The list of American verbs made of simple nouns is almost endless. The process has been normal in English for a great many years, and at all periods it has produced forms that have survived, e.g., to house (Old English), to shackle (c. 1400) and to waltz (c. 1790). But it is carried on in the United States with a freedom which England has not seen since Elizabethan times, and though many of its products pass out almost as fast as they come in, others remain in the vocabulary, and rise slowly to respectable usage. A large number are succinct substitutes for verb phrases, and so give evidence of the American liking for short cuts in speech, e.g., to service for to give service,85 to intern for to serve as intern, to style for to cut in accord with the style, to biograph for to write the biography of,86 to chamois (or, perhaps more often, to shammy) for to polish with chamois, to model for to act as a model, to taxpay for to pay taxes on,87 to momentum for to give momentum to, to contact for to make contact with,88 to ready for to make ready, to protest for to protest against, to vacation, to holiday or to week-end for to take a vacation or holiday or to go on a week-end trip, and to yes for to say yes to.89 There is another class of verbs that may be called “regular” substitutes for the forms that differ from the corresponding nouns or adjectives, e.g., to loan for to lend,90 to author for to write,91 to host for to entertain, and to signature for to sign.92 Of verbs made freely and fancifully of simple nouns, whether simple or compound, there is a huge stock and it is enough to cite a few, some of them only nonce-words but others in more or less good usage: to gesture, to racketeer, to gavel, to reunion, to park,93 to waste-basket, to lobby-display,94 to press-agent, to clearance,95 to railroad, to grand marshal,96 to New Thought,97 to accession98 to demagogue, to bellyache, to propaganda, to S.O.S., to steam-roller, to pan, to janitor,99 to bible,100 to census,101 and so on. Some of these, of course, belong to various argots, but practically all of them would be intelligible to any alert American, and it would scarcely shock him to see them in his newspaper.102 The use of to room in the sense of to supply with a room is common, and it has brought in to meal and to sleep.103 The movement toward simplicity is also responsible for the triumph of to graduate over to be graduated and of to operate over to operate on. The latter is denounced regularly by the Journal of the American Medical Association and other medical authorities, but it makes steady headway.104 To chiropract is another sweet flower of American speech105 and to it, perhaps, to goose106 should be added. When to broadcast began to be used widely, in 1925, there was a debate among American grammarians over its preterite. Should it be broadcast or broadcasted? The majority of them appear to have preferred broadcasted, as more regular, and they were supported by the English grammarian, H. W. Fowler,107 but broadcast seems to have prevailed. It has bred the inevitable noun. Daily the newspapers announce that “His speech was broadcast last night” or that “A nation-wide broadcast has been arranged for tomorrow.”
The common American tendency to overwork a favorite verb has been often noted by English observers. How those of an early day were affected by to fix I have reported in Chapter I, Section 3. In our own time to get has done the heaviest service. Says Ernest Weekley in “Adjectives — and Other Words” (1930):
It has become a verb of motion, commonly used in the imperative, and a euphemism for kill, as when the gunman gets the sleuth or the sleuth gets the gunman. The successful yeggman makes his getaway, and the successful artist gets away with it, while comprehension of a speaker’s meaning can be conveyed by the formula, “I get you, Steve.”
