American Language Supplement 2 (67 page)

Charles J. Lovell, an assiduous delver into early American language records, tells me that the abandonment of capitals was apparently a function of the Revolution. “Beginning with Lexington and Concord,” he says, “upper case letters were removed even from
Christianity
and the names of the various religious sects and political parties.”
⁴
By 1791, a year after Franklin’s death, the
American Museum
of Philadelphia was reducing all honorifics, including even
Mr
., to lower case,
⁵
and using such forms as
six nations, bank of the United States, vice-president of the United States
, and
satan
. By the 1830s, as examples in the DAE show,
whig, tory
and
federalist
were usually l.c., though
Constitution
remained caps. Lovell sends me an extract from the Ohio Almanac (Cincinnati) for 1814 showing
protestant episcopal church, methodist meeting house, quaker, jupiter, saturn
and
venus
. He says that “just before the Civil War caps were coming back,
¹
State
was always capitalized, and personal names were written in small capitals.”
²
At present there is considerable variation in the practise of American newspapers. The Chicago
Tribune
uses lower case for
company, union, university, board, hospital, bank, church, corporation
, etc., following proper names, but makes a curious exception in favor of
Line
, as in
Seaboard Air Line
, and
Foundation
, as in
Rockefeller Foundation
. The Baltimore
Sunpapers
capitalize all of these words. They use caps for the
Constitution
of the United States, but lower case for that of the States, including Maryland. They capitalize
Government, Administration
and
Cabinet
, as does the Providence
Journal-Bulletin
. Very few newspapers capitalize the names of the seasons, those of the points of the compass, or the numerical designations of centuries. All capitalize the names of
God
and His divine associates, and all pronouns referring to them save those beginning with
w
, but these pronouns are not capitalized in direct quotations from the King James Bible, where they are all l.c. Nearly all American publications now capitalize
Negro
.
³
The London
Times
still capitalizes
Street, Road, Crescent
, etc., and prints them as separate words; other English newspapers give them the form of
Park-lane, Bond-street
, etc.,
⁴
sometimes with the second element abbreviated to
-st., -rd
., etc.
⁵
In the United States abbreviations are most commonly used, without capitals.

There is evidence of a Catholic campaign to induce American newspapers to capitalize
mass
. In the
Editor & Publisher
, in 1945, a letter appeared saying that capitalizing the word “would be regarded by Catholics as a gesture of understanding,” and appealing to
the editor thereof to “bring the matter to the newspaper field.”
¹
The writer thus stated the theological reason for his request:

The Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary, the standard British authority, ordains that in writing dates “the order shall be day, month, year as
5 June 1903
, not
June 5, 1903
,”
³
and this is usually followed by the English in letters. But in other situations they commonly make the order month, day, year.
⁴
The latter is the usual American practise, but during World War II the War Department came out for day, month, year,
⁵
and even before that the form had been in more or less use in both the Army and the Navy.
⁶
Not, however, in the other departments at Washington. The latest edition of the Style Manual of the Government Printing Office
⁷
ordains
July 30, 1914
, and even the State Department, which is otherwise excessively English, uses the same form.
⁸
There was a time when the English used a comma instead of a period (which they call a
full stop
) to divide the hours from the minutes in figures indicating times of the
day,
e.g., 7,25
, but now they commonly use a period as we do, with the
a.m
. or
p.m
. following in small letters.
¹

In the use of the hyphen English practise and American practise seem to be substantially identical, though the English employ it in proper names rather more than we do,
e.g., Stoke-on-Trent, Weston-under-Lizard, Weston-super-Mare, Ossett-cum-Gawthorpe, Hore-Belisha
and
Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax
.
²
There is an elaborate and excellent discussion of hyphenization in “Compounding in the English Language,” by Alice Morton Ball, one of the compilers of the Style Manual of the Department of State.
³
It includes a review of all the principal dictionaries, style books and grammars, with an attempt to set up rational rules. Like most other writers on the subject, Miss Ball makes a distinction between compounds used as nouns and the same used as adjectives. The former she prefers to leave separate,
e.g., paper mill
and
holding company
, but the latter she hyphenates,
e.g., paper-mill employee
and
holding-company bond
. This is the practise of most American newspapers. She prefers no hyphen in such compound titles as
vice president
and
under secretary
, but advises its use when prefixes or affixes are added,
e.g., ex-vice-president
and
under-secretaryship
. She also recommends it when its absence might cause misunderstanding or mispronunciation, and when there is an inconvenient cluster of vowels or consonants, as in
bee-eater, egg-gatherer
and
brass-smith
. She prefers using a hyphen in
good-by
(Eng.
good-bye
), but it is my impression that
goodby
is supplanting
good-by
in the United States, as
today
and
tomorrow
have long supplanted
to-day
and
to-morrow
.
⁴
Of late there has been a tendency among American newspapers to amalgamate
-man
with a long series of nouns that were formerly separated,
e.g., garbageman
and
newspaperman
. This, it seems to me, is irrational and confusing. In cases where the
-man
has been reduced to
-m’n
in pronunciation,
e.g., workman, batsman
and even
longshoreman
, making one word of the compound is plainly allowable, but where the
-man
is still clearly enunciated, as in
garbage man, newspaper man, working man
and
end man
the most that can
be reasonably allowed is a hyphen.
¹
Jacques Barzun has printed an eloquent protest against the excessive amalgamation of words that had better be kept separate,
²
listing some of the horrors that he has encountered,
e.g., picturegallery, hardshelled, fifteenyearold, ultraaustere, nonessential
and
midsummermadness
.
³
He adds a
reductio ad absurdum
in the form of a version of the Gettysburg Address beginning
“Fourscoreandseven years ago ourfathers broughtforth …”
⁴

