[Pg131]toc
§ 1
International Exchanges—More than once, during the preceding chapters, we encountered Americanisms that had gone over into English, and English locutions that had begun to get a foothold in the United States. Such exchanges are made very frequently and often very quickly, and though the guardians of English still attack every new Americanism vigorously, even when, as in the case ofscientist, it is obviously sound and useful, they are often routed by public pressure, and have to submit in the end with the best grace possible. For example, considercaucus. It originated in Boston at some indeterminate time before 1750, and remained so peculiarly American for more than a century following that most of the English visitors before the Civil War remarked its use. But, according to J. Redding Ware,[1]it began to creep into English political slang about 1870, and in the 80's it was lifted to good usage by the late Joseph Chamberlain. Ware, writing in the first years of the present century, said that the word had become "very important" in England, but was "not admitted into dictionaries." But in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, dated 1914, it is given as a sound English word, though its American origin is noted. The English, however, use it in a sense that has become archaic in America, thus preserving an abandoned American meaning in the same way that many abandoned British meanings have been preserved on this side. In the United States the word means, and has meant for years, a meeting of some division,[Pg132]large or small, of a political or legislative body for the purpose of agreeing upon a united course of action in the main assembly. In England it means the managing committee of a party or fraction—something corresponding to our national committee, or state central committee, or steering committee, or to the half-forgotten congressional caucuses of the 20's. It has a disparaging significance over there, almost equal to that of our wordsorganizationandmachine. Moreover, it has given birth to two derivatives of like quality, both unknown in America—caucusdom, meaning machine control, andcaucuser, meaning a machine politician.[2]
A good many other such Americanisms have got into good usage in England, and new ones are being exported constantly. Farmer describes the process of their introduction, and assimilation. American books, newspapers and magazines, especially the last, circulate in England in large number, and some of their characteristic locutions pass into colloquial speech. Then they get into print, and begin to take on respectability. "The phrase, 'as the Americans say,'" he continues, "might in some cases be ordered from the type foundry as a logotype, so frequently does it do introduction duty."[3]Ware shows another means of ingress: the argot of sailors. Many of the Americanisms he notes as having become naturalized in England,e. g.,boodle,boostandwalk-out, are credited to Liverpool as a sort of half-way station. Travel brings in still more: England swarms with Americans, and Englishmen themselves, visiting America, bring home new and racy phrases. Bishop Coxe says[4]that[Pg133]Dickens, in his "American Notes," gave English currency toreliable,influential,talentedandlengthy. Bristed, writing in 1855, said thattalentedwas already firmly fixed in the English vocabulary by that time. All four words are in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and onlylengthyis noted as "originally an Americanism." Finally, there is the influence of the moving pictures. Hundreds of American films are shown in England every week, and the American words and phrases appearing in their titles, sub-titles and other explanatory legends thus become familiar to the English. "The patron of the picture palace," says W. G. Faulkner, in an article in theLondon Daily Mail, "learns to think of his railway station as adepot; he has alternatives to one of our newest words,hooligan, inhoodlumandtough; he watches adive, which is a thieves' kitchen or a room in which bad characters meet, and whether the villain talks ofdoughorsugarhe knows it is money to which he is referring. The musical ring of the wordtrampgives way to the stodgyhoboordead-beat. It may be that the plot reveals an attempt to deceive some simple-minded person. If it does, the innocent one is spoken of as asucker, acome-on, aboob, or alobsterif he is stupid into the bargain."
Mr. Faulkner goes on to say that a great many other Americanisms are constantly employed by Englishmen "who have not been affected by the avalanche ... which has come upon us through the picture palace." "Thus today," he says, "we hear people speak of thefallof the year, astuntthey have in hand, their desire toboosta particular business, apeachwhen they mean a pretty girl, ascab—a common term among strikers,—theglad-eye,junkwhen they mean worthless material, their effortsto make good, theelevatorin the hotel or office, thebossor manager, thecrookor swindler; and they will tell you that they have thegoods—that is, they possess the requisite qualities for a given position." The venerable Frederic Harrison, writing in theFortnightly Reviewin the Spring of 1918, denounced this tendency with a vigor recalling the classical anathemas of Dean Alford and Sydney Smith.[5]"Stale American phrases, ..."[Pg134]he said, "are infecting even our higher journalism and our parliamentary and platform oratory.... A statesman is nowoutfor victory; he isup againstpacificism.... He has acard up his sleeve, by which the enemy are at last to beeuchred. Then a fierce fight in which hundreds of noble fellows are mangled or drowned is ascrap.... To criticise a politician is to call for hisscalp.... The other fellow is beaten to afrazzle." And so on. "Bolshevism," concluded Harrison sadly, "is ruining language as well as society."
But though there are still many such alarms by constables of the national speech, the majority of Englishmen continue to make borrowings from the tempting and ever-widening American vocabulary. What is more, some of these loan-words take root, and are presently accepted as sound English, even by the most watchful. The two Fowlers, in "The King's English," separate Americanisms from other current vulgarisms, but many of the latter on their list are actually American in origin, though they do not seem to know it—for example,to demeanandto transpire. More remarkable still, the Cambridge History of English Literature listsbackwoodsman,know-nothingandyellow-backas English compounds, apparently in forgetfulness of their American origin, and addsskunk,squawandtobogganas direct importations from the Indian tongues, without noting that they came through American, and remained definite Americanisms for a long while.[6]It even addsmusquash, a popular name for theFiber zibethicus, borrowed from the Algonquinmuskwessubut long since degenerated tomusk-ratin America.Musquashhas been in disuse in this country, indeed, since the middle of the last century, save as a stray localism, but the English have preserved it, and it appears in the Oxford Dictionary.[7]
A few weeks in London or a month's study of the London[Pg135]newspapers will show a great many other American pollutions of the well of English. The argot of politics is full of them. Many besidecaucuswere introduced by Joseph Chamberlain, a politician skilled in American campaign methods and with an American wife to prompt him. He gave the English their first taste ofto belittle, one of the inventions of Thomas Jefferson.Graftandto graftcrossed the ocean in their nonage.To bluffhas been well understood in England for 30 years. It is in Cassell's and the Oxford Dictionaries, and has been used by no less a magnifico than Sir Almroth Wright.[8]To stump, in the form ofstump-oratory, is in Carlyle's "Latter-Day Pamphlets,"circa1850, andcaucusappears in his "Frederick the Great;"[9]though, as we have seen on the authority of Ware, it did not come into general use in England until ten years later.Buncombe(usually spelledbunkum) is in all the later English dictionaries. In the London stock market and among English railroad men various characteristic Americanisms have got a foothold. The meaning ofbucket-shopandto water, for example, is familiar to every London broker's clerk. English trains are nowtelescopedand carrydead-heads, and in 1913 a rival to the Amalgamated Order of RailwayServantswas organized under the name of the National Union ofRailway Men. The beginnings of a movement against the use ofservantare visible in other directions, and the Americanhelpthreatens to be substituted; at all events,Help Wantedadvertisements are now occasionally encountered in English newspapers. But it is American verbs that seem to find the way into English least difficult, particularly those compounded with prepositions and adverbs, such asto pan outandto swear off. Most of them, true enough,[Pg136]are still used as conscious Americanisms, but used they are, and with increasing frequency. The highly typical American verbto loafis now naturalized, and Ware says thatThe Loaferiesis one of the common nicknames of the Whitechapel workhouse.
It is curious, reading the fulminations of American purists of the last generation, to note how many of the Americanisms they denounced have not only got into perfectly good usage at home but even broken down all guards across the ocean.To placateandto antagonizeare examples. The Oxford Dictionary distinguishes between the English and American meanings of the latter: in England a man may antagonize only another man, in America he may antagonize a mere idea or thing. But, as the brothers Fowler show, even the English meaning is of American origin, and no doubt a few more years will see the verb completely naturalized in Britain.To placate, attacked vigorously by all native grammarians down to (but excepting) White, now has the authority of theSpectator, and is accepted by Cassell.To donateis still under the ban, butto transpirehas been used by theLondon Times. Other old bugaboos that have been embraced aregubernatorial,presidentialandstandpoint. White labored long and valiantly to convince Americans that the adjective derived frompresidentshould be without theiin its last syllable, following the example ofincidental,regimental,monumental,governmental,oriental,experimentaland so on; but in vain, forpresidentialis now perfectly good English.To demeanis still questioned, but English authors of the first rank have used it, and it will probably lose its dubious character very soon.
The flow of loan-words in the opposite direction meets with little impediment, for social distinction in America is still largely dependent upon English recognition, and so there is an eager imitation of the latest English fashions in speech. This emulation is most noticeable in the large cities of the East, and particularly in what Schele de Vere called "Boston and the Boston dependencies." New York is but little behind. The small stores there, if they are of any pretentions, are now almost invariably calledshops. Shoes for the well-to-do are no longer[Pg137]shoes, butboots, and they are sold inbootshops. One encounters, too, in the side-streets off Fifth avenue, a multitude ofgift-shops,tea-shopsandhaberdashery-shops. In Fifth avenue itself there are severalluggage-shops. In August, 1917, signs appeared in the New York surface cars in which the conductors were referred to asguards. This effort to be English and correct was exhibited over the sign manual of Theodore P. Shonts, president of the Interborough, a gentleman of Teutonic name, but evidently a faithful protector of the king's English. On the same cars, however, painted notices, surviving from some earlier régime, mentioned the guards asconductors.To Letsigns are now as common in all our cities asFor Rentsigns. We all know thecharwoman, and have begun to forget our native modification ofchar, to wit,chore. Every apartment-house has atradesmen's-entrance. In Charles street, in Baltimore, some time ago, the proprietor of a fashionable stationery store directed me, not to the elevator, but to thelift.
Occasionally, some uncompromising patriot raises his voice against these importations, but he seldom shows the vigorous indignation of the English purists, and he seldom prevails. White, in 1870, warned Americans against the figurative use ofnastyas a synonym fordisagreeable.[10]This use of the word was then relatively new in England, though, according to White, theSaturday Reviewand theSpectatorhad already succumbed. His objections to it were unavailing;nastyquickly got into American and has been there ever since. In 1883 Gilbert M. Tucker protested againstgood-form,traffic(in the sense of travel),to bargainandto tubas Briticisms that we might well do without, but all of them took root and are perfectly sound American today. There is, indeed, no intelligible reason why such English inventions and improvements should not be taken in, even though the motive behind the welcome to them may occasionally cause a smile. English, after all, is the mother of American, and the child, until lately, was still at nurse. The English, confronted by some of our fantastic innovations, may well regard them as impudences to be put down, but what they[Pg138]offer in return often fits into our vocabulary without offering it any outrage. American, indeed, is full of lingering Briticisms, all maintaining a successful competition with native forms. If we take backshopit is merely taking back something thatstorehas never been able to rid us of: we useshop-worn,shoplifter,shopping,shopper,shop-girlandto shopevery day. In the same way the wordpennyhas survived among us, despite the fact that there has been no American coin of that name for more than 125 years. We havenickel-in-the-slotmachines, but when they take a cent we call thempenny-in-the-slotmachines. We havepenny-arcadesandpenny-whistles. We do not playcent-ante, butpenny-ante. We still "turn an honestpenny" and say "apennyfor your thoughts." The pound and the shilling became extinct a century ago, but the penny still binds us to the mother tongue.
§ 2
Points of Difference—These exchanges and coalescences, however, though they invigorate each language with the blood of the other and are often very striking in detail, are neither numerous enough nor general enough to counteract the centrifugal force which pulls them apart. The simple fact is that the spirit of English and the spirit of American have been at odds for nearly a century, and that the way of one is not the way of the other. The loan-words that fly to and fro, when examined closely, are found to be few in number both relatively and absolutely: they do not greatly affect the larger movements of the two languages. Many of them, indeed, are little more than temporary borrowings; they are not genuinely adopted, but merely momentarily fashionable. The class of Englishmen which affects American phrases is perhaps but little larger, taking one year with another, than the class of Americans which affects English phrases. This last class, it must be plain, is very small. Leave the large cities and you will have difficulty finding any members of it. It is circumscribed, not because there is any very formidable prejudice against English locutions as such,[Pg139]but simply because recognizably English locutions, in a good many cases, do not fit into the American language. The American thinks in American and the Englishman in English, and it requires a definite effort, usually but defectively successful, for either to put his thoughts into the actual idiom of the other.
