Part 15

The elements that enter into the special character of American have been rehearsed in the first chapter: a general impatience of rule and restraint, a democratic enmity to all authority, an extravagant and often grotesque humor, an extraordinary capacity for metaphor[13]--in brief, all the natural marks of what Van Wyck Brooks calls "a popular life which bubbles with energy and spreads and grows and slips away ever more and more from the control of tested ideas, a popular life with the lid off."[14] This is the spirit of America, and from it the American language is nourished. Brooks, perhaps, generalizes a bit too lavishly. Below the surface there is also a curious conservatism, even a sort of timorousness; in a land of manumitted peasants the primary trait of the peasant is bound to show itself now and then; as Wendell Phillips once said, "more than any other people, we Americans are afraid of one another"--that is, afraid of opposition, of derision, of all the consequences of singularity. But in the field of language, as in that of politics, this suspicion of the new is often transformed into a suspicion of the merely unfamiliar, and so its natural tendency toward conservatism is overcome. It is of the essence of democracy that it remain a government by amateurs, and under a government by amateurs it is precisely the expert who is most questioned--and it is the expert [Pg141] who commonly stresses the experience of the past. And in a democratic society it is not the iconoclast who seems most revolutionary, but the purist. The derisive designation of /high-brow/ is thoroughly American in more ways than one. It is a word put together in an unmistakably American fashion, it reflects an habitual American attitude of mind, and its potency in debate is peculiarly national too.

I daresay it is largely a fear of the weapon in it--and there are many others of like effect in the arsenal--which accounts for the far greater prevalence of idioms from below in the formal speech of America than in the formal speech of England. There is surely no English novelist of equal rank whose prose shows so much of colloquial looseness and ease as one finds in the prose of Howells: to find a match for it one must go to the prose of the neo-Celts, professedly modelled upon the speech of peasants, and almost proudly defiant of English grammar and syntax, and to the prose of the English themselves before the Restoration. Nor is it imaginable that an Englishman of comparable education and position would ever employ such locutions as those I have hitherto quoted from the public addresses of Dr. Wilson--that is, innocently, seriously, as a matter of course. The Englishman, when he makes use of coinages of that sort, does so in conscious relaxation, and usually with a somewhat heavy sense of doggishness. They are proper to the paddock or even to the dinner table, but scarcely to serious scenes and occasions. But in the United States their use is the rule rather than the exception; it is not the man who uses them, but the man who doesn't use them, who is marked off. Their employment, if high example counts for anything, is a standard habit of the language, as their diligent avoidance is a standard habit of English.

A glance through the /Congressional Record/ is sufficient to show how small is the minority of purists among the chosen leaders of the nation. Within half an hour, turning the pages at random, I find scores of locutions that would paralyze the stenographers in the House of Commons, and they are in the speeches, not of wild mavericks from the West, but of some of the chief men of the two Houses. Surely no Senator occupied a more conspicuous [Pg142] position, during the first year of the war, than Lee S. Overman, of North Carolina, chairman of the Committee on Rules, and commander of the administration forces on the floor. Well, I find Senator Overman using /to enthuse/ in a speech of the utmost seriousness and importance, and not once, but over and over again.[15] I turn back a few pages and encounter it again--this time in the mouth of General Sherwood, of Ohio. A few more, and I find a fit match for it, to wit, /to biograph/.[16] The speaker here is Senator L. Y. Sherman, of Illinois. In the same speech he uses /to resolute/. A few more, and various other characteristic verbs are unearthed: /to demagogue/,[17] /to dope out/[18] /to fall down/[19] (in the sense of to fail), /to jack up/,[20] /to phone/,[21] /to peeve/,[22] /to come across/,[23] /to hike/, /to butt in/,[24] /to back pedal/, /to get solid with/, /to hooverize/, /to trustify/, /to feature/, /to insurge/, /to haze/, /to reminisce/, /to camouflage/, /to play for a sucker/, and so on, almost /ad infinitum/. And with them, a large number of highly American nouns, chiefly compounds, all pressing upward for recognition: /tin-Lizzie/, /brain-storm/, /come-down/, /pin-head/, /trustification/, /pork-barrel/, /buck-private/, /dough-boy/, /cow-country/. And adjectives: /jitney/, /bush/ (for rural), /balled-up/,[25] /dolled-up/, /phoney/, /tax-paid/.[26] And phrases: /dollars to doughnuts/, /on the job/, /that gets me/, /one best bet/. And back-formations: /ad/, /movie/, /photo/. And [Pg143] various substitutions and Americanized inflections: /over/ for /more than/, /gotten/ for /got/ in the present perfect,[27] /rile/ for /roil/, /bust/ for /burst/. This last, in truth, has come into a dignity that even grammarians will soon hesitate to question. Who, in America, would dare to speak of /bursting/ a broncho, or of a /trust-burster/?[28]

