The American Language
The same caveat lies against the work of the later makers of
dictionaries; they have gone ahead of common usage in the matter of
orthography, but they have hung back in the far more important matter
of vocabulary, and have neglected the most important matter of idiom
altogether. The defect in the work of the Dialect Society lies in a
somewhat similar circumscription of activity. Its constitution,
adopted in 1889, says that "its object is the investigation of the
spoken English of the United States and Canada," but that
investigation, so far, has got little beyond the accumulation of
vocabularies of local dialects, such as they are. Even in this
department its work is very far from finished, and the Dialect
Dictionary announced years ago has not yet appeared. Until its
collections are completed and synchronized, it will be impossible for
its members to make any profitable inquiry into the general laws
underlying the development of American, or even to attempt a
classification of the materials common to the whole speech. The
meagreness of the materials accumulated in the five slow-moving
volumes of /Dialect Notes/ shows clearly, indeed, how little the
American philologist is [Pg008] interested in the language that falls
upon his ears every hour of the day. And in /Modern Language Notes/
that impression is reinforced, for its bulky volumes contain
exhaustive studies of all the other living languages and dialects, but
only an occasional essay upon American.
Now add to this general indifference a persistent and often violent
effort to oppose any formal differentiation of English and American,
initiated by English purists but heartily supported by various
Americans, and you come, perhaps, to some understanding of the
unsatisfactory state of the literature of the subject. The pioneer
dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1816 by John Pickering, a
Massachusetts lawyer,[11] was not only criticized unkindly; it was
roundly denounced as something subtly impertinent and corrupting, and
even Noah Webster took a formidable fling at it.[12] Most of the
American philologists of the early days--Witherspoon, Worcester,
Fowler, Cobb and their like--were uncompromising advocates of
conformity, and combatted every indication of a national independence
in speech with the utmost vigilance. One of their company, true
enough, stood out against the rest. He was George Perkins Marsh, and
in his "Lectures on the English Language"[13] he argued that "in point
of naked syntactical accuracy, the English of America is not at all
inferior to that of England." But even Marsh expressed the hope that
Americans would not, "with malice prepense, go about to republicanize
our orthography and our syntax, our grammars and our dictionaries, our
nursery hymns (/sic/) and our Bibles" to the point of actual
separation.[14] Moreover, he was a philologist only by courtesy; the
regularly ordained school-masters were all against him. The fear
voiced by William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, that
Americans might "break loose from the laws of the English
language"[15] altogether, was [Pg009] echoed by the whole fraternity,
and so the corrective bastinado was laid on.
It remained, however, for two professors of a later day to launch the
doctrine that the independent growth of American was not only immoral,
but a sheer illusion. They were Richard Grant White, for long the
leading American writer upon language questions, at least in popular
esteem, and Thomas S. Lounsbury, for thirty-five years professor of
the English language and literature in the Sheffield Scientific School
at Yale, and an indefatigable controversialist. Both men were of the
utmost industry in research, and both had wide audiences. White's
"Words and Their Uses," published in 1872, was a mine of erudition,
and his "Everyday English," following eight years later, was another.
True enough, Fitzedward Hall, the Anglo-Indian-American philologist,
disposed of many of his etymologies and otherwise did execution upon
him,[16] but in the main his contentions held water. Lounsbury was
also an adept and favorite expositor. His attacks upon certain
familiar pedantries of the grammarians were penetrating and effective,
and his two books, "The Standard of Usage in English" and "The
Standard of Pronunciation in English," not to mention his excellent
"History of the English Language" and his numerous magazine articles,
showed a profound knowledge of the early development of the language,
and an admirable spirit of free inquiry. But both of these laborious
scholars, when they turned from English proper to American English,
displayed an unaccountable desire to deny its existence altogether,
and to the support of that denial they brought a critical method that
was anything but unprejudiced. White devoted not less than eight long
articles in the /Atlantic Monthly/[17] to a review of the fourth
edition of John [Pg010] Russell Bartlett's American Glossary,[18] and
when he came to the end he had disposed of nine-tenths of Bartlett's
specimens and called into question the authenticity of at least half
of what remained. And no wonder, for his method was simply that of
erecting tests so difficult and so arbitrary that only the exceptional
word or phrase could pass them, and then only by a sort of chance. "To
stamp a word or a phrase as an Americanism," he said, "it is necessary
to show that (1) it is of so-called 'American' origin--that is, that
it first came into use in the United States of North America, or that
(2) it has been adopted in those States from some language other than
English, or has been kept in use there while it has /wholly/ passed
out of use in England." Going further, he argued that unless "the
simple words in compound names" were used in America "in a sense
different from that in which they are used in England" the compound
itself could not be regarded as an Americanism. The absurdity of all
this is apparent when it is remembered that one of his rules would bar
out such obvious Americanisms as the use of /sick/ in place of /ill/,
of /molasses/ for /treacle/, and of /fall/ for /autumn/, for all of
these words, while archaic in England, are by no means wholly extinct;
and that another would dispose of that vast category of compounds
which includes such unmistakably characteristic Americanisms as
/joy-ride/, /rake-off/, /show-down/, /up-lift/, /out-house/,
/rubber-neck/, /chair-warmer/, /fire-eater/ and /back-talk/.
Lounsbury went even further. In the course of a series of articles in
/Harper's Magazine/, in 1913,[19] he laid down the dogma that
"cultivated speech ... affords the only legitimate basis of comparison
between the language as used in England and in America," and then went
on:
In the only really proper sense of the term, an Americanism is a word
or phrase naturally used by an educated American which under similar
conditions would not be used by an educated Englishman. The emphasis,
it will be seen, lies in the word "educated."
This curious criterion, fantastic as it must have seemed to [Pg011]
European philologists, was presently reinforced, for in his fourth
article Lounsbury announced that his discussion was "restricted to the
/written/ speech of educated men." The result, of course, was a
wholesale slaughter of Americanisms. If it was not impossible to
reject a word, like White, on the ground that some stray English poet
or other had once used it, it was almost always possible to reject it
on the ground that it was not admitted into the vocabulary of a
college professor when he sat down to compose formal book-English.
What remained was a small company, indeed--and almost the whole field
of American idiom and American grammar, so full of interest for the
less austere explorer, was closed without even a peek into it.
White and Lounsbury dominated the arena and fixed the fashion. The
later national experts upon the national language, with a few somewhat
timorous exceptions, pass over its peculiarities without noticing
them. So far as I can discover, there is not a single treatise in type
upon one of its most salient characters--the wide departure of some of
its vowel sounds from those of orthodox English. Marsh, C. H.
Grandgent and Robert J. Menner have printed a number of valuable
essays upon the subject, but there is no work that co-ordinates their
inquiries or that attempts otherwise to cover the field. When, in
preparing materials for the following chapters, I sought to determine
the history of the /a/-sound in America, I found it necessary to plow
through scores of ancient spelling-books, and to make deductions,
perhaps sometimes rather rash, from the works of Franklin, Webster and
Cobb. Of late the National Council of Teachers of English has
appointed a Committee on American Speech and sought to let some light
into the matter, but as yet its labors are barely begun and the
publications of its members get little beyond preliminaries. Such an
inquiry involves a laboriousness which should have intrigued
Lounsbury: he once counted the number of times the word /female/
appears in "Vanity Fair." But you will find only a feeble dealing with
the question in his book on pronunciation. Nor is there any adequate
work (for Schele de Vere's is full of errors and omissions) upon the
influences felt by American through contact with the languages of our
millions [Pg012] of immigrants, nor upon our peculiarly rich and
characteristic slang. There are several excellent dictionaries of
English slang, and many more of French slang, but I have been able to
find but one devoted exclusively to American slang, and that one is a
very bad one.
§ 3
/The View of Writing Men/--But though the native /Gelehrten/ thus
neglect the vernacular, or even oppose its study, it has been the
object of earnest lay attention since an early day, and that attention
has borne fruit in a considerable accumulation of materials, if not in
any very accurate working out of its origins and principles. The
English, too, have given attention to it--often, alas, satirically, or
even indignantly. For a long while, as we shall see, they sought to
stem its differentiation by heavy denunciations of its vagaries, and
so late as the period of the Civil War they attached to it that
quality of abhorrent barbarism which they saw as the chief mark of the
American people. But in later years they have viewed it with a greater
showing of scientific calm, and its definite separation from correct
English, at least as a spoken tongue, is now quite frankly admitted.
The Cambridge History of English Literature, for example, says that
English and American are now "notably dissimilar" in vocabulary, and
that the latter is splitting off into a distinct dialect.[20] The
Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, going further, says
that the two languages are already so far apart that "it is not
uncommon to meet with [American] newspaper articles of which an
untravelled Englishman would hardly be able to understand a
sentence."[21] A great many other academic authorities, including A.
H. Sayce and H. W. and F. G. Fowler, bear testimony to the same
effect.
On turning to the men actually engaged in writing English, and
particularly to those aspiring to an American audience, one finds
nearly all of them adverting, at some time or other, to the growing
difficulties of intercommunication. William Archer, [Pg013] Arnold
Bennett, H. G. Wells, Sidney Low, the Chestertons and Kipling are some
of those who have dealt with the matter at length. Low, in an article
in the /Westminster Gazette/[22] ironically headed "Ought American to
be Taught in our Schools?" has described how the latter-day British
business man is "puzzled by his ignorance of colloquial American" and