Words Across the Sea

I

THE Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, who had a way of disguising large impersonal suggestions as personal chitchat or mere fooling, once declared his own extravagant appetite for language in terms that admirably describe the mass of his fellow Americans. The remark is eighty years old, — it occurs, by the way, in an installment of the first serial ever published in the Atlantic Monthly, — but it speaks even more eloquently for the America of 1938 than for that of 1858. ‘I am,’ the Autocrat said, ‘omniverbivorous by nature and training.’ Being above mere pedantic mystification of the unlettered, he instantly translated his sesquipedalian nonce word: ‘Passing by such words as are poisonous, I can swallow most others, and chew such as I cannot swallow.’

The statement is such a one as Holmes could hardly have made without at least a flash of perception that it was genuinely descriptive of his whole country from early colonial times. In a context at no great remove from that quoted he notes that we are ‘the Romans of the modern world — the great assimilating people’; and he toyed with the speculation that the Anglo-Saxon cannot survive in the climate of this continent, so unlike that of the mother island, unless he is ‘kept up by fresh supplies.’ The essential American, he liked to believe, is ‘ the Englishman reinforced.’ This idea in its more generalized shape was, then, a favorite and recurrent one of his, and it is not easy to believe that he failed to associate with the specific business of language the principle he saw so clearly in other connections.

America is, in any event, omniverbivorous by training and nature and has become steadily more so to this day. The twentieth-century American, in fact, goes the Autocrat one better in that he does not pass by the words that are poisonous; it does not occur to him that there are any such. (Holmes supplied an example of his poisonous words in the aphorism, ‘The woman who “calc’lates” is lost.’ ‘Retire’ for ‘go to bed’ also gave him an otalgia.) Like Holmes, we speakers of neo-English will swallow about anything that comes in syllables, and the newer it is the more avidly we swallow it. Our linguistic history on this continent is one long demonstration of the Autocrat’s theorem that the AngloSaxon finds it impossible to survive here except as his vitality is constantly replenished by fresh supplies.

Three centuries of such replenishment have made us heir to accumulated verbal assets that, so far as range, variety, or sheer quantity goes, dwarf those of any other Occidental tongue and leave those of the British Isles, by comparison, nowhere. Our speech is English reinforced in every imaginable way that means quantitative extension. We have minted, adapted, or borrowed new names for things unknowm to the English or known to us first (prairie, succotash, butte, arroyo, ranch, picayune). To suit our own sense of fitness or expressiveness we have renamed a variety of things known to both peoples (sidewalk, vacation, billboard, squash, hardware). With a freedom strange and, indeed, obnoxious to the modern English we have naturalized terms from most of the American Indian dialects and languages, from Eskimo, from all the tongues of Europe, from the principal ones of Asia.

By inventive fertility in the manipulation of affixes we have made English itself increase and multiply, often against the resistance of its self-appointed British custodians (belittle, itemize, electioneer, editorial, donate). Bored with the very sound of everyday literal terms for common things and experiences, we make each such term proliferate in substitutes at every level from mild pleasantry to pungent slang (Cape Cod turkey, Pope’s nose, logroller, pussyfoot, baloney, joy ride, inkslinger, rubberneck, landslide, sob sister; and witness tied, hitched, haltered, tethered, welded, sealed, and other improvisations for ‘married,’ stanza, canto, strophe, frame, for an inning of baseball, and Hollywood’s sublime horse opera for a Western film).

In these and a dozen other ways the history of English on this continent is above all a history of rapid, incessant, unbridled growth. American speech, it seems, has perpetuated a stage of youthfully creative zest out of which transatlantic English had begun to emerge even before the eighteenth-century beginnings of serious lexicography.

II

The most cursory review of these differences leads to the conviction that the ordinary American has the run of a great many more words than the ordinary Englishman; that he possesses and uses an actually larger vocabulary. This opinion may not be statistically provable, but it is as certain as any unprovable fact can be. For we fall heir to all the British English there ever was, barring a few score terminological variants (a majority of which, as holiday, lumber, biscuit, we have preserved for somewhat different uses); and to boot we have the whole lavish store of trimmings with which we have ourselves diversified and begauded the king’s English.

