Part 17

The rapidity with which new verbs are made in the United States is really quite amazing. Two days after the first regulations of the Food Administration were announced, /to hooverize/ appeared spontaneously in scores of newspapers, and a week later it was employed without any visible sense of its novelty in the debates of Congress and had taken on a respectability equal to that of /to bryanize/, /to fletcherize/ and /to oslerize/. /To electrocute/ appeared inevitably in the first public discussion of capital [Pg164] punishment by electricity; /to taxi/ came in with the first taxi-cabs; /to commute/ no doubt accompanied the first commutation ticket; /to insurge/ attended the birth of the Progressive balderdash. Of late the old affix /-ize/, once fecund of such monsters as /to funeralize/, has come into favor again, and I note, among its other products, /to belgiumize/, /to vacationize/, /to picturize/ and /to scenarioize/. In a newspaper headline I even find /to s o s/, in the form of its gerund.[65] Many characteristic American verbs are compounds of common verbs and prepositions or adverbs, with new meanings imposed. Compare, for example, /to give/ and /to give out/, /to go back/ and /to go back on/, /to beat/ and /to beat it/, /to light/ and /to light out/, /to butt/ and /to butt in/, /to turn/ and /to turn down/, /to show/ and /to show up/, /to put/ and /to put over/, /to wind/ and /to wind up/. Sometimes, however, the addition seems to be merely rhetorical, as in /to start off/, /to finish up/, /to open up/ and /to hurry up/. /To hurry up/ is so commonplace in America that everyone uses it and no one notices it, but it remains rare in England. /Up/ seems to be essential to many of these latter-day verbs, /e. g./, /to pony up/, /to doll up/, /to ball up/; without it they are without significance. Nearly all of them are attended by derivative adjectives or nouns; /cut-up/, /show-down/, /kick-in/, /come-down/, /hang-out/, /start-off/, /run-in/, /balled-up/, /dolled-up/, /wind-up/, /bang-up/, /turn-down/, /jump-off/.

In many directions the same prodigal fancy shows itself--for example, in the free interchange of parts of speech, in the bold inflection of words not inflected in sound English, and in the invention of wholly artificial words. The first phenomenon has already concerned us. Would an English literary critic of any pretensions employ such a locution as "all by her /lonesome/"? I have a doubt of it--and yet I find that phrase in a serious book by the critic of the /New Republic/.[66] Would an English M. P. use "he has another /think/ coming" in debate? Again I doubt it--but even more anarchistic dedications of verbs and adjectives to substantival use are to be found in the /Congressional Record/ every day. /Jitney/ is an old American substantive lately [Pg165] revived; a month after its revival it was also an adjective, and before long it may also be a verb and even an adverb. /To lift up/ was turned tail first and made a substantive, and is now also an adjective and a verb. /Joy-ride/ became a verb the day after it was born as a noun. And what of /livest/? An astounding inflection, indeed--but with quite sound American usage behind it. The /Metropolitan Magazine/, of which Col. Roosevelt is an editor, announces on its letter paper that it is "the /livest/ magazine in America," and /Poetry/, the organ of the new poetry movement, prints at the head of its contents page the following encomium from the /New York Tribune/: "the /livest/ art in America today is poetry, and the /livest/ expression of that art is in this little Chicago monthly."

