The American Language
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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
Original spelling and grammar has mostly been retained. Many
inconsistencies in the use of hyphens and character accents have been
retained; some of these were probably intentional. Footnotes were
moved to the ends of chapters. The original pagination of this 1919
edition is shown in square brackets, e.g. [Pg009]. There are an awful
lot of italics in this book. In this simple text version, /italics are
marked with the solidus/. Text that was originally small caps is
shown in uppercase.
Further details are provided in the TRANSCRIBER ENDNOTE.
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
OF THE FIRST EDITION OF
THIS BOOK FIFTEEN HUNDRED
COPIES HAVE BEEN PRINTED
AND THE TYPE DISTRIBUTED
THIS IS NUMBER 1434
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
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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
1. The Diverging Streams, 1
2. The Academic Attitude, 4
3. The View of Writing Men, 12
4. Foreign Observers, 18
5. The Characters of American, 19
6. The Materials of American, 29
II. THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN, 36
1. In Colonial Days, 36
2. Sources of Early Americanisms, 40
3. New Words of English Material, 44
4. Changed Meanings, 51
5. Archaic English Words, 54
6. Colonial Pronunciation, 58
III. THE PERIOD OF GROWTH, 63
1. The New Nation, 63
2. The Language in the Making, 72
3. The Expanding Vocabulary, 76
4. Loan-Words, 86
5. Pronunciation, 94
IV. AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY, 97
1. The Two Vocabularies, 97
2. Differences in Usage, 102
3. Honorifics, 117
4. Euphemisms and Forbidden Words, 124
V. TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN, 131
1. International Exchanges, 131
2. Points of Difference, 138
3. Lost Distinctions, 143
4. Foreign Influences Today, 149
5. Processes of Word Formation, 159
6. Pronunciation, 166
VI. THE COMMON SPEECH, 177
1. Grammarians and Their Ways, 177
2. Spoken American As It Is, 184
3. The Verb, 192
4. The Pronoun, 212
5. The Adverb, 226
6. The Noun and Adjective, 229
7. The Double Negative, 231
8. Pronunciation, 234
VII. DIFFERENCES IN SPELLING, 242
1. Typical Forms, 242
2. General Tendencies, 245
3. The Influence of Webster, 247
4. Exchanges, 255
5. Simplified Spelling, 261
6. Minor Differences, 264
VIII. PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA, 268
1. Surnames, 268
2. Given Names, 283
3. Geographical Names, 286
4. Street Names, 298
IX. MISCELLANEA, 301
1. Proverb and Platitude, 301
2. American Slang, 304
3. The Future of the Language, 312
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 323
LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES, 340
GENERAL INDEX, 368
[Pg001]
I
By Way of Introduction
§ 1
/The Diverging Streams/--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