All linguistic freakishness is not confined to the Continent.  The English, who are popularly supposed to use the same language we ourselves use, sometimes speak with a mighty strange tongue.  A great many of them do not speak English; they speak British, a very different thing.  An Englishwoman of breeding has a wonderful speaking voice; as pure as a Boston woman’s and more liquid; as soft as a Southern woman’s and with more attention paid to the R’s.  But the Cockney type—­Wowie!  During a carriage ride in Florence with a mixed company of tourists I chanced to say something of a complimentary nature about something English, and a little London-bred woman spoke up and said:  “Thenks!  It’s vurry naice of you to sezzo, ’m sure.”  Some of them talk like that—­honestly they do!

Though Americo-English may not be an especially musical speech, it certainly does lend itself most admirably to slang purposes.  Here again the Britishers show their inability to utilize the vehicle to the full of its possibilities.  England never produced a Billy Baxter or a George Ade, and I am afraid she never will.  Most of our slang means something; you hear a new slang phrase and instantly you realize that the genius who coined it has hit on a happy and a graphic and an illuminating expression; that at one bound he rose triumphant above the limitations of the language and tremendously enriched the working vocabulary of the man in the street.  Whereas an Englishman’s idea of slinging slang is to scoop up at random some inoffensive and well-meaning word that never did him any harm and apply it in the place of some other word, to which the first word is not related, even by marriage.  And look how they deliberately mispronounce proper names.  Everybody knows about Cholmondeley and St. John.  But take the Scandinavian word fjord.  Why, I ask you, should the English insist on pronouncing it Ferguson?

At Oxford, the seat of learning, Magdalen is pronounced Maudlin, probably in subtle tribute to the condition of the person who first pronounced it so.  General-admission day is not the day you enter, but the day you leave.  Full term means three-quarters of a term.  An ordinary degree is a degree obtained by a special examination.  An inspector of arts does not mean an inspector of arts, but a student; and from this point they go right ahead, getting worse all the time.  The droll creature who compiled the Oxford glossary was a true Englishman.

When an Englishman undertakes to wrestle with American slang he makes a fearful hash of it.  In an English magazine I read a short story, written by an Englishman who is regarded by a good many persons, competent to judge, as being the cleverest writer of English alive today.  The story was beautifully done from the standpoint of composition; it bristled with flashing metaphors and whimsical phrasing.  The scene of the yarn was supposed to be Chicago and naturally the principal figure in it was a millionaire.  In one place the author has this person saying, “I reckon you’ll feel pretty mean,” and in another place, “I reckon I’m not a man with no pull.”