Now and then the spirit of American shows a transient faltering, and its inventiveness is displaced by a banal extension of meaning, so that a single noun comes to signify discrete things. Thus /laundry/, meaning originally a place where linen is washed, has come to mean also the linen itself. So, again, /gun/ has come to mean fire-arms of all sorts, and has entered into such compounds as /gun-man/ and /gun-play/. And in the same way /party/ has been borrowed from the terminology of the law and made to do colloquial duty as a synonym for /person/. But such evidences of poverty are rare and abnormal; the whole movement of the language is toward the multiplication of substantives. A new object gets a new name, and that new name enters into the common vocabulary at once. /Sundae/ and /hokum/ are late examples; their origin is dubious and disputed, but they met genuine needs and so they seem to be secure. A great many more such substantives are deliberate inventions, for example, /kodak/, /protectograph/, /conductorette/, /bevo/, /klaxon/, /vaseline/, /jap-a-lac/, /resinol/, /autocar/, /postum/, /crisco/, /electrolier/, /addressograph/, /alabastine/, /orangeade/, /pianola/, /victrola/, /dictagraph/, /kitchenette/, /crispette/, /cellarette/, /uneeda/, /triscuit/ and /peptomint/. Some of these indicate attempts at description: /oleomargarine/, /phonograph/ and /gasoline/ are older examples of that class. Others represent efforts to devise designations that will meet the conditions of advertising psychology and the trade-marks law, to wit, that they [Pg166] be (/a/) new, (/b/) easily remembered, and (/c/) not directly descriptive. Probably the most successful invention of this sort is /kodak/, which was devised by George Eastman, inventor of the portable camera so called. /Kodak/ has so far won acceptance as a common noun that Eastman is often forced to assert his proprietary right to it.[67] /Vaseline/ is in the same position. The annual crop of such inventions in the United States is enormous.[68] The majority die, but a hearty few always survive.

Of analogous character are artificial words of the /scalawag/ and /rambunctious/ class, the formation of which constantly goes on. Some of them are shortened compounds: /grandificent/ (from /grand/ and /magnificent/), /sodalicious/ (from /soda/ and /delicious/) and /warphan/(/age/) (from /war/ and /orphan/(/age/)).[69] Others are made up of common roots and grotesque affixes: /swelldoodle/, /splendiferous/ and /peacharino/. Yet others are mere extravagant inventions: /scallywampus/, /supergobsloptious/ and /floozy/. Most of these are devised by advertisement writers or college students, and belong properly to slang, but there is a steady movement of selected specimens into the common vocabulary. The words in /-doodle/ hint at German influences, and those in /-ino/ owe something to Italian, or at least to popular burlesques of what is conceived to be Italian.

§ 6

/Pronunciation/--"Language," said Sayce, in 1879, "does not consist of letters, but of sounds, and until this fact has been brought home to us our study of it will be little better than an [Pg167] exercise of memory."[70] The theory, at that time, was somewhat strange to English grammarians and etymologists, despite the investigations of A. J. Ellis and the massive lesson of Grimm's law; their labors were largely wasted upon deductions from the written word. But since then, chiefly under the influence of Continental philologists, and particularly of the Dane, J. O. H. Jespersen, they have turned from orthographical futilities to the actual sounds of the tongue, and the latest and best grammar of it, that of Sweet, is frankly based upon the spoken English of educated Englishmen--not, remember, of conscious purists, but of the general body of cultivated folk. Unluckily, this new method also has its disadvantages. The men of a given race and time usually write a good deal alike, or, at all events, attempt to write alike, but in their oral speech there are wide variations. "No two persons," says a leading contemporary authority upon English phonetics,[71] "pronounce exactly alike." Moreover, "even the best speaker commonly uses more than one style." The result is that it is extremely difficult to determine the prevailing pronunciation of a given combination of letters at any time and place. The persons whose speech is studied pronounce it with minute shades of difference, and admit other differences according as they are conversing naturally or endeavoring to exhibit their pronunciation. Worse, it is impossible to represent a great many of these shades in print. Sweet, trying to do it,[72] found himself, in the end, with a preposterous alphabet of 125 letters. Prince L.-L. Bonaparte more than doubled this number, and Ellis brought it to 390.[73] Other phonologists, English and Continental, have gone floundering into the same bog. The dictionary-makers, forced to a far greater economy of means, are brought into obscurity. The difficulties of the enterprise, in fact, are probably unsurmountable. It is, as White says, "almost impossible for one person to express to another by signs the [Pg168] sound of any word." "Only the voice," he goes on, "is capable of that; for the moment a sign is used the question arises, What is the value of that sign? The sounds of words are the most delicate, fleeting and inapprehensible things in nature.... Moreover, the question arises as to the capability to apprehend and distinguish sounds on the part of the person whose evidence is given."[74] Certain German orthoepists, despairing of the printed page, have turned to the phonograph, and there is a Deutsche Grammophon-Gesellschaft in Berlin which offers records of specimen speeches in a great many languages and dialects, including English. The phonograph has also been put to successful use in language teaching by various American correspondence schools.

In view of all this it would be hopeless to attempt to exhibit in print the numerous small differences between English and American pronunciation, for many of them are extremely delicate and subtle, and only their aggregation makes them plain. According to a recent and very careful observer,[75] the most important of them do not lie in pronunciation at all, properly so called, but in intonation. In this direction, he says, one must look for the true characters "of the English accent." I incline to agree with White,[76] that the pitch of the English voice is somewhat higher than that of the American, and that it is thus more penetrating. The nasal twang which Englishmen observe in the /vox Americana/, though it has high overtones, is itself not high pitched, but rather low pitched, as all constrained and muffled tones are apt to be. The causes of that twang have long engaged phonologists, and in the main they agree that there is a physical basis for it--that our generally dry climate and rapid changes of temperature produce an actual thickening of the membranes concerned in the production of sound.[77] We are, in brief, a somewhat snuffling [Pg169] people, and much more given to catarrhs and coryzas than the inhabitants of damp Britain. Perhaps this general impediment to free and easy utterance, subconsciously apprehended, is responsible for the American tendency to pronounce the separate syllables of a word with much more care than an Englishman bestows upon them; the American, in giving /extraordinary/ six distinct syllables instead of the Englishman's grudging four, may be seeking to make up for his natural disability. Marsh, in his "Lectures on the English Language,"[78] sought two other explanations of the fact. On the one hand, he argued that the Americans of his day read a great deal more than the English, and were thus much more influenced by the spelling of words, and on the other hand he pointed out that "our flora shows that the climate of even our Northern States belongs ... to a more Southern type than that of England," and that "in Southern latitudes ... articulation is generally much more distinct than in Northern regions." In support of the latter proposition he cited the pronunciation of Spanish, Italian and Turkish, as compared with that of English, Danish and German--rather unfortunate examples, for the pronunciation of German is at least as clear as that of Italian. Swedish would have supported his case far better: the Swedes debase their vowels and slide over their consonants even more markedly than the English. Marsh believed that there was a tendency among Southern peoples to throw the accent back, and that this helped to "bring out all the syllables." One finds a certain support for this notion in various American peculiarities of stress. /Advertisement/ offers an example. The prevailing American pronunciation, despite incessant pedagogical counterblasts, puts the accent on the penult, whereas the English pronunciation stresses the second syllable. /Paresis/ illustrates the same tendency. The English accent the first syllable, but, as Krapp says, American usage clings to the [Pg170] accent on the second syllable.[79] There are, again, /pianist/, /primarily/ and /telegrapher/. The English accent the first syllable of each; we commonly accent the second. In /temporarily/ they also accent the first; we accent the third. Various other examples might be cited. But when one had marshalled them their significance would be at once set at naught by four very familiar words, /mamma/, /papa/, /inquiry/ and /ally/. Americans almost invariably accent each on the first syllable; Englishmen stress the second. For months, during 1918, the publishers of the Standard Dictionary, advertising that work in the street-cars, explained that /ally/ should be accented on the second syllable, and pointed out that owners of their dictionary were safeguarded against the vulgarism of accenting it on the first. Nevertheless, this free and highly public instruction did not suffice to exterminate /al´ly/. I made note of the pronunciations overheard, with the word constantly on all lips. But one man of my acquaintance regularly accented the second syllable, and he was an eminent scholar, professionally devoted to the study of language.

