American Language

by H. L. Mencken

  George Philip Krapp attempts to distinguish between slang and sound idiom by setting up the doctrine that the former is “more expressive than the situation demands.” “It is,” he says, “a kind of hyperesthesia in the use of language. To laugh in your sleeve is idiom because it arises out of a natural situation; it is a metaphor derived from the picture of one raising his sleeve to his face to hide a smile, a metaphor which arose naturally enough in early periods when sleeves were long and flowing; but to talk through your hat is slang, not only because it is new, but also because it is a grotesque exaggeration of the truth.”20 The theory, unluckily, is combated by many plain facts. To hand it to him, to get away with it and even to hand him a lemon are certainly not metaphors that transcend the practicable and probable, and yet all are undoubtedly slang. On the other hand, there is palpable exaggeration in such phrases as “he is not worth the powder it would take to kill him,” in such adjectives as breakbone (fever), and in such compounds as fire-eater, and yet it would be absurd to dismiss them as slang. Between blockhead and bonehead there is little to choose, but the former is sound English, whereas the latter is American slang. So with many familiar similes, e.g., like greased lightning, as scarce as hen’s teeth: they are grotesque hyperboles, but hardly slang.

  The true distinction, in so far as any distinction exists at all, is that indicated by Whitney, Bradley, Sechrist and McKnight. Slang originates in the effort of ingenious individuals to make the language more pungent and picturesque — to increase the store of terse and striking words, to widen the boundaries of metaphor, and to provide a vocabulary for new shades of difference in meaning. As Dr. Otto Jespersen has pointed out,21 this is also the aim of poets (as, indeed, it is of prose writers), but they are restrained by consideration of taste and decorum, and also, not infrequently, by historical or logical considerations. The maker of slang is under no such limitations: he is free to confect his neologism by any process that can be grasped by his customers, and out of any materials available, whether native or foreign. He may adopt any of the traditional devices of metaphor. Making an attribute do duty for the whole gives him stiff for corpse, flat-foot for policeman, smoke-eater for fireman, skirt for woman, lunger for consumptive, and yes-man for sycophant. Hidden resemblances give him morgue for a newspaper’s file of clippings, bean for head, and sinker for a doughnut. The substitution of far-fetched figures for literal description gives him glad-rags for fine clothing, bonehead for ignoramus, booze-foundry for saloon, and cart-wheel for dollar, and the contrary resort to a brutal literalness gives him kill-joy, low-life and hand-out. He makes abbreviations with a free hand — beaut for beauty, gas for gasoline, and so on. He makes bold avail of composition, as in attaboy and whatdyecallem, and of onomatopoeia, as in biff, zowie, honky-tonk and wow. He enriches the ancient counters of speech with picturesque synonyms, as in guy, gink, duck, bird and bozo for fellow. He transfers proper names to common usage, as in ostermoor for mattress, and then sometimes gives them remote figurative significances, as in ostermoors for whiskers. Above all, he enriches the vocabulary of action with many new verbs and verb-phrases, e.g., to burp, to neck, to gang, to frame up, to hit the pipe, to give him the works, and so on. If, by the fortunes that condition language-making, his neologism acquires a special and limited meaning, not served by any existing locution, it enters into sound idiom and is presently wholly legitimatized; if, on the contrary, it is adopted by the populace as a counter-word and employed with such banal imitativeness that it soon loses any definite significance whatever, then it remains slang and is avoided by the finical. An example of the former process is afforded by tommy-rot. It first appeared as English school-boy slang, but its obvious utility soon brought it into good usage. In one of Jerome K. Jerome’s books, “Paul Kelver,” there is the following dialogue:

  “The wonderful songs that nobody ever sings, the wonderful pictures that nobody ever paints, and all the rest of it. It’s tommy-rot!”

  “I wish you wouldn’t use slang.”

  “Well, you know what I mean. What is the proper word? Give it to me.”

  “I suppose you mean cant.”

  “No, I don’t. Cant is something that you don’t believe in yourself.22 It’s tommy-rot; there isn’t any other word.”

  Nor were there any other words for hubbub, fireworks, foppish, fretful, sportive, dog-weary, to bump and to dwindle in Shakespeare’s time; he adopted and dignified them because they met genuine needs.23 Nor was there any other satisfactory word for graft when it came in, nor for rowdy, nor for boom, nor for joy-ride, nor for slacker, nor for trust-buster. Such words often retain a humorous quality; they are used satirically and hence appear but seldom in wholly serious discourse. But they have standing in the language nevertheless, and only a prig would hesitate to use them as George Saintsbury used the best of the bunch and joke-smith. So recently as 1929 the Encyclopaedia Britannica listed bootlegger, speakeasy, dry, wet, crook, fake, fizzle, hike, hobo, poppycock, racketeer and O.K. as American slang terms, but today most of them are in perfectly good usage. What would one call a racketeer if racketeer were actually forbidden? It would take a phrase of four or five words at least, and they would certainly not express the idea clearly.24

