All words and phrases that could by the largest and most liberal use of
the term be called Americanisms may be properly ranked in one of these
classes.
_Spelling Exercises_
The following short sentence was dictated by the late Lord Palmerston to
eleven Cabinet ministers, not one of whom, it is said, spelled it
correctly:
“It is disagreeable to witness the embarrassment of a harassed pedler
gauging the symmetry of a peeled potato.”
Lord Cecil, in the House of Commons, quoted the following lines, which
he said were given as a dictation exercise by an assistant commissioner
to the children of a school in Ipswich:
“While hewing yew Hugh lost his ewe, and put it in the _Hue and Cry_.
To name its face’s dusky hues
Was all the effort he could use.
You brought the ewe back, by-and-bye,
And only begged the hewer’s ewer,
Your hands to wash in water pure,
Lest nice-nosed ladies, not a few,
Should cry, on coming near you, ‘Ugh!’”
The absurdity of that Indian grunt in our language, “ugh,” is shown in
the following:
H_ugh_ Go_ugh_, of Boro_ugh_bridge, was a ro_ugh_ soldier on furlo_ugh_,
but a man of do_ugh_ty deeds in war, tho_ugh_ before he fo_ugh_t for
this country he was a thoro_ugh_ do_ugh_-faced plo_ugh_man. His horse
having been ho_ugh_ed in an engagement with the enemy, H_ugh_ was taken
prisoner, and, I o_ugh_t to add, was kept on a short eno_ugh_ clo_ugh_
of food, and suffered from dro_ugh_t as well as from hunger. Having, on
his return home, drank too large a dra_ugh_t of usqueba_ugh_, he became
intoxicated, and was la_ugh_ing, co_ugh_ing, and hicco_ugh_ing by a
tro_ugh_, against which he so_ugh_t to steady himself. There he was
accosted by another ro_ugh_, who showed him a cho_ugh_ which he had
ca_ugh_t on a clo_ugh_ near, also the slo_ugh_ of a snake, which he held
at the end of a to_ugh_ bo_ugh_ of e_ugh_-tree, and which his shaggy
sho_ugh_ had found and had bro_ugh_t to him from the entrance to a
so_ugh_ which ran thro_ugh_ and drained a slo_ugh_ that was close to a
lo_ugh_ in the ne_igh_borhood.
_A Spelling Lesson_
The most skilful gauger we ever knew was a maligned cobbler, armed with
a poniard, who drove a pedler’s wagon, using a mullein-stalk as an
instrument of coercion, to tyrannize over his pony shod with calks. He
was a Galilean Sadducee, and he had a phthisicky catarrh, diphtheria,
and the bilious intermittent erysipelas. A certain Sibyl, with the
sobriquet of “Gypsy,” went into ecstasies of cachinnation at seeing him
measure a bushel of peas; and separate saccharine tomatoes from a heap
of peeled potatoes, without dyeing or singeing the ignitible queue which
he wore, or becoming paralyzed with a hemorrhage. Lifting her eyes to
the ceiling of the cupola of the Capitol to conceal her unparalleled
embarrassment, making a rough courtesy, and not harassing him with
mystifying, rarefying, and stupefying innuendoes, she gave him a couch,
a bouquet of lilies, mignonette, and fuchsias, a treatise on mnemonics,
a copy of the Apocrypha in hieroglyphics, daguerreotypes of Mendelssohn
and Kosciusko, a kaleidoscope, a dramphial of ipecacuanha, a teaspoonful
of naphtha, for deleble purposes, a ferrule, a clarionet, some licorice,
a surcingle, a carnelian of symmetrical proportions, a chronometer with
a movable balance-wheel, a box of dominoes, and a catechism. The gauger,
who was also a trafficking rectifier and a parishioner of a
distinguished ecclesiastic, preferring a woollen surtout (his choice was
referable to a vacillating occasionally occurring idiosyncrasy), wofully
uttered this apothegm: “Life is checkered; but schism, apostasy, heresy,
and villany shall be punished.” The Sibyl apologizingly answered, “There
is a ratable and allegeable difference between a conferrable ellipsis
and a trisyllabic diæresis.” We replied in trochees, not impugning her
suspicion.
_Dream of a Spelling-Bee_
Menageries where sleuth-hounds caracole,
Where jaguar phalanx and phlegmatic gnu
Fright ptarmigan and kestrels cheek by jowl,
With peewit and precocious cockatoo.
Gaunt seneschals, in crotchety cockades,
With seine net trawl for porpoise in lagoons;
While scullions gauge erratic escapades
Of madrepores in water-logged galloons.
Flamboyant triptychs groined with gherkins green,
In reckless fracas with coquettish bream,
Ecstatic gargoyles, with grotesque chagrin,
Garnish the gruesome nightmare of my dream!
_The Longest Words_
The following sentence won a prize offered in England for the longest
twelve-word telegram: “Administrator-General’s counter-revolutionary
intercommunications uncircumstantiated. Quartermaster-General’s
disproportionableness characteristically contra-distinguished
unconstitutionalist’s incomprehensibilities.” It is said that the
telegraph authorities accepted it as a despatch of twelve words.
The statement, upon the publication of a new English dictionary,
that the longest word in the language is “disproportionableness”
was met by pointing to a still longer word employed by the
Parnellites at the time of the disestablishment of the Irish
Church, in 1S71,—“disestablishmentarianism,” which found its way
into the House of Commons, and another, quoted from a theological
work,—“anthropomorphologically.” These are likely to hold the
record, at least outside of the names of chemical compounds and
their derivatives, such as trioxymethylanthraquinonic, or
dichlorhydroquinonedisulphonic, which outstrip all reckoning.
There is an old farce called “Cryptochonchoidsyphonostomata” which was
revived by Mr. Charles Collette, a London actor, several years ago, and
was extensively advertised in the London press, to the dismay of the
compositors and proof-readers.
One of the funniest long words is
necrobioneopaleonthydrockthonanthropopithekology. That, of course, is
not an English word, though it is in an English book,—Kingsley’s “Water
Babies.” It means the science of life and death of man and monkeys in
by-gone times, as well as one can make it out. It is a word invented by
Kingsley.
The clown Costard, in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, addressing the
schoolmaster, says, “Thou art not so long by the head as
_honorificabilitudinitatibus_.”