The American Language
"painfully hampered" thereby in his handling of American trade. He
continues:
In the United States of North America the study of the English tongue
forms part of the educational scheme. I gather this because I find
that they have professors of the English language and literature in
the Universities there, and I note that in the schools there are
certain hours alloted for "English" under instructors who specialize
in that subject. This is quite right. English is still far from being
a dead language, and our American kinsfolk are good enough to
appreciate the fact.
But I think we should return the compliment. We ought to learn the
American language in our schools and colleges. At present it is
strangely neglected by the educational authorities. They pay
attention to linguistic attainments of many other kinds, but not to
this. How many thousands of youths are at this moment engaged in
puzzling their brains over Latin and Greek grammar only Whitehall
knows. Every well-conducted seminary has some instructor who is under
the delusion that he is teaching English boys and girls to speak
French with a good Parisian accent. We teach German, Italian, even
Spanish, Russian, modern Greek, Arabic, Hindustani. For a moderate
fee you can acquire a passing acquaintance with any of these tongues
at the Berlitz Institute and the Gouin Schools. But even in these
polyglot establishments there is nobody to teach you American. I have
never seen a grammar of it or a dictionary. I have searched in vain
at the book-sellers for "How to Learn American in Three Weeks" or
some similar compendium. Nothing of the sort exists. The native
speech of one hundred millions of civilized people is as grossly
neglected by the publishers as it is by the schoolmasters. You can
find means to learn Hausa or Swahili or Cape Dutch in London more
easily than the expressive, if difficult, tongue which is spoken in
the office, the bar-room, the tram-car, from the snows of Alaska to
the mouths of the Mississippi, and is enshrined in a literature that
is growing in volume and favor every day.
Low then quotes an extract from an American novel appearing [Pg014]
serially in an English magazine--an extract including such
Americanisms as /side-stepper/, /saltwater-taffy/, /Prince-Albert/
(coat), /boob/, /bartender/ and /kidding/, and many characteristically
American extravagances of metaphor. It might be well argued, he goes
on, that this strange dialect is as near to "the tongue that
Shakespeare spoke" as "the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton," but that
philological fact does not help to its understanding. "You might
almost as well expect him [the British business man] to converse
freely with a Portuguese railway porter because he tried to stumble
through Caesar when he was in the Upper Fourth at school."
In the /London Daily Mail/, W. G. Faulkner lately launched this
proposed campaign of education by undertaking to explain various terms
appearing in American moving-pictures to English spectators. Mr.
Faulkner assumed that most of his readers would understand /sombrero/,
/sidewalk/, /candy-store/, /freight-car/, /boost/, /elevator/, /boss/,
/crook/ and /fall/ (for /autumn/) without help, but he found it
necessary to define such commonplace Americanisms as /hoodlum/,
/hobo/, /bunco-steerer/, /rubber-neck/, /drummer/, /sucker/, /dive/
(in the sense of a thieves' resort), /clean-up/, /graft/ and /to
feature/. Curiously enough, he proved the reality of the difficulties
he essayed to level by falling into error as to the meanings of some
of the terms he listed, among them /dead-beat/, /flume/, /dub/ and
/stag/. Another English expositor, apparently following him, thought
it necessary to add definitions of /hold-up/, /quitter/, /rube/,
/shack/, /road-agent/, /cinch/, /live-wire/ and /scab/,[23] but he,
too, mistook the meaning of /dead-beat/, and in addition he misdefined
/band-wagon/ and substituted /get-out/, seemingly an invention of his
own, for /get-away/. Faulkner, somewhat belated in his animosity,
seized the opportunity to read a homily upon the vulgarity and
extravagance of the American language, and argued that the
introduction of its coinages through the moving-picture theatre
(/Anglais, cinema/) "cannot be regarded without serious [Pg015]
misgivings, if only because it generates and encourages mental
indiscipline so far as the choice of expressions is concerned." In
other words, the greater pliability and resourcefulness of American is
a fault to be corrected by the English tendency to hold to that which
is established.
Cecil Chesterton, in the /New Witness/, recently called attention to
the increasing difficulty of intercommunication, not only verbally,
but in writing. The American newspapers, he said, even the best of
them, admit more and more locutions that puzzle and dismay an English
reader. After quoting a characteristic headline he went on:
I defy any ordinary Englishman to say that that is the English
language or that he can find any intelligible meaning in it. Even a
dictionary will be of no use to him. He must know the language
colloquially or not at all.... No doubt it is easier for an
Englishman to understand American than it would be for a Frenchman to
do the same, just as it is easier for a German to understand Dutch
than it would be for a Spaniard. But it does not make the American
language identical with the English.[24]
Chesterton, however, refrained from denouncing this lack of identity;
on the contrary, he allowed certain merits to American. "I do not want
anybody to suppose," he said, "that the American language is in any
way inferior to ours. In some ways it has improved upon it in vigor
and raciness. In other ways it adheres more closely to the English of
the best period." Testimony to the same end was furnished before this
by William Archer. "New words," he said, "are begotten by new
conditions of life; and as American life is far more fertile of new
conditions than ours, the tendency toward neologism cannot but be
stronger in America than in England. America has enormously enriched
the language, not only with new words, but (since the American mind
is, on the whole, quicker and wittier than the English) with apt and
luminous colloquial metaphors."[25]
The list of such quotations might be indefinitely prolonged. [Pg016]
There is scarcely an English book upon the United States which does
not offer some discussion, more or less profound, of American
peculiarities of speech, both as they are revealed in spoken discourse
(particularly pronunciation and intonation) and as they show
themselves in popular literature and in the newspapers, and to this
discussion protest is often added, as it very often is by the reviews
and newspapers. "The Americans," says a typical critic, "have so far
progressed with their self-appointed task of creating an American
language that much of their conversation is now incomprehensible to
English people."[26] On our own side there is almost equal evidence of
a sense of difference, despite the fact that the educated American is
presumably trained in orthodox English, and can at least read it
without much feeling of strangeness. "The American," says George Ade,
in his book of travel, "In Pastures New," "must go to England in order
to learn for a dead certainty that he does not speak the English
language.... This pitiful fact comes home to every American when he
arrives in London--that there are two languages, the English and the
American. One is correct; the other is incorrect. One is a pure and
limpid stream; the other is a stagnant pool, swarming with
bacilli."[27] This was written in 1906. Twenty-five years earlier Mark
Twain had made the same observation. "When I speak my native tongue in
its utmost purity in England," he said, "an Englishman can't
understand me at all."[28] The languages, continued Mark, "were
identical several generations ago, but our changed conditions and the
spread of our people far to the south and far to the west have made
many alterations in our pronunciation, and have introduced new words
among us and changed the meanings of old ones." Even before this the
great humorist had marked and hailed these differences. Already in
"Roughing It" he was celebrating "the vigorous new vernacular of the
[Pg017] occidental plains and mountains,"[29] and in all his writings,
even the most serious, he deliberately engrafted its greater liberty
and more fluent idiom upon the stem of English, and so lent the
dignity of his high achievement to a dialect that was as unmistakably
American as the point of view underlying it.
The same tendency is plainly visible in William Dean Howells. His
novels are mines of American idiom, and his style shows an undeniable
revolt against the trammels of English grammarians. In 1886 he made a
plea in /Harper's/ for a concerted effort to put American on its own
legs. "If we bother ourselves," he said, "to write what the critics
imagine to be 'English,' we shall be priggish and artificial, and
still more so if we make our Americans talk 'English.' ... On our lips
our continental English will differ more and more from the insular
English, and we believe that this is not deplorable but
desirable."[30] Howells then proceeded to discuss the nature of the
difference, and described it accurately as determined by the greater
rigidity and formality of the English of modern England. In American,
he said, there was to be seen that easy looseness of phrase and gait
which characterized the English of the Elizabethan era, and
particularly the Elizabethan hospitality to changed meanings and bold
metaphors. American, he argued, made new words much faster than
English, and they were, in the main, words of much greater daring and
savor.
The difference between the two tongues, thus noted by the writers of
both, was made disconcertingly apparent to the American troops when
they first got to France and came into contact with the English.
Fraternizing was made difficult by the wide divergence in vocabulary
and pronunciation--a divergence interpreted by each side as a sign of
uncouthness. The Y. M. C. A. made a characteristic effort to turn the
resultant feeling of strangeness and homesickness among the Americans
to account. In the /Chicago Tribune's/ Paris edition of July 7, 1917,
I find a large advertisement inviting them to make use of the Y. M. C.
A. [Pg018] clubhouse in the Avenue Montaigue, "where /American/ is
spoken." Earlier in the war the /Illinoiser Staats Zeitung/, no doubt
seeking to keep the sense of difference alive, advertised that it
would "publish articles daily in the /American/ language."
§ 4
/Foreign Observers/--What English and American laymen have thus
observed has not escaped the notice of continental philologists. The
first edition of Bartlett, published in 1848, brought forth a long and
critical review in the /Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen
und Literaturen/ by Prof. Felix Flügel,[31] and in the successive
volumes of the /Archiv/, down to our own day, there have been many
valuable essays upon Americanisms, by such men as Herrig, Koehler and
Koeppel. Various Dutch philologists, among them Barentz, Keijzer and
Van der Voort, have also discussed the subject, and a work in French
has been published by G. A. Barringer.[32] That, even to the lay
Continental, American and English now differ considerably, is
demonstrated by the fact that many of the popular German
/Sprachführer/ appear in separate editions, /Amerikanisch/ and
/Englisch/. This is true of the "Metoula Sprachführer" published by
Prof. F. Lanenscheidt[33] and of the "Polyglott Kuntz" books.[34] The
American edition of the latter starts off with the doctrine that