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330, pronouncing an apparent neologism an Americanism, when as a matter of fact the expression shows a good English pedigree extending back many generations. A more intimate acquaintance with the history of our common speech would save them the embarrassment from such a glaring blunder. But it is so easy to fall into the careless habit of branding as an Americanism an unfamiliar idiom or a phrase that is rarely heard in England. This convenient term has thus become in England a reproach, inasmuch as a certain stigma, somehow, attaches to it in the British mind. But for all that, like charity, it covers a multitude of sins, sins of keen prejudice, no less than of crass ignorance.

Many of the so-called Americanisms are really survivals of Elizabethan English and boast a Shakespearean pedigree, although they are no longer heard in the country of that consummate master of our speech. Somehow, they seem to have drifted out of the main current of British English. Perhaps they have been caught up by an eddy and carried into one. of the provinces where they are still preserved, as they are in America, fresh and vigorous. A moment's reflection will show that we Americans come rightly by our Elizabethan English. For surely New England, Maryland and Virginia were settled by those who spoke the tongue of Shakespeare, even though they did not all hold the faith and morals of Milton. Many of these settlers—both Puritan and Cavalier—were college-bred men, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. Therefore they inherited the best traditions of the English speech and transmitted it uncorrupted to their children. Nor were their children wilful traducers and corruptors of the King's English, but contrariwise they conserved it and safeguarded its purity quite as sedulously as the inhabitants of the mother country. Thus the English speech was handed down, undeflled, from one generation to another, in America. Hence some words and phrases of good Elizabethan usage have been preserved in America, which long ago became obsolete and dropped out of the living speech in England, where the growth of the language was, of course, not arrested by the rude shock incident to its being transplanted in a foreign country.

Let us now point out a few examples of reputed Americanisms, social pariahs which have lost caste and no longer move in polite circles in England. An interesting example is found in the word 'fall' used in the sense of autumn. Both these terms are in favor in America, although the pedants, following the lead of British critics, proscribe the use of 'fall.' We are told it is not employed in standard English, and hence must be censured as provincial. Yet 'fall,' which enjoys a certain poetic association with the fall of the leaf, can offer in its support the high authority of Dryden, who employed it in his translation of Juvenal's satires: