American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  The advertisement writers, especially for firms catering to the rich, show a considerable liking for Briticisms, and to them, I believe, we owe the appearance of masters bedroom, swim-suit and the various terms in -shop. Swim-suit, as a matter of fact, is seldom used in England, and I see no sign that it will ever oust bathing-suit in this country. The DAE traces bathing-suit to 1886. The earlier American term seems to have been bathing-dress.1 The American Postoffice still makes a distinction between a postal-card, on sale at every postoffice, with the stamp printed on it, and a post-card, which means something supplied by the sender himself and to which he must affix a stamp, or print, by arrangement with the postoffice, a notice that the postage has been otherwise paid for, but in everyday American usage that distinction seems to be breaking down. The first American postal-card was issued in 1873.2 The English always use post-card: they saw their first in 1870. It had been invented in 1865, under the name of offene postblatt (now postkarte), by Heinrich von Stephan, later postmaster-general of the German Empire and founder of the International Postal Union, and Austria adopted it in 1869.3 It may be that the increasing use of post-card in America is due to English influence, but on that point, of course, it is difficult to find evidence. Parcel-post was undoubtedly borrowed, for parcel, save in the legal sense, is a word but seldom used in the United States: package-mail would have sounded more American. The English parcels-post was set up in 1859, and the plural form continued in use until 1884, when parcel-post was adopted. In the United States parcels-post was used during the congressional discussion of plans for such a service, but when the project was at last executed, in 1912, parcel-post appeared in the statute, and it has been parcel-post, officially, ever since, though many Americans continue to say parcels-post. A number of other familiar terms may be borrowings from England, e.g., gadget and exchange (telephone). The history of gadget is obscure, but it appears to have come into the argot of British sailors about the middle of the Nineteenth Century, perhaps suggested by the French gâchette, meaning a piece of machinery. It seems thoroughly and even typically American today, but the DAE does not list it, and the NED and Partridge show that it was in English use a good while before it began to rage in the United States. So with exchange. The original American word was apparently central, though the DAE’s first example is dated 1889, two years after its first example of exchange. The latter has been in use in England since 1879. Just when the American scrubwoman began to yield to the English charwoman I do not know, but it was probably toward the end of the last century. The NED traces charwoman in English use to c. 1596.

  269. [Fashionable American mothers teach their children to call them Mummy.] This most hideous and irrational of Briticisms was not imported into the United States until the Twentieth Century; indeed, the NED reported in 1908 that it had come into vogue in England itself only “in recent years.” It has been traced to 1839 and its short form Mum to 1823, but the earlier examples of both are all from low life. In my boyhood American children called their mothers Mamma, and it was not until the turn of the century that any effort was made to displace it with the more formal and adult Mother. The latter showed good progress for a while but was presently challenged by Mummy. Mamma is ancient in English and has congeners in many other languages. It is, says the NED, “a reduplicated syllable often uttered instinctively by young children.” It was reinforced early in the Seventeenth Century by the French maman, and in the course of the next hundred years became so fashionable that even adults used it. But it was confined to the upper classes, and it was not until the Nineteenth Century that the English lower orders began to adopt it. By the end of the century it had become so unfashionable that the way was open for Mummy. In England Mamma usually had the accent on the last syllable, but in the United States it more often fell upon the first. The first a, in this country, gradually became indistinguishable from o. The NED does not list Mom as in English use, but the Supplement thereof, 1933, records it as a “U.S. abbreviation of Mamma.” I observed during World War II that it frequently occurred in published letters from American soldiers, greeting the folks at home. Mammy, for a colored woman and especially for a child’s nurse, apparently did not appear until the 1830s. It was preceded by momma, mauma and maum, and was apparently pronounced at the start so that its first syllable had the vowel of either comma or dawn rather than that of slam, as now. Ma is recorded as a Suffolk dialect form in 1823 by the DAE, and as in general use soon afterward. Maw is not listed by either the NED or the DAE.

  The history of Papa is much like that of Mamma. It, too, is based upon sounds uttered by babies, and it too got reinforced in England by French example in the Seventeenth Century. Again, it too became fashionable during the century following, and began to fall out of vogue in the Nineteenth. The accent, at the start, was sometimes on the first syllable and sometimes on the second, but the latter form finally prevailed in England and the former in America. In America the a gradually acquired the sound of o, and by 1840, as the DAE shows, a shortened form, Pop, had developed. In England Pop was not used, perhaps because, in the Eighteenth Century, it had become there a general term of endearment for a woman or girl, and had later taken on the narrower significance of a kept woman. Pa is traced by the NED to 1811, but it and Paw were not much favored by the English, since they were in nursery use (the former spelled pah) as euphemisms for nasty, indecent. Pa seems to have been popular in America before its first reported appearance in England, for Parson Mason L. Weems, in his original telling of the cherry-tree story, 1800, made Washington say to his father: “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.” Pappy is traced by the NED in English use to 1763 but is marked “now rare.” Like Mammy, it is still heard among the whites of Appalachia, and does not denote that a colored person is being addressed or spoken of.

  In my boyhood in Maryland Dad and Daddy were in use, but not extensively, for Dad was a familiar American euphemism for God and appeared in many words and phrases that were considered more or less profane, e.g., dad-blamed, dad-blasted, dad burn me, dad fetch it and dad gum. But daddy-longlegs for a spider-like creature with long, slender legs was in common and unquestioned use, though it had rivals in granddaddy-longlegs and grandfather-longlegs. Grandpa and Grandma were in almost universal use as vocatives, with Grandfather and Grandmother heard only rarely, save of course in the third person. Grandpappy and Grandmammy were confined to Appalachia and the South, but Grandpop and Grandpaw were tolerated variants of Grandpa. Dad is traced by the NED to c. 1500, as is daddy. They became fashionable in England toward the end of the Nineteenth Century and were soon afterward adopted widely in the United States. An American boy of today, at least above the age of five, would blush to call his father Papa, though in my boyhood the term was used even by grown men. The effort to substitute Father arose simultaneously with the effort to substitute Mother for Mamma, but was presently challenged by Dad.1 In England, I gather, Mummy and Daddy are a shade more elegant than Mum and Dad.1 Mater and pater, nearly always used in the third person and with the definite article, have never made any headway in the United States. The NED marks them both “chiefly schoolboys’ slang,” and it is obvious that they must have arisen among boys more or less familiar with Latin. Pater is traced to 1728, but there is a long gap afterward until 1880; mater is traced to 1864. Governor as a designation for father is traced by the NED to 1847. It is not unknown in the United States, but has never been in wide use.2

  In AL4, p. 268, I ascribed to Dr. J. Milnor Coit, physician to St. Paul’s School at Concord, N. H., the introduction to America of the terminology of the swagger English public-schools, e.g., form and headmaster. I am informed by various correspondents that I thereby confused Dr. Coit with his kinsman, the Rev. Dr. Henry Augustus Coit, the first rector of St. Paul’s, who, on his death in 1895, was succeeded by his brother, the Rev. Joseph How-land Coit, who died in turn in 1906. Dr. J. Milnor Coit was not physician to the school, but its master in natural sciences fro
m 1876 onward, its vice-rector in 1904 and 1906, and its acting rector a short while after the death of Dr. Joseph Howland Coit. He was not a medical man, but held the degree of Ph.D. from Dartmouth and that of Sc.D. from Hobart. Born at Harrisburg, Pa., in 1845, he was manager of the Cleveland Tube Works before taking to the birch On his withdrawal from St. Paul’s he went to Munich and there operated the Coit School for American boys.3 The true begetter of St. Paul’s excessive Anglicism was Dr. Henry Augustus Coit. It still has forms, removes, evensong and other parrotings of Eton and Harrow, and also an annual cricket holiday, though the game is no longer played by the boys. Its chief rivals in the emulation of the English public schools are Groton, St. Mark’s and Choate, but virtually all American prep schools of any pretensions show the same influence. Dixon Wecter notes in “The Saga of American Society,”1 that “the introduction of fives2 at Groton and a modified fag system at St. Mark’s are richly significant of social Anglophilia.”

  There are plenty of Briticisms, especially on the level of slang, that deserve American adoption better than any of these shaky borrowings from the English upper classes, e.g., pub-crawl (a tour of saloons). Many more are to be found in the extraordinarily rich and pungent slang of Australia, e.g., donk (a fool), fork (a jockey), hunk (a large man), to mizzle (to complain), rest (a year in jail), smoodger (a flatterer) and wowser (“a drab-souled Philistine haunted by the mockery of others’ happiness”3). During the hurricane of moral endeavor that beset the United States after the first World War I tried to introduce wowser in the Republic, but without success. It gained, however, at least one recruit who was worth a host, to wit, the late Dr. William Morton Wheeler (1865–1937), professor of entomology at Harvard from 1908 onward, dean of the Bussey Institution, and the world’s greatest authority on ants and their kindred. Dr. Wheeler was not only an eminent man of science; he was also a highly adroit and pungent satirist, and it was in both capacities that he introduced wowser into a paper contributed to the Scientific Monthly in 1920.4 Not long after this the term was also used by his and my friend, the late Dr. Raymond Pearl, (1879–1940), professor of biology at the Johns Hopkins, but my memorandum of the time and place is unhappily mislaid. Every Puritan is not necessarily a wowser: to be one he must devote himself zealously to reforming the morals of his neighbors, and, in particular, to throwing obstacles in the way of their enjoyment of what they choose to regard as pleasures. The Prohibitionist of the thirteen dark years was an archetypical example. The word was invented by an Australian named John Norton, editor of a somewhat saucy and even ribald weekly paper called John Norton’s Truth, published simultaneously in Sydney, Melbourne and Wellington, N. Z.1 Truth had, in its heyday, a style as characteristic and individual as the style of the American Time, and all its contributors were trained to write like Norton himself. He invented many other spicy terms, including stink-chariot for automobile, but only wowser has survived. Partridge says that it was launched c. 1895 and had become domiciled in England by 1930. “If Australia,” said the London Daily Telegraph in 1937, “had given nothing more to civilization than that magnificent label for one of its most melancholy products it would not have been discovered in vain.” There have been several guesses at the etymology of wowser but I have encountered none that is convincing, and the Shorter Oxford marks it “origin obscure.” My own surmise is that Norton simply invented it, just as Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson) invented to chortle in 1872. Such masterpieces are inspired by the powers and principalities of the air.2

  The English opposite number, signifying a person in corresponding office or position, e.g., the American Secretary of State with respect to the English Foreign Secretary, has made some progress in the United States in recent years, but only on relatively lofty levels: the common people know nothing of it. It has come in in England since World War I, and probably had a military origin. The most hard-worked of all the English counter-words of recent years, to wit, amenities, is seldom if ever encountered in the United States. Amenity is the French word amenité, borrowed in the Fifteenth Century. To an American it is very similar in meaning, in the plural, to civilities, as in “the amenities of the occasion,” but the English have widened it, since c. 1916, to mean almost anything agreeable, from a beautiful view to a sound system of drains, and from the chance to hear a band of music to law and order. There is an Amenities Society in Norwich which devoted itself, before the late unpleasantness, to restoring the antiquities of the town,3 there is an Amenities Group in the House of Commons which keeps an eye on public monuments and memorials,4 and there is a Bath Preservation Trust which seeks “to preserve for the benefit of the public the amenities of Bath and its surroundings.”1 I have in my collectanea clippings from English papers applying the term, inter alia, to public parks, bandstands, piers at the seaside, improved water supply, public health services, bathing accommodations, parking lots,2 meal service in jails,3 playing fields,4 housing developments, public comfort stations,5 telephones, public washrooms,6 libraries, swimming-pools, air-raid shelters, inspiring outlooks on land or river7 and town-planning.8 The English realtors have seized upon the term with violent affection, and it is seldom that an advertisement of a country estate for sale or flats in a new apartment house for rent appears in the London papers without a long catalogue of the amenities offered with it, e.g., central heating, electric clocks, elevator service, refrigerators, radio installation, fireproof doors, open fireplaces, tiled bathrooms, garages, roof gardens, “constant hot-water,” kitchen-cabinets, shower-baths, “box-room accommodations” (storage space), softened drinking water, “pet’s parlour,” wall safes, separate tradesmen’s entrances and built-in beauty-shoppes.9 “Every modern amenity” or “Every possible up-to-date amenity” appears in fully half of these offers.10 In 1937 Lord Horder, physician-in-ordinary to the king, went about the country explaining the meaning of the term as he understood it. In November he defined it thus:

  By the amenities I mean clear air to breathe, contact with the earth in our games and hobbies, quiet and leisure, time to stand and stare — over a gate in the country, or, if Scotland Yard would allow it, on the kerb in the city.11

  A couple of weeks later he had revised his definition as follows:

  What do I mean by amenities? Clean air to breathe. Close contact with the earth and sky and sun. The sight of beautiful things. The hearing of beautiful sounds. Quiet and leisure to enjoy all these.1

  It is a wonder that this noble word has not migrated to America. It has an elegant smack.

  5. HONORIFICS

  274. [The American fondness for hollow titles goes back to colonial days.] In the Eighteenth Century, says Allen Walker Read, “anyone could become a colonel or a doctor if he impressed his fellows as deserving some mark of distinction.”2 The DAE traces colonel, as a mere title of esteem, to 1744, captain and major to 1746, professor to 1774, judge to 1800 and general to 1805, and all are probably older. In 1723 a writer in the New England Courant noted that “sow-gelders and farriers” were already calling themselves doctor. The English give the courtesy title of doctor to medical men who are only M.B.’s. (bachelors of medicine) but the fact that it is only a courtesy title is borne in mind. In America all who pretend to leechcraft have been doctors since the early Nineteenth Century, and the degree of M.B. has disappeared.3 Druggists and dentists are not doctors in England,4 and even surgeons insist on being called Mr.,5 but in this country all three classes are doctors, unanimously, and so are a great variety of other healers, including osteopaths, chiropractors, optometrists, chiropodists and veterinarians. Most of these have set up doctorates of their own, and that of the veterinarians, like that of the dentists, really represents advanced professional training, but those of some of the others are often highly dubious. Thus the state of affairs among the optometrists,1 as described by Dr. Frederick Juchhoff in the Journal of the American Medical Association:2