We manage language as some New England housewives keep house, throwing away nothing we have ever owned, perhaps relegating our old verbal furnishings to the attic as we replace them with new, but sooner or later thriftily bringing out the old to be refurbished with new meanings (pie, penny, corn, store, battery). We retain British words in senses long archaic or obsolete in Britain (as the Chaucerian ‘guess’ for ‘suppose’), and we even cling to scraps of English dialect that have either failed to get into standard English or have been lost out of it (chump, shoat, pesky, char = chore). For innumerable things we have both the British term and our own (railroad, railway; fall, autumn; vaudeville, variety; can, tin; letter carrier, postman; shade, blind). In fact, most of our inventions and borrowings mean, not simple displacement of old terms by new, but retention of the old alongside the new for interchangeable use. Having, then, virtually the whole arsenal of British English at our disposal, whereas the English have accepted thus far only a fraction of American English, we can scarcely fail, class for class, to outdo our cousins in the matter of vocabulary.

The American is, in short, verbally eclectic and omnivorous. His appetite for variants knows no satiety. Of the modern Occidental peoples he certainly makes the nearest approach to that unattainable ideal, the creation of new language for each new occasion, and his repertory of overlapping synonyms for the common ideas and acts is a marvel of the age. For instance, a typical American child thirty months of age, living in a fairly articulate household, has the following expressions for the simple command ‘go away,’ and can be heard to use all of them idiomatically when speaking to animals, toy animals, and dolls: go, go away, go on, go along, off with you, be off with you, away with you, get out, get along, get along with you, light out, clear out, hurry up, scamper, scatter, skitter, scoot, scurry, move, move on, get a move on, mosey along, disappear, vamose, mooch, flit, flitter, fly, beat it, git.

Twenty years ago the list would certainly have included the magnificent invention ‘skiddoo,’ a word done to death, as many an American invention has been, by its inherent expressiveness. The wonder is that ‘breeze along’ and ‘ scram ’ are among the missing. The rest of the same child’s vocabulary is, of course, in proportion, and runs a like gamut from restraint to exaggeration, from bookishness to colloquialism, from unexceptionable diction to slang. In a small suggestive way it is representative of American adult speech so far as numerical resources are concerned. Is it anywhere near as representative of British?

The result of such a comparison does not, to be sure, agree very well with a long-standing official belief that the average American somehow gets through life commanding no more than a pitifully, grotesquely limited stock of a few hundreds of words. But, happily, this cherished delusion of the learned about the speech of the unlearned, after decades of being handed on from one rhetorician to another as a sort of trade superstition, is now pretty thoroughly demolished by statistical investigation. It is shown by documented studies that normal children of five — and some noticeably subnormal adults — possess vocabularies to be counted in thousands, not mere hundreds, of words; that Americans not trained or skilled in language have a stock of nouns alone that far exceeds what was once estimated to be the entire vocabulary of a tolerably well educated person; and that an extremely moderate total allowance for the educated citizen is 30,000 words — from seven to ten times as many as a typical pre-war rhetoric on my desk names as a liberal guess.

It is interesting in the present connection to note that, in this country, the delusion referred to was propagated, not to say parroted, by Anglomaniacs and that it apparently came entirely from English sources. In The American Language, Mr. H. L. Mencken’s wide-ranging, compendious, and invaluable popular essay in philological patriotism, an American scholar is cited as having traced the superstition to such sources as the English rector who stated that ‘some of the laborers in his parish had not three hundred words in their vocabulary.’ This rector is an old friend of many Americans. He was habitually cited by the great worthies of the Harvard tradition in rhetoric, from Adams Sherman Hill on; and I am afraid he used to be cited to college sophomores, at second or tenth hand, by many scores of us who knew no more about the matter than that our elders and betters had once told us so-and-so, and to whom, heaven forgive us, it never occurred to open our minds to the richly suggestive actualities of the American speech and writing all around us.

To what extent the clergyman’s estimate was a mere impression or snap judgment — and to what extent, supposing it to have been accurate in its day, the darkness has been dispersed by the subsequent spread of popular education — I am in no position to guess. But two points, at least, are clear: (1) he was reporting upon a certain level of English, not American, speech; and (2) the application of his findings to the American populace involved large and erroneous assumptions of analogy by learned men. A little investigation would have shown them that any such account was a libel on the verbal equipment of many American infants of two.

Self-evidently, there has never been a time when any Englishman, savant or yokel, would not materially have increased his stock of words by residence in America. Englishmen have, in fact, been doing precisely that from the year 1607. Even to this day, and even when they stay at home, they learn a good many more words from us than we from them, though they are commonly reluctant where we are eager. The reason is simply that we have so many more words for them to learn.

III

We have more words; do we also, as many of us passionately maintain and a few of the English generously concede, have better words? The question carries us at a plunge into waters deep, cold, and murky.

Taking it in its most literal meaning, we can find no answer but a plain ‘Yes.’ The reason is already stated. Being able to disport ourselves in two great streams of English to their one, and possessing the best along with the worst of both, we enjoy the omniverbivorous freedom of all their good words and our own too.

But this is not quite what is generally meant by the question. More often it is restricted by implication to those really very small areas of English in which the two peoples consistently use different words for the same meaning. And here the waters begin to deepen. For sometimes one word surpasses the other in descriptive accuracy, only to be surpassed by it in imaginativeness or vigor (spanner, monkey wrench; block, traffic jam; whiskey-and-soda, highball). As a rule it is the British term that excels in literal truth, the American in figurative piquancy. But not always: the English have, for instance, the telling phrase ‘cat burglar’ for what we tamely call a second-story worker or porch climber. Where there is this difference, who is to say how much of one quality shall balance how much of the other? And where is the scale to weigh such qualities in the first place?

Anyway, the great majority of parallel Briticisms and Americanisms are pretty close equivalents in both respects (lift, elevator; tram, trolley car; underground, subway; gramophone, phonograph; tart, pie; goloshes, rubbers; sledge, sled). And, when all is said, the total of such differences is so small a fraction of the common language, and the interchange of terms is becoming so free, that our quest ion is hardly worth asking at all unless it is intended to cover more ground than this.

What the British defenders of the barricades (together with our own Anglomaniacs) really mean by their general disdain for our ‘slanguage,’ as they are pleased to call it, is that the net effect of the American contribution to English is debasement and vulgarization. That some of our coinages have great felicity, they do not deny; indeed, how could they, since many are now so long established in Great Britain that their origin is forgotten? But they insist that for every such happy invention we produce half a dozen or a hundred forms that are tasteless, barbaric, or grotesque. In fine, our bad so far outweighs our good that the general average of English diction is lowered by the American share in it. To the language we contribute, they say, a few drops of enlivenment and a vast flood of impurities.

But how much actual merit is there in this entire notion of the English vocabulary as an average that can be lowered by intrusions of the barbaric and kept up by conscientious, resistance to such intrusions? Does it really make sense to talk about the net effect on the language of a whole people’s contribution to it? Historically, it seems to make very little. All such ways of thinking ignore the decisive fact that time and taste are a great composite sieve through which the useless addenda to language pass to oblivion while the useful ones are retained. One good word remains just as good though a thousand bad ones exist beside it, and it is pointless to speak of words as if they were apples in a barrel. The validity of our language is no average, but rather the sum of its positive merits. When this continent gives the language a single such invention as ‘ blizzard’— it has, of course, supplied hundreds quite as admirable — it has thereby improved the resources of English, and the improvement is not undone by whatever else we may do. The linguistic genius of a people has surely as much claim to be measured by its best creations as an author has to be known by his best work or a horse by his fastest mile.

And, anyhow, what words are good if not the ones that make their way and survive? To persons of a certain temperament any word seems bad when it is new, because it is new. But every old word was new once; all have had to run the same gauntlet. Neologisms that, because they answer to some continuing need, are destined to last are, ipso facto, good. They may not seem so to us now, but we are bound to come to it. Who in England to-day has any feeling that that once outlandish American importation, ‘backwoods,’ is less reputable, less English, than the parts of the vocabulary that go back to Wycliffe? It is, indeed, more English than some of Wychffe’s words, for some of them, answering to no felt need of our time, are obsolete and therefore alien.

Historically, it is as senseless to talk about purity of diction as about purity of race.

IV

What actually debases and impoverishes diction is not the coinage of new words that the future may or may not pronounce bad, but rather the perversion of established, admittedly good words — their prostitution to uses that dilute or obliterate their sense. And in this kind of vitiation we certainly have no preëminence over the English themselves, who are always taking one sound word or another and degrading it to mere patter.

Conspicuous fairly recent examples are what they have done to convert the two adverbs ‘definitely’ and ‘quite’ into mere verbal catchalls of a modish sort. That polished sleuth, Lord Peter Death Breadon Wimsey, exemplifies the fate of both in a single line of Miss Dorothy L. Sayers’s best-selling murder story, Busmans Honeymoon. ‘We must all try to think calmly,’ the rector begins. ‘“Quite,” said Peter. “Definitely.”’ This dry ‘quite’ is now doing duty for meanings that American speech of various levels might cover by ‘Just so,’ ‘I hear you,’ ‘You bet,’ ‘You said it,’ ‘Says you,’ and ‘What of it?’ The current ‘definitely’ means ‘decidedly,’ ‘certainly,’ ‘noticeably,’ ‘very,’ ‘more or less,’ and, on occasion, something pretty close to ‘indefinitely.’ Elsewhere in the same book we read: ‘ I ’m definitely sorry for the girl,’ ‘You’re definitely too good to live,’ and ‘Baths, real baths, are definitely a good idea.’ The answer to ‘Rather giddy-making, but nice’ is ‘Oh, definitely’; and the question ‘Are you sorry we did n’t go to Paris or Mentone after all?’ draws the answer ‘No, definitely not.’

More thanks to Miss Sayers than to any other one person, this plague is now epidemic in America too. In a New York reporter’s account of an interview with Miss Marlene Dietrich I learn that the actress wore no rouge, though she was ‘definitely lipsticked.’ A young woman volunteer on one of Major Bowes’s radio programmes describes herself as being ‘definitely from Brooklyn.’ Even a recent Atlantic article declares that ‘there should definitely be some manner of licensing testing laboratories.’ A Manhattan store (Anglice shop) says that all the débutantes are describing one of its new ‘creations’ in winter headgear as ‘definitely divine.’ One of my cisatlantic correspondents finds himself at last provoked to write: ‘There is always some popular word one must use, and whether it is used correctly or not is secondary. Just now that word is “definitely.” To be up-to-date you must grasp this word by the fur of the neck, twirl it around, and let fly into the nearest sentence. It would n’t do to say simply, “I have decided to raise dahlias next fall.” No, indeed! Say “I have definitely decided to raise dahlias” (or hell or whatever). In a short time a new word will be “it” to take the place of “definitely.”’ And, he might have added, ‘definitely’ will have become denatured almost beyond recognition. That, if you like, is linguistic decay.

The British are, of course, by no means alone in their addiction to such catchalls of speech. They are merely prone enough to them to justify the retort courteous whenever the English pot calls the American kettle black. The literate classes of both countries are always sneering at the popular habit of making some one overworked expression do duty for a dozen or twenty meanings (nice, awfully, the limit, rotten, not so hot, swell, swanky), but the lugubrious truth is that the literate classes themselves are much given to the same foible. In American reviews of a single week-end I have found the word ‘significant’ used to convey, so far as I could determine by the context, the following meanings: important, charged with meaning, timely, enduring, popular, eagerly awaited, influential, ingenious, clear, self-betraying, cogent, representative, suggestive, ambiguous, penetrating, apt, suspicious, dubious, sound, disingenuous, risqué. The British abuse the word almost as incorrigibly. Reaction, colorful, vibrant, glamorous, compelling, are other such notoriously jaded words of the jaded reviewer. There is, in fact, a comprehensive vocabulary of them, and a great part of Anglo-American periodical criticism is written with the automatism of stale slang, not in English, but in what ought to be called Literish, or perhaps Criticant.

