The American Language
By . New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1919. 8vo, x+374 pp.
TROUGH Mr. Mencken’s book on our language has the rare distinction among philological works of deserving to be read especially for its faults, it has, so far as word-mongering is concerned, a distinct and useful sphere. In tracing the development of the difference between speech in America and in the mother country, it sheds convenient light in many very dark places. The preservation by the colonists of expressions and pronunciations that soon passed out of use in England; the picturesque inventions of frontier life; the borrowings of words from the Dutch, the French, the Indians, the Spanish, and, in more recent times, the flood of immigrants; the coinages of the West — these elements of difference between our tongue and the King’s English are most humorously, most comprehensively, and withal rather learnedly, exploited. There is a strange memorableness and delight in following for three centuries the sturdy independence of the American people growing into a new vocabulary. From the origins of ‘Yankee’ and ‘schooner,’ to the passing out of Indian terms and the spread of Western isms through the ‘movies’ nowadays, Mr. Mencken examines our language as a panorama of social history.
‘But in that case,’ as Lavengro would say, ‘he should rather be termed a philosopher than a philologist — between the two the difference is wide indeed!’ And it is in this very point that Mr. Mencken’s book develops its faults: in questions raised with an unerring sense of their importance, and answered with a strange and utter blindness. Mr. Mencken charges the teachers and scholars of America with a conspiracy of cackling against the recognition of a new speech, wholly divorced from that of England. Thus he runs over the common view that what he calls ‘the American language’ (the colloquial speech of the uneducated in this country) and the speech of the street in London likewise, are both but dialects of a world-wide standard language, growing under present conditions of commerce and literature into more and more nearly the same predominant language of the world.
To say that ‘for the old control of English over American to be reasserted is now quite unthinkable’ quite begs the question of this fundamental kinship of the two. And it is by no means holding out a hopeful prospect to assert that ‘“Me see she” is bad English, perhaps, but in some not too distant to-morrow it may be very fair American.’ Nor will all of us resent the fact — if we could believe it — that ‘George Ade is neglected because his work is grounded firmly upon the naational speech.' Happily, except in rare and easily detected spots, Mr. Mencken’s own style is not reduced to the level of that with which he works.
Thus the main interest of the book lies in serious questions wisely raised but wrongly answered, in a vein too merely popular, too glittering and boastful, too typical of one side of the American ideal to be more than fascinating propaganda for vulgarity. It is by no means a typical philological work, ‘an opus magnum which Murray will never publish, and nobody ever read.’ But its real value lies in its being the first in a new field, with essentials of references, material, and scheme which less personal, less bitterly anti-British, and possibly less epigrammatic and popular successors must use to build upon. T. L. H.