350 CANADIAN ENGLISH. 



But is this the fact ? Certainly it is not. At least it has 

 never been my fortune to meet with one in this country who 

 wore them. Pantaloons are an article of dress, out of fashion 

 for fifty years. In more familiar vernacular they were wont to be 

 called skin-tights, and while answering a similar purpose, are very 

 different from browsers in their shape . The origin of such a misnomer 

 is sufficiently obvious. Such prudish euphemisms are by no means 

 peculiar to Canada or the States. They find their complete parallel 

 in the English synouymes : unmentionables or inexpressibles, and the 

 like familiar shiboleths of immodest prudery, which belong exclusive- 

 ly to no class or county, but are none the less to be avoided by all who 

 would regulate their mode of thought and expression by purity and 

 true refinement. 



In England, good housewives and the lieges at large, are sometimes 

 horrified by the apparition of a loathsome insect, yclept a bug. 

 Gardeners also find creatures of the same genus on their plants, and 

 zoologists are familiar with numerous varieties of them. But, how- 

 ever great the variety, and however diverse the habits of different 

 species, few words associated with insect life are so universally avoid- 

 ed, or are, from certain associations, more revolting than this 

 monosyllable. And yet, we hear people on this side of the Atlantic, 

 who, to say the least of it, are quite as familiar with this insect-pest 

 as those on the other, — applying this nauseous title to the beautiful 

 firefly which makes our fields so glorious on a warm summer night. 

 Canadians call it the " Wghtmng-bug /" Here, we have, not simply 

 an abuse of language, but a breach of good taste, which it might be 

 thought no person of refinement could ever perpetrate As well 

 might they dignify a vase of sweetly scented roses by making it share 

 with the offensive and suffocating missile occasionally employed in 

 naval warfare, the euphonious epithet of " stink-pot !" .Moreover as 

 this term bug is universally employed both in Canada and the States 

 as a synonym for insect, the further result is a loss of precision, 

 such as, in the commonest use of terms at home, discriminates at once 

 between a fly, a beetle, and a grub. In England the tevmfly is also 

 applied occasionally to a light vehicle, and it is on the same principle 

 I presume that a four wheeled gig receives here the elegant name of 

 hl "J9!I ! 



Turning again to another class of words ; there is a curious dis- 

 position manifested among our manufacturers of improved English, 

 to convert our regular into irregular verbs, for the sake of gaining 

 what some modern grammarians have styled the strong preterite. 



