Words and Their Uses, Past and Present
Format: Paperback
ISBN13: 9780217909587
Paperback|9780217909587
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. BRITISH ENGLISH AND AMERICAN ENGLISH. IT has been frequently asserted by British critics that even among the best educated people and the very men of letters in the United States, the English language is neither written nor spoken with the clearness and strength and the mastery of idiom that are common among the people of Great Britain. Boucher, in his Glossary, speaks of Americans as making all the haste they can to rid themselves of the English] language; and Dean Alford makes a like charge in a passage of his Queen's English, which, no less for its reasoning than for its assertions, deserves entire reproduction. It would be ruthiess to mar so complete and so exquisite a whole. Look, to take one familar example, at the process of deterioration which our Queen's English has undergone at the hands of the Americans. Look at those phrases which so amuse us in their speech and in their books; at their reckless.exaggeration and contempt for congruity; and then compare the character and history of the nation ? its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man, its open disregard of conventional right, where aggrandizement is to be obtained; and I may now say its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world. Quoted from Schele de Vere. Boucher's Glossary, which was designed as a tupplement to Johnson's Dictionary, 1 have not read Some of our own writers, blindly following, I think, blind British guides, have been misled into the expression of like opinions. Mr. Lowell, in the preface to his second series of the Biglow Papers, makes this damaging admission: ? Whether it be want of culture, for the highest outcome of culture is simplicity, or for whatever reason, it is cert...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217909587 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217909582 |
| Weight | 0.72 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.49 In |
| List Price | $20.40 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 216 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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