this is apparent when it is remembered that one of his rules would bar out such obvious Americanisms as the use of /sick/ in place of /ill/, of /molasses/ for /treacle/, and of /fall/ for /autumn/, for all of these words, while archaic in England, are by no means wholly extinct; and that another would dispose of that vast category of compounds which includes such unmistakably characteristic Americanisms as /joy-ride/, /rake-off/, /show-down/, /up-lift/, /out-house/, /rubber-neck/, /chair-warmer/, /fire-eater/ and /back-talk/. Lounsbury went even further. In the course of a series of articles in /Harper's Magazine/, in 1913,[19] he laid down the dogma that "cultivated speech ... affords the only legitimate basis of comparison between the language as used in England and in America," and then went on: In the only really proper sense of the term, an Americanism is a word or phrase naturally used by an educated American which under similar conditions would not be used by an educated Englishman. The emphasis, it will be seen, lies in the word "educated." This curious criterion, fantastic as it must have seemed to [Pg011] European philologists, was presently reinforced, for in his fourth article Lounsbury announced that his discussion was "restricted to the /written/ speech of educated men." The result, of course, was a wholesale slaughter of Americanisms. If it was not impossible to reject a word, like White, on the ground that some stray English poet or other had once used it, it was almost always possible to reject it on the ground that it was not admitted into the vocabulary of a college professor when he sat down to compose formal book-English. What remained was a small company, indeed--and almost the whole field of American idiom and American grammar, so full of interest for the less austere explorer, was closed without even a peek into it.