ous shifting of emphasis. America, with the true
instinct of democracy, is determined to give all parts of speech an
equal chance. The modest pronoun is not to be outdone by the blustering
substantive or the self-asserting verb. And so it is that the native
American hangs upon the little words: he does not clip and slur "the
smaller parts of speech," and what his tongue loses in colour it gains
in distinctness.

If the American continent had been colonised by Englishmen before the
invention of printing, we might have watched the growth of another
Anglo-Saxon tongue, separate and characteristic. American might have
wandered as far from English as French or Spanish has wandered from
Latin. It might have invented fresh inflections, and shaped its own
syntax. But the black art of Gutenberg had hindered the free development
of speech before John Smith set foot in Virginia, and the easy
interchange of books, newspapers, and other merchandise ensured a
certain uniformity. And so it was that the Americans, having accepted a
ready-made system of grammar, were forced to express their fancy in
an energetic and a multi-coloured vocabulary. Nor do they attempt
to belittle their debt, Rather they claim in English an exclusive
privilege. Those whose pleasure it is to call America "God's own
country" tell us with a bluff heartiness that they are the sole
inheritors of the speech which Chaucer and Shakespeare adorned. It is
their favourite boast that they have preserved the old language from
extinction. They expend a vast deal of ingenuity in the fruitless
attempt to prove that even their dialect has its roots deep down in the
soil of classical English. And when their proofs are demanded they
are indeed a sorry few. A vast edifice of mistaken pride has been
established upon the insecure basis of three words--fall, gotten, and
bully. These once were familiar English, and they are English no more.
The word "fall," "the fall of the leaf," which so beautifully echoes
the thought of spring, survives only in our provinces. It makes but
a furtive and infrequent appearance in our literature. Chaucer and
Shakespeare know it not. It is found in "The Nymph's Reply to the
Shepherd":

"A honey tongue, a heart of gall
Is fancy's Spring, but Sorrow's Fall."

Johnson cites but one illustration of its use--from Dryden:

"What crowds of patients the town-doctor kills, Or how last fall he
raised the weekly hills."

On the other side of th