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re obsolete in England? Far be it from me to assert that Mr. Tucker makes no good points in his catalogue of English solecisms. I merely hint that this game of pot and kettle is neither dignified nor profitable; that purism is almost always over-hasty, and apt to ignore both the history and the psychology of language; and, finally, that nothing is gained by introducing acerbity (though I have admitted the frequent provocation) into a discussion which a little exercise of temper should render no less agreeable than instructive to both parties. "The speech of the lower orders of our people," says Mr. Tucker, "... differs from what all admit to be standard correctness in a much smaller degree[R] than we have every reason to believe to be the case in England, _our enemies themselves being judges_." Now I protest I am not Mr. Tucker's enemy, and I know of no reason why he should be mine. I cannot share the withering contempt with which he regards the extension of the term "traffic" from barter to movement to and fro, as in a street or on a railway; but if he prefers another word (he does not suggest one, by the way) for the traffic on Broadway or on the New York Central, I shall not esteem him one whit the less.[S] Even when he tells me that "bumper" is the English term for the American "buffer" (on a railway carriage) I do not feel my blood boil. A very slight elevation of the eyebrows expresses all the emotion of which I am conscious. So long as he does not insist on my saying a "bumper state" when I mean a "buffer state," I see no reason whatever for any rupture of that sympathy which ought to subsist between two men who take a common interest and pride in the subject of his treatise--_Our Common Speech_. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote Q: See _English Past and Present_, ninth edition, pp. 63, 215.] [Footnote R: "What great city of this country," Mr. Tucker inquires, "has developed, or is likely to develop, any peculiar class of errors at all comparable in importance to those of the Cockney speech of London?" The answer is pat: New York and Chicago--unless Mr. Townsend's _Chimmie Fadden_ and Mr. Ade's _Artie_ are sheer linguistic libels.] [Footnote S: It must be very painful to Mr. Tucker to find Shakespeare talking of the "two hours' traffic of our stage." He was a hardened offender, was Shakespeare, against Mr. Tucker's ideal of one single, inelastic, cast-iron signification for every word in the language.] II
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