It is curious, reading the fulminations of American purists of the last generation, to note how many of the Americanisms they denounced have not only got into perfectly good usage at home but even broken down all guards across the ocean. To placate and to antagonize are examples. The Oxford Dictionary distinguishes between the English and American meanings of the latter: in England a man may antagonize only another man, in America he may antagonize a mere idea or thing. But, as the brothers Fowler show, even the English meaning is of American origin, and no doubt a few more years will see the verb completely naturalized in Britain. To placate, attacked vigorously by all native grammarians down to (but excepting) White, now has the authority of the Spectator, and is accepted by Cassell. To donate is still under the ban, but to transpire has been used by the London Times. Other old bugaboos that have been embraced are gubernatorial, presidential and standpoint. White labored long and valiantly to convince Americans that the adjective derived from president should be without the i in its last syllable, following the example of incidental, regimental, monumental, governmental, oriental, experimental and so on; but in vain, for presidential is now perfectly good English. To demean is still questioned, but English authors of the first rank have used it, and it will probably lose its dubious character very soon.
The flow of loan-words in the opposite direction meets with little impediment, for social distinction in America is still largely dependent upon English recognition, and so there is an eager imitation of the latest English fashions in speech. This emulation is most noticeable in the large cities of the East, and particularly in what Schele de Vere called "Boston and the Boston dependencies." New York is but little behind. The small stores there, if they are of any pretentions, are now almost invariably called shops. Shoes for the well-to-do are no longer [Pg137] shoes, but boots, and they are sold in bootshops. One encounters, too, in the side-streets off Fifth avenue, a multitude of gift-shops, tea-shops and haberdashery-shops. In Fifth avenue itself there are several luggage-shops. In August, 1917, signs appeared in the New York surface cars in which the conductors were referred to as guards. This effort to be English and correct was exhibited over the sign manual of Theodore P. Shonts, president of the Interborough, a gentleman of Teutonic name, but evidently a faithful protector of the king's English. On the same cars, however, painted notices, surviving from some earlier régime, mentioned the guards as conductors. To Let signs are now as common in all our cities as For Rent signs. We all know the charwoman, and have begun to forget our native modification of char, to wit, chore. Every apartment-house has a tradesmen's-entrance. In Charles street, in Baltimore, some time ago, the proprietor of a fashionable stationery store directed me, not to the elevator, but to the lift.
Occasionally, some uncompromising patriot raises his voice against these importations, but he seldom shows the vigorous indignation of the English purists, and he seldom prevails. White, in 1870, warned Americans against the figurative use of nasty as a synonym for disagreeable.[10] 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. In 1883 Gilbert M. Tucker 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 perfectly sound American today. There is, indeed, no intelligible reason why such English inventions and improvements should not be taken in, even though the motive behind the welcome to them may occasionally cause a smile. English, after all, is the mother of American, and the child, until lately, was still at nurse. The English, confronted by some of our fantastic innovations, may well regard them as impudences to be put down, but what they [Pg138] offer in return often fits into our vocabulary without offering it any outrage. American, indeed, is full of lingering Briticisms, all maintaining a successful competition with native forms. If we take back shop it is merely taking back something that store has never been able to rid us of: we use shop-worn, shoplifter, shopping, shopper, shop-girl and to shop every day. In the same way the word penny has survived among us, despite the fact that there has been no American coin of that name for more than 125 years. We have nickel-in-the-slot machines, but when they take a cent we call them penny-in-the-slot machines. We have penny-arcades and penny-whistles. We do not play cent-ante, but penny-ante. We still "turn an honest penny" and say "a penny for your thoughts." The pound and the shilling became extinct a century ago, but the penny still binds us to the mother tongue.
§ 2
Points of Difference
The difficulties of this enterprise are well exhibited, though quite unconsciously, by W. L. George in a chapter entitled "Litany of the Novelist" in his book of criticism, "Literary Chapters."[11] This chapter, it is plain by internal evidence, was written, not for Englishmen, but for Americans. A good part of it, in fact, is in the second person—we are addressed and argued with directly. And throughout there is an obvious endeavor to help out comprehension by a studied use of purely American phrases and examples. One hears, not of the East End, but of the East Side; not of the City, but of Wall Street; not of Belgravia or the West End, but of Fifth avenue; not of bowler hats, but of Derbys; not of idlers in pubs, but of saloon loafers; not of pounds, shillings and pence, but of dollars and cents. In brief, a gallant attempt upon a strange tongue, and by a writer of the utmost skill—but a hopeless failure none the less. In the midst of his best American, George drops into Briticism after Briticism, some of them quite as unintelligible to the average American reader as so many Gallicisms. On page after page they display the practical impossibility of the enterprise: back-garden for back-yard, perambulator for baby-carriage, corn-market for grain-market, coal-owner for coal-operator, post for mail, and so on. And to top them there are English terms that have no American equivalents at all, for example, kitchen-fender.
The same failure, perhaps usually worse, is displayed every time an English novelist or dramatist essays to put an American into a novel or a play, and to make him speak American. However painstakingly it is done, the Englishman invariably falls into capital blunders, and the result is derided by Americans as Mark Twain derided the miners' lingo of Bret Harte, and for the same reason. The thing lies deeper than vocabulary and [Pg140] even than pronunciation and intonation; the divergences show themselves in habits of speech that are fundamental and almost indefinable. And when the transoceanic gesture is from the other direction they become even plainer. An Englishman, in an American play, seldom shows the actual speech habit of the Sassenach; what he shows is the speech habit of an American actor trying to imitate George Alexander. "There are not five playwrights in America," said Channing Pollock one day, "who can write English"—that is, the English of familiar discourse. "Why should there be?" replied Louis Sherwin. "There are not five thousand people in America who can speak English."[12]
The elements that enter into the special character of American have been rehearsed in the first chapter: a general impatience of rule and restraint, a democratic enmity to all authority, an extravagant and often grotesque humor, an extraordinary capacity for metaphor[13]—in brief, all the natural marks of what Van Wyck Brooks calls "a popular life which bubbles with energy and spreads and grows and slips away ever more and more from the control of tested ideas, a popular life with the lid off."[14] This is the spirit of America, and from it the American language is nourished. Brooks, perhaps, generalizes a bit too lavishly. Below the surface there is also a curious conservatism, even a sort of timorousness; in a land of manumitted peasants the primary trait of the peasant is bound to show itself now and then; as Wendell Phillips once said, "more than any other people, we Americans are afraid of one another"—that is, afraid of opposition, of derision, of all the consequences of singularity. But in the field of language, as in that of politics, this suspicion of the new is often transformed into a suspicion of the merely unfamiliar, and so its natural tendency toward conservatism is overcome. It is of the essence of democracy that it remain a government by amateurs, and under a government by amateurs it is precisely the expert who is most questioned—and it is the expert [Pg141] who commonly stresses the experience of the past. And in a democratic society it is not the iconoclast who seems most revolutionary, but the purist. The derisive designation of high-brow is thoroughly American in more ways than one. It is a word put together in an unmistakably American fashion, it reflects an habitual American attitude of mind, and its potency in debate is peculiarly national too.
I daresay it is largely a fear of the weapon in it—and there are many others of like effect in the arsenal—which accounts for the far greater prevalence of idioms from below in the formal speech of America than in the formal speech of England. There is surely no English novelist of equal rank whose prose shows so much of colloquial looseness and ease as one finds in the prose of Howells: to find a match for it one must go to the prose of the neo-Celts, professedly modelled upon the speech of peasants, and almost proudly defiant of English grammar and syntax, and to the prose of the English themselves before the Restoration. Nor is it imaginable that an Englishman of comparable education and position would ever employ such locutions as those I have hitherto quoted from the public addresses of Dr. Wilson—that is, innocently, seriously, as a matter of course. The Englishman, when he makes use of coinages of that sort, does so in conscious relaxation, and usually with a somewhat heavy sense of doggishness. They are proper to the paddock or even to the dinner table, but scarcely to serious scenes and occasions. But in the United States their use is the rule rather than the exception; it is not the man who uses them, but the man who doesn't use them, who is marked off. Their employment, if high example counts for anything, is a standard habit of the language, as their diligent avoidance is a standard habit of English.
A glance through the Congressional Record is sufficient to show how small is the minority of purists among the chosen leaders of the nation. Within half an hour, turning the pages at random, I find scores of locutions that would paralyze the stenographers in the House of Commons, and they are in the speeches, not of wild mavericks from the West, but of some of the chief men of the two Houses. Surely no Senator occupied a more conspicuous [Pg142] position, during the first year of the war, than Lee S. Overman, of North Carolina, chairman of the Committee on Rules, and commander of the administration forces on the floor. Well, I find Senator Overman using to enthuse in a speech of the utmost seriousness and importance, and not once, but over and over again.[15] I turn back a few pages and encounter it again—this time in the mouth of General Sherwood, of Ohio. A few more, and I find a fit match for it, to wit, to biograph.[16] The speaker here is Senator L. Y. Sherman, of Illinois. In the same speech he uses to resolute. A few more, and various other characteristic verbs are unearthed: to demagogue,[17] to dope out[18] to fall down[19] (in the sense of to fail), to jack up,[20] to phone,[21] to peeve,[22] to come across,[23] to hike, to butt in,[24] to back pedal, to get solid with, to hooverize, to trustify, to feature, to insurge, to haze, to reminisce, to camouflage, to play for a sucker, and so on, almost ad infinitum. And with them, a large number of highly American nouns, chiefly compounds, all pressing upward for recognition: tin-Lizzie, brain-storm, come-down, pin-head, trustification, pork-barrel, buck-private, dough-boy, cow-country. And adjectives: jitney, bush (for rural), balled-up,[25] dolled-up, phoney, tax-paid.[26] And phrases: dollars to doughnuts, on the job, that gets me, one best bet. And back-formations: ad, movie, photo. And [Pg143] various substitutions and Americanized inflections: over for more than, gotten for got in the present perfect,[27] rile for roil, bust for burst. This last, in truth, has come into a dignity that even grammarians will soon hesitate to question. Who, in America, would dare to speak of bursting a broncho, or of a trust-burster?[28]