View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What is the second characteristic that Mencken attributes to American English in Chapter 1.5?
(a) Resistance to neologisms.
(b) Disregard of rule and precedent.
(c) Translatability to British English.
(d) Disunity of regional dialects.

2. What difference in pronunciation does Mencken state most sharply distinguishes the two dialects?
(a) The normative "ch."
(b) The normative "-ary" suffix.
(c) The normative "a."
(d) The normative "o."

3. What language does Mencken quote Sidney Low as saying is not taught to English youth?
(a) American.
(b) Latin.
(c) Greek.
(d) Russian.

4. What class of Americans is most influenced by Briticisms, according to Mencken in Chapter 5.2?
(a) The fashionable.
(b) The middle-class.
(c) The poor.
(d) The vulgar.

5. Which of the following groups of immigrants does Mencken claim have a profound effect on not only the American vocabulary, but also its pronunciation and idiom?
(a) Danish.
(b) Scottish.
(c) Irish.
(d) Italian.

Short Answer Questions

1. In terms of politics, an American candidate "runs" for office. What does an English candidate do?

2. Which word do Americans use for "angry" that was once an English provincialism considered base?

3. According to Mencken, how do the Americans consider the precise English use of the indefinite pronoun ("one")?

4. Who is the author of "Travels in North America," published in 1827?

5. According to Benjamin Franklin, what was roughly the population of the colonies in 1751?

Short Essay Questions

1. In Chapter 1.2, whom does Mencken identify as chiefly responsible for the inhibiting of an American dialect?

2. In what ways is the noun principally abused in vulgar American?

3. What characterizes the favorite slang phrases of the American soldier in World War I, according to Mencken?

4. What is Mencken's evident attitude towards the vulgar American pronunciation of foreign loan-words?

5. What was Walt Whitman's role in the development of the national literature of the United States?

6. What was the predominant attitude of philologists towards the study of American slang, at the time of Mencken's writing?

7. Upon what does Mencken claim the art of American prose is based, in Chapter 9.2?

8. What typifies the difference in the use of honorifics between Americans and the English?

9. For what reason did the early Americans wish to distinguish their language from that of the English?

10. What is the significance of the quote from Sayce at the beginning of Chapter 9.9 that "Language begins with sentences, not with single words"?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 811 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample