Part 6

Webster, though he agreed with Franklin in opposing /to advocate/, gave his /imprimatur/ to /to appreciate/ (/i. e./, to rise in value), and is credited by Sir Charles Lyell[22] with having himself invented /to demoralize/. He also approved /to obligate/. /To antagonize/ seems to have been given currency by John Quincy Adams, /to immigrate/ by John Marshall, /to eventuate/ by Gouverneur Morris, and /to derange/ by George Washington. Jefferson, always hospitable to new words, used /to belittle/ in his "Notes on Virginia," and Thornton thinks that he coined it. Many new verbs were made by the simple process of prefixing the preposition to common nouns, /e. g./, /to clerk/, /to dicker/, /to dump/, /to blow/, (/i. e./, to bluster or boast), /to cord/ (/i. e./, wood) /to stump/, /to room/ and /to shin/. Others were made by transforming verbs in the orthodox vocabulary, /e. g./, /to cavort/ from /to curvet/, and /to snoop/ from /to snook/. Others arose as metaphors, /e. g./, /to whitewash/ (figuratively) and /to squat/ (on unoccupied land). Others were made by hitching suffixes to nouns, /e. g./, /to negative/, /to deputize/, /to locate/, /to legislate/, /to infract/, /to compromit/ and /to happify/. Yet others seem to have been produced by onomatopoeia, /e. g./, /to fizzle/, or to have arisen by some other such spontaneous process, so far unintelligible, /e. g./, /to tote/. With them came an endless series of verb-phrases, /e. g./, /to draw a bead/, /to face the music/, /to darken one's doors/, /to take to the woods/, /to fly off the handle/, /to go on the war-path/ and /to saw wood/--all obvious products of frontier life. Many coinages of the pre-Revolutionary era later disappeared. Jefferson used /to ambition/ but it dropped out nevertheless, and so did /to compromit/, (/i. e./, to compromise), /to homologize/, and /to happify/. Fierce battles raged 'round some of these words, and they were all violently derided in England. Even so useful a verb as /to locate/, now in perfectly good usage, [Pg050] was denounced in the third volume of the /North American Review/, and other purists of the times tried to put down /to legislate/.

The young and tender adjectives had quite as hard a row to hoe, particularly /lengthy/. The /British Critic/ attacked it in November, 1793, and it also had enemies at home, but John Adams had used it in his diary in 1759 and the authority of Jefferson and Hamilton was behind it, and so it survived. Years later James Russell Lowell spoke of it as "the excellent adjective,"[23] and boasted that American had given it to English. /Dutiable/ also met with opposition, and moreover, it had a rival, /customable/; but Marshall wrote it into his historic decisions, and thus it took root. The same anonymous watchman of the /North American Review/ who protested against /to locate/ pronounced his anathema upon "such barbarous terms as /presidential/ and /congressional/," but the plain need for them kept them in the language. /Gubernatorial/ had come in long before this, and is to be found in the New Jersey Archives of 1734. /Influential/ was denounced by the Rev. Jonathan Boucher and by George Canning, who argued that /influent/ was better, but it was ardently defended by William Pinkney, of Maryland, and gradually made its way. /Handy/, /kinky/, /law-abiding/, /chunky/, /solid/ (in the sense of well-to-do), /evincive/, /complected/, /judgmatical/, /underpinned/, /blooded/ and /cute/ were also already secure in revolutionary days. So with many nouns. Jefferson used /breadstuffs/ in his Report of the Secretary of State on Commercial Restrictions, December 16, 1793. /Balance/, in the sense of remainder, got into the debates of the First Congress. /Mileage/ was used by Franklin in 1754, and is now sound English. /Elevator/, in the sense of a storage house for grain, was used by Jefferson and by others before him. /Draw/, for /drawbridge/, comes down from Revolutionary days. So does /slip/, in the sense of a berth for vessels. So does /addition/, in the sense of a suburb. So, finally, does /darkey/.

