particularly /lengthy/. The /British Critic/ attacked it in November,
1793, and it also had enemies at home, but John Adams had used it in
his diary in 1759 and the authority of Jefferson and Hamilton was
behind it, and so it survived. Years later James Russell Lowell spoke
of it as "the excellent adjective,"[23] and boasted that American had
given it to English. /Dutiable/ also met with opposition, and
moreover, it had a rival, /customable/; but Marshall wrote it into his
historic decisions, and thus it took root. The same anonymous watchman
of the /North American Review/ who protested against /to locate/
pronounced his anathema upon "such barbarous terms as /presidential/
and /congressional/," but the plain need for them kept them in the
language. /Gubernatorial/ had come in long before this, and is to be
found in the New Jersey Archives of 1734. /Influential/ was denounced
by the Rev. Jonathan Boucher and by George Canning, who argued that
/influent/ was better, but it was ardently defended by William
Pinkney, of Maryland, and gradually made its way. /Handy/, /kinky/,
/law-abiding/, /chunky/, /solid/ (in the sense of well-to-do),
/evincive/, /complected/, /judgmatical/, /underpinned/, /blooded/ and
/cute/ were also already secure in revolutionary days. So with many
nouns. Jefferson used /breadstuffs/ in his Report of the Secretary of
State on Commercial Restrictions, December 16, 1793. /Balance/, in the
sense of remainder, got into the debates of the First Congress.
/Mileage/ was used by Franklin in 1754, and is now sound English.
/Elevator/, in the sense of a storage house for grain, was used by
Jefferson and by others before him. /Draw/, for /drawbridge/, comes
down from Revolutionary days. So does /slip/, in the sense of a berth
for vessels. So does /addition/, in the sense of a suburb. So,
finally, does /darkey/.
The history of many of these Americanisms shows how vain is the effort
of grammarians to combat the normal processes of [Pg051] language
development. I have mentioned the early opposition to /dutiable/,
/influential/, /presidential/, /lengthy/, /to locate/, /to oppose/,
/to advocate/, /to legislate/ and /to progress/. /Bogus/, /reliable/
and /standpoint/ were attacked with the same academic ferocity. All of
them are to be found in Bryant's /Index Expurgatorius/[24] (/circa/
1870), and /reliable/ was denounced by Bishop Coxe as "that abominable
barbarism" so late as 1886.[25] Edward S. Gould, another
uncompromising purist, said of /standpoint/ that it was "the bright
particular star ... of solemn philological blundering" and "the very
counterpart of Dogberry's /non-com/."[26] Gould also protested against
/to jeopardize/, /leniency/ and /to demean/, and Richard Grant White
joined him in an onslaught upon /to donate/. But all of these words
are in good use in the United States today, and some of them have gone
over into English.[27]
§ 4
/Changed Meanings/--A number of the foregoing contributions to the
American vocabulary, of course, were simply common English words with
changed meanings. /To squat/, in the sense of /to crouch/, had been
sound English for centuries; what the colonists did was to attach a
figurative meaning to it, and then bring that figurative meaning into
wider usage than the literal meaning. In a somewhat similar manner
they changed the significance of /pond/, as I have pointed out. So,
too, with /creek/. In English it designated (and still designates) a
small inlet or arm of a large river or of the sea; in American, so
early as 1674, it designated any small stream. Many other such changed
meanings crept into American in the early days. A typical one was the
use of /lot/ to designate a /parcel/ of land. Thornton says, perhaps
inaccurately, that it originated in the fact that the land in New
England was distributed by lot. Whatever the truth, /lot/, [Pg052] to
this day, is in almost universal use in the United States, though rare
in England. Our conveyancers, in describing real property, always
speak of "all that /lot/ or /parcel/ of land."[28] Other examples of
the application of old words to new purposes are afforded by
/freshet/, /barn/ and /team/. A /freshet/, in eighteenth century
English, meant any stream of fresh water; the colonists made it
signify an inundation. A /barn/ was a house or shed for storing crops;
in the colonies the word came to mean a place for keeping cattle also.
