THE
AMERICAN LANGUAGE

THE
AMERICAN LANGUAGE

A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development
of English in the United States

BY

H. L. MENCKEN

NEW YORK
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
MCMXIX

PREFACE

The aim of this book is best exhibited by describing its origin. I am, and have been since early manhood, an editor of newspapers, magazines and books, and a critic of the last named. These occupations have forced me into a pretty wide familiarity with current literature, both periodical and within covers, and in particular into a familiarity with the current literature of England and America. It was part of my daily work, for a good many years, to read the principal English newspapers and reviews; it has been part of my work, all the time, to read the more important English novels, essays, poetry and criticism. An American born and bred, I early noted, as everyone else in like case must note, certain salient differences between the English of England and the English of America as practically spoken and written—differences in vocabulary, in syntax, in the shades and habits of idiom, and even, coming to the common speech, in grammar. And I noted too, of course, partly during visits to England but more largely by a somewhat wide and intimate intercourse with English people in the United States, the obvious differences between English and American pronunciation and intonation.

Greatly interested in these differences—some of them so great that they led me to seek exchanges of light with Englishmen—I looked for some work that would describe and account for them with a show of completeness, and perhaps depict the process of their origin. I soon found that no such work existed, either in England or in America—that the whole literature of the subject was astonishingly meagre and unsatisfactory. There were several dictionaries of Americanisms, true enough, but only one of them made any pretension to scientific method, and even that one was woefully narrow and incomplete. The one more general treatise, the work of a man foreign to both England and America in race and education, was more than 40 years old, and full of palpable errors. For the rest, there was only a fugitive and inconsequential literature—an almost useless mass of notes and essays, chiefly by the minor sort of pedagogues, seldom illuminating, save in small details, and often incredibly ignorant and inaccurate. On the large and important subject of American pronunciation, for example, I could find nothing save a few casual essays. On American spelling, with its wide and constantly visible divergences from English usages, there was little more. On American grammar there was nothing whatever. Worse, an important part of the poor literature that I unearthed was devoted to absurd efforts to prove that no such thing as an American variety of English existed—that the differences I constantly encountered in English and that my English friends encountered in American were chiefly imaginary, and to be explained away by denying them.

Still intrigued by the subject, and in despair of getting any illumination from such theoretical masters of it, I began a collection of materials for my own information, and gradually it took on a rather formidable bulk. My interest in it being made known by various articles in the newspapers and magazines, I began also to receive contributions from other persons of the same fancy, both English and American, and gradually my collection fell into a certain order, and I saw the workings of general laws in what, at first, had appeared to be mere chaos. The present book then began to take form—its preparation a sort of recreation from other and far different labor. It is anything but an exhaustive treatise upon the subject; it is not even an exhaustive examination of the materials. All it pretends to do is to articulate some of those materials—to get some approach to order and coherence into them, and so pave the way for a better work by some more competent man. That work calls for the equipment of a first-rate philologist, which I am surely not. All I have done here is to stake out the field, sometimes borrowing suggestions from other inquirers and sometimes, as in the case of American grammar, attempting to run the lines myself.

That it should be regarded as an anti-social act to examine and exhibit the constantly growing differences between English and American, as certain American pedants argue sharply—this doctrine is quite beyond my understanding. All it indicates, stripped of sophistry, is a somewhat childish effort to gain the approval of Englishmen—a belated efflorescence of the colonial spirit, often commingled with fashionable aspiration. The plain fact is that the English themselves are not deceived, nor do they grant the approval so ardently sought for. On the contrary, they are keenly aware of the differences between the two dialects, and often discuss them, as the following pages show. Perhaps one dialect, in the long run, will defeat and absorb the other; if the two nations continue to be partners in great adventures it may very well happen. But even in that case, something may be accomplished by examining the differences which exist today. In some ways, as in intonation, English usage is plainly better than American. In others, as in spelling, American usage is as plainly better than English. But in order to develop usages that the people of both nations will accept it is obviously necessary to study the differences now visible. This study thus shows a certain utility. But its chief excuse is its human interest, for it prods deeply into national idiosyncrasies and ways of mind, and that sort of prodding is always entertaining.

I am thus neither teacher, nor prophet, nor reformer, but merely inquirer. The exigencies of my vocation make me almost completely bilingual; I can write English, as in this clause, quite as readily as American, as in this here one. Moreover, I have a hand for a compromise dialect which embodies the common materials of both, and is thus free from offense on both sides of the water—as befits the editor of a magazine published in both countries. But that compromise dialect is the living speech of neither. What I have tried to do here is to make a first sketch of the living speech of These States. The work is confessedly incomplete, and in places very painfully so, but in such enterprises a man must put an arbitrary term to his labors, lest some mischance, after years of diligence, take him from them too suddenly for them to be closed, and his laborious accumulations, as Ernest Walker says in his book on English surnames, be "doomed to the waste-basket by harassed executors."

If the opportunity offers in future I shall undoubtedly return to the subject. For one thing, I am eager to attempt a more scientific examination of the grammar of the American vulgar speech, here discussed briefly in Chapter VI. For another thing, I hope to make further inquiries into the subject of American surnames of non-English origin. Various other fields invite. No historical study of American pronunciation exists; the influence of German, Irish-English, Yiddish and other such immigrant dialects upon American has never been investigated; there is no adequate treatise on American geographical names. Contributions of materials and suggestions for a possible revised edition of the present book will reach me if addressed to me in care of the publisher at 220 West Forty-second Street, New York. I shall also be very grateful for the correction of errors, some perhaps typographical but others due to faulty information or mistaken judgment.

In conclusion I borrow a plea in confession and avoidance from Ben Jonson's pioneer grammar of English, published in incomplete form after his death. "We have set down," he said, "that that in our judgment agreeth best with reason and good order. Which notwithstanding, if it seem to any to be too rough hewed, let him plane it out more smoothly, and I shall not only not envy it, but in the behalf of my country most heartily thank him for so great a benefit; hoping that I shall be thought sufficiently to have done my part if in tolling this bell I may draw others to a deeper consideration of the matter; for, touching myself, I must needs confess that after much painful churning this only would come which here we have devised."

Mencken.

Baltimore, January 1, 1919.

CONTENTS

I
By Way of Introduction

§ 1

Nearly a quarter of a century before this, another great American, and one with an expertness in the matter that the too versatile Jefferson could not muster, had ventured upon a prophecy even more bold and specific. He was Noah Webster, then at the beginning of his stormy career as a lexicographer. In his little volume of "Dissertations on the English Language," printed in 1789 and dedicated to "His Excellency, Benjamin Franklin, Esq., LL.D., F.R.S., late President of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," Webster argued that the time for regarding English usage and submitting to English authority had already passed, and that "a future separation of the American tongue from the English" was "necessary and unavoidable." "Numerous local causes," he continued, "such as a new country, new associations of people, new combinations of ideas in arts and sciences, and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe, will introduce new words into the American tongue. These causes will produce, in a course of time, a language in [Pg002] North America as different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one another."[1]

Neither Jefferson nor Webster put a term upon his prophecy. They may have been thinking, one or both, of a remote era, not yet come to dawn, or they may have been thinking, with the facile imagination of those days, of a period even earlier than our own. In the latter case, they allowed far too little (and particularly Webster) for factors that have worked powerfully against the influences they saw so clearly in operation about them. One of these factors, obviously, has been the vast improvement in communications across the ocean, a change scarcely in vision a century ago. It has brought New York relatively nearer to London today than it was to Boston, or even to Philadelphia, during Jefferson's presidency, and that greater proximity has produced a steady interchange of ideas, opinions, news and mere gossip. We latter-day Americans know a great deal more about the everyday affairs of England than the early Americans, for we read more English books, and have more about the English in our newspapers, and meet more Englishmen, and go to England much oftener. The effects of this ceaseless traffic in ideas and impressions, so plainly visible in politics, in ethics and aesthetics, and even in the minutae of social intercourse, are also to be seen in the language. On the one hand there is a swift exchange of new inventions on both sides, so that much of our American slang quickly passes to London and the latest English fashions in pronunciation are almost instantaneously imitated, at least by a minority, in New York; and on the other hand the English, by so constantly having the floor, force upon us, out of their firmer resolution and certitude, a somewhat sneaking respect for their own greater conservatism of speech, so that our professors of the language, in the overwhelming main, combat all signs of differentiation with the utmost diligence, and safeguard the doctrine that the standards of English are the only reputable standards of American.

This doctrine, of course, is not supported by the known laws of [Pg003] language, nor has it prevented the large divergences that we shall presently examine, but all the same it has worked steadily toward a highly artificial formalism, and as steadily against the investigation of the actual national speech. Such grammar, so-called, as is taught in our schools and colleges, is a grammar standing four-legged upon the theorizings and false inferences of English Latinists, eager only to break the wild tongue of Shakespeare to a rule; and its frank aim is to create in us a high respect for a book language which few of us ever actually speak and not many of us even learn to write. That language, heavily artificial though it may be, undoubtedly has notable merits. It shows a sonority and a stateliness that you must go to the Latin of the Golden Age to match; its "highly charged and heavy-shotted" periods, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, serve admirably the obscurantist purposes of American pedagogy and of English parliamentary oratory and leader-writing; it is something for the literary artists of both countries to prove their skill upon by flouting it. But to the average American, bent upon expressing his ideas, not stupendously but merely clearly, it must always remain something vague and remote, like Greek history or the properties of the parabola, for he never speaks it or hears it spoken, and seldom encounters it in his everyday reading. If he learns to write it, which is not often, it is with a rather depressing sense of its artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, bred in the colloquial Onmun, may master the literary Korean-Chinese, but he never thinks in it or quite feels it.

This fact, I daresay, is largely responsible for the notorious failure of our schools to turn out students who can put their ideas into words with simplicity and intelligibility. What their professors try to teach is not their mother-tongue at all, but a dialect that stands quite outside their common experience, and into which they have to translate their thoughts, consciously and painfully. Bad writing consists in making the attempt, and failing through lack of practise. Good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberately throwing overboard the principles so elaborately inculcated, or, as in the case of Lincoln, in standing unaware of them. Thus the study of the language he is [Pg004] supposed to use, to the average American, takes on a sort of bilingual character. On the one hand, he is grounded abominably in a grammar and syntax that have always been largely artificial, even in the country where they are supposed to prevail, and on the other hand he has to pick up the essentials of his actual speech as best he may. "Literary English," says Van Wyck Brooks,[2] "with us is a tradition, just as Anglo-Saxon law with us is a tradition. They persist, not as the normal expressions of a race, ... but through prestige and precedent and the will and habit of a dominating class largely out of touch with a national fabric unconsciously taking form out of school." What thus goes on out of school does not interest the guardians of our linguistic morals. No attempt to deduce the principles of American grammar, or even of American syntax, from the everyday speech of decently spoken Americans has ever been made. There is no scientific study, general and comprehensive in scope, of the American vocabulary, or of the influences lying at the root of American word-formation. No American philologist, so far as I know, has ever deigned to give the same sober attention to the sermo plebeius of his country that he habitually gives to the mythical objective case in theoretical English, or to the pronunciation of Latin, or to the irregular verbs in French.

§ 2

I am not forgetting, of course, the early explorations of Noah Webster, of which much more anon, nor the labors of our later dictionary makers, nor the inquiries of the American Dialect Society,[9] nor even the occasional illuminations of such writers as Richard Grant White, Thomas S. Lounsbury and Brander Matthews. But all this preliminary work has left the main field almost uncharted. Webster, as we shall see, was far more a reformer of the American dialect than a student of it. He introduced radical changes into its spelling and pronunciation, but he showed little understanding of its direction and genius. One always sees in him, indeed, the teacher rather than the scientific inquirer; the ardor of his desire to expound and instruct was only matched by his infinite capacity for observing inaccurately, and his profound ignorance of elementary philological principles. In the preface to the first edition of his American Dictionary, published in 1828—the first in which he added the qualifying adjective to the title—he argued eloquently for the right of Americans to shape their own speech without regard to English [Pg007] precedents, but only a year before this he had told Captain Basil Hall[10] that he knew of but fifty genuine Americanisms—a truly staggering proof of his defective observation. Webster was the first American professional scholar, and despite his frequent engrossment in public concerns and his endless public controversies, there was always something sequestered and almost medieval about him. The American language that he described and argued for was seldom the actual tongue of the folks about him, but often a sort of Volapük made up of one part faulty reporting and nine parts academic theorizing. In only one department did he exert any lasting influence, and that was in the department of orthography. The fact that our spelling is simpler and usually more logical than the English we chiefly owe to him. But it is not to be forgotten that the majority of his innovations, even here, were not adopted, but rejected, nor is it to be forgotten that spelling is the least of all the factors that shape and condition a language.

The same caveat lies against the work of the later makers of dictionaries; they have gone ahead of common usage in the matter of orthography, but they have hung back in the far more important matter of vocabulary, and have neglected the most important matter of idiom altogether. The defect in the work of the Dialect Society lies in a somewhat similar circumscription of activity. Its constitution, adopted in 1889, says that "its object is the investigation of the spoken English of the United States and Canada," but that investigation, so far, has got little beyond the accumulation of vocabularies of local dialects, such as they are. Even in this department its work is very far from finished, and the Dialect Dictionary announced years ago has not yet appeared. Until its collections are completed and synchronized, it will be impossible for its members to make any profitable inquiry into the general laws underlying the development of American, or even to attempt a classification of the materials common to the whole speech. The meagreness of the materials accumulated in the five slow-moving volumes of Dialect Notes shows clearly, indeed, how little the American philologist is [Pg008] interested in the language that falls upon his ears every hour of the day. And in Modern Language Notes that impression is reinforced, for its bulky volumes contain exhaustive studies of all the other living languages and dialects, but only an occasional essay upon American.

Now add to this general indifference a persistent and often violent effort to oppose any formal differentiation of English and American, initiated by English purists but heartily supported by various Americans, and you come, perhaps, to some understanding of the unsatisfactory state of the literature of the subject. The pioneer dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1816 by John Pickering, a Massachusetts lawyer,[11] was not only criticized unkindly; it was roundly denounced as something subtly impertinent and corrupting, and even Noah Webster took a formidable fling at it.[12] Most of the American philologists of the early days—Witherspoon, Worcester, Fowler, Cobb and their like—were uncompromising advocates of conformity, and combatted every indication of a national independence in speech with the utmost vigilance. One of their company, true enough, stood out against the rest. He was George Perkins Marsh, and in his "Lectures on the English Language"[13] he argued that "in point of naked syntactical accuracy, the English of America is not at all inferior to that of England." But even Marsh expressed the hope that Americans would not, "with malice prepense, go about to republicanize our orthography and our syntax, our grammars and our dictionaries, our nursery hymns (sic) and our Bibles" to the point of actual separation.[14] Moreover, he was a philologist only by courtesy; the regularly ordained school-masters were all against him. The fear voiced by William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, that Americans might "break loose from the laws of the English language"[15] altogether, was [Pg009] echoed by the whole fraternity, and so the corrective bastinado was laid on.

It remained, however, for two professors of a later day to launch the doctrine that the independent growth of American was not only immoral, but a sheer illusion. They were Richard Grant White, for long the leading American writer upon language questions, at least in popular esteem, and Thomas S. Lounsbury, for thirty-five years professor of the English language and literature in the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, and an indefatigable controversialist. Both men were of the utmost industry in research, and both had wide audiences. White's "Words and Their Uses," published in 1872, was a mine of erudition, and his "Everyday English," following eight years later, was another. True enough, Fitzedward Hall, the Anglo-Indian-American philologist, disposed of many of his etymologies and otherwise did execution upon him,[16] but in the main his contentions held water. Lounsbury was also an adept and favorite expositor. His attacks upon certain familiar pedantries of the grammarians were penetrating and effective, and his two books, "The Standard of Usage in English" and "The Standard of Pronunciation in English," not to mention his excellent "History of the English Language" and his numerous magazine articles, showed a profound knowledge of the early development of the language, and an admirable spirit of free inquiry. But both of these laborious scholars, when they turned from English proper to American English, displayed an unaccountable desire to deny its existence altogether, and to the support of that denial they brought a critical method that was anything but unprejudiced. White devoted not less than eight long articles in the Atlantic Monthly[17] to a review of the fourth edition of John [Pg010] Russell Bartlett's American Glossary,[18] and when he came to the end he had disposed of nine-tenths of Bartlett's specimens and called into question the authenticity of at least half of what remained. And no wonder, for his method was simply that of erecting tests so difficult and so arbitrary that only the exceptional word or phrase could pass them, and then only by a sort of chance. "To stamp a word or a phrase as an Americanism," he said, "it is necessary to show that (1) it is of so-called 'American' origin—that is, that it first came into use in the United States of North America, or that (2) it has been adopted in those States from some language other than English, or has been kept in use there while it has wholly passed out of use in England." Going further, he argued that unless "the simple words in compound names" were used in America "in a sense different from that in which they are used in England" the compound itself could not be regarded as an Americanism. The absurdity of all this is apparent when it is remembered that one of his rules would bar out such obvious Americanisms as the use of sick in place of ill, of molasses for treacle, and of fall for autumn, for all of these words, while archaic in England, are by no means wholly extinct; and that another would dispose of that vast category of compounds which includes such unmistakably characteristic Americanisms as joy-ride, rake-off, show-down, up-lift, out-house, rubber-neck, chair-warmer, fire-eater and back-talk.

Lounsbury went even further. In the course of a series of articles in Harper's Magazine, in 1913,[19] he laid down the dogma that "cultivated speech ... affords the only legitimate basis of comparison between the language as used in England and in America," and then went on:

This curious criterion, fantastic as it must have seemed to [Pg011] European philologists, was presently reinforced, for in his fourth article Lounsbury announced that his discussion was "restricted to the written speech of educated men." The result, of course, was a wholesale slaughter of Americanisms. If it was not impossible to reject a word, like White, on the ground that some stray English poet or other had once used it, it was almost always possible to reject it on the ground that it was not admitted into the vocabulary of a college professor when he sat down to compose formal book-English. What remained was a small company, indeed—and almost the whole field of American idiom and American grammar, so full of interest for the less austere explorer, was closed without even a peek into it.

White and Lounsbury dominated the arena and fixed the fashion. The later national experts upon the national language, with a few somewhat timorous exceptions, pass over its peculiarities without noticing them. So far as I can discover, there is not a single treatise in type upon one of its most salient characters—the wide departure of some of its vowel sounds from those of orthodox English. Marsh, C. H. Grandgent and Robert J. Menner have printed a number of valuable essays upon the subject, but there is no work that co-ordinates their inquiries or that attempts otherwise to cover the field. When, in preparing materials for the following chapters, I sought to determine the history of the a-sound in America, I found it necessary to plow through scores of ancient spelling-books, and to make deductions, perhaps sometimes rather rash, from the works of Franklin, Webster and Cobb. Of late the National Council of Teachers of English has appointed a Committee on American Speech and sought to let some light into the matter, but as yet its labors are barely begun and the publications of its members get little beyond preliminaries. Such an inquiry involves a laboriousness which should have intrigued Lounsbury: he once counted the number of times the word female appears in "Vanity Fair." But you will find only a feeble dealing with the question in his book on pronunciation. Nor is there any adequate work (for Schele de Vere's is full of errors and omissions) upon the influences felt by American through contact with the languages of our millions [Pg012] of immigrants, nor upon our peculiarly rich and characteristic slang. There are several excellent dictionaries of English slang, and many more of French slang, but I have been able to find but one devoted exclusively to American slang, and that one is a very bad one.

§ 3

On turning to the men actually engaged in writing English, and particularly to those aspiring to an American audience, one finds nearly all of them adverting, at some time or other, to the growing difficulties of intercommunication. William Archer, [Pg013] Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, Sidney Low, the Chestertons and Kipling are some of those who have dealt with the matter at length. Low, in an article in the Westminster Gazette[22] ironically headed "Ought American to be Taught in our Schools?" has described how the latter-day British business man is "puzzled by his ignorance of colloquial American" and "painfully hampered" thereby in his handling of American trade. He continues:

Low then quotes an extract from an American novel appearing [Pg014] serially in an English magazine—an extract including such Americanisms as side-stepper, saltwater-taffy, Prince-Albert (coat), boob, bartender and kidding, and many characteristically American extravagances of metaphor. It might be well argued, he goes on, that this strange dialect is as near to "the tongue that Shakespeare spoke" as "the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton," but that philological fact does not help to its understanding. "You might almost as well expect him [the British business man] to converse freely with a Portuguese railway porter because he tried to stumble through Caesar when he was in the Upper Fourth at school."

In the London Daily Mail, W. G. Faulkner lately launched this proposed campaign of education by undertaking to explain various terms appearing in American moving-pictures to English spectators. Mr. Faulkner assumed that most of his readers would understand sombrero, sidewalk, candy-store, freight-car, boost, elevator, boss, crook and fall (for autumn) without help, but he found it necessary to define such commonplace Americanisms as hoodlum, hobo, bunco-steerer, rubber-neck, drummer, sucker, dive (in the sense of a thieves' resort), clean-up, graft and to feature. Curiously enough, he proved the reality of the difficulties he essayed to level by falling into error as to the meanings of some of the terms he listed, among them dead-beat, flume, dub and stag. Another English expositor, apparently following him, thought it necessary to add definitions of hold-up, quitter, rube, shack, road-agent, cinch, live-wire and scab,[23] but he, too, mistook the meaning of dead-beat, and in addition he misdefined band-wagon and substituted get-out, seemingly an invention of his own, for get-away. Faulkner, somewhat belated in his animosity, seized the opportunity to read a homily upon the vulgarity and extravagance of the American language, and argued that the introduction of its coinages through the moving-picture theatre (Anglais, cinema) "cannot be regarded without serious [Pg015] misgivings, if only because it generates and encourages mental indiscipline so far as the choice of expressions is concerned." In other words, the greater pliability and resourcefulness of American is a fault to be corrected by the English tendency to hold to that which is established.

Cecil Chesterton, in the New Witness, recently called attention to the increasing difficulty of intercommunication, not only verbally, but in writing. The American newspapers, he said, even the best of them, admit more and more locutions that puzzle and dismay an English reader. After quoting a characteristic headline he went on:

Chesterton, however, refrained from denouncing this lack of identity; on the contrary, he allowed certain merits to American. "I do not want anybody to suppose," he said, "that the American language is in any way inferior to ours. In some ways it has improved upon it in vigor and raciness. In other ways it adheres more closely to the English of the best period." Testimony to the same end was furnished before this by William Archer. "New words," he said, "are begotten by new conditions of life; and as American life is far more fertile of new conditions than ours, the tendency toward neologism cannot but be stronger in America than in England. America has enormously enriched the language, not only with new words, but (since the American mind is, on the whole, quicker and wittier than the English) with apt and luminous colloquial metaphors."[25]

The list of such quotations might be indefinitely prolonged. [Pg016] There is scarcely an English book upon the United States which does not offer some discussion, more or less profound, of American peculiarities of speech, both as they are revealed in spoken discourse (particularly pronunciation and intonation) and as they show themselves in popular literature and in the newspapers, and to this discussion protest is often added, as it very often is by the reviews and newspapers. "The Americans," says a typical critic, "have so far progressed with their self-appointed task of creating an American language that much of their conversation is now incomprehensible to English people."[26] On our own side there is almost equal evidence of a sense of difference, despite the fact that the educated American is presumably trained in orthodox English, and can at least read it without much feeling of strangeness. "The American," says George Ade, in his book of travel, "In Pastures New," "must go to England in order to learn for a dead certainty that he does not speak the English language.... This pitiful fact comes home to every American when he arrives in London—that there are two languages, the English and the American. One is correct; the other is incorrect. One is a pure and limpid stream; the other is a stagnant pool, swarming with bacilli."[27] This was written in 1906. Twenty-five years earlier Mark Twain had made the same observation. "When I speak my native tongue in its utmost purity in England," he said, "an Englishman can't understand me at all."[28] The languages, continued Mark, "were identical several generations ago, but our changed conditions and the spread of our people far to the south and far to the west have made many alterations in our pronunciation, and have introduced new words among us and changed the meanings of old ones." Even before this the great humorist had marked and hailed these differences. Already in "Roughing It" he was celebrating "the vigorous new vernacular of the [Pg017] occidental plains and mountains,"[29] and in all his writings, even the most serious, he deliberately engrafted its greater liberty and more fluent idiom upon the stem of English, and so lent the dignity of his high achievement to a dialect that was as unmistakably American as the point of view underlying it.

