American Language

by H. L. Mencken

  1 S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXVII, 1927, p. 208.

  2 Americanisms in England, by A. Cleveland Coxe, Forum, Oct., 1886.

  3 Letter to Macvey Napier, April 18, 1842, printed in The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, by G. Otto Trevelyan; New York, 1877, Vol. II, p. 100.

  4 Here, as in so many other places, I am indebted to the Oxford Dictionary for its dated quotations.

  5 The Fowlers call reliable “an established word avoided by purists as of irregular formation.” It has actually been in good usage in England since the 60’s. In 1871, when the United States claimed a large sum from England as indemnity for the depredations of the Confederate cruiser Alabama, Punch suggested that the injury England had suffered through the introduction of the word was sufficient compensation.

  6 See Chapter I, Section 2, for the text of its denunciation.

  7 Americanisms Old and New; London, 1889, p. vii.

  8 Cambridge History of American Literature; New York, 1921, Vol. III, p. 26.

  9 Americanisms Old and New, above cited, p. vii.

  10 London letter in the Boulevardier (Paris) April, 1931. In July, 1932 (News of the World, July 24), the Assistant Bishop of Guildford, Dr. Cyril Golding-Bird, appeared before the Farnham (Surrey) magistrates on a charge of dangerous driving. The policeman who arrested him testified that, on being overhauled, he demanded “Are you a speed-cop?” His Lordship, evidently in fear that the use of an Americanism by one of his exalted station would prejudice the bench against him, stoutly declared that he “was not sufficiently colloquial” to have used it. But the magistrates, taking a serious view of the matter, fined him £ 10 and costs and suspended his driving license for three months.

  11 In the Spring of 1935, for example, Major Brooke Heckstall-Smith, yachting correspondent to the London Daily Telegraph, raised a holy war against to debunk in the columns of his paper, and was presently joined by other viewers with alarm. One of them, A. E. Sullivan (March 2), ascribed its origin to “the inability of an ill-educated and unintelligent democracy to assimilate long words.” But it was defended by Hubert Furst (March 2), author of a book entitled Art Debunked, and by Pearl Freeman (March 4), who called it “a full-blooded descriptive word.” On March 2 radio was put at the head of a list of “bastard American expressions” by John C. Mellis (with O.K., sez you, nerts, cute and big-fella following), but on March 6 it was defended by Jan Stewer as a beautiful coinage,” and its English equivalent, wireless, denounced as “an abomination.”

  12 Oxford, 1935. Horwill excludes foreign loan-words in American, and words spelled differently in American and English, and his book naturally reveals a great many omissions; nevertheless, he manages to list nearly 3000 words and phrases that differ in the two languages.

  13 Academy Papers; New York, 1925, p. 150.

  14 Sunderland Echo, Oct. 31, 1934.

  15 Manchester Guardian, April 5.

  16 For example, Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign of 1880.

  17 The Study of American English, by W. A. Craigie, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXVII, 1927, p. 208.

  18 See British English and American English, by Thomas G. Tucker, Scribner’s, Dec., 1921.

  19 Eastern Evening News (Norwich), March 27, 1935.

  20 March 28, 1935.

  21 News-Chronicle, March 21, 1935.

  22 Note the archaic spelling here. Jane Austen used it in Pride and Prejudice, and in 1756 there was a newspaper in London called the Universal Visiter.

  23 March 6, 1935.

  24 Is English Becoming Too American?, London Evening News, Nov. 19, 1931. It is curious to note what such bigwigs accept and reject. Dr. Onions, after accepting — or, at all events, condoning — dope, repudiates witness-stand and to measure up to the standard.

  25 The American Language, New Statesman and Nation, July 27, p.131.

  26 See also American Prepositions, London Times (Weekly Ed.), Feb. 16, 1933.

  27 Harold Brighouse in the Manchester Guardian, April 5, 1919.

  28 The London bureau of the United Press reported on April 28: “The American O.K. is rapidly displacing the British righto in everyday conversation in Great Britain, despite the opposition of educators.… One English columnist the other day made four telephone calls to different numbers and in each case the conversation ended with O.K. from the person at the other end.”

  29 The Most Popular Songs of a Decade, World Almanac, 1934, p. 800.

  30 In Notes on the Way, Time and Tide, Dec. 8, 1934, Humbert Wolfe denounced this “baboon-jargon that we have proudly borrowed from across the Atlantic.” The London Daily Express has lifted the whole vocabulary of the American news-weekly, Time, and adopted even its eccentric syntax. (See, for example, These Names Make News, Aug. 28, 1935.) I once encountered Bible Belt in a headline in the London Times, but I have unfortunately forgotten the date. For the use of but that in a leading article in the Times I point sadly to Two More Days of Pilgrimage, July 13, 1934. Other lexicographical pathologists tell me they have found high-brow and the limit in the same great newspaper.

  31 The Invasion From U. S. A., by Ellis Healey, Birmingham Gazette, April 11, 1932.

  32 To collide is barred by many English newspapers, which prefer to come in collision. But the aim here is simply to avoid any direct imputation of agency, and so head off possible libel suits.

  33 London, 1929, p. 79 ff.

  34 Adjectives — and Other Words; London, 1930, p. 182.

  35 Printed as English on Both Sides of the Atlantic, Listener, April, 1935.

  36 Contemporary English: a Personal Speech Record; Leipzig, 1927, p. 114.

  37 I am indebted here to various English acquaintances, and to a number of Americans resident in England, but most of all to Mr. H. W. Seaman, of Norwich. Mr. Seaman is an English journalist with ten years of American experience behind him, and so he is peculiarly alert to differences in usage. Moreover, he is greatly interested in linguistics, and has done some valuable writing upon the subject. My debt to his friendly patience is enormous; he has willingly answered scores of questions, some of them difficult. But I hasten to add that he is not to be held responsible for anything that follows. The inevitable errors are my own.

  38 Here, almost at the start of my list, I must file a caveat against it myself, for Mr. Seaman tells me that garbage, in England as in the United States, is coming to be applied to all sorts of refuse.

  39 In the London Daily Mail, June 25, 1935, I found the heading: Key to the Can. It would have cost the job of any American copy-reader who wrote it. But in England it was a proper heading for a news story dealing with Treasury regulations for the importation of can-openers with canned-goods.

  40 But drug-store, as we have seen in Section 1, is coming in. I am informed by an English correspondent, Mr. H. R. Rutter, that “the scientific chemists of England have for some time been agitating for the withdrawal of the designation chemist from the pharmacist, and the substitution of druggist.”

  41 But living-room appears to be coming in.

  42 There are many other differences between the names of cuts of meat in the two countries. I am indebted to Mr. H. Kendall Kidds of San Francisco, who is at work on a book on the butchering craft, for what follows. Our porterhouse steak is the sirloin in England, but porterhouse is coming in, with the prefix Yankee. Our sirloin is the rump, or middle-rump. The bottom-round is called the silverside in England, and the top-round is the top-side. The rump is known as the H-bone piece or shellbone. The part that contains the shoulder-blade is the chuck, as it is here. A leg of mutton or lamb cut with the hip-bone attached is called a haunch in England. If the hip-bone is left on the loin and cut into chops, they are known as chump-bone chops. What we call the rib chops are the best end of the neck or best end. Under the shoulder, which is raised in England, the chops are called the middle-neck, while the rest is the scrag-end.

  43 Variety, of course, is known and understood in the United States. Indeed, the chief theatrical paper of New York is called Variety. But in its colum
ns it commonly refers to the thing itself as vaudeville, or vaude, or vaud. Some years ago a German movie, done into English, was called Variety here and Vaudeville in England. In both countries it thus carried an exotic flavor.

  44 See, for longer lists, Automobile Nomenclature, American Speech, Sept., 1926, p. 686; The Automobile and American English, by Theodore Hornberger, the same, April, 1930; English Theatrical Terms and Their American Equivalents, by Henry J. Heck, the same, Aug., 1930; and British and American Fishing Terms, by Frederick White, Outdoor Life, Aug., 1934.

  45 I am indebted here to suggestions by Messrs. H. F. Rutter, P. H. Muir and J. Dwight Francis of London, Dr. Ernest Wignall of the Rockefeller Institute, and Mr. George H. Mather of Moose Jaw, Canada.

  46 But it is a bumper on a motor-car.

  47 But the commander of an omnibus is a conductor.

  48 See The Sins of the Railroad Period, by F. Walker Pollock, American Speech, Feb., 1927, p. 248.

  49 This title has been borrowed by some of the American universities, e.g., Syracuse, but the usual title is president. On the Continent it is rector.

  50 He serves for three years, and the heads of the various colleges take the office in rotation.

  51 See The Yearbook of the Universities of the Empire, edited by T. S. Sterling; London, annually.

  52 But faculty is used to designate the staff of a special school, e.g., of theology, medicine or law.

  53 But the London, Midland and Scottish Railway has a president.

  54 This form survives in the American term city-stock, meaning the bonds of a municipality. But State and Federal securities are almost always called bonds.

  55 A Glossary of Colloquial Slang and Technical Terms in Use in the Stock Exchange and in the Money Market, by A. J. Wilson; London, 1895.

  56 “An act was passed to prohibit playing nine-pins; as soon as the law was put in force, it was notified everywhere, ‘Ten-pins played here.’”— Capt. Frederick Marryat: A Diary in America; London, 1839, Vol. Ill, p. 195.

  57 “The term chapel” says P. W. Joyce, in English as We Speak It in Ireland, 2nd ed.; London, 1910, “has so ingrained itself in my mind that to this hour the word instinctively springs to my lips when I am about to mention a Catholic place of worship; and I always feel some sort of hesitation or reluctance in substituting the word church. I positively could not bring myself to say, ‘Come, it is time now to set out for church’ It must be either mass or chapel.”

  58 Concerning the American Language, in The Stolen White Elephant; Hartford, 1882.

  59 Concerning the American Language, just cited.

  60 London Observer, Jan. 13, 1919.

  61 In a private communication, April 26, 1935.

  62 I Speak United States, London Saturday Review, Sept. 22, 1894.

  63 Our Dictionaries; New York, 1890, p. 86.

  64 Should Language Be Abolished? by Harold Goddard, July, 1918, p. 63.

  65 Words on Trial, by T. Michael Pope, Sept., 1919, p. 151.

  66 In St. Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, there is a tablet in memory of “Alfred Robbins, Kt., Lobbyist in the Palace of Westminster & London; Letter Writer in the Parish of St. Bride.”

  67 The American Language, Spectator, Sept. 6, 1935.

  68 Reprinted as Litany of the Novelist in his Literary Chapters; London, 1918.

  69 On July 31, 1935 the Associated Press reported that the manuscript of an American movie version of Kipling’s The Light That Failed was to be presented to the British Museum, and that it showed some corrections of Americanisms in the author’s hand. Thus he struck out to measure up and inserted to match, as better English, and substituted private for personal in “He had some important personal business.”

  70 The Yankee in British Fiction, Outlook, Nov. 19, 1910.

  71 See A British Misconception, by Stuart Robertson, American Speech, April, 1931, p. 314.

  72 British Notes, New Republic, Feb. 24, 1926, p. 16.

  73 American Speech According to Galsworthy, by Stuart Robertson, American Speech, April, 1932, p. 297.

  74 If You Know What I Mean, by C. W. M., Independent, March 17, 1928.

  75 Cockney American, American Speech, April, 1932.

  76 American Written Here, Dec. 19, 1919, p. 1362.

  77 To this Brooke anecdote a correspondent adds: “An Englishman, confronted by the puzzling American phrase, ‘Where am I at? ’, interpreted it as a doubly barbarous form of ‘Where is me ‘at?’ ”

  78 If You Know What I Mean, by C. W. M., above cited. See also Speak the Speech, Nation, May 15, 1935, p. 562. The writer of the latter calls attention to the innocent way in which the brethren of punch mix old and new American slang. A New York gangster, he says, is made to use I swan in the same sentence with gun-moll and gat. “He bets dollars to doughnuts and thinks that something beats the Dutch only a few seconds before he calls the object of his affection a hot patootie who refused to middle-aisle it with him because he is a palooka. He also refers to a fried [boiled?] shirt, and speaks of someone as dead from the hoofs up, and of a gazissey [sic] with a dial like a painted doormat.” The Nation writer says that when Berton Braley once protested to Sir Owen Seaman, editor of punch, against such manhandling of American he got the reply: “In caricature it is more essential to give what our clientele will recognize as a familiar likeness than to follow the very latest portrait from life.”

  79 Autocar (London), Feb. 4, 1922, P- 55.

  80 The First Reader, New York World, July 9, 1926.

  81 This cook-book was reviewed in the Baltimore Evening Sun, April 14, by a writer who had recently returned from a long sojourn in England. “What we Americans called endive,” he said, “the Kentish gardener called chicory. Chicory was our endive. Romaine lettuce was cos, string-beans were runner-beans, lima-beans were broad-beans, and so on.” “What is here [in England], “known as a hash,” said Eugene Field in Sharps and Flats; New York, 1900, p. 210, “we should call a stew, and what we call a hash is here known as a mince.” Field printed a list of about 30 terms differing in English and American.

  82 News of the World, Sept. 10, 1932.

  83 We Translate a Letter From London, April 17, 1932.

  84 When Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick was brought out in England, c. 1885, rnany changes were made in the text in order to get rid of Americanisms and American spellings. “In Ch. XVI alone there are 106 variations.” See Some Americanisms in Moby Dick, by William S. Ament, American Speech, June, 1932, and Bowdler and the Whale, by the same, American Literature. March, 1932.

  85 Anglicizing Americanisms, Feb., 1926, and Anglicizings, Jan., 1927.

  86 Claude de Crespigny, an Englishman resident in the United States, objected to some of Mr. Pember-ton’s Anglicizations in Peculiar Anglicizing, American Speech, July, 1926, and was answered by Mr. Pemberton in Anglicizing Americanisms, American Speech, Jan., 1927.

  87 See Another Language, by Anna R. Baker, Writer’s Digest, Sept., 1934. Miss Baker describes the revision of a story called Try to Forget Me, by Sewell Peaslee Wright, first published in the Woman’s Home Companion for Feb., 1934. In the English reprint to go over big was changed to be successful, sure to of course, sure-fire to popular, to boss around to to boss about, grip to control, all set to ready, and so on. Altogether, Miss Baker notes 74 changes, including a few in spelling.

  88 Addressing American advertisers in Anglo-American Trade (London), Jan., 1928, Paul E. Derrick, vice-president of the American Chamber of Commerce in London, said: “I strongly advise Americans who aim to cultivate the British market to have their American advertising translated into idiomatic English by trained English advertising writers. I know, from my long and wide experience, that the distributors and consumers in both Britain and America are distracted from concentration upon the message by every unfamiliar word and expression they encounter.… It is time that both Britons and Americans came to know, and to accept the fact, that they do not speak in the same idiom.”

  89 The United Kingdom: an Indust
rial, Commercial and Financial Handbook (Trade Promotion Series No. 94). My quotations are from Ch. XXVI: Selling American Merchandise in the United Kingdom. I am indebted for the reference to Mr. R. M. Stephenson, chief of the European Section, Division of Regional Information, Department of Commerce.

  90 Sometimes with sad results. In 1923 D. L. Blumenfeld wrote to the Cinema (London, June 5): “The other day I saw an American film in which one of the characters was made to say, in a rough-house scene, “ ’Ere you — ’op it!” — which is tantamount to making an Englishman in similar circumstances say “G’wan, you big stiff — beat it!”

  91 For example, American Without Tears, by Hamilton Eames, London Times, May 6, 1931. Mr. Eames undertook to define 118 terms, ranging from alky-cooking to yen.

  92 It was reprinted in American Speech, May, 1926, p. 462, and again in the same, Dec, 1927, p. 167.

  93 The Lewis glossary was made by Montgomery Belgion, an Englishman who once lived in New York. Despite his American experience, he made a number of errors. Thus he defined to buck as to cheat, bum as a rotter, flipflop as rot, high- binder as an extravagant person, and roustabout as a revolutionary. The glossaries printed in the English newspapers are usually full of howlers. Even the otherwise accurate Hamilton Eames, whose contribution to the London Times has just been cited, defined panhandler as a swindler. It means, of course, a street beggar.

  94 The Dumb Ox, Life and Letters, April, 1934, p. 42.