ordinary vocabulary and with unconsciousness of any differences between their own and American usages."
Other Americans remain less resolute, for example, Vincent O'Sullivan, whose English schooling may account for his sensitiveness. In America, he says in the London New Witness,[1] "the English literary tradition is dying fast, and the spoken, and to a considerable extent, the written language is drawing farther and farther away from English as it is used in England." He continues:
To most English people, many pages of the published sermons of Billy Sunday, the evangelist, would be almost as unintelligible as a Welsh newspaper. But is American at its present point of development a language or a lingo? Professor Brander Matthews does not hesitate to liken it to Elizabethan English for its figurative vigour. American figures, however, are generally on a low level. When Bacon calls floods great winding-sheets, he is more impressive than when the Pennsylvania Railroad announces that there is a wash-out down 'round Harrisburg, Pa. It would, in fact, be impossible to express any grand or moving thought in American; humour, homely wisdom, yes; but not grandeur. Leaving aside the intellectual value of either, Bishop Latimer's sermons are in the plain language of his time, and they easily maintain themselves on heights that Billy Sunday never gets a clutch on, even for a moment. It is a fair claim that American is more vivid than English.[2]
So much for the literati. The plain people of the two countries, whenever they come into contact, find it very difficult to exchange ideas. This was made distressingly apparent when American troops began to pour into France in 1917. Fraternizing with the British was impeded, not so much because of old animosities as because of the wide divergence in vocabulary and pronunciation between the doughboy and Tommy Atkins—a divergence interpreted by each as a sign of uncouthness in the other. The Y. M. C. A. made a characteristic effort to turn the resultant feeling of strangeness and homesickness among the Americans to account. In the Chicago Tribune's Paris edition of July 7, 1917, I find a large advertisement inviting
- ↑ Sept. 12, 1919.
- ↑ The question is often (and sometimes violently) discussed in American journals. Typical articles are Our Barbarous Lingo, by John Macy, Nation, April 12, 1922, and a review of the 2nd ed. of the present work by P. B. McDonald, Mining and Scientific Press, March 11, 1922. William McFee, a Scotchman now domiciled in the United States, attacked my main contentions in the Bookman (New York), Jan., 1922. Frequent denunciations of the doctrine that English and American differ appear in the Anglophile newspapers, especially the Boston Evening Transcript, the Springfield Republican, the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times.
