American Language (112 page)

Nor were there any other words for
hubbub, fireworks, foppish, fretful, sportive, dog-weary, to bump
and
to dwindle
in Shakespeare’s time; he adopted and dignified them because they met genuine needs.
²³
Nor was there any other satisfactory word for
graft
when it came in, nor for
rowdy
, nor for
boom
, nor for
joy-ride
, nor for
slacker
, nor for
trust-buster
. Such words often retain a humorous quality; they are used satirically and hence appear but seldom in wholly serious discourse. But they have standing in the language nevertheless, and only a prig would hesitate to use them as George Saintsbury used
the best of the bunch
and
joke-smith
. So recently as 1929 the Encyclopaedia Britannica listed
bootlegger, speakeasy, dry, wet, crook, fake, fizzle, hike, hobo, poppycock, racketeer
and
O.K
. as American slang terms, but today most of them are in perfectly good usage. What would one call a racketeer if
racketeer
were actually forbidden? It would take a phrase of four or five words at least, and they would certainly not express the idea clearly.
²⁴

On the other hand, many an apt and ingenious neologism, by falling too quickly into the gaping maw of the proletariat, is spoiled forthwith and forever. Once it becomes, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s phrase, “a cheap generic term, a substitute for differentiated specific expressions,” it quickly acquires such flatness that the fastidious flee it as a plague. The case of
strenuous
I have already mentioned. One recalls, too, many capital verb-phrases, thus ruined by unintelligent appreciation,
e.g., to freeze on to, to have the goods, to cut no ice, to fall for
, and
to get by
; and some excellent substantives,
e.g., dope
and
dub
, and compounds,
e.g., come-on
and
easy-mark
, and simple verbs,
e.g., to neck
and
to vamp
. These are all quite as sound in structure as the great majority of our most familiar words and phrases —
to cut no ice
, for example, is certainly as good as
to butter no parsnips —
, but their adoption by the ignorant and their endless use and misuse in all sorts of situations have left them tattered and obnoxious, and soon or late they will probably go the way, as Brander Matthews once said, of all the other “temporary phrases which spring up, one scarcely knows how, and flourish unaccountably for a few months,
and then disappear forever, leaving no sign.” Matthews was wrong-in two particulars here. They do not arrive by any mysterious parthenogenesis, but come from sources which, in many cases, may be determined. And they last, alas, a good deal more than a month.
Shoo-fly
afflicted the American people for four or five years, and “I
don’t
think,”
aber nit, over the left, good night
and
oh yeah
were scarcely less long-lived.
²⁵
There are, indeed, slang terms that have survived for centuries, never dropping quite out of use and yet never attaining to good usage. Among verbs,
to do
for to cheat has been traced to 1789,
to frisk
for to search to 1781,
to grease
for to bribe to 1557, and
to blow
for to boast to
c
. 1400.
²⁶
Among nouns,
gas
for empty talk has been traced to 1847,
jug
for prison to 1834,
lip
for insolence to 1821,
sap
for fool to 1815,
murphy
for potato to 1811,
racket
to 1785,
bread-basket
for stomach to 1753,
hush-money
to 1709,
hick
to 1690,
gold-mine
for profitable venture to 1664,
grub
for food to 1659,
rot-gut
to 1597 and
bones
for dice to
c
. 1386. Among the adjectives,
lousy
in the sense of inferior goes back to 1690; when it burst into American slang in 1910 or thereabout it was already more than two centuries old.
Booze
has never got into Standard English, but it was known to slang in the first years of the Fourteenth Century. When
nuts
in the sense revealed by “Chicago was
nuts
for the Giants” came into popularity in the United States
c
. 1920, it was treated by most of the newspaper commentators on current slang as a neologism, but in truth it had been used in precisely the same sense by R. H. Dana, Jr., in “Two Years Before the Mast,”
1840, and by Mark Twain in “Following the Equator,” 1897.
²⁷
Sometimes an old slang word suddenly acquires a new meaning. An example is offered by
to chisel
. In the sense of to cheat, as in “He
chiseled
me out of $3,” it goes back to the first years of the Nineteenth Century, but with the advent of the N.R.A., in the late Summer of 1933, it took on the new meaning of to evade compliance with the law by concealment or stealth. It has been credited to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but I believe that its true father was General Hugh S. Johnson, J.D.

With the possible exception of the French, the Americans now produce more slang than any other people, and put it to heavier use in their daily affairs. But they entered upon its concoction relatively late, and down to the second decade of the Nineteenth Century they were content to take their supply from England. American slang, says George Philip Krapp, “is the child of the new nationalism, the new spirit of joyous adventure that entered American life after the close of the War of 1812.”
²⁸
There was, during the colonial and early republican periods, a great production of neologisms, as we have seen in
Chapter III
, but very little of it was properly describable as slang. I find
to boost
, defined as to raise up, to lift up, to exalt, in the glossary appended to David Humphreys’s “The Yankey in England,” 1815,
²⁹
but all the other slang terms listed,
e.g., duds
for clothes,
spunk
for courage, and
uppish
, are in Francis Grose’s “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” published in London thirty years before. The Rev. John Witherspoon’s denunciation of slang in “The Druid,” 1781, is a denunciation of English slang, though he is discussing the speech habits of Americans. But with the great movement into the West, following the War of 1812, the American vulgate came into its own, and soon the men of the ever-receding frontier were pouring out a copious stream of neologisms, many of them showing the audacious fancy of true slang. When these novelties penetrated to the East they produced a sort of linguistic shock, and the finicky were as much upset by the “tall talk” in which they were embodied as English pedants are today by the slang of Hollywood.
³⁰
That some of them were extremely extravagant is a fact: I need point only to
blustiferous, clam-jamphrie, conbobberation, helliferocious, mollagausauger, peedoodles, ripsniptiously, slang-whanger, sockdolager, to exflunctify, to flummuck, to giraffe, to hornswoggle, to obflisticate
and
to pucker stopple
.
³¹
Most of these, of course, had their brief days and then disappeared, but there were others that got into the common vocabulary and still survive,
e.g., blizzard, to hornswoggle, sockdolager
and
rambunctious
, the last-named the final step in a process which began with
robustious
and ran through
rumbustious
and
rambustious
in England before Americans took a hand in it. With them came many verb-phrases,
e.g., to pick a crow with, to cut one’s eye-teeth, to go the whole hog
. This “tall talk,” despite the horror of the delicate, was a great success in the East, and its salient practitioners — for example, David Crockett — were popular heroes. Its example encouraged the production of like neologisms everywhere, and by 1840 the use of slang was very widespread. It is to those days before the Civil War that we owe many of the colorful American terms for strong drink, still current,
e.g., panther-sweat, nose-paint, red-eye, corn-juice, forty-rod, mountain-dew, coffin-varnish, bust-head, stagger-soup, tonsil-paint, squirrel-whiskey
and so on, and for drunk,
e.g., boiled, canned, cockeyed, frazzled, fried, oiled, ossified, pifficated, pie-eyed, plastered, snozzled, stewed, stuccoed, tanked, woozy
.,
³²
“Perhaps the most striking difference between British and American slang,” says Krapp,
³³
“is that the former is more largely merely a matter of the use of queer-sounding words, like
bally
and
swank
, whereas American slang suggests vivid images and pictures.” This was hardly true in the heyday of “tall talk,” but that it is true now is revealed by a comparison of current English and American college slang. The vocabulary of Oxford and Cambridge seems inordinately obvious and banal to an American undergraduate. At Oxford it is made up in large part of a series of childish perversions of common and proper nouns, effected by adding
-er
or inserting
gg
. Thus, breakfast becomes
brekker
, collection becomes
collecker
, the Queen Street
Cinema becomes the
Queener
, St. John’s becomes
Jaggers
and the Prince of Wales becomes the
Pagger-Wagger
. The rest of the vocabulary is equally feeble. To match the magnificent American
lounge-lizard
the best the Oxonians can achieve is
a bit of a lad
, and in place of the multitudinous American synonyms for
girl
³⁴
there are only
bint
and a few other such flabby inventions.
³⁵
All college slang, of course, borrows heavily from the general slang vocabulary. For example,
chicken
, which designated a young girl on most American campuses until 1921 or thereabout,
³⁶
was used by Steele in 1711, and, in the form of
no chicken
, by Swift in 1720. It had acquired a disparaging significance in the United States by 1788, as the following lines show:

Like the vulgar language in general, popular American slang has got very little sober study from the professional philologians. The only existing glossary of it by a native scholar — “A Dictionary of American Slang,” by Maurice H. Weseen, associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska — is an extremely slipshod and even ridiculous work.
³⁸
There are several collections by laymen, but most of them are still worse.
³⁹
The best, and by far, is “Slang Today and Yesterday,” by Eric Partridge,
⁴⁰
which deals principally with English slang, but also has a valuable section on American slang. All the dictionaries of Americanisms, of course, include words reasonably describable as slang, but they appear only incidentally, and not in large numbers. Thornton, for example, bars out a great deal of interesting and amusing material by confining his researches to written records. In England the literature of the subject is far more extensive. It began in the Sixteenth Century with the publication of several vocabularies of thieves’ argot, and has been enriched in recent years by a number of valuable works, notably the Partridge volume just cited, “Slang, Phrase and Idiom in Colloquial English and Their Use,” by Thomas R. G. Lyell,
⁴¹
and the monumental “Slang and Its Analogues,” by John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley.
⁴²
Before the completion
of the last-named, the chief authorities on English slang were “A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant,” by Albert Barrère and Charles G. Leland,
⁴³
and “A Dictionary of Modern Cant, Slang and Vulgar Words,” by J. C. Hotten.
⁴⁴
Relatively little attention is paid to slang in the philological journals, but it is frequently discussed in the magazines of general circulation and in the newspapers.
⁴⁵
When the English papers denounce Americanisms, which is very often, it is commonly slang that arouses their most violent dudgeon. This dudgeon, of course, is grounded upon its very success: the American movies and talkies have implanted American slang in England even more copiously than they have implanted more decorous American neologisms. As the
Spectator
was saying lately, its influence “on the British Empire continues, ever more rapidly, to increase — a portent frequently mentioned and almost as frequently deplored.”
⁴⁶
Sometimes it is belabored as intolerably vulgar, indecent and against God, as when the
Christian World
⁴⁷
blamed it for the prevalence of “dishonest and debased thought” and ascribed its use to “a sneaking fear and dislike of calling beautiful things by their beautiful names and of calling ugly things by their ugly names”; sometimes it is sneered at as empty and puerile, signifying nothing, as when Allan Monkhouse
⁴⁸
demanded piously “What is the good of all this?” and answered “Such words are the ghosts of old facetiousness, and the world would be better without them”; and sometimes efforts are made to dispose of it by proving that it is all stolen from England, as when Dr. C. T.
Onions, one of the editors of the Oxford Dictionary, offered to show a London reporter that the dictionary listed any American slang term he could name.
⁴⁹
Alas, for Dr. Onions, after making good with
to grill, fresh, to figure
(in the sense of to conclude),
bunkum
(he apparently forgot its clearly American origin) and
rake-off
(he had to fall back upon an American example), he came to grief with
boloney
and
nerts
. One of the favorite forms of this latter enterprise is a letter to the editor announcing the discovery that this or that locution, lately come into popularity by way of the talkies, is to be found in Shakespeare,
⁵⁰
or the Authorized Version of the Bible, or maybe even in Piers Plowman. There are also the specialists who devote themselves to demonstrating that American slang is simply a series of borrowings from the Continental languages, particularly French — for example, that
and how
is a translation of
et comment
, that
you’re telling me
is from
à qui le dites-vous
, and that
to get one’s goat
is from
prendre sa chèvre
.
⁵¹
But not all Englishmen, of course, oppose and deride the American invasion, whether of slang or of novelties on high levels. Not a few agree with Horace Annesley Vachell that “American slanguage is not a tyranny, but a beneficent autocracy.…
Lounge-lizard
, for example, is excellent.… It is humiliating to reflect that English slang at its best has to curtsey to American
slang.” To which “Jackdaw” adds in
John O’London’s Weekly:
⁵²
“We do but pick up the crumbs that fall from Jonathan’s table.”