American Language (24 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
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 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 up; 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 vulgar American misuse of
Miss
or
Mis
’ (pro.
miz
) for
Mrs
. It was so widespread by 1790 that on November 17 of that year Webster denounced it as “a gross impropriety” in the
American Mercury
. The schoolmarm has made war on it ever since, but it survives unscathed in the speech of the common people.
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,”
32
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 produced from an original immigration of less than 80,000. 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, and there were signs of the rise of a new native aristocracy, entirely distinct from the older aristocracy of the royal governors’ courts.
33
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. “No allusion to Shakespeare,” says Bliss Perry,
34
“has been discovered in the colonial literature of the Seventeenth Century, and scarcely an allusion to the Puritan poet Milton.” Benjamin Franklin’s brother, James, had a copy of Shakespeare at the
New England Courant
office in Boston, but Benjamin himself seems to have made little use of it, for there is not a single quotation from or mention of the bard in all his voluminous works.
35
“The Harvard College Library in 1723,” says Perry, “had
nothing of Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope and Swift, and had only recently obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare.… Franklin reprinted ‘Pamela’ and his Library Company of Philadelphia had two copies of ‘Paradise Lost’ for circulation in 1741, but there had been no copy of that work in the great library of Cotton Mather.” Moreover, after 1760, the eyes of the colonists 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.
36
During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries England was wracked by a movement to standardize the language, alike in vocabulary, in pronunciation and in spelling, and it went far enough to set up artificial standards that still survive.
37
The great authority of Samuel Johnson gave heavy support to this movement, though he was wise enough in the preface to his Dictionary (1735) to admit somewhat sadly that “sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints” and that “to enchain syllables, and to lash the winds, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.” But Johnson could never resist the temptation to pontificate, and so he thundered idiotically against
to wobble, to bamboozle, to swap, to budge, to coax, touchy, stingy, swimmingly, fib, banter, fop, row
(in the sense of a disturbance) and even
fun
and
chaperon
, all of them then somewhat novel.
38
He also permitted himself to read the death-warrants of many archaisms that were not really archaisms at all, for example,
glee, jeopardy
and
to smoulder
. The Americans, in the main, were cut off from this double policing, and in consequence they went on making new words freely and cherishing old ones that had come under the ban in England. A minority along the coast, to be sure, tried to keep up with the latest
dictates of English fashion, but it was never large, and its speech habits had but small influence upon those of the majority. There was obviously only rhetoric in James Russell Lowell’s saying that “our ancestors, unhappily, could bring over no English better than Shakespeare’s,” for relatively few of them had ever heard of Shakespeare, and to even fewer was he anything more than a vague name;
39
but it is nevertheless a fact that their way of using the language had something in it of his glorious freedom and spaciousness.
40
If they had any written guide it was the King James Bible (1611). Whenever an English reform or innovation percolated to them they were inclined to remain faithful to the sacred text, not only because of its pious authority but also because of the superior pull of its imminent and constant presence. Thus when fashionable prudery in English ordered the abandonment of the Anglo-Saxon
sick
for the later and more elegant
ill
, the colonists refused to follow, for
sick
was in both the Old Testament and the New;
41
and that refusal remains in force to this day.
A 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, shoat, beef
(to designate the live animal),
chinch, cord-wood
and
home-spun
; Halliwell
42
adds
andiron, bay-window, cesspool, clodhopper, cross-purposes, greenhorn, loop-hole, ragamuffin
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 “Antony and Cleopatra.”
Char
, as a noun, disappeared from Standard English long ago, save in the compound,
charwoman
, but it survives in American as
chore
. Among the verbs 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”:
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 Oxford Dictionary offers examples much older — from Chaucer, Wycliffe and Gower.
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, in both English and American, now call it an Americanism.
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
was used in its American sense of plain-featured by both Shakespeare and Milton. Other such survivors are
burly, catty-conered, likely, deft, copious, scant
and
ornate
. Perhaps
clever
also belongs to this category, that is, in the American sense of amiable.
Most of the English archaisms surviving in American seem to be derived from the dialects of Eastern and Southern England, from which regions, in fact, a large percentage of the original English
settlers came. Sir William Craigie says
43
that in New England three areas are chiefly represented — Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, East Anglia, and the Southwestern counties. The Rev. Edward Gepp, of Colchester, who has made comparative studies of the Essex dialect and the common speech of the United States, says that the latter shows a “striking
absence
of words and forms characteristic of Scotland, and of the North and West of England.”
44
Since the early colonial period there has been an accession of Northern forms, chiefly through the so-called Scotch-Irish influence, but the older archaisms are nearly all Southern or Eastern. Another English observer, the Rev. H. T. Armfield, has found many Essex place-names in New England, among them, Hedingham, Topsfield, Wethers-field, Braintree, Colchester, Haverhill and Billerica.
