Words

THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE: SUPPLEMENT Two (933 pp.)--H. L. Mencken--Knopf ($7.50).

With this fourth & final volume, H. L. Mencken has had his say on the peculiarities of U.S. speech. The final volume, like its predecessors, is a vast miscellany, ill-arranged, bulging at the seams with inconsequential information, festooned with footnotes in such profusion as to give it the appearance of a gigantic hoax. Its elaborate cross references sometimes seem soberly professorial, sometimes like parodies on scholarship. The whole work now runs to 2,880 pages. It is surely one of the great curiosities of literature.

It is saved by what Edmund Wilson calls Mencken's genial and acrid relish for the flavor of American life. Even more helpful are the odd anecdotes scattered through it, possessing the sort of owlish, stubborn humor that comes from wringing a subject dry and then wringing it some more. "In late years," says Mencken, "it is me has even got support from eminent statesmen. When, just before Roosevelt II's inauguration day in 1933, the first New Deal martyr, the Hon. Anton J. Cermak, was shot ... he turned to Roosevelt and said, 'I'm glad it was me instead of you,' and when, in March 1946, the Right Hon. Winston Churchill made a recorded speech at New Haven, he introduced himself by saying, 'This is me, Winston Churchill.' "*

It's Mendong Gomba. Typical of Mencken's exhaustive coverage is his account of the U.S. Board on Geographical Names. Organized in the Administration of Benjamin Harrison, it was abolished in 1934 and its functions transferred to the Department of the Interior. "For some time it seems to have escaped the notice of the idealists then fashioning a new world, and so late as 1935 its staff was confined to an executive secretary, an assistant and a clerk. But then its potentialities were grasped by the forward-looking Secretary of the Interior, the Hon. Harold L. Ickes, and after Pearl Harbor it began to move into high gear. On February 25, 1943, it was reorganized with a director [and] assistant, two grand divisions of five sections each, a staff of geographers and philologians, and a working force of 110 altogether. During the war years it naturally gave most of its attention to foreign place names, for the Army and Navy were then penetrating to many far places, and where even the Army and Navy could not go airships were carrying agents soliciting clients for Lend-Lease. Thus the board, in July 1945, brought out a brochure on Tibet by which it appeared that the proper spelling of the name of the Tibetan village lying at the intersection of Lat. 27DEG 31' N and Long. 85DEG 14' E was Mendong Gomba, not Mendong Gompa, and that to call it Men-tung-Ssu was altogether incorrect. . . ."

Mencken also provides a state-by-state roundup of native terms. Judge in the Ozarks means a fool or a clown, and a human rifle is a "rifle of large calibre, suitable for homicide." In Kentucky drats is a game of marbles, smothersome means hot and humid. In Massachusetts (Nantucket) flink is a good time, to tivis means to wander about, and wadgetty means fidgety. Yet in this broad list the native terms of humor and ingenuity are surprisingly few. Most are too often forced in their humor and show too great a straining for effect--e.g., restaurant workers' familiar name for poached eggs on toast (Adam and Eve on a raft).

"Rulahs of the Aia." The main difficulty with The American Language is that Mencken had won his case; the triumph of colloquial American speech over academic imitations of Oxford English has been so overwhelming that he has no real opponent on whom he can exercise his gift for invective. In place of those old bludgeoning attacks on any & all affectations, he now gives a good brief history of the struggles of the radio announcers, over English and general American pronunciation. He quotes a bit of doggerel describing the letter R's feeling about its treatment on the British radio:

0 culcha'd rulahs of the aia, Listen to my humble praya There was a time -when I knew my place, But lately I have fallen from grace. . . . I used to be alive in modern, I But now I find it rhymes with sodden. . . .

*In Nicholas Ntckleby, Mr. Squeers defended t's me by explaining "me's the first person singular, nominative case, agreeing with the verb it's, and governed by Squeers understood, as a acorn, a hour."

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