concession on the part of educated Americans to drop the "s." After all,
"somewhere" does not jar in America, and "somewheres" very distinctly
jars in England.

An insidious laxity of pronunciation (rather than of grammar), which is
taking great hold in America, is the total omission of the "had" or
"have," in such phrases as "You'd better," "we've got to." Mr. Howells's
Willis Campbell, a witty and cultivated Bostonian, says, in _The Albany
Depot_, "I guess we better get out of here;" Mr. Ade's Artie, a Chicago
clerk, says, "I got a boost in my pay," meaning "I have got:" the
locution is very common indeed. It is no more defensible than "swelp me"
for "so help me." It arises from sheer laziness, unwillingness to face
the infinitesimal difficulty of pronouncing, "d" and "b" together. As a
colloquialism it is all very well; but I regard it with a certain alarm,
for where all trace of a word disappears, people are apt to forget the
logical and grammatical necessity for it. Though contracted to its last
letter, a word still asserts its existence; but when even the last
letter has vanished its state is parlous indeed.

An Anglicism much ridiculed in America is "different to." As a
Scotchman, I dislike it, and would neither use nor defend it. At the
same time I cannot but hint to American critics that the use of a
particular preposition in a particular context is largely a matter of
convention; that when we learn a new language we have simply to get up
by rote the conventions that obtain in this regard, reason being little
or no guide to us; and that within the same language the conventions are
always changing. You may easily nonplus even a good grammarian by asking
him suddenly, "What preposition should you use in such-and-such a
context?" just as you may puzzle a man by asking him to spell a word
which, if he wrote it without thinking about it, would present no