Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
American Language Supplement 2 (72 page)
6
The speechways of radio announcers have been discussed in Chapter VII, Section 1. In July, 1946, a press-agent disguised as an indignant schoolma’am got space in the newspapers by protesting against the Arkansas dialect forms used in sports broadcasts by Dizzy Dean, a former baseball player,
e.g., slud
as the preterite of
to slide, respectable
for
respective
, and
confidentially
for
confidently
. See an Associated Press dispatch from St. Louis, printed in many morning papers the next day. Fans in large number supported Dizzy, and he was defended passionately by the
Saturday Review of Literature
(Aug. 3), the Baltimore
Sun
(Aug. 16), and
The Pleasures of Publishing
, press-sheet of the Columbia University Press (Aug. 12).
1
James D. Woolf, in The Difficult Art of Using Simple Words,
Printers Ink
, Sept. 29, 1944, p. 39, quoted
Life
as saying that “comic strips comprise the most significant body of literature in America today,” read diligently by 51% of the nation’s adults. The number of children following them is probably nearly 90%.
2
Stabilizing the Language Through Popular Songs,
New Yorker
, July 7, 1934, pp. 32–36.
3
A writer in
American Speech
, Oct., 1942, p. 181, says that in the Oxford Book of Light Verse this was changed to
did
. The first edition of Gray’s famous elegy, published in 1751, had the title, An Elegy
Wrote
in a Country Church Yard.
4
See also Folk Song and Folk Speech, by Hans Kurath,
American Speech
, April, 1945, pp. 122–25.
5
The Science of Language; First Series; London, 1861, p. 277. Müller was challenged so early as Oct., 1865, by a writer in the
Eclectic Magazine
, p. 435. “A Derbyshire peasant,” said this writer, “uses eight different terms for a pigsty.”
1
Language and Superstition,
French Review
, May, 1944, p. 378, n. 5.
2
Extent of Personal Vocabularies and Cultural Control, by J. M. Gillette,
Scientific Monthly
, Nov., 1929, p. 453. Hugh Morrison tells me of a French missionary in the Belgian Congo who is compiling a dictionary of the local language, and has already found 60,000 words. (Private communication, May 21, 1946.)
3
Millions of Words, by Frank H Vizetelly, New York
Herald Tribune
, March 5, 1933.
4
Taking the Census of English Words,
American Speech
, Feb., 1933, pp. 36–41.
1
A Vocabulary Test,
Popular Science Monthly
, Feb., 1907. I take this and much of what follows from A Brief Outline of Vocabulary Measurement With a Summary of Some Methods Employed,
Word Study
, Feb., 1939, pp. 5–8.
2
On the Size of Vocabularies,
American Speech
, Oct., 1926, pp. 1–7.
1
References to many papers on the vocabularies of children are given in Miss Nice’s study. Others worth consulting are listed in AL4, p. 426, n. 2. Yet others are Notes on Child Speech, by Urban T. Holmes,
American Speech
, June, 1929, pp. 390–94; The Speech of a Child Two Years of Age, by E. C. Hills,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Part II, 1914, pp. 84–100; Vocabularies of Children and Adults, by W. S. Gray,
Elementary School Journal
, May, 1945, and Speech Development of a Bilingual Child,
Northwestern University Studies in the Humanities No. 6
, 1939. Dr. Wilfred J. Funk, the lexicographer, once startled the readers of the New York
Times
(Topics of the Times, July 26, 1938) by declaring that the average intelligent dog could understand about 60 words of English, though unable to speak the language. He said that trick dogs could be taught more than 250 words, and in four or more languages.
2
The Story of a New Dictionary, issued by the publishers of the College Standard, says, p. 12, that “a parrot can learn 200–300 words, a bright child of six knows 2000–3000, a stupid adult knows 8000–10,000, the ordinary man knows 20,000–30,000, and the well-read man knows 35,000–70,000.”
3
Says Average Man Uses 8000 Words, New York
Times
, July 15, 1923, p. 6.
4
Did Wilson Know 62,210 Words?,
Literary Digest
, April 3, 1926, p. 48.
1
For a Literary Lend-Lease, by Struthers Burt,
Saturday Review of Literature
, Nov. 4, 1944, p. 6. Unhappily, such delusions are shared even by philologians. In 1933 or thereabout a savant in practise at Harvard told his students that the average working vocabulary consists of but 2000 words. He was challenged by one of them, L. Clark Keating, later professor of Romance languages at George Washington University, who undertook to set down 2000 nouns alone without consulting a dictionary. He produced 1300 at a single sitting, and the next day added 1000 more.
2
A Study of the English Vocabulary Scores of 75 Executives, published by the Human Engineering Laboratories of the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, N. J.
3
The Spelling Vocabularies of Personal and Business Letters; New York, Feb. 13, 1925.
4
In The Words and Sounds of Telephone Conversations,
Bell System Technical Journal
, April, 1930, pp. 290–324, N. R. French, C. W. Carter, Jr., and Walter Koenig, Jr., reported that the first nine recorded in telephone conversations are
I, you, the, a, on, to, that, it
and
is. And
is in tenth place,
of
in thirteenth,
in
in fourteenth,
for
in twentieth, and
your
in ninety-third.
5
There is a large literature of vocabulary studies. Items down to the end of 1922 are listed in Kennedy, pp. 361–62. Various other papers are mentioned in AL4 or in the foregoing pages. Yet others worth consulting are Psychological Aspects of Language, by George C. Brandenburg,
Journal of Educational Psychology
, June, 1918; In Defense of Ezra, by L. E. Nelson,
English Journal
(College Edition), June, 1938; Size of Recognition and Recall Vocabularies, by P. M. Symonds,
School and Society
, Oct. 30, 1926; Vocabulary as a Symptom of Intellect, by Leta Stetter Hollingsworth,
American Speech
, Dec., 1925, pp. 154–58, and The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary, by G. Udny Yule; Cambridge (England), 1944. The last is devoted to devices for settling questions of disputed authorship, and its mathematics go beyond the equipment of the average layman, or even of the average philologist.
“The most surprising fact about the illiterate level of speech,” says Pooley,
1
“is its widespread uniformity. It is not merely a haphazard series of lapses from standard English, but is rather a distinct and national mode of speech, with a fairly regular grammar of its own. It is characterized principally by inversions of the forms of irregular verbs, the confusion of regular and irregular verb tense forms, a bland disregard of number agreement in subjects and verbs and pronoun relations, the confusion of adjectives and adverbs, and the employment of certain syntactical combinations like the double negative, the redundant subject, and the widely split infinitive.”
Most of these, of course, have long histories in the dialects of England, and crossed the ocean ready-made, but others seem to have originated in the Republic, or to have got a much firmer and more general lodgment here. Even
I seen
, though it is traced to
c
. 1440 by the NED, and had a prototype in
sehen
nearly two centuries earlier, has long had a formidable rival in England in
I seed
, and begins to take on a distinctively American color. It apparently did not gain its present wide vogue among the American underprivileged until the high tide of the Irish immigration in the 1840s. The Rev. John Witherspoon, writing in 1781,
2
denounced
I seed
and
I see
(in the past tense), but not
I seen
, and John Pickering, writing in 1815,
3
and Daniel Staniford, writing at about the same time
4
were content to echo Witherspoon. The glossary that David
Humphreys appended to “The Yankey in England” during the same year, likewise listed
I seed
but not
I seen
, and so did the list of Southern provincialisms included in the Rev. Adiel Sherwood’s “Gazetteer of the State of Georgia” in 1827. The NED offers no recent examples of
I seen
in England, but quotes
I see
from Thackeray and
I seed
from Scott and Kipling. Joseph Wright, in his “English Dialect Grammar,”
1
lists
I seed
and
I sawed
, but not
I seen
, and in his “English Dialect Dictionary” makes
I seen
chiefly Irish. Thornton’s first American example is dated 1796, but after that he offers none until 1840. As I have noted in AL4
2
believes that when
I seen
began to flourish in the American common speech it was “still in the perfect tense with the auxiliary syncopated,”
i.e
., “I(ve) never seen it,” but that it soon “came to be regarded as a real preterite and extended to all the functions of the past tense.” Menner also believes that
I have saw
and
I have did
were probably launched and propagated by “the condemnation of
I seen
and
I done
by grammarians, teachers and family critics,” as
between you and I
was prospered by the war on
it is me
.
3
His first example of
I have saw
is from Artemus Ward’s “Scenes Outside the Fair-ground,”
c
. 1862, and he says that “the grammarians of the early Nineteenth Century do not appear to include” it “in their ‘exercises in false syntax,’ ” but I find it frowned upon as a Pennsylvania provincialism in the eleventh edition of Samuel Kirkman’s “English Grammar in Familiar Lectures,” 1829.
4
There is great need for a study of the history of such forms in American English, but so far as I know only one attempt upon it has been made, to wit, by Henry Alexander in 1929.
5
Alexander found no inflections of the verb that had not been recorded in England, but his field of search was circumscribed and if it were extended to the whole body of colonial records it might produce something of great interest. The fact that most such forms are also to
be found in English dialects is not of any significance, for American is itself an English dialect, and its vocabulary is largely made up of borrowings from its congeners. The important thing is that many forms have had histories in this country differing from their histories in England, and that some that are used only in narrow areas there have come into almost universal use in the American common speech. There are also archaisms to be considered,
e.g., to loan
in the sense of
to lend
, and again there are forms that have undergone vocalic or consonantal changes, apparently in this country,
e.g., to bust
.
The case of
to bust
would especially reward investigation, for it seems to have been evolved from
to burst
on these shores. The NED Supplement finds it in Dickens’s “Nicholas Nickleby,” published in 1839, just before his first visit to America, but he may have borrowed it as he borrowed more than one other Americanism, for the DAE shows that it was in use in this country in 1806, and that by 1830 it was widespread. Bartlett says that when, in 1832, Henry Clay, the Whig candidate, was defeated for the Presidency by Andrew Jackson, the following conundrum “went the rounds of the papers”: “
Q
. Why is the Whig party like a sculptor?
A
. Because it takes Clay and makes a
bust
.” The banks that blew up so copiously in 1837 did not
burst;
they
bust
. So with the boilers of the river-steamers.
To bust out laughing, to bust a blood-vessel
(or a
suspenders button
),
to go on a bust
(
i.e
., a spree)
1
and the like became common phrases, and by 1845
buster
was a popular designation for anything large or astounding and especially for a fat and hearty boy.
2
Not long afterward the last named became a nickname for such a boy,
e.g., Buster
Brown, and survived in that capacity until our own time.
To bust a bronco
has been traced to 1888, but it is no doubt much older.
Trust-buster
appeared in 1877
3
and had a heavy run during the reign of Roosevelt I, and
gang-buster
was launched in 1935 to describe Thomas E. Dewey.
Bust-head
, meaning the cephalalgia following alcoholic indiscretion, is traced by the DAE to 1863, and
bustinest
, a synonym for
largest
, to 1851. “Pike’s Peak or
bust
” was launched in 1858 and soon took on figurative meaning and almost proverbial
dignity. Down to the 80s there was some effort by the hypersophic to preserve
burst
,
1
but they did not succeed. The Linguistic Atlas of New England
2
shows that
bust
and
busted
are widely prevalent in New England, and notes that
burst
or
bursted
“are felt as modern or refined.” Berrey and Van den Bark, in the index to their “American Thesaurus of Slang,” have nearly 200 entries for
to bust
and its derivatives, but only nine for
to burst
.
The paradigms of American vulgar verbs in AL4
3
may stand with only minor changes. The majority of the forms listed are also to be found in one or more of the English dialects, and are given in Wright’s “English Dialect Grammar.” This is the case, for example, with the New England use of
be
for
am, is
and
are
, as in “I
be
going” and “
Be
he (or you) sick? ” Pickering, in his Vocabulary of 1816, said that it was not then “so common as it was some years ago,” and dismissed it as confined to “the interior towns or the vulgar,” but the Linguistic Atlas of New England
4
shows that it was still flourishing in 1943. Some of the forms listed by the Atlas are: “I
be
what I
be
,” “He says you
be
and I says I
ben’t
,” “I don’t know as it
be
,” “There you
be
,” “They
be
good,” “They
be
to Providence” and “You ain’t going,
be
you?”
5
The NED says that both
be
and
ben’t
survive in the Southern and Eastern dialects of England – the chief sources of the New England dialect –,
6
and cites both the singular form, “I
be
a-going,” and the plural, “We
be
ready.” In literary use
ic beo
(
i.e., I be
) is traced to
c
. 1000, and the NED adds that
be
remained a formidable rival to
are
until the time of Shakespeare. A long and very interesting discussion of the term in its various forms is appended.
7
It is described as “an irregular and defective verb, the full conjugation of which in modern English is effected by a union of the surviving inflexions of three originally distinct and independent verbs,
viz
. (1) the original Aryan
substantive verb with stem
es
- ……, (2) the verb with stem
wes
- ……, and (3) the stem
beu
.” The DAE traces
I be
in American use (in the negative form of
I been’t
) to Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia,” 1702. Wentworth reports examples from California, Ohio, Iowa, the Ozarks, central New York, Newfoundland, Florida and Appalachia, but the stronghold of
be
is and always has been New England.
1