward 80 years before by Webster, and some of them had entered into unquestioned American usage in the meantime, e. g., the deletion of the u from the -our words, the substitution of er for re at the end of words, and the reduction of traveller to traveler.

1

The trouble with the others was that they were either too uncouth to be adopted without a long struggle or likely to cause errors in pronunciation. To the first class belonged tung for tounge, ruf for rough, batl for battleand abuv for above, and to the second such forms as cach for catch and troble for trouble. The result was that the whole reform received a set-back: the public dismissed the reformers as a pack of dreamers. Twelve years later the National Education Association received the movement with a proposal that a beginning be made with a very short list of reformed spellings, and nominated the following by way of experiment: tho, altho, thru, through, thoro, thoroly, thorofare, program, prolog, catalog, pedagog and decalog. This scheme of gradual changes was sound in principle, and in a short time at least two of the recommended spellings,program and catalog, were in general use. Then, in 1906, came the organization of the Simplified Spelling Board, with an endowment of $15,000 a year from Andrew Carnegie, and a formidable list of members and collaborators, including Henry Bradley, F. I. Furnivall, C. H> Grandgent, W. W. Skeat, T. R. Lounsbury and F. A. March. The board at once issued a list of 300 revised spellings, new and old, and in August, 1906, President Rooselvet ordered their adoption by the Government Printing Office. But this unwise effort to hasten matters, combained with the buffoonery characteristically thrown about the matter by Roosevelt, served only to raise up enemies, and then, though it has prudently gone back to more discret endeavors and now lays main stress upon the original 12 words of the National Education Association, the board has not made a great deal of progress. 36 From time to time it issues impressive lists of newspapers and periodicals that have made them optional, but an inspection of these lists shows that very few publications of any importance have been converted and that most of the great universities still hesitate. 37 It has, however, greatly reinforced the authority behind many of Webster’s spellings, and aided by the Chemical> Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association, it has done much to reform scientific orthography. Such forms as gram, cocain, chlorid, anemia and anilin are the products of its influence. 38 Its latest list recommends the following changes:

2

1. When a word begins with œ or œ substitute e: esthetic, medieval, subpena. But retain the diphthong at the end of a word: alumnœ.

2. When bt is pronounced t, drop the silent b: det, dettor, dout.

3. When ceed is final spell it cede: excede, procede, succede.

4. When ch is pronounced like hard c, drop the silent h except before e, i and y: caracter, clorid, corus, cronic, eco, epoc, mecanic, monarc, scolar, school, stomac, technical. But retain architect, chemist, monarchy.

5. When a double consonant appears before a final silent e drop the last two letters: bizar, cigaret, creton, gavot, gazet, giraf, gram, program, quartet, vaudevil.

6. When a word ends with a double consonant substitute a single consonant: ad, bii, bluf, buz, clas, dol, dul, eg, glas, les, los, mes, mis, pas, pres, shal, tel, wil. But retain ll after a long vowel: all, roll. And retain ss when the word has more than one syllable: needless.

7. Drop the final silent e after a consonant preceded by a short stressed vowel: giv, hav, liv.

8. Drop the final silent e in the common words are, gone and were: ar, gon, wer.

9. Drop the final silent e in the unstressed final short syllables ide, ile, ine, ise, ite and ive: activ, bromid, definit, determin, practis, hostil.

10. Drop the silent e after lv and rv: involv, twelv, carv, deserv.

11. Drop the silent e after v or z when preceded by a digraph representing a long vowel or a diphthong: achiev, freez, gauz, sneez.

12. Drop the e in final oe when it is pronounced o: fo, ho, ro, to, wo. But retain it in inflections: foes, hoed.

13. When one of the letters in ea is silent drop it: bred, brekfast, hed, hart, harth.

14. When final ed is pronounced d drop the e: cald, carrid, employd, marrid, robd, sneezd, struggld, wrongd. But not when a wrong pronunciation will be suggested: bribd, cand, fild (for filed), etc.

15. When final ed is pronounced t substitute t: addrest, shipt, helpt, indorst. But not when a wrong pronunciation will be suggested: bakt, fact (for faced), etc.

16. When ei is pronounced like ie in brief substitute ie: conciet, deciev, wierd.

17. When a final ey is pronounced y drop the e: barly, chimny, donky, mony, vally.

18. When final gh is pronounced f substitute f and drop the silent letter of the preceding digraph: enuf, laf, ruf, tuf.

19. When gh is pronounced g drop the silent h: agast, gastly, gost, goul.

20. When gm is final drop the silent g: apothem, diagram, flem.

21. When gue is final after a consonant, a short vowel or a digraph representing a long vowel or a diphthong drop the silent ue: tung, catalog, harang, leag, sinagog. But not when a wrong pronunciation would be suggested: rog (for rogue), vag (for vague), etc.

22. When a final ise is pronounced ize substitute ize: advertize, advize, franchize, rize, wize.

23. When mb is final after a short vowel drop b: bom, crum, dum, lam, lim, thum. But not when a wrong pronunciation would be suggested: com (for comb), tom (for tomb), etc.

24. When ou before l is pronounced o drop u: mold, sholder. But not sol (for soul).

25. When ough is final spell o, u, ock or up, according to the pronunciation: altho, boro, donut, furlo, tho, thoro, thru, hock, hiccup.

26. When our is final and ou is pronounced as a short vowel drop u: color, honor, labor.

27. When ph is pronounced f substitute f: alfabet, emfasis, fantom, fonograf, fotograf, sulfur, telefone, telegraf.

28. When re is final after any consonant save c substitute er: center, fiber, meter, theater. But not lucer, mediocer.

29. When rh is initial and the h is silent drop it: retoric, reumatism, rime, rubarb, rithm.

30. When sc is initial and the c is silent drop it: senery, sented, septer, sience, sissors.

31. When u is silent before a vowel drop it: bild, condit, garantee, gard, ges, gide, gild.

32. When y is between consonants substitute i: analisis, fisic, gipsy, paralize, rime, silvan, tipe.

Obviously this list is far ahead of the public inclination. Moreover, it is so long and contains so many exceptions (observe rules 1, 4, 6, 12, 14, 15, 21, 23, 24 and 28) that there is little hope that any considerable number of Americans will adopt it, at least during the lifetime of its proponents. Its extravagance, indeed, has had the effect of alienating the support of the National Education Association, and at the convention held in Des Moines in the Summer of 1921 the Association formally withdrew from the campaign. 39 But even so long a list is not enough for the extremists. To it they add various miscellaneous new spellings: aker, anser, burlesk, buro, campain, catar, counterfit, delite, foren, forfit, frend, grotesk, iland, maskerade, morgage, picturesk, siv, sorgum, sovren, spritely, tuch, yu and yung. The reader will recognize some of these as surviving inventions of Webster. But though all such bizarre forms languish, the twelve spellings adopted by the National Education Association in 1898 are plainly making progress, especially tho and thru. I read many manuscripts by American authors, and find in them an increasing use of both forms, with the occasional addition of altho, thoro and thoroly. The spirit of American spelling is on their side. They promise to come in as honor, bark, check, wagon and story came in many years ago, as tire, 40 esophagus and theater came in later on, and as program, catalog and cyclopedia came in only yesterday. The advertisement writers seem to be even more hospitable than the authors. Such forms as vodvil, burlesk, foto, fonograf, kandy, kar, holsum, kumfort, sulfur, arkade, kafeteria and segar are not infrequent in their writings. At least one American professor of English predicts that these forms will eventually prevail. Even fosfate and fotograf, he says, “are bound to be the spellings of the future.” 41 Meanwhile the advertisement writers and authors combine in an attempt to naturalize alright, a compound of all and right, made by analogy with already and almost. I find it in American manuscripts every day, and it not seldom gets into print. 42 So far no dictionary supports it, but it has already migrated to England and has the imprimatur of a noble lord. 43 Another vigorous newcomer is sox for socks. The White Sox are known to all Americans; the White Socks would seem strange. The new plural has got into the Congressional Record. 44

3

Note 35.  Accounts of earlier proposals of reform in English spelling are to be found in Sayce’s Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. i, p. 330 et seq., and White’s Everyday English, p. 152 et seq. The best general treatment of the subject is in Lounsbury’s English Spelling and Spelling Reform; New York, 1909. A radical innovation, involving the complete abandonment of the present alphabet and the substitution of a series of symbols with vowel points, is proposed in Peetickay, by Wilfrid Perrett; Cambridge (England), 1920. Mr. Perrett’s book is written in a lively style, and includes much curious matter. He criticises the current schemes of spelling reform very acutely. Nearly all of them, he says, suffer from the defect of seeking to represent all the sounds of English by the present alphabet. This he calls“one more reshuffle of a prehistoric pack, one more attempt to deal out 26 cards to some 40 players.” [back]

Note 36.  Its second list was published on January 28, 1908, its third on Janurary 25, 1909, and its fourth on March 24, 1913, and since then there have been several others. But most its literature is devoted to the 12 words and to certain reformed spellings of Webster, already in general use. [back]

Note 37.  In April, 1919, it claimed 556 newspapers and periodicals, with a circulation of 18,000,000, and 460 universities, colleges and normal schools. [back]

Note 38.  The Standard Dictionary, published in 1906, gave great aid to the movement by listing the 3,500 reformed spellings recommended by the American Philological Association in 1886. The publication of the Standard are also the publishers of the Literary Digest, the only magazine of large ciraculation to adopt the Simplified Spelling Board’s recommendations to any appreciable extent. It substitutes simple vowels for diphthongs in such words as esthetc and fetus, usest in place of the usual terminal ed in addrest, affixt, etc., drops the final me and te in words of the programme and cigarette classes, and drops the ue from words of the catalogue class. See Funk & Wagnalls Company Style Card; New York, 1914. [back]

Note 39.  See the Weekly Review, July 16, 1921, p. 47. [back]

Note 40.  Tyre was still in use in America in the 70’s. It will be found on p. 150 of Mark Twain’s Roughing It: Hartford, 1872. [back]

Note 41.  Krapp: Modern English, p. 181. [back]

Note 42.  For example, in Teepee Neighbors, by Grace Coolidge; Boston, 1917, p. 220; Duty and Other Irish Comedies, by Seumas O’Brien; New York, 1916, p. 52; Salt, by Charles G. Norris; New York, 1918, p. 135, and The Ideal Guest, by Wyndham Lewis, Little Review, May, 1918, p. 3. O’Brien is an Irishman and Lewis an Englishman, but the printer in each case was American. I find allright, as one word but with two l’s, in Diplomatic Correspondence with Belligerent Governments, etc., European War, No. 4; Washington, 1918, p. 214. [back]

Note 43.  Vide How to Lengthen Our Ears, by Viscount Harberton; London, 1917, p. 28. [back]

Note 44.  May 16, 1921, p. 1478, col. 2. [back]

In the treatment of loan-words English spelling is very much more conservative than American. This conservatism, in fact, is so marked that it is frequently denounced by English critics of the national speech usages, and it stood first among the “tendencies of modern taste” attacked by the Society for Pure English in its original prospectus in 1913—a prospectus prepared by Henry Bradley, Dr. Robert Bridges, Sir Walter Raleigh and L. Pearsall Smith, and signed by many important men of letters, including Thomas Hardy, A. J. Balfour, Edmund Gosse, Austin Dobson, Maurice Hewlett, Gilbert Murray, George Saintsbury and the professors of English literature at Oxford and London, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and W. P. Ker. I quote from this caveat:

Literary taste at the present time, with regard to foreign words recently borrowed from abroad, is on wrong lines, the notions which govern it being scientifically incorrect, tending to impair the national character of our standard speech, and to adapt it to the habits of classical scholars. On account of these alien associations our borrowed terms are now spelt and pronounced, not as English, but as foreign words, instead of being assimilated, as they were in the past, and brought into conformity with the main structure of our speech. And as we more and more rarely assimilate our borrowings, so even words that were once naturalized are being now one by one made un-English, and driven out of the language back into their foreign forms; whence it comes that a paragraph of serious English prose may be sometimes seen as freely sprinkled with italicized French words as a passage of Cicero is often interlarded with Greek. The mere printing of such words in italics is an active force toward degeneration. The Society hopes to discredit this tendency, and it will endeavour to restore to English its old recreative energy; when a choice is possible we should wish to give an English pronunciation and spelling to useful foreign words, and we would attempt to restore to a good many words the old English forms which they once had, but which are now supplanted by the original foreign forms. 45

1

A glance through any English weekly or review, or, indeed, any English newspaper of the slightest intellectual pretension will show how far this tendency has gone. All the foreign words that English must perforce employ for want of native terms of precisely the same import are carefully italicized and accented, e. g., matinèe, cafè, crêpe, dèbut, portiére, èclat, naïvetè, règime, rôle, soirèe, prècis, protègè, èlite, gemütlichkeit, mêlèe, tête-á-tête, porte-cochére, divorcèe, fiancèe, weltpolitik, weltschmerz, muzhik, ukase, dènouement. Even good old English words have been displaced by foreign analogues thought to be more elegant, e. g., repertory by rèpertoire, sheik by shaikh, czar by tsar, levee by levèe, moslem by muslim, khalifate by khilifat, said by seyd, crape by crêpe, supper by souper, Legion of Honor by Lègion d’honneur, gormand by gourmand, grip by la grippe, crown by krone. Proper names also yield to this new pedantry, and the London Times frequently delights the aluminados by suddenly making such substitutions as that of Serbia for Servia and that of Rumania for Roumania; in the course of time, if the warnings of the S. P. E. do not prevail, the English may be writing München, Kobenhavn, Napoli, Wien, Warszava, Bruxelles and s’Gravenhage; even today they commonly use Hannover, Habana and Leipzig. Nearly all the English papers are careful about the diacritical marks in proper names, e. g., Sévres, Zürich, Bülow, François, Frèdèric, Hèloise, Bogotà, Orlèans, Besançon, Rhône, Côted’Or, Württemberg. The English dictionaries seldom omit the accents from recent foreign words. Cassell’s leaves them off règime and dèbut, but preserves them on practically all the other terms listed above; the Concise Oxford always uses them.

2

In the United States, as everyone knows, there is no such preciosity visible. Dèpôt became depot immediately it entered the language, and the same rapid naturalization has overtaken employè, matinèe, dèbutante, negligèe, tête-á-tête, exposè, rèsumè, hofbräu, and scores of other loan-words. Cafè is seldom seen with its accent, nor is senor or divorcèe or attachè. In fact, says a recent critic, 46 “the omission of the diacritic is universal. Even the English press of French New Orleans ignores it.” This critic lists some rather amazing barbarisms, among them standchen for ständchen in Littell’s Living Age, outre for outrè in Judge, and Poincaire, Poincare and Poinciarre for Poincarè in an unnamed newspaper. He gives an amusing account of the struggles of American newspapers with thè dansant. He says:

Put this through the hopper of the typesetting machine, and it comes forth, “the the dansant”—which even Oshkosh finds intolerable. The thing was, however, often attempted when thes dansants came into fashion, and with various results. Generally the proof-reader eliminates one of the the’s, making dansant a quasi-noun, and to this day one reads of people giving or attending dansants. Latterly the public taste seems to favor dansante, which doubtless has a Frenchier appearance, provided you are sufficiently ignorant of the Gallic tongue. Two other solutions of the difficulty may be noted:

Among those present at the “the dansant”;

Among those present at the the-dansant;

that is, either a hyphen or quotation marks set off the exotic phrase.

3

Even when American newspapers essay to use accents, they commonly use them incorrectly. The same critic reports Piérre for Pierre, má for ma, and buffèt, buffêt and even buffet for buffet. But they seldom attempt to use them, and in this iconoclasm they are supported by at least one professor, Brander Matthews. In speaking of naïve and naïvetè, which he welcomes because “we have no exact equivalent for either word,” he says: “but they will need to shed their accents and to adapt themselves somehow to the traditions of our orthography.” 47 He goes on: “After we have decided that the foreign word we find knocking at the doors of English [he really means American, as the context shows] is likely to be useful, we must fit it for naturalization by insisting that it shall shed its accents, if it has any; that it shall change its spelling, if this is necessary; that it shall modify its pronunciation, if this is not easy for us to compass; and that it shall conform to all our speech-habits, especially in the formation of the plural.” This counsel is heeded by the great majority of American printers. I have found bozart (for beaux arts) on the first page of a leading American newspaper, and a large textile corporation widely advertises Bozart rugs. Exposè long since lost its accent and is now commonly pronounced to rhyme with propose. In the common speech the French word beau has been naturalized as bo, and is often so spelled. Schmierkäse has become smearkase. The sauer, in sauer-kraut and sauer-braten, is often spelled sour. Cole-slaw, has become cold-slaw. Canon is canyon. I have even seen jonteel, in a trade name, for the French gentil.

4

American newspapers seldom distinguish between the masculine and feminine forms of common loan-words. Blond and blonde are used indiscriminately. The majority of papers, apparently mistaking blond for a simplified form of blonde, use it to designate both sexes. So with employèe, divorcèe, dèbutante, etc. Here the feminine form is preferred; no doubt it has been helped into use in the case of the -ee words by the analogy of devotee. In all cases, of course, the accents are omitted. In the formation of the plural American adopts native forms much more quickly than English. All the English authorities that I have consulted advocate retaining the foreign plurals of most of the loan-words in daily use, e. g., sanatoria, appendices, indices, virtuosi, formulœ, libretti, media, thèsdansants, monsignori. But American usage favors plurals of native design, and sometimes they take quite fantastic forms. I have observed delicatessens, monsignors, virtuosos, rathskellers, kindergartens, nucleuses and appendixes. Even the Journal of the American Medical Association, a highly scientific authority, goes so far as to approve curriculums and septums. Banditti, in place of bandits, would seem an affectation to an American, and so would soprani for sopranos and soli for solos, but the last two, at least, are common in England. Both English and American labor under the lack of native plurals for the two everyday titles, Mister and Missus. In the written speech, and in the more exact forms of the spoken speech, the French plurals, Messieurs and Mesdames, are used, but in the ordinary spoken speech, at least in America, they are avoided by circumlocution. When Messieurs has to be spoken it is almost invariably pronounced messers, and in the same way Mesdames becomes mez-dames, with the first syllable rhyming with sez and the second, which bears the accent, with games. In place of Mesdames a more natural form, Madames, seems to be gaining ground in America. Thus, I have found Dames du Sacrè Cœur translated as Madames of the Sacred Heart in a Catholic paper of wide circulation, 48 and the form is apparently used by American members of the community.

5

Dr. Louise Pound 49 notes that a number of Latin plurals tend to become singular nouns in colloquial American, notably curricula, data, dicta, insignia and strata, and with them a few Greek plurals, e. g., criteria and phenomena. She reports hearing the following uses of them: “The curricula of the institution is being changed,” “This data is very significant,” “The dicta, ‘Go West,’ is said to have come from Horace Greeley,” “What is that insignia on his sleeve?”, “This may be called the Renaissance strata of loan-words,” “That is no criteria,” and “What a strange phenomena!”—all by speakers presumed to be of some education. The error leads to the creation of double plurals, e. g., curriculas, insignias, stratas, stimulis, alumnis, bacillis, narcissis. The Latin names of plants lead to frequent blunders. Cosmos and gladiolus are felt to be plurals, and from them, by folk-etymology, come the false singulars, cosma and gladiola. Dr. Pound notes many other barbarous plurals, not mentioned above, e. g., antennas, cerebras, alumnas, alumnuses, narcissuses, apparatuses, emporiums, opuses, criterions, amœbas, cactuses, phenomenons.

6

Note 45.  S. P. E. Tract No. 1, Preliminary Announcement and List of Members, Oct., 1919; Oxford, 1919, p. 7. The Literary Supplement of the London Times supported the Society in a leading article on Jan. 8, 1920. “Of old,” it said, “we incorporated foreign words rapidly and altered their spelling ruthlessly. Today we take them in and go on spelling them and pronouncing them in a foreign way. Rendezvous is an example, règime is another. They have come to stay; the spelling of the first, and at least the pronunciation of the second, should be altered; and a powerful organization of schoolmasters and journalists could secure changes which the working classes are in process of securing with the words (more familiar to them) garridge and shover.” See also A Few Practical Suggestions, by Logan Pearsall Smith, S. P. E. Tract No. 3; Oxford, 1920, especially sections i, ii and iii. [back]

Note 46.  Charles Fitzhugh Talman: Accents Wild, Atlantic Monthly, Dec., 1915, p. 807ff. [back]

Note 47.  Why Not Speak Your Own Language? Delineator, Nov., 1917, p. 12. [back]

Note 48.  Irish World, June 26, 1918. [back]

Note 49.  The Pluralization of Latin Loan-Words in Present-Day American Speech, Classical Journal, vol. xv, no. 3 (Dec., 1919). [back]

In capitalization the English are a good deal more conservative than we are. They invariably capitalize such terms as Government, Prime Minister and Society, when used as proper nouns; they capitalize Press, Pulpit, Bar, etc., almost as often. In America a movement against this use of capitals appeared during the latter part of the eighteenth century. In Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence nature and creator, and even god are in lower case. During the 20’s and 30’s of the succeeding century, probably as a result of French influence, the movement against the capitals went so far that the days of the week were often spelled with small initial letters, and even Mr. became mr. Curiously enough, the most striking exhibition of this tendency of late years is offered by an English work of the highest scholarship, the Cambridge History of English Literature. It uses the lower case for all titles, even baron and colonel before proper names, and also avoids capitals in such words as presbyterian, catholic and christian, and in the second parts of such terms as Westminster abbey and Atlantic ocean.

1

There are also certain differences in punctuation. The English, as everyone knows, put a comma after the street number of a house, making it, for example, 34, St. James’s street. They usually insert a comma instead of a period after the hour when giving the time in figures, e. g., 9, 27, and omit the o when indicating less than 10 minutes, e. g., 8, 7, instead of 8.07. They do not use the period as the mark of the decimal, but employ a dot at the level of the upper dot of a colon, as in 3.1416. They cling to the hyphen in such words as to-day, to-night and good-bye; it begins to disappear in America.

2

There remains a class of differences that may as well be noticed under spelling, though they are not strictly orthographical. Specialty, aluminum and alarm offer examples. In English they are speciality, aluminium and alarum, though alarm is also an alternative form. Specialty, in America, is always accented on the first syllable; speciality, in England, on the third. The result is two distinct words, though their meaning is identical. How aluminium, in America, lost its fourth syllable I have been unable to determine, but all American authorities now make it aluminium and all English authorities stick to aluminium. Perhaps the boric-boracic pair also belongs here. In American boric is now almost universally preferred, but it is also making progress in England. How the difference between the English behove and the American behoove arose I do not know. Equally mysterious is the origin of the American snicker, apparently a decadent form of the English snigger.

3

1. Grammarians and Their Ways

So far, in the main, the language examined has been of a relatively pretentious and self-conscious variety—the speech, if not always of formal discourse, then at least of literate men. Most of the examples of its vocabulary and idiom, in fact, have been drawn from written documents or from written reports of more or less careful utterances, for example, the speeches of members of Congress and of other public men. The whole of Thornton’s excellent material is of this character. In his dictionary there is scarcely a locution that is not supported by printed examples.

1

It must be obvious that such materials, however lavishly set forth, cannot exhibit the methods and tendencies of a living speech with anything approaching completeness, nor even with accuracy. What men put into writing and what they say when they take sober thought are very far from what they utter in everyday conversation. All of us, no matter how careful our speech habits, loosen the belt a bit, so to speak, when we talk familiarly to our fellows, and pay a good deal less heed to precedents and proprieties, perhaps, than we ought to. It was a sure instinct that made Ibsen put “bad grammar” into the mouth of Nora Helmar in “A Doll’s House.” She is a general’s daughter and the wife of a professor, but even professors’ wives are not above occasional bogglings of the cases of pronouns and the conjugations of verbs. The professors themselves, in truth, must have the same habit, for sometimes they show plain signs of it in print. More than once, plowing through profound and interminable treatises of grammar and syntax during the writing and revision of the present work, I have encountered the cheering spectacle of one grammarian exposing, with contagious joy, the grammatical lapses of some other grammarian. And nine times out of ten, a few pages further on, I have found the enchanted purist erring himself. 1 The most funereal of the sciences is saved from utter horror by such displays of human malice and fallibility. Speech itself, indeed, would become almost impossible if the grammarians could follow their own rules unfailingly, and were always right.

2

But here we are among the learned, and their sins, when detected and exposed, are at least punished by conscience. What are of more importance, to those interested in language as a living thing, are the offendings of the millions who are not conscious of any wrong. It is among these millions, ignorant of regulation and eager only to express their ideas clearly and forcefully, that language undergoes its great changes and constantly renews its vitality. These are the genuine makers of grammar, marching miles ahead of the formal grammarians. Like the Emperor Sigismund, each man among them may well say: “Ego sum … supra grammaticam.” It is competent for any individual to offer his contribution—his new word, his better idiom, his novel figure of speech, his short cut in grammar or syntax—and it is by the general vote of the whole body, not by the verdict of a small school, that the fate of the innovation is decided. As Brander Matthews says, there is not even representative government in the matter; the posse comitatus decides directly, and despite the sternest protest, finally. The ignorant, the rebellious and the daring come forward with their brilliant barbarisms; the learned and conservative bring up their objections. “And when both sides have been heard, there is a show of hands; and by this the irrevocable decision of the community itself is rendered.” 2 Thus it was that the Romance languages were fashioned out of the wreck of Latin, the vast influence of the literate minority to the contrary notwithstanding. Thus it was, too, that English lost its case inflections and many of its old conjugations, and that our yes came to be substituted for the gea-se (= so be it) of an earlier day, and that we got rid of whom after man in the man I saw, and that our stark pronoun of the first person was precipitated from the German ich. And thus it is that, in our own day, the language faces forces in America which, not content with overhauling and greatly enriching its materials, now threaten to work changes in its very structure.

3

Where these tendencies run strongest, of course, is on the plane of the vulgar spoken language. Among all classes the everyday speech departs very far from orthodox English, and even very far from any recognized spoken English, but among the lower classes that make up the great body of the people it gets so far from orthodox English that it gives promise, soon or late, of throwing off its old bonds altogether, or, at any rate, all save the loosest of them. Behind it is the gigantic impulse that I have described in earlier chapters: the impulse of an egoistic and iconoclastic people, facing a new order of life in highly self-conscious freedom, to break a relatively stable language, long since emerged from its period of growth, to their novel and multitudinous needs, and, above all, to their experimental and impatient spirit. This impulse, it must be plain, would war fiercely upon any attempt at formal regulation, however prudent and elastic; it is often rebellious for the mere sake of rebellion. But what it comes into conflict with, in America, is nothing so politic, and hence nothing so likely to keep the brakes upon it. What it actually encounters here is a formalism that is artificial, illogical and almost unintelligible—a formalism borrowed from English grammarians, and by them brought into English, against all fact and reason, from the Latin. “In most of our grammars, perhaps in all of those issued earlier than the opening of the twentieth century,” says Matthews, “we find linguistic laws laid down which are in blank contradiction with the genius of the language.” 3 In brief, the American school-boy, hauled before a pedagogue to be instructed in the structure and organization of the tongue he speaks, is actually instructed in the structure and organization of a tongue that he never hears at all, and seldom reads, and that, in more than one of the characters thus set before him, does not even exist.

4

The effects of this are twofold. On the one hand he conceives an antipathy to a subject so lacking in intelligibility and utility. As one teacher puts it, “pupils tire of it; often they see nothing in it, because there is nothing in it.” 4 And on the other hand, the schoolboy goes entirely without sympathetic guidance in the living language that he actually speaks, in and out of the classroom, and that he will probably speak all the rest of his life. All he hears in relation to it is a series of sneers and prohibitions, most of them grounded, not upon principles deduced from its own nature, but upon its divergences from the theoretical language that he is so unsuccessfully taught. The net result is that all the instruction he receives passes for naught. It is not sufficient to make him a master of orthodox English and it is not sufficient to rid him of the speech-habits of his home and daily life. Thus he is thrown back upon those speech-habits without any helpful restraint or guidance, and they make him a willing ally of the radical and often extravagant tendencies which show themselves in the vulgar tongue. In other words, the very effort to teach him an excessively tight and formal English promotes his use of a loose and rebellious English. And so the grammarians, with the traditional fatuity of their order, labor for the destruction of the grammar they defend, and for the decay of all those refinements of speech that go with it.

5

The folly of this system, of course, has not failed to attract the attention of the more intelligent teachers, nor have they failed to observe the causes of its failure. “Much of the fruitlessness of the study of English grammar,” says Wilcox, 5 “and many of the obstacles encountered in its study are due to ‘the difficulties created by the grammarians.’# These difficulties arise chiefly from three sources—excessive classification, multiplication of terms for a single conception, and the attempt to treat the English language as if it were highly inflected.” Dr. Otto Jespersen puts them a bit differently. “Ordinary grammars,” he says, “in laying down their rules, are too apt to forget that the English language is one thing, common-sense or logic another thing, and Latin grammar a third, and that these three things have really, in many cases, very little to do with one another. Schoolmasters generally have an astonishing talent for not observing real linguistic facts, and an equally astonishing inclination to stamp everything as faulty that does not agree with their narrow rules.” 6 So long ago as the 60’s Richard Grant White began an onslaught upon all such punditic stupidities. He saw clearly that “the attempt to treat English as if it were highly inflected” was making its intelligent study almost impossible, and proposed boldly that all English grammar-books be burned. 7 Of late his ideas have begun to gain a certain acceptance, and as the literature of denunciation has grown 8 the grammarians have been constrained to overhaul their texts. When I was a school-boy, during the penultimate decade of the last century, the chief American grammar was “A Practical Grammar of the English Language,” by Thomas W. Harvey. 9 This formidable work was almost purely synthetical: it began with a long series of definitions, wholly unintelligible to a child, and proceeded into a maddening maze of pedagogical distinctions, puzzling even to an adult. The latter-day grammars, at least those for the elementary schools, are far more analytical and logical. For example, there is “Longman’s Briefer Grammar,” by George J. Smith, 10 a text now in very wide use. This book starts off, not with page after page of abstractions, but with a well-devised examination of the complete sentence, and the characters and relations of the parts of speech are very simply and clearly developed. But before the end the author begins to succumb to precedent, and on page 114 I find paragraph after paragraph of such dull, flyblown pedantry as this:

Some Intransitive Verbs are used to link the Subject and some Adjective or Noun. These Verbs are called Copulative Verbs, and the Adjective or Noun is called the Attribute.

The Attribute always describes or denotes the person or thing denoted by the Subject.

Verbals are words that are derived from Verbs and express action or being without asserting it. Infinitives and Participles are Verbals.

6

And so on. Smith, in his preface, says that his book is intended, “not so much to ‘cover’# the subject of grammar, as to teach it,” and calls attention to the fact, somewhat proudly, that he has omitted “the rather hard subject of gerunds,” all mention of conjunctive adverbs, and even the conjugation of verbs. Nevertheless, he immerses himself in the mythical objective case of nouns on page 108, and does not emerge until the end. 11 “The New-Webster-Cooley Course in English,” 12 another popular text, carries reform a step further. The subject of case is approached through the personal pronouns, where it retains its only surviving intelligibility, and the more lucid object form is used in place of objective case. Moreover, the pupil is plainly informed, later on, that “a noun has in reality but two case-forms: a possessive and a common case-form.” This is the best concession to the facts yet made by a text-book grammarian. But no one familiar with the habits of the pedagogical mind need be told that its interior pull is against even such mild and obvious reforms. Defenders of the old order are by no means silent; a fear seems to prevail that grammar, robbed of its imbecile classifications, may collapse entirely. Wilcox records how the Council of English Teachers of New Jersey, but a few years ago, spoke out boldly for the recognition of no less than five cases in English. “Why five?” asks Wilcox. “Why not eight, or ten, or even thirteen? Undoubtedly because there are five cases in Latin.” 13 Most of the current efforts at improvement, in fact, tend toward a mere revision and multiplication of classifications; the pedant is eternally convinced that pigeon-holing and relabelling are contributions to knowledge. A curious proof in point is offered by a pamphlet entitled “Reorganization of English in Secondary Schools,” compiled by James Fleming Hosic and issued by the National Bureau of Education. 14 The aim of this pamphlet is to rid the teaching of English, including grammar, of its accumulated formalism and ineffectiveness—to make it genuine instruction instead of a pedantic and meaningless routine. And how is this revolutionary aim set forth? By a meticulous and merciless splitting of hairs, a gigantic manufacture of classifications and sub-classifications, a colossal display of professorial bombast and flatulence!

7

I could cite many other examples. Perhaps, after all, the disease is incurable. What such laborious stupidity shows at bottom is simply this: that the sort of man who is willing to devote his life to teaching grammar to children, or to training schoolmarms to do it, is not often the sort of man who is intelligent enough to do it competently. In particular, he is not often intelligent enough to deal with the fluent and ever-amazing permutations of a living and rebellious speech. The only way he can grapple with it at all is by first reducing it to a fixed and formal organization—in brief, by first killing it and embalming it. The difference in the resultant proceedings is not unlike that between a gross dissection and a surgical operation. The difficulties of the former are quickly mastered by any student of normal sense, but even the most casual of laparotomies calls for a man of special skill and address. Thus the elementary study of the national language, at least in America, is almost monopolized by dullards. Children are taught it by men and women who observe it inaccurately and expound it ignorantly. In most other fields the pedagogue meets a certain corrective competition and criticism. The teacher of any branch of applied mechanics or mathematics, for example, has practical engineers at his elbow and they quickly expose and denounce his defects; the college teacher of chemistry, however limited his equipment, at least has the aid of text-books written by actual chemists. But English, even in its most formal shapes, is chiefly taught by those who cannot write it decently and get no aid from those who can. One wades through treatise after treatise on English style by pedagogues whose own style is atrocious. A Huxley or a Macaulay might have written one of high merit and utility—but Huxley and Macaulay had other fish to fry, and so the business was left to Prof. Balderdash. Consider the standard texts on prosody—vast piles of meaningless words—hollow babble about spondees, iambics, trochees and so on—idiotic borrowings from dead languages. Two poets, Poe and Lanier, blew blasts of fresh air through the fog, but they had no successors, and it has apparently closed in again. In the department of prose it lies wholly unbroken; no first-rate writer of English prose has ever written a text-book upon the art of writing it.

8

Note 1.  Sweet, perhaps the abbot of the order, makes almost indecent haste to sin. See the second paragraph on the very first page of vol. i of his New English Grammar. [back]

Note 2.  Yale Review, April, 1918, p. 548. [back]

Note 3.  Yale Review, op. cit., p. 560. See also Is Grammar Useless? by Walter Guest Kellogg, North American Review, July, 1920. [back]

Note 4.  The Difficulties Created by Grammarians Are to Be Ignored, by W. H. Wilcox, Atlantio Educational Journal, Nov., 1912, p. 8. The title of this article is quoted from ministerial instructions of 1909 to the teachers of French lycées. [back]

Note 5.  Op. cit., p. 7. Mr. Wilcox is an instructor in the Maryland State Normal School. [back]

Note 6.  Chapters on English; London, 1918, p. 49. [back]

Note 7.  See especially chapters ix and x of Words and Their Uses and chapters xvii, xviii and xix of Every-Day English; also the preface to the latter, p. xi et seq. The study of other languages has been made difficult by the same attempt to force the characters of Greek and Latin grammar upon them. One finds a protest against the process, for example, in E. H. Palmer’s Grammar of Hindustani, Persian and Arabic; London, 1906. In all ages, indeed, grammarians appear to have been fatuous. The learned will remember Aristophanes’ ridicule of them in The Clouds, 660-690. [back]

Note 8.  The case is well summarized in Simpler English Grammar, by Patterson Wardlaw, Bull. of the University of S. Carolina, no. 38, pt. iii, July, 1914. [back]

Note 9.  Cincinnati, 1868; rev. ed., 1878. [back]

Note 10.  New York, 1903; rev. ed., 1915. [back]

Note 11.  Even Sweet, though he bases his New English Grammar upon the spoken language and thus sets the purists at defiance, quickly succumbs to the labelling mania. Thus his classification of tenses includes such fabulous monsters as these: continuous, recurrent, neutral, definite, indefinite, secondary, incomplete, inchoate, short and long. [back]

Note 12.  By W. F. Webster and Alice Woodworth Cooley; Boston, 1903; rev. eds., 1905 and 1909. The authors are Minneapolis teachers. [back]

Note 13.  Op. cit., p. 8. [back]

Note 14.  Bulletin No. 2; Washington, 1917. [back]

But here I wander afield. The art of prose has little to do with the stiff and pedantic English taught in grammar-schools and a great deal less to do with the loose and lively English spoken by the average American in his daily traffic. The thing of importance is that the two differ from each other even more than they differ from the English of a Huxley or a Stevenson. The school-marm, directed by grammarians, labors heroically, but all her effort goes for naught. The young American, like the youngster of any other race, inclines irresistibly toward the dialect that he hears at home, and that dialect, with its piquant neologisms, its high disdain of precedent, its complete lack of self-consciousness, is almost the antithesis of the hard and stiff speech that is expounded out of books. It derives its principles, not from the subtle logic of learned and stupid men, but from the rough-and-ready logic of every day. It has a vocabulary of its own, a syntax of its own, even a grammar of its own. Its verbs are conjugated in a way that defies all the injunctions of the grammar books; it has its contumacious rules of tense, number and case; it has boldly re-established the double negative, once sound in English; it admits double comparatives, confusions in person, clipped infinitives; it lays hands on the vowels, changing them to fit its obscure but powerful spirit; it repudiates all the finer distinctions between the parts of speech.

1

This highly virile and defiant dialect, and not the fossilized English of the school-marm and her books, is the speech of the Middle American of Joseph Jacobs’ composite picture—the mill-hand in a small city of Indiana, with his five years of common schooling behind him, his diligent reading of newspapers, and his proud membership in the Order of Foresters and the Knights of the Maccabees. 15 Go into any part of the country, North, East, South or West, and you will find multitudes of his brothers, car conductors in Philadelphia, immigrants of the second generation in the East Side of New York, iron-workers in the Pittsburgh region, corner grocers in St. Louis, holders of petty political jobs in Atlanta and New Orleans, small farmers in Kansas or Kentucky, house carpenters in Ohio, tinners and plumbers in Chicago—genuine Americans all, bawling patriots, hot for the home team, marchers in parades, readers of the yellow newspapers, fathers of families, sheep on election day, undistinguished norms of the Homo Americanus. Such typical Americans, after a fashion, know English. They read it—all save the “hard” words, i. e., all save about 90 per cent of the words of Greek and Latin origin. 16 They can understand perhaps two-thirds of it as it comes from the lips of a political orator or clerygman. They have a feeling that it is, in some recondite sense, superior to the common speech of their kind. They recognize a fluent command of it as the salient mark of a “smart” and “educated” man, one with “the gift of gab.” But they themselves never speak it or try to speak it, nor do they look with approbation on efforts in that direction by their fellows.

2

In no other way, indeed, is the failure of popular education made more vividly manifest. Despite a gigantic effort to enforce certain speech habits, universally in operation from end to end of the country, the masses of people turn almost unanimously to very different speech habits, nowhere advocated and seldom so much as even accurately observed. The literary critic, Francis Hackett, somewhere speaks of “the enormous gap between the literate and unliterate American.” He is apparently the first to call attention to it. It is the national assumption that no such gap exists—that all Americans, at least if they be white, are so outfitted with sagacity in the public schools that they are competent to consider any public question intelligently and to follow its discussion with understanding. But the truth is, of course, that the public school accomplishes no such magic. The inferior man, in America as elsewhere, remains an inferior man despite the hard effort made to improve him, and his thoughts seldom if ever rise above the most elemental concerns. What lies above not only does not interest him; it actually excites his derision, and he has coined a unique word, high-brow, to express his view of it. Especially in speech is he suspicious of superior pretension. The school-boy of the lower orders would bring down ridicule upon himself, and perhaps criticism still more devastating, if he essayed to speak what his teachers conceive to be correct English, or even correct American, outside the school-room. On the one hand his companions would laugh at him as a prig, and on the other hand his parents would probably cane him as an impertinent critic of their own speech. Once he has made his farewell to the schoolmarm, all her diligence in this department goes for nothing. 17 The boys with whom he plays baseball speak a tongue that is not the one taught in school, and so do the youths with whom he will begin learning a trade tomorrow, and the girl he will marry later on, and the saloon-keepers, star pitchers, vaudeville comedians, business sharpers and political mountebanks he will look up to and try to imitate all the rest of his life.

3

So far as I can discover, there has been but one attempt by a competent authority to determine the special characters of this general tongue of the mobile vulgus. That authority is Dr. W. W. Charters, now Professor of Education at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh. In 1914 Dr. Charters was dean of the faculty of education and professor of the theory of teaching in the University of Missouri, and one of the problems he was engaged upon was that of the teaching of grammar. In the course of this study he encountered the theory that such instruction should be confined to the rules habitually violated—that the one aim of teaching grammar was to correct the speech of the pupils, and that it was useless to harass them with principles which they already instinctively observed. Apparently inclining to this somewhat dubious notion, Dr. Charters applied to the School Board of Kansas City for permission to undertake an examination of the language actually used by the children in the elementary schools of that city, and this permission was granted. The materials thereupon gathered were of two classes. First, the teachers of grades III to VII inclusive in all the Kansas City public schools were instructed to turn over to Dr. Charters all the written work of their pupils, “ordinarily done in the regular order of school work” during a period of four weeks. Secondly, the teachers of grades II to VII inclusive were instructed to make note of “all oral errors in grammar made in the school-rooms and around the schoolbuildings” during the five school-days of one week, by children of any age, and to dispatch these notes to Dr. Charters also. The result was an accumulation of material so huge that it was unworkable with the means at hand, and so the investigator and his assistants reduced it. Of the oral reports, two studies were made, the first of those from grades III and VII and the second of those from grades VI and VII. Of the written reports, only those from grades VI and VII of twelve typical schools were examined.

4

The ages thus covered ran from nine or ten to fourteen or fifteen, and perhaps five-sixths of the material studied came from children above twelve. Its examination threw a brilliant light upon the speech actually employed by children near the end of their schooling in a typical American city, and per corollary, upon the speech employed by their parents and other older associates. If anything, the grammatical and syntactical habits revealed were a bit less loose than those of the authentic Volkssprache, for practically all of the written evidence was gathered under conditions which naturally caused the writers to try to write what they conceived to be correct English, and even the oral evidence was conditioned by the admonitory presence of the teacher. Moreover, it must be obvious that a child of the lower classes, during the period of its actual study of grammar, probably speaks better English than at any time before or afterward, for it is only then that any positive pressure is exerted upon it to that end. But even so, the departures from standard usage that were unearthed were numerous and striking, and their tendency to accumulate in definite groups showed plainly the working of general laws. 18

5

Thus, no less than 57 per cent of the oral errors reported by the teachers of grades III and VII involved the use of the verb, and nearly half of these, or 24 per cent of the total, involved a confusion of the past tense form and the perfect participle. Again, double negatives constituted 11 per cent of the errors, and the misuse of adjectives or of adjectival forms for adverbs ran to 4 per cent. Finally, the difficulties of the objective case among the pronouns, the last stronghold of that case in English, were responsible for 7 per cent, thus demonstrating a clear tendency to get rid of it altogether. Now compare the errors of these children, half of whom, as I have just said, were in grade III, and hence wholly uninstructed in formal grammar, with the errors made by children of the second oral group—that is, children of grades VI and VII, in both of which grammar is studied. Dr. Charters’ tabulations show scarcely any difference in the character and relative rank of the errors discovered. Those in the use of the verb drop from 57 per cent of the total to 52 per cent, but the double negatives remain at 7 per cent and the errors in the cases of pronouns at 11 per cent.

