Mr. Faulkner goes on to say that a great many other Americanisms are constantly employed by Englishmen "who have not been affected by the avalanche ... which has come upon us through the picture palace." "Thus today," he says, "we hear people speak of the /fall/ of the year, a /stunt/ they have in hand, their desire to /boost/ a particular business, a /peach/ when they mean a pretty girl, a /scab/--a common term among strikers,--the /glad-eye/, /junk/ when they mean worthless material, their efforts /to make good/, the /elevator/ in the hotel or office, the /boss/ or manager, the /crook/ or swindler; and they will tell you that they have the /goods/--that is, they possess the requisite qualities for a given position." The venerable Frederic Harrison, writing in the /Fortnightly Review/ in the Spring of 1918, denounced this tendency with a vigor recalling the classical anathemas of Dean Alford and Sydney Smith.[5] "Stale American phrases, ..." [Pg134] he said, "are infecting even our higher journalism and our parliamentary and platform oratory.... A statesman is now /out/ for victory; he is /up against/ pacificism.... He has a /card up his sleeve/, by which the enemy are at last to be /euchred/. Then a fierce fight in which hundreds of noble fellows are mangled or drowned is a /scrap/.... To criticise a politician is to call for his /scalp/.... The other fellow is beaten to a /frazzle/." And so on. "Bolshevism," concluded Harrison sadly, "is ruining language as well as society."
But though there are still many such alarms by constables of the national speech, the majority of Englishmen continue to make borrowings from the tempting and ever-widening American vocabulary. What is more, some of these loan-words take root, and are presently accepted as sound English, even by the most watchful. The two Fowlers, in "The King's English," separate Americanisms from other current vulgarisms, but many of the latter on their list are actually American in origin, though they do not seem to know it--for example, /to demean/ and /to transpire/. More remarkable still, the Cambridge History of English Literature lists /backwoodsman/, /know-nothing/ and /yellow-back/ as English compounds, apparently in forgetfulness of their American origin, and adds /skunk/, /squaw/ and /toboggan/ as direct importations from the Indian tongues, without noting that they came through American, and remained definite Americanisms for a long while.[6] It even adds /musquash/, a popular name for the /Fiber zibethicus/, borrowed from the Algonquin /muskwessu/ but long since degenerated to /musk-rat/ in America. /Musquash/ has been in disuse in this country, indeed, since the middle of the last century, save as a stray localism, but the English have preserved it, and it appears in the Oxford Dictionary.[7]