American Language
Page 42
An American visiting England discovers quickly that different words are under the ban on the two sides of the ocean. Knocked-up, which means pregnant in the United States and is avoided as vulgar even where pregnant itself would be tolerated, has only the harmless significance of exhausted in England. Screw, in England, means pay. But bum means the backside, and is thus taboo, though the English use bum-bailiff. An Englishman restricts the use of bug to the Cimex lectularius, or common bedbug, and hence the word has highly impolite connotations. All other crawling things he calls insects. An American of my acquaintance once greatly offended an English friend by using bug for insect. The two were playing billiards one Summer evening in the Englishman’s house, and various flying things came through the window and alighted on the cloth. The American, essaying a shot, remarked that he had killed a bug with his cue. To the Englishman this seemed a slanderous reflection upon the cleanliness of his house.216 Not so long ago stomach was in the English Index, and such euphemisms as tummy and Little Mary were used in its place, but of late it has recovered respectability. Dirt, to designate earth, and closet, in the sense of a cupboard, are seldom used by an Englishman. The former always suggests filth to him, and the latter has obtained the limited sense of water-closet. The more important English newspapers, compared to their American analogues, are very plain-spoken, but the popular sheets have a repertory of euphemisms to match those in use on this side of the ocean. The sheet of “Don’ts For Reporters and Sub-Editors” of the London Daily Express, for example, ordains that was cited as corespondent is to be used to avoid adultery, and that betrayed or deceived is to be used in place of seduced. Here are some other specimens, all dredged up from the News of the World:
For prostitute: woman of a certain class.
For pregnant: in a certain condition.
For performing an abortion: producing a certain state.
For pandering: having, for purposes of gain, exercised influence over the movements of the girl victim.
For homosexuality: improper assault.
For rape: improper assault or to interfere with.
Finally, there is the euphemistic address which begins every letter. In the United States, says Mrs. Emily Post,217 “the most formal beginning of a social letter is My dear Mrs. Smith” but “in England Dear Mrs. Smith is more formal.” Archibald Marshall, the English novelist, says that when he first visited the United States My dear struck him “as effusive coming from strangers,” and Dear “seemed slightly chilling from intimate friends,” but that on reflection he concluded “that our usage must have precisely the same effect upon Americans.”218 But in this matter the rules are not rigid, and though the more conservative English seldom use the American forms, the English forms are not uncommonly encountered in this country.219
8. EXPLETIVES
Perhaps the most curious disparity between the vocabulary of the two tongues is presented by bloody. This word is entirely without improper significance in America, but in England it is regarded as indecent, with overtures of the blasphemous. The sensation produced in London when George Bernard Shaw put it into the mouth of the elegant Mrs. Patrick Campbell in his play, “Pygmalion,” will be remembered. “The interest in the first English performance,” said the New York Times,220 “centered in the heroine’s utterance of this banned word. It was waited for with trembling, heard shudderingly, and presumably, when the shock subsided, interest dwindled.” But in New York, of course, it failed to cause any stir. Just why it is viewed so shudderingly by the English is one of the mysteries of the language. It came in during the latter half of the Seventeenth Century, and remained innocuous for nearly a hundred years. Various amateur etymologists have sought to account for its present evil fame by giving it loathsome derivations, sometimes theological and sometimes catamenial, but the professional etymologists all agree that these derivations are invalid, though when it comes to providing a better one they unhappily disagree. Some hold that bloody was born of the rich young bloods who broke windows, upset sedan-chairs and beat up watchmen in the reign of Anne. Others argue that it goes back to the infancy of the Germanic languages, and is a brother to the German blut, often used in such combinations as blutarm, meaning bloody poor. And yet others think it is a degenerate form of either ’s blood or by ’r Lady, both of them favorite oaths in Shakespeare’s day, and then thought of as quite harmless. But none of these derivations justifies the present infamy of the word. Richard Henry Dana, who loved saline speech, put it into “Two Years Before the Mast” in 1840, but it failed to catch on in this country. In the Motherland, however, it has continued a lush life under cover, and the more it is denounced by the delicate, the more it is cherished by the vulgar. It is in constant use as a counterword, and has become a general intensive with no ponderable meaning — in Dean W. R. Inge’s phrase, simply a sort of notice that a noun may be expected to follow.221
In England frequent efforts have been made to put down profanity, as distinct from obscenity. There was one so long ago as the first quarter of the Seventeenth Century, and B. A. P. Van Dam, in his study of the text of “Hamlet,” shows that it even went to the length of bowdlerizing Shakespeare. The early versions of “Hamlet,” published during the Bard’s lifetime, were liberally besprinkled with the oaths of the time, but in the First Folio, printed seven years after his death, many of them were greatly toned down. Thus God was changed to Heauen (i.e., Heaven), ’5 wounds (God’s wounds) was changed to come, and’s bloud (God’s blood) to why. ’S wounds and ’s bloud were regarded as innocuous when Shakespeare wrote them: like bloody, they had lost all literal significance. By 1623 both were under the ban. Later on ’s wounds enjoyed a revival in the shape of zounds, to flourish for a century and a half and then disappear. By 1823, according to an anonymous author of the time, quoted by George H. McKnight in “Modern English in the Making,”222 the only oath surviving in English circles having “any pretension to fashion” was by Jove. But on lower levels bloody was already making its way. In the United States, probably because of the decay of the legal concept of blasphemy, there has been little organized opposition to profanity. The New England Puritans attempted to punish it, but only half-heartedly; for, as one of the earliest English travelers in America, Ned Ward, reported in 1699, they were themselves, “notwithstanding their sanctity,… very prophane in their common dialect.” In the more southerly colonies there must have been an even more lavish use of cuss-words. The Rev. Jonathan Boucher wrote home from Maryland on August 7, 1759, that visitors there were forced “to hear obscene conceits and broad expressions, and from this there are times w’n no sex, no rank, no conduct can exempt you,” and on September 12, 1744, Dr. Alexander Hamilton, a Scottish physician then lodged in a New Jersey inn, recorded in his diary:
I was waked this morning before sunrise with a strange bawling and hollowing without doors. It was the landlord ordering his Negroes, with an imperious and exalted voice. In his orders the known term or epithet of son-of-a-bitch was often repeated.223
The Holy Name Society, which has flourished among American Catholics since the 1870’s, has hardly done more than discourage the use of Jesus by its members; they appear to employ hell and damn for their daily occasions quite as freely as the admittedly damned. In this they follow the example of the Father of His Country, who was extremely skillful in the use of these expletives. In 1931, writing in American Speech, L. W. Merryweather observed that “hell fills so large a part in the American vulgate that it will probably be worn out in a few years more,” and in anticipation of this catastrophe he suggested that the divines of the land be invited to propose a suitable successor to it.224 But it continues in daily use, and there is every reason to believe that it will go on indefinitely. It is not only employed constantly in its naked form; it is also a part of almost countless combinations, many of them unknown to the English. Mr. Merryweather printed a long list of such combinations, and others have been published since by other philologians. Hell-bent, hell-bender, hell-roaring, hell-ra
iser, hellion — all these are Americanisms, and the English dictionaries know them not. The use of hell in such phrases as “He ran like hell” is apparently an English invention, but when like hell is put first, as in “Like hell you will,” the form is American. So is “The hell you say.” So is the use of hell as a verb, as in “to hell around.” So is the adjective hellishing, as “He was in a hellishing hurry.” So is the general use of hell as an intensive, without regard to its logical meaning, as in “It was colder than hell,” “The pitcher was wilder than hell,” “What in hell did you say?” and “Hell, yes.” So is its use as a common indicator of inferiority or disagreeableness, as in “A hell of a drink,” “A hell of a note,” and “A hell of a Baptist.” Hell also appears in many familiar American phrases — for example, “till hell freezes over,” “from hell to breakfast,” “hell-bent for election,” “there was hell to pay,” “hell and high water,” “hell and red niggers,” and “like a snowbird in hell” I turn to Farmer and Henley’s monumental dictionary of English slang, and find only such flabby forms as to give hell, hell-for-leather, to play (or kick up) hell, and hell and scissors (this last, God save us all, credited falsely to the United States!). An American list would be much longer, and on it there would be a great many lovely specimens, most of them known to every American schoolboy.
Robert Graves, in his “Lars Porsena, or The Future of Swearing,” published in 1927,225 reported sadly that there was then “a notable decline of swearing and foul language” in England. The lower classes, he said, found bloody sufficient for all ordinary purposes, with bastard and three obscene auxiliaries to help out on great occasions. One of these auxiliaries resembles bloody in that it is not generally considered obscene in the United States. It is bugger. When I was a small boy my father used it often, as an affectionate term for any young male, and if it shows any flavor of impropriety today, the fact must be due to English influence. All three auxiliaries are discussed at length in “Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, 1914–1918,” by John Brophy and Eric Partridge.226 They say of one of them, a word of sexual significance:
From being an intensive to express strong emotion it became a merely conventional excrescence. By adding -ing and -ingwell an adjective and an adverb were formed and thrown into every sentence. It became so common that an effective way for the soldier to express emotion was to omit this word. Thus, if a sergeant said, “Get your — ing rifles!” it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said “Get your rifles!” there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger.
All expletives tend to be similarly dephlogisticated by over-use. “Less than a generation ago, when I was at school,” says H. W. Seaman, “blast was accounted a most corrosive blasphemy, and I once did a hundred lines for using it vainly. Today it is as innocent as blow or bother, and only a trifle stronger.”227 Bloody seems to be going the same way, though the English still profess to be shocked by it. There are many stories in point. One concerns two workmen who stopped before a poster set up in one of David Lloyd-George’s pre-war campaigns. It read “One Man, One Vote.” “What does that mean?” asked one workman of the other. “It means,” said the other, “one bloody man, one bloody vote.” The explanation somehow sufficed. The two bloodys were essentially meaningless, but they translated the sentiment into a familiar pattern, and so helped to its comprehension. There has been no revival of the old English oaths in England since Mr. Graves printed his plaint. In a former and more spacious day Goddam was used so freely by Englishmen that they were known as Goddams all over the Continent, but now the term is so rare among them that when it is heard the police take a serious view of it. It went out in Victorian days, and an English friend in the middle forties tells me that he was greatly shocked when, as a boy of ten, he heard his father use it. He says it seemed as quaint to him as egad or odsblood. The American custom of inserting goddam into other words, to give them forensic force, is generally believed by the learned to have been launched by the late Joseph Pulitzer, of the New York World, a great master of profanity in three languages. The story current is that he resorted to it in order to flabbergast the managing editor of the World, Foster Coates. “The trouble with you, Coates,” he is said to have roared, “is that you are too indegoddampendent!” Another version makes Coates the inventor. According to it, Pulitzer sent out an unwelcome order, and Coates replied to his catchpoll: “Tell Mr. Pulitzer that I’m under no obligoddamnation to do that, and I won’t.”228 This ingenious device has been borrowed by the Australians, who are great admirers of the American language, but they use bloody instead of goddam, no doubt as a concession to Empire solidarity. Mr. David B. Dodge of San Francisco sends me this specimen: “It is imma-bloodymaterial to me.” It will be observed that the ma is duplicated, probably for the sake of euphony. The insertion of infixes into Jesus Christ also seems to be an American invention. The common form is Jesus H. Christ, but for special emphasis Jesus H. Particular Christ is sometimes used. Holy jumping Jesus is also heard.
Swearing, of course, is not the prerogative of all men. Many lack the natural gift for it, and others are too timorous. For such toters of inferiority complexes there is a repertory of what may be called denaturized profanity. For spoken discourse there are darn, goldarn, doggone, jiminy, gosh, golly, gee-whiz, holy gee, son-of-a-gun and their congeners, and for written discourse damphool, damfino, helluva and s.o.b., by the Y.W.C.A. out of the tea-shoppe.229 All-fired for hell-fired, gee-whiz for Jesus, tarnal for eternal, tarnation for damnation, cuss for curse, holy gee for holy Jesus, goldarned for God-damned, by golly for by God, great Scott for great God, and what’ell for what the hell are all Americanisms, but by gosh and by gum are English. Tornton has traced all-fired to 1835, tarnation to 1801 and tarnal to 1790; Tucker says that blankety is also American. By golly has been found in England so early as 1843, but it probably originated in America; down to the Civil War it was the characteristic oath of the Negro slaves — at all events in the literature of the time. The English have a number of euphemistic surrogates for bloody — among them, bleeding, sanguinary and ruddy. These, in their turn, have become somewhat raffish, and it would be a grave breach of etiquette to use any of them in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. So long ago as 1887 W. S. Gilbert shocked the more refined moiety of London theatre-goers by calling one of his operas “Ruddigore.” Darn and doggone are both American inventions. They came into use during the first half of the last century. The late Professor George Philip Krapp gave over a long essay to proving, as he thought, that darn comes from dierne, an early English adjective signifying secret, dark, lamentable,230 but Dr. Louise Pound has disposed of his case in a paper that is shorter but far more convincing.231 She shows that the origin of the term is actually to be sought in tarnal, a corruption of eternal very common at the end of the Eighteenth Century. From tarnal arose tarnation, and presently tarnation was wedded to damnation, and the offspring of the union was darned, a virtuous sister to damned. Sometimes darned appears as derned. The English form used to be demrned, but it survives only historically, in deminition bow-wows. Used today, it would sound as archaic as zounds. Doggone seems to be a blend form of dog on it; in fact, it is still often used with it following. It is thus a brother to the old English phrase, “a pox upon it,” but is considerably more decorous.
But darn and doggone are hardly more than proofs that profanity is not an American art. The chief national reliances are still hell and damn, both of them badly shop-worn. To support them we have nothing properly describable as a vocabulary of indecency. Our maid-of-all-work in that department is son-of-a-bitch, which seems as pale and ineffectual to a Slav or a Latin as fudge does to us. There is simply no lift in it, no shock, no sis-boom-ah. The dumbest policeman in Palermo thinks of a dozen better ones between breakfast and the noon whistle. The term, indeed, is so flat, stale and unprofitable that, when uttered with a wink or a dig in the ribs, it is actually a kind of endearment, and has been applied with every evidence of respect by one Un
ited States Senator to another. Put the second person pronoun and the adjective old in front of it, and scarcely enough bounce is left in it to shake up an archdeacon. Worse, it is frequently toned down to s.o.b., or transmogrified into the childish son-of-a-gun. The latter is so lacking in punch that the Italians among us have borrowed it as a satirical name for an American: la sanemagogna is what they call him, and by it they indicate their contempt for his backwardness in the art that is one of their great glories. In Standard Italian there are no less than forty congeners of son-of-a-bitch, and each and every one of them is more opprobrious, more brilliant, more effective. In the Neapolitan dialect there are thousands.232