American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  Are there really people who think that English is still the exclusive property of those born (in comfortable circumstances) in these little islands? Surely we ought 10 regard the American influence of the films as a vitalizing power of enormous benefit to us all as Englishmen. America has given us, admittedly, a good deal of rubbishy slang through the medium of the talkies; but the rubbish perishes very rapidly, whether it be American or English; and the talking film has actually opened up for us an enormous range of neat phrasing, vivid simile and picturesque metaphor which every year tend to enrich our speech rather than impoverish it.3

  Next came A. Witcomb Jenkins in Answers:

  Americanisms are often extremely useful additions to our language. Many of them are clear, vivid, brief and picturesque. There’s imagination in them. They hit off a situation with uncanny accuracy.… There is no two-word phrase in English for “I commute,” which in the States means, “I live out of town and come in every day with a season-ticket.” And an American doesn’t waste his breath saying, “Second turning on the right after you get to the next corner.” He says, tersely, “Two blocks on.”4

  Finally the Professor Brogan who was quoted some time back went overboard in the grand manner in 1943:

  There is nothing surprising in the constant reinforcement, or, if you like, corruption of English by American. And there is every reason to believe that it has increased, is increasing and will not be diminished. If American could influence English a century ago, when the predominance of the Mother Country in wealth, population and prestige was secure, and when most educated Americans were reverentially colonial in their attitude to English culture, how can it be prevented from influencing English today, when every change has been a change of weight to the American side? That the balance of linguistic power is upset is hard to doubt. Of the 200,000,000 people speaking English, nearly seven-tenths live in the United States,5 and another tenth in the British Dominions are as much influenced by American as by English English. Nor is this all. As an international language, it is American that the world increasingly learns.…

  To understand what is happening to the language in whose ownership and control we are now only minority shareholders is an object of curiosity worthy of serious persons. It is also an object worthy of less serious persons, for the study of American is rich in delights and surprises.1

  Five months later the Times called for an armistice in the ancient war. “There is urgent need,” it said, “for surmounting what someone has called the almost insuperable barrier of a common language. It would never do for Great Britain and America to think they understand, yet miss, the point of each other’s remarks just now. Both versions of the common language must be correctly understood by both peoples.” It then went on to commend a school set up in London to teach Americanisms to British officers and Anglicisms to Americans, and paused to recall, perhaps with a touch of nostalgia, the ill humors of days now (perhaps only transiently) past:

  “English as she is spoke” by foreigners has always been a popular touch in comedy. It was an old device when Shakespeare wrote the English of that fine theoretical and practical soldier, the Welsh Fluellen.2 By the time of the Restoration the Dutch were sharing the honors with the Irish, who lasted until the latter part of the Victorian era, when they yielded first place to the French. Then came the Americans. The Briton who could not raise a laugh by pretending to talk American was either a great fool or a very dull dog.3

  34. [There has been a steady emission of English-American glossaries since the earliest days.… The first seems to have been that of the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, probably drawn up before 1800, but not published until 1832.… It was followed by that of David Humphreys, one of the Hartford Wits, printed as an appendix to his play, “The Yankey in England,” in 1815.] The Hartford Wits had an enormous reputation in their time, but survive today only as ghosts in treatises on American literature. Humphreys was one of the first of the long line of jobholding literati that was to reach its full effulgence in Henry Van Dyke and Robert Underwood Johnson. He was born at Derby, Conn., on July 10, 1752, and was the son of a clergyman named Daniel Humphrey; he himself added the final s to the family name. He was graduated from Yale in 1774, and after teaching school for two years entered the Revolutionary Army. He had a creditable record as a soldier, and in 1780 became military secretary to George Washington, with the rank of major. After the Revolution he went into politics and held various offices at home and abroad, both elective and appointive. When, in 1802, Jefferson retired him at last, he was minister to Spain. In 1797 he married the daughter of an English banker at Lisbon. On his return to private life he went into sheep-raising in Connecticut and set up a woolen mill. He died in 1818.1

  His play, “The Yankey in England,” was one of two that he wrote, the other being “The Widow of Malabar.” It was apparently designed for an English audience, but there is no record that it was ever played in London. The glossary was added because Humphreys feared that the talk of Doolittle, the Yankey of his title, might be unintelligible without it.2 There are very few actual Americanisms in it. Indeed, among its 275 items, I can find but nineteen, to wit, to boost, 1815;3 breadstuffs, 1793; to calculate (in the sense of to suppose or expect), 1805; cent, 1783; cuss, 1775; cussed;4 darned, 1806;5 fortino or fortizno (for aught I know);6 forzino (far as I know), c. 1870;7 gal, 1795; to guess (in the sense of to think or suppose), 1732; gum (foolish talk, nonsense);8 to improve (to employ), 1640; lengthy, 1689; Sabbaday, c. 1772; slim (sick), 1815;9 to spark it (to engage in what is now called petting or necking), 1787; spook, 1801; to stump (to challenge or dare), 1766. Of these nearly half are now obsolete.

  The rest of Humphreys’s list is a monument to his faulty observation and lack of common sense, though it seems to have been taken seriously in his day, and Bartlett was relying on it so late as 1848. Scores of the pronunciations he sets down were at least as common in England as in America, for example, ort for ought, biled for boiled, darter for daughter, hoss for horse, and kittle for kettle. Not a few were in perfectly good usage in both countries and remain so to this day, for example, pritty for pretty, strait for straight, vittles for victuals, dubble for double, blud for blood, cumfort for comfort, and fokes for folks. Even close for clothes was hardly peculiar to America, or to the class represented by Doolittle the Yankey. Finally, Humphreys was apparently unaware, despite his English wife, that such clipped forms as cute for acute and potecary for apothecary were common in England, and that to argufy for to argue was anything but a novelty. Worse, he failed to list certain actual Americanisms that occurred in his play, as Mathews notes, for example, to pluck up stakes, 1640 (later, to pull up stakes); as fine as a fiddle, 1811; and to rain pitchforks.1

  To guess was not actually an Americanism, for Shakespeare, Chaucer, Wycliffe and Gower had used it, but it seems to have dropped out of use in England in the Eighteenth Century, and was either preserved or revived in America. Its constant use by Americans in the sense of to believe or suppose was remarked by nearly all the early English travelers. It was, at the start, confined to New England, and in 1815 the Massachusetts Spy alleged that a Southerner, though he made free with reckon and calculate, “would as soon … blaspheme as guess,” but it went along with the pioneers on the great movement into the West, and soon moved into the South. Some of the English travelers illustrated its use with dialogues, for example, Henry Bradshaw Fearon, who offered the following in his “Sketches of America”:2

  Q. What is your name?

  A. William Henry —–, I guess.

  Q. Is your wife alive?

  A. No, she is dead, I guess.

  Q. How long have you been married?

  A. Thirty years, I guess.

  Fearon mentioned various other Americanisms in his book. He thought it necessary, for example, to explain that cracker was the American name for what the English call a biscuit. He also gave some attention to caucus, but more to the thing itself than to the word. This, explained Sydney Smith, in reviewi
ng his book for the Edinburgh, was

  the cant word of the Americans for the committees and party meetings in which the business of the elections is prepared — the influence of which he seems to consider as prejudicial. To us, however, it appears to be nothing more than the natural, fair, and unavoidable influence which talent, popularity and activity always must have upon such occasions. What other influence can the leading characters of the democratic party in Congress possibly possess? Bribery is entirely out of the question — equally so is the influence of family and fortune. What then can they do, with their caucus or without it, but recommend? And what charge is it against the American government to say that those members of whom the people have the highest opinion meet together to consult whom they shall recommend for President, and that their recommendation is successful in their different States? Could any friend to good order wish other means to be employed, or other results to follow?

  Humphreys’ glossary was followed in 1816 by John Pickering’s “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America, to Which is Prefixed an Essay on the Present State of the English Language in the United States,” the first really competent treatise on the subject.1 Pickering, who was the son of Timothy Pickering, Postmaster-General, Secretary of War and Secretary of State under Washington, was himself apparently trained for a political career, but he preferred scholarship. Dr. Franklin Edgerton, professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology at Yale, says that he was “one of the two greatest general linguists of the first half of the Nineteenth Century in America,”1 the other being Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (1760–1844). Born at Salem, Mass., in 1777, he survived until 1846. Says Edgerton:

  He was an excellent classical scholar, and prepared what has been called “the best Greek-English dictionary before Liddell and Scott.” In 1814 he declined the newly founded Eliot professorship of Greek at Harvard (to which Edward Everett was then appointed); he had previously declined the professorship of Hebrew at the same institution. Even while working on his Greek dictionary he found time to go deeply into the American Indian languages. He reprinted John Eliot’s “Indian Grammar” (1822), Jonathan Edwards, Jr.’s “Observations on the Language of the Muhhekaneew (Mohegan) Indians” (1823), Roger Williams’s “Key to the Indian Language” (1827), Josiah Cotton’s “Vocabulary of the Massachusetts Indians” (1830), and Rasles’s (or Râle’s) “Dictionary of the Abnaki Language” (1833), all with linguistic notes and comments of his own. He wrote the article on Indian languages of North America for the Encyclopaedia Americana (1831). Particularly interesting is his early “Essay on a Uniform Orthography for the Indian Languages of North America” (1820), which is nothing more or less than a start toward an international phonetic alphabet. It is, of course, crude and rudimentary when judged by modern standards. But it is highly creditable to Pickering that he saw what was needed. His alphabet was adopted by missionary societies, and it exerted an important and useful influence.…

  [He] was a founder and the first president of the American Oriental Society, the organization of which in 1842 is an important landmark in American linguistics as well as in oriental studies. His presidential address at his first annual meeting is a remarkable performance. It is a very competent summary of current learning in all oriental fields, from Northern Africa to the Pacific islands. Its sources were almost wholly European, since this country then had virtually no original or creative scholarship in oriental fields. There was little more than some rather conventional Hebrew learning, chiefly associated with the training of clergymen.

  Pickering’s Vocabulary was prepared in 1815 as a paper for a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences of Boston, of which he was president, and was published in its Memoirs,2 but the circulation of the Memoirs was so limited that he reissued it in June of the next year, with extensive additions, as a book. He says in his preface that he began to note and record Americanisms during a residence in London, where he served as secretary to Rufus King, the American minister, from the end of 1799 to the Autumn of 1801. But he did not attempt a formal collection, he goes on, until

  a few years ago, when, in consequence of a decided opinion of some friends that a work of the kind would be generally acceptable,1 I began to reduce into order the few materials I possessed, and to make such additions to them as my leisure would permit. The present volume is the result of that labor, for labor it may be called. To those persons, indeed, who have never undertaken to make such a collection and to investigate, compare and cite the numerous authorities which a work of this nature demands, the present volume will, perhaps, not appear to have been a very arduous task. But when the reader shall have examined it, and have observed the various citations, and the continual references to dictionaries and glossaries, he will be able to form some judgment of the time and pains it must have cost me.

  This boast of diligence is well borne out by the book, which, for a pioneer work, is unusually comprehensive. Pickering not only depended upon his own collectanea for its substance; he also made drafts upon Witherspoon, and got a great deal of material from the denunciations of Americanisms in the British reviews of the time. On the whole, he was in sympathy with their protests, and his book was mainly devoted to supporting them. He gave next to no attention to the loan words from the Indian languages that had been taken into American2 but confined himself to the new coinages from English material and to the changes in meaning that had overtaken some of the terms of standard English. Thus he stated his position:

  The language of the United States has perhaps changed less than might have been expected, when we consider how many years have elapsed since our ancestors brought it from England; yet it has in so many instances departed from the English standards that our scholars should lose no time in endeavoring to restore it to its purity, and to prevent future corruption.… As a general rule we should avoid all those words which are noticed by English authors of reputation as expressions with which they are unacquainted; for though we might produce some English authority for such words, yet the very circumstance of their being thus noticed by well educated Englishmen is a proof that they are not in use at this day in England, and, of course, ought not to be used elsewhere by those who would speak correct English.

  The italics are Pickering’s. The most bitter denunciations of the British reviews did not daunt him, and he even professed to believe that there was no real anti-American feeling in them. Thus his defense of them:

  We see the same critics censure the Scotticisms of their Northern brethren, the peculiarities of the Irish, and the provincial corruptions of their own English writers. We cannot therefore be so wanting in liberality as to think that when deciding upon the literary claims of Americans they are governed by prejudice or jealousy.… It is to be regretted that the reviewers have not pointed out all the instances which have come under their notice of our deviations from the English standard. This would have been doing an essential service to our literature, and have been the most effectual means of accomplishing what those scholars appear to have so much at heart —the preservation of the English language in its purity, wherever it is spoken.

  Again the italics are Pickering’s. A few pages further on, as if uneasily aware that his Anglomania may have carried him a bit too far, he hastened to add in a footnote:

  The reader will not infer from these remarks that our right to make new words is here meant to be denied. We, as members of that great community or family which speaks the English language have undoubtedly, as well as other members, a right to make words and to propose them for adoption into our common language. But unless those who are the final arbiters in the case — that is, the body of the learned and polite of this whole community wherever they shall be — shall sanction such new terms it will be presumptuous in the authors of them to attempt to force them into general use.… That a radical change in the language of a people so remote from the source of it as we are from England is not an imaginary sup
position will be apparent from the alterations which have taken place among the nations of Europe; of which no instance, perhaps, is more striking than the gradual change and final separation, of the languages of Spain and Portugal, notwithstanding the vicinity and frequent intercourse of the people of those two countries.