Questions at Issue in Our English Speech

by Edwin W. Bowen

Many of the so-called Americanisms are really survivals of Elizabethan English and boast a Shakespearean pedigree, although they are no longer heard in the country of that consummate master of our speech.[13] Somehow, they seem to have drifted out of the main current of British English. Perhaps they have been caught up by an eddy and carried into one of the provinces where they are still preserved, as they are in America, fresh and vigorous. A moment’s reflection will show that we Americans come rightly by our Elizabethan English. For surely New England, Maryland and Virginia were settled by those who spoke the tongue of Shakespeare, even though they did not all hold the faith and morals of Milton. Many of these settlers—both Puritan and Cavalier—were college-bred men, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. Therefore they inherited the best traditions of the English speech and transmitted it uncorrupted to their children. Nor were their children wilful traducers and corruptors of the King’s English, but contrariwise they conserved it and safeguarded its purity quite as sedulously as the inhabitants of the mother country. Thus the English speech was handed down, undefiled, from one generation to another, in America. Hence some words and phrases of good Elizabethan usage have been preserved in America, which long ago became obsolete and dropped out of the living speech in England, where the growth of the language was, of course, not arrested by the rude shock incident to its being transplanted in a foreign country.

Let us now point out a few examples of reputed Americanisms, social pariahs which have lost caste and no longer move in polite circles in England. An interesting example is found in the word “fall” used in the sense of autumn. Both these terms are in favor in America, although the pedants, following the lead of British critics, proscribe the use of “fall.” We are told it is not employed in standard English, and hence must be censured as provincial. Yet “fall,” which enjoys a certain poetic association with the fall of the leaf, can offer in its support the high authority of Dryden, who employed it in his translation of Juvenal’s satires:

What crowds of patients the town doctor kills,
Or how last fall he raised the weekly bills.

In his “Northern Farmer,” Tennyson used the offending word, but of course under the cloak of a provincialism. Still Freeman did not deign to employ it. Commenting on it, he remarks: “If fall as a season of the year has gone out of use in Britain, it has gone out very lately. At least I remember perfectly well the phrase of ‘spring and fall’ in my childhood.”

Another good illustration of a word still surviving in American usage, but long ago discarded in England, is “sick” in the sense of ill. British usage restricts the meaning to nausea, employing ill to describe a man suffering with a disease of whatever sort. Yet “sick” is supported by the very best literary authority. The term occurs again and again in Elizabethan literature. Reference to Bartlett’s concordance will convince even the most skeptical that the word abounds in Shakespeare, and that, too, in passages where the correct interpretation leaves no doubt that “ill” is meant. Suffice it to cite only an example or two: In “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (act 1, scene 1), Shakespeare makes Helena say, “Sickness is catching”; again in “Cymbeline” (act 5, scene 4), we read, “Yet am I better than one that’s sick of the gout”; and in “Romeo and Juliet” (act 5, scene 2), we read, “Here in this city visiting the sick.” Not only so. “Sick,” in the American acceptation, has an unbroken line of the best literary authority from Chaucer, “that well of English undefiled,” down to Doctor Johnson, whose dictionary defines the word in reference to a person afflicted with disease. American usage, furthermore, is supported by the King James version, in which “ill” is nowhere found, and also by the Anglican Church ritual. It is needless to multiply citations. If Americans sin in the improper use of “sick,” it may be urged in extenuation that they can at least plead a long array of illustrious and unimpeachable authority and are in good company.

The use of “well” as an interjection is mentioned by Bartlett in his dictionary as one of “the most marked peculiarities of American speech.” Moreover, he adds, “Englishmen have told me that they could always detect an American by the use of this word.” If this is an infallible hall-mark of American speech, then American English is nearer the tongue of Shakespeare than British English of the present day. For the word “well” in the sense of an interjection occurs again and again in Shakespeare. In “Hamlet” (act 1, scene 1), Bernardo asks, “Have you had a quiet guard?” Francisco replies, “Not a mouse stirring.” Whereupon Bernardo adds, “Well, good-night.” Again in “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (act 3, scene 1):

Bottom. And then indeed let him name his name, and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner.

Quince. Well, it shall be so.

In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Captain” (act 3, scene 3), we find an excellent example in the line, “Well, I shall live to see your husbands beat you.” No one, of course, would think of charging Tennyson with using unidiomatic English. Yet, in “Locksley Hall,” you read:

“Well—’tis well that I should bluster.”