The St. Johns herald., 1891-06-04
American Newspaper English.

that many supposed American
 isms" are really survivals of gooc
 old English words and phrases
 which were brought to this country
 centuries ago, and which have had the good fortune to thrive here
 while in their ancient habitat they
 have perished from the lips, and even from the memory, of the peo- pie. Some real Americanisms our English cousins have found to be good enough to be adopted from us, and there are others which may never commend themselves to the English taste, but which are by no means to be rashly abandoned by Americans on that account. Per haps the time may come when American English will be as distin- guishable from Australian English or British English as Ionic Greek was from the Attic or the Doric and unless one is prepared to call 1t a misfortune that Herodutus wrote in one dialect and Thucy- dides in another, there is no good Leason for thinking that the Amer ican dialect a century hence will be any more regretable a variation from the mother tongue than the English which may then be written and spoken within the sound of Bow Bells. Such a variation would be regretable, however, if it were the outgrowth of a slovenly misuse of the noble language which is one of the best things in our national inheritance, and therefore we con- fess to a certain nervousness when we hear or read the criticisms of American English" which are often made by our kin across the sea. We compose ourselves, however, as best we may, with the reflection that, taking this country all over and comparing it with all Britain, or, for that matter, with all England, quite as good English-as good in grammatical construction and bet ter in pronunciation-is spoken by natiye-born Ameri cans as by native born Britons, or even by native-born Englishmen. That we believe to be the fact, and it encourages the hope that the American English of the future has at least as good a chance of normal and felicitous development as the English of any part of her Maiesty's present do- minions. The extreme of literary scorn is directed against American newspaper English. We are natu- rally sensitive on that score, and chiefly because we are obliged to confess that American newspaper English is not always elegant. But neither is British newspaper Eng fish always elegant; ard when one considers the condition on which newspaper English, whether British or American, is written, the marvel is not that it Jacks some of the felicities of literary style, nor that it sometimes lacks verbal and grammatical correctness, but that, on the whole, it should be no worse than it is. Indeed, we are surprised to observe how good much of it is, and there is more than one Ameri- can daily newspaper which gives us pleasing surprise of that sort very often. Were it otherwise, there might be some difficulty in finding an unexceptionable model on the other side of the water; for in all England there are not more than half a dozen daily papers which. in the matter of English, could be rated above an equal number of American publications that might easily be named.-The Churchman.
 Two cases of pneumonia as re- suit of concussion of the lungs have been reported. A boy of II. who l