I Myself Was Sorely Tempted To Try Him On Coptic
And Early Aztec; But I Held Off.
My Coptic is not what it once
was; and, partly through disuse and partly through carelessness,
I have allowed my command of early Aztec to fall off pretty badly
these last few months.
All linguistic freakishness is not confined to the Continent. The
English, who are popularly supposed to use the same language we
ourselves use, sometimes speak with a mighty strange tongue. A
great many of them do not speak English; they speak British, a
very different thing. An Englishwoman of breeding has a wonderful
speaking voice; as pure as a Boston woman's and more liquid; as
soft as a Southern woman's and with more attention paid to the R's.
But the Cockney type - Wowie! During a carriage ride in Florence
with a mixed company of tourists I chanced to say something of a
complimentary nature about something English, and a little
London-bred woman spoke up and said: "Thenks! It's vurry naice of
you to sezzo, 'm sure." Some of them talk like that - honestly they
do!
Though Americo-English may not be an especially musical speech,
it certainly does lend itself most admirably to slang purposes.
Here again the Britishers show their inability to utilize the
vehicle to the full of its possibilities. England never produced
a Billy Baxter or a George Ade, and I am afraid she never will.
Most of our slang means something; you hear a new slang phrase and
instantly you realize that the genius who coined it has hit on a
happy and a graphic and an illuminating expression; that at one
bound he rose triumphant above the limitations of the language and
tremendously enriched the working vocabulary of the man in the
street.
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