De Quincey's Use of Americanisms

TN THAT diffuseness which mars so much of the work of Thomas De l Quincey, one striking element consists of jocular use of substandard speech. He who could write with good taste and power did not reject flippant terms of jargon, dialect, and overseas provincialisms. His use of ridiculous speech is often directed to some satiric end in keeping with his Tory patriotism; his attitude toward the United States and its speech is part of that early nineteenth-century British derogation of American culture. His one essay on an American subject denounces the swindle of the California gold-digging mania,1 but most references to this country are incidental, indicating a condescending interest in the vagaries of American life. He tends to sneer at such things as a 'red-hot republican from the banks of the Potomac,'2 the confusion of oddly named states, the delight in immense things, newspapers, hotels, even men-the 'Yankees, who spindle up so tall and narrow.'3 And his incidental, scattered use of Americanisms in speech carries with it the same De Quinceyan sneer. He sprinkles through his articles forms of colloquial speech that may be British or American, those forms which in a sort of phonetic spelling often are the stuff of 'American dialect' humor. Such expressions as, they does, an't it, fork out, and ugZy customer4 were heard first in England; yet English writers such as Marryat imputed to the United States these substandard forms, and De Quincey too may have thought such words to be American. In revising a paper on Homer, he found accasion to remark upon the repulsive dialect of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, 'with its sorter, kinder 8cc.,'5 but his examples are not exclusively Southern or American. He can fall a slangy vein wherein he jumbles substandard English and American speech, as in a review of Landor (1847), when he says that Greece was 'proud of having licked [Troy] into almighty smash . '6 Lick and smash are of English birth, but that almighty is American; De Quincey

Lexicography and Language Studies · Philosophy