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AMERICANISMS AND BRITICISMS

ON a novel written in the last decade but one of the nineteenth century by an Australian lady in collaboration

with a member of Parliament, one of the characters stops another "to ask for the explanation of this or that Australian phrase," wondering whether

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it would be better to give the English meaning of each word after the word itself, and to keep on repeating it all through, or would it do to put a footnote once for all, or how would it do to have a little glossary at the end?” As it happens, oddly enough, the authors of The Ladies' Gallery have not themselves done any one of these things; and therefore, if we chance to read their fiction, we are left to grope for ourselves when in the first two chapters we are told of "the wild howling of the dingoes in the

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scrub," and when we learn that the hero had "eaten his evening meal-damper and a hard junk of wallabi flesh "—while his "billy of tea was warming." Then we are informed that "he had arranged a bed with his blankets, his swag for a pillow," and that he wished for a good mate to share his watch, or even "a black tracker upon whom he could depend as a scout." We are told also that this hero, who "was not intended to grub along,' hears a call in the night, and he reflects that a black fellow would not cou-ee in that way." Later he cuts up "a fig of tobacco;" he says "we can yarn now;" he speaks of living on wild plums and bandicoot," and he makes mention of "a certain newchum." From the context we may fairly infer that this last term is the Australian equivalent of the Western tenderfoot; but who shall explain the meaning of damper and dingoes, cou-ee and bandicoot? And why have scrub and billy, grub and fig, taken on new meanings, as though they had suffered a sea-change in the long voyage around the Cape or through the canal ?

As yet, so far as I know, no British critic has raised a cry of alarm against

the coming degradation of the English language by the invasion of Australianisms. It can hardly be doubted, however, that the necessities of a new civilization will force the Australian to the making of many a new word to define new conditions. As the San Francisco hoodlum is different from the New York loafer, so the Melbourne larrikin has differentiated himself from the London rough, and in due season a term had to be developed to denote this differentiation. There are also not a few Canadian phrases to be collected by the curious; and the exiles in India have evolved a vocabulary of their own by a frequent adoption of native words, which makes difficult the reading of certain of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's earlier tales. To recall these things is but to recognize that the same causes are at work in Canada, in India, and in Australia as have been acting in the United States. It remains to be seen whether the British critic will show the same intolerance towards the colonial and dependent Australian and Canadian that he has been wont to show towards the independent American. The controversy, when it comes, is one at which the American will look on

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