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America have discovered that there is a marked difference between their phrases and accents and those to which they have been accustomed, wherefore they have, of course, decided that no Englishman can speak English.'

Mr Bretherton, in his 'Midas,' makes the remark that Americans write one language and speak another: 'The American speaks American-a crisp, virile, colourful language, full of copious possibilities—and writes English which he does not really understand.' This is true, of course, of all nations, but especially of the United States, where, if one may judge from contemporary novels, the spoken language of even the educated class is rapidly degenerating into a jargon. In American works of scholarship we occasionally come across trifling peculiarities, such as the past participle gotten or the use of loan as a verb, and most English readers will boggle at Mr Mencken's allusion in his Preface to the 'wild snarls' I of his manuscript; but, broadly speaking, the cultivated American writer on politics, history, literature, art, etc., uses the same language as the cultivated Englishman.

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In the Letters of that great gentleman, Walter Hines Page, written in familiar language to his relatives and friends, we find all the characteristic American colloquialisms, e.g. 'bully good plan,' 'buy a newspaper on the street,' he eats out of my hand in the afternoon and has one of his papers jump on me in the morning (this causative use of the verb 'to have' seems particularly common), 'in the fall or in December,' 'you'd just as well abandon your trip,' nothin' doin',' 'to lick to a frazzle,' 'they can't whip Great Britain,' ' quit dreaming,' 'for keeps,' with such national figures of speech as 'the nigger in the woodpile,' 'never tie up with a crank,' 'that's really what they're out gunning for,' 'he'll cut no more figure than a tar-baby at a negro meeting,' 'the Kaiser woke up the wrong passenger.' Page also shows a devotion to the archaic use of the subjunctive after if, supposing, etc., which does not accord with contemporary English usage. But we find nothing approaching the jerky, explosive jargon, the mixture of the crude with the high-falutin', which one gathers from Mr Sinclair Lewis's novels to be the usual medium of communication among the professional and business men of the Middle West.

In an article published last year in the 'Sunday Times,' Mr Alfred Noyes rebuked those who regard the inhabitants of the Middle West as a lot of uncultivated 'hicks,' or what Mr Bretherton wittily terms' a gigantic Babbitt warren.' 'It is,' says Mr Bretherton, 'from this region that come most of America's cranks, fanatics, revolutionaries, uplifters, patriots and other well-meaning trouble-makers.' Mr Channing Pollock is still harder on his own countrymen. Not only the inhabitants of the Middle West, but 'ninety per cent. of Americans are intellectual morons, judging by their taste in pictures, comic supplements, music and drama,' After all, the corresponding percentage in England would hardly be lower.

We are, however, concerned here with language only, and especially with language in its relation to our own contemporary Americanised English. The poetry of the Middle West has not, so far, appreciably affected The following lines by Mr Carl Sandburg need to be read, says Miss Rebecca West, with a Middle West accent

us.

6 Rum tiddy um

tiddy um

tiddy um tum tum

My knees are looselike, my feet

want to sling theirselves.'

Without the Middle West accent they somehow fail to please. The prose of the Middle West is, however, both intelligible and effective, if not elegant. Martin Arrowsmith went to Nautilus as assistant to the local Director of Public Health, Dr Almus Pickerbaugh. Here is that public-spirited official's invitation to a congress

'Brother Males and Shemales; are you coming to the Health Bee? It will be the liveliest Hop-to-it that this busy lil ole planet has ever see. And its going to be Practical. We'll kiss out on all these glittering generalities and get messages from men as kin talk, so we can lug a think or two (2) home wid us. Luther Botts, the famous community sing leader, will be there to put Wim and Wigor neverything into the programme. John F. Zeisser, MA., M.D., nall the rest of the alphabet (part your hair Jock and look cute, the ladies sure love you) will unlimber a coupla key-notes. (On your

ated

tootsies, fellers, thar she blows!) From time to time, if the the brakes hold, we will, or shall in the infinitive, hie oursellufs from wherein we are at to thither and grab a lunch with Wild Wittles. Do it sound like a good show? It do! Barber, you're next. Let's have those cards saying you're coming.'

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This 'snappy come-on letter' was highly approved by a medical colleague, in spite of the criticism of 'one old hen, Bostonian or somepun, who was howling that your letter was undignified. Can you beat it? I think people as hypercritical and lacking in humour as her should be treated with the dignified contempt they deserve, the damn fool!' Lay opinion is voiced by the local 'cop'

'If you want the straight dope, he hollers a good deal, but he's one awful brainy man. He can certainly sling the Queen's English, and never hear one of his poems? They're darn bright, I'll tell you. There's some people say Pickerbaugh pulls the song and dance too much, but way I figure it, course maybe for you and me, Doctor, it'd be all right if he just looked after the milk and the kids' teeth. But there's a lot of careless, ignorant, foreign slobs that need to be jollied into using their conks about these health biznai,' etc.

Finally, on a certain evening of May, Congressman Almus Pickerbaugh was dining with the President of the United States. "When the campaign is over, Doctor," said the President, "I hope we shall see you a cabinet member-the first Secretary of Health and Eugenics in the country!"'

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It was really very forgiving of America to award to Mr Sinclair Lewis's Martin Arrowsmith' the Pulitzer prize, given annually for the American novel which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.' It was graceful of Mr Sinclair Lewis to decline it. He perhaps felt that the prize might have been awarded with almost equal fitness to 'Martin Chuzzlewit.' I have no means of knowing how far his presentment of the English language as spoken and written at Nautilus, Iowa, is a caricature; but I find in Mr Mencken's 'Americana, 1925,' the following extract from a speech by one of the professors at the Iowa State College

'Des Moines has the largest per capita ice-cream consumption in America.

'The second largest gold-fish farm in the world is located within seventy miles of Des Moines.

'The best pair of overalls made on the American continent come from Iowa.

'There is no group of two and a half million people in the world who worship God as Iowans do.'

As Dickens visited the United States in 1842 and began the publication of Martin Chuzzlewit' the next year, Martin Arrowsmith' has followed his namesake at an interval of rather more than eighty years. It would appear that during that period a great change has taken place in colloquial American. The opening-up of vast regions which in Dickens' time were trackless wildernesses, the development of backwoods settlements into wealthy industrial cities, the immigration of hordes representing every language, civilisation and uncivilisation of Europe, all these have done much to break up that uniformity of speech noted by investigators of the early 19th century. That Dickens gave a fairly accurate reproduction of the American language of his day may be taken for granted. In matters of external oddity or idiosyncrasy no man ever made more accurate observations or reproduced them more cunningly. The American language of 'Martin Chuzzlewit' does not differ materially from that of colloquial English, except in some features of its pronunciation and accentuation. There is also that tendency to defy grammar, which, if we may trust Mr Lewis, still distinguishes the intimate conversation of the American middle-class man, often coupled with an itch for the 'high falutin',' which seems inseparable in America from any kind of public announcement, from the Declaration of Independence onward. When Martin replied to Mr La Fayette Kettle that he had no reason for supposing that Queen Victoria would shortly be taken with a cold chill,' that gentleman 'looked at him as if in pity for his ignorance or prejudice and said, "Well, sir, I tell you this-there ain't a ĕn-gine with its biler bust, in God A'mighty's free U-nited States, so fixed, and nipped, and frizzled to a most e-tarnal smash, as that young critter, in her luxurious location in the Tower of London, will be,

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when she reads the next double-extra Watertoast Gazette.'"'

The American population, as Dickens knew it, was still preponderantly Anglo-Saxon. He does not appear to have noted anything like the dat for that, nuttin for nothing, etc., which contemporary novelists attribute to the Irish-American, or the amazing New York pronunciation of 'vowel plus r' which leads the New York child to explain stoic as 'the boid (bird) that brings the babies.' The whole of the second volume of Prof. Krapp's important work is taken up with a detailed investigation of American pronunciation from the point of view of the scientific phonetician. On the general question of the received standard he emphasises the fact that the tendency of the educated American is be guided by spelling rather than tradition: 'American English replaced social tests by literary educational tests in speech, the latter being almost altogether tests applied through the printed page.' As early as 1843 Webster observed that 'pronunciation in England is not regulated by books, or any book, but< by the usage of the higher classes of society.' In short, the change now taking place in English pronunciation, the replacement of the traditional by the pedantic, has already been brought about in American. Prof. Krapp is surely thinking ahead when he says that for clerk (riming in America with jerk) the pronunciation clark 'may' be heard in England!

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In syntax there seem to be three chief differences between literary English and literary American. One is the, to English ears, pedantic attachment to the subjunctive which I have already mentioned as characterising Page's letters, e.g. 'Whatever happen in Mexico,' Unless there be some reason,' 'I am now going down to Garden City and New York till the President send for me; or if he do not send for me, I'm going to his house and sit on his front steps till he come out.' Another is the tendency to omit the auxiliary should in subordinate clauses, e.g. He desired rather to keep free of these follies lest they confuse him and make him soft,' 'She insisted that he knock before entering and she demanded that he admire her hats.' In this construction, both examples of which are from 'Martin Arrowsmith,' we have apparently a revival, rather than a survival, of the

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