Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/341

Rh shall live and flourish or decline and perish in the English tongue. No sovereign, no nation can determine this, either by decree or by statute. The most that the British can say in derogation of an alleged Americanism is that it is current only in America and is not authorized by British usage. But this does not make it un-English, if it bears the American sign manual.

It is perfectly absurd for the British critics to condemn Americanisms offhand and to attempt to read them out of the language, simply because they are not in accord with British usage. In so doing they give proof of their insularity and fail to exhibit a spirit of liberality and sweet reasonableness. Indeed, they seem disposed, at all events, to take themselves too seriously as guardians of the English language. It is well enough for a critic to throw his influence on the side of the preservation of the purity and propriety of speech. But it is sheer folly to allow one's pedantry to go to such a length as Malherbe, that 'tyrant of words and syllables,' who on his death-bed angrily rebuked his nurse for the solecisms of her language, exclaiming in extenuation of his act, 'Sir, I will defend to my very last gasp the purity of the French language.' It is related of him that he was so fatal a precisian in the choice of words that he spent three years in composing an ode on the death of a friend's wife, and when at last the ode was completed, his friend had married again, and the purist had only his labor for his. pains. Now your true British pedant seems to think it his bounden duty to reject summarily every word or expression which does not. bear the pure English hall-mark, and that as for Americanisms they are an abomination which must inevitably work the speedy corruption and ultimate decadence of the noble English tongue. Such an one, whether from his precisianism or his prejudice, fails utterly to recognize in Americanisms conclusive evidence of the inherent potency, vigor and vitality of the English language on American lips.