4. There is already available a considerable body of reliable information regarding the history of the population.… Thus a more scientific choice of representative communities is possible.
How many maps will be published in all is not yet determined, but the number will probably run to thousands. Each will show all the reported occurrences and permutations of a given locution, and in that way the dispersion of typical words and phrases, and of characteristic pronunciations, throughout the United States and Canada will be indicated. The Atlas will cover “all phases of the spoken language — pronunciation, accentuation (intonation and stress), the inflections, syntactical features, and vocabulary.” The speech of all strata of society is being investigated, and an attempt is being made to differentiate between the vocabularies of the educated and the uneducated, the young and the old, men and women. In addition to the Atlas, the Council will publish a series of monographs showing “the influence on the spoken language of movements of population, of topography and arteries of communication, of the stratification of society and the rise of the lower classes to positions of importance in their communities, of political, religious, and racial particularism, of the schools, and of cultural centers.” In particular, an effort will be made to find out to what extent the early immigrations to the West carried the speech habits of the older settlements with them. Finally, phonograph records are being collected, and copies of them will be available to persons interested.
These manifestations of a new interest in the scientific study of American English among American philologians are gratifying, but it would be a mistake to assume that that interest is widespread. It seems to be confined mainly, as collaboration in Dialect Notes and American Speech has always been confined, to a relatively small group of scholars, most of them either foreigners by birth or under foreign influences. The typical native teacher of English, now as in the past, fights shy of American, and can see in it only an unseemly corruption of English. Just as the elaborate obfuscations of Eighteenth Century law have been preserved in American law long after their abandonment in England, so the tight rules of the Eighteenth Century purists, with their absurd grammatical niceties, their fanciful etymologies and their silly spelling-pronunciations, tend to be preserved. Noah Webster protested against this pedantry nearly a century and a half ago, but it continues to be cherished among the rank and file of American pedagogues, from the kindergarten up to the graduate school. In the American colleges and high-schools there is no faculty so weak as the English faculty. It is the common catch-all for aspirants to the birch who are too lazy or too feeble in intelligence to acquire any sort of exact knowledge, and the professional incompetence of its typical ornament is matched only by his hollow cocksureness. Most of the American philologists, so-called, of the early days — Witherspoon, Whitney, Worcester, Fowler, Cobb and their like — were uncompromising advocates of conformity to English precept and example, and combated every indication of a national independence in speech with the utmost vigilance. One of their company, true enough, stood out against the rest. He was George Perkins Marsh, and in his “Lectures on the English Language,”80 he argued that “in point of naked syntactical accuracy, the English of America is not at all inferior to that of England.” But even Marsh expressed the hope that Americans would not, “with malice prepense, go about to republicanize our orthography and our syntax, our grammars and our dictionaries, our nursery hymns [sic] and our Bibles” to the point of actual separation. Moreover, he was a philologian only by courtesy; the regularly ordained brethren were all against him. The fear voiced by William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, that Americans might “break loose from the laws of the English language”81 altogether, was echoed by the whole fraternity, and so the corrective bastinado was laid on.
It remained, however, for two sages of a later day to preach the doctrine that the independent growth of American was not only immoral, but a sheer illusion. They were Richard Grant White, for long the leading American writer upon language questions, at least in popular esteem, and Thomas R. Lounsbury, for thirty-five years professor of the English language and literature in the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, and an indefatigable controversialist. Both men were of the utmost industry in research, and both had wide audiences. White’s “Words and Their Uses,” published in 1872, was a mine of more or less authentic erudition, and his “Everyday English,” following eight years later, was another. True enough, Fitzedward Hall, the Anglo-Indian-American philologist, disposed of some of his etymologies and otherwise did execution upon him,82 but in the main his contentions were accepted. Lounsbury was also an adept and favorite expositor. His attacks upon certain familiar follies of the grammarians were penetrating and effective, and his two books, “The Standard of Usage in English” and “The Standard of Pronunciation in English,” not to mention his excellent “History of the English Language” and his numerous magazine articles, showed a sound knowledge of the early history of the language, and an admirable spirit of free inquiry. But both of these laborious scholars, when they turned from English proper to American English, displayed an unaccountable desire to deny its existence altogether, and to the support of that denial they brought a critical method that was anything but scientific. White devoted not less than eight long articles in the Atlantic Monthly83 to a review of the fourth edition of John Russell Bartlett’s “American Glossary” (1877) and when he came to the end he had disposed of nine-tenths of Bartlett’s specimens and called into question the authenticity of at least half the remainder. And no wonder, for his method was simply that of erecting tests so difficult and so arbitrary that only the exceptional word or phrase could pass them, and then only by a sort of chance. “To stamp a word or a phrase as an Americanism,” he said, “it is necessary to show that (1) it is of so-called ‘American’ origin — that is, that it first came into use in the United States of North America, or that (2) it has been adopted in those States from some language other than English, or has been kept in use there while it has wholly passed out of use in England.” Going further, he argued that unless “the simple words in compound names” were used in America “in a sense different from that in which they are used in England” the compound itself could not be regarded as an Americanism. The absurdity of all this is apparent when it is remembered that one of his rules would bar out such obvious Americanisms as the use of sick in place of ill, of molasses for treacle, and of fall for autumn, for all these words, while archaic in England, are by no means wholly extinct; and that another would dispose of that vast category of compounds which includes such unmistakably characteristic Americanisms as joy-ride, rake-off, show-down, up-lift, out-house, rubber-neck, chair-warmer, fire-eater and back-talk.
Lounsbury went even further. In the course of a series of articles in Harper’s Magazine, he laid down the dogma that “cultivated speech … affords the only legitimate basis of comparison between the language as used in England and in America,” and then went on:
In the only really proper sense of the term, an Americanism is a word or phrase naturally used by an educated American which under similar conditions would not be used by an educated Englishman. The emphasis, it will be seen, lies in the word “educated.”
This curious criterion, fantastic as it must have seemed to European philologians, was presently reinforced, for in his fourth article Lounsbury announced that his discussion was “restricted to the written speech of educated men.” The result, of course, was a wholesale slaughter of Americanisms. If it was not possible to reject a word, like White, on the ground that some stray English poet or other had once used it, it was almost always possible to reject it on the ground that it was not admitted into the vocabulary of a college professor when he sat down to compose formal book-English. What remained was a small company, indeed — and almost the whole field of American idiom and American grammar, so full of interest for the less austere explorer, was closed without even a peek into it.
Despite its absurdity, Lounsbury
’s position was taken by most of the American Gelehrten of his heyday. Their heirs and assigns have receded from it somewhat, but have yet to go to the length of abandoning it altogether. They admit, in despondent moments, that an American dialect of English really exists, but they still dream of bringing it into harmony with what they choose to regard as correct English. To the latter purpose the humorless omphalophysites of the American Academy of Arts and Letters address themselves periodically, and with great earnestness. Not many of them show any capacity for sound writing, whether in English or in American, but they nevertheless propose in all solemnity to convert themselves into a sort of American counterpart of the Académie Française, and to favor the country, from time to time, with authoritative judgments in matters of speech.84 In 1916 the Academy was given $3,000 by Mrs. E. H. Blashfield to help it “determine its duty regarding both the preservation of the English language in its beauty and integrity, and its cautious enrichment by such terms as grow out of the modern conditions.” The brethren laid out this money by paying one another honoraria for reading essays on the subject at plenary sessions, and in 1925 nine of these essays were printed in a book.85 It begins with a declaration of fealty to England and ends with a furious assault upon Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg — and a grave bow to Don Marquis! The general theory underlying it seems to be divided into two halves. The first half is to the effect that the only sound models of English are to be found in the thunderous artificialities of Eighteenth Century England, and the second teaches that the only remedy for “entire abandonment to the loose-lipped lingo of the street” is “a little study of Latin, and translation of Cicero and Virgil.” It should be added in fairness that some of the contributors dissent from this two-headed theory, but even so the book presents a sufficiently depressing proof of the stupidity of the learned.86
On June 13, 1923, there was a Conference of British and American Professors of English at Columbia University. Under the leadership of Henry van Dyke and Fred Newton Scott87 its deliberations quickly resolved themselves into a violent assault upon every evidence of Americanism in the national speech. Dr. van Dyke, unconsciously echoing Witherspoon after 142 years, denounced “the slovenly way” in which the mother-tongue was spoken in this country, “not only in the streets, but also in the pulpit, on the stage, and even in the classroom.” Such “lazy, unintelligible, syncopated speech,” he continued, “is like a dirty face.” Apparently as an answer to a possible accusation of Anglomania — for he had been one of the most vociferous of English propagandists during the World War —, he added that he had also “heard some folks talk in Lunnon who were hard to understand,” but after this he returned to his muttons, and closed with the dictum that “the proposal to make a new American language to fit our enormous country may be regarded either as a specimen of American humor or as a serious enormity.” Dr. Scott, going further, allowed that it was “for Americans not a matter of ridicule, but for the hair shirt and the lash, for tears of shame and self-abasement.”
That Anglomania may have actually colored the views of both Dr. van Dyke and Dr. Scott is suggested by the case of their Corps-bruder, Dr. Brander Matthews. Before the war Matthews was a diligent collector of Americanisms, and often wrote about them with a show of liking them. But during the war he succumbed to a great upsurge of love for the Motherland, and took up a position almost identical with that of Lounsbury. Thus he once wrote in the intensely pro-English New York Times.
We may rest assured that the superficial evidences of a tendency toward the differentiation of American-English and British-English are not so significant as they may appear to the unreflecting, and that the tendency itself will be powerless against the cohesive force of our common literature, the precious inheritance of both the English-speaking peoples.… So long as the novelists and the newspaper men on both sides of the ocean continue to eschew Briticisms and Americanisms, and so long as they indulge in these localisms only in quotation marks, there is no danger that English will ever halve itself into a British language and an American language.
After the war Matthews did some wobbling. He undoubtedly noticed that quotation marks were no longer being used to tag Americanisms, but so late as the time of his contribution to Academy Papers, c. 1923, he continued to believe that “the divergences of speech between the United States and Great Britain are not important, and are not more marked than those between … Boston and Wyoming.” To this he added a sort of hurrah in the form of a solemn declaration, in his character of scholar, that “to the rest of the world German is still an uncouth tongue.” But by 1926 he had so far returned to his first love that he was praising Logan Pearsall Smith, albeit somewhat cautiously, for speaking kindly of Americanisms in “Words and Idioms.” I quote:
I have called attention more particularly to Mr. Pearsall Smith’s friendly attitude toward American words and phrases, usages and idioms, because I find here evidence of a change of heart in our kin across the sea. Time was when to stigmatize a verbal novelty as an Americanism was to condemn it utterly. Most of those who took on themselves the duty of defending our common tongue did not doubt that the English language belonged exclusively to the British. They felt — and the feeling was natural enough — that the language was the exclusive possession of the inhabitants of the island where it had come into being. It is pleasant to see signs that this jealousy is now dying a natural death. It was pleasant indeed, to behold our right to our linguistic heritage cordially recognized in the review of Mr. Pearsall Smith’s book in the Literary Supplement of the London Times.88
If any speaker arose at the Columbia Conference to defend American speechways, the fact did not appear in the published reports. Apparently, all the assembled “professors of English,” whether actual Englishmen or only American colonials, were of like mind with Drs. Scott and van Dyke. On the lower levels of pedagogy there is the same general attitude. As I have noted, the National Council of Teachers of English, like the American Academy of Arts and Letters, frequently toys with the project of setting up machinery for “purifying” the language, and there are innumerable minor bands of schoolmarms, male and female, consecrated to the same end. But there is a party in the National Council, as in the American Academy, that dissents. One of its spokesmen is J. C. Tressler, head of the English department of the Richmond Hill High-School, New York City. Writing in the English Journal, College Edition, in April, 1934, he said:
Although thousands of English teachers [i.e., in the United States] with the blood of crusaders and martyrs in their veins have for decades fought heroically against the corruption and utter ruin of English, their warfare has had by and large slight effect on the language.… It’s hardly wise for the National Council at this late date to attempt to confine it in a strait-jacket.
6. THE VIEWS OF WRITING MEN
The great majority of American writers have always held out against the dominant pedagogical opinion, in this as in other matters. In every age, of course, there have been pedantic fellows who out-schoolmarmed the schoolmarms in their devotion to grammatical, syntactical and lexicographical niceties — Ambrose Bierce suggests himself as a good example89 —, and in every age there have been Anglomaniacs of great earnestness — for example, Washington Irving and Henry James,90 not to mention Matthews, van Dyke, and the other faithful colonials of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, already mentioned. But not many writers of the first distinction have belonged to either faction, and among the lesser ranks there has always been an active movement in the other direction. After the War of 1812, after the Civil War, and again after the World War there were deliberate efforts, among the literati as well as among the folk, to throw off English precept and example altogether, and among the authors concerned were such respectable figures as J. Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis.
So long ago as 1820, in the twenty-seventh number of the North American Review, Edward Everett sought to turn the fire of the English reviews by arguing that the common l
anguage was not only spoken better in America than in England, but also better written. He said:
We challenge any critic who shall maintain the corruption of the English language in America to assume whatever standard he shall choose of the English, the standard of dictionaries, or of good writers, or of good company; and whatever standard be taken, we engaged to detect in English writers of respectable standing, and in respectable English society, more provincialisms, more good words in false acceptations, and more newly coined words, than can be found in an equal number of American writers, or in American society, of the same relative respectability. We think we should begin such a comparison with the number of the Edinburgh Review for March, 1817…. For in the first article of that number we fell upon forty-six words not authorized by the standards of our language. The English language corrupted in America! What are the Columbiads, or Webster’s Dictionaries, or any other name of American innovation, compared with the lucubrations of Jeremy Bentham!
In the North American for July, 1821, in a review of an anti-American article in the New London Monthly Magazine for February of the same year, Everett returned to the subject, arguing that “on the whole, the English language is better spoken here than in England,” and that “there is no part of America in which the corruption of the language has gone so far as in the heart of the English counties.” He did not advocate a severance of American from English, but he insisted that, in the cases of many differences already noticeable, the American practise was better than the English. “We presume,” he concluded somewhat loftily, “that the press set up by the American missionaries in the Sandwich Islands will furnish a good deal better English than Mr. Bentham’s Church-of-Englandism.”
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