Finally, there are certain differences in punctuation. The English, as everyone knows, put a comma after the street number of a house, making it, for example, 34, St. James street. They usually insert a comma instead of a period after the hour when giving the time in figures, e. g., 9,27, and omit the 0 when indicating less than 10 minutes, e. g., 8,7 instead of 8.07. They do not use the period as the mark of the decimal, but employ a dot at the level of the upper dot of a colon, as in 3·1416. They cling to the hyphen in such words as to-day and to-night; it begins to disappear in America. They use an before hotel and historical; Kipling has even used it before hydraulic;[39] American usage prefers a. But these small differences need not be pursued further.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Fowler & Fowler, in The King's English, p. 23, say that "when it was proposed to borrow from France what we [i. e., the English] now know as the closure, it seemed certain for some time that with the thing we should borrow the name, clôture; a press campaign resulted in closure." But in the Congressional Record it is still cloture, though with the loss of the circumflex accent, and this form is generally retained by American newspapers.
[2] Richard P. Read: The American Language, New York Sun, March 7, 1918.
[3] To shew has completely disappeared from American, but it still survives in English usage. Cf. The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, by George Bernard Shaw. The word, of course, is pronounced show, not shoe. Shrew, a cognate word, still retains the early pronunciation of shrow in English, but is now phonetic in American.
[4] Cf. Lounsbury; English Spelling and Spelling Reform; p. 209 et seq. Johnson even advocated translatour, emperour, oratour and horrour. But, like most other lexicographers, he was often inconsistent, and the conflict between interiour and exterior, and anteriour and posterior, in his dictionary, laid him open to much mocking criticism.
[5] In a letter to Miss Stephenson, Sept. 20, 1768, he exhibited the use of his new alphabet. The letter is to be found in most editions of his writings.
[6] R. C. Williams: Our Dictionaries; New York, 1890, p. 30.
[7] Nomenclature of Diseases and Condition, prepared by direction of the Surgeon General; Washington, 1916.
[8] American Medical Association Style Book; Chicago, 1915.