The difficulties of this enterprise are well exhibited, though quite unconsciously, by W. L. George in a chapter entitled "Litany of the Novelist" in his book of criticism, "Literary Chapters."[11]This chapter, it is plain by internal evidence, was written, not for Englishmen, but for Americans. A good part of it, in fact, is in the second person—we are addressed and argued with directly. And throughout there is an obvious endeavor to help out comprehension by a studied use of purely American phrases and examples. One hears, not of theEast End, but of theEast Side; not of theCity, but ofWall Street; not ofBelgraviaor theWest End, but ofFifth avenue; not ofbowlerhats, but ofDerbys; not of idlers inpubs, but ofsaloon loafers; not ofpounds,shillingsandpence, but ofdollarsandcents. In brief, a gallant attempt upon a strange tongue, and by a writer of the utmost skill—but a hopeless failure none the less. In the midst of his best American, George drops into Briticism after Briticism, some of them quite as unintelligible to the average American reader as so many Gallicisms. On page after page they display the practical impossibility of the enterprise:back-gardenforback-yard,perambulatorforbaby-carriage,corn-market forgrain-market, coal-ownerfor coal-operator,postformail, and so on. And to top them there are English terms that have no American equivalents at all, for example,kitchen-fender.
The same failure, perhaps usually worse, is displayed every time an English novelist or dramatist essays to put an American into a novel or a play, and to make him speak American. However painstakingly it is done, the Englishman invariably falls into capital blunders, and the result is derided by Americans as Mark Twain derided the miners' lingo of Bret Harte, and for the same reason. The thing lies deeper than vocabulary and[Pg140]even than pronunciation and intonation; the divergences show themselves in habits of speech that are fundamental and almost indefinable. And when the transoceanic gesture is from the other direction they become even plainer. An Englishman, in an American play, seldom shows the actual speech habit of the Sassenach; what he shows is the speech habit of an American actor trying to imitate George Alexander. "There are not five playwrights in America," said Channing Pollock one day, "who can write English"—that is, the English of familiar discourse. "Why should there be?" replied Louis Sherwin. "There are not five thousand people in America who canspeakEnglish."[12]
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 ofhigh-browis 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 theCongressional Recordis 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 usingto enthusein 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 usesto 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, almostad 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:overformore than,gottenforgotin the present perfect,[27]rileforroil,bustforburst. This last, in truth, has come into a dignity that even grammarians will soon hesitate to question. Who, in America, would dare to speak ofburstinga broncho, or of atrust-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 betweenwillandshalloffers 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 theLondon 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.Willis sound American "with all persons of the nominative," andshallis almost invariably an "expression of purpose or authority."[32]
And so, though perhaps not to the same extent, withwhoandwhom. Now and then there arises a sort of panicky feeling thatwhomis 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 "whodid he marry?" Today such a form as "whomare you talking to?" would seem somewhat affected in ordinary discourse in America; "whoare you talking to?" is heard a thousand times oftener—and is doubly American, for it substituteswhoforwhomand 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 isme,"[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 betweenwhoandwhom. 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 ofyouforyein the nominative shows the dative and accusative swallowing the nominative, and the practical disappearance ofhither,thitherandwhither, whose place is now taken byhere,thereandwhere, shows a contrary process. In such wars aposse comitatusmarches 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 defendain'tas a substitute[Pg146]forisn't, say in "heain'tthe man," and yetain'tis already tolerably respectable in the first person, where English countenances the even more clumsyaren't.Aren'thas 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'tI in this?" It still grates a bit, perhaps, butaren'tgrates 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 feelbad" begins to take on the dignity of a national idiom, andsure,to go bigandrun slow[35]become almost respectable. When, on the entrance of the United States into the war, the Marine Corps chose "treat 'emrough" 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.,healthfulandhealthy,tastefulandtasty. And to challenge the somewhat absurd text-book prohibition of terminal prepositions, so that "where are weat?" loses its old raciness. And to dally with the double negative, as in "I have no doubtbutthat."[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 theSaturday Evening Post, and in two minutes find: "onefeels like an atom whenhebegins to reviewhisown 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 redundantsin such words astowards,downwards,afterwardsandheavenwards. In England thissis used relatively seldom, and then it usually marks a distinction in meaning, as it does on both sides of the ocean betweenbesideandbesides. "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 betweenforwardandforwards;forwardsbeing used in definite contrast to any other direction, as 'if you move at all, you can only moveforwards,' whileforwardis 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 thesin cases where English usage would certainly be against it. Gould, in the 50's, noted its appearance at the end of such words assomewhereandanyway, and denounced it as vulgar and illogical. Thornton has tracedanywaysback to 1842 and shown that it is an archaism, and to be found in the Book of Common Prayer (circa1560); perhaps it has been preserved by analogy withsideways. Henry James, in "The Question of Our Speech," attacked "such forms of impunity assomewheres elseandnowheres else,a good ways onanda 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]Towardsandafterwards, though frowned upon in England, are now quite sound in American. I[Pg148]find the former in the title of an article inDialect 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 dutytowardsthe conservation of the English language in its beauty and purity."[42]Bothtowardsandafterwards, finally, are included in theNew York Evening Post'slist of "words no longer disapproved when in their proper places," along withoverformore than, andduringforin 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 arerightandgood. Neither holds the same place in English. Thornton shows that the use ofright, as inright away,right goodandright 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 notedright awayas an almost universal Americanism during his first American tour, in 1842, and poked fun at it in the second chapter of "American Notes."Rightis used as a synonym fordirectly, as inright away,right off,right nowandright on time; formoderately, as inright well,right smart,right goodandright often, and in place ofprecisely, as inright 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——?Gorightalong, and take the first turning (sic) on theright, and you arerightthere.[Pg149]Right?Right.Right![43]
How do I get to——?
Gorightalong, and take the first turning (sic) on theright, and you arerightthere.
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 forright 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 ofrightas an adverb.Goodis almost as protean. It is not only used as a general synonym for all adjectives and adverbs connoting satisfaction, as into feel good,to be treated good,to sleep good, but also as a reinforcement to other adjectives and adverbs, as in "I hit himgoodand hard" and "I amgoodand tired." Of latesomehas come into wide use as an adjective-adverb of all work, indicating special excellence or high degree, as insome 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 theCongressional Record, and not long ago a writer in theAtlantic Monthly[45]hymned it ecstatically as "someword—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 askosher,ganof,schadchen,oi-yoi,matzohormazuma.[47]Black-hand, too, is English in form, but it is nevertheless as plainly an Italian loan-word asspaghetti,mafiaorpadrone.
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 withsängerfest. There is no mention of it in any of the dictionaries of Americanisms, and yet, in such forms astalk-festandgabfestit is met with almost daily. So with-heimer,-inskiand-bund. Several years ago-heimerhad a great vogue in slang, and was rapidly done to death. Butwiseheimerremains[Pg152]in colloquial use as a facetious synonym forsmart-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-bundis now at least as good aspork-barrelandslush-fund, andmoney-bundis 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.Nixandnixy, forno, are debased forms of the Germannichts;aber nit, once as popular ascamouflage, is obviouslyaber 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 incamorra,padrone,spaghettiand 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 substituteliberty-cabbageforsour-kraut, but it quickly failed, for the name had become as completely Americanized as the thing itself, and soliberty-cabbageseemed 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 Americanyessomething of the quality ofja.
Constant familiarity with such contributions from foreign languages and with the general speech habits of foreign peoples has made American a good deal more hospitable to loan-words than English, even in the absence of special pressure. Let the same[Pg153]word knock at the gates of the two languages, and American will admit it more readily, and give it at once a wider and more intimate currency. Examples are afforded bycafé,vaudeville,employé,boulevard,cabaret,toilette,exposé,kindergarten,dépôt,fêteandmenu.Café, in American, is a word of much larger and more varied meaning than in English and is used much more frequently, and by many more persons. So isemployé, in the naturalized form ofemployee. So istoilet: we have even seen it as a euphemism for native terms that otherwise would be in daily use. So iskindergarten: I read lately of akindergartenfor the elementary instruction of conscripts. Such words are not unknown to the Englishman, but when he uses them it is with a plain sense of their foreignness. In American they are completely naturalized, as is shown by the spelling and pronunciation of most of them. An American would no more think of attempting the French pronunciation ofdepotor of putting the French accents upon it than he would think of spellingtoiletwith the finalteor of essaying to pronounceAnheuserin the German manner. Often curious battles go on between such loan-words and their English equivalents, and with varying fortunes. In 1895 Weber and Fields tried to establishmusic-hallin New York, but it quickly succumbed tovaudeville-theatre, asvarietyhad succumbed tovaudevillebefore it. In the same waylawn-fete(without the circumflex accent, and commonly pronouncedfeet) has elbowed out the Englishgarden-party. But now and then, when the competing loan-word happens to violate American speech habits, a native term ousts it. The Frenchcrècheoffers an example; it has been entirely displaced byday-nursery.
The English, in this matter, display their greater conservatism very plainly. Even when a loan-word enters both English and American simultaneously a sense of foreignness lingers about it on the other side of the Atlantic much longer than on this side, and it is used with far more self-consciousness. The wordmatinéeoffers a convenient example. To this day the English commonly print it in italics, give it its French accent, and pronounce it with some attempt at the French manner. But in America it is entirely naturalized, and the most ignorant man[Pg154]uses it without any feeling that it is strange. The same lack of any sense of linguistic integrity is to be noticed in many other directions—for example, in the freedom with which the Latinperis used with native nouns. One constantly seesper day,per dozen,per hundred,per mile, etc., in American newspapers, even the most careful, but in England the more seemlyais almost always used, or the noun itself is made Latin, as inper diem.Per, in fact, is fast becoming an everyday American word. Such phrases as "asperyour letter (or order) of the 15th inst." are incessantly met with in business correspondence. The same greater hospitality is shown by the readiness with which various un-English prefixes and affixes come into fashion, for example,super-and-itis. The English accept them gingerly; the Americans take them in with enthusiasm, and naturalize them instanter.[51]
The same deficiency in reserve is to be noted in nearly all other colonialized dialects. The Latin-American variants of Spanish, for example, have adopted a great many words which appear in true Castilian only as occasional guests. Thus in Argentinamatinée,menu,début,toiletteandfemme de chambreare perfectly good Argentine, and in Mexicosandwichandclubhave been thoroughly naturalized. The same thing is to be noted in the French of Haiti, in the Portuguese of Brazil, and even in the Danish of Norway. Once a language spreads beyond the country of its origin and begins to be used by people born, in the German phrase, to a differentSprachgefühl, the sense of loyalty to its vocabulary is lost, along with the instinctive feeling for its idiomatic habits. How far this destruction of its forms may go in the absence of strong contrary influences is exhibited by the rise of the Romance languages from the vulgar Latin of the Roman provinces, and, here at home, by the decay of foreign languages in competition with English. The Yiddish that the Jews from Russia bring in is German debased with Russian, Polish and[Pg155]Hebrew; in America, it quickly absorbs hundreds of words and idioms from the speech of the streets. Various conflicting German dialects, among the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch and in the German areas of the Northwest, combine in a patois that, in its end forms, shows almost as much English as German. Classical examples of it are "es giebt gar keinuse," "Ich kann es nichtständen" and "meinstallionhat über diefenz gescheumptund dem nachbar seinwhietabscheulichgedämätscht."[52]The use ofgleicheforto like, by false analogy fromgleich(=like,similar) is characteristic. In the same way the Scandinavians in the Northwest corrupt their native Swedish and Dano-Norwegian. Thus, American-Norwegian is heavy with such forms asstrit-kar,reit-evé,nekk-töiandstaits-pruessen, forstreet-car,right away,necktieandstates-prison, and admits such phrases as "detmekaingendifrens."[53]
The changes that Yiddish has undergone in America, though rather foreign to the present inquiry, are interesting enough to be noticed. First of all, it has admitted into its vocabulary a large number of everyday substantives, among themboy,chair,window,carpet,floor,dress,hat,watch,ceiling,consumption,property,trouble,bother,match,change,party,birthday,picture,paper(only in the sense ofnewspaper),gambler,show,hall,kitchen,store,bedroom,key,mantelpiece,closet,lounge,broom,tablecloth,paint,landlord,fellow,tenant,shop,wages,foreman,sleeve,collar,cuff,button,cotton,thimble,needle,pocket,bargain,sale,remnant,sample,haircut,razor,waist,basket,school,scholar,teacher,baby,mustache,butcher,grocery,dinner,streetandwalk. And with them many characteristic Americanisms,[Pg156]for example,bluffer,faker,boodler,grafter,gangster,crook,guy,kike,piker,squealer,bum,cadet,boom,bunch,pants,vest,loafer,jumper,stoop,saleslady,ice-boxandraise, with their attendant verbs and adjectives. These words are used constantly; many of them have quite crowded out the corresponding Yiddish words. For example,ingel, meaningboy(it is a Slavic loan-word in Yiddish), has been obliterated by the English word. A Jewish immigrant almost invariably refers to his son as hisboy, though strangely enough he calls his daughter hismeidel. "Dieboysmit diemeidlachhaben a good time" is excellent American Yiddish. In the same wayfensterhas been completely displaced bywindow, thoughtür(=door) has been left intact.Tisch(=table) also remains, butchairis always used, probably because few of the Jews had chairs in the old country. There thebeinkel, a bench without a back, was in use; chairs were only for the well-to-do.Floorhas apparently prevailed because no invariable corresponding word was employed at home: in various parts of Russia and Poland a floor is adill, apodlogé, or abricke. So withceiling. There were six different words for it.
Yiddish inflections have been fastened upon most of these loan-words. Thus, "er hat ihmabgefaked" is "he cheated him,"zubumtis the Americangone to the bad,fix'nis tofix,usenisto use, and so on. The feminine and diminutive suffix-kéis often added to nouns. Thusbluffergives rise toblufferké(=hypocrite), and one also notesdresské,hatké,watchkéandbummerké. "Oi! is sie ablufferké!" is good American Yiddish for "isn't she a hypocrite!" The suffix-nick, signifying agency, is also freely applied.Allrightnickmeans an upstart, an offensive boaster, one of whom his fellows would say "He is all right" with a sneer. Similarly,consumptionickmeans a victim of tuberculosis. Other suffixes are-chickand-ige, the first exemplified inboychick, a diminutive ofboy, and the second innext-doorige, meaning the woman next-door, an important person in ghetto social life. Some of the loan-words, of course, undergo changes on Yiddish-speaking lips. Thus,landlordbecomeslendler,loungebecomeslunch,tenantbecomestenner, andwhiskersloses its finals. "Wie gefällt dir seinwhisker?" (=how do you like his beard?)[Pg157]is good Yiddish, ironically intended.Fellow, of course, changes to the Americanfeller, as in "Rosie hat schon afeller" (=Rosie has got afeller,i. e., a sweetheart).Show, in the sense ofchance, is used constantly, as in "git ihm ashow" (=give him a chance).Bad boyis adopted bodily, as in "er is abad boy." Toshut upis inflected as one word, as in "er hat nit gewoltshutup'n" (=he wouldn't shut up).To catchis used in the sense of to obtain, as in "catch'na gmilath chesed" (=to raise a loan). Here, by the way,gmilath chesedis excellent Biblical Hebrew.To bluff, unchanged in form, takes on the new meaning of to lie: ablufferis a liar. Scores of American phrases are in constant use, among them,all right,never mind,I bet you,no sirandI'll fix you. It is curious to note thatsure Mike, borrowed by the American vulgate from Irish English, has gone over into American Yiddish. Finally, to make an end, here are two complete and characteristic American Yiddish sentences: "Sie wetclean'ndierooms,scrub'ndemfloor,wash'ndiewindows,dress'ndemboyund gehn inbutcher-storeund ingrocery. Dernoch vet sie machendinnerund gehn instreetfür awalk."[54]
American itself, in the Philippines, and to a lesser extent in Porto Rico and on the Isthmus, has undergone similar changes under the influence of Spanish and the native dialects. Maurice P. Dunlap[55]offers the following specimen of a conversation between two Americans long resident in Manila: