The Mother Tongue (27 page)

There were three main reasons. First, the continuous movement of people back and forth across the continent militated against the formation of permanent regionalisms. Americans enjoyed social mobility long before sociologists thought up the term. Second, the intermingling of people from diverse backgrounds worked in favor of homogeneity. Third, and above all, social pressures and the desire for a common national identity encouraged people to settle on a single way of speaking.

People who didn't blend in risked being made to feel like outsiders. They were given names that denigrated their backgrounds:
wop
from the Italian
guappo
(a strutting fellow),
kraut
(from the supposed German fondness for sauerkraut),
yid
(for Yiddish speakers),
dago
from the Spanish
Diego, kike
(from the
-ki
and
-ky
endings on many Jewish names),
bohunk
from Bohemian-Hungarian,
micks
and
paddies
for the Irish. As we shall see in the chapter on dialects, the usual pattern was for the offspring of immigrants to become completely assimilated—to the point of being unable to speak their parents' language.

Occasionally physical isolation, as with the Cajuns in Louisiana or the Gullah speakers on the Sea Islands off the East Coast, enabled people to be more resistant to change. It has often been said that if you want to hear what the speech of Elizabethan England sounded like, you should go to the hills of Appalachia or the Ozarks, where you can find isolated communities of people still speaking the English of Shakespeare. To be sure, many of the words and expressions that we think of today as “hillbilly” words—
afeared, tetchy, consarn it, yourn
(for
yours
),
hisn
(for
his
),
et
(for
ate
),
sassy
(for
saucy
),
jined
(for
joined
), and scores of others—do indeed reflect the speech of Elizabethan London. But much the same claim could be made for the modern-day speech of Boston or Charleston or indeed almost anywhere else. After all, every person in America uses a great many expressions and pronunciations familiar to Shakespeare but which have since died out in England—
gotten, fall
(for the season), the short
a
of
bath
and
path,
and so on. The mountain regions may possess a somewhat greater abundance of archaic expressions and pronunciations because of their relative isolation, but to imply that the speech there is a near replica of the speech of Elizabethan England is taking it too far. Apart from anything else, most of the mountain areas weren't settled for a century or more after Elizabeth's death. H. L. Mencken traced this belief to an early authority, one A. J. Ellis, and then plunged the dagger in with the conclusion that “Ellis was densely ignorant of the history of the English settlements in America, and ascribed to them a cultural isolation that never existed.” Still, it is easy to find the belief, or something very like it, repeated in many books.

It is certainly true to say that America in general preserved many dozens of words that would otherwise almost certainly have been lost to English. The best noted, perhaps, is
gotten,
which to most Britons is the quaintest of Americanisms. It is now so unused in Britain that many Britons have to have the distinction between
got
and
gotten
explained to them—they use
got
for both—even though they make exactly the same distinction with
forgot
and
forgotten. Gotten
also survives in England in one or two phrases, notably “ill-gotten gains.”
Sick
likewise underwent a profound change of sense in Britain that was not carried over to America. Shakespeare uses it in the modern American sense in
Henry V
(“He is very sick, and would to bed”), but in Britain the word has come to take on the much more specific sense of being nauseated. Even so, the broader original sense survives in a large number of expressions in Britain, such as
sick bay, sick note, in sickness and in health, to be off sick
(that is, to stay at home from work or school because of illness),
sickbed, homesick,
and
lovesick.
Conversely, the British often use
ill
where Americans would only use
injured,
as in newspaper accounts describing the victim of a train crash as being “seriously ill in hospital.”

Other words and expressions that were common in Elizabethan England that died in England were
fall
as a synonym for autumn,
mad
for angry,
progress
as a verb,
platter
for a large dish,
assignment
in the sense of a job or task (it survived in England only as a legal expression),
deck of cards
(the English now say pack),
slim
in the sense of small (as in slim chance),
mean
in the sense of unpleasant instead of stingy,
trash
for rubbish (used by Shakespeare),
hog
as a synonym for pig,
mayhem, magnetic, chore, skillet, ragamuffin, homespun,
and the expression
I guess.
Many of these words have reestablished themselves in England, so much so that most Britons would be astonished to learn that they had ever fallen out of use there.
Maybe
was described in the original
Oxford English Dictionary
in this century as “archaic and dialectal.”
Quit
in the sense of resigning had similarly died out in Britain. To
leaf through
a book was first recorded in Britain in 1613, but then fell out of use there and was reintroduced from America, as was
frame-up,
which the
Oxford English Dictionary
in 1901 termed obsolete, little realizing that it would soon be reintroduced to its native land in a thousand gangster movies.

America also introduced many words and expressions that never existed in Britain, but which have for the most part settled comfortably into domestic life there. Among these words and phrases are—and this really is a bare sampling—
commuter, bedrock, snag, striptease, cold spell, gimmick, babysitter, lengthy, sag, soggy, teenager, telephone, typewriter, radio, to cut no ice, to butt in, to sidetrack, hangover, to make good
(to be successful),
fudge, publicity, joyride, bucket shop, blizzard, stunt, law-abiding, department store, notify, advocate
(as a verb),
currency
(for money),
to park, to rattle
(in the sense of to unnerve or unsettle),
hindsight, beeline, raincoat, scrawny, take a backseat, cloudburst, graveyard, know-how, to register
(as in a hotel),
to shut down, to fill the bill, to hold down
(as in keep),
to hold up
(as in rob),
to bank on, to stay put, to be stung
(cheated), and even
stiff upper lip.
In a rather more roundabout way, so to speak, the word
roundabout,
their term for traffic circles, is of American origin. More precisely, it was a term invented by Logan Pearsall Smith, an American living in England, who was one of the members in the 1920s of the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English. This lofty panel had the job of deciding questions of pronunciation, usage, and even vocabulary for the BBC. Before Smith came along, traffic circles in Britain were called gyratory circuses.
^*

Of course, the traffic has not been entirely one way. Apart from the several thousand words that the British endowed Americans with in the first place, they have since the colonial exodus also given the world
smog, weekend, gadget, miniskirt, radar, brain drain,
and
gay
in the sense of homosexual. Even so, there is no denying that the great bulk of words introduced into the English language over the last two centuries has traveled from west to east. And precious little thanks we get. Almost from the beginning of the colonial experience it has been a common assumption in Britain that a word or turn of phrase is inferior simply by dint of its being American-bred. In dismissing the “vile and barbarous word
talented,
” Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed that “most of these pieces of slang come from America.” That clearly was ground enough to detest them. In point of fact, I am very pleased to tell you,
talented
was a British coinage, first used in 1422. Something of the spirit of the age was captured in Samuel Johnson's observation in 1769 that Americans were “a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging” [quoted by Pyles, in
Words and Ways of American English,
page 106]. A reviewer of Thomas Jefferson's
Notes on the State of Virginia
(1787) entreated Jefferson to say what he would about the British character, but “O spare, we beseech you, our mother-tongue.” Another, noting his use of the word
belittle,
remarked: “It may be an elegant [word] in Virginia, and even perfectly intelligible; but for our part all we can do is to guess at its meaning. For shame, Mr. Jefferson” [quoted by Pyles,
Words and Ways of American English,
page 17]. Jefferson also coined the word
Anglophobia;
little wonder.

As often as not, these sneerers showed themselves to be not only gratuitously offensive but also etymologically underinformed because the objects of their animus were invariably British in origin. Johnson disparaged
glee, jeopardy,
and
smolder,
little realizing that they had existed in England for centuries.
To antagonize,
coined by John Quincy Adams, was strenuously attacked. So was
progress
as a verb, even though it had been used by both Bacon and Shakespeare.
Scientist
was called “an ignoble Americanism” and “a cheap and vulgar product of trans-Atlantic slang.”

Americans, alas, were often somewhat sniveling cohorts in this caviling—perhaps most surprisingly Benjamin Franklin. When the Scottish philosopher David Hume criticized some of his Americanisms, Franklin meekly replied: “I thank you for your friendly admonition relating to some unusual words in the pamphlet. It will be of service to me. The
pejorate
and the
colonize
 . . . ​I give up as bad; for certainly in writings intended for persuasion and for general information, one cannot be too clear; and every expression in the least obscure is a fault; The
unshakable
too, tho clear, I give up as rather low. The introducing new words, where we are already possessed of old ones sufficiently expressive, I confess must be generally wrong. . . . ​I hope with you, that we shall always in America make the best English of this island our standard, and I believe it will be so.” And yet he went right on introducing words:
eventuate, demoralize, constitutionality.
This servility persisted for a long time among some people. William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the New York
Evening Post
and one of the leading journalists of the nineteenth century in America, refused to allow such useful words as
lengthy
and
presidential
into his paper simply because they had been dismissed as Americanisms a century earlier. Jefferson, more heroically, lamented the British tendency to raise “a hue and cry at every word he [Samuel Johnson] has not licensed.”

The position has little improved with time. To this day you can find authorities in Britain attacking such vile “Americanisms” as
maximize, minimize,
and
input,
quite unaware that the first two were coined by Jeremy Bentham more than a century ago and the last appeared more than 600 years ago in Wycliffe's translation of the Bible.
Loan
as a verb (rather than
lend
) is often criticized as an Americanism, when in fact it was first used in England a full eight centuries ago. The stylebook of the
Times
of London sniffily instructs its staff members that “normalcy should be left to the Americans who coined it.
The English
[italics mine] is normality.” In point of fact
normalcy
is a British coinage. As Baugh and Cable put it, “The English attitude toward Americanisms is still quite frankly hostile.”

Indeed, it occasionally touches new peaks of smugness. In 1930, a Conservative member of Parliament, calling for a quota on the number of American films allowed into Britain, said: “The words and accent are perfectly disgusting, and there can be no doubt that such films are an evil influence on our language” [quoted by Norman Moss in
What's the Difference,
page 12]. More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: “If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is.” (We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless, nonelective institution. It is an arresting fact of British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted status simply because he is the residue of an illicit coupling 300 years before between a monarch and an orange seller.)

Even when they have not been actively hostile, the British have often struck an aloof, not to say fantastical, attitude to the adoption of American words. In
The King's English
(1931), the Fowler brothers, usually paragons of common sense in matters linguistic, take the curious and decidedly patronizing view that although there is nothing wrong with American English, and that it is even capable of evincing occasional flashes of genius, it is nonetheless a foreign tongue and should be treated as such. “The English and the American language and literature are both good things; but they are better apart than mixed.” They particularly cautioned against using three vulgar Americanisms:
placate, transpire,
and
antagonize.