American Language by H.L. Mencken

our misfortune, not our fault. They certainly threaten our language, but the only way in which we can effectively meet that threat is by assuming — in the words of the authors of “The King’s English” 46 that “Americanisms are foreign words and should be so treated.”
    The proposal that a permanent Council of English be formed, with 50 American members and 50 from the British Empire, brought the
New Statesman
to the verge of hysterics. It admitted that such a council “might be very useful indeed,” but argued that it “ought not to include more than one Scotsman and one Irishman, and should certainly not include even a single American.” Thus it reasoned:
    The American language is the American language, and the English language is the English language. In some respects the Americans may fairly claim superiority.
Sidewalk
, for example, is a better word than
pavement
, and
fall
an infinitely better word than
autumn
. If we do not adopt these better words it is simply because of their “American flavor”; and the instinct which makes us reject them, though unfortunate in certain cases, is profoundly right. The only way to preserve the purity of the English language is to present a steadily hostile resistance to every American innovation. From time to time we may adopt this word or that, or sometimes a whole vivid phrase. But for all serious lovers of the English tongue it is America that is the only dangerous enemy. She must develop her own language and allow us to develop ours.
    The other English journals were rather less fierce in their denunciation of the council and its programme, but very few of them greeted either with anything approaching cordiality. 47 The
Times
,obviously trying to be polite, observed that “without offense it may be said that no greater assaults are made on the common language than in America,” and the
Spectator
ventured the view that in the United States English was departing definitely from the home standard, and was greatly “imposed upon and influenced by a host of immigrants from all the nations of Europe.” This insistence that Americans are not, in any cultural sense, nor even in any plausible statistical sense, Anglo-Saxons is to be found in many English fulminations upon the subject. During the World War, especially after 1917, they were hailed as blood-brothers, but that lasted only until the first mention of war-debts. Ever since 1920 they have been mongrels again, as they were before 1917, and most discussions of Americanisms include the objection that yielding to them means yielding to a miscellaneous rabble of inferior tribes, some of them, by English standards, almost savage. There was a time when the American in the English menagerie of comic foreigners was Hiram Q. Simpkins or Ulysses X. Snodgrass, a Yankee of Puritan, and hence of vaguely English stock, but on some near tomorrow he will probably be Patrick Kraus, Rastus O’Brien, Ole Ginzberg, or some other such fantastic compound of races.
    The complaint that Americanisms are inherently unintelligible to civilized Christians is often heard in England, though not as often as in the past. It is a fact that they frequently deal with objects and ideas that are not familiar to the English, and that sometimes they make use of metaphors rather too bold for the English imagination. In consequence, there has been a steady emission of glossaries since the earliest days, some of them on a large scale. The first seems to have been that of the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, which was probably drawn up before 1800, but was not published until 1832, when itappeared in the second edition of his “Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words.” 48 It was followed by that of David Humphreys, one of the Hartford Wits, which was printed as an appendix to his play, “The Yankey in England,” in 1815. 49 A year later came John Pickering’s “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the