Every time the House [of Commons] meets things are said in a phraseology that would shock and baffle Mr. Gladstone.… Even Mr. Baldwin, one of the few authorities on the King’s English in the House, used in his speech yesterday the expressions backslider, best-seller and party dog-fight. I have heard him use to deliver the goods. The House is undoubtedly Americanized in some of its phrases. I have heard whoopee and debunked in the debating chamber, and oh, yeah and you’re telling me in the lobby. To pass the buck is a well-known House expression and it is often used.14
The argot of English politics has naturalized many Americanisms beside caucus and buncombe. Graft, wrote Harold Brighouse in 1929, “is acclimatized in England.”15 So is gerrymander. So are platform, carpet-bagger, wire-puller, log-rolling, on the fence, campaign,16 to stump, and to electioneer.17 In other fields there has been the same infiltration. The meaning of bucket-shop and to water, for example, is familiar to every London broker’s clerk. English trains are now telescoped and carry dead-heads, there is an Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, and in 1913 a rival to the Amalgamated Order Of Railway Servants was organized under the name of the National Union of Railway Men. A movement against the use of the ignominious servant is visible in other directions, and the American help threatens to be substituted; at all events, Help Wanted advertisements are occasionally printed in English newspapers. The American to phone is now in general use over there, and “Hello” has displaced “Are you there?” as the standard telephone greeting. English journalists are ceasing to call themselves pressmen, and have begun to use the American newspaper men. They begin to write editorials instead of leaders. The English theaters continue to have dress-circles where ours have balconies, but there are balconies in the movie-houses. Since England began to grow sugar-beets the English beet-root has succumbed to the American (and earlier English) beet, and the American can seems to be ousting the English tin. Sky-scraper, strap-hanger and fool-proof were naturalized long ago,18 and I have encountered cafeteria, kitchen-cabinet, filing-cabinet, nut-sundae, soda-fountain, icecream-soda and pop-corn on shop signs in London, chain-store in a headline in a 100% British provincial newspaper,19 junk in the London Daily Telegraph20 and sticker instead of the English sticky-back or tab in another great London journal,21 all within the space of a few days. On December 8, 1934, Miss Julia Hogan, of 245 Lord street, Southport, was advertising in the Southport Visiter22 that she was a beautician, and a few months later J. A. Watson was reporting in the London Daily Telegraph23 that “those truly loathsome transatlantic importations,” to help make, worth-while, nearby and colorful, were “spreading like plague.” No less a lexicographical dignitary than Dr. C. T. Onions, one of the editors of the Oxford Dictionary, is authority for the news that to make good “no longer gives the impression of being an alien idiom” in England, that “the American applications of the word dope have generally commended themselves and have obtained a wide currency,” and that yep and nope “have penetrated even into the speech of the educated of the younger generation.”24 “Twenty years ago,” said S. K. Ratcliffe in 1935,25 “no one in England started in, started out or checked up; we did not stand for or fall for, as we do today.… We have learned from the American to try out, but not as yet to curse out, and when we make out we are still deciphering something, and not, as the American is, doing something fairly well.”26 Sometimes an Americanism that has long ceased to be a novelty in this country is suddenly taken up in England, and becomes popular almost overnight. Thus shyster, in use here since the 1850’s, was introduced by Robert Louis Stevenson in “The Wrecker” in 1892;27 Indian-Summer which goes back to Colonial days, was given a start by John Galsworthy’s use of it in the title of “The Indian Summer of a Forsyte” (1918); and the Prince of Wales popularized the Rooseveltian bully by using it in a speech to Leicestershire huntsmen in 1930. O.K. has been known and understood in England for at least thirty years, but it was not until 1932 that it came into general use.28 The movies and talkies are now responsible for most such introductions, whether of new Americanisms or old ones, but they get active help from the radio, the stage and even the English newspapers. In 1933 Henry Hall broadcast from London a list of the songs most popular in Great Britain since 1919, estimated on the basis of the sales of sheet music and phonograph records. Of the sixteen he mentioned, all save five were American.29 The English newspapers of wide circulation make a heavy use of Americanisms in their headlines and their more gossipy articles,30 and in the popular magazines “a large number of the stories are set in American situations, or are at least written from an American viewpoint, in semi-American language.”31
It is curious, reading the fulminations of American purists of the last generation, to note how many of the Americanisms they denounced have broken down all guards across the ocean. To placate and to antagonize are examples. The Concise Oxford and Cassell distinguished between the English and American meanings of the latter: in England a man may antagonize only another man, in America he may antagonize a mere idea or things. But, as the brothers Fowler show, even the English meaning is of American origin, and no doubt a few more years will see the verb completely naturalized in Britain. To placate, attacked vigorously by all native grammarians down to (but excepting) White, now has the authority of the Spectator, and is accepted by Cassell. Other old bugaboos that have been embraced are to donate, reliable, gubernatorial, presidential and standpoint. White labored long and valiantly to convince Americans that the adjective derived from president should be without the i before its last syllable, following the example of incidental, regimental, monumental, governmental, oriental, experimental and so on; but in vain, for presidential is now perfectly good English. To engineer, to collide,32 to corner, to obligate, and to lynch are in Cassell with no hint of their American origin, and so are home-spun, out-house, cross-purposes, green-horn, blizzard, tornado, cyclone, hurricane, excursionist, wash-stand and wash-basin, though wash-hand-stand and wash-hand-basin are also given. Drug-store is making its way in England; the firm known as Boots’ the Chemists (formerly Boots Cash Chemists) uses the term to designate its branches. But it is not yet listed by either Cassell or the Concise Oxford, though both give druggist. Tenderfoot is in general use, though the English commonly mistake it for an Australianism; it is used by the English Boy Scouts just as our own Boy Scouts use it. Scalawag has got into English with an extra l, making it scallawag or scallywag. J. Y. T. Greig, in “Breaking Priscian’s Head,”33 prints a long list of Americanisms that have become firmly lodged in English, and says that “few of us who have not taken the trouble to go into the matter are aware how many of our common expressions derive from the United States.” His list includes, besides the words mentioned above, the compounds back-woods, chewing-gum, cold-snap, dug-out, half-breed, hot-cake, mass-meeting, beach-comber, six-shooter, bee-line, indignation-meeting and pow-wow, the simple nouns blizzard, bluff, boodle, boss, caboodle, canyon, collateral (in the Stock Exchange sense), combine (noun), crank (eccentric person), cuss, dago, filibuster, fix (in a fix), floor (in the sense of to have, yield or hold the floor), flurry, goner, gulch, hustler, mileage, misstep, mugwump, paleface, persimmon, porterhouse (steak), ranch, rowdy, school-marm, scrap (fight), shack, shanty, shyster, snag (in a river, and figuratively), splurge, spook, squatter and stampede, the adjectives blue, bogus, colored (Negro), governmental, highfalutin, low-down, non-commital, pesky, pivotal, played-out, previous (too previous), rattled, slick and whole-souled, the verbs to bluff, to boost, to bullyrag, to enthuse, to eventuate, to itemize, to jump (a claim), to lobby, to locate, to lynch, to negative, to run (for office), to scoot, to splurge, to tote and to vamose, the verb-phrases to take the cake, to bury the hatchet, to cut no ice, to draw a bead on, to keep one’s eye peeled, to fizzle out, to freeze out, to go back on, to go it blind, to go one better, to go the whole hog, to go under, to get the hang of, to hold up, to keep a stiff upper lip, to monkey with, to play possum, to pull up stakes, to put it through, to raise Cain, to shi
n up, to size up, to spread oneself, to go on the stump and to trade off, the adverb plumb, and the phrases best bib and tucker, not my funeral, true inwardness, for keeps, no flies on, no two ways about it, on time, no slouch and under the weather. “It is difficult now,” says Ernest Weekley,34 “to imagine how we got on so long without the word stunt, how we expressed the characteristics so conveniently summed up in dope-fiend or high-brow, or any other possible way of describing that mixture of the cheap pathetic and the ludicrous which is now universally labelled sob-stuff” “Every Englishman listening to me now,” said Alistair Cooke in a radio broadcast from London,35 “uses thirty or forty Americanisms a day.” “We seem to offer less and less resistance,” said Professor W. E. Collinson of the University of Liverpool,36 “to the new importations.”
