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Show : I i A Professor cf American j By Frederic J. Haskin. i - : f BALTIMORE, Md., Aug. 23. "Don't be afraid to use your native language, which . is American, not English." j This is the behest to all Americans of -Dr. Henry L, Mencken of this city, who ; has recently risen to unique fame as the first and only professor of the American j lanjLiaye. In fact, he is a great deal : more than that; he is the discoverer of our national tongue, the Christopher Columbus of Americanese. And, like the fearless Christopher at the outset of his voyage, ; he faces some rough sailing. The comparison com-parison may be carried even further, for many of his fellow sailors on the good ship Language think he is- cracked, and he may count himself lucky if the college professors and philologists do not make him walk the gangplank of conservatism and drown in the Sea of Solemn Disapproval, Disap-proval, i The Mencken creed of linguistic Americanism Ameri-canism is set forth In a volume boldly entitled, "The American Language." Anticipating An-ticipating that nobody would read it, Mencken had the work published in a limited and numbered edition, but this already has been exhausted, and reviews of the book have appeared in a number of the most highbrow periodicals devoted to the science of language. Tnese notices often register acute pain on the part of , the reviewer, but, none the less, recognize the fact that Mencken has an idea and presents it in a plausible way. Professor Mencken has devoted most of a long life to the study of the American i language, and he has studied it, not in . books, but in the place wh-jre it is found ! in' all its purity and vigor; namely, on the 1 street. Whenever he leaves his study for j a brief constitutional, or on one of the ! errands of charity which occupy so much I of his leisure. Professor Mencken carries . in the breast pocket of his Prince Albert , a notebook and a pencil. If on the street j car, for example, he overhears the con- ; ductor arguing with a passenger about the validity of a transfer in racy American j argot, making the grammar of the good j old English language jump through hoops 1 and turn handsprings, spicing Its vocabu- 1 lary with bits of new and vivid slang, the : learned professor pricks up his ears. He ' edges closer. The notebook and pencil I are surreptitiously produced, and the very latest and most spontaneous developments of the American language are forthwith recorded. Many years of this sort of scientific eavesdropping have provided tho savant with an enormous mass of pure Americanisms. American-isms. In the quiet of his study. Professor Mencken subjects these specimens to prolonged pro-longed and heavy thought, bringing to bear upon them an analytical mind and an unrivaled erudition. These are the most important and revolutionary of his conclusions: In the first place, the American language lan-guage is one and fairly uniform from j coast to coast, and from the Great Lakes ! to the Rio Grande. It Is true that there are local dialects. It is true that Spanish ' influences the language in the southwest, and Yiddish words creep into It from the east side of New York. But Americans are always on the move and these localisms local-isms move with them. "Corral" is at home on Broadway, though it is a Spanish word, and a native of New Mexico may refer to money as "mazuma" without in the least suspecting that he has used Yiddish. The drummer from Boston and the one from San Francisco meet in a hotel lobby In Kansas. "Le's go out and see if we can't rustle some booze In this burg" proposes the Callfornian. "Nothing stirring; I'm on the wagon," says the virtuous one from Boston. And they understand each other perfectly, and you understand both of them, wherever you may live. But the conversation would be wholly unintelligible to an Englishman who had recently arrived in this country. it This, then, is the first and most Important Im-portant fact: There is an American language, lan-guage, which Is current everywhere in the United States. It is a fact which has been overlooked by the American Dialect society and by numerous individual students stu-dents whot have devoted themselves to collecting local peculiarities of speech, while overlooking the grand and inspiring truth that we have a native tongue. The second consideration for which Professor Mencken solicits . your attention atten-tion Is that the slang which we all use, which school marms and other pedagogues peda-gogues frown upon, which careful mothers chastise their childx-en for using, which Is excluded from our more formal literature and denied a place In most of our dictionaries, dic-tionaries, is, linguistically, the best thing we have. It enriches our language, making mak-ing it more expressive; and expression is the only object of language. Furthermore, it shows that our language is young, alive and growing, and is one of the surest signs that we are still full of vitality as a nation. Professor Mencken compares us in this regard with England. The English do not invent nearly as much slang as we do; in fact, they invent almost none. Moreover, the wise men of Great Britain are always inveighing against us for the use of slang. They complain that we are corrupting cor-rupting the King's English. And yet, as Professor Mencken conclusively conclu-sively shows, our slang is always getting Into the English language as spoken in England. It is used over there because it is so useful. Eventually, some of it even appears in English dictionaries, where it is sometimes classified under the title "Ame icanism." But more often we are not even given credit for it. Thus the English are caught by Professor Pro-fessor Mencken in the inconsistency of defaming our slang and using it at the same time. He shows further, that, in Shakespeare's time, when England was a young and vigorous vig-orous country, she was almost as proliferous pro-liferous of slang as we are today. Her conservatism, her tendency to embalm her native speech in formalisms and bury it in distionarles, is distinctly a symptom of old age. It is overpopulated England, the England which is dependent for her very existence as an empire upon control of the seas, the England which ran to us for help when she got into a fight, that scorns our racy and expressive slang, and seeks to overawe us with the moribund elegance of her own book language. The difference between the two national na-tional spirits, as shown in the use of language, lan-guage, is well illustrated by comparison of the British term "whisky and soda" with the American "highball." The two mean the same thing. But the British term is a mere description in forma! language, lan-guage, while the American word is an expressive and original name. This particular Americanism originated way back in the days of the California gold rush, when any drink of whisky was called a ball. Ball was a term then used to mean a bullet, and was probably extended ex-tended to Include a drink, because a single sin-gle dose of the poison served over the San Francisco bars in those days would often leave a man considerably more than half shot. This is a hypothetical explanation; but it is known that when the effete custom of mixing -whisky with water was introduced, intro-duced, highball was evolved by reason of the fact that a tall giass was necessary to accommodate the mixture. That Americans have not lost any of their youthful exuberance of imagination in naming drinks, is proved by the host of terms to which prohibition has given birth. "Near-beer" is the oldest and most widely known, and the "spitohell cocktail" Is one of the newest. Slang has had some defenders before Professor Mencken, but he is the first to come but boldly in Bupport of the alterations alter-ations in classical English grammar which give so much pain to the ears of those who consider themselves cultured. Take the case of "ain't." It is good American to say I ain't, you ain't and they ain't. "Ain't" does duty as singular and plural, as first, second and third person. per-son. It is a verb of all work. Professor Mencken defends this usage on the ground that It is logical. The use of "ain't" saves space and time, it avoids such painful locutions as "am I not V" And it does not cause any confusion of meaning. "Ain't" may not be good English, Eng-lish, but it is good American And it ia good language, because it y'rves the purpose of language, which is to express an idea as clearly, briefly and vigorously as possible. For the use of nearly all the other characteristic char-acteristic American alterations of Knir-lish Knir-lish grammar, Professor Mencken finds equally sound Justification. And he points out that this tendency toward si)nplili'a-tion, si)nplili'a-tion, like the use of slancr, is proof that our language is still aliv,? and developing. develop-ing. He shows that all the higher types of language have boen evolved by just such a process of simplification.- It is the man in the street, innoeent of books, who is building the language of the future, fu-ture, and not the professor with his nose in a dictionary. You should not gather from all this that the learned Mencken would have the vulgate American adopted forthwith as our official language, taught in the schools and used in government documents and in literature. He rea'izes that this must come about gradually. Hut he wishes Americans to be aware that they have a language. He admonishes tho man in the street not to be ashamed of the language lan-guage which serves his purposes so well, and he utters a dignified reprimand to those fashionable folks uud literary snobs who ape the English in grammar, in spelling and even in pronunciation. Above all, he pleads tor a more liberal and' intelligent attitude toward language In the schools, l'cor little Johnny is set before a grammar filled with rule's which he cannot understand, and could not re-rnenihe: re-rnenihe: if be did undorMn nd them. Ib-struggles Ib-struggles in vain with tho science of syntax, and then goes home and tells his mother that it's no use- going to school because "he ain't gonna learn nothing there nohow." And there is something, besides the .grammar of tho future, in what he says. |