Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/31

 men on linguistic grounds. "The irruption of Mr. Wilson upon our scene," he said, "threatens to modify our terminology. If one knew the American language (as I do not)," and so on. At about the same time a leading English medical journal was protesting satirically against the Americanisms in an important American surgical monograph. Some time before this, in the New Witness, the late Cecil Chesterton discussed the growing difficulty, for Englishmen, of understanding American newspapers. After quoting a characteristic headline he went on:

Chesterton, however, refrained from denouncing this lack of identity; on the contrary, he allowed certain merits to American. "I do not want anybody to suppose," he said, "that the American language is in any way inferior to ours. In some ways it has improved upon it in vigor and raciness. In other ways it adheres more closely to the English of the best period." Testimony to the same end was furnished before this by William Archer. "New words," he said, "are begotten by new conditions of life; and as American life is far more fertile of new conditions than ours, the tendency toward neologism cannot but be stronger in America than in England. America has enormously enriched the language, not only with new words, but (since the American mind is, on the whole, quicker and wittier than the English) with apt and luminous colloquial metaphors." To which the Manchester Guardian, reviewing Henry G. Aikman's "Zell," added: "The writing is, frankly, not