say, 'I beg your pardon?'"[1] In more recent days there have been many like defiances. Brander Matthews, as I have said, was an eager apologist for Americanisms until he joined the Ochs lodge of Anglo-Saxon brothers. Others in the forefront of the fray are Dr. Richard Burton and Rupert Hughes. "Who can doubt," says Dr. Burton, "that Mr. Mencken is right in speaking of the 'American language'?…One recalls the cowboy who made a trip to Paris and was asked by his bunkie on returning to the big plains, how he had got along with French; to which he answered: 'I got along fine, but the French had a hell of a time.' English has that sort of time in the United States, but the people are perfectly happy about it. Why worry? A few professors are hired, at very small pay, to do that, and the populace prefers to do its suffering vicariously.…When a mayor of a large western city says has went twice in a public speech, and a governor of a great eastern state in public utterances declares that 'it ain't in my heart to hurt any man,' it gives one a piquant sense of the democracy of language in these United States.…We get a charming picture of proletariat and pedants amiably exchanging idiom, while school larnin' goes glimmering, and go-as-you-please is the order of the day. Why bother about the form of sentences when vital questions are for settling, and when to make others understand your meaning is the main purpose of words? That, at least, appears to be the general view. Ho wonder Brander Matthews speaks of English as a grammarless tongue. America has done and is doing her full share to make it so."[2] Dr. Burton continues:
Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/36
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THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
The pundit, the pedant, and the professor who are fain to stem the turbid tide of popular vernacular may suffer pain; but they can have little influence on the situation. Even college-bred folk revert to type and use people's speech—when they are out from under the restraining, corrective monitions of academic haunts—in a way to shock, amuse, or encourage, according to the point of view. Artificial book-speech is struggled for in recitation halls; then forth issue the vital young, and just beyond the door real talk is heard once more: the words and sentences that come hot from the heart, eagerly from emotional reactions, spontaneously representing the feelings rather than a state of mind supposed to be proper. To see a pupil who on trial solemnly declares that two nouns call for a plural verb, hasten out into the happy sunshine and immediately begin to do what the race always has done—including truly idiomatic
