The American Language quotes

He will resist dictation out of the past, but he will follow a new messiah with almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of economics, religion, morals and speech.

A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new metaphor or piece of slang.

Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty;

D. Q., have been traced back to the first days of the republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these early tendencies invisible today, for the country is still in process of growth, and no settled social order has yet descended upon it.

Institution-making is still going on, and so is language-making.

In so modest an operation as that which has evolved bunco from buncombe and bunk from bunco there is evidence of a phenomenon which the philologist recognizes as belonging to the most primitive and lusty stages of speech.

But of more importance than its sheer inventions, if only because much more numerous, are its extensions of the vocabulary, both absolutely and in ready workableness, by the devices of rhetoric.

The American, from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians.

His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest as much upon brilliant phrases as upon logical ideas.

But of more importance than its sheer inventions, if only because much more numerous, are its extensions of the vocabulary, both absolutely and in ready workableness, by the devices of rhetoric. The American, from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians.

His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest as much upon brilliant phrases as upon logical ideas.

And in small things as in large he exercises continually an incomparable capacity for projecting hidden and often fantastic relationships into arresting parts of speech. Such a term as rubber-neck is almost a complete treatise on American psychology;

his fundamental institutions rest as much upon brilliant phrases as upon logical ideas. And in small things as in large he exercises continually an incomparable capacity for projecting hidden and often fantastic relationships into arresting parts of speech.

Such a term as rubber-neck is almost a complete treatise on American psychology; it reveals the national habit of mind more clearly than any labored inquiry could ever reveal it.

It has in it precisely the boldness and disdain of ordered forms that are so characteristically American, and it has too the grotesque humor of the country, and the delight in devastating opprobriums, and the acute feeling for the succinct and savory.

They are, indeed, common to all languages; they keep language alive. But if you will put the English of today beside the American of today you will see at once how much more forcibly they are in operation in the latter than in the former.

English has been arrested in its growth by its purists and grammarians.

It shows no living change in structure and syntax since the days of Anne, and very little modification in either pronunciation or vocabulary. Its tendency is to conserve that which is established; to say the new thing, as nearly as possible, in the old way;

Even "educated American English," agrees the chief of modern English grammarians, "is now almost entirely independent of British influence, and differs from it considerably, though as yet not enough to make the two dialects—American English and British English—mutually unintelligible."[53]

American thus shows its character in a constant experimentation, a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid forms.

No other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and phrases more readily; none is more careless of precedents; none shows a greater fecundity and originality of fancy.

What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it comes into contact with what is new and vivid. Let American confront a novel problem alongside [Pg027] English, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious.

Movie is better than cinema; it is not only better American, it is better English.

Bill-board is better than hoarding. Office-holder is more honest, more picturesque, more thoroughly Anglo-Saxon that public-servant. Stem-winder somehow has more life in it, more fancy and vividness, than the literal keyless-watch. Turn to the terminology of railroading (itself, by the way, an Americanism):

it meets Montaigne's ideal of "a succulent and nervous speech, short and compact, not as much delicated and combed out as vehement and brusque, rather arbitrary than monotonous, not pedantic but soldierly, as Suetonius called Caesar's Latin."

One pictures the common materials of English dumped into a pot, exotic flavorings added, and the bubblings assiduously and expectantly skimmed.

What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it comes into contact with what is new and vivid. Let American confront a novel problem alongside [Pg027] English, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious. Movie is better than cinema;

One pictures the common materials of English dumped into a pot, exotic flavorings added, and the bubblings assiduously and expectantly skimmed.

What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it comes into contact with what is new and vivid.

Let American confront a novel problem alongside [Pg027] English, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious. Movie is better than cinema; it is not only better American, it is better English. Bill-board is better than hoarding.

Let it be admitted: American is not infrequently vulgar; the Americans, too, are vulgar (Bayard Taylor called them "Anglo-Saxons relapsed into semi-barbarism"); America itself is unutterably vulgar.

But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions, and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy language-making.

The history of English, like the history of American and every other living tongue, is a history of vulgarisms that, by their accurate meeting of real needs, have forced their way into sound usage, and even into the lifeless catalogues of the grammarians.

Live-oak appears in a document of 1610; bull-frog was familiar to Beverley in 1705; so was James-Town weed (later reduced to Jimson weed, as the English hurtleberry or whortleberry was reduced to huckleberry).

These early Americans were not botanists.

They were often ignorant of the names of the plants they encountered, even when those plants already had English names, and so they exercised their fancy upon new ones.

… Shakespeare—or a part of it,—even if the uses he made of it were beyond their comprehension, and they also brought with [Pg058] them that sense of ease in the language, that fine disdain for formality, that bold experimentalizing in words, which was so peculiarly Elizabethan.

There were no grammarians in that day; there were no purists that anyone listened to; it was a case of saying your say in the easiest and most satisfying way.

In remote parts of the United States there are still direct and almost pure-blooded descendants of those seventeenth century colonists.

… the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for more direct elections of President and Vice-President, until the end of 1804, and even then three of the five New England states rejected it,[4] and have never ratified it, in fact, to this day.

Democracy was still experimental, doubtful, full of gunpowder.

In so far as it had actually come into being, it had come as a boon conferred from above. Jefferson, its protagonist, was the hero of the populace, but he was not of the populace himself, nor did he ever quite trust it.

This animosity, culminating in Sydney Smith's famous sneer,[8] was but part of a [Pg068] larger hostility to all things American, from political theories to table manners.

The American, after the war of 1812, became the pet abomination of the English, and the chief butt of the incomparable English talent for moral indignation.

There was scarcely an issue of the Quarterly Review, the Edinburgh, the Foreign Quarterly, the British Review or Blackwood's, for a generation following 1814, in which he was not stupendously assaulted. Gifford, Sydney Smith and the poet Southey became specialists in this business;

This flood of racy and unprecedented words and phrases beat upon and finally penetrated the retreat of the literati, but the purity of speech cultivated there had little compensatory influence upon the vulgate.

The newspaper was now enthroned, and belles lettres were cultivated almost in private, and as a mystery.

It is probable, indeed, that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Ten Nights in a Bar-room," both published in the early 50's, were the first contemporary native books, after Cooper's day, that the American people, as a people, ever read.

As I say, the pressure from below broke down the defenses of the purists, and literally forced a new national idiom upon them.

Pen in hand, they might still achieve laborious imitations of Johnson and Macaulay, but their mouths began to betray them.

"When it comes to talking," wrote Charles Astor Bristed for Englishmen in 1855, "the most refined and best educated American, who has habitually resided in his own country, the very man who would write, on some serious topic, volumes in which no peculiarity could be …

the new derivatives: abolitionist, candidacy, boss-rule, [Pg084] per-diem, to lobby and boodler; and the almost innumerable verbs and verb-phrases: to knife, to split a ticket, to go up Salt River, to bolt, to eat crow, to boodle, to divvy, to grab and to run.

An English candidate never runs; he stands.

To run, according to Thornton, was already used in America in 1789; it was universal by 1820. Platform came in at the same time. Machine was first applied to a political organization by Aaron Burr.

he must always add some extra and gratuitous asseveration.[40] The American is in like case. His speech bristles with intensives: bet your life, not on your life, well I guess, and no mistake, and so on.

The Irish extravagance of speech struck a responsive chord in the American heart.

The American borrowed, not only occasional words, but whole phrases, and some of them have become thoroughly naturalized.

… call a double whole note a breve, a whole note a semibreve, a half note a minim, a quarter note a crotchet, an eighth note a quaver, a sixteenth note a semi-quaver, a thirty-second note a demisemiquaver, and a sixty-fourth note a hemidemisemiquaver, or semidemisemiquaver.

If, by any chance, an English musician should write a one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth note he probably wouldn't know what to call it.

This clumsy terminology goes back to the days of plain chant, with its longa, brevis, semi-brevis, minima and semiminima. The French and Italians cling to a system almost as confusing, but the Germans use ganze, halbe, viertel, [Pg114] achtel, etc.

Bache tells us that pismire was also banned, antmire being substituted for it. In 1847 the word chair was actually barred out and seat was adopted in its place.[34] These were the palmy days of euphemism.

The delicate female was guarded from all knowledge, and even from all suspicion, of evil.

"To utter aloud in her presence the word shirt," says one historian, "was an open insult."[35] Mrs. Trollope, writing in 1832, tells of "a young German gentleman of perfectly good manners" who "offended one of the principal families ...

One of the characters in the piece is A Virgin. At every occurrence a change was made to A Young Girl.

Apparently, even virgin is still regarded as too frank in Philadelphia.[41]

Fifty years [Pg129] ago the very word decent was indecent in the South: no respectable woman was supposed to have any notion of the difference between decent and indecent.

We have nickel-in-the-slot machines, but when they take a cent we call them penny-in-the-slot machines. We have penny-arcades and penny-whistles. We do not play cent-ante, but penny-ante. We still "turn an honest penny" and say "a penny for your thoughts."

The pound and the shilling became extinct a century ago, but the penny still binds us to the mother tongue.

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.

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.

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 nine times out of ten, a few pages further on, I have found the enchanted purist erring himself.[1] The most funereal of the sciences is saved from utter horror by such displays of human malice and fallibility.

Speech itself, indeed, would become almost impossible if the grammarians could follow their own rules unfailingly, and were always right.

But here we are among the learned; and their sins, when detected and exposed, are at least punished by conscience.

As Brander Matthews says, there is not even representative government in the matter; the posse comitatus decides directly, and despite the sternest protest, finally.

The ignorant, the rebellious and the daring come forward with their brilliant barbarisms; the learned and conservative bring up their objections.

"And when both sides have been heard, there is a show of hands;

But English, even in its most formal shapes, is chiefly taught by those who cannot write it decently and who get no aid from those who can.

One wades through treatise after treatise on English style by pedagogues whose own style is atrocious.

A Huxley or a Stevenson might have written one of high merit and utility—but Huxley and Stevenson had other fish to fry, and so the business was left to Prof. Balderdash.

The difficulties of the former are quickly mastered by any student of normal sense, but even the most casual of laparotomies calls for a man of special skill and address.

Thus the elementary study of the national language, at least in America, is almost monopolized by dullards.

Children are taught it by men and women who observe it inaccurately and expound it ignorantly. In most other fields the pedagogue meets a certain corrective competition and [Pg184] criticism.

The result of this reaction is that the me in such constructions as 'between John and me' and 'he saw John and me' sounds vulgar and ungrammatical, and is consequently corrected into I."

Here the pedagogues, seeking to impose an inelastic and illogical grammar upon a living speech, succeed only in corrupting it still more.

Following than and as the American uses the objective form of the pronoun, as in "he is taller than me" and "such as her."

Moreover, most of the 23 minus six were adjectives of all work, such as nasty, funny and nice.

Colloquial American uses the same rubber-stamps of speech.

Funny connotes the whole range of the unusual; hard indicates every shade of difficulty; nice is everything satisfactory; bully is a superlative of almost limitless scope.

Moreover, most of the 23 minus six were adjectives of all work, such as nasty, funny and nice. Colloquial American uses the same rubber-stamps of speech.

Funny connotes the whole range of the unusual; hard indicates every shade of difficulty; nice is everything satisfactory; bully is a superlative of almost limitless scope.

The decay of one to a vague n-sound, as in this'n, is matched by a decay of than after comparatives. Earlier than is seldom if ever heard; composition reduces the two words to earlier'n. So with better'n, faster'n, hotter'n, deader'n, etc.

composition reduces the two words to earlier'n. So with better'n, faster'n, hotter'n, deader'n, etc. Once I overheard the following dialogue: "I like a belt more looser'n what this one is." "Well, then, why don't you unloosen it more'n you got it unloosened?"

Like most other examples of "bad grammar" encountered in American the compound negative is of great antiquity and was once quite respectable.

The student of Anglo-Saxon encounters it constantly. In that language the negative of the verb was formed by prefixing a particle, ne. Thus, singan (=to sing) became ne singan (=not to sing).

Now and then some anarchistic student of the language boldly defends and even advocates it. "The double negative," said a writer in the London Review a long time ago,[77] "has been abandoned to the great injury of strength of expression."

Surely "I won't take nothing" is stronger than either "I will take nothing" or "I won't take anything."

"Language begins," says Sayce, "with sentences, not with single words." In a speech in process of rapid development, unrestrained by critical analysis, the tendency to sacrifice the integrity of words to the needs of the complete sentence is especially marked.

And where no etymological reasons presented themselves, he made his changes by analogy and for the sake of uniformity, or for euphony or simplicity, or because it pleased him, one guesses, to stir up the academic animals.

Webster, in fact, delighted in controversy, and was anything but free from the national yearning to make a sensation.

A great many of his innovations, of course, failed to take root, and in the course of time he abandoned some of them himself.

Reckawackes, by the law of Hobson-Jobson, was turned into Rockaway, and Pentapang into Port Tobacco.[38] But, despite such elisions and transformations, the charm of thousands of them remained, and today they are responsible for much of the characteristic color of American geographical nomenclature.

Such names as Tallahassee, Susquehanna, Mississippi, Allegheny, Chicago, Kennebec, Patuxent and Arkansas give a barbaric brilliancy to the American map.

Only the map of Australia, with its mellifluous Maori names, can match it.

Among them I find Affinity, Annamoriah (Anna Maria?), Bee, Bias, Big Chimney, Billie, Blue Jay, Bulltown, Caress, Cinderella, Cyclone, Czar, Cornstalk, Duck, Halcyon, Jingo, Left Hand, Ravens Eye, Six, Skull Run, Three Churches, Uneeda, Wide Mouth, War Eagle and Stumptown.

The Postal Guide shows two Ben Hurs, five St. Elmos and ten Ivanhoes, but only one Middlemarch.

There are seventeen Roosevelts, six Codys and six Barnums, but no Shakespeare. Washington, of course, is the most popular of American place-names.

Awful seems to be going the same route. "Awful sweet" and "awfully dear" still seem slangy and school-girlish, but "awful children," "awful weather" and "an awful job" have entirely sound support, and no one save a pedant would hesitate to use them.

Such insidious purifications and consecrations of slang are going on under our noses all the time.

The use of some as a general adjective-adverb seems likely to make its way in the same manner.

Such insidious purifications and consecrations of slang are going on under our noses all the time. The use of some as a general adjective-adverb seems likely to make its way in the same manner.

It is constantly forgotten by purists of defective philological equipment that a great many of our most respectable words and phrases originated in the plainest sort of slang.

Thus, quandary, despite a fanciful etymology which would identify it with wandreth (=evil), is probably simply a composition form of the French phrase, qu'en dirai-je?

The true distinction between slang and more seemly idiom, in so far as any distinction exists at all, is that indicated by Whitney.

Slang originates in an effort, always by ingenious individuals, to make the language more vivid and expressive.

When in the form of single words it may appear as new metaphors, [Pg310] e. g., bird and peach; as back formations, e. g., beaut and flu; as composition-forms, e. g., whatdyecallem; as picturesque compounds, e. g., booze-foundry; as onomatopes, e. g., biff and zowie;

The foreigner essaying it, indeed, finds his chief difficulty, not in mastering its forms, but in grasping its lack of forms.

He doesn't have to learn a new and complex grammar; what he has to do is to forget grammar.

Once he has done so, the rest is a mere matter of acquiring a vocabulary. He can make himself understood, given a few nouns, pronouns, verbs and numerals, without troubling [Pg317] himself in the slightest about accidence.

Once he has done so, the rest is a mere matter of acquiring a vocabulary. He can make himself understood, given a few nouns, pronouns, verbs and numerals, without troubling [Pg317] himself in the slightest about accidence.

"Me see she" is bad English, perhaps, but it would be absurd to say that it is obscure—and on some not too distant tomorrow it may be very fair American.

Essaying an inflected language, the beginner must go into the matter far more deeply before he may hope to be understood. Bradley, in "The Making of English,"[23] shows clearly how German and English differ in this respect, and how great is the advantage of English.

the neglect of its investigation is an evidence of snobbishness that is a folly of the same sort. It is useless to dismiss the growing peculiarities of the American vocabulary and of grammar and syntax in the common speech as vulgarisms beneath serious notice.

Such vulgarisms have a way of intrenching themselves, and gathering dignity as they grow familiar.

"There are but few forms in use," says Lounsbury, "which, judged by a standard previously existing, would not be regarded as gross barbarisms."[27] Each language, in such matters, is a law unto itself, and each vigorous dialect, particularly if it be spoken by millions, is …

The American dialect has not yet come to that stage. In so far as it is apprehended at all it is only in the sense that Irish-English was apprehended a generation ago—that is, as something [Pg321] uncouth and comic.

But that is the way that new dialects always come in—through a drum-fire of cackles.

Given the poet, there may suddenly come a day when our theirns and would'a hads will take on the barbaric stateliness of the peasant locutions of old Maurya in "Riders to the Sea."