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in its Americanism. He instanced, among others, the verb tiptoed as an amazing and incredible thing. On tiptoe, or a-tiptoe, he could well understand because he had seen it in print at home. But the well-recognized truth that our language is largely made up of interchangeable facts did not calm his dismay. We know what a foot is; therefore we can say ‘she footed it gracefully,’ or speak of foot-troops or footers. To toe the mark is a legitimate development from the noun toe. Tiptoed is a simple employment of the franchise of our language, a franchise that Shakespeare and countless others have taken full advantage of. In fact, Richardson used it in ‘Clarissa Harlowe’ as far back as 1747: ‘Mabel tiptoed it to her door.’ But even if he did not, why should not I.?” Mr. Hughes is bitter against the “snobbery that divides our writers into two sharp classes—those who in their effort to write pure English strut pompously and uneasily in Piccadilly fashions, and those who in their effort to be true to their own environment seem to wear overalls and write with a nasal twang.” Between the two extremes he evidently prefers the latter. “Americans who try to write like Englishmen,” he says, “are not only committed to an unnatural pose, but doomed as well to failure, above all among the English; for the most likable thing about the English is their contempt for the hyphenated imitation Englishmen from the States, who only emphasize their nativity by their apish antics. The Americans who have triumphed among them have been, almost without exception, peculiarly American.” Finally, he repeats his clarion call for a formal rebellion, saying:

But let us sign a Declaration of Literary Independence and formally begin to write, not British, but Unitedstatish. For there is such a language, a brilliant, growing, glowing, vivacious, elastic language for which we have no specific name. We might call it Statesish, or for euphony condense it to Statish. But, whatever we call it, let us cease to consider it a vulgar dialect of English, to be used only with deprecation. Let us study it in its splendid efflorescence, be proud of it, and true to it. Let us put off livery, cease to be the butlers of another people’s language, and try to be the masters and the creators of our own.

Meanwhile, various Americans imitate John Fiske by abandoning the defense for the attack. When, in 1919, a British literary

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