American Language (30 page)

As to
high-binder
which is so confidently quoted as modern (“not in use,
certainly
, before 1819,”) I can refute all that is said by referring to a journal in my own possession — the
Weekly Inspector
, for Dec. 27, 1806 — published in New York:

“On Christmas Eve, a party of banditti, amounting, it is stated, to forty or fifty members of an association, calling themselves
high-binders
, assembled in front of St. Peter’s Church, in Barclay-street, expecting that the Catholic ritual would be performed with a degree of pomp and splendor which has usually been omitted in this city. These ceremonies, however, not taking place, the
high-binders
manifested great displeasure.”

In a subsequent number, the association are called
hide-binders
. They were Irish.

1
According to R. E. Spiller (The American in England During the First Half Century of Independence; New York, 1926), Benjamin Silliman’s Journal of Travels in England, Holland, and Scotland, and of Two Passages Over the Atlantic, in the Years 1805 and 1806; New York, 1810, was “the first book of travels by an American which attempted to describe and discuss England as though she were actually a foreign land.”

2
In Studies in History; Boston, 1884. Lodge says that Franklin, Hamilton and Noah Webster were brilliant exceptions. Franklin’s autobiography, he says, was “American in feeling, without any taint of English colonialism.” Hamilton’s “intense eagerness for a strong national government made him the deadliest foe of the colonial spirit.” As for Webster, he “went into open rebellion against British tradition. He was snubbed, laughed at, and abused. He was regarded as little better than a madman to dare to set himself up against Johnson and his successors. But the hard-headed New Englander pressed on, and finally brought out his dictionary — a great work, which has fitly preserved his name.”

3
The best brief account of this uprising that I have encountered is not in any history book, but in Mr. Justice Sutherland’s dissenting opinion in Home Building & Loan Ass’n
vs
. Blaisdell
et al
, 54
Supreme Court Reporter
, p. 244
ff
.

4
The thing went, indeed, far beyond mere hope. In 1812 a conspiracy was unearthed to separate New England from the Republic and make it an English colony. The chief conspirator was one John Henry, who acted under the instructions of Sir John Craig, Governor-General of Canada.

5
Maine was not separated from Massachusetts until 1820.

6
Indiana and Illinois were erected into Territories during Jefferson’s first term, and Michigan during his second. Kentucky was admitted to the Union in 1792, Tennessee in 1796, Ohio in 1803. Lewis and Clarke set out for the Pacific in 1804. The Louisiana Purchase was ratified in 1803, and Louisiana became a State in 1812.

7
A Literary History of America; New York, 1900.

8
Our Dictionaries and Other English Language Topics; New York, 1890, pp. 30–31. See also, for an excellent account of the spirit of the time, Localism in American Criticism, by Carey McWilliams,
Southwest Review
, July, 1934.

9
I borrow this example from Tall Talk in American Sixty Years Ago, by Mamie Meredith,
American Speech
, April, 1929. See also Big Talk, by Dorothy Dondore,
American Speech
, Oct., 1930; Frontier Tall Talk, by William F. Thompson,
American Speech
, Oct., 1934; and Tall Tales of the Southwest, 1830–60, by F. J. Meine; New York, 1930.

10
The Study of American English,
S.P.E. Tracts
, No. XXVII, 1927, p. 203.

11
The Oxford Dictionary quotes an example of its use in the sense of to render sad or melancholy from Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial (1658). But in the sense of to conduct a funeral the verb seems to be American. It thus appears in the diary of Moses Waddel, president of the University of Georgia; 1825. See College Life in the Old South, by E. Merton Couleer; New York, 1928, p. 197.

12
J. R. Ware, in Passing English of the Victorian Era; London, n.d., says that
to burgle
was introduced to London by W. S. Gilbert in The Pirates of Penzance, 1880. On Nov. 14, 1874 the London
Standard
was speaking of it as one of the “new words with which the American vocabulary has lately been enriched,” but it probably goes back to the 40’s or 50’s.

13
The origin of
to lynch
was long in dispute, but it now appears to be established that it was derived from the name of Captain (or Colonel) Charles Lynch, of Pittsylvania county, Virginia, a primeval 100% American who devoted himself to harassing Loyalists before and during the Revolution. He was a member of the House of Burgesses, but seems to have paid little heed to the statutes. In 1782 the Virginia Assembly purged him of charges that he had illegally imprisoned certain Loyalists in 1780. For an account of him, probably somewhat inaccurate in detail, see Rope and Faggott, by Walter White; New York, 1929, p. 83. See also the art.
Lynch law
in the Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary; London, 1933. A useful article on the subject was printed in the Lynchburg (Va.)
News
, July 30, 1922.

14
The spelling of this word shows large variations. The Oxford Dictionary gives
holow
(1542),
hollow
(1599),
holloe
(1642),
holo
(1654),
holloa
(1769),
holla
(1842), and
holler
(1883). In the United States the common pronunciation is
holler
, and this form has been accepted by the Public Printer. See the
Congressional Record
, May 12, 1917, p. 2309.

15
It quickly bred two nouns,
noncommittal
and
non-committalism
, and the latter had the political significance of
straddling
in the 50’s, but both seem to have gone out. An adverb,
non-committally
, has survived, and the Oxford Dictionary quotes it from W. D. Howell’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1885.

16
Rough-neck
often appears in lists of recent slang terms, but Thornton shows that it was used in Texas so long ago as 1836.

17
This innocent compound has given a great deal of concern to etymologists. The Standard Dictionary (1893) derives it from the verb
to pop
and the noun
cock
, which seems very far-fetched. The Oxford Dictionary, attempting no etymology, dismisses it as “U. S. slang.” Webster’s New International (1934) derives it from “Colloq. D.
pappekak
, lit. soft dung,” which seems silly.

18
This use goes back to 1839.

19
Thornton gives an example dated 1812.

20
See Terms of Approbation and Eulogy, by Elsie L. Warnock,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Pt. I, 1913. Among the curious recent coinages cited by Miss Warnock are
scally-wampus, supergobosnoptious, hyperfirmatious
, and
scrumdifferous
. See also Language and Nonce-Words, by Francis A. Wood,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Pt. I, 1913.

21
The origin of this noble word remains mysterious. Its first appearance in print seems to have been in 1861, but Ernest Weekley says in his Etymological Dictionary of Modern English that it “appeared earlier in a Northern English dialect in the sense of to spill,” and Webster’s New International follows him. The Oxford Dictionary says that “there is some slight evidence” to that effect, but remains in doubt. It rejects the suggestion that the word is of Danish or Swedish genesis, made in the Webster of 1864. In 1927 the following appeared in the Dayton, O.,
Daily News:
“[The word is] a corruption of
skedannumi
, a Greek word meaning to scatter: General Giles W. Shurtleff, a professor at Oberlin College, commanded a regiment of Negroes [in the Civil War], and many of his subordinates were from Oberlin, where students knew their Greek. Corrupting the Greek word, officers and Negroes alike evolved
skedaddle.
” (Reprinted in the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Aug. 26, 1927).

22
See American Intensives in
Ka
-,
Ke
, and
Ker
-, by Exha Akins Sadilek,
American Speech
, Dec., 1931.

23
E.g.
,
Single-track mind, to jump the rails, to collide head-on, broad-gauge man, to walk the ties, blind-baggage, underground-railroad, tank-town
.

24
Some of the early American railroad terms are already obsolete.
Depot
is seldom used today; it has been displaced by
station
or
terminal
. The use of
cars
to designate a railroad train was universal down to the Civil War era, but today it survives only in the signs occasionally seen at grade-crossings; “Look Out for the
Cars
,” and in the verb-phrase,
to change cars
. The Pullman
palace-car
is now extinct, and the Pullman
Palace-Car
Company, incorporated in 1867, is now simply the Pullman Company. Even
parlor-car
has been elbowed out by
Pullman
. Incidentally,
telegram
was suggested in the Albany
Evening Journal
, April 6, 1852, by E. Peshine Smith of Rochester, N. Y., and seems to have been his invention. It quickly ousted
telegraphic dispatch
and
telegraphic communication
.

25
Political Americanisms; New York, 1890. “In America,” said Walt Whitman in An American Primer,
Atlantic Monthly
, April, 1904, “an immense number of new words are needed to embody the new political facts, the compact of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Constitution — the union of the States — the new States — the Congress — the modes of election — the stump speech — the ways of electioneering — addressing the people — stating all that is to be said in modes that fit the life and experience of the Indianian, the Michi-ganian, the Vermonter, the men of Maine.”