45
Among the vulgar forms now common in the United States which still survive in the Essex dialect Mr. Gepp notes
kilter, kiver, yarb, ary, nary, ellum, tonguey, pesky, snicker, bimeby, cowcumber, invite
(for invitation) and
hoss
, and the verbs
to argify, to slick up
and
to scrimp
. His word-lists also show a number of words that are now good American,
e.g., chump, given-name
and
heft
. But such archaisms are naturally most common on the lower levels of speech, and in remote and uncultured settlements. “It is a commonplace of the study of cultural history,” says George Philip Krapp,
46
“that isolated communities tend to remain relatively stable. They retain their customs, their occupations, their speech, all their cultural traditions, very much as they were at the time when the members of the community seated themselves within the confines of the prison house which they call their home.” Thus it is no wonder that the American spoken by the mountaineers of Appalachia shows an unusually large admixture of ancient forms, usually English but often Scottish, not only in its vocabulary, but also in its syntax and pronunciation. Archaic forms continue to flourish in such remote regions just as the Rheno-Franconian dialect of the Seventeenth Century survives among the more bucolic Germans of the lower counties of Pennsylvania. We shall encounter some of them in
Chapter VII
.
1
A number of such Indian words are preserved in the nomenclature of Tammany Hall and in that of the Improved Order of Red Men, an organization with more than 500,-000 members. The Red Men, borrowing from the Indians, thus name the months, in order:
Cold Moon, Snow, Worm, Plant, Flower, Hot, Buck, Sturgeon, Corn, Travelers’, Beaver
and
Hunting
. They call their officers
incohonee, sachem, wampum-keeper
, etc. But such terms, of course, are not in general use.
2
Sylva Clapin lists 110 Indian loanwords in his New Dictionary of Americanisms; New York,
c
. 1902, and Alexander F. Chamberlain lists 132 in Algonquin Words in American English,
Journal of American
Folk-Lore
, Vol. XV. But only 24 of Clapin’s words would have any meaning to the average American today. The rest either survive only as proper names,
e.g., tupelo, tuckhoe, tammany, michigouen, sing-sing, netop, catawba
, or are obsolete altogether. An elaborate dictionary of Indian loan-words, compiled by the late W. R. Gerard, is in the possession of the Smithsonian Institution, but it remains in manuscript. Parts of it are almost unintelligible, and there is little likelihood that it will ever be printed. The literature of the subject is rather meager. Probably the best discussion of it is in the first chapter of Scheie de Vere’s Americanisms; New York, 1872.
3
Clapin lists 131 loan-words from the French in his Dictionary, but not more than 20 of them would be generally recognized today. Most of the rest survive only along the Canadian border. A curious obso-letism is
movey-star
, from the French
mauvaises terres
. It is still used in the translated form of
badlands
, but
movey-star
went out many years ago.
4
(a) A chest of drawers, (b) a government office. In both senses the word is rare in England, though its use by the French is familiar. In the United States its use in (b) has been extended, e.g., in
employment-bureau
.
5
Cole-slaw
was quickly converted into
cold-slaw
by folk etymologv. Thornton’s first example of the latter is dated 1794, but it must have appeared earlier. Later on a
warm-slaw
was invented to keep
cold-slaw
company.
6
From
Sant Klaas
(Saint Nicholas).
Santa Claus
has also become familiar to the English, but the Oxford Dictionary still calls it an Americanism. It is always pronounced, of course,
Santy Claws
.
7
The Term
State-House, Dialect Notes
, Vol. II, Pt. IV, 1902.
8
Dutch Contributions to the Vocabulary of English in America, by William H. Carpenter,
Modern Philology
, July, 1908. Mr. Karl von Schlieder of Hackensack, N. J., sends me a list of curious forms encountered near Kingston, N. Y. It includes
pietje-kamaakal
(unreasonable),
surallikus
(so-so),
zwok
(soft, slippery),
connalyer
(crowd),
klainzaric
(untidy),
haidang
(nothing),
onnozel
(outlandish),
poozly
(whining),
feaselick
(undesirable),
kanaapie
(child),
aislick
(no-account),
brigghity
(impudent), and
bahay
(confusion). That all of these are of Dutch origin is not certain, but some of them seem to be duplicated in the Jersey Dutch once spoken in Bergen and Passaic counties, New Jersey. See The Jersey Dutch Dialect, by J. Dyneley Prince,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. III, Pt. IV, 1910. Krapp in The English Language in America, adds a few Long Island obsoletisms,
e.g., scule
, from
fiskaal
, meaning a public prosecutor (Hempstead Records, 1675–84);
morgen
, a measure of land (do. 1658);
schepel
, a bushel (do. 1658); and
much
, from
mutsje
, a liquid measure (do. 1673).
Morgen
survived until 1869, and is to be found in the annual report of the Federal Commissioner of Agriculture for that year.
9
Of the 46 Dutch loan-words listed by Clapin in his Dictionary only a dozen or so remain in general use. See also A Dictionary of the Low-Dutch Element in the English Vocabulary, by J. F. Bense; Oxford, 1926; and The Dutch Influence on the English Vocabulary, by G. N. Clark,
S.P.E. Tracts
, No. XLIV, 1935
10
“The commonest there,” says Reed Smith, in Gullah,
Bulletin of the University of South Carolina
, Nov. 1, 1926, “are the exclamation
ki
(or
kai
) to express wonder or to add emphasis to a statement, and
buckra
for white man.… To these may be added
nyam, oona, swanga
(or
swongger), du-du, goober, pinder, cooter, okra, geechy, cymbi, bakalingo
(obsolescent),
guffer, penepne, da, da-da. Malafee
for whiskey has been noted on St. Helena Island.” How many of these are actually African I don’t know. See also Gullah: a Negro Patois, by John Bennett,
South Atlantic Quarterly
, Oct., 1908, and Jan., 1909; and The Black Border, by Ambrose E. Gonzalez; Columbia, S. C., 1922. The latter contains a Gullah glossary.
11
See The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 14 and 22.
12
For example, Chevy
Chase
, Boston
Common
, the Back Bay
Fens
, and
cranberry-bog
.
13
A long list of compounds based on
back
, from the collection of the editorial board of the Dictionary of American English, is to be found in
American Speech
, Oct., 1930. It runs to no less than 120 terms, all of them of American origin. In addition, there is a list of eleven peculiarly American uses of
back
as a verb, and five of its uses as an adjective.
14
Log-cabin
came later. Thornton’s first quotation is dated 1818. The
Log-Cabin
campaign was in 1840.
15
I am indebted here to Mr. Maury Maverick, of San Antonio, Tex., a diligent searcher of the early laws of the Republic. A thorough investigation of them might yield materials of value to the philologian. Some of the early town-records were explored by George Philip Krapp (The English Language in America, Vol. II), but his interest was in pronunciation rather than in vocabulary. There are leads to other material in E. G. Swem’s monumental Virginia Historical Index; Roanoke Va., 1934, which indexes words as well as names.
16
Willian Brown Meloney: The Heritage of Tyre, New York, 1916, p. 15.
17
Despite his implacable hostility to American innovations, Southey was himself a busy inventor of uncouth neologisms. In The Doctor (1834–37), says George H. McKnight in Modern English in the Making, he used
agathokakological, cacodemonize, dendanthropology, gelastics
,
kittenship, magnisonant
and
critikin
, and even in the
Quarterly Review
, the very G.H.Q. of anti-American pedantry, he used
doniv-orous, humgig, frizzgig
and
evangelizationeer
.
18
In his Travels in North America in the Years 1841–42; London, 1845; New York, 1852, p. 53.
19
It is reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931, p. 48
ff
.
20
The Oxford Dictionary traces
amendable
to 1589,
antithetical
to 1583,
imprescriptible
to 1562,
bailment
to 1554,
bailee
to 1528 and
appellor
to
c
. 1400. The following were also in use before Webster’s time:
absorbable
, 1779;
admissibility
, 1778;
statement
, 1775;
acidulous
, 1769;
achromatic
, 1766;
aneurismal
, 1757;
accompaniment
, 1756;
indorsee
, 1754;
animalize
, 1741;
arborescent
, 1675.
21
Thornton’s last example of the use of
to compromit
is dated 1842; of
to happify
, 1857, and of
to ambition
, 1861. So far as I know, no one has ever attempted to compile anything approaching a complete list of obsolete Americanisms, but a number are given in The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp, Vol. I, Ch. II. They include
spong
, a strip of meadow;
bolts
, timber cut into lengths;
while
in the sense of until;
hole
, a synonym of
spong
(it survives in a few geographical names,
e.g.
, Woods
Hole); shruffe
, the undergrowth of a swamp;
cohoss
, a bend in a river;
folly
, a word of undetermined meaning, maybe from the Dutch
vallje
, a little valley;
seater
, a settler; and
crickthatch
, salt-water grass. Some of these were old English words that survived in America longer than in England.
22
The Biglow Papers, Series II, 1866,
pref
.
23
In a letter to his sister Hannah, dated May 30, 1831, Macaulay told her of a visit to Holland House and a conversation with Lady Holland, who objected to various words, beginning with
constituency
, and going on to
influential, talented
and
gentlemanly
. Macaulay argued in favor of
talented
, saying that its root “first appeared in theological writing,” and was taken from the Parable of the Talents. “She seemed surprised by this theory,” he wrote to his sister, “never having, so far as I could judge, heard of the parable.”
Talented
is sometimes listed as an Americanism, but it actually arose in England,
c
. 1825.
24
Franklin, incidentally, also invented the harmonica and its name. But his harmonica was not the mouth-organ that we know today, but a sort of improvement on the old musical-glasses. Moreover, he called it the
armonica
, not the
harmonica
. This was in 1762. The term went over into English very quickly, and had ceased to be an Americanism before 1800. Later it seems to have become changed to
harmonicon
. But the prevalent present form is
harmonica
, and it now designates not only a mouth-organ, but also one of the organ-stops. The Oxford Dictionary’s first example of
mouth-organ
is dated
c
. 1668. In Germany, where most mouth-organs come from, the instrument is called the
harmonika
. Whether the name was borrowed from Franklin or invented independently I do not know.
25
Reprinted in Helpful Hints in Writing and Reading, comp. by Grenville Kleiser; New York, 1911, pp. 15–17.
26
A. Cleveland Coxe: Americanisms in England,
Forum
, Oct., 1886.
27
Edward S. Gould: Good English, or Popular Errors in Language; New York, 1867, pp. 25–27. So recently as 1918 an Anglophil reviewer denounced me for using it in a book, and hinted that I had borrowed it from the German
standpunkt
.
28
The English Language in America Vol. I, pp. 85–6.
Lott
appears in the Connecticut Code of 1650. See the edition of Andrus: Hartford, 1822. On page 35 is “their landes,
lotts
and accommodations.” On page 46 is “meadow and home
lotts
” American conveyancers, in describing real property, still usually speak of “all that
lot
or parcel of land,” though in the Southwest, so I am told by Mr. Maury Maverick, the more prosaic “the following described real estate” is coming in.
Lot
has begotten a number of derivations,
e.g., back-lots, building-lot, front-lot, side-lot, pasture-lot, garden-lot, house-lot
and
house and lot
.
29
Hutchinson’s Diary, Vol. I, p. 171; London, 1883–6. A great many derivatives go back to the same era,
e.g., corn-husk, corn-shuck, corn-crib, corn-stalk, corn-broom, corn-brake, corn-fritter, corn-fodder, corn-grater, corn-hook, corn-juice, corn-knife, corn-starch, pop-corn, corn-cob, corn-cake, corn-pone, corn-cutter, corn-dodger, corn-fed, corn-meal, corn-snake
. Some of these have since become obsolete. “The American colonists,” says Allen Walker Read in The Comment of British Travelers on Early American Terms Relating to Agriculture,
Agricultural History
, July, 1933, “have never taken kindly to the word [
maize
]. … Even today [it] is wholly a book word in America.”
30
The definitions are from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1914) and Webster’s New International Dictionary (1934), respectively.
31
Samuel Sewall: Diary, April 14, 1712: “I lay’d a
Rock
in the Northeast corner of the Foundation of the Meeting-House.”
32
Immigration, 2nd ed.; New York, 1913, p. 4. Sir J. R. Seeley says, in The Expansion of England (2nd ed.; London, 1895, p. 84) that the emigration from England to New England, after the meeting of the Long Parliament (1640), was so slight for a full century that it barely balanced “the counter-movement of colonists quitting the colony.” Richard Hildreth, in his History of the United States, Vol. I, p. 267, says that the departures actually exceeded the arrivals. See also The Founding of New England, by James Truslow Adams; Boston, 1921, p. 221
ff
.
33
Sydney George Fisher: The True Story of the American Revolution; Phila. and London, 1902, p. 27. See also John T. Morse’s Life of Thomas Jefferson in the American Statesmen series (Boston and New York, 1898), p. 2. Morse points out that Washington, Jefferson and Madison belonged to this new aristocracy, not to the old one.
34
The American Spirit in Literature; New Haven, 1918, p. 61.
35
Since this statement appeared in my last edition Mr. Meyer Isenberg of Chicago has called my attention to what may be an echo of Shakespeare in Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1735: “A ship under sail and a big-bellied woman are the handsomest things that can be seen in common.” Mr. Isenberg believes that this may have been suggested by Titania’s speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II, Sc. 1, beginning “Set your heart at rest.” But even if this be true, Franklin may have encountered the idea at second hand. He said in his Autobiography: “At the time I established myself in Philadelphia (1723) there was not a good bookseller’s shop in any of the colonies to the southward of Boston. In New York and Philadelphia the printers were indeed stationers, but they sold only paper, almanacs, ballads, and a few common school-books. Those who loved reading were obliged to send for their books to England.”