6

In the written work of grades VI and VII, however, certain changes appear, no doubt because of the special pedagogical effort against the more salient oral errors. The child, pen in hand, has in mind the cautions oftenest heard, and so reveals something of that greater exactness which all of us show when we do any writing that must bear critical inspection. Thus, the relative frequency of confusion between the past tense forms of verbs and the perfect participles drops from 24 per cent to 5 per cent, and errors based on double negatives drop to 1 per cent. But this improvement in one direction merely serves to unearth new barbarisms in other directions, concealed in the oral tables by the flood of errors now remedied. It is among the verbs that they are still most numerous; altogether the errors here amount to exactly 50 per cent of the total. Such locutions as I had went and he seen diminish relatively and absolutely, but in all other situations the verb is treated with the lavish freedom that is so characteristic of the American common speech. Confusions of the past and present tenses jump relatively from 2 per cent to 19 per cent, thus eloquently demonstrating the tenacity of the error. And mistakes in the forms of nouns and pronouns increase from 2 per cent to 19: a shining proof of a shakiness which follows the slightest effort to augment the vocabulary of everyday.

7

The materials collected by Dr. Charters and his associates are not, of course, presented in full, but his numerous specimens must strike familiar chords in every ear that is alert to the sounds and ways of the sermo vulgaris. What he gathered in Kansas City might have been gathered just as well in San Francisco, or New Orleans, or Chicago, or New York, or in Youngstown, O., or Little Rock, Ark., or Waterloo, Iowa. In each of these places, large or small, a few localisms might have been noted—oi substituted for ur in New York, you-all in the South, a few Germanisms in Pennsylvania and in the upper Mississippi Valley, a few Spanish locutions in the Southwest, certain peculiar vowel-forms in New England—but in the main the report would have been identical with the report he makes. “Relatively few Americans,” says Krapp, 19 “spend all their lives in one locality, and even if they do, they cannot possibly escape coming into contact with Americans from other localities…. We can distinguish with some certainty Eastern and Western and Southern speech, but beyond this the author has little confidence in those confident experts who think they can tell infallibly, by the test of speech, a native of Hartford from a native of Providence, or a native of Philadelphia from a native of Atlanta, or even, if one insist on infallibility, a native of Chicago from a native of Boston.” Krapp is discussing the so-called “standard” speech; on the plane of the vulgate the levelling is quite as apparent. That vast uniformity which marks the people of the United States, in political doctrine, in social habit, in general information, in reaction to ideas, in prejudices and enthusiasms, in the veriest details of domestic custom and dress, is nowhere more marked, in truth, than in their speech habits. The incessant neologisms of the national dialect sweep the whole country almost instantly, and the iconoclastic changes which its popular spoken form is constantly undergoing show themselves from coast to coast. “He hurt hisself,” cited by Dr. Charters, is surely anything but a Missouri localism; one hears it everywhere. And so, too, one hears “she invited him and I,” and “it hurt terrible,” and “I set there,” and “this here man,” and “no, I never, neither,” and “he ain’t here,” and “where is he at?” and “it seems like I remember,” and “if I was you,” and “us fellows,” and “he give her hell.” And “he taken and kissed her,” and “he loaned me a dollar,” and “the man was found two dollars,” and “the bee stang him,” and “I wouldda thought,” and “can I have one?” and “he got hisn,” and “the boss left him off,” and “the baby et the soap,” and “them are the kind I like,” and “he don’t care,” and “no one has their ticket,” and “how is the folks?” and “if you would of gotten in the car you could of rode down.”

8

Curiously enough, this widely dispersed and highly savory dialect—already, as I shall show, come to a certain grammatical regularity—has attracted the professional writers of the country almost as little as it has attracted the philologists. There are foreshadowings of it in “Huckleberry Finn,” in “The Biglow Papers” and even in the rough humor of the period that began with J. C. Neal and company and ended with Artemus Ward and Josh Billings, but in those early days it had not yet come to full flower; it wanted the influence of the later immigrations to take on its present character. The enormous dialect literature of twenty years ago left it almost untouched. Localisms were explored diligently, but the general dialect went virtually unobserved. It is not in “Chimmie Fadden”; it is not in “David Harum”; it is not even in the pre-fable stories of George Ade, perhaps the most acute observer of average, undistinguished American types, urban and rustic, that American literature has yet produced. The business of reducing it to print had to wait for Ring W. Lardner, a Chicago newspaper reporter. In his grotesque tales of base-ball players, so immediately and so deservedly successful, 20 Lardner reports the common speech not only with humor, but also with the utmost accuracy. The observations of Charters and his associates are here reinforced by the sharp ear of one especially competent, and the result is a mine of authentic American.

9

In a single story by Lardner, in truth, it is usually possible to discover examples of almost every logical and grammatical peculiarity of the emerging language, and he always resists very stoutly the temptation to overdo the thing. Here, for example, are a few typical sentences from “The Busher’s Honeymoon”: 21

I and Florrie was married the day before yesterday just like I told you we was going to be…. You was to get married in Bedford, where not nothing is nearly half so dear…. The sum of what I have wrote down is &dollar;29.40…. Allen told me I should ought to give the priest &dollar;5…. I never seen him before…. I didn’t used to eat no lunch in the playing season except when I knowed I was not going to work…. I guess the meals has cost me all together about &dollar;1.50, and I have eat very little myself….

I was willing to tell her all about them two poor girls…. They must not be no mistake about who is the boss in my house. Some men lets their wife run all over them…. Allen has went to a college foot-ball game. One of the reporters give him a pass…. He called up and said he hadn’t only the one pass, but he was not hurting my feelings none…. The flat across the hall from this here one is for rent…. If we should of boughten furniture it would cost us in the neighborhood of &dollar;100, even without no piano…. I consider myself lucky to of found out about this before it was too late and somebody else had of gotten the tip…. It will always be ourn, even when we move away…. Maybe you could of did better if you had of went at it in a different way…. Both her and you is welcome at my house…. I never seen so much wine drank in my life….

10

Here are specimens to fit into most of Charters’ categories—verbs confused as to tense, pronouns confused as to case, double and even triple negatives, nouns and verbs disagreeing in number, have softened to of, n marking the possessive instead of s, like used in place of as, and the personal pronoun substituted for the demonstrative adjective. A study of the whole story would probably unearth all the remaining errors noted in Kansas City. Lardner’s baseball player, though he has pen in hand and is on his guard, and is thus very careful to write would not instead of wouldn’t and even am not instead of ain’t, offers a comprehensive and highly instructive panorama of popular speech habits. To him the forms of the subjunctive mood have no existence, and will and shall are identical, and adjectives and adverbs are indistinguishable, and the objective case is merely a variorum form of the nominative. His past tense is, more often than not, the orthodox present tense. All fine distinctions are obliterated in his speech. He uses invariably the word that is simplest, the grammatical form that is handiest. And so he moves toward the philological millennium dreamed of by George T. Lanigan, when “the singular verb shall lie down with the plural noun, and a little conjunction shall lead them.”

11

Lardner, as I say, is a very accurate observer. More, despite the grotesqueness of the fables that he uses as skeletons for his reports, he is a man of sound philological knowledge, and approaches his business quite seriously. As yet the academic critics have failed to discover him, but soon or late such things as “The Busher’s Honeymoon” are bound to find a secure place in the new literature of the United States. His influence, indeed, is already considerable, and one sees it plainly in such things as Sinclair Lewis’ “Main Street.” 22 Much of the dialogue in “Main Street” is in vulgar American, and Mr. Lewis reports it very accurately. Other writers of fiction turn to the same gorgeous and glowing speech, among them Caroline Lockhart. 23 It even penetrates to more or less serious writing. For example, in a recent treatise on angling by an eminent American authority I find such sentences as “You gotta give him credit for being on the job” and “For an accommodating cuss we gotta tip the kelly to the wall-eyed pike.” 24 Finally, there are the experiments in verse by John V. A. Weaver 25—still a bit uncertain, but perhaps showing the way to a new American poetry tomorrow.

12

Note 15.  The Middle American, American Magazine, March, 1907. [back]

Note 16.  Cf. White: Every-Day English, p. 367 ff. [back]

Note 17.  Cf. Sweet: New English Grammar, vol. i, p. 5. [back]

Note 18.  Dr. Charters’ report appears as Vol. XVI, No. 2, University of Missouri Bulletin, Education Series No. 9, Jan., 1915. He was aided in his inquiry by Edith Miller, teacher of English in one of the St. Louis high-schools. [back]

Note 19.  The Pronunciation of Standard English in America; New York, 1919, p. viii. [back]

Note 20.  You Know Me Al; New York, 1916. [back]

Note 21.  Saturday Evening Post, July 11, 1914. [back]

Note 22.  New York, 1920. [back]

Note 23.  See, for example, Blase Cody Gives Cold Eye to Jeraldine Farrar Troupe, Denver Post, Aug. 18, 1918. [back]

Note 24.  Fishing, Tackle and Kits, by Dixie Carroll, editor of The National Sportsman; Cincinnati, 1919. [back]

Note 25.  See Appendix II; also, the end of the chapter on The Future of the Language. [back]

A study of the materials amassed by Charters and Lardner, if it be reinforced by observation of what is heard on the streets every day, will show that the chief grammatical peculiarities of spoken American lie among the verbs and pronouns. The nouns in common use, in the overwhelming main, are quite sound in form. Very often, of course, they do not belong to the vocabulary of English, but they at least belong to the vocabulary of American: the proletariat, setting aside transient slang, calls things by their proper names, and pronounces those names more or less correctly. The adjectives, too, are treated rather politely, and the adverbs, though commonly transformed into adjectives, are not further mutilated. But the verbs and pronouns undergo changes which set off the common speech very sharply from both correct English and correct American. Their grammatical relationships are thoroughly overhauled and sometimes they are radically modified in form.

1

This process is natural and inevitable, for it is among the verbs and pronouns, as we have seen, that the only remaining grammatical inflections in English, at least of any force or consequence, are to be found, and so they must bear the chief pressure of the influences that have been warring upon all inflections since the earliest days. The primitive Indo-European language, it is probable, had eight cases of the noun; the oldest known Teutonic dialect reduced them to six; in Anglo-Saxon they fell to four, with a weak and moribund instrumental hanging in the air; in Middle English the dative and accusative began to decay; in Modern English they have disappeared altogether, save as ghosts to haunt grammarians. But we still have two plainly defined conjugations of the verb, and we still inflect it for number, and, in part, at least, for person. And we yet retain an objective case of the pronoun, and inflect it for person, number and gender.

2

Some of the more familiar conjugations of verbs in the American common speech, as recorded by Charters or Lardner or derived from my own collectanea, are here set down:

Present

Preterite

Perfect Participle

Am
was
bin (or ben) 26

Attack
attackted
attackted

(Be) 27
was
bin (or ben)

Beat
beaten
beat

Become 28
become
became

Begin
begun
began

Bend
bent
bent

Bet
bet
bet

Bind
bound
bound

Bite
bitten
bit

Bleed
bled
bled

Blow
blowed (or blew)

blowed (or blew)

Break
broken
broke

Bring
brought (or brung, or brang)

brung

Broke (passive)

broke
broke

Build
built
built

Burn
burnt 29
burnt

Burst 30

Bust
busted
busted

Buy
bought (or boughten)

bought (or boughten)

Can
could
could

Catch
caught 31
caught

Choose
chose
choose

Climb
clum
clum

Cling (to hold fast)

clung
clung

Cling (to ring)

clang
clang

Come
come
came

Creep
crep (or crope)

crep

Crow
crowed (or crew)

crowed

Cut
cut
cut

Dare
dared (or dast) 32
dared

Deal
dole 33
dealt

Dig
dug
dug

Dive
dove 34
dived

Do
done
done (or did)

Drag
drug
dragged

Draw
drawed
drawed (or drew)

Dream
drempt
drempt

Drink
drank (or drunk)

drank

Drive
drove
drove

Drown
drownded
drownded

Eat
et (or eat)

ate (or et)

Fall
fell (or fallen)

fell

Feed
fed
fed

Feel
felt
felt

Fetch
fetched 35
fetch

Fight
fought 36
fought

Find
found
found

Fine
found
found

Fling
flang
flung

Flow
flew
flowed

Fly
flew
flew

Forget
forgot (or forgotten)

forgotten

Forsake
forsaken
forsook

Freeze
frozen (or froze) 37
frozen

Get
got (or gotten)

gotten

Give
give
give

Glide
glode 38
glode

Go
went
went

Grow
growed
growed

Hang
hung 39
hung

Have
had
had (or hadden)

Hear
heerd
heerd (or heern)

Heat
het 40
het

Heave
hove
hove

Hide
hidden
hid

H’ist 41
h’isted
h’isted

Hit
hit
hit

Hold
helt
held (or helt)

Holler
hollered
hollered

Hurt
hurt
hurt

Keep
kep
kep

Kneel
knelt
knelt

Know
knowed
knew

Lay
laid (or lain)

laid

Lead
led
led

Lean
lent
lent

Leap
lep
lep

Learn
learnt
learnt

Lend
loaned
loaned

Lie (to falsify)

lied
lied

Lie (to recline)

laid (or lain)

laid

Light
lit
lit

Loose 42

Lose
lost
lost

Make
made
made

May

might’a

Mean
meant
meant

Meet
met
met

Mow
mown
mowed

Pay
paid
paid

Plead
pled
pled

Prove
proved (or proven)

proven

Put
put
put

Quit
quit
quit

Raise
raised
raised

Read
read
read

Rench 43
renched
renched

Rid
rid
rid

Ride
ridden
rode

Rile 44
riled
riled

Ring
rung
rang

Rise
riz (or rose)

riz

Run
run
ran

Say
sez
said

See
seen
saw

Sell
sold
sold

Send
sent
sent

Set
set 45
sat

Shake
shaken (or shuck)

shook

Shave
shaved
shaved

Shed
shed
shed

Shine (to polish)

shined
shined

Shoe
shoed
shoed

Shoot
shot
shot

Show
shown
showed

Sing
sung
sang

Sink
sunk
sank

Sit 46

Skin
skun
skun

Sleep
slep
slep

Slide
slid
slid

Sling
slang
slung

Slit
slitted
slitted

Smell
smelt
smelt

Sneak
snuck
snuck

Speed
speeded
speeded

Spell
spelt
spelt

Spill
spilt
spilt

Spin
span
span

Spit
spit
spit

Spoil
spoilt
spoilt

Spring
sprung
sprang

Steal
stole
stole

Sting
stang
stang

Stink
stank
stunk

Strike
struck
struck

Swear
swore
swore

Sweep
swep
swep

Swell
swole (or swelled)

swollen

Swim
swum
swam

Swing
swang
swung

Take
taken
took

Teach
taught
taught

Tear
tore
torn

Tell
tole
tole

Thin 47

Think
thought 48
thought

Thrive
throve
throve

Throw
throwed
threw

Tread
tread
tread

Unloosen
unloosened
unloosened

Wake
woke
woken

Wear
wore
wore

Weep
wep
wep

Wet
wet
wet

Win
won (or wan) 49
won (or wan)

Wind
wound
wound

Wish (wisht)

wisht
wisht

Wring
wrung
wrang

Write
written
wrote

3

A glance at these conjugations is sufficient to show several general tendencies, some of them going back, in their essence, to the earliest days of the English language. The most obvious is that leading to the transfer of verbs from the so-called strong conjugation to the weak—a change already in operation before the Norman Conquest, and very marked during the Middle English period. Chaucer used growed for grew in the prologue to “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” and rised for rose and smited for smote are in John Purvey’s edition of the Bible, circa 1385. Many of these transformations were afterward abandoned, but a large number survived, for example, climbed for clomb as a preterite of to climb, and melted for molt as the preterite of to melt. Others showed themselves during the early part of the Modern English period. Comed as the perfect participle of to come and digged as the preterite of to dig are both in Shakespeare, and the latter is also in Milton and in the Authorized Version of the Bible. This tendency went furthest, of course, in the vulgar speech, and it has been embalmed in the English dialects. I seen and I knowed, for example, are common to many of them. But during the seventeenth century it seems to have been arrested, and even to have given way to a contrary tendency—that is, toward strong conjugations. The English of Ireland, which preserves many seventeenth century forms, shows this plainly. Ped for paid, gother for gathered, and ruz for raised are still in use there, and Joyce says flatly that the Irish, “retaining the old English custom (i. e., the custom of the period of Cromwell’s invasion, circa 1650), have a leaning toward the strong inflection.” 50 Certain verb forms of the American colonial period, now reduced to the estate of localisms, are also probably survivors of the seventeenth century.

4

“The three great causes of change in language,” says Sayce, “may be briefly described as (1) imitation or analogy, (2) a wish to be clear and emphatic, and (3) laziness. Indeed, if we choose to go deep enough we might reduce all three causes to the general one of laziness, since it is easier to imitate than to say something new.” 51 This tendency to take well-worn paths, paradoxically enough, is responsible both for the transfer of verbs from the strong to the weak declension, and for the transfer of certain others from the weak to the strong. A verb in everyday use tends almost inevitably to pull less familiar verbs with it, whether it be strong or weak. Thus fed as the preterite of to feed and led as the preterite of to lead paved the way for pled as the preterite of to plead, and rode as plainly performed the same office for glode, and rung for brung, and drove for dove and hove, and stole for dole, and won for skun. Moreover, a familiar verb, itself acquiring a faulty inflection, may fasten a similar inflection upon another verb of like sound. Thus het, as the preterite of to heat, no doubt owes its existence to the example of et, the vulgar preterite of to eat. 52 So far the irregular verbs. The same combination of laziness and imitativeness works toward the regularization of certain verbs that are historically irregular. In addition, of course, there is the fact that regularization is itself intrinsically simplification—that it makes the language easier. One sees the antagonistic pull of the two influences in the case of verbs ending in -ow. The analogy of knew suggests snew as the preterite of to snow, and it is sometimes encountered in the American vulgate. But the analogy of snowed also suggests knowed, and the superior regularity of the form is enough to overcome the greater influence of knew as a more familiar word than snowed. Thus snew grows rare and is in decay, but knowed shows vigor, and so do growed and throwed. The substitution of heerd for heard also presents a case of logic and convenience supporting analogy. The form is suggested by steered, feared and cheered, but its main advantage lies in the fact that it gets rid of a vowel change, always an impediment to easy speech. Here, as in the contrary direction, one barbarism breeds another. Thus taken, as the preterite of to take, has undoubtedly helped to make preterites of two other perfects, shaken and forsaken.

5

But in the presence of two exactly contrary tendencies, the one in accordance with the general movement of the language since the Norman Conquest and the other opposed to it, it is unsafe, of course, to attempt any very positive generalizations. All one may exhibit with safety is a general habit of treating the verb conveniently. Now and then, disregarding grammatical tendencies, it is possible to discern what appear to be logical causes for verb phenomena. That lit is preferred to lighted and hung to hanged is probably the result of an aversion to fine distinctions, and perhaps, more fundamentally, to the passive. Again, the use of found as the preterite of to fine is obviously due to an ignorant confusion of fine and find, due to the wearing off of -d in find, and that of lit as the preterite of to alight to a confusion of alight and light. Yet again, the use of tread as its own preterite in place of trod is probably the consequence of a vague feeling that a verb ending with d is already of preterite form. Shed exhibits the same process. Both are given a logical standing by such preterites as bled, fed, led, read, dead and spread. But here, once more, it is hazardous to lay down laws, for shredded, headed, dreaded, threaded and breaded at once come to mind. In other cases it is still more difficult to account for preterites in common use. In my first edition I called attention to the cases of drug, clum and friz. On this point, a correspondent has since sent me the following interesting observations:

True enough, these forms may not adhere closely to the rules of umlaut; but are they not born of the spirit of umlaut which pervades the English verb? Thus: the most obvious form of strong verb is

ring
rang
rung

stink
stank
stunk

begin
began
begun

sing
sang
sung

spin
span 53
spun

speak
spake
spoke 54

spit
spat
spot

(I feel in my bones that spot is a derivative of spit. Spot is the name of the mark made by spitting, which is obviously one of the most primary of human acts.)

swim
swam
swum

spring
sprang
sprung

I imagine that more irregular verbs conform to this one succession than to any one of the others. But all of them, including this one, have been interrupted and obscured by the collision of such independent words as think and thank, i.e.,

think

(thank)

(thunk)

Thank is forced out to avoid collision with

thank
thanked
thanked

Now, if freeze had been regularly irregular, it would have been

friz
fraz
frozen

but the present being freeze instead of friz, the procession would normally be

freeze
frez
frozen

I don’t know whether I have made my idea plain: it is not based on visible law so much as on innate feeling. Its validity depends on whether, when I state it to you, you too feel instinctively that amid the clash of strong tenses your own mind would select these forms, in obedience to an overmastering impulse of euphony. The proper jury to render the verdict would be one of poets. I do not suppose anyone will deny that a man reacts to the genius of his mother tongue, without knowing why. There are, and must have been, even deeper depths of reaction than these strong verbs, to account for the choice of vowel sounds in different words, which process in early ages was entirely unconscious.

This, of course, is only to intimate that there must have been “method in the madness” of friz. As for clum, it seems to me that it is visibly clomb descended to the next lower level, and then denuded of its final b, probably by analogy with thumb. Indeed, it is difficult to pronounce that b unless one says clommmb, thummmb! And will you not agree with me that these are inevitable:

(drig)

drag
drog (descended to drug)

drag

(drog)

drug

(dreeg)

(dreg)

(droge)

(drogg)

(drug)

(droog)

i.e., it scarcely matters what vowel marked the present tense of dr-g, for with any vowel this combination of consonants demands, in any English-speaking mind which is functioning naturally, and not biased by conscious thought, that its past participle be something very close to drug.

6

Some of the verbs of the vulgate show the end and products of language movements that go back to the Anglo-Saxon period, and even beyond. There is, for example, the disappearance of the final t in such words as crep, slep, lep, swep and wep. Most of these, in Anglo-Saxon, were strong verbs. The preterite of to sleep (sloepan), for example, was slep, and of to weep was weop. But in the course of time both to sleep and to weep acquired weak preterite endings, the first becoming sloepte and the second wepte. This weak conjugation was itself degenerated. Originally, the inflectional suffix had been -de or -ede and in some cases -ode, and the vowels were always pronounced. The wearing down process that set in in the twelfth century disposed of the final e, but in certain words the other vowel survived for a good while, and we still observe it in such archaisms as learned and beloved. Finally, however, it became silent in other preterites, and loved, for example, began to be pronounced (and often written) as a word of one syllable: lov’d. 55 This final d-sound now fell upon difficulties of its own. After certain consonants it was hard to pronounce clearly, and so the sonant was changed into the easier surd, and such words as pushed and clipped became, in ordinary conversation, pusht and clipt. In other verbs, the t-sound had come in long before, with the degenerated weak ending, and when the final e was dropped their stem vowels tended to change. Thus arose such forms as slept. In vulgar American another step is taken, and the suffix is dropped altogether. Thus, by a circuitous route, verbs originally strong, and for many centuries hovering between the two conjugations, have eventually become strong again.

7

The case of helt is probably an example of change by false analogy. During the thirteenth century, according to Sweet, 56 “d was changed to t in the weak preterites of verbs (ending) in rd, ld, nd.” Before that time the preterite of sende (send) had been sende; now it became sente. It survives in our modern sent, and the same process is also revealed in built, girt, lent, rent and bent. The popular speech, disregarding the fact that to hold is a strong verb, arrives at helt by imitation. 57 In the case of tole, which I almost always hear in place of told, there is a leaping of steps. The d is got rid of without any transitional use of t. So also, perhaps, in swole, which is fast displacing swelled. Attackted and drownded seem to be examples of an effort to dispose of harsh combinations by a contrary process. Both are very old in English. Boughten and dreampt present greater difficulties. Lounsbury says that boughten probably originated in the Northern (i.e., Lowland Scotch) dialect of English, “which… inclined to retain the full form of the past participle,” and even to add its termination “to words to which it did not properly belong.” 58 The p-sound in dreampt follows a phonetic law that is also seen in warm(p)th, com(p)fort, and some(p)thing, and that has actually inserted a p in Thompson (=Tom’s son).

8

The general tendency toward regularization is well exhibited by the new verbs that come into the language constantly. Practically all of them show the weak conjugation, for example, to phone, to bluff, to rubber-neck, to ante, to bunt, to wireless, to insurge and to loop-the-loop. Even when a compound has as its last member a verb ordinarily strong, it remains weak itself. Thus the preterite of to joy-ride is not joy-rode, nor even joy-ridden, but joy-rided. And thus bust, from burst, is regular and its preterite is busted, though burst is irregular and its preterite is the verb itself unchanged. The same tendency toward regularity is shown by the verbs of the kneel-class. They are strong in English, but tend to become weak in colloquial American. Thus the preterite of to kneel, despite the example of to sleep and its analogues, is not knel’, nor even knelt, but kneeled. I have even heard feeled as the preterite of to feel, as in “I feeled my way,” though here felt still persists. To spread also tends to become weak, as in “he spreaded a piece of bread.” And to peep remains so, despite the example of to leap. The confusion between the inflections of to lie and those of to lay extends to the higher reaches of spoken American, and so does that between lend and loan. The proper inflections of to lend are often given to to lean, and so leaned becomes lent, as in “I lent on the counter.” In the same way to set has almost completely superseded to sit, and the preterite of the former, set, is used in place of sat. But the perfect participle (which is also the disused preterite) of to sit has survived, as in “I have sat there.” To speed and to shoe have become regular, not only because of the general tendency toward the weak conjugation, but also for logical reasons. The prevalence of speed contests of various sorts, always to the intense interest of the proletariat, has brought such words as speeder, speeding, speed-mania, speed-maniac and speed-limit into daily use, and speeded harmonizes with them better than the stronger sped. As for shoed, it merely reveals the virtual disappearance of the verb in its passive form. An American would never say that his wife was well shod; he would say that she wore good shoes. To shoe suggests to him only the shoeing of animals, and so, by way of shoeing and horse-shoer, he comes to shoed. His misuse of to learn for to teach is common to most of the English dialects. More peculiar to his speech is the use of to leave for to let. Charters records it in “Washington left them have it,” and there are many examples of it in Lardner. Spit, in American, has become invariable; the old preterite, spat, has completely disappeared. But slit, which is now invariable in English (though it was strong in Old English and had both strong and weak preterites in Middle English), has become regular in American, as in “she slitted her skirt.”

9

In studying the American verb, of course, it is necessary to remember always that it is in a state of transition, and that in many cases the manner of using it is not yet fixed. “The history of language,” says Lounsbury, “when looked at from the purely grammatical point of view, is little else than the history of corruptions.” What we have before us is a series of corruptions in active process, and while some of them have gone very far, others are just beginning. Thus it is not uncommon to find corrupt forms side by side with orthodox forms, or even two corrupt forms battling with each other. Lardner, in the case of to throw, hears “if he had throwed”; my own observation is that threw is more often used in that situation. Again, he uses “the rottenest I ever seen gave”; my own belief is that give is far more commonly used. The conjugation of to give, however, is yet very uncertain, and so Lardner may report accurately. I have heard “I given” and “I would of gave,” but “I give” seems to be prevailing, and “I would of give” with it, thus reducing to give to one invariable form, like those of to cut, to hit, to put, to cost, to hurt and to spit. My table of verbs shows various other uncertainties and confusions. The preterite of to hear is heerd; the perfect may be either heerd or heern. That of to do may be either done or did, with the former apparently prevailing; that of to draw is drew if the verb indicates to attract or to abstract and drawed if it indicates to draw with a pencil. Similarly, the preterite of to blow may be either blowed or blew, and that of to drink oscillates between drank and drunk, and that of to fall is still usually fell, though fallen has appeared, and that of to shake may be either shaken or shuck. The conjugation of to win is yet far from fixed. The correct English preterite, won, is still in use, but against it are arrayed wan and winned, and Lardner, as I have noted, believes that the plain form of the present is ousting all of them. Wan seems to show some kinship, by ignorant analogy, with ran and began. It is often used as the perfect participle, as in “I have wan &dollar;4.” This uncertainty shows itself in many of the communications that I have received since my first edition was published. Practically every one of my conjugations has been questioned by at least one correspondent; nevertheless, the weight of observation has supported all save a few of them, and I have made no more than half a dozen changes.

10

The misuse of the perfect participle for the preterite, now almost the invariable rule in vulgar American, is common to many other dialects of English, and seems to be a symptom of a general decay of the perfect tenses. That decay has been going on for a long time, and in American, the most vigorous and advanced of all the dialects of the language, it is particularly well marked. Even in the most pretentious written American it shows itself. The English, in their writing, still use the future perfect, albeit somewhat laboriously and self-consciously, but in America it has virtually disappeared: one often reads whole books without encountering a single example of it. Even the present perfect and past perfect seem to be instinctively avoided. The Englishman says “I have dined,” but the American says “I am through dinner”; the Englishman says “I had slept,” but the American often says “I was done sleeping.” Thus the perfect tenses are forsaken for the simple present and the past. In the vulgate a further step is taken, and “I have been there” becomes “I been there.” Even in such phrases as “he hasn’t been here,” ain’t (=am not) is commonly substituted for have not, thus giving the present perfect a flavor of the simple present. The step from “I have taken” to “I taken” was therefore neither difficult nor unnatural, and once it had been made the resulting locution was supported by the greater apparent regularity of its verb. Moreover, this perfect participle, thus put in place of the preterite, was further reinforced by the fact that it was the adjectival form of the verb, and hence collaterally familiar. Finally, it was also the authentic preterite in the passive voice, and although this influence, in view of the decay of the passive, may not have been of much consequence, nevertheless it is not to be dismissed as of no consequence at all.

11

The contrary substitution of the preterite for the perfect participle, as in “I have went” and “he has did,” apparently has a double influence behind it. In the first place, there is the effect of the confused and blundering effort, by an ignorant and unanalytical speaker, to give the perfect some grammatical differentiation when he finds himself getting into it—an excursion not infrequently made necessary by logical exigencies, despite his inclination to keep out. The nearest indicator at hand is the disused preterite, and so it is put to use. Sometimes a sense of its uncouthness seems to linger, and there is a tendency to give it an en-suffix, thus bringing it into greater harmony with its tense. I find that boughten, just discussed, is used much oftener in the perfect than in the simple past tense; 59 for the latter bought usually suffices. The quick ear of Lardner detects various other coinages of the same sort, among them tooken, as in “little A1 might of tooken sick.” 60 Hadden is also met with, as in “I would of hadden.” But the majority of preterites remain unchanged. Lardner’s baseball player never writes “I have written” or “I have wroten,” but always “I have wrote.” And in the same way he always writes, “I have did, ate, went, drank, rode, ran, saw, sang, woke and stole.” Sometimes the simple form of the verb persists through all tenses. This is usually the case, for example, with to give. I have noted “I give” both as present and as preterite, and “I have give,” and even “I had give.” But even here “I have gave” offers rivalry to “I have give,” and usage is not settled. So, too, with to come. “I have come” and “I have came” seem to be almost equally favored, with the former supported by pedagogical admonition and the latter by the spirit of the language.

12

Whatever the true cause of the substitution of the preterite for the perfect participle, it seems to be a tendency inherent in English, and during the age of Elizabeth it showed itself even in the most formal speech. An examination of any play of Shakespeare’s will show many such forms as “I have wrote.” “I am mistook” and “he has rode.” In several cases this transfer for the preterite has survived. “I have stood,” for example, is now perfectly correct English, but before 1550 the form was “I have stonden.” To hold and to sit belong to the same class; their original perfect participles were not held and sat, but holden and sitten. These survived the movement toward the formalization of the language which began with the eighteenth century, but scores of other such misplaced preterites were driven out. One of the last to go was wrote, which persisted until near the end of the century. 61 Paradoxically enough, the very purists who performed the purging showed a preference for got (though not forgot), and it survives in correct English today in the preterite-present form, as in “I have got,” whereas in American, both vulgar and polite, the elder and more regular gotten is often used. In the polite speech gotten indicates a distinction between a completed action and a continuing action—between obtaining and possessing. “I have gotten what I came for” is correct, and so is “I have got a house.” In the vulgar speech much the same distinction exists, but the perfect becomes a sort of simple tense by the elision of have. Thus the two sentences change to “I gotten what I come for” and “I got a house,” the latter being understood, not as past, but as present. 62

13

In “I have got a house” got is historically a sort of auxiliary of have, and in colloquial American, as we have seen in the examples just given, the auxiliary has obliterated the verb. To have, as an auxiliary, probably because of its intimate relationship with the perfect tenses, is under heavy pressure, and promises to disappear from the situations in which it is still used. I have heard was used in place of it, as in “before the Elks was come here.” 63 Sometimes it is confused ignorantly with a distinct of, as in “she would of drove,” and “I would of gave.” 64 More often it is shaded to a sort of particle, attached to the verb as an inflection, as in “he would ’a tole you,” and “who could ’a took it?” But this is not all. Having degenerated to such forms, it is now employed as a sort of auxiliary to itself, in the subjunctive, as in “if you had of went,” “if it had of been hard,” and “if I had of had.” 65 I have encountered some rather astonishing examples of this doubling of the auxiliary. One appears in “I wouldn’t had ’a went”; another in “I’d ’a had ’a saved more money.” Here, however, the a may belong partly to had and partly to the verb; such forms as a-going are very common in American. But in the other cases, and in such forms as “I had ’a wanted,” it clearly belongs to had. Sometimes for syntactical reasons the degenerated form of have is put before had instead of after it, as in “I could of had her if I had of wanted to.” 66 Meanwhile, to have, ceasing to be an auxiliary, becomes a general verb indicating compulsion. Here it promises to displace must. The American seldom says “I must go”; he almost invariably says “I have to go,” 67 or “I have got to go,” in which last case, as we have seen, got is the auxiliary.

14

The most common inflections of the verb for mode and voice are shown in the following paradigm of to bite:

ACTIVE VOICE

Indicative Mode

Present

I bite

Past Perfect

I had of bit

Present Perfect

I have bit

Future

I will bite

Past

I bitten

Future Perfect

(wanting)

Subjunctive Mode

Present

If I bite

Past Perfect

If I had of bit

Past

If I bitten

Potential Mode

Present

I can bite

Past

I could bite

Present Perfect

(wanting)

Past Perfect

I could of bit

Imperative (or Optative) Mode

Future

I shall (or will)

bite

Infinitive Mode

(wanting)

PASSIVE VOICE

Indicative Mode

Present

I am bit

Past Perfect

I had been bit

Present Perfect

I been bit

Future

I will be bit

Past

I was bit

Future Perfect

(wanting)

Subjunctive Mode

Present

If I am bit

Past Perfect

If I had of been

Past

If I was bit

bit

Potential Mode

Present

I can be bit

Past

I could be bit

Present Perfect

(wanting)

Past Perfect

I could of been bit

Imperative Mode

(wanting)

Infinitive Mode

(wanting)

15

A study of this paradigm reveals several plain tendencies. One has just been discussed: the addition of a degenerated form of have to the preterite of the auxiliary, and its use in place of the auxiliary itself. Another is the use of will instead of shall in the first person future. Shall is confined to a sort of optative, indicating much more than mere intention, and even here it is yielding to will. Yet another is the consistent use of the transferred preterite in the passive. Here the rule in correct English is followed faithfully, though the perfect participle employed is not the English participle. “I am broke” is a good example. Finally, there is the substitution of was for were and of am for be in the past and present of the subjunctive. In this last case American is in accord with the general movement of English, though somewhat more advanced. Be, in the Shakespearean form of “where be thy brothers?” was expelled from the present indicative two hundred years ago, and survives today only in dialect. And as it thus yielded to are in the indicative, it now seems destined to yield to am and is in the subjunctive. It remains, of course, in the future indicative: “I will be.” In American its conjugation coalesces with that of am in the following manner:

Present

I am

Past Perfect

I had of ben

Present Perfect

I bin (or ben)

Future

I will be

Past

I was

Future Perfect

(wanting)

16

And in the subjunctive:

Present

If I am

Past Perfect

If I had of ben

Past

If I was

17

All signs of the subjunctive, indeed, seem to be disappearing from vulgar American. One never hears “if I were you,” but always “if I was you”; “was you going to the dance?” is a very common form. In the third person the -s is not dropped from the verb. One hears, not “if she go,” but always “if she goes.” “If he be the man” is never heard; it is always “if he is.” Such a sentence as “Had I wished her, I had had her” would be unintelligible to most Americans; even “I had rather” is fast disappearing. This war upon the forms of the subjunctive, of course, extends to the most formal English. “In Old English,” says Bradley, 68 “the subjunctive played as important a part as in modern German, and was used in much the same way. Its inflection differed in several respects from that of the indicative. But the only formal trace of the old subjunctive still remaining, except the use of be and were, is the omission of the final s in the third person singular. And even this is rapidly dropping out of use…. Perhaps in another generation the subjunctive forms will have ceased to exist except in the single instance of were, which serves a useful function, although we manage to dispense with a corresponding form in other verbs.” Here, as elsewhere, unlettered American usage simply proceeds in advance of the general movement. Be and the omitted s are already dispensed with, and even were has been discarded.

18

In the same way the distinction between will and shall, preserved in correct English but already breaking down in the most correct American, has been lost entirely in the American common speech. Will has displaced shall completely, save in the imperative. This preference extends to the inflections of both. Sha’n’t is very seldom heard; almost always won’t is used instead. As for should, it is displaced by ought to (degenerated to oughter or ought’a), and in its negative form by hadn’t ought’a, as in “he hadn’t oughter said that,” reported by Charters. Lardner gives various redundant combinations of should and ought, as in “I don’t feel as if I should ought to leave” and “they should not ought to of had.” I have encountered the same form, but I don’t think it is as common as the simple ought’a forms. 69 In the main, should is avoided, sometimes at considerable pains. Often its place is taken by the more positive don’t. Thus “I don’t” mind” is used instead of “I shouldn’t mind.” Don’t has also completely displaced doesn’t, which is very seldom heard. “He don’t” and “they don’t” are practically universal. In the same way ain’t has displaced is not, am not, isn’t and aren’t, and even have not and haven’t. One recalls a famous speech in a naval melodrama of twenty years ago: “We ain’t got no manners, but we can fight like hell.” Such forms as “he ain’t here,” “I ain’t the man,” “ain’t it the truth?”, “you been there, ain’t you?”, “you ain’t drank much,” “them ain’t what I want” and “I ain’t heerd of it” are common.

19

This extensive use of ain’t, of course, is merely a single symptom of a general disregard of number, obvious throughout the verbs, and also among the pronouns, as we shall see. Charters gives many examples, among them, “how is Uncle Wallace and Aunt Clara?”, “you was,” “there is six” and the incomparable “it ain’t right to say, ‘He ain’t here today.’#” In Lardner there are many more, for instance, “them Giants is not such rotten hitters, isthey?”, “the people has all wanted to shake hands with Matthewson and I” and “some of the men has brung their wife along.” Sez (=says), used as the preterite of to say shows the same confusion. One observes it again in such forms as “then I goes up to him.” Here the decay of number helps in what threatens to become a decay of tense. A gambler of the humbler sort seldom says “I won &dollar;2,” or even “I wan &dollar;2,” but almost always “I win &dollar;2.” And in the same way he says “I see him come in,” not “I saw him come in” or “seen him.” Lardner, as we have seen, believes that win is displacing both won,winned and wan. Charters’ materials offer other specimens, among them “we help distributed the fruit,” “she recognize, hug, and kiss him” and “her father ask her if she intended doing what he ask.” Perhaps the occasional use of eat as the preterite of to eat, as in “I eat breakfast as soon as I got up,” is an example of the same flattening out of distinctions. Lardner has many specimens, among them “if Weaver and them had not of begin kicking” and “they would of knock down the fence.” I notice that used, in used to be, is almost always reduced to simple use, as in “it use to be the rule,” with the s very much like that of hiss. One seldom, if ever, hears a clear d at the end. Here, of course, the elision of the d is due primarily to assimilation with the t of to—a second example of one form of decay aiding another form. But the tenses apparently tend to crumble without help. I frequently hear whole narratives in a sort of debased historical present: “I says to him…. Then he ups and says…. I land him one on the ear…. He goes down and out,…” and so on. 70 Still under the spell of our disintegrating inflections, we are prone to regard the tense inflections of the verb as absolutely essential, but there are plenty of languages that get on without them, and even in our own language children and foreigners often reduce them to a few simple forms. Some time ago an Italian contractor said to me, “I have go there often.” Here one of our few surviving inflections was displaced by an analytical device, and yet the man’s meaning was quite clear, and it would be absurd to say that his sentence violated the inner spirit of English. That inner spirit, in fact, has inclined steadily toward “I have go” for a thousand years.

20

Note 26.  Bin is the correct American pronunciation. Bean, as we have seen, is the English. But I have often found ben, rhyming with pen, in such phrases as “I ben there.” [back]

Note 27.  Be, in the subjunctive, is practically extinct. [back]

Note 28.  Seldom used. Get is used in the place of it, as in “I am getting old” and “he got sick.” [back]

Note 29.  Burned with a distinct d-sound is almost unknown in American. [back]

Note 30.  Not used. Bust has quite displaced it. [back]

Note 31.  Cotched is heard only in the South, and mainly among negroes. Catch, of course, is usually pronounced ketch. Even catcher is ketcher. [back]

Note 32.  Dast is more common in the negative, as in “He dasn’t do it.” [back]

Note 33.  Dole, of course, is supported by the noun. [back]

Note 34.  Dove seems to be making its way into standard American. I constantly encounter it in manuscripts. It is used by Amy Lowell in Legends; Boston, 1921, p. 4. [back]

Note 35.  Fotch is also heard, but it is not general. [back]

Note 36.  Fit and fitten, unless my observation errs, are heard only in dialect. Fit is archaic English. Cf. Thornton, vol. i, p. 322. [back]

Note 37.  Friz is used only humorously. [back]

Note 38.  Glode once enjoyed a certain respectability in America. It occurs in the Knickerbocker Magazine for April, 1856. [back]

Note 39.  Hanged is never heard. [back]

Note 40.  Het is incomplete without the addition of up. “He was het up” is always heard, not “he was het.” [back]

Note 41.  Always so pronounced. [back]

Note 42.  To loose is never used; to unloosen has displaced it. [back]

Note 43.  Always used in place of rinse. [back]

Note 44.  Always used in place of roil. [back]

Note 45.  Sot is heard as a localism only. [back]

Note 46.  See set, which is used almost invariably in place of sit. [back]

Note 47.  To thin is never used; to thinnen takes its place. [back]

Note 48.  Thunk is never used seriously; it always shows humorous intent. [back]

Note 49.  Lardner tells me that he believes win is supplanting both won and wan in the past tense. [back]

Note 50.  English As We Speak It in Ireland, p. 77. [back]

Note 51.  The Science of Language, vol. i, p. 166. [back]

Note 52.  The use of eat as its own preterite was formerly sound in English and still survives more or less. I find it on p. 24 of On Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham; New York, 1915. A correspondent informs me that it occurs in Much Ado About Nothing, act iv, sc. i, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act ii, sc. ii, in As You Like It, act i, sc. iii, in The Taming of the Shrew, act iv, sc. i, in Macbeth, act ii, sc. iv, and in King Lear, act i, sc. iv. How the preterite was pronounced in Shakespeare’s day I do not know. [back]

Note 53.  Span, of course, is now archaic in standard English, but it survives in vulgar American and in many other English dialects. [back]

Note 54.  Spoke replaces the earlier spak. [back]

Note 55.  The last stand of the distinct -ed was made in Addison’s day. He was in favor of retaining it, and in the Spectator for Aug. 4, 1711, he protested against obliterating the syllable in the termination “of our praeter perfect tense, as in these words, drown’d, walk’d, arriv’d, for drowned, walked, arrived, which has very much disfigured the tongue, and turned a tenth part of our smoothest words into so many clusters of consonants.” [back]

Note 56.  A New English Grammar, pt. i, p. 380. [back]

Note 57.  The noun is commonly made holt, as in, “I got a-holt of it.” [back]

Note 58.  History of the English Language, p. 398. [back]

Note 59.  And still more often as an adjective, as in “it was a boughten dress.” [back]

Note 60.  You Know Me Al, p. 180; see also p. 122. [back]

Note 61.  Cf. Lounsbury: History of the English Language, pp. 393 ff. [back]

Note 62.  Got, of course, also has a compulsive sense, as in “I have got to go.” It is also used in the general sense of becoming, as in “I got scared.” [back]

Note 63.  Remark of a policeman talking to another. What he actually said was “before the Elks was c’m’ere.” Come and here were one word, approximately cmear. The context showed that he meant to use the past perfect tense. [back]

Note 64.  The following curious example, sent to me by Dr. Morris Fishbein of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is from a letter received by a California physician: “If I had of waited a day longer before I wrote to you I would not of had to write that letter to you.” Here the author plainly mistakes have for of. [back]

Note 65.  These examples are from Lardner’s story, A New Busher Breaks In, in You Know Me Al, pp. 122 et seq. [back]

Note 66.  You Know Me Al, op. cit., p. 124. [back]

Note 67.  Almost always pronounced haf to, or, in the past tense, hat to. Sometimes hat to undergoes composition and the d is restored; it then becomes hadda. Haf to similarly changes to hafta. [back]

Note 68.  The Making of English, p. 53. [back]

Note 69.  In the negative, ought not has degenerated to oughten, as in “you oughten do that.” [back]

Note 70.  Cf. Dialect Notes, vol. iii, pt. i, p. 59; ibid., vol. iii, pt. iv, p. 283. [back]

The following paradigm shows the inflections of the personal pronoun in the American common speech:

FIRST PERSON

Common Gender

Singular

Plural

Nominative

I
we

Possessive

Conjoint
Absolute
my
mine
our
ourn

Objective

me
us

SECOND PERSON

Common Gender

Nominative

you
yous

Possessive

Conjoint
Absolute
your
yourn
your
yourn

Objective

you
yous

THIRD PERSON

Masculine Gender

Nominative

he
they

Possessive

Conjoint
Absolute
his
hisn
their
theirn

Objective

him
them

Feminine Gender

Nominative

she
they

Possessive

Conjoint
Absolute
her
hern
their
theirn

Objective

her
them

Neuter Gender

Nominative

it
they

Possessive

Conjoint
Absolute
its
its
their
theirn

Objective

it
them

1

These inflections, as we shall see, are often disregarded in use, but nevertheless it is profitable to glance at them as they stand. The only variations that they show from standard English are the substitution of n for s as the distinguishing mark of the absolute form of the possessive, and the attempt to differentiate between the logical and the merely polite plurals in the second person by adding the usual sign of the plural to the former. The use of n in place of s is not an American innovation. It is found in many of the dialects of English, and is, in fact, historically quite as sound as the use of s. In John Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible (circa 1380) the first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount (Mark v, 3) is made: “Blessed be the pore in spirit, for the kyngdam in hevenes is heren.” And in his version of Luke xxiv, 24, is this: “And some of ourenwentin to the grave.” Here heren (or herun) represents, of course, not the modern hers, but theirs. In Anglo-Saxon the word was heora, and down to Chaucer’s day a modified form of it, here, was still used in the possessive plural in place of the modern their, though they had already displaced hie in the nominative. 71 But in John Purvey’s revision of the Wycliffe Bible, made a few years later, hern actually occurs in II Kings vii, 6, thus: “Restore thou to hir alle things that ben hern.” In Anglo-Saxon there had been no distinction between the conjoint and absolute forms of the possessive pronoun; the simple genitive sufficed for both uses. But with the decay of that language the surviving remnants of its grammar began to be put to service somewhat recklessly, and so there arose a genitive inflection of this genitive—a true double inflection. In the Northern dialects of English that inflection was made by simply adding s, the sign of the possessive. In the Southern dialects the old n-declension was applied, and so there arose such forms as minum and eowrum (=mine and yours), from min and eower (=my and your). 72 Meanwhile, the original simple genitive, now become youre, also survived, and so the literature of the fourteenth century shows the three forms flourishing side by side: youre, youres and youren. All of them are in Chaucer.

