subjunctive. The third peculiarity, also exemplified in 'Martin Arrowsmith,' is the omission of the verb to be in such sentences as He ordered a family in Shanty Town quarantined.' It may be prejudice, but I find all three of these constructions ugly and unnatural. They seem to be quite modern, and, like most novelties, they are worked to death.

The same tendency to exploit the verbal novelty appears in the constant recurrence of such 'vogue words as dope, in a great variety of senses; proposition, which, says Mr Fowler, in his recently published 'Dictionary of Modern English Usage,' is now, under American influence, misused in English for proposal, task, job, problem, objective, undertaking, occupation, trade, opponent, possibility, prospect, area, field, method, experiment; and guy, as in the following excerpt from a quite interesting story of low life and tall timber-'I got a job in Minneapolis drivin' truck. The guy I worked for was a square guy-a guy that worked harder than the men he hired. I'd time to do a lot of thinkin' by that time, and the more I watched this guy, the more thinkin' I done. I'd always said, like all them guys I run with, that a guy was a fool to work,' etc.

It might have been thought that the English had exhausted the possibilities of the verb to get, which foreigners not unnaturally regard as a possible substitute for nearly any verb in the language; but its use has been still further extended in America. It has become a verb of motion, commonly used in the imperative, and a euphemism for kill, as when the gunman 'gets' the sleuth or the sleuth 'gets' the gunman. The successful yegg-man makes his 'getaway' and the successful artist 'gets away with it,' while comprehension of a speaker's meaning can be conveyed by the formula 'I get you, Steve.'

This tendency to overwork a few words points to the real poverty of American, so far as it is used by the nonreading class. Often of foreign origin, living with parents who still speak a foreign language, acquiring in the elementary schools the merest smattering of English, which is bound to become vitiated by contact with uneducated Irish, Americanised Italian, Yiddish and the many other ingredients of the melting-pou, the American

'guy' of the humbler class must inevitably remain inarticulate. It is true that he makes up for his lack of vocabulary by the inventiveness of his figurative speech. Such similes as 'as sore as a flea on an iron dog,' or 'as much chance as an ice-cream freezer in hell,' have both originality and picturesqueness. In connection with the second it may be remarked that the conversation of American fictional characters suggests that the word hell may conveniently be used to introduce any kind of comment or observation.

It would seem that not only in business American, but also in conversational American, outside really cultured and literary circles, grammatical correctness is no longer regarded as either necessary or desirable. Mr Mencken's 'Americana, 1925' contains grotesque extracts from speeches and newspaper articles. 'American Speech' for May, 1926, quotes from a newspaper, 'Mr Louis R. Cohen is no longer connected with the firm of the Jay Dress Company, any debts incurred by him will not be responsible by us since Dec. 15, 1925.' Prof. Macknight, in English Words and their Background,' gives as a typical illustration of the American boy's language the sentence, Them guys ain't got no pep.' The conversational style of Mr Babbitt and his friends is distinctly impressionist in its insistence on the essential and its neglect of transitions. The same features appear, refined and grammatically corrected, in the American literary style, which, says Prof. Krapp, 'rests not upon a basis of structural organisation, but is more a matter of points, of successive brilliant moments, of verbal ingenuities and surprises. It is a restless, rapid, animated style, a sparkling if not a profound style, whereas British style is a style of thought and constructive understanding.' To put it crudely, the American style has the quality variously described as snap, vim, kick or pep. When it aims at dignity, it tends to verge on the 'highfalutin'. I have seldom read anything funnier, apart from its tragic subject, than Senator Smith's report on the 'Titanic' disaster of 1912.

The earliest traces of the American influence on English are to be found about 1800 in connection with rather censorious English protests against supposed new American coinages such as belittle, progress (as a verb),

The

lengthy, etc. Such protests were often begotten of ignorance and pedantry. Belittle is a very useful word, now quite at home in English, progress is, as I have already remarked, an American survival from Stuart times, lengthy expresses what cannot well be otherwise expressed, and its formation is parallel to that of strengthy, which had a respectable English history of four centuries before it was relegated to dialect. In the early part of the 19th century we find occasional allusions to American modes of expression. De Quincey in 1834 uses eventuate, explaining that he is 'speaking Yankeeishly,' and in the following year Michael Scott, in The Cruise of the Midge,' writes, the squib had eventuated, as the Yankees say, . . . in a zigzag or cracker.' In 1836 Frazer's Magazine' speaks offensively of those Yankeeisms which distinguish the lout from the gentleman.' The fantastic or humorous Yankee, guessing,' 'calculating,' and calculating,' and reckoning,' made his appearance as a character in English fiction. general attitude of the old country, as reflected in its writers and tourists, towards the States was one of unfriendly criticism, or of still more irritating condescension. But the use of a common language, commercial intercourse between the two countries, and a bloodrelationship which was still a reality, inevitably resulted in some importation of American words and expressions. The Red Indian vocabulary, with its characteristic metaphor, such as 'burying the hatchet,' 'going on the war-path,' etc., was made familiar to the English reading public in the very popular novels of Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851). It would be possible to compile from this source a very considerable list of words and phrases, not altogether new to English, for they had become more or less familiar before the Revolution, but passing in the 19th century from the pages of the 'Last of the Mohicans,' into the verbal treasure-house of the schoolboy and the figurative language of everyday English.

The real flood of Americanisms began with the humorists. Washington Irving and Hawthorne wrote approximately the same language as their English contemporaries, but Artemus Ward (C. F. Browne), who died untimely in 1865, gave his English readers and hearers something absolutely new. American humour,

with the entrancing oddity of its vocabulary, idiom and mental processes, conquered England almost at a blow. Bret Harte familiarised us with the vocabulary and metaphor, the tragedy and comedy, of the miner's camp, and Mark Twain, the least great of the three, expressed in droll and unexpected terms the homespun outlook of the cute and humorous American observer. The American dialect writers were also not without influence. Professor Krapp says

'American literary dialects which have been cultivated in any considerable body of literature are indeed not numerous and are readily recognisable as such from the literary monuments in which they appear. Of these the most familiar are the New England dialect, the Pike County or South-Western dialect of John Hay, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and others, · the Southern dialect and the negro dialect. All these dialects have been used sympathetically.'

Omitting Bret Harte and Mark Twain, who are not essentially dialect writers-in fact, the genuineness of Bret Harte's digger's language has been disputed-the two forms of American dialect literature which have been most popular in England are Lowell's New England 'Biglow Papers' and the Brer Rabbit' legends of Uncle Remus (Joel Chandler Harris). More than forty years ago at Cambridge, a taciturn student named Turpin was called by his friends Brer Terrapin, because he kept on saying nuffin.' Many people have attempted to describe or define American humour. The quality in it, from Artemus Ward to O. Henry, which appeals to us is its unexpectedness. Though totally unlike English humour, it can, by some fantastic mental process, be appreciated by the English mind.

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Apart from the influence of the professional humorists, the American element in English has arrived in successive waves, each wave reflecting a phase in the development of the United States. We have the Fenimore Cooper or backwoods contribution, the outcome of the struggle with the redskin, that of the explorer and the prospector, looking out for snags in the uncharted rivers, or anxious to see how his first washing of auriferous earth will pan out, and that of the railway pioneer. Then comes, dating especially from the American Civil War, the new political vocabulary, the replacing

of the stump, which was the backwoods orators rostrum, by the platform, which now even has wet and dry planks. When the North and South made peace, reconstruction became the mot d'ordre. Then arose a new political figure, the carpet-bagger, the needy and seedy adventurer from the North eager to exploit the negro vote. Our own day has seen the birth of the boot-legger, the real obstacle to any modification of strict prohibition. The era of frenzied finance gave us the wild-cat scheme, the bucket-shop and the alternations of booms and slumps. Mr Karel Čapek has recently criticised the American admiration of the 'big.' It is curious how often the word recurs in the language. The man who succeeds in big business, makes big money, and is looked upon locally as the big noise.

Of late years English has been inundated with American slang pure and simple. Intercourse between the two nations has never been so intimate. It would, I imagine, be difficult to find an Englishman of any notoriety who has not done a lecturing tour in the States, and there is to Englishmen such an attractiveness in American idiom that very slight contact with it is quickly reflected. Most English business men of any eminence cross the Atlantic frequently. As a result, they no longer speak of 'getting to business' but of 'getting down to brass tacks.' Sir Charles Higham, addressing business men at Nottingham (Feb. 4, 1926), is reported as saying that the newspapers were pulling better results than ever.' Sir H. Walford Davies, giving evidence before a B.B.C. committee on music, explained that, 'This jazz stuff has been fed to the public for years, and broadcasting is the best practicable way of counteracting its results.' His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, at a recent hunt lunch, expressed the opinion that Leicestershire farmers are bully. This word, belonging to an older stratum of American, occurs in an historic utterance attributed to Theodore Roosevelt-'I stand by the Ten Commandments. They are bully.' The forcible picturesque element even enters, with what some people would regard as a shade of irreverence, into utterances inspired by religious enthusiasm. A recent American allusion to the pep of Saint Paul, the first booster,' shows the same attitude of mind as the advertisement,