Dr. Weekley might have added to get going, to get it over, to get wise, to get off (to publish or utter), to get religion, to get back at, to get behind, to get there, to get together, it gets me, to get by, to get the bulge (or drop) on, to get ahead of, to get solid, to get sore, to make a get-away, to get on to, and scores of other verb-phrases, all of them in everyday American use. Most of them, it will be noted, are made by the simple device of adding a preposition or adverb to the verb. American, especially on the colloquial level, is very rich in such compounds,108 and the differences in meaning between them and the verbs they come from are often great. Compare, for example, to give and to give out, to go back and to go back on, to light and to light out, to bawl and to bawl out, to butt and to butt in, to turn and to turn down, to go109 and to go big, to show and to show up, to put and to put over, to pass and to pass out, to call and to call down, to run and to run in, to wind and to wind up. To check has bred a whole series, e.g., to check up, to check in, to check out, to check with, to check against and to check over. Sometimes, to be sure, the addition seems to be only rhetorical, and many of the resultant forms strike an Englishman as redundant. Hurry up, in the imperative, is common in England, but to hurry up in the indicative is used less than the simple to hurry. Brush your hat off would seem American there, and so would to stop over, to open up, to beat up, to try out, to start off, to finish up, to average up, to lose out, to start in (or out), and to stay put. But such forms are almost innumerable in this country, and most of them, if they lack the sanction of the Yale Review, at least have that of the Congressional Record.110 Not a few of the characteristic American verb-phrases embody very bold and picturesque metaphors, e.g., to go haywire, to muscle in, to turn up missing, to spill the beans, to shoot the chutes, to put the skids under, to do a tailspin, to eat crow, to chew the rag, to hit the ceiling, to play possum, to hand him a lemon, to kick in, to show a yellow streak, to saw wood, to throw a scare into, and to come out at the little end of the horn. And some of the simple verbs show equally bold and picturesque transfers of meaning, e.g., to fire (in the sense of to dismiss), to can (in the same sense), to star, to neck, and so on.111
Verbs of the last-named class are heavily patronized by the headline writers, partly because they are pungent but mainly because most of them are very short. The favorite verbs of the newspaper copy-desk are those of three letters, e.g., to air (which serves to indicate any form of disclosure), to cut, to net, to set, to bar, to aid, to map, to nab, to hit, to rap, to vie and to ban. It has revived an archaism, to ire, and has produced to null from to nullify by clipping. Gassed is always used in place of asphyxiated. To admit is used as a substitute for to confess, to acknowledge, to concede, to acquiesce and to recognize. To cut is a synonym for every verb signifying any sort of opposition to enhancement. To back is to give any sort of support or recognition, to ban indicates any sort of prohibition, and to hit connotes every variety of criticism. A few of the headline verbs are of five letters, e.g., to claim, to photo, to blame, to quash, to speed and to score, and some are even of six letters, e.g., to attack, to debunk and to battle, but that is only because the researches of the copy-desk Websters have not, as yet, discovered shorter synonyms. Their preference, after their three-letter favorites, runs to four letter verbs, e.g., to best, to cite, to curb, to flay, to loom, to lure, to name, to oust, to push, to quit, to rule, to spur and to void, and among them, as among the nouns, their first choice is for those of onomatopeic tang.112
Writing in the late 60’s of the last century, Richard Grant White said that “in New England … even the boys and girls playing on the commons” used the auxiliary verbs will and shall “correctly,” which is to say, in accord with Southern English practice, and that “even in New York, New Jersey, and Ohio, in Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina, fairly educated people of English stock” did the same.113 But that was more than two generations ago, and the chances are that it wasn’t actually true even then. Today the distinction between will and shall has become so muddled in all save the most painstaking and artificial varieties of American that it may almost be said to have ceased to exist.114 Save for emphasis, shall and should are seldom used in the first person, and all of the confusions in other situations that are listed by H. W. Fowler in “Modern English Usage”115 and by Fowler and his brother in “The King’s English”116 are encountered in the United States every day. No ordinary American, save after the most laborious reflection, would detect anything wrong in thi
s sentence from the London Times, denounced as corrupt by the Fowlers: “We must reconcile what we would like to do with what we can do.” Nor in this by W. B. Yeats: “The character who delights us may commit murder like Macbeth … and yet we will rejoice in every happiness that comes to him.” When Leonard and Moffett submitted “Will you be at the Browns’ this evening?” to a committee made up principally of American philologians, seven of them called it perfectly sound English, eighteen put it down as “cultivated informal English,” and only four dismissed it as “uncultivated.” Two thought it was American, not English, but the Fowlers’ evidence shows that they were in error.117 In “The King’s English,” the Fowlers admit that the idiomatic use of the two auxiliaries, “while it comes by nature to Southern Englishmen,… is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it.” In Scotland and Ireland, as in the United States, the difference between them is largely disregarded, and no doubt Northern English example is at least partly responsible for American usage.118 As Leonard once said,119 “The whole mass of pronouncements about the matter in text-books is of very little importance now, since the future in English is most commonly expressed by neither shall nor will, but by the much commoner contraction ’ll, and by the forms is to go, about to go, is going to, and the whole range of auxiliary verbs which mean both past and future.”120 More than two generations ago, impatient of the effort to fasten an arbitrary English distinction upon American, George P. Marsh attacked the differentiation of shall from will as of “no logical value or significance whatever,” and predicted that “at no very distant day this verbal quibble will disappear, and one of the auxiliaries will be employed, with all persons of the nominative, exclusively as the sign of the future, and the other only as an expression of purpose or authority.”121 This prophecy has been substantially verified. Will is sound American “with all persons of the nominative,” and shall is almost invariably an “expression of purpose or authority.”
