American Language Supplement 2
Page 52
The case of to bust would especially reward investigation, for it seems to have been evolved from to burst on these shores. The NED Supplement finds it in Dickens’s “Nicholas Nickleby,” published in 1839, just before his first visit to America, but he may have borrowed it as he borrowed more than one other Americanism, for the DAE shows that it was in use in this country in 1806, and that by 1830 it was widespread. Bartlett says that when, in 1832, Henry Clay, the Whig candidate, was defeated for the Presidency by Andrew Jackson, the following conundrum “went the rounds of the papers”: “Q. Why is the Whig party like a sculptor? A. Because it takes Clay and makes a bust.” The banks that blew up so copiously in 1837 did not burst; they bust. So with the boilers of the river-steamers. To bust out laughing, to bust a blood-vessel (or a suspenders button), to go on a bust (i.e., a spree)1 and the like became common phrases, and by 1845 buster was a popular designation for anything large or astounding and especially for a fat and hearty boy.2 Not long afterward the last named became a nickname for such a boy, e.g., Buster Brown, and survived in that capacity until our own time. To bust a bronco has been traced to 1888, but it is no doubt much older. Trust-buster appeared in 18773 and had a heavy run during the reign of Roosevelt I, and gang-buster was launched in 1935 to describe Thomas E. Dewey. Bust-head, meaning the cephalalgia following alcoholic indiscretion, is traced by the DAE to 1863, and bustinest, a synonym for largest, to 1851. “Pike’s Peak or bust” was launched in 1858 and soon took on figurative meaning and almost proverbial dignity. Down to the 80s there was some effort by the hypersophic to preserve burst,1 but they did not succeed. The Linguistic Atlas of New England2 shows that bust and busted are widely prevalent in New England, and notes that burst or bursted “are felt as modern or refined.” Berrey and Van den Bark, in the index to their “American Thesaurus of Slang,” have nearly 200 entries for to bust and its derivatives, but only nine for to burst.
The paradigms of American vulgar verbs in AL43 may stand with only minor changes. The majority of the forms listed are also to be found in one or more of the English dialects, and are given in Wright’s “English Dialect Grammar.” This is the case, for example, with the New England use of be for am, is and are, as in “I be going” and “Be he (or you) sick? ” Pickering, in his Vocabulary of 1816, said that it was not then “so common as it was some years ago,” and dismissed it as confined to “the interior towns or the vulgar,” but the Linguistic Atlas of New England4 shows that it was still flourishing in 1943. Some of the forms listed by the Atlas are: “I be what I be,” “He says you be and I says I ben’t,” “I don’t know as it be,” “There you be,” “They be good,” “They be to Providence” and “You ain’t going, be you?”5 The NED says that both be and ben’t survive in the Southern and Eastern dialects of England – the chief sources of the New England dialect –,6 and cites both the singular form, “I be a-going,” and the plural, “We be ready.” In literary use ic beo (i.e., I be) is traced to c. 1000, and the NED adds that be remained a formidable rival to are until the time of Shakespeare. A long and very interesting discussion of the term in its various forms is appended.7 It is described as “an irregular and defective verb, the full conjugation of which in modern English is effected by a union of the surviving inflexions of three originally distinct and independent verbs, viz. (1) the original Aryan substantive verb with stem es- ……, (2) the verb with stem wes- ……, and (3) the stem beu.” The DAE traces I be in American use (in the negative form of I been’t) to Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia,” 1702. Wentworth reports examples from California, Ohio, Iowa, the Ozarks, central New York, Newfoundland, Florida and Appalachia, but the stronghold of be is and always has been New England.1
Attackted or attacted as the preterite and perfect participle of to attack is very widespread in the United States, but Wright indicates in his “English Dialect Dictionary”2 that it is confined to relatively few regional dialects in England, e.g., those of Essex, Somerset, Devonshire and the town of Newcastle. In Warwickshire, he says, it “is used by the uneducated above the lowest class, such as small tradespeople.” The DAE traces it to 1689 in American use, and John Witherspoon denounced it in 1781 as “a vulgarism in America only.”3 The corresponding noun, attackt, has been traced to 1706, when it appeared in the Virginia state papers. John Pickering, in 1816, said that attackted was then confined, in the American seaports, to “the most illiterate people,” but that in the interior it was “sometimes heard among persons of a somewhat higher class.” He added that it was “used by the vulgar in London as well as in this country.”4 Oma Stanley notes it in “The Speech of East Texas,”5 and Wentworth finds records of it in central New York, Tennessee, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Long Island, and the southern mountains. In October, 1937, the Hon. Alf M. Landon used it in a radio speech, and was held up to contumely therefor in Newsweek. A few weeks later he was defended by a fan who said that it had been used by “an Easterner,” presumably of learning, “only a few hours before.”6 The analogous form drownded was used by Shaftesbury in his “Characteristics,” 1711, and by Swift in his “Polite Conversation,” 1738, but the DAE says that it is “now vulgar.” Witherspoon listed it as “a vulgarism in England and America” in 1781,1 and Thomas G. Fessenden frowned upon it in “The Ladies’ Monitor,” 1818.2 Wentworth finds it in use in all parts of the country, from Maine to Georgia and from New York to California. It is accompanied by to drownd, as in “He was scared of drowndin’.”3 Wentworth lists many other curious forms, e.g., foalded, swoonded, tossted, ailded, belongded, bornded, deceaseded and pawnded, some of them confined to relatively narrow areas or classes, e.g., Appalachia or the Southern Negroes, but others in use in all parts of the country.
