342 



America^i English. 



Nineteenth Century (Book III, chapter 1); assist, for be present, 

 as the silent auditors at a concert are absurdly said to assist" at it; 

 plant for fixtures, as the " plant " of a railway or a factory (I am not 

 entirely certain about the last two words, but believe them to be com- 

 paratively new in England and very rarely used in the United 

 States); intimate, iov announce — advertisers in British newspapers 

 continually *Mntimate" to their customers that they have changed 

 their quarters or received new goods ; and tidy, for almost anything 

 complimentary — a London paper made mention the other day of "a 

 very tidy bull," tlie writer meaning a valuable animal, and by no 

 means intending to refer to any particular cleanliness in the beast's 

 personal habits. English hostlers also — to get pretty well down in the 

 social scale, though by no means going as low as do the compilers of 

 what are termed Americanisms, in their search for blunders — English 

 hostlers sometimes speak of chilling cold water, meaning warming it, 

 an extraordinary perversion of a very common and elementary 

 word. 



It is not only, however, in their recent coinages and anomalous 

 assigning of new meanings to old terms, that the English have made 

 reckless changes in the body of our speech where the American prac- 

 tice adheres to the former standard. They have swung off in the 

 opposite direction also, curtailing to no good purpose the significance 

 of several words. A'* young person," I believe, is always a girl in 

 England, the term being never applied to a boy. An invalid is "ill," 

 not sick, unless he happens to be nauseated, while at the same time, 

 strangely enough, it is regarded as perfectly proper to describe him as 

 confined to a sick-room or stretched upon a sick-bed. A Briton is 

 horrified at the idea of riding in a carriage, although he makes no 

 scruple of riding in an omnibus or a street car. When you enter the 

 vehicle at the side, yju drive ; when at the end, you ride. And if the 

 author of Macleod of Dare is a trustworthy guide, the word up, used 

 in reference to a journey in Great Britain, indicates, not that the 

 traveler is seeking a more elevated region or moving northwardly, but 

 solely that he is going toward the capital; "up to London" and 

 *Mown to the Highlands" are, it appears, the correct formulas. No 

 wonder the young Scotchman thought it sounded " stupid." Fancy 

 a man in Chicago saying that he was going up to Washington," or 

 a man in Washington speaking of events occurring " down in St. 

 Paul ! " 



A third kind of variation that seems to have grown up in Great 

 Britain to a greater degree than in this country, is the habit of turn- 



