The American Language: An inquiry into the development of English in the United States

Contents

Introductory

The Beginnings of American

The Period of Growth

Preface to the First Edition

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 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 familiarity with the current literature of England and America. It was part of my daily work, for a number of 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 shade 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, in either England or 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 incomplete. The solitary general treatise on the American dialect, the work of a man foreign to both Eng 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 whatsoever. 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 interested in the subject, and despairing of getting any illumination from such theoretical masters of it, I began a collection of materials for my own information and amusement, and gradually it took on a rather formidable bulk. My employment being made known by various articles in the newspapers and magazines, I began also to receive contributions from other persons of the same taste, 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 popular 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 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; moreover, I have a hand for a compromise dialect which embodies the common materials of both languages, 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 Weekly 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 fully 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."

Baltimore, January 1, 1919.

Preface to the Second Edition

This edition has been greatly enlarged and thoroughly rewritten. Every chapter has been scrutinized for errors, and nearly every page shows changes. The corrections and suggestions that accumulated after the publication of the first edition---they came from all parts of the world, and from observers of the most various equipment and accuracy---were of such bulk that they almost alarmed me into abandoning the work altogether, but after due prayer I finally tackled them, and the result is now spread before the nobility and gentry. I thought it well, in a book opening so much new ground, to document liberally, that possible successors might be spared the tedious searches that I had to make myself. In the revision I have pursued the same plan, and I believe that all the useful material is now charted. Especially in the first chapter and in the chapters on Tendencies in American, American and English Today, American Spelling, and Proper Names in America there are summaries of much new matter, and somewhat elaborate references. The discussion of foreign languages in the United States, scarcely more than a footnote in the first edition, is now enlarged and put into an appendix. Another appendix offers some specimens of the American vulgate. The bibliography has been augmented, reorganized, and I hope, made more useful. Everywhere the text has been revised in the light of the criticism that has reached me.

Unluckily, the book does not contain all of the new matter that I hoped to get into it. For one thing, there is the "more scientific examination of the grammar of the American vulgar speech," spoken of in the preface to the first edition. It is not that I made no effort to carry out this promised inquiry; it is simply that I found it extending far beyond the limits of the time that I could give to it, and even further beyond the bounds of my philological equipment. The science of grammar, as it was taught and practised until a few years ago, had a very comfortable simplicity, for it dealt only with written languages, and what lay outside the printed page was conveniently neglected. But of late grammarians have been turning to spoken languages, and the result is a great increase in their difficulties. They must now deal, not with single words, but with whole phrases, many of which are not easily resolved into the words that originally made them. Worse, they must deal with phrases that no two individuals utter precisely alike. Thus grammar begins to ground itself on phonology, as it once grounded itself upon etymology, and the grammarian can no longer lock himself in his study with his books, but must go among men and women and listen attentively to what they say. The old-fashioned science of grammar was almost helpless in dealing with such a thing as the American vulgate; the new science, as I say, demands a wide and accurate knowledge in fields wherein my own knowledge is sadly imperfect. I have made various efforts to enlist professional philologists for the investigation, but with no success. From all that I have approached I have received far more courtesy than my amateurish inquiries deserved, and from many I have received very useful information and not a few acute suggestions. But the academic prudery that I spoke of in my first edition still flourishes. It would be regarded as infra dig., I am told, for an American professor of English to concern himself too actively with the English spoken by nearly a hundred millions of his countrymen. He may, if he will, devote a lifetime to the English dialect of Norfolk or Dorset, but he may not waste his time and his dignity upon the dialect of his janitor, his barber and his trousers-presser. That dialect, it appears, does not belong to philology, but merely to humor. If it is to be investigated, then the work must be done by such wags as Ring W. Lardner and such dilettanti as I.

Thus the section on vulgar American, save for the introduction of new illustrative material, remains substantially as I originally wrote it. In the interval, of course, I have received contributions and criticisms from many correspondents, and some of them have suggested changes that I have adopted. But in the main the section is unchanged. So are the various historical discussions of American pronunciation. The meagre material that I made use of remains almost as meagre as it was then; the whole literature of the subject, in fact, is embraced in a few essays, chiefly by Dr. Charles H. Grandgent. Why this inquiry, which demands the equipment of a competent phonologist, has not attracted more American scholars I do not know. It is certainly not open to objection on grounds of academic dignity. Nevertheless, it remains neglected, and so does the subject of American surnames. Practically all of the existing work upon American surnames, indeed, has been done by philological amateurs. As for geographical names, the material available is confined chiefly to incomplete and chaotic word-lists. Many of the etymologies currently accepted are clearly ridiculous, and many more have a dubious smack. There is certainly room here for a useful book. There is even more room in the field of loan-words. And quite as much in the field of artificial words, e. g., kodak, crisco and postum, though here Dr. Louise Pound and her pupils have done a great deal of careful and valuable work.

