perpetually "in a state of flux." At any given moment the "standard" language consists of nothing else but the usages sanctioned by a dominating majority of the educated. Similarly the accepted colloquial language, during any generation, consists of the usages current among a dominating majority of those speaking the language concerned. In neither case can there be finality. It is impossible to render the area of meaning of one word or phrase so distinctly individual that it can never overlap or be confounded with that of another word or phrase. We cannot represent the words of a language as so many separate squares on an infinitely large chess-board; they are circles or irregular figures intersecting each other in all manner of intricate ways. One is often to a large extent synonymous with another; still more frequently it contains part of the same meaning, while-properly used-it lacks the other part. Is it to be expected that popular use, which is largely ignorant use or careless use, will maintain the due distinctions, so that one word will not come to be employed too freely in place of the other, until, perhaps, that other disappears into the limbo of forgotten things? If American English affects the one word or phrase and drops the other, is it to be expected that British English will necessarily do the same and not the reverse? Until all human minds are equipped with the same complete and exact linguistic information, possess the same alertly discriminating faculty and habit, and cultivate the same machinelike precision, there can be no lasting uniformity of diction.

It is the same with pronunciation. Until all our vocal and aural organs are minutely true to one pattern, and until no such thing as mishearing or indolence of articulation exists, there must be many mere loose approximations to the orthodox enunciation of vowels and consonants. Such vagaries, like diseases, are "catching," and a man is largely at the mercy of his local and social environment. Here also is it to be expected that what has happened to British English during the last three hundred years will be the same that has happened to American English during the same period? An Englishman might plausibly assume,

and commonly does assume, that the vastly mixed and more migratory population of America has been more likely to corrupt the old pronunciation than the purer and more locally-adhesive stock in Britain. I am far from saying that this actually is the case, for there are many counter-considerations, with which it would require too much space now to deal. But at least it might be worth the while of the American, when he suspects a more or less wilful affectation in what he loosely calls the English "accent," to reflect a little upon the possibilities.

II

THAT One may read the higher or more serious literature of both Britain and America without the least consciousness of divergence is indubitable. Personally I become aware of the local origin of such literature only through the name of the writer or publisher, through the local references, or through explicit remarkscomplimentary or otherwise-incidentally made upon the other nation. In conversation also, the better educated an American and a British speaker may be, the less dissimilarity is there in their ordinary diction. The "standard" language is to all intents and purposes identical, and it is a far cry to the supposed day when American English and British English of this grade will become "mutually unintelligible." Jests concerning that danger are but jests, to be taken with no more seriousness than those concerning the laying-in of a supply of overcoats in readiness for the ultimate cooling of the sun.

But no sooner does American writing pass to the less ambitious domains of popular fiction or "smart" and jaunty journalism than the British reader becomes aware of unfamiliar notes. This is not merely so when the writer is deliberately representing dialect. In such cases we naturally look for plentiful eccentricities of speech. We recognize that they are probably as much eccentricities from the American point of view as they are from our own. We no more take them for the ordinary language of America than we should take dialect in our own novelists for the ordinary language of

Great Britain. Thus whatever delusion many Americans may entertain upon the point-the humorous provincial phrasing of Mark Twain's characters is probably as fully appreciated by the British reader as by the same proportion of readers in America. Perhaps to us it even gains something in humor through a quaintness" of language which is necessarily somewhat less quaint to the people who are in more habitual touch with it. Probably, if we were fortunate enough to possess as superlative a humorist writing in Britain, the effect upon the American reader would be analogous. The colloquialism in Mark Twain is, indeed, far less "foreign" to ourselves than many a piece of ordinary writing in the "snappy" journalism of the United States. But this is, perhaps, by the way. The immediate point is that the more popular or ephemeral type of American book or article, even when neither in dialect nor in slang, does generally contain for us sundry indications of an exotic origin. In other words, it contains "Americanisms." This does not mean that we carp at or resent such unfamiliar expressions as those writings offer; it merely means that we are conscious of them; they suggest a widening, though not yet a perplexingly wide, rift within the common language. To some extent this is due to the mere words. American English does not merely talk, as the national coinage compels it to do, of dollars, cents, and nickels, where British English talks of pounds, half-sovereigns, pence, and coppers. It speaks of faucets and caskets where we speak of taps and coffins, and of bills where we speak of bank-notes, or, more commonly notes. By bills we mean something very different and much less welcome. With us, bug is a word avoided in fastidious society, since it has somehow become appropriated to the repulsive cimex lectularius. We have no such term as day-bed. The American eats crackers while we eat biscuits. What precise or unprecise sense attaches to the American pie is a question to which I have never been able to secure a definite answer. Though British, I do not imagine that biscuits, for example, is a better name than crackers. On the other hand one need not regard crackers as a better name

