not fit the whole skeleton.

As the English language, spoken everywhere, must depend on good usage,
and the bad usage of to-day often becomes the good usage of to-morrow,
it is regrettable that no scientific study of the American vocabulary or
of the influences lying at the root of American word-formation--to quote
Mr. Mencken--has as yet been made. The elder student was content with
correcting the examples of bad English in Blair's "Rhetoric." Later, he
read "The Dean's English," very popular at one time, Richard Grant
White's "Words and Their Uses," and perhaps a little book called "The
Verbalist." To this, one of the most bewildering books on the manner of
writing English ever written, Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style"
was added. Whether it is Herbert Spencer's lack of a sense of humour or
the fallibility of his theories that has put him somewhat out of date is
not easy to say. In no book of his is a sense of humour so lacking as in
the "Philosophy of Style." Its principles have a perennial value and
nearly every author on style, since Spencer wrote, has repeated them
with variations; but Spencer's method of presenting them is as involved
as any method adopted by a philosopher could be--and that is saying a
good deal.

The English of the universities hold that Americans are the slave of
Webster's Dictionary; and this is true of a certain limited class of
Americans. The English public speaker allows himself more freedom in the
matter of pronunciation than very scrupulous Americans do. Lord
Balfour's speeches at the Washington Conference offered several
examples of this.

"The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that Webster's
Dictionary is _the_ American dictionary, and I propose to consider all
its decisions as final," said, in hot argument, a New York lawyer who
habitually uses "dontcha know" and "I wanta." Shakespeare, he regards as
an author whose English ought to be corrected; and he became furious
over what he called the mispronunciation of "apotheosis," which he said
a favourite preacher had not uttered according to Webster. And I have
known literary societies in the South to be disrupted over the use of
the word "nasty" by a Northern woman; and, as for "bloody," Mr. Mencken
shows us that one of the outrages committed by Mr. Shaw against English
convention was his permitting the heroine of "Pygmalion" to use it on
the stage. There is one Americanism, however, against which, as far as I
can f