separate an auxiliary from its verb; you must say "probably will be,"
not "will probably be." This is English by the card indeed.

I will not waste space upon discussing the different fashions of
spelling in England and America. The rage excited in otherwise rational
human beings by the dropping of the "u" in "favor," or the final "me" in
"program," is one of the strangest of psychological phenomena. The
baselessness of the reasonings used to bolster up the British clinging
to superfluous letters is very ably shown in Professor Matthews'
_Americanisms and Briticisms_. Let me only put in a plea for the
retention of such abnormal spellings as serve to distinguish two words
of the same sound. For instance, it seems to me useful that we should
write "story" for a tale and "storey" for a floor, and in the plural
"stories" and "storeys."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote T: "Surely, on Mr. Archer's own showing," writes Mr. A.B.
Walkley, "the Englishman has the advantage here, for 'when he wants to
be emphatic' he can be, whereas the American cannot." This is a
misapprehension on Mr. Walkley's part. The American a can be spoken with
or without emphasis, just as the speaker pleases. It is because we are
accustomed always to associate this particular sonority with emphasis
that even when it is spoken without emphasis, we imagine it to be
emphatic.]

III

Passing now from questions of pronunciation and grammar to questions of
vocabulary, I can only express my sense of the deep indebtedness of the
English language, both literary and colloquial, to America, for the old
words she has kept alive and the new words and phrases she has invented.
It is a sheer pedantry--nay, a misconception of the laws which govern
language as a living organism--to despise pithy and apt colloquialisms,
and even slang. In order to remain healthy and vigorous, a literary
language must be rooted in the soil of a copious vernacular, from which
it can extract and assimilate, by a chemistry peculiar to itself,
whatever nourishment it requires. It must keep in touch with life in the
broadest acceptation of the word; and life at certain levels, obeying a
psychological law which must simply be accepted as one of the conditions
of the problem, will always express itself in dialect, provincialism,
slang.

America doubles and trebles the number of points at which the English
language comes in touch with nature and life, and is therefore a great
source of st