The American Language
In the last chapter we glanced at several salient differences between
the common coin of English and the common coin of American--that is,
the verbs and adjectives in constant colloquial use--the
rubber-stamps, so to speak, of the two languages. America has two
adverbs that belong to the same category. They are /right/ and /good/.
Neither holds the same place in English. Thornton shows that the use
of /right/, as in /right away/, /right good/ and /right now/, was
already widespread in the United States early in the last century; his
first example is dated 1818. He believes that the locution was
"possibly imported from the southwest of Ireland." Whatever its
origin, it quickly attracted the attention of English visitors.
Dickens noted /right away/ as an almost universal Americanism during
his first American tour, in 1842, and poked fun at it in the second
chapter of "American Notes." /Right/ is used as a synonym for
/directly/, as in /right away/, /right off/, /right now/ and /right on
time/; for /moderately/, as in /right well/, /right smart/, /right
good/ and /right often/, and in place of /precisely/, as in /right
there/. Some time ago, in an article on Americanisms, an English
critic called it "that most distinctively American word," and
concocted the following dialogue to instruct the English in its use:
How do I get to----?
Go /right/ along, and take the first turning (/sic/) on the /right/,
and you are /right/ there.
/Right?/
/Right./
/Right!/[43]
Like W. L. George, this Englishman failed in his attempt to write
correct American despite his fine pedagogical passion. No American
would ever say "take the first turning"; he would say "turn at the
first corner." As for /right away/, R. O. Williams argues that "so far
as analogy can make good English, it is as good as one could
choose."[44] Nevertheless, the Oxford Dictionary admits it only as an
Americanism, and avoids all mention of the other American uses of
/right/ as an adverb. /Good/ is almost as protean. It is not only used
as a general synonym for all adjectives and adverbs connoting
satisfaction, as in /to feel good/, /to be treated good/, /to sleep
good/, but also as a reinforcement to other adjectives and adverbs, as
in "I hit him /good/ and hard" and "I am /good/ and tired." Of late
/some/ has come into wide use as an adjective-adverb of all work,
indicating special excellence or high degree, as in /some girl/, /some
sick/, /going some/, etc. It is still below the salt, but threatens to
reach a more respectable position. One encounters it in the newspapers
constantly and in the /Congressional Record/, and not long ago a
writer in the /Atlantic Monthly/[45] hymned it ecstatically as "/some/
word--a true super-word, in fact" and argued that it could be used "in
a sense for which there is absolutely no synonym in the dictionary."
Basically, it appears to be an adjective, but in many of its common
situations the grammarians would probably call it an adverb. It gives
no little support to the growing tendency, already noticed, to break
down the barrier between the two parts of speech.
§ 4
/Foreign Influences Today/--No other great nation of today supports so
large a foreign population as the United States, [Pg150] either
relatively or absolutely; none other contains so many foreigners
forced to an effort, often ignorant and ineffective, to master the
national language. Since 1820 nearly 35,000,000 immigrants have come
into the country, and of them probably not 10,000,000 brought any
preliminary acquaintance with English with them. The census of 1910
showed that nearly 1,500,000 persons then living permanently on
American soil could not speak it at all; that more than 13,000,000 had
been born in other countries, chiefly of different language; and that
nearly 20,000,000 were the children of such immigrants, and hence
under the influence of their speech habits. Altogether, there were
probably at least 25,000,000 whose house language was not the vulgate,
and who thus spoke it in competition with some other language. No
other country houses so many aliens. In Great Britain the alien
population, for a century past, has never been more than 2 per cent of
the total population, and since the passage of the Alien Act of 1905
it has tended to decline steadily. In Germany, in 1910, there were but
1,259,873 aliens in a population of more than 60,000,000, and of these
nearly a half were German-speaking Austrians and Swiss. In France, in
1906, there were 1,000,000 foreigners in a population of 39,000,000
and a third of them were French-speaking Belgians, Luxembourgeois and
Swiss. In Italy, in 1911, there were but 350,000 in a population of
35,000,000.
This large and constantly reinforced admixture of foreigners has
naturally exerted a constant pressure upon the national language, for
the majority of them, at least in the first generation, have found it
quite impossible to acquire it in any purity, and even their children
have grown up with speech habits differing radically from those of
correct English. The effects of this pressure are obviously two-fold;
on the one hand the foreigner, struggling with a strange and difficult
tongue, makes efforts to simplify it as much as possible, and so
strengthens the native tendency to disregard all niceties and
complexities, and on the other hand he corrupts it with words and
locutions from the language he has brought with him, and sometimes
with whole idioms and grammatical forms. We have seen, in earlier
chapters, how the [Pg151] Dutch and French of colonial days enriched
the vocabulary of the colonists, how the German immigrants of the
first half of the nineteenth century enriched it still further, and
how the Irish of the same period influenced its everyday usages. The
same process is still going on. The Italians, the Slavs, and, above
all, the Russian Jews, make steady contributions to the American
vocabulary and idiom, and though these contributions are often
concealed by quick and complete naturalization their foreignness to
English remains none the less obvious. /I should worry/,[46] in its
way, is correct English, but in essence it is as completely Yiddish as
/kosher/, /ganof/, /schadchen/, /oi-yoi/, /matzoh/ or /mazuma/.[47]
/Black-hand/, too, is English in form, but it is nevertheless as
plainly an Italian loan-word as /spaghetti/, /mafia/ or /padrone/.
The extent of such influences upon American, and particularly upon
spoken American, remains to be studied; in the whole literature I can
find but one formal article upon the subject. That article[48] deals
specifically with the suffix /-fest/, which came into American from
the German and was probably suggested by familiarity with
/sängerfest/. There is no mention of it in any of the dictionaries of
Americanisms, and yet, in such forms as /talk-fest/ and /gabfest/ it
is met with almost daily. So with /-heimer/, /-inski/ and /-bund/.
Several years ago /-heimer/ had a great vogue in slang, and was
rapidly done to death. But /wiseheimer/ remains [Pg152] in colloquial
use as a facetious synonym for /smart-aleck/, and after awhile it may
gradually acquire dignity. Far lowlier words, in fact, have worked
their way in. /Buttinski/, perhaps, is going the same route. As for
the words in /-bund/, many of them are already almost accepted.
/Plunder-bund/ is now at least as good as /pork-barrel/ and
/slush-fund/, and /money-bund/ is frequently heard in Congress.[49]
Such locutions creep in stealthily, and are secure before they are
suspected. Current slang, out of which the more decorous language
dredges a large part of its raw materials, is full of them. /Nix/ and
/nixy/, for /no/, are debased forms of the German /nichts/; /aber
nit/, once as popular as /camouflage/, is obviously /aber nicht/. And
a steady flow of nouns, all needed to designate objects introduced by
immigrants, enriches the vocabulary. The Hungarians not only brought
their national condiment with them; they also brought its name,
/paprika/, and that name is now thoroughly American.[50] In the same
way the Italians brought in /camorra/, /padrone/, /spaghetti/ and a
score of other substantives, and the Jews made contributions from
Yiddish and Hebrew and greatly reinforced certain old borrowings from
German. Once such a loan-word gets in it takes firm root. During the
first year of American participation in the World War an effort was
made, on patriotic grounds, to substitute /liberty-cabbage/ for
/sour-kraut/, but it quickly failed, for the name had become as
completely Americanized as the thing itself, and so /liberty-cabbage/
seemed affected and absurd. In the same way a great many other German
words survived the passions of the time. Nor could all the influence
of the professional patriots obliterate that German influence which
has fastened upon the American /yes/ something of the quality of /ja/.
Constant familiarity with such contributions from foreign languages
and with the general speech habits of foreign peoples has made
American a good deal more hospitable to loan-words than English, even
in the absence of special pressure. Let the same [Pg153] word knock
at the gates of the two languages, and American will admit it more
readily, and give it at once a wider and more intimate currency.
Examples are afforded by /café/, /vaudeville/, /employé/, /boulevard/,
/cabaret/, /toilette/, /exposé/, /kindergarten/, /dépôt/, /fête/ and
/menu/. /Café/, in American, is a word of much larger and more varied
meaning than in English and is used much more frequently, and by many
more persons. So is /employé/, in the naturalized form of /employee/.
So is /toilet/: we have even seen it as a euphemism for native terms
that otherwise would be in daily use. So is /kindergarten/: I read
lately of a /kindergarten/ for the elementary instruction of
conscripts. Such words are not unknown to the Englishman, but when he
uses them it is with a plain sense of their foreignness. In American
they are completely naturalized, as is shown by the spelling and
pronunciation of most of them. An American would no more think of
attempting the French pronunciation of /depot/ or of putting the
French accents upon it than he would think of spelling /toilet/ with
the final /te/ or of essaying to pronounce /Anheuser/ in the German
manner. Often curious battles go on between such loan-words and their
English equivalents, and with varying fortunes. In 1895 Weber and
Fields tried to establish /music-hall/ in New York, but it quickly
succumbed to /vaudeville-theatre/, as /variety/ had succumbed to
/vaudeville/ before it. In the same way /lawn-fete/ (without the
circumflex accent, and commonly pronounced /feet/) has elbowed out the
English /garden-party/. But now and then, when the competing loan-word
happens to violate American speech habits, a native term ousts it. The
French /crèche/ offers an example; it has been entirely displaced by
/day-nursery/.
The English, in this matter, display their greater conservatism very
plainly. Even when a loan-word enters both English and American
simultaneously a sense of foreignness lingers about it on the other
side of the Atlantic much longer than on this side, and it is used
with far more self-consciousness. The word /matinée/ offers a
convenient example. To this day the English commonly print it in
italics, give it its French accent, and pronounce it with some attempt
at the French manner. But in America it is entirely naturalized, and
the most ignorant man [Pg154] uses it without any feeling that it is
strange. The same lack of any sense of linguistic integrity is to be
noticed in many other directions--for example, in the freedom with
which the Latin /per/ is used with native nouns. One constantly sees