"He married money" an American will say "He married rich;"
but this, I take it, is a vulgarism--as, indeed, is the English
expression. I find that in the modern American novel, setting forth the
sayings and doings of more or less educated people, there are apt to be,
on an average, about half a dozen words and phrases at which the English
reader stumbles for a moment. Mr. Howells, a master of English, may be
taken as a faithful reporter of the colloquial speech of Boston and New
York. In one of his comediettas, he makes Willis Campbell say, "Let me
turn out my sister's cup" (pour her a cup of tea). Mrs. Roberts, in
another of these delightful little pieces, says, "I'll smash off a
note," where an English Mrs. Roberts would say "dash off "; and where an
English Mrs. Roberts would ring the bell, her American namesake "touches
the annunciator." It is commonly believed in England that there is no
such thing as a "servant" in America, but only "hired girls" and
"helps." This is certainly not so in New York. I once "rang up" a
friend's house by telephone, and, on asking who was speaking to me,
received the answer, in a feminine voice, "I'm one of Mr. So-and-so's
servants."

The heroine of _The Story of a Play_ says to her husband, "Are you still
thinking of our scrap of this morning?" "Scrap," in the sense of
"quarrel," is one of the few exceedingly common American expressions
which, have as yet taken little hold in England.[V] Admiral Dewey, for
instance, is admired as a "scrapper," or, as we should phrase it, a
fighting Admiral. Mr. Henry Fuller, of Chicago, in his powerful novel
_The Cliff Dwellers_, uses a still less elegant synonym for "scrap"--he
talks of a "connubial spat." In the same book I note the phrases "He
teetered back and forth on his toes," "He was a stocky young man," "One
of his brief noonings," "That's right, Claudia--score the profession."
"Score," as used in America, does not mean "score off," but rather, I
take it, "attack and leave your mark upon." It is very common in this
sense. For instance, I note among the headlines of a New York paper,
"Mr. So-and-so scores Yellow Journalism." Talking of Yellow Journalism,
by the way, the expressions "a beat," and "a scoop," for what we in
England call an "exclusive" item of news, were unknown to me until I
went to America. I was a little bewildered, too, when I was told of a
family which "lived on air-tights." Their diet consisted of canned (or,
as we should sa