Elite is spelt without the accent; and it is frequently pronounced ell-leet. Clôture is rarely to be discovered in American newspapers; closure is not uncommon; but the term commonly employed is the purely English 'previous question'.

In the final quarter of the nineteenth century an American adaptation of a French comic opera, 'La Mascotte', was for two or three seasons very popular. The heroine of its story was believed to have the gift of bringing luck. So it is that Americans now call any animal which has been adopted by a racing crew or by an athletic team (or even by a regiment) a mascot; and probably not one in ten thousand of those who use the word have any knowledge of its French origin, or any suspicion that it was transformed from the title of a musical play.

I regret, however, to be forced to confess that I have lately been shocked by a piece of petty pedantry which seems to show that we Americans are falling from grace—at least so far as one word is concerned. Probably because many of our architects and decorators have studied in Paris there is a pernicious tendency to call a 'grill' a grille. And I have seen with my own eyes, painted on a door in an hotel grille-room; surely the ultimate abomination of verbal desolation!

I may, however, record to our credit one righteous act—the perfect and satisfactory anglicizing of a Spanish word, whereby we have made 'canyon' out of cañon. And I cannot forbear to adduce another word for a fish soup, chowder, which the early settlers derived from the French name of the pot in which it was cooked, chaudière.1

IV

As the military vocabulary of English is testimony to the former leadership of the French in the art of war, so the vocabulary of fashion and of gastronomy is evidence of the cosmopolitan primacy of French millinery and French cookery. But most of the military terms were absorbed before the middle of the seventeenth century and were therefore assimilated, whereas the terms of the French dressmaker and of the French cook, chef, or cordon bleu, are being for ever multiplied in France and are very rarely being naturalized in English-speaking lands. So far as these two sets of words are concerned the case is probably hopeless, because, if for no other reason, they are more or less in the domain of the gentler sex and we all know that

The terms of the motor-car, however, and those of the airplane, are in the control of men; and there may be still a chance of bringing about a better state of affairs than now exists. While the war correspondents were actually in France, and while they were often forced to write at topmost speed, there was excuse for avion and camion, vrille and escadrille, and all the other French words which bespattered the columns of British and American, Canadian and Australian newspapers. I doubt if there was ever any necessity for hangar, the shed which sheltered the airplane or the airship. Hangar is simply the French word for 'shed', no more and no less; it does not indicate specifically a shed for a flying-machine; and as we already had 'shed' we need not take over hangar.

When we turn from the gas-engine on wings to the gas-engine on wheels, we find a heterogeny of words in use which bear witness to the fact that the French were the first to develop the motor-car, and also to the earlier fact that they had long been renowned for their taste and their skill as coach-builders. As the terminology of the railway in England is derived in part from that of the earlier stage-coach—in the United States, I may interject, it was derived in part from that of the earlier river-steamboat—so the terminology of the motor-car in France was derived in part from that of the pleasure-carriage. So we have the landaulet and limousine to designate different types of body. I think landaulet had already acquired an English pronunciation; at least I infer this because I cannot now recall that I ever heard it fall from the lips of an English-speaking person with its original French pronunciation of the nasal n. And limousine, being without accent and without nasal n can be trusted to take care of itself.

There are other technical terms of the motor-car industry which present more difficult problems. Tonneau is not troublesome, even if its spelling is awkward. There is chauffeur first of all; and I wish that it might generally acquire the local pronunciation it is said to have in Norfolk—shover. Then there is chassis. Is this the exact equivalent of 'running gear'? Is there any available substitute for the French word? And if chassis is to impose itself from sheer necessity what is to be done with it? Our forefathers boldly cut down chaise to 'shay'—at least my forefathers did it in New England, long before Oliver Wendell Holmes commemorated their victory over the alien in the 'Deacon's Masterpiece', more popularly known as the 'One Horse Shay'. And the men of old were even bolder when they curtailed cabriolet to 'cab', just as their children have more recently and with equal courage shortened 'taximeter vehicle' to 'taxi', and 'automobile' itself to 'auto'. Unfortunately it is not possible to cut the tail off chassis, or even to cut the head off, as the men of old did with 'wig', originally 'periwig', which was itself only a daring and summary anglicization of peruke.

Due to the fact that the drama has been more continuously alive in the literature of France than in that of any other country, and due also, it may be, to the associated fact that the French have been more loyally devoted to the theatre than any other people, the vocabulary of the English-speaking stage has probably more unassimilated French words than we can discover in the vocabulary of any of our other activities. We are none of us surprised when we find in our newspaper criticisms artiste, ballet, conservatoire, comédienne, costumier, danseuse, début, dénoûment, diseuse, encore, ingénue, mise-en-scène, perruquier, pianiste, première, répertoire, revue, rôle, tragédienne—the catalogue stretches out to the crack of doom.

Long as the list is, the words on it demand discussion. As to rôle I need say nothing since it has been considered carefully in Tract No. 3; I may merely mention that it appeared in English at least as early as 1606, so that it has had three centuries to make itself at home in our tongue. Conservatoire and répertoire have seemingly driven out the English words, which were long ago made out of them, 'conservatory' and 'repertory'. What is the accepted pronunciation of ballet? Is it bal-lett or ballay or bally? (If it is bally, it has a recently invented cockney homophone.) For costumier and perruquier I can see no excuse whatever; although I have observed them frequently on London play-bills, I am delighted to be able to say that they do not disgrace the New York programmes, which mention the 'costumer' and the 'wigmaker'. 'Encore' was used by Steele in 1712; it was early made into an English verb; and yet I have heard the verb pronounced with the nasal n of the original French. Here is another instance of English taking over a French word and giving it a meaning not acceptable in Paris, where the playgoers do not encore, they bis.

Why should we call a nondescript medley of dialogue and dance and song a revue, when revue in French is the exact equivalent of 'review' in English? Why should we call an actress of comic characters a comédienne and an actress of tragic