various substitutions and Americanized inflections: over for more than, gotten for got in the present perfect,[1] rile for roil, bust for burst. This last, in truth, has come into a dignity that even grammarians will soon hesitate to question. Who, in America, would dare to speak of bursting a broncho, or of a trust-burster?[2]
§3
Lost Distinctions—This general iconoclasm reveals itself especially in a disdain for most of the niceties of modern English. The American, like the Elizabethan Englishman, is usually quite unconscious of them and even when they have been instilled into him by the hard labor of pedagogues he commonly pays little heed to them in his ordinary discourse. The English distinction between will and shall offers a salient case in point. This distinction, it may be said at once, is far more a confection of the grammarians than a product of the natural forces shaping the language. It has, indeed, little etymological basis, and is but imperfectly justified logically. One finds it disregarded in the Authorized Version of the Bible, in all the plays of Shakespeare, in the essays of the reign of Anne, and in some of the best examples of modern English literature. The theory behind it is so inordinately abstruse that the Fowlers, in "The King's English"[3] require 20 pages to explain it, and even then they come to the resigned conclusion that the task is hopeless. "The idiomatic use [of the two auxiliaries]," they say, "is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it."[4] "Well, even those who are to the manner born seem to find
- ↑ Mr. Bankhead, of Alabama, in the Senate, May 14, 1918, p. 6995.
- ↑ Bust seems to be driving out burst completely when used figuratively. Even in a literal sense it creeps into more or less respectable usage. Thus I find "a busted tire" in a speech by Gen. Sherwood, of Ohio, in the House, Jan. 24, 1918. The familiar American derivative, buster, as in Buster Brown, is unknown to the English.
- ↑ Pp. 133-154.
- ↑ L. Pearsall Smith, in The English Language, p. 29, says that "the differentiation is ... so complicated that it can hardly be mastered by those born in parts of the British Islands in which it has not yet been established"—e. g., all of Ireland and most of Scotland.
