consciousness so soaring and so blatant that it began to dismiss all
British usage and opinion as puerile and idiotic. William L. Marcy,
when Secretary of State under Pierce (1853-57), issued a circular to
all American diplomatic and consular officers, loftily bidding them
employ only "the American language" in communicating with him. The
Legislature of Indiana, in an act approved February 15, 1838,
establishing the state university at Bloomington,[11] provided that it
should instruct the youth of the new commonwealth (it had been
admitted to the Union in 1816) "in the American, learned and foreign
languages ... and literature." Such grandiose pronunciamentos [Pg072]
well indicate and explain the temper of the era.[12] It was a time of
expansion and braggadocia. The new republic would not only produce a
civilization and a literature of its own; it would show the way for
all other civilizations and literatures. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, the
enemy of Poe, rose from his decorous Baptist pew to protest that so
much patriotism amounted to insularity and absurdity, but there seems
to have been no one to second the motion. It took, indeed, the vast
shock of the Civil War to unhorse the optimists. While the Jackson
influence survived, it was the almost unanimous national conviction
that "he who dallies is a dastard, and he who doubts is damned."
§ 2
/The Language in the Making/--All this jingoistic bombast, however,
was directed toward defending, not so much the national vernacular as
the national beautiful letters. True enough, an English attack upon a
definite American locution always brought out certain critical
minute-men, but in the main they were anything but hospitable to the
racy neologisms that kept crowding up from below, and most of them
were eager to be accepted as masters of orthodox English and very
sensitive to the charge that their writing was bestrewn with
Americanisms. A glance through the native criticism of the time will
show how ardently even the most uncompromising patriots imitated the
Johnsonian jargon then fashionable in England. Fowler and Griswold
followed pantingly in the footsteps of Macaulay; their prose is
extraordinarily ornate and self-conscious, and one searches it in vain
for any concession to colloquialism. Poe, the master of them all,
achieved a style so elephantine that many an English leader-writer
must have studied it with envy. A few bolder spirits, as we have seen,
spoke out for national freedom in language as well as in
letters--among them, Channing--but in the main the Brahmins of the
time were conservatives in [Pg073] that department, and it is
difficult to imagine Emerson or Irving or Bryant sanctioning the
innovations later adopted so easily by Howells. Lowell and Walt
Whitman, in fact, were the first men of letters, properly so called,
to give specific assent to the great changes that were firmly fixed in
the national speech during the half century between the War of 1812
and the Civil War. Lowell did so in his preface to the second series
of "The Biglow Papers." Whitman made his declaration in "An American
Primer." In discussing his own poetry, he said: "It is an attempt to
give the spirit, the body and the man, new words, new potentialities
of speech--an American, a cosmopolitan (for the best of America is the
best cosmopolitanism) range of self-expression." And then: "The
Americans are going to be the most fluent and melodious-voiced people
in the world--and the most perfect users of words. The new times, the
new people, the new vistas need a new tongue according--yes, and what
is more, they will have such a new tongue." To which, as everyone
knows, Whitman himself forthwith contributed many daring (and still
undigested) novelties, /e. g./, /camerado/, /romanza/, /Adamic/ and
/These States/.
