The American Language
Cockneyisms are in it, but despite the small number of Americans in
the Antipodes [Pg319] it has adopted, of late, so many Americanisms
that a Cockney visitor must often find it difficult. Among them are
the verb and verb-phrases, /to beef/, /to biff/, /to bluff/, /to
boss/, /to break away/, /to chase one's self/, /to chew the rag/, /to
chip in/, /to fade away/, /to get it in the neck/, /to back and fill/,
/to plug along/, /to get sore/, /to turn down/ and /to get wise/; the
substantives, /dope/, /boss/, /fake/, /creek/, /knockout-drops/ and
/push/ (in the sense of /crowd/); the adjectives, /hitched/ (in the
sense of /married/) and /tough/ (as before /luck/), and the adverbial
phrases, /for keeps/ and /going strong/.[25] Here, in direct
competition with English locutions, and with all the advantages on the
side of the latter, American is making steady progress.
"This American language," says a recent observer, "seems to be much
more of a pusher than the English. For instance, after eight years'
occupancy of the Philippines it was spoken by 800,000, or 10 per cent,
of the natives, while after an occupancy of 150 of India by the
British, 3,000,000, or one per cent, of the natives speak
English."[26] I do vouch for the figures. They may be inaccurate, in
detail, but they at least state what seems to be a fact. Behind that
fact are phenomena which certainly deserve careful study, and, above
all, study divested of unintelligent prejudice. The attempt to make
American uniform with English has failed ingloriously; the neglect of
its investigation is an evidence of snobbishness that is a folly of
the same sort. It is useless to dismiss the growing peculiarities of
the American vocabulary and of grammar and syntax in the common speech
as vulgarisms beneath serious notice. Such vulgarisms have a way of
intrenching themselves, and gathering dignity as they grow familiar.
"There are but few forms in use," says Lounsbury, "which, judged by a
standard previously existing, would not be regarded as gross
barbarisms."[27] Each language, in such matters, is a law unto itself,
and each vigorous dialect, particularly if it be spoken by millions,
is a [Pg320] law no less. "It would be as wrong," says Sayce, "to use
/thou/ for the nominative /thee/ in the Somersetshire dialect as it is
to say /thee art/ instead of /you are/ in the Queen's English." All
the American dialect needs, in the long run, to make even pedagogues
acutely aware of it, is a poet of genius to venture into it, as
Chaucer ventured into the despised English of his day, and Dante into
the Tuscan dialect, and Luther, in his translation of the Bible, into
peasant German. Walt Whitman made a half attempt and then drew back;
Lowell, perhaps, also heard the call, but too soon. The Irish dialect
of English, vastly less important than the American, has already had
its interpreters--Douglas Hyde, John Milington Synge and Augusta
Gregory--and with what extraordinary results we all know. Here we have
writing that is still indubitably English, but English rid of its
artificial restraints and broken to the less self-conscious grammar
and syntax of a simple and untutored folk. Synge, in his preface to
"The Playboy of the Western World,"[28] tells us how he got his gypsy
phrases "through a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I
was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls
in the kitchen." There is no doubt, he goes on, that "in the happy
ages of literature striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the
story-teller's or the playwright's hand as the rich cloaks and dresses
of his time. It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took
his ink-horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had
just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children."
The result, in the case of the neo-Celts, is a dialect that stands
incomparably above the tight English of the grammarians--a dialect so
naïf, so pliant, so expressive, and, adeptly managed, so beautiful
that even purists have begun to succumb to it, and it promises to
leave lasting marks upon English style. The American dialect has not
yet come to that stage. In so far as it is apprehended at all it is
only in the sense that Irish-English was apprehended a generation
ago--that is, as something [Pg321] uncouth and comic. But that is the
way that new dialects always come in--through a drum-fire of cackles.
Given the poet, there may suddenly come a day when our /theirns/ and
/would'a hads/ will take on the barbaric stateliness of the peasant
locutions of old Maurya in "Riders to the Sea." They seem grotesque
and absurd today because the folks who use them seem grotesque and
absurd. But that is a too facile logic and under it is a false
assumption. In all human beings, if only understanding be brought to
the business, dignity will be found, and that dignity cannot fail to
reveal itself, soon or late, in the words and phrases with which they
make known their high hopes and aspirations and cry out against the
intolerable meaninglessness of life.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiii, p. 167.
[2] Proverbs, Maxims and Phrases of All Ages; New York, 1905. This
work extends to 1267 pages and contains about 30,000 proverbs,
admirably arranged.
[3] James Maitland: The American Slang Dictionary; Chicago, 1891.
[4] For example, the works of Villatte, Virmaitre, Michel, Rigaud and
Devau.
[5] The best of these, of course, is Farmer and Henley's monumental
Slang and Its Analogues, in seven volumes.
[6] Matthews' essay, The Function of Slang, is reprinted in Clapin's
Dictionary of Americanisms, pp. 565-581.
[7] P. 199 /et seq./
[8] For example, The Psychology of Unconventional Language, by Frank
K. Sechrist, /Pedagogical Seminary/, vol. xx, p. 413, Dec., 1913, and
The Philosophy of Slang, by E. B. Taylor, reprinted in Clapin's
Dictionary of Americanisms, pp. 541-563.
[9] Olaf E. Bosson: Slang and Cant in Jerome K. Jerome's Works;
Cambridge, 1911.
[10] Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xii, p. 144.
[11] Curiously enough, the American language, usually so fertile in
words to express shades of meaning, has no respectable synonym for
/chicken/. In English there is /flapper/, in French there is
/ingénue/, and in German there is /backfisch/. Usually either the
English or the French word is borrowed.
[12] The Life and Growth of Language, New York, 1897, p. 113.
[13] /Cf./ Two Children in Old Paris, by Gertrude Slaughter; New York,
1918, p. 233. Another American popular saying, once embodied in a coon
song, may be traced to a sentence in the prayer of the Old Dessauer
before the battle of Kesseldorf, Dec. 15, 1745: "Or if Thou wilt not
help me, don't help those Hundvögte."
[14] Modern English, p. 211.
[15] A Plea for the Queen's English, p. 244.
[16] Life and Letters of E. C. Stedman, ed. by Laura Stedman and
George M. Gould; New York, 1910, vol. i, p. 477.
[17] Governor M. R. Patterson, of Tennessee, in an address before the
National Anti-Saloon League at Washington, Dec. 13, 1917.
[18] Long before this the general question of the relative superiority
of various languages had been debated in Germany. In 1796 the Berlin
Academy offered a prize for the best essay on The Ideal of a Perfect
Language. It was won by one Jenisch with a treatise bearing the
sonorous title of A Philosophico-Critical Comparison and Estimate of
Fourteen of the Ancient and Modern Languages of Europe, viz., Greek,
Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, English,
Danish, Swedish, Polish, Russian and Lithuanian.
[19] Is English Destined to Become the Universal Language?, by W.
Brackebusch; Göttingen, 1868.
[20] I take these figures from A Modern English Grammar, by H. G.
Buehler; New York, 1900, p. 3.
[21] /World Almanac/, 1914, p. 63.
[22] The Geography of Great Languages, /World's Work/, Feb., 1908, p.
9907. Babbitt predicts that by the year 2000 English will be spoken by
1,100,000,000 persons, as against 500,000,000 speakers of Russian,
300,000,000 of Spanish, 160,000,000 of German and 60,000,000 of
French.
[23] P. 5 /et seq./
[24] /Cf./ Beach-la-Mar, by William Churchill, former United States
consul-general in Samoa and Tonga. The pamphlet is published by the
Carnegie Institution of Washington.
[25] A glossary of latter-day Australian slang is in Doreen and the
Sentimental Bloke, by C. J. Dennis; New York, 1916.
[26] The American Language, by J. F. Healy; Pittsburgh, 1910, p. 6.
[27] History of the English Language, p. 476.
[28] Dublin, 1907. See also ch. ii of Ireland's Literary Renaissance,
by Ernest A. Boyd; New York, 1916.
[Pg323]
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