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person of “I bet you,” which in comic-cartoon circles is pronounced and spelled “I betcha.” 17

I doubt that the war gave much new currency to Americanisms among the English. The fact is that the American and British troops were seldom on the best of terms, and so fraternized very little. Cassell’s New English Dictionary, published in 1919, lists a number of words borrowed by the British from the Americans, among them cold-feet, delicatessen, guy (noun), high-brow, hobo, jitney, hot-stuff, jazz, joy-ride, milk-shake, movies, pronto, tangle-foot, to make good, to hike, and to frazzle, but not many of them were in general use. Cassell lists chautauquan but not chautauqua, and converts the American dub into dud. A correspondent who was an officer in the American army writes:

I was with an American division brigaded with the British. The chief result seemed to be the adoption of a common unit of swearing, but probably even this had been arrived at independently. The passage of all the American troops that went through Liverpool, which was near-American before the war, didn’t make much difference. I had to get some shoes while I was on furlough there after the armistice, and although I was in my American uniform, a fact that should have made the nature of the shoes demanded doubly sure, they brought out a pair of low shoes.

2. Briticisms in the United States

Nor did the American troops pick up many Briticisms during their year and a half in France, save temporarily. In an exhaustive and valuable vocabulary of soldiers’ slang compiled by E. A. Hecker and Edmund Wilson, Jr., I can find few words or phrases that seem to be certainly English in origin. To carry on retains in American its old American meaning of to raise a pother, despite its widespread use among the English in the sense of to be (in American) on the job. Even to wangle, perhaps the most popular of all the new verbs brought out of the war by the English, has never got a

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