Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [15]
LITERACY AND LANGUAGE
As adults become less able or willing to use formal language, their children are likely to care less about learning the rules. The trend is clearly toward less formal language and lower public literacy. But definitions of literacy are slippery.
If it is defined as being able to understand written text and participate in society, U.S. fifteen-year-olds are about average, according to an international assessment of literacy in 2009 by the National Center for Education Statistics. It showed that 30 percent of young Americans reached “proficiency” level 4, while 18 percent fell below level 2, “a baseline of proficiency.” The results put U.S. participants in fourteenth place among thirty-four countries in the survey, about where they were in 2000.27
According to a survey by the U.S. Department of Education in 2008, roughly 40 percent of Americans of all ages scored at either the basic or below-basic level of proficiency in English. This meant that two out of five adults knew so little about formal English that they could not write a simple letter about a billing error.
A what? Who writes letters anymore? Can you remember the last time you wrote a complaint letter and actually mailed it? Just think of all the energy and time that goes into the process: the typing (hand printing?), folding, inserting it in an envelope, sealing the envelope, attaching the proper stamp, addressing the envelope, adding the return address, and dropping it in the mailbox for anytime delivery. The exercise is called snail mail because it’s not only slow but for the birds. Of course, going through an automated telephone menu is not fast either.
It might be more in line with today’s customs for researchers to assess the ability to text or telephone while multitasking, two more prevalent means of communication today. The figures might show much more functional literacy than old-fashioned assessments do.
EARLY PIONEERS
Alteration of the language inherited from Britain began as soon as the colonists hit the beach. H. L. Mencken, who chronicled many of the early changes in English in this country in his mammoth book The American Language, says the colonists eagerly explored language changes and “freely exchanged parts of speech, turning verbs into nouns, nouns into verbs, and adjectives into either or both with an abandon that is still one of the hallmarks of American English.”28
There was also a continuous free exchange of language between the colonists and the natives. The power of guns over darts and arrows forced the natives to pick up the invaders’ language in a heap big hurry. The exchange of words gave the resulting mishmash a decidedly Native American flavor.
Mencken called the mixture “American” to distinguish it from British English, which many intellectual Americans have tried to preserve over the years despite a largely libertarian climate. Indian terms that survive include chipmunk, hickory, moccasin, possum, pecan, podunk, powwow, raccoon, skunk, squash, toboggan, and woodchuck. Most come from the Algonquin tribe since it was the one most closely in contact with early English settlements in the eastern part of the country.
Today’s Americans can’t go far without running into Indian place names. They include half the states and hundreds of communities, such as Chicago (Algonquin for “garlic field”), Manhattan (“island” in Algonquin), Milwaukee (“good spot” in Algonquin), and Pensacola (“hair people” in Choctaw). Then there are Massachusetts places that sound like a lunch menu: Mashpee, Chicopee, and Sippewisset. Or is that a bus line?
A YANGTZE DOODLE?
Even the familiar Dutch-American term Yankee may have partly originated in the plains of Asia, according to an item in H. L. Mencken’s The American Language.29 It says the word may be from the Persian janghe or jenghe, meaning