Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/340

336 Britain there is much less uniformity of speech than with us, and the difference between the language of a Scotchman and that of a Devonshire man is almost infinitely greater than the difference between any two American dialects. But the dissimilarity of the British dialects is historic and dates back from time immemorial. The story of Caxton, the first English printer, is well known, how the good merchant from a southern shire, when he inquired for eggs of a good-wife in a northern shire, could not make himself understood, his southern dialect being mistaken for French. To be sure, the dialectal differences are not so great to-day as they were in those remote times, largely as the result of the printing-press Caxton set up in Westminster. But even yet the differences between the dialects of the extreme parts of the British Isles is so pronounced as to be a barrier to complete interchange of thought.

It appears from the foregoing that the indictment of corrupting the English language which certain British critics have brought in against the American people is not a true bill, since no count has been established. Our British critics seem loath to acknowledge any American rights in our common language. Americans have as much right to enrich the English vocabulary with useful words as the English people themselves. We also have as just a claim as they to revive and preserve an obsolescent phrase or idiom. Because a given English word is no longer in use and esteem in England, but is recognized as standard usage in the United States, it does not follow that it is not good English. The number of those using the English language in America far exceeds the population of England, and the English speech is just as vigorous and virile in America as it is in the parent country. Indeed, it has given indubitable proof of its vitality and vigor on American lips by adapting itself to the infinite variety of new conditions in this new country and by the added flexibility, strength and richness as exhibited in its augmented vocabulary. English now is the language of the American people as well as of the English people. It is, therefore, no longer proper or scientific to speak of the queen's or of the king's English. Such a phrase is really an anachronism in the twentieth century, when the English-speaking subjects of King Edward are numerically inferior to those not owning allegiance to Britain's sovereign, who speak the same tongue. Moreover, it is manifestly not in keeping with the eternal fitness of things, as well as unscientific, for our British kith and kin to stigmatize an idiom or a phrase in good American usage as a provincialism simply because it is not current in Great Britain. The Britons have no more right to attempt to prescribe and limit the growth of the English tongue than we have. Nor do they enjoy an exclusive prerogative of determining whether a given expression, be it a new coinage or a survival from a former period,