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, altho 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, diagram, 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, and to trait, which in America have long since been accepted frankly as English words.
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 Shakspere’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 Shakspere and Ben Jonson and Spenser spelled them. But when we get so far toward 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 rime 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 rimes 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 rime justly with chivalry and canopy and artillery, altho Campbell may have so contorted his vision that he evoked the dim spook of a rime in his mind’s eye. A rime to the eye is a sorry thing at best, and it is sorriest when it depends on an inaccurate and evanescent orthography.
Dr. Johnson was as illogical in his keeping in and leaving out of the u in words like honor and governor as he was in many other things; and the makers of later dictionaries have departed widely from his practice, those in Great Britain still halting half-way, while those in the United States have gone on to the bitter end. The illogic of the burly lexicographer is shown in his omission of the u from exterior and posterior, and his retention of it in the kindred words interiour and anteriour; this, indeed, seems like wilful perversity, and justifies Hood’s merry jest about “Dr. Johnson’s Contradictionary.” The half-way measures of later British lexicographers are shown in their omission of the u from words which Dr. Johnson spelled emperour, governour, oratour, horrour, and dolour, while still retaining it in favour and honour and a few others.
The reason for his disgust generally given by the London man of letters who is annoyed by the “American spelling” of honor and favor is that these words are not derived directly from the Latin, but indirectly through the French; this is the plea put forward by the late Archbishop Trench. Even if this plea were pertinent, the application of this theory is not consistent in current British orthography, which prescribes the omission of the u from error and emperor, and its retention in colour and honour—altho all four words are alike derived from the Latin through the French. And this plea fails absolutely to account for the u which the British insist on preserving in harbour and in neighbour, words not derived from the Latin at all, whether directly or indirectly through the French. An American may well ask, “If the u in honour teaches etymology, what does the u in harbour teach?” There is no doubt that the u in harbour teaches a false etymology; and there is no doubt also that the u in honour has been made to teach a false etymology, for Trench’s derivation of this final our from the French eur is absurd, as the old French was our, and sometimes ur, sometimes even or. Pseudo-philology of this sort is no new thing; Professor Max Müller noted that the Roman prigs used to spell cena (to show their knowledge of Greek), coena, as if the word were somehow connected with κοινή.
Thus we see that the u in honour suggests a false etymology; so does the ue in tongue, and the g in sovereign, and the c in scent, and the s in island, and the mp in comptroller, and the h in rhyme; and there are many more of our ordinary orthographies which are quite as misleading from a philological point of view. As the late Professor Hadley mildly put it, “our common spelling is often an untrustworthy guide to etymology.” But why should we expect or desire spelling to be a guide to etymology? If it is to be a guide at all, we may fairly insist on its being trustworthy; and so we cannot help thinking scorn of those who insist on retaining a superfluous u in harbour.