The American Language
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
/Points of Difference/--These exchanges and coalescences, however,
though they invigorate each language with the blood of the other and
are often very striking in detail, are neither numerous enough nor
general enough to counteract the centrifugal force which pulls them
apart. The simple fact is that the spirit of English and the spirit of
American have been at odds for nearly a century, and that the way of
one is not the way of the other. The loan-words that fly to and fro,
when examined closely, are found to be few in number both relatively
and absolutely: they do not greatly affect the larger movements of the
two languages. Many of them, indeed, are little more than temporary
borrowings; they are not genuinely adopted, but merely momentarily
fashionable. The class of Englishmen which affects American phrases is
perhaps but little larger, taking one year with another, than the
class of Americans which affects English phrases. This last class, it
must be plain, is very small. Leave the large cities and you will have
difficulty finding any members of it. It is circumscribed, not because
there is any very formidable prejudice against English locutions as
such, [Pg139] but simply because recognizably English locutions, in a
good many cases, do not fit into the American language. The American
thinks in American and the Englishman in English, and it requires a
definite effort, usually but defectively successful, for either to put
his thoughts into the actual idiom of the other.
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.