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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Which London newspaper lamented the "menace" that American movies offer to the purity of the English language?

2. According to Mencken, the name of what game puzzles etymologists?

3. What term did John Witherspoon coin, framing it within the context of vulgarity?

4. What letter, when preceding a consonant, greatly irritated Henry James like a "morose grinding of the back teeth?"

5. Who "tries" a legal case in England?

Short Essay Questions

1. Describe H.L. Mencken's attitude towards the American tendencies in the formation of new words.

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

3. What is revealed by the attitudes of the English conservatives in Australia towards American spelling?

4. What principally causes the difficulty of the English people understanding the American speech as explained in Chapter 1.3?

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

6. What chief cause does Mencken ascribes the backwardness of American war slang to?

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

8. In general, how did Noah Webster influence American pronunciation?

9. What were some of the reasons that many immigrants changed their names upon arriving in America?

10. What is Mencken's chief critique of the classifications that he reports in Chapter 1.6?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write an essay analyzing the nature of the relationship between the "melting pot" of American immigrant assimilation and the nomenclature that permeates the country. What are the evident influences of foreign languages on American names? How are these names Americanized? What is the general tendency of American-speakers in the employment and application of names to places and people? To what degree are the various names Americanized? What is the cause of Americanization of names? What is its result and what does it indicate about the American spirit?

Essay Topic 2

Of all the various ways in which the American and British dialects are divergent, perhaps the most obvious is the distinct spellings of words. Analyze the significance of this distinction and put forth an argument in support of one or the other spelling paradigm. How do the two dialects go about determining the spelling of a word? What are the principles that ought to be at work in the conventional acceptance of a word's spelling? Which of these principles is the most important? To which principles does each dialect adhere? What is the greater significance of this adherence?

Essay Topic 3

Part of the driving force behind the divergence of American from British, is what Americans rather distinctly desire to express in language, according to Mencken. Write an essay discussing these desires of which Mencken implicitly speaks. What is the American concerned with in his language? What obstacles in linguistic form can stand between him and his desires? What then happens to these obstacles? What happens to language overall? Are there any dangers in these tendencies? If so, what are they? What is the fundamental relationship between the desires of a populace and their linguistic form?

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