49. OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD(part -5)

Americans, alas, were often somewhat sniveling cohorts in this caviling—

perhaps most surprisingly Benjamin Franklin. When the Scottish philosopher

David Hume criticized some of his Americanisms, Franklin meekly replied: "I

thank you for your friendly admonition relating to some unusual words in the

pamphlet. It will be of service to me. The pejorative and the colonize … I give up as bad; for certainly in writings intended for persuasion and for general

information, one cannot be too clear; and every expression in the least obscure is a fault; The unshakable too, tho clear, I give up as rather low. The introducing

new words, where we are already possessed of old ones sufficiently expressive,

I confess must be generally wrong… . I hope with you, that we shall always in

America make the best English of this island our standard, and I believe it will

be so." And yet he went right on introducing words: eventuate, demoralize,

constitutionality. This servility persisted for a long time among some people.

William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the New York Evening Post and one of the

leading journalists of the nineteenth century in America, refused to allow such

useful words as lengthy and presidential into his paper simply because they had been dismissed as Americanisms a century earlier. Jefferson, more heroically,

lamented the British tendency to raise "a hue and cry at every word he [Samuel

Johnson] has not licensed."

The position has little improved with time. To this day you can find authorities in Britain attacking such vile "Americanisms" as maximize, minimize, and input,

quite unaware that the first two were coined by Jeremy Bentham more than a

century ago and the last appeared more than boo years ago in Wycliffe's

translation of the Bible. Loan as a verb (rather than lend) is often criticized as an

Americanism, when in fact it was first used in England a full eight centuries ago.

The style book of the Times of London sniffily instructs its staff members that

"normalcy should be left to the Americans who coined it. The English [italics

mine] is normality." In point of fact normalcy is a British coinage. "The English attitude toward Americanisms is still quite frankly hostile."

Indeed, it occasionally touches new peaks of smugness. In 1930, a Conservative

member of Parliament, calling for a quota on the number of American films

allowed into Britain, said: "The words and accent are perfectly disgusting, and

there can be no doubt that such films are an evil influence on our language."

recently,during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is." (We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless, non elective institution. It is an arresting fact of British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted status simply because he is the residue of an illicit coupling 300 years before between a monarch and an orange seller.) Even when they have not been actively hostile, the British have often struck an aloof, not to say fantastical, attitude to the adoption of American words. In The King's English (1931), the Fowler brothers, usually paragons of common sense in matters

linguistic, take the curious and decidedly patronizing view that although there is nothing wrong with American English, and that it is even capable of evincing

occasional flashes of genius, it is nonetheless a foreign tongue and should be

treated as such. "The English and the American language and literature are both good things; but they are better apart than mixed." They particularly cautioned

against using three vulgar Americanisms: placate, transpire, and antagonize.

Putting aside the consideration that without America 's contribution English

today would enjoy a global importance about on a par with Portuguese, it is not too much to say that this attitude is unworthy of the British. It is at any rate an

arresting irony that the more dismissive they grow of American usages, the more lavishly they borrow them—to the extent of taking phrases that have no literal meaning in British English. People in Britain talk about doing something on a shoestring even though the word there is shoelace. They talk about the 64,000- dollar question, looking like a million bucks, having a megabucks salary, stepping on the gas (when they fuel their cars with petrol), and taking a

rain check even though probably not one Briton in a hundred knows what a

rain check is. They have even quietly modified their grammar and idiom to fit the American model. Ernest Gowers, in the revised edition of A Dictionary of

Modern English Usage, noted that under the influence of American usage the

British had begun to change aim at doing into aim to do, haven't got to don't

have, begun using in instead of for in phrases like "the first time in years," and

started for the first time using begin to with a negative, as in "This doesn't begin to make sense." And these changes go on. Just in the last decade or so, truck has begun driving out lorry. Airplane is more and more replacing aeroplane. The American sense of billion (1,000,000,000) has almost completely routed the

British sense ( 1, 000, 000 000 , 000 ).