American Language

by H. L. Mencken

  148 Under date of March 29, 1935 I received the following from Mr. P. B. Merry of the B.V.D. Company, Inc.: “From the standpoint of business psychology and because of the great public curiosity as to the meaning of our trademark, we would not care to have you publish any information regarding its origin, but for your personal use, if you request it, we will be glad to tell you the history of B.V.D.” I did not request it.

  149 See Semi-Secret Abbreviations, by Percy W. Long, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. III, 1915, and Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916. Dr. Long lists, among others, c. & s. (Navy: clean and sober), G.b.F. (among teachers: God bless Friday), c.o.p. (department-stores: customer’s own property), r.b. (tailors: round back), b.d.t. (college: back-door trot), g.p. (medical men: grateful patient), G.o.k. (medical men: God only knows), f.h.b. (general: family hold back), and b.s. (college: euphemistically explained by Dr. Long as meaning bovine excrescence).

  150 Alphabetical soup is itself an Americanism. It designates a noodle-soup in which the noodles are stamped out in the form of letters of the alphabet.

  151 See Notes on the Vernacular, by Louise Pound, American Mercury, Oct., 1924, p. 237.

  152 See Showing Hollywood, by Cecelia Ager, Variety, July 23, 1930, p. 49.

  153 In a speech in the Senate by Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska, on Feb. 21, 1921, it was used in five or six distinct senses. The speech may be found in the Congressional Record of the same date, p. 374 ff.

  154 Angle got into English about 15 years later. For examples of its use there see The Supplement to the O.E.D., by George G. Loane, Literary Supplement to the London Times, March 8, 1934, p. 162.

  155 In 1906, according to Enid C. Dauncey, Living Age, Dec. 15, to claim was “employed in the most inhuman fashion to do the work of a dozen healthy, willing substitutes,” e.g., to allege, assert, protest, profess, advance, propound, depose, avow.

  156 I find it used no less than five times on a single page of American Writers, by Edwin L. Miller, assistant superintendent of schools of Detroit; Philadelphia, 1934, p. 676. See Educational Lingo, by Olivia Pound, American Speech, March, 1926. Miss Pound makes some amusing comments upon the platitudinous and cliché-studded English of the gogues. When outstanding got to England it hatched an adverb, outstandingly. See English, Feb., 1920, p. 286, and Speech Degeneracy, by M. V. P. Yeaman, American Speech, Nov., 1925.

  157 See Classic, by R. G. Lewis, American Speech, June, 1928, p. 433.

  158 The Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary suggests that dingus is derived from the Dutch ding (a thing). The earliest quotation given is dated 1898. See American Indefinite Names, by Louise Pound, American Mercury, Oct., 1924, p. 236.

  159 A Comprehensive Guide to Good English; Chicago, 1927, p. 269. See also Beau Geste?, by J. M. Stead-man, Jr., American Speech, June, 1928.

  160 The Census Bureau explains somewhat lamely (Fifteenth Census: Population, Vol. II; Washington, 1933, p. 27) that “by reason of its growing importance, the Mexican element was given a separate classification in 1930,” though it had been “included for the most part with the white population at prior censuses.” The instruction given to enumerators was that “all persons born in Mexico, or having parents born in Mexico, who are not definitely white, Negro, Indian, Chinese or Japanese, should be returned as Mexicans.” Under this instruction, 1,422,533 Mexicans were returned in 1930, besides 65,968 “persons of Mexican birth or parentage returned as white.”

  161 Congressional Record, Feb. 19, 1935, p. 2290.

  162 Including Negroes, Mexicans and Asiatics, the total number was 14,-204,149. Of these, 7,919,536 were naturalized, 1,266,419 had taken out their first papers, 4,518,341 had made no move to be naturalized, and 499,853 were of uncertain status. It was estimated in 1934 that the number of the unnaturalized had shrunk to 3,600,000. Very often the statement is made that there are also millions of unrecorded aliens in the country, but for this there is no evidence.

  163 These figures, it should be noted, do not show the total number of foreign-born Jews in the country. “Many Jews of foreign birth,” says the Census Bureau (Fifteenth Census: Population, Vol. II; Washington, 1933, p. 342), “report German, Russian or other languages as their mother tongue.”

  164 See New Orleans Word-List, by E. Riedel, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. IV, 1916; Louisiana, by James Routh, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916; and Terms From Louisiana, by James Routh and E. O. Barker, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. VI, 1917. Appended to the last-named is a long list of Louisiana names for birds and animals, many of them French, e.g., aigle tête blanche (the bald eagle), becas-sine (a species of snipe), biorque (the bittern), carencro (vulture), corbigeau (plover), dindon farouche or dindon sauvage (wild turkey), gros-bec (heron), paper bleu (finch), and bassaris (civet cat). The word ofay, which may have come from the French au fait (signifying mastery), is in general use in the Negro press of the United States to designate a white person. It is possible that it originated in New Orleans. Its popularity, I suspect, is at least partly due to its brevity, which makes it a good headline word. Most of the more recent American borrowings from French have come in through English, e.g., garage, gigolo and hangar, or have entered the two languages simultaneously, but rô-tisserie, with the accent omitted, seems to be an Americanism. It signifies an eating-house wherein chickens and butcher’s meat are roasted at a charcoal-grill, usually in the show-window of the establishment. It has been in use in New York since 1900 or thereabout, but is encountered only infrequently elsewhere.

  165 Twenty Idioms Illustrating the Influence of Swedish on English, by Thorvald E. Holter, American Speech, Feb., 1931.

  166 Mr. Roy W. Swanson, of the editorial staff of the St. Paul Dispatch.

  167 See Czech Influence Upon the American Vocabulary, by Mon-signor J. B. Dudek, Czecho-Slovak Student Life (Lisle, Ill.), June, 1928.

  168 I am indebted here to Mr. Charles J. Lovell. The prevalence of Dutch loan-words in the Hudson river region has been remarked in Chapter III, Section 1, and of Spanish loan-words in the Southwest in Chapter IV, Section 3.

  169 I am indebted here to Mr. Arthur R. Coelho.

  170 According to H. Heshin (American Speech, May, 1926, p. 456) mazuma is derived from a Chaldean word, m’zumon, “meaning in literal translation the ready necessary.” Gefilte, of course, is the German gefüllte (stuffed).

  171 Here I am indebted to Mr. Albert Kaplan.

  172 In the collectanea of Judge J. C. Ruppenthal, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1016, p. 326.

  173 The following is from a letter signed Philologist in the New York Evening Post, Feb. 15, 1929: “Any one who has ever visited drowsy little inns of the German countryside remembers the grotesque portrait of the chap with a topheavy, huge and red nose, possibly be-haired, on the tip of which a fat fly takes it easy. In order that the guests may not mistake it for a likeness of Cyrano, an invariable legend cautions energetically: ‘Kibitz, halts maul!’ (Kibitzer, keep your mouth shut).” Another correspondent, Hermann Post, wrote on the same day: “The eggs of the peewit are very much sought after for their delicious taste. They are laid on the ground. The bird, to protect the eggs, flies frantically around the heads of people looking for them.”

  174 Lingo of the Shoe Salesman, by David Geller, American Speech, Dec., 1934.

  175 The Borax House, by Louise Conant, American Mercury, June, 1929.

  176 I am indebted in Yiddish matters to Mr. B. H. Hartogensis of Baltimore, who has undertaken an extensive study of Loan-Words From the Hebrew in the American Language, not yet published.

  177 A writer in the Editor and Publisher for Dec. 25, 1919, p. 30, credits the first use of gabfest to the late Joseph S. McCullagh, editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. He says: “McCullagh coined the word while writing a comment upon an unusually prolonged and empty debate in Congress. No other word in the dictionary or out of it seemed to fit the case so well, and as a great percentage of the readers of the Globe-Democrat throughout the Central West were of German birth or origin, gabfest was seized upon wit
h hearty zest, and it is today very generally applied to any protracted and particularly loquacious gathering.” In the Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary the first quoted use of the word is from the Grand Rapids (Mich.) Evening Express, July 30, 1904.

  178 The “first annual bookfest and movie star rummage sale” of the League of American Penwomen was held at the Hotel Marion, Little Rock, Ark., Jan. 13–14, 1924. An applefest was held at the Marble Collegiate Church, New York City, in Dec., 1922. The North Side Community Choral Club, a Negro organization, held a sanger-fest (without the umlaut) in Pittsburgh in April, 1927. (Pittsburgh Courier, April 9.) See Domestication of the Suffix -jest, by Louise Pound, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916.

  179 American Speech, April, 1935, p. 155, reports a punning analogue, squanderlust, and ascribes it to Louis Ludlow, a member of Congress from Indiana.

  180 See The Word Blizzard, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, Feb., 1928, and Blizzard Again, by the same, American Speech, Feb., 1930.

  181 The letter is to be found in The Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, by Marie Hansen Taylor; Boston, 1884. I am indebted for the reference to And How, by J. R. Schultz, American Speech, Dec., 1933, p. 80.

  182 See The Cambridge History of American Literature; New York, 1921; Ch. IX; p. 23 ff.

  183 New Yorker, Feb. 16, 1935.

  184 I am informed by the Rev. W. G. Polack, of Evansville, Ind., that certain Lutherans in the United States, following German usage, employ vicar to designate “a theological student, not yet ordained, who is doing temporary supply-work in a mission congregation.” The verb to vicar means to occupy such a pulpit. Mr. Polack believes that mission-festival, common in the Middle West, comes from the German missionsfest. So with agenda, used by some of the Lutheran churches to designate their Book of Common Prayer. He says that it is not the English term, but the German agende. He notes also the use of confirmand to designate a candidate for confirmation; of to announce to indicate notifying a pastor of an intention to partake of communion (Ger. sich anmel-den); and of inner-mission (Ger. innere mission) instead of the usual home-mission; and of confessional-address (beichtrede). All these terms are used by English-speaking Lutherans.

  185 For the following I am indebted to Mr. Leon L. Kay, for six years a correspondent of the United Press in Latin America: “The lower classes always slur the consonant in the regular ending, -ado, of Spanish participles, and so do the upper classes in rapid speech or unguarded moments. Furthermore, the final o is sounded so lightly as to make a virtual diphthong of ao, equivalent to ou in mouth. Peons, never able to, are seldom asked to pay fines. To them, to be juzgado (sentenced) means simply to be jailed. When Felipe or José, after the usual week-end drunk, is missed and inquired after, the answer to ‘Where is he?’ is ‘Juzgado.’ The first Americans, seeking missing ranch-hands, no doubt took this to be a Spanish word for jail, and so hoosegow was born. Apart from shifting the stress to the first from the penultimate syllable, the South-westerners have achieved an almost perfect transliteration.” The Spanish j is pronounced like our h, the Spanish u like our oo, and the Spanish ado like our ou.

  186 Dearborn Independent, March 3, 1923: “It is said that one quart was sufficient to craze the brains of ten Indians.”

  187 See Chautauqua Notes, by J. R. Schultz, American Speech, Oct., 1934, p. 232.

  188 The word policy, which was used in the United States from about 1885 to 1915 to designate the form of gambling now called numbers, was from the Italian polizza. But it apparently came in by way of English, though with a change in meaning, and it is now virtually obsolete.

  189 By M. H. Palmer in the London Morning Post, Feb. 9, 1935.

  190 See the following notes by Louise Pound, all in Dialect Notes; Vol. IV, Pt. IV, 1916, p. 304; Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916, p. 354; Vol. V, Pt. I, 1918, p. 11.

  VI

  AMERICAN AND ENGLISH

  I. THE INFILTRATION OF ENGLISH BY AMERICANISMS

  The English travelers and reviewers whose pious horror of Americanisms has been recorded in Chapters I and III were able, for a while, to shut off their flow into Standard English, but only for a while. The tide began to turn, according to Sir William Craigie,1 in 1820, and soon thereafter a large number of Yankee neologisms that had been resisted with heroic dudgeon came into common use in England, e.g., reliable, influential, talented and lengthy. Charles Dickens was credited by Bishop Coxe2 with responsibility for the final acceptance of all four words: he put them into his “American Notes” in 1842 and Coxe believed that he thus naturalized them. But as a matter of fact they had all come in before this. Coleridge used reliable in 1800 and influential in 1833, and though he was still denouncing talented as “that vile and barbarous vocable” in 1832, and it was dismissed as a word “proper to avoid” by Macaulay even in 1842,3 it had been used by the critic and philologian, William Taylor, in 1830, by Sir William Herschel, the astronomer, in 1829, and by no less an Americophobe than Robert Southey in 1828. Southey, in his turn, sneered at lengthy in 1812 and again in 1834, but it was used by Jeremy Bentham so early as 1816, by Scott in 1827 (though still as a conscious Americanism), and by Dickens himself in “Pickwick” in 1837, five years before the publication of “American Notes.” Talented had become so respectable by 1842 that it was accepted by E. B. Pusey, leader of the Oxford Movement,4 and fifteen years later it received the imprimatur of Gladstone. Along with reliable, influential and lengthy it now appears in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, published by the brothers Fowler in 1911, and of the four words, only lengthy is noted as “originally an Americanism.”5 All are listed in Casselt’s Dictionary without remark. During the half century following 1820 many other Americanisms also made their way into English. Even to belittle, which had provoked an almost hysterical outburst from the European Magazine and London Review when Thomas Jefferson ventured to use it in 1787,6 was so generally accepted by 1862 that Anthony Trollope admitted it to his chaste vocabulary.

  John S. Farmer says7 that the American humorists who flourished after the Civil War broke down most of the remaining barriers to Americanisms. The English purists continued to rage against them, as they do even to this day, but the success in England of such writers as Charles Godfrey Leland (Hans Breitmann), Charles Heber Clark (Max Adeler), Charles Farrar Browne (Artemus Ward), David R. Locke (Petroleum V. Nasby) and Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) made the English public familiar with the pungent neologisms of the West, and many of them were taken into the language. George F. Whicher says that Leland and Clark “became better known in England than in the United States;”8 as for Browne, he was so popular in London that he moved there in 1866, and died on English soil a year later. The influence of these men, according to Farmer, was still strong in the late 80’s; they had popularized “American peculiarities of speech and diction to an extent which, a few years since, would have been deemed incredible.” He continued:

  Even our newspapers, hitherto regarded as models of correct literary style, are many of them following in their wake; and both in matter and phraseology are lending countenance to what at first sight appears a monstrously crude and almost imbecile jargon; while others, fearful of a direct plunge, modestly introduce the uncouth bantlings with a saving clause. The phrase, as the Americans say, might in some cases be ordered from the type-foundry as a logotype, so frequently does it do introduction duty.9

  But before the great invasion of England by American movies, beginning in the first years of the World War, Americanisms commonly had to linger in a sort of linguistic Alsatia a long while before they were accepted, and even then they were sometimes changed in meaning. The cases of caucus and buncombe are perhaps typical. The former, as we have seen in Chapter III, Section 1, was borrowed from an Indian word so early as 1624, and was in general use in the American colonies before 1738, but in 1818 Sydney Smith was dismissing it as “the cant word of the Americans,” and even in 1853 Bulwer-Lytton, using it in “My Novel,” was conscious that it was a somewhat strange Americanism. It was not until 1878
that it came into general use in England, and then, in the words of the Oxford Dictionary, it was “grossly misapplied.” In the United States it had the settled meaning of a meeting of some division, large or small, of a political or legislative body for the purpose of agreeing upon a united course of action in the main assembly, but in England it was applied to what we would call the organization. It was used by Benjamin Disraeli to designate the faction of Birmingham Liberals otherwise known as the Six Hundred, and in this sense was used thereafter by the Times and other English newspapers. It retains that meaning to this day; it signifies the managing committee of a party or faction — something corresponding to our national committees, our State committees, or to the half-forgotten congressional caucuses of the 1820’s. It thus has a disparaging connotation, and the London Saturday Review, in 1888, denounced what it called a caucuser as “a machine politician.” Caucuser is a derivative concocted in England; it is never used in the United States, and does not appear in “Webster’s New International Dictionary” (1934). Nor does caucusdom, which appeared in England in 1885. Buncombe got into Standard English just as slowly as caucus, and suffered a change too, though it was of a different kind. The word has been in use in the United States since the beginning of the last century, and was spoken of as “old and common at Washington” by a writer in Niles’s Register on September 27, 1827, but it did not come into general use in England until the late 1850’s, and then its spelling was changed to bunkum.

  But when the American clipped form bunk arose toward the end of the World War it began to appear in England almost instantly, for it had the influence of the American movies behind it, and when the verb to debunk followed ten years later it got into use quite as quickly. Hundreds of other saucy Americanisms have followed it, often in successful competition with English neologisms. Thus, when the English police began to patrol the roads on motorcycles they were called, officially, mobile police, but in a little while an alternative name for them was speed-cops, borrowed from the American movies and talkies.10 This invasion is resisted valiantly by swarms of volunteer guardians of the national linguistic chastity, and at irregular intervals they break out into violent crusades against this or that American novelty,11 but many of the more colorful ones now get into circulation very rapidly. H. W. Horwill, in his “Dictionary of Modern American Usage,”12 notes a large number that have “become naturalized since the beginning of the present century ,” e.g., the compounds hot-air, bed-rock, come-back, -filling-station, high-brow, jay-walker, round-up and foot-wear, the simple nouns crook (a criminal), boom, kick (a powerful effect), publicity (advertising) and conservatory (musical), the verbs to park (automobile), to rattle and to boom, and the verb-phrases to put across, to blow in (to turn up), to get away with, to make good, to get a move on, to put over and to turn down; and an even larger number that are “apparently becoming naturalized,” e.g., the compounds bargain-counter, bell-boy, schedule-time, speed-way, chafing-dish, carpet-bagger, come-down, joy-ride, hold-up, horse-sense, soap-box, frame-up dance-hall, key-man, close-up, close-call, rough-house, gold-brick, log-rolling and money-to-burn, the simple nouns rally, bromide, cub, cut (in the sense of a reduction), engineer (locomotive), fan (enthusiast), pep, machine (political), quitter, pull (political), pointer, mixer and cereal (breakfast-food), the simple verbs to ditch, to feature, to fire (dismiss), to pass (a dividend) and to hustle, the verb-phrases to bank on, to get busy, to come to stay, to crowd out, to fall down (or for), to try out, to pick on, to hand-pick, to iron out, to see the light, to deliver the goods, to soft-pedal, to sand-bag, to sit up and take notice, to snow under, to stay put, to side-step, to side-track, to stand for and to win out, and the miscellaneous idioms good and, on the side, up to and up against. Many of these, of course, belong to slang but some of them are nevertheless making their way into relatively decorous circles. The late Dr. Paul Shorey, professor of Greek at the University of Chicago, used to amuse himself by collecting instances of the use of thumping Americanisms by English authors of dignified standing. He found to make good and cold feet in John Galsworthy, rubber-neck in Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge!), nothing doing in Lowes Dickinson, proposition “as a word of all work” in Mrs. Humphrey Ward, to cough up in John Masefield, the limit in Archibald Marshall, and up against a tough proposition in William J. Locke.13 Such literati seldom if ever adorn their discourse with the current slang of their own country, save of course in depicting low or careless characters. But they are fetched by the piquancy of Americanisms, and employ them for their pungent rhetorical effect. The same consideration influences English politicians too, and “a veteran Parliamentarian” was lately saying: