The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States
1848
The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States
1848
H. L. Mencken was never content to let experts have the last word. When he turned his corrosive intelligence to the English language in 1919, he found a nation still apologizing for its tongue, scholars treating American vernacular as a degraded colonial relic. This book is his fierce, funny, deeply opinionated case for why they're wrong. Mencken, the great journalist and satirist of early 20th-century America, argues that the American tongue is not British English in decline but a living, evolving language shaped by frontier, immigration, industry, and the boundless American instinct to make things new. He ranges across pronunciation, slang, grammar, and usage with the verve of a man who genuinely loves language, even as he savages the pretensions of those who condescend to it. The book captures a specific historical moment: an America just beginning to claim cultural independence from England, using its own words as proof of nationhood. More than a linguistic study, this is a portrait of American confidence in the making.
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“But, by a curious twist, it is not the leadership that is old and decorous that fetches him, but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He will resist dictation out of the past, but he will follow a new messiah with almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of economics, religion, morals and speech. A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new metaphor or piece of slang. Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meet the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative. The characteristic American habit of reducing complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations was already noticeable in colonial times, [Pg023] and such highly typical Americanisms as O. K., N. G., and P. D. Q., have been traced back to the first days of the republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these early tendencies invisible””
— H. L. Mencken
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Mencken, H. L.. The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-american-language-a-preliminary-inquiry-into-the-development-of-english-in-t-2c63271f-fc0a-4e67-b793-92226fedabde.Mencken, H. L. (1848). The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-american-language-a-preliminary-inquiry-into-the-development-of-english-in-t-2c63271f-fc0a-4e67-b793-92226fedabdeMencken, H. L.. The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-american-language-a-preliminary-inquiry-into-the-development-of-english-in-t-2c63271f-fc0a-4e67-b793-92226fedabde.
