American Language

by H. L. Mencken

  Most of the terms that I have rehearsed came into the speech of the Western plainsmen and mountain-men before the Civil War, but some of them did not reach the East until the beginning of the movement to pacify and settle the Indian lands, toward the end of the 60’s. Many others, in common use by the pioneers, have since sunk to the estate of Westernisms, or dropped out altogether. To the latter class belong adelantado, a military governor; borracho, a drunkard; capitan; comisario, a policeman; ayuntamiento, a city council; and lepero, a beggar. To the former belong amigo, a friend; camino, a road; chico and chiquito, small; campo santo, a cemetery; hacienda, a landed estate; huero, a blond; Jornada, a desert; mesa, a tableland; mocho, bob-tailed; mozo, a servant; pinto, piebald; zarape, a cloak; paseo, a trip; and sala, a room. But the effect of Western fiction, of the movies and talkies, of the popularity of pseudo-Spanish bungalow architecture, and of the constant invasion of Southern California by transient visitors has been to keep a large number of Spanish loanwords alive in American speech. Thus most Americans know what a patio is, and a pinto pony, and a hombre. Such words are not often used save in the Southwest, but nevertheless they are understood almost everywhere.38

  The period saw the beginning of the great immigrations, and the American people now came into contact, on a large scale, with peoples of divergent race, particularly Germans, Irish Catholics from the South of Ireland (the Irish of colonial days “were descendants of Cromwell’s army, and came from the North of Ireland”),39 and, on the Pacific Coast, Chinese. So early as the 20’s the immigration to the United States reached 25,000 in a year; in 1824 the Legislature of New York, in alarm, passed a restrictive act.40 The Know-Nothing movement of the 50’s need not concern us here. It is enough to recall that the immigration of 1845 passed the 100,000 mark, and that that of 1854 came within sight of 500,000. These new Americans, most of them Germans and Irish, did not all remain in the East; a great many spread through the West and Southwest with the other pioneers. Their effect upon the language was a great deal more profound than most of us think. The Irish, speaking the English of Cromwell’s time, greatly reinforced its usages in the United States, where it was beginning to yield to the schoolmarm. “The influence of Irish-English,” writes an English correspondent, “is still plainly visible all over the United States. Some years ago, before I had seen America, a relative of mine came home after twelve years’ farming in North Dakota, and I was struck by the resemblance between his speech and that of the Irish drovers who brought cattle to Norwich market.”41 The Germans also left indelible marks upon American, and particularly upon the spoken American of the common people. The everyday vocabulary shows many German words and turns of phrase. Sauerkraut and noodle, as we have seen in Chapter III, Section 1, came in during the colonial period, apparently through the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, i.e., a mixture, somewhat debased, of the German dialects of Switzerland, Suabia and the Palatinate. The immigrants who came in after 1848 contributed pumpernickel, haus-frau, beer-garden (biergarten), lager-beer, wienerwurst (often reduced to wiener or wienie), frankfurter, bock-beer, sauerbraten, schnitzel, leberwurst (sometimes half translated as liverwurst), blut-wurst, dachshund, zwieback, stein (drinking vessel), rathskeller, schweizer (cheese), delicatessen, hamburger (steak), kindergarten and katzenjammer.42 Some of these words did not really lodge in the American vocabulary until after the second great German immigration began in 1870, but nevertheless they were heard before the Civil War. From the Germans, in all probability, there also came two very familiar Americanisms, loafer and bum. The etymology of the former is still to be worked out, but practically all authorities agree that it is of German origin. James Russell Lowell suggested that it was derived from the German laufen (in various dialects, lofen), meaning to run, but this seems improbable, and the Oxford Dictionary rejects the derivation. A much more likely prototype is to be found in the German noun landläufer, meaning a tramp, and this etymology is favored by Ernest Weekley in his “Etymological Dictionary of Modern English” (1921). Thornton’s first example is taken from the title of a sketch by Cornelius Matthews, “The Late Ben Smith, Loafer” printed in the Knickerbocker Magazine, for July, 1835. R- H. Dana, in “Two Years Before the Mast” (1840) spoke of loafer as “the newly invented Yankee word”; his book was an expansion of notes made in 1834–6. In 1855, in “Leaves of Grass,” Whitman used to loaf in a phrase that seems destined to live: “I loafe [note the original spelling] and invite my soul.” Bum was originally bummer, and apparently comes from the German word bummler.43 Both loafer and bummer have provided numerous derivatives: loaf (noun), to loaf, loafing-place, corner-loafer, common-loafer, town-loafer, to bum, bum as an adjective (as in bum steer and bum food), bum’s-rush, bumming-place and bummery, not to mention to go (or be) on the bum. Loafer has migrated to England, but bum is still unknown there in the American sense. In England an old English word, bum, dating from the Fourteenth Century, is used to designate the buttocks, and is thus not heard in polite discourse.