  On the other hand, many an apt and ingenious neologism, by falling too quickly into the gaping maw of the proletariat, is spoiled forthwith and forever. Once it becomes, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s phrase, “a cheap generic term, a substitute for differentiated specific expressions,” it quickly acquires such flatness that the fastidious flee it as a plague. The case of strenuous I have already mentioned. One recalls, too, many capital verb-phrases, thus ruined by unintelligent appreciation, e.g., to freeze on to, to have the goods, to cut no ice, to fall for, and to get by; and some excellent substantives, e.g., dope and dub, and compounds, e.g., come-on and easy-mark, and simple verbs, e.g., to neck and to vamp. These are all quite as sound in structure as the great majority of our most familiar words and phrases — to cut no ice, for example, is certainly as good as to butter no parsnips —, but their adoption by the ignorant and their endless use and misuse in all sorts of situations have left them tattered and obnoxious, and soon or late they will probably go the way, as Brander Matthews once said, of all the other “temporary phrases which spring up, one scarcely knows how, and flourish unaccountably for a few months, and then disappear forever, leaving no sign.” Matthews was wrong-in two particulars here. They do not arrive by any mysterious parthenogenesis, but come from sources which, in many cases, may be determined. And they last, alas, a good deal more than a month. Shoo-fly afflicted the American people for four or five years, and “I don’t think,” aber nit, over the left, good night and oh yeah were scarcely less long-lived.25 There are, indeed, slang terms that have survived for centuries, never dropping quite out of use and yet never attaining to good usage. Among verbs, to do for to cheat has been traced to 1789, to frisk for to search to 1781, to grease for to bribe to 1557, and to blow for to boast to c. 1400.26 Among nouns, gas for empty talk has been traced to 1847, jug for prison to 1834, lip for insolence to 1821, sap for fool to 1815, murphy for potato to 1811, racket to 1785, bread-basket for stomach to 1753, hush-money to 1709, hick to 1690, gold-mine for profitable venture to 1664, grub for food to 1659, rot-gut to 1597 and bones for dice to c. 1386. Among the adjectives, lousy in the sense of inferior goes back to 1690; when it burst into American slang in 1910 or thereabout it was already more than two centuries old. Booze has never got into Standard English, but it was known to slang in the first years of the Fourteenth Century. When nuts in the sense revealed by “Chicago was nuts for the Giants” came into popularity in the United States c. 1920, it was treated by most of the newspaper commentators on current slang as a neologism, but in truth it had been used in precisely the same sense by R. H. Dana, Jr., in “Two Years Before the Mast,” 1840, and by Mark Twain in “Following the Equator,” 1897.27 Sometimes an old slang word suddenly acquires a new meaning. An example is offered by to chisel. In the sen
se of to cheat, as in “He chiseled me out of $3,” it goes back to the first years of the Nineteenth Century, but with the advent of the N.R.A., in the late Summer of 1933, it took on the new meaning of to evade compliance with the law by concealment or stealth. It has been credited to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but I believe that its true father was General Hugh S. Johnson, J.D.

  With the possible exception of the French, the Americans now produce more slang than any other people, and put it to heavier use in their daily affairs. But they entered upon its concoction relatively late, and down to the second decade of the Nineteenth Century they were content to take their supply from England. American slang, says George Philip Krapp, “is the child of the new nationalism, the new spirit of joyous adventure that entered American life after the close of the War of 1812.”28 There was, during the colonial and early republican periods, a great production of neologisms, as we have seen in Chapter III, but very little of it was properly describable as slang. I find to boost, defined as to raise up, to lift up, to exalt, in the glossary appended to David Humphreys’s “The Yankey in England,” 1815,29 but all the other slang terms listed, e.g., duds for clothes, spunk for courage, and uppish, are in Francis Grose’s “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” published in London thirty years before. The Rev. John Witherspoon’s denunciation of slang in “The Druid,” 1781, is a denunciation of English slang, though he is discussing the speech habits of Americans. But with the great movement into the West, following the War of 1812, the American vulgate came into its own, and soon the men of the ever-receding frontier were pouring out a copious stream of neologisms, many of them showing the audacious fancy of true slang. When these novelties penetrated to the East they produced a sort of linguistic shock, and the finicky were as much upset by the “tall talk” in which they were embodied as English pedants are today by the slang of Hollywood.30 That some of them were extremely extravagant is a fact: I need point only to blustiferous, clam-jamphrie, conbobberation, helliferocious, mollagausauger, peedoodles, ripsniptiously, slang-whanger, sockdolager, to exflunctify, to flummuck, to giraffe, to hornswoggle, to obflisticate and to pucker stopple.31 Most of these, of course, had their brief days and then disappeared, but there were others that got into the common vocabulary and still survive, e.g., blizzard, to hornswoggle, sockdolager and rambunctious, the last-named the final step in a process which began with robustious and ran through rumbustious and rambustious in England before Americans took a hand in it. With them came many verb-phrases, e.g., to pick a crow with, to cut one’s eye-teeth, to go the whole hog. This “tall talk,” despite the horror of the delicate, was a great success in the East, and its salient practitioners — for example, David Crockett — were popular heroes. Its example encouraged the production of like neologisms everywhere, and by 1840 the use of slang was very widespread. It is to those days before the Civil War that we owe many of the colorful American terms for strong drink, still current, e.g., panther-sweat, nose-paint, red-eye, corn-juice, forty-rod, mountain-dew, coffin-varnish, bust-head, stagger-soup, tonsil-paint, squirrel-whiskey and so on, and for drunk, e.g., boiled, canned, cockeyed, frazzled, fried, oiled, ossified, pifficated, pie-eyed, plastered, snozzled, stewed, stuccoed, tanked, woozy.,32 “Perhaps the most striking difference between British and American slang,” says Krapp,33 “is that the former is more largely merely a matter of the use of queer-sounding words, like bally and swank, whereas American slang suggests vivid images and pictures.” This was hardly true in the heyday of “tall talk,” but that it is true now is revealed by a comparison of current English and American college slang. The vocabulary of Oxford and Cambridge seems inordinately obvious and banal to an American undergraduate. At Oxford it is made up in large part of a series of childish perversions of common and proper nouns, effected by adding -er or inserting gg. Thus, breakfast becomes brekker, collection becomes collecker, the Queen Street Cinema becomes the Queener, St. John’s becomes Jaggers and the Prince of Wales becomes the Pagger-Wagger. The rest of the vocabulary is equally feeble. To match the magnificent American lounge-lizard the best the Oxonians can achieve is a bit of a lad, and in place of the multitudinous American synonyms for girl34 there are only bint and a few other such flabby inventions.35 All college slang, of course, borrows heavily from the general slang vocabulary. For example, chicken, which designated a young girl on most American campuses until 1921 or thereabout,36 was used by Steele in 1711, and, in the form of no chicken, by Swift in 1720. It had acquired a disparaging significance in the United States by 1788, as the following lines show:

  From visiting bagnios, those seats of despair,

  Where chickens will call you my duck and my dear

  In hopes that your purse may fall to their share, Deliver me!37

  Like the vulgar language in general, popular American slang has got very little sober study from the professional philologians. The only existing glossary of it by a native scholar — “A Dictionary of American Slang,” by Maurice H. Weseen, associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska — is an extremely slipshod and even ridiculous work.38 There are several collections by laymen, but most of them are still worse.39 The best, and by far, is “Slang Today and Yesterday,” by Eric Partridge,40 which deals principally with English slang, but also has a valuable section on American slang. All the dictionaries of Americanisms, of course, include words reasonably describable as slang, but they appear only incidentally, and not in large numbers. Thornton, for example, bars out a great deal of interesting and amusing material by confining his researches to written records. In England the literature of the subject is far more extensive. It began in the Sixteenth Century with the publication of several vocabularies of thieves’ argot, and has been enriched in recent years by a number of valuable works, notably the Partridge volume just cited, “Slang, Phrase and Idiom in Colloquial English and Their Use,” by Thomas R. G. Lyell,41 and the monumental “Slang and Its Analogues,” by John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley.42 Before the completion of the last-named, the chief authorities on English slang were “A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant,” by Albert Barrère and Charles G. Leland,43 and “A Dictionary of Modern Cant, Slang and Vulgar Words,” by J. C. Hotten.44 Relatively little attention is paid to slang in the philological journals, but it is frequently discussed in the magazines of general circulation and in the newspapers.45 When the English papers denounce Americanisms, which is very often, it is commonly slang that arouses their most violent dudgeon. This dudgeon, of course, is grounded upon its very success: the American movies and talkies have implanted American slang in England even more copiously than they have implanted more decorous American neologisms. As the Spectator was saying lately, its influence “on the British Empire continues, ever more rapidly, to increase — a portent frequently mentioned and almost as frequently deplored.”46 Sometimes it is belabored as intolerably vulgar, indecent and against God, as when the Christian World47 blamed it for the prevalence of “dishonest and debased thought” and ascribed its use to “a sneaking fear and dislike of calling beautiful things by their beautiful names and of calling ugly things by their ugly names”; sometimes it is sneered at as empty and puerile, signifying nothing, as when Allan Monkhouse48 demanded piously “What is the good of all this?” and answered “Such words are the ghosts of old facetiousness, and the world would be better without them”; and sometimes efforts are made to dispose of it by proving that it is all stolen from England, as when Dr. C. T. Onions, one of the editors of the Oxford Dictionary, offered to show a London reporter that the dictionary listed any American slang term he could name.49 Alas, for Dr. Onions, after making good with to grill, fresh, to figure (in the sense of to conclude), bunkum (he apparently forgot its clearly American origin) and rake-off (he had to fall back upon an American example), he came to grief with boloney and nerts. One of the favorite forms of this latter enterprise is a letter to the editor announcing the discovery that this or that locution, lately come into popularity by way of the talkies, is to be found i
n Shakespeare,50 or the Authorized Version of the Bible, or maybe even in Piers Plowman. There are also the specialists who devote themselves to demonstrating that American slang is simply a series of borrowings from the Continental languages, particularly French — for example, that and how is a translation of et comment, that you’re telling me is from à qui le dites-vous, and that to get one’s goat is from prendre sa chèvre.51 But not all Englishmen, of course, oppose and deride the American invasion, whether of slang or of novelties on high levels. Not a few agree with Horace Annesley Vachell that “American slanguage is not a tyranny, but a beneficent autocracy.… Lounge-lizard, for example, is excellent.… It is humiliating to reflect that English slang at its best has to curtsey to American slang.” To which “Jackdaw” adds in John O’London’s Weekly:52 “We do but pick up the crumbs that fall from Jonathan’s table.”

  During the World War there was some compensatory borrowing of English army slang and argot by the American troops, but it did not go very far. Indeed, the list of loan-words that came into anything approaching general use in the A.E.F. was about limited to ace, blimp, cootie, Frog, Jack Johnson, Jerry, over the top and whizz-bang. Some of the favorites of the British soldiers, e.g., fag, blighty, cheerio, to strafe, funk-hole and righto, were seldom if ever used by the Americans. The greater part of the American vocabulary came from the Regular Army, and some of it was of very respectable antiquity, e.g., hand-shaker, Holy Joe (for chaplain), slum (stew), corned willie (corned beef hash), outfit, belly-robber, dog-robber (an officer’s servant or orderly),53 doughboy, jawbone (meaning credit, or anything spurious or dubious), mud-splasher (artilleryman), buck-private, top-kick, gold-fish (canned salmon), gob, leatherneck, padre, chow, outfit and punk (bread). A few novelties came in, e.g., tin-hat and a.w.o.l., and there was some fashioning of counter-words and phrases from French materials, e.g., boocoo or boocoop (beaucoup), toot sweet (tout de suite) and trez beans (très bien), but neither class was numerous. Naturally enough, a large part of the daily conversation of the troops was obscene, or, at all events, excessively vulgar. Their common name for cavalryman, for example, could hardly be printed here. The English called the military police red-caps, but the American name was M.P.’s. The British used O.C. for Officer Commanding; the Americans used CO. for Commanding Officer. The British were fond of a number of Americanisms, e.g., blotto, cold-feet, kibosh, nix, pal and to chew the rag, but whether they were borrowed from the A.E.F. or acquired by some less direct route I do not know.54 About gob, leatherneck and dough- boy there have been bitter etymological wrangles. Gob has been traced variously to a Chinese word (gobshite), of unknown meaning and probably mythical; to gobble, an allusion to the somewhat earnest methods of feeding prevailing among sailors; and to gob, an archaic English dialect word signifying expectoration. The English coast-guardsmen, who are said to be free spitters, are often called gobbies. In May, 1928, Admiral H. A. Wiley, then commander-in-chief of the United States Fleet, forbade the use of gob in ship’s newspapers, calling it “undignified and unworthy.” But the gobs continue to cherish it. Leatherneck, I have been told, originated in the fact that the collar of the Marines used to be lined with leather. But the Navy prefers to believe that it has something to do with the fact that a sailor, when he washes, strips to the waist and renovates his whole upper works, whereas a Marine simply rolls up his sleeves and washes in the scantier manner of a civilian. It is the theory of all gobs that all Marines are dirty fellows. But the step from unwashed necks to leather seems to me to be somewhat long and perilous. The term devil-dogs, often applied to the Marines during the World War, was supposed to be a translation of the German teufelhunde. During the fighting around Chateau Thierry, in June and July, 1918, the Marines were heavily engaged, and the story went at the time that the Germans, finding them very formidable, called them teufelhunde. But I have been told by German officers who were in that fighting that no such word was known in the German army. Doughboy is an old English navy term for dumpling. It was formerly applied to the infantry only, and its use is said to have originated in the fact that the infantrymen once pipe-clayed parts of their uniforms, with the result that they became covered with a doughy mass when it rained.55