Right![ [43]
Like W. L. George, this Englishman failed in his attempt to write correct American despite his fine pedagogical passion. No American would ever say "take the first turning"; he would say "turn at the first corner." As for right away, R. O. Williams argues that "so far as analogy can make good English, it is as good as one could choose."[44] Nevertheless, the Oxford Dictionary admits it only as an Americanism, and avoids all mention of the other American uses of right as an adverb. Good is almost as protean. It is not only used as a general synonym for all adjectives and adverbs connoting satisfaction, as in to feel good, to be treated good, to sleep good, but also as a reinforcement to other adjectives and adverbs, as in "I hit him good and hard" and "I am good and tired." Of late some has come into wide use as an adjective-adverb of all work, indicating special excellence or high degree, as in some girl, some sick, going some, etc. It is still below the salt, but threatens to reach a more respectable position. One encounters it in the newspapers constantly and in the Congressional Record, and not long ago a writer in the Atlantic Monthly[45] hymned it ecstatically as "some word—a true super-word, in fact" and argued that it could be used "in a sense for which there is absolutely no synonym in the dictionary." Basically, it appears to be an adjective, but in many of its common situations the grammarians would probably call it an adverb. It gives no little support to the growing tendency, already noticed, to break down the barrier between the two parts of speech.
§ 4
Foreign Influences Today
This large and constantly reinforced admixture of foreigners has naturally exerted a constant pressure upon the national language, for the majority of them, at least in the first generation, have found it quite impossible to acquire it in any purity, and even their children have grown up with speech habits differing radically from those of correct English. The effects of this pressure are obviously two-fold; on the one hand the foreigner, struggling with a strange and difficult tongue, makes efforts to simplify it as much as possible, and so strengthens the native tendency to disregard all niceties and complexities, and on the other hand he corrupts it with words and locutions from the language he has brought with him, and sometimes with whole idioms and grammatical forms. We have seen, in earlier chapters, how the [Pg151] Dutch and French of colonial days enriched the vocabulary of the colonists, how the German immigrants of the first half of the nineteenth century enriched it still further, and how the Irish of the same period influenced its everyday usages. The same process is still going on. The Italians, the Slavs, and, above all, the Russian Jews, make steady contributions to the American vocabulary and idiom, and though these contributions are often concealed by quick and complete naturalization their foreignness to English remains none the less obvious. I should worry,[46] in its way, is correct English, but in essence it is as completely Yiddish as kosher, ganof, schadchen, oi-yoi, matzoh or mazuma.[47] Black-hand, too, is English in form, but it is nevertheless as plainly an Italian loan-word as spaghetti, mafia or padrone.
The extent of such influences upon American, and particularly upon spoken American, remains to be studied; in the whole literature I can find but one formal article upon the subject. That article[48] deals specifically with the suffix -fest, which came into American from the German and was probably suggested by familiarity with sängerfest. There is no mention of it in any of the dictionaries of Americanisms, and yet, in such forms as talk-fest and gabfest it is met with almost daily. So with -heimer, -inski and -bund. Several years ago -heimer had a great vogue in slang, and was rapidly done to death. But wiseheimer remains [Pg152] in colloquial use as a facetious synonym for smart-aleck, and after awhile it may gradually acquire dignity. Far lowlier words, in fact, have worked their way in. Buttinski, perhaps, is going the same route. As for the words in -bund, many of them are already almost accepted. Plunder-bund is now at least as good as pork-barrel and slush-fund, and money-bund is frequently heard in Congress.[49] Such locutions creep in stealthily, and are secure before they are suspected. Current slang, out of which the more decorous language dredges a large part of its raw materials, is full of them. Nix and nixy, for no, are debased forms of the German nichts; aber nit, once as popular as camouflage, is obviously aber nicht. And a steady flow of nouns, all needed to designate objects introduced by immigrants, enriches the vocabulary. The Hungarians not only brought their national condiment with them; they also brought its name, paprika, and that name is now thoroughly American.[50] In the same way the Italians brought in camorra, padrone, spaghetti and a score of other substantives, and the Jews made contributions from Yiddish and Hebrew and greatly reinforced certain old borrowings from German. Once such a loan-word gets in it takes firm root. During the first year of American participation in the World War an effort was made, on patriotic grounds, to substitute liberty-cabbage for sour-kraut, but it quickly failed, for the name had become as completely Americanized as the thing itself, and so liberty-cabbage seemed affected and absurd. In the same way a great many other German words survived the passions of the time. Nor could all the influence of the professional patriots obliterate that German influence which has fastened upon the American yes something of the quality of ja.
Constant familiarity with such contributions from foreign languages and with the general speech habits of foreign peoples has made American a good deal more hospitable to loan-words than English, even in the absence of special pressure. Let the same [Pg153] word knock at the gates of the two languages, and American will admit it more readily, and give it at once a wider and more intimate currency. Examples are afforded by café, vaudeville, employé, boulevard, cabaret, toilette, exposé, kindergarten, dépôt, fête and menu. Café, in American, is a word of much larger and more varied meaning than in English and is used much more frequently, and by many more persons. So is employé, in the naturalized form of employee. So is toilet: we have even seen it as a euphemism for native terms that otherwise would be in daily use. So is kindergarten: I read lately of a kindergarten for the elementary instruction of conscripts. Such words are not unknown to the Englishman, but when he uses them it is with a plain sense of their foreignness. In American they are completely naturalized, as is shown by the spelling and pronunciation of most of them. An American would no more think of attempting the French pronunciation of depot or of putting the French accents upon it than he would think of spelling toilet with the final te or of essaying to pronounce Anheuser in the German manner. Often curious battles go on between such loan-words and their English equivalents, and with varying fortunes. In 1895 Weber and Fields tried to establish music-hall in New York, but it quickly succumbed to vaudeville-theatre, as variety had succumbed to vaudeville before it. In the same way lawn-fete (without the circumflex accent, and commonly pronounced feet) has elbowed out the English garden-party. But now and then, when the competing loan-word happens to violate American speech habits, a native term ousts it. The French crèche offers an example; it has been entirely displaced by day-nursery.
The English, in this matter, display their greater conservatism very plainly. Even when a loan-word enters both English and American simultaneously a sense of foreignness lingers about it on the other side of the Atlantic much longer than on this side, and it is used with far more self-consciousness. The word matinée offers a convenient example. To this day the English commonly print it in italics, give it its French accent, and pronounce it with some attempt at the French manner. But in America it is entirely naturalized, and the most ignorant man [Pg154] uses it without any feeling that it is strange. The same lack of any sense of linguistic integrity is to be noticed in many other directions—for example, in the freedom with which the Latin per is used with native nouns. One constantly sees per day, per dozen, per hundred, per mile, etc., in American newspapers, even the most careful, but in England the more seemly a is almost always used, or the noun itself is made Latin, as in per diem. Per, in fact, is fast becoming an everyday American word. Such phrases as "as per your letter (or order) of the 15th inst." are incessantly met with in business correspondence. The same greater hospitality is shown by the readiness with which various un-English prefixes and affixes come into fashion, for example, super- and -itis. The English accept them gingerly; the Americans take them in with enthusiasm, and naturalize them instanter.[51]
The same deficiency in reserve is to be noted in nearly all other colonialized dialects. The Latin-American variants of Spanish, for example, have adopted a great many words which appear in true Castilian only as occasional guests. Thus in Argentina matinée, menu, début, toilette and femme de chambre are perfectly good Argentine, and in Mexico sandwich and club have been thoroughly naturalized. The same thing is to be noted in the French of Haiti, in the Portuguese of Brazil, and even in the Danish of Norway. Once a language spreads beyond the country of its origin and begins to be used by people born, in the German phrase, to a different Sprachgefühl, the sense of loyalty to its vocabulary is lost, along with the instinctive feeling for its idiomatic habits. How far this destruction of its forms may go in the absence of strong contrary influences is exhibited by the rise of the Romance languages from the vulgar Latin of the Roman provinces, and, here at home, by the decay of foreign languages in competition with English. The Yiddish that the Jews from Russia bring in is German debased with Russian, Polish and [Pg155] Hebrew; in America, it quickly absorbs hundreds of words and idioms from the speech of the streets. Various conflicting German dialects, among the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch and in the German areas of the Northwest, combine in a patois that, in its end forms, shows almost as much English as German. Classical examples of it are "es giebt gar kein use," "Ich kann es nicht ständen" and "mein stallion hat über die fenz gescheumpt und dem nachbar sein whiet abscheulich gedämätscht."[52] The use of gleiche for to like, by false analogy from gleich (=like, similar) is characteristic. In the same way the Scandinavians in the Northwest corrupt their native Swedish and Dano-Norwegian. Thus, American-Norwegian is heavy with such forms as strit-kar, reit-evé, nekk-töi and staits-pruessen, for street-car, right away, necktie and states-prison, and admits such phrases as "det meka ingen difrens."[53]
The changes that Yiddish has undergone in America, though rather foreign to the present inquiry, are interesting enough to be noticed. First of all, it has admitted into its vocabulary a large number of everyday substantives, among them boy, chair, window, carpet, floor, dress, hat, watch, ceiling, consumption, property, trouble, bother, match, change, party, birthday, picture, paper (only in the sense of newspaper), gambler, show, hall, kitchen, store, bedroom, key, mantelpiece, closet, lounge, broom, tablecloth, paint, landlord, fellow, tenant, shop, wages, foreman, sleeve, collar, cuff, button, cotton, thimble, needle, pocket, bargain, sale, remnant, sample, haircut, razor, waist, basket, school, scholar, teacher, baby, mustache, butcher, grocery, dinner, street and walk. And with them many characteristic Americanisms, [Pg156] for example, bluffer, faker, boodler, grafter, gangster, crook, guy, kike, piker, squealer, bum, cadet, boom, bunch, pants, vest, loafer, jumper, stoop, saleslady, ice-box and raise, with their attendant verbs and adjectives. These words are used constantly; many of them have quite crowded out the corresponding Yiddish words. For example, ingel, meaning boy (it is a Slavic loan-word in Yiddish), has been obliterated by the English word. A Jewish immigrant almost invariably refers to his son as his boy, though strangely enough he calls his daughter his meidel. "Die boys mit die meidlach haben a good time" is excellent American Yiddish. In the same way fenster has been completely displaced by window, though tür (=door) has been left intact. Tisch (=table) also remains, but chair is always used, probably because few of the Jews had chairs in the old country. There the beinkel, a bench without a back, was in use; chairs were only for the well-to-do. Floor has apparently prevailed because no invariable corresponding word was employed at home: in various parts of Russia and Poland a floor is a dill, a podlogé, or a bricke. So with ceiling. There were six different words for it.