American Language Supplement 1 Read online

  Boyd, in his article, hinted that business rivalry had something to do with the English antipathy to American translations — an ever-recurring leit motif in the symphony of moral indignation. He said:

  Pirandello is not the only Continental author of importance whose existence in English is due to American enterprise. There are many others: André Gide, Pío Baroja, Pérez de Ayala, Henri Céard, Jacinto Benavente, Ladislas Reymont, Carl Spitteler, Hauptmann, Blasco Ibáñez, Azorín, Eça de Queiroz, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, C. F. Ramuz, Jakob Wassermann. The list might be greatly extended, especially if one adds to it the writers such as Gobineau, Hamsun, Maupassant, Werner von Heidenstam, and Romain Rolland, who would have been abandoned after a volume or two had been tried, but for the support of American publishers and readers.

  As the 20s faded there was an abatement of ardor in the English discovery and running down of American barbarisms. The passage of the Cinematograph Films Act in 1927, putting a high duty on American movie films and requiring every British exhibitor to show a certain number of English-made films after September 30, 1928, running up to 20% from 1935 onward, gave a considerable reassurance to the guardians of the national language, and they were unaware as yet that the American talkie would soon overwhelm them. But there was still some lust for battle left in them, and on occasion they performed in the traditionally hearty manner. When, early in 1930, I contributed an article on Americanisms to the London Daily Express2 and ventured in it to hint that the worst had already come, I was belabored right zealously in many newspapers, including the Express itself.3 Its chosen gladiator was James Douglas, then editor of its Sunday edition and later director of the London Express Newspapers, Ltd. He took the strange line of arguing that the talkies were having virtually no effect on English speech. “It is not true to say,” he said, “that ‘the Englishman is talking and writing more and more American.’ American dialects and slang find us curiously un-imitative.”1 But other contributors to the discussion were a good deal less complacent, and one of them said:

  One must admit that we write and speak Americanisms. So long as Yankeeisms came to us insidiously we absorbed them carelessly. They have been a valuable addition to the language — as nimble coppers are a valuable addition to purer currency. But the talkies have presented the American language in one giant meal, and we are revolted.2

  I was the unwitting cause of another uproar in 1936, when the Daily Express reprinted some long extracts from an article that I had written for the Yale Review.3 In that article I argued that the increasing adoption of American words and phrases in England was a natural and inevitable process, and that they got in simply because England had “nothing to offer in competition with them —that is, nothing so apt or pungent, nothing so good.” There was the usual flood of protests from indignant Englishmen, whereupon the Express fanned the flames by printing some more extracts from my article, including the following:

  Confronted by novelty, whether in object or in situation, the Americans always manage to fetch up a name for it that not only describes it but also illuminates it, whereas the English, since the Elizabethan stimulant oozed out of them, have been content merely to catalogue it.4

  Typical of the protests was a letter signed Hilda Coe,5 beginning as follows:

  I began to read Mr. Mencken’s article in the hope that it would clear away some of my English dislike of Americanisms. But I found instead a school-masterly style, lamentably dull. Mr. Mencken gives the impression that he has revised his work until he has revised all the life out of it. He is even glad to make use of an old English cliché — to run the gauntlet. From him I learn only what I knew before, that we owe so America a few individual words, examples of which are gee, darn, nerts and oh, yeah. They have less liveliness and vigor than the rude remarks of a small boy, and America — still very young — has the small boy’s impudent pride in them.

  “Most Americanisms,” said another correspondent, “are merely examples of bad grammar, like going some place else. Many others are vulgar and lazy misrepresentations of recognized English words.” This charge that Americanisms are largely only good old English terms, taken over either without any change at all or with debasements in form or meaning suggested by American uncouthness, is one that appears very often in English discourses on the repellant subject. In 1935, for example, a correspondent signing himself W. G. Bloom informed the London Daily Telegraph1 that “many so-called American colloquialisms” were “only emigrants returning to England.” Thus he specified:

  Too true is to be found in Shakespeare, and so is to beat it. In Cowper tell the world appears, and Byron gives us and all that. Son-of-a-gun, while savouring of Arizona, is to be found in “The Ingoldsby Legends,” and to bite the dust is in “The Adventures of Gil Bias.”

  A year later, when Sir George Philip Langton, a justice of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court, rebuked a lawyer for using the American to bluff in an argument,2 one of the London newspapers assured its readers that the verb was actually sound and old English, and went on to argue that the game of poker, from which it had been borrowed, was English too.1 Again, a contributor to the London Morning Post, in 1936, claimed bee-line and come-uppance for old England, and even questioned the American origin of cracker, in the sense of what the English call (or used to call) a biscuit.2 The recognized authorities, unhappily, do not agree with these patriots. Too true, of course, is not an Americanism at all, and neither is and all that. It is possible that to tell the world may be found in Cowper, but Partridge says that its latter-day vogue originated in the United States, and that it was not until 1930 or 1931 that it was “anglicized as a colloquialism.” Partridge says that to beat it is also of American origin, and he does not list to bite the dust as an English phrase. The NED gives the latter, but its first example is from William Cullen Bryant’s translation of the Iliad, 1870. The NED lists two English forerunners, to bite the sand, 1718, and to bite the ground, 1771, but both are obviously less picturesque than to bite the dust, which has about it a strong suggestion of the plainsman, and probably arose during the great movement into the West, though the DAE omits it. The history of son-of-a-gun, like that of the allied son-of-a-bitch, is obscure, and neither seems to be ancient.3 They are not listed in Grose, but Partridge says that son-of-a-bitch is to be found in “The Triumph of Wit,” 1712. Admiral W. H. Smyth, in “The Sailor’s Word-Book,”4 says that son-of-a-gun is a nautical term, and that it was “originally applied to boys born afloat, when women were permitted to accompany their husbands to sea”—that is, in the British Navy. “One admiral,” he adds, “declared that he literally was thus cradled, under the breast of a gun-carriage.” Partridge says that the term dates from the early Eighteenth Century, but gives no reference earlier than 1823, and Farmer and Henley’s earliest quotation is dated 1830. Bee-line and comeuppance seem to be indubitable Americanisms. The first is traced by the DAE to c. 1845, and the second to 1859. As for cracker in the sense of a small hard biscuit, e.g., a soda-cracker, it is traced to 1739 in America, but only to 1810 in England, and the NED marks it “now chiefly in U.S.” Grab am-cracker goes back to the early 80s and soda-cracker to 1863, and the DAE marks both Americanisms. It does not list animal-cracker, but that is probably one also.

  The British discussions of the origin of such terms are seldom profitable, for they are carried on, in the main, by writers who are patriots rather than etymologists, and what they have to say often reduces itself to a feeble and ill-natured complaint against all things American.1 Those who avoid a show of bogus learning and devote themselves frankly and whole-heartedly to damning the abominable Yankee and his gibberish are much more amusing. They had a field-day in 1935 when the 100% British Cunard White Star Line, in its advertising (in London) of the first sailing of the Queen Mary, offered prospective passengers one-way and round-trip tickets instead of single and return tickets. The uproar over this ignominious concession to American terminology became so heated that news of it was cab
led to the United States.2 “Is the Queen Mary,” asked the Manchester Guardian gravely, “to be a British or an American vessel?”3 There was another pother in 1938, when Sydney F. Markham, M.P.,4 in a speech in the House of Commons, expressed the waggish hope that King George and Queen Mary, then about to embark on their American tour, would not come home speaking American instead of English.5 The subject was tender at the time, for King Edward VIII, whom George had succeeded only two years before, had been more than once accused of a traitorous and unmanly liking for Americanisms. But the new king and queen somehow escaped contamination, and both still speak English, the latter with a touch of Scots accent. Such doubts and dubieties, before the outbreak of World War II and even down to the fateful event of Pearl Harbor, produced a great deal of indignant writing about the American language. In 1937 there was a heavy outbreak of it,1 with Cosmo Hamilton denouncing the “slick Americanisms … that belong to the worst illiteracy of a foreign tongue”; Lord Plender protesting against the Americanization of English newspaper headlines;2 William Powell damning “the gibberish of morons” produced by “immigrations of South Europeans, many of whom were backward and illiterate”;3 and Pamela Frankau taking space in the London Daily Sketch4 to arraign all “victims to the American craze” as enemies of the true, the good and the beautiful. Their enthusiasm for oke and scram, for “I’ll call you back” instead of “I’ll ring again,” and for various other such “nonsensical” Americanisms was plain evidence, to her mind, of spiritual collapse and deterioration. She continued:

  It goes with the professed admiration of meaningless poetry, incomprehensible pictures, ugly fashions and uncomfortable furniture. It is the refuge of the intellectual coward who trumpets his affection for everything modern in case he be thought old-fashioned.… We have a perfectly good language of our own. We owe no syllable of it to America.5

  At the time this moral rebellion against Americanisms was going on in England there were also repercussions in the colonies and dominions, and especially in Canada. In January, 1937, a learned Englishman by the name of C. Egerton Lowe, described as “of Trinity College, London,” turned up in Toronto with a warning that American influence was corrupting the pure English that the Canadians (at all events, in Ontario) formerly spoke. He was denounced with some asperity in the Detroit Free Press, just across the border,1 but he found a certain amount of support among those he was seeking to save, and soon he was joined in his crusade by Mr. Justice A. Rives Hall, of the Canadian Court of Appeal, who was heard from on the subject several times during the months following.2 The learned judge took the line of denouncing my AL4,3 and appeared to be convinced that my specimens of the American vulgar speech, presented in Chapter IX thereof, had been offered as examples of tony American usage, and even as goals for all aspiring Americanos to aim at. He said:

  To support his argument Mencken has ransacked the Bowery and the haunts of Chicago gunmen, isolated valleys in the mountains of the South, mining camps and Western saloons, dives on the Mexican border, the training camps of pugilists, and the slums in which are congregated unassimilated foreigners for words and phrases never heard in England and seldom if ever used in polite or educated circles in the United States.

  Mr. Justice Hall was still laboring the revolting subject so late as 1939,4 but whether or not his direful admonitions had any effect I do not know. In the Motherland, by that time, many erstwhile viewers with alarm had retreated into a sort of despair, for the flood of Americanisms pouring in through the talkies and the comic-strips had been reinforced by a fashion, suddenly raging among English columnists, for imitating Walter Winchell, and, among other journalists of low aesthetic visibility, for borrowing the iconoclastic jargons of Variety and Time. This new menace was attacked by J. B. Firth in the London Daily Telegraph, by A. E. Wilson in the London Star, by St. John Ervine in the London Observer, and by various other orthodox literati, most of them several cuts higher than the lady novelists, old subscribers and other such persons who had carried on the holy war of 1937. Thus Ervine described the English imitators of what he called American tabloids:

  Bright young gents who cannot compose a grammatical sentence flourish on these shameless sheets, shameless not only for the way in which they are written, but for what is written in them; and they have the impertinence to claim that the style they inflict on their readers is the style we should all use.…

  The American tabloid reporter has to communicate with an extraordinary diversity of alien readers, great numbers of whom can scarcely read their native language, and can only spell their way through the easiest English phrases. The paradoxical fact about American journalism of this sort is that in attempting to make their sentences as plain as possible, so that the most elementary alien reader shall understand them, the reporters have produced a hybrid language which is often incomprehensible to many Americans.1

  But whether comprehensible to Americans or not, it was plainly having a considerable success in England, and many Englishmen, while still disliking it violently, apparently came to the dismayed conclusion that the time was too late for halting it. This defeatist faction, indeed, had been heard from off and on for some years past, and in 1932 Ellis Healey was reporting in the Birmingham Gazette2 that “a definitely American flavor” had already appeared in “the more progressive” English newspapers and even in “the more modern” English magazines; worse, he was playing with the resigned thought that “in about fifty years” England might be only “a moral colony of America.” A year or so later Lieut. R. N. Tripp, R.N., joined in the melancholy foreboding. “If the public would just listen, wonderingly, to the American language,” he said, “and refrain from speaking it or writing it, all would be well. Unfortunately, they will not.”3 Naturally enough, there was some effort to track down the agent or agencies chiefly responsible, and in 1935 a smart pedagogue, A. Noxon, headmaster of Highfield College, Leigh, found a convenient goat in the British Broadcasting Corporation. “It is high time,” he wrote to the Southend Standard,4 that protest was made against the increasingly wretched example set by the B.B.C. in broadcasting during the Children’s Hour the most horrible American slang for the benefit of children who, naturally imitative, quickly pick up all the atrocities which are broadcast for their benefit(?). Schoolmasters have a difficult enough job already to teach decent English to their pupils. What chance have they when every cinema fills their ears with ungrammatical Americanisms?

  Nor was it only school children who picked up these barbaric Words and phrases, for in 1936 a writer signing himself Ochiltree was reporting in the Glasgow Evening Times:

  Only those people who know the latest American slang are considered to be up-to-date and smart in some circles, just as in others the bright Mayfair wits are thought to be those who strain their brains to find successors to marvellous, darling, bogus, too utterly utter, shame-making, and the series of other idiotic words that are ridden to death rapidly.1

  In 1938 Stephen Williams summed up the situation in the London Evening Standard.2 “I seldom hear English spoken,” he said, “in the streets of London. I hear constantly the kind of bastard American culled from the films.” To which Cecil G. Calvert, an actor, added a few days later:3 “What is the use of sending a boy or girl to one of our universities to learn English? When they come to make their way in the world they will find that it is obsolete. Children who are supposed to be taught the English language at our board schools4 go from them to the cinema, and the horrible distortion of our language that they hear there becomes their everyday speech.” A female contributor to the London Evening News presently confirmed all this with two anecdotes, as follows:

  An American, coming over to England for the first time, was struck by the fact that English children in the streets of London and elsewhere talked exactly the same as children in the United States. An American impressario came to this country to make films. He was anxious to secure a crowd of English-speaking children, but he utterly failed to find English children who could talk Engl
ish, and he had to abandon that part of his programme altogether.5

  The objection here, of course, was primarily to American slang, though not many of the Britons who wrote to the newspapers on the subject differentiated clearly between it and more decorous American speech. Many of them, in fact, denounced sidewalk, elevator and candy-store quite as vigorously as they denounced sez you, nert and oh, yeah. The special case of slang will be discussed in Chapter XI of Volume II: here it is in order to remark that not all Englishmen, even at the height of one of the recurrent alarms, were unqualifiedly against all Americanisms. There were, in fact, not a few who rose to defend them, or, at all events, to explain and condone them, and among those defenders were men and women of authority, e.g., William Archer, Robert Bridges, Richard Aldington, G. K. Chesterton, Virginia Woolf and Sir John Foster Fraser. There is some account in AL41 of the earlier writings in that direction; there have been many reinforcements in later years. “We have to admit,” said a staff contributor to the Manchester Evening News in 1936,2 “the intense vitality and colorful expressiveness of the American tongue, no matter what the purists may say.… American makes plain English sound a tortuous and poverty-stricken language. It is no idle fancy of the younger generation which seizes on the American idiom to express something which would need a lot more words in English.” A few months later Wilfred R. Childe, lecturer in English at Leeds University, said much the same thing in an address to the Annual Army Educational Conference,3 and presently there was in progress an earnest if somewhat mild defense of certain Americanisms under fire from chauvinists. Even the Manchester Guardian, ordinarily at least 150% British, took a hand in this counter-attack when Dr. Henry Albert Wilson, Bishop of Chelmsford, denounced to release in his diocesan paper. “Why,” asked the Guardian, “is released, in the sense of a film’s being freed for general exhibition, ‘an abominable Americanism’? It seems to convey a perfectly plain meaning in a perfectly plain way.” His Lordship had hinted to his customers that they might be safer post-mortem if they used prepared instead, but the Guardian would have none of it. Released, it argued, “does not mean the same thing as prepared, for a film might be and sometimes is prepared long before it is released.”4 But this was a debate about a single word, and not altogether significant. The London Times, even more truculently British than the Guardian, went the whole hog (as Abraham Lincoln was fond of saying) in its obituary of John V. A. Weaver, the American poet, in 1938 His books in vulgar American—“In American,” “More American” and so on — offered proof, it allowed, that “the American language is a separate and living tongue, capable of beauty and poetry in itself. These vernacular American poems have something of the same freshness, robustness and beauty of ‘The Canterbury Tales.’ ”1 A few more specimens of English approval must content us. The first was by a Cambridge double-first2 in 1938: