A Dictionary of Modern American Usage [antikvár]

PREFACE The title of this book has obviously been suggested by that of H. W. Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, but the two books are radically different in their purpose. Mr. Fowler's ambition was to help English people to use their own language more correctly. Mine is certainly not to teach Americans how to write or speak American. The present volume is intended for the benefit of three classes of readers. (1) It is primarily designed to assist English people who visit the United States, or who meet American friends, or who read American books and magazines, or who listen to American 'talkies'. Few of us, perhaps, realize what a subtle and frequent cause of misimderstanding urks in the fact that so many familiar words are used in America with a different meaning, or at any rate with a different implication, from that which they bear in England. On both sides of the Atlantic we speak a common language, but if that common language has not always a common meaning its employment as a means of communication is beset by many pitfalls. The object of this book is to set forth and explain these differences of linguistic idiom, many of them unsuspected by the ordinary man. (2) Its value, I hope, will be scarcely less to Americans. They win leam from it much that will interest them respecting the stamp that has been impressed upon the language by the American environment and American conditions of life. It will also, incidentally, make English speakers and writers more intelligible to them, as I have included, for their benefit, fuller particulars of the normal usage in England than would be required by English readers. I have not thought it necessary, however, to give English usages anything like an e:Saaustive treatment. The few readers who may require such a complete account can turn for it to the Oxford English Dictionary or some other source of detailed information. It has seemed to me sufficient to set down the meanings that are attached to a word by an ordinary educated Englishman in his everyday use of it, without troubling, for example, about its signification in a local dialect or in the special vocabulary of a particular trade. In matters of English usage I have taken the Oxford English Dictionary and its Supplement as an authoritative standard. (3) Apart from the service it may render in facilitating intercourse between England and the United States, this book is intended also to provide material for any student of language, whatever his nationality, who concerns himself with tracing the changes in