Since my first edition was published there have been various evidences of a renewed interest in the contemporary status and development of the language, both in the United States and in England. The Society for Pure English, organized in 1913 but paralyzed by the onset of the war, has resumed its functions, and, under the leadership of Dr. Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, is now showing an intelligent interest in the language that is in being, and a fine determination to rescue it from the outworn formulae of the grammarians. At home the National Council of Teachers of English has begun to make propaganda for better instruction in the mother-tongue---though often without due discrimination, I fear, between what is in the books and what people actually speak---and a great many discussions of living philological questions, sometimes very penetrating, have appeared in the magazines and newspapers, and even in some of the more daring philological journals. The American Dialect Society continues its work, and still looks forward to the publication of its dictionary. English, the first English periodical devoted wholly to the mother-tongue, made its bow in March, 1919. Its prospectus announced that it would discuss, among other things, "American English, Americanisms, and Anglicisms in America," but this promise has not been fulfilled. English quickly degenerated, in fact, to what one correspondent denounced as "carping schoolmasterishness and conventional pedantry"; it is now no more than a sort of grammatical Answers. Mr. R. H. Thornton's revision and extension of his American Glossary remains unpublished, unfortunately, for lack of funds, and his materials have been turned over to the library of Harvard University. But Mr. Gilbert M. Tucker, a pioneer student of Americanisms, has published an important work, "American English," summarizing his observations over a period of forty years, Dr. George Philip Krapp has published an admirable study of the current standard pronunciation of English in America, and various other writers---for example, Mr. Ring W. Lardner and Mr. John V. A. Weaver---have made interesting contributions to American-English literature. All these new works are noticed in their proper places.

The first edition of this book was printed from type and limited in numbers deliberately---not, as some kind friends seem to suspect, because the publisher and I plotted to profiteer by putting up the price, but simply because I knew it to be full of imperfections and planned to submit a small edition to scholars and then prepare a revised edition for general circulation in the light of their criticism. The popular demand for the volume was a genuine surprise, and the whole edition was quickly sold out. Since then stray copies have brought large premiums in the second-hand book-shops---a consolation, perhaps, to original purchasers, but certainly no source of profit to either the publisher or me. The present edition will be electrotyped after the first printing has been run over and all errors of the press have been corrected, and is not limited in number; I do not plan to make any substantial changes in it for at least ten years. If it is reprinted in the interval, an effort, of course, will be made to correct all surviving errors; a great many will persist, I make no doubt. But I shall not rewrite the book until the investigations suggested in it have been carried out by competent hands---and this business, I fear, is not likely to be undertaken very soon. As before, I ask all readers who may observe omissions or inaccuracies to communicate with me in care of the publisher, or at my home, 1524 Hollins Street, Baltimore. In particular, I am eager to get more light upon the history of American pronunciation, upon the grammar and syntax of the vulgar speech, and upon the non-English languages spoken in the United States.

My debt to my many and far-flung correspondents is very heavy, and I have acknowledged it in various places in the text. But above all I owe thanks to Dr. Louise Pound, of the University of Nebraska, not only for the materials I have so lavishly borrowed from her, but also, and even more importantly, for her constant interest in the work and her generous toleration of my philological shortcomings. Various other scholars, notably Dr. Otto Jespersen, of Copenhagen, have volunteered very valuable encouragement. I regret that the appearance of my book caused Dr. Jespersen to postpone a work upon the same subject that he had long had in contemplation; I can only hope that he will return to it, for his great learning will make it of extraordinary utility. Among the many private friends and correspondents who have helped me over difficult places I owe most to Mrs. Harry C. Black of Baltimore, and Mr. H. W. Seaman, of New York, both English-born. Mrs. Black made parts of "English and American Today," especially in its first stages, almost her own, and Mr. Seaman prepared for me an exhaustive and extremely useful review and criticism of the whole book. Dr. W. W. Charters generously offered to place his unique collection of vulgar Americanisms at my disposal; Mr. Thornton and Mr. Tucker, the one the compiler of the best existing dictionary of Americanisms and the other the pioneer of their scientific study, both gave me much encouragement, though differing from some of my conclusions. The aid of Miss Marion L. Bloom, of Washington, has been peculiarly valuable. She pursued many investigations for me in the Library of Congress, and otherwise gave me intelligent assistance. Finally, I owe a special debt to my amanuensis, Miss Addie B. Deering, of Baltimore, whose extraordinary diligence and good sense rescued me more than once from the wild snarls of my own manuscript---a manuscript bristling with difficulties that she never failed to surmount.

