MRS. ROOSEVELT SPOKE ENGLISH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 220, 10 September 1943, Page 17

MRS. ROOSEVELT SPOKE ENGLISH

(Written for "The Listener"

by

KAY

T must have interested others as much as it did me to notice, that Mrs. Roosevelt spoke English, and nothing but English. Her accent was American, of course, but her words were all out of the O.E.D. I don’t recall one exception. We hardly flatter the American people when we think of their speech as a crude and slangy caricature of our own. Both languages have sprung from a common stem, and, just as French and Italian may be described as divergent

forms of Latin, American and English may be regarded as divergent forms of modern English. You will find the facts if you turn to H. L. Mencken, whose American Language, published in 1936, is a standard work, and, unlike many such tomes, of a great liveliness. A language spoken by so many millions cannot possibly be ignored, especially a language so much on the move, so alive, so lusty, and for ever developing. In Elizabethan days we had just such an exuberance, but since then our tendency has been to slow up Pro-Americans in England According to Mencken the pro-Ameri-can party is still small in England, although the war may have made a difference. Robert Bridges was in sympathy, also Wyndham Lewis, Edward Shanks and Virginia Woolf. "The Americans," Mrs. Woolf said, "are doing what the Elizabethans did-coining new words and instinctively making the language adapt itself to their need." G. B. Shaw goes further. The English, he says, have no respect for their language-an honest and natural slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically. untaught person to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club, Many will be amazed to find that such words as "reliable,’ "talented," "influential," "lengthy," "belittle" are all Yankee neologisms and were stoutly resisted when they made their first appearance in the early nineteenth century. The American humorists who flourished after the Civil War broke down many barriers. Bret Harte, and Mark Twain most of all, made the English public familiar with the pungent neologisms of the West, and as a result many bright words were taken into our speech. They have been gradually seeping. in ever since, and with the coming of the American talkies, resistance was no longer possible. For instance, "speed cop" has more tang in it than "mobile police" and "cow-catcher" than "plough." Even in the Commons Even those of us who loathe American speech most can hardly avoid using American terms. Galsworthy uses "make good" and "cold feet." Sir Arthur Quiller Couch uses "rubberneck," Lowes Dickinson "nothing doing," and Masefield "to cough up." And even in the House of Commons, Mr. Baldwin, one of the masters of the King’s English, used "backslider,"’ "bestseller," "deliver the goods." "Whoopee," "debunked," "you're telling me" have sometimes been heard in the House of Commons lobby. We are so ‘used to "platform," "electioneer," "racketeer," "wirepuller," "foolproof," and "on the fence" that we scarcely notice them. Here are a few more of the many hundreds of American-origin colloquialisms: bee-line, dug-out, dumb-bell, slick, schoolmarm, the cat’s pyjamas, bluff, take the cake, bark up the wrong tree, cut no ice, fizzle out, keep a stiff upperlip, fly off the handle, bury the hatchet, raise Cain, not my funeral, best. bib and

tucker, for keeps, no flies on, under the weather, low and high-brow, phoney. This week I heard a BBC announcer talking about train-busting. How it Happens This is how it happens. The first schooner. ever seen was launched at Gloucester, Mass., in 1713. The word was originally spelt Scooner, To Scoon was borrowed from the Scottish dialect and meant to skim or skip across the water like a flat stone. As the first schooner left the ways and glided into Gloucester Harbour, an enraptured spectator shouted, "O see how she scoons." "A scooner let her be," replied her builder, Captain Andrew Robertson, and all boats of her class took the name thereafter. Anyhow, that story has some So the word "Yankee" was apparently first applied, not to the English, but to the Dutch. -As early as 1683 it was discovered that Yankey was a common nickname among buccaneers who ranged along the Spanish Main and the men who bore it were Dutchmen.