§2
Differences in Usage—The differences here listed, most of them between words in everyday employment, are but examples of a divergence in usage which extends to every department of daily life. In his business, in his journeys from his home to his office, in his dealings with his family and servants, in his sports and amusements, in his politics and even in his religion the American uses, not only words and phrases, but whole syntactical constructions, that are unintelligible to the Englishman, or intelligible only after laborious consideration. A familiar anecdote offers an example in miniature. It concerns a young American woman living in a region of prolific orchards who is asked by a visiting Englishman what the residents do with so much fruit. Her reply is a pun: "We eat all we can, and what we can't we can." This answer would mystify nine Englishmen out of ten, for in the first place it involves the use of the flat American a in can't and in the second place it applies an unfamiliar name to the vessel that every Englishman knows as a tin, and then adds to the confusion by deriving a verb from the substantive. There are no such things as canned–goods in England; over there they are tinned. The can that holds them is a tin; to can them is to tin them…. And they are counted, not as groceries, but as stores, and advertised, not on bill–boards but on hoardings.[1] And the cook who prepares them for the table is not Nora or Maggie, but Cook, and if she does other work in addition she is not a girl for general housework, but a cook–general, and not help, but a servant. And the boarder who eats them is not a boarder at all, but a paying–guest, though he is said to board. And the grave of the tin, once it is emptied, is not the ash–can, but the dust–bin, and the man who carries it away is not the garbage–man or the ash–man or the white–wings, but the dustman.
An Englishman, entering his home, does not walk in upon the
- ↑ The latter has crept into American of late. I find it on p. 58 of The United States at War, a pamphlet issued by the Library of Congress, 1917. The compiler of this pamphlet is a savant bearing the fine old British name of Herman H. B. Meyer.
