Books: Alphabet Soup

THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE: SUPPLEMENT I—H. L. Mencken—Knopf ($5).

The brashest, bounciest lexicographer who ever lived is a Baltimorean of German extraction named Henry Louis Mencken. His first, famed dictionary (The American Language, 1919) was dedicated to the proposition that English has now become only a dialect of American.

Author Mencken first intended The American Language: Supplement I to be a small addition to his American Language, soon discovered that his mass of new material had outgrown the parent volume. Many of Supplement I’s 739 pages are devoted simply to supporting the thesis of The American Language, i.e., U.S. speech-ways have grown so powerful that they are rapidly reducing to a dialect “the ancient and lovely but now somewhat rheumy language of the British Isles.” Readers of the Supplement will find it packed with boisterous Menckenian humor and casual erudition.

British rules of speech have retained some influence in the U.S., Mencken admits. But whereas most Briticisms rarely penetrate below U.S. “levels of cultural pretentions,” Americanisms subversively invade the British proletariat via movies, magazines and comic-strips, then worm their insidious way up into the best society.

Privy O.K. The American invasion has been so successful that the most determined British purist cannot even counterattack without unconsciously employing Americanisms. Most Englishmen would be astonished to learn, for instance, that businessman, governmental, graveyard, law-abiding, lengthy, overcoat and telegram are of U.S. origin. And even Noah Webster would be surprised to learn that O.K. (“without question the most successful of all Americanisms, old or new”) has recently been approved by the Judicial Committee of His Majesty’s Privy Council, which “decided formally that inscribing O.K. upon a legal document ‘meant that the details contained (in it) were correctly given.’ ”

The past 15 years have shown a verbal inventiveness that, says Mencken, is “the most riotous seen in the world since the break-up of Latin.” Some of the results are rooted in the New Deal and the Depression —e.g., forgotten man, economic royalist, horse-and-buggy days, boondoggling—as are the more ephemeral third-termite and That Man, and the alphabet soup of government bureaus (NRA, TVA). But the bulk of heavy coinage has come from a slew of irresponsible, word-happy inventors, including such Menckenian heroes as Variety’s late Jack Conway (who coined baloney, S.A., high-hat, pushover, payoff, bellylaugh, palooka and scram) and the inventor of slanguage itself, Walter Winchell.

Obsequial Engineer. Businessmen have hastened to take advantage of the general, linguistic license. Deeply characteristic of American life, says Mencken, is the desire of the little man to make himself sound bigger, of the common man to make himself uncommon. (Even in the 18th Century, small New England shopkeepers had ditched the British shop in favor of the more grandiose store.) U.S. undertakers have fought and won a hundred-years’ war to sweeten the sound of their macabre occupation. Today, after relatives have consulted with an obsequial engineer, the so-called patient (who may in his lifetime have been a realtor, soda-counter fizzician or canine-control officer) is first preserved by an expert sanitarian, then garbed in a slumber-robe, then laid in his slumber-cot, and finally whisked off in a casket-coach to his appointed burial-abbey.

Men of other occupations have refused to be outdone by the morticians. America’s dignified Society of Automotive Engineers has noted the use of their sacred title by such prideful up-and-comers as the “rat, cockroach and bedbug eradicators,” whose organization is known impressively as the American Society of Exterminating Engineers. Other engineers now include: sleep-engineer (bedding manufacturer), imagineer (idea-man), custodian-engineer (one who furnishes creative janitorial service), esthetic-engineer (an artist), pediatric-engineer (a corn-cutter), civilization-engineer (a scientist), odor-engineer (perfume manufacturer), and social-engineer (one who “appreciates that one important function of education is the release of the potential energies in human nature”).

World War II has brought a spate of innovations, ranging from the G.I.-adopted Shangri-La (designating a comfort-station in the South Seas) to the experienced tires hopefully advertised by second-hand automobile dealers. Only in the field of creative swearing, concludes Author Mencken, has American verbal fecundity sunk as low as Britain’s.