Rupert Brooke. When Brooke was in the United States he sent a letter to the Westminster Gazette containing the phrase "You bet your." The editor, unable to make anything of it, inserted the word boots in place of the dash. Brooke thereupon wrote a letter to a friend, Edward Marsh, complaining of this botching of his Americanism, and Marsh afterward printed it in his memoir of the poet. Miss Hillyard says that she was long puzzled by this alleged Americanism, and wondered where Brooke had picked it up. Finally, "light dawned by way of a comic cartoon. It was the classic phrase, you betcha (accent heavily on the bet) which Brooke was spelling conventionally!"
And, as Miss Hillyard shows, incorrectly, as usual, for you betcha is not a collision form of "you bet your" but a collision form of "you bet you"—an imitative second person of "I bet you," which in comic-cartoon circles is pronounced and spelled "I betcha."[1]
I doubt that the war aided very much in giving new currency to Americanisms among the English. The fact is that the American and British troops were seldom on the best of terms, and so fraternized very little. Cassell's New English Dictionary, published in 1919, lists a number of words borrowed by the British from the Americans, among them cold-feet, delicatessen, guy (noun), high-brow, hobo, jitney, hot-stuff, jazz, joy-ride, milk-shake, movies, pronto, tangle-foot, to make good, to hike, and to frazzle, but not many of them were in general use. Cassell lists chautauquan but not chautauqua, and converts the American dub into dud. A correspondent who was an officer in the American army writes:
I was with an American division brigaded with the British. The chief result seemed to be the adoption of a common unit of swearing, but probably even this had been arrived at independently. The passage of all the American troops that went through Liverpool, which was near-American before the war, didn't make much difference. I had to get some shoes while I was on furlough there after the armistice, and although I was in my American uniform, a fact that should have made the nature of the shoes demanded doubly sure, they brought out a pair of low shoes.
- ↑ See also Novelists Far Afield, New York Evening Post (editorial). May 6, 1919. To the Brooke anecdote a correspondent adds: "An Englishman, confronted by the puzzling American phrase, 'Where am I at?', interpreted it as a doubly barbarous form of 'Where is me 'at?'"
