lish, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious. Movie is better than cinema; it is not only better American, it is better English. Bill–board is better than hoarding. Office–holder is more honest, more picturesque, more thoroughly Anglo–Saxon that public–servant. Stem–winder somehow has more life in it, more fancy and vividness, than the literal keyless–watch. Turn to the terminology of railroading (itself, by the way, an Americanism): its creation fell upon the two peoples equally, but they tackled the job independently. The English, seeking a figure to denominate the wedge–shaped fender in front of a locomotive, called it a plough; the Americans, characteristically, gave it the far more pungent name of cow–catcher. So with the casting where two rails join. The English called it a crossing–plate. The Americans, more responsive to the suggestion in its shape, called it a frog.
This boldness of conceit, of course, makes for vulgarity. Unrestrained by any critical sense—and the critical sense of the professors counts for little, for they cry wolf too often—it flowers in such barbaric inventions as tasty, alright, no–account, pants, go–aheadativeness, tony, semi–occasional, to fellowship and to doxologize. Let it be admitted: American is not infrequently vulgar; the Americans, too, are vulgar (Bayard Taylor called them "Anglo–Saxons relapsed into semi–barbarism"); America itself is unutterably vulgar. But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions, and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy language–making. The history of English, like the history of American and every other living tongue, is a history of vulgarisms that, by their accurate meeting of real needs, have forced their way into sound usage, and even into the lifeless catalogues of the grammarians. The colonial pedants denounced to advocate as bitterly as they ever denounced to compromit or to happify, and all the English authorities gave them aid, but it forced itself into the American language despite them, and today it is even accepted as English and has got into the Oxford Dictionary. To donate, so late as 1870, was dismissed by Richard Grant White as ignorant and
