American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  2 By a pedagogue I mean one trained in the so-called technic of teaching, but not in anything beyond the elements of the subject taught. This category embraces 99.9% of the teachers in the elementary schools, 95% of those in the high-schools and prep-schools, and probably 85% of those in all the colleges save a few dozen of the upper crust.

  3 This pioneer work is described in AL4, pp. 418–23.

  4 Old Purist Junk, English Journal, May, 1918, pp. 295–302. In this early paper he laid down the excellent principle: “A usage which one finds properly recorded as colloquial must certainly not be considered as thereby banned from the English classroom or from any but the most solemn and formal themes. Objection to real colloquialism is surely as wrong as that against genuine Americanisms, which one finds even yet in the common attitude of purists toward such words as depot for station.” Leonard defended none are, proven, try and see, to get sick, have got, quick and slow as adverbs, then as an adjective, through for finished, and a number of other forms condemned by pedants.

  1 Current English Usage: Chicago, 1932. The persons who gave him help in his investigation and completed his report after he was dead are listed on pp. xxi-xxii. He was born in California in 1888, and was drowned while canoeing on Lake Mendota, Wis., on May 15, 1931. There is an account of him in American Speech, June, 1931, p. 373.

  2 Grammar and Usage in Textbooks on English, Educational Research Bulletin No. 14 of the University of Wisconsin; Madison, Aug., 1933.

  1 Studies in Current Colloquial Usage; New York, 1933. There is a bibliography of language tests in Part IV, pp. 3 and 4.

  2 Part II, p. 2.

  3 Facts About Current English Usage; New York, 1938.

  1 pp. 133–34. This was anticipated by a thoughtful layman of legal training and distinction, Walter Guest Kellogg. He wrote in Is Grammar Useless?, North American Review, July, 1920, p. 10: “Usage is standard and by usage English must be taught. No grammar or dictionary can lay down the law nor have the effect of a statute; they can only record what passes current among the people of the time and can only preserve the customs of today and the precedents of yesterday, as do the common-law reports.”

  2 Warfel says, p. 84, that “Webster declared this work to be the one he was most satisfied with,” but that it “never took hold, and only a few editions appeared.” The established grammarians of the time were all against it.

  3 Published in Boston. The subtitle was “an Attempt to form a Grammar of English not modelled upon those of the Latin, and Greek, and other Foreign Languages.” Fowle tried to reduce the parts of speech to nouns, verbs and adjectives. He argued that the articles were really adjectives, and that most proper names were the same. He recognized only two tenses, the present and the past, and tried to get rid of mood, number and person.

  1 Wilson’s conclusions were first published in the form of a bulletin to his teachers, reprinted in the report of the Connersville School Board for 1908, and again as Errors in the Language of Grade Pupils, Educator-Journal, Dec., 1909, pp. 178–80. He found that ten errors constituted 58% of the total number unearthed, and urged the ma’ams of his flock to concentrate upon them. These ten, he said, “were reported again and again, and as persistently in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades as in the lower grades.” They were the use of ain’t or hain’t I seen and I have saw, the double negative, the coupling of plural pronouns with singular verbs, the addition of got to to have, git for get, come for came, them for those, learned for taught, and me and him in the nominative.

  2 Special Report of the Boise Public Schools, June, 1915, pp. 29–35, republished in Sixteenth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I, pp. 89–91. I am indebted here to Mr. Frederick L. Whitney, of the Colorado State College of Education.

  3 A Course of Study in Grammar Based Upon the Grammatical Errors of School Children of Kansas City, Mo.; Columbia (Mo.), 1915. Its findings are summarized in AL4, pp. 418–21.

  4 Rebuilding the English-Usage Curriculum to Insure Greater Mastery of Essentials; Washington, 1934.

  5 A bibliography down to 1927 is in The Most Common Grammatical Errors, by Henry Harap, English Journal, June, 1930, pp. 444–46. It lists 33 titles. Since then there has been a heavy accumulation, mostly repetitive. But there is an original approach, along with a criticism of previous approaches, in Errors in the Oral Language of Mentally Defective Adolescents and Normal Elementary School Children, by Theodore Carlton and Lilyn E. Carlton, Journal of Genetic Psychology, Vol. LXVI, 1945, pp. 183–220. The Carltons, in this valuable study, report that four common errors accounted for between 40% and 55% of the total numbers they encountered, and that seven accounted for between 64% and 70%.

  1 O’Rourke and Leonard, American Speech, Dec., 1934, pp. 291–95.

  2 Dr. Aiken, who died in 1944, published A New Plan of English Grammar; New York, 1933, in which she sought to reduce the traditional eight parts of speech to six functions, and to introduce other rationalizations. She followed this with Commonsense Grammar; New York, 1936, and Psychology of English (with Margaret M. Bryant); New York, 1940. Other efforts to the same end have been made by other teachers of grammar, e.g., Patterson Wardlaw in Simpler English Grammar, Bulletin of the University of South Carolina, July, 1914, and James Hayford in American Grammar, College English, Oct., 1942, pp. 38–45.

  3 New York, 1940. Fries’s investigation was “financed by the National Council of Teachers of English and supported by the Modern Language Association and the Linguistic Society of America.”

  1 Linguistic Change; Chicago, 1917, p. 1.

  2 A Grammar of Spoken English on a Strictly Phonetic Basis; Cambridge (England), 1924.

  3 Essentials of English Grammar; New York, 1933.

  4 George O. Curme had published A Grammar of the German Language based on actual usage in 1905; revised edition, 1922. In his Grammar of the English Tongue, which began to appear in 1931, he gave studious attention to colloquial speech and even to vulgar speech. “Those who always think of popular speech as ungrammatical,” he said in his preface to Vol. III, p. vi, “should recall that our present literary grammar was originally the grammar of the common people of England.”

  1 Grammar: the Swing of the Pendulum, English Journal (College Edition), Oct., 1938, pp. 637–43. See also Smith’s A College Man Looks at High School English, English Journal, May, 1942, pp. 375–84, and An Apology for Grammar, by W. Alan Grove, Science and Society, May 30, 1942, pp. 600–05.

  2 For the former see three papers by Reuben Steinbach, all in American Speech – On Usage in English, Feb., 1929, pp. 161–77; The Misrelated Constructions, Feb., 1930, pp. 181–97, and English as Some Teach It, Aug., 1930, pp. 456–62. For the latter, Grammar for the Populace, by Stuart Robertson, English Journal (College Edition), Jan., 1939, pp. 24–32.

  3 Schoolmarm English, by John J. De Boer, American Scholar, Winter, 1936, pp. 78–86, and American Youth and Their Language, by Walter Barnes, English Journal (College Edition), April, 1937, pp. 283–90.

  4 How English Teachers Correct Papers, by Sterling Andrus Leonard, English Journal, Oct., 1923, pp. 517–32; Are Our English Teachers Adequately Prepared for Their Work?, by George O. Curme, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1931, pp. 1415–26, and The Failure of Freshman English, by Oscar James Campbell, English Journal (College Edition), March. 1939, pp. 177–85.

  1 Standard English and Incorrect English, American Speech, April, 1934, p. 88.

  2 Vol. I; Oxford, 1888, p. xvii.

  1 Current Definition of Levels in English Usage, English Journal, May, 1927, p. 349.

  2 For example, William Feather, in the William Feather Magazine, May, 1945, p. 13: “For better or for worse, I move among those who insist on correct speech in business and social life. You can’t do business and you can’t drink cocktails with this bunch unless you speak the King’s English.”

  1 Hypercorrect Forms in American English, American Speech, Oct., 1937, pp. 167–78. Allen Walker Read has used hypersophic
to designate the same thing – a better word, and much needed.

  2 This explanation was anticipated by Leonard Bloomfield in Literate and Illiterate Speech, American Speech, July, 1927, p. 436.

  3 p. 348.

  1 Language and Superstition, French Review, May, 1944, p. 377.

  2 A Technique for Determining Levels in English Usage, English Journal (College Edition), Jan., 1934, pp. 57–69.

  3 This study was followed by A Study of Levels of English Usage, by Mayme Berns, one of Franzén’s students. It is unpublished, but I have had access to it by his courtesy.

  4 The Levels of Language, Educational Method, March, 1937, pp. 289–98.

  5 Usage Errors in Oral English as Found in Representative Plays, by Alice E. McKeehan and Carl G. F. Franzén, Journal of Educational Research, Dec., 1945, pp. 300–04.

  6 The speechways of radio announcers have been discussed in Chapter VII, Section 1. In July, 1946, a press-agent disguised as an indignant schoolma’am got space in the newspapers by protesting against the Arkansas dialect forms used in sports broadcasts by Dizzy Dean, a former baseball player, e.g., slud as the preterite of to slide, respectable for respective, and confidentially for confidently. See an Associated Press dispatch from St. Louis, printed in many morning papers the next day. Fans in large number supported Dizzy, and he was defended passionately by the Saturday Review of Literature (Aug. 3), the Baltimore Sun (Aug. 16), and The Pleasures of Publishing, press-sheet of the Columbia University Press (Aug. 12).

  1 James D. Woolf, in The Difficult Art of Using Simple Words, Printers Ink, Sept. 29, 1944, p. 39, quoted Life as saying that “comic strips comprise the most significant body of literature in America today,” read diligently by 51% of the nation’s adults. The number of children following them is probably nearly 90%.

  2 Stabilizing the Language Through Popular Songs, New Yorker, July 7, 1934, pp. 32–36.

  3 A writer in American Speech, Oct., 1942, p. 181, says that in the Oxford Book of Light Verse this was changed to did. The first edition of Gray’s famous elegy, published in 1751, had the title, An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard.

  4 See also Folk Song and Folk Speech, by Hans Kurath, American Speech, April, 1945, pp. 122–25.

  5 The Science of Language; First Series; London, 1861, p. 277. Müller was challenged so early as Oct., 1865, by a writer in the Eclectic Magazine, p. 435. “A Derbyshire peasant,” said this writer, “uses eight different terms for a pigsty.”

  1 Language and Superstition, French Review, May, 1944, p. 378, n. 5.

  2 Extent of Personal Vocabularies and Cultural Control, by J. M. Gillette, Scientific Monthly, Nov., 1929, p. 453. Hugh Morrison tells me of a French missionary in the Belgian Congo who is compiling a dictionary of the local language, and has already found 60,000 words. (Private communication, May 21, 1946.)

  3 Millions of Words, by Frank H Vizetelly, New York Herald Tribune, March 5, 1933.

  4 Taking the Census of English Words, American Speech, Feb., 1933, pp. 36–41.

  1 A Vocabulary Test, Popular Science Monthly, Feb., 1907. I take this and much of what follows from A Brief Outline of Vocabulary Measurement With a Summary of Some Methods Employed, Word Study, Feb., 1939, pp. 5–8.

  2 On the Size of Vocabularies, American Speech, Oct., 1926, pp. 1–7.

  1 References to many papers on the vocabularies of children are given in Miss Nice’s study. Others worth consulting are listed in AL4, p. 426, n. 2. Yet others are Notes on Child Speech, by Urban T. Holmes, American Speech, June, 1929, pp. 390–94; The Speech of a Child Two Years of Age, by E. C. Hills, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part II, 1914, pp. 84–100; Vocabularies of Children and Adults, by W. S. Gray, Elementary School Journal, May, 1945, and Speech Development of a Bilingual Child, Northwestern University Studies in the Humanities No. 6, 1939. Dr. Wilfred J. Funk, the lexicographer, once startled the readers of the New York Times (Topics of the Times, July 26, 1938) by declaring that the average intelligent dog could understand about 60 words of English, though unable to speak the language. He said that trick dogs could be taught more than 250 words, and in four or more languages.

  2 The Story of a New Dictionary, issued by the publishers of the College Standard, says, p. 12, that “a parrot can learn 200–300 words, a bright child of six knows 2000–3000, a stupid adult knows 8000–10,000, the ordinary man knows 20,000–30,000, and the well-read man knows 35,000–70,000.”

  3 Says Average Man Uses 8000 Words, New York Times, July 15, 1923, p. 6.

  4 Did Wilson Know 62,210 Words?, Literary Digest, April 3, 1926, p. 48.

  1 For a Literary Lend-Lease, by Struthers Burt, Saturday Review of Literature, Nov. 4, 1944, p. 6. Unhappily, such delusions are shared even by philologians. In 1933 or thereabout a savant in practise at Harvard told his students that the average working vocabulary consists of but 2000 words. He was challenged by one of them, L. Clark Keating, later professor of Romance languages at George Washington University, who undertook to set down 2000 nouns alone without consulting a dictionary. He produced 1300 at a single sitting, and the next day added 1000 more.

  2 A Study of the English Vocabulary Scores of 75 Executives, published by the Human Engineering Laboratories of the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, N. J.

  3 The Spelling Vocabularies of Personal and Business Letters; New York, Feb. 13, 1925.

  4 In The Words and Sounds of Telephone Conversations, Bell System Technical Journal, April, 1930, pp. 290–324, N. R. French, C. W. Carter, Jr., and Walter Koenig, Jr., reported that the first nine recorded in telephone conversations are I, you, the, a, on, to, that, it and is. And is in tenth place, of in thirteenth, in in fourteenth, for in twentieth, and your in ninety-third.

  5 There is a large literature of vocabulary studies. Items down to the end of 1922 are listed in Kennedy, pp. 361–62. Various other papers are mentioned in AL4 or in the foregoing pages. Yet others worth consulting are Psychological Aspects of Language, by George C. Brandenburg, Journal of Educational Psychology, June, 1918; In Defense of Ezra, by L. E. Nelson, English Journal (College Edition), June, 1938; Size of Recognition and Recall Vocabularies, by P. M. Symonds, School and Society, Oct. 30, 1926; Vocabulary as a Symptom of Intellect, by Leta Stetter Hollingsworth, American Speech, Dec., 1925, pp. 154–58, and The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary, by G. Udny Yule; Cambridge (England), 1944. The last is devoted to devices for settling questions of disputed authorship, and its mathematics go beyond the equipment of the average layman, or even of the average philologist.

  2. THE VERB

  “The most surprising fact about the illiterate level of speech,” says Pooley,1 “is its widespread uniformity. It is not merely a haphazard series of lapses from standard English, but is rather a distinct and national mode of speech, with a fairly regular grammar of its own. It is characterized principally by inversions of the forms of irregular verbs, the confusion of regular and irregular verb tense forms, a bland disregard of number agreement in subjects and verbs and pronoun relations, the confusion of adjectives and adverbs, and the employment of certain syntactical combinations like the double negative, the redundant subject, and the widely split infinitive.”

  Most of these, of course, have long histories in the dialects of England, and crossed the ocean ready-made, but others seem to have originated in the Republic, or to have got a much firmer and more general lodgment here. Even I seen, though it is traced to c. 1440 by the NED, and had a prototype in sehen nearly two centuries earlier, has long had a formidable rival in England in I seed, and begins to take on a distinctively American color. It apparently did not gain its present wide vogue among the American underprivileged until the high tide of the Irish immigration in the 1840s. The Rev. John Witherspoon, writing in 1781,2 denounced I seed and I see (in the past tense), but not I seen, and John Pickering, writing in 1815,3 and Daniel Staniford, writing at about the same time4 were content to echo Witherspoon. The glossary that David Humphreys appended to “The Yankey in England” during the s
ame year, likewise listed I seed but not I seen, and so did the list of Southern provincialisms included in the Rev. Adiel Sherwood’s “Gazetteer of the State of Georgia” in 1827. The NED offers no recent examples of I seen in England, but quotes I see from Thackeray and I seed from Scott and Kipling. Joseph Wright, in his “English Dialect Grammar,”1 lists I seed and I sawed, but not I seen, and in his “English Dialect Dictionary” makes I seen chiefly Irish. Thornton’s first American example is dated 1796, but after that he offers none until 1840. As I have noted in AL42 believes that when I seen began to flourish in the American common speech it was “still in the perfect tense with the auxiliary syncopated,” i.e., “I(ve) never seen it,” but that it soon “came to be regarded as a real preterite and extended to all the functions of the past tense.” Menner also believes that I have saw and I have did were probably launched and propagated by “the condemnation of I seen and I done by grammarians, teachers and family critics,” as between you and I was prospered by the war on it is me.3 His first example of I have saw is from Artemus Ward’s “Scenes Outside the Fair-ground,” c. 1862, and he says that “the grammarians of the early Nineteenth Century do not appear to include” it “in their ‘exercises in false syntax,’ ” but I find it frowned upon as a Pennsylvania provincialism in the eleventh edition of Samuel Kirkman’s “English Grammar in Familiar Lectures,” 1829.4

  There is great need for a study of the history of such forms in American English, but so far as I know only one attempt upon it has been made, to wit, by Henry Alexander in 1929.5 Alexander found no inflections of the verb that had not been recorded in England, but his field of search was circumscribed and if it were extended to the whole body of colonial records it might produce something of great interest. The fact that most such forms are also to be found in English dialects is not of any significance, for American is itself an English dialect, and its vocabulary is largely made up of borrowings from its congeners. The important thing is that many forms have had histories in this country differing from their histories in England, and that some that are used only in narrow areas there have come into almost universal use in the American common speech. There are also archaisms to be considered, e.g., to loan in the sense of to lend, and again there are forms that have undergone vocalic or consonantal changes, apparently in this country, e.g., to bust.