American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  This was supposed to be addressed by a traveling American to a strange Englishwoman at a railway refreshment-counter. I should add that there were English critics who recognized that it was excessively bad reporting, and denounced it accordingly. One of them was Edward Dicey, who declared that “you might travel through the United States for years and never hear such a speech uttered out of a lunatic asylum.”1 But there was often more than bad reporting in such stuff; there was also (and preëminently in Dickens’s case) a bitter dislike of all things American. “How can we wonder Americans do not love us,” added Dicey, “when, as Hawthorne said, with too much truth, ‘not an Englishman of them all ever spared America for courtesy’s sake or kindness’?” In the years since 1866 there have appeared English authors whose loathing of the United States and its people is less apparent than Dickens’s, but even the most friendly of them runs into difficulties when he tries to report American colloquial speech. The only latter-day English novelist, said an American correspondent of the Manchester Guardian in 1937, “who can speak American” is P. G. Wodehouse.2 John Galsworthy’s difficulties with it were discussed by the late Dr. Stuart Robertson in American Speech in 1932,3 and some specimen blunders are given in AL4, p. 257. Many of them arose from Galsworthy’s apparent belief that Americans use gotten instead of got in all situations, instead of only in the sense of acquired or become. Said Robertson:

  The following sentence from “Maid in Waiting”: “I fear you’ve gotten a grouch against me, Miss Cherrell,” is wrong unless Hallorsen means “You’ve acquired a grouch.” The context shows, however, that he does not; what he means is “You have (or cherish) a grouch.” In the following instances there can be no manner of doubt as to the error: “You’ve lost the spirit of inquiry; or if you’ve still gotten it, you have a dandy way of hiding it up.” … “We haven’t gotten your roots and your old things.”4

  Arnold Bennett, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Edgar Wallace and Bram Stoker were other English novelists, popular in the United States, who had distressing difficulties with American speech.5 Here is a specimen of the curious jargon that Stoker put into the mouth of an American supposed to hail from “Isthmian City, Bleeding Gulch, Maple Tree county, Nebraska”:

  Not me, ma’am. Why, I’m as tender as a Maine cherry-tree. Lor’ bless me, I wouldn’t hurt the poor pooty little critter more’n I’d scalp a baby. An’ you may bet your variegated socks on that.1

  The whole tribe, for some occult reason, seems to be convinced that all Americans give a u-sound to the er in such words as very and American, and usually they double the r.2 At other times Americanisms are used in senses and situations that must inevitably give every actual American a start. In 1942, for example, the lady novelist, Margaret Louise Allingham, in a book review in the English edition of Time add Tide, described two quite respectable American girl characters as floosies.3 During the same year another lady novelist, Elizabeth Bo wen, used Americanisms in an amazing (if usually correct) manner in a serious historical work, “Bowen’s Court.” Some examples:

  The Stuarts gestured, flattered and double-crossed (p. 47).

  Lord Muskerry was putting something across (p. 55).

  On the claim of having discovered a papist plot (which they faked), etc. (p. 58).4

  Again in 1942 a third lady novelist, Dorothy Sayers, got into hot water by introducing indecorous Americanisms into a serial radio life of Christ, e.g., to hop it. She was flayed for the sacrilege in the London Star by the Rev. James Colville, pastor of St. Peter’s Presbyterian Church, Balham,5 and the Star announced primly that “M.P.’s have been told that a number of alterations to the original script are being considered.” A fourth lady novelist, Rosamund Lehmann, did measurably better, and one of her American reviewers was moved to exclaim at her correct (and frequent) use of boy friend, bunk and kidding.6 But to counterbalance this a he-novelist, Bruce Graeme, brought out a crime shocker, reprinted in the United States, in which American gangsters were made to use blimey and ruddy.7 “There are very few English writers,” concluded a resigned London journalist in 1937, “who can employ American slang correctly.”1

  Errors in its use made by English statesmen and other such more austere characters are not infrequently reported in the American newspapers, e.g., the late Neville Chamberlain’s extension of jitterbug to indicate an alarmist.2 At about the same time the Opposition Leader, the Right Hon. C. R. Attlee, accused Chamberlain of trying to put sob stuff over the House, forgetting the on that, by American rules, should have followed over.3 Chamberlain replied by describing himself as a go-getter for peace. He was very fond of Americanisms, and occasionally used them more or less correctly. One of his favorites was in the neighborhood of. His predecessor, Stanley Baldwin (created an earl in 1937), had a formidable répertoire, and made precise use of to try out, to deliver the goods,4 rattled, more to it,5 best-seller,6 and party dog-fight.7 Sometimes he was accused by purists of mouthing Americanisms when he was actually using ancient English terms, as when he adorned a debate with backslider, which the NED traces to 1581. Winston Churchill, who is half American, clings to the Oxford accent but lards his discourses with many American terms, e.g., proposition and cold feet. Nevertheless, he once rebuked a Conservative M.P., Arthur Hugh Elsdale Molson, for using stooge in a question asked in the House of Commons. “I am not prepared,” he said primly, “to answer a question couched in such very unseemly terms.”1 Other M.P.’s have shocked patriotic Englishmen in recent years with Americanisms that, in some cases, are not indecorous to American ears. In 1943, for example, Lord Morris got into the newspapers by using skullduggery in a debate in the House of Lords;2 in 1937 the Commons was thrown upon its haunches by to debunk;3 and in 1940 Capt. Harold Harington Balfour caused a raising of eyebrows by saying to a Labor member, Emanuel Shinwell, “I apologize if I got you wrong.”4 Even higher dignitaries have occasionally sinned. In 1936 no less a character than the Archbishop of Canterbury used up against in a public pronunciamento, and during the same year King Edward VIII used both radio and to broadcast in his first fireside chat to his lieges.5 As Prince of Wales he had employed Americanisms in a number of speeches — a fact hailed by a few advanced Englishmen as “evidence of a charming disposition to speak the democratic language of a democratic age, to speak to genial Englishmen, not in the trappings of princely oratory, but as another genial Englishman like themselves,” but frowned upon by old-timers on the ground that it was “the duty of the king’s son to defend the king’s English against the undesirable aliens of speech.”6 The former king’s cousin, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten (geb. Battenberg), speaks American fluently, for in the interval between the two wars he made intensive linguistic and other studies at Hollywood. On September 24, 1943, he told the scholars assembled at a luncheon of the Royal Naval Film Corporation in London that he thought he was fully qualified to act as an interpreter between the British and American forces in Southeastern Asia.7 Three years before this Sir Eric Phipps, then British ambassador to France, had warned a luncheon meeting of the American Club in Paris that World War II was not a phony war.1 Some of the earlier American political terms, e.g., caucus, gerrymander and carpet-bagger, have been taken over, as we have seen in Chapter IV, Section 2, by the English politicos. According to the political correspondent of the Eastern Evening News (Norwich),2 carpet-bagger was first used in the parliamentary campaign of 1880. How the meaning of caucus has been perverted in England has been described. The English have done almost as badly with gerrymander, which they employ to indicate any “method whereby one political party obtains an unfair advantage over another.”3 The New Deal boondoggling, when it reached England, was converted into boonwiggling,4 and the London Times, until 1939, was still calling the Brain Trust the brains trust, and spelling it with small letters.5 Even the English newspapers on levels where American neologisms may be presumed to be more familiar often make shining blunders. In the News of the World, for example, I once encountered sawn-down for sawed-off in a description of fire-arms.
6 Some of the interpretations of Americanisms in English editions of American books are far from illuminating. When Marjorie Hillis’s “Live Alone and Like It” was published in London in 1936 Junior Leaguers was changed to Girl Guides.7

  4. BRITICISMS IN THE UNITED STATES

  264. As has been noted in Section 1 of the present chapter, a large proportion of the Americanisms that get into English use enter upon the lower levels of culture, among the intellectually underprivileged patrons of American movies and comic strips. Some of them afterward penetrate to more austere circles, including even the academic, but while they are still new they are commonly scorned as vulgarisms. In the United States the thing runs the other way. That is to say, Briticisms are nearly always first adopted by persons of some pretension to culture, and on that level they commonly remain, for to the plain people most of them seem affected and even sissified. It would be hard to imagine any male American of the plain people using such terms as rotter, braces (for suspenders), boot-shop, fed up, tube (for subway), pram (for baby-carriage), nursing-home or master’s bedroom.1 A number of Briticisms, to be sure, have got and are still getting into his vocabulary, e.g., tabloid and bungalow, but by the time they reach him he has no awareness of their provenance, and in consequence they do not collide with his conviction that everything English has a pansy cast. England, however, is still the fount of honor and mold of fashion to all Americans of social aspiration, including the tonier sort of pedagogues, and they make diligent efforts to imitate English cultural patterns, including the linguistic. That fact, I suspect, is responsible for the change of the old American sequence of breakfast, dinner and supper, surviving even among the rich until the Ward McAllister era, to breakfast, luncheon (often shortened to lunch) and dinner, with supper left hanging in the air as a designation for a nonce meal in the late evening. But that change has never been adopted by the great masses of Americans, nor, for that matter, by their opposite numbers in the British Isles, among whom the sequence is breakfast, dinner and tea.

  There seems to be some tendency, in late years, to substitute the English postman for the older American letter-carrier (traced by the DAE to 1825), and it was apparently given a lift by the great success of James M. Cain’s novel, “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” in 1934, but postman, as the DAE shows, was actually in use in the United States long before letter-carrier, and it has always been favored in large parts of the country. The American telephone salutation, “Hello,” has never been supplanted by the English “Are you there?,” even among Anglomaniacs who affected the English secretary and pronounce been to rhyme with seen, and any American telephone-operator who said “You are through” to a subscriber in the sense of “There is your party” would get an unpleasant earful. So would a Federal jobholder who ventured to describe himself as a civil servant,1 or an investment banker who attempted to float an issue of preference-shares,2 or a baggage-smasher who began to talk of luggage vans, or a Greek lunchroom man who hung out a sign announcing brunch, or a farmer who called his hired-man an agricultural laborer, or a public school principal who let it be known that he had become a headmaster,3 or a filling-station attendant who spoke of gas as petrol,4 or the hood of a car as the bonnet, or an elevator-starter who (outside a few fashionable shops and hotels) called his goons liftmen, or a candidate for any office of public honor or trust who dared to turn secretary into secretary or been into bean.

  World War II made all Americans familiar with a few Briticisms, e.g., commando, but they were not numerous, even on official levels. When, on March 3, 1942, the word rating was used to describe enlisted men in a Navy communiqué, and I made alarmed inquiries at Washington, I was assured at once by Captain Leland P. Lovette, then head of the Navy’s literary and philological bureau, that the word had slipped in advertently, by the hand of a patriotic officer whose resistance had been broken down by the incessant reading of communiqués from England.1 Other English military and naval terms that appeared during the war were alert, quisling and paratroops, and the German loans, flak, panzer and lebensraum, but they did not penetrate to the common speech. Blitz and its derivatives were apparently in use in the United States before they got into general circulation in England. Some of the phrases launched by English politicians of the war era, such as Neville Chamberlain’s to miss the bus and Winston Churchill’s blood, sweat and tears, were heavily labored by the American newspapers, just as King Edward VIII’s at long last had been labored before them, but the vulgar were no more than dimly aware of them. Blood, sweat and tears, in fact, was not Churchill’s invention, though he had employed it even before it appeared in his speech of May 13, 1940. Nor was at long last original with Edward’s anonymous ghost, for the NED traces it to 1523.2

  Some of the Briticisms that actually come into use in America, whether in wide or narrow circles, have rather curious histories, e.g., flapper. This excellent term, now obsolescent in both countries, is not listed by the DAE, for it was not borrowed from England until after 1900, the last year the DAE pretends to cover. It is also missing, in the sense here meant, from the NED, whose F-G volume was published in 1901, but it appears in the NED Supplement, 1933. Its history in England, however, goes back at least to 1892, for in that year there was a discussion of it in Notes and Queries, summed up by an anonymous writer in the London Evening News on August 20. A year later Farmer and Henley listed it in their “Slang and Its Analogues” as meaning both “a very young prostitute” and “a little girl.” In the latter sense it had not been listed in “A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant,” by Barrère and Leland, published in 1889, though they had noted it in the sense of “a very young girl trained to vice, generally for the amusement of elderly men.” Thus it seems to have come into respectable significance in England at some time between 1889 and 1892. The anonymous writer in the London Evening News, just mentioned, inclined to believe that it represented a figurative borrowing of an earlier flapper meaning “a young wild duck, unable to fly,” which has been traced by the NED to 1773. That etymology is also favored by other authorities, but the NED Supplement suggests the contrary possibility that the term may really come from a dialect word, flap, meaning any unsteady young woman, not necessarily a prostitute. Partridge says that in the English society slang of the early Nineteenth Century flapper meant “a very immoral young girl in her early teens” (a definition borrowed from J. Redding Ware’s “Passing English of the Victorian Era,” 1900), and that World War I “firmly established the meaning (already pretty general by 1905) of any young girl with her hair not yet up (or, in the late 1920s and the 30s, not yet cut short).” I am inclined to believe, as I have indicated, that this transformation occurred at least a decade before the time set by Partridge. Flapper began to be heard in the United States not later than 1910, and it had, from the start, the perfectly unopprobrious signification of the German backfisch. It is one of a long series of jocular terms used to designate a young and somewhat foolish girl, full of wild surmises and inclined to revolt against the precepts and admonitions of her elders. The filly of the Eighteenth Century was of that general type, and so was the chicken of the pre-1900 era. The NED Supplement traces flapper hood to 1905, flapperdom to 1907, flapperism to 1909, flapper-age to 1917, flapperish to 1920 and flapper-vote to 1928. All save the last reached America, but they survived only until flapper itself succumbed to various homebrewed terms, e.g., sub-deb, which, so far as I can find, has never been in use in England.1

  Some of the Briticisms taken into American have got in only after long delays, and others have been changed in meaning or otherwise modified. Bungalow, from bangla, a Hindustani word meaning belonging to Bengal, appeared in English use in the sense of a one-story house so long ago as 1676, but was not adopted in this country until c. 1900, though it now seems almost as native as rubberneck. In England, as we have seen, it has produced the excellent derivative bungaloid, not yet in use in the United States.2 Tabloid was invented by Sir Henry Wellcome in 1884, and was registered as a trade-mark in England b
y his pharmaceutical firm, Burroughs, Wellcome & Company, on March 14 of that year. But the rights of the firm extend only to its use in marketing what in this country are commonly called tablets, and it began to be used to designate newspapers smaller than the usual size in 1901. At some undetermined time afterward it reached the United States in both this new sense and in its original sense. Since then its meaning has been greatly extended in this country, and it is now used to designate anything small, from a prize-fighter to an automobile. The familiar cop is an American shortening of the English copper, and has been renaturalized in England.1 All the slang authorities derive copper from an old cant verb, to cop, meaning to capture or catch, which is traced by the NED to 1704. It has, however, become one of the favorite marks of amateur etymologists, and their speculations about its origin often get into the newspapers.2 Copper was in use in England by the early 50s, and soon afterward made its way to New York, where it was presently reduced to cop. The English police of the time greatly disliked copper, and the street boys badgered them by yelling the word after them. When this contumacy began to be punished by the magistrates the boys resorted to holding up a copper coin as they passed a policeman.

  Many Briticisms have not only been long delayed in getting into American, but have continued on levels of affectation after coming in. Examples are swagger and swank. Swank first appeared in English, as university slang, at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, but it was not heard in the United States until near the century’s end. In England swank is the noun and verb and swanky is the adjective, but in the United States swank has been used as an adjective also.3 The English attach the meaning of over-swagger to it, and hence it would hardly persuade them in an advertisement,4 but in the United States it has become virtually synonymous with fashionable and chic. Brunch, designating a combination of breakfast and lunch, eaten about noon, appeared in England about 1900, but it was thirty years later before it began to make any headway on this side of the water.1 Snack-bar began to be used by some of the swagger American drinking-places after the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, but, like brunch, it survived only in a narrow circle.2 The Federal Reserve System set up by the Act of December 23, 1913 has governors in imitation of the Bank of England, but all other American banks continue to be operated by directors.3 In the National Bank Act stock is designated by the English shares and stockholder by shareholder, but the New York Banking Act sticks to stock and stockholder, and so do virtually all American corporations.4 The introduction of golf to the United States in 1888 naturally brought with it the vocabulary of the game, and most Americans are now familiar with many of its terms, e.g., to tee off, to putt, hole in one, long drive, hazard and bunker, and even with cleek, mashie and niblick. But the American players have discharged this debt by inventing some terms of their own, e.g., birdie, eagle and nineteenth hole, nearly all of which have passed to the British Isles. “There is nothing an Englishman could object to in any of these words,” said Charles Ambrose in the London Morning Post in 1931,5 “except the fact that they are used by American golfers and now by ourselves in an unaccustomed sense.” It was probably golfers who brought in the English sorry for the American excuse me: it is now in wide use among Americans pretending to elegance.