Similar changes are frequently made in American short stories reprinted in English magazines,87 and American advertisements are commonly rewritten for English use.88 In 1930 the Department of Commerce issued a business handbook of the United Kingdom89 giving warning that the American “sales-promoter will have to use British English in his sales drive” in the British Isles. “While American exporters and advertisers doing business in Britain,” it continued, “find it is of distinct advantage that English is the common language of the two countries, it is not by any means on as common a basis as it is widely assumed to be.” There followed a list of trade-terms differing in England and the United States. In the early days of the movie invasion the titles in American films were commonly translated into English,90 but as the flood mounted that effort had to be abandoned as hopeless, and today the talkies pour a constant stream of American neologisms into English. Not infrequently they are puzzling at first blush, and to the end that they may be understood, glossaries are often printed in the English newspapers.91 Similar glossaries are sometimes attached to American books, or inserted in the programmes of American plays. When James Gleason’s “Is Zat So?” was presented in London in 1926, Hal O’Flaherty, the correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, cabled to his paper as follows:
From the first act to the last the English section of the audience was forced to refer incessantly to a printed glossary of American slang words and phrases. Even then, when they learned that to moyder a skoyt meant to kill a girl, they found themselves three or four sentences behind the actors.
This glossary92 included definitions of goof, applesauce, to crab, to can (to dismiss), to frame, gorilla, hick, hooch, to lamp, pippin, to stall, sucker, wise-crack and to wise up, most of which have since entered into the English slang vocabulary. When Carl Sandburg’s “Collected Poems” were reprinted in London a similar word-list was given in the introduction, with definitions of bunk-shooter, con-man, dock-walloper, honky-tonk, floozy, yen, cahoots, leatherneck, mazuma and flooey, and when Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt” was published there in 1922, there was added a glossary defining about 125 American terms, including bellhop, booster, to bulldoze, burg, dingus, flivver, frame-house, getaway, hootch, jeans, kibosh, lounge-lizard, nut, once-over, pep, plute, room-mate, saphead, tinhorn, wisenheimer and yeggman. Nearly all of these are now understood in England.93 In 1927 the Oxford University Press brought out an American edition, revised by George Van Santvoord, a former Rhodes scholar, of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary of F. G. and H. W. Fowler. It gave American spellings and pronunciations, and listed a great many words not to be found in the original English edition, e.g., jitney, goulash, chop-suey and drug-store. In 1934 there followed a new edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, revised by H. G. LeMesurier and H. W. Fowler, with an appendix largely devoted to American terms, e.g., alfalfa, attaboy, bad-lands, bingle, bohunk, boloney (in the Al Smith sense), boob, bourbon, burg, calaboose, campus, chaps, chiropractic, co-ed, cole-slaw, con-niption, coon, craps, third-degree, crackerjack, to doll up, to dope out, to fade out, to frame and to get away with. “The cinema, now vocal,” says Mr. LeMesurier, “has made [the Englishman] familiar with many Americanisms at the meaning of which he has often to guess.”
4. BRITICISMS IN THE UNITED STATES
“While England was a uniquely powerful empire-state, ruled by an aristocratic caste,” said Wyndham Lewis in 1934,94 “its influence upon the speech as upon the psychology of the American ex-colonies was overwhelming. But today that ascendancy has almost entirely vanished. The aristocratic caste is nothing but a shadow of itself, the cinema has brought the American scene and the American dialect nightly into the heart of England, and the Americanizing process is far advanced.… There has been no reciprocal movement of England into the United States; indeed, with the new American nationalism, England is kept out.” This is certainly true in the field of language. It is most unusual for an English neologism to be taken up in this country, and when it is, it is only by a small class, mainly made up of conscious Anglomaniacs. To the common people everything English, whether an article of dress, a social custom or a word or phrase has what James M. Cain has called “a somewhat pansy cast.” That is to say, it is regarded as affected, effeminate and ridiculous. The stage Englishman is never a hero, and in his rôle of comedian he is laughed at with brutal scorn. To the average red-blooded he-American his tea-drinking is evidence of racial decay, and so are the cut of his clothes, his broad a, and his occasional use of such highly un-American locutions as jolly, awfully and ripping. The American soldiers who went to France in 1917 and 1918 did not develop either admiration or liking for their English comrades; indeed, they were better pleased with the French, and reserved their greatest fondness for the Germans. As we shall see in Chapter XI, Section 1, one of the evidences of their coolness toward Tommy Atkins was that they borrowed very little of his slang. They found him singing a number of American songs — for example, “Casey Jones,” “John Brown” and “We’re Here Because We’re Here”– but they adopted only one of his own, to wit, “Mademoiselle from Armenteers.”95 In an elaborate vocabulary of American soldiers’ slang compiled by E. A. Hecker and Edmund Wilson, Jr.,96 I can find very few words or phrases that seem to be of English origin. To carry on retains in American its old American meaning of to raise a pother, despite its widespread use among the English in the sense of to be (in American) on the job. Even to wangle, perhaps the best of the new verbs brought out of the war by the English, and wowser97 an excellent noun, have never got a foothold in the United States, and would be unintelligible today to nine Americans out of ten. As for blighty, cheerio and righto they would strike most members of the American Legion as almost as unmanly as tummy or pee-pee. After the success of “What Price Glory?” by Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson, in 1924, what price had a certain vogue, but it quickly passed out.
On higher and less earthly planes there is a greater hospitality to English example. Because the United States has failed to develop anything properly describable as a Court, or a native aristocracy of any settled position and authority, persons of social pretensions are thrown back upon English usage and opinion for guidance, and the vocabulary and pronunciation of the West End of London naturally flavor their speech. Until the beginning of the present century the word shop, in American, always meant a workshop, but in 1905 or thereabout the small stores along the Fifth avenues of the larger American cities began turning themselves into shops. Today the word has the special meaning of a store dealing in a limited range of merchandise, as opposed to a department-store; indeed, shop and specialty-shop are used interchangeably. Every American town of any pretensions now has gift-shops (or shoppes),98 book-shops, hat-shops, tea-shops, luggage-shops and candy-shops. But the plain people continue to call a shop a store, though they use shopping and shopper. The effort, made at the time shop came in, to substitute boot for shoe did not get very far, and there are not many boot-shops left, and even fewer boot-makers, save in the strict American sense. Bootery and toggery did not last long. But tradesmen’s-entrance fared better, and so did charwoman, which has now pretty well supplanted scrubwoman, and, in the cities at least, caused Americans to forget their native modification of char, to wit, chore. Hired-girls began to vanish from the cities so long ago as the second Cleveland administration, and now they are all maids. Drawing-room, always used in the South, began to challenge the Northern parlor about 1895, but by the turn of the century both encountered stiff competition from living-room. To Let signs, once conscious affectations, are now almost as common, at least in the New York area, as For Rent signs, postman seems to be making some progress against letter-carrier, the tunnels under the Hudson are tubes, flapper is now good American, and nursing-home has got some lodgment. In August, 1917, signs appeared in the New York surface cars in which the conductors were referred to as guards; all of them are now guards on the elevated lines and in the subways save the forward men, who remain conductors officially. During the war even the gover
nment seemed inclined to substitute the English hoarding for the American billboard.99 In the Federal Reserve Act (1913) it borrowed the English governor to designate the head of a bank,100 and in 1926 the Weather Bureau formally adopted the English smog for a mixture of smoke and fog.101 How and when the National Biscuit Company acquired its name I don’t know. What it manufactures are biscuits in England, but crackers in the United States. Evacustes A. Phipson, an Englishman, says that railway came into American as “a concession to Anglomania,”102 but about that I am uncertain. In any case, the number of such loans is small, and not many of them are of any significance. More interesting is the Briticism penny, which survives in American usage despite the fact that we have no coin bearing that name officially, and the further fact that the cent to which it is applied is worth only half an English penny. It occurs in many compounds, e.g., penny-bank and penny-in-the-slot, and has even produced Americanisms, e.g., penny-ante and penny-arcade. In 1928 the Legislature of South Carolina considered a bill providing that in certain prosecutions for criminal libel the culprit should “be fined a penny and the costs, and no more.”103
In the days when the theater bulked large in American life it supplied non-traveled Americans of Anglophil leanings with a steady supply of Briticisms, both in vocabulary and in pronunciation. Of plays dealing with fashionable life, most of those seen in the United States were of English origin, and many of them were played by English companies. Thus the social aspirants of provincial towns became familiar with the Standard English pronunciation of the moment and with the current English phrases. It was by this route, I suppose, that the use of sorry in place of the traditional American excuse me got in. The American actors, having no Court to imitate, contended themselves by imitating their English colleagues. Thus an American of fashionable pretensions, say in Altoona, Pa., or Athens, Ga., learned how to shake hands, eat soup, greet his friends, enter a drawing-room and pronounce the words path, secretary, melancholy and necessarily in a manner that was an imitation of some American actor’s imitation of an English actor’s imitation of what was done in Mayfair — in brief, an imitation in the fourth degree. The American actor did his best to mimic the pronunciation and intonation of the English, but inasmuch as his name, before he became Gerald Cecil, was probably Rudolph Goetz or Terence Googan, he frequently ran upon laryngeal difficulties. Since the decay of the theater this influence has vanished. The movie actors in Hollywood, with a few exceptions, make no effort to imitate the English pronunciation, and the dialogue put into their mouths seldom contains recognizable Briticisms. To the English it sounds like a farrago of barbaric Americanisms, and on frequent occasions they arise to denounce it with pious indignation.
The Protestant Episcopal Church, on account of its affiliation with the Church of England and its generally fashionable character, is a distributing-station for Anglomania in the United States, but its influence upon the language seems to be very slight. Most of its clergy, in my experience, use sound American in their pulpits, and not long ago, at the funeral orgies of a friend, I heard one of the most Anglophil of them pronounce amen in the best Middle Western manner. The fashionable preparatory schools for boys, most of which are under Protestant Episcopal control, have introduced a number of Briticisms into the vocabulary of their art and mystery, e.g., head-master, chapel (for the service as well as the building), house-master, monitor, honors, prefect and form. The late Dr. J. Milnor Coit, while rector of the fashionable St. Paul’s School at Concord, N. H., diligently promoted this Anglicization. He encouraged the playing of cricket instead of baseball, and “introduced English schoolroom nomenclature to the American boy.” But his successors suffered a relapse into Americanisms, and while “St. Paul’s still has forms, the removes, evensong and matins, and even the cricket of Dr. Coit’s time are now forgotten.”104 At Groton, the most swagger of all the American prep-schools, the boys are divided into forms and there are prefects, masters and a headmaster, but an examination of the catalogue shows few other imitations of English nomenclature. The staff is actually called the faculty, and the headmaster, a Protestant Episcopal clergyman, is listed as Rev., without the the.
Occasionally some American patriot launches an attack upon the few Briticisms that seep in, but it is not done often, for there is seldom any excuse. Richard Grant White, in 1870,105 warned his followers against the figurative use of nasty as a synonym for disagreeable. This use of the word was then relatively new in England, though, according to White, the Saturday Review and the Spectator had already succumbed. His objections to it were unavailing; nasty quickly got into American, and has been there ever since.106 Gilbert M. Tucker, in 1883,107 protested against good-form, traffic (in the sense of travel), to bargain and to tub as Briticisms that we might well do without, but all of them took root and are sound American today. The locutions that are more obviously merely fashionable slang have a harder time of it, and seldom get beyond a narrow circle. When certain advertisers in New York sought to appeal to snobs by using such Briticisms as swagger and topping in their advertisements, the town wits, led by the watchful Franklin P. Adams (though he then served the Tribune, which Clement K. Shorter once called “more English than we are English”), fell upon them, and quickly routed them. To the average American of the plain people, indeed, any word or phrase of an obviously English flavor has an offensive smack. To call him old dear would be almost as hazardous as to call him Percy, and bah Jove and my word somehow set his teeth on edge. But in consciously elegant circles there is less aversion to such forms, and even fed-up, rotter, priceless, swank, top-hole, cheerio, tosh, and no-end are tolerated. Fashionable mothers teach their children to call them Mummy, and fox-hunters call a leaper a lepper.108
The grotesque errors that English authors fall into every time they essay to write American, referred to a few pages back, are matched by the blunders of Americans who try to write colloquial English. Some years ago, St. John Ervine, the Anglo-Irish playwright and critic, discussed the matter at length in Vanity Fair.109 He said:
When I was in Chicago two years ago, I read in one of the newspapers of that city an account of a jewel theft.… A young Englishman, belonging to the aristocracy, had married an American girl, and while they were on their honeymoon, thieves stole some of her jewels. A reporter hurried from Chicago to get a story out of the affair. He interviewed the young husband who was reported to have said something like this: “Haw, haw, yaas, by Jove! Isn’t it awf’lly jolly rotten, what? They stole the bally jewels, haw, haw!…” I cannot remember the exact words put into this young man’s mouth by the reporter, but they were not less foolish than those I have set out.… The reporter had either decided before the interview that all Englishmen of aristocratic birth speak like congenital idiots, and therefore could not listen accurately to what was being said to him, or he was too lazy or incompetent to do his work properly, and trusted to conventional caricature to cover up his own deficiencies.
Mr. Ervine then proceeded to a detailed analysis of a book called “Full Up and Fed Up,” by Whiting Williams, an American who lived as a workingman in England, Wales and Scotland during 1920, and sought to report the conversations of the native workingmen among whom he worked. He recorded the speech of an English laborer as follows:
If Hi wuz you, Hi’d walk right in ter the fountain-’ead o’ these steel works ’ere, and sye, “Hi wants ter see the manager!” — just like thot. With wot ye’ve done in Hamerica, ye’ll get on fine ’ere.
And that of an English soldier thus:
Hi never seen a ranker make a good hofficer yet — awnd Hi’ve ’ad ’em over me a lot — hadjutants and all. In the hexercises and heverywhere it’s alius “Hi’ve been there meself, boys, and it cawn’t be done. Hi’m too wise, boys.” You know ’ow it is. No, sir, never one.
Said Mr. Ervine of these alleged specimens of Cockney English:
I have lived in England for twenty-one years and I know the country, North and South, East and West, country and town, far better than Mr
. Williams can ever hope to know it. I have lived among working-people in London, in provincial towns, and in villages, and I have never heard any Englishman speak in that style. I have been in the Army, as a private soldier and as an officer, and I tell Mr. Williams that if he imagines he heard a soldier saying hexercises and heverywhere, then he simply has not got the faculty of hearing. The dropped h is common, but the sounding of it where it ought not to be sounded has almost ceased. I have never heard it sounded in a city, and only on one occasion have I heard it sounded in the country, where an old-fashioned fisherman, with whom I used to go sailing, would sometimes say haccident when he meant accident. This man’s younger brother never misplaced the h at all in this way, though he often elided it where it ought to have been sounded. The h is more likely to be dropped than sounded because of the natural laziness of most people over language.… A considerable effort is necessary in order to sound it in words where there is no such letter, and this fact, apart altogether from the results of compulsory education, makes it unlikely that Mr. Williams heard anyone in England saying Hi for I and Hamerica for America.
Mr. Ervine continued:
I imagine that most Americans form their impressions about English dialect from reading Dickens, and do not check these impressions with the facts of contemporary life.… A popular novel will fix a dialect in the careless mind, and people will continue to believe that men and women speak in that particular fashion long after they have ceased to do so. Until I went to America, I believed that all Negroes spoke like the characters in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Mr. John Drinkwater clearly thought so, too, when he wrote “Abraham Lincoln.” I expected to hear a Negro saying something like “Yaas, massa, dat am so!” when he meant, “Yes, sir, that is so!” I daresay there are many Negroes in America who do speak in that way; in fact, Mr. T. S. Stribling’s notable story, “Birthright,” makes this plain. But all Negroes do not do so, and perhaps the most correct English I heard during my short visit to the United States two years ago came from the mouth of a red-cap in Boston.
American Language Page 37
