What crowds of patients the town doctor kills,
Or how last fall he raised the weekly bills.
In his 'Northern Farmer,' Tennyson used the offending word, but of course under the cloak of a provincialism. Still Freeman did not deign to employ it. Commenting on it, he remarks: "If fall as a season of the year has gone out of use in Britain, it has gone out very lately. At least I remember perfectly well the phrase of 'spring and fall' in my childhood."
Another good illustration of a word still surviving in American usage, but long ago discarded in England, is 'sick' in the sense of ill. British usage restricts the meaning to nausea, employing ill to describe a man suffering with a disease of whatever sort. Yet 'sick' is supported by the very best literary authority. The term occurs again and again in Elizabethan literature. Reference to Bartlett's concordance will convince even the most skeptical that the word abounds in Shakespeare, and that, too, in passages where the correct interpretation leaves no doubt that 'ill' is meant. Suffice it to cite only an example or two: In 'Midsummer Night's Dream' (act 1, scene 1), Shakespeare makes Helena say, 'Sickness is catching'; again in 'Cymbeline' (act 5, scene 4), we read, 'Yet am I better than one that's sick of the gout'; and in 'Romeo and Juliet' (act 5, scene 2), we read, 'Here in this city visiting the sick.' Not only so. 'Sick,' in the American acceptation, has an unbroken line of the best literary authority from Chaucer, 'that well of English undefiled,' down to Doctor Johnson, whose dictionary defines the word in reference to a person afflicted with disease. American usage, furthermore, is supported by the King James version, in which 'ill' is nowhere found, and also by the Anglican Church ritual. It is needless to multiply citations. If Americans sin in the improper use of 'sick,' it may be urged in extenuation that they can at least plead a long array of illustrious and unimpeachable authority and are in good company.
The use of 'well' as an interjection is mentioned by Bartlett in his dictionary as one of 'the most marked peculiarities of American speech.' Moreover, he adds, 'Englishmen have told me that they could always detect an American by the use of this word.' If this is an infallible hall-mark of American speech, then American English is nearer the tongue of Shakespeare than British English of the present day. For the word 'well' in the sense of an interjection occurs again and again in Shakespeare. In 'Hamlet' (act 1, scene 1), Bernardo asks, 'Have you had a quiet guard?' Francisco replies, 'Not a mouse stirring.' Whereupon Bernardo adds, 'Well, good-night.' Again, in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' (act 3, scene 1):
Bottom. And then indeed let him name his name, and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner.
Quince. Well, it shall be so.
