Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/12

viii Since my second edition was published there have been various evidences of a growing interest in the development of the English language in the United States.

For one thing, the Society for Pure English, organized in England in 1913 with the Poet Laureate at its head, has extended its activities to this country, and now has an American secretary, Dr. Henry Seidel Canby. The ostensible aim of the society is to improve standard English by importing words and idioms into it from the English dialects, including the American, and by restoring to it that bold and enterprising habit which marked it in Elizabethan days, but is now chiefly confined, as I try to show in the pages which follow, to what the London Times has called Amerenglish. This aim, I believe, is honestly cherished by the Poet Laureate, Dr. Bridges, as his writings on the subject sufficiently demonstrate, but I am inclined to think that many of his American collaborators are rather intent upon an enterprise no more novel or intelligent than that of augmenting the authority of standard English in America. That is to say, they are simply Anglomaniacs. This is certainly true, for example, of Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, the expatriated American who is honorary secretary of the society, and of Dr. Brander Matthews, the principal American contributor to its tracts. The curious case of Dr. Matthews is dealt with at various places in the chapters following. Like his employer, Adolph S. Ochs, of the New York Times, Dr. Matthews is so ardent an advocate of Anglo-American unity, with England as the lordy husband and the United States as the dutiful and obedient wife, that he sees every effort to study the growing divergences, cultural, political and linguistic, between the two nations as no more than evidence of a sinister conspiracy of Bolsheviki, Germans, Irishmen and Jews. The English, of course, are not taken in by such nonsense. The Saturday Review, which is certainly not deficient in English spirit, lately declared that Dr. Matthews "minimizes the national differences in language to an absurd degree," and set down his curious notion that American novelists do not use Americanisms as "obviously a war hope, like hanging the Kaiser." But he is supported by various other Gelehrten of the Sunday supplement species, and, to some degree, by the National Council of Teachers of English. This organization of