2

Thus, yourn, hern, hisn, ourn and theirn, whatever their present offense to grammarians, are of a genealogy quite as respectable as that of yours, hers, his, ours and theirs. Both forms represent a doubling of inflections, and hence grammatical debasement. On the side of the yours-form is the standard usage of the past five hundred years, but on the side of the yourn-form there is no little force of analogy and logic, as appears on turning to mine and thine. In Anglo-Saxon, as we have seen, my was min; in the same way thy was thin. During the decadence of the language the final n was dropped in both cases before nouns—that is, in the conjoint form—but it was retained in the absolute form. This usage survives to our own day. One says “my book,” but “the book is mine”; “thy faith,” but “I am thine.” 73 Also, one says “no matter,” but “I have none.” Without question this retention of the n in these pronouns had something to do with the appearance of the n-declension in the treatment of your, her, his and our, and, after their had displaced here in the third person plural, in their. And equally without question it supports the vulgar American usage today. 74 What that usage shows is simply the strong popular tendency to make language as simple and as regular as possible—to abolish subtleties and exceptions. The difference between “his book” and “the book is his’n” is exactly that between my and mine, thy and thine, in the examples just given. “Perhaps it would have been better,” says Bradley, “if the literary language had accepted hisn, but from some cause it did not do so.” 75

3

As for the addition of s to you in the nominative and objective of the second person plural, it exhibits no more than an effort to give clarity to the logical difference between the true plural and the mere polite plural. In several other dialects of English the same desire has given rise to cognate forms, and there are even secondary devices in American. In the South, for example, the true plural is commonly indicated by you-all, which, despite a Northern belief to the contrary, is seldom used in the singular by any save the most ignorant. 76 You-all, like yous, simply means you-jointly as opposed to the you that means thou. Again, there is the form observed in “you can all of you go to hell”—another plain effort to differentiate between singular and plural. The substitution of you for thou goes back to the end of the thirteenth century. It appeared in late Latin and in the other Continental languages as well as in English, and at about the same time. In these languages the true singular survives alongside the transplanted plural, but English has dropped it entirely, save in its poetical and liturgical forms and in a few dialects. It passed out of ordinary polite speech before Elizabeth’s day. By that time, indeed, its use had acquired an air of the offensive, such as it has today, save between intimates or to children, in Germany. Thus, at the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603, Sir Edward Coke, then attorney-general, displayed his animosity to Raleigh by addressing him as thou, and finally burst into the contemptuous “I thou thee, thou traitor!” And in “Twelfth Night” Sir Toby Belch urges Sir Andrew Aguecheek to provoke the disguised Viola to combat by thouing her. In our own time, with thou passed out entirely, even as a pronoun of contempt, the confusion between you in the plural and you in the singular presents plain difficulties to a man of limited linguistic resources. He gets around them by setting up a distinction that is well supported by logic and analogy. “I seen yous” is clearly separated from “I seen you.” And in the conjoint position “yous guys” is separated from “you liar.”

4

Let us now glance at the demonstrative and relative pronouns. Of the former there are but two in English, this and that, with their plural forms, these and those. To them, American adds a third, them, which is also the personal pronoun of the third person, objective case. 77 In addition it had adopted certain adverbial pronouns, this-here, these-here, that-there, those-there and them-there, and set up inflections of the original demonstratives by analogy with mine, hisn and yourn, to wit, thisn, thesen, thatn and thosen. I present some examples of everyday use:

Them are the kind I like.

Them men all work here.

Who is this-here Smith I hear about?

These-here are mine.

That-there medicine ain’t no good.

Those-there wops has all took to the woods.

I wisht I had one of them-there Fords.

Thisn is better’n thatn.

I like thesen better’n thosen.

5

The origin of the demonstratives of the thisn-group is plain: they are degenerate forms of this-one, that-one, etc., just as none is a degenerate composition form of no(t)-one. In every case of their use that I have observed the simple demonstratives might have been set free and one actually substituted for the terminal n. But it must be equally obvious that they have been reinforced very greatly by the absolutes of the hisn-group, for in their relation to the original demonstratives they play the part of just such absolutes and are never used conjointly. Thus, one says, in American, “I take thisn” or “thisn is mine,” but one never says “I take thisn hat” or “thisn dog is mine.” In this conjoint situation plain this is always used, and the same rule applies to these,those and that. Them, being a newcomer among the demonstratives, has not yet acquired an inflection in the absolute. I have never heard them’n, and it will probably never come in, for it is forbiddingly clumsy. One says, in American, both “them are mine” and “them collars are mine.”

6

This-here, these-here, that-there, those-there and them-there are plainly combinations of pronouns and adverbs, and their function is to support the distinction between proximity, as embodied in this and these, and remoteness, as embodied in that, those and them. “This-here coat is mine” simply means “this coat here, or this present coat, is mine.” But the adverb promises to coalesce with the pronoun so completely as to obliterate all sense of its distinct existence, even as a false noun or adjective. As commonly pronounced, this-here becomes a single word, somewhat like thish-yur, and these-here becomes these-yur, and that-there and them-there become that-ere and them-ere. Those-there, if I observe accurately, is still pronounced more distinctly, but it, too, may succumb to composition in time. The adverb will then sink to the estate of a mere inflectional particle, as one has done in the absolutes of the thisn-group. Them, as a personal pronoun in the absolute, of course, is commonly pronounced em, as in “I seen em,” and sometimes its vowel is almost lost, but this is also the case in all save the most exact spoken English. Sweet and Lounsbury, following the German grammarians, argue that this em is not really a debased form of them, but the offspring of hem, which survived as the regular plural of the third person in the objective case down to the beginning of the fifteenth century. But in American them is clearly pronounced as a demonstrative. I have never heard “em men” or “em are the kind I like,” but always “them men” and “them are the kind I like.”

7

The relative pronouns, so far as I have been able to make out, are declined as follows:

Nominative
who
which
what
that

Possessive
whose
whosen
whose
whosen

Objective
who
which
what
that

8

Two things will be noted in this paradigm. First there is the disappearance of whom as the objective form of who, and secondly there is the appearance of an inflected form of whose in the absolute, by analogy with mine, hisn and thesen. Whom, as we have seen, is fast disappearing from standard spoken American; 78 in the vulgar language it is already virtually extinct. Not only is who used in such constructions as “who did you find there?” where even standard spoken English would tolerate it, but also in such constructions as “the man who I saw,” “them who I trust in” and “to who?” Krapp explains this use of who on the ground that there is a “general feeling,” due to the normal word-order in English, that “the word which precedes the verb is the subject word, or at least the subject form.” 79 But this explanation is probably fanciful. Among the plain people no such “general feeling” for case exists. Their only “general feeling” is a prejudice against case inflections in any form whatsoever. They use who in place of whom simply because they can discern no logical difference between the significance of the one and the significance of the other.

9

Whosen, which is still relatively rare, is obviously the offspring of the other absolutes in n. In the conjoint relation plain whose is always used, as in “whose hat is that?” and “the man whose dog bit me.” But in the absolute whosen is sometimes substituted, as in “if it ain’t hisn, then whosen is it?” The imitation is obvious. There is an analogous form of which, to wit, whichn, resting heavily on which one. Thus, “whichn do you like?” and “I didn’t say whichn” are plainly variations of “which one do you like?” and “I didn’t say which one.” That, as we have seen, has a like form, thatn, but never, of course, in the relative situation. “I like thatn” is familiar, but “the one thatn I like” is never heard. If that, as a relative, could be used absolutely, I have no doubt that it would change to thatn, as it does as a demonstrative. So with what. As things stand, it is sometimes substituted for that, as in “them’s the kind what I like.” Joined to but it can also take the place of that in other situations, as in “I don’t know but what.”

10

The substitution of who for whom in the objective case, just noticed, is typical of a general movement toward breaking down all case distinctions among the pronouns, where they make their last stand in English and its dialects. This movement, of course, is not peculiar to vulgar American; nor is it of recent beginning. So long ago as the fifteenth century the old clear distinction between ye, nominative, and you, objective, disappeared, and today the latter is used in both cases. Sweet says that the phonetic similarity between ye and thee, the objective form of the true second singular, was responsible for this confusion. 80 In modern spoken English, indeed, you in the objective often has a sound far more like that of ye than like that of you, as, for example, in “how do y’ do?” and in American its vowel takes the neutral form of the e in the definite article, and the word becomes a sort of shortened yuh. But whenever emphasis is laid upon it, you becomes quite distinct, even in American. In “I mean you,” for example, there is never any chance of mistaking it for ye. In Shakespeare’s time the other personal pronouns of the objective case threatened to follow you into the nominative, and there was a compensatory movement of the nominative pronouns toward the objective. Lounsbury has collected many examples. 81 Marlowe used “is it him you seek?”, “’tis her I esteem” and “nor thee nor them shall want”; Fletcher used “’tis her I admire”; Shakespeare himself used “that’s me.” Contrariwise, Webster used “what difference is between the duke and I?” and Green used “nor earth nor heaven shall part my love and I.” Krapp has unearthed many similar examples from the Restoration dramatists. 82 Etheredge used “’tis them,” “it may be him,” “let you and I” and “nor is it me”; Matthew Prior, in a famous couplet, achieved this:

For thou art a girl as much brighter than her

As he was a poet sublimer than me.

11

The free exchange continued, in fact, until the eighteenth century was well advanced; there are examples of it in Addison. Moreover, it survived, at least in part, even the attack that was then made upon it by the professors of the new-born science of English grammar, and to this day “it is me” is still in more or less good colloquial use. Sweet thinks that it is supported in such use, though not, of course, grammatically, by the analogy of the correct “it is he” and “it is she.” Lounsbury, following Dean Alford, says it came into English in imitation of the French c’est moi, and defends it as at least as good as “it is I.” 83 The contrary form, “between you and I,” has no defenders, and is apparently going out. But in the shape of “between my wife and I” it is seldom challenged, at least in spoken English.

12

All these liberties with the personal pronouns, however, fade to insignificance when put beside the thoroughgoing confusion of the case forms in vulgar American. “Us fellas” is so far established in the language that “we fellas” from the mouth of a car conductor would seem almost an affectation. So, too, is “me and her are friends.” So, again, are “her and I set down together,” “him and his wife,” and “I knowed it was her.” Here are some other characteristic examples of the use of the objective forms in the nominative from Characters, Lardner and other writers:

Me and her was both late.

His brother is taller than him.

That little boy was me.

Us girls went home.

They were John and him.

Her and little Al is to stay here.

She says she thinks us and the Allens.

If Weaver and them had not of begin kicking.

Us two’ll walk, me and him.

But not me.

Him and I are friends.

Me and them are friends.

13

Less numerous, but still varied and plentiful, are the substitutions of nominative forms for objective forms:

She gave it to mother and I.

She took all of we children.

I want you to meet he and I at 29th street.

It is going to cost me &dollar;6 a week for a room for she and the baby.

Anything she has is O.K. for I and Florrie. 84

14

Here are some grotesque confusions, indeed. Perhaps the best way to get at the principles underlying them is to examine first, not the cases of their occurrence, but the cases of their non-occurrence. Let us begin with the transfer of the objective form to the nominative in the subject relation. “Me and her was both late” is obviously sound American; one hears it, or something like it, on the streets every day. But one never hears “me was late” or “her was late” or “us was late” or “him was late” or “them was late.” Again, one hears “us girls was there” but never “us was there.” Yet again, one hears “her and John was married,” but never “her was married.” The distinction here set up should be immediately plain. It exactly parallels that between her and hern, our and ourn, their and theirn: the tendency, as Sweet says, is “to merge the distinction of nominative and objective in that of conjoint and absolute.” 85 The nominative, in the subject relation, takes the usual nominative form only when it is in immediate contact with its verb. If it be separated from its verb by a conjunction or any other part of speech, even including another pronoun, it takes the objective form. Thus “me went home” would strike even the most ignorant shopgirl as “bad grammar,” but she would use “me and my friend went,” or “me and him,” or “he and her,” or “me and them” without the slightest hesitation. What is more, if the separation be effected by a conjunction and another pronoun, the other pronoun also changes to the objective form, even though its contact with the verb may be immediate. Thus one hears “me and her was there,” not “me and she”; “her and him kissed,” not “her and he.” Still more, this second pronoun commonly undergoes the same inflection even when the first member of the group is not another pronoun, but a noun. Thus one hears “John and her was married,” not “John and she.” To this rule there is but one exception, and that is in the case of the first person pronoun, especially in the singular. “Him and me are friends” is heard often, but “him and I are friends” is also heard. I seems to suggest the subject very powerfully; it is actually the subject of perhaps a majority of the sentences uttered by an ignorant man. At all events, it resists the rule, at least partially, and may even do so when actually separated from the verb by another pronoun, itself in the objective form, as, for example, in “I and him were there.”

15

In the predicate relation the pronouns respond to a more complex regulation. When they follow any form of the simple verb of being they take the objective form, as in “it’s me,” “it ain’t him,” and “I am him,” probably because the transitiveness of this verb exerts a greater pull than its function as a mere copula, and perhaps, too, because the passive naturally tends to put the speaker in the place of the object. “I seen he” or “he kissed she” or “he struck I” would seem as ridiculous to an ignorant American as to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his instinct for simplicity and regularity naturally tends to make him reduce all similar expressions, or what seem to him to be similar expressions, to coincidence with the more seemly “I seen him.” After all, the verb of being is fundamentally transitive, and, in some ways, the most transitive of all verbs, and so it is not illogical to bring its powers over the pronoun into accord with the powers exerted by the others. I incline to think that it is some such subconscious logic, and not the analogy of “it is he,” as Sweet argues, that has brought “it is me” to conversational respectability, even among rather careful speakers of English. 86

16

But against this use of the objective form in the nominative position after the verb of being there also occurs in American a use of the nominative form in the objective position, as in “she gave it to mother and I” and “she took all of we children.” What lies at the bottom of it seems to be a feeling somewhat resembling that which causes the use of the objective form before the verb, but exactly contrary in its effects. That is to say, the nominative form is used when the pronoun is separated from its governing verb, whether by a noun, a noun-phrase or another pronoun, as in “she gave it to mother and I,” “she took all of we children” and “he paid her and I,” respectively. But here usage is far from fixed, and one observes variations in both directions—that is, toward using the correct objective when the pronoun is detached from the verb, and toward using the nominative even when it directly follows the verb. “She gave it to mother and me,” “she took all of us children” and “he paid her and me” would probably sound quite as correct, to a Knight of Pythias, as the forms just given. And at the other end Charters and Lardner report such forms as “I want you to meet he and I” and “it is going to cost me &dollar;6 a week for a room for she and the baby.” I have noticed, however, that the use of the nominative is chiefly confined to the pronoun of the first person, and particularly to its singular. Here again we have an example of the powerful way in which I asserts itself. And superimposed upon that influence is a cause mentioned by Sweet in discussing “between you and I.” 87 It is a sort of by-product of the pedagogical war upon “it is me.” “As such expressions,” he says, “are still denounced by the grammars, many people try to avoid them in speech as well as in writing. The result of this reaction is that the me in such constructions as ‘between John and me’# and ‘he saw John and me’# sounds vulgar and ungrammatical, and is consequently corrected into I.” Here the pedagogues, seeking to impose an inelastic and illogical grammar upon a living speech, succeed only in corrupting it still more.

17

Following than and as the American uses the objective form of the pronoun, as in “he is taller than me” and “such as her.” He also uses it following like, but not when, as often happens, he uses the word in place of as or as if. Thus he says “do it like him,” but “do it like he does” and “she looks like she was sick.” What appears here is an instinctive feeling that these words, followed by a pronoun only, are not adverbs, but prepositions, and that they should have the same power to put the pronoun into an oblique case that other prepositions have. Just as “the taller of we” would sound absurd to all of us, so “taller than he,” to the unschooled American, sounds absurd. This feeling has a good deal of respectable support. “As her” was used by Swift, “than me” by Burke, and “than whom” by Milton. The brothers Fowler show that, in some cases, “than him” is grammatically correct and logically necessary. 88 For example, compare “I love you more than him” and “I love you more than he.” The first means “I love you more than (I love) him”; the second, “I love you more than he (loves you).” In the first him does not refer to I, which is nominative, but to you, which is objective, and so it is properly objective also. But the American, of course, uses him even when the preceding noun is in the nominative, save only when another verb follows the pronoun. Thus, he says, “I love you better than him,” but “I love you better than he does.”

18

In the matter of the reflexive pronouns the American vulgate exhibits forms which plainly show that it is the spirit of the language to regard self, not as an adjective, which it is historically, but as a noun. This confusion goes back to Anglo-Saxon days; it originated at a time when both the adjectives and the nouns were losing their old inflections. Such forms as Petrussylf (=Peter’s self), Cristsylf (=Christ’s self) and Icsylf (=I, self) then came into use, and along with them came combinations of self and the genitive, still surviving in hisself and theirselves (or theirself). Down to the sixteenth century these forms remained in perfectly good usage. “Each for hisself,” for example, was written by Sir Philip Sidney, and is to be found in the dramatists of the time, though modern editors always change it to himself. How the dative pronoun got itself fastened upon self in the third person masculine and neuter is one of the mysteries of language, but there it is, and so, against all logic, history and grammatical regularity, himself, themselves and itself (not its-self) are in favor today. But the American, as usual, inclines against these illogical exceptions to the rule set by myself. I constantly hear hisself and theirselves, as in “he done it hisself” and “they know theirselves.” Also, the emphatic own is often inserted between the pronoun and the noun, as in “let every man save his own self.” In general the American vulgate makes very extensive use of the reflexive. It is constantly thrown in for good measure, as in “I overeat myself” and it is as constantly used singly, as in “self and wife.”

19

The American pronoun does not necessarily agree with its noun in number. I find “I can tell each one what they make,” “each fellow put their foot on the line,” “nobody can do what they like” and “she was one of these kind 89 of people” in Charters, and “I am not the kind of man that is always thinking about their record,” “if he was to hit a man in the head… they would think their nose tickled” in Lardner. At the bottom of this error there is a real difficulty: the lack of a pronoun of the true common gender in English, corresponding to the French soi and son. 90 His, after a noun or pronoun connoting both sexes, often sounds inept, and his-or-her is intolerably clumsy. Thus the inaccurate plural is often substituted. The brothers Fowler have discovered “anybody else who have only themselves in view” in Richardson and “everybody is discontented with their lot” in Disraeli, and Ruskin once wrote “if a customer wishes you to injure their foot.” In spoken American, even the most careful, they and their often appear; I turn to the Congressional Record at random and in two minutes find “if anyone will look at the bank statements they will see.” 91 In the lower reaches of the language the plural seems to get into every sentence of any complexity, even when the preceding noun or pronoun is plainly singular. Such forms as “every man knows their way,” and “nobody oughter never take what ain’t theirn” are quite common.

20

In demotic American the pedantry which preserves such forms as someone’s else is always disregarded; someone else’s is invariably used. I have heard “who else’s wife was there?” and “if it ain’t his’n, it ain’t nobody here else’s.” Finally, I note that he’s seems to be assimilating with his. In such sentences as “I hear he’s coming here to work,” the sound of he’s is precisely that of his.

21

Note 71.  Henry Bradley, in The Making of English, pp. 54-5: “In the parts of England which were largely inhabited by Danes the native pronouns (i. e., heo, hie, heom and heora) were supplanted by the Scandinavian pronouns which are represented by the modern she, they, them and their.” This substitution, at first dialectical, gradually spread to the whole language. [back]

Note 72.  Cf. Sweet: A New English Grammar, pt. i, p. 344, 1096. [back]

Note 73.  Before a noun beginning with a vowel thine and mine are commonly substituted for thy and my, as in “thine eyes” and “mine infirmity.” But this is solely for the sake of euphony. There is no compensatory use of my and thy in the absolute. [back]

Note 74.  I am not forgetting, of course, the possible aid of his own, her own, etc. [back]

Note 75.  The Making of English, p. 58. [back]

Note 76.  Cf. The Dialect of Southeastern Missouri, by D. S. Crumb, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, pt. iv, 1903, p. 337. It may be due to the influence of the French vous autres. [back]

Note 77.  It occurs, too, of course, in other dialects of English, though by no means in all. The Irish influence probably had something to do with its prosperity in vulgar American. At all events, the Irish use it in the American manner. Joyce, in English As We Speak It in Ireland, pp. 34-5, argues that this usage was suggested by Gaelic. In Gaelic the accusative pronouns, e, i and iad (=him, her and them) are often used in place of the nominatives, se, si and siad (=he, she and they), as in “isiad sin na buachaillidhe” (=them are the boys). This is “good grammar” in Gaelic, and the Irish, when they began to learn English, translated the locution literally. The familiar Irish “John is dead and him always so hearty” shows the same influence. [back]

Note 78.  Chapter VI, Section 2. [back]

Note 79.  Modern English, p. 300. [back]

Note 80.  A New English Grammar, pt. i, p. 339. [back]

Note 81.  History of the English Language, pp. 274-5. [back]

Note 82.  Modern English, pp. 288-9. [back]

Note 83.  Every now and then it is furiously debated in the American newspapers. When, early in 1921, Edward J. Tobin, superintendent of the schools of Cook county, Ill. (i. e., of Chicago), decided that the pupils might use it, the decision was discussed all over the country, and for weeks. See the New York World, Feb. 23, 1921; the New York Evening World, March I, and the New York Times (a letter from Frank H. Vizetelly), Feb. 24. See also Jespersen: Chapters on English, p. 101 and p. 142. Mr. Tobin is also said to have given his imprimatur to he don’t. [back]

Note 84.  Sometimes the two errors are combined, as in a speech heard by a correspondent from the lips of a Wyoming hotel-keeper: “Between I and you, him and her drinks too much.” [back]

Note 85.  A New English Grammar, pt. i, p. 341. [back]

Note 86.  It may be worth noting here that the misuse of me for my, as in “I lit me pipe,” is almost unknown in American, either standard or vulgar, though a correspondent in Philadelphia tells me that it is a localism in that city, and it is sometimes used by elderly persons of Irish birth. Even “me own” is seldom heard. This boggling of the cases is very common in spoken English. The most correct barristers usually say “me lud” in addressing the court. [back]

Note 87.  A New English Grammar, pt. i, p. 341. [back]

Note 88.  The King’s English, p. 63. [back]

Note 89.  Here, of course, kind is probably felt to be plural. Those is used in the same way, as in “those are the kind.” [back]

Note 90.  Thon, as we have seen, was proposed so long ago as 1858, but it has never established itself. [back]

Note 91.  “Hon.” Edward E. Browne, of Wisconsin, in the House of Representatives, July 18, 1918, p. 9965. [back]

All the adverbial endings in English, save -ly, have gradually fallen into decay; it is the only one that is ever used to form new adverbs. At earlier stages of the language various other endings were used, and some of them survive in a few old words, though they are no longer employed in making new words. The Anglo-Saxon endings were -e and -lice. The latter was, at first, merely an -e-ending to adjectives in -lic, but after a time it attained to independence and was attached to adjectives not ending in -lic. In early Middle English this -lice changed to -like, and later on to -li and -ly. Meanwhile, the -e-ending, following the -e-endings of the nouns, adjectives and verbs, ceased to be pronounced, and so it gradually fell away. Thus a good many adverbs came to be indistinguishable from their ancestral adjectives, for example, hard in to pull hard, loud in to speak loud, and deep in to bury deep (=Anglo-Saxon, deop-e). Worse, not a few adverbs actually became adjectives, for example, wide, which was originally the Anglo-Saxon adjective wid (=wide) with the adverbial -e-ending, and late, which was originally the Anglo-Saxon adjective loet (=slow) with the same ending.

1

The result of this movement toward identity in form was a confusion between the two classes of words, and from the time of Chaucer down to the eighteenth century one finds innumerable instances of the use of the simple adjective as an adverb. “He will answer trewe” is in Sir Thomas More; “and soft unto himself he sayd” in Chaucer; “the singers sang loud” in the Authorized Version of the Bible (Nehemiah xii, 42), and “indifferent well” in Shakespeare. Even after the purists of the eighteenth century began their corrective work this confusion continued. Thus one finds “the people are miserable poor” in Hume, “how unworthy you treated mankind” in the Spectator, and “wonderful silly” in Joseph Butler. To this day the grammarians battle against the amalgamation, still without complete success; every new volume of rules and regulations for those who would speak by the book is full of warnings against it. Among the great masses of the plain people, it goes without saying, it flourishes unimpeded. The cautions of the school-marm, in a matter so subtle and so plainly lacking in logic or necessity, are forgotten as quickly as her prohibition of the double negative, and thereafter the adjective and the adverb tend more and more to coalesce in a part of speech which serves the purposes of both, and is simple and intelligible and satisfying.

2

Charters gives a number of characteristic examples of its use: “wounded very bad,” “I sure was stiff,” “drank out of a cup easy,” “he looked up quick.” Many more are in Lardner: “a chance to see me work regular,” “I am glad I was lucky enough to marry happy,” “I beat them easy,” and so on. And others fall upon the ear every day: “he done it proper,” “he done himself proud,” “she was dressed neat,” “she was awful ugly,” “the horse ran O.K.,” “it near finished him,” “it sells quick,” “I like it fine,” “he et hoggish,” “she acted mean,” “he loved her something fierce,” “they keep company steady.” The bob-tailed adverb, indeed, enters into a large number of the commonest coins of vulgar speech. Near-silk, I daresay, is properly nearly-silk. The grammarians protest that “run slow” should be “run slowly.” But near-silk and “run slow” remain, and so do “to be in bad,” “it sure will help,” “to play it up strong” and their brothers. What we have here is simply an incapacity to distinguish any ponderable difference between adverb and adjective, and beneath it, perhaps, is the incapacity, already noticed in dealing with “it is me,” to distinguish between the common verb of being and any other verb. If “it is bad” is correct, then why should “it leaks bad” be incorrect? It is just this disdain of purely grammatical reasons that is at the bottom of most of the phenomena visible in vulgar American, and the same impulse is observable in all other languages during periods of inflectional decay. During the highly inflected stage of a language the parts of speech are sharply distinct but when inflections fall off they tend to disappear. The adverb, being at best the step-child of grammar—as the old Latin grammarians used to say, “Omnis pars orationis migrat in adverbium”—is one of the chief victims of this anarchy. John Horne Tooke, despairing of bringing it to any order, even in the most careful English, called it, in his “Diversions of Purley,” “the common sink and repository of all heterogeneous and unknown corruptions.”

3

Where an obvious logical or lexical distinction has grown up between an adverb and its primary adjective the unschooled American is very careful to give it its terminal -ly. For example, he seldom confuses hard and hardly, scarce and scarcely, real and really. These words convey different ideas. Hard means unyielding; hardly means barely. Scarce means present only in small numbers; scarcely is substantially synonymous with hardly. Real means genuine; really is an assurance of veracity. So, again, with late and lately. Thus, and American says “I don’t know, scarcely,” not “I don’t know, scarce”; “he died lately,” not “he died late.” 92 But in nearly all such cases syntax is the preservative, not grammar. These adverbs seem to keep their tails largely because they are commonly put before and not after verbs, as in, for example, “I hardly (or scarcely) know,” and “I really mean it.” Many other adverbs that take that position habitually are saved as well, for example, generally, usually, surely, certainly. But when they follow verbs they often succumb, as in “I’ll do it sure” and “I seen him recent.” And when they modify adjectives they sometimes succumb, too, as in “it was sure hot.” Practically all the adverbs made of adjectives in -y lose the terminal -ly and thus become identical with their adjectives. I have never heard mightily used; it is always mighty, as in “he hit him mighty hard.” So with filthy, dirty, nasty, lowly, naughty and their cognates. One hears “he acted dirty,” “he spoke nasty,” “the child behaved naughty,” and so on. Here even standard English has had to make concessions to euphony. Cleanlily is seldom used; cleanly nearly always takes its place. And the use of illy and thusly is confined to ignoramuses.

4

Vulgar American, like all the higher forms of American and all save the most precise form of written English, has abandoned the old inflections of here, there and where, to wit, hither and hence, thither and thence, whither and whence. These fossil remains of dead cases are fast disappearing from the language. In the case of hither (=to here) even the preposition has been abandoned. One says, not “I came to here,” but simply “I came here.” In the case of hence, however, from here is still used, and so with from there and from where. Finally, it goes without saying that the common American tendency to add -s to such adverbs as towards is carried to full length in the vulgar language. One constantly hears, not only somewheres and forwards, but even noways and anyways, where’-bouts and here’bouts. Here we have but one more example of the movement toward uniformity and simplicity. Anyways is obviously fully supported by sideways and always.

5

Note 92.  I have, however, noted “here late” for “here lately.” But it is obviously derived from “here of late.” [back]

The only inflections of the noun remaining in English are those for number and for the genitive, and so it is in these two regions that the few variations to be noted in vulgar American occur. The rule that, in forming the plurals of compound nouns or noun-phrases, the -s shall be attached to the principal noun is commonly disregarded, and it goes at the end. Thus, “I have two sons-in-law” is never heard among the plain people; one always hears “I have two son-in-laws.” So with the genitive. I once overheard this: “that umbrella is the young lady I go with’s.” Often a false singular is formed from a singular ending in s, the latter being mistaken for a plural. Chinee, Portugee and Japanee are familiar; I have also noted trapee, specie, 93 tactic and summon (from trapeze, species, tactics and summons). 94 Paradoxically, the word incidence is commonly misused for incident, as in “he told an incidence.” Here incidence (or incident) seems to be regarded as a synonym, not for happening, but for story. I have never heard “he told of an incidence.” The of is always omitted. The general disregard of number often shows itself when the noun is used as object. I have already quoted Lardner’s “some of the men has brung their wife along”; in a popular magazine I lately encountered “those book ethnologists… can’t see what is before their nose.” Many similar examples might be brought forward.

1

Note 93.  This occasionally gets into print, along with tactic. See South American Travels, by Henry Stephens; New York, 1915, p. 114. [back]

Note 94.  It is possible that hoakum, the verb of which is to hoak, is a similar backformation from hoax. [back]

The adjectives in English are inflected only for comparison, and the American commonly uses them correctly, with now and then a double comparative or superlative to ease his soul. More better is the commonest of these. It has a good deal of support in logic. A sick man is reported today to be better. Tomorrow he is further improved. Is he to be reported better again, or best? The standard language gets around the difficulty by using still better. The American vulgate boldly employs more better. In the case of worse, worser is used, as Charters shows. He also reports baddest, more queerer and beautifullest. Littler, which he notes, is still outlawed from standard English, but it has, with littlest, a respectable place in American. The late Richard Harding Davis wrote a play called “The Littlest Girl.” The American freely compares adjectives that are incapable of the inflection logically. Charters reports most principal, and I myself have heard uniquer and even more uniquer, as in “I have never saw nothing more uniquer.” I have also heard more ultra, more worse, idealer, liver (that is, more alive), and wellest, as in “he was the wellest man you ever seen.” In general, the -er and -est terminations are used instead of the more and most prefixes, as in beautiful, beautifuller, beautifullest. The fact that the comparative relates to two and the superlative to more than two is almost always forgotten. I have never heard “the better of the two,” in the popular speech, but always “the best of the two.” Charters also reports “the hardest of the two” and “my brother and I measured and he was the tallest.” I have frequently heard “it ain’t so worse,” but here a humorous effect seems to have been intended.

1

Adjectives are made much less rapidly in American than either substantives or verbs. The only suffix that seems to be in general use for that purpose is -y, as in tony, classy, daffy, nutty, dinky, leery, etc. The use of the adjectival prefix super- is confined to the more sophisticated classes; the plain people seem to be unaware of it. 95 This relative paucity of adjectives appears to be common to the more primitive varieties of speech. E. J. Hills, in his elaborate study of the vocabulary of a child of two, 96 found that it contained but 23 descriptive adjectives, of which six were the names of colors, as against 59 verbs and 173 common nouns. Moreover, most of the 23 minus six were adjectives of all work, such as nasty, funny and nice. Colloquial American uses the same rubber-stamps of speech. Funny connotes the whole range of the unusual; hard indicates every shade of difficulty; nice is everything satisfactory; wonderful is a superlative of almost limitless scope.

2

The decay of one to a vague n-sound, as in this’n, is matched by a decay of than after comparatives. Earlier than is seldom if ever heard; composition reduces the two words to earlier’n. So with better’n, faster’n, hotter’n, deader’n, etc. Once I overheard the following dialogue: “I like a belt more looser’n what this one is.” “Well, then, why don’t you unloosen it more’n you got it unloosened?”

3

The almost universal confusion of liable and likely is to be noted. The former is nearly always used, as in, “he’s liable to be there” and “it ain’t liable to happen.” Likely is reserved for the sense of attractive, as in “a likely candidate.”

4

Note 95.  Cf. Vogue Affixes in Present-Day Word-Coinage, by Louise Pound, Dialect Notes, vol. v, pt. i, 1918. [back]

Note 96.  The Speech of a Child Two Years of Age, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. ii, 1914. [back]

Syntactically, perhaps the chief characteristic of vulgar American is its sturdy fidelity to the double negative. So freely is it used, indeed, that the simple negative appears to be almost abandoned. Such phrases as “I see nobody,” “I could hardly walk,” “I know nothing about it” are heard so seldom among the masses of the people that they appear to be affectations when encountered; the well-nigh universal forms are “I don’t see nobody,” “I couldn’t hardly walk,” and “I don’t know nothing about it.” Charters lists some very typical examples, among them, “he ain’t never coming back no more,” “you don’t care for nobody but yourself,” “couldn’t be no more happier” and “I can’t see nothing.” In Lardner there are innumerable examples: “they was not no team,” “I have not never thought of that,” “I can’t write no more,” “no chance to get no money from nowhere,” “we can’t have nothing to do,” and so on. Some of his specimens show a considerable complexity, for example, “Matthewson was not only going as far as the coast,” meaning, as the context shows, that he was going as far as the coast and no further. Only gets into many other examples, e. g., “he hadn’t only the one pass,” “I can’t stay only a minute,” and “I don’t work nights no more, only except Sunday nights.” This last I got from a car conductor. Many other curious specimens are in my collectanea, among them: “one swaller don’t make no summer,” “I never seen nothing I would of rather saw,” and “once a child gets burnt once it won’t never stick its hand in no fire no more,” and so on. The last embodies a triple negative. In “You don’t know nobody what don’t want nobody to do nothing for ’em, do you?” there is a quadruplet. And in “the more faster you go, the sooner you don’t get there,” there is a muddling that almost defies analysis.

1

Like most other examples of “bad grammar” encountered in American the compound negative is of great antiquity and was once quite respectable. The student of Anglo-Saxon encounters it constantly. In that language the negative of the verb was formed by prefixing a particle, ne. Thus, singan (=to sing) became ne singan (=not to sing). In case the verb began with a vowel the ne dropped its e and was combined with the verb, as in noefre (never), from ne-oefre (=not ever). In case the verb began with an h or a w followed by a vowel, the h or w of the verb and the e of ne were both dropped, as in noefth (=has not), from ne-hoefth (=not has), and nolde (=would not), from ne-wolde. Finally, in case the vowel following a w was an i, it changed to y, as in nyste (=knew not), from ne-wiste. But inasmuch as Anglo-Saxon was a fully inflected language the inflections for the negative did not stop with the verbs; the indefinite article, the indefinite pronoun and even some of the nouns were also inflected, and survivors of those forms appear to this day in such words as none and nothing. Moreover, when an actual inflection was impossible it was the practise to insert this ne before a word, in the sense of our no or not. Still more, it came to be the practise to reinforce ne, before a vowel, with na (=not) or naht (=nothing), which later degenerated to nat and not. As a result, there were fearful and wonderful combinations of negatives, some of them fully matching the best efforts of Lardner’s baseball players. Sweet gives several curious examples. 97 “Nan ne dorste nan thing ascian,” translated literally, becomes “no one dares not ask nothing.” “Thaet hus na ne feoll” becomes “the house did not fall not.” As for the Middle English “he never nadde nothing,” it has too modern and familiar a ring to need translating at all. Chaucer, at the beginning of the period of transition to Modern English, used the double negative with the utmost freedom. In “The Knight’s Tale” is this:

He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde

In al his lyf unto no maner wight.

2

By the time of Shakespeare this license was already much restricted, but a good many double negatives are nevertheless to be found in his plays, and he was particularly shaky in the use of nor. In “Richard III” one finds “I never was nor never will be”; in “Measure for Measure,” “harp not on that nor do not banish treason,” and in “Romeo and Juliet,” “thou expectedst not, nor I looked not for.” This misuse of nor is still very frequent. In other directions, too, the older forms show a tendency to survive all the assaults of grammarians. No, it doesn’t,” heard every day and by no means from the ignorant only, is a sort of double negative. The insertion of but before that, as in “I doubt but that” and “there is no question but that,” makes a double negative that is probably full-blown. Nevertheless, as we have seen, it is heard on the floor of Congress every day, and the Fowlers show that it is also common in England. 98 Even worse forms get into the Congressional Record. Not long ago, for example, I encountered “without hardly an exception” in a public paper of the utmost importance. 99 There are, indeed, situations in which the double negative leaps to the lips or from the pen almost irresistibly; even such careful writers as Huxley, Robert Louis Stevenson and Leslie Stephen have occasionally dallied with it. 100 It is perfectly allowable in the Romance languages, and, as we have seen, is almost the rule in the American vulgate. Now and then some anarchistic student of the language boldly defends and even advocates it. “The double negative,” said a writer in the London Review a long time ago, 101 “has been abandoned to the great injury of strength of expression.” Surely “I won’t take nothing” is stronger than either “I will take nothing” or “I won’t take anything.”

3

Note 97.  A New English Grammar, pt. i, pp. 437-8. [back]

Note 98.  The King’s English, p. 322. See especially the quotation from Frederick Greenwood, the distinguished English journalist. [back]

Note 99.  Report of Edward J. Brundage, attorney-general of Illinois, on the East St. Louis massacre, Congressional Record, Jan. 7, 1918, p. 661. [back]

Note 100.  The King’s English, op. cit. [back]

Note 101.  Oct. 1, 1864. [back]

“Language begins,” says Sayce, “with sentences, not with single words.” In a speech in process of rapid development, unrestrained by critical analysis, the tendency to sacrifice the integrity of words to the needs of the complete sentence is especially marked. One finds it clearly in American. Already we have examined various assimilation and composition forms: that’n, use’to, would’a, them’ere and so on. Many others are observable. Off’n is a good example; it comes from off of and shows a preposition decaying to the form of a mere inflectional particle. One constantly hears “I bought it off’n John.” Sort’a, kind’a and their like follow in the footsteps of would’a. Usen’t follows the analogy of don’t and wouldn’t, as in “I didn’t usen’t to be.” Would’ve and should’ve are widely used; Lardner commonly hears them as would of and should of. The neutral a-particle also appears in other situations, especially before way, as in that-a way and this-a way. It is found again in a tall, a liaison form of at all. 102

1

Various minor syntactical peculiarities may be noticed; an exhaustive study of them would afford materials for a whole volume. The use of all the further, as in, “it was all the further I could go,” seems to be American. It has bred many analogues, e. g., “is that all the later it is?” Another curious formation employs there with various negatives in an unusual way; it is illustrated in “there can’t anyone break me.” Again, there is the use of in in such constructions as “he caught in back of the plate,” apparently suggested by in front. Yet again, there is the use of too and so as intensives, as in “You are, too” and “You are, so.” Yet again, there is the growing tendency to omit the verb of action in phrases indicating desire or intent, as in, “he wants out” for “he wants to go out.” This last, I believe, originated as a Pennsylvania localism, and probably owes its genesis to Pennsylvania German, but of late it has begun to travel, and I have received specimens from all parts of the country. In the form of “Belgium wants in this protective arrangement” it has even got into a leading editorial in the Chicago Tribune, “the world’s greatest newspaper.” 103

2

Note 102.  At all, by the way, is often displaced by any or none, as in “he don’t love her any” and “it didn’t hurt me none.” [back]

Note 103.  Nov. 10, 1919, p. 8. [back]

Before anything approaching a thorough and profitable study of the sounds of the American common speech is possible, there must be a careful assembling of the materials, and this, unfortunately, still awaits a phonologist of sufficient enterprise and equipment. Dr. William A. Read, of the State University of Louisiana, has made some excellent examinations of vowel and consonant sounds in the South, Dr. Louise Pound has done capital work of the same sort in the Middle West, and there have been other regional studies of merit. But most of these become misleading by reason of their lack of scope; forms practically universal in the nation are discussed as dialectical variations. This is a central defect in the work of the American Dialect Society, otherwise very industrious and meritorious. It is essaying to study localisms before having first platted the characteristics of the general speech. The dictionaries of Americanisms deal with pronunciation only casually, and often very inaccurately; the remaining literature is meagre and unsatisfactory. Until the matter is gone into at length it will be impossible to discuss any phase of it with exactness. No single investigator can examine the speech of the whole country; for that business a pooling of forces is necessary. But meanwhile it may be of interest to set forth a few provisional ideas.

