It is not to be expected that an extremely English intonation should
ever be agreeable to Americans, or an extremely American intonation to
Englishmen. We ourselves laugh at a "haw-haw" intonation in English;
why, then, should we forbid Americans to do so? If "an accent like a
banjo" is recognised as undesirable in America (and assuredly it is),
there is no reason why we in England should pretend to admire it. But a
vulgar or affected intonation is clearly distinguishable, and ought to
be clearly distinguished, from a national habit in the pronunciation of
a given letter, or accentuation of a particular word, or class of words.
For instance, take the pronunciation of the indefinite article. The
American habitually says "[=a] man" (_a_ as in "game"); the Englishman,
unless he wants to be emphatic, says, "[)a] man."[T] Neither is right,
neither wrong; it is purely a matter of habit; and to consider either
habit ridiculous is merely to exhibit that childishness or provincialism
of mind which is moved to laughter by whatever is unfamiliar. Again,
when I first read the works of the sagacious Mr. Dooley, I thought it a
curiously far-fetched idea on the part of that philosopher to talk of
Admiral Dewey as his "Cousin George," and assert that "Dewey" and
"Dooley" were practically the same name. I had not then noticed that the
American pronunciation of "Dewey" is "Dooey," and that the liquid "yoo"
is very seldom heard in America. In the course of the five minutes I
spent in the Supreme Court at Washington, I heard the Chief Justice of
the United States make this one remark: "That, sir, is not
_constitootional_." To our ears this "oo" has an old-fashioned ring,
like that of the "ee" in "obleeged;" but to call it wrong is absurd, and
to find it ridiculous is provincial. Very possibly it can be proved that
had Shakespeare used the word at all, he would have said
"constitootional;" but that would make the "oo" neither better nor worse
in my eyes. There always have been, and always will be, changing