[Gutenberg 37029] • Americanisms and Briticisms; with other essays on other isms

Excerpt from Americanisms and Briticisms: With Other Essays on Other Isms

In the preface to the first edition of his dictionary, issued in 1825, Noah Webster declared that although in America the body of the language is the same as in England, and it is desirable to perpetuate that sameness, yet some differences must exist, Since language is the expression of ideas, and if the people of one' country cannot preserve an identity of ideas with the people of another country, they are not likely to retain an absolute identity of language; and Webster had no difficulty in showing that differences of physical and political conditions had al ready in his day, only half a century after the Revolution, and when the centre of population was still close to the Atlanticseaboard, produced differences of speech. It is too much to expect, perhaps, that the British critic shall look at this Yankee independence from our point of view. Professor Lounsbury tells us in his admi rable biography that in Fenimore Cooper's time the attitude of the Englishman towards the American in the most favorable cases was supercilious and patronizing, an attitude which never permits the nation criticising to understand the nation criticised. Things have changed for the better since Cooper was almost alone in his stalwart Americanism, but the arrogance which General Braddock of his Majesty's army Showed towards Colonel Washington of the Virginia contingent survives here and there in Great Britain, even though another dean sits in Dr. Alford's stall in Canterbury Cathedral; it prompted a British novelist not long ago to be offensively impertinent to an American lady (athenceuin, September I, and it allowed Lord Wolseley to insult the memory of Robert E. Lee with ignorant praise. It finds expression in a passage like the following from a Primer of English Composition, by Mr. John Nichols: Americanisms, as Britisher, ' Skedaddle, ' and the peculiar use of clever, ' 'calculate, guess, 'reckon, ' etc with the mongrel Speech adopted by some humorists, are only admissible in satirical pictures of American manners (p. When we read an assertion of this sort, we are reduced to believe that it must be the dampness of the British climate which has thus rusted the hinges of British manners.