Whose Language?

THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE: Fourth Edition, Corrected, Enlarged and Rewritten-- H. L. Mencken--Knopf ($5).

Henry Louis Mencken has filled some 15 books and countless heads with his brilliant palaver. The Billiken-god of a generation that read his Smart Set like so many monthly revelations, he emancipated many a corn-fed adolescent. Mencken was an iconoclastic prophet but not an indignant one. "As an American," he said once, "I naturally spend most of my time laugh-ing." And his brilliance, like that of his fellow-iconoclast, Bernard Shaw, has not always done him justice. Some of his trumpetings have merely deafened the ears they assaulted, some of his more winning piccolo-and-bassoon effects have roused more laughter than thought. Since retiring from the editorship of the American Mercury, Mencken has brought out several treatises in soberer vein. His biggest opus, first published in the brave days of 1919, last week reappeared in a guise so transfigured that it was almost unrecognizable.

As Mencken first wrote The American Language it was a modest (for him) book of 374 pages. Since then he has twice revised it, finally re-written it to its present size of 769 pages. Even his old enemies will find it a respectable achievement.

Less biased spectators will heartily agree with Lexicographer Vizetelly and the late Poet Robert Bridges that The American Language is a handsome and useful milestone in U. S. and English letters.

Whether or not that milestone stands at a parting of the ways, not even scholars can tell with certainty. Mencken himself, modestly disclaiming any clairvoyance on the subject, sticks stoutly to his factual report on what the American language has been and now is, but thinks American the coming tongue. Calling himself a lay brother, "surely no philologian," he intimates that his book is but a temporary signpost, serving its turn until the completion of such monuments-in-progress as Sir William Craigie's Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles (begun in 1926 at the University of Chicago, now well under way).* For The American Language, though it lists a vocabulary of 12,000 terms, is not primarily a dictionary.

Its Thesis will annoy not only loyal subjects of His Majesty but U. S. Anglophiles: that the American language, once a dialect of English, is now stronger than its mother tongue, so that English " promises to become, on some not too remote tomorrow, a kind of dialect of American.

. . . When two-thirds of the people who use a certain language decide to call it a freight-train instead of a goods-train they are 'right'; and the first is correct English and the second a dialect." Americanisms, which have been forcing their way into English since the early 19th Century, have lately "been entering at a truly dizzy pace." Two causes: i) British cinemaddicts absorb more U. S. talkies than their own. 2) "The influence of 125,000,000 people, practically all headed in one direction, is simply too great to be resisted by any minority, however resolute." The tide turned in 1820 (Sir William Craigie's date) ; first U. S. invaders were reliable, influential, talented, lengthy.

Clothed in the regalia and lugging the impedimenta of scholarship but with a brighter twinkle in his eye, Philologist Mencken cites the history of American, from Captain John Smith to Walter Winchell, compares its tumultuous flow with the slower, more dignified progress of English; takes up U. S. pronunciation, spelling, common speech, slang; in an appendix shows the effect on American of the non-English immigrant dialects. No Anglophile, he quotes with glee a story told of Congress at the close of the Revo lution : When certain members proposed that English be prohibited in the U. S. and Greek substituted for it, the proposal was rejected on the ground that "it would be more convenient for us to keep the lan guage as it is, and make the English speak Greek." That Greek, to all intents, is what American was becoming to many a Bri ton, before the advent of the talkies, is Mencken's contention. Foreigners have recognized the distinction, to the extent of publishing different handbooks for the two languages.

Hallmarks of American are: 1) its na tional uniformity, 2) its disregard for rule and precedent, 3 ) its rapacity for new words and phrases. Says Mencken: "No other country can show such linguistic solidarity, nor any approach to it." Conditions of life in the U. S. "have put a high value upon the . . . qualities of curiosity and daring, and so [Americans] have acquired that character of restlessness, that impatience of forms, that disdain of the dead hand, which now broadly marks them. ... It is not the leadership that is old and decorous that commonly fetches [the American], but the leadership that is new and extravagant. . . .

Such a term as rubberneck is almost a complete treatise on American psychology." Mencken, always a hearty praiser of things-as-they-are, gives American a big hand, approves of "Mr. Dooley's" remark: "When we Americans are through with the English language, it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy." Standard English (spoken only by a small minority of Britons) is still trying to hold the pass, but Mencken considers its position hopeless. It no longer grows at anything like the rate of American, and though English is now constantly borrowing American phrases, "it is most unusual for an English neologism to be taken up in this country, and when it is, it is only by a small class, mainly made up of conscious Anglomaniacs.* Though American no longer imports British words, in its time it has naturalized many a foreign term, from Indian down. Readers may be surprised to learn that the largest body of loan-words in American come from Spanish, with German a close second.

Mencken calls Walt Whitman the first serious writer to use American. But after him, with such exceptions as The Biglow Papers and Huckleberry Finn, there was a long wait until the late Ring Lardner, whom Mencken nominates as the most accurate reporter of U. S. common speech.

As potent slangsters he lists such ephemeral immortals as Tad Dorgan, Sime Silverman, Gene Buck, Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell, Bugs Baer, George Ade, Gelett Burgess, James Gleason, Rube Goldberg, Milt Gross.

The Future of American. According to Mencken, the sky's the limit. He points out the dominant position of the English language today: in what he calls conservative figures, 174,000,000 people speak it as their native tongue and another 17,000,000 speak it besides their own. Nearest world-competitor is Spanish, with a little more than half as many. And "no other language is spreading so fast or into such remote areas." English looks like the lingua franca of the future, but probably not in its present form. What will it look like? Says Mencken: it may look like English, but it will sound like American.

The Author. If a writer's stature is measured by the influence he has on his contemporaries, then Henry Louis Mencken must be counted great. In the last ten years his influence has dwindled notably, but to a college generation now growing bald he was the greatest debunker of them all. For his vigorous and vivid style, that sometimes rises to heights of rhetoric and grotesque anathema, he has never been given his due rating, being regarded less as a good and aggressively sensible writer than as a sort of public entertainer with a sleeve-full of uproarious phrases. His bull-roaring denunciations have been returned with interest by many a patriot, professor, politician: he has been accused of slandering Abraham Lincoln, ruining the English language, taking money from the onetime Kaiser, spying for the Soviets. In 1928 Mencken published a collection of these attacks (Menckeniana, a Schimpflexicon). Born in Baltimore of German grandparentage. Mencken began to write "seriously" at 12, took T. H. Huxley (see below I for his god at 16. An amiable skeptic, short, fat. boyish to look at, he is fond of practical jokes. Some suspect his philological delvings are merely a form of involved japery. but fellow-philologists take him seriously, call him the authority on U. S. English.

*The Chicago Tribune thus headlined Sir William's appointment: MIDWAY SIGNS LIMEY PROF. TO DOPE YANK TALK *As an instance of British borrowins;, Mencken cites the fact that "the London Daily Express has lifted the whole vocabulary of the American newsweekly, TIME, and adopted even its eccentric syntax."

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