A few weeks in London or a month's study of the London [Pg135] newspapers will show a great many other American pollutions of the well of English. The argot of politics is full of them. Many beside /caucus/ were introduced by Joseph Chamberlain, a politician skilled in American campaign methods and with an American wife to prompt him. He gave the English their first taste of /to belittle/, one of the inventions of Thomas Jefferson. /Graft/ and /to graft/ crossed the ocean in their nonage. /To bluff/ has been well understood in England for 30 years. It is in Cassell's and the Oxford Dictionaries, and has been used by no less a magnifico than Sir Almroth Wright.[8] /To stump/, in the form of /stump-oratory/, is in Carlyle's "Latter-Day Pamphlets," /circa/ 1850, and /caucus/ appears in his "Frederick the Great;"[9] though, as we have seen on the authority of Ware, it did not come into general use in England until ten years later. /Buncombe/ (usually spelled /bunkum/) is in all the later English dictionaries. In the London stock market and among English railroad men various characteristic Americanisms have got a foothold. The meaning of /bucket-shop/ and /to water/, for example, is familiar to every London broker's clerk. English trains are now /telescoped/ and carry /dead-heads/, and in 1913 a rival to the Amalgamated Order of Railway /Servants/ was organized under the name of the National Union of /Railway Men/. The beginnings of a movement against the use of /servant/ are visible in other directions, and the American /help/ threatens to be substituted; at all events, /Help Wanted/ advertisements are now occasionally encountered in English newspapers. But it is American verbs that seem to find the way into English least difficult, particularly those compounded with prepositions and adverbs, such as /to pan out/ and /to swear off/. Most of them, true enough, [Pg136] are still used as conscious Americanisms, but used they are, and with increasing frequency. The highly typical American verb /to loaf/ is now naturalized, and Ware says that /The Loaferies/ is one of the common nicknames of the Whitechapel workhouse.
It is curious, reading the fulminations of American purists of the last generation, to note how many of the Americanisms they denounced have not only got into perfectly good usage at home but even broken down all guards across the ocean. /To placate/ and /to antagonize/ are examples. The Oxford Dictionary distinguishes between the English and American meanings of the latter: in England a man may antagonize only another man, in America he may antagonize a mere idea or thing. But, as the brothers Fowler show, even the English meaning is of American origin, and no doubt a few more years will see the verb completely naturalized in Britain. /To placate/, attacked vigorously by all native grammarians down to (but excepting) White, now has the authority of the /Spectator/, and is accepted by Cassell. /To donate/ is still under the ban, but /to transpire/ has been used by the /London Times/. Other old bugaboos that have been embraced are /gubernatorial/, /presidential/ and /standpoint/. White labored long and valiantly to convince Americans that the adjective derived from /president/ should be without the /i/ in its last syllable, following the example of /incidental/, /regimental/, /monumental/, /governmental/, /oriental/, /experimental/ and so on; but in vain, for /presidential/ is now perfectly good English. /To demean/ is still questioned, but English authors of the first rank have used it, and it will probably lose its dubious character very soon.