American Language (45 page)

For each of the three earlier editions of this book I prepared a list of couplets showing variations between the everyday vocabularies of England and the United States, and in every instance that list had become archaic in some of its details before it could be got into print. The English reviewers had a great deal of sport demonstrating that a number of my Americanisms were really in wide use in England, but all they proved, save in a few cases of undeniable blundering, was that the exotic had at last become familiar. Others undertook to show that some term I had listed was not only accepted current English, but also discoverable in the works of Shakespeare, of Chaucer, or even of King Alfred, but as a rule the
most they could actually prove was that it had been good English once, but had fallen out of currency, and had then been taken back from the United States, where it had survived all the while. From those reviews I learned that opinions often differ as to whether a given word or phrase is in general use. Sometimes, two reviewers would differ sharply over a specimen, one arguing that every Englishman knew it and used it, and the other maintaining that it was employed only by traitorous vulgarians under the spell of the American movies.

Nevertheless, it is still possible to draw up an impressive roster of common terms that remain different in England and the United States, and so I attempt the business once more,
³⁷
beginning with some words from everyday home life:

Let us now turn to the field of another list of differences:

Similar lists might be prepared to show differences in a great many other fields — business, finance, government, politics, education, ecclesiastical affairs, and most of the arts and sciences, including even cookery. Despite their steady gobbling of Americanisms, the English continue faithful to many words and phrases that are quite unknown in this country, and so the two languages remain recognizably different, especially in their more colloquial forms. An
Englishman, walking into his house, does not enter upon the
first floor
as we do, but upon the
ground floor
. He may also call it the
first storey
(not forgetting the penultimate
e
), but when he speaks of the
first floor
he means what we call the
second floor
, and so on up to the roof, which is covered, not with
tin
or
shingles
, but with
tiles
or
leads
. He does not ask his servant, “Is there any
mail
for me?” but “Are there any
letters
for me?” for
mail
, in the American sense, is a word that he uses much less often than we do. There are
mail-trains
in his country, and they carry
mail-bags
(more often called
post-bags
) that are unloaded into
mail-vans
bearing signs reading “Royal
Mail,
” but in general he reserves the word
mail
for letters going to or from foreign countries, and he knows nothing of the compounds so numerous in American,
e.g., mail-car, -matter, -man, -box
, and
-carrier
. He uses
post
instead. The man who brings his
post
or
letters
is not a
letter-carrier
or
mailman
, but a
postman
. His outgoing letters are
posted
, not
mailed
, at a
pillar-box
, not at a
mail-box
. If they are urgent they are sent, not by
special delivery
, but by
express post
. Goods ordered by post on which the dealer pays the cost of transportation are said to arrive, not
postpaid
or
prepaid
, but
post-free
or
carriage-paid
. The American
mail-order
, however, seems to be coming in, though as yet the English have developed no mail-order firms comparable to Montgomery-Ward or Sears-Roebuck. To the list of railroad terms differing in the two countries, given in
Chapter IV
, Section 2, a number of additions might be made. The English have begun to use
freight
in our sense, though they prefer to restrict it to water-borne traffic, and they have borrowed
Pullman, ballast
and
track
, and begin to abandon
left-luggage room
for
cloak-room
, but they still get
in
or
out
of a train, not
on
or
off
it, and their only way of expressing what we mean by
commuter
is to say a
season-ticket-holder.
⁴⁵
They say a train is
up to
time, not
on
time, they designate what we call a station-agent by the more sonorous
station-master
, they call a ticket-agent a
booking-clerk
, a railway bill-of-lading a
consignment-note
, a bureau-of-information an
inquiry-office
, a bumper a
buffer
,
⁴⁶
a caboose a
brake-van
, and the aisle of a Pullman its
corridor
, and they know nothing, according to Horwill, of
way-stations, flag-stops, box-cars, chair-cars, check-rooms,
ticket-choppers, claim-agents, grade-crossings, classification-yards, flyers, long-
and
short-hauls, trunk-lines
and
tie-ups
. An English
guard
(not
conductor
)
⁴⁷
does not bellow “All aboard!” but “Take your seats, please!”
Railroad
itself is, to all intents and purposes, an Americanism; it has been little used in England for fifty years. In the United States the English
railway
is also used, but not as commonly as
railroad
. It has acquired the special sense of a line of rails for light traffic, as in
street-railway
(Eng.
tramway
), but it has been employed, too, to designate large railroad systems, and to differentiate between bankrupt railroad corporations and their more or less solvent heirs and assigns.
⁴⁸
To return to the mails, the kind we call domestic is
inland
in England and the kind we call foreign is
overseas
. Our division of the mails into first, second, third and fourth classes is unknown there. The English internal revenue is the
inland revenue
.