2. SURVIVING DIFFERENCES
For each of the three earlier editions of this book I prepared a list of couplets showing variations between the everyday vocabularies of England and the United States, and in every instance that list had become archaic in some of its details before it could be got into print. The English reviewers had a great deal of sport demonstrating that a number of my Americanisms were really in wide use in England, but all they proved, save in a few cases of undeniable blundering, was that the exotic had at last become familiar. Others undertook to show that some term I had listed was not only accepted current English, but also discoverable in the works of Shakespeare, of Chaucer, or even of King Alfred, but as a rule the most they could actually prove was that it had been good English once, but had fallen out of currency, and had then been taken back from the United States, where it had survived all the while. From those reviews I learned that opinions often differ as to whether a given word or phrase is in general use. Sometimes, two reviewers would differ sharply over a specimen, one arguing that every Englishman knew it and used it, and the other maintaining that it was employed only by traitorous vulgarians under the spell of the American movies.
Nevertheless, it is still possible to draw up an impressive roster of common terms that remain different in England and the United States, and so I attempt the business once more,37 beginning with some words from everyday home life:
American English
alcohol-lamp spirit lamp
apartment flat
apartment-hotel block of service-flats
apartment-house block of flats
ash-can dust-bin
ash-cart (or truck) dust-cart
ashman dustman38
atomiser scent-spray
automobile motor-car
baby-carriage perambulator, or pram
baggage luggage
bakery bake-house, or baker’s shop
bank-account banking-account
bathing-suit swim-suit
bathtub bath
bedbug or chinch bug
bill (money) banknote, or note
billboard hoarding
biscuit scone, or tea-cake
boot high-boot, or Wellington
broiled (meat) grilled
candy sweets
candy-store sweet-shop
can-opener tin-opener, or key39
chain-store multiple-shop
charged (goods bought) put down
cheese-cloth butter-muslin
chicken-yard fowl-run
chores odd jobs
cigarette-butt cigarette-end
clothes-pin clothes-peg
coal-oil paraffin
collar-button collar-stud
cook-book cookery-book
cook-stove cooking-stove
cookie biscuit
corn maize, or Indian corn
cornmeal Indian meal
corn-starch corn-flour
cotton (absorbent) cotton-wool
cracker biscuit (unsweetened)
custom-made (clothes) bespoke, or made to measure
daylight time Summer time
derby (hat) bowler, or hard hat
dishpan washing-up bowl
drawers (men’s) pants
druggist chemist
drug-store chemist’s-shop40
drygoods-store draper’s-shop
elevator lift
elevator-boy liftman
fish-dealer fishmonger
five-and-ten (store) bazaar
floorwalker shopwalker
frame-house wooden-house
fruit-seller (or dealer) fruiterer
fruit-store fruiterer’s
garbage-incinerator destructor
garters (men’s) sock-suspenders
groceries stores
hardware ironmongery
huckster coster, costermonger, or hawker
instalment-plan hire-purchase system, or hire system
janitor caretaker, or porter
junk rubbish, or odds and ends
kindergarten infants’-school, or nursery-school
letter-box pillar-box
letter-carrier postman
living-room sitting-room41
long-distance (telephone) trunk
marriage-certificate marriage-lines
molasses black treacle
monkey-wrench screw-spanner
mucilage gum
necktie tie
oatmeal (boiled) porridge
package parcel
phonograph gramophone
pie (fruit) tart
pitcher jug
play-room nursery
push-cart barrow
raincoat mackintosh, or mac
recess (school) interval, or break
roast (of meat) joint
roomer lodger
rooster cock, or cockerel
rubbers overshoes, goloshes, or galoshes
run (in a stocking) ladder
sack-suit (or business-suit) lounge-suit
scarf-pin tie-pin
second floor first floor
sewerage (house) drains
shoe boot
shoestring bootlace, or shoelace
sidewalk footpath, or pavement
silverware plate
sled sledge
soda-biscuit (or cracker) cream-cracker
spigot (or faucet) tap
spool (of cotton) reel
stairway staircase, or stairs
stem-winder keyless-watch
string-bean French-bean
sugar-bowl sugar-basin
suspenders (men’s) braces
syrup treacle
taffy toffee
taxes (municipal) rates
taxpayer (local) ratepayer
tenderloin (of beef) under-cut or fillet42
tinner tinker, or tinsmith
transom (of door) fanlight
undershirt vest, or singlet
union-suit combinations
wash-bowl wash-basin
wash-rag face-cloth
washstand wash-hand stand
waste-basket waste-paper basket
water-heater geyser
window-shade blind
Let us now turn to the field of another list of differences:
American English
aisle (theatre) gangway
bartender barman, or potman
battery (automobile) accumulator
American Language Page 33
