Authors: H.L. Mencken
American Language (51 page)
In the days when the theater bulked large in American life it supplied non-traveled Americans of Anglophil leanings with a steady supply of Briticisms, both in vocabulary and in pronunciation. Of plays dealing with fashionable life, most of those seen in the United States were of English origin, and many of them were played by English companies. Thus the social aspirants of provincial towns became familiar with the Standard English pronunciation of the moment and with the current English phrases. It was by this route, I suppose, that the use of
sorry
in place of the traditional American
excuse me
got in. The American actors, having no Court to imitate, contended themselves by imitating their English colleagues. Thus an American of fashionable pretensions, say in Altoona, Pa., or Athens, Ga., learned how to shake hands, eat soup, greet his friends, enter a drawing-room and pronounce the words
path, secretary, melancholy
and
necessarily
in a manner that was an imitation of some American actor’s imitation of an English actor’s imitation of what was done in Mayfair — in brief, an imitation in the fourth degree. The American actor did his best to mimic the pronunciation and intonation of the English, but inasmuch as his name, before he became Gerald Cecil, was probably Rudolph Goetz or Terence Googan, he frequently ran upon laryngeal difficulties. Since the decay of the theater this influence has vanished. The movie actors in Hollywood, with a few exceptions, make no effort to imitate the
English pronunciation, and the dialogue put into their mouths seldom contains recognizable Briticisms. To the English it sounds like a farrago of barbaric Americanisms, and on frequent occasions they arise to denounce it with pious indignation.
The Protestant Episcopal Church, on account of its affiliation with the Church of England and its generally fashionable character, is a distributing-station for Anglomania in the United States, but its influence upon the language seems to be very slight. Most of its clergy, in my experience, use sound American in their pulpits, and not long ago, at the funeral orgies of a friend, I heard one of the most Anglophil of them pronounce
amen
in the best Middle Western manner. The fashionable preparatory schools for boys, most of which are under Protestant Episcopal control, have introduced a number of Briticisms into the vocabulary of their art and mystery,
e.g., head-master, chapel
(for the service as well as the building),
house-master, monitor, honors, prefect
and
form
. The late Dr. J. Milnor Coit, while rector of the fashionable St. Paul’s School at Concord, N. H., diligently promoted this Anglicization. He encouraged the playing of cricket instead of baseball, and “introduced English schoolroom nomenclature to the American boy.” But his successors suffered a relapse into Americanisms, and while “St. Paul’s still has
forms
, the
removes, evensong
and
matins
, and even the cricket of Dr. Coit’s time are now forgotten.”
104
At Groton, the most swagger of all the American prep-schools, the boys are divided into
forms
and there are
prefects, masters
and a
headmaster
, but an examination of the catalogue shows few other imitations of English nomenclature. The
staff
is actually called the
faculty
, and the
headmaster
, a Protestant Episcopal clergyman, is listed as
Rev.
, without the
the
.
Occasionally some American patriot launches an attack upon the few Briticisms that seep in, but it is not done often, for there is seldom any excuse. Richard Grant White, in 1870,
105
warned his followers against the figurative use of
nasty
as a synonym for
disagreeable
.
This use of the word was then relatively new in England, though, according to White, the
Saturday Review
and the
Spectator
had already succumbed. His objections to it were unavailing;
nasty
quickly got into American, and has been there ever since.
106
Gilbert M. Tucker, in 1883,
107
protested against
good-form, traffic
(in the sense of travel),
to bargain
and
to tub
as Briticisms that we might well do without, but all of them took root and are sound American today. The locutions that are more obviously merely fashionable slang have a harder time of it, and seldom get beyond a narrow circle. When certain advertisers in New York sought to appeal to snobs by using such Briticisms as
swagger
and
topping
in their advertisements, the town wits, led by the watchful Franklin P. Adams (though he then served the
Tribune
, which Clement K. Shorter once called “more English than we are English”), fell upon them, and quickly routed them. To the average American of the plain people, indeed, any word or phrase of an obviously English flavor has an offensive smack. To call him
old dear
would be almost as hazardous as to call him
Percy
, and
bah Jove
and
my word
somehow set his teeth on edge. But in consciously elegant circles there is less aversion to such forms, and even
fed-up, rotter, priceless, swank, top-hole, cheerio, tosh
, and
no-end
are tolerated. Fashionable mothers teach their children to call them
Mummy
, and fox-hunters call a leaper a
lepper
.
108
The grotesque errors that English authors fall into every time they essay to write American, referred to a few pages back, are matched by the blunders of Americans who try to write colloquial English. Some years ago, St. John Ervine, the Anglo-Irish playwright and critic, discussed the matter at length in
Vanity Fair
.
109
He said:
When I was in Chicago two years ago, I read in one of the newspapers of that city an account of a jewel theft.… A young Englishman, belonging to the aristocracy, had married an American girl, and while they were on their honeymoon, thieves stole some of her jewels. A reporter hurried from Chicago to get a story out of the affair. He interviewed the young husband who
was reported to have said something like this: “Haw, haw, yaas, by Jove! Isn’t it awf’lly jolly rotten, what? They stole the bally jewels, haw, haw!…” I cannot remember the exact words put into this young man’s mouth by the reporter, but they were not less foolish than those I have set out.… The reporter had either decided before the interview that all Englishmen of aristocratic birth speak like congenital idiots, and therefore could not listen accurately to what was being said to him, or he was too lazy or incompetent to do his work properly, and trusted to conventional caricature to cover up his own deficiencies.
Mr. Ervine then proceeded to a detailed analysis of a book called “Full Up and Fed Up,” by Whiting Williams, an American who lived as a workingman in England, Wales and Scotland during 1920, and sought to report the conversations of the native workingmen among whom he worked. He recorded the speech of an English laborer as follows:
If Hi wuz you, Hi’d walk right in ter the fountain-’ead o’ these steel works ’ere, and sye, “Hi wants ter see the manager!” — just like thot. With wot ye’ve done in Hamerica, ye’ll get on fine ’ere.
And that of an English soldier thus:
Hi never seen a ranker make a good hofficer yet — awnd Hi’ve ’ad ’em over me a lot — hadjutants and all. In the hexercises and heverywhere it’s alius “Hi’ve been there meself, boys, and it cawn’t be done. Hi’m too wise, boys.” You know ’ow it is. No, sir, never one.
Said Mr. Ervine of these alleged specimens of Cockney English:
I have lived in England for twenty-one years and I know the country, North and South, East and West, country and town, far better than Mr. Williams can ever hope to know it. I have lived among working-people in London, in provincial towns, and in villages, and I have never heard any Englishman speak in that style. I have been in the Army, as a private soldier and as an officer, and I tell Mr. Williams that if he imagines he heard a soldier saying
hexercises
and
heverywhere
, then he simply has not got the faculty of hearing. The dropped
h
is common, but the sounding of it where it ought not to be sounded has almost ceased. I have never heard it sounded in a city, and only on one occasion have I heard it sounded in the country, where an old-fashioned fisherman, with whom I used to go sailing, would sometimes say
haccident
when he meant
accident
. This man’s younger brother never misplaced the
h
at all in this way, though he often elided it where it ought to have been sounded. The
h
is more likely to be dropped than sounded because of the natural laziness of most people over language.… A considerable effort is necessary in order to sound it in words where there is no such letter, and this fact, apart altogether from the results of compulsory education, makes it unlikely that Mr. Williams heard anyone in England saying
Hi
for
I
and
Hamerica
for
America
.
Mr. Ervine continued:
I imagine that most Americans form their impressions about English dialect from reading Dickens, and do not check these impressions with the facts of contemporary life.… A popular novel will fix a dialect in the careless mind, and people will continue to believe that men and women speak in that particular fashion long after they have ceased to do so. Until I went to America, I believed that all Negroes spoke like the characters in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Mr. John Drinkwater clearly thought so, too, when he wrote “Abraham Lincoln.” I expected to hear a Negro saying something like “Yaas, massa, dat am so!” when he meant, “Yes, sir, that is so!” I daresay there are many Negroes in America who do speak in that way; in fact, Mr. T. S. Stribling’s notable story, “Birthright,” makes this plain. But
all
Negroes do not do so, and perhaps the most correct English I heard during my short visit to the United States two years ago came from the mouth of a red-cap in Boston.
The honorifics in everyday use in England and the United States show some notable divergences. On the one hand the English are almost as diligent as the Germans in bestowing titles of honor upon their men of mark, but on the other hand they are very careful to withhold such titles from men who do not legally bear them. In America every practitioner of any branch of the healing art, even a chiropodist or an osteopath, is a doctor
ipso facto
,
110
but in England a good many surgeons lack the title and even physicians may not have it. It is customary there, however, to address a physician in the second person as
Doctor
, though his card may show that he is only
medicince baccalaureus
, a degree quite unknown in Amerca. Thus an Englishman, when he is ill, always consults a
doctor
, as we do. But a surgeon is usually plain
Mr.
,
111
and
prefers to be so called, though he may have
M.D
. on his card, along with
F.R.C.S
. (fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons). A physician (or surgeon), if he manages to cure the right patients, is not infrequently knighted, in which event he becomes
Sir Basil
and ceases to be either
Dr
. or
Mr
. If royalty patronizes him he may even become
Lord Bolus
. The Englishman uses the word
physician
less than we do; he prefers
medical man
. But with women doctors increasing in number,
medical man
becomes inconvenient, and
medical woman
would seem rather harsh to the English, whose natural tendency would be to say
medical lady
, a plain impossibility. The late Henry Bradley proposed to get round the difficulty by reviving the archaic word
leech
,
112
but it has never been adopted. An English dentist or druggist or veterinarian is never
Dr
. Nor is the title frequent among pedagogues, for the
Ph.D
. is an uncommon degree in England, and it is seldom if ever given to persons trained in the congeries of quackeries which passes, in the American universities, under the name of “education.” According to William McAndrew, once superintendent of schools in Chicago and famous as the antagonist of Mayor Big Bill Thompson, every school principal in Boston and New York “has secured a general usage of getting himself called
doctor.
”
113
Professor
, like
doctor
, is worked much less hard in England than in the United States. In all save a few of our larger cities every male pedagogue is a professor, and so is every band leader, dancing master, and medical consultant. Two or three generations ago the title was given to horse-trainers, barbers, bartenders, phrenologists, caterers, patent-medicine vendors, acrobats, ventriloquists, and pedagogues and champions of all sorts.
114
Of late its excessive misuse has brought it into disrepute, and more often than not it is applied satirically.
115
The real professors try hard to get rid of it. In 1925 those at the University of Virginia organized a society “for the
encouragement of the use of
Mister
as applied to all men, professional or otherwise.” In England
professor
is used less lavishly, and is thus better esteemed. In referring to any man who holds a professorship in a university it is almost always employed. But when he acquires a secular title, that title takes precedence. Thus it was
Professor
Almroth Wright down to 1906, but
Sir
Almroth afterward. Huxley was always called
Professor
until he was appointed to the Privy Council. This appointment gave him the right to have
Right Honourable
put before his name, and thereafter it was customary to call him simply
Mr
. Huxley, with the
Right Honourable
, so to speak, floating in the air. The combination, to an Englishman, was more flattering than
Professor
, for the English always esteem political dignities more than the dignities of learning. This explains, perhaps, why their universities distribute so few honorary degrees. In the United States every respectable Protestant clergyman, save perhaps a few in the Protestant Episcopal Church, is a
D.D.
,
116
and it is almost impossible for a man to get into the papers as a figure in anything short of felony without becoming an
LL.D.
, but in England such honors are granted only grudgingly.
117
So with military titles. To promote a war veteran from sergeant to colonel by acclamation, as is often done in the United States, is unknown over there. The English have nothing equivalent to the gaudy tin soldiers of our Governors’ staffs, nor to the bespangled colonels and generals of the Knights Templar and Patriarchs Militant, nor to the nondescript captains and majors of our country towns.
118
An English railroad conductor (
railway guard
) is never
Captain
, as he often is in the United States. Nor are military titles used by the police. Nor is it the custom to make every newspaper editor a colonel, as used
to be done south of the Potomac.
119
Nor is an Attorney-General or Postmaster-General or Consul-General called
General
. Nor are the glories of public office, after they have officially come to an end, embalmed in such clumsy quasi-titles as
ex-United States Senator, ex-Judge of the Circuit Court of Appeals, ex-Federal Trade Commissioner
and
former Chief of the Fire Department
.
120
Nor does every college swarm with
deans
. Nor is every magistrate a
judge
. This American fondness for hollow titles goes back to colonial days. An English traveler, Edward Kimber, wrote in 1746: “Where-ever you travel in Maryland (as also in Virginia and Carolina) your ears are constantly astonished at the number of colonels, majors and captains that you hear mentioned: in short, the whole country seems at first to you a retreat of heroes.” Two years earlier the Scottish physician, Alexander Hamilton, traveling along the Hudson, found an immense number of colonels. “It is a common saying here,” he wrote, “that a man has no title to that dignity unless he has killed a rattlesnake.” After the Revolution many of the discharged soldiers opened inns, and large numbers of them blossomed out as captains, majors and colonels.
121
Every successive war brought in a swarm of new military titles, and after the Civil War they were almost innumerable. During the Grant Era it also became common for wives to borrow their husbands’ titles in the German-Scandinavian fashion, and the historian, Edward A. Freeman, who made a lecture tour of the United States in 1881–82, reported when he got home that he had seen
Mrs. Professor
on a woman’s visiting card and had read in a newspaper of
Mrs. ex-Senator
. A. Freeman was almost always called either
Professor
or
Doctor
by the Americans he encountered. “In some parts,” he said, “a stranger is commonly addressed as
Colonel
or
Judge.
” He called attention to an American peculiarity that is still observable: the overuse of
Mister
. “I noticed,” he said, “that men who were thoroughly intimate with one another, men who were old friends and colleagues, spoke of and to one another
with handles to their names, in a way which men in the same case would not do [in England].”
122
The leap in the United States is often directly from
Mister
to
Jack
, This use of the given-name was popularized by Rotary, the members of which so address one another, and no doubt was also fostered by the advent of the Hon. James A. Farley, whose greeting to all comers was “Call me Jim.”
123