1

At the start two streams of influence upon vulgar American pronunciation may be noted, the one an inheritance from the English of the colonists, and the other arising spontaneously within the country, and apparently much colored by immigration. The first influence, it goes without saying, is gradually dying out. Consider, for example, the pronunciation of the diphthong oi. In Middle English it was as in boy, but during the early Modern English period it was assimilated with that of the i in wine, and this usage prevailed at the time of the settlement of America. The colonists thus brought it with them, and at the same time it lodged in Ireland, where it still prevails. But in England, during the pedantic eighteenth century, this i-sound was displaced by the original oi-sound, not by historical research but by mere deduction from the spelling, and the new pronunciation soon extended to the polite speech of America. In the common speech, however, the i-sound persisted, and down to the time of the Civil War it was constantly heard in such words as boil, hoist, oil, join, poison and roil, which thus became bile, hist, ile, jine, pisen and rile. Since then the school-marm has combated it with such vigor that it has begun to disappear, and such forms as pisen, jine, bile and ile are now very seldom heard, save as dialectic variations. But in certain other words, perhaps supported by Irish influence, the i-sound still persists. Chief among them are hoist and roil. 104 An unlearned American, wishing to say that he was enraged, never says that he was roiled, but always that he was riled. Desiring to examine the hoof of his horse, he never orders the animal to hoist but always to hist. In the form of booze-hister the latter is almost in good usage. I have seen booze-hister thus spelled and obviously to be thus pronounced, in an editorial article in the American Issue, organ of the Anti-Saloon League of America. 105

2

Various similar misplaced vowels were brought from England by the colonists and have persisted in America, while dying out of good English usage. There is, for example, short i in place of long e, as in critter for creature. Critter is common to almost all the dialects of English, but American has embedded the vowel in a word that is met with nowhere else and has thus become characteristic, to wit, crick for creek. Nor does any other dialect make such extensive use of slick for sleek. Again, there is the substitution of the flat a for the broad a, as in sassy and apple-sass. England has gone back to the broad a, but in America the flat a persists, and many Americans who use sassy every day would scarcely recognize saucy if they heard it. Yet again, there is quoit. Originally, the English pronounced it quate, but now they pronounce the diphthong as in doily. In the United States the quate pronunciation remains. Finally, there is deaf. Its proper pronunciation, in the England that the colonists left, was deef, but it now rhymes with Jeff. That new pronunciation has been adopted by polite American, despite the protests of Noah Webster, but in the common speech the word is still deef.

3

However, a good many of the vowels of the early days have succumbed to pedagogy. The American proletarian may still use skeer for scare, but in most of the other words of that class he now uses the vowel approved by correct English usage. Thus he seldom permits himself such old forms as dreen for drain, keer for care, skeerce for scarce or even cheer for chair. The Irish influence supported them for a while, but now they are fast going out. So, too, are kivver for cover, crap for crop, and chist for chest. But kittle for kettle still shows a certain vitality, rench is still used in place of rinse, and squinch in place of squint, and a flat a continues to displace various e-sounds in such words as rare for rear (e. g., as a horse), thrash for thresh, 106 and wrassle for wrestle. Contrariwise, e displaces a in catch and radish, which are commonly pronounced ketch and reddish. This e-sound was once accepted in standard English; when it got into spoken American it was perfectly sound; one still hears it from the most pedantic lips in any. 107 There are also certain other ancients that show equally unbroken vitality among us, for example, stomp for stamp, 108 snoot for snout, guardeen for guardian, janders for jaundice, muss for mess, and champeen for champion.

4

But all these vowels, whether approved or disapproved, have been under the pressure, for the past century, of a movement toward a general vowel neutralization, and in the long run it promises to dispose of many of them. The same movement also affects standard English, as appears by Robert Bridges’ “Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation,” but I believe that it is stronger in America, and will go farther, at least with the common speech, if only because of our unparalleled immigration. Standard English has 19 separate vowel sounds. No other living tongue of Europe, save Portuguese, has so many; most of the others have a good many less; Modern Greek has but five. The immigrant, facing all these vowels, finds some of them quite impossible; the Russian Jew, for example, cannot manage ur. As a result, he tends to employ a neutralized vowel in the situations which present difficulties, and this neutralized vowel, supported by the slip-shod speech-habits of the native proletariat, makes steady progress. It appears in many of the forms that we have been examining—in the final a of would-a, vaguely before the n in this’n and off’n, in place of the original d in use’ to, and in the common pronunciation of such words as been, come and have, particularly when they are sacrificed to sentence exigencies, as in “I b’n thinking,” “c’m ’ere,” and “he would’ve saw you.”

5

Here we are upon a wearing down process that shows many other symptoms. One finds, not only vowels disorganized, but also consonants. Some are displaced by other consonants, measurably more facile; others are dropped altogether. D becomes the unvoiced t, as in holt, or is dropped, as in tole, han’kerchief, bran-new, di’nt (=didn’t) and fine (for find). In ast (for ask) t replaces k; when the same word is used in place of asked, as often happens, e. g., in “I ast him his name,” it shoulders out ked. It is itself lopped off in bankrup, quan’ity, crep, slep, wep, kep, gris’-mill and les (=let’s=let us), and is replaced by d in kindergarden and pardner. L disappears, as in a’ready and gent’man. The s-sound becomes tsh, as in pincers. The same tsh replaces ct, as in pitcher for picture, and t, as in amachoor. G disappears from the ends of words, 109 and sometimes, too, in the middle, as in stren’th and reco’nize. R, though it is better preserved in American than in English, is also under pressure, as appears by bust, Febuary, stuck on (for struck on), cuss (for curse), yestiddy, sa’s’parella, pa’tridge, ca’tridge, they is (for there is) and Sadd’y (for Saturday). An excrescent t survives in a number of words, e. g., onc’t, twic’t, clos’t, wisht (for wish) and chanc’t; it is an heirloom from the English of two centuries ago. So is the final h in heighth. An excrescent b, as in chimbley and fambly, seems to be native. Whole syllables are dropped out of words, paralleling the English butchery of extraordinary; for example, in bound’ry, pro’bition, tarnal (=eternal), complected, hist’ry, lib’ry and prob’ly. Ordinary, like extraordinary, is commonly enunciated clearly, but it has bred a degenerated form, onry or onery, differentiated in meaning. 110 Consonants are misplaced by metathesis, as in prespiration, hunderd, brethern, childern, libery, interduce, apern, calvary, govrenment, modren and wosterd (for worsted). Ow is changed to er, as in piller, swaller, yeller, beller and holler, or to a, as in fella, or to i, as in minni (=minnow); ice is changed to ers in janders. Words are given new syllables, as in ellum, fillum, lozenger, athaletic, mischievious, mayorality and municipial, or new consonants, as in overhalls and idear.

6

In the complete sentence, assimilation makes this disorganization much more obvious. Mearns, in a brief article, 111 gives many examples of the extent to which it is carried. He hears “wah zee say?” for “what does he say?”, “ware zee?” for “where is he?”, “ast ’er in” for “ask her in,” “itt’m owd” for “hit them out,” “sry” for “that is right,” and “c’meer” for “come here.” He believes that the voiceless t is gradually succumbing to the voiced d, and cites “ass bedder” (for “that’s better”), “wen juh ged din?” (for “when did you get in?”), and “siddup” (for “sit up”). One hears countless other such decayed forms on the street every day. Let’s is le’s. The neutral vowel replaces the oo of good in g’by. “What did you say?” reduces itself to “wuz ay?” Maybe is mebby, perhaps is p’raps, so long is s’long, excuse me is skus me; the common salutation, “how are you?” is so dismembered that it finally emerges as a word almost indistinguishable from high. Here there is room for inquiry, and that inquiry deserves the best effort of American phonologists, for the language is undergoing rapid changes under their very eyes, or, perhaps more accurately, under their very ears, and a study of those changes should yield a great deal of interesting matter. How did the word stint, on American lips, first convert itself into stent and then into stunt? By what process was baulk changed into buck?

7

A by-way that is yet to be so much as entered is that of naturalized loan-words in the common speech. A very characteristic word of that sort is sashay. Its relationship to the French chassé seems to be plain, and yet it has acquired meanings in American that differ very widely from the meaning of chassé. How widely it is dispersed may be seen by the fact that it is reported in popular use, as a verb signifying to prance or to walk consciously, in Southeastern Missouri, Nebraska, Northwestern Arkansas, Michigan, Eastern Alabama and Western Indiana, and, with slightly different meaning, on Cape Cod. The travels of café in America would repay investigation; particularly its variations in pronunciation. I believe that it is fast becoming kaif. Plaza, boulevard, vaudeville, menu and rathskeller have entered into the common speech of the land, and are pronounced as American words. Such words, when they come in verbally, by actual contact with immigrants, commonly retain some measure of their correct native pronunciation. Spiel, kosher, ganof and matzoth are examples; their vowels remain un-American. But words that come in visually, say through street-signs and the newspapers, are immediately overhauled and have thoroughly Americanized vowels and consonants thereafter. School-teachers have been trying to establish various pseudo-French pronunciations of vase for fifty years past, but it still rhymes with face in the vulgate. Vaudeville is vawd-vill; boulevard has three syllables and a hard d at the end; plaza has a flat a; the first syllable of menu rhymes with bee; the first of rathskeller with cats; fiancée is fy-ance-y; née rhymes with see; décolleté is de-coll-ty; hofbräu is huffbrow; the German w has lost its v-sound and becomes an American w. I have, in my day, heard proteege for protégé, habichoo for habitué, connisoor for connoisseur, shirtso for scherzo, premeer for première, dee tour for détour, eetood for étude and prelood for prélude. I once heard a burlesque show manager, in announcing a French dancing act, pronounce M. and Mlle. as Em and Milly. Divorcée is divorcey, and has all the rakishness of the adjectives in -y. The first syllable of mayonnaise rhymes with hay. Crème de menthe is cream de mint. Schweizer is swite-ser. Roquefort is roke-fort. I have heard début with the last syllable rhyming with nut. I have heard minoot for minuet. I have heard tchefdoover for chef-d’ceuvre. And who doesn’t remember

As I walked along the Boys Boo-long

With an independent air

and

Say aw re-vore,

But not good-by!

8

Charles James Fox, it is said, called the red wine of France Bordox to the end of his days. He had an American heart; his great speeches for the revolting colonies were more than mere oratory. John Bright, another kind friend in troubled days, had one too. He always said Bordox and Calass.

9

Note 104.  Roil is obsolete in standard English. Krapp says that “in conventional cultivated use in America” a spelling pronunciation has arisen, making the word rhyme with oil. I have never encountered this pronunciation. All Americans, when they use roiled at all, seem to make it riled. [back]

Note 105.  Maryland edition, July 18, 1914, p. 1. [back]

Note 106.  Here a distinction shows itself: a farmer thrashes his boy, but threshes his wheat. [back]

Note 107.  Cf. Lounsbury: The Standard of Pronunciation in English, p. 172 ff. [back]

Note 108.  Stomp is used only in the sense of to stamp with the foot. One always stamps a letter. An analogue of stomp, accepted in correct English, is strop (e. g., razor-strop), from strap. In American champ (chomp) and tramp (tromp) tend to diverge in the same way. A horse chomps its bit, but champ (=champion) retains the flat a. A cow tromps her fodder, but a tramp remains a tramp. [back]

Note 109.  But not all words in -g. Lardner calls my attention to the fact that anything and everything are almost always excepted. He says: “I used, occasionally, to sit on the players’ bench at baseball games, and it was there that I noted the exceptions made in favor of these two words. A player, returning to the bench after batting, would be asked, ‘Has he got anything in there?’# (‘He—in there’# always means the pitcher). The answer would be ‘He’s got everything.’# On the other hand, the player might return and (usually after striking out) say, ‘He hasn’t got nothin’.’# And the manager: ‘Looks like he must have somethin’.’#” [back]

Note 110.  This word, when written, often appears as ornery, but it is almost always pronounced on’ry, with the first syllable rhyming with don. [back]

Note 111.  Our Own, Our Native Speech, McClure’s Magazine, Oct., 1916. [back]

1. Surnames

On October 20, 1919, Mr. Mondell, of Wyoming, the majority leader, arose in the House of Representatives and called the attention of the House to the presence in the gallery of a detachment of 27 soldiers, “popularly known by the appropriate title and designation of ‘Americans all.’ ” A few moments later Mr. Wilson, of Connecticut, had the names of these soldiers spread upon the record for the day. Here they are:

Pedro Araez

Frank Kristopoulos

Sylvester Balchunas

Johannes Lenferink

Arezio Aurechio

Fidel Martin

Jules Boutin

Attilio Marzi

Oasge Christiansen

Gurt Mistrioty

Kusti Franti

Michael Myatowych

Odilian Gosselin

Francisco Pungi

Walter Hucko

Joseph Rossignol

Argele Intili

Ichae Semos

Henry Jurk

Joe Shestak

David King

George Strong

John Klok

Hendrix Svennigsen

Norman Kerman

Fritz Wold

Eugene Kristiansen

1

This was no unusual group of Americans, though it was deliberately assembled to convince Congress of the existence of a “melting pot that really melts.” I turn to the list of promotions in the army sent in to the Senate on the first day of the Harding administration, and find Lanza, Huguet, Shaffer, Brambila, Straat, Knabenshue, De Armond, Meyer, Wiezorek and Stahl among the new colonels and lieutenant-colonels, and Ver, Lorch, von Deesten, Violland and Armat among the new majors. I proceed to the roll of the Sixty-sixth Congress and find Babka, Bacharach, Baer, Chindblom, Crago, Dupré, Esch, Focht, Goldfogel, Goodykoontz, Hernandez, Hoch, Juul, Kahn, Keller, Kiess, Kleczka, Knutson, Kraus, Larsen, Lazaro, Lehlbach, Rodenberg, Romjue, Siegel, Steenerson, Volk, Volstead, Voigt and Zihlman in the House. I go on to the list of members of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1919) and find Cortissoz, deKay, Gummere, Lefevre, Schelling, van Dyke and Wister among the writers, and Ballin, Betts, Brunner, Carlsen, De Camp, Dielman, Du Mond, Guerin, Henri, Jaegers, La Farge, Niehaus, Ochtman, Roth, Volk and Weinman among the painters and sculptors. I conclude with a glance through “Who’s Who in America.” There are Aasgaard, Abbé, Abt, Ackerman, Adler, Agassiz, Agee, Allaire, Alsberg, Alschuler, Althoff, Althouse, Ament, Amstutz, Amweg, Andrus, Angellotti, Anshutz, Anspacher, Anstadt, App, Arndt, Auer, Auerbach, Ault and Auman, to go no further than the A’s—all “notable living men and women of the United States” and all nativeborn.

2

Practically any other list of Americans would show many names of the same sort. Indeed, every American telephone directory offers plenty of evidence that, despite the continued political and cultural preponderance of the original English strain, the American people have quite ceased to be authentically English in race, or even, as a London weekly has said, “predominantly of British stock.” 1 The blood in their arteries is inordinately various and inextricably mixed, but yet not mixed enough to run a clear stream. A touch of foreignness still lingers about millions of them, even in the country of their birth. They show their alien origin in their speech, in their domestic customs, in their habits of mind, and in their very names. Just as the Scotch and the Welsh have invaded England, elbowing out the actual English to make room for themselves, so the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, the Scandinavians and the Jews of Eastern Europe, and in some areas, the French, the Slavs and the hybrid-Spaniards have elbowed out the descendants of the first colonists. It is no exaggeration, indeed, to say that whereever the old stock comes into direct and unrestrained conflict with one of these new stocks, it tends to succumb, or, at all events, to give up the battle. The Irish, in the big cities of the East, attained to a truly impressive political power long before the first nativeborn generation of them had grown up. 2 The Germans, following the limestone belt of the Alleghany foothills, preempted the best lands East of the mountains before the new republic was born. And so in our own time we have seen the Swedes and Norwegians shouldering the native from the wheat lands of the Northwest, and the Italians driving the decadent New Englanders from their farms, and the Jews gobbling New York, and the Slavs getting a firm foothold in the mining regions, and the French Canadians penetrating New Hampshire and Vermont, and the Japanese and Portuguese menacing Hawaii, and the awakened negroes gradually ousting the whites from the farms of the South. 3 The birthrate among all these foreign stocks is enormously greater than among the older stock, and though the deathrate is also high, the net increase remains relatively formidable. Even without the aid of immigration it is probable that they would continue to rise in numbers faster than the original English and so-called Scotch-Irish. 4

3

Turn to the letter z in the New York telephone directory and you will find a truly astonishing array of foreign names, some of them in process of anglicization, but many of them still arrestingly outlandish. The only Anglo-Saxon surname beginning with z is Zacharias 5 and even that was originally borrowed from the Greek. To this the Norman invasion seems to have added only Zouchy. But in Manhattan and the Bronx, even among the necessarily limited class of telephone subscribers, there are nearly 1500 persons whose names begin with the letter, and among them one finds fully 150 different surnames. The German Zimmermann, with either one n or two, is naturally the most numerous single name, and following close upon it are its relatives, Zimmer and Zimmern. With them are many more German names, Zahn, Zechendorf, Zeffert, Zeitler, Zeller, Zellner, Zeltmacher, Zepp, Ziegfeld, Zabel, Zucker, Zuckermann, Ziegler, Zillman, Zinser and so on. They are all represented heavily, but they indicate neither the earliest nor the most formidable accretion, for underlying them are many Dutch names, e. g., Zeeman, and over them are a large number of Slavic, Italian and Jewish names. Among the first I note Zabludosky, Zachczynski, Zapinkow, Zaretsky, Zechnowitz, Zenzalsky and Zywachevsky; among the second, Zaccardi, Zaccarini, Zaccaro, Zapparano, Zanelli, Zicarelli and Zucca; among the third, Zukor, Zipkin and Ziskind. There are, too, various Spanish names: Zalaya, Zingaro, etc. And Greek: Zapeion, Zarvakos and Zouvelekis. And Armenian: Zaloom, Zaron and Zatmajian. And Hungarian: Zadek, Zagor and Zichy. And Swedish: Zetterholm and Zetterlund. And a number that defy placing: Zrike, Zvan, 6 Zwipf, Zula, Zur and Zeve.

4

In the New York city directory the fourth most common name is now Murphy, an Irish name, and the fifth most common is Meyer, which is German and often Jewish. The Meyers are the Smiths of Austria, and of most of Germany. They outnumber all other clans. After them come the Schultzes and Krauses, just as the Joneses and Williamses follow the Smiths in Great Britain. Schultze and Kraus do not seem to be very common names in New York, but Schmidt, Muller, Schneider and Klein appear among the fifty commonest. 7 Cohen and Levy rank eighth and ninth, and are both ahead of Jones, which is second in England, and Williams, which is third. Taylor, a highly typical British name, ranking fourth in England and Wales, is twenty-third in New York. Ahead of it, beside Murphy, Meyer, Cohen and Levy, are Schmidt, Ryan, O’Brien, Kelly and Sullivan. Robinson, which is twelfth in England, is thirty-ninth in New York; even Schneider and Muller are ahead of it. In Chicago Olson, Schmidt, Meyer, Hansen and Larsen are ahead of Taylor, and Hoffman and Becker are ahead of Ward; in Boston Sullivan and Murphy are ahead of any English name save Smith; in Philadelphia Myers is just below Robinson. Nor, as I have said, is this great proliferation of foreign surnames confined to the large cities. There are whole regions in the Southwest in which López and Gonzales are far commoner names than Smith, Brown or Jones, and whole regions in the Middle West wherein Olson is commoner than either Taylor or Williams, and places both North and South where Duval is at least as common as Brown.

5

Moreover, the true proportions of this admixture of foreign blood are partly concealed by a wholesale anglicization of surnames, sometimes deliberate and sometimes the fruit of mere confusion. That Smith, Brown and Miller remain in first, second and third places among the surnames of New York is surely no sound evidence of Anglo-Saxon survival. The German and Scandinavian Schmidt has undoubtedly contributed many a Smith, and Braun many a Brown, and Müller many a Miller. In the same way Johnson, which holds first place among Chicago surnames, and Anderson, which holds third, are plainly reinforced from Scandinavian sources, and the former may also owe something to the Russian Ivanof. Miller is a relatively rare name in England; it is not among the fifty most common. But it stands thirtieth in Boston, third in New York, fourth in Baltimore, and second in Philadelphia. 8 In the lastnamed city the influence of Müller, probably borrowed from the Pennsylvania German, is plainly indicated, and in Chicago it is likely that there are also contributions from the Scandinavian Möller, the Polish Jannszewski and the Bohemian Mlinár. Myers, as we have seen, is a common surname in Philadelphia. So are Fox and Snyder. In some part, at least, they have been reinforced by the Pennsylvania German Myer, Fuchs and Schneider. Sometimes Müller changes to Miller, sometimes to Muller, and sometimes it remains unchanged, but with the spelling made Mueller. Muller and Mueller do not appear among the commoner names in Philadelphia; nearly all the Müllers seem to have become Millers, thus putting Miller in second place. But in Chicago, with Miller in fourth place, there is also Mueller in thirty-first place, and in New York, with Miller in third place, there is also Muller in twenty-fourth place.

6

Such changes, chiefly based upon transliterations, are met with in all countries. The name of Taaffe, familiar in Austrian history, had an Irish prototype, probably Taft. General Demikof, one of the Russian commanders at the battle of Zorndorf, in 1758, was a Swede born Themicoud, and no doubt the founder of the house in Sweden was born a Frenchman. Franz Maria von Thugut, the Austrian diplomatist, was a member of an Italian Tyrolese family named Tunicotto. This became Thunichgut (=do no good) in Austria, and was changed to Thugut (=do good) to bring it into greater accord with its possessor’s deserts. 9 In Bonaparte the Italian buon (o) became the French bon. Many English surnames are decayed forms of Norman-French names, for example, Sidney from St. Denis, Divver from De Vere, Bridgewater from Burgh de Walter, Montgomery from de Mungumeri, Garnett from Guarinot, and Seymour from Saint-Maure. A large number of so-called Irish names are the products of rough-and-ready transliterations of Gaelic patronymics, for example, Findlay from Fionnlagh, Dermott from Diarmuid, and McLane from Mac Illeathiain. In the same way the name of Phœnix Park, in Dublin, came from Fion Uisg (=fine water). Of late some of the more ardent Irish authors and politicians have sought to return to the originals. Thus, O’Sullivan has become O Suilleabháin, Pearse has become Piarais, Shields has become O’Sheel, Mac Sweeney has become Mac Suibhne, and Patrick has suffered a widespread transformation to Padraic. But in America, with a language of peculiar vowel-sounds and even consonant-sounds struggling against a foreign invasion unmatched for strength and variety, such changes have been far more numerous than across the ocean, and the legal rule of idem sonans is of much wider utility than anywhere else in the world. If it were not for that rule there would be endless difficulties for the Wises whose grandfathers were Weisses, and the Leonards born Leonhards, Leonhardts or Lehnerts, and the Manneys who descend and inherit from Le Maines.

7

“A crude popular etymology,” says a leading authority on surnames, 10 “often begins to play upon a name that is no longer significant to the many. So the Thurgods have become Thoroughgoods, and the Todenackers have become the Pennsylvania Dutch Toothakers, much as asparagus has become sparrow-grass.” So, too, the Wittenachts of Boyle county, Kentucky, descendants of a Hollander, have become Whitenecks, and the Lehns of lower Pennsylvania, descendants of some far-off German, have become Lanes. 11 The original Herkimer in New York was a Herchheimer; the original Waldo in New England was a German named Waldow. Edgar Allan Poe was a member of a family long settled in Western Maryland, the founder being one Poh or Pfau, a native of the Palatinate. Major George Armistead, who defended Fort McHenry in 1814, when Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was the descendant of an Armstädt who came to Virginia from Hesse-Darmstadt. General George A. Custer, the Indian fighter, was the great-grandson of one Küster, a Hessian soldier paroled after Burgoyne’s surrender. William Wirt, anti-Masonic candidate for the presidency in 1832, was the son of one Wörth. William Paca, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was the great-grandson of a Bohemian named Paka. General J. J. Pershing is the descendant of an Alsatian named Pfoersching, who immigrated to America in the eighteenth century; the name was at first debased to Pershin; in 1838 the final g was restored. General W. S. Rosecrans was really a Rosenkrantz. Even the surname of Abraham Lincoln, according to some authorities, was an anglicized form of the German Linkhorn. 12

8

Such changes, in fact, are almost innumerable; every work upon American genealogy is full of examples. The first foreign names to undergo the process were Dutch and French. Among the former, Reiger was debased to Riker, Van de Veer to Vandiver, Van Huys to Vannice, Van Siegel to Van Sickel, Van Arsdale to Vannersdale, and Haerlen (or Haerlem) to Harlan; 13 among the latter, Petit became Poteet, Caillé changed to Kyle, De la Haye to Dillehay, Dejean to Deshong, Guizor to Gossett, Guereant to Caron, Soulé to Sewell, Gervaise to Jarvis, Bayle to Bailey, Fontaine to Fountain, Denis to Denny, Pebaudière to Peabody, Bon Pas to Bumpus and de l’Hôtel to Doolittle. “Frenchmen and French Canadians who came to New England,” says Schele de Vere, “had to pay for such hospitality as they there received by the sacrifice of their names. The brave Bon Cœur, Captain Marryatt tells us in his Diary, became Mr. Bunker, and gave his name to Bunker’s Hill.” 14 But it was the German immigration that provoked the first really wholesale slaughter. A number of characteristic German sounds—for example, that of ü and the guttural in ch and g—are almost impossible to the Anglo-Saxon pharynx, and so they had to go. Thus, Bloch was changed to Block or Black, Ochs to Oakes, Hoch to Hoke, Fischbach to Fishback, Albrecht to Albert or Albright, and Steinweg to Steinway, and the Grundwort, bach, was almost universally changed to baugh or paugh, as in Brumbaugh and Fish paugh (or Fishpaw). The ü met the same fate: Grün was changed to Green, Sänger to Sanger or Singer, Glück to Gluck, Führ to Fear or Fuhr, Wärner to Warner, Düring to Deering, and Schnäbele to Snabely, Snavely or Snively. In many other cases there were changes in spelling to preserve vowel sounds differently represented in German and English. Thus, Blum was changed to Bloom, 15 Reuss to Royce, Koester to Kester, Kuehle to Keeley, Schroeder to Schrader, Stehli to Staley, Weymann to Wayman, Klein to Kline or Cline, Federlein to Federline, Friedmann to Freedman, Bauman to Bowman, Braun to Brown, and Lang (as the best compromise possible) to Long. The change of Oehm to Ames belongs to the same category; the addition of the final s represents a typical effort to substitute the nearest related Anglo-Saxon name or name so sounding. Other examples of that effort are to be found in Michaels for Michaelis, Bowers for Bauer, Johnson for Johannsen, Ford for Furth, Hines for Heintz, Kemp for Kempf, Foreman for Führmann, Kuhns or Coons for Kuntz, Hoover for Huber, Levering for Liebering, Jones for Jonas, Redwood for Rothholz, Grosscup for Grosskopf, Westfall for Westphal, Kerngood for Kerngut, Collenberg for Kaltenberg, Cronkhite for Krankheit, Betts for Betz, Pennypacker for Pfannenbecker, Crile for Kreil, 16 Swope for Schwab, Hite or Hyde for Heid, Andrews for André, Young for Jung and Pence for Pentz. 17

9

The American antipathy to accented letters, mentioned in the chapter on spelling, is particularly noticeable among surnames. An immigrant named Fürst inevitably becomes plain Furst in the United States, and if not the man, then surely his son. Löwe, in the same way, is transformed into Lowe (pro. low), 18 Lürmann into Lurman, Schön into Schon or Shane, Günther into Ginter, Suplée into Suplee or Supplee, Lüders into Luders, and Brühl into Brill. Even when no accent betrays it, the foreign diphthong is under hard pressure. Thus the German oe disappears and Loeb is changed to Lobe or Laib, Oehler to Ohler, Loeser to Leser, and Schoen to Schon or Shane. In the same way the au in such names as Rosenau changes to aw. So too, the French oi-sound is disposed of, and Dubois is pronounced Doo-bóys and Boileau acquires a first syllable rhyming with toil. So with the kn in the German names of the Knapp class; they are nearly all pronounced, probably by analogy with Knight, as if they began with n. So with sch; Schneider becomes Snyder, Schlegel becomes Slagel, and Schluter becomes Sluter. If a foreigner clings to the original spelling of his name he must usually expect to hear it mispronounced. Roth, in American, quickly becomes Rawth, Ranft is pronounced Ranf; Frémont, losing both accent and the French e, becomes Freemont; the names in -thal take the English th sound; Blum begins to rhyme with dumb; Mann rhymes with van, and Lang with hang; Krantz, Lantz and their cognates with chance; Kurtz with shirts; the first syllable of Gutmann with but; the first of Kahler with bay; the first of Werner with turn; the first of Wagner with nag. Uhler, in America, is always Youler. Berg loses its German e-sound for an English usound, and its German hard g for an English g; it becomes identical with the berg of iceberg. The same change in the vowel occurs in Erdmann. In König the German diphthong succumbs to a long o, and the hard g becomes k; the common pronunciation is Cone-ik. Often, in Berger, the g becomes soft, and the name rhymes with verger. It becomes soft, too, in Bittinger. In Wilstach and Welsbach the ch becomes a k. In Anheuser the eu changes to ow. The final e, important in German, is nearly always silenced; Dohme rhymes with foam; Kühne becomes keen. In the collectanea of Judge J. C. Ruppenthal, of Russell, Kansas, a very careful observer, are many curious specimens. He finds Viereck transformed into Fearhake, Vogelgesang into Fogelsong, Pfannenstiel into Fanestil, Pflüger into Phlegar, Pfeil into Feil, and Steinmetz into Stimits. The Bohemian Hrdlicka becomes Herdlichka. The Dutch Broywer (in Michigan, where there are many Hollanders of relatively recent immigration) becomes Brower, Pelgrim becomes Pilgrim, Pyp becomes Pipe, Londen becomes London, Roos becomes Rose, and Wijngaarden becomes Winegar.

10

In addition to these transliterations, there are constant translations of foreign proper names. “Many a Pennsylvania Carpenter,” says Dr. Oliphant, 19 “bearing a surname that is English, from the French, from the Latin, and there a Celtic loan-word in origin, is neither English, nor French, nor Latin, nor Celt, but an original German Zimmermann.” 20 A great many other such translations are under everyday observation. Pfund becomes Pound; Becker, Baker; Schumacher, Shoemaker; König, King; Weissberg, Whitehill; Koch, Cook; 21 Neumann, Newman; Schaefer, Shepherd or Sheppard; Gutmann, Goodman; Goldschmidt, Goldsmith; Edelstein, Nobelstone; Steiner, Stoner; Meister, Master(s); Schwartz, Black; Weiss, White; Kurtz, Short; Stern, Starr; Morgenstern, Morningstar; Weber, Weaver; Bucher, Booker; Vogelgesang, Birdsong; Sonntag, Sunday, and so on. It is not unusual for some members of a family to translate the patronymic while others leave it unchanged. Thus in Pennsylvania (and no doubt elsewhere) there are Carpenters and Zimmermans of the same blood. A Frenchman named LeRoi settled in the Mohawk Valley in the early eighteenth century; today his descendants are variously named Leroy, Larraway and King. Partial translations are also encountered, e. g., Studebaker from Studebecker, and Reindollar from Rheinthaler, and radical shortenings, e. g., Swiler from Lebenschweiler, Kirk from Kirkeslager, and Castle (somewhat fantastically) from Katzenellenbogen. The same processes show themselves in the changes undergone by the names of the newer immigrants. The Hollanders in Michigan often have to submit to translations of their surnames. Thus Hoogsteen becomes Highstone, Veldhuis becomes Fieldhouse, Huisman becomes Houseman, Prins becomes Prince, Kuiper becomes Cooper, Dykhuis becomes Dykehouse, Konig becomes King, Werkman becomes Workman, Nieuwhuis becomes Newhouse, and Christiaanse becomes Christians. Similarly the Greek Triantafyllopoulos (signifying rose) is often turned into the English Rose, Giannopoulos becomes Johnson, and Demetriades becomes Jameson. So, too, Constantinopoulos is shortened to Constant or Constantine, Athanasios to Nathan or Athan, Pappadakis, Pappadopoulos or Pappademetriou to Pappas. Transliteration also enters into the matter, as in the change from Mylonas to Miller, from Demopoulos to DeMoss, and from Christides to Christie. 22 And so, by one route or another, the Polish Wiikiewicz becomes Wilson, the Scandinavian Knutson becomes Newton, the Bohemian Bohumil becomes Godfrey, and the Bohemian Kovár and the Russian Kuznetzov become Smith. Some curious examples are occasionally encountered, particularly among the Italians of the big cities. The late James E. March, Republican leader of the Third Assembly District in New York, was originally Antonio Maggio. Paul Kelly, leader of the Longshoremen’s Union, was Paolo Vaccarelli. One Alessandro Smiraglia has become Sandy Smash, Francesco Napoli is Frank Knapp, Francesco Tomasini is Frank Thomas, and Luigi Zampariello is Louis Smith. Henry Woodhouse, a gentleman prominent in aeronautical affairs, came to the United States from Italy as Mario Terenzio Enrico Casalegno; his new surname is simply a translation of his old one. The Belmonts, unable to find a euphonious English equivalent for their German patronymic of Schönberg, chose a French one that Americans could pronounce. Edmund Burke Fairfield, once chancellor of the University of Nebraska, was the descendant of a Frenchman named Beauchamp, who came to America in 1639.

11

In part, as I have said, these changes in surname are enforced by the sheer inability of Americans to pronounce certain Continental consonants, and their disinclination to remember the Continental vowel sounds. Many an immigrant, finding his name constantly mispronounced, changes its vowels or drops some of its consonants; many another shortens it, or translates it, or changes it entirely for the same reason. Just as a well-known Greek-French poet changed his Greek name of Papadiamantopoulos to Moréas because Papadiamantopoulos was too much for Frenchmen, and as an eminent Polish-English novelist changed his Polish name of Karzeniowski to Conrad because few Englishmen could pronounce owski correctly, so the Italian or Greek or Slav immigrant, coming up for naturalization, very often sheds his family name with his old allegiance, and emerges as Taylor, Jackson or Wilson. I once encountered a firm of Polish Jews, showing the name of Robinson & Jones on its sign-board, whose partners were born Rubinowitz and Jonas. I lately heard of a German named Knoche—a name doubly difficult to Americans, what with the kn and the ch—who changed it boldly to Knox to avoid being called Nokky. A Greek named Papademetracopoulos, Harzidakis, Papalhesdoros, Sakorrhaphos, Jouphexes or Oikonomakes would find it practically impossible to carry on amicable business with Americans; his name would arouse their mirth, if not their downright ire. And the same burden would lie upon a Hungarian named Beniczkyné, or Gyalui, or Szilagyi, or Vezercsillagok. Or a Finn named Kyyhkysen, or Jääskelainen, or Tuulensuu, or Uotinen,—all honorable Finnish patronymics. Or a Swede named Sjogren, or Leijonhufvud. Or a Bohemian named Srb, or Hrubka. Or a Hollander named Zylstra, or Pyp, or Hoogsteen. Or, for that matter, a German named Kannengiesser, or Schnapaupf, or Pfannenbecker.

12

But more important than this purely linguistic hostility, there is a deeper social enmity, and it urges the immigrant to change his name with even greater force. For a hundred years past all the heaviest and most degrading labor of the United States has been done by successive armies of foreigners, and so a concept of inferiority has come to be attached to mere foreignness. In addition, these newcomers, pressing upward steadily in the manner already described, have offered the native a formidable, and considering their lower standards of living, what has appeared to him to be an unfair competition on his own plane, and as a result a hatred born of disastrous rivalry has been added to contempt. Our unmatchable vocabulary of derisive names for foreigners reveals the national attitude. The French boche, the German hunyadi (for Hungarian), 23 and the old English frog or froggy (for Frenchman) seem lone and feeble beside our great repertoire: dago, wop, guinea, kike, goose, mick, harp, 24 bohick, bohee, bohunk, heinie, square-head, greaser, canuck, spiggoty, 25 spick, chink, polack, dutchie, skibby, 26 scowegian, hunkie and yellow-belly. This disdain tends to pursue an immigrant with extraordinary rancor when he bears a name that is unmistakably foreign and hence difficult to the native, and open to his crude burlesque. Moreover, the general feeling penetrates the man himself, particularly if he be ignorant, and he comes to believe that his name is not only a handicap, but also intrinsically discreditable—that it wars subtly upon his worth and integrity. 27 This feeling, perhaps, accounted for a good many changes of surnames among Germans and Jews of German name upon the entrance of the United States into the war. But in the majority of cases, of course, the changes so copiously reported—e. g., from Bielefelder to Benson, and from Pulvermacher to Pullman—were merely efforts at protective coloration. The immigrant, in a time of extraordinary suspicion and difficulty, tried to get rid of at least one handicap. 28

13

This motive constantly appears among the Jews, who face an anti-Semitism that is imperfectly concealed and may be expected to grow stronger hereafter. Once they have lost the faith of their fathers, a phenomenon almost inevitable in the first native-born generation, they shrink from all the disadvantages that go with Jewishness, and seek to conceal their origin, or, at all events, to avoid making it unnecessarily noticeable. 29 To this end they modify the spelling of the more familiar Jewish surnames, turning Levy into Lewy, Lewyt, Levitt, Levin, Levine, Levey, Levie 30 and even Lever; Cohen into Cohn, Cahn, Kahn, Kann, Coyne and Conn; Aarons into Arens and Ahrens, and Solomon into Salmon, Salomon and Solmson. 31 In the same way they shorten their long names, changing Wolfsheimer to Wolf, Goldschmidt to Gold, and Rosenblatt, Rosenthal, Rosenbaum, Rosenau, Rosenberg, Rosenbusch, Rosenblum, Rosenstein, Rosengarten, Rosenheim and Rosenfeldt to Rose or Ross. 32 Like the Germans, they also seek refuge in translations more or less literal. Thus, on the East Side of New York, Blumenthal is often changed to Bloomingdale, Schneider to Taylor, Reichman to Richman, and Schlachtfeld to Warfield. One Lobenstine (i. e., Lobenstein) had his name changed to Preston during the war, and announced that this was “the English version” of his patronymic. A Wolfsohn similarly became a Wilson, though without attempting any such fantastic philological justification for the change. 33 Fiedler, a common Jewish name, often becomes Harper in New York; so does Pikler, which is Yiddish for drummer. Stolar, which is a Yiddish word borrowed from the Russian, signifying carpenter, is changed to Carpenter. Lichtman and Lichtenstein become Chandler. Meilach, which is Hebrew for king, becomes King, and so does Meilachson. The strong tendency to seek English-sounding equivalents for names of noticeably foreign origin changes Sher into Sherman, Michel into Mitchell, 34 Rogowsky into Rogers, Kolinsky into Collins, Rabinovitch into Robbins, Davidovitch into Davis, Moiseyev into Macy or Mason, and Jacobson, Jacobovitch and Jacobovsky into Jackson. This last change proceeds by way of a transient change to Jake or Jack as a nickname. Jacob is always abbreviated to one or the other on the East Side. Yankelevitch also becomes Jackson, for Yankel is Yiddish for Jacob. 35 The Jews go further with such changes than any other people. They struggle very hard for position, and try to rid themselves of every unnecessary handicap. Moreover, they are supported by the historical name-shedding of a very eminent Jew, the Saul of Tarsus who became Paul. In precisely the same way, on attaining to 100 per cent Americanism, the Itzik Kolinsky of today becomes Sidney Collins.

14

Among the immigrants of other stocks some extraordinarily radical changes in name are also to be observed. Greek names of five, and even eight syllables shrink to Smith; Hungarian names that seem to be all consonants are reborn in such euphonious forms as Martin and Lacy. I have encountered a Gregory who was born Grgurevich in Serbia; a Uhler who was born Uhlyarik; a Beresford who was born Bilkovski; a Graves who descends from the fine old Dutch family of ’sGravesande. I once knew a man named Lawton whose grandfather had been a Lautenberger. First he shed the berger and then he changed the spelling of Lauten to make it fit the inevitable American mispronunciation. There is, again, a family of Dicks in the South whose ancestor was a Schwettendieck—apparently a Dutch or Low German name. There is, yet again, a celebrated American artist, of the Bohemian patronymic of Hrubka, who has abandoned it for a surname which is common to all the Teutonic languages, and is hence easy for Americans. The Italians, probably because of the relations established by the Catholic church, often take Irish names, as they marry Irish girls; it is common to hear of an Italian pugilist or politician named Kelly or O’Brien. The process of change is often informal, but even legally it is quite facile. The Naturalization Act of June 29, 1906, authorizes the court, as a part of the naturalization of any alien, to make an order changing his name. This is frequently done when he receives his last papers; sometimes, if the newspapers are to be believed, without his solicitation, and even against his protest. If the matter is overlooked at the time, he may change his name later on, like any other citizen, by simple application to a court of record or even without any legal process whatever.

15

Among names of Anglo-Saxon origin and names naturalized long before the earliest colonization, one notes certain American peculiarities, setting off the nomenclature of the United States from that of the mother country. The relative infrequency of hyphenated names in America is familiar; when they appear at all it is almost always in response to direct English influences. 36 Again, a number of English family names have undergone modification in the New World. Venable may serve as a specimen. The form in England is almost inevitably Venables, but in America the final s has been lost, and every example of the name that I have been able to find in the leading American reference-books is without it. And where spellings have remained unchanged, pronunciations have been frequently modified. This is particularly noticeable in the South. 37 Callowhill, down there, is commonly pronounced Carrol; Crenshawe is Granger; Hawthorne, Horton; Heyward, Howard; Norsworthy, Nazary; Ironmonger, Munger; Farinholt, Fernall; Camp, Kemp; Buchanan, Bohannan; Drewry, Droit; Enroughty, Darby; 38 and Taliaferro, Tolliver. The English Crowninshields commonly make it Crunshel. Van Schaick, an old New York Dutch name, is pronounced Von Scoik, though the hard Dutch sh-sound in other New York names, e. g., Schurman, has been softened. A good many American Jews, aiming at a somewhat laborious refinement, change the pronunciation of the terminal stein in their names so that it rhymes, not with line, but with bean. Thus, in fashionable Jewish circles, there are no longer any Epsteins, Goldsteins and Hammersteins but only Epsteens, Goldsteens and Hammersteens. The American Jews differ further from the English in pronouncing Levy to make the first syllable rhyme with tea; the English Jews always make the name Lev-vy, to rhyme with heavy. In general there is a tendency in America to throw the accents back, i. e., in such names as Cassels, Brennan, Gerard, Doran, Burnett, Maurice, etc. In England the first syllable is commonly accented; in the United States, the second.

16

To match such American prodigies as Darby for Enroughty, the English themselves have Hools for Howells, Sillinger for St. Leger, Sinjin for St. John, Weems for Wemyss, Luson-Gore for Leveson-Gower, Stubbs for St. Aubyn, Vane for Veheyne, Kerduggen for Cadogen, Moboro or Mobrer for Marlborough, Key for Caius, March-banks for Marjoribanks, Beecham for Beauchamp, Chumley for Cholmondeley, Trosley for Trotterscliffe, and Darby for Derby. 39

17

Note 1.  Nation, March 12, 1912. [back]

Note 2.  The great Irish famine, which launched the chief emigration to America, extended from 1845 to 1847. The Know Nothing movement, which was chiefly aimed at the Irish, extended from 1852 to 1860. [back]

Note 3.  Richard T. Ely: Outlines of Economics, 3rd rev. ed.; New York, 1916, p. 68. [back]

Note 4.  Cf. Seth K. Humphrey: Mankind; New York, 1917, p. 45. [back]

Note 5.  Cf. William G. Searle: Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum; Cambridge, 1897. [back]

Note 6.  A correspondent suggests that Zvan may be a misprint for Ivan. But what of the other strange names in the group? [back]

Note 7.  World Almanac, 1914, p. 668. [back]

Note 8.  It was announced by the Bureau of War Risk Insurance on March 30, 1918, that there were then 15,000 Millers in the United States Army. On the same day there were 262 John J. O’Briens, of whom 50 had wives named Mary. [back]

Note 9.  Cf. Carlyle’s Frederick the Great, bk. xxi, ch. vi. [back]

Note 10.  S. Grant Oliphant, in the Baltimore Sun, Dec. 2, 1906. [back]

Note 11.  Harriet Lane Johnston was of this family. Many other examples are to be found in the pages of the Pennsylvania-German Magazine, especially in the “Meaning of Names” department conducted by Dr. Leonard Felix Fuld. [back]

Note 12.  Cf. Faust, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 183–4. See also A Few Bausman Letters, by Lottie M. Bausman, Pennsylvania-German Magazine, April, 1910, p. 229. [back]

Note 13.  A Tragedy of Surnames, by Fayette Dunlap, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. 1, 1913, pp. 7–8. [back]

Note 14.  Americanisms, p. 112. [back]

Note 15.  Henry Harrison, in his Dictionary of the Surnames of the United Kingdom; London, 1912, shows that such names as Bloom, Cline, etc., always represent transliterations of German names. They are unknown to genuinely British nomenclature. [back]

Note 16.  I suggest that the eminent American surgeon, George W. Crile, may be a descendant of some early Kreil. His mother’s name was Deeds. During the World War, when an American officer named Deeds was under attack, it was alleged that the original form of his name was Dietz. [back]

Note 17.  A great many more such transliterations and modifications are listed by Faust, op. cit., particularly in his first volume. Others are in Pennsylvania Dutch, by S. S. Haldemann; London, 1872, p. 60 et seq., and in The Origin of Pennsylvania Surnames, by L. Oscar Kuhns, Lippincott’s Magazine, March, 1897, p. 395. [back]

Note 18.  I lately encountered the following sign in front of an automobile repair shop:

For puncture or blow
Bring it to Lowe. [back]

Note 19.  Baltimore Sun, March 17, 1907. [back]

Note 20.  Cf. The Origin of Pennsylvania Surnames, op. cit. [back]

Note 21.  Koch, a common German name, has very hard sledding in America. Its correct pronunciation is almost impossible to Americans; at best it becomes Coke. Hence it is often changed, not only to Cook, but to Cox, Koke or even Cockey. [back]

Note 22.  For the Dutch examples, I am indebted to Prof. Henry J. G. Van Andel, of Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Mich., and to Prof. B. K. Kuiper, of the same city. The Greek examples come from Mr. S. S. Lontos, editor of Atlantis, the Greek daily newspaper in New York. [back]

Note 23.  This is army slang, but promises to survive. The Germans, during the war, had no opprobrious nicknames for their foes. The French were usually simply die Franzosen, the English were die Engländer, and so on, even when most violently abused. Even der Yankee was rare. Teufelhunde (devil-dogs), for the American marines, was invented by an American correspondent; the Germans never used it. Cf. Wie der Feldgraue spricht, by Karl Borgmann; Giessen, 1916, p. 23. [back]

Note 24.  Cf. Some Current Substitutes for Irish, by W. A. McLaughlin, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. ii. [back]

Note 25.  Spiggoty, of which spick is a variant, originated at Panama and now means a native of any Latin-American region under American protection, and in general any Latin-American. It is navy slang, but has come into extensive civilian use. It is a derisive daughter of “No spik Inglese.” [back]

Note 26.  This designates a Japanese and is apparently used only on the Pacific Coast. It originally meant a Japanese loose woman, but is now applied to all persons of the race. Tucker says that dago goes back to 1832. It is probably a corruption of Diego; it was first applied to Mexicans. The etymologies of wop, guinea and kike are uncertain, and frequently disputed. Often efforts are made to discourage the use of these nicknames. Dr. P. P. Claxton, United States Commissioner of Education, devised in 1919 a Code of Honorable Names to be subscribed to by the Boy Scouts, whereby they agreed to avoid them. But Dr. Claxton omitted all the opprobrious names for the negroes, and the fact brought forth a protest from them. See Offensive Nicknames, by James W. Johnson, New York Age, Feb. 1, 1919. [back]

Note 27.  Cf. Reaction to Personal Names, by Dr. C. P. Oberndorf, Psychoanalytic Review, vol. v. no. 1, January, 1918, p. 47 et seq. This, so far as I know, is the only article in English which deals with the psychological effects of surnames upon their bearers. Abraham, Silberer and other German psychoanalysts have made contributions to the subject. Dr. Oberndorf alludes, incidentally, to the positive social prestige which goes with an English air or a French air in America. He tells of an Italian who changed his patronymic of Dipucci into de Pucci to make it more “aristocratic.” And of a German bearing the genuinely aristocratic name of von Landsschaffshausen who changed it to “a typically English name” because the latter seemed more distinguished to his neighbors. Why is a French surname regarded as aristocratic in America? The question has never been investigated. [back]

Note 28.  The effects of race antagonism upon language are still to be investigated. The etymology of slave indicates that the inquiry might yield interesting results. The word French, in English, is largely used to suggest sexual perversion. In German anything Russian is barbarous, and English education hints at flagellation. The French, for many years, called a certain contraband appliance a capote Anglaise, but after the entente cordiale they changed the name to capote Allemande. The common English name to this day is French letter. Cf. The Criminal, by Havelock Ellis; London, 1910, p. 208. In France a sharper is called a Greek, as drunk as a Pole is a common phrase, and one of the mainstays of low comedy is le truc du brésilien. See Xenophobia, by Rufino Blanco-Fombona, in his La Lámpara de Aladino, pp. 431–440. In most of the non-Prussian parts of Germany cockroaches are called Preussen; in Prussia they are Franzosen; in some places they are Schwaben. [back]

Note 29.  Cf. The Jews, by Maurice Fishberg; New York, 1911, ch. xxii, and especially p. 485 ff. [back]

Note 30.  The English Jews usually change Levy to Lewis, a substitution almost unknown in America. They also change Abraham to Braham and Moses to Moss. Vide Surnames, Their Origin and Nationality, by L. B. McKenna; Quincy (Ill.), 1913, pp. 13–14. Taylor is another common name among them. [back]

Note 31.  I lately encountered Openhym in New York, Dalsemer (for Dalsheimer) in Philadelphia, and Thalhimer in Richmond, Va. Slessinger and Slazenger are common variants of Schlesinger in New York. [back]

Note 32.  See A Cycle of Manhattan, by Thyra Samter Winslow, Smart Set, March, 1919. In New York I have encountered Schönes transformed into Shainess. [back]

Note 33.  I take the following from Dr. Pepys’ Diary in the Journal of the American Medical Association: “Today in ye clinic a tale told of Dr. Levy who hath had his name changed to Sullivan. A month after he cometh again to ye court, this time wishing to become Kilpatrick. On request for ye reason, he telleth ye court that ye patients continually ask of him, ‘What was your name before?’ If granted ye change he shall then tell them ‘Sullivan.’ ” [back]

Note 34.  I once encountered a Mitchell Judge whose original name was Moses Richter. [back]

Note 35.  For these observations of name changes among the Jews I am indebted to Mr. Abraham Cahan. [back]

Note 36.  They arose in England through the custom of requiring an heir by the female line to adopt the family name on inheriting the family property. Formerly the heir dropped his own surname. Thus the ancestor of the present Duke of Northumberland, born Smithson, took the ancient name of Percy on succeeding to the underlying earldom in the eighteenth century. But about a hundred years ago, heirs in like case began to join the two names by hyphenation, and such names are now very common in the British peerage. Thus the surname of Lord Barrymore is Smith-Barry, that of Lord Vernon is Venables-Vernon, and that of the Earl of Wharncliffe is Montagu-Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie. [back]

Note 37.  B. W. Green: Word-Book of Virginia Folk-Speech; Richmond, 1899, pp. 13-16. [back]

Note 38.  A correspondent writes in explanation of this amazing pronunciation: “The family, having rather unwillingly had to change their name to Enroughty to secure an inheritance, balanced up by continuing to pronounce their original name—Darby.” [back]

Note 39.  Vide Who’s Who Year Book for 1917, pp. 74-82. [back]

The non-Anglo-Saxon American’s willingness to anglicize his patronymic is far exceeded by his eagerness to give “American” baptismal names to his children. The favorite given names of the old country almost disappear in the first native-born generation. The Irish immigrants quickly dropped such names as Terence, Dennis and Patrick, and adopted in their places the less conspicuous John, George and William. The Germans, in the same way, abandoned Otto, August, Hermann, Ludwig, Heinrich, Wolfgang, Albrecht, Wilhelm, Kurt, Hans, Rudolf, Gottlieb, Johann and Franz. For some of these they substituted the English equivalents: Charles, Lewis, Henry, William, John, Frank, and so on. In the room of others they began afflicting their offspring with more fanciful native names: Milton and Raymond were their chief favorites thirty or forty years ago. 40 The Jews carry the thing to great lengths. At present they seem to take most delight in Sidney, Irving, Milton, Roy, Stanley and Monroe, but they also call their sons John, Charles, Henry, Harold, William, Richard, James, Albert, Edward, Alfred, Frederick, Thomas, and even Mark, Luke, and Matthew, 41 and their daughters Mary, Gertrude, Estelle, Pauline, Alice and Edith. As a boy I went to school with many Jewish boys. The commonest given names among them were Isidore, Samuel, Jonas, Isaac and Israel. These are seldom bestowed by the rabbis of today. In the same school were a good many German pupils, boy and girl. Some of the girls bore such fine old German given names as Katharina, Wilhelmina, Elsa, Lotta, Ermentrude and Franziska. All these have begun to disappear. The Jews have lately shown a great liking for Lee, a Southern given name. It has almost displaced Leon and Leopold, just as it has been substituted for Li among the Chinese.

1

The newer immigrants, indeed, do not wait for the birth of children to demonstrate their naturalization; they change their own given names immediately they land. I am told by Abraham Cahan that this is done almost universally on the East Side of New York. “Even the most old-fashioned Jews immigrating to this country,” he says, “change Yosel to Joseph, Yankel to Jacob, Liebel to Louis, Feivel to Philip, Itzik to Isaac, Ruven to Robert, and Moise or Motel to Morris.” Moreover, the spelling of Morris, as the position of its bearer improves, commonly changes to Maurice, though the pronunciation may remain Mawruss, as in the case of Mr. Perlmutter. The immigrants of other stocks follow the same habit. The Italian Giuseppe quickly becomes Joseph and his brother Francesco is as quickly transformed into Frank. The Greek Athanasios is changed to Nathan or Tom, Panagiotis to Peter, Constantine to Gus, Demetrios to James, Chasalambos to Charles and Vasilios (Basil) to Bill. The Dutch Dirk becomes Dick, Klaas becomes Clarence or Claude, Gerrit becomes Garrett or Garritt, Mina becomes Minnie, Neeltje becomes Nellie, Barend becomes Barney, Maarten becomes Martin, Arie becomes Arthur, and Douwe becomes Dewey. 42 The Polish Stanislav is changed to Stanley, Czeslan to Chester, and Kazimierz to Casey. 43 Every Bohemian Jaroslav becomes Jerry, every Bronislav a Barney, every Stanislav a Stanley and every Vaclav or Vojtech a William. 44 The Hungarians and the Balkan peoples run to Frank, John and Joe; the Russians quickly drop their national system of nomenclature and give their children names according to the American plan. Even the Chinese laundrymen of the big cities become John, George, Charlie and Frank; I once encountered one boasting the name of Emil.

2

The Puritan influence, in names as in ideas, has remained a good deal more potent in America than in England. The given name of the celebrated Praise-God Barebone marked a fashion which died out in England very quickly, but one still finds traces of it in America, e. g., in such women’s names as Faith, Hope, Prudence, Charity and Mercy, and in such men’s names as Peregrine. 45 The religious obsession of the New England colonists is also kept in mind by the persistence of Biblical names: Ezra, Hiram, Ezekiel, Zechariah, Elijah, Elihu, and so on. These names excite the derision of the English; an American comic character, in an English play or novel, always bears one of them. Again, the fashion of using surnames as given names is far more widespread in America than in England. In this country, indeed, it takes on the character of a national habit; fully three out of four eldest sons, in families of any consideration, bear their mothers’ surnames as middle names. This fashion arose in England during the seventeenth century, and one of its fruits was the adoption of such well-known surnames as Stanley, Cecil, Howard, Douglas and Duncan as common given names. 46 It died out over there during the eighteenth century, and today the great majority of Englishmen bear such simple given names as John, Charles and William—often four or five of them— but in America it has persisted. A glance at a roster of the presidents of the United States will show how firmly it has taken root. Of the eleven that have had middle names at all, six have had middle names that were family surnames, and two of the six have dropped their other given names and used these surnames. This custom, perhaps, has paved the way for another: that of making given names of any proper nouns that happen to strike the fancy. Thus General Sherman was named after an Indian chief, Tecumseh, and a Chicago judge was baptized Kenesaw Mountain 47 in memory of the battle that General Sherman fought there. A late candidate for governor of New York had the curious given name of D-Cady, and a late American ethnologist, McGee, always insisted that his first name was simply W J, and that these letters were not initials and should not be followed by periods. 48 Various familiar American given names, originally surnames, are almost unknown in England, among them, Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Columbus and Lee. Chauncey forms a curious addition to the list. It was the surname of the second president of Harvard College, and was bestowed upon their offspring by numbers of his graduates. It then got into general use and acquired a typically American pronunciation, with the a of the first syllable flat. It is never encountered in England.

3

Americans, in general, manifest a much freer spirit in the invention of new given names than the English, who remain faithful, in the main, to the biblical and historical names. Dr. Louise Pound, that most alert observer of American speech-habits, lists some very curious coinages,  49 among them the blends, Olouise (from Olive and Louise), Marjette (Marjorie+Henrietta), Maybeth (May+Elizabeth), Lunette (Luna+Nettie), Leilabeth (Leila+Elizabeth), Rosella (Rose+Bella), Adrielle (Adrienne+Belle), Birdene (Birdie+Pauline), Bethene (Elizabeth+Christine), Olabelle (Ola+Isabel), and Armina (Ardelia+Wilhelmina). Even surnames and men’s given names are employed in these feminine blends, as in Romiette (Romeo+Juliette), Adnelle (Addison+Nellie), Adelloyd (Addie+Lloyd), and Charline (Charles+Pauline). A woman professor in the Middle West has the given name of Eldarema, coined from those of her grandparents, Elkanah, Daniel, Rebecca and Mary. In some parts of the United States, particularly south of the Potomac, men’s given names are quite as fantastic. Hoke, Ollie and Champ are familiar to students of latter-day political history In the mountains of Tennessee one encounters such prodigies as Lute, Bink, Ott and Gin. The negroes, like the white immigrants, have a great liking for fancy given names. The old-time Janes, ’Lizas and Jinnies have almost disappeared. Among the ladies of color who have passed through my kitchen in Baltimore during the past twenty years have been Geneva, Nicholine, Leah, Celeste, Evelyn, Olivia, Blanche, Isabelle, Dellott, Irene and Violet.

4

In the pronunciation of various given names, as in that of many surnames, English and American usages differ. Evelyn, in England, is given two syllables instead of three, and the first is made to rhyme with leave. Irene is given three syllables, making it Irene-y. Ralph is pronounced Rafe. Jerome is accented on the first syllable; in America it is always accented on the second.  50 In diminutives there are several differences. The English Jem is almost unknown in the United States and so are Hal and Alf. The English, on the other hand, seldom use Peggy, Teddy or Beth. In general there has been a tendency to drop diminutives. When I was a boy it was rare, at least in the South, to hear such names as Charles, William, Elizabeth, Frederick, Margaret and Lillian used in full, but now it is very common. This new custom, I believe, owes something to English example.  51

5

Note 40.  The one given name that they have clung to is Karl. This, in fact, has been adopted by Americans of other stocks, nearly always, however, spelled Carl. Such combinations as Carl Gray, Carl Williams and even Carl Murphy are common. Here intermarriage has doubtless had its effect. A variant, Karle, has appeared, and I suspect that Carl has helped to popularize Carlo, Carlyle and Carleton. Simon Newton (see the World Almanac for 1921, p. 150) lately sought to determine the most popular American given names by examining 100,000 names in biographical dictionaries, Army and Navy registers, Masonic rosters and the Detroit City Directory. He found that John, William, James, George and Charles were the most popular, in the order named, but that Carl was thirty-eighth, and ahead of Ernest, Michael, Lewis and Hugh, all of which would have been far above it on an English list. [back]

Note 41.  One recalls Montague Glass’ DeWitt C. Feinberg and Kent J. Goldstein. In the New York Telephone Directory I find the following given names borne by gentlemen of the name of Cohen: Alexander, Archie, Arthur, Bert, Clarence, Davis, De Witt, Edgar, Edward, Edwin, Eliot, Frank, Godfrey, Harold, Harvey, Herbert, Irving, Jacques, James, Jerome, John, Julian, Lawrence, Mark, Martin, Matthew, Maxwell, Milton, Murry, Nathaniel, Noel, Norman, Oscar, Paul, Philip, Ralph, Robert, Sanford, Sidney, Thomas, Victor, Walter, William. [back]

Note 42.  Here I am again indebted to Mr. S. S. Lontos and to Profs. Van Andel and Kuiper. [back]

Note 43.  Kindly communicated by Dr. C. H. Wachtel, editor of the Polish Dziennick Chicagoski. [back]

Note 44.  But I am informed by Judge J. C. Ruppenthal that the Bohemians of Central Kansas change Vaclav into James. [back]

Note 45.  Cf. Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature, by Charles W. Bardsley; London, 1880. Such names, of course, were not peculiar to the English Puritans. Cf. the German Gottlob, Gottlieb, etc. [back]

Note 46.  Cf. Bardsley, op. cit., p. 205 ff. [back]

Note 47.  The Geographic Board has lately decided that Kenesaw should be Kennesaw, but the learned jurist sticks to one n. [back]

Note 48.  Thornton reprints a paragraph from the Congressional Globe of June 15, 1854, alleging that in 1846, during the row over the Oregon boundary, when “Fifty-four forty or fight” was a political slogan, many “canal-boats, and even some of the babies, … were christened 54° 40’.” [back]

Note 49.  Stunts in Language, English Journal, Feb., 1920, p. 92; Blends, Anglistische Forschungen, heft 42, p. 16. [back]

Note 50.  The Irish present some curious variants. Thus, they divide Charles into two syllables. The man who founded the St. Louis Republic, in 1808, was an Irishman named Charles. He pronounced his name in two syllables. But his neighbors would not, so he added another s. Then he was known as Charless. [back]

Note 51.  A rather curious device, apparently confined to Maryland, is that of distinguishing between two relatives (usually cousins) of the same surname and given name by adding the initials of their fathers’ given names. Thus, if two cousins are both named John Brown, the one being the son of Richard and the other of Thomas, the first becomes John Brown of R. and the second John Brown of T. [back]

“There is no part of the world,’’ said Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘‘where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous and picturesque as in the United States of America.’’ A glance at the latest United States Official Postal Guide  52 or report of the United States Geographic Board  53 quite bears out this opinion. The map of the country is besprinkled with place names from at least half a hundred languages, living and dead, and among them one finds examples of the most daring and elaborate fancy. There are Spanish, French and Indian names as melodious and charming as running water; there are names out of the histories and mythologies of all the great races of man; there are names grotesque and names almost sublime. ‘‘Mississippi!’’ rhapsodized Walt Whitman; ‘‘the word winds with chutes—it rolls a stream three thousand miles long…. Monongahela! it rolls with venison richness upon the palate.’’ No other country can match our geographical names for interest and variety. When there arises among us a philologist who will study them as thoroughly and intelligently as the Swiss, Johann Jakob Egli, studied the place names of Central Europe, his work will be an invaluable contribution to the history of the nation, and no less to an understanding of the psychology of its people.  54

1

The original English settlers, it would appear, displayed little imagination in naming the new settlements and natural features of the land that they came to. Their almost invariable tendency, at the start, was to make use of names familiar at home, or to invent banal compounds. Plymouth Rock at the North and Jamestown at the South are examples of their poverty of fancy; they filled the narrow tract along the coast with new Bostons, Cambridges, Bristols and Londons, and often used the adjective as a prefix. But this was only in the days of beginning. Once they had begun to move back from the coast and to come into contact with the aborigines and with the widely dispersed settlers of other races, they encountered rivers, mountains, lakes and even towns that bore far more engaging names, and these, after some resistance, they perforce adopted. The native names of such rivers as the James, the York and the Charles succumbed, but those of the Potomac, the Patapsco, the Merrimac and the Penobscot survived, and they were gradually reinforced as the country was penetrated. Most of these Indian names, in getting upon the early maps, suffered somewhat severe simplifications. Potowanmeac was reduced to Potomack and then to Potomac; Unéaukara became Niagara; Reckawackes, by the law of Hobson-Jobson, was turned into Rockaway, and Pentapang into Port Tobacco.  55 But, despite such elisions and transformations, the charm of thousands of them remained, and today they are responsible for much of the characteristic color of American geographical nomenclature. Such names as Tallahassee, Susquehanna, Mississippi, Allegheny, Chicago, Kennebec, Patuxent and Kalamazoo give a barbaric brilliancy to the American map. Only the map of Australia can match it.

2

The settlement of the American continent, once the eastern coast ranges were crossed, proceeded with unparalleled speed, and so the naming of the new rivers, lakes, peaks and valleys, and of the new towns and districts no less, strained the inventiveness of the pioneers. The result is the vast duplication of names that shows itself in the Postal Guide. No less than eighteen imitative Bostons and New Bostons still appear, and there are nineteen Bristols, twenty-eight Newports, and twenty-two Londons and New Londons. Argonauts starting out from an older settlement on the coast would take its name with them, and so we find Philadelphias in Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee, Richmonds in Iowa, Kansas and nine other western states, and Princetons in fifteen. Even when a new name was hit upon it seems to have been hit upon simultaneously by scores of scattered bands of settlers; thus we find the whole land bespattered with Washingtons, Lafayettes, Jeffersons and Jacksons, and with names suggested by common and obvious natural objects, e. g., Bear Creek, Bald Knob and Buffalo. The Geographic Board, in its fourth report, made a belated protest against this excessive duplication. ‘‘The names Elk, Beaver, Cottonwood and Bald,’’ it said, ‘‘are altogether too numerous.’’ Of postoffices alone there are fully a hundred embodying Elk; counting in rivers, lakes, creeks, mountains and valleys, the map of the United States probably shows at least twice as many such names.

3

A study of American geographical and place names reveals eight general classes, as follows: (a) those embodying personal names, chiefly the surnames of pioneers or of national heroes; (b) those transferred from other and older places, either in the eastern states or in Europe; (c) Indian names; (d) Dutch, Spanish, French, German and Scandinavian names; (e) Biblical and mythological names; (f) names descriptive of localities; (g) names suggested by the local flora, fauna or geology; (h) purely fanciful names. The names of the first class are perhaps the most numerous. Some consist of surnames standing alone, as Washington, Cleveland, Bismarck, Lafayette, Taylor and Randolph; others consist of surnames in combination with various old and new Grundwörter, as Pittsburgh, Knoxville, Bailey’s Switch, Hagerstown, Franklinton, Dodge City, Fort Riley, Wayne Junction and McKeesport; and yet others are contrived of given names, either alone or in combination, as Louisville, St. Paul, Elizabeth, Johnstown, Charlotte, Williamsburg and Marysville. All our great cities are surrounded by grotesque Bensonhursts, Bryn Joneses, Smithvales and Krauswoods. The number of towns in the United States bearing women’s given names is enormous. I find, for example, eleven postoffices called Charlotte, ten called Ada and no less than nineteen called Alma. Most of these places are small, but there is an Elizabeth with 75,000 population, an Elmira with 40,000, and an Augusta with nearly 45,000.

4

The names of the second class we have already briefly observed. They are betrayed in many cases by the prefix New; more than 600 such postoffices are recorded, ranging from New Albany to New Windsor. Others bear such prefixes as West, North and South, or various distinguishing affixes, e. g., Bostonia, Pittsburgh Landing, Yorktown and Hartford City. One often finds eastern county names applied to western towns and eastern town names applied to western rivers and mountains. Thus, Cambria, which is the name of a county but not of a postoffice in Pennsylvania, is a town in seven western states; Baltimore is the name of a glacier in Alaska, and Princeton is the name of a peak in Colorado. In the same way the names of the more easterly states often reappear in the west, e. g., in Mount Ohio, Colo., Delaware, Okla., and Virginia City, Nev. The tendency to name small American towns after the great capitals of antiquity has excited the derision of the English since the earliest days; there is scarcely an English book upon the states without some fling at it. Of late it has fallen into abeyance, though sixteen Athenses still remain, and there are yet many Carthages, Uticas, Syracuses, Romes, Alexandrias, Ninevehs and Troys. The third city of the nation, Philadelphia, got its name from the ancient stronghold of Philadelphus of Pergamon. To make up for the falling off of this old and flamboyant custom, the more recent immigrants have brought with them the names of the capitals and other great cities of their fatherlands. Thus the American map bristles with Berlins, Bremens, Hamburgs, Warsaws and Leipzigs, and is beginning to show Stockholms, Venices, Belgrades and Christianias.  56

5

The influence of Indian names upon American nomenclature is quickly shown by a glance at the map. No fewer than 26 of the states have names borrowed from the aborigines,  57 and the same thing is true of most of our rivers and mountains, and of large numbers of our towns and counties.  58 There was an effort, at one time, to get rid of these Indian names. Thus the early Virginians changed the name of the Powhatan to the James, and the first settlers in New York changed the name of Horicon to Lake George. In the same way the present name of the White Mountains displaced Agiochook, and New Amsterdam, and later New York, displaced Manhattan, which has been recently revived. The law of Hobson-Jobson made changes in other Indian names, sometimes complete and sometimes only partial. Thus, Mauwauwaming became Wyoming, Maucwachoong became Mauch Chunk, Ouabache became Wabash, Asingsing became Sing-Sing, and Machihiganing became Michigan. But this vandalism did not go far enough to take away the brilliant color of the aboriginal nomenclature.  59 The second city of the United States bears an Indian name, and so do the largest American river, and the greatest American water-fall, and four of the five Great Lakes, and the scene of the most important military decision ever reached on American soil.

6

The Dutch place-names of the United States are chiefly confined to the vicinity of New York, and a good many of them have become greatly corrupted. Brooklyn, Wallabout and Gramercy offer examples. The first-named was originally Breuckelen, the second was Waale Bobht, and the third was De Kromme Zee. Hell-Gate is a crude translation of the Dutch Helle-Gat. During the early part of the last century the more delicate New Yorkers transformed the term into Hurlgate, but the change was vigorously opposed by Washington Irving, and so Hell-Gate was revived. The law of Hobson-Jobson early converted the Dutch hoek into hook, and it survives in various place-names, e. g., Kinderhook and Sandy Hook. The Dutch kill is a Grundwort in many other names, e. g., Catskill, Schuylkill, Peekskill, Fishkill and Kill van Kull; it is the equivalent of the American creek. Many other Dutch place-names will come familiarly to mind: Harlem, Staten, Flushing, Cortlandt, Calver, Plaat, Nassau, Coenties, Spuyten Duyvel, Yonkers, Barnegat, Bowery (from Bouvery).  60 Block Island was originally Blok, and Cape May, according to Schele de Vere, was Mey, both Dutch. A large number of New York street and neighborhood names come down from Knickerbocker days, often greatly changed in pronunciation. Desbrosses offers an example. The Dutch called it de Broose, but in New York today it is commonly spoken of as Des-bros-sez.

7

French place-names have suffered almost as severely. Few persons would recognize Smackover, the name of a small town in Arkansas, as French, and yet in its original form it was Chemin Couvert.  61 Schele de Vere, in 1871, recorded the degeneration of the name to Smack Cover; the Postoffice, always eager to shorten and simplify names, has since made one word of it and got rid of the redundant c. In the same way Bob Ruly, a Missouri name, descends from Bois Brulé; Glazypool, the name of an Arkansas mountain, from Glaise á Paul; Low Freight, the name of an Arkansas river, from L’Eau Froid, and Barboo from Baribault. ‘‘The American tongue,’’ says W. W. Crane, ‘‘seems to lend itself reluctantly to the words of alien languages.’’  62 A large number of French place-names, e. g., Lac Supérieur, were translated into English at an early day, and most of those that remain are now pronounced as if they were English. Thus Des Moines is dee-moyns, Terre Haute is terry-hut, Beaufort is byu-fort in South Carolina (but bo-fort in North Carolina!). New Orleans is or-leens, Bonne Terre, an old town near St. Louis, is bonnie tar, Lafayette has a flat a, Havre de Grace has another, and Versailles is ver-sales. The pronunciation of sault, as in Sault Ste. Marie, is commonly more or less correct; the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad is popularly called the Soo. This may be due to Canadian example, or to some confusion between Sault and Sioux. The French Louis, in Louisville, is usually pronounced correctly, but in St. Louis it is almost always converted into Lewis. The rouge in Baton Rouge is correctly pronuonced, though the baton is commonly boggled. The local pronunciation of Illinois is Illinoy, an attempt to improve upon the vulgar Illin-i.

8

For a number of years the Geographic Board has been seeking vainly to reëstablish the correct pronunciation of the name of the Purgatoire river in Colorado. Originally named the Rio de las Animas by the Spaniards, it was renamed the Riviére du Purgatoire by their French successors. The American pioneers changed this to Picketwire, and that remains the local name of the stream to this day, despite the effort of the Geographic Board to compromise on Purgatoire river. Many other French names are being anglicized with its aid and consent. Already half a dozen Bellevues have been changed to Belleviews and Bellviews, and the spelling of nearly all the Belvédéres has been changed to Belvidere. Belair, La., represents the end-product of a process of decay which began with Belle Aire, and then proceeded to Bellaire and Bellair. All these forms are still to be found, together with Bel Air. The Geographic Board’s antipathy to accented letters and to names of more than one word  63 has converted Isle Ste. Thérése, in the St. Lawrence river, to Isle Ste. Therese, a truly abominable barbarism, and La Cygne, in Kansas, to Lacygne, which is even worse.  64 Lamoine, Labelle, Lagrange and Lamonte are among its other improvements; Lafayette, for La Fayette, long antedates the beginning of its labors.

9

The Spanish names of the Southwest are undergoing a like process of corruption, though without official aid. San Antonio has changed to San Antone in popular pronunciation and seems likely to go to San Tone; El Paso has acquired a flat American a and a z-sound in place of the Spanish s; Los Angeles presents such difficulties that no two of its inhabitants agree upon the proper pronunciation, and many compromise on simple Los, as the folks of Jacksonville commonly monly call their town Jax. Some of the most mellifluous of American place-names are in the areas once held by the Spaniards. It would be hard to match the beauty of Santa Margarita, San Anselmo, Alamogordo, Terra Amarilla, Sabinoso, Las Palomas, Ensenada, Nogales, San Patricio and Bernalillo. But they are under a severe and double assault. Not only do the present lords of the soil debase them in speaking them; in many cases they are formally displaced by native names of the utmost harshness and banality. Thus, one finds in New Mexico such absurdly-named towns as Sugarite, Shoemaker, Newhope, Lordsburg, Eastview and Central; in Arizona such places as Old Glory, Springville, Wickenburg and Congress Junction, and even in California such abominations as Oakhurst, Ben Hur, Drytown, Skidoo, Susanville, Uno and Ono.

10

The early Spaniards were prodigal with place-names testifying to their piety, but these names, in the overwhelming main, were those of saints. Add Salvador, Trinidad and Concepcion, and their repertoire is almost exhausted. If they ever named a town Jesus the name has been obliterated by Anglo-Saxon prudery; even their use of the name as a personal appellation violates American notions of the fitting. The names of the Jewish patriarchs and those of the holy places in Palestine do not appear among their place-names; their Christianity seems to have been exclusively of the New Testament. But the Americans who displaced them were intimately familiar with both books of the Bible, and one finds copious proofs of it on the map of the United States. There are no less than eleven Beulahs, nine Canaans, eleven Jordans and twenty-one Sharons. Adam is sponsor for a town in West Virginia and an island in the Chesapeake, and Eve for a village in Kentucky. There are five postoffices named Aaron, two named Abraham, two named Job, and a town and a lake names Moses. Most of the St. Pauls and St. Josephs of the country were inherited from the French, but the two St. Patricks show a later influence. Eight Wesleys and Wesleyvilles, eight Asburys and twelve names embodying Luther indicate the general theological trend of the plain people. There is a village in Maryland, too small to have a postoffice, named Gott, and I find Gotts Island in Maine (in the French days, Petite Plaisance) and Gottville in California, but no doubt these were named after German settlers of that awful name, and not after the Lord God directly. There are four Trinities, to say nothing of the inherited Trinidads.

11

Names wholly or partly descriptive of localities are very numerous throughout the country, and among the Grundwörter embodied in them are terms highly characteristic of American and almost unknown to the English vocabulary. Bald Knob would puzzle an Englishman, but the name is so common in the United States that the Geographic Board has had to take measures against it. Others of that sort are Council Bluffs, Patapsco Neck, Delaware Water Gap, Curtis Creek, Walden Pond, Sandy Hook, Key West, Bull Run, Portage, French Lick, Jones Gulch, Watkins Gully, Cedar Bayou, Keams Canyon, Parker Notch, Sucker Branch, Fraziers Bottom and Eagle Pass. Butte Creek, in Montana, is a name made up of two Americanisms. There are thirty-five postoffices whose names embody the word prairie, several of them, e. g., Prairie du Chien, Wis., inherited from the French. There are seven Divides, eight Buttes, eight town-names embodying the word burnt, innumerable names embodying grove, barren, plain, fork, center, cross-roads, courthouse, cove and ferry, and a great swarm of Cold Springs, Coldwaters, Summits, Middletowns and Highlands. The flora and fauna of the land are enormously represented. There are twenty-two Buffalos beside the city in New York, and scores of Buffalo Creeks, Ridges, Springs and Wallows. The Elks, in various forms, are still more numerous, and there are dozens of towns, mountains, lakes, creeks and country districts named after the beaver, martin, coyote, moose and otter, and as many more named after such characteristic flora as the paw-paw, the sycamore, the cottonwood, the locust and the sunflower. There is an Alligator in Mississippi, a Crawfish in Kentucky and a Rat Lake on the Canadian border of Minnesota. The endless search for mineral wealth has besprinkled the map with such names as Bromide, Oil City, Anthracite, Chrome, Chloride, Coal Run, Goldfield, Telluride, Leadville and Cement.

12

There was a time, particularly during the gold rush to California, when the rough humor of the country showed itself in the invention of extravagant and often highly felicitous place-names, but with the growth of population and the rise of civic spirit they have tended to be replaced by more seemly coinages. Catfish creek, in Wisconsin, is now the Yakara river; the Bulldog mountains, in Arizona, have become the Harosomas; the Picketwire river, as we have seen, has resumed its old French name of Purgatoire. As with natural features of the landscape, so with towns. Nearly all the old Boozevilles, Jackass Flats, Three Fingers, Hell-For-Sartains, Undershirt Hills, Razzle-Dazzles, Cow-Tails, Yellow Dogs, Jim-Jamses, Jump-Offs, Poker Citys and Skunktowns have yielded to the growth of delicacy, but Tombstone still stands in Arizona, Goose Bill remains a postoffice in Montana, and the Geographic Board gives its imprimatur to the Horsethief trail in Colorado, to Burning Bear in the same state, and to Pig Eye lake in Minnesota. Various other survivors of a more lively and innocent day linger on the map: Blue Ball, Pa., Cowhide, W. Va., Dollarville, Mich., Oven Fork, Ky., Social Circle, Ga., Sleepy Eye, Minn., Bubble, Ark., Shy Beaver, Pa., Shin Pond, Me., Rough-and-Ready, Calif., Non Intervention, Va., Noodle, Tex., Number Four, N. Y., Oblong, Ill., Stock Yards. Neb., Stout, Iowa, and so on. West Virginia, the wildest of the eastern states, is full of such place-names. Among them I find Affinity, Annamoriah (Anna Maria?), Bee, Bias, Big Chimney, Billie, Blue Jay, Bulltown, Caress, Cinderella, Cyclone, Czar, Cornstalk, Duck, Halcyon, Jingo, Left Hand, Ravens Eye, Six, Skull Run, Three Churches, Uneeda, Wide Mouth, War Eagle and Stumptown. The Postal Guide shows two Ben Hurs, five St. Elmos and ten Ivanhoes, but only one Middle-march. There are seventeen Roosevelts, six Codys and six Barnums, but no Shakespeare. Washington, of course, is the most popular of American place-names. But among names of postoffices it is hard pushed by Clinton, Centerville, Liberty, Canton, Marion and Madison, and even by Springfield, Warren and Bismarck.

13

Many American place-names are purely arbitrary coinages. Towns on the border between two states, or near the border, are often given names made of parts of the names of the two states, e. g., Pen-Mar (Pennsylvania+Maryland), Mar-Del (Maryland+Delaware), Texarkana (Texas+Arkansas), Kanorado (Kansas+Colorado), Tex-homa (Texas+Oklahoma), Dakoming (Dakota+Wyoming), Texico (Texas+New Mexico), Calexico (California+Mexico). Norlina is a telescope form of North Carolina. Ohiowa (Neb.) was named by settlers who came partly from Ohio and partly from Iowa. Penn Yan (N. Y.) was named by Pennsylvanians and New Englanders, i. e., Yankees. Colwich (Kansas) is a telescope form of the name of the Colorado and Wichita Railroad. There are two Delmars in the United States. The name of one is a blend of Delaware and Maryland; the name of the other (in Iowa) was ‘‘made by using the names (i. e., the initials of the names) of six women who accompanied an excursion that opened the railroad from Clinton, Iowa.’’ 65 In the same state Le Mars got its name in exactly the same way. Benld (Ill.) is a collision form of Benjamin L. Dorsey, the name of a local magnifico; Cadams (Neb.) is a collision form of C. Adams; Wascott (Wis.) derives from W. A. Scott; Eleroy (Ill.) from E. Leroy; Bucoda (Wash.) is a blend of Buckley, Collier and Davis; Gilsum (N. H.) is a blend of Gilbert and Sumner; Paragould (Ark.) is a blend of W. J. Paramore and Jay Gould; Marenisco (Mich.) is named after Mary Relief Niles Scott; Miloma (Minn.) derives its name from the first syllable of Milwaukee, in the name of the Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis & St. Paul Railroad, and the first two syllables of Omaha, in the name of the Chicago, Minneapolis & Omaha Railroad; Gerled (Iowa) is a blend of Germanic and Ledyard, the names of two nearby townships; Rolyat (Ore.) is simply Taylor spelled backward; Biltmore (N. C.) is the last syllable of Vanderbilt plus the Gaelic Grundwort, more.

14

The Geographic Board, in its laudable effort to simplify American nomenclature, has played ducks and drakes with some of the most picturesque names on the national map. Now and then, as in the case of Purgatoire, it has temporarily departed from this policy, but in the main its influence has been thrown against the fine old French and Spanish names, and against the more piquant native names no less. Thus, I find it deciding against Portage des Flacons and in favor of the hideous Bottle portage, against Cañada del Burro and in favor of Burro canyon, against Cañonsy Ylas de la Cruz and in favor of the barbarous Cruz island. 66 In Boug re landing and Cañon City it has deleted the accents. The name of the De Grasse river it has changed to Grass. De Laux it has changed to the intolerable Dlo. And, as we have seen, it has steadily amalgamated French and Spanish articles with their nouns, thus achieving such barbarous forms as Duchesne, Eldorado, Deleon and Laharpe. But here its policy is fortunately inconsistent, and so a number of fine old names have escaped. Thus, it has decided in favor of Bon Secours and against Bonsecours, and in favor of De Soto, La Crosse and La Moure, and against Desoto, Lacrosse and Lamoure. Here its decisions are confused and often unintelligible. Why Laporte, Pa., and La Porte, Iowa? Why Lagrange, Ind., and La Grange, Ky.? Here it would seem to be yielding a great deal too much to local usage.

15

The Board proceeds to the shortening and simplification of native names by various devices. It deletes such suffixes as town, city and courthouse; it removes the apostrophe and often the genitive s from such names as St. Mary’s; it shortens burgh to burg and borough to boro; and it combines separate and often highly discreet words. The last habit often produces grotesque forms, e. g., Newberlin, Boxelder, Sabbathday lake, Fallentimber, Bluemountain, Westtown, Three-pines and Missionhill. It apparently cherishes a hope of eventually regularizing the spelling of Allegany. This is now Allegany for the Maryland county, the Pennsylvania township and the New York and Oregon towns, Alleghany for the mountains, the Colorado town and the Virginia town and springs, and Allegheny for the Pittsburgh borough and the Pennsylvania county, college and river. The Board inclines to Allegheny for all. Other Indian names give it constant concern. Its struggles to set up Chemquasabamticook as the name of a Maine lake in place of Chemquasabamtic and Chemquassabamticook, and Chatahospee as the name of an Alabama creek in place of Chattahospee, Hoolethlocco, Hoolethloces, Hoolethloco and Hootethlocco are worthy of its learning and authority. 67

16

The American tendency to pronounce all the syllables of a word more distinctly than the English shows itself in geographical names. White, in 1880, 68 recorded the increasing habit of giving full value to the syllables of such borrowed English names as Worcester and Warwick. I have frequently noted the same thing. In Worcester county, Maryland, the name is usually pronounced Wooster, but on the Western Shore of the state one hears Worcest-’r. Norwich is another such name; one hears Nor-wich quite as often as Norrich. Another is Delhi; one often hears Del-high. Another is Warwick. Yet another is Birmingham; it is pronounced as spelled in the United States, and never in the English manner. White said that in his youth the name of the Shawangunk mountains, in New York, was pronounced Shongo, but that the custom of pronouncing it as spelled had arisen during his manhood. 69 So with Winnipiseogee, the name of a lake; once Winipisaukie, it gradually came to be pronounced as spelled. There is frequently a considerable difference between the pronunciation of a name by natives of a place and its pronunciation by those who are familiar with it only in print. Baltimore offers an example. The natives always drop the medial i and so reduce the name to two syllables; in addition, they substitute a neutral vowel, very short, for the o. Anne Arundel, the name of a county in Maryland, is usually pronounced Ann’ran’l by its people. Arkansas, as everyone knows, is pronounced Arkansaw by the Arkansans. 70 The local pronunciation of Illinois is Illinoy. Iowa, at home, is Ioway. 71 Many American geographical names offer great difficulty to Englishmen. One of my English acquaintances tells me that he was taught at school to accent Massachusetts on the second syllable, to rhyme the second syllable of Ohio with tea, and to sound the second c in Connecticut. In Maryland the name of Calvert county is given a broad a, whereas the name of Calvert street, in Baltimore, has a flat a. This curious distinction is almost always kept up. A Scotchman, coming to America, would give the ch in such names as Loch Raven and Lochvale the guttural Scotch (and German) sound, but locally it is always pronounced as if it were k.

17

Finally, there is a curious difference between English and American usage in the use of the word river. The English invariably put it before the proper name, whereas we almost as invariably put it after. The Thames River would seem quite as strange to an Englishman as the river Chicago would seem to us. This difference arose more than a century ago and was noticed by Pickering. But in his day the American usage was still somewhat uncertain, and such forms as the river Mississippi were yet in use. Today river almost always goes after the proper name.

18

Note 52.  Issued annually in July, with monthly supplements. [back]

Note 53.  The report here used is the fourth, covering the period 1890-1916; Washington, 1916. The fifth was published in 1921. [back]

Note 54.  No such general investigation has been attempted, though a good deal of material for it is assembled in the Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States, by Henry Gannett, 2nd ed.; Washington, 1905, and in A History of the Origin of the Place Names in Nine Northwestern States, 2nd ed.; Chicago, 1908. [back]

Note 55.  The authority here is River and Lake Names in the United States, by Edmund T. Ker; New York, 1911. Stephen G. Boyd, in Indian Local Names; York (Pa.), 1885, says that the original Indian name was Pootuppag. [back]

Note 56.  Cf. Amerikanska Ortnamn af Svenskt Ursprung, by V. Berger; New York, 1915. The Swedish names listed by Mr. Berger are chiefly to be found in Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas. [back]

Note 57.  In most of the states local antiquaries have investigated the state names. Vide, for example, The Origin and Meaning of the Name California, by George Davidson; San Francisco, 1910; California, the Name, by Ruth Putnam; Berkeley, 1917; Arizona, Its Derivation and Origin, by Merrill P. Freeman; Tucson, 1913; Ohio, 1803-1903, by Maria Ewing Martin; New Straitsville, 1903; The Naming of Indiana, by Cyrus W. Hodgin; Richmond (Ind.), 1903; Idaho, Its Meaning, Origin and Application, by John E. Rees; Portland (Ore.), 1917. [back]

Note 58.  The student interested in the subject will find useful information in The History and Geography of Texas as Told in County Names, by Z. T. Fulmore; Austin, 1915; Spanish and Indian Place Names of California, by Nellie van de Grift Sanchez; San Francisco, 1914; The Powhatan Name for Virginia, by W. W. Tooker, American Anthropologist, vol. viii, no. 1, 1906; Chicago: Origin of the Name of Our City, by J. F. Steward; Chicago, 1904; Some More About Virginia Names, by W. W. Tooker, American Anthropologist, vol. vii, no. 3, 1905; The Origin of the Name of Buffalo, by Wm. Ketchum, Pub. Buffalo Hist. Society, vol. i, p. 17, 1879; The Origin of the Name Manhattan, by W. W. Tooker; New York, 1901; British Columbia Coast Names, by John D. Walbran; Ottawa, 1909; Place-Names in the Thousand Islands, by James White; Ottawa, 1910; Minnesota Geographic Names, by Warren Upham, Collections of the Minnesota Hist. Society, vol. xvii, 1920; Indian Names of Water Courses in the State of Indiana, by H. W. Beckwith (in Annual Report, Dept. of Geology and Natural History; Indianapolis, 1883); Origin of Ohio Place-Names, by Maria E. Martin, Ohio Archœological and Historical Quarterly, vol. xiv, p. 272; Origin and Meaning of Wisconsin Place-Names, by Henry E. Legler, Tr. of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, vol. xiv, pt. i, 1903; Geographical Names on the Coast of Maine, by Edward Ballard (in Report of the Coast Survey; Washington, 1868); Baraboo and Other Place-Names in Sauk County, Wisconsin, by H. E. Cole; Baraboo, 1912; Names of Places of Interest on Mackinac Island, by Frank A. O’Brien; Lansing (Mich.), 1916; The Niagara Frontier, by Orsamus H. Marshall; Buffalo, 1881; How Missouri Counties, Towns and Streams Were Named, by David W. Eaton; Columbia (Mo.), 1917; Indian Place-Names, by Moses Greenleaf; Bangor (Me.), 1903; The Composition of Indian Geographical Names, by J. Hammond Trumbull, Collections of the Connecticut Hist. Society, vol. ii, p. 1, 1870; The Indian Place-Names on Long Island, by W. W. Tooker; New York, 1911; Indian Names of Places in … Massachusetts, by Lincoln N. Kinnicutt; Worcester, 1909; Indian Names of Places in and on the Borders of Connecticut, by J. Hammond Trumbull; Hartford, 1881; Dictionary of American-Indian Place and Proper Names in New England, by R. A. Douglas-Lithgow; Salem (Mass.), 1909; California Place-Names of Indian Origin, by A. L. Kroeber; Berkeley, 1916; Indian Names of Places in Rhode Island, by Usher Parsons; Providence, 1861; Indian Geographic Names of Indian Origin, by A. L. Kroeber; Berkeley, 1916; Indian Names of Places Near the Great Lakes, by Dwight H. Kelton; Detroit, 1888; The Indian Names of Boston, by Eben N. Horsford; Cambridge, 1886; Footprints of the Red Men, by E. M. Ruttenber; Newburgh (N. Y.), 1906; Indian Names of Places in Worcester County, Mass., by Lincoln N. Kinnicutt; Worcester, 1905; Indian Names and History of the Sault Ste. Marie Canal, by Dwight H. Kelton; Detroit, 1889; Proper Names from the Muskhogean Languages, by Noxon Toomey; St. Louis, 1917; Report of the Aboriginal Names and Geographical Terminology of the State of New York, by Henry R. Schoolcraft, pt. i; New York, 1845. Other works are listed in the Bibliography. [back]

Note 59.  Walt Whitman bitterly opposed such changes. He even demanded that Indian names be substituted for names of other origin. ‘‘California,’’ he said, ‘‘is sown thick with the names of big and little saints. Chase them away and substitute aboriginal names…. No country can have its own poems without having its own names. The name of Niagara should be substituted for St. Lawrence. Among the places that stand in need of fresh, appropriate names are the great cities of St. Louis, New Orleans, St. Paul.’’ [back]

Note 60.  Cf. Dutch Contributions to the Vocabulary of English in America, by W. H. Carpenter, Modern Philology, July, 1908. [back]

Note 61.  Cf. Some Old French Place-Names in the State of Arkansas, by John C. Branner, Modern Language Notes, vol. xiv, no. 2, 1899. [back]

Note 62.  Our Naturalized Names, Lippincott’s Magazine, April, 1899. [back]

Note 63.  Vide its fourth report (1890-1916), p. 15. [back]

Note 64.  A correspondent writes: ‘‘The river on which the town is located was named by French explorers, late in the 18th century, Marais des Cygnes. When the town site was bought from the Miami Indians, about 1868, the town was named La Cygne. The railroad, built soon after, put the name in its time tables as Les Cygnes. My father started the Journal there in 1870. He persuaded the railroad people to change their spelling. The Postal Guide still gives it as La Cygne. It is usually pronounced Lay Seen.’’ [back]

Note 65.  Louise Pound: Blends, Anglistische Forschungen, heft 42, p. 10. [back]

Note 66.  Canada goes the United States one better, with Ste. Anne de la Boundary Line! [back]

Note 67.  The Geographic Board is composed of representatives of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Geological Survey, the General Land Office, the Post Office, the Forest Service, the Smithsonian Institution, the Biological Survey, the Government Printing Office, the Census and Lighthouse Bureaus, the General Staff of the Army, the Hydrographic Office, the Library and War Records Office of the Navy, the Treasury and the Department of State. It was created by executive order Sept. 4, 1890, and its decisions are binding upon all federal officials. It has made, to date, more than 25,000 decisions. They are recorded in reports issued at irregular intervals and in more frequent bulletins. [back]

Note 68.  Every-Day English, p. 100. See also Tucker: American English, p. 33. [back]

Note 69.  This pedantry seems to have disappeared. The local pronunciation today is Shongum. I have often noted that Americans, in speaking of the familiar Worcestershire sauce, commonly pronounce every syllable and enunciate shire distinctly. In England it is always Woostersh’r. The English have a great number of decayed pronunciations, e. g., Maudlin for Magdalen College, Sister for Cirencester, Merrybone for Marylebone. Their geographical nomenclature shows many corruptions due to faulty pronunciation and the law of Hobson-Jobson, e. g., Leighton Buzzard for the Norman Leiton Beau Desart. [back]

Note 70.  Vide Proceedings of the Legislature and of the Historical Society of the State of Arkansas, and the Eclectic Society, of Little Rock, Ark., Fixing the Pronunciation of the Name Arkansas; Little Rock, 1881. [back]

Note 71.  Curiously enough, Americans always use the broad a in the first syllable of Albany, whereas Englishmen rhyme the syllable with pal. The Londoners pronounce Pall Mall as if it were spelled pell-mell. Americans commonly give it two broad a’s. [back]

‘‘Such a locality as ‘the corner of Avenue H and Twenty-third street,’ ’’ says W. W. Crane, ‘‘is about as distinctly American as Algonquin and Iroquois names like Mississippi and Saratoga.’’ 72 Kipling, in his ‘‘American Notes,’’ 73 gives testimony to the strangeness with which the number-names, the phrase ‘‘the corner of,’’ and the custom of omitting street fall upon the ear of a Britisher. He quotes with amazement certain directions given to him on his arrival in San Francisco from India: ‘‘Go six blocks north to [the] corner of Geary and Markey [Market?]; then walk around till you strike [the] corner of Sutter and Sixteenth.’’ The English always add the word street (or road or place or avenue) when speaking of a thoroughfare; such a phrase as ‘‘Oxford and New Bond’’ would strike them as incongruous. The American custom of numbering and lettering streets is almost always ascribed by English writers who discuss it, not to a desire to make finding them easy, but to sheer poverty of invention. The English apparently have an inexhaustible fund of names for streets; they often give one street more than one name. Thus, Oxford street, London, becomes the Bayswater road, High street, Holland Park avenue, Goldhawke road and finally the Oxford road to the westward, and High Holborn, Holborn viaduct, Newgate street, Cheapside, the Poultry, Cornhill and Leadenhall street to the eastward. The Strand, in the same way, becomes Fleet street, Ludgate hill and Cannon street. Nevertheless, there is a First avenue in Queen’s Park, London, and parallel to it are Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth avenues—all small streets leading northward from the Harrow road, just east of Kensal Green cemetery. I have observed that few Londoners have ever heard of them. There is also a First street in Chelsea—a very modest thoroughfare near Lennox Gardens and not far from the Brompton Oratory.

1

Next to the numbering and lettering of streets, a fashion apparently set up by Major Pierre-Charles L’Enfant’s plans for Washington, the most noticeable feature of American street nomenclature, as opposed to that of England, is the extensive use of such designations as avenue, boulevard, drive and speedway. Avenue is used in England, but only rather sparingly; it is seldom applied to a mean street, or to one in a warehouse district. In America the word is scarcely distinguished in meaning from street. 74 Boulevard, drive and speed-way are almost unknown to the English, but they use road for urban thoroughfares, which is very seldom done in America, and they also make free use of place, walk, passage, lane and circus, all of which are obsolescent on this side of the ocean. Some of the older American cities, such as Boston and Baltimore, have surviving certain ancient English designations of streets, e. g., Cheapside and Cornhill; these are unknown in the newer American towns. Broadway, which is also English, is more common. Many American towns now have plazas, which are unknown in England. Nearly all have City Hall parks, squares or places; City Hall is also unknown over there. The principal street of a small town, in America, is almost always Main street; in England it is as invariably High street, usually with the definite article before High.

2

I have mentioned the corruption of old Dutch street and neighbor-hood names in New York. Spanish names are corrupted in the same way in the Southwest and French names in the Great Lakes region and in Louisiana. In New Orleans the street names, many of them strikingly beautiful, are pronounced so barbarously by the people that a Frenchman would have difficulty recognizing them. Thus, Bourbon has become Bur-bun, Dauphine is Daw-fin, Foucher is Foosh’r, Enghien is En-gine, and Felicity (originally F licité) is Fill-a-city. The French, in their day, bestowed the names of the Muses upon certain of the city streets. They are now pronounced Cal-y-ope, Terp-si-chore, Mel-po-mean, You-terp, and so on. Bons Enfants, apparently too difficult for the native, has been translated into Good Children. Only Esplanade and Bagatelle, among the French street names of the city, seem to be commonly pronounced with any approach to correctness. Worse, there is a growing tendency to translate the old names. Thus, the rue Royale is now usually called Royal street.

3

The use of at in the phrase, ‘‘Fifth avenue at 48th street,’’ seems to be an Americanism. It indicates that the house designated is near the corner, but not actually at it. I have observed this use of at in England.

4

Note 72.  Our Street Names, Lippincott’s Magazine, Aug., 1897, p. 264. [back]

Note 73.  Ch. i. [back]

Note 74.  There are, of course, local exceptions. In Baltimore, for example, avenue used to be reserved for wide streets in the suburbs. Thus Charles street, on passing the old city boundary, became Charles street-avenue. Further out it became Charles street-avenue-road—probably a unique triplication. But that was years ago. Of late many fifth-rate streets in Baltimore have been changed into avenues. [back]

1. Its Origin and Nature

There is but one work, so far as I can discover, formally devoted to American slang, 1 and that work is extremely superficial. Moreover, it has been long out of date, and hence is of little save historical value. There are at least a dozen careful treatises on French slang, half as many on English slang, 2 and a good many on German slang, but American slang, which is probably quite as rich as that of France and a good deal richer than that of any other country, is yet to be studied at length. Nor is there much discussion of it, of any interest or value, in the general philological literature. Fowler and all the other early native students of the language dismissed it with lofty gestures; down to the time of Whitney it was scarcely regarded as a seemly subject for the notice of a man of learning. Lounsbury, less pedantic, viewed its phenomena more hospitably, and even defined it as “the source from which the decaying energies of speech are constantly refreshed,” and Brander Matthews, following him, has described its function as that of providing “substitutes for the good words and true which are worn out by hard service.” 3 But that is about as far as the investigation has got. Krapp has some judicious paragraphs upon the matter in his “Modern English,” 4 there are a few scattered essays upon the underlying psychology, 5 and various superficial magazine articles, but that is all. The practising authors of the country, like its philologians, have always shown a gingery and suspicious attitude. “The use of slang,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, “is at once a sign and a cause of mental atrophy.” “Slang,” said Ambrose Bierce fifty years later, “is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage cans on their way to the dumps.” Literature in America, as we have seen, remains aloof from the vulgate. Despite the contrary examples of Mark Twain and Howells, all of the more pretentious American authors try to write chastely and elegantly; the typical literary product of the country is still a refined essay in the Atlantic Monthly manner, perhaps gently jocose but never rough—by Emerson, so to speak, out of Charles Lamb—the sort of thing one might look to be done by a somewhat advanced English curate. George Ade, undoubtedly one of the most adept anatomists of the American character and painters of the American scene that the national literature has yet developed, is neglected because his work is grounded firmly upon the national speech—not that he reports it literally, like Lardner and the hacks trailing after Lardner, but that he gets at and exhibits its very essence. It would stagger a candidate for a doctorate in philology, I daresay, to be told off by his professor to investigate the slang of Ade in the way that Bosson, 6 the Swede, has investigated that of Jerome K. Jerome, and yet, until something of the sort is undertaken, American philology will remain out of contact with the American language.

1

Most of the existing discussions of slang spend themselves upon efforts to define it, and, in particular, upon efforts to differentiate it from idiomatic neologisms of a more legitimate type. This effort is largely in vain; the border-line is too vague and wavering to be accurately mapped; words and phrases are constantly crossing it, and in both directions. There was a time, perhaps, when the familiar American counter-word, proposition, was slang; its use seems to have originated in the world of business, and it was soon afterward adopted by the sporting fraternity. But today it is employed without much feeling that it needs apology, and surely without any feeling that it is low. Nice, as an adjective of all work, was once in slang use only; today no one would question “a nice day,” or “a nice time,” or “a nice hotel.” Awful seems to be going the same route. “Awful sweet” and “awfully dear” still seem slangy and school-girlish, but “awful children” and “awful job” have entirely sound support, and no one save a pedant would hesitate to use them. Such insidious purifications and conscrations of slang are going on under our noses all the time. The use of some as a general adjective-adverb seems likely to make its way in the same manner, and so does the use of kick as verb and noun. It is constantly forgotten by purists of defective philological equipment that a great many of our respectable words and phrases originated in the plainest sort of slang. Thus, quandary, despite a fanciful etymology which would identify it with wandreth (=evil), is probably simply a composition form of the French phrase, qu’en dirai-je? Again, to turn to French itself, there is tête, a sound name for the human head for many centuries, though its origin was in the Latin testa (=pot), a favorite slang word of the soldiers of the decaying empire, analogous to our own block, nut and conch. The word slacker, recently come into good usage in the United States as a designation for a successful shirker of conscription, is a substantive derived from the English verb to slack, which was born as university slang and remains so to this day. Brander Matthews, so recently as 1901, though to hold up slang; it is now perfectly good American.

2

The contrary movement of words from the legitimate vocabulary into slang is constantly witnessed. Some one devises a new and arresting trope or makes use of an old one under circumstances arresting the public attention, and at once it is adopted into slang, given a host of remote significances, and ding-donged ad nauseam. The Rooseveltian phrases, muck-raker, Ananias Club, short and ugly word, nature-faker and big-stick, offer examples. Not one of them was new and not one of them was of much pungency, but Roosevelt’s vast talent for delighting the yokelry threw about them a charming air, and so they entered into current slang and were mouthed idiotically for months. Another example is to be found in steam-roller. It was first heard of in American politics in June, 1908, when it was applied by Oswald F. Schuette, of the Chicago Inter-Ocean, to the methods employed by the Roosevelt-Taft majority in the Republican National Committee in over-riding the protests against seating Taft delegates from Alabama and Arkansas. At once it struck the popular fancy and was soon in general use. All the usual derivatives appeared, to steam-roller, steam-rollered, and so on. Since then the term has gradually forced its way back into good usage, and even gone over to England. In the early days of the World War it actually appeared in the most solemn English reviews, and once or twice, I believe, in state papers.

3

Much of the discussion of slang by popular etymologists is devoted to proofs that this or that locution is not really slang at all—that it is to be found in Shakespeare, in Milton, or in the Authorized Version. These scientists, of course, overlook the plain fact that slang, like the folk-song, is not the creation of people in the mass, but of definite individuals, 7 and that its character as slang depends entirely upon its adoption by the ignorant, who use its novelties too assiduously and with too little imagination, and so debase them to the estate of worn-out coins, smooth and valueless. It is this error, often shared by philologists of sounder information, that lies under the doctrine that the plays of Shakespeare are full of slang, and that the Bard showed but a feeble taste in language. Nothing could be more absurd. The business of writing English, in his day, was unharassed by the proscriptions of purists, and so the vocabulary could be enriched more facilely than today, but though Shakespeare and his fellow-dramatists quickly adopted such neologisms as to bustle, to huddle, bump, hubbub and pat, it goes without saying that they exercised a sound discretion and that the slang of the Bankside was full of words and phrases which they were never tempted to use. In our own day the same discrimination is exercised by all writers of sound taste. On the one hand they disregard the senseless prohibitions of schoolmasters, and on the other hand they draw the line with more or less watchfulness, according as they are of conservative or liberal habit. I find the best of the bunch and joke-smith in Saintsbury; 8 one could scarcely imagine either in Walter Pater. But by the same token one could not imagine chicken (for young girl), 9 aber nit, to come across or to camouflage in Saintsbury.

4

What slang actually consists of doesn’t depend, in truth, upon intrinsic qualities, but upon the surrounding circumstances. It is the user that determines the matter, and particularly the user’s habitual way of thinking. If he chooses words carefully, with a full understanding of their meaning and savor, then no word that he uses seriously will belong to slang, but if his speech is made up chiefly of terms poll-parroted, and he has no sense of their shades and limitations, then slang will bulk largely in his vocabulary. In its origin it is nearly always respectable; it is devised, not by the stupid populace, but by individuals of wit and ingenuity; as Whitney says, it is a product of an “exuberance of mental activity, and the natural delight of language-making.” But when its inventions happen to strike the popular fancy and are adopted by the mob, they are soon worn thread-bare and so lose all piquancy and significance, and, in Whitney’s words, become “incapable of expressing anything that is real.” 10 This is the history of such slang phrases, often interrogative, as “How’d you like to be the ice-man?” “How’s your poor feet?” “Merci pour la langouste,” “Have a heart,” “This is the life,” “Where did you get that hat?” “Would you for fifty cents?” “Let her go, Gallagher,” “Shoo-fly, don’t bother me,” “Don’t wake him up” and “Let George do it.” The last well exhibits the process. It originated in France, as “Laissez faire à Georges,” during the fifteenth century, and at the start had satirical reference to the multiform activities of Cardinal Georges d’Amboise, prime minister to Louis XII. 11 It later became common slang, was translated into English, had a revival during the early days of David Lloyd George’s career, was adopted into American without any comprehension of either its first or its latest significance, and enjoyed the brief popularity of a year.

5

Krapp attempts to distinguish between slang and sound idiom by setting up the doctrine that the former is “more expressive than the situation demands.” “It is,” he says, “a kind of hyperesthesia in the use of language. To laugh in your sleeve is idiom because it arises out of a natural situation; it is a metaphor derived from the picture of one raising his sleeve to his face to hide a smile, a metaphor which arose naturally enough in early periods when sleeves were long and flowing; but to talk through your hat is slang, not only because it is new, but also because it is a grotesque exaggeration of the truth.” 12 The theory, unluckily, is combated by many plain facts. To hand it to him, to get away with it and even to hand him a lemon are certainly not metaphors that transcend the practicable and probable, and yet all are undoubtedly slang. On the other hand, there is palpable exaggeration in such phrases as “he is not worth the powder it would take to kill him,” in such adjectives as break-bone (fever), and in such compounds as fire-eater, and yet it would be absurd to dismiss them as slang. Between block-head and bone-head there is little to choose, but the former is sound English, whereas the latter is American slang. So with many familiar similes, e. g., like greased lightning, as scarce as hen’s teeth; they are grotesque hyperboles, but surely not slang.

6

The true distinction between slang and more seemly idiom, in so far as any distinction exists at all, is that indicated by Whitney. Slang originates in an effort, always by ingenious individuals, to make the language more vivid and expressive. When in the form of single words it may appear as new metaphors, e. g., bird and peach; as back formations, e. g., beaut and flu; as composition-forms, e. g., whatdyecallem and attaboy; as picturesque compounds, e. g., booze-foundry; as onomatopes, e. g., biff and zowie; or in any other of the shapes that new terms take. If, by the chances that condition language-making, it acquires a special and limited meaning, not served by any existing locution, it enters into sound idiom and is presently wholly legitimatized; if, on the contrary, it is adopted by the populace as a counter-word and employed with such banal imitativeness that it soon loses any definite significance whatever, then it remains slang and is avoided by the finical. An example of the former process is afforded by tommy-rot. It first appeared as English school-boy slang, but its obvious utility soon brought it into good usage. In one of Jerome K. Jerome’s books, “Paul Kelver,” there is the following dialogue:

“The wonderful songs that nobody ever sings, the wonderful pictures that nobody ever paints, and all the rest of it. It’s tommy-rot!”

7

“I wish you wouldn’t use slang.”

8

“Well, you know what I mean. What is the proper word? Give it to me.”

9

“I suppose you mean cant.”

10

“No, I don’t. Cant is something that you don’t believe in yourself. It’s tommy-rot; there isn’t any other word.”

11

Nor was there any other word for hubbub and to dwindle in Shakespeare’s time; he adopted and dignified them because they met genuine needs. Nor was there any other satisfactory word for graft when it came in, nor for rowdy, nor for boom, nor for joy-ride, nor for omnibus-bill, nor for slacker, nor for trust-buster. Such words often retain a humorous quality; they are used satirically and hence appear but seldom in wholly serious discourse. But they have standing in the language nevertheless, and only a prig would hesitate to use them as Saintsbury used the best of the bunch and joke-smith.

12

On the other hand, many an apt and ingenious neologism, by falling too quickly into the gaping maw of the proletariat, is spoiled forthwith. Once it becomes, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ phrase, “a cheap generic term, a substitute for differentiated specific expressions,” it quickly acquires such flatness that the fastidious flee it as a plague. One recalls many capital verb-phrases, thus ruined by unintelligent appreciation, e. g., to hand him a lemon, to freeze on to, to have the goods, to cut no ice, to give him the glad hand, to fall for it, and to get by. One recalls, too, some excellent substantives, e. g., dope and dub, and compounds, e. g., come-on and easy-mark, and verbs, e. g., to vamp. These are all quite as sound in structure as the great majority of our most familiar words and phrases to cut no ice, for example, is certainly as good as to butter no parsnips—but their adoption by the ignorant and their endless use and misuse in all sorts of situations have left them tattered and obnoxious, and they will probably go the way, as Matthews says, of all the other “temporary phrases which spring up, one scarcely knows how, and flourish unaccountably for a few months, and then disappear forever, leaving no sign.” Matthews is wrong in two particulars here. They do not arise by any mysterious parthenogenesis, but come from sources which, in many cases, may be determined. And they last, alas, a good deal more than a month. Shoo-fly afflicted the American people for at least two years, and “I don’t think” and aber nit quite as long. Even “good-night” lasted a whole year.

13

A very large part of our current slang is propagated by the newspapers, and much of it is invented by newspaper writers. One need but turn to the slang of baseball to find numerous examples. Such phrases as to clout the sphere, the initial sack, to slam the pill and the dexter meadow are obviously not of bleachers manufacture. There is not enough imagination in that depressing army to devise such things; more often than not, there is not even enough intelligence to comprehend them. The true place of their origin is the perch of the newspaper reporters, whose competence and compensation is largely estimated, at least on papers of wide circulation, by their capacity for inventing novelties. The supply is so large that connoisseurship has grown up; an extra-fecund slang-maker on the press has his following. During the summer of 1913 the Chicago Record-Herald, somewhat alarmed by the extravagant fancy of its baseball reporters, asked its readers if they would prefer a return to plain English. Such of them as were literate enough to send in their votes were almost unanimously against a change. As one of them said, “one is nearer the park when Schulte slams the pills than when he merely hits the ball.” In all other fields the newspapers originate and propagate slang, particularly in politics. Most of our political slang-terms since the Civil War, from pork-barrel to steam-roller, have been their inventions. The English newspapers, with the exception of a few anomalies such as Pink-Un, lean in the other direction; their fault is not slanginess, but an otiose ponderosity—in Dean Alford’s words, “the insisting on calling common things by uncommon names; changing our ordinary short Saxon nouns and verbs for long words derived from the Latin.” 13 The American newspapers, years ago, passed through such a stage of bombast, but since the invention of yellow journalism by the elder James Gordon Bennett—that is, the invention of journalism for the frankly ignorant and vulgar—they have gone to the other extreme. Edmund Clarence Stedman noted the change soon after the Civil War. “The whole country,” he wrote to Bayard Taylor in 1873, “owing to the contagion of our newspaper ‘exchange’ system, is flooded, deluged, swamped beneath a muddy tide of slang.” 14 A thousand alarmed watchmen have sought to stay it since, but in vain. The great majority of our newspapers, including all those of large circulation, are chiefly written, as one observer says, “not in English, but in a strange jargon of words that would have made Addison or Milton shudder in despair.” 15

14

Note 1.  James Maitland: The American Slang Dictionary; Chicago, 1891. [back]

Note 2.  The best of these, of course, is Farmer and Henley’s monumental Slang and Its Analogues, in seven volumes. [back]

Note 3.  Matthews’ essay, The Function of Slang, is reprinted in Clapin’s Dictionary of Americanisms, pp. 565–581. [back]

Note 4.  P. 199 ff. [back]

Note 5.  For example, The Psychology of Unconventional Language, by Frank K. Sechrist, Pedagogical Seminary, vol. xx, p. 413, Dec., 1913, and The Philosophy of Slang, by E. B. Taylor, reprinted in Clapin’s Dictionary of Americanisms, pp. 541–563. [back]

Note 6.  Olaf E. Bosson: Slang and Cant in Jerome K. Jerome’s Works; Cambridge, 1911. [back]

Note 7.  Cf. Poetic Origins and the Ballad, by Louise Pound; New York, 1921. [back]

Note 8.  Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xii, p. 144. [back]

Note 9.  Curiously enough, the American language, usually so fertile in words to express shades of meaning, has no respectable synonym for chicken. In English there is flapper, in French there is ingénue, and in German there is backfisch. Usually either the English or the French word is borrowed. [back]

Note 10.  The Life and Growth of Language; New York, 1897, p. 113. [back]

Note 11.  Cf. Two Children in Old Paris, by Gertrude Slaughter; New York, 1918, p. 233. Another American popular saying, once embodied in a coon song, may be traced to a sentence in the prayer of the Old Dessauer before the battle of Kesseldorf, Dec. 15, 1745: “Or if Thou wilt not help me, don’t help those Hundvögte.” [back]

Note 12.  Modern English, p. 211. [back]

Note 13.  A Plea for the Queen’s English, p. 244. [back]

Note 14.  Life and Letters of E. C. Stedman, ed. by Laura Stedman and George M. Gould; New York, 1910, vol. i, p. 477. [back]

Note 15.  Governor M. R. Patterson, of Tennessee, in an address before the National Anti-Saloon League, Washington, Dec. 13, 1917. [back]

“During the war,” says a writer in the New York Tribune, “our army was slow in manufacturing words …. The English army invented not only more war slang than the American, but much more expressive slang. In fact, we took over a number of their words, such as dud, cootie and bus (for aeroplane) …. During the first year of [American participation in] the war the Americans had no slang word for German. Hun was used sparingly, but only by officers. Fritzie was rare. Boche was tried, but proved to be ill adapted to Americans. They seemed afraid of it, and, indeed, it was often pronounced botch. Finally, after a year all these foreign substitutes were abandoned by the enlisted men, and the German became Jerry. Curiously enough, the word was almost invariably used in the singular. We heard a soldier telling about a patrol encounter in which he and twenty companions had driven a slightly larger German force out of an abandoned farmhouse, and he said: ‘When we came over the top of the hill we found Jerry.’ He stuck to that usage all through the story. In the last year of the war the American army began to find names for various things, but the slang list of the first year was short. The French army was the most prolific of all in language, and several large dictionaries of French trench slang have already been published.”

1

The chief cause of this American backwardness is not far to seek. During the first year of American participation in the war few Americans got to France, and those who did found an enormous army of Britishers already in the field. These Britishers, in their three years of service, had developed a vast vocabulary of slang, and it stood ready for use. Naturally enough, some of it was borrowed forthwith, though not much. When the main American army followed in 1918 there was little need to make extensive additions to it. Frog, for Frenchman, was entirely satisfactory; why substitute anything else? So was cootie. So was bus. So was Holy Joe, for chaplain. So were blimp, Jack Johnson, whizz-bang, to strafe and pill-box. Whatever was needed further was adapted from the everyday slang of the United States. Thus, handshaker came to mean a soldier sycophantic to officers, to bust got the new meaning of to demote, and the cowboy outfit was borrowed for general military use. Most of the remaining slang that developed among the troops was derisory, e. g., Sears-Roebuck for a new lieutenant, loot for lieutenant, Jewish cavalry for the Quartermaster’s force, belly-robber for the mess-sergeant, punk for bread, canned-monkey for the French canned beef, gold-fish for canned salmon. Much that remained was obscene, and had its origin in the simple application of obscene verbs and adjectives, long familiar, to special military uses. In the “Vocabulary of the A. E. F.” compiled by E. A. Hecker and Edmund Wilson, Jr., 16 fully 25 per cent. of the terms listed show more or less indecency; the everyday speech of the troops was extraordinarily dirty. But in this department, as I say, there were very few new coinages. In all departments, in truth, the favorite phrases were not invented in the field but brought from home, e. g., corp for corporal, sarge for sergeant, to salvage for to steal, chow for food. Even gob, doughboy and leatherneck were not new. Gob and leatherneck had been in use in the navy for a long while, though the common civilian designation for a sailor had been jackie. The origin of the terms is much disputed. Gob is variously explained as a derivative from the Chinese (?) word gobshite, and as the old word gob, signifying a large, irregular mass, applied to a new use. The original meaning of gobshite I don’t know. One correspondent suggests that gob was first used to designate sailors because of their somewhat voracious and noisy habits of feeding. He tells a story of an old master-at-arms who happened into a land aëro-station and found a party of sailors solemnly at table. “My Gawd,” he exclaimed, “lookit the gobs, usin’ forks an’ all!” Doughboy was originally applied to the infantry only. It originated in the fact that infantrymen, on practise marches, were served rations of flour, and that they made crude biscuits of this flour when they halted. Leatherneck needs no explanation. It obviously refers to the sunburn suffered by marines in the tropics. Hard-boiled seems to have originated among the Americans in France. It is one of the few specimens of army slang that shows any sign of surviving in the general speech. The only others that I can think of are cootie, gob, leatherneck, doughboy, frog, and buck-private. Hand-shaker, since the war ended, has resumed its old meaning of an excessively affable man. Top-sergeant, during the war, suffered an interesting philological change, like that already noticed in buncombe. First it degenerated to top-sarge and then to plain top. To a. w. o. l. is already almost forgotten. So is bevo officer. So are such charming inventions as submarine for bed-pan. The favorite affirmations of the army, “I’ll say so,” “I’ll tell the world,” “You said it,” etc., are also passing out. From the French, save for a few grotesque mispronunciations of common French phrases, e. g., boocoop, the doughboys seem to have borrowed nothing whatsoever. To camouflage was already in use in the United States long before the country entered the war, and such aviation terms as ace, chandelle, vrille and glissade were seldom heard outside the air-force.

2

The war-slang of the English, the French and the Germans was enormously richer, and a great deal more of it has survived. One need but glance at the vocabulary in the last edition of Cassell’s Dictionary 17 or at such works as Gaston Esnault’s “Le Poilu Tel Qu’il se Parle” 18 or Karl Bergmann’s “Wie der Feldgraue Spricht” 19 to note the great difference. The only work which pretends to cover the subject of American war-slang is “New Words Self-Defined,” by Prof. C. Alphonso Smith, of the Naval Academy. 20 It is pieced out with much English slang, and not a little French slang.

3

Note 16.  It remains unpublished, but the compilers have kindly placed it at my disposal. [back]

Note 17.  London, 1919. [back]

Note 18.  Paris, 1919. [back]

Note 19.  Giessen, 1916. [back]

Note 20.  New York, 1919. [back]

1. English as a World Language

The great Jakob Grimm, the founder of comparative philology, hazarded the guess more than three-quarters of a century ago that English would one day become the chief language of the world, and perhaps crowd out several of the then principal idioms altogether. “In wealth, wisdom and strict economy,” he said, “none of the other living languages can vie with it.” At that time the guess was bold, for English was still in fifth place, with not only French and German ahead of it, but also Spanish and Russian. In 1801, according to Michael George Mulhall, the relative standing of the five, in the number of persons using them, was as follows:

French

.....................

31,450,000

Russian

.....................

30,770,000

German

.....................

30,320,000

Spanish

.....................

26,190,000

English

.....................

20,520,000 1

1

The population of the United States was then but little more than 5,000,000, but in twenty years it had nearly doubled, and thereafter it increased steadily and enormously, and by 1860 it was greater than that of the United Kingdom. Since that time the majority of English-speaking persons in the world have lived on this side of the water; today there are nearly three times as many as in the United Kingdom and nearly twice as many as in the whole British Empire. This enormous increase in the American population, beginning with the great immigrations of the 30’s and 40’s, quickly lifted English to fourth place among the languages, and then to third, to second and to first. When it took the lead the attention of philologists was actively directed to the matter, and in 1868 one of them, a German named Brackebusch, first seriously raised the question whether English was destined to obliterate certain of the older tongues. 2 Brackebusch decided against it on various philological grounds, none of them particularly sound. His own figures, as the following table from his dissertation shows, 3 were rather against him:

English

.....................

60,000,000

German

.....................

52,000,000

Russian

.....................

45,000,000

French

.....................

45,000,000

Spanish

.....................

40,000,000

2

This is 1868. Before another generation had passed the lead of English, still because of the great growth of the United States, and yet more impressive, as the following figures for 1890 show:

English

.....................

111,100,000

German

.....................

75,200,000

Russian

.....................

75,000,000

French

.....................

51,200,000

Spanish

.....................

42,800,000

Italian

.....................

33,400,000

Portuguese

.....................

13,000,000 4

3

The next estimates, for the year 1900, I take from Jespersen. The statisticians responsible for them I do not know:

English

.....................

from 116,000,000 to 123,000,000

German

.....................

from 75,000,000 to 80,000,000

Russian

.....................

from 70,000,000 to 85,000,000

French

.....................

from 45,000,000 to 52,000,000

Spanish

.....................

from 44,000,000 to 58,000,000

Italian

.....................

from 34,000,000 to 54,000,000

4

Now comes an estimate as of 1911: 5

English

.....................

160,000,000

German

.....................

130,000,000

Russian

.....................

100,000,000

French

.....................

70,000,000

Spanish

.....................

50,000,000

Italian

.....................

50,000,000

Portuguese

.....................

25,000,000

5

And now one, somewhat more moderate, as of 1912:

English

.....................

150,000,000

German

.....................

90,000,000

Russian

.....................

106,000,000

French

.....................

47,000,000

Spanish

.....................

52,000,000

Italian

.....................

37,000,000 6

6

If we accept the 1911 estimate, we find English spoken by two and a half times as many persons as spoke it at the close of the Civil War, and by nearly eight times as many as spoke it at the beginning of the nineteenth century. No other language spread to any such extent during the century. German made a fourfold gain, but that was just half the gain made by English. Russian, despite the vast extension of the Russian Empire during the century, barely more than tripled its users, and French barely doubled them. Perhaps all of the figures in the table are excessive; that is almost certainly true of German, and probably also true of English and French. The same authority, in 1921, modified them as follows:

English

.....................

150,000,000

German

.....................

120,000,000

Russian

.....................

90,000,000

French

.....................

60,000,000

Spanish

.....................

55,000,000

Italian

.....................

40,000,000

Portuguese

.....................

30,000,000 7

7

I am inclined to think that the German estimate is still far too high; probably even Hickmann’s 90,000,000 is too liberal. The number of Germans in Germany is about 60,000,000, and in German Austria not more than 6,000,000 or 7,000,000. Add the German-speaking inhabitants of Holstein, Alsace-Lorraine, the lost portions of Silesia and the Dantzig territory: perhaps 3,000,000 more. Then the German-speaking peoples of the Baltic region, of Transylvania and of Russia: at most, 2,000,000. Then the German-speaking colonists in North and South America: 2,000,000 or 3,000,000 more. Altogether, I put the number of living users of German at less than 75,000,000, which is probably no more than half of the number of living users of English. Japanese, I daresay, should follow French: it is spoken by at least 60,000,000 persons. But it seems to be making very little progress, and its difficulties put it out of consideration as a world language. Chinese, too, may be disregarded, for though it is spoken by more than 300,000,000 persons, it is split into half a dozen mutually unintelligible dialects, and shows no sign of spreading beyond the limits of China; in fact, it is yielding to other languages along the borders, especially to English in the seaports. The same may be said of Hindustani, which is the language of 100,000,000 inhabitants of British India; it shows wide dialectical variations and the people who speak it are not likely to spread. But English is the possession of a race that is still pushing in all directions, and wherever that race settles the existing languages tend to succumb. Thus French, despite the passionate resistance sistance of the French-Canadians, is gradually decaying in Canada; in all newly-settled regions English is universal. And thus Spanish is dying out in our own Southwest, and promises to meet with severe competition in some of the nearer parts of Latin-America. The English control of the sea has likewise carried the language into far places. There is scarcely a merchant ship-captain on deep water, of whatever nationality, who does not find some acquaintance with it necessary, and it has become, in debased forms, the lingua franca of Oceanica and the Far East generally. “Three-fourths of the world’s mail matter,” says E. H. Babbitt, “is now addressed in English,” and “more than half of the world’s newspapers are printed in English.” 8

8

Brackebusch, in the speculative paper just mentioned, came to the conclusion that the future domination of English would be prevented by its unphonetic spelling, its grammatical decay and the general difficulties that a foreigner encounters in seeking to master it. “The simplification of its grammar,” he said, with true philological fatuity, “is the commencement of dissolution, the beginning of the end, and its extraordinary tendency to degenerate into slang of every kind is the foreshadowing of its approaching dismemberment.” But in the same breath he was forced to admit that “the greater development it has obtained” was the result of this very simplification of grammar, and an inspection of the rest of his reasoning quickly shows its unsoundness, even without an appeal to the plain facts. The spelling of a language, whether it be phonetic or not, has little to do with its spread. Very few men learn it by studying books; they learn it by hearing it spoken. As for grammatical decay, it is not a sign of dissolution, but a sign of active life and constantly renewed strength. To the professional philologist, perhaps it may sometimes appear otherwise. He is apt to estimate languages by looking at their complexity; the Greek aorist elicits his admiration because it presents enormous difficulties and is inordinately subtle. But the object of language is not to bemuse grammarians, but to convey ideas, and the more simply it accomplishes plishes that object the more effectively it meets the needs of an energetic and practical people and the larger its inherent vitality. The history of every language of Europe, since the earliest days of which we have record, is a history of simplifications. Even such languages as German, which still cling to a great many exasperating inflections, including the absurd inflection of the article for gender, are less highly inflected than they used to be, and are proceeding slowly but surely toward analysis. The fact that English has gone further along that road than any other civilized tongue is not a proof of its decrepitude, but a proof of its continued strength. Brought into free competition with another language, say German or French or Spanish, it is almost certain to prevail, if only because it is vastly easier—that is, as a spoken language—to learn. The foreigner essaying it, indeed, finds his chief difficulty, not in mastering its forms, but in grasping its lack of forms. He doesn’t have to learn a new and complex grammar; what he has to do is to forget grammar.

9

Once he has done so, the rest is a mere matter of acquiring a vocabulary. He can make himself understood, given a few nouns, pronouns, verbs and numerals, without troubling himself in the slightest about accidence. “Me see she” is bad English, perhaps, but it would be absurd to say that it is obscure—and on some not too distant tomorrow it may be very fair American. Essaying an inflected language, the beginner must go into the matter far more deeply before he may hope to be understood. Bradley, in “The Making of English,” 9 shows clearly how German and English differ in this respect, and how great is the advantage of English. In the latter the verb sing has but eight forms, and of these three are entirely obsolete, one is obsolescent, and two more may be dropped out without damage to comprehension. In German the corresponding verb, singen, has no fewer than sixteen forms. How far English has proceeded toward the complete obliteration of inflections is shown by such barbarous forms of it as Pidgin English and Beach-la-Mar, in which the final step is taken without appreciable loss of clarity. The Pidgin English verb is identical in all tenses. Go stands for both went and gone; makee is both make and made. In the same way there is no declension of the pronoun for case. My is thus I, me, mine and our own my. “No belong my” is “it is not mine,” a crude construction, of course, but still clearly intelligible. Chinamen learn Pidgin English in a few months, and savages in the South Seas master Beach-la-Mar almost as quickly. And a white man, once he has accustomed himself to either, finds it strangely fluent and expressive. He cannot argue politics in it, nor dispute upon transubstantiation, but for all the business of every day it is perfectly satisfactory.

10

This capacity of English for clear and succinct utterance is frequently remarked by Continental philologists, many of whom seem inclined to agree with Grimm that it will eventually supersede all of the varying dialects now spoken in Europe, at least for commercial purposes. Jespersen, in the first chapter of his “Growth and Structure of the English Language,” 10 discusses the matter very penetratingly and at great length. “There is one impression,” he says, “that continually comes to my mind whenever I think of the English language and compare it with others: it seems to me positively and expressively masculine; it is the language of a grownup man and has very little childish or feminine about it. A great many things go together to produce and to confirm that impression, things phonetical, grammatical, and lexical, words and turns that are found, and words and turns that are not found, in the language.” He then goes on to explain the origin and nature of the “masculine” air: it is grounded chiefly upon clarity, directness and force. He says:

The English consonants are well defined; voiced and voiceless consonants stand over against each other in neat symmetry, and they are, as a rule, clearly and precisely pronounced. You have none of those indistinct or half-slurred consonants that abound in Danish, for instance (such as those in hade, hage, livlig), where you hardly know whether it is a consonant or a vowel-glide that meets the ear. The only thing that might be compared to this in English is the r when not followed by a vowel, but then this has really given up definitely all pretensions to the rank of a consonant, and is (in the pronunciation of the South of England) 11 either frankly a vowel (as in here) or else nothing at all (in hart, etc.). Each English consonant belongs distinctly to its own type, a t is a t, and a k is a k, and there is an end. There is much less modification of a consonant by the surrounding vowels than in some other languages; thus none of that palatalization of consonants which gives an insinuating grace to such languages as Russian. The vowel sounds, too, are comparatively independent of their surroundings; and in this respect the language now has deviated widely from the character of Old English, and has become more clear-cut and distinct in its phonetic structure, although, to be sure, the diphthongization of most long vowels (in ale, whole, eel, who, phonetically eil, houl, ijl, huw) counteracts in some degree this impression of neatness and evenness.

11

Jespersen then proceeds to consider certain peculiarities of English grammar and syntax, and to point out the simplicity and forcefulness of the everyday English vocabulary. The grammatical baldness of the language, he argues (against the old tradition in philology), is one of the chief sources of its vigor. He says:

Where German has, for instance, alle diejenigen wilden tiere, die dort leben, so that the plural idea is expressed in each word separately (apart, of course, from the adverb), English has all the wild animals that live there, where all, the article, the adjective, and the relative pronoun are alike incapable of receiving any mark of the plural number; the sense is expressed with the greatest clearness imaginable, and all the unstressed endings -e and -en, which make most German sentences so drawling, are avoided.

12

The prevalence of very short words in English, and the syntactical law which enables it to dispense with the definite article in many constructions “where other languages think it indispensable, e. g., ‘life is short,’ ‘dinner is ready’ ”—these are further marks of vigor and clarity, according to Dr. Jespersen. “ ‘First come, first served,’ ” he says, “is much more vigorous than the French ‘Premier venu, premier moulu’ or ‘Le Premier venu engrène,’ the German ‘Werzuerst kommt, mahlt zuerst,’ and especially than the Danish ‘Dender kommer forst til molle, far forst malet’ ” Again, there is the superior logical sense of English—the arrangement of words, not according to grammatical rules, but according to their meaning. “In English,” says Dr. Jespersen, “an auxiliary verb does not stand far from its main verb, and a negative will be found in the immediate neighborhood of the word it negatives, generally the verb (auxiliary). An adjective nearly always stands before its noun; the only really important exception is when there are qualifications added to it which draw it after the noun so that the whole complex serves the purpose of a relative clause.” In English, the subject almost invariably precedes the verb and the object follows after. Once Dr. Jespersen had his pupils determine the percentage of sentences in various authors in which this order was observed. They found that even in English poetry it was seldom violated; the percentage of observances in Tennyson’s poetry ran to 88. But in the poetry of Holger Drachmann, the Dane, it fell to 61, in Anatole France’s prose to 66, in Gabriele d’Annunzio to 49, and in the poetry of Goethe to 30. All these things make English clearer and more logical than other tongues. It is, says Dr. Jespersen, “a methodical, energetic, business-like and sober language, that does not care much for finery and elegance, but does care for logical consistency and is opposed to any attempt to narrow-in life by police regulations and strict rules either of grammar or of lexicon.” In these judgments another distinguished Danish philologist, Prof. Thomsen, agrees fully.

13

There is, of course, something to be said on the other side. “Besides a certain ungainliness [Dr. Jespersen’s masculine quality],” said a recent writer in English, 12 “English labors under other grave disadvantages. The five vowels of our alphabet have to do duty for some twenty sounds, and, to the foreigner, there are no simple rules by which the correct vowel sounds may be gauged from the way a word is written; our orthography also reflects the chaotic period before our language was formed, and the spelling of a particular word is often unconnected with either its present pronunciation or correct derivation. And although our literature contains more great poetry than any other, and though our language was made by poets rather than by prose writers, English is not musical in the sense that Greek was, or that Italian is when sung.” But these objections have very little genuine force. The average foreigner does not learn English in order to sing it, but in order to speak it. And, as I have said, he does not learn it from books, but by word of mouth. To write it correctly, and particularly to spell it correctly, is a herculean undertaking, but very few foreigners find any need to do either. If our spelling were reformed, most of the difficulties now encountered would vanish.

14

Meanwhile, it remains a plain fact that, if only because of the grammatical simplicity, it is easier to obtain an intelligible working knowledge of English than of any other living tongue. This superior simplicity, added to the commercial utility of knowing the language, will probably more than counterbalance the nationalistic objections to acquiring it. In point of fact, they are already grown feeble. All over the Continent English is being studied by men of every European race, including especially the German. “During my recent stay in Berlin,” says a post-war English traveler, 13 “nothing annoyed me more than the frequency with which my inquiries of the man in the street for direction, made in atrocious German, elicited replies in perfect English.” This writer accounts for what he observed by the fact that “the English-speaking nations own half the world,” and asks, “what language should they study but English?” But the spread of the language was already marked before the war. Another Englishman, writing in 1910, 14 thus described its extension in the Far East, as observed during a trip to Japan:

It was only on reaching Italy that I began fully to realize this wonderful thing, that for nearly six weeks, on a German ship, in a journey of nearly ten thousand miles, we had heard little of any language but English!

15

It is an amazing thing when one thinks of it.

16

In Japan most of the tradespeople spoke English. At Shanghai, at Hong Kong, at Singapore, at Penang, at Colombo, at Suez, at Port Said—all the way home to the Italian ports, the language of all the ship’s traffic, the language of such discourse as the passengers held with natives, most of the language or board ship itself, was English.

17

The German captain of our ship spoke English more often than German. All his officers spoke English.

18

The Chinese man-o’-war’s men who conveyed the Chinese prince on board at Shanghai, received commands and exchanged commands with our German sailors in English. The Chinese mandarins in their conversations with the ships’ officers invariably spoke English. They use the same ideographs in writing as the Japanese, but to talk to our Japanese passengers they had to speak English. Nay, coming as they did from various provinces of the Empire, where the language greatly differs, they found it most convenient in conversation among themselves to speak English!

19

If, as some aver, the greatest hindrances to peaceful international intercourse are the misunderstandings due to diversity of tongues, the wide prevalence of the English tongue must be the greatest unifying bond the world has ever known.

20

And it grows—it grows unceasingly. At the beginning of last century English was the native speech of little more than twenty million people. At the end of the century it was spoken by 130 millions. Before the year 2000 it will probably be spoken by 250 to 500 millions.

21

In the most high and palmy state of Rome, the population of the Empire was less than 100 millions. To-day 350 millions own the sway of rulers who speak English.

22

Note 1.  Jespersen, in his Growth and Structure of the English Language, p. 244, lists a number of estimates for previous periods. At the beginning of the sixteenth century English was variously estimated to be spoken by from four to five millions of persons, German by ten, Russian by three, French by from ten to twelve, Spanish by eight and a half and Italian by nine and a half. French was thus in first place, closely followed by German, with English fifth. In the year 1600 English was spoken by six millions, German by ten, Russian by three, French by fourteen, Spanish by eight and a half, and Italian by nine and a half. The six languages thus ranked exactly as they had ranked a century before, but with French showing a greatly increased lead, and English slowly spreading. In the year 1700 the various estimates were: English, eight and a half millions; German, ten; Russian, from three to fifteen; French, twenty; Spanish, eight and a half; Italian, from nine and a half to eleven. Jespersen shows that Mulhall’s estimate, given above, differed a good deal from that of other statisticians. The guesses made in the year 1800 and thereabout ranged as follows: English, twenty to forty; German, thirty to thirty-three; Russian, twenty-five to thirty-one; French, twenty-seven to thirty-one; Spanish, twenty-six; Italian, fourteen to fifteen. Mulhall did not list Italian. [back]

Note 2.  Long before this the general question of the relative superiority of various languages had been debated in Germany. In 1796 the Berlin Academy offered a prize for the best essay on The Ideal of a Perfect Language. It was won by one Jenisch with a treatise bearing the sonorous title of A Philosophical-Critical Comparison and Estimate of Fourteen of the Ancient and Modern Languages of Europe, viz., Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, English, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Russian and Lithuanian. [back]

Note 3.  Is English Destined to Become the Universal Language? by W. Brackebusch; Göttingen, 1868. [back]

Note 4.  I take these figures from A Modern English Grammar, by H. G. Buehler; New York, 1900, p. 3. [back]

Note 5.  World Almanac, 1914, p. 63. See also English, March, 1919, p. 20. [back]

Note 6.  Hickmann’s Geographisch-Statistischer Universal Atlas. [back]

Note 7.  World Almanac, 1921, p. 145. [back]

Note 8.  The Geography of Great Languages, World’s Work, Feb., 1908, p. 9907. Babbitt predicts that by the year 2000 English will be spoken by 1,100,000,000 persons, as against 500,000,000 speakers of Russian, 300,000,000 of Spanish, 160,000,000 of German and 60,000,000 of French. [back]

Note 9.  New York, 1915, p. 5 ff. [back]

Note 10.  Third ed., rev.; Leipzig, 1919. [back]

Note 11.  But certainly not in that of the United States, save maybe in the South. [back]

Note 12.  Feb., 1921, p. 450. [back]

Note 13.  John Cournos: English as Esperanto: Its Extraordinary Popularity in Central Europe, English, Feb., 1921, p. 451. [back]

Note 14.  Alexander M. Thompson: Japan for a Week; Britain Forever!; London, 1910. [back]

Because of the fact that the American form of English is now spoken by three times as many persons as all the British forms taken together, and by at least twenty times as many as the standard Southern English, and because, no less, of the greater resilience it shows, and the greater capacity for grammatical and lexical growth, and the far greater tendency to accommodate itself to the linguistic needs and limitations of foreigners—because of all this it seems to me very likely that it will determine the final form of the language. For the old control of English over American to be reasserted is now quite unthinkable; if the two dialects are not to drift apart entirely English must follow in American’s tracks. This yielding seems to have begun; the exchanges from American into English, as we have seen, grow steadily larger and more important than the exchanges from English into American. John Richard Green, the historian, discerning the inevitable half a century ago, expressed the opinion, amazing and unpalatable then, that the Americans were already “the main branch of the English people.” It is not yet wholly true; a cultural timorousness yet shows itself; there is still a class, chiefly of pedagogues and of social aspirants, which looks to England as the Romans long looked to Greece. But it is not the class that is shaping the national language, and it is not the class that is carrying it beyond the national borders. The Americanisms that flood the English of Canada are not borrowed from the dialects of New England Loyalists and fashionable New Yorkers, but from the common speech that has its sources in the native and immigrant proletariat and that displays its gaudiest freightage in the newspapers.

1

The impact of this flood is naturally most apparent in Canada, whose geographical proximity and common interests completely obliterate the effects of English political and social dominance. The American flat a has swept the whole country, and American slang is everywhere used; turn to any essay on Canadianisms, 15 and you will find that nine-tenths of them are simply Americanisms. No doubt this is chiefly due to the fact that the Canadian newspapers are all supplied with news by the American press associations, and thus fall inevitably into the habit of discussing it in American terms. “The great factor that makes us write and speak alike,” says a recent writer on American speech habits, 16 “is the indefinite multiplication of the instantaneous uniformity of the American daily, … due to a non-sectional, continental exchange of news through the agency of the various press associations.” In this exchange Canada shares fully. Its people may think as Britons, but they must perforce think in American.

2

More remarkable is the influence that American has exerted upon the speech of Australia and upon the crude dialects of Oceanica and the Far East. One finds such obvious Americanisms as tomahawk, boss, bush, go finish (=to die) and pickaninny in Beach-la-Mar 17 and more of them in Pidgin English. The common trade speech of the whole Pacific, indeed, tends to become American rather than English. An American correspondent at Oxford sends me some curious testimony to the fact. Among the Britishers he met there was one student who showed an amazing familiarity with American words and phrases. The American, asking him where he had lived in the United States, was surprised to hear that he had never been here at all. All his Americanisms had been picked up during his youth in a Chinese sea-port, where his father was the British Consul. The English of Australia, though it is Cockney in pronunciation and intonation, 18 becomes increasingly American in vocabulary. In a glossary of Australianisms compiled by the Australian author, C. T. Dennis, 19 I find the familiar verbs and verb-phrases, to beef, to biff, to bluff, to boss, to break away, to chase one’s self, to chew the rag, to chip in, to fade away, to get it in the neck, to back and fill, to plug along, to get sore, to turn down and to get wise; the substantives, dope, boss, fake, creek, knockout-drops and push (in the sense of crowd); the adjectives, hitched (in the sense of married) and tough (as before luck), and the adverbial phrases, for keeps and going strong. Here, in direct competition with English locutions, and with all the advantages on the side of the latter, American is making steady progress. Moreover, the Australians, 20 following the Americans, have completely obliterated several old niceties of speech that survive in England—for example, the distinction between will and shall. “An Australian,” says a recent writer, 21 “uses the phrase I shall about as often as he uses the accusative whom. Usually he says I will or I’ll; and the expectant we shall see is the only ordinary shall locution which I can call to mind.” But perhaps it is Irish influence that is visible here, and not American.

3

“This American language,” says a recent observer, “seems to be much more of a pusher than the English. For instance, after eight years’ occupancy of the Philippines it was spoken by 800,000, or 10 per cent, of the natives, while after an occupancy of 150 years of India by the British, 3,000,000, or one per cent, of the natives speak English.” 22 I do not vouch for the figures. They may be inaccurate, in detail, but they at least state what seems to be a fact. Behind that fact are phenomena which certainly deserve careful study, and, above all, study divested of unintelligent prejudice. The attempt to make American uniform with English has failed ingloriously; the neglect of its investigation is an evidence of snobbishness that is a folly of the same sort. It is useless to dismiss the growing peculiarities of the American vocabulary and of grammar and syntax in the common speech as vulgarisms beneath serious notice. Such vulgarisms have a way of intrenching themselves, and gathering dignity as they grow familiar. “There are but few forms in use,” says Lounsbury, “which, judged by a standard previously existing, would not be regarded as gross barbarisms.” 23 Each language, in such matters, is a law unto itself, and each vigorous dialect, particularly if it be spoken by millions, is a law no less. “It would be as wrong,” says Sayce, “to use thou for the nominative thee in the Somersetshire dialect as it is to say thee art instead of you are in the Queen’s English.” American has suffered severely from the effort to impose an impossible artificiality upon it, but it has survived the process, and soon or late there must be a formal abandonment of the pedagogical effort to bring it into agreement with Southern English. “It has had held up to it,” says Prof. Ayres, “silly ideals, impossible ideals, ignorant dogmatisms, and for the most part it wisely repudiates them all.” 24 The American Academy of Arts and Letters still pleads for these silly ideals and ignorant dogmatisms, and the more stupid sort of schoolmasters echo the plea, but meanwhile American goes its way. In England its progress is not unmarked. Dr. Robert Bridges and the Society for Pure English seek to bring about the precise change in standard English that American shows spontaneously. Maybe the end will be two dialects—standard English for pedants, and American for the world.

4

As yet, American suffers from the lack of a poet bold enough to venture into it, as Chaucer ventured into the despised English of his day, and Dante into the Tuscan dialect, and Luther, in his translation of the Bible, into peasant German. Walt Whitman made a half attempt and then drew back; Lowell, perhaps, also heard the call, but too soon; in our own time, young Mr. Weaver has shown what may be done tomorrow, and Carl Sandburg has also made experiments. The Irish dialect of English, vastly less important than the American, has already had its interpreters—Douglas Hyde, John Millington Synge and Augusta Gregory—with what extraordinary results we all know. 25 Here we have writing that is still indubitably English, but English rid of its artificial restraints and broken to the less self-conscious grammar and syntax of a simple and untutored folk. Synge, in his preface to “The Playboy of the Western World,” tells us how he got his gipsy phrases “through a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen.” There is no doubt, he goes on, that “in the happy ages of literature striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the story-teller’s or the playwright’s hand as the rich cloaks and dresses of his time. It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink-horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children.”

5

The result, in the case of the neo-Celts, is a dialect that stands incomparably above the tight English of the grammarians—a dialect so naïve, so pliant, so expressive, and, adeptly managed, so beautiful that even purists have begun to succumb to it, and it promises to leave lasting marks upon English style. The American dialect has not yet come to that stage. In so far as it is apprehended at all it is only in the sense that Irish-English was apprehended a generation ago—that is, as something uncouth and comic. But that is the way that new dialects always come in—through a drum-fire of cackles. Given the poet, there may suddenly come a day when our theirns and would’a hads will take on the barbaric stateliness of the peasant locutions of old Maurya in “Riders to the Sea.” They seem grotesque and absurd today because the folks who use them seem grotesque and absurd. But that is a too facile logic and under it is a false assumption. In all human beings, if only understanding be brought to the business, dignity will be found, and that dignity cannot fail to reveal itself, soon or late, in the words and phrases with which they make known their high hopes and aspirations and cry out against the intolerable meaninglessness of life.

6

Note 15.  For example, Geikie’s or Lighthall’s. See the Bibliography. [back]

Note 16.  Harvey M. Watts: Need of Good English Growing as World Turns to Its Use, New York Sun, Nov. 19, 1919. [back]

Note 17.  Cf. Beach-la-Mar, by William Churchill, former United States consul-general in Samoa and Tonga. The pamphlet is published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. [back]

Note 18.  Cf. The Australian Accent, Triad (Sydney), Nov. 10, 1920, p. 37. [back]

Note 19.  It is in Doreen and the Sentimental Bloke; New York, 1916. [back]

Note 20.  It is a pity that American has not borrowed the Australian invention wowser. Says a writer in the Manchester Guardian: “Wowser, whether used as an adjective or a substantive, covers everyone and everything that is out of sympathy with what some people consider la joie de vivre. A wowser, as a person, is one who desires to close public-houses, prevent shouting (Australese for treating), and so on—in short, one who intends to limit the opportunities ‘of all professions that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.’ ” In the United States fully 99 per cent of all the world’s wowsers rage and roar, and yet we have no simple word to designate them. [back]

Note 21.  English, Sept., 1919, p. 167. [back]

Note 22.  The American Language, by J. F. Healy; Pittsburgh, 1910, p. 6. [back]

Note 23.  History of the English Language, p. 476. [back]

Note 24.  Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. iv, p. 566. [back]

Note 25.  The Sicilian dialect of Italian has been brought to dignity in the same way by Giovanni Verga, author of the well-known Cavalleria Rusticana. See Giovanni Verga and the Sicilian Novel, by Carlo Linati, Dial, Aug., 1921, p. 150 ff. [back]

1. The Declaration of Independence in American

[The following is my own translation, but I have had the aid of suggestions from various other scholars. It must be obvious that more than one section of the original is now quite unintelligible to the average American of the sort using the Common Speech. What would he make, for example, of such a sentence as this one: “He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures”? Or of this: “He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise.” Such Johnsonian periods are quite beyond his comprehension, and no doubt the fact is at least partly to blame for the neglect upon which the Declaration has fallen in recent years. When, during the Wilson-Palmer saturnalia of oppressions, specialists in liberty began protesting that the Declaration plainly gave the people the right to alter the goverment under which they lived and even to abolish it altogether, they encountered the utmost incredulity. On more than one occasion, in fact, such an exegete was tarred and feathered by the shocked members of the American Legion, even after the Declaration had been read to them. What ailed them was that they could not understand its eighteenth century English. I make the suggestion that its circulation among such patriotic men, translated into the language they use every day, would serve to prevent, or, at all events, to diminish that sort of terrorism.]

1

When things get so balled up that the people of a country have to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are on the level, and not trying to put nothing over on nobody.

2

All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, you and me is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain’t got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time however he likes, so long as he don’t interfere with nobody else. That any government that don’t give a man these rights ain’t worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of goverment they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter. That whenever any goverment don’t do this, then the people have got a right to can it and put in one that will take care of their interests. Of course, that don’t mean having a revolution every day like them South American coons and yellow-bellies and Bolsheviki, or every time some job-holder does something he ain’t got no business to do. It is better to stand a little graft, etc., than to have revolutions all the time, like them coons and Bolsheviki, and any man that wasn’t a anarchist or one of them I. W. W.’s would say the same. But when things get so bad that a man ain’t hardly got no rights at all no more, but you might almost call him a slave, then everybody ought to get together and throw the grafters out, and put in new ones who won’t carry on so high and steal so much, and then watch them. This is the proposition the people of these Colonies is up against, and they have got tired of it, and won’t stand it no more. The administration of the present King, George III, has been rotten from the start, and when anybody kicked about it he always tried to get away with it by strong-arm work. Here is some of the rough stuff he has pulled:

3

He vetoed bills in the Legislature that everybody was in favor of, and hardly nobody was against.

4

He wouldn’t allow no law to be passed without it was first put up to him, and then he stuck it in his pocket and let on he forgot about it, and didn’t pay no attention to no kicks.

5

When people went to work and gone to him and asked him to put through a law about this or that, he give them their choice: either they had to shut down the Legislature and let him pass it all by him-self, or they couldn’t have it at all.

6

He made the Legislature meet at one-horse thank-towns out in the alfalfa belt, so that hardly nobody could get there and most of the leaders would stay home and let him go to work and do things as he pleased.

7

He give the Legislature the air, and sent the members home every time they stood up to him and give him a call-down.

8

When a Legislature was busted up he wouldn’t allow no new one to be elected, so that there wasn’t nobody left to run things, but anybody could walk in and do whatever they pleased.

9

He tried to scare people outen moving into these States, and made it so hard for a wop or one of them poor kikes to get his papers that he would rather stay home and not try it, and then, when he come in, he wouldn’t let him have no land, and so he either went home again or never come.

10

He monkeyed with the courts, and didn’t hire enough judges to do the work, and so a person had to wait so long for his case to come up that he got sick of waiting, and went home, and so never got what was coming to him.

11

He got the judges under his thumb by turning them out when they done anything he didn’t like, or holding up their salaries, so that they had to cough up or not get no money.

12

He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they wanted to or not.

13

Without no war going on, he kept an army loafing around the country, no matter how much people kicked about it.

14

He let the army run things to suit theirself and never paid no attention whatsoever to nobody which didn’t wear no uniform.

15

He let grafters run loose, from God knows where, and give them the say in everything, and let them put over such things as the following:

16

Making poor people board and lodge a lot of soldiers they ain’t got no use for, and don’t want to see loafing around.

17

When the soldiers kill a man, framing it up so that they would get off.

18

Interfering with business.

19

Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying taxes for or not.

20

When a man was arrested and asked for a jury trial, not letting him have no jury trial.

21

Chasing men out of the country, without being guilty of nothing, and trying them somewheres else for what they done here.

22

In countries that border on us, he put in bum goverments, and then tried to spread them out, so that by and by they would take in this country too, or make our own goverment as bum as they was. He never paid no attention whatever to the Constitution, but he went to work and repealed laws that everybody was satisfied with and hardly nobody was against, and tried to fix the goverment so that he could do whatever he pleased.

23

He busted up the Legislatures and let on he could do all the work better by himself.

24

Now he washes his hands of us and even declares war on us, so we don’t owe him nothing, and whatever authority he ever had he ain’t got no more.

25

He has burned down towns, shot down people like dogs, and raised hell against us out on the ocean.

26

He hired whole regiments of Dutch, etc., to fight us, and told them they could have anything they wanted if they could take it away from us, and sicked these Dutch, etc., on us without paying no attention whatever to international law.

27

He grabbed our own people when he found them in ships on the ocean, and shoved guns into their hands, and made them fight against us, no matter how much they didn’t want to.

28

He stirred up the Indians, and give them arms ammunition, and told them to go to it, and they have killed men, women and children, and don’t care which.

29

Every time he has went to work and pulled any of these things, we have went to work and put in a kick, but every time we have went to work and put in a kick he has went to work and did it again. When a man keeps on handing out such rough stuff all the time, all you can say is that he ain’t got no class and ain’t fitten to have no authority over people who have got any rights, and he ought to be kicked out.

30

When we complained to the English we didn’t get no more satisfaction. Almost every day we warned them that the politicians over there was doing things to us that they didn’t have no right to do. We kept on reminding them who we were, and what we was doing here, and how we come to come here. We asked them to get us a square deal, and told them that if this thing kept on we’d have to do something about it and maybe they wouldn’t like it. But the more we talked, the more they didn’t pay no attention to us. Therefore, if they ain’t for us they must be agin us, and we are ready to give them the fight of their lives, or to shake hands when it is over.

31

Therefore be it resolved, That we, the representatives of the people of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, hereby declare as follows: That the United States, which was the United Colonies in former times, is now free and independent, and ought to be; that we have throwed out the English Kings and don’t want to have nothing to do with him no more, and are not in England no more; and that,being as we are now free and independent, we can do anything that free and independent parties can do, especially declare war, make peace, sign treaties, go into business, etc. And we swear on the Bible on this proposition, one and all, and agree to stick to it no matter what happens, whether we win or we lose, and whether we get away with it or get the worst of it, no matter whether we lose all our property by it or even get hung for it.

32

[I am indebted to Mr. Ring W. Lardner, author of “You Know Me, A1,” for the following. It combines the common language with the special argot of the professional baseball-players, a class of men whose speech Mr. Lardner has studied with great diligence.]

1

[Plot: The enemy has fallen on our pitcher and scored five runs. The side is finally retired and our men come in to the bench, where the manager awaits them.]

2

MANAGER—What the hell! 1

3

PITCHER (indicating the catcher)—Ask him!

4

CATCHER—Ask yourself, you yella bum! (To the manager) He’s been shakin’ me off all day.

5

MANAGER—What was it Peck hit?

6

PITCHER—I was tryin’ to waste it.

7

CATCHER—Waste it! You dinked it up there chest high. 2 He couldn’t of got a better cut at it if he’d of tooken the ball in his hand.

8

PITCHER (to the catcher)—You could of got Shawkey at the plate if you’d of left Jack’s peg hop. He never even hit the dirt.

9

CATCHER—It would of been a short hop and I couldn’t take no chance. You wasn’t backin’ up. You was standin’ over in back of third base, posin’ for a pitcher (=picture) or somethin’.

10

MANAGER (to the catcher)—What the hell happened on that ball on Bodie?

11

CATCHER—He (referring to the pitcher) crossed me up. I ast him for a hook and he yessed me and then throwed a fast one.

12

PITCHER—It was a curve ball, just like you ast me, only it didn’t break good.

13

MANAGER (to the pitcher)—And what about Ruth? Is that all the more sense you got, groovin’ one for that big ape! You’d of did better to roll it up there.

14

PITCHER—The ball he hit was outside.

15

MANAGER—You mean after he hit it. For God’s sakes, use your head in there! This ain’t Fort Worth!

16

PITCHER—I wisht to hell it was!

17

MANAGER—And you’re li’ble to get your wish!

18

Glossary

19

In there: In the pitcher’s position.

20

Up there: In the batter’s position.

21

Shakin’ me off: Refusing to pitch the kind of ball I signalled for.

22

Waste: To pitch a ball so high or so far outside that the batsman cannot reach it.

23

Dink: To throw a slow ball.

24

Hook: A curve ball.

25

Peg: A throw.

26

Hop: To bound.

27

Hit the dirt: To slide.

28

Note 1.  Or, more likely, the Jesus! [back]

Note 2.  Chest-high is a euphemism; the more usual form is titty-high. [back]

[Mr. Lardner also very kindly wrote the following for the present work. A ham, of course, means a fifth-rate actor. The scene is the sidewalk in front of the Lambs’ Club. The two hams, meeting, stop for a chat.]

1

FIRST HAM—Have you seen Craven?

2

SECOND HAM—Yes, I was in Thursday.

3

FIRST HAM—It’s a great troupe. 3

4

SECOND HAM—I give him the notion. I says to him last summer, I says, “Frank, I got a great notion for you.” He says, “What is it, Charley?” So then I give him the notion.

5

FIRST HAM—It’s a great troupe. I enjoyed every minute, if you know what I mean.

6

SECOND HAM—I give him the notion.

7

FIRST HAM—He’s wrote himself a great part, if you know what I mean.

8

SECOND HAM—I give him the notion.

9

FIRST HAM—He’s a duke in that kind of a part.

10

SECOND HAM—How’d you like the gal?

11

FIRST HAM—Just fair, if you know what I mean. But What’s his-name was lousy the day I was in, if you know what I mean.

12

SECOND HAM—I don’t think they cast it very good.

13

FIRST HAM—No, and when you come right down to it, they’s nothin’ to the troupe, only the notion.

14

SECOND HAM—I give him the notion.

15

FIRST HAM—It’d be a flop without Craven.

16

SECOND HAM—That’s the way I figured when I had the notion, and I tol’ Craven, I says, “Frank, I got a notion that’d make a play for you, but it’d be a flop for anybody else.”

17

FIRST HAM—They’s really nothin’ to it but hoakum, if you know what I mean. But they eat it up.

18

SECOND HAM—Too bad they ain’t got a bigger theater.

19

FIRST HAM—You can’t tell. It might flop in a bigger house. It’s just a little every-day family troupe, if you know what I mean. Nothin’ to it but Craven and the notion.

20

SECOND HAM—I give him the notion.

21

Note 3.  Troupe here means the entire production. [back]

[The following “Élégie Américaine,” by John V. A. Weaver, of Chicago, 4 marks the first appearance of the American vulgate, I believe, in serious verse. It has been attempted often enough by comic poets, though seldom with the accuracy shown by Mr. Lardner’s prose. But it was Mr. Weaver who first directed attention to the obvious fact that the American proletarian is not comic to himself but quite serious, and that he carries on his most lofty and sentimental thoughts in the same tongue he uses in discussing baseball.]

I wished I’d took the ring, not the Victrola.

You get so tired of records, hearin’ an’ hearin’ ’em,

And when a person don’t have much to spend

They feel they shouldn’t ought to be so wasteful.

And then these warm nights makes it slow inside,

And sittin’s lovely down there by the lake

Where him and me would always use ta go.

He thought the Vic’d make it easier

Without him; and it did at first. I’d play

Some jazz-band music and I’d almost feel

His arms around me, dancin’; after that

I’d turn out all the lights, and set there quiet

Whiles Alma Gluck was singin’ “Home, Sweet Home”,

And almost know his hand was strokin’ my hand.

“If I was you, I’d take the Vic,” he says,

“It’s somethin’ you can use; you can’t a ring.

Wisht I had ways ta make a record for you,

So’s I could be right with you, even though

Uncle Sam had me”… Now I’m glad he didn’t;

It would be lots too much like seein’ ghosts

Now that I’m sure he never won’t come back….

Oh, God! I don’t see how I ever stand it!

He was so big and strong! He was a darb!

The swellest dresser, with them nifty shirts

That fold down, and them lovely nobby shoes,

And always all his clothes would be one color,

Like green socks with green ties, and a green hat,

And everything…. We never had no words

Or hardly none….

And now to think that mouth

I useta kiss is bitin’ into dirt,

And through them curls I useta smooth a bullet

Has went….

I wisht it would of killed me, too….

Oh, well… about the Vic…. I guess I’ll sell it

And get a small ring anyways. (I won’t

Get but half as good a one as if

He spent it all on that when he first ast me.)

It don’t seem right to play jazz tunes no more

With him gone. And it ain’t a likely chanst

I’d find nobody ever else again

Would suit me, or I’d suit. And so a little

Quarter of a carat, maybe, but a real one

That could sparkle, sometimes, and remember

The home I should of had.…

And still, you know,

The Vic was his idear, and so…

I wonder….

1

Note 4.  From In American; New York, 1921. [back]

1. German

The German dialect spoken by the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch of lower Pennsylvania is the oldest immigrant language to remain in daily use in the United States, and so it shows very extensive English influences. The fact that it survives at all is due to the extreme clannishness of the people using it—a clannishness chiefly based upon religious separatism. The first Germans came to Pennsylvania toward the end of the seventeenth century and settled in the lower tier of counties, running from Philadelphia westward to the mountains; a few continued into Maryland and then down the Valley of Virginia. They came, in the main, from the Palatinate; the minority hailed from Württemberg, Bavaria, the lower Rhine, Alsace, Saxony and German Switzerland. The language they brought with them was thus High German; it came to be called Dutch by the American colonists of the time because the immigrants themselves called it Deitsch (=Deutsch), and because Dutch was then (and has remained, to some extent, ever since) a generic American term to designate all the Germanic peoples and languages. This misuse of Dutch is frequently ascribed to the fact that the colonists were very familiar with the true Dutch in New York, but as a matter of fact Dutch was commonly used in place of German by the English of the seventeenth century and the colonists simply brought the term with them and preserved it as they preserved many other English archaisms. The Pennsylvania Germans themselves often used Pennsylvania Dutch in place of Pennsylvania German.

1

Their dialect has produced an extensive literature and has been studied and described at length by competent philologians; in consequence there is no need to deal with it here at any length. 5 Excellent specimens of it are to be found in “Harbaugh’s Harfe: Gedichte in Pennsylvanisch-Deutscher Mundart.” 6 That part of it which remains genuinely German shows a change of a to o, as in jor for jahr; of the diphthong ö to a long e, as in bees for böse, and of the diphthongs ei and äu to the neutral e, as in bem for bäume. Most of the German compound consonants are changed to simple consonants, and there is a general decay of inflections. But the chief mark of the dialect is its very extensive adoption of English loan words. Harbaugh, in his vocabulary, lists some characteristic examples, e. g., affis from office, altfäschen from old-fashioned, beseid from beside, boghie from buggy, bortsch from porch, diehlings from dealings, Dschäck from Jack, dscheneral-’leckschen from general-election, dschent’lleit (=gentle leut) from gentlemen, Dschim from Jim, dschuryman from juryman, ebaut from about, ennihau from anyhow, gehm from game, kunschtabler from constable, lofletters from love-letters, tornpeik from turnpike and ’xäktly from exactly. Many English words have been taken in and inflected in the German manner, e.g., gedscheest (=ge±chased), gedschumpt (ge±jumped) and gepliescht (=ge±pleased). The vulgar American pronunciation often shows itself, as in heist for hoist and krick for creek. An illuminating brief specimen of the language is to be found in the sub-title of E. H. Rauch’s “Pennsylvania Dutch Handbook”: 7 “En booch for inschtructa.” Here we see the German indefinite article decayed to en, the spelling of buch made to conform to English usage, für abandoned for for, and a purely English word, instruction, boldly adopted and naturalized. Some astounding examples of Pennsylvania German are to be found in the copious humorous literature of the dialect; e.g., “Mein stallion hat über die fenz geschumpt and dem nachbar sein whiet abscheulich gedämätscht.” (My stallion jumped over the fence, and horribly damaged my neighbor’s wheat.) Such phrases as “Es giebt gar kein use” and “Ich kann es nicht ständen” are very common on Pennsylvania German lips. Of late, with the improvement in communications, the dialect shows signs of disappearing. The younger Pennsylvania Germans learn English in school, read English newspapers, and soon forget their native patois. But so recently as the eighties of the last century, two hundred years after the coming of the first German settlers, there were thousands of their descendants in Pennsylvania who could scarcely speak English at all.

2

An interesting variant dialect is to be found in the Valley of Virginia, though it is fast dying out. It is an offshoot of Pennsylvania German, and shows even greater philological decay. The genitive ending has been dropped and possession is expressed by various syntactical devices, e.g., der mann sei buch, dem mann sei buch or am mann sei buch. The cases of the nouns do not vary in form, adjectives are seldom inflected, and only two tenses of the verbs remain, the present and the perfect, e.g., ich geh and ich bin gange. The indefinite article, en in Pennsylvania German, has been worn away to a simp&pgr;’n. The definite article has been preserved, but das has changed to des. It is declined as follows:

Nom.

der
die
des-’s
die

Dat.

dem-’m
der
dem-’m
dene

Acc.

den-der
die
des-’s
die

3

In brief, this Valley German is a language in the last stages of decay. The only persons speaking it are a few remote country-folk and they have reduced it to its elements: even the use of polite pronouns, preserved in Pennsylvania German and so important in true German, has been abandoned. It has been competently investigated and described by H. M. Hays, 8 from whom I borrow the following specimen of it:

’S war wimol ei Mätel, wu ihr Liebling fat in der Grieg is, un’ is dot gmacht wure. Sie hut sich so ang gedrauert un’ hut ksat: “O wann ich ihn just noch eimol sehne könnt!” Ei Ovet is sie an ’n Partie gange, aver es war ken Freud dat für sie. Sie hut gwtünscht, ihre Lieve war dat au. Wie freundlich sie sei hätt könne! Sie is ’naus in den Garde gange, un’ war allei im Monlicht khockt. Kschwind hut sie ’n Reiter höre komme. ’S war ihre Lieve ufm weisse Gaul. Er hut ken Wat ksat, æver hut sie uf den Gaul hinner sich gnomme, un’ is fatgritte….

4

The German spoken elsewhere in the United States is much less decayed. The hard effort of German schoolmasters and the extensive literature that it has produced 9 tend to keep it relatively pure, even from English influences. But a great many loan-words have nevertheless got into it, and it shows some phenomena that instantly arrest the attention of a German arriving from Germany, for example, the use of gleiche for to like, by false analogy from gleich (=like, similar). The German encountered in German newspapers printed in the United States is often very bad, but this is simply due to the that much of it is written by uneducated men. Nothing approaching a general decay is visible in it; in intent, at least, it is always good High German.

5

Note 5.  See the Bibliography, p. 447, and especially the works of Haldeman, Horne, Learned, Lins, Miller and Rauch. [back]

Note 6.  Philadelphia, 1874; rev. ed., 1902. [back]

Note 7.  Mauch Chunk, Pa., 1879. [back]

Note 8.  On the German Dialect Spoken in the Valley of Virginia, Dialect Notes, vol. iii, p. 263. [back]

Note 9.  Of. Non-English Writings: I, German, by A. B. Faust, in the Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. iv, p. 572 ff. There is a valuable bibliography appended, p. 813 ff. [back]

The French spoken in Canada has been so extensively studied and literature is so accessible that it is scarcely necessary to describe it at any length. A very extensive investigation of it was undertaken by the late Dr. A. M. Elliott, of the Johns Hopkins University; his conclusions may be found in the American Journal of Philology. 10 Since then researches into its history, phonology and morphology have been made by James Geddes, Jr., 11 A. F. Chamberlain 12 and other competent philologists, and there has grown up an extensive literature by native, French-speaking Canadians. 13 Dr. Elliott says that alarmed purists predicted so long ago as 1817 that the French of Canada would be completely obliterated by English, and this fear still shows itself in all discussions of the subject by French-Canadians But the language continues as the daily speech of perhaps 1,500,000 persons, and still has an official status, and is often heard in the Dominion Parliament. “The effect of English on the French,” says Elliott, “has been immeasurably greater than that of French on the English…. The French has made use of all the productive means—suffixes, prefixes—at its disposal to incorporate the English vocables in its word-supply,… and to adapt them by a skilful use of its inflectional apparatus to all the requirements of a rigid grammatical system.” On one page of N. E. Dionne’s lexicon I find the following loan-words from English: barkeeper, bargaine (used in place of marché), bar-room, bull’s-eye, buckwheat, buggy, buck-board, bugle, bully, bum, business, bus. As will be observed, a large proportion of them are not really English at all, but American. Many other Americanisms have got into the language, e. g., gang (in the political sense), greenback, ice-cream, elevateur, knickerbockers, trolley-car, sweater, swell (as an adjective of all work), caucus, lofeur (=loafer, a loan-word originally German) and lager, another. “Comme tu es swell ce matin, vas-tu aux noces?” —this is now excellent Canadian French. So is gologne (=go’long). Louvigny de Montigny, in “La Langue Française au Canada,” complains bitterly that American words and phrases are relentlessly driving out French words and phrases, even when the latter are quite as clear and convenient. Thus, un patron, throughout French Canada, is now un boss, pétrole is I’huile de charbon (=coal-oil), une bonne ÿ; tout faire is une servante générale, and un article d’occasion is un article de seconde main!

1

The French dialect spoken by the Creoles and their colored retainers in Louisiana has been extensively studied, 14 as has the dialect of the French West Indies. Its principal characters must be familiar to every reader of the stories of Lafcadio Hearn, George W. Cable, Kate Chopin and Grace Elizabeth King. It produced a large oralliterature, chiefly in the form of songs, during the days of actual French rule in Louisiana, and some of this literature is still preserved, though the French-speaking population of the state is rapidly diminishing, and New Orleans is now a thoroughly American city. But the written literature of the Creoles was almost wholly in standard French. Curiously enough, nearly the whole of it was produced, not during the days of French rule, but after the American occupation in 1803. “It was not until after the War of 1812,” says a recent historian of it, 15 “that letters really flourished in French Louisiana. The contentment and prosperity that filled the forty years between 1820 and 1860 encouraged the growth of a vigorous and in some respects a native literature, comprising plays, novels, and poems.” The chief dramatists of the period were Placide Canonge, A. Lussan, Oscar Dugué, Le Blanc de Villeneufve, P. Pérennes and Charles Testut; today all their works are dead, and they themselves are but names. Testut was also a poet and novelist; other novelists were Canonge, Alfred Mercier, Alexandre Barde, Adrien Rouquette, Jacques de Roquigny and Charles Lamaître. The principal poets were Dominique Rouquette, Tullius Saint-Céran, Constant Lepouzé, Felix de Courmont, Alexandre Latil, A. Lussan, and Armand Lanusse. But the most competent of all the Creole authors was Charles E. A. Gayerré (1805-95), who was at once historian, dramatist and novelist. Today the Creole literature is practically extinct. A few poets and essayists are still at work, but they are of no importance.

2

Note 10.  Vol. vi, p. 135; vol. vii, p. 141; vol. vii, p. 135 and p. 338; vol. x, p. 133. [back]

Note 11.  Mr. Geddes’ studies have been chiefly published in Germany. His Study of an Acadian-French Dialect Spoken on the North Shore of the Baie-des-Chaleurs; Halle, 1908, contains an exhaustive bibliography. [back]

Note 12.  He printed an article on Dialect Research in Canada in Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 43. A bibliography is added. [back]

Note 13.  For example: La Langue Française au Canada, by Louvigny de Montigny; Ottawa, 1916, and Le Parler Populaire des Canadiens Français; by N. E. Dionne; Quebee, 1909. The latter is a lexicon running to 671 pages. [back]

Note 14.  For example, by J. A. Harrison, in The Creole Patois of Louisiana, American Journal of Philology, vol. iii, p. 285 ff.; by Alcée Fortier, in The French Language in Louisiana and the Negro French Dialect; New Orleans, n. d.; Acadians of Louisiana and Their Dialect; New Orleans, 1891, and A Few Words About the Creoles of Louisiana; Baton Rouge, 1892; and by H. Schuchardt, in Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Englischen Kreolisch, Englische Studien, vol. xii, p. 470; vol. xiii, p. 158, and vol. xv, p. 286. [back]

Note 15.  Edward J. Fortier, in the Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. iv, p. 591. A bibliography is appended, p. 820 ff. [back]

The mutations of Spanish in Spanish-America have been very extensively studied by Spanish-American philologists, and there are separate monographs on Cubanisms, Mexicanisms, Porto Ricanisms, Venezuelanisms, Argentinisms, Peruanisms, Chileanisms, Costa Ricanisms and Honduranisms, and even extensive discussions of the dialects of single cities, notably Buenos Ayres and the City of Mexico. 16 The influence of the Indian language has been especially studied. 17 But the only extensive treatise upon the Spanish spoken in the United States is a series of four papers by Dr. Aurelio M. Espinosa, of Leland Stanford, Jr., University, in the Revue de Dialectologie Romane under the general title of “Studies in New Mexican Spanish.” 18 These papers, however, are of such excellence that they almost exhaust the subject. The first two deal with the phonology of the dialect and the last two with its morphology. Dr. Espinosa, who was a professor in the University of New Mexico for eight years, reports that the Spanish of the Southwest in its general characters, shows a curious parallel with American English. There is the same decay of grammatical niceties —the conjugations of the verb, for example, are reduced to two—the same great hospitality to loan-words, the same leaning toward a picturesque vividness, and the same preservation of words and phrases that have become archaic in the standard language. “It is a source of delight to the student of Spanish philology,” he says, “to hear daily from the mouths of New Mexicans such words as agora, ansi, naidien, trujo, escrebir, adrede”—all archaic Castilian forms, and corresponding exactly to the fox-fire, homespun, andiron, ragamuffin, fall (for autumn), flapjack and cesspool that are preserved in American. They are survivors, in the main, of the Castilian Spanish of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though some of them come from other Spanish dialects. Castilian has changed very much since that time, as standard English has changed; it is probable, indeed, that a Castilian of the year 1525, coming back to life today, would understand a New Mexican far more readily than he would understand a Spaniard, just as an Englishman of 1630 would understand a Kentucky mountaineer more readily than he would understand a Londoner.

1

New Mexico has been in the possession of the United States since 1846, and so it is natural to find its Spanish corrupted by American influences, especially in the vocabulary. Of the 1,400 words that Dr. Espinosa chooses for remark, 300 are English, 75 are Nahuatl, 10 come from the Indian languages of the Southwest, and 15 are of doubtful or unknown origin; the rest are pure Spanish, chiefly archaic. As in the case of the Pennsylvania Germans, the French Canadians and the Scandinavians of the Northwest, the Spanishspeaking people of New Mexico have borrowed the American names of all objects of peculiarly American character, e. g., besbol (=baseball), grimbaque (=greenback), aiscrim (=ice-cream), quiande (=candy), fayaman (=fireman), otemil (=oatmeal), piquenic (=picnic), lonchi (=lunch). Most of them have been modified to bring them into accord with Spanish speech-habits. For example, all explosive endings are toned down by suffixes, e. g., lonchi for lunch. So with many r-endings, e.g., blofero for bluffer. And sibilants at the beginning of words are shaded by prefixes, e. g., esteque for steak and espechi for speech. Not only words have been taken in, but also many phrases, though most of the latter are converted into simple words, e. g., olraite (=all right), jaitun (=hightoned), jamachi (=how much), sarape (=shut up), enejau (=anyhow). Dr. Espinosa’s study is a model of what such an inquiry should be. I cordially commend it to all students of dialect.

2

English has also greatly influenced the Spanish spoken in Spanish America proper, especially in Mexico, Cuba, Porto Rico and in the seaports of South America. Sandwich and club, though they are not used by the Spaniards, are quite good Mexican. Bluffer is quite as familiar in Cuban Spanish as it is in New Mexican Spanish, though in Cuba it has become blofista instead of blofero. I take the following from El Mundo, one of the Havana newspapers, of June 28, 1920:

New York, junio 27.—Por un sensacional batting rally, en el octavo inning en el que los Yankees dieron seis hits incluyendo un triple de Ruth y tubeyes de Ward y Meusel, gano el New York el match de esta tarde, pues hizo cinco carreras en ese episodio, venciendo 7 a 5. Mays el pitcher de los locales autuó bien, con excepcion del cuarto round, cuando Vitt le dió un home run con dos en bases.

3

Nor are such words any longer exotic; the Cubans have adopted the terminology with the game, and begin to use it figuratively as the Americans use it. Along the east coast of South America the everyday speech of the people is full of Americanisms, and they enter very largely into the fashionable slang of the upper classes. Cocktail, dinner-dance, one-step, fox-trot, sweater, kimono, high-ball, ginger-ale and sundae are in constant use, and most of them are pronounced correctly, though sundae is transformed into soondÿ;e. Bombo (=boom) is used by all the politicians, and so are plataforma (=platform), mitin (=meeting), alarmista, big-stick, damphool and various forms of to bluff. The American auto has been naturalized, and so has ice-cream, but in the form of milkcream, pronounced milclee by the lower orders. The boss of a train down there is the conductor del tren; a commuter is a commutador; switch is used both in its American railroad sense and to indicate the electrical device; slip, dock and wharf (the last pronounced guÿ;fay) are in daily use; so is socket (electrical), though it is pronounced sokÿ;ytay; so are poker and many of the terms appertaining to the game. The South Americans use just in the American way, as in justamente a (or en) tiempo (=just in time). They are very fond of good-bye and go to hell. They have translated the verb phrase, to water stocks, into aguar las acciones. The American white elephant has become el elefanto blanco. In Cuba the watermelon—patilla or sandía, in Spanish—is the mélon-de-agua. Just as FrenchCanadian has borrowed Americanisms that are loan-words from other immigrant tongues, e. g., bum and loafer from the German, so some of the South American dialects have borrowed rapidas (=rapids), and kimono, the first brought into American from the French and the second from the Japanese. 19

4

Note 16.  See the Bibliography—Non-English Languages in America: Spanish—under Abeille, Arons, Ferraz, Maspero, Armengal y Valenzuela, Malaret, Calanno, Pichardo, Rincón, Ramos y Duarte, Sanchez and Toro y Gisbert. [back]

Note 17.  See Ferraz, Armengal y Valenzuela, Robelo, Sanchez and Espinosa in the Bibliography. [back]

Note 18.  Tome i, p. 157 and p. 269; tome iii, p. 251; tome iv, p. 241. [back]

Note 19.  For most of these observations I am indebted to Dr. A. Z. López-Penha, the distinguished Colombian poet and critic. [back]

Yiddish, even more than American, is a lady of easy virtue among the languages. Basically, a medieval High German, it has become so overladen with Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian and even Hungarian words that it is unintelligible to Germans. 20 Transported to the United States, it has taken in so many English words and phrases, and particularly so many Americanisms, that it is now nearly unintelligible, as spoken in the big cities of the East, to recent arrivals from Russia and Poland. Such typical Americanisms as sky-scraper, loan-shark, graft, bluffer, faker, boodler, gangster, crook, guy, kike, piker, squealer, bum, cadet, boom, bunch, pants, vest, loafer, jumper, stoop, saleslady, ice-box, and raise are quite as good Yiddish as they are American. For all the objects and acts of everyday life the East Side Jews commonly use English terms, e. g., boy, chair, window, carpet, floor, dress, hat, watch, ceiling, consumption, property, trouble, bother, match, change, party, birthday, picture, paper (only in the sense of newspaper), gambler, show, hall, kitchen, store, bedroom, key, mantelpiece, closet, lounge, broom, table-cloth, paint, landlord, fellow, tenant, bargain, sale, haircut, razor, basket, school, scholar, teacher, baby, mustache, butcher, grocery, dinner, street and walk. In the factories there is the same universal use of shop, wages, foreman, boss, sleeve, collar, cuff, button, cotton, thimble, needle, machine, pocket, remnant, sample, etc., even by the most recent immigrants. Many of these words have quite crowded out the corresponding Yiddish terms, so that the latter are seldom heard. For example, ingle, meaning boy (=Ger. jüngling), has been wholly obliterated by the English word. A Jewish immigrant almost invariably refers to his son as his boy, though strangely enough he calls his daughter his meidel. “Die boys mitdie meidlach haben a good time” is excellent American Yiddish. In the same way fenster has been completely displaced by window, though tür (=door) has been left intact. Tisch (=table) also remains, but chair is always used, probably because few of the Jews had chairs in the old country. There the beinkel, a bench without a back, was in use; chairs were only for the well-to-do. Floor has apparently prevailed because no invariable corresponding word was employed at home: in various parts of Russia and Poland a floor is a dill, a podlogé, or a bricke. So with ceiling. There were six different words for it.

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Yiddish inflections have been fastened upon most of these loanwords. Thus, “er hat ihm abgefaked” is “he cheated him,” zubumt is the American gone to the bad, fix’n is to fix, usen is to use, and so on. The feminine and diminutive suffix -ké is often added to nouns. Thus bluffer gives rise to blufferké (=hypocrite), and one also notes dresské, hatké, watchké and bummerké. “Oi! is sie a blufferké!” is good American Yiddish for “isn’t she a hypocrite!” The suffix -nick, signifying agency, is also freely applied. Allrightnick means an upstart, an offensive boaster, one of whom his fellows would say “He is all right” with a sneer. Similarly, consumptionick means a victim of tuberculosis. Other suffixes are -chick and -ige, the first exemplified in boychick, a diminutive of boy, and the second in next-doorige, meaning the woman next-door, an important person in ghetto social life. Some of the loan-words, of course, undergo changes on Yiddish-speaking lips. Thus landlord becomes lendler, certificate (a pretty case of Hobson-Jobson!) becomes stiff-ticket, lounge becomes lunch, tenant becomes tenner, and whiskers loses its final s. “Wie gefällt dir sein whisker?” (=how do you like his beard?) is good Yiddish, ironically intended. Fellow, of course, changes to the American fella or feller, as in “Rosie hat schon a fella” (=Rosie has got a fella, i. e., a sweetheart). Show, in the sense of chance, is used constantly, as in “git imh a Show, (=give him a chance). Bod boy is adopted bodily, as in “er is a bad boy.” To shut up is inflected as one word, as in “er hat nit gewolt shutup’n” (=he wouldn’t shut up). To catch is used in the sense of to obtain, as in “catch’n a gmilath chesed” (=to raise a loan). Here, by the way, gmilath chesed is excellent Biblical Hebrew. To bluff, unchanged in form, takes on the new meaning of to lie: a bluffer is a liar. Scores of American phrases are in constant use, among them, all right, never mind, I bet you, no sir and I’ll fix you. It is curious to note that sure Mike, borrowed by the American vulgate from Irish English, has gone over into American Yiddish. Finally, to make an end, here are two complete American Yiddish sentences: “Sie wet clean’n die rooms, scrub’n dem floor, wash’n die windows, dress’n dem boy und gehn in butcher-store und in grocery. Dernoch vet sie machen dinner und gehn in street für a walk.” 21

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For some time past there has been an active movement among the New York Jews for the purification of Yiddish. This movement is an offshoot of Zionism, and has resulted in the establishment of a number of Yiddish schools. Its adherents do not propose, of course, that English be abandoned, but simply that the two languages be kept separate, and that Jewish children be taught Yiddish as well as English. The Yiddishists insist that it is more dignified to say a gooten tog than good-bye, and billet instead of ticket. But the movement makes very poor progress. “The Americanisms absorbed by the Yiddish of this country,” says Abraham Cahan, “have come to stay. To hear one say ‘Ich hob a billet für heitige vorschtellung’ would be as jarring to the average East Side woman, no matter how illiterate and ignorant she might be, as the intrusion of a bit of Chinese in her daily speech.”

3

Yiddish, as everyone knows, has produced a very extensive literature during the past two generations; it is, indeed, so large and so important that I can do no more than refer to it here. 22 Much of it has come from Jewish authors living in New York. In their work, and particularly their work for the stage, there is extensive and brilliant evidence of the extent to which American English has influenced the language.

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Note 20.  During the war I visited Lithuania and Livonia while they were occupied by the Germans. The latter could not understand the Yiddish of the native Jews, but there were in almost every town a few Jews who had been to the United States and could speak English, and these were employed as interpreters. Among the Germans, of course, there were many English-speaking officers. [back]

Note 21.  I am indebted throughout this section to Mr. Abraham Cahan, editor of the leading Yiddish daily in New York, and a distinguished writer in both Yiddish and English. [back]

Note 22.  Cf. the article on Yiddish, by Nathaniel Buchwald, in the Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. iv, p. 598, and the bibliography following, p. 822 ff. [back]

Rémy de Gourmont, the French critic, was the first to call attention to the picturesqueness of the Americanized Italian spoken by Italians in the United States; 23 unluckily his appreciation of its qualities has not been shared by American Romance scholars. The literature dealing with it, in fact, is confined to one capital study by Dr. Arthur Livingston, 24 formerly of Columbia University, who says that other “American philologists have curiously disdained it.” Meanwhile, it has begun to produce, like Yiddish, an extensive literature, ranging in character and quality from such eloquent pieces as Giovanni Pascoli’s “Italy” to the Rabelaisian trifles of Carlo Ferrazzano. Ferrazzano shines in the composition of macchiette coloniali for the cheap Italian theatres in New York. The macchietta coloniale is an Americanized variety of the Neapolitan macchietta, which Dr. Livingston describes as “a character-sketch—etymologically, a character-‘daub’—most often constructed on rigorous canons of ‘ingenuity’: there must be a literal meaning, accompanied by a double sense, which in the nature of the tradition, inclines to be pornographic.” The macchietta was brought to New York by Edoardo Migliacci (Farfariello), purged of its purely Neapolitan materials, and so adapted to the comprehension of Italians from other parts of Italy. Farfariello wrote fully five hundred macchiette and Ferrazzano has probably written as many more; many of the latter have been printed. They are commonly in verse, with now and then a descent to prose. I take from Dr. Livingston’s study a specimen of the latter:

Ne sera dentro na barra americana dove il patrone era americano, lo visco era americano, la birra era americana, ce steva na ghenga de loffari tutti americani: solo io non ero americano; quanno a tutto nu mumento me mettono mmezzo e me dicettono: Alò spaghetti; iu mericano men? No! no! mi Italy men! Iu blacco enze. No, no! Iu laico chistu contri. No, no! Mi laico mio contry! Mi laico Italy! A questa punto me chiavaieno lo primo fait! “Dice: Orré for America!” Io tuosto: Orré for Italy! Un ato fait. “Dice: Orré for America!” Orré for Italy! N’ato fait e n ato fait, fino a che me facetteno addurmentare; ma però, orré for America nun o dicette!

Quanno me scietaie, me trovaie ncoppa lu marciepiedi cu nu pulizio vicino che diceva; Ghiroppe bomma! Io ancora stunato alluccaie: America nun gudde! Orré for Italy! Sapete li pulizio che facette? Mi arrestò!

Quanno fu la mattina, lu giorge mi dicette: Wazzo maro laste naite? Io risponette: No tocche nglese! “No? Tenne dollari.” E quello porco dello giorge nun scherzava, perché le diece pezze se le pigliaie!…

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Most of the Americanisms are obvious: barra for bar, visco for whisky, blacco enze for black-hand, laico for like, chistu for this, contri for country, fait for fight (it is also used for punch, as in chiaver nu fair, give a punch, and nato fait, another punch), loffari for loafers, ghiroppe for get up, bomma for bum, pulizio for police, nun gudde for no good, orré for hurray, giorge for judge, wazzo maro for what’s the matter, laste for last, naite for night, toccho for talk, tenne for ten, dollari for dollars. All of the macchiette coloniali are gaudy with the same sort of loan-words; one of the best of them, says Dr. Livingston, is Farfariello’s “A lingua ’nglese,” which is devoted almost wholly to humorous attempts to represent English words as ignorant Italians hear and use them.

2

As in the case of Yiddish, there is a movement among Italian intellectuals in America, and especially in New York, for the restoration of a purer Italian. These purists are careful to use the sotterraneo to take them nell bassa città. But the great majority prefer il subway or the tonno (=tunnel) to take them tantane (=downtown). All the common objects of life tend similarly to acquire names borrowed from American English, sometimes bodily and sometimes by translation. In the main, these loan-words are given Italianized forms and inflected in a more or less correct Italian manner. Dr. Livingston presents a number of interesting examples from the advertising columns of an Italian newspaper in New York. Pressers are pressatori, operators are operatori, machines are mascine, carpenters are carpentieri, presser’s halpers are sottopressatori, a store is a storo, board is bordo, boarders are abbordato, bushelmen are buscellatori, customs-coats are cotti da costume, men’s coats are cotti da uomo. “Originally,” he says, “the policy of this paper was to translate, in correct form, the Italian copy. The practice had to be abandoned because poorer results were obtained from advertisements restored to the literary tongue.” In other words, the average Italian in New York now understands American-Italian better than he understands the standard language of his country.

3

The newly arrived Italian quickly picks up the Americanized vocabulary. Almost at once he calls the man in charge of his ghenga (=gang) his bosso, and talks of his work in the indiccio (=ditch) and with the sciabola (=shovel), picco (=pick) and stim-sciabola (=steam-shovel). He buys sechenze (=second-hand) clothes, works on the tracca (=track), buys food at the grosseria (=grocery) or marchetto (=market,) eats pinozze (=peanuts,) rides on the livetta (=elevated,) rushes a grollo (=growler) for near-beer, gets on good terms with the barritenne (=bartender,) and speaks of the auschieppe (=housekeeper) of his boarding-house, denounces idlers as loffari (=loafers,) joins a globbo (=club,) gets himself a ghella (=girl,) and is her falò (=fellow.) Some of the new words he acquires are extremely curious, e. g.,canabuldogga (=bulldog), pipe del gasso (=gas-pipe), coppetane (=’ncuop+town=uptown), fruttistenne (=fruit-stand), sanemagogna (=son-of-agun), mezzo-barrista (=half-time bartender.) Several quite new words, unknown to Americans, have been made of American materials and added to the vocabulary. An example is afforded by temeniollo, signifying a very large glass of beer. Dr. Livingston says that it comes from Tammany Hall! Another Italian-American invention is flabussce, used as an interjection to indicate the extreme of pessimism. It comes from Flatbush, where the principal Italian cemetery is situated.

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The large emigration of Italians during the past half dozen years has transported a number of Americanisms to Italy. Bomma (=bum) is now a familiar word in Naples: a strange wandering, indeed, for the original bum was German. So is schidù (=skiddoo.) So is briccoliere (=bricklayer.) 25

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Note 23.  In L’Esthétique de la Langue Française; Paris, 1899. [back]

Note 24.  La Merica Sanemagogna, Romanic Review, vol. ix, no. 2, p. 206 ff. [back]

Note 25.  In addition to my indebtedness to Dr. Livingston, I owe thanks for assistance to Prof. A. Arbib Costa, of the College of the City of New York, and to Mr. Alfred Boni, editor of Il Progresso Italo-Americano. [back]

Here are some characteristic specimens of the Dano-Norwegian spoken by Norwegian settlers in Minnesota, as given by Dr. Nils Flaten, of Northfield, Minn.: 26

Mrs. Olsen va aafel bisi idag; hun maatte béke kék. (Mrs. Olsen was awfully busy today; she had to bake cake.)

Den spattute stiren braekka sig ut av pastre aa r&odblac;nna langt ind i fila aa je va ikke aebel te aa kaetsche’n; men saa sigga je doggen min paa’n. (The spotted steer broke out of the pasture and ran far into the field before I was able to catch him; but then I sicked my dog at him.)

Reileaaden ha muva schappa sine. (The railroad has moved its shops.)

Je kunde ikke faa resa saa mye kaes at je fik betalt morgesen i farmen min. (I couldn’t raise enough cash to pay the mortgage on my farm.)

Det meka ingen difrens. (That makes no difference.)

Det k&odblac;tta ingen figger. (That cuts no figure.)

Hos’n fila du? puddi gud. (How do you feel? Pretty good.)

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The words in italics would be unintelligible to a recent arrival from Norway; they are all American loan-words. “Such words,” says Dr. Flaten, “are often mutilated beyond recognition by an American…. In the case of many words the younger generation cannot tell whether they are English or Norse. I was ten years old before I found that such words as paatikkel (=particular), staebel (=stable), fens (=fence) were not Norse, but mutilated English. I had often wondered that poleit, trubbel, s&odblac;pperéter were so much like the English words polite, trouble, separator. So common is this practise of borrowing that no English word is refused admittance into this vocabulary provided it can stand the treatment it is apt to get. Some words, indeed, are used without any appreciable difference in pronunciation, but more generally the root, or stem, is taken and Norse inflections are added as required by the rules of the language.” Sometimes the English loan-word and a corresponding Norwegian word exist side by side, but in such cases, according to Dr. George T. Flom, 27 “there is a prevalent and growing tendency” to drop the latter, save in the event that it acquires a special meaning. “Very often in such cases,” continues Dr. Flom, “the English word is shorter and easier to pronounce or the Norse equivalent is a purely literary word—that is, does not actually exist in the dialect of the settlers…. In the considerable number of cases where the loan-word has an exact equivalent in the Norse dialect it is often very difficult to determine the reason for the loan, though it would be safe to say that it is frequently due simply to a desire on the part of the speaker to use English words, a thing that becomes very pronounced in the jargon that is sometimes heard.”

2

Dr. Flaten exhibits the following declension of a typical loanword, swindler. In Dano-Norwegian there is no letter w, and the suffix of agency is not -er but -ar; so the word becomes svindlar. It is regarded as masculine and declined thus:

Singular

Indefinite

Definite

Nom.

ein svindlar
svindlarn

Gen.

aat svindlar
aat svindlaré

Dat.

(te) ein svindlar

(te) svindlaré

Acc.

ein svindlar
svindlarn

Plural

Nom.

noko svindlara
svindlaradn

Gen.

aat noko svindlara
aat svindlaro

Dat.

(te) noko svindlara

(te) svindlaro

Acc.

noko svindlara
svindlaradn

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The vocabularies of Drs. Flaten and Flom show a large number of such substitutions of English (including some thoroughly American) words. The Dano-Norwegian öl is abandoned for the English beer, which becomes bir. Tonde succumbs to baerel, barel or baril (=barrel), frokost to brekkfaest (=breakfast), forsikring to inschurings (=insurance,) 28 stald to staebel (=stable), skat to taex (=tax,) and so on. The verbs yield in the same way: vaeljuéte (=valuate), titsche (teach), Katte (cut), Klém (claim), savére (survey), refjuse (refuse.) And the adjectives: plén (plain), jel&odblac;s (jealous), kjokfuldt (chock-full), Krésé (crazy), aebel (able), Klir (clear), pjur (pure), pur (poor). And the adverbs and adverbial phrases: isé (easy), reit evé (right away), aept to (apt to), allreit (all right). Dr. Flaten lists some extremely grotesque compound words, e. g., nekk-t&odblac;i (necktie), Kjaens-bogg (chinch-bug), hospaar (horse-power), gitte long (get along), hardvaer-staar (hardware-store), staets-praessen (state’s-prison), traevling-maen (traveling-man), uxe-jogg (yoke of oxen), stim-baat (steamboat). Pure Americanisms are not infrequent, e. g., b&odblac;sta (busted), bés-baal (baseball), boggé (buggy), dipo (depot), fraimhus (frame-house), jukre (to euchre), kaemp-mid’n (camp-meeting), kjors (chores), magis (moccasin), malasi (molasses), munke-rins (monkey-wrench), raad-bas (road-boss), sjante (shanty), s&odblac;rpreisparti (surprise-party), strit-kar (street-car), tru trin (through train). The decayed American adverb is boldly absorbed, as in han file baed (=he feels bad). “That this lingo,” says Dr. Flaten, “will ever become a dialect of like importance with the Pennsylvania Dutch is hardly possible…. The Norwegians are among those of our foreign-born citizens most willing to part with their mother tongue.” But meanwhile it is spoken by probably half a million of them, and it will linger in isolated farming regions for years.

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Note 26.  Notes on American-Norwegian, with a Vocabulary, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, p. 115 ff. [back]

Note 27.  English Elements in the Norse Dialects of Utica, Wisconsin, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, p. 257 ff. [back]

Note 28.  Connoisseurs will recall Abe Potash’s insurings. What we have here is the substitution of a familiar suffix for one of somewhat similar sound but much less familiar—a frequent cause of phonetic decay. [back]

A useful study of American-Swedish is to be found in “Vårt Språk,” by Vilhelm Berger, 29 editor of the Swedish semi-weekly, Nordstjernan, published in New York. In his preface to his little book Mr. Berger mentions two previous essays upon the same subject: “Det Svenske Språket in Amerika,” by Rector Gustav Andreen, of Rock Island, Ill., and “Engelskans Inflytande på Svenska Språket in Amerika,” by Dr. E. A. Zetterstrand, but I have been unable to gain access to either. Mr. Berger says that the Swedes who comes to America quickly purge their speech of the Swedish terms indicating the ordinary political, social and business relations and adopt the American terms bodily. Thus, borgmästere is displaced by mayor, länsman by sheriff, häradsskrifvare by countyclerk, centraluppvärmning med ånga by steam-heat, and ananas by pineapple, the Swedish measurements give way to mile, inch, pound, acre, etc., and there is an immediate adoption of such characteristic Americanisms as graft, trust, ring, janitor, surprise-party, bay-window, bluff, commencement (college), homestead, buggy and pull. Loan-words taken into American from other immigrant languages go with the purely English terms, e. g., luffa (=to loaf, from the German) and vigilans (=vigilantes, from the Spanish). Many of these borrowings are adapted to Swedish spelling, and so sidewalk becomes sajdoak, street becomes strit, fight becomes fajt, business becomes bissness, and housecleaning becomes husklining. But even more important is the influence that American English has upon the vocabulary that remains genuinely Swedish; when words are not borrowed bodily they often change the form of familiar Swedish words. Thus sängkammare (=bedroom) is abandoned for bäddrum, husållsgöromål (=housework) gives way to husarbete, kabeltelegram to kabelgram, brandsoldat (=fireman) to brandman, regnby (=rainstorm) to regnstorm, brekfort (=postcard) to postkort, and beställa (=order) to ordra. The Swedish-American no longer speaks of frihet; instead he uses fridom, an obvious offspring of freedom. His wife abandons the hattnål for the hattpinne. He acquires a hemadress (=home address) in place of his former bostadsadress. Instead of kyrkogård (=churchyard) he uses grafgård (=graveyard). For godståg (=goods-train) he substitutes frakttåg (=freight-train). In place of words with roots that are Teutonic he devises words with roots that have been taken into English from the Latin, the Greek or the French, e.g., investigera, krusad, minoritetsrapport, officerare, audiens, affår, exkursion, evangelist, hospital, liga (=league), residens, sympati.

1

This influence of American extends to grammar and syntax. The inflections of Swedish tend to fall off in the United States, as the inflections of German have fallen off among the Pennsylvania Germans. And the Americanized Swede gradually acquires a habit of putting his sentences together English-fashion. At home he would say Bröderna Anderson, just as the German would say Gebr&umacr;der Anderson, but in America he says Anderson Bröderna. In Sweden all over is öfverallt; in America, following the American construction, it becomes allt öfver. Mina vänner (=my friend) is Americanized into en vän af mina (=a friend of mine). Tid efter annan (literally, time after another) becomes från tid till tid (=from time to time). The American verb to take drags its Swedish relative, taga, into strange places, as in taga kallt (=to take cold), taga nöje i (=to take pleasure in), taga fördel af (=to take advantage of), and taga tåget (=to take a train). The thoroughly American use of right is imitated by a similar use of its equivalent, rätt, as in rätt af (=right off), rätt iväg (=right away) and rätt intill (=right next to). The Swede at home says här i landet (=here in this country); in America he says i det här landet (=in this here country). All right, well and other such American counter-words he adopts instantly, just as he adopts hell and damn. He exiles the preposition, imitating the American vulgate, to the end of the sentence. He begins to use the Swedish af precisely as if it were the English of, and i as if it were in. After a few years his Swedish is so heavy with American loan-words and American idioms that it is almost unintelligible to his brother recently arrived from home.

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Note 29.  Rock Island, Ill., 1912. [back]

The Dutch language exists in two forms in the United States, both differentiated from the original Dutch of Holland by the influence of American-English. The first is the so-called Jersey, or Bergen County Dutch, which is spoken by the descendants of seventeenth century Dutch settlers in Bergen and Passaic counties, New Jersey. In New York, as everyone knows, Dutch completely disappeared many years ago, but in these Jersey counties it still survives, though apparently obsolescent, and is spoken by many persons who are not of Dutch blood, including a few negroes. The second variety of Americanized Dutch is spoken by more recent immigrants, chiefly in Michigan. There is little if any communication between the two dialects.

1

An excellent short study of Jersey Dutch was published by Dr. J. Dyneley Prince in 1910; 30 it remains the only one in print. The dialect, says Dr. Prince, “was originally the South Holland or Flemish language, which, in the course of centuries (ca. 1630-1880), became mixed with and partially influenced by English, having bor rowed also from the Mindi (Lenâpe-Delaware) Indian language a few animal and plant names. This Dutch has suffered little or nothing from modern Holland or Flemish immigration, although Paterson (the county seat of Passaic County) has at present a large Netherlands population. The old county people hold themselves strictly aloof from these foreigners, and say, when they are questioned as to the difference between the idioms: ‘Onze tal äz lex däuts en hoelliz äs Holläns; kwait dääfrent’ (our language is low Dutch and theirs is Holland Dutch; quite different). An intelligent Fleming or South Hollander with a knowledge of English can make shift at following a conversation in this Americanized Dutch, but the converse is not true.”

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As usual, contact with English has worn off the original inflections, and the definite and indefinite articles, de and en, are uniform for all genders. The case-endings have nearly all disappeared, in the comparison of adjectives the superlative affix has decayed from -st to -s, the person-endings in the conjugation of verbs have fallen off, and the pronouns have been much simplified. The vocabulary shows many signs of English influence. A large number of words in daily use have been borrowed bodily, e. g., bottle, town, railroad, cider, smoke, potato, match, good-bye. Others have been borrowed with changes, e.g., säns (since), määm (ma’m), belange (belong), boddere (bother), bääznäs (business), orek (earache). In still other cases the drag of English is apparent, as in blaubääse, a literal translation of blueberry (the standard Dutch word is heidebes), in mep’lbom (=mapletree; Dutch, ahoornboom), and in njeuspampir (=newspaper; Dutch, nieuwsblad). A few English archaisms are preserved in the dialect; for example, the use of gentry as a plural for gentleman.

3

The Dutch spoken by the colonists from Holland in Michigan has been very extensively modified by American influences, both in vocabulary and in grammar. As in Jersey Dutch and in South African Dutch there has been a decay of inflections, and the neuter article het has been absorbed by the masculine-feminine article de. Says Prof. Henry J. G. Van Andel, of the chair of Dutch history, literature and art in Calvin College at Grand Rapids: “Almost all the American names of common objects, e. g., stove, mail, carpet, bookcase, kitchen, store, post-office, hose, dress, pantry, porch, buggy, picture, newspaper, ad, road, headline, particularly when they differ considerably from the Dutch terms, have been taken into the everyday vocabulary. This is also true of a great many verbs and adjectives, e. g., to move (moeven), to dig (diggen), to shop (shoppen), to drive (dryven: a meaning different from the standard Dutch one), slow, fast, easy, pink, etc. The religious language has remained pure, but even here purity has only a relative meaning, for the constructions employed are often English.” This corrupted vulgate is called Yankee-Dutch by the Hollanders of Michigan, and, like Pennsylvania German, it has begun to produce a literature, chiefly humorous in character. A little book of sketches by Dirk Nieland, called “Yankee-Dutch,” 31 contains some amusing specimens, e. g., piezelmietje (=pleased to meet you), and ‘You want’n ander kop koffie.” From an anonymous piece kindly supplied by Dr. John J. Hiemenga, president of Calvin College, I extract the following:

’t Had tamelijk ferm gesneeuwd de laatste twee dagen, zoodat de farmers toch nog een sleeride konden krijgen in het bijna vervlogen jaar. Vooral de young folks hunkerden naar een cutter-ride. Bijna allerwege in den omtrek van de Star Corners waren de cutters dan ook voor den dag gehaald en nagezien, want alles moest natuurlijk in running-order zijn. De dust moest er afgeveegd, hier en daar een bur wat aangetight, de kussens een weinig opgefixt, en de bells vooral nauwkeurig onderzocht.

Dit was hedenmiddag ook Frits zijn job geweest, met het doel hedenavond zijn eerste ride in de mooie cutter can Klaas Ekkel, biji wien hij als winterknecht diende, te nemen. Hij begon dan ook al vroeg met de chores, molk in a hurry en was daarmee dus tijdig klaar. ’t Supper werd even vlug verorberd, zoodat Frits om half-zeven al in de barn was, om Florie op te hichen.

Trotsch op haar nieuw harness en schallende bellen, draaft Florie gezwind enfier daarheen. Hier en daar waar een oude railfence de sneeuw opving, zoodat de road bijna geheel opgeblokt is, gaat of rakelings langs de andere fence of over de fields. Wel zijn er van daag een paar teams langs gegaan, doch de sneeuw en de wind hebben hun tracks geheel opgecoverd, zoodat Frits zijn eigen pad maar moet maken.

Dat’t vinnig koud is voelt hij niet, dank zij zijn dikke furcoat. Voelt hij de koude echter niet, hooren deed hij haar wel. War knarst en giert die sneeuw onder de runners! Ook de milliarden fonkelende sneeuwkelkjes, die met evenveel kleuren het licht der halve maan weerkaatsen, getuigen van de koude. Frits geniet dit schoone kleurenspel en verzinkt weldra in diep gepeins. Plotseling schrikt hij op.

“Hello, Frits, going to the store?”

“Ja, Henry, als je er in jumpen wilt, kan je zoover meerijden, maar ’t is haast te veel troebel voor ’t geld.”

Henry wil ook kunnen zeggen, dat hij van een cutter-ride gehad heeft en stapt dus in. Nog enkele rods en ze zijn bij de stables achter de kerk, waar ze ’t paard stallen en nu naar de store. Zoo ’n country-store is de lievelingsplek van de meeste jongens uit den omtrek, als ’s avonds het werk aan kant is. Enkele loafers maken zoo’n store hun home. Heel gezelling is men’s avonds soms bij elkaar. Is her een onnoozele bloed aanwezig, dan heeft men wat fun met hem. Stories hoort men er bij de wholesale. Twijfelt Jan er aan of Piet wel een barrel met salt kan tillen, dan noopt een “I’ll bet you the cigars” hem om te zwijgen of te wedden. Voor cigars, peanuts en candy wordt er dan ook heel wat geld gespend…

4

This curious dialect promises to be short of life. On the one hand the leaders among the colonists strive to make them use a pure Dutch and on the other hand the younger members, particularly those born in America, abandon both good and bad Dutch for English. I am informed by various observers in Grand Rapids and its vicinity that there seems to be but small prospect that Yankee-Dutch will survive as long as Pennsylvania German. 32

5

Note 30.  The Jersey Dutch Dialect, Dialect Notes, vol. iii, pp. 459 ff. [back]

Note 31.  Yankee-Dutch, humoristische schetsen uit het Hollandsch-Amerikaansche volksleven; Grand Rapids, Mich., 1919. [back]

Note 32.  I am intebted to Prof. B. K. Kuiper, to Mr. H. H. D. Langereis, to Mr. D. J. Van Riemsdyck, of the Eerdmans-Sevensma Co., the Dutch publishers of Grand Rapids, and to Dr. Paul H. De Kruif, of the Rockefeller Institute, for aid and suggestions. [back]

The only study that I have been able to find of the changes undergone by Icelandic in America is a brief but informative note on the inflection of loan-nouns by Vilhjÿ;lmer Stefÿ;nsson, 33 the well-known arctic explorer, who was born of Icelandic parents in Canada. There are relatively few Icelanders in the United States and most of them are concentrated in a few North Dakota and Minnesota counties. There are many more in Manitoba. Their language, philologically, is one of the most ancient of Europe, for the remote situation and poor communications of Iceland have served to preserve many early Teutonic characters that have long since vanished from the related languages. It is, of course, highly inflected, and the most interesting thing about its relations with American English in the United States is the sturdy way in which it fastens inflections upon loan-words from the latter. “No word,” says Mr. Stefÿ;nsson, “can be used in Icelandic without being assigned a gender-form distinguished by the post-positive article.” This law produces some curious effects when English nouns are taken in. The very American baseball, buggy, candy, cyclone and corn-starch are all neuter, but beer, boss, cowboy, cowcatcher, nickel and populist are masculine, and tie (railroad), prohibition and siding are feminine. In the case of many words usage varies. Thus caucus has no fixed gender; different speakers make it masculine, feminine or neuter. Crackers and automobile are other such words. Banjo may be either feminine or neuter, bicycle may be either masculine or neuter, and broncho may be either masculine or feminine. The gender of such loan-words tends to be logical, but it is not always so. Farmer is always masculine and so is engineer, and nurse is always feminine, but dressmaker is given the masculine post-positive article, becoming dressmakerinn. However, when the pronoun is substituted, hún, which is feminine, is commonly used. Words ending in -l or -ll are usually considered neuter, e. g., baseball, corral, hotel, hall. “A striking example,” says Mr. Stefÿ;nsson, “is the term constable. The natural gender is evidently masculine and the Icelandic equivalent, lögreglumathur, is masculine; yet constable is usually employed as a neuter, though occasionally as a masculine.” Words in -er fall under the influence of the Icelandic masculine nouns in -ari, denoting agency, and so usually become masculine, e. g., director, ginger, mower, parlor, peddler, reaper, separator. Republican and socialist are masculine, but democrat is neuter. Why cashbook, chique, contract, election and grape should be feminine it is hard to understand. Of the 467 loan-nouns listed by Mr. Stefÿ;nsson, 176 are neuters and 137 are masculines. There are but 44 clear feminines, though 80 others are sometimes feminine.

1

On the syntax of American-Icelandic I can find nothing. The literature of the dialect is not extensive, and it has produced very few writers of any ability. Nearly all the Icelandic periodicals of the New World are published in Canada, chiefly at Winnipeg. 34 They are conducted, in the main, by natives of Iceland, and hence endeavor to preserve the purity of the language. But the Icelander born in America prefers to speak English, and even when he essays Icelandic he fills it with English words and phrases.

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Note 33.  English Loan-Nouns Used in the Icelandic Colony of North Dakota, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, pp. 354 ff. [back]

Note 34.  Icelandic-American Periodicals, by Halldór Hermannsson, Pub. Soc. for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, vol. iii, no. 2; Urbana, III., July, 1916. [back]

I am informed by Mr. S. S. Lontos, editor of Atlantis, the Greek newspaper published in New York, that Greek journalists and other writers working in the United States try to avoid the use of Americanisms in their writing, and that the same care is observed by educated Greeks in conversation. But the masses of Greek immigrants imitate the newcomers of all other races by adopting Americanisms wholesale. In most cases the loan-words, as in Italian, undergo changes. Thus, bill-of-fare becomes biloferi, pie changes to pay, sign and shine to saina (there is no sh-sound in Greek), cream to creamy, fruit-store to fruitaria, clams to clammess, steak to stecky, polish to policy, hotel to otelli, stand to stanza, lease to lista, depot to depos, car to carron (=Modern Greek, karron, a cart), picture to pitsa, elevator and elevated to elevata, and so on. The Greeks suffer linguistic confusion immediately they attempt English, for in Modern Greek nay (spelled nai) means yes, P. M. indicates the hours before noon, and the letter N stands for South. To make things even worse, the Greek papoose means grandfather and mammie means grandmother.

1

So far as I know, no philological study of American Greek has been made. Undoubtedly all the processes of decay that have been going on in Greece itself for centuries will be hastened in this country. Whenever English begins to influence another language it plays havoc with the inflections.

2

So far as I have been able to discover there is no literature in English upon the philological results of transplanting the Slavic languages, Polish, Czech, Serbian and Bulgarian, to America. Dr. C. H. Wachtel, editor of the Dziennik Chicagoski, the Polish daily newspaper published in Chicago, informs me that the Polish spoken in the United States has “taken over a great multitude of English words and phrases,” and says that the Rev. B. E. Goral, a priest of Milwaukee, has written several articles in Polish upon the subject and collected a vocabulary. But I have been unable to get into communication with Father Goral. I am likewise informed by the editor of the Svornost, the Bohemian daily of Chicago, that a study of the changes undergone by Czech in the United States has been published by Dr. J. Salaba Vojan, of Chicago, but my inquiries of Dr. Vojan are unanswered. Regarding Serbian and Bulgarian I have been unable to obtain any information whatever. Of late years several chairs of Slavic languages and literatures have been set up in American universities. It is to be hoped that among the students they attract there will be some who will devote themselves to the transplanted living tongues as the scholars of the Middle West have devoted themselves to Dano-Norwegian.

1

No people, save perhaps the Spaniards, have a richer store of proverbial wisdom than the Americans, and surely none other makes more diligent and deliberate efforts to augment its riches. The American literature of “inspirational” platitude is enormous and almost unique. There are half a dozen authors, e. g., Dr. Orison Swett Marden and Dr. Frank Crane, who devote themselves almost exclusively, and to vast profit, to the composition of arresting and uplifting apothegms, and the fruits of their fancy are not only sold in books but also displayed upon an infinite variety of calendars, banners and wall-cards. It is rarely that one enters the office of an American business man without encountering at least one of these wall-cards. It may, on the one hand, show nothing save a succinct caution that time is money, say, “Do It Now,” or “This Is My Busy Day”; on the other hand, it may embody a long and complex sentiment, ornately set forth. The taste for such canned sagacity seems to have arisen in America at a very early day. Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” begun in 1732, remained a great success for twenty-five years, and the annual sales reached 10,000. It had many imitators, and founded an aphoristic style of writing which culminated in the essays of Emerson, often mere strings of sonorous certainties, defectively articulated. The “Proverbial Philosophy”of Martin Farquhar Tupper, dawning upon the American public in the early 40’s, was welcomed with enthusiasm; as Saintsbury says, 35 success on this side of the Atlantic even exceeded its success on the other. But that was the last and perhaps the only importation of the sage and mellifluous in bulk. In late years the American production of such merchandise has grown so large that the balance of trade now flows in the other direction. Every traveling American must have observed the translations of the chief works of Dr. Marden that are on sale in all the countries of Europe, and with them the masterpieces of such other apostles of the New Thought as Ralph Waldo Trine and Elizabeth Towne. No other American books are half so well displayed.

1

The note of all such literature, and of the maxims that precipitate themselves from it, is optimism. They “inspire” by voicing and revoicing the New Thought doctrine that all things are possible to the man who thinks the right sort of thoughts—in the national phrase, to the right-thinker. This right-thinker is indistinguishable from the forward-looker, whose belief in the continuity and benignity of the evolutionary process takes on the virulence of a religious faith. Out of his confidence come the innumberable saws, axioms and geflügelte Wrote in the national arsenal, ranging from the “It won’t hurt none to try” of the great masses of the plain people to such exhilarating confections of the wall-card virtuosi as “The elevator to success is not running; take the stairs.” Naturally enough, a grotesque humor plays about this literature of hope; the folk, though it moves them, prefer it with a dash of salt. “Smile, damn you, smile!” is a typical specimen of this seasoned optimism. Many examples of it go back to the early part of the last century, for instance, “Don’t monkey with the buzz-saw,” “The silent hog eats the swill,” and “It will never get well if you pick it.” Others are patently modern, e. g., “The Lord is my shepherd; I should worry” and “Roll over; you’re on your back.” The national talent for extravagant and pungent humor is well displayed in many of these maxims. It would be difficult to match, in any other folk-literature, such examples as “I’d rather have them say ‘There he goes’ than ‘Here he lies,”’ or “Don’t spit: remember the Johnstown flood,” or “Shoot it in the leg; your arm’s full,” or “Foolishness is next to happiness,” or “Work is the curse of the drinking classes,” or “It’s better to be a has-been than a never-was,” or “Cheer up; there ain’t no hell,” or “If you want to cure homesickness, go back home.” Many very popular phrases and proverbs are borrowings from above. “Few die and none resign” originated with Thomas Jefferson; Bret Harte, I believe, was the author of “No check-ee, no shirt-ee,” General W. T. Sherman is commonly credited with “War is hell,” and Mark Twain with “Life is one damn thing after another.” An elaborate and highly characteristic proverb of the uplifting variety—“So live that you can look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell”—was first given currency by one of the engineers of the Panama Canal, a gentleman later retired, it would seem, for attempting to execute his own counsel. From humor the transition to cynicism is easy, and so many of the current sayings are at war with the optimism of the majority.“Kick him again; he’s down” is a depressing example. “What’s the use?” is another. The same spirit is visible in “Tell your troubles to a policeman,” “How’d you like to be the ice-man?” “Some she do and some say she don’t," “Nobody loves a fat man,” “Ain’t it hell to be poor!", “Have a heart!”, “I love my wife, but O you kid,” and “Would you for fifty cents?” The last originated in the ingenious mind of an advertisement writer and was immediately adopted. In the course of time it acquired a naughty significance, and helped to give a start to the amazing button craze of the first years of the century—a saturnalia of proverb and phrase making which finally aroused the guardians of the public morals and was put down by the Polizei.

2

The war, as we have seen in the chapter on Slang, produced very little new slang, but the doughboys showed all the national talent for manufacturing proverbs and proverbial expressions, chiefly derisive. “Our American visitors,” said an English writer at the end of the war, “are startling London with vivid phrases. Some of them are well known by now. ‘Hurry up and get born’ is one of them. Others are coming on, such as ‘Put crape on your nose; your brains are dead,’ and ‘Snow again, kid, I’ve lost your drift.”’ 36 Perhaps the favorite in the army was “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,” though “They say the first hundred years are the hardest” offered it active rivalry. No study of these military witticisms has been made. The whole subject of American proverbs, in fact, has been grossly neglected; there is not even a collection of them. The English publisher, Frank Palmer, prints an excellent series of little volumes presenting the favorite proverbs of all civilized races, including the Chinese and Japanese, but there is no American volume among them. Nor is there one in the similar series issued by the Appeal to Reason. Even such exhaustive collections as that of Robert Christy 37 contain no American specimens—not even “Don’t monkey with the buzzsaw” or “Root, hog, or die.”

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Note 35.  Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiii, p. 167. [back]

Note 36.  English, March, 1919, p. 6. [back]

Note 37.  Proverbs, Maxims and Phrases of All Ages; New York, 1905. This work extends to 1267 pages and contains about 30,000 proverbs, admirably arranged. [back]