The American Language (1923)/Chapter 5

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More than once, during the preceding chapters, we encountered Americanisms that had gone over into English, and English locutions that had begun to get a foothold in the United States. Such exchanges are made frequently and often very quickly, and though the guardians of English, as we saw in Chapter I, Section 3, still attack every new Americanism vigorously, even when, as in the case of scientist, it is obviously sound, or, as in the case of joy-ride, it is irresistibly picturesque, they are often routed by public pressure, and have to submit in the end with the best grace possible.

For example, consider caucus. It originated in Boston at some indeterminate time before 1750, and remained so peculiarly American for more than a century following that most of the English visitors before the Civil War remarked its use. But, according to J. Redding Ware,^[1] it began to creep into English political slang about 1870, and in the 80's it was lifted to good usage by the late Joseph Chamberlain. Ware, writing in the first years of the present century, said that the word had become "very important" in England, but was "not admitted into dictionaries."

But in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, dated 1914, and in Cassell's New English Dictionary, published five years later, it is given as a sound English word, though its American origin is noted. The English, however, use it in a sense that has become archaic in America, thus preserving an abandoned American meaning in the same way that many abandoned British meanings have been preserved on this side. In the ​United States the word means, and has meant for years, a meeting of some division, large or small, of a political or legislative body for the purpose of agreeing upon a united course of action in the main assembly. In England it means the managing committee of a party or faction—something corresponding to our national committee, or state central committee, or steering committee, or to the half-forgotten congressional caucuses of the 20's. It has a disparaging significance over there, almost equal to that of our words organization and machine. Moreover, it has given birth to two derivatives of like quality, both unknown in America—caucusdom, meaning machine control, and caucuser, meaning a machine politician.^[2]

A good many other such Americanisms have got into good usage in England, and new ones are being exported constantly. Farmer describes the process of their introduction and assimilation. American books, newspapers and magazines, especially the last, circulate in England in large number, and some of their characteristic locutions strike the English fancy and are repeated in conversation. Then they get into print, and begin to take on respectability. "The phrase, 'as the Americans say,'" he continues, "might in some cases be ordered from the type foundry as a logotype, so frequently does it do introduction duty."^[3] Ware shows another means of ingress: the argot of sailors. Many of the Americanisms he notes as having become naturalized in England, e. g., boodle, boost and walk-out, are credited to Liverpool as a sort of half-way station. Travel brings in still more: England swarms with Americans, and Englishmen themselves, visiting America, are struck by the new and racy phrases that they hear, and afterward take them home and try them on their friends.

The English authors who burden every westbound ship, coming here to lecture, have especially sharp ears for ​such neologisms, and always use them when they get home—often, as we shall see, inaccurately. Dickens was the first of these visitors to carry back that sort of cargo; according to Bishop Coxe^[4] he gave currency in England, in his "American Notes," to reliable, influential, talented and lengthy. Bristed, writing in 1855, said that talented was already firmly fixed in the English vocabulary by that time. All four words are in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and only lengthy is noted as "originally an Americanism." Cassell lists them without any remark at all; they have been thoroughly assimilated. Finally, there is the influence of American plays and moving pictures. Hundreds of American films are shown in England every week, and the American words and phrases appearing in their titles, sub-titles and other explanatory legends thus become familiar to the English. "The patron of the picture palace," says W. G. Faulkner, in an article in the London Daily Mail, "learns to think of his railway station as a depot; he has alternatives to one of our newest words, hooligan, in hoodlum, and tough; he watches a dive, which is a thieves' kitchen or a room in which bad characters meet, and whether the villain talks of dough or sugar he knows it is money to which he is referring. The musical ring of the word tramp gives way to the stodgy hobo or dead-beat. It may be that the plot reveals an attempt to deceive some simple-minded person. If it does, the innocent one is spoken of as a sucker, a come-on, a boob, or a lobster if he is stupid in the bargain."

Mr. Faulkner goes on to say that a great many other Americanisms are constantly employed by Englishmen "who have not been affected by the avalanche…which has come upon us through the picture palace." "Thus today," he says, "we hear people speak of the fall of the year, a stunt they have in hand, their desire to boost a particular business, a peach when they mean a pretty girl, a scab—a common term among strikers—the glad-eye, junk when they mean worthless material, their efforts to make good, the elevator in the hotel or office, the boss or manager, the crook or swindler; and they will tell you that they have the goods—that is, they possess the requisite qualities for a given position." The venerable Frederic Harri​son, writing in the Fortnightly Review in the Spring of 1918, denounced this tendency with a vigor recalling the classical anathemas of Dean Alford and Sydney Smith.^[5] "Stale American phrases,…" he said, "are infecting even our higher journalism and our parliamentary and platform oratory.…A statesman is now out for victory; he is up against pacificism.…He has a card up his sleeve, by which the enemy are at last to be euchred. Then a fierce fight in which hundreds of noble fellows are mangled or drowned is a scrap.…To criticise a politician is to call for his scalp.…The other fellow is beaten to a frazzle." And so on. "Bolshevism," concluded Harrison sadly, "is ruining language as well as society." Other watchmen have often sounded the same alarm, sometimes in very acrimonious terms. "Thou callest trousers pants," roared Samuel Butler in his "Psalm to Montreal," "whereas I call them trousers; therefore thou art in hell-fire and may the Lord pity thee!"^[6]

But though there are many such protests, the majority of Englishmen make borrowings from the tempting and ever-widening American vocabulary, and many of these loan-words take root, and are presently accepted as sound English, even by the most squeamish. The Cambridge History of English Literature lists backwoodsman, know-nothing and yellow-back as English compounds, apparently in forgetfulness of their American origin, and adds skunk, squaw and toboggan as direct importations from the Indian tongues, without noting that they came through American, and remained definite Americanisms for a long while.^[7] It even adds musquash, a popular* name for the Fiber zibethicus, borrowed from the Algonquin muskwessu but long since degenerated to muskrat in America. Musquash has been in disuse in this country, indeed, since the middle of the last century, save as a stray localism, but the English have preserved it, and it appears in the Oxford Dictionary.^[8]

​A few weeks in London or a month's study of the London newspapers will show a great many other American pollutions of the well of English. The argot of politics is full of them. Many besides caucus were introduced by Joseph Chamberlain, a politician skilled in American campaign methods and with an American wife to prompt him. He gave the English their first taste of to belittle, one of the inventions of Thomas Jefferson. Graft and to graft crossed the ocean in their nonage. To bluff has been well understood in English for 30 years. It is in Cassell's and the Oxford Dictionaries, and has been used by no less a magnifico than Sir Almroth Wright.^[9] To stump, in the form of stump-oratory, is in Carlyle's "Latter-Day Pamphlets," published in 1850, and caucus appears in his "Frederick the Great,"^[10] though, as we have seen on the authority of Ware, it did not come into general use in England until ten years later. Buncombe (usually spelled bunkum) is in all the later English dictionaries. Gerrymander is in H. G. Wells' "Outline of History."^[11] In the London stock market and among English railroad men various characteristic Americanisms have got a foothold. The meaning of bucket-shop and to water, for example, is familiar to every London broker's clerk. English trains are now telescoped and carry dead-heads, and in 1913 a rival to the Amalgamated Order of Railway Servants was organized under the name of the National Union of Railway Men. The beginnings of a movement against the use of servant are visible in other directions, and the American help threatens to be substituted; at all events, Help Wanted advertisements are now occasionally encountered in English newspapers. But it is American verbs that seem to find the way into English least difficult, particularly those compounded with prepositions and adverbs, such as to pan out and to swear off. Most of ​them, true enough, are still used as conscious Americanisms, hut used they are, and with increasing frequency. The highly typical American verb to loaf is now naturalized, and Ware says that The Loaferies is one of the common nicknames of the Whitechapel workhouse. Both the Concise Oxford and Cassell list to loaf without mentioning its American origin. The former says that its etymology is "dubious" and the latter that it is "doubtful."

