American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  The Linguistic Atlas was originally suggested by Dr. E. H. Sturtevant of Yale, a linguistic scholar of eminence, now professor of linguistics emeritus at Yale.2 Dr. Hans Kurath, then of Ohio State University, later of Brown and now of Michigan, was in charge of it from the start, and his extraordinary learning and energy vitalized the whole enterprise.3 His principal collaborators were Miles L. Hanley,4 Bernard Bloch,5 the late Guy S. Lowman, Jr., the late Marcus L. Hansen, Lee S. Hultzén and Herbert Penzl, and he was aided in organizing the field work by Jakob Jud, one of the editors of the Linguistic Atlas of Italy and Southern Switzerland,1 and Paul Scheuermeier, a member of its staff. The gathering of materials in other parts of the country and Canada has been in progress for some years, with Albert H. Marckwardt in charge of the Great Lakes and Ohio valley regions, Henry Alexander in charge of Canada, Raven I. McDavid, Jr., in charge of South Carolina, and other competent linguists directing the work elsewhere. To this end funds have been provided by the American Council of Learned Societies2 and Drs. Kurath, Bloch, Harold Whitehall and others have undertaken the training of field workers.3 But it is hardly probable that any of the volumes to be brought out hereafter will be on the heroic scale of the New England folios, which cost about $250,000 to produce and were sold at $185 a set. Indeed, Sturtevant seems to be of the opinion4 that a less formidable format, without maps, will be more useful.

  It was the dialect of New England that first attracted the attention of writers upon speechways in the United States and as a result the literature upon it is very large. That literature began with Noah Webster’s amateurish effort, in his “Dissertations on the English Language,” 1789, to account for the Yankee drawl,5 and it has culminated in our time in such competent and valuable studies as the Linguistic Atlas and Anders Orbeck’s “Early New England Pronunciation.”6 Two years before Webster, in 1787, the Yankee made his first appearance as a stage type in “The Contrast,” by Royal Tyler, and thereafter he gradually took on popularity, was borrowed by the writers of humorous fiction,7 and finally came to his apotheosis in “The Biglow Papers” of James Russell Lowell, the first series of which was published in the Boston Courier in 1846. When this series appeared in book form, two years later, Lowell added a preface on the Yankee dialect and a glossary thereof, and when a second series followed in 1867 (begun in 1862) he expanded these into a somewhat elaborate treatise. Unhappily, he was untutored in the ways of language, so he fell into two serious errors, all the more confusing because they were antagonistic. The first was the error of seeking to justify every Yankee locution he noticed by showing that it could be found in some English book, and the second was that of listing as Yankeeisms peculiarities of pronunciation and accidence which really belonged to the common stock of ignorant English, and were no more the monopolies of New England than boiled dinners and the Saturday night bath. Thus in his glossary of 1848 he listed darsn’t as a Yankeeism, but in his dissertation of 1867 he showed that darst is to be found in Chaucer.1 Again, he listed shet (shut), and then found it in Arthur Golding (c. 1556-c. 1605). Yet again, he listed ben (been), and found it in “Gammer Gurton’s Needle.” In the first series of “The Biglow Papers” Lowell lay down seven rules for distinguishing the Yankee dialect, but Krapp has shown that only two of them, both relating to the pronunciation of a, had any validity.2 Krapp also showed that of forty words distinguished as dialect in six stanzas of Lowell’s “The Courtin’,” only six were really local to New England.3 A later commentator, Miss Marie Killheffer,4 has exposed the same deficiencies in one later and three earlier attempts to put the Yankee dialect into print. In “The Yankey in England,” published in 1815, David Humphrey used a higher percentage of genuine Yankeeisms than Lowell or than any of the other three dramatists,5 but in a glossary that he appended to the play, intended for the illumination of English audiences, he also included a great many terms that he himself described as “low words in general,” e.g., agin for again, crittur for creature, and gal for girl. In one soliloquy of 151 words Miss Killheffer finds 32 distinguished as dialectal, and of them only twelve are really peculiar to the Yankee.

  Charles Astor Bristed, a dilettante grandson of the original John Jacob Astor, did an essay on “The English Language in America” for a volume of “Cambridge Essays, Contributed by Members of the University,” published in London in 1855,1 in which he warned the English that Haliburton’s Yankee clock-maker in “Sam Slick” interspersed a good many Westernisms and much general slang with his Yankeeisms.2 He said that the chief peculiarities of New England speech lay in pronunciation rather than in accidence or vocabulary, and went on:3

  Among its features of this sort may be mentioned a nasal intonation, particularly before the diphthong ow, so that cow and now are sounded kyow and nyow; a perverse misplacing of final g after n, almost equal to the Cockney’s transposition of initial h, making walkin of walking, and capting of captain; a shortening of long o and u in final syllables; e.g., fortun and natur for fortune and nature; on the other hand, a lengthening of various short syllables, as naughtin for nothing, and genuíne for genuine. Also, a general tendency to throw forward4 the accent of polysyllables and sometimes even of dissyllables; e.g., territóry, legislátive, conquést. This tendency, from which, by the way, the very best classes of New England society are not altogether free, has been noticed as a Scotticism, erroneously, we think, for though the Scotch sometimes misplace the accent, they throw it backward as often as forward, in mágazine, for instance. Some peculiar words, however, are found, as doing chores, for doing miscellaneous jobs of work, (a North Country word, cf. char-woman), and many peculiar uses of ordinary words.5

  Next to New England speech, the American dialect that has been most studied is that of the Southern mountains. According to Greet, it “comes down the Blue Ridge to southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina, eastern Kentucky. Thence it was carried to southern Indiana and southern Illinois, but there it has been overcome by the Middle Western variety.1 It thrives in east Tennessee, west Tennessee and northern Alabama – in short, wherever the land is rocky, hilly and bad. Where the land is good, as in Middle Tennessee, in central and western Kentucky, in the neighborhood of Memphis, in the lowlands of Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, you find the plantation or general Southern type. The Southern Hill type was influenced and carried along by the Scotch Highlanders who came into the Shenandoah Valley from Pennsylvania and traveled on south and west.”2 Greet overlooks West Virginia, where it flourishes. It is encountered only sporadically in the mountains of Pennsylvania, but begins to appear in the western tip of Maryland, and then sweeps southward through the mountain coves into Georgia and Alabama, with leaps into southern Illinois and the Ozarks of southwestern Missouri. The persons who speak it undiluted are often called, by Southern publicists, “the purest Anglo-Saxons in the United States,” but this view of them seems to be disputed by less romantic ethnologists. Most of the latter describe them as predominantly Celtic in blood, though the fact is plain that there has been a large infiltration of English and even German strains. The dwellers in the more remote regions are thus dealt with by a distinguished English historian:

  The Appalachian has relapsed into illiteracy and into all the superstitions for which illiteracy opens the door. His agricultural calendar is governed by the phases of the moon; his personal life is darkened by fear, and by the practise of witchcraft. He lives in poverty and squalor and ill-health. In particular, he is a victim of hook-worm, a scourge which lowers the general level of vitality in Appalachia just as it does in India.… The Appalachian mountain people are the American counterparts of the latter-day white barbarians of the Old World: the Rifis and Kabyles and Tuareg, the Albanians and Caucasians, the Kurds and the Pathans and the Hairy Ainu … [They] are ci-devant heirs of the Western Civilization who have relapsed into barbarism under the depressing effects of a challenge which has been inordinately severe.… They may be traced back to a ruthless tradition of frontier warfare along the border between Western Civilization and �
��the Celtic Fringe” which … has been revived among these Scotch-Irish settlers in North America by the barbarizing severity of their Appalachian environment.… [Their] nearest social analogues … are certain “fossils” of extinct civilizations which have survived in fastnesses and have likewise relapsed into barbarism there: such “fossils” as the Jewish “wild highlanders” of Abyssinia and the Caucasus, or the Nestorian “wild highlanders” of Hakkiari.1

  To this may be added the testimony of a Scots kinsman regarding those who have been lured into the mill-towns of the Piedmont and so converted from hill-billies into lint-heads:

  One cannot but sympathize with these poor relations of ours – Celts, most of them —, though their own bigoted ignorance and arrogant unprogressiveness have been the main causes of their misfortunes. They may realize by this time that it would have been better for them to educate themselves, cooperate in the improvement of their farms, and make common cause with the Negroes. Economic servitude and the dismal life of factory towns are the doom of a people who will not bring brain and purpose to bear upon their own rural polity.2

  It would be ridiculous to say that all the Appalachian mountaineers are on this low level, or to assume that their stock is wholly decayed. They produce, at somewhat longish intervals, individuals of marked ability – whether by chance adulteries or by some fortunate collocation and effervescence of Mendelian characters is not certain.1 But such individuals usually escape from their native alps at the first chance, so that their genes do not improve the remaining population, which continues to go downhill, with excessive inbreeding to help it along. The speech of these poor folk, who have been called “our contemporary ancestors,” is ignorant but very far from unpleasant, as I can testify who have heard it used to preach the Word in the mountains of eastern Tennessee.2 It was first described with any approach to scientific precision by Calvin S. Brown, Jr., in two papers published in 1889 and 1891,3 but during the years thereafter various other linguists began to study it at length, notably Josiah H. Combs. Combs’s first report on it, published in Dialect Notes in 1916,4 was so good a conspectus of the subject that there has been little for later inquirers to do save run down the leads he furnished. He not only described the dialect at length in its most typical form; he also noted its local variations,5 and did not overlook the grotesque effects sometimes produced when a native rhetorician, say a Primitive Baptist preacher, attempts to “place it up on stilts.” On two points subsequent research has questioned his first conclusions: it seems probable that the Celtic element in the mountain population, including Welsh as well as Scotch-Irish fractions, is larger than he was disposed to grant,1 and there is a rising doubt that the linguistic fossils he discovered in large number are really inherited directly from Elizabethan England, as the title of his paper indicated. Many of them flourished along the Scotch-English border so late as the Eighteenth Century, and not a few survive there to this day, as a glance through Alexander Warrack’s “Scots Dialect Dictionary”2 is enough to show.3 But this, after all, is an irrelevance, for Combs made it plain that the archaisms that appear in all American speech4 are appreciably more numerous, whatever their immediate provenance, in the mountain dialect than in General American. He returned to the subject at various times after 1916,5 and in 1931 summed up his observations in a paper contributed to Publications of the Modern Language Association.6 In this paper he included an account of Appalachian place-names and given-names and a discussion of the mountain phonology. The latter was dealt with at greater length in 1942 by Joseph Sargent Hall,7 who gathered his materials in two counties of western North Carolina and three of eastern Tennessee. Unfortunately, his methodology has been sharply criticized by a competent authority.1 Other investigators, not named above, who have contributed to our knowledge of this Appalachian speech are listed below.2

  Vance Randolph, who has written so much and so well about the Ozarks since 1926 that he has converted them into his private preserve, says that the dialect of the region is “derived doubtless from the dialect of the Southern Appalachians,”3 but that it has been reinforced in the remoter areas by words and phrases apparently of indigenous origin. Some of these, he says, are hardly more than gibberish, and he offers the theory that they are either engendered by the howling “in the tongues”4 at mountain revivals or come from the jabber of imbeciles. “The people in these isolated hill-regions,” he says, “intermarry excessively, and feeble-mindedness is very common; it is not unusual to find whole families and clans of people who, while perfectly able to take care of themselves in their native hills, are easily recognized as definitely sub-normal if placed in a more complex environment.… It very frequently happens that such individuals … have a singular ability to coin impressive words at a moment’s notice, or to pronounce words in some grotesque and ludicrous fashion.”1 “The chief differences between the Ozark dialect and the standard vulgate of the United States,” he says in another place, “are matters of pronunciation and vocabulary rather than of grammar.”2 Most of his examples of pronunciation, however, show that of ordinary ignorant American English, e.g., skeerce for scarce, bar’l for barrel, ketch for catch, extry for extra, yaller for yellow, laig for leg, deef for deaf, kittle for kettle, potater for potato, bresh for brush, sassy for saucy, neckid for naked, hist for hoist, onct for once, rench for rinse, dreen for drain, and brethern for brethren, and nearly all the rest are encountered in Appalachia, e.g., hit for it, malary for malaria, yander for yonder, goom for gum, vomick for vomit, and heathern for heathen.3 In the vocabulary he notes some curious changes in meaning:

  A stew is not a dish of meat and vegetables in the Ozarks, but a drink made of ginger, hot water and corn-whiskey.… Ashamed, when used with reference to a child or a young girl, does not mean ashamed at all, but merely timid or bashful. Gum means … a rabbit-trap – when the hillman wants chewing-gum he calls for wax.… When he says several he doesn’t mean two or three or four, but a large number.… Judge or jedge is used to mean a fool or clown, and there is even an adjective, jedgy. Enjoy is used in the sense of entertain. Lavish is used as a noun, meaning a large quantity.… Portly, as applied to a man, means handsome.… Out is used as a verb meaning to defraud.… Fine-haired means aristocratic.4

  Among the other more or less picturesque Ozark terms listed by Randolph are the following:

  Arbuckle. A carbuncle.5

  Arkansaw, v. To murder in what is regarded locally as an unfair way.

  Boggy. Delirious.

  Chaunk, v. To crush with the teeth.

  Crimp, v. To writhe in pain.

  Cripple, v. To limp.

  Ducy. The penis.1

  Fastly. Firmly, persistently.

  Feather into, v. To shoot.2

  Givey. Unsteady.

  Hate, v. To be sorry.

  Hoe. A stocking.3

  Host, v. To entertain guests.4

  Human rifle. A rifle of large calibre, suitable for homicide.

  Love-hole. A ditch across a road.

  Miller, v. To beat.

  Nursement. Human milk.

  Paw-pawer. A fugitive from justice.

  Poot. An exclamation of disgust.

  Saying. A speech.

  Scoffle, v. To ridicule.

  Shoot. An adolescent.

  Snag. A tall tree-stump.

  Squirrel-turner. A marksman.

  Susy. Countrified.

  Swoggle, v. To dip or stir.

  Tutor, v. To pamper or indulge.

  Wash-off. A bath.

  Weather, v. To storm.5

  Randolph’s account of the extreme prudishness of the Ozarkers has been noticed in Supplement I, pp. 654–55. Many common words, e.g., bully buck, bitch, virgin, bed, leg, bag and even love, are taboo among them,6 but on the other hand they are free in the use of terms, e.g., to snot and to give tittie, that are frowned upon elsewhere.7

  The division of Southern American into Appalachian, Tidewater and Lowland or General Southern has been noted earlier in this section. Tidewater
, which is the most extreme form of the dialect, covers a relatively small area:1 the majority of Southerners speak General Southern. But General Southern is a variable quantity, and more than one observer has noted the great range between the careful speech of an educated and self-conscious inhabitant of, say, Atlanta, Richmond or New Orleans and the casual talk of a Georgia cracker or Mississippi Negro. The former tends to approximate General American, though in dealing with r before consonants and at the ends of words it follows Boston speech in making the letter silent. Its vowels, according to a Louisiana authority, C. M. Wise,2 are substantially those of General American, including the flat a in pass, dance, can’t, etc. It inserts a y-glide before u after t, n and d, but not after s, z and l, e.g., tyune, nyew and dyew, but not presyume or absolyutely.3 But this elegant Southern is a narrow class dialect, and is seldom encountered in its purest form. More commonly it is colored, even on the highest levels, by usages borrowed from below. These include the conversion of the flat a into something resembling e, as in keint for can’t; the omission of the final r in poor, floor and your, and sometimes of the medial r, as in throw and through; the change of the diphthong in cow into a mixture of the flat a and y and of that in I into something resembling ah; the omission of the l from twelve, self, help, etc.; the voicing of the s, as in greasy and blouse; the use of you-all;1 the dropping of g from the -ing words, and the omission of t from next, best, soft, etc., and of d from land, etc. Says Wise: