# The American Language (1923)/Chapter 1

Thomas Jefferson, with his usual prevision, saw clearly more than a century ago that the American people, as they increased in numbers and in the diversity of their national interests and racial strains, would make changes in their mother tongue, as they had already made changes in the political institutions of their inheritance. "The new circumstances under which we are placed," he wrote to John Waldo from Monticello on August 16, 1813, "call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects. An American dialect will therefore be formed."
Nearly a quarter of a century before this, another great American, and one with an expertness in the matter that the too versatile Jefferson could not muster, had ventured upon a prophecy even more bold and specific. He was Noah Webster, then at the beginning of his stormy career as a lexicographer. In his little volume of "Dissertations on the English Language," printed in 1789 and dedicated to "His Excellency, Benjamin Franklin, Esq., LL.D., F.R.S., late President of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," Webster argued that the time for regarding English usage and submitting to English authority had already passed, and that "a future separation of the American tongue from the English" was "necessary and unavoidable." "Numerous local causes," he continued, "such as a new country, new associations of people, new combinations of ideas in arts and sciences, and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe, will introduce new words into the American tongue. These causes will produce, in a course of time, a language ​in North America as different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one another."
Neither Jefferson nor Webster put a term upon his prophecy. They may have been thinking, one or both, of a remote era, not yet come to dawn, or they may have been thinking, with the facile imagination of those days, of a period even earlier than our own. In the latter case they allowed far too little (and particularly Webster) for factors that have worked powerfully against the influences they saw so clearly in operation about them. One of these factors, obviously, has been the vast improvement in communications across the ocean, a change scarcely in vision a century ago. It has brought New York relatively nearer to London today than it was to Boston, or even to Philadelphia, during Jefferson's presidency, and that greater proximity has produced a steady interchange of ideas, opinions, news and mere gossip. We latter-day Americans know a great deal more about the everyday affairs of England than the early Americans did, for we read more English books, and find more about the English in our newspapers, and meet more Englishmen, and go to England much oftener. The effects of this ceaseless traffic in ideas and impressions, so plainly visible in polities, in ethics and æsthetics, and even in the minutiæ of social intercourse, are also to be seen in the language. On the one hand there is a swift exchange of new inventions on both sides, so that many of our American neologisms quickly pass to London and the latest English fashions in pronunciation are almost instantaneously imitated, at least by a minority, in New York; and, on the other hand, the English, by so constantly having the floor, force upon us, out of their firmer resolution and certitude, and no ​less out of the authority that goes with their mere cultural seniority, a somewhat sneaking respect for their own greater conservatism of speech, so that our professors of the language, in the overwhelming main, combat all signs of differentiation with the utmost diligence, and safeguard the doctrine that the standards of English are the only reputable standards of American.
This doctrine, of course, is not supported by the known laws of language, nor has it prevented the large divergences that we shall presently examine, but all the same it has worked steadily toward a highly artificial formalism, and as steadily against the investigation of the actual national speech. Such grammar, so-called, as is taught in our schools and colleges, is a grammar standing four-legged upon the theorizings and false inferences of English Latinists of a past generation, eager only to break the wild tongue of Shakespeare to a rule; and its frank aim is to create in us a high respect for a book language which few of us ever actually speak and not many of us even learn to write. That language, elaborately artificial though it may be, undoubtedly has merits. It shows a sonority and a stateliness that you must go to the Latin of the Golden Age to match; its "highly charged and heavy-shotted" periods, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, serve admirably the obscurantist purposes of American pedagogy and of English parliamentary oratory and leader-writing; it is something for the literary artists of both countries to prove their skill upon by flouting it. But to the average American, bent upon expressing his ideas, not stupendously but merely clearly, it must always remain something vague and remote, like Greek history or the properties of the parabola, for he never speaks it or hears it spoken, and seldom encounters it in his everyday reading. If he learns to write it, which is not often, it is with a rather depressing sense of its artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, ​bred in the colloquial Onmun, may master the literary Korean-Chinese, but he never thinks in it or quite feels it.
This fact, I daresay, is largely responsible for the notorious failure of our schools and colleges to turn out pupils who can put their ideas into words with simplicity and intelligibility. What their professors try to teach is not their mother-tongue at all, but a dialect that stands quite outside their common experience, and into which they have to translate their thoughts, consciously and painfully. Bad writing consists in making the attempt, and failing through lack of practise. Good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberately throwing overboard the principles so elaborately inculcated, or, as in the case of Lincoln, in standing unaware of them. Thus the study of the language he is supposed to use, to the average American, takes on a sort of bilingual character. On the one hand, he is grounded abominably in a grammar and syntax that have always been largely artificial, even in the country where they are supposed to prevail, and on the other hand he has to pick up the essentials of his actual speech as best he may. "Literary English," says Van Wyck Brooks, "with us is a tradition, just as Anglo-Saxon law with us is a tradition. They persist, not as the normal expressions of a race,…but through prestige and precedent and the will and habit of a dominating class largely out of touch with a national fabric unconsciously taking form out of school." What thus goes on out of school does not interest most of the guardians of our linguistic morals. Now and then a Charters takes a somewhat alarmed peep into the materials of the vulgar speech, and now and then a Krapp investigates the pronunciation of actual Americans, but in the main there is little save a tedious repetition of nonsense. In no department are American universities weaker than in the department of English. The æsthetic opinion that they disseminate is flabby and childish, and their philological work in the national language is extraordinarily lacking in enterprise. No attempt to deduce the principles of vulgar American grammar from the everyday speech of the people has ever been made by an American philologist. There is no scientific study, general and comprehensive in scope, ​of the American vocabulary, or of the influences lying at the root of American word-formation. No professor, so far as I know, has ever deigned to give the same sober attention to the sermo plebeius of his country that his colleagues habitually give to the pronunciation of Latin, or to the irregular verbs in French.
This neglect of the vulgate by those professionally trained to investigate it, and its disdainful dismissal when it is considered at ail, are among the strangest phenomena of American scholarship. In all other countries the everyday speech of the common people, and even the grotesque dialects of remote yokels, have the constant attention of philologists, and the laws of their growth and variation are elaborately studied. In France, to name but one agency, there is the Société des Parlers de France, with its diligent inquiries into changing forms; moreover, the Académie itself is endlessly concerned with the subject, and is at great pains to observe and rate every fluctuation in popular usage. There is, besides, a constant outpouring of books by private investigators, of which "Le Langage Populaire," by Henri Banche, is a good example. In Germany, amid many other such works, there are the admirable grammars of the spoken speech by Dr. Otto Bremer. In Sweden there are several journals devoted to the study of the vulgate, and the government has granted a subvention of 7500 kronor a year to an organization ​of scholars called the Undersökningen av Svenska Folkmål, formed to investigate it systematically. In Norway there is a widespread movement to overthrow the official Dano-Norwegian, and substitute a national language based upon the speech of the peasants. In Spain the Real Academia Española de la Lengua is constantly at work upon its great Diccionario, Ortografia and Gramática, and revises them at frequent intervals, taking in all new words as they appear and all new forms of old ones. And in Latin-America, to come nearer to our own case, the native philologists have produced a copious literature on the matter closest at hand, and one finds in it excellent works upon the Portuguese dialect of Brazil, and the variations of Spanish in Mexico, the Argentine, Chili, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay and even Honduras and Costa Rica. But in the United States the business has attracted little attention and less talent. The only existing comprehensive treatise upon the subject, if the present work be excepted, was written by a Swede trained in Germany and is heavy with errors and omissions. And the only usable dictionary of Americanisms was written in England, and is the work of an English-born lawyer.
I am not forgetting, of course, the early explorations of Noah Webster, of which much more anon, nor the labors of our later ​dictionary makers, nor the inquiries of the American Dialect Society, nor even the occasional illuminations of such writers as Richard Grant White, Charles H. Grandgent, George Philip Krapp, Thomas R. Lounsbury and Brander Matthews. But all this preliminary work has left the main field almost uncharted. Webster, as we shall see, was far more a reformer of the American dialect than a student of it. He introduced radical changes into its spelling and pronunciation, but he showed little understanding of its direction and genius. One always sees in him, indeed, the teacher rather than the scientific inquirer; the ardor of his desire to expound and instruct was only matched by his infinite capacity for observing inaccurately, and his profound ignorance of elementary philological principles. In the preface to the first edition of his American Dictionary, published in 1828—the first in which he added the qualifying adjective to the title—he argued eloquently for the right of Americans to shape their own speech without regard to English precedents, but only a year before this he had told Captain Basil Hall that he knew of but fifty genuine Americanisms—a truly staggering proof of his defective observation. Webster was the first American professional scholar, and despite his frequent engrossment in public concerns and his endless public controversies, there was always something sequestered and almost medieval about him. The American language that he described and argued for was seldom the actual tongue of the folks about him, but often a sort of Volapük made up of one part faulty reporting and nine parts academic theorizing. In only one department did he exert any lasting influence, and that was in the department of orthography. The fact that our spelling is simpler and usually more logical than the English we owe chiefly to him. But it is not to be forgotten that the majority of his innovations, even here, were not adopted, but rejected, nor is it to be forgotten that spelling is the least of all the factors that shape and condition a language.
The same caveat lies against the work of the later makers of dictionaries; they have often gone ahead of common usage in the ​matter of orthography, but they have hung back in the far more important matter of idiom. The defect in the work of the Dialect Society lies in a somewhat similar circumscription of activity. Its constitution, adopted in 1889, says that "its object is the investigation of the spoken English of the United States and Canada," but that investigation, so far, has got little beyond the accumulation of vocabularies of local dialects, such as they are. Even in this department its work is very far from finished, and the Dictionary of Distinctively American Speech announced years ago (and again in 1919) has not yet appeared. Until its collections are completed and synchronized, it will be impossible for its members to make any profitable inquiry into the general laws underlying the development of American, or even to attempt a classification of the materials common to the whole speech. The meagreness of the materials accumulated in the slow-moving volumes of Dialect Notes shows clearly, indeed, how little the American philologist is interested in the language that falls upon his ears every hour of the day. And in Modern Language Notes that impression is reinforced, for its bulky volumes contain exhaustive studies of all the other living languages and dialects, but only an occasional essay upon American.
