2. 职称英语
  3. There was relatively little communication back and forth between colonies an

There was relatively little communication back and forth between colonies an

游客2025-03-27  14
问题     There was relatively little communication back and forth between colonies and homeland in the earliest days, and in consequence the majority of Americanisms were seldom if ever heard in England. By an unhappy chance the beginnings of more frequent intercourse coincided precisely with that rise of Parism in speech which marked the age of Queen Anne. The first Englishman to sound the alarm against Americanisms was one Francis Moor who visited Georgia with Oglethorpe in 1780. In Savannah, then a village but two years old, he heard the word bluff applied to a steep bank and was so unpleasantly affected by it that he denounced it as "barbarous." He was followed by a gradually increasing stream of other linguistic policemen, and by 1781 the Rev John Witherspoon, who had come out in 1769 to be president of Princeton, was printing a headlong attack upon American speech habits, not only on the level of the folk but also higher up indeed, clear to the top. "I have heard in this country," he wrote, "in the senate, and from the pulpit, and see daily in dissertations from the press, errors in grammar, improprieties, and vulgarisms which hardly any person of the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain."
    Withers poon’s attack made some impression but only in academic circles. The generality of Americans, insofar as they heard of it at all dismissed its author as a mere Englishman (he was actually a Scotsman), and hence somehow inferior and ridiculous. The former colonies were now sovereign states, and their somewhat cocky citizens thought that they were under no obligation to heed admonitions from a defeated and effete empire 3,000 miles across the sea. Even before the Declaration of Independence the anonymous author, suppose to have been John Adams, proposed formally that an American Society of Language be set up to "polish" the American language on strictly American principles, and on Sept. 30, 1780, Adams wrote and signed a letter to the president of Congress renewing this proposal. "Let it be carried out." he said, "and England will never more have any honor, excepting now and then that of imitating the Americans." He was joined in 1789 by the redoubtable Noah Webster, who predicted the rise in the new Republic of a "language as different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish, and Swedish are from the German, or from one another."
    The English reply to such contumacy was a series of blasts that continued in dreadful fray for a whole generation and then abated to a somewhat milder bombardment that goes on to this day. From 1,785 to 1,815 the English quarterly reviewers, then at the height of their power, denounced all Americanisms in a really frantic manner, the good along with the bad. When Thomas Jefferson, in 1,787, ventured to use the verb to belittle in his Notes on Virginia, he was dealt with as if he had committed some nefarious and ignoble act. "Freely, good Sir," roared the European Magazine and London Review, "will we forgive all your attacks, impotent as they are illiberal, upon our national character; but for the future-oh spare, we beseech you, our mother tongue!" All the other American writers of the ensuing quarter century were similarly belabored-among them, John Marshall, Noah Webster, Joel Barlow, and John Quincy Adams. Even Washington got a few licks-for using to derange. But the Yankee, between the two wars with England, was vastly less susceptible to English precept and example that he is today, and the thundering of the reviewers did not stay the hatching of Americanisms. On the contrary, it seems to have stimulated the process. [br] Which of the following statements about John Witherspoon is NOT TRUE according to the passage?
选项 A、He was British by birth.
B、He made open and strong attack on American usage of English.
C、His criticism appealed to the common people’s speech habits only.
D、The effect of his attack was not impressiv
答案 C
解析 从文中第一段后半部分John Witherspoon对美式英语的抨击可知，他对普通百姓和社会上层的说话习惯不满。故选C项。
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