Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/33

 phases of the Great Stupidity. The current English of today owes a great deal to America, and though certain American writers carry to excess the cult of slang, that tendency is not in the least affecting serious American literature and journalism. Much of the best and purest English of our time has been, and is being, written in America.…If English journalists make a show of arrogant and self-righteous Briticism, it is quite possible that a certain class of American journalists may retaliate by setting afoot a deliberately anti-British movement and attempting (as an American has wittily put it) to "deserve well of mankind by making two languages grow where only one grew before."

Another attorney for the defense is Richard Aldington, the poet. "Are Americans," he asks, "to write the language they speak, which is slowly but inevitably separating itself from the language of England, or are they to write a devitalized idiom learned painfully from hooks or from a discreet frequentation of London literary cliques?" Now and then, says Mr. Aldington, "one encounters an American who speaks perfect standard [i. e., British] English, but the great majority of Americans make no attempt to do so." He goes on:

Language is made by the people; it is only fixed by writers and orators. When language, especially that of poetry, is too far removed from that of the people, it becomes conventional and hieratic, like church Latin; or languid and degenerate, like modern official French poetry. When language is conventionally used by writers it becomes burdened with clichés and dead phrases. If American soldiers, newspapers and popular novels are evidence, it is clear that the American people is evolving a new language, full of vigorous and racy expressions. In spite of the phenomenon of the "pure-English" American, mentioned above, I am compelled to believe that the majority of his countrymen use an idiom which differs considerably from that which he employs. Whitman wrote a language which is intelligible to all Englishmen (far more so than that of James); but it seems to us inaccurate, harsh and crude, for all its vigor and occasional rare beauty. The language of the American people—judging from a comparison between newspapers of the Civil War and of today