But in this battle across the ocean it was Paulding who got in the most licks, and the heaviest ones. In all he wrote five books dealing with the subject. The first, “The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan” (1812) was satirical in tone, and made a considerable popular success. Three years later he followed it with a more serious work, “The United States and England,” another reply to the Quarterly review of “Inchiquin.” The before-mentioned “Letters From the South” came out in 1817, and in 1822 Paulding resumed the attack with “A Sketch of Old England,” a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the current English books of American travels. He had never been to England, and the inference was that many of the English travelers had never been to America. Finally, in 1825, he resorted to broad burlesque in “John Bull in America, or The New Munchausen.”33 Now and then some friendly aid came from the camp of the enemy. Cairns shows that, while the Quarterly, the European Magazine and the Anti-Jacobin were “strongly anti-American” and “deliberately and dirtily bitter,” three or four of the lesser reviews displayed a fairer spirit, and even more or less American bias. After 1824, when the North American Review gave warning that if the campaign of abuse went on it would “turn into bitterness the last drops of good-will toward England that exist in the United States,” even Blackwood’s became somewhat conciliatory.
3. AMERICAN “BARBARISMS”
But this occasional tolerance for things American was never extended to the American language. Most of the English books of travel mentioned Americanisms only to revile them, and even when they were not reviled they were certainly not welcomed. The typical attitude was well set forth by Captain Hamilton in “Men and Manners in America,” already referred to as denying that the United States of 1833 had any libraries. “The amount of bad grammar in circulation,” he said, “is very great; that of barbarisms [i.e., Americanisms] enormous.” Worse, these “barbarisms” were not confined to the ignorant, but came almost as copiously from the lips of the learned.
I do not now speak of the operative class, whose massacre of their mother-tongue, however inhuman, could excite no astonishment; but I allude to the great body of lawyers and traders; the men who crowd the exchange and the hotels; who are to be heard speaking in the courts, and are selected by their fellow-citizens to fill high and responsible offices. Even by this educated and respectable class, the commonest words are often so transmogrified as to be placed beyond recognition of an Englishman.
Hamilton then went on to describe some of the prevalent “barbarisms”:
The word does is split into two syllables, and pronounced do-es. Where, for some incomprehensible reason, is converted into whare, there into thare; and I remember, on mentioning to an acquaintance that I had called on a gentleman of taste in the arts, he asked “whether he sheiv (showed) me his pictures.” Such words as oratory and dilatory are pronounced with the penult syllable long and accented: missionary becomes missionary, angel, ângel, dânger, danger, etc.
But this is not all. The Americans have chosen arbitrarily to change the meaning of certain old and established English words, for reasons they cannot explain, and which I doubt much whether any European philologist could understand. The word clever affords a case in point. It has here no connexion with talent, and simply means pleasant or amiable. Thus a good-natured blockhead in the American vernacular is a clever man, and having had this drilled into me, I foolishly imagined that all trouble with regard to this word, at least, was at an end. It was not long, however, before I heard of a gentleman having moved into a clever house, of another succeeding to a clever sum of money, of a third embarking in a clever ship, and making a clever voyage, with a clever cargo; and of the sense attached to the word in these various combinations, I could gain nothing like a satisfactory explanation.…
The privilege of barbarizing the King’s English is assumed by all ranks and conditions of men. Such words as slick, kedge and boss, it is true, are rarely used by the better orders; but they assume unlimited liberty in the use of expect, reckon, guess and calculate, and perpetrate other conversational anomalies with remorseless impunity.
This Briton, as usual, was as full of moral horror as of grammatical disgust, and put his denunciation upon the loftiest of grounds. He concluded:
I will not go on with this unpleasant subject, nor should I have alluded to it, but I feel it something of a duty to express the natural feeling of an Englishman at finding the language of Shakespeare and Milton thus gratuitously degraded. Unless the present progress of change be arrested by an increase of taste and judgment in the more educated classes, there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman, and that the nation will be cut off from the advantages arising from their participation in British literature. If they contemplate such an event with complacency, let them go on and prosper; they have only to progress in their present course, and their grandchildren bid fair to speak a jargon as novel and peculiar as the most patriotic American linguist can desire.34
All the other English writers of travel books took the same line, and so did the stay-at-homes who hunted and abhorred Americanisms from afar. Mrs. Frances Trollope reported in her “Domestic Manners of the Americans” (1832) that during her whole stay in the Republic she had seldom “heard a sentence elegantly turned and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American”: there was “always something either in the expression or the accent” that jarred her feelings and shocked her taste. She concluded that “the want of refinement” was the great American curse. Captain Frederick Marry at, in “A Diary in America” (1839) observed that “it is remarkable how very debased the language has become in a short period in America,” and then proceeded to specifications — for example, the use of right away for immediately, of mean for ashamed, of clever in the senses which stumped Captain Hamilton, of bad as a deprecant of general utility, of admire for like, of how? instead of what? as an interrogative, of considerable as an adverb, and of such immoral verbs as to suspicion and to opinion. Marryat was here during Van Buren’s administration, when the riot of Americanisms was at its wildest, and he reported some really fantastic specimens. Once, he said, he heard “one of the first men in America” say, “Sir, if I had done so, I should not only have doubled and trebled, but I should have fourbled and fivebled my money.” Unfortunately, it is hard to believe that an American who was so plainly alive to the difference between shall and will, should and would, would have been unaware of quadrupled and quintupled. No doubt there was humor in the country, then as now, and visiting Englishmen were sometimes taken for rides.
Captain Basil Hall, who was here in 1827 and 1828, and published his “Travels in North America” in 1829, was so upset by some of the novelties he encountered that he went to see Noah Webster, then seventy years old, to remonstrate. Webster upset him still further by arguing stoutly that “his countrymen had not only a right to adopt new words, but were obliged to modify the language to suit the novelty of the circumstances, geographical and political, in which they were placed.” The lexicographer went on to observe judicially that “it is quite impossible to stop the progress of language — it is like the course of the Mississippi, the motion of which, at times, is scarcely perceptible; yet even then it possesses a momentum quite irresistible. Words and expressions will be forced into use, in spite of all the exertions of all the writers in the world.”
“But surely,” persisted Hall, “such innovations are to be deprecated?”
“I don’t know that,” replied Webster. “If a word becomes universally current in America, where English is spoken, why should it not take its station in the language?”
To this Hall made an honest British reply. “Because,” he said, “there are words enough already.”
Webster tried to mollify him by saying that “there were not fifty words in all which were used in America and not in England” — an underestimate of large proportions —, but Hall went away muttering.
Marryat, who toured the United States ten years after Hall, was chiefly impressed by the American verb to fix, which he described as “universal” and as meaning “to do anything.” It also got attention from other English travelers, including Godfrey Thomas Vigne, whose “Six Months in America” was printed in 1832, and Charles Dickens, who came in 1842. Vigne said that it had “perhaps as many significations as any word in the Chinese language,” and proceeded to list some of them — “to be done, made, mixed, mended, bespoken, hired, ordered, arranged, procured, finished, lent or given.” Dickens thus dealt with it in one of his letters home to his family:
I asked Mr. Q. on board a steamboat if breakfast be nearly ready, and he tells me yes, he should think so, for when he was last below the steward was fixing the tables — in other words, laying the cloth. When we have been writing and I beg him … to collect our papers, he answers that he’ll fix ’em presently. So when a man’s dressing he’s fixing himself, and when you put yourself under a doctor he fixes you in no time. T’other night, before we came on board here, when I had ordered a bottle of mulled claret, and waited some time for it, it was put on the table with an apology from the landlord (a lieutenant-colonel) that he fear’d it wasn’t properly fixed. And here, on Saturday morning, a Western man, handing his potatoes to Mr. Q. at breakfast, inquired if he wouldn’t take some of “these fixings” with his meat.35
In another letter, written on an Ohio river steamboat on April 15, 1842, Dickens reported that “out of Boston and New York” a nasal drawl was universal, that the prevailing grammar was “more than doubtful,” that the “oddest vulgarisms” were “received idioms,” and that “all the women who have been bred in slave States speak more or less like Negroes.” His observations on American speech habits in his “American Notes” (1842) were so derisory that they drew the following from Emerson:
No such conversations ever occur in this country in real life, as he relates. He has picked up and noted with eagerness each odd local phrase that he met with, and when he had a story to relate, has joined them together, so that the result is the broadest caricature.36
Almost every English traveler of the years between the War of 1812 and the Civil War was puzzled by the strange signs on American shops. Hall couldn’t make out the meaning of Leather and Finding Store, though he found Flour and Feed Store and Clothing Store self-explanatory, albeit unfamiliar. Hamilton, who followed in 1833, failed to gather “the precise import” of Dry-Goods Store, and was baffled and somewhat shocked by Coffin Warehouse (it would now be Casketeria!) and Hollow Ware, Spiders, and Fire-Dogs. But all this was relatively mild stuff, and after 1850 the chief licks at the American dialect were delivered, not by English travelers, most of whom had begun by then to find it more amusing than indecent, but by English pedants who did not stir from their cloisters. The climax came in 1863, when the Very Rev. Henry Alford, D.D. dean of Canterbury, printed his “Plea for the Queen’s English.”37 He said:
Look at the process of deterioration which our Queen’s English has undergone at the hands of the Americans. Look at those phrases which so amuse us in their speech and books; at their reckless exaggeration and contempt for congruity; and then compare the character and history of the nation — its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man; its open disregard of conventional right when aggrandisement is to be obtained; and I may now say, its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world.
It will be noted that Alford here abandoned one of the chief counts in Sydney Smith’s famous indictment, and substituted its exact opposite. Smith had denounced slavery, whereas Alford, by a tremendous feat of moral virtuosity, was now denouncing the war to put it down! But Samuel Taylor Coleridge had done almost as well in 1822. The usual English accusation at that time, as we have seen, was that the Americans had abandoned English altogether and set up a barbarous jargon in its place. Coleridge, speaking to his friend Thomas Allsop, took the directly contrary tack. “An American,” he said, “by his boasting of the superiority of the Americans generally, but especially in their language, once provoked me to tell him that ‘on that head the least said the better, as the Americans presented the extraordinary anomaly of a people without a language. [Allsop’s italics] That they had mistaken the English language for baggage (which is called plunder in America), and had stolen it.’ ” And then the inevitable moral reflection: “Speaking of America, it is believed a fact verified beyond doubt that some years ago it was impossible to obtain a copy of the Newgate Calendar, as they had all been bought up by the Americans, whether to suppress the blazon of their forefathers, or to assist in their genealogical researches, I could never learn satisfactorily.”38
4: THE ENGLISH ATTITUDE TODAY
Smith, Alford and Coleridge have plenty of heirs and assigns in the England of today. There is in the United States, as everyone knows, a formidable sect of Anglomaniacs, and its influence is often felt, not only in what passes here for society, but also in the domains of politics, finance, pedagogy and journalism, but the corresponding sect of British Americophils is small and feeble, though it shows a few respectable names. It is seldom that anything specifically American is praised in the English press, save, of course, some new manifestation of American Anglomania. The realm of Uncle Shylock remains, at bottom, the “brigand confederation” of the Foreign Quarterly, and on occasion it becomes again the “loathsome creature,… maimed and lame, full of sores and ulcers,” of Dickens. In the field of language an Americanism is generally regarded as obnoxious ipso facto, and when a new one of any pungency begins to force its way into English usage the guardians of the national linguistic chastity belabor it with great vehemence, and predict calamitous consequences if it is not put down. If, despite these alarms, it makes progress, they often switch to the doctrine that it is really old English, and search the Oxford Dictionary for examples of its use in Chaucer’s time, or even in the Venerable Bede’s;39 but while it is coming in they give it no quarter. Here the unparalleled English talent for discovering moral obliquity comes into play, and what begins as an uproar over a word sometimes ends as a holy war to keep the knavish Yankee from undermining and ruining the English Kultur and overthrowing the British Empire. The crusade has abundant humors. Not infrequently a phrase denounced as an abominable Americanism really originated in the London music-halls, and is unknown in the United States. And almost as often the denunciation of it is sprinkled with genuine Americanisms, unconsciously picked up.
The English seldom differentiate between American slang and Americanisms of legitimate origin and in respectable use: both belong to what they often call the American slanguage.40 It is most unusual for an American book to be reviewed in England without some reference to its strange and (so one gathers) generally unpleasant diction. The Literary Supplement of the London Times is especially alert in this matter. It discovers Americanisms in the writings of even the most decorous American authors, and when none can be found it notes the fact, half in patronizing approbation and half in incredulous surprise. Of the 240 lines it gave to the first two volumes of the Dictionary of American Biography, 31 were devoted to animadversions upon the language of the learned authors.41 The Manchester Guardian and the weeklies of opinion follow dutifully. The Guardian, in a review of Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s “As I See Religion,” began by praising his “telling speech,” but ended by deploring sadly his use of the “full-blooded Americanisms which sometimes make even those who do not for a moment question America’s right and power to contribute to the speech which we use in common wince as they read.”42 One learns from J. L. Hammond that the late C. P. Scott, for long the editor of the Guardian, had a keen nose for Americanisms, and was very alert to keep them out of his paper. Says Hammond:
He would go bustling into a room, waving a cutting or a proof, in which was an obscure phrase, a preciosity, or an Americanism. “What does he mean by this? He talks about a final showdown? An Americanism, I suppose. What does it
mean? Generally known? I don’t know it. Taken from cards? I never heard of it.”43
This war upon Americanisms is in progress all the time, but it naturally has its pitched battles and its rest-periods between. For months there may be relative quiet on the linguistic Western front, and then some alarmed picket fires a gun and there is what the German war communiqués used to call a sharpening of activity. As a general thing the English content themselves with artillery practise from their own lines, but now and then one of them boldly invades the enemy’s country. This happened, for example, in 1908, when Charles Whibley contributed an extremely acidulous article on “The American Language” to the Bookman (New York) for January. “To the English traveler in America,” he said, “the language which he hears spoken about him is at once a puzzle and a surprise. It is his own, yet not his own. It seems to him a caricature of English, a phantom speech, ghostly yet familiar, such as he might hear in a land of dreams.” Mr. Whibley objected violently to many characteristic American terms, among them, to locate, to operate, to antagonize, transportation, commutation and proposition. “These words,” he said, “if words they may be called, are hideous to the eye, offensive to the ear, meaningless to the brain.” The onslaught provoked even so mild a man as Dr. Henry W. Boynton to action, and in the Bookman for March of the same year he published a spirited rejoinder. “It offends them [the English],” he said, “that we are not thoroughly ashamed of ourselves for not being like them.” Mr. Whibley’s article was reprinted with this counterblast, so that readers of the magazine might judge the issues fairly. The controversy quickly got into the newspapers, and was carried on for months, with American patriots on one side and Englishmen and Anglomaniacs on the other.
American Language Page 4
