American Language

by H. L. Mencken

  Nouns

  abbordato (boarder)

  ais-bocsa (ice-box)

  apricotto, or abricotto (apricot)

  auschieppe (housekeeper)

  avvenuta (avenue)

  baga (bag)

  barna (barn)

  barritenne, or barrista (bartender)

  baschetta or baschetto (basket)

  beca (baker)

  billo (bill)

  bisiniss, or besenisso (business)

  blocco (block)

  bloffo (bluff)

  bordo (board)

  bocsa (box)

  boncio (bunch)

  boto, or bot (boat)

  boya (boy)

  briccoliere (bricklayer)

  bucia, or buccia (butcher)

  canna, or canno (can)

  canneria (cannery)

  carpentieri (carpenter)

  carpeta, or carpetto (carpet)

  cecca (check)

  cestenotto (chestnut)77

  cianza (chance)

  colle (coal)

  collettoro (collector)

  conduttore (conductor)

  coppo (cop)

  costume (customer)

  cupa, or cuppa (cup)

  dicce, die or indiccio (ditch)

  docco, or doc (dock)

  elevete, or alveto (elevator)

  faitatore (prize-fighter)

  falo (fellow)

  farma (farm)

  farmaioulo (farm-hand)

  fattoria (factory)

  ferri (ferry)

  ferriboto (ferry-boat)

  foremme (foreman)

  fornitura (furniture)

  frencofutte (frankfurter)

  fruttistenne (fruitstand)

  galone or gallone (gallon)

  garrita (garret)

  ghemma (game)

  ghirla, or ghella (girl)

  giobba (job)

  gliarda, or jarda (yard)

  globbo (club)

  grignollo, or grignona (greenhorn)

  grollo (grower)

  grossiere (grocer)

  grosseria, or grussaria (grocery)

  guaffo, or guarfo (wharf)

  gum, or gumma (chewing-gum)

  kettola, or chettola (kettle)

  licenza (license)

  loffaro, or loffarone (loafer)

  lotto (lot)

  maccio (match)

  marchetto (market)

  mascina (machine)

  moni (money)

  morgico, or morgheggio (mortgage)

  naffia (knife)

  nursa, or nirsa (nurse)

  olla (hall)

  ovrecoto (overcoat)

  pensila, or pensula (pencil)

  penta (pint)

  pepa (paper)

  piccio (moving-picture)

  pinotto (peanut)

  pipa (pipe)

  pipoli (people)

  pondo, or ponte (pound)

  pulizzimmo (policeman)

  pullo (pull)

  quarto (quart)

  racchettiere (racketeer)

  raida (ride)

  riccemanne (rich man)

  rivolvaro (revolver)

  road (road)

  saiduak (sidewalk)

  saina (sign)

  salone (saloon)

  sanemagogna, or sanimagogna (son- of-a-gun)78

  schira, or scurta (skirt)

  sciain (shine)

  sciainatore (bootblack)

  scio (show)

  sciumecco (shoemaker)

  sparagrassi (asparagus)

  sprini, sprigni, or springi (springs)

  stic, or stico (stick)

  stima (steamer)

  stimbotto (steamboat)

  stim-sciabola (steam-shovel)

  stocco (stock)

  strappa (strap)

  stringa (string)

  sueta (sweater)

  tacsa, tachise, or taxe (taxes)

  tichetta (ticket)

  ticia (teacher)

  tonica (tonic)

  tracca (track)

  trobolo (trouble)

  trocco (truck)

  tub (tub)

  uilbarro (wheelbarrow)

  Adjectives

  isi (easy)

  ruffo, or roffo (rough)

  sciur (sure)

  sechenenze (second-hand)

  smarto, or smatto (smart)

  stinge (stingy)

  Verbs

  abbordare (to board)

  draivare (to drive)

  fixare, ficsare, or fichisare (to fix)

  giumpare (to jump)

  parcare (to park)

  strappare (to strop a razor)

  Phrases

  aidonchea (I don’t care)

  aigatiu, or aigaccia (I got you)

  airono (I don’t know)

  alrait, or orraite (all right)

  bigu (be good)

  dezzo (that’s all)

  godam (goddam)

  gudbai (good-bye)

  il forte gelato (the fourth of July)

  lo cuntri (old country)

  oke or oche (O.K.)

  rongue, or roune (wrong way)

  sciacchenze (shake hands)

  uatsius (what’s the use?)

