The American Language
"/Jeder, der nach Nord-Amerika oder Australien will, muss Englisch
können/," but a great many of the words and phrases that appear in its
examples would be unintelligible to many Englishmen--/e.g./,
/free-lunch/, /real-estate agent/, /buckwheat/, /corn/ (for /maize/),
/conductor/, /pop-corn/ and /drug-store/--and a number of others would
suggest false meanings or otherwise puzzle--/e. g./, /napkin/,
/saloon/, /wash-stand/, /water-pitcher/ and /apple-pie/.[35] To
[Pg019] these pedagogical examples must be added that of Baedeker, of
guide-book celebrity. In his guide-book to the United States, prepared
for Englishmen, he is at pains to explain the meaning of various
American words and phrases.
A philologist of Scandinavian extraction, Elias Molee, has gone so far
as to argue that the acquisition of correct English, to a people grown
so mongrel in blood as the Americans, has become a useless burden. In
place of it he proposes a mixed tongue, based on English, but
admitting various elements from the other Germanic languages. His
grammar, however, is so much more complex than that of English that
most Americans would probably find his artificial "American" very
difficult of acquirement. At all events it has made no progress.[36]
§ 5
/The Characters of American/--The characters chiefly noted in American
speech by all who have discussed it are, first, its general uniformity
throughout the country, so that, dialects, properly speaking, are
confined to recent immigrants, to the native whites of a few isolated
areas and to the negroes of the South; and, secondly, its impatient
disdain of rule and precedent, and hence its large capacity
(distinctly greater than that of the English of England) for taking in
new words and phrases and for manufacturing new locutions out of its
own materials. The first of these characters has struck every
observer, native and foreign. In place of the local dialects of other
countries we have a general /Volkssprache/ for the whole nation, and
if it is conditioned [Pg020] at all it is only by minor differences
in pronunciation and by the linguistic struggles of various groups of
newcomers. "The speech of the United States," said Gilbert M. Tucker,
"is quite unlike that of Great Britain in the important particular
that here we have no dialects."[37] "We all," said Mr. Taft during his
presidency, "speak the same language and have the same ideas."
"Manners, morals and political views," said the /New York World/,
commenting upon this dictum, "have all undergone a standardization
which is one of the remarkable aspects of American evolution. Perhaps
it is in the uniformity of language that this development has been
most noteworthy. Outside of the Tennessee mountains and the back
country of New England there is no true dialect."[38] "While we have
or have had single counties as large as Great Britain," says another
American observer, "and in some of our states England could be lost,
there is practically no difference between the American spoken in our
4,039,000 square miles of territory, except as spoken by foreigners.
We, assembled here, would be perfectly understood by delegates from
Texas, Maine, Minnesota, Louisiana, or Alaska, or from whatever walk
of life they might come. We can go to any of the 75,000 postoffices in
this country and be entirely sure we will be understood, whether we
want to buy a stamp or borrow a match."[39] "From Portland, Maine, to
Portland, Oregon," agrees an English critic, "no trace of a distinct
dialect is to be found. The man from Maine, even though he may be of
inferior education and limited capacity, can completely understand the
man from Oregon."[40]
No other country can show such linguistic solidarity, nor any approach
to it--not even Canada, for there a large part of the population
resists learning English altogether. The Little Russian of the Ukraine
is unintelligible to the citizen of Petrograd; [Pg021] the Northern
Italian can scarcely follow a conversation in Sicilian; the Low German
from Hamburg is a foreigner in Munich; the Breton flounders in
Gascony. Even in the United Kingdom there are wide divergences.[41]
"When we remember," says the New International Encyclopaedia[42] "that
the dialects of the countries (/sic/) in England have marked
differences--so marked, indeed that it may be doubted whether a
Lancashire miner and a Lincolnshire farmer could understand each
other--we may well be proud that our vast country has, strictly
speaking, only one language." This uniformity was noted by the
earliest observers; Pickering called attention to it in the preface to
his Vocabulary and ascribed it, no doubt accurately, to the
restlessness of the Americans, their inheritance of the immigrant
spirit, "the frequent removals of people from one part of our country
to another." It is especially marked in vocabulary and grammatical
forms--the foundation stones of a living speech. There may be slight
differences in pronunciation and intonation--a Southern softness, a
Yankee drawl, a Western burr--but in the words they use and the way
they use them all Americans, even the least tutored, follow the same
line. One observes, of course, a polite speech and a common speech,
but the common speech is everywhere the same, and its uniform vagaries
take the place of the dialectic variations of other lands. A Boston
street-car conductor could go to work in Chicago, San Francisco or New
Orleans without running the slightest risk of misunderstanding his new
fares. Once he had picked up half a dozen localisms, he would be, to
all linguistic intents and purposes, fully naturalized.
Of the intrinsic differences that separate American from English the
chief have their roots in the obvious disparity between the
environment and traditions of the American people since the
seventeenth century and those of the English. The latter have lived
under a stable social order, and it has impressed upon their souls
their characteristic respect for what is customary and of [Pg022]
good report. Until the war brought chaos to their institutions, their
whole lives were regulated, perhaps more than those of any other
people save the Spaniards, by a regard for precedent. The Americans,
though largely of the same blood, have felt no such restraint, and
acquired no such habit of conformity. On the contrary, they have
plunged to the other extreme, for the conditions of life in their new
country have put a high value upon the precisely opposite qualities of
curiosity and daring, and so they have acquired that character of
restlessness, that impatience of forms, that disdain of the dead hand,
which now broadly marks them. From the first, says a recent literary
historian, they have been "less phlegmatic, less conservative than the
English. There were climatic influences, it may be; there was surely a
spirit of intensity everywhere that made for short effort."[43] Thus,
in the arts, and thus in business, in politics, in daily intercourse,
in habits of mind and speech. The American is not, in truth, lacking
in a capacity for discipline; he has it highly developed; he submits
to leadership readily, and even to tyranny. But, by a curious twist,
it is not the leadership that is old and decorous that fetches him,
but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He will resist
dictation out of the past, but he will follow a new messiah with
almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of
economics, religion, morals and speech. A new fallacy in politics
spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and
so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new
means of killing time, or a new metaphor or piece of slang.
Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language
as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers
can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that
it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it
meet the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the
bold and imaginative. The characteristic American habit of reducing
complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations was already noticeable
in colonial times, [Pg023] and such highly typical Americanisms as
/O. K./, /N. G./, and /P. D. Q./, have been traced back to the first
days of the republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these early
tendencies invisible today, for the country is still in process of
growth, and no settled social order has yet descended upon it.
Institution-making is still going on, and so is language-making. In so
modest an operation as that which has evolved /bunco/ from /buncombe/
and /bunk/ from /bunco/ there is evidence of a phenomenon which the
philologist recognizes as belonging to the most primitive and lusty
stages of speech. The American vulgate is not only constantly making
new words, it is also deducing roots from them, and so giving proof,
as Prof. Sayce says, that "the creative powers of language are even
now not extinct."[44]
But of more importance than its sheer inventions, if only because much
more numerous, are its extensions of the vocabulary, both absolutely
and in ready workableness, by the devices of rhetoric. The American,
from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians.
His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has
been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest as
much upon brilliant phrases as upon logical ideas. And in small things
as in large he exercises continually an incomparable capacity for
projecting hidden and often fantastic relationships into arresting
parts of speech. Such a term as /rubber-neck/ is almost a complete
treatise on American psychology; it reveals the national habit of mind
more clearly than any labored inquiry could ever reveal it. It has in
it precisely the boldness and disdain of ordered forms that are so
characteristically American, and it has too the grotesque humor of the
country, and the delight in devastating opprobriums, and the acute
feeling for the succinct and savory. The same qualities are in
/rough-house/, /water-wagon/, /near-silk/, /has-been/, /lame-duck/ and
a thousand other such racy substantives, and in all the great stock of
native verbs and adjectives. There is, indeed, but a shadowy boundary
in these new coinages between the various parts of speech. /Corral/,
borrowed [Pg024] from the Spanish, immediately becomes a verb and the
father of an adjective. /Bust/, carved out of /burst/, erects itself
into a noun. /Bum/, coming by way of an earlier /bummer/ from the
German /bummler/, becomes noun, adjective, verb and adverb. Verbs are
fashioned out of substantives by the simple process of prefixing the
preposition: /to engineer/, /to chink/, /to stump/, /to hog/. Others
grow out of an intermediate adjective, as /to boom/. Others are made
by torturing nouns with harsh affixes, as /to burglarize/ and /to
itemize/, or by groping for the root, as /to resurrect/. Yet others
are changed from intransitive to transitive: a sleeping-car /sleeps/
thirty passengers. So with the adjectives. They are made of
substantives unchanged: /codfish/, /jitney/. Or by bold combinations:
/down-and-out/, /up-state/, /flat-footed/. Or by shading down suffixes
to a barbaric simplicity: /scary/, /classy/, /tasty/. Or by working
over adverbs until they tremble on the brink between adverb and
adjective: /right/ and /near/ are examples.
All of these processes, of course, are also to be observed in the
English of England; in the days of its great Elizabethan growth they
were in the lustiest possible being. They are, indeed, common to all
languages; they keep language alive. But if you will put the English
of today beside the American of today you will see at once how much