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6 - American Languages

from Ethnic Modernism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Sacvan Bercovitch
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Summary

H. L. Mencken was always a provocative essayist, ready to surprise his readers with unpredictable attacks or new directions of cultural inquiry. Ethnic works from Louis Adamic’s Laughing in the Jungle (1931) to Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and authors from Claude McKay to John Fante attested to the freeing influence of Mencken’s essays. Among the many topics he pursued, Mencken’s deepest interest was in language as it was actually spoken in the United States. He observed the linguistic enrichment that came with features of modernity such as the streetcar: “Trolley crews, in the days of their glory, had their jargon, too,” he wrote in 1948, “ e.g., boat for a trolley-car, horse for a motorman, poor-box for a fare-box, stick for a trolley-pole and Sunday for any day of light traffic.” Drawing on the “Lexicon of Trade Jargon,” a Federal Writers’ Project manuscript, he also noted that the trolley-car “gave us the expression to slip one’s trolley.”

Mencken was fascinated by the linguistic consequences of America’s multi-ethnic makeup, and undertook a still unparalleled effort to examine the many ethnic and non-English tributaries to the “American Language.” It is telling that Zora Neale Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang,” published in Mencken’s American Mercury, was accompanied by a glossary of the slang she employed, including “Big Apple” for New York, apparently still in need of annotation in 1942. Mencken was interested in all semantic and grammatical features that made American different from British English, and he called attention to many aspects of multilingualism that were present in America.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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  • American Languages
  • Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book: The Cambridge History of American Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521497312.047
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  • American Languages
  • Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book: The Cambridge History of American Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521497312.047
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • American Languages
  • Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book: The Cambridge History of American Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521497312.047
Available formats
×