Page:The American Language.djvu/150

134 he said, "are infecting even our higher journalism and our parliamentary and platform oratory. ... A statesman is now out for victory; he is up against pacificism…. He has a card up his sleeve, by which the enemy are at last to be euchred. Then a fierce fight in which hundreds of noble fellows are mangled or drowned is a scrap…. To criticise a politician is to call for his scalp…. The other fellow is beaten to a frazzle." And so on. "Bolshevism," concluded Harrison sadly, "is ruining language as well as society."

But though there are still many such alarms by constables of the national speech, the majority of Englishmen continue to make borrowings from the tempting and ever–widening American vocabulary. What is more, some of these loan–words take root, and are presently accepted as sound English, even by the most watchful. The two Fowlers, in "The King's English," separate Americanisms from other current vulgarisms, but many of the latter on their list are actually American in origin, though they do not seem to know it—for example, to demean and to transpire. More remarkable still, the Cambridge History of English Literature lists backwoodsman, know–nothing and yellow–back as English compounds, apparently in forgetfulness of their American origin, and adds skunk, squaw and toboggan as direct importations from the Indian tongues, without noting that they came through American, and remained definite Americanisms for a long while. It even adds musquash, a popular name for the Fiber zibethicus, borrowed from the Algonquin musk–wessu but long since degenerated to musk–rat in America. Musquash has been in disuse in this country, indeed, since the middle of the last century, save as a stray localism, but the English have preserved it, and it appears in the Oxford Dictionary.

A few weeks in London or a month's study of the London