The American Language
and to vast profit, to the composition of arresting and uplifting
apothegms, and the fruits of their fancy are not only sold in books
but also displayed upon an infinite variety of calendars, banners and
wall-cards. It is rarely that one enters the office of an American
business man without encountering at least one of these wall-cards. It
may, on the one hand, show nothing save a succinct caution that time
is money, say, "Do It Now," or "This Is My Busy Day"; on the other
hand, it may embody a long and complex sentiment, ornately set forth.
The taste for such canned sagacity seems to have arisen in America at
a very early day. Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanac," begun
in 1732, remained a great success for twenty-five years, and the
annual sales reached 10,000. It had many imitators, and founded an
aphoristic style of writing which culminated in the essays of Emerson,
often mere strings of sonorous certainties, defectively articulated.
The "Proverbial Philosophy" of Martin Farquhar Tupper, dawning upon
the American public in the early 40's, was welcomed with enthusiasm;
as Saintsbury says,[1] its success [Pg302] on this side of the
Atlantic even exceeded its success on the other. But that was the last
and perhaps the only importation of the sage and mellifluous in bulk.
In late years the American production of such merchandise has grown so
large that the balance of trade now flows in the other direction.
Visiting Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, France and Spain in the spring
of 1917, I found translations of the chief works of Dr. Marden on sale
in all those countries, and with them the masterpieces of such other
apostles of the New Thought as Ralph Waldo Trine and Elizabeth Towne.
No other American books were half so well displayed.
The note of all such literature, and of the maxims that precipitate
themselves from it, is optimism. They "inspire" by voicing and
revoicing the New Thought doctrine that all things are possible to the
man who thinks the right sort of thoughts--in the national phrase, to
the /right-thinker/. This right-thinker is indistinguishable from the
/forward-looker/, whose belief in the continuity and benignity of the
evolutionary process takes on the virulence of a religious faith. Out
of his confidence come the innumerable saws, axioms and /geflügelte
Worte/ in the national arsenal, ranging from the "It won't hurt none
to try" of the great masses of the plain people to such exhilarating
confections of the wall-card virtuosi as "The elevator to success is
not running; take the stairs." Naturally enough, a grotesque humor
plays about this literature of hope; the folk, though it moves them,
prefer it with a dash of salt. "Smile, damn you, smile!" is a typical
specimen of this seasoned optimism. Many examples of it go back to the
early part of the last century, for instance, "Don't monkey with the
buzz-saw" and "It will never get well if you pick it." Others are
patently modern, /e. g./, "The Lord is my shepherd; I should worry"
and "Roll over; you're on your back." The national talent for
extravagant and pungent humor is well displayed in many of these
maxims. It would be difficult to match, in any other folk-literature,
such examples as "I'd rather have them say 'There he goes' than 'Here
he lies,'" or "Don't spit: remember the Johnstown flood," or "Shoot it
in the arm; your leg's full," or "Cheer up; [Pg303] there ain't no
hell," or "If you want to cure homesickness, go back home." Many very
popular phrases and proverbs are borrowings from above. "Few die and
none resign" originated with Thomas Jefferson; Bret Harte, I believe,
was the author of "No check-ee, no shirt-ee," General W. T. Sherman is
commonly credited with "War is hell," and Mark Twain with "Life is one
damn thing after another." An elaborate and highly characteristic
proverb of the uplifting variety--"So live that you can look any man
in the eye and tell him to go to hell"--was first given currency by
one of the engineers of the Panama Canal, a gentleman later retired,
it would seem, for attempting to execute his own counsel. From humor
the transition to cynicism is easy, and so many of the current sayings
are at war with the optimism of the majority. "Kick him again; he's
down" is a depressing example. "What's the use?" a rough translation
of the Latin "Cui bono?" is another. The same spirit is visible in
"Tell your troubles to a policeman," "How'd you like to be the
ice-man?" "Some say she do and some say she don't," "Nobody loves a
fat man," "I love my wife, but O you kid," and "Would you for fifty
cents?" The last originated in the ingenious mind of an advertisement
writer and was immediately adopted. In the course of time it acquired
a naughty significance, and helped to give a start to the amazing
button craze of ten or twelve years ago--a saturnalia of proverb and
phrase making which finally aroused the guardians of the public morals
and was put down by the police.
That neglect which marks the study of the vulgate generally extends to
the subject of popular proverb-making. The English publisher, Frank
Palmer, prints an excellent series of little volumes presenting the
favorite proverbs of all civilized races, including the Chinese and
Japanese, but there is no American volume among them. Even such
exhaustive collections as that of Robert Christy[2] contain no
American specimens--not even "Don't monkey with the buzz-saw" or
"Root, hog, or die." [Pg304]
§ 2
/American Slang/--This neglect of the national proverbial philosophy
extends to the national slang. There is but one work, so far as I can
discover, formally devoted to it,[3] and that work is extremely
superficial. Moreover, it has been long out of date, and hence is of
little save historical value. There are at least a dozen careful
treatises on French slang,[4] half as many on English slang,[5] and a
good many on German slang, but American slang, which is probably quite
as rich as that of France and a good deal richer than that of any
other country, is yet to be studied at length. Nor is there much
discussion of it, of any interest or value, in the general
philological literature. Fowler and all the other early native
students of the language dismissed it with lofty gestures; down to the
time of Whitney it was scarcely regarded as a seemly subject for the
notice of a man of learning. Lounsbury, less pedantic, viewed its
phenomena more hospitably, and even defined it as "the source from
which the decaying energies of speech are constantly refreshed," and
Brander Matthews, following him, has described its function as that of
providing "substitutes for the good words and true which are worn out
by hard service."[6] But that is about as far as the investigation has
got. Krapp has some judicious paragraphs upon the matter in his
"Modern English,"[7] there are a few scattered essays upon the
underlying psychology,[8] and various uninforming magazine articles,
but that is all. The practising authors of the country, like its
philologians, have always shown [Pg305] a gingery and suspicious
attitude. "The use of slang," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, "is at once
a sign and a cause of mental atrophy." "Slang," said Ambrose Bierce
fifty years later, "is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage
carts on their way to the dumps." Literature in America, as we have
seen, remains aloof from the vulgate. Despite the contrary examples of
Mark Twain and Howells, all the more pretentious American authors try
to write chastely and elegantly; the typical literary product of the
country is still a refined essay in the /Atlantic Monthly/, perhaps
gently jocose but never rough--by Emerson, so to speak, out of Charles
Lamb--the sort of thing one might look to be done by a somewhat
advanced English curate. George Ade, undoubtedly one of the most adept
anatomists of the American character and painters of the American
scene that the national literature has yet developed, is neglected
because his work is grounded firmly upon the national speech--not that
he reports it literally, like Lardner and the hacks trailing after
Lardner, but that he gets at and exhibits its very essence. It would
stagger a candidate for a doctorate in philology, I daresay, to be
told off by his professor to investigate the slang of Ade in the way
that Bosson,[9] the Swede, has investigated that of Jerome K. Jerome,
and yet, until something of the sort is undertaken, American philology
will remain out of contact with the American language.
Most of the existing discussions of slang spend themselves upon
efforts to define it, and, in particular, upon efforts to
differentiate it from idiomatic neologisms of a more legitimate type.
This effort is largely in vain; the border-line is too vague and
wavering to be accurately mapped; words and phrases are constantly
crossing it, and in both directions. There was a time, perhaps, when
the familiar American counter-word, /proposition/, was slang; its use
seems to have originated in the world of business, and it was soon
afterward adopted by the sporting fraternity. But today it is employed
without much feeling that it needs apology, and surely without any
feeling that it is low. [Pg306] /Nice/, as an adjective of all work,
was once in slang use only; today no one would question "a /nice/
day," or "a /nice/ time" or "a /nice/ hotel." /Awful/ seems to be
going the same route. "/Awful/ sweet" and "/awfully/ dear" still seem
slangy and school-girlish, but "/awful/ children," "/awful/ weather"
and "an /awful/ job" have entirely sound support, and no one save a
pedant would hesitate to use them. Such insidious purifications and
consecrations of slang are going on under our noses all the time. The
use of /some/ as a general adjective-adverb seems likely to make its
way in the same manner. It is constantly forgotten by purists of
defective philological equipment that a great many of our most
respectable words and phrases originated in the plainest sort of
slang. Thus, /quandary/, despite a fanciful etymology which would
identify it with /wandreth/ (=/evil/), is probably simply a
composition form of the French phrase, /qu'en dirai-je?/ Again, to
turn to French itself, there is /tête/, a sound name for the human
head for many centuries--though its origin was in the Latin /testa/
(=/pot/), a favorite slang-word of the soldiers of the decaying
empire, analogous to our own /block/, /nut/ and /conch/. The word
/slacker/, recently come into good usage in the United States as a
designation for an unsuccessful shirker of conscription, is a
substantive derived from the English verb /to slack/, which was born
as university slang and remains so to this day. Brander Matthews, so
recently as 1901, thought /to hold up/ slang; it is now perfectly good
American.
The contrary movement of words from the legitimate vocabulary into
slang is constantly witnessed. Some one devises a new and intriguing
trope or makes use of an old one under circumstances arresting the
public attention, and at once it is adopted into slang, given a host
of remote significances, and ding-donged /ad nauseam/. The
Rooseveltian phrases, /muck-raker/, /Ananias Club/, /short and ugly
word/, /nature-faker/ and /big-stick/, offer examples. Not one of them
was new and not one of them was of much pungency, but Roosevelt's vast
talent for delighting the yokelry threw about them a charming air, and
so they entered into current slang and were mouthed idiotically for
months. Another example is to be found in /steam-roller/. [Pg307] It
was first heard of in June, 1908, when it was applied by Oswald F.
Schuette, of the /Chicago Inter-Ocean/, to the methods employed by the
Roosevelt-Taft majority in the Republican National Committee in
over-riding the protests against seating Taft delegates from Alabama