Chapter VI
. For another thing, I hope to make further inquiries into the subject of American surnames of non-English origin. Various other fields invite. No historical study of American pronunciation exists; the influence of German, Irish-English, Yiddish and other such immigrant dialects upon American has never been investigated; there is no adequate treatise on American geographical names. Contributions of materials and suggestions for a possible revised edition of the present book will reach me if addressed to me in care of the publisher at 220 West Forty-second Street, New York. I shall also be very grateful for the correction of errors, some perhaps typographical but others due to faulty information or mistaken judgment.
In conclusion I borrow a plea in confession and avoidance from Ben Jonson's pioneer grammar of English, published in incomplete form after his death. "We have set down," he said, "that that in our judgment agreeth best with reason and good order. Which notwithstanding, if it seem to any to be too rough hewed, let him plane it out more smoothly, and I shall not only not envy it, but in the behalf of my country most heartily thank him for so great a benefit; hoping that I shall be thought sufficiently to have done my
## part if in tolling this bell I may draw others to a deeper
consideration of the matter; for, touching myself, I must needs confess that after much painful churning this only would come which here we have devised."
MENCKEN.
Baltimore, January 1, 1919.
CONTENTS
I. BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION, 1
1. The Diverging Streams, 1
2. The Academic Attitude, 4
3. The View of Writing Men, 12
4. Foreign Observers, 18
5. The Characters of American, 19
6. The Materials of American, 29
II. THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN, 36
1. In Colonial Days, 36
2. Sources of Early Americanisms, 40
3. New Words of English Material, 44
4. Changed Meanings, 51
5. Archaic English Words, 54
6. Colonial Pronunciation, 58
III. THE PERIOD OF GROWTH, 63
1. The New Nation, 63
2. The Language in the Making, 72
3. The Expanding Vocabulary, 76
4. Loan-Words, 86
5. Pronunciation, 94
IV. AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY, 97
1. The Two Vocabularies, 97
2. Differences in Usage, 102
3. Honorifics, 117
4. Euphemisms and Forbidden Words, 124
V. TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN, 131
1. International Exchanges, 131
2. Points of Difference, 138
3. Lost Distinctions, 143
4. Foreign Influences Today, 149
5. Processes of Word Formation, 159
6. Pronunciation, 166
VI. THE COMMON SPEECH, 177
1. Grammarians and Their Ways, 177
2. Spoken American As It Is, 184
3. The Verb, 192
4. The Pronoun, 212
5. The Adverb, 226
6. The Noun and Adjective, 229
7. The Double Negative, 231
8. Pronunciation, 234
VII. DIFFERENCES IN SPELLING, 242
1. Typical Forms, 242
2. General Tendencies, 245
3. The Influence of Webster, 247
4. Exchanges, 255
5. Simplified Spelling, 261
6. Minor Differences, 264
VIII. PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA, 268
1. Surnames, 268
2. Given Names, 283
3. Geographical Names, 286
4. Street Names, 298
IX. MISCELLANEA, 301
1. Proverb and Platitude, 301
2. American Slang, 304
3. The Future of the Language, 312
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 323
LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES, 340
GENERAL INDEX, 368
[Pg001]
I
By Way of Introduction
§ 1
/The Diverging Streams/--Thomas Jefferson, with his usual prevision, saw clearly more than a century ago that the American people, as they increased in numbers and in the diversity of their national interests and racial strains, would make changes in their mother tongue, as they had already made changes in the political institutions of their inheritance. "The new circumstances under which we are placed," he wrote to John Waldo from Monticello on August 16, 1813, "call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects. An American dialect will therefore be formed."
Nearly a quarter of a century before this, another great American, and one with an expertness in the matter that the too versatile Jefferson could not muster, had ventured upon a prophecy even more bold and specific. He was Noah Webster, then at the beginning of his stormy career as a lexicographer. In his little volume of "Dissertations on the English Language," printed in 1789 and dedicated to "His Excellency, Benjamin Franklin, Esq., LL.D., F.R.S., late President of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," Webster argued that the time for regarding English usage and submitting to English authority had already passed, and that "a future separation of the American tongue from the English" was "necessary and unavoidable." "Numerous local causes," he continued, "such as a new country, new associations of people, new combinations of ideas in arts and sciences, and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe, will introduce new words into the American tongue. These causes will produce, in a course of time, a language in [Pg002] North America as different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one another."[1]
Neither Jefferson nor Webster put a term upon his prophecy. They may have been thinking, one or both, of a remote era, not yet come to dawn, or they may have been thinking, with the facile imagination of those days, of a period even earlier than our own. In the latter case, they allowed far too little (and particularly Webster) for factors that have worked powerfully against the influences they saw so clearly in operation about them. One of these factors, obviously, has been the vast improvement in communications across the ocean, a change scarcely in vision a century ago. It has brought New York relatively nearer to London today than it was to Boston, or even to Philadelphia, during Jefferson's presidency, and that greater proximity has produced a steady interchange of ideas, opinions, news and mere gossip. We latter-day Americans know a great deal more about the everyday affairs of England than the early Americans, for we read more English books, and have more about the English in our newspapers, and meet more Englishmen, and go to England much oftener. The effects of this ceaseless traffic in ideas and impressions, so plainly visible in politics, in ethics and aesthetics, and even in the minutae of social intercourse, are also to be seen in the language. On the one hand there is a swift exchange of new inventions on both sides, so that much of our American slang quickly passes to London and the latest English fashions in pronunciation are almost instantaneously imitated, at least by a minority, in New York; and on the other hand the English, by so constantly having the floor, force upon us, out of their firmer resolution and certitude, a somewhat sneaking respect for their own greater conservatism of speech, so that our professors of the language, in the overwhelming main, combat all signs of differentiation with the utmost diligence, and safeguard the doctrine that the standards of English are the only reputable standards of American.
This doctrine, of course, is not supported by the known laws of [Pg003] language, nor has it prevented the large divergences that we shall presently examine, but all the same it has worked steadily toward a highly artificial formalism, and as steadily against the investigation of the actual national speech. Such grammar, so-called, as is taught in our schools and colleges, is a grammar standing four-legged upon the theorizings and false inferences of English Latinists, eager only to break the wild tongue of Shakespeare to a rule; and its frank aim is to create in us a high respect for a book language which few of us ever actually speak and not many of us even learn to write. That language, heavily artificial though it may be, undoubtedly has notable merits. It shows a sonority and a stateliness that you must go to the Latin of the Golden Age to match; its "highly charged and heavy-shotted" periods, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, serve admirably the obscurantist purposes of American pedagogy and of English parliamentary oratory and leader-writing; it is something for the literary artists of both countries to prove their skill upon by flouting it. But to the average American, bent upon expressing his ideas, not stupendously but merely clearly, it must always remain something vague and remote, like Greek history or the properties of the parabola, for he never speaks it or hears it spoken, and seldom encounters it in his everyday reading. If he learns to write it, which is not often, it is with a rather depressing sense of its artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, bred in the colloquial Onmun, may master the literary Korean-Chinese, but he never thinks in it or quite feels it.
This fact, I daresay, is largely responsible for the notorious failure of our schools to turn out students who can put their ideas into words with simplicity and intelligibility. What their professors try to teach is not their mother-tongue at all, but a dialect that stands quite outside their common experience, and into which they have to translate their thoughts, consciously and painfully. Bad writing consists in making the attempt, and failing through lack of practise. Good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberately throwing overboard the principles so elaborately inculcated, or, as in the case of Lincoln, in standing unaware of them. Thus the study of the language he is [Pg004] supposed to use, to the average American, takes on a sort of bilingual character. On the one hand, he is grounded abominably in a grammar and syntax that have always been largely artificial, even in the country where they are supposed to prevail, and on the other hand he has to pick up the essentials of his actual speech as best he may. "Literary English," says Van Wyck Brooks,[2] "with us is a tradition, just as Anglo-Saxon law with us is a tradition. They persist, not as the normal expressions of a race, ... but through prestige and precedent and the will and habit of a dominating class largely out of touch with a national fabric unconsciously taking form out of school." What thus goes on out of school does not interest the guardians of our linguistic morals. No attempt to deduce the principles of American grammar, or even of American syntax, from the everyday speech of decently spoken Americans has ever been made. There is no scientific study, general and comprehensive in scope, of the American vocabulary, or of the influences lying at the root of American word-formation. No American philologist, so far as I know, has ever deigned to give the same sober attention to the /sermo plebeius/ of his country that he habitually gives to the mythical objective case in theoretical English, or to the pronunciation of Latin, or to the irregular verbs in French.
§ 2
/The Academic Attitude/--This neglect of the vulgate by those professionally trained to investigate it, and its disdainful dismissal when it is considered at all, are among the strangest phenomena of American scholarship. In all other countries the everyday speech of the people, and even the speech of the illiterate, have the constant attention of philologists, and the laws of their growth and variation are elaborately studied. In France, to name but one agency, there is the Société des Parlers de France, with its diligent inquiries into changing forms; moreover, the Académie itself is endlessly concerned with the [Pg005] subject, and is at great pains to observe and note every fluctuation in usage.[3] In Germany, amid many other such works, there are the admirable grammars of the spoken speech by Dr. Otto Bremer. In Sweden there are several journals devoted to the study of the vulgate, and the government has recently granted a subvention of 7500 /kronen/ a year to an organization of scholars called the Undersökningen av Svenska Folkmaal, formed to investigate it systematically.[4] In Norway there is a widespread movement to overthrow the official Dano-Norwegian, and substitute a national language based upon the speech of the peasants.[5] In Spain the Academia is constantly at work upon its great Diccionario, Ortografía and Gramática, and revises them at frequent intervals (the last time in 1914), taking in all new words as they appear and all new forms of old ones. And in Latin-America, to come nearer to our own case, the native philologists have produced a copious literature on the matter closest at hand, [Pg006] and one finds in it very excellent works upon the Portuguese dialect of Brazil, and the variations of Spanish in Mexico, the Argentine, Chili, Peru, Ecuador, Uraguay and even Honduras and Costa Rica.[6] But in the United States the business has attracted little attention, and less talent. The only existing formal treatise upon the subject[7] was written by a Swede trained in Germany and is heavy with errors and omissions. And the only usable dictionary of Americanisms[8] was written in England, and is the work of an expatriated lawyer. Not a single volume by a native philologist, familiar with the language by daily contact and professionally equipped for the business, is to be found in the meagre bibliography.
I am not forgetting, of course, the early explorations of Noah Webster, of which much more anon, nor the labors of our later dictionary makers, nor the inquiries of the American Dialect Society,[9] nor even the occasional illuminations of such writers as Richard Grant White, Thomas S. Lounsbury and Brander Matthews. But all this preliminary work has left the main field almost uncharted. Webster, as we shall see, was far more a reformer of the American dialect than a student of it. He introduced radical changes into its spelling and pronunciation, but he showed little understanding of its direction and genius. One always sees in him, indeed, the teacher rather than the scientific inquirer; the ardor of his desire to expound and instruct was only matched by his infinite capacity for observing inaccurately, and his profound ignorance of elementary philological principles. In the preface to the first edition of his American Dictionary, published in 1828--the first in which he added the qualifying adjective to the title--he argued eloquently for the right of Americans to shape their own speech without regard to English [Pg007] precedents, but only a year before this he had told Captain Basil Hall[10] that he knew of but fifty genuine Americanisms--a truly staggering proof of his defective observation. Webster was the first American professional scholar, and despite his frequent engrossment in public concerns and his endless public controversies, there was always something sequestered and almost medieval about him. The American language that he described and argued for was seldom the actual tongue of the folks about him, but often a sort of Volapük made up of one part faulty reporting and nine parts academic theorizing. In only one department did he exert any lasting influence, and that was in the department of orthography. The fact that our spelling is simpler and usually more logical than the English we chiefly owe to him. But it is not to be forgotten that the majority of his innovations, even here, were not adopted, but rejected, nor is it to be forgotten that spelling is the least of all the factors that shape and condition a language.
The same caveat lies against the work of the later makers of dictionaries; they have gone ahead of common usage in the matter of orthography, but they have hung back in the far more important matter of vocabulary, and have neglected the most important matter of idiom altogether. The defect in the work of the Dialect Society lies in a somewhat similar circumscription of activity. Its constitution, adopted in 1889, says that "its object is the investigation of the spoken English of the United States and Canada," but that investigation, so far, has got little beyond the accumulation of vocabularies of local dialects, such as they are. Even in this department its work is very far from finished, and the Dialect Dictionary announced years ago has not yet appeared. Until its collections are completed and synchronized, it will be impossible for its members to make any profitable inquiry into the general laws underlying the development of American, or even to attempt a classification of the materials common to the whole speech. The meagreness of the materials accumulated in the five slow-moving volumes of /Dialect Notes/ shows clearly, indeed, how little the American philologist is [Pg008] interested in the language that falls upon his ears every hour of the day. And in /Modern Language Notes/ that impression is reinforced, for its bulky volumes contain exhaustive studies of all the other living languages and dialects, but only an occasional essay upon American.
Now add to this general indifference a persistent and often violent effort to oppose any formal differentiation of English and American, initiated by English purists but heartily supported by various Americans, and you come, perhaps, to some understanding of the unsatisfactory state of the literature of the subject. The pioneer dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1816 by John Pickering, a Massachusetts lawyer,[11] was not only criticized unkindly; it was roundly denounced as something subtly impertinent and corrupting, and even Noah Webster took a formidable fling at it.[12] Most of the American philologists of the early days--Witherspoon, Worcester, Fowler, Cobb and their like--were uncompromising advocates of conformity, and combatted every indication of a national independence in speech with the utmost vigilance. One of their company, true enough, stood out against the rest. He was George Perkins Marsh, and in his "Lectures on the English Language"[13] he argued that "in point of naked syntactical accuracy, the English of America is not at all inferior to that of England." But even Marsh expressed the hope that Americans would not, "with malice prepense, go about to republicanize our orthography and our syntax, our grammars and our dictionaries, our nursery hymns (/sic/) and our Bibles" to the point of actual separation.[14] Moreover, he was a philologist only by courtesy; the regularly ordained school-masters were all against him. The fear voiced by William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, that Americans might "break loose from the laws of the English language"[15] altogether, was [Pg009] echoed by the whole fraternity, and so the corrective bastinado was laid on.
It remained, however, for two professors of a later day to launch the doctrine that the independent growth of American was not only immoral, but a sheer illusion. They were Richard Grant White, for long the leading American writer upon language questions, at least in popular esteem, and Thomas S. Lounsbury, for thirty-five years professor of the English language and literature in the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, and an indefatigable controversialist. Both men were of the utmost industry in research, and both had wide audiences. White's "Words and Their Uses," published in 1872, was a mine of erudition, and his "Everyday English," following eight years later, was another. True enough, Fitzedward Hall, the Anglo-Indian-American philologist, disposed of many of his etymologies and otherwise did execution upon him,[16] but in the main his contentions held water. Lounsbury was also an adept and favorite expositor. His attacks upon certain familiar pedantries of the grammarians were penetrating and effective, and his two books, "The Standard of Usage in English" and "The Standard of Pronunciation in English," not to mention his excellent "History of the English Language" and his numerous magazine articles, showed a profound knowledge of the early development of the language, and an admirable spirit of free inquiry. But both of these laborious scholars, when they turned from English proper to American English, displayed an unaccountable desire to deny its existence altogether, and to the support of that denial they brought a critical method that was anything but unprejudiced. White devoted not less than eight long articles in the /Atlantic Monthly/[17] to a review of the fourth edition of John [Pg010] Russell Bartlett's American Glossary,[18] and when he came to the end he had disposed of nine-tenths of Bartlett's specimens and called into question the authenticity of at least half of what remained. And no wonder, for his method was simply that of erecting tests so difficult and so arbitrary that only the exceptional word or phrase could pass them, and then only by a sort of chance. "To stamp a word or a phrase as an Americanism," he said, "it is necessary to show that (1) it is of so-called 'American' origin--that is, that it first came into use in the United States of North America, or that (2) it has been adopted in those States from some language other than English, or has been kept in use there while it has /wholly/ passed out of use in England." Going further, he argued that unless "the simple words in compound names" were used in America "in a sense different from that in which they are used in England" the compound itself could not be regarded as an Americanism. The absurdity of all 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.
White and Lounsbury dominated the arena and fixed the fashion. The later national experts upon the national language, with a few somewhat timorous exceptions, pass over its peculiarities without noticing them. So far as I can discover, there is not a single treatise in type upon one of its most salient characters--the wide departure of some of its vowel sounds from those of orthodox English. Marsh, C. H. Grandgent and Robert J. Menner have printed a number of valuable essays upon the subject, but there is no work that co-ordinates their inquiries or that attempts otherwise to cover the field. When, in preparing materials for the following chapters, I sought to determine the history of the /a/-sound in America, I found it necessary to plow through scores of ancient spelling-books, and to make deductions, perhaps sometimes rather rash, from the works of Franklin, Webster and Cobb. Of late the National Council of Teachers of English has appointed a Committee on American Speech and sought to let some light into the matter, but as yet its labors are barely begun and the publications of its members get little beyond preliminaries. Such an inquiry involves a laboriousness which should have intrigued Lounsbury: he once counted the number of times the word /female/ appears in "Vanity Fair." But you will find only a feeble dealing with the question in his book on pronunciation. Nor is there any adequate work (for Schele de Vere's is full of errors and omissions) upon the influences felt by American through contact with the languages of our millions [Pg012] of immigrants, nor upon our peculiarly rich and characteristic slang. There are several excellent dictionaries of English slang, and many more of French slang, but I have been able to find but one devoted exclusively to American slang, and that one is a very bad one.
§ 3
/The View of Writing Men/--But though the native /Gelehrten/ thus neglect the vernacular, or even oppose its study, it has been the object of earnest lay attention since an early day, and that attention has borne fruit in a considerable accumulation of materials, if not in any very accurate working out of its origins and principles. The English, too, have given attention to it--often, alas, satirically, or even indignantly. For a long while, as we shall see, they sought to stem its differentiation by heavy denunciations of its vagaries, and so late as the period of the Civil War they attached to it that quality of abhorrent barbarism which they saw as the chief mark of the American people. But in later years they have viewed it with a greater showing of scientific calm, and its definite separation from correct English, at least as a spoken tongue, is now quite frankly admitted. The Cambridge History of English Literature, for example, says that English and American are now "notably dissimilar" in vocabulary, and that the latter is splitting off into a distinct dialect.[20] The Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, going further, says that the two languages are already so far apart that "it is not uncommon to meet with [American] newspaper articles of which an untravelled Englishman would hardly be able to understand a sentence."[21] A great many other academic authorities, including A. H. Sayce and H. W. and F. G. Fowler, bear testimony to the same effect.
On turning to the men actually engaged in writing English, and
## particularly to those aspiring to an American audience, one finds
nearly all of them adverting, at some time or other, to the growing difficulties of intercommunication. William Archer, [Pg013] Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, Sidney Low, the Chestertons and Kipling are some of those who have dealt with the matter at length. Low, in an article in the /Westminster Gazette/[22] ironically headed "Ought American to be Taught in our Schools?" has described how the latter-day British business man is "puzzled by his ignorance of colloquial American" and "painfully hampered" thereby in his handling of American trade. He continues:
In the United States of North America the study of the English tongue forms part of the educational scheme. I gather this because I find that they have professors of the English language and literature in the Universities there, and I note that in the schools there are certain hours alloted for "English" under instructors who specialize in that subject. This is quite right. English is still far from being a dead language, and our American kinsfolk are good enough to appreciate the fact.
But I think we should return the compliment. We ought to learn the American language in our schools and colleges. At present it is strangely neglected by the educational authorities. They pay attention to linguistic attainments of many other kinds, but not to this. How many thousands of youths are at this moment engaged in puzzling their brains over Latin and Greek grammar only Whitehall knows. Every well-conducted seminary has some instructor who is under the delusion that he is teaching English boys and girls to speak French with a good Parisian accent. We teach German, Italian, even Spanish, Russian, modern Greek, Arabic, Hindustani. For a moderate fee you can acquire a passing acquaintance with any of these tongues at the Berlitz Institute and the Gouin Schools. But even in these polyglot establishments there is nobody to teach you American. I have never seen a grammar of it or a dictionary. I have searched in vain at the book-sellers for "How to Learn American in Three Weeks" or some similar compendium. Nothing of the sort exists. The native speech of one hundred millions of civilized people is as grossly neglected by the publishers as it is by the schoolmasters. You can find means to learn Hausa or Swahili or Cape Dutch in London more easily than the expressive, if difficult, tongue which is spoken in the office, the bar-room, the tram-car, from the snows of Alaska to the mouths of the Mississippi, and is enshrined in a literature that is growing in volume and favor every day.
Low then quotes an extract from an American novel appearing [Pg014] serially in an English magazine--an extract including such Americanisms as /side-stepper/, /saltwater-taffy/, /Prince-Albert/ (coat), /boob/, /bartender/ and /kidding/, and many characteristically American extravagances of metaphor. It might be well argued, he goes on, that this strange dialect is as near to "the tongue that Shakespeare spoke" as "the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton," but that philological fact does not help to its understanding. "You might almost as well expect him [the British business man] to converse freely with a Portuguese railway porter because he tried to stumble through Caesar when he was in the Upper Fourth at school."
In the /London Daily Mail/, W. G. Faulkner lately launched this proposed campaign of education by undertaking to explain various terms appearing in American moving-pictures to English spectators. Mr. Faulkner assumed that most of his readers would understand /sombrero/, /sidewalk/, /candy-store/, /freight-car/, /boost/, /elevator/, /boss/, /crook/ and /fall/ (for /autumn/) without help, but he found it necessary to define such commonplace Americanisms as /hoodlum/, /hobo/, /bunco-steerer/, /rubber-neck/, /drummer/, /sucker/, /dive/ (in the sense of a thieves' resort), /clean-up/, /graft/ and /to feature/. Curiously enough, he proved the reality of the difficulties he essayed to level by falling into error as to the meanings of some of the terms he listed, among them /dead-beat/, /flume/, /dub/ and /stag/. Another English expositor, apparently following him, thought it necessary to add definitions of /hold-up/, /quitter/, /rube/, /shack/, /road-agent/, /cinch/, /live-wire/ and /scab/,[23] but he, too, mistook the meaning of /dead-beat/, and in addition he misdefined /band-wagon/ and substituted /get-out/, seemingly an invention of his own, for /get-away/. Faulkner, somewhat belated in his animosity, seized the opportunity to read a homily upon the vulgarity and extravagance of the American language, and argued that the introduction of its coinages through the moving-picture theatre (/Anglais, cinema/) "cannot be regarded without serious [Pg015] misgivings, if only because it generates and encourages mental indiscipline so far as the choice of expressions is concerned." In other words, the greater pliability and resourcefulness of American is a fault to be corrected by the English tendency to hold to that which is established.
Cecil Chesterton, in the /New Witness/, recently called attention to the increasing difficulty of intercommunication, not only verbally, but in writing. The American newspapers, he said, even the best of them, admit more and more locutions that puzzle and dismay an English reader. After quoting a characteristic headline he went on:
I defy any ordinary Englishman to say that that is the English language or that he can find any intelligible meaning in it. Even a dictionary will be of no use to him. He must know the language colloquially or not at all.... No doubt it is easier for an Englishman to understand American than it would be for a Frenchman to do the same, just as it is easier for a German to understand Dutch than it would be for a Spaniard. But it does not make the American language identical with the English.[24]
Chesterton, however, refrained from denouncing this lack of identity; on the contrary, he allowed certain merits to American. "I do not want anybody to suppose," he said, "that the American language is in any way inferior to ours. In some ways it has improved upon it in vigor and raciness. In other ways it adheres more closely to the English of the best period." Testimony to the same end was furnished before this by William Archer. "New words," he said, "are begotten by new conditions of life; and as American life is far more fertile of new conditions than ours, the tendency toward neologism cannot but be stronger in America than in England. America has enormously enriched the language, not only with new words, but (since the American mind is, on the whole, quicker and wittier than the English) with apt and luminous colloquial metaphors."[25]
The list of such quotations might be indefinitely prolonged. [Pg016] There is scarcely an English book upon the United States which does not offer some discussion, more or less profound, of American peculiarities of speech, both as they are revealed in spoken discourse (particularly pronunciation and intonation) and as they show themselves in popular literature and in the newspapers, and to this discussion protest is often added, as it very often is by the reviews and newspapers. "The Americans," says a typical critic, "have so far progressed with their self-appointed task of creating an American language that much of their conversation is now incomprehensible to English people."[26] On our own side there is almost equal evidence of a sense of difference, despite the fact that the educated American is presumably trained in orthodox English, and can at least read it without much feeling of strangeness. "The American," says George Ade, in his book of travel, "In Pastures New," "must go to England in order to learn for a dead certainty that he does not speak the English language.... This pitiful fact comes home to every American when he arrives in London--that there are two languages, the English and the American. One is correct; the other is incorrect. One is a pure and limpid stream; the other is a stagnant pool, swarming with bacilli."[27] This was written in 1906. Twenty-five years earlier Mark Twain had made the same observation. "When I speak my native tongue in its utmost purity in England," he said, "an Englishman can't understand me at all."[28] The languages, continued Mark, "were identical several generations ago, but our changed conditions and the spread of our people far to the south and far to the west have made many alterations in our pronunciation, and have introduced new words among us and changed the meanings of old ones." Even before this the great humorist had marked and hailed these differences. Already in "Roughing It" he was celebrating "the vigorous new vernacular of the [Pg017] occidental plains and mountains,"[29] and in all his writings, even the most serious, he deliberately engrafted its greater liberty and more fluent idiom upon the stem of English, and so lent the dignity of his high achievement to a dialect that was as unmistakably American as the point of view underlying it.
The same tendency is plainly visible in William Dean Howells. His novels are mines of American idiom, and his style shows an undeniable revolt against the trammels of English grammarians. In 1886 he made a plea in /Harper's/ for a concerted effort to put American on its own legs. "If we bother ourselves," he said, "to write what the critics imagine to be 'English,' we shall be priggish and artificial, and still more so if we make our Americans talk 'English.' ... On our lips our continental English will differ more and more from the insular English, and we believe that this is not deplorable but desirable."[30] Howells then proceeded to discuss the nature of the difference, and described it accurately as determined by the greater rigidity and formality of the English of modern England. In American, he said, there was to be seen that easy looseness of phrase and gait which characterized the English of the Elizabethan era, and
## particularly the Elizabethan hospitality to changed meanings and bold
metaphors. American, he argued, made new words much faster than English, and they were, in the main, words of much greater daring and savor.
The difference between the two tongues, thus noted by the writers of both, was made disconcertingly apparent to the American troops when they first got to France and came into contact with the English. Fraternizing was made difficult by the wide divergence in vocabulary and pronunciation--a divergence interpreted by each side as a sign of uncouthness. The Y. M. C. A. made a characteristic effort to turn the resultant feeling of strangeness and homesickness among the Americans to account. In the /Chicago Tribune's/ Paris edition of July 7, 1917, I find a large advertisement inviting them to make use of the Y. M. C. A. [Pg018] clubhouse in the Avenue Montaigue, "where /American/ is spoken." Earlier in the war the /Illinoiser Staats Zeitung/, no doubt seeking to keep the sense of difference alive, advertised that it would "publish articles daily in the /American/ language."
§ 4
/Foreign Observers/--What English and American laymen have thus observed has not escaped the notice of continental philologists. The first edition of Bartlett, published in 1848, brought forth a long and critical review in the /Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen/ by Prof. Felix Flügel,[31] and in the successive volumes of the /Archiv/, down to our own day, there have been many valuable essays upon Americanisms, by such men as Herrig, Koehler and Koeppel. Various Dutch philologists, among them Barentz, Keijzer and Van der Voort, have also discussed the subject, and a work in French has been published by G. A. Barringer.[32] That, even to the lay Continental, American and English now differ considerably, is demonstrated by the fact that many of the popular German /Sprachführer/ appear in separate editions, /Amerikanisch/ and /Englisch/. This is true of the "Metoula Sprachführer" published by Prof. F. Lanenscheidt[33] and of the "Polyglott Kuntz" books.[34] The American edition of the latter starts off with the doctrine that "/Jeder, der nach Nord-Amerika oder Australien will, muss Englisch können/," but a great many of the words and phrases that appear in its examples would be unintelligible to many Englishmen--/e.g./, /free-lunch/, /real-estate agent/, /buckwheat/, /corn/ (for /maize/), /conductor/, /pop-corn/ and /drug-store/--and a number of others would suggest false meanings or otherwise puzzle--/e. g./, /napkin/, /saloon/, /wash-stand/, /water-pitcher/ and /apple-pie/.[35] To [Pg019] these pedagogical examples must be added that of Baedeker, of guide-book celebrity. In his guide-book to the United States, prepared for Englishmen, he is at pains to explain the meaning of various American words and phrases.
A philologist of Scandinavian extraction, Elias Molee, has gone so far as to argue that the acquisition of correct English, to a people grown so mongrel in blood as the Americans, has become a useless burden. In place of it he proposes a mixed tongue, based on English, but admitting various elements from the other Germanic languages. His grammar, however, is so much more complex than that of English that most Americans would probably find his artificial "American" very difficult of acquirement. At all events it has made no progress.[36]
§ 5
/The Characters of American/--The characters chiefly noted in American speech by all who have discussed it are, first, its general uniformity throughout the country, so that, dialects, properly speaking, are confined to recent immigrants, to the native whites of a few isolated areas and to the negroes of the South; and, secondly, its impatient disdain of rule and precedent, and hence its large capacity (distinctly greater than that of the English of England) for taking in new words and phrases and for manufacturing new locutions out of its own materials. The first of these characters has struck every observer, native and foreign. In place of the local dialects of other countries we have a general /Volkssprache/ for the whole nation, and if it is conditioned [Pg020] at all it is only by minor differences in pronunciation and by the linguistic struggles of various groups of newcomers. "The speech of the United States," said Gilbert M. Tucker, "is quite unlike that of Great Britain in the important particular that here we have no dialects."[37] "We all," said Mr. Taft during his presidency, "speak the same language and have the same ideas." "Manners, morals and political views," said the /New York World/, commenting upon this dictum, "have all undergone a standardization which is one of the remarkable aspects of American evolution. Perhaps it is in the uniformity of language that this development has been most noteworthy. Outside of the Tennessee mountains and the back country of New England there is no true dialect."[38] "While we have or have had single counties as large as Great Britain," says another American observer, "and in some of our states England could be lost, there is practically no difference between the American spoken in our 4,039,000 square miles of territory, except as spoken by foreigners. We, assembled here, would be perfectly understood by delegates from Texas, Maine, Minnesota, Louisiana, or Alaska, or from whatever walk of life they might come. We can go to any of the 75,000 postoffices in this country and be entirely sure we will be understood, whether we want to buy a stamp or borrow a match."[39] "From Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon," agrees an English critic, "no trace of a distinct dialect is to be found. The man from Maine, even though he may be of inferior education and limited capacity, can completely understand the man from Oregon."[40]
No other country can show such linguistic solidarity, nor any approach to it--not even Canada, for there a large part of the population resists learning English altogether. The Little Russian of the Ukraine is unintelligible to the citizen of Petrograd; [Pg021] the Northern Italian can scarcely follow a conversation in Sicilian; the Low German from Hamburg is a foreigner in Munich; the Breton flounders in Gascony. Even in the United Kingdom there are wide divergences.[41] "When we remember," says the New International Encyclopaedia[42] "that the dialects of the countries (/sic/) in England have marked differences--so marked, indeed that it may be doubted whether a Lancashire miner and a Lincolnshire farmer could understand each other--we may well be proud that our vast country has, strictly speaking, only one language." This uniformity was noted by the earliest observers; Pickering called attention to it in the preface to his Vocabulary and ascribed it, no doubt accurately, to the restlessness of the Americans, their inheritance of the immigrant spirit, "the frequent removals of people from one part of our country to another." It is especially marked in vocabulary and grammatical forms--the foundation stones of a living speech. There may be slight differences in pronunciation and intonation--a Southern softness, a Yankee drawl, a Western burr--but in the words they use and the way they use them all Americans, even the least tutored, follow the same line. One observes, of course, a polite speech and a common speech, but the common speech is everywhere the same, and its uniform vagaries take the place of the dialectic variations of other lands. A Boston street-car conductor could go to work in Chicago, San Francisco or New Orleans without running the slightest risk of misunderstanding his new fares. Once he had picked up half a dozen localisms, he would be, to all linguistic intents and purposes, fully naturalized.
Of the intrinsic differences that separate American from English the chief have their roots in the obvious disparity between the environment and traditions of the American people since the seventeenth century and those of the English. The latter have lived under a stable social order, and it has impressed upon their souls their characteristic respect for what is customary and of [Pg022] good report. Until the war brought chaos to their institutions, their whole lives were regulated, perhaps more than those of any other people save the Spaniards, by a regard for precedent. The Americans, though largely of the same blood, have felt no such restraint, and acquired no such habit of conformity. On the contrary, they have plunged to the other extreme, for the conditions of life in their new country have put a high value upon the precisely opposite qualities of curiosity and daring, and so they have acquired that character of restlessness, that impatience of forms, that disdain of the dead hand, which now broadly marks them. From the first, says a recent literary historian, they have been "less phlegmatic, less conservative than the English. There were climatic influences, it may be; there was surely a spirit of intensity everywhere that made for short effort."[43] Thus, in the arts, and thus in business, in politics, in daily intercourse, in habits of mind and speech. The American is not, in truth, lacking in a capacity for discipline; he has it highly developed; he submits to leadership readily, and even to tyranny. But, by a curious twist, it is not the leadership that is old and decorous that fetches him, but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He will resist dictation out of the past, but he will follow a new messiah with almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of economics, religion, morals and speech. A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new metaphor or piece of slang.
Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meet the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative. The characteristic American habit of reducing complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations was already noticeable in colonial times, [Pg023] and such highly typical Americanisms as /O. K./, /N. G./, and /P. D. Q./, have been traced back to the first days of the republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these early tendencies invisible today, for the country is still in process of growth, and no settled social order has yet descended upon it. Institution-making is still going on, and so is language-making. In so modest an operation as that which has evolved /bunco/ from /buncombe/ and /bunk/ from /bunco/ there is evidence of a phenomenon which the philologist recognizes as belonging to the most primitive and lusty stages of speech. The American vulgate is not only constantly making new words, it is also deducing roots from them, and so giving proof, as Prof. Sayce says, that "the creative powers of language are even now not extinct."[44]
But of more importance than its sheer inventions, if only because much more numerous, are its extensions of the vocabulary, both absolutely and in ready workableness, by the devices of rhetoric. The American, from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians. His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest as much upon brilliant phrases as upon logical ideas. And in small things as in large he exercises continually an incomparable capacity for projecting hidden and often fantastic relationships into arresting parts of speech. Such a term as /rubber-neck/ is almost a complete treatise on American psychology; it reveals the national habit of mind more clearly than any labored inquiry could ever reveal it. It has in it precisely the boldness and disdain of ordered forms that are so characteristically American, and it has too the grotesque humor of the country, and the delight in devastating opprobriums, and the acute feeling for the succinct and savory. The same qualities are in /rough-house/, /water-wagon/, /near-silk/, /has-been/, /lame-duck/ and a thousand other such racy substantives, and in all the great stock of native verbs and adjectives. There is, indeed, but a shadowy boundary in these new coinages between the various parts of speech. /Corral/, borrowed [Pg024] from the Spanish, immediately becomes a verb and the father of an adjective. /Bust/, carved out of /burst/, erects itself into a noun. /Bum/, coming by way of an earlier /bummer/ from the German /bummler/, becomes noun, adjective, verb and adverb. Verbs are fashioned out of substantives by the simple process of prefixing the preposition: /to engineer/, /to chink/, /to stump/, /to hog/. Others grow out of an intermediate adjective, as /to boom/. Others are made by torturing nouns with harsh affixes, as /to burglarize/ and /to itemize/, or by groping for the root, as /to resurrect/. Yet others are changed from intransitive to transitive: a sleeping-car /sleeps/ thirty passengers. So with the adjectives. They are made of substantives unchanged: /codfish/, /jitney/. Or by bold combinations: /down-and-out/, /up-state/, /flat-footed/. Or by shading down suffixes to a barbaric simplicity: /scary/, /classy/, /tasty/. Or by working over adverbs until they tremble on the brink between adverb and adjective: /right/ and /near/ are examples.
All of these processes, of course, are also to be observed in the English of England; in the days of its great Elizabethan growth they were in the lustiest possible being. They are, indeed, common to all languages; they keep language alive. But if you will put the English of today beside the American of today you will see at once how much more forcibly they are in operation in the latter than in the former. English has been arrested in its growth by its purists and grammarians. It shows no living change in structure and syntax since the days of Anne, and very little modification in either pronunciation or vocabulary. Its tendency is to conserve that which is established; to say the new thing, as nearly as possible, in the old way; to combat all that expansive gusto which made for its pliancy and resilience in the days of Shakespeare. In place of the old loose-footedness there is set up a preciosity which, in one direction, takes the form of unyielding affectations in the spoken language, and in another form shows itself in the heavy Johnsonese of current English writing--the Jargon denounced by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his Cambridge lectures. This "infirmity of speech" Quiller-Couch finds "in parliamentary debates and in the newspapers"; [Pg025] ... "it has become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought, and so voice the reason of their being." Distinct from journalese, the two yet overlap, "and have a knack of assimilating each other's vices."[45]
American, despite the gallant efforts of the professors, has so far escaped any such suffocating formalization. We, too, of course, have our occasional practitioners of the authentic English Jargon; in the late Grover Cleveland we produced an acknowledged master of it. But in the main our faults in writing lie in precisely the opposite direction. That is to say, we incline toward a directness of statement which, at its greatest, lacks restraint and urbanity altogether, and toward a hospitality which often admits novelties for the mere sake of their novelty, and is quite uncritical of the difference between a genuine improvement in succinctness and clarity, and mere extravagant raciness. "The tendency," says one English observer, "is ... to consider the speech of any man, as any man himself, as good as any other."[46] "All beauty and distinction," says another,[47] "are ruthlessly sacrificed to force." Moreover, this strong revolt against conventional bonds is by no means confined to the folk-speech, nor even to the loose conversational English of the upper classes; it also gets into more studied discourse, both spoken and written. I glance through the speeches of Dr. Woodrow Wilson, surely a purist if we have one at all, and find, in a few moments, half a dozen locutions that an Englishman in like position would never dream of using, among them /we must get a move on/,[48] /hog/ as a verb,[49] /gum-shoe/ as an adjective with [Pg026] verbal overtones,[50] /onery/ in place of /ordinary/,[51] and /that is going some/.[52] From the earliest days, indeed, English critics have found this gipsy tendency in our most careful writing. They denounced it in Marshall, Cooper, Mark Twain, Poe, Lossing, Lowell and Holmes, and even in Hawthorne and Thoreau; and it was no less academic a work than W. C. Brownell's "French Traits" which brought forth, in a London literary journal, the dictum that "the language most depressing to the cultured Englishman is the language of the cultured American." Even "educated American English," agrees the chief of modern English grammarians, "is now almost entirely independent of British influence, and differs from it considerably, though as yet not enough to make the two dialects --American English and British English--mutually unintelligible."[53]
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/.
This boldness of conceit, of course, makes for vulgarity. Unrestrained by any critical sense--and the critical sense of the professors counts for little, for they cry wolf too often--it flowers in such barbaric inventions as /tasty/, /alright/, /no-account/, /pants/, /go-aheadativeness/, /tony/, /semi-occasional/, /to fellowship/ and /to doxologize/. Let it be admitted: American is not infrequently vulgar; the Americans, too, are vulgar (Bayard Taylor called them "Anglo-Saxons relapsed into semi-barbarism"); America itself is unutterably vulgar. But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions, and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy language-making. The history of English, like the history of American and every other living tongue, is a history of vulgarisms that, by their accurate meeting of real needs, have forced their way into sound usage, and even into the lifeless catalogues of the grammarians. The colonial pedants denounced /to advocate/ as bitterly as they ever denounced /to compromit/ or /to happify/, and all the English authorities gave them aid, but it forced itself into the American language despite them, and today it is even accepted as English and has got into the Oxford Dictionary. /To donate/, so late as 1870, was dismissed by Richard Grant White as ignorant and [Pg028] abominable and to this day the English will have none of it, but there is not an American dictionary that doesn't accept it, and surely no American writer would hesitate to use it.[54] /Reliable/, /gubernatorial/, /standpoint/ and /scientist/ have survived opposition of equal ferocity. The last-named was coined by William Whewell, an Englishman, in 1840, but was first adopted in America. Despite the fact that Fitzedward Hall and other eminent philologists used it and defended it, it aroused almost incredible opposition in England. So recently as 1890 it was denounced by the /London Daily News/ as "an ignoble Americanism," and according to William Archer it was finally accepted by the English only "at the point of the bayonet."[55]
The purist performs a useful office in enforcing a certain logical regularity upon the process, and in our own case the omnipresent example of the greater conservatism of the English corrects our native tendency to go too fast, but the process itself is as inexorable in its workings as the precession of the equinoxes, and if we yield to it more eagerly than the English it is only a proof, perhaps, that the future of what was once the Anglo-Saxon tongue lies on this side of the water. "The story of English grammar," says Murison, "is a story of simplification, of dispensing with grammatical forms."[56] And of the most copious and persistent enlargement of vocabulary and mutation of idiom ever recorded, perhaps, by descriptive philology. English now has the brakes on, but American continues to leap in the dark, and the prodigality of its movement is all the [Pg029] indication that is needed of its intrinsic health, its capacity to meet the ever-changing needs of a restless and iconoclastic people, constantly fluent in racial composition, and disdainful of hampering traditions. "Language," says Sayce, "is no artificial product, contained in books and dictionaries and governed by the strict rules of impersonal grammarians. It is the living expression of the mind and spirit of a people, ever changing and shifting, whose sole standard of correctness is custom and the common usage of the community.... The first lesson to be learned is that there is no intrinsic right or wrong in the use of language, no fixed rules such as are the delight of the teacher of Latin prose. What is right now will be wrong hereafter, what language rejected yesterday she accepts today."[57]
§ 6
/The Materials of American/--One familiar with the habits of pedagogues need not be told that, in their grudging discussions of American, they have spent most of their energies upon vain attempts to classify its materials. White and Lounsbury, as I have shown, carried the business to the limits of the preposterous; when they had finished identifying and cataloguing Americanisms there were no more Americanisms left to study. The ladies and gentlemen of the American Dialect Society, though praiseworthy for their somewhat deliberate industry, fall into a similar fault, for they are so eager to establish minute dialectic variations that they forget the general language almost altogether.
Among investigators of less learning there is a more spacious view of the problem, and the labored categories of White and Lounsbury are much extended. Pickering, the first to attempt a list of Americanisms, rehearsed their origin under the following headings:
1. "We have formed some new words."
2. "To some old ones, that are still in use in England, we have affixed new significations."
3. "Others, which have long been obsolete in England, are still retained in common use among us."
Bartlett, in the second edition of his dictionary, dated 1859, increased these classes to nine;
1. Archaisms, /i. e./, old English words, obsolete, or nearly so, in England, but retained in use in this country.
2. English words used in a different sense from what they are in England. These include many names of natural objects differently applied.
3. Words which have retained their original meaning in the United States, though not in England.
4. English provincialisms adopted into general use in America.
5. Newly coined words, which owe their origin to the productions or to the circumstances of the country.
6. Words borrowed from European languages, especially the French, Spanish, Dutch and German.
7. Indian words.
8. Negroisms.
9. Peculiarities of pronunciation.
Some time before this, but after the publication of Bartlett's first edition in 1848, William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, devoted a brief chapter to "American Dialects" in his well-known work on English[58] and in it one finds the following formidable classification of Americanisms:
1. Words borrowed from other languages.
a. Indian, as /Kennebec/, /Ohio/, /Tombigbee/; /sagamore/, /quahaug/, /succotash/.
b. Dutch, as /boss/, /kruller/, /stoop/.
c. German, as /spuke/ (?), /sauerkraut/.
d. French, as /bayou/, /cache/, /chute/, /crevasse/, /levee/.
e. Spanish, as /calaboose/, /chapparal/, /hacienda/, /rancho/, /ranchero/.
f. Negro, as /buckra/.
2. Words "introduced from the necessity of our situation, in order to express new ideas."
a. Words "connected with and flowing from our political institutions," as /selectman/, /presidential/, /congressional/, /caucus/, /mass-meeting/, /lynch-law/, /help/ (for /servants/).
b. Words "connected with our ecclesiastical institutions," as /associational/, /consociational/, /to fellowship/, /to missionate/.
c. Words "connected with a new country," as /lot/, /diggings/, /betterments/, /squatter/.
3. Miscellaneous Americanisms.
a. Words and phrases become obsolete in England, as /talented/, /offset/ (for /set-off/), /back and forth/ (for /backward and forward/).
b. Old words and phrases "which are now merely provincial in England," as /hub/, /whap/ (?), /to wilt/.
c. Nouns formed from verbs by adding the French suffix /-ment/, as /publishment/, /releasement/, /requirement/.
d. Forms of words "which fill the gap or vacancy between two words which are approved," as /obligate/ (between /oblige/ and /obligation/) and /variate/ (between /vary/ and /variation/).
e. "Certain compound terms for which the English have different compounds," as /bank-bill/, (/bank-note/), /book-store/ (/book-seller's shop/), /bottom-land/ (/interval land/), /clapboard/ (/pale/), /sea-board/ (/sea-shore/), /side-hill/ (/hill-side/).
f. "Certain colloquial phrases, apparently idiomatic, and very expressive," as /to cave in/, /to flare up/, /to flunk out/, /to fork over/, /to hold on/, /to let on/, /to stave off/, /to take on/.
g. Intensives, "often a matter of mere temporary fashion," as /dreadful/, /mighty/, /plaguy/, /powerful/.
h. "Certain verbs expressing one's state of mind, but partially or timidly," as /to allot upon/ (for /to count upon/), /to calculate/, /to expect/ (/to think/ or /believe/), /to guess/, /to reckon/.
i. "Certain adjectives, expressing not only quality, but one's subjective feelings in regard to it," as /clever/, /grand/, /green/, /likely/, /smart/, /ugly/.
j. Abridgments, as /stage/ (for /stage-coach/), /turnpike/ (for /turnpike-road/), /spry/ (for /sprightly/), /to conduct/ (for /to conduct one's self/).
k. "Quaint or burlesque terms," as to /tote/, /to yank/; /humbug/, /loafer/, /muss/, /plunder/ (for /baggage/), /rock/ (for /stone/).
l. "Low expressions, mostly political," as /slangwhanger/, /loco foco/, /hunker/; /to get the hang of/.
m. "Ungrammatical expressions, disapproved by all," as /do don't/, /used to could/, /can't come it/, /Universal preacher/ (for /Universalist/), /there's no two ways about it/.
Elwyn, in 1859, attempted no classification.[59] He confined his glossary to archaic English words surviving in America, and sought only to prove that they had come down "from our remotest ancestry" and were thus undeserving of the reviling [Pg032] lavished upon them by English critics. Schele de Vere, in 1872, followed Bartlett, and devoted himself largely to words borrowed from the Indian dialects, and from the French, Spanish and Dutch. But Farmer, in 1889,[60] ventured upon a new classification, prefacing it with the following definition:
An Americanism may be defined as a word or phrase, old or new, employed by general or respectable usage in America in a way not sanctioned by the best standards of the English language. As a matter of fact, however, the term has come to possess a wider meaning, and it is now applied not only to words and phrases which can be so described, but also to the new and legitimately born words adapted to the general needs and usages, to the survivals of an older form of English than that now current in the mother country, and to the racy, pungent vernacular of Western life.
He then proceeded to classify his materials thus:
1. Words and phrases of purely American derivation, embracing words originating in:
a. Indian and aboriginal life.
b. Pioneer and frontier life.
c. The church.
d. Politics.
e. Trades of all kinds.
f. Travel, afloat and ashore.
2. Words brought by colonists, including:
a. The German element.
b. The French.
c. The Spanish.
d. The Dutch.
e. The negro.
f. The Chinese.
3. Names of American things, embracing:
a. Natural products.
b. Manufactured articles.
4. Perverted English words.
5. Obsolete English words still in good use in America.
6. English words, American by inflection and modification.
7. Odd and ignorant popular phrases, proverbs, vulgarisms, and colloquialisms, cant and slang.
8. Individualisms.
9. Doubtful and miscellaneous.
Clapin, in 1902,[61] reduced these categories to four:
1. Genuine English words, obsolete or provincial in England, and universally used in the United States.
2. English words conveying, in the United States, a different meaning from that attached to them in England.
3. Words introduced from other languages than the English:--French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Indian, etc.
4. Americanisms proper, /i.e./, words coined in the country, either representing some new idea or peculiar product.
Thornton, in 1912, substituted the following:
1. Forms of speech now obsolete or provincial in England, which survive in the United States, such as /allow/, /bureau/, /fall/, /gotten/, /guess/, /likely/, /professor/, /shoat/.
2. Words and phrases of distinctly American origin, such as /belittle/, /lengthy/, /lightning-rod/, /to darken one's doors/, /to bark up the wrong tree/, /to come out at the little end of the horn/, /blind tiger/, /cold snap/, /gay Quaker/, /gone coon/, /long sauce/, /pay dirt/, /small potatoes/, /some pumpkins/.
3. Nouns which indicate quadrupeds, birds, trees, articles of food, etc., that are distinctively American, such as /ground-hog/, /hang-bird/, /hominy/, /live-oak/, /locust/, /opossum/, /persimmon/, /pone/, /succotash/, /wampum/, /wigwam/.
4. Names of persons and classes of persons, and of places, such as /Buckeye/, /Cracker/, /Greaser/, /Hoosier/, /Old Bullion/, /Old Hickory/, the /Little Giant/, /Dixie/, /Gotham/, the /Bay State/, the /Monumental City/.
5. Words which have assumed a new meaning, such as /card/, /clever/, /fork/, /help/, /penny/, /plunder/, /raise/, /rock/, /sack/, /ticket/, /windfall/.
In addition, Thornton added a provisional class of "words and phrases of which I have found earlier examples in American than in English writers; ... with the /caveat/ that further research may reverse the claim"--a class offering specimens in /alarmist/, /capitalize/, /eruptiveness/, /horse of another colour/ (/sic!/), /the jig's up/, /nameable/, /omnibus bill/, /propaganda/ and /whitewash/.
No more than a brief glance at these classifications is needed to show that they hamper the inquiry by limiting its scope--not so much, to be sure, as the ridiculous limitations of White and Lounsbury, but still very seriously. They meet the ends of [Pg034] purely descriptive lexicography, but largely leave out of account some of the most salient characters of a living language, for example, pronunciation and idiom. Only Bartlett and Farmer establish a separate category of Americanisms produced by changes in pronunciation, though even Thornton, of course, is obliged to take notice of such forms as /bust/ and /bile/. None of them, however, goes into the matter at any length, nor even into the matter of etymology. Bartlett's etymologies are scanty and often inaccurate; Schele de Vere's are sometimes quite fanciful; Thornton offers scarcely any at all. The best of these collections of Americanisms, and by long odds, is Thornton's. It presents an enormous mass of quotations, and they are all very carefully dated, and it corrects most of the more obvious errors in the work of earlier inquirers. But its very dependence upon quotations limits it chiefly to the written language, and so the enormously richer materials of the spoken language are passed over, and
## particularly the materials evolved during the past twenty years. One
searches the two fat volumes in vain for such highly characteristic forms as /would of/, /near-accident/, and /buttinski/, the use of /sure/ as an adverb, and the employment of /well/ as a sort of general equivalent of the German /also/.
These grammatical and syntactical tendencies are beyond the scope of Thornton's investigation, but it is plain that they must be prime concerns of any future student who essays to get at the inner spirit of the language. Its difference from standard English is not merely a difference in vocabulary, to be disposed of in an alphabetical list; it is, above all, a difference in pronunciation, in intonation, in conjugation and declension, in metaphor and idiom, in the whole fashion of using words. A page from one of Ring W. Lardner's baseball stories contains few words that are not in the English vocabulary, and yet the thoroughly American color of it cannot fail to escape anyone who actually listens to the tongue spoken around him. Some of the elements which enter into that color will be considered in the following pages. The American vocabulary, of course, must be given first attention, for in it the earliest American divergences are embalmed and it tends to grow richer and freer year after year, [Pg035] but attention will also be paid to materials and ways of speech that are less obvious, and in particular to certain definite tendencies of the grammar of spoken American, hitherto wholly neglected.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Pp. 22-23.
[2] America's Coming of Age; New York, 1915, p. 15. See also the preface to Every-Day English, by Richard Grant White; Boston, 1881, p. xviii.
[3] The common notion that the Académie combats changes is quite erroneous. In the preface to the first edition of its dictionary (1694) it disclaimed any purpose "to make new words and to reject others at its pleasure." In the preface to the second edition (1718) it confessed that "ignorance and corruption often introduce manners of writing" and that "convenience establishes them." In the preface to the third edition (1740) it admitted that it was "forced to admit changes which the public has made." And so on. Says D. M. Robertson, in A History of the French Academy (London, 1910): "The Academy repudiates any assumption of authority over the language with which the public in its own practise has not first clothed it. So much, indeed, does it confine itself to an interpretation merely of the laws of language that its decisions are sometimes contrary to its own judgment of what is either desirable or expedient."
[4] Cf. /Scandinavian Studies and Notes/, vol. iv, no. 3, Aug. 1917, p. 258.
[5] This movement won official recognition so long ago as 1885, when the Storting passed the first of a series of acts designed to put the two languages on equal footing. Four years later, after a campaign going back to 1874, provision was made for teaching the /landsmaal/ in the schools for the training of primary teachers. In 1899 a professorship of the /landsmaal/ was established in the University of Christiania. The school boards in the case of primary schools, and the pupils in the case of middle and high schools are now permitted to choose between the two languages, and the /landsmaal/ has been given official status by the State Church. The chief impediment to its wider acceptance lies in the fact that it is not, as it stands, a natural language, but an artificial amalgamation of peasant dialects. It was devised in 1848-50 by Ivar Aasen. /Vide/ The Language Question, /London Times/ Norwegian Supplement, May 18, 1914.
[6] A few such works are listed in the bibliography. More of them are mentioned in Americanismos, by Miguel de Toro y Gisbert; Paris, n. d.
[7] Maximilian Schele de Vere: Americanisms: The English of the New World; New York, 1872.
[8] Richard H. Thornton: An American Glossary ..., 2 vols.; Phila. and London, 1912.
[9] Organized Feb. 19, 1889, with Dr. J. J. Child, of Harvard, as its first president.
[10] Author of Travels in North America; London, 1829.
[11] A Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America; Boston, 1816.
[12] A Letter to the Hon. John Pickering on the Subject of His Vocabulary; Boston, 1817.
[13] 4th ed., New York, 1870, p. 669.
[14] /Op. cit./ p. 676.
[15] The English Language; New York 1850; rev. ed., 1855. This was the first American text-book of English for use in colleges. Before its publication, according to Fowler himself (rev. ed., p. xi), the language was studied only "superficially" and "in the primary schools." He goes on: "Afterward, when older, in the academy, during their preparation for college, our pupils perhaps despised it, in comparison with the Latin and the Greek; and in the college they do not systematically study the language after they come to maturity."
[16] In Recent Exemplifications of False Philology; London, 1872.
[17] Americanisms, parts I-VIII, April, May, July, Sept., Nov., 1878; Jan., March, May, 1879.
[18] A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States, 4th ed.; Boston, 1877.
[19] Feb., March, June, July, Sept.
[20] Vol. xiv, pp. 484-5; Cambridge, 1917.
[21] Vol. xxv, p. 209.
[22] July 18, 1913.
[23] Of the words cited as still unfamiliar in England, Thornton has traced /hobo/ to 1891, /hold-up/ and /bunco/ to 1887, /dive/ to 1882, /dead-beat/ to 1877, /hoodlum/ to 1872, /road-agent/ to 1866, /stag/ to 1856, /drummer/ to 1836 and /flume/ to 1792. All of them are probably older than these references indicate.
[24] Summarized in /Literary Digest/, June 19, 1915.
[25] America Today, /Scribner's/, Feb. 1899, p. 218.
[26] /London Court Journal/, Aug. 28, 1892.
[27] In Pastures New; New York, 1906, p. 6.
[28] Concerning the American Language, in The Stolen White Elephant; Boston, 1882. A footnote says that the essay is "part of a chapter crowded out of A Tramp Abroad." (Hartford, 1880.)
[29] Hartford, 1872, p. 45.
[30] The Editor's Study, /Harper's Magazine/, Jan. 1886.
[31] Die englische Sprache in Nordamerika, band iv, heft i; Braunschweig, 1848.
[32] Étude sur l'Anglais Parlé aux Etats Unis (la Langue Américaine), /Actes de la Société Philologique de Paris/, March, 1874.
[33] Metoula-Sprachführer.... Englisch von Karl Blattner; Ausgabe für Amerika; Berlin-Schöneberg, 1912.
[34] Polyglott Kuntze; Schnellste Erlernung jeder Sprache ohne Lehrer; Amerikanisch; Bonn a. Rh., n. d.
[35] Like the English expositors of American slang, this German falls into several errors. For example, he gives /cock/ for /rooster/, /boots/ for /shoes/, /braces/ for /suspenders/ and /postman/ for /letter-carrier/, and lists /iron-monger/, /joiner/ and /linen-draper/ as American terms. He also spells /wagon/ in the English manner, with two /g/'s, and translates /Schweinefüsse/ as /pork-feet/. But he spells such words as /color/ in the American manner and gives the pronunciation of /clerk/ as the American /klörk/, not as the English /klark/.
[36] Molee's notions are set forth in Plea for an American Language ...; Chicago, 1888; and Tutonish; Chicago, 1902. He announced the preparation of A Dictionary of the American Language in 1888, but so far as I know it has not been published. He was born in Wisconsin, of Norwegian parents, in 1845, and pursued linguistic studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he seems to have taken a Ph. B.
[37] American English, /North American Review/, Jan. 1883.
[38] Oct. 1, 1909.
[39] J. F. Healy, general manager of the Davis Colliery Co. at Elkins, W. Va., in a speech before the West Virginia Coal Mining Institute, at Wheeling, Dec. 1910; reprinted as The American Language; Pittsburgh, 1911.
[40] /Westminster Review/, July, 1888, p. 35.
[41] W. W. Skeat distinguishes no less than 9 dialects in Scotland, 3 in Ireland and 30 in England and Wales. /Vide/ English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day; Cambridge, 1911, p. 107 /et seq./
[42] /Art./ Americanisms, 2nd ed.
[43] F. L. Pattee: A History of American Literature Since 1870; New York, 1916.
[44] A. H. Sayce: Introduction to the Science of Language, 2 vols.; London, 1900. See especially vol. ii, ch. vi.
[45] /Cf./ the chapter, Interlude: On Jargon, in Quiller-Couch's On the Art of Writing; New York, 1916. Curiously enough, large parts of the learned critic's book are written in the very Jargon he attacks.
[46] Alexander Francis: Americans: an Impression; New York, 1900.
[47] G. Lowes Dickinson, in the /English Review/, quoted by /Current Literature/, April, 1910.
[48] Speech before the Chamber of Commerce Convention, Washington, Feb. 19, 1916.
[49] Speech at workingman's dinner, New York, Sept. 4, 1912.
[50] wit and Wisdom of Woodrow Wilson, comp. by Richard Linthicum; New York, 1916, p. 54.
[51] Speech at Ridgewood, N. J., April 22, 1910.
[52] Wit and Wisdom ..., p. 56.
[53] Henry Sweet: A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical, 2 parts; Oxford, 1900-03, part i, p. 224.
[54] Despite this fact an academic and ineffective opposition to it still goes on. On the Style Sheet of the /Century Magazine/ it is listed among the "words and phrases to be avoided." It was prohibited by the famous /Index Expurgatorius/ prepared by William Cullen Bryant for the /New York Evening Post/, and his prohibition is still theoretically in force, but the word is now actually permitted by the /Post/. The /Chicago Daily News/ Style Book, dated July 1, 1908, also bans it.
[55] /Scientist/ is now in the Oxford Dictionary. So are /reliable/, /standpoint/ and /gubernatorial/. But the /Century Magazine/ still bans /standpoint/ and the /Evening Post/ (at least in theory) bans both /standpoint/ and /reliable/. The /Chicago Daily News/ accepts /standpoint/, but bans /reliable/ and /gubernatorial/. All of these words, of course, are now quite as good as /ox/ or /and/.
[56] /Art./ Changes in the Language Since Shakespeare's Time, Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv. p. 491.
[57] Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. ii, pp. 333-4.
[58] /Op. cit./, pp. 119-28.
[59] Alfred L. Elwyn, M. D.: Glossary of Supposed Americanisms ...; Phila., 1859.
[60] John S. Farmer: Americanisms Old and New ...; London, 1889.
[61] Sylva Clapin: A New Dictionary of Americanisms, Being a Glossary of Words Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States and the Dominion of Canada; New York, 1902.
[Pg036]
II
The Beginnings of American
§ 1
/In Colonial Days/--William Gifford, the first editor of the /Quarterly Review/, is authority for the tale that some of the Puritan clergy of New England, during the Revolution, proposed that English be formally abandoned as the national language of America, and Hebrew adopted in its place. An American chronicler, Charles Astor Bristed, makes the proposed tongue Greek, and reports that the change was rejected on the ground that "it would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it is, and make the English speak Greek."[1] The story, though it has the support of the editors of the Cambridge History of American Literature,[2] has an apocryphal smack; one suspects that the savagely anti-American Gifford invented it. But, true or false, it well indicates the temper of those times. The passion for complete political independence of England bred a general hostility to all English authority, whatever its character, and that hostility, in the direction of present concern to us, culminated in the revolutionary attitude of Noah Webster's "Dissertations on the English Language," printed in 1789. Webster harbored no fantastic notion of abandoning English altogether, but he was eager to set up American as a distinct and independent dialect. "Let us," he said, "seize the present moment, and establish a national language as well as a national government.... As an independent nation our honor requires [Pg037] us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government."
Long before this the challenge had been flung. Scarcely two years after the Declaration of Independence Franklin was instructed by Congress, on his appointment as minister to France, to employ "the language of the United States," not simply English, in all his "replies or answers" to the communications of the ministry of Louis XVI. And eight years before the Declaration Franklin himself had drawn up a characteristically American scheme of spelling reform, and had offered plenty of proof in it, perhaps unconsciously, that the standards of spelling and pronunciation in the New World had already diverged noticeably from those accepted on the other side of the ocean.[3] In acknowledging the dedication of Webster's "Dissertations" Franklin endorsed both his revolt against English domination and his forecast of widening differences in future, though protesting at the same time against certain Americanisms that have since come into good usage, and even migrated to England.[4]
This protest was marked by Franklin's habitual mildness, but in other quarters dissent was voiced with far less urbanity. The growing independence of the colonial dialect, not only in its spoken form, but also in its most dignified written form, had begun, indeed, to attract the attention of purists in both England and America, and they sought to dispose of it in its infancy by /force majeure/. One of the first and most vigorous of the attacks upon it was delivered by John Witherspoon, a Scotch clergyman who came out in 1769 to be president of Princeton /in partibus infidelium/. This Witherspoon brought a Scotch hatred of the English with him, and at once became a leader of the party of independence; he signed the Declaration to the tune of much rhetoric, and was the only clergyman to sit in the Continental Congress. But in matters of learning he was orthodox to the point of hunkerousness, and the strange locutions that [Pg038] he encountered on all sides aroused his pedagogic ire. "I have heard in this country," he wrote in 1781, "in the senate, at the bar, and from the pulpit, and see daily in dissertations from the press, errors in grammar, improprieties and vulgarisms which hardly any person of the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain."[5] It was Witherspoon who coined the word /Americanism/--and at once the English guardians of the sacred vessels began employing it as a general synonym for vulgarism and barbarism. Another learned immigrant, the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, soon joined him. This Boucher was a friend of Washington, but was driven back to England by his Loyalist sentiments. He took revenge by printing various charges against the Americans, among them that of "making all the haste they can to rid themselves of the [English] language."
After the opening of the new century all the British reviews maintained an eager watchfulness for these abhorrent inventions, and denounced them, when found, with the utmost vehemence. The /Edinburgh/, which led the charge, opened its attack in October, 1804, and the appearance of the five volumes of Chief Justice Marshall's "Life of George Washington," during the three years following, gave the signal for corrective articles in the /British Critic/, the /Critical Review/, the /Annual/, the /Monthly/ and the /Eclectic/. The /British Critic/, in April, 1808, admitted somewhat despairingly that the damage was already done--that "the common speech of the United States has departed very considerably from the standard adopted in England." The others, however, sought to stay the flood by invective against Marshall and, later, against his rival biographer, the Rev. Aaron Bancroft. The /Annual/, in 1808, pronounced its high curse and anathema upon "that torrent of barbarous phraseology" which was pouring across the Atlantic, and which threatened "to destroy the purity of the English language."[6] In Bancroft's "Life of George Washington" [Pg039] (1808), according to the /British Critic/, there were gross Americanisms, inordinately offensive to Englishmen, "at almost every page."
The Rev. Jeremy Belknap, long anticipating Elwyn, White and Lounsbury, tried to obtain a respite from this abuse by pointing out the obvious fact that many of the Americanisms under fire were merely survivors of an English that had become archaic in England, but this effort counted for little, for on the one hand the British purists enjoyed the chase too much to give it up, and on the other hand there began to dawn in America a new spirit of nationality, at first very faint, which viewed the differences objected to, not with shame, but with a fierce sort of pride. In the first volume of the /North American Review/ William Ellery Channing spoke out boldly for "the American language and literature,"[7] and a year later Pickering published his defiant dictionary of "words and phrases which have been supposed to be peculiar to the United States." This thin collection of 500 specimens set off a dispute which yet rages on both sides of the Atlantic. Pickering, however, was undismayed. He had begun to notice the growing difference between the English and American vocabulary and pronunciation, he said, while living in London from 1799 to 1801, and he had made his collections with the utmost care, and after taking counsel with various prudent authorities, both English and American. Already in the first year of the century, he continued, the English had accused the people of the new republic of a deliberate "design to effect an entire change in the language" and while no such design was actually harbored, the facts were the facts, and he cited the current newspapers, the speeches from pulpit and rostrum, and Webster himself in support of them. This debate over Pickering's list, as I say, still continues. Lounsbury, entrenched behind his grotesque categories, once charged that four-fifths of the words in it had "no business to be there," and [Pg040] Gilbert M. Tucker[8] has argued that only 70 of them were genuine Americanisms. But a careful study of the list, in comparison with the early quotations recently collected by Thornton, seems to indicate that both of these judgments, and many others no less, have done injustice to Pickering. He made the usual errors of the pioneer, but his sound contributions to the subject were anything but inconsiderable, and it is impossible to forget his diligence and his constant shrewdness. He established firmly the native origin of a number of words now in universal use in America--/e. g./, /backwoodsman/, /breadstuffs/, /caucus/, /clapboard/, /sleigh/ and /squatter/--and of such familiar derivatives as /gubernatorial/ and /dutiable/, and he worked out the genesis of not a few loan-words, including /prairie/, /scow/, /rapids/, /hominy/ and /barbecue/. It was not until 1848, when the first edition of Bartlett appeared, that his work was supplanted.
§ 2
/Sources of Early Americanisms/--The first genuine Americanisms were undoubtedly words borrowed bodily from the Indian dialects--words, in the main, indicating natural objects that had no counterparts in England. We find /opossum/, for example, in the form of /opasum/, in Captain John Smith's "Map of Virginia" (1612), and, in the form of /apossoun/, in a Virginia document two years older. /Moose/ is almost as old. The word is borrowed from the Algonquin /musa/, and must have become familiar to the Pilgrim Fathers soon after their landing in 1620, for the woods of Massachusetts then swarmed with the huge quadrupeds and there was no English name to designate them. Again, there are /skunk/ (from the Abenaki Indian /seganku/), /hickory/, /squash/, /paw-paw/, /raccoon/, /chinkapin/, /porgy/, /chipmunk/, /pemmican/, /terrapin/, /menhaden/, /catalpa/, /persimmon/ and /cougar/. Of these, /hickory/ and /terrapin/ are to be found in Robert Beverley's "History and Present State of Virginia" (1705), and /squash/, /chinkapin/ and /persimmon/ are in documents of the preceding century. Many of these words, of course, were shortened [Pg041] or otherwise modified on being taken into colonial English. Thus /chinkapin/ was originally /checkinqumin/, and /squash/ appears in early documents as /isquontersquash/, /askutasquash/, /isquonkersquash/ and /squantersquash/. But William Penn, in a letter dated August 16, 1683, used the latter in its present form. Its variations show a familiar effort to bring a new and strange word into harmony with the language--an effort arising from what philologists call the law of Hobson-Jobson. This name was given to it by Col. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, compilers of a standard dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms. They found that the British soldiers in India, hearing strange words from the lips of the natives, often converted them into English words of similar sound, though of widely different meaning. Thus the words /Hassan/ and /Hosein/, frequently used by the Mohammedans of the country in their devotions, were turned into /Hobson-Jobson/. The same process is constantly in operation elsewhere. By it the French /route de roi/ has become /Rotten Row/ in English, /écrevisse/ has become /crayfish/, and the English /bowsprit/ has become /beau pré/ (=/beautiful meadow/) in French. The word /pigeon/, in /Pigeon English/, offers another example; it has no connection with the bird, but merely represents a Chinaman's attempt to pronounce the word /business/. No doubt /squash/ originated in the same way. That /woodchuck/ did so is practically certain. Its origin is to be sought, not in /wood/ and /chuck/, but in the Cree word /otchock/, used by the Indians to designate the animal.
In addition to the names of natural objects, the early colonists, of course, took over a great many Indian place-names, and a number of words to designate Indian relations and artificial objects in Indian use. To the last division belong /hominy/, /pone/, /toboggan/, /canoe/, /tapioca/, /moccasin/, /pow-wow/, /papoose/, /tomahawk/, /wigwam/, /succotash/ and /squaw/, all of which were in common circulation by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Finally, new words were made during the period by translating Indian terms, for example, /war-path/, /war-paint/, /pale-face/, /medicine-man/, /pipe-of-peace/ and /fire-water/. The total number of such borrowings, direct and indirect, was a good deal larger [Pg042] than now appears, for with the disappearance of the red man the use of loan-words from his dialects has decreased. In our own time such words as /papoose/, /sachem/, /tepee/, /wigwam/ and /wampum/ have begun to drop out of everyday use;[9] at an earlier period the language sloughed off /ocelot/, /manitee/, /calumet/, /supawn/, /samp/ and /quahaug/, or began to degrade them to the estate of provincialisms.[10] A curious phenomenon is presented by the case of /maize/, which came into the colonial speech from some West Indian dialect, went over into orthodox English, and from English into French, German and other continental languages, and was then abandoned by the colonists. We shall see other examples of that process later on.
Whether or not /Yankee/ comes from an Indian dialect is still disputed. An early authority, John G. E. Heckwelder, argued that it was derived from an Indian mispronunciation of the word /English/.[11] Certain later etymologists hold that it originated more probably in an Indian mishandling of the French word /Anglais/. Yet others derive it from the Scotch /yankie/, meaning a gigantic falsehood. A fourth party derive it from the Dutch, and cite an alleged Dutch model for "Yankee Doodle," beginning "/Yanker/ didee doodle down."[12] Of these theories that of Heckwelder is the most plausible. But here, as in other directions, the investigation of American etymology remains sadly incomplete. An elaborate dictionary of words derived from the Indian languages, compiled by the late W. R. Gerard, is in the possession of the Smithsonian Institution, but on account of a shortage of funds it remains in manuscript. [Pg043]
From the very earliest days of English colonization the language of the colonists also received accretions from the languages of the other colonizing nations. The French word /portage/, for example, was already in common use before the end of the seventeenth century, and soon after came /chowder/, /cache/, /caribou/, /voyageur/, and various words that, like the last-named, have since become localisms or disappeared altogether. Before 1750 /bureau/,[13] /gopher/, /batteau/, /bogus/, and /prairie/ were added, and /caboose/, a word of Dutch origin, seems to have come in through the French. /Carry-all/ is also French in origin, despite its English quality. It comes, by the law of Hobson-Jobson, from the French /carriole/. The contributions of the Dutch during the half century of their conflicts with the English included /cruller/, /cold-slaw/, /dominie/ (for /parson/), /cookey/, /stoop/, /span/ (of horses), /pit/ (as in /peach-pit/), /waffle/, /hook/ (a point of land), /scow/, /boss/, /smearcase/ and /Santa Claus/.[14] Schele de Vere credits them with /hay-barrack/, a corruption of /hooiberg/. That they established the use of /bush/ as a designation for back-country is very probable; the word has also got into South African English. In American it has produced a number of familiar derivatives, /e. g./, /bush-whacker/ and /bush-league/. Barrère and Leland also credit the Dutch with /dander/, which is commonly assumed to be an American corruption of /dandruff/. They say that it is from the Dutch word /donder/ (=/thunder/). /Op donderen/, in Dutch, means to burst into a sudden rage. The chief Spanish contributions to American were to come after the War of 1812, with the opening of the West, but /creole/, /calaboose/, /palmetto/, /peewee/, /key/ (a small island), /quadroon/, /octoroon/, /barbecue/, /pickaninny/ and /stampede/ had already entered the language in colonial days. /Jerked beef/ came from the Spanish /charqui/ by the law of Hobson-Jobson. The Germans who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1682 also undoubtedly gave a few words to the language, though [Pg044] it is often difficult to distinguish their contributions from those of the Dutch. It seems very likely, however, that /sauerkraut/[15] and /noodle/ are to be credited to them. Finally, the negro slaves brought in /gumbo/, /goober/, /juba/ and /voodoo/ (usually corrupted to /hoodoo/), and probably helped to corrupt a number of other loan-words, for example /banjo/ and /breakdown/. /Banjo/ seems to be derived from /bandore/ or /bandurria/, modern French and Spanish forms of /tambour/, respectively. It may, however, be an actual negro word; there is a term of like meaning, /bania/, in Senegambian. Ware says that /breakdown/, designating a riotous negro dance, is a corruption of the French /rigadon/. The word is not in the Oxford Dictionary. Bartlett listed it as an Americanism, but Thornton rejected it, apparently because, in the sense of a collapse, it has come into colloquial use in England. Its etymology is not given in the American dictionaries.
§ 3
/New Words of English Material/--But of far more importance than these borrowings was the great stock of new words that the colonists coined in English metal--words primarily demanded by the "new circumstances under which they were placed," but also indicative, in more than one case, of a delight in the business for its own sake. The American, even in the early eighteenth century, already showed many of the characteristics that were to set him off from the Englishman later on--his bold and somewhat grotesque imagination, his contempt for authority, his lack of aesthetic sensitiveness, his extravagant humor. Among the first colonists there were many men of education, culture and gentle birth, but they were soon swamped by hordes of the ignorant and illiterate, and the latter, cut off from the corrective influence of books, soon laid their hands upon the language. It is impossible to imagine the austere Puritan divines of Massachusetts inventing such verbs as /to cowhide/ and /to logroll/, or such adjectives as /no-account/ and /stumped/, or such adverbs as /no-how/ and [Pg045] /lickety-split/, or such substantives as /bull-frog/, /hog-wallow/ and /hoe-cake/; but under their eyes there arose a contumacious proletariat which was quite capable of the business, and very eager for it. In Boston, so early as 1628, there was a definite class of blackguard roisterers, chiefly made up of sailors and artisans; in Virginia, nearly a decade earlier, John Pory, secretary to Governor Yeardley, lamented that "in these five moneths of my continuance here there have come at one time or another eleven sails of ships into this river, but fraighted more with ignorance than with any other marchansize." In particular, the generation born in the New World was uncouth and iconoclastic;[16] the only world it knew was a rough world, and the virtues that environment engendered were not those of niceness, but those of enterprise and resourcefulness.
Upon men of this sort fell the task of bringing the wilderness to the ax and the plow, and with it went the task of inventing a vocabulary for the special needs of the great adventure. Out of their loutish ingenuity came a great number of picturesque names for natural objects, chiefly boldly descriptive compounds: /bull-frog/, /canvas-back/, /lightning-bug/, /mud-hen/, /cat-bird/, /razor-back/, /garter-snake/, /ground-hog/ and so on. And out of an inventiveness somewhat more urbane came such coinages as /live-oak/, /potato-bug/, /turkey-gobbler/, /poke-weed/, /copper-head/, /eel-grass/, /reed-bird/, /egg-plant/, /blue-grass/, /pea-nut/, /pitch-pine/, /cling-stone/ (peach), /moccasin-snake/, /June-bug/ and /butter-nut/. /Live-oak/ appears in a document of 1610; /bull-frog/ was familiar to Beverley in 1705; so was /James-Town weed/ (later reduced to /Jimson weed/, as the English /hurtleberry/ or /whortleberry/ was reduced to /huckleberry/). These early Americans were not botanists. They were often ignorant of the names of the plants they encountered, even when those plants already had English names, and so they exercised their fancy upon new ones. So arose /Johnny-jump-up/ for the /Viola tricolor/, and /basswood/ for the common European /linden/ or /lime-tree/ (/Tilia/), and /locust/ for the /Robinia pseudacacia/ and its allies. The /Jimson weed/ itself was anything but a [Pg046] novelty, but the pioneers apparently did not recognize it, and so we find them ascribing all sorts of absurd medicinal powers to it, and even Beverley solemnly reporting that "some Soldiers, eating it in a Salad, turn'd natural Fools upon it for several Days." The grosser features of the landscape got a lavish renaming, partly to distinguish new forms and partly out of an obvious desire to attain a more literal descriptiveness. I have mentioned /key/ and /hook/, the one borrowed from the Spanish and the other from the Dutch. With them came /run/, /branch/, /fork/, /bluff/, (noun), /neck/, /barrens/, /bottoms/, /underbrush/, /bottom-land/, /clearing/, /notch/, /divide/, /knob/, /riffle/, /gap/, /rolling-country/ and /rapids/,[17] and the extension of /pond/ from artificial pools to small natural lakes, and of /creek/ from small arms of the sea to shallow feeders of rivers. Such common English geographical terms as /downs/, /weald/, /wold/, /fen/, /bog/, /fell/, /chase/, /combe/, /dell/, /heath/ and /moor/ disappeared from the colonial tongue, save as fossilized in a few proper names. So did /bracken/.
With the new landscape came an entirely new mode of life--new foods, new forms of habitation, new methods of agriculture, new kinds of hunting. A great swarm of neologisms thus arose, and, as in the previous case, they were chiefly compounds. /Back-country/, /back-woods/, /back-woodsman/, /back-settlers/, /back-settlements/: all these were in common use early in the eighteenth century. /Back-log/ was used by Increase Mather in 1684. /Log-house/ appears in the Maryland Archives for 1669.[18] /Hoe-cake/, /Johnny-cake/, /pan-fish/, /corn-dodger/, /roasting-ear/, /corn-crib/, /corn-cob/ and /pop-corn/ were all familiar before the Revolution. So were /pine-knot/, /snow-plow/, /cold-snap/, /land-slide/, /salt-lick/, /prickly-heat/, /shell-road/ and /cane-brake/. /Shingle/ was a novelty in 1705, but one S. Symonds wrote to John Winthrop, of Ipswich, about a /clapboarded/ house in 1637. /Frame-house/ seems to have come in with /shingle/. /Trail/, /half-breed/, /Indian-summer/ and [Pg047] /Indian-file/ were obviously suggested by the Red Men. /State-house/ was borrowed, perhaps, from the Dutch. /Selectman/ is first heard of in 1685, displacing the English /alderman/. /Mush/ had displaced /porridge/ by 1671. Soon afterward /hay-stack/ took the place of the English /hay-cock/, and such common English terms as /byre/, /mews/, /weir/, and /wain/ began to disappear. /Hired-man/ is to be found in the Plymouth town records of 1737, and /hired-girl/ followed soon after. So early as 1758, as we find by the diary of Nathaniel Ames, the second-year students at Harvard were already called /sophomores/, though for a while the spelling was often made /sophimores/. /Camp-meeting/ was later; it did not appear until 1799. But /land-office/ was familiar before 1700, and /side-walk/, /spelling-bee/, /bee-line/, /moss-back/, /crazy-quilt/, /mud-scow/, /stamping-ground/ and a hundred and one other such compounds were in daily use before the Revolution. After that great upheaval the new money of the confederation brought in a number of new words. In 1782 Gouverneur Morris proposed to the Continental Congress that the coins of the republic be called, in ascending order, /unit/, /penny-bill/, /dollar/ and /crown/. Later Morris invented the word /cent/, substituting it for the English /penny/.[19] In 1785 Jefferson proposed /mill/, /cent/, /dime/, /dollar/ and /eagle/, and this nomenclature was adopted.
Various nautical terms peculiar to America, or taken into English from American sources, came in during the eighteenth century, among them, /schooner/, /cat-boat/ and /pungy/, not to recall /batteau/ and /canoe/. According to a recent historian of the American merchant marine,[20] the first schooner ever seen was launched at Gloucester, Mass., in 1713. The word, it appears, was originally spelled /scooner/. /To scoon/ was a verb borrowed by the New Englanders from some Scotch dialect, and meant to skim or skip across the water like a flat stone. As the first schooner left the ways and glided out into Gloucester harbor, an enraptured spectator shouted: "Oh, see how she scoons!" "A /scooner/ let her be!" replied Captain Andrew Robinson, her [Pg048] builder--and all boats of her peculiar and novel fore-and-aft rig took the name thereafter. The Dutch mariners borrowed the term and changed the spelling, and this change was soon accepted in America. The Scotch root came from the Norse /skunna/, to hasten, and there are analogues in Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon and Old High German. The origin of /cat-boat/ and /pungy/ I have been unable to determine. Perhaps the latter is related in some way to /pung/, a one-horse sled or wagon. /Pung/ was once widely used in the United States, but of late it has sunk to the estate of a New England provincialism. Longfellow used it, and in 1857 a writer in the /Knickerbocker Magazine/ reported that /pungs/ filled Broadway, in New York, after a snow-storm.
Most of these new words, of course, produced derivatives, for example, /to stack hay/, /to shingle/, /to shuck/ (/i. e./, corn), /to trail/ and /to caucus/. /Backwoods/ immediately begat /backwoodsman/ and was itself turned into a common adjective. The colonists, indeed, showed a beautiful disregard of linguistic nicety. At an early date they shortened the English law-phrase, /to convey by deed/, to the simple verb, /to deed/. Pickering protested against this as a barbarism, and argued that no self-respecting law-writer would employ it, but all the same it was firmly entrenched in the common speech and it has remained there to this day. /To table/, for /to lay on the table/, came in at the same time, and so did various forms represented by /bindery/, for /bookbinder's shop/. /To tomahawk/ appeared before 1650, and /to scalp/ must have followed soon after. Within the next century and a half they were reinforced by many other such new verbs, and by such adjectives made of nouns as /no-account/ and /one-horse/, and such nouns made of verbs as /carry-all/ and /goner/, and such adverbs as /no-how/. In particular, the manufacture of new verbs went on at a rapid pace. In his letter to Webster in 1789, Franklin denounced /to advocate/, /to progress/, and /to oppose/--a vain enterprise, for all of them are now in perfectly good usage. /To advocate/, indeed, was used by Thomas Nashe in 1589, and by John Milton half a century later, but it seems to have been reinvented in America. In 1822 and again in 1838 Robert Southey, then poet laureate, led two belated attacks upon it, as a barbarous Americanism, but [Pg049] its obvious usefulness preserved it, and it remains in good usage on both sides of the Atlantic today--one of the earliest of the English borrowings from America. In the end, indeed, even so ardent a purist as Richard Grant White adopted it, as he did /to placate/.[21]
Webster, though he agreed with Franklin in opposing /to advocate/, gave his /imprimatur/ to /to appreciate/ (/i. e./, to rise in value), and is credited by Sir Charles Lyell[22] with having himself invented /to demoralize/. He also approved /to obligate/. /To antagonize/ seems to have been given currency by John Quincy Adams, /to immigrate/ by John Marshall, /to eventuate/ by Gouverneur Morris, and /to derange/ by George Washington. Jefferson, always hospitable to new words, used /to belittle/ in his "Notes on Virginia," and Thornton thinks that he coined it. Many new verbs were made by the simple process of prefixing the preposition to common nouns, /e. g./, /to clerk/, /to dicker/, /to dump/, /to blow/, (/i. e./, to bluster or boast), /to cord/ (/i. e./, wood) /to stump/, /to room/ and /to shin/. Others were made by transforming verbs in the orthodox vocabulary, /e. g./, /to cavort/ from /to curvet/, and /to snoop/ from /to snook/. Others arose as metaphors, /e. g./, /to whitewash/ (figuratively) and /to squat/ (on unoccupied land). Others were made by hitching suffixes to nouns, /e. g./, /to negative/, /to deputize/, /to locate/, /to legislate/, /to infract/, /to compromit/ and /to happify/. Yet others seem to have been produced by onomatopoeia, /e. g./, /to fizzle/, or to have arisen by some other such spontaneous process, so far unintelligible, /e. g./, /to tote/. With them came an endless series of verb-phrases, /e. g./, /to draw a bead/, /to face the music/, /to darken one's doors/, /to take to the woods/, /to fly off the handle/, /to go on the war-path/ and /to saw wood/--all obvious products of frontier life. Many coinages of the pre-Revolutionary era later disappeared. Jefferson used /to ambition/ but it dropped out nevertheless, and so did /to compromit/, (/i. e./, to compromise), /to homologize/, and /to happify/. Fierce battles raged 'round some of these words, and they were all violently derided in England. Even so useful a verb as /to locate/, now in perfectly good usage, [Pg050] was denounced in the third volume of the /North American Review/, and other purists of the times tried to put down /to legislate/.
The young and tender adjectives had quite as hard a row to hoe,
## particularly /lengthy/. The /British Critic/ attacked it in November,
1793, and it also had enemies at home, but John Adams had used it in his diary in 1759 and the authority of Jefferson and Hamilton was behind it, and so it survived. Years later James Russell Lowell spoke of it as "the excellent adjective,"[23] and boasted that American had given it to English. /Dutiable/ also met with opposition, and moreover, it had a rival, /customable/; but Marshall wrote it into his historic decisions, and thus it took root. The same anonymous watchman of the /North American Review/ who protested against /to locate/ pronounced his anathema upon "such barbarous terms as /presidential/ and /congressional/," but the plain need for them kept them in the language. /Gubernatorial/ had come in long before this, and is to be found in the New Jersey Archives of 1734. /Influential/ was denounced by the Rev. Jonathan Boucher and by George Canning, who argued that /influent/ was better, but it was ardently defended by William Pinkney, of Maryland, and gradually made its way. /Handy/, /kinky/, /law-abiding/, /chunky/, /solid/ (in the sense of well-to-do), /evincive/, /complected/, /judgmatical/, /underpinned/, /blooded/ and /cute/ were also already secure in revolutionary days. So with many nouns. Jefferson used /breadstuffs/ in his Report of the Secretary of State on Commercial Restrictions, December 16, 1793. /Balance/, in the sense of remainder, got into the debates of the First Congress. /Mileage/ was used by Franklin in 1754, and is now sound English. /Elevator/, in the sense of a storage house for grain, was used by Jefferson and by others before him. /Draw/, for /drawbridge/, comes down from Revolutionary days. So does /slip/, in the sense of a berth for vessels. So does /addition/, in the sense of a suburb. So, finally, does /darkey/.
The history of many of these Americanisms shows how vain is the effort of grammarians to combat the normal processes of [Pg051] language development. I have mentioned the early opposition to /dutiable/, /influential/, /presidential/, /lengthy/, /to locate/, /to oppose/, /to advocate/, /to legislate/ and /to progress/. /Bogus/, /reliable/ and /standpoint/ were attacked with the same academic ferocity. All of them are to be found in Bryant's /Index Expurgatorius/[24] (/circa/ 1870), and /reliable/ was denounced by Bishop Coxe as "that abominable barbarism" so late as 1886.[25] Edward S. Gould, another uncompromising purist, said of /standpoint/ that it was "the bright
## particular star ... of solemn philological blundering" and "the very
counterpart of Dogberry's /non-com/."[26] Gould also protested against /to jeopardize/, /leniency/ and /to demean/, and Richard Grant White joined him in an onslaught upon /to donate/. But all of these words are in good use in the United States today, and some of them have gone over into English.[27]
§ 4
/Changed Meanings/--A number of the foregoing contributions to the American vocabulary, of course, were simply common English words with changed meanings. /To squat/, in the sense of /to crouch/, had been sound English for centuries; what the colonists did was to attach a figurative meaning to it, and then bring that figurative meaning into wider usage than the literal meaning. In a somewhat similar manner they changed the significance of /pond/, as I have pointed out. So, too, with /creek/. In English it designated (and still designates) a small inlet or arm of a large river or of the sea; in American, so early as 1674, it designated any small stream. Many other such changed meanings crept into American in the early days. A typical one was the use of /lot/ to designate a /parcel/ of land. Thornton says, perhaps inaccurately, that it originated in the fact that the land in New England was distributed by lot. Whatever the truth, /lot/, [Pg052] to this day, is in almost universal use in the United States, though rare in England. Our conveyancers, in describing real property, always speak of "all that /lot/ or /parcel/ of land."[28] Other examples of the application of old words to new purposes are afforded by /freshet/, /barn/ and /team/. A /freshet/, in eighteenth century English, meant any stream of fresh water; the colonists made it signify an inundation. A /barn/ was a house or shed for storing crops; in the colonies the word came to mean a place for keeping cattle also. A /team/, in English, was a pair of draft horses; in the colonies it came to mean both horses and vehicle.
The process is even more clearly shown in the history of such words as /corn/ and /shoe/. /Corn/, in orthodox English, means grain for human consumption, and especially wheat, /e. g./, the /Corn/ Laws. The earliest settlers, following this usage, gave the name of /Indian corn/ to what the Spaniards, following the Indians themselves, had called /maíz/. But gradually the adjective fell off, and by the middle of the eighteenth century /maize/ was called simply /corn/, and grains in general were called /breadstuffs/. Thomas Hutchinson, discoursing to George III in 1774, used /corn/ in this restricted sense, speaking of "rye and /corn/ mixed." "What /corn/?" asked George. "/Indian corn/," explained Hutchinson, "or, as it is called in authors, /maize/."[29] So with /shoe/. In English it meant (and still means) a topless article of foot-wear, but the colonists extended its meaning to varieties covering the ankle, thus displacing the English /boot/, which they reserved for foot coverings reaching at least to the knee. To designate the English /shoe/ they began to use the word /slipper/. This distinction between English and American usage still prevails, despite the affectation which has lately sought to revive /boot/, and with it its derivatives, /boot-shop/ and /bootmaker/.
/Store/, /shop/, /lumber/, /pie/, /dry-goods/, /cracker/, /rock/ and /partridge/ among nouns and /to haul/, /to jew/, /to notify/ and /to heft/ among verbs offer further examples of changed meanings. Down to the [Pg053] middle of the eighteenth century /shop/ continued to designate a retail establishment in America, as it does in England to this day. /Store/ was applied only to a large establishment--one showing, in some measure, the character of a warehouse. But in 1774 a Boston young man was advertising in the /Massachusetts Spy/ for "a /place/ as a /clerk/ in a /store/" (three Americanisms in a row!). Soon afterward /shop/ began to acquire its special American meaning as a factory, /e. g./, /machine-shop/. Meanwhile /store/ completely displaced /shop/ in the English sense, and it remained for a late flowering of Anglomania, as in the case of /boot/ and /shoe/, to restore, in a measure, the /status quo ante/. /Lumber/, in eighteenth century English, meant disused furniture, and this is its common meaning in England today. But the colonists early employed it to designate timber, and that use of it is now universal in America. Its familiar derivatives, /e. g./, /lumber-yard/, /lumberman/, /lumberjack/, greatly reinforce this usage. /Pie/, in English, means a meat-pie; in American it means a fruit-pie. The English call a fruit-pie a /tart/; the Americans call a meat-pie a /pot-pie/. /Dry-goods/, in England, means "non-liquid goods, as corn" (/i. e./, wheat); in the United States the term means "textile fabrics or wares."[30] The difference had appeared before 1725. /Rock/, in English, always means a large mass; in America it may mean a small stone, as in /rock-pile/ and /to throw a rock/. The Puritans were putting /rocks/ into the foundations of their meeting-houses so early as 1712.[31] /Cracker/ began to be used for /biscuit/ before the Revolution. /Tavern/ displaced /inn/ at the same time. As for /partridge/, it is cited by a late authority[32] as a salient example of changed meaning, along with /corn/ and /store/. In England the term is applied only to the true partridge (/Perdix perdix/) and its nearly related varieties, but in the United States it is also used to designate the ruffed grouse (/Bonasa umbellus/), the common quail (/Colinus virginianus/) and various [Pg054] other tetraonoid birds. This confusion goes back to colonial times. So with /rabbit/. Properly speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped the word /hare/ out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which, curiously enough, is not a hare at all, but a true rabbit.
/To haul/, in English, means to move by force or violence; in the colonies it came to mean to transport in a vehicle, and this meaning survives in sound American. /To jew/, in English, means to cheat; the colonists made it mean to haggle, and devised /to jew down/ to indicate an effort to work a reduction in price. /To heft/, in English, means to lift; the early Americans made it mean to weigh by lifting, and kept the idea of weighing in its derivatives, /e. g./, /hefty/. Finally, there is the familiar American misuse of /Miss/ or /Mis'/ for /Mrs./. It was so widespread by 1790 that on November 17 of that year Webster solemnly denounced it in the /American Mercury/.
§ 5
/Archaic English Words/--Most of the colonists who lived along the American seaboard in 1750 were the descendants of immigrants who had come in fully a century before; after the first settlements there had been much less fresh immigration than many latter-day writers have assumed. According to Prescott F. Hall, "the population of New England ... at the date of the Revolutionary War ... was produced out of an immigration of about 20,000 persons /who arrived before 1640/,"[33] and we have Franklin's authority for the statement that the total population of the colonies in 1751, then about 1,000,000, had been [Pg055] produced from an original immigration of less than 80,000.[34] Even at that early day, indeed, the colonists had begun to feel that they were distinctly separated, in culture and customs, from the mother-country,[35] and there were signs of the rise of a new native aristocracy, entirely distinct from the older aristocracy of the royal governors' courts.[36] The enormous difficulties of communication with England helped to foster this sense of separation. The round trip across the ocean occupied the better part of a year, and was hazardous and expensive; a colonist who had made it was a marked man,--as Hawthorne said, "the /petit-maître/ of the colonies." Nor was there any very extensive exchange of ideas, for though most of the books read in the colonies came from England, the great majority of the colonists, down to the middle of the century, seem to have read little save the Bible and biblical commentaries, and in the native literature of the time one seldom comes upon any reference to the English authors who were glorifying the period of the Restoration and the reign of Anne. Moreover, after 1760 the colonial eyes were upon France rather than upon England, and Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire and the Encyclopedists began to be familiar names to thousands who were scarcely aware of Addison and Steele, or even of the great Elizabethans.[37]
The result of this isolation, on the one hand, was that proliferation of the colonial speech which I have briefly reviewed, and on the other hand, the preservation of many words and phrases that gradually became obsolete in England. The Pilgrims of 1620 brought over with them the English of James I and the Revised [Pg056] Version, and their descendants of a century later, inheriting it, allowed its fundamentals to be little changed by the academic overhauling that the mother tongue was put to during the early part of the eighteenth century. In part they were ignorant of this overhauling, and in part they were indifferent to it. Whenever the new usage differed from that of the Bible they were inclined to remain faithful to the Bible, not only because of its pious authority but also because of the superior pull of its imminent and constant presence. Thus when an artificial prudery in English ordered the abandonment of the Anglo-Saxon /sick/ for the Gothic /ill/, the colonies refused to follow, for /sick/ was in both the Old Testament and the New;[38] and that refusal remains in force to this day.
A very large number of words and phrases, many of them now exclusively American, are similar survivals from the English of the seventeenth century, long since obsolete or merely provincial in England. Among nouns Thornton notes /fox-fire/, /flap-jack/, /jeans/, /molasses/, /beef/ (to designate the live animal), /chinch/, /cord-wood/, /homespun/, /ice-cream/, /julep/ and /swingle-tree/; Halliwell[39] adds /andiron/, /bay-window/, /cesspool/, /clodhopper/, /cross-purposes/, /greenhorn/, /loophole/, /ragamuffin/, /riff-raff/, /rigmarole/ and /trash/; and other authorities cite /stock/ (for cattle), /fall/ (for autumn), /offal/, /din/, /underpinning/ and /adze/. /Bub/, used in addressing a boy, is very old English, but survives only in American. /Flap-jack/ goes back to Piers Plowman, but has been obsolete in England for two centuries. /Muss/, in the sense of a row, is also obsolete over there, but it is to be found in "Anthony and Cleopatra." /Char/, as a noun, disappeared from English a long time ago, but it survives in American as /chore/. Among the adjectives similarly preserved are /to whittle/, /to wilt/ and /to approbate/. /To guess/, in the American sense of /to suppose/, is to be found in "Henry VI": [Pg057]
Not all together; better far, I /guess/, That we do make our entrance several ways.
In "Measure for Measure" Escalus says "I /guess/ not" to Angelo. The New English Dictionary offers examples much older--from Chaucer, Wyclif and Gower. /To interview/ is in Dekker. /To loan/, in the American sense of to lend, is in 34 and 35 Henry VIII, but it dropped out of use in England early in the eighteenth century, and all the leading dictionaries, both English and American, now call it an Americanism.[40] /To fellowship/, once in good American use but now reduced to a provincialism, is in Chaucer. Even /to hustle/, it appears, is ancient. Among adjectives, /homely/, which means only homelike or unadorned in England, was used in its American sense of plain-featured by both Shakespeare and Milton. Other such survivors are /burly/, /catty-cornered/, /likely/, /deft/, /copious/, /scant/ and /ornate/. Perhaps /clever/ also belongs to this category, that is, in the American sense of amiable.
"Our ancestors," said James Russell Lowell, "unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare's." Shakespeare died in 1616; the Pilgrims landed four years later; Jamestown was founded in 1607. As we have seen, the colonists, saving a few superior leaders, were men of small sensitiveness to the refinements of life and speech: soldiers of fortune, amateur theologians, younger sons, neighborhood "advanced thinkers," bankrupts, jobless workmen, decayed gentry, and other such fugitives from culture--in brief, Philistines of the sort who join tin-pot fraternal orders today, and march in parades, and whoop for the latest mountebanks in politics. There was thus a touch of rhetoric in Lowell's saying that they spoke the English of Shakespeare; as well argue that the London grocers of 1885 spoke the English of Pater. But in a larger sense he said truly, for these men at least brought with them the vocabulary of Shakespeare--or a part of it,--even if the uses he made of it were beyond their comprehension, and they also brought with [Pg058] them that sense of ease in the language, that fine disdain for formality, that bold experimentalizing in words, which was so peculiarly Elizabethan. There were no grammarians in that day; there were no purists that anyone listened to; it was a case of saying your say in the easiest and most satisfying way. In remote parts of the United States there are still direct and almost pure-blooded descendants of those seventeenth century colonists. Go among them, and you will hear more words from the Shakespearean vocabulary, still alive and in common service, than anywhere else in the world, and more of the loose and brilliant syntax of that time, and more of its gipsy phrases.[41]
§ 6
/Colonial Pronunciation/--The debate that long raged over the pronunciation of classical Latin exhibits the difficulty of determining with exactness the shades of sound in the speech of a people long departed from earth. The American colonists, of course, are much nearer to us than the Romans, and so we should have relatively little difficulty in determining just how they pronounced this or that word, but against the fact of their nearness stands the neglect of our philologists, or, perhaps more accurately, our lack of philologists. What Sweet did to clear up the history of English pronunciation,[42] and what Wilhelm Corssen did for Latin, no American professor has yet thought to attempt for American. The literature is almost, if not quite a blank. But here and there we may get a hint of the facts, and though the sum of them is not large, they at least serve to set at rest a number of popular errors.
One of these errors, chiefly prevalent in New England, is that the so-called Boston pronunciation, with its broad /a/'s (making /last/, /path/ and /aunt/ almost assonant with /bar/) comes down unbrokenly from the day of the first settlements, and that it is in consequence superior in authority to the pronunciation of the [Pg059] rest of the country, with its flat /a/'s (making the same words assonant with /ban/). A glance through Webster's "Dissertations" is sufficient to show that the flat /a/ was in use in New England in 1789, for the pronunciation of such words as /wrath/, /bath/ and /path/, as given by him, makes them rhyme with /hath/.[43] Moreover, he gives /aunt/ the same /a/-sound. From other sources come indications that the /a/ was likewise flattened in such words as /plant/, /basket/, /branch/, /dance/, /blast/, /command/ and /castle/, and even in /balm/ and /calm/. Changes in the sound of the letter have been going on in English ever since the Middle English period,[44] and according to Lounsbury[45] they have moved toward the disappearance of the Continental /a/, "the fundamental vowel-tone of the human voice." Grandgent, another authority,[46] says that it became flattened "by the sixteenth century" and that "until 1780 or thereabouts the standard language had no broad /a/." Even in such words as /father/, /car/ and /ask/ the flat /a/ was universally used. Sheridan, in the dictionary he published in 1780,[47] actually gave no /ah/-sound in his list of vowels. This habit of flatting the /a/ had been brought over, of course, by the early colonists, and was as general in America, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, as in England. Benjamin Franklin, when he wrote his "Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling," in 1768, apparently had no suspicion that any other /a/ was possible. But between 1780 and 1790, according to Grandgent, a sudden fashion for the broad /a/ (not the /aw/-sound, as in /fall/, but the Continental sound as in /far/) arose in England,[48] and this fashion soon found servile imitation in Boston. But it was as much an affectation in those [Pg060] days as it is today, and Webster indicated the fact pretty plainly in his "Dissertations." How, despite his opposition, the broad /a/ prevailed East of the Connecticut river, and how, in the end, he himself yielded to it, and even tried to force it upon the whole nation--this will be rehearsed in the next chapter.
The colonists remained faithful much longer than the English to various other vowel-sounds that were facing change in the eighteenth century, for example, the long /e/-sound in /heard/. Webster says that the custom of rhyming /heard/ with /bird/ instead of with /feared/ came in at the beginning of the Revolution. "To most people in this country," he adds, "the English pronunciation appears like affectation." He also argues for rhyming /deaf/ with /leaf/, and protests against inserting a /y/-sound before the /u/ in such words as /nature/. Franklin's authority stands behind /git/ for /get/. This pronunciation, according to Menner,[49] was correct in seventeenth century England, and perhaps down to the middle of the next century. So was the use of the Continental /i/-sound in /oblige/, making it /obleege/. It is probable that the colonists clung to these disappearing usages much longer than the English. The latter, according to Webster, were unduly responsive to illogical fashions set by the exquisites of the court and by popular actors. He blames Garrick, in particular, for many extravagant innovations, most of them not followed in the colonies. But Garrick was surely not responsible for the use of a long /i/-sound in such words as /motive/, nor for the corruption of /mercy/ to /marcy/. Webster denounced both of these barbarisms. The second he ascribed somewhat lamely to the fact that the letter /r/ is called /ar/, and proposed to dispose of it by changing the /ar/ to /er/.
As for the consonants, the colonists seem to have resisted valiantly that tendency to slide over them which arose in England after the Restoration. Franklin, in 1768, still retained the sound of /l/ in such words as /would/ and /should/, a usage not met with in England after the year 1700. In the same way, according to Menner, the /w/ in /sword/ was sounded in America "for some time after Englishmen had abandoned it." The sensitive ear of Henry James detected an unpleasant /r/-sound in the speech of Americans, long ago got rid of by the English, so late as 1905; he even charged that it was inserted gratuitously in innocent words.[50] The obvious slurring of the consonants by Southerners is explained by a recent investigator[51] on the ground that it began in England during the reign of Charles II, and that most of the Southern colonists came to the New World at that time. The court of Charles, it is argued, was under French influence, due to the king's long residence in France and his marriage to Henrietta Marie. Charles "objected to the inharmonious contractions /will'nt/ (or /wolln't/) and /wasn't/ and /weren't/ ... and set the fashion of using the softly euphonious /won't/ and /wan't/, which are used in speaking to this day by the best class of Southerners." A more direct French influence upon Southern pronunciation is also pointed out. "With full knowledge of his /g's/ and his /r's/, ... [the Southerner] sees fit to glide over them, ... and he carries over the consonant ending one word to the vowel beginning the next, just as the Frenchman does." The political importance of the South, in the years between the Mecklenburg Declaration and the adoption of the Constitution, tended to force its provincialisms upon the common language. Many of the acknowledged leaders of the nascent nation were Southerners, and their pronunciation, as well as their phrases, must have become familiar everywhere. Pickering gives us a hint, indeed, at the process whereby their usage influenced that of the rest of the people.[52]
The Americans early dropped the /h/-sound in such words as /when/ and /where/, but so far as I can determine they never elided it at the beginning of words, save in the case of /herb/, and a few others. This elision is commonly spoken of as a cockney vulgarism, but it has extended to the orthodox English speech. In /ostler/ the initial /h/ is openly left off; in /hotel/ and /hospital/ it is [Pg062] seldom sounded, even by the most careful Englishmen. Certain English words in /h/, in which the /h/ is now sounded, betray its former silence by the fact that not /a/ but /an/ is still put before them. It is still good English usage to write /an hotel/ and /an historical/; it is the American usage to write /a hotel/ and /a historical/.
The great authority of Webster was sufficient to establish the American pronunciation of /schedule/. In England the /sch/ is always given the soft sound, but Webster decided for the hard sound, as in /scheme/. The variance persists to this day. The name of the last letter of the alphabet, which is always /zed/ in English, is usually made /zee/ in the United States. Thornton shows that this Americanism arose in the eighteenth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Bristed was a grandson of John Jacob Astor and was educated at Cambridge. He contributed an extremely sagacious essay on The English Language in America to a volume of Cambridge Essays published by a group of young Cambridge men; London, 1855.
[2] Vol. i, p. vi.
[3] Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling; Philadelphia, 1768.
[4] Dec. 26, 1789. The Works of B. Franklin, ed. by A. F. Smyth; New York, 1905, vol. i, p. 40.
[5] /The Druid/, No. 5; reprinted in Witherspoon's Collected Works, edited by Ashbel Green, vol. iv; New York, 1800-1.
[6] /Vide/, in addition to the citations in the text, the /British Critic/, Nov. 1793; Feb. 1810; the /Critical Review/, July 1807; Sept. 1809; the /Monthly Review/, May 1808; the /Eclectic Review/, Aug. 1813.
[7] 1815, pp. 307-14; reprinted in his Remarks on National Literature, Boston, 1823.
[8] American English, /North American Review/, April, 1883.
[9] A number of such Indian words are preserved in the nomenclature of Tammany Hall and in that of the Improved Order of Red Men, an organization with more than 500,000 members. The Red Men, borrowing from the Indians, thus name the months, in order: /Cold Moon/, /Snow/, /Worm/, /Plant/, /Flower/, /Hot/, /Buck/, /Sturgeon/, /Corn/, /Travelers'/, /Beaver/ and /Hunting/. They call their officers /incohonee/, /sachem/, /wampum-keeper/, etc. But such terms, of course, are not in general use.
[10] A long list of such obsolete Americanisms is given by Clapin in his Dictionary.
[11] An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations....; Phila., 1818.
[12] /Cf./ Hans Brinker, by Mary Maples Dodge; New York, 1891.
[13] (/a/) A chest of drawers, (/b/) a government office. In both senses the word is rare in English, though its use by the French is familiar. In the United States its use in (/b/) has been extended, /e. g./, in /employment-bureau/.
[14] From /Sint-Klaas/--/Saint Nicholas/. /Santa Claus/ has also become familiar to the English, but the Oxford Dictionary still calls the name an Americanism.
[15] The spelling is variously /sauerkraut/, /saurkraut/, /sourkraut/ and /sourkrout/.
[16] /Cf./ The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, pp. 14 and 22.
[17] The American origin of this last word has been disputed, but the weight of evidence seems to show that it was borrowed from the /rapides/ of the French Canadians. It is familiar in the United States and Canada, but seldom met with in England.
[18] /Log-cabin/ came in later. Thornton's first quotation is dated 1818. The /Log-Cabin/ campaign was in 1840.
[19] Theo. Roosevelt: Gouverneur Morris; Boston, 1888, p. 104.
[20] William Brown Meloney: The Heritage of Tyre; New York, 1916, p. 15.
[21] /Vide/ his preface to Every-Day English, pp. xxi and xv, respectively.
[22] /Vide/ Lyell's Travels in North America; London, 1845.
[23] Pref. to the Biglow Papers, 2nd series, 1866.
[24] Reprinted in Helpful Hints in Writing and Reading, comp. by Grenville Kleiser; New York, 1911, pp. 15-17.
[25] A. Cleveland Coxe: Americanisms in England, /Forum/, Oct., 1886.
[26] Edwin S. Gould: Good English, or, Popular Errors in Language: New York, 1867; pp. 25-27.
[27] /Cf./ Ch. I, § 5, and Ch. V, § 1.
[28] /Lott/ appears in the Connecticut Code of 1650. /Vide/ the edition of Andrus; Hartford, 1822. On page 35 is "their landes, /lotts/ and accommodations." On page 46 is "meadow and home /lotts/."
[29] /Vide/ Hutchinson's Diary, vol. i, p. 171; London, 1883-6.
[30] The definitions are from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1914) and the Standard Dictionary (1906), respectively.
[31] S. Sewall: Diary, April 14, 1712: "I lay'd a /Rock/ in the North-east corner of the Foundation of the Meeting-house."
[32] The Americana, ... /art./ Americanisms: New York, 1903-6.
[33] Immigration, 2nd ed.; New York, 1913, p. 4. Sir J. R. Seeley says, in The Expansion of England (2nd ed.; London, 1895, p. 84) that the emigration from England to New England, after the meeting of the Long Parliament (1640), was so slight for a full century that it barely balanced "the counter-movement of colonists quitting the colony." Richard Hildreth, in his History of the United States, vol. i, p. 267, says that the departures actually exceeded the arrivals.
[34] Works, ed. by Sparks: vol. ii, p. 319.
[35] /Cf./ Pehr Kalm: Travels into N. America, tr. by J. R. Forster, 3 vols.; London, 1770-71.
[36] Sydney George Fisher: The True Story of the American Revolution; Phila. and London, 1902, p. 27. See also John T. Morse's Life of Thomas Jefferson in the American Statesmen series (Boston and New York, 1898), p. 2. Morse points out that Washington, Jefferson and Madison belonged to this new aristocracy, not to the old one.
[37] /Cf./ the Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, p. 119. Francis Jeffrey, writing on Franklin in the /Edinburgh Review/ for July, 1806, hailed him as a prodigy who had arisen "in a society where there was no relish and no encouragement for literature."
[38] Examples of its use in the American sense, considered vulgar and even indecent in England, are to be found in Gen. xlviii, 1; II Kings viii, 7; John xi, 1, and Acts ix, 37.
[39] J. O. Halliwell (Phillips): A Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms, Containing Words now Obsolete in England All of Which are Familiar and in Common Use in America, 2nd ed.; London, 1850.
[40] An interesting discussion of this verb appeared in the /New York Sun/, Nov. 27, 1914.
[41] /Cf./ J. H. Combs: Old, Early and Elizabethan English in the Southern Mountains, /Dialect Notes/, vol. iv, pt. iv, pp. 283-97.
[42] Henry Sweet: A History of English Sounds; London, 1876; Oxford, 1888.
[43] P. 124.
[44] /Cf./ /Art./ Changes in the Language Since Shakespeare's Time, by W. Murison, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv, p. 485.
[45] English Spelling and Spelling Reform; New York, 1909.
[46] C. H. Grandgent: Fashion and the Broad /A/, /Nation/, Jan. 7, 1915.
[47] Thomas Sheridan: A Complete Dictionary of the English Language; London, 1780.
[48] It first appeared in Robert Nares' Elements of Orthography; London, 1784. In 1791 it received full approbation in John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary.
[49] Robert J. Menner; The Pronunciation of English in America, /Atlantic Monthly/, March, 1915.
[50] The Question of Our Speech; Boston and New York, 1906, pp. 27-29.
[51] Elizabeth H. Hancock: Southern Speech, /Neale's Monthly/, Nov., 1913, pp. 606-7.
[52] /Vide/ his remarks on /balance/ in his Vocabulary. See also Marsh, p. 671.
[Pg063]
III
The Period of Growth
§ 1
/The New Nation/--The American language thus began to be recognizably differentiated from English in both vocabulary and pronunciation by the opening of the nineteenth century, but as yet its growth was hampered by two factors, the first being the lack of a national literature of any pretentions and the second being an internal political disharmony which greatly conditioned and enfeebled the national consciousness. During the actual Revolution common aims and common dangers forced the Americans to show a united front, but once they had achieved political independence they developed conflicting interests, and out of those conflicting interests came suspicions and hatreds which came near wrecking the new confederation more than once. Politically, their worst weakness, perhaps, was an inability to detach themselves wholly from the struggle for domination still going on in Europe. The surviving Loyalists of the revolutionary era--estimated by some authorities to have constituted fully a third of the total population in 1776--were ardently in favor of England, and such patriots as Jefferson were as ardently in favor of France. This engrossment in the quarrels of foreign nations was what Washington warned against in his Farewell Address. It was at the bottom of such bitter animosities as that between Jefferson and Hamilton. It inspired and perhaps excused the pessimism of such men as Burr. Its net effect was to make it difficult for the people of the new nation to think of themselves, politically, as Americans. Their state of mind, vacillating, uncertain, alternately timorous and [Pg064] pugnacious, has been well described by Henry Cabot Lodge in his essay on "Colonialism in America."[1] Soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed, someone referred to the late struggle, in Franklin's hearing, as the War for Independence. "Say, rather, the War of the Revolution," said Franklin. "The War for Independence is yet to be fought."
"That struggle," adds Lossing, "occurred, and that independence was won, by the Americans in the War of 1812."[2] In the interval the new republic had passed through a period of /Sturm und Drang/ whose gigantic perils and passions we have begun to forget--a period in which disaster ever menaced, and the foes within were no less bold and pertinacious than the foes without. Jefferson, perhaps, carried his fear of "monocrats" to the point of monomania, but under it there was undoubtedly a body of sound fact. The poor debtor class (including probably a majority of the veterans of the Revolution) had been fired by the facile doctrines of the French Revolution to demands which threatened the country with bankruptcy and anarchy, and the class of property-owners, in reaction, went far to the other extreme. On all sides, indeed, there flourished a strong British party, and
## particularly in New England, where the so-called codfish aristocracy
(by no means extinct, even today) exhibited an undisguised Anglomania, and looked forward confidently to a /rapprochement/ with the mother country.[3] This Anglomania showed itself, not only in ceaseless political agitation, but also in an elaborate imitation of English manners. We have already seen, on Noah Webster's authority, how it even extended to the pronunciation of the language.
The first sign of the dawn of a new national order came with the election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency in 1800. The issue in the campaign was a highly complex one, but under it lay a plain conflict between democratic independence and the [Pg065] old doctrine of dependence and authority; and with the Alien and Sedition Laws about his neck, so vividly reminiscent of the issues of the Revolution itself, Adams went down to defeat. Jefferson was violently anti-British and pro-French; he saw all the schemes of his political opponents, indeed, as English plots; he was the man who introduced the bugaboo into American politics. His first acts after his inauguration were to abolish all ceremonial at the court of the republic, and to abandon spoken discourses to Congress for written messages. That ceremonial, which grew up under Washington, was an imitation, he believed, of the formality of the abhorrent Court of St. James; as for the speeches to Congress, they were palpably modelled upon the speeches from the throne of the English kings. Both reforms met with wide approval; the exactions of the English, particularly on the high seas, were beginning to break up the British party. But confidence in the solidarity and security of the new nation was still anything but universal. The surviving doubts, indeed, were strong enough to delay the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for more direct elections of President and Vice-President, until the end of 1804, and even then three of the five New England states rejected it,[4] and have never ratified it, in fact, to this day. Democracy was still experimental, doubtful, full of gunpowder. In so far as it had actually come into being, it had come as a boon conferred from above. Jefferson, its protagonist, was the hero of the populace, but he was not of the populace himself, nor did he ever quite trust it.
It was reserved for Andrew Jackson, a man genuinely of the people, to lead and visualize the rise of the lower orders. Jackson, in his way, was the archetype of the new American--ignorant, pushful, impatient of restraint and precedent, an iconoclast, a Philistine, an Anglophobe in every fibre. He came from the extreme backwoods and his youth was passed amid surroundings but little removed from downright savagery.[5] [Pg066] Thousands of other young Americans like him were growing up at the same time--youngsters filled with a vast impatience of all precedent and authority, revilers of all that had come down from an elder day, incorrigible libertarians. They swarmed across the mountains and down the great rivers, wrestling with the naked wilderness and setting up a casual, impromptu sort of civilization where the Indian still menaced. Schools were few and rudimentary; there was not the remotest approach to a cultivated society; any effort to mimic the amenities of the East, or of the mother country, in manner or even in speech, met with instant derision. It was in these surroundings and at this time that the thorough-going American of tradition was born: blatant, illogical, elate, "greeting the embarrassed gods" uproariously and matching "with Destiny for beers." Jackson was unmistakably of that company in his every instinct and idea, and it was his fate to give a new and unshakable confidence to its aspiration at the Battle of New Orleans. Thereafter all doubts began to die out; the new republic was turning out a success. And with success came a vast increase in the national egoism. The hordes of pioneers rolled down the western valleys and on to the great plains.[6] America began to stand for something quite new in the world--in government, in law, in public and private morals, in customs and habits of mind, in the minutia of social intercourse. And simultaneously the voice of America began to take on its characteristic twang, and the speech of America began to differentiate itself boldly and unmistakably from the speech of England. The average Philadelphian or Bostonian of 1790 had not the slightest difficulty in making himself understood by a visiting Englishman. But the average Ohio boatman of 1810 or plainsman of 1815 was already speaking a dialect that the Englishman would have shrunk from as barbarous and unintelligible, and before long it began to leave [Pg067] its mark upon and to get direction and support from a distinctively national literature.
That literature, however, was very slow in coming to a dignified, confident and autonomous estate. Down to Jefferson's day it was almost wholly polemical, and hence lacking in the finer values; he himself, an insatiable propagandist and controversialist, was one of its chief ornaments. "The novelists and the historians, the essayists and the poets, whose names come to mind when American literature is mentioned," says a recent literary historian, "have all flourished since 1800."[7] Pickering, so late as 1816, said that "in this country we can hardly be said to have any authors by profession." It was a true saying, though the new day was about to dawn; Bryant had already written "Thanatopsis" and was destined to publish it the year following. Difficulties of communication hampered the circulation of the few native books that were written; it was easier for a man in the South to get books from London than to get them from Boston or New York, and the lack of a copyright treaty with England flooded the country with cheap English editions. "It is much to be regretted," wrote Dr. David Ramsay, of Charleston, S. C., to Noah Webster in 1806, "that there is so little intercourse in a literary way between the states. As soon as a book of general utility comes out in any state it should be for sale in all of them." Ramsay asked for little; the most he could imagine was a sale of 2,000 copies for an American work in America. But even that was far beyond the possibilities of the time.
An external influence of great potency helped to keep the national literature scant and timorous during those early and perilous days. It was the extraordinary animosity of the English critics, then at the zenith of their pontifical authority, to all books of American origin or flavor. This animosity, culminating in Sydney Smith's famous sneer,[8] was but part of a [Pg068] larger hostility to all things American, from political theories to table manners. The American, after the war of 1812, became the pet abomination of the English, and the chief butt of the incomparable English talent for moral indignation. There was scarcely an issue of the /Quarterly Review/, the /Edinburgh/, the /Foreign Quarterly/, the /British Review/ or /Blackwood's/, for a generation following 1814, in which he was not stupendously assaulted. Gifford, Sydney Smith and the poet Southey became specialists in this business; it took on the character of a holy war; even such mild men as Wordsworth were recruited for it. It was argued that the Americans were rogues and swindlers, that they lived in filth and squalor, that they were boors in social intercourse, that they were poltroons and savages in war, that they were depraved and criminal, that they were wholly devoid of the remotest notion of decency or honor. The /Foreign Quarterly/, summing up in January, 1844, pronounced them "horn-handed and pig-headed, hard, persevering, unscrupulous, carnivorous, with a genius for lying." Various Americans went to the defense of their countrymen, among them, Irving, Cooper, Timothy Dwight, J. K. Paulding, John Neal, Edward Everett and Robert Walsh. Paulding, in "John Bull in America, or, the New Munchausen," published in 1825, attempted satire. Even an Englishman, James Sterling, warned his fellow-Britons that, if they continued their intolerant abuse, they would "turn into bitterness the last drops of good-will toward England that exist in the United States." But the avalanche of denunciation kept up, and even down to a few years ago it was very uncommon for an Englishman to write of American politics, or manners, or literature without betraying his dislike. Not, indeed, until the Prussian began monopolizing the whole British talent for horror and invective did the Yankee escape the lash.[9]
This gigantic pummelling, in the long run, was destined to encourage an independent spirit in the national literature, if [Pg069] only by a process of mingled resentment and despair, but for some time its chief effect was to make American writers of a more delicate aspiration extremely self-conscious and diffident. The educated classes, even against their will, were influenced by the torrent of abuse; they could not help finding in it an occasional reasonableness, an accidental true hit. The result, despite the efforts of Channing, Knapp and other such valiant defenders of the native author, was uncertainty and skepticism in native criticism. "The first step of an American entering upon a literary career," says Lodge, writing of the first quarter of the century, "was to pretend to be an Englishman in order that he might win the approval, not of Englishmen, but of his own countrymen." Cooper, in his first novel, "Precaution," chose an English scene, imitated English models, and obviously hoped to placate the critics thereby. Irving, too, in his earliest work, showed a considerable discretion, and his "History of New York," as everyone knows, was first published anonymously. But this puerile spirit did not last long. The English onslaughts were altogether too vicious to be received lying down; their very fury demanded that they be met with a united and courageous front. Cooper, in his second novel, "The Spy," boldly chose an American setting and American characters, and though the influence of his wife, who came of a Loyalist family, caused him to avoid any direct attack upon the English, he attacked them indirectly, and with great effect, by opposing an immediate and honorable success to their derisions. "The Spy" ran through three editions in four months; it was followed by his long line of thoroughly American novels; in 1834 he formally apologized to his countrymen for his early truancy in "Precaution." Irving, too, soon adopted a bolder tone, and despite his English predilections, he refused an offer of a hundred guineas for an article for the /Quarterly Review/, made by Gifford in 1828, on the ground that "the /Review/ has been so persistently hostile to our country that I cannot draw a pen in its service."
The same year saw the publication of the first edition of [Pg070] Webster's American Dictionary of the English language, and a year later followed Samuel L. Knapp's "Lectures on American Literature," the first history of the national letters ever attempted. Knapp, in his preface, thought it necessary to prove, first of all, that an American literature actually existed, and Webster, in his introduction, was properly apologetic, but there was no real need for timorousness in either case, for the American attitude toward the attack of the English was now definitely changing from uneasiness to defiance. The English critics, in fact, had overdone the thing, and though their clatter was to keep up for many years more, they no longer spread terror or had much influence. Of a sudden, as if in answer to them, doubts turned to confidence, and then into the wildest sort of optimism, not only in politics and business, but also in what passed for the arts. Knapp boldly defied the English to produce a "tuneful sister" surpassing Mrs. Sigourney; more, he argued that the New World, if only by reason of its superior scenic grandeur, would eventually hatch a poetry surpassing even that of Greece and Rome. "What are the Tibers and Scamanders," he demanded, "measured by the Missouri and the Amazon? Or what the loveliness of Illysus or Avon by the Connecticut or the Potomack?"
In brief, the national feeling, long delayed at birth, finally leaped into being in amazing vigor. "One can get an idea of the strength of that feeling," says R. O. Williams, "by glancing at almost any book taken at random from the American publications of the period. Belief in the grand future of the United States is the key-note of everything said and done. All things American are to be grand--our territory, population, products, wealth, science, art--but especially our political institutions and literature. The unbounded confidence in the material development of the country which now characterizes the extreme northwest of the United States prevailed as strongly throughout the eastern part of the Union during the first thirty years of the century; and over and above a belief in, and concern for, materialistic progress, there were enthusiastic anticipations of achievements in all the moral and intellectual fields of national [Pg071] greatness."[10] Nor was that vast optimism wholly without warrant. An American literature was actually coming into being, and with a wall of hatred and contempt shutting in England, the new American writers were beginning to turn to the Continent for inspiration and encouragement. Irving had already drunk at Spanish springs; Emerson and Bayard Taylor were to receive powerful impulses from Germany, following Ticknor, Bancroft and Everett before them; Bryant was destined to go back to the classics. Moreover, Cooper and John P. Kennedy had shown the way to native sources of literary material, and Longfellow was making ready to follow them; novels in imitation of English models were no longer heard of; the ground was preparing for "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Finally, Webster himself, as Williams demonstrated, worked better than he knew. His American Dictionary was not only thoroughly American: it was superior to any of the current dictionaries of the English, so much so that for a good many years it remained "a sort of mine for British lexicography to exploit."
Thus all hesitations disappeared, and there arose a national consciousness so soaring and so blatant that it began to dismiss all British usage and opinion as puerile and idiotic. William L. Marcy, when Secretary of State under Pierce (1853-57), issued a circular to all American diplomatic and consular officers, loftily bidding them employ only "the American language" in communicating with him. The Legislature of Indiana, in an act approved February 15, 1838, establishing the state university at Bloomington,[11] provided that it should instruct the youth of the new commonwealth (it had been admitted to the Union in 1816) "in the American, learned and foreign languages ... and literature." Such grandiose pronunciamentos [Pg072] well indicate and explain the temper of the era.[12] It was a time of expansion and braggadocia. The new republic would not only produce a civilization and a literature of its own; it would show the way for all other civilizations and literatures. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, the enemy of Poe, rose from his decorous Baptist pew to protest that so much patriotism amounted to insularity and absurdity, but there seems to have been no one to second the motion. It took, indeed, the vast shock of the Civil War to unhorse the optimists. While the Jackson influence survived, it was the almost unanimous national conviction that "he who dallies is a dastard, and he who doubts is damned."
§ 2
/The Language in the Making/--All this jingoistic bombast, however, was directed toward defending, not so much the national vernacular as the national beautiful letters. True enough, an English attack upon a definite American locution always brought out certain critical minute-men, but in the main they were anything but hospitable to the racy neologisms that kept crowding up from below, and most of them were eager to be accepted as masters of orthodox English and very sensitive to the charge that their writing was bestrewn with Americanisms. A glance through the native criticism of the time will show how ardently even the most uncompromising patriots imitated the Johnsonian jargon then fashionable in England. Fowler and Griswold followed pantingly in the footsteps of Macaulay; their prose is extraordinarily ornate and self-conscious, and one searches it in vain for any concession to colloquialism. Poe, the master of them all, achieved a style so elephantine that many an English leader-writer must have studied it with envy. A few bolder spirits, as we have seen, spoke out for national freedom in language as well as in letters--among them, Channing--but in the main the Brahmins of the time were conservatives in [Pg073] that department, and it is difficult to imagine Emerson or Irving or Bryant sanctioning the innovations later adopted so easily by Howells. Lowell and Walt Whitman, in fact, were the first men of letters, properly so called, to give specific assent to the great changes that were firmly fixed in the national speech during the half century between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. Lowell did so in his preface to the second series of "The Biglow Papers." Whitman made his declaration in "An American Primer." In discussing his own poetry, he said: "It is an attempt to give the spirit, the body and the man, new words, new potentialities of speech--an American, a cosmopolitan (for the best of America is the best cosmopolitanism) range of self-expression." And then: "The Americans are going to be the most fluent and melodious-voiced people in the world--and the most perfect users of words. The new times, the new people, the new vistas need a new tongue according--yes, and what is more, they will have such a new tongue." To which, as everyone knows, Whitman himself forthwith contributed many daring (and still undigested) novelties, /e. g./, /camerado/, /romanza/, /Adamic/ and /These States/.
Meanwhile, in strong contrast to the lingering conservatism above there was a wild and lawless development of the language below, and in the end it forced itself into recognition, and profited by the literary declaration of independence of its very opponents. "The /jus et norma loquendi/," says W. R. Morfill, the English philologist, "do not depend upon scholars." Particularly in a country where scholarship is still new and wholly cloistered, and the overwhelming majority of the people are engaged upon novel and highly exhilarating tasks, far away from schools and with a gigantic cockiness in their hearts. The remnants of the Puritan civilization had been wiped out by the rise of the proletariat under Jackson, and whatever was fine and sensitive in it had died with it. What remained of an urbane habit of mind and utterance began to be confined to the narrowing feudal areas of the south, and to the still narrower refuge of the Boston Brahmins, now, for the first time, a definitely recognized caste of /intelligentsia/, self-charged with carrying the [Pg074] torch of culture through a new Dark Age. The typical American, in Paulding's satirical phrase, became "a bundling, gouging, impious" fellow, without either "morals, literature, religion or refinement." Next to the savage struggle for land and dollars, party politics was the chief concern of the people, and with the disappearance of the old leaders and the entrance of pushing upstarts from the backwoods, political controversy sank to an incredibly low level. Bartlett, in the introduction to the second edition of his Glossary, describes the effect upon the language. First the enfranchised mob, whether in the city wards or along the western rivers, invented fantastic slang-words and turns of phrase; then they were "seized upon by stump-speakers at political meetings"; then they were heard in Congress; then they got into the newspapers; and finally they came into more or less good usage. Much contemporary evidence is to the same effect. Fowler, in listing "low expressions" in 1850, described them as "chiefly political." "The vernacular tongue of the country," said Daniel Webster, "has become greatly vitiated, depraved and corrupted by the style of the congressional debates." Thornton, in the appendix to his Glossary, gives some astounding specimens of congressional oratory between the 20's and 60's, and many more will reward the explorer who braves the files of the /Congressional Globe/. This flood of racy and unprecedented words and phrases beat upon and finally penetrated the retreat of the /literati/, but the purity of speech cultivated there had little compensatory influence upon the vulgate. The newspaper was now enthroned, and /belles lettres/ were cultivated almost in private, and as a mystery. It is probable, indeed, that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Ten Nights in a Bar-room," both published in the early 50's, were the first contemporary native books, after Cooper's day, that the American people, as a people, ever read. Nor did the pulpit, now fast falling from its old high estate, lift a corrective voice. On the contrary, it joined the crowd, and Bartlett denounces it specifically for its bad example, and cites, among its crimes against the language, such inventions as /to doxologize/ and /to funeralize/. [Pg075] To these novelties, apparently without any thought of their uncouthness, Fowler adds to /missionate/ and /consociational/.
As I say, the pressure from below broke down the defenses of the purists, and literally forced a new national idiom upon them. Pen in hand, they might still achieve laborious imitations of Johnson and Macaulay, but their mouths began to betray them. "When it comes to talking," wrote Charles Astor Bristed for Englishmen in 1855, "the most refined and best educated American, who has habitually resided in his own country, the very man who would write, on some serious topic, volumes in which no peculiarity could be detected, will, in half a dozen sentences, use at least as many words that cannot fail to strike the inexperienced Englishman who hears them for the first time." Bristed gave a specimen of the American of that time, calculated to flabbergast his inexperienced Englishman; you will find it in the volume of Cambridge Essays, already cited. His aim was to explain and defend Americanisms, and so shut off the storm of English reviling, and he succeeded in producing one of the most thoughtful and persuasive essays on the subject ever written. But his purpose failed and the attack kept up, and eight years afterward the Very Rev. Henry Alford, D.D., dean of Canterbury, led a famous assault. "Look at those phrases," he said, "which so amuse us in their speech and books; at their reckless exaggeration and contempt for congruity; and then compare the character and history of the nation--its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man; its open disregard of conventional right where aggrandizement is to be obtained; and I may now say, its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world."[13] In his American edition of 1866 Dr. Alford withdrew this reference to the Civil War and somewhat ameliorated his indignation otherwise, but he clung to the main counts in his indictment, and most Englishmen, I daresay, still give them a certain support. The American is no longer a [Pg076] "vain, egotistical, insolent, rodomontade sort of fellow"; America is no longer the "brigand confederation" of the /Foreign Quarterly/ or "the loathsome creature, ... maimed and lame, full of sores and ulcers" of Dickens; but the Americanism is yet regarded with a bilious eye, and pounced upon viciously when found. Even the friendliest English critics seem to be daunted by the gargantuan copiousness of American inventions in speech. Their position, perhaps, was well stated by Capt. Basil Hall, author of the celebrated "Travels in North America," in 1827. When he argued that "surely such innovations are to be deprecated," an American asked him this question: "If a word becomes universally current in America, why should it not take its station in the language?" "Because," replied Hall in all seriousness, "there are words enough in our language already."
§ 3
/The Expanding Vocabulary/--A glance at some of the characteristic coinages of the time, as they are revealed in the /Congressional Globe/, in contemporary newspapers and political tracts, and in that grotesque small literature of humor which began with Judge Thomas C. Haliburton's "Sam Slick" in 1835, is almost enough to make one sympathize with Dean Alford. Bartlett quotes /to doxologize/ from the /Christian Disciple/, a quite reputable religious paper of the 40's. /To citizenize/ was used and explained by Senator Young, of Illinois, in the Senate on February 1, 1841, and he gave Noah Webster as authority for it. /To funeralize/ and /to missionate/, along with /consociational/, were contributions of the backwoods pulpit; perhaps it also produced /hell-roaring/ and /hellion/, the latter of which was a favorite of the Mormons and even got into a sermon by Henry Ward Beecher. /To deacon/, a verb of decent mien in colonial days, signifying to read a hymn line by line, responded to the rough humor of the time, and began to mean to swindle or adulterate, /e. g./, to put the largest berries at the top of the box, to extend one's fences /sub rosa/, or to mix sand with sugar. A great rage for extending the vocabulary by the use of suffixes seized upon [Pg077] the corn-fed etymologists, and they produced a formidable new vocabulary in /-ize/, /-ate/, /-ify/, /-acy/, /-ous/ and /-ment/. Such inventions as /to obligate/, /to concertize/, /to questionize/, /retiracy/, /savagerous/, /coatee/ (a sort of diminutive for coat) and /citified/ appeared in the popular vocabulary, and even got into more or less good usage. Fowler, in 1850, cited /publishment/ and /releasement/ with no apparent thought that they were uncouth. And at the same time many verbs were made by the simple process of back formation, as, /to resurrect/, /to excurt/, /to resolute/, /to burgle/[14] and /to enthuse/.[15]
Some of these inventions, after flourishing for a generation or more, were retired with blushes during the period of aesthetic consciousness following the Civil War, but a large number have survived to our own day, and are in good usage. Not even the most bilious purist would think of objecting to /to affiliate/, /to itemize/, /to resurrect/ or /to Americanize/ today, and yet all of them gave grief to the judicious when they first appeared in the debates of Congress, brought there by statesmen from the backwoods. Nor to such simpler verbs of the period as /to corner/ (/i. e./, the market), /to boss/ and /to lynch/.[16] Nor perhaps to /to boom/, /to boost/, /to kick/ (in the sense of to protest), /to coast/ (on a sled), /to engineer/, /to collide/, /to chink/ (/i. e./, logs), /to feaze/, /to splurge/, /to aggravate/ (in the sense of to anger), /to yank/ and /to crawfish/. These verbs have entered into the very fibre of the American vulgate, and so have many nouns derived from them, /e. g./, /boomer/, /boom-town/, /bouncer/, /kicker/, /kick/, /splurge/, /roller-coaster/. A few of them, /e. g./, /to collide/ and /to feaze/, were [Pg078] archaic English terms brought to new birth; a few others, /e. g./, /to holler/[17] and /to muss/, were obviously mere corruptions. But a good many others, /e. g./, /to bulldoze/, /to hornswoggle/ and /to scoot/, were genuine inventions, and redolent of the soil.
With the new verbs came a great swarm of verb-phrases, some of them short and pithy and others extraordinarily elaborate, but all showing the true national talent for condensing a complex thought, and often a whole series of thoughts, into a vivid and arresting image. Of the first class are /to fill the bill/, /to fizzle out/, /to make tracks/, /to peter out/, /to plank down/, /to go back on/, /to keep tab/, /to light out/ and /to back water/. Side by side with them we have inherited such common coins of speech as /to make the fur fly/, /to cut a swath/, /to know him like a book/, /to keep a stiff upper lip/, /to cap the climax/, /to handle without gloves/, /to freeze on to/, /to go it blind/, /to pull wool over his eyes/, /to know the ropes/, /to get solid with/, /to spread one's self/, /to run into the ground/, /to dodge the issue/, /to paint the town red/, /to take a back seat/ and /to get ahead of/. These are so familiar that we use them and hear them without thought; they seem as authentically parts of the English idiom as /to be left at the post/. And yet, as the labors of Thornton have demonstrated, all of them are of American nativity, and the circumstances surrounding the origin of some of them have been accurately determined. Many others are palpably the products of the great movement toward the West, for example, /to pan out/, /to strike it rich/, /to jump/ or /enter a claim/, /to pull up stakes/, /to rope in/, /to die with one's boots on/, /to get the deadwood on/, /to get the drop/, /to back and fill/ (a steamboat phrase used figuratively) and /to get the bulge on/. And in many others the authentic American is no less plain, for example, in /to kick the bucket/, /to put a bug in his [Pg079] ear/, /to see the elephant/, /to crack up/, /to do up brown/, /to bark up the wrong tree/, /to jump on with both feet/, /to go the whole hog/, /to make a kick/, /to buck the tiger/, /to let it slide/ and /to come out at the little end of the horn/. /To play possum/ belongs to this list. To it Thornton adds /to knock into a cocked hat/, despite its English sound, and /to have an ax to grind/. /To go for/, both in the sense of belligerency and in that of
## partisanship, is also American, and so is /to go through/ (/i. e./, to
plunder).
Of adjectives the list is scarcely less long. Among the coinages of the first half of the century that are in good use today are /non-committal/, /highfalutin/, /well-posted/, /down-town/, /played-out/, /flat-footed/, /whole-souled/ and /true-blue/. The first appears in a Senate debate of 1841; /highfalutin/ in a political speech of the same decade. Both are useful words; it is impossible, not employing them, to convey the ideas behind them without circumlocution. The use of /slim/ in the sense of meagre, as in /slim chance/, /slim attendance/ and /slim support/, goes back still further. The English use /small/ in place of it. Other, and less respectable contributions of the time are /brash/, /brainy/, /peart/, /locoed/, /pesky/, /picayune/, /scary/, /well-heeled/, /hardshell/ (/e. g./, Baptist), /low-flung/, /codfish/ (to indicate opprobrium) and /go-to-meeting/. The use of /plumb/ as an adjective, as in /plumb crazy/, is an English archaism that was revived in the United States in the early years of the century. In the more orthodox adverbial form of /plump/ it still survives, for example, in "she fell /plump/ into his arms." But this last is also good English.
The characteristic American substitution of /mad/ for /angry/ goes back to the eighteenth century, and perhaps denotes the survival of an English provincialism. Witherspoon noticed it and denounced it in 1781, and in 1816 Pickering called it "low" and said that it was not used "except in very familiar conversation." But it got into much better odor soon afterward, and by 1840 it passed unchallenged. Its use is one of the peculiarities that Englishmen most quickly notice in American colloquial speech today. In formal written discourse it is less often encountered, probably because the English marking of it has so conspicuously singled it out. But it is constantly met with [Pg080] in the newspapers and in the /Congressional Record/, and it is not infrequently used by such writers as Howells and Dreiser. In the familiar simile, /as mad as a hornet/, it is used in the American sense. But /as mad as a March hare/ is English, and connotes insanity, not mere anger. The English meaning of the word is preserved in /mad-house/ and /mad-dog/, but I have often noticed that American rustics, employing the latter term, derive from it a vague notion, not that the dog is demented, but that it is in a simple fury. From this notion, perhaps, comes the popular belief that dogs may be thrown into hydrophobia by teasing and badgering them.
It was not, however, among the verbs and adjectives that the American word-coiners of the first half of the century achieved their gaudiest innovations, but among the substantives. Here they had temptation and excuse in plenty, for innumerable new objects and relations demanded names, and here they exercised their fancy without restraint. Setting aside loan words, which will be considered later, three main varieties of new nouns were thus produced. The first consisted of English words rescued from obsolescence or changed in meaning, the second of compounds manufactured of the common materials of the mother tongue, and the third of entirely new inventions. Of the first class, good specimens are /deck/ (of cards), /gulch/, /gully/ and /billion/, the first three old English words restored to usage in America and the last a sound English word changed in meaning. Of the second class, examples are offered by /gum-shoe/, /mortgage-shark/, /dug-out/, /shot-gun/, /stag-party/, /wheat-pit/, /horse-sense/, /chipped-beef/, /oyster-supper/, /buzz-saw/, /chain-gang/ and /hell-box/. And of the third there are instances in /buncombe/, /greaser/, /conniption/, /bloomer/, /campus/, /galoot/, /maverick/, /roustabout/, /bugaboo/ and /blizzard/.
Of these coinages, perhaps those of the second class are most numerous and characteristic. In them American exhibits one of its most marked tendencies: a habit of achieving short cuts in speech by a process of agglutination. Why explain laboriously, as an Englishman might, that the notes of a new bank (in a day of innumerable new banks) are insufficiently secure? Call [Pg081] them /wild-cat/ notes and have done! Why describe a gigantic rain storm with the lame adjectives of everyday? Call it a /cloud-burst/ and immediately a vivid picture of it is conjured up. /Rough-neck/ is a capital word; it is more apposite and savory than the English /navvy/, and it is overwhelmingly more American.[18] /Square-meal/ is another. /Fire-eater/ is yet another. And the same instinct for the terse, the eloquent and the picturesque is in /boiled-shirt/, /blow-out/, /big-bug/, /claim-jumper/, /spread-eagle/, /come-down/, /back-number/, /claw-hammer/ (coat), /bottom-dollar/, /poppy-cock/, /cold-snap/, /back-talk/, /back-taxes/, /calamity-howler/, /cut-off/, /fire-bug/, /grab-bag/, /grip-sack/, /grub-stake/, /pay-dirt/, /tender-foot/, /stocking-feet/, /ticket-scalper/, /store-clothes/, /small-potatoes/, /cake-walk/, /prairie-schooner/, /round-up/, /snake-fence/, /flat-boat/, /under-the-weather/, /on-the-hoof/, and /jumping-off-place/. These compounds (there must be thousands of them) have been largely responsible for giving the language its characteristic tang and color. Such specimens as /bell-hop/, /semi-occasional/, /chair-warmer/ and /down-and-out/ are as distinctively American as baseball or the quick-lunch.
The spirit of the language appears scarcely less clearly in some of the coinages of the other classes. There are, for example, the English words that have been extended or restricted in meaning, /e. g./, /docket/ (for court calendar), /betterment/ (for improvement to property), /collateral/ (for security), /crank/ (for fanatic), /jumper/ (for tunic), /tickler/ (for memorandum or reminder),[19] /carnival/ (in such phrases as /carnival of crime/), /scrape/ (for fight or difficulty),[20] /flurry/ (of snow, or in the market), /suspenders/, /diggings/ (for habitation) and /range/. Again, there are the new assemblings of English materials, /e. g./, /doggery/, /rowdy/, /teetotaler/, /goatee/, /tony/ and /cussedness/. Yet again, there are the purely artificial words, /e. g./, /sockdolager/, /hunkydory/, /scalawag/, /guyascutis/, /spondulix/, /slumgullion/, /rambunctious/, /scrumptious/, [Pg082] /to skedaddle/, /to absquatulate/ and /to exfluncticate/.[21] In the use of the last-named coinages fashions change. In the 40's /to absquatulate/ was in good usage, but it has since disappeared. Most of the other inventions of the time, however, have to some extent survived, and it would be difficult to find an American of today who did not know the meaning of /scalawag/ and /rambunctious/ and who did not occasionally use them. A whole series of artificial American words groups itself around the prefix /ker/, for example, /ker-flop/, /ker-splash/, /ker-thump/, /ker-bang/, /ker-plunk/, /ker-slam/ and /ker-flummux/. This prefix and its onomatopoeic daughters have been borrowed by the English, but Thornton and Ware agree that it is American. Its origin has not been determined. As Sayce says, "the native instinct of language breaks out wherever it has the chance, and coins words which can be traced back to no ancestors."
In the first