American Language Read online

  BOOKS BY H·L·MENCKEN

  THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

  THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE: Supplement I

  THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE: Supplement II

  A NEW DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS

  TREATISE ON THE GODS

  CHRISTMAS STORY

  A MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY (with selections from the Prejudices series, A Book of Burlesques, In Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy, Making a President, A Book of Calumny, Treatise on Right and Wrong, with pieces from the American Mercury, Smart Set, and the Baltimore Evening Sun, and some previously unpublished notes)

  MINORITY REPORT: H. L. MENCKEN’S NOTEBOOKS

  THE BATHTUB HOAX and Other Blasts and Bravos from the Chicago Tribune

  LETTERS OF H. L. MENCKEN, selected and annotated by Guy J. Forgue

  H. L. MENCKEN ON MUSIC, edited by Louis Cheslock

  THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE: The Fourth Edition and the Two Supplements, abridged, with annotations and new material, by Raven I. McDavid, Jr., with the assistance of David W. Maurer

  H. L. MENCKEN: THE AMERICAN SCENE, A READER, selected and edited, with an introduction and commentary, by Huntington Cairns

  These are BORZOI BOOKS, published by ALFRED A. KNOPF in New York

  Copyright 1919, 1921, 1923, 1936 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright renewed 1947, 1949, 1950 by H. L. Mencken. Copyright renewed 1963 by August Mencken and Mercantile-Safe Deposit and Trust Company. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  PUBLISHED March, 1919

  REVISED EDITION published December, 1921

  THIRD EDITION again revised published February, 1923

  FOURTH EDITION corrected, enlarged, and rewritten

  Published April, 1936

  Reprinted Twenty-six Times

  Twenty-eighth Printing, May 2006

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80879-0

  v3.1

  PREFACE

  TO THE FOURTH EDITION

  The first edition of this book, running to 374 pages, was published in March, 1919. It sold out very quickly, and so much new matter came in from readers that a revision was undertaken almost at once. This revision, however, collided with other enterprises, and was not finished and published until December, 1921. It ran to 492 pages. In its turn it attracted corrections and additions from many correspondents, and in February, 1923, I brought out a third edition, revised and enlarged. This third edition has been reprinted five times, and has had a large circulation, but for some years past its mounting deficiencies have been haunting me, and on my retirement from the editorship of the American Mercury at the end of 1933 I began to make plans for rewriting it. The task turned out to be so formidable as to be almost appalling. I found myself confronted by a really enormous accumulation of notes, including hundreds of letters from correspondents in all parts of the world and thousands of clippings from the periodical press of the British Empire, the United States and most of the countries of Continental Europe. Among the letters were many that reviewed my third edition page by page, and suggested multitudinous additions to the text, or changes in it. One of them was no less than 10,000 words long. The clippings embraced every discussion of the American language printed in the British Empire since the end of 1922 — at all events, every one that the singularly alert Durrant Press-Cutting Agency could discover. Furthermore, there were the growing files of American Speech, set up in October, 1925, and of Dialect Notes, and a large number of books and pamphlets, mostly in English but some also in German, French and other foreign languages, including even Japanese. It soon became plain that this immense mass of new material made a mere revision of the third edition out of the question. What was needed was a complete reworking, following to some extent the outlines of the earlier editions, but with many additions and a number of emendations and shortenings. That reworking has occupied me, with two or three intervals, since the beginning of 1934. The present book picks up bodily a few short passages from the third edition, but they are not many. In the main, it is a new work.

  The reader familiar with my earlier editions will find that it not only presents a large amount of matter that was not available when they were written, but also modifies the thesis which they set forth. When I became interested in the subject and began writing about it (in the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1910), the American form of the English language was plainly departing from the parent stem, and it seemed at least likely that the differences between American and English would go on increasing. This was what I argued in my first three editions. But since 1923 the pull of American has become so powerful that it has begun to drag English with it, and in consequence some of the differences once visible have tended to disappear. The two forms of the language, of course, are still distinct in more ways than one, and when an Englishman and an American meet they continue to be conscious that each speaks a tongue that is far from identical with the tongue spoken by the other. But the Englishman, of late, has yielded so much to American example, in vocabulary, in idiom, in spelling and even in pronunciation, that what he speaks promises to become, on some not too remote tomorrow, a kind of dialect of American, just as the language spoken by the American was once a dialect of English. The English writers who note this change lay it to the influence of the American movies and talkies, but it seems to me that there is also something more, and something deeper. The American people now constitute by far the largest fraction of the English-speaking race, and since the World War they have shown an increasing inclination to throw off their old subservience to English precept and example. If only by the force of numbers, they are bound to exert a dominant influence upon the course of the common language hereafter. But all this I discuss at length, supported by the evidence now available, in the pages following.

  At the risk of making my book of forbidding bulk I have sought to present a comprehensive conspectus of the whole matter, with references to all the pertinent literature. My experience with the three preceding editions convinces me that the persons who are really interested in American English are not daunted by bibliographical apparatus, but rather demand it. The letters that so many of them have been kind enough to send to me show that they delight in running down the by-ways of the subject, and I have tried to assist them by setting up as many guide-posts as possible, pointing into every alley as we pass along. Thus my references keep in step with the text, where they are most convenient and useful, and I have been able to dispense with the Bibliography which filled 32 pages of small type in my third edition. I have also omitted a few illustrative oddities appearing in that edition — for example, specimens of vulgar American by Ring W. Lardner and John V. A. Weaver, and my own translations of the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettsyburg Address. The latter two, I am sorry to say, were mistaken by a number of outraged English critics for examples of Standard American, or of what I proposed that Standard American should be. Omitting them will get rid of that misapprehension and save some space, and those who want to consult them will know where to find them in my third edition.

  I can’t pretend that I have covered the whole field in the present volume, for that field has become very large in area. But I have at least tried to cover those parts of it of which I have any knowledge, and to indicate the main paths through the remainder. The Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, now under way at the University of Chicago under the able editorship of Sir William Craigie, will deal with the vocabulary of Americanisms on a scale impossible here, and the Linguistic Atlas in preparation by Dr. Hans Kurath and his associates at Brown University will similarly cover the large and vexatious subject of regional differences in usage. In
the same way, I hope, the work of Dr. W. Cabell Greet and his associates at Columbia will one day give us a really comprehensive account of American pronunciation. There are other inquiries in progress by other scholars, all of them unheard of at the time my third edition was published. But there are still some regions into which scholarship has hardly penetrated — for example, that of the vulgar grammar —, and therein I have had to disport as gracefully as possible, always sharply conscious of the odium which attaches justly to those amateurs who, “because they speak, fancy they can speak about speech.” I am surely no philologian, and my inquiries and surmises will probably be of small value to the first successor who is, but until he appears I can only go on accumulating materials, and arranging them as plausibly as possible.

  In the course of the chapters following I have noted my frequent debt to large numbers of volunteer aides, some of them learned in linguistic science but the majority lay brothers as I am. My contacts with them have brought me many pleasant acquaintanceships, and some friendships that I value greatly. In particular, I am indebted to Dr. Louise Pound, professor of English at the University of Nebraska and the first editor of American Speech, whose interest in this book has been lively and generous since its first appearance; to Mr. H. W. Seaman, of Norwich, England, whose herculean struggles with the chapter on “American and English Today” deserve a much greater reward than he will ever receive on this earth; to Dr. Kemp Malone, professor of English at the Johns Hopkins, who was kind enough to read the chapter on “The Common Speech”; to the late Dr. Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate of England and founder of the Society for Pure English, who was always lavish of his wise and stimulating counsel; to Professor Dr. Heinrich Spies of Berlin, who published a critical summary of my third edition in German, under the title of “Die amerikanische Sprache,” in 1927; and to the late Dr. George Philip Krapp, professor of English at Columbia, who allowed me the use of the manuscript of his excellent “History of the English Language in America” in 1922, and was very obliging in other ways down to the time of his lamented death in 1934. Above all, I am indebted to my secretary, Mrs. Rosalind C. Lohrfinck, without whose indefatigable aid the present edition would have been quite impossible. The aforesaid friends of the philological faculty are not responsible, of course, for anything that appears herein. They have saved me from a great many errors, some of them of a large and astounding character, but others, I fear, remain. I shall be grateful, as in the past, for corrections and additions sent to me at 1524 Hollins street, Baltimore.

  Baltimore, 1936

  H. L. M.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface to the Fourth Edition

  I. THE TWO STREAMS OF ENGLISH

  1. The Earliest Alarms

  2. The English Attack

  3. American “Barbarisms”

  4. The English Attitude Today

  5. The Position of the Learned

  6. The Views of Writing Men

  7. The Political Front

  8. Foreign Observers

  II. THE MATERIALS OF THE INQUIRY

  1. The Hallmarks of American

  2. What is an Americanism?

  III. THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN

  1. The First Loan-Words

  2. New Words of English Material

  3. Changed Meanings

  4. Archaic English Words

  IV. THE PERIOD OF GROWTH

  1. A New Nation in the Making

  2. The Expanding Vocabulary

  3. Loan-Words and Non-English Influences

  V. THE LANGUAGE TODAY

  1. After the Civil War

  2. The Making of New Nouns

  3. Verbs

  4. Other Parts of Speech

  5. Foreign Influences Today

  VI. AMERICAN AND ENGLISH

  1. The Infiltration of English by Americanisms

  2. Surviving Differences

  3. English Difficulties with American

  4. Briticisms in the United States

  5. Honorifics

  6. Euphemisms

  7. Forbidden Words

  8. Expletives

  VII. THE PRONUNCIATION OF AMERICAN

  1. Its General Characters

  2. The Vowels

  3. The Consonants

  4. Dialects

  VIII. AMERICAN SPELLING

  1. The Influence of Noah Webster

  2. The Advance of American Spelling

  3. The Simplified Spelling Movement

  4. The Treatment of Loan-Words

  5. Punctuation, Capitalization, and Abbreviation

  IX. THE COMMON SPEECH

  1. Outlines of its Grammar

  2. The Verb

  3. The Pronoun

  4. The Noun

  5. The Adjective

  6. The Adverb

  7. The Double Negative

  8. Other Syntactical Peculiarities

  X. PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA

  1. Surnames

  2. Given-Names

  3. Place-Names

  4. Other Proper Names

  XI. AMERICAN SLANG

  1. The Nature of Slang

  2. Cant and Argot

  XII. THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

  1. The Spread of English

  2. English or American?

  APPENDIX. NON–ENGLISH DIALECTS IN AMERICA

  1. Germanic

  a. German

  b. Dutch

  c. Swedish

  d. Dano-Norwegian

  e. Icelandic

  f. Yiddish

  2. Latin

  a. French

  b. Italian

  c. Spanish

  d. Portuguese

  e. Rumanian

  3. Slavic

  a. Czech

  b. Slovak

  c. Russian

  d. Ukrainian

  e. Serbo-Croat

  f. Lithuanian

  g. Polish

  4. Finno-Ugrian

  a. Finnish

  b. Hungarian

  5. Celtic

  a. Gaelic

  6. Semitic

  a. Arabic

  7. Greek

  a. Modern Greek

  8. Asiatic

  a. Chinese

  b. Japanese

  9. Miscellaneous

  a. Armenian

  b. Hawaiian

  c. Gipsy

  About the Author

  I

  THE TWO STREAMS OF ENGLISH

  I. THE EARLIEST ALARMS

  The first American colonists had perforce to invent Americanisms, if only to describe the unfamiliar landscape and weather, flora and fauna confronting them. Half a dozen that are still in use are to be found in Captain John Smith’s “Map of Virginia,” published in 1612, and there are many more in the works of the New England annalists. As early as 1621 Alexander Gill was noting in his “Logonomia Anglica” that maize and canoe were making their way into English.1 But it was reserved for one Francis Moore, who came out to Georgia with Oglethorpe in 1735, to raise the earliest alarm against this enrichment of English from the New World, and so set the tone that English criticism has maintained ever since. Thus he described Savannah, then a village only two years old:

  It stands upon the flat of a Hill; the Bank of the River (which they in barbarous English call a bluff) is steep, and about forty-five foot perpendicular.2

  John Wesley arrived in Georgia the same year, and from his diary for December 2, 1737, comes the Oxford Dictionary’s earliest example of the use of the word. But Moore was the first to notice it, and what is better to the point, the first to denounce it, and for that pioneering he must hold his honorable place in this history. In colonial times, of course, there was comparatively little incitement to hostility to Americanisms, for the stream of Englishmen coming to America to write books about their sufferings had barely begun to flow, and the number of American books reaching London was very small. Bu
t by 1754 literary London was already sufficiently conscious of the new words arriving from the New World for Richard Owen Cambridge, author of “The Scribleriad,” to be suggesting3 that a glossary of them would soon be in order, and two years later the finicky and always anti-American Samuel Johnson was saying, in a notice of Lewis Evans’s “Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical, and Mechanical Essays,”4 substantially what many English reviewers still say with dogged piety:

  This treatise is written with such elegance as the subject admits, tho’ not without some mixture of the American dialect, a tract [i.e., trace] of corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed.

  As the Revolution drew on, the English discovered varieties of offensiveness on this side of the ocean that greatly transcended the philological, and I can find no record of any denunciation of Americanisms during the heat of the struggle itself. When, on July 20, 1778, a committee appointed by the Continental Congress to arrange for the “publick reception of the sieur Gerard, minister plenipotentiary of his most christian majesty,” brought in a report recommending that “all replies or answers” to him should be “in the language of the United States,”5 no notice of the contumacy seems to have been taken in the Motherland. But a few months before Cornwallis was finally brought to heel at Yorktown the subject was resumed, and this time the attack came from a Briton living in America, and otherwise ardently pro-American. He was John Witherspoon (1723–94), a Scottish clergyman who had come out in 1769 to be president of Princeton in partibus infidelium.

  Witherspoon took to politics when the war closed his college, and was elected a member of the New Jersey constitutional convention. In a little while he was promoted to the Continental Congress, and in it he sat for six years as its only member in holy orders. He signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, and was a member of the Board of War throughout the Revolution. But though his devotion to the American cause was thus beyond question, he was pained by the American language, and when, in 1781, he was invited to contribute a series of papers to the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser of Philadelphia, he seized the opportunity to denounce it, albeit in the politic terms proper to the time. Beginning with the disarming admission that “the vulgar in America speak much better than the vulgar in England, for a very obvious reason, viz., that being much more unsettled, and moving frequently from place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology,” he proceeded to argue that Americans of education showed a lamentable looseness in their “public and solemn discourses.”