Thus it is unsafe, here as elsewhere, to generalize too facilely, and particularly unsafe to exhibit causes with too much assurance. "Man frage nicht warum," says Philipp Karl Buttmann. "Der Sprachgebrauch lässt sich nur beobachten."[80] But the greater distinctness of American utterance, whatever its genesis and machinery, is palpable enough in many familiar situations. "The typical American accent," says Vizetelly, "is often harsh and unmusical, but it sounds all of the letters to be sounded, and slurs, but does not distort, the rest."[81] An American, for example, almost always sounds the first /l/ in /fulfill/; an Englishman makes the first syllable /foo/. An American sounds every syllable in /extraordinary/, /literary/, /military/, /secretary/ and the other words of the /-ary/-group; an Englishman never pronounces the /a/ of the penultimate syllable. /Kindness/, with the /d/ silent, would attract notice in the United States; in England, according to [Pg171] Jones,[82] the /d/ is "very commonly, if not usually" omitted. /Often/, in America, commonly retains a full /t/; in England it is actually and officially /offen/. Let an American and an Englishman pronounce /program/ (/me/). Though the Englishman retains the long form of the last syllable in writing, he reduces it in speaking to a thick triple consonant, /grm/; the American enunciates it clearly, rhyming it with /damn/. Or try the two with any word ending in /-g/, say /sporting/ or /ripping/. Or with any word having /r/ before a consonant, say /card/, /harbor/, /lord/ or /preferred/. "The majority of Englishmen," says Menner, "certainly do not pronounce the /r/ ...; just as certainly the majority of educated Americans pronounce it distinctly."[83] Henry James, visiting the United States after many years of residence in England, was much harassed by this persistent /r/-sound, which seemed to him to resemble "a sort of morose grinding of the back teeth."[84] So sensitive to it did he become that he began to hear where it was actually non-existent, save as an occasional barbarism, for example, in /Cuba-r/, /vanilla-r/ and /California-r/. He put the blame for it, and for various other departures from the strict canon of contemporary English, upon "the American common school, the American newspaper, and the American Dutchman and Dago." Unluckily for his case, the full voicing of the /r/ came into American long before the appearance of any of these influences. The early colonists, in fact, brought it with them from England, and it still prevailed there in Dr. Johnson's day, for he protested publicly against the "rough snarling sound" and led the movement which finally resulted in its extinction.[85] Today, extinct, it is mourned by English purists, and the Poet Laureate denounces the clergy of the Established Church for saying "the /sawed/ of the /Laud/" instead of "the sword of the Lord."[86]

But even in the matter of elided consonants American is not always the conservator. We cling to the /r/, we preserve the final [Pg172] /g/, we give /nephew/ a clear /f/-sound instead of the clouded English /v/-sound, and we boldly nationalize /trait/ and pronounce its final /t/, but we drop the second /p/ from /pumpkin/ and change the /m/ to /n/, we change the /ph/(=/f/)-sound to plain /p/ in /diphtheria/, /diphthong/ and /naphtha/,[87] we relieve /rind/ of its final /d/, and, in the complete sentence, we slaughter consonants by assimilation. I have heard Englishmen say /brand-new/, but on American lips it is almost invariably /bran-new/. So nearly universal is this nasalization in the United States that certain American lexicographers have sought to found the term upon /bran/ and not upon /brand/. Here the national speech is powerfully influenced by Southern dialectical variations, which in turn probably derive partly from French example and partly from the linguistic limitations of the negro. The latter, even after two hundred years, has great difficulties with our consonants, and often drops them. A familiar anecdote well illustrates his speech habit. On a train stopping at a small station in Georgia a darkey threw up a window and yelled "Wah ee?" The reply from a black on the platform was "Wah oo?" A Northerner aboard the train, puzzled by this inarticulate dialogue, sought light from a Southern passenger, who promptly translated the first question as "Where is he?" and the second as "Where is who?" A recent viewer with alarm[88] argues that this conspiracy against the consonants is spreading, and that English printed words no longer represent the actual sounds of the American language. "Like the French," he says, "we have a marked /liaison/--the borrowing of a letter from the preceding word. We invite one another to 'c'meer' (=come here) ... 'Hoo-zat?' (=who is that?) has as good a /liaison/ as the French /vois avez/." This critic believes that American tends to abandon /t/ for /d/, as in /Sadd'y/ (=Saturday) and /siddup/ (=sit up), and to get rid of /h/, as in "ware-zee?" (=where is he?). But here we invade the vulgar speech, which belongs to the next chapter. [Pg173]

Among the vowels the most salient difference between English and American pronunciation, of course, is marked off by the flat American /a/. This flat /a/, as we have seen, has been under attack at home for nearly a century. The New Englanders, very sensitive to English example, substitute a broad /a/ that is even broader than the English, and an /a/ of the same sort survives in the South in a few words, /e. g./, /master/, /tomato/ and /tassel/, but everywhere else in the country the flat /a/ prevails. Fashion and the example of the stage oppose it,[89] and it is under the ban of an active wing of schoolmasters, but it will not down. To the average American, indeed, the broad /a/ is a banner of affectation, and he associates it unpleasantly with spats, Harvard, male tea-drinking, wrist watches and all the other objects of his social suspicion. He gets the flat sound, not only into such words as /last/, /calf/, /dance/ and /pastor/, but even into /piano/ and /drama/. /Drama/ is sometimes /drayma/ west of Connecticut, but almost never /drahma/ or /drawma/. /Tomato/ with the /a/ of /bat/, may sometimes borrow the /a/ of /plate/, but /tomahto/ is confined to New England and the South. /Hurrah/, in American, has also borrowed the /a/ of /plate/; one hears /hurray/ much oftener than /hurraw/. Even /amen/ frequently shows that /a/, though not when sung. Curiously enough, it is displaced in /patent/ by the true flat /a/. The English rhyme the first syllable of the word with /rate/; in America it always rhymes with /rat/.

The broad /a/ is not only almost extinct outside of New England; it begins to show signs of decay even there. At all events, it has gradually disappeared from many words, and is measurably less sonorous in those in which it survives than it used to be. A century ago it appeared, not only in /dance/, /aunt/, /glass/, /past/, etc., but also in /Daniel/, /imagine/, /rational/ and /travel/.[90] And in 1857 Oliver Wendell Holmes reported it in /matter/, /handsome/, /caterpillar/, /apple/ and /satisfaction/. It has been displaced in virtually all of these, even in the most remote reaches of the back country, [Pg174] by the national flat /a/. Grandgent[91] says that the broad /a/ is now restricted in New England to the following situations:

1. when followed by /s/ or /ns/, as in /last/ and /dance/.

2. when followed by /r/ preceding another consonant, as in /cart/.

3. when followed by /lm/, as in /calm/.

4. when followed by /f/, /s/ or /th/, as in /laugh/, /pass/ and /path/.

The /u/-sound also shows certain differences between English and American usage. The English reduce the last syllable of /figure/ to /ger/; the educated American preserves the /u/-sound as in /nature/. The English make the first syllable of /courteous/ rhyme with /fort/; the American standard rhymes it with /hurt/. The English give an /oo/-sound to the /u/ of /brusque/; in America the word commonly rhymes with /tusk/. A /u/-sound, as everyone knows, gets into the American pronunciation of /clerk/, by analogy with /insert/; the English cling to a broad /a/-sound, by analogy with /hearth/. Even the latter, in the United States, is often pronounced to rhyme with /dearth/. The American, in general, is much less careful than the Englishman to preserve the shadowy /y/-sound before /u/ in words of the /duke/-class. He retains it in /few/, but surely not in /new/. Nor in /duke/, /blue/, /stew/, /due/, /duty/ and /true/. Nor even in /Tuesday/. Purists often attack the simple /oo/-sound. In 1912, for example, the Department of Education of New York City warned all the municipal high-school teachers to combat it.[92] But it is doubtful that one pupil in a hundred was thereby induced to insert the /y/ in /induced/. Finally there is /lieutenant/. The Englishman pronounces the first syllable /left/; the American invariably makes it /loot/. White says that the prevailing American pronunciation is relatively recent. "I never heard it," he reports, "in my boyhood."[93] He was born in New York in 1821.