Chapter IX: Miscellanea, 301 (6)

In their vocabularies of opprobrium and profanity English and Americans diverge sharply. The English /rotter/ and /blighter/ are practically unknown in America, and there are various American equivalents that are never heard in England. A /guy/, in the American vulgate, simply signifies a man; there is not necessarily any disparaging significance. But in English, high or low, it means one who is making a spectacle of himself. The derivative verb, /to guy/, is unknown in English; its nearest equivalent is /to spoof/, which is unknown in American. The average American, I believe, has a larger vocabulary of profanity than the average Englishman, and swears a good deal more, but he attempts an amelioration of many of his oaths by softening them to forms with no apparent meaning. /Darn/ (=/dern/=/durn/) for /damn/ is apparently of English origin, but it is heard ten thousand times in America to once in England. So is /dog-gone/. Such euphemistic written forms as /damphool/ and /damfino/ are also far more common in this country. /All-fired/ for /hell-fired/, /gee-whiz/ for /Jesus/, /tarnal/ for /eternal/, /tarnation/ for /damnation/, /cuss/ for /curse/, /goldarned/ for /God-damned/, /by gosh/ for /by God/ and /great Scott/ for /great God/ are all Americanisms; Thornton has traced /all-fired/ to 1835, /tarnation/ to 1801 and /tarnal/ to 1790. /By golly/ has been found in English literature so early as 1843, but it probably originated in America; down to the Civil War it was the characteristic oath of the negro slaves. Such terms as /bonehead/, /pinhead/ and /boob/ have been invented, perhaps, to take the place of the English /ass/, which has a flavor of impropriety in America on account of its identity in sound with the American pronunciation of /arse/.[42] At an earlier day /ass/ was always differentiated by making it /jackass/. Another word that is improper in America but not in England is /tart/. To an Englishman the word connotes sweetness, and so, if he be of the lower orders, he may apply [Pg130] it to his sweetheart. But to the American it signifies a prostitute, or, at all events, a woman of too ready an amiability.

But the most curious disparity between the profane vocabulary of the two tongues is presented by /bloody/. This word is entirely without improper significance in America, but in England it is regarded as the vilest of indecencies. The sensation produced in London when George Bernard Shaw put it into the mouth of a woman character in his play, "Pygmalion," will be remembered. "The interest in the first English performance," said the /New York Times/,[43] "centered in the heroine's utterance of this banned word. It was waited for with trembling, heard shudderingly, and presumably, when the shock subsided, interest dwindled." But in New York, of course, it failed to cause any stir. Just why it is regarded as profane and indecent by the English is one of the mysteries of the language. The theory that it has some blasphemous reference to the blood of Christ is disputed by many etymologists. It came in during the latter half of the seventeenth century, and at the start it apparently meant no more than "in the manner of a blood," /i. e./, a rich young roisterer of the time. Thus, /bloody drunk/ was synonymous with as /drunk as a lord/. The adjective remained innocuous for 200 years. Then it suddenly acquired its present abhorrent significance. It is regarded with such aversion by the English that even the lower orders often substitute /bleeding/ as a euphemism.

So far no work devoted wholly to the improper terms of English and American has been published, but this lack may be soon remedied by a compilation made by a Chicago journalist. It is entitled "The Slang of Venery and Its Analogues," and runs to two large volumes. A small edition, mimeographed for private circulation, was issued in 1916. I have examined this work and found it of great value. If the influence of comstockery is sufficient to prevent its publication in the United States, as seems likely, it will be printed in Switzerland.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It should be noted that /mews/ is used only in the larger cities. In the small towns /livery-stable/ is commoner. /Mews/ is quite unknown in America save as an occasional archaism.

[2] Sometimes /whiffle-tree/.

[3] The latter has crept into American of late. I find it on p. 58 of The United States at War, a pamphlet issued by the Library of Congress, 1917. The compiler of this pamphlet is a savant bearing the fine old British name of Herman H. B. Meyer.

[4] /Living-room/, however, is gradually making its way in England. It was apparently suggested, in America, by the German /wohnzimmer/.

[5] This form survives in the American term /city-stock/, meaning the bonds of a municipality. But government securities are always called /bonds/.

[6] /Cf./ A Glossary of Colloquial Slang and Technical Terms in Use in the Stock Exchange and in the Money Market, by A. J. Wilson, London, 1895.

[7] Or /bailiffs/.

[8] But he is /run/ by his party organization. /Cf./ The Government of England, by A. Lawrence Lowell; New York, 1910, vol. ii, p. 29.

[9] Until very recently no self-respecting American newspaper reporter would call himself a /journalist/. He always used /newspaper man/, and referred to his vocation, not as a profession, but as the newspaper /business/. This old prejudice, however, now seems to be breaking down. /Cf./ Don't Shy at Journalist, /The Editor and Publisher and Journalist/, June 27, 1914.

[10] /Cf./ a speech of Senator La Follette, /Congressional Record/, Aug. 27, 1917, p. 6992.

[11] According to the New International Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (/Art./ Apartment House), the term /flat/ "is usually in the United States restricted to apartments in houses having no elevator or hall service." In New York such apartments are commonly called /walk-up apartments/. Even with the qualification, /apartment/ is better than /flat/.

[12] Canoeing was introduced into England by John MacGregor in 1866, and there is now a Royal Canoe Club. In America the canoe has been familiar from the earliest times, and in Mme. Sarah Kemble Knight's diary (1704) there is much mention of /cannoos/. The word itself is from an Indian dialect, probably the Haitian, and came into American through the Spanish, in which it survives as /canoa/.

[13] "An act was passed to prohibit playing /nine-pins/; as soon as the law was put in force, it was notified everywhere, '/Ten-pins/ played here.'"--Capt. Marryat: Diary in America, vol. iii, p. 195.

[14] "The term /chapel/," says Joyce, in English as We Speak It in Ireland, "has so ingrained itself in my mind that to this hour the word instinctively springs to my lips when I am about to mention a Catholic place of worship; and I always feel some sort of hesitation or reluctance in substituting the word /church/. I positively could not bring myself to say, 'Come, it is time now to set out for /church/' It must be either /mass/ or chapel."

[15] Certain dissenters, of late, show a disposition to borrow the American usage. Thus the /Christian World/, organ of the English Congregationalists, uses /Episcopal/ to designate the Church of England.

[16] So long ago as the 70's certain Jews petitioned the publishers of Webster's and Worcester's dictionaries to omit their definitions of the verb /to jew/, and according to Richard Grant White, the publisher of Worcester's complied. Such a request, in England, would be greeted with derision.

[17] But nevertheless he uses /begotten/, not /begot/.

[18] This specimen is from the /Congressional Record/ of Dec. 11, 1917: "I do not like to be butting into this /proposition/, but I look upon this postoffice business as a purely business /proposition/." The speaker was "Hon" Homer P. Snyder, of New York. In the /Record/ of Jan. 12, 1918, p. 8294, /proposition/ is used as a synonym for state of affairs.

[19] Already in 1855 Bristed was protesting that /to fix/ was having "more than its legitimate share of work all over the Union." "In English conversation," he said, "the panegyrical adjective of all work is /nice/; in America it is /fine/." This was before the adoption of /jolly/ and its analogues, /ripping/, /stunning/, /rattling/, etc.

[20] In the Appendix to the Final Report of the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases, London, 1916, p. iv., I find the following: "/Mr./ C. J. Symonds, F.R.C.S., M.D.; /Mr./ F. J. McCann, F.R.C.S., M.D.; /Mr./ A. F. Evans, F.R.C.S". /Mr./ Symonds is consulting surgeon to Guy's Hospital, /Mr./ McCann is an eminent London gynecologist, and /Mr./ Evans is a general surgeon in large practise. All would be called /Doctor/ in the United States.

[21] Among the curious recipients of this degree have been Gumshoe Bill Stone, Uncle Joe Cannon and Josephus Daniels. Billy Sunday, the evangelist, is a D.D.

[22] /Congressional Record/, May 16, 1918, p. 7147.

[23] /Vide/ his annual reports, printed at Sing Sing Prison.

[24] I encountered this gem in /Public Health Reports/, a government publication, for April 26, 1918, p. 619.

[25] For the /Record/ see the issue of Dec. 14, 1917, p. 309. For the New International Encyclopaedia see the article on Brotherhood of Andrew and Philip. For the /World/ Almanac see the article on Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor, ed. of 1914. The grammar-book is Longman's Briefer Grammar; New York, 1908, p. 160. The editor is George J. Smith, a member of the board of examiners of the New York City Department of Education.

[26] Edwin S. Gould: Good English; New York, 1867, pp. 56-57.

[27] Despite the example of Congress, however, the Department of State inserts the /the/. /Vide/ the /Congressional Record/, May 4, 1918, p. 6552. But the War Department, the Treasury and the Post Office omit it. /Vide/ the /Congressional Record/, May 11, 1918, p. 6895 and p. 6914 and May 14, p. 7004, respectively. So, it appears, does the White House. /Vide/ the /Congressional Record/, May 10, 1918, p. 6838, and June 12, 1918, p. 8293.

[28] In the 60's an undertaker was often called an /embalming surgeon/ in America.

[29] In a list of American "universites" I find the Christian of Canton, Mo., with 125 students; the Lincoln, of Pennsylvania, with 184; the Southwestern Presbyterian, of Clarksville, Tenn., with 86; and the Newton Theological, with 77. Most of these, of course, are merely country high-schools.

[30] The Rev. John C. Stephenson in the /New York Sun/, July 10, 1914: ... "that empty courtesy of addressing every clergyman as /Doctor/.... And let us abolish the abuse of ... /baccalaureate/ sermons for sermons before graduating classes of high schools and the like."

[31] /Cf./ Dardanelles Commission Report; London, 1916, p. 58, § 47.

[32] Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold /Bug/" is called "The Golden /Beetle/" in England. Twenty-five years ago an Englishman named /Buggey/, laboring under the odium attached to the name, had it changed to /Norfolk-Howard/, a compound made up of the title and family name of the Duke of Norfolk. The wits of London at once doubled his misery by adopting /Norfolk-Howard/ as a euphemism for /bed-bug/.

[33] A recent example of the use of /male-cow/ was quoted in the /Journal/ of the American Medical Association, Nov. 17, 1917, advertising page 24.

[34] /New York Organ/ (a "/family journal/ devoted to temperance, morality, education and general literature"), May 29, 1847. One of the editors of this delicate journal was T. S. Arthur, author of Ten Nights in a Bar-room.

[35] John Graham Brooks: As Others See Us; New York, 1908, p. 11.

[36] Domestic Manners of the Americans, 2 vols.; London, 1832; vol. i, p. 132.

[37] /Female/, of course, was epidemic in England too, but White says that it was "not a Briticism," and so early as 1839 the Legislature of Maryland expunged it from the title of a bill "to protect the reputation of unmarried /females/," substituting /women/, on the ground that /female/ "was an Americanism in that application."

[38] The French /pissoir/, for instance, is still regarded as indecent in America, and is seldom used in England, but it has gone into most of the Continental languages. It is curious to note, however, that these languages also have their pruderies. Most of them, for example, use /W. C./, an abbreviation of the English /water-closet/, as a euphemism. The whole subject of national pruderies, in both act and speech, remains to be investigated.

