American Language (28 page)

In the department of conviviality the imaginativeness of Americans was early shown both in the invention and in the naming of new and often highly complex beverages. So vast was the production of novelties during the Nineteenth Century that England borrowed many of them and their names with them. And not only England:
one buys
cocktails
and
gin-fizzes
to this day in American bars that stretch from Paris to Yokohama.
Cocktail, stone-fence
and
sherry-cobbler
were mentioned by Washington Irving in “Knickerbocker” (1809);
²⁷
by Thackeray’s time they were already well-known in England. Thornton traces the
sling
to 1788, and the
stinkibus
and
anti-fogmatic
, both now extinct, to the same year. The origin of the
rickey, fizz, sour, cooler, skin, shrub
and
smash
, and of such curious American drinks as the
horse’s neck, Mamie Taylor, Tom-and-Jerry, Tom Collins, John Collins, bishop, stone-wall, gin-fix, brandy-cham-parelle, golden-slipper, hari-kari, locomotive, whiskey-daisy, blue-blazer, black-stripe, white-plush
and
brandy-crusta
remains to be established; the historians of the booze arts, like the philologists, differ in their theories. But the essentially American character of most of them is obvious, despite the fact that a number have gone over into English. The English, in naming their own somewhat meager inventions, commonly display a far more limited imagination. Seeking a name, for example, for a mixture of whiskey and soda-water, the best they could achieve was
whiskey-and-soda
. The Americans, introduced to the same drink, at once gave it the far more original name of
high-ball
. So with
soda-water
and
pop
. So with
minerals
and
soft-drinks
. Other characteristic Americanisms (a few of them borrowed by the English) are
red-eye, corn-juice, eye-opener, forty-rod, squirrel-whiskey, phlegm-cutter, hard-cider, apple-jack
and
corpse-reviver
, and the auxiliary drinking terms,
boot-legger, sample-room, blind-pig, barrel-house, bouncer, bung-starter, dive, doggery, schooner, stick, duck, straight, hooch, saloon
,
finger
and
chaser
. Thornton shows that
jag, bust, bat
and
to crook the elbow
are also Americanisms. So are
bartender
and
saloon-keeper
.

It would be possible, too, to compile a formidable roster of theological and ecclesiastical Americanisms,
e.g., anxious bench
, or
seat
(first noted in 1839),
mourners’ bench, amen corner, hard-shell
(1842),
camp-meeting
(1801),
circuit-rider
(1838),
come-outer
(1840),
deacon-seat
(1851),
desk
, for pulpit (1770),
blue-law
(1775),
book-concern
(1851),
go-to-meeting, hell-robber, experience-meeting, foot-wash, donation-party, pounding, pastorium
, and the verbs,
to pastor, to missionate, to get
(or
experience
)
religion, to fellowship
and
to shout
.

The Indians of the Far West, it would seem, had little to add to the contributions already made to the American vocabulary by the Algonquians of the Northeast. Most of the new loan-words that were picked up west of the Mississippi came in either through the Spanish,
e.g., coyote
, or through the Chinook trade-jargon of the Columbia river region,
²⁸
e.g., cayuse
.
²⁹
There was also some translation of terms supposed to be in use among the Indians,
e.g., squaw-man, heap big chief, Great White Father, Father of Waters
, and
happy hunting-grounds
, but most of these, I suspect, owed more to the imagination of the pioneers than to the actual usage of the Indians. In the Oregon country Chinook is still understood by many Indians, and terms borrowed from it are heard as localisms,
e.g., tillicum
(friend),
cultus
(worthless, evil),
tumtum
(literally heart, used to signify belief, opinion, hunch),
potlatch
(feast, public meeting),
skookum
(strong, majestic, splendid),
nanitch
(a journey),
and
kokshut
(used up, worn out, ruined).
³⁰
It is possible that
hike
is derived from the Chinook
hyak
(to hurry), but this remains uncertain. In the Southwest many loan-words from the local Indian languages are similarly in more or less general use, e.g.,
hogan
(an Indian habitation),
kiva
(the central building of a pueblo),
sambuke
(a musical instrument),
tombé
(another),
katchina
(a spirit),
tisiwn
(an intoxicant), and
tegua
(a sandal).
³¹

Contact with the French in Louisiana and along the Northwestern border, and with the Spanish in Texas and farther West, brought in many new words. From the Canadian French, as we have seen in
Chapter III
, Section 1,
prairie, batteau, portage
and
rapids
had been borrowed during colonial days. To these French contributions
bayou, depot, picayune, levee, chute, butte, crevasse, lagniappe
and
coulee
³²
were now added, and probably also
shanty
³³
and
canuck.
³⁴
Prairie
begat an enormous progeny during the great movement into the West. In 1828 Noah Webster omitted it altogether from his “American Dictionary of the English Language,” but Thornton shows that its use to designate the Western steppes was already common before the Revolution, and that
prairie-hen
and
prairie-dog
had come in by 1805. By 1857, according to Sir William Craigie,
³⁵
“at least thirty other combinations of the same type had been employed in the works of explorers and other writers.” The Century Dictionary (1889–91) records thirty-four
prairie
combinations, the Oxford Dictionary (1909) sixty-three, and Webster’s New International, Second Edition (1934), seventy-nine.

From Spanish, once the Mississippi was crossed, and particularly during and after the Mexican War, there came a swarm of novelties, many of which have remained firmly imbedded in the language. Among them were numerous names of strange personages and objects:
rancho, alfalfa, mustang, sombrero, canyon, desperado, poncho, chaparral, corral, bronco, plaza, peon, alcalde, burro, mesa, tornado, presidio, patio, sierra
and
adobe
. To them, as soon as gold was discovered, were added
bonanza, eldorado, placer
and
vigilante
. Some of the borrowings of the time underwent phonetic change. The Spanish
cincho
, meaning a saddle girth, quickly became
cinch
, and in a little while took on a figurative significance that still clings to it.
Vamos
, the first person plural of the Spanish “let’s go,” became
vamose
or
vamoose
in American, and presently begat an American verb,
to mosey. Chigre
, which the English had borrowed from the Spanish in the Seventeenth Century, making it
chigoe
(the Oxford Dictionary still credits it to “the West Indies and South America”), was borrowed anew by the Western pioneers, and converted into the more American
chigger
or
jigger
. The Spanish
chinche
, which had been likewise borrowed by English in the Seventeenth Century but later abandoned, was reborrowed by American on the frontier, and became the still familiar
chinch
, a bedbug.
Estampida
was converted into
stampede, frijol
into
frijole
(pro.
free-holay
),
tamal
into
tamale, tortilla
into
tortillia
, and
vaquero
into
buckaroo.
³⁶
Chile
, a pepper, came in with
frijole
and
tamale
, and at the same time the pioneers became acquainted with the Mexican beverages,
mescal
,
³⁷
pulque
and
tequila
. Such words as
señor, se-ñorita, padre, siesta, sabe, poncho, pinto, yerba, hombre, casa
and
arroyo
began to bespatter their speech. They converted
cala-bozo
into
calaboose, (la)reata
into
lariat, lazo
into
lasso, rancho
into
ranch
, and
chaparejos
into
chaps
, made free use of such words and phrases as
poco, pronto
and
quien sabe?
, and outfitted many Spanish loan-words with derivatives,
e.g., ranchman, rancher, ranch-house, to ranch, to lasso, to corral, to cinch, hot-tomale, bronc, box-canyon, peonage, burro-load, -weed, -train
and
-trail, loco-weed
(Sp.
loco
,
crazy),
locoed
, and so on. It is possible that they borrowed
coon
, in the sense of a Negro, from the Spanish
barraeon
(commonly pronounced
barracoon
by the Americans), a rude shelter used by slaves. In the East
coon
was commonly applied to whites down to the Civil War, and especially to the adherents of Tyler in 1840. The precise history of its transfer to Negroes remains to be investigated.

Most of the terms that I have rehearsed came into the speech of the Western plainsmen and mountain-men before the Civil War, but some of them did not reach the East until the beginning of the movement to pacify and settle the Indian lands, toward the end of the 60’s. Many others, in common use by the pioneers, have since sunk to the estate of Westernisms, or dropped out altogether. To the latter class belong
adelantado,
a military governor;
borracho
, a drunkard;
capitan; comisario
, a policeman;
ayuntamiento
, a city council; and
lepero
, a beggar. To the former belong
amigo
, a friend;
camino
, a road;
chico
and
chiquito
, small;
campo santo
, a cemetery;
hacienda
, a landed estate;
huero,
a blond;
Jornada
, a desert;
mesa
, a tableland;
mocho
, bob-tailed;
mozo
, a servant;
pinto
, piebald;
zarape,
a cloak;
paseo
, a trip; and
sala
, a room. But the effect of Western fiction, of the movies and talkies, of the popularity of pseudo-Spanish bungalow architecture, and of the constant invasion of Southern California by transient visitors has been to keep a large number of Spanish loanwords alive in American speech. Thus most Americans know what a
patio
is, and a
pinto
pony, and a
hombre
. Such words are not often used save in the Southwest, but nevertheless they are understood almost everywhere.
³⁸

The period saw the beginning of the great immigrations, and the American people now came into contact, on a large scale, with peoples
of divergent race, particularly Germans, Irish Catholics from the South of Ireland (the Irish of colonial days “were descendants of Cromwell’s army, and came from the North of Ireland”),
³⁹
and, on the Pacific Coast, Chinese. So early as the 20’s the immigration to the United States reached 25,000 in a year; in 1824 the Legislature of New York, in alarm, passed a restrictive act.
⁴⁰
The Know-Nothing movement of the 50’s need not concern us here. It is enough to recall that the immigration of 1845 passed the 100,000 mark, and that that of 1854 came within sight of 500,000. These new Americans, most of them Germans and Irish, did not all remain in the East; a great many spread through the West and Southwest with the other pioneers. Their effect upon the language was a great deal more profound than most of us think. The Irish, speaking the English of Cromwell’s time, greatly reinforced its usages in the United States, where it was beginning to yield to the schoolmarm. “The influence of Irish-English,” writes an English correspondent, “is still plainly visible all over the United States. Some years ago, before I had seen America, a relative of mine came home after twelve years’ farming in North Dakota, and I was struck by the resemblance between his speech and that of the Irish drovers who brought cattle to Norwich market.”
⁴¹
The Germans also left indelible marks upon American, and particularly upon the spoken American of the common people. The everyday vocabulary shows many German words and turns of
phrase.
Sauerkraut
and
noodle
, as we have seen in
Chapter III
, Section 1, came in during the colonial period, apparently through the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch,
i.e.
, a mixture, somewhat debased, of the German dialects of Switzerland, Suabia and the Palatinate. The immigrants who came in after 1848 contributed
pumpernickel, haus-frau, beer-garden (biergarten), lager-beer, wienerwurst
(often reduced to
wiener
or
wienie
),
frankfurter, bock-beer, sauerbraten, schnitzel, leberwurst
(sometimes half translated as
liverwurst
),
blut-wurst, dachshund, zwieback, stein
(drinking vessel),
rathskeller, schweizer
(cheese),
delicatessen, hamburger
(steak),
kindergarten
and
katzenjammer
.
⁴²
Some of these words did not really lodge in the American vocabulary until after the second great German immigration began in 1870, but nevertheless they were heard before the Civil War. From the Germans, in all probability, there also came two very familiar Americanisms,
loafer
and
bum
. The etymology of the former is still to be worked out, but practically all authorities agree that it is of German origin. James Russell Lowell suggested that it was derived from the German
laufen
(in various dialects,
lofen
), meaning to run, but this seems improbable, and the Oxford
Dictionary rejects the derivation. A much more likely prototype is to be found in the German noun
landläufer
, meaning a tramp, and this etymology is favored by Ernest Weekley in his “Etymological Dictionary of Modern English” (1921). Thornton’s first example is taken from the title of a sketch by Cornelius Matthews, “The Late Ben Smith,
Loafer
” printed in the
Knickerbocker Magazine
, for July, 1835. R- H. Dana, in “Two Years Before the Mast” (1840) spoke of
loafer
as “the newly invented Yankee word”; his book was an expansion of notes made in 1834–6. In 1855, in “Leaves of Grass,” Whitman used
to loaf
in a phrase that seems destined to live: “I
loafe
[note the original spelling] and invite my soul.”
Bum
was originally
bummer
, and apparently comes from the German word
bummler
.
⁴³
Both
loafer
and
bummer
have provided numerous derivatives:
loaf
(noun),
to loaf, loafing-place, corner-loafer, common-loafer, town-loafer, to bum, bum
as an adjective (as in
bum steer
and
bum food
),
bum’s-rush, bumming-place
and
bummery
, not to mention
to go
(or
be
)
on the bum. Loafer
has migrated to England, but
bum
is still unknown there in the American sense. In England an old English word,
bum
, dating from the Fourteenth Century, is used to designate the buttocks, and is thus not heard in polite discourse.