Mencken 's Masterwork

__"Babylonian Frolics: H. L. Mencken and The American Language" by Raymond Nelson, in American Literary History (Winter 1999), Oxford Univ. Press, 2001 Evans Rd., Cary, N.C. 27513–2009.__

"A gaudy piece of buncombe, rather neatly done." So H. L. Mencken once described his monumental tome The American Language (1919). Written as America was drawn into, then engaged in, the Great War against his beloved Germany, the work was a declaration of America’s linguistic independence from England. It also was "the first attempt since Noah Webster’s at an overview of the national language," writes Nelson, a professor of American literature and literary history at the University of Virginia.

American and British English, argued Mencken (1880–1956), were on the verge of becoming separate languages, thanks mainly to the vigorous, vulgar expressions that America’s "yokelry" kept turning out. By Mencken’s account, Nelson says, the American vocabulary had begun to evolve in colonial times, "when the awakening language brought to the New World by English settlers and adventurers was redefined by the first Americanisms and expanded by loanwords from Indian, French, Dutch, Spanish, and African residents. Mencken then traces the lexicon through alternate cycles of growth and stasis," concluding in the 20th century’s early decades, "with vulgar impulses once again unleashed," to produce such welcome neologisms as joy-ride, high-brow, and sobsister.

In Mencken’s history of the development of American English, Nelson writes, there is ceaseless comic conflict between the demotic schoolboy, "doomed to the quality of the vulgate to which he is born," and the eternal schoolmarm, who, thanks to her own birth and upbringing, "is cursed to recite her rules and declensions through thousands of drowsy afternoons, never to any discernible effect." Mencken scorned the yokels as well as the schoolmarm, but he identified "linguistic energy with American loutish ingenuity while assigning linguistic form to the British and their ill-fitting Latin grammars." The hardly profound implication was: energy good, form bad. Not for Mencken, says Nelson, the more subtle "dialectical interplay of description and prescription, usage and sanction."

The American Language, first published in an edition of only 1,500 copies, played little role in the literary and cultural upheavals of the 1920s, Nelson says. But it did have an impact on academics and students of language. "The truth is," Mencken wrote to a friend, "that the academic idiots are all taking it very seriously, greatly to my joy."

He thrice revised and expanded the work, in editions published in 1921, ’23, and ’36 (and also produced two massive supplements in 1945 and ’48). The American Language in its 1936 edition was widely hailed as Mencken’s masterwork, and it was a great popular success.

The Sage of Baltimore’s influence on linguistics "has been primarily literary and inspirational," Nelson observes. Mencken was essentially an artist, not a rigorous thinker.

Yet his masterwork has "the ambition as well as the messiness and inconsistency of many classic American books," Nelson points out. And on its future, he believes, heavily rests Mencken’s own.