1 The first proposal that such a conference be held came from the American side in March, 1922. It was signed by Robert Underwood Johnson, representing the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the following academic dignitaries: John Livingston Lowes, head of the English department at Harvard; Fred Newton Scott, professor of rhetoric at the University of Michigan; James W. Bright, then professor of English literature at the Johns Hopkins; Charles H. Grandgent, professor of Romance languages at Harvard; Charles G. Osgood, chairman of the department of English at Princeton, and John M. Manly, professor of English at Brown. This proposal was addressed to Arthur J. Balfour (then only a knight), Sir Henry Newbolt and Dr. Robert Bridges, the last-named Poet Laureate and founder of the Society for Pure English. After seven months a favorable reply was received, but nothing came of it and the meeting of 1927 was actually arranged by Bridges and Henry S. Canby, the latter then editor of the Saturday Review of Literature. The American delegates who made the trip were Canby, Lowes, Johnson, Scott, George Philip Krapp, Louise Pound, Kemp Malone, Leonard Bacon and William A. Craigie, then in the United States as editor of the Dictionary of American English. Those representing the British Isles were Balfour (by now an earl); Newbolt, president of the Royal Society for Literature; Sir Frederic Kenyon, director of the British Museum; Sir Israel Gollancz, secretary of the British Academy; Sir John Reith, chairman of the British Broadcasting Corporation; Dr. Dover Wilson, of the British Association; John C. Squire, editor of the London Mercury; George Bernard Shaw, John Buchan (later Lord Tweedsmuir), Dr. F. S. Boas, and John C. Bailey, editor of the Literary Supplement of the London Times. See the International Council For Speech, by Kemp Malone, American Speech, April, 1928, pp. 261–75. The letters exchanged in 1922 were printed in the Literary Review of the New York Herald Tribune, Dec. 16, 1922, p. 330.
2 June 25, 1927.
3 It was reprinted in full by Dr. Malone in the article just cited, American Speech, April, 1928. Parts of it were reprinted in Words Across the Sea, by Doris Fox Benardete, New Republic, June 12, 1929, p. 102.
1 June 25, 1927.
2 June 20, 1927.
1 Vol. VI, 1927.
2 Dr. Malone noted, in the American Speech article lately cited, that there was no American response to the English onslaught. It was not, in fact, until two years later that any notice of it was taken in the United States, and that notice then got no further than a brief series of letters in the New Republic. On June 26, 1929 George E. G. Catlin contributed one in which he observes shrewdly that the English objection to American speechways is not always “a genuine philological one, but quite frequently is symbolical” of deeper aversions. “Sometimes,” he said, “it is merely an expression of anti-Americanism which, unable to declare itself directly, breaks out like a rash in unexpected places.”
1 Translations, Saturday Review of Literature, Dec. 26, 1925, p. 442. An interesting comparative study of the English and American translations of Lion Feuchtwanger’s Die Geschwister Oppenheim, 1933, is in American and English Translations of The Oppermanns, by Edmund E. Miller, American Speech, Oct., 1935, pp. 180–83.
2 What America Is Doing to Your Language, Jan. 15.
3 See AL4, p. 31.
1 You Are Wrong About the Mother Tongue, Jan. 18, 1930. Mr. Douglas was kind enough to grant that my article had been written in very fair English. He found “only one vulgarism” in it, to wit, the phrase on American motion. “But that,” he said, “is not an Americanism. It is merely bad English.” On (or at all events, upon) his motion is actually ancient in English, though the NED marks it “now archaic.”
2 Words That We Borrow, by Jameson Thomas, Jan. 21, 1930.
3 The American Language, Spring, 1936. The Daily Express extracts appeared on June 5, 1936, and were headed Boloney!
4 This appeared under the heading of More Boloney, June 10, 1936.
5 Daily Express, June 6, 1936.
1 Homing Emigrants, March 11, 1935.
2 Langton was a bitter critic of Americanisms and would not tolerate them in his court. He was a man of curious misfortunes. Once he sat too late in his chambers and was locked up in the Law Courts, and had to wait while a passing office-boy, hailed from a window, found someone with the keys. “The observant office-boy,” said the Eastern Daily Press (Norwich), Aug. 14, 1942, “received a judicial 5s” for his pains. In 1942 the learned justice did a vanishing act while on holiday in the West of England, and the police used bloodhounds in an effort to find him. Four days later his body was found in the river Parret. The coroner’s jury brought in what the English call an open verdict — that is to say, it refused to make an official guess as to how he had come by his death. He was not the only English judge to forbid the use of Americanisms in his presence. Another was Mr. Justice Humphreys, who, when a lawyer read a document saying that an agreement had been reached, roared from the bench: “We do not want these horrible things to get into our language!” (London dispatch to the New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 3, 1937). In England agreements are arrived at, or concluded, and decisions are not reached but taken. I am indebted here to Mr. William S. Pfriender of Glendale, L. I. Less decorous Americanisms are often slapped down by English judges. Even more often they set their catchpolls to guffawing by pretending that they don’t know the meaning of such terms. Thus the London Sunday Express reported on Feb. 21, 1937 that Mr. Justice Clauson, in the Chancery Division, had raised a laugh by alleging that he was baffled by sez you, used by the poet, Osbert Sitwell, and on Nov. 29, 1938 the London Telegraph and Post reported that Mr. Justice Merriman, in the Divorce Division, had got another by saying of hangover: “I won’t yield to the temptation of asking what it is.”
1 The Origin of Bluff, John o’ London’s Weekly, April 4, 1936, p. 33.
2 Americanese, Aug. 27, 1936.
3 See Chapter VI, Section 8.
4 London, 1867.
1 Often they reveal their amateur status by condemning as an Americanism a word or phrase that is actually quite sound English. I take an example from Ireland, the home of bulls, where a Dublin judge in 1935 rebuked a lawyer for using to kill time. “This hideous colloquialism,” said a reproving writer in the Dublin Evening Mail (Jottings by a Man About Town, July 22, 1935), “no doubt originated in Chicago, where gangsters occupy their time by killing it, and one another. The appearance of such expressions in our courts is an alarming reminder that the American language is rapidly shouldering out English and Irish in the Free State.” To kill time is listed by the NED without any indication that it is not kosher English.
2 English Resent Yankee Lingo in Queen Mary Ads, Baltimore Sun, Dec. 28, 1935.
3 Dec. 27, 1935.
4 Markham is a member of the Labor party, and the author of a history of Socialism. He was private secretary to the Prime Minister during J. Ramsay Macdonald’s term in that office, and was chosen to complete the official life of King Edward VII.
5 Associated Press dispatch from London, Nov. 8, 1938. In the course of the same speech he said: “It may be that the Commissioner of Works will in time label this lobby (pointing to the House’s aye-obby) the sez-you-lobby, and that lobby (pointing to the no-lobby) the include-me-out-lobby.”
1 “The outcry against the pollution of our well of pure English by Americanisms,” said a writer in the London Tatler, Oct. 6, 1937, “has yet once again become very clamant.”
2 In a speech to the boys of King’s School, Rochester. The London Sunday Dispatch, June 27, 1937, poked fun at his lordship by heading its report of his remarks: Hot For Good Books, He Slams Slouch Scribes.
3 Americanisms, Glasgow Daily Record and Mail, June 30, 1937.
4 Snob-stuff From U.S.A., Oct. 25, 1937.
5 Unhappily, La Frankau’s indignation led her into the usual forensic excesses. For example, she told of an American who produced a “howl of delight” at a party by demanding of her, “Are you giving me a ham steer?” Whether her ears actually heard this as ham steer or her delicacy prevented her reporting bum steer I
do not know. Bum, of course, means only the backside in England, and is thus a naughty word. The poor lady also fell into the error of denouncing serviette as an Americanism for a table-napkin. The NED shows that it was in common use in Scotland so long ago as the Fifteenth Century. It was introduced into England from France early in the Nineteenth Century, but “has come to be considered vulgar.” It is seldom heard in the United States.
1 Good Morning, by Malcolm W. Bingay, Jan. 21, 1937.
2 Montreal Daily Star, March 13,1937; Montreal Gazette, May 5.
3 Published in April, 1936.
4 Montreal Star, March 15, 1939.
1 Debasing Our Speech, London Observer, Jan. 30, 1938.
2 The Invasion From U.S.A., April 11.
3 Slushy Talk: the American Invasion, London Morning Post, Oct. 26, 1933
4 Broadcasting and American Slang, Oct. 31, 1935.
1 Slang and Language, April 13, 1935. Bogus, here listed as a Mayfair invention, is actually an Americanism. The DAE calls it “of obscure origin” and traces it to 1839. The NED calls it “a cant word of U.S.” Shame-making is not listed in any dictionary of English or American slang. It must have had a very short life.
2 Shakespeare as She is Spoke, July 26, 1938.
3 London Evening Standard, July 29, 1938.
4 The English equivalent of the American public schools.
5 A Serious Woman’s Diary, Dec. 14, 1938.
1 Pp. 44–48.
2 To-night, by Tempus, March 24.
3 Americanisms and Slang, Catholic Herald (Manchester edition), June 19, 1936.
4 An English Paper Deplores a Bishop for Deploring, Baltimore Evening Sun (editorial page), Nov 6, 1936.
1 June 17, 1938. What the Times had to say of Weaver’s poems in American at the time of their publication in the early 20s — if, indeed, it said anything at all — I do not know.
2 Defined by the NED as one who takes “a place in the first class in each of two final examinations in different subjects” at an English university.
3 Quoted in English Films and the U. S. Market, by Campbell Dixon, London Daily Telegraphy April 11, 1938.
4 Oh! What Slanguage!, July 23,1938.
5 When I called attention to the same fact in 1930 (What America is Doing to Your Language, London Daily Express, Jan. 15) I was lambasted with great energy. See AL4, pp. 31 and 32.
1 The Conquering Tongue, London Spectator, Feb. 5, 1943, pp. 120–21.
2 A character in Henry V.
3 Two Peoples and One Tongue, June 29, 1943.
1 An interesting contemporary account of him is in Anecdotes of Colonel Humphreys, Monthly Magazine and American Review, June, 1800, pp. 472–75.
2 It is reprinted in full in Mathews, pp. 57–61. He also reprinted it in Dialect Notes, Vol. V., Part IX, 1926, pp. 375–82.
3 The dates are those of the earliest examples in the DAE. That of to boost is the date of the play’s publication. The word was apparently just coming in at the time.
4 Discussed in Chapter VI, Section 8.
5 Humphreys describes darned as “old English,” but the NED’s early examples are all American.
6 I suspect that Humphreys invented this monstrosity. The DAE’s first example comes from his glossary, and its second, obviously borrowed therefrom, from Bartlett’s, 1848. Bartlett says: “This remarkable specimen of clipping and condensing a phrase approaches the Indian method of forming words. The word is very common through New England, Long Island, and the rest of New York.” But he confused it with forzino, the next term on the Humphreys list.
7 Or farzino. The DAE throws no light on either form, and Thornton, Clapin, Farmer and most of the other American lexicographers ignore them. Schele de Vere describes a third form, farziner, as “a violent corruption of as far as I know throughout New England, and in parts of New York, but confined to the most ignorant classes and rapidly disappearing.” Schele was too optimistic. I have heard farzino in Maryland within the last few years.
8 Humphreys so defines the word, but the DAE does not list it.
9 Here again the DAE’s first example is from Humphreys himself.
1 The DAE’s first example of this is from Humphreys himself. It apparently did not appear in England until the middle of the century.
2 London, 1818. The subtitle is A Narrative of a Journey of Five Thousand Miles Through the Eastern and Western States. There was a second edition the same year and a third in 1819. Fearon was sent out in 1817 by 39 English heads of families “to ascertain whether any and what part of the United States would be suitable for their residence.” He reached New York Aug. 6, and sailed for home May 10, 1818. The post-Napoleonic depression was on in England at the time, and he says in his preface that emigration had “assumed a totally new character; it was no longer merely the poor, the idle, the profligate, or the wholly speculative who were proposing to quit their native country, but men also of capital, of industry, of sober habits and regular pursuits.” Despite the recentness of the War of 1812 he was politely received.
1 It was published in Boston and makes a volume of 207 pp. It has never been reprinted, but copies are still occasionally encountered in the second-hand book-stores.
1 Notes on Early American Work in Linguistics, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, July, 1943, p. 27.
2 Allen Walker Read says in American Projects for an Academy to Regulate Speech, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1936, p. 1150, that the academy usually devoted itself to “practical matters in geology, agriculture, mathematics and the like”: the Pickering paper was something of a novelty for it.
1 One of these friends, it would appear, was the Peter Du Ponceau lately mentioned. In 1935 Dr. Julian P. Boyd, then librarian of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and now (1944) librarian of Princeton, discovered a long run of letters from Pickering to Du Ponceau in the Historical Society’s collection, all of them dealing with language. So far they have not been published.
2 The only ones he listed were barbecue, caucus, hominy, moccasin, netop, papoose, samp, squaw and succotash.
1 Pickering’s introductory essay, but not his preface, is reprinted in full in Mathews, pp. 65 ff.
2 The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. X; New York and Cambridge, 1913, p. 516, says that the Todd revision was brought out in four volumes in 1818, but the first volume, at least, must have appeared earlier, for Pickering was quoting it in 1816. It increased Johnson’s vocabulary to 58,000 words.
3 The Rev. Jonathan Boucher, author of a Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words. For an account of him see AL4, p. 35, n. 1.
1 Animadversions Upon the Remonstrants’ Defense Against Smectymnuus; London, 1641.
3 Freshet, in the sense of a flood caused by melting snow or excessive rainfall, is probably an Americanism. The DAE’s first example is dated 1638. The NED’s first is later.
3 Freshet, in the sense of a flood caused by melting snow or excessive rainfall, is probably an Americanism. The DAE’s first example is dated 1638. The NED’s first is later.
4 This curious denunciation is printed in full in AL4, p. 14. The Quarterly Review also denounced the word.
1 Mark Twain used it in Sketches Old and New, 1864, but it is now heard only in rustic speech, and seldom there.
2 Not listed in the DAE. Pickering says that in his day it was “often heard from our pulpits,” but notes that it had come from England, where it was obsolete.
3 The DAE’s first American example is dated 1809. It apparently appeared in England before this, but quickly passed out.
4 The DAE’s first example is from the New England Courant of April 9/16, 1722. The word is in Thomas Wright’s Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English; London 1857. Wright says that it comes from the Anglo-Norman, whatever that may be. The NED gives a quotation from Shakespeare’s King John, 1595, but throws some doubt upon it. Its first unmistakable quotation is dated 1706.
5 The DAE’s only quotations ar
e from Pickering himself and from a review in the British Critic, 1796, which he quotes. He says that the British Critic called the word an American coinage, and declared that it was better than citizeness. It did not last long.
6 Jefferson used the word as early as 1787, and it was admitted by Noah Webster to his American Dictionary of 1828. The DAE’s last example is dated 1879.
7 It was provincial in England. The DAE does not list it.
8 To doxologize and to happify are not listed in the DAE. The latter appears in Dunglison.
9 Traced by the DAE to the Connecticut probate records of 1647. Pickering says that, in his time, it was “in constant use in all parts of New England.”
10 This word, which arose at the close of the Eighteenth Century, went out with the disappearance of the redemptioners themselves. They were immigrants who paid for their passage to America by binding themselves to service for a term of years.
1 Pickering lists this as a New England provincialism. It is not recorded in the DAE.
2 The NED traces brash in this sense to 1566, but says that it is “now chiefly U.S.” Pickering said the term was used “in some parts of New England,” and Dunglison, in 1829, marked it “New England.” It is now used universally by workmen dealing with wood, e.g., carpenters and cabinet-makers.
3 Pickering hazards the guess that this word may be a variant of the Devonshire dialect term, clatchy, meaning the same. The NED traces to clitch, in the sense of to stick, to adhere, to c. 1325, but it apparently vanished into dialect soon after 1400. The NED prints a note from a correspondent who says that to clitch, not to clatch, still survives in the West of England.
4 I take this Webster list from Mathews.
1 It was listed in Todd’s revision of Johnson’s Dictionary.
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