United States of America.” Pickering got many of his words from the current English reviews of American books, and his purpose was the double, and rather contradictory, one of proving to the English reviewers that they were good English, and of dissuading Americans from using them. 50 Robley Dunglison’s glossary followed in 1829–30, JohnMason Peck’s in 1834, 51 J. O. Halliwell-Phillips’s “Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms, Containing Words Now Obsolete in England, All of Which Are Familiar and in Common Use in America” in 1850, John Russell Bartlett’s “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States” (about 3725 terms) in 1848, A. L. Elwin’s “Glossary of Supposed Americanisms” (about 465 terms) in 1859, Maximilien Scheie de Vere’s “Americanisms” (about 4000 terms) in 1872, John S. Farmer’s “Americanisms Old and New” (about 5000 terms) in 1889, Sylva Clapin’s “New Dictionary of Americanisms” (about 5250 terms) in 1902, and Richard H. Thornton’s “American Glossary” (about 3700 terms) in 1912. These were mainly the work of philological amateurs, and only Thornton’s two volumes had any scientific value.
So long ago as 1913 Sir Sidney Low, who had lived in America and had a sound acquaintance with Americanisms, suggested ironically in an article in the
Westminster Gazette
that American be taught in the English schools. This was before the movie invasion, and he reported that the English business man was “puzzled by his ignorance of colloquial American” and “painfully hampered” thereby in his handling of American trade. He went on:
In the United States the study of the English tongue forms part of the educational scheme.… I think we should return the compliment. We ought to learn the American language in our schools and colleges. At present it is strangely neglected by the educational authorities. They pay attention to linguistic attainments of many other kinds, but not to this. How many thousands of youths are at this moment engaged in puzzling their brains over Latin and Greek grammar only Whitehall knows. Every well-conducted seminary has some instructor who is under the delusion that he is teaching English boys and girls to speak French with a good Parisian accent. We teach German, Italian, even Spanish, Russian, modern Greek, Arabic, Hindustani. For a moderate fee you can acquire a passing acquaintance with any of these tongues at the Berlitz Institute and the Gouin Schools. But even in these polyglot establishments there is nobody to teach you American. I have neverseen a grammar of it or a dictionary. I have searched in vain at the booksellers for “How to Learn American in Three Weeks” or some similar compendium. Nothing of the sort exists. The native speech of one hundred millions of civilized people is as grossly neglected by the publishers as it is by the schoolmasters. You can find means to learn Hausa or Swahili or Cape Dutch in London more easily than the expressive, if difficult, tongue which is spoken in the office, the barroom, the tramcar, from the snows of Alaska to the mouths of the Mississippi, and is enshrined in a literature that is growing in volume and favor every day.
Low quoted an extract from an American novel then appearing serially in an English magazine — an extract including such Americanisms as
side-stepper, saltwater-taffy, Prince-Albert
(coat),
boob, bartender
and
kidding
, and many characteristically American extravagances of metaphor. It might be well argued, he said, that this strange dialect was as near to “the tongue that Shakespeare spoke” as “the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton,” but that philological fact did not help to its understanding. “You might almost as well expect him [the British business man] to converse freely with a Portuguese railway porter because he tried to stumble through Caesar when he was in the Upper Fourth at school.”
At the time Low published his
So long ago as 1913 Sir Sidney Low, who had lived in America and had a sound acquaintance with Americanisms, suggested ironically in an article in the
Westminster Gazette
that American be taught in the English schools. This was before the movie invasion, and he reported that the English business man was “puzzled by his ignorance of colloquial American” and “painfully hampered” thereby in his handling of American trade. He went on:
In the United States the study of the English tongue forms part of the educational scheme.… I think we should return the compliment. We ought to learn the American language in our schools and colleges. At present it is strangely neglected by the educational authorities. They pay attention to linguistic attainments of many other kinds, but not to this. How many thousands of youths are at this moment engaged in puzzling their brains over Latin and Greek grammar only Whitehall knows. Every well-conducted seminary has some instructor who is under the delusion that he is teaching English boys and girls to speak French with a good Parisian accent. We teach German, Italian, even Spanish, Russian, modern Greek, Arabic, Hindustani. For a moderate fee you can acquire a passing acquaintance with any of these tongues at the Berlitz Institute and the Gouin Schools. But even in these polyglot establishments there is nobody to teach you American. I have neverseen a grammar of it or a dictionary. I have searched in vain at the booksellers for “How to Learn American in Three Weeks” or some similar compendium. Nothing of the sort exists. The native speech of one hundred millions of civilized people is as grossly neglected by the publishers as it is by the schoolmasters. You can find means to learn Hausa or Swahili or Cape Dutch in London more easily than the expressive, if difficult, tongue which is spoken in the office, the barroom, the tramcar, from the snows of Alaska to the mouths of the Mississippi, and is enshrined in a literature that is growing in volume and favor every day.
Low quoted an extract from an American novel then appearing serially in an English magazine — an extract including such Americanisms as
side-stepper, saltwater-taffy, Prince-Albert
(coat),
boob, bartender
and
kidding
, and many characteristically American extravagances of metaphor. It might be well argued, he said, that this strange dialect was as near to “the tongue that Shakespeare spoke” as “the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton,” but that philological fact did not help to its understanding. “You might almost as well expect him [the British business man] to converse freely with a Portuguese railway porter because he tried to stumble through Caesar when he was in the Upper Fourth at school.”
At the time Low published his
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