Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/156

 568 The English Language in America / offends, if the Southerner loops and curls the diphthong of cow, if the Westerner in pronouncing r retorts the tongue so far back upon itself that no clear vowel can be made before it, each can be told, with some hope of affecting both his belief and his practice, that such extremes have no appropriateness, are not indulged in, indeed, by the best speakers of his own region. If many Americans tend to lengthen the vowel in jrost and long, that is something that can be effectively discouraged without resorting to the equally objectionable extreme of say- ing "frahst" and "lahng. " But it is just as useless to teU a Westerner that he must not use an r as to tell a New Englander that he must furnish himself with one. It is, then, not a question of one standard that does not exist against no standards at all; it is a question of sensibly recognizing several standards that do exist and making the best ^ of them, criticizing the language of each main group according to its own standard, and not on grounds of right and wrong but on grounds of what may be regarded as appropriate. The peasant and the pedant, though one talks like a man and the other like a book, are alike in that each speaks his language in only one way; the educated man knows and employs his lan- guage in three or four ways. He has only an enlightened sense of appropriateness to guide him. But it is enough. How to get such a sense of appropriateness widely diffused among people of widely various opportunities, is the problem of American English. It is a serious problem. With Italian- American, Yiddish-American, Scandinavian- American, Ger- man-American yammering in our ears, it is not a time for academicians to regret that we write toward and not towards, or for teachers of "oral" English to endeavour to make broad our o's. Such scribal pharisaism, if it were harmless, would be amusing. But it is chiefly owing to such folly that sound and reasonable standards for American English have never come into recognition. What is needed is some knowledge of the facts, a willingness to face them with a sympathetic and ra- tional criticism, and above all a belief that life as lived in America has a value and an atmosphere of its own. It is distinctly to be desired that British authors should write whilst and different to; we rejoice when the hero begins his dinner with "an" oyster, talks d,bout "coals," takes "in" the Times, says