AMERICAN ENGLISH. Americanisms are words or phrase peculiar to the English speech of the United States. John Pickering, who published the first vocabulary of them in 1816, divided them into THREE classes. First, he said, “we have formed some new words”; second, “to some old ones that are still in use in England we have affixed new significations”; and third, “others which have been long obsolete in England are still retained in common use among us.” He should have added a fourth class, composed of borrowings from the Indian languages and from those of non-British immigrants. Examples of all four classes come readily to mind: of the first, peanut, hired man, crazy quit, schooner, movie, bootlegger, spellbinder, rubberneck, cafeteria, reliable, upstate, flatfooted, O.K., to advocate, to belittle, and to service; of the second, corn, shoe, rock, lumber, shop, cracker, dry goods, homely, and to haul, all of which till have different significances in England and the United States; of the third, andiron, offal, adze, bay window, burly, catty-cornered, to wilt, to loan, and to whittle; and of the fourth, persimmon, hominy, tomahawk, terrapin, skunk, cruller, portage, prairie, ranch, canyon, chop suey, bum, sauerkraut, spaghetti, kosher, and frankfurter.

美式英语。美式英语是美国的英语言谈中特有的词汇或短语。约翰·皮克林于1816年首次出版了有关它们的词汇表，将它们分为三类。他说，首先“我们已形成了一些新词汇”；其次，“我们对一些依然在英格兰使用的旧词汇附上了新的含义”；第三，“其它一些在英格兰早已废弃的词汇依然在我们中间普遍使用。”他应该再加上第四类，从印第安语言和从非英国移民那里借来的部分。在我们的头脑中会迅速地出现所有这四类例子：第一类有花生、雇工、像疯了一样乞求离开、纵帆船、电影、私酒商、能吸引听众的演说家、爱问长问短的人、

自助餐馆、可靠的、偏僻的、平脚的、行、倡导、贬低以及服务；第二类有谷物、鞋、岩石、木材、商店、黑客、纺织品、朴实无华的和运输，所有这些词汇在英格兰和美国依然有不同的含义；第三类有壁炉、下水、扁斧、飘窗、结实的、斜放的、枯萎、贷款以及削弱；而第四类有柿子、玉米粥、战斧、水龟、臭鼬、油煎饼、搬运、大草原、大农场、峡谷、杂碎、流浪汉、德国酸泡菜、意大利面、犹太食品和法兰克福香肠。

Origins.  The first settlers must have begun to make Americanisms as soon as they landed, for they were confronted by a flora and a fauna that were largely unfamiliar to them, and they had to find words to designate the various species. Some of those words they borrowed from the Indians, such as hickory, squash, and opossum, but in most cases they fashioned their novelties out of English material, as, for example, June bug, live oak, bullfrog, and catfish. Similarly, they needed names for the features of the new articles of their new domestic economy. A great many words that are still in use appear to have been those invented before the end of the 17^th century. Backlog occurs in a writing of Increase Mather dated 1684, and log house in the Maryland Archives for 1669. Clapboarded houses, quite unknown in England, were being built in Ipswich, Mass., in 1637, and cockroaches (from the Spanish cucaracha) were mentioned in Capt. John Smith’s General Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624). Indeed, a number of words borrowed from the Indian languages, usually through the Spanish, were carried back to England by voyager before there was any permanent English settlement in America, and some of them, like alligator, sassafras, and sarsaparilla, not to mention potato and tobacco, were familiar by 1600. But these were hardly Americanisms in the sense here meant, and it was not until after the founding of Jamestown that Englishmen in the New World began to concoct in earnest, and on large scale, a really new vocabulary.

In 1919, H.L. Mencken (1880—1956), published the first edition of his American Language, one of the landmarks in the study of the English language as used in the United States. Some years before his death, Mr. Mencken wrote an article on Americanisms for the Encyclopedia Americana. Because of the historical interest of this article, it is reprinted as the first part of the coverage of American English. The second part, American Usage, which discusses the differences between “American English” and “English English” since World War II, was written by Margaret Nicholson, author of A Dictionary of American-English Usage.

