Do we give a hoot?

‘There is room for a very interesting work,’ Gibbon observed in a footnote, ‘which should lay open the connection between the languages and manners of nations.’ The manners of the peoples of the United Kingdom and of the United States are very different, although not always in the way that received prejudices have it: any English visitor to America must be struck by how much politer most Americans are than the average run of his compatriots.

But The American Language, as H.L. Mencken called his great book, has developed in a way that isn’t always dainty. It has a vigor and color of its own, and a rich vocabulary which has combined with the central advantages English already possessed. Apart from its flexible syntax and rudimentary grammar, it has long had, to a degree quite unmatched by other European languages, two vocabularies, as Jacques Barzun observed, nearly parallel — formal and vernacular — which make it ideally suited to be the global lingua franca.