American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  3 This was formerly looked on as an Americanism, though Southey used it in 1807. In late years the English have taken to it. See, for example, the obituary of the Rev. A. N. Campbell in the London Times, July 13, 1934.

  4 In American Speech, Feb., 1934, p. 76, Louise Pound reported the following from a speech in Birmingham, Ala., Sept. 17, 1933, by Dr. Sterling J. Foster, chairman of an association opposed to municipal ownership: “Taxes will be upped on every house in the city.” I add the following from a pamphlet entitled Taxes and Estates, published by the Equitable Trust Company, Baltimore, in Jan., 1944, p. 1: “A tremendous upping of the rates of death taxes.” And this from an Associated Press dispatch from Washington, Oct. 1, 1941: “The excess profits tax on corporations has been upped.”

  5 Apparently invented by Life. See American Speech, Feb., 1941, p. 31.

  1 American Speech, Dec., 1939, p. 286.

  2 New Verbs, by Mabel E. Strong, American Speech, Feb., 1926, p. 292. In an Associated Press dispatch from Cambridge, N. Y., May 20, 1939 the invention of pie à la mode was claimed for Charles Watson Townsend, who had died there that day. The inspiration seized him, it was said, while dining at a local hotel, c. 1887, and soon afterward he introduced the dessert to Delmonico in New York.

  3 In the Manchester Guardian, April 5, 1929, Harold Brighouse hinted that to debunk was my private property, with the inference that I had invented it. I did not invent it, and have never, so far as I can recall, made more than occasional use of it.

  4 Debunk, American Speech, May, 1927, p. 374.

  5 To detrain was originally a military term, and is traced by the NED in Army usage to 1881. It came into general use soon afterward and was borrowed in this country. American purists sought to dispose of it by concocting satirical analogues, e.g., to deomnibus, to dehack, to dehorse-car and to decanalboat. See New Words in the New World, by C. B. A., American Speech, Feb., 1933, p. 78. In recent years the English have toyed with some new words in em-, imitated from to embark, e.g., to embus. See A Spectator’s Notebook, London Spectator, Aug. 9, 1940, p. 137 and Aug. 16, p. 161.

  6 Both used in automobile service-stations. See American Speech, April, 1935, p. 154.

  7 Defined as follows in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Nov.-Dec., 1938, p. 301: “To degerm an object is to reduce, by any means, the number of microbes, pathogenic or nonpathogenic, in or on it.… To disinfect an object (successfully) means fully to eliminate its infectious quality. Likewise, to sterilize means to carry through destruction of the germs to completion. The word degerm, however, refers simply to the act of reduction, and not to the bacteriological state at its termination.” I take this from Use of the Term Degerm, by Philip B. Price, Journal of the American Medical Association, May 6, 1944, p. 82.

  8 Advertisement of the Simplicity Engineering Company, Durand, Mich., in the Chemical Equipment Review, May-June, 1942, p. 11. I am indebted here to Mr. Fred Hamann.

  9 American Speech, Oct., 1943, p. 237.

  10 Apparently coined by Barney Oldfield, “a newspaper writer on film topics,” Jan. 14, 1940. American Speech, April, 1940, p. 131.

  1 The last two are reported in Two More De- Words, by Atcheson L. Hench, American Speech, Feb. 1935, p. 78.

  2 The English have heard to derat, but buck at it. See a note on it in the London Observer, Nov. 13, 1938. They accept, however, deratization, which the NED Supplement traces to 1914, when it appeared in a circular of the Board of Trade. To deskill was recorded by Country Life (London), Feb. 1, 1941, but not hailed with joy. “Civil servants,” said the editor gloomily, “are adepts at the creation of new words, and soldiers are not without a certain merit in the same hideous art; so when a war comes and the two are on the same side we must expect something out of the common. One of the latest examples is the verb to deskill, which is, we believe, applied to factories and refers to the increasing use of unskilled labor in them.”

  3 The Living Language, by Dwight L. Bolinger, Words, Oct., 1937, p. 155.

  4 University of California Publications in Modern Philology, Sept. 21, 1918, pp. 175–200.

  5 He went to the chair Aug. 3, 1890.

  1 The DAE’s first example or to electrocute is dated Aug. 1, 1889. It does not list to electrize. Kemmler’s crime was committed March 29, 1889. The act establishing electrocution as the means of inflicting the death penalty in New York went into effect Jan. 1, 1889. See The First Electrocution, by Tom Mahone, Real Detective, May, 1935, p. 27.

  2 From Horace Fletcher (1849–1919), a fanatic who advocated chewing food until all its taste was lost. He had a large following in the early years of the century, but his cure-all is now forgotten. F. H. Garrison says in An Introduction to the History of Medicine; fourth ed.; Philadelphia, 1929, p. 737, that he “really cultivated constipation and suffered from chronic toxemia and decayed teeth.”

  3 See AL4, p. 193.

  4 New Words For Old, Baltimore Evening Sun (editorial page), April 29, 1940.

  5 Gardens, Houses and People (Baltimore), Jan., 1944, p. 24.

  6 Among the New Words, by Dwight L. Bolinger, American Speech, April, 1941, p. 148. Defined as “to equip or prepare for Winter use.”

  7 Motto of the Texas centennial celebration at Corsicana, 1936: Let’s Texanize Texas.

  8 To pre-shrink cloth, from the first name of Sanford Lockwood Cluett, inventor of the process. American Speech, Feb., 1942, p. 24.

  9 Down the Spillway, by John O’Ren, Baltimore Sun, June 9, 1937, p. 12.

  10 American Speech, Dec., 1939, p. 316.

  11 Cue, Sept. 9, p. 7.

  12 Women’s Wear Daily, recorded in New Words For Old, Baltimore Evening Sun (editorial page), Oct. 25, 1938. Example: “The trade is partnerizing the consumer.”

  13 American Speech, Dec., 1943, p. 303. It is there defined in the sense of “to provide with air under pressure, as in an aircraft for breathing purposes to compensate for low natural pressure at high altitudes.” But it is also used, like to pressure, to indicate any sort of persistence or duress, whether physical or psychic.

  14 Recorded by Bartlett in his second edition of 1859 and marked an Americanism by the DAE. The English do not seem to know it, but they use the even more hideous to obituarize. See the Literary Supplement of the London Times, June 7, 1934, p. 407.

  15 A Hollywood coinage, borrowed by the News of the World (London), June 12, 1938. To deglamorize is recorded by Dwight L. Bolinger in Among the New Words, American Speech, April, 1943, p. 149.

  16 A Variety coinage, recorded in New Words For Old, Baltimore Evening Sun (editorial page), July 1, 1939.

  17 Graham Taylor in the Chicago Daily News, Oct. 17, 1936, recorded by American Speech, Dec., 1936, p. 373.

  18 Traced by the NED Supplement to 1928 in English use, but older in American. Used by Mr. Justice Murphy in the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States in Thornhill vs. State of Alabama, April 2, 1940: “No clear and present danger … can be thought to be inherent in the activities of every person who approaches the premises of an employer and publicizes the facts of a labor dispute involving the latter.”

  1 Madison (Wis.) State Journal, Dec. 18, 1925, recorded in English as She is Wrote, by Charles Forster Smith, American Speech, June, 1926, p. 507.

  2 Forumize, by Charles P. Greene, American Speech, June, 1928, p. 432.

  3 The last three are recorded in New Verbs in -ize, by Anne E. Perkins, American Speech, June, 1928, p. 434.

  4 American Speech, Oct., 1934, p. 236.

  5 The last five are recorded in The New Language, Chicago Journal of Commerce, Aug. 18, 1943.

  6 To expertize is not listed by the DAE, but the NED’s first (and only) example is from Harper’s Magazine, Feb. 1889. The noun expertise, borrowed from the French, is traced in England to 1869.

  7 From custom-made, which is traced by the DAE to 1855 and marked an Americanism.

  8 American Speech, Feb., 1934, p. 76.

  9 American Speech, Sept., 1927, p. 515.

  10 American
Speech, Dec., 1936, p. 374.

  11 Used in the Farm Journal, March, 1926. I am indebted here to Mr. Thomas M. Sloane of Washington. Noted by Wilson Follett in The State of the Language, Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 1939.

  12 This verb, now in wide use to designate the winding-up of any matter of business, especially in official circles at Washington, may have been coined in Australia. A New South Wales correspondent of John o’London’s Weekly, April 18, 1936, reported that it was used there at the end of World War I.

  13 American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 236. The meaning, however, is not to prosper, but to make to look prosperous.

  14 Described in American Speech, Oct., 1933, p. 76 as “a popular novelty of the year.” It has since made inroads on to renovate.

