A History of English Language

The english language in america
371
Philadelphian, Bostonian, and New York accents.” 56 What Brander Matthews, in his
Americanisms and Briticisms, wrote of English criticism of American spelling has a
wider significance as indicative of the contemporary attitude in America toward English
authority in matters of linguistic usage: “Any American who chances to note the force
and the fervor and the frequency of the objurgations against American spelling in the
columns of the Saturday Review, for example, and of the Athenaeum, may find himself
wondering as to the date of the papal bull which declared the infallibility of contemporary
British orthography, and as to the place at which it was made an article of faith.” By the
end of the twentieth century passionate criticisms and defenses of Americanisms had
given way to other concerns about language, and the general attitude on both sides of the
Atlantic now seems to be close to what the British author William Archer wrote a century
earlier: “New words are begotten by new conditions…. America has enormously
enriched the language.”
252. The Purist Attitude.
The controversy over Americanisms has at times been more or less connected in the
United States with the purist attitude, 57 always an element in linguistic discussions in any
age. There is nothing, of course, to compel purists in America to be hostile to an
American standard of “purity,” but as a matter of fact they were in the beginning almost
always identical with those who accepted English usage as a norm and believed that
Americans should conform as completely as possible to it. While theoretically the purist
ideal and advocacy of the English standard are two quite distinct things, they are so often
united in our guardians of linguistic decorum that it would be difficult to separate them
for purposes of discussion. Conversely, in England at any time during the nineteenth
century any impurity in the language, meaning anything that the individual purist
objected to, was more likely than not to be described as an Americanism. Coleridge
objected to “that vile and barbarous word, talented,” adding, “Most of these pieces of
slang come from America.” Talented did not come from America, though the point is of
no consequence. Mencken tells us that scientist was denounced as “an ignoble
Americanism” in 1890. 58 It is well known that the word has been disliked by many in
England, although it was coined in 1840 by an Englishman.
56
Harper’s Magazine, 32 (1886), 325.
57
Purist and purism “are for the most part missile words, which we all of us fling at anyone who
insults us by finding not good enough for him some manner of speech that is good enough for us…;
by purism is to be understood a needless and irritating insistence on purity or correctness of
speech.” (Fowler, Modern English Usage [Oxford, 1926], pp. 474–75.)
58 TheAmerican Language (1st ed.), p. 38.