Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/336

332 In Beaumont and Fletcher's 'Captain' (act 3, scene 3), we find an excellent example in the line, 'Well, I shall live to see your husbands beat you.' No one, of course, would think of charging Tennyson with using unidiomatic English. Yet, in 'Locksley Hall,' you read:

Surely it is superfluous to cite further examples from English authors showing that American usage in the case of 'well' as an interjection is perfectly good English, even if the locution is censured by British pedantry and never heard on British lips.

The trite and hard-worked 'guess,' as characteristic of American speech as the much-abused 'fancy' is of British speech, furnishes another conspicuous example of a reputable word in Elizabethan English which has become obsolete in England, but is still preserved on this side of the Atlantic. There is no doubt that our constant employment of this good old Saxon word to do service on every occasion and to express every shade of thought from mild conjecture to positive assertion is somewhat inelegant; and this circumstance has perhaps contributed to bring the overtaxed phrase into disrepute with our kin across the sea. Yet there is abundant warrant in Elizabethan usage for the familiar notation we give 'guess' in our every-day speech, although it is generally confined to its strict meaning of conjecture in that period of the language. We find it used in the familiar sense of 'think' in several passages in Shakespeare, notably in 'I. Henry VI.' (act 2, scene 1):

 Not altogether; better far, I guess, That we do make our entrance several ways.

Likewise, in 'Measure for Measure' (act 4, scene 4):

 Angelo. And why meet him at the gates and redeliver our authorities there? Escalus. I guess not.

So, again, in the 'Winter's Tale' (act 4, scene 3):

Camillo. Which, I do guess, you do not purpose to him.

But this meaning of 'guess' is common throughout the entire history of English literature, for the word has always borne the sense of think, cheek by jowl with its specific meaning of conjecture. It is so employed by Chaucer and Gower in early times and in the last century by Sheridan and Wordsworth, certainly good literary authority enough. However, this meaning of the term appears to have died out in the present-day British speech, and the word is there employed strictly in the sense of conjecture, its lost sense being supplied by 'fancy.' Now, as between the Briton's 'fancy' and the American's 'guess,' there may not be much choice. But certainly the employment of 'guess' which our British cousins claim to be a shibboleth of American nationality