H.L. Mencken (1880–1956). The American Language. 1921.
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to argue with him was, “Cut out that dope,” and a hundred piping voices repeated the injunction. The comic man announced his marriage to the Belle of Lumbertown by saying, “I’m hitched.”…
The same writer protested bitterly against the intrusion of such commonplace Americanisms as fire-water, daffy, forget it, and bootlegger. The Associated Press, in reporting the protest, said:
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. It is the subtitle of the American moving picture film which, it is feared, constitutes the most menacing threat to the vaunted English purity of speech.26
But it is not only American slang that the English observe and object to; they also begin to find it difficult to comprehend American-English on higher planes. It was H. N. Brailsford who protested that many of the utterances of Dr. Woodrow Wilson, during and after the Versailles conference, were incomprehensible to Englishmen on linguistic grounds. “The irruption of Mr. Wilson upon our scene,” he said,27 “threatens to modify our terminology. If one knew the American language (as I do not),” and so on. At about the same time a leading English medical journal was protesting satirically against the Americanisms in an important American surgical monograph.28 Some time before this, in the New Witness, the late Cecil Chesterton discussed the growing difficulty, for Englishmen, of understanding American newspapers. After quoting a characteristic headline he went on:
I defy any ordinary Englishman to say that that is the English language or that he can find any intelligible meaning in it. Even a dictionary will be of no use to him. He must know the language colloquially or not at all.…
Note 26. Mail correspondence dated Jan. 22, 1920. [back]
Note 27. London Daily Herald, Aug. 20, 1919. [back]
Note 28. Review of Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics, by MacCarty and Connor, in the Medical Press, Sept. 17, 1919. “In the study of the terminology of diseases of the breast,” says this review, “[the authors] suggest a scheme which seems simple, but unfortunately for British understanding it is written in American.” [back]
