All these differences between English and American pronunciation, separately considered, seem slight, but in the aggregate they are sufficient to place serious impediments between mutual [Pg176] comprehension. Let an Englishman and an American (not of New England) speak a quite ordinary sentence, "My aunt can't answer for my dancing the lancers even passably," and at once the gap separating the two pronunciations will be manifest. Here only the /a/ is involved. Add a dozen everyday words--/military/, /schedule/, /trait/, /hostile/, /been/, /lieutenant/, /patent/, /nephew/, /secretary/, /advertisement/, and so on--and the strangeness of one to the other is augmented. "Every Englishman visiting the States for the first time," said an English dramatist some time ago, "has a difficulty in making himself understood. He often has to repeat a remark or a request two or three times to make his meaning clear, especially on railroads, in hotels and at bars. The American visiting England for the first time has the same trouble."[97] Despite the fact that American actors imitate English pronunciation to the best of their skill, this visiting Englishman asserted that the average American audience is incapable of understanding a genuinely English company, at least "when the speeches are rattled off in conversational style." When he presented one of his own plays with an English company, he said, many American acquaintances, after witnessing the performance, asked him to lend them the manuscript, "that they might visit it again with some understanding of the dialogue."[98] FOOTNOTES: [1] In Passing English of the Victorian Era; London, n. d., p. 68. [2] The Oxford Dictionary, following the late J. H. Trumbull, the well-known authority on Indian languages, derives the word from the Algonquin /cau-cau-as-u/, one who advises. But most other authorities, following Pickering, derive it from /caulkers/. The first caucuses, it would appear, were held in a caulkers' shop in Boston, and were called /caulkers' meetings/. The Rev. William Gordon, in his History of the Rise and Independence of the United States, Including the Late War, published in London in 1788, said that "more than fifty years ago Mr. Samuel Adams' father and twenty others, one or two from the north end of the town [Boston], where the ship business is carried on, used to meet, make a /caucus/, and lay their plans for introducing certain persons into places of trust and power." [3] Americanisms Old and New; p. vii. [4] A. Cleveland Coxe: Americanisms in England, /Forum/, Oct. 1886. [5] Reprinted, in part, in the /New York Sun/, May 12, 1918. [6] Vol. xiv. pp. 507, 512. [7] In this connection it is curious to note that, though the raccoon is an animal quite unknown in England, there was, until lately, a destroyer called the /Raccoon/ in the British Navy. This ship was lost with all hands off the Irish coast, Jan. 9, 1918.