American Language (43 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
162
Including Negroes, Mexicans and Asiatics, the total number was 14,-204,149. Of these, 7,919,536 were naturalized, 1,266,419 had taken out their first papers, 4,518,341 had made no move to be naturalized, and 499,853 were of uncertain status. It was estimated in 1934 that the number of the unnaturalized had shrunk to 3,600,000. Very often the statement is made that there are also millions of unrecorded aliens in the country, but for this there is no evidence.
163
These figures, it should be noted, do not show the total number of foreign-born Jews in the country. “Many Jews of foreign birth,” says the Census Bureau (Fifteenth Census: Population, Vol. II; Washington, 1933, p. 342), “report German, Russian or other languages as their mother tongue.”
164
See New Orleans Word-List, by E. Riedel,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Pt. IV, 1916; Louisiana, by James Routh,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916; and Terms From Louisiana, by James Routh and E. O. Barker,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Pt. VI, 1917. Appended to the last-named is a long list of Louisiana names for birds and animals, many of them French,
e.g., aigle tête blanche
(the bald eagle),
becas-sine
(a species of snipe),
biorque
(the bittern),
carencro
(vulture),
corbigeau
(plover),
dindon farouche
or
dindon sauvage
(wild turkey),
gros-bec
(heron),
paper bleu
(finch), and
bassaris
(civet cat). The word
ofay
, which may have come from the French
au fait
(signifying mastery), is in general use in the Negro press of the United States to designate a white person. It is possible that it originated in New Orleans. Its popularity, I suspect, is at least partly due to its brevity, which makes it a good headline word. Most of the more recent American borrowings from French have come in through English,
e.g., garage, gigolo
and
hangar
, or have entered the two languages simultaneously, but
rô-tisserie
, with the accent omitted, seems to be an Americanism. It signifies an eating-house wherein chickens and butcher’s meat are roasted at a charcoal-grill, usually in the show-window of the establishment. It has been in use in New York since 1900 or thereabout, but is encountered only infrequently elsewhere.
165
Twenty Idioms Illustrating the Influence of Swedish on English, by Thorvald E. Holter,
American Speech
, Feb., 1931.
166
Mr. Roy W. Swanson, of the editorial staff of the St. Paul
Dispatch
.
167
See Czech Influence Upon the American Vocabulary, by Mon-signor J. B. Dudek,
Czecho-Slovak Student Life
(Lisle, Ill.), June, 1928.
168
I am indebted here to Mr. Charles J. Lovell. The prevalence of Dutch loan-words in the Hudson river region has been remarked in Chapter III, Section 1, and of Spanish loan-words in the Southwest in Chapter IV, Section 3.
169
I am indebted here to Mr. Arthur R. Coelho.
170
According to H. Heshin (
American Speech
, May, 1926, p. 456)
mazuma
is derived from a Chaldean word,
m’zumon
, “meaning in literal translation the ready necessary.”
Gefilte
, of course, is the German
gefüllte
(stuffed).
171
Here I am indebted to Mr. Albert Kaplan.
172
In the collectanea of Judge J. C. Ruppenthal,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1016, p. 326.
173
The following is from a letter signed Philologist in the New York
Evening Post
, Feb. 15, 1929: “Any one who has ever visited drowsy little inns of the German countryside remembers the grotesque portrait of the chap with a topheavy, huge and red nose, possibly be-haired, on the tip of which a fat fly takes it easy. In order that the guests may not mistake it for a likeness of Cyrano, an invariable legend cautions energetically: ‘
Kibitz
, halts maul!’ (Kibitzer, keep your mouth shut).” Another correspondent, Hermann Post, wrote on the same day: “The eggs of the peewit are very much sought after for their delicious taste. They are laid on the ground. The bird, to protect the eggs, flies frantically around the heads of people looking for them.”
174
Lingo of the Shoe Salesman, by David Geller,
American Speech
, Dec., 1934.
175
The Borax House, by Louise Conant,
American Mercury
, June, 1929.
176
I am indebted in Yiddish matters to Mr. B. H. Hartogensis of Baltimore, who has undertaken an extensive study of Loan-Words From the Hebrew in the American Language, not yet published.
177
A writer in the
Editor and Publisher
for Dec. 25, 1919, p. 30, credits the first use of
gabfest
to the late Joseph S. McCullagh, editor of the St. Louis
Globe-Democrat
. He says: “McCullagh coined the word while writing a comment upon an unusually prolonged and empty debate in Congress. No other word in the dictionary or out of it seemed to fit the case so well, and as a great percentage of the readers of the
Globe-Democrat
throughout the Central West were of German birth or origin,
gabfest
was seized upon with hearty zest, and it is today very generally applied to any protracted and particularly loquacious gathering.” In the Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary the first quoted use of the word is from the Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Evening Express
, July 30, 1904.
178
The “first annual
bookfest
and movie star rummage sale” of the League of American Penwomen was held at the Hotel Marion, Little Rock, Ark., Jan. 13–14, 1924. An
applefest
was held at the Marble Collegiate Church, New York City, in Dec., 1922. The North Side Community Choral Club, a Negro organization, held a
sanger-fest
(without the umlaut) in Pittsburgh in April, 1927. (Pittsburgh
Courier
, April 9.) See Domestication of the Suffix
-jest
, by Louise Pound,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916.
179
American Speech
, April, 1935, p. 155, reports a punning analogue,
squanderlust
, and ascribes it to Louis Ludlow, a member of Congress from Indiana.
180
See The Word
Blizzard
, by Allen Walker Read,
American Speech
, Feb., 1928, and
Blizzard
Again, by the same,
American Speech
, Feb., 1930.
181
The letter is to be found in The Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, by Marie Hansen Taylor; Boston, 1884. I am indebted for the reference to
And How
, by J. R. Schultz,
American Speech
, Dec., 1933, p. 80.
182
See The Cambridge History of American Literature; New York, 1921; Ch. IX; p. 23
ff
.
183
New Yorker
, Feb. 16, 1935.
184
I am informed by the Rev. W. G. Polack, of Evansville, Ind., that certain Lutherans in the United States, following German usage, employ
vicar
to designate “a theological student, not yet ordained, who is doing temporary supply-work in a mission congregation.” The verb
to vicar
means to occupy such a pulpit. Mr. Polack believes that
mission-festival
, common in the Middle West, comes from the German
missionsfest
. So with
agenda
, used by some of the Lutheran churches to designate their Book of Common Prayer. He says that it is not the English term, but the German
agende
. He notes also the use of
confirmand
to designate a candidate for confirmation; of
to announce
to indicate notifying a pastor of an intention to partake of communion (Ger.
sich anmel-den
); and of
inner-mission
(Ger.
innere mission
) instead of the usual
home-mission
; and of
confessional-address
(beichtrede). All these terms are used by English-speaking Lutherans.
185
For the following I am indebted to Mr. Leon L. Kay, for six years a correspondent of the United Press in Latin America: “The lower classes always slur the consonant in the regular ending,
-ado
, of Spanish participles, and so do the upper classes in rapid speech or unguarded moments. Furthermore, the final
o
is sounded so lightly as to make a virtual diphthong of
ao
, equivalent to
ou
in
mouth
. Peons, never able to, are seldom asked to pay fines. To them, to be
juzgado
(sentenced) means simply to be jailed. When Felipe or José, after the usual week-end drunk, is missed and inquired after, the answer to ‘Where is he?’ is ‘
Juzgado.
’ The first Americans, seeking missing ranch-hands, no doubt took this to be a Spanish word for jail, and so
hoosegow
was born. Apart from shifting the stress to the first from the penultimate syllable, the South-westerners have achieved an almost perfect transliteration.” The Spanish
j
is pronounced like our
h
, the Spanish
u
like our
oo
, and the Spanish
ado
like our
ou
.
186
Dearborn
Independent
, March 3, 1923: “It is said that one quart was sufficient to craze the brains of ten Indians.”
187
See
Chautauqua
Notes, by J. R. Schultz,
American Speech
, Oct., 1934, p. 232.
188
The word
policy
, which was used in the United States from about 1885 to 1915 to designate the form of gambling now called
numbers
, was from the Italian
polizza
. But it apparently came in by way of English, though with a change in meaning, and it is now virtually obsolete.
189
By M. H. Palmer in the London
Morning Post
, Feb. 9, 1935.
190
See the following notes by Louise Pound, all in
Dialect Notes
; Vol. IV, Pt. IV, 1916, p. 304; Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916, p. 354; Vol. V, Pt. I, 1918, p. 11.
AMERICAN AND ENGLISH
I. THE INFILTRATION OF ENGLISH BY AMERICANISMS
The English travelers and reviewers whose pious horror of Americanisms has been recorded in Chapters I and III were able, for a while, to shut off their flow into Standard English, but only for a while. The tide began to turn, according to Sir William Craigie,
1
in 1820, and soon thereafter a large number of Yankee neologisms that had been resisted with heroic dudgeon came into common use in England,
e.g., reliable, influential, talented
and
lengthy
. Charles Dickens was credited by Bishop Coxe
2
with responsibility for the final acceptance of all four words: he put them into his “American Notes” in 1842 and Coxe believed that he thus naturalized them. But as a matter of fact they had all come in before this. Coleridge used
reliable
in 1800 and
influential
in 1833, and though he was still denouncing
talented
as “that vile and barbarous vocable” in 1832, and it was dismissed as a word “proper to avoid” by Macaulay even in 1842,
3
it had been used by the critic and philologian, William Taylor, in 1830, by Sir William Herschel, the astronomer, in 1829, and by no less an Americophobe than Robert Southey in 1828. Southey, in his turn, sneered at
lengthy
in 1812 and again in 1834, but it was used by Jeremy Bentham so early as 1816, by Scott in 1827 (though still as a conscious Americanism), and by Dickens himself in “Pickwick” in 1837, five years before the publication of “American Notes.”
Talented
had become so respectable by 1842 that it was accepted by E. B. Pusey, leader of the Oxford Movement,
4
and fifteen years later it received the imprimatur of Gladstone.
Along with
reliable, influential
and
lengthy
it now appears in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, published by the brothers Fowler in 1911, and of the four words, only
lengthy
is noted as “originally an Americanism.”
5
All are listed in Casselt’s Dictionary without remark. During the half century following 1820 many other Americanisms also made their way into English. Even
to belittle
, which had provoked an almost hysterical outburst from the
European Magazine and London Review
when Thomas Jefferson ventured to use it in 1787,
6
was so generally accepted by 1862 that Anthony Trollope admitted it to his chaste vocabulary.
John S. Farmer says
7
that the American humorists who flourished after the Civil War broke down most of the remaining barriers to Americanisms. The English purists continued to rage against them, as they do even to this day, but the success in England of such writers as Charles Godfrey Leland (Hans Breitmann), Charles Heber Clark (Max Adeler), Charles Farrar Browne (Artemus Ward), David R. Locke (Petroleum V. Nasby) and Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) made the English public familiar with the pungent neologisms of the West, and many of them were taken into the language. George F. Whicher says that Leland and Clark “became better known in England than in the United States;”
8
as for Browne, he was so popular in London that he moved there in 1866, and died on English soil a year later. The influence of these men, according to Farmer, was still strong in the late 80’s; they had popularized “American peculiarities of speech and diction to an extent which, a few years since, would have been deemed incredible.” He continued:
Even our newspapers, hitherto regarded as models of correct literary style, are many of them following in their wake; and both in matter and phraseology are lending countenance to what at first sight appears a monstrously crude and almost imbecile jargon; while others, fearful of a direct plunge, modestly introduce
the uncouth bantlings with a saving clause. The phrase,
as the Americans say
, might in some cases be ordered from the type-foundry as a logotype, so frequently does it do introduction duty.
9