Chapter IX: Miscellanea, 301 (8)

[30] L. Pearsall Smith, in The English Language, p. 29, says that "the differentiation is ... so complicated that it can hardly be mastered by those born in parts of the British Islands in which it has not yet been established"--/e. g./, all of Ireland and most of Scotland.

[31] Quoted by White, in Words and Their Uses, pp. 264-5. White, however, dissented vigorously and devoted 10 pages to explaining the difference between the two auxiliaries. Most of the other authorities of the time were also against Marsh--for example, Richard Meade Bache (See his Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech, p. 92 /et seq./). Sir Edmund Head, governor-general of Canada from 1854 to 1861, wrote a whole book upon the subject: /Shall/ and /Will/, or Two Chapters on Future Auxiliary Verbs; London, 1856.

[32] The probable influence of Irish immigration upon the American usage is not to be overlooked. Joyce says flatly (English As We Speak It in Ireland, p. 77) that, "like many another Irish idiom this is also found in American society chiefly through the influence of the Irish." At all events, the Irish example must have reinforced it. In Ireland "/Will/ I light the fire, ma'am?" is colloquially sound.

[33] Often with such amusing results as "/whom/ is your father?" and "/whom/ spoke to me?" The exposure of excesses of that sort always attracts the wits, especially Franklin P. Adams.

[34] "It is /I/" is quite as unsound historically. The correct form would be "it /am/ I" or "I am it." Compare the German: "ich /bin/ es," not, "es /ist/ ich."

[35] A common direction to motormen and locomotive engineers. The English form is "slow down." I note, however, that "drive slow/ly/" is in the taxicab shed at the Pennsylvania Station, in New York.

[36] I quote from a speech made by Senator Sherman, of Illinois, in the United States Senate on June 20, 1918. /Vide/ /Congressional Record/ for that day, p. 8743. Two days later, "There is no question /but/ that" appeared in a letter by John Lee Coulter, A.M., Ph.D., dean of West Virginia University. It was read into the /Record/ of June 22 by Mr. Ashwell, one of the Louisiana representatives. Even the pedantic Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, oozing Harvard from every pore, uses /but that/. /Vide/ the /Record/ for May 14, 1918, p. 6996.

[37] June 15, 1918, p. 62.

[38] The English Language, p. 79.

[39] This phrase, of course, is a Briticism, and seldom used in America. The American form is "to take a matter up."

[40] P. 30.

[41] A Contribution /Towards/, etc., by Prof. H. Tallichet, vol. 1, pt. iv.

[42] /Yale Review/, April, 1918, p. 545.

[43] I Speak United States, /Saturday Review/, Sept. 22, 1894.

[44] Our Dictionaries, pp. 84-86.

[45] Should Language Be Abolished? by Harold Goddard, /Atlantic Monthly/, July, 1918, p. 63.

[46] In Yiddish, /ish ka bibble/. The origin and meaning of the phrase have been variously explained. The prevailing notion seems to be that it is a Yiddish corruption of the German /nicht gefiedelt/ (=/not fiddled/=/not flustered/). But this seems to me to be fanciful. To the Jews /ish/ is obviously the first personal pronoun and /kaa/ probably corruption of /kann/. As for /bibble/ I suspect that it is the offspring of /bedibbert/ (=/embarrassed/, /intimidated/). The phrase thus has an ironical meaning, /I should be embarrassed/, almost precisely equivalent to /I should worry/.

[47] All of which, of course, are coming into American, along with many other Yiddish words. These words tend to spread far beyond the areas actually settled by Jews. Thus I find /mazuma/ in A Word-List from Kansas, from the collectanea of Judge J. C. Ruppenthal, of Russell, Kansas, /Dialect Notes/, vol. iv. pt. v, 1916, p. 322.

[48] Louise Pound: Domestication of the Suffix /-fest/, /Dialect Notes/, vol. iv, pt. v, 1916. Dr. Pound, it should be mentioned, has also printed a brief note on /-inski/. Her observation of American is peculiarly alert and accurate.

[49] For example, see the /Congressional Record/ for April 3, 1918, p. 4928.

[50] /Paprika/ is in the Standard Dictionary, but I have been unable to find it in any English dictionary. Another such word is /kimono/, from the Japanese.

[51] /Cf./ Vogue Affixes in Present-Day Word-Coinage, by Louise Pound, /Dialect Notes/, vol. v, pt. i, 1918. Dr. Pound ascribes the vogue of /super-/ to German influences, and is inclined to think that /-dom/ may be helped by the German /-thum/.

[52] /Vide/ Pennsylvania Dutch, by S. S. Haldeman; Philadelphia, 1872. Also, The Pennsylvania German Dialect, by M. D. Learned; Baltimore, 1889. Also Die Zukunft deutscher Bildung in Amerika, by O. E. Lessing, /Monatshefte für deutsche Sprache und Pedagogik/, Dec., 1916. Also, Where Do You Stand? by Herman Hagedorn; New York, 1918, pp. 106-7. Also, On the German Dialect Spoken in the Valley of Virginia, by H. M. Hays, /Dialect Notes/, vol. iii, pt. iv, 1908, pp. 263-78.

[53] /Vide/ Notes on American-Norwegian, by Nils Flaten, /Dialect Notes/, vol. ii, 1900. Also, for similar corruptions, The Jersey Dutch Dialect, by J. Dyneley Prince, /ibid./, vol. iii, pt. vi, 1910, pp. 461-84. Also, see under Hempl, Flom, Bibaud, Buies and A. M. Elliott in the bibliography.

[54] For all these examples of American Yiddish I am indebted to the kindness of Abraham Cahan, editor of the /Jewish Daily Forward/. Mr. Cahan is not only editor of the chief Yiddish newspaper of the United States, but also an extraordinarily competent writer of English, as his novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, demonstrates.

[55] What Americans Talk in the Philippines, /American Review of Reviews/, Aug., 1913.

[56] /Cf./ The English of the Lower Classes in New York City and Vicinity, /Dialect Notes/, vol. i, pt. ix, 1896. It is curious to note that the same corruption occurs in the Spanish spoken in Santo Domingo. The Dominicans thus change /porque/ into /poique/. /Cf./ Santo Domingo, by Otto Schoenrich; New York, 1918, p. 172. See also High School Circular No. 17, Dept. of Education, City of New York, June 19, 1912, p. 6.

[57] The American People, 2 vols.; New York, 1909-11, vol. ii, pp. 449-50. For a discussion of this effect of contact with foreigners upon a language see also Beach-la-Mar, by William Churchill; Washington, 1911, p. 11 /et seq./

[58] /Vide/ Lounsbury: The Standard of Usage in English, pp. 65-7.

[59] For an exhaustive discussion of these formations /cf./ Clipped Words, by Elizabeth Wittman, /Dialect Notes/, vol. iv, pt. ii, 1914.

[60] Americanisms Old and New, p. 1.

[61] /Cf./ Semi-Secret Abbreviations, by Percy W. Long, /Dialect Notes/, vol. iv, pt. iii, 1915.

[62] The classical example is in a parliamentary announcement by Sir Robert Peel: "When that question is made to me in a proper time, in a proper place, under proper qualifications, and with proper motives, I will hesitate long before I will refuse to take it into consideration."

[63] /Cf./ On the Art of Writing, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch; p. 100 /et seq./

[64] This use of /tenderloin/ is ascribed to Alexander (alias "Clubber") Williams, a New York police captain. /Vide/ the /New York Sun/, July 11, 1913. Williams, in 1876, was transferred from an obscure precinct to West Thirtieth Street. "I've been having chuck steak ever since I've been on the force," he said, "and now I'm going to have a bit of tenderloin." "The name," says the /Sun/, "has endured more than a generation, moving with the changed amusement geography of the city, and has been adopted in all parts of the country."

[65] /New York Evening Mail/, Feb. 2, 1918, p. 1.

[66] Horizons, by Francis Hackett; New York, 1918, p. 53.

[67] It has even got into the Continental languages. In October, 1917, the Verband Deutscher Amateurphotographen-Vereine was moved to issue the following warning: "Es gibt kein deutschen /Kodaks/. /Kodak/, als Sammelname für photographische Erzeugnisse ist falsch und bezeichnet nur die Fabrikate der Eastman-/Kodak/-Company. Wer von einem /Kodak/ spricht und nur allgemein eine photographische Kamera meint, bedenkt nicht, dass er mit der Weiterverbreitung dieses Wortes die deutsche Industrie zugunsten der amerikanisch-englischen schädigt."

[68] /Cf./ Word-Coinage and Modern Trade Names, by Louise Pound, /Dialect Notes/, vol. iv, pt. i, 1913, pp. 29-41. Most of these coinages produce derivatives, /e. g./, /bevo-officer/, /to kodak/, /kodaker/.

[69] This conscious shortening, of course, is to be distinguished from the shortening that goes on in words by gradual decay, as in /Christmas/ (from /Christ's mass/) and /daisy/ (from /day's eye/).

[70] The Science of Language, vol. ii, p. 339.

[71] Daniel Jones: The Pronunciation of English, 2nd ed.; Cambridge, 1914, p. 1. Jones is lecturer in phonetics at University College, London.

[72] /Vide/ his Handbook of Phonetics, p. xv, /et seq./

[73] It is given in Ellis' Early English Pronunciation, p. 1293 /et seq./ and in Sayce's The Science of Language, vol. i, p. 353 /et seq./

[74] Every-Day English, p. 29.

[75] Robert J. Menner: The Pronunciation of English in America, /Atlantic Monthly/, March, 1915, p. 366.

[76] Words and Their Uses, p. 58.

[77] The following passage from Kipling's American Notes, ch. i, will be recalled: "Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the Yankee schoolmarm, the cider and the salt codfish of the Eastern states are responsible for what he calls a nasal accent. I know better. They stole books from across the water without paying for 'em, and the snort of delight was fixed in their nostrils for ever by a just Providence. That is why they talk a foreign tongue today."

[78] Lecture xxx. The English Language in America.

[79] Modern English, p. 166. /Cf./ A Desk-Book of 25,000 Words Frequently Mispronounced, by Frank H. Vizetelly, p. 652.

[80] Lexilogus, 2nd ed.; Berlin, 1860, p. 239. An English translation was published in London in 1846.

[81] A Desk-Book of 25,000 Words Frequently Mispronounced, p. xvi.

[82] The Pronunciation of English, p. 17.

[83] The Pronunciation of English in America, /op. cit./, p. 362.

[84] The Question of Our Speech, p. 29 /et seq./

[85] /Cf./ The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv, p. 487.

[86] Robert Bridges: A Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation; Oxford, 1913.

[87] An interesting discussion of this peculiarity is in Some Variant Pronunciations in the New South, by William A. Read, /Dialect Notes/, vol. iii, pt. vii, 1911, p. 504 /et seq./

[88] Hugh Mearns: Our Own, Our Native Speech, /McClure's Magazine/, Oct., 1916.

[89] The American actor imitates, not only English pronunciation in all its details, but also English dress and bearing. His struggles with such words as /extraordinary/ are often very amusing.

[90] /Cf./ Duncan Mackintosh: Essai Raisonné sur la Grammaire et la Pronunciation Anglais; Boston, 1797.

[91] Fashion and the Broad /A/, /Nation/, Jan 7, 1915.

[92] High School Circular No. 17, June 19, 1912.

[93] Every-Day English, p. 243.

[94] Open Boats, by Alfred Noyes, New York, 1917, pp. 89-91.

[95] P. 30.

[96] The Science of Language, vol. i, p. 259.

[97] B. MacDonald Hastings, /New York Tribune/, Jan. 19, 1913.

[98] Various minor differences between English and American pronunciation, not noted here, are discussed in British and American Pronunciation, by Louise Pound, /School Review/, vol. xxiii, no. 6, June, 1915.

[Pg177]

VI

The Common Speech

§ 1

/Grammarians and Their Ways/--So far, in the main, the language examined has been of a relatively pretentious and self-conscious variety--the speech, if not always of formal discourse, then at least of literate men. Most of the examples of its vocabulary and idiom, in fact, have been drawn from written documents or from written reports of more or less careful utterances, for example, the speeches of members of Congress and of other public men. The whole of Thornton's excellent material is of this character. In his dictionary there is scarcely a locution that is not supported by printed examples.

It must be obvious that such materials, however lavishly set forth, cannot exhibit the methods and tendencies of a living speech with anything approaching completeness, nor even with accuracy. What men put into writing and what they say when they take sober thought are very far from what they utter in everyday conversation. All of us, no matter how careful our speech habits, loosen the belt a bit, so to speak, when we speak familiarly to our fellows, and pay a good deal less heed to precedents and proprieties, perhaps, than we ought to. It was a sure instinct that made Ibsen put "bad grammar" into the mouth of Nora Helmar in "A Doll's House." She is a general's daughter and the wife of a professor, but even professor's wives are not above occasional bogglings of the cases of pronouns and the conjugations of verbs. The professors themselves, in truth, must have the same habit, for sometimes they show plain signs of it in print. More than once, plowing through profound and interminable treatises of grammar and syntax in [Pg178] preparation for the present work, I have encountered the cheering spectacle of one grammarian exposing, with contagious joy, the grammatical lapses of some other grammarian. And nine times out of ten, a few pages further on, I have found the enchanted purist erring himself.[1] The most funereal of the sciences is saved from utter horror by such displays of human malice and fallibility. Speech itself, indeed, would become almost impossible if the grammarians could follow their own rules unfailingly, and were always right.

But here we are among the learned; and their sins, when detected and exposed, are at least punished by conscience. What are of more importance, to those interested in language as a living thing, are the offendings of the millions who are not conscious of any wrong. It is among these millions, ignorant of regulation and eager only to express their ideas clearly and forcefully, that language undergoes its great changes and constantly renews its vitality. These are the genuine makers of grammar, marching miles ahead of the formal grammarians. Like the Emperor Sigismund, each man among them may well say: "/Ego sum ... super grammaticam/." It is competent for any individual to offer his contribution--his new word, his better idiom, his novel figure of speech, his short cut in grammar or syntax--and it is by the general vote of the whole body, not by the verdict of a small school, that the fate of the innovation is decided. As Brander Matthews says, there is not even representative government in the matter; the /posse comitatus/ decides directly, and despite the sternest protest, finally. The ignorant, the rebellious and the daring come forward with their brilliant barbarisms; the learned and conservative bring up their objections. "And when both sides have been heard, there is a show of hands; and by this the irrevocable decision of the community itself is rendered."[2] Thus it was that the Romance languages were fashioned out of the wreck of Latin, the vast [Pg179] influence of the literate minority to the contrary notwithstanding. Thus it was, too, that English lost its case inflections and many of its old conjugations, and that our /yes/ came to be substituted for the /gea-se/ (=/so be it/) of an earlier day, and that we got rid of /whom/ after /man/ in /the man I saw/, and that our stark pronoun of the first person was precipitated from the German /ich/. And thus it is that, in our own day, the language faces forces in America which, not content with overhauling and greatly enriching its materials, now threaten to work changes in its very structure.

Where these tendencies run strongest, of course, is on the plane of the vulgar spoken language. Among all classes the everyday speech departs very far from orthodox English, and even very far from any recognizable spoken English, but among those lower classes which make up the great body of the people it gets so far from orthodox English that it gives promise, soon or late, of throwing off its old bonds altogether, or, at any rate, all save the loosest of them. Behind it is the gigantic impulse that I have described in earlier chapters: the impulse of an egoistic and iconoclastic people, facing a new order of life in highly self-conscious freedom, to break a relatively stable language, long since emerged from its period of growth, to their novel and multitudinous needs, and, above all, to their experimental and impatient spirit. This impulse, it must be plain, would war fiercely upon any attempt at formal regulation, however prudent and elastic; it is often rebellious for the mere sake of rebellion. But what it comes into conflict with, in America, is nothing so politic, and hence nothing so likely to keep the brakes upon it. What it actually encounters here is a formalism that is artificial, illogical and almost unintelligible--a formalism borrowed from English grammarians, and by them brought into English, against all fact and reason, from the Latin. "In most of our grammars, perhaps in all of those issued earlier than the opening of the twentieth century," says Matthews, "we find linguistic laws laid down which are in blank contradiction with the genius of the language."[3] In brief, the American [Pg180] school-boy, hauled before a pedagogue to be instructed in the structure and organization of the tongue he speaks, is actually instructed in the structure and organization of a tongue that he never hears at all, and seldom reads, and that, in more than one of the characters thus set before him, does not even exist.

