Ask A Brit | Vol. 2

I like this bloke. He's chosen just the right American words (lollapaloosa, conniption, copacetic) to represent our present best; though he seems somewhat deficient in his understanding of the history of American English: I think he is not aware that Roger Williams was a graduate of Cambridge University, chief clerk to Sir Edward Coke, bosom buddy to John Milton (with whom he exchanged language lessons [Dutch for Hebrew]), and a much sought-after man-about-town in the London of the late 1680's--who may, just, have had as profound an influence on the American English Language (in which he wrote--and spoke--a great deal) as he did on the American Conception of Civil Liberty and Religious Tolerance. Nor does he quite appreciate what brilliant prose stylists were springing up in Massachusetts contemporaneously with Congreve and Dryden in the Mather family. I fear that he, though he be a Doctor of English Letters, may be infected with the modernist fallacy, that spoken language is the only real language. Which point de vue is, when you think about it, as applied to Puritans and Pilgrims, who were, above all, in their own estimation, People of the (printed) Word (specifically in the form of King James' Holy Bible)--let's just say--peculiarly and particularly  inapposite.