Free American Language Supplement 2 by H.L. Mencken Page A

nuts, salami, green and black olives, pretzels, pumpernickel and fragments of
Leberwurst
that were served with cocktails it was mauled very badly. In 1937 the sponsors of a Midwest Hotel Show at Chicago offered a prize for a likely substitute, and it was won by Roy L. Alciatore of New Orleans with
apiteaser
. One contestant proposed that the term be naturalized as
horse-doovers
. In 1938 the quest was resumed by a popular magazine, 2 and at about the same time the Hon. Maury Maverick of Texas, the foe of
gobbledegook
, 3 proposed
dingle-doos
. 4 Many Americans, in despair, have turned to the Italian
antipasto
, which is much less painful to the national larynx.
    In 1935 Emily Post, then the unchallenged arbiter of elegance in the United States, was appealed to for advice about pronouncing the French words currently in vogue. She replied that those which had “already been Americanized” should be turned into “plain English,”
e.g., menyou
for
menu
and
valet
with a clear
t;
and that those having sounds nearly equivalent to English sounds should be given the latter,
e.g., mass-her
for
masseur
(“emphasis is the same on both syllables”),
boo-kay
for
bouquet
, 5
brass-yair
for
brassière, voad-veal
for
vaudeville
, and
showfur
, not
showfer
or
showf’r
(“accent both syllables equally or else slightly on the last”), for
chauffeur
. Such words as
garage, demi-tasse
and
fiancé
she described as “stumbling blocks,” and advised her customers, in the last two cases, to substitute
black coffee
and either
betrothed
or
man I’m going to marry
. 6
    The bare sounds of spoken speech, of course, constitute only one of its characters, and that character, as the professors of phonemes 1 have taught us, is a variable quality, for a given phoneme may change its vowel, and yet remain the same phoneme, or, at all events, a pair of diaphones. 2 Even syllable stress changes more or less with the position of a word in a sentence and with the mood and intent of the speaker; hence it cannot be reduced to rigid rules. There are students of speech who hold that neither is as important, in distinguishing one dialect from another, as intonation, or, as some of them call it, pitch pattern. 3 When an American hears a strange Englishman speaking it is not the unfamiliar pronunciation that chiefly warns him to be on his guard, nor even the occasional use of unintelligible words; it is the exotic speech tune. Between the two forms of the language, says Hilaire Belloc,
    there is not only a difference in rhythm and in tonal inflection – that is, in the musical notes of a sentence – but there is also a spiritual difference.… Different parts of the same phrase are emphasized. That means not only a difference in the sense of rhythm but some subtle difference in the mind of the speaker. So far as rhythm is concerned the main difference would seem to be … onewhich I have discovered in many other departments of the national life beyond this medium of speech. The American rhythm is shorter. If you hear an Englishman pronounce a long sentence, such as, “I shall be very glad to see him again after such a long interval,” and then compare it with the way in which the average American would pronounce identically the same printed words, you will discover … that the number of emphatic syllables in the English intonation is less than in the American. To take a metaphor from the movement of water, the waves are shorter and steeper. Further, the phrase lifts in tone at the end in English and falls in American. 1
    Unhappily, there is a good deal of conflict of opinion regarding the precise nature of the difference in intonation between typically English and typically American speech. Some observers report that, to their ears, Englishmen cover a wider range of tone in speaking, and carry it higher than Americans; 2 others, while agreeing that Americans pitch their voices within a very narrow range, 3 hold that their gamut lies further up the scale