All 11 Uses of

uncouth
in
The American Language, by Mencken

Fraternizing was made difficult by the wide divergence in vocabulary and pronunciation—a divergence interpreted by each side as a sign of uncouthness.†
*

In particular, the generation born in the New World was uncouth and iconoclastic;[16] the only world it knew was a rough world, and the virtues that environment engendered were not those of niceness, but those of enterprise and resourcefulness.†

[Pg075] To these novelties, apparently without any thought of their uncouthness, Fowler adds to /missionate/ and /consociational/†

Fowler, in 1850, cited /publishment/ and /releasement/ with no apparent thought that they were uncouth.†

The Yankees, so to speak, had lived down such Jacobean pronunciations as /tay/ for /tea/ and /desave/ for /deceive/, and these forms, on Irish lips, struck them as uncouth and absurd, but they still clung, in their common speech, to such forms as /h'ist/ for /hoist/, /bile/ for /boil/, /chaw/ for /chew/, /jine/ for /join/,[39] /sass/ for /sauce/, /heighth/ for /height/ and /rench/ for /rinse/ and /lep/ for /leap/, and the employment of precisely the same forms by the thousands of Irish immigrants who spread through the country undoubtedly gave them a certain support, and so protected them, in a measure, from the assault of the purists.†

[15] This process, of course, is philologically respectable, however uncouth its occasional products may be†

[36] The word /woman/, in those sensitive days, became a term of reproach, comparable to the German /mensch/; the uncouth /female/ took its place†

Others, as we have seen, have come from the German immigrants of half a century ago, from the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch (who are notoriously ignorant and uncouth), and from the Irish, who brought with them a form of English already very corrupt.†

Sometimes a sense of its uncouthness seems to linger, and there is a tendency to give it an /en/-suffix, thus bringing it into greater harmony with its tense.†

The trouble with the others was that they were either too uncouth to be adopted without a struggle or likely to cause errors in pronunciation.†

In so far as it is apprehended at all it is only in the sense that Irish-English was apprehended a generation ago—that is, as something [Pg321] uncouth and comic.†

Definition:

rude or unpleasant due to a lack of manners, refinement, or taste