Mencken, H.L.

Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) is, after Noah Webster, the most significant observer and authority in the study of American English. Since he was essentially a maverick, this status would probably surprise and even annoy him. Mencken did not regard himself as a scholar, but his lifetime in journalism in Baltimore, especially as a court reporter, and his omnivorous philological interest put him in touch with the language actually in use. Consequently, his magnum opus, The American Language: An Enquiry into the Development of English in the United States , is a treasure-house of observation and fact, revealing the distinctive qualities of American English, especially its resiliently informal character. This great work, with its pointedly independent title derived from Webster, went through four editions, revisions, and enlargements from 1919 to 1936, by which time it had expanded to 800 pages. To this he added two huge Supplements, in 1945 and 1948. His industry stimulated the founding of the important journal American Speech in 1925. Eight months after the appearance of Supplement Two, Mencken had his first stroke and never wrote again, although various “Postscripts to the American Language” appeared subsequently in The New Yorker .

In the main work Mencken traced the growth of the new variety and its struggles to gain its independence from the mother tongue. He wrote in an incisive fashion laced with broad humor and an acerbic wit:

The hardest thing for these peewee pedants to understand is that language is never uniform—that different classes and even different ages speak it differently. The American of a Harvard professor speaking ex cathedra is seldom the same as the American of a Boston bartender or a Mississippi evangelist. Let the daughter of a hogsticker in the Omaha stockyards go home talking like a book and her ma will fan her fanny.

(1963, 517-18)

He labeled the early stages of American English with typical irony “The Earliest Alarms,” “The English Attack,” “American ‘Barbarisms,’” and so on. He was frequently intemperate in his judgments, dismissing Samuel Johnson as “the grand master of all pedantic quacks of his time. No eminent lexicographer was ever more ignorant of speechways than he was” (1963, 100). James Murray and the OED are largely ignored. Yet he was by no means a simple chauvinist, as his even-handed treatment of Noah Webster shows: he reveres him as the first champion of American English, but is contemptuous of his attempts to bowdlerize the Bible (1963, 357-58). As Raven I. McDavid, editor of the Abridged edition rightly asserts, “In short, The American Language , uniquely Mencken’s, is … a work of serious scholarship” (1963, ix).

Unlike most scholars of the American variety, Mencken gave space to the less reputable aspects of the language, with sections on “Euphemisms,” “Forbidden Words,” “Terms of Abuse,” and “Expletives.” One natural target in the first category is the extensive vocabulary generated by the death industry “whereby they have sought to bedizen their hocus pocus with mellifluous euphemisms,” words such as casket, mortician, parlor, memorial park, slumber robe , and so on (1963, 341-43). His hatred of cant and pomposity led him to identify a particularly American form of euphemism, the inflated title for a menial position, such as rodent operative for rat-catcher and termite engineer .

“Forbidden Words” begins with the observation that “The American people, once the most prudish on earth, took to a certain defiant looseness of speech in World War I and Prohibition. Today after a second world war, words and phrases are encountered everywhere—on the air, on the screen, in the theaters, in the comic papers, in the newspapers, on the floor of Congress and even at the domestic hearth—that were reserved for use in saloons and bagnios a generation ago” (1963, 355). However, he notes that a Scottish visitor, “James Flint, in his ‘Letters from America,’ reported that rooster had been substituted for cock (the latter having acquired an indelicate anatomical significance) by 1821” (1963, 356-57). “The palmy days of euphemism ran from the 1820s to the 1880s. Bulls became male cows … the breast became the bosom , cockroaches became roaches , trousers became inexpressibles … the biblical ass homonymous with arse , was displaced by jackass, jack or donkey ” (1963, 357). The discussion is wide-ranging, including references to the “four-letter words,” notably in quoting Allen Walker Read’s important article, “An Obscenity Symbol” (1934): “surely a student of the language is even less warranted in refusing to consider certain four-letter words because they are too ‘nasty’ or too ‘dirty.’” Nevertheless, Mencken, like Read, avoids mentioning the grossest himself.

“The American language boasts a large stock of terms of opprobrium, chiefly directed at aliens,” Mencken rightly observes at the beginning of his twenty-page discussion of “Terms of Abuse” (1963, 367). Less inhibited in this area, Mencken traverses the field with flair and unusual detail. Names for syphilis, he notes, are foreign, as in French pox; likewise lice, fleas, and cockroaches, he notes, are often given national names ( espagnol , “Spanish”) or regional ( Preussen , “Prussian”). " Woppage appeared in England as a designation for the retreating Italian Army in North Africa, but it did not survive" (1963, 372).

Mencken showed some regrettable signs of race prejudice, and his discussion of Jew (partly covered in the relevant entry) is frank, often verging on the tactless: “In 1936 a vigilant male Jew from Chicago undertook a jehad [sic] against the publishers of Roget’s Thesaurus because it listed Jew as a synonym for lender.” He continued: “Certainly the sort of Jew who devotes himself to visiting editors seems to prefer Hebrew ” (1963, 376). In similar tone he observes that " Nigger is so bitterly resented by the more elegant blackamoors that they object to it even in quotations, and not a few of their papers spell it n?r " (1963, 383). Today Mencken is undoubtedly classified as “politically incorrect,” but his discussions are revealing on a number of grounds, beyond simply showing the comparative lack of sensitivity in the handling of ethnic terms in the 1920s and 1930s. He brings out strict semantic and historical distinctions, as between Hebrew and Jew , and between Negro and nigger; he also reminds readers of the special use of Creole in Louisiana. But above all he records and resents the attempts of pressure groups to suppress particular usages.

The discussion of “Expletives” starts, curiously, with a whole rehearsal of the English history of bloody, God’s wounds , and hell before the more specifically American darn, tarnation, goddam , and son of a bitch , “the hardest worked by far” (1963, 399). However, he brings out the useful distinction that bloody “is entirely without improper significance in America, but in England it is regarded as indecent, with overtones of the blasphemous” (1963, 389) and that bugger “is not generally considered obscene in the United States” (1963, 398). He quotes extensively from a pioneering article, " Hell in American Speech," published in 1931 by L.W. Merryweather. This distinguished fourteen different functions of the word (1963, 393). Even more valuably he unearths “the only comprehensive collection of American swear words,” namely “A Dictionary of Profanity and its Substitutes,” by M.R. Walter of Dalton, Pennsylvania, noting wryly: “It has not been published, but a typescript is in the Princeton University Library and may be consulted there by learned men of reasonable respectability” (1986, 398). Mencken produces a fairly lengthy list of euphemisms, from Walter and other sources (1963, 394-95). A selection of them shows the creativity of American expletives:

For damn: drat, bang, blame, blast, bother, darn, cuss, dang, ding, bean .

For goddam: goldarn, doggone, consarn, goldast, goshdarn , and various terms in dad -, e.g., dad-blame, dad-blast dad-burn , etc.

For Jesus: Jemima, Jerusalem, Jehosaphat, jiminy whiz, gee-whittaker .

His generalized view is typically Menckenian: “All expletives tend to be dephlogisticated by over-use” (1963, 399)