It is curious, reading the fulminations of American purists of the last generation, to note how many of the Americanisms they denounced have not only got into perfectly good usage at home but even broken down all guards across the ocean. To placate and to antagonize are examples. The Concise Oxford and Cassell distinguish between the English and American meanings of the latter: in England a man may antagonize only another man, in America he may antagonize a mere idea or thing. But, as the brothers Fowler show, even the English meaning is of American origin, and no doubt a few more years will see the verb completely naturalized in Britain. To placate, attacked vigorously by all native grammarians down to (but excepting) White, now has the authority of the Spectator, and is accepted by Cassell. To donate is still under the ban, but other old bugaboos that have been embraced are gubernatorial, presidential and standpoint. White labored long and valiantly to convince Americans that the adjective derived from president should be without the i before its last syllable, following the example of incidental, regimental, monumental, governmental, oriental, experimental and so on; but in vain, for presidential is now perfectly good English. To engineer, to collide, to corner, to obligate, and to lynch are in Cassell with no hint of their American origin, and so are home-spun, out-house, cross-purposes, green-horn, blizzard, tornado, cyclone, hurricane, excursionist, wash-stand and wash-basin, though wash-hand-stand and wash-hand-basin are also given. To boom, to boost and to boss are listed as Americanisms; so are highfalutin, skeedaddle and flat-footed. But to donate and to feature are not there at all, and neither are non-committal, bay-window, semi-occasional, square-meal, back-number, spondulix, back-yard, stag-party, derby (hat) and trained-nurse. Drug-store is making its way in England; the firm known as Botts Cash Chemists ​uses the term to designate its branches. But it is not yet listed by either Cassell or the Concise Oxford, though both give druggist. L. Pearsall Smith adds platform (political), interview, faith-healing, co-education and cake-walk.^[12] Cassell says that letter-carrier is obsolete in England and that pay-day is used only on the Stock Exchange there. Tenderfoot is creeping in, though the English commonly mistake it for an Australianism; it is used by the English Boy Scouts just as our own Boy Scouts use it. Scalawag, characteristically, has got into English with an extra l, making it callawag. Rambunctious is not in any of the new English dictionaries, but in Cassell I find rumbustious, probably its father.

So many Americanisms, in fact, have gone into English of late that the English have begun to lose sight of the transoceanic origin of large numbers of them. When the last edition of the present work was published some of the English reviewers made lists of such Americanisms that had ousted or begun to oust their English equivalents, for example, sweater for jersey, overcoat for greatcoat, scarf-pin for tie-pin, subway for underground, homely for plain, fall for autumn, rare for underdone, and blizzard, cyclone, tornado and hurricane for storm. A number of these terms, of course, were sound old English, but the point is that they had been preserved in good usage in the United States during a time, often extending to more than a century, which saw their exile to dialects or to the vulgar speech in England, and that their revival was due solely to American influence. Even so, many of them retained a good deal of foreignness, as was revealed by an obvious difference of opinion as to the extent of their acceptance, and their right to it. It is, in fact, easy to overestimate the importance of such exportations, and of the transient slang-phrases that go with them. It usually takes a long while for one of them to become naturalized in England, and even then the business is sometimes achieved only at the cost of a change in meaning or spelling. To the Englishman, indeed, most Americanisms continue to show an abhorrent quality, even after he has begun to use them; he never feels quite at ease in their use, and so he ​seldom uses them correctly. When, a few years ago, the English borrowed the highly characteristic American phrase, I should worry (probably borrowed by American, in turn, from the Yiddish), they changed it absurdly into I should not worry. In the same way they confused the two Americanisms, gink and jinx, and so produced the bastard ginx.^[13] Perhaps their inability to understand the generality of Americanisms or to enter naturally into the spirit of the language helps to explain the common American notion that they are dull-pated and unable to appreciate a joke. Certain it is that very few of their authors, even after the most careful preparation, show any capacity for writing American in a realistic manner. A proof of it is offered by the English novelist, W. L. George, in a chapter entitled "Litany of the Novelist" in his book of criticism, "Literary Chapters."^[14] George has been in the United States, knows many Americans, and is here addressing Americans and trying to help out their comprehension by a studied use of purely American phrases. One hears, not of the East End, but of the East Side; not of the City, but of Wall Street; not of Belgravia or the West End, but of Fifth avenue; not of bowler hats, but of derbys; not of idlers in pubs, but of saloon loafers; not of pounds, shillings and pence, but of dollars and cents. In brief, a gallant attempt upon a strange tongue, and by a writer of the utmost skill—but a hopeless failure none the less. In the midst of his best American, George drops into Briticism after Briticism, some of them quite as unintelligible to the average American reader as so many Gallicisms. On page after page they display the practical impossibility of the enterprise: back-garden for back-yard, perambulator for baby-carriage, corn-market for grain-market, coal-owner for coal-operator, post for mail, and so on. And to top them there are English terms that have no American equivalents at all, for example, kitchen-fender. In other chapters of the same book his blunders are even worse: petrol and cruet most certainly puzzle many of his American readers.

Nor is he alone. Every English author who attempts to render the speech of American characters makes a mess of it. H. G. Wells' American in "Mr. Britling Sees It Through" is only matched by ​G. K. Chesterton's in "Man Alive." Even Kipling, who submitted the manuscript of "Captains Courageous" to American friends for criticism, yet managed to make an American in it say "He's by way of being a fisherman now." The late Frank M. Bicknell once amassed some amusing examples of this unanimous failing.^[15] Max Pemberton, in a short story dealing with an American girl's visit to England, makes her say: "I'm right glad.…You're as pale as spectres, I guess.…Fancy that, now!…You are my guest, I reckon, . . . and here you are, my word!" C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, in depicting a former American naval officer, makes him speak of saloon-corner men (corner-loafers?). E. W. Hornung, in one of his "Raffles" stories, introduces an American prize-fighter who goes to London and regales the populace with such things as these: "Blamed if our Bowery boys ain't cock-angels to scum like this.…By the holy tinker!…Blight and blister him!…I guess I'll punch his face into a jam pudding.…Say, sonny, I like you a lot, but I sha'n't like you if you're not a good boy." The American use of way and away seems to have daunted many of the authors quoted by Mr. Bicknell; several of them agree on forms that are certainly never heard in the United States. Thus H. B. Marriott Watson makes an American character say: "You ought to have done business with me away in Chicago," and Walter Frith makes another say: "He has gone way off to Holborn," "I stroll a block or two way down the Strand," "I'll drive him way down home by easy stages," and "He can pack his grip and be way off home." Even worse are the attempts at American made by English writers upon lower planes. Here, for example, is the effort of the advertising agent of the Morris motor car (prefaced by the rather cryptic note: "In view of the fact that the famous Morris car is now being sold at low 'American' prices, we have ventured to put our advertisement into the American language"):

Various American critics have noted similar and even worse maulings of American in current English books and periodicals, and one of them, Miss Anna Branson Hillyard, once offered publicly in the Athenæum^[17] to undertake the revision of English manuscripts for "fees carefully and inversely scaled by the consultant's importance." Miss Hillyard, in this article, cited a curious misunerstanding of American by the late ​Rupert Brooke. When Brooke was in the United States he sent a letter to the Westminster Gazette containing the phrase "You bet your——." The editor, unable to make anything of it, inserted the word boots in place of the dash. Brooke thereupon wrote a letter to a friend, Edward Marsh, complaining of this botching of his Americanism, and Marsh afterward printed it in his memoir of the poet. Miss Hillyard says that she was long puzzled by this alleged Americanism, and wondered where Brooke had picked it up. Finally, "light dawned by way of a comic cartoon. It was the classic phrase, you betcha (accent heavily on the bet) which Brooke was spelling conventionally!"

And, as Miss Hillyard shows, incorrectly, as usual, for you betcha is not a collision form of "you bet your" but a collision form of "you bet you"—an imitative second person of "I bet you," which in comic-cartoon circles is pronounced and spelled "I betcha."^[18]

I doubt that the war aided very much in giving new currency to Americanisms among the English. The fact is that the American and British troops were seldom on the best of terms, and so fraternized very little. Cassell's New English Dictionary, published in 1919, lists a number of words borrowed by the British from the Americans, among them cold-feet, delicatessen, guy (noun), high-brow, hobo, jitney, hot-stuff, jazz, joy-ride, milk-shake, movies, pronto, tangle-foot, to make good, to hike, and to frazzle, but not many of them were in general use. Cassell lists chautauquan but not chautauqua, and converts the American dub into dud. A correspondent who was an officer in the American army writes:

​

Nor did the American troops pick up many Briticisms during their year and a half in France, save temporarily. In an exhaustive and valuable vocabulary of soldiers' slang compiled by E. A. Hecker and Edmund Wilson, Jr., I can find few words or phrases that seem to be certainly English in origin. To carry on retains in American its old American meaning of to raise a pother, despite its widespread use among the English in the sense of to he (in American) on the job. Even to wangle, perhaps the most popular of all the new verbs brought out of the war by the English, has never got a foothold in the United States, and would be unintelligible to nine Americans out of ten. Nor have we ever borrowed wowser, which the English got from the Australians.

It is on far higher and less earthly planes that Briticisms make their entry into American, and are esteemed and cultivated. Because the United States has failed to develop a native aristocracy of settled position and authority, there is still an almost universal tendency here, among folk of social pretensions, to defer to English usage and opinion.^[19] The English court, in fact, still remains the only fount of honor that such persons know, and its valuations of both men and customs take precedence of all native valuations. I can't imagine any fashionable American who would not be glad to accept even so curious an English aristocrat as Lord Reading or Lord Birkenhead at his face value, and to put him at table above a United States Senator. This emulation is visible in all the minutiæ of social intercourse in America—in the hours chosen for meals, in the style of personal correspondence, in wedding customs, in the ceremonials incidental to entertaining, and in countless other directions. It even extends to the use of the language.^[20] We have seen ​how, even so early as Webster's time, the intransigent Loyalists of what Scheie de Vere calls "Boston and the Boston dependencies" imitated the latest English fashions in pronunciation, and how this imitation continues to our own day. New York is but little behind, and with the affectation of what is regarded as English pronunciation there goes a constant borrowing of new English words and phrases, particularly of the sort currently heard in the West End of London. The small stores in the vicinity of Fifth avenue, for some years past, have all been turning themselves into shops. Shoes for the persons who shop in that region are no longer shoes, but boots, and they are sold by bootmakers in bootshops. One encounters, too, in Fifth avenue and the streets adjacent, a multitude of gift-shops, tea-shops, haberdashery-shops, book-shops, luggage-shops, hat-shops and print-shops. Every apartment-house in New York has a trades-men's entrance. To Let signs have become almost as common, at least in the East, as For Rent signs. Railway has begun to displace railroad.^[21] Charwoman has been adopted all over the country, and we have begun to forget our native modification of char, to wit, chore. Long ago drawing-room was borrowed by the haut ton to take the place of parlor, and hired girls began to be maids. Whip for driver, stick for cane, top-hat for high-hat, and to tub for to bathe came in long ago, and guard has been making a struggle against conductor in New York for years. In August, 1917, signs appeared in the New York surface cars in which the conductors were referred to as guards; all of them are guards on the elevated lines and in the subways save the forward men, who remain conductors officially. In Charles street in Baltimore, some time ago, the proprietor of a fash​ionable stationery store directed me, not to the elevator but to the lift. During the war even the government seemed inclined to substitute the English hoarding for the American billboard.^[22] In the Federal Reserve Act it actually borrowed the English governor to designate the head of a bank.

The influence of the stage is largely responsible for the introduction and propagation of such Briticisms. Of plays dealing with fashionable life, most of those seen in the United States are of English origin, and many of them are played by English companies. Thus the social aspirants of the towns become familiar with the standard English pronunciation of the moment and with the current English phrases. It was by this route, I suppose, that old top and its analogues got in. The American actors, having no court to imitate, content themselves by imitating their English colleagues. Thus an American of fashionable pretensions, say in Altoona, Pa., or Athens, Ga., shakes hands, eats soup, greets his friends, enters a drawing-room and pronounces the words path, secretary, melancholy and necessarily in a manner that is an imitation of some American actor's imitation of an English actor's imitation of what is done in Mayfair—in brief, an imitation in the fourth degree. No wonder it is sometimes rather crude. This crudity is especially visible in speech habits. The American actor does his best to imitate the pronunciation and intonation of the English, but inasmuch as his name, before he became Gerald Cecil, was probably Rudolph Goetz or Terence Googan, he frequently runs upon laryngeal impossibilities. Here we have an explanation of the awful mess that society folk in Des Moines and Little Rock make of pronouncing the test words in the authentic English manner. All such words are filtered through Gaelic or Teutonic or Semitic gullets before they reach the ultimate consumer.

The influence of the Protestant Episcopal Church is also to be taken into account. It was the center of Loyalism during the Revolution, and it has fostered a passionate and often excessive Anglomania ever since. In the larger American cities entrance into it ​is the aim of all social pushers—including, of late, even the Jews^[23]—and once they get in they adopt, in so far as they are able, the terminology of its clergy, whose eagerness to appear English is traditional. The fashionable preparatory schools for boys and finishing schools for girls, many of which are directly controlled by this sect, are also very active centers of Anglomania, and have firmly established such Briticisms as headmaster, varsity, chapel (for the service as well as the building), house-master, old boy, monitor, honors, prefect and form, at least in fashionable circles. The late Woodrow Wilson, during his term as president of Princeton, gave currency to various other English academic terms, including preceptor and quad, but the words died with his reforms. At such schools as Groton and Lawrenceville the classes are called forms, and elaborate efforts are made in other ways to imitate the speech of Eton and Harrow. Dr. J. Milnor Coit, while rector of the fashionable St. Paul's School, at Concord, N. H., gave a great impetus to this imitation of English manners. Says a leading authority on American private schools: "Dr. Coit encouraged cricket rather than baseball. The English schoolroom nomenclature, too, was here introduced to the American boy. St. Paul's still has forms, but the removes, evensong and matins, and even the cricket of Dr. Coit's time are now forgotten. Most boys of the three upper forms have separate rooms. The ​younger boys have alcoves in the dormitories similar to the cubicles of many of the English public schools."^[24]

Occasionally some uncompromising patriot raises his voice against such importations, but he seldom shows the vigorous indignation of the English purists. White, in 1870, warned Americans against the figurative use of nasty as a synonym for disagreeable. The use of the word was then relatively new in England, though, according to White, the Saturday Review and the Spectator had already succumbed. His objections to it were unavailing; nasty quickly got into American and has been there ever since. In 1883 Gilbert M. Tucker protested against good-form, traffic (in the sense of travel), to bargain and to tub as Briticisms that we might well do without, but all of them took root and are perfectly sound American today. The locutions that are more obviously merely fashionable slang have a harder time of it, and seldom gain lodgment. When certain advertisers in New York sought to appeal to snobs by using such Briticisms as swagger and topping in their advertisements, the town wits, led by the watchful Franklin P. Adams (though he then served the Tribune, which Clement K. Shorter once called "more English than we are English"), fell upon them, and quickly routed them. To the average American of the plain people, indeed, any word or phrase of an obviously English flavor appears to be subtly offensive. To call him old dear would be almost as hazardous as to call him Claude or Clarence. He associates all such terms, and the English broad a no less, with the grotesque Britons he sees in burlesque shows. Perhaps this feeling entered into the reluctance of the American soldier to borrow British war slang.

The grotesque errors which English authors fall into every time they write American, referred to a few pages back, are matched by the blunders of Americans who essay to write colloquial English. Some time ago, St. John Ervine, the Anglo-Irish playwright, discussed the matter at length in Vanity Fair.^[25] Thus his indignant protest: ​

Mr. Ervine then proceeded to a detailed analysis of a book called "Full Up and Fed Up," by Whiting Williams, an American who lived as a workingman in England, Wales and Scotland during 1920, and sought to report the conversations of the native workingmen among whom he worked. He recorded the speech of an English laborer as follows:

And that of an English soldier thus:

Said Mr. Ervine of these alleged specimens of Cockney English:

Mr. Ervine is of the opinion that popular novels perpetuate misconception of the common speech of England in America, and of that of the United States in England. "I imagine that most Americans," he says, "form their impressions about English dialect from reading Dickens, and do not check these impressions with the facts of contemporary life.…A popular novel will fix a dialect in the careless mind, and people will continue to believe that men and women speak in that particular fashion long after they have ceased to do so. Until I went to America, I believed that all negroes spoke like the characters in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' Mr. John Drinkwater clearly thought so, too, when he wrote 'Abraham Lincoln.' I expected to hear a negro saying something like 'Yaas, massa, dat am so!' when he meant, 'Yes, sir, that is so!' I daresay there are many negroes in America who do speak in that way; in fact, Mr. T. S. Stribling's notable story, 'Birthright,' makes this plain. But all negroes do not do so, and perhaps the most correct English I ​heard during my short visit to the United States two years ago came from the mouth of a red-cap in Boston!"

I incline to think that both the grand dialects of English would be the better for a somewhat freer interchange, and fully endorse the doctrine laid down by Prof. Gordon Hall Gerould, of Princeton, who argues that it would be a sensible thing for Americans to adopt the English lift and tram in place of the more cumbersome elevator and trolley-car, and that the English, in their turn, would find the communication of ideas easier if they borrowed some of our American neologisms.^[27] "Logophobia," he says, "has usually been a sign, in men of our race, of a certain thinness of blood. The man of imagination and the man with something to say have never been afraid of words, even words that have rung strangely on the ear. It has been the finicking person, not very sure of himself, who has trod delicately between alternatives, and used the accepted and timeworn word in preference to the newer coinage, out of his abhorrence born of fear.…I do not wish to urge…the wiping out of those peculiarities of vocabulary by which one region of the English-speaking world is made to seem slightly exotic to the visitor from another. Without such differences of idiom, the common speech of the race would be the poorer, as the waters from many rivulets are needed to feed the river. Let him who says naturally a pail of water say so still, and him to whom a bucket is more familiar rejoice in his locution. Let my English friend call for his jug, while I demand my pitcher; for he will—if he be not afflicted with logophobia—enjoy what seems to him the fine archaic flavor of my word. What I would commend is a generous reciprocity in vocabulary, as between section and section, commonwealth and commonwealth, country and country. If it should become convenient for us Americans to use a word now peculiar to Great Britain, I hope we should not be so silly as to stop it at the tongue's end out of national pride or chauvinistic delicacy. It is evident that any 'American' language which might be evolved by the sedulous fostering on our part of native idioms would still retain a good deal of the original English lan​guage. Why, then, should we shut ourselves off from the good things in words that have been invented or popularized in Great Britain since the Pilgrims sailed? And why, on the other hand, should the Englishman disdain the ingenious locutions that have come to light on this side the Atlantic?"

A correspondent makes the suggestion that such exchanges, if they were more numerous, would greatly enrich each language's stock of fine distinctions. A loan-word, he says, does not usually completely displace the corresponding native word, but simply puts a new distinction beside it. Unquestionably, this often happens. Consider, for example, the case of shop. As it is now used in the American cities it affords a convenient means of distinguishing between a large store offering various lines of merchandise and a small establishment specializing in one line. The old-fashioned country store remains a store and so does the department-store. To call either a shop would seem absurd. Shop is applied exclusively to smaller establishments, and almost always in combination with some word designating the sort of stock they carry. Shop, indeed, has always been good American, though its current application is borrowed from England. We have used shop-worn, shoplifter, shopping, pawn-shop, shopper, shop-girl and to shop for years. In the same way the word penny continues to flourish among us, despite the fact that there has been no American coin of that name for more than 125 years. We have nickel-in-the-slot machines, but when they take a cent we call them penny-in-the-slot machines. We have penny-arcades and penny-whistles. We do not play cent-ante, but penny-ante. We still "turn an honest penny" and say "a penny for your thoughts." The pound and the shilling became extinct legally a century ago,^[28] but the penny still binds us to the mother-tongue. But an American knows nothing of pence. To him two pennies are always pennies.

Exchanges in spelling, some of them very important, are discussed in Chapter VIII.