336 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Britain there is much less uniformity of speech than with us, and the 

 difference between the language of a Scotchman and that of a Devon- 

 shire man is almost infinitely greater than the difference between any 

 two American dialects. But the dissimilarity of the British dialects 

 is historic and dates back from time immemorial. The story of 

 Caxton, the first English printer, is well known, how the good 

 merchant from a southern shire, when he inquired for eggs of a good- 

 wife in a northern shire, could not make himself understood, his south- 

 ern dialect being mistaken for French. To be sure, the dialectal 

 differences are not so great to-day as they were in those remote times, 

 largely as the result of the printing-press Caxton set up in Westminster. 

 But even yet the differences between the dialects of the extreme parts 

 of the British Isles is so pronounced as to be a barrier to complete 

 interchange of thought. 



It appears from the foregoing that the indictment of corrupting the 

 English language which certain British critics have brought in against 

 the American people is not a true bill, since no count has been estab- 

 lished. Our British critics seem loath to acknowledge any American 

 rights in our common language. Americans have as much right to 

 enrich the English vocabulary with useful words as the English people 

 themselves. We also have as just a claim as they to revive and pre- 

 serve an obsolescent phrase or idiom. Because a given English word 

 is no longer in use and esteem in England, but is recognized as standard 

 usage in the United States, it does not follow that it is not good Eng- 

 lish. The number of those using the English language in America 

 far exceeds the population of England, and the English speech is just 

 as vigorous and virile in America as it is in the parent country. In- 

 deed, it has given indubitable proof of its vitality and vigor on Ameri- 

 can lips by adapting itself to the infinite variety of new conditions in 

 this new country and by the added flexibility, strength and richness 

 as exhibited in its augmented vocabulary. English now is the lan- 

 guage of the American people as Avell as of the English people. It 

 is, therefore, no longer proper or scientific to speak of the queen's or 

 of the king's English. Such a phrase is really an anachronism in the 

 twentieth century, when the English-speaking subjects of King Edward 

 are numerically inferior to those not owning allegiance to Britain's 

 sovereign, who speak the same tongue. Moreover, it is manifestly 

 not in keeping with the eternal fitness of things, as well as unscientific, 

 for our British kith and kin to stigmatize an idiom or a phrase in good 

 American usage as a provincialism simply because it is not current in 

 Great Britain. The Britons have no more right to attempt to pre- 

 scribe and limit the growth of the English tongue than we have. Nor 

 do they enjoy an exclusive prerogative of determining whether a given 

 expression, be it a new coinage or a survival from a former period, 