  Dr. Livingston says that the Italians in the United States resent dago and wop, but have become reconciled to guinea, which they spell ghini and use frequently in good-humored abuse, as in grannis-simo ghini, a sort of euphemism for fool. He reports that a number of Americanisms have been taken back to Italy by returning immigrants, e.g., schidu (skiddoo) and bomma (bum), “which have become Neapolitan ejaculations.” Briccoliere (bricklayer) “circulates in Sicily.”79

  The Census of 1930 showed that there were 1,790,424 persons of Italian birth in the United States at that time, 2,306,015 who had been born here of Italian parentage, and 450,438 who had been born here of partly Italian parentage, or, 4,546,877 in all. Save for the Germans, they constituted the largest racial bloc in the country, and they exceeded the Germans in the number of individuals actually born in their country of origin. Of them, 1,808,289 reported that Italian was their mother-tongue. The Italian periodicals published in the United States number 113, of which eight are daily newspapers.

  c. Spanish

  The changes undergone by Spanish in the New World have been studied at length by Spanish-American philologians, and their numerous monographs on Cubanisms, Mexicanisms, Argentinisms, Chileanisms, Honduranisms and so on put to shame the neglect of the American vulgate by their American colleagues. Even the Spanish spoken in the Southwestern United States has been investigated scientifically, chiefly by Dr. Aurelio M. Espinosa, of Leland Stanford University. Dr. Espinosa’s papers on the subject have been printed in both English and Spanish. In English he published a series of “Studies in New Mexican Spanish” in the Revue de Dialectologie Romane from 1909 to 1914,80 and in Spanish he has brought out an elaborate study of New Mexican phonology in the Biblioteca de Dialectología Hispanoamericana edited by the Instituto de Filología of the University of Buenos Aires,81 and a number of smaller studies.82

  The New Mexican speech area investigated by Dr. Espinosa runs from El Paso in the south to beyond Pueblo, Colo., in the north, and from near the Texas border in the east to beyond the Arizona border in the west. At the time he made his inquiry it had about 250,000 Spanish-speaking inhabitants —175,000 in New Mexico, 50,000 in Colorado, and 25,000 in Arizona. Within this area the dialect spoken is generally uniform. In Southern Arizona, Southern California and the upper part of the Mexican State of Sonora there is another speech area, using a dialect somewhat closer to Standard Castilian than that of New Mexico. It has been studied by Dr. Anita C. Post, who took her doctorate at Stanford under Dr. Espinosa.83 Both dialects show a great many resemblances to American-English. There is the same tendency toward the decay of grammatical niceties, the same hospitality to loan-words, the same leaning toward a picturesque vividness, and the same survival of words and phrases that have become archaic in the standard language. �
��It is a source of delight to the student of Spanish philology,” says Dr. Espinosa in “Studies in New Mexican Spanish,” “to hear daily from the mouths of New Mexicans such words as agora, ansi, naidien, trujo, escrebir, adrede” — all archaic Castilian forms, and corresponding exactly to the fox-fire, homespun, andiron, ragamuffin, jail (for autumn), flapjack and cesspool that are preserved in American. They are survivors, in the main, of the Castilian Spanish of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, though some of them come from other Spanish dialects. Castilian itself has changed very much since that time, as Standard English has changed; it is probable, indeed, that a Castilian of the year 1525, coming back to life today, would understand a New Mexican far more readily than he would understand a Spaniard, just as an Englishman of 1630 would understand a Kentucky mountaineer more readily than he would understand a Londoner.

