Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/337

Rh does not indicate any misuse of our mother tongue, as they contend. Only one more case shall be adduced in illustration, to wit, our word 'baggage,' which the other half of the Anglo-Saxon race has discarded for 'luggage.' Here again, as elsewhere in the exercise of our prerogative, we have demonstrated our independence of the mother country in the matter of our speech and have chosen one term while the English people have adopted another, to designate the same thing. Both words have a good literary pedigree extending several centuries back. Shakespearean usage seems about equally divided, perhaps, with the odds in favor of 'baggage.' The Shakespearean coinage 'bag and baggage and scrip and scrippage,' which falls from the lips of Touchstone in 'As You Like It,' and which enjoys the familiarity of a household word, ought to have given 'baggage' a wider currency, especially in the author's own country. But language, like the heathen Chinee, has ways that are dark, if not tricks that are vain, and does not develop according to logic or our a priori conceptions. Between the Briticism 'luggage' and the Americanism 'baggage' it appears, therefore, to be a drawn battle. So the British have nothing to reproach us with on this score, since convention has adopted 'baggage' on one side of the Atlantic and 'luggage' on the other.

So much for this interesting class of Americanisms which repose on standard Elizabethan usage, but are social outcasts in the land of their birth. There is another class of Americanisms which are not bolstered up by a long literary pedigree, inasmuch as they originated on American soil and were not imported from the old world. As compared with the class just considered, these latter are mere parvenus, without any illustrious ancestral history to commend them. This class of Americanisms is composed of phrases which have found their way into our speech from various foreign sources. They have been introduced into our tongue from our contact with diverse peoples from remote parts of the globe. They constitute a small residuum of terms and phrases, the presence of which in our vocabulary attests the fact of our relations with different nations of the earth. For instance, in the early history of our country, we had to do with the Indians, and so borrowed from them certain terms especially pertaining to natural objects. We also had relations with the French, and consequently borrowed from them sundry phrases employed in official parlance, such as 'bureau of information,' for which British usage prefers 'office'; 'exposition' for the British 'exhibition,' and the like. Let these few examples represent the class. It is apparent here that we have made a slight departure from British usage. But it does not follow that our speech, for this reason, is less pure or less idiomatic. Both American usage and British usage show that the respective nations have decided to employ Romance importations in official language, but they have