hought that if we spoke Greek and
they spoke Latin we might understand each other better. For Greek and
Latin are at least fixed, while American at least is still very fluid. I
do not know the American language, and therefore I do not claim to
distinguish between the American language and the American slang. But I
know that highly theatrical developments might follow on taking the
words as part of the English slang or the English language. I have
already given the example of calling a person 'a regular guy,' which in
the States is a graceful expression of respect and esteem, but which on
the stage, properly handled, might surely lead the way towards a divorce
or duel or something lively. Sometimes coincidence merely clinches a
mistake, as it so often clinches a misprint. Every proof-reader knows
that the worst misprint is not that which makes nonsense but that which
makes sense; not that which is obviously wrong but that which is
hideously right. He who has essayed to write 'he got the book,' and has
found it rendered mysteriously as 'he got the boob' is pensively
resigned. It is when it is rendered quite lucidly as 'he got the boot'
that he is moved to a more passionate mood of regret. I have had
conversations in which this sort of accident would have wholly misled
me, if another accident had not come to the rescue. An American friend
of mine was telling me of his adventures as a cinema-producer down in
the south-west where real Red Indians were procurable. He said that
certain Indians were 'very bad actors.' It passed for me as a very
ordinary remark on a very ordinary or natural deficiency. It would
hardly seem a crushing criticism to say that some wild Arab chieftain
was not very good at imitating a farmyard; or that the Grand Llama of
Thibet was rather clumsy at making paper boats. But the remark might be
natural in a man travelling in paper boats, or touring with an invisible
farmyard for his menagerie. As my friend was a cinema-producer, I
supposed he meant that the Indians were bad cinema actors. But the
phrase has really a high and austere moral meaning, which my levity had
wholly missed. A bad actor means a man whose actions are bad or morally
reprehensible. So that I might have embraced a Red Indian who was
dripping with gore, or covered with atrocious crimes, imagining there
was nothing the matter with him beyond a mistaken choice of the
theatrical profession. Surely there are here the elements of a play, not