(2 of 3)
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.