I may, however, record to our credit one righteous act—­the perfect and satisfactory anglicizing of a Spanish word, whereby we have made ‘canyon’ out of canon.  And I cannot forbear to adduce another word for a fish soup, chowder, which the early settlers derived from the French name of the pot in which it was cooked, chaudiere.[1]

[Footnote 1:  No doubt all these variations of American from British usage will be duly discussed in Professor George Philip Krapp’s forthcoming History of the English Language in America.]

IV

As the military vocabulary of English is testimony to the former leadership of the French in the art of war, so the vocabulary of fashion and of gastronomy is evidence of the cosmopolitan primacy of French millinery and French cookery.  But most of the military terms were absorbed before the middle of the seventeenth century and were therefore assimilated, whereas the terms of the French dressmaker and of the French cook, chef, or cordon bleu, are being for ever multiplied in France and are very rarely being naturalized in English-speaking lands.  So far as these two sets of words are concerned the case is probably hopeless, because, if for no other reason, they are more or less in the domain of the gentler sex and we all know that

  ’A woman, convinced against her will,
   Is of the same opinion still.’

The terms of the motor-car, however, and those of the airplane, are in the control of men; and there may be still a chance of bringing about a better state of affairs than now exists.  While the war correspondents were actually in France, and while they were often forced to write at topmost speed, there was excuse for avion and camion, vrille and escadrille, and all the other French words which bespattered the columns of British and American, Canadian and Australian newspapers.  I doubt if there was ever any necessity for hangar, the shed which sheltered the airplane or the airship. Hangar is simply the French word for ‘shed’, no more and no less; it does not indicate specifically a shed for a flying-machine; and as we already had ‘shed’ we need not take over hangar.

When we turn from the gas-engine on wings to the gas-engine on wheels, we find a heterogeny of words in use which bear witness to the fact that the French were the first to develop the motor-car, and also to the earlier fact that they had long been renowned for their taste and their skill as coach-builders.  As the terminology of the railway in England is derived in part from that of the earlier stage-coach—­in the United States, I may interject, it was derived in part from that of the earlier river-steamboat—­so the terminology of the motor-car in France was derived in part from that of the pleasure-carriage.  So we have the landaulet and limousine to designate different types of body.  I think landaulet had already acquired an English pronunciation; at least I infer this because I cannot now recall that I ever heard it fall from the lips of an English-speaking person with its original French pronunciation of the nasal n.  And limousine, being without accent and without nasal n can be trusted to take care of itself.