The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United StatesMencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
General
The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States
Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
Americanisms; English language; Names -- United States; Names, Personal -- United States
The English have an ecclesiastical vocabulary with which we are almost
unacquainted, and it is in daily use, for the church bulks large in
public affairs over there. Such terms as /vicar/, /canon/, /verger/,
/prebendary/, /primate/, /curate/, /non-conformist/, /dissenter/,
/convocation/, /minster/, /chapter/, /crypt/, /living/,
/presentation/, /glebe/, /benefice/, /locum tenens/, /suffragan/,
/almoner/, /dean/ and /pluralist/ are to be met with in the English
newspapers constantly, but on this side of the water they are seldom
encountered. Nor do we hear much of /matins/, /lauds/, /lay-readers/,
/ritualism/ and the /liturgy/. The English use of /holy orders/ is
also strange to us. They do not say that a young man is /studying for
the ministry/, but that he is /reading for holy orders/. They do not
say that he is /ordained/, but that he /takes orders/. Save he be in
the United Free Church of Scotland, he is never a /minister/; save he
be a nonconformist, he is never a /pastor/; a clergyman of the
Establishment is always either a /rector/, a /vicar/ or a /curate/,
and colloquially a /parson/.
In American /chapel/ simply means a small church, usually the branch
of some larger one; in English it has the special sense of a place of
worship unconnected with the establishment. Though three-fourths of
the people of Ireland are Catholics (in Munster and Connaught, more
than nine-tenths), and the Protestant Church of Ireland has been
disestablished since 1871, a Catholic place of worship in the country
is still a /chapel/ and not a /church/.[14] So is a Methodist
wailing-place in England, however large it may be, though now and then
/tabernacle/ is substituted. In the same way the English Catholics
sometimes vary /chapel/ with /oratory/, as in /Brompton Oratory/. A
Methodist, in Great [Pg113] Britain, is not a /Methodist/, but a
/Wesleyan/. Contrariwise, what the English call simply a /churchman/
is an /Episcopalian/ in the United States, what they call the /Church/
(always capitalized!) is the /Protestant Episcopal/ Church,[15] what
they call a /Roman Catholic/ is simply a /Catholic/, and what they
call a /Jew/ is usually softened (if he happens to be an advertiser)
to a /Hebrew/. The English Jews have no such idiotic fear of the plain
name as that which afflicts the more pushing and obnoxious of the race
in America.[16] "News of /Jewry/" is a common head-line in the /London
Daily Telegraph/, which is owned by Lord Burnham, a Jew, and has had
many Jews on its staff, including Judah P. Benjamin, the American. The
American language, of course, knows nothing of /dissenters/. Nor of
such gladiators of dissent as the /Plymouth Brethren/, nor of the
/nonconformist conscience/, though the United States suffers from it
even more damnably than England. The English, to make it even, get on
without /circuit-riders/, /holy-rollers/, /Dunkards/, /Seventh Day
Adventists/ and other such American /ferae naturae/, and are born,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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