1919年，门肯（1880年至1956年），出版了他的《美国语言》第一版，它成为了在美国使用的英语语言研究中的一个里程碑。在他去世前的几年里，门肯先生为《大美百科全书》的美式英语撰写了一篇文章。由于这篇文章的历史价值，作为《美式英语》内容的第一部分被重印。第二部分，《美国的用法》讨论了自二次大战以来“美式英语”与“英式英语”的差别，由《美式英语用法词典》的作者，玛格丽特·尼克尔森撰写。

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They had come from an England in which even the standard speech was still untrammeled by rule, and eagerly hospitable to picturesque neologisms. Shakespeare himself had been an ardent introducer of novelties and was the first writer, so far as the record shows, to use such now-classical word as capable, courtship, lonely, and to dwindle. In the same way Ben Jonson introduced parody, brain-child, keystone, nonsense, exotic, arrow-minded, and graphic. The American colonists, less sensitive to the sough and burble of words than these masters, confined themselves to homelier situations and produced mainly novelties that remained lodged in the folk-speech. But all the same those novelties revealed a boldness that was genuinely Elizabethan, and if hog-wallow, razorback, (hog),corn-dodger, and mossback remain more or less inelegant to this day, they also remain pungent and highly EXPRESSIVE. Many of the first colonists were ignorant men, and so they made some blunders that have endured. Mistaking the native grouse for a partridge, they called it a partridge, and a partridge it continues to be. And when they mistook the American hare for a rabbit, they obliterated the whole race of hares from the new country and made them all rabbits.

他们来自英格兰，在那里甚至是标准的讲话都依然不受规则的约束，而且热切地乐于创造独特的新词语。莎士比亚本人就是一位新奇事物的热心介绍人，而且是第一位作家，截止到目前的记录显示，他使用了这样一些现代经典的词汇，如有能力的、求爱、孤单的以及减少。同样的，本·琼森引入了拙劣的模仿、脑力劳动的产物、基础、胡说、奇异的、气度狭小的和图形的。美洲的殖民者相比这些主人对言语的强弱不那么敏感，将他们自身限制在了日常的环境中，主要产生保留在民间话语中的那些新奇事物。但尽管如此，这些新奇事物展示了一种真诚的伊丽莎白时代的大胆，即使猪窝、尖背野猪、（猪）、玉米饼，以及极端保守的人对今日或多或少保留了不雅，但它们也保留了辛辣和高度的表达力。许多第一批移民者是无知的人，因此他们经历了一些错误。误将本地松鸡当作鹧鸪，他们把它称为鹧鸪，而且它就一直被叫成了鹧鸪。而当他们把美国野兔误认为是兔子时，他们就从这个新国家中抹去了野兔种群，使它们都变成了兔子。

Reaction in England.  There was relatively little communication back and forth between colony and homeland in the earliest days, and in consequence the majority of Americanisms were seldom if ever heard in England. By an unhappy chance the beginnings of more frequent intercourse coincided precisely with that rise of purism in speech which marked the age of Queen Anne. The first Englishman to sound the alarm against Americanisms was one Francis Moore, who visited Georgia with Oglethorpe in 1735. In Savannah, then a village but two years old, he heard the word bluff applied to a steep bank, and was so unpleasantly affected by it that he denounced it as “barbarous.” He was followed by a gradually increasing stream of other linguistic policemen, and by 1781 the Rev. John Witherspoon, who had come out in 1769 to be president of Princeton, was printing a headlong attack upon American speech habits, not only on the level of the folk but also higher up---indeed, clear to the top. “I have heard in this country,” he wrote, “in the senate, at the bar, and from the pulpit, and see daily in dissertations from the press, errors in grammar, improprieties, and vulgarisms which hardly any person of the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain.”

在英格兰的反应。在早期，殖民地与本土之间来回的交流相对较少，因此，大多数的美式英语在英格兰难得听到。不幸的是，更频繁交往的开始恰好与标志着安妮女王时代的纯粹主义在言语中的兴起同时发生。第一个对美式英语发出警报的英国人是弗朗西斯·摩尔，他于1735年随同奥格尔索普访问了乔治亚。在萨凡纳，在一个仅有两年时间的村庄，他听到了描述陡峭河岸的那个词垂直的，由此感到了不适，以至于他谴责它是“野蛮的”。跟随他的是逐渐增加的其他语言审察者，而到了1781年，于1769年曾出任普林斯顿大学校长的约翰·威瑟斯彭牧师，撰文对美国人讲话的习惯进行了轻率地抨击，不仅对民间层次，也对更高的层次---的确，明显到了最高级别。“在这个国家我听到了”他写到“在参议院、在酒吧以及从神职人员那里，而且每天都看到报刊上的论文，语法错误、用词不当，而在大不列颠，在地位和文学方面相同阶层的任何人几乎不会落入粗俗语言的境地”。

Witherspoon’s attack made some IMPRESSION, but only in academic circles. The generality of Americans, insofar as they heard of it at all, dismissed its author as a mere Englishman (he was actually a Scotsman), and hence somehow inferior and ridiculous. The former colonies were now sovereign states, and their somewhat cocky citizens thought that they were under no obligation to heed admonitions from a defeated and effete empire 3,000 miles across the sea. Even before the Declaration of Independence an anonymous author, supposed to have been John Adams, proposed formally that an American Society of Language be set up to “polish” the American language on strictly American principles, and on Sept. 30, 1780, Adams wrote and signed a letter to the president of Congress renewing this proposal. “Let it be carried out,” he said, and “England will never more have any honor, excepting now and then that of imitating the Americans.” He was joined in 1789 by the redoubtable Noah Webster, who predicted the rise in the new Republic of a “language as different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish, and Swedish are from the German, or from one another.”

威瑟斯彭的抨击产生了某些作用，但仅限于学术圈。大部分美国人，就他们听到的而言，将作者仅仅视为一位英国人（实际上，他是一位苏格兰人），因此在某种程度上认为他低档而且荒谬。前殖民地现在是主权国家，而且他们中有些自大的市民认为他们没有义务听从一个远隔重洋三千英里，战败和衰落帝国的警告。甚至在《独立宣言》之前一位匿名的作者，应该是约翰·亚当斯正式提出过，应建立一个美国语言协会，严格按照美国的原则来“改进”美国人的语言，而在1780年9月30日，亚当斯给国会议长写信并签名，重申了这一建议。“让它实行吧”他说，而且“除了偶尔模仿美国人的事，英格兰不会再有任何荣誉了”。1789年，令人敬畏的诺亚·韦伯斯特也加入了他的行列，韦伯斯特预言了在新共和国中的崛起，一种“不同于未来英格兰语言的语言，就像现代的荷兰语、丹麦语和瑞典语一样都是来自德语，或来自彼此一样”。

The English reply to such contumacy was a series of blasts that continued in dreadful fury for a whole generation, and then abated to a somewhat milder bombardment that goes on to this day. From 1785 to 1815 the English quarterly reviewer, then at the height of their power, denounced all Americanisms in a really frantic manner, the good along with the bad. When Thomas Jefferson, in 1787, ventured to use the verb to belittle in his Notes on Virginia, he was dealt with as if he had committed some nefarious and ignoble act. “Freely, good Sir,” roared the European Magazine and London Review, “will we forgive all your attacks, impotent as they are illiberal, upon our national character; but for the future—oh spare, we beseech you, our mother-tongue!” All the other American writers of the ensuing quarter century were similarly belabored—among them, John Marshall, Noah Webster, Joel Barlow, and John Quincy Adams. Even Washington got a few licks—for using to derange. But the Yankee, between the two wars with England, was vastly less susceptible to English precept and example than he is today, and the thundering of the reviewers did not stay the hatching of Americanisms. On the contrary, it seems to have stimulated the process.

英国人对这种藐视的回应是一连串猛烈的进攻，以至于在可怕的愤怒中持续了整整一代人，然后减弱为一直到现在的某种较为温和的攻击。从1785年到1815年的英语季刊评论者，在他们权力的顶峰时，以一种很猖狂的方式谴责所有的美式英语，无论好的和不好的。1787年，当托马斯·杰克逊在其《弗吉尼亚笔记》中冒险使用轻视这个动词时，他受到的待遇好像他进行了某些邪恶和不光彩的行动。“随意的，好先生”《欧洲杂志》和《伦敦评论》咆哮道，“我们会原谅你对我们民族性格所有的攻击，尽管它们是粗鄙、无力的；但为了未来---噢，宽恕我吧，我们以我们母语的名义恳求你！”在随后四分之世纪里，所有其他的美国作家都受到了类似的抨击---在他们中间有约翰·马歇尔，诺亚·韦伯斯特，乔尔·巴罗和约翰·昆西·亚当斯。甚至连华盛顿都被敲打了几下---用它来扰乱秩序。但在与英格兰的二次战争期间，美国佬远没有比今天受到英国训诫和榜样的影响，而评论家的大声吼叫并没有延缓美式英语的孵化。正相反，它似乎刺激了这一过程。

Frontier Influences.  With the opening of the West, the invention of Americanisms got a fresh start, and by the time of the Mexican War, American English was already so far differentiated from the English of England that almost every Englishman who crossed the ocean to write a book complained that understanding it as spoken had become difficult. Not only was its vocabulary enormously enriched by the movement of population beyond the Alleghanies; there was also a distinct change in American pronunciation. The influence of English example in the latter field began to be restricted sharply to the Boston area and the Tidewater region of the South. Everywhere else the English broad a disappeared, the r that the English had begun to elide reasserted itself harshly, and there gradually emerged the brisk, clear, somewhat metallic Western American that has since conquered four fifths of the whole country and seems very likely to conquer the rest. This Western American is still obnoxious to Englishmen, but its superiority to Standard English, and especially to Oxford English, is obvious. It gives nearly all sounds their full value and is quite devoid of affectation and artificiality. There is no mistaking the meaning of a person speaking it. It tends to a certain monotony, for its range of pitch is much smaller than that of Standard English, but what it thus lacks in variety it more than makes up in clarity.

边疆的影响。随着西部的开放，美式英语的创造获得了一种新开端，而且到墨西哥战争时，美式英语已经不同于英格兰英语，以至于几乎每个漂洋过海的英国人要写一本诉苦理解口语的书已变得很困难。不仅是由于人口的流动极大地丰富了它的词汇，除了阿利盖尼地区外。美国人的发音也有了明显的变化。英语范例在后者的领域中的影响开始被严格地限制在波士顿地区和南部的低洼地区。英语在其它地方普遍消失了，那个英语已经开始消失的r字母又刺眼地出现了，而且逐渐出现了轻快、易懂，带有某些金属声的西部美式英语，从那以后，它就征服了整个国家五分之四的地区，而且似乎极有可以征服其余的地区。这种西部的美式英语对于英国人来说依然是粗鲁无礼的，但它比标准英国，尤其是牛津英语的优势是显而易见的。它几乎赋予了声音所有的价值，而完全没有矫揉造作。说美式英语的人是不会弄错意思的。因为它的音高范围相比标准英语要低很多，所以它趋于某种单调，尽管它缺乏变化，但它在清晰易懂上得到了弥补。

It differentiates American from English much more definitely than the difference in vocabulary, but the latter is what English observers chiefly discuss, for it includes hundreds of terms that puzzle, astonish, and shock them. Their own language was so harshly regimented in the 18the century, largely under the influence of the pedantic Samuel Johnson, that it has never recovered the lively enterprise that it showed in Shakespeare’s day. It takes in foreign words very reluctantly, and in making neologism out of its own materials exhibits very little sense of the pungent and picturesque. Whenever a new situation confronts the people of the two countries, the Americans respond with much more boldness and ingenuity. Certainly it will hardly be denied that movie is a better word than cinema, and commuter than season-ticket holder, and weather bureau than meteorological office, and steam shovel than crane-navvy, and cow-catcher than plough, and thirty-second note than demisemiquaver. The English have invented nothing as magnificently EXPRESSIVE as rubber-neck in a century. Nor have they taken in the half, or even the tenth, of our rich harvest of loanwords, beginning with the French chowder, bogus, and picayune, and the Dutch cooky, cole slaw, scow, and waffle of colonial days, and running through the Spanish stampede, tamale, lasso, corral, and calaboose of the Western migration and the German rathskeller, kindergarten, stein, delicatessen, and katzenjammer of the great immigration, to the Yiddish mazuma, matzoth, and oi-yoi of our own time.

这比在词汇上的差异更明确地区分了美式英语和英语，但后者是英语观察者们主要讨论的问题，因为它包括了数以百计的使他们困惑、吃惊和震惊的术语。在18世纪，他们的语言受到了如此严格的管制，在很大程度上是受到了迂腐的塞缪尔·约翰逊的影响，因此它再也没有恢复到莎士比亚时代它所展示的充满活力的进取心。它很不情愿地接受外来词，而在用它自己的材料创造新词中很少展现出辛辣和生动的感觉。每当两国民众面临新形势时，美国人总是以多得多的大胆和智慧来回应。当然，这几乎无法否认movie(电影(要比cinema(电影)一词更好，commuter(月票乘客)要比season-ticket holder(月票持有者)更好，weather bureau(气象局)比meteorological office(气象局)更好，而steam shovel(挖掘机)比crane-navvy(挖掘机)更好，cow-catcher排障器比plough(犁)更好，以及thirty-second note(三十二音符)比demisemiquaver(三十二音符)更好。在一个世纪中，英国人还没有创造像rubber-neck(东张西望的人)这样令人印象深刻的词。从法语海鲜杂烩浓汤、假冒的和不值钱的，荷兰语曲奇、卷心菜沙拉，殖民时代的华夫饼干，和通过西班牙语引入的蜂拥、玉米粉蒸肉、套索、畜栏，西方移民的西部拘留所和德语餐厅、幼儿园、啤酒杯、熟食，以及大移民时期的头痛开始，到我们自己时代的意第绪语钱、马佐饼和哦，可悲！，它们没有吸收我们丰收的外来语的一半，甚至十分之一。

Modern Trends. There was a day when it seemed likely that the different direction and far greater impetus of American would carry it so far from English that the two would bear out Noah Webster’s prophecy by becoming mutually unintelligible. But that possibility has now vanished, for since the turn of the century the influence of American upon English has been felt increasingly, and large numbers of American neologisms come into use in England almost as quickly as they circulate at home. The influence of American movies and the American radio is obvious in this process, and the American comic strip has had some influence too. But the main reason for the eagerness with which American novelties are accepted and adopted is simply the fact that they are, taking one with another, greatly superior to the home product. There is usually more humor in them, and they show better resourcefulness and ingenuity. The English, indeed, have come to look upon such novelties in speech as essentially imported goods, and no longer resist them as fiercely as aforetime. A few purists, to be sure, still denounce them violently, and now and then a storm of such denunciation runs through the letter-columns of the English newspapers. But much more frequently the papers give over their space to vocabularies of the latest comers with definitions. It is a commonplace in England that the younger generation already speaks American—if not always correctly, then at least fluently. When, during 1938 and 1939, Punch ran a series of amusing articles, explaining the meaning of a long series of American slang terms, it was announced frankly that they were printed for the enlightenment and edification of adults only: the assumption was that the youth of the country were already familiar with them, and skilled in their use.

现代趋势。有一天，美式英语的不同方向和更大的动力会让它与英语极为不同，以至于两种语言会变得无法相互理解而证实诺亚·韦伯斯特的预言。但这种可能性现在已消失了，因为本世纪以来美式英语对英语的影响在不断地增加，而且大量的美国新词在英格兰使用，速度快得几乎就像是在本国传播一样。在这个过程中，美国电影和美国广播的影响是很明显的，而且美国的连环漫画也有了一定的影响力。但事实上，人们渴望接受和采用美国新奇事物的主要原因，总的来看只是因为它们要优于所在国的产品。他们通常有更多的幽默感，而且它们表现出更好的机智和独创性。的确，英国人已经把说话方式上的这种新奇事物基本看作了舶来品，不再像以前那样猛烈地抵制它了。当然，一些纯化论者依然激烈地谴责它们，不时地通过英国报纸的来信专栏弄出些这类谴责。但更多的情况是，报纸为这些最新定义的词汇留出版面。在英格兰这是很平常的事，年青的一代已在说美式英语了---即使并不总是正确，但至少是流利的。在1938年和1939年间，当时的《笨拙》刊登了一系列有趣的文章，对一长串美国俚语术语的含义进行了解释，杂志坦言，印刷它们只是为启蒙和熏陶成年人：假定这个国家的青少年已经熟悉了它们，并熟练地使用它们。

A contrary movement of Anglicisms to the United States also goes on, but it is much feebler than the movements of Americanisms to England. It shows itself chiefly on the level where speech habits are rather self-conscious and there is some pretension to elegance. The use of the English shop in place of the American store began about 1910, and shop has now acquired the special American meaning of a relatively small establishment dealing in but one line of goods. An effort was made about the same time to displace the American shoe with the English boot, but it never made much progress, though boot-shops still survive. Of late it has become fashionable to teach children to call their mothers Mummy, which is English, instead of Mamma, which is American, but Mummy is so hideous a word that it is not likely to prevail. Perhaps the most striking English contribution to the American language in recent years has been charwoman, which has pretty well supplanted scrubwoman.

一场英式英语进美国的相反运动也在进行，但它相比美式英语进英格兰的运动要弱得多。这主要表现在说话习惯极强的自我意识方面与为达优雅而出现的一些自负层面上。英语商店一词取代美语仓库一词大约始于1910，而商店一词现在已获得了美式英语特殊的含义，是指只经营一类商品，相对的小企业。大约在同一时期人们做出尝试用英语boot(靴子)替代美语shoe(鞋)，但从未取得很大的进步，尽管boot-shops(鞋店)一词还存在。最近，教孩子叫他们的母亲为妈咪已成为一种时尚，但妈咪一词是如此的令人难以忍受，以至于它不可能流行。近年来，也许对美国语言显著的贡献是charwoman(打杂的女佣人)一词，它已成功地取代了scrubwoman(打杂女工)一词。

                                              H.L MENCKEN

                                   Author of “The American Language”

                                                   H.L 门肯

                                            《美国语言》的作者

                                                 2022年7月5日译

（译者注：该词条位列《大美百科全书》1985年版，第1卷，第682页至684页）

待续部分：AMERICAN USAGE 美国的用法。