22 University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, No. 1; Madison, Wis., 1918.
23 See A Historical Note on American English, by Leon Howard, American Speech, Sept., 1927.
24 Cairns says that the Edinburgh, the Anti-Jacobin, the Quarterly, and the European Magazine and London Review were especially virulent. He says that the Monthly, despite my quotations, was always “kindly toward America” and that the Eclectic was, “on the whole, fair.” The Literary Magazine and British Review he describes as enthusiastically pro-American, but it lived only a short time.
25 November, 1796. I take what follows from Cairns.
26 Salisbury, 1796. Wansey stayed but two months, and his journey was confined to the region between Boston and Philadelphia.
27 Published in Edinburgh in 1833, and reprinted in Philadelphia the same year. The book did not bear Hamilton’s name, but was ascribed on the title page to “the author of ‘Cyril Thornton.’ ” Hamilton was a younger brother to Sir William Hamilton, the metaphysician, and a friend to Sir Walter Scott. He was himself a frequent contributor to Blackwood’s. “Cyril Thornton,” published in 1827, was a successful novel, and remained in favor for many years. Hamilton died in 1842. “Men and Manners in America” was translated into French and twice into German.
28 Gifford was a killer in general practise, and his onslaughts on Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats are still remembered. He retired from the Quarterly in 1824 with a fortune of £ 25,000 — the first magazine editor in history to make it pay. On his death in 1826 he was solemnly buried in Westminster Abbey. The Quarterly, despite its anti-American ferocity, was regularly reprinted in Boston. But when its issue for July, 1823 appeared with an extraordinarily malignant review of William Faux’s Memorable Days in America (London, 1823) the American publishers were warned that it contained a libel on “a distinguished individual at Washington,” and accordingly withheld it.
29 See also The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I; New York, 1917, pp. 205–8; As Others See Us, by John Graham Brooks; New York, 1909, Ch. VII; James Kirke Paulding, by Amos L. Her-old; New York, 1926, Ch. IV; American Social History as Recorded by British Travellers, by Allan Nevins; New York, 1923, pp. 3–26 and pp. 111–138; One Hundred Years of Peace, by Henry Cabot Lodge: New York, 1913, pp. 41–55; and The English Traveller in America, 1785–1835, by Jane Louise Mesick; New York, 1922, pp. 241–45. There is a brief but comprehensive view of the earlier period in British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, 1933. A bibliography of British books of American travel is in The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 468–90, and another, annotated, in Nevins, pp. 555–68.
30 American Social History as Recorded by British Travelers; New York, 1923, p. 3.
31 In his essay, Colonialism in America, in Studies in History; Boston, 1884.
32 At that time both words were neologisms. The Oxford Dictionary’s first example of gullibility is dated 1793. So late as 1818 it was denounced by the Rev. H. J. Todd, one of the improvers of Johnson’s Dictionary, as “a low expression, sometimes used for cullibility.” The Oxford’s first example of to diddle is dated 1806.
33 This book, like John Bull and Brother Jonathan, seems to have had readers for a generation or more. So late as 1867 the Scribners brought out a new edition of the two in a single volume, under the title of The Bulls and Jonathans, with a preface by William I. Paulding. It still makes amusing reading.
34 The quotations are from pp. 127–9.
35 The letter appears in John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens; London, 1872–74; Book III, Chapter V. It is reprinted in Allan Nevins’s American Social History as Recorded by British Travelers; New York, 1923, p. 268. It was written on a canal-boat nearing Pittsburgh, and dated March 28, 1842.
36 Journal, Nov. 25, 1842.
37 A second edition followed in 1864, and an eighth was reached by 1880. There was also an American edition. In October, 1864, an American resident in England, G. Washington Moon by name, brought out a counterblast, The Dean’s English. This reached a seventh edition by 1884. Moon employed the ingenious device of turning Alford’s pedantries upon him. He showed that the dean was a very loose and careless writer, and often violated his own rules. Another American, Edward S. Gould, bombarded him from the same ground in Good English, or Popular Errors in Language; New York, 1867. Alford was a favorite scholar of the time. He wrote Latin odes and a history of the Jews before he was ten years old, and in later life was the first editor of the Contemporary Review and brought out a monumental edition of the New Testament in Greek. He was born in 1810, served as dean of Canterbury from 1857 to 1871, and died in the latter year.
38 Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, edited by Thomas Allsop; London, 1836.
39 “This dichotomy,” says Allen Walker Read in British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, 1933, p. 331, “runs through most British writing on American speech … : on the one hand the Americans are denounced for introducing corruptions into the language, and on the other hand those very expressions are eagerly claimed as of British origin to show that the British deserve the credit for them.”
40 According to American Speech (Feb. 1930, p. 250) this term was invented in 1925 or thereabout. At that time the English war debt to the United States was under acrimonious discussion, and Uncle Sam became Uncle Shylock.
41 Aug. 29, 1929. The passage is perhaps worth quoting in full: “The literary style of the articles is, in most instances, suitable to their purpose. Some of them afford obvious indications of their country of origin, as when we read that Bishop Asbury was at no time a well man, or that Chester A. Arthur’s chief did not uphold the power of the Conkling crowd, or that Robert Bacon announced his candidacy for the Senate, or that Governor Altgeld protested the action of President Cleveland, or that Dr. W. Beaumont, when a doctor’s apprentice, learned to fill prescriptions, or that J. G. Blaine raised a family of seven children, or that Prof. B. P. Bowne tested the progress of his pupils by a written quiz. The article on Blaine contains a curious illustration of the peculiar American use of the word politician. We read that ‘however much Blaine was a politician, it seems to be the fact that from 1876 he was the choice of the majority, or of the largest faction, of Republicans.’ One naturally wonders why it should be thought surprising for a politician to win popular support within his own party. The explanation is that politician is here very nearly a synonym for wire-puller or intriguer, and the point the writer wishes to make is that Blaine’s influence was not wholly due to his adroit manipulation of the political machine.” The following is from the Times’ review of Hervey Allen’s Toward the Flame (Literary Supplement, June 7, 1934): “Mr. Allen may or not feel complimented by the statement that, apart from military terms which appear strange to us, there is not an Americanism in his strong and supple prose; but the fact adds to an English reader’s pleasure. Yet one would like to know what were the functions of the individual called the colonel’s striker.” The English term for striker, as the reviewer might have discovered by consulting the Oxford Dictionary, is batman. Both signify a military servant.
42 Weekly edition, Aug. 26, 1932, p. 175.
43 C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian; London, 1934, p. 314.
44 According to the Associated Press, Mr. Graham pointed to the Cinematographic Act as designed to encourage British films, but added: “I’m not prepared to place direct restrictions on the importations of American talking films into this country.”
45 It was issued in March, 1922, and was signed by the late James W. Bright, then professor of English at the Johns Hopkins; Charles H. Grandgent of Harvard; Robert Underwood Johnson, secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; John Livingston Lowes of Harvard; John M. Manly of the University of Chicago; Charles G. Osgood of Princeton, and the late Fred Newton Scott of the University of Michigan. A reply
was received in October, 1922, from an English committee consisting of the Earl of Balfour, Dr. Robert Bridges and Sir Henry Newbolt, but it was not until five years later that the conference was actually held. It will be referred to again a bit later on.
46 By H. W. and F. G. Fowler; Oxford, 1908.
47 There is an account of their attitude, with quotations, by Dr. Kemp Malone of the Johns Hopkins, who was an American delegate to the conference, in American Speech, April, 1928, p. 261. The conference held two sessions, both at the quarters of the Royal Society of Literature. On the first day Lord Balfour presided, and on the second day Dr. Johnson. The speakers on the first day were Lord Balfour, Dr. Canby, George Bernard Shaw, Prof. Lloyd Jones of the British Broadcasting Corporation, Sir Israel Gollancz, Dr. Lowes, and Dr. Johnson. Those on the second day were Dr. Canby, Dr. Louise Pound of the University of Nebraska, Professor F. S. Boas, Dr. Lowes, Sir Henry Newbolt, and J. C. Squire. In addition to the speakers, those in attendance were Dr. Scott, Dr. George Philip Krapp, Prof. W. H. Wagstaff, Prof. J. Dover Wilson, Prof. A. Lloyd James, Dr. W. A. Craigie, and John Bailey. The conference was financed by the Commonwealth Fund, with some aid from Thomas W. Lamont. Later on the support of the Commonwealth Fund was withdrawn, and so the project to form a permanent Council of English fell through.
