Constant familiarity with such contributions from foreign languages and with the general speech habits of foreign peoples has made American a good deal more hospitable to loan-words than English, even in the absence of special pressure. Let the same [Pg153] word knock at the gates of the two languages, and American will admit it more readily, and give it at once a wider and more intimate currency. Examples are afforded by /café/, /vaudeville/, /employé/, /boulevard/, /cabaret/, /toilette/, /exposé/, /kindergarten/, /dépôt/, /fête/ and /menu/. /Café/, in American, is a word of much larger and more varied meaning than in English and is used much more frequently, and by many more persons. So is /employé/, in the naturalized form of /employee/. So is /toilet/: we have even seen it as a euphemism for native terms that otherwise would be in daily use. So is /kindergarten/: I read lately of a /kindergarten/ for the elementary instruction of conscripts. Such words are not unknown to the Englishman, but when he uses them it is with a plain sense of their foreignness. In American they are completely naturalized, as is shown by the spelling and pronunciation of most of them. An American would no more think of attempting the French pronunciation of /depot/ or of putting the French accents upon it than he would think of spelling /toilet/ with the final /te/ or of essaying to pronounce /Anheuser/ in the German manner. Often curious battles go on between such loan-words and their English equivalents, and with varying fortunes. In 1895 Weber and Fields tried to establish /music-hall/ in New York, but it quickly succumbed to /vaudeville-theatre/, as /variety/ had succumbed to /vaudeville/ before it. In the same way /lawn-fete/ (without the circumflex accent, and commonly pronounced /feet/) has elbowed out the English /garden-party/. But now and then, when the competing loan-word happens to violate American speech habits, a native term ousts it. The French /crèche/ offers an example; it has been entirely displaced by /day-nursery/.
The English, in this matter, display their greater conservatism very plainly. Even when a loan-word enters both English and American simultaneously a sense of foreignness lingers about it on the other side of the Atlantic much longer than on this side, and it is used with far more self-consciousness. The word /matinée/ offers a convenient example. To this day the English commonly print it in italics, give it its French accent, and pronounce it with some attempt at the French manner. But in America it is entirely naturalized, and the most ignorant man [Pg154] uses it without any feeling that it is strange. The same lack of any sense of linguistic integrity is to be noticed in many other directions--for example, in the freedom with which the Latin /per/ is used with native nouns. One constantly sees /per day/, /per dozen/, /per hundred/, /per mile/, etc., in American newspapers, even the most careful, but in England the more seemly /a/ is almost always used, or the noun itself is made Latin, as in /per diem/. /Per/, in fact, is fast becoming an everyday American word. Such phrases as "as /per/ your letter (or order) of the 15th inst." are incessantly met with in business correspondence. The same greater hospitality is shown by the readiness with which various un-English prefixes and affixes come into fashion, for example, /super-/ and /-itis/. The English accept them gingerly; the Americans take them in with enthusiasm, and naturalize them instanter.[51]