The American Language
A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. By H. W. Horwill. (Oxford at the Clarendon Press. 78. ed,)
Tim format of this book has already recalled to many reviewers, with unnecessary tenderness, the format and style of the late H. W. Fowler's Modern English Usage. The comparison is unfair to Mr. Horwill. Fowler could assume in his audience a vast knowledge of " correct " usage and then go on to be witty about its stylistic abuses. But English knowledge of American is- not only scanty and misinformed ; it is— and this, I think, would be Mr. Horwilf s point—even less than we suppose, as many distinguished attempts to write it, from Dickens' Jefferson Brick to Mr. Shaw's American Ambassador and Mr. Aldington's Charlemagne Cox, will -outrageously disclose. Moreover, Mr. Horwill's linguistic attitude is . a little more modern than Fowler's, he is more interested. in usage than in propaganda. • And his business is. to explain with patience elementary meanings.
• "'• Mr. Horwill began some time in 1902 to make notes of • American linguistic usages that were unfamiliar to him. Several of these usages," he recalls, " have since come to be so frequent in importations that, if I trusted to my memory alone, I doubt whether I should myself think of
His .observations and reading
them as originally American."
over thirty odd years have . enabled him to make nine classifications of the • difficulties that face an English visitor. Soino of these. groups cannot concern us here, because Mr. Horwill has a policy • about them (he 'makes no .claim, for instance, to record words wholly American in origin, or the innumerable importations from German, Italian, Swedish, Dutch; Yiddish), or he, is sensible in knowing which groups an Englishman expects to be ignorant about. Such as, for examples, native utility words : an Englishman can choose, Oi not choose, to learn what " squash is, or a rumble-seat, Or Arbor Day, but he is not likely to pretend to know. But this dictionary can be most fairly and strongly tested by seeing how well it approaches three crucial groups, how it provides for the feelings of an Englishman confronted with three kinds of sentence. They are different words for the same thing ; the same words for different things ; and modern vernacular usage. With the first group Mr. Horwill is at his best. He is always aware of , the synonym. After all, there is no good reason why an Englishman should ever write about a cold snap, or a thumb-tack, when his own vocabulary offers him a cold spell, and a drawing-pin. And though we may admire an American who wins out, or even gets by, our own language has arranged for us to pull through or at least to pass muster. It may seem very puritanical to insist on this consistency, but knowledge of American is blurred by Anglo-American Sentimentality, appeals to aesthetics, irrelevant wit, ignorance of linguistic history, and by assuming that we have no word. Doubtless there are occasions when the keener visual activity of American metaphor cannot be resisted. One may sym- pathise with anyone who prefers to say that he couldn't make the grade and was bounced from college rather than resort to our slangy equivalent which dourly records only that he didn't fulfil expectations and was sent down. The most consistent of Mr. Horwill's virtues is that of seeking always—in this group—for the English synonym, where many English writers, preening themselves on knowing what Americans call a playboy, affect never to have heard of a man-about-town (actually, "playboy " is getting misused in this country as meaning a man -who just " tinkers " with something).
The second group is by far the most important and the commonest source of misunderstanding. It includes that vast vocabulary that English and American have in common, which refers to totally different things. Explaining it consists in substituting something tricky foi what had seemed obvious, An Englishman may live in America a long time and yet remain quite innocent of this whole area of usage, might deny that he is ignorant of what an American means by corn, politics, a park, a pony, a corporation. If an Englishman reads " the floorwalker says to go to the notion counter," he knows at least one word he does not understand. If he reads a speech of President 'Roosevelt declaring that " our industries will have little doubt of black-ink operations-in the last quarter of the year," he is at least aware of a foreign usage, and may be trusted to go off and discover it. But if I write " the clerk gave a biscuit to the solicitor," he will imagine something precise, if a little odd. The trouble is that, however lively his imagination, what he imagines may be precise but is bound to be. wrong. For he is confronted with three nouns which mean different things in the United States and in England.
The weakest part of the dictionary is its listing of, and asides on, contemporary idiom. In his preface Mr. Horwill had disclaimed any ambition of compiling a dictionary of Americanisms. But he has fallen into a now familiar indecision when he comes to separate out slang from colloquialism. This is a division which can be simply made in older languages where slang bears a social stigma and where, as in England, the line between cultured usage and vernacular slang is very rigid. The distinction means practically nothing in a language where even the prepositions provide subdued metaphors -(start in on, miss out, check up on). Mr. Horwill cannot avoid the vernacular. But it is too often the vernacular pf 1905, now deceased. Mr.. Horwill has worked for thirty odd years, has spent six of them in America, five of which were, I believe, between the years of 1900 and 1905. He has been naturally, therefore, most vigilant in recording what words and locutions came into the language, or were current, at that time. But he has not been equally alert in noticing when some of these usages became obsolete or gave way to others. This dictionary still records, for instance, masher (now almost .dead even in importation), to call down (mod; usage=to bawl out); to set one's bag for (=to make a play for), elegant (=swell) as modern usage. These with..many others made up the vocabulary with which rum elderly American lady, long resident in England, hoped to fortify me against living in America and which I discovered were unknown to this generation, in the previous one awakened only warm memories of their parents. A short comparative study of the changes in usage between two couples of writers at an equal distance—say George Ade to 0. Henry compared with Ring Lardner to James M. Cain—would, I think, vividly demon- strate that the only
way to establish agreement about con- temporary usage is to date all examples. Mr. Horwill's book is in this respect, and emphatically only in this respect, often a quarter of a century out of date.
The American language has been written about at enormous and expert length for two hundred years. If contemporary proof were needed, , the scholarship of the late great Dr. Knipp, the inexhaustible researches of the field workers on the American Linguistic Atlas, and the magnificent quarterly harvest of the staff of American Speech, should suffice to show that Mr. Mencken's responsible example in revising his book every five years is the least that can be done, that new material is almost too prolific to deal with, that here is a language der spairingly fluid and, in the strict Jespersen sense, truly
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