The American Language

by H.L. Mencken

A modified, one-volume edition of Mencken's classic analysis of American English

Genres: Language, Nonfiction, History, Linguistics, Reference, Writing, Philosophy

816 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

Henry Louis "H.L." Mencken became one of the most influential and prolific journalists in America in the 1920s and '30s, writing about all the shams and con artists in the world. He attacked chiropractors and the Ku Klux Klan, politicians and other journalists. Most of all, he attacked Puritan morality. He called Puritanism, "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

At the height of his career, he edited and wrote for The American Mercury magazine and the Baltimore Sun newspaper, wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column for the Chicago Tribune, and published two or three books every year. His masterpiece was one of the few books he wrote about something he loved, a book called The American Language (1919), a history and collection of American vernacular speech. It included a translation of the Declaration of Independence into American English that began, "When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody."

When asked what he would like for an epitaph, Mencken wrote, "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."

(from American Public Media)

Reviews

[dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

No, not a dry read at all! Despite the 1930's publication, it's fascinating to read the opinions of the transformation of the English language on American soil...and its effects on the global populate via 2008. I loved the original derivation of words, especially growing up "Pennsylvania Dutch". The best part was sounding out the words with their regional dialect.

Did you know that "yes, siree!" came from the Irish CCD "Yes, certainly"?

I read this after hearing David Milch describe the writing on HBO's Deadwood. He's such an amazing individual, I love to hear him talk about anything; his insight on human nature is spot on.

Maybe I'll get around to reading the two additional companions at about 800 each!

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've wanted to read this for awhile, and eventually decided to pick it up during my recent Dresden Files sprint, to cleanse the palate between Harry Dresden's various lengthy and often amusing beat-downs. It took me awhile to finish, but honestly not as long as I thought it would, which is perhaps a testament to Mencken's ability to compellingly weave a tale about something as simultaneously ordinary and urbane as the everyday language in which we speak.

The main body of the book can be split into roughly three parts. The first five chapters covers the history of American as a language. Chapters V through VIII provide various grammatical explanations of "standard" American language, as it existed in Mencken's day. Chapters IX through XI focus on vulgar American language. After a short chapter with Mencken's predictions on the future of the language (XII), there's a long Appendix exploring more than two dozen languages that exist in various parts of the U.S., primarily in immigrant communities.

By and large, the most interesting part of the book for me was those first few chapters exploring the history of the language. Mencken very effectively shows how there mere fact of arriving in America forced explorers and settlers to begin developing their own language to describe the new plants, animals, landscapes and peoples they encountered. One of my favorite anecdotes is Mencken's description of the evolution of the word "raccoon" as people attempted to transcribe it from its original Native American pronunciation:

Thus, in Captain John Smith's "True Relation," published in 1608, one finds mention of a strange beast described variously as a rahaugcum and a raugroughcum. Four years later, in William Strachey's "Historie of Trevaile Into Virginia Britannia" it became an aracoune, "much like a badger," and by 1624 Smith had made it a rarowcun in his "Virginia." It was not until 1672 that it emerged as the raccoon we know today.

Mencken doesn't only focus how new words come into the language. He also shows how America's separation from England prevented developments in the parent tongue from replicating in American. For example, while Shakespeare was busily coining words and phrases in Elizabethan England, the American language had little opportunity, initially anyway, to benefit directly from his inventiveness. Such differences due to separation weren't limited to new vocabulary. Existing words also changed their meaning, including which words were acceptable to speakers of "standard" English. Mencken points to a number of cases in which perfectly legitimate English terminology and phraseology survived in America but became disused in England, and then later became known as Americanisms, although they could more accurately be called archaisms that had simply fallen out of vogue.

Mencken also spends a lot of time showing how American language absorbed the language of other cultures. Many more words than "raccoon" have their roots in Native American language. Likewise, contact with the various explorers, settlers and later immigrants brought new words and phrases into the language. Most interestingly, however, Mencken notes the propensity of Americans to simply create new words to accommodate ideas as they are needed. Some of these stick around, though many tend, eventually, to fall by the wayside. And it's hard to predict which will remain ahead of time.

Mencken is also quite fond of word lists. At one point, he lists a stunningly large number of supposedly offensive words that I could only laugh, both at its size and the relative mildness of its members, before wondering whether he had a private list of more uncivil terms — and how I might get my hands on it. However, as might be expected, at times such lists are a little tedious. Part of why I like the earlier chapters so much is that they tell a story, weaving words and word groups together with their historical context and how they both affected and were affected by the people who used them. In the last few chapters, Mencken tends to ditch narrative and undertake the role of cataloger. I would be lying if I didn't admit to glossing over some portions of the last several chapters. Likewise for the Appendix.

That said, overall Mencken does an excellent job of balancing scholarship with storytelling. For anyone who has even the slightest interest in American as a language, there are a lot of treasures to uncover, and undoubtedly you will come away with ideas and inquiries to pursue further. This was the last edition Mencken produced, and it still remains a compelling read today. Although there have been other books written about the American language (or aspects of it) since 1936, I suspect it would be difficult to find any that are more enjoyable.


An expanded version of this review is available at CurtisWeyant.com

[twrctdrv]

why did i read this whole thing?

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fourth Edition corrected, enlarged, and rewritten.

Massive study of American--English with the overlay of new words, pronunciations, spellings, and usages, in the chaotic wild of the New World. Mencken's classic is so old (the shock hits when you realize that the 60s he is referring to are the 1860s!) that the world was still relatively much newer then, so much of what Mencken writes seems archaic now.

It is interesting to read many of the same arguments that we consider modern in Mencken's classic prose; turns out "ebonics" isn't a new idea at all, but the acceptance of spoken vernacular as the right and rightful future of the language was a live debate in Mencken's day. It is also interesting to read some of the established and accepted slanguage we use today rated as new and even "racy", and conversely, read similar words and phrases considered outre then that are still--outre, if not forgotten.

Because of its age and weightiness, this book is better read as a historical document, not a live discussion of language. For example, the 100-pages of appendix covering the influence of English on various foreign languages as spoken in the United States is strictly for academic specialists in those languages. But for word lovers and linguistics, there is still a feast of well-aged profundity here.

[Vicky Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inevitable Change: American Linguistic Independence
There is very little that we can own of culture. Human culture-ways are as rivers. And nothing is as fluid as language. Though rivers only flow in one direction, a select few have been known to change direction. English is a language which has crossed the oceans in every direction, and is an official language of 67 different countries. In most all cases, that language only flows out of England. The United States is a notable exception. Here, visitors from across 'the pond' often do not recognize their own language. And, many Americans use subtitles for British films. Not only have we spoken the King's English with a different accent, but we repurposed it for our own use. The changes are so prominent that many people internationally refer to our English as American. In much the same way, recently there have been a few people in South and Central America suggesting that Spanish be called American, since it differs from the Empire Spanish. But, that's another story.

This work explains how, beginning at the American Revolution, American English began to change direction. 'Americanisms' began to flow back to Britain. This is the source now of the British agitation with our change to the language, and it has always been a subject over which many people in the BE complain. Mencken shared many quotations directly from that era. He writes in elaborate detail and uses many sources, which are all attributed with extensive footnotes. But, it is not boring in the least. You will find yourself reading the footnotes with as great attention as the text, since they are all interspersed throughout. The book as a whole is a deep study of how American English is not a 'falsified English,' but rather a new language in its own right.

English is in England the property of an ancient caste system. Unfortunately, there are more speakers of American English here than there are of British English on the islands of Britain, which is not even admitted by their scholars to include the outer Celtic fringe, but primarily Southern England. Still, they consider us rather than themselves as having a provincial language. John Witherspoon, a Scottish clergyman in the 19th Century, divided what he called American "errors in grammar, improprieties and vulgarisms" into eight classes:

1. Americanisms, or ways of speaking peculiar to this country
2. Vulgarisms in England and America
3. Vulgarisms in America only.
4. Local phrases or terms.
5. Common blunders arising from ignorance,
6. Cant phrases.
7. Personal blunders
8. Technical terms introduced into the language.

It always seems odd to me that Britain complains of American idiom, when all the great English writers wrote in the idiom of their characters. You can recognize the area of England a person is from by his dialect. So even the British English is not so pure. As Mencken quoted, " The English tongue is of small reach, Stretching no further than this island of ours, nay not there over all." (P. 590) It really makes no sense for Brits to complain that we speak our own language. We, like them, are our own people. What seems to irk Brits most is that our language flows back to their own country, and they are changing to be more like us. British English is suffering invasions of Americanisms. Not all people in England feel that way. Virginia Woolf said, "The Americans are doing what the Elizabethans did — they are coining new words. They are instinctively making the language adapt itself to their needs."

The fact is that people living in new ways needed new words to describe not only the countryside and geography around them, but the way they live and think in this new world. All languages are constantly changing for this reason, though many countries try to control the use and adaptation of language. The attempt by England to control America's use of English has been called "The Great Stupidity." There is of course the Latin Analogy. It is entirely possible that eventually American English will undergo a change similar to that which Latin underwent after the fall of the Roman Empire, when the Romance languages split up into multiple modern languages across Europe that are recognized today. It is conjectured that in the future we could have multiple separate languages stemming from the different current dialects of American English, such as 'Spanglish' or German English, etc.

This large hardcover is the fourth and final edition of Mencken's review of the American language, and was published in 1936. This 1999 printing is the 25th, and because it is so informative it endures. The first edition was published in 1919. This fourth edition is much larger and has been expanded since then with over 800 pages. It is a great resource for all lovers of words and of American history. I'm going to leave a few quotations below.

"There is no authority which can enforce the recognition of a Standard English that does not exist, save in the imagination of a few people in London. When these people write or speak they betray their place of origin as definitely as a native of New York or Edinburgh, Their assumption that, while the latter are strange and provincial, they are standard and authoritative, is merely an illustration of self-complacent provincialism, It is an assumption which the great English speaking world does not and cannot admit."- Ernest Boyd

"If the Anglicization of the world is good, why is the Americanization of England bad?"

"This insistence that Americans are not, in any cultural sense, nor even in any plausible statistical sense, Anglo-Saxons is to be found in many English fulminations upon the subject."

"Several circumstances render a future separation of the American from the English necessary and unavoidable... numerous local causes, such as a new country, new Associations of people, new combinations of ideas in Arts and Sciences, and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe, will introduce new words into the American tongue. These causes will produce, in a course of time, a language in North America as different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one another: like remote branches of a tree springing from the same stock, or rays of light shot same center, and diverging from each other in proportion to their distance from the point of separation..." - John Adams

"It offends them [the English], " he said, "that we are not thoroughly ashamed of ourselves for not being like them."

"The British will learn every language, living and dead, but American English."

"Hollywood gradually conquered the English cinema palaces..."

"After the war of 1812, after the Civil War, and again after the world war there were deliberate efforts, among the Literati as well as among the folk, to throw off English precept and example all together, and among the authors concerned were such respectable figures as J. Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Sinclair Lewis."

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this mostly because H.L.Mencken is a master of language. I appreciate his ability to turn a phrase, his high intelligence, humour and majestic scorn...

But this book is also the fruit of much research and so, even a century after it was published, is interesting for its subject matter. Being antipodean and therefore having developed a tri-lingual familiarity with English, I was fascinated and delightfully amazed at what time and geography have done to the mother tongue.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The American Language is a work in lexicographical historiography and philology on the American dialect of English. Mencken offers a detailed account of the history of the emergence of what he calls the American language from the colonial period until the first half of the twentieth century. He does so in order to fill in what he calls the huge gap in the scholarship. He notes the irony that barely any studies of the American dialect have been produced by Americans, while the latter have produced detailed studies of multiple other dialects and languages. A debate emerges in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century between purists and reformers about how English ought to be used and regulated in the United States after the country declared its independence from Britain. Mencken is gleefully Anglophobic, which is great; he argues for the richness and vitality of American English--it's protean, loose-footed, barbaric brilliance. Yes, it is often vulgar and incorrect, he says, but this is the inevitable tax that Americans must pay in what he thinks of as one of the most exciting phases in a language's development. British English after Johnson, in his view, is conservative and stiff. American English has a strong impulse toward neologism and metaphor. There's is an irregularity and ready-to-handless about American English that is similar to the English of Elizabethan England, when the language was still malleable and unhampered by extensive lexicographical regimes. The pedagogues in general have taught a version of English far-removed from what is spoken by the everyday people; they in addition to Americans of social pretentious generally defer to British authority in terms of usage. (Mencken doesn't like pedagogues.) But the common people, who determine the fate and the destiny of the language, are blithely indifferent to the forms of British usage, and make up the language "as they go." This has incited the indignation of many on both sides of the Atlantic. Mencken writes in the tradition of Noah Webster, who sought to differentiate British and American English in his American Dictionary of the English Language. He refuses to mindlessly defer to British English and affirms the vigor of American English, which he ultimately argues will supplant British English in the long term.

[East Bay J · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mencken’s The American Language is a fascinating look at the ever changing nature of language. His premise is that the English spoken by the English differs significantly enough from that spoken by United States residents and that they are, in fact, two very different languages spoken by two very different cultures.

This book's 1921 publication date underlines the changing nature of language. Many, many words given as examples here are no longer used in this country 90 years after the publication of The American Language. Often in the course of reading this book, I came across words Mencken would refer to as being commonplace in American speech but that were news to me. Jap-a-lac is a fine example. What the heck is a jap-a-lac? Turns out it was a product manufactured by the Glidden Varnish Company and later loaned its name to a rye whiskey based cocktail.

Speaking of cocktails, Mencken lists several in the chapter Expanding The Vocabulary, originating in the States, including, "horse's neck, Mamie Taylor, Tom And Jerry, Tom Collins, John Collins, bishop, stone wall, gin fix, brandy champarelle, golden slipper, hari kari, locomotive, whiskey daisy, blue blazer, black stripe, white plush and brandy crusta." The more alcoholically inclined among us will recognize several of these but many have passed on to the great cocktail graveyard in the sky.

Also interesting were the musical terms from page 132. Mencken says, "In music the English cling to an archaic and unintelligible nomenclature, long since abandoned in America." These terms include breve for a double whole note, semibreve for a whole note, minim for a half note, crotchet for a quarter note, quaver for an eighth note and so forth, all apparently deriving from something called "plain chant," the precursor to Gregorian Chant.

Another change since '21 is that we are significantly less apt to use racist terminology or ideas, especially in a scholarly text of this nature. Mencken is clearly educated and education is the ostensible enemy of ignorance. However, in the chapter Loan Words And Non English Influences, Mencken states that a number of loan words from the Chinese, "have remained California localisms, among them such verbs as yen (to desire strongly, as a Chinaman desires opium).” On page 211, Mencken refers to an African American as a "darkey." Or how about, "But in the United States there is a class of well to do commercial Jews of a peculiarly ignorant and obnoxious type - chiefly department store owners, professional Jewish philanthropists and their attendant rabbis, lawyers, doctors and so on..." This sort of thinking was perhaps more acceptable in the 20's but would be met today with derision if not outright animosity.

I was unaware that, at one time, the word tenderloin was used to denote a "gay and dubious neighborhood." The word apparently originates from Alexander "Clubber" Williams, an 1870's New York police captain. After a transfer from an obscure precinct to one in West Thirtieth Street, Williams stated, "I've been having chuck steak ever since I've been on the force and now I'm going to have a bit of tenderloin."

In examining the American fondness for acronyms, Mencken discusses O.K. and its origins. One etymology has it coming from the American Indian word, okeh, meaning "so be it." I was tickled to see Mencken reference Okeh Records, which he refers to as, "a popular series of phonograph records."

The American Language is successful as a study of English but also functions as a history text. It is packed full of facts and information, though sometimes things take on a sort of listing quality (not like a ship, like list after list after list) and things often seem a bit random. Regardless, this book would be very interesting to the philologically minded.

[P · Rating 5 out of 5]

H. L. Mencken was a rara avis - few writers could or can aspire to reach the heights of his intellect.
In this, his most well-known and accepted book, he elucidates and defends the evolution of 'proper British' into American as its own language, cogently and limpidly, citing irrefutable example after example to corroborate his conclusions. Since I have an affinity for late 19th and early 20th century - aka "fin de siecle" - writing and writers, and perspectives held by occupants of America during that era, this book hit the mark for me.
And, while I've had a passing knowledge of Mencken up to now (see https://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/H...), he just jumped way up on my list of authors to follow.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was an eye-opener for me. It was fascinating to read about the evolution of the English language from the Revolutionary War to the 1930s. The author is old-school witty and clearly cares a lot about communication and language.

Since reading this book, I've been trying to add some words to my vocabulary. Words like exluncticate, absquatulate, go-ahead-ativeness...

This is a fun book.

[Leonard Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is simply an essential book for anyone who wants to know how and why the American version of English developed the way it did. Mencken did a tremendous amount of scholarship here, but he doesn't lose his irascible sense of humor and cynicism. Note to "Deadwood" fans: the creators relied heavily on this work when crafting their characters' speech patterns.

[Mark Singer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The autodidact Mencken wrote this well-researched and idiosyncratic account on how the American English language evolved separately from its roots in Britain.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the 1936 4th edition, last reprinted in 1974. I note that the price in pencil is marked down to $5.98 and my address is written in it from 1977, so I bought it used. The book has been on various shelves in four states since then. It took a Coronavirus pandemic to get me to look at it, and I ended up reading it through. If you’re interested in the difference between English in England vs the US, in the history of the development of American English, in the origin of American surnames, in American place names, in American slang, or in the historical development of any of these things, I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t enjoy this detailed work.

If you are of a sensitive nature, you might be offended by Mencken’s well-known bigotry, but he does not display it openly here. It is just occasionally slightly exposed. You might not even notice it unless you are an American of non-English ancestry.

Of some interest were:
Mencken explains the difference between the meaning of the expression to jew someone in the US and England on p. 124 (Who knew?).

There is a list of Americanisms that derive from commercial products. Some are surprising and some that anyone would have known in 1936 have disappeared, e.g. uneeda.

There is a list of common short words that were selected and used by newspaper editors for their headlines that sometimes popularized the word, e.g.

Ace. In the sense of expert or champion it came in during the World War. It has since been extended to mean any person who shows any ponderable proficiency in whatever he undertakes to do…
Blast. It has quite displaced explosion in headlines…
Car. It is rapidly displacing all the older synonyms for automobile, including even auto….

He discusses the creation of American verbs in various ways, e.g. to phone … to tiptoe (for to walk tiptoe) … to reminisce … to orate … to author, and others using -ize and a proper name which are now almost lost to us, e.g. to hooverize (introduced in 1917 and included in Webster’s New International Dictionary in 1934) and to oslerize appearing after a famous oration by Dr. William Osler in 1905.

Along with other true or pseudo-abbreviations Mencken mentions the American expression O.K., which he comments was already used internationally in 1936, and he discusses its various false origin histories.

There is an extensive discussion of the differences between American and English school terminology that I found useful since I never understand what it means if a character in a novel is in their third standard, or what the differences are among an usher, a master, a pro-chancellor, or a high steward.

Various American vs English euphemisms are mentioned including nerts that I mostly see in old comic strips, but was apparently very widely used in 1936. He mentions some odd euphemisms that have been used in newspapers where gonorrhea, syphilis, venereal, and even virgin were prohibited. In 1933 the new treatment of giving a patient malaria to treat tertiary syphilis was invented (the fever is beneficial; the inventor won the Nobel prize in Medicine). The New York Times spoke of it only as a dread form of insanity caused by a blood disease. Mencken tells us that in Appalachia and the Ozarks certain common words were avoided in every-day speech regardless of context. Examples include bed, tail and leg!

There is an interesting discussion of various expletives and the history of their development, e.g. hell and, in England, bloody.

In a fantastic discovery (!), I learned that the word insignia is, in Latin, the plural of insigne, and that it was formerly considered inappropriate to use insignia as a singular noun, much as some decry data or criteria as a singular.

[John Meuser · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a fascinating time capsule into the history of America and her mother tongue. Menken delves into the minutia of our language and points out its uniqueness in the world. He makes many convincing arguments about how America, as a nation of immigrants and a mishmash of cultures, is able to accept new words and forms of grammar enthusiastically. There are examples of the language that he presents as being incredibly common, which I have never heard of 100 years later. At the same time, he presents forms as being new and novel that I find to be commonplace in my era. The difference between his observed version of American English and my observations a century later is stark.

However, I will say I do not believe that the central thesis of his book has been proven to be true. His prediction was that British English and American English would diverge to the point of irreconcilability by this point in time. Be believed that an American speaking to an Englishman in his native tongue would be as difficult as a German speaking to a Dutchman. This very clearly has not been the case, and in fact, I believe, the two dialects have done far more converging than diverging. I attribute his predictive failure to two things that he would not have been able to anticipate.

First of all, there is no way he could have foreseen how small the world would become from an information and communication perspective. He did notice the booming film industry, even if it was embryonic in 1919, and that America was poised to dominate the medium. I do not believe he could see how large that industry would become and that America's cultural exports would be as overwhelming as they have come to be. He also would not have been able to conceive of how the internet has facilitated the cross-pollination of grammar, pronunciation, orthology, and vocabulary bidirectionally across the Atlantic and beyond.

Secondly, he observed the tendency of American English to devolve into simpler forms. He did not see this as a criticism of the language but as its strength. He assumed that the way the less educated used language would become dominant and that the prescriptive grammarians would be powerless to influence the process. The examples he cites as being self-evidently ascendant are laughable to modern readers. I believe that he underestimated the ubiquity of literacy in the modern age. This is not to say that we have a perfect record of education, but the non-literacy rate has shrunk to almost nothing. Of course, we will always wish proficiency was higher, but the number of Americans who cannot read at all is far lower than it was 100 years ago. I admittedly might be overly optimistic with my assessment though.

Overall, the book was fascinating, if a bit dry in parts. His entire paragraphs listing examples of words and grammar could get quite tedious, but the moments of surprise of finding an etymological gem made it worth it.

[Dayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clever writer, who also wrote "In Defense of Women," which made me like him, until I really found out what he thought.

But this book, is his masterpiece and one of the few books he wrote about something he loved, "The American Language." Written in 1919, it is a history and collection of American jargon or slang.

It included a translation of the Declaration of Independence into American English that began, "When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody."

It sounds very stilted and embarrassingly naive, but don't fool yourself. Mencken was a reigning journalist and writer of his time.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprisingly thorough exploration of American English, fascinating both because of how relevant it remains a century after publication but also because it illustrates how much has changed since then. I went into this book expecting Mencken to provide a light but entertaining treatment of a subject matter that can easily become dry. He didn't disappoint with his writing style — he never does — but the treatment turned out to be more in-depth than I anticipated, which was a pleasant surprise. 4/5

[Joan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve “finished” this as in I’m done. :-) Got about halfway through and it became too detailed for me. But was interesting to read the general info about what set American English apart from English English.

[Cutenerd scraped an O OWL in Charms · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic.

[Dennis Hargens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good state of the American language in 1920. Informative on slang and usage

[Robert Armstrong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not for everyone, but if you are even a little interested in language, words, spelling, and just what kind of person was Noah Webster, then you must read this.

[Erneilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting although quite dated.

[Ryan Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

mencken is so smart.

[Bill Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the list-reciting can get a tad mind-numbing, this has to be considered the ur-text of American language.

Mencken performs a yeoman's task of identifying vocabulary and pronunciations that are specifically American (as opposed to In The English Language) and traces their origins, from German loanwords to bastardizations of Spanish and British root words.

It's pretty exhaustive, and somewhat exhausting, considering it's 100 years old this year, and yet still has relevance. (Although it is fascinating to hear arcana that was contemporary at the time but has fallen out of use.) Pretty much a must-read for language geeks.

[Susan Molloy · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this early twentieth century publication was immensely interesting and presented a good history of the evolution of American English, I noted that this is not a hard and set rule for vocabulary, even as late as the mid-twentieth century. I discovered that what Mencken denoted as strictly British English vocabulary was already in my lexicon while growing up in the Midwest. This is not to say this book is wrong, nor that it is outdated; language is fluid, and American English is vastly so.

💥 Recommended.
🟣

[Bob Kaufman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent foray into the diversion and growth of American from English.

[Abhishek · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting "philological" (Mencken's word of choice, but I suppose "linguistic" would be more apposite today) study of American English. This work reveals just as much through Mencken's actual scholarship, which was considerable, as it does through the datedness of the work (which was written in 1919). For instance, Mencken remarks that the tendency to add an s after words ending in -ward (forward/forwards, toward/towards, etc.) is an American development, but it's clear to anyone who cares to pay attention to such things today that the version without the s is more widespread in the United States, and the version with the s is more widespread elsewhere. ("Elsewhere" to Mencken meant Great Britain exclusively.) This shows how essential it is to consult philological accounts from different periods when studying the history of a language.

Other things that surprised me is the sheer number of American innovations that are so common today in English everywhere that it never occurs to you that they might have been Americanisms. Mencken compares this creative tendency in American English to that which was current in G. B. in the Elizabethan period.

I was also amused to note how alarmist commentators in the nineteenth century were when it came to the divergence of American English from British English. They claimed that by the twentieth century American and British English (the former of which Mencken consistently refers to as "American" rather than "American English") would be as different as German and Dutch. This, as we know, is manifestly not the case, and American English (unless you count Internet speak, I suppose) has reached a comfortable stasis of sorts in which radical innovations are few and far between.

[Kate Gardner · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to categorise. It’s part reference book, part textbook, part history, part sociology. Mencken combines his own knowledge of etymology and philology with a huge array of sources in order to cover the rather large question of how the American language evolved into its then-current state.

He begins by comparing British English (which he calls plain “English” throughout) and American English (which he calls “American”) in terms of words and phrases. What I liked was that he strove throughout to reflect the actual language spoken, rather than just formal written language, though he did use the latter to prove when words and phrases had passed into the “accepted” lexicon.

My favourite part was the historical section, which traced changes in the language from the first settlers onward. Mencken explained how isolation from the “mother country” allowed some words ot be corrupted or to change in meaning, while others retained meanings or pronunciations that became obselete in Britain. The new Americans acquired words from people they came into contact with; initially American Indians, French and Spanish settlers, and later people from all over the world. And then of course there was Noah Webster, who I’d love to learn more about.

However, it has some major flaws too.

Read my full review: http://www.noseinabook.co.uk/2016/01/...

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm treating this like one of those books of quotations you receive for Christmas -- read a little dab here and another there -- really what other way could you read it? What makes it fascinating is that his analysis was done about 75 years ago, so the language has changed a great deal since then -- often in the directions he predicts, but frequently not.
This is the 4th ed. (1936): it originally appeared just after the war and was revised in 1921 and again in 1923. In 1945 he published a "supplement" (in 2 volumes!) which followed the outline of the present edition, but included entirely new material sent him by his correspondents.
A lot of the fun is Mencken's style, which is elegantly playful. I think he would have made a challenging friend.
I was stunned to see a quotation from Alistair Cooke, then (1936) an announcer on BBC.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are interested in linguistics or etymology then this book and its sequels are must reads. The author of this 700 page book is amazing (Supplement 1 is also 700 pages). However, I could not get past page 253. I looked for this book because Richard Rodriguez, the author, thought that this was a great history book and it is. I even bought it together with Supplement 1. However it is really slow, too slow. Sort of like reading logarithmic tables. But it will stay in my library just in case.

[Eric Chevlen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had thought that Mencken was simply a humorous curmudgeon, but this book reveals that he was in fact a scholar with the heart of a lexicographer. Ultimately, however, the book could not hold my interest beyond about a third of it. It began to read like a laundry list of differences between the English and American languages. I could recommend this book for dilatory browsing, but not for a cover-to-cover page-turner.