How do I get to —?
Go right along, and take the first turning on the right, and you are right there.
Right?
Right.
Right!62
But this Englishman failed in his attempt to write correct American, despite his fine pedagogical passion. No American would ever use take the first turning; he would use turn at the first corner. As for right away, R. O. Williams argues that “so far as analogy can make good English, it is as good as one could choose.”63 Nevertheless, the Concise Oxford Dictionary admits it only as an Americanism, and avoids all mention of the other American uses of right. Good is almost as protean. It is not only used as a general synonym for all adverbs connoting satisfaction, as in to feel good, to be treated good, to sleep good, but also as an adjectival reinforcement to adjectives, as in “I hit him good and hard” and “I am good and tired.” The American use of some as an adjective indicating the superlative, as in “She is some girl,” is now common in England, but its employment as an adverb to indicate either moderation or intensification, as in “I play golf some” and “That’s lying some,” is still looked upon as an Americanism there. The former usage has respectable English precedents, but the latter seems to be American in origin. Thornton has traced it to 1785. It enjoyed a revival during the World War, and produced a number of counter-phrases, e.g., going some. In 1918 a writer in the Atlantic Monthly hailed some as “some word — a true super-word.”64 But a year later an Englishman writing in English (London) was denouncing it as “a pure vulgarism, which answers no real need.”65 The same word often has different meanings in the United States and England. Thus, a davenport, which is a couch here, is a desk or escritoire there; a dumb-waiter, which is an elevator here, is a revolving-table there; and a bureau, which is a chest of drawers here, is a desk or writing-table with drawers there. Haberdashery, in the United States, means men’s wear (excluding shoes and outer clothes); in England it designates what we call notions. A guy, in England, is a ridiculous figure, and the word is thus opprobrious; in the United States the word is hardly more than an amiable synonym for fellow. The English guy owes its origin to the effigies of Guy Fawkes, leader of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which used to be burnt in public on November 5; the American word seems to be derived from the guy-rope of a circus tent, and first appeared in the complimentary form of head-guy. When G. K. Chesterton made his first visit to the United States he was much upset when an admiring reporter described him as a regular guy. But the English sense of the word is preserved in the American verb to guy. In this country luggage is coming to have the special meaning of the bags in which baggage is packed; in England it means their contents, though baggage is still used by military men. A lobbyist, in England, is not a legislative wire-puller, but a journalist who frequents the lobby of the House of Commons, looking for news and gossip.66 A veteran always means a soldier of long service; not, as with us, any ex-soldier. Pussyfoot, according to Horwill, means “a temperance propagandist” in England, obviously because of a misunderstanding of the nickname of William E. (Pussyfoot) Johnson, who set up shop in London in 1916 and proposed to convert the English to Prohibition. In the United States, of course, the word has a quite different meaning, and Johnson himself explains in “Who’s Who in America” that it was applied to him “because of his catlike policies in pursuing lawbreakers in the Indian Territory,” 1906–7. The English use the same measures that we do, but in many cases their values differ. Their bushel, since 1826, has contained 2,218.192 cubic inches, whereas we retain the old Winchester bushel of 2,150.42 inches. Their peck, of course, follows suit. So with their gallon, quart, pint and gill, all of which are larger than ours. Their hundredweight is 112 pounds, whereas ours is 100 pounds. Of their quarter of wheat we know nothing, nor have we their quartern-loaf or their quarter-days. A billion, in England, is not 1,000,000,000, but 1,000,000,000,000; for the former the word is milliard. According to Alistair Cooke, it is these words of differing meaning in England and the United States that give a visiting Englishman most trouble. He says:
If an Englishman reads “The floorwalker says to go to the notion counter,” he knows at least one word he does not understand. If he reads a speech of President Roosevelt declaring that “our industries will have little doubt of black-ink operations in the last quarter of the year,” he is at least aware of a foreign usage, and may be trusted to go off and discover it. But if I write “The clerk gave a biscuit to the solicitor,” he will imagine something precise, if a little odd. The trouble is that, however lively his imagination, what he imagines may be precise but is bound to be wrong. For he is confronted with three nouns which mean different things in the United States and in England.67
3. ENGLISH DIFFICULTIES WITH AMERICAN
Very few English authors, even those who have made lengthy visits to the United States, ever manage to write American in a realistic manner. At the time the American movies were first terrorizing English purists the late W. L. George undertook a tour of this country , and on his return home wrote a paper dealing with his observations.68 George was a very competent reporter, and he had no prejudice against Americanisms; on the contrary, he delighted in them. But despite his diligent effort to write them he dropped into many Briticisms, some almost as unintelligible to the average American reader as so many Gallicisms. On page after page of his paper they display the practical impossibility of the enterprise: back-garden for back-yard, perambulator for baby-carriage; corn-market for grain-market, coal-owner for coal-operator, post for mail, petrol for gasoline, and so on. And to top them there were English terms that had no American equivalents at all, for example, kitchen-fender. Every English author who attempts to render the speech of American characters makes the same mess of it. H. G. Wells’s American in “Mr. Britling Sees It Through “is only matched by G. K. Chesterton’s in “Man Alive.” Even Kipling, who submitted the manuscript of “Captains Courageous” to American friends for criticism, yet managed to make an American in it say: “He’s by way of being a fisherman now.”69 The late Frank M. Bicknell once amassed some amusing examples of this unanimous failing.70 Sir Max Pemberton, in a short story dealing with an American girl’s visit to England, made her say: “I’m right glad … You’re as pale as spectres, I guess … Fancy that, now!