The American Language
by H.L. Mencken
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Book Summary Information
Author: H.L. MenckenEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 1984
ISBN: 0394400755
Number of pages: 816
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of The American Language
Book Review: The Very Spirit of Political Incorrectness
Summary: 5 Stars
Nobody was safe from the vituperative pen of the self-appointed dean of the attackers of parochialism, provincialism, patriotism, puritanism, philistinism, prohibition. In between, he took some parting shots at college professors and women. He coined a new word `Booboisie,' which to him signified those whom he considered to be intellectualism's weakest link. He was an elitist who had no love for democracy, the common man, or anyone else who disagreed with his exalted opinions. He leaves no doubt in THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE that he bemoans the lack of an educated, ruling class in America: `The capital defect in the culture of These States (phrase borrowed from Whitman) is the lack of a civilized aristocracy, secure in its position, animated by an intellectual curiosity, skeptical of all facile generalizations, superior to the sentimentality of the mob (mob: a term often used by Mencken), and delighting in the battle of ideas for its own sake.' Mencken sees a fake aristocracy of intellectual has-beens, wanna-bes, and never-wases as constituting the current ruling intellectual clique: `But this bugaboo aristocracy is actually bogus, and the evidence of its bogusness lies in the fact that it is insecure.' He would much rather see `a genuine aristocracy founded upon very much different principles. Its first and most salient character is its interior security.' He bitterly adds: `No such aristocracy...is now on view in the United States.' He describes the current sad state of intellectual degeneracy as a sort of perverted hierarchy: `What one beholds, sweeping the eye over the land is a culture that, like the national literature, is in 3 layers--the plutocracy on top, a vast mass of undifferentiated human blanks (notice the elitist disgust here) bossed by demagogues at the bottom, and a forlorn intelligentsia gasping out a precarious life between.'
When Mencken took time off from bashing his numerous targets of his intellectual bulls-eyes, he occasionally had something germane to add to literature and language. He was a firm believer that American language, culture and literature were superior to that of its English ancestors. In THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE he asserts that the American language is free from the distracting variations of the English used in Great Britain: `The characters chiefly noted in American English...are, first, its general uniformity throughout the country; second, its impatient disregard for grammatical, syntactical and phonological rule and precedent; and third, its large capacity...for taking in new words and phrases from outside sources, and for manufacturing them of its own materials. The first of these characters has struck every observer, native and foreign. In place of the discordant local dialects of all the other major countries, including England, we have a general Volkssprache for the whole nation, and if it is conditioned at all it is only by minor differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, and by the linguistic struggles of various groups of new-comers.' He also adds that rhetorical flourishes are another peculiar American trait that the English sorely lack: `The American, from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians. His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest far more upon brilliant phrases than upon logical ideas.' He concludes with an invidious comparison of American freedom from stifling English formalizations to the English habit of stuffing words and phrases with dead and dying images: `But if you will put the English of today beside the American of today you will see at once how much more forcibly they (the inevitable processes of linguistic evolution) are in operation in the latter than in the former.' English in England, Mencken concludes `shows no living changes since the reign of Samuel Johnson.' It is difficult to imagine that so politically incorrect a writer as Mencken could possibly be taken seriously today. But perhaps it is this very trait that renders his ascerbic tongue as welcome today as back in his.
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