Now add to this general indifference a persistent and often violent effort to oppose any formal differentiation of English and American, initiated by English purists but heartily supported by various Americans, and you come, perhaps, to some understanding of the unsatisfactory state of the literature of the subject. The pioneer dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1816 by John Pickering, a Massachusetts lawyer, was not only criticised unkindly; it was roundly denounced as something subtly impertinent and corrupting, and even Noah Webster took a formidable fling at it. Most of the American philologists of the early days—Witherspoon, Worcester, Fowler, Cobb and their like—were uncompromising advocates of conformity, and combated every indication of a national independence in speech with the utmost vigilance. One of their company, true enough, stood out against the rest. He was George Per​kins Marsh, and in his "Lectures on the English Language," he argued that "in point of naked syntactical accuracy, the English of America is not at all inferior to that of England." But even Marsh expressed the hope that Americans would not, "with malice prepense, go about to republicanize our orthography and our syntax, our grammars and our dictionaries, our nursery hymns (sic) and our Bibles" to the point of actual separation. Moreover, he was a philologist only by courtesy; the regularly ordained schoolmasters were all against him. The fear voiced by William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, that Americans might "break loose from the laws of the English language" altogether, was echoed by the whole fraternity, and so the corrective bastinado was laid on. Fowler, in fact, advocated heroic measures. He declared that all Americanisms were "foreign words and should be so treated."
It remained, however, for two professors of a later day to launch the doctrine that the independent growth of American was not only immoral, but a sheer illusion. They were Richard Grant White, for long the leading American writer upon language questions, at least in popular esteem, and Thomas R. Lounsbury, for thirty-five years professor of the English language and literature in the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, and an indefatigable controversialist. Both men were of the utmost industry in research, and both had wide audiences. White's "Words and Their Uses," published in 1872, was a mine of erudition, and his "Everyday English," following eight years later, was another. True enough, Fitzedward Hall, the Anglo-Indian-American philologist, disposed of many of his etymologies and otherwise did execution upon him but in the main his contentions held water. Lounsbury was also an adept and favorite expositor. His attacks upon certain familiar pedantries of the grammarians were penetrating and effective, and his two ​books, "The Standard of Usage in English" and "The Standard of Pronunciation in English," not to mention his excellent "History of the English Language" and his numerous magazine articles, showed a profound knowledge of the early development of the language, and an admirable spirit of free inquiry. But both of these laborious scholars, when they turned from English proper to American English, displayed an unaccountable desire to deny its existence altogether, and to the support of that denial they brought a critical method that was anything but unprejudiced. White devoted not less than eight long articles in the Atlantic Monthly to a review of the fourth edition of John Russell Bartlett's American Glossary and when he came to the end he had disposed of nine-tenths of Bartlett's specimens and called into question the authenticity of at least half of what remained. And no wonder, for his method was simply that of erecting tests so difficult and so arbitrary that only the exceptional word or phrase could pass them, and then only by a sort of chance. "To stamp a word or a phrase as an Americanism," he said, "it is necessary to show that (1) it is of so-called 'American' origin—that is, that it first came into use in the United States of North America, or that (2) it has been adopted in those States from some language other than English, or has been kept in use there while it has wholly passed out of use in England." Going further, he argued that unless "the simple words in compound names" were used in America "in a sense different from that in which they are used in England" the compound itself could not be regarded as an Americanism. The absurdity of all this is apparent when it is remembered that one of his rules would bar out such obvious Americanisms as the use of sick in place of ill, of molasses for treacle, and of fall for autumn, for all of these words, while archaic in England, are by no means wholly extinct; and that another would dispose of that vast category of compounds which includes such unmistakably characteristic Americanisms as joy-ride, rake-off, show-down, up-lift, out-house, rubber-meek, chair-warmer, fire-eater and back-talk.
​Lounsbury went even further. In the course of a series of articles in Harper's Magazine, in 1913, he laid down the dogma that "cultivated speech…affords the only legitimate basis of comparison between the language as used in England and in America," and then went on:
In the only really proper sense of the term, an Americanism is a word or phrase naturally used by an educated American which under similar conditions would not be used by an educated Englishman. The emphasis, it will be seen, lies in the word "educated."
This curious criticism, fantastic as it must have seemed to European philologists, was presently reinforced, for in his fourth article Lounsbury announced that his discussion was "restricted to the written speech of educated men." The result, of course, was a wholesale slaughter of Americanisms. If it was not possible to reject a word, like White, on the ground that some stray English poet or other had once used it, it was almost always possible to reject it on the ground that it was not admitted into the vocabulary of a college professor when he sat down to compose formal book English. What remained was a small company, indeed—and almost the whole field of American idiom and American grammar, so full of interest for the less austere explorer, was closed without even a peek into it.
White and Lounsbury dominated the arena and fixed the fashion. The later national experts upon the national language, with a few somewhat timorous exceptions, pass over its peculiarities without noticing them. So far as I can discover, there is not a single treatise in type upon one of its most salient characters—the wide departure of some of its vowel sounds from those of orthodox English. Marsh, C. H. Grandgent and Robert J. Menner have printed a number of valuable essays upon the subject, and George Philip Krapp has discussed the matter incidentally in "The Pronunciation of Standard English in America," but there is no work that co-ordinates these inquiries or that attempts otherwise to cover the field. When, in preparing materials for the following chapters, I sought to determine the history of the a-sound in America, I found it necessary to plow ​through scores of ancient spelling-books, and to make deductions, perhaps sometimes rather rash, from the works of Franklin, Webster and Cobb. Some time ago the National Council of Teachers of English appointed a Committee on American Speech and sought to let some light into the matter, but as yet its labors are barely begun and the publications of its members get little beyond preliminaries. Such an inquiry involves a laboriousness which should have attracted Lounsbury: he once counted the number of times the word female appears in "Vanity Fair." But you will find only a feeble dealing with the question in his book on pronunciation. Nor is there any adequate general work (for Scheie de Vere's is full of errors and omissions) upon the influences felt by American through contact with the languages of our millions of immigrants, nor upon our peculiarly rich and characteristic slang.
Against all such enterprises, as I have said, academic opinion stands firmly. During the World War it seems to have taken on, if possible, an added firmness. Before the war, for example, Dr. Brander Matthews, of Columbia University, was a diligent collector of Americanisms, and often discussed them with much show of liking for them. He even used the term Briticism to designate an English locution rejected by 100% Americans. But during the war he appears to have succumbed to the propaganda for British-American unity launched by his employer, the eminent Anglo-Saxon idealist, Adolph S. Ochs, of the New York Times. I quote from one of his articles in the Times:
We may rest assured that the superficial evidences of a tendency toward the differentiation of American-English and British-English are not so significant as they may appear to the unreflecting, and that the tendency itself will be powerless against the cohesive force of our common literature, the precious inheritance of both the English-speaking peoples.…So long as the novelists and the newspaper men on both sides of the ocean continue to eschew Briticisms and Americanisms, and so long as they indulge in these localisms only in quotation marks, there is no danger that English will ever halve itself into a British language and an American language.
Unluckily for Dr. Matthews, there is not the slightest sign that the novelists and newspaper men on the two sides of the ocean will ever bring themselves to such eschewing. On the contrary, they apparently delight in the use of the "localisms" he denounces, and the result is a growing difficulty of intercommunication. Americans, trained in book English and constantly reading English books and journals, still make their way in British-English comfortably enough, though now and then, no doubt, an English novel daunts them. But the English have a great deal more difficulty with American, and devote a great deal of attention to its peculiarities—often with very ill grace. For a long while, as we shall see in the next chapter, they viewed its differentiation from standard English with frank indignation, and sought to put an end to the process by violent denunciation; even so late as the period of the Civil War their chief spokesman saw in every Americanism that quality of abhorrent barbarism which they looked upon as the salient mark of the American people. But in later years, despite a certain lingering waspishness, they have brought themselves to a more philosophical view, and the fact that American-English is definitely separating itself from British-English is now admitted as a matter of course. The Cambridge History of English Literature, for example, says that the two have become "notably dissimilar" in vocabulary, and that American is splitting off into a distinct dialect. The Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, going further, says that the two languages are already so far apart that "it is not uncommon to meet with [American] newspaper articles of which an untravelled Englishman would hardly be able to understand a sentence." A great many other academic authorities, including A. H. Sayce and H. W. and F. G. Fowler, bear testimony to the same effect, and the London ​Times gives them ironical support by arguing that the two languages, though no longer one, are still "nearly allied."
On turning to the men actually engaged in writing English, and particularly to those aspiring to an American audience, one finds nearly all of them adverting, at some time or other, to the growing difficulties of intercommunication. William Archer, Arnold Bennett, W. L. George, George Moore, H. G. Wells, Edgar Jepson, H. N. Brailsford, Hugh Walpole, Henry W. Nevinson, E. V. Lucas, A. G. Gardiner, Sir Henry Newbolt, Sidney Low, J. C. Squire, the Chestertons and Kipling are some of those who have dealt with the matter, following Dickens, Buskin, Oscar Wilde, George Augustus Sala and others of an elder generation.
Low, in an article in the Westminster Gazette ironically headed "Ought American to be Taught in Our Schools?" has described how the latter-day British business man is "puzzled by his ignorance of colloquial American" and "painfully hampered" thereby in his handling of American trade. He continues:
But I think we should return the compliment. We ought to learn the American language in our schools and colleges. At present it is strangely neglected by the educational authorities. They pay attention to linguistic attainments of many other kinds, but not to this. How many thousands of youths are at this moment engaged in puzzling their brains over Latin and Greek grammar only Whitehall knows. Every well-conducted seminary has some instructor who is under the delusion that he is teaching English boys and girls to speak French with a good Parisian accent. We teach German, Italian, even Spanish, Russian, modern Greek, Arabic, Hindustani. For a moderate fee you can acquire a passing acquaintance with any of these tongues at the Berlitz Institute and the Gouin Schools. But even in these polyglot establishments there is nobody to teach you American. I have never seen a grammar of it or a dictionary. I have searched in vain at the booksellers for "How to Learn American in Three Weeks" or some similar compendium. Nothing of the sort exists. The native speech of one hundred millions of civilized people is as ​grossly neglected by the publishers as it is by the schoolmasters. You can find means to learn Hausa or Swahili or Cape Dutch in London more easily than the expressive, if difficult, tongue which is spoken in the office, the bar-room, the tram-car, from the snows of Alaska to the mouths of the Mississippi, and is enshrined in a literature that is growing in volume and favor every day.
Low then quotes an extract from an American novel appearing serially in an English magazine—an extract including such Americanisms as side-stepper, saltwater-taffy, Prince-Albert (coat), boob, bartender and kidding, and many characteristically American extravagances of metaphor. It might be well argued, he goes on, that this strange dialect is as near to "the tongue that Shakespeare spoke" as "the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton," but that philological fact does not help to its understanding. "You might almost as well expect him [the British business man] to converse freely with a Portuguese railway porter because he tried to stumble through Caesar when he was in the Upper Fourth at school."
A campaign of education is undertaken by the London newspapers whenever a new American play of the racier sort, e. g., Montague Glass's "Potash and Perlmutter" or Willard Mack's "Kick In," holds the boards in the West End. The legends shown in moving-pictures also keep the subject alive. Some time ago, in the London Daily Mail, W. G. Faulkner undertook an elaborate explanation of common American movie terms. Mr. Faulkner assumed that most of his readers would understand sombrero, sidewalk, candy-store, freight-car, boost, elevator, boss, crook and fall (for autumn) without help, but he found it necessary to define such commonplace Americanisms as hoodlum, hobo, bunco-steerer, rubber-neck, drummer, sucker, dive (in the sense of a thieves' resort), clean-up, graft and to feature. Curiously enough, he proved the reality of the difficulties he essayed to level by falling into error as to the meanings of some of the terms he listed, among them dead-beat, flume, dub and stag. Another English expositor, apparently following him, thought it necessary to add definitions of hold-up, quitter, rube, shack, road-agent, cinch, live-wire and scab, but he, too, mistook ​the meaning of dead-beat, and in addition he misdefined bandwagon and substituted get-out, seemingly an invention of his own, for get-away. Faulkner seized the opportunity to read a homily upon the vulgarity and extravagance of the American language, and argued that the introduction of its coinages through the moving-picture theatre (English, cinema) "cannot be regarded without serious misgivings, if only because it generates and encourages mental indiscipline so far as the choice of expressions is concerned." Such warnings are common in the English newspapers. Early in 1920 the London Daily News began a formal agitation of the subject, and laid particular stress upon the menace that American moving-pictures offered to the purity of the English learned and used by children. I quote from a characteristic contribution to the discussion:
I visited two picture theatres today for the express purpose of collecting slang phrases and of noticing the effect of the new language on the child as well as on the adult. What the villain said to the hero when the latter started to argue with him was, "Cut out that dope," and a hundred piping voices repeated the injunction. The comic man announced his marriage to the Belle of Lumbertown by saying, "I'm hitched."…
The same writer protested bitterly against the intrusion of such commonplace Americanisms as fire-water, daffy, forget it, and bootlegger. The Associated Press, in reporting the protest, said:
England is apprehensive lest the vocabularies of her youth become corrupted through incursions of American slang. Trans-Atlantic tourists in England note with interest the frequency with which resort is made to "Yankee talk" by British song and play writers seeking to enliven their productions. Bands and orchestras throughout the country when playing popular music play American selections almost exclusively. American songs monopolize the English music hall and musical comedy stage. It is the subtitle of the American moving picture film which, it is feared, constitutes the most menacing threat to the vaunted English purity of speech.
But it is not only American slang that the English observe and object to; they also begin to find it difficult to comprehend American-English on higher planes. It was H. N. Brailsford who protested that many of the utterances of Dr. Woodrow Wilson, during and after the Versailles conference, were incomprehensible to English​men on linguistic grounds. "The irruption of Mr. Wilson upon our scene," he said, "threatens to modify our terminology. If one knew the American language (as I do not)," and so on. At about the same time a leading English medical journal was protesting satirically against the Americanisms in an important American surgical monograph. Some time before this, in the New Witness, the late Cecil Chesterton discussed the growing difficulty, for Englishmen, of understanding American newspapers. After quoting a characteristic headline he went on:
I defy any ordinary Englishman to say that that is the English language or that he can find any intelligible meaning in it. Even a dictionary will be of no use to him. He must know the language colloquially or not at ail.…No doubt it is easier for an Englishman to understand American than it would be for a Frenchman to do the same, just as it is easier for a German to understand Dutch than it would be for a Spaniard. But it does not make the American language identical with the English.
Chesterton, however, refrained from denouncing this lack of identity; on the contrary, he allowed certain merits to American. "I do not want anybody to suppose," he said, "that the American language is in any way inferior to ours. In some ways it has improved upon it in vigor and raciness. In other ways it adheres more closely to the English of the best period." Testimony to the same end was furnished before this by William Archer. "New words," he said, "are begotten by new conditions of life; and as American life is far more fertile of new conditions than ours, the tendency toward neologism cannot but be stronger in America than in England. America has enormously enriched the language, not only with new words, but (since the American mind is, on the whole, quicker and wittier than the English) with apt and luminous colloquial metaphors." To which the Manchester Guardian, reviewing Henry G. Aikman's "Zell," added: "The writing is, frankly, not ​English but American, and it cannot be judged by our standards. Some of the sentences are simply appalling, from our point of view—but they serve their purpose. This prompts the interesting speculation whether it is not time that we gave up the pretense of a 'common language' and accepted the American on its own merits."
The list of such quotations might be indefinitely prolonged. There is scarcely an English book upon the United States or an English review of an American book which does not offer some discussion, more or less profound, of American peculiarities of speech, both as they are revealed in spoken discourse (particularly pronunciation and intonation) and as they show themselves in literature and in the newspapers, and to this discussion protest is often added, as it very often is by the reviews and newspapers. "The Americans," says a typical critic, "have so far progressed with their self-appointed task of creating an American language that much of their conversation is now incomprehensible to English people." "This amazing lack of a sense of the beauty of words," says another, "comes from the manner in which the language of the United States is spoken—that monotonous drone, generally nasal, or that monotonous nasal whine." English reviews of American books frequently refer in this way to the growing differences between the two dialects—in fact, it is rare for an English reviewer to refrain from noting and sneering at Americanisms. Even translations from foreign languages made by Americans are constantly under fire.
But, now and then there appears a defender. One such is William Archer, already quoted, who lately protested eloquently against "pulling a wry face over American expressions, not because they are inherently bad, but simply because they are American." He continued:
Another attorney for the defense is Richard Aldington, the poet. "Are Americans," he asks, "to write the language they speak, which is slowly but inevitably separating itself from the language of England, or are they to write a devitalized idiom learned painfully from hooks or from a discreet frequentation of London literary cliques?" Now and then, says Mr. Aldington, "one encounters an American who speaks perfect standard [i. e., British] English, but the great majority of Americans make no attempt to do so." He goes on:
Language is made by the people; it is only fixed by writers and orators. When language, especially that of poetry, is too far removed from that of the people, it becomes conventional and hieratic, like church Latin; or languid and degenerate, like modern official French poetry. When language is conventionally used by writers it becomes burdened with clichés and dead phrases. If American soldiers, newspapers and popular novels are evidence, it is clear that the American people is evolving a new language, full of vigorous and racy expressions. In spite of the phenomenon of the "pure-English" American, mentioned above, I am compelled to believe that the majority of his countrymen use an idiom which differs considerably from that which he employs. Whitman wrote a language which is intelligible to all Englishmen (far more so than that of James); but it seems to us inaccurate, harsh and crude, for all its vigor and occasional rare beauty. The language of the American people—judging from a comparison between newspapers of the Civil War and of today​—has altered considerably in fifty years, so that a modern Whitman would write a language almost needing a glossary for Englishmen. Contemporary American poets use this popular language merely for comic effect or for purposes of sentimentality; most of them, since they are cultivated and rather literary, are careful to use a speech which is as well understood here [in England] as in America. Yet even in their writings there is a conception of the language which differs from ours. Almost all the American poets in "The New Poetry" anthology seem to have a feeling for words which differs from that of the English. In the works of Miss Lowell, for example, there are few usages which an Englishman would not be prepared to defend; yet there is an Americanism in her language, indefinable but unmistakable. Miss Lowell will, I think, recognize this as one of the excellencies of her work; she is, however, too well versed in classic English literature to have any but a faint trace of the quality I am trying to describe. It is more marked in Mr. Carl Sandberg, and still more marked in American prose; for even American literary criticism is a little difficult to understand, and new novels are bewildering with vigorous but incomprehensible expressions. Englishmen of letters and literary journalists may publish their exhortations and practice their refinements; in vain—a vast and increasingly articulate part of the Englishspeaking and English-writing world will ignore them. Another century may see English broken into a number of dialects or even different languages, spoken in Canada, Australia, South Africa, the United States and England. The result may eventually be similar to the break-up of Latin. The triumph of any one of these languages will be partly a matter of commercial and military supremacy, and partly a matter of literary supremacy.
On the western shore of the Atlantic, despite the professors of English, there is equal evidence of a growing sense of difference. "The American," says George Ade, in his book of travel, "In Pastures New," "must go to England in order to learn for a dead certainty that he does not speak the English language.…This pitiful fact comes home to every American when he arrives in London—that there are two languages, the English and the American. One is correct; the other is incorrect. One is a pure and limpid stream; the other is a stagnant pool swarming with bacilli." This was written in 1906. Twenty-five years earlier Mark Twain had made the same observation. "When I speak my native tongue in its utmost purity in England," he said, "an Englishman can't understand me at all." The languages, continued Mark, "were identical several generations ago, but our changed conditions and the ​spread of our people far to the south and far to the west have made many alterations in our pronunciation, and have introduced new words among us and changed the meanings of old ones." Even before this the great humorist had marked and hailed these differences. Already in "Roughing It" he was celebrating "the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains," and in all his writings, even the most serious, he deliberately engrafted its greater liberty and more fluent idiom upon the stem of English, and so lent the dignity of his high achievement to a dialect that was as unmistakably American as the point of view underlying it.
The same tendency is plainly visible in William Dean Howells. His novels are mines of American idiom, and his style shows an undeniable revolt against the trammels of English grammarians. In 1886 he made a plea in Harper's for a concerted effort to put American on its own legs. "If we bother ourselves," he said, "to write what the critics imagine to be 'English,' we shall be priggish and artificial, and still more so if we make our Americans talk 'English.'…On our lips our continental English will differ more and more from the insular English, and we believe that this is not deplorable but desirable." Howells then proceeded to discuss the nature of the difference, and described it accurately as determined by the greater rigidity and formality of the English of modern England. In American, he said, there was to be seen that easy looseness of phrase and gait which characterized the English of the Elizabethan era, and particularly the Elizabethan hospitality to changed meanings and bold metaphors. American, he argued, made new words much faster than English, and they were, in the main, words of much greater daring and savor.
Howells' position was supported by that of many other well-known American authors of his generation, including especially Lowell, Whitman and John Fiske. Fiske, always truculent, carried the war into Africa by making a bold attack upon Briticisms, and even upon English pronunciation and intonation. "The English," he said in 1873, "talk just like the Germans. So much guttural is very unpleasant, especially as half the time I can't understand them, and have to ​say, 'I beg your pardon?'" In more recent days there have been many like defiances. Brander Matthews, as I have said, was an eager apologist for Americanisms until he joined the Ochs lodge of Anglo-Saxon brothers. Others in the forefront of the fray are Dr. Richard Burton and Rupert Hughes. "Who can doubt," says Dr. Burton, "that Mr. Mencken is right in speaking of the 'American language'?…One recalls the cowboy who made a trip to Paris and was asked by his bunkie on returning to the big plains, how he had got along with French; to which he answered: 'I got along fine, but the French had a hell of a time.' English has that sort of time in the United States, but the people are perfectly happy about it. Why worry? A few professors are hired, at very small pay, to do that, and the populace prefers to do its suffering vicariously.…When a mayor of a large western city says has went twice in a public speech, and a governor of a great eastern state in public utterances declares that 'it ain't in my heart to hurt any man,' it gives one a piquant sense of the democracy of language in these United States.…We get a charming picture of proletariat and pedants amiably exchanging idiom, while school larnin' goes glimmering, and go-as-you-please is the order of the day. Why bother about the form of sentences when vital questions are for settling, and when to make others understand your meaning is the main purpose of words? That, at least, appears to be the general view. Ho wonder Brander Matthews speaks of English as a grammarless tongue. America has done and is doing her full share to make it so." Dr. Burton continues:
The pundit, the pedant, and the professor who are fain to stem the turbid tide of popular vernacular may suffer pain; but they can have little influence on the situation. Even college-bred folk revert to type and use people's speech—when they are out from under the restraining, corrective monitions of academic haunts—in a way to shock, amuse, or encourage, according to the point of view. Artificial book-speech is struggled for in recitation halls; then forth issue the vital young, and just beyond the door real talk is heard once more: the words and sentences that come hot from the heart, eagerly from emotional reactions, spontaneously representing the feelings rather than a state of mind supposed to be proper. To see a pupil who on trial solemnly declares that two nouns call for a plural verb, hasten out into the happy sunshine and immediately begin to do what the race always has done—including truly idiomatic ​writers—namely, use a singular verb on all such occasions, is only depressing to those who place the letter before the spirit which is life.
Mr. Hughes is even more emphatic. There must be an end, he argues, to all weak submission to English precept and example. What is needed is "a new Declaration of Independence." Then he goes on:
Could anyone imagine an English author hesitating to use a word because of his concern as to the ability of American readers to understand it and approve it? The mere suggestion is fantastic. Yet it is the commonest thing imaginable for an American author to wonder if the word that interests him is good "English," or, as the dictionaries say, "colloquial U. S." The critics, like awe-inspiring and awe-inspired governesses, take pains to remind their pupils that Americanisms are not nice, and are not written by well-bred little writers. When you stop to think of it, isn't this monstrously absurd, contemptible, and servilely colonial?…Why should we fail to realize that all our arts must be American to be great? Why should we permit the survival of the curious notion that our language is a mere loan from England, like a copper kettle that we must keep scoured and return without a dent? Have we any less right to develop the language we brought away with us than they have who stayed behind?
Mr. Hughes, whose own novels are full of racy and effective Americanisms, describes some of his difficulties in England. "A London publisher," he says, "once wrote of a book of mine that it was bewildering in its Americanism. He instanced, among others, the verb tiptoed as an amazing and incredible thing. On tiptoe, or a-tiptoe, he could well understand because he had seen it in print at home. But the well-recognized truth that our language is largely made up of interchangeable facts did not calm his dismay. We know what a foot is; therefore we can say 'she footed it gracefully,' or speak of foot-troops or footers. To toe the mark is a legitimate development from the noun toe. Tiptoed is a simple employment of the franchise of our language, a franchise that Shakespeare and countless others have taken full advantage of. In fact, Richardson used it in 'Clarissa Harlowe' as far back as 1747: 'Mabel tiptoed it to her door.' But even if he did not, why should not I?" Mr. Hughes is bitter against the "snobbery that divides our writers into two sharp classes—those who in their effort to write pure English strut pom​pously and uneasily in Piccadilly fashions, and those who in their effort to be true to their own environment seem to wear overalls and write with a nasal twang." Between the two extremes he evidently prefers the latter. "Americans who try to write like Englishmen," he says, "are not only committed to an unnatural pose, but doomed as well to failure, above all among the English; for the most likable thing about the English is their contempt for the hyphenated imitation Englishmen from the States, who only emphasize their nativity by their apish antics. The Americans who have triumphed among them have been, almost without exception, peculiarly American." Finally, he repeats his clarion call for a formal rebellion, saying:
But let us sign a Declaration of Literary Independence and formally begin to write, not British, but Unitedstatish. For there is such a language, a brilliant, growing, glowing, vivacious, elastic language for which we have no specific name. We might call it Statesish, or for euphony condense it to Statish. But, whatever we call it, let us cease to consider it a vulgar dialect of English, to be used only with deprecation. Let us study it in its splendid efflorescence, be proud of it, and true to it. Let us put off livery, cease to be the butlers of another people's language, and try to be the masters and the creators of our own.
Meanwhile, various Americans imitate John Fiske by abandoning the defense for the attack. When, in 1919, a British literary paper presumed to criticise the Americanisms in American advertisements, the editor of the Indianapolis Star replied with a vigorous denunciation of current Briticisms. "In British fiction," he said, "with the omission of a few writers rated as first class, badly constructed and even ungrammatical sentences are by no means uncommon, and even the books of the 'big' authors are not immune from criticism. As for slang, certain colloquialisms and peculiarities of English speech appear so frequently in even the pages of Wells and Galsworthy as to be irritating. Right-o is an example; bloody and beastly, as applied to commonplace happenings, are others; the use of directly with a meaning quite unlike our usage, and many more of their kind, jump at American readers from the pages of English novels, and are there usually without intent of the writers to put color or accuracy into their delineations, but merely as a part of their ​ordinary vocabulary and with unconsciousness of any differences between their own and American usages."
Other Americans remain less resolute, for example, Vincent O'Sullivan, whose English schooling may account for his sensitiveness. In America, he says in the London New Witness, "the English literary tradition is dying fast, and the spoken, and to a considerable extent, the written language is drawing farther and farther away from English as it is used in England." He continues:
To most English people, many pages of the published sermons of Billy Sunday, the evangelist, would be almost as unintelligible as a Welsh newspaper. But is American at its present point of development a language or a lingo? Professor Brander Matthews does not hesitate to liken it to Elizabethan English for its figurative vigour. American figures, however, are generally on a low level. When Bacon calls floods great winding-sheets, he is more impressive than when the Pennsylvania Railroad announces that there is a wash-out down 'round Harrisburg, Pa. It would, in fact, be impossible to express any grand or moving thought in American; humour, homely wisdom, yes; but not grandeur. Leaving aside the intellectual value of either, Bishop Latimer's sermons are in the plain language of his time, and they easily maintain themselves on heights that Billy Sunday never gets a clutch on, even for a moment. It is a fair claim that American is more vivid than English.
So much for the literati. The plain people of the two countries, whenever they come into contact, find it very difficult to exchange ideas. This was made distressingly apparent when American troops began to pour into France in 1917. Fraternizing with the British was impeded, not so much because of old animosities as because of the wide divergence in vocabulary and pronunciation between the doughboy and Tommy Atkins—a divergence interpreted by each as a sign of uncouthness in the other. The Y. M. C. A. made a characteristic effort to turn the resultant feeling of strangeness and homesickness among the Americans to account. In the Chicago Tribune's Paris edition of July 7, 1917, I find a large advertisement inviting ​them to make use of the Y. M. C. A. clubhouse in the Avenue Montaigne, "where American is spoken." At about the same time an enterprising London tobacconist, Peters by name, affixed a large sign bearing the legend "American spoken here" to the front of his shop, and soon he was imitated by various other London, Liverpool and Paris shop-keepers. Earlier in the war the Illinoiser Staats-Zeitung, no doubt seeking to keep the sense of difference alive, advertised that it would "publish articles daily in the American language."
What English and American laymen have thus observed has not escaped the notice of Continental philologists. The first edition of Bartlett, published in 1848, brought forth a long and critical review in the Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literar turen by Prof. Felix Flügel, and in the successive volumes of the Archiv there have been many valuable essays upon Americanisms, by such men as Herrig, Köhler and Kartzke. Various Dutch philologists, among them Barentz, Keijzer and Van der Voort, have also discussed the subject, and a study in French has been published by G. A. Barranger. The literature in German is becoming very extensive, and there have been contributions to it of late by philologists of high standing, notably Prof. Dr. Heinrich Spies, of Greifswald, and Dr. Georg Kartzke, of Berlin. Dr. Spies delivered a course of lectures at Greifswald in February, 1921, which covered the whole field of current English, and especially the matter of its neologisms; he is an eager and very shrewd student of American speech-habits, as is Dr. Kartzke. Two other foreign scholars who show more interest in American English than is usually displayed at home are Prof. Wincenty Lutoslawski, of the University of Wilna in Poland, and Prof. Sanki Ichikawa, of the Imperial University at ​Tokyo. The last edition of the present work brought me into pleasant contact with the two last-named, and I have received valuable suggestions from both. Says Dr. Ichikawa:
It is a great question with us teachers of English in Japan whether we should teach American English or British English. We have more opportunities for coming into contact with Americans than for meeting Englishmen, but on the other hand books on phonetics are mostly done by English scholars. As to vocabulary, we are teaching English and American indiscriminately—many of us, perhaps, without knowing which is which.
Apparently, the same difficulty has appeared in France. In 1921 the University of Paris sought to meet it by appointing two new lecturers—M. de Selencourt as lecteur d'anglais and M. Roy P. Bowey as lecteur d'americain.
That, even to the lay Continental, American and English now differ considerably, is demonstrated by the fact that many of the popular German Sprachführer appear in separate editions, Amerikanisch and Englisch. This is true, for example, of the "Metoula-Sprachführer" and of the "Polyglott Kuntze" books. The American edition of the latter starts off with the doctrine that "Jeder, der nach Nord-Amerika oder Australien will, muss Englisch können," but a great many of the words and phrases that appear in its examples would be unintelligible to most Englishmen—e. g., free-lunch, real-estate agent, buckwheat, corn (for maize), conductor and popcorn—and a number of others would suggest false meanings or otherwise puzzle—e. g., saloon, wash-stand, water-pitcher and apple-pie. In the "Neokosmos Sprachführer durch England-Amerika" there are many notes calling attention to differences between American and English usage, e. g., baggage-luggage, car-carriage, conduc​tor-guard. The authors are also forced to enter into explanations of the functions of the boots in an English hotel and of the clerk in an American hotel, and they devote a whole section, now mainly archaic, to a discourse upon the nature and uses of such American beverages as whiskey-sours. Martini-cocktails, silver-fizzes, John-Collinses, and ice-cream sodas. In other works of the same sort there is a like differentiation between English and American. So long ago as 1912, an American of German ancestry, Alfred D. Schoch, of Bonneterre, Mo., published in Germany an American version of Prof. Dr. R. Kron's very popular little handbook, "The Little Londoner," and it remains to this day a valuable glossary of Americanisms, particularly in the department of idiom. More recently a group of Scandinavian American scholars have printed a work upon the United States, in Dano-Norwegian, in which an important chapter is devoted to the national speech. A vocabulary of Americanisms unknown in England is appended; in it I find butterine, cat-boat, clawhammer, co-ed, crags, dago, dumbwaiter, faker, freeze-out, gusher, hard-cider, hen-party, jitney, mortician, panhandle, patrolman, sample-room, shyster, sleuth, wet (noun), dry (noun), head-cheese and overhead-expenses. The guide-books for tourists almost always differentiate between the English and American vocabularies. Baedeker's "United States" has a glossary for Englishmen likely to be daunted by such terms as el, European-plan and sundae, and in Muirhead's "London and Its Environs" there is a corresponding one for Americans unfamiliar with bank-holiday, hoarding and trunk-call. Asiatics are equally observant of the fast-growing differences. In the first number of the Moslem Sunrise, a quarterly edited by Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadig, there is an explanatory note, apparently for the guidance of East Indian Mohammedan missionaries in the United States, upon certain peculiarities of the American vocabulary.
​Most Continental Europeans who discuss the matter seem to take it for granted that American and English are now definitely separated. When I was in Germany as a correspondent, in 1917, I met many German officers who spoke English fluently. Some had learned it in England and some in America, and I noted that they were fully conscious of the difference between the two dialects, and often referred to it. M. Clemenceau, who acquired a very fluent and idiomatic English during his early days in New York, is always at pains to inform those who compliment him upon it that it is not English at all, but American. The new interest in American literature in France, growing out of the establishment of a chair of American Literature and Civilization at the Sorbonne, with Charles Cestre as incumbent, has brought forth several articles upon the peculiarities of American in the French reviews. Early in May, 1920, in discussing "La Poésie americaine d'aujourd'hui" in Les Marges, Eugène Montfort argued that American showed every sign of being more vigorous than English, and would eventually take on complete autonomy. A philologist of Scandinavian extraction, Elias Molee, has gone so far as to argue that the acquisition of correct English, to a people grown so mongrel in blood as the Americans, has already become a useless burden. In place of it he proposes a mixed tongue, based on English, but admitting various elements from the other Germanic languages. His grammar, however, is so much more complex than that of English that most Americans would probably find his artificial "American" very difficult of acquirement. At all events it has made no progress.
The characters chiefly noted in American speech by all who have discussed it, are, first, its general uniformity throughout the country, so that dialects, properly speaking, are confined to recent ​immigrants, to the native whites of a few isolated areas and to the negroes of the South; and, secondly, its impatient disregard of rule and precedent, and hence its large capacity (distinctly greater than that of the English of England) for taking in new words and phrases and for manufacturing new locutions out of its own materials. The first of these characters has struck every observer, native and foreign. In place of the local dialects of other countries we have a general Volkssprache for the whole nation, and if it is conditioned at all it 13 only by minor differences in pronunciation and by the linguistic struggles of various groups of newcomers. "The speech of the United States," says Gilbert M. Tucker, "is quite unlike that of Great Britain in the important particular that here we have no dialects." "We all," said Mr. Taft during his presidency, "speak the same language and have the same ideas." "Manners, morals and political views," said the New York World, commenting upon this dictum, "have all undergone a standardization which is one of the remarkable aspects of American evolution. Perhaps it is in the uniformity of language that this development has been most noteworthy. Outside of the Tennessee mountains and the back country of New England there is no true dialect." "While we have or have had single counties as large as Great Britain," says another American observer, "and in some of our states England could be lost, there is practically no difference between the American spoken in our 4,039,000 square miles of territory, except as spoken by foreigners. We, assembled here, would be perfectly understood by delegates from Texas, Maine, Minnesota, Louisiana, or Alaska, from whatever walk of life they might come. We can go to any of the 75,000 postoffices in this country and be entirely sure we will be understood, whether we want to buy a stamp or borrow a match." "From Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon," agrees an English critic, "no trace of a distinct dialect is to be found. The man from Maine, even though he may be of inferior education and limited capacity, can completely understand the man from Oregon." To which add the testimony ​of a Scandinavian: "In the small country of Denmark it is some¬ times difficult for an islander to understand a Jutlander. Every county has its own expression; every province its own dialect. In England we find not only more than 200 dialects, but also entire language groups, distinct from one another in their roots, despite the fact that the land itself is certainly not large. But in the United States one may travel over the greater part of a continent without encountering a single dialect. The language is the same from ocean to ocean."
Ho other country can show such linguistic solidarity, nor any approach to it—not even Canada, for there a large part of the population resists learning English altogether. The Little Russian of the Ukraine is unintelligible to the citizen of Petrograd; the Northern Italian can scarcely follow a conversation in Sicilian; the Low German from Hamburg is a foreigner in Munich; the Breton flounders in Gascony. Even in the United Kingdom there are wide divergences. "When we remember," says the New International Encyclopedia, "that the dialects of the countries (sic) in England have marked differences—so marked, indeed, that it may be doubted whether a Lancashire miner and a Lincolnshire farmer could understand each other—we may well be proud that our vast country has, strictly speaking, only one language." This uniformity was noted by the earliest observers; Pickering called attention to it in the preface to his Vocabulary and ascribed it, no doubt accurately, to the restlessness of the Americans, their inheritance of the immigrant spirit, "the frequent removals of people from one part of our country to another." It is especially marked in vocabulary and grammatical forms—the foundation stones of a living speech. There may be slight differences in pronunciation and intonation—a Southern softness, a Yankee drawl, a Western burr—but in the words they use and the way they use them all Americans, even the least tutored, follow the same line. One observes, of course, a polite speech and a common speech. But the common speech is everywhere the same, ​and its uniform vagaries take the place of the dialectic variations of other lands. A Boston street-car conductor could go to work in Chicago or San Francisco without running the slightest risk of misunderstanding his new fares. Once he had picked up half a dozen localisms, he would be, to all linguistic intents and purposes, fully naturalized.
Of the intrinsic differences that separate American from English the chief have their roots in the obvious disparity between the environment and traditions of the American people since the seventeenth century and those of the English. The latter have lived under a relatively stable social order, and it has impressed upon their souls their characteristic respect for what is customary and of good report. Until the Great War brought chaos to most of their institutions, their whole lives were regulated, perhaps more than those of any other people save the Spaniards, by a regard for precedent. The Americans, though partly of the same blood, have felt no such restraint, and acquired no such habit of conformity. On the contrary, they have plunged to the other extreme, for the conditions of life in their new country have put a high value upon the precisely opposite qualities of curiosity and daring, and so they have acquired that character of restlessness, that impatience of forms, that disdain of the dead hand, which now broadly marks them. From the first, says a recent literary historian, they have been "less phlegmatic, less conservative than the English. There were climatic influences, it may be; there was surely a spirit of intensity everywhere that made for short effort." Thus, in the arts, and thus in business, in politics, in daily intercourse, in habits of mind and speech. The American is not, in truth, lacking in a capacity for discipline; he has it highly developed; he submits to leadership readily, and even to tyranny. But, by a curious twist, it is not the leadership that is old and decorous that fetches him, but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He will resist dictation out of the past, but he will follow a new messiah with almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of economics, religion, morals and speech. A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere ​else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new shibboleth, or metaphor, or piece of slang.
Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty ; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meets the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative. The characteristic American habit of reducing complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations was already noticeable in colonial times, and such highly typical Americanisms as O. K., N. G., and P. D. Q., have been traced back to the first days of the republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these early tendencies invisible today, for the country is still in process of growth, and no settled social order has yet descended upon it. Institution-making is yet going on, and so is language-making. In so modest an operation as that which has evolved bunco from buncombe and bunk from bunco there is evidence of a phenomenon which the philologist recognizes as belonging to the most youthful and lusty stages of speech.
But of more importance than the sheer inventions, if only because much more numerous, are the extensions of the vocabulary, both absolutely and in ready workableness, by the devices of rhetoric. The American, from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians. His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest as much upon brilliant phrases as upon logical ideas. And in small things as in large he exercises continually an incomparable capacity for projecting hidden and often fantastic relationships into arresting parts of speech. Such a term as rubber-neck is almost a complete treatise on American psychology; it reveals the national habit of mind more clearly than any labored inquiry could ever reveal it. It has in it precisely the boldness and contempt for ordered forms that are so characteristically American, and it has too the grotesque humor of the country, and the delight in devastating opprobriums, and the acute feeling for the succinct and savory. The same qualities are in rough-house, water-wagon, near-silk, has-been, lame-duck and ​a thousand other such racy substantives, and in all the great stock of native verbs and adjectives. There is, indeed, but a shadowy boundary in these new coinages between the various parts of speech. Corral, borrowed from the Spanish, immediately becomes a verb and the father of an adjective. Bust, carved out of burst, erects itself into a noun. Bum, coming by way of an earlier bummer from the German bummler, becomes noun, adjective, verb and adverb. Verbs are fashioned out of substantives by the simple process of prefixing the preposition: to engineer, to chink, to stump, to hog. Others grow out of an intermediate adjective, as to boom. Others are made by torturing nouns with harsh affixes, as to burglarize and to itemize, or by groping for the root, as to resurrect and to jell. Yet others are changed from intransitive to transitive: a sleeping-car sleeps thirty passengers. So with the adjectives. They are made of substantives unchanged: codfish, jitney. Or by bold combinations: down-and-out, up-state, flat-footed. Or by shading down suffixes to a barbaric simplicity: scary, classy, tasty. Or by working over adverbs until they tremble on the brink between adverb and adjective: right and near are examples.
All of these processes, of course, are also to be observed in the English of England; in the days of its great Elizabethan growth they were in the lustiest possible being. They are, indeed, common to all tongues; "the essence of language," says Dr. Jespersen, "is activity." But if you will put the English of today beside the American of today you will see at once how much more forcibly they are in operation in the latter than in the former. The standard southern dialect of English has been arrested in its growth by its purists and grammarians. It shows no living change in structure and syntax since the days of Anne, and very little modification in either pronunciation or vocabulary. Its tendency is to conserve that which is established; to say the new thing, as nearly as possible, in the old way; to combat all that expansive gusto which made for its pliancy and resilience in the days of Shakespeare. In place of the old loose-footedness there is set up a preciosity which, in one direction, takes the form of unyielding affectations in the spoken language, and in another form shows itself in the heavy Johnsonese of current English writing—the Jargon denounced by Sir Arthur ​Quiller-Couch in his Cambridge lectures. This "infirmity of speech" Quiller-Couch finds "in parliamentary debates and in the newspapers";…"it has become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought, and so voice the reason of their being." Distinct from journalese, the two yet overlap, "and have a knack of assimilating each other's vices."
American, despite the gallant efforts of the professors, has so far escaped any such suffocating formalization. We, too, of course, have our occasional practitioners of the authentic English Jargon; in the late Grover Cleveland we produced an acknowledged master of it. But in the main our faults in writing lie in precisely the opposite direction. That is to say, we incline toward a directness of statement which, at its greatest, lacks restraint and urbanity altogether, and toward a hospitality which often admits novelties for the mere sake of their novelty, and is quite uncritical of the difference between a genuine improvement in succinctness and clarity, and mere extravagant raciness. "The tendency," says one English observer, "is…to consider the speech of any man, as any man himself, as good as any other." "All beauty and distinction," says another, "are ruthlessly sacrificed to force." "The Americans, in a kind of artistic exuberance," says a third, "are not afraid to ​use words as we sometimes are in England." Moreover, this strong revolt against conventional bonds is by no means confined to the folk-speech, nor even to the loose conversational English of the upper classes; it also gets into more studied discourse, both spoken and written. I glance through the speeches of Dr. Woodrow Wilson, surely a conscientious purist and Anglomaniac if we have ever had one, and find, in a few moments, half a dozen locutions that an Englishman in like position would never dream of using, among them we must get a move on, hog as a verb, gum-shoe as an adjective with verbal overtones, onery in place of ordinary, and that is going some. I turn to Dr. John Dewey, surely a most respectable pedagogue, and find him using dope for opium.
From the earliest days, indeed, English critics have found this gipsy tendency in our most careful writing. They denounced it in Marshall, Cooper, Mark Twain, Poe, Lossing, Lowell and Holmes, and even in Hawthorne and Thoreau; and it was no less academic a work than W. C. Brownell's "French Traits" which brought forth, in a London literary journal, the dictum that "the language most depressing to the cultured Englishman is the language of the cultured American." Even "educated American English," agrees the chief of modern English grammarians, "is now almost entirely independent of British influence, and differs from it considerably, though as yet not enough to make the two dialects—American English and British English—mutually unintelligible." Surely no Englishman of position equal to Dr. Wilson's or Dr. Dewey's would venture upon such locutions as dope and to hog. One might conceivably think of George Saintsbury doing it—but Saintsbury is a privileged iconoclast. Gilbert Murray would blush to death if merely accused of it ​falsely. When, on August 2, 1914, Sir Edward Grey ventured modestly to speak of "pressing the button in the interest of peace," the New Age denounced him for indulging in vulgarism, and, as one English correspondent writes to me, various other Britons saw in the locution "a sign of the impending fall of the Empire."
American thus shows its character in a constant experimentation, a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid forms. No other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and phrases more readily; none is more careless of precedents; none shows a greater fecundity and originality of fancy. It is producing new words every day, by trope, by agglutination, by the shedding of inflections, by the merging of parts of speech, and by sheer brilliance of imagination. It is full of what Bret Harte called the "saber-cuts of Saxon"; it meets Montaigne's ideal of "a succulent and nervous speech, short and compact, not as much delicated and combed out as vehement and brusque, rather arbitrary than monotonous, not pedantic but soldierly, as Suetonius called Cæsar's Latin." One pictures the common materials of English dumped into a pot, exotic flavorings added, and the bubblings assiduously and expectantly skimmed. What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it comes into contact with what is new and vivid. "When we Americans are through with the English language," says Mr. Dooley, "it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy." Let American confront a novel problem alongside English, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious. Movie is better than cinema; and the English begin to admit the fact by adopting the word; it is not only better American, it is better English. Bill-board is better than hoarding. Office-holder is more honest, more picturesque, more thoroughly Anglo-Saxon than public-servant. Stem-winder somehow has more life in it, more fancy and vividness, than the literal keyless-watch. Turn to the terminology of railroading (itself, by the way, an Americanism): its creation fell upon the two peoples equally, but they tackled the job independently. The English, seeking a figure to denominate the wedge-shaped fender in front of a locomotive, called it a plough; the Americans, characteristically, gave it the far more pungent name of cow-catcher. So with the casting where two rails join. The En​glish called it a crossing-plate. The Americans, more responsive to the suggestion in its shape, called it a frog.
This boldness of conceit, of course, makes for vulgarity. Unrestrained by any critical sense—and the critical sense of the professors counts for little, for they cry wolf too often—it flowers in such barbaric inventions as tasty, alright, go-getter, he-man, go-aheadativeness, tony, semi-occasional, to fellowship and to doxologize. Let it be admitted: American is not infrequently vulgar; the Americans, too, are vulgar (Bayard Taylor called them "Anglo-Saxons relapsed into semi-barbarism"); America itself is unutterably vulgar. But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions, and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy language-making. The history of English, like the history of American and of every other living tongue, is a history of vulgarisms that, by their accurate meeting of real needs, have forced their way into sound usage, and even into the lifeless catalogues of the grammarians. The colonial pedants denounced to advocate as bitterly as they ever denounced to compromit or to happify, and all the English authorities gave them aid, but it forced itself into the American language despite them, and today it is even accepted as English and has got into the Concise Oxford Dictionary. To donate, so late as 1870, was dismissed by Richard Grant White as ignorant and abominable but today there is not an American dictionary that doesn't accept it, and surely no American writer would hesitate to use it. Reliable, gubernatorial, standpoint and scientist have survived opposition of equal ferocity. The last-named was coined by William Whewell, an Englishman, in 1840, but was first adopted in America. Despite the fact that Fitzedward Hall and other eminent philologists used it and defended it, it aroused almost incredible opposition in England. So recently as 1890 it was denounced by the London Daily News as ​"an ignoble Americanism," and according to William Archer it was finally accepted by the English only "at the point of the bayonet."
The purist performs a useful office in enforcing a certain logical regularity upon the process, and in our own case the omnipresent example of the greater conservatism of the English corrects our native tendency to go too fast, but the process itself is as inexorable in its workings as the precession of the equinoxes, and if we yield to it more eagerly than the English, it is only a proof, perhaps, that the future of what was once the Anglo-Saxon tongue lies on this side of the water. "The story of English grammar," says Murison, "is a story of simplification, of dispensing with grammatical forms." And of the most copious and persistent enlargement of vocabulary and mutation of idiom ever recorded, perhaps, by descriptive philology. English now has the brakes on, but American continues to leap in the dark, and the prodigality of its movement is all the indication that is needed of its intrinsic health, its capacity to meet the ever-changing needs of a restless and emotional people, constantly fluent in racial composition, and disdainful of tradition. "Language," says Sayce, "is no artificial product, contained in books and dictionaries and governed by the strict rules of impersonal grammarians. It is the living expression of the mind and spirit of a people, ever changing and shifting, whose sole standard of correctness is custom and the common usage of the community.…The first lesson to be learned is that there is no intrinsic right or wrong in the use of language, no fixed rules such as are the delight of the teacher of Latin prose. What is right now will be wrong hereafter, what language rejected yesterday she accepts today."
One familiar with the habits of pedagogues need not be told that, in their grudging discussions of American, they have spent most of their energies upon vain attempts to classify its materials. White and Lounsbury, as I have shown, carried the business to the limits of the preposterous; when they had finished identifying and cataloguing Americanisms there were no more Americanisms left to study. But among investigators of less learning there is a more spacious view of the problem, and the labored categories of White and Lounsbury are much extended. Pickering, the first to attempt a list of Americanisms, rehearsed their origin under the following headings:
* "We have formed some new words."
* "To some old ones, that are still in use in England, we have affixed new significations."
* "Others, which have been long obsolete in England, are still retained in common use among us."
Bartlett, in the second edition of his dictionary, dated 1859, increased these classes to nine:
* Archaisms, i. e., old English words, obsolete, or nearly so, in England, but retained in use in this country.
* English words used in a different sense from what they are in England. "These include many names of natural objects differently applied."
* Words which have retained their original meaning in the United States, though not in England.
* English provincialisms adopted into general use in America.
* Newly coined words, which owe their origin to the productions or to the circumstances of the country.
* Words borrowed from European languages, especially the French, Spanish, Dutch and German.
* Indian words.
* Negroisms.
* Peculiarities of pronunciation.
Some time before this, but after the publication of Bartlett's first edition in 1848, William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Am​herst, devoted a brief chapter to "American Dialects" in his well-known work on English and in it one finds the following formidable classification of Americanisms:
* 1. Words borrowed from other languages.
** a. Indian, as Kennebec, Ohio, Tombigbee; sagamore, quahaug, succotash.
** b. Dutch, as boss, kruller, stoop.
** c. German, as spuke(?), sauerkraut.
** d. French, as bayou, cache, chute, crevasse, levee.
** e. Spanish, as calaboose, chaparral, hacienda, rancho, ranchero.
** f. Negro, as buckra.
* 2. Words "introduced from the necessity of our situation, in order to express new ideas."
** a. Words "connected with and flowing from our political institutions." as selectman, presidential, congressional, caucus, mass-meeting, lynch law, help (for servants).
** b. Words "connected with our ecclesiastical institutions," as associational, consociational, to fellowship, to missionate.
** c. Words "connected with a new country," as lot, diggings, betterments, squatter.
* 3. Miscellaneous Americanisms.
** a. Words and phrases become obsolete in England, as talented, offset (for set-off), back and forth (for backward and forward).
** b. Old words and phrases "which are now merely provincial in England," as hub, whap (?), to wilt.
** c. Nouns formed from verbs by adding the French suffix -ment, as publishment, releasement, requirement.
** d. Forms of words "which fill the gap or vacancy between two words which are approved," as obligate (between oblige and obligation) and variate (between vary and variation).
** e. "Certain compound terms for which the English have different compounds," as bank-bill (bank-note), book-store (bookseller's shop), bottom-land (interval-land), clapboard (pale), sea-board (sea-shore), side-hill (hill-side) .
** f. "Certain colloquial phrases, apparently idiomatic, and very expressive," as to cave in, to flare up, to flunk out, to fork over, to hold on, to let on, to stave off, to take on.
** g. Intensives, "often a matter of mere temporary fashion," as dreadful, might, plaguy, powerful.
** h. "Certain verbs expressing one's state of mind, but partially or timidly," as to allot upon (for to count upon), to calculate, to expect (to think or believe), to guess, to reckon.
** i. "Certain adjectives, expressing not only quality, but one's subjective feelings in regard to it," as clever, grand, green, likely, smart, ugly. ​
** j. Abridgments, as stage (for stage-coach), turnpike (for turnpike-road), spry (for sprightly), to conduct (for to conduct one's self).
** k. "Quaint or burlesque terms," as to tote, to yank; humbug, loafer, muss, plunder (for baggage), rock (for stone).
** l. "Low expressions, mostly political," as slangwhanger, loco foco, hunker; to get the hang of.
** m. "Ungrammatical expressions, disapproved by all," as do don't, used to could, can't come it, Universal preacher (for Universalist), there's no two ways about it.
Elwyn, in 1859, attempted no classification. He confined his glossary to archaic English words surviving in America, and sought only to prove that they had come down "from our remotest ancestry" and were thus undeserving of the reviling lavished upon them by English critics. Scheie de Vere, in 1872, followed Bartlett, and devoted himself largely to words borrowed from the Indian dialects, and from the French, Spanish and Dutch. But Farmer, in 1889, ventured upon a new classification, prefacing it with the following definition:
An Americanism may be defined as a word or phrase, old or new, employed by general or respectable usage in America in a way not sanctioned by the best standards of the English language. As a matter of fact, however, the term has come to possess a wider meaning, and it is now applied not only to words and phrases which can be so described, but also to the new and legitimately born words adapted to the general needs and usages, to the survivals of an older form of English than that now current in the mother country, and to the racy, pungent vernacular of Western life.
He then proceeded to this classification:
* 1. Words and phrases of purely American derivation, embracing words originating in:
** а. Indian and aboriginal life.
** b. Pioneer and frontier life.
** c. The church.
** d. Politics.
** e. Trades of all kinds.
** f. Travel, afloat and ashore.
* 2. Words brought by colonists, including:
** a. The German element.
** b. The French. ​
** c. The Spanish.
** d. The Dutch.
** e. The negro.
** f. The Chinese.
* 3. Names of American things, embracing:
** a. Natural products.
** b. Manufactured articles.
* 4. Perverted English words.
* 5. Obsolete English words still in good use in America.
* 6. English words, American by inflection and modification.
* 7. Odd and ignorant popular phrases, proverbs, vulgarisms, and colloquialisms, cant and slang.
* 8. Individualisms.
* 9. Doubtful and miscellaneous.
Clapin, in 1902, reduced these categories to four:
* 1. Genuine English words, obsolete or provincial in England, and universally used in the United States.
* 2. English words conveying, in the United States, a different meaning from that attached to them in England.
* 3. Words introduced from other languages than the English:—French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Indian, etc.
* 4. Americanisms proper, i. e., words coined in the country, either representing some new idea or peculiar product.
Thornton, in 1912, substituted the following:
Tucker, in 1921, attempted to reduce all Americanisms to two grand divisions, as follows:
1. Words and phrases that originated in America and express something that the British have always expressed differently if they have mentioned it at all.
2. Words and phrases that would convey to a British ear a different meaning from that which they bear in this country.
To which he added seven categories of locutions not to be regarded as Americanisms, despite their inclusion in various previous lists, as follows:
1. Words and phrases stated by the previous compiler himself to be of foreign [i. e., chiefly of English] origin, like Farmer’s hand-me-downs.
2. Names of things exclusively American, but known abroad under the same name, such as moccasin.
3. Names of things invented in the United States, like drawing-room oar.
4. Words used in this country in a sense hardly distinguishable from that they bear in England, like force for a gang of laborers.
5. Nonce words, like Mark Twain’s cavalieress.
6. Perfectly regular and self-explanatory compounds, like office-holder, planing-machine, ink-slinger and fly-time.
7. Purely technical terms, such as those employed in baseball.
No more than a glance at these discordant classifications is needed to show that they hamper the inquiry by limiting its scope — not so much, to be sure, as the extravagant limitations of White and Lounsbury, but still very seriously. They leave out of account some of the most salient characters of a living language. Only Bartlett and Farmer establish a separate category of Americanisms produced by umlaut, by shading of consonants and by other phonological changes, though even Thornton, of course, is obliged to take notice of such forms as bust and bile, and even Tucker lists buster. None of them, however, goes into the matter at any length, nor even into the matter ​of etymology. Bartlett's etymologies are scanty and often inaccurate; Scheie de Vere's are sometimes quite fanciful; Thornton, Tucker and the rest scarcely offer any at all. It must be obvious that many of the words and phrases excluded by Tucker's index expurgatorius are quite genuine Americanisms. Why should he bar out such a word as moccasin on the ground that it is also used in England? So is caucus, and yet he includes it. He is also far too hostile to such characteristic American compounds as office-holder, fly-time and parlor-car. True enough, their materials are good English, and they involve no change in the meaning of their component parts, but it must be plain that they were put together in the United States and that an Englishman always sees a certain strangeness in them. Pay-dirt, panel-house, passage-way, patrolman, night-rider, low-down, know-nothing, hoe-cake and hog-wallow are equally compounded of pure English metal, and yet he lists all of them. Again, he is too ready, it seems to me, to bar out archaisms, which constitute one of the most interesting and authentic of all the classes of Americanisms. It is idle to prove that Chaucer used to guess. The important thing is that the English abandoned it centuries ago, and that when they happen to use it today they are always conscious that it is an Americanism. Baggage is in Shakespeare, but it is not in the London Times. The Times, save when it wants to be American, uses luggage, as do the fashionable shop-keepers along Fifth avenue. Here Mr. Tucker allows his historical principles to run away with his judgment. His book represents the labor of nearly forty years and is full of shrewd observations and persuasive contentions, but it is sometimes excessively dogmatic.
The most scientific and laborious of all these collections of Americanisms is Thornton's. It presents an enormous mass of quotations, and they are all very carefully dated, and it corrects most of the more ​obvious errors in the work of earlier inquirers. But its very dependence upon quotations limits it chiefly to the written language, and so the enormously richer materials of the spoken language are passed over, and particularly the materials evolved during the past twenty years. One searches the two fat volumes in vain for such highly characteristic forms as near-accident and buttinski, the use of sure as an adverb, and the employment of well as a sort of general equivalent of the German also. These grammatical and syntactical tendencies are beyond the scope of Thornton's investigation, but it is plain that they must be prime concerns of any future student who essays to get at the inner spirit of the language. Its difference from standard English is not merely a difference in vocabulary, to be disposed of in an alphabetical list; it is, above all, a difference in pronunciation, in intonation, in conjugation and declension, in metaphor and idiom, in the whole fashion of using words. A page from one of Ring W. Lardner's baseball stories contains few words that are not in the English vocabulary, and yet the thoroughly American color of it cannot escape anyone who actually listens to the tongue spoken around him. Some of the elements which enter into that color will be considered in the following pages. The American vocabulary, of course, must be given first attention, for in it the earliest American divergences are embalmed and it tends to grow richer and freer year after year, but attention will also be paid to materials and ways of speech that are less obvious, and in particular to certain tendencies of the grammar of spoken American, hitherto not investigated.
* ↑ Pp. 22-23. A year before this, in his Plan of a Federal University, contributed fo the American Museum for 1788, Dr. Benjamin Rush had indulged himself in a rather more measured prognostication. Under the heading of Philology he said: "Instruction in this branch of literature will become the more necessary in America as our intercourse must soon cease with the bar, the stage and the pulpit of Great Britain, from whence (sic) we received our knowledge of the pronunciation of the English language. Even modern English books should cease to be the models of style in the United States. The present is the age of simplicity of writing in America. The turgid style of Johnson, the purple glare of Gibbon, and even the studied and thick-set metaphors of Junius are all equally unnatural and should not be admitted into our country."
* ↑ Most latter-day English grammarians, of course, (e.g., Sweet and Jespersen) ground their work upon the spoken language. But inasmuch as this differs from American English, the American pedagogues remain faithful to the grammarians of the era before phonology became a science, and imitate them in most of their absurdities. For a discussion of the evil effects of this stupidity see O. Jespersen: Growth and Structure of the English Language, 3rd ed.; Leipzig, 1919, p. 125 et seq. See also The English Language in America, by Harry Morgan Ayres, in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. iv; New York, 1921.
* ↑ America's Coming of Age; New York, 1915, p. 15. See also the preface to Every-Day English, by Richard Grant White; Boston, 1881, p. xviii.
* ↑ The common notion that the Académie combats changes is quite erroneous. In the preface to the first edition of its dictionary (1694) it disclaimed any purpose "to make new words and to reject others at its pleasure." In the preface to the second edition (1718) it confessed that "ignorance and corruption often introduce manners of writing" and that "convenience establishes them." In the preface to the third edition (1740) it admitted that it was "forced to admit changes which the public has made," and so on. Says D. M. Robertson, in A History of the French Academy (London, 1910): "The Academy repudiates any assumption of authority over the language with which the public in its own practise has not first clothed it. So much, indeed, does it confine itself to an interpretation merely of the laws of language that its decisions are sometimes contrary to its own judgment of what is either desirable or expedient."
* ↑ Paris, 1920.
* ↑ Cf. Scandinavian Studies and Notes, vol. iv, no. 3, Aug., 1917, p. 258.
* ↑ This movement won official recognition so long ago as 1885, when the Storthing passed the first of a series of acts designed to put the two languages on equal footing. Four years later, after a campaign going back to 1874, provision was made for teaching the landsmaal in the schools for the training of primary teachers. In 1899 a professorship of the landsmaal was established in the University of Christiania. The school boards in the case of primary schools, and the pupils in the case of middle and high schools are now permitted to choose between the two languages, and the landsmaal has been given official status by the State Church. The chief impediment to its wider acceptance lies in the fact that it is not, as it stands, a natural language, but an artificial amalgamation of peasant dialects. It was devised in 1848-50 by Ivar Aasen. Vide The Language Question, London Times, Norwegian Supplement, May 18, 1914.
* ↑ A number of such works are listed in the Bibliography and in Part II, Section 3 of the Appendix. The late Ricardo Palma, director of the Biblioteca Nacional at Lima, was an ardent student of American-Spanish, and tried to induce the Academia to adopt a long list of terms used in the Spanish of South America.
* ↑ Maximilian Scheie de Vere: Americanisms: The English of the New World: New York, 1872.
* ↑ Richard H. Thornton: An American Glossary…2 vols.; Phila. and London, 1912. Mr. Thornton returned to the United States after his dictionary was published.
* ↑ Organized Feb. 19, 1889, with Dr. J. J. Child, of Harvard, as its first president.
* ↑ Author of the once famous Travels in North America; London, 1820.
* ↑ A Letter to the Hon. John Pickering on the Subject of His Vocabulary; Boston, 1817.
* ↑ A Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America; Boston, 1816.
* ↑ 4th ed., New York, 1870, p. 669.
* ↑ Op. cit. p. 676.
* ↑ The English Language; New York, 1850; rev. ed., 1855. This was the first American text-book of English for use in colleges. Before its publication, according to Fowler himself (rev, ed., p. xi), the language was studied only "superficially" and "in the primary schools." He goes on: "Afterward, when older in the academy, during their preparation for college, our pupils perhaps despised it, in comparison with the Latin and the Greek; and in the college they do not systematically study the language after they come to maturity."
* ↑ In Recent Exemplifications of False Philology; London, 1872.
* ↑ Americanisms, parts i-viii, April, May, July, Sept., Nov., 1878; Jan., March, May, 1879.
* ↑ A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States, 4th ed.; Boston, 1877.
* ↑ Feb., March, June, July, Sept.
* ↑ Dr. Matthews, however, did not invent this term, as is sometimes stated. Nor was it invented by Gilbert M. Tucker, who claims it in his American English; New York, 1921, p. 42. Since printing his claim Mr. Tucker has called my attention to the fact that the word was used by R. G. White in the Galaxy for March, 1868.
* ↑ Vol. xiv, pp. 484-5; Cambridge, 1917.
* ↑ Vol xxv, p. 209.
* ↑ Literary Supplement, Jan. 19, 1922, p. 46.
* ↑ July 18, 1913.
* ↑ Of the words cited as still unfamiliar in England, Thornton has traced hobo to 1891, hold-up and bunco to 1887, dive to 1882, dead-beat to 1877, hoodlum to 1872, road-agent to 1866, stag to 1856, drummer to 1836 and flume to 1792. All of them are probably older than these references indicate.
* ↑ Mail correspondence dated Jan. 22, 1920.
* ↑ London Daily Herald, Aug. 20, 1919.
* ↑ Review in the Medical Press, Sept. 17, 1919, of an article by MacCarty and Connor in Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics. "In the study of the terminology of diseases of the breast," says this review, "[the authors] suggest a scheme which seems simple, but unfortunately for British understanding it is written in American."
* ↑ Summarized in Literary Digest, June 19, 1915.
* ↑ American Today, Scribner's, Feb., 1899. Sir Henry Newbolt seems to be of the same mind. So, I suspect, is Dr. Robert Bridges.
* ↑ Edgar Jepson, Little Review, Sept., 1918.
* ↑ For example, see the Athenæum's review of Barrett H. Clark's translation of Romain Holland's Danton, April 4, 1919, p. 152. In the same way the anti-American J. C. Squire protested bitterly because an American translator of the Journal of the Goncourts "spoke of a pavement as a sidewalk." See the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, July 23, 1921.
* ↑ Westminster Gazette, reprinted in the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, July 23, 1921.
* ↑ English and American. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, May, 1920, p. 94. For other discussions by Englishmen consult The Anglo-American Future, by A. G. Gardiner; New York, 1921, p. 65; Roving East and Roving West, by E. V. Lucas; New York, 1921, p. 129; a review of the 2nd ed. of the present work by H. W. Nevinson, in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Feb. 11, 1922; and other reviews of it in the London Observer, March 17, 1922; the London Morning Post, March 10, 1922; the Westminster Gazette, March 17, 1922; the Saturday Review March 25, 1922; the Manchester Guardian, March 28, 1922; the Spectator, March 25, 1922; the London Sunday Express, April 9, 1922; the Nation and Athenæum, May 6, 1922; the London Outlook, May 20, 1922; also a review of Matthews' Essays on English, London Sunday Times, March 19, 1922.
* ↑ In Pastures New; New York, 1906, p. 6.
* ↑ Concerning the American Language, in The Stolen White Elephant; Boston, 1882. A footnote says that the essay is "part of a chapter crowded out of A Tramp Abroad." (Hartford, 1880.)
* ↑ Hartford, 1872, p. 45.
* ↑ The Editor's Study, Harper's Magazine, Jan., 1886.
* ↑ J. S. Clarke's Life of Fiske, vol. i, p. 431.
* ↑ English as She is Spoke, Bookman, July, 1920.
* ↑ Our Statish Language, Harper's Magazine, May, 1920, p. 846.
* ↑ M. A. B., Nov., 1919, p. 288. The rejoinder is reprinted in the March, 1920, issue, p. 107.
* ↑ Sept. 12, 1919.
* ↑ The question is often (and sometimes violently) discussed in American journals. Typical articles are Our Barbarous Lingo, by John Macy, Nation, April 12, 1922, and a review of the 2nd ed. of the present work by P. B. McDonald, Mining and Scientific Press, March 11, 1922. William McFee, a Scotchman now domiciled in the United States, attacked my main contentions in the Bookman (New York), Jan., 1922. Frequent denunciations of the doctrine that English and American differ appear in the Anglophile newspapers, especially the Boston Evening Transcript, the Springfield Republican, the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times.
* ↑ Étude sur l'Anglais Parlé aux États Unis (la Langue Americaine), Actes de la Société Philologique de Paris, March, 1874.
* ↑ A summary of these lectures has been printed by Julius Beltz, at Langensalza.
* ↑ Metoula-Sprachführer…Englisch von Karl Blattner; Ausgabe für Amerika; Berlin-Schoneberg, 1912.
* ↑ Polyglott Kuntze; Schnellste Erlernung jeder Sprache ohne Lehrer; Amerikanisch; Bonn a. Rh., n. d.
* ↑ Like the English expositors of American slang this German falls into several errors. For example, he gives cock for rooster, boots for shoes, braces for suspenders and postman for letter-carrier, and lists ironmonger, joiner and linen-draper as American terms. He also spells wagon in the English manner, with two g's, and translates schweinefüsse as pork-feet. But he spells such words as color in the American manner and gives the pronunciation of clerk as the American klörk, not as the English klark.
* ↑ By Carlo di Domizio and Charles M. Smith; Munich, n. d.
* ↑ Like the Metoula expositor they make mistakes. Certainly no American bartender ever made a Hock-cup; he made a Rhine-wine-cup. They list several drinks that were certainly not very well known in America in the old days, e. g., the knickebein and the white-lion. They convert julep into jules—a foul blow, indeed!
* ↑ The Little Yankee: a Handbook of Idiomatic American English; Freiburg i. B., 1912.
* ↑ It is by Dr. A. Th. Dorf, of Chicago. The book is De Forenede Stater: Landet og Folket. The editor is Prof. Evald Kristensen, of Atterdag College, Solvang, California, and the publisher is Axel H. Anderson, of Omaha, Neb.
* ↑ Molee's notions are set forth in Plea for an American Language…; Chicago, 1888; and Tutonish; Chicago, 1902. He announced the preparation of a Dictionary of the American Language in 1888, but so far as I know it has not been published. He was born in Wisconsin, of Norwegian parents, in 1845, and pursued linguistic studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he seems to have taken a Ph.B.
* ↑ American English, North American Review, Jan., 1883.
* ↑ Oct. 1, 1909.
* ↑ J. F. Healy, general manager of the Davis Colliery Co. at Elkins, W. Va., in a speech before the West Virginia Coal Mining Institute, at Wheeling, Dec., 1910; reprinted as The American Language; Pittsburgh, 1911.
* ↑ Westminster Review, July, 1888, p. 35.
* ↑ Dr. A. Th. Dorf, in De Forenede Stater; Omaha, Neb., 1921, p. 207.
* ↑ W. W. Skeat distinguishes 9 principal dialects in Scotland, 3 in Ireland and 30 in England and Wales. Vide English Dialects from the Eighth Century to the Present Day; Cambridge, 1911, p. 107 ff.
* ↑ Art. Americanisms, 2nd ed.
* ↑ F. L. Pattee: A History of American Literature Since 1870; New York, 1916. See also The American Novel, by Carl Van Doren; New York, 1921.
* ↑ Cf. the chapter, Interlude: On Jargon, in Quiller-Couch's On the Art of Writing; New York, 1916. Curiously enough, large parts of the learned critic's book are written in the very Jargon he attacks. See also ch. vi. of Growth and Structure of the English Language, by O. Jespersen, 3rd ed. rev.; Leipzig, 1919, especially pp. 143 ff. See also Official English, in English, March, 1919, p. 7; April, p. 45, and Aug., p. 135, and The Decay of Syntax, in the London Times Literary Supplement, May 8, 1919, p. 1.
* ↑ Alexander Francis: Americans: an Impression; New York, 1900.
* ↑ G. Lowes Dickinson, in the English Review, quoted by Current Literature, April, 1910.
* ↑ Frank Dilnot: The New America; New York, 1919, p. 25. The same author describes two tendencies in American, one toward the reinvigoration of English, the other toward its dilution and corruption. He regards the language as far more vivid and effective than the English of England. "Show me the alert Englishman," he says, "who will not find a stimulation in those nuggety word-groupings which are the commonplaces in good American conversation. They are like flashes of crystal. They come from all kinds of people—who are brilliantly innocent of enriching the language.…The written word in America follows generally along the lines of the spoken word.…In writing as well as in speech there is a widespread range of what to an Englishman is looseness, occasionally slovenliness.…The American tongue, written or spoken, with its alteration from the English of England, is a potent and penetrating instrument, rich in new vibrations, full of joy as well as shocks for the unsuspecting visitor."
* ↑ Speech before the Chamber of Commerce Convention, Washington, Feb. 19, 1916.
* ↑ Speech at workingman's dinner, New York, Sept. 4, 1912.
* ↑ Wit and Wisdom of Woodrow Wilson, comp, by Richard Linthicum: New York, 1916, p. 54.
* ↑ Speech at Ridgewood, N. J., April 22, 1910.
* ↑ Wit and Wisdom…, p. 56.
* ↑ New Republic, Dec. 24, 1919, p. 116, col. 1.
* ↑ Henry Sweet: A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical, 2 parts; Oxford, 1900–03, part i, p. 224.
* ↑ Despite this fact an academic and ineffective opposition to it still goes on. On the Style Sheet of the Century Magazine it is listed among the "words and phrases to be avoided." It was prohibited by the famous Index Expurgatorius prepared by William Cullen Bryant for the New York Evening Post, and his prohibition is still theoretically in force, but the word is now actually permitted by the Post. The Chicago Daily News Style Book, dated July 1, 1908, also bans it.
* ↑ Scientist is now in the Concise Oxford Dictionary and in Cassell's. So are reliable, standpoint and gubernatorial. But the Century Magazine still bans standpoint and the Evening Post (at least in theory) bans both standpoint and reliable. The Chicago Daily News accepts standpoint, but bans reliable and gubernatorial. All of these words, of course, are now almost as good as ox or and.
* ↑ Changes in the Language since Shakespeare's Time, in Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv, p. 491. See also Jespersen, op. cit.
* ↑ Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. ii, pp. 333-4.
* ↑ Op. cit., pp. 119–28.
* ↑ Alfred L. Elwyn, M.D.: Glossary of Supposed Americanisms…; Phila., 1859.
* ↑ John S. Farmer: Americanisms Old and New…, London, 1889.
* ↑ Sylva Clapin: A New Dictionary of Americanisms, Being a Glossary of Words Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States and the Dominion of Canada; New York, 1902.
* ↑ Gilbert M. Tucker: American English: New York, 1921.
* ↑ He gives the term as drawing-room car, but obviously means parlor-car. The former is a Briticism long since dropped in America.
* ↑ 86 I detect a few rather astonishing errors. P.D.Q. is defined as an abbreviation of "pretty deuced quick," which it certainly is not. Passage (of a bill in Congress) is listed as an Americanism; it is actually very good English and is used in England every day. Standee is defined as "standing place"; it really means one who stands. Sundae (the soda-fountain mess) is misspelled sunday; it was precisely the strange spelling that gave the term vogue. Mucker, a brilliant Briticism, unknown in America, save in college slang, is listed between movie and muckraker.
* ↑ His two volumes, however, do not exhaust the materials gathered by him. He collected enough matter to make three volumes. But his age dissuaded him from attempting to prepare it for the press, and so he deposited it at Harvard University, for the use of some future philologist. In 1917 he appealed to various rich men for funds to complete and publish his work, but "to their lasting infamy, they were uniformly too unappreciative…to guarantee the success of this record of American self-expression." See his letter in Dialect Notes, vol. v. p. 43 (1919).