American Language (22 page)

Perhaps the most notable of all the contributions of Knickerbocker Dutch to American is the word
Yankee
. The earlier etymologists, all of them amateurs, sought an Indian origin for it. Thomas Anbury, a British officer who served in the Revolution with Burgoyne, argued in his “Travels” (1789, Ch. II) that it came from a Cherokee word,
eankke
, meaning a coward or slave; Washington Irving, in “Knickerbocker’s History of New York” (1809, Ch. VII) derived it (probably only humorously) from
yanokies
, “which in the Mais-Tschusaeg or Massachusetts language signifies silent men”; and the Rev. John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder, a learned Moravian missionary who published “An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States” in 1822, maintained therein that it was simply a product of the Indians’ unhappy effort to pronounce the word
English
, which they converted, he said, into
Yengees
. Noah Webster accepted this guess, but other contemporary authorities held that the word the Indians were trying to pronounce was not
English
but the French
Anglais
. There were, however, difficulties in the way of all forms of this theory, for investigation showed that
Yankee
was apparently first applied, not to the English but to the Dutch. So early as 1683, it was discovered,
Yankey
was a common nickname among the buccaneers who then raged along the Spanish Main, and always the men who bore it were Dutchmen. Apparently it was derived either from
Janke
, a diminutive of the common Dutch given name
Jan
, or from
Jankees
(pronounced
Yoncase
), a blend of
Jan
and
Cornells
, two Dutch names which often appear in combination. Analogues in support of the former hypothesis are to be found in the use of
dago
(Diego) to indicate any Spaniard (and now, by extension, any Italian), and of
Heinie
or
Fritz, Sandy
and
Pat
to indicate any German, Scotsman or Irishman, respectively;
and for the latter there is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as
Chinee
from
Chinese, Portugee
from
Portuguese, tactic
from
tactics
, and
specie
from
species
. But how did this nickname for Dutchmen ever come to be applied to Englishmen, and particularly to the people of New England, male and female alike? To this day no satisfactory answer has been made. All that may be said with any certainty is that it was already in use by 1765 as a term of derision, and that by 1775 the Yankees began to take pride in it. In the latter year, in fact, John Turnbull spoke of it in his “McFingal” as connoting “distinction.” But he neglected to explain its transfer from Dutch pirates to New England Puritans, and no one has done so to this day. During the Civil War, as everyone knows, Yankee became a term of disparagement again, applied by the people of the South to all Northerners. But its evil significance began to wear off after the turn of the century, and when in 1917 the English began applying it to the men of the A.E.F., Southerners and Northerners alike, the former seem to have borne the affliction philosophically. At that time a characteristic clipped form,
Yank
, came into popularity at home, launched by its use in George M. Cohan’s war song, “Over There.” But
Yank
was not invented by Cohan, for it has been traced back to 1778, and the Confederates often used it during the Civil War. Incidentally, the verb
to yank
, in the sense of to jerk, is also an Americanism, and its origin is almost as mysterious as that of
Yankee
. That the two have any connection is doubtful. It seems more probable that the verb comes from a Scottish noun,
yank
, meaning a sharp, sudden blow.
⁹

The Spanish contributions to the American vocabulary are far more numerous than those of any other Continental language, but most of them have come in since the Louisiana Purchase, and notices of them will be deferred to the
next chapter
. There was relatively little contact between the first English settlers and the Spaniards to the southward; it remained for the great movement across the plains, begun by Zebulon M. Pike’s expedition in 1806, to make Spanish the second language in a large part of the United States. The first Spanish loan-words were mainly Spanish adaptations of
Indian terms, picked up by the early adventurers in the West Indies. Of such sort were
tobacco, hammock, tomato, tapioca, chocolate, barbecue
and
canoe
. But with them also came some genuinely Spanish words, and of these
sarsaparilla
and
sassafras
have been traced to 1577,
alligator
to 1568,
creole
to 1604,
pickaninny
to 1657,
key
(islet) to 1697, and
quadroon
to the first years of the Eighteenth Century. A good many Spanish words, or Spanish adaptations of native words, went into English during the Sixteenth Century without any preliminary apprenticeship as Americanisms, for example,
mosquito, chocolate, banana
and
cannibal
. But
cockroach
(from the Spanish
cucaracha
, assimilated by folk etymology to
cock
and
roach
) is first heard of in Captain John Smith’s “General Historie of Virginia” (1624), and most of the Oxford Dictionary’s early examples of
mosquito
are American.
Mosquito
suffered some fantastic variations in spelling. The original Spanish was
mosquito
, a diminutive of
mosca
, a fly, but in Hakluyt’s “Voyages” (
c
. 1583) it became
musketa
, in Whitbourne’s “Newfoundland” (1623)
muskeito
, in Hughes’s “American Physician” (1672)
muscato
, in Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia” (finished in 1697 and published in 1702)
moscheto
, and at the hands of Benjamin Franklin (1747)
musqueto
. The
jerked
in
jerked-beef
was fashioned by folk-etymology out of a Spanish word which was in turn borrowed from one of the Peruvian dialects. The noun
barbecue
came from a Haitian word,
barbacoa
, signifying a frame set up to lift a bed off the ground. But it got the meaning of a frame used for roasting meat soon after it appeared in Spanish, and the derivative word has had its present sense in American since about 1660.

