The American Language
A glance through the /Congressional Record/ is sufficient to show how
small is the minority of purists among the chosen leaders of the
nation. Within half an hour, turning the pages at random, I find scores
of locutions that would paralyze the stenographers in the House of
Commons, and they are in the speeches, not of wild mavericks from the
West, but of some of the chief men of the two Houses. Surely no Senator
occupied a more conspicuous [Pg142] position, during the first year of
the war, than Lee S. Overman, of North Carolina, chairman of the
Committee on Rules, and commander of the administration forces on the
floor. Well, I find Senator Overman using /to enthuse/ in a speech of
the utmost seriousness and importance, and not once, but over and over
again.[15] I turn back a few pages and encounter it again--this time in
the mouth of General Sherwood, of Ohio. A few more, and I find a fit
match for it, to wit, /to biograph/.[16] The speaker here is Senator L.
Y. Sherman, of Illinois. In the same speech he uses /to resolute/. A
few more, and various other characteristic verbs are unearthed: /to
demagogue/,[17] /to dope out/[18] /to fall down/[19] (in the sense of
to fail), /to jack up/,[20] /to phone/,[21] /to peeve/,[22] /to come
across/,[23] /to hike/, /to butt in/,[24] /to back pedal/, /to get
solid with/, /to hooverize/, /to trustify/, /to feature/, /to insurge/,
/to haze/, /to reminisce/, /to camouflage/, /to play for a sucker/, and
so on, almost /ad infinitum/. And with them, a large number of highly
American nouns, chiefly compounds, all pressing upward for recognition:
/tin-Lizzie/, /brain-storm/, /come-down/, /pin-head/, /trustification/,
/pork-barrel/, /buck-private/, /dough-boy/, /cow-country/. And
adjectives: /jitney/, /bush/ (for rural), /balled-up/,[25] /dolled-up/,
/phoney/, /tax-paid/.[26] And phrases: /dollars to doughnuts/, /on the
job/, /that gets me/, /one best bet/. And back-formations: /ad/,
/movie/, /photo/. And [Pg143] various substitutions and Americanized
inflections: /over/ for /more than/, /gotten/ for /got/ in the present
perfect,[27] /rile/ for /roil/, /bust/ for /burst/. This last, in
truth, has come into a dignity that even grammarians will soon hesitate
to question. Who, in America, would dare to speak of /bursting/ a
broncho, or of a /trust-burster/?[28]
§ 3
/Lost Distinctions/--This general iconoclasm reveals itself especially
in a disdain for most of the niceties of modern English. The American,
like the Elizabethan Englishman, is usually quite unconscious of them
and even when they have been instilled into him by the hard labor of
pedagogues he commonly pays little heed to them in his ordinary
discourse. The English distinction between /will/ and /shall/ offers a
salient case in point. This distinction, it may be said at once, is
far more a confection of the grammarians than a product of the natural
forces shaping the language. It has, indeed, little etymological
basis, and is but imperfectly justified logically. One finds it
disregarded in the Authorized Version of the Bible, in all the plays
of Shakespeare, in the essays of the reign of Anne, and in some of the
best examples of modern English literature. The theory behind it is so
inordinately abstruse that the Fowlers, in "The King's English,"[29]
require 20 pages to explain it, and even then they come to the
resigned conclusion that the task is hopeless. "The idiomatic use [of
the two auxiliaries]," they say, "is so complicated that those who are
not to the manner born can hardly acquire it."[30] Well, even those
who are to the manner born seem to find [Pg144] it difficult, for at
once the learned authors cite blunder in the writings of Richardson,
Stevenson, Gladstone, Jowett, Oscar Wilde, and even Henry Sweet,
author of the best existing grammar of the English language. In
American the distinction is almost lost. No ordinary American, save
after the most laborious reflection, would detect anything wrong in
this sentence from the /London Times/, denounced as corrupt by the
Fowlers: "We must reconcile what we would like to do with what we can
do." Nor in this by W. B. Yeats: "The character who delights us may
commit murder like Macbeth ... and yet we will rejoice in every
happiness that comes to him." Half a century ago, impatient of the
effort to fasten the English distinction upon American, George P.
Marsh attacked it as of "no logical value or significance whatever,"
and predicted that "at no very distant day this verbal quibble will
disappear, and one of the auxiliaries will be employed, with all
persons of the nominative, exclusively as the sign of the future, and
the other only as an expression of purpose or authority."[31] This
prophecy has been substantially verified. /Will/ is sound American
"with all persons of the nominative," and /shall/ is almost invariably
an "expression of purpose or authority."[32]
And so, though perhaps not to the same extent, with /who/ and /whom/.
Now and then there arises a sort of panicky feeling that /whom/ is
being neglected, and so it is trotted out,[33] but in the [Pg145]
main the American language tends to dispense with it, at least in its
least graceful situations. Noah Webster, always the pragmatic
reformer, denounced it so long ago as 1783. Common sense, he argued,
was on the side of "/who/ did he marry?" Today such a form as "/whom/
are you talking to?" would seem somewhat affected in ordinary
discourse in America; "/who/ are you talking to?" is heard a thousand
times oftener--and is doubly American, for it substitutes /who/ for
/whom/ and puts a preposition at the end of a sentence: two crimes
that most English purists would seek to avoid. It is among the
pronouns that the only remaining case inflections in English are to be
found, if we forget the possessive, and even here these survivors of
an earlier day begin to grow insecure. Lounsbury's defense of "it is
/me/,"[34] as we shall see in the next chapter, has support in the
history and natural movement of the language, and that movement is
also against the preservation of the distinction between /who/ and
/whom/. The common speech plays hob with both of the orthodox
inflections, despite the protests of grammarians, and in the long run,
no doubt, they will be forced to yield to its pressure, as they have
always yielded in the past. Between the dative and accusative on the
one side and the nominative on the other there has been war in the
English language for centuries, and it has always tended to become a
war of extermination. Our now universal use of /you/ for /ye/ in the
nominative shows the dative and accusative swallowing the nominative,
and the practical disappearance of /hither/, /thither/ and /whither/,
whose place is now taken by /here/, /there/ and /where/, shows a
contrary process. In such wars a /posse comitatus/ marches ahead of
the disciplined army. American stands to English in the relation of
that posse to that army. It is incomparably more enterprising, more
contemptuous of precedent and authority, more impatient of rule.
A shadowy line often separates what is currently coming into sound
usage from what is still regarded as barbarous. No self-respecting
American, I daresay, would defend /ain't/ as a substitute [Pg146] for
/isn't/, say in "he /ain't/ the man," and yet /ain't/ is already
tolerably respectable in the first person, where English countenances
the even more clumsy /aren't/. /Aren't/ has never got a foothold in
the American first person; when it is used at all, which is very
rarely, it is always as a conscious Briticism. Facing the alternative
of employing the unwieldy "am I not in this?" the American turns
boldly to "/ain't/ I in this?" It still grates a bit, perhaps, but
/aren't/ grates even more. Here, as always, the popular speech is
pulling the exacter speech along, and no one familiar with its
successes in the past can have much doubt that it will succeed again,
soon or late. In the same way it is breaking down the inflectional
distinction between adverb and adjective, so that "I feel /bad/"
begins to take on the dignity of a national idiom, and /sure/, /to go
big/ and /run slow/[35] become almost respectable. When, on the
entrance of the United States into the war, the Marine Corps chose
"treat 'em /rough/" as its motto, no one thought to raise a
grammatical objection, and the clipped adverb was printed upon
hundreds of thousands of posters and displayed in every town in the
country, always with the imprimatur of the national government. So,
again, American, in its spoken form, tends to obliterate the
distinction between nearly related adjectives, /e. g./, /healthful/
and /healthy/, /tasteful/ and /tasty/. And to challenge the somewhat
absurd text-book prohibition of terminal prepositions, so that "where
are we /at/?" loses its old raciness. And to dally with the double
negative, as in "I have no doubt /but/ that."[36]
But these tendencies, or at least the more extravagant of them, belong
to the next chapter. How much influence they exert, even [Pg147]
indirectly, is shown by the American disdain of the English precision
in the use of the indefinite pronoun. I turn to the /Saturday Evening
Post/, and in two minutes find: "/one/ feels like an atom when /he/
begins to review /his/ own life and deeds."[37] The error is very rare
in English; the Fowlers, seeking examples of it, could get them only
from the writings of a third-rate woman novelist, Scotch to boot. But
it is so common in American that it scarcely attracts notice. Neither
does the appearance of a redundant /s/ in such words as /towards/,
/downwards/, /afterwards/ and /heavenwards/. In England this /s/ is
used relatively seldom, and then it usually marks a distinction in
meaning, as it does on both sides of the ocean between /beside/ and
/besides/. "In modern standard English," says Smith,[38] "though not
in the English of the United States, a distinction which we feel, but
many of us could not define, is made between /forward/ and /forwards/;
/forwards/ being used in definite contrast to any other direction, as
'if you move at all, you can only move /forwards/,' while /forward/ is
used where no such contrast is implied, as in the common phrase 'to
bring a matter forward.'"[39] This specific distinction, despite
Smith, probably retains some force in the United States too, but in
general our usage allows the /s/ in cases where English usage would
certainly be against it. Gould, in the 50's, noted its appearance at
the end of such words as /somewhere/ and /anyway/, and denounced it as
vulgar and illogical. Thornton has traced /anyways/ back to 1842 and
shown that it is an archaism, and to be found in the Book of Common
Prayer (/circa/ 1560); perhaps it has been preserved by analogy with
/sideways/. Henry James, in "The Question of Our Speech," attacked
"such forms of impunity as /somewheres else/ and /nowheres else/, /a
good ways on/ and /a good ways off/" as "vulgarisms with what a great
deal of general credit for what we good-naturedly call 'refinement'
appears so able to coexist."[40] /Towards/ and /afterwards/, though
frowned upon in England, are now quite sound in American. I [Pg148]
find the former in the title of an article in /Dialect Notes/, which
plainly gives it scholastic authority.[41] More (and with no little
humor), I find it in the deed of a fund given to the American Academy
of Arts and Letters to enable the gifted philologs of that sanhedrin
"to consider its duty /towards/ the conservation of the English
language in its beauty and purity."[42] Both /towards/ and
/afterwards/, finally, are included in the /New York Evening Post's/
list of "words no longer disapproved when in their proper places,"
along with /over/ for /more than/, and /during/ for /in the course
of/.