than biscuits. In British English crackers are a cheap kind of firework much employed by the fiendish small boy. To the uninitiated Briton crackers would be an amazing article of diet.

I do not propose to make any long list of such variants. It must suffice to cite a few at random. Perhaps, "in these days of dereliction and dismay,” Americans themselves have forgotten what is meant by a highball. To British English the word is entirely strange and calls for translation, although doubtless we possess the thing itself, under whatever other name it may taste as sweet. British English never makes a date with any one; it makes an appointment. That word has the disadvantage of being longer; en revanche, we have no elevators, but only lifts. Nor have we automobiles; they are motor-cars, motors, or, in social usage, more commonly just cars. In England a city is by ancient convention a town" with a bishop and a cathedral." In Australia it is a town sufficiently large and important to show a certain minimum assessment of property and revenue from rates. In America the term is apparently applied without much discrimination to more insignificant places, which British English would never dignify with any higher name than town.

Nevertheless, so far as the mere appellations of things are concerned, it cannot be said that American English needs any extensive glossary for the average Briton. He may not himself use the particular term, but he knows its meaning. It is alien, but it is not foreign. Moreover, even concerning this diversity of terminology, it is easy to overstate the case. Once, when travelling in Europe in company with an American, I observed that I was concerned about my "baggage." He said: "You are not a genuine Englishman; otherwise you would have said luggage." But the nuances of language are subtle. In point of fact one would not speak of luggage unless there were articles of some considerable size or weight. Smaller articles are variously described; colloquially you may call them your traps. I should have been unEnglish only if I had spoken of a grip (excellent as that term may be). Again, it is true that we speak of railway car

riages, but of tram-cars. Yet, at least in Australia, a railway-carriage is frequently referred to as a car, and habitually so when we refer to the several cars on a "sleeper." It is, however, probable that this usage is mainly due to the fact that American models and semi-American management have had much influence upon our railways. And, speaking of railways, I may remark that the term to which I was more accustomed in my English boyhood was railroad. The notion entertained by some Americans that coaches is British English for cars upon a railway is entirely baseless. No Briton ever uses that expression.

Professor Brander Matthews mentions a number of words which he appears to regard as unfamiliar in British English, if not exclusively American. One is wilt, in the sense of wither. It may be true that wilt is not one of the commonest elements in the British vocabulary; nevertheless it is tolerably frequent in circles in which I happen to have moved. But the sense is not identical with that of wither. It denotes the first drooping limpness or languescence of a leaf still green, whereas the leaf "withers" when it dries up and loses color. We have not borrowed or rather recovered-the word from America. It has simply lived on among the less prominent part of our vocabulary. Possibly, and not improbably, American literature has done something to remind us of its existence and to reinstate it in wider employment. The same is in all likelihood true of a number of other useful words which were tending to become obsolete in British mouths. A similar influence has doubtless been exerted upon American English by literature from "the other side." This, indeed, is the great saving-clause in the matter of linguistic separation. American books and magazines are now so widely read in the British Empire, and vice versa, that an averaging or assimilating is continually taking place to counteract a divergence which otherwise would certainly become undesirably wide.

To what extent America picks up new words or re-establishes old ones from British books and periodicals, it is for an American to say. On our side there is always a readiness to adopt an American

term which fills, as the advertisements put it, "a long-felt want." Especially is this the case with those imaginative or humorous creations in which America excels-not, I believe, because of any keener wit, but because of greater boldness and independence of tradition. The Briton, or at least the Englishman, is as apt to be conservative in language as he is in social traditions and business methods. But he is not so conservative that he will refuse an unmistakably useful thing when he finds it offered. When I read over the list of American compounds supplied by Professor Matthews, it appears to me that we have annexed the best of them and discarded the rest. Sky-scraper, fool-proof, and strap-hanger, are no longer distinctly American. Of sky-scrapers we have hitherto (happily, as we think) had fewer specimens and less need. Nevertheless they are on their way, at least in Australian towns, and the name is now as familiar as if it had been in the language ever since the days of Chaucer. Of things fool-proof the world has unfortunately always had dire need, and no British motor-engineer or inventor could resist borrowing the happy coinage of expression. Also, the morality of traffic companies being what it is, we are only too familiar with both the word straphangers and the victims whom it denotes. I am not sure as to the exact sense of joyride in America. In Australia it has borne a special application to the unauthorized use of a filched motor-car which is-naturally in the circumstances -made to travel "for all it is worth." Apart from these compounded examples, to call a thing "the limit" is part of our established usage. Incidentally it may be remarked that even ancient Greek colloquially applied the equivalent term peras in almost precisely the same sense.

On the other hand there is tending to become accentuated between the two branches of the language another kind of difference, of which Professor Matthews is doubtless quite conscious, but which he does not happen to mention. This is a difference in the phrasing and, to a certain extent, in the grammar. So far as I am able to ascertain, an American would find nothing in particular to arrest his attention in such a passage as the following:

"He strolled around the farm, closely examining its location. Back of the house were a number of outbuildings, of which he drew a plan, lest he forget any detail of their exact position."

Yet to any ordinary Briton this would contain four "peculiarities" which would stamp it as not produced by one of his own people. In the first place he would balk a little at location, for which he would have said situation. Around and back are of course among the everyday parts of his vocabulary, but it happens that he does not use them quite in the same manner. He would say round, and either at the back of or behind. But the idiom which would strike him as most strange would be lest he forget. British English uses such a "present subjunctive" only after a present tense, and very sparingly even then. Since "drew" is a past tense, it would say "he drew a plan, lest he might forget," or, more naturally, "for fear he might forget." Similarly, "They recommended that he take the matter into court," is a sentence which would never be heard in ordinary speech, nor be written in ordinary literature, from one end of Britain to the other. The normal expression would be either "They recommended that he should take" or "They recommended him to take." The question here is not whether the usage is logical (a point with which even the standard language by no means always concerns itself) or otherwise defensible. I am not arguing either for it or against it. The fact immediately relevant is that, in this usage, American English differentiates itself from British English of the same standing. I do not remember meeting with this particular idiom in American literature of the higher order, and it may possibly be disapproved by austere American grammarians; nevertheless it occurs so frequently in current productions of less pretensions that it appears to be at least recognized as a practice inoffensive to ears polite. Again, British English, though it says "I have seen him only once in two years," does not say "I have not set eyes on him in years," but "for years." Nor do we say "I had him bring me the document," but "I made him bring." It is also worth observing that American English is much

more free than British English with the possessive case of nouns. To us "the frost's sharpness" sounds entirely unnatural for "the sharpness of the frost." We regularly confine the possessive case to proper nouns, nouns denoting living beings, and things personified.

III

THERE is one class of writers by whom such linguistic divergences might be studied with advantage. It requires no detective skill to discern that short stories originally written for one side of the Atlantic are frequently recast for consumption on the other side. Instead of New York the scene becomes London, or instead of London it becomes New York. Peers and peeresses are substituted for members of "the Four Hundred" (if that term is not now out of date), or else Mr. and Mrs. Van Newport are substituted for Lord and Lady Park-lane. In the attempt to achieve local color there follows a certain necessary modification of the phraseology to suit the various social elements forming the dramatis persona. Who it is that readjusts the language and retouches the local color in the interchange, I have no means of knowing. Sometimes it is tolerably well done, sometimes very badly, but it is seldom that internal evidence of the recasting does not crop up in some incidental word or turn of phrase inadvertently retained. An American reader will of course be best able to detect the false tints of the replica when the original was British. On the other hand an American writer is tolerably sure to fall into some little trap or other if he attempts to reword his own production for a British periodical. It might be well for editors on either side to submit such readjustments to some competent and careful scribe who is himself "to the manner born." Any British writer who, without having lived sufficiently long in America, endeavors to make an American speak convincingly in colloquial American English is likely to make a mess of it, just as an American writer, insufficiently habituated to England, almost invariably makes a mess of the phraseology or pronunciation of either the British aristocrat or the British proletarian.