Part 5

After the opening of the new century all the British reviews maintained an eager watchfulness for these abhorrent inventions, and denounced them, when found, with the utmost vehemence. The /Edinburgh/, which led the charge, opened its attack in October, 1804, and the appearance of the five volumes of Chief Justice Marshall's "Life of George Washington," during the three years following, gave the signal for corrective articles in the /British Critic/, the /Critical Review/, the /Annual/, the /Monthly/ and the /Eclectic/. The /British Critic/, in April, 1808, admitted somewhat despairingly that the damage was already done--that "the common speech of the United States has departed very considerably from the standard adopted in England." The others, however, sought to stay the flood by invective against Marshall and, later, against his rival biographer, the Rev. Aaron Bancroft. The /Annual/, in 1808, pronounced its high curse and anathema upon "that torrent of barbarous phraseology" which was pouring across the Atlantic, and which threatened "to destroy the purity of the English language."[6] In Bancroft's "Life of George Washington" [Pg039] (1808), according to the /British Critic/, there were gross Americanisms, inordinately offensive to Englishmen, "at almost every page."

The Rev. Jeremy Belknap, long anticipating Elwyn, White and Lounsbury, tried to obtain a respite from this abuse by pointing out the obvious fact that many of the Americanisms under fire were merely survivors of an English that had become archaic in England, but this effort counted for little, for on the one hand the British purists enjoyed the chase too much to give it up, and on the other hand there began to dawn in America a new spirit of nationality, at first very faint, which viewed the differences objected to, not with shame, but with a fierce sort of pride. In the first volume of the /North American Review/ William Ellery Channing spoke out boldly for "the American language and literature,"[7] and a year later Pickering published his defiant dictionary of "words and phrases which have been supposed to be peculiar to the United States." This thin collection of 500 specimens set off a dispute which yet rages on both sides of the Atlantic. Pickering, however, was undismayed. He had begun to notice the growing difference between the English and American vocabulary and pronunciation, he said, while living in London from 1799 to 1801, and he had made his collections with the utmost care, and after taking counsel with various prudent authorities, both English and American. Already in the first year of the century, he continued, the English had accused the people of the new republic of a deliberate "design to effect an entire change in the language" and while no such design was actually harbored, the facts were the facts, and he cited the current newspapers, the speeches from pulpit and rostrum, and Webster himself in support of them. This debate over Pickering's list, as I say, still continues. Lounsbury, entrenched behind his grotesque categories, once charged that four-fifths of the words in it had "no business to be there," and [Pg040] Gilbert M. Tucker[8] has argued that only 70 of them were genuine Americanisms. But a careful study of the list, in comparison with the early quotations recently collected by Thornton, seems to indicate that both of these judgments, and many others no less, have done injustice to Pickering. He made the usual errors of the pioneer, but his sound contributions to the subject were anything but inconsiderable, and it is impossible to forget his diligence and his constant shrewdness. He established firmly the native origin of a number of words now in universal use in America--/e. g./, /backwoodsman/, /breadstuffs/, /caucus/, /clapboard/, /sleigh/ and /squatter/--and of such familiar derivatives as /gubernatorial/ and /dutiable/, and he worked out the genesis of not a few loan-words, including /prairie/, /scow/, /rapids/, /hominy/ and /barbecue/. It was not until 1848, when the first edition of Bartlett appeared, that his work was supplanted.

§ 2

/Sources of Early Americanisms/--The first genuine Americanisms were undoubtedly words borrowed bodily from the Indian dialects--words, in the main, indicating natural objects that had no counterparts in England. We find /opossum/, for example, in the form of /opasum/, in Captain John Smith's "Map of Virginia" (1612), and, in the form of /apossoun/, in a Virginia document two years older. /Moose/ is almost as old. The word is borrowed from the Algonquin /musa/, and must have become familiar to the Pilgrim Fathers soon after their landing in 1620, for the woods of Massachusetts then swarmed with the huge quadrupeds and there was no English name to designate them. Again, there are /skunk/ (from the Abenaki Indian /seganku/), /hickory/, /squash/, /paw-paw/, /raccoon/, /chinkapin/, /porgy/, /chipmunk/, /pemmican/, /terrapin/, /menhaden/, /catalpa/, /persimmon/ and /cougar/. Of these, /hickory/ and /terrapin/ are to be found in Robert Beverley's "History and Present State of Virginia" (1705), and /squash/, /chinkapin/ and /persimmon/ are in documents of the preceding century. Many of these words, of course, were shortened [Pg041] or otherwise modified on being taken into colonial English. Thus /chinkapin/ was originally /checkinqumin/, and /squash/ appears in early documents as /isquontersquash/, /askutasquash/, /isquonkersquash/ and /squantersquash/. But William Penn, in a letter dated August 16, 1683, used the latter in its present form. Its variations show a familiar effort to bring a new and strange word into harmony with the language--an effort arising from what philologists call the law of Hobson-Jobson. This name was given to it by Col. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, compilers of a standard dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms. They found that the British soldiers in India, hearing strange words from the lips of the natives, often converted them into English words of similar sound, though of widely different meaning. Thus the words /Hassan/ and /Hosein/, frequently used by the Mohammedans of the country in their devotions, were turned into /Hobson-Jobson/. The same process is constantly in operation elsewhere. By it the French /route de roi/ has become /Rotten Row/ in English, /écrevisse/ has become /crayfish/, and the English /bowsprit/ has become /beau pré/ (=/beautiful meadow/) in French. The word /pigeon/, in /Pigeon English/, offers another example; it has no connection with the bird, but merely represents a Chinaman's attempt to pronounce the word /business/. No doubt /squash/ originated in the same way. That /woodchuck/ did so is practically certain. Its origin is to be sought, not in /wood/ and /chuck/, but in the Cree word /otchock/, used by the Indians to designate the animal.

In addition to the names of natural objects, the early colonists, of course, took over a great many Indian place-names, and a number of words to designate Indian relations and artificial objects in Indian use. To the last division belong /hominy/, /pone/, /toboggan/, /canoe/, /tapioca/, /moccasin/, /pow-wow/, /papoose/, /tomahawk/, /wigwam/, /succotash/ and /squaw/, all of which were in common circulation by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Finally, new words were made during the period by translating Indian terms, for example, /war-path/, /war-paint/, /pale-face/, /medicine-man/, /pipe-of-peace/ and /fire-water/. The total number of such borrowings, direct and indirect, was a good deal larger [Pg042] than now appears, for with the disappearance of the red man the use of loan-words from his dialects has decreased. In our own time such words as /papoose/, /sachem/, /tepee/, /wigwam/ and /wampum/ have begun to drop out of everyday use;[9] at an earlier period the language sloughed off /ocelot/, /manitee/, /calumet/, /supawn/, /samp/ and /quahaug/, or began to degrade them to the estate of provincialisms.[10] A curious phenomenon is presented by the case of /maize/, which came into the colonial speech from some West Indian dialect, went over into orthodox English, and from English into French, German and other continental languages, and was then abandoned by the colonists. We shall see other examples of that process later on.

Whether or not /Yankee/ comes from an Indian dialect is still disputed. An early authority, John G. E. Heckwelder, argued that it was derived from an Indian mispronunciation of the word /English/.[11] Certain later etymologists hold that it originated more probably in an Indian mishandling of the French word /Anglais/. Yet others derive it from the Scotch /yankie/, meaning a gigantic falsehood. A fourth party derive it from the Dutch, and cite an alleged Dutch model for "Yankee Doodle," beginning "/Yanker/ didee doodle down."[12] Of these theories that of Heckwelder is the most plausible. But here, as in other directions, the investigation of American etymology remains sadly incomplete. An elaborate dictionary of words derived from the Indian languages, compiled by the late W. R. Gerard, is in the possession of the Smithsonian Institution, but on account of a shortage of funds it remains in manuscript. [Pg043]

From the very earliest days of English colonization the language of the colonists also received accretions from the languages of the other colonizing nations. The French word /portage/, for example, was already in common use before the end of the seventeenth century, and soon after came /chowder/, /cache/, /caribou/, /voyageur/, and various words that, like the last-named, have since become localisms or disappeared altogether. Before 1750 /bureau/,[13] /gopher/, /batteau/, /bogus/, and /prairie/ were added, and /caboose/, a word of Dutch origin, seems to have come in through the French. /Carry-all/ is also French in origin, despite its English quality. It comes, by the law of Hobson-Jobson, from the French /carriole/. The contributions of the Dutch during the half century of their conflicts with the English included /cruller/, /cold-slaw/, /dominie/ (for /parson/), /cookey/, /stoop/, /span/ (of horses), /pit/ (as in /peach-pit/), /waffle/, /hook/ (a point of land), /scow/, /boss/, /smearcase/ and /Santa Claus/.[14] Schele de Vere credits them with /hay-barrack/, a corruption of /hooiberg/. That they established the use of /bush/ as a designation for back-country is very probable; the word has also got into South African English. In American it has produced a number of familiar derivatives, /e. g./, /bush-whacker/ and /bush-league/. Barrère and Leland also credit the Dutch with /dander/, which is commonly assumed to be an American corruption of /dandruff/. They say that it is from the Dutch word /donder/ (=/thunder/). /Op donderen/, in Dutch, means to burst into a sudden rage. The chief Spanish contributions to American were to come after the War of 1812, with the opening of the West, but /creole/, /calaboose/, /palmetto/, /peewee/, /key/ (a small island), /quadroon/, /octoroon/, /barbecue/, /pickaninny/ and /stampede/ had already entered the language in colonial days. /Jerked beef/ came from the Spanish /charqui/ by the law of Hobson-Jobson. The Germans who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1682 also undoubtedly gave a few words to the language, though [Pg044] it is often difficult to distinguish their contributions from those of the Dutch. It seems very likely, however, that /sauerkraut/[15] and /noodle/ are to be credited to them. Finally, the negro slaves brought in /gumbo/, /goober/, /juba/ and /voodoo/ (usually corrupted to /hoodoo/), and probably helped to corrupt a number of other loan-words, for example /banjo/ and /breakdown/. /Banjo/ seems to be derived from /bandore/ or /bandurria/, modern French and Spanish forms of /tambour/, respectively. It may, however, be an actual negro word; there is a term of like meaning, /bania/, in Senegambian. Ware says that /breakdown/, designating a riotous negro dance, is a corruption of the French /rigadon/. The word is not in the Oxford Dictionary. Bartlett listed it as an Americanism, but Thornton rejected it, apparently because, in the sense of a collapse, it has come into colloquial use in England. Its etymology is not given in the American dictionaries.

§ 3

/New Words of English Material/--But of far more importance than these borrowings was the great stock of new words that the colonists coined in English metal--words primarily demanded by the "new circumstances under which they were placed," but also indicative, in more than one case, of a delight in the business for its own sake. The American, even in the early eighteenth century, already showed many of the characteristics that were to set him off from the Englishman later on--his bold and somewhat grotesque imagination, his contempt for authority, his lack of aesthetic sensitiveness, his extravagant humor. Among the first colonists there were many men of education, culture and gentle birth, but they were soon swamped by hordes of the ignorant and illiterate, and the latter, cut off from the corrective influence of books, soon laid their hands upon the language. It is impossible to imagine the austere Puritan divines of Massachusetts inventing such verbs as /to cowhide/ and /to logroll/, or such adjectives as /no-account/ and /stumped/, or such adverbs as /no-how/ and [Pg045] /lickety-split/, or such substantives as /bull-frog/, /hog-wallow/ and /hoe-cake/; but under their eyes there arose a contumacious proletariat which was quite capable of the business, and very eager for it. In Boston, so early as 1628, there was a definite class of blackguard roisterers, chiefly made up of sailors and artisans; in Virginia, nearly a decade earlier, John Pory, secretary to Governor Yeardley, lamented that "in these five moneths of my continuance here there have come at one time or another eleven sails of ships into this river, but fraighted more with ignorance than with any other marchansize." In particular, the generation born in the New World was uncouth and iconoclastic;[16] the only world it knew was a rough world, and the virtues that environment engendered were not those of niceness, but those of enterprise and resourcefulness.

Upon men of this sort fell the task of bringing the wilderness to the ax and the plow, and with it went the task of inventing a vocabulary for the special needs of the great adventure. Out of their loutish ingenuity came a great number of picturesque names for natural objects, chiefly boldly descriptive compounds: /bull-frog/, /canvas-back/, /lightning-bug/, /mud-hen/, /cat-bird/, /razor-back/, /garter-snake/, /ground-hog/ and so on. And out of an inventiveness somewhat more urbane came such coinages as /live-oak/, /potato-bug/, /turkey-gobbler/, /poke-weed/, /copper-head/, /eel-grass/, /reed-bird/, /egg-plant/, /blue-grass/, /pea-nut/, /pitch-pine/, /cling-stone/ (peach), /moccasin-snake/, /June-bug/ and /butter-nut/. /Live-oak/ appears in a document of 1610; /bull-frog/ was familiar to Beverley in 1705; so was /James-Town weed/ (later reduced to /Jimson weed/, as the English /hurtleberry/ or /whortleberry/ was reduced to /huckleberry/). These early Americans were not botanists. They were often ignorant of the names of the plants they encountered, even when those plants already had English names, and so they exercised their fancy upon new ones. So arose /Johnny-jump-up/ for the /Viola tricolor/, and /basswood/ for the common European /linden/ or /lime-tree/ (/Tilia/), and /locust/ for the /Robinia pseudacacia/ and its allies. The /Jimson weed/ itself was anything but a [Pg046] novelty, but the pioneers apparently did not recognize it, and so we find them ascribing all sorts of absurd medicinal powers to it, and even Beverley solemnly reporting that "some Soldiers, eating it in a Salad, turn'd natural Fools upon it for several Days." The grosser features of the landscape got a lavish renaming, partly to distinguish new forms and partly out of an obvious desire to attain a more literal descriptiveness. I have mentioned /key/ and /hook/, the one borrowed from the Spanish and the other from the Dutch. With them came /run/, /branch/, /fork/, /bluff/, (noun), /neck/, /barrens/, /bottoms/, /underbrush/, /bottom-land/, /clearing/, /notch/, /divide/, /knob/, /riffle/, /gap/, /rolling-country/ and /rapids/,[17] and the extension of /pond/ from artificial pools to small natural lakes, and of /creek/ from small arms of the sea to shallow feeders of rivers. Such common English geographical terms as /downs/, /weald/, /wold/, /fen/, /bog/, /fell/, /chase/, /combe/, /dell/, /heath/ and /moor/ disappeared from the colonial tongue, save as fossilized in a few proper names. So did /bracken/.

With the new landscape came an entirely new mode of life--new foods, new forms of habitation, new methods of agriculture, new kinds of hunting. A great swarm of neologisms thus arose, and, as in the previous case, they were chiefly compounds. /Back-country/, /back-woods/, /back-woodsman/, /back-settlers/, /back-settlements/: all these were in common use early in the eighteenth century. /Back-log/ was used by Increase Mather in 1684. /Log-house/ appears in the Maryland Archives for 1669.[18] /Hoe-cake/, /Johnny-cake/, /pan-fish/, /corn-dodger/, /roasting-ear/, /corn-crib/, /corn-cob/ and /pop-corn/ were all familiar before the Revolution. So were /pine-knot/, /snow-plow/, /cold-snap/, /land-slide/, /salt-lick/, /prickly-heat/, /shell-road/ and /cane-brake/. /Shingle/ was a novelty in 1705, but one S. Symonds wrote to John Winthrop, of Ipswich, about a /clapboarded/ house in 1637. /Frame-house/ seems to have come in with /shingle/. /Trail/, /half-breed/, /Indian-summer/ and [Pg047] /Indian-file/ were obviously suggested by the Red Men. /State-house/ was borrowed, perhaps, from the Dutch. /Selectman/ is first heard of in 1685, displacing the English /alderman/. /Mush/ had displaced /porridge/ by 1671. Soon afterward /hay-stack/ took the place of the English /hay-cock/, and such common English terms as /byre/, /mews/, /weir/, and /wain/ began to disappear. /Hired-man/ is to be found in the Plymouth town records of 1737, and /hired-girl/ followed soon after. So early as 1758, as we find by the diary of Nathaniel Ames, the second-year students at Harvard were already called /sophomores/, though for a while the spelling was often made /sophimores/. /Camp-meeting/ was later; it did not appear until 1799. But /land-office/ was familiar before 1700, and /side-walk/, /spelling-bee/, /bee-line/, /moss-back/, /crazy-quilt/, /mud-scow/, /stamping-ground/ and a hundred and one other such compounds were in daily use before the Revolution. After that great upheaval the new money of the confederation brought in a number of new words. In 1782 Gouverneur Morris proposed to the Continental Congress that the coins of the republic be called, in ascending order, /unit/, /penny-bill/, /dollar/ and /crown/. Later Morris invented the word /cent/, substituting it for the English /penny/.[19] In 1785 Jefferson proposed /mill/, /cent/, /dime/, /dollar/ and /eagle/, and this nomenclature was adopted.

Various nautical terms peculiar to America, or taken into English from American sources, came in during the eighteenth century, among them, /schooner/, /cat-boat/ and /pungy/, not to recall /batteau/ and /canoe/. According to a recent historian of the American merchant marine,[20] the first schooner ever seen was launched at Gloucester, Mass., in 1713. The word, it appears, was originally spelled /scooner/. /To scoon/ was a verb borrowed by the New Englanders from some Scotch dialect, and meant to skim or skip across the water like a flat stone. As the first schooner left the ways and glided out into Gloucester harbor, an enraptured spectator shouted: "Oh, see how she scoons!" "A /scooner/ let her be!" replied Captain Andrew Robinson, her [Pg048] builder--and all boats of her peculiar and novel fore-and-aft rig took the name thereafter. The Dutch mariners borrowed the term and changed the spelling, and this change was soon accepted in America. The Scotch root came from the Norse /skunna/, to hasten, and there are analogues in Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon and Old High German. The origin of /cat-boat/ and /pungy/ I have been unable to determine. Perhaps the latter is related in some way to /pung/, a one-horse sled or wagon. /Pung/ was once widely used in the United States, but of late it has sunk to the estate of a New England provincialism. Longfellow used it, and in 1857 a writer in the /Knickerbocker Magazine/ reported that /pungs/ filled Broadway, in New York, after a snow-storm.

Most of these new words, of course, produced derivatives, for example, /to stack hay/, /to shingle/, /to shuck/ (/i. e./, corn), /to trail/ and /to caucus/. /Backwoods/ immediately begat /backwoodsman/ and was itself turned into a common adjective. The colonists, indeed, showed a beautiful disregard of linguistic nicety. At an early date they shortened the English law-phrase, /to convey by deed/, to the simple verb, /to deed/. Pickering protested against this as a barbarism, and argued that no self-respecting law-writer would employ it, but all the same it was firmly entrenched in the common speech and it has remained there to this day. /To table/, for /to lay on the table/, came in at the same time, and so did various forms represented by /bindery/, for /bookbinder's shop/. /To tomahawk/ appeared before 1650, and /to scalp/ must have followed soon after. Within the next century and a half they were reinforced by many other such new verbs, and by such adjectives made of nouns as /no-account/ and /one-horse/, and such nouns made of verbs as /carry-all/ and /goner/, and such adverbs as /no-how/. In particular, the manufacture of new verbs went on at a rapid pace. In his letter to Webster in 1789, Franklin denounced /to advocate/, /to progress/, and /to oppose/--a vain enterprise, for all of them are now in perfectly good usage. /To advocate/, indeed, was used by Thomas Nashe in 1589, and by John Milton half a century later, but it seems to have been reinvented in America. In 1822 and again in 1838 Robert Southey, then poet laureate, led two belated attacks upon it, as a barbarous Americanism, but [Pg049] its obvious usefulness preserved it, and it remains in good usage on both sides of the Atlantic today--one of the earliest of the English borrowings from America. In the end, indeed, even so ardent a purist as Richard Grant White adopted it, as he did /to placate/.[21]