A /team/, in English, was a pair of draft horses; in the colonies it
came to mean both horses and vehicle.
The process is even more clearly shown in the history of such words as
/corn/ and /shoe/. /Corn/, in orthodox English, means grain for human
consumption, and especially wheat, /e. g./, the /Corn/ Laws. The
earliest settlers, following this usage, gave the name of /Indian
corn/ to what the Spaniards, following the Indians themselves, had
called /maíz/. But gradually the adjective fell off, and by the middle
of the eighteenth century /maize/ was called simply /corn/, and grains
in general were called /breadstuffs/. Thomas Hutchinson, discoursing
to George III in 1774, used /corn/ in this restricted sense, speaking
of "rye and /corn/ mixed." "What /corn/?" asked George. "/Indian
corn/," explained Hutchinson, "or, as it is called in authors,
/maize/."[29] So with /shoe/. In English it meant (and still means) a
topless article of foot-wear, but the colonists extended its meaning
to varieties covering the ankle, thus displacing the English /boot/,
which they reserved for foot coverings reaching at least to the knee.
To designate the English /shoe/ they began to use the word /slipper/.
This distinction between English and American usage still prevails,
despite the affectation which has lately sought to revive /boot/, and
with it its derivatives, /boot-shop/ and /bootmaker/.
/Store/, /shop/, /lumber/, /pie/, /dry-goods/, /cracker/, /rock/ and
/partridge/ among nouns and /to haul/, /to jew/, /to notify/ and /to
heft/ among verbs offer further examples of changed meanings. Down to
the [Pg053] middle of the eighteenth century /shop/ continued to
designate a retail establishment in America, as it does in England to
this day. /Store/ was applied only to a large establishment--one
showing, in some measure, the character of a warehouse. But in 1774 a
Boston young man was advertising in the /Massachusetts Spy/ for "a
/place/ as a /clerk/ in a /store/" (three Americanisms in a row!).
Soon afterward /shop/ began to acquire its special American meaning as
a factory, /e. g./, /machine-shop/. Meanwhile /store/ completely
displaced /shop/ in the English sense, and it remained for a late
flowering of Anglomania, as in the case of /boot/ and /shoe/, to
restore, in a measure, the /status quo ante/. /Lumber/, in eighteenth
century English, meant disused furniture, and this is its common
meaning in England today. But the colonists early employed it to
designate timber, and that use of it is now universal in America. Its
familiar derivatives, /e. g./, /lumber-yard/, /lumberman/,
/lumberjack/, greatly reinforce this usage. /Pie/, in English, means a
meat-pie; in American it means a fruit-pie. The English call a
fruit-pie a /tart/; the Americans call a meat-pie a /pot-pie/.
/Dry-goods/, in England, means "non-liquid goods, as corn" (/i. e./,
wheat); in the United States the term means "textile fabrics or
wares."[30] The difference had appeared before 1725. /Rock/, in
English, always means a large mass; in America it may mean a small
stone, as in /rock-pile/ and /to throw a rock/. The Puritans were
putting /rocks/ into the foundations of their meeting-houses so early
as 1712.[31] /Cracker/ began to be used for /biscuit/ before the
Revolution. /Tavern/ displaced /inn/ at the same time. As for
/partridge/, it is cited by a late authority[32] as a salient example
of changed meaning, along with /corn/ and /store/. In England the term
is applied only to the true partridge (/Perdix perdix/) and its nearly
related varieties, but in the United States it is also used to
designate the ruffed grouse (/Bonasa umbellus/), the common quail
(/Colinus virginianus/) and various [Pg054] other tetraonoid birds.
This confusion goes back to colonial times. So with /rabbit/. Properly
speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are
all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped
the word /hare/ out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in
American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always
applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which, curiously enough, is not
a hare at all, but a true rabbit.
/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 sound 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; 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 familiar American misuse of /Miss/ or
/Mis'/ for /Mrs./. It was so widespread by 1790 that on November 17 of
that year Webster solemnly denounced it in the /American Mercury/.
§ 5
/Archaic English Words/--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/,"[33]
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
[Pg055] produced from an original immigration of less than 80,000.[34]
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,[35] and there were signs of the rise of a new native
aristocracy, entirely distinct from the older aristocracy of the royal
governors' courts.[36] 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. Moreover, after 1760 the colonial eyes 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.[37]
The result of this isolation, on the one hand, was that proliferation
of the colonial speech which I have briefly reviewed, and on the other
hand, the preservation of many words and phrases that gradually became
obsolete in England. The Pilgrims of 1620 brought over with them the
English of James I and the Revised [Pg056] Version, and their
descendants of a century later, inheriting it, allowed its
fundamentals to be little changed by the academic overhauling that the
mother tongue was put to during the early part of the eighteenth
century. In part they were ignorant of this overhauling, and in part
they were indifferent to it. Whenever the new usage differed from that
of the Bible they were inclined to remain faithful to the Bible, not
only because of its pious authority but also because of the superior
pull of its imminent and constant presence. Thus when an artificial
prudery in English ordered the abandonment of the Anglo-Saxon /sick/
for the Gothic /ill/, the colonies refused to follow, for /sick/ was
in both the Old Testament and the New;[38] and that refusal remains in
force to this day.
A very 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/,
/beef/ (to designate the live animal), /chinch/, /cord-wood/,
/homespun/, /ice-cream/, /julep/ and /swingle-tree/; Halliwell[39]
adds /andiron/, /bay-window/, /cesspool/, /clodhopper/,
/cross-purposes/, /greenhorn/, /loophole/, /ragamuffin/, /riff-raff/,
/rigmarole/ 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
"Anthony and Cleopatra." /Char/, as a noun, disappeared from English a
long time ago, but it survives in American as /chore/. Among the
adjectives 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": [Pg057]
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
New English Dictionary offers examples much older--from Chaucer,
Wyclif and Gower. /To interview/ is in Dekker. /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, both English and American, now call it an
Americanism.[40] /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/, which means only
homelike or unadorned in England, was used in its American sense of
plain-featured by both Shakespeare and Milton. Other such survivors
are /burly/, /catty-cornered/, /likely/, /deft/, /copious/, /scant/
and /ornate/. Perhaps /clever/ also belongs to this category, that is,
in the American sense of amiable.
"Our ancestors," said James Russell Lowell, "unhappily could bring
over no English better than Shakespeare's." Shakespeare died in 1616;
the Pilgrims landed four years later; Jamestown was founded in 1607.
As we have seen, the colonists, saving a few superior leaders, were
men of small sensitiveness to the refinements of life and speech:
soldiers of fortune, amateur theologians, younger sons, neighborhood
"advanced thinkers," bankrupts, jobless workmen, decayed gentry, and
other such fugitives from culture--in brief, Philistines of the sort
who join tin-pot fraternal orders today, and march in parades, and
whoop for the latest mountebanks in politics. There was thus a touch
of rhetoric in Lowell's saying that they spoke the English of
Shakespeare; as well argue that the London grocers of 1885 spoke the
English of Pater. But in a larger sense he said truly, for these men
at least brought with them the vocabulary of Shakespeare--or a part of
it,--even if the uses he made of it were beyond their comprehension,
and they also brought with [Pg058] them that sense of ease in the
language, that fine disdain for formality, that bold experimentalizing
in words, which was so peculiarly Elizabethan. There were no
grammarians in that day; there were no purists that anyone listened
to; it was a case of saying your say in the easiest and most
satisfying way. In remote parts of the United States there are still
direct and almost pure-blooded descendants of those seventeenth
century colonists. Go among them, and you will hear more words from
the Shakespearean vocabulary, still alive and in common service, than
anywhere else in the world, and more of the loose and brilliant syntax
of that time, and more of its gipsy phrases.[41]
§ 6
/Colonial Pronunciation/--The debate that long raged over the
pronunciation of classical Latin exhibits the difficulty of
determining with exactness the shades of sound in the speech of a
people long departed from earth. The American colonists, of course,
are much nearer to us than the Romans, and so we should have
relatively little difficulty in determining just how they pronounced
this or that word, but against the fact of their nearness stands the
neglect of our philologists, or, perhaps more accurately, our lack of
philologists. What Sweet did to clear up the history of English
pronunciation,[42] and what Wilhelm Corssen did for Latin, no American
professor has yet thought to attempt for American. The literature is
almost, if not quite a blank. But here and there we may get a hint of
the facts, and though the sum of them is not large, they at least
serve to set at rest a number of popular errors.
One of these errors, chiefly prevalent in New England, is that the
so-called Boston pronunciation, with its broad /a/'s (making /last/,
/path/ and /aunt/ almost assonant with /bar/) comes down unbrokenly
from the day of the first settlements, and that it is in consequence
superior in authority to the pronunciation of the [Pg059] rest of the
country, with its flat /a/'s (making the same words assonant with
/ban/). A glance through Webster's "Dissertations" is sufficient to
show that the flat /a/ was in use in New England in 1789, for the
pronunciation of such words as /wrath/, /bath/ and /path/, as given by
him, makes them rhyme with /hath/.[43] Moreover, he gives /aunt/ the
same /a/-sound. From other sources come indications that the /a/ was
likewise flattened in such words as /plant/, /basket/, /branch/,
/dance/, /blast/, /command/ and /castle/, and even in /balm/ and
/calm/. Changes in the sound of the letter have been going on in
English ever since the Middle English period,[44] and according to
Lounsbury[45] they have moved toward the disappearance of the
Continental /a/, "the fundamental vowel-tone of the human voice."
Grandgent, another authority,[46] says that it became flattened "by
the sixteenth century" and that "until 1780 or thereabouts the
standard language had no broad /a/." Even in such words as /father/,
/car/ and /ask/ the flat /a/ was universally used. Sheridan, in the
dictionary he published in 1780,[47] actually gave no /ah/-sound in
his list of vowels. This habit of flatting the /a/ had been brought
over, of course, by the early colonists, and was as general in
America, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, as in
England. Benjamin Franklin, when he wrote his "Scheme for a New
Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling," in 1768, apparently had no
suspicion that any other /a/ was possible. But between 1780 and 1790,
according to Grandgent, a sudden fashion for the broad /a/ (not the
/aw/-sound, as in /fall/, but the Continental sound as in /far/) arose
in England,[48] and this fashion soon found servile imitation in
Boston. But it was as much an affectation in those [Pg060] days as it
is today, and Webster indicated the fact pretty plainly in his
"Dissertations." How, despite his opposition, the broad /a/ prevailed
East of the Connecticut river, and how, in the end, he himself yielded
to it, and even tried to force it upon the whole nation--this will be
rehearsed in the next chapter.
The colonists remained faithful much longer than the English to
various other vowel-sounds that were facing change in the eighteenth
century, for example, the long /e/-sound in /heard/. Webster says that
the custom of rhyming /heard/ with /bird/ instead of with /feared/
came in at the beginning of the Revolution. "To most people in this
country," he adds, "the English pronunciation appears like
affectation." He also argues for rhyming /deaf/ with /leaf/, and
protests against inserting a /y/-sound before the /u/ in such words as
/nature/. Franklin's authority stands behind /git/ for /get/. This
pronunciation, according to Menner,[49] was correct in seventeenth
century England, and perhaps down to the middle of the next century.
So was the use of the Continental /i/-sound in /oblige/, making it
/obleege/. It is probable that the colonists clung to these
disappearing usages much longer than the English. The latter,
according to Webster, were unduly responsive to illogical fashions set
by the exquisites of the court and by popular actors. He blames
Garrick, in particular, for many extravagant innovations, most of them
not followed in the colonies. But Garrick was surely not responsible
for the use of a long /i/-sound in such words as /motive/, nor for the
corruption of /mercy/ to /marcy/. Webster denounced both of these
barbarisms. The second he ascribed somewhat lamely to the fact that
the letter /r/ is called /ar/, and proposed to dispose of it by
changing the /ar/ to /er/.
As for the consonants, the colonists seem to have resisted valiantly
that tendency to slide over them which arose in England after the
Restoration. Franklin, in 1768, still retained the sound of /l/ in
such words as /would/ and /should/, a usage not met with in England
after the year 1700. In the same way, according to Menner, the /w/ in
/sword/ was sounded in America "for some time after Englishmen had
abandoned it." The sensitive ear of Henry James detected an unpleasant
/r/-sound in the speech of Americans, long ago got rid of by the
English, so late as 1905; he even charged that it was inserted
gratuitously in innocent words.[50] The obvious slurring of the
consonants by Southerners is explained by a recent investigator[51] on
the ground that it began in England during the reign of Charles II,
and that most of the Southern colonists came to the New World at that
time. The court of Charles, it is argued, was under French influence,
due to the king's long residence in France and his marriage to
Henrietta Marie. Charles "objected to the inharmonious contractions
/will'nt/ (or /wolln't/) and /wasn't/ and /weren't/ ... and set the
fashion of using the softly euphonious /won't/ and /wan't/, which are
used in speaking to this day by the best class of Southerners." A more
direct French influence upon Southern pronunciation is also pointed
out. "With full knowledge of his /g's/ and his /r's/, ... [the
Southerner] sees fit to glide over them, ... and he carries over the
consonant ending one word to the vowel beginning the next, just as the
Frenchman does." The political importance of the South, in the years
between the Mecklenburg Declaration and the adoption of the
Constitution, tended to force its provincialisms upon the common
language. Many of the acknowledged leaders of the nascent nation were
Southerners, and their pronunciation, as well as their phrases, must
have become familiar everywhere. Pickering gives us a hint, indeed, at
the process whereby their usage influenced that of the rest of the
people.[52]
The Americans early dropped the /h/-sound in such words as /when/ and
/where/, but so far as I can determine they never elided it at the
beginning of words, save in the case of /herb/, and a few others. This
elision is commonly spoken of as a cockney vulgarism, but it has
extended to the orthodox English speech. In /ostler/ the initial /h/
is openly left off; in /hotel/ and /hospital/ it is [Pg062] seldom
sounded, even by the most careful Englishmen. Certain English words in
/h/, in which the /h/ is now sounded, betray its former silence by the
fact that not /a/ but /an/ is still put before them. It is still good
English usage to write /an hotel/ and /an historical/; it is the
American usage to write /a hotel/ and /a historical/.
The great authority of Webster was sufficient to establish the
American pronunciation of /schedule/. In England the /sch/ is always
given the soft sound, but Webster decided for the hard sound, as in
/scheme/. The variance persists to this day. The name of the last
letter of the alphabet, which is always /zed/ in English, is usually
made /zee/ in the United States. Thornton shows that this Americanism
arose in the eighteenth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Bristed was a grandson of John Jacob Astor and was educated at
Cambridge. He contributed an extremely sagacious essay on The English
Language in America to a volume of Cambridge Essays published by a
group of young Cambridge men; London, 1855.
[2] Vol. i, p. vi.
[3] Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling;
Philadelphia, 1768.
[4] Dec. 26, 1789. The Works of B. Franklin, ed. by A. F. Smyth; New
York, 1905, vol. i, p. 40.
[5] /The Druid/, No. 5; reprinted in Witherspoon's Collected Works,
edited by Ashbel Green, vol. iv; New York, 1800-1.
[6] /Vide/, in addition to the citations in the text, the /British
Critic/, Nov. 1793; Feb. 1810; the /Critical Review/, July 1807; Sept.
1809; the /Monthly Review/, May 1808; the /Eclectic Review/, Aug.
1813.
[7] 1815, pp. 307-14; reprinted in his Remarks on National Literature,
Boston, 1823.
[8] American English, /North American Review/, April, 1883.