American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  1 “Headline idiom,” says Frederick Bodmer in The Loom of Language; New York, 1944, p. 118, “breaks through all the functional fences which schoolbooks put up round the parts of speech.”

  2 As in Dewey Sees Victory, Accord with Britain Seen, See Realty Gains in New Parkway, etc.

  3 I take most of these examples from Scribes Seek Snappy Synonyms, by Maurice Hicklin, American Speech, Dec., 1930, pp. 110–22. There are others in Headline Words, by Harold E. Rockwell, American Speech, Dec., 1926, pp. 140–41; The Invading Goth of Literature, by William N. Brigance, North American Review, Sept., 1928, pp. 316–20; Newspaper Balladry, by Winifred Johnston, American Speech, April, 1935, pp. 119–21; Headline Pep in America, London Morning Post, Dec. 29, 1936, and Motley Notes, by Alan Kamp, Sketch (London), Nov. 3, 1937, p. 2. See also Head Writing Made Easy, by Lucien Kellogg; Salt Lake City, 1944.

  4 What’s In a Name?, by Floyd Olds, Omaha World-Herald, Sept. 15, 1943: “Sometimes the answer is too many letters, when it comes to getting the name in a newspaper headline. The fellows we’re thinking about are Bill Dellastatious of Missouri and Bob Hoernschemeyer of Indiana. For headline purposes they’re likely to become Delia and Hunchy, for the same reason Coach Adolph Lewandowski is known intimately as Lew to the boys on copy-desks.” See also Shop Talk at Thirty. by Jack Lait, Editor and Publisher, Sept. 9, 1944, p. 72.

  5 Liths Here in Toast to Homeland, Chicago Sunday Times, Feb. 18. 1940, p. 5.

  6 Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, quoted in the Martinez (Calif.) Gazette, Feb, 16, 1940.

  1 New York Daily News. The meaning is that a sailor’s sweetheart petitioned President Roosevelt to order his release from the Navy, but that the sailor refused to acquiesce. I am indebted here to Mr. Albert K. Dawson.

  2 New Haven Journal-Courier, noted by the Ansonia (Conn.) Sentinel, Jan. 24, 1938.

  3 Boston Post, quoted in The Attributive Noun Becomes Cancerous, by Steven T. Byington, American Speech, Oct., 1926, p. 35. The meaning is that the vogue for wearing smocks in offices is passing. It should be noted that Mr. Byington’s diatribe against such forms was itself denounced by George O. Curme, one of the most influential of American grammarians, in Newspaper Headlines, American Speech, April, 1929, p. 306. “They are,” he said, “as old as our language and very much older in fact.” In The Attributive Noun Again, American Speech, Dec., 1929, pp. 173–75 Byington made another attack, and under the same title, Aug., 1930, pp. 490–92, Curme took another hack at him.

  4 Baltimore Evening Sun, Jan. 12, 1938.

  5 Newspaper-Made Language, editorial page, Dec. 30. Some of the headline-writers’ rhetorical devices are discussed in Alliteration on the Sports Page, by Eugene S. McCartney, American Speech, Feb., 1938, pp. 30–34, and The Cliché Expert Tells All, by Frank Sullivan, New Yorker, June 20, 1936, pp. 16–17. In 1942 John W. Harden, news editor of the Salisbury (N. C.) Post, collected from other North Carolina editors a list of prevailing newspaper clichés, and it was printed in the Editor and Publisher, Jan. 2, 1943, p. 12. See also Where is Usage Bred?, by Robert Withington, Commonweal, Dec. 17, 1937, pp. 208–11.

  6 See Newspapers Err in Use of Foreign Titles, Editor and Publisher, Oct. 8, 1938, and Accents Wild, by Charles Fitzhugh Talman, Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1915, pp. 807 ff.

  7 This banality was constantly affected by the late Hey wood Broun. See The Phoenix Nest, by William Rose Benét, Saturday Review of Literature, Feb. 13 and March 13, 1943, and The Talk of the Town, New Yorker, March 4, 1944, p. 15. In From the Oak to the Olive; Boston, 1868, p. 1, Julia Ward Howe undertook to account for the origin of the editorial we as follows: “[It] is essential for newspaper writing because people are liable to be horsewhipped for what they put in the sacred columns of a daily journal. We may represent a vague number of individuals, less inviting to, and safer from, the cowhide than the provoking egomet ipse.” The bastard ourself, archaic in English save as a poetic term, survives among American columnists. The DAE does not list it but I find an example as early as 1852 in Harper’s Magazine, Nov., p. 849.

  1 For Variety see, for example, Variety, by Hugh Kent, American Mercury, Dec., 1926, pp. 462–66; Variety, by Raymond Tyson, American Speech, Dec., 1937, pp. 317–18; A Guide to Variety, by the same, April, 1940, pp. 204–05; Lord Broadway, by Dayton Stoddart; New York, 1941, pp. 268 ff, and The Story of Variety, by Bennett Cerf, Saturday Review of Literature, April 17, 1943, pp. 32–34. Two Variety muggs (the name used by the staff to designate its members) have contributed to the discussion in Veteran Variety Mugg Gives Some Inside Stuff on Sime’s Starting V, by Epes W. Sargent, Variety, Sept. 26, 1933, p. 3, and The Variety Mugg, by Abel Green, Esquire, Sept., 1936.

  1 Headlines, Egyptian Gazette (Alexandria), May 12, 1937.

  2 Variety, May 5, 1937, p. 63. I am indebted here to Mr. George Weiler.

  3 Variety, Nov. 10, 1937. The meaning of b.r.ing I can only guess.

  1 I take these from Time Makes a Word For It, Reader’s Digest, March, 1936, and The Vocabulary of Time Magazine, by Joseph J. Firebaugh, American Speech, Oct., 1940, pp. 232–42. There are other discussions of the Time vocabulary and syntax in A Guide to the Pronunciation of Words in Time, by E. B. White, New Yorker, March 14, 1936, p. 16 (reprinted in his Quo Vadimus?; New York, 1939); Observations on American Prose, by J. Howard Wellard, Nineteenth Century and After, Jan., 1937, pp. 66 ff; Some Neologisms From Recent Magazines, by Robert Withington, American Speech, April, 1931, pp. 277–89; Coinages, by the same, April, 1940, pp. 216–18, and Profiles: Time, Fortune, Life, Luce, by Wolcott Gibbs, New Yorker, Nov. 28, 1936, pp. 20–25. The last is a merciless parody of the Time style.

  2 In England S. K. R[atcliffe], in Everyman (London), Sept. 19, 1929, belabored the omission of the article as “a parsimony such as used to be thought of as natural only to the natives of Bengal” (reprinted in American Speech, Aug., 1930, p. 481), and in this country Westbrook Peglar let go as follows in the New York World-Telegram, May 29, 1943: “I have no quarrel with Mr. Luce’s nervous weekly news review. The Time-style is original with Time and may be called an honest affectation, although I should think any normal writer, joining the Time staff fresh from the outside world, would be driven nuts the first few weeks by the office rule which makes it necessary to back into sentences, telescope certain sets of words into such combinations as GOPsters and OP Administrator, throw in the correct proportion of tycoons and avoid use of the definite article. If Time wants to gibber, that’s Time’s privilege in a free country. But, for gossakes, what has come over our city editors and our press association desk men, particularly in Washington, that they accept this as correct American journalese and harass the undeserving reader with something that may be gullah and may be geechee but certainly isn’t newspaper language?”

  3 I find the following, for example, in a release of the National Geographic Society, Jan. 12, 1939: “Busiest trade artery is the railroad from France,” etc. And the following in an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Aug. 9, 1941, p. 453: “Desirable therefore was separation chemically, if possible, of the addiction property of morphine from its analgesic attributes.” And the following in Death and Dentistry by Martin H. Fischer, professor of physiology in the University of Cincinnati; Springfield, Ill., 1940, p. 52: “Grossest error lies in the nonrecognition of obviously infected tonsils.” And the following in a statement by the Australian News and Information Bureau in London, Literary Supplement of the London Times, June 10, 1944, p. 288: “Virtual cessation of book importing has caused public demand for local work.” In The Oxford Cockneys, London Observer, Feb. 13, 1938, St. John Ervine had this to say of a book review in an Oxford undergraduate magazine: “The reviewer, who seems ambitious to join the staff of an American tabloid, an ambition which scarcely justifies his presence at a university, is possessed of the New Style in which articles are omitted, adjectives are used as verbs, and nouns are telescoped to such an extent that a sentence looks like a railway accident. This is not, as you may imagine, the idiosyncrasy
of an undergraduate whose brains have recently received a good hard knock, but is the style that is becoming commoner in our popular press.… Cub reporters undergo an intensive training in cinemas and the contents of American ragtime magazines, and are then let loose on the British public.… Having learnt in Time and magazines of that sort to foreshorten every sentence, they join the staff of a popular print and start zipping the language.”

  1 In American Speech, April, 1940, p. 217, Robert Withington gave these specimens: tantrumental, snoopidity, cosmeticulous, to make-belove and intoxicateer. Among the Reader’s Digest gleanings from Time itself I find AAAdministrator, bally-hooligan, dramateur, franchiseler, GOPossibility, intelligentiac, microphonie and vitalics. See Word Study, Sept., 1936, p. 4. Time once protested that “there is no such thing as Time style, but only Time tempo and attitude.” See the Reader’s Digest, March, 1938.

  1 A number are listed in Pillaging the Dictionary, by Frank H. Vizetelly, Atlantic Monthly, Aug., 1932, pp. 228–34. An English list is in Trade Terms Adopted in Standard English, by Edward J. G. Forse, Notes and Queries, Oct. 25, 1911, p. 238.

  2 Word-Coinage and Modern Trade-Names, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part I, pp. 20–41.

  3 The subject is intricate, and I do not pretend to be a patent lawyer: my Fach is moral theology. There is an excellent exposition in Lost Monopolies of Names and Things, by E. W. Leavenworth, Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, Sept., 1937, pp. 1006–08. See also Surname or Trade Name, the Purpose is the Same, by Edward S. Rogers, Americon Druggist, March, 1944.

  4 I am indebted here to Mr. James K. Hunt, of the du Pont public relations department.

  1 To the history of kodak may be added the following extract from a letter from its inventor, George Eastman (1854–193 2) to John M. Manly, Dec. 15, 1906: “It was a purely arbitrary combination of letters, not derived in whole or in part from any existing word, arrived at after considerable search for a word that would answer all requirements for a trade-mark name. The principal of these were that it must be short, incapable of being misspelled so as to destroy its identity, must have a vigorous and distinctive personality, and must meet the requirements of the various foreign trade-mark laws, the English being the one most difficult to satisfy owing to the very narrow interpretation that was being given to their law at that time.” I take this from George Eastman, by Carl W. Ackerman; New York, 1930, p. 76n. Ackerman himself says: “Eastman was determined that this product should have a name that could not be misspelled or mispronounced, or infringed or copied by anyone. He wanted a strong word that could be registered as a trade-mark, something that everyone would remember and associate only with the product which he proposed to manufacture. K attracted him. It was the first letter of his mother’s family name. It was ‘firm and unyielding.’ It was unlike any other letter and easily pronounced. Two k’s appealed to him more than one, and by a process of association and elimination he originated kodak and gave a new name to a new commercial product. The trade-mark was registered in the United States Sept. 4, 1888.” The first kodak had been offered for sale in June, 1888. Eastman also originated the slogan, “You press the button and we do the rest.” In the early days owners of kodaks did not do their own developing and printing.

  1 No doubt Mr. Fish intended to say may not.

  1 I take this from Scientific Terms in American Speech, by P. B. McDonald, American Speech, Nov., 1926, p. 70. Mazda was first used Dec. 21, 1909; its registration as a trade-mark is dated May 3, 1910. I am informed by Mr. C. W. Maedje, of the General Electric Company’s lamp department, that the term is “not the name of a thing but rather the mark of a research service.”

  2 I am indebted here to an anonymous writer in American Notes and Queries, April, 1944, p. 9. Mrs. Wilson died in 1944.

  3 Goodrich vs. Hockmeyer, 40 Fed. 2nd 99.

  4 The statement, sent to me by the company on April 27, 1944, said: “The trade-mark ‘Zipper’ remains today the exclusive trademark of B. F. Goodrich for footwear just as it was when adopted by B. F. Goodrich in 1923. No other has the right to use the trade-mark for footwear or in connection with a business in footwear, nor has any other, to the knowledge of B. F. Goodrich so used it.” On Jan. 3, 1933, Philip Handerson, then director of advertising and publicity for the company, printed in Life, p. 6, a letter protesting against an article published on Nov. 8, 1937, in which zipper was treated as a common noun. The editors replied: “Life’s apologies, but the Goodrich Company must be aware that its trademark has passed into the English language.”

  1 Into a Second Century With Procter & Gamble; Cincinnati, 1944.

  2 Labeling, National Consumer News, Nov., 1937, p. 8.

  3 War Calls the Tune; Industry Supplies the Words, American Speech, April, 1941, p. 160. Dr. Baekeland is a Belgian who came to the United States in 1889, and founded in 1893 a business for the manufacture of photographic papers. He sold out to the Eastman Kodak Company in 1899 and devoted himself to chemical research. The Bakelite Corporation was launched in 1910.

  4 Genesis of the Word Veronal, by Kurt F. Behne, Journal of the American Medical Association, July 18, 1931, p. 198.

  1 The Coca-Cola Company vs. The Koke Company of America et al, 254 U. S. 143; 65 L. Ed. 189.

  2 As, for example: “Coke = Coca-Cola. It’s natural for popular names to acquire friendly abbreviations. That’s why you hear Coca-Cola called ‘Coke’.” The following is from the decision of the Supreme Court in Coca-Cola Company vs. Koke Company of America, just cited: “Before 1900 the beginning of the good will [of Coca-Cola] was more or less helped by the presence of cocaine, a drug that, like alcohol or caffein or opium, may be described as a deadly poison or as a valuable item of the pharmacopoeia according to the rhetorical purposes in view. The amount seems to have been very small, but it may have been enough to begin a bad habit, and after the Food and Drug Act of June 30, 1906, if not earlier, long before this suit was brought, it was eliminated from the plaintiff’s compound, Coca leaves still are used, to be sure, but after they have been subjected to a drastic process that removes from them every characteristic substance except a little tannin and still less chlorophyl. The cola nut, at best, on its side furnishes but a very small portion of caffein, which now is the only element that has appreciable effect.” This decision is printed in full, along with many decisions of lower courts, in Opinions and Decrees Involving Coke, the Abbreviation of the Trade-Mark Coca-Cola; Atlanta, 1943. I am indebted to Messrs. William J. Hobbs and Ralph Hayes, vice-presidents of the company, for a copy of the book.

  1 See AL4, p. 172.

  2 Trade-Name Suffixes, by Walter E. Myers, American Speech, July 1927, p. 448, and X-ploiting the La-z-y Letters, by Mabel E. Strong, Words, Dec. 1938, pp. 136–37.

  3 The Word Master in Trade Names, by G. H. Reese, American Speech, Dec., 1937, pp. 262–66.

  4 Rem was invented by Joseph Katz, a Baltimore advertising man.

  5 Launched by the Curran Corporation, Maiden, Mass., in 1932.

  6 An interesting discussion of the qualities required in such names, dividing them into categories, is in 33 Check Points for Finding a Name for That New Product, by P. H. Erbes, Jr., Printers Ink, Oct. 1, 1943, pp. 28–97. An account of the method, frequently used, of finding a new name by means of a prize competition, is in $1,000 a Word, by Homer A. Parsons, Writers’ Digest, Feb., 1927, pp. 102–03. The names in a special field are dealt with in Trade-Names in the Petroleum Industry, by Dora Lee Brauer, American Speech, April, 1935, pp. 122–28.

  1 Patent Office Report for 1943, p. 8.

  2 Mrs. William W. Elder, Jr., of Idaho City, Idaho.

  3 Carriage-repository, now obsolete, was apparently an Americanism, though the DAE does not list it.

  4 It survives more or less in New England. Up to within recent times it had an elegant smack there and was thought to be better than pantry. (I am indebted here to Mrs. Isaac Gerson Swope of Wayne, Pa., and Mr. J. F. Malley of Boston.) At Oxford and Cambridge the term is used to designate a pantry. It was
borrowed by Harvard and Yale to designate a room in which food and drink for sale to the students was stored. The Yale buttery was abolished in 1817.

  5 Notes of a Tour of the United States, by A. Fergusson. I am indebted for this to the DAE. Fergusson’s book is not listed in the bibliographies of English travelers’ books by Nevins, Brooks and Mesick.

  1 New York Daguerreotyped, April, 1853, p. 358, col. 1.

  2 Observed in Atlanta, Ga., by Mr. C. Mertzanoff of New York: private communication, Feb. 11, 1938.

  3 New Yorker, June 11, 1938, p. 8.

  4 Advertisement of Filene’s department-store, Boston Herald, Dec. 18, 1935.

  5 American Speech, April, 1941, p. 120.

  6 American Speech, just cited.

  7 Notes of a Peninsula Commuter, by Joseph Burton Vasché, American Speech, Feb., 1940, p. 54.

  8 American Speech, March, 1927, p. 206.

  9 Sign on a bowling alley in North Charles street, Baltimore, 1944: “Most Modern Bowleries.”

  10 The Second Visitor, by Timothy Fuller, American Magazine, Sept., 1937.

  11 Not listed by the DAE, but it must go back to the 80s, at least.

  12 The Living Language, by Dwight L. Bolinger, Words, May, 1938, p. 69.

  13 Some Odd Names, by Manuel Prenner, American Speech, Oct., 1931, p. 80.

  14 Atlantic Monthly, May, 1935, p. 38: “Fresh Eggs from our Own Henry” — a sign encountered at Tannersville, N. Y.

  15 The examples from eatery to stitchery come from Irradiation of Certain Suffixes, by E. C. Hills, American Speech, Oct., 1925, p. 38.

  16 Vogue Affixes in Present Day Word-Coinage, by Louise Pound, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part I, 1918, p. 10.