American Language

by H. L. Mencken

  60 The article is summarized, with long extracts, in the Literary Digest for June 19, 1915, p. 1468.

  61 Reprinted in the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, July 23, 1921.

  62 The New America; New York, 1919, Ch. III.

  63 The Society was organized in 1913, but the intervention of the war suspended its proceedings until 1918. The first of its Tracts was issued in October, 1919. The original committee consisted of Dr. Bridges, Henry Bradley, Sir Walter Raleigh and L. Pearsall Smith, the last-named an American living in England. In Tract No. I one of its purposes was stated to be the encouragement of “those who possess the word-making faculty,” and another was the enrichment of Standard English with dialectic and “democratic” forms and usages. In Tract No. XXIV, 1926, Dr. Bridges protested against an allegation that the Society was “working for uniformity and standardization against idiom and freedom. Our readers,” he went on, “know that this is not what we intend or desire; indeed teachers, who as a class advocate standardization of speech as the necessary basis for general tuition, sometimes complain of us as mischief-makers because we do not support them more thoroughly.” In 1922 Dr. Bridges wrote to Dr. H. S. Canby: “We desire as many American subscribers as possible, in order to make our Society seem as much American as it is English. [His italics.] There is a great and natural prejudice in America against English dictation in the matter of our language, and that followed, I think, as a protest against the insular contempt which the English felt a couple of generations ago for American forms of speech. We now in England feel very differently and the S.P.E. would certainly treat American usages and preferences with full respect” (Literary Review, May 20, 1922). “The S.P.E.,” says J. Y. T. Greig in Breaking Priscian’s Head (London, 1929), “despite its inauspicious name, has done a great deal of splendid work, but only because it happened to be founded by, and to have remained under, the control of men like Dr. Bridges, Mr. L. P. Smith, and Mr. H. W. Fowler. This was a fortunate and very rare accident. In wrong hands it would have long ago become a dreadful curse, a veritable Inquisition and Congregation of the Propaganda rolled into one.”

  64 London Sunday Graphic, Jan. 3, 1932.

  65 Printed as That Dreadful American, Listener, Jan. 30, 1935.

  66 An Accidence to the English Tongue; London, 1724. This was the first English grammar written in America. For the reference to it I am indebted to American Projects For an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1935. For part of what follows I am also indebted to Mr. Read.

  67 George Campbell (1719–96), a Scottish theologian who published a New Translation of the Gospels in 1778. He is best known, however, for his Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1776. Pickering’s reference is to the preface to the Gospels.

  68 The Baltimore Evening Sun reported that this was a new project in the Baltimore public-schools on Jan. 21, 1925.

  69 American Speech, Jan., 1926, p. 250.

  70 For example, in Modern Language Notes, Vol. XLVIII, 1933, there is but one reference to it and that is in a review of H. C. Wyld’s Universal Dictionary, 1932, by Kemp Malone. In Modern Philology, Vol. XXXII, 1933–34, there is no mention of American. In Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. XLVIII, 1933, which runs to 1400 pages, there is only a brief note by Sir William Craigie, editor of the Dictionary of American English, calling on American philologians for aid. In the annual bibliography of philological papers for 1932, p. 1342 ff., 45 articles on American English are listed, but 31 of them appeared in American Speech, 6 in Dialect Notes, 6 in popular magazines, and only 2 in professional journals. The Modern Language Association has a Present-Day Speech Section, but it shows little effective activity. The association, which was founded in 1883, had 4,132 members in 1932. “Under the protection of our ægis,” said Dr. A. H. Thorndike in his presidential address in 1927, “are gathering languages whose applications for membership not even the secretary can read.” Perhaps American will one day be one of them.

  71 The original members included C. H. Grandgent, E. S. Sheldon, George L. Kittredge and J. M. Manly of Harvard, James W. Bright and A. Marshall Elliott of the Johns Hopkins, Eugene H. Babbitt of Columbia, O. F. Emerson and Benjamin Ide Wheeler of Cornell, W. D. Whitney and W. R. Harper of Yale, and F. A. March of Lafayette. James Russell Lowell was also a member.

  72 Just how many are in practise today I do not know, but it must be a very large number. L. J. O’Rourke, in Rebuilding the English-Usage Curriculum; Washington, 1934, p. 4, says that “more than 40,000 teachers of English” aided him in his inquiry — all of them, it appears, teaching in grade-schools. The Educational Lists Company of New York and Chicago, which supplies the names and addresses of teachers to advertisers, offers a list of 18,000 names of high-school teachers teaching “English language, literature, drama and public speaking,” and one of 5,750 “English teachers” in the colleges and normal-schools. Some of these, of course, also teach other subjects.

  73 This lack of academic interest in the American language was for many years matched by a lack of interest in American literature, but since the setting up of the quarterly, American Literature, at Duke University in 1929, partly as a result of the activities of the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Association, there has been something of an awakening. The old neglect of Whitman, Melville and Clemens will be recalled. The first professorship of American literature seems to have been established at the Pennsylvania State College in 1894, with Dr. Fred Lewis Pattee as the incumbent. The chair is still a rare one in the American colleges.

  74 Another enterprise of the Dialect Society that has suffered from inadequate support is its publication of the third volume of R. H. Thornton’s American Glossary. Before his death Thornton deposited his manuscript in the Widener Library, and in 1931 its publication was begun in Dialect Notes under the editorship of Percy W. Long. The first instalment ran to 112 pages, and it was hoped to complete the work by December, 1933. But the failure of expected aid caused such a slacking of pace that by that time only J had been reached. Thornton’s first two volumes came out in England in 1912 in a modest edition of 2000 copies. Of these, 250 were imported by an American publisher. Selling them was slow work, and when they were exhausted at last no more were imported. In this connection it may be recalled that George Philip Krapp’s The English Language in America; New York, 1925, a work of very high value, failed to find a commercial publisher, and had to be brought out “for the Modern Language Association of America” at the cost of the Carnegie Corporation. Thornton’s somewhat pathetic account of his difficulties is to be found in Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. II, 1919. “Early in 1917,” he said, “I made an appeal to a large number of wealthy Americans — this was before we were in the war — to help the venture financially. To their lasting infamy, they were uniformly too unappreciative to respond.”

  75 On Oct. 18, 1924 the Chicago Tribune announced Sir William’s appointment under these headlines:

  MIDWAY SIGNS

  LIMEY PROF. TO

  DOPE YANK TALK

  He was born at Dundee in 1867 and was educated at St. Andrews and at Oxford. He joined the staff of the New English Dictionary in 1897, and became joint editor in 1901. His specialty is Scandinavian, but he has also written on Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, Scottish and modern English. He was knighted in 1928, but, rather curiously, this fact is not noted in Who’s Who in America. Dr. Kurath was born ih Austria in 1891 and came to America in 1907. He studied at the Universities of Wisconsin, Texas and Chicago, and took his Ph.D. at the last-named. His specialty is the comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages. He was assistant professor of German at Northwestern, 1920–27, and professor of German at Ohio State, 1927–32. In 1932 he became professor of German at Brown.

  76 In an article in Tract No. XXVII of the Society for Pure English, 1927, Dr. Craigie noted that his idea had been anticipated, though not his plan. He said: “It is possible that this idea has occurred to more than one
of those who have given their attention to the subject, but until very recently I have found it clearly expressed only in a review of a part of the Oxford Dictionary, written in 1913 by Dr. C. W. Ernst of Boston. ‘The American bonanza’ he wrote, ‘is in the hands of squatters; it is yet to be worked scientifically. That is impossible at Oxford; it must be done here, whether in Washington or the University of Texas is immaterial; only let it be done. It will take at least twenty-five years to gather the materials, and twenty-five years more to digest them properly. And neither dogma nor cash can help us; the thing needed is grace.’ ”

  77 The New Dictionary of American English, American Mercury, July, 1933.

  78 The other members of the committee were Drs. Leonard Bloomfield of Chicago, C. H. Carruthers of McGill, C. H. Grandgent of Harvard, Miles L. Hanley of Wisconsin, Marcus L. Hansen of Illinois, John S. Kenyon of Hiram College, George P. Krapp of Columbia, Eduard Prokosch of Yale, and G. Oscar Russell of Ohio State. Dr. Krapp, author of The English Language in America, died in 1934, and Dr. William A. Read of Louisiana has been added to the committee.

  79 It is perhaps worth noting that five of the seven bear non-English surnames — Hansen, Hultzén, Low-man, Bloch and Penzl.

  80 They were delivered at Columbia College during the Winter of 1858–9, and were published in New York in 1859. They had reached a fourth edition by 1861. Marsh was educated for the law and went into politics. He was successively a member of the Vermont Legislature, a member of the Supreme Executive Council of the State, a Congressman, minister at Constantinople, special envoy to Greece, railroad commissioner in Vermont, and minister to Italy. Born in 1801, he died at romantic Vallombrosa in 1882. He was an amateur philo-logian of considerable repute in his day, and in addition to his Lectures published The Origin and History of the English Language; New York, 1862.

  81 The English Language: New York, 1850; rev. ed., 1855. This was the first American text-book of English for use in colleges. Before its publication, according to Fowler himself (rev. ed., p. xi), the language was studied only “superficially” and “in the primary schools.” He goes on: “Afterward, when older in the academy, during their preparation for college, our pupils perhaps despised it, in comparison with the Latin and the Greek; and in the college they do not systematically study the language after they come to maturity.”

  82 In Recent Exemplifications of False Philology; London, 1872.

  83 Americanisms, parts i-viii, April, May, July, Sept., Nov., 1878; Jan., March, May, 1879.

  84 The Académie itself pretends to no such omniscience. In the preface to the first edition of its dictionary (1694) it disclaimed any purpose “to make new words and to reject others at its pleasure.” In the preface to the second edition (1718) it confessed that “ignorance and corruption often introduce manners of writing” and that “convenience establishes them.” In the preface to the third edition (1740) it admitted that it was “forced to admit changes which the public has made,” and so on. Says D. M. Robertson, in A History of the French Academy (London, 1910) : “The Academy repudiates any assumption of authority over the language with which the public in its own practise has not first clothed it. So much, indeed, does it confine itself to an interpretation merely of the laws of language that its decisions are sometimes contrary to its own judgment of what is either desirable or expedient.” But despite this, its natural leaning is toward tradition, and that leaning has greatly diminished its authority. Even some of its own members repudiate its judgments. “There are,” says J. C. Tressler in the English Journal, College Ed., April, 1934, p. 296, “two French languages: the Academy’s and the people’s. In France, as in the United States, slang has flourished and has on the whole enriched, enlivened, and invigorated the language. In France, as in other countries, the language has evolved in its own way.”

  85 Academy Papers: Addresses on Language Problems by Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; New York, 1925. The contributors were Paul Elmer More, William M. Sloane, William C. Brownell, Brander Matthews, Bliss Perry, Paul Shorey, Henry van Dyke, and Robert Underwood Johnson.

  86 An instructive account of some forerunners of the Academy, all of them dismal failures, is to be found in American Projects For an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1935.

  87 Scott, who died in 1930, was one of the signers of the call for the International Conference on English held in London in 1927. He was, in his day, a great academic dignitary, and served as president of both the Modern Language Association and the National Council of Teachers of English. He was also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the British Association. He wrote many books, including an English grammar, a treatise on literary criticism, and another on æsthetics. His Standards of American Speech, and Other Papers, published in 1925, offers a good gauge of his mentality. One of its chapters is devoted to proving that “of the 10,565 lines of ‘Paradise Lost’ 670, or 6.3% contain each two or more accented alliterating vowels,” and another to proving that in such doublets as rough and ready 68% put the monosyllable first. On January 2, 1925 he read a paper on British and American Idiom before the Committee on Philological Sciences of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1926 he contributed a paper on American Slang to Tract No. XXIV of the Society for Pure English. In Tract No. XXVII, 1927, some of his definitions were disputed by an anonymous American.

  88 The Literary Digest International Book Review, March, 1926. Apparently, Matthews forgot here that Smith was not an Englishman. Actually he was born in Philadelphia, and did not migrate to England until after passing through Haverford and Harvard. His Words and Idioms was published in London in 1925. Matthews’s war-time Anglomania was not taken seriously by the English. His belief that American novelists and newspaper men would “continue to eschew Americanisms” was derided by the London Saturday Review, a bit later on, as “obviously a war hope, like hanging the Kaiser.” There is what may be called a blanket sneer at “Anglomaniac professors of English” in Breaking Priscian’s Head, by J. Y. T. Greig, of Armstrong College, Newcastle (1929). “Some of them,” says Professor Greig, “to judge by their obiter dicta, are as scholastically minded as the dismalest snob of a housemaster in an English public school.”

  89 Bierce was especially hostile to slang, but in 1909 he published a little book called “Write It Right,” full of denunciations of common American idioms. His own writing, though cramped by his self-imposed rules, yet managed to be fluent, colorful and even melodious. It is possible that he was influenced by the fact that he spent nearly ten years of his early manhood in England.

  90 In Afternoon Neighbors; New York, 1934, p. 43, Hamlin Garland reports that John S. Sargent once told him of James: “Henry became excessively English in his later years and resented all Americanisms in speech. I once heard him reproving his niece. She said: ‘Uncle Henry, if you will tell me how you like your tea I will fix it for you.’ To this James replied: ‘Pray, my dear young lady, what will you fix it with and what will you fix it to?’ ”

  91 Vol. II, p. 148.

  92 New York, 1925; Vol. I, p. 246 ff. Krapp gives some curious examples of early attempts at reducing Negro American to writing. His essay also deals with the Yankee, Southwestern, Hoosier, and Indian dialects. “The New England dialect as a literary form,” he says, “is mainly popular or illiterate American English with a very occasional splash of genuine local color.” Krapp reprints Lowell’s seven rules for writing this dialect, as given in the introduction to Series I of The Biglow Papers, and C. Alphonso Smith’s seven rules for writing “the Southern literary dialect.” See also Notes on Negro Dialect in the American Novel to 1821, by Tremaine McDowell, American Speech, April, 1930.

  93 The Fight of a Book for the World, by W. S. Kennedy; West Yarmouth, Mass., 1926, pref.

  94 Whitman and the American Language, New York Evening Post, May 31, 1919. Mr. Untermeyer has himself made vigorous propaganda to
the same end. Since 1932 or thereabout he has been delivering a lecture entitled A New Language For a New Generation which embodies a review of the gradual separation of American from English, and a valuable discussion of the present differences.

  95 See Walt Whitman and the French Language, by Louise Pound, American Speech, May, 1926, and Walt Whitman’s Neologisms, by the same, American Mercury, Feb., 1925.

  96 See Walt Whitman and the American Language, by Leon Howard, American Speech, Aug., 1930.

  97 The Life and Letters of John Fiske, by John Spencer Clark; Boston, 1917, Vol. I, p. 431.

  98 The Editor’s Study, Harper’s Magazine, Jan., 1886.

  99 English As She is Spoken, Bookman, July, 1920.

  100 Our Statish Language, Harper’s Magazine, May, 1920.

  101 The American Slanguage, Irish Statesman, Oct. 9, 1926.

  102 Translations, Saturday Review of Literature, Dec. 26, 1925.

  103 Gifford seems to have picked up this story from the Marquis François Jean de Chastellux, who made a tour of America in 1780–82, and printed Voyages dans l’Amérique septentrionale in 1786. (English translation in two volumes; London, 1787; New York, 1828). See The Philological Society of New York, 1788, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, April, 1934, p. 131.

  104 Nation, April 11, 1923.

  105 Peters, it appears, had a remote forerunner in one Proctor, who was in practise as a teacher of English in Paris at the end of the Eighteenth Century. Mr. H. A. Larrabee of Cambridge, Mass., calls my attention to the following reference to him in John G. Alger’s Paris in 1789–94: “In October, 1794, Proctor advertised that he taught the English and American languages — there had been no advertisements of lessons in foreign languages during the Terror — and he was still doing this in 1802.” Apparently the strained relations between France and the United States in 1797–1800 did not force Proctor to suspend the teaching of American.