Meanwhile, in strong contrast to the lingering conservatism above
there was a wild and lawless development of the language below, and in
the end it forced itself into recognition, and profited by the
literary declaration of independence of its very opponents. "The /jus
et norma loquendi/," says W. R. Morfill, the English philologist, "do
not depend upon scholars." Particularly in a country where scholarship
is still new and wholly cloistered, and the overwhelming majority of
the people are engaged upon novel and highly exhilarating tasks, far
away from schools and with a gigantic cockiness in their hearts. The
remnants of the Puritan civilization had been wiped out by the rise of
the proletariat under Jackson, and whatever was fine and sensitive in
it had died with it. What remained of an urbane habit of mind and
utterance began to be confined to the narrowing feudal areas of the
south, and to the still narrower refuge of the Boston Brahmins, now,
for the first time, a definitely recognized caste of /intelligentsia/,
self-charged with carrying the [Pg074] torch of culture through a new
Dark Age. The typical American, in Paulding's satirical phrase, became
"a bundling, gouging, impious" fellow, without either "morals,
literature, religion or refinement." Next to the savage struggle for
land and dollars, party politics was the chief concern of the people,
and with the disappearance of the old leaders and the entrance of
pushing upstarts from the backwoods, political controversy sank to an
incredibly low level. Bartlett, in the introduction to the second
edition of his Glossary, describes the effect upon the language. First
the enfranchised mob, whether in the city wards or along the western
rivers, invented fantastic slang-words and turns of phrase; then they
were "seized upon by stump-speakers at political meetings"; then they
were heard in Congress; then they got into the newspapers; and finally
they came into more or less good usage. Much contemporary evidence is
to the same effect. Fowler, in listing "low expressions" in 1850,
described them as "chiefly political." "The vernacular tongue of the
country," said Daniel Webster, "has become greatly vitiated, depraved
and corrupted by the style of the congressional debates." Thornton, in
the appendix to his Glossary, gives some astounding specimens of
congressional oratory between the 20's and 60's, and many more will
reward the explorer who braves the files of the /Congressional Globe/.
This flood of racy and unprecedented words and phrases beat upon and
finally penetrated the retreat of the /literati/, but the purity of
speech cultivated there had little compensatory influence upon the
vulgate. The newspaper was now enthroned, and /belles lettres/ were
cultivated almost in private, and as a mystery. It is probable,
indeed, that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Ten Nights in a Bar-room," both
published in the early 50's, were the first contemporary native books,
after Cooper's day, that the American people, as a people, ever read.
Nor did the pulpit, now fast falling from its old high estate, lift a
corrective voice. On the contrary, it joined the crowd, and Bartlett
denounces it specifically for its bad example, and cites, among its
crimes against the language, such inventions as /to doxologize/ and
/to funeralize/. [Pg075] To these novelties, apparently without any
thought of their uncouthness, Fowler adds to /missionate/ and
/consociational/.
As I say, the pressure from below broke down the defenses of the
purists, and literally forced a new national idiom upon them. Pen in
hand, they might still achieve laborious imitations of Johnson and
Macaulay, but their mouths began to betray them. "When it comes to
talking," wrote Charles Astor Bristed for Englishmen in 1855, "the
most refined and best educated American, who has habitually resided in
his own country, the very man who would write, on some serious topic,
volumes in which no peculiarity could be detected, will, in half a
dozen sentences, use at least as many words that cannot fail to strike
the inexperienced Englishman who hears them for the first time."
Bristed gave a specimen of the American of that time, calculated to
flabbergast his inexperienced Englishman; you will find it in the
volume of Cambridge Essays, already cited. His aim was to explain and
defend Americanisms, and so shut off the storm of English reviling,
and he succeeded in producing one of the most thoughtful and
persuasive essays on the subject ever written. But his purpose failed
and the attack kept up, and eight years afterward the Very Rev. Henry
Alford, D.D., dean of Canterbury, led a famous assault. "Look at those
phrases," he said, "which so amuse us in their speech and books; at
their reckless exaggeration and contempt for congruity; and then
compare the character and history of the nation--its blunted sense of
moral obligation and duty to man; its open disregard of conventional
right where aggrandizement is to be obtained; and I may now say, its
reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled
war in the history of the world."[13] In his American edition of 1866
Dr. Alford withdrew this reference to the Civil War and somewhat
ameliorated his indignation otherwise, but he clung to the main counts
in his indictment, and most Englishmen, I daresay, still give them a
certain support. The American is no longer a [Pg076] "vain,
egotistical, insolent, rodomontade sort of fellow"; America is no
longer the "brigand confederation" of the /Foreign Quarterly/ or "the
loathsome creature, ... maimed and lame, full of sores and ulcers" of
Dickens; but the Americanism is yet regarded with a bilious eye, and
pounced upon viciously when found. Even the friendliest English
critics seem to be daunted by the gargantuan copiousness of American
inventions in speech. Their position, perhaps, was well stated by
Capt. Basil Hall, author of the celebrated "Travels in North America,"
in 1827. When he argued that "surely such innovations are to be
deprecated," an American asked him this question: "If a word becomes
universally current in America, why should it not take its station in
the language?" "Because," replied Hall in all seriousness, "there are
words enough in our language already."
§ 3
/The Expanding Vocabulary/--A glance at some of the characteristic
coinages of the time, as they are revealed in the /Congressional
Globe/, in contemporary newspapers and political tracts, and in that
grotesque small literature of humor which began with Judge Thomas C.
Haliburton's "Sam Slick" in 1835, is almost enough to make one
sympathize with Dean Alford. Bartlett quotes /to doxologize/ from the
/Christian Disciple/, a quite reputable religious paper of the 40's.
/To citizenize/ was used and explained by Senator Young, of Illinois,
in the Senate on February 1, 1841, and he gave Noah Webster as
authority for it. /To funeralize/ and /to missionate/, along with
/consociational/, were contributions of the backwoods pulpit; perhaps
it also produced /hell-roaring/ and /hellion/, the latter of which was
a favorite of the Mormons and even got into a sermon by Henry Ward
Beecher. /To deacon/, a verb of decent mien in colonial days,
signifying to read a hymn line by line, responded to the rough humor
of the time, and began to mean to swindle or adulterate, /e. g./, to
put the largest berries at the top of the box, to extend one's fences
/sub rosa/, or to mix sand with sugar. A great rage for extending the
vocabulary by the use of suffixes seized upon [Pg077] the corn-fed
etymologists, and they produced a formidable new vocabulary in /-ize/,
/-ate/, /-ify/, /-acy/, /-ous/ and /-ment/. Such inventions as /to
obligate/, /to concertize/, /to questionize/, /retiracy/,
/savagerous/, /coatee/ (a sort of diminutive for coat) and /citified/
appeared in the popular vocabulary, and even got into more or less
good usage. Fowler, in 1850, cited /publishment/ and /releasement/
with no apparent thought that they were uncouth. And at the same time
many verbs were made by the simple process of back formation, as, /to
resurrect/, /to excurt/, /to resolute/, /to burgle/[14] and /to
enthuse/.[15]
Some of these inventions, after flourishing for a generation or more,
were retired with blushes during the period of aesthetic consciousness
following the Civil War, but a large number have survived to our own
day, and are in good usage. Not even the most bilious purist would
think of objecting to /to affiliate/, /to itemize/, /to resurrect/ or
/to Americanize/ today, and yet all of them gave grief to the
judicious when they first appeared in the debates of Congress, brought
there by statesmen from the backwoods. Nor to such simpler verbs of
the period as /to corner/ (/i. e./, the market), /to boss/ and /to
lynch/.[16] Nor perhaps to /to boom/, /to boost/, /to kick/ (in the
sense of to protest), /to coast/ (on a sled), /to engineer/, /to
collide/, /to chink/ (/i. e./, logs), /to feaze/, /to splurge/, /to
aggravate/ (in the sense of to anger), /to yank/ and /to crawfish/.
These verbs have entered into the very fibre of the American vulgate,
and so have many nouns derived from them, /e. g./, /boomer/,
/boom-town/, /bouncer/, /kicker/, /kick/, /splurge/, /roller-coaster/.
A few of them, /e. g./, /to collide/ and /to feaze/, were [Pg078]
archaic English terms brought to new birth; a few others, /e. g./, /to
holler/[17] and /to muss/, were obviously mere corruptions. But a good
many others, /e. g./, /to bulldoze/, /to hornswoggle/ and /to scoot/,
were genuine inventions, and redolent of the soil.
With the new verbs came a great swarm of verb-phrases, some of them
short and pithy and others extraordinarily elaborate, but all showing
the true national talent for condensing a complex thought, and often a
whole series of thoughts, into a vivid and arresting image. Of the
first class are /to fill the bill/, /to fizzle out/, /to make tracks/,
/to peter out/, /to plank down/, /to go back on/, /to keep tab/, /to
light out/ and /to back water/. Side by side with them we have
inherited such common coins of speech as /to make the fur fly/, /to
cut a swath/, /to know him like a book/, /to keep a stiff upper lip/,
/to cap the climax/, /to handle without gloves/, /to freeze on to/,
/to go it blind/, /to pull wool over his eyes/, /to know the ropes/,
/to get solid with/, /to spread one's self/, /to run into the ground/,
/to dodge the issue/, /to paint the town red/, /to take a back seat/
and /to get ahead of/. These are so familiar that we use them and hear
them without thought; they seem as authentically parts of the English
idiom as /to be left at the post/. And yet, as the labors of Thornton
have demonstrated, all of them are of American nativity, and the
circumstances surrounding the origin of some of them have been
accurately determined. Many others are palpably the products of the
great movement toward the West, for example, /to pan out/, /to strike
it rich/, /to jump/ or /enter a claim/, /to pull up stakes/, /to rope
in/, /to die with one's boots on/, /to get the deadwood on/, /to get
the drop/, /to back and fill/ (a steamboat phrase used figuratively)
and /to get the bulge on/. And in many others the authentic American
is no less plain, for example, in /to kick the bucket/, /to put a bug
in his [Pg079] ear/, /to see the elephant/, /to crack up/, /to do up
brown/, /to bark up the wrong tree/, /to jump on with both feet/, /to
go the whole hog/, /to make a kick/, /to buck the tiger/, /to let it
slide/ and /to come out at the little end of the horn/. /To play
possum/ belongs to this list. To it Thornton adds /to knock into a
cocked hat/, despite its English sound, and /to have an ax to grind/.
/To go for/, both in the sense of belligerency and in that of
partisanship, is also American, and so is /to go through/ (/i. e./, to
plunder).
Of adjectives the list is scarcely less long. Among the coinages of
the first half of the century that are in good use today are
/non-committal/, /highfalutin/, /well-posted/, /down-town/,
/played-out/, /flat-footed/, /whole-souled/ and /true-blue/. The first
appears in a Senate debate of 1841; /highfalutin/ in a political
speech of the same decade. Both are useful words; it is impossible,
not employing them, to convey the ideas behind them without
circumlocution. The use of /slim/ in the sense of meagre, as in /slim
chance/, /slim attendance/ and /slim support/, goes back still
further. The English use /small/ in place of it. Other, and less
respectable contributions of the time are /brash/, /brainy/, /peart/,
/locoed/, /pesky/, /picayune/, /scary/, /well-heeled/, /hardshell/
(/e. g./, Baptist), /low-flung/, /codfish/ (to indicate opprobrium)
and /go-to-meeting/. The use of /plumb/ as an adjective, as in /plumb
crazy/, is an English archaism that was revived in the United States
in the early years of the century. In the more orthodox adverbial form
of /plump/ it still survives, for example, in "she fell /plump/ into
his arms." But this last is also good English.
