I have recorded in AL4, pp. 26 ff, the fact that to fix is used in the United States in many senses unknown to the English, and that this large use of the verb has attracted the notice of English travelers for many years. A number of American observers, in the early days, called to fix a Southernism or Westernism,1 but the DAE’s examples come from all parts, including Canada. The verb, of course, was no invented in America, but its meanings became greatly extended here, and the DAE marks it an Americanism in such sentences as “He stopped to fix the lock of his rifle,” “Clarence will fix you all right,” “You fix my pillow,” “Fix the table,” “The politicians fix primaries,” “The race was fixed,” “I’ll fix you,” and “We had better fix the fire.” The DAE devotes more than three pages to it, as verb, as noun and in various compounds; indeed, it gives more space to fix than to any other word. The meanings of the verb are divided into fourteen categories, five of them further subdivided into sub-categories, and one into no less than eight. Of the fourteen, twelve are marked American, and in addition there are eight different definitions of the noun, all of them marked American. In the sense of to repair or mend the DAE traces to fix to 1737, in that of to accommodate wants to 1779, in that of to arrange to 1796, in that of to tidy or make trim to 1820, in that of to clean up to 1836, in that of to adjust in any manner and in that of to repair a fire to the same year, in that of to prepare a meal to 1839, in that of to influence a jury to 1882, and in that of to tamper with a race-horse to 1881.2 “In England,” says Horwill, “it is commonly restricted to the meaning of to establish, make stable, place in a permanent position, but in America it is a word-of-all-work which saves the trouble of finding the specific term to describe almost any kind of adjustment or repair.” Like many other American verbs, to fix is frequently coupled with adverbs. To fix out is traced to 1725, to fix down to 1787, and to fix up to 1817. As a noun the word seems to be wholly an Americanism; the DAE traces it, as such, to 1809. There are numerous derivatory nouns and adjectives, e.g., fixer, traced to 1889; fix-up, to 1843; well-fixed, to 1822; fixings, to 1820; and Mr. Fix-It.
English observers have frequently remarked, in recent years, a like heavy use, in the United States, of to get.1 Some of the American significances of the unadorned verb are relatively old — for example, the sense of to track down and kill, traced by the DAE to 1853, the sense of to depart, traced to 1869, the sense of to vex or annoy, traced to 1867—, but most of them have come in within recent years — for example, the sense of to grasp or comprehend, traced only to 1907. So with the verb compounds. The DAE traces to get around to 1848, to get away with to 1878, to get back at to 1888, to get behind (in the sense of to support) to 1903, to get down on to 1898, to get into (in the sense of to get a hold on) to 1876, to get on to to 1889, to get through (say a bill in Congress) to 1873, to get together to 1904, to get up and get to 1877, to get busy to 1904, to get off (a joke) to 1849, to get one’s back up to 1854, to get even with to 1845, to get one’s goat to 1912, to get the hang of to 1840, to get one’s mad up to 1867, to get a move on to 1893, and to get one dead to 1891. All these verb phrases are Americanisms. So are to get going, to get wise, to get religion, to get right with God, to get back at, to get by with, to get on the right side of, to get next to, to get by, to get there, to get the bulge on, to get the drop on, to get ahead of, to get solid with, and to get sore.2 So also, are get out, an exclamation of incredulity, all get-out, it gets me, get-rich-quick and the lovely go-getter. Some of these Americanisms have become more or less familiar in English, but the rest strike an Englishman as strange, and Horwill is at pains to explain the meaning of a number of them. From go-getter, he says, a new verb, to go get, has been produced by back formation.3 Right is also in much more frequent use in the United States than in England, and Charles Dickens marvelled upon some of its combinations so long ago as 1840.1 Thornton traces right away to 1818 and hazards the guess that it may have been brought in by Irish immigrants. The DAE lists it along with right about, right along, right in, right down, right off and right smart as an Americanism, and the NED marks right there and right here “now chiefly U.S.” Other forms in right are old in English, e.g., right now, right from, right on, right at, right then and right round. Sometimes American phrases in right are used strangely by Englishmen. I find the following use of right away in a colonial paper:2 “In a studio right away from his home … Low does his work.”
On the English side there are many words and idioms which puzzle an American, for, as I have noted, the exchanges in vocabulary run mainly eastward, and Americans have nothing to help them toward an understanding of English comparable to the American movies which introduce Englishmen to all the latest Americanisms. In several areas of speech the English make daily use of terms that have never penetrated to the United States — for example, in that of ecclesiastical activity. No American ever makes natural use of such words as dissenter and nonconformist, and to most Americans they are quite meaningless. As for such common English terms as vicar, canon, verger, primate, curate, chapter, locum tenens, suffragan, dean, lay-reader, holy orders and churchman, they are seldom used in the United States, at least in their English senses, save by members of the Protestant Episcopal Church, the crown colony of the Church of England. To the average American outside that loyal fold a curate must seem as puzzling a mammal as an archimandrite, and a locum tenens must suggest inevitably what, in the vulgate, is known as jimjams. The NED traces dissenter to 1663, and says that “in early use” it included Roman Catholics, but is “now usually restricted to those legally styled Protestant dissenters.” Jews, like Catholics, are excluded. Nonconformist, of the same meaning, is traced to 1672, but nonconformist conscience is not listed, though every civilized Englishman is its goat. Many of the English dissenters are harmless sectarians analogous to our Dunkers and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but among them are also nearly all the more violent wowsers3 of the land. In Scotland one who refuses to swallow the national Presbyterianism is likewise a dissenter. The term was in use in America in colonial days, but disappeared when the battered fragment of the Church of England among us became converted into the Protestant Episcopal Church. In 1928 the New York Times began to use nonconformist to designate Protestant churches outside the Protestant Episcopal fold, e.g., the Congregational, but this imitation of English usage did not take and was presently abandoned.1 In their “Mark Twain Lexicon”2 Robert L. Ramsay and Frances Guthrie Emberson take me somewhat waspishly to task for saying that dissenters are unknown in the United States, and cite the use of dissentering in “Huckleberry Finn,”3 but a brief inspection is enough to show that dissentering is here used as a quoted Briticism. The English have a number of dissenting sects whose very names are unknown in the United States, but the American crop is much larger and considerably more bizarre. The Census Bureau’s official list of American denominations omits, unaccountably and to my personal regret, the Holy Rollers and the Footwash and Hardshell Baptists, but includes the General Six Principle Baptists, the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists, the Progressive Dunkers, the United Zion’s Children, the Christadelphians, the Hutterian Brethren, the Schwenkfelders, the Social Brethren and the members of the Apostolic Overcoming Holy Church of God, Christ’s Sanctified Holy Church, the Church of the Full Gospel, the Church of Daniel’s Band, the Pillar of Fire, the House of David, the Church of Illumination, the Italian Pentacostal Assembly of God, the Kodesh Church of Immanuel, the Mennonite Kleine Gemeinde, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Evangelical Unity of Bohemian and Moravian Churches, the Pentecostal Assemblies of Jesus Christ, and the United Holy Church of America, not to mention more than a dozen cubicles and cell-blocks of the Church of God.
The English educational terminology also differs from our own, and on all levels from that of the universities to that of what we would call the public-schools. I attempted, in AL4, pp. 240 ff, to list and define some of the English terms unknown in the United States, bat fell, I fear, into sundry errors. For the followi
ng illuminating gloss upon my exposition I am indebted to Mr. P. A. Browne, an inspector of the English Board of Education:1
Council-schools are those schools in the public elementary system that are “provided” by the Local Education Authority. Nearly half, if not more than half, of the schools that are run by these Authorities are “non-provided,” i.e., they were built by other bodies (e.g., the Church of England, the Wesleyans);2 except for certain regulations about the appointment of teachers, the management of religious instruction, and the upkeep and use of the buildings outside school hours, they are run by the Authorities on a par with council-schools, i.e., the Authorities pay the teachers, provide books and equipment, and make such improvements to the premises internally as are required by “fair wear and tear.” …
After the babies class a child moves into class four, class three, class two and class one, i.e., the nomenclature goes backwards, the top class of infants being class one. It is by no means universal that the sexes should be separate above the infants’ school; I fancy that more than half of the public elementary schools of England that deal with children of seven or more are still “mixed.” Nor will a boy always be put under a male teacher at the third or fourth standard. Sometimes he will meet one in Standard 1, while in small schools he may be under a woman teacher until he leaves.…
The time at which children go from elementary school to secondary school in England is now pretty universally at the age of eleven. The standard system is being gradually replaced by a class system in elementary schools other than infants’ schools. These are called forms in secondary schools, and I have met with them occasionally in the swaggerer elementary schools, though they are still not frequent there.
Head-mistresses are found in mixed schools as well as girls’ schools, though not usually if there are men on the staff. The lower pedagogues used to be called ushers in the so-called public schools,3 and still are at Harrow (at Winchester they are called dons), but are now masters or assistant masters (or mistresses) at public-schools and secondary schools, though far more usually teachers at elementary schools.4
245. [The English keep up most of the old distinctions between barristers and solicitors. A barrister is greatly superior to a solicitor. He alone can address the higher courts and the parliamentary committees; a solicitor must keep to office work and the inferior courts.] In part, the distinction is like that between the American trial-lawyer and office-lawyer, but only in part, for an American may function as both, whereas an English lawyer must stick to his class. In the London Sunday Express, in 1938,1 Viscount Castlerosse described eloquently the pains and costs of becoming a barrister. First, the candidate must be entered at one of the Inns of Court, the English equivalent of our law-schools, and there he must prove his diligence by eating thirty-six dinners with its resident bigwigs, or, if he is not a university man, seventy-two. Said Castlerosse:
This is rather the same as at a university, where there is no obligation to swallow the food, but a man must check in. At the university he waves his hat at the marker, but for legal purposes a student must stay there from “the grace before dinner until the concluding grace should have been said.” Dinners cost 3s. 6d. each, and some diners consider they do not get much value for the money. Joining an Inn is expensive. The admission documents cost £1 1s., government stamp £25, admission fees £20, lecture fees £12 12s. — in all £58 13s. Also, unless the student can get two householders to put up a bond for him, he has to deposit £50. Next come the examinations, and then, if successful, the business of being called,2 which costs £100, of which £50 is bagged by the government.
Finally, there is the outfit. A wig costs £8 8s. Second-hand wigs are half-price, but it is not everybody who likes to wear second-hand wigs, and, besides, they have a way of going to bits. The tin box to keep the wig in costs 6s. 6d.; the gown costs £4 4s., — why I cannot imagine; white bands 2s. a pair, and the blue bag 10s. 6d.
Even though our friend has got through the sacred portals he still has to go on paying out. He reads in chambers for twelve months, during which period he devils for some junior counsel.3 Instead of getting paid he has to shell out 100 guineas plus five guineas to the clerk of the chambers. When the year is out he has to get chambers of his own, and he is now taken over by a clerk.
A barrister’s clerk is a truly remarkable man, and requires qualities not found in any other profession. The perfect barrister’s clerk must be able to imbibe endless quantities of alcohol without feeling it. He must be on friendly terms with every solicitor’s clerk, and, as all wise men know, there’s only one way to do that. Further, he must know how to put his man over.
At the beginning the young barrister pays his clerk a pound a week. After that the clerk collects about 7 per cent, on the earnings of the barrister, who, by the way, loses about another 7 per cent, through bad debts. Eventually work will come to a barrister, probably in the shape of inquests in the suburbs at £1 3s. 6d. a time, which works out at £1 1s. net to the barrister.
The American visitor to England is often brought up by Briticisms so seldom heard in the United States, even as quotations, that they have the effect on him of foreign words. When, on passing a butcher’s shop, he sees a sign offering offals, he is unpleasantly affected until someone tells him that, to an Englishman, the word simply means liver, kidneys, tongue, heart, etc. Nor can he grasp without aid the meaning of the silversides, gigots and stewing steak offered at the same place, nor of the brill, raker, monkfish, coalfish, periwinkles, prawns, ling, doreys and witches announced by the nearest fishmonger, nor of the Forfar bridles, Scotch baps and treacle scones on the list of the adjacent pastry-cook,1 nor of the fireside-suites and surrounds advertised by the dealers in house-furnishings, nor of the judge’s kettles, secateurs, coal-cauidrons and spark-guards to be had of the same. He is puzzled by the rubric Au Pair in the want-ad columns of the newspapers — until he reads the ads and finds that it simply indicates an offer of services for board and lodging. In their news columns he finds that the police are on the hunt for smash-and-grab raiders and gutter-crawling motorists: the meaning of the first he readily penetrates, but it takes him some time to discover that gutter-crawling is practised by mashers who run close to the sidewalk, hoping to pick up light-headed girls. To tout, he finds after a while, may have the harmless meaning of to collect party funds, and making a whip-round is only passing the hat. But what is a tomasha, and what are gold-sticks, crocodiles, satellite towns, navvies, hydros, tied houses, hooroosh, tarmac? How can there be such a thing as a proper bungalow? What, precisely, is good form?2 This American finds it hard, sometimes, to claw the news out of the English newspapers. To be sure, most of them are full of Americanisms or pseudo-Americanisms, but they are also full, and to much nearer the brim, of Briticisms, and some of those Briticisms, when he guesses at their meaning, turn out to mean something quite different. Nor is he helped, in reading the papers, by the archaic and murky past perfect tense in which they commonly report the speeches of the national haruspices. A sample:
Good pictures could only be made by building up writers, directors, and stars and keeping them in this country. This could only be done with money, and Mr. Rank was the only man who rightly had attempted to do so. He (Lord Grantley) was the last person to wish to see any monopoly in the film industry, but so far from worrying about the so-called Rank monopoly and the fact that Mr. Rank would become a Colossus in the industry, striding over it, he would like one or two more colossi like him to help them, because money was the only thing that put pictures on the celluloid. Mr. Rank had done a tremendous lot to improve the quality of the pictures manufactured in this country, and to achieve good marketing.1
Contrariwise, there are many familiar and characteristic Americanisms that have not been adopted in England, and are little known there, e.g., snarl (tangle), lye (household), to hospitalize, truck-garden, immortelles (the English call them everlasting flowers), to shuck (oysters), gum for chewing-gum (in England it always means mucilage), in ba
ck of (though the English use in front of), dirt (for earth, though dirt-track is coming into use), jigger, bung-starter, powder-room (though it is occasionally used), stein, to sashay, scallion, waist and shirtwaist (the English always use blouse), lima-bean, pipe-dream, goose-pimple (the English use chicken-flesh) and badger-game. Some of these are old English terms that have become obsolete in England, e.g., scallion, which the NED traces to the Fourteenth Century. “An Englishman,” says Seaman, “never calls his car his machine. His machine would be his bicycle.… Closet, for cupboard or wardrobe, always rouses a titter in an English cinema. Here it means a W. C.… We still speak of having our teeth stopped, but the American filled is coming in.”1
3. ENGLISH DIFFICULTIES WITH AMERICAN
255. [Very few English authors, even those who have made lengthy visits to the United States, ever manage to write American in a realistic manner.] In the earlier days their attempts were usually upon the so-called Yankee or Down East dialect. The pioneer was apparently the anonymous author of “The Adventures of Jonathan Corncob,” brought out in London in 1787. He had his Americans use I snore and I snort as expletives,2 and stretched their vowels out into such forms as blaaze away like daavils, get aloong and let me alo-one.3 By 1866, when Charles Dickens published “Mugsby Junction,” this Yankee dialect had developed, in English hands, into the following:4
I tell Yew what ’t is, ma’arm. I la’af. Theer! I la’af. I Dew. I oughter ha’ seen most things, for I hail from the Onlimited side of the Atlantic Ocean, and I haive travelled right slick over the Limited, head on through Jee-rusalemm and the East, and likeways France and Italy, Europe, Old World, and am now upon the track to the Chief European Village; but such an Institution as Yew, and Yewer young ladies, and Yewer fixin’s solid and liquid, afore the glorious Tarnal I never did see yet! And if I hain’t found the eighth wonder of monarchical Creation, in finding Yew, and Yewer young ladies, and Yewer fixin’s solid and liquid, all as aforesaid, established in a country where the people air not absolute Loonaticks, I am Extra Double Darned with a Nip and Frizzle to the innermostest grit! Wheerfur — Theer! — I la’af! I Dew, ma’arm, I la’af!
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