33 o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ion, pronouncing an apparent neologism an Americanism, when as a 

 matter of fact the expression shows a good English pedigree extending 

 back many generations. A more intimate acquaintance with the his- 

 tory of our common speech would save them the embarrassment from 

 such a glaring blunder. But it is so easy to fall into the careless 

 habit of branding as an Americanism an unfamiliar idiom or a phrase 

 that is rarely heard in England. This convenient term has thus be- 

 come in England a reproach, inasmuch as a certain stigma, somehow, 

 attaches to it in the British mind. But for all that, like charity, it 

 covers a multitude of sins, sins of keen prejudice, no less than of crass 

 ignorance. 



Many of the so-called Americanisms are really survivals of Eliza- 

 bethan English and boast a Shakespearean pedigree, although they are 

 no longer heard in the country of that consummate master of our 

 speech. Somehow, they seem to have drifted out of the main current 

 of British English. Perhaps they have been caught up by an eddy 

 and carried into one. of the provinces where they are still preserved, as 

 they are in America, fresh and vigorous. A moment's reflection will 

 show that we Americans come rightly by our Elizabethan English. For 

 surely New England, Maryland and Virginia were settled by those who 

 spoke the tongue of Shakespeare, even though they did not all hold the 

 faith and morals of Milton. Many of these settlers — both Puritan 

 and Cavalier — were college-bred men, graduates of Oxford and Cam- 

 bridge. Therefore they inherited the best traditions of the English 

 speech and transmitted it uncorrupted to their children. Nor were 

 their children wilful traducers and corruptors of the King's English, 

 but contrariwise they conserved it and safeguarded its purity quite as 

 sedulously as the inhabitants of the mother country. Thus the English 

 speech was handed down, undeflled, from one generation to another, 

 in America. Hence some words and phrases of good Elizabethan usage 

 have been preserved in America, which long ago became obsolete and 

 dropped out of the living speech in England, where the growth of the 

 language was, of course, not arrested by the rude shock incident to its 

 being transplanted in a foreign country. 



Let us now point out a few examples of reputed Americanisms, 

 social pariahs which have lost caste and no longer move in polite circles 

 in England. An interesting example is found in the word ' fall ' used 

 in the sense of autumn. Both these terms are in favor in America, 

 although the pedants, following the lead of British critics, proscribe 

 the use of ' fall.' We are told it is not employed in standard English, 

 and hence must be censured as provincial. Yet ' fall,' which enjoys a 

 certain poetic association with the fall of the leaf, can offer in its sup- 

 port the high authority of Dryden, who employed it in his translation 

 of Juvenal's satires: 