  Another example of debased German is offered by the American Kriss Kringle. It is from Christkindlein, or Christkind’l, and properly designates, of course, not the patron saint of Christmas, but the child in the manger. A German friend tells me that the form Kriss Kringle, which is that given in “Webster’s New International Dictionary,” and the form Krisking’l, which is that most commonly used in the United States, are both unknown in Germany. Here, obviously, we have an example of a loan-word undergoing phonetic change. Whole phrases have gone through the same process, for example, nix come erous44 (from nichts kommt heraus45 and ’rous mit ’im (from heraus mit ihm). These phrases, like wie geht’s and ganz gut, are familiar to practically all Americans, no matter how complete their ignorance of correct German. Most of them know, too, the meaning of gesundheit, kümmel, seidel, spitzbub, gemütlich, männerchor, scültzenfest, sängerfest, turnverein, hoch, yodel and zwei (as in zwei bier). I once found snitz (Ger. schnitz) in the elegant pages of Town Topics46 Prosit is in all American dictionaries.47 Bower, as used in cards, is an Americanism derived from the German bauer (peasant), meaning the jack. Poker, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is probably derived from pochspiel, “a similar bluffing card-game of considerable age, from pochen, to boast, brag, literally to knock, rap.” From a correspondent I have a somewhat different account of this game. “Its name,” he says, “is derived from the fact that at one stage of the play the players in turn declare the state of their hands by either passing or opening. Those who pass, signify it by saying ‘Ich poche’ or ’ Ich poch? This is sometimes indicated by knocking on the table with one’s knuckles.” But poker remains an enigma, and many other theories to account for the origin of the name have been advanced. In the Fourteenth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1929) R. F. Foster, author of several well-known card manuals, says that the game is of Persian origin, and reached the United States by way of New Orleans. Its Persian name is as nas, “but owing to its resemblance to the French game of poque and the German game of pochen, the French colonists called it poque, and this spelling was mispronounced by the English-speaking players as po-que, easily converted into po-ker.” Scheie de Vere, in his “Americanisms” (1872) derived poker from the French poche, a pocket, but apparently on very shaky grounds.

  The exclamation ouch is classed as an Americanism by Thornton, and he gives an example dated 1837. The Oxford Dictionary refers it to the German autsch, and Thornton says that “it may have come across with the Dunkers or the Mennonites.” All of the Oxford’s examples are American, for ouch is seldom used in English, save in the sense of a clasp or buckle set with precious stones (from the Old French nouche), and even in that sense it is archaic. Shyster may be German also; Thornton has traced it back to the 50’s.48 Rum-dumb is grounded upon the meaning of dumb borrowed from the Germans; it is not listed in the English slang dictionaries. Bristed says that the American meaning of wagon, which indicates almost any four-wheeled, horse-drawn vehicle in this country but only the very heaviest in En
gland, was probably influenced by the German wagen. He also suggests that the American use of hold on for stop was influenced by the German halt an, and White says that the substitution of standpoint for point of view, long opposed by purists, was first made by an American professor who sought “an Anglicized form” of the German standpunkt. Other etymologists, professional and amateur, have discerned German influences in the peculiarly American use of fresh in the sense of saucy or impudent (Ger. frech); in gee-whiz (Ger. gewiss — but this is hardly convincing); in the American preference for shoe as against the English boot (Ger. schuh); in the common use of Bladder as a derisory title for a small and bad newspaper (Ger. k.äseblatt); in stunt (Ger. stunde, hour — another one hard to believe); in the American bub, once commonly used in addressing a boy (Ger. bube); in the American use of check instead of the English bill to designate a restaurant reckoning (Ger. zeche); and in such phrases as it is to laugh, and five minutes of three (instead of the English to three). German influence may also have something to do with the extraordinary facility with which American forms compound nouns. In most other modern languages the process is rare, and English itself lags far behind American. But in German it is almost unrestricted. “It is,” says Logan Pearsall Smith, “a great step in advance toward that ideal language in which meaning is expressed, not by terminations, but by the simple method of word-position.”

  German, like Dutch, Spanish and French, has naturally left its most salient traces in those areas with the largest population of German-speaking immigrants. In the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch regions of Pennsylvania and in some of the Western States a great many Germanisms are in circulation. In the former, says W. H. Allen,49 “many words and constructions are obviously of German origin. That equals so that, as in ‘We like our mince-pie piping hot that it steams inside.’ A tut or a paper tut is a paper bag. Verdrübt means sad. The freinschaft is the relationship. All is all gone, as in ‘The butter is all.’ Look means be fitting, as in ’ It doesn’t look for two girls to go there alone.’ ” Mr. Allen lists many other localisms, among them, glick, to come out right (Ger. glück)-, siffer, a heavy drinker (Ger. säufer); and ritschi, a frozen pond used for sliding (Ger. rutschen, to slide). Santa Claus, in such areas, is usually Belsnickel, as indeed he was among the Germans of Baltimore when I was a boy.50 A. W. Meyer has assembled some curious examples from the Middle West,51 for example, brickstein for brick (Ger. backsteirin), heurack for hayrack (Ger. heu, hay), and büchershelf for bookshelf (Ger. bücher, books). Plunder is still often used in that part of the country to designate baggage, a usage probably suggested by the identical German word, and going back to the first years of the Nineteenth Century. A peculiar intonation is remarked by visitors to the Pennsylvania German towns. “The voice,” says Mr. Allen, “is raised at the beginning of a question and lowered at the end.” Whether this is due to German influence I do not know, but it is also noticeable when the native speaker is using what passes locally for German. Mr. Allen goes on:

  Questions frequently contain an ain’t: “You’ll do that, ain’t you will?.” “You won’t do that, ain’t you won’t?.” “He’s been gone a long time, ain’t he has?” If one asks “Have you any good apples?” the answer is “I do.” “Don’t you think?” with a falling inflection is often added to questions. The most striking idiom is the use of till (and until) as a conjunction meaning by the time, and as a preposition meaning at or on (temporarily). “It will be raining till we get home.” “We were tired till we were there.” “We’ll be back till (at) six.” A sort of genitive of time is found in this sentence: “She came Saturdays and left Mondays.” In each instance this means one particular day. An ethical dative is often heard: “Little Thomas ran away for his mother yesterday.”

  The immigrants from the South of Ireland, during the period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, exerted an influence upon the language that was vastly greater than that of the Germans, both directly and indirectly, but their contributions to the actual vocabulary were probably less. They gave American, indeed, very few new words; perhaps speakeasy, shillelah and smithereens exhaust the list. Lallapalooza may also be an Irish loan-word, though it is not Gælic, nor even English. It apparently comes from allay-foozee, a Mayo provincialism, signifying a sturdy fellow. Allay-foozee, in its turn, comes from the French allez-fusil, meaning “Forward the muskets!” — a memory, according to P. W. Joyce,52 of the French landing at Killala in 1798. Such phrases as Erin go bragh and such expletives as begob and begorry may perhaps be added: they have got into American understanding, though they are surely not distinctive Americanisms. But of far more importance, in the days of the great immigrations, than these few contributions to the vocabulary were certain speech habits that the Irish brought with them — habits of pronunciation, of syntax, and even of grammar. These habits were, in part, the fruit of efforts to translate the idioms of Gælic into English, and in part survivals from the English of the age of James I. The latter, preserved by Irish conservatism in speech, came into contact in America with habits surviving, with more or less change, from the same time, and so gave those American habits an unmistakable reinforcement. The Yankees have lived down such Jacobean pronunciations as tay for tea and desave for deceive, and these forms, on Irish lips, strike them as uncouth and absurd, but they still cling, in their common speech, to such forms as h’ist for hoist, bile for boil, chaw for chew, jine for join, sass for sauce, heighth for height, rench for rinse and lep for leaped, and the employment of precisely the same forms by the thousands of Irish immigrants who spread through the country undoubtedly gave them support, and so protected them, in a measure, from the assault of the purists. And the same support was give to drownded for drowned, oncet for once, ketch for catch, ag’in for against and onery for ordinary. C. H. Grandgent shows in “Old and New” (1920) that the so-called Irish oi- sound in jine and bile was still regarded as correct in the United States so late as 1822, though certain New England grammarians, eager to establish the more recent English usage, had protested against it before the end of the Eighteenth Century. The Irish who came in in the 30’s joined the populace in the war upon the reform, and to this day some of the old forms survive on the lower levels of the national speech.

  Certain usages of Gælic, carried over into the English of Ireland, fell upon fertile soil in America. One was the employment of the definite article before nouns, as in French and German. An Irishman does not say “I am good at Latin,” but “I am good at the Latin.” In the same way an American does not say “I had measles,” but “I had the measles.” There is, again, the use of the prefix a before various continuing verbs, as in a-going and a-riding. This usage, of course, is native to English, but it is much more common in the Irish dialect, on account of the influence of the parallel Gælic form, and it is also much more common in American. There is, yet again, a use of intensifying prefixes and suffixes, often set down as characteristically American, which may have been borrowed from the Irish. Examples of such stretch-forms are no-siree, yes-indeedy, teetotal. The Irishman is almost incapable of saying plain yes or no; he must always add some extra and gratuitous asseveration.53 The American is in like case. His speech bristles with intensives, so the Irish extravagance of speech struck a responsive chord in the American heart, and American borrowed, not only occasional words, but whole phrases, and some of them have become thoroughly naturalized. Joyce shows the Irish origin of many locutions that are now often mistaken for native inventions, for example, dead as an intensive, not to mention many familiar similes and proverbs. Certain Irish pronunciations, Gælic rather than archaic English, got into American during the early Nineteenth Century, often with humorous effect. Among them, one recalls bhoy, which entered our political slang in the middle 40’s but has since passed out.

  From other languages the borrowings during the period of growth were naturally less. Down to the last decades of the Nineteenth Century, the overwhelming majority of immigrants were either Germans or Irish; the Jews, Italians,
Scandinavians and Slavs were yet to come. But the first Chinese appeared in 1848, and soon their speech began to contribute its inevitable loan-words. These words were first adopted by the argonauts of the Pacific Coast, and a great many of them have remained Western localisms. A number of others have got into the common speech of the whole country. Of such sort are the verbs to yen (meaning to desire strongly, as a Chinaman is supposed to desire opium), to flop (meaning to sleep or lie down), and to kowtow, and the nouns joss, chow, yok-a-mi, fantan, chop-suey, chow-mein54 and tong. Josshouse, flophouse, tong-war, and chopsuey-joint are familiar derivatives. Contrary to what seems to be a popular opinion, hop is not Chinese. It is simply the common name of the Humulus lupulus, which, in English folklore, has long been held to have a soporific effect. Hop-pillows were brought to American by the first English colonists. Neither is high-binder a translation from a Chinese term, as seems to be commonly believed. So long ago as 1840 Edgar Allan Poe wrote in his Marginalia: