I daresay it is largely a fear of the weapon in it--and there are many others of like effect in the arsenal--which accounts for the far greater prevalence of idioms from below in the formal speech of America than in the formal speech of England. There is surely no English novelist of equal rank whose prose shows so much of colloquial looseness and ease as one finds in the prose of Howells: to find a match for it one must go to the prose of the neo-Celts, professedly modelled upon the speech of peasants, and almost proudly defiant of English grammar and syntax, and to the prose of the English themselves before the Restoration. Nor is it imaginable that an Englishman of comparable education and position would ever employ such locutions as those I have hitherto quoted from the public addresses of Dr. Wilson--that is, innocently, seriously, as a matter of course. The Englishman, when he makes use of coinages of that sort, does so in conscious relaxation, and usually with a somewhat heavy sense of doggishness. They are proper to the paddock or even to the dinner table, but scarcely to serious scenes and occasions. But in the United States their use is the rule rather than the exception; it is not the man who uses them, but the man who doesn't use them, who is marked off. Their employment, if high example counts for anything, is a standard habit of the language, as their diligent avoidance is a standard habit of English.
A glance through the /Congressional Record/ is sufficient to show how small is the minority of purists among the chosen leaders of the nation. Within half an hour, turning the pages at random, I find scores of locutions that would paralyze the stenographers in the House of Commons, and they are in the speeches, not of wild mavericks from the West, but of some of the chief men of the two Houses. Surely no Senator occupied a more conspicuous [Pg142] position, during the first year of the war, than Lee S. Overman, of North Carolina, chairman of the Committee on Rules, and commander of the administration forces on the floor. Well, I find Senator Overman using /to enthuse/ in a speech of the utmost seriousness and importance, and not once, but over and over again.[15] I turn back a few pages and encounter it again--this time in the mouth of General Sherwood, of Ohio. A few more, and I find a fit match for it, to wit, /to biograph/.[16] The speaker here is Senator L. Y. Sherman, of Illinois. In the same speech he uses /to resolute/. A few more, and various other characteristic verbs are unearthed: /to demagogue/,[17] /to dope out/[18] /to fall down/[19] (in the sense of to fail), /to jack up/,[20] /to phone/,[21] /to peeve/,[22] /to come across/,[23] /to hike/, /to butt in/,[24] /to back pedal/, /to get solid with/, /to hooverize/, /to trustify/, /to feature/, /to insurge/, /to haze/, /to reminisce/, /to camouflage/, /to play for a sucker/, and so on, almost /ad infinitum/. And with them, a large number of highly American nouns, chiefly compounds, all pressing upward for recognition: /tin-Lizzie/, /brain-storm/, /come-down/, /pin-head/, /trustification/, /pork-barrel/, /buck-private/, /dough-boy/, /cow-country/. And adjectives: /jitney/, /bush/ (for rural), /balled-up/,[25] /dolled-up/, /phoney/, /tax-paid/.[26] And phrases: /dollars to doughnuts/, /on the job/, /that gets me/, /one best bet/. And back-formations: /ad/, /movie/, /photo/. And [Pg143] various substitutions and Americanized inflections: /over/ for /more than/, /gotten/ for /got/ in the present perfect,[27] /rile/ for /roil/, /bust/ for /burst/. This last, in truth, has come into a dignity that even grammarians will soon hesitate to question. Who, in America, would dare to speak of /bursting/ a broncho, or of a /trust-burster/?[28]