Americanisms and Briticisms; with other essays on other isms

by Brander Matthews

The most of those who write with ease in British journals, deploring the prevalence of "American spelling," have never carried their education so far as to acquire that foundation of wisdom which prevents a man from expressing an opinion on subjects as to which he is ignorant. The object of education, it has been said, is to make a man know what he knows, and also to know how much he does not know. Despite the close sympathy between the intellectual pursuits, a student of optics is not qualified to express an opinion in esthetics; and on the other hand, a critic of art may easily be ignorant of science. Now literature is one of the arts, and philology is a science. Though men of letters have to use words as the tools of their trade, orthography is none the less a branch of philology, and philology does not come by nature. Literature may even exist without writing, and therefore without spelling. Homer, the trouvères, and the minnesingers practised their art perhaps without the aid of letters. Writing, indeed, has no necessary connection with literature, still less has orthography. A literary critic is rarely a scientific student of language; he has no need to be; but being ignorant, it is the part of modesty for him not to expose his ignorance. To boast of it is unseemly.

Far be it from me to appear as the defender of the "American spelling" which the British journalists denounce. This "American spelling" is less absurd than the British spelling only in so far as it has varied therefrom. Even in these variations there is abundant absurdity. Once upon a time most words that now are spelled with a final c had an added k. Even now both British and American usage retains this k in hammock, although both British and Americans have dropped the needless letter from havoc; while the British retain the k at the end of almanack and the Americans have dropped it. Dr. Johnson was a reactionary in orthography as in politics; and in his dictionary he wilfully put a final k to words like optick, without being generally followed by the publick—as he would have spelled it. Music was then musick, although, even as late as Aubrey's time, it had been musique. In our own day we are witnessing the very gradual substitution of the logical technic for the form originally imported from France—technique. As yet, so far as I have observed, no attempts have been made to modify the foreign spelling of clique and oblique.

I am inclined to think that technic is replacing technique more rapidly—or should I say less slowly?—in the United States than in Great Britain. We Americans like to assimilate our words and to make them our own, while the British have rather a fondness for foreign phrases. A London journalist recently held up to public obloquy as an "ignorant Americanism" the word program, although he would have found it set down in Professor Skeat's Etymological Dictionary. "Programme was taken from the French," so a recent writer reminds us, "and in violation of analogy, seeing that, when it was imported into English, we had already anagram, cryptogram, diogram, epigram, etc." The logical form program is not common even in America, and British writers seem to prefer the French form, as British speakers still give a French pronunciation to charade, which in America has long since been accepted frankly as an English word. So we find Mr. Andrew Lang, in his Angling Sketches, referring to the asphalte: surely in our language the word is either asphaltum or asphalt.

Here, if the excursus may be permitted, I should like to note also that the American willingness to acknowledge the English language as good enough for the ordinary purposes of speech shows itself in our acceptance of certain words of foreign origin as now fully naturalized, and therefore so to be treated. The Americans are inclined to consider that formula, for example, and criterion and memorandum and cherub and bureau are now good English words, forming their plurals by the addition of an s. Our first cousins, once removed, across the Atlantic seem to be still in doubt; and therefore we find them making the plurals of these words in accordance with the rules of the various languages from which the several words were derived. So in British books we meet the Latin plurals, formulæ and memoranda; the Greek plural, criteria; the Hebrew plural, cherubim; and the French plural, bureaux. Oddly enough, the writers who use these foreign plurals are unwilling to admit that the word thus modified is a foreign word, for more often than not they print it without italics, although frankly foreign words are carefully italicized. Possibly it is idle to look for any logic in anything which has to do with modern English orthography on either side of the ocean.

Perhaps, however, there is less even than ordinary logic in the British journalist's objection to the so-called "American spelling" of meter; for why should any one insist on metre while unhesitatingly accepting its compound diameter? Mr. John Bellows, in the preface to his inestimable French-English and English-French pocket dictionary, one of the very best books of reference ever published, informs us that "the Act of Parliament legalizing the use of the metric system in this country [England] gives the words meter, liter, gram, etc., spelled on the American plan." Perhaps now that the sanction of law has been given to this spelling, the final er will drive out the re which has usurped its place. In one of the last papers that he wrote, Lowell declared that "center is no Americanism; it entered the language in that shape, and kept it at least as late as Defoe." "In the sixteenth and in the first half of the seventeenth century," says Professor Lounsbury, "while both ways of writing these words existed side by side, the termination er is far more common than that in re. The first complete edition of Shakespeare's plays was published in 1623. In that work sepulcher occurs thirteen times; it is spelled eleven times with er. Scepter occurs thirty-seven times; it is not once spelled with re, but always with er. Center occurs twelve times, and in nine instances out of the twelve it ends in er." So we see that this so-called "American spelling" is fully warranted by the history of the English language. It is amusing to note how often a wider and a deeper study of English will reveal that what is suddenly denounced in Great Britain as the very latest Americanism, whether this be a variation in speech or in spelling, is shown to be really a survival of a previous usage of our language, and authorized by a host of precedents.

Of course it is idle to kick against the pricks of progress, and no doubt in due season Great Britain and her colonial dependencies will be content again to spell words that end in er as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and Spenser spelled them. But when we get so far towards the orthographic millennium that we all spell sepulcher, the ghost of Thomas Campbell will groan within the grave at the havoc then wrought in the final line of "Hohenlinden," which will cease to end with even the outward semblance of a rhyme to the eye. We all know that

"On Linden, when the sun was low,

All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,

And dark as winter was the flow

Of Iser, rolling rapidly,"

and those of us who have persevered may remember that with one exception every fourth line of Campbell's poem ends with a y—the words are rapidly, scenery, revelry, artillery, canopy, and chivalry—not rhymes of surpassing distinction, any of them, but perhaps passable to a reader who will humor the final syllable. The one exception is the final line of the poem—

"Shall be a soldier's sepulchre."

To no man's ear did sepulchre ever rhyme justly with chivalry and canopy and artillery, although Campbell may have so contorted his vision that he evoked the dim spook of a rhyme in his mind's eye. A rhyme to the eye is a sorry thing at best, and it is sorriest when it depends on an inaccurate and evanescent orthography.