To the same general class, more or less, belong such reinforced verbs as to loaden, to quieten and to unloosen. The NED shows that to loose, which is traced to c. 1225, had become to loosen in England by 1382, and to unloosen by c. 1450. The first has disappeared from the American common speech, and the third has pretty well displaced the second. In England to unloosen seems to be rare, but to unloose is preferred to to loose by respectable authorities.4 To loaden is traced by the NED to a letter of Queen Elizabeth, 1568, and to unloaden to 1567. Wentworth finds the former in use in the hill country of Virginia, and a writer in American Speech offers evidence that it was in vogue during the high days of the Western expansion, 1830–60.5 When to quieten first appeared in England, in 1828, it was denounced as “not English,” but by 1852, the year of “Cranford,” it was used by Mrs. Gaskell. The DAE does not list it, but Wentworth finds it in use in the Ozarks, Appalachia and Newfoundland, often with down following. Other such forms to be found in the records are to shapen,6 mistakened for mistaken, awestrickened, ladened,1 to pinken,2 soddened,3 dampened, to safen,4 to thinnen,5 to rotten,6 to smoothen,7 stallded,8 underminded,9 confinded, and even misted (misseded).10 The impulse lying behind such inventions is plain enough. They are suggested by the countless accepted words that follow the same plan. Thus to thicken produces to thinnen, to unbend produces to unloose, which becomes to unloosen, and so on.11
The movement among verbs in English is apparently away from the so-called strong or irregular conjugation, i.e., sing, sang, sung, and toward the weak and regular, i.e., wish, wished, wished; mean, meant, meant. Charles C. Fries says in his “American English Grammar”12 that there were 312 strong verbs, including those unchanged for tense, in Old English,13 but that of the 195 which still survive at all 129, or 65%, have gone over to the weak category. In recent years the old strong verbs show a marked tendency to take refuge in the vulgar speech. Chaucer used clombe as the preterite of to limb without challenge, but by Shakespeare’s time climbed had begun to supplant it, and today clomb, clum and the like must be sought among the lowly. Similarly, dove, which once had plenty of authority behind it, is now vulgar, though of late it seems to be creeping back into more or less cultured use.1 John Earle, in “The Philology of the English Tongue,”2 gave a list of strong
verbs that have become weak since Middle English days, e.g., bow, beah, bowne; carve, carf, corfen; delve, dalfe, dolven; glide, glod, glode; gnaw, gnew, gnawn; help, holp, holpen; melt, malt, molten;3 wash, wush, washen;4 and George P. Marsh, in his “Lectures on the English Language,”5 predicted that the strong conjugations would disappear altogether. “Every new English dictionary,” he said, “diminishes the number of irregular verbs.” But he saw that the popular speech tended to preserve “many old preterites and participles which are no longer employed in written English.”
This partiality for the old is opposed, however, by the plain fact that the weak conjugations are more logical than the strong, and hence easier to contrive and remember, and as a result there is a contrary movement toward them in the popular speech as well as on higher levels. Sometimes it goes to the length of providing regular inflections for verbs that are historically invariable in all situations, e.g., to slit and to cast;6 sometimes it turns inflected verbs into invariable ones, e.g., to sweat;7 and in many more cases it transfers a regular past participle to the place of an inflected preterite, e.g., I taken8 and I written. In the latter event, as often happens, the admonitions of the schoolma’am sometimes have a greater effect than she intends, and the discarded preterite is often used as the participle, e.g., I have took and I was broke. This last change seems to be rare in the English dialects, but it has become very widespread in vulgar American, as readers of Ring Lardner, Will Rogers and other such reporters of it are well aware. Sometimes there are competing forms, e.g., I knowed and I known; I wish and I wisht, both in the present tense; I ate, I et and I eat, all in the past;1 I sang and I sung;2 he ran and he run, in the past; he did and he done,3 he said and he sez; I win and I wan, both in the past; I give, I given and I guv, again in the past; I drag and I drug, yet again;4 I got and I gotten; I brung,5 I brang and I bring; they beat, they beaten and they bet;6 they taken, they tuck, they takened and they tooken;7 he shut and he shet; lay, laid and lain;1 bought and boughten;2 crep and crope; sat, set and sot;3 wake, waked and woken;4 pleaded and pled;5 lent and lended;6 drank and drunk;7 drew and drawed;8 leaped and lep;9 braked and broke;10 treaded and trod,11 and heated, heat and het.12 It would be hard to disentangle the conflicting tendencies visible here. Language, in fact, is very far from logical. Its development is determined, not by neat and obvious rules, but by a polyhedron of disparate and often sharply conflicting forces – the influence of the schoolma’am, imitation (often involving misunderstanding), the lazy desire for simplicity and ease, and sheer wantonness and imbecility.1
Mark Twain, in one of his philological moods, ventured the opinion that got is used as an auxiliary more frequently in England than in the United States, as in “I haven’t got any money,”2 but most other observers seem to believe that the reverse is really the case. When it comes, however, to gotten there is no difference of opinion, for all authorities agree that it is now one of the hallmarks of American speech. Says George O. Curme:
The English colonists brought gotten along with them to their new American home. It wasn’t after all an American blemish. It was good English.3 But a great ocean lay between the English colonists and the mother country. English in England went on developing as in earlier times, and gotten became got, but in America gotten retained its original form. Gotten evidently belongs to the long list of American things.4
Today it is so firmly lodged that in some parts of the South, as Wentworth notes, got has come to be considered improper in the past tense. But in the present it flourishes lushly in the form of gotta, and in that form has completely obliterated have.5 Other characteristics of vulgar American are the heavy use of used to as a general indicator of the past tense, and the use of do and done as auxiliaries. The former is always given the unvoiced s without a final d, and may be used also in the negative, as in “He use to didn’t like it.” For the following interesting observations upon it I am indebted to Mr. W. S. Hamilton, of Louisville:1
I hyphenate the to because I believe it is felt to belong to use rather than to the following infinitive. In fact, the most striking thing about its employment throughout the South is that use-to is not always followed by the infinitive. For example:
1. He use-to wouldn’t take a drink; now he drinks like a fish.
2. He use-to didn’t care how he looked.
3. He use-to was always gambling, but he saves his money now.
Now let’s take a case in which the infinitive follows:
4. She use-to help me with my lessons.
What can be made of all this? It seems that we are dealing with a handy past tense auxiliary which gives an habitual or continuing signification to the past action, somewhat as does the Latin imperfect as opposed to the perfect preterite. Greek, Latin, the Romance languages and German all possess, while English lacks, a tense form to express this shade of meaning. “She helped me,” etc., would not have exactly the meaning of No. 4, and certainly the deletion of use-to would somewhat change the meaning of Nos. 1 and 2. No. 3 points to his reform better than it would if use-to were deleted.
In the mouths of the vulgar it seems to distinguish itself from the old verb to use in four ways:
1. It is pronounced, not like the verb, but like the noun use.
2. It is uninflected.
3. It has acquired an inseparable suffix, to, which obviates the use of a preposition before a following infinitive. (In this power it is not unique. Cf. dare-say and helped eat.)
4. It is not limited to helping an infinitive. It may directly help to habituate (if the expression be admissible) the past tense of such modal auxiliaries as could and would and the negative intensive auxiliary didn’t. It has been pointed out that the vulgar shy away from the subjunctive be. The very vulgar seem to shy away from even the infinitive be in the merely vulgar’s use-to-be. And so, as in No. 3, they employ use-to-was as the habitual past tense of to be.2
Wentworth gives many examples of the employment of used to in his “American Dialect Dictionary” and says that the pronunciation discussed by Hamilton is “probably universal.” He finds used to could, would and was in all parts of the country. The DAE ignores such forms, but use- to could was listed by the Rev. Adiel Sherwood in the vocabulary accompanying his “Gazetteer of the State of Georgia,” 1827, and in 1850 William C. Fowler put it among “ungrammatical expressions, disapproved by all,” in his chapter on “American Dialects” in “The English Language.”