4. OTHER PARTS OF SPEECH
The schoolmarm, in fact, has virtually abandoned her old effort to differentiate between the two auxiliaries, but she continues the heroic task of trying to make her young charges grasp the difference between who and whom. Here, alas, the speechways of the American people seem to be again against her. The two forms of the pronoun are confused magnificently in the debates in Congress, and in most newspaper writing, and in ordinary discourse the great majority of Americans avoid whom diligently, as a word full of snares. When they employ it, it is often incorrectly, as in “Whom is your father?” and “Whom spoke to me?” Noah Webster, always the pragmatic reformer, denounced it as usually useless so long ago as 1783. Common sense, he argued, was on the side of “Who did he marry?” Today such a form as “Whom are you talking to?” would seem very affected to most Americans; they might write it, but they would never speak it.122 The use of me instead of I in “It’s me” is also almost universal in the United States, but here it is the objective form that is prevailing, not the nominative, as in the case of who and whom, “It’s me” will be discussed at length in Chapter IX, Section 3.
A shadowy line often separates what is currently coming into sound usage from what is still regarded as barbarous. No American of any pretensions, I assume, would defend ain’t as a substitute for isn’t, say in “He ain’t the man,” and yet ain’t is already tolerably respectable in the first person, where English countenances the even more clumsy aren’t. Aren’t has never got a foothold in the American first person; when it is used at all, which is very rarely, it is always as a conscious Briticism. Facing the alternative of employing the unwieldy “Am I not in this?” the American turns boldly to “Ain’t I in this?” It still grates a bit, perhaps, but aren’t grates even more.123 Here, as always, the popular speech is pulling the exacter speech along, and no one familiar with its successes in the past can have much doubt that it will succeed again, soon or late. In the same way it is breaking down the inflectional distinction between adverb and adjective, so that in bad begins to take on the dignity of a national idiom, and sure, to go big and run slow124 become almost respectable. When, on the entrance of the United States into the World War, the Tank Corps chose “Treat ’em rough” as its motto, no one thought to raise a grammatical objection, and the clipped adverb was printed upon hundreds of thousands of posters and displayed in every town in the country, always with the imprimatur of the national government. So again, American, in its spoken form, tends to obliterate the distinction between nearly related adjectives, e.g., healthful and healthy. And to challenge the somewhat absurd textbook prohibition of terminal prepositions, so that “Where are we at?” loses its old raciness. And to substitute as though for as if. And to split infinitives in a wholesale and completely innocent manner.125 And to dally lavishly with a supererogatory but, as in “I have no doubt but that.” The last occurs very frequently in the Congressional Record, and though it was denounced by Edward S. Gould so long ago as 1867126 it seems to be very firmly lodged in colloquial American, and even to have respectable standing in the standard speech. It was used often by the highly correct Henry Cabot Lodge,127 and has been written into a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States by Charles Evans Hughes.128 The one-he combination, so offensive to purists (among whom, in this case, I venture to include myself), is now so common in the United States that putting it down becomes quite hopeless. In 1921, when the late Warren Gamaliel Harding, LL.D., used it in his Inaugural Address, I mocked it in the Nation, but in vain, for most of the correspondents who wrote to me afterward argued for it. Of the twenty-nine philologians who voted on it in the Leonard-Moffett inquiry,129 six called it good “literary or formal English” and sixteen thought it was “cultivated, informal English.” It is, of course, not English at all, as Fowler observes in “Modern English Usage,” though it is used by “a small minority of modern British writers.” But in this country its use is almost universal, and I have even found it in a serious treatise on the national letters by a former editor of the Atlantic Monthly, edited by a posse of Yale professors and published by the University Press.130 The appearance of a redundant s at the end of such words as downward, somewhere and forward has been long marked in American. “In modern Standard English,” says Logan Pearsall Smith,131 “though not in the English of the United States, a distinction which we feel, but many of us could not define, is made between forward and forwards; forwards being used in definite contrast to any other direction, as ‘If you move at all, you can only move forwards’ while forward is used where no such contrast is implied, as in the common phrase, ‘to bring a matter forward.’”132 This distinction, pace Smith, retains some force in the United States too, but in general our usage allows the s in cases where English usage would certainly be against it. Gould, in the 50’s, noting its appearance at the end of such words as somewhere and anyway, denounced it as vulgar and illogical, and White, in the late 60’s, was against it even in towards. But towards, according to Fowler, is now prevailing even in England. Thornton traced anyways back to 1842 and showed that it was an archaism, and to be found in the Book of Common Prayer (c. 1560); perhaps it has been preserved by analogy with sideways. Henry James attacked “such forms of impunity as somewheres else and nowheres else, a good ways on and a good ways off” as “vulgarisms with which a great deal of general credit for what we good-naturedly call ‘refinement’ appears so able to coexist,”133 but his shrill complaint seems to have fallen upon sound-proofed ears. Perhaps he would have been even more upset, on his so unhappy American tour, if he had encountered no place and some place, which show some sign of dislodging nowheres and somewheres.
The general American liking for short cuts in speech, so plainly visible in the incessant multiplication of compounds and back-formations, is also shown in the popularity of abbreviations. They are employed in the United States, says John S. Farmer, “to an extent unknown in Europe. Life, they say, is short and the pace is quick; brevity, therefore, is not only the soul of wit, but the ess
ence of business capacity as well. This trait of the American character is discernible in every department of the national life and thought — even slang being curtailed at times.”134 O.K., C.O.D., N.G. and P.D.Q. are American masterpieces; the first has been borrowed by all the languages of Western Europe and some of those of Asia, and in the days of the great immigrations the immigrants learned all four immediately after hell and damn. Thornton has traced N.G. to 1840, and C.O.D. and P.D.Q. are probably quite as old. The earliest use of O.K. that has been recorded in the dictionaries is dated 1840 also, and the story generally credited is that it originated in Champaign county, Ohio, during the presidential campaign of that year. The Whig candidate was William Henry Harrison, an Ohioan, and on September 15 there was a rally in his interest in a grove belonging to John A. Ward, father of J. Q. A. Ward the sculptor, at Urbana. In the parade preceding the speech-making there were 42 farm-wagons, each freighted with a small log-cabin. One of these wagons was driven by John Rock, a nearby farmer. It was drawn by 24 horses, and had 36 young women as passengers, all dressed in white. On it was a streamer bearing the words “The People is Oll Korrect,” painted by Thomas Daniels, the local handy-man. The story is to the effect that Daniels’s error was seized upon by Harrison’s opponents, but that his friends, seeing the popular appeal in it, took it over themselves and made “The People is O.K.” their battle-cry. Unluckily, Mr. H. J. Carr, of the Urbana Citizen, has discovered that O.K. had appeared in Samuel Medary’s Ohio Statesman, published at Columbus, on September 11, four days before the Urbana meeting.135 More, it had been used in the Boston Transcript on April 15, five months before the meeting,136 and again in the Boston Atlas on June 20.137 There are many rival etymologies for the abbreviation. One derives it from the initials of one Obediah Kelly, an early railway freight-agent, who signed them to bills of lading. Another derives it from Keokuk, the name of an Indian chief from whom the town of Keokuk, Iowa, was named. His admirers called him Old Keokuk, and usually added “He’s all right!”, and so Old Keokuk, and finally the simple initials, came to mean the same thing.138 A third etymology derives O.K. from omnis korrecta, supposed to have been once used by schoolmasters in marking examination-papers.139 A fourth seeks its origin in Aux Cayes, the name of a port in what is now Haiti, whence the best rum came in the early days. A fifth holds that it was borrowed from the terminology of the early shipbuilders, who fashioned the timbers of their ships under cover, marked each one for identification, and then began the actual building by laying O.K. (i.e., outer keel) No. 1.140 A sixth contends that O.K. was invented by the early telegraphers, along with many other abbreviations, e.g., G.M. (good morning), G.A. (go ahead) and N.M. (no more).141 A seventh credits O.K. to the elder John Jacob Astor, “who marked it on bills presented to him for credit.”142 An eighth seeks its origin in the archaic English word hoacky or horkey, meaning the last load brought in from the fields at harvest.143 A ninth derives it from a Choctaw word, okeh, signifying “it is so.” “Webster’s New International Dictionary” (1934) accepts this last, though adding a saving “probably,” but the Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary (1933) rejects it, saying that “it does not agree with the evidence.” There is yet a tenth etymology, whereby O.K. is made to originate in a libel of Andrew Jackson by Seba Smith (Major Jack Downing), who is said to have alleged, c. 1832, that he saw Jackson’s endorsement “O.K., Amos,” on the elegant pronunciamentoes drawn up for him by his literary secretary, Amos Kendall. Says a floating newspaper paragraph:
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