tried to obtain a respite from this abuse by pointing out the obvious
fact that many of the Americanisms under fire were merely survivors of
an English that had become archaic in England, but this effort counted
for little, for on the one hand the British purists enjoyed the chase
too much to give it up, and on the other hand there began to dawn in
America a new spirit of nationality, at first very faint, which viewed
the differences objected to, not with shame, but with a fierce sort of
pride. In the first volume of the /North American Review/ William
Ellery Channing spoke out boldly for "the American language and
literature,"[7] and a year later Pickering published his defiant
dictionary of "words and phrases which have been supposed to be
peculiar to the United States." This thin collection of 500 specimens
set off a dispute which yet rages on both sides of the Atlantic.
Pickering, however, was undismayed. He had begun to notice the growing
difference between the English and American vocabulary and
pronunciation, he said, while living in London from 1799 to 1801, and
he had made his collections with the utmost care, and after taking
counsel with various prudent authorities, both English and American.
Already in the first year of the century, he continued, the English
had accused the people of the new republic of a deliberate "design to
effect an entire change in the language" and while no such design was
actually harbored, the facts were the facts, and he cited the current
newspapers, the speeches from pulpit and rostrum, and Webster himself
in support of them. This debate over Pickering's list, as I say, still
continues. Lounsbury, entrenched behind his grotesque categories, once
charged that four-fifths of the words in it had "no business to be
there," and [Pg040] Gilbert M. Tucker[8] has argued that only 70 of
them were genuine Americanisms. But a careful study of the list, in
comparison with the early quotations recently collected by Thornton,
seems to indicate that both of these judgments, and many others no
less, have done injustice to Pickering. He made the usual errors of
the pioneer, but his sound contributions to the subject were anything
but inconsiderable, and it is impossible to forget his diligence and
his constant shrewdness. He established firmly the native origin of a
number of words now in universal use in America--/e. g./,
/backwoodsman/, /breadstuffs/, /caucus/, /clapboard/, /sleigh/ and
/squatter/--and of such familiar derivatives as /gubernatorial/ and
/dutiable/, and he worked out the genesis of not a few loan-words,
including /prairie/, /scow/, /rapids/, /hominy/ and /barbecue/. It was
not until 1848, when the first edition of Bartlett appeared, that his
work was supplanted.
§ 2
/Sources of Early Americanisms/--The first genuine Americanisms were
undoubtedly words borrowed bodily from the Indian dialects--words, in
the main, indicating natural objects that had no counterparts in
England. We find /opossum/, for example, in the form of /opasum/, in
Captain John Smith's "Map of Virginia" (1612), and, in the form of
/apossoun/, in a Virginia document two years older. /Moose/ is almost
as old. The word is borrowed from the Algonquin /musa/, and must have
become familiar to the Pilgrim Fathers soon after their landing in
1620, for the woods of Massachusetts then swarmed with the huge
quadrupeds and there was no English name to designate them. Again,
there are /skunk/ (from the Abenaki Indian /seganku/), /hickory/,
/squash/, /paw-paw/, /raccoon/, /chinkapin/, /porgy/, /chipmunk/,
/pemmican/, /terrapin/, /menhaden/, /catalpa/, /persimmon/ and
/cougar/. Of these, /hickory/ and /terrapin/ are to be found in Robert
Beverley's "History and Present State of Virginia" (1705), and
/squash/, /chinkapin/ and /persimmon/ are in documents of the
preceding century. Many of these words, of course, were shortened
[Pg041] or otherwise modified on being taken into colonial English.
Thus /chinkapin/ was originally /checkinqumin/, and /squash/ appears
in early documents as /isquontersquash/, /askutasquash/,
/isquonkersquash/ and /squantersquash/. But William Penn, in a letter
dated August 16, 1683, used the latter in its present form. Its
variations show a familiar effort to bring a new and strange word into
harmony with the language--an effort arising from what philologists
call the law of Hobson-Jobson. This name was given to it by Col. Henry
Yule and A. C. Burnell, compilers of a standard dictionary of
Anglo-Indian terms. They found that the British soldiers in India,
hearing strange words from the lips of the natives, often converted
them into English words of similar sound, though of widely different
meaning. Thus the words /Hassan/ and /Hosein/, frequently used by the
Mohammedans of the country in their devotions, were turned into
/Hobson-Jobson/. The same process is constantly in operation
elsewhere. By it the French /route de roi/ has become /Rotten Row/ in
English, /écrevisse/ has become /crayfish/, and the English /bowsprit/
has become /beau pré/ (=/beautiful meadow/) in French. The word
/pigeon/, in /Pigeon English/, offers another example; it has no
connection with the bird, but merely represents a Chinaman's attempt
to pronounce the word /business/. No doubt /squash/ originated in the
same way. That /woodchuck/ did so is practically certain. Its origin
is to be sought, not in /wood/ and /chuck/, but in the Cree word
/otchock/, used by the Indians to designate the animal.
