on H. L. Mencken's "The American Language"

I haven't finished reading this, but I have already picked up some highly interesting pieces of information. Before I launch into them, I should perhaps mention that H. L. Mencken was not an antisemite of unusual proportions, and I direct you to Gore Vidal's defense of Mencken. Now, I know there are some who accuse Gore Vidal of antisemitism, and if you're one of them, I direct you to 4chan, for no reason in particular.

Moving on to Mencken, it seems that people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries predicted that American and British English would diverge to a far greater extent than they have in reality, going so far as to refer to the former as "American" instead of "American English" (also see the title of the work in question). They predicted that American and British would be as different as Dutch and German. Obviously that hasn't been the case. What those early fear-mongering anglophiles and anglophobes neglected to account for was that British English, too, was susceptible to change, and that any radical changes in American English could be undone by the same changes in British English.

To be fair, American English probably didn't have a well-accepted standard dialect for a while, so that anyone who looked at the vast number of regional dialects across the United States, none of which could be called "Standard American [English]", would be apt to lose count of the differences between "American" and British English. Now that a well-accepted standard exists, we can safely overlook the regional oddities.

A consequence of having a well-accepted standard variety of American English seems to be a sharp reduction in the number of books written in regional dialects (a la most characters' speech in, for example, Tom Sawyer, which is as unpleasant to read as it is to listen to, and certainly impenetrable to the British reader).

Another thing that fascinated me was the degree to which the British press inveighed against locutions that had the faintest whiff of the American about them. The modern media's fixation with the irrelevant pales in comparison. Not even Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were safe from the British editor's petulant pen, and we tend to regard them and others from the Enlightenment as some of the best writers of English prose ever to have lived.

On this point, it is astounding how many well-accepted English words and phrases today originated in the United States. A lot of them seem to have involved verbing and adjectiving (?) nouns, so I can appreciate the lettered Brit's consternation to an extent. Examples include dutiable, influential, presidential, lengthy, to locate, to oppose, to advocate, to legislate, to progress, bogus, reliable and standpoint. Some, like Jefferson, even used verbs like to ambition in their writings, but fortunately, they did not hold.

The average American wordsmith (accidental wordsmiths as well as deliberate wordsmiths like Noah Webster, of whom Mencken wrote, "The ardor of his desire to expound and instruct was only matched by his infinite capacity for observing inaccurately.") was not bound to England by any ties of loyalty, so he had no compunction about making words up. Many of them were uneducated, so they were not aware that the objects for which they were coming up with names in abandon already had names in English.

American English also retained words and locutions that passed out of use in England. This was mainly because the Americans of the Colonial period read little of English literature, even though they got most of their books from England. The only constant authority of language in the lives of most people was King James's Bible. French writers like Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Voltaire were more popular among the literate than English writers like Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope, and Swift.

So while American English did change a lot in the early decades of the country, observe that British English didn't stay constant. British literature departed from the staid dignified prose of Charles Dickens, and arrived at Jeffrey Archer's monotonous drone. There seem to be relatively few differences between American and British prose today, and I can't name any off the top of my head.

Thus H. L. Mecken and other students of language can rest assured that American and British prose are not about to diverge radically anytime soon, and lovers of good prose everywhere can collectively lament what English has become.