Part 4

4. English provincialisms adopted into general use in America.

5. Newly coined words, which owe their origin to the productions or to the circumstances of the country.

6. Words borrowed from European languages, especially the French, Spanish, Dutch and German.

7. Indian words.

8. Negroisms.

9. Peculiarities of pronunciation.

Some time before this, but after the publication of Bartlett's first edition in 1848, William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, devoted a brief chapter to "American Dialects" in his well-known work on English[58] and in it one finds the following formidable classification of Americanisms:

1. Words borrowed from other languages.

a. Indian, as /Kennebec/, /Ohio/, /Tombigbee/; /sagamore/, /quahaug/, /succotash/.

b. Dutch, as /boss/, /kruller/, /stoop/.

c. German, as /spuke/ (?), /sauerkraut/.

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

e. Spanish, as /calaboose/, /chapparal/, /hacienda/, /rancho/, /ranchero/.

f. Negro, as /buckra/.

2. Words "introduced from the necessity of our situation, in order to express new ideas."

a. Words "connected with and flowing from our political institutions," as /selectman/, /presidential/, /congressional/, /caucus/, /mass-meeting/, /lynch-law/, /help/ (for /servants/).

b. Words "connected with our ecclesiastical institutions," as /associational/, /consociational/, /to fellowship/, /to missionate/.

c. Words "connected with a new country," as /lot/, /diggings/, /betterments/, /squatter/.

3. Miscellaneous Americanisms.

a. Words and phrases become obsolete in England, as /talented/, /offset/ (for /set-off/), /back and forth/ (for /backward and forward/).

b. Old words and phrases "which are now merely provincial in England," as /hub/, /whap/ (?), /to wilt/.

c. Nouns formed from verbs by adding the French suffix /-ment/, as /publishment/, /releasement/, /requirement/.

d. Forms of words "which fill the gap or vacancy between two words which are approved," as /obligate/ (between /oblige/ and /obligation/) and /variate/ (between /vary/ and /variation/).

e. "Certain compound terms for which the English have different compounds," as /bank-bill/, (/bank-note/), /book-store/ (/book-seller's shop/), /bottom-land/ (/interval land/), /clapboard/ (/pale/), /sea-board/ (/sea-shore/), /side-hill/ (/hill-side/).

f. "Certain colloquial phrases, apparently idiomatic, and very expressive," as /to cave in/, /to flare up/, /to flunk out/, /to fork over/, /to hold on/, /to let on/, /to stave off/, /to take on/.

g. Intensives, "often a matter of mere temporary fashion," as /dreadful/, /mighty/, /plaguy/, /powerful/.

h. "Certain verbs expressing one's state of mind, but partially or timidly," as /to allot upon/ (for /to count upon/), /to calculate/, /to expect/ (/to think/ or /believe/), /to guess/, /to reckon/.

i. "Certain adjectives, expressing not only quality, but one's subjective feelings in regard to it," as /clever/, /grand/, /green/, /likely/, /smart/, /ugly/.

j. Abridgments, as /stage/ (for /stage-coach/), /turnpike/ (for /turnpike-road/), /spry/ (for /sprightly/), /to conduct/ (for /to conduct one's self/).

k. "Quaint or burlesque terms," as to /tote/, /to yank/; /humbug/, /loafer/, /muss/, /plunder/ (for /baggage/), /rock/ (for /stone/).

l. "Low expressions, mostly political," as /slangwhanger/, /loco foco/, /hunker/; /to get the hang of/.

m. "Ungrammatical expressions, disapproved by all," as /do don't/, /used to could/, /can't come it/, /Universal preacher/ (for /Universalist/), /there's no two ways about it/.

Elwyn, in 1859, attempted no classification.[59] He confined his glossary to archaic English words surviving in America, and sought only to prove that they had come down "from our remotest ancestry" and were thus undeserving of the reviling [Pg032] lavished upon them by English critics. Schele de Vere, in 1872, followed Bartlett, and devoted himself largely to words borrowed from the Indian dialects, and from the French, Spanish and Dutch. But Farmer, in 1889,[60] ventured upon a new classification, prefacing it with the following definition:

An Americanism may be defined as a word or phrase, old or new, employed by general or respectable usage in America in a way not sanctioned by the best standards of the English language. As a matter of fact, however, the term has come to possess a wider meaning, and it is now applied not only to words and phrases which can be so described, but also to the new and legitimately born words adapted to the general needs and usages, to the survivals of an older form of English than that now current in the mother country, and to the racy, pungent vernacular of Western life.

He then proceeded to classify his materials thus:

1. Words and phrases of purely American derivation, embracing words originating in:

a. Indian and aboriginal life.

b. Pioneer and frontier life.

c. The church.

d. Politics.

e. Trades of all kinds.

f. Travel, afloat and ashore.

2. Words brought by colonists, including:

a. The German element.

b. The French.

c. The Spanish.

d. The Dutch.

e. The negro.

f. The Chinese.

3. Names of American things, embracing:

a. Natural products.

b. Manufactured articles.

4. Perverted English words.

5. Obsolete English words still in good use in America.

6. English words, American by inflection and modification.

7. Odd and ignorant popular phrases, proverbs, vulgarisms, and colloquialisms, cant and slang.

8. Individualisms.

9. Doubtful and miscellaneous.

Clapin, in 1902,[61] reduced these categories to four:

1. Genuine English words, obsolete or provincial in England, and universally used in the United States.

2. English words conveying, in the United States, a different meaning from that attached to them in England.

3. Words introduced from other languages than the English:--French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Indian, etc.

4. Americanisms proper, /i.e./, words coined in the country, either representing some new idea or peculiar product.

Thornton, in 1912, substituted the following:

1. Forms of speech now obsolete or provincial in England, which survive in the United States, such as /allow/, /bureau/, /fall/, /gotten/, /guess/, /likely/, /professor/, /shoat/.

2. Words and phrases of distinctly American origin, such as /belittle/, /lengthy/, /lightning-rod/, /to darken one's doors/, /to bark up the wrong tree/, /to come out at the little end of the horn/, /blind tiger/, /cold snap/, /gay Quaker/, /gone coon/, /long sauce/, /pay dirt/, /small potatoes/, /some pumpkins/.

3. Nouns which indicate quadrupeds, birds, trees, articles of food, etc., that are distinctively American, such as /ground-hog/, /hang-bird/, /hominy/, /live-oak/, /locust/, /opossum/, /persimmon/, /pone/, /succotash/, /wampum/, /wigwam/.

4. Names of persons and classes of persons, and of places, such as /Buckeye/, /Cracker/, /Greaser/, /Hoosier/, /Old Bullion/, /Old Hickory/, the /Little Giant/, /Dixie/, /Gotham/, the /Bay State/, the /Monumental City/.

5. Words which have assumed a new meaning, such as /card/, /clever/, /fork/, /help/, /penny/, /plunder/, /raise/, /rock/, /sack/, /ticket/, /windfall/.

In addition, Thornton added a provisional class of "words and phrases of which I have found earlier examples in American than in English writers; ... with the /caveat/ that further research may reverse the claim"--a class offering specimens in /alarmist/, /capitalize/, /eruptiveness/, /horse of another colour/ (/sic!/), /the jig's up/, /nameable/, /omnibus bill/, /propaganda/ and /whitewash/.

No more than a brief glance at these classifications is needed to show that they hamper the inquiry by limiting its scope--not so much, to be sure, as the ridiculous limitations of White and Lounsbury, but still very seriously. They meet the ends of [Pg034] purely descriptive lexicography, but largely leave out of account some of the most salient characters of a living language, for example, pronunciation and idiom. Only Bartlett and Farmer establish a separate category of Americanisms produced by changes in pronunciation, though even Thornton, of course, is obliged to take notice of such forms as /bust/ and /bile/. None of them, however, goes into the matter at any length, nor even into the matter of etymology. Bartlett's etymologies are scanty and often inaccurate; Schele de Vere's are sometimes quite fanciful; Thornton offers scarcely any at all. The best of these collections of Americanisms, and by long odds, is Thornton's. It presents an enormous mass of quotations, and they are all very carefully dated, and it corrects most of the more obvious errors in the work of earlier inquirers. But its very dependence upon quotations limits it chiefly to the written language, and so the enormously richer materials of the spoken language are passed over, and particularly the materials evolved during the past twenty years. One searches the two fat volumes in vain for such highly characteristic forms as /would of/, /near-accident/, and /buttinski/, the use of /sure/ as an adverb, and the employment of /well/ as a sort of general equivalent of the German /also/.

These grammatical and syntactical tendencies are beyond the scope of Thornton's investigation, but it is plain that they must be prime concerns of any future student who essays to get at the inner spirit of the language. Its difference from standard English is not merely a difference in vocabulary, to be disposed of in an alphabetical list; it is, above all, a difference in pronunciation, in intonation, in conjugation and declension, in metaphor and idiom, in the whole fashion of using words. A page from one of Ring W. Lardner's baseball stories contains few words that are not in the English vocabulary, and yet the thoroughly American color of it cannot fail to escape anyone who actually listens to the tongue spoken around him. Some of the elements which enter into that color will be considered in the following pages. The American vocabulary, of course, must be given first attention, for in it the earliest American divergences are embalmed and it tends to grow richer and freer year after year, [Pg035] but attention will also be paid to materials and ways of speech that are less obvious, and in particular to certain definite tendencies of the grammar of spoken American, hitherto wholly neglected.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Pp. 22-23.

[2] America's Coming of Age; New York, 1915, p. 15. See also the preface to Every-Day English, by Richard Grant White; Boston, 1881, p. xviii.

[3] The common notion that the Académie combats changes is quite erroneous. In the preface to the first edition of its dictionary (1694) it disclaimed any purpose "to make new words and to reject others at its pleasure." In the preface to the second edition (1718) it confessed that "ignorance and corruption often introduce manners of writing" and that "convenience establishes them." In the preface to the third edition (1740) it admitted that it was "forced to admit changes which the public has made." And so on. Says D. M. Robertson, in A History of the French Academy (London, 1910): "The Academy repudiates any assumption of authority over the language with which the public in its own practise has not first clothed it. So much, indeed, does it confine itself to an interpretation merely of the laws of language that its decisions are sometimes contrary to its own judgment of what is either desirable or expedient."

[4] Cf. /Scandinavian Studies and Notes/, vol. iv, no. 3, Aug. 1917, p. 258.

[5] This movement won official recognition so long ago as 1885, when the Storting passed the first of a series of acts designed to put the two languages on equal footing. Four years later, after a campaign going back to 1874, provision was made for teaching the /landsmaal/ in the schools for the training of primary teachers. In 1899 a professorship of the /landsmaal/ was established in the University of Christiania. The school boards in the case of primary schools, and the pupils in the case of middle and high schools are now permitted to choose between the two languages, and the /landsmaal/ has been given official status by the State Church. The chief impediment to its wider acceptance lies in the fact that it is not, as it stands, a natural language, but an artificial amalgamation of peasant dialects. It was devised in 1848-50 by Ivar Aasen. /Vide/ The Language Question, /London Times/ Norwegian Supplement, May 18, 1914.

[6] A few such works are listed in the bibliography. More of them are mentioned in Americanismos, by Miguel de Toro y Gisbert; Paris, n. d.

[7] Maximilian Schele de Vere: Americanisms: The English of the New World; New York, 1872.

[8] Richard H. Thornton: An American Glossary ..., 2 vols.; Phila. and London, 1912.

[9] Organized Feb. 19, 1889, with Dr. J. J. Child, of Harvard, as its first president.

[10] Author of Travels in North America; London, 1829.

[11] A Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America; Boston, 1816.

[12] A Letter to the Hon. John Pickering on the Subject of His Vocabulary; Boston, 1817.

[13] 4th ed., New York, 1870, p. 669.

[14] /Op. cit./ p. 676.

[15] The English Language; New York 1850; rev. ed., 1855. This was the first American text-book of English for use in colleges. Before its publication, according to Fowler himself (rev. ed., p. xi), the language was studied only "superficially" and "in the primary schools." He goes on: "Afterward, when older, in the academy, during their preparation for college, our pupils perhaps despised it, in comparison with the Latin and the Greek; and in the college they do not systematically study the language after they come to maturity."

[16] In Recent Exemplifications of False Philology; London, 1872.

[17] Americanisms, parts I-VIII, April, May, July, Sept., Nov., 1878; Jan., March, May, 1879.

[18] A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States, 4th ed.; Boston, 1877.

[19] Feb., March, June, July, Sept.

[20] Vol. xiv, pp. 484-5; Cambridge, 1917.

[21] Vol. xxv, p. 209.

[22] July 18, 1913.

[23] Of the words cited as still unfamiliar in England, Thornton has traced /hobo/ to 1891, /hold-up/ and /bunco/ to 1887, /dive/ to 1882, /dead-beat/ to 1877, /hoodlum/ to 1872, /road-agent/ to 1866, /stag/ to 1856, /drummer/ to 1836 and /flume/ to 1792. All of them are probably older than these references indicate.

[24] Summarized in /Literary Digest/, June 19, 1915.

[25] America Today, /Scribner's/, Feb. 1899, p. 218.

[26] /London Court Journal/, Aug. 28, 1892.

[27] In Pastures New; New York, 1906, p. 6.

[28] Concerning the American Language, in The Stolen White Elephant; Boston, 1882. A footnote says that the essay is "part of a chapter crowded out of A Tramp Abroad." (Hartford, 1880.)

[29] Hartford, 1872, p. 45.

[30] The Editor's Study, /Harper's Magazine/, Jan. 1886.

[31] Die englische Sprache in Nordamerika, band iv, heft i; Braunschweig, 1848.

[32] Étude sur l'Anglais Parlé aux Etats Unis (la Langue Américaine), /Actes de la Société Philologique de Paris/, March, 1874.

[33] Metoula-Sprachführer.... Englisch von Karl Blattner; Ausgabe für Amerika; Berlin-Schöneberg, 1912.

[34] Polyglott Kuntze; Schnellste Erlernung jeder Sprache ohne Lehrer; Amerikanisch; Bonn a. Rh., n. d.

[35] Like the English expositors of American slang, this German falls into several errors. For example, he gives /cock/ for /rooster/, /boots/ for /shoes/, /braces/ for /suspenders/ and /postman/ for /letter-carrier/, and lists /iron-monger/, /joiner/ and /linen-draper/ as American terms. He also spells /wagon/ in the English manner, with two /g/'s, and translates /Schweinefüsse/ as /pork-feet/. But he spells such words as /color/ in the American manner and gives the pronunciation of /clerk/ as the American /klörk/, not as the English /klark/.

[36] Molee's notions are set forth in Plea for an American Language ...; Chicago, 1888; and Tutonish; Chicago, 1902. He announced the preparation of A Dictionary of the American Language in 1888, but so far as I know it has not been published. He was born in Wisconsin, of Norwegian parents, in 1845, and pursued linguistic studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he seems to have taken a Ph. B.

[37] American English, /North American Review/, Jan. 1883.

[38] Oct. 1, 1909.

[39] J. F. Healy, general manager of the Davis Colliery Co. at Elkins, W. Va., in a speech before the West Virginia Coal Mining Institute, at Wheeling, Dec. 1910; reprinted as The American Language; Pittsburgh, 1911.

[40] /Westminster Review/, July, 1888, p. 35.

[41] W. W. Skeat distinguishes no less than 9 dialects in Scotland, 3 in Ireland and 30 in England and Wales. /Vide/ English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day; Cambridge, 1911, p. 107 /et seq./

[42] /Art./ Americanisms, 2nd ed.

[43] F. L. Pattee: A History of American Literature Since 1870; New York, 1916.

[44] A. H. Sayce: Introduction to the Science of Language, 2 vols.; London, 1900. See especially vol. ii, ch. vi.

[45] /Cf./ the chapter, Interlude: On Jargon, in Quiller-Couch's On the Art of Writing; New York, 1916. Curiously enough, large parts of the learned critic's book are written in the very Jargon he attacks.

[46] Alexander Francis: Americans: an Impression; New York, 1900.

[47] G. Lowes Dickinson, in the /English Review/, quoted by /Current Literature/, April, 1910.

[48] Speech before the Chamber of Commerce Convention, Washington, Feb. 19, 1916.

[49] Speech at workingman's dinner, New York, Sept. 4, 1912.

[50] wit and Wisdom of Woodrow Wilson, comp. by Richard Linthicum; New York, 1916, p. 54.

[51] Speech at Ridgewood, N. J., April 22, 1910.

[52] Wit and Wisdom ..., p. 56.

[53] Henry Sweet: A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical, 2 parts; Oxford, 1900-03, part i, p. 224.

[54] Despite this fact an academic and ineffective opposition to it still goes on. On the Style Sheet of the /Century Magazine/ it is listed among the "words and phrases to be avoided." It was prohibited by the famous /Index Expurgatorius/ prepared by William Cullen Bryant for the /New York Evening Post/, and his prohibition is still theoretically in force, but the word is now actually permitted by the /Post/. The /Chicago Daily News/ Style Book, dated July 1, 1908, also bans it.

[55] /Scientist/ is now in the Oxford Dictionary. So are /reliable/, /standpoint/ and /gubernatorial/. But the /Century Magazine/ still bans /standpoint/ and the /Evening Post/ (at least in theory) bans both /standpoint/ and /reliable/. The /Chicago Daily News/ accepts /standpoint/, but bans /reliable/ and /gubernatorial/. All of these words, of course, are now quite as good as /ox/ or /and/.

[56] /Art./ Changes in the Language Since Shakespeare's Time, Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv. p. 491.

[57] Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. ii, pp. 333-4.

[58] /Op. cit./, pp. 119-28.

[59] Alfred L. Elwyn, M. D.: Glossary of Supposed Americanisms ...; Phila., 1859.

[60] John S. Farmer: Americanisms Old and New ...; London, 1889.

[61] Sylva Clapin: A New Dictionary of Americanisms, Being a Glossary of Words Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States and the Dominion of Canada; New York, 1902.

[Pg036]

II

The Beginnings of American

§ 1

/In Colonial Days/--William Gifford, the first editor of the /Quarterly Review/, is authority for the tale that some of the Puritan clergy of New England, during the Revolution, proposed that English be formally abandoned as the national language of America, and Hebrew adopted in its place. An American chronicler, Charles Astor Bristed, makes the proposed tongue Greek, and reports that the change was rejected on the ground that "it would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it is, and make the English speak Greek."[1] The story, though it has the support of the editors of the Cambridge History of American Literature,[2] has an apocryphal smack; one suspects that the savagely anti-American Gifford invented it. But, true or false, it well indicates the temper of those times. The passion for complete political independence of England bred a general hostility to all English authority, whatever its character, and that hostility, in the direction of present concern to us, culminated in the revolutionary attitude of Noah Webster's "Dissertations on the English Language," printed in 1789. Webster harbored no fantastic notion of abandoning English altogether, but he was eager to set up American as a distinct and independent dialect. "Let us," he said, "seize the present moment, and establish a national language as well as a national government.... As an independent nation our honor requires [Pg037] us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government."

Long before this the challenge had been flung. Scarcely two years after the Declaration of Independence Franklin was instructed by Congress, on his appointment as minister to France, to employ "the language of the United States," not simply English, in all his "replies or answers" to the communications of the ministry of Louis XVI. And eight years before the Declaration Franklin himself had drawn up a characteristically American scheme of spelling reform, and had offered plenty of proof in it, perhaps unconsciously, that the standards of spelling and pronunciation in the New World had already diverged noticeably from those accepted on the other side of the ocean.[3] In acknowledging the dedication of Webster's "Dissertations" Franklin endorsed both his revolt against English domination and his forecast of widening differences in future, though protesting at the same time against certain Americanisms that have since come into good usage, and even migrated to England.[4]

This protest was marked by Franklin's habitual mildness, but in other quarters dissent was voiced with far less urbanity. The growing independence of the colonial dialect, not only in its spoken form, but also in its most dignified written form, had begun, indeed, to attract the attention of purists in both England and America, and they sought to dispose of it in its infancy by /force majeure/. One of the first and most vigorous of the attacks upon it was delivered by John Witherspoon, a Scotch clergyman who came out in 1769 to be president of Princeton /in partibus infidelium/. This Witherspoon brought a Scotch hatred of the English with him, and at once became a leader of the party of independence; he signed the Declaration to the tune of much rhetoric, and was the only clergyman to sit in the Continental Congress. But in matters of learning he was orthodox to the point of hunkerousness, and the strange locutions that [Pg038] he encountered on all sides aroused his pedagogic ire. "I have heard in this country," he wrote in 1781, "in the senate, at the bar, and from the pulpit, and see daily in dissertations from the press, errors in grammar, improprieties and vulgarisms which hardly any person of the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain."[5] It was Witherspoon who coined the word /Americanism/--and at once the English guardians of the sacred vessels began employing it as a general synonym for vulgarism and barbarism. Another learned immigrant, the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, soon joined him. This Boucher was a friend of Washington, but was driven back to England by his Loyalist sentiments. He took revenge by printing various charges against the Americans, among them that of "making all the haste they can to rid themselves of the [English] language."