compounds," as /bank-bill/, (/bank-note/), /book-store/
(/book-seller's shop/), /bottom-land/ (/interval land/),
/clapboard/ (/pale/), /sea-board/ (/sea-shore/), /side-hill/
(/hill-side/).
f. "Certain colloquial phrases, apparently idiomatic, and very
expressive," as /to cave in/, /to flare up/, /to flunk out/, /to
fork over/, /to hold on/, /to let on/, /to stave off/, /to take
on/.
g. Intensives, "often a matter of mere temporary fashion," as
/dreadful/, /mighty/, /plaguy/, /powerful/.
h. "Certain verbs expressing one's state of mind, but partially
or timidly," as /to allot upon/ (for /to count upon/), /to
calculate/, /to expect/ (/to think/ or /believe/), /to guess/,
/to reckon/.
i. "Certain adjectives, expressing not only quality, but one's
subjective feelings in regard to it," as /clever/, /grand/,
/green/, /likely/, /smart/, /ugly/.
j. Abridgments, as /stage/ (for /stage-coach/), /turnpike/ (for
/turnpike-road/), /spry/ (for /sprightly/), /to conduct/ (for
/to conduct one's self/).
k. "Quaint or burlesque terms," as to /tote/, /to yank/;
/humbug/, /loafer/, /muss/, /plunder/ (for /baggage/), /rock/
(for /stone/).
l. "Low expressions, mostly political," as /slangwhanger/, /loco
foco/, /hunker/; /to get the hang of/.
m. "Ungrammatical expressions, disapproved by all," as /do
don't/, /used to could/, /can't come it/, /Universal preacher/
(for /Universalist/), /there's no two ways about it/.
Elwyn, in 1859, attempted no classification.[59] He confined his
glossary to archaic English words surviving in America, and sought
only to prove that they had come down "from our remotest ancestry" and
were thus undeserving of the reviling [Pg032] lavished upon them by
English critics. Schele de Vere, in 1872, followed Bartlett, and
devoted himself largely to words borrowed from the Indian dialects,
and from the French, Spanish and Dutch. But Farmer, in 1889,[60]
ventured upon a new classification, prefacing it with the following
definition:
An Americanism may be defined as a word or phrase, old or new,
employed by general or respectable usage in America in a way not
sanctioned by the best standards of the English language. As a matter
of fact, however, the term has come to possess a wider meaning, and
it is now applied not only to words and phrases which can be so
described, but also to the new and legitimately born words adapted to
the general needs and usages, to the survivals of an older form of
English than that now current in the mother country, and to the racy,
pungent vernacular of Western life.
He then proceeded to classify his materials thus:
1. Words and phrases of purely American derivation, embracing words
originating in:
a. Indian and aboriginal life.
b. Pioneer and frontier life.
c. The church.
d. Politics.
e. Trades of all kinds.
f. Travel, afloat and ashore.
2. Words brought by colonists, including:
a. The German element.
b. The French.
c. The Spanish.
d. The Dutch.
e. The negro.
f. The Chinese.
3. Names of American things, embracing:
a. Natural products.
b. Manufactured articles.
4. Perverted English words.
5. Obsolete English words still in good use in America.
6. English words, American by inflection and modification.
7. Odd and ignorant popular phrases, proverbs, vulgarisms, and
colloquialisms, cant and slang.
8. Individualisms.
9. Doubtful and miscellaneous.
Clapin, in 1902,[61] reduced these categories to four:
1. Genuine English words, obsolete or provincial in England, and
universally used in the United States.
2. English words conveying, in the United States, a different
meaning from that attached to them in England.
3. Words introduced from other languages than the English:--French,
Dutch, Spanish, German, Indian, etc.
4. Americanisms proper, /i.e./, words coined in the country, either
representing some new idea or peculiar product.
Thornton, in 1912, substituted the following:
1. Forms of speech now obsolete or provincial in England, which
survive in the United States, such as /allow/, /bureau/, /fall/,
/gotten/, /guess/, /likely/, /professor/, /shoat/.
2. Words and phrases of distinctly American origin, such as
/belittle/, /lengthy/, /lightning-rod/, /to darken one's doors/, /to
bark up the wrong tree/, /to come out at the little end of the
horn/, /blind tiger/, /cold snap/, /gay Quaker/, /gone coon/, /long
sauce/, /pay dirt/, /small potatoes/, /some pumpkins/.
3. Nouns which indicate quadrupeds, birds, trees, articles of food,
etc., that are distinctively American, such as /ground-hog/,
/hang-bird/, /hominy/, /live-oak/, /locust/, /opossum/, /persimmon/,
/pone/, /succotash/, /wampum/, /wigwam/.
4. Names of persons and classes of persons, and of places, such as
/Buckeye/, /Cracker/, /Greaser/, /Hoosier/, /Old Bullion/, /Old
Hickory/, the /Little Giant/, /Dixie/, /Gotham/, the /Bay State/,
the /Monumental City/.
5. Words which have assumed a new meaning, such as /card/, /clever/,
/fork/, /help/, /penny/, /plunder/, /raise/, /rock/, /sack/,
/ticket/, /windfall/.
In addition, Thornton added a provisional class of "words and phrases
of which I have found earlier examples in American than in English
writers; ... with the /caveat/ that further research may reverse the
claim"--a class offering specimens in /alarmist/, /capitalize/,
/eruptiveness/, /horse of another colour/ (/sic!/), /the jig's up/,
/nameable/, /omnibus bill/, /propaganda/ and /whitewash/.
No more than a brief glance at these classifications is needed to show
that they hamper the inquiry by limiting its scope--not so much, to be
sure, as the ridiculous limitations of White and Lounsbury, but still
very seriously. They meet the ends of [Pg034] purely descriptive
lexicography, but largely leave out of account some of the most
salient characters of a living language, for example, pronunciation
and idiom. Only Bartlett and Farmer establish a separate category of
Americanisms produced by changes in pronunciation, though even
Thornton, of course, is obliged to take notice of such forms as /bust/
and /bile/. None of them, however, goes into the matter at any length,
nor even into the matter of etymology. Bartlett's etymologies are
scanty and often inaccurate; Schele de Vere's are sometimes quite
fanciful; Thornton offers scarcely any at all. The best of these
collections of Americanisms, and by long odds, is Thornton's. It
presents an enormous mass of quotations, and they are all very
carefully dated, and it corrects most of the more obvious errors in
the work of earlier inquirers. But its very dependence upon quotations
limits it chiefly to the written language, and so the enormously
richer materials of the spoken language are passed over, and
particularly the materials evolved during the past twenty years. One
searches the two fat volumes in vain for such highly characteristic
forms as /would of/, /near-accident/, and /buttinski/, the use of
/sure/ as an adverb, and the employment of /well/ as a sort of general
equivalent of the German /also/.
These grammatical and syntactical tendencies are beyond the scope of
Thornton's investigation, but it is plain that they must be prime
concerns of any future student who essays to get at the inner spirit
of the language. Its difference from standard English is not merely a
difference in vocabulary, to be disposed of in an alphabetical list;
it is, above all, a difference in pronunciation, in intonation, in
conjugation and declension, in metaphor and idiom, in the whole
fashion of using words. A page from one of Ring W. Lardner's baseball
stories contains few words that are not in the English vocabulary, and
yet the thoroughly American color of it cannot fail to escape anyone
who actually listens to the tongue spoken around him. Some of the
elements which enter into that color will be considered in the
following pages. The American vocabulary, of course, must be given
first attention, for in it the earliest American divergences are
embalmed and it tends to grow richer and freer year after year,
[Pg035] but attention will also be paid to materials and ways of
speech that are less obvious, and in particular to certain definite
tendencies of the grammar of spoken American, hitherto wholly
neglected.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Pp. 22-23.
[2] America's Coming of Age; New York, 1915, p. 15. See also the
preface to Every-Day English, by Richard Grant White; Boston, 1881, p.
xviii.
[3] The common notion that the Académie combats changes is quite
erroneous. In the preface to the first edition of its dictionary
(1694) it disclaimed any purpose "to make new words and to reject
others at its pleasure." In the preface to the second edition (1718)
it confessed that "ignorance and corruption often introduce manners of
writing" and that "convenience establishes them." In the preface to
the third edition (1740) it admitted that it was "forced to admit
changes which the public has made." And so on. Says D. M. Robertson,
in A History of the French Academy (London, 1910): "The Academy
repudiates any assumption of authority over the language with which
the public in its own practise has not first clothed it. So much,
indeed, does it confine itself to an interpretation merely of the laws
of language that its decisions are sometimes contrary to its own
judgment of what is either desirable or expedient."
[4] Cf. /Scandinavian Studies and Notes/, vol. iv, no. 3, Aug. 1917,
p. 258.
[5] This movement won official recognition so long ago as 1885, when
the Storting passed the first of a series of acts designed to put the
two languages on equal footing. Four years later, after a campaign
going back to 1874, provision was made for teaching the /landsmaal/ in
the schools for the training of primary teachers. In 1899 a
professorship of the /landsmaal/ was established in the University of
Christiania. The school boards in the case of primary schools, and the
pupils in the case of middle and high schools are now permitted to
choose between the two languages, and the /landsmaal/ has been given
official status by the State Church. The chief impediment to its wider
acceptance lies in the fact that it is not, as it stands, a natural
language, but an artificial amalgamation of peasant dialects. It was
devised in 1848-50 by Ivar Aasen. /Vide/ The Language Question, /London
Times/ Norwegian Supplement, May 18, 1914.
[6] A few such works are listed in the bibliography. More of them are
mentioned in Americanismos, by Miguel de Toro y Gisbert; Paris, n. d.
[7] Maximilian Schele de Vere: Americanisms: The English of the New
World; New York, 1872.
[8] Richard H. Thornton: An American Glossary ..., 2 vols.; Phila. and
London, 1912.
[9] Organized Feb. 19, 1889, with Dr. J. J. Child, of Harvard, as its
first president.
[10] Author of Travels in North America; London, 1829.
[11] A Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases which Have Been
Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America; Boston, 1816.
[12] A Letter to the Hon. John Pickering on the Subject of His
Vocabulary; Boston, 1817.
[13] 4th ed., New York, 1870, p. 669.
[14] /Op. cit./ p. 676.
[15] The English Language; New York 1850; rev. ed., 1855. This was the
first American text-book of English for use in colleges. Before its
publication, according to Fowler himself (rev. ed., p. xi), the
language was studied only "superficially" and "in the primary
schools." He goes on: "Afterward, when older, in the academy, during
their preparation for college, our pupils perhaps despised it, in
comparison with the Latin and the Greek; and in the college they do
not systematically study the language after they come to maturity."
[16] In Recent Exemplifications of False Philology; London, 1872.
[17] Americanisms, parts I-VIII, April, May, July, Sept., Nov., 1878;
Jan., March, May, 1879.
[18] A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to
the United States, 4th ed.; Boston, 1877.
[19] Feb., March, June, July, Sept.
[20] Vol. xiv, pp. 484-5; Cambridge, 1917.
[21] Vol. xxv, p. 209.
[22] July 18, 1913.
[23] Of the words cited as still unfamiliar in England, Thornton has
traced /hobo/ to 1891, /hold-up/ and /bunco/ to 1887, /dive/ to 1882,
/dead-beat/ to 1877, /hoodlum/ to 1872, /road-agent/ to 1866, /stag/
to 1856, /drummer/ to 1836 and /flume/ to 1792. All of them are
probably older than these references indicate.
[24] Summarized in /Literary Digest/, June 19, 1915.
[25] America Today, /Scribner's/, Feb. 1899, p. 218.
[26] /London Court Journal/, Aug. 28, 1892.
[27] In Pastures New; New York, 1906, p. 6.
[28] Concerning the American Language, in The Stolen White Elephant;
Boston, 1882. A footnote says that the essay is "part of a chapter
crowded out of A Tramp Abroad." (Hartford, 1880.)
[29] Hartford, 1872, p. 45.
[30] The Editor's Study, /Harper's Magazine/, Jan. 1886.
[31] Die englische Sprache in Nordamerika, band iv, heft i;
Braunschweig, 1848.
[32] Étude sur l'Anglais Parlé aux Etats Unis (la Langue Américaine),
/Actes de la Société Philologique de Paris/, March, 1874.
[33] Metoula-Sprachführer.... Englisch von Karl Blattner; Ausgabe für
Amerika; Berlin-Schöneberg, 1912.
[34] Polyglott Kuntze; Schnellste Erlernung jeder Sprache ohne Lehrer;
Amerikanisch; Bonn a. Rh., n. d.
[35] Like the English expositors of American slang, this German falls
into several errors. For example, he gives /cock/ for /rooster/,
/boots/ for /shoes/, /braces/ for /suspenders/ and /postman/ for
/letter-carrier/, and lists /iron-monger/, /joiner/ and /linen-draper/
as American terms. He also spells /wagon/ in the English manner, with
two /g/'s, and translates /Schweinefüsse/ as /pork-feet/. But he
spells such words as /color/ in the American manner and gives the
pronunciation of /clerk/ as the American /klörk/, not as the English
/klark/.
[36] Molee's notions are set forth in Plea for an American Language
...; Chicago, 1888; and Tutonish; Chicago, 1902. He announced the
preparation of A Dictionary of the American Language in 1888, but so
far as I know it has not been published. He was born in Wisconsin, of
Norwegian parents, in 1845, and pursued linguistic studies at the
University of Wisconsin, where he seems to have taken a Ph. B.
[37] American English, /North American Review/, Jan. 1883.
[38] Oct. 1, 1909.
[39] J. F. Healy, general manager of the Davis Colliery Co. at Elkins,
W. Va., in a speech before the West Virginia Coal Mining Institute, at
Wheeling, Dec. 1910; reprinted as The American Language; Pittsburgh,
1911.
[40] /Westminster Review/, July, 1888, p. 35.
[41] W. W. Skeat distinguishes no less than 9 dialects in Scotland, 3
in Ireland and 30 in England and Wales. /Vide/ English Dialects From
the Eighth Century to the Present Day; Cambridge, 1911, p. 107 /et
seq./
[42] /Art./ Americanisms, 2nd ed.
[43] F. L. Pattee: A History of American Literature Since 1870; New
York, 1916.
[44] A. H. Sayce: Introduction to the Science of Language, 2 vols.;
London, 1900. See especially vol. ii, ch. vi.
[45] /Cf./ the chapter, Interlude: On Jargon, in Quiller-Couch's On
the Art of Writing; New York, 1916. Curiously enough, large parts of
the learned critic's book are written in the very Jargon he attacks.
[46] Alexander Francis: Americans: an Impression; New York, 1900.
[47] G. Lowes Dickinson, in the /English Review/, quoted by /Current
Literature/, April, 1910.
[48] Speech before the Chamber of Commerce Convention, Washington,
Feb. 19, 1916.
[49] Speech at workingman's dinner, New York, Sept. 4, 1912.
[50] wit and Wisdom of Woodrow Wilson, comp. by Richard Linthicum; New
York, 1916, p. 54.
[51] Speech at Ridgewood, N. J., April 22, 1910.
[52] Wit and Wisdom ..., p. 56.
[53] Henry Sweet: A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical, 2
parts; Oxford, 1900-03, part i, p. 224.
[54] Despite this fact an academic and ineffective opposition to it
still goes on. On the Style Sheet of the /Century Magazine/ it is
listed among the "words and phrases to be avoided." It was prohibited
by the famous /Index Expurgatorius/ prepared by William Cullen Bryant
for the /New York Evening Post/, and his prohibition is still
theoretically in force, but the word is now actually permitted by the
/Post/. The /Chicago Daily News/ Style Book, dated July 1, 1908, also
bans it.
[55] /Scientist/ is now in the Oxford Dictionary. So are /reliable/,
/standpoint/ and /gubernatorial/. But the /Century Magazine/ still
bans /standpoint/ and the /Evening Post/ (at least in theory) bans
both /standpoint/ and /reliable/. The /Chicago Daily News/ accepts
/standpoint/, but bans /reliable/ and /gubernatorial/. All of these
words, of course, are now quite as good as /ox/ or /and/.
[56] /Art./ Changes in the Language Since Shakespeare's Time,
Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv. p. 491.
[57] Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. ii, pp. 333-4.
[58] /Op. cit./, pp. 119-28.
[59] Alfred L. Elwyn, M. D.: Glossary of Supposed Americanisms ...;
Phila., 1859.
[60] John S. Farmer: Americanisms Old and New ...; London, 1889.
[61] Sylva Clapin: A New Dictionary of Americanisms, Being a Glossary
of Words Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States and the Dominion
of Canada; New York, 1902.
[Pg036]
II
The Beginnings of American
§ 1
/In Colonial Days/--William Gifford, the first editor of the
/Quarterly Review/, is authority for the tale that some of the Puritan
clergy of New England, during the Revolution, proposed that English be
formally abandoned as the national language of America, and Hebrew
adopted in its place. An American chronicler, Charles Astor Bristed,
makes the proposed tongue Greek, and reports that the change was
rejected on the ground that "it would be more convenient for us to
keep the language as it is, and make the English speak Greek."[1] The
story, though it has the support of the editors of the Cambridge
History of American Literature,[2] has an apocryphal smack; one
suspects that the savagely anti-American Gifford invented it. But,
true or false, it well indicates the temper of those times. The
passion for complete political independence of England bred a general
hostility to all English authority, whatever its character, and that
hostility, in the direction of present concern to us, culminated in
the revolutionary attitude of Noah Webster's "Dissertations on the
English Language," printed in 1789. Webster harbored no fantastic
notion of abandoning English altogether, but he was eager to set up
American as a distinct and independent dialect. "Let us," he said,
"seize the present moment, and establish a national language as well
as a national government.... As an independent nation our honor
requires [Pg037] us to have a system of our own, in language as well
as government."
Long before this the challenge had been flung. Scarcely two years
after the Declaration of Independence Franklin was instructed by
Congress, on his appointment as minister to France, to employ "the
language of the United States," not simply English, in all his
"replies or answers" to the communications of the ministry of Louis
XVI. And eight years before the Declaration Franklin himself had drawn
up a characteristically American scheme of spelling reform, and had
offered plenty of proof in it, perhaps unconsciously, that the
standards of spelling and pronunciation in the New World had already
diverged noticeably from those accepted on the other side of the
ocean.[3] In acknowledging the dedication of Webster's "Dissertations"
Franklin endorsed both his revolt against English domination and his
forecast of widening differences in future, though protesting at the
same time against certain Americanisms that have since come into good
usage, and even migrated to England.[4]
This protest was marked by Franklin's habitual mildness, but in other
quarters dissent was voiced with far less urbanity. The growing
independence of the colonial dialect, not only in its spoken form, but
also in its most dignified written form, had begun, indeed, to attract
the attention of purists in both England and America, and they sought
to dispose of it in its infancy by /force majeure/. One of the first
and most vigorous of the attacks upon it was delivered by John
Witherspoon, a Scotch clergyman who came out in 1769 to be president
of Princeton /in partibus infidelium/. This Witherspoon brought a
Scotch hatred of the English with him, and at once became a leader of
the party of independence; he signed the Declaration to the tune of
much rhetoric, and was the only clergyman to sit in the Continental
Congress. But in matters of learning he was orthodox to the point of
hunkerousness, and the strange locutions that [Pg038] he encountered
on all sides aroused his pedagogic ire. "I have heard in this
country," he wrote in 1781, "in the senate, at the bar, and from the
pulpit, and see daily in dissertations from the press, errors in
grammar, improprieties and vulgarisms which hardly any person of the
same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in
Great Britain."[5] It was Witherspoon who coined the word
/Americanism/--and at once the English guardians of the sacred vessels
began employing it as a general synonym for vulgarism and barbarism.
Another learned immigrant, the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, soon joined him.
This Boucher was a friend of Washington, but was driven back to
England by his Loyalist sentiments. He took revenge by printing
various charges against the Americans, among them that of "making all
the haste they can to rid themselves of the [English] language."
After the opening of the new century all the British reviews
maintained an eager watchfulness for these abhorrent inventions, and
denounced them, when found, with the utmost vehemence. The
/Edinburgh/, which led the charge, opened its attack in October, 1804,
and the appearance of the five volumes of Chief Justice Marshall's
"Life of George Washington," during the three years following, gave
the signal for corrective articles in the /British Critic/, the
/Critical Review/, the /Annual/, the /Monthly/ and the /Eclectic/. The
/British Critic/, in April, 1808, admitted somewhat despairingly that
the damage was already done--that "the common speech of the United
States has departed very considerably from the standard adopted in
England." The others, however, sought to stay the flood by invective
against Marshall and, later, against his rival biographer, the Rev.
Aaron Bancroft. The /Annual/, in 1808, pronounced its high curse and
anathema upon "that torrent of barbarous phraseology" which was
pouring across the Atlantic, and which threatened "to destroy the
purity of the English language."[6] In Bancroft's "Life of George
Washington" [Pg039] (1808), according to the /British Critic/, there
were gross Americanisms, inordinately offensive to Englishmen, "at
almost every page."