In addition to the names of natural objects, the early colonists, of
course, took over a great many Indian place-names, and a number of
words to designate Indian relations and artificial objects in Indian
use. To the last division belong /hominy/, /pone/, /toboggan/,
/canoe/, /tapioca/, /moccasin/, /pow-wow/, /papoose/, /tomahawk/,
/wigwam/, /succotash/ and /squaw/, all of which were in common
circulation by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Finally, new
words were made during the period by translating Indian terms, for
example, /war-path/, /war-paint/, /pale-face/, /medicine-man/,
/pipe-of-peace/ and /fire-water/. The total number of such borrowings,
direct and indirect, was a good deal larger [Pg042] than now appears,
for with the disappearance of the red man the use of loan-words from
his dialects has decreased. In our own time such words as /papoose/,
/sachem/, /tepee/, /wigwam/ and /wampum/ have begun to drop out of
everyday use;[9] at an earlier period the language sloughed off
/ocelot/, /manitee/, /calumet/, /supawn/, /samp/ and /quahaug/, or
began to degrade them to the estate of provincialisms.[10] A curious
phenomenon is presented by the case of /maize/, which came into the
colonial speech from some West Indian dialect, went over into orthodox
English, and from English into French, German and other continental
languages, and was then abandoned by the colonists. We shall see other
examples of that process later on.
Whether or not /Yankee/ comes from an Indian dialect is still
disputed. An early authority, John G. E. Heckwelder, argued that it
was derived from an Indian mispronunciation of the word /English/.[11]
Certain later etymologists hold that it originated more probably in an
Indian mishandling of the French word /Anglais/. Yet others derive it
from the Scotch /yankie/, meaning a gigantic falsehood. A fourth party
derive it from the Dutch, and cite an alleged Dutch model for "Yankee
Doodle," beginning "/Yanker/ didee doodle down."[12] Of these theories
that of Heckwelder is the most plausible. But here, as in other
directions, the investigation of American etymology remains sadly
incomplete. An elaborate dictionary of words derived from the Indian
languages, compiled by the late W. R. Gerard, is in the possession of
the Smithsonian Institution, but on account of a shortage of funds it
remains in manuscript. [Pg043]
From the very earliest days of English colonization the language of
the colonists also received accretions from the languages of the other
colonizing nations. The French word /portage/, for example, was
already in common use before the end of the seventeenth century, and
soon after came /chowder/, /cache/, /caribou/, /voyageur/, and various
words that, like the last-named, have since become localisms or
disappeared altogether. Before 1750 /bureau/,[13] /gopher/, /batteau/,
/bogus/, and /prairie/ were added, and /caboose/, a word of Dutch
origin, seems to have come in through the French. /Carry-all/ is also
French in origin, despite its English quality. It comes, by the law of
Hobson-Jobson, from the French /carriole/. The contributions of the
Dutch during the half century of their conflicts with the English
included /cruller/, /cold-slaw/, /dominie/ (for /parson/), /cookey/,
/stoop/, /span/ (of horses), /pit/ (as in /peach-pit/), /waffle/,
/hook/ (a point of land), /scow/, /boss/, /smearcase/ and /Santa
Claus/.[14] Schele de Vere credits them with /hay-barrack/, a
corruption of /hooiberg/. That they established the use of /bush/ as a
designation for back-country is very probable; the word has also got
into South African English. In American it has produced a number of
familiar derivatives, /e. g./, /bush-whacker/ and /bush-league/.
Barrère and Leland also credit the Dutch with /dander/, which is
commonly assumed to be an American corruption of /dandruff/. They say
that it is from the Dutch word /donder/ (=/thunder/). /Op donderen/,
in Dutch, means to burst into a sudden rage. The chief Spanish
contributions to American were to come after the War of 1812, with the
opening of the West, but /creole/, /calaboose/, /palmetto/, /peewee/,
/key/ (a small island), /quadroon/, /octoroon/, /barbecue/,
/pickaninny/ and /stampede/ had already entered the language in
colonial days. /Jerked beef/ came from the Spanish /charqui/ by the
law of Hobson-Jobson. The Germans who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1682
also undoubtedly gave a few words to the language, though [Pg044] it
is often difficult to distinguish their contributions from those of
the Dutch. It seems very likely, however, that /sauerkraut/[15] and
/noodle/ are to be credited to them. Finally, the negro slaves brought
in /gumbo/, /goober/, /juba/ and /voodoo/ (usually corrupted to
/hoodoo/), and probably helped to corrupt a number of other
loan-words, for example /banjo/ and /breakdown/. /Banjo/ seems to be
derived from /bandore/ or /bandurria/, modern French and Spanish forms
of /tambour/, respectively. It may, however, be an actual negro word;
there is a term of like meaning, /bania/, in Senegambian. Ware says
that /breakdown/, designating a riotous negro dance, is a corruption
of the French /rigadon/. The word is not in the Oxford Dictionary.
Bartlett listed it as an Americanism, but Thornton rejected it,
apparently because, in the sense of a collapse, it has come into
colloquial use in England. Its etymology is not given in the American
dictionaries.
§ 3
/New Words of English Material/--But of far more importance than these
borrowings was the great stock of new words that the 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 early eighteenth 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
authority, his lack of aesthetic sensitiveness, his extravagant humor.
Among the first colonists there were many 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 impossible 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 [Pg045]
/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 Governor
Yeardley, lamented that "in these five moneths 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
marchansize." In particular, the generation born in the New World was
uncouth and iconoclastic;[16] 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/,
/canvas-back/, /lightning-bug/, /mud-hen/, /cat-bird/, /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/, /poke-weed/, /copper-head/, /eel-grass/,
/reed-bird/, /egg-plant/, /blue-grass/, /pea-nut/, /pitch-pine/,
/cling-stone/ (peach), /moccasin-snake/, /June-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 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 [Pg046]
novelty, but the pioneers apparently did not recognize it, and so we
find them ascribing all sorts of absurd medicinal powers to it, and
even Beverley solemnly 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 /run/,
/branch/, /fork/, /bluff/, (noun), /neck/, /barrens/, /bottoms/,
/underbrush/, /bottom-land/, /clearing/, /notch/, /divide/, /knob/,
/riffle/, /gap/, /rolling-country/ and /rapids/,[17] 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 geographical terms as /downs/, /weald/, /wold/, /fen/, /bog/,
/fell/, /chase/, /combe/, /dell/, /heath/ and /moor/ disappeared from
the colonial tongue, save as fossilized in a few proper names. 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-country/,
/back-woods/, /back-woodsman/, /back-settlers/, /back-settlements/:
all these were in common use early in the eighteenth century.
/Back-log/ was used by Increase Mather in 1684. /Log-house/ appears in
the Maryland Archives for 1669.[18] /Hoe-cake/, /Johnny-cake/,
/pan-fish/, /corn-dodger/, /roasting-ear/, /corn-crib/, /corn-cob/ and
/pop-corn/ were all familiar before the Revolution. So were
/pine-knot/, /snow-plow/, /cold-snap/, /land-slide/, /salt-lick/,
/prickly-heat/, /shell-road/ and /cane-brake/. /Shingle/ was a novelty
in 1705, but one S. Symonds wrote to John Winthrop, of Ipswich, about
a /clapboarded/ house in 1637. /Frame-house/ seems to have come in
with /shingle/. /Trail/, /half-breed/, /Indian-summer/ and [Pg047]
/Indian-file/ were obviously suggested by the Red Men. /State-house/
was borrowed, perhaps, from the Dutch. /Selectman/ is first heard of
in 1685, displacing the English /alderman/. /Mush/ had displaced
/porridge/ by 1671. Soon afterward /hay-stack/ took the place of the
English /hay-cock/, and such common English terms as /byre/, /mews/,
/weir/, and /wain/ began to disappear. /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 by 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/, /mud-scow/,
/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/.[19] In 1785 Jefferson
proposed /mill/, /cent/, /dime/, /dollar/ and /eagle/, and this
nomenclature was adopted.
Various nautical terms peculiar to America, or taken into English from
American sources, came in during the eighteenth century, among them,
/schooner/, /cat-boat/ and /pungy/, not to recall /batteau/ and
/canoe/. According to a recent historian of the American merchant
marine,[20] the first schooner ever seen was launched at Gloucester,
Mass., in 1713. The word, it appears, was originally spelled
/scooner/. /To scoon/ was a verb borrowed by the New Englanders from
some Scotch dialect, and meant to skim or skip across the water like a
flat stone. As the first schooner left the ways and glided out into
Gloucester harbor, an enraptured spectator shouted: "Oh, see how she
scoons!" "A /scooner/ let her be!" replied Captain Andrew Robinson,
her [Pg048] builder--and all boats of her peculiar and novel
fore-and-aft rig took the name thereafter. The Dutch mariners borrowed
the term and changed the spelling, and this change was soon accepted
in America. The Scotch root came from the Norse /skunna/, to hasten,
and there are analogues in Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon and Old High German.
The origin of /cat-boat/ and /pungy/ I have been unable to determine.
Perhaps the latter is related in some way to /pung/, a one-horse sled
or wagon. /Pung/ was once widely used in the United States, but of
late it has sunk to the estate of a New England provincialism.
Longfellow used it, and in 1857 a writer in the /Knickerbocker
Magazine/ reported that /pungs/ filled Broadway, in New York, after a
snow-storm.
Most of these new words, of course, produced derivatives, for example,
/to stack hay/, /to shingle/, /to shuck/ (/i. e./, corn), /to trail/
and /to caucus/. /Backwoods/ immediately begat /backwoodsman/ and was
itself turned into a common adjective. The colonists, indeed, showed a
beautiful disregard of linguistic nicety. At an early date they
shortened the English law-phrase, /to convey by deed/, to the simple
verb, /to deed/. Pickering protested against this as a barbarism, and
argued that no self-respecting law-writer would employ it, but all the
same it was firmly entrenched in the common speech and it has remained
there to this day. /To table/, for /to lay on the table/, came in at
the same time, and so did various forms represented by /bindery/, for
/bookbinder's shop/. /To tomahawk/ appeared before 1650, and /to
scalp/ must have followed soon after. Within the next century and a
half they were reinforced by many other such new verbs, and by such
adjectives made of nouns as /no-account/ and /one-horse/, and such
nouns made of verbs as /carry-all/ and /goner/, and such adverbs as
/no-how/. In particular, the manufacture of new verbs went on at a
rapid pace. In his letter to Webster in 1789, Franklin denounced /to
advocate/, /to progress/, and /to oppose/--a vain enterprise, for all
of them are now in perfectly good usage. /To advocate/, indeed, was
used by Thomas Nashe in 1589, and by John Milton half a century later,
but it seems to have been reinvented in America. In 1822 and again in
1838 Robert Southey, then poet laureate, led two belated attacks upon
it, as a barbarous Americanism, but [Pg049] its obvious usefulness
preserved it, and it remains in good usage on both sides of the
Atlantic today--one of the earliest of the English borrowings from
America. In the end, indeed, even so ardent a purist as Richard Grant
White adopted it, as he did /to placate/.[21]
Webster, though he agreed with Franklin in opposing /to advocate/,
gave his /imprimatur/ to /to appreciate/ (/i. e./, to rise in
value), and is credited by Sir Charles Lyell[22] with having himself
invented /to demoralize/. He also approved /to obligate/. /To
antagonize/ seems to have been given currency by John Quincy Adams,
/to immigrate/ by John Marshall, /to eventuate/ by Gouverneur Morris,
and /to derange/ by George Washington. Jefferson, always hospitable
to new words, used /to belittle/ in his "Notes on Virginia," and
Thornton thinks that he coined it. Many new verbs were made by
the simple process of prefixing the preposition to common nouns,
/e. g./, /to clerk/, /to dicker/, /to dump/, /to blow/, (/i. e./,
to bluster or boast), /to cord/ (/i. e./, wood) /to stump/, /to
room/ and /to shin/. Others were made by transforming verbs in the
orthodox vocabulary, /e. g./, /to cavort/ from /to curvet/, and /to
snoop/ from /to snook/. Others arose as metaphors, /e. g./, /to
whitewash/ (figuratively) and /to squat/ (on unoccupied land). Others
were made by hitching suffixes to nouns, /e. g./, /to negative/,
/to deputize/, /to locate/, /to legislate/, /to infract/, /to
compromit/ and /to happify/. Yet others seem to have been produced by
onomatopoeia, /e. g./, /to fizzle/, or to have arisen by some other
such spontaneous process, so far unintelligible, /e. g./, /to tote/.
With them came an endless series of verb-phrases, /e. g./, /to draw a
bead/, /to face the music/, /to darken one's doors/, /to take to the
woods/, /to fly off the handle/, /to go on the war-path/ and /to saw
wood/--all obvious products of frontier life. Many coinages of the
pre-Revolutionary era later disappeared. Jefferson used /to ambition/
but it dropped out nevertheless, and so did /to compromit/, (/i. e./,
to compromise), /to homologize/, and /to happify/. Fierce battles
raged 'round some of these words, and they were all violently derided
in England. Even so useful a verb as /to locate/, now in perfectly
good usage, [Pg050] was denounced in the third volume of the /North
American Review/, and other purists of the times tried to put down
/to legislate/.