American Language

by H. L. Mencken

  American newspapers seldom distinguish between the masculine and feminine forms of common loan-words. Blond and blonde are used indiscriminately. The majority of papers, apparently mistaking blond for a simplified form of blonde, use it to designate both sexes. So with employée, divorcee, fiancée, etc. Here the feminine form is preferred; no doubt it has been helped into use in the case of the -ee words by the analogy of devotee.64 In all cases, of course, the accents are omitted. In the formation of the plural American adopts native forms much more quickly than English. All the English authorities that I have consulted advocate retaining the foreign plurals of most of the loan-words in daily use, e. g., sanatoria, appendices, indices, virtuosi, formulœ, libretti, media, thés-dansants, monsignori. But American usage favors plurals of native design, and sometimes they take quite fantastic forms. I have observed delicatessens, monsignors, virtuosos, rathskellers, vereins, nucleuses and appendixes. Banditti, in place of bandits, would seem an affectation to an American, and so would soprani for sopranos and soli for solos. Both English and American labor under the lack of native plurals for the two everyday titles, Mister and Missus. In the written speech, and in the more exact forms of the spoken speech, the French plurals, Messieurs and Mesdames, are used, but in the ordinary spoken speech, at least in America, they are avoided, whenever possible, by circumlocution. When Messieurs has to be spoken it is pronounced messers, and in the same way Mesdames becomes mezdames, with the first syllable rhyming with sez and the second, which bears the accent, with games. In place of Mesdames a more natural form, Madames, seems to be gaining ground in America. Thus, I have found Dames du Sacré Coeur translated as Madames, of the Sacred Heart in a Catholic paper of wide circulation,65 and the form is apparently used by American members of the community.

  Dr. Louise Pound66 notes that a number of Latin plurals tend to become singular nouns in colloquial American, notably curricula, data, dicta, insignia and strata, and with them a few Greek plurals, e.g., criteria and phenomena. She reports hearing the following uses of them: “The curricula of the institution is being changed,” “This data is very significant,” “The dicta, ‘Go West,’ is said to have come from Horace Greeley,” “What is that insignia on his sleeve?”, “This may be called the Renaissance strata of loan-words,” “That is no criteria,” and “What a strange phenomena!” — all by speakers presumed to be of some education. The error leads to the creation of double plurals, e.g., curriculas, insignias, stratas, stimulis, alumnis, bacillis, narcissis. The Latin names of plants lead to frequent blunders. Cosmos and gladiolus are felt to be plurals, and from them, by folk-etymology, come the false singulars, cosma and gladiola. Dr. Pound notes many other barbarous plurals, not mentioned above, e.g., antennas, cerebras, alumnas, alumnuses, narcissuses, apparatuses, emporiums, opuses, criterions, amoebas, cactuses, phenomenons.

  5. PUNCTUATION, CAPITALIZATION, AND ABBREVIATION

  In capitalization the English are much more conservative than we are. They invariably capitalize such terms as Government, Prime Minister, Church and Society, when used as proper nouns; they capitalize Press, Pulpit, Bar, etc., almost as often. Some of the English newspapers, in their leading articles (Am.: editorials), print all names of persons in capitals and small capitals, e.g., MR. RAMSAY MACDONALD, and also such titles as the KING and the PRIME MINISTER. In the London Times this is also done in news articles. But in the United States only the New York Times appears to do so, and it confines the practise to its editorials. In the Eighteenth Century there was a fashion for reducing all capitals to small letters, and Lord Chesterfield thus denounced it in a letter to his son, April 13, 1752:

  It offends my eyes to see rome, france, caesar, henry the fourth, etc. begin with small letters; and I do not conceive that there can be any reason for doing it half so strong as the reason of long usage to the contrary. This is an affectation below Voltaire.

  But Thomas Jefferson thought otherwise, and in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence nature and creator, and even god are in lower case.67 During the 20’s and 30’s of the succeeding century, probably as a result of French influence, the movement against the capitals went so far that the days of the week were often spelled with small initial letters, and even Mr. became mr. Curiously enough, the most striking exhibition of this tendency of late years is offered by an English work of the highest scholarship, the Cambridge History of English Literature. It uses the lower case for all titles, even baron and colonel, before proper names, and also avoids capitals in such words as presbyterian, catholic and christian, and in the second parts of such terms as Westminster abbey and Atlantic ocean.

  There are also certain differences in punctuation. The English, as everyone knows, usually put a comma after the street number of a house, making it, for example, 34, St. James’s Street.68 They insert a comma instead of a period after the hour when giving the time in figures, e.g., 9,27, and omit the o when indicating less than 10 minutes, e.g., 8,7 instead of 8.07. They do not use the period as the mark of the decimal, but employ a dot at the level of the upper dot of a colon, as in 3.1416. They commonly write 8th October instead of October 8th, and when they write 8/10/35 they mean October 8, 1935, not August 10, 1935, as we should usually mean. They cling to the hyphen in to-day, to-night and to-morrow; it is fast disappearing in America.69 They are far more careful than we are to retain the apostrophe in possessive forms of nouns used in combination, e.g., St. Mary’s Church, ladies’ room. In geographical names they sometimes use it and sometimes omit it; in the United States the Geographic Board endeavors to obliterate it, and most American newspapers do so. The English newspapers usually spell out street, avenue, etc., print them as separate words, and give them capital initials, but in the United States they are commonly abbreviated and printed in small letters, and sometimes they are hooked to the preceding proper names with hyphens. “Some of our papers,” says the Scripps-Howard Style Book, “abbreviate streets and avenues thus: Prospect-st., Euclid-av., Bulkley-blvd, Wanamaker-pl. Notwithstanding certain objections, we approve of this abbreviated style, for space reasons.” Many papers abbreviate county and company in the same way, e.g., Grady-co. and Pullman-co. The Chicago Tribune does not abbreviate such words, but it prints them in lower case, and treats even hall, house, mansion, building, park and palace likewise.70

  There remains a class of differences that may as well be noticed under spelling, though they are not strictly orthographical. Specialty, aluminum and alarm offer examples. In English they are speciality, aluminium and alarum, though alarm is also an alternative form. Specialty, in America, is always accented on the first syllable; speciality, in England, on the third. The result is two distinct words, though their meaning is identical. How aluminium, in America, lost its fourth syllable I have been unable to determine, but all American authorities now make it aluminum and all English authorities stick to aluminium. Perhaps the boric-boracic pair also belongs here. In American boric is now almost universally preferred, but it is also making progress in England. How the difference between the English behove and the American behoove arose I do not know.

  1 Dr. Miles L. Hanley of the University of Wisconsin, with the aid of various other scholars, has unearthed a large number of such forms from “forty diaries and ten sets of town and parish records,… chiefly from Massachusetts and Connecticut.” His list of them was mimeographed in June, 1935, and he has kindly placed a copy at my disposal.

  2 They are described in George H. McKnight’s Modern English in the Making; New York, 1928, especially pp. 119–20, 191–2, and 229.

  3 The Scheme is reprinted in Franklin’s Words, edited by John Bige-low; New York, 1887–8; Vol. IV, p. 198 ff. The six new characters were a modified a for the long a in ball, an h upside down for the u in unto, a combination of long s and i for the sh in wish, a y with a curled tail for ng, an h with a curled tail for the th in think, and a somewhat similar h, but with a wavy appendage at the top, for the th of thy. Franklin expunged c, w, y and j from the alphabet as unne
cessary. He proposed that the vowels be differentiated by using one letter for the short ones and two for the long ones. He made trial of his new alphabet in a letter to Miss Stephenson of London, apparently a bluestocking of the time. She replied on Sept. 26, 1768, saying that she could si meni inkanviiniensis in it. He defended it in a letter from Kreven striit, London, Sept. 28.

  4 For his letter to Pickering, dated May 12, see American Projects for an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1936. He said: “The idea is well received in New York, and many of the most discerning gentlemen in Congress are its warmest advocates.” Timothy Pickering (1745–1829) was the father of John Pickering.

  5 New York, 1925, Vol. I, p. 332 ff.

  6 I find soveran in the London Times Literary Supplement for Aug. 5, 1920, p. 1, art. Words for Music, but it seems to have no support elsewhere.

  7 Their influence was described by Allen Walker Read in The Development of Faith in the Dictionary in America, a paper read before the Present Day English Section of the Modern Language Association at Philadelphia, Dec. 29, 1934. So late as 1851 the deputy superintendent of the common schools of Massachusetts reported after he had made a tour through the State: “In many towns the dictionary was the only authoritative judge and umpire in literary matters.” Webster’s and its rivals were sold very cheaply. The following is from a letter by Bemis and Ward, booksellers of Canandaigua, N. Y., Jan. 16, 1833: “We published Walker’s until last year, but … the market was crowded with them at 20 to 25 cents. Our country merchants get their supplies of them in the cities, and we have sold our plates, not being able or willing to make the book poor enough to compete with such editions. We retail Webster’s [School Dictionary] at 87 cents — Walker’s at 50. The poorer editions are probably sold at 37½.”

  8 A Critical Review of the Orthography of Dr. Webster’s Series of Books …; New York, 1831. A modern and more moderate review of Webster’s inconsistences is in A Linguistic Patriot, by Kemp Malone, American Speech, Oct., 1925.

  9 Modern English in the Making, p. 490.

  10 Democratic Review, March, 1856. In Good English New York, 1867, p. 145 ff, Gould gloated over the fact that in the Webster’s Dictionaries of 1854 and 1866, brought out after Webster’s death, many of his spellings were withdrawn, or reduced to the estate of variants.

  11 See his English Spelling and Spelling Reform; New York, 1909, p. 229.

  12 Americanisms and Briticisms; New York, 1892, p. 37.

  13 This Nu Speling, by C. R. Prance; London Times, April 24, 1930.

  14 Authors’ & Printers’ Dictionary … an attempt to codify the best typographical practices of the present day, by F. Howard Collins; 4th ed., revised by Horace Hart; London, 1912.

  15 Horace Hart: Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford: 23rd ed.; London, 1914. I am informed by Mr. Humphrey Davy, of the London Times, that, with one or two minor exceptions, the Times observes the rules laid down in this book.

  16 Edited by Dr. Ernest A. Baker; London, 1919.

  17 On English Homophones; S.P.E. Tracts, No. II, 1919, p. 7.

  18 This note appeared in English, May–June, 1919, p. 88: “By the way, the Nation now spell labor, honor, favor” Note the plural verb.

  19 Shaw is, in general, an advanced speller. He was spelling program without the final -me when it still seemed barbaric in England, and he also prefers catalog, toilet and etiquet. But he clings to to shew (as in The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet), though it is going out, and the Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary recommends to show “except in Sc. law, and Bib. and Prayer Book citations.”

  20 In Christopher Morley’s Thunder on the Left; New York, 1925, the name of Deep Harbor, a place supposedly near New York City, is spelled Harbour. This natural slip by a Rhodes scholar is rebuked by Clifford H. Bissell in Is It Pedantry?, Saturday Review of Literature, Aug. 13, 1927.

  21 Handbook of Style in Use at the Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass.; Boston, 1913.

  22 Boston, 1930.

  23 Preparation of Manuscript, Proof Reading, and Office Style at J. S. Cushing Company’s; Norwood, Mass., n.d. Under date of Sept. 19, 1935, Mr. Robert T. Barr, one of the directors of the company, writes: “In practically all of the new books that are now being published we have been requested by the several publishers to follow the new Webster’s International Dictionary (1934) in regard to spelling. With the few English books we have been doing lately our orders have been to follow copy.”

  24 The Authors’ Book; New York, 1925. I am indebted here to Mr. H. S. Latham, vice-president of the Macmillan Co.

  25 Text, Type and Style: A Compendium of Atlantic usage, by George B. Ives; Boston, 1921.

  26 This form is used by the Chatham and Phenix National Bank, in New York. But the Phœnix Insurance Company, of Hartford, Conn., retains the old spelling. About 100 corporations having the word in their names are listed in the New York telephone directory. A fifth of them use phenix.

  27 The Fowlers in The King’s English, 2nd ed.; London, 1908, p. 23, say that “when it was proposed to borrow from France what we [i.e., the English] now know as the closure, it seemed certain for some time that with the thing we should borrow the name, clôture; a press campaign resulted in closure” But in the Congressional Record it is still cloture, though with the loss of the circumflex accent, and this form is generally retained by American newspapers — that is, when they do not use gag.

  28 Webster’s New International prefers offense and defense. In license, advice, device, prophecy, practise, etc. the English rule is that the nouns shall take c and the verbs s. But the American Medical Association Press “has always spelled practice with c, whether for noun or for verb.” Journal of the American Medical Association, April 26, 1930, p. 1342.

  29 Says H. W. Fowler in Modern English Usage; Oxford, 1926, p. 415: “The American abolition of -our in such words as honour and favour has probably retarded rather than quickened English progress in the same direction. Our first notification that a book we are reading is not English but American is often, nowadays, the sight of an -or. ‘Yankee’ we say, and congratulate ourselves on spelling like gentlemen; we wisely decline to regard it as a matter for argument; the English way cannot but be better than the American way; that is enough. Most of us, therefore, do not come to the question with an open mind.” “The Americans,” says Basil de Sélincourt in Pomona, or The Future of English; London, 1928, p. 40, “have dropped a u out of humour and other words; possibly we should have done so, if they had not.” My italics.

  30 American English; New York, 1921, p. 37.

  31 Canada Won’t Even Import American Spelling, Baltimore Evening Sun, Aug. 5, 1931.

  32 5th ed., 1928.

  33 He was in favor of what he called a “clean and pure” English, and opposed the excessive use of loanwords, then very popular. In a translation of the Gospel of Mark, published in 1550, he substituted hunderder for centurion, and crossed for crucified.

  34 A good account of the early reformers is in Every-Day English, by Richard Grant White; Boston, 1881, Ch. X. See also Introduction to the Science of Language, by A. H. Sayce, 4th ed.; London, 1900, p. 330 ff Modern English in the Making, by George H. McKnight; New York, 1928, p. 117 ff and the various passages listed under Spelling in his index; The Development of Modern English, by Stuart Robertson; New York, 1934, pp. 271–80; and Handbook of Simplified Spelling; New York, 1920, p. 5.

  35 A partial list of the books on the subject printed in the United States between 1807 and 1860 is in The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp; New York, 1925, Vol. I, p. 330. Most of those printed down to the end of 1922 are listed in Arthur G. Kennedy’s Bibliography of Writings on the English Language; Cambridge (Mass.), 1927.

  36 First and last, he is said to have spent $283,000 on the movement.

  37 In 1920 it organized a Simplified Spelling Leag [sic] to raise funds. Members were asked to contribute $10 a year and associates $1
. A fellow made a single payment of $100, and a patron one of $1000. But apparently not many customers came to the cashier’s desk, and the Leag now seems to be moribund.

  38 Reasons and Rules For Simplified Spelling, April, 1919.

  39 The English Alphabet: What It Is, What I Should Be – and What It Could Be; Freiburg i. B., 1930.

  40 Among Spelling Reformers, by Frederick S. Wingfield, American Speech, Oct., 1931. Mr. Wingfield also gives specimens of the spelling of other reformers.

  41 Anglic: A New Agreed Simplified English Spelling, final rev. ed.; Upsala, 1931.

  42 There is a brief but cogent criticism of Anglic, and of all like systems, in a review of the Anglic textbook in American Speech, June, 1931, p. 378 ff. It is signed A. G. K. and is apparently by Dr. Arthur G. Kennedy. Another devastating criticism is in Or Shall We Go Anglic?, by Janet Rankin Aiken, Bookman, Feb., 1931.