New-York tribune., 1919-05-31
By Philip Goodman

1tE AMbtitAN lANGl AGE. BY H. L. Mcncken.
Published by Alfred A. hnopf Sli pages Price
The late DR.. Goldsmith, whose name
has not appeared in the London Post
office Directory since 1774, once OBJ
served that language is an instrument
for concealing thought. Ursa Major,
sitting at the same table, asked which
language he meant. "English," replied
Goldy. "Sir," said DR.. Jornson. "prob-
ably your English" Now, Mr.. Mencken.
IN his recently published "American
Language does not hold with Gold
smith that English is an instrument for
concealing thought, but he does main
tam that English with all its circum-
locutlons and euphemisms. often OBJ
fuscates thought or at least spoken
thought,' whereas our everyday Ameri-
can OF the hleachers, riding roughly
over all infections, gets down to brass
tacks and beats English to it forty
ways Indeed, Mr. Mencken says that
all foreigner needs is a few nouns,
pronouns, verbs and numerals and he
can launch forth in American Whv
even waste time over accidence? "Me
see She" he will grant, might be pretty
pad English, but it is understandable
American, land on some not far dM-
tant tomorrow it may be very fair
American" Let US hope that that to-
morrow, like the one ir the apopthegm
that hangs on the wall, is the to-mor-
row that never comes.
There are ninety-nine things about
this new Mencken book that we like;
there is one that we do not. 1t is
astoundingly complete, it is written
IN a most perfect spirit of honest in
quiry, it is incredibly interesting, it is
promptuary of philology, it has an
inculpable humor, it is intellectually
lncorrupt, it has a we'll ordered ar
rangement, it is ungrudgingly fair in
the crediting Of references (there is
hardly page without its quota of
Vldes and Cfs), it is consistently aloof
from the pettiness of proving some
thing, it is consummately learned and
1t is not written in American. The
one thing that we do not like is its
title. 1t might have been more fifty
called american Locutions" than "The
American Language" The mass of
neologlsms, the tabulations of slurred
and disregarded infections, the half
blood derivates, the teratological loan
words. the syllable elsions of the
canaille, all of which Mr. Mencken
carefully exhibits, are admittedly heard
IN American streets, in American bar
rooms, in American business offices,
but assuredly it is not the American
language. We are not prepared to ad
NIT that any mere tara -diddle is
language. The word is fraught with
some deserving dignity. We might al
most say that it is the thing that men
write in; what they speak in is sub
lingual something else. For if this is
not true, then what we have often heard
exchanged between two irate vendors
in Billingsgate must be English.
In studying Mr.. Mencken's book we
were at first suspicious of a subtle
hoax. Even now we are not entirely
satisfied that he has not successfully
hid the joker somewhere. What ex-
cites our suspicion is his stubborn in
sistence that this sub-lingual thing.
this amorphous mass Of bleary bla -bla
this gutter gibberish which he calls
American, is really language. For be
it understood that this here Otis all
right; it's perfectly good American)
Mencken has an instructive sense of
the beautiful in letters. Besides being
an artist himself, he probably has a
larger following than any other liter
ary critic in America Thus it does
not seem consonant with his work that
he should sponsor a SO downright ugly
thing as this foul and noxious sidewalk
psychology. 1t is like dragging in mud
on the drawingroom carpet.
Mr. Mencken speaks by the card
when he says: american is not in
frequently vulgar; the Americans. too,
are vulgar (Bayard Taylor called them
'Anglo-Saxons relapsed into semi-bar-
barismD America itself is unutter-
ably vulgar. But vulgarity, after all
means no more than yielding to nat
ural impulses in the face of conven-
tional inhibitions. and that yielding to
natural impulses is at the heart of all
healthy language The history
of the English, like the history of
American and every other living tongue,
is 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' But it is pre-
cisely and Immediately at the point
where a vulgarism meets a real need
that it ceases to be vulgarism; it
then becomes a part of speech in good
repute. The essential qualities of vul-
garity are its utter uselessness as vul-
garity and its high utility because OF
its potential vitality But this poten-
tial vitality always requires an accept
ant capacity-1cal reed, as Mencken
calls ito change its garb, cleanse it
and give it good address. Then it is
ready to enter the Vulgate with all its
purpose and doughty strength,
to energize its neighbor- and
give spirited and bold point to Ian
guage. Mencken has no patience with
the purists who would deny vulgarity
this adnittance, and in this he unde-
niably is right. Vulgarity is to the
living tongue what Schleswig- Holstein
has been to the courts of Europe.
But Mencken admits that "the mr.