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American Regionalism and the Harmless Drudge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Frederic G. Cassidy
Frederic G. Cassidy*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
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Extract

Offspring, in the fullness of time, have to come of age; young nations have to come of age; so too with the language of young nations. And, as we are often slow to recognize, the experience of achieving maturity may be traumatic no less for the parent than the child. Yet time does its work, and has done it for our language; so that now not even the most jealous of the ancient nations can deny that the relatively young United States is old enough to vote—that our literature has earned the franchise, and that the language as we speak and write it today has established its individuality and identity.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 3 , June 1967 , pp. 12 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © 1967 by The Modern Language Association of America

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Footnotes

∗

An address given at the General Meeting on English in New York, 29 December 1966.

References

Notes

1 First edition 1919, 2nd, 1921(New York: Alfred A. Knopf).Google Scholar

2 An American Dictionary of the English Language (New York, 1828).Google Scholar

3 On the inception of the Atlas see the Handbook to the Linguistic Geography of New England (Providence, R. I.: Brown Univ. Press, 1939), pp. xi-xii.Google Scholar

4 New York: Crowell, 1944.Google Scholar

5 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida ii.i.20.Google Scholar

6 Babcock, C. M., “Mark Twain and the Dictionary,” Word Study, xlii, (Oct. 1966), 4.Google Scholar

7 Matthews, William, American Diaries, Univ. of California Pubs. in English, Vol. xvi (1945). (The remark was made in conversation.)Google Scholar