… You are my guest, I reckon,… and here you are, my word!” C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, in depicting a former American naval officer, made him speak of saloon-corner men (corner-loafers?). E. W. Hornung, in one of his “Raffles” stories, introduced an American prize-fighter who went to London and regaled the populace with such things as these: “Blamed if our Bowery boys ain’t cock-angels to scum like this … By the holy tinker!… Blight and blister him!… I guess I’ll punch his face into a jam pudding … Say, sonny, I like you a lot, but I sha’n’t like you if you’re not a good boy.” The American use of way and away seems to have daunted many of the authors quoted by Mr. Bicknell; several of them agree on forms that are certainly never heard in the United States. Thus H. B. Marriott Watson makes an American character say: “You ought to have done business with me away in Chicago,” and Walter Frith makes another say: “He has gone way off to Hol-born,” “I stroll a block or two way down the Strand,” “I’ll drive him way down home by easy stages,” and “He can pack his grip and be way off home.” The American use of gotten also seems to present difficulties to English authors. For example, in “Staying with Relations” (1930), by Rose Macaulay, American characters are made to say “The kid’s the only one who’s gotten sense,” “You’ve gotten but one small grip apiece,” “That about uses up all the energy they’ve gotten,” and “That’s what’s wrong with Mexico, they’ve gotten no public spirit.”71
“No Englishman,” says Bruce Bliven, “really understands our native tongue; interpreters are ever so much more needed than they are between French or Germans and ourselves. That is why British authors never put into the mouth of an American character anything other than weird gibberish — presumably deriving from a faint, in
correct memory of Bret Harte and George Ade, with a touch of erroneous Josh Billings.”72 The late John Galsworthy, who frequently visited the United States, never came within miles of writing sound American. His stock device for indicating American characters was to lard his dialogue with I judge, gee, cats (as an exclamation), vurry (for very), dandy and cunning. He almost invariably confused have got and have gotten, the latter of which is used by Americans only in the sense of have acquired, received or become, not in the sense of simple have. Rather curiously, he sometimes put good American phrases into the mouths of English characters, e.g., good egg and to say a mouthful.73 Arnold Bennett, like Galsworthy, was fond of making American he-men use lovely in such sentences as “It was a lovely party.” Another shining offender was the late Edgar Wallace, and yet another was the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose American, Bill Scanlon, in “Maracot Deep” has been described as “one of the most extraordinary linguists ever known to fiction; the Bowery, Vermont, Whitechapel, Texas: all of these tongues are his, not to mention a few fragments of Pennsylvania Dutch.”74 “Mannerisms of speech that to an American would identify the speaker as from the Middle West, South, Boston, or Philadelphia,” says Miss Mildred Wasson,75 “are mixed freely in the speeches of American characters as interpreted by English writers. Ridiculous uses of words, never to be heard from the tongue of an American man, are invariably ascribed to him.” She continues:
Granted that it is difficult for a stranger to understand our regional differences without years of residence in each part of this country, it is still more difficult for him to grasp that we have social lines of demarcation in speech as definite as those in England and France. There are horizontal lines which are not shown on the map. To sense those intangible lines, separating stratum from stratum in society and education, one must know America. To ignore them stamps a writer, to Americans at least, as being a bit off his ground. An American writing of an English lord and making him speak music-hall cockney would go just as far astray.
Miss Anna Branson Hillyard once offered publicly, in an article in the London Athenœum,76 to undertake the revision of English manuscripts dealing with American people and speech for “fees carefully and inversely scaled by the consultant’s importance.” Miss Hillyard, in the same article, cited a curious misunderstanding of American by Rupert Brooke. When Brooke was in the United States he sent a letter to the Westminster Gazette containing the phrase “You bet your —.” The editor, unable to make anything of it, inserted the word boots in place of the dash. Brooke thereupon wrote a letter to a friend, Edward Marsh, complaining of this botching of his Americanism, and Marsh afterward printed it in his memoir of the poet. Miss Hillyard says that she was long puzzled by this alleged Americanism, and wondered where Brooke had picked it up. Finally, “light dawned by way of a comic cartoon. It was the classic phrase, you betcha (accent heavily on the bet) which Brooke was spelling conventionally!” And, as Miss Hillyard shows, incorrectly, as usual, for you betcha is not a collision form of you bet your but a collision form of you bet you — an imitative second person of I bet you, which in comic-cartoon circles is pronounced and spelled I betcha.77
When they venture to deal with Americanisms humorously the British literati do even worse. The contributors to Punch often try their hands at the business, and with melancholy results. From their efforts an American pathologist of language has recovered the following:
He heard foot noises of quite a bunch.
I reckon to work through that programme twice a day, and I garntee them bears gets to know eighty barrel oil leaving Central daily under my tabs.
They greased for the trolley.
Young split, your lil jaunt soaks me twelve dollar seventy-five.78
Here, finally, is the effort of the advertising agent of the Morris motor-car to do an advertisement in the American manner:
Say, bud, jest haow do you calculate to buy an automobile? Do you act pensive after you’ve bought, or do you let a few facts form fours on your grey matter before you per-mit the local car agent to take a hack at your bank balance?
F’rinstance, what horse-power class do you aim to get into? Will your pocket bear a 20 h.p., and, if not, will a 10 h.p. bear your family? That’s the first problem, and the best way to answer it is to think what old friend Solomon would have done and cut th’ trouble in half by making your car an 11.9 — safe both ways up.
Wal, after you’ve laid out your cash an’ folded its arms on its little chest, there are just two people who are liable to hold you up for ransom; the tax-collector and th’ polisman. Per-sonally, I give a polisman just nuthin’ and a tax-collector as little as George and Mary will let me. If I’m in the 11.9 h.p. class I can send the kids to school with th’ tax balance. Get me?79
Colloquial English is just as unfathomable to most Americans as colloquial American is to Englishmen. Galsworthy not only puzzled his American readers with his bogus Americanisms; he also puzzled them with his attempts at English slang. When “The Silver Spoon” was published in this country, in 1926, Harry Hansen was moved to print the following caveat:
When a character says, “I shall break for lunch now” we understand what he means, but how are we to know what is meant by bees too bee busy, and again, bee weak-minded, which apparently is not a typographical error. Mr. Galsworthy’s characters take a lunar, and enjoy the prospect of getting tonked. They are hit on the boko. “It’s not my business to queer the pitch of her money getting,” says one, and of another the author writes: “What was his image of her but a phlizz?”80
The last word here, I suspect, was actually a typographical error for phiz. But Galsworthy was too austere a man to write slang, and Mr. H. W. Seaman tells me that he is also baffled by some of the phrases that baffled Mr. Hansen. In the following passage from Mrs. Joseph Conrad’s cook-book (1923) there were no visible blunders, yet to most American housewives it must have been almost unintelligible:
We shall need several enameled basins of various sizes, a fish-slice, a vegetable-slice, a wire salad-basket, one or two wooden spoons, two large iron ones, a good toasting-fork, a small Dutch oven to hang in front of the fire.81
Nor would it be easy to find Americans able, without some pondering, to comprehend such news items as the following:
Lewis had driven the horse and trap laden with milk-churns to a collecting-stage on the main road, and to do so he had to cross Wood Green level-crossing.… He apparently failed to see a train approaching around a bend.… The driver of the train pulled up promptly.…82
Even ordinary business correspondence between Englishmen and Americans is sometimes made difficult by differences in the two vocabularies. In 1932 the publisher of the Decatur, Ill., Review wrote to the London Times, asking what its practice was in the matter of stereotyping half-tones. The reply of its chief engineer was not downright unintelligible, but it contained so many strange words and phrases that the Review was moved to print an editorial about them.83 In England, it appeared, stereotypers’ blankets were called packing, mat-rollers were mangles, mats (matrices) were flongs, and to underlay a cut was to bump a block. To underlay has since been adopted in England, but cut is seldom used. As we have seen in Chapter I, Section 4, the English often have difficulty understanding American books, and protest against their strange locutions with great bitterness. When my series of “Prejudices” began to be reprinted in London in 1921, many of the notices they received roundly denounced my Americanisms. But when, five years later, I translated the text from American into Standard English for a volume of selections, it was reviewed very amiably, and sold better than any of the books from which its contents were drawn.84 At about the same time William Feather of Cleveland, the editor of a syndicated house-organ, sold the English rights thereto to Alfred Pemberton, a London advertising agent. Mr. Feather writes excellent English, as English is understood in this country, but for British consumption many of his articles had to be extensively revised. In American Speech he later printed two amusing papers listing s
ome of the changes made.85 I content myself with parallel passages from the American and English version of an article describing an ideal weekend in the country:
Feather’s American Pembertotfs English
The interior essentials are several lamps, a large supply of logs, a blazing fire, and a table loaded with broiled Spring chicken, steaming Golden Bantam corn, young string-beans, a pitcher of fresh milk, a pot of black coffee, and perhaps a large peach shortcake, with whipped cream. The interior essentials are several lamps, a large supply of logs, a blazing fire, and a table loaded with roast pheasant and bacon, steaming hot spinach, crisp potatoes, and bread sauce, a jug of cream, a pot of black coffee, and perhaps a large Stilton cheese and a jug of old ale.86
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