48. OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD(part -4)

The mountain regions may possess a somewhat greater abundance of archaic

expressions and pronunciations because of their relative isolation, but to imply

that the speech there is a near replica of the speech of Elizabethan England is

taking it too far. Apart from anything else, most of the mountain areas weren't

settled for a century or more after Elizabeth's death. H.L. Mencken traced this

belief to an early authority, one A.J. Ellis, and then plunged the dagger in with

the conclusion that "Ellis was densely ignorant of the history of the English

settlements in America, and ascribed to them a cultural isolation that never

existed." Still, it is easy to find the belief, or something very like it, repeated in

many books.

It is certainly true to say that America in general preserved many dozens of

words that would otherwise almost certainly have been lost to English. The best

noted, perhaps, is gotten, which to most Britons is the quaintest of

Americanisms. It is now so unused in Britain that many Britons have to have the

distinction between got and gotten explained to them—they use got for both—

even though they make exactly the same distinction with forgot and forgotten.

Gotten also survives in England in one or two phrases, notably "ill-gotten gains."

Sick likewise underwent a profound change of sense in Britain that was not

carried over to America. Shakespeare uses it in the modern American sense in

Henry V ("He is very sick, and would to bed"), but in Britain the word has come

to take on the much more specific sense of being nauseated. Even so, the broader

original sense survives in a large number of expressions in Britain, such as sick

bay, sick note, in sickness and in health, to be off sick (that is, to stay at home

from work or school because of illness), sickbed, homesick, and lovesick.Conversely, the British often use ill where Americans would only use injured, as

in newspaper accounts describing the victim of a train crash as being "seriously

ill in hospital."

Other words and expressions that were common in Elizabethan England that

died in England were fall as a synonym for autumn, mad for angry, progress as a

verb, platter for a large dish, assignment in the sense of a job or task (it survived

in England only as a legal expression), deck of cards (the English now say pack),

slim in the sense of small (as in slim chance), mean in the sense of unpleasant

instead of stingy, trash for rubbish (used by Shakespeare), hog as a synonym for

pig, mayhem, magnetic, chore, skillet, ragamuffin, homespun, and the

expression I guess. Many of these words have reestablished themselves in

England, so much so that most Britons would be astonished to learn that they

had ever fallen out of use there. Maybe was described in the original Oxford

English Dictionary in this century as "archaic and dialectal." Quit in the sense of

resigning had similarly died out in Britain. To leaf through a book was first

recorded in Britain in 161 3, but then fell out of use there and was reintroduced

from America, as was frame-up, which the Oxford English Dictionary in 1901

termed obsolete, little realizing that it would soon be reintroduced to its native

land in a thousand gangster movies.

America also introduced many words and expressions that never existed in

Britain, but which have for the most part settled comfortably into domestic life

there. Among these words and phrases are—and this really is a bare sampling—

commuter, bedrock, snag, striptease, cold spell, gimmick, baby-sitter, lengthy,

sag, soggy, teenager, telephone, typewriter, radio, to cut no ice, to butt in, to

sidetrack, hangover, to make good (to be successful), fudge, publicity, joyride,

bucket shop, blizzard, stunt, law-abiding, department store, notify, advocate (as a

verb), currency (for money), to park, to rattle (in the sense of to unnerve or

unsettle), hindsight, beeline, raincoat, scrawny, take a backseat, cloudburst,

grave-yard, know-how, to register (as in a hotel), to shut down, to fill the bill, to

hold down (as in keep), to hold up (as in rob), to bank on, – to stay put, to be

stung (cheated), and even stiff upper lip. In a rather more roundabout way, so to

speak, the word roundabout, their term for traffic circles, is of American origin.

More precisely, it was a term invented by Logan Pearsall Smith, an American

living in England, who was one of the members in the 19205 of the BBC

Advisory Committee on Spoken English. This lofty panel had the job ofdeciding questions of pronunciation, usage, and even vocabulary for the BBC.

Before Smith came along, traffic circles in Britain were called gyratory circuses

Of course, the traffic has not been entirely one way. Apart from the several

thousand words that the British endowed Americans with in the first place, they

have since the colonial exodus also given the world smog, weekend, gadget,

miniskirt, radar, brain drain, and gay in the sense of homosexual. Even so, there

is no denying that the great bulk of words introduced into the English language

over the last two centuries has traveled from west to east.

And precious little thanks we get. Almost from the beginning of the colonial

experience it has been a common assumption in Britain that a word or turn of

phrase is inferior simply by dint of its being American-bred. In dismissing the

"vile and barbarous word talented," Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed that

"most of these pieces of slang come from America." That clearly was ground

enough to detest them. In point of fact, I am very pleased to tell you, talented

was a British coinage, first used in 1422. Something of the spirit of the age was

captured in Samuel Johnson's observation in 1769 that Americans were "a race

of convicts and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of

hanging. – [ Quoted by Pyles, in Words and Ways of American English] A

reviewer of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) entreated

Jefferson to say what he would about the British character, but O spare, we

beseech you, our mother-tongue." Another, noting his use of the word belittle,

remarked: "It may be an elegant [word] in Virginia, and even perfectly

intelligible; but for our part all we can do is to guess at its meaning. For shame,

Mr. Jefferson!" [Quoted by Pyle's, Words and Ways of American English, page

17] Jefferson also coined the word Anglophobia; little wonder.

As often as not, these sneers showed themselves to be not only gratuitously

offensive but also etymologically under informed because the objects of their

animus were invariably British in origin.

Johnson disparaged glee, jeopardy, and smolder, little realizing that they had

existed in England for centuries. To antagonize, coined by John Quincy Adams,

was strenuously attacked. So was progress as a verb, even though it had been

used by both Bacon and Shakespeare. Scientist was called "an ignoble

Americanism" and "a cheap and vulgar product of trans-Atlantic slang."