  New Mexico has been in the possession of the United States since 1846, and so it is natural to find its Spanish corrupted by American influences, especially in the vocabulary. Of the 1400 words that Dr. Espinosa chooses for remark, 300 are English, 75 are Nahuatl, 10 come from the Indian languages of the Southwest, and 15 are of doubtful or unknown origin; the rest are pure Spanish, chiefly archaic. As in the case of the Pennsylvania Germans, the French Canadians and the Scandinavians of the Northwest, the Spanish-speaking people of New Mexico have borrowed the American names of all objects of peculiarly American character, e.g., besbol (baseball), grimbaque (greenback), játqueque (hot-cake), sosa (soda), quiande (candy), fayaman (fireman), otemil (oatmeal), piquenic (picnic), lonchi (lunch). Most of them have been modified to bring them into accord with Spanish speech-habits. For example, all explosive endings are toned down by suffixes, e.g., lonchi for lunch. So with many r-endings, e.g., blofero for bluffer. And sibilants at the beginning of words are shaded by prefixes, e.g., esteque for steak and espechi for speech. Not only words have been taken in, but also many phrases, though most of the latter are converted into simple words, e.g., olraite (all right), jaitun (hightoned), jamachi (how much), sarape (shut up), enejau (anyhow). This Southwestern Spanish, like Pennsylvania-German, Yankee-Dutch and Vestur-islanska, seems doomed to vanish soon or late. “For a generation at least,” says Dr. Post, “the child of Spanish-American parentage has really been learning Spanish at school, rather than at home. The present generation is not saying truje, vide, muncho, as their grandparents did. The Spanish of the future may be more nearly correct, if it does not die out completely.”

  English, of course, has also influenced the Spanish of the Antilles and of the Canal Zone. “Porto Ricans are conscious of the fact,” says Salvador Rovira,84 “that their Spanish has been debased with English idiom, and that it is rapidly becoming mongrel.” In the large Puerto Rican colony in New York a large number of American loan-words are in everyday use, e.g., champu (shampoo), dresin (dressing), chopas (chops), cornfleques (cornflakes), ribsteque (rib-steak), chainaría (shoe-shining stand), corna (corner of a street), cuora (quarter of a dollar), fanfurria (frankfurter), bildin (building), cuilto (quilt), ticha (teacher), estor (store), marqueta (market), caucho (couch), lanlor (landlord), lanlora (landlady), boso (boss), meibi (maybe).85 From Panama comes news of nacao (knockout), estrei (straight), managual (man o’ war), guachiman (watchman).86 The people of each and every one of the Latin-American countries pride themselves on the purity of their Spanish, but the truth is, of course, that all of them speak dialects more or less marked, and use large numbers of words unknown to Standard Castilian.87 The late Dr. A. Z. López-Penha, the Colombian poet and critic, once made up for me (1922) a list of American loans in common use in the Latin-American seaports: it included cocktail, dinner-dance, foxtrot, sweater, kimono, high-ball, sundae, bombo (boom), plataforma (platform, political), mitin (meeting), alarmista, big-stick and various forms of bluff (usually blofero, but blofista in Cuba). The American auto has been naturalized, and so has ice-cream, but in the form of milk-cream, pronounced milclee by the lower orders. The boss of a train is the conductor del tren; a commuter is a commutador; switch is used both in its American railroad sense and to indicate the electrical device; slip, dock and wharf (guáfay) are in daily use; so is socket (electrical), though it is pronounced sokáytay; so are poker and many of the terms appertaining to the game. The South Americans often use just in the American way, as in justamente a (or en) tiempo (just in time). They are very fond of good-bye, dam-fool and go to hell. They have translated the verb phrase, to water stocks, into aguar las acciones. In Cuba the watermelon (patilla or sandía, in Spanish) is the mélon-de-agua. Just as French-Canadian has borrowed Americanisms that are loan-words from other immigrant tongues, e.g., bum and loafer from the German, so some of the South American dialects have borrowed rapidas (rapids) and kimono, the first brought into American from the French and the second from the Japanese. The Spanish borrowings from American are naturally most numerous just south of the Rio Grande, just as the American borrowings from Spanish are most numerous along its north bank. Says a recent explorer:88

  When a border Mexican goes out chopeando (shopping), and meets a friend on the street, he cordially shouts: “Como le how do you dea?,” to be reassured by the reply: “Oh, very-well-eando, gracias a díos.” Pausing, as is his custom, to pass the time of day, he will borrow a mecha (the Spanish word for wick or fuse sounds like match, so why not use it?) to light his cigarette, and since he has just received his time-check will ask if there is a chanza to get a chamba (job).89

  The Latin-Americans have taken over the vocabulary of American sport along with the games. “If you read El Universal, the soi-disant great daily of Mexico,” says the explorer just quoted, “you will be apprised that at a match de box a gentleman named, as like as not, Battling Martinez, has received from one Kid Sanchez un K.O. as the result of an upper cut (pro. ooper coot) or a left hook (’00k).… Next morning you can play tenis and keep score in English terms provided you have learned to give them the correct Spanish accent; and if you watch a game of beisbol or futbol or basket you virtuously call a foul a foul. In the afternoon you may shoot a few rounds of golfo” “Of a Monday morning,” says another observer,90 “when all the Latin-American journals are heavy with week-end sporting news, one’s eye is apt to be arrested by el score at los links of el country club. Some local cup-collector may be featured at some length. Su pivot, one learns, leaves nothing to be desired; he is un swinger rapído, too, and always makes un espléndido drive. With such a reputation, one can hardly feel surprised to read that he won yesterday’s match por walkover.”

  The number of Spanish-speaking persons in the United States at the moment (1936) is hard to estimate. There were 1,422,533 Mexicans in 1930, of whom 805,535 had been born in this country and 616,998 in Mexico, but many of the latter have since returned home. At the same time the enumerators unearthed 58,302 natives of Spain, 52,774 of Puerto Rico, 47,699 of the Philippines and 2,834 of the Canal Zone. The natives of Cuba and Central and South America do not seem to have been listed. The Puerto Ricans were nearly all concentrated in New York, which had 45,973 of them, and the Filipinos in California. The Cubans live mainly in New York and Florida. There are Spanish daily newspapers in Tampa (2), New York (2), El Paso (2), Los Angeles, Laredo, Tex., and San Antonio.

  d. Portuguese

  So far as I have been able to discover, there is no discussion in print of the Portuguese spoken in the United States. I am informed, however, by Mr. João R. Rocha, editor of O Independente of New Bedford, Mass., the oldest Portuguese weekly in the country, and Mr. Peter L. C. Silveira, editor of the Jornal Portugues of Oakland, Calif., that it has been markedly modified by American influence. The grammatical changes are few, but there is a heavy borrowing of English words and not a few Portuguese words have been changed in meaning. Thus, the word frizado, which means curled up in Standard Portuguese, has come to mean frozen in America, and the word cigarro, which means a cigarette in Standard Portuguese, means a cigar here. Again, the Portuguese immigrants have abandoned remé-dios, the St
andard Portuguese word for medicines, in favor of medicinas and have changed the meaning of colégio from a private grammar or secondary school to what we call a college.91 In the case of high-school, they have produced a translated form, escola alta. From the phrase to park a car they have derived a verb, parcar, and use it in place of the Standard Portuguese arrumar or estacionar. Virtually all of the other verbs that they have borrowed have been given the Portuguese verbal termination -ar, e.g., drivar (to drive), feeda (to feed), treatar (to treat), ablievar (to believe), tirear (to ride), pinchar (to pitch), savar (to save), crackar (to crack), pumpear (to pump). A number of nouns are also given Portuguese terminations, e.g., feeda (feed), mecha (match), rancho (ranch, thus showing a return to the original Spanish form), raça (race), pana (pan), córa (quarter of a dollar), and passe-presidente (past-president). But loan-nouns are often used unchanged, as in “Vou falar com a meu lawyer por causa do case que tenho na court” (I am going to talk with my lawyer about the case I have in court). In the case of nouns that are identical in Portuguese and English, e.g., conductor and inspector, the Portuguese pronunciation is abandoned for the English. In the use of loan-words English idioms are often borrowed, e.g., não e das suas business (none of your business), fazar um speech (to make a speech), isso faz o spoil (that spoils it), está alright (it’s all right), é fine (it’s fine). The Portuguese spoken in Brazil is also full of loans from English, e.g., aristú (Irish stew), buldogue (bulldog), sulipa (slipper, and also sleeper, a railroad tie), arceboque (a boxcar for horses), liderança (leader), araruta (arrowroot). The Brazilians of the nether classes use godeme (God-damn) to signify a blow; they confused the exclamations of the fighting English sailors on the docks with their actual wallops. They use bonde to signify a street-car, for when the first line was established at Rio de Janeiro it was financed by the sale of bonds, and the operating company came to be known as the companhia dos bonds. In Portugal a street-car is called an americano.92