Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/42

 tor-guard. The authors are also forced to enter into explanations of the functions of the boots in an English hotel and of the clerk in an American hotel, and they devote a whole section, now mainly archaic, to a discourse upon the nature and uses of such American beverages as ''whiskey-sours. Martini-cocktails, silver-fizzes, John-Collinses, and ice-cream sodas''. In other works of the same sort there is a like differentiation between English and American. So long ago as 1912, an American of German ancestry, Alfred D. Schoch, of Bonneterre, Mo., published in Germany an American version of Prof. Dr. R. Kron's very popular little handbook, "The Little Londoner," and it remains to this day a valuable glossary of Americanisms, particularly in the department of idiom. More recently a group of Scandinavian American scholars have printed a work upon the United States, in Dano-Norwegian, in which an important chapter is devoted to the national speech. A vocabulary of Americanisms unknown in England is appended; in it I find butterine, cat-boat, clawhammer, co-ed, crags, dago, dumbwaiter, faker, freeze-out, gusher, hard-cider, hen-party, jitney, mortician, panhandle, patrolman, sample-room, shyster, sleuth, wet (noun), dry (noun), head-cheese and overhead-expenses. The guide-books for tourists almost always differentiate between the English and American vocabularies. Baedeker's "United States" has a glossary for Englishmen likely to be daunted by such terms as el, European-plan and sundae, and in Muirhead's "London and Its Environs" there is a corresponding one for Americans unfamiliar with bank-holiday, hoarding and trunk-call. Asiatics are equally observant of the fast-growing differences. In the first number of the Moslem Sunrise, a quarterly edited by Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadig, there is an explanatory note, apparently for the guidance of East Indian Mohammedan missionaries in the United States, upon certain peculiarities of the American vocabulary.