Another peculiarity of vulgar American speech that has interested philologians is the use of done as an auxiliary, especially but by no means exclusively in the South. Oma Stanley1 gives the following examples from East Texas: “He done bought a new hat,” “He done got here,” and “He done done it,” and Wentworth adds the following from other parts of the country: “He’s done in his grave,” “I done gone went to town,” “Bennie has done married,” and “The chores done been done.” Done is prefixed to a verb, says D. S. Crumb,2 “only when action is completed. Most dialect writers stumble on this and use the word in a way it would never be heard in the South. ‘The bread is done burnt up.’ Never ‘The bread is done burning.’ ” Robley Dunglison, who listed done gone and “What have you done do?” in the Virginia Literary Museum in 1829, called the use of the auxiliary “a prevalent vulgarism in the Southern States,… only heard amongst the lowest classes,” and hazarded the guess that it was “probably obtained from Ireland.” Adiel Sherwood cited done said it and done did it in his “Gazetteer of the State of Georgia,” 1827, but without comment. The DAE offers no examples earlier than these of Sherwood.
The assimilation of to to the preceding verb, noted by Hamilton in the case of use-to, is a general process that in the opinion of William Randel may still have far to go.3 “In the past,” he says, “groups of words have coalesced, in either spelling or use. Don and doff, originally do on and do off, represent what verbs are capable of doing. Similar to this pair are various verbs that have absorbed prepositions as prefixes, e.g., overtake, undermine, inveigh,
outplay, dismiss. Such combinations … represent an important force in vocabulary growth.” Combinations of the use-to form are numerous in the vulgar speech, e.g., gonna, gotta and hadda, and there is reinforcement for them in the combinations with have, e.g., woulda and coulda, and occasionally, among the nouns, with of, e.g., sorta. The final a, in fact, is often assumed to be of by the ignorant, and when Ring Lardner’s baseball player takes pen in hand he writes would of, not would have. The DAE traces this form to 1844 and marks it an Americanism, but it is actually old in unstudied English and is to be found in the Verney Letters of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.1 When, in 1938, a correspondent of the London Observer denounced it as an Americanism2 he was answered by another who showed that it was common in England among persons “who have been denied more than the rudiments of education.”3 Vance Randolph, the authority on the Ozark dialect, says that in that speech “could have and might have are sometimes pronounced in three syllables, something like could-a-of and might-a-of, but would have is usually would-a.”4 Miss Brooke Jones reports hearing, in Oklahoma, the beautiful form, “Even if I could of knew I wouldn’t of got to gone.”5 The NED describes this reduction of the OE habben (Ger. haben) to a as the ne plus ultra of the wearing-down tendency among English words.
To the discussion of the American use of shall and will in AL4,6 and Supplement I7 there is little to add. Their “so-called improper use,” said Krapp,8 “has been called the Irish difficulty, but it might as well be called the Scottish and the American and the British difficulty, for nowhere where the English language is spoken does there exist complete harmony between theory and practise in this matter.” Charles C. Fries has shown1 that the first serious effort to differentiate between the two words was made by a grammarian named George Mason, whose “Grammaire Angloise,” written in French, was published in 1622. In this forgotten work was the first adumbration of the rules still to be found in grammar-books, though it was not until 1765 that a successor named William Ward brought them up to their present state of muddled refinement. Ward was imitated by the grammarians who began to flourish after the Revolution, and especially by Lindley Murray, but Fries says that it was “only after the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century” that “the complete discussion of the rules for shall and will in independent-declarative statements, in interrogative sentences, and in subordinate clauses” became “a common feature of text-books of English grammar.” These rules still survive, but the schoolma’am has failed to implant them in her pupils. The Americano, when it comes to the future tense, has abandoned shall altogether and even will: he has his say, as Sterling Andrus Leonard long ago noted,2 by using “the much commoner contraction ’ll and by the forms is to go, about to go, is going to, and the whole range of auxiliary verbs which mean both past and future.” This was borne out by an investigation undertaken in 1933 by John Whyte, professor of German at Brooklyn College.3 He submitted two German sentences, “Spielen Sie morgen?” and “Werden Sie morgen spielen?,” to 139 colleagues and students, and asked them how they would ask the question in English. Most of them rejected “Will you play tomorrow” on the ground that they understood by it, not a simple inquiry, but an invitation, and only 2% admitted ever using “Shall you play?” “The first choice of the large majority of both teachers and students, with the students making it their unanimous choice,” reported Whyte, was “Are you going to play tomorrow?”4