H. L. Mencken

“ Much of the best and purest English of our time has been, and is being, written in America.... If English journalists make a show of arrogant and self-righteous Briticism, it is quite possible that a certain class of American journalists may retaliate by setting afoot a deliberately anti-British movement and attempting (as an American has wittily put it) to “deserve well of mankind by making two languages grow where only one grew before.” ”

“ How many thousands of youths are at this moment engaged in puzzling their brains over Latin and Greek grammar only Whitehall knows. Every well-conducted seminary has some instructor who is under the delusion that he is teaching English boys and girls to speak French with a good Parisian accent. We teach German, Italian, even Spanish, Russian, modern Greek, Arabic, Hindustani. For a moderate fee you can acquire a passing acquaintance with any of these tongues at the Berlitz Institute and the Gouin Schools. But even in these polyglot establishments there is nobody to teach you American. ”

“ When a mayor of a large western city says has went twice in a public speech, and a governor of a great eastern state in public utterances declares that ‘it ain’t in my heart to hurt any man,’ it gives one a piquant sense of the democracy of language in these United States. We get a charming picture of proletariat and pedants amiably exchanging idiom, while school larnin’ goes glimmering, and go-as-you-please is the order of the day. ”

“ In the United States of North America the study of the English tongue forms part of the educational scheme. I gather this because I find that they have professors of the English language and literature there, and I note that in the schools there are certain hours allotted for “English” under instructors who specialize in that subject. This is quite right. English is still far from being a dead language, and our American kinsfolk are good enough to appreciate the fact. But I think we should return the compliment. We ought to learn the American language in our schools and colleges. ”

“ It is a fair claim that American is more vivid than English. So much for the literati. The plain people of the two countries, whenever they come into contact, find it very difficult to exchange ideas. This was made distressingly apparent when American troops began to pour into France in 1917. Fraternizing with the British was impeded, not so much because of old animosities as because of the wide divergence in vocabulary and pronunciation between the doughboy and Tommy Atkins—a divergence interpreted by each as a sign of uncouthness in the other. ”

“ Americans, trained in book English and constantly reading English books and journals, still make their way in British-English comfortably enough, though now and then, I daresay, an English novel daunts them. But the English have a great deal more difficulty with American, and devote a great deal of attention to its peculiarities—often with very ill grace. ”

“ There is scarcely an English book upon the United States or an English review of an American book which does not offer some discussion, more or less profound, of American peculiarities of speech, both as they are revealed in spoken discourse (particularly pronunciation and intonation) and as they show themselves in literature and in the newspapers, and to this discussion protest is often added, as it very often is by the reviews and newspapers. ”

“ On turning to the men actually engaged in writing English, and particularly to those aspiring to an American audience, one finds nearly all of them adverting, at some time or other, to the growing difficulties of intercommunication. ”

“ England is apprehensive lest the vocabularies of her youth become corrupted through incursions of American slang. Trans-Atlantic tourists in England note with interest the frequency with which resort is made to “Yankee talk” by British song and play writers seeking to enliven their productions. Bands and orchestras throughout the country when playing popular music play American selections almost exclusively. American songs monopolize the English music hall and musical comedy stage. ”

“ To see a pupil who on trial solemnly declares that two nouns call for a plural verb, hasten out into the happy sunshine and immediately begin to do what the race always has done—including truly idiomatic writers—namely, use a singular verb on all such occasions, is only depressing to those who place the letter before the spirit which is life. ”

“ Carl Sandberg, and still more marked in American prose; for even American literary criticism is a little difficult to understand, and new novels are bewildering with vigorous but incomprehensible expressions. Englishmen of letters and literary journalists may publish their exhortations and practice their refinements; in vain—a vast and increasingly articulate part of the English-speaking and English-writing world will ignore them. ”

“ To toe the mark is a legitimate development from the noun toe. Tiptoed is a simple employment of the franchise of our language, a franchise that Shakespeare and countless others have taken full advantage of. ”

“ The language of the American people—judging from a comparison between newspapers of the Civil War and of today—has altered considerably in fifty years, so that a modern Whitman would write a language almost needing a glossary for Englishmen. ”

“ Even college-bred folk revert to type and use people’s speech—when they are out from under the restraining, corrective monitions of academic haunts—in a way to shock, amuse, or encourage, according to the point of view. ”

“ Artificial book-speech is struggled for in recitation halls; then forth issue the vital young, and just beyond the door real talk is heard once more: the words and sentences that come hot from the heart, eagerly from emotional reactions, spontaneously representing the feelings rather than a state of mind supposed to be proper. ”

“ Hughes is bitter against the “snobbery that divides our writers into two sharp classes—those who in their effort to write pure English strut pompously and uneasily in Piccadilly fashions, and those who in their effort to be true to their own environment seem to wear overalls and write with a nasal twang.” Between the two extremes he evidently prefers the latter. “Americans who try to write like Englishmen,” he says, “are not only committed to an unnatural pose, but doomed as well to failure, above all among the English ”

“ As for slang, certain colloquialisms and peculiarities of English speech appear so frequently in even the pages of Wells and Galsworthy as to be irritating. Right-o is an example; bloody and beastly, as applied to commonplace happenings, are others ”

“ Hughes, whose own novels are full of racy and effective Americanisms, describes some of his difficulties in England. “A London publisher,” he says, “once wrote of a book of mine that it was bewildering in its Americanism. He instanced, among others, the verb tiptoed as an amazing and incredible thing. On tiptoe, or a-tiptoe, he could well understand because he had seen it in print at home. But the well-recognized truth that our language is largely made up of interchangeable facts did not calm his dismay. We know what a foot is ”