American Language

by H. L. Mencken

  43 Collected Essays, Papers, Etc.; London, 1927, pref.

  44 All of the articles announcing and arguing for these changes were written by James O’Donnell Bennett. The dates of two have been given. The others appeared on Feb. 25, March 4, March 18 and March 25.

  45 In a letter from the Lake Placid Hindenburg Line, dated “14 Je 34.”

  46 Modern English; New York, 1910, p. 181.

  47 Nite, says Blanche Jennings Thompson in Our Vanishing Vocabulary, Catholic World, Aug., 1934, “connotes speakeasies, gin, cheapness and vulgarity.” Night “suggests quiet, rest and beauty.”

  48 The Craze for K, by Louise Pound, American Speech, Oct., 1925; Spelling-Manipulation and Present-Day Advertising, by the same, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. VI, 1923; and Word-Coinage and Modern Trade-Names, by the same, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. I, 1913, especially p. 35.

  49 For example, in Teepee Neighbors, by Grace Coolidge; Boston, 1917, p. 220; Duty and Other Irish Comedies, by Seumas O’Brien; New York, 1916, p. 52; Salt by Charles G. Norris; New York, 1918, p. 135, and The Ideal Guest, by Wyndham Lewis, Little Review, May, 1918, p. 3. O’Brien is an Irishman and Lewis an Englishman, but the printer in each case was American. I find allright, as one word but with two l’s, in Diplomatic Correspondence with Belligerent Governments, etc. European War, No. 4; Washington, 1918, p. 214.

  50 Viscount Harberton, in How to Lengthen Our Ears, London, 1917, p. 28.

  51 May 16, 1921, p. 1478, col. 2.

  52 In Why Not U for You?, American Speech, Oct., 1929, Donald M. Alexander of Ohio Wesleyan University argues seriously that this substitution should be made, just as I has been substituted for various earlier forms of the first person pronoun.

  53 See The Spelling of Naphtha, by J. J. Jones, American Speech, Dec., 1930, p. 154. Mr. Jones prints the following letter from Fels and Company of Philadelphia, manufacturers of Fels-Naptha soap: “Fels-Naptha has been manufactured for almost forty years, and since the very beginning, when we wedded the name Fels and the word naptha we recognized that the first h was superfluous, and we merely discarded it. Since that time our spelling of naptha has found favor and it is now listed in all large and up-to-date dictionaries.” This last seems to have been an exaggeration. I can’t find naptha in Webster’s New International (1934). The decay of ph to p is discussed in Chapter VII, Section 3.

  54 Smith is an expatriate American.

  55 S.P.E. Tracts, No. 1, Preliminary Announcement and List of Members, Oct., 1919, p. 7. The Literary Supplement of the London Times supported the Society in a leading article on Jan. 8, 1920. “Of old,” it said, “we incorporated foreign words rapidly and altered their spelling ruthlessly. Today we take them in and go on spelling them and pronouncing them in a foreign way. Rendezvous is an example, régime is another. They have come to stay; the spelling of the first, and at least the pronunciation of the second, should be altered; and a powerful organization of schoolmasters and journalists could secure changes which the working classes are in process of securing with the words (more familiar to them) garridge and shofer.” See also A Few Practical Suggestions, by Logan Pearsall Smith, S.P.E. Tracts, No. III, 1920, especially Sections I, II and III.

  56 In later Tracts the Society printed lists of proposed new spellings. In No. XIII (1923) it advocated rencounter for recontre, role for rôle, tamber for timbre, intransigent for intransigeant, and malease for malaise.

  57 Accents Wild, Dec., 1915, p. 807 ff.

  58 Walt Whitman and the French Language, American Speech, May, 1926, p. 423.

  59 Why Not Speak Or Own Language?, Delineator, Nov., 1917, p. 12. See also his French Words in the English Language, S.P.E. Tracts, No. V, 1921.

  60 To compensate for this a firm in Hollysburg, N. Y. calls itself Beaux-Artes, Inc., thus giving the plural of art a complimentary e.

  61 It is to be found thus in the 1852 edition of Webster’s American Dictionary, edited by his son-in-law, Chauncey A. Goodrich, and in Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad; New York, 1869, p. 94. But sauerkraut is given in the Standard Dictionary (1906), and Webster’s New International (1934).

  62 Nomenclature of Diseases and Conditions, prepared by direction of the Surgeon General; Washington, 1916.

  63 American Medical Association Style Book; Chicago, 1915. At the 1921 session of the American Medical Association in Boston an English gynecologist read a paper and it was printed in the Journal. When he received the proofs he objected to a great many of the spellings, e.g., gonorrheal for gonorrhtœl, and fallopian for Falloppian. The Journal refused to agree to his English spellings, but when his paper was reprinted separately they were restored.

  64 See Words From the French (-é, -ée), by Matthew Barnes, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXX, 1928.

  65 Irish World, June 26, 1918.

  66 The Pluralization of Latin Loan-Words in Present-Day American Speech, Classical Journal, Dec., 1919.

  67 A correspondent tells me that, in the manuscripts of Jefferson’s letters, even sentences are begun with small letters.

  68 This custom is sometimes imitated by American Anglophiles, but it is certainly not general in the United States.

  69 Mr. David H. Dodge of San Francisco reminds me that the Western Union used to charge for each of these words as two words. But now it counts only one. It also counts good-bye as one, though Webster’s New International gives it a hyphen. In England good-bye has a hyphen but good night is two words.

  70 Many American newspapers and chains of newspapers print style books for the use of their staffs. That of the Scripps-Howard group I have just quoted. Among the most elaborate are The Style Book of the Detroit News, edited by A. L. Weeks; Detroit, 1918; Style Book of the New York Herald Tribune; New York, 1929; Rules of Composition For the Use of Editors, Copy Readers, Operators and Proof Readers (Chicago Tribune); Chicago, 1934; and General Style Book (New York News); New York, 1931. Such books are not for sale, though copies usually may be obtained by persons interested. There are discussions of capitalization and abbreviation in virtually all the current desk-books of “good” English. For English usage see Modern English Punctuation, by Reginald Skelton; London, 1933.

  IX

  THE COMMON SPEECH

  I. OUTLINES OF ITS GRAMMAR

  The American common speech, of course, is closely related grammatically to the vulgar dialects of the British Isles, and in many ways it is identical with them. In both one encounters the double negative, the use of the adjective as an adverb, the confusion of cases in the pronoun and of tenses in the verb, and various other violations of the polite canon. But these similarities are accompanied by important differences. For one thing, vulgar American is virtually uniform throughout the country, whereas the British dialects differ so greatly that some of them are mutually unintelligible. There are, as we have seen in Chapter VII, certain group and regional peculiarities in the United States, but virtually all of them have to do with pronunciation and vocabulary, and are thus of no importance to grammar. A Boston taxicab-driver who moved to San Francisco would find the everyday speech of his fellows, save for a few vowel sounds and a few localisms, very like his own, and he would encounter little more difficulty in communicating with them if he moved to Chicago, New Orleans or Denver. For another thing, vulgar American shows the same tendency to ready change that characterizes the standard language, and is thus given to taking in new forms and abandoning old ones more rapidly than any of the English dialects. I myself remember when the use of the present form of the verb for the preterite, as in he give, began to develop into a wholesale adoption of a sort of historical present, as in he win a dollar, I say to him, and so on. And various observers have noted the disappearance of forms that were common only a generation or two ago, or their descent to the dialects, e.g., sot (for sat), riz, driv, clomb, see’d, and gin (for given).1 The English dialects have changed too, as one may discover by comparing the Cockney of Dickens with the Cockney of today, but they have apparently changed less than vulgar American, and the changes occurring
in some of them have affected others hardly at all.

  For many years the indefatigable schoolmarm has been trying to put down the American vulgate, but with very little success. At great pains she teaches her pupils the rules of what she conceives to be correct English, but the moment they get beyond reach of her constabulary ear they revert to the looser and more natural speech-habits of home and work-place. They acquire, after a fashion, a reading knowledge of her correct English, and can even make shift to speak it on occasion, or, at all events, something colorably resembling it, but for all ordinary purposes they prefer a tongue that is easier, if less elegant. The schoolmarm’s heroic struggles to dissuade them have got little aid from her professional superiors. They have provided her with a multitude of textbooks, most of them hopelessly pedantic, though others are sensible enough,2 and they have invented a wealth of teaching methods, mostly far more magical than scientific, but they have not thrown much light upon the psychological problem actually before her. In particular, they have failed to make an adequate investigation of the folk-speech she tries to combat, seeking to uncover its inner nature and account for its vitality. American philologians have printed admirable studies of many of the other languages spoken in the United States, including the most obscure Indian tongues,3 but incredible as it may seem, they have yet to produce a grammar of the daily speech of nearly 100,000,000 Americans. It was not until 1908, indeed, that any serious notice of it was taken in academic circles,4 and not until 1914 that an investigation of it was undertaken on an adequate scale and by an inquirer of adequate equipment. That inquirer was Dr. W. W. Charters, then professor of the theory of teaching at the University of Missouri, and now (1936) director of the Bureau of Educational Research at Ohio State University. One of the problems he found himself engaged upon in 1914 was that of the teaching of the grammar of Standard English in the public elementary schools. In the course of his investigation he encountered the theory that such instruction should be confined to the rules habitually violated — that the one aim of teaching grammar was to correct the speech of the pupils, and that it was useless to harass them with principles which they already observed. Apparently inclining to this somewhat dubious notion, Dr. Charters applied to the School Board of Kansas City for permission to undertake an examination of the language actually used by the children in the elementary schools of that city, and that permission was granted.

  The materials he gathered were of two classes. First, the teachers of grades III to VII inclusive in twelve Kansas City public schools were instructed to turn over to Dr. Charters all the written work of their pupils, “ordinarily done in the regular order of school work” during a period of four weeks. Secondly, the teachers of grades II to VII inclusive in all the city schools, together with the principals, were instructed to make note of “all oral errors in grammar made in the school-rooms and around the school-buildings” during the five school-days of one week, by children of any age, and to dispatch these notes to Dr. Charters also. The ages thus covered ran from nine or ten to fourteen or fifteen, and perhaps five-sixths of the material studied came from children above twelve. Its examination threw a brilliant light upon the speech actually employed by children near the end of their schooling in a typical American city, and per corollary, upon the speech employed by their parents and other older associates. If anything, the grammatical and syntactical habits revealed were a bit less loose than those of the authentic Volks-sprache, for practically all of the written evidence was gathered under conditions which naturally caused the writers to try to write what they thought to be correct English, and even the oral evidence was conditioned by the admonitory presence of the teacher, by her probably frequent failure to note errors, and by her occasional incapacity to detect them. Moreover, it must be obvious that a child of the lower classes, during the period of its actual contact with pedagogy, probably speaks better English than at any time before or afterward, for it is only then that any positive pressure is exerted upon it to that end. But even so, the departures from standard usage that were unearthed were numerous and striking, and their tendency to accumulate in definite groups appeared to show the working of general laws.5

  The materials accumulated by Dr. Charters were so large that a complete Virchovian autopsy upon them was impracticable, and in consequence he confined his examination to parts of them. He chose (a) the oral errors “reported by the teachers of grades III and VII and by the principals”; (b) the oral errors made by another group consisting of the children of grades VI and VII; and (c) the written errors made by children of the last-named in twelve schools. The children of grade III had had no formal instruction in grammar, but it was in the curricula of grades VI and VII. He classified the oral errors of his (a) group as follows:

