ing serially in an English magazine—an extract including such Americanisms as side–stepper, saltwater–taffy, Prince–Albert (coat), boob, bartender and kidding, and many characteristically American extravagances of metaphor. It might be well argued, he goes on, that this strange dialect is as near to "the tongue that Shakespeare spoke" as "the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton," but that philological fact does not help to its understanding. "You might almost as well expect him [the British business man] to converse freely with a Portuguese railway porter because he tried to stumble through Caesar when he was in the Upper Fourth at school." In the London Daily Mail, W. G. Faulkner lately launched this proposed campaign of education by undertaking to explain various terms appearing in American moving–pictures to English spectators. Mr. Faulkner assumed that most of his readers would understand sombrero, sidewalk, candy–store, freight–car, boost, elevator, boss, crook and fall (for autumn) without help, but he found it necessary to define such commonplace Americanisms as hoodlum, hobo, bunco–steerer, rubber–neck, drummer, sucker, dive (in the sense of a thieves' resort), clean–up, graft and to feature. Curiously enough, he proved the reality of the difficulties he essayed to level by falling into error as to the meanings of some of the terms he listed, among them dead–beat, flume, dub and stag. Another English expositor, apparently following him, thought it necessary to add definitions of hold–up, quitter, rube, shack, road–agent, cinch, live–wire and scab,[1] but he, too, mistook the meaning of dead–beat, and in addition he misdefined band–wagon and substituted get–out, seemingly an invention of his own, for get–away. Faulkner, somewhat belated in his animosity, seized the opportunity to read a homily upon the vulgarity and extravagance of the American language, and argued that the introduction of its coinages through the moving–picture theatre (Anglais, cinema) "cannot be regarded without serious
- ↑ Of the words cited as still unfamiliar in England, Thornton has traced hobo to 1891, hold–up and bunco to 1887, dive to 1882, dead–beat to 1877, hoodlum to 1872, road–agent to 1866, stag to 1856, drummer to 1836 and flume to 1792. All of them are probably older than these references indicate.
