The American Language/Chapter 55

by H. L. Mencken

Because of the fact that the American form of English is now spoken by three times as many persons as all the British forms taken together, and by at least twenty times as many as the standard Southern English, and because, no less, of the greater resilience it shows, and the greater capacity for grammatical and lexical growth, and the far greater tendency to accommodate itself to the linguistic needs and limitations of foreigners—because of all this it seems to me very likely that it will determine the final form of the language. For the old control of English over American to be reasserted is now quite unthinkable; if the two dialects are not to drift apart entirely English must follow in American’s tracks. This yielding seems to have begun; the exchanges from American into English, as we have seen, grow steadily larger and more important than the exchanges from English into American. John Richard Green, the historian, discerning the inevitable half a century ago, expressed the opinion, amazing and unpalatable then, that the Americans were already “the main branch of the English people.” It is not yet wholly true; a cultural timorousness yet shows itself; there is still a class, chiefly of pedagogues and of social aspirants, which looks to England as the Romans long looked to Greece. But it is not the class that is shaping the national language, and it is not the class that is carrying it beyond the national borders. The Americanisms that flood the English of Canada are not borrowed from the dialects of New England Loyalists and fashionable New Yorkers, but from the common speech that has its sources in the native and immigrant proletariat and that displays its gaudiest freightage in the newspapers.

The impact of this flood is naturally most apparent in Canada, whose geographical proximity and common interests completely obliterate the effects of English political and social dominance. The American flat a has swept the whole country, and American slang is everywhere used; turn to any essay on Canadianisms, ^[1] and you will find that nine-tenths of them are simply Americanisms. No doubt this is chiefly due to the fact that the Canadian newspapers are all supplied with news by the American press associations, and thus fall inevitably into the habit of discussing it in American terms. “The great factor that makes us write and speak alike,” says a recent writer on American speech habits, ^[2] “is the indefinite multiplication of the instantaneous uniformity of the American daily, … due to a non-sectional, continental exchange of news through the agency of the various press associations.” In this exchange Canada shares fully. Its people may think as Britons, but they must perforce think in American.

More remarkable is the influence that American has exerted upon the speech of Australia and upon the crude dialects of Oceanica and the Far East. One finds such obvious Americanisms as tomahawk, boss, bush, go finish (=to die) and pickaninny in Beach-la-Mar ^[3] and more of them in Pidgin English. The common trade speech of the whole Pacific, indeed, tends to become American rather than English. An American correspondent at Oxford sends me some curious testimony to the fact. Among the Britishers he met there was one student who showed an amazing familiarity with American words and phrases. The American, asking him where he had lived in the United States, was surprised to hear that he had never been here at all. All his Americanisms had been picked up during his youth in a Chinese sea-port, where his father was the British Consul. The English of Australia, though it is Cockney in pronunciation and intonation, ^[4] becomes increasingly American in vocabulary. In a glossary of Australianisms compiled by the Australian author, C. J. Dennis, ^[5] I find the familiar verbs and verb-phrases, to beef, to biff, to bluff, to boss, to break away, to chase one’s self, to chew the rag, to chip in, to fade away, to get it in the neck, to back and fill, to plug along, to get sore, to turn down and to get wise; the substantives, dope, boss, fake, creek, knockout-drops and push (in the sense of crowd); the adjectives, hitched (in the sense of married) and tough (as before luck), and the adverbial phrases, for keeps and going strong. Here, in direct competition with English locutions, and with all the advantages on the side of the latter, American is making steady progress. Moreover, the Australians, ^[6] following the Americans, have completely obliterated several old niceties of speech that survive in England—for example, the distinction between will and shall. “An Australian,” says a recent writer, ^[7] “uses the phrase I shall about as often as he uses the accusative whom. Usually he says I will or I’ll; and the expectant we shall see is the only ordinary shall locution which I can call to mind.” But perhaps it is Irish influence that is visible here, and not American.

“This American language,” says a recent observer, “seems to be much more of a pusher than the English. For instance, after eight years’ occupancy of the Philippines it was spoken by 800,000, or 10 per cent, of the natives, while after an occupancy of 150 years of India by the British, 3,000,000, or one per cent, of the natives speak English.” ^[8] I do not vouch for the figures. They may be inaccurate, in detail, but they at least state what seems to be a fact. Behind that fact are phenomena which certainly deserve careful study, and, above all, study divested of unintelligent prejudice. The attempt to make American uniform with English has failed ingloriously; the neglect of its investigation is an evidence of snobbishness that is a folly of the same sort. It is useless to dismiss the growing peculiarities of the American vocabulary and of grammar and syntax in the common speech as vulgarisms beneath serious notice. Such vulgarisms have a way of intrenching themselves, and gathering dignity as they grow familiar. “There are but few forms in use,” says Lounsbury, “which, judged by a standard previously existing, would not be regarded as gross barbarisms.” ^[9] Each language, in such matters, is a law unto itself, and each vigorous dialect, particularly if it be spoken by millions, is a law no less. “It would be as wrong,” says Sayce, “to use thou for the nominative thee in the Somersetshire dialect as it is to say thee art instead of you are in the Queen’s English.” American has suffered severely from the effort to impose an impossible artificiality upon it, but it has survived the process, and soon or late there must be a formal abandonment of the pedagogical effort to bring it into agreement with Southern English. “It has had held up to it,” says Prof. Ayres, “silly ideals, impossible ideals, ignorant dogmatisms, and for the most part it wisely repudiates them all.” ^[10] The American Academy of Arts and Letters still pleads for these silly ideals and ignorant dogmatisms, and the more stupid sort of schoolmasters echo the plea, but meanwhile American goes its way. In England its progress is not unmarked. Dr. Robert Bridges and the Society for Pure English seek to bring about the precise change in standard English that American shows spontaneously. Maybe the end will be two dialects—standard English for pedants, and American for the world.

As yet, American suffers from the lack of a poet bold enough to venture into it, as Chaucer ventured into the despised English of his day, and Dante into the Tuscan dialect, and Luther, in his translation of the Bible, into peasant German. Walt Whitman made a half attempt and then drew back; Lowell, perhaps, also heard the call, but too soon; in our own time, young Mr. Weaver has shown what may be done tomorrow, and Carl Sandburg has also made experiments. The Irish dialect of English, vastly less important than the American, has already had its interpreters—Douglas Hyde, John Millington Synge and Augusta Gregory—with what extraordinary results we all know. ^[11] Here we have writing that is still indubitably English, but English rid of its artificial restraints and broken to the less self-conscious grammar and syntax of a simple and untutored folk. Synge, in his preface to “The Playboy of the Western World,” tells us how he got his gipsy phrases “through a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen.” There is no doubt, he goes on, that “in the happy ages of literature striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the story-teller’s or the playwright’s hand as the rich cloaks and dresses of his time. It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink-horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children.”

The result, in the case of the neo-Celts, is a dialect that stands incomparably above the tight English of the grammarians—a dialect so naïve, so pliant, so expressive, and, adeptly managed, so beautiful that even purists have begun to succumb to it, and it promises to leave lasting marks upon English style. The American dialect has not yet come to that stage. In so far as it is apprehended at all it is only in the sense that Irish-English was apprehended a generation ago—that is, as something uncouth and comic. But that is the way that new dialects always come in—through a drum-fire of cackles. Given the poet, there may suddenly come a day when our theirns and would’a hads will take on the barbaric stateliness of the peasant locutions of old Maurya in “Riders to the Sea.” They seem grotesque and absurd today because the folks who use them seem grotesque and absurd. But that is a too facile logic and under it is a false assumption. In all human beings, if only understanding be brought to the business, dignity will be found, and that dignity cannot fail to reveal itself, soon or late, in the words and phrases with which they make known their high hopes and aspirations and cry out against the intolerable meaninglessness of life.

Notes

1. For example, Geikie’s or Lighthall’s. See the Bibliography.
2. Harvey M. Watts: Need of Good English Growing as World Turns to Its Use, New York Sun, Nov. 19, 1919.
3. Cf. Beach-la-Mar, by William Churchill, former United States consul-general in Samoa and Tonga. The pamphlet is published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
4. Cf. The Australian Accent, Triad (Sydney), Nov. 10, 1920, p. 37.
5. It is in Doreen and the Sentimental Bloke; New York, 1916.
6. It is a pity that American has not borrowed the Australian invention wowser. Says a writer in the Manchester Guardian: “Wowser, whether used as an adjective or a substantive, covers everyone and everything that is out of sympathy with what some people consider la joie de vivre. A wowser, as a person, is one who desires to close public-houses, prevent shouting (Australese for treating), and so on—in short, one who intends to limit the opportunities ‘of all professions that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.’ ” In the United States fully 99 per cent of all the world’s wowsers rage and roar, and yet we have no simple word to designate them.
7. English, Sept., 1919, p. 167.
8. The American Language, by J. F. Healy; Pittsburgh, 1910, p. 6.
9. History of the English Language, p. 476.
10. Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. iv, p. 566.
11. The Sicilian dialect of Italian has been brought to dignity in the same way by Giovanni Verga, author of the well-known Cavalleria Rusticana. See Giovanni Verga and the Sicilian Novel, by Carlo Linati, Dial, Aug., 1921, p. 150 ff.