The American Language (Fourth Edition; Corrected, Enlarged & Rewritten)

New York: A Borzoi Book/Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., Publishers, 1973. 4th Edition . Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo or 8° (Medium Octavo): 7¾" x 9¾" tall. 769 + pp. Over-sized and/or over weight book; extra postage required. Please note that large and/or heavy items may incur an additional shipping charge. Essentially and virtually clean, fresh, flawless copy, with solid binding and minimal external & internal wear. Clean text on crisp pages with moderate foxing on page edges, not affecting text. Light shelf wear. Dust jacket shows moderate wear all around. Please inquire for the complete set, consisting of Fourth Edition and Supplements I + II. Synopsis: The American Language is H. L. Mencken's 1919 book about changes Americans had made to the English Language. Mencken was inspired by the argot of the colored waiters in Washington, as well as one of his favourite authors, Mark Twain, and his experiences on the streets of Baltimore, MD. In 1902, Mencken remarked on the queer words which go into the making of United States. The book was preceded by several columns in The Evening Sun. Henry Louis Mencken eventually asked 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? It would appear that he answered his own question. In the tradition of Noah Webster, who wrote the first American dictionary, Mencken wanted to defend 'Americanisms' against a steady stream of English critics, who usually isolated Americanisms as borderline barbarous perversions of the mother tongue. H.L. Mencken assaulted the prescriptive grammar of these critics and American schoolmarms, now sometimes known as grammar mavens, arguing, like Samuel Johnson in the preface to his dictionary, that language evolves independently of textbooks. The book discusses the beginnings of American variations from English, the spread of these variations, American names and slangs over the course of its 374 pages. According to Henry Louis Mencken, American English was more colorful, vivid, and creative than its British counterpart. The book sold exceptionally well by Mencken's standards - 1400 copies in the first two months. Reviews of the book praised it lavishly, with the exception of one by Mencken's old nemesis, Stuart Sherman. Mencken released several full-sized supplements to the main volume in ensuing decades, based on the boom in linguistics articles. Many of the sources and research material associated with the book are in the Mencken collection at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, MD. Contents: The American Language, The Two Streams of English, The Earliest Alarms, The English Attack, American Barbarisms, The English Attitude Today, The Position of the Learned, The Views of Writing Men, The Political Front, Foreign Observers, The Materials of the Inquiry, The Hallmarks of American, What is an Americanism?, The Beginnings of American, The First Loan-Words, New Words of English Material, Changed Meanings, Archaic English Words, The Period of Growth, A New Nation in the Making, The Expanding Vocabulary, Loan-Words and Non-English Influences, The Language Today, After The Civil War, The Making of New Nouns, Verbs, Other Parts of Speech, Foreign Influences Today, American and English, The Infiltration of English by Americanisms, Surviving Differences, English Difficulties with American, Criticisms in the United States, Honorifics, Euphemisms, Forbidden Words, Expletives, The Pronounciation of American, Its General Characters, The Vowels, The Consonants, Dialects, American Spelling, The Influence of Noah Webster, The Advance of American Spelling, The Simplified Spelling Movement, The Treatment of Loan-Words, Punctuation, Capitalization, and Abbreviation, The Common Speech, Outlines of its Grammar, The Verb, The Pronoun, The Noun, The Adjective, The Adverb, The Double Negative, Other Syntactical Peculiarities, Proper Names in America, Surnames, Given-Names, Place-Names, Other Proper Names, American Slang, The Nature of Slang, Cant and Argot, The Future of the Language, The Spread of English, Engl