The American Language
/full-house/, /divvy/, /a card up his sleeve/, /three-of-a-kind/, /to
ante up/, /to pony up/, /to hold out/, /to cash in/, /to go it one
better/, /to chip in/ and /for keeps/. But the Englishman uses many
more racing terms and metaphors than we do, and he has got a good many
phrases from other games, particularly cricket. The word /cricket/
itself has a definite figurative meaning. It indicates, in general,
good sportsmanship. To take unfair advantage of an opponent is not
/cricket/. The sport of boating, so popular on the Thames, has also
given colloquial English some familiar terms, almost unknown in the
United States, /e. g./, /punt/ and /weir/. Contrariwise, /pungy/,
/batteau/ and /scow/ are unheard of in England, and /canoe/ is not
long emerged from the estate of an Americanism.[12] The game known as
/ten-pins/ in America is called /nine-pins/ in England, and once had
that name over here. The Puritans forbade it, and its devotees changed
its name in order to evade the prohibition.[13] Finally, there is
/soccer/, a form of football quite unknown in the United States. What
we call simply football is /Rugby/ or /Rugger/ to the Englishman. The
word /soccer/ is derived from /association/; the rules of the game
were [Pg112] established by the London Football Association. /Soccer/
is one of the relatively few English experiments in ellipsis. Another
is to be found in /Bakerloo/, the name of one of the London
underground lines, from /Baker-street/ and /Waterloo/, its termini.
The English have an ecclesiastical vocabulary with which we are almost
unacquainted, and it is in daily use, for the church bulks large in
public affairs over there. Such terms as /vicar/, /canon/, /verger/,
/prebendary/, /primate/, /curate/, /non-conformist/, /dissenter/,
/convocation/, /minster/, /chapter/, /crypt/, /living/,
/presentation/, /glebe/, /benefice/, /locum tenens/, /suffragan/,
/almoner/, /dean/ and /pluralist/ are to be met with in the English
newspapers constantly, but on this side of the water they are seldom
encountered. Nor do we hear much of /matins/, /lauds/, /lay-readers/,
/ritualism/ and the /liturgy/. The English use of /holy orders/ is
also strange to us. They do not say that a young man is /studying for
the ministry/, but that he is /reading for holy orders/. They do not
say that he is /ordained/, but that he /takes orders/. Save he be in
the United Free Church of Scotland, he is never a /minister/; save he
be a nonconformist, he is never a /pastor/; a clergyman of the
Establishment is always either a /rector/, a /vicar/ or a /curate/,
and colloquially a /parson/.
In American /chapel/ simply means a small church, usually the branch
of some larger one; in English it has the special sense of a place of
worship unconnected with the establishment. Though three-fourths of
the people of Ireland are Catholics (in Munster and Connaught, more
than nine-tenths), and the Protestant Church of Ireland has been
disestablished since 1871, a Catholic place of worship in the country
is still a /chapel/ and not a /church/.[14] So is a Methodist
wailing-place in England, however large it may be, though now and then
/tabernacle/ is substituted. In the same way the English Catholics
sometimes vary /chapel/ with /oratory/, as in /Brompton Oratory/. A
Methodist, in Great [Pg113] Britain, is not a /Methodist/, but a
/Wesleyan/. Contrariwise, what the English call simply a /churchman/
is an /Episcopalian/ in the United States, what they call the /Church/
(always capitalized!) is the /Protestant Episcopal/ Church,[15] what
they call a /Roman Catholic/ is simply a /Catholic/, and what they
call a /Jew/ is usually softened (if he happens to be an advertiser)
to a /Hebrew/. The English Jews have no such idiotic fear of the plain
name as that which afflicts the more pushing and obnoxious of the race
in America.[16] "News of /Jewry/" is a common head-line in the /London
Daily Telegraph/, which is owned by Lord Burnham, a Jew, and has had
many Jews on its staff, including Judah P. Benjamin, the American. The
American language, of course, knows nothing of /dissenters/. Nor of
such gladiators of dissent as the /Plymouth Brethren/, nor of the
/nonconformist conscience/, though the United States suffers from it
even more damnably than England. The English, to make it even, get on
without /circuit-riders/, /holy-rollers/, /Dunkards/, /Seventh Day
Adventists/ and other such American /ferae naturae/, and are born,
live, die and go to heaven without the aid of either the /uplift/ or
the /chautauqua/.
In music the English cling to an archaic and unintelligible
nomenclature, long since abandoned in America. Thus they call a double
whole note a /breve/, a whole note a /semibreve/, a half note a /minim/,
a quarter note a /crotchet/, an eighth note a /quaver/, a sixteenth note
a /semi-quaver/, a thirty-second note a /demisemiquaver/, and a
sixty-fourth note a /hemidemisemiquaver/, or /semidemisemiquaver/. If,
by any chance, an English musician should write a one-hundred-and-
twenty-eighth note he probably wouldn't know what to call it. This
clumsy terminology goes back to the days of plain chant, with its
/longa/, /brevis/, /semi-brevis/, /minima/ and /semiminima/. The French
and Italians cling to a system almost as confusing, but the Germans use
/ganze/, /halbe/, /viertel/, [Pg114] /achtel/, etc. I have been unable
to discover the beginnings of the American system, but it would seem to
be borrowed from the German. Since the earliest times the majority of
music teachers in the United States have been Germans, and most of the
rest have had German training.
In the same way the English hold fast to a clumsy and inaccurate
method of designating the sizes of printers' types. In America the
simple point system makes the business easy; a line of /14-point/ type
occupies exactly the vertical space of two lines of /7-point/. But the
English still indicate differences in size by such arbitrary and
confusing names as /brilliant/, /diamond/, /small pearl/, /pearl/,
/ruby/, /ruby-nonpareil/, /nonpareil/, /minion-nonpareil/, /emerald/,
/minion/, /brevier/, /bourgeois/, /long primer/, /small pica/, /pica/,
/English/, /great primer/ and /double pica/. They also cling to a
fossil system of numerals in stating ages. Thus, an Englishman will
say that he is /seven-and-forty/, not that he is /forty-seven/. This
is probably a direct survival, preserved by more than a thousand years
of English conservatism, of the Anglo-Saxon /seofan-and-feowertig/. He
will also say that he weighs eleven /stone/ instead of 154 pounds. A
/stone/ is 14 pounds, and it is always used in stating the heft of a
man. Finally, he employs such designations of time as /fortnight/ and
/twelvemonth/ a great deal more than we do, and has certain special
terms of which we know nothing, for example, /quarter-day/, /bank
holiday/, /long vacation/, /Lady Day/ and /Michaelmas/. /Per contra/,
he knows nothing whatever of our /Thanksgiving/, /Arbor/, /Labor/ and
/Decoration Days/, or of /legal holidays/, or of /Yom Kippur/.
In English usage, to proceed, the word /directly/ is always used to
signify /immediately/; in American a contingency gets into it, and it
may mean no more than /soon/. In England /quite/ means "completely,
wholly, entirely, altogether, to the utmost extent, nothing short of,
in the fullest sense, positively, absolutely"; in America it is
conditional, and means only nearly, approximately, substantially, as
in "he sings /quite/ well." An Englishman does not say "I will pay you
/up/" for an injury, but "I will pay you /back/." He doesn't look /up/
a definition in a dictionary; he looks it /out/. He doesn't say, being
ill, "I am /getting/ on well," but [Pg115] "I am /going/ on well." He
doesn't use the American "different /from/" or "different /than/"; he
uses "different /to/." He never adds the pronoun in such locutions as
"it hurts /me/," but says simply "it hurts." He never "catches /up
with you/" on the street; he "catches /you up/." He never says "are
you through?" but "have you finished?" He never uses /to notify/ as a
transitive verb; an official act may be /notified/, but not a person.
He never uses /gotten/ as the perfect participle of /get/; he always
uses plain /got/.[17] An English servant never washes the /dishes/;
she always washes the /dinner/ or /tea things/. She doesn't /live
out/, but /goes into service/. She smashes, not the /mirror/, but the
/looking-glass/. Her beau is not her /fellow/, but her /young man/.
She does not /keep company/ with him but /walks out/ with him.
That an Englishman always calls out "/I/ say!", and not simply "say!"
when he desires to attract a friend's attention or register a
protestation of incredulity--this perhaps is too familiar to need
notice. His "/hear, hear!/" and "/oh, oh!/" are also well known. He is
much less prodigal with /good-bye/ than the American; he uses
/good-day/ and /good-afternoon/ far more often. A shop-assistant would
never say /good-bye/ to a customer. To an Englishman it would have a
subtly offensive smack; /good-afternoon/ would be more respectful.
Another word that makes him flinch is /dirt/. He never uses it, as we
do, to describe the soil in the garden; he always says /earth/.
Various very common American phrases are quite unknown to him, for
example, /over his signature/, /on time/ and /planted to corn/. The
first-named he never uses, and he has no equivalent for it; an
Englishman who issues a signed statement simply makes it /in writing/.
He knows nothing of our common terms of disparagement, such as /kike/,
/wop/, /yap/ and /rube/. His pet-name for a tiller of the soil is not
/Rube/ or /Cy/, but /Hodge/. When he goes gunning he does not call it
/hunting/, but /shooting/; /hunting/ is reserved for the chase of the
fox.
An intelligent Englishwoman, coming to America to live, told me that
the two things which most impeded her first communications with
untravelled Americans, even above the gross differences [Pg116]
between England and American pronunciation and intonation, were the
complete absence of the general utility adjective /jolly/ from the
American vocabulary, and the puzzling omnipresence and versatility of
the American verb /to fix/. In English colloquial usage /jolly/ means
almost anything; it intensifies all other adjectives, even including
/miserable/ and /homesick/. An Englishman is /jolly/ tired, /jolly/
hungry or /jolly well/ tired; his wife is /jolly/ sensible; his dog is
/jolly/ keen; the prices he pays for things are /jolly dear/ (never
/steep/ or /stiff/ or /high/: all Americanisms). But he has no noun to
match the American /proposition/, meaning proposal, business, affair,
case, consideration, plan, theory, solution and what not: only the
German /zug/ can be ranged beside it.[18] And he has no verb in such
wide practise as /to fix/. In his speech it means only to make fast or
to determine. In American it may mean to repair, as in "the plumber
/fixed/ the pipe"; to dress, as in "Mary /fixed/ her hair"; to
prepare, as in "the cook is /fixing/ the gravy"; to bribe, as in "the
judge was /fixed/"; to settle, as in "the quarrel was /fixed/ up"; to
heal, as in "the doctor /fixed/ his boil"; to finish, as in "Murphy
/fixed/ Sweeney in the third round"; to be well-to-do, as in "John is
well-/fixed/"; to arrange, as in "I /fixed/ up the quarrel"; to be
drunk, as in "the whiskey /fixed/ him"; to punish, as in "I'll /fix/
him"; and to correct, as in "he /fixed/ my bad Latin." Moreover, it is
used in all its English senses. An Englishman never goes to a dentist
to have his teeth /fixed/. He does not /fix/ the fire; he /makes it
up/, or /mends/ it. He is never /well-fixed/, either in money or by
liquor.[19]
The English use /quite/ a great deal more than we do, and, as we have