Word: englishes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Etymologists have long recognized the difference between U. S. and British English, but it was a layman, Henry Louis Mencken (The American Language), who first popularized the idea that U. S. citizens speak a tongue of their own. Eleven years ago the University of Chicago asked slight, bearded Professor Sir William Alexander Craigie, since 1901 co-editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, to collect in definitive form the words that have meanings and currency peculiar to the U. S. Last week in Chicago appeared the first section, A-to-Baggage, of his long-awaited Dictionary of American English on Historical...
...American inventiveness, coupled with the strange and rich conditions which faced pioneers on the frontier," explains Lexicographer Craigie, accounts for the U. S. habit of twisting familiar English words into new meanings. Inventive John Adams first used appreciation to mean an increase in value. Inventive George Washington introduced administration in its U. S. political sense in his 1796 Farewell Address, first used average as a verb, first used the term back country. Since then back has been firmly imbedded as an adjective in such U. S. phrases as back taxes, back pay, back number, back talk, backhouse. Likewise inventive...
...most of their source material the editors relied on second-rate writers, extinct magazines like the Southern Literary Messenger, the Lowell Magazine, the early Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Scribner's, The Congressional Record. Writers like Hawthorne. Emerson, and Thoreau, Sir William observes, were "too English" to contribute much to his compendium...
...into spending the $175,000 to make the Conference a success. For six months quantities of press releases were poured out. Three auditoriums, in the Department of Labor, in the Department of Commerce and in the National Museum were equipped with "translators" whereby foreign delegates who did not understand English could, by picking up earphones, hear translations in French, German or Spanish. And finally for the grand banquet Washington's Union Station was hired and its vast waiting room-the only available place in the capital large enough to seat 3,000 guests-converted into a dining room...
...things did not go off as planned. As chairman of the Conference the New Deal imported an engineer from Palo Alto, Professor Emeritus William Frederick Durand of Stanford University. That famed expert in aerodynamics made a brilliant beginning by addressing the guests, without the aid of any translators, in English, French, German and Spanish, all of which he speaks fluently. This tour de force was enjoyed by the 650 foreign delegates who showed up. These included : Germany's Herr Doktor Julius Dorpmuller, the pudgy head of the Reich rail roads who was President of the second World Power Conference...