48 Boucher, who was born in England in 1737, came out to Virginia in 1759 as a private tutor. In 1762 he returned home to take holy orders, but was soon back in Virginia as rector of Hanover parish. He also conducted a school, and one of his pupils was young John Parke Custis, Washington’s stepson. Boucher made the most of this connection. In 1770 he became rector at Annapolis, and soon afterward he married an heiress and bought a plantation on the Maryland side of the Potomac. His Loyalist sentiments got him into difficulties as the Revolution approached, and in 1775 he returned to England, where he died in 1804. In 1797 he published A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution, a series of thirteen sermons. After his death his friends began the publication of his Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words, on which he had been engaged for thirty years. The first part, covering part of the letter A, came out in 1807. In 1832 the Rev. Joseph Hunter and Joseph Stevenson undertook to continue the work, but it got no further than Bl. Boucher’s brief glossary of Americanisms appeared in the introduction to this second edition. It listed but 38 words. With it was printed Absence: a Pastoral; “drawn from the life, from the manners, customs and phraseology of planters (or, to speak more pastorally, of the rural swains) inhabiting the Banks of the Potomac, in Maryland.” Boucher accused the Americans of “making all the haste they conveniently can to rid themselves of” the English language. “It is easy to foresee,” he said, “that, in no very distant period, their language will become as independent of England as they themselves are, and altogether as unlike English as the Dutch or Flemish is unlike German, or the Norwegian unlike the Danish, or the Portuguese unlike Spanish.” Absence is reprinted in Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VII, 1933, with a commentary by Allen Walker Read.
49 It is reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931, pp. 56–63. About 280 terms are listed. They are mainly New England dialect forms, but one finds a few Americanisms that were in general use, and have survived, e.g., breadstuffs, spook, nip (a measure of drink), to boost, to stump, and tarnation.
50 Pickering’s long introductory essay, but not his vocabulary, is reprinted in Mathews, pp. 65–76. On March 18, 1829, Dr. T. Romeyn Beck, a New York physician and antiquary, read a paper on the Pickering book before the Albany Institute. It was published in the Transactions of the Institute for 1830, and is reprinted by Mathews, pp. 78–85.
51 Dunglison’s glossary, dealing with about 190 terms, was published in three instalments in the Virginia Literary Museum. It was reprinted in Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. X, 1927, with a commentary by Allen Walker Read. Peck’s appeared in his Emigrant’s Guide and Gazetteer of the State of Illinois, first published in 1834, and reissued with revisions in 1836 and 1837. See John Mason Peck and the American Language, by Elrick B. Davis, American Speech, Oct., 1926. “An examination of the vocabulary of the 1837 edition,” says Davis, “shows that out of 648 specific words used in strategic positions only 313 show a history in the Oxford Dictionary complete in Peck’s use of them before 1789, the year of his birth.”
52 In Thornton’s American Glossary hobo is traced to 1891, hold-up and bunco to 1887, dive to 1882, dead-beat to 1877, hoodlum to 1872, road-agent to 1866, drummer to 1836, and flume to 1792.
53 The first American films reached England in 1907, but until 1915 they came in such small numbers that they were not separated, in the customs returns, from “optical supplies and equipment.” In 1915 their total value was fixed at £47,486. But the next year it leaped to £ 349,-919, and thereafter it mounted, with occasional recessions, to the peak of £880,240 in 1927. These values represented, of course, only the cost of the actual films, not that of the productions. In 1927 the Cinematograph Films Act was passed. It provided that all English exhibitors would have to show at least 5% of English-made films after Sept. 30, 1928, 7½ after the same date in 1930, 10% after 1931, 12½% after 1932, 15% after 1933, and 20% from Sept. 30, 1935 onward. The English duty is id. a foot on positives and 5d. on negatives. I am indebted for these figures and for those following to Mr. Lynn W. Meekins, American commercial attache in London, and Mr. Henry E. Stebbins, assistant trade commissioner.
54 After the introduction of the talkie the imports of American films showed a great decline in value. They dropped from £ 861,592 in 1929, to £506, 477 in 1930, and to £ 130,847 in 1932. In part this was due to the operation of the Cinematograph Films Act, but in larger part it was produced by a change in trade practise. In the silent days many positives were sent to England, but since the talkie came in the film companies have been sending negatives and duplicating them in England. Thus the total annual footage is probably but little less than it was in 1929. Of the 476 imported films shown in England, Scotland and Wales in 1933, 330 were American, and according to Henry J. Gibbs, writing in the Blackshirt, “their value was 90 to 95% of the total.”
55 The following is from the Denby Herald’s report of an address by Col. Bendall before the Dudley Literary Society on January 31, 1931: “He suggested that though it was true that American had a remarkable capacity for growth, there was no need to suppose that it would eventually settle the form which English must take. Such a state of affairs would necessarily result either in a wider divergence between literary and spoken English or in literary English becoming affected. The former position would lead to a loss of subtlety in spoken English and to literature’s becoming unintelligible to the masses, while to illustrate how deplorable the latter would be, the speaker read a part of Mr. Mencken’s translation of the Declaration of Independence into modern American.” The colonel’s apparently grave acceptance of my burlesque as a serious specimen of “modern American” was matched by a sage calling himself John O’London in Is It Good English?; London, 1924, p. 92. After quoting the opening paragraph of my version, he said solemnly, “I hope ‘these States’ will suppress all such translations.”
56 Chief Constable’s Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1932; Wallasey, 1933, p. 13.
57 In the London Times for June 15, 1927, George Bernard Shaw was reported as saying: “When President Wilson came to this country he gave us a shock by using the word obligate instead of oblige. It showed that a man could become President in spite of that, and we asked ourselves if a man could become King of England if he used the word obligate. We said at once that it could not be done.”
58 Review in the Medical Press, Sept. 17, 1919, of an article by MacCarty and Connor in Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics. “In the study of the terminology of diseases of the breast,” said the reviewer, “[the authors] suggest a scheme which seems simple, but unfortunately for British understanding, it is written in American.”
59 Many more examples might be ad
ded, some of them not without their humors. Back in 1921 J. C. Squire (now Sir John) was protesting bitterly because an American translator of the Journal of the Goncourts “spoke of a pavement as a sidewalk.” See the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, July 23, 1921. In Dostoevsky: Letters and Reminiscences, translated from the Russian by S. S. Ko-telinansky and J. Middleton Murry (New York, 1923; American binding of English sheets) there is this note, p. 282: “Saltykov, Mihail Efgrafovich (who used the pseudonym N. Schedrin), author of the Golovlevs, one of the greatest of Russian novels, which has been translated into French and American, but not yet into English.” Such sneers are now answered by defiance as often as with humility. When Dr. Edgar J. Goodspeed, professor of Biblical and patristic Greek at the University of Chicago, published his new version of the New Testament (Chicago, 1923) he boldly called it “an American translation,” and in it he as boldly employed Americanisms in place of the English forms of the Authorized Version. Thus corn, meaning wheat in England but maize in America, was changed to wheat in Mark II, 23, Mark IV, 28, and Matthew XII, 1. Similarly, when Ezra Pound published Ta Hio: the Great Learning (University of Washington Chapbooks, No. 14; Seattle, 1928) he described it on the title-page as “newly rendered into the American language.” See American and English translations of “The Oppermanns,” by Edmund E. Miller, American Speech, Oct., 1935.
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