Professor Thornton lived in Portland during the ’90s. He was a great friend of my father. He was dean of the University of Oregon Law School, where my father, who was a lawyer, gave certain lecture courses. I used to see a good deal of him, as he was frequently at our home. I was a small boy then and it seemed to me that he was the oldest man I had ever seen. He had a sort of Old Testament beard and looked as though he was a grandfather of Confucius.
Despite the fact that Professor Thornton looked formidable to me when I was small, I remember that I was often interested in his talks with my father about English words. They both had an unusual knowledge of the business. I have a notion that perhaps that is one of the reasons I have been attracted to the subject.
Professor Thornton subsequently dropped out of sight. He returned to Portland a few years later and was given an honorary degree by the University of Oregon. I saw the old gentleman paddling along Fifth street in Portland in the Fall of 1924 in a pair of carpet slippers. He died in January, 1925.
5. THE POSITION OF THE LEARNED
It will be noted that nearly all the investigators of American speech-ways mentioned so far were either amateurs or foreigners, and that more than one of them was both. The earlier native Gelehrte of the language faculty, with the massive exceptions of Webster and Pickering, disdained the subject as beneath their notice, and even Pickering, as we have seen, discussed it with distaste. Beginning with Lindley Murray (1745–1826) and running down to Richard Grant White (1821–85) and Thomas S. Lounsbury (1838–1915), the more influential of its accepted expositors threw themselves into a mighty effort, not to describe and study the language of their country, but to police and purify it, and most of them accepted without challenge the highly artificial standards set up by English pedants of the Eighteenth Century.1 By a curious irony it fell to Murray’s fate to be more influential in England than in America, and it would not be absurd to argue that he was responsible beyond all others for the linguistic lag visible in the Mother Country to this day, but it is not to be forgotten that he also had a great deal of weight at home, and was the Stammvater of the dismal pedagogues who still expound “correct English” in our schools and colleges.2 From these pedagogues the investigation of the living speech of 140,000,000 Americans has seldom got any effective assistance. All the contributions from the English faculty that have gone into the files of Dialect Notes and American Speech and into such enterprises as the Dictionary of American English and the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada have come from an extremely small minority, scattered among the general as sparsely as raisins in an orphanage cake. There is, of course, nothing really singular in this lack of professional keenness, for it is to be observed in the United States in other similar groups. Of the 175,000 physicians and surgeons in the country, probably not 5000 have ever added anything, however little, to the sum of medical knowledge, and among lawyers the ratio of legal scholars to legal hewers of wood and drawers of water is even smaller. But the percentage of actual students of the language among teachers of English seems to be the smallest of all, and even the members of this minority commonly eschew the speech of their own country. Four-fifths of those who write at all devote themselves to “literary” rabbinism,3 and many of the rest waste themselves upon the current philological crazes — in recent years, upon the study of the mysterious entities called phonemes, and the high-falutin but hollow pseudo-science of semantics.1 These sombre studies exhaust the brethren, and they have no time or energy left for the investigation of the language they all speak. So far as I can make out, the American Dialect Society, though it was launched by men of high professional reputation and influence and has the support of such men (and women) to this day, has never had more than a few hundred members, and at last accounts the circulation of the interesting and valuable American Speech1 was stated (probably somewhat generously) to be 520.2 The surveys of the Linguistic Atlas are being made by students rather than by teachers, with an Austrian-born professor of German in charge of them, and the DAE was edited by a Scotsman imported for the purpose. Some of the chief defects in the DAE, to be noted presently, are to be blamed on the fact that the far-flung and almost innumerable teachers of English of the country failed nearly unanimously to give it any help.
The Modern Language Association, which includes in its membership virtually all the scientifically-trained language teachers of the country,3 has had a Present-Day English section since 1924, but its activities have been of a very moderate degree of virulence, to say the least, and I judge by the names appearing on its modest programs that it has recruited few philologues who were not already at work for Dialect Notes and American Speech. Nor have all its lucubrations had to do with American English. The Linguistic Society of America, organized in 1924, also gives an occasional glance to the subject,4 but the papers in point that are presented at its meetings are seldom printed in its organ, Language,5 which is devoted principally to languages more interesting to its members than American English, e.g., Hittite and Old Church Slavonic.6 In 1941 a proposal was made to widen the scope of the American Dialect Society by changing its name to the English Language Society of America, but it was rejected by the members at a meeting in Indianapolis on December 30. The society, however, has been hospitable, ever since its organization in 1889,1 to scholars working in regions outside its own special field, and the files of Dialect Notes are rich with the contributions of such students of general American speechways as Albert Matthews, M. M. Mathews, Allen Walker Read and Dr. Louise Pound and her pupils, and of such specialists in non-English languages as J. Dynely Prince (Dutch) and George T. Flom (Norwegian). In 1943 it issued a circular entitled “Needed Research in American English” in which the whole subject was admirably surveyed, and excellent suggestions were made to willing investigators. By 1917 Dialect Notes had printed 26,000 examples of American dialect terms and phrases, and had accumulated almost as many more. The publication of a Dialect Dictionary of the United States thus suggested itself, and plans for it were undertaken in 1926.2 Unhappily, they were delayed inordinately by the Dialect Society’s lack of support, leading to recurrent financial crises, and when, in 1941, Dr. Harold Wentworth, then of West Virginia University, projected, at the suggestion of Dr. Louise Pound, a dialect dictionary of his own, and applied for the use of the society’s files, it was found that they had been lost. The equivalent of a court martial, set up to inquire into this catastrophe, found that the cards had been stored for years in a room in Warren House at Harvard, that the university authorities, having other uses for the space they occupied, moved them out, and that after that they vanished. Harvard put the blame on the officers of the society, and the officers denied that they were responsible, so nothing came of the investigation, nor were the cards recovered. Simultaneously, the society made a narrow escape from bankruptcy. The membership, in 1941, dropped to 38, with three unpaid, and there was an accumulated debt of $868.12. Part of this debt was shouldered by Dr. Miles L. Hanley, of the University of Wisconsin, the secretary and treasurer, and the balance was raised through the efforts of Dr. Pound, Mr. Read and others. In 1941 the society was reorganized, and by the end of 1942 it had 231 members, the annual dues had been raised from $1 to $2, and a receipt and release were in hand from the long-suffering printers of Dialect Notes. Dr. Pound was elected president, Dr. Harry Morgan Ayres of Columbia became vice-president, and Dr. Atcheson L. Hench of the University of Virginia secretary-treasurer. A year later Ayres succeeded Dr. Pound, Dr. Kemp Malone of the Johns Hopkins became vice-president, and Read followed Hench as secretary-treasurer. At the end of 1943 Ayres retired and was succeeded by Malone. Read, who had gone into the Army, was forced by his military duties to resign soon afterward, and Dr. George P. Wilson was appointed in his place. Thus the society stands in the first years of its second half-century, rejuvenated and indeed reincarnated. It is still small, but its members include all the American philologians who are really interested in American English, and it has more ambitious plans tha
n ever before.
The two great events in the study of the American language since the publication of AL4 in 1936 have been the appearance of the first volume of “A Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada” in 1939 and the completion of “A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles” in 1944. The origin, plan and early history of the dictionary are given in AL4, pp. 56 ff, and need not be rehearsed here.1 When it was announced that Dr. William A. Craigie, one of the editors of the monumental “New English Dictionary on Historical Principles,” had been engaged to edit it, I permitted myself, in a newspaper article, a chauvinistic sniff,2 for it was impossible for me to imagine a British don getting to really close grips with the wayward speech of this great Republic. It is still impossible for me to imagine it, but I should add at once that Sir William (he was knighted in 1928) made a gallant attempt, and that the result is a dictionary which, whatever its deficiencies, is at least enormously better than anything that preceded it. It leans heavily upon the pioneer work of Thornton, but it shows a much wider sweep, and, what is more important, a higher degree of accuracy and a greatly superior technical competence.1 On every page there is evidence that the editing was directed by a first-rate professional lexicographer. Sir William’s long years of service on the NED equipped him as no American of his trade was equipped, and when he got to Chicago in 1925 he assembled a staff of highly competent Americans, including Dr. M. M. Mathews, Dr. Catherine Sturtevant, Allen Walker Read and Dr. Woodford A. Heflin, which remedied the deficiencies in his own first-hand knowledge of the subject. In 1935 they were reinforced by Dr. James R. Hulbert, professor of English in the University of Chicago, who became co-editor. Sir William brought with him a large mass of material that had been gathered for the NED but not used, and he presently set up classes in lexicography at the University of Chicago, and put his students to work. From the great body of American professors of English and from Americans in general he seems to have got relatively little help. Even the names of many of the contributors to Dialect Notes and American Speech are missing from his list of acknowledgments. His predecessors and colleagues of the NED were a great deal better served. In their first volume, published in 1888, they recorded their debt to a list of volunteers ranging from philologians of the first eminence to country clergymen with time on their hands. One of these volunteers actually sent in 165,000 quotations, and another 136,000. Many Americans also took a hand. One of them, the Rev. J. Pierson, of Ionia, Mich., contributed 46,000, and another, the Rev. B. Talbot, of Columbus, O., 16,600. But both clergy and laity seem to have ignored the appeals of the DAE.2
Work was begun soon after Dr. Craigie’s arrival in Chicago,1 and the first half dozen years were devoted to collecting materials. Then the difficult task of editing was begun, and in 1936 the first fascicle, running from A to Baggage, was published by the University of Chicago Press. The first volume, ending with Corn Patch, was finished in 1938; the second, ending with Honk, in 1940; the third, ending with Record, in 1942; and the fourth, completing the work, in 1943. The whole fills 2552 large double-column pages, beautifully printed by the university printers and substantially bound in maroon cloth, with gilt stamping. The father of the enterprise was the late John M. Manly (1865–1940), a native of Alabama who took his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1890, was head of the English department at the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1933, and made his chief mark as an editor of Chaucer. It was he, apparently, who induced the General Education Board, the American Council of Learned Societies and the University of Chicago to supply the necessary funds — about $350,000 for the editing and $70,000 for printing and promotion.2 The print order was for 2500 copies, of which all but about 100 had been sold before the last volume was published. The price was fixed at $100 for the four volumes, but subscribers in advance got a substantial discount, and with review and presentation copies and dealers’ profits counted out, the total receipts were but $120,000.3 Unhappily, the plates of the earlier sections were destroyed before the work was completed, so a reprint was impossible, but plans are now afloat to reset the four volumes at the conclusion of World War II and its sequelae.1 After the publication of the first volume in 1936 Sir William returned to England, and thereafter his editing was carried on at long distance, with Dr. Hulbert in charge on the ground.2
The DAE lists about 26,000 terms and is by no means restricted to those originating in the United States. It also includes many words that, while old in English, have acquired new meanings in this country, or have come into wider use than in England, or have survived after becoming obsolete there. All save a few entries are supported by illustrative quotations, with dates, and whenever a word or phrase has a history in England the date of the first quotation in the NED is noted. Such are the “historical principles” of the title of the work. It must be manifest that the quotations, in many and perhaps most instances, do not show the actual age of the term: all they show is the date of its first appearance in print, or, more accurately, the date of the first appearance discovered by the dictionary’s searchers. But this is a defect visible in all “historical” dictionaries, including the massive NED. It can be remedied more or less by the accumulation of new material, and in the case of the NED an attempt was made to push the histories back in time by a Supplement issued in 1933, five years after the main work was completed. But in the majority of cases the history of a given word or phrase must remain incomplete, for it would be impossible to read all the printed matter in English, and allowance must be made for the fact that a considerable body of it has disappeared altogether, and for the more important fact that many terms have a history before they are recorded in print, and that others are never recorded at all. There is no way to get round these difficulties, and the most a lexicographer can do is to be as diligent as possible. The editors of the DAE did not spare hard work, and the result is an extremely valuable dictionary, despite its defects. Its indispensability to the student of the national speech is well demonstrated by the number of times it is quoted in the present volume. Unhappily, some of the limitations that the editors set for themselves forced the omission of interesting and useful matter. They did not undertake to investigate American slang after 1875 or the American vocabulary in general after 1900, though they made exceptions in the cases of a few terms. Moreover, they gave relatively little attention to etymology, and avoided the indication of speech levels (always a vexatious business) whenever possible. But for all these lacks the DAE remains an impressive monument to the scholarship of its editors. Going through it page by page, I find occasional evidence that the chief of them was a foreigner, and hence a stranger to the national Sprachgefühl, but against that misfortune must be set the fact that he was an expert lexicographer whose personal prestige (especially after he was knighted in 1928), overcame at least to some extent the prevailing prejudice against the serious study of American speechways.1
As the successive fascicles of the DAE were published they were reviewed at length in the philological press, and many excellent suggestions were made for additions and improvements. Some of those who were active in this work of criticism and renovation were John A. Kouwenhoven of Bennington College, J. Louis Kuethe of the Johns Hopkins, and Miles L. Hanley of the University of Wisconsin. An elaborate review of the first two fascicles, running from A to Blood, printed by Dr. Hanley in Dialect Notes in July, 1937, raised a considerable pother, for it not only criticized severely the general plan of the dictionary, but also accused the editors of failing to give Thornton sufficient credit for their copious borrowings from him. This attack was met by Allen Walker Read, of the dictionary staff, in Dialect Notes for July-December, 1938. In American Speech for April, 1939, Dr. Hanley withdrew his general criticisms as “presumptuous and probably wrong-headed,” but stuck to his contention that Thornton had been treated badly. On this point, fortunately, it is possible to disagree without rancor. So early as 1930, in a paper in American Speech,1 Sir William Craigie had made specific acknowledgment of the dictionary’s debt t
o Thornton and testified to “the great value of his labors,” and in the preface to the first volume, dated 1938, he was given thanks for “frequently” supplying the work with “its earliest instances, as well as the illustration of many colloquialisms and rarer uses.” For the rest, it seems to me that it may be taken as obvious that every dictionary must depend heavily on earlier workers in its special field.
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