§ 3

/Lost Distinctions/--This general iconoclasm reveals itself especially in a disdain for most of the niceties of modern English. The American, like the Elizabethan Englishman, is usually quite unconscious of them and even when they have been instilled into him by the hard labor of pedagogues he commonly pays little heed to them in his ordinary discourse. The English distinction between /will/ and /shall/ offers a salient case in point. This distinction, it may be said at once, is far more a confection of the grammarians than a product of the natural forces shaping the language. It has, indeed, little etymological basis, and is but imperfectly justified logically. One finds it disregarded in the Authorized Version of the Bible, in all the plays of Shakespeare, in the essays of the reign of Anne, and in some of the best examples of modern English literature. The theory behind it is so inordinately abstruse that the Fowlers, in "The King's English,"[29] require 20 pages to explain it, and even then they come to the resigned conclusion that the task is hopeless. "The idiomatic use [of the two auxiliaries]," they say, "is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it."[30] Well, even those who are to the manner born seem to find [Pg144] it difficult, for at once the learned authors cite blunder in the writings of Richardson, Stevenson, Gladstone, Jowett, Oscar Wilde, and even Henry Sweet, author of the best existing grammar of the English language. In American the distinction is almost lost. No ordinary American, save after the most laborious reflection, would detect anything wrong in this sentence from the /London Times/, denounced as corrupt by the Fowlers: "We must reconcile what we would like to do with what we can do." Nor in this by W. B. Yeats: "The character who delights us may commit murder like Macbeth ... and yet we will rejoice in every happiness that comes to him." Half a century ago, impatient of the effort to fasten the English distinction upon American, George P. Marsh attacked it as of "no logical value or significance whatever," and predicted that "at no very distant day this verbal quibble will disappear, and one of the auxiliaries will be employed, with all persons of the nominative, exclusively as the sign of the future, and the other only as an expression of purpose or authority."[31] This prophecy has been substantially verified. /Will/ is sound American "with all persons of the nominative," and /shall/ is almost invariably an "expression of purpose or authority."[32]

And so, though perhaps not to the same extent, with /who/ and /whom/. Now and then there arises a sort of panicky feeling that /whom/ is being neglected, and so it is trotted out,[33] but in the [Pg145] main the American language tends to dispense with it, at least in its least graceful situations. Noah Webster, always the pragmatic reformer, denounced it so long ago as 1783. Common sense, he argued, was on the side of "/who/ did he marry?" Today such a form as "/whom/ are you talking to?" would seem somewhat affected in ordinary discourse in America; "/who/ are you talking to?" is heard a thousand times oftener--and is doubly American, for it substitutes /who/ for /whom/ and puts a preposition at the end of a sentence: two crimes that most English purists would seek to avoid. It is among the pronouns that the only remaining case inflections in English are to be found, if we forget the possessive, and even here these survivors of an earlier day begin to grow insecure. Lounsbury's defense of "it is /me/,"[34] as we shall see in the next chapter, has support in the history and natural movement of the language, and that movement is also against the preservation of the distinction between /who/ and /whom/. The common speech plays hob with both of the orthodox inflections, despite the protests of grammarians, and in the long run, no doubt, they will be forced to yield to its pressure, as they have always yielded in the past. Between the dative and accusative on the one side and the nominative on the other there has been war in the English language for centuries, and it has always tended to become a war of extermination. Our now universal use of /you/ for /ye/ in the nominative shows the dative and accusative swallowing the nominative, and the practical disappearance of /hither/, /thither/ and /whither/, whose place is now taken by /here/, /there/ and /where/, shows a contrary process. In such wars a /posse comitatus/ marches ahead of the disciplined army. American stands to English in the relation of that posse to that army. It is incomparably more enterprising, more contemptuous of precedent and authority, more impatient of rule.

