The Mother Tongue (26 page)

Settlers moving west not only had to find new expressions to describe features of their new outsized continent—mesa,
butte,
bluff,
and so on—but also outsized words that reflected their zestful, virile, wildcat-wrassling, hell-for-leather approach to life.

These expressions were, to put it mildly, often colorful, and a surprising number of them have survived:
hornswoggle, cattywam-
pus, rambunctious, absquatulate, to move like greased lightning,
to kick the bucket, to be in cahoots with, to root hog or die.
Others have faded away:
monstracious, teetotaciously, helliferocious, con-
bobberation, obflisticate,
and many others of equal exuberance.

Of all the new words to issue from the New World, the quin-tessential Americanism without any doubt was
O.K.
Arguably America's single greatest gift to international discourse, O.K. is the most grammatically versatile of words, able to serve as an adjective ("Lunch was O.K."), verb ("Can you O.K. this for me?"), noun ("I need your O.K. on this"), interjection ("O.K., I hear you"), and adverb ( 'We did O.K."). It can carry shades of meaning that range from casual assent ("Shall we go?" "O.K."), to great enthusiasm ("O. K.!"), to lukewarm endorsement ("The party was O.K."), to a more or less meaningless filler of space ("O.K., can I have your attention please?").

It is a curious fact that the most successful and widespread of all English words, naturalized as an affirmation into almost every Ian-
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guage in the world, from Serbo-Croatian to Tagalog, is one that has no correct agreed spelling (it can be O.K., OK, or okay) and one whose origins are so obscure that it has been a matter of heated dispute almost since it first appeared. The many theories break down into three main camps:

1. It comes from someone's or something's initials—a Sac Indian chief called Old Keokuk, or a shipping agent named Obadiah Kelly, or from President Martin Van Buren's nickname, Old Kinderhook, or from Orrins-Kendall crackers, which were popular in the nineteenth century. In each of these theories the initials were stamped or scribbled on documents or crates and gradually came to be synonymous with quality or reli-ability.

2. It is adapted from some foreign or English dialect word or place name, such as the Finnish
oikea,
the Haitain
Aux Cayes
(the source of a particularly prized brand of rum), or the Choctaw
okeh.
President Woodrow Wilson apparently so liked the Choctaw theory that he insisted on spelling the word
okeh.

3. It is a contraction of the expression "oll korrect," often said to be the spelling used by the semiliterate seventh President, Andrew Jackson.

This third theory, seemingly the most implausible, is in fact very possibly the correct one—though without involving Andrew Jack-son and with a bit of theory one thrown in for good measure.

According to Allen Walker Read of Columbia University, who spent years tracking down the derivation of O.K., a fashion devel-oped among young wits of Boston and New York in 1838 of writing abbreviations based on intentional illiteracies. They thought it highly comical to write O.W. for "oll wright," O.K. for "oll kor-rect," K.Y. for "know yuse," and so on. O.K. first appeared in print on March 23, 1839, in the
Boston
Morning
Post.
Had that been it, the expression would no doubt have died an early death, but co-incidentally in 1840 Martin Van Buren, known as Old Kinderhook from his hometown in upstate New York, was running for reelec-
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tion as president, and an organization founded to help his campaign was given the name the Democratic O.K. Club. O.K. became a rallying cry throughout the campaign and with great haste estab-lished itself as a word throughout the country. This may have been small comfort to Van Buren, who lost the election to William Henry Harrison, who had the no-less-snappy slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too."

Although the residents of the New World began perforce to use new words almost from the first day they stepped ashore, it isn't at all clear when they began pronouncing them in a distinctively American way. No one can say when the American accent first arose—or why it evolved quite as it did. As early as 1 79 1, Dr.

David Ramsay, one of the first American historians, noted in his
History of the American Revolution
that Americans had a particular purity of speech, which he attributed to the fact that people from all over Britain were thrown together in America where they

"dropped the peculiarities of their several provincial idioms, re-taining only what was fundamental and common to them all."

But that is not to suggest that they sounded very much like Americans of today. According to Robert Burchfield, George Washington probably sounded as British as Lord North. On the other hand, Lord North probably sounded more American than would any British minister today. North would, for instance, have given
necessary
its full value. He would have pronounced
path
and
bath in
the American way. He would have given r's their full value in words like
cart
and
horse.
And he would have used many words that later fell out of use in England but were preserved in the New World.

The same would be true of the soldiers on the battlefield, who would, according to Burchfield, have spoken identically "except in minor particularities."
[The English Language,
page 36] Soldiers from both sides would have tended not to say
join
and
poison
as we do today, but something closer to "jine" and "pison."
Speak
and
tea
would have sounded to modern ears more like "spake" and "tay,"

certain
and merchant more like "sartin" and "marchant."

It has been said many times that hostility towards Britain at the end of the Revolutionary War was such that America seriously
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considered adopting another language. The story has been re-peated many times, even by as eminent an authority as Professor Randolph Quirk of Oxford,* but it appears to be without founda-tion. Someone
may
have made such a proposal. At this remove we cannot be certain. But what we can say with confidence is that if such a proposal was made it appears not to have stimulated any widespread public debate, which would seem distinctly odd in a matter of such moment. We also know that the Founding Fathers were so little exercised by the question of an official language for the United States that they made not one mention of it in the Constitution. So it seems evident that such a proposal was not treated seriously, if indeed it ever existed.

What is certain is that many people, including both Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster, expected American English to evolve into a separate language over time. Benjamin Franklin, casting an uneasy eye at the Germans in his native Pennsylvania, feared that America would fragment into a variety of speech communities. But neither of these things happened. It is worth looking at why they did not.

Until about 1840
America
received no more than about zo,000

immigrants a year, mostly from two places: Africa in the form of slaves and the British Isles. Total immigration between 1607 and 1840 was no more than one million. Then suddenly, thanks to a famine in Ireland in 1845 and immense political upheaval else-where, America's immigration became a flood. In the second half of the nineteenth century, thirty million people poured into the country, and the pace quickened further in the early years of the twentieth century. In just four years at its peak, between 1901 and 1905, America absorbed a million Italians, a million Austro- Hungarians, and half a million Russians, plus tens of thousands of other people from scores of other places.

At the turn of the century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than in Kiev,

* "At the time when the United States split off from Britain, for example, there were proposals that independence should be linguistically acknowledged by the use of a different language from that of Britain."
[The Use of English,
page 3]

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more Italians than in Milan or Naples. In 1890 the United States had 800 German newspapers and as late as the outbreak of World War I Baltimore alone had four elementary sch00ls teaching in German only.

Often, naturally, these people settled in enclaves. John Russell Bartlett noted that it was possible to cross Oneida County, New York, and hear nothing but Welsh. Probably the most famous of these enclaves—certainly the most enduring—was that of the Amish who settled primarily in and around Lancaster County in southern Pennsylvania and spoke a dialect that came to be known, misleadingly, as Pennsylvania Dutch. (The name is a corruption of Deutsch, or German.) Some 300,00o people in America still use Pennsylvania Dutch as their first language, and perhaps twice as many more can speak it. The large number is accounted for no doubt by the extraordinary insularity of most Amish, many of whom even now shun cars, tractors, electricity, and the other refinements of modern life. Pennsylvania Dutch is a kind of institutionalized broken English, arising from adapting English words to German syntax and idiom. Probably the best known of their expressions is

"Outen the light" for put out the light. Among others: Pennsylvania Dutch speakers also have a tendency to speak with semi-Germanic accents—saying "chorge" for
George,
"britches"

for
bridges,
and "tolt" for
told.
Remarkably, many of them still have trouble, despite more than two centuries in America, with "v"

and "th" sounds, saying "wisit" for
visit
and "ziss" for
this.
But two things should be borne in mind. First, Pennsylvania Dutch is an anomaly, nurtured by the extreme isolation from modern life of its speakers. And second, it is an
English
dialect. That is significant.

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Throughout the last century, and often into this one, it was easy to find isolated speech communities throughout much of America: Norwegians in Minnesota and the Dakotas, Swedes in Nebraska, Germans in Wisconsin and Indiana, and many others. It was nat-ural to suppose that the existence of these linguistic pockets would lead the United States to deteriorate into a variety of regional tongues, rather as in Europe, or at the very least result in widely divergent dialects of English, each heavily influenced by its pre-vailing immigrant group. But of course nothing of the sort hap-pened. hi fact, the very opposite was the case. Instead of becoming more divergent, people over the bulk of the American mainland continued to evince a more or less uniform speech. Why should that be?

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 out-siders. 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 speak-ers),
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 im-migrants 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, en-abled 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
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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 in-deed 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 fa-miliar 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.