The American Language
more forcibly they are in operation in the latter than in the former.
English has been arrested in its growth by its purists and
grammarians. It shows no living change in structure and syntax since
the days of Anne, and very little modification in either pronunciation
or vocabulary. Its tendency is to conserve that which is established;
to say the new thing, as nearly as possible, in the old way; to combat
all that expansive gusto which made for its pliancy and resilience in
the days of Shakespeare. In place of the old loose-footedness there is
set up a preciosity which, in one direction, takes the form of
unyielding affectations in the spoken language, and in another form
shows itself in the heavy Johnsonese of current English writing--the
Jargon denounced by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his Cambridge
lectures. This "infirmity of speech" Quiller-Couch finds "in
parliamentary debates and in the newspapers"; [Pg025] ... "it has
become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils,
Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as
well as the conclusions of their thought, and so voice the reason of
their being." Distinct from journalese, the two yet overlap, "and have
a knack of assimilating each other's vices."[45]
American, despite the gallant efforts of the professors, has so far
escaped any such suffocating formalization. We, too, of course, have
our occasional practitioners of the authentic English Jargon; in the
late Grover Cleveland we produced an acknowledged master of it. But in
the main our faults in writing lie in precisely the opposite
direction. That is to say, we incline toward a directness of statement
which, at its greatest, lacks restraint and urbanity altogether, and
toward a hospitality which often admits novelties for the mere sake of
their novelty, and is quite uncritical of the difference between a
genuine improvement in succinctness and clarity, and mere extravagant
raciness. "The tendency," says one English observer, "is ... to
consider the speech of any man, as any man himself, as good as any
other."[46] "All beauty and distinction," says another,[47] "are
ruthlessly sacrificed to force." Moreover, this strong revolt against
conventional bonds is by no means confined to the folk-speech, nor
even to the loose conversational English of the upper classes; it also
gets into more studied discourse, both spoken and written. I glance
through the speeches of Dr. Woodrow Wilson, surely a purist if we have
one at all, and find, in a few moments, half a dozen locutions that an
Englishman in like position would never dream of using, among them /we
must get a move on/,[48] /hog/ as a verb,[49] /gum-shoe/ as an
adjective with [Pg026] verbal overtones,[50] /onery/ in place of
/ordinary/,[51] and /that is going some/.[52] From the earliest days,
indeed, English critics have found this gipsy tendency in our most
careful writing. They denounced it in Marshall, Cooper, Mark Twain,
Poe, Lossing, Lowell and Holmes, and even in Hawthorne and Thoreau;
and it was no less academic a work than W. C. Brownell's "French
Traits" which brought forth, in a London literary journal, the dictum
that "the language most depressing to the cultured Englishman is the
language of the cultured American." Even "educated American English,"
agrees the chief of modern English grammarians, "is now almost
entirely independent of British influence, and differs from it
considerably, though as yet not enough to make the two dialects
--American English and British English--mutually unintelligible."[53]
American thus shows its character in a constant experimentation, a
wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid
forms. No other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and
phrases more readily; none is more careless of precedents; none shows
a greater fecundity and originality of fancy. It is producing new
words every day, by trope, by agglutination, by the shedding of
inflections, by the merging of parts of speech, and by sheer
brilliance of imagination. It is full of what Bret Harte called the
"sabre-cuts of Saxon"; it meets Montaigne's ideal of "a succulent and
nervous speech, short and compact, not as much delicated and combed
out as vehement and brusque, rather arbitrary than monotonous, not
pedantic but soldierly, as Suetonius called Caesar's Latin." One
pictures the common materials of English dumped into a pot, exotic
flavorings added, and the bubblings assiduously and expectantly
skimmed. What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it
comes into contact with what is new and vivid. Let American confront a
novel problem alongside [Pg027] English, and immediately its superior
imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious. /Movie/ is better
than /cinema/; it is not only better American, it is better English.
/Bill-board/ is better than /hoarding. Office-holder/ is more honest,
more picturesque, more thoroughly Anglo-Saxon that /public-servant/.
/Stem-winder/ somehow has more life in it, more fancy and vividness,
than the literal /keyless-watch/. Turn to the terminology of
railroading (itself, by the way, an Americanism): its creation fell
upon the two peoples equally, but they tackled the job independently.
The English, seeking a figure to denominate the wedge-shaped fender in
front of a locomotive, called it a /plough/; the Americans,
characteristically, gave it the far more pungent name of
/cow-catcher/. So with the casting where two rails join. The English
called it a /crossing-plate/. The Americans, more responsive to the
suggestion in its shape, called it a /frog/.
This boldness of conceit, of course, makes for vulgarity. Unrestrained
by any critical sense--and the critical sense of the professors counts
for little, for they cry wolf too often--it flowers in such barbaric
inventions as /tasty/, /alright/, /no-account/, /pants/,
/go-aheadativeness/, /tony/, /semi-occasional/, /to fellowship/ and
/to doxologize/. Let it be admitted: American is not infrequently
vulgar; the Americans, too, are vulgar (Bayard Taylor called them
"Anglo-Saxons relapsed into semi-barbarism"); America itself is
unutterably vulgar. But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a
yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions,
and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy
language-making. The history of English, like the history of American
and every other living tongue, is a history of vulgarisms that, by
their accurate meeting of real needs, have forced their way into sound
usage, and even into the lifeless catalogues of the grammarians. The
colonial pedants denounced /to advocate/ as bitterly as they ever
denounced /to compromit/ or /to happify/, and all the English
authorities gave them aid, but it forced itself into the American
language despite them, and today it is even accepted as English and
has got into the Oxford Dictionary. /To donate/, so late as 1870, was
dismissed by Richard Grant White as ignorant and [Pg028] abominable
and to this day the English will have none of it, but there is not an
American dictionary that doesn't accept it, and surely no American
writer would hesitate to use it.[54] /Reliable/, /gubernatorial/,
/standpoint/ and /scientist/ have survived opposition of equal
ferocity. The last-named was coined by William Whewell, an Englishman,
in 1840, but was first adopted in America. Despite the fact that
Fitzedward Hall and other eminent philologists used it and defended
it, it aroused almost incredible opposition in England. So recently as
1890 it was denounced by the /London Daily News/ as "an ignoble
Americanism," and according to William Archer it was finally accepted
by the English only "at the point of the bayonet."[55]
The purist performs a useful office in enforcing a certain logical
regularity upon the process, and in our own case the omnipresent
example of the greater conservatism of the English corrects our native
tendency to go too fast, but the process itself is as inexorable in
its workings as the precession of the equinoxes, and if we yield to it
more eagerly than the English it is only a proof, perhaps, that the
future of what was once the Anglo-Saxon tongue lies on this side of
the water. "The story of English grammar," says Murison, "is a story
of simplification, of dispensing with grammatical forms."[56] And of
the most copious and persistent enlargement of vocabulary and mutation
of idiom ever recorded, perhaps, by descriptive philology. English now
has the brakes on, but American continues to leap in the dark, and the
prodigality of its movement is all the [Pg029] indication that is
needed of its intrinsic health, its capacity to meet the ever-changing
needs of a restless and iconoclastic people, constantly fluent in
racial composition, and disdainful of hampering traditions.
"Language," says Sayce, "is no artificial product, contained in books
and dictionaries and governed by the strict rules of impersonal
grammarians. It is the living expression of the mind and spirit of a
people, ever changing and shifting, whose sole standard of correctness
is custom and the common usage of the community.... The first lesson
to be learned is that there is no intrinsic right or wrong in the use
of language, no fixed rules such as are the delight of the teacher of
Latin prose. What is right now will be wrong hereafter, what language
rejected yesterday she accepts today."[57]
§ 6
/The Materials of American/--One familiar with the habits of
pedagogues need not be told that, in their grudging discussions of
American, they have spent most of their energies upon vain attempts to
classify its materials. White and Lounsbury, as I have shown, carried
the business to the limits of the preposterous; when they had finished
identifying and cataloguing Americanisms there were no more
Americanisms left to study. The ladies and gentlemen of the American
Dialect Society, though praiseworthy for their somewhat deliberate
industry, fall into a similar fault, for they are so eager to
establish minute dialectic variations that they forget the general
language almost altogether.
Among investigators of less learning there is a more spacious view of
the problem, and the labored categories of White and Lounsbury are
much extended. Pickering, the first to attempt a list of Americanisms,
rehearsed their origin under the following headings:
1. "We have formed some new words."
2. "To some old ones, that are still in use in England, we have
affixed new significations."
3. "Others, which have long been obsolete in England, are still
retained in common use among us."
Bartlett, in the second edition of his dictionary, dated 1859,
increased these classes to nine;
1. Archaisms, /i. e./, old English words, obsolete, or nearly so, in
England, but retained in use in this country.
2. English words used in a different sense from what they are in
England. These include many names of natural objects differently
applied.
3. Words which have retained their original meaning in the United
States, though not in England.
4. English provincialisms adopted into general use in America.
5. Newly coined words, which owe their origin to the productions or
to the circumstances of the country.
6. Words borrowed from European languages, especially the French,
Spanish, Dutch and German.
7. Indian words.
8. Negroisms.
9. Peculiarities of pronunciation.
Some time before this, but after the publication of Bartlett's first
edition in 1848, William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst,
devoted a brief chapter to "American Dialects" in his well-known work
on English[58] and in it one finds the following formidable
classification of Americanisms: