American Language Supplement 2 (76 page)
Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
In the oral lessons given little children throughout the United States
it is I
is banged into their minds, and
it is me
is ranked with
ain’t got none
and a long list of similar vulgarisms.… What a waste! What is accomplished? I can remember back sixty years to my share in a frenzied dance of the first form at school, a dozen of us yelling “
It is I, it is I!
” in derisive contempt for minutes together after we had just been told for the first time that this alone was correct. I believe this to be the normal attitude of the right-minded boy, and one that persists through life.
5
J. M. Steadman found support for this when, in 1937, he polled the students of Emory University at Atlanta, Ga., to find out what words and phrases they considered affected. His tally-clerks reported that first place was taken by
limb
, but that
it is I
was a good second, and ran ahead of
expectorate
.
6
The Linguistic Atlas of New England
7
shows that
it is me
prevails overwhelmingly in that region, even within the Boston area. Most of the informants who reported
it is I
confessed that their use of it was the product of belaboring by the schoolma’am. “Whenever I used
me
,” one of them said, “the teacher would say, ‘Who is
me?
,’ and then I’d change
it quick.” But not many of those consulted recalled the horrors of education so clearly. “If somebody knocked at my door and called ‘It’s
I
,’ ” a New York school teacher told a writer for the New York
Times
in 1946,
1
“I’d faint.” In late years
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 by a Nazi agent in Florida, 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.”
2
Just why
me
has thus displaced
I
is in dispute. A correspondent suggests that it may be because
I
“suggests the ego too strongly,” but S. A. Nock thinks that it is because “the nominative
I
is colorless.”
3
Various authorities, including Sir William Craigie,
4
have suggested that the school grammarians’ war upon
it is me
has prospered
between you and I
, just as their war upon
I seen
has prospered
I have saw
. Wyld shows that
you and I
was thus used by English writers of the Seventeenth Century,
5
and Henry Alexander produces examples from Pepys’s Diary,
6
including
between him and I
. Robert J. Menner, dissenting from the Craigie theory, believes that the form came in because
you
and
I
were “often felt to be gramatically indivisible,” and because
you
“had come to be used for both nominative and accusative.”
7
He says:
Pronoun or noun plus
I
after preposition and verb … is coming to be the natural usage at certain speech levels. Yet when the first personal pronoun
precedes
another pronoun or noun it is not normally in the objective
form in careless speech. I heard the following from one man calling to another from a porch:
A. They invited
me and Jim
.
B. (Not having heard) What?
A. (louder) They invited
Jim and I
to their party.
This is natural syntax among people who are neither at the lowest speech level, where
me
and
him
and
her
are common as nominatives, nor at the highest, where family tradition or academic training make the standard literary forms prevail.
Craigie says that “no one would venture to carry this confusion so far as to say
between you and we
,” but I am not too sure, for I have encountered
he
in the objective following a preposition in the headline of a great moral newspaper.
1
Mark Twain, a very reliable (if sometimes unconscious) witness to American speechways, used
between you and I
regularly until W. D. Howells took him in hand.
2
Whom
need not detain us, for it does not exist in the American common speech. Even in England, says the NED, and on the highest levels, it is “no longer current in natural colloquial speech.” When it is used on those levels in the United States it is frequently used incorrectly, as F. P. Adams used to demonstrate almost daily when he was conducting his newspaper column.
3
It was rejected as “effeminate” by Steadman’s Emory University students,
4
and got as many adverse votes as
divine, dear
and
gracious
(exclamation). Indeed, only sweet, lovely and darling beat it. The Linguistic Atlas of New England shows that its use there is pretty well confined to the auras of Harvard and Yale, and that even so it is rare. George H. McKnight has supplied evidence that many English authors of the first chop, including Richard Steele, Jane Austen, George Meredith and Laurence Housman have used
who
freely in situations where
whom
is ordained by the grammar-books,
5
and I have no doubt that a similar inquiry among Americans would show many more. J. S. Kennedy, in 1930, printed a learned argument to the effect that the use of
who
in “
Who
did he marry?” need not be defended as a matter of mere tolerance, but may be accounted
for on the ground that
who
, in this situation, is actually in the objective case, and has been so almost as long as
you
has been in the nominative.
1
Just, he says, as “we have objective
you
and nominative
you
side by side, with
ye
preserved in the unstressed form in speech and also for very formal or archaic styles,” so “we have nominative
who
and objective
who
side by side, with
whom
reserved for more formal style, chiefly written.” In the common speech
that
is often substituted for both
who
and
whom
, as in “He’s the man
that
I seen.” Robert J. Menner has shown
2
that
that
has also largely displaced
whose
, as in “He’s the fellow
that
I took his hat,” and that often even
that
itself is suppressed by periphrasis, as in “He’s the fellow I took his hat” and “She’s the girl I’ve been trying to think of her name.” The substitution of
them
for
these
or
those
, as in “
Them
are the kind I like,” was denounced as a barbarism of the frontier South and West by Adiel Sherwood in 1827, but it has survived gloriously and Wentworth offers examples from all parts of the country. Says Horace Reynold:
The use of
them
as a demonstrative is the mark of the manual worker. He finds
these
and
those
a little sissified and high-toned. He feels more comfortable in
them
shoes than in
these
shoes.
Them
is a word with a strong end; a man can get his teeth into it. Like the Irishman’s
me
for
my, them
beats
these
hollow for force. The Irishman’s “Give me some likker to temper
me
pain” has the same shirtsleeve, spit-on-me-hands wallop as the American’s “Shut
them
winders!”
3
The Southern
you-all
seems to be indigenous to the United States: there is no mention of it in Wright’s “English Dialect Dictionary” nor in his “English Dialect Grammar.” What is more, it seems to be relatively recent. Wentworth quotes “I b’lieve
you’ all
savages in this country” from Anne Royall’s “Letters From Alabama,” 1830, but it is highly probable that this
you’ all
was simply a contraction of
you are all. You-all
struck a Northerner visiting Texas as “something fresh” so late as 1869, though he had apparently been in the South during the Civil War and was familiar with
you uns
.
4
It was not listed by any of the early writers
on Americanisms, and it is missing even from Bartlett’s fourth and last edition of 1877. On the question of its origin there has never been any agreement. In 1907 Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, then head of the English department at the University of North Carolina,
1
published a learned paper on the subject in
Uncle Remus’s Magazine
(Atlanta), then edited by Joel Chandler Harris,
2
in which he rehearsed some of the theories then prevailing. One, launched by a correspondent of the New York
Times
signing himself F. B.,
3
ascribed the pronoun to the influence of the Low German spoken by German settlers in Lunenburg, Mecklenburg, Brunswick and Charlotte counties, Virginia. This correspondent said:
A little imagination will help us see two old dignitaries meet and address each other with “Good’n morn, wohen wilt
ye all?
” (Whence will ye already?). And after the confab is over they will express their regret by saying “Wilt
ye all
gaan?” (Wilt ye already go?) and the answer, “Ya,
we
wilt
all
foort” (Yes, we will already forth).
Another theory, also advanced by a correspondent of the
Times
,
4
was thus set forth:
During the Cotton Exposition at New Orleans, 1885–86, I was in an official position which brought me into contact with hundreds of people from all parts of the Union, and as I was from Texas I seemed singled out for benevolent missionary work on the part of visitors from Northern States. With cheerful frankness they pointed out the many shortcomings of my people, and among them this idiom of
you-all
. I was boarding at the time with a Frenchwoman. I poured out to her my woes in English, and she expressed her sympathy in French. When I mentioned
you-all
as one of our sins she exclaimed: “Mais c’est naturelle, ça! On dit toujours nous tous,
vous tous!
”
Smith rejected both of these etymologies, and sought to show, by quotations from Shakespeare and the King James Bible, that
you-all
went back in England to Elizabethan times,
5
but his quotations
offered him very dubious support, for those that were metrical showed the accent falling on
all
, not on
you
, and in another part of his article he had to admit that this shift of accent clearly distinguished the Southern
you-all
from
you all
in the ordinary sense of
all of you
. He sought to explain the difference as follows:
In
you all, all
is an adjective modifying the pronoun
you
. But in
you-all
the parts of speech have changed places.
All
is the pronoun, standing for some other substantive, as
folks
, and
you
is the modifying adjective. This interchange is not without analogy in English. In such phrases as
genitive singular
and
indicative present
the first words were originally nouns,
singular
and
present
being adjectives. The plurals were
genitives singular
and
indicatives present
. But these phrases, borrowed from Latin, were exceptions to the usual position of words in English, which demands that adjectives precede nouns. The exception could not hold its own against the precedent established by the numberless phrases in which adjectives regularly preceded their nouns. After a while, such was the influence of mere position, the words
genitive
and
indicative
, standing in the normal position of adjectives, became adjectives, and the words
singular
and
present
, standing in the normal position of nouns, became nouns. Thus the plurals of these phrases are now
genitive singulars
and
indicative presents
. In similar fashion
you all
(pronoun plus adjective) passed into
you-all
(adjective plus pronoun).
Like any other patriotic Southerner, Smith devoted a part of his paper to arguing that
you-all
is never used in the singular, and to that end he summoned Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page as witnesses. This is a cardinal article of faith in the South, and questioning it is almost as serious a
faux pas
as hinting that General Lee was an octoroon.
1
Nevertheless, it has been questioned very often, and with a considerable showing of evidence. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, to be sure,
you-all
indicates a plural, implicit if not explicit, and thus means, when addressed to a single person,
you and your folks
or the like, but the hundredth time it is impossible to discover any such extension of meaning. Eleven years before Smith wrote, in 1896, correspondents of
Dialect Notes
had reported hearing the pronoun in an unmistakable
singular in North Carolina, Delaware and Illinois,
1
and during the years following there had been a gradual accumulation of testimony to the same effect from other witnesses, including Southerners. In 1926 Miss Estelle Rees Morrison provoked an uproar by suggesting in
American Speech
that, when thus used in the singular,
you-all
was a plural pronoun of courtesy analogous to the German
sie
, the Spanish
usted
, and indeed the English
you
itself.
2
In May, 1927, Lowry Axley, of Savannah, declared in the same journal that in an experience covering “all the States of the South,” he had “never heard any person of any degree of education or station in life use the expression in addressing another as an individual,” and added somewhat tartly that the idea that it is ever so used “by any class of people … is a hydra-headed monster that sprouts more heads apparently than can ever be cut up.” A correspondent signing himself G.B. and writing from New Orleans, offered Axley unqualified support three months later,
3
but after two more months had rolled round Vance Randolph popped up with direct and unequivocal testimony that
you-all
was “used as singular in the Ozarks” and that he had “heard it daily for weeks at a time.”
4
