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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 4.4 | Chapter 4.5.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What use of storage was added to the American meaning of the word "barn?"
(a) Cattle.
(b) Crops.
(c) Horses.
(d) Chickens.

2. What Anglo-Saxon word does Mencken report the colonists refused to replace with an Old Norse word of similar meaning?
(a) Sick.
(b) Hale.
(c) Vapid.
(d) Ill.

3. Which of the early presidents does Mencken identify as archetypal of the new American?
(a) Andrew Jackson.
(b) James Monroe.
(c) Thomas Jefferson.
(d) George Washington.

4. What "Anglomaniac affectation" did Noah Webster sneer at in 1789?
(a) Clinging to the silent "u" as in "honour."
(b) The literature of Fowler.
(c) The broad "a."
(d) The recalcitrance to neologisms.

5. What is the second characteristic that Mencken attributes to American English in Chapter 1.5?
(a) Disregard of rule and precedent.
(b) Disunity of regional dialects.
(c) Resistance to neologisms.
(d) Translatability to British English.

Short Answer Questions

1. Which is the first factor that Mencken identifies as an immediate impediment to the growth of the American language in Chapter 3.1?

2. Which of the following did the African slaves NOT introduce to American English?

3. What country's works dominated the reading habits of the American colonists in the latter 18th century?

4. To what continent does Mencken attribute the acknowledgment of the differences between American and British English?

5. Who "tries" a legal case in England?

(see the answer key)

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