American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  9 Right Dress, London Daily Express, June 27, 1936.

  10 Our prep-school is a public-school in England, and is almost exclusively for the sons of the rich. The best known are Eton and Harrow. In recent years a number of a less expensive sort have been opened, but they are still below the salt. An English prep-school prepares boys for these public-schools and also for the Royal Navy. Its pupils seldom remain beyond the age of fourteen. An official document published in 1900 — Preparatory Schools For Boys: Their Place in English Secondary Education, by C. C. Cotterill — said that the first English prep-school was opened on the Isle of Wight in 1837, but this is disputed by old boys of various schools now operating as such, though they may have been something else in earlier times. See The First Prep-school, London Sunday Times, Jan. 12, 1935.

  1 As She Is Spoke in the United States, by J. H. M., Glasgow Evening Citizen, Aug. 29, 1936: “It is not a question of slang but of the astonishing number of everyday words used predominantly in one sense by the British and in another by the nephews of Uncle Sam. It is in the use of these that the stranger is detected — and perplexed.”

  1 The King’s English, March-April, 1943, pp. 57–134.

  2 I am indebted for Col. Allen’s paper to Dr. George W. Corner of the Carnegie Institution.

  3 Weights and Measures, Oct. 27.

  1 Americans Bound Coronationwards Should Read This Alphabet, April 28, 1937.

  2 Some curious English weights and measures, unknown in the United States, are listed in American Speech, April, 1930, p. 330.

  3 The Loom of Language, by Frederick Bodmer; New York, 1944, pp. 126 and 127. Bodmer’s discussion of the subject is exhaustive and excellent.

  4 Advertisement of Wm. Whiteley, Ltd., London Daily Telegraph, Sept. 25, 1935.

  5 Houses and Estates, same paper, same date.

  6 John o’ London’s Weekly, June 20, 1936.

  7 London Daily Express, Dec. 12, 1937.

  8 Socialist Repartee, London Daily Telegraph, Oct. 5, 1935.

  9 Advertisement in the London Telegraph and Post, May 10, 1938.

  1 Mr. Theodore Spencer, of Cambridge, Mass., suggests that this is probably because “the English station platforms are always level with the door of the carriage. With us there is usually a difference of level between platform and car; hence on and off, with their suggestion of ascent and descent.…”

  2 Up and Down, American Speech, Oct., 1926, p. 19.

  3 The whole English railroad terminology differs radically from that prevailing in the United States, though there have been some interchanges. See AL4, pp. 146 and 147. The following is from an advertisement of the Associated British Railways in the New York Times Magazine, May 17, 1936: “What! No cowcatchers? It’s quite true that our railway engines have no cowcatchers, no headlights — no, not even a bell. But they’re modern, and they draw luxurious trains at 80 miles an hour.” The same advertisement warned American tourists that there were “no familiar hot-dog stands, tourist-camps or one-arm lunchrooms along the route.” Why railroad travelers should look for such things was not explained.

  4 Anne-Laurence Dodge reports in American Notes and Queries, March, 1944, p. 188, that in Newbury port, Mass., up-along and down-along are used instead of uptown and downtown. There are probably other local variations elsewhere.

  1 At the South, At the North, American Speech, Dec, 1931, pp. 154–56. All of Hench’s examples came from the writings of George Carey Eggleston (1839–1911).

  2 British-American Differentiations in Syntax and Idiom, Dec, 1939, pp. 243–54.

  3 Cited by Jespersen, Sonnenschein and other grammarians.

  1 Concerning the American Language, in The Stolen White Elephant, Etc.; New York, 1888, p. 269.

  2 “Our journalists,” said Ernest Weekley, in Words, American and English, London Observer, Oct. 9, 1938, “are gradually ejecting the English should in favor of the revived American subjunctive.”

  3 From the London Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 16, 1944, p. 456: “The Bodleian do not regard it as a pseudonym.”

  4 Cricket English, July 22, 1938.

  5 I take an example from the London Times, Feb. 20, 1939: “New College retained their position at the head of the river, but St. Edmund Hall gained rapidly on them over the second half of the course.” A little further on in the same article: “Much confusion was caused in the Second Division when Jesus claimed to have bumped Queen’s at the boathouse. The Queen’s cox failed to acknowledge it and Wadham then bumped Jesus at the Cherwell. The matter will come before the committee for decision.”

  1 New York Times (editorial page), Aug. 3, 1938.

  2 Aug., 1942, p. 23. I take this from A Protest From the Philippines, by M. J. M., American Speech, April, 1944, pp. 147–48.

  3 London Daily Telegraph, Aug. 8, 1936. In 1937 he had the temerity to tackle A. P. Herbert, the linguistic expert of the House of Commons, and suffered in consequence a bad fall. (Lord Bertie Meets His Match, London Daily Telegraph, July 11, 1937). The dispute this time was not over the plural verb after collective nouns, but over amongst, which many Englishmen apparently prefer to among, as they prefer whilst to while. Herbert came out strongly for the American forms and managed to convince the Lords. This defeat so crushed Lord Bertie that he withdrew a motion to substitute “petition for divorce” for “petition of divorce” and “decree of divorce” for “decree for divorce” in a pending Marriage bill.

  1 8 More Hours — for 6s., London Daily Mirror, Sept. 20, 1935.

  2 London Daily Express, Oct. 3, 1936. I am indebted here to Mr. James R. Barbour of London.

  3 American Idiom, London Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 26, 1944, p. 103.

  4 Guy, April, p. 400: “It is doubtful if the word would ever have obtained its present currency in America if it had not been for the telescoped meaning of guy-rope or guy-pole in the circus tent. ‘Who’s the main guy around here?’ carries to an American no unpleasant associations; it is just the vulgate for ‘Who is the main support of this institution?’ ”

  5 See AL4, p. 254.

  6 Band XLIII, Heft 4, Oct., 1931.

  1 The Comedy of Errors, II.

  2 Woman’s Touch, June 16, 1938.

  3 I am indebted here to Mr. Percy Marks.

  4 A Shorthand Diary of William Byrd of Westover, by Louis B. Wright, Huntington Library Quarterly, July, 1939, p. 494, later reissued as a reprint.

  1 New York, 1925, Vol. I, p. 81.

  2 Swamp in Early American Usage, American Speech, Feb., 1935, pp. 30–35.

  3 Swamp-angel was the nickname of a big gun used at the siege of Charleston in the early part of the Civil War; it was later used to designate a member of one of the bands of ruffians allied with the Ku Klux Klan.

  1 See Mathews’s The Beginnings of American English, pp. 106 and 119.

  2 James Macaulay, in Across the Ferry: First Impressions of America and Its People; fourth ed.; London, 1887, p. 93, reported that he had even found it used in the sense of getting right with God. “It represents expressively,” he said, “the vain attempt of the sinner to make himself more worthy of receiving divine mercy and grace.”

  1 For example, Ernest Weekley in Adjectives — and Other Words; New York, 1930, p. 174.

  2 The English purists frequently discuss this American habit of reinforcing verbs with adverbs. Sometimes they denounce it as ignorant and naughty, as when to try out, for example, was belabored by Dr. Terrot Reavley Glover, Public Orator at Cambridge, in 1933. The London Times Weekly Edition (Feb. 16, 1933) agreed with him in principle, but argued that it was too late to attempt a reform, and testified to its humorous despair by using to get away with, to face up, to stand up for, to slip up, to blow up, to catch on, to play out, to tick off, to haul up, to let off, to stick it out, to hand up, to check up, to shoot up, to bump off, to speed up and to listen in in its comment. At other times the question is dealt with by dredging up proofs that this or that verb-adverb is really ancient in English. See, for example, American Prep
ositions, by L. Pearsall Smith, London Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 12, 1933.

  3 A learned discussion of to get, including some consideration of the American gotten, is in Get and Got, by Wallace Rice, American Speech, April, 1932, pp. 280–96.

  1 See AL4, p. 253.

  2 Cape Times (Cape Town), Nov. 12, 1938.

  3 An English dissenter is free to carry on his gloomy croaking as much as he pleases and is often extremely influential, but his social position is alway inferior. Up to a few years ago the B.B.C., the official English radio, refused to describe a service in a noncomformist tabernacle as a religious service, but always used Wesleyan service, Baptist service, etc. Religious was reserved for the orgies of the Church of England. Once a broadcaster, having inadvertently called a Baptist service at Folkestone a religious service, apologized at once. But this prejudice seems to be abating. So is the feeling that dissenters are presuming beyond their station when they call one of their meeting houses a church. The old name was chapel, and the customers were commonly spoken of as chapel-goers, to distinguish them from Church of England churchgoers. Even Catholic churches were called chapels. But in late years that old invidious distinction tends to disappear, and there are now plenty of Methodist churches in England, some of them free of debt.

  1 Sectarian and Nonconformist, by C. P. Mason, American Speech, Feb., 1929, p. 202.

  2 University of Missouri Studies, Jan. 1, 1938, pp. cxi and 64.

  3 Chapter XXIV. Ramsay and Ember-son give 241 as the page number in the first edition of 1884. In my edition of 1886, apparently printed from the original plates, it is 208.

  1 Private communication, Jan. 12, 1938.

  2 The English Wesleyans are the American Methodists.

  3 i.e., the endowed schools, for sons of the upper classes, e.g., Eton and Harrow.

  4 The seeker after further light on this difficult subject is referred to As the English Twig is Bent, by William Oliver Stevens, Saturday Evening Post, May 9, 1936, pp. 14 ff; The School Question in England, by S. J. Gosling, Commonweal, Aug. 13, 1943, pp. 422 ff; and A Guide to British Educational Terms, by Herbert B. Grimsditch, Wilson Bulletin (New York), May, 1936, pp. 576 ff.

  1 March 20.

  2 i.e., to the bar — the equivalent of the American admitted.

  3 An English lawyer, whether barrister or solicitor, never has an office, but always chambers. To devil is defined by the NED as “to do professional work for another without fee, or without recognition.”

  1 Contrariwise, many American names for comestibles puzzle the English. In I Discover America, by Kenneth Adam, London Star, Nov. 30, 1937, the author, writing from Richmond, Ind., found it advisable to supply definitions of sauer kraut-juice, clam-chowder, squabs with yams, succotash, cole-slaw, caraway-roll and pie à la mode. He defined sauerkraut-juice as “a kind of bitter apertif,” and squabs as “small chickens.”

  2 A Thing Called Not Done, London Morning Post, Aug. 4, 1936: “Good form — that mysterious ideal of schools — was the subject of pointed comment by Mr. W. B. Curry, headmaster of Dartington Hall, Devon, yesterday. ‘Good form, so far as I understand it,’ he told the New Education Fellowship at Cheltenham, ’is a way of making important things seem trivial and trivial things seem important. It is concerned with manners and behaviour and a thing called not done. In schools where good form is thought important, it is much more serious to violate the canons of good form than to violate the Ten Commandments. Serious worship of good form among the young seems inevitably to lead to inflexibility of temper, because the essence of good form is that you do not question it.”

  1 Parliament, London Times, Feb. 24, 1944, p. 8. I am indebted here to Dr. John Whyte of Brooklyn College. An amusing note on the difficulties encountered by Americans in English novels is in Mrs. Miniver’s Briticisms, by Marian and George Hibbitt, American Speech, April, 1941, pp. 149–51.

  1 Private communications, May 25 and June 4, 1944.

  2 The DAE’s first example of the former is dated 1700. Its first example of corncob is dated 1793. Obviously, its searchers overlooked The Adventures of Jonathan Corncob.

  3 America in English Fiction, 1760–1800, by Robert Bechtold Heilman. Baton Rouge (La.), 1937, p. 368. “The author’s use of italics,” says Heilman, “makes doubly sure that the reader will notice what the Americans are doing with the language.”

  4 I preserve the capitals he used for emphasis.

  1 Every Saturday (Boston), March 30, 1867, p. 397.

  2 American Slang in England, by D. B. Whitman, of Winthrop, Mass., May 4, 1937. His letter was reprinted in various American newspapers, e.g., the Milwaukee Journal, Oct. 9, 1937.

  3 American Speech According to Galsworthy, April, pp. 297–301.

  4 Dr. Robertson had noted this misuse of gotten by another English novelist, Rose Macaulay, in A British Misconception, American Speech, April, 1931, pp. 314–16.

  5 Cockney American, by Mildred Wasson, American Speech, April, 1932, pp. 255–56.

  1 I am indebted here to Miss Miriam Allen deFord of San Francisco.

  2 American Speech in English Fiction, by Francis Hayes, American Notes and Queries, Jan., 1942, p. 156.

  3 Oct. 10, 1942. She was brought to book in Time and Tide, Oct. 17, by D. W. Brogan.

  4 The page numbers are those of the American edition; New York, 1942.

  5 Your Radio Life of Christ is an Affront, Jan. 22, 1942.

  6 All of Us, by Marshall Maslin, South Bend. (Ind.) Tribune, June 27, 1936.

  7 Gangsters, British Type, Detroit Times, May 5, 1935. The book was called Public Enemy No. 1 in England and John Jenkin, Public Enemy, in the United States.

  1 War Between US and U. S. A. — Over Language, by Collinson Owen, London Sunday Pictorial, April 11, 1937.

  2 Chamberlain seems to have been misled by Sir Samuel Hoare, then Home Secretary, who, in a speech in the House of Commons on Jan. 26, 1939, said: “I am told that in the United States of America there is a class of people who sit listening in hysterical excitement to what is called hot music and waiting for the final crash. Americans, in their forcible language, call them the jitterbugs. There are many people in Europe today that seem to be behaving in much the same way. They sit, listening to all the hot music of the scares and alarms, waiting helplessly for the crash that, according to them, will destroy us all.” This was a correct enough definition of iitterbug, but Chamberlain’s subsequent use of it in the extended sense suggested by Hoare puzzled Englishmen who were familiar only with the original American sense.

  3 British Americanisms, Newsweek, March 13, 1939.

  4 Oh! What Slanguage!, by A. Whit-comb Jenkins, Answers, July 23, 1938.

  5 The Correspondence of an Easy Gentle Essayist, by Geoffrey Grigson, London Morning Post, Jan. 21, 1936.

  6 Best-seller is marked “orig. U. S.” by the NED Supplement and traced in English use to 1912. The DAE does not list it, but I believe it was in use in the United States not later than 1895.

  7 Fie, Fie, Right Honourable Member!, Sunderland Echo, Oct. 31, 1934.

  1 I am indebted here to Mr. John A. Tillinghast, of Providence, R. I.

  2 London Daily Express, June 17, 1943. This beautiful word was first listed by Bartlett in the late 70s; he said that it originated in Missouri. The DAE marks it an Americanism.

  3 English Undefiled?, Barbados Advocate, Sept. 11, 1937. I am indebted here to Mr. R. C. Hackett, of Balboa, C. Z.

  4 London Daily Express, Nov. 14, 1940.

  5 London Morning Post, March 2, 1936; King’s English, Manchester Guardian Weekly, March 6, 1936.

  6 The King’s English and the President’s American, by Robert Lynd, New Statesman (London), Feb. 4, 1930.

  7 Lord Louis Learns American, London Evening Standard, Sept. 24 1943.

  1 This is Not a Phony War: Paris Envoy, London News-Chronicle, Jan. 19, 1940. The News-Chronicle explained that phony was “American slang, anglicized about 1920.” Early in 1940 Lord Willingdon, in an interview in the London papers on the p
rogress of World War II, said “the Empire is all in.” He meant, of course, that it was pledged to fight to the last gasp. The American correspondents in London were warned to explain this meaning if they transmitted his speech to the United States, lest Americans assume that he had said that the Empire was done for. Phony was also used by Paul Reynaud, then premier of France, in a radio speech to Americans on April 3, 1940: “ ‘Il faut en finir’; tel fut, dès le début, le refrain qu’on entendit. Et cela signifie qu’il aura pas de ‘phoney peace’ après une guerre qui n’est nullement une ‘phoney war’.” I am indebted here to Mr. Howard C. Rice of Cambridge, Mass.

  2 Election Expenses, 1880, April 24, 1935.

  3 Premier’s Gerrymandering Rebuked, London Morning Advertiser, Nov. 21, 1941.

  4 London Daily Mirror, quoted in the New Yorker, Oct. 17, 1936.

  5 Obituary of Thomas Gilbert White, Feb. 20, 1939.

  6 Shot Man’s Legacy to Woman Friend, Aug. 2, 1936.

  7 New Yorker, Dec. 19, 1936.

  1 When, in 1937, J. M. Steadman, Jr., of Emory University, Atlanta, Ga., polled the students of that seminary, seeking to find out what terms they avoided as beneath their dignity, his returns included chap, cheerio, cinema, jolly (swell, fine), mater (mother), pater (father), petrol, righto, stunning and top-hole, all of them recognized as Briticisms. See his Affected and Effeminate Words, American Speech, Feb., 1938, pp. 13–18. “Americans,” said the London Times in an editorial, Two Peoples and One Tongue, June 29, 1943, “have always been rather shy of drawing upon what they believe to be un-American English. This phrase, that accent, t’other manner remain a joke.”

  1 The title of a paper on Walt Whitman’s adventures as a Washington jobholder, by Dixon Wecter, in Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1943, pp. 1094 ff, called him a civil servant, but I suspect that Dr. Wecter may have intended the term to be satirical rather than swanky.

  2 Indeed, such an investment banker might run some risk of getting into Sing Sing or Atlanta prematurely, and even unjustly.