[39] Even the /Springfield Republican/, the last stronghold of Puritan /Kultur/, printed the word on Oct. 11, 1917, in a review of New Adventures, by Michael Monahan.

[40] /Pep/, July, 1918, p. 8.

[41] Perhaps the Quaker influence is to blame. At all events, Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world. Early in 1918, when a patriotic moving-picture entitled "To Hell with the Kaiser" was sent on tour under government patronage, the word /hell/ was carefully toned down, on the Philadelphia billboards, to /h----/.

[42] /Cf./ R. M. Bache: Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech; Phila., 1869, p. 34 /et seq./

[43] April 14, 1914.

[Pg131]

V

Tendencies in American

§ 1

/International Exchanges/--More than once, during the preceding chapters, we encountered Americanisms that had gone over into English, and English locutions that had begun to get a foothold in the United States. Such exchanges are made very frequently and often very quickly, and though the guardians of English still attack every new Americanism vigorously, even when, as in the case of /scientist/, it is obviously sound and useful, they are often routed by public pressure, and have to submit in the end with the best grace possible. For example, consider /caucus/. It originated in Boston at some indeterminate time before 1750, and remained so peculiarly American for more than a century following that most of the English visitors before the Civil War remarked its use. But, according to J. Redding Ware,[1] it began to creep into English political slang about 1870, and in the 80's it was lifted to good usage by the late Joseph Chamberlain. Ware, writing in the first years of the present century, said that the word had become "very important" in England, but was "not admitted into dictionaries." But in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, dated 1914, it is given as a sound English word, though its American origin is noted. The English, however, use it in a sense that has become archaic in America, thus preserving an abandoned American meaning in the same way that many abandoned British meanings have been preserved on this side. In the United States the word means, and has meant for years, a meeting of some division, [Pg132] large or small, of a political or legislative body for the purpose of agreeing upon a united course of action in the main assembly. In England it means the managing committee of a party or fraction--something corresponding to our national committee, or state central committee, or steering committee, or to the half-forgotten congressional caucuses of the 20's. It has a disparaging significance over there, almost equal to that of our words /organization/ and /machine/. Moreover, it has given birth to two derivatives of like quality, both unknown in America--/caucusdom/, meaning machine control, and /caucuser/, meaning a machine politician.[2]

A good many other such Americanisms have got into good usage in England, and new ones are being exported constantly. Farmer describes the process of their introduction, and assimilation. American books, newspapers and magazines, especially the last, circulate in England in large number, and some of their characteristic locutions pass into colloquial speech. Then they get into print, and begin to take on respectability. "The phrase, 'as the Americans say,'" he continues, "might in some cases be ordered from the type foundry as a logotype, so frequently does it do introduction duty."[3] Ware shows another means of ingress: the argot of sailors. Many of the Americanisms he notes as having become naturalized in England, /e. g./, /boodle/, /boost/ and /walk-out/, are credited to Liverpool as a sort of half-way station. Travel brings in still more: England swarms with Americans, and Englishmen themselves, visiting America, bring home new and racy phrases. Bishop Coxe says[4] that [Pg133] Dickens, in his "American Notes," gave English currency to /reliable/, /influential/, /talented/ and /lengthy/. Bristed, writing in 1855, said that /talented/ was already firmly fixed in the English vocabulary by that time. All four words are in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and only /lengthy/ is noted as "originally an Americanism." Finally, there is the influence of the moving pictures. Hundreds of American films are shown in England every week, and the American words and phrases appearing in their titles, sub-titles and other explanatory legends thus become familiar to the English. "The patron of the picture palace," says W. G. Faulkner, in an article in the /London Daily Mail/, "learns to think of his railway station as a /depot/; he has alternatives to one of our newest words, /hooligan/, in /hoodlum/ and /tough/; he watches a /dive/, which is a thieves' kitchen or a room in which bad characters meet, and whether the villain talks of /dough/ or /sugar/ he knows it is money to which he is referring. The musical ring of the word /tramp/ gives way to the stodgy /hobo/ or /dead-beat/. It may be that the plot reveals an attempt to deceive some simple-minded person. If it does, the innocent one is spoken of as a /sucker/, a /come-on/, a /boob/, or a /lobster/ if he is stupid into the bargain."

Mr. Faulkner goes on to say that a great many other Americanisms are constantly employed by Englishmen "who have not been affected by the avalanche ... which has come upon us through the picture palace." "Thus today," he says, "we hear people speak of the /fall/ of the year, a /stunt/ they have in hand, their desire to /boost/ a particular business, a /peach/ when they mean a pretty girl, a /scab/--a common term among strikers,--the /glad-eye/, /junk/ when they mean worthless material, their efforts /to make good/, the /elevator/ in the hotel or office, the /boss/ or manager, the /crook/ or swindler; and they will tell you that they have the /goods/--that is, they possess the requisite qualities for a given position." The venerable Frederic Harrison, writing in the /Fortnightly Review/ in the Spring of 1918, denounced this tendency with a vigor recalling the classical anathemas of Dean Alford and Sydney Smith.[5] "Stale American phrases, ..." [Pg134] he said, "are infecting even our higher journalism and our parliamentary and platform oratory.... A statesman is now /out/ for victory; he is /up against/ pacificism.... He has a /card up his sleeve/, by which the enemy are at last to be /euchred/. Then a fierce fight in which hundreds of noble fellows are mangled or drowned is a /scrap/.... To criticise a politician is to call for his /scalp/.... The other fellow is beaten to a /frazzle/." And so on. "Bolshevism," concluded Harrison sadly, "is ruining language as well as society."

But though there are still many such alarms by constables of the national speech, the majority of Englishmen continue to make borrowings from the tempting and ever-widening American vocabulary. What is more, some of these loan-words take root, and are presently accepted as sound English, even by the most watchful. The two Fowlers, in "The King's English," separate Americanisms from other current vulgarisms, but many of the latter on their list are actually American in origin, though they do not seem to know it--for example, /to demean/ and /to transpire/. More remarkable still, the Cambridge History of English Literature lists /backwoodsman/, /know-nothing/ and /yellow-back/ as English compounds, apparently in forgetfulness of their American origin, and adds /skunk/, /squaw/ and /toboggan/ as direct importations from the Indian tongues, without noting that they came through American, and remained definite Americanisms for a long while.[6] It even adds /musquash/, a popular name for the /Fiber zibethicus/, borrowed from the Algonquin /muskwessu/ but long since degenerated to /musk-rat/ in America. /Musquash/ has been in disuse in this country, indeed, since the middle of the last century, save as a stray localism, but the English have preserved it, and it appears in the Oxford Dictionary.[7]

A few weeks in London or a month's study of the London [Pg135] newspapers will show a great many other American pollutions of the well of English. The argot of politics is full of them. Many beside /caucus/ were introduced by Joseph Chamberlain, a politician skilled in American campaign methods and with an American wife to prompt him. He gave the English their first taste of /to belittle/, one of the inventions of Thomas Jefferson. /Graft/ and /to graft/ crossed the ocean in their nonage. /To bluff/ has been well understood in England for 30 years. It is in Cassell's and the Oxford Dictionaries, and has been used by no less a magnifico than Sir Almroth Wright.[8] /To stump/, in the form of /stump-oratory/, is in Carlyle's "Latter-Day Pamphlets," /circa/ 1850, and /caucus/ appears in his "Frederick the Great;"[9] though, as we have seen on the authority of Ware, it did not come into general use in England until ten years later. /Buncombe/ (usually spelled /bunkum/) is in all the later English dictionaries. In the London stock market and among English railroad men various characteristic Americanisms have got a foothold. The meaning of /bucket-shop/ and /to water/, for example, is familiar to every London broker's clerk. English trains are now /telescoped/ and carry /dead-heads/, and in 1913 a rival to the Amalgamated Order of Railway /Servants/ was organized under the name of the National Union of /Railway Men/. The beginnings of a movement against the use of /servant/ are visible in other directions, and the American /help/ threatens to be substituted; at all events, /Help Wanted/ advertisements are now occasionally encountered in English newspapers. But it is American verbs that seem to find the way into English least difficult, particularly those compounded with prepositions and adverbs, such as /to pan out/ and /to swear off/. Most of them, true enough, [Pg136] are still used as conscious Americanisms, but used they are, and with increasing frequency. The highly typical American verb /to loaf/ is now naturalized, and Ware says that /The Loaferies/ is one of the common nicknames of the Whitechapel workhouse.

It is curious, reading the fulminations of American purists of the last generation, to note how many of the Americanisms they denounced have not only got into perfectly good usage at home but even broken down all guards across the ocean. /To placate/ and /to antagonize/ are examples. The Oxford Dictionary distinguishes between the English and American meanings of the latter: in England a man may antagonize only another man, in America he may antagonize a mere idea or thing. But, as the brothers Fowler show, even the English meaning is of American origin, and no doubt a few more years will see the verb completely naturalized in Britain. /To placate/, attacked vigorously by all native grammarians down to (but excepting) White, now has the authority of the /Spectator/, and is accepted by Cassell. /To donate/ is still under the ban, but /to transpire/ has been used by the /London Times/. Other old bugaboos that have been embraced are /gubernatorial/, /presidential/ and /standpoint/. White labored long and valiantly to convince Americans that the adjective derived from /president/ should be without the /i/ in its last syllable, following the example of /incidental/, /regimental/, /monumental/, /governmental/, /oriental/, /experimental/ and so on; but in vain, for /presidential/ is now perfectly good English. /To demean/ is still questioned, but English authors of the first rank have used it, and it will probably lose its dubious character very soon.

The flow of loan-words in the opposite direction meets with little impediment, for social distinction in America is still largely dependent upon English recognition, and so there is an eager imitation of the latest English fashions in speech. This emulation is most noticeable in the large cities of the East, and particularly in what Schele de Vere called "Boston and the Boston dependencies." New York is but little behind. The small stores there, if they are of any pretentions, are now almost invariably called /shops/. Shoes for the well-to-do are no longer [Pg137] /shoes/, but /boots/, and they are sold in /bootshops/. One encounters, too, in the side-streets off Fifth avenue, a multitude of /gift-shops/, /tea-shops/ and /haberdashery-shops/. In Fifth avenue itself there are several /luggage-shops/. In August, 1917, signs appeared in the New York surface cars in which the conductors were referred to as /guards/. This effort to be English and correct was exhibited over the sign manual of Theodore P. Shonts, president of the Interborough, a gentleman of Teutonic name, but evidently a faithful protector of the king's English. On the same cars, however, painted notices, surviving from some earlier régime, mentioned the guards as /conductors/. /To Let/ signs are now as common in all our cities as /For Rent/ signs. We all know the /charwoman/, and have begun to forget our native modification of /char/, to wit, /chore/. Every apartment-house has a /tradesmen's-entrance/. In Charles street, in Baltimore, some time ago, the proprietor of a fashionable stationery store directed me, not to the elevator, but to the /lift/.

Occasionally, some uncompromising patriot raises his voice against these importations, but he seldom shows the vigorous indignation of the English purists, and he seldom prevails. White, in 1870, warned Americans against the figurative use of /nasty/ as a synonym for /disagreeable/.[10] This use of the word was then relatively new in England, though, according to White, the /Saturday Review/ and the /Spectator/ had already succumbed. His objections to it were unavailing; /nasty/ quickly got into American and has been there ever since. In 1883 Gilbert M. Tucker protested against /good-form/, /traffic/ (in the sense of travel), /to bargain/ and /to tub/ as Briticisms that we might well do without, but all of them took root and are perfectly sound American today. There is, indeed, no intelligible reason why such English inventions and improvements should not be taken in, even though the motive behind the welcome to them may occasionally cause a smile. English, after all, is the mother of American, and the child, until lately, was still at nurse. The English, confronted by some of our fantastic innovations, may well regard them as impudences to be put down, but what they [Pg138] offer in return often fits into our vocabulary without offering it any outrage. American, indeed, is full of lingering Briticisms, all maintaining a successful competition with native forms. If we take back /shop/ it is merely taking back something that /store/ has never been able to rid us of: we use /shop-worn/, /shoplifter/, /shopping/, /shopper/, /shop-girl/ and /to shop/ every day. In the same way the word /penny/ has survived among us, despite the fact that there has been no American coin of that name for more than 125 years. We have /nickel-in-the-slot/ machines, but when they take a cent we call them /penny-in-the-slot/ machines. We have /penny-arcades/ and /penny-whistles/. We do not play /cent/-ante, but /penny/-ante. We still "turn an honest /penny/" and say "a /penny/ for your thoughts." The pound and the shilling became extinct a century ago, but the penny still binds us to the mother tongue.

§ 2

/Points of Difference/--These exchanges and coalescences, however, though they invigorate each language with the blood of the other and are often very striking in detail, are neither numerous enough nor general enough to counteract the centrifugal force which pulls them apart. The simple fact is that the spirit of English and the spirit of American have been at odds for nearly a century, and that the way of one is not the way of the other. The loan-words that fly to and fro, when examined closely, are found to be few in number both relatively and absolutely: they do not greatly affect the larger movements of the two languages. Many of them, indeed, are little more than temporary borrowings; they are not genuinely adopted, but merely momentarily fashionable. The class of Englishmen which affects American phrases is perhaps but little larger, taking one year with another, than the class of Americans which affects English phrases. This last class, it must be plain, is very small. Leave the large cities and you will have difficulty finding any members of it. It is circumscribed, not because there is any very formidable prejudice against English locutions as such, [Pg139] but simply because recognizably English locutions, in a good many cases, do not fit into the American language. The American thinks in American and the Englishman in English, and it requires a definite effort, usually but defectively successful, for either to put his thoughts into the actual idiom of the other.

The difficulties of this enterprise are well exhibited, though quite unconsciously, by W. L. George in a chapter entitled "Litany of the Novelist" in his book of criticism, "Literary Chapters."[11] This chapter, it is plain by internal evidence, was written, not for Englishmen, but for Americans. A good part of it, in fact, is in the second person--we are addressed and argued with directly. And throughout there is an obvious endeavor to help out comprehension by a studied use of purely American phrases and examples. One hears, not of the /East End/, but of the /East Side/; not of the /City/, but of /Wall Street/; not of /Belgravia/ or the /West End/, but of /Fifth avenue/; not of /bowler/ hats, but of /Derbys/; not of idlers in /pubs/, but of /saloon loafers/; not of /pounds/, /shillings/ and /pence/, but of /dollars/ and /cents/. In brief, a gallant attempt upon a strange tongue, and by a writer of the utmost skill--but a hopeless failure none the less. In the midst of his best American, George drops into Briticism after Briticism, some of them quite as unintelligible to the average American reader as so many Gallicisms. On page after page they display the practical impossibility of the enterprise: /back-garden/ for /back-yard/, /perambulator/ for /baby-carriage/, /corn/-market for /grain/-market, coal-/owner/ for coal-/operator/, /post/ for /mail/, and so on. And to top them there are English terms that have no American equivalents at all, for example, /kitchen-fender/.

The same failure, perhaps usually worse, is displayed every time an English novelist or dramatist essays to put an American into a novel or a play, and to make him speak American. However painstakingly it is done, the Englishman invariably falls into capital blunders, and the result is derided by Americans as Mark Twain derided the miners' lingo of Bret Harte, and for the same reason. The thing lies deeper than vocabulary and [Pg140] even than pronunciation and intonation; the divergences show themselves in habits of speech that are fundamental and almost indefinable. And when the transoceanic gesture is from the other direction they become even plainer. An Englishman, in an American play, seldom shows the actual speech habit of the Sassenach; what he shows is the speech habit of an American actor trying to imitate George Alexander. "There are not five playwrights in America," said Channing Pollock one day, "who can write English"--that is, the English of familiar discourse. "Why should there be?" replied Louis Sherwin. "There are not five thousand people in America who can /speak/ English."[12]

The elements that enter into the special character of American have been rehearsed in the first chapter: a general impatience of rule and restraint, a democratic enmity to all authority, an extravagant and often grotesque humor, an extraordinary capacity for metaphor[13]--in brief, all the natural marks of what Van Wyck Brooks calls "a popular life which bubbles with energy and spreads and grows and slips away ever more and more from the control of tested ideas, a popular life with the lid off."[14] This is the spirit of America, and from it the American language is nourished. Brooks, perhaps, generalizes a bit too lavishly. Below the surface there is also a curious conservatism, even a sort of timorousness; in a land of manumitted peasants the primary trait of the peasant is bound to show itself now and then; as Wendell Phillips once said, "more than any other people, we Americans are afraid of one another"--that is, afraid of opposition, of derision, of all the consequences of singularity. But in the field of language, as in that of politics, this suspicion of the new is often transformed into a suspicion of the merely unfamiliar, and so its natural tendency toward conservatism is overcome. It is of the essence of democracy that it remain a government by amateurs, and under a government by amateurs it is precisely the expert who is most questioned--and it is the expert [Pg141] who commonly stresses the experience of the past. And in a democratic society it is not the iconoclast who seems most revolutionary, but the purist. The derisive designation of /high-brow/ is thoroughly American in more ways than one. It is a word put together in an unmistakably American fashion, it reflects an habitual American attitude of mind, and its potency in debate is peculiarly national too.

I daresay it is largely a fear of the weapon in it--and there are many others of like effect in the arsenal--which accounts for the far greater prevalence of idioms from below in the formal speech of America than in the formal speech of England. There is surely no English novelist of equal rank whose prose shows so much of colloquial looseness and ease as one finds in the prose of Howells: to find a match for it one must go to the prose of the neo-Celts, professedly modelled upon the speech of peasants, and almost proudly defiant of English grammar and syntax, and to the prose of the English themselves before the Restoration. Nor is it imaginable that an Englishman of comparable education and position would ever employ such locutions as those I have hitherto quoted from the public addresses of Dr. Wilson--that is, innocently, seriously, as a matter of course. The Englishman, when he makes use of coinages of that sort, does so in conscious relaxation, and usually with a somewhat heavy sense of doggishness. They are proper to the paddock or even to the dinner table, but scarcely to serious scenes and occasions. But in the United States their use is the rule rather than the exception; it is not the man who uses them, but the man who doesn't use them, who is marked off. Their employment, if high example counts for anything, is a standard habit of the language, as their diligent avoidance is a standard habit of English.

A glance through the /Congressional Record/ is sufficient to show how small is the minority of purists among the chosen leaders of the nation. Within half an hour, turning the pages at random, I find scores of locutions that would paralyze the stenographers in the House of Commons, and they are in the speeches, not of wild mavericks from the West, but of some of the chief men of the two Houses. Surely no Senator occupied a more conspicuous [Pg142] position, during the first year of the war, than Lee S. Overman, of North Carolina, chairman of the Committee on Rules, and commander of the administration forces on the floor. Well, I find Senator Overman using /to enthuse/ in a speech of the utmost seriousness and importance, and not once, but over and over again.[15] I turn back a few pages and encounter it again--this time in the mouth of General Sherwood, of Ohio. A few more, and I find a fit match for it, to wit, /to biograph/.[16] The speaker here is Senator L. Y. Sherman, of Illinois. In the same speech he uses /to resolute/. A few more, and various other characteristic verbs are unearthed: /to demagogue/,[17] /to dope out/[18] /to fall down/[19] (in the sense of to fail), /to jack up/,[20] /to phone/,[21] /to peeve/,[22] /to come across/,[23] /to hike/, /to butt in/,[24] /to back pedal/, /to get solid with/, /to hooverize/, /to trustify/, /to feature/, /to insurge/, /to haze/, /to reminisce/, /to camouflage/, /to play for a sucker/, and so on, almost /ad infinitum/. And with them, a large number of highly American nouns, chiefly compounds, all pressing upward for recognition: /tin-Lizzie/, /brain-storm/, /come-down/, /pin-head/, /trustification/, /pork-barrel/, /buck-private/, /dough-boy/, /cow-country/. And adjectives: /jitney/, /bush/ (for rural), /balled-up/,[25] /dolled-up/, /phoney/, /tax-paid/.[26] And phrases: /dollars to doughnuts/, /on the job/, /that gets me/, /one best bet/. And back-formations: /ad/, /movie/, /photo/. And [Pg143] various substitutions and Americanized inflections: /over/ for /more than/, /gotten/ for /got/ in the present perfect,[27] /rile/ for /roil/, /bust/ for /burst/. This last, in truth, has come into a dignity that even grammarians will soon hesitate to question. Who, in America, would dare to speak of /bursting/ a broncho, or of a /trust-burster/?[28]

§ 3

/Lost Distinctions/--This general iconoclasm reveals itself especially in a disdain for most of the niceties of modern English. The American, like the Elizabethan Englishman, is usually quite unconscious of them and even when they have been instilled into him by the hard labor of pedagogues he commonly pays little heed to them in his ordinary discourse. The English distinction between /will/ and /shall/ offers a salient case in point. This distinction, it may be said at once, is far more a confection of the grammarians than a product of the natural forces shaping the language. It has, indeed, little etymological basis, and is but imperfectly justified logically. One finds it disregarded in the Authorized Version of the Bible, in all the plays of Shakespeare, in the essays of the reign of Anne, and in some of the best examples of modern English literature. The theory behind it is so inordinately abstruse that the Fowlers, in "The King's English,"[29] require 20 pages to explain it, and even then they come to the resigned conclusion that the task is hopeless. "The idiomatic use [of the two auxiliaries]," they say, "is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it."[30] Well, even those who are to the manner born seem to find [Pg144] it difficult, for at once the learned authors cite blunder in the writings of Richardson, Stevenson, Gladstone, Jowett, Oscar Wilde, and even Henry Sweet, author of the best existing grammar of the English language. In American the distinction is almost lost. No ordinary American, save after the most laborious reflection, would detect anything wrong in this sentence from the /London Times/, denounced as corrupt by the Fowlers: "We must reconcile what we would like to do with what we can do." Nor in this by W. B. Yeats: "The character who delights us may commit murder like Macbeth ... and yet we will rejoice in every happiness that comes to him." Half a century ago, impatient of the effort to fasten the English distinction upon American, George P. Marsh attacked it as of "no logical value or significance whatever," and predicted that "at no very distant day this verbal quibble will disappear, and one of the auxiliaries will be employed, with all persons of the nominative, exclusively as the sign of the future, and the other only as an expression of purpose or authority."[31] This prophecy has been substantially verified. /Will/ is sound American "with all persons of the nominative," and /shall/ is almost invariably an "expression of purpose or authority."[32]

And so, though perhaps not to the same extent, with /who/ and /whom/. Now and then there arises a sort of panicky feeling that /whom/ is being neglected, and so it is trotted out,[33] but in the [Pg145] main the American language tends to dispense with it, at least in its least graceful situations. Noah Webster, always the pragmatic reformer, denounced it so long ago as 1783. Common sense, he argued, was on the side of "/who/ did he marry?" Today such a form as "/whom/ are you talking to?" would seem somewhat affected in ordinary discourse in America; "/who/ are you talking to?" is heard a thousand times oftener--and is doubly American, for it substitutes /who/ for /whom/ and puts a preposition at the end of a sentence: two crimes that most English purists would seek to avoid. It is among the pronouns that the only remaining case inflections in English are to be found, if we forget the possessive, and even here these survivors of an earlier day begin to grow insecure. Lounsbury's defense of "it is /me/,"[34] as we shall see in the next chapter, has support in the history and natural movement of the language, and that movement is also against the preservation of the distinction between /who/ and /whom/. The common speech plays hob with both of the orthodox inflections, despite the protests of grammarians, and in the long run, no doubt, they will be forced to yield to its pressure, as they have always yielded in the past. Between the dative and accusative on the one side and the nominative on the other there has been war in the English language for centuries, and it has always tended to become a war of extermination. Our now universal use of /you/ for /ye/ in the nominative shows the dative and accusative swallowing the nominative, and the practical disappearance of /hither/, /thither/ and /whither/, whose place is now taken by /here/, /there/ and /where/, shows a contrary process. In such wars a /posse comitatus/ marches ahead of the disciplined army. American stands to English in the relation of that posse to that army. It is incomparably more enterprising, more contemptuous of precedent and authority, more impatient of rule.

A shadowy line often separates what is currently coming into sound usage from what is still regarded as barbarous. No self-respecting American, I daresay, would defend /ain't/ as a substitute [Pg146] for /isn't/, say in "he /ain't/ the man," and yet /ain't/ is already tolerably respectable in the first person, where English countenances the even more clumsy /aren't/. /Aren't/ has never got a foothold in the American first person; when it is used at all, which is very rarely, it is always as a conscious Briticism. Facing the alternative of employing the unwieldy "am I not in this?" the American turns boldly to "/ain't/ I in this?" It still grates a bit, perhaps, but /aren't/ grates even more. Here, as always, the popular speech is pulling the exacter speech along, and no one familiar with its successes in the past can have much doubt that it will succeed again, soon or late. In the same way it is breaking down the inflectional distinction between adverb and adjective, so that "I feel /bad/" begins to take on the dignity of a national idiom, and /sure/, /to go big/ and /run slow/[35] become almost respectable. When, on the entrance of the United States into the war, the Marine Corps chose "treat 'em /rough/" as its motto, no one thought to raise a grammatical objection, and the clipped adverb was printed upon hundreds of thousands of posters and displayed in every town in the country, always with the imprimatur of the national government. So, again, American, in its spoken form, tends to obliterate the distinction between nearly related adjectives, /e. g./, /healthful/ and /healthy/, /tasteful/ and /tasty/. And to challenge the somewhat absurd text-book prohibition of terminal prepositions, so that "where are we /at/?" loses its old raciness. And to dally with the double negative, as in "I have no doubt /but/ that."[36]

But these tendencies, or at least the more extravagant of them, belong to the next chapter. How much influence they exert, even [Pg147] indirectly, is shown by the American disdain of the English precision in the use of the indefinite pronoun. I turn to the /Saturday Evening Post/, and in two minutes find: "/one/ feels like an atom when /he/ begins to review /his/ own life and deeds."[37] The error is very rare in English; the Fowlers, seeking examples of it, could get them only from the writings of a third-rate woman novelist, Scotch to boot. But it is so common in American that it scarcely attracts notice. Neither does the appearance of a redundant /s/ in such words as /towards/, /downwards/, /afterwards/ and /heavenwards/. In England this /s/ is used relatively seldom, and then it usually marks a distinction in meaning, as it does on both sides of the ocean between /beside/ and /besides/. "In modern standard English," says Smith,[38] "though not in the English of the United States, a distinction which we feel, but many of us could not define, is made between /forward/ and /forwards/; /forwards/ being used in definite contrast to any other direction, as 'if you move at all, you can only move /forwards/,' while /forward/ is used where no such contrast is implied, as in the common phrase 'to bring a matter forward.'"[39] This specific distinction, despite Smith, probably retains some force in the United States too, but in general our usage allows the /s/ in cases where English usage would certainly be against it. Gould, in the 50's, noted its appearance at the end of such words as /somewhere/ and /anyway/, and denounced it as vulgar and illogical. Thornton has traced /anyways/ back to 1842 and shown that it is an archaism, and to be found in the Book of Common Prayer (/circa/ 1560); perhaps it has been preserved by analogy with /sideways/. Henry James, in "The Question of Our Speech," attacked "such forms of impunity as /somewheres else/ and /nowheres else/, /a good ways on/ and /a good ways off/" as "vulgarisms with what a great deal of general credit for what we good-naturedly call 'refinement' appears so able to coexist."[40] /Towards/ and /afterwards/, though frowned upon in England, are now quite sound in American. I [Pg148] find the former in the title of an article in /Dialect Notes/, which plainly gives it scholastic authority.[41] More (and with no little humor), I find it in the deed of a fund given to the American Academy of Arts and Letters to enable the gifted philologs of that sanhedrin "to consider its duty /towards/ the conservation of the English language in its beauty and purity."[42] Both /towards/ and /afterwards/, finally, are included in the /New York Evening Post's/ list of "words no longer disapproved when in their proper places," along with /over/ for /more than/, and /during/ for /in the course of/.

In the last chapter we glanced at several salient differences between the common coin of English and the common coin of American--that is, the verbs and adjectives in constant colloquial use--the rubber-stamps, so to speak, of the two languages. America has two adverbs that belong to the same category. They are /right/ and /good/. Neither holds the same place in English. Thornton shows that the use of /right/, as in /right away/, /right good/ and /right now/, was already widespread in the United States early in the last century; his first example is dated 1818. He believes that the locution was "possibly imported from the southwest of Ireland." Whatever its origin, it quickly attracted the attention of English visitors. Dickens noted /right away/ as an almost universal Americanism during his first American tour, in 1842, and poked fun at it in the second chapter of "American Notes." /Right/ is used as a synonym for /directly/, as in /right away/, /right off/, /right now/ and /right on time/; for /moderately/, as in /right well/, /right smart/, /right good/ and /right often/, and in place of /precisely/, as in /right there/. Some time ago, in an article on Americanisms, an English critic called it "that most distinctively American word," and concocted the following dialogue to instruct the English in its use:

How do I get to----?

Go /right/ along, and take the first turning (/sic/) on the /right/, and you are /right/ there.

/Right?/

/Right./

/Right!/[43]

Like W. L. George, this Englishman failed in his attempt to write correct American despite his fine pedagogical passion. No American would ever say "take the first turning"; he would say "turn at the first corner." As for /right away/, R. O. Williams argues that "so far as analogy can make good English, it is as good as one could choose."[44] Nevertheless, the Oxford Dictionary admits it only as an Americanism, and avoids all mention of the other American uses of /right/ as an adverb. /Good/ is almost as protean. It is not only used as a general synonym for all adjectives and adverbs connoting satisfaction, as in /to feel good/, /to be treated good/, /to sleep good/, but also as a reinforcement to other adjectives and adverbs, as in "I hit him /good/ and hard" and "I am /good/ and tired." Of late /some/ has come into wide use as an adjective-adverb of all work, indicating special excellence or high degree, as in /some girl/, /some sick/, /going some/, etc. It is still below the salt, but threatens to reach a more respectable position. One encounters it in the newspapers constantly and in the /Congressional Record/, and not long ago a writer in the /Atlantic Monthly/[45] hymned it ecstatically as "/some/ word--a true super-word, in fact" and argued that it could be used "in a sense for which there is absolutely no synonym in the dictionary." Basically, it appears to be an adjective, but in many of its common situations the grammarians would probably call it an adverb. It gives no little support to the growing tendency, already noticed, to break down the barrier between the two parts of speech.

§ 4

/Foreign Influences Today/--No other great nation of today supports so large a foreign population as the United States, [Pg150] either relatively or absolutely; none other contains so many foreigners forced to an effort, often ignorant and ineffective, to master the national language. Since 1820 nearly 35,000,000 immigrants have come into the country, and of them probably not 10,000,000 brought any preliminary acquaintance with English with them. The census of 1910 showed that nearly 1,500,000 persons then living permanently on American soil could not speak it at all; that more than 13,000,000 had been born in other countries, chiefly of different language; and that nearly 20,000,000 were the children of such immigrants, and hence under the influence of their speech habits. Altogether, there were probably at least 25,000,000 whose house language was not the vulgate, and who thus spoke it in competition with some other language. No other country houses so many aliens. In Great Britain the alien population, for a century past, has never been more than 2 per cent of the total population, and since the passage of the Alien Act of 1905 it has tended to decline steadily. In Germany, in 1910, there were but 1,259,873 aliens in a population of more than 60,000,000, and of these nearly a half were German-speaking Austrians and Swiss. In France, in 1906, there were 1,000,000 foreigners in a population of 39,000,000 and a third of them were French-speaking Belgians, Luxembourgeois and Swiss. In Italy, in 1911, there were but 350,000 in a population of 35,000,000.

This large and constantly reinforced admixture of foreigners has naturally exerted a constant pressure upon the national language, for the majority of them, at least in the first generation, have found it quite impossible to acquire it in any purity, and even their children have grown up with speech habits differing radically from those of correct English. The effects of this pressure are obviously two-fold; on the one hand the foreigner, struggling with a strange and difficult tongue, makes efforts to simplify it as much as possible, and so strengthens the native tendency to disregard all niceties and complexities, and on the other hand he corrupts it with words and locutions from the language he has brought with him, and sometimes with whole idioms and grammatical forms. We have seen, in earlier chapters, how the [Pg151] Dutch and French of colonial days enriched the vocabulary of the colonists, how the German immigrants of the first half of the nineteenth century enriched it still further, and how the Irish of the same period influenced its everyday usages. The same process is still going on. The Italians, the Slavs, and, above all, the Russian Jews, make steady contributions to the American vocabulary and idiom, and though these contributions are often concealed by quick and complete naturalization their foreignness to English remains none the less obvious. /I should worry/,[46] in its way, is correct English, but in essence it is as completely Yiddish as /kosher/, /ganof/, /schadchen/, /oi-yoi/, /matzoh/ or /mazuma/.[47] /Black-hand/, too, is English in form, but it is nevertheless as plainly an Italian loan-word as /spaghetti/, /mafia/ or /padrone/.