American English "To the Editor of the "Nowr-Cuuxa Dasy News"
Sm—Your delightful discourse the other day on the American variety of Vox Fopuli recalls that quaint horror which English purists or styliste—and many Englishmen neither purists nor siyliste—used to affect when con fronted with those terse expressions and that effective language which singe long has come to be regarded as "typically American'.
Sayings such as that attributed to. the Congressman from 'Texas often come as a rill of pure, clear water into a stagnant pool, a gust of fresh air over the prairie from those snowcapped peaks of the Sierras. Bril-Nant, illuminating, vivid, they throw piercing shaft' of light into the dark social and intellectual mummery and voodooism of the Old World.
"American English" is not, as many Englishmen seem to imagine, a mere Jadditional vocabulary of colloisms affected because of wanton, of picturesque effect. It must be regarded rather as the natural and spontaneous growth or development of tne English language, " "the greatest living thing in the world to-day", its" possibilities already. almost limitless, serving the needs. and purposes of a new civilization jin the making into which enter many. new elements in thinking, and mew: ethnological and psychological factors.
Engtish is tar too vital a force to confine at will in any given channel or (9 reduce arbitrarily" to any desiree shape. It grows" Uke the! protoplasm in the scientist's test tube. If the King's English is merely 'a matter of form, why stop Dickens, Charles Lamb" or Gals worthy? Why not Shakespeare even Chaucer? Anyway, what would, democracy be without its Vox Populi? Like an Empire without its Emperor, a poet without *his sorrow, a mother without her child To many of us Europeans, 100 sensitive, perhaps, and too impressionable, much of what we see and hear in' America is strange, bizarre or even grotesque. 'The' "new" American civilization in many of Lis aspects is merely a reaction—and sometimes a rather violent and jerky reaction—to the social and political abuses and defects of the old Bur-open system. We miss those Ittle dency sentiments and conceits, those spiritual values, those ideals and traditions which, with the more apparent or visible manifestations fan older culture, give European rife substance and a fuller meaning even the midst of lesser afMuence, and much Teas The vast melting pot of American life too often seems to us a seething witches' cauldron fanned by the fires and flames of Greed and Lust. Or, T believe someone has said, life in America is a constant succession of cheap thrills. You feel as if you were in the midst of a mad carnival or carouse, a vast Vanity Fair from which you eseape—if you escape at all—with your head dizzy, and quite out of breath. You are not, sure but that everything ts "front" "and fake" hoax or humbug, and your character or person Is judged by the clothes you wear, or by your luggage you have any luge America nothing "cannot done". But a year or two ago we were still watching American films—that strange medium of an ever extending forceful influence—in which sordid and offensive themes were made the most of in a manner trans gressing the simplest canons of good forte and right thinking. The word went forth, eventually" reaching Filmland's powerful rules, and Tolsovernight, as it were, Hollywood's studios began to vie with one another to produce pictures which in their ingenuity © and. techni. ne, in the excellence of their art Jand their truthfulness to the subject, provide the highest quality of enter-fairment for happy throngs in our In America Achievement is the deal, the aim, the goal, the ultimate meaning of life, and amazing stan-ards of Achievement are set. The aking of a new nation, the creation of a" new civilization In the New, World will probably prove to be the greatest achievement in the history of the European races, momentous Ju its effects or consequences, In places you may still see the wheel ruts or axe marks of those intrepid pioneers who, a bare seventy years ago, fighting heat and cold and Dloodthirsty savages, braved untold Jhardships in order to master " huge continent, making farms and fertile
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.