BRITICISMS VERSUS AMERICANISMS 333 



does not indicate any misuse of our mother tongue, as they contend. 

 Only one more case shall be adduced in illustration, to wit, our 

 word ' baggage/ which the other half of the Anglo-Saxon race has dis- 

 carded for ' luggage.' Here again, as elsewhere in the exercise of our 

 prerogative, we have demonstrated our independence of the mother 

 country in the matter of our speech and have chosen one term while 

 the English people have adopted another, to designate the same thing. 

 Both words have a good literary pedigree extending several centuries 

 back. Shakespearean usage seems about equally divided, perhaps, with 

 the odds in favor of ' baggage.' The Shakespearean coinage ' bag and 

 baggage and scrip and scrippage,' which falls from the lips of Touch- 

 stone in ' As You Like It,' and which enjoys the familiarity of a house- 

 hold word, ought to have given ' baggage ' a wider currency, especially 

 in the author's own country. But language, like the heathen Chinee, 

 has ways that are dark, if not tricks that are vain, and does not develop 

 according to logic or our a priori conceptions. Between the Briticism 

 ' luggage ' and the Americanism ' baggage ' it appears, therefore, to be 

 a drawn battle. So the British have nothing to reproach us with on 

 this score, since convention has adopted ' baggage ' on one side of the 

 Atlantic and ' luggage ' on the other. 



So much for this interesting class of Americanisms which repose 

 on standard Elizabethan usage, but are social outcasts in the land of 

 their birth. There is another class of Americanisms which are not 

 bolstered up by a long literary pedigree, inasmuch as they originated 

 on American soil and were not imported from the old world. As com- 

 pared with the class just considered, these latter are mere parvenus, 

 without any illustrious ancestral history to commend them. This class 

 of Americanisms is composed of phrases which have found their way 

 into our speech from various foreign sources. They have been intro- 

 duced into our tongue from our contact with diverse peoples from re- 

 mote parts of the globe. They constitute a small residuum of terms 

 and phrases, the presence of which in our vocabulary attests the fact 

 of our relations with different nations of the earth. For instance, in 

 the early history of our country, we had to do with the Indians, and 

 so borrowed from them certain terms especially pertaining to natural 

 objects. "We also had relations with the French, and consequently 

 borrowed from them sundry phrases employed in official parlance, such 

 as ' bureau of information,' for which British usage prefers 'office'; 

 ' exposition ' for the British ' exhibition,' and the like. Let these few 

 examples represent the class. It is apparent here that we have made a 

 slight departure from British usage. But it does not follow that our 

 speech, for this reason, is less pure or less idiomatic. Both American 

 usage and British usage show that the respective nations have decided 

 to employ Eomance importations in official language, but they have 



