American Language

by H. L. Mencken

  179 London, 1930, p. 25.

  180 Why Piccadilly?; London, 1935.

  181 See the Chapter on London Street-Names in Adjectives — and Other Words, by Earnest Weekley; London, 1930. A brief bibliography is appended.

  182 Naming the Bungalow, by Ida M. Mellen, American Speech, March, 1927.

  183 I am informed by Miss Miriam Allen de Ford that Broadway street appears on some street signs in San Francisco, and also in San Diego. This suggests that Broadway is recent on the Pacific Coast.

  184 For aid here I am indebted to Mr. Maurice K. Weil of New Orleans.

  185 See Dunn and Indianan, by Jacob P. Dunn, Indianapolis News, Aug. 11, 1922. Mr. Dunn, forgetting Canadian, argues that Indianian is just as absurd as Texian or Cubian. But Mr. Julian Hall, editor of the Dothan (Ala.) Eagle, prefers Ala-bamian on the ground of long usage. “If there is any merit,” he says, “in the rule of spelling a proper name just as the possessor spells it, then we are Alabamians.”

  186 In the Canal Zone the Americans commonly call the people of Panama Panamanians, with the first syllable showing a Latin a, but the third rhyming with cane.

  187 Names For Citizens, American Speech, Feb., 1934, p. 78.

  188 Moscowite or Moscovian?, Moscow Star-Mirror, April 22, 1935. I am indebted here to Mr. Louis A. Boas, editor of the Star-Mirror.

  189 “So far as we are aware,” says Kenneth A. Fowler, in The Town Crier, Yonkers Herald Statesman, April 25, 1935, “there is no official designation. The most common word is probably Yonkersite, with Yonkers man another quite frequently used phrase. The more tony term of Yonkersonian is seldom if ever heard.”

  190 This is used in Richmond, Va. In Richmond, Ind., Richmondite is preferred.

  191 Private Communication, June 15, 1935.

  192 For help here I am indebted to Mrs. Jessie I. Miller of Cairo, Ill.; Miss Jean E. Riegel, of Bethlehem, Pa.; Miss Helen Merrill Bradley, of Toronto; Mrs. F. M. Hanes, of Durham, N. C; Miss Katherine Ferguson, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Miss Nan Strum, of Rocky Mount, N. C; Mrs. Carolina Penna Hyman, of Los Altos, Calif.; Miss Mable E. Bontz, of Sacramento, Calif.; Mrs. Alicia L. Rooney, of San Antonio, Tex.; Messrs. Maury Maverick, of San Antonio, Tex.; Mahlon N. Haines, of York, Pa.; Harry Allard, of Cape Girardeau, Mo.; S. H. Abramson, of Montreal; J. S. Cree-gan, of Albuquerque, N. Mex.; Wilson O. Clough, of Laramie, Wyo.; E. L. Clark, of Providence, R. I.; Henry Broderick, of Seattle, Wash.; J. A. Macdonald, of Vancouver, B. C; Rowland Thomas, of Little Rock, Ark.; Philip G. Quinn, of Fall River, Mass.; Herman Baradinsky, of New York; Alfred C. Booth, of East Orange, N. J.; Israel Bloch, of Lynn, Mass.; N. R. Callender, of Benton Harbor, Mich.; Harry Corry, of Davenport, Iowa; John William Cummins, of Wheeling, W. Va.; Henry Ware Allen, of Wichita, Kansas; Marshall Ballard, of New Orleans; James Doolittle, of Grand Rapids, Mich.; J. A. Coneys, of Engle-wood, N. J.; Carl J. Ruskowski, of Schenectady, N. Y.; Charles Stewart Lake, of Columbus, O.; Duncan Aikman, of Los Angeles, Calif.; Eugene Davidson, of New Haven, Conn.; J. G. Sims, Jr., of Fort Worth, Tex.; J. L. Meeks, of Florence, Ala.; Gerald W. Johnson, of Baltimore; Leigh Toland, of La Crosse, Wis.; A. C. Ross, of Rochester, N. Y.; Folger McKinsey, of Baltimore; Virginius Dabney, of Richmond, Va.; Irving C. Hess, of San Diego, Calif.; Morris Fletcher Atkins, of Montpelier, Vt.; Donald L. Cherry, of Watsonville, Calif.; R. R. Peters, of Bucyrus, O.; L. M. Feeger, of Richmond, Ind.; Charles F. Eichenauer, of Quincy, Ill.; Otto Stabell, of Passaic, N. J.; J. W. Spear, of Phoenix, Ariz.; Torrey Fuller, of Poughkeepsie, N. Y.; Raymond Fields, of Guthrie, Okla.; James Q. Dealey, of Dallas, Tex.; Charles P. Manship, of Baton Rouge, La.; Paul R. Kelty, of Portland, Ore.; Edwin M. Shanklin, of Des Moines, Iowa; Julian Hall, of Dothan, Ala.; C. Oliver Power, of Carthage, Mo.; J. E. Barbey, of Reading, Pa.; Samuel Grafton, of New York, and Clyde K. Hyder, of Lawrence, Kansas; Col. Patrick H. Callahan, of Louisville; Lieut. Col. E. L. M. Burns, of Ottawa; Monsignor J. B. Dudek, of Oklahoma City, Okla.; Dr. J. A. Kostalek, of the University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho; Dr. W. L. Frazier, of Boise, Idaho; Dr. H. K. Croessmann, of DuQuoin, Ill.; Dr. D. C. Alldredge, of Berkeley, Calif.; Dr. J. Christopher O’Day, of Honolulu; and Messrs. Theodore W. Noyes and Philander Johnson, of Washington, D. C.

  193 In Columbus, Ind., Columbusite is used only rarely, but Columbusonian even more rarely. “I don’t believe,” says Mr. Melvin Lostutter, editor of the Columbus Evening Republican, “you would be accurate in applying a local designation to our citizenry.”

  194 Mr. L. K. Bronson, managing editor of the Oshkosh Northwestern, tells me that Oshkoshian has been used, but only rarely. “Oshkosh man,” he says, “is the more common description.”

  195 Miss Harriet E. Matthison, of the Rutland Herald, says that there is “no recollection” in the Herald office “of hearing Rutland people called by any particular name.” “The secretary of the Chamber of Commerce,” she adds, “informs me that she would think Rutlander preferable to Rutlandite.”

  196 See On the Difficulty of Indicating Nativity in the United States, by Miriam Allen de Ford, American Speech, April, 1927, and Comments, by Miles L. Hanley, American Speech, Oct., 1933, p. 78.

  197 Chicagorilla is the invention of Walter Winchell. Baltimoron was coined by Harry C. Black, of the Baltimore Evening Sun, and first appeared in that paper, Feb. 15, 1922.

  198 A list of those currently in use is printed annually in the World Almanac.

  199 See Nicknames of the States; a Note on Walt Whitman, by John Howard Birss, American Speech, June, 1932, p. 389.

  200 See The Origin of the Term Hoosier, by O. D. Short, Indiana Magazine of History, June, 1929. See also Tar Heels (anonymous), American Speech, March, 1926.

  201 Kalamazoo, which was settled in 1829 and chartered as a city in 1884, remained a joke-town down to the end of the century. A set of derisive verses, credited to the Denver News, circulated through the newspapers about 1900. Its refrain was:

  O Kalamazozle — mazizzle — Mazazzle-mazeezle- mazoo!

  That liquid, harmonious, easy, euphonious

  Name known as Kalamazoo!

  It will be noted that k is prominent in the names of all the towns cited by Dr. Krapp.

  202 The English Language in America; New York, 1925, p. 176.

  203 See The Locus of Podunk, by Louise Pound, American Speech, Feb., 1934, p. 80.

  204 For Dr. Pound see the paper just cited. Mr. Hess’s paper, Poduck in Southeast Missouri, is in American Speech, Feb., 1935, p. 80.

  XI

  AMERICAN SLANG

  I. THE NATURE OF SLANG

  Slang is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “language of a highly colloquial type, considered as below the level of standard educated speech, and consisting either of new words or of current words employed in some special sense.” The origin of the word is unknown. Ernest Weekley, in his “Etymological Dictionary of Modern English,” 1921, suggests that it may have some relation to the verb to sling, and cites two Norwegian dialect words, based upon the cognate verb slenge or slengje, that appear to be its brothers: slengjeord, a neologism, and slengjenamn, a nickname. But he is not sure, so he adds the note that “some regard it as an argotic perversion of the French langue, language.” A German philologian, O. Ritter, believes that it may be derived, not from langue, but from language itself, most probably by a combination of blending and shortening, as in thieve(s’ lang)uage, beggar(s’ lang)uage, and so on.1 “Webster’s New International,” 1934, follows somewhat haltingly after Weekley. The Oxford Dictionary, 1919, evades the question by dismissing slang as “a word of cant origin, the ultimate source of which is not apparent.” When it first appeared in English, about the middle of the Eighteenth Century,2 it was employed as a synonym of cant, and so designated “the special vocabulary used by any set of persons of a low or disreputable character”; and half a century later it began to be used interchangeably with argot, which means the vocabulary special to any group, trade or profession. But during the past fifty years the three terms have tended to be more or less clearly distinguished. Th
e jargon of criminals is both a kind of slang and a kind of argot, but it is best described as cant, a word derived from the Latin cantus, and going back, in its present sense, to c, 1540. One of the principal aims of cant is to make what is said unintelligible to persons outside the group, a purpose that is absent from most forms of argot and slang. Argot often includes slang, as when a circus man calls his patrons suckers and speaks of refunding money to one full of complaints as squaring the beef, but when he calls the circus grounds the lot and the manager’s quarters the white wagon, he is simply using the special language of his trade, and it is quite as respectable as the argot of lawyers or diplomats. The essence of slang is that it is of general dispersion, but still stands outside the accepted canon of the language. It is, says George H. McKnight,3 “a form of colloquial speech created in a spirit of defiance and aiming at freshness and novelty.… Its figures are consciously farfetched and are intentionally drawn from the most ignoble of sources. Closely akin to profanity in its spirit, its aim is to shock.” Among the impulses leading to its invention, adds Henry Bradley,4 “the two more important seem to be the desire to secure increased vivacity and the desire to secure increased sense of intimacy in the use of language.” “It seldom attempts,” says the London Times, “to supply deficiencies in conventional language; its object is nearly always to provide a new and different way of saying what can be perfectly well said without it.”5 What chiefly lies behind it is simply a kind of linguistic exuberance, an excess of word-making energy. It relates itself to the standard language a great deal as dancing relates itself to music. But there is also something else. The best slang is not only ingenious and amusing; it also embodies a kind of social criticism. It not only provides new names for a series of everyday concepts, some new and some old; it also says something about them. “Words which produce the slang effect,” observes Frank K. Sechrist,6 “arouse associations which are incongruous or incompatible with those of customary thinking.”

  Everyone, including even the metaphysician in his study and the eremite in his cell, has a large vocabulary of slang, but the vocabulary of the vulgar is likely to be larger than that of the cultured, and it is harder worked. Its content may be divided into two categories: (a) old words, whether used singly or in combination, that have been put to new uses, usually metaphorical, and (b) new words that have not yet been admitted to the standard vocabulary. Examples of the first type are rubberneck, for a gaping and prying person, and iceberg, for a cold woman; examples of the second are hoosegow, flim-flam, blurb, bazoo and blah. There is a constant movement of slang terms into accepted usage. Nice, as an adjective of all work, signifying anything satisfactory, was once in slang use only, and the purists denounced it,7 but today no one would question “a nice day,” “a nice time,” or “a nice hotel.” The French word tête has been a sound name for the human head for many centuries, but its origin was in testa, meaning a pot, a favorite slang word of the soldiers of the decaying Roman Empire, exactly analogous to our block, nut and bean. The verb-phrase to hold up is now perfectly good American, but so recently as 1901 the late Brander Matthews was sneering at it as slang. In the same way many other verb-phrases, e.g., to cave in, to fill the bill and to fly off the handle, once viewed askance, have gradually worked their way to a relatively high level of the standard speech. On some indeterminate tomorrow to stick up and to take for a ride may follow them. “Even the greatest purist,” says Robert Lynd, “does not object today to the inclusion of the word bogus in a literary English vocabulary, though a hundred years ago bogus was an American slang word meaning an apparatus for coining false money. Carpetbagger and bunkum are other American slang words that have naturalized themselves in English speech, and mob is an example of English slang that was once as vulgar as incog or photo.”8 Sometimes a word comes in below the salt, gradually wins respectability, and then drops to the level of slang, and is worked to death. An example is offered by strenuous. It was first used by John Marston, the dramatist, in 1599, and apparently he invented it, as he invented puffy, chilblained, spurious and clumsy. As strange as it may seem to us today, all these words were frowned on by the purists of the time as uncouth and vulgar, and Ben Jonson attacked them with violence in his “Poetaster,” written in 1601. In particular, Ben was upset by strenuous. But it made its way despite him, and during the next three centuries it was used by a multitude of impeccable authors, including Milton, Swift, Burke, Hazlitt, and Macaulay. And then Theodore Roosevelt invented and announced the Strenuous Life, the adjective struck the American fancy and passed into slang, and in a little while it was so horribly threadbare that all persons of careful speech sickened of it, and to this day it bears the ridiculous connotation that hangs about most slang, and is seldom used seriously.

  All neologisms, of course, are not slang. At about the time the word hoosegow, derived from the Spanish, came into American slang use, the word rodeo, also Spanish, came into the standard vocabulary. The distinction between the two is not hard to make out. Hoosegow was really not needed. We had plenty of words to designate a jail, and they were old and good words. Hoosegow came in simply because there was something arresting and outlandish about it — and the users of slang have a great liking for pungent novelties. Rodeo, on the other hand, designated something for which there was no other word in American — something, indeed, of which the generality of Americans had just become aware — and so it was accepted at once. Many neologisms have been the deliberate inventions of quite serious men, e.g., gas, kodak, vaseline. Scientist was concocted in 1840 by William Whewell, professor of moral theology and casuistical divinity at Cambridge. Ampere was proposed solemnly by the Electric Congress which met in Paris in 1881, and was taken into all civilized languages instantly. Radio was suggested for wireless telegrams by an international convention held in Berlin in 1906, and was extended to wireless broadcasts in the United States about 1920, though the English prefer wireless in the latter sense. But such words as these were never slang; they came into general and respectable use at once, along with argon, x-ray, carburetor, stratosphere, bacillus, and many another of the sort. These words were all sorely needed; it was impossible to convey the ideas behind them without them, save by clumsy circumlocutions. It is one of the functions of slang, also, to serve a short cut, but it is seldom if ever really necessary. Instead, as W. D. Whitney once said, it is only a wanton product of “the exuberance of mental activity, and the natural delight of language-making.”9 This mental activity, of course, is the function of a relatively small class. “The unconscious genius of the people,” said Paul Shorey, “no more invents slang than it invents epics. It is coined in the sweat of their brow by smart writers who, as they would say, are out for the coin.”10 Or, if not out for the coin, then at least out for notice, kudos, admiration, or maybe simply for satisfaction of the “natural delight of language-making.” Some of the best slang emerges from the argot of college students, but everyone who has observed the process of its gestation knows that the general run of students have nothing to do with the matter, save maybe to provide an eager welcome for the novelties set before them. College slang is actually made by the campus wits, just as general slang is made by the wits of the newspapers and theaters. The idea of calling an engagement-ring a handcuff did not occur to the young gentlemen of Harvard by mass inspiration; it occurred to a certain definite one of them, probably after long and deliberate cogitation, and he gave it to the rest and to his country.

  Toward the end of 1933 W. J. Funk of the Funk and Wagnalls Company, publishers of the Standard Dictionary and the Literary Digest, undertook to supply the newspapers with the names of the ten most fecund makers of the American slang then current. He nominated T. A. (Tad) Dorgan, the cartoonist; Sime Silverman, editor of the theatrical weekly, Variety; Gene Buck, the song writer; Damon Runyon, the sports writer; Walter Winchell and Arthur (Bugs) Baer, newspaper columnists; George Ade, Ring Lardner and Gelett Burgess.11 He should have added Jack Conway and Johnny O’Connor of the staff of Variety;
James Gleason, author of “Is Zat So?”; Rube Goldberg, the cartoonist; Johnny Stanley and Johnny Lyman, Broadway figures; Wilson Mizner and Milt Gross. Conway, who died in 1928, is credited with the invention of palooka (a third-rater), belly-laugh, Arab (for Jew), S.A. (sex appeal), high-hat, pushover, boloney (for buncombe, later adopted by Alfred E. Smith), headache (wife), and the verbs to scram, to click (meaning to succeed), and to laugh that off.12 Winchell, if he did not actually invent whoopee, at least gave it the popularity it enjoyed, c. 1930.13 He is also the father of Chicagorilla, Joosh (for Jewish), pash (for passion) and shafts (for legs), and he has devised a great many nonce words and phrases, some of them euphemistic and others far from it, e.g., for married: welded, sealed, lohengrined, merged and middle-aisled; for divorced: Reno-vated; for contemplating divorce: telling it to a judge, soured, curdled, in husband trouble, this-and-that-way, and on the verge; for in love: on the merge, on fire, uh-huh, that way, cupiding, Adam-and-Eveing, and man-and-womaning it; for expecting young: infanticipating, baby-bound and storked. I add a few other characteristic specimens of his art: go-ghetto, debutramp, phffft, foofff (a pest), Wildeman (a homosexual), heheheh (a mocking laugh), Hard-Times Square (Times Square), blessed-event (the birth of young), the Hardened Artery (Broadway), radiodor (a radio announcer), moom-pitcher (moving picture), girl-mad, Park Rowgue (a newspaper reporter) and intelligentlemen. Most of these, of course, had only their brief days, but a few promise to survive. Dorgan, who died in 1929, was the begetter of apple-sauce, twenty-three, skiddoo,14 ball-and-chain (for wife), cake-eater, dumb Dora, dumbell (for stupid person), nobody home, and you said it. He also gave the world, “Yes, we have no bananas,” though he did not write the song, and he seems to have originated the cat’s pajamas, which was followed by a long series of similar superlatives.15 The sports writers, of course, are all assiduous makers of slang, and many of their inventions are taken into the general vocabulary. Thus, those who specialize in boxing have contributed, in recent years, kayo, cauliflower-ear, prelim, shadow-boxing, slug-fest, title-holder, punch-drunk,16 brother-act, punk, to side-step and to go the limit;17 those who cover baseball have made many additions to the list of baseball terms given in Chapter V;18 and those who follow the golf tournaments have given currency to birdie, fore, par, bunker, divot, fairway, to tee off, stance, and onesome, twosome, threesome and so on — some of them received into the standard speech, but the majority lingering in the twilight of slang.19