Between England and the United States there is a differ-
ence of vocabulary. In England an elevator is called a
lift; a railroad is a railway; the rails themselves are called
metals ; the cars are carriages ; the ticket-office is the booking-
office ; the train is not switched but shunted ; baggage is called
luggage; our baggage-checks are not in use in England, but
the English name for them is brasses; the engineer of a
train is the engine-driver, and the fireman is the stoker. A
store is usually called a shop ; twenty-five is usually five-and-
twenty. Instead of betting, an Englishman usually lays a
guinea, a shilling, etc.
In these and hundreds of similar divergences of vocabu-
lary it would be pedantry or Anglomania to urge Ameri-
cans to substitute the foreign term for the native. The
latter has become sanctioned through long use, literary,
legal, and commercial. Only one word of the above seems
to call for the change, viz. engineer. Such a designation



PROPRIETY. 163

ought to be reserved for the professional man who designs
structures, the civil engineer. The man who merely drives
an engine ought not to be called engineer.
99. Present. — Obsolete words and phrases are not often
a source of danger to the prose- writer. Very few at the
present day would be tempted to use -perchance, peradven-
twe, haply fox perhaps; eke for ako; verily for truly, really;
in sooth for in truth. The verb eke, in the phrase to eke out,
is still current. Furthermore is hardly to be treated as ob-
solete, or even as obsolescent.* Hight, swain, wight are
permissible only in humorous prose.
