E.B. Osborn of the London Morning Post reviewed H.L. Mencken's book, The American Language (1921) and came away amused and in agreement with many of the same conclusions that the "Bard of Baltimore" had reached: "...Americans show superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness; for example, movie is better than cinema...The American language offers a far greater variety of synonyms than ours; transatlantic equivalents for drunk are "Piffled, spifflicated, awry-eyed, tanked, snooted, stewed, ossified, slopped, fiddled, edged, loaded, het-up, frazzled, jugged and burned."
Read about the Canadian Preferences in English...
- from Amazon: A Decade-by-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the Twentieth Century
Vanity Fair correspondent L.L. Jones cracked open a copy of The American Language by H.L. Mencken: "At last a man has arrived who knows something about English prose style under American conditions..."
The rest of his thoughts can be read in the attached review.
Culture critic H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956) reviewed American English by Gilbert M. Tucker:
"The fact is, of course, that American English is noticeably superior to British English in several important respects, and that not the least of these superiorities lies in the learned department of spelling. Here even the more intelligent Englishmen are against their own rules, and in favor of the American rules, and every year one notices a greater tendency among them to spell "wagon" with one "g" instead of two...The English "- our" ending, the main hallmark of English spelling, dies harder."
Having made a twenty year study of the English spoken in both Britain and the United States, Alois Brandl (1855 - 1940), chief Professor of English literature at the University of Berlin, found himself in an advantageous position that would allow him to make definitive conclusions about the evolution of the English language on American shores:
"Mr. Brandl has been comparing English as it is spoken by Englishmen and English as it is spoken by Americans, and has come to the conclusion that the former is not a whit purer than the latter... the English of Americans was not only improving, but was already as good as that of our English cousins... He is very severe on the Cockney accent, and declares that the English of the ordinary educated American is quite on an equality with that of the ordinary educated Englishman..."
Professor W.W. Skeat (1835 - 1912), chair of Anglo-Saxon Studies at Cambridge University, entirely agreed with the German savant and went on in greater detail along similar lines. No mention was made as to what unit of measure was applied to reach their deductions.
Heaven knows that the average American had it tough during 1931. The Great Depression was coming down hard on them - but the harshest blow came from our neighbor to the North who rejected our manner of spelling! When it came to the issue of assimilating immigrants on American shores and deporting "Alien Slackers", few groups yelled louder than the editors at The American Legion Weekly. In this anonymous editorial the author "gently" advocates for the recognition of American English in all schools with heavy immigrant numbers.
"Why not inform these aliens they are about to be taught the American language... [and] announce to the world that there is a new language? Why, even in Mexico they do not stand for calling their language the Spanish language. They insist it is the Mexican language... why not quit press-agenting John Bull and have our own language - the American language."
- from Amazon: A Decade-by-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the Twentieth Century
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