The history of many of these Americanisms shows how vain is the effort of grammarians to combat the normal processes of [Pg051] language development. I have mentioned the early opposition to /dutiable/, /influential/, /presidential/, /lengthy/, /to locate/, /to oppose/, /to advocate/, /to legislate/ and /to progress/. /Bogus/, /reliable/ and /standpoint/ were attacked with the same academic ferocity. All of them are to be found in Bryant's /Index Expurgatorius/[24] (/circa/ 1870), and /reliable/ was denounced by Bishop Coxe as "that abominable barbarism" so late as 1886.[25] Edward S. Gould, another uncompromising purist, said of /standpoint/ that it was "the bright particular star ... of solemn philological blundering" and "the very counterpart of Dogberry's /non-com/."[26] Gould also protested against /to jeopardize/, /leniency/ and /to demean/, and Richard Grant White joined him in an onslaught upon /to donate/. But all of these words are in good use in the United States today, and some of them have gone over into English.[27]

§ 4

/Changed Meanings/--A number of the foregoing contributions to the American vocabulary, of course, were simply common English words with changed meanings. /To squat/, in the sense of /to crouch/, had been sound English for centuries; what the colonists did was to attach a figurative meaning to it, and then bring that figurative meaning into wider usage than the literal meaning. In a somewhat similar manner they changed the significance of /pond/, as I have pointed out. So, too, with /creek/. In English it designated (and still designates) a small inlet or arm of a large river or of the sea; in American, so early as 1674, it designated any small stream. Many other such changed meanings crept into American in the early days. A typical one was the use of /lot/ to designate a /parcel/ of land. Thornton says, perhaps inaccurately, that it originated in the fact that the land in New England was distributed by lot. Whatever the truth, /lot/, [Pg052] to this day, is in almost universal use in the United States, though rare in England. Our conveyancers, in describing real property, always speak of "all that /lot/ or /parcel/ of land."[28] Other examples of the application of old words to new purposes are afforded by /freshet/, /barn/ and /team/. A /freshet/, in eighteenth century English, meant any stream of fresh water; the colonists made it signify an inundation. A /barn/ was a house or shed for storing crops; in the colonies the word came to mean a place for keeping cattle also. A /team/, in English, was a pair of draft horses; in the colonies it came to mean both horses and vehicle.

The process is even more clearly shown in the history of such words as /corn/ and /shoe/. /Corn/, in orthodox English, means grain for human consumption, and especially wheat, /e. g./, the /Corn/ Laws. The earliest settlers, following this usage, gave the name of /Indian corn/ to what the Spaniards, following the Indians themselves, had called /maíz/. But gradually the adjective fell off, and by the middle of the eighteenth century /maize/ was called simply /corn/, and grains in general were called /breadstuffs/. Thomas Hutchinson, discoursing to George III in 1774, used /corn/ in this restricted sense, speaking of "rye and /corn/ mixed." "What /corn/?" asked George. "/Indian corn/," explained Hutchinson, "or, as it is called in authors, /maize/."[29] So with /shoe/. In English it meant (and still means) a topless article of foot-wear, but the colonists extended its meaning to varieties covering the ankle, thus displacing the English /boot/, which they reserved for foot coverings reaching at least to the knee. To designate the English /shoe/ they began to use the word /slipper/. This distinction between English and American usage still prevails, despite the affectation which has lately sought to revive /boot/, and with it its derivatives, /boot-shop/ and /bootmaker/.

/Store/, /shop/, /lumber/, /pie/, /dry-goods/, /cracker/, /rock/ and /partridge/ among nouns and /to haul/, /to jew/, /to notify/ and /to heft/ among verbs offer further examples of changed meanings. Down to the [Pg053] middle of the eighteenth century /shop/ continued to designate a retail establishment in America, as it does in England to this day. /Store/ was applied only to a large establishment--one showing, in some measure, the character of a warehouse. But in 1774 a Boston young man was advertising in the /Massachusetts Spy/ for "a /place/ as a /clerk/ in a /store/" (three Americanisms in a row!). Soon afterward /shop/ began to acquire its special American meaning as a factory, /e. g./, /machine-shop/. Meanwhile /store/ completely displaced /shop/ in the English sense, and it remained for a late flowering of Anglomania, as in the case of /boot/ and /shoe/, to restore, in a measure, the /status quo ante/. /Lumber/, in eighteenth century English, meant disused furniture, and this is its common meaning in England today. But the colonists early employed it to designate timber, and that use of it is now universal in America. Its familiar derivatives, /e. g./, /lumber-yard/, /lumberman/, /lumberjack/, greatly reinforce this usage. /Pie/, in English, means a meat-pie; in American it means a fruit-pie. The English call a fruit-pie a /tart/; the Americans call a meat-pie a /pot-pie/. /Dry-goods/, in England, means "non-liquid goods, as corn" (/i. e./, wheat); in the United States the term means "textile fabrics or wares."[30] The difference had appeared before 1725. /Rock/, in English, always means a large mass; in America it may mean a small stone, as in /rock-pile/ and /to throw a rock/. The Puritans were putting /rocks/ into the foundations of their meeting-houses so early as 1712.[31] /Cracker/ began to be used for /biscuit/ before the Revolution. /Tavern/ displaced /inn/ at the same time. As for /partridge/, it is cited by a late authority[32] as a salient example of changed meaning, along with /corn/ and /store/. In England the term is applied only to the true partridge (/Perdix perdix/) and its nearly related varieties, but in the United States it is also used to designate the ruffed grouse (/Bonasa umbellus/), the common quail (/Colinus virginianus/) and various [Pg054] other tetraonoid birds. This confusion goes back to colonial times. So with /rabbit/. Properly speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped the word /hare/ out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which, curiously enough, is not a hare at all, but a true rabbit.

/To haul/, in English, means to move by force or violence; in the colonies it came to mean to transport in a vehicle, and this meaning survives in sound American. /To jew/, in English, means to cheat; the colonists made it mean to haggle, and devised /to jew down/ to indicate an effort to work a reduction in price. /To heft/, in English, means to lift; the early Americans made it mean to weigh by lifting, and kept the idea of weighing in its derivatives, /e. g./, /hefty/. Finally, there is the familiar American misuse of /Miss/ or /Mis'/ for /Mrs./. It was so widespread by 1790 that on November 17 of that year Webster solemnly denounced it in the /American Mercury/.

§ 5

/Archaic English Words/--Most of the colonists who lived along the American seaboard in 1750 were the descendants of immigrants who had come in fully a century before; after the first settlements there had been much less fresh immigration than many latter-day writers have assumed. According to Prescott F. Hall, "the population of New England ... at the date of the Revolutionary War ... was produced out of an immigration of about 20,000 persons /who arrived before 1640/,"[33] and we have Franklin's authority for the statement that the total population of the colonies in 1751, then about 1,000,000, had been [Pg055] produced from an original immigration of less than 80,000.[34] Even at that early day, indeed, the colonists had begun to feel that they were distinctly separated, in culture and customs, from the mother-country,[35] and there were signs of the rise of a new native aristocracy, entirely distinct from the older aristocracy of the royal governors' courts.[36] The enormous difficulties of communication with England helped to foster this sense of separation. The round trip across the ocean occupied the better part of a year, and was hazardous and expensive; a colonist who had made it was a marked man,--as Hawthorne said, "the /petit-maître/ of the colonies." Nor was there any very extensive exchange of ideas, for though most of the books read in the colonies came from England, the great majority of the colonists, down to the middle of the century, seem to have read little save the Bible and biblical commentaries, and in the native literature of the time one seldom comes upon any reference to the English authors who were glorifying the period of the Restoration and the reign of Anne. Moreover, after 1760 the colonial eyes were upon France rather than upon England, and Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire and the Encyclopedists began to be familiar names to thousands who were scarcely aware of Addison and Steele, or even of the great Elizabethans.[37]

The result of this isolation, on the one hand, was that proliferation of the colonial speech which I have briefly reviewed, and on the other hand, the preservation of many words and phrases that gradually became obsolete in England. The Pilgrims of 1620 brought over with them the English of James I and the Revised [Pg056] Version, and their descendants of a century later, inheriting it, allowed its fundamentals to be little changed by the academic overhauling that the mother tongue was put to during the early part of the eighteenth century. In part they were ignorant of this overhauling, and in part they were indifferent to it. Whenever the new usage differed from that of the Bible they were inclined to remain faithful to the Bible, not only because of its pious authority but also because of the superior pull of its imminent and constant presence. Thus when an artificial prudery in English ordered the abandonment of the Anglo-Saxon /sick/ for the Gothic /ill/, the colonies refused to follow, for /sick/ was in both the Old Testament and the New;[38] and that refusal remains in force to this day.

A very large number of words and phrases, many of them now exclusively American, are similar survivals from the English of the seventeenth century, long since obsolete or merely provincial in England. Among nouns Thornton notes /fox-fire/, /flap-jack/, /jeans/, /molasses/, /beef/ (to designate the live animal), /chinch/, /cord-wood/, /homespun/, /ice-cream/, /julep/ and /swingle-tree/; Halliwell[39] adds /andiron/, /bay-window/, /cesspool/, /clodhopper/, /cross-purposes/, /greenhorn/, /loophole/, /ragamuffin/, /riff-raff/, /rigmarole/ and /trash/; and other authorities cite /stock/ (for cattle), /fall/ (for autumn), /offal/, /din/, /underpinning/ and /adze/. /Bub/, used in addressing a boy, is very old English, but survives only in American. /Flap-jack/ goes back to Piers Plowman, but has been obsolete in England for two centuries. /Muss/, in the sense of a row, is also obsolete over there, but it is to be found in "Anthony and Cleopatra." /Char/, as a noun, disappeared from English a long time ago, but it survives in American as /chore/. Among the adjectives similarly preserved are /to whittle/, /to wilt/ and /to approbate/. /To guess/, in the American sense of /to suppose/, is to be found in "Henry VI": [Pg057]

Not all together; better far, I /guess/, That we do make our entrance several ways.

In "Measure for Measure" Escalus says "I /guess/ not" to Angelo. The New English Dictionary offers examples much older--from Chaucer, Wyclif and Gower. /To interview/ is in Dekker. /To loan/, in the American sense of to lend, is in 34 and 35 Henry VIII, but it dropped out of use in England early in the eighteenth century, and all the leading dictionaries, both English and American, now call it an Americanism.[40] /To fellowship/, once in good American use but now reduced to a provincialism, is in Chaucer. Even /to hustle/, it appears, is ancient. Among adjectives, /homely/, which means only homelike or unadorned in England, was used in its American sense of plain-featured by both Shakespeare and Milton. Other such survivors are /burly/, /catty-cornered/, /likely/, /deft/, /copious/, /scant/ and /ornate/. Perhaps /clever/ also belongs to this category, that is, in the American sense of amiable.

"Our ancestors," said James Russell Lowell, "unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare's." Shakespeare died in 1616; the Pilgrims landed four years later; Jamestown was founded in 1607. As we have seen, the colonists, saving a few superior leaders, were men of small sensitiveness to the refinements of life and speech: soldiers of fortune, amateur theologians, younger sons, neighborhood "advanced thinkers," bankrupts, jobless workmen, decayed gentry, and other such fugitives from culture--in brief, Philistines of the sort who join tin-pot fraternal orders today, and march in parades, and whoop for the latest mountebanks in politics. There was thus a touch of rhetoric in Lowell's saying that they spoke the English of Shakespeare; as well argue that the London grocers of 1885 spoke the English of Pater. But in a larger sense he said truly, for these men at least brought with them the vocabulary of Shakespeare--or a part of it,--even if the uses he made of it were beyond their comprehension, and they also brought with [Pg058] them that sense of ease in the language, that fine disdain for formality, that bold experimentalizing in words, which was so peculiarly Elizabethan. There were no grammarians in that day; there were no purists that anyone listened to; it was a case of saying your say in the easiest and most satisfying way. In remote parts of the United States there are still direct and almost pure-blooded descendants of those seventeenth century colonists. Go among them, and you will hear more words from the Shakespearean vocabulary, still alive and in common service, than anywhere else in the world, and more of the loose and brilliant syntax of that time, and more of its gipsy phrases.[41]

§ 6

/Colonial Pronunciation/--The debate that long raged over the pronunciation of classical Latin exhibits the difficulty of determining with exactness the shades of sound in the speech of a people long departed from earth. The American colonists, of course, are much nearer to us than the Romans, and so we should have relatively little difficulty in determining just how they pronounced this or that word, but against the fact of their nearness stands the neglect of our philologists, or, perhaps more accurately, our lack of philologists. What Sweet did to clear up the history of English pronunciation,[42] and what Wilhelm Corssen did for Latin, no American professor has yet thought to attempt for American. The literature is almost, if not quite a blank. But here and there we may get a hint of the facts, and though the sum of them is not large, they at least serve to set at rest a number of popular errors.

One of these errors, chiefly prevalent in New England, is that the so-called Boston pronunciation, with its broad /a/'s (making /last/, /path/ and /aunt/ almost assonant with /bar/) comes down unbrokenly from the day of the first settlements, and that it is in consequence superior in authority to the pronunciation of the [Pg059] rest of the country, with its flat /a/'s (making the same words assonant with /ban/). A glance through Webster's "Dissertations" is sufficient to show that the flat /a/ was in use in New England in 1789, for the pronunciation of such words as /wrath/, /bath/ and /path/, as given by him, makes them rhyme with /hath/.[43] Moreover, he gives /aunt/ the same /a/-sound. From other sources come indications that the /a/ was likewise flattened in such words as /plant/, /basket/, /branch/, /dance/, /blast/, /command/ and /castle/, and even in /balm/ and /calm/. Changes in the sound of the letter have been going on in English ever since the Middle English period,[44] and according to Lounsbury[45] they have moved toward the disappearance of the Continental /a/, "the fundamental vowel-tone of the human voice." Grandgent, another authority,[46] says that it became flattened "by the sixteenth century" and that "until 1780 or thereabouts the standard language had no broad /a/." Even in such words as /father/, /car/ and /ask/ the flat /a/ was universally used. Sheridan, in the dictionary he published in 1780,[47] actually gave no /ah/-sound in his list of vowels. This habit of flatting the /a/ had been brought over, of course, by the early colonists, and was as general in America, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, as in England. Benjamin Franklin, when he wrote his "Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling," in 1768, apparently had no suspicion that any other /a/ was possible. But between 1780 and 1790, according to Grandgent, a sudden fashion for the broad /a/ (not the /aw/-sound, as in /fall/, but the Continental sound as in /far/) arose in England,[48] and this fashion soon found servile imitation in Boston. But it was as much an affectation in those [Pg060] days as it is today, and Webster indicated the fact pretty plainly in his "Dissertations." How, despite his opposition, the broad /a/ prevailed East of the Connecticut river, and how, in the end, he himself yielded to it, and even tried to force it upon the whole nation--this will be rehearsed in the next chapter.

The colonists remained faithful much longer than the English to various other vowel-sounds that were facing change in the eighteenth century, for example, the long /e/-sound in /heard/. Webster says that the custom of rhyming /heard/ with /bird/ instead of with /feared/ came in at the beginning of the Revolution. "To most people in this country," he adds, "the English pronunciation appears like affectation." He also argues for rhyming /deaf/ with /leaf/, and protests against inserting a /y/-sound before the /u/ in such words as /nature/. Franklin's authority stands behind /git/ for /get/. This pronunciation, according to Menner,[49] was correct in seventeenth century England, and perhaps down to the middle of the next century. So was the use of the Continental /i/-sound in /oblige/, making it /obleege/. It is probable that the colonists clung to these disappearing usages much longer than the English. The latter, according to Webster, were unduly responsive to illogical fashions set by the exquisites of the court and by popular actors. He blames Garrick, in particular, for many extravagant innovations, most of them not followed in the colonies. But Garrick was surely not responsible for the use of a long /i/-sound in such words as /motive/, nor for the corruption of /mercy/ to /marcy/. Webster denounced both of these barbarisms. The second he ascribed somewhat lamely to the fact that the letter /r/ is called /ar/, and proposed to dispose of it by changing the /ar/ to /er/.