V
Tendencies in American

§ 1

A good many other such Americanisms have got into good usage in England, and new ones are being exported constantly. Farmer describes the process of their introduction, and assimilation. American books, newspapers and magazines, especially the last, circulate in England in large number, and some of their characteristic locutions pass into colloquial speech. Then they get into print, and begin to take on respectability. "The phrase, 'as the Americans say,'" he continues, "might in some cases be ordered from the type foundry as a logotype, so frequently does it do introduction duty."[3] Ware shows another means of ingress: the argot of sailors. Many of the Americanisms he notes as having become naturalized in England, e. g., boodle, boost and walk-out, are credited to Liverpool as a sort of half-way station. Travel brings in still more: England swarms with Americans, and Englishmen themselves, visiting America, bring home new and racy phrases. Bishop Coxe says[4] that [Pg133] Dickens, in his "American Notes," gave English currency to reliable, influential, talented and lengthy. Bristed, writing in 1855, said that talented was already firmly fixed in the English vocabulary by that time. All four words are in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and only lengthy is noted as "originally an Americanism." Finally, there is the influence of the moving pictures. Hundreds of American films are shown in England every week, and the American words and phrases appearing in their titles, sub-titles and other explanatory legends thus become familiar to the English. "The patron of the picture palace," says W. G. Faulkner, in an article in the London Daily Mail, "learns to think of his railway station as a depot; he has alternatives to one of our newest words, hooligan, in hoodlum and tough; he watches a dive, which is a thieves' kitchen or a room in which bad characters meet, and whether the villain talks of dough or sugar he knows it is money to which he is referring. The musical ring of the word tramp gives way to the stodgy hobo or dead-beat. It may be that the plot reveals an attempt to deceive some simple-minded person. If it does, the innocent one is spoken of as a sucker, a come-on, a boob, or a lobster if he is stupid into the bargain."

Mr. Faulkner goes on to say that a great many other Americanisms are constantly employed by Englishmen "who have not been affected by the avalanche ... which has come upon us through the picture palace." "Thus today," he says, "we hear people speak of the fall of the year, a stunt they have in hand, their desire to boost a particular business, a peach when they mean a pretty girl, a scab—a common term among strikers,—the glad-eye, junk when they mean worthless material, their efforts to make good, the elevator in the hotel or office, the boss or manager, the crook or swindler; and they will tell you that they have the goods—that is, they possess the requisite qualities for a given position." The venerable Frederic Harrison, writing in the Fortnightly Review in the Spring of 1918, denounced this tendency with a vigor recalling the classical anathemas of Dean Alford and Sydney Smith.[5] "Stale American phrases, ..." [Pg134] he said, "are infecting even our higher journalism and our parliamentary and platform oratory.... A statesman is now out for victory; he is up against pacificism.... He has a card up his sleeve, by which the enemy are at last to be euchred. Then a fierce fight in which hundreds of noble fellows are mangled or drowned is a scrap.... To criticise a politician is to call for his scalp.... The other fellow is beaten to a frazzle." And so on. "Bolshevism," concluded Harrison sadly, "is ruining language as well as society."

But though there are still many such alarms by constables of the national speech, the majority of Englishmen continue to make borrowings from the tempting and ever-widening American vocabulary. What is more, some of these loan-words take root, and are presently accepted as sound English, even by the most watchful. The two Fowlers, in "The King's English," separate Americanisms from other current vulgarisms, but many of the latter on their list are actually American in origin, though they do not seem to know it—for example, to demean and to transpire. More remarkable still, the Cambridge History of English Literature lists backwoodsman, know-nothing and yellow-back as English compounds, apparently in forgetfulness of their American origin, and adds skunk, squaw and toboggan as direct importations from the Indian tongues, without noting that they came through American, and remained definite Americanisms for a long while.[6] It even adds musquash, a popular name for the Fiber zibethicus, borrowed from the Algonquin muskwessu but long since degenerated to musk-rat in America. Musquash has been in disuse in this country, indeed, since the middle of the last century, save as a stray localism, but the English have preserved it, and it appears in the Oxford Dictionary.[7]

A few weeks in London or a month's study of the London [Pg135] newspapers will show a great many other American pollutions of the well of English. The argot of politics is full of them. Many beside caucus were introduced by Joseph Chamberlain, a politician skilled in American campaign methods and with an American wife to prompt him. He gave the English their first taste of to belittle, one of the inventions of Thomas Jefferson. Graft and to graft crossed the ocean in their nonage. To bluff has been well understood in England for 30 years. It is in Cassell's and the Oxford Dictionaries, and has been used by no less a magnifico than Sir Almroth Wright.[8] To stump, in the form of stump-oratory, is in Carlyle's "Latter-Day Pamphlets," circa 1850, and caucus appears in his "Frederick the Great;"[9] though, as we have seen on the authority of Ware, it did not come into general use in England until ten years later. Buncombe (usually spelled bunkum) is in all the later English dictionaries. In the London stock market and among English railroad men various characteristic Americanisms have got a foothold. The meaning of bucket-shop and to water, for example, is familiar to every London broker's clerk. English trains are now telescoped and carry dead-heads, and in 1913 a rival to the Amalgamated Order of Railway Servants was organized under the name of the National Union of Railway Men. The beginnings of a movement against the use of servant are visible in other directions, and the American help threatens to be substituted; at all events, Help Wanted advertisements are now occasionally encountered in English newspapers. But it is American verbs that seem to find the way into English least difficult, particularly those compounded with prepositions and adverbs, such as to pan out and to swear off. Most of them, true enough, [Pg136] are still used as conscious Americanisms, but used they are, and with increasing frequency. The highly typical American verb to loaf is now naturalized, and Ware says that The Loaferies is one of the common nicknames of the Whitechapel workhouse.

The flow of loan-words in the opposite direction meets with little impediment, for social distinction in America is still largely dependent upon English recognition, and so there is an eager imitation of the latest English fashions in speech. This emulation is most noticeable in the large cities of the East, and particularly in what Schele de Vere called "Boston and the Boston dependencies." New York is but little behind. The small stores there, if they are of any pretentions, are now almost invariably called shops. Shoes for the well-to-do are no longer [Pg137] shoes, but boots, and they are sold in bootshops. One encounters, too, in the side-streets off Fifth avenue, a multitude of gift-shops, tea-shops and haberdashery-shops. In Fifth avenue itself there are several luggage-shops. In August, 1917, signs appeared in the New York surface cars in which the conductors were referred to as guards. This effort to be English and correct was exhibited over the sign manual of Theodore P. Shonts, president of the Interborough, a gentleman of Teutonic name, but evidently a faithful protector of the king's English. On the same cars, however, painted notices, surviving from some earlier régime, mentioned the guards as conductors. To Let signs are now as common in all our cities as For Rent signs. We all know the charwoman, and have begun to forget our native modification of char, to wit, chore. Every apartment-house has a tradesmen's-entrance. In Charles street, in Baltimore, some time ago, the proprietor of a fashionable stationery store directed me, not to the elevator, but to the lift.

Occasionally, some uncompromising patriot raises his voice against these importations, but he seldom shows the vigorous indignation of the English purists, and he seldom prevails. White, in 1870, warned Americans against the figurative use of nasty as a synonym for disagreeable.[10] This use of the word was then relatively new in England, though, according to White, the Saturday Review and the Spectator had already succumbed. His objections to it were unavailing; nasty quickly got into American and has been there ever since. In 1883 Gilbert M. Tucker protested against good-form, traffic (in the sense of travel), to bargain and to tub as Briticisms that we might well do without, but all of them took root and are perfectly sound American today. There is, indeed, no intelligible reason why such English inventions and improvements should not be taken in, even though the motive behind the welcome to them may occasionally cause a smile. English, after all, is the mother of American, and the child, until lately, was still at nurse. The English, confronted by some of our fantastic innovations, may well regard them as impudences to be put down, but what they [Pg138] offer in return often fits into our vocabulary without offering it any outrage. American, indeed, is full of lingering Briticisms, all maintaining a successful competition with native forms. If we take back shop it is merely taking back something that store has never been able to rid us of: we use shop-worn, shoplifter, shopping, shopper, shop-girl and to shop every day. In the same way the word penny has survived among us, despite the fact that there has been no American coin of that name for more than 125 years. We have nickel-in-the-slot machines, but when they take a cent we call them penny-in-the-slot machines. We have penny-arcades and penny-whistles. We do not play cent-ante, but penny-ante. We still "turn an honest penny" and say "a penny for your thoughts." The pound and the shilling became extinct a century ago, but the penny still binds us to the mother tongue.

The difficulties of this enterprise are well exhibited, though quite unconsciously, by W. L. George in a chapter entitled "Litany of the Novelist" in his book of criticism, "Literary Chapters."[11] This chapter, it is plain by internal evidence, was written, not for Englishmen, but for Americans. A good part of it, in fact, is in the second person—we are addressed and argued with directly. And throughout there is an obvious endeavor to help out comprehension by a studied use of purely American phrases and examples. One hears, not of the East End, but of the East Side; not of the City, but of Wall Street; not of Belgravia or the West End, but of Fifth avenue; not of bowler hats, but of Derbys; not of idlers in pubs, but of saloon loafers; not of pounds, shillings and pence, but of dollars and cents. In brief, a gallant attempt upon a strange tongue, and by a writer of the utmost skill—but a hopeless failure none the less. In the midst of his best American, George drops into Briticism after Briticism, some of them quite as unintelligible to the average American reader as so many Gallicisms. On page after page they display the practical impossibility of the enterprise: back-garden for back-yard, perambulator for baby-carriage, corn-market for grain-market, coal-owner for coal-operator, post for mail, and so on. And to top them there are English terms that have no American equivalents at all, for example, kitchen-fender.

The same failure, perhaps usually worse, is displayed every time an English novelist or dramatist essays to put an American into a novel or a play, and to make him speak American. However painstakingly it is done, the Englishman invariably falls into capital blunders, and the result is derided by Americans as Mark Twain derided the miners' lingo of Bret Harte, and for the same reason. The thing lies deeper than vocabulary and [Pg140] even than pronunciation and intonation; the divergences show themselves in habits of speech that are fundamental and almost indefinable. And when the transoceanic gesture is from the other direction they become even plainer. An Englishman, in an American play, seldom shows the actual speech habit of the Sassenach; what he shows is the speech habit of an American actor trying to imitate George Alexander. "There are not five playwrights in America," said Channing Pollock one day, "who can write English"—that is, the English of familiar discourse. "Why should there be?" replied Louis Sherwin. "There are not five thousand people in America who can speak English."[12]

The elements that enter into the special character of American have been rehearsed in the first chapter: a general impatience of rule and restraint, a democratic enmity to all authority, an extravagant and often grotesque humor, an extraordinary capacity for metaphor[13]—in brief, all the natural marks of what Van Wyck Brooks calls "a popular life which bubbles with energy and spreads and grows and slips away ever more and more from the control of tested ideas, a popular life with the lid off."[14] This is the spirit of America, and from it the American language is nourished. Brooks, perhaps, generalizes a bit too lavishly. 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 opposition, of derision, of all the consequences of singularity. 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. It is of the essence of democracy that it remain a government by amateurs, and under a government by amateurs it is precisely the expert who is most questioned—and it is the expert [Pg141] who commonly stresses the experience of the past. And in a democratic society it is not the iconoclast who seems most revolutionary, but the purist. The derisive designation of high-brow is thoroughly American in more ways than one. It is a word put together in an unmistakably American fashion, it reflects an habitual American attitude of mind, and its potency in debate is peculiarly national too.

A glance through the Congressional Record is sufficient to show how small is the minority of purists among the chosen leaders of the nation. Within half an hour, turning the pages at random, I find scores of locutions that would paralyze the stenographers in the House of Commons, and they are in the speeches, not of wild mavericks from the West, but of some of the chief men of the two Houses. Surely no Senator occupied a more conspicuous [Pg142] position, during the first year of the war, than Lee S. Overman, of North Carolina, chairman of the Committee on Rules, and commander of the administration forces on the floor. Well, I find Senator Overman using to enthuse in a speech of the utmost seriousness and importance, and not once, but over and over again.[15] I turn back a few pages and encounter it again—this time in the mouth of General Sherwood, of Ohio. A few more, and I find a fit match for it, to wit, to biograph.[16] The speaker here is Senator L. Y. Sherman, of Illinois. In the same speech he uses to resolute. A few more, and various other characteristic verbs are unearthed: to demagogue,[17] to dope out[18] to fall down[19] (in the sense of to fail), to jack up,[20] to phone,[21] to peeve,[22] to come across,[23] to hike, to butt in,[24] to back pedal, to get solid with, to hooverize, to trustify, to feature, to insurge, to haze, to reminisce, to camouflage, to play for a sucker, and so on, almost ad infinitum. And with them, a large number of highly American nouns, chiefly compounds, all pressing upward for recognition: tin-Lizzie, brain-storm, come-down, pin-head, trustification, pork-barrel, buck-private, dough-boy, cow-country. And adjectives: jitney, bush (for rural), balled-up,[25] dolled-up, phoney, tax-paid.[26] And phrases: dollars to doughnuts, on the job, that gets me, one best bet. And back-formations: ad, movie, photo. And [Pg143] various substitutions and Americanized inflections: over for more than, gotten for got in the present perfect,[27] rile for roil, bust for burst. This last, in truth, has come into a dignity that even grammarians will soon hesitate to question. Who, in America, would dare to speak of bursting a broncho, or of a trust-burster?[28]

§ 3

And so, though perhaps not to the same extent, with who and whom. Now and then there arises a sort of panicky feeling that whom is being neglected, and so it is trotted out,[33] but in the [Pg145] main the American language tends to dispense with it, at least in its least graceful situations. Noah Webster, always the pragmatic reformer, denounced it so long ago as 1783. Common sense, he argued, was on the side of "who did he marry?" Today such a form as "whom are you talking to?" would seem somewhat affected in ordinary discourse in America; "who are you talking to?" is heard a thousand times oftener—and is doubly American, for it substitutes who for whom and puts a preposition at the end of a sentence: two crimes that most English purists would seek to avoid. It is among the pronouns that the only remaining case inflections in English are to be found, if we forget the possessive, and even here these survivors of an earlier day begin to grow insecure. Lounsbury's defense of "it is me,"[34] as we shall see in the next chapter, has support in the history and natural movement of the language, and that movement is also against the preservation of the distinction between who and whom. The common speech plays hob with both of the orthodox inflections, despite the protests of grammarians, and in the long run, no doubt, they will be forced to yield to its pressure, as they have always yielded in the past. Between the dative and accusative on the one side and the nominative on the other there has been war in the English language for centuries, and it has always tended to become a war of extermination. Our now universal use of you for ye in the nominative shows the dative and accusative swallowing the nominative, and the practical disappearance of hither, thither and whither, whose place is now taken by here, there and where, shows a contrary process. In such wars a posse comitatus marches ahead of the disciplined army. American stands to English in the relation of that posse to that army. It is incomparably more enterprising, more contemptuous of precedent and authority, more impatient of rule.

A shadowy line often separates what is currently coming into sound usage from what is still regarded as barbarous. No self-respecting American, I daresay, would defend ain't as a substitute [Pg146] for isn't, say in "he ain't the man," and yet ain't is already tolerably respectable in the first person, where English countenances the even more clumsy aren't. Aren't has never got a foothold in the American first person; when it is used at all, which is very rarely, it is always as a conscious Briticism. Facing the alternative of employing the unwieldy "am I not in this?" the American turns boldly to "ain't I in this?" It still grates a bit, perhaps, but aren't grates even more. Here, as always, the popular speech is pulling the exacter speech along, and no one familiar with its successes in the past can have much doubt that it will succeed again, soon or late. In the same way it is breaking down the inflectional distinction between adverb and adjective, so that "I feel bad" begins to take on the dignity of a national idiom, and sure, to go big and run slow[35] become almost respectable. When, on the entrance of the United States into the war, the Marine Corps chose "treat 'em rough" as its motto, no one thought to raise a grammatical objection, and the clipped adverb was printed upon hundreds of thousands of posters and displayed in every town in the country, always with the imprimatur of the national government. So, again, American, in its spoken form, tends to obliterate the distinction between nearly related adjectives, e. g., healthful and healthy, tasteful and tasty. And to challenge the somewhat absurd text-book prohibition of terminal prepositions, so that "where are we at?" loses its old raciness. And to dally with the double negative, as in "I have no doubt but that."[36]

But these tendencies, or at least the more extravagant of them, belong to the next chapter. How much influence they exert, even [Pg147] indirectly, is shown by the American disdain of the English precision in the use of the indefinite pronoun. I turn to the Saturday Evening Post, and in two minutes find: "one feels like an atom when he begins to review his own life and deeds."[37] The error is very rare in English; the Fowlers, seeking examples of it, could get them only from the writings of a third-rate woman novelist, Scotch to boot. But it is so common in American that it scarcely attracts notice. Neither does the appearance of a redundant s in such words as towards, downwards, afterwards and heavenwards. In England this s is used relatively seldom, and then it usually marks a distinction in meaning, as it does on both sides of the ocean between beside and besides. "In modern standard English," says Smith,[38] "though not in the English of the United States, a distinction which we feel, but many of us could not define, is made between forward and forwards; forwards being used in definite contrast to any other direction, as 'if you move at all, you can only move forwards,' while forward is used where no such contrast is implied, as in the common phrase 'to bring a matter forward.'"[39] This specific distinction, despite Smith, probably retains some force in the United States too, but in general our usage allows the s in cases where English usage would certainly be against it. Gould, in the 50's, noted its appearance at the end of such words as somewhere and anyway, and denounced it as vulgar and illogical. Thornton has traced anyways back to 1842 and shown that it is an archaism, and to be found in the Book of Common Prayer (circa 1560); perhaps it has been preserved by analogy with sideways. Henry James, in "The Question of Our Speech," attacked "such forms of impunity as somewheres else and nowheres else, a good ways on and a good ways off" as "vulgarisms with what a great deal of general credit for what we good-naturedly call 'refinement' appears so able to coexist."[40] Towards and afterwards, though frowned upon in England, are now quite sound in American. I [Pg148] find the former in the title of an article in Dialect Notes, which plainly gives it scholastic authority.[41] More (and with no little humor), I find it in the deed of a fund given to the American Academy of Arts and Letters to enable the gifted philologs of that sanhedrin "to consider its duty towards the conservation of the English language in its beauty and purity."[42] Both towards and afterwards, finally, are included in the New York Evening Post's list of "words no longer disapproved when in their proper places," along with over for more than, and during for in the course of.

In the last chapter we glanced at several salient differences between the common coin of English and the common coin of American—that is, the verbs and adjectives in constant colloquial use—the rubber-stamps, so to speak, of the two languages. America has two adverbs that belong to the same category. They are right and good. Neither holds the same place in English. Thornton shows that the use of right, as in right away, right good and right now, was already widespread in the United States early in the last century; his first example is dated 1818. He believes that the locution was "possibly imported from the southwest of Ireland." Whatever its origin, it quickly attracted the attention of English visitors. Dickens noted right away as an almost universal Americanism during his first American tour, in 1842, and poked fun at it in the second chapter of "American Notes." Right is used as a synonym for directly, as in right away, right off, right now and right on time; for moderately, as in right well, right smart, right good and right often, and in place of precisely, as in right there. Some time ago, in an article on Americanisms, an English critic called it "that most distinctively American word," and concocted the following dialogue to instruct the English in its use:

Like W. L. George, this Englishman failed in his attempt to write correct American despite his fine pedagogical passion. No American would ever say "take the first turning"; he would say "turn at the first corner." As for right away, R. O. Williams argues that "so far as analogy can make good English, it is as good as one could choose."[44] Nevertheless, the Oxford Dictionary admits it only as an Americanism, and avoids all mention of the other American uses of right as an adverb. Good is almost as protean. It is not only used as a general synonym for all adjectives and adverbs connoting satisfaction, as in to feel good, to be treated good, to sleep good, but also as a reinforcement to other adjectives and adverbs, as in "I hit him good and hard" and "I am good and tired." Of late some has come into wide use as an adjective-adverb of all work, indicating special excellence or high degree, as in some girl, some sick, going some, etc. It is still below the salt, but threatens to reach a more respectable position. One encounters it in the newspapers constantly and in the Congressional Record, and not long ago a writer in the Atlantic Monthly[45] hymned it ecstatically as "some word—a true super-word, in fact" and argued that it could be used "in a sense for which there is absolutely no synonym in the dictionary." Basically, it appears to be an adjective, but in many of its common situations the grammarians would probably call it an adverb. It gives no little support to the growing tendency, already noticed, to break down the barrier between the two parts of speech.

§ 4

This large and constantly reinforced admixture of foreigners has naturally exerted a constant pressure upon the national language, for the majority of them, at least in the first generation, have found it quite impossible to acquire it in any purity, and even their children have grown up with speech habits differing radically from those of correct English. The effects of this pressure are obviously two-fold; on the one hand the foreigner, struggling with a strange and difficult tongue, makes efforts to simplify it as much as possible, and so strengthens the native tendency to disregard all niceties and complexities, and on the other hand he corrupts it with words and locutions from the language he has brought with him, and sometimes with whole idioms and grammatical forms. We have seen, in earlier chapters, how the [Pg151] Dutch and French of colonial days enriched the vocabulary of the colonists, how the German immigrants of the first half of the nineteenth century enriched it still further, and how the Irish of the same period influenced its everyday usages. The same process is still going on. The Italians, the Slavs, and, above all, the Russian Jews, make steady contributions to the American vocabulary and idiom, and though these contributions are often concealed by quick and complete naturalization their foreignness to English remains none the less obvious. I should worry,[46] in its way, is correct English, but in essence it is as completely Yiddish as kosher, ganof, schadchen, oi-yoi, matzoh or mazuma.[47] Black-hand, too, is English in form, but it is nevertheless as plainly an Italian loan-word as spaghetti, mafia or padrone.

The extent of such influences upon American, and particularly upon spoken American, remains to be studied; in the whole literature I can find but one formal article upon the subject. That article[48] deals specifically with the suffix -fest, which came into American from the German and was probably suggested by familiarity with sängerfest. There is no mention of it in any of the dictionaries of Americanisms, and yet, in such forms as talk-fest and gabfest it is met with almost daily. So with -heimer, -inski and -bund. Several years ago -heimer had a great vogue in slang, and was rapidly done to death. But wiseheimer remains [Pg152] in colloquial use as a facetious synonym for smart-aleck, and after awhile it may gradually acquire dignity. Far lowlier words, in fact, have worked their way in. Buttinski, perhaps, is going the same route. As for the words in -bund, many of them are already almost accepted. Plunder-bund is now at least as good as pork-barrel and slush-fund, and money-bund is frequently heard in Congress.[49] Such locutions creep in stealthily, and are secure before they are suspected. Current slang, out of which the more decorous language dredges a large part of its raw materials, is full of them. Nix and nixy, for no, are debased forms of the German nichts; aber nit, once as popular as camouflage, is obviously aber nicht. And a steady flow of nouns, all needed to designate objects introduced by immigrants, enriches the vocabulary. The Hungarians not only brought their national condiment with them; they also brought its name, paprika, and that name is now thoroughly American.[50] In the same way the Italians brought in camorra, padrone, spaghetti and a score of other substantives, and the Jews made contributions from Yiddish and Hebrew and greatly reinforced certain old borrowings from German. Once such a loan-word gets in it takes firm root. During the first year of American participation in the World War an effort was made, on patriotic grounds, to substitute liberty-cabbage for sour-kraut, but it quickly failed, for the name had become as completely Americanized as the thing itself, and so liberty-cabbage seemed affected and absurd. In the same way a great many other German words survived the passions of the time. Nor could all the influence of the professional patriots obliterate that German influence which has fastened upon the American yes something of the quality of ja.

Constant familiarity with such contributions from foreign languages and with the general speech habits of foreign peoples has made American a good deal more hospitable to loan-words than English, even in the absence of special pressure. Let the same [Pg153] word knock at the gates of the two languages, and American will admit it more readily, and give it at once a wider and more intimate currency. Examples are afforded by café, vaudeville, employé, boulevard, cabaret, toilette, exposé, kindergarten, dépôt, fête and menu. Café, in American, is a word of much larger and more varied meaning than in English and is used much more frequently, and by many more persons. So is employé, in the naturalized form of employee. So is toilet: we have even seen it as a euphemism for native terms that otherwise would be in daily use. So is kindergarten: I read lately of a kindergarten for the elementary instruction of conscripts. Such words are not unknown to the Englishman, but when he uses them it is with a plain sense of their foreignness. In American they are completely naturalized, as is shown by the spelling and pronunciation of most of them. An American would no more think of attempting the French pronunciation of depot or of putting the French accents upon it than he would think of spelling toilet with the final te or of essaying to pronounce Anheuser in the German manner. Often curious battles go on between such loan-words and their English equivalents, and with varying fortunes. In 1895 Weber and Fields tried to establish music-hall in New York, but it quickly succumbed to vaudeville-theatre, as variety had succumbed to vaudeville before it. In the same way lawn-fete (without the circumflex accent, and commonly pronounced feet) has elbowed out the English garden-party. But now and then, when the competing loan-word happens to violate American speech habits, a native term ousts it. The French crèche offers an example; it has been entirely displaced by day-nursery.

The English, in this matter, display their greater conservatism very plainly. Even when a loan-word enters both English and American simultaneously a sense of foreignness lingers about it on the other side of the Atlantic much longer than on this side, and it is used with far more self-consciousness. The word matinée offers a convenient example. To this day the English commonly print it in italics, give it its French accent, and pronounce it with some attempt at the French manner. But in America it is entirely naturalized, and the most ignorant man [Pg154] uses it without any feeling that it is strange. The same lack of any sense of linguistic integrity is to be noticed in many other directions—for example, in the freedom with which the Latin per is used with native nouns. One constantly sees per day, per dozen, per hundred, per mile, etc., in American newspapers, even the most careful, but in England the more seemly a is almost always used, or the noun itself is made Latin, as in per diem. Per, in fact, is fast becoming an everyday American word. Such phrases as "as per your letter (or order) of the 15th inst." are incessantly met with in business correspondence. The same greater hospitality is shown by the readiness with which various un-English prefixes and affixes come into fashion, for example, super- and -itis. The English accept them gingerly; the Americans take them in with enthusiasm, and naturalize them instanter.[51]

The same deficiency in reserve is to be noted in nearly all other colonialized dialects. The Latin-American variants of Spanish, for example, have adopted a great many words which appear in true Castilian only as occasional guests. Thus in Argentina matinée, menu, début, toilette and femme de chambre are perfectly good Argentine, and in Mexico sandwich and club have been thoroughly naturalized. The same thing is to be noted in the French of Haiti, in the Portuguese of Brazil, and even in the Danish of Norway. Once a language spreads beyond the country of its origin and begins to be used by people born, in the German phrase, to a different Sprachgefühl, the sense of loyalty to its vocabulary is lost, along with the instinctive feeling for its idiomatic habits. How far this destruction of its forms may go in the absence of strong contrary influences is exhibited by the rise of the Romance languages from the vulgar Latin of the Roman provinces, and, here at home, by the decay of foreign languages in competition with English. The Yiddish that the Jews from Russia bring in is German debased with Russian, Polish and [Pg155] Hebrew; in America, it quickly absorbs hundreds of words and idioms from the speech of the streets. Various conflicting German dialects, among the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch and in the German areas of the Northwest, combine in a patois that, in its end forms, shows almost as much English as German. Classical examples of it are "es giebt gar kein use," "Ich kann es nicht ständen" and "mein stallion hat über die fenz gescheumpt und dem nachbar sein whiet abscheulich gedämätscht."[52] The use of gleiche for to like, by false analogy from gleich (=like, similar) is characteristic. In the same way the Scandinavians in the Northwest corrupt their native Swedish and Dano-Norwegian. Thus, American-Norwegian is heavy with such forms as strit-kar, reit-evé, nekk-töi and staits-pruessen, for street-car, right away, necktie and states-prison, and admits such phrases as "det meka ingen difrens."[53]

The changes that Yiddish has undergone in America, though rather foreign to the present inquiry, are interesting enough to be noticed. First of all, it has admitted into its vocabulary a large number of everyday substantives, among them boy, chair, window, carpet, floor, dress, hat, watch, ceiling, consumption, property, trouble, bother, match, change, party, birthday, picture, paper (only in the sense of newspaper), gambler, show, hall, kitchen, store, bedroom, key, mantelpiece, closet, lounge, broom, tablecloth, paint, landlord, fellow, tenant, shop, wages, foreman, sleeve, collar, cuff, button, cotton, thimble, needle, pocket, bargain, sale, remnant, sample, haircut, razor, waist, basket, school, scholar, teacher, baby, mustache, butcher, grocery, dinner, street and walk. And with them many characteristic Americanisms, [Pg156] for example, bluffer, faker, boodler, grafter, gangster, crook, guy, kike, piker, squealer, bum, cadet, boom, bunch, pants, vest, loafer, jumper, stoop, saleslady, ice-box and raise, with their attendant verbs and adjectives. These words are used constantly; many of them have quite crowded out the corresponding Yiddish words. For example, ingel, meaning boy (it is a Slavic loan-word in Yiddish), has been obliterated by the English word. A Jewish immigrant almost invariably refers to his son as his boy, though strangely enough he calls his daughter his meidel. "Die boys mit die meidlach haben a good time" is excellent American Yiddish. In the same way fenster has been completely displaced by window, though tür (=door) has been left intact. Tisch (=table) also remains, but chair is always used, probably because few of the Jews had chairs in the old country. There the beinkel, a bench without a back, was in use; chairs were only for the well-to-do. Floor has apparently prevailed because no invariable corresponding word was employed at home: in various parts of Russia and Poland a floor is a dill, a podlogé, or a bricke. So with ceiling. There were six different words for it.

Yiddish inflections have been fastened upon most of these loan-words. Thus, "er hat ihm abgefaked" is "he cheated him," zubumt is the American gone to the bad, fix'n is to fix, usen is to use, and so on. The feminine and diminutive suffix -ké is often added to nouns. Thus bluffer gives rise to blufferké (=hypocrite), and one also notes dresské, hatké, watchké and bummerké. "Oi! is sie a blufferké!" is good American Yiddish for "isn't she a hypocrite!" The suffix -nick, signifying agency, is also freely applied. Allrightnick means an upstart, an offensive boaster, one of whom his fellows would say "He is all right" with a sneer. Similarly, consumptionick means a victim of tuberculosis. Other suffixes are -chick and -ige, the first exemplified in boychick, a diminutive of boy, and the second in next-doorige, meaning the woman next-door, an important person in ghetto social life. Some of the loan-words, of course, undergo changes on Yiddish-speaking lips. Thus, landlord becomes lendler, lounge becomes lunch, tenant becomes tenner, and whiskers loses its final s. "Wie gefällt dir sein whisker?" (=how do you like his beard?) [Pg157] is good Yiddish, ironically intended. Fellow, of course, changes to the American feller, as in "Rosie hat schon a feller" (=Rosie has got a feller, i. e., a sweetheart). Show, in the sense of chance, is used constantly, as in "git ihm a show" (=give him a chance). Bad boy is adopted bodily, as in "er is a bad boy." To shut up is inflected as one word, as in "er hat nit gewolt shutup'n" (=he wouldn't shut up). To catch is used in the sense of to obtain, as in "catch'n a gmilath chesed" (=to raise a loan). Here, by the way, gmilath chesed is excellent Biblical Hebrew. To bluff, unchanged in form, takes on the new meaning of to lie: a bluffer is a liar. Scores of American phrases are in constant use, among them, all right, never mind, I bet you, no sir and I'll fix you. It is curious to note that sure Mike, borrowed by the American vulgate from Irish English, has gone over into American Yiddish. Finally, to make an end, here are two complete and characteristic American Yiddish sentences: "Sie wet clean'n die rooms, scrub'n dem floor, wash'n die windows, dress'n dem boy und gehn in butcher-store und in grocery. Dernoch vet sie machen dinner und gehn in street für a walk."[54]

American itself, in the Philippines, and to a lesser extent in Porto Rico and on the Isthmus, has undergone similar changes under the influence of Spanish and the native dialects. Maurice P. Dunlap[55] offers the following specimen of a conversation between two Americans long resident in Manila: