Tariff reform, in England, does not mean a movement toward free trade, but one toward protection. The word Government, meaning what we call the administration, is always capitalized and usually plural, e.g., “The Government are considering the advisability, etc.” Vestry, committee, council, ministry and even company are also plural, though sometimes not capitalized. A member of Parliament, if he be one who respects the integrity of his mother-tongue, does not run for office; he stands. But of late the American to run has been coming in, and not long ago an M.P. wrote to me: “If I think of my own candidature (candidacy), I say ‘I ran,’” etc. An English candidate is not nominated, but adopted. If he stands successfully, he sits at Westminster, and is a sitting member. When it is said of a man that he is nursing a constituency, it means that he is attending fairs, subscribing to charities, and otherwise flattering and bribing the voters, in the hope of inducing them to return him. Once returned, he does not represent a district, but a division or constituency. At a political meeting (they are often rough in England) the ushers and bouncers are called stewards; the pre-war suffragettes used to delight in stabbing them with hatpins. An M.P. is not afflicted by most of the bugaboos that poison the dreams of an American Congressman. He has never heard, save as a report of far-off heresies, of direct primaries, the recall, or the initiative and referendum. A roll-call in Parliament is a division, and an appropriation is a vote. A member speaking is said to be up or on his legs. When the House adjourns it is said to rise. The word politician has no opprobrious significance in England; it is applied to themselves by statesmen of the first eminence. Cabinet is used as with us, but it has a synonym in ministry, and a member of it may be called a minister. A contested election, in England, is simply one in which there is more than one candidate; the adjective has no relation to charges of fraud.
The English keep up most of the old distinctions between physicians and surgeons, 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. A man with a grievance goes first to his solicitor, who then instructs or briefs a barrister for him. If that barrister, in the course of the trial, wants certain evidence removed from the record, he moves that it be struck out, not stricken out, as an American lawyer would usually say. Only barristers may become judges. An English barrister, like his American brother, takes a retainer when he is engaged, but the rest of his fee does not wait upon the termination of the case: he expects and receives a refresher from time to time. A barrister is never admitted to the bar, but is always called. If he becomes a King’s Counsel, or K.C. (a mainly honorary appointment though it carries some privileges, and usually brings higher fees), he is said to have taken silk. In the United States a lawyer tries a case and the judge either tries or hears it; in England it is the judge who tries it, and the barrister pleads it. The witness-stand is the witness-box. In the United States the court hands down a decision; in England the court hands it out. In the United States a lawyer probates a will; in England he proves it, or has it admitted to probate. The calendar of a court is a cause-list, and a lawyer’s brief-case is an attaché-case. The brief in it is not a document to be filed in court, as with us, but a solicitor’s instructions to a barrister. What we call a brief is called pleadings. A corporation-lawyer, of course, is a company-lawyer. Ambulance-chasers are unknown.
The common objects and phenomena of nature are often differently named in England and America. The Englishman knows the meaning of sound (e.g., Long Island Sound), but he nearly always uses channel in place of it. Contrariwise, the American knows the meaning of the English bog, but rejects the English distinction between it and swamp, and almost always uses swamp or marsh (often elided to ma’sh). The Englishman, instead of saying that the temperature is 29 degrees (Fahrenheit) or that the thermometer or the mercury is at 29 degrees, sometimes says there are three degrees of frost. He never, of course, uses down-East or up-State, nor does he use downtown or uptown. Many of our names for common fauna and flora are unknown to him save as strange Americanisms heard in the talkies, e.g., terrapin, ground-hog, poison-ivy, persimmon, gumbo, eggplant, catnip, sweet-potato and yam. He calls the rutabaga a mangelwurzel. He is familiar with many fish that we seldom see, e.g., the turbot, and eats some that we reject, e.g., the ray, which he calls the skate. He also knows the hare, which is seldom heard of in America. But he knows nothing of devilled-crabs, crab-cocktails, club-sandwiches, clam-chowder or oyster-stews, and he never goes to oyster-suppers, sea-food (or shore) dinners, clam-bakes or barbecues, or eats boiled-dinners.
