Even Americans of the highest culture and of Boston families speak English differently from any people in the old country. The difference may not be obvious to all, but it is there, and it is a thing to rejoice in, not to be sorry for. The American nation is different from the British, has different history and a different hope; it has a different soul, therefore its expression should be different. The American face as a type is different; it would be folly to correct the words of the mouth by Oxford, or Eton, or Granville Barker's theatre, or the cultured Aberdonian, or any other criterion. The use of American expressions of quite moderate tone amounts to a breach of good taste in many British drawing-rooms; and if you tell a story in which American conversation is repeated with the accent imitated, you can feel the temperature going down as you proceed; that is, if you are not merely making fun of the Americans. Making fun of any foreign people is always tolerable to the British; a truly national and insular trait. The literary world and the working men and women of[Pg 246] Britain can enter into the American spirit, and even imitate it upon occasion; but that is only the misfortune of our populace, who ought to be finding national expression in journalism and music-hall songs and dancing, and who are merely going off the lines by imitating a foreign country. It is loss to Britain that the Americans speak a comprehensible dialect of our tongue, and that the journalist of Fleet Street, when he is hard-up for wit, should take scissors and paste and snip out stories from American papers; or that commercial entrepreneurs should bring to the British public things thought to be sure of success because they have succeeded in America—"Within the Law," "I Should Worry," "Hullo Ragtime!" and the rest. The people who are surest in instinct, though they are sympathetic to a brother-people, hate the importation of foreign uglinesses, and the substitution of foreign for local talent.  
The American language is chiefly distinguished from the British by its emphatic expressive character. Britain, as I have said, lives in a tradition; America in a passion. We are laconic, accidental, inarticulate; our duty is plain, and we do it without words. But the American is affirmative, emphatic, striving; he has to find out what he's going to do next, and he has got to use strong words. Britain also is the place of an acknowledged Caste system; but America is the place of equal citizens, and many American[Pg 247] expressions are watchdogs of freedom and instruments of mockery, which reduce to a common dimension any people who may give themselves airs.
 
The subtler difference is that of rhythm. American blood flows in a different tempo, and her hopes keep different measure.
 
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Americans commonly tell us that theirs is the language of Shakespeare and Shakespearian England, and that they have in America the "well of English undefiled." But if they have any purely European English in that country it must be a curiosity. Shakespeare was a lingual junction, but we've both gone on a long way since then, and in our triangle the line subtending the Shakespearian angle gets longer and longer. O. Henry makes a character in one of his stories write a telegram in American phraseology, so that it shall be quite unintelligible to people who only know English:
 
His nibs skedaddled yesterday per jack-rabbit line with all the coin in the kitty and the bundle of muslin he's spoony about. The boodle is six figures short. Our crowd in good shape, but we need the spondulicks. You collar it. The main guy and the dry goods are headed for the briny. You know what to do.—Bob.
 
This is not Shakespearian English, but of course it is not Shakespearian American. The worst of[Pg 248] the contemporary language of America is that it is in the act of changing its skin. It is difficult to say what is permanent and what is merely eruptive and dropping. Such expressions as those italicised in the following examples are hardly permanent:
 
"One, two, three, cut it out and work for Socialism."
 
"I should worry and get thin as a lamp-post so that tramps should come and lean against me."
 
"Him with the polished dome."
 
"She hadn't been here two days before I saw her kissing the boss. Well, said I, that's going some."
 
"This is Number Nine of the Ibsen, highbrow series.&qu............