The Cinema and Americanisms

Abstract

In view of the various articles published on the influence of the picture house on the language of to-day (cf. Spies, passim) I will content myself with a brief note. We all know the word movies, but still use pictures or cinema [si’nima]¹) in preference to the American term. Screen (s. and vb.), reel, the flicker of the film, fade-out (s. and vb.), register (emotions) and close-up (s.) are technical words which have passed into general use as also to feature and to star. Another curious term is a cut-back for the glimpses of episodes already narrated, which often so annoyingly interrupt the progress of the reel. Among the Americanisms which constantly appear in the captions of the films and have — probably more through them than through other means — attained a measure of popularity are uplift, high-brow (intellectual), low-brow, sob-stuff, mush, mushy; guy, stiff, boob, mutt (synonyms for ‘person, fellow’); joint (public house or saloon); to put wise, get wise; make a get away, beat it for to escape especially in the ‘crook’ dramas, but also in literature, (cf. R. Knox, The Viaduct Murder — 1925 — p. 146). The intensive some in some fellow etc. is still prevalent. As an example or two of the extravagant Americanisms which are shown to us, I quote from the film ‘Hay Fever’ the description of a girl as a ‘cornfed canary with a Broadway smile’, and the threat of her father to ‘manicure the gizzard’ of the suitor, who was so inventive that he invented ‘a three-cornered mouthpiece so that a hair-lipped (sic) man could play the saxophone’. Another film The Soilers, showed a healthy reaction against the fustian of ‘heroic’ phrases once used in all seriousness like ‘I broke him with my two bare hands’, which it burlesques admirably.