I myself once helped to loose such an uproar, though quite unintentionally. Happening to be in London in the Winter of 1929–30, I was asked by Mr. Ralph D. Blumenfeld, the American-born editor of the Daily Express, to do an article for his paper on the progress of Americanisms in England since my last visit in 1922. In that article I ventured to say:
The Englishman, whether he knows it or not, is talking and writing more and more American. He becomes so accustomed to it that he grows unconscious of it. Things that would have set his teeth on edge ten years ago, or even five years ago, are now integral parts of his daily speech.… In a few years it will probably be impossible for an Englishman to speak, or even to write, without using Americanisms, whether consciously or unconsciously. The influence of 125,000,000 people, practically all headed in one direction, is simply too great to be resisted by any minority, however resolute.
The question whether or not this was sound will be examined in Chapters VI and XII. For the present it is sufficient to note that my article was violently arraigned by various volunteer correspondents of the Express and by contributors to many other journals. One weekly opened its protest with “That silly little fellow, H. L. Mencken, is at it again” and headed it “The American Moron,” and in various other quarters I was accused of a sinister conspiracy against the mother-tongue, probably political or commercial in origin, or maybe both. At this time the American talkie was making its first appearance in England, and so there was extraordinary interest in the subject, for it was obvious that the talkie would bring in far more Americanisms than the silent movie; moreover, it would also introduce the hated American accent. On February 4, 1930 Sir Alfred Knox, a Conservative M.P., demanded in the House of Commons that the Right Hon. William Graham, P.C., then president of the Board of Trade, take steps to “protect the English language by limiting the import of American talkie films.” In a press interview he said:
I don’t go to the cinema often, but I had to be present at one a few days ago, when an American talkie film was shown. The words and accent were perfectly disgusting, and there can be no doubt that such films are an evil influence on our language. It is said that 30,000,000 [British] people visit the cinemas every week. What is the use of spending millions on education if our young people listen to falsified English spoken every night?44
There had been another such uproar in 1927, when an International Conference on English was held in London, under the presidency of the Earl of Balfour. This conference hardly got beyond polite futilities, but the fact that the call for it came from the American side45 made it suspect from the start, and its deliberations met with unconcealed hostility. On June 25, 1927, the New Statesman let go with a heavy blast, rehearsing all the familiar English objections to Americanisms. It said:
It is extremely desirable, to say the least, that every necessary effort should be made to preserve some standard of pure idiomatic English. But from what quarter is the preservation of such a standard in any way threatened? The answer is “Solely from America.” Yet we are asked to collaborate with the Americans on the problem; we are to make bargains about our own tongue; there is to be a system of give and take.… Why should we offer to discuss the subject at all with America? We do not want to interfere with their language; why should they seek to interfere with ours? That their huge hybrid population of which only a small minority are even racially Anglo-Saxons should use English as their chief medium of intercommunication is our misfortune, not our fault. They certainly threaten our language, but the only way in which we can effectively meet that threat is by assuming — in the words of the authors of “The King’s English”46 that “Americanisms are foreign words and should be so treated.”
The proposal that a permanent Council of English be formed, with 50 American members and 50 from the British Empire, brought the New Statesman to the verge of hysterics. It admitted that such a council “might be very useful indeed,” but argued that it “ought not to include more than one Scotsman and one Irishman, and should certainly not include even a single American.” Thus it reasoned:
The American language is the American language, and the English language is the English language. In some respects the Americans may fairly claim superiority. Sidewalk, for example, is a better word than pavement, and fall an infinitely better word than autumn. If we do not adopt these better words it is simply because of their “American flavor”; and the instinct which makes us reject them, though unfortunate in certain cases, is profoundly right. The only way to preserve the purity of the English language is to present a steadily hostile resistance to every American innovation. From time to time we may adopt this word or that, or sometimes a whole vivid phrase. But for all serious lovers of the English tongue it is America that is the only dangerous enemy. She must develop her own language and allow us to develop ours.
The other English journals were rather less fierce in their denunciation of the council and its programme, but very few of them greeted either with anything approaching cordiality.47 The Times, obviously trying to be polite, observed that “without offense it may be said that no greater assaults are made on the common language than in America,” and the Spectator ventured the view that in the United States English was departing definitely from the home standard, and was greatly “imposed upon and influenced by a host of immigrants from all the nations of Europe.” This insistence that Americans are not, in any cultural sense, nor even in any plausible statistical sense, Anglo-Saxons is to be found in many English fulminations upon the subject. During the World War, especially after 1917, they were hailed as blood-brothers, but that lasted only until the first mention of war-debts. Ever since 1920 they have been mongrels again, as they were before 1917, and most discussions of Americanisms include the objection that yielding to them means yielding to a miscellaneous rabble of inferior tribes, some of them, by English standards, almost savage. There was a time when the American in the English menagerie of comic foreigners was Hiram Q. Simpkins or Ulysses X. Snodgrass, a Yankee of Puritan, and hence of vaguely English stock, but on some near tomorrow he will probably be Patrick Kraus, Rastus O’Brien, Ole Ginzberg, or some other such fantastic compound of races.
The complaint that Americanisms are inherently unintelligible to civilized Christians is often heard in England, though not as often as in the past. It is a fact that they frequently deal with objects and ideas that are not familiar to the English, and that sometimes they make use of metaphors rather too bold for the English imagination. In consequence, there has been a steady emission of glossaries since the earliest days, some of them on a large scale. The first seems to have been that of the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, which was probably drawn up before 1800, but was not published until 1832, when it appeared in the second edition of his “Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words.”48 It was followed by that of David Humphreys, one of the Hartford Wits, which was printed as an appendix to his play, “The Yankey in England,” in 1815.49 A year later came John Pickering’s “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America.” Pickering got many of his words from the current English reviews of American books, and his purpose was the double, and rather contradictory, one of proving to the English reviewers that they were good English, and of dissuading Americans from using them.50 Robley Dunglison’s glossary followed in 1829–30, John Mason Peck’s in 1834,51 J. O. Halliwell-Phillips’s “Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms, Containing Words Now Obsolete in England, All of Which Are Familiar and in Common Use in America” in 1850, John Russell Bartlett’s “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States” (about 3725 terms) in 1848, A. L. Elwin’s “Glossary of Supposed Americanisms” (about 465 terms) in 1859, Maximilien Scheie de Vere’s “Americanisms” (about 4000 terms) in 1872, John S. Farmer’s “Americanisms Old and New” (about 5000 terms) in 1889, Sylva Clapin’s “New Dictionary of Americanisms” (about 5250 terms) in 1902, and Richard H. Thornton’s “American G
lossary” (about 3700 terms) in 1912. These were mainly the work of philological amateurs, and only Thornton’s two volumes had any scientific value.
So long ago as 1913 Sir Sidney Low, who had lived in America and had a sound acquaintance with Americanisms, suggested ironically in an article in the Westminster Gazette that American be taught in the English schools. This was before the movie invasion, and he reported that the English business man was “puzzled by his ignorance of colloquial American” and “painfully hampered” thereby in his handling of American trade. He went on:
In the United States the study of the English tongue forms part of the educational scheme.… I think we should return the compliment. We ought to learn the American language in our schools and colleges. At present it is strangely neglected by the educational authorities. They pay attention to linguistic attainments of many other kinds, but not to this. How many thousands of youths are at this moment engaged in puzzling their brains over Latin and Greek grammar only Whitehall knows. Every well-conducted seminary has some instructor who is under the delusion that he is teaching English boys and girls to speak French with a good Parisian accent. We teach German, Italian, even Spanish, Russian, modern Greek, Arabic, Hindustani. For a moderate fee you can acquire a passing acquaintance with any of these tongues at the Berlitz Institute and the Gouin Schools. But even in these polyglot establishments there is nobody to teach you American. I have never seen a grammar of it or a dictionary. I have searched in vain at the booksellers for “How to Learn American in Three Weeks” or some similar compendium. Nothing of the sort exists. The native speech of one hundred millions of civilized people is as grossly neglected by the publishers as it is by the schoolmasters. You can find means to learn Hausa or Swahili or Cape Dutch in London more easily than the expressive, if difficult, tongue which is spoken in the office, the barroom, the tramcar, from the snows of Alaska to the mouths of the Mississippi, and is enshrined in a literature that is growing in volume and favor every day.
Low quoted an extract from an American novel then appearing serially in an English magazine — an extract including such Americanisms as side-stepper, saltwater-taffy, Prince-Albert (coat), boob, bartender and kidding, and many characteristically American extravagances of metaphor. It might be well argued, he said, that this strange dialect was as near to “the tongue that Shakespeare spoke” as “the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton,” but that philological fact did not help to its understanding. “You might almost as well expect him [the British business man] to converse freely with a Portuguese railway porter because he tried to stumble through Caesar when he was in the Upper Fourth at school.”
At the time Low published his article the invasion of England by Americanisms was just beginning in earnest, and many words and phrases that have since become commonplaces there were still strange and disquieting. Writing in the London Daily Mail a year or so later W. G. Faulkner thought it necessary to explain the meanings of hobo, hoodlum, bunco-steerer, dead-beat, flume, dub, rubberneck, drummer, sucker, dive (in the sense of a thieves’ resort), clean up, graft and to feature, and another interpreter, closely following him, added definitions of hold-up, quitter, rube, shack, bandwagon, road-agent, cinch, live-wire and scab.52 This was in the early days of the American-made movie, and Faulkner denounced its terminology as “generating and encouraging mental indiscipline.” As Hollywood gradually conquered the English cinema palaces,53 such warnings became more frequent and more angry, and in 1920 the London Daily News began a formal agitation of the subject, with the usual pious editorials and irate letters from old subscribers. I quote a characteristic passage from one of the latter:
I visited two picture theaters today for the express purpose of collecting slang phrases and of noticing the effect of the new language on the child as well as on the adult. What the villain said to the hero when the latter started to argue with him was, “Cut out that dope” and a hundred piping voices repeated the injunction. The comic man announced his marriage to the Bell of Lumbertown by saying, “I’m hitched.”
On January 22, 1920 the London bureau of the Associated Press made this report:
England is apprehensive lest the vocabularies of her youth become corrupted through incursions of American slang. Trans-Atlantic tourists in England note with interest the frequency with which resort is made to “Yankee talk” by British song and play writers seeking to enliven their productions. Bands and orchestras throughout the country when playing popular music play American selections almost exclusively. American songs monopolize the English music hall and musical comedy stage. But it is the subtitle of the American moving picture film which, it is feared, constitutes the most menacing threat to the vaunted English purity of speech.
When the American talkie began to reinforce the movie, in 192954 there was fresh outburst of indignation, but this time it had a despairist undertone. Reinforced by the spoken word, Americanisms were now coming in much faster than they could be challenged and disposed of. “Within the past few years,” said Thomas Anderson in the Manchester Sunday Chronicle for January 12, 1930, “we have gradually been adopting American habits of speech, American business methods, and the American outlook.” To which Jameson Thomas added in the London Daily Express for January 21:
One must admit that we write and speak Americanisms. So long as Yankeeisms came to us insiduously we absorbed them carelessly. They have been a valuable addition to the language, as nimble coppers are a valuable addition to purer currency. But the talkies have presented the American language in one giant meal, and we are revolted.
But this revolt, in so far as it was real at all, was apparently confined to the aged: the young of the British species continued to gobble down the neologisms of Hollywood and to imitate the Hollywood intonation. “Seldom do I hear a child speak,” wrote a correspondent of the London News Chronicle on June 15, 1931, “who has not attached several Americanisms to his vocabulary, which are brought out with deliberation at every opportunity.” During the next few years the English papers printed countless protests against this corruption of the speech of British youth, but apparently to no avail. Nor was there any halt when Col. F. W. D. Bendall, C.M.G., M.A., an inspector of the Board of Education, began stumping the country in an effort to further the dying cause of linguistic purity.55 Nor when the chief constable — i.e., chief of police — of Wallasey, a suburb of Liverpool, issued this solemn warning in his annual report:
I cannot refrain from commenting adversely on the pernicious and growing habit of … youths to use Americanisms, with nasal accompaniment, in order to appear, in their own vernacular, tough guys. On one of my officers going to search him, a young housebreaker told him to “Lay off, cop.” Oh-yeahs are frequent in answer to charges, and we are promised shoots up in the burg [sic] and threatened to be bumped off.56
Parallel with this alarmed hostility to the jargon of the movies and the talkies, much of it borrowed from the American underworld, there has gone on in England a steady opposition to the more decorous varieties of American. I have already mentioned the Times’ sneering review of the first two volumes of the Dictionary of American Biography. Back in 1919 H. N. Brailsford, the well-known English publicist, who has been in the United States many times and often contributes to American magazines, actually objected to the vocabulary of the extremely precious and Anglomaniacal Woodrow Wilson, then in action in Versailles. “The irruption of Mr. Wilson upon our scene,” he wrote in the London Daily Herald on August 20, “threatens to modify our terminology. If one knew the American language (as I do not),” and so on.57 A little while before this a leading English medical journal had been protesting against the Americanisms in an important surgical monograph.58 Translations done in the United States are so often denounced that denouncing them has become a sort of convention. There was a storm of unusual violence, in 1925, over the plays of Luigi Pirandello. Their merit had been recognized in America earlier than in England — indeed, some of them had been forbidden, at least in English, by the English ce
nsor —, and in consequence the first translations were published in this country. What followed when they reached England was thus described by the London correspondent of the Bookman (New York) in its issue for September, 1925:
A strange situation has arisen over the Pirandello translations. These were made in America, and they contain phraseology which is peculiarly American. As a consequence they have been generally condemned in the English press as being translations from one foreign tongue into another.… It will be understood that when an English reader is used to calling comfits sweets and finds them called candies he feels he is not getting an English equivalent of the Italian author’s word.
This correspondence was signed Simon Pure; its actual author, I am informed, was Rebecca West. She expressed the opinion that English translations of foreign books were frequently offensive to Americans, and for like reasons. “It seems to me to be a pity,” she continued, “that the habit should have grown up among Continental authors of selling ‘world rights in the English language.’ If the English translation does not satisfy the Americans, and the American translation does not please the English, it would surely be far better that there should be two translations.” In a long reply to this, published in the Saturday Review of Literature (New York) for December 26, 1925, Ernest Boyd — himself a translator of wide experience, born in Ireland, educated there and in England, for seven years a member of the British consular service, and resident in New York since 1920 — denied that there was any hostility to English translations in this country. “English translators,” he said, “are accepted at their own — or their publishers’ — valuation in America,” but American translators “are received with prejudice and criticized with severity” in England. The American edition of Pirandello’s plays consisted of two volumes, one translated by Dr. Arthur Livingston of Columbia University, and the other by Edward Storer, an Englishman. Said Mr. Boyd:
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