In 1920, England became dismayed by the influence of American music and slang. Heavens forbid, their children were suddenly telling each other to “forget it” and adults began referring to liquor as “fire water” while getting sloshed to the tune of Yankee Doodle.
Fear Yankee Slang
LONDON. MARCH 3, 1920. — England is apprehensive lest the vocabularies of her youth become corrupted through incursions of American frequency with which resort is made to “Yankee talk” by British song and play writers seeking to enliven their productions. Bands and orchestras throughout the country, when playing popular music, play American selections almost exclusively. American songs monopolize the English musical hall and musical comedy stage.
It is the subtitle of the American moving picture film which, it is feared, constitutes the most menacing threat of vaunted English purity of speech.
“The child at the pictures is picking up a new language from the slangy American films,” says a critic in a contribution to the London Daily News headed “The Vulgar Tongue.”
“I visited two picture theaters today for the express purpose of collecting slang phrases and of noticing the effect of the new language on the child as well as on the adult. What the villain said to the hero when the latter started to argue with him was ‘Cut out that dope,’ and a hundred piping voices repeated the injunction. The comic man announced his marriage to the belle of Lumbertown by saying, ‘I’m hitched.’
“Of course, the American child can comprehend these things much better than the British child, who is quite unfamiliar with such phrases. Imagine a child going home to mother and asking the meaning of ‘fly cop.’ We may admire the terseness of the phrase ‘forget it,’ but does the subtitle ‘The Bun’s Gone Daffy’ convey anything to a theater full of cockneys?
“In another picture a man trafficked secretly with Indiana, exchanging bottles of ‘fire water’ for beaver skins was subtitled ‘The Bootlegger.'”
Source: The Bemidji daily pioneer. (Bemidji, Minn.), 03 March 1920.
