The American Language (1923)/Preface to Third Edition
This edition, like the second, has been extensively revised. I have added new material to nearly every chapter, and all of them have been diligently scrutinized for errors. In detecting those errors I have been greatly aided by the fact that the second edition was published in both the United States and England. One of the consequences thereof was that it was reviewed at length in the English press, and that my necessarily imperfect acquaintance with current English usages was improved by the observations of men on the spot. The result is visible in the chapter on "American and English Today," which, I hope, is measurably sounder than it was in the second edition. But even here there are still regions in which doubt prevails. So many Americanisms have gone over into standard English of late that Englishmen tend to lose the sense of their foreignness. For example, consider the word homely, in its American sense of unbeautiful. The latest English guide-book for visiting Americans (Muirhead's "London and Its Environs," 1922, p. 10) gives specific warning that homely means "domestic, unpretending, home-like" in England, and that it is "seldom if ever" used as a synonym for plain-looking. Moreover, Dean W. R. Inge, in an article in the London Evening Standard (November 24, 1921), has cited it as one of five important words whose meanings differ in the two countries. Nevertheless, a number of English reviewers objected to my attempt to distinguish between the American homely and the English homely, and insisted that the former was in universal use in England. In the face of such conflicts of evidence it is difficult to get at the truth. In many cases I have evaded the matter by omitting the word in dispute. But in other cases, despite indications of its transplantation to England, I have continued to regard it as an Americanism, though always noting that transplantation.
Since my second edition was published there have been various evidences of a growing interest in the development of the English language in the United States.
For one thing, the Society for Pure English, organized in England in 1913 with the Poet Laureate at its head, has extended its activities to this country, and now has an American secretary, Dr. Henry Seidel Canby. The ostensible aim of the society is to improve standard English by importing words and idioms into it from the English dialects, including the American, and by restoring to it that bold and enterprising habit which marked it in Elizabethan days, but is now chiefly confined, as I try to show in the pages which follow, to what the London Times has called Amerenglish. This aim, I believe, is honestly cherished by the Poet Laureate, Dr. Bridges, as his writings on the subject sufficiently demonstrate, but I am inclined to think that many of his American collaborators are rather intent upon an enterprise no more novel or intelligent than that of augmenting the authority of standard English in America. That is to say, they are simply Anglomaniacs. This is certainly true, for example, of Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, the expatriated American who is honorary secretary of the society, and of Dr. Brander Matthews, the principal American contributor to its tracts. The curious case of Dr. Matthews is dealt with at various places in the chapters following. Like his employer, Adolph S. Ochs, of the New York Times, Dr. Matthews is so ardent an advocate of Anglo-American unity, with England as the lordy husband and the United States as the dutiful and obedient wife, that he sees every effort to study the growing divergences, cultural, political and linguistic, between the two nations as no more than evidence of a sinister conspiracy of Bolsheviki, Germans, Irishmen and Jews. The English, of course, are not taken in by such nonsense. The Saturday Review, which is certainly not deficient in English spirit, lately declared that Dr. Matthews "minimizes the national differences in language to an absurd degree," and set down his curious notion that American novelists do not use Americanisms as "obviously a war hope, like hanging the Kaiser." But he is supported by various other Gelehrten of the Sunday supplement species, and, to some degree, by the National Council of Teachers of English. This organization of pedagogues, following the drive managers of the war time, conducts an annual Better Speech Week. The documents it issues offer but one more proof of the depressing fact that schoolmasters, at least in America, learn nothing and forget nothing. Its whole campaign seems to be centered upon an effort to protect the grammar books against the living speech of the American people.
As this edition goes to press, Dr. George Philip Krapp's large work, "The History of the English Language in America," has not yet been issued. Dr. Krapp, however, has politely permitted me to read his manuscript. His book presents an immense mass of material, and in the department of phonology most of that material is new. The complaint that I made in my first edition, that no adequate study of the development of American pronunciation existed, may be maintained no longer. But my discussions of the subject in the chapters which follow would be modified only in detail by the publication of Dr. Krapp's work, and so I have let them stand. It was my hope that some other American scholar would undertake a study of the grammar of vulgar American, hut so far this has not been done. Nor is there, as yet, any adequate investigation of American surnames, or of American slang. Perhaps Dr. Krapp's example will start work in these directions. Certainly it is absurd for American philologists to disdain, as they have in the past, the study of the national language. Judging by the communications that I have received from many of them—some, alas, rather waspish!--I incline to believe that the successive editions of the present work have broken down some of their old aloofness. Maybe the inquiries that I have suggested are being made even now.
The present edition is electrotyped, and I do not propose to make any changes in it for several years. The time and labor that I have put into it have kept me from other tasks that now press for execution. But soon or late, as fresh material accumulates, I'll probably go back to it. Meanwhile, I shall be grateful for any corrections or additions that are sent to me at my home, 1524 Hollins street, Baltimore. H. L. M.
1923.