The reviews of the first edition in philological periodicals were always friendly, and in many cases exhaustive and valuable. The notices in the lay press were extensive, but not often intelligent. The book appeared at a time when colonialism, revived by the war, was at its height, and so a number of newspaper reviewers were rather alarmed by its apparent tendency to defend American practise against English example. One such watchman went to the length of denouncing it as proof of a sinister effort, inspired by the Wilhelmstrasse, to introduce discord into the Anglo-American entente. This reviewer gave a final touch to his bill of complaint by accusing me of being a Jew. I remain unable to comprehend the relevancy of the charge, but hasten to give assurance that my earliest known ancestors were uncompromising Christians, and engaged gallantly in the pogroms of their time.

For all the changes made in the text, I am, of course, wholly responsible. In many cases, after inquiry, I have felt it necessary to reject the suggestions of correspondents; in other cases observers of equal authority have revealed such a conflict of opinion that I have had perforce to fall back upon my own judgment. This conflict has been especially noticeable in the field of current usages on the plane of educated speech. I observe that Englishmen, when they settle in the United States, quickly lose their sense of difference between the two dialects, and are thereafter apt to argue that every American locution they encounter has been borrowed from England. Various correspondents, for example, have sought to convince me that such typical American verbs as to steam-roller (in the political sense) and to joy-ride are actually English. Others have maintained that various well-known American spellings, lately begun to be imitated in England, originated there. In the face of such earnest assaults it becomes difficult to hold to the thesis that there is any American dialect at all, but nevertheless I have managed to do so. Here, fortunately, exact evidence is often procurable, for the locutions in question enter into the written speech. Whenever I have found a contemporary English journal referring to a given form as an Americanism I have thought it quite safe to accept that view of it. True enough, almost every imaginable Americanism is heard now and then in England. But when it seems strange to an active journalist, it is certainly not in common use.

Many American correspondents and reviewers have objected to this or that locution, particularly in the section on the vulgar speech, on the ground that it is a localism. Such objections, I believe, have been almost invariably based upon faulty observation. More than once, investigating a word or a phrase thus alleged to be confined to New England or the South or the far West, I have found it in Lardner or in the materials collected by Charters in Kansas City. The collections of the American Dialect Society dispose of most such criticisms. They show that what are accepted as localisms in Vermont or Connecticut are often also localisms in Texas or Nebraska---in brief, that the common speech of the different parts of the country differs a good deal less than superficial observers usually believe. A great many persons, I find, are strangely deaf to the dialect that they hear every day from humble lips. When their attention is called to a peculiar word or grammatical form they are first disposed to deny that it is used, and then to argue that it is a localism. Other earnest but useless criticisms have come to me from persons who have confused what I say about the vulgar speech with what I say about the speech of educated folk. More than one reviewer, in fact, has solemnly taken me to task for accusing all Americans of saying "I seen" and "if I hadda went." In part I must accept primary responsibility for this confusion. When I set out to write this book I soon found that I was dealing with two very distinct dialects, and that it was often difficult to keep the distinction between them clear. This difficulty still confronts me, and now and then, I fear, it has led me into obscurity. I say there are two dialects; an American scholar, whose suggestions have been most useful, argues that there are actually four: "a language of the intellectuals, another of the fairly educated (business men, Congressmen, etc.), another of the great American democracy, another of the poor trash." This scholar argues that I should compare the vulgar speech (which seems to me to be his third and fourth varieties), not with standard English, but with corresponding dialects of England. But that would obviously lead to confusion worse confounded. The only safe plan is to compare both varieties of American English with what is currently regarded as standard English. That is the method adopted by the students of the dialects of all other living languages. It has its disadvantages, but it at least avoids the necessity of stopping every few minutes to describe the standard. All my readers, I assume, know standard English.

H. L. M.

Baltimore, November 12, 1921.

The Diverging Streams of English

Thomas Jefferson, with his usual prevision, saw clearly more than a century ago that the American people, as they increased in numbers and in the diversity of their national interests and racial strains, would make changes in their mother tongue, as they had already made changes in the political institutions of their inheritance. "The new circumstances under which we are placed," he wrote to John Waldo from Monticello on August 16, 1813, "call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects. An American dialect will therefore be formed."

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 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."

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 did, for we read more English books, and find 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 æsthetics, and even in the minutiæ 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 many of our American neologisms quickly pass 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, and no less out of the authority that goes with their mere cultural seniority, 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 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 of a past generation, 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, elaborately artificial though it may be, undoubtedly has 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.