American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  3 Headline in the Congressional Record, May 2, 1939, first page of House section: “The Chicago Mayorality Election.” The frequent use of the term in Ottawa was noted in That Fourth Syllable, Ottawa Evening Journal, Dec. 13, 1939.

  4 The farmer was William Manning and his pamphlet was The Key of Liberty. Alexander’s investigation is reported in A Sidelight on Eighteenth Century American English, Queen’s Quarterly (Kingston, Ont.), Nov., 1923, pp. 173 ff.

  5 p. 290.

  1 Wentworth offers examples from all parts of the country, ranging in date from 1837 to 1943.

  2 In Middle English once was ones, i.e., one in the genitive. It and the allied words were corrupted in the early Modern period by the influence of against, etc.

  3 Hunderd was listed as acceptable in John Jones’s Practical Phonography, 1701.

  4 In a paper in Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part V, 1922, pp. 133–38, Intentional Mispronunciations in the Central West, Louise Pound called attention to the fact that fillum, ellum and their congeners are often used by persons “wishing to contribute to the entertainment of others.”

  5 Dec., p. 132.

  6 Dec., 1940, p. 360.

  7 The Reconteur, Montreal Gazettte, Jan. 19, 1924.

  8 The Hon. Sam C. Massingale of Oklahoma in the Congressional Record, Aug. 5, 1939: “Will Rogers came across the American scene with … a hoot and a holler.”

  9 Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Part II, 1890, p. 74.

  10 Receipt-Recipe: A Request for Information, by Wendell R. Fogg, American Speech, Feb., 1931, pp. 218–19.

  11 p. 353.

  12 There are many books on pronunciation, but most of them are of small value. Those of more dignity are listed in Kennedy; pp. 267–81, 429, 447 and 466; The Phonetics of English, by Ida C. Ward; Cambridge (England), 1929, pp. 169–70; An English Pronouncing Dictionary, by Daniel Jones, London, 1937, pp. xxvii and xxviii; and The Broadcast Word, by A. Lloyd James; London, 1935, pp. 201 and 202. Others are referred to in the text, hitherto and hereafter.

  4. DIALECTS

  354. [All the early writers on the American language remarked its strange freedom from dialects.] This freedom, of course, was only relative, for differences between Northern speech and Southern speech were noted even before the Revolution, and when the movement into the west began the pioneers quickly developed dialects that were set off from all those prevailing along the seacoast. But the English travelers who toured the country in the intervals between the Revolution and the War of 1812 were right in reporting that the linguistic differences they found among Americans were vastly less than they had experienced at home.1 In all its history, indeed, the United States has produced but one dialect that stumps a visitor from any other part of the country, and that is the so-called Gullah speech of the Negroes of the Southern sea-islands, to be dealt with hereafter. And even these Negroes, when they put their minds to it, can make themselves intelligible to fellow-Americans from thousands of miles away, and it is only a small minority of remote and sequestered individuals among them who find any difficulty in understanding a man from Maine, Texas, Iowa or California. The differences in pronunciation between American dialects seldom impede this free communication, for a man who converts pass into pahs or drops the final r in father is still usually able to palaver readily with one who gives pass the a of Dan and wrings the last gurgle out of his r’s. The differences in vocabulary are sometimes more puzzling, but they are not, after all, very numerous, and a stranger quickly picks them up. I have often noted that a newcomer to my Maryland Fatherland soon abandons faucet, or tap, or whatever it was that prevailed in his native wilds, and turns easily to the local spigot. In the same way an immigrant to the Deep South is rapidly fluent in the use of you-all, yonder and to carry in the sense of to convey. Differences in intonation present greater difficulties, but they are much less marked between any two parts of the United States than they are between any two parts of England, or than between England and this country as a whole.1

  The origins in British speech of such American regional peculiarities as survive have been discussed in Section 1, and are summarized in various learned publications.2 The differences implanted by successive waves of Eastern Englishmen, Western Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen and other immigrants, each group with its own characteristic speechways, must have been considerable at the start, but they were soon being worn down and obliterated by the intermingling gling of the population, and that leveling has been going on ever since, and at a constantly accelerated rate. Webster, in 1789, feared that “the body of the people, governed by habit,” would “retain their [local] peculiarities of speaking, and for want of schools and proper books fall into … inaccuracies which … may imperceptibly corrupt the national language,”1 but he noted at the same time that “the establishment of schools and some uniformity in the use of books” might very readily prevent this debasement, and he himself was destined to have more hand than any other in the operation of the second of the influences he named.2 Bartlett, so late as 1859,3 was still willing to predict that “in those parts of the country aside from the great thoroughfares,” dialects would become so “firmly established” that “a thousand years might not suffice” to eradicate them, but there are no longer any regions that are really far from “the great thoroughfares,” and hence no longer any dialects that stand entirely apart from the common speech. The railroad, the automobile, the moving-picture and, above all, the radio, have promoted uniformity in even the most remote backwaters, and there is every reason to believe that General American, which has been steadily widening its territory for two generations past, will eventually conquer the whole country.4

  Because of its steady encroachment upon the other dialects the area it covers today is shifting and somewhat vague, but all authorities seem to agree that it begins in the East somewhere in the vicinity of the Connecticut river, runs southward to the line of the Potomac and Ohio, and covers the whole country, save for a few outcroppings of Southern or Appalachian-speech, west of the Mississippi. Kenyon and Knott call it Northern American5 and Kurath calls it Western,6 but in view of its immense spread it seems to me that General is preferable. It is, of course, not entirely uniform throughout its area, and Kurath distinguishes a Central or Midland speech from that of the Great Lakes Basin1 and the Far West, but these differences are very slight, and a casual observer from some other Sprachgebiet notices no substantial variance between the speech of a Western New Yorker, that of a Michigander, that of a Nebraskan and that of an Oregonian. This General American, says Kurath, is spoken in “the Middle Atlantic States (New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania), the Middle West (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Northern Missouri), and the Further West to the Pacific Coast.” He might have added most of Delaware, Maryland and West Virginia, a part of Kentucky, and a not inconsiderable part of New England.2

  Southern American marches with General American along the Potomac and Ohio, shows a few dips across the latter into Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and leaps the Mississippi into Southern Missouri, Arkansas and Eastern Texas. Kurath shows that it is “more varied than either the Eastern or the Western, both geographically and as between the various classes of society.” The educated Southerner tends to move toward General American, but the people of the lower classes, whether white or black, still cling to their ancient speechways,3 and as a result “cultivated speech and dialects are more clearly separated than in the North.”4 Greet distinguishes three general sub-types of Southern speech – the coastal or Tidewater, the general lowland speech, and that of Appalachia – the Southern hill type. “The speech of the Virginia Tidewater,” he says “has been transplanted successfully to the northern Shenandoah region and to Charlottesville, but outside of Virginia it has made no headway against the General Southern of the lowlands.”5 This General Southern is spoken in “the plantation up-country of Georgia and South Carolina, the cotton country of Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana in so far as the speech is without French influence,�
�� and the Piedmont of Virginia. The speech of the hill people is quite different from both dialects of the Southern lowlands, and in some ways shows resemblances to that of rural New England. “There is no sharper speech boundary in the United States,” says Kurath, “than that following the Blue Ridge from the Potomac to the James.”1 This mountain speech is also to be found in the Ozarks, which lie in the corner where Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma meet. It was taken there by immigrants from Appalachia and has filtered into the adjacent lowlands.

  Dr. Louise Pound has called attention to the fact that the study of dialect, in both England and the United States, came in later than the study of folklore. The latter, she says, was “an offshoot of the Romantic Movement of the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries,” but the latter had to wait until 1870, when Aldis Wright and Alexander J. Ellis issued simultaneous calls for the organization of the English Dialect Society, which got under way in 1873, with W. W. Skeat (1835–1912) as its director and honorary secretary. There had been, of course, some investigations of dialectal differences before this, beginning with Francis Grose’s “Provincial Glossary” in 1786, and including, for example, Robert Forby’s “Vocabulary of East Anglia” in 1830,2 but nearly all these had been undertaken by amateurs, and it was not until Skeat applied his extraordinary philological powers to the business that the study of the British dialects got upon a scientific basis.3 After that the Society published a long series of excellent books upon them, covering nearly all the English counties, and Joseph Wright, deputy professor of comparative philology at Oxford, used the material thus amassed in his large “English Dialect Dictionary.”4 The American Dialect Society did not follow until 1889.1 As I have suggested in Supplement I,2 it probably owed its organization quite as much to the current discovery of and rage for dialect by American novelists as to the example of the English Society, but it had the advantage from the start of the interest of such competent philologians as E. S. Sheldon, C. H. Grandgent, F. J. Child and J. M. Manly, and until the appearance of American Speech in 1925 its organ, Dialect Notes, offered the only outlet for scholars investigating American speechways.

  Its vicissitudes have been recounted in Supplement I, including the mysterious loss of its collection of 26,000 examples of American dialect words and phrases – a catastrophe which rocked the small world of 100% American Sprachwissenschaftler almost as dizzily as the larger world of American physical scientists had been rocked by the hanging of Professor John W. Webster of Harvard in 1850. This collection has not been recovered, but enough of it had been printed in Dialect Notes to launch Dr. Harold Wentworth3 upon his “American Dialect Dictionary,” published in June, 1944. Wentworth, however, was not content to depend upon Dialect Notes; he also mined American Speech, the newspapers and popular magazines, and the writings of such lay observers as Edward Eggleston, James Russell Lowell, James Lane Allen, Roark Bradford, William Faulkner, Joel Chandler Harris, Vance Randolph, James Whitcomb Riley and the early humorists.4 As a result students of American speechways now have the use of a pioneer work of great value. It brings into one handy volume the accumulated observations of hundreds of men and women, extending over many years, and it is so arranged that consulting it is easy. It shares a defect of the Dictionary of American English, in that most of its materials come from printed sources, but Wentworth has studied them with a critical eye, and added first-hand examples whenever possible, some gathered in the field and the rest borrowed from other workers and the radio. Unhappily, he has omitted a good many interesting words and phrases without apparent reason, and as a result the student is not infrequently brought up by irritating gaps.

  An inspection of the book makes clear the fact that, in the United States as elsewhere, dialect is mainly a function of the lower orders of the population. Persons of the educated class, though they show the influence of the circumambient patois, not only in vocabulary but also and more particularly in pronunciation and intonation, nevertheless approach the standard speech of the region whenever any care in speaking is indicated. Individuals of this class, living in the country, says Wyld,1 will “gain inevitably a very fair knowledge of the local dialect in all its aspects. They can imitate the pronunciation, they know the characteristic grammatical ‘mistakes,’ and they know a considerable number of the typical words and idioms.” Yet they do not use this dialect in conversation among themselves, and seldom if ever in speaking to “their humbler friends,” for if they did so “it would be felt as an insult.” Wyld is discussing Englishmen, but the same thing is true of Americans. No educated Southerner, save with teasing intent, ever uses what he understands to be Negro dialect in addressing Negroes, and no New Yorker, when forced to ask his way in the wilderness of Brooklyn, uses thoid. The plain people save on their very lowest levels, understand “good English” quite well, and many of them make not unsuccessful attempts, on occasion, to use it.

  Wentworth’s dictionary shows that any given dialect term is apt to be considerably more widespread than is commonly assumed. To tote, for example, seems to many persons to be a quite typical Southernism, but he finds examples of it from Maine, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana and Oregon. To carry, in the sense of to transport or escort, is also associated in recent years with Southern speech, but he cites its use in Maine.2 The same wide extension of terms is encountered among the names for common birds, most of which Wentworth does not list. The Florida gallinule (Gallinula chloropus cachinnans), for example, has at least a dozen different designations in various parts of the country, but it is a mud-hen in States as far apart as Alabama, California, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, New York and Texas, not to mention Quebec.1 “Sometimes,” says Bradford F. Swan, “a usage went West with the tide of settlers. On other occasions Western expressions have been spread across the whole nation and are now perfectly familiar to Easterners.”2 Not infrequently the evidence makes it clear how a given locution got from one place to another. There is, for example, the Pennsylvania use of all in such a phrase as “The bread is all.” Its old home is in the German counties of its native State, and though it has got as far away as Nebraska and Kansas it is never encountered save in centers of German immigration. Many terms, sometimes thought of as dialectal, are really nearly universal, e.g., to allow in the sense of to think, guess or assert; gallus, suspenders; h’ist, hoist; bub, boy; sass, sauce; and brung, brought.3 Some specimens of this class belong to ignorant English everywhere, but others seem to be American inventions. Appreciable progress has been made in late years in tracking down the history of the latter, chiefly in the colonial town-records,4 but much remains to be done. What is needed is a coöperative dictionary on a comprehensive scale, following the method of the Dictionary of American English. Since the resurrection of the American Dialect Society in 1941 there have been some efforts, under the able leadership of Dr. George P. Wilson, of the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, to interest a competent posse in such an enterprise,1 but so far the response has been far from exhilarating. Meanwhile, Wentworth’s volume is a monument to his extraordinary diligence and to the courage of his publisher.2

  The Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, launched in 1928, does not meet the need for the dialect dictionary just mentioned, for though it is on a large scale and is magnificently done it does not undertake to present the whole body of dialect terms, but confines itself to showing the distribution of a relatively small number – less than 800. Those chosen are adroitly selected, and the maps recording them tell the student a great deal, but the scheme inevitably overlooks many of the most interesting oddities of local speech. Not a few recorders of dialect object to it on that ground, and there rages an unhappy dispute between those who favor it and those who are against it. The former say that it offers the only feasible way to determine dialect boundaries with any precision – that the mere accumulation of terms is likely to lay too much stress upon those that are only aberrant and curious, and that the collector has no means of checking their distributio
n. The latter reply that the sample method, though much more accurate within its limits than their own, nevertheless fails to turn up many of the most interesting and significant specimens of local speech. Differences between philologians are apt to become waspish, and this one has already produced some flashes of sauciness. It is a pity that the brethren cannot get together on a joint or compromise scheme, and so pool their learning for the edification of all persons at interest and the glory of the Flag.1

  The first part of the Linguistic Atlas, devoted to New England, was published in six elephant-folio volumes, 14 × 21 inches in size, between 1939 and 1943, along with a 240-page interpretative Handbook. The six volumes are made up of 734 double-page tinted maps showing, in phonetic symbols, the vocabulary and pronunciation encountered in 425 communities in New England and six in New Brunswick. The materials were all collected between September 1, 1931 and October 1, 1933, and less than a dozen field workers bore the heat and burden of gathering them. The arrangement is clear and admirable. Successive maps show how typical people of the communities investigated pronounce common words, e.g., class, theatre and yesterday; what names they use to designate common objects, e.g., pail or bucket, garret or attic, purse or pocketbook; how they conjugate common verbs, e.g., swelled or swole, drove or driv, took or taken; and what euphemisms they use for such words as coffin, bull and ram. The test-words were adroitly chosen, and though there was some variation in the use made of them by the field-agents, they undoubtedly produced a reasonably accurate and more or less comprehensive report on New England speech.

  One of the strange facts unearthed has been noted already – that the broad a of the Boston area seems to be gradually succumbing to the flat a of General American, even within cannon-shot of the Harvard pump. Many other curiosities of American speech will reward the patience and stamina of any reader bold enough to struggle with the six hefty volumes and search the glosses accompanying the 734 maps. Map 372, for example, indicates that in 1933 the hideous mummy, borrowed from the English and now fashionable in all the big cities,2 was just beginning to invade New England. It was supported by a somewhat similar form, apparently indigenous, to wit, mumma, but the overwhelming majority of natives, whether urban or bucolic, appear to prefer the more ancient ma, maw, mom, mahm, mum, mamma, mommy or mother. So with names for the other parent. Map 371 shows that pa, paw, pap, pappy, papa, dad and daddy are all in wide use, with marked differences on different age levels. One example of pater is reported from the Boston area and one of governor from the Maine coast, but both seem to be what the Handbook calls innovations. Such innovations, it says, are “derived from the literary language” or “through contact with the upper classes of society.” Unhappily, the maps do not indicate social levels, and their statistical value is thus diminished.1 But they show pretty clearly that the old Yankee dialect is fast losing many of what were once among its characteristic terms. Pantry is supplanting buttery, clothes-press is yielding to clothes-closet, shopping is driving out trading, and to home is succumbing to at home.