AMERICAN SLANG.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2338, 6 October 1921, Page 4

AMERICAN SLANG.

Some Americans resent the accusation of English critics that the Americans of to-day do not speak English, but a slangy concoction of all the alien tongues. Reading some American newspapers is almost like deciphering Chinese, so many unfamiliar words are set down. This is especially true of sporting and trade journals. They express themselves in a sort of jargon that reechoes the market place of a city of cross-roads.

A correspondent in the London Times writes: “There is a great deal of so-called slang current in New York newspapers, theatres, and in magazines, and motion pictures, that lias had its origin in the Germanspeaking Jewish population of New York. Perhaps you do not realise in England that more, than fivesixths of the population of New York city was born on.the Continent of Europe, and that the children of these foreigners constitute a large proportion of the remaining sixth. ■\Ye have an enormous Jewish population —larger than has ever been represented by any census —mostly originally German speaking. The same conditions exist in a less degree in the other large American cities. It is a population that becomes prosperous very swiftly, and consequently achieves positions of importance. The majority of the younger men on the New York papers are either Jewish or Irish. When they are neither they are Americans from the West, where among people of the middle class slang amounting to jargon has become common speech. It is easy to see, therefore, where the slang circulated by newspapers, popular

magazines, and moving pictures has had its origin. A ‘hick/ for example (one of the words you quoted), is Western slang for a rustic that has recently been circulated throughout the country by the means described above.

“Not only slang is circulated by this means —an incorrect and unEnglish use of prepositions has become common in print, in street signs, and advertisements. Thus we read of “the ’bus line in Fifth Avenue’ (as in German usage), while sales of various commodities are advertised as ‘ a sale on’ furs, shoes, etc.

“Worse than this, the contributor to the ‘popular’ American magazine frequently finds his or her English converted into provincialism by the blue pencil of the editor. In a re-cently-published story of mine I found the clause ‘in the village’ changed to ‘back in the village.’

“In a volume called the American Language, a number of American provincialisms are given as representing authentic American usages as compared with the English. Yet the colloquialisms quoted were, without exception, expressions used only by the plain people of the American middle class, people of the American middle class, people from Western villages and the Agricultural districts, and that have never at any period in American history been used by the well-educated and (he well-bred American.

“There are many so-called American writers who resent the AngloSaxonism of the country their parents emigrated to, and refuse to accept the undeniable fact of our language. Any paper picked up at random will furnish an illustration. In the mornings’ Herald a reporter speaks of hearing in an ‘American’ crowd, ‘objurgations in all the languages of North America.’ Very often in all seriousness these liyphenites refer to our mother tongue as ‘the American language.’ “The patois of our newer Americans is not yet to be taken as typical of American speech. There are still many of us who adhere to the ‘King’s English’ and know that, and that only, as the real ‘American language.’ ”