Caun't Speak The Language

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Title:     Caun't Speak The Language
Author: Robert Cortes Holliday [More Titles by Holliday]

Whenever we go to England we learn that we "caun't" speak the language. We are told very frankly that we can't. And we very quickly perceive that, whatever it is that we speak, it certainly is not "the language."

Let us consider this matter. A somewhat clever and an amusingly ill-natured English journalist, T. W. H. Crosland, not long ago wrote a book "knocking" us, in which he says "that having inherited, borrowed or stolen a beautiful language, they (that is, we Americans) wilfully and of set purpose distort and misspell it." Crosland's ignorance of all things American, ingeniously revealed in this lively bit of writing, is interesting in a person of, presumably, ordinary intelligence, and his credulity in the matter of what he has heard about us is apparently boundless.

However, he does not much concern us. Well-behaved Englishmen would doubtless consider as impolite his manner of expression regarding the "best thing imported in the Mayflower." But however unamiably, he does voice a feeling very general, if not universal, in England. You never get around--an Englishman would say "round"--the fact over there that we do not speak the English language.

Well, to use an Americanism, they,--the English,--certainly do have the drop on us in the matter of beauty. Mr. Chesterton somewhere says that a thing always to be borne in mind in considering England is that it is an island, that its people are insulated. An excellent thing to remember, too, in this connection, is that England is a flower garden. In ordinary times, after an Englishman is provided with a roof and four meals a day, the next thing he must have is a garden, even if it is but a flowerpot. They are continually talking about loveliness over there: it is a lovely day; it is lovely on the river now; it is a lovely spot. And so there are primroses in their speech. And then they have inherited over there, or borrowed or stolen, a beautiful literary language, worn soft in colour, like their black-streaked, grey-stone buildings, by time; and, as Whistler's Greeks did their drinking vessels, they use it because, perforce, they have no other. The humblest Londoner will innocently shame you by talking perpetually like a storybook.

One day on an omnibus I asked the conductor where I should get off to reach a certain place. "Oh, that's the journey's end, sir," he replied. Now that is poetry. It sounds like Christina Rossetti. What would an American car conductor have said? "Why, that's the end of the line." "Could you spare me a trifle, sir?" asks the London beggar. A pretty manner of requesting alms. Little boys in England are very fond of cigarette pictures, little cards there reproducing "old English flowers." I used to save them to give to children. Once I gave a number to the ringleader of a group. I was about to tell him to divide them up. "Oh, we'll share them, sir," he said. At home such a boy might have said to the others: "G'wan, these're fer me." Again, when I inquired my way of a tiny, ragged mite, he directed me to "go as straight as ever you can go, sir, across the cricket field; then take your first right; go straight through the copse, sir," he called after me. The copse? Perhaps I was thinking of the "cops" of New York. Then I understood that the urchin was speaking of a small wood.

Of course he, this small boy, sang his sentences, with the rising and falling inflection of the lower classes. "Top of the street, bottom of the road, over the way"--so it goes. And, by the way, how does an Englishman know which is the top and which is the bottom of every street?

Naturally, the English caun't understand us. "When is it that you are going 'ome?" asked my friend, the policeman in King's Road.

"Oh, some time in the fall," I told him.

"In the fall?" he inquired, puzzled.

"Yes, September or October."

"Oh!" he exclaimed, "in the autumn, yes, yes. At the fall of the leaves," I heard him murmur meditatively. Meeting him later in the company of another policeman, "He," he said to his friend, nodding at me, "is going back in the fall." Deliciously humorous to him was my speech. Now it may be mentioned as an interesting point that many of the words imported in the Mayflower, or in ships following it, have been quite forgotten in England. Fall, as in the fall of the year, I think, was among them. Quite so, quite so, as they say in England.

Yes, in the King's Road. For, it is an odd thing, Charles Scribner's Sons are on Fifth Avenue, but Selfridge's is in Oxford Street. Here we meet a man on the street; we kick him into it. And in England it is a very different thing, indeed, whether you meet a lady in the street or on the street. You, for instance, wouldn't meet a lady on the street at all. In fact, in England, to our mind, things are so turned around that it is as good as being in China. Just as traffic there keeps to the left kerb, instead of to the right curb, so whereas here I call you up on the telephone, there you phone me down. It would be awkward, wouldn't it, for me to say to you that I called you down?

England is an island; and though the British government controls one fifth, or something like that, of the habitable globe, England is a very small place. Most of the things there are small. A freight car is a goods van, and it certainly is a goods van and not a freight car. So when you ask what little stream this is, you are told that that is the river Lea, or the river Arun, as the case may be, although they look, indeed, except that they are far more lovely, like what we call "cricks" in our country. And the Englishman is fond of speaking in diminutives. He calls for a "drop of ale," to receive a pint tankard. He asks for a "bite of bread," when he wants half a loaf. His "bit of green" is a bowl of cabbage. He likes a "bit of cheese," in the way of a hearty slice, now and then. One overhearing him from another room might think that his copious repast was a microscopic meal. About this peculiarity in the homely use of the language there was a joke in Punch not long ago. Said the village worthy in the picture: "Ah, I used to be as fond of a drop o' beer as any one, but nowadays if I do take two or dree gallons it do knock I over!"

Into the matter of the quaint features of the speech of the English countryside, or the wonders of the Cockney dialect, the unlearned foreigner hardly dare venture. It is sufficient for us to wonder why a railroad should be a railway. When it becomes a "rilewie" we are inclined, in our speculation, "to pass," as we say over here. And ale, when it is "ile," brings to mind a pleasant story. A humble Londoner, speaking of an oil painting of an island, referred to it as "a painting in ile of an oil."

An American friend of mine, resident in London, insists that where there is an English word for a thing other than the American word for it, the English word is in every case better because it is shorter. He points to tram, for surface-car; and to lift, for elevator. Still though it may be a finer word, hoarding is not shorter than billboard; nor is "dailybreader" shorter than commuter. I think we break about even on that score.

This, however, would seem to be true: where the same words are employed in a somewhat different way the English are usually closer to the original meaning of the word. Saloon bar, for instance, is intended to designate a rather aristocratic place, above the public bar; while the lowest "gin mill" in the United States would be called a "saloon." I know an American youth who has thought all the while that Piccadilly Circus was a show, like Barnum and Bailey's. With every thing that is round in London called a circus, he must have imagined it a, rather hilarious place.

The English "go on" a good deal about our slang. They used to be fond of quoting in superior derision in their papers our, to them, utterly unintelligible baseball news. Mr. Crosland, to drag him in again, to illustrate our abuse of "the language," quotes from some tenth-rate American author--which is a way they have had in England of judging our literature--with the comment that "that is not the way John Milton wrote." Not long ago Mr. Crosland became involved in a trial in the courts in connection with Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and Robert Ross. He defended himself with much spirit and considerable cleverness. Among other things he said, as reported in the press: "What is this game? This gang are trying to do me down. Here I am a poor man up against two hundred quid (or some such amount) of counsel."

Well, that wasn't the way John Milton talked, either.

The English slang for money is a pleasant thing: thick'uns and thin'uns; two quid, five bob; tanners and coppers. And they have a good body of expressive and colourful speech. "On the rocks" is a neat and poetic way of saying "down and out." It is really not necessary to add the word "resources" to the expression "on his own." A "tripper" is a well-defined character, and so is a "flapper," a "nipper," and a "bounder." There had to be some word for the English "nut," as no amount of the language of John Milton would describe him; and while the connotation of this word as humour is different with us, the appellation of the English, when you have come to see it in their light, hits off the personage very crisply. To say that such a one "talks like a ha'penny book" is, as the English say, "a jolly good job." And a hotel certainly is presented as full when it is pronounced "full up." A "topper" would be only one kind of a hat. Very well, then it is quite possible, we see, to be "all fed up," as they say in England, with English slang.

Humorous Englishmen sometimes rather fancy our slang; and make naive attempts at the use of it. In England, for instance, a man "gets the sack" when he is "bounced" from his job. So I heard a lively Englishman attracted by the word say that so and so should "get the bounce."

In writing, the Englishman usually employs "the language." He has his yellow journals, indeed, which he calls "Americanised" newspapers. But crude and slovenly writing certainly is not a thing that sticks out on him. What a gentlemanly book reviewer he is always! We have here in the United States perhaps a half dozen gentlemen who review books. Is it not true that you would get tired counting up the young English novelists who are as accomplished writers as our few men of letters? The Englishman has a basketful of excellent periodicals to every one of ours. And in passing it is interesting to note this. When we are literary we become a little dull. See our high-brow journals! When we frolic we are a little, well, rough. The Englishman can be funny, even hilarious, and unconsciously, confoundedly well bred at the same time. But he does have a rotten lot of popular illustrated magazines over there compared to ours.

When you return from a sojourn of several months in the land of "the language" you are immediately struck very forcibly by the vast number of Americanisms, by the richness of our popular speech, by the "punch" it has, and by the place it holds in the printed page at home. In a journey from New York I turned over in the smoking-car a number of papers I had not seen for some time, among them the New York Evening Post, Collier's, Harper's, Puck, and the Indianapolis News. Here, generally without quotation marks and frequently in the editorial pages, I came across these among innumerable racy phrases: nothing doing, hot stuff, Right O!, strong-arm work, some celebration, has 'em all skinned, mad at him, this got him in bad, scared of, skiddoo, beat it, a peach of a place, get away with the job, been stung by the party, got by on his bluff, sore at that fact, and always on the job. I learned that the weather man had put over his first frost last night, that a town we passed had come across with a sixteen-year-old burglar, and that a discredited politician was attempting to get out from under. Perhaps it is not to be wondered at that the Englishman frequently fails to get us.

You note a change in the whole atmosphere of language. A pronounced instance of this difference is found in public signs. You have been seeing in English conveyances the placards in neat type posted about which kindly request the traveller not to expectorate upon the floor of this vehicle, as to do so may cause inconvenience to other passengers or spread disease, and so forth and so on. Over here:

Don't Spit?
This means You!

This is about the way our signs of this kind go. Now what about all this? I used to think many person just returned from England ridiculously affected in their speech. And many of them are--those who say caun't when they can't do it unconsciously. That is, over here. In Britain, perhaps, it is just as well to make a stagger at speaking the way the Britains do. When you accidently step on an Englishman's toe, it is better to say "I'm sorry!" or simply "sorry," than to beg his pardon or ask him to excuse you. This makes you less conspicuous, and so more comfortable. And when you stay any length of time you fall naturally into English ways. Then when you come back you seem to us, to use one of the Englishman's most delightful words, to "swank" dreadfully. And in that is the whole story.

Mr. James declares that in the work of two equally good writers you could still tell by the writing which was that of the Englishman and which that of the American. The assumption of course is that where they differed the American would be the inferior writer. Mr. James prefers the English atmosphere. And the Englishman is inclined to regard us in our deviation as a sort of imperfect reproduction of himself. What is his is ours, it is true; but what's ours is our own. That is, we have inherited a noble literature in common. But we write less and less like an Englishman all the while. Our legacy of language brought over in the Mayflower has become adapted to our own environment, been fused in the "melting-pot," and quickened by our own life to-day. Whether for better or for worse--it may be either--the literary touch is rapidly going by the board in modern American writing. One of the newer English writers remarks: "A few carefully selected American phrases can very swiftly kill a great deal of dignity and tradition."

Why should we speak the very excellent language spoken in the tight little isle across the sea? In Surrey they speak of the "broad Sussex" of their neighbours in the adjoining county. Is it exactly that we caun't? Or that we just don't? Because we have an article more to our purpose, made largely from English material, but made in the United States?

[The end]
Robert Cortes Holliday's essay: Caun't Speak The Language

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