H. L. Mencken

“ But in the field of language, as in that of politics, this suspicion of the new is often transformed into a suspicion of the merely unfamiliar, and so its natural tendency toward conservatism is overcome. ”

“ But in the Unitel States their use is the rule rather than the exception; it is not the man who uses them, but the man who doesn’t use them, who is marked off. Their employment, if high example counts for anything, is a standard habit of the language, as their diligent avoidance is a standard habit of English.
A glance through the Congressional Record is sufficient to show how small is the minority of purists among the chosen leaders of the nation. ”

“ The American has an Elizabethan love of exuberant language.” Brooks, perhaps, generalizes a bit too lavishly; Ayres calls attention to the fact that below the surface there is also a curious conservatism, even a sort of timorousness. In a land of manumitted peasants the primary trait of the peasant is bound to show itself now and then; as Wendell Phillips once said, “more than any other people, we Americans are afraid of one another”— that is, afraid of isolation, of derision, of all the consequences of singularity. ”

“ It has been brought to my attention by many people in Georgia and those whom I see here that the present high passenger and freight rates are doing more to decrease the amount of income received by the railroads than if a lower rate was in effect, which would cause more freight to move and more people to travel. In other words, the railroads are not carrying an average maximum of freight and passengers since the increase in rates. ”

“ I leave the analysis of the American political style here displayed to grammarians. They will find plenty of further clinical material in the speeches of Mr. Harding—the one-he combination in the first sentence of his inaugural address, illy in the fourth sentence of his first message to Congress, and many other choice specimens in his subsequent state papers. Nor are politicians the only Americans who practise the flouting of the purists. ”

“ The men of a given race and time usually write a good deal alike, or, at all events, attempt to write alike, but in their oral speech there are wide variations. “No two persons,” says a leading contemporary authority upon English phonetics, [2] “pronounce exactly alike.” Moreover, “even the best speaker commonly uses more than one style.” The result is that it is extremely difficult to determine the prevailing pronunciation of a given combination of letters at any time and place. ”

“ A Northerner aboard the train, puzzled by this inarticulate dialogue, sought light from a Southern passenger, who promptly translated the first question as “Where is he?” and the second as “Where is who?” A recent viewer with alarm [20] argues that this conspiracy against the consonants is spreading, and that English printed words no longer represent the actual sounds of the American language. “Like the French,” he says, “we have a marked liaison—the borrowing of a letter from the preceding word. We invite one another to c’ meer (=come here) . ”

“ But the greater distinctness of American utterance, whatever its genesis and machinery, is palpable enough in many familiar situations. “The typical American accent,” says Vizetelly, “is often harsh and unmusical, but it sounds all of the letters to be sounded, and slurs, but does not distort, the rest.” [12] An American, for example, almost always sounds the first l in fulfill; an Englishman makes the first syllable foo. An American sounds every syllable in extraordinary, literary, military, dysentery, temporary, necessarily, secretary and the other words of the -ary-group ”

“ According to a recent and very careful observer [6] the most important of them do not lie in pronunciation at all, properly so called, but in intonation. In this direction, he says, one must look for the true characters of “the English accent.” Despite the opinion of Krapp, a very competent authority, that “the American voice in general starts on a higher plane, is normally pitched higher than the British voice,” [7] I incline to agree with White that the contrary is the case. ”

“ Swedish would have supported his case far better: the Swedes debase their vowels and slide over their consonants even more markedly than the English. Marsh believed that there was a tendency among Southern peoples to throw the accent toward the ends of words, and that this helped to bring out all the syllables. A superficial examination shows a number of examples of that movement of accent in American: advertisement, paresis, pianist, primarily, telegrapher, temporarily. The English invariably accent all of these words on the first syllable ”

“ The thing which I am greatly interested in is the matter of freight and passenger rates to be placed within reach of the average person, and at the same time give the railroads a reasonable income for their investment. ”

“ The Englishman, when he makes use of coinages of that sort, does so in conscious relaxation, and usually with a somewhat heavy sense of doggishness. They are proper to the paddock or even to the dinner table, but scarcely to serious scenes and occasions. ”

“ The dictionary-makers, forced to a far greater economy of means, are brought into obscurity. The difficulties of the enterprise, in fact, are probably unsurmountable. It is, as White says, “almost impossible for one person to express to another by signs the sound of any word.” “Only the voice,” he goes on, “is capable of that ”

“ Keep on writin’ t’ll y’ c’n do ’t right. But here, of course, we come upon the tendency to depress all vowels to the level of a neutral e—a tendency quite as visible in English as in American, though there are differences in detail. ”

“ The familiar American derivative, buster, as in Buster Brown, is unknown to the English.↑ Mr. Tincher, of Kansas, in the House, July 19, 1919, p. 3009.↑ Mr. Blanton, of Texas, in the House, Aug. 12, 1919, p. 4057.↑ Of Georgia. Congressional Record, Feb. 21, 1921, p. 3755.↑ The American Spirit in Literature, by Bliss Perry; New Haven, 1918, p. 117. “If one habitually prints the words, ... one may do it because he is a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the chances are that he is neither.”↑ The Invisible Censor; New York, 1921, pp. 6 and 60 respectively. All by her lonesome is in Horizons ”