A DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN ENGLISH

New Zealand Herald, Volume 81, Issue 25054, 18 November 1944, Page 10

A DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN ENGLISH

By H. W. HORWILL, author of "An Anglo-American Interpreter" and "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage"

"Midway Signs Limey Prof, to Dope Yank Talk." Under this appropriately worded headline the Chicago Tribune of October 18, 1924, announced the appointment of Sir ■William Craigie to be a Professor of "English at Chicago University, with the special function of editing a dictionary of American English on the lines of the Oxford English Dictionary. I must interrupt myself at the start by explaining that the University of Chicago is situated in the suburban) district of that city known since the -exposition of 1893 as the Midway, and that Limey, as a synonym for Britisher, recalls the issue of limejuice long ago to jailors of the British Navy. In 1925, then. Sir William Craigie ■went into voluntary exile for several years in the home town of the Mr Dooley who once predicted that "when we Americans are through with the English language, it will look as if it had been run over by a musical 'Comedy." Sir William collected around him a large staff of competent assistants to prepare a dictionary of the American variety of our speech on the pattern of

the monumental work that had so long been in progress at Oxford. Since 1986 the results of their labours appeared in a succession of fascicles of "A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles" (Milford), of which the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth have just been published. They cover the section from Outdoors to Schoolhouse Preacher, and bring up to 2036 the total number of two-column pages of small print, each of them measuring twelve inches bv nine. They have dredged all manner of .American books and papers of all gjeriods. including the Congressional Record (America's Hansard) —an especially valuable source, inasmuch as the speakers in the debates represent the varieties of idiom distinctive of every part of the American Union. The scale on which this great work has been planned may be indicated by the fact that the word red and its compounds take up twenty- ic columns. The D.A.E. will administer some severe shocks to those linguistic protectionists who would preserve our language from contamination by imports from abroad. They will be horrified by discovering that they are themselves guilty of debasing the English tongue by the constant use of American inventions.

If they live up to their convictions they will need to forswear the use, for instance, of outdoors, overcoat, paper currency, patent leather, philopoena, pitch-pine, place (identify), policyholder, pre-empt, proof-reader, pushbutton, rag baby, rock-bottom, and Santa Clans. The dated record of these familiar terms shows incontrovertibly that they originated in the United States. Progress, as a verb, has had a singular history. It was common in Britain in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth it became obsolete there but was retained in America. After 1800 it was taken back to England. So'uthey used it in 1809. One might, indeed, adduce evidence from the D.A.E. to support the theory that it is the Americans, after all, that are the real conservatives. They have preserved in their everyday speech some locutions that we have almost or quite discarded, or that we no longer use 111 their original sense; e.g., peek, pig (young hog), pitcher, platter, preceptor, quit, raise (rear), rare (underdone), right here, rod (linear measure) and sav-so. One might add a few instances overlooked hv the compilers of this dictionary, such as pled, proponent, proven, and remember of. Extract from an article in a recent issue of John O'London'a Weekly.