26
See American Political Cant, by Lowry Charles Wimberly,
American Speech
, Dec., 1926.

27
The etymology of
cocktail
has long engaged the learned, but without persuasive result. It is thus set forth by William Henry Nugent in Cock Fighting Today,
American Mercury
, May, 1929, p. 80: “Feeding is an important thing in the process [of conditioning game-cocks]. The old-time English and Irish trainers made a specially prepared bread of flour and stale beer or ale. They also added white wine or sack, gin, whiskey or other spirits, and a whole
materia medica
of seeds, plants, roots, barks, and leaves. In sampling this concoction before pouring it into the dough they found it an appetizing tonic, not only for pit fowl, but also for man. They named it
cock-bread ale
or
cock ale
, and in the spelling of the time it became
cock ail
. Americans knew a variant of this beverage, as early as 1800, as the
cocktail
. Somehow a
t
had got into the mixture.” Early in 1926 Marcel Boulenger printed an article in
Le Figaro Heb-domadaire
(Paris) arguing that
cocktail
was derived from
coquetel
, the name of a drink known for centuries in the vicinity of Bordeaux. See
Cocktail
French Invention, Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Feb. 11, 1926.

28
An amalgam of Chinook proper and various other Indian languages,
e.g.
, Nootka, Chehalis, Klickitat and Wasco, with contributions from French, English and probably also Russian. A good account of it, with a vocabulary, is in Gill’s Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, 15th ed.; Portland, Ore., 1909. It was in use all over the Northwest, from the Cascade Mountains to the coast. The Indian languages differed so greatly that they were mutually unintelligible. See also the Chinook Jargon, by Douglas Leechman,
American Speech
, July, 1926, and the Chinook Jargon, by E. H. Thomas, the same, June, 1927.

29
According to the Oxford Dictionary,
cayuse
is “said to be from the language of the Chinook Indians of Oregon,” but Mr. H. L. Davis believes that it is from the French
cailloux
(pebbles).

30
I am indebted here to Mr. H. L. Davis, author of Honey in the Horn, and to Mr. Lewis A. Mc-Arthur of Portland, secretary to the Oregon Geographic Board.

31
For a longer list, see The English Language in the Southwest, by T. M. Pearce,
New Mexico Historical Review
, July, 1932.

32
Coulee
, from the French
coulée
, running or flowing, is applied to deep valleys or ravines. It is commonly debased to
coolly
, as in the title of Hamlin Garland’s book, Rose of Dutchers Coolly (1895). Its use is confined to the Northwest.

33
Shanty
is apparently derived from the French
chantier
, the camp of a gang of loggers. A lumberman is often called a
shantyman
, and the word has spawned other derivatives,
e.g., Shanty Irish
(title of a book by Jim Tully, 1928),
shanty-town
and
to shanty. Shanty
has been traced to 1820. Folk etymology has assimilated
chantey
to it, but the two words are distinct in derivation and meaning.
Chantey
is from the French
chantez
, the imperative of
chanter
, to sing, and is not American.

34
Thornton’s first example of
canuck
is dated 1855.

35
The Study of American English,
S.P.E. Tracts
No. XXVII, 1927, p. 208.

36
Vaquero
means cowboy, and is used in that sense in Argentina. In the American West it quickly acquired the special sense of a
Mexican
cowboy, and that sense it retains.
Buck-aroo
seems to have dropped out. The American cowboy is always a
cow-puncher
, a
cow-hand
, or simply a
cowboy
.

37
Mescal
like
chile, tamale, chocolate, coyote, mesquite, zarape, tobacco
and
tomato
, is of Indian origin, but like all of them it came into the language by way of the Spanish.

38
The best study of Spanish loanwords is to be found in A Dictionary of Spanish Terms in English, With Special Reference to the American Southwest, by Harold W. Bentley; New York, 1932. This admirable work discusses the Spanish influence upon American at length, and with historical insight, and presents a vocabulary of about 400 terms. In addition there is a list of Indian words that came in through the Spanish, and a long list of Spanish place-names in the United States. There is a brief bibliography. See also Geographical Terms in the Far West, by Edward E. Hale,
Dialect Notes,
Vol. VI, Pt. IV, 1932; A Contribution Towards a Vocabulary of Spanish and Mexican Words Used in Texas, by H. Tallichet,
Dialect Notes
, Pt. IV, 1892 (with addenda in Pt. V, 1893, and Pt. VII, 1894); Geographical Terms From the Spanish, by Mary Austin,
American Speech
, Oct., 1933; and The English Language in the Southwest, by T. M. Pearce,
New Mexico Historical Review
, July, 1932.