The President insisted most courteously on conducting us to our carriage, and bareheaded he handed us in, standing on the steps till we drove off, and cordially reiterating many kind and friendly wishes for our prosperous journey, and health, and safety.
Lady Emmeline not only refrained from denouncing the speech of Americans; she actually praised their habit, then in full tide, of giving grandiloquent sobriquets to their cities. New Bedford, Mass., she reported, was called the City of Palaces. She went on:
Philadelphia is the City of Brotherly Love, or the Iron City. Buffalo, the Queen City of the Lakes; New Haven, the City of Elms, &c. I think the American imagination is more florid than ours. I am afraid matter-of-fact John Bull, if he attempted such a fanciful classification, would make sad work of it. Perhaps we should have Birmingham the City of Buttons or Warming-pans; Nottingham, the City of Stockings; Sheffield, the City of Knives and Forks, and so forth.2
Lady Emmeline’s encomiums were so grateful to the fevered national gills that Harper’s Magazine gave over four pages in its issue for August, 1851, to extracts from her book. But in part, at least, that appreciation may have been inspired by the fact that Harper & Brothers had just brought out an American edition of it.
29. [Slanguage.] In AL4, on the strength of a suggestion in American Speech,1 I noted that this term was apparently “invented in 1925 or thereabout.” Dr. William R. Williams, of New York, tells me that it is really much older. He says that it occurred in Edward E. Rice’s “Evangeline,” a great stage success of the 80s. One of the characters in that piece was a young girl who made heavy use of the current slang in saucing her father. He turned to the audience and said sadly, “Such slanguage from a daughter!” Slanguage is not listed by Partridge, but it is used in England.2 The related slangwohanger and its congeners are Americanisms, traced by the DAE to 1807. Slangwhanger is defined as “a low, noisy, ranting talker or writer.” In his brief section on “American Dialects” in “The English Language,”3 William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, put it among “very low expressions, mostly political.”
4. THE ENGLISH ATTITUDE TODAY
30. [The English war upon Americanisms is in progress all the time, but it naturally has its pitched battles and its rest-periods between.] The rest-periods, of course, tend to coincide with the times when it is politic, on grounds remote from the philological, to treat the Yankee barbarian with a certain amount of politeness. Such a time, as historians will recall, came in 1917, and lasted until the first mention of the repayment of war debts, when the genial if oafish Uncle Sam was supplanted by the horrendous Uncle Shylock. It came again in 1943, when American troops began pouring into England in large force, and the fear of invasion, so lively during the first years of World War II, was allayed at last. The Ministry of Information and the Board of Education celebrated this happy deliverance by bringing out jointly a pamphlet by Louis MacNeice, entitled “Meet the U. S. Army.” This pamphlet was circulated wholesale, not only among the English soldiery but also among school children. Its title showed a graceful concession to an American vulgarism that more than one English pedagogue had reviled in the past, and in the text there were many more. Thus its message in the department of speech, as summarized with approval by the London Times:
American speech, coinage, games and food are discussed in turn. If they seem strange to us, our own equivalents will look equally odd to Americans, and for just as good — or sometimes better — reasons. If some people in Britain consider American slang too flamboyant, to the ears of some of our visitors our own may be “flat, hackneyed, monotonous and colorless.”1
The Times, ordinarily, deals with American speechways much less blandly. In normal times, indeed, it seldom mentions them save to sneer at them, and in its Literary Supplement it adverts to the unpleasant subject frequently.2 “The very language of most American writers of imaginative literature,” it said on Jan. 3, 1929, “is fast approaching the stage of being only a form of English.” But in wartime this forthright attitude is considerably ameliorated, as it is in the other great organs of British opinion. Thus the somewhat malicious Baltimore Evening Sun was able to note in 19403 that all these organs, including the Times, had grown “a good deal cagier” than usual “about denouncing certain expressions as horrid Americanisms,” and that the Times itself had lately achieved the extraordinary feat of belaboring to check up on without “any mention of America.”4 Yet even in war-time it occasionally blurts out its low opinion of the American way of talking and writing, though usually with the addition of a disarming corollary. “To describe the language in which the American language is now written as almost a foreign language,” it said on April 5, 1941, “is to make no reference to slang. American slang — that amazing blend of flexibility and sense of absurdity — has always had as many admirers in England as it could desire and more unsuccessful imitation than it deserves.” The Edinburgh Scotsman, another ardent guardian of English linguistic purity, qualifies and abates its dudgeon, in times of national peril, in much the same way. Thus, when an anonymous reader took space in its columns on Nov. 6, 1941, to denounce by and large, to contact, to demote and O.K.,1 it printed an article the same day saying that “it can be argued that these expressions are useful currency; they present definite nuances and inflections and make possible a certain informality of mood or approach which is not otherwise attainable. And they have a certain historical significance and even dignity, in virtue of their association with a restless, changeable and disturbing age.” In this article there was no mention of their American origin. The same prudence is visible, when the Hun is at the gate, on lower levels. Thus when Commander Reginald Fletcher, M.P. (now Lord Winster), private secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, undertook in 1941 to confute and confuse “the people who say that Germany will be out of oil next week or will crack next month” by hurling at them a derisive “Oh, yeah!”, a columnist in the London Sunday Mercury2 backed into his denunciation of the infamy in the following very graceful manner:
I have every respect for most Americans; I think the graphic descriptive vigor of much American prose has an animating effect upon the English language; but the nasal American intonation — and “Oh, yeah!” is a typical example of it — is vile.
The same device was used by a writer signing himself Argus, in the Falkirk Herald five months later:1
The writer does not despise the American language (for it cannot be termed the King’s English). It has virility and vividness; it is easy to speak. But the writer does lament that there are Britons who taint our language with phraseology which belongs to another, the New World; that our boys no longer say “Stand and deliver!” but “Stick ’em up!”; that so long2 and O.K. have replaced the British cheerio and all right.… One charge against Americanism can be brought, maintained, and even proved.… The American has the greatest appreciation of the individual who is “different.” So they make their language different, distinct from our own by calling a waistcoat a vest, a lift an elevator, the pavement the sidewalk, and so on.
But in times of peace and security the British critics of American speech seldom condescend to pull their punches in this way; on the contrary, they lay about them in a berserk and all-out manner, and commonly couple flings at the American character with their revilings of the American language. “Every few years,” says D. W. Brogan,
someone sounds the clarion and fills the fife, calling us on to man the breaches and repel the assailing hordes of Americanisms that threaten the chastity of the pure well of English undefiled. Sometimes the invaders intend to clip off the strong verbs, sometimes they threaten to enrich our language with new and horrid words. Whatever they do, or threaten to do, it must be resisted.3
It is a pity that no literary pathologist has ever investigated and reported at length on the ebb and flow of this resistance during the past several generations, as Pickering, Cairns and Read have reported on its manifestations in the era between the Revolution and the Civil War.1 The ma
terial is rich and instructive, and my files bulge with it, but I have space here only for a few specimens. The first real blast of the modern era was probably that delivered by the Very Rev. Henry Alford, D.D., dean of Canterbury, in his “Plea for the Queen’s English” in 1863.2 Alford set the tone of nearly all the objurgations that have followed, for he began by describing American as a debased and barbaric form of English, and then proceeded to a denunciation of the “character and history” of the Republic — “its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man; its open disregard of conventional right when aggrandisement is to be obtained; and I may now say, its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world.” This was before Gettysburg, and most Englishmen of the dean’s class were looking forward hopefully to the break-up and ruin of the United States, with certain pleasant benefits to British trade, not to mention what then appeared to be British military and naval security. That hope was soon to perish, and there ensued a period of uneasy politeness, but when the Alabama claims began to threaten the British treasury there was a sharp revival of moral indignation, and Punch expressed the prevailing English view when it said:
If the pure well of English is to remain undefiled no Yankee should be allowed henceforth to throw mud into it. It is a form of verbal expectoration that is most profane, most detestable.3
By 1870 the rage against the loutish and depraved Americano had gone so far that it was possible for the Medical Times and Gazette (London) to allege quite seriously that the medical journals of the United States were written in a slang so outlandish that no decent English medical man could be expected to understand it,1 and in 1871 it seemed quite rational to his English readers when John Ruskin let go with:
You have felt, doubtless, at least those of you who have been brought up in any habit of reverence, that every time I have used an American expression, or aught like one, there came upon you a sense of sudden wrong — the darting through you of acute cold. I meant you to feel that: for it is the essential function of America to make us feel like that.
Sharp-shooting went on through the 70s and 80s, culminating in a violent attack with all arms after Grover Cleveland’s Venezuela message of December 17, 1895, but when the possible effects thereof began to be pondered there appeared a more conciliatory spirit, and during the uneasy years before World War I the Americano began to be cherished as an Anglo-Saxon brother, and not much was heard about the villainousness of either his character or his speech.2 The war itself brought a return to Bach, and by two routes. First, the American and English troops, coming into contact in France, found that intercommunication was impeded by harsh differences in speech-ways, and, in the manner of simple-minded men at all times and everywhere, laid those differences to moral deficiencies. Second, the American movie, which began to invade England on a large scale at the end of the war, introduced so many Americanisms, especially on the level of slang, that the guardians of the King’s English were aroused to protest. But even more influential in reviving the old indignation against everything American was the sinister talk of war debts that began in 1920 and led up to Calvin Coolidge’s derisive, “Well, they hired the money, didn’t they?” in 1925. It was at this time that Uncle Sam became Uncle Shylock, and every fresh Americanism an insult to the English language. A climax was reached in 1927, when a group of American literati, traveling at the expense of the Commonwealth Fund and Thomas W. Lamont, went to London to confer with a similar committee of Britishers upon the present state and future prospects of the common tongue, with special reference to the unhappy differences between English and American usage.1 The English newspapers reported the deliberations of the conference in some detail, and it brought forth a good deal of editorial comment, some no worse than patronizing but the rest downright vitriolic. In AL4, p. 33, there are some extracts from an article in the New Statesman2 in which Americans were warned in no weasel terms to keep hands off the mother-tongue. “Why,” demanded the author, “should we offer to discuss the subject at all with America?… From time to time we may adopt this [American] word or that, or sometimes a whole vivid phrase. But for all serious lovers of the English language it is America that is the only dangerous enemy.” I add a few more strophes of this diatribe, not given in AL4:3
After sitting for two days the conference decided to form an International Council as “an investigating body which will consider facts as to disputed usage and other questions of language in the various English-speaking countries, and give the results of its investigations the widest publicity; in short, will maintain the traditions and foster the development of our common tongue. The Council is to consist of one hundred members — fifty from the United States and fifty from the British Empire.… Its proposed composition is palpably absurd. The English language proper belongs to the people who dwell south of Hadrian’s Wall, east of the Welsh hills and north of the English Channel.… We may do what we please with it, and we cannot submit to any sort of foreign dictation or even influence about it without destroying it. An authoritative Council to decide doubtful questions which must inevitably arise from time to time might be very useful indeed, but such a body ought not to include more than one Scotchman and one Irishman; and it should certainly not include even a single American.
In the course of the somewhat timorous deliberations of the conference Dr. Canby permitted himself the blasphemy of speaking of Anglicisms as well as of Americanisms. This slip was seized upon with ferocity by the New Statesman writer, and denounced as follows:
What Dr. Canby meant by it, presumably, was some usage which his own country had not adopted. His point of view, at any rate, was clear enough. He claimed for America a right equal to our own to decide what is English and what is not! That is a claim which we cannot too emphatically repudiate.… The English language is our own.… We cannot admit that it contains “Anglicisms” — because that admission would imply that it belongs to everybody who uses it — including Negroes and Middle-Westerners and Americanized Poles and Italians. That is the fundamental point. “Anglicisms” are English tout court. On the question of what words and idioms are to be used or to be forbidden we cannot afford any kind of compromise or even discussion with the semi-demi-English-speaking populations of overseas. Their choice is to accept our authority or else make their own language.
The other English commentators upon the conference were somewhat less violent than this New Statesman brother, but all of them, however polite, were more or less unfriendly, and all of them dealt with the American language as something strange and hostile. “The differences in vocabulary, the meanings attached to words, their spelling, and so on are always very great and are becoming so marked,” said a writer in the Nation and Athenaeum,1 “that the result promises or threatens to produce over there a new form of the language.” To which the London Times added:2 “Without offense it may be said that no greater assaults are made on the common language guage than in America.… The question is,… how far the disruptive process can be stayed.” Nor was there any more favorable response to the stated purpose of the conference from colonial newspapers and pedagogues. The Canadian and Australian commentators sneered at it, and the South-Africa-born Professor J. R. R. Tolkien of Oxford wrote in “The Year’s Work in English Studies”:1 “Whatever may be the special destiny and peculiar future splendor of the language of the United States, it is still possible to hope that our fate may be kept distinct.” Nothing more was ever heard of the proposed General Council on English, with its membership of fifty Britons and fifty Americans. The Commonwealth Fund withdrew its support, Lamont turned to forms of the uplift less loathsome, and the hundred immortals were never actually appointed.2
It was during this period that the English antipathy to American translations of foreign books broke forth into one of the fiercest of its recurring outbursts. The casus belli was a version of the Italian plays of Luigi Pirandello in two volumes, one being translated by Dr. Arthur Livingston, an American, and the othe
r by Edward Storer, an Englishman. Dr. Livingston, professor of Romance languages at Columbia, was an Italian scholar of the highest eminence, and the qualifications of Mr. Storer were considerably less conspicuous, but the English reviewers, with few exceptions, denounced Livingston in their reviews and at the same time whooped up Storer. Their chief objection to Livingston was that, in cases where English and American usage differed, he preferred the forms and locutions of his own country, and did not try to write like an Englishman. Thus the uproar was summed up by Ernest Boyd, himself a translator of long experience:
In one London weekly a reviewer cites right away indignantly, and asks: “Why not at once?” The London correspondent of the New York Bookman declares that candies does not strike an English reader as Italian, but sweets does! Another critic wonders if the expression a man made over means anything to an American, doubts it, but concludes triumphantly that it is certainly meaningless to English ears. Nobody condescends to explain how it is closer to the original Italian, French, Polish, Russian, or whatever the text may be, to say: “Come off it, old bean!” rather than “Quit your kiddin’, buddy!”; top hole instead of O.K.; or “I shall let my flat in Gower Street this Autumn,” rather than “I shall rent my apartment on 12th Street this Fall.” An English locution is ipso facto not only more familiar to an English reader, but, it seems, also nearer the text. Yet, the fact actually is that more people from Continental Europe speak American than speak English!1
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