AMERICA TO-DAY
all admit to be standard correctness in a much smaller degree[1] than we have every reason to believe to be the case in England, our enemies themselves being judges." Now I protest I am not Mr. Tucker's enemy, and I know of no reason why he should be mine. I cannot share the withering contempt with which he regards the extension of the term "traffic" from barter to movement to and fro, as in a street or on a railway; but if he prefers another word (he does not suggest one, by the way) for the traffic on Broadway or on the New York Central, I shall not esteem him one whit the less.[2] Even when he tells me that "bumper" is the English term for the American "buffer" (on a railway carriage) I do not feel my blood boil. A very slight elevation of the eyebrows expresses all the emotion of which I am conscious. So long as he does not insist on my saying a "bumper state" when I mean a "buffer state," I see no reason whatever for any rupture of that sympathy which ought to subsist between two
- ↑ "What great city of this country," Mr. Tucker inquires, "has developed, or is likely to develop, any peculiar class of errors at all comparable in importance to those of the Cockney speech of London?" The answer is pat: New York and Chicago—unless Mr. Townsend's Chimmie Fadden and Mr. Ade's Artie are sheer linguistic libels.
- ↑ It must be very painful to Mr. Tucker to find Shakespeare talking of the "two hours' traffic of our stage." He was a hardened offender, was Shakespeare, against Mr. Tucker's ideal of one single, inelastic, cast-iron signification for every word in the language.
188
