"We don't trample our fathers, even when they are very much in the way; but we like short cuts for all that. Now 'car' is a short cut for a long carriage-drive."
"Oh! but I beg to say you don't always go in for shortness. You call a 'lift' an 'elevator,' and you always 'conclude' a thing, instead of 'ending' it. I must tell you frankly that we think those long words horrid."
"I am sorry for it," he replied, amused, "but we, on our side, think fashionable English slang, and a good deal of fashionable English pronunciation horrid. There is a lady here, lately returned from London, who speaks so beautifully that we can't understand more than half she says!"
Mrs. Frampton laughed. She was quite pleased with her neighbor. If he carried the war into the enemy's country, she felt justified in saying a tart thing.
"You mean that she no longer pronounces 'clerk' as if it rhymed with 'shirk' and 'work.' You get that, and the tendency to nasal intonation from your Puritan fathers. We retain a Cavalier broadness and boldness of utterance."
"Ah! I see the broadness and boldness," returned the American, with a humorous twitch of the lips. "Still, all evidence shows that Englishmen of Chaucer's day pronounced 'clerk' as it is written."
"Chaucer? Good heavens! you don't expect us to go on talking as they did in Edward III.'s reign?"
"Why are you to start from Charles II. rather than Edward III.? 'Clark' is an affectation that crept into the language in the seventeenth century, when it became the fashion to talk of Jarsey and Barkley. The latter I believe you still retain in fashionable parlance."
"Of course! The man or woman would be lost who spoke of Berkley Square."
"But worse than all is your fashionable pronunciation of Pall Mall. Why! you lose all the pleasant old association and courtly flavor of the 'Palace Mall' by calling it 'Pell Mell.' You might as well call it 'Helter-Skelter'!"