American Language (21 page)

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 demonstrated
⁷
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