American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  The limitations set by the plan of the DAE have left the way open for further work in this field. It is very weak in slang and vulgar English, even for the period before 1875, and its 1900 deadline bars out a vast number of picturesque words and phrases on all levels. The average reader is bound to be critical of a lexicon of Americanisms, however meritorious otherwise, which omits such terms as blurb, highbrow, jitney, flivver, rubberneck, boob, gob (sailor) and leatherneck, and shows a considerable discretion in dealing with profanity and other loose language. There is, beside, the objection to its high cost, and the fact that no more copies are obtainable. To supply something at once more comprehensive, less burdened with historical apparatus, and salable at a more moderate price the University of Chicago Press has undertaken a “Dictionary of Americanisms,” with the competent Dr. M. M. Mathews as editor. It will include every sort of Americanism save the most transient slang, and will bring the record up to the time of publication. It will also deal with etymologies and pronunciations, omitted by the DAE. How long it will take to complete this project remains to be seen.2 Meanwhile, Allen Walker Read, another of the collaborators of Sir William Craigie, continues at work upon his projected “Historical Dictionary of Briticisms,” announced in 1938.1 It will be devoted to “words found in England but not in America,” e.g., cinema, rook, squirearchy, pub, corn law, bloody (as an expletive), woolsack, beefeater, furze and hear, hear, and will be fortified by dated quotations of the sort made familiar by Thornton, the NED and the DAE. Various other special dictionaries are also in progress. One is “A Dictionary of American English Grammar,” by Dr. Janet Rankin Aiken of Columbia, and another is “A Dictionary of American Criminal Argots” by Dr. D. W. Maurer of the University of Louisville.2 The need for special works confined to relatively small areas of space or time was admirably set forth by Sir William Craigie in Tract No. LVIII of the Society for Pure English.3 He is himself engaged upon “A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue,” and other enterprises of the sort, dealing with American English, will probably follow soon or late. There is plenty of room, despite the DAE, for intensive studies, inter alia, of English in colonial America, of the novelties introduced into the language by the great movement into the West, of American trade argots, and of American slang.

  The Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada is on a grandiose scale, and if it is ever completed will run to scores of large folio volumes, at a cost beyond the means of all save a small number of the richer libraries and private students. The first section, dealing with New England, began to appear in 1939 and was completed in 1943. It consists of three volumes, each in two parts, and the six immense books are made up of no less than 734 double-page maps. Along with the first volume, in 1939, there appeared a quarto “Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England,” by Dr. Hans Kurath of Brown University. Dr. Kurath with Dr. Miles L. Hanley, formerly secretary and treasurer of the American Dialect Society, as his chief aide, has been in charge of the project since it was launched in 1929, and into it they and their collaborators have put an immense amount of hard work. The funds have been found by the American Council of Learned Societies, which also helped to finance the DAE, and grants in aid have been made by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the General Education Board, and various colleges and universities.1 The atlas, in its early stages, attracted more attention from professional philologians than the DAE, but as the work has gone on its burdens have been thrown upon a relatively small group, made up mainly of associates and students of Dr. Kurath. I called attention in AL42 to the fact that four of the seven men principally engaged upon it in 1936 had non-English surnames. Dr. Kurath himself is a native of Austria, but came to the United States in early life, and was educated at the Universities of Wisconsin, Texas and Chicago, the last-named of which made him Ph.D. in 1920. After teaching German at Texas, Northwestern and Ohio State, he became professor of the Germanic languages and general linguistics and chairman of the department of Germanic languages at Brown in 1932. Since 1942 he has been chairman of the university’s division of modern languages. He reports in Jacques Cattell’s “Dictionary of American Scholars”3 that his chief interests are “American English; linguistic geography; American pronunciation; linguistic geography of New England; speech areas, settlement areas and culture areas in the United States.” He is a man of indomitable energy, and is carrying on a vast work with a good deal less than an excess of help.4

  The Linguistic Atlas attempts to record dialectal variations, not only in pronunciation but also in vocabulary. Thus Map No. 235 shows that the common round or littleneck clam (Venus mercenaria) is usually called a quahog along the New England coast, but that in some places it is spoken of as a round, hard, hardshell or hen clam.1 Similarly, the soft or long-neck clam (Mya arenaria) is sometimes called a long, or soft-shell, or sand, or steaming clam, or simply a clam. Many other familiar terms show equally curious local variations. The common lightning-bug remains a lightning-bug until it comes into the Boston Sprachgebiet, where it becomes a fire-fly. June-bug, which is in wide use to the southward, is seldom encountered in New England, but fire-bug is recorded.2 Faucet is the usual New England name for the kitchen water-tap, but spigot seems to be coming in from the southward, and cock and tap are also recorded. A wooden spigot in a cider barrel is sometimes called a spile. The towel used for drying dishes is usually a dish-towel, but in various places it is a cup-towel, a wiping-towel, a dish-cloth, a wiping-cloth, a wiper, a dish-wiper or a cup-wiper. Sometimes such variants appear in clusters on the maps, and sometimes they are scattered, probably in response to migrations. The lingering strength of Puritan prudery is shown in the survival of a number of grotesque euphemisms for bull, e.g., gentleman cow, top cow, cow critter, seed ox, male animal, he-cow, roarer, or the beast, the brute, the sire, the male, the masculine, the old man, the gentleman, the master or the he. Similarly, a stallion is sometimes a sire, a male horse, a seed horse, a stock horse, a top horse, a he-horse or simply a horse, a ram is a buck, a sire, a male or a gentleman sheep, and a boar is a seed or top hog, a gimlet pig, a borer, a sire or a stock hog. The DAE neglects such forms, and as a result the LA makes a novel and useful contribution to the study of the American vocabulary.

  But its chief stress is on pronunciations, and in that field it is considerably more interesting to the professional phonologist than to the layman. This is mainly because it uses “a finely graded phonetic alphabet based on that of the International Phonetic Association” — an alphabet so extensive that no less than nineteen pages of the accompanying handbook are needed to explain it. How many separate symbols and combinations of symbols are in it I have not attempted to determine, but the number must run to hundreds. More, it is used differently by the different field workers, and even by the same field worker at different times, and in consequence the lay student of the maps is confronted by a mass of strange characters that are frequently unintelligible and sometimes almost maddening. The truth is that the sounds of American speech are so numerous that it is next to impossible to represent all of them with complete accuracy by printed symbols. They vary not only in every pair of individuals, but also in the same individual at different times. The hopeful penologists, however, do not despair of getting them on paper, and in consequence there is a constant effort to improve and augment the International Phonetic Alphabet, leading to the incessant invention of new symbols and combinations, many of them baffling even to phonologists. Even in its simplest form the IPA is almost as unilluminating to the layman as so much Mongolian, as anyone may discover by examining it in American Speech, where it is printed on the inside cover of every issue, along with an exposition that does not explain. It is dealt with a good deal more understandably in “A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English,” by John S. Kenyon and Thomas A. Knott,1 but even Kenyon and Knott fall very far short of making its interpretation facile.2

  6. THE VIEWS OF WRITING MEN

  “American authors,” said Alexis de Tocquev
ille in 1835,3 “may truly be said to live more in England than in their own country, since they constantly study the English writers and take them every day for their models. But such is not the case with the bulk of the population, which is more immediately subjected to the peculiar causes acting upon the United States. It is not then to the written, but to the spoken language that attention must be paid if we would detect the modifications which the idiom of an aristocratic people may undergo when it becomes the language of a democracy.”1 Toqueville’s visit to the United States was made in 1831, and his remarks about American writers were certainly true for their time.2 The two then principally admired and influential, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, were both regarded by their contemporaries, and with sound reason, as Anglomaniacs. Cooper, to be sure, had been moved, three years before, to protest (anonymously) against the venomous and incessant English revilings of all things American, including American speechways, but he seems to have regretted his contumacy, for in “The American Democrat,” which followed in 1838, he sneered at Americanisms in the best manner of the English reviewers.3 As for Irving, he never ceased to be subservient to English precept and example.4 The revolt against both, as against English libel and invective, was left to lesser men, the most effective of whom, James K. Paulding, had been Irving’s collaborator in Salmagundi in 1807, and had brought out a second series all his own in 1819. Paulding, a New Yorker from Dutchess county, in the heart of the Hudson Valley Little England, nevertheless took the American side in the War of 1812, and hastened into print with a “Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan” that must have had a powerful effect at the time, for it remained in print until 1835 and was brought out again in 1867. This last edition had a preface by William I. Paulding, a son of the author. The younger man was apparently somewhat upset by the bitterness of his pa’s satire, and sought to apologize for it as follows:

  He wrote in an atmosphere of acerbity, about matters then really of almost national [sic!] concern, though at the present day they can scarcely be made to appear in that light. He looked upon the whole detracting tribe1 as mercenary calumniators of an entire people, with no claim to either courtesy or grace; and pitched upon the individual subjects of attack rather as types of the the different styles of the British objector than from any personal feeling or knowledge of the parties.

  This, of course, was poppycock. Paulding’s savage thrusts were aimed at easily recognized offenders, and he must have known some of them well enough. Thirteen years later, in 1825, he returned to the attack with a still more devastating buffoonery, this time under the title of “John Bull in America, or, The New Munchhausen.” Here he singled out individual travelers so plainly that even his dunderhead son, writing forty-two years later, could not escape identifying them, e.g., Thomas Ashe, Richard Parkinson and William Faux, to whom Thomas Hamilton was added in a new edition in 1837. The book still makes excellent reading, for it is a burlesque full of broad humors, with no squeamish pulling of punches. In his preface Paulding suggests waggishly that the author was probably William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly Review and grand master of all the English America-haters. Throughout he very adroitly parodies Gifford’s condescending style, and is full of other devices that make the thing a capital example of a kind of writing that has been curiously little practised in the United States. Paulding, of course, got some help in his counterattack — from Edward Everett, from Timothy Dwight, from Robert Walsh,2 and even from the timorous Cooper — but for twenty years he bore most of the burden and heat of the day. Everett (1794–1865) was a convert to the cause of American independence in speech, and had no truck with it until he visited England in 1815, and then proceeded to Göttingen to take his doctorate. Says Allen Walker Read:

  In his early years he imbibed the cultural colonialism that prevailed in Boston, but this he lost upon becoming acquainted with England. He became a leader in defense of the right of Americans to develop new words and to retain old ones, and held that in point of fact the state of English in America was sounder than that in England. He rebutted vigorously the attacks of small-minded British critics.1

  Everett had several encounters with Gifford in London and stood up to him boldly, even to the extent of criticizing the English of the Quarterly itself. He was unfavorably impressed, not only by the multiplicity of English provincial dialects, but also by the accepted speech of the higher circles of London, and sneered impartially at the language of “a stout Lancashire yeoman” who shined his shoes in Liverpool and that of the royal Duke of Sussex. When, on returning home, he became editor of the North American Review, he denounced one of the slanderous English travelers of the time as a “miscreant” and another as a “swindler.” Even when, in 1841, he was made American minister to England, he resisted stoutly the notorious tendency of that exalted post to make its incumbents limber-kneed, and came back in 1845 still convinced that American English was better than British English. He was the first, in fact, to suggest a dictionary of Briticisms. In one of his last publications, the “Mount Vernon Papers” of 1860, he quoted David Hume’s prophecy to Edward Gibbon in 1767: “Our solid and increasing establishments in America … promise a superior stability and duration to the English language,” and added: “What a contrast between these sensible remarks … and the sneers of English tourists and critics on the state of the English language as written and spoken in America.”2

  Cooper, as I have noted, blew both hot and cold — and not so briskly hot as cold. According to his biographer, Robert E. Spiller, the purpose of “Notions of the Americans,” which was published in London in 1828 and in Philadelphia a little later in the same year, was twofold: “the misinformed and prejudiced criticism of the English must be silenced, and the slavish mental dependence of the American mind upon British opinion must be brought to an end.”1 But he was so faint-hearted that he withheld his name from the book and ascribed it instead to an anonymous “traveling bachelor,” seeking to make it appear that this bachelor was an Englishman. In “The American Democrat,” which followed ten years later, he forgot altogether the denunciations of American speechways by the English, and devoted himself mainly to drawing up an indictment on his own account. In part he said:

  The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms. To these may be added ambiguity of expression. Many perversions of significations also exist, and a formality of speech, which, while it renders conversation ungraceful, and destroys its playfulness, seriously weakens the power of the language, by applying to ordinary ideas words that are suited only to themes of gravity and dignity.

  While it is true that the great body of the American people use their language more correctly than the mass of any other considerable nation, it is equally true that a smaller proportion than common attain to elegance in this accomplishment, especially in speech. Contrary to the general law in such matters, the women of the country have a less agreeble utterance than the men, a defect that great care should be taken to remedy, as the nursery is the birth-place of so many of our habits.…

  Creek, a word that signifies an inlet of the sea, or of a lake, is misapplied to running streams, and frequently to the outlets of lakes.2 A square is called a park;3 lakes are often called ponds;4 and arms of the sea are sometimes termed rivers.5

  In pronunciation, the faults are still more numerous, partaking decidedly of provincialisms. The letter u, sounded like double o or oo, or like i, as in virtoo, fortin, fortinate; and ew, pronounced also like oo, are common errors. This is an exceedingly vicious pronunciation, rendering the language mean and vulgar. New, pronounced as noo, is an example,1 and few, as foo; the true sounds are nu and fu, the u retaining its proper soft sound, and not that of oo.…2

  False accentuation is a common American fault. Ensign (insin) is called ensyne, and engine (injin), engyne. Indeed, it is a common fault of narrow associations to suppose that words are to be pronounced as they are spelled.3

 
; Many words are in a state of mutation, the pronunciation being unsettled even in the best society, a result that must often arise where language is as variable and undetermined as the English. To this class belong clerk, cucumber and gold, which are often pronounced as spelt, though it were better and more in conformity with polite usage to say dark, cowcumber (not cowcumber), and goold.4 For lootenant (lieutenant) there is not sufficient authority, the true pronunciation being levtenant. By making a familiar compound of this word, we see the uselessness of attempting to reduce the language to any other laws than those of the usages of polite life, for they who affect to say lootenant, do not say lootenant-co-lo-nel, but iootenant-kurnel.5

  The polite pronunciation of either and neither is i-ther and ni-ther, and not eether and neether.6 This is a case in which the better usage of the language has respected derivations, for ei, in German, is pronounced as in height and sleight, ie making the sound of ee. We see the arbitrary usages of the English, however, by comparing these legitimate sounds with those of the words lieutenant colonel, which are derived from the French, in which language the latter word is called co-lo-nel.