A shadowy line often separates what is currently coming into sound usage from what is still regarded as barbarous. No self-respecting American, I daresay, would defend /ain't/ as a substitute [Pg146] for /isn't/, say in "he /ain't/ the man," and yet /ain't/ is already tolerably respectable in the first person, where English countenances the even more clumsy /aren't/. /Aren't/ has never got a foothold in the American first person; when it is used at all, which is very rarely, it is always as a conscious Briticism. Facing the alternative of employing the unwieldy "am I not in this?" the American turns boldly to "/ain't/ I in this?" It still grates a bit, perhaps, but /aren't/ grates even more. Here, as always, the popular speech is pulling the exacter speech along, and no one familiar with its successes in the past can have much doubt that it will succeed again, soon or late. In the same way it is breaking down the inflectional distinction between adverb and adjective, so that "I feel /bad/" begins to take on the dignity of a national idiom, and /sure/, /to go big/ and /run slow/[35] become almost respectable. When, on the entrance of the United States into the war, the Marine Corps chose "treat 'em /rough/" as its motto, no one thought to raise a grammatical objection, and the clipped adverb was printed upon hundreds of thousands of posters and displayed in every town in the country, always with the imprimatur of the national government. So, again, American, in its spoken form, tends to obliterate the distinction between nearly related adjectives, /e. g./, /healthful/ and /healthy/, /tasteful/ and /tasty/. And to challenge the somewhat absurd text-book prohibition of terminal prepositions, so that "where are we /at/?" loses its old raciness. And to dally with the double negative, as in "I have no doubt /but/ that."[36]

But these tendencies, or at least the more extravagant of them, belong to the next chapter. How much influence they exert, even [Pg147] indirectly, is shown by the American disdain of the English precision in the use of the indefinite pronoun. I turn to the /Saturday Evening Post/, and in two minutes find: "/one/ feels like an atom when /he/ begins to review /his/ own life and deeds."[37] The error is very rare in English; the Fowlers, seeking examples of it, could get them only from the writings of a third-rate woman novelist, Scotch to boot. But it is so common in American that it scarcely attracts notice. Neither does the appearance of a redundant /s/ in such words as /towards/, /downwards/, /afterwards/ and /heavenwards/. In England this /s/ is used relatively seldom, and then it usually marks a distinction in meaning, as it does on both sides of the ocean between /beside/ and /besides/. "In modern standard English," says Smith,[38] "though not in the English of the United States, a distinction which we feel, but many of us could not define, is made between /forward/ and /forwards/; /forwards/ being used in definite contrast to any other direction, as 'if you move at all, you can only move /forwards/,' while /forward/ is used where no such contrast is implied, as in the common phrase 'to bring a matter forward.'"[39] This specific distinction, despite Smith, probably retains some force in the United States too, but in general our usage allows the /s/ in cases where English usage would certainly be against it. Gould, in the 50's, noted its appearance at the end of such words as /somewhere/ and /anyway/, and denounced it as vulgar and illogical. Thornton has traced /anyways/ back to 1842 and shown that it is an archaism, and to be found in the Book of Common Prayer (/circa/ 1560); perhaps it has been preserved by analogy with /sideways/. Henry James, in "The Question of Our Speech," attacked "such forms of impunity as /somewheres else/ and /nowheres else/, /a good ways on/ and /a good ways off/" as "vulgarisms with what a great deal of general credit for what we good-naturedly call 'refinement' appears so able to coexist."[40] /Towards/ and /afterwards/, though frowned upon in England, are now quite sound in American. I [Pg148] find the former in the title of an article in /Dialect Notes/, which plainly gives it scholastic authority.[41] More (and with no little humor), I find it in the deed of a fund given to the American Academy of Arts and Letters to enable the gifted philologs of that sanhedrin "to consider its duty /towards/ the conservation of the English language in its beauty and purity."[42] Both /towards/ and /afterwards/, finally, are included in the /New York Evening Post's/ list of "words no longer disapproved when in their proper places," along with /over/ for /more than/, and /during/ for /in the course of/.

In the last chapter we glanced at several salient differences between the common coin of English and the common coin of American--that is, the verbs and adjectives in constant colloquial use--the rubber-stamps, so to speak, of the two languages. America has two adverbs that belong to the same category. They are /right/ and /good/. Neither holds the same place in English. Thornton shows that the use of /right/, as in /right away/, /right good/ and /right now/, was already widespread in the United States early in the last century; his first example is dated 1818. He believes that the locution was "possibly imported from the southwest of Ireland." Whatever its origin, it quickly attracted the attention of English visitors. Dickens noted /right away/ as an almost universal Americanism during his first American tour, in 1842, and poked fun at it in the second chapter of "American Notes." /Right/ is used as a synonym for /directly/, as in /right away/, /right off/, /right now/ and /right on time/; for /moderately/, as in /right well/, /right smart/, /right good/ and /right often/, and in place of /precisely/, as in /right there/. Some time ago, in an article on Americanisms, an English critic called it "that most distinctively American word," and concocted the following dialogue to instruct the English in its use:

How do I get to----?

Go /right/ along, and take the first turning (/sic/) on the /right/, and you are /right/ there.

/Right?/

/Right./

/Right!/[43]

Like W. L. George, this Englishman failed in his attempt to write correct American despite his fine pedagogical passion. No American would ever say "take the first turning"; he would say "turn at the first corner." As for /right away/, R. O. Williams argues that "so far as analogy can make good English, it is as good as one could choose."[44] Nevertheless, the Oxford Dictionary admits it only as an Americanism, and avoids all mention of the other American uses of /right/ as an adverb. /Good/ is almost as protean. It is not only used as a general synonym for all adjectives and adverbs connoting satisfaction, as in /to feel good/, /to be treated good/, /to sleep good/, but also as a reinforcement to other adjectives and adverbs, as in "I hit him /good/ and hard" and "I am /good/ and tired." Of late /some/ has come into wide use as an adjective-adverb of all work, indicating special excellence or high degree, as in /some girl/, /some sick/, /going some/, etc. It is still below the salt, but threatens to reach a more respectable position. One encounters it in the newspapers constantly and in the /Congressional Record/, and not long ago a writer in the /Atlantic Monthly/[45] hymned it ecstatically as "/some/ word--a true super-word, in fact" and argued that it could be used "in a sense for which there is absolutely no synonym in the dictionary." Basically, it appears to be an adjective, but in many of its common situations the grammarians would probably call it an adverb. It gives no little support to the growing tendency, already noticed, to break down the barrier between the two parts of speech.

§ 4

/Foreign Influences Today/--No other great nation of today supports so large a foreign population as the United States, [Pg150] either relatively or absolutely; none other contains so many foreigners forced to an effort, often ignorant and ineffective, to master the national language. Since 1820 nearly 35,000,000 immigrants have come into the country, and of them probably not 10,000,000 brought any preliminary acquaintance with English with them. The census of 1910 showed that nearly 1,500,000 persons then living permanently on American soil could not speak it at all; that more than 13,000,000 had been born in other countries, chiefly of different language; and that nearly 20,000,000 were the children of such immigrants, and hence under the influence of their speech habits. Altogether, there were probably at least 25,000,000 whose house language was not the vulgate, and who thus spoke it in competition with some other language. No other country houses so many aliens. In Great Britain the alien population, for a century past, has never been more than 2 per cent of the total population, and since the passage of the Alien Act of 1905 it has tended to decline steadily. In Germany, in 1910, there were but 1,259,873 aliens in a population of more than 60,000,000, and of these nearly a half were German-speaking Austrians and Swiss. In France, in 1906, there were 1,000,000 foreigners in a population of 39,000,000 and a third of them were French-speaking Belgians, Luxembourgeois and Swiss. In Italy, in 1911, there were but 350,000 in a population of 35,000,000.

This large and constantly reinforced admixture of foreigners has naturally exerted a constant pressure upon the national language, for the majority of them, at least in the first generation, have found it quite impossible to acquire it in any purity, and even their children have grown up with speech habits differing radically from those of correct English. The effects of this pressure are obviously two-fold; on the one hand the foreigner, struggling with a strange and difficult tongue, makes efforts to simplify it as much as possible, and so strengthens the native tendency to disregard all niceties and complexities, and on the other hand he corrupts it with words and locutions from the language he has brought with him, and sometimes with whole idioms and grammatical forms. We have seen, in earlier chapters, how the [Pg151] Dutch and French of colonial days enriched the vocabulary of the colonists, how the German immigrants of the first half of the nineteenth century enriched it still further, and how the Irish of the same period influenced its everyday usages. The same process is still going on. The Italians, the Slavs, and, above all, the Russian Jews, make steady contributions to the American vocabulary and idiom, and though these contributions are often concealed by quick and complete naturalization their foreignness to English remains none the less obvious. /I should worry/,[46] in its way, is correct English, but in essence it is as completely Yiddish as /kosher/, /ganof/, /schadchen/, /oi-yoi/, /matzoh/ or /mazuma/.[47] /Black-hand/, too, is English in form, but it is nevertheless as plainly an Italian loan-word as /spaghetti/, /mafia/ or /padrone/.

The extent of such influences upon American, and particularly upon spoken American, remains to be studied; in the whole literature I can find but one formal article upon the subject. That article[48] deals specifically with the suffix /-fest/, which came into American from the German and was probably suggested by familiarity with /sängerfest/. There is no mention of it in any of the dictionaries of Americanisms, and yet, in such forms as /talk-fest/ and /gabfest/ it is met with almost daily. So with /-heimer/, /-inski/ and /-bund/. Several years ago /-heimer/ had a great vogue in slang, and was rapidly done to death. But /wiseheimer/ remains [Pg152] in colloquial use as a facetious synonym for /smart-aleck/, and after awhile it may gradually acquire dignity. Far lowlier words, in fact, have worked their way in. /Buttinski/, perhaps, is going the same route. As for the words in /-bund/, many of them are already almost accepted. /Plunder-bund/ is now at least as good as /pork-barrel/ and /slush-fund/, and /money-bund/ is frequently heard in Congress.[49] Such locutions creep in stealthily, and are secure before they are suspected. Current slang, out of which the more decorous language dredges a large part of its raw materials, is full of them. /Nix/ and /nixy/, for /no/, are debased forms of the German /nichts/; /aber nit/, once as popular as /camouflage/, is obviously /aber nicht/. And a steady flow of nouns, all needed to designate objects introduced by immigrants, enriches the vocabulary. The Hungarians not only brought their national condiment with them; they also brought its name, /paprika/, and that name is now thoroughly American.[50] In the same way the Italians brought in /camorra/, /padrone/, /spaghetti/ and a score of other substantives, and the Jews made contributions from Yiddish and Hebrew and greatly reinforced certain old borrowings from German. Once such a loan-word gets in it takes firm root. During the first year of American participation in the World War an effort was made, on patriotic grounds, to substitute /liberty-cabbage/ for /sour-kraut/, but it quickly failed, for the name had become as completely Americanized as the thing itself, and so /liberty-cabbage/ seemed affected and absurd. In the same way a great many other German words survived the passions of the time. Nor could all the influence of the professional patriots obliterate that German influence which has fastened upon the American /yes/ something of the quality of /ja/.