Before the Revolution a few German words worked their way into American, but not many.
Sauerkraut
has been traced by Thornton to 1789 and is probably much older; so are
noodle
and
pretzel
. But
lager, bockbeer, sangerfest, kindergarten, wienerwurst, ratskeller, zwieback, turnverein
and so on belong to the period after 1848, and will be noticed later.
Beer-soup
(probably from
biersuppe
) goes back to 1799, but
beer-garden
(from
biergarten
) has not been found before 1870. As I have suggested, German probably helped Dutch to put
dumb
, in the sense of stupid, into the American vocabulary. It also, I suppose, gave some help to
smearcase
. The native languages of the Negro slaves, rather curiously, seem to have left few marks upon American.
Buckra
is apparently of Negro origin, but it was
never peculiar to America, and has long since gone out.
Gumbo
seems to be derived from an Angolan word, ’
ngombo
, but it came into American relatively late, and may have been introduced by way of Louisiana French.
Okra
, which means the same thing, was first used in the West Indies, and may have had a Spanish transition form.
Yam
is not Negro, but apparently Spanish or Portuguese.
Banjo
is simply a Negro perversion of
bandore
, which was also of Latin origin. Whether
goober
and
juba
are Negro loan-words is unknown. Thornton’s first example of the latter is dated 1834, Webster’s New International (1934) ascribes the former, somewhat improbably, to a Congo source, ’
nguba
, and it may have come from
jubilee. Voodoo
was borrowed from the Dahoman
tovôdoun
, still in use in West Africa, but it seems to have come in through the French. Its American corruption,
hoodoo
, probably owes nothing to the Negroes; moreover, the earliest use of it recorded by Thornton is dated 1889. The early slaves, of course, retained many words and phrases from their native languages, but they have all disappeared from the speech of their descendants today, save for a few surviving in the Gullah dialect of the South Carolina coast.
¹⁰

Of far more importance than such small borrowings was the great stock of new words that the early 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 Seventeenth 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 dignified
authority, his lack of æsthetic sensitiveness, his extravagant humor. Among the first settlers there were a few 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 hard 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
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 Sir George Yeardley, Deputy Governor, lamented that “in these five months 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 mar-chansize.” In particular, the generation born in the New World was uncouth and iconoclastic;
¹¹
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, mud-hen, cat-bird, cat-fish, musk-rat, 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, sweet-potato, canvas-back, poke-weed, copper-head, eel-grass, reed-bird, egg-plant, blue-grass, katy-did, pea-nut, pitch-pine, cling-stone
(peach),
June-bug, lightning-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 that 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 novelty, but the pioneers apparently did not recognize it as the
Datura stramonium
, and so we find Beverley 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
branch, fork, run
(stream),
bluff, cliff, neck, barrens, bottoms, watershed, foot-hill, hollow, water-gap, under-brush, bottom-land, clearing, notch, divide, knob, riffle, rolling-country
and
rapids
, 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 topographical terms as
down, weald, wold, fen, bog, fell, chase, combe, dell, tarn, common, heath
and
moor
disappeared from the colonial tongue, save as fossilized in a few localisms and proper names.
¹²
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-woods, back-street, back-lane, back-land, back-log, back-country, back-field, back-line
and
back-settler
were all in common use before the Revolution.
Back-log
was used by Increase Mather in 1684, and
back-street
has been traced to 1638.
¹³
Log-house
appears in the Maryland Archives for 1669.
¹⁴
Hoe-cake, Johnny-cake
(originally
Shawnee-cake
or
-bread), pan-fish, corn-dodger, roasting-ear, corn-crib
, and
pop-corn
all belong to the colonial period. So do
pine-knot, snow-plow, cold-snap, land-slide, ash-can, bob-sled, fox-grape, apple-
butter, salt-lick, prickly-heat, shell-road, worm-fence
and
cane-brake. Shingle
, in the American sense, was a novelty in 1705, but one S. Symonds wrote to John Winthrop, of Ipswich, about a
clap-boarded
house in 1637.
Frame-house
seems to have come in with
shingle. Selectman
is first heard of in 1685, displacing the English
alderman. Mush
had displaced
porridge
in general use by 1671.
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 in 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, 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
. In 1785 Jefferson, after playing with such terms as
pistarine
and
piece-of-eight
, proposed
mill, cent, disme, dollar
and
eagle
, and this nomenclature was made official by the Act Establishing a Mint, approved April 2, 1792. Jefferson apparently derived
disme
from the French word
dixiéme
, meaning a tenth, and the original pronunciation seems to have been
deem
. But
dime
soon supplanted it.
¹⁵