American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  Quiller-Couch and Herbert are not the only Britons who have protested against this sonorous rubbish. It was denounced by the late Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor-General of Canada,1 and in 1940 Winston Churchill had at it in an official memorandum to the members of his government and the heads of the civil service, begging them to order their subordinates to write more simply. In the United States its chief critic in office has been the Hon. Maury Maverick, chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corporation, who boiled over on March 30, 1944 with a formal prohibition of what he called gobbledygook language by the tax-eaters under his command. Thus his order:

  Be short and say what you’re talking about. Let’s stop pointing up programs, finalizing contracts that stem from district, regional or Washington levels. No more patterns, effectuating, dynamics. Anyone using the words activation or implementation will be shot.2

  In defense of the jobholders it should be said that many of the ideas they have to deal with are probably unstatable in plain American, or even in literary English. Perhaps this must be the excuse for such masterpieces as the following, taken from an OPA directive defining fruit-cake:

  “Fruit cake of a comparable type sold by the producer in the period October 1st to December 31st, 1941, inclusive,” means a fruit cake (1) the ingredients of which would have had the same approximate total cost if such ingredients had been purchased in March, 1942, as the total cost of ingredients used in making the fruit cake for which a maximum price is to be determined if such ingredients had also been purchased in March, 1942, and (2) of the same weight when completed and ready for packaging as the fruit cake for which a maximum price is to be determined.1

  And this from a directive to internal revenue agents, expounding the inwardness of a proposed amendment to the famous Income Tax Act of 1944:

  The effect of the amendment, as explained on the floor of the Senate, if finally enacted into law, would be to permit, after having made an adjustment in an item affecting the excess profits tax, in a year to which the amendment is made applicable, which has an effect on the normal or surtax for the year, any resulting adjustment necessary in the normal or surtaxes may be accomplished although the statute of limitations for assessment of any deficiency or making any refund of such taxes, has expired.2

  Complaints about the unintelligibility of OPA directives became so bitter during the Spring of 1944 that an expert was employed to attempt their translation into English. Characteristically, the savant selected was an Austrian who arrived in the United States so recently as 1938. He undertook an elaborate analysis of the American vocabulary, separating it into seven categories, the first and easiest embracing the simple words used in radio soap-operas and the seventh and worst the hard words used by the Scientific Monthly. Applying these categories to the directives, he found that some of them, e.g., OPA regulation MPR 496, amended section 5 [D] [1], dealing with the price of beet, carrot, onion and turnip seeds, included terms running far beyond the hardest in the Scientific Monthly répertoire.3 Whether or not he managed to effect a reform I do not know: there is no mention of it in the record. Meanwhile, the Army and Navy also succumbed to the new official style. The Army, in the days before World War II, was largely staffed by West Pointers and they used the plain and excellent American taught at that great seminary, but the entrance of large numbers of officers from civil life brought in a taste and a talent for jargon, and by the end of 1943 such monstrosities as the following were appearing in official handbooks:

  Proper application of prescribed preventative maintenance measures must be a prime consideration in order to minimize replacements. Vehicle equipment of tactical organizations and that of administrative units and reserve pools should be interchangeable wherever possible in order that needed replacements for forward areas be secured by interorganization transfers to meet emergencies in which normal channels of supply would introduce delays.1

  Among the favorites of the New Deal wizards between 1933 and 1944 were coördinator,2 expediter, priority, pool,3

  “Where is your daughter now?”

  “Oh, she’s in the pool at the OPM. She’s a secretary, you know.”

  “And your husband, where is he?”

  “Why, didn’t you know? He’s in the doctors’ pool at Walter Reed Hospital.”

  “How did you get downtown this morning?”

  “It was very simple. We have the loveliest motor pool. And it’s great fun. We have a sign, ‘Motor Pool,’ on the back of our car. We do pick up some interesting people.”

  duration, bottleneck,4 roll-back, gradualism, over-all,5 rationale,6 directive,7 pattern,8 objective, plateau,9 level,10 clearance,11 long-range, to stem from, to point up, to finalize, to explore, to implement, to gear in, to spell out, to be severed,1 to process, and the sententious saying “Time is of the essence.” Few if any of these were their inventions, but they gave all of them wide currency, and one of them, to process, now threatens to take its place in the language alongside to contact. It is old as a law term, but in the sense of to subject to a mechanical or chemical process it seems to be an Americanism, first recorded by the NED in the New York Evening Post of January 28, 1884, where it was described as “a new verb invented to fit a new thing,” to wit, the process of making photo-engravings. Webster 1934 lists it in the general sense of to convert a raw material into marketable form by some form of manipulation, e.g., to process milk by pasteurizing it, or beets by extracting the sugar, or rancid butter by getting rid of the products of decomposition. But the New Dealers gave it a much wider range by using it for purely ideational operations, and widening it to include human beings among its objects. It has since been adopted by the pre-Roosevelt or dirt jobholders of the Old Guard in Washington,2 by the Army and Navy,3 and by large groups, mostly of learned pretensions, outside the ranks of officialdom, both in its older sense of doing something to inanimate materials and its new sense of mauling and manipulating God’s creatures.1

  There was no need for most of these groups to borrow it, for they all have plenty of counter-words and clichés of their own. The medical brethren here come to mind at once, for they are notorious for their muggy writing. In part its defects are produced by mere garrulity, but in other part they flow out of a fondness for irrational and misleading terms, e.g., the shortenings, to operate (a patient) for to operate on and temperature for elevation of temperature.2 Not a few of them use case for patient,3 and some even lean toward such bizarre forms as to diagnosticate,4 to do a urine, rectal and basal (as nouns), pathology for pathological condition, to clinic, to Wassermann, to obstetricate, to cystoscope, to blood count, and so on.5 The psychiatrists, especially those of the psychoanalytical faction, have concocted a vast vocabulary of new words,1 and some of them have got into the common speech, e.g., complex (inferiority, Oedipus, etc.), libido, inhibition, repression, introvert, extrovert, fixation, subconscious, psychopathic personality, and various derivatives of schizophrenia.2 From the répertoire of the internists has come the adjective allergic, now in wide use as a general indicator of aversion, whether physical or psychic.3 The orthodox psychologists have also made contributions, e.g., reaction,4 conditioned, to stultify,5 and psychological moment. But of all the bands of learned men who devote themselves to inventing new terms, and then to hugging them until the last drop of juice is squeezed out of them, the most assiduous are the pedagogues. A few of their favorites, e.g., outstanding, have got into the common stock,6 but on the whole their jargon remains esoteric, e.g., stimulus-response bond, mind-set, creativity, differentia, overview, overall (adjective), factor, integration, implication, essentialism, function, core-curriculum, challenge, emphases,1 orthogenic, purposeful, control of the learning situation, dynamic, to motivate, educationist,2 to evaluate, to vitalize and to socialize. The so-called progressive gogues, in the days of their glory, had a large and bristling vocabulary of their own, much of it lifted from the lingo of the psychoanalysts, the various warring wings of psychologists, the Ro-tarians and the Boy Scouts. One of its favorite t
erms was creative:3 The progressives are now in the dog-house, and the generality of public-school gogues are going back to what they call essentialism, i.e., the teaching of such once-scorned subjects as reading, writing and ciphering. They have, in both their thinking and their talk, made liberal drafts from the more advanced and idealistic sociologists,4 and especially from that faction of soaring pseudo-sociologists known as social workers.5 “Newer sciences like sociology and pedagogy,” said William Allen Neilson in 1938,

  which aren’t quite certain of their place in the academic hierarchy, are anxious to establish themselves as real sciences, and naturally but stupidly what they do is to imitate real sciences by being unintelligible. Students of pedagogy and sociologists have already invented the worst English that any class of scholars write, as far as I know. Take up one of their books and you will find no ideas, once you have penetrated the shell, that are not perfectly capable of being expounded in good English.1

  The prevalence of counter-words in everyday speech is familiar to everyone. There is a constant accretion of new ones, and some have come into such wide use that they are read or heard every hour, and indeed every minute. Not a few are adjectives or adverbs, e.g., awful(ly), grand and swell. So long ago as September 27, 1749 Lord Chesterfield was noting (and denouncing), in a letter to his son, the vogue for vastly in England. Jolly, still in use in England, is traced by the NED in English use, sometimes followed by well, to 1548, but it has never had a run in the United States, though the verb to jolly was adopted years ago. The DAE marks awful and awfully Americanisms. The first is traced to 1809, more than sixty years before it appeared in England. “In New England,” said Pickering in his Vocabulary of 1816, “many people would call a disagreeable medicine awful, an ugly woman an awful-looking woman; a perverse, ill-natured child that disobeys his parents would be said to behave awfully, etc.” Pickering seemed to believe that awful and awfully were on their way out, but they still survive. He also noted grand, in the general sense of superior or noteworthy, and it is apparently an Americanism, though the DAE overlooks it. Swell, as a noun signifying a person of fashion, seems to have been borrowed from the cant of thieves in England, c. 1800. In 1804 a number of young English officers were dismissed from the Army for forming what they called the Swell Club, but soon afterward the term was in general use, and the adjective seems to have followed almost immediately. Swell had a revival in the United States c. 1910, and acquired an antonym in lousy. Both became counter-words of the first virulence, and there is an illustrative story about an Eastern literatus who said to a movie-queen: “The only words used in Hollywood are swell and lousy.” Her reply was: “What words are they?” Many other counter-words of recent years will occur to the reader, e.g., constructive (beloved of Rotarians), angle,1 consistent,2 gesture,3 shambles,4 stream-lined, alibi,5 definitely,6 flair,7 proposition,8 plus,9 lurid, reaction, conference and to intrigued.1 Strenuous should not be forgotten,2 nor the counter-words that occupy the intelligentsia without ever descending to lower levels, e.g., meticulous,3 chemurgic4 and podium.5 The English have many counter-words that fail to make the Atlantic journey, e.g., knowledgeable, which had a great run in the 1935–38 era,6 unilateral,7 and the fashionable intensives of the foul and putrid order.1 Whether or not the and/or combination originated in England I have been unable to determine. Like alibi, it comes from the argot of the law. It has been denounced in both England and America, even by judges,2 but it continues to flourish.3

  To the notes in AL4, pp. 201 ff, on various peculiarities of American usage little need be added. Whom is now almost obsolete, save as a conscious affectation usually employed incorrectly. “Who are you talking to?” has come into well-nigh universal use, and may be called sound American; indeed, the late Dr. Stuart Robertson argued that it was also sound English.4 He also argued for the validity of the terminal preposition, as in “Where are we at?” The split infinitive has even more impressive support. Dr. George O. Curme defended it at length in American Speech in 1927,1 and gave over nearly eight pages of his monumental grammar of 1931 to detailing its history and proving its utility.2 Other eminent authorities have taken the same line, including H. W. Fowler, author of “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.”3 I see no sign that academic dubieties are making any impression on other popular American forms, e.g., the one-he combination,4 but that,5 and the intrusion of of between question and whether.6 There are many others of the same sort.7

  5. FOREIGN INFLUENCES TODAY

  218. [Since the Civil War the chief contribution of German has been the domestication of the suffix -fest.] In 1916 Louise Pound rounded up twenty-three specimens from the current vocabulary, to wit: Ananiasfest, batfest, blarneyfest, bloodfest, crabfest,1 eatfest, gabfest, gabblefest, gadfest, grubfest, jawfest, olymphest,2 singfest, slugfest, smilefest, smokefest, sobfest, songfest, spooffest, stuntfest, swatfest, talkfest and walkfest.3 Many others appeared during the years following, e.g., hoochfest, lovefest, bullfest, boozefest, bookfest and applefest,4 and in 1918 Dr. Pound herself added chatfest, egofest, funfest and gossipfest.5 Since then the scouts of American Speech and other linguistic explorers have unearthed beerfest, hymnfest,6 gagfest,7 hamfest,8 suitfest,9 blabfest, chatfest, chawfest, chinfest, gasfest, hashfest, pipefest, joshfest, laughfest, nudefest, stripfest, pepfest and henfest.10 On April 9, 1927 the Pittsburgh Courier announced that the Northside Community Club of that city, a colored organization, was about to hold a sangerfest (no umlaut). The Spanish fiesta seems to have reinforced fest in the West, and funfesta,11 jubilesta, mulesta, goldesta and hallowesta have been recorded.12 The DAE does not list sängerfest, but its meaning has been familiar to all Americans interested in music since the 70s. It also omits schützenfest, which was likewise familiar in the 1850–90 era. Webster 1934 lists both, along with sängerbund. There was a fashion c. 1900 for words in -bund, and for a while moneybund and plunderbund were in wide use. Both are omitted by the DAE, but Webster lists them. The suffix early acquired a pejorative significance, accentuated when the F.B.I, began running down bundists, i.e., members of a bund of Nazis. The latest word in -bund seems to be smearbund, signifying a band of defamers, e.g., of the Jews.1 Other German suffixes that have produced progeny in American are -lust, -heimer and -burger. The first-named was introduced by wanderlust, which was in wide use for some years, c. 1930, and produced the derivatives wanderluster (Eng. rambler), wanderlust-club (Eng. rambling-club), wanderlusting and wanderlustful. The DAE omits all of them, but Webster lists wanderlust, wanderlusting and wanderlustful. In 1933 the Hon. Louis Ludlow, a member of Congress from Indiana, launched squanderlust in a book, “America Go Bust,” but it did not catch on.2 The suffix -heimer begat wiseheimer and various other terms. It was probably helped into American English by Yiddish influence. Along with it came -sky or -ski, as in allrightsky, hurryupsky, youbetsky, buttinski and damfoolski, but of these only buttinski shows any sign of surviving.3 All the American words in -burger appear to be derived from hamburger. In its early days in the United States the chopped beef now known as a hamburger was called a hamburg-steak, and was served like any other steak, not in the form of a sandwich. The DAE traces hamburg-steak to 1884 and it is probably older. By the turn of the century it had become hamburger-steak, and soon afterward it degenerated from the estate of a steak to that of a sandwich and became a simple hamburger. It began to produce numerous offspring after World War I. Says Arnold Williams:

  Like lemonade it has, at least in the vulgate, added a new suffix to the language. To the proprietors and clientèle of thousands of roadside inns, diners and eat-and-run lunch-counters-burger has come to mean almost any meat or meat-substitute ground or chopped and, fried or grilled, made into sandwiches.4

  Williams lists chickenburger, cheeseburger, clamburger, lamburger (made of ground “lamb,” and tasting, he notes, like ram), rabbit-burger, nut burger, porkburger and wimpyburger. He says:

  Wimpyburger suggests to the student of etymology a clue to the popularity of -burger as a suffix. Popey
e, the popular comic strip of the late Segar, though it cannot be credited with the popularity of the hamburger sandwich, did, in the character of Wimpy, endow hamburger with a mythos. Like all of Segar’s characters, Wimpy is an inveterate coiner of new words. Several years ago he created goonburger. More recently demonburger has appeared.

  In 1940 Louise Pound reported beefburger from New York City, kirschburger from Lincoln, Neb., and shrimpburger from New Orleans.1 Three years later Dwight L. Bolinger followed with gluten-burger, barbe cue burger, Spamburger (made of a proprietary ground-meat preparation called Spam), huskiburger, Bar-B-burger, sausage-burger, pickleburger and Meet-the-People-burger, named after a musical comedy called “Meet the People.”2 In 1937 a correspondent reported a tomatoburger from Minneapolis,3 and another a liverwurst-burger from Washington.4 In 1940 the austere sausage-engineers of the Institute of American Meat Packers converted the latter into a liver-sausage-burger.5 Other searchers have unearthed the horsemeat-burger,6 Mexiburger, chuckburger, dogburger, seaburger, fishburger,7 whinneyburger (a euphemism for horsemeatburger)8 oomphburger9 and griddleburger.10

  The DAE’s first examples of frankfurter and wienerwurst are both dated 1899, but the two sausages were well known in the United States long before. The former is the variety commonly used in the hot-dog: the latter is smaller. But the terms are frequently interchanged, even by Germans. Two clipped forms of wienerwurst, to wit, wiener and wienie, are in wide use. Webster 1934 lists wiener but not wienie: the DAE ignores both. Liver-pudding, corresponding to the German leberwurst, may be an Americanism, though the DAE does not list it, for neither is it recorded by the NED. In the Baltimore of my childhood leberwurst was in frequent use, though liverwurst, liver-pudding and liver-sausage were also heard. In 1930 Swift & Company, the Chicago packers, began calling the sausage braunschweiger — the adjective often prefixed to leberwurst by the Germans, for the variety most esteemed in their homeland comes from Braunschweig (Brunswick).1 The other Chicago packers seem to prefer liver-sausage. Swift has also reduced frankfurter to frankfurt, and put on the market a preparation of liver called liver cheese.2 Frankfurter has produced at least one derivative, turkeyfurter.3 Sometimes these German borrowings are sadly misspelled in American use. I have encountered brownswoger, weanerwust, and even wienna shitzel (for wiener schnitzel).4