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.