  15 American Speech, Oct., 1940, p. 261.

  1 Shall and Will, Should and Would in the Newspapers of Today, S.P.E. Tract No. VI, 1921, p. 14.

  2 New York, 1940, pp. 150 ff.

  3 Shall and Will, American Speech, Aug., 1929, pp. 497–98.

  4 The Future Tense in English, College English, March, pp. 333–37.

  1 British-American Differentiations in Syntax and Idiom, by Stuart Robertson, American Speech, Dec., 1939, p. 252.

  2 It is not uncommon, when shall and will are used by an American in what is taken to be in accord with English practise, for him to be derided for pedantry or worse. This happened, for example, in July 1944, when President Roosevelt used “If the convention should … nominate me for the presidency I shall accept; if the people elect me I will serve” in his letter to the chairman of the Democratic national committee. On July 13 the Boston Herald sneered at him in an editorial headed Willy-Shallying. He was defended in the Herald two days later by E. K. Rand of Cambridge, who argued that he wrote “like a cultivated gentleman.” The English themselves are shaky about will and shall, and there are frequent discussions of the verbs in their newspapers.

  3 Fire in Our Ears, English Journal (College Edition), May 1932, p. 412.

  4 A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, by Otto Jespersen; Part I, Sounds and Spellings-, third ed.; Heidelberg, 1922, p. 228.

  1 The Origin of Ain’t, Word Study, March, 1936, p. 3. In the same issue, p. 2, E. Payson Willard suggests that ain’t “has come from the verb have rather than from the verb be.” His reasons: “1. It is used in all three persons and is not confined to the first person singular. 2. As an auxiliary it has the meaning of have much more than that of be. 3. Short forms of have can be found in the older English and in dialect English (e.g., han in Chaucer and ha’ in Burns). 4. It is sometimes aspirated. 5. Ha has the long a-sound in the word halfpenny (which is pronounced by Englishmen as if the first syllable were hay); hence the ha of have may have been given this sound also.”

  2 A Grammar of the English Language, by George O. Curme; II. Parts of Speech and Accidence; Boston, 1935, p. 248.

  3 See p. 8.

  4 Wallace Rice says in Ain’t, American Mercury, Aug., 1927, p. 450, that “this Briticism began only with the present century.”

  5 Oxford, 1926, p. 45.

  1 Fire in Our Ears, already cited, p. 416. In a paper read before the National Council of Teachers of English at Milwaukee (reported in Shall and Will Yield to Present-Day Usage, New York Herald Tribune, Dec. 6, 1931) Dr. J. C. Tressler suggested that the only way for the schoolma’am to make headway against ain’t would be for her to set her pupils to “chanting in unison for five minutes a day for a month: ‘I ain’t going, you ain’t going, we ain’t going, they ain’t going; in fact, nobody ain’t going.’ ” Whether or not this suggestion was ever adopted does not appear in the record.

  2 Ain’t, already cited, p. 450.

  3 There is frequent discussion of ain’t in the lay press, but not often to any profit. Some specimens: We’re Right, Ain’t We?, Cleveland Press (editorial), March 11, 1937; Ain’t Wins Promotion (editorial), Syracuse Post-Standard, same date; Kind Words for Ain’t, New York World-Telegram, same date; Ain’t It the Truth, by Milton Ellis, Saturday Review of Literature, April 3, 1943. In The Grammarian’s Corner, Writer, March, 1937, p. 94, an anonymous writer suggested the substitution of ’m I not, pronounced my not, in such forms as “I am to speak ten minutes, ’m I not?” A more learned discussion is in Ain’t I and Aren’t I, by R. I. McDavid, Language, Jan.-March, 1941, pp. 57–59. The English objection to ain’t is stated in The Owlglass, by Mark Over, London Outlook, Aug. 13, 1927.

  4 Traced by the DAE, in the figurative sense of small or petty, as in one-horse town, to the middle 50s, and marked an Americanism.

  5 The etymology of bogus remains undetermined, but the DAE’s examples show it appearing as a noun in 1826, sixteen years before its appearance as an adjective.

  1 Journal of the American Medical Association, Aug. 26, 1944, p. 1188, col. 1.

  2 Coined by Willard Houghland of Albuquerque, N. Mex.

  3 Used by Rudolph Justice Watson, in the Capitol Daily (Washington), to describe the dames of the D.A.R., and noted in New Words For Old, Baltimore Evening Sun, June 18, 1938.

  4 Mamie Meredith says in Superpower, American Speech, Feb., 1939, p. 79, that ultra- was a favorite prefix in the Civil War era, but the DAE lists only a few examples. So far as I know, the Greek prefix pan, meaning all, has produced but one Americanism, to wit, pan-American. The DAE traces it to Sept. 27, 1889, when it appeared in the New York Evening Post, but on April 11, 1940 the Post laid claim to having used it so early as June 27, 1882.

  5 Journal of the American Medical Association (editorial) Aug. 19, 1939, p. 682.

  6 Want-ad in the same journal, May 11, 1940.

  7 Advertisement of Thearle-Duffield Fireworks, Ltd., in the Billboard, Dec. 29, 1934, p. 158.

  8 Sired by Westbrook Pegler, and recorded in New Words For Old, Baltimore Evening Sun (editorial page), July 17, 1939.

  9 Journal of the American Medical Association, Feb. 26, 1944, p. 572.

  10 London Morning Post, Feb. 24, 1936.

  11 Used twice in Woman and Her World, by H. Pearl Adam, London Observer, Jan. 5, 1936.

  12 Peterborough’s column in the London Daily Telegraph, May 20, 1936.

  1 In a paper on Conditions in the United States of America, read before the Insurance Institute of London on March 30, 1936, Lord Knollys, managing director of the Employers’ Liability Assurance Corporation, reported that American holders of automobile accident policies were becoming increasingly claim-minded.

  2 Among the New Words, by Dwight L. Bolinger, American Speech, Dec. 1943, p. 301.

  3 American Speech, Dec., 1940, p. 360.

  4 I am indebted here to Mr. K. P. McElroy of Washington.

  5 I find chronophobia in the title of an article by Salvatore Russo in Viewpoint, the house-organ of the convicts locked up in the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton. He defines it “a fear of time” and says of it: “It is a neurotic disorder from which almost all inmates suffer sooner or later, although it is more pronounced in individuals with long sentences.… It may be characterized as prison panic.”

  6 Among the New Words, by Dwight L. Bolinger, American Speech, April, 1941, p. 144.

  7 American Speech, Feb., 1935, p. 35.

  8 Atcheson L. Hench reported in American Speech, Dec., 1942, p. 250, that it came in during that year.

  9 Coined by Women’s Wear Daily.

  10 Used in Methods Help Tribune Reader, South Bend (Ind.) Tribune, March 22, 1944.

  11 Nifty is traced by the DAE to 1865 and marked an Americanism. It is discussed at length in Nifty, Hefty, Natty, Snappy, by Klara Hechtenberg Collitz, American Speech, Dec., 1927, pp. 119–28, and Observations on Nifty, Hefty, Natty and Snappy, by Henry J. Heck, American Speech, Oct., 1928, pp. 80–81.

  12 Used by President Roosevelt at a White House press conference, 1941. See American Speech, April, 1941, p. 158.

  1 Defined as “a synonym of punch-drunk” by Dwight L. Bolinger in American Speech, Feb., 1944, p. 60. He lists sap-happy, scrap-happy, snap-happy and tap-happy as congen
ers.

  2 Associated Press dispatch from Omaha, noted in New Words For Old, Baltimore Evening Sun, Oct. 27, 1939.

  3 Chapel Hill (N. C.) Weekly, noted in New Words For Old, just cited, June 10, 1940.

  4 Modern Screen, noted in New Words For Old, just cited, May 6, 1938.

  5 Program of the National Theatre, Detroit, for the week of Aug. 9, 1940, p. 1.

  6 As in must legislation. The usage is borrowed from the argot of newspaper men, to whom a must story is one that must be published at all hazards, often because the owner is interested in it.

  7 Neologisms, by Dwight L. Bolinger, American Speech, Feb., 1941, p. 66.

  8 American Speech, Feb., 1942, p. 41.

  9 Hard-boiled apparently originated before 1900, but it did not have much popularity until T. A. Dorgan began using it in the noun form, hard-boiled egg, in 1915. The vogue of the adjective followed during World War I. See The Origin of Hard-Boiled, by Peter Tamony, American Speech, Dec., 1937, pp. 258–61.

  10 The NED Supplement’s first example is from Dean W. R. Inge, writing in the London Daily Express, Nov. 22, 1927: “Hideous allotments and bungaloid growths make the approach to any city repulsive.”

  11 April, 1941, p. 156.

  12 Oct., 1937, p. 242.

  13 Oct., 1941, p. 207.

  14 Oct., 1941, p. 207.

  15 Drew Pearson in Washington Merry-Go-Round, Washington Post, May 9, 1944: “California is going to be one of the keyest States in the Union.” I am indebted here to Mr. Lester Hargrett of Washington.

  16 A newspaper paragraph, widely printed in 1944, accused Winston Churchill of using uniquest in his speech to the House of Commons on the German robot bombs, July 6, 1944. The Associated Press report shows that what he actually said was: [“London] … is the unique target for the use of a weapon of such proved inaccuracy.”

  17 American Speech, April, 1928, p. 349.

  18 Coined by Variety, and recorded in New Words For Old, Baltimore Evening Sun, June 19, 1939.