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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Who was the author of the couplet that Mencken quotes: "For thou art a girl as much brighter than her / As he was a poet sublimer than me"?
(a) Matthew Prior.
(b) Matthew Arnold.
(c) John Keats.
(d) Percy Bysse Shelley.

2. Who does Mencken quote as saying, "There is no part of the world where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous and picturesque as in the United States of America"?
(a) Benjamin Franklin.
(b) Walt Whitman.
(c) Robert Louis Stevenson.
(d) G.K. Chesterton.

3. Which nationality does Mencken claim is most eager to Americanize the names of their children?
(a) The Jews.
(b) The Irish.
(c) The Italians.
(d) The Germans.

4. What religious affiliation, commonly held in both countries, has had a larger influence on names in America than in England?
(a) Puritanism.
(b) Anglicanism.
(c) Presbyterianism.
(d) Catholicism.

5. According to Mencken, the English opposition to American spelling transcends the academic and takes on the character of what?
(a) The patriotic.
(b) The ethical.
(c) The political.
(d) The religious.

6. In what does the American pronoun not necessarily agree with its noun?
(a) Subject.
(b) Number.
(c) Tense.
(d) Case.

7. Which of the following does Wilcox not list as a negative treatment of the English language by grammarians?
(a) Excessive revision.
(b) Multiplication of terms for a single conception.
(c) Excessive classification.
(d) Excessive inflection.

8. Which of the following is the analogate to which Mencken compares the slang words overused by the ignorant?
(a) Marriages.
(b) Cushions.
(c) Coins.
(d) Horses.

9. In what sort of languages are double negatives "perfectly allowable"?
(a) Teutonic.
(b) Romance.
(c) Semitic.
(d) Asiatic.

10. Which word do the English always place prior to the proper noun whereas Americans place it after, as Mencken reports at the end of Chapter 10.3?
(a) County.
(b) Street.
(c) Lake.
(d) River.

11. In which city are the French names of streets reported by Mencken to be beautiful but so barbarously pronounced as to be unrecognizable by a Frenchman?
(a) Baton Rouge.
(b) Lafayette.
(c) Houston.
(d) New Orleans.

12. Which country does Mencken state has a fondness for using surnames as given names?
(a) America.
(b) Mexico.
(c) Canada.
(d) England.

13. According to Mencken, the word "none" is a degenerate composition of what two words?
(a) No one.
(b) Not on.
(c) Not one.
(d) No tone.

14. In what language does Mencken state the double negative was once "quite respectable?"
(a) Spanish.
(b) French.
(c) Anglo-Saxon.
(d) Russian.

15. In what part of the country did the Irish attain to a "truly impressive political power before the first native-born generation of them had grown up" as Mencken states in Chapter 10.1?
(a) The Western cities.
(b) The Southeast.
(c) The Eastern cities.
(d) The Midwest.

Short Answer Questions

1. What language does the formalism of English grammarians come from?

2. Which Americanized foreign loan-word in the common speech means, in its vulgar loaned form, "to prance or to walk consciously"?

3. Whom does Mencken quote as saying, at the beginning of Chapter 10.4, "Such a locality as 'the <i>corner of Avenue H and Twenty-third street,</I> is about as distinctly American as Algonquin and Iroquois names like <i>Mississippi</i> and <i>Saratoga</i>"?

4. According to Mencken, which of the following does "one American professor of English" predict will become a spelling form of the future?

5. Mencken states that the "Meyers" are the "Smiths" of what country?

(see the answer keys)

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