Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/188

174 younger boys have alcoves in the dormitories similar to the cubicles of many of the English public schools."

Occasionally some uncompromising patriot raises his voice against such importations, but he seldom shows the vigorous indignation of the English purists. White, in 1870, warned Americans against the figurative use of nasty as a synonym for disagreeable. The use of the word was then relatively new in England, though, according to White, the Saturday Review and the Spectator had already succumbed. His objections to it were unavailing; nasty quickly got into American and has been there ever since. In 1883 Gilbert M. Tucker protested against good-form, traffic (in the sense of travel), to bargain and to tub as Briticisms that we might well do without, but all of them took root and are perfectly sound American today. The locutions that are more obviously merely fashionable slang have a harder time of it, and seldom gain lodgment. When certain advertisers in New York sought to appeal to snobs by using such Briticisms as swagger and topping in their advertisements, the town wits, led by the watchful Franklin P. Adams (though he then served the Tribune, which Clement K. Shorter once called "more English than we are English"), fell upon them, and quickly routed them. To the average American of the plain people, indeed, any word or phrase of an obviously English flavor appears to be subtly offensive. To call him old dear would be almost as hazardous as to call him Claude or Clarence. He associates all such terms, and the English broad a no less, with the grotesque Britons he sees in burlesque shows. Perhaps this feeling entered into the reluctance of the American soldier to borrow British war slang.

The grotesque errors which English authors fall into every time they write American, referred to a few pages back, are matched by the blunders of Americans who essay to write colloquial English. Some time ago, St. John Ervine, the Anglo-Irish playwright, discussed the matter at length in Vanity Fair. Thus his indignant protest: