BOOKS BY H · L · MENCKEN
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE: Supplement I
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE: Supplement II
HAPPY DAYS
NEWSPAPER DAYS
HEATHEN DAYS which taken together constitute
The Days of H. L. Mencken
A NEW DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
TREATISE ON THE GODS
CHRISTMAS STORY
A MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY (with selections from the Prejudices series, A Book of Burlesques, In Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy, Making a President, A Book of Calumny, Treatise on Right and Wrong, with pieces from the American Mercury, Smart Set, and the Baltimore Evening Sun, and some previously unpublished notes)
MINORITY REPORT: H. L. MENCKEN’S NOTEBOOKS
THE BATHTUB HOAX and Other Blasts and Bravos from the Chicago Tribune
LETTERS OF H. L. MENCKEN, selected and annotated by Guy J. Forgue
H. L. MENCKEN ON MUSIC, edited by Louis Cheslock
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE: The Fourth Edition and the Two Supplements, abridged, with annotations and new material, by Raven I. McDavid, Jr., with the assistance of David W. Maurer
H. L. MENCKEN: THE AMERICAN SCENE, A READER, selected and edited, with an introduction and commentary, by Huntington Cairns
These are BORZOI BOOKS, published by ALFRED A. KNOPF in New York
COPYRIGHT 1945 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from, the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. Published in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80878-3
v3.1
PREFACE
Since the fourth edition of “The American Language” was published in April, 1936, it has been reprinted eight times (not to mention an English edition and one in Braille, in fourteen volumes, for the use of the blind), and in consequence I have had a chance to correct some of the more embarrassing errors in the earlier printings; but the size of the volume has made it impracticable to attempt any considerable addition of new matter, and in consequence there is a formidable arrearage of material awaiting working up. It has poured in from numerous and varied sources. For one thing, there has been a sharp increase in the professional literature of the subject, culminating in the launching in 1939 of the monumental “Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada,” and the completion in 1944 of “A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles,” which was barely getting under way when my fourth edition was published. Meanwhile, the publication of the third volume of Richard H. Thornton’s “American Glossary” (the first two volumes had appeared in 1912) was finished in Dialect Notes in 1939, and that intermittent journal and the more regular American Speech (begun in 1925) continued to print many valuable papers on American speechways, laid under heavy contribution here. Nor was all the work of exploration and mapping done by Americans, for in 1939 H. W. Horwill brought out at Oxford his “Anglo-American Interpreter,” the first attempt at an English-American dictionary on a comprehensive scale, and Eric Partridge continued his studies of English borrowings of American slang. In the latter field the American, W. J. Burke, published an excellent bibliography in 1939, under the title of “The Literature of Slang,” and Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark followed in 1942 with “The American Thesaurus of Slang,” which went far beyond the late Maurice H. Weseen’s “Dictionary of American Slang” of 1934. There appeared also a number of books dealing with various other special phases of the subject — for example, Robert L. Ramsay and Frances Guthrie Emberson’s “Mark Twain Lexicon” in 1938, Satoshi Ichiya’s “King’s English or President’s English” in 1939, Charles Carpenter Fries’s “American English Grammar” in 1940, Colonel Elbridge Colby’s “Army Talk” in 1942, and Harold Wentworth’s “American Dialect Dictionary” in 1944.
I have given diligent study to all this literature, and in addition have accumulated a large body of observations from other sources. Ever since the publication of my first edition in 1919 I have had clipping bureaus supply me with everything printed on the subject in the newspapers of the United States, Great Britain and the British dominions and colonies, and until the outbreak of World War II my gleanings also included many contributions from non-English-speaking countries, especially Germany and Japan. Finally, I have been in constant correspondence with interested persons, many of them professional philologians but most of them lay inquirers like myself, in all parts of the world, and from them I have received a great deal of extremely useful matter, most of it unprinted. Not a few excellent suggestions have come from blind readers of the Braille edition before mentioned. I have given credit to all these helpers at appropriate places in the text, but to some I owe debts so heavy that they should be mentioned again here — for example, to Dr. Louise Pound of the University of Nebraska, whose early work put the study of current American English on its legs, and whose interest in my book has been of fundamental value at all of its stages; to the Right Rev. J. B. Dudek, chancellor of the Roman Catholic diocese of Oklahoma City and Tulsa, whose wide learning includes a mass of philological knowledge that he has been generous enough, at every turn, to place at my disposal; to Allen Walker Read, late of the staff of “A Dictionary of American English,” from whose invaluable investigations of the history of the language I have borrowed often and copiously; to Fred Hamann of Pekin, Ill., who turned over to me a large body of very useful material, otherwise unobtainable; to Don Bloch of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, Department of the Interior, for many contributions of the same sort; to P. E. Cleator of Wallasey (Cheshire), who has favored me with many clippings missed by the English clipping bureaus, and has otherwise lent a sturdy hand to my labors; to my old friend H. W. Seaman of Norwich, an English journalist of extensive American experience, a diligent and perspicacious student of the popular speech of both countries, and hence my constant (and amiably willing) referee on questions of disputed usage; to Professor D. W. Brogan of Cambridge University, another Briton with a wide and deep knowledge of American speechways; to Dr. Joseph M. Carrière of the University of Virginia, who has led me to sources that I’d certainly have missed without his open-handed aid; to Dr. Atcheson L. Hench of the same university, who has made me free of his large and valuable accumulations and given me generous help otherwise; and to the late F. H. Tyson of Hong Kong, who began to send me a steady stream of useful material (largely from the English colonial papers) in 1923, and whose widow, after his lamented death in 1942, made me a present of his extraordinarily rich collection. I am indebted too to the editors and publishers of “A Dictionary of American English,” “Webster’s New International,” American Speech, Dialect Notes, Words, Word Study, American Notes and Queries, the Writer’s Monthly and a large number of other books and periodicals for permission to quote from them, in some cases frequently and at length. Finally, I owe thanks to a number of librarians who have supplied me with material and helped me to solve problems, and especially to the ladies of the Pratt Library, Baltimore; to Wilmer Ross Leech of the New York Public Library, and to my old and much esteemed colleague, Edgar Ellis, librarian of the Baltimore Sunpapers. My secretary, Mrs. Rosalind C. Lohrfinck, has labored on this book, as she labored on the fourth edition of “The American Language,” with such diligence and intelligence that any acknowledgment of her aid must seem meagre, and I am in debt, too, to her sister, Mrs. Clare Crump, who helped me greatly while Mrs. Lohrfinck was disabled by illness.
This Supplement is not a new edition of “The American Language,” and repeats only a small and inconsiderable amount of
the matter in the fourth edition thereof. My first plan was to revise that work as I had done thrice before, and so make a fifth edition, but it quickly appeared that if I tried to get all the new material into it I’d have a volume of forbidding bulk, probably running to 2,000 pages. I was thus forced to resort to the present Supplement, only to discover that even a Supplement of the same size as the fourth edition would not contain the whole of my accumulations. Thus I must offer it in two volumes. The present one covers the ground of “The American Language,” fourth edition, through Chapter VI. The second, to follow, if all goes well, in about a year, will cover Chapters VII to XIII — The Pronunciation of American, American Spelling, The Common Speech, Proper Names in America, American Slang, and The Future of the Language —, and also the appendix on Non-English Dialects in America. In addition, I hope to add a second appendix on various subjects not hitherto discussed, for example, the language of gesture, that of children, cattle brands, hog and other animal calls, and American prose style.
The plan adopted for both Supplements is simple, and I hope it will turn out to be workable. It follows precisely the order of my fourth edition, and each section of it is hooked to that work by identical headings. But it is not necessary for the reader to have the fourth edition before him, nor even to have read it, in order to make his way, for the new matter here presented is almost always self-contained and I have included in brackets, wherever they seemed useful, explanatory catch-lines or quotations. The figures at the beginnings of sections all refer to pages of the fourth edition. The arrangement is generally chronological, but whenever it has seemed conducive to clarity and coherence to group material from different periods I have not hesitated to do so. As in all the editions of “The American Language,” I have presented my bibliographical and other documentary material with the text. There is, I believe, a certain prejudice against footnotes, especially when they are numerous, but I am convinced that it is not shared by the readers of such books as this one. On the contrary, I have learned by the thousands of communications with which I have been favored that they find somewhat elaborate annotations useful and attractive. Moreover, I have had to provide a critical apparatus for the enlightenment of later (and, I hope, far more competent) students of this or that phase of American speech, inasmuch as a large part of the material I present comes from obscure sources, and some of it is quite inaccessible without guidance. I have called attention, from time to time, to the great gaps in the existing knowledge of the subject, and I am in hopes that enough volunteers to fill them will appear soon or late. There is room here for the labors of a whole herd of nascent Ph.D.’s. I trust that all readers of the present volume will bear in mind that, like “The American Language,” it does not pretend to be a lexicon. I have sought to put together, not a complete list of American words and phrases, but simply a collection of interesting and perhaps instructive specimens, with a commentary. I have not hesitated to use nonce-words when they illustrated a tendency. Various works that will cover more thoroughly some of the areas I explore are now in progress — for example, the before-mentioned “Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada,” a dictionary of American place-names by Dr. George A. Stewart, Jr., and a shorter version of “A Dictionary of American English,” but covering a much wider field, by Dr. M. M. Mathews, a member of its staff.
The literature of the subject was so meagre at the time I published my first edition in 1919 that I got a comprehensive bibliography of it into less than seventeen pages, and even so had room for many books and papers that bore upon American speechways only indirectly. During the years that have passed since then that literature has become so vast that an adequate account of it would half fill a book as large as this one. A brief history of “The American Language,” down to and including the fourth edition, is given in the preface thereof. Here I seize the chance to answer a question that reaches me frequently, to wit, What aroused my interest in the subject, and when did I print my earliest discussions of it? The answer to the first part is that I began to observe American speechways as a young newspaper reporter, working in the police-courts of Baltimore at the turn of the century, and that I was urged to a more systematic study by a chance encounter with a file of Dialect Notes in the Enoch Pratt Free Library of the same city, probably about 1905. Dialect Notes had been set up in 1890, but it was still moving very slowly (as it is still moving very slowly), and its second volume had got only to Part IV. What it lacked in bulk, however, was more than made up for by the industry and learning of its pioneer contributors — for example, A. F. Chamberlain, E. S. Sheldon, O. F. Emerson, C. H. Grandgent, E. H. Babbitt, George Hempl, Albert Matthews, George T. Flom, Clark S. Northrup, J. M. Manly, M. D. Learned, and Francis J. Child, who were joined after a while by Louise Pound and her students. I was a steady customer of Dialect Notes after my discovery of its riches, and it presently sent me to such early works as John S. Farmer’s “Americanisms Old and New,” 1889; M. Schele de Vere’s “Americanisms: The English of the New World,” 1872, and J. R. Bartlett’s “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States,” second edition, 1859. When, in 1910, the Baltimore Evening Sun was launched, and I was set to doing a daily article for its editorial page, I began experimenting with an occasional discussion of the common speech of the country, and by October was engaged upon an effort to expound its grammar. These inquiries brought a pleasant response from the readers of the paper, who took to sending me additional material, and I soon began that huge accumulation of notes and commentaries which still engulfs me. In August, 1913, I printed my first magazine article on the subject, and it was presently followed by others. When, in 1917, the United States entered World War I, and free speech was suspended in the department of public affairs, then my main interest, I sought release from my bonds and exercise for my curiosity in that of language. The result was the first edition of “The American Language,” completed just as the war ended. When it was published in March, 1919, it brought in a large number of suggestions from other persons interested in the subject, and the second edition naturally followed in 1921. There was a third in 1923, after which I had to shelve the book on account of the heavy work thrown upon me by the launching of the American Mercury. But fresh materials kept on piling up, and when, at the end of 1933, I resigned my editorship of the magazine, I resumed work upon the book, and in 1936 the fourth edition was published. It ran to 809 pages; for the first edition 374 had sufficed. Corrected from time to time, it is still in print.
As I close this preface new material continues to come in. I have made arrangements for the preservation of it on my departure for parts unknown, and it will be available to any other investigator who cares to use it. Thus I am still glad to have more. It should be addressed to me at 1524 Hollins street, Baltimore-23.
H. L. M.
Baltimore, 1945
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Abbreviations
I. THE TWO STREAMS OF ENGLISH 1. The Earliest Alarms
2. The English Attack
3. American “Barbarisms”
4. The English Attitude Today
5. The Position of the Learned
6. The Views of Writing Men
7. The Political Front
8. Foreign Observers
II. THE MATERIALS OF INQUIRY 1. The Hallmarks of American
2. What is an Americanism?
III. THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 1. The First Loan-Words
2. New Words of English Material
3. Changed Meanings
4. Archaic English Words
IV. THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 1. A New Nation in the Making
2. The Expanding Vocabulary
3. Loan-Words and Non-English Influences
V. THE LANGUAGE TODAY 1. After the Civil War
2. The Making of New Nouns
3. Verbs
/> 4. Other Parts of Speech
5. Foreign Influences Today
VI. AMERICAN AND ENGLISH 1. The Infiltration of English by Americanisms
2. Surviving Differences
3. English Difficulties with American
4. Briticisms in the United States
5. Honorifics
6. Euphemisms
7. Forbidden Words
8. Expletives
About the Author
With reference to footnote 1 on this page, Mr. Julian Boyd of Princeton, New Jersey, has pointed out that John Adams, writing on September 11, 1785, to Mr. Dumas and Mr. Short concerning the Treaty with Prussia, said: “I will not disguise from you, what I should advise you to reserve from others with some discretion, that, old as I am, I hope to live to see the day when the American language will be understood and respected in every Court in Europe.…”
ABBREVIATIONS
To save space some of the books referred to frequently in the text are cited by the following catch-words and abbreviations:
AL4 The American Language, by H. L. Mencken; fourth ed.; New York, 1936.
Baker A Popular Dictionary of Australian Slang, by Sidney J. Baker; second ed.; Melbourne, n.d.
Barrère Argot and Slang, by A. Barrère; London, 1887.
Bartlett A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States, by John Russell Bartlett; New York, 1848; second ed., Boston, 1859; third ed., Boston, 1860; fourth ed., Boston, 1877.
Bentley A Dictionary of Spanish Terms in English, by Harold W. Bentley; New York, 1932.
Berrey and Van den Bark The American Thesaurus of Slang, by Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark; New York, 1942.
Boucher Boucher’s Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words; a Supplement to the Dictionaries of the English Language, Particularly Those of Dr. Johnson and Dr. Webster,… by the late Rev. Jonathan Boucher,… edited jointly by the Rev. Joseph Hunter and Joseph Stevenson; London, Part I, 1832; Part II, 1833.
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