The American Language : An Inquiry into the Development of
English in the United States. By H. L. Mencken. Fourth
A Declaration of :Independence
Edition. Enlarged and Rewritten. (Kagan Paul. 21s.)
Two hundred years ago Richard Owen Cambridge, an Englishman, remarked that since the flow of American words into English was already so rapid, a glossary of them would soon be in order. The suggestion has been renewed with decreasing seriousness ever since. The only charming idea left in the history of the opposition is the recollection that of all innocents it should have been John Wesley who, by using the American word bluff for the English bank in his diary in December, 1737, set the Great English Wrath ablaze. Nowadays this educated anger crackles away regularly in the Sunday newspapers, and only a fortnight ago a corre- spondent coming recently on Dr. Heinrich Spies' German translation of Mr. Mencken's third edition apostrophised as a titbit of irony a distinction between an American usage and one " of British English," though it is a distinction made by all good writers on language and is indeed essential in those continental and Japanese universities where two courses are offered, one in each dialect. It seems, that in language, as in Other fields, where there is no educated opinion already formed, educated people tend to pick up the illiterate opinion that happens to be lying around.
But Americans need to know that our ancient prejudice is not entirely due to our natural stubbornness and conde- scension. It has been confirmed and abetted by at least two sorts of Ameepmns.
There are what Mr. Mencken calls the Anglomaniacs, who have deceived many an Englishman into thinking he had come to terms, at the cost of little effort, with America and Americans. On one page or another Mr. Mencken routs them all, from Washington Irving to Henry James (here impaled in the bleakest anecdote a man could wish to have forgotten), though he somehow omits the latest, grcat2st of the expat- riates, of whom the present Professor of American History at Harvard superbly said that he had " retraced the spiritual progress of his ancestors."
And then there is the. Loyalist party, which was originally encouraged in its aloofness and suspicion of the new way of life by Webster's absurdly self-conscious plans for a Federal English. In the party today there are strange bedfellows : school-marms, passionate for elocution, still reviving Better Speech Week ; New Englanders flattered by the British rationalisation of their geography—the north Atlantic sea- board is America (because, of course, its nearest to the British Isles) and the rest of the continent " the provinces." Hollywood, more than we dare ever dream a partisan of our island prejudice, spreading among what Mr. Mencken once called the booboisie the gospel that British voices arc right for " straight " parts and American for - character."
But left to itself, without this colonial aid, what are the symptoms of the British prejudice, which in the face of all linguistic history and other sorts of history as well yet takes offence at the idiom, the pronunciation and vocabulary of another nation's tongue ?
First, is the rooted belief that what was transplanted was a medley of provincial dialects. Although Sheldon and Whitney have pretty well disproved this, their findings have not been noised abroad much outside the publication Dialect Notes, and there is still much of the controversy in doubt. Secondly is the most beloved doctrine of layman and pedant—the aesthetic approach to innately " beautiful sounds." There is too the very natural projection, at this peak of our history, of British ideas on to a puzzling continent : our inability to appreciate a society in which regional accents imply no loss, but rather a more honest assurance, of social status ; our unwillingness to admit that the Anglo-Saxon is now a negative minority influence ; our distaste for the melting pot." And when these instinctive ideas are applied to language, there is the greatest difficulty of all in clarifying linguistics for the layman : the fact that he is unaware that in such things there is a professional opinion.
So when Mr. Meneketes first edition of the present work was published in this country in 1919, even reputable philologists greeted it as if it were the first professional textbook and not the first popular one. Now the idea is gaining currency that that language is no private invention of Mr. Mencken (like Ethnic or Mr. Ogden's Basic, or even Mr. Dooley's " English language run over by a musical comedy ") but an historical fact. We begin to admit that a language is not made as we thought they pretended, by a few vaudeville comedians taking thought, but by a whole nation taking in new experience, a new landscape, three or four climates, the first idea of essential economy, the later idea of lavish natural rewards (it would be possible to tell the history of the Grass Lands through merely the ebullient, and lately tragic, idioms they have directly inspired).
Mr. Mencken begins his huge labour with the fairest kind of shock tactics, by showing how in the eighteenth century simple English utility words changed their meaning, so that an Englishman today has to learn again what an American is thinking of when he talks or writes about a creek, a shoe, lumber, corn, a rock, a partridge, a barn. Ile then proceeds to an historical account of the British attack. The second section is an attempt to define fairly and finally " an Americanism." There follows a hundred-page history of the growth of the language ; another hundred pages of patient and detailed equation of American and British English ; separate and tireless sections on pronunciation, spelling, the materials of the common speech ; a section on proper names in America ; another on American slang ; an enormous appendix on the contribution to American of 33 non-English dialects. And Mr. Mencken's final chapter expounds the thesis that American is already gaining on the parent language, will overtake it, and that probably English will not very distantly become a dialect of American.
English readers will probably continue, even in the face of this magnificent compilation of the great authorities, to be sceptical and sad. For this feeling too there is already palpable justification. . For the impact of American on English has been at least as bad as it has been good. In the last hundred years it has given us endless words and idioms we should now hotly protest as Briticisms. But the neglect of the study of American in this country has been at a price. Mr. Mencken constantly notes that the British cannot dis- tinguish slang from educated usage and good from bad slang (and it is merely wish-thinking to say we have taken only the best of American). It is not remarkable, then, that for every group of writers, like the editors of London Week, who manage to take over with fair success a style (from the \'ew Yorker's inimitable Talk of The Town ") they well under- stand, there will always be the Daily Express to take over (from Time) a style it profoundly misunderstands. The significant example of P. G. Wodehouse, who has declined steadily in proportion to his absorption of American, . points to our still vast ignorance of the feel, the character, what Sapir calls the slope," of this new and ripening language. It is on this score that English readers may complain of Mr. Mencken—that we could have done with sonic exposition of the varieties of American style. But of course, this is selfish. Mr. Mencken is talking, in 800 beautifully documented pages, about the materials of the language, not its resources. How vast those materials are may be gathered from the fact that in 600 years of a unified English language there has been no survey of a living language which can compare with the truly gigantic prospect of the American Linguistic Atlas, a survey of a language 200 years old, a project which hopes to complete—in 25 years—many thousand maps specify- ing every variety of locution, vocabularies, dispersion of words, meanings, intonations, inflexions, idioms, constructions and so on over the entire north _American continent.
It is a proud reflection that Mr. Meneken, whose literary career has been most remarkable for a gift of invective and for a frequent sneering at the researches of scholarship, should here magnanimously play fair by his gift and produce in his maturity a great work of scholarship. Let no reader be deterred by that word scholarship. A reading of the section giving a full account of the Englishman's magic incapacity to write American English when creating American characters in fiction—this alone is extremely funny, awarding as it does the booby prize to Galsworthy and Conan Doyle, with Wells, Kipling, Miss Rose Macaulay, and Edgar Wallace in hot pursuit for the title. And for readers who never touch learned works of any kind, there are the pleasures of geography, cross- word puzzles, social history, hundreds of anecdotes, all the pleasures of a journey to America without the hangover.
ALISTAIR COOKE.
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