The vocabulary is debased, then, by the careless triteness that abuses existing words of good repute, rather than by the inroads of neologisms, barbarisms, and slang terms. Of these latter groups some members will be the reputable words of the future. Which ones, there is no way of knowing in advance. For all we can tell, expressions that the fastidious particularly loathe — for instance, ‘contact’ and ‘ proposition ’ as verbs — may presently be so integral with the language that only the philologist can think why they ever seemed loathsome. (That is exactly the history of the verbs ‘ to negative’ and ‘to advocate,’ which, by the way, were also Americanisms to begin with.) As for the much greater number of similar expressions destined to enjoy their heyday and perish, most of them will not have left a chemical trace in the permanent language.

Nothing on earth is deader than a dead colloquialism that used to be on everybody’s lips forty times a day. It is, for instance, only by a feat of memory that I recover the verb ‘to smear’ in a slang application of my youth, as a synonym of overthrow, rout, dispose of, or confute. A football play stopped dead in its tracks was ‘smeared’; and ‘smeared’ was the undergraduate who, asking a patently idiotic question of George Lyman Kittredge in English 2, drew a glare, an awful silence, and at last, in a voice of hollow despair, the adroitly timed words ‘Are there any other questions?’ We used to think this invention among the better pieces of slang, and it was used freely by many a collegian of that era whose tongue would never have condescended to ‘rubberneck’ or ‘skiddoo’; but our teachers campaigned implacably against it in the interest of purity, just because it was slang and therefore a debasement. Their campaign had, of course, nothing whatever to do with its demise; we simply wore the expression ragged and turned to respectable old words and newer fashions in slang.

Our teachers need not have bothered. The language can be counted on to obliterate its verbal rubbish as a high mountain peak sweeps away in winter the tin cans and waste paper of the summer visitant. Whether a neologism be witty (‘lounge lizard’) or dull (‘beautician’), learned (‘moron’) or illiterate (‘go some place else’), British (‘ wangle’) or American (‘give him the works’) — these issues are neither here nor there. The few expressions that last are completely disinfected by time; their youth is forgiven, their very provenance forgotten; they enrich the language. But the converse is not true. No impoverishment is wrought by the many worthless coinages that soon exhaust their vogue and disappear.

It is a truism that might well be borne in mind by our censors of all things new, not to mention the British censor of all things American.

V

Because our continent has long been more fluently creative of new speech than the British Isles, and because latterly we have exported far more speech to Britain than we have imported from it, the more radical theorists of both countries try to show that we are rapidly developing a complete language of our own — one so divergent in all particulars from English that neither people will long be able to comprehend the speech and writing of the other without translation. The tendency was first remarked to our discredit by sarcastic English observers, but in the last generation or so their impeachment has been accepted as a compliment by various of our own Anglophobes, of whom Mr. H. L. Mencken of Baltimore is now the leading popular spokesman and Dr. Louise Pound of Nebraska perhaps the most eminent academic one. Among them they have made ‘the American language’ a household phrase, and the reality that it postulates is now supposed to be among our chief national glories.

Is there, sensibly speaking, any such entity as the American language? Or have certain of us drawn premature and exaggerated inferences from the really astonishing omniverbivorousness of our fellow countrymen? Do our linguistic Anglophobes really make out a case? There are many of us who still doubt that they do; and the doubters include some who have not an Anglophile sentiment in their whole composition.

For one consideration, we are disturbed by the failure of Mr. Mencken et al. to make any distinction between the really differentiating influences upon language and simple illiteracy. It is perfectly true that the ignorant error of today may be the respectable speech of to-morrow; a great deal of language has evolved through just that process. But the chances that any given error will become established are small to vanishing, and certainly too small to mean that we ought to devote ourselves might and main to propagating current error in the belief that thus we shape the language of the future.

Besides, why put American illiteracy on a different footing from British? The two populaces make the same kind of hash of standard usage; why should British offenses mean mere lack of education, whereas ours mean progress toward a new grammar? When Kipling in facetious mood writes

no observer detects a broad linguistic tendency in the solecisms; no one supposes himself to be reading the English of an emancipated future. But when an American baseball rookie or iceman is heard to say ‘on account I got no use for them kind of guys,’ we are expected to pounce on the pitiful scrap with glee and gloating and hold it up as a fingerboard to the diction and syntax of a new tongue. The argument won’t, as our cousins put it, wash. One might as well draw far-reaching conclusions from the syntactical confusion into which children easily slip; as when a two-year-old says, ‘Please may I don’t want to put on my rubbers?’

As for the lately increased rate of the British borrowings from America, it is a phenomenon that counts rather against than for the alleged differentiation. It is a cohesive force, not a sundering. Judicious English scholars arc now recognizing this fact themselves, and many of them have ceased to rail against the currency of new Americanisms among the British populace.

One prime identifying mark of a genuine language, as distinguished from a dialect or a patois, is that all ordinary persons born to that language possess its basic, nuclear stock entire. Their vocabularies may differ vastly in size and marginal frills, but they differ around an identical core. Now, no American individual has any such relationship to what is rashly called the American language. Mr. Mencken gets his American language by adding together on paper a great many isolated and insulated strata of usage that nothing has ever yet put together in living practice — dialectal peculiarities from all corners of every state; Broadway and collegiate slang; picturesque vagaries of the untutored; specialized trade jargons such as those celebrated in Mr. H. T. Webster’s series of cartoons, ‘They Don’t Speak Our Language’; the characteristic blunders of foreign-language groups just learning English; and forty more. Some of us thoroughly possess two or three of these many strata; others have a smattering of several or even all; but no one (except perhaps the Babu of Baltimore himself) has a comprehensive working grasp of them all, or is ever likely to have. If they constitute an independent language, then a printer’s type case is literature.

Thus we are confronted by the anomaly of a language, supposed to be our own, without any nuclear, universally familiar stock of words at all — a language nobody knows; that is to say, no language. The ordinary American has a central stock of words, to be sure; but when you inquire into its composition your first discovery is that most of it is included in our Anglo-Norman heritage. Your second discovery is that the rest of it consists almost entirely of such Americanisms as have already become English on their merits. This central stock of the ordinary American is, in short, English; and he has no other.

VI

Before me is an interesting recent novel, zmr. Kenneth Payson Kempton’s Monday Go to Meeting, written almost wholly in a regional variation of what Mr. Mencken calls American. (‘That would make Ada feel good, sort of make up for her not having a car, and might make her loosen up.’ ‘If he died on her hands she was sunk for fair.’ ‘She slept like a good one.’ ‘She looked young and just off the slim.’ ‘The man strength was all gone out of his fingers, they were more like a boy does n’t know where he’s going but bound to get there.’) The characters, Maine coastal folk, habitually think as well as speak in this idiom. No one can pick a serious flaw or show a noticeable gap in Mr. Kempton’s command of it. But one fact of the greatest linguistic importance is ignored throughout his book, as it is in nearly all regional fiction and in the results of most scholarly investigation of the folk speech. That missing fact is simply the provincial man’s tenacious possession of a second, a comparatively bookish idiom in addition to his everyday colloquial one.

From school reader, pulpit, and editorial page, from books, magazines, and lecturers, from the Bible and latterly the radio, the great majority of supposedly untutored provincials have acquired a quasi-literary language that is to all intents standard English. Many of them speak it with a remarkably fluent correctness, and most of them resort to it on occasions of some formality or dignity. To a good many of the folk whom Mr. Mencken likes to call the yokelry it is second nature to slip into this book English in talk with strangers, or on a visit to the city, or when they are called upon for a public utterance. And — a rock-bottom fact that will be received with incredulity by some urban philologists — it is the common thing for rural folk to think in this more polished style. In their imaginary dialogues it is the other person who speaks the patois of the region, while they themselves keep to diction as nearly impeccable as they can make it. Indeed, it is likely to be too nearly impeccable to be human; because, for better or worse, the folk ideal of language tends to become a somewhat overrefined, not to say prissy one, inimical to the salty originality of everyday speech and often verging, alas, on the nasty-nice.

At nearly every level of cultivation in the United States the more informal and slapdash ways of speaking are somewhat consciously on the defensive. All sorts of persons will express themselves quite adequately — ‘adequately enough,’ as some of them say — in what Mr. Mencken calls the vulgate, and then unexpectedly translate their meaning into book English by way of extenuation or apology. When the closing game of the 1937 World Series was being broadcast (or shall it be ‘broadcasted’?) and the Giants had men on first and second with none out, the sports reporter in charge assured us that something was about to ‘pop’ — ‘or happen,’ he instantly added. The emendation, be sure, was not made for clearness. It was an assertion of dignified refinement — his own and the National Broadcasting Company’s. A few minutes later, when two of his colleagues were reviewing the completed Series in dialogue, one of them exclaimed: ‘You said a mouthful! — if I may use that expression.’ Mr. Mencken is doing very much the same thing, though of course in a much more subtle and impressive way, when, to glorify the American vulgate in his seven hundred fascinating pages, he writes in the English of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

One very real general difference between the English and ourselves is the greater flexibility with which we compromise our linguistic habits to any new environmental influence. I know an elderly artisan of British origin who has lived and worked for forty years in rural Vermont: his speech to this day is all but unadulterated Cockney, On the other hand an American man of letters, Harvard professor emeritus, and former editor of the Atlantic, Mr. Bliss Perry, assures me that his mere summers in Vermont so far modify his speech toward that of his country neighbors that he can perceive the influence himself. He refers principally to the intonation of words; but the same easy adaptability affects likewise most Americans’ choice of words, and it makes the ignorant borrow from the educated with the greatest facility of all, simply because the ignorant are generally aware that they have everything to learn and are eager to take it from those whom they suppose to know. If Mr. Mencken were to reconcile himself to a month in any New England hamlet, he would add a hundred new expressions to his American curiosa, but he would also leave behind him a thousand terms from the standard English section of his immense vocabulary, and some of them would locally displace their colloquial equivalents and continue in common use.

The various strata of popular usage that might constitute an American language if they were to coalesce seem gradually to be succumbing to standardization and dying out. What replaces them is simply English. The great mass of Americans from coast to coast aspire to speak and write better than they now do, and by better they mean more correctly according to dictionaries and a tangible, teachable code, as the most esteemed radio announcers and advertisers speak and write, or mean to. That aspiration holds out small encouragement to anyone avid of proofs that an American language comes into being. It would be nearer the mark to say that one has died a-borning. In all likelihood we have got past the point of maximum divergence between the two great tributary streams of future English. The language is in a period of exceptionally rapid growth and modification, and more of the changes originate on this side of the Atlantic than on the other; but we may reasonably expect to see this evolving tongue become as a whole steadily more, not less, homogeneous. The facility of modern communication makes any other trend all but unthinkable.

VII

Shakespeare used pretty much all the English there was in his day and then manufactured more. His impulsion came from a teeming surplus of thoughts and perceptions over the existing means of expression. To-day his Anglo-American successors find a teeming surplus of language over what any one mind can have to express. The modern writer has not to burst the bonds of language, as the Elizabethans had to do or suffocate. Indeed, he is more likely to burst the toy balloon of his thought by blowing it up with expanding gases of verbiage, simply because the words are there in such unusable excess.

A greater and greater part of our protean modern language necessarily stands idle a greater and greater part of the time, and this fact leads us naturally enough to the interesting speculation that our verbal resources may have considerably outgrown our capacity to make profitable use of them; also that America, as possessor of the greatest share of this unmanageable swollen fortune of words, is in a more helpless plight than the other sections of the English-speaking world.

There is, to be sure, another point of view about this plethoric language of ours. A few very advanced thinkers look upon the present medium of expression as hopelessly effete and outworn, and now and then one of them even takes the ground that the sole intellectual task fully worthy of respect is the creation of a new language for the immediate future. It is a task that has actually been approached or skirted by various psychologists, sociologists, symbolic logicians, physicists, literary surrealists and postimpressionists, a handful of advertising copy writers, and Mr. James Joyce. And anyone who ever writes on fairly solemn subjects probably has traffic with a few correspondents who volunteer to instruct him in some such vein as this: ‘Tendencies being new kinds of lengthening over material in order to amplify into personal costing the flow from around you,’ or ‘Upon which, all theys, in betweens, all words, all actions, and all men become part of one gigantically simple universing law structure.’ But for some reason the hardheaded find the results exiguous compared with the effort demanded of the reader and (probably) expended by the author, and the world remains obdurately skeptical about the pretensions of those who tell us what momentous communications they are ready to make if ever they are given a verbal medium worthy of their inspiration. Most of us continue to suspect that the agitation is occasioned, not by our outgrowing the tongue we already have, but by its outgrowing us, quite as some other human institutions have done.

If there is any merit whatever in these surmises, the superior American facility in word manufacture may not be wholly to our advantage after all, nor is there so much gain as we usually assume in the modern cultivated man’s possession of a vocabulary three or even four times the size of Shakespeare’s. We may seriously question the service done us by the professional rhetoricians who are always adjuring us to free our minds by adding words to our store, as many and as fast as possible. In the wide and grateful public response to certain modern authors — the Messrs. Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway will serve to represent them — whose most obvious characteristic is their deliberate simplification of language, their war on verbiage, their almost primitive laconicism, is there not a strong hint that the present worldweariness is in great part sheer wordweariness? A man of letters to whom I have already referred, Mr. Bliss Perry, though he is a polar opposite of these modern writers in about every other way, will similarly remind you, if you urge upon him the benefits of a huge arsenal of words, that one of the most formidable giants of history was slain by a stripling who ‘chose him five smooth stones out of the brook.’ Mr. Perry means, among other things, that the best words are the old words, the ones worn smoothest by attrition. That is exactly what Joseph Conrad asserted incidentally when, defining the highest levels of truth accessible to the artist in fiction, he described the means whereby ‘the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words; of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.’

Was there not, after all, a profound rightness underlying the superficial absurdity of Captain Basil Hall’s querulous retort to Noah Webster a century ago: ‘But there are enough words already’?

Say what we like, there is still something about the finest, most memorable English that sweeps to limbo every contention of British and American, cosmopolitan and provincial, old and new, ornate and simple. If you challenge me to declare what, specifically, I mean by such uses of English, I rest content for the moment to present this brief sample: —

The sea remembers nothing. It is feline. It licks your feet, — its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and cat you, for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened. The mountains give their lost children berries and water; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them die. The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea has a fascinating, treacherous intelligence. The mountains lie about like huge ruminants, their broad backs awful to look upon, but safe to handle. The sea smooths its silver scales until you cannot see their joints, — but their shining is that of a snake’s belly, after all. — In deeper suggestiveness I find as great a difference. The mountains dwarf mankind and foreshorten the procession of its long generations. The sea drowns out humanity and time; it has no sympathy with either; for it belongs to eternity, and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.

The case for the American language, or for a new language fit to carry us on adventures that English, mere English, cannot compass, will be a stronger case when its advocates can show a finer passage than this, or one that promises to remain as living in the year 2017 as these words remain in 1937. For, you must know, this is not their first appearance in the Atlantic Monthly. They, too, were given to it some time ago by that very earliest of its favorite contributors, that playful and omniverbivorous American, the Autocrat.