American thus shows its character in a constant experimentation, a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid forms. No other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and phrases more readily; none is more careless of precedents; none shows a greater fecundity and originality of fancy. It is producing new words every day, by trope, by agglutination, by the shedding of inflections, by the merging of parts of speech, and by sheer brilliance of imagination. It is full of what Bret Harte called the "sabre-cuts of Saxon"; it meets Montaigne's ideal of "a succulent and nervous speech, short and compact, not as much delicated and combed out as vehement and brusque, rather arbitrary than monotonous, not pedantic but soldierly, as Suetonius called Caesar's Latin." One pictures the common materials of English dumped into a pot, exotic flavorings added, and the bubblings assiduously and expectantly skimmed. What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it comes into contact with what is new and vivid. Let American confront a novel problem alongside [Pg027] English, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious. /Movie/ is better than /cinema/; it is not only better American, it is better English. /Bill-board/ is better than /hoarding. Office-holder/ is more honest, more picturesque, more thoroughly Anglo-Saxon that /public-servant/. /Stem-winder/ somehow has more life in it, more fancy and vividness, than the literal /keyless-watch/. Turn to the terminology of railroading (itself, by the way, an Americanism): its creation fell upon the two peoples equally, but they tackled the job independently. The English, seeking a figure to denominate the wedge-shaped fender in front of a locomotive, called it a /plough/; the Americans, characteristically, gave it the far more pungent name of /cow-catcher/. So with the casting where two rails join. The English called it a /crossing-plate/. The Americans, more responsive to the suggestion in its shape, called it a /frog/.