American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  When Rotary began to spread over the world, taking the great boons and usufructs of American Kultur with it, the given-name habit went along, and no doubt it was as influential as any other Rotarian idea in preventing World War II. But it must have caused, at least at the start, some quiet grinding of teeth among English converts, and I suspect that the German, French, Italian and Japanese Rotarians may have also found it somewhat disconcerting. The English often remark another American habit that strikes them as strange, to wit, the frequent use of Sir. They seldom use it save in addressing indubitable superiors, especially royalty, but in this country, more particularly in the South, it is heard very frequently in the palaver of equals. It was thus defended by the Lynchburg (Va.) News in 1939:1

  Sir is a word of importance and of diversified application. We use it, especially here in the South — where we are said to pronounce it suh — in a number of different ways and yet without greatly disturbing its fundamental status. Eliminating its baronial and knightly references, which mean nothing in these provincial precincts, the word finds a place in the American language in the following instances, and perhaps many others:

  As a definite courtesy to one’s superior in age, attainments or authority.

  As a customary “compellation” to one’s equal not yet placed upon the plane of informal acquaintanceship or intimacy.

  Strictly formal address or in the meeting of strangers.

  Addressing an inferior to whom a sharp order is given, as “Do this or that, sir!”

  In speaking to animals to emphasize the weight of discipline.…

  Virginians and most other Southerners use the word with such changes and variations as we only seem perfectly to understand, but can not quite explain,… It has been with us through the generations and the prospect is that it will survive at least a few others.2

  In the South the question whether members of the Negro race should or should not be accorded the ordinary American honorifics constantly agitates publicists. When, in 1940, the colored teachers in the Durham (N. C.) public schools received notices of reappointment bearing Miss, Mrs. or Mr. before their names there was loud rejoicing in Aframerica. It seemed, indeed, to be almost too good to be true, but investigation showed that the female teachers had been called by telephone before the notices were sent out and asked if they were Miss or Mrs.1 In an article in Ken in 1939 R. E. Wolseley told the sad story of a young Northern journalist who went South and began describing blackamoors in a paper of the Bible Belt as Mr., Mrs. and Miss. When protests poured in from local guardians of the Caucasian hegemony he sought for light and leading in his paper’s Southern exchanges. Said Mr. Wolseley:2

  He found out that some eight or ten devices have been invented by Southern journalists to avoid using Mr., Mrs. and Miss in front of the names of Negroes. They are:

  Mademoiselle

  Madame

  Professor

  Doctor

  Reverend

  Uncle

  Aunt

  Another variation, he learned, is not to include any title whatsoever, making it impossible, therefore, to distinguish a married from an unmarried woman. Still one more is to phrase it “The wife of Prof. Dodie Barnes will sing a soprano solo next Sunday at the A.M.E.Church.” Or, “The daughter of Rev. Mank Arter will teach grammar, etc.” Another is to use first names on second references.

  One Mississippi editor, being somewhat more courageous or at least original than his fellows, solved it by printing an explanation in a box at the head of a column of news of Negro residents:

  “The publisher of this paper assumes no responsibility for the manner in which the writer of this column addresses members of his own race.”

  Still another plan now in use down South is to replate or make over (substitute a new page in) the paper and send the special edition containing Negro news only to the Negro neighborhoods.… A large star on the front page identifies it.

  Aunt (or auntie) and uncle are greatly disliked by the now emancipated colored folk, who see in them a contemptuous sort of patronage. As the DAE shows, both were formerly used in addressing white persons. A writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine reported in 17933 that elderly persons were so called on the island of Nantucket, and the DAE confirms this with a quotation dated 1801. But by the 30s of the last century aunt and uncle had begun to be confined to Negroes, and the latter got a great boost in 1851, when Harriet Beecher Stowe started the serial publication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” But both terms now seem to be going out, and the more advanced Aframericans use Uncle Tom to signify a subservient and pusillanimous member of their race.

  Few Englishmen of title settled in America in the early days, though some of the transitory colonial Governors and other high officials were knights, baronets and even peers. Thus the English scheme of honorifics soon passed out of common knowledge, and Dr. S. E. Morison has suggested that the disappearance of its sonorous handles for the names of notables may have had something to do with the proliferation of more or less dubious military titles. With the pre-revolutionary rise of feeling against English institutions even Americans who, by English law, had a right to something better than Mr. tended to forget the fact, and this tendency was increased in the first days of the new Republic. The case of the Fairfax family is in point. When Thomas, the sixth Baron Fairfax, took possession of his estate of 6,000,000 acres in Virginia in 1748 his Scottish title was universally recognized, and after his death as a bachelor in 1782 it passed to Bryan Fairfax, the son of his cousin William, who had married a daughter of George Washington’s elder brother Lawrence. Bryan’s claim was admitted by the House of Lords in 1800, but his heirs soon dropped the title and it remained under cover until 1908, when one of them, Albert Kirby Fairfax, born in the United States in 1870, resumed it, becoming the twelfth Baron Fairfax of Cameron. Thomas Fairfax, so far as I know, was the only English peer ever to settle and die in colonial America; even baronets were scarce, and a British traveler reported in 1724 that there was only one in Cavalier Virginia, to wit, Sir William Skipwith.1 The Skipwith title, says Allen Walker Read, “was kept up even after the establishment of the independent government,”2 but apparently not for long. Despite Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, which provides that “no title of nobility shall be granted by the United States,” there is no statute, so far as I am aware, forbidding an American to accept one from a foreign state, or even to assume one on his own motion. A Federal jobholder is forbidden by the same section to accept one without the consent of Congress, but the inference is that that consent may be granted constitutionally — and even after half a generation of the New Deal there are still plenty of Americans who are not Federal jobholders. Not a few, in fact, are counts, marquises and so on by creation of the Pope, and no one objects to their bearing these titles, though when they register for voting purposes they have to give their dirt names.1

  American newspapers, in dealing with foreign titles, often use them ignorantly, to the horror of visiting Englishmen. When Sir William Craigie landed at the University of Chicago in 1925 to take charge of the Dictionary of American English the campus newspaper, the Maroon, noted his arrival under the heading, “Chicago Welcomes Sir Craigie and Lady Sadie” — a triple error, for it should have been Sir William and Lady Craigie, and the lady’s name was not Sadie but Jessie.2 It is almost an everyday occurrence for some paper to speak of a knight or a baronet as a peer, or of a duke as Lord So-and-so.3 The intricacies of English nomenclature as they are set forth in such an authority as “Titles and Forms of Address” lie far beyond the professional equipment of the average American copy-reader.4 Even the official experts who compiled the Style Manual of the Department of State show a certain ignorance of accepted English usages.5 When, in 1942, the copy-readers of the Chicago Tribune began to find their nightly struggle with the titles of English statesmen and war heroes “as tedious as picking birdshot out of a prairie chicken,” Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the iconoclastic editor and publisher of the paper, proposed
that all such fripperies be dropped by the American newspapers. This proposal, which was couched in somewhat contumacious terms, was denounced as subversive by many of the English papers, and especially by the London Daily Telegraph, whose proprietor, originally William Ewert Berry, was made a baronet in 1921 and Baron Camrose of Long Cross in 1929. The Editor and Publisher, the trade journal of the American Press, also protested,1 mainly on the ground that the change might cause confusion, but Colonel McCormick stood his ground, and presently let fly with the following:

  Obviously there would be no confusion in any one’s mind if we omitted the Sir from Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery. Nor would any one be in doubt about the identity of the person described as Gov. Windsor of the Bahamas. These changes in style would promote the idea in American minds that our allies, like us, are fighting for democracy.…

  We appear to be undermining something. We hope we are. Lincoln said this nation could not exist half slave and half free, and his words could not have been much weightier if they had been uttered by an earl. Likewise, a nation cannot survive half democratic and half aristocratic. So far as this country is concerned it will make considerable sacrifices to preserve a British democracy, but it doesn’t find any great satisfaction in fighting for an aristocratic Britain.

  In deference to American opinion we should expect the British to abolish their titles and the privileges that go with them. After all, the deprivation wouldn’t amount to much; it isn’t as if Camrose didn’t have another name that sounds less like soap to fall back on.2

  The old English title of dame was revived in 1917 to adorn female members of the new Order of the British Empire. There are two divisions of the order, military and civil, and five classes in each. Women gazetted to the first class become dames grand cross; those in the second class are dames commander; those in the remaining classes are not dames at all, but simply commanders, officers or members. The order is conferred upon eminent women writers, actresses, politicos, uplifters and so on, and the members of the first class wear gaudy decorations, including a star, a badge, a sash and a collar, and have the right to put G.B.E. after their names. A dame is dealt with precisely like a knight; that is, she is to be addressed as Dame Mary Smith in writing, with her given-name always inserted, and as Dame Mary in speech. American reporters, when they have to mention a dame, commonly call her Lady Smith, for the word dame, in this great Republic, has a rather contemptuous significance, but that is an error which upsets an Englishman. Dame was a generic name for any Englishwoman of position in the Middle Ages, and in the early Seventeenth Century it became the legal title of the wife of a knight. But in the Eighteenth Century the wives of knights began to call themselves Lady So-and-so (never with either their own or their husbands’ given-names), and that is their usual style today. The wife of a knight grand cross or knight commander of the British Empire is probably also a dame, legally speaking, but it is usual to call her Lady, for her husband is Sir. The husband of a female dame does not gain any reflected title from his wife.

  During the mid-Nineteenth Century it was usual for American wives to borrow the honorifics of their husbands — a custom long prevailing in Germany and the Scandinavian countries, but never popular in England, save, of course, in the case of wives of peers. I find Mrs. Captain Voorhees in the diary of Isaac Van Bibber of Maryland, 1844,1 and so late as 1883 the English historian, Edward A. Freeman,2 reported that he had seen Mrs. Professor on an American woman’s visiting card, and that “the newspapers sometimes tell one how Mrs. ex-Senator A went somewhere with her daughter, Mrs. Senator B.” Mark Twain, in his famous appendix on “The Awful German Language” in “A Tramp Abroad,” 1879, recorded Mrs. Assistant District Attorney Johnson, and there are other amusing examples in Carl Sandburg’s “Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.”1 Sandburg reproduces fashion drawings from Leslie’s Weekly showing frocks worn at the White House by Mrs. Commodore Levy, Mrs. Senator Weller, Mrs. Senator Ames, and Mrs. Senator Crittenden,2 and records that in a pass permitting Mrs. Lincoln’s stepmother, Mrs. Robert S. Todd, to go through the lines to bring her daughter, Mrs. B. Hardin Helm, northward, Lincoln described Mrs. Helm as Mrs. General.3 General McClellan, in letters referring to Mrs. Lincoln, spoke of her as Mrs. President.4 This transfer of husbands’ titles to wives is now virtually obsolete in the United States, but another barbarism that seems to have arisen in Civil War days, to wit, the habit of prefixing long and cumbersome titles to names, still flourishes. The latter was first noted, so far as I know, in the appendix to “A Tramp Abroad” lately cited: the example offered was: “Clerk of the County and District Court Simmons was in town yesterday.” The style of Life and Time promotes the creation of such monstrosities, and they are imitated by the newspapers. I could fill pages with them, but content myself with two magnificent specimens. The first is from Life: “Episcopal Bishop in Japan’s brother J. C. Reifsnider.”5 The second is from an Associated Press dispatch: “Vice-President in Charge of Sales of Evaporated, Condensed and Malted Milk, Cheese, Mince-Meat and Caramels Arthur W. Ramsdell, and Vice-President in Charge of Casein, Adhesives and Prescription Products William Callan were elected to those offices today by the board of directors of the Borden Company.”6 Not infrequently such thunderous titles are preceded by ex- or former. Former, in this situation, is an Americanism, and the DAE traces it to 1885. I am told by Mr. Charles Honce, of the Associated Press, that it is now preferred to ex- by many American newspapers. Ex- is not an Americanism. The DAE unearths ex-President in 1798 and ex-Special Agent of the Government in 1869, but the NED counters with ex-Bishop of Autun in English use in 1793. In late years the English columnists who imitate American columnists have gone in heavily for such mild forms as leading amateur jockey Ivor House,7 and Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky,8 but their use is pretty well confined to gossip columns and the cheap cinema and radio journals. Both the Style Manual of the Department of State and the Style Manual of the United States Government Printing Office seem to prefer ex- (with a hyphen) to former.1

  The first female politicians to whom Ma was applied seem to have been the Hon. Nellie Tayloe Ross, who became Governor of Wyoming in January, 1925, and the Hon. Miriam A. Ferguson, who became Governor of Texas at the same time. La Ross succeeded her husband, the Hon. William B. Ross, who died October 2, 1924, and La Ferguson followed hers, the Hon. James E. Ferguson, who was impeached and removed from office in 1917. Another stateswoman who was commonly called Ma was the Hon. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who was assistant Attorney-General of the United States from 1921 to 1929, in charge of Prohibition enforcement. The term was applied to many other lady jobholders, chiefly of the more bosomy moiety, but began to drop out of use in the 30s. The Hon. Frances Perkins, who became Secretary of Labor in 1933, was often called Ma during her early days in that great office, but after a while it became a custom in Washington to speak of her, and even to address her, as Madam. In 1937 the Style Manual of the Department of State2 ordained that she be called Madam Secretary in the salutation of informal letters, and that her style and appellation upon the envelopes of all communications be the Hon. Perhaps it was this official lead that led to the general custom of calling her Madam instead of Mrs. in all situations. In the Congressional Record she almost always appears under that title.3 The Style Manual gives similar forms for addressing a female diplomat, though it permits My dear Mrs. (if she has or has had a husband), with her surname following.4 But it does not accord the honorific of Madam to congresswomen, who are to be addressed as My dear Mrs. —, nor even to lady Senators, who rate only My dear Senator — or My dear Mrs. —. The reasons for these distinctions I do not know: they lie concealed in the secret dungeons of the State Department.

  In the Eighteenth Century in both England and America Madam(e) was the common designation of any woman of dignified position. During the Nineteenth Century it began to be restricted, on this side of the ocean, to a widow with a married son, leaving Mrs. for the latter’s wife. This usage was noted as prevailing in both New England and
the South by Sir Charles Lyell, the English geologist, who visited the United States in 1845 and again in 1849.1 The title was also given post mortem, at a somewhat earlier day, to the deceased wives of men of any mark.2 In this last sense it was an Americanism, but in the other senses noted it was borrowed from England, where it had been in use since Chaucer’s time. Mistress is almost as old, but at the start it was always fully pronounced, and not reduced to missus or missez. Until the beginning of the Seventeenth Century the common abbreviation was not Mrs., but Mis. or Mris. “Originally distinctive of gentlewomen,” says the NED, “the use of the prefix has gradually extended downwards; at the present time every married woman who has no superior title is styled Mrs., even though her husband is of so humble a position as not ordinarily to be referred to as Mr.” In England, adds the NED, it is uncommon to use Mrs. before a given-name save in legal documents, but in the United States both Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Mary Smith are in everyday use. The Style Manual of the Department of State3 advises the use of the form Mrs. John Smith in addressing even a widow, though it allows Mrs. Mary Smith.4 It ordains the use of Madam as the salutation in all formal letters. In writing to Frenchwomen, it says, the spelling Madame should be used. The English authority, “Titles and Forms of Address,” advises that envelopes be addressed either Mrs. Smith or Mrs. John Smith, and recommends Madam as the salutation for formal letters. The editor of an 1828 edition of John Walker’s “Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language” (1791) noted that to pronounce Mrs. mistress would “appear quaint and pedantick,” and Noah Webster, in his “American Dictionary” of the same year, gave its “colloquial” pronunciation as mis-ses. But Schele de Vere reported in 18721 that “in the South” it was still “very frequently heard pronounced fully, without the usual contraction into misses.” This full pronunciation continues to be heard occasionally from the lips of old-fashioned Southerners.2