Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/179

 uses the term to designate its branches. But it is not yet listed by either Cassell or the Concise Oxford, though both give druggist. L. Pearsall Smith adds platform (political), interview, faith-healing, co-education and cake-walk. Cassell says that letter-carrier is obsolete in England and that pay-day is used only on the Stock Exchange there. Tenderfoot is creeping in, though the English commonly mistake it for an Australianism; it is used by the English Boy Scouts just as our own Boy Scouts use it. Scalawag, characteristically, has got into English with an extra l, making it callawag. Rambunctious is not in any of the new English dictionaries, but in Cassell I find rumbustious, probably its father.

So many Americanisms, in fact, have gone into English of late that the English have begun to lose sight of the transoceanic origin of large numbers of them. When the last edition of the present work was published some of the English reviewers made lists of such Americanisms that had ousted or begun to oust their English equivalents, for example, sweater for jersey, overcoat for greatcoat, scarf-pin for tie-pin, subway for underground, homely for plain, fall for autumn, rare for underdone, and blizzard, cyclone, tornado and hurricane for storm. A number of these terms, of course, were sound old English, but the point is that they had been preserved in good usage in the United States during a time, often extending to more than a century, which saw their exile to dialects or to the vulgar speech in England, and that their revival was due solely to American influence. Even so, many of them retained a good deal of foreignness, as was revealed by an obvious difference of opinion as to the extent of their acceptance, and their right to it. It is, in fact, easy to overestimate the importance of such exportations, and of the transient slang-phrases that go with them. It usually takes a long while for one of them to become naturalized in England, and even then the business is sometimes achieved only at the cost of a change in meaning or spelling. To the Englishman, indeed, most Americanisms continue to show an abhorrent quality, even after he has begun to use them; he never feels quite at ease in their use, and so he