  Error Illustration Percentage of the Total Errors

  1. Subject of verb not in nominative case. Us girls went. 4

  2. Predicate nominative not in nominative case. They were John and him. It is me. 2

  3. Object of verb or preposition not in objective case. She gave it to Martha and I. 1

  4. Wrong form of noun or pronoun. Sheeps; theirself. The problem what is — 2

  5. First personal pronoun standing first in a series. Me and him. 2

  6. Failure of the pronoun to agree with its noun in number, person and gender. Nobody can do what they like. 0

  7. Confusion of demonstrative adjective and personal pronoun. Them things. 3

  8. Failure of verb to agree with its subject in number and person. There is six. You was. 14

  9. Confusion of past and present tenses. She give us four. He ask me. 2

  10. Confusion of past tense and past participle. I seen, I have saw. 24

  11. Wrong tense form. Attackted; had ought. 5

  12. Wrong verb. Lay for lie; ain’t got; confusion of can and may, shall and will. 12

  13. Incorrect use of mood. If I was in your place. 0

  14. Incorrect comparison of adjectives. Joyfulest; beautifuler; more better; worser. 1

  15. Confusion of comparatives and superlatives. She is the tallest (of two). 0

  16. Confusion of adjectives and ad-verbs. He looked up quick. That there book. 4

  17. Misplaced modifier. He only went two miles. 0

  18. Double negative. He isn’t hardly old enough. 11

  19. Confusion of preposition and conjunction. He talks like he is sick. 0

  20. Syntactical redundance. Mother she said so. Where is it at? 10

  21. Wrong part of speech due to similarity of sound. I would of known; they for there. 1

  It will be noted that 57% of the total errors discovered involved the use of the verb, and that nearly half of these, or 24% of the total, involved a confusion between the preterite and the perfect participle. Difficulties with pronouns accounted for 14%, double negatives for 11% and the confusion of adjectives and adverbs for 4%. The (b) group, composed of children of grades VI and VII, in both of which grammar was studied, made almost the same errors, and in substantially the same proportions. Those in the use of the verb dropped from 57% to 52%, but those in the use of pronouns remained at 14%, and those involving the double negative remained at 11%. In the written work of the (c) group certain changes appeared, but they were hardly significant. The percentage of errors in the use of verbs dropped to 50, and those involving the double negative to 1, but those in the use of pronouns rose to 24.

  Dr. Charters, of course, confined himself to a comparative study of errors actually made and observed, and no attempt was made to relate them statistically to instances of correct usage. Twelve years later Dr. Robert J. Menner of Yale argued that this method was “likely to produce an exaggerated impression of the frequency of errors”6 — obviously, a plausible contention. Since then several efforts have been made to investigate the material quantitatively, but so far without results that meet every critical standard. The most ambitious of these attempts was that of Dr. L. J. O’Rourke and his associates in 1930–33. With the coöperation of 40,000 teachers
they sought to test the grammatical knowledge of 1,500,000 public-school children, ranging from the third grade to the thirteenth, in the forty-eight States of the Union, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Porto Rico and the Philippines. Their test-papers included three categories of questions. The first had to do with such essentials as Charters covered in his inquiry; their second concerned more delicate matters, and their third included points properly belonging to style rather than to grammar, e.g., the use of he or his following one as a pronoun. The percentages of children passing the tests of the first category, in the grades from the seventh to the thirteenth, were as follows:

  7 34.7 9 52.8 11 69.5

  8 44.7 10 61.5 12 74.37

  These figures, if they are to be depended upon as reasonably accurate, show that the schoolmarm’s efforts to inculcate “good grammar” have some effect, but they also show that more than half the school-children of the country speak the vulgate at least up to the first year of high-school. And what they speak, of course, is simply what they hear at home.8 Indeed, Dr. Menner’s own inquiries indicate that many of the errors on Dr. O’Rourke’s list are common among persons presumably educated. His observations were made on the speech of about forty men and women, divided into three classes, described by him as follows:

  1. People trained in some special profession (usually with college degrees), but with little general culture, and little literary background.

  2. The average product of American high-schools.

  3. People with little education and no background.

  He found that individuals of his second class sometimes used begin, come, done, give, sit and run as preterites, and broke, drank, rode and threw as perfect participles, and that even those of his first class, “trained in some special profession (usually with college degrees),” occasionally resorted to begin, come, done and give, broke and drank. “The most meticulous speakers,” he said, “occasionally lapse into carelessness, just as the most illiterate sometimes attempt to speak elegantly.” This tendency, naturally enough, is chiefly found among educated persons living in close association with uncultured groups. The “bad grammar” of the Southern whites was noted by the earliest travelers below the Potomac, and it is still observable there, even in the loftiest circles. All of us, on occasion, slip easily into the circumambient speech habits, if only to enjoy their pleasant looseness, just as an educated German sometimes slips into the Mundart of his province. And what is thus borrowed from below not infrequently finds more or less secure lodgment above, as the frequent appearance of it’s me, rile, broke and bust in perfectly good American usage well demonstrates.9