170 Thornton’s earliest example is dated 1855.
171 In The Čechs (Bohemians) in America; Boston, 1912, Thomas Čapek says that bohoe is obsolete. He calls bohunk a portmanteau word that originated in a confusion between Bohemians and Hungarians. Cheskey is simply the Czech adjective český, mistaken for a noun. Bootchkey is the Czech počkej (wait, hold on), a cry used by Czech boys at play. See also Czech Influence Upon the American Vocabulary, by Monsignor J. B. Dudek, CzechoSlovak Student Life (Lisle, Ill.) June, 1927, p. 16.
172 A term borrowed from Navy slang. It refers to the fact that, beginning in 1795, lime-juice was issued in the British Navy (and later in the merchant marine) as an anti-scorbutic.
173 See Some Current Substitutes for Irish, by W. A. McLaughlin, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. II, 1914. Mr. McLaughlin discusses harp, mick, Paddy, Turk and Tad. Turk is commonly used among the Roman Catholic clergy in the United States to designate a priest or bishop of Irish blood, and especially one born in Ireland. The Irish are thought to be too adept at ecclesiastical politics, and to get an undue proportion of ecclesiastical promotions.
174 Gilbert Tucker says that dago goes back to 1832. It is probably a corruption of Diego; it was first applied to Mexicans. The etymologies of wop and guinea are uncertain, and frequently disputed.
175 This is used only on the Pacific Coast. It originally meant a Japanese loose woman, but is now applied to all persons of the race.
176 Kike is used to distinguish a Russian, Polish or other Eastern Jew from the German Jews. The origin of the word is uncertain. J. H. A. Lacher, in Kike, American Speech, March, 1926, says it was suggested by the fact that the names of many of the early Eastern Jewish immigrants ended in -ki or -ky. The German Jews called them kikis and this gradually changed to kike. Webster’s New International Dictionary (1934) hints that the word may have some relation to keek, a term used in the clothing trade to designate one employed to spy out the designs of rival manufacturers. Keek is an ancient English verb, now confined to Northern dialects, signifying to peep. Its past tense form appears in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale (c. 1386) as kiked.
177 Spiggoty, of which spick is a variant, originated at Panama and now means a native of any Latin-American region under American protection, and in general any Latin-American. It is Navy slang, but has come into extensive civilian use. It is a derisive daughter of “No spik Ingles.” The Marines in Nicaragua called the natives gooks. Those of Costa Rica are sometimes called goo-goos.
178 Thornton quotes from Ruxton’s Life in the Far West, 1849: “The Mexicans are called … greasers from their greasy appearance.”
179 The Oxford Dictionary’s first example of nigger is dated 1786, but the word must be older. The American Negroes have many words of their own to designate shades of color, e.g., brown-skin, high-brown and high-yellow. As I have noted in Chapter V, Section 4, they use ofay to designate whites. But this usage is confined to the sophisticates. In 1919, Dr. P. P. Claxton, United States Commissioner of Education, devised a Code of Honorable Names to be subscribed to by the Boy Scouts, whereby they agreed to avoid all opprobrious terms for immigrants. But he omitted the Negroes, and the fact brought forth a protest from them. See Offensive Nicknames, by James W. Johnson, New York Age, Feb. 1, 1919.
180 The effects of race antagonism upon language are still to be investigated. The etymology of slave indicates that the inquiry might yield interesting results. The word French, in English, is largely used to suggest sexual perversion. In German anything Russian is barbarous, and English education hints at flaggellation. The French, for many years, called a certain contraband appliance a capote Anglaise, but after the entente cordiale they changed the name to capote Al-lemande. The common English name to this day is French letter. See The Criminal, by Havelock Ellis; London, 1910, p. 208. In France a sharper is called a Greek, as drunk as a Pole is a common phrase, and one of the mainstays of low comedy is le truc du brésilien. In most of the non-Prussian parts of Germany cockroaches are called Preussen; in Prussia they are Franzosen; in some places they are Schwaben. Finally, it will be recalled that Benvenuto Cellini, in his autobiography, says that he was accused in a French court of using one of his mistresses in “the Italian manner.” See International Libels, by William Power, Glasgow (Scotland) Record, April 10, 1929, and Calling Names in Any Language, by Joachim Joesten, American Mercury, Dec, 1935.
181 Words and Their Uses, new ed.; New York, 1876, p. 131.
182 Mr. Maximilian Hurwitz tells me that this movement originated among the so-called Reform Jews, most of whom were from Germany or Austria. Its leader was the Rev. Isaac M. Wise. In 1854 he established the American Israelite, in 1873 he organized the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and in 1875 he founded the Hebrew Union College. The Jews’ Hospital of New York changed its name to Mount Sinai, and in 1874, when a merger of Jewish eleemosynary institutions was effected, it took the name of the United Hebrew Charities. The Eastern Jews, who began to flock in in the early 80’s, objected to the abandonment of Jew and Jewish and began to call the German Jews Yuhudi in derision. They were influential enough by 1916 to cause a new amalgamation of Jewish charities to be called the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies of New York. The theatrical weekly, Variety, which is owned and mainly staffed by Jews, takes a poke at Hebrew by reducing it to Hebe.
183 Private communication, April 10, 1925.
184 March 15, 1930.
185 Along This Way; New York, 1933, P- 375.
186 Domestic Manners of the Americans; London, 1832, Vol. I, p. 132.
187 Edinburgh, 1822.
188 A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States; New York, 1848, intro.
189 A Diary in America; Phila., 1839. The passage is reprinted in American Social History as Recorded by British Travellers, by Allan Nevins; New York, 1923, p. 245.
190 Seven Years in America; London, 1845, p. 16. I borrow this from Noah Webster as a Euphemist, by Allen Walker Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VIII, 1934.
191 John Graham Brooks: As Others See Us; New York, 1908, p. 11.
192 Female, of course, was epidemic in England too, but White says that it was “not a Briticism,” and so early as 1839 the Legislature of Maryland expunged it from the title of a bill “to protect the reputation of unmarried females” substituting women, on the ground that female “was an Americanism in that application.”
193 The Lady of Godey’s, by Ruth E. Finley; Phila., 1931, p. 205.
194 See Squeamish Cant, in Words and Their Uses, by Richard Grant White; new ed.; New York, 1876, p. 176 ff. Also, Inexpressibles, Unmentionables, Univhisperables, and Other Verbal Delicacies of Mid-Nineteenth Century Americans, by Mamie Meredith, American Speech, April, 1930.
195 Domestic Manners of the Americans, quoted by Nevins, p. 162.
196 Noah Webster as a Euphemist, by Allen Walker Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VIII, 1934.
197 p. 109. I am indebted here to Mr. Bernard De Voto.
198 The French pissoir is still regarded as indecent in America, and is seldom used in England, but it has gone into most of the Continental languages, though the French themselves avoid it in print, and use the inane Vespasien in place of it. But all the Continental languages have their euphemisms. Most of them, for example, use W.C., an abbreviation of the English water-closet, as a euphemism. The whole subject of national pruderies, in both act and speech, remains to be investigated.
199 Euphemism, Monroe (Mich.) Evening News, Nov. 21, 1931. See also A Note on Newspaper English, by Nelson Antrim Crawford, Kansas Magazine (an annual), 1935.
200 See The Theatre, by Robert Benchley, New Yorker, Nov. 3, 1934, reprinted in American Speech, Feb., 1935, p. 76.
201 Perhaps because of the Quaker influence, Philadelphia has always been one of the most Pecksniffian of American cities. Early in 1918, when a patriotic moving-picture entitled To Hell With the Kaiser was sent on tour under government patronage, the word hell was
carefully toned down, on the Philadelphia billboards, to h—.
202 Associated Press dispatch, Sept. 21. I have to thank Mr. Lewis Hawkins of the Atlanta Constitution for calling my attention to it.
203 This prohibition of two euphemistic forms of son-of-a-bitch, of course, includes the term itself.
204 See The Silver Screen, by Roger Whately, Jack O’Donnell and H. W. Hanemann; Los Angeles, 1935, p. 244. I suspect that the prohibition of bum is due to the fact that the word is obscene in England.
205 Rudy Vallee’s Music Notebook, Radioland, March, 1935, p. 35. Mr. Vallee says that he was thus deprived of the use of one of his “greatest stage and radio vehicles, Let’s Do It.” He adds that Do It Again and You Do Something to Me were also prohibited.
206 Pep, July, 1918, p. 8.
207 Social Hygiene Bulletin, May, 1919, p. 7.
208 May 31, 1933, p. 599.
209 Variety, Nov. 27, 1934, p. 37.
210 Hygeia, Feb., 1925, p. 107. Interstitial glands, of course, was used inaccurately.
211 Oct. 2, 1935. The advertiser was Bonwit Teller.
212 An Obscenity Symbol, Dec, 1934, p. 264 ff. Mr. Read is also the author of Lexical Evidence From Folk Epigraphy in Western North America; Paris, 1935, a sober and very interesting study of the written obscenity encountered on the walls of filling-station “rest-rooms” during “an extensive sight-seeing trip throughout the Western United States and Canada in the Summer of 1928.” The four-letter words are treated very warily in the dictionaries. Even the great Oxford omits those of sexual significance, though it lists all those relating to excretions. Webster’s New International admits arse and piss (the latter of which occurs seven times in the King James Bible), but bars all the rest.
213 Verbal Modesty in the Ozarks, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. I, 1928. This paper is reprinted in Mr. Randolph’s The Ozarks; New York, 1931, p. 78 ff.
214 A Study of Verbal Taboos, American Speech, April, 1935, and Language Taboos of American College Students, English Studies, June, 1935. See also the chapter on Euphemisms in Words and Their Ways in English Speech, by J. B. Greenough and G. L. Kittredge: New York, 1901, and the chapter on Euphemism and Hyperbole in English Words and Their Background, by George H. McKnight; New York, 1923.
215 New York, 1933, p. 401. I take this reference from Steadman.
216 On June 26, 1862, an Englishman named Joshua Bug, laboring under the odium attached to the name, advertised in the London Times that he had changed it to Norfolk- Howard, a compound made up of the title and family name of the Dukes of Norfolk. The wits of London at once doubled his misery by adopting Norfolk-Howard as a Euphemism for bedbug.
217 Etiquette; New York, 1922, p. 455.
218 Dear and My Dear, London Mercury, Sept., 1922.
219 For the history of such forms in England since 1418 see A History of Modern Colloquial English, by H. C. Wyld; London, 1920, p. 379. This is a very interesting and valuable book. Unfortunately, using it is made a burden by the lack of an index.
220 April 14, 1914. In 1920 the English Licenser of Stage Plays ordered bloody expunged from a play dealing with labor. See English, Oct., 1920, p. 403.
221 See A Note on Bloody, by Robert Withington, American Speech, Oct., 1930, and Children of Linguistic Fashion, by the same author, American Speech, Dec, 1934.
222 New York, 1928, p. 506.
223 For these references I am indebted to British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, July, 1933, p. 328.
224 Hell in American Speech, American Speech, Aug., 1931. See also a commentary on the foregoing by J. R. Schultz, American Speech, Feb., 1933, p. 81, and Hellion, by Willa Roberts, American Speech, Feb., 1932, p. 240.
225 London and New York.
226 London, 1930, p. 15 ff.
227 Let’s Stick To Our Own Bad Language, London Sunday Chronicle, Jan. 26, 1930. Mr. Seaman, in this article, discusses “the growing use of American swear-words by British swearers.”
228 See Reporters Become of Age, by Isabelle Keating, Harper’s Magazine, April, 1935, p. 601.
229 Both of the American telegraph companies have rules strictly forbidding the acceptance of telegrams containing profane words. Some time ago a telegram of mine containing the harmless adjective damndest was refused by both. I appealed to the higher authorities of the Western Union. After I had solemnly filed a brief in defense of the term, Mr. T. W. Carroll, general manager of the Eastern Division, as solemnly decided that the company “must take the position that, if there is any question or doubt on the subject, the safest plan is to request the sender to so modify his language as to make his message acceptable.”
230 The English Language in America; New York, 1925, Vol. I, p. 118 ff.
231 The Etymology of an English Expletive, Language, June, 1927.
232 For a long list of euphemistic substitutes for God, Jesus, Christ, Lord, saints, devil, hell and damn see Exclamations in American English, by E. C. Hills, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. VII, 1924.
VII
THE PRONUNCIATION OF AMERICAN
I. ITS GENERAL CHARACTERS
“Language,” said A. H. Sayce, in 1879, “does not consist of letters, but of sounds, and until this fact has been brought home to us our study of it will be little better than an exercise of memory.”1 The theory, at that time, was somewhat strange to English and American grammarians and etymologists; their labors were largely wasted upon deductions from the written word. But since then, chiefly under the influence of Continental philologians, they have turned from orthographical futilities to the actual sounds of the tongue, and a number of the more recent grammar-books are based upon the spoken language of educated persons — not, remember, of conscious purists, but of the general body of cultivated folk.2 Unluckily, this new method also has its disadvantages. The men of a given race and time usually write a good deal alike, or, at all events, attempt to write alike, but in their oral speech there are wide variations. “No two persons,” says a leading contemporary authority upon English phonetics,3 “pronounce exactly alike.” Moreover, “even the best speaker commonly uses more than one style.” The result is that it is extremely difficult to determine the prevailing pronunciation of a given combination of letters at any time and place. The persons whose speech is studied pronounce it with minute shades of differences, and admit other differences according as they are conversing naturally or endeavoring to exhibit their pronunciation. Worse, it is impossible to represent a great many of these shades in print. Sweet, trying to do it, found himself, in the end, with an alphabet of 125 letters. Prince L.-L. Bonaparte more than doubled this number, and A. J. Ellis brought it to 390.4 During the late 80’s of the last century the unwieldy Ellis alphabet was taken in hand by P. E. Passy, a French phonetician, and reduced to a workable compass. In its new form it was adopted by the Association Internationale Pho-netique, which Passy had founded, and today, under the name of the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, it is in general use. It suffices for recording most of the sounds commonly encountered in the Western European languages, but every time it is put to some new use defects in it are discovered, and when it was adopted by the Practical Phonetics Group of the Modern Language Association in 1927 a new character had to be added to represent the vowel in the American pronunciation of hurt. Unfortunately, its 50-odd characters include twenty or more that do not occur in any normal modern alphabet, and so it is readily interpreted only by phonologists, and the makers of dictionaries avoid it.5 What Richard Grant White wrote in 1880, that “it is almost impossible for one person to express to another by signs the sound of any word,” is still more or less true. He went on:
Only the voice is capable of that; for the moment a sign is used the question arises, What is the value of that sign? The sounds of words are the most delicate, fleeting, and inapprehensible things in nature; far more so than the tones of music, whether made by the human voice or by instruments. Moreover, the question ari
ses as to the capability to apprehend and distinguish sounds on the part of the person whose evidence is given.6
Some years ago certain German phonologists, despairing of the printed page, turned to the phonograph, and there is now a Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft in Berlin which offers to supply records of a great many languages and dialects, including English. The phonograph has also been adopted for teaching foreign languages by some of the American correspondence schools.7 In 1924, at the request of the Present Day English Group of the Modern Language Association, Dr. Harry Morgan Ayres of Columbia University began to make phonograph records of American speech at the New York studios of the Columbia Phonograph Company. In 1927 he was joined by Dr. W. Cabell Greet, now editor of American Speech, and since then a machine for recording on aluminum disks has been installed at Columbia University, and under Dr. Greet’s direction nearly 2500 records of about 3500 different speakers have been accumulated (1936). Approximately two thirds of them preserve recordings of a little story called “Arthur the Rat,” so that minute comparisons are easily made. All parts of the country, save the Pacific Coast, are well represented. The same method has been employed by other phonologists, and it was used in accumulating material for the Linguistic Atlas. Transcriptions of Dr. Greet’s records, in the IPA, have been printed in every issue of American Speech since February, 1933.8 Of late efforts have been made to record speech by the oscillograph, which has already proved its usefulness in the investigation of the singing voice. It seems to be very likely that, in the near future, the study of oscillograph records on motion picture films will provide a means of distinguishing minute differences in pronunciation with great precision.9 The lead in this work has been taken by Dr. E. W. Scripture, the American-born professor of experimental phonetics at the University of Vienna; by Dr. S. N. Treviño of the University of Chicago; and by the acoustical engineers of the Bell Telephone System laboratories. The x-rays have also been employed, especially by Dr. G. Oscar Russell of Ohio State University.10
American Language Page 45