An Englishman never lives on a street, but always in it, though he may live on an avenue or road. He never lives in a block of houses, but in a row of them or in a block of flats (not apartments); an apartment, to him, is a room. His home is never in a section of the city, but always in a district. The business-blocks that are so proudly exhibited in all small American towns are quite unknown to him. He often calls an office-building simply a house, e.g., Lever House. Going home from London by train he always takes the down-train, no matter whether he be proceeding southward to Wimbledon, westward to Shepherd’s Bush, northward to Tottenham, or eastward to Noak’s Hill. A train headed toward London is always an up-train, and the track it runs on (the left-hand track, not the right-hand one, as in the United States) is the up-line. Oxford men also speak of up- and down-trains to and from Oxford. In general, the Englishman seems to have a much less keen sense of the points of the compass than the American. He knows the East End and the West End, but the names of his streets are never preceded by north, east, south or west, and he never speaks of the north-east corner of two of them. But there are eastbound and westbound trains in the London tubes. English streets have no sidewalks; they are always called pavements or foot-paths or simply paths. Sidewalk, however, is used in Ireland. A road, in England, is always a road, and never a railway. A car means a tram-car or motor-car; never a railway-carriage. A telegraph-blank is a telegraph-form. The Englishman does not usually speak of having his shoes (or boots) shined; he has them blacked. He always calls russet, yellow or tan shoes brown shoes (or, if they cover the ankle, boots). He calls a pocketbook a purse or wallet, and gives the name of pocketbook or pocket-diary to what we call a memorandum-book. By cord he means something strong, almost what we call twine; a thin cord he always calls a string; his twine is the lightest sort of string. He uses dessert, not to indicate the whole last course at dinner, but to designate the fruit only; the rest is the sweet. If he inhabits bachelor quarters he commonly says that he lives in chambers. Flat-houses are often mansions. The janitor or superintendent thereof is a care-taker or porter.
The Englishman is naturally unfamiliar with baseball, and in consequence his language is bare of the countless phrases and metaphors that it has supplied to American. But he uses more racing terms and metaphors than we do, and he has got a good many phrases from other games, particularly cricket. The word cricket itself has a definite figurative meaning to him. It indicates, in general, good sportsmanship. To take unfair advantage of an opponent is not cricket. The sport of boating, once so popular on the Thames, has also given colloquial English some familiar terms, almost unknown in the United States, e.g., punt and weir. The game known as ten-pins in America is called nine-pins in England, and once had that name over here. The Puritans forbade it, and its devotees changed its name in order to evade the prohibition.56 Bowls, in England, means only the lawn game; the alley game is called skittles, and is played in a skittle-alley. The English vocabulary of racing differs somewhat from ours. When the odds are 2 to 1 in favor of a horse we say that its price is 1 to 2; the Englishman says that it is 2 to 1 on. We speak of backing a horse to win, place or show; the Englishman uses each way instead, meaning win or place, for place, in England, means both second and third. Though the English talk of racing, football, cricket and golf a great deal, they have developed nothing comparable to the sporting argot
used by American sporting reporters. When, during the World War (which Englishmen always call the Great War), American soldier nines played baseball in England, some of the English newspapers employed visiting American reporters to report the games, and the resultant emission of technicalities interested English readers much more than the games themselves. One of the things that puzzled them was the word inning, as in second inning; in England it is always plural.
As a set-off to American sports-page jargon, the English have an ecclesiastical vocabulary with which we are almost unacquainted, and it is in daily use, for the church bulks much larger in public affairs over there than it does here. Such terms as vicar, canon, verger, prebendary, primate, curate, nonconformist, dissenter, convocation, minster, chapter, crypt, living, presentation, glebe, benefice, locum tenens, suffragan, almoner, tithe, dean and pluralist are to be met with in the English newspapers constantly, but on this side of the water they are seldom encountered. Nor do we hear much of mat-tins (which has two t’s in England), lauds, lay-readers, ritualism and the liturgy. The English use of holy orders is also strange to us. They do not say that a young man aspiring to sacerdotal ease under the Establishment is studying for the ministry, but that he is reading for holy orders, though he may do the former if he is headed for the dissenting pulpit. Indeed, save he be a nonconformist, he is seldom called a minister at all, though the term appears in the Book of Common Prayer, and never a pastor; a clergyman of the Establishment is always either a rector, vicar or curate, or colloquially a parson. According to Horwill, the term clergyman is seldom applied to any other kind of preacher. In American chapel simply means a small church, usually the dependant of some larger one; in English it has acquired the special sense of a place of worship unconnected with the Establishment. Though three-fourths of the people of Ireland are Catholics (in Munster and Connaught, more than nine-tenths), and the Protestant Church of Ireland has been disestablished since 1871, a Catholic place of worship in that country is still legally a chapel and not a church.57 So is a Methodist wailing-place in England, however large it may be, or any other dissenting house of worship. But here custom begins to war with the law, and in a current issue of the London Times I find notices of services in Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist, Christian Science and even Catholic churches. Chapel, of course, is also used to designate a small house of worship of the Establishment when it is neither a parish church nor a cathedral, e.g., St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, and King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. What the English call simply a churchman is an Episcopalian in the United States, what they call the Church (always capitalized) is the Protestant Episcopal Church, what they call a Roman Catholic is simply a Catholic, and what they call a Jew is usually softened to a Hebrew. The American language, of course, knows nothing of nonconformists or dissenters. Nor of such gladiators of dissent as the Plymouth Brethren and the Methodist New Connexion, nor of the nonconformist conscience, though the United States suffers from it even more damnably than England. The English, to make it even, get on without holy-rollers, Dunkards, hard-shell Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists and other such American alarmers of God, and they give a mourners’-bench the austere name of penitent-seat or form. The Salvation Army, which is of English origin uses penitent-form even in America.
In music the English cling to an archaic and unintelligible nomenclature, long since abandoned over here. Thus, they call a double whole note a breve, a whole note a semibreve, a half note a minim, a quarter note a crotchet, an eighth note a quaver, a sixteenth note a semi-quaver, a thirty-second note a demisemiquaver, a sixty-fourth note a hemidemisemiquaver, or semidemisemiquaver, and a hundred and twenty-eighth note a quasihemidemisemiquaver. This clumsy terminology goes back to the days of plain chant, with its longa, brevis, semi-brevis, minima and semiminima. The French and Italians cling to a system almost as confusing, but the Germans use ganze, halbe, viertel, achtel, etc. I have been unable to discover the beginnings of the American system, but it would seem to be borrowed from the German, for since the earliest times a great many of the music teachers in the United States have been Germans, and some of the rest have had German training. In the same way the English hold fast (though with a slacking of the grip of late) to a clumsy method of designating the sizes of printers’ types. In America the point-system makes the business easy; a line of 14-point type occupies exactly the vertical space of two lines of 7-point. But the more old-fashioned English printers still indicate differences in size by such arbitrary and confusing names as brilliant, diamond, small pearl, pearl, ruby, ruby-nonpareil, nonpareil, minion-nonpareil, emerald, minion, brevier, bourgeois, long primer, small pica, pica, English, great primer and double pica. The English also cling to various archaic measures. Thus, an Englishman will commonly say that he weighs eleven stone instead of 154 pounds. A stone, in speaking of a man, is fourteen pounds, but in speaking of beef on the hoof it is only eight pounds. Instead of saying that his buck-yard is fifty feet long, an Englishman will say that his back-garden is sixteen yards, two feet long. He employs such designations of time as fortnight and twelve-month a great deal more than we do. He says “a quarter to nine,” not “a quarter of nine.” He rarely says fifteen minutes to or ten thirty; nearly always he uses quarter to and half past ten. He never says a quarter hour or a half hour; he says a quarter of an hour or half an hour. To him, twenty-five minutes is often five-and-twenty minutes.
In Standard English usage directly is always used to signify immediately; “in the American language, generally speaking,” as Mark Twain once explained, “the word signifies after a little.”58 In England, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, quite means “completely, wholly, entirely, altogether, to the utmost extent, nothing short of, in the fullest sense, positively, absolutely”; in America it is conditional, and means only nearly, approximately, substantially, as in “He sings quite well.” An Englishman doesn’t say, being ill, “I am getting on well,” but “I am going on well.” He never adds the pronoun in such locutions as “It hurts me,” but says simply, “It hurts.” He never “catches up with you” on the street; he “catches you up.” He never brushes off his hat; he brushes it. He never says “Are you through?” but “Have you finished?” or “Are you done?” He never uses gotten as the perfect participle of get; he always uses plain got, and he is usually more careful than the American to insert it after have. Said Mark Twain to an Englishman encountered on a train in Germany:
You say, “I haven’t got any stockings on,” “I haven’t got any memory,” “I haven’t got any money in my purse”; we usually say “I haven’t any stockings on,” “I haven’t any memory,” “I haven’t any money in my purse.” You say out of window; we always put in a the. If one asks “How old is that man?” the Briton answers, “He will be about forty”; in the American language we should say “He is about forty.”59
In the United States homely always means ill-favored; in England it may also mean simple, friendly, home-loving, folksy. Drages, the furniture-dealer in Oxford street, London, advertises that his wares are for “nice, homely people.” St. John Ervine reports that on his first visit to the Republic he got into trouble by praising a gracious female as homely.60 Sick is in common use attributively in England, as in sick-leave, sick-bed and sick-room, but in the predicative situation it has acquired the special meaning of nauseated, and so ill is usually used in place of it. The English never apply sick to specific organs, as in the American sick-nerves, sick-kidneys and sick-teeth. When an Englishman takes a bath it is in a tub (or in the dishpan that he sometimes uses for a tub); when he goes for one in a swimming-pool, a river or the ocean it is a bathe. The use of of following all, as in “All of the time,” still strikes him as American; he prefers “All the time.” He prefers, again, behind to in back of. He seldom speaks of a warm day; he prefers to call it hot. The American use of to jibe, in the sense of to chime in with, is unknown to him, though he knows the word (as gibe) in the sense of to make game of. He seldom uses to peek in the sense of to p
eep, and the Oxford Dictionary marks peek-a-boo as “now chiefly U. S.” The same mark is given to to pry in the sense of to raise or move by leverage; the Englishman always uses to prize or to prise. He knows the verb to skimp, but prefers to scrimp. He likewise knows to slew, but prefers to swerve, and is unacquainted with slew-foot. “The English newspapers,” says H. W. Seaman,61 “used to be very careful to avoid such Americanisms as lifeboat for ship’s-boat, life-preserver for lifebelt, and lifeguard for the fellow on the beach who looks out for sharks, etc. Strictly, a lifeboat in England is a boat kept ready to go to the help of ships at sea, a life-preserver is a club or truncheon, and a lifeguard is a soldier in the Life Guards. In the last few years, however, this strictness has gone and the American usages have been generally adopted. We have only recently had lifeguards at beaches and pools, and since the idea came from America, we use the American name for them.”
That an Englishman calls out “I say!” and not simply “Say!” when he desires to attract a friend’s attention or register a protestation of incredulity — this perhaps is too familiar to need notice. The movies, however, have taught his children the American form. His hear, hear! and oh, oh! are also well known. He is much less prodigal with good-bye than the American; he uses good-day and good-afternoon far more often. Various very common American phrases are quite unknown to him, for example, over his signature. This he never uses, and he has no equivalent for it; an Englishman who issues a signed statement simply makes it in writing. His pet-name for a tiller of the soil is not Rube or Cy, but Hodge. When he goes gunning he does not call it hunting, but shooting; hunting is reserved for the chase of the fox, deer or otter. An intelligent Englishwoman, coming to America to live, once told me that the two things which most impeded her first communications with untraveled Americans, even above the differences between English and American pronunciation and intonation, were the complete absence of the general utility adjective jolly from the American vocabulary, and the puzzling omnipresence and versatility of the verb to fix. I marveled that she did not also notice the extravagant American use of just, right and good. In American just is almost equivalent to the English quite, as in just lovely. Thornton shows that this use of it goes back to 1794. The word is also used in place of exactly in other ways, as in just in time, just how many? and just what do you mean? Thornton shows that the use of right in right away, right good and right now was already widespread in the United States early in the last century; his first example is dated 1818. He believes that the locution was “possibly imported from the Southwest of Ireland.” Whatever its origin, it quickly attracted the attention of English visitors. Dickens noted right away as an almost universal Americanism during his first American tour, in 1842, and poked fun at it in Chapter II of “American Notes.” Right is used as a synonym for directly, as in right away, right off, right now and right on time; for moderately, as in right well, right smart, right good and right often, and in place of precisely or certainly, as in right there and “I’ll get there all right.” More than a generation ago, in an article on Americanisms, an English critic called it “that most distinctively American word,” and concocted the following dialogue to instruct the English in its use:
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