The American Language
to and try to imitate all the rest of his life.
So far as I can discover, there has been but one attempt by a
competent authority to determine the special characters of this
general tongue of the /mobile vulgus/. That authority is Dr. W. W.
Charters, now head of the School of Education at the University of
Illinois. In 1914 Dr. Charters was dean of the faculty of education
and professor of the theory of teaching in the University of Missouri,
and one of the problems he was engaged upon was that of the teaching
of grammar. In the course of this study he encountered the theory that
such instruction should be confined to the rules habitually
violated--that the one aim of teaching grammar was to correct the
speech of the pupils, and that it was useless to harass them with
principles which they already instinctively observed. Apparently
inclining to this somewhat dubious notion, Dr. Charters applied to the
School Board of Kansas City for permission to undertake an examination
of the language actually used by the children in the elementary
schools of that city, and this permission was granted. The materials
thereupon gathered were of two classes. First, the teachers of grades
III to VII inclusive in all the Kansas City public-schools were
instructed to turn over to Dr. Charters all the written work of their
pupils, "ordinarily done in the regular order of school work" during a
period of four weeks. Secondly, the teachers of grades II to VII
inclusive were instructed to make note of "all oral errors in grammar
made in the school-room and around the school-building" during the
five school-days of one week, by children of any age, and to dispatch
these notes to Dr. Charters also. The result was an accumulation of
material so huge that it was unworkable with the means at hand, and so
the investigator and his assistants reduced it. Of the oral reports,
two studies were made, the first of those from grades III and VII and
the second of those from grades VI and VII. Of the written reports,
only those from grades VI and VII of twelve typical schools were
examined.
The ages thus covered ran from nine or ten to fourteen or fifteen, and
perhaps five-sixths of the material studied came from [Pg188]
children above twelve. Its examination threw a brilliant light upon
the speech actually employed by children near the end of their
schooling in a typical American city, and, /per corollary/, upon the
speech employed by their parents and other older associates. If
anything, the grammatical and syntactical habits revealed were a bit
less loose than those of the authentic /Volkssprache/, for practically
all of the written evidence was gathered under conditions which
naturally caused the writers to try to write what they conceived to be
correct English, and even the oral evidence was conditioned by the
admonitory presence of the teachers. Moreover, it must be obvious that
a child of the lower classes, during the period of its actual study of
grammar, probably speaks better English than at any time before or
afterward, for it is only then that any positive pressure is exerted
upon it to that end. But even so, the departures from standard usage
that were unearthed were numerous and striking, and their tendency to
accumulate in definite groups showed plainly the working of general
laws.[17]
Thus, no less than 57 per cent of the oral errors reported by the
teachers of grades III and VII involved the use of the verb, and
nearly half of these, or 24 per cent, of the total, involved a
confusion of the past tense form and the perfect participle. Again,
double negatives constituted 11 per cent of the errors, and the misuse
of adjectives or of adjectival forms for adverbs ran to 4 per cent.
Finally, the difficulties of the objective case among the pronouns,
the last stronghold of that case in English, were responsible for 7
per cent, thus demonstrating a clear tendency to get rid of it
altogether. Now compare the errors of these children, half of whom, as
I have just said, were in grade III, and hence wholly uninstructed in
formal grammar, with the errors made by children of the second oral
group--that is, children of grades VI and VII, in both of which
grammar is studied. Dr. Charters' tabulations show scarcely any
difference in the [Pg189] character and relative rank of the errors
discovered. Those in the use of the verb drop from 57 per cent of the
total to 52 per cent, but the double negatives remain at 7 per cent
and the errors in the case of pronouns at 11 per cent.
In the written work of grades VI and VII, however, certain changes
appear, no doubt because of the special pedagogical effort against the
more salient oral errors. The child, pen in hand, has in mind the
cautions oftenest heard, and so reveals something of that greater
exactness which all of us show when we do any writing that must bear
critical inspection. Thus, the relative frequency of confusions
between the past tense forms of verbs and the perfect participles
drops from 24 per cent to 5 per cent, and errors based on double
negatives drop to 1 per cent. But this improvement in one direction
merely serves to unearth new barbarisms in other directions, concealed
in the oral tables by the flood of errors now remedied. It is among
the verbs that they are still most numerous; altogether, the errors
here amount to exactly 50 per cent of the total. Such locutions as /I
had went/ and /he seen/ diminish relatively and absolutely, but in all
other situations the verb is treated with the lavish freedom that is
so characteristic of the American common speech. Confusions of the
past and present tenses jump from 2 per cent to 19 per cent, thus
eloquently demonstrating the tenacity of the error. And mistakes in
the forms of nouns and pronouns increase from 2 per cent to 16: a
shining proof of a shakiness which follows the slightest effort to
augment the vocabulary of everyday.
The materials collected by Dr. Charters and his associates are not, of
course, presented in full, but his numerous specimens must strike
familiar chords in every ear that is alert to the sounds and ways of
the /sermo vulgus/. What he gathered in Kansas City might have been
gathered just as well in San Francisco, or New Orleans, or Chicago, or
New York, or in Youngstown, O., or Little Rock, Ark., or Waterloo,
Iowa. In each of these places, large or small, a few localisms might
have been noted--/oi/ substituted for ur in New York, /you-all/ in the
South, a few Germanisms in Pennsylvania and in the upper Mississippi
[Pg190] Valley, a few Spanish locutions in the Southwest, certain
peculiar vowel-forms in New England--but in the main the report would
have been identical with the report he makes. That vast uniformity
which marks the people of the United States, in political doctrine, in
social habit, in general information, in reaction to ideas, in
prejudices and enthusiasms, in the veriest details of domestic custom
and dress, is nowhere more marked than in language. The incessant
neologisms of the national speech sweep the whole country almost
instantly, and the iconoclastic changes which its popular spoken form
are undergoing show themselves from coast to coast. "He hurt
/his/self," cited by Dr. Charters, is surely anything but a Missouri
localism; one hears it everywhere. And so, too, one hears "she invited
/him/ and /I/," and "it hurt /terrible/," and "I /set/ there," and
"this /here/ man," and "no, I /never, neither/", and "he /ain't/
here," and "where is he /at/?" and "it seems /like/ I remember," and
"if I /was/ you," and "/us/ fellows," and "he /give/ her hell." And
"he /taken/ and kissed her," and "he /loaned/ me a dollar," and "the
man was /found/ two dollars," and "the bee /stang/ him," and "I
/wouldda/ thought," and "/can/ I have one?" and "he got /hisn/," and
"the boss /left/ him off," and "the baby /et/ the soap," and "/them/
are the kind I like," and "he /don't/ care," and "no one has /their/
ticket," and "how /is/ the folks?" and "if you would /of gotten/ in
the car you could /of rode/ down."
Curiously enough, this widely dispersed and highly savory
dialect--already, as I shall show, come to a certain grammatical
regularity--has attracted the professional writers of the country
almost as little as it has attracted the philologists. There are
foreshadowings of it in "Huckleberry Finn," in "The Biglow Papers" and
even in the rough humor of the period that began with J. C. Neal and
company and ended with Artemus Ward and Josh Billings, but in those
early days it had not yet come to full flower; it wanted the influence
of the later immigrations to take on its present character. The
enormous dialect literature of twenty years ago left it almost
untouched. Localisms were explored diligently, but the general dialect
went virtually unobserved. It is not in "Chimmie Fadden"; it is not
in [Pg191] "David Harum"; it is not even in the pre-fable stories of
George Ade, perhaps the most acute observer of average,
undistinguished American types, urban and rustic, that American
literature has yet produced. The business of reducing it to print had
to wait for Ring W. Lardner, a Chicago newspaper reporter. In his
grotesque tales of base-ball players, so immediately and so deservedly
successful and now so widely imitated,[18] Lardner reports the common
speech not only with humor, but also with the utmost accuracy. The
observations of Charters and his associates are here reinforced by the
sharp ear of one specially competent, and the result is a mine of
authentic American.
In a single story by Lardner, in truth, it is usually possible to
discover examples of almost every logical and grammatical peculiarity
of the emerging language, and he always resists very stoutly the
temptation to overdo the thing. Here, for example, are a few typical
sentences from "The Busher's Honeymoon":[19]
I and Florrie /was/ married the day before yesterday just /like/ I
told you we /was/ going to be.... You /was/ wise to get married in
Bedford, where /not nothing/ is nearly half so dear.... The sum of
what I have /wrote/ down is $29.40.... Allen told me I /should ought/
to give the priest $5.... I never /seen/ him before.... I didn't used
to eat /no/ lunch in the playing season except when I /knowed/ I was
not going to work.... I guess the meals /has/ cost me all together
about $1.50, and I have /eat/ very little myself....
I was willing to tell her all about /them/ two poor girls.... They
must not be /no/ mistake about who is the boss in my house. Some men
/lets/ their /wife/ run all over them.... Allen has /went/ to a
college football game. One of the reporters /give/ him a pass.... He
called up and said he /hadn't/ only the one pass, but he was not
hurting my feelings /none/.... The flat across the hall from this
/here/ one is for rent.... If we should /of boughten/ furniture it
would cost us in the neighborhood of $100, even without /no/
piano.... I consider myself lucky to /of/ found out about this before
it was too late and somebody else had /of/ gotten the tip.... It will
always be /ourn/, even when we move away.... Maybe you could /of did/
better if you had /of went/ at it in a different way.... Both /her/
and you /is/ welcome at my house.... I never /seen/ so much wine
/drank/ in my life....
[Pg192]
Here are specimens to fit into most of Charters' categories--verbs
confused as to tense, pronouns confused as to case, double and even
triple negatives, nouns and verbs disagreeing in number, /have/
softened to /of/, /n/ marking the possessive instead of /s/, /like/
used in place of /as/, and the personal pronoun substituted for the
demonstrative adjective. A study of the whole story would probably
unearth all the remaining errors noted in Kansas City. Lardner's