Such a form as
St. James-place
would seem barbarous to an Englishman: he sticks to the possessive, and writes
St. James’s-place
or
-pl
. In the United States the apostrophe seems to be doomed, for the Board on Geographical Names has swept it out of such old forms as
Prince George’s
and
Queen Anne’s
(counties in Maryland), and it has been dropped from the title of
Teacher’s
College, Columbia, the Lhasa of American pedagogy.
⁵
In other respects American and English punctuation show few differences. The English are rather more careful than we are, and commonly put a comma after the next-to-the-last member of a series,
⁶
but otherwise are not too
precise to offend a red-blooded American. There are frequent proposals that the semi-colon be abandoned, though its utility must be manifest.
¹
The Style Manual of the Government Printing Office is content to say of it that it “is to be avoided where a comma will suffice,”
²
and this is repeated by that of the Department of State.
³
Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor. The fact that quotes within quotes are often confusing, and unhinge the minds of thousands of poor copy-readers every year, has fanned these flames. Also, there is frequent complaint that the marks themselves, as they stand, are unsightly, with demands for something better. During the 1890s Theodore L. DeVinne (1828–1914), then the premier typographer of the United States, designed a new type-face, including new quotes, for the
Century Magazine
. They consisted of pairs of nested carets or small parentheses laid on their sides, with those pointing west used to open a quotation and those pointing east to close it, and were imitations of characters adopted by the Didots, famous French printers, at the end of the Eighteenth Century. In explaining them
⁴
he said:

The DeVinne quotation marks were first used in the
Century
for November, 1895. No other publication adopted them, and after a few years they were abandoned for the more familiar
inverted commas
.
⁵
In 1941 another innovator proposed, with equal lack of success, a mark that he described as follows:

Most American newspapers print the names of other newspapers, when they can’t avoid mentioning them, in Roman, enclosed in quotation marks, but the Government Printing Office prints them without the quotation marks.
¹
The relatively few that use italics
²
go on to caps and small caps when they mention themselves. The
Editor & Publisher
follows the irrational and unlovely system of using italics the first time a given newspaper is mentioned in an article, and then putting it in Roman every time it is repeated. The same newspapers which print unnaturalized loan-words without accents also print them in Roman,
e.g., communique, tete-a-tete, hofbrauhaus, gemutlichkeit
and
a la carte
. “Most American newspapers,” says the Style Book (printed
Stylebook
) of the Baltimore
Sunpapers
, not without a touch of ablonogastrigolumpiosity, “do not use italics; they are not even mentioned in the majority of style books. We should make our better practise stand out by using them correctly.”
³

The difficulties that 100% Americans have with the plurals of loan-words, mentioned in Section 4 of this chapter, are matched by their difficulties with the plurals of certain native words. Is
buses
correct, or
busses?
This problem first engaged the learned men of England when the first motor-bus appeared at Oxford, and one of the dons thereof made a pretty little poem upon it. It spread to the United States soon afterward and has been debated ever since, with no conclusion. Webster 1926 said “pl.
busses
or
buses
,” but Webster 1934 evaded the question by giving no plural at all. H. W. Fowler, in his “Modern English Usage,” accounts for
buses
by saying that it “is still regarded as an abbreviation of the regular
omnibuses
,” but expresses the opinion that “when
omnibus
is forgotten
(and
bus
is now more usual than
’bus
) doubtless
buses
will become, as it should,
busses
.”
¹
And what of the plurals of
attorneygeneral
and its cognates? All the handbooks of “correct” English that I am aware of ordain adding the
s
to the first element, but
State Government
, the official organ of the Council of State Governments, puts it at the end.
²
Again, is the plural of
roof roofs
or
rooves? Proofs
pulls one way and
hooves
another. The NED finds
roofes
in 1600 and
roofs
in “Paradise Regained,” 1671, but
roovis
in 1445. Yet again, is it
spoonsful
or
spoonfuls, brothers-in-law
or
brother-in-laws, Misses Smith
or
Miss Smiths?
Most authorities declare for the first of each of these pairs, but the others are undoubtedly in wide use. No less an authority than Sir William Craigie says that
sisteren
or
sistren
, now confined to the Christians, white and black, of the Get-Right-with-God Country, was common in Middle English and is just as respectable, etymologically speaking, as
brethren
. He also says that down to the Seventeenth Century
grieves
was the plural of
grief
and
strives
of
strife
.
³
Certain plurals of words ending in
-th
, though their spelling is established, present problems in pronunciation,
e.g., wreath
. Should the
th
of
wreaths
be that of
think
or that of
this?
⁴
The plurals of the names of birds and animals have long engaged orthographers, and they still show a considerable difference of opinion. Webster’s New International Dictionary, second ed., pp. 1896–7, says that there are four classes of them, as follows: