American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  4 On English Homophones, p. 43.

  5 Shop Talk at Thirty, April 22, 1939, p. 84. See also Foreign Words, by H. L. Mencken, San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 3, 1934.

  6 German Papers Near 4 Million, Sept. 28, 1946, p. 54.

  1 S. J. P.’s Ilks, by Phil Stong, Sept. 21, 1946, p. 23.

  2 Scully’s Scrapbook, by Frank Scully, Jan. 17, 1945, p. 2. This article includes some interesting contributions to the history of vaudeville.

  3 Rome (N.Y.) Sentinel, editorial, June 21, 1944.

  4 The necessary linotype matrices were laid in by the Evening Sun in 1914 or thereabout. I was at that time a member of the editorial staff of the paper, and had been carrying on an intra-office campaign for their purchase since 1910. It took about five years to induce the copy-desk and proof-room to use them. The morning Sun followed ten or eleven years later. It was a long and bitter battle, and left me pretty well exhausted.

  5 Style Book of the New York Herald Tribune, 1929, p. 2. On Dec. 25, 1938 it printed a Christmas editorial in which the following words all had accents: marzipän, turrón, pfeffernüsse, gemüthlichkeit, crèche, Père Noël and Nürnberg. This probably broke all American newspaper records. I am indebted here to Mr. Valdemar Viking, of Red Bank, N. J.

  6 Chicago Tribune Rules of Composition, 1934, pp. 8–9.

  1 United States Government Printing Office Style Manual, revised edition, Jan., 1945, p. 49.

  2 Style Manual of the Department of State, by Margaret M. Hanna and Alice M. Ball; Washington, 1937, p. 113.

  3 Cassell’s New French-English English-French Dictionary, edited by Ernest A. Barker; New York, 1930, p. 563.

  4 S.P.E. Tract No. XXII, 1925, p. 65.

  5 Extension of Remarks of Hon. Francis Case, of South Dakota, Nov. 23, 1945, p. A5440.

  6 Two examples are on p. 9, Aug. 7, 1937, and a third is noted in Latin Plurals, by Mamie Meredith, American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 178.

  7 The headline was: Delay in Arms Merger Decision is Urged Until More Data is In. Someone must have squawked in the office, for in later editions this was changed to the equivocal Delay in Arms Merger Decision Urged Until There is More Data. I am indebted here to Mr. Alexander Kadison.

  8 Censor’s Office Discusses Rules of Advertising, March 7, 1942, p. 8.

  9 Drum Hunt, Jan., 1944, p. 10.

  10 The Hulls of Tennessee, April 8, 1940: “I have never seen a better Americana.”

  1 The Pluralization of Latin Loan-Words in Present-Day American Speech, Classical Journal, Dec., 1919, pp. 163–68.

  2 Plural Singulars From Latin Neuters, American Speech, Oct., 1927, pp. 26–27.

  3 Latin Plurals, by Mamie Meredith, American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 178.

  4 I take the former from Dozen Periodicals Fold, Variety, June 23, 1937; the latter is ascribed to John Steinbeck in Minimum? Minimis? Minima?, by Ernest Fuld, Saturday Review of Literature, Jan. 20, 1945, p. 23. The true Latin plural of prospectus is the singular unchanged, and the plural of octopus, according to Dr. Fuld, is octopodes.

  5 S.P.E. Tract No. XXII, pp. 66–67.

  6 Dr. Ball is a distinguished botanist. He was attached to the Bureau of Plant Industry of the Department of Agriculture in 1928. In 1931 he went to the University of California. He has been editor for agronomy of Biological Abstracts since 1926.

  1 Why not errors?

  2 English or Latin Plurals for Anglicized Latin Nouns?, American Speech, April, 1928, pp. 291–325.

  3 Plurals of Nouns Ending in -itis, July 26, 1930, p. 287.

  4 Suggestions to Medical Authors; Chicago, 1919, p. 32.

  5 In 1944 the Archbishop of Armagh wrote to the London Times denouncing questionnaire and proposed questionary in its place. Questionnaire, Liverpool Daily Post, July 1, 1944.

  6 The Japanese Stage, Galaxy, Jan., 1876, pp. 76, 78 and 79 respectively.

  5. PUNCTUATION, CAPITALIZATION, AND ABBREVIATION

  413. [In the first draft of the Declaration of Independence nature and creator, and even god are in lower case.] Sometimes, indeed, small letters appear at the beginning of sentences and even paragraphs.1 But Franklin, a conservative in this field as in so many others, stuck to capitals for all nouns, whether proper or common, to the end of his days, and wrote to Noah Webster from his deathbed, in 1789, protesting against the growing use of small letters. He said:

  In examining the English Books that were printed between the Restoration and the Accession of George the 2nd2 we may observe that all Substantives were begun with a capital, in which we imitated our Mother Tongue, the German. This was more particularly useful to those who were not well acquainted with the English, there being such a prodigious Number of Words that are both Verbs and Substantives and spelt in the same manner, tho’ often accented differently in Pronunciation. This Method has, by the Fancy of Printers, of late Years been laid aside, from an Idea that suppressing the Capitals shows the Character to greater Advantage, those Letters prominent above the Line disturbing its even regular Appearance.3

  Charles J. Lovell, an assiduous delver into early American language records, tells me that the abandonment of capitals was apparently a function of the Revolution. “Beginning with Lexington and Concord,” he says, “upper case letters were removed even from Christianity and the names of the various religious sects and political parties.”4 By 1791, a year after Franklin’s death, the American Museum of Philadelphia was reducing all honorifics, including even Mr., to lower case,5 and using such forms as six nations, bank of the United States, vice-president of the United States, and satan. By the 1830s, as examples in the DAE show, whig, tory and federalist were usually l.c., though Constitution remained caps. Lovell sends me an extract from the Ohio Almanac (Cincinnati) for 1814 showing protestant episcopal church, methodist meeting house, quaker, jupiter, saturn and venus. He says that “just before the Civil War caps were coming back,1 State was always capitalized, and personal names were written in small capitals.”2 At present there is considerable variation in the practise of American newspapers. The Chicago Tribune uses lower case for company, union, university, board, hospital, bank, church, corporation, etc., following proper names, but makes a curious exception in favor of Line, as in Seaboard Air Line, and Foundation, as in Rockefeller Foundation. The Baltimore Sunpapers capitalize all of these words. They use caps for the Constitution of the United States, but lower case for that of the States, including Maryland. They capitalize Government, Administration and Cabinet, as does the Providence Journal-Bulletin. Very few newspapers capitalize the names of the seasons, those of the points of the compass, or the numerical designations of centuries. All capitalize the names of God and His divine associates, and all pronouns referring to them save those beginning with w, but these pronouns are not capitalized in direct quotations from the King James Bible, where they are all l.c. Nearly all American publications now capitalize Negro.3 The London Times still capitalizes Street, Road, Crescent, etc., and prints them as separate words; other English newspapers give them the form of Park-lane, Bond-street, etc.,4 sometimes with the second element abbreviated to -st., -rd., etc.5 In the United States abbreviations are most commonly used, without capitals.

  There is evidence of a Catholic campaign to induce American newspapers to capitalize mass. In the Editor & Publisher, in 1945, a letter appeared saying that capitalizing the word “would be regarded by Catholics as a gesture of understanding,” and appealing to the editor thereof to “bring the matter to the newspaper field.”1 The writer thus stated the theological reason for his request:

  The Catholic Church teaches that Christ is present in the Mass as He was in the Last Supper, not in a representative way, but really, truly and substantially. This teaching is based on the words used by Christ, “This is My body” over the bread, and over the wine, “This is the chalice of My blood.”2 Thus, in the Mass, Christ is present as He was on Calvary, making the Mass and Calvary synonymous, and since Christ is a Divine Person and the Mass is Christ, in an unbloody manner, references indicating
Christ are properly capitalized, e.g., Son, Saviour, Mass or Lord.

  The Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary, the standard British authority, ordains that in writing dates “the order shall be day, month, year as 5 June 1903, not June 5, 1903,”3 and this is usually followed by the English in letters. But in other situations they commonly make the order month, day, year.4 The latter is the usual American practise, but during World War II the War Department came out for day, month, year,5 and even before that the form had been in more or less use in both the Army and the Navy.6 Not, however, in the other departments at Washington. The latest edition of the Style Manual of the Government Printing Office7 ordains July 30, 1914, and even the State Department, which is otherwise excessively English, uses the same form.8 There was a time when the English used a comma instead of a period (which they call a full stop) to divide the hours from the minutes in figures indicating times of the day, e.g., 7,25, but now they commonly use a period as we do, with the a.m. or p.m. following in small letters.1

  In the use of the hyphen English practise and American practise seem to be substantially identical, though the English employ it in proper names rather more than we do, e.g., Stoke-on-Trent, Weston-under-Lizard, Weston-super-Mare, Ossett-cum-Gawthorpe, Hore-Belisha and Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax.2 There is an elaborate and excellent discussion of hyphenization in “Compounding in the English Language,” by Alice Morton Ball, one of the compilers of the Style Manual of the Department of State.3 It includes a review of all the principal dictionaries, style books and grammars, with an attempt to set up rational rules. Like most other writers on the subject, Miss Ball makes a distinction between compounds used as nouns and the same used as adjectives. The former she prefers to leave separate, e.g., paper mill and holding company, but the latter she hyphenates, e.g., paper-mill employee and holding-company bond. This is the practise of most American newspapers. She prefers no hyphen in such compound titles as vice president and under secretary, but advises its use when prefixes or affixes are added, e.g., ex-vice-president and under-secretaryship. She also recommends it when its absence might cause misunderstanding or mispronunciation, and when there is an inconvenient cluster of vowels or consonants, as in bee-eater, egg-gatherer and brass-smith. She prefers using a hyphen in good-by (Eng. good-bye), but it is my impression that goodby is supplanting good-by in the United States, as today and tomorrow have long supplanted to-day and to-morrow.4 Of late there has been a tendency among American newspapers to amalgamate -man with a long series of nouns that were formerly separated, e.g., garbageman and newspaperman. This, it seems to me, is irrational and confusing. In cases where the -man has been reduced to -m’n in pronunciation, e.g., workman, batsman and even longshoreman, making one word of the compound is plainly allowable, but where the -man is still clearly enunciated, as in garbage man, newspaper man, working man and end man the most that can be reasonably allowed is a hyphen.1 Jacques Barzun has printed an eloquent protest against the excessive amalgamation of words that had better be kept separate,2 listing some of the horrors that he has encountered, e.g., picturegallery, hardshelled, fifteenyearold, ultraaustere, nonessential and midsummermadness.3 He adds a reductio ad absurdum in the form of a version of the Gettysburg Address beginning “Fourscoreandseven years ago ourfathers broughtforth …”4

  Such a form as St. James-place would seem barbarous to an Englishman: he sticks to the possessive, and writes St. James’s-place or -pl. In the United States the apostrophe seems to be doomed, for the Board on Geographical Names has swept it out of such old forms as Prince George’s and Queen Anne’s (counties in Maryland), and it has been dropped from the title of Teacher’s College, Columbia, the Lhasa of American pedagogy.5 In other respects American and English punctuation show few differences. The English are rather more careful than we are, and commonly put a comma after the next-to-the-last member of a series,6 but otherwise are not too precise to offend a red-blooded American. There are frequent proposals that the semi-colon be abandoned, though its utility must be manifest.1 The Style Manual of the Government Printing Office is content to say of it that it “is to be avoided where a comma will suffice,”2 and this is repeated by that of the Department of State.3 Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor. The fact that quotes within quotes are often confusing, and unhinge the minds of thousands of poor copy-readers every year, has fanned these flames. Also, there is frequent complaint that the marks themselves, as they stand, are unsightly, with demands for something better. During the 1890s Theodore L. DeVinne (1828–1914), then the premier typographer of the United States, designed a new type-face, including new quotes, for the Century Magazine. They consisted of pairs of nested carets or small parentheses laid on their sides, with those pointing west used to open a quotation and those pointing east to close it, and were imitations of characters adopted by the Didots, famous French printers, at the end of the Eighteenth Century. In explaining them4 he said:

  When British printers decided to use quotation marks their type-founders had no characters for the purpose and did not make them. Whether this refusal was due to the unwillingness of the British printers to pay for a new character or to the prevalent dislike of everything French cannot be decided. All we know is that they decided to imitate them with the unfit characters in stock.

  The DeVinne quotation marks were first used in the Century for November, 1895. No other publication adopted them, and after a few years they were abandoned for the more familiar inverted commas.5 In 1941 another innovator proposed, with equal lack of success, a mark that he described as follows:

  It is a symmetrical elbow bracket, the size of a caret opened out to a right angle. It is placed at the top of the line like the strokes of the [present] quotation mark. Its nook is turned toward the quotation, like the angles of parenthetical brackets. I have called it the Text-quote.6

  Most American newspapers print the names of other newspapers, when they can’t avoid mentioning them, in Roman, enclosed in quotation marks, but the Government Printing Office prints them without the quotation marks.1 The relatively few that use italics2 go on to caps and small caps when they mention themselves. The Editor & Publisher follows the irrational and unlovely system of using italics the first time a given newspaper is mentioned in an article, and then putting it in Roman every time it is repeated. The same newspapers which print unnaturalized loan-words without accents also print them in Roman, e.g., communique, tete-a-tete, hofbrauhaus, gemutlichkeit and a la carte. “Most American newspapers,” says the Style Book (printed Stylebook) of the Baltimore Sunpapers, not without a touch of ablonogastrigolumpiosity, “do not use italics; they are not even mentioned in the majority of style books. We should make our better practise stand out by using them correctly.”3

  The difficulties that 100% Americans have with the plurals of loan-words, mentioned in Section 4 of this chapter, are matched by their difficulties with the plurals of certain native words. Is buses correct, or busses? This problem first engaged the learned men of England when the first motor-bus appeared at Oxford, and one of the dons thereof made a pretty little poem upon it. It spread to the United States soon afterward and has been debated ever since, with no conclusion. Webster 1926 said “pl. busses or buses,” but Webster 1934 evaded the question by giving no plural at all. H. W. Fowler, in his “Modern English Usage,” accounts for buses by saying that it “is still regarded as an abbreviation of the regular omnibuses,” but expresses the opinion that “when omnibus is forgotten (and bus is now more usual than ’bus) doubtless buses will become, as it should, busses.”1 And what of the plurals of attorneygeneral and its cognates? All the handbooks of “correct” English that I am aware of ordain adding the s to the first element, but State Government, the official organ of the Council of State Governments, puts it at the end.2 Again, is the plural of roof roofs or rooves? Proofs pulls one way and hooves another. The NED finds roofes in 1600 and roofs in “Paradise Regained,” 1671, but roovis in 1445. Yet again, is it spoonsf
ul or spoonfuls, brothers-in-law or brother-in-laws, Misses Smith or Miss Smiths? Most authorities declare for the first of each of these pairs, but the others are undoubtedly in wide use. No less an authority than Sir William Craigie says that sisteren or sistren, now confined to the Christians, white and black, of the Get-Right-with-God Country, was common in Middle English and is just as respectable, etymologically speaking, as brethren. He also says that down to the Seventeenth Century grieves was the plural of grief and strives of strife.3 Certain plurals of words ending in -th, though their spelling is established, present problems in pronunciation, e.g., wreath. Should the th of wreaths be that of think or that of this?4 The plurals of the names of birds and animals have long engaged orthographers, and they still show a considerable difference of opinion. Webster’s New International Dictionary, second ed., pp. 1896–7, says that there are four classes of them, as follows:

  1. Those which use a plural differing from the singular, e.g., bird and its compounds, dog, goat, mouse, owl and rat. But when some of these words are preceded by wild, native, sea, mountain, etc., they may be unchanged in the plural, e.g., wild pig, native horse and band of musk ox.

  2. Those which take plural forms in ordinary speech, but may be used in the singular “in the language of those who hunt or fish,” e.g., antelope, beaver, buffalo, duck, hare, muskrat, quail and fox.

  3. Those that are unchanged in form in the plural, e.g., bison, deer, grouse, moose and sheep.

  4. Those that use a different plural form “only to signify diversity in kind or species,” e.g., trouts of the Rocky Mountains, fishes of the Atlantic.5

  Down to the advent of the New Deal the section on abbreviations, in the average American style book, filled only a few pages, and even the Style Manual of the Government Printing Office1 exhausted the subject in six and a half. But now the number of them, chiefly emanating from Washington, is so enormous that the Manual refers its customers to a separate reference work, the United States Government Manual.2 During the four years of American participation in World War II the Army and Navy spewed them out diligently, and so many new civil government agencies were set up, each with a long name and each name with an abbreviation, that no copy-reader in the country could keep up with them. Worse, more came pouring in from England and even more from Russia, and by 1945 George Erlie Shankle had assembled enough recognized abbreviations to fill a volume of 207 pages, set in small type in double columns.3 The Russian contribution had found a recorder eight years before,4 and that of the English helped fill a book of 104 pages by 1942.5 All such volumes, alas, were incomplete, for new abbreviations came out faster than any press could run; moreover, the compilers, in sheer desperation, omitted many of the abbreviations used for the names of divisions, sub-divisions and ultradivisions in the new mobs of jobholders, e.g., EIDEBOEW ABEW, which the Editor & Publisher reported in 1943 as the accepted abbreviation of Economic Intelligence Division of the Enemy Branch of the Office of Economic Warfare Analysis of the Board of Economic Warfare.1