AMERICANISMS IN ENGLISH

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22904, 11 June 1936, Page 3

AMERICANISMS IN ENGLISH

Mr H. L. Mencken has contributed to the Yale Review a lively article on the unwillingness of the custodians of English in England to absorb vigorous new words and phrases that their American cousins keep coining to reinforce the common tongue. We English have lost (says the Manchester Guardian) that “ Elizabethan ecstasy in word-making ” which led Shakespeare to put more new words into circulation than any other, writer; and we have lost, too, (he courage to absorb the words that others coin. In the result our variant of the language “ at its best shows excellent manners and even a kind of mellifluous elegance,” but it “ lacks novelty, variety, audacity.” In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries refusal to adopt even (he most useful Americanisms was explained by dislike and jealousy of the new country that had emerged with the Declaration of Independence. When Jefferson in 1787 coined the excellent word “belittle,” the London Review besought him to “ spare the mother tongue,” and it took more tlian half a century for the word to establish itself. Now it has been followed into secure acceptance by carpet-bagger, gerrymander, filibuster, bunkum, and other words that have come across the ocean. But two causes, perhaps, operate to make us slow in absorbing Americanisms at present. For one thing, they change at such a rate that the forcible argot of one year may be forgotten or discarded the' next. For another, the impact of Hollywood films is already implanting American words and phrases on the younger generation, and these not always the most admirable, at a rate that alarms ns into conservatism.