The characteristic American substitution of /mad/ for /angry/ goes
back to the eighteenth century, and perhaps denotes the survival of an
English provincialism. Witherspoon noticed it and denounced it in
1781, and in 1816 Pickering called it "low" and said that it was not
used "except in very familiar conversation." But it got into much
better odor soon afterward, and by 1840 it passed unchallenged. Its
use is one of the peculiarities that Englishmen most quickly notice in
American colloquial speech today. In formal written discourse it is
less often encountered, probably because the English marking of it has
so conspicuously singled it out. But it is constantly met with
[Pg080] in the newspapers and in the /Congressional Record/, and it is
not infrequently used by such writers as Howells and Dreiser. In the
familiar simile, /as mad as a hornet/, it is used in the American
sense. But /as mad as a March hare/ is English, and connotes insanity,
not mere anger. The English meaning of the word is preserved in
/mad-house/ and /mad-dog/, but I have often noticed that American
rustics, employing the latter term, derive from it a vague notion, not
that the dog is demented, but that it is in a simple fury. From this
notion, perhaps, comes the popular belief that dogs may be thrown into
hydrophobia by teasing and badgering them.
It was not, however, among the verbs and adjectives that the American
word-coiners of the first half of the century achieved their gaudiest
innovations, but among the substantives. Here they had temptation and
excuse in plenty, for innumerable new objects and relations demanded
names, and here they exercised their fancy without restraint. Setting
aside loan words, which will be considered later, three main varieties
of new nouns were thus produced. The first consisted of English words
rescued from obsolescence or changed in meaning, the second of
compounds manufactured of the common materials of the mother tongue,
and the third of entirely new inventions. Of the first class, good
specimens are /deck/ (of cards), /gulch/, /gully/ and /billion/, the
first three old English words restored to usage in America and the
last a sound English word changed in meaning. Of the second class,
examples are offered by /gum-shoe/, /mortgage-shark/, /dug-out/,
/shot-gun/, /stag-party/, /wheat-pit/, /horse-sense/, /chipped-beef/,
/oyster-supper/, /buzz-saw/, /chain-gang/ and /hell-box/. And of the
third there are instances in /buncombe/, /greaser/, /conniption/,
/bloomer/, /campus/, /galoot/, /maverick/, /roustabout/, /bugaboo/ and
/blizzard/.
Of these coinages, perhaps those of the second class are most numerous
and characteristic. In them American exhibits one of its most marked
tendencies: a habit of achieving short cuts in speech by a process of
agglutination. Why explain laboriously, as an Englishman might, that
the notes of a new bank (in a day of innumerable new banks) are
insufficiently secure? Call [Pg081] them /wild-cat/ notes and have
done! Why describe a gigantic rain storm with the lame adjectives of
everyday? Call it a /cloud-burst/ and immediately a vivid picture of
it is conjured up. /Rough-neck/ is a capital word; it is more apposite
and savory than the English /navvy/, and it is overwhelmingly more
American.[18] /Square-meal/ is another. /Fire-eater/ is yet another.
And the same instinct for the terse, the eloquent and the picturesque
is in /boiled-shirt/, /blow-out/, /big-bug/, /claim-jumper/,
/spread-eagle/, /come-down/, /back-number/, /claw-hammer/ (coat),
/bottom-dollar/, /poppy-cock/, /cold-snap/, /back-talk/, /back-taxes/,
/calamity-howler/, /cut-off/, /fire-bug/, /grab-bag/, /grip-sack/,
/grub-stake/, /pay-dirt/, /tender-foot/, /stocking-feet/,
/ticket-scalper/, /store-clothes/, /small-potatoes/, /cake-walk/,
/prairie-schooner/, /round-up/, /snake-fence/, /flat-boat/,
/under-the-weather/, /on-the-hoof/, and /jumping-off-place/. These
compounds (there must be thousands of them) have been largely
responsible for giving the language its characteristic tang and color.
Such specimens as /bell-hop/, /semi-occasional/, /chair-warmer/ and
/down-and-out/ are as distinctively American as baseball or the
quick-lunch.
The spirit of the language appears scarcely less clearly in some of
the coinages of the other classes. There are, for example, the English
words that have been extended or restricted in meaning, /e. g./,
/docket/ (for court calendar), /betterment/ (for improvement to
property), /collateral/ (for security), /crank/ (for fanatic),
/jumper/ (for tunic), /tickler/ (for memorandum or reminder),[19]
/carnival/ (in such phrases as /carnival of crime/), /scrape/ (for
fight or difficulty),[20] /flurry/ (of snow, or in the market),
/suspenders/, /diggings/ (for habitation) and /range/. Again, there
are the new assemblings of English materials, /e. g./, /doggery/,
/rowdy/, /teetotaler/, /goatee/, /tony/ and /cussedness/. Yet again,
there are the purely artificial words, /e. g./, /sockdolager/,
/hunkydory/, /scalawag/, /guyascutis/, /spondulix/, /slumgullion/,
/rambunctious/, /scrumptious/, [Pg082] /to skedaddle/, /to
absquatulate/ and /to exfluncticate/.[21] In the use of the last-named
coinages fashions change. In the 40's /to absquatulate/ was in good
usage, but it has since disappeared. Most of the other inventions of
the time, however, have to some extent survived, and it would be
difficult to find an American of today who did not know the meaning of
/scalawag/ and /rambunctious/ and who did not occasionally use them. A
whole series of artificial American words groups itself around the
prefix /ker/, for example, /ker-flop/, /ker-splash/, /ker-thump/,
/ker-bang/, /ker-plunk/, /ker-slam/ and /ker-flummux/. This prefix and
its onomatopoeic daughters have been borrowed by the English, but
Thornton and Ware agree that it is American. Its origin has not been
determined. As Sayce says, "the native instinct of language breaks out
wherever it has the chance, and coins words which can be traced back
to no ancestors."
In the first chapter I mentioned the superior imaginativeness revealed
by Americans in meeting linguistic emergencies, whereby, for example,
in seeking names for new objects introduced by the building of
railroads, they surpassed the English /plough/ and /crossing-plate/
with /cow-catcher/ and /frog/. That was in the 30's. Already at that
early day the two languages were so differentiated that they produced
wholly distinct railroad nomenclatures. Such commonplace American
terms as /box-car/, /caboose/, /air-line/ and /ticket-agent/ are still
quite unknown in England. So are /freight-car/, /flagman/, /towerman/,
/switch/, /switching-engine/, /switch-yard/, /switchman/,
/track-walker/, /engineer/, /baggage-room/, /baggage-check/,
/baggage-smasher/, /accommodation-train/, /baggage-master/,
/conductor/, /express-car/, /flat-car/, /hand-car/, /way-bill/,
/expressman/, /express-office/, /fast-freight/, /wrecking-crew/,
/jerk-water/, /commutation-ticket/, /commuter/, /round-trip/,
/mileage-book/, /ticket-scalper/, /depot/, /limited/, /hot-box/,
iron-horse, /stop-over/, /tie/, /rail/, /fish-plate/, /run/,
/train-boy/, /chair-car/, /club-car/, /diner/, /sleeper/, /bumpers/,
/mail-clerk/, /passenger-coach/, /day-coach/, /excursionist/, [Pg083]
/excursion-train/, /railroad-man/, /ticket-office/, /truck/ and
/right-of-way/, not to mention the verbs, /to flag/, /to derail/, /to
express/, /to dead-head/, /to side-swipe/, /to stop-over/, /to fire/
(/i. e./, a locomotive), /to switch/, /to side-track/, /to railroad/,
/to commute/, /to telescope/ and /to clear the track/. These terms are
in constant use in America; their meaning is familiar to all
Americans; many of them have given the language everyday figures of
speech.[22] But the majority of them would puzzle an Englishman, just
as the English /luggage-van/, /permanent-way/, /goods-waggon/,
/guard/, /carrier/, /booking-office/, /return-ticket/, /railway-rug/,
/R. S. O./ (railway sub-office), /tripper/, /line/, /points/, /shunt/,
/metals/ and /bogie/ would puzzle the average untravelled American.