Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/26

 through scores of ancient spelling-books, and to make deductions, perhaps sometimes rather rash, from the works of Franklin, Webster and Cobb. Some time ago the National Council of Teachers of English appointed a Committee on American Speech and sought to let some light into the matter, but as yet its labors are barely begun and the publications of its members get little beyond preliminaries. Such an inquiry involves a laboriousness which should have attracted Lounsbury: he once counted the number of times the word female appears in "Vanity Fair." But you will find only a feeble dealing with the question in his book on pronunciation. Nor is there any adequate general work (for Scheie de Vere's is full of errors and omissions) upon the influences felt by American through contact with the languages of our millions of immigrants, nor upon our peculiarly rich and characteristic slang.

Against all such enterprises, as I have said, academic opinion stands firmly. During the World War it seems to have taken on, if possible, an added firmness. Before the war, for example, Dr. Brander Matthews, of Columbia University, was a diligent collector of Americanisms, and often discussed them with much show of liking for them. He even used the term Briticism to designate an English locution rejected by 100% Americans. But during the war he appears to have succumbed to the propaganda for British-American unity launched by his employer, the eminent Anglo-Saxon idealist, Adolph S. Ochs, of the New York Times. I quote from one of his articles in the Times: