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BOOKS BY H·L·MENCKEN

THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE: Supplement I

THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE: Supplement II

A NEW DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
TREATISE ON THE GODS
CHRISTMAS STORY

A MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY (with selections from the Prejudices series, A Book of Burlesques, In Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy, Making a President, A Book of Calumny, Treatise on Right and Wrong, with pieces from the American Mercury, Smart Set, and the Baltimore Evening Sun, and some previously unpublished notes)

MINORITY REPORT: H. L. MENCKEN’S NOTEBOOKS

THE BATHTUB HOAX and Other Blasts and Bravos from the Chicago Tribune

LETTERS OF H. L. MENCKEN, selected and annotated by Guy J. Forgue

H. L. MENCKEN ON MUSIC, edited by Louis Cheslock

THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE: The Fourth Edition and the Two Supplements, abridged, with annotations and new material, by Raven I. McDavid, Jr., with the assistance of David W. Maurer

H. L. MENCKEN: THE AMERICAN SCENE, A READER, selected and edited, with an introduction and commentary, by Huntington Cairns

These are BORZOI BOOKS, published by ALFRED A. KNOPF in New York

Copyright 1919, 1921, 1923, 1936 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright renewed 1947, 1949, 1950 by H. L. Mencken. Copyright renewed 1963 by August Mencken and Mercantile-Safe Deposit and Trust Company. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

PUBLISHED March, 1919

REVISED EDITION published December, 1921

THIRD EDITION again revised published February, 1923

FOURTH EDITION corrected, enlarged, and rewritten

Published April, 1936
Reprinted Twenty-six Times
Twenty-eighth Printing, May 2006

eISBN: 978-0-307-80879-0

v3.1

PREFACE
TO THE FOURTH EDITION

The first edition of this book, running to 374 pages, was published in March, 1919. It sold out very quickly, and so much new matter came in from readers that a revision was undertaken almost at once. This revision, however, collided with other enterprises, and was not finished and published until December, 1921. It ran to 492 pages. In its turn it attracted corrections and additions from many correspondents, and in February, 1923, I brought out a third edition, revised and enlarged. This third edition has been reprinted five times, and has had a large circulation, but for some years past its mounting deficiencies have been haunting me, and on my retirement from the editorship of the American Mercury at the end of 1933 I began to make plans for rewriting it. The task turned out to be so formidable as to be almost appalling. I found myself confronted by a really enormous accumulation of notes, including hundreds of letters from correspondents in all parts of the world and thousands of clippings from the periodical press of the British Empire, the United States and most of the countries of Continental Europe. Among the letters were many that reviewed my third edition page by page, and suggested multitudinous additions to the text, or changes in it. One of them was no less than 10,000 words long. The clippings embraced every discussion of the American language printed in the British Empire since the end of 1922 — at all events, every one that the singularly alert Durrant Press-Cutting Agency could discover. Furthermore, there were the growing files of American Speech, set up in October, 1925, and of Dialect Notes, and a large number of books and pamphlets, mostly in English but some also in German, French and other foreign languages, including even Japanese. It soon became plain that this immense mass of new material made a mere revision of the third edition out of the question. What was needed was a complete reworking, following to some extent the outlines of the earlier editions, but with many additions and a number of emendations and shortenings. That reworking has occupied me, with two or three intervals, since the beginning of 1934. The present book picks up bodily a few short passages from the third edition, but they are not many. In the main, it is a new work.

The reader familiar with my earlier editions will find that it not only presents a large amount of matter that was not available when they were written, but also modifies the thesis which they set forth. When I became interested in the subject and began writing about it (in the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1910), the American form of the English language was plainly departing from the parent stem, and it seemed at least likely that the differences between American and English would go on increasing. This was what I argued in my first three editions. But since 1923 the pull of American has become so powerful that it has begun to drag English with it, and in consequence some of the differences once visible have tended to disappear. The two forms of the language, of course, are still distinct in more ways than one, and when an Englishman and an American meet they continue to be conscious that each speaks a tongue that is far from identical with the tongue spoken by the other. But the Englishman, of late, has yielded so much to American example, in vocabulary, in idiom, in spelling and even in pronunciation, that what he speaks promises to become, on some not too remote tomorrow, a kind of dialect of American, just as the language spoken by the American was once a dialect of English. The English writers who note this change lay it to the influence of the American movies and talkies, but it seems to me that there is also something more, and something deeper. The American people now constitute by far the largest fraction of the English-speaking race, and since the World War they have shown an increasing inclination to throw off their old subservience to English precept and example. If only by the force of numbers, they are bound to exert a dominant influence upon the course of the common language hereafter. But all this I discuss at length, supported by the evidence now available, in the pages following.

At the risk of making my book of forbidding bulk I have sought to present a comprehensive conspectus of the whole matter, with references to all the pertinent literature. My experience with the three preceding editions convinces me that the persons who are really interested in American English are not daunted by bibliographical apparatus, but rather demand it. The letters that so many of them have been kind enough to send to me show that they delight in running down the by-ways of the subject, and I have tried to assist them by setting up as many guide-posts as possible, pointing into every alley as we pass along. Thus my references keep in step with the text, where they are most convenient and useful, and I have been able to dispense with the Bibliography which filled 32 pages of small type in my third edition. I have also omitted a few illustrative oddities appearing in that edition — for example, specimens of vulgar American by Ring W. Lardner and John V. A. Weaver, and my own translations of the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettsyburg Address. The latter two, I am sorry to say, were mistaken by a number of outraged English critics for examples of Standard American, or of what I proposed that Standard American should be. Omitting them will get rid of that misapprehension and save some space, and those who want to consult them will know where to find them in my third edition.

I can’t pretend that I have covered the whole field in the present volume, for that field has become very large in area. But I have at least tried to cover those parts of it of which I have any knowledge, and to indicate the main paths through the remainder. The Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, now under way at the University of Chicago under the able editorship of Sir William Craigie, will deal with the vocabulary of Americanisms on a scale impossible here, and the Linguistic Atlas in preparation by Dr. Hans Kurath and his associates at Brown University will similarly cover the large and vexatious subject of regional differences in usage. In the same way, I hope, the work of Dr. W. Cabell Greet and his associates at Columbia will one day give us a really comprehensive account of American pronunciation. There are other inquiries in progress by other scholars, all of them unheard of at the time my third edition was published. But there are still some regions into which scholarship has hardly penetrated — for example, that of the vulgar grammar —, and therein I have had to disport as gracefully as possible, always sharply conscious of the odium which attaches justly to those amateurs who, “because they speak, fancy they can speak about speech.” I am surely no philologian, and my inquiries and surmises will probably be of small value to the first successor who is, but until he appears I can only go on accumulating materials, and arranging them as plausibly as possible.

In the course of the chapters following I have noted my frequent debt to large numbers of volunteer aides, some of them learned in linguistic science but the majority lay brothers as I am. My contacts with them have brought me many pleasant acquaintanceships, and some friendships that I value greatly. In particular, I am indebted to Dr. Louise Pound, professor of English at the University of Nebraska and the first editor of American Speech, whose interest in this book has been lively and generous since its first appearance; to Mr. H. W. Seaman, of Norwich, England, whose herculean struggles with the chapter on “American and English Today” deserve a much greater reward than he will ever receive on this earth; to Dr. Kemp Malone, professor of English at the Johns Hopkins, who was kind enough to read the chapter on “The Common Speech”; to the late Dr. Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate of England and founder of the Society for Pure English, who was always lavish of his wise and stimulating counsel; to Professor Dr. Heinrich Spies of Berlin, who published a critical summary of my third edition in German, under the title of “Die amerikanische Sprache,” in 1927; and to the late Dr. George Philip Krapp, professor of English at Columbia, who allowed me the use of the manuscript of his excellent “History of the English Language in America” in 1922, and was very obliging in other ways down to the time of his lamented death in 1934. Above all, I am indebted to my secretary, Mrs. Rosalind C. Lohrfinck, without whose indefatigable aid the present edition would have been quite impossible. The aforesaid friends of the philological faculty are not responsible, of course, for anything that appears herein. They have saved me from a great many errors, some of them of a large and astounding character, but others, I fear, remain. I shall be grateful, as in the past, for corrections and additions sent to me at 1524 Hollins street, Baltimore.

Baltimore, 1936

H. L. M.

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Preface to the Fourth Edition

I. THE TWO STREAMS OF ENGLISH

1. The Earliest Alarms

2. The English Attack

3. American “Barbarisms”

4. The English Attitude Today

5. The Position of the Learned

6. The Views of Writing Men

7. The Political Front

8. Foreign Observers

II. THE MATERIALS OF THE INQUIRY

1. The Hallmarks of American

2. What is an Americanism?

III. THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN

1. The First Loan-Words

2. New Words of English Material

3. Changed Meanings

4. Archaic English Words

IV. THE PERIOD OF GROWTH

1. A New Nation in the Making

2. The Expanding Vocabulary

3. Loan-Words and Non-English Influences

V. THE LANGUAGE TODAY

1. After the Civil War

2. The Making of New Nouns

3. Verbs

4. Other Parts of Speech

5. Foreign Influences Today

VI. AMERICAN AND ENGLISH

1. The Infiltration of English by Americanisms

2. Surviving Differences

3. English Difficulties with American

4. Briticisms in the United States

5. Honorifics

6. Euphemisms

7. Forbidden Words

8. Expletives

VII. THE PRONUNCIATION OF AMERICAN

1. Its General Characters

2. The Vowels

3. The Consonants

4. Dialects

VIII. AMERICAN SPELLING

1. The Influence of Noah Webster

2. The Advance of American Spelling

3. The Simplified Spelling Movement

4. The Treatment of Loan-Words

5. Punctuation, Capitalization, and Abbreviation

IX. THE COMMON SPEECH

1. Outlines of its Grammar

2. The Verb

3. The Pronoun

4. The Noun

5. The Adjective

6. The Adverb

7. The Double Negative

8. Other Syntactical Peculiarities

X. PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA

1. Surnames

2. Given-Names

3. Place-Names

4. Other Proper Names

XI. AMERICAN SLANG

1. The Nature of Slang

2. Cant and Argot

XII. THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

1. The Spread of English

2. English or American?

APPENDIX. NON–ENGLISH DIALECTS IN AMERICA

1. Germanic

a. German

b. Dutch

c. Swedish

d. Dano-Norwegian

e. Icelandic

f. Yiddish

2. Latin

a. French

b. Italian

c. Spanish

d. Portuguese

e. Rumanian

3. Slavic

a. Czech

b. Slovak

c. Russian

d. Ukrainian

e. Serbo-Croat

f. Lithuanian

g. Polish

4. Finno-Ugrian

a. Finnish

b. Hungarian

5. Celtic

a. Gaelic

6. Semitic

a. Arabic

7. Greek

a. Modern Greek

8. Asiatic

a. Chinese

b. Japanese

9. Miscellaneous

a. Armenian

b. Hawaiian

c. Gipsy

About the Author

I
THE TWO STREAMS OF ENGLISH

I. THE EARLIEST ALARMS

The first American colonists had perforce to invent Americanisms, if only to describe the unfamiliar landscape and weather, flora and fauna confronting them. Half a dozen that are still in use are to be found in Captain John Smith’s “Map of Virginia,” published in 1612, and there are many more in the works of the New England annalists. As early as 1621 Alexander Gill was noting in his “Logonomia Anglica” that maize and canoe were making their way into English.¹ But it was reserved for one Francis Moore, who came out to Georgia with Oglethorpe in 1735, to raise the earliest alarm against this enrichment of English from the New World, and so set the tone that English criticism has maintained ever since. Thus he described Savannah, then a village only two years old:

It stands upon the flat of a Hill; the Bank of the River (which they in barbarous English call a bluff) is steep, and about forty-five foot perpendicular.²

John Wesley arrived in Georgia the same year, and from his diary for December 2, 1737, comes the Oxford Dictionary’s earliest example of the use of the word. But Moore was the first to notice it, and what is better to the point, the first to denounce it, and for that pioneering he must hold his honorable place in this history. In colonial times, of course, there was comparatively little incitement to hostility to Americanisms, for the stream of Englishmen coming to America to write books about their sufferings had barely begun to flow, and the number of American books reaching London was very small. But by 1754 literary London was already sufficiently conscious of the new words arriving from the New World for Richard Owen Cambridge, author of “The Scribleriad,” to be suggesting³ that a glossary of them would soon be in order, and two years later the finicky and always anti-American Samuel Johnson was saying, in a notice of Lewis Evans’s “Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical, and Mechanical Essays,”⁴ substantially what many English reviewers still say with dogged piety:

This treatise is written with such elegance as the subject admits, tho’ not without some mixture of the American dialect, a tract [i.e., trace] of corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed.

As the Revolution drew on, the English discovered varieties of offensiveness on this side of the ocean that greatly transcended the philological, and I can find no record of any denunciation of Americanisms during the heat of the struggle itself. When, on July 20, 1778, a committee appointed by the Continental Congress to arrange for the “publick reception of the sieur Gerard, minister plenipotentiary of his most christian majesty,” brought in a report recommending that “all replies or answers” to him should be “in the language of the United States,”⁵ no notice of the contumacy seems to have been taken in the Motherland. But a few months before Cornwallis was finally brought to heel at Yorktown the subject was resumed, and this time the attack came from a Briton living in America, and otherwise ardently pro-American. He was John Witherspoon (1723–94), a Scottish clergyman who had come out in 1769 to be president of Princeton in partibus infidelium.

Witherspoon took to politics when the war closed his college, and was elected a member of the New Jersey constitutional convention. In a little while he was promoted to the Continental Congress, and in it he sat for six years as its only member in holy orders. He signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, and was a member of the Board of War throughout the Revolution. But though his devotion to the American cause was thus beyond question, he was pained by the American language, and when, in 1781, he was invited to contribute a series of papers to the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser of Philadelphia, he seized the opportunity to denounce it, albeit in the politic terms proper to the time. Beginning with the disarming admission that “the vulgar in America speak much better than the vulgar in England, for a very obvious reason, viz., that being much more unsettled, and moving frequently from place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology,” he proceeded to argue that Americans of education showed a lamentable looseness in their “public and solemn discourses.”

I have heard in this country, 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.

Witherspoon’s mention of “the senate” was significant, for he must have referred to the Continental Congress, and it is fair to assume that at least some of the examples he cited to support his charge came from the sacred lips of the Fathers. He divided these “errors in grammar, improprieties and vulgarisms” into eight classes, as follows:

1. Americanisms, or ways of speaking peculiar to this country.

2. Vulgarisms in England and America.

3. Vulgarisms in America only.

4. Local phrases or terms.

5. Common blunders arising from ignorance.

6. Cant phrases.

7. Personal blunders.

8. Technical terms introduced into the language.⁶

By Americanisms, said Witherspoon,

I understand an use of phrases or terms, or a construction of sentences, even among people of rank and education, different from the use of the same terms or phrases, or the construction of similar sentences in Great Britain. It does not follow, from a man’s using these, that he is ignorant, or his discourse upon the whole inelegant; nay, it does not follow in every case that the terms or phrases used are worse in themselves, but merely that they are of American and not of English growth. The word Americanism, which I have coined for the purpose, is exactly similar in its formation and significance to the word Scotticism.

Witherspoon listed twelve examples of Americanisms falling within his definition, and despite the polite assurance I have just quoted, he managed to deplore all of them. His first was the use of either to indicate more than two, as in “The United States, or either of them.” This usage seems to have had some countenance in the England of the early Seventeenth Century, but it had gone out there by Witherspoon’s day, and it has since been outlawed by the schoolmarm in the United States. His second caveat was laid against the American use of to notify, as in “The police notified the coroner.” “In English,” he said somewhat prissily, “we do not notify the person of the thing, but notify the thing to the person.” But to notify, in the American sense, was simply an example of archaic English, preserved like so many other archaisms in America, and there was, and is, no plausible logical or grammatical objection to it.⁷ Witherspoon’s third Americanism was fellow countrymen, which he denounced as “an evident tautology,” and his fourth was the omission of to be before the second verb in such constructions as “These things were ordered delivered to the army.” His next three were similar omissions, and his remaining five were the use of or instead of nor following neither, the use of certain in “A certain Thomas Benson” (he argued that “A certain person called Thomas Benson” was correct), the use of incident in “Such bodies are incident to these evils,” and the use of clever in the sense of worthy, and of mad in the sense of angry.

It is rather surprising that Witherspoon found so few Americanisms for his list. Certainly there were many others, current in his day, that deserved a purist’s reprobation quite as much as those he singled out, and he must have been familiar with them. Among the verbs a large number of novelties had come into American usage since the middle of the century, some of them revivals of archaic English verbs and others native inventions — to belittle, to advocate, to progress, to notice, to table, to raise (for to grow), to deed, to locate, to ambition, to deputize, to compromit, to appreciate (in the sense of increase in value), to eventuate, and so on. Benjamin Franklin, on his return to the United States in 1785, after nine years in France, was impressed so unpleasantly by to advocate, to notice, to progress and to oppose that on December 26, 1789 he wrote to Noah Webster to ask for help in putting them down, but they seem to have escaped Witherspoon. He also failed to note the changes of meaning in the American use of creek, shoe, lumber, corn, barn, team, store, rock, cracker and partridge. Nor did he have anything to say about American pronunciation, which had already begun to differ materially from that of Standard English.

Witherspoon’s strictures, such as they were, fell upon deaf ears, at least in the new Republic. He was to get heavy support, in a little while, from the English reviews, which began to belabor everything American in the closing years of the century, but on this side of the ocean the tide was running the other way, and as the Revolution drew to its victorious close there was a widespread tendency to reject English precedent and authority altogether, in language no less than in government. In the case of the language, several logical considerations supported that disposition, though the chief force at the bottom of it, of course, was probably only national conceit. For one thing, it was apparent to the more astute politicians of the time that getting rid of English authority in speech, far from making for chaos, would encourage the emergence of home authority, and so help to establish national solidarity, then the great desideratum of desiderata. And for another thing, some of them were far-sighted enough to see that the United States, in the course of the years, would inevitably surpass the British Isles in population and wealth, and to realize that its cultural independence would grow at the same pace.

Something of the sort was plainly in the mind of John Adams when he wrote to the president of Congress from Amsterdam on September 5, 1780, suggesting that Congress set up an academy for “correcting, improving and ascertaining the English language.” There were such academies, he said, in France, Spain and Italy, but the English had neglected to establish one, and the way was open for the United States. He went on:

It will have a happy effect upon the union of States to have a public standard for all persons in every part of the continent to appeal to, both for the signification and pronunciation of the language.… English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age. The reason of this is obvious, because the increasing population in America, and their universal connection and correspondence with all nations will, aided by the influence of England in the world, whether great or small, force their language into general use, in spite of all the obstacles that may be thrown in their way, if any such there should be.⁸

Six years before this, in January, 1774, some anonymous writer, perhaps also Adams, had printed a similar proposal in the Royal American Magazine. That it got some attention is indicated by the fact that Sir John Wentworth, the Loyalist Governor of New Hampshire, thought it of sufficient importance to enclose a reprint of it in a dispatch to the Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies, dated April 24. I quote from it briefly:

The English language has been greatly improved in Britain within a century, but its highest perfection, with every other branch of human knowledge, is perhaps reserved for this land of light and freedom. As the people through this extensive country will speak English, their advantages for polishing their language will be great, and vastly superior to what the people of England ever enjoyed. I beg leave to propose a plan for perfecting the English language in America, thro’ every future period of its existence; viz: That a society for this purpose should be formed, consisting of members in each university and seminary, who shall be stiled Fellows of the American Society of Language; That the society … annually publish some observations upon the language, and from year to year correct, enrich and refine it, until perfection stops their progress and ends their labor.⁹

Whether this article was Adams’s or not, he kept on returning to the charge, and in a second letter to the president of Congress, dated September 30, 1780, he expressed the hope that, after an American Academy had been set up, England would follow suit.

This I should admire. England will never more have any honor, excepting now and then that of imitating the Americans. I assure you, Sir, I am not altogether in jest. I see a general inclination after English in France, Spain and Holland, and it may extend throughout Europe. The population and commerce of America will force their language into general use.¹⁰

In his first letter to the president of Congress Adams deplored the fact that “it is only very lately that a tolerable dictionary [of English] has been published, even by a private person,¹¹ and there is not yet a passable grammar enterprised by any individual.” He did not know it, but at that very moment a young schoolmaster in the backwoods of New York was preparing to meet both lacks. He was Noah Webster. Three years later he returned to Hartford, his birthplace, and brought out his “Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” and soon afterward he began the labors which finally bore fruit in his “American Dictionary of the English Language” in 1828.¹² Webster was a pedantic and rather choleric fellow — someone once called him “the critic and cockcomb-general of the United States” —, and his later years were filled with ill-natured debates over his proposals for reforming English spelling, and over the more fanciful etymologies in his dictionary. But though, in this enlightened age, he would scarcely pass as a philologian, he was extremely well read for his time, and if he fell into the blunder of deriving all languages from the Hebrew of the Ark, he was at least shrewd enough to notice the relationship between Greek, Latin and the Teutonic languages before it was generally recognized. He was always at great pains to ascertain actual usages, and in the course of his journeys from State to State to perfect his copyright on his first spelling-book¹³ he accumulated a large amount of interesting and valuable material, especially in the field of pronunciation. Much of it he utilized in his “Dissertations on the English Language,” published at Boston in 1789.

In the opening essay of this work he put himself squarely behind Adams. He foresaw that the new Republic would quickly outstrip England in population, and that virtually all its people would speak English. He proposed therefore that an American standard be set up, independent of the English standard, and that it be inculcated in the schools throughout the country. He argued that it should be determined, not by “the practise of any particular class of people,” but by “the general practise of the nation,” with due regard, in cases where there was no general practise, to “the principle of analogy.” He went on:

As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted,¹⁴ and her language on the decline. But if it were not so, she is at too great a distance to be our model, and to instruct us in the principles of our own tongue.… Several circumstances render a future separation of the American tongue from the English necessary and unavoidable.… Numerous local causes, 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 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: like remote branches of a tree springing from the same stock, or rays of light shot from the same center, and diverging from each other in proportion to their distance from the point of separation.… We have therefore the fairest opportunity of establishing a national language and of giving it uniformity and perspicuity, in North America, that ever presented itself to mankind. Now is the time to begin the plan.¹⁵

What Witherspoon thought of all this is not recorded. Maybe he never saw Webster’s book, for he was going blind in 1789, and lived only five years longer. Webster seems to have got little support for what he called his Federal English from the recognized illuminati of the time;¹⁶ indeed, his proposals for a reform of American spelling, set forth in an appendix to his “Dissertations,” were denounced roundly by some of them, and the rest were only lukewarm. He dedicated the “Dissertations” to Franklin, but Franklin delayed acknowledging the dedication until the last days of 1789, and then ventured upon no approbation of Webster’s linguistic Declaration of Independence. On the contrary, he urged him to make war upon various Americanisms of recent growth, and perhaps with deliberate irony applauded his “zeal for preserving the purity of our language.” A year before the “Dissertations” appeared, Dr. Benjamin Rush anticipated at least some of Webster’s ideas in “A Plan of a Federal University,”¹⁷ and they seem to have made some impression on Thomas Jefferson, who was to ratify them formally in 1813;¹⁸ but the rest of the contemporaneous sages held aloof, and in July, 1800, the Monthly Magazine and American Review of New York printed an anonymous denunciation, headed “On the Scheme of an American Language,” of the notion that “grammars and dictionaries should be compiled by natives of the country, not of the British or English, but of the American tongue.” The author of this tirade, who signed himself C, displayed a violent Anglomania. “The most suitable name for our country,” he said, “would be that which is now appropriated only to a part of it: I mean New England.” While admitting that a few Americanisms were logical and necessary — for example, Congress, president and capitol —, he dismissed all the rest as “manifest corruptions.” A year later, a savant using the nom de plume of Aristarcus delivered a similar attack on Webster in a series of articles contributed to the New England Palladium and reprinted in the Port Folio of Philadelphia, the latter “a notoriously Federalistic and pro-British organ.” “If the Connecticut lexicographer,” he said, “considers the retaining of the English language as a badge of slavery, let him not give us a Babylonish dialect in its stead, but adopt, at once, the language of the aborigines.”¹⁹

But if the illuminati were thus chilly, the plain people supported Webster’s scheme for the emancipation of American English heartily enough, though very few of them could have heard of it. The period from the gathering of the Revolution to the turn of the century was one of immense activity in the concoction and launching of new Americanisms, and more of them came into the language than at any time between the earliest colonial days and the rush to the West. Webster himself lists some of these novelties in his “Dissertations,” and a great many more are to be found in Richard H. Thornton’s “American Glossary”²⁰ — for example, black-eye (in the sense of defeat), block (of houses), bobolink, bookstore, bootee (now obsolete), breadstuffs, buckeye, buckwheat-cake, bull-snake, bundling and buttonnjoood, to go no further than the b’s. It was during this period, too, that the American meanings of such words as shoe, corn, bug, bureau, mad, sick, creek, barn and lumber were finally differentiated from the English meanings, and that American peculiarities in pronunciation began to make themselves felt. Despite the economic difficulties which followed the Revolution, the general feeling was that the new Republic was a success, and that it was destined to rise in the world as England declined. There was a widespread contempt for everything English, and that contempt extended to the canons of the mother-tongue.

2. THE ENGLISH ATTACK

But the Jay Treaty of 1794 gave notice that there was still some life left in the British lion, and during the following years the troubles of the Americans, both at home and abroad, mounted at so appalling a rate that their confidence and elation gradually oozed out of them. Simultaneously, their pretensions began to be attacked with pious vigor by patriotic Britishers, and in no field was the fervor of these brethren more marked than in those of literature and language. To be sure, there were Englishmen, then as now, who had a friendly and understanding interest in all things American, including even American books, and some of them took the trouble to show it, but they were not many. The general tone of English criticism, from the end of the Eighteenth Century to the present day, has been one of suspicion, and not infrequently it has been extremely hostile. The periods of remission, as often as not, have been no more than evidences of adroit politicking, as when Oxford, in 1907, helped along the graceful liquidation of the Venezuelan unpleasantness of 1895 by giving Mark Twain an honorary D.C.L. In England all branches of human endeavor are alike bent to the service of the state, and there is an alliance between society and politics, science and literature, that is unmatched anywhere else on earth. But though this alliance, on occasion, may find it profitable to be polite to the Yankee, and even to conciliate him, there remains an active aversion under the surface, born of the incurable rivalry between the two countries, and accentuated perhaps by their common tradition and their similar speech. Americanisms are forcing their way into English all the time, and of late they have been entering at a truly dizzy pace, but they seldom get anything properly describable as a welcome, save from small sects of iconoclasts, and every now and then the general protest against them rises to a roar. As for American literature, it is still regarded in England as somewhat barbaric and below the salt, and the famous sneer of Sydney Smith, though time has made it absurd in all other respects, is yet echoed complacently in many an English review of American books.²¹

There is an amusing compilation of some of the earlier diatribes in William B. Cairns’s “British Criticisms of American Writings, 1783–1815.”²² Cairns is not so much concerned with linguistic matters as with literary criticism, but he reprints a number of extracts from the pioneer denunciations of Americanisms, and they surely show a sufficient indignation. The attack began in 1787, when the European Magazine and London Review fell upon the English of Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia,” and especially upon his use of to belittle, which, according to Thornton, was his own coinage. “Belittle!” it roared. “What an expression! It may be an elegant one in Virginia, and even perfectly intelligible; but for our part, all we can do is to guess at its meaning. For shame, Mr. Jefferson! Why, after trampling upon the honour of our country, and representing it as little better than a land of barbarism — why, we say, perpetually trample also upon the very grammar of our language, and make that appear as Gothic as, from your description, our manners are rude? — Freely, good sir, will we forgive all your attacks, impotent as they are illiberal, upon our national character; but for the future spare — O spare, we beseech you, our mother-tongue!” The Gentleman’s Magazine joined the charge in May, 1798, with sneers for the “uncouth … localities” [sic] in the “Yankey dialect” of Noah Webster’s “Sentimental and Humorous Essays,” and the Edinburgh followed in October, 1804, with a patronizing article upon John Quincy Adams’s “Letters on Silesia.” “The style of Mr. Adams,” it said, “is in general very tolerable English; which, for an American composition, is no moderate praise.” The usual American book of the time, it went on, was full of “affectations and corruptions of phrase,” and they were even to be found in “the enlightened state papers of the two great Presidents.” The Edinburgh predicted that a “spurious dialect” would prevail, “even at the Court and in the Senate of the United States,” and that the Americans would thus “lose the only badge that is still worn of our consanguinity.” The appearance of the five volumes of Chief Justice Marshall’s “Life of George Washington,” from 1804 to 1807, brought forth corrective articles from the British Critic, the Critical Review, the Annual, the Monthly, and the Eclectic. The Edinburgh, in 1808, declared that the Americans made “it a point of conscience to have no aristocratical distinctions — even in their vocabulary.” They thought, it went on, “one word as good as another, provided its meaning be as clear.” The Monthly Mirror, in March of the same year, denounced “the corruptions and barbarities which are hourly obtaining in the speech of our transatlantic colonies [sic],” and reprinted with approbation a parody by some anonymous Englishman of the American style of the day. Here is an extract from it, with the words that the author regarded as Americanisms in italics:

In America authors are to be found who make use of new or obsolete words which no good writer in this country would employ; and were it not for my destitution of leisure, which obliges me to hasten the occlusion of these pages, as I progress I should bottom my assertation on instances from authors of the first grade; but were I to render my sketch lengthy I should illy answer the purpose which I have in view.

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 anathema upon “that torrent of barbarous phraseology” which was pouring across the Atlantic, and which threatened “to destroy the purity of the English language.” In Bancroft’s “Life of George Washington” (1808), according to the British Critic, there were “new words, or old words in a new sense,” all of them inordinately offensive to Englishmen, “at almost every page,” and in Joel Barlow’s “The Columbiad” (1807; reprinted in England in 1809) the Edinburgh found “a great multitude of words which are radically and entirely new, and as utterly foreign as if they had been adopted from the Hebrew or Chinese,” and “the perversion of a still greater number of English words from their proper use or signification, by employing nouns substantive for verbs, adjectives for substantives, &c.” The Edinburgh continued:

We have often heard it reported that our transatlantic brethren were beginning to take it amiss that their language should still be called English; and truly we must say that Mr. Barlow has gone far to take away that ground of reproach. The groundwork of his speech, perhaps may be English, as that of the Italian is Latin; but the variations amount already to more than a change of dialect; and really make a glossary necessary for most untravelled readers.

Some of Barlow’s novelties, it must be granted, were fantastic enough — for example, to vagrate and to ameed among the verbs, imkeeled and homicidious among the adjectives, and coloniarch among the nouns. But many of the rest were either obsolete words whose use was perfectly proper in heroic poetry, or nonce-words of obvious meaning and utility. Some of the terms complained of by the Edinburgh are in good usage at this moment — for example, to utilize, to hill, to breeze, to spade (the soil), millenial, crass, and scow.²³ But to the English reviewers of the time words so unfamiliar were not only deplorable on their own account; they were also proofs that the Americans were a sordid and ignoble people with no capacity for prose, or for any of the other elegances of life.²⁴ “When the vulgar and illiterate lose the force of their animal spirits,” observed the Quarterly in 1814, reviewing J. K. Paulding’s “Lay of the Scottish Fiddle” (1813), “they become mere clods.… The founders of American society brought to the composition of their nation few seeds of good taste, and no rudiments of liberal science.” To which may be added Southey’s judgment in a letter to Landor in 1812: “See what it is to have a nation to take its place among civilized states before it has either gentlemen or scholars! They have in the course of twenty years acquired a distinct national character for low and lying knavery; and so well do they deserve it that no man ever had any dealings with them without having proofs of its truth.” Landor, it should be said, entered a protest against this, and on a somewhat surprising ground, considering the general view. “Americans,” he said, “speak our language; they read ‘Paradise Lost.’ ” But he hastened to add, “I detest the American character as much as you do.”

The War of 1812 naturally exacerbated this animosity, though when the works of Irving and Cooper began to be known in England some of the English reviewers moderated their tone. Irving’s “Knickerbocker” was not much read there until 1815, and not much talked about until “The Sketch-Book” followed it in 1819, but Scott had received a copy of it from Henry Brevoort in 1813, and liked it and said so. Byron mentioned it in a letter to his publisher, Murray, on August 7, 1821. We are told by Thomas Love Peacock that Shelley was “especially fond of the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the American,” but Cairns says there is no mention of the fact, if it be a fact, in any of Shelley’s own writings, or in those of his other friends. “Knickerbocker” was published in 1809, the North American Review began in May, 1815, Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” was printed in its pages in 1817, and Paulding’s “The Backwoodsman,” with an American theme and an American title, came out a year later, but Cooper’s “Precaution” was still two years ahead, and American letters were yet in a somewhat feeble state. John Pickering, so late as 1816, said that “in this country we can hardly be said to have any authors by profession,” and Justice Story, three years later, repeated the saying and sought to account for the fact. “So great,” said Story, “is the call for talents of all sorts in the active use of professional and other business in America that few of our ablest men have leisure to devote exclusively to literature or the fine arts.… This obvious reason will explain why we have so few professional authors, and those not among our ablest men.” In 1813 Jefferson, anticipating both Pickering and Story, had written to John Waldo:

We have no distinct class of literati in our country. Every man is engaged in some industrious pursuit, and science is but a secondary occupation, always subordinate to the main business of life. Few, therefore, of those who are qualified have leisure to write.

Difficulties of communication hampered the circulation of such native books as were written. “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 apparently beyond the possibilities of the time. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the Americans eschewed reading altogether; on the contrary, there is some evidence that they read many English books. In 1802 the Scot’s Magazine reported that at a book-fair held shortly before in New York the sales ran to 520,000 volumes, and that a similar fair was projected for Philadelphia. Six years before this the London bookseller, Henry Lemoine, made a survey of the American book trade for the Gentleman’s Magazine.²⁵ He found that very few books were being printed in the country, and ascribed the fact to the high cost of labor, but he encountered well-stocked bookstores in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, and plenty of customers for their importations. He went on:

Their sales are very great, for it is scarcely possible to conceive the number of readers with which every little town abounds. The common people are on a footing, in point of literature, with the middle ranks in Europe; they all read and write, and understand arithmetic. Almost every little town now furnishes a small circulating-library.… Whatever is useful sells, but publications on subjects merely speculative, and rather curious than important, controversial divinity, and voluminous polemical pieces, as well as heavy works on the arts and sciences, lie upon the importer’s hands. They have no ready money to spare for anything but what they find useful.

But other visitors were much less impressed by the literary gusto of the young Republic. Henry Wansey, who came out in 1794, reported in his “Excursion to the United States of North America”²⁶ that the American libraries were “scanty,” that their collections were “almost entirely of modern books,” and that they were deficient in “the means of tracing the history of questions,… a want which literary people felt very much, and which it will take some years to remedy.” And Captain Thomas Hamilton, in his “Men and Manners in America,”²⁷ said flatly that “there is … nothing in the United States worthy of the name of library. Not only is there an entire absence of learning, in the higher sense of the term, but an absolute want of the material from which alone learning can be extracted. At present an American might study every book within the limits of the Union, and still be regarded in many parts of Europe — especially in Germany — as a man comparatively ignorant. Why does a great nation thus voluntarily continue in a state of intellectual destitution so anomalous and humiliating?” According to Hamilton, all the books imported from Europe for public institutions during the fiscal year 1829–30 reached a value of but $10,829.

But whatever the fact here, there can be no doubt that the Americans were quickly aware of every British aspersion upon their culture, whether it appeared in a book or in one of the reviews. If nothing else was read, such things were certainly read, and they came with sufficient frequency, and were couched in terms of sufficient offensiveness, to keep the country in a state of indignation for years. The flood of books by English visitors began before the end of the Eighteenth Century, and though many of them were intended to be friendly, there was in even the friendliest of them enough of what Cairns calls “the British knack for saying gracious things in an ungracious way” to keep the pot of fury boiling. At the other extreme the thing went to fantastic lengths. The Quarterly Review, summing up in 1814, accused the Americans of a multitude of strange and hair-raising offenses — for example, employing naked colored women to wait upon them at table, kidnapping Scotsmen, Welshmen and Hollanders and selling them into slavery, and fighting one another incessantly under rules which made it “allowable to peel the skull, tear out the eyes, and smooth away the nose.” In this holy war upon the primeval damyankee William Gifford, editor of the Anti-Jacobin in 1797–98, and after 1809 the first editor of the Quarterly, played an extravagant part,²⁸ but he was diligently seconded by Sydney Smith, Southey, Thomas Moore and many lesser lights. “If the [English] reviewers get hold of an American publication,” said J. K. Paulding in “Letters From the South” in 1817, “it is made use of merely as a pretext to calumniate us in some way or other.” There is an instructive account of the whole uproar in the fifth volume of John Bach McMaster’s “History of the People of the United States From the Revolution to the Civil War.” McMaster says that it was generally believed that the worst calumniators of the United States were subsidized by the British government, apparently in an effort to discourage emigration. He goes on:

The petty annoyances, the little inconveniences and unpleasant incidents met with in all journeys, were grossly exaggerated and cited as characteristic of daily life in the States. Men and women met with at the inns and taverns, in the stage-coaches and far-away country towns, were described not as so many types, but as the typical Americans. The abuse heaped on public men by partisan newspapers, the charges of corruption made by one faction against the other, the scandals of the day, were all cited as solemn truth.

Even the relatively mild and friendly Captain Hamilton condescended to such tactics. This is what he had to say of Thomas Jefferson:

The moral character of Jefferson was repulsive. Continually puling about liberty, equality, and the degrading curse of slavery, he brought his own children to the hammer, and made money of his debaucheries.²⁹

Such violent assaults, in the long run, were bound to breed defiance, but while they were at their worst they produced a contrary effect. “The nervous interest of Americans in the impressions formed of them by visiting Europeans,” says Allan Nevins,³⁰ “and their sensitiveness to British criticism in especial, were long regarded as constituting a salient national trait.” The native authors became extremely self-conscious and diffident, and the educated classes, in general, were daunted by the torrent of abuse: they could not help finding in it an occasional reasonableness, an accidental true hit. The result was uncertainty and skepticism in native criticism. “The first step of an American entering upon a literary career,” said Henry Cabot Lodge, writing of the first quarter of the century,³¹ “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,” (1820) chose an English scene, imitated English models, and obviously hoped to placate the English critics thereby. Irving, too, in his earliest work, showed a considerable discretion, and his “Knickerbocker” was first published anonymously. But this puerile spirit did not last long. The English libels 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” (1821), 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, and was followed by a long line of thoroughly American novels. In 1828 Cooper undertook a detailed reply to the more common English charges in “Notions of the Americans,” but he was still too cautious to sign his name to it: it appeared as “by a Travelling Bachelor.” By 1834, however, he was ready to apologize formally to his countrymen for his early truancy in “Precaution.” Irving, who was even more politic, and suffered moreover from Anglomania in a severe form, nevertheless edged himself gradually into the patriot band, and by 1828 he was brave enough to refuse the Quarterly’s offer of a hundred guineas for an article on the ground that it was “so persistently hostile to our country” that he could not “draw a pen in its service.”

The real counter-attack was carried on by lesser men — the elder Timothy Dwight, John Neal, Edward Everett, Charles Jared Ingersoll, J. K. Paulding, and Robert Walsh, Jr., among them. Neal went to England, became secretary to Jeremy Bentham, forced his way into the reviews, and so fought the English on their own ground. Walsh set up the American Review of History and Politics, the first American critical quarterly, in 1811, and eight years later published “An Appeal From the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America.” Everett performed chiefly in the North American Review (founded in 1815), to which he contributed many articles and of which he was editor from 1820 to 1824. Wirt published his “Letters of a British Spy” in 1803, and Ingersoll followed with “Inchiquin the Jesuit’s Letters on American Literature and Politics” in 1811. In January, 1814 the Quarterly reviewed “Inchiquin” in a particularly violent manner, and a year later Dwight replied to the onslaught in “Remarks on the Review of Inchiquin’s Letters Published in the Quarterly Review, Addressed to the Right Honorable George Canning, Esq.” Dwight ascribed the Quarterly diatribe to Southey. He went on:

Both the travelers and the literary journalists of [England] have, for reasons which it would be idle to inquire after and useless to allege, thought it proper to caricature the Americans. Their pens have been dipped in gall; and their representations have been, almost merely, a mixture of malevolence and falsehood.

Dwight rehearsed some of the counts in the Quarterly’s indictment — that “the president of Yale College tells of a conflagrative brand,” that Jefferson used to belittle, that to guess was on the tongues of all Americans, and so on. “You charge us,” he said, “with making some words, and using others in a peculiar sense.… You accuse us of forming projects to get rid of the English language; ‘not,’ you say, ‘merely by barbarizing it, but by abolishing it altogether, and substituting a new language of our own.’ ” His reply was to list, on the authority of Pegge’s “Anecdotes of the English Language,” 105 vulgarisms common in London — for example, potecary for apothecary, chimly for chimney, saace for sauce, kiver for cover, nowheres for nowhere, scholard for scholar, and hisn for his — to accuse “members of Parliament” of using diddled and gullibility³² and to deride the English provincial dialects as “unintelligible gabble.”

But in this battle across the ocean it was Paulding who got in the most licks, and the heaviest ones. In all he wrote five books dealing with the subject. The first, “The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan” (1812) was satirical in tone, and made a considerable popular success. Three years later he followed it with a more serious work, “The United States and England,” another reply to the Quarterly review of “Inchiquin.” The before-mentioned “Letters From the South” came out in 1817, and in 1822 Paulding resumed the attack with “A Sketch of Old England,” a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the current English books of American travels. He had never been to England, and the inference was that many of the English travelers had never been to America. Finally, in 1825, he resorted to broad burlesque in “John Bull in America, or The New Munchausen.”³³ Now and then some friendly aid came from the camp of the enemy. Cairns shows that, while the Quarterly, the European Magazine and the Anti-Jacobin were “strongly anti-American” and “deliberately and dirtily bitter,” three or four of the lesser reviews displayed a fairer spirit, and even more or less American bias. After 1824, when the North American Review gave warning that if the campaign of abuse went on it would “turn into bitterness the last drops of good-will toward England that exist in the United States,” even Blackwood’s became somewhat conciliatory.

3. AMERICAN “BARBARISMS”

But this occasional tolerance for things American was never extended to the American language. Most of the English books of travel mentioned Americanisms only to revile them, and even when they were not reviled they were certainly not welcomed. The typical attitude was well set forth by Captain Hamilton in “Men and Manners in America,” already referred to as denying that the United States of 1833 had any libraries. “The amount of bad grammar in circulation,” he said, “is very great; that of barbarisms [i.e., Americanisms] enormous.” Worse, these “barbarisms” were not confined to the ignorant, but came almost as copiously from the lips of the learned.

I do not now speak of the operative class, whose massacre of their mother-tongue, however inhuman, could excite no astonishment; but I allude to the great body of lawyers and traders; the men who crowd the exchange and the hotels; who are to be heard speaking in the courts, and are selected by their fellow-citizens to fill high and responsible offices. Even by this educated and respectable class, the commonest words are often so transmogrified as to be placed beyond recognition of an Englishman.

Hamilton then went on to describe some of the prevalent “barbarisms”:

The word does is split into two syllables, and pronounced do-es. Where, for some incomprehensible reason, is converted into whare, there into thare; and I remember, on mentioning to an acquaintance that I had called on a gentleman of taste in the arts, he asked “whether he sheiv (showed) me his pictures.” Such words as oratory and dilatory are pronounced with the penult syllable long and accented: missionary becomes missionary, angel, ângel, dânger, danger, etc.

But this is not all. The Americans have chosen arbitrarily to change the meaning of certain old and established English words, for reasons they cannot explain, and which I doubt much whether any European philologist could understand. The word clever affords a case in point. It has here no connexion with talent, and simply means pleasant or amiable. Thus a good-natured blockhead in the American vernacular is a clever man, and having had this drilled into me, I foolishly imagined that all trouble with regard to this word, at least, was at an end. It was not long, however, before I heard of a gentleman having moved into a clever house, of another succeeding to a clever sum of money, of a third embarking in a clever ship, and making a clever voyage, with a clever cargo; and of the sense attached to the word in these various combinations, I could gain nothing like a satisfactory explanation.…

The privilege of barbarizing the King’s English is assumed by all ranks and conditions of men. Such words as slick, kedge and boss, it is true, are rarely used by the better orders; but they assume unlimited liberty in the use of expect, reckon, guess and calculate, and perpetrate other conversational anomalies with remorseless impunity.

This Briton, as usual, was as full of moral horror as of grammatical disgust, and put his denunciation upon the loftiest of grounds. He concluded:

I will not go on with this unpleasant subject, nor should I have alluded to it, but I feel it something of a duty to express the natural feeling of an Englishman at finding the language of Shakespeare and Milton thus gratuitously degraded. Unless the present progress of change be arrested by an increase of taste and judgment in the more educated classes, there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman, and that the nation will be cut off from the advantages arising from their participation in British literature. If they contemplate such an event with complacency, let them go on and prosper; they have only to progress in their present course, and their grandchildren bid fair to speak a jargon as novel and peculiar as the most patriotic American linguist can desire.³⁴

All the other English writers of travel books took the same line, and so did the stay-at-homes who hunted and abhorred Americanisms from afar. Mrs. Frances Trollope reported in her “Domestic Manners of the Americans” (1832) that during her whole stay in the Republic she had seldom “heard a sentence elegantly turned and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American”: there was “always something either in the expression or the accent” that jarred her feelings and shocked her taste. She concluded that “the want of refinement” was the great American curse. Captain Frederick Marry at, in “A Diary in America” (1839) observed that “it is remarkable how very debased the language has become in a short period in America,” and then proceeded to specifications — for example, the use of right away for immediately, of mean for ashamed, of clever in the senses which stumped Captain Hamilton, of bad as a deprecant of general utility, of admire for like, of how? instead of what? as an interrogative, of considerable as an adverb, and of such immoral verbs as to suspicion and to opinion. Marryat was here during Van Buren’s administration, when the riot of Americanisms was at its wildest, and he reported some really fantastic specimens. Once, he said, he heard “one of the first men in America” say, “Sir, if I had done so, I should not only have doubled and trebled, but I should have fourbled and fivebled my money.” Unfortunately, it is hard to believe that an American who was so plainly alive to the difference between shall and will, should and would, would have been unaware of quadrupled and quintupled. No doubt there was humor in the country, then as now, and visiting Englishmen were sometimes taken for rides.

Captain Basil Hall, who was here in 1827 and 1828, and published his “Travels in North America” in 1829, was so upset by some of the novelties he encountered that he went to see Noah Webster, then seventy years old, to remonstrate. Webster upset him still further by arguing stoutly that “his countrymen had not only a right to adopt new words, but were obliged to modify the language to suit the novelty of the circumstances, geographical and political, in which they were placed.” The lexicographer went on to observe judicially that “it is quite impossible to stop the progress of language — it is like the course of the Mississippi, the motion of which, at times, is scarcely perceptible; yet even then it possesses a momentum quite irresistible. Words and expressions will be forced into use, in spite of all the exertions of all the writers in the world.”

“But surely,” persisted Hall, “such innovations are to be deprecated?”

“I don’t know that,” replied Webster. “If a word becomes universally current in America, where English is spoken, why should it not take its station in the language?”

To this Hall made an honest British reply. “Because,” he said, “there are words enough already.”

Webster tried to mollify him by saying that “there were not fifty words in all which were used in America and not in England” — an underestimate of large proportions —, but Hall went away muttering.

Marryat, who toured the United States ten years after Hall, was chiefly impressed by the American verb to fix, which he described as “universal” and as meaning “to do anything.” It also got attention from other English travelers, including Godfrey Thomas Vigne, whose “Six Months in America” was printed in 1832, and Charles Dickens, who came in 1842. Vigne said that it had “perhaps as many significations as any word in the Chinese language,” and proceeded to list some of them — “to be done, made, mixed, mended, bespoken, hired, ordered, arranged, procured, finished, lent or given.” Dickens thus dealt with it in one of his letters home to his family:

I asked Mr. Q. on board a steamboat if breakfast be nearly ready, and he tells me yes, he should think so, for when he was last below the steward was fixing the tables — in other words, laying the cloth. When we have been writing and I beg him … to collect our papers, he answers that he’ll fix ’em presently. So when a man’s dressing he’s fixing himself, and when you put yourself under a doctor he fixes you in no time. T’other night, before we came on board here, when I had ordered a bottle of mulled claret, and waited some time for it, it was put on the table with an apology from the landlord (a lieutenant-colonel) that he fear’d it wasn’t properly fixed. And here, on Saturday morning, a Western man, handing his potatoes to Mr. Q. at breakfast, inquired if he wouldn’t take some of “these fixings” with his meat.³⁵

In another letter, written on an Ohio river steamboat on April 15, 1842, Dickens reported that “out of Boston and New York” a nasal drawl was universal, that the prevailing grammar was “more than doubtful,” that the “oddest vulgarisms” were “received idioms,” and that “all the women who have been bred in slave States speak more or less like Negroes.” His observations on American speech habits in his “American Notes” (1842) were so derisory that they drew the following from Emerson:

No such conversations ever occur in this country in real life, as he relates. He has picked up and noted with eagerness each odd local phrase that he met with, and when he had a story to relate, has joined them together, so that the result is the broadest caricature.³⁶

Almost every English traveler of the years between the War of 1812 and the Civil War was puzzled by the strange signs on American shops. Hall couldn’t make out the meaning of Leather and Finding Store, though he found Flour and Feed Store and Clothing Store self-explanatory, albeit unfamiliar. Hamilton, who followed in 1833, failed to gather “the precise import” of Dry-Goods Store, and was baffled and somewhat shocked by Coffin Warehouse (it would now be Casketeria!) and Hollow Ware, Spiders, and Fire-Dogs. But all this was relatively mild stuff, and after 1850 the chief licks at the American dialect were delivered, not by English travelers, most of whom had begun by then to find it more amusing than indecent, but by English pedants who did not stir from their cloisters. The climax came in 1863, when the Very Rev. Henry Alford, D.D. dean of Canterbury, printed his “Plea for the Queen’s English.”³⁷ He said:

Look at the process of deterioration which our Queen’s English has undergone at the hands of the Americans. Look at those phrases 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 when aggrandisement 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.

It will be noted that Alford here abandoned one of the chief counts in Sydney Smith’s famous indictment, and substituted its exact opposite. Smith had denounced slavery, whereas Alford, by a tremendous feat of moral virtuosity, was now denouncing the war to put it down! But Samuel Taylor Coleridge had done almost as well in 1822. The usual English accusation at that time, as we have seen, was that the Americans had abandoned English altogether and set up a barbarous jargon in its place. Coleridge, speaking to his friend Thomas Allsop, took the directly contrary tack. “An American,” he said, “by his boasting of the superiority of the Americans generally, but especially in their language, once provoked me to tell him that ‘on that head the least said the better, as the Americans presented the extraordinary anomaly of a people without a language. [Allsop’s italics] That they had mistaken the English language for baggage (which is called plunder in America), and had stolen it.’ ” And then the inevitable moral reflection: “Speaking of America, it is believed a fact verified beyond doubt that some years ago it was impossible to obtain a copy of the Newgate Calendar, as they had all been bought up by the Americans, whether to suppress the blazon of their forefathers, or to assist in their genealogical researches, I could never learn satisfactorily.”³⁸

4: THE ENGLISH ATTITUDE TODAY

Smith, Alford and Coleridge have plenty of heirs and assigns in the England of today. There is in the United States, as everyone knows, a formidable sect of Anglomaniacs, and its influence is often felt, not only in what passes here for society, but also in the domains of politics, finance, pedagogy and journalism, but the corresponding sect of British Americophils is small and feeble, though it shows a few respectable names. It is seldom that anything specifically American is praised in the English press, save, of course, some new manifestation of American Anglomania. The realm of Uncle Shylock remains, at bottom, the “brigand confederation” of the Foreign Quarterly, and on occasion it becomes again the “loathsome creature,… maimed and lame, full of sores and ulcers,” of Dickens. In the field of language an Americanism is generally regarded as obnoxious ipso facto, and when a new one of any pungency begins to force its way into English usage the guardians of the national linguistic chastity belabor it with great vehemence, and predict calamitous consequences if it is not put down. If, despite these alarms, it makes progress, they often switch to the doctrine that it is really old English, and search the Oxford Dictionary for examples of its use in Chaucer’s time, or even in the Venerable Bede’s;³⁹ but while it is coming in they give it no quarter. Here the unparalleled English talent for discovering moral obliquity comes into play, and what begins as an uproar over a word sometimes ends as a holy war to keep the knavish Yankee from undermining and ruining the English Kultur and overthrowing the British Empire. The crusade has abundant humors. Not infrequently a phrase denounced as an abominable Americanism really originated in the London music-halls, and is unknown in the United States. And almost as often the denunciation of it is sprinkled with genuine Americanisms, unconsciously picked up.

The English seldom differentiate between American slang and Americanisms of legitimate origin and in respectable use: both belong to what they often call the American slanguage.⁴⁰ It is most unusual for an American book to be reviewed in England without some reference to its strange and (so one gathers) generally unpleasant diction. The Literary Supplement of the London Times is especially alert in this matter. It discovers Americanisms in the writings of even the most decorous American authors, and when none can be found it notes the fact, half in patronizing approbation and half in incredulous surprise. Of the 240 lines it gave to the first two volumes of the Dictionary of American Biography, 31 were devoted to animadversions upon the language of the learned authors.⁴¹ The Manchester Guardian and the weeklies of opinion follow dutifully. The Guardian, in a review of Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s “As I See Religion,” began by praising his “telling speech,” but ended by deploring sadly his use of the “full-blooded Americanisms which sometimes make even those who do not for a moment question America’s right and power to contribute to the speech which we use in common wince as they read.”⁴² One learns from J. L. Hammond that the late C. P. Scott, for long the editor of the Guardian, had a keen nose for Americanisms, and was very alert to keep them out of his paper. Says Hammond:

He would go bustling into a room, waving a cutting or a proof, in which was an obscure phrase, a preciosity, or an Americanism. “What does he mean by this? He talks about a final showdown? An Americanism, I suppose. What does it mean? Generally known? I don’t know it. Taken from cards? I never heard of it.”⁴³

This war upon Americanisms is in progress all the time, but it naturally has its pitched battles and its rest-periods between. For months there may be relative quiet on the linguistic Western front, and then some alarmed picket fires a gun and there is what the German war communiqués used to call a sharpening of activity. As a general thing the English content themselves with artillery practise from their own lines, but now and then one of them boldly invades the enemy’s country. This happened, for example, in 1908, when Charles Whibley contributed an extremely acidulous article on “The American Language” to the Bookman (New York) for January. “To the English traveler in America,” he said, “the language which he hears spoken about him is at once a puzzle and a surprise. It is his own, yet not his own. It seems to him a caricature of English, a phantom speech, ghostly yet familiar, such as he might hear in a land of dreams.” Mr. Whibley objected violently to many characteristic American terms, among them, to locate, to operate, to antagonize, transportation, commutation and proposition. “These words,” he said, “if words they may be called, are hideous to the eye, offensive to the ear, meaningless to the brain.” The onslaught provoked even so mild a man as Dr. Henry W. Boynton to action, and in the Bookman for March of the same year he published a spirited rejoinder. “It offends them [the English],” he said, “that we are not thoroughly ashamed of ourselves for not being like them.” Mr. Whibley’s article was reprinted with this counterblast, so that readers of the magazine might judge the issues fairly. The controversy quickly got into the newspapers, and was carried on for months, with American patriots on one side and Englishmen and Anglomaniacs on the other.

I myself once helped to loose such an uproar, though quite unintentionally. Happening to be in London in the Winter of 1929–30, I was asked by Mr. Ralph D. Blumenfeld, the American-born editor of the Daily Express, to do an article for his paper on the progress of Americanisms in England since my last visit in 1922. In that article I ventured to say:

The Englishman, whether he knows it or not, is talking and writing more and more American. He becomes so accustomed to it that he grows unconscious of it. Things that would have set his teeth on edge ten years ago, or even five years ago, are now integral parts of his daily speech.… In a few years it will probably be impossible for an Englishman to speak, or even to write, without using Americanisms, whether consciously or unconsciously. The influence of 125,000,000 people, practically all headed in one direction, is simply too great to be resisted by any minority, however resolute.

The question whether or not this was sound will be examined in Chapters VI and XII. For the present it is sufficient to note that my article was violently arraigned by various volunteer correspondents of the Express and by contributors to many other journals. One weekly opened its protest with “That silly little fellow, H. L. Mencken, is at it again” and headed it “The American Moron,” and in various other quarters I was accused of a sinister conspiracy against the mother-tongue, probably political or commercial in origin, or maybe both. At this time the American talkie was making its first appearance in England, and so there was extraordinary interest in the subject, for it was obvious that the talkie would bring in far more Americanisms than the silent movie; moreover, it would also introduce the hated American accent. On February 4, 1930 Sir Alfred Knox, a Conservative M.P., demanded in the House of Commons that the Right Hon. William Graham, P.C., then president of the Board of Trade, take steps to “protect the English language by limiting the import of American talkie films.” In a press interview he said:

I don’t go to the cinema often, but I had to be present at one a few days ago, when an American talkie film was shown. The words and accent were perfectly disgusting, and there can be no doubt that such films are an evil influence on our language. It is said that 30,000,000 [British] people visit the cinemas every week. What is the use of spending millions on education if our young people listen to falsified English spoken every night?⁴⁴

There had been another such uproar in 1927, when an International Conference on English was held in London, under the presidency of the Earl of Balfour. This conference hardly got beyond polite futilities, but the fact that the call for it came from the American side⁴⁵ made it suspect from the start, and its deliberations met with unconcealed hostility. On June 25, 1927, the New Statesman let go with a heavy blast, rehearsing all the familiar English objections to Americanisms. It said:

It is extremely desirable, to say the least, that every necessary effort should be made to preserve some standard of pure idiomatic English. But from what quarter is the preservation of such a standard in any way threatened? The answer is “Solely from America.” Yet we are asked to collaborate with the Americans on the problem; we are to make bargains about our own tongue; there is to be a system of give and take.… Why should we offer to discuss the subject at all with America? We do not want to interfere with their language; why should they seek to interfere with ours? That their huge hybrid population of which only a small minority are even racially Anglo-Saxons should use English as their chief medium of intercommunication is our misfortune, not our fault. They certainly threaten our language, but the only way in which we can effectively meet that threat is by assuming — in the words of the authors of “The King’s English”⁴⁶ that “Americanisms are foreign words and should be so treated.”

The proposal that a permanent Council of English be formed, with 50 American members and 50 from the British Empire, brought the New Statesman to the verge of hysterics. It admitted that such a council “might be very useful indeed,” but argued that it “ought not to include more than one Scotsman and one Irishman, and should certainly not include even a single American.” Thus it reasoned:

The American language is the American language, and the English language is the English language. In some respects the Americans may fairly claim superiority. Sidewalk, for example, is a better word than pavement, and fall an infinitely better word than autumn. If we do not adopt these better words it is simply because of their “American flavor”; and the instinct which makes us reject them, though unfortunate in certain cases, is profoundly right. The only way to preserve the purity of the English language is to present a steadily hostile resistance to every American innovation. From time to time we may adopt this word or that, or sometimes a whole vivid phrase. But for all serious lovers of the English tongue it is America that is the only dangerous enemy. She must develop her own language and allow us to develop ours.

The other English journals were rather less fierce in their denunciation of the council and its programme, but very few of them greeted either with anything approaching cordiality.⁴⁷ The Times, obviously trying to be polite, observed that “without offense it may be said that no greater assaults are made on the common language than in America,” and the Spectator ventured the view that in the United States English was departing definitely from the home standard, and was greatly “imposed upon and influenced by a host of immigrants from all the nations of Europe.” This insistence that Americans are not, in any cultural sense, nor even in any plausible statistical sense, Anglo-Saxons is to be found in many English fulminations upon the subject. During the World War, especially after 1917, they were hailed as blood-brothers, but that lasted only until the first mention of war-debts. Ever since 1920 they have been mongrels again, as they were before 1917, and most discussions of Americanisms include the objection that yielding to them means yielding to a miscellaneous rabble of inferior tribes, some of them, by English standards, almost savage. There was a time when the American in the English menagerie of comic foreigners was Hiram Q. Simpkins or Ulysses X. Snodgrass, a Yankee of Puritan, and hence of vaguely English stock, but on some near tomorrow he will probably be Patrick Kraus, Rastus O’Brien, Ole Ginzberg, or some other such fantastic compound of races.

The complaint that Americanisms are inherently unintelligible to civilized Christians is often heard in England, though not as often as in the past. It is a fact that they frequently deal with objects and ideas that are not familiar to the English, and that sometimes they make use of metaphors rather too bold for the English imagination. In consequence, there has been a steady emission of glossaries since the earliest days, some of them on a large scale. The first seems to have been that of the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, which was probably drawn up before 1800, but was not published until 1832, when it appeared in the second edition of his “Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words.”⁴⁸ It was followed by that of David Humphreys, one of the Hartford Wits, which was printed as an appendix to his play, “The Yankey in England,” in 1815.⁴⁹ A year later came John Pickering’s “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America.” Pickering got many of his words from the current English reviews of American books, and his purpose was the double, and rather contradictory, one of proving to the English reviewers that they were good English, and of dissuading Americans from using them.⁵⁰ Robley Dunglison’s glossary followed in 1829–30, John Mason Peck’s in 1834,⁵¹ J. O. Halliwell-Phillips’s “Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms, Containing Words Now Obsolete in England, All of Which Are Familiar and in Common Use in America” in 1850, John Russell Bartlett’s “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States” (about 3725 terms) in 1848, A. L. Elwin’s “Glossary of Supposed Americanisms” (about 465 terms) in 1859, Maximilien Scheie de Vere’s “Americanisms” (about 4000 terms) in 1872, John S. Farmer’s “Americanisms Old and New” (about 5000 terms) in 1889, Sylva Clapin’s “New Dictionary of Americanisms” (about 5250 terms) in 1902, and Richard H. Thornton’s “American Glossary” (about 3700 terms) in 1912. These were mainly the work of philological amateurs, and only Thornton’s two volumes had any scientific value.

So long ago as 1913 Sir Sidney Low, who had lived in America and had a sound acquaintance with Americanisms, suggested ironically in an article in the Westminster Gazette that American be taught in the English schools. This was before the movie invasion, and he reported that the English business man was “puzzled by his ignorance of colloquial American” and “painfully hampered” thereby in his handling of American trade. He went on:

In the United States the study of the English tongue forms part of the educational scheme.… 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 booksellers 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 barroom, the tramcar, 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 quoted an extract from an American novel then appearing 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 said, that this strange dialect was as near to “the tongue that Shakespeare spoke” as “the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton,” but that philological fact did 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.”

At the time Low published his article the invasion of England by Americanisms was just beginning in earnest, and many words and phrases that have since become commonplaces there were still strange and disquieting. Writing in the London Daily Mail a year or so later W. G. Faulkner thought it necessary to explain the meanings of hobo, hoodlum, bunco-steerer, dead-beat, flume, dub, rubberneck, drummer, sucker, dive (in the sense of a thieves’ resort), clean up, graft and to feature, and another interpreter, closely following him, added definitions of hold-up, quitter, rube, shack, bandwagon, road-agent, cinch, live-wire and scab.⁵² This was in the early days of the American-made movie, and Faulkner denounced its terminology as “generating and encouraging mental indiscipline.” As Hollywood gradually conquered the English cinema palaces,⁵³ such warnings became more frequent and more angry, and in 1920 the London Daily News began a formal agitation of the subject, with the usual pious editorials and irate letters from old subscribers. I quote a characteristic passage from one of the latter:

I visited two picture theaters today for the express purpose of collecting slang phrases and of noticing the effect of the new language on the child as well as on the adult. What the villain said to the hero when the latter started to argue with him was, “Cut out that dope” and a hundred piping voices repeated the injunction. The comic man announced his marriage to the Bell of Lumbertown by saying, “I’m hitched.”

On January 22, 1920 the London bureau of the Associated Press made this report:

England is apprehensive lest the vocabularies of her youth become corrupted through incursions of American slang. Trans-Atlantic tourists in England note with interest the frequency with which resort is made to “Yankee talk” by British song and play writers seeking to enliven their productions. Bands and orchestras throughout the country when playing popular music play American selections almost exclusively. American songs monopolize the English music hall and musical comedy stage. But it is the subtitle of the American moving picture film which, it is feared, constitutes the most menacing threat to the vaunted English purity of speech.

When the American talkie began to reinforce the movie, in 1929⁵⁴ there was fresh outburst of indignation, but this time it had a despairist undertone. Reinforced by the spoken word, Americanisms were now coming in much faster than they could be challenged and disposed of. “Within the past few years,” said Thomas Anderson in the Manchester Sunday Chronicle for January 12, 1930, “we have gradually been adopting American habits of speech, American business methods, and the American outlook.” To which Jameson Thomas added in the London Daily Express for January 21:

One must admit that we write and speak Americanisms. So long as Yankeeisms came to us insiduously we absorbed them carelessly. They have been a valuable addition to the language, as nimble coppers are a valuable addition to purer currency. But the talkies have presented the American language in one giant meal, and we are revolted.

But this revolt, in so far as it was real at all, was apparently confined to the aged: the young of the British species continued to gobble down the neologisms of Hollywood and to imitate the Hollywood intonation. “Seldom do I hear a child speak,” wrote a correspondent of the London News Chronicle on June 15, 1931, “who has not attached several Americanisms to his vocabulary, which are brought out with deliberation at every opportunity.” During the next few years the English papers printed countless protests against this corruption of the speech of British youth, but apparently to no avail. Nor was there any halt when Col. F. W. D. Bendall, C.M.G., M.A., an inspector of the Board of Education, began stumping the country in an effort to further the dying cause of linguistic purity.⁵⁵ Nor when the chief constable — i.e., chief of police — of Wallasey, a suburb of Liverpool, issued this solemn warning in his annual report:

I cannot refrain from commenting adversely on the pernicious and growing habit of … youths to use Americanisms, with nasal accompaniment, in order to appear, in their own vernacular, tough guys. On one of my officers going to search him, a young housebreaker told him to “Lay off, cop.” Oh-yeahs are frequent in answer to charges, and we are promised shoots up in the burg [sic] and threatened to be bumped off.⁵⁶

Parallel with this alarmed hostility to the jargon of the movies and the talkies, much of it borrowed from the American underworld, there has gone on in England a steady opposition to the more decorous varieties of American. I have already mentioned the Times’ sneering review of the first two volumes of the Dictionary of American Biography. Back in 1919 H. N. Brailsford, the well-known English publicist, who has been in the United States many times and often contributes to American magazines, actually objected to the vocabulary of the extremely precious and Anglomaniacal Woodrow Wilson, then in action in Versailles. “The irruption of Mr. Wilson upon our scene,” he wrote in the London Daily Herald on August 20, “threatens to modify our terminology. If one knew the American language (as I do not),” and so on.⁵⁷ A little while before this a leading English medical journal had been protesting against the Americanisms in an important surgical monograph.⁵⁸ Translations done in the United States are so often denounced that denouncing them has become a sort of convention. There was a storm of unusual violence, in 1925, over the plays of Luigi Pirandello. Their merit had been recognized in America earlier than in England — indeed, some of them had been forbidden, at least in English, by the English censor —, and in consequence the first translations were published in this country. What followed when they reached England was thus described by the London correspondent of the Bookman (New York) in its issue for September, 1925:

A strange situation has arisen over the Pirandello translations. These were made in America, and they contain phraseology which is peculiarly American. As a consequence they have been generally condemned in the English press as being translations from one foreign tongue into another.… It will be understood that when an English reader is used to calling comfits sweets and finds them called candies he feels he is not getting an English equivalent of the Italian author’s word.

This correspondence was signed Simon Pure; its actual author, I am informed, was Rebecca West. She expressed the opinion that English translations of foreign books were frequently offensive to Americans, and for like reasons. “It seems to me to be a pity,” she continued, “that the habit should have grown up among Continental authors of selling ‘world rights in the English language.’ If the English translation does not satisfy the Americans, and the American translation does not please the English, it would surely be far better that there should be two translations.” In a long reply to this, published in the Saturday Review of Literature (New York) for December 26, 1925, Ernest Boyd — himself a translator of wide experience, born in Ireland, educated there and in England, for seven years a member of the British consular service, and resident in New York since 1920 — denied that there was any hostility to English translations in this country. “English translators,” he said, “are accepted at their own — or their publishers’ — valuation in America,” but American translators “are received with prejudice and criticized with severity” in England. The American edition of Pirandello’s plays consisted of two volumes, one translated by Dr. Arthur Livingston of Columbia University, and the other by Edward Storer, an Englishman. Said Mr. Boyd:

Dr. Livingston, the American, is taken to task though his Italian scholarship is well authenticated and beyond dispute. Mr. Storer, on the contrary, is an Englishman, and his translations are so defective in places as to show a complete misunderstanding of the text, but no complaints have been raised on that score.… One might have thought that the proper claim would be that a competent person, and only a competent person, irrespective of nationality, should translate. But British nationality is more important than American scholarship, apparently.

The ensuing debate ran on for several years; in fact, it is still resumed from time to time, with the English champions holding stoutly to the doctrine that there can be but one form of English pure and undefiled, and that it must, shall and will be the Southern English variety. Thus Raymond Mortimer in the Nation and Athenaeum for July 28, 1928:

It is most unfortunate that American publishers should be able to buy the English as well as the American rights of foreign books. For the result usually is that these books remain permanently closed to the English reader.⁵⁹

The English objection is not alone to the American vocabulary; it is also to the characteristic American style, which begins to differ appreciably from the normal English style. In every recent discussion of the matter the despairist note that I was mentioning a few paragraphs back is audible. There was a time when the English guardians of the mother-tongue tried to haul American into conformity by a kind of force majeure, but of late they seem to be resigned to its differentiation, and are concerned mainly about the possibility that Standard English may be considerably modified by its influence. As I have noted, H. W. and F. G. Fowler, in “The King’s English,” were deciding so long ago as 1906 that “Americanisms are foreign words, and should be so treated.” They admitted that American had its points of superiority — “Fall is better on the merits than autumn, in every way; it is short, Saxon (like the other three season names), picturesque; it reveals its derivation to everyone who uses it, not to the scholar only, like autumn” —, but they protested against taking even the most impeccable Americanisms into English. “The English and the American language and literature,” they argued, “are both good things, but they are better apart than mixed.” In 1910 the Encylopædia Britannica (Eleventh Edition) admitted that this falling apart had already gone so far that it was “not uncommon to meet with American newspaper articles of which an untravelled Englishman would hardly be able to understand a sentence.” “The fact is,” said the London Times Literary Supplement for January 21, 1926, in a review of G. P. Krapp’s “The English Language in America,” “that in spite of the greater frequency of intercourse the two idioms have drifted apart; farther apart than is, perhaps, generally recognized.… A British visitor in America, if he has any taste for the niceties of language, experiences something of the thrills of contact with a foreign idiom, for he hears and reads many things which are new to him and not a few which are unintelligible.” “If the American temperament, despite its general docility, persists in its present attitude towards a standardized language,” said Ernest Weekley in “Adjectives — and Other Words” (1930), “spoken American must eventually become as distinct from English as Yiddish is from classical Hebrew.” Or, added Professor J. Y. T. Greig of Newcastle in “Breaking Priscian’s Head” (1929), as “Spanish is from Portuguese.”

This echo of Noah Webster is itself echoed frequently by other English publicists and philologians. There is, indeed, a school of English thought which holds that the United States is not only drifting away from the mother country linguistically, but is fundamentally differentiated from it on wider cultural grounds. “Those who have had to do with Americans,” said Geoffrey Grigson in the London Morning Post for February 13, 1934, “will not mistake them for our intimate cousins, our near psychic relations.” He continued:

They are linked to us by many strands of sympathy, but they are a different people, or a number of different peoples. Their language, their real literature — witness Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, James, Ransom, Macleish, Hemingway — are different; and one might say even that the more they are English the more they are alien. The New Englander, for example, feels and thinks differently; his communal, political, and person “mythology” — to use a convenient word for those bodies of fiction and “belief” which unite each social entity — differentiates him completely from an Englishman. I am not sure, in fact, that we cannot more easily get to understand the soul of Frenchman, Italian, German, Spaniard even. After all, we belong geographically and spiritually to the European cultural bloc.

The late Cecil Chesterton was saying something to the same general effect in the London New Witness so long ago as 1915. “I do not believe,” he wrote, “that nations ever quarrel merely because they feel that they do not understand each other. That attitude of mind of itself tends to produce a salutary humility on the one side and a pleasantly adventurous curiosity on the other. What really produces trouble between peoples is when one is quite certain that it understands the other — and in fact doesn’t. And I am perfectly certain that that has been from the first one of the primary causes of trouble between England and America.”⁶⁰ To which may be added the following from an article by Herbert Agar in the New Statesman for August 8, 1931:

The English should try to cope with their philological ignorance. They should train themselves to realize that it is neither absurd nor vulgar that a language which was once the same should in the course of centuries develop differently in different parts of the world. If such were not the case, we should all still be speaking a sort of Ur-Sanskrit. Just as French and Italian may be described as divergent forms of modern Latin, so it would be helpful to think of the language of Oxford and the language of Harvard as divergent forms of modern English. It is perhaps a pity, from the point of view of international good feeling, that the two forms have not diverged a little further. At any rate, when the Englishman can learn to think of American as a language, and not merely as a ludicrously unsuccessful attempt to speak as he himself speaks, when he can learn to have for American only the normal intolerance of the provincial mind for all foreign tongues, then there will come a great improvement in Anglo-American relations. For even though Americans realise the absurdity of the English attitude toward their language, nevertheless they remain deeply annoyed by it. This is natural, for a man’s language is his very soul. It is his thoughts and almost all his consciousness. Laugh at a man’s language, and you have laughed at the man himself in the most inclusive sense.

But not all Englishmen, of course, indulge themselves in the derision that Mr. Agar denounces. The prevailing tone of English opinion remains loftily anti-American, in linguistic as in other matters, but there have arisen in late years two factions which take a more moderate position, the one contending that American speech is really not the barbaric jargon it is commonly thought to be, and the other arguing boldly that its peculiarities, though maybe somewhat uncouth, nevertheless have a merit of their own. A representative spokesman of the first faction is Sir Charles Strachey, M.C.M.G., a former official of the Foreign and Colonial Offices. On May 2, 1931, he wrote to the London Times to protest against the assumption that the argot of Chicago gunmen is the official language of the United States. “American diplomatic correspondence,” he said, “is always a model of correct English, and it would be a gross error to suppose that the United States Ambassador calls revenue the dough or the berries, and refers to his Italian colleagues as a wop.” But this Strachey faction is not large, and as a general thing even the language of American diplomacy grates on English nerves, as I was lately noting in the case of H. N. Brailsford’s objection to the style of Woodrow Wilson.

The revolutionary theory that the American language actually has some merit seems to have been launched by William Archer, a Scotsman, in an article entitled “American Today,” printed somewhat prudently, not in England, but in Scribner’s Magazine for February, 1899. “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. American 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.” Twenty years later Archer returned to the matter, this time on English soil, in an article written for the Westminster Gazette.⁶¹ In it he protested vigorously against the English habit of “pulling a wry face over American expressions, not because they are inherently bad, but simply because they are American. The vague and unformulated idea behind all such petty cavillings,” he continued, “is that the English language is in danger of being corrupted by the importation of Americanisms, and that it behooves us to establish a sort of quarantine in order to keep out the detrimental germs. This notion is simply one of the milder phases of the Greater Stupidity.”

Two years before this, Frank Dilnot, an English journalist with American experience, had come out for American in a large way. “Show me the alert Englishman,” he wrote,⁶² “who will not find a stimulation in those nuggety word-groupings which are the commonplaces in good American conversation. They are like flashes of crystal. They come from all kinds of people — who are brilliantly innocent of enriching the language.… The American tongue, written or spoken with its alteration from the English of England, is a potent and penetrating instrument, rich in new vibrations, full of joy as well as shocks for the unsuspecting visitor.” In May, 1920, Richard Aldington joined the American party in an article contributed to Poetry (Chicago). In it he made an eloquent plea for American linguistic independence, and praised the development of a characteristically American idiom by the American poets and novelists of the day. “Are Americans,” he demanded,

to write the language which they speak, which is slowly but inevitably separating itself from the language of England, or are they to write a devitalized idiom learned painfully from books or from a discreet frequentation of London literary cliques?… Englishmen of letters and literary journalists may publish these exhortations and practise their refinements: in vain — a vast and increasingly articulate part of the English-speaking and English-writing world will ignore them. Another century may see English broken into a number of dialects or even different languages, spoken in Canada, Australia, South Africa, the United States and England. The result may eventually be similar to the break-up of Latin.

This pro-American party is still small, but it can show some well-known names. The late Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate and founder of the Society for Pure English, was in sympathy with it,⁶³ and it has got support from Wyndham Lewis, Edward Shanks, Virginia Woolf and Sir John Foster Fraser. “The Americans,” said Mrs. Woolf in the Saturday Review of Literature on August 1, 1925, “are doing what the Elizabethans did — they are coining new words. They are instinctively making the language adapt itself to their needs.” She continued:

In England, save for the impetus given by the war, the word-coining power has lapsed; our writers vary the metres of their poetry, remodel the rhythms of prose, but one may search English fiction in vain for a single new word. It is significant that when we want to freshen our speech, we borrow from American — poppycock, rambunctious, flip-flop, booster, good mixer. All the expressive, ugly, vigorous slang which creeps into use among us, first in talk, later in writing, comes from across the Atlantic.

In February, 1925, H. E. Moore printed an elaborate defense of Americanisms in the English Review, then edited by Austin Harrison. He contrasted the tendency to academic tightness in Standard English with the greater naturalness of American, and gave high praise to some of the salient characters of the latter — its hospitality to neologisms, its fertility in effective metaphor, its “fluid” spelling. “As this divergence of English and American,” he said, “has proceeded through strata of English derision and American defiance it has tended to become deliberate and constructive. England and academic America generally have asserted the old criteria. But they have been swept aside by America’s egalitarian millions, and established changes have now made any acceptance of literary Southern English impossible.” “I have never found it possible,” said Mr. Shanks in the London Evening Standard in 1931,

to understand why with so many people there should be an automatic objection to anything that can be called an Americanism. An Americanism is an expression adopted by those who speak our common language but who live in the United States. There are more of them than there are of us, and so one would suppose, on democratic principles, that their choice was entitled at least to our serious consideration. There are, in fact, more of them than of all the other English-speaking peoples put together, and a majority vote on the question to whom the language really belongs would certainly give a verdict against us. Yet, for many of us “Americanism” is simply a term of abuse.… The facts that we ought to realise and that we ignore when we talk loftily about “Americanisms” are that America is making a formidable contribution to the development of our language and that all our attempts to reject that contribution will in the long run be vain — quite apart from the other fact that we ought to rejoice in this proof that the language is still alive and capable of learning from experience.

Writing a year later, Sir John Fraser⁶⁴ made a vigorous attack upon the dominant anti-American party, and accused it of trying absurdly to halt a process of inevitable change. He said:

Quite respectable people, very refined, even literary gents and prelates, would faint were they not so angry at the Americanization of our ways, and particularly the degradation of our speech. Why? If we take up the position that because we are British we must be right there is no argument. But if the Anglicization of the world is good, why is the Americanization of England bad?… Is our language to remain staid and dignified like a piece of furniture made when good Victoria was Queen, or, as we live in swiftly shifting times, aeroplanes and record-smashing cars, is there something to be said for adapting our ways of speech to the newer generations?… Then there is the other school, which is called the Oxford manner, though mostly adopted by people who know nothing about Oxford. With their stuffy, roof-of-the-mouth inflections [sic] they have developed a speech of their own.… I prefer slangy American.

In Life and Letters for April, 1934, Wyndham Lewis argued at length that, even if it were rational, it was too late for the English to stem the advance of American. He said:

While England was a uniquely powerful empire-state, ruled by an aristocratic caste, its influence upon the speech as upon the psychology of the American ex-colonies was overwhelming. But today that ascendancy has almost entirely vanished. The aristocratic caste is nothing but a shadow of itself, the cinema has brought the American scene and the American dialect nightly into the heart of England, and the Americanizing process is far advanced.… There has been no reciprocal movement of England into the United States; indeed, with the New American nationalism, England is deliberately kept out.… So the situation is this, as far as our common language is concerned: the destiny of England and the United States is more than ever one, but it is now the American influence that is paramount. The tables have effectively been turned in this respect.

Finally, I extract a few sentences of sage advice from a radio speech to his fellow-countrymen by Alistair Cooke, of the British Broadcasting Corporation:

When you hear an expression that seems a little odd to you, don’t assume it was invented by a music-hall comedian trying to be smart. It was probably spoken by Lincoln or Paul Jones.… And when you hear a strange pronunciation remember you are not hearing a chaotic speech that anyone has deliberately changed.… It is the cultivated speech of a New England gentleman of 1934, and It happens in essentials also to be the cultivated speech you would have heard in London over two hundred years ago.⁶⁵

5. THE POSITION OF THE LEARNED

But these witnesses to the virtues and glories of the American language are not to be taken as representative of English opinion; nor even as spokesmen for any considerable part of it. In general, it remains almost as hostile to Americanisms as it was in the Golden Age of the critical reviews. Nor does its hostility go without support in the United States. On the contrary there has been, since the early Eighteenth Century, a party of Americans vowed to the strict policing of the national speech habits, usually with the English example in mind, and it has always had a formidable body of adherents. In 1724 Hugh Jones, professor of mathematics at William and Mary College, expressed the wish that a “Publick Standard were fix’d” to “direct Posterity, and prevent Irregularity, and confused Abuses and Corruptions in our Writings and Expressions.”⁶⁶ In Section 1 of the present chapter I have mentioned John Adams’s keen interest in a project to set up an American Academy to “correct, enrich and refine” the language, “until perfection stops their progress and ends their labor.” In 1806 a bill to establish such an academy was actually introduced in the Senate by Senator George Logan of Pennsylvania and given a favorable report by a committee of which John Quincy Adams was a member, but some irreverent member moved that the word national be stricken out of the title, and when this motion was carried the enterprise died. Soon afterward an American Academy of Arts and Sciences was formed in Boston, and in 1820 an American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres followed in New York, with John Quincy Adams as president. The latter appointed a committee headed by the Rev. John M. Mason, provost of Columbia College and later president of Dickinson College, “to collect throughout the United States a list of words and phrases, whether acknowledged corruptions or words of doubtful authority, which are charged up as bad English, with a view to take the best practical course for promoting the purity and uniformity of our language.” And the former received from one of its members, John Pickering, that “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America” (1816) which I have already noticed.

Pickering’s professional career was made in the law, with occasional ventures into politics, but he passed for a scholar in his time, he was offered the chair of Oriental languages at Harvard in 1806 and that of Greek in 1814, and he published a Greek-English lexicon in 1826. The preface to his Vocabulary was largely devoted to a defense of the English reviewers. “It cannot be denied,” he said, “that we have in several instances deviated from the standard of the language, as spoken and written in England at the present day. [His italics.] By this I do not mean that so great a deviation has taken place as to have rendered any considerable part of our language unintelligible to Englishmen, but merely that so many corruptions have crept into our English as to have become the subject of much animadversion and regret with the learned of Great Britain.” Pickering then proceeded to argue that these animadversions and regrets were well founded, and called upon his erring countrymen to “imitate the example of the learned and modest Campbell,”⁶⁷ who, though he had devoted a great part of a long life to the study of the English language, “yet thought it no disgrace to make an apology for his style,” and to remember the similar diffidence of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lugdunum (Lyons) in Gaul, who prefixed a similar apology for his shaky provincial Latin to his “Adversus Hæreses.” Thus Pickering summed up:

Upon an impartial consideration of the subject, therefore, it seems impossible to resist the conclusion that, although the language of the United States has perhaps changed less than might have been expected, when we consider how many years have elapsed since our ancestors brought it from England, yet it has in so many instances departed from the English standard that our scholars should lose no time in endeavoring to restore it to its purity, and to prevent further corruption.… As a general rule, we should undoubtedly avoid all those words which are noticed by English authors of reputation as expressions with which they are unacquainted, for although we might produce some English authority for such words, yet the very circumstance of their being thus noticed by well-educated Englishmen is a proof that they are not in use at this day in England, and, of course, ought not to be used elsewhere by those who would speak correct English.

Again I follow Pickering’s italization. His theory is still entertained by multitudes of American pedagogues. They believe as he did that the natural growth of the language is wild and wicked, and that it should be regulated according to rules formulated in England. To this end they undertake periodical crusades against “bad grammar,” the American scheme of pronunciation, and the general body of Americanisms — in the classroom, by means of hortatory pamphlets and leaflets, and over the air. In 1915 the National Council of Teachers of English, following that hopeful American custom which gave the nation Mothers’ Day, and Safety-First, Paint-Up-Clean-Up and Eat-More-Cheese Weeks, proposed to make the first seven days of November Better-Speech Week. Ten years later the General Federation of Women’s Clubs joined the movement, and for some unknown reason the time was changed to the last week in February. For awhile Better-Speech Week was much discussed in the newspapers, and it is still observed, I believe, in parts of the country. Some of the schoolmarms, despairing of effecting a wholesale reform, concentrated their efforts upon various specific crimes against their canons, and among the subsidiary weeks thus launched were Ain’t-less Week and Final-G Week. They also established a Tag Day, and hung derisory tags on youngsters guilty of such indecencies as “I have got” and “It’s me”⁶⁸ This missionary effort was not confined to school-children. Efforts were also made to perfect the speech of their parents and of the public in general, and even the newspapers were besought to mend their linguistic ways. In 1925, a Los Angeles schoolmarm went about Southern California inducing women’s clubs to pass the following resolution:

Whereas, we believe that if newspaper comic strips and jokes use English free from grammatical errors (except for decided character rôles) they will become more attractive to many readers, and

Whereas, we believe that this effort on the part of the newspapers will be of invaluable aid in raising the standard of American speech, therefore

Be it resolved, that we request editors of newspapers and comic writers to eliminate grammatical errors in the comic strips and jokes except for decided character rôles.⁶⁹

The object of attack here, of course, was the grotesque slang that appears from nowhere, has its brief day, and then vanishes. But the American pedagogues, with few exceptions, seem to be opposed also to more decorous Americanisms, and many of them devote themselves to teaching a pronunciation that is quite foreign to the country, and to inculcating grammatical niceties that were concocted during the earnest but innocent days when English grammar was assumed to be a kind of Latin grammar — niceties that have been long since abandoned by the English themselves. The influence of Samuel Johnson is thus still more or less potent in the American public schools, though Noah Webster was denouncing it so long ago as 1789. On this melancholy theme I shall discourse at greater length in Chapter IX.

The higher varieties of gogues are somewhat less naïve, but they nevertheless show a considerable reluctance to deal with American as the living language of a numerous and puissant people, making its own rules as it goes along and well worthy of scientific study. Very few American philologians have specialized in it, and such study of it as has been undertaken has been carried on by amateurs quite as often as by professionals. It is rare for any discussion of it to appear in such journals as Modern Language Notes, Modern Philology, Language, the American Philological Journal, the English Journal, and the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, or for it to be undertaken seriously at the annual meetings of the philological associations.⁷⁰ Dialect Notes, the first journal to be devoted to it, was not set up until 1890, and American Speech did not follow until 1925. Both have had very meager support. Dialect Notes was launched by the American Dialect Society, which had been organized at Harvard University in 1889, with the late Professor Francis J. Child, the authority on English and Scottish ballads, as its first president.⁷¹ It made very slow progress. Though there were, at that time, fully 5,000 teachers of English in the United States, including at least 500 in the colleges,⁷² it started off with but 140 members, and the publication of the first volume of Dialect Notes, running to 497 pages, dragged through six years. When the second volume was completed, in 1904, the society had 310 members, but many of them failed to pay their dues, and by 1912 successive purges had reduced the roll to 219. The income was then less than $400 a year. By 1926 the membership had grown to 266 and by 1932 the income was $776.38. Neither membership nor income appears to have increased since, for Dialect Notes now comes out only at long intervals, and its average issue is very thin. Yet its files contain a very large amount of invaluable matter, as my frequent references to them will show, and it long offered the only outlet for the work of that small minority of American scholars who took the national language seriously, and gave it scientific study — among them, Drs. Percy W. Long, C. H. Grandgent and E. S. Sheldon of Harvard, E. H. Babbitt of Columbia, George Hempl of Michigan, George T. Flom of Iowa, E. H. Sturtevant of Yale, O. F. Emerson of Western Reserve, C. S. Northrup of Cornell, J. W. Carr of Maine, L. W. Payne, Jr., of Texas, William A. Read of Louisiana, Josiah Combs of Texas Christian, John M. Manly and Allen Walker Reed of Chicago, and Louise Pound of Nebraska.

The work of Dr. Pound has been especially productive, for whereas most of the other members of the Dialect Society have confined their investigations to the regional dialects of American, she and her pupils have studied the general speechways of the country. She took her doctorate at Heidelberg under the distinguished Anglicist, Johannes Hoops, and soon afterward joined the English faculty of the University of Nebraska. Her first contribution to Dialect Notes was published in 1905; thereafter, for twenty years, she or her pupils were represented in almost every issue. In 1925, in association with Dr. Kemp Malone of the Johns Hopkins and Dr. Arthur G. Kennedy of Stanford, she founded American Speech, becoming its first editor. She continued in that capacity until 1933, when she was succeeded by Dr. William Cabell Greet of Barnard College, Columbia University. American Speech, even more than Dialect Notes, has encouraged the study of American: its files constitute a rich mine of instructive and often very amusing stuff. But it has got but little more support from American teachers of English than its predecessor. Though its first issues contained many articles addressed to them directly, they refused to be interested, and during its later years its pages have been supplied largely by lay students of the language. During its first five years its subscription list never reached 1500 names, and at the beginning of its sixth year it had but 329 subscribers. When Dr. Pound retired in 1933 it was taken over by the Columbia University Press. Today it continues to be published at a loss, though Dr. Greet and his associates make it a very useful journal.⁷³ Beginning as a monthly, it is now a quarterly.

This failure of support has greatly hampered the work of the American Dialect Society. It projected an American Dialect Dictionary immediately after its organization in 1889, and by 1930 its collection of materials embraced more than 30,000 words and phrases. But so far the lack of funds has prevented the completion of the work,⁷⁴ and it has had to give place to two more recent enterprises, both of which seem to be adequately financed, and promise to give the study of American English great encouragement, and to set it, in combination, upon a scientific foundation. The first is the Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, now going forward at the University of Chicago under the direction of Sir William Craigie, one of the editors of the New English Dictionary (now called the Oxford English Dictionary); the other is the Linguistic Atlas of the United States, in charge of Dr. Hans Kurath of Brown University and sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies. The first fascicle of the former appeared early in 1936, and the first map of the latter shortly afterward. Both will require years for their completion. Sir William and Dr. Kurath are alike of foreign birth, the former being a Scotsman and the latter an Austrian.⁷⁵

Sir William described the origin of the Dictionary of American English in the English Journal (Chicago) for January, 1926. The dictionaries hitherto published in the United States, he said,

have commonly noted the different usage of the two countries, in respect both of the words and of their pronunciation. In none of these dictionaries, however, has there been any attempt to make the language of the United States the sole, or even main, basis of the matter they contain. Even Webster, although he patriotically called for a “national language” as well as a national government, contented himself, when he published “An American Dictionary of the English Language,” with having cited American authors as well as English. All subsequent dictionaries which have appeared in this country have adhered to the same principle — their American material is merely an addition (sometimes a very restricted addition) to that drawn from English or British sources.… So far as I am aware, this fact had not clearly presented itself to anyone until it occurred to me one day in the Summer of 1924, in Chicago, while I was reading some proofs of the Oxford English Dictionary. I observed that in the case of two or three words beginning with the prefix un- the older quotations (from the Seventeenth Century) were from English sources, while the later (of the Eighteenth Century) were all American. From the evidence it seemed probable that the use of the words had continued later in this country than at home. It then occurred to me that it would be interesting to know how far back the words could be traced in American use; and that thought immediately brought me up against the fact that we had no means of ascertaining this point, for the simple reason that no effort had yet been made to trace the whole vocabulary which had been in use on this side of the ocean from the Seventeenth Century to the present day. It was then a simple matter to draw the natural conclusion that what was required was a new dictionary.⁷⁶

“As soon as the idea had presented itself to me,” he continued, “I communicated it to Professor [John M.] Manly, [head of the department of English at Chicago], who at once took steps to interest the University of Chicago in the project.” The upshot was that Sir William was made professor of English in the university, and provided with a competent staff of assistants at the cost of the General Education Board. Before sailing for the United States to take up his work, in June, 1925, he said to the London correspondent of the North American Newspaper Alliance:

The United States is now at a period in the national development which corresponds closely to the Elizabethan age in England. It is a period of intellectual creativeness and invention. The extraordinary facility that you, as a people, exhibit in the coining of picturesque and expressive slang is only one of many manifestations of this. I thoroughly approve of American slang. It is often carried to an excess, but on the other hand many of your current colloquial phrases are extremely apt, and win the admiration of even the most strict purist. In America slang gets into general conversation much more widely than in England, and is therefore more likely to win a place in permanent usage. The real test of slang is its utility. If a slang phrase fills a long-felt want it will get into the language. There are some American expressions of comparatively recent vintage which have already been adopted wherever English is spoken, and they are so particularly apt and expressive that one wonders how the idea was expressed before they were invented. One instance of this is the phrase, it’s up to you.

The Dictionary of American English is of course confined to the written language. Its staff has been engaged since 1926 in a laborious search of all available American records, whether printed or in manuscript. While the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary was similarly engaged, from 1859 to 1928, it had the aid of a large corps of volunteer searchers, and some of its most valuable material came from them, but Dr. Craigie and his collaborators, James Root Hulbert, George Watson, M. M. Mathews and Allen Walker Read, have had relatively little such help. In order to keep the dictionary within reasonable bounds its plan had to be made somewhat narrow. According to Dr. Louise Pound,⁷⁷ it will deal with the following classes of words only:

1. Those descriptive of the physical features of the country, as backwoods, bluff, canyon, prairie.

2. Words connected with the material development of the country, as frame-house, log-cabin, canoe, steamboat, turnpike, railroad.

3. Terms of administration, politics, religion, trade and other activities, as Senate, caucus, Mormon, lumber, elevator.

4. Colloquialisms and slang, so far as they are specially American in origin or in later use.

But the bounds of these classes will be elastic, and not only words and phrases originating in this country will be included, but also, as Sir William Craigie has explained, “every one which has a clear connection with the development of the country and its inhabitants. The most ordinary word may call for insertion on the latter ground, as having not only a real but often a vital connection with the life of the settlers and their descendants.” No words will be included for which records before 1900 do not exist, and examples of the use of admitted words will not be carried beyond 1925. Slang and colloquialisms will be dealt with fully down to 1875, but after that date only terms that have come into literary use will be included. The work will be in no sense a dictionary of slang. Soon or late, said Dr. Craigie in 1927, it “must be supplemented by a dialect dictionary and a slang dictionary; otherwise the record will be either defective or ill balanced.”

The Linguistic Atlas seems to have been first proposed by a committee of the Modern Language Association in 1924, but it owes its actual launching to Dr. E. H. Sturtevant of Yale, who interested the American Council of Learned Societies in the project in 1928. A conference of philologians was held at Yale on August 2 and 3, 1929, in connection with the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America, and on its recommendation the Council appointed a committee to make definite plans. The chairman of this committee was Dr. Kurath, then of Ohio State University, who remains as director of the work, with his headquarters moved to Brown.⁷⁸ He has a staff of seven assistants, headed by Dr. Miles L. Hanley, secretary of the American Dialect Society,⁷⁹ and the collection of materials is being furthered by other members of the society and by a small number of outside volunteers. The project has received grants from the Carnegie Corporation, the General Education Board and the Rockefeller Foundation. It proposes eventually to publish maps covering the whole country, but so far it has concentrated most of its attention upon New England. The reasons for this are thus stated:

1. The dialects of New England are primary as compared with those of the more Western areas, such as the Ohio region.…

2. New England has striking geographical dialects; the class dialects are perhaps more distinct than in any other part of the country; there are clear urban and rural dialects; there are large elements of the population that have been only recently assimilated or that are in part still unassimilated.

3. The fact that we possess more information regarding the present linguistic situation in New England than we have for any other area will shorten and simplify the important task of selecting the dialect features that are to be recorded in all the communities selected for study.

4. There is already available a considerable body of reliable information regarding the history of the population.… Thus a more scientific choice of representative communities is possible.

How many maps will be published in all is not yet determined, but the number will probably run to thousands. Each will show all the reported occurrences and permutations of a given locution, and in that way the dispersion of typical words and phrases, and of characteristic pronunciations, throughout the United States and Canada will be indicated. The Atlas will cover “all phases of the spoken language — pronunciation, accentuation (intonation and stress), the inflections, syntactical features, and vocabulary.” The speech of all strata of society is being investigated, and an attempt is being made to differentiate between the vocabularies of the educated and the uneducated, the young and the old, men and women. In addition to the Atlas, the Council will publish a series of monographs showing “the influence on the spoken language of movements of population, of topography and arteries of communication, of the stratification of society and the rise of the lower classes to positions of importance in their communities, of political, religious, and racial particularism, of the schools, and of cultural centers.” In particular, an effort will be made to find out to what extent the early immigrations to the West carried the speech habits of the older settlements with them. Finally, phonograph records are being collected, and copies of them will be available to persons interested.

These manifestations of a new interest in the scientific study of American English among American philologians are gratifying, but it would be a mistake to assume that that interest is widespread. It seems to be confined mainly, as collaboration in Dialect Notes and American Speech has always been confined, to a relatively small group of scholars, most of them either foreigners by birth or under foreign influences. The typical native teacher of English, now as in the past, fights shy of American, and can see in it only an unseemly corruption of English. Just as the elaborate obfuscations of Eighteenth Century law have been preserved in American law long after their abandonment in England, so the tight rules of the Eighteenth Century purists, with their absurd grammatical niceties, their fanciful etymologies and their silly spelling-pronunciations, tend to be preserved. Noah Webster protested against this pedantry nearly a century and a half ago, but it continues to be cherished among the rank and file of American pedagogues, from the kindergarten up to the graduate school. In the American colleges and high-schools there is no faculty so weak as the English faculty. It is the common catch-all for aspirants to the birch who are too lazy or too feeble in intelligence to acquire any sort of exact knowledge, and the professional incompetence of its typical ornament is matched only by his hollow cocksureness. Most of the American philologists, so-called, of the early days — Witherspoon, Whitney, Worcester, Fowler, Cobb and their like — were uncompromising advocates of conformity to English precept and example, and combated 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,”⁸⁰ 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. Moreover, he was a philologian only by courtesy; the regularly ordained brethren 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”⁸¹ altogether, was echoed by the whole fraternity, and so the corrective bastinado was laid on.

It remained, however, for two sages of a later day to preach 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 R. 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 more or less authentic erudition, and his “Everyday English,” following eight years later, was another. True enough, Fitzedward Hall, the Anglo-Indian-American philologist, disposed of some of his etymologies and otherwise did execution upon him,⁸² but in the main his contentions were accepted. Lounsbury was also an adept and favorite expositor. His attacks upon certain familiar follies 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 sound knowledge of the early history 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 scientific. White devoted not less than eight long articles in the Atlantic Monthly⁸³ to a review of the fourth edition of John Russell Bartlett’s “American Glossary” (1877) 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 the remainder. 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 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, 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 European philologians, 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 possible 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.

Despite its absurdity, Lounsbury’s position was taken by most of the American Gelehrten of his heyday. Their heirs and assigns have receded from it somewhat, but have yet to go to the length of abandoning it altogether. They admit, in despondent moments, that an American dialect of English really exists, but they still dream of bringing it into harmony with what they choose to regard as correct English. To the latter purpose the humorless omphalophysites of the American Academy of Arts and Letters address themselves periodically, and with great earnestness. Not many of them show any capacity for sound writing, whether in English or in American, but they nevertheless propose in all solemnity to convert themselves into a sort of American counterpart of the Académie Française, and to favor the country, from time to time, with authoritative judgments in matters of speech.⁸⁴ In 1916 the Academy was given $3,000 by Mrs. E. H. Blashfield to help it “determine its duty regarding both the preservation of the English language in its beauty and integrity, and its cautious enrichment by such terms as grow out of the modern conditions.” The brethren laid out this money by paying one another honoraria for reading essays on the subject at plenary sessions, and in 1925 nine of these essays were printed in a book.⁸⁵ It begins with a declaration of fealty to England and ends with a furious assault upon Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg — and a grave bow to Don Marquis! The general theory underlying it seems to be divided into two halves. The first half is to the effect that the only sound models of English are to be found in the thunderous artificialities of Eighteenth Century England, and the second teaches that the only remedy for “entire abandonment to the loose-lipped lingo of the street” is “a little study of Latin, and translation of Cicero and Virgil.” It should be added in fairness that some of the contributors dissent from this two-headed theory, but even so the book presents a sufficiently depressing proof of the stupidity of the learned.⁸⁶

On June 13, 1923, there was a Conference of British and American Professors of English at Columbia University. Under the leadership of Henry van Dyke and Fred Newton Scott⁸⁷ its deliberations quickly resolved themselves into a violent assault upon every evidence of Americanism in the national speech. Dr. van Dyke, unconsciously echoing Witherspoon after 142 years, denounced “the slovenly way” in which the mother-tongue was spoken in this country, “not only in the streets, but also in the pulpit, on the stage, and even in the classroom.” Such “lazy, unintelligible, syncopated speech,” he continued, “is like a dirty face.” Apparently as an answer to a possible accusation of Anglomania — for he had been one of the most vociferous of English propagandists during the World War —, he added that he had also “heard some folks talk in Lunnon who were hard to understand,” but after this he returned to his muttons, and closed with the dictum that “the proposal to make a new American language to fit our enormous country may be regarded either as a specimen of American humor or as a serious enormity.” Dr. Scott, going further, allowed that it was “for Americans not a matter of ridicule, but for the hair shirt and the lash, for tears of shame and self-abasement.”

That Anglomania may have actually colored the views of both Dr. van Dyke and Dr. Scott is suggested by the case of their Corps-bruder, Dr. Brander Matthews. Before the war Matthews was a diligent collector of Americanisms, and often wrote about them with a show of liking them. But during the war he succumbed to a great upsurge of love for the Motherland, and took up a position almost identical with that of Lounsbury. Thus he once wrote in the intensely pro-English New York Times.

We may rest assured that the superficial evidences of a tendency toward the differentiation of American-English and British-English are not so significant as they may appear to the unreflecting, and that the tendency itself will be powerless against the cohesive force of our common literature, the precious inheritance of both the English-speaking peoples.… So long as the novelists and the newspaper men on both sides of the ocean continue to eschew Briticisms and Americanisms, and so long as they indulge in these localisms only in quotation marks, there is no danger that English will ever halve itself into a British language and an American language.

After the war Matthews did some wobbling. He undoubtedly noticed that quotation marks were no longer being used to tag Americanisms, but so late as the time of his contribution to Academy Papers, c. 1923, he continued to believe that “the divergences of speech between the United States and Great Britain are not important, and are not more marked than those between … Boston and Wyoming.” To this he added a sort of hurrah in the form of a solemn declaration, in his character of scholar, that “to the rest of the world German is still an uncouth tongue.” But by 1926 he had so far returned to his first love that he was praising Logan Pearsall Smith, albeit somewhat cautiously, for speaking kindly of Americanisms in “Words and Idioms.” I quote:

I have called attention more particularly to Mr. Pearsall Smith’s friendly attitude toward American words and phrases, usages and idioms, because I find here evidence of a change of heart in our kin across the sea. Time was when to stigmatize a verbal novelty as an Americanism was to condemn it utterly. Most of those who took on themselves the duty of defending our common tongue did not doubt that the English language belonged exclusively to the British. They felt — and the feeling was natural enough — that the language was the exclusive possession of the inhabitants of the island where it had come into being. It is pleasant to see signs that this jealousy is now dying a natural death. It was pleasant indeed, to behold our right to our linguistic heritage cordially recognized in the review of Mr. Pearsall Smith’s book in the Literary Supplement of the London Times.⁸⁸

If any speaker arose at the Columbia Conference to defend American speechways, the fact did not appear in the published reports. Apparently, all the assembled “professors of English,” whether actual Englishmen or only American colonials, were of like mind with Drs. Scott and van Dyke. On the lower levels of pedagogy there is the same general attitude. As I have noted, the National Council of Teachers of English, like the American Academy of Arts and Letters, frequently toys with the project of setting up machinery for “purifying” the language, and there are innumerable minor bands of schoolmarms, male and female, consecrated to the same end. But there is a party in the National Council, as in the American Academy, that dissents. One of its spokesmen is J. C. Tressler, head of the English department of the Richmond Hill High-School, New York City. Writing in the English Journal, College Edition, in April, 1934, he said:

Although thousands of English teachers [i.e., in the United States] with the blood of crusaders and martyrs in their veins have for decades fought heroically against the corruption and utter ruin of English, their warfare has had by and large slight effect on the language.… It’s hardly wise for the National Council at this late date to attempt to confine it in a strait-jacket.

6. THE VIEWS OF WRITING MEN

The great majority of American writers have always held out against the dominant pedagogical opinion, in this as in other matters. In every age, of course, there have been pedantic fellows who out-schoolmarmed the schoolmarms in their devotion to grammatical, syntactical and lexicographical niceties — Ambrose Bierce suggests himself as a good example⁸⁹ —, and in every age there have been Anglomaniacs of great earnestness — for example, Washington Irving and Henry James,⁹⁰ not to mention Matthews, van Dyke, and the other faithful colonials of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, already mentioned. But not many writers of the first distinction have belonged to either faction, and among the lesser ranks there has always been an active movement in the other direction. After the War of 1812, after the Civil War, and again after the World War there were deliberate efforts, among the literati as well as among the folk, to throw off English precept and example altogether, and among the authors concerned were such respectable figures as J. Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis.

So long ago as 1820, in the twenty-seventh number of the North American Review, Edward Everett sought to turn the fire of the English reviews by arguing that the common language was not only spoken better in America than in England, but also better written. He said:

We challenge any critic who shall maintain the corruption of the English language in America to assume whatever standard he shall choose of the English, the standard of dictionaries, or of good writers, or of good company; and whatever standard be taken, we engaged to detect in English writers of respectable standing, and in respectable English society, more provincialisms, more good words in false acceptations, and more newly coined words, than can be found in an equal number of American writers, or in American society, of the same relative respectability. We think we should begin such a comparison with the number of the Edinburgh Review for March, 1817…. For in the first article of that number we fell upon forty-six words not authorized by the standards of our language. The English language corrupted in America! What are the Columbiads, or Webster’s Dictionaries, or any other name of American innovation, compared with the lucubrations of Jeremy Bentham!

In the North American for July, 1821, in a review of an anti-American article in the New London Monthly Magazine for February of the same year, Everett returned to the subject, arguing that “on the whole, the English language is better spoken here than in England,” and that “there is no part of America in which the corruption of the language has gone so far as in the heart of the English counties.” He did not advocate a severance of American from English, but he insisted that, in the cases of many differences already noticeable, the American practise was better than the English. “We presume,” he concluded somewhat loftily, “that the press set up by the American missionaries in the Sandwich Islands will furnish a good deal better English than Mr. Bentham’s Church-of-Englandism.”

Everett was supported by a number of other authors of the time, including, as I have already noted, Paulding, Timothy Dwight, and J. Fenimore Cooper, whose early Anglomania was by then only a memory. In the second volume of his “Notions of the Americans,” printed anonymously in 1828, but quickly recognized as his and acknowledged by him, Cooper argued stoutly against the artificial English standards, mainly out of the Eighteenth Century, that the contemporary grammarians were trying to impose upon American, and contended that it should be left to its own devices, with due regard, of course, for reason, analogy, and any plausible indigenous authority that might develop. He went on:

This we are daily doing, and I think the consequence will be that in another generation or two far more reasonable English will be used in this country than exists here now.… I think it will be just as much the desire of England then to be in our fashion as it was our desire twenty years ago to be in hers.

In “The American Democrat,” published in 1838, Cooper set himself up as the indigenous authority he had anticipated ten years before. By this time the American language was far gone upon the grand bust that had begun with the Jackson uprising, and there was a tremendous flow of neologisms from the West. The “common faults” of the popular speech, according to Cooper, were “an ambition of eifect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.” He denounced the democratic substitution of boss for master, and of help for servant, and preached a smug sermon upon the true meaning of lady and gentleman. “To call a laborer, one who has neither education, manners, accomplishments, tastes, associations, nor any one of the ordinary requisites, a gentleman,” he said,” is just as absurd as to call one who is thus qualified a fellow,… [A true gentleman] never calls his wife his lady, but his wife, and he is not afraid of lessening the dignity of the human race by styling the most elevated and refined of his fellow creatures men and women.” Waspish words, but they at least avoided the pedantry of the pedagogues, and yielded no more than its just due to English precedent.

The first really full-length defense of American by an American appeared in a volume of “Cambridge Essays, Contributed by Members of the University,” published in London in 1855. Its author was Charles Astor Bristed, a grandson of John Jacob Astor and one of the forgotten worthies of his era. He was graduated from Yale in 1839 and then went to Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1845. After that he devoted himself to literary endeavor, and during the next thirty years lived chiefly at Washington. There he gathered a small coterie of dilettanti about him, and became a sort of forerunner of Henry Adams. In 1852 he published “Five Years in an English University,” and three years later he was asked to contribute to the aforesaid volume of “Cambridge Essays.” His contribution bore the title of “The English Language in America”; it remains to this day, despite a few aberrations, the most intelligent brief discussion of the subject ever printed. He began by denouncing the notion, prevalent then as now, that the study of American was somehow undignified, and proceeded to argue that it was really worth any scholar’s while “to investigate the course of a great living language, transplanted from its primitive seat, brought into contact and rivalry with other civilized tongues, and exposed to various influences, all having a prima facie tendency to modify it.” He then proceeded to dispose of the familiar arguments against the existence of an American form of English, later to be reassembled and reinforced by Lounsbury — (1) that most Americanisms “can be traced to an English source,” (2) that “the number of actually new words invented in America is very small,” (3) that “the deviations from standard English which occur in America are fewer and less gross than those which may be found in England herself,” and so on. Here is a specimen passage from his caveat to the first two propositions, which he grouped together as embodying a single argument:

We admit this argument to be true, so far as it goes; but it does not go so far, by any means, as its supporters imagine. They seem to forget that there is such a thing as applying a new meaning to existing words, and of this novelty the examples in America are sufficiently numerous. Thus creek is a perfectly legitimate English word, but its legitimate English meaning is “a small arm of the sea,” whereas in America it is invariably used to designate a small river, except when it happens to be used to designate a large one. Draw is an old-established English verb, but the Americans have further employed it as a noun, and made it do duty for draw-bridge.

The third proposition Bristed answered thus:

This is the line of argument which sometimes develops itself into the amusingly paradoxical assertion that the Americans speak better English than the English themselves. But such reasoning is on a par with that of one who should consider himself to have demonstrated that the upper classes of America were richer than those of England by showing that the lower classes of England were poorer than those of America, or that the average wealth of the American population per head was greater than that of the English. There is no inconsistency in admitting that the worst English patois may be less intelligible than the worst American, and yet maintaining that the best currently spoken American contains appreciable deviations from the true English standard. The English provincialisms keep their place; they are confined to their own particular localities, and do not encroach on the metropolitan model. The American provincialisms are most equally distributed through all classes and localities, and though some of them may not rise above a certain level of society, others are heard everywhere. The senate or the boudoir is no more sacred from their intrusions than the farm-house or the tavern.

Bristed argued boldly that in many ways American usage was already superior to English. He defended, for example, the American use of sick, and the American practise, borrowed from the Northern British dialects, of sounding the h in such words as which and wheel. In any case, he said, the Americans were perfectly free to modify their language as they pleased, and no conceivable pressure could dissuade them. Many American inventions had already “settled down into and become established in the language. Talented is a familiar example. It is of little use to inveigh against such words — there they are in full possession, and cannot be turned out.” In conclusion he thus philosophized:

Possibly, some of the American expressions are in themselves, abstracdy and philosophically considered, better than the English; but this is not all that the jus et norma loquendi demands. Every language contains idioms and phrases philosophically reprehensible, as is clearly shown by the fact that the most ordinary phrases of one language become unmeaning or ludicrous absurdities when translated literally into another. All languages contain terms which have nothing but usage to plead in their favor. In English conversation, the panegyrical adjective of all-work is nice, in America it is fine. Both people often use their pet adjective inappropriately; perhaps the Americans do so in fewer cases than the English.

It was naturally the humorous writers who first began to turn Americanisms to literary uses, for many of the new locutions that came in between the War of 1812 and the Civil War showed a grotesque fancy. As Will D. Howe says in “The Cambridge History of American Literature,”⁹¹ there were two streams of American humor from the beginnings of the national letters — “the one following closely English models, especially Addison, Steele, Defoe, and Goldsmith in the Eighteenth Century, and Lamb, Hood, Jerrold, and Dickens in the Nineteenth Century; the other springing from American soil and the new conditions of American life, and assuming a character as new to the world as the country that produced it.” To the first stream belonged the writings of Franklin, the Hartford Wits, Paulding, Irving and Holmes; to the second that of Seba Smith, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Joseph G. Bailey, Mrs. Frances M. Whicher, Charles G. Halpine, George H. Derby, Henry Wheeler Shaw, David R. Locke, Charles Farrar Browne, and Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain). The pioneers of a really indigenous humor were mainly dialect writers. Smith discovered the riches of the New England dialect (“The Life and Writings of Major Jack Downing”) in 1830; he was followed by Thomas C. Haliburton (“The Clockmaker, or The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick”) in 1837, and by James Russell Lowell (“The Biglow Papers”) in 1848. The Negro dialect, as we know it today, seems to have been formulated by the song-writers for minstrel shows; it did not appear in literature until the time of the Civil War; before that, as George Philip Krapp shows in “The English Language in America,”⁹² it was a vague and artificial lingo which had little relation to the actual speech of the Southern blacks. The Civil War period also saw the rise of the Irish dialect, which seems to have been invented (or discovered) by Halpine, whose Miles O’Reilly sketches began to appear in 1862, and of the German dialect, which first took form in Charles Leland’s “Hans Breitmann’s Ballads” a year or two later. The dialect of the frontier was foreshadowed in Longstreet’s “Georgia Scenes” in 1835, and in Baldwin’s “Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi” in 1853, but it did not displace the Yankee dialect as the typical American patois until Clemens published “The Jumping Frog” in 1867, and John Hay followed with “Pike County Ballads” in 1871.

These humorists, and their successors after them, were keenly conscious of the rich treasures lying in American speech, and whenever they discussed it seriously they argued for its autonomy. Clemens, who employed Americanisms with great freedom, even when he was attempting elegant writing, hailed “the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains” in “Roughing It” in 1872, and ten years later he printed an essay, “Concerning the American Language,” in “The Stolen White Elephant,” with a footnote describing it as “part of a chapter crowded out of ‘A Tramp Abroad’ ” (1880). It is in the form of a dialogue with an Englishman met on a train. “The languages,” says 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 meaning of many old ones.… A nation’s language is a very large matter. It is not simply a manner of speech obtaining among the educated handful; the manner obtaining among the vast uneducated multitude must be considered also.… I could pile up differences until I not only convinced you that English and American are separate languages, but that when I speak my native tongue in its utmost purity an Englishman can’t understand me at all.” Another American humorist, George Ade, came to the same conclusion a quarter of a century later. “The American,” he said in his book of travel, “Pastures New,” in 1906, “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.”

Of the more serious American writers, the first to explore the literary possibilities of the national language was Walt Whitman. Once, in conversation with his fidus Achates, Horace Traubel, he described his “Leaves of Grass” as “only a language experiment — an attempt to give the spirit, the body, the man, new words, new potentialities of speech — an American … range of self-expression. The new world, the new times, the new peoples, the new vistas,” he went on, “need a tongue according — yes, what is more, will have such a tongue — will not be satisfied until it is evolved.”⁹³ During the early 50’s, before the first publication of the “Leaves,” Whitman began the preparation of a lecture entitled “An American Primer,” the burden of which is indicated by an alternative title that he toyed with but finally rejected: “The Primer of Words, For American Young Men and Women, For Literati, Orators, Teachers, Musicians, Judges, Presidents, &c.” This lecture was apparently never delivered, and the manuscript remained unpublished at Whitman’s death in 1892. Twelve years later, in April, 1904, it was printed in the Atlantic Monthly, with a prefatory note by Traubel. It was an eloquent plea for national independence in language, and in particular for the development of an American style, firmly grounded upon the speech of everyday. “The Americans,” said Whitman, “are going to be the most fluent and melodious voiced people in the world — and the most perfect users of words.”

I see that the time is nigh when the etiquette of salons is to be discharged from that great thing, the renovated English speech in America. The occasions of the English speech in America are immense, profound — stretch over ten thousand vast cities, over through thousands of years, millions of miles of meadows, farms, mountains, men. The occasions of salons are for a coterie, a bon soir or two — involve waiters standing behind chairs, silent, obedient, with backs that can bend and must often bend.… Ten thousand native idiomatic words are growing, or are today already grown, out of which vast numbers could be used by American writers, with meaning and effect — words that would be welcomed by the nation, being of the national blood, — words that would give that taste of identity and locality which is so dear in literature.

Whitman ranged himself squarely against the pedagogues who, then as now, were trying to police American English, and bring it into accord with literary English. “Nobody ever actually talks,” he said, “as books and plays talk.” He argued that there should be a dictionary of the common speech, and that some attempt should be made to ascertain its grammar.

The Real Dictionary will give all the words that exist in use, the bad words as well as any. The Real Grammar will be that which declares itself a nucleus of the spirit of the laws, with liberty to all to carry out the spirit of the laws, even by violating them, if necessary.… These States are rapidly supplying themselves with new words, called for by new occasions, new facts, new politics, new combinations. Far plentier additions will be needed, and, of course, will be supplied.… Many of the slang words are our best; slang words among fighting men, gamblers, thieves, are powerful words.… The appetite of the people of These States, in popular speeches and writings, is for unhemmed latitude, coarseness, directness, live epithets, expletives, words of opprobrium, resistance. This I understand because I have the taste myself as large, as largely, as any one. I have pleasure in the use, on fit occasions, of — traitor, coward, liar, shyster, skulk, doughface, trickster, mean cuss, backslider, thief, impotent, lickspittle.… I like limber, lasting, fierce words. I like them applied to myself — and I like them in newspapers, courts, debates, Congress. Do you suppose the liberties and the brawn of These States have to do only with delicate lady-words? with gloved gentleman words? Bad Presidents, bad judges, bad clients, bad editors, owners of slaves, and the long ranks of Northern political suckers (robbers, traitors, suborned), monopolists, infidels,… shaved persons, supplejacks, ecclesiastics, men not fond of women, women not fond of men, cry down the use of strong, cutting, beautiful, rude words. To the manly instincts of the People they will be forever welcome.

At a time, says Louis Untermeyer, “when the rest of literary America was still indulging in the polite language of pulpits and the lifeless rhetoric of its libraries, Whitman not only sensed the richness and vigor of the casual word, the colloquial phrase — he championed the vitality of slang, and freshness of our quickly assimilated jargons, the indigenous beauty of vulgarisms. He even predicted that no future native literature could exist that neglected this racy speech, that the vernacular of people as opposed to the language of literati would form the living accents of the best poets to come. One has only to observe the contemporary works of Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay and a dozen others to see how his prophecy has been fulfilled. Words, especially the neglected words regarded as too crude and literal for literature, fascinated Whitman. The idea of an enriched language was scarcely ever out of his mind.… This interest … grew to great proportions; it became almost an obsession.”⁹⁴ As everyone knows, Whitman was an assiduous word-coiner himself, and many of his inventions will be recalled — for example, the verbs to promulge, to eclaircise, to diminute, to imperturbe, to effuse, and to inure, the adjectives ostent, omnigenous, and adamic, the adverb affetuoso, and the nouns presidentiad, deliveress, civilizee, literat, acceptress, yawp, and partiolist. A large number of his coinages were in foreign, and especially in Romance metal; he believed that American should not be restricted to the materials of English, and he made frequent use of such French terms as allons, feuillage, habitan, savant, ma femme, mon cher, militaire, rapport and éclaircissement, and of such Spanish and pseudo-Spanish terms as libertad, camerado, vaquero and Americano.⁹⁵ I have heard it argued that he introduced finale into common American usage; the evidence is dubious, but certainly the word is much oftener employed in the United States than in England. Most of his coinages, alas, died with him, but yawp and These States have survived. Among his literary remains were many notes upon American speechways, and he often discussed the subject with Traubel. In November, 1885, he printed an article on “Slang in America” in the North American Review, and afterward included it in “November Boughs” (1888).⁹⁶

Whitman got support in his time from James Russell Lowell and John Fiske, and a little later from William Dean Howells. Lowell undertook the defense of Americanisms in his preface to the first series of “The Biglow Papers” (1848). “The English,” he said, “have complained of us for coining new words. Many of those so stigmatized were old ones by them forgotten, and all make now an unquestioned part of the currency, wherever English is spoken. Undoubtedly, we have a right to make new words as they are needed by the fresh aspects under which life presents itself here in the New World; and, indeed, wherever a language is alive, it grows. It might be questioned whether we could not establish a stronger title to the ownership of the English tongue than the mother-islanders themselves. Here, past all question, is to be its great home and center. And not only is it already spoken here in greater numbers, but with a far higher popular average of correctness than in Britain.” Fiske, writing home from England in 1873, reported that the English pronunciation grated upon his sensibilities. “The English,” he said, “talk just like Germans. So much guttural is very unpleasant, especially as half the time I can’t understand them, and have to say, ‘ I beg your pardon? ’ Our American enunciation is much pleasanter to the ear.”⁹⁷

Howells, in 1886, 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.’ … It has always been supposed by grammarians and purists that a language can be kept as they find it, but languages, while they live, are perpetually changing. God apparently meant them for the common people,… and the common people will use them freely, as they use other gifts of God. On their lips our continental English will differ more and more from the insular English, and we believe that this is not deplorable, but desirable.… We have only to leave our studies, editorial or other, and go into the shops and fields to find the ‘spacious times of great Elizabeth’ again.” In the same article Howells advised the young American novelists of the day to give their ears to regional speechways, and quoted what Alphonse Daudet once said of Turgenev: “What a luxury it must be to have a big untrodden barbarian language to wade into!” “We hope,” he concluded, “that our inherited English may be constantly freshened and revived from the native sources which literary decentralization will help to keep open.”⁹⁸

The literature of the subject has taken on large proportions in recent years, and contributions to it have been made by authors as diverse as Vachel Lindsay and Rupert Hughes, Ernest Boyd and Richard Burton. For one article on Americanisms in the philological journals there are at least fifty in the popular magazines. Burton, with a long career as a teacher of English behind him, is convinced that the pedagogical effort to police the national speech will fail. “The pundit, the pedant, and the professor,” he says, “who are fain to stem the turbid tide of the popular vernacular may suffer pain; but they can have little influence on the situation. Even college-bred folk revert to type and use people’s speech — when they are from under the restraining, corrective monitions of academic haunts — in a way to shock, amuse, or encourage, according to the point of view.”⁹⁹ Hughes has written on the subject more than once, and always with great vigor. “Could anyone imagine an English author,” he says, “hesitating to use a word because of his concern as to the ability of American readers to understand it and approve it?… Why should he permit the survival of the curious notion that our language is a mere loan from England, like a copper kettle that we must keep scoured and return without a dent?”

Americans who try to write like Englishmen are not only committed to an unnatural pose, but doomed as well to failure, above all among the English; for the most likeable thing about the English is their contempt for the hyphenated imitation Englishmen from the States, who only emphasize their nativity by their apish antics. The Americans who have triumphed among them have been, almost without exception, peculiarly American.… Let us sign a Declaration of Literary Independence and formally begin to write, not British, but Unitedstatish. For there is such a language, a brilliant, growing, glowing, vivacious, elastic language for which we have no specific name.… Whatever we call it, let us cease to consider it a vulgar dialect of English, to be used only with deprecation. Let us study it in its splendid efflorescence, be proud of it, and true to it. Let us put off livery, cease to be the butlers of another people’s language, and try to be the masters and the creators of our own.¹⁰⁰

Lindsay, who gave the subtitle of “Rhymes in the American Language” to “The Golden Whales of California,” published in 1920, had his say on the subject under the heading of “The Real American Language” in the American Mercury for March, 1928. He began by recounting “a few delusions in regard to the United States language.” One of them, he said, “is that it came in with the ultra-flappers and the most saxophonish of the jazz, after Armistice Day.” Another is that “the United States language is a New York novelty.”

It is really a new vocabulary arranged on an old British framework. It is true that the new vocabulary pours every day into our growing dictionaries, but this vocabulary is apt to mislead one. A smart phrase or new word is not the United States language. The very framework is as old as the writings of Captain John Smith of Virginia.… Wherever there is a touch of Virginia left, there is the United States language. The United States language is Virginia with the r put back into it.… When you reach the land of “Old Dan Tucker” and “Clementine” and the places where they sing the song, “Tell Me the Tale That I Once Held So Dear,” you are getting into the region of the United States language in its essential fluency.… Mark Twain writes Virginian with the r put back into his alphabet when speaking in his own person.

The Irish brethren naturally range themselves on the side of autonomy for American English, and are firm believers in its merits: not many of them show any trace of Anglomania. Whenever the English reviews and newspapers begin one of their periodical denunciations of Americanisms, these Celts rush to the rescue. Thus Murray Godwin of Detroit sought the hospitality of the Irish Statesman in 1926 to flog and flay two English critics of American speech-ways, one writing in the Quarterly Review and the other in the Manchester Guardian Weekly. In the following burning words he paid his respects to the former:

The author of this particular piece of refined skullduggery … quotes … a personal notice written by a Jewish clothing merchant, and containing some characteristic Yiddish English, to prove that grammar is no longer honored even in the written language of American business men. Of course we have come to expect such tactics on the part of our British step-cousins, whose reputation for fair play has been so firmly established by tradition that it has no longer any need to be supported by example.… Though I feel touched damn nigh to tears when I picture this noble Briton in the throes of molding and milling this length of literary leadpipe with which to bash the blinking Yank, I shall not pass up the chance to point out that his implication that English is a pure and integrated growth, while American is a nondescript tangle of underbrush, would seem to stem from a scholarly logic turned sour by contact with the viewpoint of an intestinally-constricted and malicious if unmuscular nitwit.¹⁰¹

To which may be added a few calmer reflections by Ernest Boyd:

The time has passed when the English language could be claimed as the exclusive idiom of Britain, much less of any restricted area of England. Today it is the tongue of millions who have no other language, but have also no other tie with the country from which English came. There is no authority which can enforce the recognition of a Standard English that does not exist, save in the imagination of a few people in London. When these people write or speak they betray their place of origin as definitely as a native of New York or Edinburgh. Their assumption that, while the latter are strange and provincial, they are standard and authoritative, is merely an illustration of self-complacent provincialism. It is an assumption which the great English-speaking world does not and cannot admit.¹⁰²

7. THE POLITICAL FRONT

The American newspapers labor the subject constantly, but not often with much perspicacity. In general, they favor freedom for American from English-imposed rules, but there is a minority that pleads for conformity. Now and then politicians looking for popularity raise the banner of independence, and propose to give it reality by the characteristic American device of passing a law, but such plans seldom get beyond the stage of tall talk. They go back to the earliest days of the Republic. William Gifford, the bitterly anti-American editor of the Quarterly Review, is authority for the story that at the close of the Revolution certain members of Congress proposed that the use of English be formally prohibited in the United States, and Hebrew substituted for it.¹⁰³ Bristed, in his essay, “The English Language in America,” 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.” How a committee of the Continental Congress, in 1778, recommended that “the language of the United States” be used in all “replies or answers” to the French ambassador I have already noted. Seventy-six years later a similar order was issued by the celebrated William L. Marcy, author of the political maxim, “To the victor belong the spoils.” After a long career in the Senate, Marcy became Secretary of War in the Cabinet of Polk and then Secretary of State in that of Pierce. While holding the latter post he issued a circular to all American diplomatic and consular officers, instructing them to employ only “the American language” in communicating with him. That was in 1854. After another septuagenarian interval, on May 9, 1927, Andrew W. Mellon, as Secretary of the Treasury, ordered that the redemption call for the Second Liberty Loan be advertised “in every daily paper printed in the American language throughout the United States.”

In the North American Review for April, 1820, Edward Everett printed “a jeu d’esprit which has fallen in our way, under the name of ‘Report of Resolutions to be proposed in the House of Representatives’ … to return the compliment paid to us by the Marquis of Lansdowne, in the session [of Parliament] of 1819, in moving for an inquiry into the conduct of General Jackson.” I can find no record that these resolutions were ever actually introduced in the House; indeed, they were probably written by Everett himself, or by one of his collaborators on the North American. But they fell in very well with the temper of the time, and if any member had dropped them into the basket it is certain that they would have received a large number of votes. They began with long satirical whereases directed at the English reviewers, and proceeded to deplore the corruption of the language in the Motherland, “to the degree that the various dialects which prevail, such as those in Yorkshire, Somersetshire and Cumberland, at the same time that they are in themselves utterly uncouth and hideous, are unintelligible to anyone but a person born and educated in these counties respectively.” Then came this:

The House farther regards, as still more pernicious,… that barbarity which from various causes is fast creeping into the language of the highest and best educated classes of society in England …; an affectation, at one time, of forgotten old words, and at another of pedantic new ones, each equally unauthorized in a pure and chaste style of writing and of speaking; the perpetual recurrence of the plural number, instead of the singular, as charities, sympathies, tendencies, &c, a phraseology which tends in a high degree to weaken a language, by leading writers and speakers to place that emphasis in the grammatical plurality, which ought to reside in the term itself; an unwise attempt to ennoble such words as clever, you know, vastly, &c. which are pardonable only in colloquial use, and unworthy the dignity of grave and sustained discourse; an adoption by noblemen, gentlemen, and clergymen, of the terms of horse-jockeys, boxers and shooters, to the degree that a great number of vulgar and cant terms are heard in what are called the best circles;… and lastly, an alarming prevalence of profane and obscene language,… which, though it is unhappily a vice too common in all countries, the House has unquestioned information prevails in England to an unparalleled and odious extent, reaching into the societies which consider themselves the most polite and best bred.

Finally, after a sonorous declaration that in the United States the language has been “preserved in a state of admirable purity” and was, “by the blessing of God, quite untainted with most of the above mentioned vulgarities prevalent in the highest English circles,” the resolutions concluded:

Resolved, in consideration of these premises, that the nobility and gentry of England be courteously invited to send their elder sons, and such others as may be destined to appear as public speakers in church or state, to America, for their education; that the President of the United States be requested to concert measures with the presidents and heads of our colleges and schools for the prompt reception and gratuitous instruction of such young persons, and to furnish them, after the expiration of a term of — years, certificates of their proficiency in the English tongue.

The Middle West has always been the chief center of linguistic chauvinism, and so early as February 15, 1838, the Legislature of Indiana, in an act established the State university at Bloomington, provided that it should instruct the youth of the new Commonwealth (which had been admitted to the Union in 1816) “in the American, learned and foreign languages … and literature.” Nearly a century later, in 1923, there was a violent upsurging of the same patriotic spirit, and bills making the American language official (but never clearly defining it) were introduced in the Legislatures of Illinois, North Dakota, Minnesota and other States. At the same time the Hon. Washington Jay McCormick, then a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Montana, offered a similar bill in Congress. It ran as follows:

A BILL

To define the national and official language of the Government and people of the United States of America, including the Territories and dependencies thereof.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the national and official language of the Government and people of the United States of America, including Territories and dependencies thereof, is hereby defined as and declared to be the American language.

Sec. 2. That all Acts and parts of Acts of Congress, including regulations of the departments of Government, wherein the speaking, reading, writing, or knowledge of the English language is set forth as a requirement for purposes of naturalization, immigration, official, legal, or other like use, shall be deemed emended to the extent of substituting in the text for the word English the word American.

Sec. 3. That, until Congress shall make specific provision for the official and more particular standardization of the American language, words and phrases generally accepted as being in good use by the people of the United States of America shall constitute a part of the American language for all legal purposes.

Sec. 4. That this Act shall be in full force and effect six months after its passage and approval.

The Hon. Mr. McCormick thus explained the purposes behind his bill:

I might say I would supplement the political emancipation of ’76 by the mental emancipation of ’23. America has lost much in literature by not thinking its own thoughts and speaking them boldly in a language unadorned with gold braid. It was only when Cooper, Irving, Mark Twain, Whitman, and O. Henry dropped the Order of the Garter and began to write American that their wings of immortality sprouted. Had Noah Webster, instead of styling his monumental work the American Dictionary of the English Language, written a Dictionary of the American Language, he would have become a founder instead of a compiler. Let our writers drop their top-coats, spats, and swagger-sticks, and assume occasionally their buckskin, moccasins, and tomahawks.¹⁰⁴

Despite this ringing appeal to the red-blooded Americanism of Congress, the Hon. Mr. McCormick was never able to rescue his bill from the dungeons of the Judiciary Committee, and there it died the Heldentod at the end of the session. The Hon. Frank Ryan, a member of the Illinois State Senate from Chicago, was more fortunate, for his bill “establishing the American language as the official language of the State of Illinois,” introduced on January 10, 1923, became a law on June 19, albeit with certain discreet changes. In its original form it was as follows:

Whereas, Since the creation of the American Republic there have been certain Tory elements in our country who have never become reconciled to our republican institutions and have ever clung to the tradition of King and Empire; and

Whereas, The assumed dominance of this Tory element in the social, business and political life of America tends to force the other racial units, in self-defense, to organize on racial lines, thus creating nations without a nation and fostering those racial and religious differences which lead to disunion and disintegration; and

Whereas, The supreme problem of American statesmen, and supreme desire of American patriots, is to weld the racial units into a solid American nation in the sense that England, France and Germany are nations; and

Whereas, The name of the language of a country has a powerful influence in stimulating and preserving the national ideal; and

Whereas, The languages of other countries bear the name of the countries to which they belong, the language of Germany being called German; of France, French; of England, English; and so on; and

Whereas, Our government, laws, customs and ideals as well as our language differ materially from those of England, now therefore;

Sec. 1. Be it enacted by the People of the State of Illinois, represented in the General Assembly: The official language of the State of Illinois shall be known hereafter as the “American” language, and not as the “English” language.

The newspapers of the time reported that only three of the Hon. Mr. Ryan’s fellow Senators voted against his bill, but it seems to have had harder sledding in the lower House, despite the aid of Mayor Big Bill Thompson of Chicago, who was then in the midst of his campaign to keep the snout of King George V out of his bailiwick. At all events, it lost two of its whereases, suffered changes in two others, and gained two new ones. Those expunged were the second, third, and sixth. In place of the second and third, when the bill was finally passed and approved by the Governor, appeared the following:

Whereas, America has been a haven of liberty and place of opportunity for the common people of all nations; and

Whereas, These strangers within our gates who seek economic betterment, political freedom, larger opportunities for their children and citizenship for themselves, come to think of our institutions as American and our language as the American language.

In addition, the word psychological was inserted before influence in the fourth whereas, apparently in deference to the Freudian thought of the time, and the examples were stricken out of the fifth. The sixth disappeared without leaving a trace. This statute is still on the books of Illinois as Chapter 127, Section 178 of the Acts of 1923. But all the similar bills introduced in other Legislatures seem to have failed of passage. The one brought up in Minnesota (H.F. 993, March 8, 1923) was sponsored by two members of the House of Representatives, N. T. Moen and J. N. Jacobson, both of them apparently of Scandinavian origin. It was supported by two enthusiasts, John M. Leonard, president of “the American Foundation” of St. Paul, and A. J. Roberts, editor of the American National Language Magazine, published in the same city. But though the mighty Magnus Johnson also gave it some help, and it had a favorable report from the Committee on Education, it got no further. In 1908 the American-Language Legion was launched in New York “to secure popular use and statutory recognition of the name, the American language, as the exclusive designation of the official language of the United States and its dependencies.” It issued a sticker bearing the word American in six sizes of type, and many times repeated. The idea was that “whenever friends of this movement encounter, in any of their books, any name sought to be relegated by the American-Language Legion, American in a corresponding size of type may be sheared from this sheet and pasted over, making it read: the American language.” But this ingenious scheme seems to have come to nothing also.

Meanwhile, the plain people of England and the United States, whenever they come into contact, find it difficult to effect a fluent exchange of ideas. This was made distressingly apparent during the World War. When the American troops began to pour into France in 1917, fraternizing with the British was impeded, not so much because of hereditary animosities as because of the wide divergence in vocabulary and pronunciation between the doughboy and Tommy Atkins — a divergence interpreted by each as low mental visibility in the other. There was very little movement of slang from one camp to the other, and that little ran mainly from the American side to the British. The Y.M.C.A., always pathetically eager for the popularity that it could never gain, made a characteristic effort to turn the feeling of strangeness 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. clubhouse in the Avenue Montaigne, “where American is spoken.” At about the same time an enterprising London tobacconist, Peters by name, affixed a sign bearing the legend “American spoken here” to the front of his shop, and soon he was imitated by hundreds of other London, Liverpool and Paris shopkeepers. Such signs are still familiar all over Europe, and they have begun to appear in Asia.¹⁰⁵

8. FOREIGN OBSERVERS

The continental awareness of the growing differences between English and American is demonstrated by the fact that some of the popular German Sprachführer now appear in separate editions, Amerikanisch and Englisch. This is true, for example, of the Metoula-Sprachführer and of the Polyglott Kuntze books.¹⁰⁶ 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 and popcorn — and a number of others would suggest false meanings or otherwise puzzle — e.g., saloon, wash-stand, water-pitcher and apple-pie.¹⁰⁷ In the “Neokosmos Sprachfuhrer durch England- Amerika”¹⁰⁸ there are many notes calling attention to differences between American and English usage, e.g., baggage-luggage, car-carriage, conductor-guard. The authors are also forced to enter into explanations of the functions of the boots in an English hotel and of the clerk in an American hotel, and they devote a whole section to a discourse upon the nature and uses of such American beverages as whiskey-sours, Martini-cocktails, silver-fizzes, John-Collinses, and ice-cream sodas.¹⁰⁹ There are many special guides to the American language in German — for example, “The Little Yankee,” by Alfred D. Schoch and R. Kron (Freiburg, 1912), “Uncle Sam and His English,” by W. K. Pfeiler and Elisabeth Wittmann (Berlin, 1932); and “Spoken American,” by S. A. Nock and H. Mutschmann (Leipzig, 1930). It is also dealt with at length in various more general guides — for example, “Hauptfragen der Amerikakunde,” by Walther Fischer (Bielefeld, 1928); “The American Wonderland,” by S. A. Nock and G. Kamitsch (Leipzig, 1930); and “America of Today,” by Frau Voight-Goldsmith and D. Borchard (Berlin, 1929). Nor is it overlooked by pedagogues. I have before me a circular of the Lessing Hochschule in Berlin, offering courses in both Amerikanisch and Englisch — two for Anfanger, one for Vorgebildete, and one for Fortgeschrittene — each of eight weeks, and at a fee of ten marks. The American language also gets attention in a number of French, Italian and Scandinavian guide-books for immigrants and travelers; in one of them¹¹⁰ I find definitions of butterine, cat-boat, clawhammer, co-ed, craps, dago, dumb-waiter, faker, freeze-out, gusher, hard-cider, hen-party, jitney, mortician, panhandle, patrolman, sample-room, shyster, sleuth, wet (noun), dry (noun), headcheese and overhead-expenses. The standard guide-books for tourists always call attention to the differences between the English and American vocabularies. Baedeker’s “United States” has a glossary for Englishmen likely to be daunted by such terms as el, European-plan and sundae, and in Muirhead’s “London and Its Environs” there is a corresponding one for Americans, warning them that bug means only bed-bug in England, that a clerk there is never a shopman, and that homely means domestic, unpretending, homelike, never plain-looking, and giving them the meanings of trunk-call, hoarding, goods-train, spanner and minerals.

From the earliest days the peculiarities of American have attracted the attention of Continental philologians, and especially of the Germans. The first edition of Bartlett’s Glossary (1848) brought forth a long review in the Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen (Braunschweig) by Dr. Felix Flügel, and in 1866 Dr. Friedrich Köhler published a “Wörterbuch der Americanismen,” based on it. In subsequent volumes of the Archiv and in the other German philological journals there have been frequent discussions of the subject by Ludwig Herrig, Karl Knortz, Johannes Hoops, Hermann U. Meysenberg, Ed. O. Paget, Paul Heyne, Georg Kartzke, Walther Fischer, Fritz Karpf, Martin Pawlik and H. Lüdeke. It has also been discussed at length in the German lay press, especially by C. A. Bratter, Friedrich Schonemann and Arnold Schöer. It is common in German for translations of American books to bear the words aus dem Amerikanischen on their title-pages, and the term is frequently in use otherwise.¹¹¹ Like his German colleagues, Dr. Otto Jespersen of Copenhagen, perhaps the first living authority on modern English, is greatly interested in Americanisms, and at one time contemplated doing a book on them. The third edition of the present work was translated into German with a commentary by Dr. Heinrich Spies of Berlin in 1927,¹¹² and the same scholar has lectured on the subject at Berlin, Greifswald and elsewhere. Various Dutch and Belgian philologians, among them Barentz, Keijzer, Aronstein, Zandvoort, Peeters, and van der Voort, have published studies of American, and so have various Frenchmen and Italians; and at the University of Paris, in 1921, Ray P. Bowen was appointed lecteur d’américain. At Tartu-Dorpat in Estonia Dr. Heinrich Mutschmann, professor of English in the university there, has printed an excellent Glossary of Americanisms (1931) — in fact, a much better one than any that has come out in America since Thornton’s. Two other foreign scholars who show more interest in American English than is usually displayed at home are Professor Wincenty Lutoslawski, of the University of Wilna in Poland, and Professor Sanki Ichikawa, of the Imperial University at Tokyo. The early editions of the present work brought me into pleasant contact with these gentlemen, and I have received valuable suggestions from both. Says Dr. Ichikawa:

It is a great question with us teachers of English in Japan whether we should teach American English or British English. We have more opportunities for coming into contact with Americans than for meeting Englishmen, but on the other hand books on phonetics are mostly done by English scholars. As to the vocabulary, we are teaching English and American indiscriminately — many of us, perhaps, without knowing which is which.

The literature on Americanisms in Japanese is already of some weight. It includes an excellent formal treatise, “English and American of Today,” by G. Tomita (Tokyo, 1930), and a number of smaller studies. Such monographs as “Japanized English” by S. Aarkawa (Tokyo, 1930) and “English Influence on Japanese,” by Dr. Ichikawa (Tokyo, 1928) give a great deal of attention to American forms. The Russians are also conscious of the difference between the two languages, and there is a party at Moscow which holds that American should be taught in the schools, not English. As yet this party does not seem to have prevailed, but so long ago as March, 1930, it was bold enough to propose the following resolutions at a conference of teachers of language at Moscow:

1. Oxford English is an aristocratic tongue purposely fostered by the highest British governing and land-holding classes in order to maintain their icy and lofty exclusiveness.

2. It is not used by the majority of the residents in Great Britain and certainly not by its intelligent working class elements.

3. It is not used by the majority of English-speaking peoples the world over.

4. The aristocracy is introducing all sorts of affectations, such as the chopping short of syllables and the swallowing of the terminations of words, in order to make it all the more difficult for anyone else to speak the language in their manner.

5. The American language is more democratic, for the employing classes speak no differently from their employes. It is more standard, due originally to the settlement of the West by Easterners, and lately due to the radio and talkies.

6. The American language is more alive and picturesque, tending more to simplification both as to spelling and grammar.

7. Linguist “purity” is mere fiction for language does not grow out of the air, but is determined by particular social conditions and in a measure is a reflex of these conditions. Language purity at best reflects a pedantic attitude and at worst an attitude either aristocratic or chauvinistic.

8. Since American engineers are preferred by the Soviet authorities to the English, since the latest industrial technique finds its highest development in the United States, good American English serves Soviet purposes best.¹¹³

The apparent feeling of so many American philologians that giving serious study to the common speech of their country would be beneath their dignity is not shared by their European colleagues. In England the local dialects have been investigated for many years, and there is a formidable literature on slang, stretching back to the Sixteenth Century and including a glossary in seven large volumes. In France, as in Germany, Italy and Japan, a linguistic atlas has been published,¹¹⁴ and the Société des Parlers de France makes diligent inquiries into changing forms; moreover, the Academie itself is endlessly concerned with the subject. There is, besides, a constant outpouring of books by private investigators, of which “Le Langage populaire,” by Henry Banche, is a good example. In Germany, amid many other such works, there are admirable grammars of all the dialects. In Sweden there are several journals devoted to the study of the vulgate, and the government has granted a subvention of 7500 kronor a year to an organization of scholars called the Undersökningen av Svenska Folkmål, formed to investigate it systematically. 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.¹¹⁵ In Spain the Real Academia Espanola de la Lengua is constantly at work upon its great Diccionario, Ortografía and Gramática, and revises them at frequent intervals, 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 large literature on the matter closest at hand, and one finds in it excellent studies of the Portuguese dialect of Brazil, and the variations of Spanish in Mexico, the Argentine, Chili, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay and even Honduras and Costa Rica.¹¹⁶

1 British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, 1933, p. 313.

2 A Voyage to Georgia, Begun in the Year 1735; London, 1744, p. 24. Moore was something of an adventurer. He went to West Africa for the Royal Africa Company in 1730, and got into obscure difficulties on the river Gambia. But when he came to Georgia in 1735 it was in the prosaic character of storekeeper to the colony. He arrived late in the year and remained until July, 1736. In 1738 he was back, staying this time until 1743. His subsequent career is unknown.

3 In the World, No. 102, Dec. 12, 1754. Quoted by Read.

4 The Literary Magazine, Sept.–Oct., 1756. Evans’s book was published in Philadelphia in 1755 by Benjamin Franklin and D. Hall. It was accompanied by the author’s General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America.

5 Secret Journals of the Continental Congress, Vol. II, p. 95. In the earlier editions of the present book I said that these instructions were issued to Franklin on his appointment as Minister to France. Where I picked up the error I don’t recall. It was corrected by the late Fred Newton Scott in the Saturday Review of Literature, Oct. 11, 1924. The instructions to Franklin, dated Oct. 12, 1778, contained no mention of language.

6 Witherspoon’s papers appeared under the heading of The Druid. This list and the foregoing quotation are from No. V, printed on May 9, 1781. The subject was continued in No. VI on May 16, and in No. VII (in two parts) on May 23 and 30. All the papers are reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, edited by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931. They are also to be found in Witherspoon’s Collected Works, edited by Ashbel Green, Vol. IV; New York, 1800–01.

7 The Oxford Dictionary’s first example is dated 1440. After 1652 all the examples cited are American, until 1843, when the usage reappears in England.

8 The letter is reprinted in full in The Beginnings of American English, before cited, pp. 41–43.

9 The full text is in The Beginnings of American English, just cited.

10 For this letter I am indebted to George Philip Krapp: The English Language in America, Vol. I, p. 7.

11 His reference, of course, was to Johnson’s Dictionary, first published in 1755.

12 His Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, a sort of trial balloon, was published in 1806. There is a brief but good account of his dictionary-making in A Survey of English Dictionaries, by M. M. Mathews; London, 1933, pp. 37–45.

13 Published in 1783. There was no national copyright until 1790.

14 Later on in the same essay Webster sought to support this doctrine by undertaking an examination of Johnson, Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Home, Kaims and Blair. Of Johnson he said: “His style is a mixture of Latin and English; an intolerable composition of Latinity, affected smoothness, scholastic accuracy, and roundness of periods.” And of Gibbon: “It is difficult to comprehend his meaning and the chain of his ‘ideas, as fast as we naturally read.… The mind of the reader is constantly dazzled by a glare of ornament, or charmed from the subject by the music of the language.”

15 The successive parts of the quotation are from pp. 20, 22, 22–3, and 36.

16 The members of the Philological Society of New York, organized in 1788, were for him, but they were young men of little influence, and their society lasted only a year or so. Webster became a member on March 17, 1788, but on Dec. 20 he left New York. The president was Josiah O. Hoffman and among the members were William Dunlap, the painter and dramatist, and Samuel L. Mitchell. On Aug. 27 Ebenezer Hazard, then Postmaster-General of the Confederation, wrote to a friend in Boston that Webster was “the monarch” of the society. In April, 1788 Webster printed in his American Magazine a notice saying that its purpose was that of “ascertaining and improving the American tongue.” On July 4, 1788 the society passed a resolution approving the first part of his Grammatical Institute. See The Philological Society of New York, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, April, 1934.

17 Contributed to the American Museum for 1788. Under the heading of Philology he said: “Instruction in this branch of literature will become the more necessary in America as our intercourse must soon cease with the bar, the stage and the pulpit of Great Britain, from whence [sic] we received our knowledge of the pronunciation of the English language. Even modern English books should cease to be the models of style in the United States. The present is the age of simplicity of writing in America. The turgid style of Johnson, the purple glare of Gibbon, and even the studied and thick-set metaphors of Junius are all equally unnatural and should not be admitted into our country.”

18 In a letter from Monticello, August 16, to John Waldo, author of Rudiments of English Grammar. On August 12, 1801 Jefferson wrote to James Madison: “I view Webster as a mere pedagogue, of very limited understanding and very strong prejudices and party passion,” but this was with reference to a political matter. In his letter to Waldo, Jefferson adopted Webster’s ideas categorically, and professed to believe that “an American dialect will be formed.”

19 See Towards a Historical Aspect of American Speech Consciousness, by Leon Howard, American Speech, April, 1930.

20 Published in two volumes; Philadelphia and London, 1912. Thornton, who died in 1925, left a large amount of additional material, and its publication was begun in Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. III, 1931.

21 “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy, and sell and torture.” All this was a part of a review of Adam Seybert’s Statistical Annals of the United States, Edinburgh Review, Jan.–May, 1820.

22 University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, No. 1; Madison, Wis., 1918.

23 See A Historical Note on American English, by Leon Howard, American Speech, Sept., 1927.

24 Cairns says that the Edinburgh, the Anti-Jacobin, the Quarterly, and the European Magazine and London Review were especially virulent. He says that the Monthly, despite my quotations, was always “kindly toward America” and that the Eclectic was, “on the whole, fair.” The Literary Magazine and British Review he describes as enthusiastically pro-American, but it lived only a short time.

25 November, 1796. I take what follows from Cairns.

26 Salisbury, 1796. Wansey stayed but two months, and his journey was confined to the region between Boston and Philadelphia.

27 Published in Edinburgh in 1833, and reprinted in Philadelphia the same year. The book did not bear Hamilton’s name, but was ascribed on the title page to “the author of ‘Cyril Thornton.’ ” Hamilton was a younger brother to Sir William Hamilton, the metaphysician, and a friend to Sir Walter Scott. He was himself a frequent contributor to Blackwood’s. “Cyril Thornton,” published in 1827, was a successful novel, and remained in favor for many years. Hamilton died in 1842. “Men and Manners in America” was translated into French and twice into German.

28 Gifford was a killer in general practise, and his onslaughts on Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats are still remembered. He retired from the Quarterly in 1824 with a fortune of £ 25,000 — the first magazine editor in history to make it pay. On his death in 1826 he was solemnly buried in Westminster Abbey. The Quarterly, despite its anti-American ferocity, was regularly reprinted in Boston. But when its issue for July, 1823 appeared with an extraordinarily malignant review of William Faux’s Memorable Days in America (London, 1823) the American publishers were warned that it contained a libel on “a distinguished individual at Washington,” and accordingly withheld it.

29 See also The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I; New York, 1917, pp. 205–8; As Others See Us, by John Graham Brooks; New York, 1909, Ch. VII; James Kirke Paulding, by Amos L. Her-old; New York, 1926, Ch. IV; American Social History as Recorded by British Travellers, by Allan Nevins; New York, 1923, pp. 3–26 and pp. 111–138; One Hundred Years of Peace, by Henry Cabot Lodge: New York, 1913, pp. 41–55; and The English Traveller in America, 1785–1835, by Jane Louise Mesick; New York, 1922, pp. 241–45. There is a brief but comprehensive view of the earlier period in British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, 1933. A bibliography of British books of American travel is in The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 468–90, and another, annotated, in Nevins, pp. 555–68.

30 American Social History as Recorded by British Travelers; New York, 1923, p. 3.

31 In his essay, Colonialism in America, in Studies in History; Boston, 1884.

32 At that time both words were neologisms. The Oxford Dictionary’s first example of gullibility is dated 1793. So late as 1818 it was denounced by the Rev. H. J. Todd, one of the improvers of Johnson’s Dictionary, as “a low expression, sometimes used for cullibility.” The Oxford’s first example of to diddle is dated 1806.

33 This book, like John Bull and Brother Jonathan, seems to have had readers for a generation or more. So late as 1867 the Scribners brought out a new edition of the two in a single volume, under the title of The Bulls and Jonathans, with a preface by William I. Paulding. It still makes amusing reading.

34 The quotations are from pp. 127–9.

35 The letter appears in John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens; London, 1872–74; Book III, Chapter V. It is reprinted in Allan Nevins’s American Social History as Recorded by British Travelers; New York, 1923, p. 268. It was written on a canal-boat nearing Pittsburgh, and dated March 28, 1842.

36 Journal, Nov. 25, 1842.

37 A second edition followed in 1864, and an eighth was reached by 1880. There was also an American edition. In October, 1864, an American resident in England, G. Washington Moon by name, brought out a counterblast, The Dean’s English. This reached a seventh edition by 1884. Moon employed the ingenious device of turning Alford’s pedantries upon him. He showed that the dean was a very loose and careless writer, and often violated his own rules. Another American, Edward S. Gould, bombarded him from the same ground in Good English, or Popular Errors in Language; New York, 1867. Alford was a favorite scholar of the time. He wrote Latin odes and a history of the Jews before he was ten years old, and in later life was the first editor of the Contemporary Review and brought out a monumental edition of the New Testament in Greek. He was born in 1810, served as dean of Canterbury from 1857 to 1871, and died in the latter year.

38 Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, edited by Thomas Allsop; London, 1836.

39 “This dichotomy,” says Allen Walker Read in British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, 1933, p. 331, “runs through most British writing on American speech … : on the one hand the Americans are denounced for introducing corruptions into the language, and on the other hand those very expressions are eagerly claimed as of British origin to show that the British deserve the credit for them.”

40 According to American Speech (Feb. 1930, p. 250) this term was invented in 1925 or thereabout. At that time the English war debt to the United States was under acrimonious discussion, and Uncle Sam became Uncle Shylock.

41 Aug. 29, 1929. The passage is perhaps worth quoting in full: “The literary style of the articles is, in most instances, suitable to their purpose. Some of them afford obvious indications of their country of origin, as when we read that Bishop Asbury was at no time a well man, or that Chester A. Arthur’s chief did not uphold the power of the Conkling crowd, or that Robert Bacon announced his candidacy for the Senate, or that Governor Altgeld protested the action of President Cleveland, or that Dr. W. Beaumont, when a doctor’s apprentice, learned to fill prescriptions, or that J. G. Blaine raised a family of seven children, or that Prof. B. P. Bowne tested the progress of his pupils by a written quiz. The article on Blaine contains a curious illustration of the peculiar American use of the word politician. We read that ‘however much Blaine was a politician, it seems to be the fact that from 1876 he was the choice of the majority, or of the largest faction, of Republicans.’ One naturally wonders why it should be thought surprising for a politician to win popular support within his own party. The explanation is that politician is here very nearly a synonym for wire-puller or intriguer, and the point the writer wishes to make is that Blaine’s influence was not wholly due to his adroit manipulation of the political machine.” The following is from the Times’ review of Hervey Allen’s Toward the Flame (Literary Supplement, June 7, 1934): “Mr. Allen may or not feel complimented by the statement that, apart from military terms which appear strange to us, there is not an Americanism in his strong and supple prose; but the fact adds to an English reader’s pleasure. Yet one would like to know what were the functions of the individual called the colonel’s striker.” The English term for striker, as the reviewer might have discovered by consulting the Oxford Dictionary, is batman. Both signify a military servant.

42 Weekly edition, Aug. 26, 1932, p. 175.

43 C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian; London, 1934, p. 314.

44 According to the Associated Press, Mr. Graham pointed to the Cinematographic Act as designed to encourage British films, but added: “I’m not prepared to place direct restrictions on the importations of American talking films into this country.”

45 It was issued in March, 1922, and was signed by the late James W. Bright, then professor of English at the Johns Hopkins; Charles H. Grandgent of Harvard; Robert Underwood Johnson, secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; John Livingston Lowes of Harvard; John M. Manly of the University of Chicago; Charles G. Osgood of Princeton, and the late Fred Newton Scott of the University of Michigan. A reply was received in October, 1922, from an English committee consisting of the Earl of Balfour, Dr. Robert Bridges and Sir Henry Newbolt, but it was not until five years later that the conference was actually held. It will be referred to again a bit later on.

46 By H. W. and F. G. Fowler; Oxford, 1908.

47 There is an account of their attitude, with quotations, by Dr. Kemp Malone of the Johns Hopkins, who was an American delegate to the conference, in American Speech, April, 1928, p. 261. The conference held two sessions, both at the quarters of the Royal Society of Literature. On the first day Lord Balfour presided, and on the second day Dr. Johnson. The speakers on the first day were Lord Balfour, Dr. Canby, George Bernard Shaw, Prof. Lloyd Jones of the British Broadcasting Corporation, Sir Israel Gollancz, Dr. Lowes, and Dr. Johnson. Those on the second day were Dr. Canby, Dr. Louise Pound of the University of Nebraska, Professor F. S. Boas, Dr. Lowes, Sir Henry Newbolt, and J. C. Squire. In addition to the speakers, those in attendance were Dr. Scott, Dr. George Philip Krapp, Prof. W. H. Wagstaff, Prof. J. Dover Wilson, Prof. A. Lloyd James, Dr. W. A. Craigie, and John Bailey. The conference was financed by the Commonwealth Fund, with some aid from Thomas W. Lamont. Later on the support of the Commonwealth Fund was withdrawn, and so the project to form a permanent Council of English fell through.

48 Boucher, who was born in England in 1737, came out to Virginia in 1759 as a private tutor. In 1762 he returned home to take holy orders, but was soon back in Virginia as rector of Hanover parish. He also conducted a school, and one of his pupils was young John Parke Custis, Washington’s stepson. Boucher made the most of this connection. In 1770 he became rector at Annapolis, and soon afterward he married an heiress and bought a plantation on the Maryland side of the Potomac. His Loyalist sentiments got him into difficulties as the Revolution approached, and in 1775 he returned to England, where he died in 1804. In 1797 he published A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution, a series of thirteen sermons. After his death his friends began the publication of his Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words, on which he had been engaged for thirty years. The first part, covering part of the letter A, came out in 1807. In 1832 the Rev. Joseph Hunter and Joseph Stevenson undertook to continue the work, but it got no further than Bl. Boucher’s brief glossary of Americanisms appeared in the introduction to this second edition. It listed but 38 words. With it was printed Absence: a Pastoral; “drawn from the life, from the manners, customs and phraseology of planters (or, to speak more pastorally, of the rural swains) inhabiting the Banks of the Potomac, in Maryland.” Boucher accused the Americans of “making all the haste they conveniently can to rid themselves of” the English language. “It is easy to foresee,” he said, “that, in no very distant period, their language will become as independent of England as they themselves are, and altogether as unlike English as the Dutch or Flemish is unlike German, or the Norwegian unlike the Danish, or the Portuguese unlike Spanish.” Absence is reprinted in Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VII, 1933, with a commentary by Allen Walker Read.

49 It is reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931, pp. 56–63. About 280 terms are listed. They are mainly New England dialect forms, but one finds a few Americanisms that were in general use, and have survived, e.g., breadstuffs, spook, nip (a measure of drink), to boost, to stump, and tarnation.

50 Pickering’s long introductory essay, but not his vocabulary, is reprinted in Mathews, pp. 65–76. On March 18, 1829, Dr. T. Romeyn Beck, a New York physician and antiquary, read a paper on the Pickering book before the Albany Institute. It was published in the Transactions of the Institute for 1830, and is reprinted by Mathews, pp. 78–85.

51 Dunglison’s glossary, dealing with about 190 terms, was published in three instalments in the Virginia Literary Museum. It was reprinted in Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. X, 1927, with a commentary by Allen Walker Read. Peck’s appeared in his Emigrant’s Guide and Gazetteer of the State of Illinois, first published in 1834, and reissued with revisions in 1836 and 1837. See John Mason Peck and the American Language, by Elrick B. Davis, American Speech, Oct., 1926. “An examination of the vocabulary of the 1837 edition,” says Davis, “shows that out of 648 specific words used in strategic positions only 313 show a history in the Oxford Dictionary complete in Peck’s use of them before 1789, the year of his birth.”

52 In Thornton’s American Glossary hobo is traced to 1891, hold-up and bunco to 1887, dive to 1882, dead-beat to 1877, hoodlum to 1872, road-agent to 1866, drummer to 1836, and flume to 1792.

53 The first American films reached England in 1907, but until 1915 they came in such small numbers that they were not separated, in the customs returns, from “optical supplies and equipment.” In 1915 their total value was fixed at £47,486. But the next year it leaped to £ 349,-919, and thereafter it mounted, with occasional recessions, to the peak of £880,240 in 1927. These values represented, of course, only the cost of the actual films, not that of the productions. In 1927 the Cinematograph Films Act was passed. It provided that all English exhibitors would have to show at least 5% of English-made films after Sept. 30, 1928, 7½ after the same date in 1930, 10% after 1931, 12½% after 1932, 15% after 1933, and 20% from Sept. 30, 1935 onward. The English duty is id. a foot on positives and 5d. on negatives. I am indebted for these figures and for those following to Mr. Lynn W. Meekins, American commercial attache in London, and Mr. Henry E. Stebbins, assistant trade commissioner.

54 After the introduction of the talkie the imports of American films showed a great decline in value. They dropped from £ 861,592 in 1929, to £506, 477 in 1930, and to £ 130,847 in 1932. In part this was due to the operation of the Cinematograph Films Act, but in larger part it was produced by a change in trade practise. In the silent days many positives were sent to England, but since the talkie came in the film companies have been sending negatives and duplicating them in England. Thus the total annual footage is probably but little less than it was in 1929. Of the 476 imported films shown in England, Scotland and Wales in 1933, 330 were American, and according to Henry J. Gibbs, writing in the Blackshirt, “their value was 90 to 95% of the total.”

55 The following is from the Denby Herald’s report of an address by Col. Bendall before the Dudley Literary Society on January 31, 1931: “He suggested that though it was true that American had a remarkable capacity for growth, there was no need to suppose that it would eventually settle the form which English must take. Such a state of affairs would necessarily result either in a wider divergence between literary and spoken English or in literary English becoming affected. The former position would lead to a loss of subtlety in spoken English and to literature’s becoming unintelligible to the masses, while to illustrate how deplorable the latter would be, the speaker read a part of Mr. Mencken’s translation of the Declaration of Independence into modern American.” The colonel’s apparently grave acceptance of my burlesque as a serious specimen of “modern American” was matched by a sage calling himself John O’London in Is It Good English?; London, 1924, p. 92. After quoting the opening paragraph of my version, he said solemnly, “I hope ‘these States’ will suppress all such translations.”

56 Chief Constable’s Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1932; Wallasey, 1933, p. 13.

57 In the London Times for June 15, 1927, George Bernard Shaw was reported as saying: “When President Wilson came to this country he gave us a shock by using the word obligate instead of oblige. It showed that a man could become President in spite of that, and we asked ourselves if a man could become King of England if he used the word obligate. We said at once that it could not be done.”

58 Review in the Medical Press, Sept. 17, 1919, of an article by MacCarty and Connor in Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics. “In the study of the terminology of diseases of the breast,” said the reviewer, “[the authors] suggest a scheme which seems simple, but unfortunately for British understanding, it is written in American.”

59 Many more examples might be added, some of them not without their humors. Back in 1921 J. C. Squire (now Sir John) was protesting bitterly because an American translator of the Journal of the Goncourts “spoke of a pavement as a sidewalk.” See the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, July 23, 1921. In Dostoevsky: Letters and Reminiscences, translated from the Russian by S. S. Ko-telinansky and J. Middleton Murry (New York, 1923; American binding of English sheets) there is this note, p. 282: “Saltykov, Mihail Efgrafovich (who used the pseudonym N. Schedrin), author of the Golovlevs, one of the greatest of Russian novels, which has been translated into French and American, but not yet into English.” Such sneers are now answered by defiance as often as with humility. When Dr. Edgar J. Goodspeed, professor of Biblical and patristic Greek at the University of Chicago, published his new version of the New Testament (Chicago, 1923) he boldly called it “an American translation,” and in it he as boldly employed Americanisms in place of the English forms of the Authorized Version. Thus corn, meaning wheat in England but maize in America, was changed to wheat in Mark II, 23, Mark IV, 28, and Matthew XII, 1. Similarly, when Ezra Pound published Ta Hio: the Great Learning (University of Washington Chapbooks, No. 14; Seattle, 1928) he described it on the title-page as “newly rendered into the American language.” See American and English translations of “The Oppermanns,” by Edmund E. Miller, American Speech, Oct., 1935.

60 The article is summarized, with long extracts, in the Literary Digest for June 19, 1915, p. 1468.

61 Reprinted in the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, July 23, 1921.

62 The New America; New York, 1919, Ch. III.

63 The Society was organized in 1913, but the intervention of the war suspended its proceedings until 1918. The first of its Tracts was issued in October, 1919. The original committee consisted of Dr. Bridges, Henry Bradley, Sir Walter Raleigh and L. Pearsall Smith, the last-named an American living in England. In Tract No. I one of its purposes was stated to be the encouragement of “those who possess the word-making faculty,” and another was the enrichment of Standard English with dialectic and “democratic” forms and usages. In Tract No. XXIV, 1926, Dr. Bridges protested against an allegation that the Society was “working for uniformity and standardization against idiom and freedom. Our readers,” he went on, “know that this is not what we intend or desire; indeed teachers, who as a class advocate standardization of speech as the necessary basis for general tuition, sometimes complain of us as mischief-makers because we do not support them more thoroughly.” In 1922 Dr. Bridges wrote to Dr. H. S. Canby: “We desire as many American subscribers as possible, in order to make our Society seem as much American as it is English. [His italics.] There is a great and natural prejudice in America against English dictation in the matter of our language, and that followed, I think, as a protest against the insular contempt which the English felt a couple of generations ago for American forms of speech. We now in England feel very differently and the S.P.E. would certainly treat American usages and preferences with full respect” (Literary Review, May 20, 1922). “The S.P.E.,” says J. Y. T. Greig in Breaking Priscian’s Head (London, 1929), “despite its inauspicious name, has done a great deal of splendid work, but only because it happened to be founded by, and to have remained under, the control of men like Dr. Bridges, Mr. L. P. Smith, and Mr. H. W. Fowler. This was a fortunate and very rare accident. In wrong hands it would have long ago become a dreadful curse, a veritable Inquisition and Congregation of the Propaganda rolled into one.”

64 London Sunday Graphic, Jan. 3, 1932.

65 Printed as That Dreadful American, Listener, Jan. 30, 1935.

66 An Accidence to the English Tongue; London, 1724. This was the first English grammar written in America. For the reference to it I am indebted to American Projects For an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1935. For part of what follows I am also indebted to Mr. Read.

67 George Campbell (1719–96), a Scottish theologian who published a New Translation of the Gospels in 1778. He is best known, however, for his Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1776. Pickering’s reference is to the preface to the Gospels.

68 The Baltimore Evening Sun reported that this was a new project in the Baltimore public-schools on Jan. 21, 1925.

69 American Speech, Jan., 1926, p. 250.

70 For example, in Modern Language Notes, Vol. XLVIII, 1933, there is but one reference to it and that is in a review of H. C. Wyld’s Universal Dictionary, 1932, by Kemp Malone. In Modern Philology, Vol. XXXII, 1933–34, there is no mention of American. In Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. XLVIII, 1933, which runs to 1400 pages, there is only a brief note by Sir William Craigie, editor of the Dictionary of American English, calling on American philologians for aid. In the annual bibliography of philological papers for 1932, p. 1342 ff., 45 articles on American English are listed, but 31 of them appeared in American Speech, 6 in Dialect Notes, 6 in popular magazines, and only 2 in professional journals. The Modern Language Association has a Present-Day Speech Section, but it shows little effective activity. The association, which was founded in 1883, had 4,132 members in 1932. “Under the protection of our ægis,” said Dr. A. H. Thorndike in his presidential address in 1927, “are gathering languages whose applications for membership not even the secretary can read.” Perhaps American will one day be one of them.

71 The original members included C. H. Grandgent, E. S. Sheldon, George L. Kittredge and J. M. Manly of Harvard, James W. Bright and A. Marshall Elliott of the Johns Hopkins, Eugene H. Babbitt of Columbia, O. F. Emerson and Benjamin Ide Wheeler of Cornell, W. D. Whitney and W. R. Harper of Yale, and F. A. March of Lafayette. James Russell Lowell was also a member.

72 Just how many are in practise today I do not know, but it must be a very large number. L. J. O’Rourke, in Rebuilding the English-Usage Curriculum; Washington, 1934, p. 4, says that “more than 40,000 teachers of English” aided him in his inquiry — all of them, it appears, teaching in grade-schools. The Educational Lists Company of New York and Chicago, which supplies the names and addresses of teachers to advertisers, offers a list of 18,000 names of high-school teachers teaching “English language, literature, drama and public speaking,” and one of 5,750 “English teachers” in the colleges and normal-schools. Some of these, of course, also teach other subjects.

73 This lack of academic interest in the American language was for many years matched by a lack of interest in American literature, but since the setting up of the quarterly, American Literature, at Duke University in 1929, partly as a result of the activities of the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Association, there has been something of an awakening. The old neglect of Whitman, Melville and Clemens will be recalled. The first professorship of American literature seems to have been established at the Pennsylvania State College in 1894, with Dr. Fred Lewis Pattee as the incumbent. The chair is still a rare one in the American colleges.

74 Another enterprise of the Dialect Society that has suffered from inadequate support is its publication of the third volume of R. H. Thornton’s American Glossary. Before his death Thornton deposited his manuscript in the Widener Library, and in 1931 its publication was begun in Dialect Notes under the editorship of Percy W. Long. The first instalment ran to 112 pages, and it was hoped to complete the work by December, 1933. But the failure of expected aid caused such a slacking of pace that by that time only J had been reached. Thornton’s first two volumes came out in England in 1912 in a modest edition of 2000 copies. Of these, 250 were imported by an American publisher. Selling them was slow work, and when they were exhausted at last no more were imported. In this connection it may be recalled that George Philip Krapp’s The English Language in America; New York, 1925, a work of very high value, failed to find a commercial publisher, and had to be brought out “for the Modern Language Association of America” at the cost of the Carnegie Corporation. Thornton’s somewhat pathetic account of his difficulties is to be found in Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. II, 1919. “Early in 1917,” he said, “I made an appeal to a large number of wealthy Americans — this was before we were in the war — to help the venture financially. To their lasting infamy, they were uniformly too unappreciative to respond.”

75 On Oct. 18, 1924 the Chicago Tribune announced Sir William’s appointment under these headlines:

  MIDWAY SIGNS
    LIMEY PROF. TO
     DOPE YANK TALK

He was born at Dundee in 1867 and was educated at St. Andrews and at Oxford. He joined the staff of the New English Dictionary in 1897, and became joint editor in 1901. His specialty is Scandinavian, but he has also written on Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, Scottish and modern English. He was knighted in 1928, but, rather curiously, this fact is not noted in Who’s Who in America. Dr. Kurath was born ih Austria in 1891 and came to America in 1907. He studied at the Universities of Wisconsin, Texas and Chicago, and took his Ph.D. at the last-named. His specialty is the comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages. He was assistant professor of German at Northwestern, 1920–27, and professor of German at Ohio State, 1927–32. In 1932 he became professor of German at Brown.

76 In an article in Tract No. XXVII of the Society for Pure English, 1927, Dr. Craigie noted that his idea had been anticipated, though not his plan. He said: “It is possible that this idea has occurred to more than one of those who have given their attention to the subject, but until very recently I have found it clearly expressed only in a review of a part of the Oxford Dictionary, written in 1913 by Dr. C. W. Ernst of Boston. ‘The American bonanza’ he wrote, ‘is in the hands of squatters; it is yet to be worked scientifically. That is impossible at Oxford; it must be done here, whether in Washington or the University of Texas is immaterial; only let it be done. It will take at least twenty-five years to gather the materials, and twenty-five years more to digest them properly. And neither dogma nor cash can help us; the thing needed is grace.’ ”

77 The New Dictionary of American English, American Mercury, July, 1933.

78 The other members of the committee were Drs. Leonard Bloomfield of Chicago, C. H. Carruthers of McGill, C. H. Grandgent of Harvard, Miles L. Hanley of Wisconsin, Marcus L. Hansen of Illinois, John S. Kenyon of Hiram College, George P. Krapp of Columbia, Eduard Prokosch of Yale, and G. Oscar Russell of Ohio State. Dr. Krapp, author of The English Language in America, died in 1934, and Dr. William A. Read of Louisiana has been added to the committee.

79 It is perhaps worth noting that five of the seven bear non-English surnames — Hansen, Hultzén, Low-man, Bloch and Penzl.

80 They were delivered at Columbia College during the Winter of 1858–9, and were published in New York in 1859. They had reached a fourth edition by 1861. Marsh was educated for the law and went into politics. He was successively a member of the Vermont Legislature, a member of the Supreme Executive Council of the State, a Congressman, minister at Constantinople, special envoy to Greece, railroad commissioner in Vermont, and minister to Italy. Born in 1801, he died at romantic Vallombrosa in 1882. He was an amateur philo-logian of considerable repute in his day, and in addition to his Lectures published The Origin and History of the English Language; New York, 1862.

81 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.”

82 In Recent Exemplifications of False Philology; London, 1872.

83 Americanisms, parts i-viii, April, May, July, Sept., Nov., 1878; Jan., March, May, 1879.

84 The Académie itself pretends to no such omniscience. 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.” But despite this, its natural leaning is toward tradition, and that leaning has greatly diminished its authority. Even some of its own members repudiate its judgments. “There are,” says J. C. Tressler in the English Journal, College Ed., April, 1934, p. 296, “two French languages: the Academy’s and the people’s. In France, as in the United States, slang has flourished and has on the whole enriched, enlivened, and invigorated the language. In France, as in other countries, the language has evolved in its own way.”

85 Academy Papers: Addresses on Language Problems by Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; New York, 1925. The contributors were Paul Elmer More, William M. Sloane, William C. Brownell, Brander Matthews, Bliss Perry, Paul Shorey, Henry van Dyke, and Robert Underwood Johnson.

86 An instructive account of some forerunners of the Academy, all of them dismal failures, is to be found in American Projects For an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1935.

87 Scott, who died in 1930, was one of the signers of the call for the International Conference on English held in London in 1927. He was, in his day, a great academic dignitary, and served as president of both the Modern Language Association and the National Council of Teachers of English. He was also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the British Association. He wrote many books, including an English grammar, a treatise on literary criticism, and another on æsthetics. His Standards of American Speech, and Other Papers, published in 1925, offers a good gauge of his mentality. One of its chapters is devoted to proving that “of the 10,565 lines of ‘Paradise Lost’ 670, or 6.3% contain each two or more accented alliterating vowels,” and another to proving that in such doublets as rough and ready 68% put the monosyllable first. On January 2, 1925 he read a paper on British and American Idiom before the Committee on Philological Sciences of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1926 he contributed a paper on American Slang to Tract No. XXIV of the Society for Pure English. In Tract No. XXVII, 1927, some of his definitions were disputed by an anonymous American.

88 The Literary Digest International Book Review, March, 1926. Apparently, Matthews forgot here that Smith was not an Englishman. Actually he was born in Philadelphia, and did not migrate to England until after passing through Haverford and Harvard. His Words and Idioms was published in London in 1925. Matthews’s war-time Anglomania was not taken seriously by the English. His belief that American novelists and newspaper men would “continue to eschew Americanisms” was derided by the London Saturday Review, a bit later on, as “obviously a war hope, like hanging the Kaiser.” There is what may be called a blanket sneer at “Anglomaniac professors of English” in Breaking Priscian’s Head, by J. Y. T. Greig, of Armstrong College, Newcastle (1929). “Some of them,” says Professor Greig, “to judge by their obiter dicta, are as scholastically minded as the dismalest snob of a housemaster in an English public school.”

89 Bierce was especially hostile to slang, but in 1909 he published a little book called “Write It Right,” full of denunciations of common American idioms. His own writing, though cramped by his self-imposed rules, yet managed to be fluent, colorful and even melodious. It is possible that he was influenced by the fact that he spent nearly ten years of his early manhood in England.

90 In Afternoon Neighbors; New York, 1934, p. 43, Hamlin Garland reports that John S. Sargent once told him of James: “Henry became excessively English in his later years and resented all Americanisms in speech. I once heard him reproving his niece. She said: ‘Uncle Henry, if you will tell me how you like your tea I will fix it for you.’ To this James replied: ‘Pray, my dear young lady, what will you fix it with and what will you fix it to?’ ”

91 Vol. II, p. 148.

92 New York, 1925; Vol. I, p. 246 ff. Krapp gives some curious examples of early attempts at reducing Negro American to writing. His essay also deals with the Yankee, Southwestern, Hoosier, and Indian dialects. “The New England dialect as a literary form,” he says, “is mainly popular or illiterate American English with a very occasional splash of genuine local color.” Krapp reprints Lowell’s seven rules for writing this dialect, as given in the introduction to Series I of The Biglow Papers, and C. Alphonso Smith’s seven rules for writing “the Southern literary dialect.” See also Notes on Negro Dialect in the American Novel to 1821, by Tremaine McDowell, American Speech, April, 1930.

93 The Fight of a Book for the World, by W. S. Kennedy; West Yarmouth, Mass., 1926, pref.

94 Whitman and the American Language, New York Evening Post, May 31, 1919. Mr. Untermeyer has himself made vigorous propaganda to the same end. Since 1932 or thereabout he has been delivering a lecture entitled A New Language For a New Generation which embodies a review of the gradual separation of American from English, and a valuable discussion of the present differences.

95 See Walt Whitman and the French Language, by Louise Pound, American Speech, May, 1926, and Walt Whitman’s Neologisms, by the same, American Mercury, Feb., 1925.

96 See Walt Whitman and the American Language, by Leon Howard, American Speech, Aug., 1930.

97 The Life and Letters of John Fiske, by John Spencer Clark; Boston, 1917, Vol. I, p. 431.

98 The Editor’s Study, Harper’s Magazine, Jan., 1886.

99 English As She is Spoken, Bookman, July, 1920.

100 Our Statish Language, Harper’s Magazine, May, 1920.

101 The American Slanguage, Irish Statesman, Oct. 9, 1926.

102 Translations, Saturday Review of Literature, Dec. 26, 1925.

103 Gifford seems to have picked up this story from the Marquis François Jean de Chastellux, who made a tour of America in 1780–82, and printed Voyages dans l’Amérique septentrionale in 1786. (English translation in two volumes; London, 1787; New York, 1828). See The Philological Society of New York, 1788, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, April, 1934, p. 131.

104 Nation, April 11, 1923.

105 Peters, it appears, had a remote forerunner in one Proctor, who was in practise as a teacher of English in Paris at the end of the Eighteenth Century. Mr. H. A. Larrabee of Cambridge, Mass., calls my attention to the following reference to him in John G. Alger’s Paris in 1789–94: “In October, 1794, Proctor advertised that he taught the English and American languages — there had been no advertisements of lessons in foreign languages during the Terror — and he was still doing this in 1802.” Apparently the strained relations between France and the United States in 1797–1800 did not force Proctor to suspend the teaching of American.

106 Metoula-Sprachführer; Englisch von Karl Blattner; Ausgabe für Amerika; Berlin-Schöneberg. Polyglott Kuntze; Schnellste Erlernung jeder Sprache ohne Lehrer; Amerikanisch; Bonn a. Rh.

107 Like the English expositors of American Slang (See Chapter VI, Section 3), 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 gr’s, and translates Schweine- füsse 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.

108 By Carlo di Domizio and Charles M. Smith; Munich, n.d.

109 Like the Metoula expositor, they make mistakes. Certainly no American bartender ever makes a Hock-cup; he makes a Rbine-wine-cup. They list several drinks that are certainly not familiar in America, e.g., the knickebein and the white-lion. Yet worse, they convert julep into jules.

110 De Forenede Stater, by Evald Kristensen; Omaha, Neb., 1921, Vol. I, pp. 207–219. For a translation of this chapter I am indebted to the kindness of Dr. A. Th. Dorf of Chicago.

111 For example, the following appears on the invitations to farewell dinners on Hamburg-Amerika Line ships (1935): “Einem geehrten Bordpublico kund und zu wissen: Dass das fröliche Bord-Glöcklin, so in amerikanischen Sprach dinner-bell geheisten ist,” etc.

112 Die Amerikanische Sprache (Das Englisch der Vereinigten Staaten), von H. L. Mencken; Deutsch Bear-beitung von Heinrich Spies; Leipzig, 1917. Dr. Spies is also the author of Kultur und Sprach in neuen England; Leipzig, 1925.

113 See The American Language Fights for Recognition in Moscow, by Eli B. Jacobson, American Mercury, Jan., 1931.

114 L’Atlas linguistique de la France, by J. Gillieron and E. Edmont; Paris, 1902–08. The German Sprach-atlas des Deutschen Reiches was edited by Wenker and appeared ten years earlier. The Japanese atlas, Dai Nippon Hogen Chidzu, was prepared by M. Tojo.

115 This movement owes its start to Ivar Aasen (1813–96), who published a grammar of the landsmaal, or peasant speech, in 1848, and a dictionary in 1850. It won official recognition in 1885, when the Storthing passed the first of a series of acts designed to put the landsmaal on an equal footing with the official Dano-Norwegian. Four years later, after a campaign going back to 1874, provision was made for teaching it in the schools for the training of primary teachers. In 1899 a professorship of it 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. See The Linguistic Development of Ivar Aasen’s New Norse, by Einas Haugen, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. XLVIII, Pt. 1, 1933.

116 There is a bibliography of this literature in the third edition of the present work; New York, 1923, pp. 460–61; and a better one in Estudios Sobre el Español de Nuevo Méjico, by Aurelio M. Espinosa; Buenos Aires, 1930, p. 24 ff.

II
THE MATERIALS OF INQUIRY

I. THE HALLMARKS OF AMERICAN

The characters chiefly noted in American English by all who have discussed it are, first, its general uniformity throughout the country; second, its impatient disregard for grammatical, syntactical and phonological rule and precedent; and third, its large capacity (distinctly greater than that of the English of present-day England) for taking in new words and phrases from outside sources, and for manufacturing them of its own materials.

The first of these characters has struck every observer, native and foreign. In place of the discordant local dialects of all the other major countries, including England, we have a general Volkssprache for the whole nation, and if it is conditioned at all it is only by minor differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, and by the linguistic struggles of various groups of newcomers. No other country can show such linguistic solidarity, nor any approach to it — not even Canada, for there a large minority of the population resists speaking English altogether. The Little Russian of the Ukraine is unintelligible to the citizen of Moscow; 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.¹ “When we remember,” says the New International Encyclopedia, “that the dialects of the counties 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.” There are some regional peculiarities in pronunciation and intonation, and they will be examined in some detail in Chapter VII, but when it comes to the words they habitually use and the way they use them all Americans, even the less tutored, follow pretty much the same line. A Boston taxi-driver could go to work in Chicago or San Francisco without running any risk of misunderstanding his new fares. Once he had flattened his a’s a bit and picked up a few 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 relatively stable social order, and it has impressed upon their souls their characteristic respect for what is customary and of good report. Until the World War brought chaos to most of 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 partly 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 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 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.”² Thus, in the arts, and thus in business, in politics, in daily intercourse, in habits of mind and speech. The American is not, of course, 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 commonly 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 shibboleth, or 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 the schoolmarm 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 meets 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, and such highly typical Americanisms as O.K., N.G., and P.D.Q., have been traced back to the early days of the Republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these tendencies invisible today, for institution-making is yet 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 philologian recognizes as belonging to the most lusty stages of speech.

But of more importance than the sheer inventions, if only because much more numerous, are the 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 far more upon brilliant phrases than 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 rubberneck 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 contempt for 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, has-been, lame-duck, speed-cop 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 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, becomes noun, adjective, verb and adverb. Verbs are fashioned out of substantives by the simple process of prefixing the preposition: to engineer, to stump, to hog, to style, to author. 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 and to jell. 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, sure and near are examples.

All these processes, of course, are also to be observed in the history of the English of England; at the time of its sturdiest growth they were in the most active possible being. They are, indeed, common to all tongues; “the essence of language,” says Dr. Jespersen, “is activity.” 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. The standard Southern dialect of English has been arrested in its growth by its purists and grammarians, and burdened with irrational affectations by fashionable pretension. It shows no living change since the reign of Samuel Johnson. Its tendency is to combat all that expansive gusto which made for its pliancy and resilience in the days of Shakespeare.³ In place of the old loose-footedness there is set up a preciosity which, in one direction, takes the form of clumsy artificialities in the spoken language, and in another shows itself in the even clumsier Johnsonese of so much 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;… 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.”⁴

American, despite the gallant efforts of the pedagogues, has so far escaped any such suffocating formalization. We, too, of course, have our occasional practitioners of the authentic English Jargon, but in the main our faults 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.”⁵ The Americans, adds a Scots professor, “are determined to hack their way through the language, as their ancestors through forests, regardless of the valuable growths that may be sacrificed in blazing the trail.”⁶ But this Scot dismisses the English neologisms of the day, when ranged beside the American stock, as “dwiny, feeble stuff”; “it is to America,” he admits, “that we must chiefly look in future for the replenishment and freshening of our language.” I quote one more Briton, this time an Englishman steeped in the public school tradition:

The English of the United States is not merely different from ours; it has a restless inventiveness which may well be founded in a sense of racial discomfort, a lack of full accord between the temperament of the people and the constitution of their speech. The English are uncommunicative; the Americans are not. In its coolness and quiet withdrawal, in its prevailing sobriety, our language reflects the cautious economies and leisurely assurance of the average speaker. We say so little that we do not need to enliven our vocabulary and underline our sentences, or cry “Wolf!” when we wish to be heard. The more stimulating climate of the United States has produced a more eager, a more expansive, a more decisive people. The Americans apprehend their world in sharper outlines and aspire after a more salient rendering of it.⁷

This revolt against conventional bonds and restraints is most noticeable, of course, on the lower levels of American speech; in the regions above there still linger some vestiges of Eighteenth Century tightness. But even in those upper regions there are rebels a-plenty, and some of them are of such authority that it is impossible to dismiss them. I glance through the speeches of the late Dr. Woodrow Wilson, surely a conscientious purist and Anglomaniac if we have ever had one, and find, in a few moments, half a dozen locutions that an Englishman in like position would certainly hesitate to use, among them we must get a move on,⁸ to hog,⁹ to gum-shoe,¹⁰ onery in place of ordinary,¹¹ and that is going some.¹² I turn to the letters of that most passionate of Anglomaniacs, Walter Hines Page, and find to eat out of my hand, to lick to a frazzle, to cut no figure, to go gunning for, nothin’ doin’, for keeps, and so on. I proceed to Dr. John Dewey, probably the country’s most respectable metaphysician, and find him using dope for opium.¹³ In recent years certain English magnificoes have shown signs of going the same route, but whenever they yield the corrective bastinado is laid on, and nine times out of ten they are accused, and rightly, of succumbing to American influence.

Let American confront a novel problem alongside English, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious. Movie is better than cinema; and the English begin to admit the fact by adopting the word; 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 than 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 which guides the wheels from one rail to another. The English called it a crossing-plate; the Americans, more responsive to the suggestion in its shape, called it a frog. American is full of what Bret Harte called the “saber-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. “When we Americans are through with the English language,” says Mr. Dooley, “it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.”

All this boldness of conceit, of course, makes for vulgarity. Unrestrained by any critical sense — and the critical sense of the pedagogues counts for little, for they cry wolf too often — it flowers in such barbaric inventions as tasty, alright, go-getter, he-man, go-aheadativeness, tony, goof, semi-occasional, and to doxologize. 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 of 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 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 restrains, to some extent, 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. Standard English now has the brakes on, but American continues to leap in the dark, and the prodigality of its movement is all the indication that is needed of its intrinsic health, its capacity to meet the ever-changing needs of a restless and emotional people, inordinately mongrel, and disdainful of tradition. Language, says A. H. Sayce,

is not 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.¹⁴

2. WHAT IS AN AMERICANISM?

John Pickering was the first to attempt to draw up a schedule of Americanisms. In his “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America” (1816) he divided them into three categories, as follows:

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 been long obsolete in England, are still retained in common use among us.”

John Russell Bartlett, in the second edition of his “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States” (1859), increased these three 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. New 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 “The English Language” (1850) and in it one finds the following formidable classification:

1. Words borrowed from other languages.

a. Indian, as Kennebec, Ohio, Tombigbee, sagamore, quahaug, sucotash.

b. Dutch, as boss, kruller, stoop.

c. German, as spuke [?], sauerkraut.

d. French, as bayou, cache, chute, crevasse, levee.

e. Spanish, as calaboose, chaparral, 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 (bookseller’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, might, 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, mosdy political,” as slang-whanger, 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.

Alfred L. Elwyn, in his “Glossary of Supposed Americanisms” (1859), attempted no classification. 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 lavished upon them by English critics. Scheie de Vere, in his “Americanisms” (1872), followed Bartlett, and devoted himself largely to words borrowed from the Indian dialects, and from the French, Spanish and Dutch. But John S. Farmer, in his “Americanisms New and Old” (1889), 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 this classification:

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.

b. 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.

Sylva Clapin, in his “New Dictionary of Americanisms” (1902), 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.

Richard H. Thornton, in his “American Glossary” (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 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.

Gilbert M. Tucker, in his “American English” (1921) attempted to reduce all Americanisms to two grand divisions, as follows:

1. Words and phrases that originated in America and express something that the British have always expressed differendy if they have mentioned it at all.

2. Words and phrases that would convey to a British ear a different meaning from that which they bear in this country.

To this he added seven categories of locution not to be regarded as Americanisms, despite their inclusion in various previous lists, as follows:

1. Words and phrases stated by the previous compiler himself to be of foreign (i.e., chiefly of English) origin, like Farmer’s hand-me-downs.

2. Names of things exclusively American, but known abroad under the same name, such as moccasin.

3. Names of things invented in the United States, like drawing-room car.

4. Words used in this country in a sense hardly distinguishable from that they bear in England, like force for a gang of laborers.

5. Nonce words, like Mark Twain’s cavalieress.

6. Perfectly regular and self-explanatory compounds, like office-holder, planing-machine, ink-slinger and fly-time.

7. Purely technical terms, such as those employed in baseball.

Only a glance at these discordant classifications is needed to show that they hamper the inquiry by limiting its scope — not so much, to be sure, as the extravagant limitations of White and Lounsbury, noted in Chapter I, Section 5, but still very seriously. They leave out of account some of the most salient characters of a living language. Only Bartlett and Farmer establish a separate category of Americanisms produced by the shading of consonants and other such phonological changes, though even Thornton, of course, is obliged to take notice of such forms as bust and bile, and even Tucker lists buster. It must be obvious that many of the words and phrases excluded by his Index Expurgatorius are quite genuine Americanisms. Why should he bar out such a word as moccasin on the ground that it is also known in England? So is caucus, and yet he includes it. He is also far too hostile to such characteristic American compounds as office-holder and fly-time. True enough, their materials are good English, and they involve no change in the meaning of their component parts, but it must be plain that they were put together in the United States and that an Englishman always sees a certain strangeness in them. Pay-dirt, panel-house, passage-way, patrolman, night-rider, low-down, know-nothing, hoe-cake and hog-wallow are equally compounded of pure English metal, and yet he lists all of them. Again, he is too ready, it seems to me, to bar out archaisms, which constitute one of the most interesting and authentic of all the classes of Americanisms. It is idle to prove that Chaucer used to guess. The important thing is that the English abandoned it centuries ago, and that when they happen to use it today they are always conscious that it is an Americanism. Baggage is in Shakespeare, but it is not often in the London Times. Here Mr. Tucker allows his historical principles to run away with his judgment. His book represents the labor of nearly forty years and is full of shrewd observations and persuasive contentions, but it is sometimes excessively dogmatic.¹⁵

The most scientific and laborious of all these collections of Americanisms, until the Dictionary of American English got under way, was 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 generation. In vain one searches the two fat volumes and their pedestrian appendix for such highly characteristic forms as 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 lay beyond the scope of Thornton’s investigation, and some of them lie outside the field of the American Dictionary, but it is plain that they must be prime concerns of any future student who essays to get at the inner spirit of the American language. Its difference from Standard English is not merely a difference in vocabulary, to be disposed of in an alphabetical list; it is also a difference in pronunciation, in intonation, in conjugation and declension, in metaphor and idiom, in the whole fashion of using words. Some of the aspects of that difference will be considered in the following pages. The 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, but attention will also be paid to materials and ways of speech that are less obvious, and in particular to certain tendencies in vulgar American, the great reservoir of the language, and perhaps the forerunner of what it will be on higher levels, at least in one detail or another, in the years to come.

1 W. W. Skeat distinguishes 9 principal dialects in Scotland, 3 in Ireland and 30 in England and Wales. See his English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day; Cambridge, 1911, p. 107 ff.

2 F. L. Pattee: A History of American Literature Since 1870; New York, 1916. See also The American Novel, by Carl Van Doren; New York, 1921.

3 Rather curiously, the two authorities who were most influential, during the Nineteenth Century, in keeping it to a rigid pattern were both Americans. They were Lindley Murray (1745–1826) and Joseph E. Worcester (1784–1865). Murray, a Pennsylvanian, went to England after the Revolution, and in 1795 published his Grammar of the English Language. It had an extraordinary sale in England, and was accepted as the court of last resort in usage down to quite recent times. Worcester’s Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language, 1846, divided the honors of authority in England with B. H. Smart’s Dictionary, published during the same year. It was extensively pirated. Thus, says Thomas R. Lounsbury (The Standard of Pronunciation in English; New York, 1904, p. 220), “the Londoner frequently got his pure London pronunciation from a citizen of this country who was never outside of New England for more than a few months of his life.” Worcester was also accepted at Harvard and at the University of Virginia, but elsewhere in the United States Webster prevailed.

4 See the chapter, Interlude on Jargon, in Quiller-Couch’s On the Art of Writing; New York, 1916. Appropriately enough, large parts of the learned critic’s book are written in the very Jargon he attacks. See also Ch. VI of Growth and Structure of the English Language, by O. Jespersen, 3rd ed., rev.; Leipzig, 1919, especially p. 143 ff. See also Official English, in English, March, 1919, p. 7; April, p. 45, and Aug., p. 135, and The Decay of Syntax, in the London Times Literary Supplement, May 8, 1919, p. 1.

5 Alexander Francis: Americans: An Impression; New York, 1900.

6 Breaking Priscian’s Head, by J. Y. T. Greig; London, 1929.

7 Pomona, or The Future of English, by Basil de Sélincourt; London, 1929.

8 Speech before the Chamber of Commerce Convention, Washington, Feb. 19, 1916.

9 Speech at a workingman’s dinner, New York, Sept. 4, 1912.

10 Wit and Wisdom of Woodrow Wilson, comp. by Richard Linthicum; New York, 1916, p. 54.

11 Speech at Ridgewood, N. J., April 22, 1910.

12 Wit and Wisdom … p. 56.

13 New Republic, Dec. 24, 1919, p. 116, col. 1.

14 Introduction to the Science of Language, 4th ed.; London, 1900, Vol. II, pp. 33–4. All this, of course, had been said long before Sayce. “Language,” said Quintilian in his Institutiones Oratorias, I (c. 95), “is like money, which becomes current when it receives the public stamp.” “Custom,” said Ben Jonson in his Grammar (1640) “is the most certain mistress of language.” “Language,” said George Campbell in The Philosophy of Rhetoric, II (1776), “is purely a species of fashion, in which by the general, but tacit, consent of the people of a particular state or country, certain sounds come to be appropriated to certain things as their signs.” “Established custom,” said Hugh Blair in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), “is the standard to which we must at last resort for determining every controverted point in language.” To which Noah Webster added in his Dissertations on the English Language (1789): “The general practise of a nation is the rule of propriety.”

15 Tucker falls into a number of rather astonishing errors. P.D.Q. is defined as an abbreviation of “pretty deuced quick,” which it certainly is not. Passage (of a bill in Congress) is listed as an Americanism; it is actually very good English and is used in England every day. Standee is defined as “standing place”; it really means one who stands. Sundœ (the soda-fountain mess) is misspelled sunday; it was precisely the strange spelling that gave the term vogue. Mucker, a brilliant Briticism, unknown in America save in college slang, is listed between movie and muckraker.

III
THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN

I. THE FIRST LOAN-WORDS

The earliest Americanisms were probably words borrowed bodily from the Indian languages — words, in the main, indicating natural objects that had no counterparts in England. Thus, in Captain John Smith’s “True Relation,” published in 1608, one finds mention of a strange beast described variously as a rahaugcum and a raugroughcum. Four years later, in William Strachey’s “Historie of Trevaile Into Virginia Britannia” it became an aracoune, “much like a badger,” and by 1624 Smith had made it a rarowcun in his “Virginia.” It was not until 1672 that it emerged as the raccoon we know today. Opossum has had much the same history. It first appeared in 1610 as apossoun, and two years later Smith made it opassom in his “Map of Virginia,” at the same time describing the animal as having “an head like a swine, a taile like a rat, and is of the bigness of a cat.” The word finally became opossom toward the end of the Seventeenth Century, and by 1763 the third o had changed to u. In the common speech, as everyone knows, raccoon is almost always reduced to coon, and opossum to possum. Thornton traced the former to 1839 and the latter to 1705. Moose is another American primitive. It is derived from the Narragansett Indian word moosu, meaning “he trims or cuts smooth”— an allusion, according to the Oxford Dictionary, “to the animal’s habit of stripping the lower branches and bark from trees when feeding.” It had become mus by 1613, mose by 1637, and moose by 1672.

To the same category belong skunk, hickory, squash, caribou, pecan, paw-paw, chinkapin, persimmon, terrapin, menhaden, and catalpa. Skunk is from an Indian word variously reported to have been segankw or segongw, and on its first appearance in print, in William Wood’s “New England’s Prospect” (1643) it was spelled squunck, but it had got its present form by 1701. Hickory, in the form of pohickery, has been traced to 1653, and persimmon, in the form of putchamin, is in Captain John Smith’s “Map of Virginia” (1612). In its early days the stress in persimmon was on the first or third syllables, not on the second, as now. Caribou came into American from the French in Canada during the Eighteenth Century, but it is most probably of Indian origin. In the same way pecan came in through the Spanish: down to Jefferson’s time it was spelled paccan. Paw-paw, in the form of papaios, is to be found in Purchas’s “Pilgrimage” (1613, a compilation of traveler’s tales), and terrapin, in the form of torope, is in Whitaker’s “Good Newes From Virginia” (1613). Menhaden seems to be derived from an Indian word, munnawhattecug, which appears as a verb, munnohquahtean, meaning to fertilize, in John Eliot’s Indian Bible (completed 1638). The Indians used menhaden to manure their corn, and the fish is still used for fertilizer. Catalpa comes from one of the Indian languages of the South; it was adopted into American in the Eighteenth Century. Most such words, of course, were shortened like munnawhattecug, or otherwise modified, on being taken into colonial English. Thus, chinkapin was originally checkinqumin, and squash appears in early documents as isquontersquash, and squantersquash. But William Penn, in a letter dated August 16, 1683, used the latter in its present form. These variations show a familiar effort to bring a new and strange word into harmony with the language. 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. Woodchuck originated in the same way. 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 latter division belong hominy, pone, toboggan, pemmican, mackinaw, moccasin, papoose, sachem, powwow, tomahawk, wigwam, succotash and squaw, all of which were in common circulation by the middle of the Eighteenth Century. Thornton has traced hominy to 1629, pone to 1634, moccasin to 1612, moccasin-flower to 1705, moccasin-snake to 1784, powwow to 1613, and wigwam to 1705. Finally, new words were made during the period by translating Indian terms, whether real or imaginary — for example, war-path, war-paint, pale-face, big-chief, medicine-man, pipe-of-peace, fire-water, and to bury the hatchet —, and by using the word Indian, as a prefix, as in Indian-Summer, Indian-file and Indian-giver. The total number of borrowings, direct and indirect, was larger than now appears, for with the recession of the Red Man from the popular consciousness the use of loan-words from his dialects has diminished. In our own time papoose, sachem, tepee, samp, quahaug and wampum have begun to drop out of everyday use;¹ at an earlier period the language sloughed off ocelot, manitee, calumet, sagamore, supawn and many others after their kind, or began to degrade them to the estate of provincialisms.² A curious phenomenon is presented by the case of maize, which came into the colonial speech from some West Indian dialect, apparently by way of the Spanish, went over into orthodox English, and from English into French, German and other Continental languages, and was then abandoned by the Americans, who substituted corn, which commonly means wheat in England. Mugwump, which is now obsolescent, is also an Indian loanword, but its meaning has been narrowed. It was originally spelled mugquomp, and signified a chief. When the Rev. John Eliot translated the Old Testament into the Algonquian language, in 1663, he used it in place of the duke which appears so often in Genesis xxxvi in the Authorized Version. During the following century it began to work its way into American, and by the beginning of the Nineteenth Century it was in common use to designate a high and mighty fellow, and especially one whose pretensions were not generally conceded. Its political use began in 1884, when James G. Blaine received the Republican nomination for the Presidency, and many influential Republicans, including Theodore Roosevelt, refused to support him. Most of these rebels were in what we now call the higher incometax brackets, and so it was natural for the party journals to hint that they suffered from what we now call superiority complexes. Thus they came to be called mugwumps, and soon they were wearing the label proudly. “I am an independent — a mugwump,” boasted William Everett in a speech at Quincy, Mass., on September 13, 1884. “I beg to state that mugwump is the best of American. It belongs to the language of the Delaware Indians; it occurs many times in Eliot’s Indian Bible; and it means a great man.” Until the end of the century any American who took an independent course in politics was a mugwump, but after that the word began to fade out, and we have developed nothing that quite takes its place.

Caucus is probably also an Indian loan-word. John Pickering, in his “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States” (1816), hazarded the guess that it might be “a corruption of caulkers’, the word meetings being understood,” but for this there was no ground save the fact that caulkers, like other workingmen, sometimes had meetings. In 1872 Dr. J. H. Trumbull, one of the earlier American specialists in Indian philology, suggested that the word was more probably derived from the Algonquian noun caucauasu, meaning one who advises, urges or encourages. Caucauasu is to be found in Captain John Smith’s “General Historie of Virginia” (1624) in the formidable form of cawcawaassough — but Smith was notoriously weak at spelling, whether of English or of Indian words. Trumbull’s suggestion is now generally accepted by etymologists, though with the prudent reservation that it has yet to be proved. Caucauasu is said to have given rise to another early American word, now obsolete. This was cockarouse, signifying a chief or other person of importance. Caucus apparently came in very early in the Eighteenth Century. The Rev. William Gordon, in his “History of the Rise and Independence of the United States” (London, 1788), said that “more than fifty years ago [that is, before 1738] Mr. Samuel Adams’s father and twenty others, one or two from the north of the town where the ship business is carried on, used to meet, make a caucus, and lay their plans for introducing certain persons into places of trust and power.” Down to 1763 a caucus seems to have been called a caucus-club, for it so appears in John Adams’s diary for that year. “Caucusing,” explained Gordon, “means electioneering.”

From the very earliest days of English colonization the language of the settlers also received accretions from the languages of the other colonizing nations. The French word portage, for example, was already in use before the end of the Seventeenth Century, and soon after came chowder, cache, voyageur, and various words that, like the last-named, have since become localisms or disappeared altogether.³ Before the Revolution bureau,⁴ batteau and prairie were added, and soon afterward came gopher, bogus and flume. Carry-all is also French in origin, despite its English sound. It comes, by folk-etymology, from the French carriole. So is brave, in the sense of an Indian warrior. But the French themselves borrowed it from the Italian bravo. Other French terms came in after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. They will be noticed in the next chapter.

The contributions of the New Amsterdam Dutch during the half century of their conflicts with the English included cruller, coleslaw,⁵ cookey, stoop, sleigh, span (of horses), dope, spook, to snoop, pit (as in peach-pit), waffle, hook (a point of land), scow, patroon, boss, smearcase and Santa Clause.⁶ Scheie 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 and has been borrowed by Australian English from American. In American it has produced a number of familiar derivatives, e.g., bush-whacker, bush-town, bush-league, busher, bush-ranger and bush-fighting. Dutch may have also given us boodle, in the sense of loot. There is an old English word, buddle or boodle, signifying a crowd or lot, and it remains familiar in the phrase, whole kit and boodle or whole kit and caboodle, but boodle in the opprobrious American sense is unknown in England save as an Americanism. It may have come from the Dutch boedel, meaning an estate or possession. Dutch also influenced Colonial American in indirect ways, e.g., by giving reinforcement to the Scotch dominie, signifying a clergyman. It may have shared responsibility with the German of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch for the introduction of dumb in the sense of stupid — dom in Dutch and dumm in German — a meaning almost unknown in England. Certain etymologists have also credited it with statehouse (from stadhuis) but Albert Matthews has demonstrated⁷ that the word was in use in Virginia in 1638, fifteen years before a stadhuis was heard of in New Amsterdam. George Philip Krapp suggests in “The English Language in America” that the peculiar American use of scout, as in good scout, may have been suggested by the Dutch. He offers quotations from various authorities to show that in New Amsterdam the schout was a town officer who combined the duties of mayor, sheriff and district attorney. He was thus dreaded by the lower orders of the population, and “a good scout was notable chiefly because of his rarity.” On this I attempt no judgment. Dutch, like German, French and Spanish, naturally had its largest influence in those areas where there were many settlers who spoke it as their native tongue. It was taught in the schools of New York until the end of the Dutch occupation in 1664, and it was used in the Dutch Reformed churches of the town for a century afterward. Up the Hudson it survived even longer, and Noah Webster heard Dutch sermons at Albany so late as 1786. Many Dutch terms are still to be found in the geographical nomenclature of the Hudson region, e.g., dorp, kill and hook, and in isolated communities in the Catskills there is still a considerable admixture in the common speech, e.g., clove (ravine), killfish, pinkster (a variety of azalea), speck (fat), fly (swamp), blummie (flower), grilly (chilly), sluck (a swallow of liquid), and wust (sausage).⁸

Perhaps the most notable of all the contributions of Knickerbocker Dutch to American is the word Yankee. The earlier etymologists, all of them amateurs, sought an Indian origin for it. Thomas Anbury, a British officer who served in the Revolution with Burgoyne, argued in his “Travels” (1789, Ch. II) that it came from a Cherokee word, eankke, meaning a coward or slave; Washington Irving, in “Knickerbocker’s History of New York” (1809, Ch. VII) derived it (probably only humorously) from yanokies, “which in the Mais-Tschusaeg or Massachusetts language signifies silent men”; and the Rev. John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder, a learned Moravian missionary who published “An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States” in 1822, maintained therein that it was simply a product of the Indians’ unhappy effort to pronounce the word English, which they converted, he said, into Yengees. Noah Webster accepted this guess, but other contemporary authorities held that the word the Indians were trying to pronounce was not English but the French Anglais. There were, however, difficulties in the way of all forms of this theory, for investigation showed that Yankee was apparently first applied, not to the English but to the Dutch. So early as 1683, it was discovered, Yankey was a common nickname among the buccaneers who then raged along the Spanish Main, and always the men who bore it were Dutchmen. Apparently it was derived either from Janke, a diminutive of the common Dutch given name Jan, or from Jankees (pronounced Yoncase), a blend of Jan and Cornells, two Dutch names which often appear in combination. Analogues in support of the former hypothesis are to be found in the use of dago (Diego) to indicate any Spaniard (and now, by extension, any Italian), and of Heinie or Fritz, Sandy and Pat to indicate any German, Scotsman or Irishman, respectively; and for the latter there is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese, tactic from tactics, and specie from species. But how did this nickname for Dutchmen ever come to be applied to Englishmen, and particularly to the people of New England, male and female alike? To this day no satisfactory answer has been made. All that may be said with any certainty is that it was already in use by 1765 as a term of derision, and that by 1775 the Yankees began to take pride in it. In the latter year, in fact, John Turnbull spoke of it in his “McFingal” as connoting “distinction.” But he neglected to explain its transfer from Dutch pirates to New England Puritans, and no one has done so to this day. During the Civil War, as everyone knows, Yankee became a term of disparagement again, applied by the people of the South to all Northerners. But its evil significance began to wear off after the turn of the century, and when in 1917 the English began applying it to the men of the A.E.F., Southerners and Northerners alike, the former seem to have borne the affliction philosophically. At that time a characteristic clipped form, Yank, came into popularity at home, launched by its use in George M. Cohan’s war song, “Over There.” But Yank was not invented by Cohan, for it has been traced back to 1778, and the Confederates often used it during the Civil War. Incidentally, the verb to yank, in the sense of to jerk, is also an Americanism, and its origin is almost as mysterious as that of Yankee. That the two have any connection is doubtful. It seems more probable that the verb comes from a Scottish noun, yank, meaning a sharp, sudden blow.⁹

The Spanish contributions to the American vocabulary are far more numerous than those of any other Continental language, but most of them have come in since the Louisiana Purchase, and notices of them will be deferred to the next chapter. There was relatively little contact between the first English settlers and the Spaniards to the southward; it remained for the great movement across the plains, begun by Zebulon M. Pike’s expedition in 1806, to make Spanish the second language in a large part of the United States. The first Spanish loan-words were mainly Spanish adaptations of Indian terms, picked up by the early adventurers in the West Indies. Of such sort were tobacco, hammock, tomato, tapioca, chocolate, barbecue and canoe. But with them also came some genuinely Spanish words, and of these sarsaparilla and sassafras have been traced to 1577, alligator to 1568, creole to 1604, pickaninny to 1657, key (islet) to 1697, and quadroon to the first years of the Eighteenth Century. A good many Spanish words, or Spanish adaptations of native words, went into English during the Sixteenth Century without any preliminary apprenticeship as Americanisms, for example, mosquito, chocolate, banana and cannibal. But cockroach (from the Spanish cucaracha, assimilated by folk etymology to cock and roach) is first heard of in Captain John Smith’s “General Historie of Virginia” (1624), and most of the Oxford Dictionary’s early examples of mosquito are American. Mosquito suffered some fantastic variations in spelling. The original Spanish was mosquito, a diminutive of mosca, a fly, but in Hakluyt’s “Voyages” (c. 1583) it became musketa, in Whitbourne’s “Newfoundland” (1623) muskeito, in Hughes’s “American Physician” (1672) muscato, in Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia” (finished in 1697 and published in 1702) moscheto, and at the hands of Benjamin Franklin (1747) musqueto. The jerked in jerked-beef was fashioned by folk-etymology out of a Spanish word which was in turn borrowed from one of the Peruvian dialects. The noun barbecue came from a Haitian word, barbacoa, signifying a frame set up to lift a bed off the ground. But it got the meaning of a frame used for roasting meat soon after it appeared in Spanish, and the derivative word has had its present sense in American since about 1660.

Before the Revolution a few German words worked their way into American, but not many. Sauerkraut has been traced by Thornton to 1789 and is probably much older; so are noodle and pretzel. But lager, bockbeer, sangerfest, kindergarten, wienerwurst, ratskeller, zwieback, turnverein and so on belong to the period after 1848, and will be noticed later. Beer-soup (probably from biersuppe) goes back to 1799, but beer-garden (from biergarten) has not been found before 1870. As I have suggested, German probably helped Dutch to put dumb, in the sense of stupid, into the American vocabulary. It also, I suppose, gave some help to smearcase. The native languages of the Negro slaves, rather curiously, seem to have left few marks upon American. Buckra is apparently of Negro origin, but it was never peculiar to America, and has long since gone out. Gumbo seems to be derived from an Angolan word, ’ngombo, but it came into American relatively late, and may have been introduced by way of Louisiana French. Okra, which means the same thing, was first used in the West Indies, and may have had a Spanish transition form. Yam is not Negro, but apparently Spanish or Portuguese. Banjo is simply a Negro perversion of bandore, which was also of Latin origin. Whether goober and juba are Negro loan-words is unknown. Thornton’s first example of the latter is dated 1834, Webster’s New International (1934) ascribes the former, somewhat improbably, to a Congo source, ’nguba, and it may have come from jubilee. Voodoo was borrowed from the Dahoman tovôdoun, still in use in West Africa, but it seems to have come in through the French. Its American corruption, hoodoo, probably owes nothing to the Negroes; moreover, the earliest use of it recorded by Thornton is dated 1889. The early slaves, of course, retained many words and phrases from their native languages, but they have all disappeared from the speech of their descendants today, save for a few surviving in the Gullah dialect of the South Carolina coast.¹⁰

2. NEW WORDS OF ENGLISH MATERIAL

Of far more importance than such small borrowings was the great stock of new words that the early 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 Seventeenth 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 dignified authority, his lack of æsthetic sensitiveness, his extravagant humor. Among the first settlers there were a few 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 hard 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 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 Sir George Yeardley, Deputy Governor, lamented that “in these five months 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 mar-chansize.” In particular, the generation born in the New World was uncouth and iconoclastic;¹¹ 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, mud-hen, cat-bird, cat-fish, musk-rat, 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, sweet-potato, canvas-back, poke-weed, copper-head, eel-grass, reed-bird, egg-plant, blue-grass, katy-did, pea-nut, pitch-pine, cling-stone (peach), June-bug, lightning-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 that 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 novelty, but the pioneers apparently did not recognize it as the Datura stramonium, and so we find Beverley 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 branch, fork, run (stream), bluff, cliff, neck, barrens, bottoms, watershed, foot-hill, hollow, water-gap, under-brush, bottom-land, clearing, notch, divide, knob, riffle, rolling-country and rapids, 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 topographical terms as down, weald, wold, fen, bog, fell, chase, combe, dell, tarn, common, heath and moor disappeared from the colonial tongue, save as fossilized in a few localisms and proper names.¹² 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-woods, back-street, back-lane, back-land, back-log, back-country, back-field, back-line and back-settler were all in common use before the Revolution. Back-log was used by Increase Mather in 1684, and back-street has been traced to 1638.¹³ Log-house appears in the Maryland Archives for 1669.¹⁴ Hoe-cake, Johnny-cake (originally Shawnee-cake or -bread), pan-fish, corn-dodger, roasting-ear, corn-crib, and pop-corn all belong to the colonial period. So do pine-knot, snow-plow, cold-snap, land-slide, ash-can, bob-sled, fox-grape, apple-butter, salt-lick, prickly-heat, shell-road, worm-fence and cane-brake. Shingle, in the American sense, was a novelty in 1705, but one S. Symonds wrote to John Winthrop, of Ipswich, about a clap-boarded house in 1637. Frame-house seems to have come in with shingle. Selectman is first heard of in 1685, displacing the English alderman. Mush had displaced porridge in general use by 1671. 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 in 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, 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. In 1785 Jefferson, after playing with such terms as pistarine and piece-of-eight, proposed mill, cent, disme, dollar and eagle, and this nomenclature was made official by the Act Establishing a Mint, approved April 2, 1792. Jefferson apparently derived disme from the French word dixiéme, meaning a tenth, and the original pronunciation seems to have been deem. But dime soon supplanted it.¹⁵

Various nautical terms peculiar to America, or taken into English from American sources, came in during the Eighteenth Century, among them, schooner, cat-boat, mud-scow and pungy. According to an historian of the American merchant marine,¹⁶ the first schooner even 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 builder — and all boats of her peculiar and novel fore-and-aft rig took the name thereafter. The Scotch verb came from the Norse skunna, to hasten, and there are analogues in Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon and Old High German. The origin of cat-boat, bug-eye and pungy I have been unable to determine. Perhaps the last-named is related in some way to pung, a one-horse sled or wagon. Pung was once widely used in the United States, but later sank 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.

The early Americans showed that spacious disregard for linguistic nicety which has characterized their descendants ever since. They reduced verb-phrases to simple verbs, turned verbs into nouns, nouns into verbs, and adjectives into either or both. Pickering, in his Vocabulary (1816) made a belated protest against the reduction of the English law-phrase, to convey by deed, to to deed, and argued solemnly that no self-respecting attorney would employ it, but American attorneys had actually been employing it for years, and they continue to do so to this day. So with to table for to lay on the table. 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 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 deprecated to advocate, to progress and to oppose — a vain caveat, 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,¹⁷ but 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.

Webster, though he agreed with Franklin in opposing to advocate, gave his imprimatur to to appreciate (i.e., to rise in value) and to obligate and is credited by Sir Charles Lyell¹⁸ with having himself claimed the invention of to demoralize. In a letter to Thomas Dawes, dated August 5, 1809,¹⁹ he said that he had also “enriched the vocabulary” with absorbable, accompaniment, acidulous, achromatic, adhesiveness, adjutancy, admissibility, advisory, amendable, animalize, aneurismal, antithetical, appellor, appreciate, appreciation, arborescent, arborization, ascertainable, bailee, bailment, indorser, indorsee, prescriptive, imprescriptible, statement, insubordination, expenditure, subsidize, “and other elegant and scientific terms, now used by the best writers in Great Britain and America.” But most of these, though he could not find them in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), were already in English before he began to write dictionaries himself, and some were very old.²⁰ 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, as we saw in Chapter I, Section 2, 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 negative, to blow (i.e., to bluster or boast), to cord (i.e., wood), to stump, to room and to shin. Others arose as metaphors, e.g., to whitewash (figuratively) and to squat (on unoccupied land). Others were made by hitching suffixes to nouns, or by groping for roots, e.g., to deputize, to locate, to legislate, to infract, to compromit and to happify. Yet others seem to have been produced by onomatopœia, 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 pioneer life. Many coinages of the pre-Revolutionary era later disappeared. Jefferson used to ambition, but it dropped out nevertheless. So did conflagrative, though a president of Yale gave it his imprimatur. So did to compromit (i.e., to compromise), to homologize and to happify.²¹ 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 quite respectable usage, 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. By 1816, indeed, Jeremy Bentham was using it in England. Years later James Russell Lowell spoke of it as “the excellent adjective,”²² 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,²³ 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.²⁴ 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 darky.

The history of these Americanisms shows how vain is the effort of grammarians to combat the normal processes of language development. I have mentioned the 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 William Cullen Bryant’s celebrated Index Expurgatorkis (c. 1870),²⁵ and reliable was denounced by Bishop Coxe as “that abominable barbarism” so late as 1886.²⁶ 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.”²⁷ Gould also protested against to jeopardize, leniency and to demean, though the last named was very old in English in the different sense of to conduct oneself, and Richard Grant White joined him in an onslaught upon to donate. But all these words are in good usage in the United States today, and some of them have gone over into English.

3. CHANGED MEANINGS

The early Americans also made a great many new words by changing the meaning of old ones. The cases of pond and creek I have already mentioned. To squat, in the sense of to crouch, had been sound English for centuries, but they gave it the meaning of to settle on land without the authority of the owner, and from it the noun squatter quickly emanated. Of another familiar Americanism Krapp says:

The method of portioning out the common lands to the townsmen of the first New England communities has led to the general American use of lot to designate a limited section of land.… The town of Lunenburg (1721) paid for “Travil and Expenc When The Lotts Were Drawn at Concord,” and the records contain a list of all the lots in the town with “the names of those That first Drew them.”… In the Norwalk Records (1671) the agreement is recorded that “all those men that now draw lots with their neighbors shall stand to their lots that now they draw.”… From this usage was derived also the popular saying, to cut across lots.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, though the former meaning, reinforced, survived in the tautological phrase, double team. 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 maiz. The term appears in Bradford’s “History of Plimouth Plantation” (1647) and in Mourt’s “Relation” (1622). 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 footwear, 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 fashion which has sought to revive boot in the United States, and with it its derivatives, boot-shop and boot-maker.

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 middle of the Eighteenth Century shop continued to designate a small 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 of 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 goods, and this is its common meaning in England today, as is shown by lumber-room. But the colonists early employed it to designate cut timber, and that use of it is now universal in America. Its familiar derivatives, e.g., lumber-yard, lumber-man, lumber-jack, greatly reinforce this usage. Dry-goods, in England, means, “non-liquid goods, as corn” (i.e., wheat); in the United States the term means “textile fabrics, cottons, woolens, linens, silks, laces, etc.”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. In England partridge is applied only to the true partridge (Perdix perdix) and its nearly related varieties, but in the United States it is also often used to designate the ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus), the common quail (Colinus virginianus), and various other tetraonid birds. This confusion goes back to colonial times. So with rabbit. Zoölogically 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. Bay and bay berry early acquired special American meanings. In England bay is used to designate the bay-tree (Laurus no-bilis); in America it designates a shrub, the wax myrtle (Myrica cerifera). Both the tree and the shrub have berries, and those of the latter are used to make the well-known bay berry candles. Other botanical and zöological terms to which the colonists gave new significances are blackbird, beech, hemlock, lark, laurel, oriole, swallow and walnut.

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 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 up; 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 vulgar American misuse of Miss or Mis’ (pro. miz) for Mrs. It was so widespread by 1790 that on November 17 of that year Webster denounced it as “a gross impropriety” in the American Mercury. The schoolmarm has made war on it ever since, but it survives unscathed in the speech of the common people.

4. 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,”³² 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 produced from an original immigration of less than 80,000. 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, and there were signs of the rise of a new native aristocracy, entirely distinct from the older aristocracy of the royal governors’ courts.³³ 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. “No allusion to Shakespeare,” says Bliss Perry,³⁴ “has been discovered in the colonial literature of the Seventeenth Century, and scarcely an allusion to the Puritan poet Milton.” Benjamin Franklin’s brother, James, had a copy of Shakespeare at the New England Courant office in Boston, but Benjamin himself seems to have made little use of it, for there is not a single quotation from or mention of the bard in all his voluminous works.³⁵ “The Harvard College Library in 1723,” says Perry, “had nothing of Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope and Swift, and had only recently obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare.… Franklin reprinted ‘Pamela’ and his Library Company of Philadelphia had two copies of ‘Paradise Lost’ for circulation in 1741, but there had been no copy of that work in the great library of Cotton Mather.” Moreover, after 1760, the eyes of the colonists 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.³⁶

During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries England was wracked by a movement to standardize the language, alike in vocabulary, in pronunciation and in spelling, and it went far enough to set up artificial standards that still survive.³⁷ The great authority of Samuel Johnson gave heavy support to this movement, though he was wise enough in the preface to his Dictionary (1735) to admit somewhat sadly that “sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints” and that “to enchain syllables, and to lash the winds, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.” But Johnson could never resist the temptation to pontificate, and so he thundered idiotically against to wobble, to bamboozle, to swap, to budge, to coax, touchy, stingy, swimmingly, fib, banter, fop, row (in the sense of a disturbance) and even fun and chaperon, all of them then somewhat novel.³⁸ He also permitted himself to read the death-warrants of many archaisms that were not really archaisms at all, for example, glee, jeopardy and to smoulder. The Americans, in the main, were cut off from this double policing, and in consequence they went on making new words freely and cherishing old ones that had come under the ban in England. A minority along the coast, to be sure, tried to keep up with the latest dictates of English fashion, but it was never large, and its speech habits had but small influence upon those of the majority. There was obviously only rhetoric in James Russell Lowell’s saying that “our ancestors, unhappily, could bring over no English better than Shakespeare’s,” for relatively few of them had ever heard of Shakespeare, and to even fewer was he anything more than a vague name;³⁹ but it is nevertheless a fact that their way of using the language had something in it of his glorious freedom and spaciousness.⁴⁰ If they had any written guide it was the King James Bible (1611). Whenever an English reform or innovation percolated to them they were inclined to remain faithful to the sacred text, not only because of its pious authority but also because of the superior pull of its imminent and constant presence. Thus when fashionable prudery in English ordered the abandonment of the Anglo-Saxon sick for the later and more elegant ill, the colonists refused to follow, for sick was in both the Old Testament and the New;⁴¹ and that refusal remains in force to this day.

A 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, shoat, beef (to designate the live animal), chinch, cord-wood and home-spun; Halliwell⁴² adds andiron, bay-window, cesspool, clodhopper, cross-purposes, greenhorn, loop-hole, ragamuffin 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 “Antony and Cleopatra.” Char, as a noun, disappeared from Standard English long ago, save in the compound, charwoman, but it survives in American as chore. Among the verbs 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”:

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 Oxford Dictionary offers examples much older — from Chaucer, Wycliffe and Gower. 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, in both English and American, now call it an Americanism. 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 was used in its American sense of plain-featured by both Shakespeare and Milton. Other such survivors are burly, catty-conered, likely, deft, copious, scant and ornate. Perhaps clever also belongs to this category, that is, in the American sense of amiable.

Most of the English archaisms surviving in American seem to be derived from the dialects of Eastern and Southern England, from which regions, in fact, a large percentage of the original English settlers came. Sir William Craigie says⁴³ that in New England three areas are chiefly represented — Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, East Anglia, and the Southwestern counties. The Rev. Edward Gepp, of Colchester, who has made comparative studies of the Essex dialect and the common speech of the United States, says that the latter shows a “striking absence of words and forms characteristic of Scotland, and of the North and West of England.”⁴⁴ Since the early colonial period there has been an accession of Northern forms, chiefly through the so-called Scotch-Irish influence, but the older archaisms are nearly all Southern or Eastern. Another English observer, the Rev. H. T. Armfield, has found many Essex place-names in New England, among them, Hedingham, Topsfield, Wethers-field, Braintree, Colchester, Haverhill and Billerica.⁴⁵ Among the vulgar forms now common in the United States which still survive in the Essex dialect Mr. Gepp notes kilter, kiver, yarb, ary, nary, ellum, tonguey, pesky, snicker, bimeby, cowcumber, invite (for invitation) and hoss, and the verbs to argify, to slick up and to scrimp. His word-lists also show a number of words that are now good American, e.g., chump, given-name and heft. But such archaisms are naturally most common on the lower levels of speech, and in remote and uncultured settlements. “It is a commonplace of the study of cultural history,” says George Philip Krapp,⁴⁶ “that isolated communities tend to remain relatively stable. They retain their customs, their occupations, their speech, all their cultural traditions, very much as they were at the time when the members of the community seated themselves within the confines of the prison house which they call their home.” Thus it is no wonder that the American spoken by the mountaineers of Appalachia shows an unusually large admixture of ancient forms, usually English but often Scottish, not only in its vocabulary, but also in its syntax and pronunciation. Archaic forms continue to flourish in such remote regions just as the Rheno-Franconian dialect of the Seventeenth Century survives among the more bucolic Germans of the lower counties of Pennsylvania. We shall encounter some of them in Chapter VII.

1 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.

2 Sylva Clapin lists 110 Indian loanwords in his New Dictionary of Americanisms; New York, c. 1902, and Alexander F. Chamberlain lists 132 in Algonquin Words in American English, Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XV. But only 24 of Clapin’s words would have any meaning to the average American today. The rest either survive only as proper names, e.g., tupelo, tuckhoe, tammany, michigouen, sing-sing, netop, catawba, or are obsolete altogether. An elaborate dictionary of Indian loan-words, compiled by the late W. R. Gerard, is in the possession of the Smithsonian Institution, but it remains in manuscript. Parts of it are almost unintelligible, and there is little likelihood that it will ever be printed. The literature of the subject is rather meager. Probably the best discussion of it is in the first chapter of Scheie de Vere’s Americanisms; New York, 1872.

3 Clapin lists 131 loan-words from the French in his Dictionary, but not more than 20 of them would be generally recognized today. Most of the rest survive only along the Canadian border. A curious obso-letism is movey-star, from the French mauvaises terres. It is still used in the translated form of badlands, but movey-star went out many years ago.

4 (a) A chest of drawers, (b) a government office. In both senses the word is rare in England, though its use by the French is familiar. In the United States its use in (b) has been extended, e.g., in employment-bureau.

5 Cole-slaw was quickly converted into cold-slaw by folk etymologv. Thornton’s first example of the latter is dated 1794, but it must have appeared earlier. Later on a warm-slaw was invented to keep cold-slaw company.

6 From Sant Klaas (Saint Nicholas). Santa Claus has also become familiar to the English, but the Oxford Dictionary still calls it an Americanism. It is always pronounced, of course, Santy Claws.

7 The Term State-House, Dialect Notes, Vol. II, Pt. IV, 1902.

8 Dutch Contributions to the Vocabulary of English in America, by William H. Carpenter, Modern Philology, July, 1908. Mr. Karl von Schlieder of Hackensack, N. J., sends me a list of curious forms encountered near Kingston, N. Y. It includes pietje-kamaakal (unreasonable), surallikus (so-so), zwok (soft, slippery), connalyer (crowd), klainzaric (untidy), haidang (nothing), onnozel (outlandish), poozly (whining), feaselick (undesirable), kanaapie (child), aislick (no-account), brigghity (impudent), and bahay (confusion). That all of these are of Dutch origin is not certain, but some of them seem to be duplicated in the Jersey Dutch once spoken in Bergen and Passaic counties, New Jersey. See The Jersey Dutch Dialect, by J. Dyneley Prince, Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Pt. IV, 1910. Krapp in The English Language in America, adds a few Long Island obsoletisms, e.g., scule, from fiskaal, meaning a public prosecutor (Hempstead Records, 1675–84); morgen, a measure of land (do. 1658); schepel, a bushel (do. 1658); and much, from mutsje, a liquid measure (do. 1673). Morgen survived until 1869, and is to be found in the annual report of the Federal Commissioner of Agriculture for that year.

9 Of the 46 Dutch loan-words listed by Clapin in his Dictionary only a dozen or so remain in general use. See also A Dictionary of the Low-Dutch Element in the English Vocabulary, by J. F. Bense; Oxford, 1926; and The Dutch Influence on the English Vocabulary, by G. N. Clark, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XLIV, 1935

10 “The commonest there,” says Reed Smith, in Gullah, Bulletin of the University of South Carolina, Nov. 1, 1926, “are the exclamation ki (or kai) to express wonder or to add emphasis to a statement, and buckra for white man.… To these may be added nyam, oona, swanga (or swongger), du-du, goober, pinder, cooter, okra, geechy, cymbi, bakalingo (obsolescent), guffer, penepne, da, da-da. Malafee for whiskey has been noted on St. Helena Island.” How many of these are actually African I don’t know. See also Gullah: a Negro Patois, by John Bennett, South Atlantic Quarterly, Oct., 1908, and Jan., 1909; and The Black Border, by Ambrose E. Gonzalez; Columbia, S. C., 1922. The latter contains a Gullah glossary.

11 See The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 14 and 22.

12 For example, Chevy Chase, Boston Common, the Back Bay Fens, and cranberry-bog.

13 A long list of compounds based on back, from the collection of the editorial board of the Dictionary of American English, is to be found in American Speech, Oct., 1930. It runs to no less than 120 terms, all of them of American origin. In addition, there is a list of eleven peculiarly American uses of back as a verb, and five of its uses as an adjective.

14 Log-cabin came later. Thornton’s first quotation is dated 1818. The Log-Cabin campaign was in 1840.

15 I am indebted here to Mr. Maury Maverick, of San Antonio, Tex., a diligent searcher of the early laws of the Republic. A thorough investigation of them might yield materials of value to the philologian. Some of the early town-records were explored by George Philip Krapp (The English Language in America, Vol. II), but his interest was in pronunciation rather than in vocabulary. There are leads to other material in E. G. Swem’s monumental Virginia Historical Index; Roanoke Va., 1934, which indexes words as well as names.

16 Willian Brown Meloney: The Heritage of Tyre, New York, 1916, p. 15.

17 Despite his implacable hostility to American innovations, Southey was himself a busy inventor of uncouth neologisms. In The Doctor (1834–37), says George H. McKnight in Modern English in the Making, he used agathokakological, cacodemonize, dendanthropology, gelastics, kittenship, magnisonant and critikin, and even in the Quarterly Review, the very G.H.Q. of anti-American pedantry, he used doniv-orous, humgig, frizzgig and evangelizationeer.

18 In his Travels in North America in the Years 1841–42; London, 1845; New York, 1852, p. 53.

19 It is reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931, p. 48 ff.

20 The Oxford Dictionary traces amendable to 1589, antithetical to 1583, imprescriptible to 1562, bailment to 1554, bailee to 1528 and appellor to c. 1400. The following were also in use before Webster’s time: absorbable, 1779; admissibility, 1778; statement, 1775; acidulous, 1769; achromatic, 1766; aneurismal, 1757; accompaniment, 1756; indorsee, 1754; animalize, 1741; arborescent, 1675.

21 Thornton’s last example of the use of to compromit is dated 1842; of to happify, 1857, and of to ambition, 1861. So far as I know, no one has ever attempted to compile anything approaching a complete list of obsolete Americanisms, but a number are given in The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp, Vol. I, Ch. II. They include spong, a strip of meadow; bolts, timber cut into lengths; while in the sense of until; hole, a synonym of spong (it survives in a few geographical names, e.g., Woods Hole); shruffe, the undergrowth of a swamp; cohoss, a bend in a river; folly, a word of undetermined meaning, maybe from the Dutch vallje, a little valley; seater, a settler; and crickthatch, salt-water grass. Some of these were old English words that survived in America longer than in England.

22 The Biglow Papers, Series II, 1866, pref.

23 In a letter to his sister Hannah, dated May 30, 1831, Macaulay told her of a visit to Holland House and a conversation with Lady Holland, who objected to various words, beginning with constituency, and going on to influential, talented and gentlemanly. Macaulay argued in favor of talented, saying that its root “first appeared in theological writing,” and was taken from the Parable of the Talents. “She seemed surprised by this theory,” he wrote to his sister, “never having, so far as I could judge, heard of the parable.” Talented is sometimes listed as an Americanism, but it actually arose in England, c. 1825.

24 Franklin, incidentally, also invented the harmonica and its name. But his harmonica was not the mouth-organ that we know today, but a sort of improvement on the old musical-glasses. Moreover, he called it the armonica, not the harmonica. This was in 1762. The term went over into English very quickly, and had ceased to be an Americanism before 1800. Later it seems to have become changed to harmonicon. But the prevalent present form is harmonica, and it now designates not only a mouth-organ, but also one of the organ-stops. The Oxford Dictionary’s first example of mouth-organ is dated c. 1668. In Germany, where most mouth-organs come from, the instrument is called the harmonika. Whether the name was borrowed from Franklin or invented independently I do not know.

25 Reprinted in Helpful Hints in Writing and Reading, comp. by Grenville Kleiser; New York, 1911, pp. 15–17.

26 A. Cleveland Coxe: Americanisms in England, Forum, Oct., 1886.

27 Edward S. Gould: Good English, or Popular Errors in Language; New York, 1867, pp. 25–27. So recently as 1918 an Anglophil reviewer denounced me for using it in a book, and hinted that I had borrowed it from the German standpunkt.

28 The English Language in America Vol. I, pp. 85–6. Lott appears in the Connecticut Code of 1650. See the edition of Andrus: Hartford, 1822. On page 35 is “their landes, lotts and accommodations.” On page 46 is “meadow and home lotts” American conveyancers, in describing real property, still usually speak of “all that lot or parcel of land,” though in the Southwest, so I am told by Mr. Maury Maverick, the more prosaic “the following described real estate” is coming in. Lot has begotten a number of derivations, e.g., back-lots, building-lot, front-lot, side-lot, pasture-lot, garden-lot, house-lot and house and lot.

29 Hutchinson’s Diary, Vol. I, p. 171; London, 1883–6. A great many derivatives go back to the same era, e.g., corn-husk, corn-shuck, corn-crib, corn-stalk, corn-broom, corn-brake, corn-fritter, corn-fodder, corn-grater, corn-hook, corn-juice, corn-knife, corn-starch, pop-corn, corn-cob, corn-cake, corn-pone, corn-cutter, corn-dodger, corn-fed, corn-meal, corn-snake. Some of these have since become obsolete. “The American colonists,” says Allen Walker Read in The Comment of British Travelers on Early American Terms Relating to Agriculture, Agricultural History, July, 1933, “have never taken kindly to the word [maize]. … Even today [it] is wholly a book word in America.”

30 The definitions are from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1914) and Webster’s New International Dictionary (1934), respectively.

31 Samuel Sewall: Diary, April 14, 1712: “I lay’d a Rock in the Northeast corner of the Foundation of the Meeting-House.”

32 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. See also The Founding of New England, by James Truslow Adams; Boston, 1921, p. 221 ff.

33 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.

34 The American Spirit in Literature; New Haven, 1918, p. 61.

35 Since this statement appeared in my last edition Mr. Meyer Isenberg of Chicago has called my attention to what may be an echo of Shakespeare in Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1735: “A ship under sail and a big-bellied woman are the handsomest things that can be seen in common.” Mr. Isenberg believes that this may have been suggested by Titania’s speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II, Sc. 1, beginning “Set your heart at rest.” But even if this be true, Franklin may have encountered the idea at second hand. He said in his Autobiography: “At the time I established myself in Philadelphia (1723) there was not a good bookseller’s shop in any of the colonies to the southward of Boston. In New York and Philadelphia the printers were indeed stationers, but they sold only paper, almanacs, ballads, and a few common school-books. Those who loved reading were obliged to send for their books to England.”

36 See 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.”

37 There is a detailed and excellent account of it in Modern English in the Making, by George H. Mc-Knierht; New York, 1028, Ch. XI ff.

38 See Adjectives — and Other Words, by Ernest Weekley; London, 1930, p. 37. Also, McKnight, pp. 372 and 412. McKnight says that among the other words “branded at one time or another by Eighteenth Century purists either as cant or as slang or as ‘low’ ” were banter, cocksure, dumbfounded, enthusiasm, extra, flimsy, flippant, flirtation, gambling, helter-skelter, humbug, jilt, mob, nervous, pell-mell, prig, quandary, shabby, sham, shuffle, topsy-turvy, touchy, turtle and twang,

39 Sir William Craigie discusses this matter in The Study of American English, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXVII, 1927, p. 199 ff. “The colonists,” he says, “were too few in number, and many of them too unlettered, to bring with them the whole of that marvellous language of which even Shakespeare could not exhaust the riches. It may safely be said that no colony ever carries with it the whole of its mother tongue, and this is all the more certain when that tongue has attained a high level of literary development.… It is necessary to draw a distinction between the potential and actual possession of the colonists and their immediate descendants. They had a heritage which was larger than they were able to occupy to the full.”

40 McKnight, Ch. X, deals with Shakespeare’s English at length. It was by no means untutored; in fact, the Bard was a consummate master of the rhetoric fashionable in the London of his time. But his genius was too vast to endure its bonds, and so he helped himself to the riches of the common speech. “The effect produced” says McKnight, “is like that of the renewed metaphors to be heard in modern times in the speech of the frontier, where, free from the blighting influence of learning, forms of language are created afresh.” All the characters that purists complain of in modern American are to be found in full flower in Elizabethan English — the bold interchange of parts of speech, the copious coinage of neologisms, the disregard of nice inflections, the free use of prepositions, and the liking for loan-words. “The general impression,” says McKnight, “is that of a language little governed as yet by rules, but on account of its very irregularity, flexible, and, therefore, adaptable to the expression of varied meaning.” See also Shakespeare’s English, by George Gordon, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXIX, 1928.

41 Examples of its use in the American sense are to be found in Gen. XLVIII, 1; II Kings VIII, 7; John XI, 1, and Acts IX, 37.

42 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. See also Gilbert M. Tucker’s American English; New York, 1921, p. 39 ff.

43 The Study of American English, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXVII, 1927, p. 201.

44 A Contribution to an Essex Dialect Dictionary, Supplement III; Colchester, 1922.

45 Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, Vol. IV, N.S., 1893.

46 Is American English Archaic?, Southwest Review, Summer, 1927, p. 296.

IV
THE PERIOD OF GROWTH

I. A NEW NATION IN THE MAKING

Sufficient evidence has been set forth, I take it, to show that the English of the United States had begun to be recognizably differentiated from the English of England by the opening of the Nineteenth Century. But as yet its free proliferation was impeded by two factors, the first being the lack of a national literature of any expanse and dignity and the second being an internal political disharmony which greatly conditioned and enfeebled the national solidarity. During the actual Revolution common aims and common dangers forced the Americans to show a more or less 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 then 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 rivalries 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 and culturally, as Americans pure and simple.¹ Their state of mind, vacillating, uncertain, alternately timorous and pugnacious, has been well described by Henry Cabot Lodge in his essay on “Colonialism in America.”² 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 B. J. Lossing in “Our Country” (1873), “occurred, and that independence was won, by the Americans in the War of 1812.” 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,³ 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 today) exhibited an undisguised Anglomania, and looked forward confidently to a rapprochement with the mother country.⁴ This Anglomania showed itself, not only in ceaseless political agitation, but also in an elaborate imitation of English manners.

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 on the one hand and subservience to English precept and example on the other; 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 modeled 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,⁵ 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 a part 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 the rise of the lower orders and give it dramatic effectiveness. Jackson was the archetype of the new American who appeared after 1814 — ignorant, pushful, impatient of restraint and precedent, an iconoclast, a Philistine, an Anglophobe in every fiber. “He was,” says his biographer, James Parton, “the most American of Americans — an embodied Declaration of Independence — the Fourth of July incarnate.” He came from the extreme backwoods, and his youth was passed, like that of Abraham Lincoln after him, amid surroundings but little removed from savagery. Thousands of other young Americans of the same sort 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 thoroughgoing 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 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 great 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 minutiæ of social intercourse. And simultaneously the voice of America began to take on its characteristic tone-colors, and the speech of America began to differentiate itself 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 its marks, at first only faintly but in the end very clearly, upon 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 predominantly and indeed almost wholly polemical, and hence lacking in anything properly describable as æsthetic value; 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,” said Barrett Wendell, “have all flourished since 1800.”⁷

But when a beginning was made at last, it was made with what might almost be described as a whoop. The violent reviling of the English reviewers, described at length in Chapter I, had at last overshot its mark. Abashed and alarmed by it for years, the American literati were goaded, in the end, into meeting it with defiance, and that defiance both supported and got support from the rising national feeling. The same year, 1828, which saw the beginning of Jackson’s first term also saw the publication of Noah Webster’s “American Dictionary of the English Language,” and a year later followed Samuel Lorenzo Knapp’s “Lectures on American Literature,” the first formal treatise on the national letters ever written. Knapp, by that time, had enough materials at hand to make a very creditable showing — for example, Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” (published in the North American Review in 1817); Irving’s “Knickerbocker” (1809), “The Sketch-Book” (1819), “Bracebridge Hall” (1822), “Tales of a Traveler” (1824) and “Columbus” (1828); Cooper’s “The Spy” (1821), “The Pilot” (1823) and “The Prairie” (1826); Hawthorne’s “Fanshaw” (1828); and Poe’s “Tamerlane and Other Poems” (1827); not to mention Schoolcraft’s “Through the Northwest” (1821) and “Travels in the Mississippi Valley” (1825), Kent’s “Commentaries” (1826), Marshall’s “Washington” (1804) and Audubon’s “Birds of America” (1827). But Knapp was not content to put these new pearls in array; he must also deliver himself of Jacksonian exultations. Where in all England, he demanded, was there a “tuneful sister” comparable to Mrs. Lydia Sigourney, whose

strains of poetic thought are as pure and lovely as the adjacent wave [of the Connecticut river] touched by the sanctity of a Sabbath’s morn?… What are the Tibers and Scamanders, measured by the Missouri and the Amazon? Or what the loveliness of Illyssus or Avon, by the Connecticut or the Potomack? The waters of these American rivers are as pure and sweet, and their names would be as poetical, were they as familiar to us in song as the others, which have been immortalized for ages. Whenever a nation wills it, prodigies are born.… In the smiles of publick favor poets will arise, yea, have already arisen, whose rays of mental fire will burn out the foul stain upon our reputation, given at first by irritated and neglected genius, and continued by envy and malice.… All things have become well settled upon true principles among us, and the agitation and bustle of their establishment having passed away, some of the first minds will gratify their ambition by literary distinction.

In brief, the national feeling, long delayed in appearing, leaped into being at last in truly 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 keynote 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. Unbounded confidence in the material development of the country … prevailed throughout 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 greatness.⁸

Nor was that vast optimism wholly without warrant. An American literature was actually taking form, and with the memory of old wrongs still shutting them off from England, the new American writers turned 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, Irving, Cooper, John P. Kennedy and many another 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 shows, 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 every British usage and opinion as puerile and idiotic. 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 in his decorous Baptist pulpit to protest that so much patriotism amounted to chauvinism and absurdity, but there seems to have been no one to second the motion. The debate upon the Oregon question gave a gaudy chance to the new breed of super-patriots, and they raged unchecked until the time of the Civil War. Thornton, in his Glossary, quotes a typical speech in Congress, the subject being the American eagle and the orator being the Hon. Samuel C. Pomeroy, of Kansas. I give a few strophes:

The proudest bird upon the mountain is upon the American ensign, and not one feather shall fall from her plumage there. She is American in design, and an emblem of wildness and freedom. I say again, she has not perched herself upon American standards to die there. Our great Western valleys were never scooped out for her burial place. Nor were the everlasting, untrodden mountains piled for her monument. Niagara shall not pour her endless waters for her requiem; nor shall our ten thousand rivers weep to the ocean in eternal tears. No, sir, no! Unnumbered voices shall come up from river, plain, and mountain, echoing the songs of our triumphant deliverance, wild lights from a thousand hill-tops will betoken the rising of the sun of freedom.

This tall talk was by no means reserved for occasions of state; it decorated the everyday speech of the people, especially in the Jackson country to the southward and beyond the mountains. It ran, there, to grotesque metaphors and far-fetched exaggerations, and out of it came a great many Americanisms that still flourish. Thornton gives a specimen from a Florida newspaper, c. 1840, the speaker being a local fee-faw-fo-fum:

This is me, and no mistake! Billy Earthquake, Esq., commonly called Little Billy, all the way from the No’th Fork of Muddy Run!… Whoop! won’t nobody come out and fight me? Come out, some of you, and die decently, for I’m spiling for a fight.… I’m a poor man, it’s a fact, and smell like a wet dog, but I can’t be run over.… Maybe you never heard of the time the horse kicked me, and put both his hips out of jint — if it ain’t true, cut me up for catfish bait! W-h-o-o-p! I’m the very infant that refused its milk before its eyes were open, and called out for a bottle of old rye.… Talk about grinning the bark off a treė — ’tain’t nothing; one squint of mine at a bull’s heel would blister it. Oh, I’m one of your toughest sort — live forever, and then turn to a white-oak post. I’m the ginewine article, a real double-acting engine, and I can out-run, out-jump, out-swim, chaw more tobacco and spit less, and drink more whiskey and keep soberer than any man in these localities.

Another noble example comes from Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi,” the time being c. 1852:

Whoo-oop! I’m the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw! Look at me! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the smallpox on the mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing. I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood’s my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentle-men, and lay low and hold your breath, for I’m ’bout to turn myself loose!

To which may be added the testimony of Dr. Thomas L. Nichols, an American who left the United States for England in 1861, and published “Forty Years of American Life” there in 1864:

The language [of the West], like the country, has a certain breadth and magnificence. A Western man “sleeps so sound, it would take an earthquake to wake him” … “Stranger,” he says, “in b’ar hunts I am numerous.” … He tells of a person “as cross as a b’ar with two cubs and a sore tail.” He “laughs like a hyena over a dead nigger.” He “walks through a fence like a falling tree through a cobweb.” He “goes the whole hog.”… “Bust me wide open,” he says, “if I didn’t bulge into the creek in the twinkling of a bedpost, I was so thunderin’ savagerous.”⁹

This extravagance of metaphor, with its naïve bombast, had but little influence, of course, upon the more decorous native literati. It was borrowed eagerly by the humorous writers, and especially by those who performed regularly in the newspapers, and at the end of the period it was to leave its marks upon two literary artists of the highest quality, Whitman and Mark Twain, but the generality of American authors eschewed it very diligently. Most of them, in fact, looked back toward Addison, or, perhaps more accurately, toward Johnson. The dominant critics of the time — of whom the Baptist, Griswold, was a good example — followed Eighteenth Century models, and one searches their sonorous periods for even the slightest concession to colloquialism. The grand master of them all, Poe, achieved a style so rotund and ornate that many a contemporary English leader-writer must have envied it. Nor was there any visible yielding to the sermo vulgus in Emerson, Irving, Bryant, Cooper and Longfellow. “Whatever differences there may be,” says Sir William Craigie,¹⁰ “between the language of Longfellow and Tennyson, of Emerson and Ruskin, they are differences due to style and subject, to a personal choice or command of words, and not to any real divergence in the means of expression.” But meanwhile, says Sir William, there was going on

a rise and rapid growth within the United States of new types of literature which would either give fuller scope to the native element by mingling it with the conventional, or would boldly adopt it as a standard in itself.… The runnels of popular speech, which had trickled underground for a century or more, come again to the light of day; they are joined by many more, which have sprung up in the same obscurity; and together they swell into a stream which at its highest flood may well seem to change and obliterate the old banks and landmarks of the language.

Henry James, in “The Question of Our Speech,” had said much the same thing a quarter of a century before (1905):

Keep in sight the interesting historical truth that no language, so far back as our acquaintance with history goes, has known any such ordeal, any such stress and strain, as was to await the English in this huge new community it was so unsuspectingly to help, at first, to father and mother. It came over, as the phrase is, came over originally without fear and without guile — but to find itself transplanted to spaces it had never dreamed, in its comparative humility, of covering, to conditions it had never dreamed, in its comparative innocence, of meeting; to find itself grafted, in short, on a social and political order that was both without precedent and example and incalculably expansive.

Thus, on the levels below the Olympians, a wild and lawless development of the language went on, and many of the uncouth words and phrases that it brought to birth gradually forced themselves into more or less good usage. “The jus et norma loquendi,” says W. R. Morfill, the English philologian, “do not depend upon scholars.” Particularly in a country where scholarship is strange, cloistered and timorous, and the overwhelming majority of the people are engaged upon new and highly exhilarating tasks, far away from schools and with a gigantic cockiness in their hearts. The old hegemony of the Tidewater gentry, North and South, had been shaken by the revolt of the frontier under Jackson, and what remained of an urbane habit of mind and utterance began to be confined to the narrowing feudal areas of the South and the still narrower refuge of the Boston Brahmins, who were presently recognized as a definite caste of intelligentsia, self-charged with carrying the 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, described 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 repute. Much contemporary evidence is to the same effect. W. C. 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 austere retreat of the literati, but the dignity of speech cultivated there had little compensatory influence upon the vulgate. The newspaper was 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 really 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 denounced it specifically for its bad example, and cited, among its crimes against the language, such inventions as to doxologize and to funeralize. To these novelties, apparently without any thought of their uncouthness, Fowler, who was professor of rhetoric at Amherst, added to missionate and consociational.

This pressure from below eventually broke down the defenses of the purists, and forced the new national idiom upon them. Pen in hand, they might still achieve laborious imitations of the hated English reviewers, 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.”

2. 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 literature of humor which began with Thomas C. Haliburton’s “Sam Slick” in 1835, is almost enough to make one sympathize with the pious horror of Dean Alford. 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. Bartlett quotes to doxologize from the Christian Disciple, a quite reputable religious paper of the 40’s. To funeralize¹¹ and to pastor, along with the aforesaid to missionate and consociational, were other contributions of the evangelical 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 the corn-fed etymologists, and they produced a formidable new vocabulary, in -ize, -ate, -ify, -acy, -ous and -ment. Such inventions as 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 respectable 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 burgle¹² and to enthuse.

Some of these inventions, after flourishing for a generation or more, were retired with blushes during the period of plush elegance following the Civil War, but a large number have survived to our own day. Not even the most meticulous purist would think of objecting to to affiliate, to endorse, to collide, to jeopardize, to predicate, 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) and to lynch.¹³ Nor perhaps to to boom, to boost, to kick (in the sense of to protest), to coast (on a sled), to engineer, to chink (i.e., logs), to feaze, to splurge, to bulldoze, to aggravate (in the sense of to anger), and to crawfish. These verbs have entered into the very fiber of the American language, and so have many nouns derived from them, e.g., boomer, boom-town, bouncer, kicker, kick, lynching-bee, splurge, roller-coaster. A few of them, e.g., to collide and to feaze, were archaic English terms brought to new birth; a few others, e.g., to holler¹⁴ and to muss, were obviously mere corruptions. But a good many others, e.g., to bulldoze, to canoodle, to honeyfogle, to hornswoggle and to scoot, were genuine inventions, and redolent of the soil.

Along with these new verbs came a great swarm of verb-phrases, some of them short and pithy and others extraordinarily elaborate, but all showing the national talent for condensing a complex thought, and often a whole series of thoughts, into a vivid and arresting image. To the first class belong 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 have the floor, to know the ropes, to get solid with, to spread oneself, 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 appear to be of American nativity, and the circumstances surrounding the origin of some of them have been accurately determined. Many others are as certainly 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, to do a land-office business and to get the bulge on. And in many others the authentic American flavor is no less plain, for example, in to kick the bucket, to put a bug in his 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 still in use today are non-committal, highfalutin, well-posted, down-town, two-fer, played-out, down-and-out, semi-occasional, under-the-weather, on-the-fence, flat-footed, whole-souled and true-blue. The first appears in a Senate debate of 1841;¹⁵ highfalutin in a political speech of 1848. 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 meager, as in slim chance, slim attendance and slim support, goes back still further. The English commonly use small in place of it. Other, and less respectable contributions of the time are brash, brainy, peart, scary, beatingest, well-heeled, hardshell (e.g., Baptist), low-flung, codfish (to indicate opprobrium) and go-to-meeting. The use of plumb as an adverb, 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 appeared in the Eighteenth Century, and perhaps shows 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 was passing 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 in the newspapers and in the Congressional Record. 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.

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 they exercised their fancy without restraint. As in the colonial and revolutionary periods, 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 ginn-shoe, mortgage-shark, carpet-bagger, cut-off, mass-meeting, dead-beat, 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, 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 by bold combinations. 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 any English equivalent, and it is unmistakably American.¹⁶ The same instinct for the terse, the vivid and the picturesque appears in boiled-shirt, blow-out, big-gun, claim-jumper, home-stretch, spread-eagle, come-down, back-number, bed-spread, claw-hammer (coat), bottom-dollar, poppycock,¹⁷ cold-snap, back-talk, back-taxes, corn-belt, calamity-howler, fire-bug, grab-bag, grip-sack, grub-stake, pay-dirt, tender-foot, stocking-feet, moss-back, crazy-quilt, ticket-scalper, store-clothes, small-potatoes, cake-walk, prairie-schooner, round-up, worm-fence, snake-fence, flat-boat and jumping-ojf place. Such compounds (there are thousands of them) have been largely responsible for giving the American vulgate its characteristic tang and color. Bell-hop, square-meal and chair-warmer, to name three charming specimens, are as distinctively American as jazz or the quick-lunch.

The spirit of the language also appears 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), backbone (for moral courage), tickler (for memorandum or reminder),¹⁸ carnival (in such phrases as carnival of crime), scrape (for fight or difficulty),¹⁹ flurry (of snow, or in the market), suspenders, diggings (for habitation) and range. Again, there are the new workings 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, spon-dulix, slumgullion, rambunctious, scrumptious, to skedaddle, to absquatulate and to exfluncticate.²⁰ 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, rambunctious, to hornswoggle and to skedaddle,²¹ and did not occasionally use them. A whole series of artificial American words groups itself around the prefix ker-, for example, ker-flop, ker-bim, ker-splash, ker-thump, ker-bang, ker-plunk, ker-swash, ker-swosh, ker-slap, ker-whut, ker-chunk, ker-souse, ker-slam and ker-flummux. This prefix and its daughters have been borrowed by the English, but Thornton and Ware agree that it is American, and all of the Oxford Dictionary’s examples down to 1875 are of American provenance. Several of my correspondents suggest that it may have been derived from the German prefix ge- — that it may represent a humorous attempt to make German verbs by analogy, e.g., geflop and gesplash. Color is given to this theory by the fact that some of the Oxford Dictionary’s earliest examples (Supplement, 1933) make the prefix che-, ca- or co-, which are all rather closer to ge- than ker-is. I offer these speculations for whatever they are worth. Certainly many ge- words must have been made by the early “Dutch” comedians in the United States, just as they are still made by college students.²²

In Chapter II, Section 1, I mentioned the superior imaginativeness revealed by Americans in meeting linguistic emergencies, whereby, for example, in seeking names for new objects introduced by the building of railroads, they surpassed the English plough and crossing-plate with cow-catcher and frog. That was in the 30’s. Already at that day the two languages were so differentiated that they produced wholly distinct railroad nomenclatures. Such commonplace American terms as box-car, caboose and air-line are still strangers in England. So are freight-car, flagman, towerman, switch, switch-engine, switch-yard, switchman, track-walker, baggage-room, baggage-check, baggage-smasher, baggage-master, accommodation-train, conductor, express-car, flat-car, hand-car, gondola, way-bill, expressman, express-office, fast-freight, wrecking-crew, jerk-water, commutation-ticket, commuter; round-trip, mileage-book, ticket-scalper, depot, limited, hot-box, iron-horse, stop-over, tie, fish-plate, run, train-boy, chair-car, club-car, bumpers, mail-clerk, passenger-coach, day-coach, railroad-man, ticket-office, truck and right-of-way, and the verbs to flag, to express, to dead-head, to side-swipe, to stop-over, to fire (i.e., a locomotive), to switch, to side-track, to railroad, to commute and to clear the track. These terms are in constant use in America; their meaning is familiar to all Americans; many of them have given the language everyday figures of speech.²³ But the majority of them would puzzle an Englishman, just as the English luggage-van, permanent-way, goods-waggon, guard, carrier, booking-office, railway-rug, tripper, line, points, shunt, metals and bogie would puzzle the average untraveled American.²⁴

In two other familiar fields very considerable differences between English and American are visible; in both fields they go back to the gaudy era before the Civil War. They are politics and that department of social intercourse which has to do with drinking. Many characteristic American political terms originated in revolutionary days and have passed over into English. Of such sort are caucus and mileage. But the majority of those in common use today were coined during the extraordinarily exciting campaigns following the defeat of Adams by Jefferson. Charles Ledyard Norton has devoted a whole book to their etymology and meaning;²⁵ the number is far too large for a list of them to be attempted here. But a few characteristic specimens may be recalled; for example, the simple compounds: omnibus-bill, banner-state, favorite-son, anxious-bench, gag-rule, executive-session, spoils-system, mass-meeting, steering-committee, office-seeker and straight-ticket; the humorous metaphors: pork-barrel, pie-counter, land-slide, dark-horse, carpet-bagger, lame-duck and on-the-fence; the old words put to new uses: plank, pull, platform, ring, machine, wheel-horse, precinct, primary, floater, repeater, bolter, filibuster, regular and fences; the new coinages: gerrymander, buncombe, roorback, mugwump and bulldozing; the new derivatives: abolitionist, candidacy, boss-rule, per-diem and boodler; and the almost innumerable verbs and verb-phrases: to knife, to straddle, to crawfish, to split a ticket, to go up Salt River, to bolt, to lobby, to eat crow, to boodle, to divvy, to grab and to run. An English candidate doesn’t run; he stands. To run, according to Thornton, was already used in America in 1789; it was universal by 1820. Platform came in at the same time. Machine was first applied to a political organization by Aaron Burr. Anxious-bench (or anxious-seat) at first designated only the place occupied by the penitent at revivals, but was used in its present political sense in Congress so early as 1842. Banner-state appears in Niles’ Register for December 5, 1840. Favorite-son appears in an ode addressed to Washington on his visit to Portsmouth, N. H., in 1789, but it did not acquire its present ironical sense until it was applied to Martin Van Buren. Thornton has traced filibuster to 1836, roorback to 1844, split-ticket to 1842, and bolter to 1812. Regularity was an issue in Tammany Hall in 1822. There were primaries in New York City in 1827, and hundreds of repeaters voted. In 1829 there were lobby-agents at Albany, and they soon became lobbyists; in 1832 lobbying had already extended to Washington. All of these terms are now as firmly imbedded in the American vocabulary as election or congressman.²⁶

In the department of conviviality the imaginativeness of Americans was early shown both in the invention and in the naming of new and often highly complex beverages. So vast was the production of novelties during the Nineteenth Century that England borrowed many of them and their names with them. And not only England: one buys cocktails and gin-fizzes to this day in American bars that stretch from Paris to Yokohama. Cocktail, stone-fence and sherry-cobbler were mentioned by Washington Irving in “Knickerbocker” (1809);²⁷ by Thackeray’s time they were already well-known in England. Thornton traces the sling to 1788, and the stinkibus and anti-fogmatic, both now extinct, to the same year. The origin of the rickey, fizz, sour, cooler, skin, shrub and smash, and of such curious American drinks as the horse’s neck, Mamie Taylor, Tom-and-Jerry, Tom Collins, John Collins, bishop, stone-wall, gin-fix, brandy-cham-parelle, golden-slipper, hari-kari, locomotive, whiskey-daisy, blue-blazer, black-stripe, white-plush and brandy-crusta remains to be established; the historians of the booze arts, like the philologists, differ in their theories. But the essentially American character of most of them is obvious, despite the fact that a number have gone over into English. The English, in naming their own somewhat meager inventions, commonly display a far more limited imagination. Seeking a name, for example, for a mixture of whiskey and soda-water, the best they could achieve was whiskey-and-soda. The Americans, introduced to the same drink, at once gave it the far more original name of high-ball. So with soda-water and pop. So with minerals and soft-drinks. Other characteristic Americanisms (a few of them borrowed by the English) are red-eye, corn-juice, eye-opener, forty-rod, squirrel-whiskey, phlegm-cutter, hard-cider, apple-jack and corpse-reviver, and the auxiliary drinking terms, boot-legger, sample-room, blind-pig, barrel-house, bouncer, bung-starter, dive, doggery, schooner, stick, duck, straight, hooch, saloon, finger and chaser. Thornton shows that jag, bust, bat and to crook the elbow are also Americanisms. So are bartender and saloon-keeper.

It would be possible, too, to compile a formidable roster of theological and ecclesiastical Americanisms, e.g., anxious bench, or seat (first noted in 1839), mourners’ bench, amen corner, hard-shell (1842), camp-meeting (1801), circuit-rider (1838), come-outer (1840), deacon-seat (1851), desk, for pulpit (1770), blue-law (1775), book-concern (1851), go-to-meeting, hell-robber, experience-meeting, foot-wash, donation-party, pounding, pastorium, and the verbs, to pastor, to missionate, to get (or experience) religion, to fellowship and to shout.

3. LOAN-WORDS AND NON-ENGLISH INFLUENCES

The Indians of the Far West, it would seem, had little to add to the contributions already made to the American vocabulary by the Algonquians of the Northeast. Most of the new loan-words that were picked up west of the Mississippi came in either through the Spanish, e.g., coyote, or through the Chinook trade-jargon of the Columbia river region,²⁸ e.g., cayuse.²⁹ There was also some translation of terms supposed to be in use among the Indians, e.g., squaw-man, heap big chief, Great White Father, Father of Waters, and happy hunting-grounds, but most of these, I suspect, owed more to the imagination of the pioneers than to the actual usage of the Indians. In the Oregon country Chinook is still understood by many Indians, and terms borrowed from it are heard as localisms, e.g., tillicum (friend), cultus (worthless, evil), tumtum (literally heart, used to signify belief, opinion, hunch), potlatch (feast, public meeting), skookum (strong, majestic, splendid), nanitch (a journey), and kokshut (used up, worn out, ruined).³⁰ It is possible that hike is derived from the Chinook hyak (to hurry), but this remains uncertain. In the Southwest many loan-words from the local Indian languages are similarly in more or less general use, e.g., hogan (an Indian habitation), kiva (the central building of a pueblo), sambuke (a musical instrument), tombé (another), katchina (a spirit), tisiwn (an intoxicant), and tegua (a sandal).³¹

Contact with the French in Louisiana and along the Northwestern border, and with the Spanish in Texas and farther West, brought in many new words. From the Canadian French, as we have seen in Chapter III, Section 1, prairie, batteau, portage and rapids had been borrowed during colonial days. To these French contributions bayou, depot, picayune, levee, chute, butte, crevasse, lagniappe and coulee³² were now added, and probably also shanty³³ and canuck.³⁴ Prairie begat an enormous progeny during the great movement into the West. In 1828 Noah Webster omitted it altogether from his “American Dictionary of the English Language,” but Thornton shows that its use to designate the Western steppes was already common before the Revolution, and that prairie-hen and prairie-dog had come in by 1805. By 1857, according to Sir William Craigie,³⁵ “at least thirty other combinations of the same type had been employed in the works of explorers and other writers.” The Century Dictionary (1889–91) records thirty-four prairie combinations, the Oxford Dictionary (1909) sixty-three, and Webster’s New International, Second Edition (1934), seventy-nine.

From Spanish, once the Mississippi was crossed, and particularly during and after the Mexican War, there came a swarm of novelties, many of which have remained firmly imbedded in the language. Among them were numerous names of strange personages and objects: rancho, alfalfa, mustang, sombrero, canyon, desperado, poncho, chaparral, corral, bronco, plaza, peon, alcalde, burro, mesa, tornado, presidio, patio, sierra and adobe. To them, as soon as gold was discovered, were added bonanza, eldorado, placer and vigilante. Some of the borrowings of the time underwent phonetic change. The Spanish cincho, meaning a saddle girth, quickly became cinch, and in a little while took on a figurative significance that still clings to it. Vamos, the first person plural of the Spanish “let’s go,” became vamose or vamoose in American, and presently begat an American verb, to mosey. Chigre, which the English had borrowed from the Spanish in the Seventeenth Century, making it chigoe (the Oxford Dictionary still credits it to “the West Indies and South America”), was borrowed anew by the Western pioneers, and converted into the more American chigger or jigger. The Spanish chinche, which had been likewise borrowed by English in the Seventeenth Century but later abandoned, was reborrowed by American on the frontier, and became the still familiar chinch, a bedbug. Estampida was converted into stampede, frijol into frijole (pro. free-holay), tamal into tamale, tortilla into tortillia, and vaquero into buckaroo.³⁶ Chile, a pepper, came in with frijole and tamale, and at the same time the pioneers became acquainted with the Mexican beverages, mescal,³⁷ pulque and tequila. Such words as señor, se-ñorita, padre, siesta, sabe, poncho, pinto, yerba, hombre, casa and arroyo began to bespatter their speech. They converted cala-bozo into calaboose, (la)reata into lariat, lazo into lasso, rancho into ranch, and chaparejos into chaps, made free use of such words and phrases as poco, pronto and quien sabe?, and outfitted many Spanish loan-words with derivatives, e.g., ranchman, rancher, ranch-house, to ranch, to lasso, to corral, to cinch, hot-tomale, bronc, box-canyon, peonage, burro-load, -weed, -train and -trail, loco-weed (Sp. loco, crazy), locoed, and so on. It is possible that they borrowed coon, in the sense of a Negro, from the Spanish barraeon (commonly pronounced barracoon by the Americans), a rude shelter used by slaves. In the East coon was commonly applied to whites down to the Civil War, and especially to the adherents of Tyler in 1840. The precise history of its transfer to Negroes remains to be investigated.

Most of the terms that I have rehearsed came into the speech of the Western plainsmen and mountain-men before the Civil War, but some of them did not reach the East until the beginning of the movement to pacify and settle the Indian lands, toward the end of the 60’s. Many others, in common use by the pioneers, have since sunk to the estate of Westernisms, or dropped out altogether. To the latter class belong adelantado, a military governor; borracho, a drunkard; capitan; comisario, a policeman; ayuntamiento, a city council; and lepero, a beggar. To the former belong amigo, a friend; camino, a road; chico and chiquito, small; campo santo, a cemetery; hacienda, a landed estate; huero, a blond; Jornada, a desert; mesa, a tableland; mocho, bob-tailed; mozo, a servant; pinto, piebald; zarape, a cloak; paseo, a trip; and sala, a room. But the effect of Western fiction, of the movies and talkies, of the popularity of pseudo-Spanish bungalow architecture, and of the constant invasion of Southern California by transient visitors has been to keep a large number of Spanish loanwords alive in American speech. Thus most Americans know what a patio is, and a pinto pony, and a hombre. Such words are not often used save in the Southwest, but nevertheless they are understood almost everywhere.³⁸

The period saw the beginning of the great immigrations, and the American people now came into contact, on a large scale, with peoples of divergent race, particularly Germans, Irish Catholics from the South of Ireland (the Irish of colonial days “were descendants of Cromwell’s army, and came from the North of Ireland”),³⁹ and, on the Pacific Coast, Chinese. So early as the 20’s the immigration to the United States reached 25,000 in a year; in 1824 the Legislature of New York, in alarm, passed a restrictive act.⁴⁰ The Know-Nothing movement of the 50’s need not concern us here. It is enough to recall that the immigration of 1845 passed the 100,000 mark, and that that of 1854 came within sight of 500,000. These new Americans, most of them Germans and Irish, did not all remain in the East; a great many spread through the West and Southwest with the other pioneers. Their effect upon the language was a great deal more profound than most of us think. The Irish, speaking the English of Cromwell’s time, greatly reinforced its usages in the United States, where it was beginning to yield to the schoolmarm. “The influence of Irish-English,” writes an English correspondent, “is still plainly visible all over the United States. Some years ago, before I had seen America, a relative of mine came home after twelve years’ farming in North Dakota, and I was struck by the resemblance between his speech and that of the Irish drovers who brought cattle to Norwich market.”⁴¹ The Germans also left indelible marks upon American, and particularly upon the spoken American of the common people. The everyday vocabulary shows many German words and turns of phrase. Sauerkraut and noodle, as we have seen in Chapter III, Section 1, came in during the colonial period, apparently through the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, i.e., a mixture, somewhat debased, of the German dialects of Switzerland, Suabia and the Palatinate. The immigrants who came in after 1848 contributed pumpernickel, haus-frau, beer-garden (biergarten), lager-beer, wienerwurst (often reduced to wiener or wienie), frankfurter, bock-beer, sauerbraten, schnitzel, leberwurst (sometimes half translated as liverwurst), blut-wurst, dachshund, zwieback, stein (drinking vessel), rathskeller, schweizer (cheese), delicatessen, hamburger (steak), kindergarten and katzenjammer.⁴² Some of these words did not really lodge in the American vocabulary until after the second great German immigration began in 1870, but nevertheless they were heard before the Civil War. From the Germans, in all probability, there also came two very familiar Americanisms, loafer and bum. The etymology of the former is still to be worked out, but practically all authorities agree that it is of German origin. James Russell Lowell suggested that it was derived from the German laufen (in various dialects, lofen), meaning to run, but this seems improbable, and the Oxford Dictionary rejects the derivation. A much more likely prototype is to be found in the German noun landläufer, meaning a tramp, and this etymology is favored by Ernest Weekley in his “Etymological Dictionary of Modern English” (1921). Thornton’s first example is taken from the title of a sketch by Cornelius Matthews, “The Late Ben Smith, Loafer” printed in the Knickerbocker Magazine, for July, 1835. R- H. Dana, in “Two Years Before the Mast” (1840) spoke of loafer as “the newly invented Yankee word”; his book was an expansion of notes made in 1834–6. In 1855, in “Leaves of Grass,” Whitman used to loaf in a phrase that seems destined to live: “I loafe [note the original spelling] and invite my soul.” Bum was originally bummer, and apparently comes from the German word bummler.⁴³ Both loafer and bummer have provided numerous derivatives: loaf (noun), to loaf, loafing-place, corner-loafer, common-loafer, town-loafer, to bum, bum as an adjective (as in bum steer and bum food), bum’s-rush, bumming-place and bummery, not to mention to go (or be) on the bum. Loafer has migrated to England, but bum is still unknown there in the American sense. In England an old English word, bum, dating from the Fourteenth Century, is used to designate the buttocks, and is thus not heard in polite discourse.

Another example of debased German is offered by the American Kriss Kringle. It is from Christkindlein, or Christkind’l, and properly designates, of course, not the patron saint of Christmas, but the child in the manger. A German friend tells me that the form Kriss Kringle, which is that given in “Webster’s New International Dictionary,” and the form Krisking’l, which is that most commonly used in the United States, are both unknown in Germany. Here, obviously, we have an example of a loan-word undergoing phonetic change. Whole phrases have gone through the same process, for example, nix come erous⁴⁴ (from nichts kommt heraus⁴⁵ and ’rous mit ’im (from heraus mit ihm). These phrases, like wie geht’s and ganz gut, are familiar to practically all Americans, no matter how complete their ignorance of correct German. Most of them know, too, the meaning of gesundheit, kümmel, seidel, spitzbub, gemütlich, männerchor, scültzenfest, sängerfest, turnverein, hoch, yodel and zwei (as in zwei bier). I once found snitz (Ger. schnitz) in the elegant pages of Town Topics⁴⁶ Prosit is in all American dictionaries.⁴⁷ Bower, as used in cards, is an Americanism derived from the German bauer (peasant), meaning the jack. Poker, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is probably derived from pochspiel, “a similar bluffing card-game of considerable age, from pochen, to boast, brag, literally to knock, rap.” From a correspondent I have a somewhat different account of this game. “Its name,” he says, “is derived from the fact that at one stage of the play the players in turn declare the state of their hands by either passing or opening. Those who pass, signify it by saying ‘Ich poche’ or ’ Ich poch? This is sometimes indicated by knocking on the table with one’s knuckles.” But poker remains an enigma, and many other theories to account for the origin of the name have been advanced. In the Fourteenth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1929) R. F. Foster, author of several well-known card manuals, says that the game is of Persian origin, and reached the United States by way of New Orleans. Its Persian name is as nas, “but owing to its resemblance to the French game of poque and the German game of pochen, the French colonists called it poque, and this spelling was mispronounced by the English-speaking players as po-que, easily converted into po-ker.” Scheie de Vere, in his “Americanisms” (1872) derived poker from the French poche, a pocket, but apparently on very shaky grounds.

The exclamation ouch is classed as an Americanism by Thornton, and he gives an example dated 1837. The Oxford Dictionary refers it to the German autsch, and Thornton says that “it may have come across with the Dunkers or the Mennonites.” All of the Oxford’s examples are American, for ouch is seldom used in English, save in the sense of a clasp or buckle set with precious stones (from the Old French nouche), and even in that sense it is archaic. Shyster may be German also; Thornton has traced it back to the 50’s.⁴⁸ Rum-dumb is grounded upon the meaning of dumb borrowed from the Germans; it is not listed in the English slang dictionaries. Bristed says that the American meaning of wagon, which indicates almost any four-wheeled, horse-drawn vehicle in this country but only the very heaviest in England, was probably influenced by the German wagen. He also suggests that the American use of hold on for stop was influenced by the German halt an, and White says that the substitution of standpoint for point of view, long opposed by purists, was first made by an American professor who sought “an Anglicized form” of the German standpunkt. Other etymologists, professional and amateur, have discerned German influences in the peculiarly American use of fresh in the sense of saucy or impudent (Ger. frech); in gee-whiz (Ger. gewiss — but this is hardly convincing); in the American preference for shoe as against the English boot (Ger. schuh); in the common use of Bladder as a derisory title for a small and bad newspaper (Ger. k.äseblatt); in stunt (Ger. stunde, hour — another one hard to believe); in the American bub, once commonly used in addressing a boy (Ger. bube); in the American use of check instead of the English bill to designate a restaurant reckoning (Ger. zeche); and in such phrases as it is to laugh, and five minutes of three (instead of the English to three). German influence may also have something to do with the extraordinary facility with which American forms compound nouns. In most other modern languages the process is rare, and English itself lags far behind American. But in German it is almost unrestricted. “It is,” says Logan Pearsall Smith, “a great step in advance toward that ideal language in which meaning is expressed, not by terminations, but by the simple method of word-position.”

German, like Dutch, Spanish and French, has naturally left its most salient traces in those areas with the largest population of German-speaking immigrants. In the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch regions of Pennsylvania and in some of the Western States a great many Germanisms are in circulation. In the former, says W. H. Allen,⁴⁹ “many words and constructions are obviously of German origin. That equals so that, as in ‘We like our mince-pie piping hot that it steams inside.’ A tut or a paper tut is a paper bag. Verdrübt means sad. The freinschaft is the relationship. All is all gone, as in ‘The butter is all.’ Look means be fitting, as in ’ It doesn’t look for two girls to go there alone.’ ” Mr. Allen lists many other localisms, among them, glick, to come out right (Ger. glück)-, siffer, a heavy drinker (Ger. säufer); and ritschi, a frozen pond used for sliding (Ger. rutschen, to slide). Santa Claus, in such areas, is usually Belsnickel, as indeed he was among the Germans of Baltimore when I was a boy.⁵⁰ A. W. Meyer has assembled some curious examples from the Middle West,⁵¹ for example, brickstein for brick (Ger. backsteirin), heurack for hayrack (Ger. heu, hay), and büchershelf for bookshelf (Ger. bücher, books). Plunder is still often used in that part of the country to designate baggage, a usage probably suggested by the identical German word, and going back to the first years of the Nineteenth Century. A peculiar intonation is remarked by visitors to the Pennsylvania German towns. “The voice,” says Mr. Allen, “is raised at the beginning of a question and lowered at the end.” Whether this is due to German influence I do not know, but it is also noticeable when the native speaker is using what passes locally for German. Mr. Allen goes on:

Questions frequently contain an ain’t: “You’ll do that, ain’t you will?.” “You won’t do that, ain’t you won’t?.” “He’s been gone a long time, ain’t he has?” If one asks “Have you any good apples?” the answer is “I do.” “Don’t you think?” with a falling inflection is often added to questions. The most striking idiom is the use of till (and until) as a conjunction meaning by the time, and as a preposition meaning at or on (temporarily). “It will be raining till we get home.” “We were tired till we were there.” “We’ll be back till (at) six.” A sort of genitive of time is found in this sentence: “She came Saturdays and left Mondays.” In each instance this means one particular day. An ethical dative is often heard: “Little Thomas ran away for his mother yesterday.”

The immigrants from the South of Ireland, during the period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, exerted an influence upon the language that was vastly greater than that of the Germans, both directly and indirectly, but their contributions to the actual vocabulary were probably less. They gave American, indeed, very few new words; perhaps speakeasy, shillelah and smithereens exhaust the list. Lallapalooza may also be an Irish loan-word, though it is not Gælic, nor even English. It apparently comes from allay-foozee, a Mayo provincialism, signifying a sturdy fellow. Allay-foozee, in its turn, comes from the French allez-fusil, meaning “Forward the muskets!” — a memory, according to P. W. Joyce,⁵² of the French landing at Killala in 1798. Such phrases as Erin go bragh and such expletives as begob and begorry may perhaps be added: they have got into American understanding, though they are surely not distinctive Americanisms. But of far more importance, in the days of the great immigrations, than these few contributions to the vocabulary were certain speech habits that the Irish brought with them — habits of pronunciation, of syntax, and even of grammar. These habits were, in part, the fruit of efforts to translate the idioms of Gælic into English, and in part survivals from the English of the age of James I. The latter, preserved by Irish conservatism in speech, came into contact in America with habits surviving, with more or less change, from the same time, and so gave those American habits an unmistakable reinforcement. The Yankees have lived down such Jacobean pronunciations as tay for tea and desave for deceive, and these forms, on Irish lips, strike them as uncouth and absurd, but they still cling, in their common speech, to such forms as h’ist for hoist, bile for boil, chaw for chew, jine for join, sass for sauce, heighth for height, rench for rinse and lep for leaped, and the employment of precisely the same forms by the thousands of Irish immigrants who spread through the country undoubtedly gave them support, and so protected them, in a measure, from the assault of the purists. And the same support was give to drownded for drowned, oncet for once, ketch for catch, ag’in for against and onery for ordinary. C. H. Grandgent shows in “Old and New” (1920) that the so-called Irish oi- sound in jine and bile was still regarded as correct in the United States so late as 1822, though certain New England grammarians, eager to establish the more recent English usage, had protested against it before the end of the Eighteenth Century. The Irish who came in in the 30’s joined the populace in the war upon the reform, and to this day some of the old forms survive on the lower levels of the national speech.

Certain usages of Gælic, carried over into the English of Ireland, fell upon fertile soil in America. One was the employment of the definite article before nouns, as in French and German. An Irishman does not say “I am good at Latin,” but “I am good at the Latin.” In the same way an American does not say “I had measles,” but “I had the measles.” There is, again, the use of the prefix a before various continuing verbs, as in a-going and a-riding. This usage, of course, is native to English, but it is much more common in the Irish dialect, on account of the influence of the parallel Gælic form, and it is also much more common in American. There is, yet again, a use of intensifying prefixes and suffixes, often set down as characteristically American, which may have been borrowed from the Irish. Examples of such stretch-forms are no-siree, yes-indeedy, teetotal. The Irishman is almost incapable of saying plain yes or no; he must always add some extra and gratuitous asseveration.⁵³ The American is in like case. His speech bristles with intensives, so the Irish extravagance of speech struck a responsive chord in the American heart, and American borrowed, not only occasional words, but whole phrases, and some of them have become thoroughly naturalized. Joyce shows the Irish origin of many locutions that are now often mistaken for native inventions, for example, dead as an intensive, not to mention many familiar similes and proverbs. Certain Irish pronunciations, Gælic rather than archaic English, got into American during the early Nineteenth Century, often with humorous effect. Among them, one recalls bhoy, which entered our political slang in the middle 40’s but has since passed out.

From other languages the borrowings during the period of growth were naturally less. Down to the last decades of the Nineteenth Century, the overwhelming majority of immigrants were either Germans or Irish; the Jews, Italians, Scandinavians and Slavs were yet to come. But the first Chinese appeared in 1848, and soon their speech began to contribute its inevitable loan-words. These words were first adopted by the argonauts of the Pacific Coast, and a great many of them have remained Western localisms. A number of others have got into the common speech of the whole country. Of such sort are the verbs to yen (meaning to desire strongly, as a Chinaman is supposed to desire opium), to flop (meaning to sleep or lie down), and to kowtow, and the nouns joss, chow, yok-a-mi, fantan, chop-suey, chow-mein⁵⁴ and tong. Josshouse, flophouse, tong-war, and chopsuey-joint are familiar derivatives. Contrary to what seems to be a popular opinion, hop is not Chinese. It is simply the common name of the Humulus lupulus, which, in English folklore, has long been held to have a soporific effect. Hop-pillows were brought to American by the first English colonists. Neither is high-binder a translation from a Chinese term, as seems to be commonly believed. So long ago as 1840 Edgar Allan Poe wrote in his Marginalia:

As to high-binder which is so confidently quoted as modern (“not in use, certainly, before 1819,”) I can refute all that is said by referring to a journal in my own possession — the Weekly Inspector, for Dec. 27, 1806 — published in New York:

“On Christmas Eve, a party of banditti, amounting, it is stated, to forty or fifty members of an association, calling themselves high-binders, assembled in front of St. Peter’s Church, in Barclay-street, expecting that the Catholic ritual would be performed with a degree of pomp and splendor which has usually been omitted in this city. These ceremonies, however, not taking place, the high-binders manifested great displeasure.”

In a subsequent number, the association are called hide-binders. They were Irish.

1 According to R. E. Spiller (The American in England During the First Half Century of Independence; New York, 1926), Benjamin Silliman’s Journal of Travels in England, Holland, and Scotland, and of Two Passages Over the Atlantic, in the Years 1805 and 1806; New York, 1810, was “the first book of travels by an American which attempted to describe and discuss England as though she were actually a foreign land.”

2 In Studies in History; Boston, 1884. Lodge says that Franklin, Hamilton and Noah Webster were brilliant exceptions. Franklin’s autobiography, he says, was “American in feeling, without any taint of English colonialism.” Hamilton’s “intense eagerness for a strong national government made him the deadliest foe of the colonial spirit.” As for Webster, he “went into open rebellion against British tradition. He was snubbed, laughed at, and abused. He was regarded as little better than a madman to dare to set himself up against Johnson and his successors. But the hard-headed New Englander pressed on, and finally brought out his dictionary — a great work, which has fitly preserved his name.”

3 The best brief account of this uprising that I have encountered is not in any history book, but in Mr. Justice Sutherland’s dissenting opinion in Home Building & Loan Ass’n vs. Blaisdell et al, 54 Supreme Court Reporter, p. 244 ff.

4 The thing went, indeed, far beyond mere hope. In 1812 a conspiracy was unearthed to separate New England from the Republic and make it an English colony. The chief conspirator was one John Henry, who acted under the instructions of Sir John Craig, Governor-General of Canada.

5 Maine was not separated from Massachusetts until 1820.

6 Indiana and Illinois were erected into Territories during Jefferson’s first term, and Michigan during his second. Kentucky was admitted to the Union in 1792, Tennessee in 1796, Ohio in 1803. Lewis and Clarke set out for the Pacific in 1804. The Louisiana Purchase was ratified in 1803, and Louisiana became a State in 1812.

7 A Literary History of America; New York, 1900.

8 Our Dictionaries and Other English Language Topics; New York, 1890, pp. 30–31. See also, for an excellent account of the spirit of the time, Localism in American Criticism, by Carey McWilliams, Southwest Review, July, 1934.

9 I borrow this example from Tall Talk in American Sixty Years Ago, by Mamie Meredith, American Speech, April, 1929. See also Big Talk, by Dorothy Dondore, American Speech, Oct., 1930; Frontier Tall Talk, by William F. Thompson, American Speech, Oct., 1934; and Tall Tales of the Southwest, 1830–60, by F. J. Meine; New York, 1930.

10 The Study of American English, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXVII, 1927, p. 203.

11 The Oxford Dictionary quotes an example of its use in the sense of to render sad or melancholy from Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial (1658). But in the sense of to conduct a funeral the verb seems to be American. It thus appears in the diary of Moses Waddel, president of the University of Georgia; 1825. See College Life in the Old South, by E. Merton Couleer; New York, 1928, p. 197.

12 J. R. Ware, in Passing English of the Victorian Era; London, n.d., says that to burgle was introduced to London by W. S. Gilbert in The Pirates of Penzance, 1880. On Nov. 14, 1874 the London Standard was speaking of it as one of the “new words with which the American vocabulary has lately been enriched,” but it probably goes back to the 40’s or 50’s.

13 The origin of to lynch was long in dispute, but it now appears to be established that it was derived from the name of Captain (or Colonel) Charles Lynch, of Pittsylvania county, Virginia, a primeval 100% American who devoted himself to harassing Loyalists before and during the Revolution. He was a member of the House of Burgesses, but seems to have paid little heed to the statutes. In 1782 the Virginia Assembly purged him of charges that he had illegally imprisoned certain Loyalists in 1780. For an account of him, probably somewhat inaccurate in detail, see Rope and Faggott, by Walter White; New York, 1929, p. 83. See also the art. Lynch law in the Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary; London, 1933. A useful article on the subject was printed in the Lynchburg (Va.) News, July 30, 1922.

14 The spelling of this word shows large variations. The Oxford Dictionary gives holow (1542), hollow (1599), holloe (1642), holo (1654), holloa (1769), holla (1842), and holler (1883). In the United States the common pronunciation is holler, and this form has been accepted by the Public Printer. See the Congressional Record, May 12, 1917, p. 2309.

15 It quickly bred two nouns, noncommittal and non-committalism, and the latter had the political significance of straddling in the 50’s, but both seem to have gone out. An adverb, non-committally, has survived, and the Oxford Dictionary quotes it from W. D. Howell’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1885.

16 Rough-neck often appears in lists of recent slang terms, but Thornton shows that it was used in Texas so long ago as 1836.

17 This innocent compound has given a great deal of concern to etymologists. The Standard Dictionary (1893) derives it from the verb to pop and the noun cock, which seems very far-fetched. The Oxford Dictionary, attempting no etymology, dismisses it as “U. S. slang.” Webster’s New International (1934) derives it from “Colloq. D. pappekak, lit. soft dung,” which seems silly.

18 This use goes back to 1839.

19 Thornton gives an example dated 1812.

20 See Terms of Approbation and Eulogy, by Elsie L. Warnock, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. I, 1913. Among the curious recent coinages cited by Miss Warnock are scally-wampus, supergobosnoptious, hyperfirmatious, and scrumdifferous. See also Language and Nonce-Words, by Francis A. Wood, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. I, 1913.

21 The origin of this noble word remains mysterious. Its first appearance in print seems to have been in 1861, but Ernest Weekley says in his Etymological Dictionary of Modern English that it “appeared earlier in a Northern English dialect in the sense of to spill,” and Webster’s New International follows him. The Oxford Dictionary says that “there is some slight evidence” to that effect, but remains in doubt. It rejects the suggestion that the word is of Danish or Swedish genesis, made in the Webster of 1864. In 1927 the following appeared in the Dayton, O., Daily News: “[The word is] a corruption of skedannumi, a Greek word meaning to scatter: General Giles W. Shurtleff, a professor at Oberlin College, commanded a regiment of Negroes [in the Civil War], and many of his subordinates were from Oberlin, where students knew their Greek. Corrupting the Greek word, officers and Negroes alike evolved skedaddle.” (Reprinted in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Aug. 26, 1927).

22 See American Intensives in Ka-, Ke, and Ker-, by Exha Akins Sadilek, American Speech, Dec., 1931.

23 E.g., Single-track mind, to jump the rails, to collide head-on, broad-gauge man, to walk the ties, blind-baggage, underground-railroad, tank-town.

24 Some of the early American railroad terms are already obsolete. Depot is seldom used today; it has been displaced by station or terminal. The use of cars to designate a railroad train was universal down to the Civil War era, but today it survives only in the signs occasionally seen at grade-crossings; “Look Out for the Cars,” and in the verb-phrase, to change cars. The Pullman palace-car is now extinct, and the Pullman Palace-Car Company, incorporated in 1867, is now simply the Pullman Company. Even parlor-car has been elbowed out by Pullman. Incidentally, telegram was suggested in the Albany Evening Journal, April 6, 1852, by E. Peshine Smith of Rochester, N. Y., and seems to have been his invention. It quickly ousted telegraphic dispatch and telegraphic communication.

25 Political Americanisms; New York, 1890. “In America,” said Walt Whitman in An American Primer, Atlantic Monthly, April, 1904, “an immense number of new words are needed to embody the new political facts, the compact of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Constitution — the union of the States — the new States — the Congress — the modes of election — the stump speech — the ways of electioneering — addressing the people — stating all that is to be said in modes that fit the life and experience of the Indianian, the Michi-ganian, the Vermonter, the men of Maine.”

26 See American Political Cant, by Lowry Charles Wimberly, American Speech, Dec., 1926.

27 The etymology of cocktail has long engaged the learned, but without persuasive result. It is thus set forth by William Henry Nugent in Cock Fighting Today, American Mercury, May, 1929, p. 80: “Feeding is an important thing in the process [of conditioning game-cocks]. The old-time English and Irish trainers made a specially prepared bread of flour and stale beer or ale. They also added white wine or sack, gin, whiskey or other spirits, and a whole materia medica of seeds, plants, roots, barks, and leaves. In sampling this concoction before pouring it into the dough they found it an appetizing tonic, not only for pit fowl, but also for man. They named it cock-bread ale or cock ale, and in the spelling of the time it became cock ail. Americans knew a variant of this beverage, as early as 1800, as the cocktail. Somehow a t had got into the mixture.” Early in 1926 Marcel Boulenger printed an article in Le Figaro Heb-domadaire (Paris) arguing that cocktail was derived from coquetel, the name of a drink known for centuries in the vicinity of Bordeaux. See Cocktail French Invention, Baltimore Evening Sun, Feb. 11, 1926.

28 An amalgam of Chinook proper and various other Indian languages, e.g., Nootka, Chehalis, Klickitat and Wasco, with contributions from French, English and probably also Russian. A good account of it, with a vocabulary, is in Gill’s Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, 15th ed.; Portland, Ore., 1909. It was in use all over the Northwest, from the Cascade Mountains to the coast. The Indian languages differed so greatly that they were mutually unintelligible. See also the Chinook Jargon, by Douglas Leechman, American Speech, July, 1926, and the Chinook Jargon, by E. H. Thomas, the same, June, 1927.

29 According to the Oxford Dictionary, cayuse is “said to be from the language of the Chinook Indians of Oregon,” but Mr. H. L. Davis believes that it is from the French cailloux (pebbles).

30 I am indebted here to Mr. H. L. Davis, author of Honey in the Horn, and to Mr. Lewis A. Mc-Arthur of Portland, secretary to the Oregon Geographic Board.

31 For a longer list, see The English Language in the Southwest, by T. M. Pearce, New Mexico Historical Review, July, 1932.

32 Coulee, from the French coulée, running or flowing, is applied to deep valleys or ravines. It is commonly debased to coolly, as in the title of Hamlin Garland’s book, Rose of Dutchers Coolly (1895). Its use is confined to the Northwest.

33 Shanty is apparently derived from the French chantier, the camp of a gang of loggers. A lumberman is often called a shantyman, and the word has spawned other derivatives, e.g., Shanty Irish (title of a book by Jim Tully, 1928), shanty-town and to shanty. Shanty has been traced to 1820. Folk etymology has assimilated chantey to it, but the two words are distinct in derivation and meaning. Chantey is from the French chantez, the imperative of chanter, to sing, and is not American.

34 Thornton’s first example of canuck is dated 1855.

35 The Study of American English, S.P.E. Tracts No. XXVII, 1927, p. 208.

36 Vaquero means cowboy, and is used in that sense in Argentina. In the American West it quickly acquired the special sense of a Mexican cowboy, and that sense it retains. Buck-aroo seems to have dropped out. The American cowboy is always a cow-puncher, a cow-hand, or simply a cowboy.

37 Mescal like chile, tamale, chocolate, coyote, mesquite, zarape, tobacco and tomato, is of Indian origin, but like all of them it came into the language by way of the Spanish.

38 The best study of Spanish loanwords is to be found in A Dictionary of Spanish Terms in English, With Special Reference to the American Southwest, by Harold W. Bentley; New York, 1932. This admirable work discusses the Spanish influence upon American at length, and with historical insight, and presents a vocabulary of about 400 terms. In addition there is a list of Indian words that came in through the Spanish, and a long list of Spanish place-names in the United States. There is a brief bibliography. See also Geographical Terms in the Far West, by Edward E. Hale, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. IV, 1932; A Contribution Towards a Vocabulary of Spanish and Mexican Words Used in Texas, by H. Tallichet, Dialect Notes, Pt. IV, 1892 (with addenda in Pt. V, 1893, and Pt. VII, 1894); Geographical Terms From the Spanish, by Mary Austin, American Speech, Oct., 1933; and The English Language in the Southwest, by T. M. Pearce, New Mexico Historical Review, July, 1932.

39 Prescott F. Hall: Immigration; New York, 1913, p. 5. Even in colonial days there were more such non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants than is commonly assumed. Says Frederick J. Turner, in The Frontier in American History, pp. 22–23: “The Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans, or Pennsylvania Dutch, furnished the dominant element in the stock of the colonial frontier.… Such examples teach us to beware of misinterpreting the fact that there is a common English speech in America into the belief that the stock is also English.”

40 Most of the provisions of this act, however, were later declared unconstitutional. Several subsequent acts met the same fate.

41 The same correspondent adds: “I find very little trace of Scotch on this continent. One might expect to find it in Toronto, the Presbyterian Lhassa, where slot-machines are removed from the streets on Sunday, but the speech of Toronto is actually not distinguishable from that of Buffalo. That is to say, it is quite Irish. The Scotch are not tenacious of their dialect, in spite of the fuss they make about it. It disappears in the second generation. I have met Prince Edward Islanders who speak Gælic and American, but not Scotch. The affinity between Scotch and French, by the way, is noticeable nowhere more than in the Province of Quebec, where I have met Macdonalds who couldn’t speak English. The Scotch surrender their speech customs more readily than the English, and the Irish, it seems to me, are most tenacious of all.”

42 The majority of these words, it will be noted, relate to eating and drinking. They mirror the profound effect of German immigration upon American drinking habits and the American cuisine. In July, 1921, despite the current prejudice against all things German, I found sourbraten on the bill-of-fare at Delmonico’s in New York, and, more surprising still, “braten with potato-salad.” The effort to substitute liberty-cabbage for sauerkraut, made by professional patriots in 1918, was a complete failure. It is a fact often observed that loanwords, at least on the level of the common speech, seldom represent the higher aspirations of the creditor nation. French and German mainly have borrowed from English such terms as beefsteak, roast-beef, pudding, grog, jockey, tourist, sport, five-o’clock tea and sweep stakes, and from American such terms as tango, jazz, fox-trot, one-step, cocktail and canoe (often kanu). “The contributions of England to European civilization, as tested by the English words in Continental languages,” says L. P. Smith, “are not, generally, of a kind to cause much national self-congratulation.” See The English Element in Foreign Language, by the same author, in English, March, 1919. Also, English and American Sport Terms in German, by Theodore McClintock, American Speech, Dec, 1933. But on higher levels a more decorous interchange goes on. From German, for example, both English and American have borrowed many scientific words, e.g., psychology, morphology, teleology, oceanography, ecology, spectroscope and statistics; many medical and chemical words, e.g., morphine, laudanum, bacillus, bacterium, ether, creosote, pepsin, protozoa and aniline; and a number of terms in everyday use, e.g., masterpiece, dollar, veneer, homesickness, taximeter, waltz and dahlia. See The German Influence on the English Vocabulary, by Charles T. Carr, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XLII, 1934.

43 Thornton offers examples of bummer ranging from 1856 to 1892. Strangely enough, he does not list bum, which has now supplanted it. During the Civil War bummer acquired the special meaning of looter, and was applied by the Southerners to the men of Sherman’s army of invasion. Here is a popular rhyme which survived until the early 90’s:

Isidor, psht, psht!
Vatch de shtore, psht, psht!
Vile I ketch de bummer
Vhat shtole de suit of clothes!

Bummler has bred many derivatives in German, e.g., bummelei, meaning dawdling or laziness; bummelig, unpunctual, careless; bummeln, to waste time, to take it easy; bummelleben, a life of ease; bummelzug, a slow train. Einen bummeln machen means to take a leisurely stroll. Once, in Bremen, when my baggage came near missing a train, the portier of my hotel explained that a porter had gebummelt delivering it.

44 Lincoln used nix come erous in a letter dated Nov. 11, 1854. It is quoted in Lincoln the Man, by Edgar Lee Masters; New York, 1931, p. 226.

45 Whether nix came into American direct from the German or by way of the English thieves’ argot I do not know. The Oxford Dictionary’s first example, dated 1789, is from George Parker’s Life’s Painter. “How they have brought a German word into cant,” says Parker, “I know not, but nicks means nothing in the cant language.” Bartlett, Farmer and Thornton fail to list it. A great many English criminals came to the United States between 1800 and the Civil War, and they brought some of their argot with them. Perhaps nix was included. Whatever the fact, the word bred a derivative, nixie, which seems to be peculiar to American. In the United States Official Post-office Guide for 1885 nixie was defined as “a term used in the railway mail service to denote matter of domestic origin, chiefly of the second and first class, which is un-mailable because addressed to places which are not postoffices, or to States, etc., in which there is no such postoffice as that indicated in the address.” Its meaning has since been extended to include all mail “so incorrectly, illegibly, indefinitely or insufficiently addressed that it cannot be transmitted.” (Sec. 1639, Postal Laws and Regulations.) The Postoffice informs me that it has no record showing when the word was introduced. Nicht is also at the bottom of nit, aber nit, nixy and nitsky, but most of them came in after the period under review. See Substitutes for No, by T. J. S., American Speech, Aug., 1927. In some of the German dialects nicht becomes nöt or nit, and nichts becomes nix.

46 Jan. 24, 1918, p. 4.

47 Nevertheless, when I once put it into a night-letter a Western Union office refused to accept it, the rules then requiring all night-letters to be in “plain English.” Meanwhile, the English have borrowed it from American, and it is in the Oxford Dictionary. It comes originally from student Latin, but has been in German for centuries.

48 Thornton’s first example shows a variant spelling, shuyster. All subsequent examples show the present spelling. It is to be noted that the suffix -ster is not uncommon in English, and that it usually carries a deprecatory significance.

49 In Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. II, 1914, p. 157.

50 See also Linguistic Substrata in Pennsylvania and Elsewhere, by R. Whitney Tucker, Language, March, 1934. Dr. Tucker discusses the phonology of the American spoken in lower Pennsylvania. Hex, meaning a witch, is in common use there, and in 1930 the sensational trial of a York county hex-doctor made the term familiar throughout the United States.