Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/157

 The Americanization of English 569 "directly" and "expect,"' and knows exactly what he means when he says "sick" and "bug," or rather knows exactly why he does not say them. We should be "very disappointed" if he did not do these things ; it is all part of the British atmos- phere ; it goes with the very smell of the book. These things are not good or bad, right or wrong, in themselves; they are merely appropriate, or the reverse. And Americans will generally speak well when they are taught to look for the best in the speech of their neighbours, pruning the more luxuriant growths of dialect and tempering their speech in the glowing heat of the common literary tradition; no longer reluctant to speak well because "good" English is unnatural and unattain- able, but conscious that a really good English, such as the world will value according to their worth as individuals and as a nation, is their rightful heritage to enter upon and enjoy. Great things have been expected of American English in the past. A Frenchman, Roland de la Platiere (1791), saw in America, a land so fortunately situated, so happily governed, with a people so constituted that they "fraternized with the universe" and presumably to be trusted to benefit by associa- tion with the primitive virtues of Indians and negroes, the country which was most likely to develop its speech into a universal language. Whitman, in the notes published as An American Primer, dug deep in the recesses of language for a word-hoard that should be distinctly American, and rolled the aboriginal names — Monongahela — with venison richness upon his palate. He saw an America cleared of all names that smack of Europe, an American vocabulary enriched with many words not in the print of dictionaries. American writers are to show far more freedom in the use of words. . . . Ten thousand native idiomatic words are growing, or are today already grown, out of which vast numbers could be used by American writers, with meaning and effect — words that would be welcomed by the nation, being of the national blood — words that would give that taste of identity and locality which is so dear in literature. No such drastic Americanization of the language as was prophesied has come to pass, or is likely to come to pass. The ' In the senses of as soon as and suppose, not unheard, indeed, in America.