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            A bogeyman is something that frightens little children, and since we are all as little children on Halloween, let us celebrate the day by unmasking the perennially paternal and often patronizing man who visits our shores from England.  In doing so, we might also exorcise from the American psyche a bogeyman who has been playing one aspect of the language game at least since 1776.

            The disquieting noises uttered by this bogeyman sound something like this: “Giving the English language to Americans is like giving sex to little children.  They know it is important but they have not the first idea what do with it.” (A visiting Englishman’s letter to the editor, Times ( 10/13/74).

            For this exorcism, we will confront him with one of his own countrymen.  In his review of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, George Steiner (Extraordinary Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge) observed that a particular interest of the entries in the Supplement ( to the OED)) is that they “mark a crucial turn in the condition of English or “British” English.   The center of linguistic gravity, the energy core, has passed away from England.  It is no longer in the British Isles that the English language is being spoken and written at the highest levels of inventive intensity. It is no longer ‘British’ English which sets the pace of invention, of assimilative suppleness and resilient informing of experience.”

            Mr. Steiner explains in detail why this change has come about (New York Times Book Review, November 26, 1972). At the least, our bogeyman should be informed, as Mr. Steiner observes, that “the masters of contemporary poetry are Americans, the prose of the imagined is American, and after 1945, the language of new hopes came largely from America.” British English has lost its influence because of “its cruel emphasis on accentual propriety, on grammatical correctness, on range of implicit reference.” (Sort of reminds one, doesn’t it, of Carl Sandburg’s observation that “the English language hasn’t gotten where it is by being pure.”) These British attitudes have prevented the language from evolving in England as it has in America.

            And if the bogeyman is still not quite out of our systems: “At its best, American speech has a raw precision of imagery, a musical wealth, a vulnerability to the uprush of argotic and neological experiments, a sheer onrush which recalls the explosive enhancement of Tudor and Elizabethan English.”

            Perhaps as we approach our bicentennial year, we ought to remind ourselves of what Noah Webster spoke so well as he justified his American Dictionary of the English Language back in 1828. “A great number of words in our language require to be defined in a phraseology accommodated to the condition and institutions of the people of these states, and the people of England must look to an American dictionary for a correct understanding of them.”

            Our visiting bogeyman should be informed that since we were given the English language we have indeed known what to do with it. He should also be informed that little children have not only a “first” but also a second and third idea of what to do with what is given to them.          

                          Bill Reynolds