Chapter 1.2 Summary

Mencken introduces the neglect and dismissal of the vulgate as a "strange phenomenon" known to American professors but not to philologists and other scholars of language in other countries. To prove by example the existence of devotion to the vulgate elsewhere, the writer cites the serious devotion at the Sociyty des Parlers de France, of Dr. Otto Bremer in Germany, journals on language in Sweden, the movement to overthrow the official language and substitute it with peasant tongue in Norway, the reversionary efforts at the Real Academia Espasola de la Lengua in Spain, and the focused attention to common languages in Latin America. Conversely, he notes, in the United States, only one "usable" treatise exists, and it is rife with errors and omissions. At the same time, only one dictionary of "Americanisms" circulates, and it was written in England by an England-born lawyer...