He
wanted to stick his oar into the argument. He had a few pregnant
thoughts of his own craving utterance, you could tell that. But
he was handicapped into a state of dumbness by the fact that he
needed both arms to balance a tray of wine and sandwiches on his
head. Merely using his voice in that company would not have
counted. He stood it as long as he could, which was not very long,
let me tell you. Then he slammed his tray down on the platform
and, with one quick movement, jerked his coat sleeves back to his
elbows, and inside thirty seconds he had the floor in both hands,
as it were. He conversed mainly with the Australian crawl stroke,
but once in a while switched to the Spencerian free-arm movement
and occasionally introduced the Chautauqua salute with telling
effect.
On the Continent guides, as a class, excel in the gift of tongues
- guides and hotel concierges. The concierge at our hotel in
Berlin was a big, upstanding chap, half Russian and half Swiss,
and therefore qualified by his breeding to speak many languages;
for the Russians are born with split tongues and can give cards
and spades to any talking crow that ever lived; while the Swiss
lag but little behind them in linguistic aptitude. It seemed such
a pity that this man was not alive when the hands knocked off work
on the Tower of Babel; he could have put the job through without
extending himself. No matter what the nationality of a guest might
be - and the guests were of many nationalities - he could talk with
that guest in his own language or in any other language the guest
might fancy. 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. Whereas an Englishman's idea of slinging slang is to scoop
up at random some inoffensive and well-meaning word that never did
him any harm and apply it in the place of some other word, to which
the first word is not related, even by marriage. And look how
they deliberately mispronounce proper names. Everybody knows about
Cholmondeley and St. John. But take the Scandinavian word fjord.
Why, I ask you, should the English insist on pronouncing it Ferguson?
At Oxford, the seat of learning, Magdalen is pronounced Maudlin,
probably in subtle tribute to the condition of the person who first
pronounced it so. General-admission day is not the day you enter,
but the day you leave. Full term means three-quarters of a term.
An ordinary degree is a degree obtained by a special examination.
An inspector of arts does not mean an inspector of arts, but a
student; and from this point they go right ahead, getting worse
all the time. The droll creature who compiled the Oxford glossary
was a true Englishman.
When an Englishman undertakes to wrestle with American slang he
makes a fearful hash of it. In an English magazine I read a
short story, written by an Englishman who is regarded by a good
many persons, competent to judge, as being the cleverest writer
of English alive today. The story was beautifully done from the
standpoint of composition; it bristled with flashing metaphors and
whimsical phrasing. The scene of the yarn was supposed to be
Chicago and naturally the principal figure in it was a millionaire.
In one place the author has this person saying, "I reckon you'll
feel pretty mean," and in another place, "I reckon I'm not a man
with no pull."
Another character in the story says, "I know you don't cotton
to the march of science in these matters," and speaks of something
that is unusual as being "a rum affair." A walled state prison,
presumably in Illinois, is referred to as a "convict camp"; and
its warden is called a "governor" and an assistant keeper is called
a "warder"; while a Chicago daily paper is quoted as saying that
"larrikins" directed the attention of a policeman to a person who
was doing thus and so.
