efficiency in the choice of epithets and other words that suggests the application of coloured photography to description; the camera is superseding the human hand. We quote two sentences from the first page of a story, and remark that in pre-Kipling days none of the words we italicize would have been likely; now, they may be matched on nearly every page of an 'up-to-date' novelist:
Between the snow-white cutter and the flat-topped, honey-colotired[1] rocks on the beach the green water was troubled with shrimp-pink prisoners-of-war bathing.—Kipling.
Far out, a three-funnelled Atlantic transport with turtle bow and stern waddled in from the deep sea.—Kipling.
The words are, as we said, extremely efficient; but the impulse that selects them is in harmony with American, not with English, methods, and we hope it may be developed in America rather than here. We cannot go more fully into the point in a digression like this. But though we have digressed, it has not been quite without purpose: any one who agrees with us in this will see in it an additional reason for jealously excluding American words and phrases. The English and the American language and literature are both good things; but they are better apart than mixed.
Fix up (organize), back of (behind), anyway (at any rate), standpoint (point of view), back-number (antiquated), right along (at once), some (to some extent), just (quite, or very——'just lovely'), may be added as typical Americanisms of a different kind from either fall or antagonize; but it is not worth while to make a large collection; every one knows an Americanism, at present, when he sees it; how long that will be true is a more anxious question.
And, back of all that, a circumstance which gave great force to all that either has ever said, the rank and file, the great mass of the people on either side, were determined...–Choate.
- ↑ Not that this word calls for censure in itself; but when packed into a sentence with snow-white, green, and shrimp-pink, it contributes noticeably to that effect of brief and startling exhaustiveness which is one variety of what we have stigmatized as efficiency.
