James Baquet

    Today we’ll add to the “The 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century” a sister list, “The 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century.” In fact, we’ve looked at a few of these before, though not by design — Henry Adams, Virginia Woolf, Rachel, James Watson, Vladimir Nabokov, etc.

    So we’ll start with No. 9, especially important for English learners: H. L. Mencken’s “The American Language.”

    Like all books published in the United States before 1926, this one is in the public domain, so the full text is available online. I encourage you to find it and read it in bits and pieces. Enlightening, always amusing and occasionally hilarious, it details the development of American English and its status in 1919, including some slang that we find befuddling today. What in the world is “aber nit?” It’s not defined anywhere online that I can find.

    Mencken was a newspaperman, and wrote a column which occasionally addressed language issues. After a few of these struck a chord with his readers, he decided to work on a book.

    His inspirations included the argot of waiters in Washington, D.C.; the works of Mark Twain; and the language he heard on the streets of his native Baltimore. He asked himself, “Why doesn’t some painstaking pundit attempt a grammar of the American language... English, that is, as spoken by the great masses of the plain people of this fair land?”

    And so his book of 11 chapters divided into 53 sections was born, sections with titles like “Sources of Early Americanisms,” “Euphemisms,” and “Vulgar Pronunciation.”

    This last one is fun. At one point in the development of British English, the “oi” diphthong was pronounced like the long “i.” So “boil” sounded like “bile,” “boy” like “bye,” etc. This pronunciation came to America, but back in England was corrected to the original “oy” sound.

    Well, eventually America caught up, but vestiges of the old sound remain. “Heist” is a kind of robbery; it originates in “hoist,” meaning to “lift.” To “rile” someone is to make him mad; it originates in “roil,” the motion of boiling water.

    And so language grows and changes.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. on purpose, with intention

    2. confusing

    3. careful, meticulous

    4. remains, leftover traces

    5. expert, authority

    6. sound of two vowels together

    7. small sections

    8. specialized vocabulary, as for a trade, jargon

    9. caused a positive feeling

    10. out of copyright