H.L. Mencken (1880–1956). The American Language. 1921.
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branch of some larger one; in English it has acquired the special sense of a place of worship unconnected with the Establishment. Though three-fourths of the people of Ireland are Catholics (in Munster and Connaught, more than nine-tenths), and the Protestant Church of Ireland has been disestablished since 1871, a Catholic place of worship in that country is still a chapel and not a church.22 So is a Methodist wailing-place in England, however large it may be, though now and then tabernacle is substituted. Chapel, of course, is also used to designate a small church of the Establishment, as St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. A Methodist, in Great Britain, is not ordinarily a Methodist, but a Wesleyan. Contrariwise, what the English call simply a churchman is an Episcopalian in the United States, what they call the Church (always capitalized!) is the Protestant Episcopal Church,23 what they call a Roman Catholic is simply a Catholic, and what they call a Jew is usually softened (if he happens to be an advertiser) to a Hebrew. The English Jews have no such idiotic fear of the plain name as that which afflicts the more pushing and obnoxious of the race in America.24 “News of Jewry” is a common headline in the London Daily Telegraph, which is owned by Lord Burnham, a Jew, and has had many Jews on its staff, including Judah P. Benjamin, the American. The American language, of course, knowns nothing of dissenters. Nor of such gladiators of dissent as the Plymouth Brethren, nor of the nonconformist conscience, though the United States suffers from it even more damnably than England. The English, to make it even, get on without circuit-riders, holy-rollers, Dunkards, hard-shell Baptists, United Brethren, Seventh Day Adventists and
Note 22. “The term chapel,” says Joyce, in English as We Speak It in Ireland, “has so ingrained itself in my mind that to this hour the word instinctively springs to my lips when I am about to mention a Catholic place of worship; and I always feel some sort of hesitation or reluctance in substituting the word church. I positively could not bring myself to say, ‘Come, it is time now to set out for church.’ It must be either mass or chapel.” [back]
Note 23. Certain dissenters, of late, show a disposition to borrow the American usage. Thus the Christian World, organ of the English Congregationalists, uses Episcopal to designate the Church of England. [back]
Note 24. So long ago as the 70’s certain Jews petitioned the publishers of Webster’s and Worcester’s dictionaries to omit their definitions of the verb to jew, and according to Richard Grant White, the publisher of Worcester’s complied. Such a request, in England, would be greeted with derision. [back]