The same tendency is plainly visible in William Dean Howells. His novels are mines of American idiom, and his style shows an undeniable revolt against the trammels of English grammarians. In 1886 he made a plea in Harper's for a concerted effort to put American on its own legs. "If we bother ourselves," he said, "to write what the critics imagine to be 'English,' we shall be priggish and artificial, and still more so if we make our Americans talk 'English.' ... On our lips our continental English will differ more and more from the insular English, and we believe that this is not deplorable but desirable."[30] Howells then proceeded to discuss the nature of the difference, and described it accurately as determined by the greater rigidity and formality of the English of modern England. In American, he said, there was to be seen that easy looseness of phrase and gait which characterized the English of the Elizabethan era, and particularly the Elizabethan hospitality to changed meanings and bold metaphors. American, he argued, made new words much faster than English, and they were, in the main, words of much greater daring and savor.

The difference between the two tongues, thus noted by the writers of both, was made disconcertingly apparent to the American troops when they first got to France and came into contact with the English. Fraternizing was made difficult by the wide divergence in vocabulary and pronunciation—a divergence interpreted by each side as a sign of uncouthness. The Y. M. C. A. made a characteristic effort to turn the resultant feeling of strangeness and homesickness among the Americans to account. In the Chicago Tribune's Paris edition of July 7, 1917, I find a large advertisement inviting them to make use of the Y. M. C. A. [Pg018] clubhouse in the Avenue Montaigue, "where American is spoken." Earlier in the war the Illinoiser Staats Zeitung, no doubt seeking to keep the sense of difference alive, advertised that it would "publish articles daily in the American language."

§ 4

A philologist of Scandinavian extraction, Elias Molee, has gone so far as to argue that the acquisition of correct English, to a people grown so mongrel in blood as the Americans, has become a useless burden. In place of it he proposes a mixed tongue, based on English, but admitting various elements from the other Germanic languages. His grammar, however, is so much more complex than that of English that most Americans would probably find his artificial "American" very difficult of acquirement. At all events it has made no progress.[36]

§ 5

No other country can show such linguistic solidarity, nor any approach to it—not even Canada, for there a large part of the population resists learning English altogether. The Little Russian of the Ukraine is unintelligible to the citizen of Petrograd; [Pg021] the Northern Italian can scarcely follow a conversation in Sicilian; the Low German from Hamburg is a foreigner in Munich; the Breton flounders in Gascony. Even in the United Kingdom there are wide divergences.[41] "When we remember," says the New International Encyclopaedia[42] "that the dialects of the countries (sic) in England have marked differences—so marked, indeed that it may be doubted whether a Lancashire miner and a Lincolnshire farmer could understand each other—we may well be proud that our vast country has, strictly speaking, only one language." This uniformity was noted by the earliest observers; Pickering called attention to it in the preface to his Vocabulary and ascribed it, no doubt accurately, to the restlessness of the Americans, their inheritance of the immigrant spirit, "the frequent removals of people from one part of our country to another." It is especially marked in vocabulary and grammatical forms—the foundation stones of a living speech. There may be slight differences in pronunciation and intonation—a Southern softness, a Yankee drawl, a Western burr—but in the words they use and the way they use them all Americans, even the least tutored, follow the same line. One observes, of course, a polite speech and a common speech, but the common speech is everywhere the same, and its uniform vagaries take the place of the dialectic variations of other lands. A Boston street-car conductor could go to work in Chicago, San Francisco or New Orleans without running the slightest risk of misunderstanding his new fares. Once he had picked up half a dozen localisms, he would be, to all linguistic intents and purposes, fully naturalized.

Of the intrinsic differences that separate American from English the chief have their roots in the obvious disparity between the environment and traditions of the American people since the seventeenth century and those of the English. The latter have lived under a stable social order, and it has impressed upon their souls their characteristic respect for what is customary and of [Pg022] good report. Until the war brought chaos to their institutions, their whole lives were regulated, perhaps more than those of any other people save the Spaniards, by a regard for precedent. The Americans, though largely of the same blood, have felt no such restraint, and acquired no such habit of conformity. On the contrary, they have plunged to the other extreme, for the conditions of life in their new country have put a high value upon the precisely opposite qualities of curiosity and daring, and so they have acquired that character of restlessness, that impatience of forms, that disdain of the dead hand, which now broadly marks them. From the first, says a recent literary historian, they have been "less phlegmatic, less conservative than the English. There were climatic influences, it may be; there was surely a spirit of intensity everywhere that made for short effort."[43] Thus, in the arts, and thus in business, in politics, in daily intercourse, in habits of mind and speech. The American is not, in truth, lacking in a capacity for discipline; he has it highly developed; he submits to leadership readily, and even to tyranny. But, by a curious twist, it is not the leadership that is old and decorous that fetches him, but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He will resist dictation out of the past, but he will follow a new messiah with almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of economics, religion, morals and speech. A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new metaphor or piece of slang.

Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meet the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative. The characteristic American habit of reducing complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations was already noticeable in colonial times, [Pg023] and such highly typical Americanisms as O. K., N. G., and P. D. Q., have been traced back to the first days of the republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these early tendencies invisible today, for the country is still in process of growth, and no settled social order has yet descended upon it. Institution-making is still going on, and so is language-making. In so modest an operation as that which has evolved bunco from buncombe and bunk from bunco there is evidence of a phenomenon which the philologist recognizes as belonging to the most primitive and lusty stages of speech. The American vulgate is not only constantly making new words, it is also deducing roots from them, and so giving proof, as Prof. Sayce says, that "the creative powers of language are even now not extinct."[44]

But of more importance than its sheer inventions, if only because much more numerous, are its extensions of the vocabulary, both absolutely and in ready workableness, by the devices of rhetoric. The American, from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians. His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest as much upon brilliant phrases as upon logical ideas. And in small things as in large he exercises continually an incomparable capacity for projecting hidden and often fantastic relationships into arresting parts of speech. Such a term as rubber-neck is almost a complete treatise on American psychology; it reveals the national habit of mind more clearly than any labored inquiry could ever reveal it. It has in it precisely the boldness and disdain of ordered forms that are so characteristically American, and it has too the grotesque humor of the country, and the delight in devastating opprobriums, and the acute feeling for the succinct and savory. The same qualities are in rough-house, water-wagon, near-silk, has-been, lame-duck and a thousand other such racy substantives, and in all the great stock of native verbs and adjectives. There is, indeed, but a shadowy boundary in these new coinages between the various parts of speech. Corral, borrowed [Pg024] from the Spanish, immediately becomes a verb and the father of an adjective. Bust, carved out of burst, erects itself into a noun. Bum, coming by way of an earlier bummer from the German bummler, becomes noun, adjective, verb and adverb. Verbs are fashioned out of substantives by the simple process of prefixing the preposition: to engineer, to chink, to stump, to hog. Others grow out of an intermediate adjective, as to boom. Others are made by torturing nouns with harsh affixes, as to burglarize and to itemize, or by groping for the root, as to resurrect. Yet others are changed from intransitive to transitive: a sleeping-car sleeps thirty passengers. So with the adjectives. They are made of substantives unchanged: codfish, jitney. Or by bold combinations: down-and-out, up-state, flat-footed. Or by shading down suffixes to a barbaric simplicity: scary, classy, tasty. Or by working over adverbs until they tremble on the brink between adverb and adjective: right and near are examples.

All of these processes, of course, are also to be observed in the English of England; in the days of its great Elizabethan growth they were in the lustiest possible being. They are, indeed, common to all languages; they keep language alive. But if you will put the English of today beside the American of today you will see at once how much more forcibly they are in operation in the latter than in the former. English has been arrested in its growth by its purists and grammarians. It shows no living change in structure and syntax since the days of Anne, and very little modification in either pronunciation or vocabulary. Its tendency is to conserve that which is established; to say the new thing, as nearly as possible, in the old way; to combat all that expansive gusto which made for its pliancy and resilience in the days of Shakespeare. In place of the old loose-footedness there is set up a preciosity which, in one direction, takes the form of unyielding affectations in the spoken language, and in another form shows itself in the heavy Johnsonese of current English writing—the Jargon denounced by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his Cambridge lectures. This "infirmity of speech" Quiller-Couch finds "in parliamentary debates and in the newspapers"; [Pg025] ... "it has become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought, and so voice the reason of their being." Distinct from journalese, the two yet overlap, "and have a knack of assimilating each other's vices."[45]

American, despite the gallant efforts of the professors, has so far escaped any such suffocating formalization. We, too, of course, have our occasional practitioners of the authentic English Jargon; in the late Grover Cleveland we produced an acknowledged master of it. But in the main our faults in writing lie in precisely the opposite direction. That is to say, we incline toward a directness of statement which, at its greatest, lacks restraint and urbanity altogether, and toward a hospitality which often admits novelties for the mere sake of their novelty, and is quite uncritical of the difference between a genuine improvement in succinctness and clarity, and mere extravagant raciness. "The tendency," says one English observer, "is ... to consider the speech of any man, as any man himself, as good as any other."[46] "All beauty and distinction," says another,[47] "are ruthlessly sacrificed to force." Moreover, this strong revolt against conventional bonds is by no means confined to the folk-speech, nor even to the loose conversational English of the upper classes; it also gets into more studied discourse, both spoken and written. I glance through the speeches of Dr. Woodrow Wilson, surely a purist if we have one at all, and find, in a few moments, half a dozen locutions that an Englishman in like position would never dream of using, among them we must get a move on,[48] hog as a verb,[49] gum-shoe as an adjective with [Pg026] verbal overtones,[50] onery in place of ordinary,[51] and that is going some.[52] From the earliest days, indeed, English critics have found this gipsy tendency in our most careful writing. They denounced it in Marshall, Cooper, Mark Twain, Poe, Lossing, Lowell and Holmes, and even in Hawthorne and Thoreau; and it was no less academic a work than W. C. Brownell's "French Traits" which brought forth, in a London literary journal, the dictum that "the language most depressing to the cultured Englishman is the language of the cultured American." Even "educated American English," agrees the chief of modern English grammarians, "is now almost entirely independent of British influence, and differs from it considerably, though as yet not enough to make the two dialects—American English and British English—mutually unintelligible."[53]

American thus shows its character in a constant experimentation, a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid forms. No other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and phrases more readily; none is more careless of precedents; none shows a greater fecundity and originality of fancy. It is producing new words every day, by trope, by agglutination, by the shedding of inflections, by the merging of parts of speech, and by sheer brilliance of imagination. It is full of what Bret Harte called the "sabre-cuts of Saxon"; it meets Montaigne's ideal of "a succulent and nervous speech, short and compact, not as much delicated and combed out as vehement and brusque, rather arbitrary than monotonous, not pedantic but soldierly, as Suetonius called Caesar's Latin." One pictures the common materials of English dumped into a pot, exotic flavorings added, and the bubblings assiduously and expectantly skimmed. What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it comes into contact with what is new and vivid. Let American confront a novel problem alongside [Pg027] English, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious. Movie is better than cinema; it is not only better American, it is better English. Bill-board is better than hoarding. Office-holder is more honest, more picturesque, more thoroughly Anglo-Saxon that public-servant. Stem-winder somehow has more life in it, more fancy and vividness, than the literal keyless-watch. Turn to the terminology of railroading (itself, by the way, an Americanism): its creation fell upon the two peoples equally, but they tackled the job independently. The English, seeking a figure to denominate the wedge-shaped fender in front of a locomotive, called it a plough; the Americans, characteristically, gave it the far more pungent name of cow-catcher. So with the casting where two rails join. The English called it a crossing-plate. The Americans, more responsive to the suggestion in its shape, called it a frog.

This boldness of conceit, of course, makes for vulgarity. Unrestrained by any critical sense—and the critical sense of the professors counts for little, for they cry wolf too often—it flowers in such barbaric inventions as tasty, alright, no-account, pants, go-aheadativeness, tony, semi-occasional, to fellowship and to doxologize. Let it be admitted: American is not infrequently vulgar; the Americans, too, are vulgar (Bayard Taylor called them "Anglo-Saxons relapsed into semi-barbarism"); America itself is unutterably vulgar. But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions, and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy language-making. The history of English, like the history of American and every other living tongue, is a history of vulgarisms that, by their accurate meeting of real needs, have forced their way into sound usage, and even into the lifeless catalogues of the grammarians. The colonial pedants denounced to advocate as bitterly as they ever denounced to compromit or to happify, and all the English authorities gave them aid, but it forced itself into the American language despite them, and today it is even accepted as English and has got into the Oxford Dictionary. To donate, so late as 1870, was dismissed by Richard Grant White as ignorant and [Pg028] abominable and to this day the English will have none of it, but there is not an American dictionary that doesn't accept it, and surely no American writer would hesitate to use it.[54] Reliable, gubernatorial, standpoint and scientist have survived opposition of equal ferocity. The last-named was coined by William Whewell, an Englishman, in 1840, but was first adopted in America. Despite the fact that Fitzedward Hall and other eminent philologists used it and defended it, it aroused almost incredible opposition in England. So recently as 1890 it was denounced by the London Daily News as "an ignoble Americanism," and according to William Archer it was finally accepted by the English only "at the point of the bayonet."[55]

The purist performs a useful office in enforcing a certain logical regularity upon the process, and in our own case the omnipresent example of the greater conservatism of the English corrects our native tendency to go too fast, but the process itself is as inexorable in its workings as the precession of the equinoxes, and if we yield to it more eagerly than the English it is only a proof, perhaps, that the future of what was once the Anglo-Saxon tongue lies on this side of the water. "The story of English grammar," says Murison, "is a story of simplification, of dispensing with grammatical forms."[56] And of the most copious and persistent enlargement of vocabulary and mutation of idiom ever recorded, perhaps, by descriptive philology. English now has the brakes on, but American continues to leap in the dark, and the prodigality of its movement is all the [Pg029] indication that is needed of its intrinsic health, its capacity to meet the ever-changing needs of a restless and iconoclastic people, constantly fluent in racial composition, and disdainful of hampering traditions. "Language," says Sayce, "is no artificial product, contained in books and dictionaries and governed by the strict rules of impersonal grammarians. It is the living expression of the mind and spirit of a people, ever changing and shifting, whose sole standard of correctness is custom and the common usage of the community.... The first lesson to be learned is that there is no intrinsic right or wrong in the use of language, no fixed rules such as are the delight of the teacher of Latin prose. What is right now will be wrong hereafter, what language rejected yesterday she accepts today."[57]

§ 6

Among investigators of less learning there is a more spacious view of the problem, and the labored categories of White and Lounsbury are much extended. Pickering, the first to attempt a list of Americanisms, rehearsed their origin under the following headings:

Bartlett, in the second edition of his dictionary, dated 1859, increased these classes to nine;

Some time before this, but after the publication of Bartlett's first edition in 1848, William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, devoted a brief chapter to "American Dialects" in his well-known work on English[58] and in it one finds the following formidable classification of Americanisms:

Elwyn, in 1859, attempted no classification.[59] He confined his glossary to archaic English words surviving in America, and sought only to prove that they had come down "from our remotest ancestry" and were thus undeserving of the reviling [Pg032] lavished upon them by English critics. Schele de Vere, in 1872, followed Bartlett, and devoted himself largely to words borrowed from the Indian dialects, and from the French, Spanish and Dutch. But Farmer, in 1889,[60] ventured upon a new classification, prefacing it with the following definition:

He then proceeded to classify his materials thus:

Clapin, in 1902,[61] reduced these categories to four:

Thornton, in 1912, substituted the following:

In addition, Thornton added a provisional class of "words and phrases of which I have found earlier examples in American than in English writers; ... with the caveat that further research may reverse the claim"—a class offering specimens in alarmist, capitalize, eruptiveness, horse of another colour (sic!), the jig's up, nameable, omnibus bill, propaganda and whitewash.

No more than a brief glance at these classifications is needed to show that they hamper the inquiry by limiting its scope—not so much, to be sure, as the ridiculous limitations of White and Lounsbury, but still very seriously. They meet the ends of [Pg034] purely descriptive lexicography, but largely leave out of account some of the most salient characters of a living language, for example, pronunciation and idiom. Only Bartlett and Farmer establish a separate category of Americanisms produced by changes in pronunciation, though even Thornton, of course, is obliged to take notice of such forms as bust and bile. None of them, however, goes into the matter at any length, nor even into the matter of etymology. Bartlett's etymologies are scanty and often inaccurate; Schele de Vere's are sometimes quite fanciful; Thornton offers scarcely any at all. The best of these collections of Americanisms, and by long odds, is Thornton's. It presents an enormous mass of quotations, and they are all very carefully dated, and it corrects most of the more obvious errors in the work of earlier inquirers. But its very dependence upon quotations limits it chiefly to the written language, and so the enormously richer materials of the spoken language are passed over, and particularly the materials evolved during the past twenty years. One searches the two fat volumes in vain for such highly characteristic forms as would of, near-accident, and buttinski, the use of sure as an adverb, and the employment of well as a sort of general equivalent of the German also.

These grammatical and syntactical tendencies are beyond the scope of Thornton's investigation, but it is plain that they must be prime concerns of any future student who essays to get at the inner spirit of the language. Its difference from standard English is not merely a difference in vocabulary, to be disposed of in an alphabetical list; it is, above all, a difference in pronunciation, in intonation, in conjugation and declension, in metaphor and idiom, in the whole fashion of using words. A page from one of Ring W. Lardner's baseball stories contains few words that are not in the English vocabulary, and yet the thoroughly American color of it cannot fail to escape anyone who actually listens to the tongue spoken around him. Some of the elements which enter into that color will be considered in the following pages. The American vocabulary, of course, must be given first attention, for in it the earliest American divergences are embalmed and it tends to grow richer and freer year after year, [Pg035] but attention will also be paid to materials and ways of speech that are less obvious, and in particular to certain definite tendencies of the grammar of spoken American, hitherto wholly neglected.

II
The Beginnings of American

§ 1

Long before this the challenge had been flung. Scarcely two years after the Declaration of Independence Franklin was instructed by Congress, on his appointment as minister to France, to employ "the language of the United States," not simply English, in all his "replies or answers" to the communications of the ministry of Louis XVI. And eight years before the Declaration Franklin himself had drawn up a characteristically American scheme of spelling reform, and had offered plenty of proof in it, perhaps unconsciously, that the standards of spelling and pronunciation in the New World had already diverged noticeably from those accepted on the other side of the ocean.[3] In acknowledging the dedication of Webster's "Dissertations" Franklin endorsed both his revolt against English domination and his forecast of widening differences in future, though protesting at the same time against certain Americanisms that have since come into good usage, and even migrated to England.[4]

This protest was marked by Franklin's habitual mildness, but in other quarters dissent was voiced with far less urbanity. The growing independence of the colonial dialect, not only in its spoken form, but also in its most dignified written form, had begun, indeed, to attract the attention of purists in both England and America, and they sought to dispose of it in its infancy by force majeure. One of the first and most vigorous of the attacks upon it was delivered by John Witherspoon, a Scotch clergyman who came out in 1769 to be president of Princeton in partibus infidelium. This Witherspoon brought a Scotch hatred of the English with him, and at once became a leader of the party of independence; he signed the Declaration to the tune of much rhetoric, and was the only clergyman to sit in the Continental Congress. But in matters of learning he was orthodox to the point of hunkerousness, and the strange locutions that [Pg038] he encountered on all sides aroused his pedagogic ire. "I have heard in this country," he wrote in 1781, "in the senate, at the bar, and from the pulpit, and see daily in dissertations from the press, errors in grammar, improprieties and vulgarisms which hardly any person of the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain."[5] It was Witherspoon who coined the word Americanism—and at once the English guardians of the sacred vessels began employing it as a general synonym for vulgarism and barbarism. Another learned immigrant, the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, soon joined him. This Boucher was a friend of Washington, but was driven back to England by his Loyalist sentiments. He took revenge by printing various charges against the Americans, among them that of "making all the haste they can to rid themselves of the [English] language."

After the opening of the new century all the British reviews maintained an eager watchfulness for these abhorrent inventions, and denounced them, when found, with the utmost vehemence. The Edinburgh, which led the charge, opened its attack in October, 1804, and the appearance of the five volumes of Chief Justice Marshall's "Life of George Washington," during the three years following, gave the signal for corrective articles in the British Critic, the Critical Review, the Annual, the Monthly and the Eclectic. The British Critic, in April, 1808, admitted somewhat despairingly that the damage was already done—that "the common speech of the United States has departed very considerably from the standard adopted in England." The others, however, sought to stay the flood by invective against Marshall and, later, against his rival biographer, the Rev. Aaron Bancroft. The Annual, in 1808, pronounced its high curse and anathema upon "that torrent of barbarous phraseology" which was pouring across the Atlantic, and which threatened "to destroy the purity of the English language."[6] In Bancroft's "Life of George Washington" [Pg039] (1808), according to the British Critic, there were gross Americanisms, inordinately offensive to Englishmen, "at almost every page."

The Rev. Jeremy Belknap, long anticipating Elwyn, White and Lounsbury, tried to obtain a respite from this abuse by pointing out the obvious fact that many of the Americanisms under fire were merely survivors of an English that had become archaic in England, but this effort counted for little, for on the one hand the British purists enjoyed the chase too much to give it up, and on the other hand there began to dawn in America a new spirit of nationality, at first very faint, which viewed the differences objected to, not with shame, but with a fierce sort of pride. In the first volume of the North American Review William Ellery Channing spoke out boldly for "the American language and literature,"[7] and a year later Pickering published his defiant dictionary of "words and phrases which have been supposed to be peculiar to the United States." This thin collection of 500 specimens set off a dispute which yet rages on both sides of the Atlantic. Pickering, however, was undismayed. He had begun to notice the growing difference between the English and American vocabulary and pronunciation, he said, while living in London from 1799 to 1801, and he had made his collections with the utmost care, and after taking counsel with various prudent authorities, both English and American. Already in the first year of the century, he continued, the English had accused the people of the new republic of a deliberate "design to effect an entire change in the language" and while no such design was actually harbored, the facts were the facts, and he cited the current newspapers, the speeches from pulpit and rostrum, and Webster himself in support of them. This debate over Pickering's list, as I say, still continues. Lounsbury, entrenched behind his grotesque categories, once charged that four-fifths of the words in it had "no business to be there," and [Pg040] Gilbert M. Tucker[8] has argued that only 70 of them were genuine Americanisms. But a careful study of the list, in comparison with the early quotations recently collected by Thornton, seems to indicate that both of these judgments, and many others no less, have done injustice to Pickering. He made the usual errors of the pioneer, but his sound contributions to the subject were anything but inconsiderable, and it is impossible to forget his diligence and his constant shrewdness. He established firmly the native origin of a number of words now in universal use in America—e. g., backwoodsman, breadstuffs, caucus, clapboard, sleigh and squatter—and of such familiar derivatives as gubernatorial and dutiable, and he worked out the genesis of not a few loan-words, including prairie, scow, rapids, hominy and barbecue. It was not until 1848, when the first edition of Bartlett appeared, that his work was supplanted.

§ 2

In addition to the names of natural objects, the early colonists, of course, took over a great many Indian place-names, and a number of words to designate Indian relations and artificial objects in Indian use. To the last division belong hominy, pone, toboggan, canoe, tapioca, moccasin, pow-wow, papoose, tomahawk, wigwam, succotash and squaw, all of which were in common circulation by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Finally, new words were made during the period by translating Indian terms, for example, war-path, war-paint, pale-face, medicine-man, pipe-of-peace and fire-water. The total number of such borrowings, direct and indirect, was a good deal larger [Pg042] than now appears, for with the disappearance of the red man the use of loan-words from his dialects has decreased. In our own time such words as papoose, sachem, tepee, wigwam and wampum have begun to drop out of everyday use;[9] at an earlier period the language sloughed off ocelot, manitee, calumet, supawn, samp and quahaug, or began to degrade them to the estate of provincialisms.[10] A curious phenomenon is presented by the case of maize, which came into the colonial speech from some West Indian dialect, went over into orthodox English, and from English into French, German and other continental languages, and was then abandoned by the colonists. We shall see other examples of that process later on.

Whether or not Yankee comes from an Indian dialect is still disputed. An early authority, John G. E. Heckwelder, argued that it was derived from an Indian mispronunciation of the word English.[11] Certain later etymologists hold that it originated more probably in an Indian mishandling of the French word Anglais. Yet others derive it from the Scotch yankie, meaning a gigantic falsehood. A fourth party derive it from the Dutch, and cite an alleged Dutch model for "Yankee Doodle," beginning "Yanker didee doodle down."[12] Of these theories that of Heckwelder is the most plausible. But here, as in other directions, the investigation of American etymology remains sadly incomplete. An elaborate dictionary of words derived from the Indian languages, compiled by the late W. R. Gerard, is in the possession of the Smithsonian Institution, but on account of a shortage of funds it remains in manuscript. [Pg043]

From the very earliest days of English colonization the language of the colonists also received accretions from the languages of the other colonizing nations. The French word portage, for example, was already in common use before the end of the seventeenth century, and soon after came chowder, cache, caribou, voyageur, and various words that, like the last-named, have since become localisms or disappeared altogether. Before 1750 bureau,[13] gopher, batteau, bogus, and prairie were added, and caboose, a word of Dutch origin, seems to have come in through the French. Carry-all is also French in origin, despite its English quality. It comes, by the law of Hobson-Jobson, from the French carriole. The contributions of the Dutch during the half century of their conflicts with the English included cruller, cold-slaw, dominie (for parson), cookey, stoop, span (of horses), pit (as in peach-pit), waffle, hook (a point of land), scow, boss, smearcase and Santa Claus.[14] Schele de Vere credits them with hay-barrack, a corruption of hooiberg. That they established the use of bush as a designation for back-country is very probable; the word has also got into South African English. In American it has produced a number of familiar derivatives, e. g., bush-whacker and bush-league. Barrère and Leland also credit the Dutch with dander, which is commonly assumed to be an American corruption of dandruff. They say that it is from the Dutch word donder (=thunder). Op donderen, in Dutch, means to burst into a sudden rage. The chief Spanish contributions to American were to come after the War of 1812, with the opening of the West, but creole, calaboose, palmetto, peewee, key (a small island), quadroon, octoroon, barbecue, pickaninny and stampede had already entered the language in colonial days. Jerked beef came from the Spanish charqui by the law of Hobson-Jobson. The Germans who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1682 also undoubtedly gave a few words to the language, though [Pg044] it is often difficult to distinguish their contributions from those of the Dutch. It seems very likely, however, that sauerkraut[15] and noodle are to be credited to them. Finally, the negro slaves brought in gumbo, goober, juba and voodoo (usually corrupted to hoodoo), and probably helped to corrupt a number of other loan-words, for example banjo and breakdown. Banjo seems to be derived from bandore or bandurria, modern French and Spanish forms of tambour, respectively. It may, however, be an actual negro word; there is a term of like meaning, bania, in Senegambian. Ware says that breakdown, designating a riotous negro dance, is a corruption of the French rigadon. The word is not in the Oxford Dictionary. Bartlett listed it as an Americanism, but Thornton rejected it, apparently because, in the sense of a collapse, it has come into colloquial use in England. Its etymology is not given in the American dictionaries.

§ 3

Upon men of this sort fell the task of bringing the wilderness to the ax and the plow, and with it went the task of inventing a vocabulary for the special needs of the great adventure. Out of their loutish ingenuity came a great number of picturesque names for natural objects, chiefly boldly descriptive compounds: bull-frog, canvas-back, lightning-bug, mud-hen, cat-bird, razor-back, garter-snake, ground-hog and so on. And out of an inventiveness somewhat more urbane came such coinages as live-oak, potato-bug, turkey-gobbler, poke-weed, copper-head, eel-grass, reed-bird, egg-plant, blue-grass, pea-nut, pitch-pine, cling-stone (peach), moccasin-snake, June-bug and butter-nut. Live-oak appears in a document of 1610; bull-frog was familiar to Beverley in 1705; so was James-Town weed (later reduced to Jimson weed, as the English hurtleberry or whortleberry was reduced to huckleberry). These early Americans were not botanists. They were often ignorant of the names of the plants they encountered, even when those plants already had English names, and so they exercised their fancy upon new ones. So arose Johnny-jump-up for the Viola tricolor, and basswood for the common European linden or lime-tree (Tilia), and locust for the Robinia pseudacacia and its allies. The Jimson weed itself was anything but a [Pg046] novelty, but the pioneers apparently did not recognize it, and so we find them ascribing all sorts of absurd medicinal powers to it, and even Beverley solemnly reporting that "some Soldiers, eating it in a Salad, turn'd natural Fools upon it for several Days." The grosser features of the landscape got a lavish renaming, partly to distinguish new forms and partly out of an obvious desire to attain a more literal descriptiveness. I have mentioned key and hook, the one borrowed from the Spanish and the other from the Dutch. With them came run, branch, fork, bluff, (noun), neck, barrens, bottoms, underbrush, bottom-land, clearing, notch, divide, knob, riffle, gap, rolling-country and rapids,[17] and the extension of pond from artificial pools to small natural lakes, and of creek from small arms of the sea to shallow feeders of rivers. Such common English geographical terms as downs, weald, wold, fen, bog, fell, chase, combe, dell, heath and moor disappeared from the colonial tongue, save as fossilized in a few proper names. So did bracken.

With the new landscape came an entirely new mode of life—new foods, new forms of habitation, new methods of agriculture, new kinds of hunting. A great swarm of neologisms thus arose, and, as in the previous case, they were chiefly compounds. Back-country, back-woods, back-woodsman, back-settlers, back-settlements: all these were in common use early in the eighteenth century. Back-log was used by Increase Mather in 1684. Log-house appears in the Maryland Archives for 1669.[18] Hoe-cake, Johnny-cake, pan-fish, corn-dodger, roasting-ear, corn-crib, corn-cob and pop-corn were all familiar before the Revolution. So were pine-knot, snow-plow, cold-snap, land-slide, salt-lick, prickly-heat, shell-road and cane-brake. Shingle was a novelty in 1705, but one S. Symonds wrote to John Winthrop, of Ipswich, about a clapboarded house in 1637. Frame-house seems to have come in with shingle. Trail, half-breed, Indian-summer and [Pg047] Indian-file were obviously suggested by the Red Men. State-house was borrowed, perhaps, from the Dutch. Selectman is first heard of in 1685, displacing the English alderman. Mush had displaced porridge by 1671. Soon afterward hay-stack took the place of the English hay-cock, and such common English terms as byre, mews, weir, and wain began to disappear. Hired-man is to be found in the Plymouth town records of 1737, and hired-girl followed soon after. So early as 1758, as we find by the diary of Nathaniel Ames, the second-year students at Harvard were already called sophomores, though for a while the spelling was often made sophimores. Camp-meeting was later; it did not appear until 1799. But land-office was familiar before 1700, and side-walk, spelling-bee, bee-line, moss-back, crazy-quilt, mud-scow, stamping-ground and a hundred and one other such compounds were in daily use before the Revolution. After that great upheaval the new money of the confederation brought in a number of new words. In 1782 Gouverneur Morris proposed to the Continental Congress that the coins of the republic be called, in ascending order, unit, penny-bill, dollar and crown. Later Morris invented the word cent, substituting it for the English penny.[19] In 1785 Jefferson proposed mill, cent, dime, dollar and eagle, and this nomenclature was adopted.

Various nautical terms peculiar to America, or taken into English from American sources, came in during the eighteenth century, among them, schooner, cat-boat and pungy, not to recall batteau and canoe. According to a recent historian of the American merchant marine,[20] the first schooner ever seen was launched at Gloucester, Mass., in 1713. The word, it appears, was originally spelled scooner. To scoon was a verb borrowed by the New Englanders from some Scotch dialect, and meant to skim or skip across the water like a flat stone. As the first schooner left the ways and glided out into Gloucester harbor, an enraptured spectator shouted: "Oh, see how she scoons!" "A scooner let her be!" replied Captain Andrew Robinson, her [Pg048] builder—and all boats of her peculiar and novel fore-and-aft rig took the name thereafter. The Dutch mariners borrowed the term and changed the spelling, and this change was soon accepted in America. The Scotch root came from the Norse skunna, to hasten, and there are analogues in Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon and Old High German. The origin of cat-boat and pungy I have been unable to determine. Perhaps the latter is related in some way to pung, a one-horse sled or wagon. Pung was once widely used in the United States, but of late it has sunk to the estate of a New England provincialism. Longfellow used it, and in 1857 a writer in the Knickerbocker Magazine reported that pungs filled Broadway, in New York, after a snow-storm.

Most of these new words, of course, produced derivatives, for example, to stack hay, to shingle, to shuck (i. e., corn), to trail and to caucus. Backwoods immediately begat backwoodsman and was itself turned into a common adjective. The colonists, indeed, showed a beautiful disregard of linguistic nicety. At an early date they shortened the English law-phrase, to convey by deed, to the simple verb, to deed. Pickering protested against this as a barbarism, and argued that no self-respecting law-writer would employ it, but all the same it was firmly entrenched in the common speech and it has remained there to this day. To table, for to lay on the table, came in at the same time, and so did various forms represented by bindery, for bookbinder's shop. To tomahawk appeared before 1650, and to scalp must have followed soon after. Within the next century and a half they were reinforced by many other such new verbs, and by such adjectives made of nouns as no-account and one-horse, and such nouns made of verbs as carry-all and goner, and such adverbs as no-how. In particular, the manufacture of new verbs went on at a rapid pace. In his letter to Webster in 1789, Franklin denounced to advocate, to progress, and to oppose—a vain enterprise, for all of them are now in perfectly good usage. To advocate, indeed, was used by Thomas Nashe in 1589, and by John Milton half a century later, but it seems to have been reinvented in America. In 1822 and again in 1838 Robert Southey, then poet laureate, led two belated attacks upon it, as a barbarous Americanism, but [Pg049] its obvious usefulness preserved it, and it remains in good usage on both sides of the Atlantic today—one of the earliest of the English borrowings from America. In the end, indeed, even so ardent a purist as Richard Grant White adopted it, as he did to placate.[21]

Webster, though he agreed with Franklin in opposing to advocate, gave his imprimatur to to appreciate (i. e., to rise in value), and is credited by Sir Charles Lyell[22] with having himself invented to demoralize. He also approved to obligate. To antagonize seems to have been given currency by John Quincy Adams, to immigrate by John Marshall, to eventuate by Gouverneur Morris, and to derange by George Washington. Jefferson, always hospitable to new words, used to belittle in his "Notes on Virginia," and Thornton thinks that he coined it. Many new verbs were made by the simple process of prefixing the preposition to common nouns, e. g., to clerk, to dicker, to dump, to blow, (i. e., to bluster or boast), to cord (i. e., wood) to stump, to room and to shin. Others were made by transforming verbs in the orthodox vocabulary, e. g., to cavort from to curvet, and to snoop from to snook. Others arose as metaphors, e. g., to whitewash (figuratively) and to squat (on unoccupied land). Others were made by hitching suffixes to nouns, e. g., to negative, to deputize, to locate, to legislate, to infract, to compromit and to happify. Yet others seem to have been produced by onomatopoeia, e. g., to fizzle, or to have arisen by some other such spontaneous process, so far unintelligible, e. g., to tote. With them came an endless series of verb-phrases, e. g., to draw a bead, to face the music, to darken one's doors, to take to the woods, to fly off the handle, to go on the war-path and to saw wood—all obvious products of frontier life. Many coinages of the pre-Revolutionary era later disappeared. Jefferson used to ambition but it dropped out nevertheless, and so did to compromit, (i. e., to compromise), to homologize, and to happify. Fierce battles raged 'round some of these words, and they were all violently derided in England. Even so useful a verb as to locate, now in perfectly good usage, [Pg050] was denounced in the third volume of the North American Review, and other purists of the times tried to put down to legislate.

The young and tender adjectives had quite as hard a row to hoe, particularly lengthy. The British Critic attacked it in November, 1793, and it also had enemies at home, but John Adams had used it in his diary in 1759 and the authority of Jefferson and Hamilton was behind it, and so it survived. Years later James Russell Lowell spoke of it as "the excellent adjective,"[23] and boasted that American had given it to English. Dutiable also met with opposition, and moreover, it had a rival, customable; but Marshall wrote it into his historic decisions, and thus it took root. The same anonymous watchman of the North American Review who protested against to locate pronounced his anathema upon "such barbarous terms as presidential and congressional," but the plain need for them kept them in the language. Gubernatorial had come in long before this, and is to be found in the New Jersey Archives of 1734. Influential was denounced by the Rev. Jonathan Boucher and by George Canning, who argued that influent was better, but it was ardently defended by William Pinkney, of Maryland, and gradually made its way. Handy, kinky, law-abiding, chunky, solid (in the sense of well-to-do), evincive, complected, judgmatical, underpinned, blooded and cute were also already secure in revolutionary days. So with many nouns. Jefferson used breadstuffs in his Report of the Secretary of State on Commercial Restrictions, December 16, 1793. Balance, in the sense of remainder, got into the debates of the First Congress. Mileage was used by Franklin in 1754, and is now sound English. Elevator, in the sense of a storage house for grain, was used by Jefferson and by others before him. Draw, for drawbridge, comes down from Revolutionary days. So does slip, in the sense of a berth for vessels. So does addition, in the sense of a suburb. So, finally, does darkey.

The history of many of these Americanisms shows how vain is the effort of grammarians to combat the normal processes of [Pg051] language development. I have mentioned the early opposition to dutiable, influential, presidential, lengthy, to locate, to oppose, to advocate, to legislate and to progress. Bogus, reliable and standpoint were attacked with the same academic ferocity. All of them are to be found in Bryant's Index Expurgatorius[24] (circa 1870), and reliable was denounced by Bishop Coxe as "that abominable barbarism" so late as 1886.[25] Edward S. Gould, another uncompromising purist, said of standpoint that it was "the bright particular star ... of solemn philological blundering" and "the very counterpart of Dogberry's non-com."[26] Gould also protested against to jeopardize, leniency and to demean, and Richard Grant White joined him in an onslaught upon to donate. But all of these words are in good use in the United States today, and some of them have gone over into English.[27]

§ 4

The process is even more clearly shown in the history of such words as corn and shoe. Corn, in orthodox English, means grain for human consumption, and especially wheat, e. g., the Corn Laws. The earliest settlers, following this usage, gave the name of Indian corn to what the Spaniards, following the Indians themselves, had called maíz. But gradually the adjective fell off, and by the middle of the eighteenth century maize was called simply corn, and grains in general were called breadstuffs. Thomas Hutchinson, discoursing to George III in 1774, used corn in this restricted sense, speaking of "rye and corn mixed." "What corn?" asked George. "Indian corn," explained Hutchinson, "or, as it is called in authors, maize."[29] So with shoe. In English it meant (and still means) a topless article of foot-wear, but the colonists extended its meaning to varieties covering the ankle, thus displacing the English boot, which they reserved for foot coverings reaching at least to the knee. To designate the English shoe they began to use the word slipper. This distinction between English and American usage still prevails, despite the affectation which has lately sought to revive boot, and with it its derivatives, boot-shop and bootmaker.

Store, shop, lumber, pie, dry-goods, cracker, rock and partridge among nouns and to haul, to jew, to notify and to heft among verbs offer further examples of changed meanings. Down to the [Pg053] middle of the eighteenth century shop continued to designate a retail establishment in America, as it does in England to this day. Store was applied only to a large establishment—one showing, in some measure, the character of a warehouse. But in 1774 a Boston young man was advertising in the Massachusetts Spy for "a place as a clerk in a store" (three Americanisms in a row!). Soon afterward shop began to acquire its special American meaning as a factory, e. g., machine-shop. Meanwhile store completely displaced shop in the English sense, and it remained for a late flowering of Anglomania, as in the case of boot and shoe, to restore, in a measure, the status quo ante. Lumber, in eighteenth century English, meant disused furniture, and this is its common meaning in England today. But the colonists early employed it to designate timber, and that use of it is now universal in America. Its familiar derivatives, e. g., lumber-yard, lumberman, lumberjack, greatly reinforce this usage. Pie, in English, means a meat-pie; in American it means a fruit-pie. The English call a fruit-pie a tart; the Americans call a meat-pie a pot-pie. Dry-goods, in England, means "non-liquid goods, as corn" (i. e., wheat); in the United States the term means "textile fabrics or wares."[30] The difference had appeared before 1725. Rock, in English, always means a large mass; in America it may mean a small stone, as in rock-pile and to throw a rock. The Puritans were putting rocks into the foundations of their meeting-houses so early as 1712.[31] Cracker began to be used for biscuit before the Revolution. Tavern displaced inn at the same time. As for partridge, it is cited by a late authority[32] as a salient example of changed meaning, along with corn and store. In England the term is applied only to the true partridge (Perdix perdix) and its nearly related varieties, but in the United States it is also used to designate the ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus), the common quail (Colinus virginianus) and various [Pg054] other tetraonoid birds. This confusion goes back to colonial times. So with rabbit. Properly speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped the word hare out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which, curiously enough, is not a hare at all, but a true rabbit.

To haul, in English, means to move by force or violence; in the colonies it came to mean to transport in a vehicle, and this meaning survives in sound American. To jew, in English, means to cheat; the colonists made it mean to haggle, and devised to jew down to indicate an effort to work a reduction in price. To heft, in English, means to lift; the early Americans made it mean to weigh by lifting, and kept the idea of weighing in its derivatives, e. g., hefty. Finally, there is the familiar American misuse of Miss or Mis' for Mrs.. It was so widespread by 1790 that on November 17 of that year Webster solemnly denounced it in the American Mercury.

§ 5

The result of this isolation, on the one hand, was that proliferation of the colonial speech which I have briefly reviewed, and on the other hand, the preservation of many words and phrases that gradually became obsolete in England. The Pilgrims of 1620 brought over with them the English of James I and the Revised [Pg056] Version, and their descendants of a century later, inheriting it, allowed its fundamentals to be little changed by the academic overhauling that the mother tongue was put to during the early part of the eighteenth century. In part they were ignorant of this overhauling, and in part they were indifferent to it. Whenever the new usage differed from that of the Bible they were inclined to remain faithful to the Bible, not only because of its pious authority but also because of the superior pull of its imminent and constant presence. Thus when an artificial prudery in English ordered the abandonment of the Anglo-Saxon sick for the Gothic ill, the colonies refused to follow, for sick was in both the Old Testament and the New;[38] and that refusal remains in force to this day.

A very large number of words and phrases, many of them now exclusively American, are similar survivals from the English of the seventeenth century, long since obsolete or merely provincial in England. Among nouns Thornton notes fox-fire, flap-jack, jeans, molasses, beef (to designate the live animal), chinch, cord-wood, homespun, ice-cream, julep and swingle-tree; Halliwell[39] adds andiron, bay-window, cesspool, clodhopper, cross-purposes, greenhorn, loophole, ragamuffin, riff-raff, rigmarole and trash; and other authorities cite stock (for cattle), fall (for autumn), offal, din, underpinning and adze. Bub, used in addressing a boy, is very old English, but survives only in American. Flap-jack goes back to Piers Plowman, but has been obsolete in England for two centuries. Muss, in the sense of a row, is also obsolete over there, but it is to be found in "Anthony and Cleopatra." Char, as a noun, disappeared from English a long time ago, but it survives in American as chore. Among the adjectives similarly preserved are to whittle, to wilt and to approbate. To guess, in the American sense of to suppose, is to be found in "Henry VI": [Pg057]

In "Measure for Measure" Escalus says "I guess not" to Angelo. The New English Dictionary offers examples much older—from Chaucer, Wyclif and Gower. To interview is in Dekker. To loan, in the American sense of to lend, is in 34 and 35 Henry VIII, but it dropped out of use in England early in the eighteenth century, and all the leading dictionaries, both English and American, now call it an Americanism.[40] To fellowship, once in good American use but now reduced to a provincialism, is in Chaucer. Even to hustle, it appears, is ancient. Among adjectives, homely, which means only homelike or unadorned in England, was used in its American sense of plain-featured by both Shakespeare and Milton. Other such survivors are burly, catty-cornered, likely, deft, copious, scant and ornate. Perhaps clever also belongs to this category, that is, in the American sense of amiable.

"Our ancestors," said James Russell Lowell, "unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare's." Shakespeare died in 1616; the Pilgrims landed four years later; Jamestown was founded in 1607. As we have seen, the colonists, saving a few superior leaders, were men of small sensitiveness to the refinements of life and speech: soldiers of fortune, amateur theologians, younger sons, neighborhood "advanced thinkers," bankrupts, jobless workmen, decayed gentry, and other such fugitives from culture—in brief, Philistines of the sort who join tin-pot fraternal orders today, and march in parades, and whoop for the latest mountebanks in politics. There was thus a touch of rhetoric in Lowell's saying that they spoke the English of Shakespeare; as well argue that the London grocers of 1885 spoke the English of Pater. But in a larger sense he said truly, for these men at least brought with them the vocabulary of Shakespeare—or a part of it,—even if the uses he made of it were beyond their comprehension, and they also brought with [Pg058] them that sense of ease in the language, that fine disdain for formality, that bold experimentalizing in words, which was so peculiarly Elizabethan. There were no grammarians in that day; there were no purists that anyone listened to; it was a case of saying your say in the easiest and most satisfying way. In remote parts of the United States there are still direct and almost pure-blooded descendants of those seventeenth century colonists. Go among them, and you will hear more words from the Shakespearean vocabulary, still alive and in common service, than anywhere else in the world, and more of the loose and brilliant syntax of that time, and more of its gipsy phrases.[41]

§ 6

One of these errors, chiefly prevalent in New England, is that the so-called Boston pronunciation, with its broad a's (making last, path and aunt almost assonant with bar) comes down unbrokenly from the day of the first settlements, and that it is in consequence superior in authority to the pronunciation of the [Pg059] rest of the country, with its flat a's (making the same words assonant with ban). A glance through Webster's "Dissertations" is sufficient to show that the flat a was in use in New England in 1789, for the pronunciation of such words as wrath, bath and path, as given by him, makes them rhyme with hath.[43] Moreover, he gives aunt the same a-sound. From other sources come indications that the a was likewise flattened in such words as plant, basket, branch, dance, blast, command and castle, and even in balm and calm. Changes in the sound of the letter have been going on in English ever since the Middle English period,[44] and according to Lounsbury[45] they have moved toward the disappearance of the Continental a, "the fundamental vowel-tone of the human voice." Grandgent, another authority,[46] says that it became flattened "by the sixteenth century" and that "until 1780 or thereabouts the standard language had no broad a." Even in such words as father, car and ask the flat a was universally used. Sheridan, in the dictionary he published in 1780,[47] actually gave no ah-sound in his list of vowels. This habit of flatting the a had been brought over, of course, by the early colonists, and was as general in America, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, as in England. Benjamin Franklin, when he wrote his "Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling," in 1768, apparently had no suspicion that any other a was possible. But between 1780 and 1790, according to Grandgent, a sudden fashion for the broad a (not the aw-sound, as in fall, but the Continental sound as in far) arose in England,[48] and this fashion soon found servile imitation in Boston. But it was as much an affectation in those [Pg060] days as it is today, and Webster indicated the fact pretty plainly in his "Dissertations." How, despite his opposition, the broad a prevailed East of the Connecticut river, and how, in the end, he himself yielded to it, and even tried to force it upon the whole nation—this will be rehearsed in the next chapter.

The colonists remained faithful much longer than the English to various other vowel-sounds that were facing change in the eighteenth century, for example, the long e-sound in heard. Webster says that the custom of rhyming heard with bird instead of with feared came in at the beginning of the Revolution. "To most people in this country," he adds, "the English pronunciation appears like affectation." He also argues for rhyming deaf with leaf, and protests against inserting a y-sound before the u in such words as nature. Franklin's authority stands behind git for get. This pronunciation, according to Menner,[49] was correct in seventeenth century England, and perhaps down to the middle of the next century. So was the use of the Continental i-sound in oblige, making it obleege. It is probable that the colonists clung to these disappearing usages much longer than the English. The latter, according to Webster, were unduly responsive to illogical fashions set by the exquisites of the court and by popular actors. He blames Garrick, in particular, for many extravagant innovations, most of them not followed in the colonies. But Garrick was surely not responsible for the use of a long i-sound in such words as motive, nor for the corruption of mercy to marcy. Webster denounced both of these barbarisms. The second he ascribed somewhat lamely to the fact that the letter r is called ar, and proposed to dispose of it by changing the ar to er.

As for the consonants, the colonists seem to have resisted valiantly that tendency to slide over them which arose in England after the Restoration. Franklin, in 1768, still retained the sound of l in such words as would and should, a usage not met with in England after the year 1700. In the same way, according to Menner, the w in sword was sounded in America "for [Pg061] some time after Englishmen had abandoned it." The sensitive ear of Henry James detected an unpleasant r-sound in the speech of Americans, long ago got rid of by the English, so late as 1905; he even charged that it was inserted gratuitously in innocent words.[50] The obvious slurring of the consonants by Southerners is explained by a recent investigator[51] on the ground that it began in England during the reign of Charles II, and that most of the Southern colonists came to the New World at that time. The court of Charles, it is argued, was under French influence, due to the king's long residence in France and his marriage to Henrietta Marie. Charles "objected to the inharmonious contractions will'nt (or wolln't) and wasn't and weren't ... and set the fashion of using the softly euphonious won't and wan't, which are used in speaking to this day by the best class of Southerners." A more direct French influence upon Southern pronunciation is also pointed out. "With full knowledge of his g's and his r's, ... [the Southerner] sees fit to glide over them, ... and he carries over the consonant ending one word to the vowel beginning the next, just as the Frenchman does." The political importance of the South, in the years between the Mecklenburg Declaration and the adoption of the Constitution, tended to force its provincialisms upon the common language. Many of the acknowledged leaders of the nascent nation were Southerners, and their pronunciation, as well as their phrases, must have become familiar everywhere. Pickering gives us a hint, indeed, at the process whereby their usage influenced that of the rest of the people.[52]

The Americans early dropped the h-sound in such words as when and where, but so far as I can determine they never elided it at the beginning of words, save in the case of herb, and a few others. This elision is commonly spoken of as a cockney vulgarism, but it has extended to the orthodox English speech. In ostler the initial h is openly left off; in hotel and hospital it is [Pg062] seldom sounded, even by the most careful Englishmen. Certain English words in h, in which the h is now sounded, betray its former silence by the fact that not a but an is still put before them. It is still good English usage to write an hotel and an historical; it is the American usage to write a hotel and a historical.

The great authority of Webster was sufficient to establish the American pronunciation of schedule. In England the sch is always given the soft sound, but Webster decided for the hard sound, as in scheme. The variance persists to this day. The name of the last letter of the alphabet, which is always zed in English, is usually made zee in the United States. Thornton shows that this Americanism arose in the eighteenth century.

III
The Period of Growth

§ 1

"That struggle," adds Lossing, "occurred, and that independence was won, by the Americans in the War of 1812."[2] In the interval the new republic had passed through a period of Sturm und Drang whose gigantic perils and passions we have begun to forget—a period in which disaster ever menaced, and the foes within were no less bold and pertinacious than the foes without. Jefferson, perhaps, carried his fear of "monocrats" to the point of monomania, but under it there was undoubtedly a body of sound fact. The poor debtor class (including probably a majority of the veterans of the Revolution) had been fired by the facile doctrines of the French Revolution to demands which threatened the country with bankruptcy and anarchy, and the class of property-owners, in reaction, went far to the other extreme. On all sides, indeed, there flourished a strong British party, and particularly in New England, where the so-called codfish aristocracy (by no means extinct, even today) exhibited an undisguised Anglomania, and looked forward confidently to a rapprochement with the mother country.[3] This Anglomania showed itself, not only in ceaseless political agitation, but also in an elaborate imitation of English manners. We have already seen, on Noah Webster's authority, how it even extended to the pronunciation of the language.

The first sign of the dawn of a new national order came with the election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency in 1800. The issue in the campaign was a highly complex one, but under it lay a plain conflict between democratic independence and the [Pg065] old doctrine of dependence and authority; and with the Alien and Sedition Laws about his neck, so vividly reminiscent of the issues of the Revolution itself, Adams went down to defeat. Jefferson was violently anti-British and pro-French; he saw all the schemes of his political opponents, indeed, as English plots; he was the man who introduced the bugaboo into American politics. His first acts after his inauguration were to abolish all ceremonial at the court of the republic, and to abandon spoken discourses to Congress for written messages. That ceremonial, which grew up under Washington, was an imitation, he believed, of the formality of the abhorrent Court of St. James; as for the speeches to Congress, they were palpably modelled upon the speeches from the throne of the English kings. Both reforms met with wide approval; the exactions of the English, particularly on the high seas, were beginning to break up the British party. But confidence in the solidarity and security of the new nation was still anything but universal. The surviving doubts, indeed, were strong enough to delay the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for more direct elections of President and Vice-President, until the end of 1804, and even then three of the five New England states rejected it,[4] and have never ratified it, in fact, to this day. Democracy was still experimental, doubtful, full of gunpowder. In so far as it had actually come into being, it had come as a boon conferred from above. Jefferson, its protagonist, was the hero of the populace, but he was not of the populace himself, nor did he ever quite trust it.

It was reserved for Andrew Jackson, a man genuinely of the people, to lead and visualize the rise of the lower orders. Jackson, in his way, was the archetype of the new American—ignorant, pushful, impatient of restraint and precedent, an iconoclast, a Philistine, an Anglophobe in every fibre. He came from the extreme backwoods and his youth was passed amid surroundings but little removed from downright savagery.[5] [Pg066] Thousands of other young Americans like him were growing up at the same time—youngsters filled with a vast impatience of all precedent and authority, revilers of all that had come down from an elder day, incorrigible libertarians. They swarmed across the mountains and down the great rivers, wrestling with the naked wilderness and setting up a casual, impromptu sort of civilization where the Indian still menaced. Schools were few and rudimentary; there was not the remotest approach to a cultivated society; any effort to mimic the amenities of the East, or of the mother country, in manner or even in speech, met with instant derision. It was in these surroundings and at this time that the thorough-going American of tradition was born: blatant, illogical, elate, "greeting the embarrassed gods" uproariously and matching "with Destiny for beers." Jackson was unmistakably of that company in his every instinct and idea, and it was his fate to give a new and unshakable confidence to its aspiration at the Battle of New Orleans. Thereafter all doubts began to die out; the new republic was turning out a success. And with success came a vast increase in the national egoism. The hordes of pioneers rolled down the western valleys and on to the great plains.[6] America began to stand for something quite new in the world—in government, in law, in public and private morals, in customs and habits of mind, in the minutia of social intercourse. And simultaneously the voice of America began to take on its characteristic twang, and the speech of America began to differentiate itself boldly and unmistakably from the speech of England. The average Philadelphian or Bostonian of 1790 had not the slightest difficulty in making himself understood by a visiting Englishman. But the average Ohio boatman of 1810 or plainsman of 1815 was already speaking a dialect that the Englishman would have shrunk from as barbarous and unintelligible, and before long it began to leave [Pg067] its mark upon and to get direction and support from a distinctively national literature.

That literature, however, was very slow in coming to a dignified, confident and autonomous estate. Down to Jefferson's day it was almost wholly polemical, and hence lacking in the finer values; he himself, an insatiable propagandist and controversialist, was one of its chief ornaments. "The novelists and the historians, the essayists and the poets, whose names come to mind when American literature is mentioned," says a recent literary historian, "have all flourished since 1800."[7] Pickering, so late as 1816, said that "in this country we can hardly be said to have any authors by profession." It was a true saying, though the new day was about to dawn; Bryant had already written "Thanatopsis" and was destined to publish it the year following. Difficulties of communication hampered the circulation of the few native books that were written; it was easier for a man in the South to get books from London than to get them from Boston or New York, and the lack of a copyright treaty with England flooded the country with cheap English editions. "It is much to be regretted," wrote Dr. David Ramsay, of Charleston, S. C., to Noah Webster in 1806, "that there is so little intercourse in a literary way between the states. As soon as a book of general utility comes out in any state it should be for sale in all of them." Ramsay asked for little; the most he could imagine was a sale of 2,000 copies for an American work in America. But even that was far beyond the possibilities of the time.

An external influence of great potency helped to keep the national literature scant and timorous during those early and perilous days. It was the extraordinary animosity of the English critics, then at the zenith of their pontifical authority, to all books of American origin or flavor. This animosity, culminating in Sydney Smith's famous sneer,[8] was but part of a [Pg068] larger hostility to all things American, from political theories to table manners. The American, after the war of 1812, became the pet abomination of the English, and the chief butt of the incomparable English talent for moral indignation. There was scarcely an issue of the Quarterly Review, the Edinburgh, the Foreign Quarterly, the British Review or Blackwood's, for a generation following 1814, in which he was not stupendously assaulted. Gifford, Sydney Smith and the poet Southey became specialists in this business; it took on the character of a holy war; even such mild men as Wordsworth were recruited for it. It was argued that the Americans were rogues and swindlers, that they lived in filth and squalor, that they were boors in social intercourse, that they were poltroons and savages in war, that they were depraved and criminal, that they were wholly devoid of the remotest notion of decency or honor. The Foreign Quarterly, summing up in January, 1844, pronounced them "horn-handed and pig-headed, hard, persevering, unscrupulous, carnivorous, with a genius for lying." Various Americans went to the defense of their countrymen, among them, Irving, Cooper, Timothy Dwight, J. K. Paulding, John Neal, Edward Everett and Robert Walsh. Paulding, in "John Bull in America, or, the New Munchausen," published in 1825, attempted satire. Even an Englishman, James Sterling, warned his fellow-Britons that, if they continued their intolerant abuse, they would "turn into bitterness the last drops of good-will toward England that exist in the United States." But the avalanche of denunciation kept up, and even down to a few years ago it was very uncommon for an Englishman to write of American politics, or manners, or literature without betraying his dislike. Not, indeed, until the Prussian began monopolizing the whole British talent for horror and invective did the Yankee escape the lash.[9]

This gigantic pummelling, in the long run, was destined to encourage an independent spirit in the national literature, if [Pg069] only by a process of mingled resentment and despair, but for some time its chief effect was to make American writers of a more delicate aspiration extremely self-conscious and diffident. The educated classes, even against their will, were influenced by the torrent of abuse; they could not help finding in it an occasional reasonableness, an accidental true hit. The result, despite the efforts of Channing, Knapp and other such valiant defenders of the native author, was uncertainty and skepticism in native criticism. "The first step of an American entering upon a literary career," says Lodge, writing of the first quarter of the century, "was to pretend to be an Englishman in order that he might win the approval, not of Englishmen, but of his own countrymen." Cooper, in his first novel, "Precaution," chose an English scene, imitated English models, and obviously hoped to placate the critics thereby. Irving, too, in his earliest work, showed a considerable discretion, and his "History of New York," as everyone knows, was first published anonymously. But this puerile spirit did not last long. The English onslaughts were altogether too vicious to be received lying down; their very fury demanded that they be met with a united and courageous front. Cooper, in his second novel, "The Spy," boldly chose an American setting and American characters, and though the influence of his wife, who came of a Loyalist family, caused him to avoid any direct attack upon the English, he attacked them indirectly, and with great effect, by opposing an immediate and honorable success to their derisions. "The Spy" ran through three editions in four months; it was followed by his long line of thoroughly American novels; in 1834 he formally apologized to his countrymen for his early truancy in "Precaution." Irving, too, soon adopted a bolder tone, and despite his English predilections, he refused an offer of a hundred guineas for an article for the Quarterly Review, made by Gifford in 1828, on the ground that "the Review has been so persistently hostile to our country that I cannot draw a pen in its service."

The same year saw the publication of the first edition of [Pg070] Webster's American Dictionary of the English language, and a year later followed Samuel L. Knapp's "Lectures on American Literature," the first history of the national letters ever attempted. Knapp, in his preface, thought it necessary to prove, first of all, that an American literature actually existed, and Webster, in his introduction, was properly apologetic, but there was no real need for timorousness in either case, for the American attitude toward the attack of the English was now definitely changing from uneasiness to defiance. The English critics, in fact, had overdone the thing, and though their clatter was to keep up for many years more, they no longer spread terror or had much influence. Of a sudden, as if in answer to them, doubts turned to confidence, and then into the wildest sort of optimism, not only in politics and business, but also in what passed for the arts. Knapp boldly defied the English to produce a "tuneful sister" surpassing Mrs. Sigourney; more, he argued that the New World, if only by reason of its superior scenic grandeur, would eventually hatch a poetry surpassing even that of Greece and Rome. "What are the Tibers and Scamanders," he demanded, "measured by the Missouri and the Amazon? Or what the loveliness of Illysus or Avon by the Connecticut or the Potomack?"

In brief, the national feeling, long delayed at birth, finally leaped into being in amazing vigor. "One can get an idea of the strength of that feeling," says R. O. Williams, "by glancing at almost any book taken at random from the American publications of the period. Belief in the grand future of the United States is the key-note of everything said and done. All things American are to be grand—our territory, population, products, wealth, science, art—but especially our political institutions and literature. The unbounded confidence in the material development of the country which now characterizes the extreme northwest of the United States prevailed as strongly throughout the eastern part of the Union during the first thirty years of the century; and over and above a belief in, and concern for, materialistic progress, there were enthusiastic anticipations of achievements in all the moral and intellectual fields of national [Pg071] greatness."[10] Nor was that vast optimism wholly without warrant. An American literature was actually coming into being, and with a wall of hatred and contempt shutting in England, the new American writers were beginning to turn to the Continent for inspiration and encouragement. Irving had already drunk at Spanish springs; Emerson and Bayard Taylor were to receive powerful impulses from Germany, following Ticknor, Bancroft and Everett before them; Bryant was destined to go back to the classics. Moreover, Cooper and John P. Kennedy had shown the way to native sources of literary material, and Longfellow was making ready to follow them; novels in imitation of English models were no longer heard of; the ground was preparing for "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Finally, Webster himself, as Williams demonstrated, worked better than he knew. His American Dictionary was not only thoroughly American: it was superior to any of the current dictionaries of the English, so much so that for a good many years it remained "a sort of mine for British lexicography to exploit."

Thus all hesitations disappeared, and there arose a national consciousness so soaring and so blatant that it began to dismiss all British usage and opinion as puerile and idiotic. William L. Marcy, when Secretary of State under Pierce (1853-57), issued a circular to all American diplomatic and consular officers, loftily bidding them employ only "the American language" in communicating with him. The Legislature of Indiana, in an act approved February 15, 1838, establishing the state university at Bloomington,[11] provided that it should instruct the youth of the new commonwealth (it had been admitted to the Union in 1816) "in the American, learned and foreign languages ... and literature." Such grandiose pronunciamentos [Pg072] well indicate and explain the temper of the era.[12] It was a time of expansion and braggadocia. The new republic would not only produce a civilization and a literature of its own; it would show the way for all other civilizations and literatures. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, the enemy of Poe, rose from his decorous Baptist pew to protest that so much patriotism amounted to insularity and absurdity, but there seems to have been no one to second the motion. It took, indeed, the vast shock of the Civil War to unhorse the optimists. While the Jackson influence survived, it was the almost unanimous national conviction that "he who dallies is a dastard, and he who doubts is damned."

§ 2

Meanwhile, in strong contrast to the lingering conservatism above there was a wild and lawless development of the language below, and in the end it forced itself into recognition, and profited by the literary declaration of independence of its very opponents. "The jus et norma loquendi," says W. R. Morfill, the English philologist, "do not depend upon scholars." Particularly in a country where scholarship is still new and wholly cloistered, and the overwhelming majority of the people are engaged upon novel and highly exhilarating tasks, far away from schools and with a gigantic cockiness in their hearts. The remnants of the Puritan civilization had been wiped out by the rise of the proletariat under Jackson, and whatever was fine and sensitive in it had died with it. What remained of an urbane habit of mind and utterance began to be confined to the narrowing feudal areas of the south, and to the still narrower refuge of the Boston Brahmins, now, for the first time, a definitely recognized caste of intelligentsia, self-charged with carrying the [Pg074] torch of culture through a new Dark Age. The typical American, in Paulding's satirical phrase, became "a bundling, gouging, impious" fellow, without either "morals, literature, religion or refinement." Next to the savage struggle for land and dollars, party politics was the chief concern of the people, and with the disappearance of the old leaders and the entrance of pushing upstarts from the backwoods, political controversy sank to an incredibly low level. Bartlett, in the introduction to the second edition of his Glossary, describes the effect upon the language. First the enfranchised mob, whether in the city wards or along the western rivers, invented fantastic slang-words and turns of phrase; then they were "seized upon by stump-speakers at political meetings"; then they were heard in Congress; then they got into the newspapers; and finally they came into more or less good usage. Much contemporary evidence is to the same effect. Fowler, in listing "low expressions" in 1850, described them as "chiefly political." "The vernacular tongue of the country," said Daniel Webster, "has become greatly vitiated, depraved and corrupted by the style of the congressional debates." Thornton, in the appendix to his Glossary, gives some astounding specimens of congressional oratory between the 20's and 60's, and many more will reward the explorer who braves the files of the Congressional Globe. This flood of racy and unprecedented words and phrases beat upon and finally penetrated the retreat of the literati, but the purity of speech cultivated there had little compensatory influence upon the vulgate. The newspaper was now enthroned, and belles lettres were cultivated almost in private, and as a mystery. It is probable, indeed, that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Ten Nights in a Bar-room," both published in the early 50's, were the first contemporary native books, after Cooper's day, that the American people, as a people, ever read. Nor did the pulpit, now fast falling from its old high estate, lift a corrective voice. On the contrary, it joined the crowd, and Bartlett denounces it specifically for its bad example, and cites, among its crimes against the language, such inventions as to doxologize and to funeralize. [Pg075] To these novelties, apparently without any thought of their uncouthness, Fowler adds to missionate and consociational.

As I say, the pressure from below broke down the defenses of the purists, and literally forced a new national idiom upon them. Pen in hand, they might still achieve laborious imitations of Johnson and Macaulay, but their mouths began to betray them. "When it comes to talking," wrote Charles Astor Bristed for Englishmen in 1855, "the most refined and best educated American, who has habitually resided in his own country, the very man who would write, on some serious topic, volumes in which no peculiarity could be detected, will, in half a dozen sentences, use at least as many words that cannot fail to strike the inexperienced Englishman who hears them for the first time." Bristed gave a specimen of the American of that time, calculated to flabbergast his inexperienced Englishman; you will find it in the volume of Cambridge Essays, already cited. His aim was to explain and defend Americanisms, and so shut off the storm of English reviling, and he succeeded in producing one of the most thoughtful and persuasive essays on the subject ever written. But his purpose failed and the attack kept up, and eight years afterward the Very Rev. Henry Alford, D.D., dean of Canterbury, led a famous assault. "Look at those phrases," he said, "which so amuse us in their speech and books; at their reckless exaggeration and contempt for congruity; and then compare the character and history of the nation—its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man; its open disregard of conventional right where aggrandizement is to be obtained; and I may now say, its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world."[13] In his American edition of 1866 Dr. Alford withdrew this reference to the Civil War and somewhat ameliorated his indignation otherwise, but he clung to the main counts in his indictment, and most Englishmen, I daresay, still give them a certain support. The American is no longer a [Pg076] "vain, egotistical, insolent, rodomontade sort of fellow"; America is no longer the "brigand confederation" of the Foreign Quarterly or "the loathsome creature, ... maimed and lame, full of sores and ulcers" of Dickens; but the Americanism is yet regarded with a bilious eye, and pounced upon viciously when found. Even the friendliest English critics seem to be daunted by the gargantuan copiousness of American inventions in speech. Their position, perhaps, was well stated by Capt. Basil Hall, author of the celebrated "Travels in North America," in 1827. When he argued that "surely such innovations are to be deprecated," an American asked him this question: "If a word becomes universally current in America, why should it not take its station in the language?" "Because," replied Hall in all seriousness, "there are words enough in our language already."

§ 3

Some of these inventions, after flourishing for a generation or more, were retired with blushes during the period of aesthetic consciousness following the Civil War, but a large number have survived to our own day, and are in good usage. Not even the most bilious purist would think of objecting to to affiliate, to itemize, to resurrect or to Americanize today, and yet all of them gave grief to the judicious when they first appeared in the debates of Congress, brought there by statesmen from the backwoods. Nor to such simpler verbs of the period as to corner (i. e., the market), to boss and to lynch.[16] Nor perhaps to to boom, to boost, to kick (in the sense of to protest), to coast (on a sled), to engineer, to collide, to chink (i. e., logs), to feaze, to splurge, to aggravate (in the sense of to anger), to yank and to crawfish. These verbs have entered into the very fibre of the American vulgate, and so have many nouns derived from them, e. g., boomer, boom-town, bouncer, kicker, kick, splurge, roller-coaster. A few of them, e. g., to collide and to feaze, were [Pg078] archaic English terms brought to new birth; a few others, e. g., to holler[17] and to muss, were obviously mere corruptions. But a good many others, e. g., to bulldoze, to hornswoggle and to scoot, were genuine inventions, and redolent of the soil.

With the new verbs came a great swarm of verb-phrases, some of them short and pithy and others extraordinarily elaborate, but all showing the true national talent for condensing a complex thought, and often a whole series of thoughts, into a vivid and arresting image. Of the first class are to fill the bill, to fizzle out, to make tracks, to peter out, to plank down, to go back on, to keep tab, to light out and to back water. Side by side with them we have inherited such common coins of speech as to make the fur fly, to cut a swath, to know him like a book, to keep a stiff upper lip, to cap the climax, to handle without gloves, to freeze on to, to go it blind, to pull wool over his eyes, to know the ropes, to get solid with, to spread one's self, to run into the ground, to dodge the issue, to paint the town red, to take a back seat and to get ahead of. These are so familiar that we use them and hear them without thought; they seem as authentically parts of the English idiom as to be left at the post. And yet, as the labors of Thornton have demonstrated, all of them are of American nativity, and the circumstances surrounding the origin of some of them have been accurately determined. Many others are palpably the products of the great movement toward the West, for example, to pan out, to strike it rich, to jump or enter a claim, to pull up stakes, to rope in, to die with one's boots on, to get the deadwood on, to get the drop, to back and fill (a steamboat phrase used figuratively) and to get the bulge on. And in many others the authentic American is no less plain, for example, in to kick the bucket, to put a bug in his [Pg079] ear, to see the elephant, to crack up, to do up brown, to bark up the wrong tree, to jump on with both feet, to go the whole hog, to make a kick, to buck the tiger, to let it slide and to come out at the little end of the horn. To play possum belongs to this list. To it Thornton adds to knock into a cocked hat, despite its English sound, and to have an ax to grind. To go for, both in the sense of belligerency and in that of partisanship, is also American, and so is to go through (i. e., to plunder).

Of adjectives the list is scarcely less long. Among the coinages of the first half of the century that are in good use today are non-committal, highfalutin, well-posted, down-town, played-out, flat-footed, whole-souled and true-blue. The first appears in a Senate debate of 1841; highfalutin in a political speech of the same decade. Both are useful words; it is impossible, not employing them, to convey the ideas behind them without circumlocution. The use of slim in the sense of meagre, as in slim chance, slim attendance and slim support, goes back still further. The English use small in place of it. Other, and less respectable contributions of the time are brash, brainy, peart, locoed, pesky, picayune, scary, well-heeled, hardshell (e. g., Baptist), low-flung, codfish (to indicate opprobrium) and go-to-meeting. The use of plumb as an adjective, as in plumb crazy, is an English archaism that was revived in the United States in the early years of the century. In the more orthodox adverbial form of plump it still survives, for example, in "she fell plump into his arms." But this last is also good English.

The characteristic American substitution of mad for angry goes back to the eighteenth century, and perhaps denotes the survival of an English provincialism. Witherspoon noticed it and denounced it in 1781, and in 1816 Pickering called it "low" and said that it was not used "except in very familiar conversation." But it got into much better odor soon afterward, and by 1840 it passed unchallenged. Its use is one of the peculiarities that Englishmen most quickly notice in American colloquial speech today. In formal written discourse it is less often encountered, probably because the English marking of it has so conspicuously singled it out. But it is constantly met with [Pg080] in the newspapers and in the Congressional Record, and it is not infrequently used by such writers as Howells and Dreiser. In the familiar simile, as mad as a hornet, it is used in the American sense. But as mad as a March hare is English, and connotes insanity, not mere anger. The English meaning of the word is preserved in mad-house and mad-dog, but I have often noticed that American rustics, employing the latter term, derive from it a vague notion, not that the dog is demented, but that it is in a simple fury. From this notion, perhaps, comes the popular belief that dogs may be thrown into hydrophobia by teasing and badgering them.

It was not, however, among the verbs and adjectives that the American word-coiners of the first half of the century achieved their gaudiest innovations, but among the substantives. Here they had temptation and excuse in plenty, for innumerable new objects and relations demanded names, and here they exercised their fancy without restraint. Setting aside loan words, which will be considered later, three main varieties of new nouns were thus produced. The first consisted of English words rescued from obsolescence or changed in meaning, the second of compounds manufactured of the common materials of the mother tongue, and the third of entirely new inventions. Of the first class, good specimens are deck (of cards), gulch, gully and billion, the first three old English words restored to usage in America and the last a sound English word changed in meaning. Of the second class, examples are offered by gum-shoe, mortgage-shark, dug-out, shot-gun, stag-party, wheat-pit, horse-sense, chipped-beef, oyster-supper, buzz-saw, chain-gang and hell-box. And of the third there are instances in buncombe, greaser, conniption, bloomer, campus, galoot, maverick, roustabout, bugaboo and blizzard.

Of these coinages, perhaps those of the second class are most numerous and characteristic. In them American exhibits one of its most marked tendencies: a habit of achieving short cuts in speech by a process of agglutination. Why explain laboriously, as an Englishman might, that the notes of a new bank (in a day of innumerable new banks) are insufficiently secure? Call [Pg081] them wild-cat notes and have done! Why describe a gigantic rain storm with the lame adjectives of everyday? Call it a cloud-burst and immediately a vivid picture of it is conjured up. Rough-neck is a capital word; it is more apposite and savory than the English navvy, and it is overwhelmingly more American.[18] Square-meal is another. Fire-eater is yet another. And the same instinct for the terse, the eloquent and the picturesque is in boiled-shirt, blow-out, big-bug, claim-jumper, spread-eagle, come-down, back-number, claw-hammer (coat), bottom-dollar, poppy-cock, cold-snap, back-talk, back-taxes, calamity-howler, cut-off, fire-bug, grab-bag, grip-sack, grub-stake, pay-dirt, tender-foot, stocking-feet, ticket-scalper, store-clothes, small-potatoes, cake-walk, prairie-schooner, round-up, snake-fence, flat-boat, under-the-weather, on-the-hoof, and jumping-off-place. These compounds (there must be thousands of them) have been largely responsible for giving the language its characteristic tang and color. Such specimens as bell-hop, semi-occasional, chair-warmer and down-and-out are as distinctively American as baseball or the quick-lunch.

The spirit of the language appears scarcely less clearly in some of the coinages of the other classes. There are, for example, the English words that have been extended or restricted in meaning, e. g., docket (for court calendar), betterment (for improvement to property), collateral (for security), crank (for fanatic), jumper (for tunic), tickler (for memorandum or reminder),[19] carnival (in such phrases as carnival of crime), scrape (for fight or difficulty),[20] flurry (of snow, or in the market), suspenders, diggings (for habitation) and range. Again, there are the new assemblings of English materials, e. g., doggery, rowdy, teetotaler, goatee, tony and cussedness. Yet again, there are the purely artificial words, e. g., sockdolager, hunkydory, scalawag, guyascutis, spondulix, slumgullion, rambunctious, scrumptious, [Pg082] to skedaddle, to absquatulate and to exfluncticate.[21] In the use of the last-named coinages fashions change. In the 40's to absquatulate was in good usage, but it has since disappeared. Most of the other inventions of the time, however, have to some extent survived, and it would be difficult to find an American of today who did not know the meaning of scalawag and rambunctious and who did not occasionally use them. A whole series of artificial American words groups itself around the prefix ker, for example, ker-flop, ker-splash, ker-thump, ker-bang, ker-plunk, ker-slam and ker-flummux. This prefix and its onomatopoeic daughters have been borrowed by the English, but Thornton and Ware agree that it is American. Its origin has not been determined. As Sayce says, "the native instinct of language breaks out wherever it has the chance, and coins words which can be traced back to no ancestors."

In the first chapter I mentioned the superior imaginativeness revealed by Americans in meeting linguistic emergencies, whereby, for example, in seeking names for new objects introduced by the building of railroads, they surpassed the English plough and crossing-plate with cow-catcher and frog. That was in the 30's. Already at that early day the two languages were so differentiated that they produced wholly distinct railroad nomenclatures. Such commonplace American terms as box-car, caboose, air-line and ticket-agent are still quite unknown in England. So are freight-car, flagman, towerman, switch, switching-engine, switch-yard, switchman, track-walker, engineer, baggage-room, baggage-check, baggage-smasher, accommodation-train, baggage-master, conductor, express-car, flat-car, hand-car, way-bill, expressman, express-office, fast-freight, wrecking-crew, jerk-water, commutation-ticket, commuter, round-trip, mileage-book, ticket-scalper, depot, limited, hot-box, iron-horse, stop-over, tie, rail, fish-plate, run, train-boy, chair-car, club-car, diner, sleeper, bumpers, mail-clerk, passenger-coach, day-coach, excursionist, [Pg083] excursion-train, railroad-man, ticket-office, truck and right-of-way, not to mention the verbs, to flag, to derail, to express, to dead-head, to side-swipe, to stop-over, to fire (i. e., a locomotive), to switch, to side-track, to railroad, to commute, to telescope and to clear the track. These terms are in constant use in America; their meaning is familiar to all Americans; many of them have given the language everyday figures of speech.[22] But the majority of them would puzzle an Englishman, just as the English luggage-van, permanent-way, goods-waggon, guard, carrier, booking-office, return-ticket, railway-rug, R. S. O. (railway sub-office), tripper, line, points, shunt, metals and bogie would puzzle the average untravelled American.

In two other familiar fields very considerable differences between English and American are visible; in both fields they go back to the era before the Civil War. They are politics and that department of social intercourse which has to do with drinking. Many characteristic American political terms originated in revolutionary days, and have passed over into English. Of such sort are caucus and mileage. But the majority of those in common use today were coined during the extraordinarily exciting campaigns following the defeat of Adams by Jefferson. Charles Ledyard Norton has devoted a whole book to their etymology and meaning;[23] the number is far too large for a list of them to be attempted here. But a few characteristic specimens may be recalled, for example, the simple agglutinates: omnibus-bill, banner-state, favorite-son, anxious-bench, gag-rule, office-seeker and straight-ticket; the humorous metaphors: pork-barrel, pie-counter, wire-puller, land-slide, carpet-bagger, lame-duck and on the fence; the old words put to new uses: plank, platform, machine, precinct, slate, primary, floater, repeater, bolter, stalwart, filibuster, regular and fences; the new coinages: gerrymander, heeler, buncombe, roorback, mugwump and to bulldoze; the new derivatives: abolitionist, candidacy, boss-rule, [Pg084] per-diem, to lobby and boodler; and the almost innumerable verbs and verb-phrases: to knife, to split a ticket, to go up Salt River, to bolt, to eat crow, to boodle, to divvy, to grab and to run. An English candidate never runs; he stands. To run, according to Thornton, was already used in America in 1789; it was universal by 1820. Platform came in at the same time. Machine was first applied to a political organization by Aaron Burr. The use of mugwump is commonly thought to have originated in the Blaine campaign of 1884, but it really goes back to the 30's. Anxious-bench (or anxious-seat) at first designated only the place occupied by the penitent at revivals, but was used in its present political sense in Congress so early as 1842. Banner-state appears in Niles' Register for December 5, 1840. Favorite-son appears in an ode addressed to Washington on his visit to Portsmouth, N. H., in 1789, but it did not acquire its present ironical sense until it was applied to Martin Van Buren. Thornton has traced bolter to 1812, filibuster to 1863, roorback to 1844, and split-ticket to 1842. Regularity was an issue in Tammany Hall in 1822.[24] There were primaries in New York city in 1827, and hundreds of repeaters voted. In 1829 there were lobby-agents at Albany, and they soon became lobbyists; in 1832 lobbying had already extended to Washington. All of these terms are now as firmly imbedded in the American vocabulary as election or congressman.

In the department of conviviality the imaginativeness of Americans has been shown in both the invention and the naming of new and often highly complex beverages. So vast has been the production of novelties, in fact, that England has borrowed many of them, and their names with them. And not only England: one buys cocktails and gin-fizzes in "American bars" that stretch from Paris to Yokohama. Cocktail, stone-fence and sherry-cobbler were mentioned by Irving in 1809;[25] by Thackeray's day they were already well-known in England. Thornton traces the sling to 1788, and the stinkibus and anti-fogmatic, [Pg085] both now extinct, to the same year. The origin of the rickey, fizz, sour, cooler, skin, shrub and smash, and of such curious American drinks as the horse's neck, Mamie Taylor, Tom-and-Jerry, Tom-Collins, John-Collins, bishop, stone-wall, gin-fix, brandy-champarelle, golden-slipper, hari-kari, locomotive, whiskey-daisy, blue-blazer, black-stripe, white-plush and brandy-crusta is quite unknown; the historians of alcoholism, like the philologists, have neglected them.[26] But the essentially American character of most of them is obvious, despite the fact that a number have gone over into English. The English, in naming their drinks, commonly display a far more limited imagination. Seeking a name, for example, for a mixture of whiskey and soda-water, the best they could achieve was whiskey-and-soda. The Americans, introduced to the same drink, at once gave it the far more original name of high-ball. So with ginger-ale and ginger-pop. So with minerals and soft-drinks. Other characteristic Americanisms (a few of them borrowed by the English) are red-eye, corn-juice, eye-opener, forty-rod, squirrel-whiskey, phlegm-cutter, moon-shine, hard-cider, apple-jack and corpse-reviver, and the auxiliary drinking terms, speak-easy, sample-room, blind-pig, barrel-house, bouncer, bung-starter, dive, doggery, schooner, shell, stick, duck, straight, saloon, finger, pony and chaser. Thornton shows that jag, bust, bat and to crook the elbow are also Americanisms. So are bartender and saloon-keeper. To them might be added a long list of common American synonyms for drunk, for example, piffled, pifflicated, awry-eyed, tanked, snooted, stewed, ossified, slopped, fiddled, edged, loaded, het-up, frazzled, jugged, soused, jiggered, corned, jagged and bunned. Farmer and Henley list corned and jagged among English synonyms, but the former is obviously an Americanism derived from corn-whiskey or corn-juice, and Thornton says that the latter originated on this side of the Atlantic also. [Pg086]

§ 4

Contact with the French in Louisiana and along the Canadian border, and with the Spanish in Texas and further West, brought many more new words. From the Canadian French, as we have already seen, prairie, batteau, portage and rapids had been borrowed during colonial days; to these French contributions bayou, picayune, levee, chute, butte, crevasse, and lagniappe were now added, and probably also shanty and canuck. The use of brave to designate an Indian warrior, almost universal until the close of the Indian wars, was also of French origin.

From the Spanish, once the Mississippi was crossed, and particularly after the Mexican war, in 1846, there came a swarm of novelties, many of which have remained firmly imbedded in the language. Among them were numerous names of strange objects: lariat, lasso, ranch, loco (weed), mustang, sombrero, canyon, desperado, poncho, chapparel, corral, broncho, plaza, [Pg087] peon, cayuse, burro, mesa, tornado, sierra and adobe. To them, as soon as gold was discovered, were added bonanza, eldorado, placer and vigilante. Cinch was borrowed from the Spanish cincha in the early Texas days, though its figurative use did not come in until much later. Ante, the poker term, though the etymologists point out its obvious origin in the Latin, probably came into American from the Spanish. Thornton's first example of its use in its current sense is dated 1857, but Bartlett reported it in the form of anti in 1848. Coyote came from the Mexican dialect of Spanish; its first parent was the Aztec coyotl. Tamale had a similar origin, and so did frijole and tomato. None of these is good Spanish.[27] As usual, derivatives quickly followed the new-comers, among them peonage, broncho-buster, ranchman and ranch-house, and the verbs to ranch, to lasso, to corral, to ante up, and to cinch. To vamose (from the Spanish vamos, let us go), came in at the same time. So did sabe. So did gazabo.

This was also the period of the first great immigrations, and the American people now came into contact, on a large scale, with peoples of divergent race, particularly Germans, Irish Catholics from the South of Ireland (the Irish of colonial days "were descendants of Cromwell's army, and came from the North of Ireland"),[28] and, on the Pacific Coast, Chinese. So early as the 20's the immigration to the United States reached 25,000 in a year; in 1824 the Legislature of New York, in alarm, passed a restrictive act.[29] The Know-Nothing movement of the 50's need not concern us here. Suffice it to recall that the immigration of 1845 passed the 100,000 mark, and that that of 1854 came within sight of 500,000. These new Americans, most of them Germans and Irish, did not all remain in the East; a great many spread through the West and Southwest with the other pioneers. Their effect upon the language was not large, [Pg088] perhaps, but it was still very palpable, and not only in the vocabulary. Of words of German origin, saurkraut and noodle, as we have seen, had come in during the colonial period, apparently through the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, i. e., a mixture, much debased, of the German dialects of Switzerland, Suabia and the Palatinate. The new immigrants now contributed pretzel, pumpernickel, hausfrau, lager-beer, pinocle, wienerwurst, dumb (for stupid), frankfurter, bock-beer, schnitzel, leberwurst, blutwurst, rathskeller, schweizer (cheese), delicatessen, hamburger (i. e., steak), kindergarten and katzenjammer.[30] From them, in all probability, there also came two very familiar Americanisms, loafer and bum. The former, according to the Standard Dictionary, is derived from the German laufen; another authority says that it originated in a German mispronounciation of lover, i. e., as lofer.[31] Thornton shows that the word was already in common use in 1835. Bum was originally bummer, and apparently derives from the German bummler.[32] Both words have produced derivatives: loaf (noun), to loaf, corner-loafer, common-loafer, to bum, bum (adj.) and bummery, not to mention on the [Pg089] bum. Loafer has migrated in England, but bum is still unknown there in the American sense. In English, indeed, bum is used to designate an unmentionable part of the body and is thus not employed in polite discourse.

Another example of debased German is offered by the American Kriss Kringle. It is from Christkindlein, or Christkind'l, and properly designates, of course, not the patron saint of Christmas, but the child in the manger. A German friend tells me that the form Kriss Kringle, which is that given in the Standard Dictionary, and the form Krisking'l, which is that most commonly used in the United States, are both quite unknown in Germany. Here, obviously, we have an example of a loan-word in decay. Whole phrases have gone through the same process, for example, nix come erous (from nichts kommt heraus) and 'rous mit 'im (from heraus mit ihm). These phrases, like wie geht's and ganz gut, are familiar to practically all Americans, no matter how complete their ignorance of correct German. Most of them know, too, the meaning of gesundheit, kümmel, seidel, wanderlust, stein, speck, maennerchor, schützenfest, sängerfest, turnverein, hoch, yodel, zwieback, and zwei (as in zwei bier). I have found snitz (=schnitz) in Town Topics.[33] Prosit is in all American dictionaries.[34] Bower, as used in cards, is an Americanism derived from the German bauer, meaning the jack. The exclamation, ouch! is classed as an Americanism by Thornton, and he gives an example dated 1837. The New English Dictionary refers it to the German autsch, and Thornton says that "it may have come across with the Dunkers or the Mennonites." Ouch is not heard in English, save in the sense of a clasp or buckle set with precious stones (=OF nouche), and even in that sense it is archaic. Shyster is very probably German also; Thornton has traced it back to the 50's.[35] Rum-dumb is grounded upon the [Pg090] meaning of dumb borrowed from the German; it is not listed in the English slang dictionaries.[36] Bristed says that the American meaning of wagon, which indicates almost any four-wheeled, horse-drawn vehicle in this country but only the very heaviest in England, was probably influenced by the German wagen. He also says that the American use of hold on for stop was suggested by the German halt an, and White says that the substitution of standpoint for point of view, long opposed by all purists, was first made by an American professor who sought "an Anglicized form" of the German standpunkt. The same German influence may be behind the general facility with which American forms compound nouns. In most other languages, for example, Latin and French, the process is rare, and even English lags far behind American. But in German it is almost unrestricted. "It is," says L. P. Smith, "a great step in advance toward that ideal language in which meaning is expressed, not by terminations, but by the simple method of word position."

The immigrants from the South of Ireland, during the period under review, exerted an influence upon the language that was vastly greater than that of the Germans, both directly and indirectly, but their contributions to the actual vocabulary were probably less. They gave American, indeed, relatively few new words; perhaps shillelah, colleen, spalpeen, smithereens and poteen exhaust the unmistakably Gaelic list. Lallapalooza is also probably an Irish loan-word, though it is not Gaelic. It apparently comes from allay-foozee, a Mayo provincialism, signifying a sturdy fellow. Allay-foozee, in its turn, comes from the French Allez-fusil, meaning "Forward the muskets!"—a memory, [Pg091] according to P. W. Joyce,[37] of the French landing at Killala in 1798. Such phrases as Erin go bragh and such expletives as begob and begorry may perhaps be added: they have got into American, though they are surely not distinctive Americanisms. But of far more importance than these few contributions to the vocabulary were certain speech habits that the Irish brought with them—habits of pronunciation, of syntax and even of grammar. These habits were, in part, the fruit of efforts to translate the idioms of Gaelic into English, and in part borrowings from the English of the age of James I. The latter, preserved by Irish conservatism in speech,[38] came into contact in America with habits surviving, with more or less change, from the same time, and so gave those American habits an unmistakable reinforcement. The Yankees, so to speak, had lived down such Jacobean pronunciations as tay for tea and desave for deceive, and these forms, on Irish lips, struck them as uncouth and absurd, but they still clung, in their common speech, to such forms as h'ist for hoist, bile for boil, chaw for chew, jine for join,[39] sass for sauce, heighth for height and rench for rinse and lep for leap, and the employment of precisely the same forms by the thousands of Irish immigrants who spread through the country undoubtedly gave them a certain support, and so protected them, in a measure, from the assault of the purists. And the same support was given to drownded for drowned, oncet for once, ketch for catch, ag'in for against and onery for ordinary. [Pg092]

Certain usages of Gaelic, carried over into the English of Ireland, fell upon fertile soil in America. One was the employment of the definite article before nouns, as in French and German. An Irishman does not say "I am good at Latin," but "I am good at the Latin." In the same way an American does not say "I had measles," but "I had the measles." There is, again, the use of the prefix a before various adjectives and gerunds, as in a-going and a-riding. This usage, of course, is native to English, as aboard and afoot demonstrate, but it is much more common in the Irish dialect, on account of the influence of the parallel Gaelic form, as in a-n-aice=a-near, and it is also much more common in American. There is, yet again, a use of intensifying suffixes, often set down as characteristically American, which was probably borrowed from the Irish. Examples are no-siree and yes-indeedy, and the later kiddo and skiddoo. As Joyce shows, such suffixes, in Irish-English, tend to become whole phrases. The Irishman is almost incapable of saying plain yes or no; he must always add some extra and gratuitous asseveration.[40] The American is in like case. His speech bristles with intensives: bet your life, not on your life, well I guess, and no mistake, and so on. The Irish extravagance of speech struck a responsive chord in the American heart. The American borrowed, not only occasional words, but whole phrases, and some of them have become thoroughly naturalized. Joyce, indeed, shows the Irish origin of scores of locutions that are now often mistaken for native Americanisms, for example, great shakes, dead (as an intensive), thank you kindly, to split one's sides (i. e., laughing), and the tune the old cow died of, not to mention many familiar similes and proverbs. Certain Irish pronunciations, Gaelic rather than archaic English, got into American during the nineteenth century. Among them, one recalls bhoy, which entered our political slang in the middle 40's and survived into our own time. Again, there is the very characteristic American word ballyhoo, signifying [Pg093] the harangue of a ballyhoo-man, or spieler (that is, barker) before a cheap show, or, by metaphor, any noisy speech. It is from Ballyhooly, the name of a village in Cork, once notorious for its brawls. Finally, there is shebang. Schele de Vere derives it from the French cabane, but it seems rather more likely that it is from the Irish shebeen.

The propagation of Irishisms in the United States was helped, during many years, by the enormous popularity of various dramas of Irish peasant life, particularly those of Dion Boucicault. So recently as 1910 an investigation made by the Dramatic Mirror showed that some of his pieces, notably "Kathleen Mavourneen," "The Colleen Bawn" and "The Shaugraun," were still among the favorites of popular audiences. Such plays, at one time, were presented by dozens of companies, and a number of Irish actors, among them Andrew Mack, Chauncey Olcott and Boucicault himself, made fortunes appearing in them. An influence also to be taken into account is that of Irish songs, once in great vogue. But such influences, like the larger matter of American borrowings from Anglo-Irish, remain to be investigated. So far as I have been able to discover, there is not a single article in print upon the subject. Here, as elsewhere, our philologists have wholly neglected a very interesting field of inquiry.

From other languages the borrowings during the period of growth were naturally less. Down to the last decades of the nineteenth century, the overwhelming majority of immigrants were either Germans or Irish; the Jews, Italians and Slavs were yet to come. But the first Chinese appeared in 1848, and soon their speech began to contribute its inevitable loan-words. These words, of course, were first adopted by the miners of the Pacific Coast, and a great many of them have remained California localisms, among them such verbs as to yen (to desire strongly, as a Chinaman desires opium) and to flop-flop (to lie down), and such nouns as fun, a measure of weight. But a number of others have got into the common speech of the whole country, e. g., fan-tan, kow-tow, chop-suey, ginseng, joss, yok-a-mi and tong. Contrary to the popular opinion, dope and hop are not from the Chinese. [Pg094] Neither, in fact, is an Americanism, though the former has one meaning that is specially American, i. e., that of information or formula, as in racing-dope and to dope out. Most etymologists derive the word from the Dutch doop, a sauce. In English, as in American, it signifies a thick liquid, and hence the viscous cooked opium. Hop is simply the common name of the Humuluslupulus. The belief that hops have a soporific effect is very ancient, and hop-pillows were brought to America by the first English colonists.

The derivation of poker, which came into American from California in the days of the gold rush, has puzzled etymologists. It is commonly derived from primero, the name of a somewhat similar game, popular in England in the sixteenth century, but the relation seems rather fanciful. It may possibly come, indirectly, from the Danish word pokker, signifying the devil. Pokerish, in the sense of alarming, was a common adjective in the United States before the Civil War; Thornton gives an example dated 1827. Schele de Vere says that poker, in the sense of a hobgoblin, was still in use in 1871, but he derives the name of the game from the French poche (=pouche, pocket). He seems to believe that the bank or pool, in the early days, was called the poke. Barrère and Leland, rejecting all these guesses, derive poker from the Yiddish pochger, which comes in turn from the verb pochgen, signifying to conceal winnings or losses. This pochgen is obviously related to the German pocher (=boaster, braggart). There were a good many German Jews in California in the early days, and they were ardent gamblers. If Barrère and Leland are correct, then poker enjoys the honor of being the first loan-word taken into American from the Yiddish.

§ 5

But the imprimatur of the Yankee Johnson was not potent enough to stay the course of nature, and, save in New England, the flat a swept the country. He himself allowed it in stamp and vase. His successor and rival, Lyman Cobb, decided for it in pass, draft, stamp and dance, though he kept to the ah-sound in laugh, path, daunt and saunter. By 1850 the flat a was dominant everywhere West of the Berkshires and South of New Haven, and had even got into such proper names as Lafayette and Nevada.[41]

Webster failed in a number of his other attempts to influence American pronunciation. His advocacy of deef for deaf had popular support while he lived, and he dredged up authority for it out of Chaucer and Sir William Temple, but the present pronunciation gradually prevailed, though deef remains familiar in the common speech. Joseph E. Worcester and other rival lexicographers stood against many of his pronunciations, and he took the field against them in the prefaces to the successive editions of his spelling-books. Thus, in that to "The Elementary Spelling [Pg096] Book," dated 1829, he denounced the "affectation" of inserting a y-sound before the u in such words as gradual and nature, with its compensatory change of d into a French j and of t into ch. The English lexicographer, John Walker, had argued for this "affectation" in 1791, but Webster's prestige, while he lived, remained so high in some quarters that he carried the day, and the older professors at Yale, it is said, continued to use natur down to 1839.[42] He favored the pronunciation of either and neither as ee-ther and nee-ther, and so did most of the English authorities of his time. The original pronunciation of the first syllable, in England, probably made it rhyme with bay, but the ee-sound was firmly established by the end of the eighteenth century. Toward the middle of the following century, however, there arose a fashion of an ai-sound, and this affectation was borrowed by certain Americans. Gould, in the 50's, put the question, "Why do you say i-ther and ni-ther?" to various Americans. The reply he got was: "The words are so pronounced by the best-educated people in England." This imitation still prevails in the cities of the East. "All of us," says Lounsbury, "are privileged in these latter days frequently to witness painful struggles put forth to give to the first syllable of these words the sound of i by those who have been brought up to give it the sound of e. There is apparently an impression on the part of some that such a pronunciation establishes on a firm foundation an otherwise doubtful social standing."[43] But the vast majority of Americans continue to say ee-ther and not eye-ther. White and Vizetelly, like Lounsbury, argue that they are quite correct in so doing. The use of eye-ther, says White, is no more than "a copy of a second-rate British affectation."

IV
American and English Today

§ 1

[Pg102]

§ 2

An Englishman, entering his home, does not walk in upon the [Pg103] first floor, but upon the ground floor. What he calls the first floor (or, more commonly, first storey, not forgetting the penultimate e!) is what we call the second floor, and so on up to the roof—which is covered not with tin, but with slate, tiles or leads. He does not take a paper; he takes in a paper. He does not ask his servant, "is there any mail for me?" but, "are there any letters for me?" for mail, in the American sense, is a word that he seldom uses, save in such compounds as mail-van and mail-train. He always speaks of it as the post. The man who brings it is not a letter-carrier, but a postman. It is posted, not mailed, at a pillar-box, not at a mail-box. It never includes postal-cards, but only post-cards; never money-orders, but only postal-orders. The Englishman dictates his answers, not to a typewriter, but to a typist; a typewriter is merely the machine. If he desires the recipient to call him by telephone he doesn't say, "phone me at a quarter of eight," but "ring me up at a quarter to eight." And when the call comes he says "are you there?" When he gets home, he doesn't find his wife waiting for him in the parlor or living-room,[4] but in the drawing-room or in her sitting-room, and the tale of domestic disaster that she has to tell does not concern the hired-girl but the slavey and the scullery-maid. He doesn't bring her a box of candy, but a box of sweets. He doesn't leave a derby hat in the hall, but a bowler. His wife doesn't wear shirtwaists but blouses. When she buys one she doesn't say "charge it" but "put it down." When she orders a tailor-made suit, she calls it a coat-and-skirt. When she wants a spool of thread she asks for a reel of cotton. Such things are bought, not in the department-stores, but at the stores, which are substantially the same thing. In these stores calico means a plain cotton cloth; in the United States it means a printed cotton cloth. Things bought on the instalment plan in England are said to be bought on the hire-purchase plan or system; the instalment business itself is the credit-trade. Goods ordered by post (not mail) on which the dealer pays the cost of transportation are said to be sent, not postpaid or prepaid, but post-free or carriage-paid. [Pg104]

An Englishman does not wear suspenders and neckties, but braces and cravats. Suspenders are his wife's garters; his own are sock-suspenders. The family does not seek sustenance in a rare tenderloin and squash, but in underdone under-cut and vegetable marrow. It does not eat beets, but beet-roots. The wine on the table, if miraculously German, is not Rhine wine, but Hock.... The maid who laces the stays of the mistress of the house is not Maggie but Robinson. The nurse-maid is not Lizzie but Nurse. So, by the way, is a trained nurse in a hospital, whose full style is not Miss Jones, but Nurse Jones. And the hospital itself, if private, is not a hospital at all, but a nursing-home, and its trained nurses are plain nurses, or hospital nurses, or maybe nursing sisters. And the white-clad young gentlemen who make love to them are not studying medicine but walking the hospitals. Similarly, an English law student does not study law, but the law.

If an English boy goes to a public school, it is not a sign that he is getting his education free, but that his father is paying a good round sum for it and is accepted as a gentleman. A public school over there corresponds to our prep school; it is a place maintained chiefly by endowments, wherein boys of the upper classes are prepared for the universities. What we know as a public school is called a board school in England, not because the pupils are boarded but because it is managed by a school board. English school-boys are divided, not into classes, or grades, but into forms, which are numbered, the lowest being the first form. The benches they sit on are also called forms. The principal of an English school is a head-master or head-mistress; the lower pedagogues used to be ushers, but are now assistant masters (or mistresses). The head of a university is a chancellor. He is always some eminent public man, and a vice-chancellor performs his duties. The head of a mere college may be a president, principal, rector, dean or provost. At the universities the students are not divided into freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, as with us, but are simply first-year men, second-year men, and so on. Such distinctions, however, are not as important in England as in America; members of the university (they are called [Pg105] members, not students) do not flock together according to seniority. An English university man does not study; he reads. He knows nothing of frats, class-days, senior-proms and such things; save at Cambridge and Dublin he does not even have a commencement. On the other hand his daily speech is full of terms unintelligible to an American student, for example, wrangler, tripos, head, pass-degree and don.

The upkeep of board-schools in England comes out of the rates, which are local taxes levied upon householders. For that reason an English municipal taxpayer is called a ratepayer. The functionaries who collect and spend his money are not office-holders but public-servants. The head of the local police is not a chief of police, but a chief constable. The fire department is the fire brigade. The street-cleaner is a crossing-sweeper. The parish poorhouse is a workhouse. If it is maintained by two or more parishes jointly it becomes a union. A pauper who accepts its hospitality is said to be on the rates. A policeman is a bobby familiarly and constable officially. He is commonly mentioned in the newspapers, not by his surname, but as P. C. 643a—i. e., Police Constable No. 643a. The fire laddie, the ward executive, the roundsman, the strong-arm squad and other such objects of American devotion are unknown in England. An English saloon-keeper is officially a licensed victualler. His saloon is a public house, or, colloquially, a pub. He does not sell beer by the bucket or can or growler or schooner, but by the pint. He and his brethren, taken together, are the licensed trade. His back-room is a parlor. If he has a few upholstered benches in his place he usually calls it a lounge. He employs no bartenders or mixologists. Barmaids do the work, with maybe a barman to help.

The American language, as we have seen, has begun to take in the English boot and shop, and it is showing hospitality to head-master, haberdasher and week-end, but subaltern, civil servant, porridge, moor, draper, treacle, tram and mufti are still strangers in the United States, as bleachers, picayune, air-line, campus, chore, scoot, stogie and hoodoo are in England. A subaltern is a commissioned officer in the army, under the rank of [Pg106] captain. A civil servant is a public servant in the national civil service; if he is of high rank, he is usually called a permanent official. Porridge, moor, scullery, draper, treacle and tram, though unfamiliar, still need no explanation. Mufti means ordinary male clothing; an army officer out of uniform is said to be in mufti. To this officer a sack-suit or business-suit is a lounge-suit. He carries his clothes, not in a trunk or grip or suit-case, but in a box. He does not miss a train; he loses it. He does not ask for a round-trip ticket, but for a return ticket. If he proposes to go to the theatre he does not reserve or engage seats; he books them, and not at the box-office, but at the booking-office. If he sits downstairs, it is not in the orchestra, but in the stalls. If he likes vaudeville, he goes to a music-hall, where the head-liners are top-liners. If he has to stand in line, he does it, not in a line, but in a queue.

In England a corporation is a public company or limited liability company. The term corporation, over there, is applied to the mayor, aldermen and sheriffs of a city, as in the London corporation. An Englishman writes Ltd. after the name of an incorporated bank or trading company as we write Inc. He calls its president its chairman or managing director. Its stockholders are its shareholders, and hold shares instead of stock in it. Its bonds are debentures. The place wherein such companies are floated and looted—the Wall Street of England—is called the City, with a capital C. Bankers, stock-jobbers, promoters, directors and other such leaders of its business are called City men. The financial editor of a newspaper is its City editor. Government bonds are consols, or stocks, or the funds.[5] To have money in the stocks is to own such bonds. Promissory notes are bills. An Englishman hasn't a bank-account, but a banking-account. He draws cheques (not checks), not on his bank, but on his bankers.[6] In England there is a rigid distinction between a broker and a stock-broker. A broker means, not a dealer in [Pg107] securities, as in our Wall Street broker, but a dealer in second-hand furniture. To have the brokers[7] in the house means to be bankrupt, with one's very household goods in the hands of one's creditors.

Tariff reform, in England, does not mean a movement toward free trade, but one toward protection. The word Government, meaning what we call the administration, is always capitalized and plural, e. g., "The Government are considering the advisability, etc." Vestry, committee, council, ministry and even company are also plural, though sometimes not capitalized. A member of Parliament does not run for office; he stands.[8] He does not make a campaign, but a canvass. He does not represent a district, but a division or constituency. He never makes a stumping trip, but always a speaking tour. When he looks after his fences he calls it nursing the constituency. At a political meeting (they are often rough in England) the bouncers are called stewards; the suffragettes used to delight in stabbing them with hatpins. A member of Parliament is not afflicted by the numerous bugaboos that menace an American congressman. He knows nothing of lame ducks, pork barrels, gag-rule, junkets, gerrymanders, omnibus bills, snakes, niggers in the woodpile, Salt river, crow, bosses, ward heelers, men higher up, silk-stockings, repeaters, ballot-box stuffers and straight and split tickets (he always calls them ballots or voting papers). He has never heard of direct primaries, the recall or the initiative and referendum. A roll-call in Parliament is a division. A member speaking is said to be up or on his legs. When the house adjourns it is said to rise. A member referring to another in the course of a debate does not say "the gentleman from Manchester," but "the honorable gentleman" (written hon. gentleman) or, if he happens to be a privy councillor, "the right honorable gentleman," or, if he is a member for one of the universities, "the honorable and learned gentleman." If the speaker chooses to be intimate or facetious, he may say "my honorable friend." [Pg108]

In the United States a pressman is a man who runs a printing press; in England he is a newspaper reporter, or, as the English usually say, a journalist.[9] This journalist works, not at space rates, but at lineage rates. A printing press is a machine. An editorial in a newspaper is a leading article or leader. An editorial paragraph is a leaderette. A newspaper clipping is a cutting. A proof-reader is a corrector of the press. A pass to the theatre is an order. The room-clerk of a hotel is the secretary. A real-estate agent or dealer is an estate-agent. The English keep up most of the old distinctions between physicians and surgeons, barristers and solicitors. A surgeon is often plain Mr., and not Dr. Neither he nor a doctor has an office, but always a surgery or consulting room. A barrister is greatly superior to a solicitor. He alone can address the higher courts and the parliamentary committees; a solicitor must keep to office work and the courts of first instance. A man with a grievance goes first to his solicitor, who then instructs or briefs a barrister for him. If that barrister, in the course of the trial, wants certain evidence removed from the record, he moves that it be struck out, not stricken out, as an American lawyer would say. Only barristers may become judges. An English barrister, like his American brother, takes a retainer when he is engaged. But the rest of his fee does not wait upon the termination of the case: he expects and receives a refresher from time to time. A barrister is never admitted to the bar, but is always called. If he becomes a King's Counsel, or K. C. (a purely honorary appointment), he is said to have taken silk.

The common objects and phenomena of nature are often differently named in English and American. As we saw in a previous chapter, such Americanisms as creek and run, for small streams, are practically unknown in England, and the English moor and downs early disappeared from American. The Englishman knows the meaning of sound (e. g., Long Island Sound), but he [Pg109] nearly always uses channel in place of it. In the same way the American knows the meaning of the English bog, but rejects the English distinction between it and swamp, and almost always uses swamp, or marsh (often elided to ma'sh). The Englishman seldom, if ever, describes a severe storm as a hurricane, a cyclone, a tornado or a blizzard. He never uses cold-snap, cloudburst or under the weather. He does not say that the temperature is 29 degrees (Fahrenheit) or that the thermometer or the mercury is at 29 degrees, but that there are three degrees of frost. He calls ice water iced-water. He knows nothing of blue-grass country or of pennyr'yal. What we call the mining regions he knows as the black country. He never, of course, uses down-East or up-State. Many of our names for common fauna and flora are unknown to him save as strange Americanisms, e. g., terrapin, moose, persimmon, gumbo, egg-plant, alfalfa, sweet-corn, sweet-potato and yam. Until lately he called the grapefruit a shaddock. He still calls the beet a beet-root and the rutabaga a mangel-wurzel. He is familiar with many fish that we seldom see, e. g., the turbot. He also knows the hare, which is seldom heard of in America. But he knows nothing of devilled-crabs, crab-cocktails, clam-chowder or oyster-stews, and he never goes to oyster-suppers, clam-bakes or burgoo-picnics. He doesn't buy peanuts when he goes to the circus. He calls them monkey-nuts, and to eat them publicly is infra dig. The common American use of peanut as an adjective of disparagement, as in peanut politics, is incomprehensible to him.

In England a hack is not a public coach, but a horse let out at hire, or one of similar quality. A life insurance policy is usually not an insurance policy at all, but an assurance policy. What we call the normal income tax is the ordinary tax; what we call the surtax is the supertax.[10] An Englishman never lives on a street, but always in it. He never lives in a block of houses, but in a row; it is never in a section of the city, but always in a district. Going home by train he always takes the down-train, no matter whether he be proceeding southward to Wimbleton, [Pg110] westward to Shepherd's Bush, northward to Tottenham or eastward to Noak's Hill. A train headed toward London is always an up-train, and the track it runs on is the up-line. Eastbound and westbound tracks and trains are unknown in England. When an Englishman boards a bus it is not at a street-corner, but at a crossing, though he is familiar with such forms as Hyde Park Corner. The place he is bound for is not three squares or blocks away, but three turnings. Square, in England, always means a small park. A backyard is a garden. A subway is always a tube, or the underground, or the Metro. But an underground passage for pedestrians is a subway. English streets have no sidewalks; they always call them pavements or footways. An automobile is always a motor-car or motor. Auto is almost unknown, and with it the verb to auto. So is machine. So is joy-ride.

An Englishman always calls russet, yellow or tan shoes brown shoes (or, if they cover the ankle, boots). He calls a pocketbook a purse, and gives the name of pocketbook to what we call a memorandum-book. His walking-stick is always a stick, never a cane. By cord he means something strong, almost what we call twine; a thin cord he always calls a string; his twine is the lightest sort of string. When he applies the adjective homely to a woman he means that she is simple and home-loving, not necessarily that she is plain. He uses dessert, not to indicate the whole last course at dinner, but to designate the fruit only; the rest is ices or sweets. He uses vest, not in place of waistcoat, but in place of undershirt. Similarly, he applies pants, not to his trousers, but to his drawers. An Englishman who inhabits bachelor quarters is said to live in chambers; if he has a flat he calls it a flat, and not an apartment;[11] flat-houses are often mansions. The janitor or superintendent thereof is a care-taker. The scoundrels who snoop around in search of divorce evidence are not private detectives, but private enquiry agents. [Pg111]

The Englishman is naturally unfamiliar with baseball, and in consequence his language is bare of the countless phrases and metaphors that it has supplied to American. Many of these phrases and metaphors are in daily use among us, for example, fan, rooter, bleachers, batting-average, double-header, pennant-winner, gate-money, busher, minor-leaguer, glass-arm, to strike out, to foul, to be shut out, to coach, to play ball, on the bench, on to his curves and three strikes and out. The national game of draw-poker has also greatly enriched American with terms that are either quite unknown to the Englishman, or known to him only as somewhat dubious Americanisms, among them cold-deck, kitty, full-house, divvy, a card up his sleeve, three-of-a-kind, to ante up, to pony up, to hold out, to cash in, to go it one better, to chip in and for keeps. But the Englishman uses many more racing terms and metaphors than we do, and he has got a good many phrases from other games, particularly cricket. The word cricket itself has a definite figurative meaning. It indicates, in general, good sportsmanship. To take unfair advantage of an opponent is not cricket. The sport of boating, so popular on the Thames, has also given colloquial English some familiar terms, almost unknown in the United States, e. g., punt and weir. Contrariwise, pungy, batteau and scow are unheard of in England, and canoe is not long emerged from the estate of an Americanism.[12] The game known as ten-pins in America is called nine-pins in England, and once had that name over here. The Puritans forbade it, and its devotees changed its name in order to evade the prohibition.[13] Finally, there is soccer, a form of football quite unknown in the United States. What we call simply football is Rugby or Rugger to the Englishman. The word soccer is derived from association; the rules of the game were [Pg112] established by the London Football Association. Soccer is one of the relatively few English experiments in ellipsis. Another is to be found in Bakerloo, the name of one of the London underground lines, from Baker-street and Waterloo, its termini.

The English have an ecclesiastical vocabulary with which we are almost unacquainted, and it is in daily use, for the church bulks large in public affairs over there. Such terms as vicar, canon, verger, prebendary, primate, curate, non-conformist, dissenter, convocation, minster, chapter, crypt, living, presentation, glebe, benefice, locum tenens, suffragan, almoner, dean and pluralist are to be met with in the English newspapers constantly, but on this side of the water they are seldom encountered. Nor do we hear much of matins, lauds, lay-readers, ritualism and the liturgy. The English use of holy orders is also strange to us. They do not say that a young man is studying for the ministry, but that he is reading for holy orders. They do not say that he is ordained, but that he takes orders. Save he be in the United Free Church of Scotland, he is never a minister; save he be a nonconformist, he is never a pastor; a clergyman of the Establishment is always either a rector, a vicar or a curate, and colloquially a parson.

In American chapel simply means a small church, usually the branch of some larger one; in English it has the special sense of a place of worship unconnected with the establishment. Though three-fourths of the people of Ireland are Catholics (in Munster and Connaught, more than nine-tenths), and the Protestant Church of Ireland has been disestablished since 1871, a Catholic place of worship in the country is still a chapel and not a church.[14] So is a Methodist wailing-place in England, however large it may be, though now and then tabernacle is substituted. In the same way the English Catholics sometimes vary chapel with oratory, as in Brompton Oratory. A Methodist, in Great [Pg113] Britain, is not a Methodist, but a Wesleyan. Contrariwise, what the English call simply a churchman is an Episcopalian in the United States, what they call the Church (always capitalized!) is the Protestant Episcopal Church,[15] what they call a Roman Catholic is simply a Catholic, and what they call a Jew is usually softened (if he happens to be an advertiser) to a Hebrew. The English Jews have no such idiotic fear of the plain name as that which afflicts the more pushing and obnoxious of the race in America.[16] "News of Jewry" is a common head-line in the London Daily Telegraph, which is owned by Lord Burnham, a Jew, and has had many Jews on its staff, including Judah P. Benjamin, the American. The American language, of course, knows nothing of dissenters. Nor of such gladiators of dissent as the Plymouth Brethren, nor of the nonconformist conscience, though the United States suffers from it even more damnably than England. The English, to make it even, get on without circuit-riders, holy-rollers, Dunkards, Seventh Day Adventists and other such American ferae naturae, and are born, live, die and go to heaven without the aid of either the uplift or the chautauqua.

In music the English cling to an archaic and unintelligible nomenclature, long since abandoned in America. Thus they call a double whole note a breve, a whole note a semibreve, a half note a minim, a quarter note a crotchet, an eighth note a quaver, a sixteenth note a semi-quaver, a thirty-second note a demisemiquaver, and a sixty-fourth note a hemidemisemiquaver, or semidemisemiquaver. If, by any chance, an English musician should write a one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth note he probably wouldn't know what to call it. This clumsy terminology goes back to the days of plain chant, with its longa, brevis, semi-brevis, minima and semiminima. The French and Italians cling to a system almost as confusing, but the Germans use ganze, halbe, viertel, [Pg114] achtel, etc. I have been unable to discover the beginnings of the American system, but it would seem to be borrowed from the German. Since the earliest times the majority of music teachers in the United States have been Germans, and most of the rest have had German training.

In the same way the English hold fast to a clumsy and inaccurate method of designating the sizes of printers' types. In America the simple point system makes the business easy; a line of 14-point type occupies exactly the vertical space of two lines of 7-point. But the English still indicate differences in size by such arbitrary and confusing names as brilliant, diamond, small pearl, pearl, ruby, ruby-nonpareil, nonpareil, minion-nonpareil, emerald, minion, brevier, bourgeois, long primer, small pica, pica, English, great primer and double pica. They also cling to a fossil system of numerals in stating ages. Thus, an Englishman will say that he is seven-and-forty, not that he is forty-seven. This is probably a direct survival, preserved by more than a thousand years of English conservatism, of the Anglo-Saxon seofan-and-feowertig. He will also say that he weighs eleven stone instead of 154 pounds. A stone is 14 pounds, and it is always used in stating the heft of a man. Finally, he employs such designations of time as fortnight and twelvemonth a great deal more than we do, and has certain special terms of which we know nothing, for example, quarter-day, bank holiday, long vacation, Lady Day and Michaelmas. Per contra, he knows nothing whatever of our Thanksgiving, Arbor, Labor and Decoration Days, or of legal holidays, or of Yom Kippur.

In English usage, to proceed, the word directly is always used to signify immediately; in American a contingency gets into it, and it may mean no more than soon. In England quite means "completely, wholly, entirely, altogether, to the utmost extent, nothing short of, in the fullest sense, positively, absolutely"; in America it is conditional, and means only nearly, approximately, substantially, as in "he sings quite well." An Englishman does not say "I will pay you up" for an injury, but "I will pay you back." He doesn't look up a definition in a dictionary; he looks it out. He doesn't say, being ill, "I am getting on well," but [Pg115] "I am going on well." He doesn't use the American "different from" or "different than"; he uses "different to." He never adds the pronoun in such locutions as "it hurts me," but says simply "it hurts." He never "catches up with you" on the street; he "catches you up." He never says "are you through?" but "have you finished?" He never uses to notify as a transitive verb; an official act may be notified, but not a person. He never uses gotten as the perfect participle of get; he always uses plain got.[17] An English servant never washes the dishes; she always washes the dinner or tea things. She doesn't live out, but goes into service. She smashes, not the mirror, but the looking-glass. Her beau is not her fellow, but her young man. She does not keep company with him but walks out with him.

That an Englishman always calls out "I say!", and not simply "say!" when he desires to attract a friend's attention or register a protestation of incredulity—this perhaps is too familiar to need notice. His "hear, hear!" and "oh, oh!" are also well known. He is much less prodigal with good-bye than the American; he uses good-day and good-afternoon far more often. A shop-assistant would never say good-bye to a customer. To an Englishman it would have a subtly offensive smack; good-afternoon would be more respectful. Another word that makes him flinch is dirt. He never uses it, as we do, to describe the soil in the garden; he always says earth. Various very common American phrases are quite unknown to him, for example, over his signature, on time and planted to corn. The first-named he never uses, and he has no equivalent for it; an Englishman who issues a signed statement simply makes it in writing. He knows nothing of our common terms of disparagement, such as kike, wop, yap and rube. His pet-name for a tiller of the soil is not Rube or Cy, but Hodge. When he goes gunning he does not call it hunting, but shooting; hunting is reserved for the chase of the fox.

An intelligent Englishwoman, coming to America to live, told me that the two things which most impeded her first communications with untravelled Americans, even above the gross differences [Pg116] between England and American pronunciation and intonation, were the complete absence of the general utility adjective jolly from the American vocabulary, and the puzzling omnipresence and versatility of the American verb to fix. In English colloquial usage jolly means almost anything; it intensifies all other adjectives, even including miserable and homesick. An Englishman is jolly tired, jolly hungry or jolly well tired; his wife is jolly sensible; his dog is jolly keen; the prices he pays for things are jolly dear (never steep or stiff or high: all Americanisms). But he has no noun to match the American proposition, meaning proposal, business, affair, case, consideration, plan, theory, solution and what not: only the German zug can be ranged beside it.[18] And he has no verb in such wide practise as to fix. In his speech it means only to make fast or to determine. In American it may mean to repair, as in "the plumber fixed the pipe"; to dress, as in "Mary fixed her hair"; to prepare, as in "the cook is fixing the gravy"; to bribe, as in "the judge was fixed"; to settle, as in "the quarrel was fixed up"; to heal, as in "the doctor fixed his boil"; to finish, as in "Murphy fixed Sweeney in the third round"; to be well-to-do, as in "John is well-fixed"; to arrange, as in "I fixed up the quarrel"; to be drunk, as in "the whiskey fixed him"; to punish, as in "I'll fix him"; and to correct, as in "he fixed my bad Latin." Moreover, it is used in all its English senses. An Englishman never goes to a dentist to have his teeth fixed. He does not fix the fire; he makes it up, or mends it. He is never well-fixed, either in money or by liquor.[19]

The English use quite a great deal more than we do, and, as we have seen, in a different sense. Quite rich, in American, [Pg117] means tolerably rich, richer than most; quite so, in English, is identical in meaning with exactly so. In American just is almost equivalent to the English quite, as in just lovely. Thornton shows that this use of just goes back to 1794. The word is also used in place of exactly in other ways, as in just in time, just how many and just what do you mean?

§ 3

Nor Professor. In all save a few large cities of America every male pedagogue is a professor, and so is every band leader, dancing master and medical consultant. But in England the title is very rigidly restricted to men who hold chairs in the universities, a necessarily small body. Even here a superior title [Pg118] always takes precedence. Thus, it used to be Professor Almroth Wright, but now it is always Sir Almroth Wright. Huxley was always called Professor Huxley until he was appointed to the Privy Council. This appointment gave him the right to have Right Honourable put before his name, and thereafter it was customary to call him simply Mr. Huxley, with the Right Honourable, so to speak, floating in the air. The combination, to an Englishman, was more flattering than Professor, for the English always esteem political dignities far more than the dignities of learning. This explains, perhaps, why their universities distribute so few honorary degrees. In the United States every respectable Protestant clergyman is a D.D., and it is almost impossible for a man to get into the papers without becoming an LL.D.,[21] but in England such honors are granted only grudgingly. So with military titles. To promote a war veteran from sergeant to colonel by acclamation, as is often done in the United States, is unknown over there. The English have nothing equivalent to the gaudy tin soldiers of our governors' staffs, nor to the bespangled colonels and generals of the Knights Templar and Patriarchs Militant, nor to the nondescript captains and majors of our country towns. An English railroad conductor (railway guard) is never Captain, as he always is in the United States. Nor are military titles used by the police. Nor is it the custom to make every newspaper editor a colonel, as is done south of the Potomac. Nor is an attorney-general or postmaster-general called General. Nor are the glories of public office, after they have officially come to an end, embalmed in such clumsy quasi-titles as ex-United States Senator, ex-Judge of the Circuit Court of Appeals, ex-Federal Trade Commissioner and former Chief of the Fire Department.

But perhaps the greatest difference between English and American usage is presented by the Honorable. In the United States the title is applied loosely to all public officials of apparent respectability, from senators and ambassadors to the mayors of [Pg119] fifth-rate cities and the members of state legislatures, and with some show of official sanction to many of them, especially congressmen. But it is questionable whether this application has any actual legal standing, save perhaps in the case of certain judges. Even the President of the United States, by law, is not the Honorable, but simply the President. In the First Congress the matter of his title was exhaustively debated; some members wanted to call him the Honorable and others proposed His Excellency and even His Highness. But the two Houses finally decided that it was "not proper to annex any style or title other than that expressed by the Constitution." Congressmen themselves are not Honorables. True enough, the Congressional Record, in printing a set speech, calls it "Speech of Hon. John Jones" (without the the before the Hon.—a characteristic Americanism), but in reporting the ordinary remarks of a member it always calls him plain Mr. Nevertheless, a country congressman would be offended if his partisans, in announcing his appearance on the stump, did not prefix Hon. to his name. So would a state senator. So would a mayor or governor. I have seen the sergeant-at-arms of the United States Senate referred to as Hon. in the records of that body.[22] More, the prefix is actually usurped by the Superintendent of State Prisons of New York.[23]

In England the thing is more carefully ordered, and bogus Hons. are unknown. The prefix is applied to both sexes and belongs by law, inter alia, to all present or past maids of honor, to all justices of the High Court during their terms of office, to the Scotch Lords of Session, to the sons and daughters of viscounts and barons, to the younger sons and all daughters of earls, and to the members of the legislative and executive councils of the colonies. But not to members of Parliament, though each is, in debate, an hon. gentleman. Even a member of the cabinet is not an Hon., though he is a Right Hon. by virtue of membership in the Privy Council, of which the Cabinet is legally merely a committee. This last honorific belongs, not only to [Pg120] privy councillors, but also to all peers lower than marquesses (those above are Most Hon.), to Lord Mayors during their terms of office, to the Lord Advocate and to the Lord Provosts of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Moreover, a peeress whose husband is a Right Hon. is a Right Hon. herself.

The British colonies follow the jealous usage of the mother-country. Even in Canada the lawless American example is not imitated. I have before me a "Table of Titles to be Used in Canada," laid down by royal warrant, which lists those who are Hons. and those who are not Hons. in the utmost detail. Only privy councillors of Canada (not to be confused with imperial privy councillors) are permitted to retain the prefix after going out of office, though ancients who were legislative councillors at the time of the union, July 1, 1867, may still use it by a sort of courtesy, and former speakers of the Dominion Senate and House of Commons and various retired judges may do so on application to the King, countersigned by the governor-general. The following are lawfully the Hon., but only during their tenure of office: the solicitor-general, the speaker of the House of Commons, the presidents and speakers of the provincial legislatures, members of the executive councils of the provinces, the chief justice, the judges of the Supreme and Exchequer Courts, the judges of the Supreme Courts of Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan and Alberta, the judges of the Courts of Appeal of Manitoba and British Columbia, the Chancery Court of Prince Edward Island, and the Circuit Court of Montreal—these, and no more. A lieutenant-governor of a province is not the Hon., but His Honor. The governor-general is His Excellency, and so is his wife, but in practise they usually have superior honorifics, and do not forget to demand their use.

But though an Englishman, and, following him, a colonial, is thus very careful to restrict the Hon. to proper uses, he always insists, when he serves without pay as an officer of any organization, to indicate his volunteer character by writing Hon. before the name of his office. If he leaves it off it is a sign that he is a hireling. Thus, the agent of the New Zealand [Pg121] government in London, a paid officer, is simply the agent, but the agents at Brisbane and Adelaide, in Australia, who serve for the glory of it, are hon. agents. In writing to a Briton one must be careful to put Esq., behind his name, and not Mr., before it. The English make a clear distinction between the two forms. Mr., on an envelope, indicates that the sender holds the receiver to be his inferior; one writes to Mr. John Jackson, one's green-grocer, but to James Thompson, Esq., one's neighbor. Any man who is entitled to the Esq. is a gentleman, by which an Englishman means a man of sound connections and dignified occupation—in brief, of ponderable social position. Thus a dentist, a shop-keeper or a clerk can never be a gentleman in England, even by courtesy, and the qualifications of an author, a musical conductor, a physician, or even a member of Parliament have to be established. But though he is thus enormously watchful of masculine dignity, an Englishman is quite careless in the use of lady. He speaks glibly of lady-clerks, lady-typists, lady-doctors and lady-inspectors. In America there is a strong disposition to use the word less and less, as is revealed by the substitution of saleswoman and salesgirl for the saleslady of yesteryear. But in England lady is still invariably used instead of woman in such compounds as lady-golfer, lady-secretary and lady-champion. The women's singles, in England tennis, are always ladies' singles; women's wear, in English shops, is always ladies' wear. Perhaps the cause of this distinction between lady and gentleman has been explained by Price Collier in "England and the English." In England, according to Collier, the male is always first. His comfort goes before his wife's comfort, and maybe his dignity also. Gentleman-clerk or gentleman-author would make an Englishman howl, though he uses gentleman-rider. So would the growing American custom of designating the successive heirs of a private family by the numerals proper to royalty. John Smith 3rd and William Simpson IV are gravely received at Harvard; at Oxford they would be ragged unmercifully.

An Englishman, in speaking or writing of public officials, avoids those long and clumsy combinations of title and name [Pg122] which figure so copiously in American newspapers. Such locutions as Assistant Secretary of the Interior Jones, Fourth Assistant Postmaster-General Brown, Inspector of Boilers Smith, Judge of the Appeal Tax Court Robinson, Chief Clerk of the Treasury Williams and Collaborating Epidermologist White[24] are quite unknown to him. When he mentions a high official, such as the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, he does not think it necessary to add the man's name; he simply says "the Secretary for Foreign Affairs" or "the Foreign Secretary." And so with the Lord Chancellor, the Chief Justice, the Prime Minister, the Bishop of Carlisle, the Chief Rabbi, the First Lord (of the Admiralty), the Master of Pembroke (College), the Italian Ambassador, and so on. Certain ecclesiastical titles are sometimes coupled to surnames in the American manner, as in Dean Stanley, and Canon Wilberforce, but Prime Minister Lloyd-George would seem heavy and absurd. But in other directions the Englishman has certain clumsinesses of his own. Thus, in writing a letter to a relative stranger, he sometimes begins it, not My dear Mr. Jones but My dear John Joseph Jones. He may even use such a form as My dear Secretary for War in place of the American My dear Mr. Secretary. In English usage, incidentally, My dear is more formal than simply Dear. In America, of course, this distinction is lost, and such forms as My dear John Joseph Jones appear only as conscious imitations of English usage.

I have spoken of the American custom of dropping the definite article before Hon. It extends to Rev. and the like, and has the authority of very respectable usage behind it. The opening sentence of the Congressional Record is always: "The Chaplain, Rev.————, D.D., offered the following prayer." When chaplains for the army or navy are confirmed by the Senate they always appear in the Record as Revs., never as the Revs. I also find the honorific without the article in the New International Encyclopaedia, in the World Almanac, and in a widely-popular [Pg123] American grammar-book.[25] So long ago as 1867, Gould protested against this elision as barbarous and idiotic, and drew up the following reductio ad absurdum:

Richard Grant White, a year or two later, joined the attack in the New York Galaxy, and William Cullen Bryant included the omission of the article in his Index Expurgatorius, but these anathemas were as ineffective as Gould's irony. The more careful American journals, of course, incline to the the, and I note that it is specifically ordained on the Style-sheet of the Century Magazine, but the overwhelming majority of American newspapers get along without it, and I have often noticed its omission on the sign-boards at church entrances.[27] In England it is never omitted. [Pg124]

§ 4

When we come to words, that, either intrinsically or by usage, are improper, a great many curious differences between English and American reveal themselves. The Englishman, on the whole, is more plain-spoken than the American, and such terms as bitch, mare and in foal do not commonly daunt him, largely, perhaps, because of his greater familiarity with country life; but he has a formidable index of his own, and it includes such essentially harmless words as sick, stomach, bum and bug. The English use of ill for sick I have already noticed, and the reasons for the English avoidance of bum. Sick, over there, means nauseated, and when an Englishman says that he was sick he means that he vomited, or, as an American would say, was sick at the stomach. The older (and still American) usage, however, survives in various compounds. Sick-list, for example, is official in the Navy,[31] and sick-leave is known in the Army, though it is more common to say of a soldier that he is invalided home. Sick-room and sick-bed are also in common use, and sick-flag is used in place of the American quarantine-flag. But an Englishman hesitates to mention his stomach in the presence of ladies, though he discourses freely about his liver. To avoid the necessity he employs such euphemisms as Little Mary. As for bug, he restricts its use very rigidly to the Cimex lectularius, or common bed-bug, and hence the word has a highly impolite connotation. All other crawling things he calls insects. An American of my acquaintance once greatly offended an English friend by using bug for insect. The two were playing billiards one summer evening in the Englishman's house, and various flying things came through the window and alighted on the cloth. The American, essaying a shot, remarked that he had killed a bug with his cue. To the Englishman this seemed a slanderous reflection upon the cleanliness of his house.[32] [Pg126]

The Victorian era saw a great growth of absurd euphemisms in England, including second wing for the leg of a fowl, but it was in America that the thing was carried farthest. Bartlett hints that rooster came into use in place of cock as a matter of delicacy, the latter word having acquired an indecent significance, and tells us that, at one time, even bull was banned as too vulgar for refined ears. In place of it the early purists used cow-creature, male-cow and even gentleman-cow.[33] Bitch, ram, buck and sow went the same way, and there was a day when even mare was prohibited. Bache tells us that pismire was also banned, antmire being substituted for it. In 1847 the word chair was actually barred out and seat was adopted in its place.[34] These were the palmy days of euphemism. The delicate female was guarded from all knowledge, and even from all suspicion, of evil. "To utter aloud in her presence the word shirt," says one historian, "was an open insult."[35] Mrs. Trollope, writing in 1832, tells of "a young German gentleman of perfectly good manners" who "offended one of the principal families ... by having pronounced the word corset before the ladies of it."[36] The word woman, in those sensitive days, became a term of reproach, comparable to the German mensch; the uncouth female took its place.[37] In the same way the legs of the fair became limbs and their breasts bosoms, and lady was substituted for wife. Stomach, under the ban in England, was transformed, by some unfathomable magic, into a euphemism denoting the whole region from the nipples to the pelvic arch. It was during [Pg127] this time that the newspapers invented such locutions as interesting (or delicate) condition, criminal operation, house of ill (or questionable) repute, disorderly-house, sporting-house, statutory offense, fallen woman and criminal assault. Servant girls ceased to be seduced, and began to be betrayed. Various French terms, enceinte and accouchement among them, were imported to conceal the fact that lawful wives occasionally became pregnant and had lyings-in.

White, between 1867 and 1870, launched various attacks upon these ludicrous gossamers of speech, and particularly upon enceinte, limb and female, but only female succumbed. The passage of the notorious Comstock Postal Act, in 1873, greatly stimulated the search for euphemisms. Once that act was upon the statute-books and Comstock himself was given the amazingly inquisitorial powers of a post-office inspector, it became positively dangerous to print certain ancient and essentially decent English words. To this day the effects of that old reign of terror are still visible. We yet use toilet and public comfort station in place of better terms,[38] and such idiotic forms as red-light district, disorderly-house, blood-poison, social-evil, social disease and white slave ostensibly conceal what every flapper is talking about. The word cadet, having a foreign smack and an innocent native meaning, is preferred to the more accurate procurer; even prostitutes shrink from the forthright pimp, and employ a characteristic American abbreviation, P. I.—a curious brother to S. O. B. and 2 o'clock. Nevertheless, a movement toward honesty is getting on its legs. The vice crusaders, if they have accomplished nothing else, have at least forced the newspapers to use the honest terms, syphilis, prostitute, brothel and venereal disease, albeit somewhat gingerly. It is, perhaps, significant of the change going on that the New York Evening Post [Pg128] recently authorized its reporters to use street-walker.[39] But in certain quarters the change is viewed with alarm, and curious traces of the old prudery still survive. The Department of Health of New York City, in April, 1914, announced that its efforts to diminish venereal disease were much handicapped because "in most newspaper offices the words syphilis and gonorrhea are still tabooed, and without the use of these terms it is almost impossible to correctly state the problem." The Army Medical Corps, in the early part of 1918, encountered the same difficulty: most newspapers refused to print its bulletins regarding venereal disease in the army. One of the newspaper trade journals thereupon sought the opinions of editors upon the subject, and all of them save one declared against the use of the two words. One editor put the blame upon the Postoffice, which still cherishes the Comstock tradition. Another reported that "at a recent conference of the Scripps Northwest League editors" it was decided that "the use of such terms as gonorrhea, syphilis, and even venereal diseases would not add to the tone of the papers, and that the term vice diseases can be readily substituted."[40] The Scripps papers are otherwise anything but distinguished for their "tone," but in this department they yield to the Puritan habit. An even more curious instance of prudery came to my notice in Philadelphia several years ago. A one-act play of mine, "The Artist," was presented at the Little Theatre there, and during its run, on February 26, 1916, the Public Ledger reprinted some of the dialogue. One of the characters in the piece is A Virgin. At every occurrence a change was made to A Young Girl. Apparently, even virgin is still regarded as too frank in Philadelphia.[41] Fifty years [Pg129] ago the very word decent was indecent in the South: no respectable woman was supposed to have any notion of the difference between decent and indecent.

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.

V
Tendencies in American

§ 1

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

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

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:

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

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.

The extent of such influences upon American, and particularly upon spoken American, remains to be studied; in the whole literature I can find but one formal article upon the subject. That article[48] deals specifically with the suffix -fest, which came into American from the German and was probably suggested by familiarity with sängerfest. There is no mention of it in any of the dictionaries of Americanisms, and yet, in such forms as talk-fest and gabfest it is met with almost daily. So with -heimer, -inski and -bund. Several years ago -heimer had a great vogue in slang, and was rapidly done to death. But wiseheimer remains [Pg152] in colloquial use as a facetious synonym for smart-aleck, and after awhile it may gradually acquire dignity. Far lowlier words, in fact, have worked their way in. Buttinski, perhaps, is going the same route. As for the words in -bund, many of them are already almost accepted. Plunder-bund is now at least as good as pork-barrel and slush-fund, and money-bund is frequently heard in Congress.[49] Such locutions creep in stealthily, and are secure before they are suspected. Current slang, out of which the more decorous language dredges a large part of its raw materials, is full of them. Nix and nixy, for no, are debased forms of the German nichts; aber nit, once as popular as camouflage, is obviously aber nicht. And a steady flow of nouns, all needed to designate objects introduced by immigrants, enriches the vocabulary. The Hungarians not only brought their national condiment with them; they also brought its name, paprika, and that name is now thoroughly American.[50] In the same way the Italians brought in camorra, padrone, spaghetti and a score of other substantives, and the Jews made contributions from Yiddish and Hebrew and greatly reinforced certain old borrowings from German. Once such a loan-word gets in it takes firm root. During the first year of American participation in the World War an effort was made, on patriotic grounds, to substitute liberty-cabbage for sour-kraut, but it quickly failed, for the name had become as completely Americanized as the thing itself, and so liberty-cabbage seemed affected and absurd. In the same way a great many other German words survived the passions of the time. Nor could all the influence of the professional patriots obliterate that German influence which has fastened upon the American yes something of the quality of ja.

Constant familiarity with such contributions from foreign languages and with the general speech habits of foreign peoples has made American a good deal more hospitable to loan-words than English, even in the absence of special pressure. Let the same [Pg153] word knock at the gates of the two languages, and American will admit it more readily, and give it at once a wider and more intimate currency. Examples are afforded by café, vaudeville, employé, boulevard, cabaret, toilette, exposé, kindergarten, dépôt, fête and menu. Café, in American, is a word of much larger and more varied meaning than in English and is used much more frequently, and by many more persons. So is employé, in the naturalized form of employee. So is toilet: we have even seen it as a euphemism for native terms that otherwise would be in daily use. So is kindergarten: I read lately of a kindergarten for the elementary instruction of conscripts. Such words are not unknown to the Englishman, but when he uses them it is with a plain sense of their foreignness. In American they are completely naturalized, as is shown by the spelling and pronunciation of most of them. An American would no more think of attempting the French pronunciation of depot or of putting the French accents upon it than he would think of spelling toilet with the final te or of essaying to pronounce Anheuser in the German manner. Often curious battles go on between such loan-words and their English equivalents, and with varying fortunes. In 1895 Weber and Fields tried to establish music-hall in New York, but it quickly succumbed to vaudeville-theatre, as variety had succumbed to vaudeville before it. In the same way lawn-fete (without the circumflex accent, and commonly pronounced feet) has elbowed out the English garden-party. But now and then, when the competing loan-word happens to violate American speech habits, a native term ousts it. The French crèche offers an example; it has been entirely displaced by day-nursery.

The English, in this matter, display their greater conservatism very plainly. Even when a loan-word enters both English and American simultaneously a sense of foreignness lingers about it on the other side of the Atlantic much longer than on this side, and it is used with far more self-consciousness. The word matinée offers a convenient example. To this day the English commonly print it in italics, give it its French accent, and pronounce it with some attempt at the French manner. But in America it is entirely naturalized, and the most ignorant man [Pg154] uses it without any feeling that it is strange. The same lack of any sense of linguistic integrity is to be noticed in many other directions—for example, in the freedom with which the Latin per is used with native nouns. One constantly sees per day, per dozen, per hundred, per mile, etc., in American newspapers, even the most careful, but in England the more seemly a is almost always used, or the noun itself is made Latin, as in per diem. Per, in fact, is fast becoming an everyday American word. Such phrases as "as per your letter (or order) of the 15th inst." are incessantly met with in business correspondence. The same greater hospitality is shown by the readiness with which various un-English prefixes and affixes come into fashion, for example, super- and -itis. The English accept them gingerly; the Americans take them in with enthusiasm, and naturalize them instanter.[51]

The same deficiency in reserve is to be noted in nearly all other colonialized dialects. The Latin-American variants of Spanish, for example, have adopted a great many words which appear in true Castilian only as occasional guests. Thus in Argentina matinée, menu, début, toilette and femme de chambre are perfectly good Argentine, and in Mexico sandwich and club have been thoroughly naturalized. The same thing is to be noted in the French of Haiti, in the Portuguese of Brazil, and even in the Danish of Norway. Once a language spreads beyond the country of its origin and begins to be used by people born, in the German phrase, to a different Sprachgefühl, the sense of loyalty to its vocabulary is lost, along with the instinctive feeling for its idiomatic habits. How far this destruction of its forms may go in the absence of strong contrary influences is exhibited by the rise of the Romance languages from the vulgar Latin of the Roman provinces, and, here at home, by the decay of foreign languages in competition with English. The Yiddish that the Jews from Russia bring in is German debased with Russian, Polish and [Pg155] Hebrew; in America, it quickly absorbs hundreds of words and idioms from the speech of the streets. Various conflicting German dialects, among the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch and in the German areas of the Northwest, combine in a patois that, in its end forms, shows almost as much English as German. Classical examples of it are "es giebt gar kein use," "Ich kann es nicht ständen" and "mein stallion hat über die fenz gescheumpt und dem nachbar sein whiet abscheulich gedämätscht."[52] The use of gleiche for to like, by false analogy from gleich (=like, similar) is characteristic. In the same way the Scandinavians in the Northwest corrupt their native Swedish and Dano-Norwegian. Thus, American-Norwegian is heavy with such forms as strit-kar, reit-evé, nekk-töi and staits-pruessen, for street-car, right away, necktie and states-prison, and admits such phrases as "det meka ingen difrens."[53]

The changes that Yiddish has undergone in America, though rather foreign to the present inquiry, are interesting enough to be noticed. First of all, it has admitted into its vocabulary a large number of everyday substantives, among them boy, chair, window, carpet, floor, dress, hat, watch, ceiling, consumption, property, trouble, bother, match, change, party, birthday, picture, paper (only in the sense of newspaper), gambler, show, hall, kitchen, store, bedroom, key, mantelpiece, closet, lounge, broom, tablecloth, paint, landlord, fellow, tenant, shop, wages, foreman, sleeve, collar, cuff, button, cotton, thimble, needle, pocket, bargain, sale, remnant, sample, haircut, razor, waist, basket, school, scholar, teacher, baby, mustache, butcher, grocery, dinner, street and walk. And with them many characteristic Americanisms, [Pg156] for example, bluffer, faker, boodler, grafter, gangster, crook, guy, kike, piker, squealer, bum, cadet, boom, bunch, pants, vest, loafer, jumper, stoop, saleslady, ice-box and raise, with their attendant verbs and adjectives. These words are used constantly; many of them have quite crowded out the corresponding Yiddish words. For example, ingel, meaning boy (it is a Slavic loan-word in Yiddish), has been obliterated by the English word. A Jewish immigrant almost invariably refers to his son as his boy, though strangely enough he calls his daughter his meidel. "Die boys mit die meidlach haben a good time" is excellent American Yiddish. In the same way fenster has been completely displaced by window, though tür (=door) has been left intact. Tisch (=table) also remains, but chair is always used, probably because few of the Jews had chairs in the old country. There the beinkel, a bench without a back, was in use; chairs were only for the well-to-do. Floor has apparently prevailed because no invariable corresponding word was employed at home: in various parts of Russia and Poland a floor is a dill, a podlogé, or a bricke. So with ceiling. There were six different words for it.

Yiddish inflections have been fastened upon most of these loan-words. Thus, "er hat ihm abgefaked" is "he cheated him," zubumt is the American gone to the bad, fix'n is to fix, usen is to use, and so on. The feminine and diminutive suffix -ké is often added to nouns. Thus bluffer gives rise to blufferké (=hypocrite), and one also notes dresské, hatké, watchké and bummerké. "Oi! is sie a blufferké!" is good American Yiddish for "isn't she a hypocrite!" The suffix -nick, signifying agency, is also freely applied. Allrightnick means an upstart, an offensive boaster, one of whom his fellows would say "He is all right" with a sneer. Similarly, consumptionick means a victim of tuberculosis. Other suffixes are -chick and -ige, the first exemplified in boychick, a diminutive of boy, and the second in next-doorige, meaning the woman next-door, an important person in ghetto social life. Some of the loan-words, of course, undergo changes on Yiddish-speaking lips. Thus, landlord becomes lendler, lounge becomes lunch, tenant becomes tenner, and whiskers loses its final s. "Wie gefällt dir sein whisker?" (=how do you like his beard?) [Pg157] is good Yiddish, ironically intended. Fellow, of course, changes to the American feller, as in "Rosie hat schon a feller" (=Rosie has got a feller, i. e., a sweetheart). Show, in the sense of chance, is used constantly, as in "git ihm a show" (=give him a chance). Bad boy is adopted bodily, as in "er is a bad boy." To shut up is inflected as one word, as in "er hat nit gewolt shutup'n" (=he wouldn't shut up). To catch is used in the sense of to obtain, as in "catch'n a gmilath chesed" (=to raise a loan). Here, by the way, gmilath chesed is excellent Biblical Hebrew. To bluff, unchanged in form, takes on the new meaning of to lie: a bluffer is a liar. Scores of American phrases are in constant use, among them, all right, never mind, I bet you, no sir and I'll fix you. It is curious to note that sure Mike, borrowed by the American vulgate from Irish English, has gone over into American Yiddish. Finally, to make an end, here are two complete and characteristic American Yiddish sentences: "Sie wet clean'n die rooms, scrub'n dem floor, wash'n die windows, dress'n dem boy und gehn in butcher-store und in grocery. Dernoch vet sie machen dinner und gehn in street für a walk."[54]

American itself, in the Philippines, and to a lesser extent in Porto Rico and on the Isthmus, has undergone similar changes under the influence of Spanish and the native dialects. Maurice P. Dunlap[55] offers the following specimen of a conversation between two Americans long resident in Manila:

[Pg158]

Here we have an example of Philippine American that shows all the tendencies of American Yiddish. It retains the general forms of American, but in the short conversation, embracing but 41 different words, there are eight loan-words from the Spanish (hola, amigo, porque, ese, señorita, lavandera, cuanto and paseo), two Spanish locutions in a debased form (spera for espera and no kerry for no quiro), two loan-words from the Taglog (komusta and kayo), two from Pigeon English (chow and chit), one Philippine-American localism (conant), and a Spanish verb with an English inflection (hablaing).

The immigrant in the midst of a large native population, of course, exerts no such pressure upon the national language as that exerted upon an immigrant language by the native, but nevertheless his linguistic habits and limitations have to be reckoned with in dealing with him, and the concessions thus made necessary have a very ponderable influence upon the general speech. In the usual sense, as we have seen, there are no dialects in American; two natives, however widely their birthplaces may be separated, never have any practical difficulty understanding each other. But there are at least quasi-dialects among the immigrants—the Irish, the German, the Scandinavian, the Italian, the Jewish, and so on—and these quasi-dialects undoubtedly leave occasional marks, not only upon the national vocabulary, but also upon the general speech habits of the country, as in the case, for example, of the pronunciation of yes, already mentioned, and in that of the substitution of the diphthong oi for the ur-sound in such words as world, journal and burn—a Yiddishism now almost universal among the lower classes of New York, and threatening to spread.[56] More important, however, is the support given to a native tendency by the foreigner's incapacity for employing (or even comprehending) syntax of any complexity, or words not of the simplest. This is the tendency toward succinctness [Pg159] and clarity, at whatever sacrifice of grace. One English observer, Sidney Low, puts the chief blame for the general explosiveness of American upon the immigrant, who must be communicated with in the plainest words available, and is not socially worthy of the suavity of circumlocution anyhow.[57] In his turn the immigrant seizes upon these plainest words as upon a sort of convenient Lingua Franca—his quick adoption of damn as a universal adjective is traditional—and throws his influence upon the side of the underlying speech habit when he gets on in the vulgate. Many characteristic Americanisms of the sort to stagger lexicographers—for example, near-silk—have come from the Jews, whose progress in business is a good deal faster than their progress in English. Others, as we have seen, have come from the German immigrants of half a century ago, from the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch (who are notoriously ignorant and uncouth), and from the Irish, who brought with them a form of English already very corrupt. The same and similar elements greatly reinforce the congenital tendencies of the dialect—toward the facile manufacture of compounds, toward a disregard of the distinctions between parts of speech, and, above all, toward the throwing off of all etymological restraints.

§ 5

A parallel movement shows itself in the great multiplication of common abbreviations. "Americans, as a rule," says Farmer, "employ abbreviations to an extent unknown in Europe.... This trait of the American character is discernible in every department of the national life and thought."[60] O. K., C. O. D., N. G., G. O. P. (get out and push) and P. D. Q., are almost national hall-marks; the immigrant learns them immediately after damn and go to hell. Thornton traces N. G. to 1840; C. O. D. and P. D. Q. are probably as old. As for O. K., it was in use so early as 1790, but it apparently did not acquire its present significance until the 20's; originally it seems to have meant "ordered recorded."[11] During the presidential campaign of 1828 Jackson's enemies, seeking to prove his illiteracy, alleged that he used it for "oll korrect." Of late the theory has been put forward that it is derived from an Indian word, okeh, signifying "so be it," and Dr. Woodrow Wilson is said to support this theory and to use okeh in endorsing government papers, but I am unaware of the authority upon which the etymology is based. Bartlett says that the figurative use of A No. 1, as in an A No. 1 man, also originated in America, but this may not be true. There can be little doubt, however, about T. B. (for tuberculosis), G. B. (for grand bounce), 23, on the Q. T., and D. & D. (drunk and disorderly). The language breeds such short forms of speech prodigiously; every trade and profession has a host of them; they are innumerable in the slang of sport.[61]

What one sees under all this, account for it as one will, is a double habit, the which is, at bottom, sufficient explanation of the gap which begins to yawn between English and American, particularly on the spoken plane. On the one hand it is a habit of verbal economy—a jealous disinclination to waste two words on what can be put into one, a natural taste for the brilliant and [Pg162] succinct, a disdain of all grammatical and lexicographical daintiness, born partly, perhaps, of ignorance, but also in part of a sound sense of their imbecility. And on the other hand there is a high relish and talent for metaphor—in Brander Matthews' phrase, "a figurative vigor that the Elizabethans would have realized and understood." Just as the American rebels instinctively against such parliamentary circumlocutions as "I am not prepared to say" and "so much by way of being,"[62] just as he would fret under the forms of English journalism, with its reporting empty of drama, its third-person smothering of speeches and its complex and unintelligible jargon,[63] just so, in his daily speech and writing he chooses terseness and vividness whenever there is any choice, and seeks to make one when it doesn't exist. There is more than mere humorous contrast between the famous placard in the wash-room of the British Museum: "These Basins Are For Casual Ablutions Only," and the familiar sign at American railroad-crossings: "Stop! Look! Listen!" Between the two lies an abyss separating two cultures, two habits of mind, two diverging tongues. It is almost unimaginable that Englishmen, journeying up and down in elevators, would ever have stricken the teens out of their speech, turning sixteenth into simple six and twenty-fourth into four; the clipping is almost as far from their way of doing things as the climbing so high in the air. Nor have they the brilliant facility of Americans for making new words of grotesque but penetrating tropes, as in corn-fed, tight-wad, bone-head, bleachers and juice (for electricity); when they attempt such things the result is often lugubrious; two hundred years of schoolmastering has dried up their inspiration. Nor have they the fine American hand for devising new verbs; to maffick and to limehouse are their best specimens in twenty years, and both have an almost pathetic flatness. Their business with the language, indeed, is not in this department. They are [Pg163] not charged with its raids and scoutings, but with the organization of its conquests and the guarding of its accumulated stores.

For the student interested in the biology of language, as opposed to its paleontology, there is endless material in the racy neologisms of American, and particularly in its new compounds and novel verbs. Nothing could exceed the brilliancy of such inventions as joy-ride, high-brow, road-louse, sob-sister, nature-faker, stand-patter, lounge-lizard, hash-foundry, buzz-wagon, has-been, end-seat-hog, shoot-the-chutes and grape-juice-diplomacy. They are bold; they are vivid; they have humor; they meet genuine needs. Joy-ride, I note, is already going over into English, and no wonder. There is absolutely no synonym for it; to convey its idea in orthodox English would take a whole sentence. And so, too, with certain single words of metaphorical origin: barrel for large and illicit wealth, pork for unnecessary and dishonest appropriations of public money, joint for illegal liquor-house, tenderloin for gay and dubious neighborhood.[64] Most of these, and of the new compounds with them, belong to the vocabulary of disparagement. Here an essential character of the American shows itself: his tendency to combat the disagreeable with irony, to heap ridicule upon what he is suspicious of or doesn't understand.

The rapidity with which new verbs are made in the United States is really quite amazing. Two days after the first regulations of the Food Administration were announced, to hooverize appeared spontaneously in scores of newspapers, and a week later it was employed without any visible sense of its novelty in the debates of Congress and had taken on a respectability equal to that of to bryanize, to fletcherize and to oslerize. To electrocute appeared inevitably in the first public discussion of capital [Pg164] punishment by electricity; to taxi came in with the first taxi-cabs; to commute no doubt accompanied the first commutation ticket; to insurge attended the birth of the Progressive balderdash. Of late the old affix -ize, once fecund of such monsters as to funeralize, has come into favor again, and I note, among its other products, to belgiumize, to vacationize, to picturize and to scenarioize. In a newspaper headline I even find to s o s, in the form of its gerund.[65] Many characteristic American verbs are compounds of common verbs and prepositions or adverbs, with new meanings imposed. Compare, for example, to give and to give out, to go back and to go back on, to beat and to beat it, to light and to light out, to butt and to butt in, to turn and to turn down, to show and to show up, to put and to put over, to wind and to wind up. Sometimes, however, the addition seems to be merely rhetorical, as in to start off, to finish up, to open up and to hurry up. To hurry up is so commonplace in America that everyone uses it and no one notices it, but it remains rare in England. Up seems to be essential to many of these latter-day verbs, e. g., to pony up, to doll up, to ball up; without it they are without significance. Nearly all of them are attended by derivative adjectives or nouns; cut-up, show-down, kick-in, come-down, hang-out, start-off, run-in, balled-up, dolled-up, wind-up, bang-up, turn-down, jump-off.

In many directions the same prodigal fancy shows itself—for example, in the free interchange of parts of speech, in the bold inflection of words not inflected in sound English, and in the invention of wholly artificial words. The first phenomenon has already concerned us. Would an English literary critic of any pretensions employ such a locution as "all by her lonesome"? I have a doubt of it—and yet I find that phrase in a serious book by the critic of the New Republic.[66] Would an English M. P. use "he has another think coming" in debate? Again I doubt it—but even more anarchistic dedications of verbs and adjectives to substantival use are to be found in the Congressional Record every day. Jitney is an old American substantive lately [Pg165] revived; a month after its revival it was also an adjective, and before long it may also be a verb and even an adverb. To lift up was turned tail first and made a substantive, and is now also an adjective and a verb. Joy-ride became a verb the day after it was born as a noun. And what of livest? An astounding inflection, indeed—but with quite sound American usage behind it. The Metropolitan Magazine, of which Col. Roosevelt is an editor, announces on its letter paper that it is "the livest magazine in America," and Poetry, the organ of the new poetry movement, prints at the head of its contents page the following encomium from the New York Tribune: "the livest art in America today is poetry, and the livest expression of that art is in this little Chicago monthly."

Now and then the spirit of American shows a transient faltering, and its inventiveness is displaced by a banal extension of meaning, so that a single noun comes to signify discrete things. Thus laundry, meaning originally a place where linen is washed, has come to mean also the linen itself. So, again, gun has come to mean fire-arms of all sorts, and has entered into such compounds as gun-man and gun-play. And in the same way party has been borrowed from the terminology of the law and made to do colloquial duty as a synonym for person. But such evidences of poverty are rare and abnormal; the whole movement of the language is toward the multiplication of substantives. A new object gets a new name, and that new name enters into the common vocabulary at once. Sundae and hokum are late examples; their origin is dubious and disputed, but they met genuine needs and so they seem to be secure. A great many more such substantives are deliberate inventions, for example, kodak, protectograph, conductorette, bevo, klaxon, vaseline, jap-a-lac, resinol, autocar, postum, crisco, electrolier, addressograph, alabastine, orangeade, pianola, victrola, dictagraph, kitchenette, crispette, cellarette, uneeda, triscuit and peptomint. Some of these indicate attempts at description: oleomargarine, phonograph and gasoline are older examples of that class. Others represent efforts to devise designations that will meet the conditions of advertising psychology and the trade-marks law, to wit, that they [Pg166] be (a) new, (b) easily remembered, and (c) not directly descriptive. Probably the most successful invention of this sort is kodak, which was devised by George Eastman, inventor of the portable camera so called. Kodak has so far won acceptance as a common noun that Eastman is often forced to assert his proprietary right to it.[67] Vaseline is in the same position. The annual crop of such inventions in the United States is enormous.[68] The majority die, but a hearty few always survive.

Of analogous character are artificial words of the scalawag and rambunctious class, the formation of which constantly goes on. Some of them are shortened compounds: grandificent (from grand and magnificent), sodalicious (from soda and delicious) and warphan(age) (from war and orphan(age)).[69] Others are made up of common roots and grotesque affixes: swelldoodle, splendiferous and peacharino. Yet others are mere extravagant inventions: scallywampus, supergobsloptious and floozy. Most of these are devised by advertisement writers or college students, and belong properly to slang, but there is a steady movement of selected specimens into the common vocabulary. The words in -doodle hint at German influences, and those in -ino owe something to Italian, or at least to popular burlesques of what is conceived to be Italian.

§ 6

In view of all this it would be hopeless to attempt to exhibit in print the numerous small differences between English and American pronunciation, for many of them are extremely delicate and subtle, and only their aggregation makes them plain. According to a recent and very careful observer,[75] the most important of them do not lie in pronunciation at all, properly so called, but in intonation. In this direction, he says, one must look for the true characters "of the English accent." I incline to agree with White,[76] that the pitch of the English voice is somewhat higher than that of the American, and that it is thus more penetrating. The nasal twang which Englishmen observe in the vox Americana, though it has high overtones, is itself not high pitched, but rather low pitched, as all constrained and muffled tones are apt to be. The causes of that twang have long engaged phonologists, and in the main they agree that there is a physical basis for it—that our generally dry climate and rapid changes of temperature produce an actual thickening of the membranes concerned in the production of sound.[77] We are, in brief, a somewhat snuffling [Pg169] people, and much more given to catarrhs and coryzas than the inhabitants of damp Britain. Perhaps this general impediment to free and easy utterance, subconsciously apprehended, is responsible for the American tendency to pronounce the separate syllables of a word with much more care than an Englishman bestows upon them; the American, in giving extraordinary six distinct syllables instead of the Englishman's grudging four, may be seeking to make up for his natural disability. Marsh, in his "Lectures on the English Language,"[78] sought two other explanations of the fact. On the one hand, he argued that the Americans of his day read a great deal more than the English, and were thus much more influenced by the spelling of words, and on the other hand he pointed out that "our flora shows that the climate of even our Northern States belongs ... to a more Southern type than that of England," and that "in Southern latitudes ... articulation is generally much more distinct than in Northern regions." In support of the latter proposition he cited the pronunciation of Spanish, Italian and Turkish, as compared with that of English, Danish and German—rather unfortunate examples, for the pronunciation of German is at least as clear as that of Italian. Swedish would have supported his case far better: the Swedes debase their vowels and slide over their consonants even more markedly than the English. Marsh believed that there was a tendency among Southern peoples to throw the accent back, and that this helped to "bring out all the syllables." One finds a certain support for this notion in various American peculiarities of stress. Advertisement offers an example. The prevailing American pronunciation, despite incessant pedagogical counterblasts, puts the accent on the penult, whereas the English pronunciation stresses the second syllable. Paresis illustrates the same tendency. The English accent the first syllable, but, as Krapp says, American usage clings to the [Pg170] accent on the second syllable.[79] There are, again, pianist, primarily and telegrapher. The English accent the first syllable of each; we commonly accent the second. In temporarily they also accent the first; we accent the third. Various other examples might be cited. But when one had marshalled them their significance would be at once set at naught by four very familiar words, mamma, papa, inquiry and ally. Americans almost invariably accent each on the first syllable; Englishmen stress the second. For months, during 1918, the publishers of the Standard Dictionary, advertising that work in the street-cars, explained that ally should be accented on the second syllable, and pointed out that owners of their dictionary were safeguarded against the vulgarism of accenting it on the first. Nevertheless, this free and highly public instruction did not suffice to exterminate al´ly. I made note of the pronunciations overheard, with the word constantly on all lips. But one man of my acquaintance regularly accented the second syllable, and he was an eminent scholar, professionally devoted to the study of language.

Thus it is unsafe, here as elsewhere, to generalize too facilely, and particularly unsafe to exhibit causes with too much assurance. "Man frage nicht warum," says Philipp Karl Buttmann. "Der Sprachgebrauch lässt sich nur beobachten."[80] But the greater distinctness of American utterance, whatever its genesis and machinery, is palpable enough in many familiar situations. "The typical American accent," says Vizetelly, "is often harsh and unmusical, but it sounds all of the letters to be sounded, and slurs, but does not distort, the rest."[81] An American, for example, almost always sounds the first l in fulfill; an Englishman makes the first syllable foo. An American sounds every syllable in extraordinary, literary, military, secretary and the other words of the -ary-group; an Englishman never pronounces the a of the penultimate syllable. Kindness, with the d silent, would attract notice in the United States; in England, according to [Pg171] Jones,[82] the d is "very commonly, if not usually" omitted. Often, in America, commonly retains a full t; in England it is actually and officially offen. Let an American and an Englishman pronounce program (me). Though the Englishman retains the long form of the last syllable in writing, he reduces it in speaking to a thick triple consonant, grm; the American enunciates it clearly, rhyming it with damn. Or try the two with any word ending in -g, say sporting or ripping. Or with any word having r before a consonant, say card, harbor, lord or preferred. "The majority of Englishmen," says Menner, "certainly do not pronounce the r ...; just as certainly the majority of educated Americans pronounce it distinctly."[83] Henry James, visiting the United States after many years of residence in England, was much harassed by this persistent r-sound, which seemed to him to resemble "a sort of morose grinding of the back teeth."[84] So sensitive to it did he become that he began to hear where it was actually non-existent, save as an occasional barbarism, for example, in Cuba-r, vanilla-r and California-r. He put the blame for it, and for various other departures from the strict canon of contemporary English, upon "the American common school, the American newspaper, and the American Dutchman and Dago." Unluckily for his case, the full voicing of the r came into American long before the appearance of any of these influences. The early colonists, in fact, brought it with them from England, and it still prevailed there in Dr. Johnson's day, for he protested publicly against the "rough snarling sound" and led the movement which finally resulted in its extinction.[85] Today, extinct, it is mourned by English purists, and the Poet Laureate denounces the clergy of the Established Church for saying "the sawed of the Laud" instead of "the sword of the Lord."[86]

But even in the matter of elided consonants American is not always the conservator. We cling to the r, we preserve the final [Pg172] g, we give nephew a clear f-sound instead of the clouded English v-sound, and we boldly nationalize trait and pronounce its final t, but we drop the second p from pumpkin and change the m to n, we change the ph(=f)-sound to plain p in diphtheria, diphthong and naphtha,[87] we relieve rind of its final d, and, in the complete sentence, we slaughter consonants by assimilation. I have heard Englishmen say brand-new, but on American lips it is almost invariably bran-new. So nearly universal is this nasalization in the United States that certain American lexicographers have sought to found the term upon bran and not upon brand. Here the national speech is powerfully influenced by Southern dialectical variations, which in turn probably derive partly from French example and partly from the linguistic limitations of the negro. The latter, even after two hundred years, has great difficulties with our consonants, and often drops them. A familiar anecdote well illustrates his speech habit. On a train stopping at a small station in Georgia a darkey threw up a window and yelled "Wah ee?" The reply from a black on the platform was "Wah oo?" A Northerner aboard the train, puzzled by this inarticulate dialogue, sought light from a Southern passenger, who promptly translated the first question as "Where is he?" and the second as "Where is who?" A recent viewer with alarm[88] argues that this conspiracy against the consonants is spreading, and that English printed words no longer represent the actual sounds of the American language. "Like the French," he says, "we have a marked liaison—the borrowing of a letter from the preceding word. We invite one another to 'c'meer' (=come here) ... 'Hoo-zat?' (=who is that?) has as good a liaison as the French vois avez." This critic believes that American tends to abandon t for d, as in Sadd'y (=Saturday) and siddup (=sit up), and to get rid of h, as in "ware-zee?" (=where is he?). But here we invade the vulgar speech, which belongs to the next chapter. [Pg173]

Among the vowels the most salient difference between English and American pronunciation, of course, is marked off by the flat American a. This flat a, as we have seen, has been under attack at home for nearly a century. The New Englanders, very sensitive to English example, substitute a broad a that is even broader than the English, and an a of the same sort survives in the South in a few words, e. g., master, tomato and tassel, but everywhere else in the country the flat a prevails. Fashion and the example of the stage oppose it,[89] and it is under the ban of an active wing of schoolmasters, but it will not down. To the average American, indeed, the broad a is a banner of affectation, and he associates it unpleasantly with spats, Harvard, male tea-drinking, wrist watches and all the other objects of his social suspicion. He gets the flat sound, not only into such words as last, calf, dance and pastor, but even into piano and drama. Drama is sometimes drayma west of Connecticut, but almost never drahma or drawma. Tomato with the a of bat, may sometimes borrow the a of plate, but tomahto is confined to New England and the South. Hurrah, in American, has also borrowed the a of plate; one hears hurray much oftener than hurraw. Even amen frequently shows that a, though not when sung. Curiously enough, it is displaced in patent by the true flat a. The English rhyme the first syllable of the word with rate; in America it always rhymes with rat.

The broad a is not only almost extinct outside of New England; it begins to show signs of decay even there. At all events, it has gradually disappeared from many words, and is measurably less sonorous in those in which it survives than it used to be. A century ago it appeared, not only in dance, aunt, glass, past, etc., but also in Daniel, imagine, rational and travel.[90] And in 1857 Oliver Wendell Holmes reported it in matter, handsome, caterpillar, apple and satisfaction. It has been displaced in virtually all of these, even in the most remote reaches of the back country, [Pg174] by the national flat a. Grandgent[91] says that the broad a is now restricted in New England to the following situations:

The u-sound also shows certain differences between English and American usage. The English reduce the last syllable of figure to ger; the educated American preserves the u-sound as in nature. The English make the first syllable of courteous rhyme with fort; the American standard rhymes it with hurt. The English give an oo-sound to the u of brusque; in America the word commonly rhymes with tusk. A u-sound, as everyone knows, gets into the American pronunciation of clerk, by analogy with insert; the English cling to a broad a-sound, by analogy with hearth. Even the latter, in the United States, is often pronounced to rhyme with dearth. The American, in general, is much less careful than the Englishman to preserve the shadowy y-sound before u in words of the duke-class. He retains it in few, but surely not in new. Nor in duke, blue, stew, due, duty and true. Nor even in Tuesday. Purists often attack the simple oo-sound. In 1912, for example, the Department of Education of New York City warned all the municipal high-school teachers to combat it.[92] But it is doubtful that one pupil in a hundred was thereby induced to insert the y in induced. Finally there is lieutenant. The Englishman pronounces the first syllable left; the American invariably makes it loot. White says that the prevailing American pronunciation is relatively recent. "I never heard it," he reports, "in my boyhood."[93] He was born in New York in 1821.

The i-sound presents several curious differences. The English make it long in all words of the hostile-class; in America it is commonly short, even in puerile. The English also lengthen it in sliver; in America the word usually rhymes with liver. The [Pg175] short i, in England, is almost universally substituted for the e in pretty, and this pronunciation is also inculcated in most American schools, but I often hear an unmistakable e-sound in the United States, making the first syllable rhyme with bet. Contrariwise, most Americans put the short i into been, making it rhyme with sin. In England it shows a long e-sound, as in seen. A recent poem by an English poet makes the word rhyme with submarine, queen and unseen.[94] The o-sound, in American, tends to convert itself into an aw-sound. Cog still retains a pure o, but one seldom hears it in log or dog. Henry James denounces this "flatly-drawling group" in "The Question of Our Speech,"[95] and cites gawd, dawg, sawft, lawft, gawne, lawst and frawst as horrible examples. But the English themselves are not guiltless of the same fault. Many of the accusations that James levels at American, in truth, are echoed by Robert Bridges in "A Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation." Both spend themselves upon opposing what, at bottom, are probably natural and inevitable movements—for example, the gradual decay of all the vowels to one of neutral color, represented by the e of danger, the u of suggest, the second o of common and the a of prevalent. This decay shows itself in many languages. In both English and High German, during their middle periods, all the terminal vowels degenerated to e—now sunk to the aforesaid neutral vowel in many German words, and expunged from English altogether. The same sound is encountered in languages so widely differing otherwise as Arabic, French and Swedish. "Its existence," says Sayce, "is a sign of age and decay; meaning has become more important than outward form, and the educated intelligence no longer demands a clear pronunciation in order to understand what is said."[96]

All these differences between English and American pronunciation, separately considered, seem slight, but in the aggregate they are sufficient to place serious impediments between mutual [Pg176] comprehension. Let an Englishman and an American (not of New England) speak a quite ordinary sentence, "My aunt can't answer for my dancing the lancers even passably," and at once the gap separating the two pronunciations will be manifest. Here only the a is involved. Add a dozen everyday words—military, schedule, trait, hostile, been, lieutenant, patent, nephew, secretary, advertisement, and so on—and the strangeness of one to the other is augmented. "Every Englishman visiting the States for the first time," said an English dramatist some time ago, "has a difficulty in making himself understood. He often has to repeat a remark or a request two or three times to make his meaning clear, especially on railroads, in hotels and at bars. The American visiting England for the first time has the same trouble."[97] Despite the fact that American actors imitate English pronunciation to the best of their skill, this visiting Englishman asserted that the average American audience is incapable of understanding a genuinely English company, at least "when the speeches are rattled off in conversational style." When he presented one of his own plays with an English company, he said, many American acquaintances, after witnessing the performance, asked him to lend them the manuscript, "that they might visit it again with some understanding of the dialogue."[98]