American English

“ Or, if an instance nearer home is needed, the lover of English need only note what that rich language has shrunk to on the lips, and in the literature, of the heterogeneous hundred millions of American citizens who, without uniformity of tradition or recognised guidance, are being suffered to work their many wills upon it. ”

“ When an Englishman and an American meet, no matter how casually, their common tongue furnishes, immediately, a means of communication which makes them "Native to the manner born." A few spoken words, a few lines of correspondence, open up, if need be, the whole life of each nation: its politics, its forms and principles of justice, its religion, its domestic interests and feelings, its science, its drama, its literature, its past, present, and future. It establishes a sympathy and bond in all common things. ”

“ The English faces and the way that English is spoken alone would tell that; while in business quarters there is a staid dignity and moderation that is very noticeable, and a want of American push and hurrah. ”

“ We might well have expected them to rise like an exhalation from the floor, and greet us with the solemn declaration, “We are no more American than you are, with your English language, which you go round with here disappointing people by not speaking it through your nose. ”

“ Without fortuitous advantage the Americans proved too much for the redoubtable English, though superior in number, therefore universally arrogating to themselves even with inferior numbers, a mastery but faintly questioned by most Americana; no accident to depreciate the triumph of the younger over the older nation; no more fortune than what favors the bravest. ”

“ I ascribe the superiority of the "American" mode of expression over the "English," when untrammelled as in song, in part to the greater personal liberty, the greater want of conventionality, the vast extent of our territory, and our almost constantly clear and unclouded sky; all these being conditions that assist the free exercise of one's natural endowments. ”

“ That in keeping with the logic of past events in other languages American English, in a new physical and moral environment, has undergone a radical modification of vocal type.
2. That Americans can not be expected to conform to British customs so far as mere emphasis, inflections, and timbre of voice are concerned. ”

“ When the European sees in the individual American, or in a dozen individual Americans, certain peculiarities, inelegancies, and sometimes even impertinences—call them what you will,—he is too prone to think that these are the essentials of the American character. The essentials of the American character are the essentials of the English character—with elbow-room. ”

“ And, more significant still to the American who watches his language go to pieces under the strain put upon it by the exigencies of the pulsating American life, there is a language here which conserves all these attitudes and nuances of feeling, and may still, unlike our modern English, express both simplicity and ardor with perfect freedom from banality. ”

“ Dominating this American tradition is, dominating, almost tyrannical, for one reason only, but that a strong one, a fact not a convention, a factor, not a mere influence—dominating because of the English language. ”

“ Fancy an Englishman considering what demeanor he should assume before entering a drawing-room! The modern American hasn't the least idea from whom he is descended; what right has he to claim anything of our glorious English heritage?—or to say there is English blood in him at all? ”

“ Since the most distinctive traits of the American are initiative and wealth of resource, no time was lost in making such additions to the English speech as seemed to supply a felt need, and that, too, without any special reference to British models and precedents. ”

“ It is a body of literature, it is a method of thinking, it is a definition of emotions, it is the exponent and the symbol of a civilization. You cannot adopt English without adapting yourself in some measure to the English, or the Anglo-American tradition. You cannot adopt English political words, English literary words, English religious words, the terms of sport or ethics, without in some measure remaking your mind on a new model. If you fail or refuse, your child will not. He is forcibly made an American, in ideas at least, and chiefly by language. ”

“ There can be no rational doubt, I think, that the English language has gained, and is gaining, enormously by its expansion over the American continent. The prime function of a language, after all, is to interpret the ‘form and pressure’ of life—the experience, knowledge, thought, emotion, and aspiration of the race which employs it. ”

“ The American has a way of writing, figuratively, with a dictionary at his elbow and a grammar within reach. There are few educated Englishmen who do not consider their own authority—the authority drawn from their school and university training—superior to that of any dictionary or grammar, especially of any American one. [220:1] So it has come about that, while the tendency of the American people is constantly to become more exact and more accurate in its written and spoken speech, the English tendency is no less constantly towards a growing laxity ”

“ The idea that the English language is degenerating in America is an absolutely groundless illusion. Take them all round, the newspapers of the leading American cities, in their editorial columns at any rate, are at least as well written as the newspapers of London; and in magazines and books the average level of literary accomplishment is certainly very high. ”

“ Still the English seem to me a religious people; they have leisure enough to say grace and give thanks before and after meals, and their institutions tend to keep alive the feelings of reverence which cannot be said to be distinctive of our own people.
In coming out of the cathedral, on the Sunday I just mentioned, a gentleman addressed me as a fellow-countryman. There is something,--I will not stop now to try and define it,--but there is something by which we recognize an American among the English before he speaks and betrays his origin. ”

“ An American born and bred, I early noted, as everyone else in like case must note, certain salient differences between the English of England and the English of America as practically spoken and written—differences in vocabulary, in syntax, in the shade and habits of idiom, and even, coming to the common speech, in grammar. ”

“ We have modified the common language far less than we have modified the common law. We have kept alive here many a word and many a meaning which was well worthy of preservation, and which our kin across the seas had permitted to perish. Professor Earle of Oxford, in his comprehensive volume on ‘English Prose,’ praises American authors for refreshing old words by novel combinations. ”

“ English originally, the American is still English in his essentials, modified chiefly by the circumstances of his material environment, the magnificence of his estate, the width of his horizons, the disciplining of his nature by the Titanic struggle with the physical conditions of the wilderness and the necessary development of those qualities of resourcefulness, buoyancy, and self-reliance which the exigencies of that struggle have demanded. ”

“ For our novelists to try to write Americanly, from any motive, would be a dismal error, but being born Americans, I then use "Americanisms" whenever these serve their turn; and when their characters speak, I should like to hear them speak true American, with all the varying Tennesseean, Philadelphian, Bostonian, and New York accents. If we bother ourselves to write what the critics imagine to be "English," we shall be priggish and artificial, and still more so if we make our Americans talk "English." ”

“ Despite the fact that our mother tongue is called English we have developed an American speech with its idiosyncrasies and idioms, a speech whose purity is not to be measured by its conformity to the speech of the British Isles. ”

“ The attitude of the extremists on the one side is well represented by the dictum of Richard Grant White:220 ‘In language whatever is peculiarly American is bad.’ In other words, the absolute test of correctness is the English standard, which is notably the usage of the educated classes in the great centre of English life. ”

“ Of the intrinsic differences that separate American from English the chief have their roots in the obvious disparity between the environment and traditions of the American people since the seventeenth century and those of the English. ”

“ The English, however, just know of our existence, and if they get a general idea twice a year of our progress in politics, they are comparatively well informed. Our periodical literature is never even heard of. Of course there can be no offence to the individuals themselves in anything which a visitor could write, calculated to convey an idea of the person or manners of distinguished people to the American public. ”

“ Only by overcoming inability to speak English, by eliminating illiteracy among aliens, and by instilling the ideals, attitudes, and habits of thought of America, can we hope to make real American citizens of the strangers within our gates.... ”

“ The English with others is suffering continual alterations. America, placed at a distance from those nations, will feel, in a much less degree, the influence of the assimilating causes; at the same time, numerous local causes, such as a new country, new associations of people, new combinations of ideas in arts and science, and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe, will introduce new words into the American tongue. ”

“ And as yet these foreign elements have but little modified the essential type; for just as the English nature wrought its steady will through the centuries, so the American characteristics have been imposed on all the welter of nationalities that swirl together in the United States. ”

“ He previously remarks on the tendency of aristocracy to make men more sympathizing with persons of their own peculiar class, and less so toward those of lower degree; and he then contrasts American manners with the English, claiming that the Americans are much the more affable, mild, and social. ”

“ Along with the training in English went instruction in American ideals, in the reasons why America was in the war and in what the war meant to them individually. The aim was to give to these foreign-born men the kind of training in patriotism and in democratic ideals, condensed into a few weeks, that the American gets by birthright and surroundings. ”

“ What is really strange is that the educational authorities have been prepared to accept and to utilise in English schools many American educational books carrying American forms of speech and American spelling. ”

“ That educated Americans, and all of them accustomed to good society at home, speak the English language with as much propriety and purity as the most cultivated Englishmen, is certainly true, and it may safely be added that the masses of the people in America, born to the manner, speak it far better. ”

“ We have the material with which to work, and the tools to do the work with. It is America's opportunity to lay the foundations for a new flowering of English verse, and to lay them as broad as they are strong. ”

“ We Americans are English in blood, English in speech, English in religion, English in the essentials of our governmental system, English in the essentials of our civilization; and so, let us hope, for the honor of the blend, for the honor of the blood, for the honor of the race, that that word got there through lack of heedfulness, and will not be suffered to remain. ”

“ A multitude of English, educated at the universities, bred into their society with manners, ability, and the gifts of fortune, are every day confronting the peers on a footing of equality, and outstripping them, as often, in the race of honor and influence. ”

“ If you believe them, no other people but the English are born with a political understanding or forecast: why then should the English, who come here, not apply the same doctrines also to the Americans? and why should they not, occasionally, join our own fashionable people in depreciating the advantages of our government, and speak disrespectfully of those whom ourselves are accustomed to treat with so little ceremony? ”

“ Those circumstances, which most excite and agitate the mind of a nation, likewise mould and shape its future action. What has most deeply interested the American mind? If we trace back the chain of our history to the fearless days of our infancy, we shall find that its absorbing interests have been of a political nature. True, there were some minds among that matchless band of our New England ancestry, who, with the great volume of nature open before them, wrote with a spirit of inspiration, and soared to the high heavens of literature. ”

“ When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: liberty, sir, was then the primary object. ”

“ But it is not for me to decide the very momentous question, as to which nation speaks the best English. The Americans generally improve upon the inventions of others; probably they may have improved upon our language. ”

“ A brief inquiry into this question may be found to have more than a merely historic interest—to have a direct bearing, indeed, upon the problems of the future, not only for America, but for the English-speaking world. ”

“ It was so easy for me to grasp the significance of certain general aspects of American life that I felt I was fully competent to state how the American people lived, what their racial, political, and religious tendencies were, what their idioms of speech meant, and to interpret their amorous, martial, dolorous, and joyous moods with perfect accuracy and ease. ”