American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  3 Ingersoll (1782–1862) was a son of Jared Ingersoll (1750–1822), one of the framers of the Constitution. He studied law, spent some time in the diplomatic service and in Congress, and wrote a tragedy produced in Philadelphia and a history of the War of 1812.

  4 p. 528.

  1 To progress, as a matter of fact, was never used as a transitive verb in the United States. As an intransitive it had flourished in England from c. 1590 to c. 1670, but had then been dropped, and it seems to have been reinvented in America. Benjamin Franklin disliked it and the English reviewers denounced it, but it made its way, and was included in Webster’s American Dictionary of 1828. It is now used in England, but not often.

  2 An Old English verb, revived in America and later readopted by the English. Pickering said in 1816 that it was “often seen in the debates of Congress, as they are reported in the newspapers,” but added primly: “It is hardly necessary to remark that it is not in any of the dictionaries.” But Webster admitted it to his dictionary in 1828, though marking it “useless” [to jeopard could be used instead], and by 1834 Sir Henry Taylor was using it in the second part of Philip Van Artevelde. By 1864 the great English philologian, W. W. Skeat, was using it.

  3 The English reviewers frequently denounced the large use of grade in America, where it had got the meaning of military rank by 1806, of the slope of a road by 1808, and of a division in a school by 1835. But the English have since used it, though they still prefer level-crossing to grade-crossing.

  4 To conglaciate, in the sense of to freeze, was not actually an Americanism. The NED traces it in English use to 1640, and it does not appear in any dictionary of Americanisms.

  5 Conflagrative was not an Americanism. Thackeray used it in 1848 and Carlyle in 1865. The NED traces to conflagrate in English use to 1657. The noun, conflagration, goes back to 1555.

  6 Jefferson first used to belittle in his Notes on Virginia, 1781–82, and seems to have invented it.

  7 The Quarterly’s diatribe was answered by Timothy Dwight in Remarks on the Review of Inchiquen’s Letters; Boston, 1815. He denied formally that any such proposal had ever been made.

  8 The Philological Society of New York, 1788, American Speech, April, 1934, p. 131.

  9 Voyages dans l’Amérique sententrionale dans les années 1780, 1781 et 1782; Paris, 1786. There seems to have been a private print of at least part of this record at Newport, R. I., n.d. A second edition was published in Paris in 1788. Chastellux (1734–88) also wrote other books, one of them a discussion of the question whether the discovery of America had been profitable or unprofitable to Europe. (He decided that it had been profitable). On the strength of his De la félicité publique; Paris, 1772, which was praised by Voltaire, he was elected a member of the French Academy. His book on America was severely criticized in France.

  1 I take this translation from Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781 and 1782, by the Marquis de Chastellux, “translated from the French by an English gentleman who resided in America at that period”; London, 1787; Vol. II, pp. 265–66. There is another translation, by Robert Withington, in The Marquis de Chastellux on Language and Peace, New England Quarterly, (Orono, Maine), June, 1943, pp. 316–19. Withington says: “It is, perhaps, worth observing that apparently no attempt was made to use French as an alternative to English, though it was even then the ‘diplomatic’ language, replacing an earlier Latin for international communication.”

  2 There is a summary of the essay, with extracts, in AL4, pp. 60–71. Bristed (1820–74) spent several years at Trinity College, Cambridge. He wrote half a dozen books, but all of them are forgotten.

  3 Geschichte und Zustande der Deutschen in Amerika; Cincinnati, 1847, pp. 194–98.

  1 Language and Legislation, Nov. 15, 1939, pp. 11–19.

  2 Summaries of the Tappert paper are in German the National Language, by W. L. Werner, American Notes and Queries, July, 1942, p. 64, and in The Official German Language Legend, by the same, American Speech, Dec., 1942, p. 246.

  1 May 9, 1732. The letter is printed in full in Franklin’s Complete Works; New York, 1887, pp. 297–98. I borrow this reference from Read.

  2 At that time it was still spoken in New Orleans almost as much as English. Said Albert D. Richardson in The Field, the Dungeon and the Escape; Hartford, 1865, p. 47: “The French Quarter is more un-American even than the famous German portion of Cincinnati known as Over the Rhine. Here you may stroll for hours, ‘a straggler from another civilization,’ hearing no word of your native tongue, seeing no object to remove the impression of an ancient French city.”

  3 I am indebted here to my old friend and colleague, Marshall Ballard, editor of the New Orleans Item.

  1 State Laws in Other Languages, by Richard F. Burges, American Notes and Queries, Dec., 1943, p. 144.

  2 State Laws in Other Languages, by M. J. P., American Notes and Queries, Oct., 1943, p. 102.

  3 American Notes and Queries, Feb., 1944, p. 173.

  4 On Oct. 25, 1943 the Associated Press reported from Yuma, Arizona, that a magistrate there, J. T. Hodges, had that day tried and sentenced three successive prisoners in an Indian language, in English, and in Spanish.

  1 Bilingualism in the Middle Colonies, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, April, 1937, p. 97.

  2 The “American” Language (editorial), March 1, 1923.

  3 A few days before this the Legislature designated the American cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) as the State bird, and a little while later designated a song called Illinois, with words by C. H. Chamberlain to the tune of Baby Mine, as the State song.

  1 July 25, 1923. The DAE traces American language to a debate in Congress in 1802, and Allen Walker Read runs it back to 1793. See p. 5, footnote.

  2 We Still Understand English (editorial), April 9, 1923.

  3 Leonard was not the first advocate of the reform in Minnesota. In May, 1920, a St. Paul man named A. J. Roberts launched the American Language National Magazine, and announced his candidacy for the City Council. It was his hope, he said, to become commissioner of education later on, in order “to boost for the American language and American literature in the bearing that these subjects have toward citizenship, Americanization and loyalty to the United States and American principles.” What fate befell this aspiration I do not know.

  1 Speech before the Swedish-American League at Duluth, reported in the St. Paul Dispatch, June 25, 1924. “By next Spring,” commented the Dispatch maliciously, “the colleges will be conferring honorary degrees in letters upon Ring Lardner, and then the glory of the American language will be complete. It is accordingly a great pleasure to find in Senator Johnson a champion of it. Through him we may hope for its early acceptance as the national tongue.”

  2 Diplomats Should be Understood (editorial), San Antonio News, Feb. 15, 1934.

  3 North Dakota’s Language (editorial), Minneapolis Evening Tribune, Feb. 11, 1937. I am indebted here to Mr. James D. Gronan, secretary of state of North Dakota, and to Mr. E. J. Conrad, president of the Capital Publishing Company of Bismarck.

  4 Associated Press dispatch from Rochester, July 12, 1940. I am indebted for the text of the resolution to Mr. James H. Faulkner, secretary of the Central Trades and Labor Council.

  1 Flügel, who survived until 1904, was the son of a well-known German lexicographer, Johann Gottfried Flügel (1788–1855), whose Vollständiges englisch-deutsches und deutsch-englisches Wörterbuch; Leipzig, 1830, maintained its authority for many years. Johann came out to the United States in 1810 and remained nine years. On his return to Germany with a sound knowledge of American English he became professor of English in the University of Leipzig. In 1838 he was appointed American consul in Leipzig, and during his later years was a corresponding member of many American learned societies. His son, Felix, was also a lexicographer of some distinction, and after Johann’s death brought out many editions of his dictionary under the new title of Praktisches Wörterbuch der englischen und deutschen Sprache: the fourteenth was p
ublished at Leipzig in 1883. Felix married Pauline Mencken, sister to Burkhard L. Mencken, grandfather of the present writer, and they had a son, Ewald, who followed in the family line. Ewald was born in Leipzig in 1863 and was educated there and at Freiburg. He took his Ph.D. in philology in 1885, and was privat dozent at Leipzig until 1892, when he was called to the chair of English philology in the new Leland Stanford University. He remained there until his death in 1914. He was editor of Anglia after 1889, edited the Chaucer Lexicon of the London Chaucer Society; London, 1891, and was president of the Pacific Coast branch of the American Philological Association in 1901–02. His numerous publications included “Die nordamerikanische Litteratur,” published in 1907.

  1 Flügel had reviewed Bartlett’s first edition in the Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen in 1848.

  2 Harper’s Magazine, Jan., 1859, p. 274.

  3 For this I am indebted to Dr. Richard H. Heindel.

  4 Die amerikanische Sprache, by Georg Kartzke, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 1921, pp. 181–98; Die amerikanische Sprache, by Johannes Hoops, Englische Studien, 1923; Das amerikanische Englisch, by C. M. Bratter, Vossische Zeitung, Feb. 23, 1923; Zur amerikanischen Intonation, by Fritz Karpf, Die neueren Sprachen, Sept., 1926; Amerikanisches und Britisches Englisch, by W. Franz (in Festschrift Friedrich Kluge zum 70. Geburtstage), 1926; Neue Amerikanismen, by Ed. O. Paget, Die neueren Sprachen, 1927; Die amerikanische Sprache, by Arnold Schröer, Kölnische Zeitung, Sept. 13, 1927; Amerikanisches Englisch, by Walther Fischer (in his Hauptfragen der Amerikakunde, pp. 68 ff); Bielefeld; a chapter of the same title in his Handbuch der Amerikakunde; Frankfurt a. M., 1931; Die Erforschung des amerikanischen Englisch, by the same (in Festschrift für Hermann Hirt, Vol. II), 1936; Sprachliche Neubildungen in der englischen Gegenwartsliteratur, by Hans Marcus, Neuphilologische Monatsschrift, July-Aug., 1937; Zur Biologie des amerikanischen Englisch, by Ph. Aronstein, Leuvensche Bijdragen, Jan., 1934; Amerikanisches Englisch, by F. L. Sack; Bern, 1935; Das amerikanische Idiom, by Sigillum, Berliner Tageblatt, May 31, 1935. The discussion of American speechways in German guide-books for immigrants has not been sufficiently investigated. They were numerous before the Civil War. One of them, Der amerikanische Dollmetscher; New York, 1844, is described in College Topics (University of Virginia), Nov. 11, 1936, p. 3. (I take this reference from American Speech, April, 1938, p. 142).

  1 For example, The American Language, in America of Today (No. 3 of the English section of Langenscheidt’s Fremdsprachliche Lektüre; Berlin, n.d.); Uncle Sam and His English (No. 32 of the same; Berlin, n.d.); Spoken American, by S. A. Nock and H. Mutschmann; Leipzig and Berlin, 1931. All these are in English, with German glosses.

  2 Some of its fruits were La lingua americana, by L. F. Biondi, Corriere della Sera (Milan), Oct. 16, 1928; Cosi si parla in America, by Carlo Rosetti; Milan, 1937; Slang, by L. Krasnick, Milan, 1938.

  3 For Russia see AL4, p. 88. From France came an intelligent article, Une nouvelle langue: l’Américain, by Alfred Obermann, Le Mois (Paris), Feb. 1, 1937, pp. 165–74, (I am indebted here to the Rev. Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse of Philadelphia), and from Belgium La langue américaine, by F. Peeters, Revue de l’université de Bruxelles, Dec., 1929, pp. 164–91.

  1 Standards of English in Europe, American Speech, Feb., 1934, pp. 3–10.

  1 This useful work was written in collaboration with J. Victor Martin, also resident in Japan, and F. G. Blandford. It was published in Cambridge, England, but Palmer’s preface was dated Tokyo.

  2 The first edition of this book, which was addressed to Japanese, was published in Tokyo in 1931. A second edition appeared in 1936.

  3 Studies in English Literature, April, 1928, pp. 165–208.

  4 Tokyo, 1932. This work is in Japanese.

  5 Tokyo. This work, like the foregoing, is in Japanese.

  6 Kobe, n.d.

  1 When AL4 was published in 1936 one of the most searching and intelligent reviews it received (and by no means a wholly favorable one) was by H. Shigemi, Studies in English Literature (Tokyo), Oct., 1937.

  II

  THE MATERIALS OF INQUIRY

  1. THE HALLMARKS OF AMERICAN

  There are frequent efforts by philologians both professional and amateur to frame a character for American English, with results that show some conflict. “The characteristic American word,” said the New York Times in 1944,1 “must be something short, sinewy, native to the soil of American life — creek, pone, squaw, or something in the rudely fantastic line, like calaboose or gerrymander. The most un-American words, in theory, would be the long bookish, Latin polysyllables.” Almost precisely a year before, Dr. Jacques Barzun of Columbia had taken a diametrically opposite line in the Saturday Review of Literature.2 “Once upon a time,” he said, “American speech was known for its racy, colloquial creations — barnstorm, boom, boost, bulldoze, pan out, splurge and so on. Now it is the flaccid polysyllable that expresses the country’s mind. Pioneer has yielded to pedant, and one begins to wonder whether the German word-order had better not be adopted to complete the system.” There seems to be an irreconcilable difference here over a fundamental matter, but, as in many similar cases, that seeming may be only seeming. What the Times had in mind, obviously, was the pungent, iconoclastic, everyday speech of the American people, whereas what fevered Dr. Barzun was the artificial pseudo-English that schoolma’ams, whether in step-ins or pantaloons, try to foist upon their victims, and the even worse jargon that Dogberries in and out of office use for their revelations to the multitude. The extent of that dichotomy was well described by Dr. George H. McKnight in American Speech so long ago as 1925.3 On the one hand, there is a force making for something almost approaching anarchy in language, a constant upsurge of innovation, some of it close to barbaric, from the levels where the laws of the pedants and precisians do not run; and on the other hand there is a persistent effort to break the national gabble to rigid rules, and, what is worse, to adorn it with inventions springing, not from the field and workshop, but from the study. Nor is this the whole story, for even the common speech has its curious conservatism, its liking for an occasional archaism in the midst of novelty. But the issue of the struggle in the past shows what may be looked for hereafter. The schoolma’am still fights on, but she is plainly fighting a losing battle, and many of her guiding grammarians have become so well aware of it that they have begun to throw up their hands. Said McKnight:

  The rule of the grammar and the spelling-book and the dictionary are not over. Better English weeks still support the old régime, to abandon which entirely, indeed, would mean anarchy. But a wealth of fresh words and phrases, products of new conditions of life, are being made to enrich an older language. The “rude and busteous” elements in uncultivated speech are being assimilated to form a re-invigorated form of speech.

  That these “rude and busteous” elements are more potent in America than in England seems to be generally recognized. The fact, to be sure, is denied occasionally in England, but only in moments of patriotic exaltation and by American-haters of the extreme wing. So long ago as 1835 Tocqueville tried to account for the superior energy and fecundity of American speech in that era by an appeal to the political theories then prevailing, and so recently as 1940 Dr. Harold Whitehall of the University of Indiana made an attempt in the light of the ideology of today. Said Tocqueville:

  The most common device used by democratic peoples to make an innovation in language consists in giving a new meaning to an expression already in use. This method is simple, prompt and convenient; no learning is needed to use it, and ignorance rather facilitates the process, but that process is dangerous to the language. When a democratic people doubles the meaning of a word in this way they sometimes make its old significance as ambiguous as its new one.

  This shrewd anticipation of what the current fuglemen of semantics are whooping up as a revolutionary discovery was supported by an excellent discussion of the democratic liking for general idea
s, most of them beautifully vague, and for terms of corresponding muzziness to designate them. Said Tocqueville:

  These abstract terms enlarge and obscure the thoughts thev are intended to convey. They render speech more succinct, but the underlying idea less clear. With regard to language democratic peoples prefer obscurity to painstaking.

  Finally,

  When men, no longer restrained by the effect of ranks, meet on terms of constant intercourse — when caste is destroyed and all the classes of society are intermixed — all the words of a language are mingled. Those which are unsuitable to the majority perish; the remainder form a common store, from which everyone chooses nearly at random.1

  Dr. Whitehall, like Tocqueville, seeks a political cause for the present state of American English, and finds it in the Industrial Revolution. He says:

  In its literate, written form, American English is a pruned and regimented language. But so, for that matter, is the equivalent British English. Wherever distinction may lie, it is not here. Both owe their present form to the effects of authoritarianism working upon bourgeois credulity. Both have succumbed to a vicious purism that is no older than the Industrial Revolution.… Modern Received Standard English, for all its social pretensions, is nothing more than a transmogrified middle-class dialect, and Beacon Hill quite legitimately plays hands-across-the-sea to Mayfair. In language, as in politics and society, the “new men” finally prevailed.