Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/164

 prostitute, colony for penitentiary, school for reformatory, psychopathic hospital for insane asylum, and house of detention for jail. Many of these new terms (or others like them) have been actually adopted. Practically all American insane asylums are now simple hospitals, and many reformatories and houses of correction have been converted into schools.

The use of Madame as a special title of honor for old women of good position survived in the United States until the 70's. It distinguished the dowager Mrs. Smith from the wife of her eldest son; today the word dowager, imitating the English usage, is frequently employed in fashionable society. Madame survives among the colored folk, who almost always apply it to women singers of their race, and often to women hairdressers, dressmakers and milliners also. It is felt to be a shade more distinguished than Miss or Mrs. White dressmakers, milliners and beauty "specialists" also occasionally use it, particularly in the South.

When we come to words that, either intrinsically or by usage, are improper, a great many curious differences between English and American reveal themselves. The Englishman, on the whole, is more plain-spoken than the American, and such terms as bitch, mare and in foal do not commonly daunt him, largely, perhaps, because of his greater familiarity with country life; hut he has a formidable index of his own, and it includes such essentially harmless words as sick, stomach, bum and bug. The English use of ill for sick I have already noticed, and the reasons for the English avoidance of bum. Sick, over there, when used predicatively, means nauseated, and when an Englishman says that he was sick he means that he vomited, or, as an American would say, was sick at the stomach. The older (and still American) usage, however, survives before the noun and in various compounds. Sick-list, for example, is official