The effects of this are two-fold. On the one hand he conceives an antipathy to a subject so lacking in intelligibility and utility. As one teacher puts it, "pupils tire of it; often they see nothing in it, because there /is/ nothing in it."[4] And on the other hand, the school-boy goes entirely without sympathetic guidance in the living language that he actually speaks, in and out of the classroom, and that he will probably speak all the rest of his life. All he hears in relation to it is a series of sneers and prohibitions, most of them grounded, not upon principles deduced from its own nature, but upon its divergences from the theoretical language that he is so unsuccessfully taught. The net result is that all the instruction he receives passes for naught. It is not sufficient to make him a master of orthodox English and it is not sufficient to rid him of the speech-habits of his home and daily life. Thus he is thrown back upon these speech-habits without any helpful restraint or guidance, and they make him a willing ally of the radical and often extravagant tendencies which show themselves in the vulgar tongue. In other words, the very effort to teach him an excessively tight and formal English promotes his use of a loose and rebellious English. And so the grammarians, with the traditional fatuity of their order, labor for the destruction of the grammar they defend, and for the decay of all those refinements of speech that go with it.

The folly of this system, of course, has not failed to attract the attention of the more intelligent teachers, nor have they failed to observe the causes of its failure. "Much of the fruitlessness of the study of English grammar," says Wilcox,[5] "and many of the obstacles encountered in its study are due to 'the difficulties created by the grammarians.' These difficulties arise chiefly from three sources--excessive classification, multiplication of terms for a single conception, and the attempt to treat the English language as if it were highly inflected." So long ago as the 60's Richard Grant White began an onslaught upon all such punditic stupidities. He saw clearly that "the attempt to treat English as if it were highly inflected" was making its intelligent study almost impossible, and proposed boldly that all English grammar-books be burned.[6] Of late his ideas have begun to gain a certain acceptance, and as the literature of denunciation has grown[7] the grammarians have been constrained to overhaul their texts. When I was a school-boy, during the penultimate decade of the last century, the chief American grammar was "A Practical Grammar of the English Language," by Thomas W. Harvey.[8] This formidable work was almost purely synthetical: it began with a long series of definitions, wholly unintelligible to a child, and proceeded into a maddening maze of pedagogical distinctions, puzzling even to an adult. The latter-day grammars, at least those for the elementary schools, are far more analytical and logical. For example, there is "Longmans' Briefer Grammar," by George J. Smith,[9] a text now in very wide use. This book starts off, not with page after page of abstractions, but with a well-devised examination of the complete sentence, and the characters and relations of the parts of speech are very simply and clearly developed. But before the end the author begins to succumb to precedent, and on page 114 I find [Pg182] paragraph after paragraph of such dull, flyblown pedantry as this:

Some Intransitive Verbs are used to link the Subject and some Adjective or Noun. These Verbs are called Copulative Verbs, and the Adjective or Noun is called the Attribute.

The Attribute always describes or denotes the person or thing denoted by the Subject.

Verbals are words that are derived from Verbs and express action or being without asserting it. Infinitives and Participles are Verbals.

And so on. Smith, in his preface, says that his book is intended, "not so much to 'cover' the subject of grammar as to /teach/ it," and calls attention to the fact, somewhat proudly, that he has omitted "the rather hard subject of gerunds," all mention of conjunctive adverbs, and even the conjugation of verbs. Nevertheless, he immerses himself in the mythical objective case of nouns on page 108, and does not emerge until the end.[10] "The New-Webster-Cooley Course in English,"[11] another popular text, carries reform a step further. The subject of case is approached through the personal pronouns, where it retains its only surviving intelligibility, and the more lucid /object form/ is used in place of /objective case/. Moreover, the pupil is plainly informed, later on, that "a noun has in reality but two case-forms: a possessive and a common case-form." This is the best concession to the facts yet made by a text-book grammarian. But no one familiar with the habits of the pedagogical mind need be told that its interior pull is against even such mild and obvious reforms. Defenders of the old order are by no means silent; a fear seems to prevail that grammar, robbed of its imbecile classifications, may collapse entirely. Wilcox records how the Council of English Teachers of New Jersey, but a few years ago, spoke out boldly for the recognition of no less than five cases [Pg183] in English. "Why five?" asks Wilcox. "Why not eight, or ten, or even thirteen? Undoubtedly because there are five cases in Latin."[12] Most of the current efforts at improvement, in fact, tend toward a mere revision and multiplication of classifications; the pedant is eternally convinced that pigeon-holing and relabelling are contributions to knowledge. A curious proof in point is offered by a pamphlet entitled "Reorganization of English in Secondary Schools," compiled by James Fleming Hosic and issued by the National Bureau of Education.[13] The aim of this pamphlet is to rid the teaching of English, including grammar, of its accumulated formalism and ineffectiveness--to make it genuine instruction instead of a pedantic and meaningless routine. And how is this revolutionary aim set forth? By a meticulous and merciless splitting of hairs, a gigantic manufacture of classifications and sub-classifications, a colossal display of professorial bombast and flatulence.

I could cite many other examples. Perhaps, after all, the disease is incurable. What such laborious stupidity shows at bottom is simply this: that the sort of man who is willing to devote his life to teaching grammar to children, or to training school-marms to do it, is not often the sort of man who is intelligent enough to do it competently. In particular, he is not often intelligent enough to grapple with the fluent and ever-amazing permutations of a living and rebellious speech. The only way he can grapple with it at all is by first reducing it to a fixed and formal organization--in brief, by first killing it and embalming it. The difference in the resultant proceedings is not unlike that between a gross dissection and a surgical operation. The difficulties of the former are quickly mastered by any student of normal sense, but even the most casual of laparotomies calls for a man of special skill and address. Thus the elementary study of the national language, at least in America, is almost monopolized by dullards. Children are taught it by men and women who observe it inaccurately and expound it ignorantly. In most other fields the pedagogue meets a certain corrective competition and [Pg184] criticism. The teacher of any branch of applied mathematics, for example, has practical engineers at his elbow and they quickly expose and denounce his defects; the college teacher of chemistry, however limited his equipment, at least has the aid of text-books written by actual chemists. But English, even in its most formal shapes, is chiefly taught by those who cannot write it decently and who get no aid from those who can. One wades through treatise after treatise on English style by pedagogues whose own style is atrocious. A Huxley or a Stevenson might have written one of high merit and utility--but Huxley and Stevenson had other fish to fry, and so the business was left to Prof. Balderdash. Consider the standard texts on prosody--vast piles of meaningless words--hollow babble about spondees, iambics, trochees and so on--idiotic borrowings from dead languages. Two poets, Poe and Lanier, blew blasts of fresh air through that fog, but they had no successors, and it has apparently closed in again. In the department of prose it lies wholly unbroken; no first-rate writer of English prose has ever written a text-book upon the art of writing it.

§ 2

/Spoken American As It Is/--But here I wander afield. The art of prose has little to do with the stiff and pedantic English taught in grammar-schools and a great deal less to do with the loose and lively English spoken by the average American in his daily traffic. The thing of importance is that the two differ from each other even more than they differ from the English of a Huxley or a Stevenson. The school-marm, directed by grammarians, labors heroically, but all her effort goes for naught. The young American, like the youngster of any other race, inclines irresistibly toward the dialect that he hears at home, and that dialect, with its piquant neologisms, its high disdain of precedent, its complete lack of self-consciousness, is almost the antithesis of the hard and stiff speech that is expounded out of books. It derives its principles, not from the subtle logic [Pg185] of learned and stupid men, but from the rough-and-ready logic of every day. It has a vocabulary of its own, a syntax of its own, even a grammar of its own. Its verbs are conjugated in a way that defies all the injunctions of the grammar books; it has its contumacious rules of tense, number and case; it has boldly re-established the double negative, once sound in English; it admits double comparatives, confusions in person, clipped infinitives; it lays hands on the vowels, changing them to fit its obscure but powerful spirit; it disdains all the finer distinctions between the parts of speech.

This highly virile and defiant dialect, and not the fossilized English of the school-marm and her books, is the speech of the Middle American of Joseph Jacobs' composite picture--the mill-hand in a small city of Indiana, with his five years of common schooling behind him, his diligent reading of newspapers, and his proud membership in the Order of Foresters and the Knights of the Maccabees.[14] Go into any part of the country, North, East, South or West, and you will find multitudes of his brothers--car conductors in Philadelphia, immigrants of the second generation in the East Side of New York, iron-workers in the Pittsburgh region, corner grocers in St. Louis, holders of petty political jobs in Atlanta and New Orleans, small farmers in Kansas or Kentucky, house carpenters in Ohio, tinners and plumbers in Chicago,--genuine Americans all, hot for the home team, marchers in parades, readers of the yellow newspapers, fathers of families, sheep on election day, undistinguished norms of the /Homo Americanus/. Such typical Americans, after a fashion, know English. They can read it--all save the "hard" words, /i. e./, all save about 90 per cent of the words of Greek and Latin origin.[15] They can understand perhaps two-thirds of it as it comes from the lips of a political orator or clergyman. They have a feeling that it is, in some recondite sense, superior to the common speech of their kind. They recognize a fluent command of it as the salient mark of a "smart" and [Pg186] "educated" man, one with "the gift of gab." But they themselves never speak it or try to speak it, nor do they look with approbation on efforts in that direction by their fellows.

In no other way, indeed, is the failure of popular education made more vividly manifest. Despite a gigantic effort to enforce certain speech habits, universally in operation from end to end of the country, the masses of the people turn almost unanimously to very different speech habits, nowhere advocated and seldom so much as even accurately observed. The literary critic, Francis Hackett, somewhere speaks of "the enormous gap between the literate and unliterate American." He is apparently the first to call attention to it. It is the national assumption that no such gap exists--that all Americans, at least if they be white, are so outfitted with sagacity in the public schools that they are competent to consider any public question intelligently and to follow its discussion with understanding. But the truth is, of course, that the public school accomplishes no such magic. The inferior man, in America as elsewhere, remains an inferior man despite the hard effort made to improve him, and his thoughts seldom if ever rise above the most elemental concerns. What lies above not only does not interest him; it actually excites his derision, and he has coined a unique word, /high-brow/, to express his view of it. Especially in speech is he suspicious of superior pretension. The school-boy of the lower orders would bring down ridicule upon himself, and perhaps criticism still more devastating, if he essayed to speak what his teachers conceive to be correct English, or even correct American, outside the school-room. On the one hand his companions would laugh at him as a prig, and on the other hand his parents would probably cane him as an impertinent critic of their own speech. Once he has made his farewell to the school-marm, all her diligence in this department goes for nothing.[16] The boys with whom he plays baseball speak a tongue that is not the one taught in school, and so do the youths with whom he will begin learning a trade tomorrow, and the girl he will marry later on, and the saloon-keepers, star pitchers, vaudeville comedians, business [Pg187] sharpers and political mountebanks he will look up to and try to imitate all the rest of his life.

So far as I can discover, there has been but one attempt by a competent authority to determine the special characters of this general tongue of the /mobile vulgus/. That authority is Dr. W. W. Charters, now head of the School of Education at the University of Illinois. In 1914 Dr. Charters was dean of the faculty of education and professor of the theory of teaching in the University of Missouri, and one of the problems he was engaged upon was that of the teaching of grammar. In the course of this study he encountered the theory that such instruction should be confined to the rules habitually violated--that the one aim of teaching grammar was to correct the speech of the pupils, and that it was useless to harass them with principles which they already instinctively observed. Apparently inclining to this somewhat dubious notion, Dr. Charters applied to the School Board of Kansas City for permission to undertake an examination of the language actually used by the children in the elementary schools of that city, and this permission was granted. The materials thereupon gathered were of two classes. First, the teachers of grades III to VII inclusive in all the Kansas City public-schools were instructed to turn over to Dr. Charters all the written work of their pupils, "ordinarily done in the regular order of school work" during a period of four weeks. Secondly, the teachers of grades II to VII inclusive were instructed to make note of "all oral errors in grammar made in the school-room and around the school-building" during the five school-days of one week, by children of any age, and to dispatch these notes to Dr. Charters also. The result was an accumulation of material so huge that it was unworkable with the means at hand, and so the investigator and his assistants reduced it. Of the oral reports, two studies were made, the first of those from grades III and VII and the second of those from grades VI and VII. Of the written reports, only those from grades VI and VII of twelve typical schools were examined.

The ages thus covered ran from nine or ten to fourteen or fifteen, and perhaps five-sixths of the material studied came from [Pg188] children above twelve. Its examination threw a brilliant light upon the speech actually employed by children near the end of their schooling in a typical American city, and, /per corollary/, upon the speech employed by their parents and other older associates. If anything, the grammatical and syntactical habits revealed were a bit less loose than those of the authentic /Volkssprache/, for practically all of the written evidence was gathered under conditions which naturally caused the writers to try to write what they conceived to be correct English, and even the oral evidence was conditioned by the admonitory presence of the teachers. Moreover, it must be obvious that a child of the lower classes, during the period of its actual study of grammar, probably speaks better English than at any time before or afterward, for it is only then that any positive pressure is exerted upon it to that end. But even so, the departures from standard usage that were unearthed were numerous and striking, and their tendency to accumulate in definite groups showed plainly the working of general laws.[17]

Thus, no less than 57 per cent of the oral errors reported by the teachers of grades III and VII involved the use of the verb, and nearly half of these, or 24 per cent, of the total, involved a confusion of the past tense form and the perfect participle. Again, double negatives constituted 11 per cent of the errors, and the misuse of adjectives or of adjectival forms for adverbs ran to 4 per cent. Finally, the difficulties of the objective case among the pronouns, the last stronghold of that case in English, were responsible for 7 per cent, thus demonstrating a clear tendency to get rid of it altogether. Now compare the errors of these children, half of whom, as I have just said, were in grade III, and hence wholly uninstructed in formal grammar, with the errors made by children of the second oral group--that is, children of grades VI and VII, in both of which grammar is studied. Dr. Charters' tabulations show scarcely any difference in the [Pg189] character and relative rank of the errors discovered. Those in the use of the verb drop from 57 per cent of the total to 52 per cent, but the double negatives remain at 7 per cent and the errors in the case of pronouns at 11 per cent.

In the written work of grades VI and VII, however, certain changes appear, no doubt because of the special pedagogical effort against the more salient oral errors. The child, pen in hand, has in mind the cautions oftenest heard, and so reveals something of that greater exactness which all of us show when we do any writing that must bear critical inspection. Thus, the relative frequency of confusions between the past tense forms of verbs and the perfect participles drops from 24 per cent to 5 per cent, and errors based on double negatives drop to 1 per cent. But this improvement in one direction merely serves to unearth new barbarisms in other directions, concealed in the oral tables by the flood of errors now remedied. It is among the verbs that they are still most numerous; altogether, the errors here amount to exactly 50 per cent of the total. Such locutions as /I had went/ and /he seen/ diminish relatively and absolutely, but in all other situations the verb is treated with the lavish freedom that is so characteristic of the American common speech. Confusions of the past and present tenses jump from 2 per cent to 19 per cent, thus eloquently demonstrating the tenacity of the error. And mistakes in the forms of nouns and pronouns increase from 2 per cent to 16: a shining proof of a shakiness which follows the slightest effort to augment the vocabulary of everyday.

The materials collected by Dr. Charters and his associates are not, of course, presented in full, but his numerous specimens must strike familiar chords in every ear that is alert to the sounds and ways of the /sermo vulgus/. What he gathered in Kansas City might have been gathered just as well in San Francisco, or New Orleans, or Chicago, or New York, or in Youngstown, O., or Little Rock, Ark., or Waterloo, Iowa. In each of these places, large or small, a few localisms might have been noted--/oi/ substituted for ur in New York, /you-all/ in the South, a few Germanisms in Pennsylvania and in the upper Mississippi [Pg190] Valley, a few Spanish locutions in the Southwest, certain peculiar vowel-forms in New England--but in the main the report would have been identical with the report he makes. That vast uniformity which marks the people of the United States, in political doctrine, in social habit, in general information, in reaction to ideas, in prejudices and enthusiasms, in the veriest details of domestic custom and dress, is nowhere more marked than in language. The incessant neologisms of the national speech sweep the whole country almost instantly, and the iconoclastic changes which its popular spoken form are undergoing show themselves from coast to coast. "He hurt /his/self," cited by Dr. Charters, is surely anything but a Missouri localism; one hears it everywhere. And so, too, one hears "she invited /him/ and /I/," and "it hurt /terrible/," and "I /set/ there," and "this /here/ man," and "no, I /never, neither/", and "he /ain't/ here," and "where is he /at/?" and "it seems /like/ I remember," and "if I /was/ you," and "/us/ fellows," and "he /give/ her hell." And "he /taken/ and kissed her," and "he /loaned/ me a dollar," and "the man was /found/ two dollars," and "the bee /stang/ him," and "I /wouldda/ thought," and "/can/ I have one?" and "he got /hisn/," and "the boss /left/ him off," and "the baby /et/ the soap," and "/them/ are the kind I like," and "he /don't/ care," and "no one has /their/ ticket," and "how /is/ the folks?" and "if you would /of gotten/ in the car you could /of rode/ down."

Curiously enough, this widely dispersed and highly savory dialect--already, as I shall show, come to a certain grammatical regularity--has attracted the professional writers of the country almost as little as it has attracted the philologists. There are foreshadowings of it in "Huckleberry Finn," in "The Biglow Papers" and even in the rough humor of the period that began with J. C. Neal and company and ended with Artemus Ward and Josh Billings, but in those early days it had not yet come to full flower; it wanted the influence of the later immigrations to take on its present character. The enormous dialect literature of twenty years ago left it almost untouched. Localisms were explored diligently, but the general dialect went virtually unobserved. It is not in "Chimmie Fadden"; it is not in [Pg191] "David Harum"; it is not even in the pre-fable stories of George Ade, perhaps the most acute observer of average, undistinguished American types, urban and rustic, that American literature has yet produced. The business of reducing it to print had to wait for Ring W. Lardner, a Chicago newspaper reporter. In his grotesque tales of base-ball players, so immediately and so deservedly successful and now so widely imitated,[18] Lardner reports the common speech not only with humor, but also with the utmost accuracy. The observations of Charters and his associates are here reinforced by the sharp ear of one specially competent, and the result is a mine of authentic American.

In a single story by Lardner, in truth, it is usually possible to discover examples of almost every logical and grammatical peculiarity of the emerging language, and he always resists very stoutly the temptation to overdo the thing. Here, for example, are a few typical sentences from "The Busher's Honeymoon":[19]

I and Florrie /was/ married the day before yesterday just /like/ I told you we /was/ going to be.... You /was/ wise to get married in Bedford, where /not nothing/ is nearly half so dear.... The sum of what I have /wrote/ down is $29.40.... Allen told me I /should ought/ to give the priest $5.... I never /seen/ him before.... I didn't used to eat /no/ lunch in the playing season except when I /knowed/ I was not going to work.... I guess the meals /has/ cost me all together about $1.50, and I have /eat/ very little myself....

I was willing to tell her all about /them/ two poor girls.... They must not be /no/ mistake about who is the boss in my house. Some men /lets/ their /wife/ run all over them.... Allen has /went/ to a college football game. One of the reporters /give/ him a pass.... He called up and said he /hadn't/ only the one pass, but he was not hurting my feelings /none/.... The flat across the hall from this /here/ one is for rent.... If we should /of boughten/ furniture it would cost us in the neighborhood of $100, even without /no/ piano.... I consider myself lucky to /of/ found out about this before it was too late and somebody else had /of/ gotten the tip.... It will always be /ourn/, even when we move away.... Maybe you could /of did/ better if you had /of went/ at it in a different way.... Both /her/ and you /is/ welcome at my house.... I never /seen/ so much wine /drank/ in my life....

[Pg192]

Here are specimens to fit into most of Charters' categories--verbs confused as to tense, pronouns confused as to case, double and even triple negatives, nouns and verbs disagreeing in number, /have/ softened to /of/, /n/ marking the possessive instead of /s/, /like/ used in place of /as/, and the personal pronoun substituted for the demonstrative adjective. A study of the whole story would probably unearth all the remaining errors noted in Kansas City. Lardner's baseball player, though he has pen in hand and is on his guard, and is thus very careful to write /would not/ instead of /wouldn't/ and even /am not/ instead of /ain't/, offers a comprehensive and highly instructive panorama of popular speech habits. To him the forms of the subjunctive mood have no existence, and /will/ and /shall/ are identical, and adjectives and adverbs are indistinguishable, and the objective case is merely a variorum form of the nominative. His past tense is, more often than not, the orthodox present tense. All fine distinctions are obliterated in his speech. He uses invariably the word that is simplest, the grammatical form that is handiest. And so he moves toward the philological millennium dreamed of by George T. Lanigan, when "the singular verb shall lie down with the plural noun, and a little conjugation shall lead them."

§ 3

/The Verb/--A study of the materials amassed by Charters and Lardner, if it be reinforced by observation of what is heard on the streets every day, will show that the chief grammatical peculiarities of spoken American lie among the verbs and pronouns. The nouns in common use, in the overwhelming main, are quite sound in form. Very often, of course, they do not belong to the vocabulary of English, but they at least belong to the vocabulary of American: the proletariat, setting aside transient slang, calls things by their proper names, and pronounces those names more or less correctly. The adjectives, too, are treated rather politely, and the adverbs, though commonly transformed into adjectives, are not further mutilated. But the verbs and pronouns undergo changes which set off the common speech very [Pg193] sharply from both correct English and correct American. Their grammatical relationships are thoroughly overhauled and sometimes they are radically modified in form.

This process is natural and inevitable, for it is among the verbs and pronouns, as we have seen, that the only remaining grammatical inflections in English, at least of any force or consequence, are to be found, and so they must bear the chief pressure of the influences that have been warring upon all inflections since the earliest days. The primitive Indo-European language, it is probable, had eight cases of the noun; the oldest known Teutonic dialect reduced them to six; in Anglo-Saxon they fell to four, with a weak and moribund instrumental hanging in the air; in Middle English the dative and accusative began to decay; in Modern English they have disappeared altogether, save as ghosts to haunt grammarians. But we still have two plainly defined conjugations of the verb, and we still inflect it for number, and, in part, at least, for person. And we yet retain an objective case of the pronoun, and inflect it for person, number and gender.

Some of the more familiar conjugations of verbs in the American common speech, as recorded by Charters or Lardner or derived from my own collectanea, are here set down:

/Present/ /Preterite/ /Perfect Participle/

Am was bin (or ben)[20] Attack attackted attackted (Be)[21] was bin (or ben) [20] Beat beaten beat Become[22] become became Begin begun began Bend bent bent Bet bet bet Bind bound bound Bite bitten bit Bleed bled bled Blow blowed (or blew) blowed (or blew) Break broken broke Bring brought (or brung, or brang) brung Broke (passive) broke broke Build built built Burn burnt[23] burnt Burst[24] ---- ---- Bust busted busted Buy bought (or boughten) bought (or boughten) Can could could'a Catch caught[25] caught Choose chose choose Climb clum clum Cling (to hold fast) clung clung Cling (to ring) clang clang Come come came Creep crep (or crope) crep Crow crew crew Cut cut cut Dare dared dared Deal dole dealt Dig dug dug Dive dove dived Do done done (or did) Drag drug dragged Draw drawed[26] drawed (or drew) Dream dreampt dreampt Drink drank (or drunk) drank Drive drove drove Drown drownded drownded Eat et (or eat) ate Fall fell (or fallen) fell Feed fed fed Feel felt felt Fetch fetched[27] fetch Fight fought[28] fought Find found found Fine found found Fling flang flung Flow flew flowed Fly flew flew Forget forgotten forgotten Forsake forsaken forsook Freeze frozen (or friz) frozen Get got (or gotten) gotten Give give give Glide glode[29] glode Go went went Grow growed growed Hang hung[30] hung Have had had (or hadden) Hear heerd heerd (or heern) Heat het[31] het Heave hove hove Hide hidden hid H'ist[32] h'isted h'isted Hit hit hit Hold helt held (or helt) Holler hollered hollered Hurt hurt hurt Keep kep kep Kneel knelt knelt Know knowed knew Lay laid (or lain) laid Lead led led Lean lent lent Leap lep lep Learn learnt learnt Lend loaned[33] loaned Lie (to falsify) lied lied Lie (to recline) laid (or lain) laid Light lit lit Lose lost lost Make made made May ---- might'a Mean meant meant Meet met met Mow mown mowed Pay paid paid Plead pled pled Prove proved (or proven) proven Put put put Quit quit quit Raise raised raised Read read read Rench[34] renched renched Rid rid rid Ride ridden rode Rile[35] riled riled Ring rung rang Rise riz (or rose) riz Run run ran Say sez said See seen saw Sell sold sold Send sent sent Set set[36] sat Shake shaken (or shuck) shook Shave shaved shaved Shed shed shed Shine (to polish) shined shined Shoe shoed shoed Shoot shot shot Show shown showed Sing sung sang Sink sunk sank Sit[37] ---- ---- Skin skun skun Sleep slep slep Slide slid slid Sling slang slung Slit slitted slitted Smell smelt smelt Sneak snuck snuck Speed speeded speeded Spell spelt spelt Spill spilt spilt Spin span span Spit spit spit Spoil spoilt spoilt Spring sprung sprang Steal stole stole Sting stang stang Stink stank stank Strike struck struck Swear swore swore Sweep swep swep Swell swole swollen Swim swum swam Swing swang swung Take taken took Teach taught taught Tear tore torn Tell tole tole Think thought[38] thought Thrive throve throve Throw throwed threw Tread tread tread Wake woke woken Wear wore wore Weep wep wep Wet wet wet Win won (or wan)[39] won (or wan) Wind wound wound Wish (wisht) wisht wisht Wring wrung wrang Write written wrote

[Pg198]

A glance at these conjugations is sufficient to show several general tendencies, some of them going back, in their essence, to the earliest days of the English language. The most obvious is that leading to the transfer of verbs from the so-called strong conjugation to the weak--a change already in operation before the Norman Conquest, and very marked during the Middle English period. Chaucer used /growed/ for /grew/ in the prologue to "The Wife of Bath's Tale," and /rised/ for /rose/ and /smited/ for /smote/ are in John Purvey's edition of the Bible, /circa/ 1385.[40] Many of these transformations were afterward abandoned, but a large number survived, for example, /climbed/ for /clomb/ as the preterite of /to climb/, and /melted/ for /molt/ as the preterite of /to melt/. Others showed themselves during the early part of the Modern English period. /Comed/ as the perfect participle of /to come/ and /digged/ as the preterite of /to dig/ are both in Shakespeare, and the latter is also in Milton and in the Authorized Version of the Bible. This tendency went furthest, of course, in the vulgar speech, and it has been embalmed in the English dialects. /I seen/ and /I knowed/, for example, are common to many of them. But during the seventeenth century it seems to have been arrested, and even to have given way to a contrary tendency--that is, toward strong conjugations. The English of Ireland, which preserves many seventeenth century forms, shows this plainly. /Ped/ for /paid/, /gother/ for /gathered/, and /ruz/ for /raised/ are still in use there, and Joyce says flatly that the Irish, "retaining the old English custom [/i. e./, the custom of the period of Cromwell's invasion, /circa/ 1650], have a leaning toward the strong inflection."[41] Certain verb forms of the American colonial period, now reduced to the estate of localisms, are also probably survivors of the seventeenth century.