Fearon mentioned various other Americanisms in his book. He thought it necessary, for example, to explain that cracker was the American name for what the English call a biscuit. He also gave some attention to caucus, but more to the thing itself than to the word. This, explained Sydney Smith, in reviewing his book for the Edinburgh, was

the cant word of the Americans for the committees and party meetings in which the business of the elections is prepared — the influence of which he seems to consider as prejudicial. To us, however, it appears to be nothing more than the natural, fair, and unavoidable influence which talent, popularity and activity always must have upon such occasions. What other influence can the leading characters of the democratic party in Congress possibly possess? Bribery is entirely out of the question — equally so is the influence of family and fortune. What then can they do, with their caucus or without it, but recommend? And what charge is it against the American government to say that those members of whom the people have the highest opinion meet together to consult whom they shall recommend for President, and that their recommendation is successful in their different States? Could any friend to good order wish other means to be employed, or other results to follow?

Humphreys’ glossary was followed in 1816 by John Pickering’s “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America, to Which is Prefixed an Essay on the Present State of the English Language in the United States,” the first really competent treatise on the subject.¹ Pickering, who was the son of Timothy Pickering, Postmaster-General, Secretary of War and Secretary of State under Washington, was himself apparently trained for a political career, but he preferred scholarship. Dr. Franklin Edgerton, professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology at Yale, says that he was “one of the two greatest general linguists of the first half of the Nineteenth Century in America,”¹ the other being Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (1760–1844). Born at Salem, Mass., in 1777, he survived until 1846. Says Edgerton:

He was an excellent classical scholar, and prepared what has been called “the best Greek-English dictionary before Liddell and Scott.” In 1814 he declined the newly founded Eliot professorship of Greek at Harvard (to which Edward Everett was then appointed); he had previously declined the professorship of Hebrew at the same institution. Even while working on his Greek dictionary he found time to go deeply into the American Indian languages. He reprinted John Eliot’s “Indian Grammar” (1822), Jonathan Edwards, Jr.’s “Observations on the Language of the Muhhekaneew (Mohegan) Indians” (1823), Roger Williams’s “Key to the Indian Language” (1827), Josiah Cotton’s “Vocabulary of the Massachusetts Indians” (1830), and Rasles’s (or Râle’s) “Dictionary of the Abnaki Language” (1833), all with linguistic notes and comments of his own. He wrote the article on Indian languages of North America for the Encyclopaedia Americana (1831). Particularly interesting is his early “Essay on a Uniform Orthography for the Indian Languages of North America” (1820), which is nothing more or less than a start toward an international phonetic alphabet. It is, of course, crude and rudimentary when judged by modern standards. But it is highly creditable to Pickering that he saw what was needed. His alphabet was adopted by missionary societies, and it exerted an important and useful influence.…

[He] was a founder and the first president of the American Oriental Society, the organization of which in 1842 is an important landmark in American linguistics as well as in oriental studies. His presidential address at his first annual meeting is a remarkable performance. It is a very competent summary of current learning in all oriental fields, from Northern Africa to the Pacific islands. Its sources were almost wholly European, since this country then had virtually no original or creative scholarship in oriental fields. There was little more than some rather conventional Hebrew learning, chiefly associated with the training of clergymen.

Pickering’s Vocabulary was prepared in 1815 as a paper for a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences of Boston, of which he was president, and was published in its Memoirs,² but the circulation of the Memoirs was so limited that he reissued it in June of the next year, with extensive additions, as a book. He says in his preface that he began to note and record Americanisms during a residence in London, where he served as secretary to Rufus King, the American minister, from the end of 1799 to the Autumn of 1801. But he did not attempt a formal collection, he goes on, until

a few years ago, when, in consequence of a decided opinion of some friends that a work of the kind would be generally acceptable,¹ I began to reduce into order the few materials I possessed, and to make such additions to them as my leisure would permit. The present volume is the result of that labor, for labor it may be called. To those persons, indeed, who have never undertaken to make such a collection and to investigate, compare and cite the numerous authorities which a work of this nature demands, the present volume will, perhaps, not appear to have been a very arduous task. But when the reader shall have examined it, and have observed the various citations, and the continual references to dictionaries and glossaries, he will be able to form some judgment of the time and pains it must have cost me.

This boast of diligence is well borne out by the book, which, for a pioneer work, is unusually comprehensive. Pickering not only depended upon his own collectanea for its substance; he also made drafts upon Witherspoon, and got a great deal of material from the denunciations of Americanisms in the British reviews of the time. On the whole, he was in sympathy with their protests, and his book was mainly devoted to supporting them. He gave next to no attention to the loan words from the Indian languages that had been taken into American² but confined himself to the new coinages from English material and to the changes in meaning that had overtaken some of the terms of standard English. Thus he stated his position:

The language of the United States has perhaps changed less than might have been expected, when we consider how many years have elapsed since our ancestors brought it from England; yet it has in so many instances departed from the English standards that our scholars should lose no time in endeavoring to restore it to its purity, and to prevent future corruption.… As a general rule we should avoid all those words which are noticed by English authors of reputation as expressions with which they are unacquainted; for though we might produce some English authority for such words, yet the very circumstance of their being thus noticed by well educated Englishmen is a proof that they are not in use at this day in England, and, of course, ought not to be used elsewhere by those who would speak correct English.

The italics are Pickering’s. The most bitter denunciations of the British reviews did not daunt him, and he even professed to believe that there was no real anti-American feeling in them. Thus his defense of them:

We see the same critics censure the Scotticisms of their Northern brethren, the peculiarities of the Irish, and the provincial corruptions of their own English writers. We cannot therefore be so wanting in liberality as to think that when deciding upon the literary claims of Americans they are governed by prejudice or jealousy.… It is to be regretted that the reviewers have not pointed out all the instances which have come under their notice of our deviations from the English standard. This would have been doing an essential service to our literature, and have been the most effectual means of accomplishing what those scholars appear to have so much at heart —the preservation of the English language in its purity, wherever it is spoken.

Again the italics are Pickering’s. A few pages further on, as if uneasily aware that his Anglomania may have carried him a bit too far, he hastened to add in a footnote:

The reader will not infer from these remarks that our right to make new words is here meant to be denied. We, as members of that great community or family which speaks the English language have undoubtedly, as well as other members, a right to make words and to propose them for adoption into our common language. But unless those who are the final arbiters in the case — that is, the body of the learned and polite of this whole community wherever they shall be — shall sanction such new terms it will be presumptuous in the authors of them to attempt to force them into general use.… That a radical change in the language of a people so remote from the source of it as we are from England is not an imaginary supposition will be apparent from the alterations which have taken place among the nations of Europe; of which no instance, perhaps, is more striking than the gradual change and final separation, of the languages of Spain and Portugal, notwithstanding the vicinity and frequent intercourse of the people of those two countries.

Rather curiously, Pickering was not greatly concerned about the actual novelties invented in America; in fact, he believed that their production was falling off. “It has been asserted,” he said, “that we have discovered a much stronger propensity than the English to add new words to the language, and the little animadversion which, till within a few years, such new-coined words have met with among us seems to support that opinion. The passion for these senseless novelties, however, has for some time past been declining.” This was written just as the great movement into the West was beginning, and the pages following will show how much in error Pickering was about the future course of American. His dominant fear in 1816, it appears, was not of new words, but of old ones preserved in America after their abandonment in England, and of new meanings attached to words still surviving.

Our greatest danger now is that we shall continue to use antiquated words which were brought to this country by our forefathers nearly two centuries ago (some of which, too, were at that day provincial words in England), and that we shall affix a new signification to words which are still used in that country solely in their original sense. Words of these descriptions having long formed a part of the language, we are not led to examine critically the authority on which their different significations rest; but those which are entirely new, like strangers on their first appearance, immediately attract attention, and induce us to inquire into their pretensions to the rank they claim.¹

Pickering’s Vocabulary runs to more than 500 terms, and some of his discussions of them are of considerable length: he gives, for example, nearly five pages to to advocate. This verb was frowned upon by Benjamin Franklin, who asked Noah Webster, in a letter of December 26, 1789, to use his authority “in reprobating” it, but Webster admitted it to his American Dictionary of 1828 — and supported it with a number of examples from high English sources. It was, in fact, not an American invention, but had been used in England long before the English reviewers began to denounce its use by such Americans as Alexander Hamilton and John Quincy Adams. Pickering quoted at length from a discussion of it in the Rev. Henry J. Todd’s edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, “with numerous corrections and additions,”² as follows:

To advocate, v.a. [Lat. advoco; Fr. avocasser]. To plead, to support, to defend. Mr. Boucher³ has remarked that though this verb has been said to be an improvement on the English language, which has been discovered by the United States of America since their separation from Great Britain, it is a very common and old Scottish word, which, indeed it is, both as an active and neuter verb. But Mr. Boucher has been misled in this literary concession which he has made to the Americans, for it is also an old English word, employed by one of our finest and most truly manly writers; and if the Americans affect to plume themselves on this pretended improvement of our language let them as well as their abetters withdraw the unfounded claim to discovery in turning to the prose writings of Milton. In the dictionaries of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, however, as in the Latin of Thomas, the Spanish of Minsheu, the Italian of Florio, and the French of Cotgrave, advoco, advogar, avocare and advocasser are rendered, not to advocate but to play the advocate.

Todd then quoted Milton: “Parliament … thought this petition worthy, not only of receiving but of voting to a commitment, after it had been advocated,”¹ and Burke: “This is the only thing distinct and sensible that has been advocated.”² Todd’s sneer at imaginary American inventors of the term got under Pickering’s skin, despite his general willingness to accept British admonitions docilely, and he hastened to enter a plea of not guilty:

Mr. Todd seems to suppose that the Americans “affect to plume themselves on this pretended improvement of our language,” and he then, in a tone which the occasion seemed hardly to require, calls upon them as well as their “abetters,” to “withdraw their unfounded claim to discovery.” I was not aware that the Americans did “plume themselves” upon this word. We did, indeed, believe it to be a word not in use among Englishmen, because they themselves have considered it as a word invented by us, and have censured it as one of the faults of our writers. The truth is that although most Americans have adopted it, yet some of our writers who have been particularly attentive to their style have (whether there is any merit in this or not, let scholars judge) avoided using it. Nor would they probably have felt themselves warranted in employing this, any more than they would many other ancient words (the word freshet, for example)³ because it is to be found in Milton or Burke, unless it were also in general use at the present day among Englishmen.

To this, as an afterthought, he added the following in the brief supplement that followed his vocabulary:

If the Americans have not a right to “plume themselves” on this word as a “discovery,” they may justly claim the merit (if there is any in the case) of reviving it.

To advocate is now perfectly good English on both sides of the water, though Robert Southey led a belated attack upon it so late as 1838. So is to belittle, though when Thomas Jefferson used it in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” 1781–82, the European Magazine and London Review let go with a veritable tirade against it.⁴ Pickering sought to get rid of it by pretending that only Jefferson used it seriously. It was “sometimes heard here,” he said primly, “in conversation; but in writing it is, I believe, peculiar to that gentleman.” This imbecility was echoed by Dr. Robley Dunglison, in his treatise on Americanisms in the Virginia Literary Museum, 1829. Belittle, he opined, was “not an Americanism, but an individualism.” Noah Webster, in his American Dictionary of 1828, described it as “rare in America, not used in England,” but it was already lodged firmly on this side of the water and was soon making progress on the other, and today it is everywhere accepted as a perfectly sound word.

Pickering’s list included a number of terms that are now obsolete, for example, to admire (in the sense of to be pleased),¹ alone (as in “the alone God”),² applicant (in the sense of a diligent student),³ brief (in the sense of prevalent, as of an epidemic disease),⁴ citess (a female citizen, borrowed from the French citoyenne),⁵ to compromit (in the sense of to involve by indiscretion, to compromise, to imperil),⁶ docity (described by Pickering as “a low word, used in some part of the United States to signify quick comprehension”),⁷ to doxologize (defined by Webster as “to give glory to God”), to happify (to make happy),⁸ to improve (in the sense of to occupy),⁹ to missionate, publishment, redemptioner,¹⁰ releasement, and to squale (“to throw a stick, or other thing, with violence, and in such a manner that it skims along the ground”).¹ Some of the terms listed by Pickering, in fact, were so little used, even in his day, that Noah Webster, in a letter to him, professed to be unfamiliar with them, e.g., brash (brittle and easily split, as of wood),² clitchy (clammy, sticky, glutinous),³ docity, kedge (brisk, in good health and spirits), to quackle (to choke or suffocate), rafty (rancid), to slat (to throw down with violence), to squale, and to squat (to squeeze or press).⁴ But a much larger number of Pickering’s terms survive in the speech of today, e.g., accountability, to americanize, to appreciate (to raise in value), appellate (of a court), authority (in the sense of a person or group), backwoodsman, balance (remainder), betterments, bookstore, dutiable, to energize, to evoke, Fall (for Autumn), governmental, gunning (for what the English call shooting), to heft, immigrant (as the newcomer is seen from the receiving end), influential, lean-to, mad (angry), nationality, to obligate, passage (of a legislative act), caucus, census, checkers (the English call the game draughts), chore, clapboard, to consider (without as following), constitutionality, corn (maize) creek (an inland brook), to debark, to deed (to convey by deed), to demoralize, departmental, to deputize, to locate, poorly (ill), presidential, to progress, to solemnize, squatter, stockholder and to systematize. Many of these, of course, were not actually American inventions, but most of them were in greater vogue in this country than in England, and not a few were denounced violently by the English purists of the time, e.g., appellate, balance, dutiable, influential, to obligate, caucus, to debark, to demoralize, presidential, and to progress. Appellate, in the sense in which it is used in Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution, 1788, was employed by Blackstone in the first volume of his “Commentaries on the Laws of England” in 1765, and was used again by Burke in “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” 1790, but so late as 1808 the Annual Review denounced John Marshall for using it in his “Life of Washington.” Pickering, ordinarily disposed to yield to English censure, defended it by quoting an unnamed correspondent as follows:

If appellate, in the sense in which it is employed in the Constitution, has not found its way into English dictionaries, it has found its way into English minds.… The word is intelligible to every scholar, and is pointed, useful and sonorous.¹

Balance, in the sense of remainder, is apparently a genuine Americanism. The DAE’s first example is dated 1788, and by the turn of the century the word was in general use. The purists, however, continued to belabor it. Noah Webster, writing to Pickering in 1817, said that its use was “forced, and not warranted by any good principle,” and so late as 1876 Richard Grant White, in “Words and Their Uses,”² was calling it “an abomination,” and denying patriotically that it was an Americanism. The reviewer of the Monthly Anthology (published in Boston, 1803–11) censured Marshall for using dutiable in his “Life of Washington,” 1804–07, but the DAE shows that it was used in England fifteen years before it was heard in the debates of Congress, 1789. It was, however, so much more frequently in use in America than in England that it came to be thought of as an Americanism, and it strikes most Englishmen as such to this date. Influential belongs to the same category. It has been traced back to c. 1734 in England, and Johnson admitted it to his dictionary, but it was used only seldom, and when it began to appear frequently in American books and newspapers it was mistaken for an Americanism, and denounced as such. To obligate is even older in English: the NED’s first example is from one of Robert South’s sermons, 1692. But it began to go out in England as it came into vogue in this country, and the NED lists it as “not now in good use.” The DAE’s first example is from no less a dignitary than George Washington, 1753, but so recently as 1927 George Bernard Shaw was commenting tartly upon its use by Woodrow Wilson.³ The Monthly Anthology, in its review of Webster’s first dictionary of 1806, denounced it as “unnecessary” and without “respectable support,” and the British Critic, in noticing a book in which it was used by an Oxford don, called it “a low colloquial inaccuracy.” The same British Critic deplored the use of to debark by Washington, and called it “a Gallicism … without rational ground of preference for melody or force” to a “genuine English word,” to wit, disembark. The DAE passes over to debark as obviously English, and the NED traces it to 1654. To demoralize was introduced into American, in the form of demoralizeing, by Webster in 1794, and he entered the infinitive in his dictionary of 1806. It is said to have been his only original contribution to the American vocabulary. The Edinburgh Review sneered at it when it appeared, as demoralization, in a book by an English lady publicist, Miss Helen Maria Williams (1762–1827), and it got some thwacks from other English reviews, but it continued to flourish in this great Republic, and is still flourishing today. Pickering thought that it had been “adopted from France since the revolution” there. “It is used,” he said, “by some English writers, but not as often as by us. It is not in any of the dictionaries, except Mr. Webster’s.” One finds it hard to believe that so logical and necessary a word as presidential should have been denounced, but it is a fact. The Monthly Anthology called it a “barbarism,” and the North American Review agreed. “English writers,” said Pickering, “have sometimes used it, but only in speaking of American affairs.” So late as 1876 Richard Grant White was arguing that it was “not a legitimate word” and pleading for the substitution of presidental. The DAE’s first example is dated 1799, but in all probability it is older. To progress, according to the NED, was in common use in England in the Seventeenth Century, but then became obsolete there. It was “retained (or formed anew) in America, where it became very common, c. 1790.” It was readopted by the English after 1800, but is still “characterized as an Americanism, and is much more used in America than in Great Britain.” The DAE’s first example is from Franklin, 1789: it comes from his letter of December 26 to Noah Webster, in which he described it as “most awkward and abominable” and asked Webster to use his authority to “reprobate” it. The Monthly Anthology for August, 1808, censured Marshall for using it in his “Life of Washington.” Pickering, writing in 1815, said that it had had “extraordinary currency for the last twenty or thirty years, notwithstanding it has been condemned by the English, and by the best American writers.” He noted that it was in Johnson’s Dictionary, 1755, but also noted that it was marked “not used.” In 1876 Richard Grant White was still hot against it, even in the form of progressive.

The rest of the words on the Pickering list may be noticed briefly. Accountability, authority (in the collective sense), to energize, to evoke, Fall, gunning, to heft, lean-to, mad (angry), nationality, passage (of a legislative act), census, checkers, chore, clapboard, to deputize, poorly, to solemnize and to systematize were not, of course, American inventions, but most of them were in wider use in this country than in England, and some are still regarded as Americanisms by Englishmen, notably Fall, gunning, checkers and clapboard. Of the genuine Americanisms, to americanize has been traced to 1797, to appreciate (in value) to 1778, backwoodsman to 1784 (backwoods goes back to 1742), betterments (in real property) to 1785, bookstore to 1763, governmental to 1744, immigrant to 1789, constitutionality to 1787, to deed to 1806, and to locate (on land) to 1652. To americanize was listed in Noah Webster’s dictionary of 1806, but Pickering, writing in 1815, said that he had never encountered it in either writing or conversation. It had been used, as a matter of fact, by John Jay in 1797 and by Jefferson in 1801. Rather curiously, americanization did not appear until the middle of the Nineteenth Century. To appreciate (to raise in value) is traced by the DAE to 1778, but when Webster listed it in his dictionary the Monthly Anthology alleged that it was “only admitted into genteel company by inadvertence.” It seems to be going out, and the DAE’s last example is dated c. 1889. In the sense of to rise in value (intransitive) it goes back to 1779. The corresponding noun, appreciation, was used by John Adams in 1777, and is still sound American. Pickering says that in his time backwoodsman was applied “by the people of the commercial towns to those who inhabit the territory westward of the Allegany [sic]¹ mountains.” The word was commonly used, he adds, “as a term of reproach (and that, only in the familiar style) to designate those people who, being at a distance from the sea and entirely agricultural, are considered as either hostile or indifferent to the interests of the commercial states.” “Thirty years ago,” said a writer in Niles’ Register in 1818, “the heart of Pennsylvania was considered as the backwoods, and appeared as distant to the citizens of the Atlantic border as the Mississippi does now.”

Pickering says that betterments, in the sense of “the improvements made on new lands, by cultivation, the erection of buildings, etc.,” was first used in Vermont, and the DAE’s first example, dated 1785, actually comes from that State. From Vermont it spread to New Hampshire, and then to Massachusetts. Webster omitted it from his first dictionary of 1806, but included it in his American Dictionary of 1828. It was noted as an Americanism by Edward Augustus Kendall in his “Travels Through the Northern Parts of the United States in 1806–08,”¹ and when it was embodied in the titles of betterment acts it took on official standing. Book-store, of course, was one of the new words that followed the transformation of the English shop (for a retail establishment) to store — a very characteristic Americanism, still often remarked by English travelers. The DAE’s first example of this use of store is dated 1721 and comes from the American Weekly Mercury of March 16. “What are called shops in England,” observed Thomas Anburey in his “Travels Through the Interior Parts of America” in 1789² “are here denominated stores.” Pickering says that the word was similarly used in Canada and the West Indies. To keep store, also an Americanism, is traced by the DAE to 1752, but store-clothes is not found before 1840, and store-teeth not before 1891. Storekeeper in the American sense goes back to 1741 and storekeeping to 1774. Book-store is first recorded in 1763 (in Boston), drug-store in 1819 (in Louisville), and grocery-store in 1774 (in Pennsylvania).

Governmental seems to have appeared in the South in 1744, but by 1796 it had spread to New England. The ever-watchful Monthly Anthology denounced it as a barbarism, and Noah Webster excluded it from his dictionary of 1806, but he admitted it to his American Dictionary of 1828, and ascribed it to Alexander Hamilton. When it was used by William Belsham (1752–1827) in his “Memoirs of George the Third,” the Edinburgh Review condemned it, along with liberticidal and royalism, as “innovations” of a “thirsty reformer,” and declined to give up the English language to his “ravages.” Pickering discusses immigrant, immigration and to immigrate at some length. He says that they were first used by Jeremy Belknap (1744-98) in his “History of New Hampshire,” 1784–92, but the DAE’s first example of immigrant, apparently the oldest of the three words, comes from an “American Geography,” by one Morse, published in 1789. In the United States it is usual to employ immigrant to designate an incoming wanderer and emigrant to designate one leaving. In England it seems to be more common to use emigrant in both cases, maybe under the influence of the French émigré. When John Marshall’s “Life of Washington” was brought out in England immigrations, in “The immigrations from England continued to be very considerable,” was changed to emigrations. It is rather astonishing that constitutionality did not appear in England before it was used by Alexander Hamilton in 1787, but such seems to have been the case. The NED’s first example of its English use is dated 1801. Constitutionalist goes back to 1766 in England, sixteen years before it is recorded in America, and constitutional to 1682. Constitutionally, in the political sense, has been traced to 1756. The DAE classes constitutional-amendment, constitutional-lawyer and constitutional-convention as Americanisms. The first is first recorded in 1854, the second in 1830 and the third in 1843. To deed, defined by Webster as to give or transfer by deed, is listed by Pickering as “a low word, used colloquially, but rarely, except by illiterate people.” “None of our writers,” he continued, “would employ it. It need hardly be observed that it is not in the English dictionaries.” But J. Fenimore Cooper was using it by 1845, and it is today reasonably respectable. So with to locate, which goes back to 1652 in America, but did not appear in England until 1837.

One of the indubitable Americanisms that was attacked with violence by the English reviewers, but all in vain, was lengthy.¹ Albert Matthews has traced it to 1689, and by the end of the Eighteenth Century it was in common use in the United States. The searchers for the NED found ten examples in the writings of Jefferson between 1782 and 1786, and others in those of Washington, Hamilton, Franklin and John Adams. “This word,” says Pickering, “has been very common among us, both in writing and in the language of conversation, but it has been so much ridiculed by Americans as well as Englishmen that in writing it is now generally avoided.² Mr. Webster has admitted it to his dictionary¹ but (as need hardly be remarked) it is not in any of the English ones. It is applied by us, as Mr. Webster justly observes, chiefly to writings or discourses. Thus we say, a lengthy pamphlet, a lengthy sermon, etc. The English would say a long or (in the more familiar style) a longish sermon.” Pickering then undertakes to show how, by the use of diffuse, lengthened, prolonged, extended, extensive and prolix, lengthy might be avoided. He was, of course, wasting his energy. The word not only got firm lodgment in America; it also penetrated England, and in a little while many of the best writers were using it, notably Southey, Bentham, Scott, Dickens, and George Eliot, sometimes as a conscious Americanism but oftener not.

Pickering gave some attention to certain changes in the use of prepositions that had arisen in America, for example, the use of at before auction in place of the English by. He recorded, under averse, that American writers formerly followed this word with to, but had begun to substitute from, apparently under the prodding of John Witherspoon and other such policemen of the national speech. But he added a sensible defense of averse to from George Campbell’s “The Philosophy of Rhetoric,” 1776, as follows:

The words averse and aversion are more properly construed with to than with from. The examples in favor of the latter preposition are beyond comparison outnumbered by those in favor of the former. The argument from etymology is here of no value, being taken from the use of another language. If, by the same rule, we were to regulate all nouns and verbs of Latin original our present syntax would be overturned.

Pickering also discussed the American use of to instead of the English at or in in such phrases as “I have been to Philadelphia.” Witherspoon had denounced this practise in 1781, but it had survived, and in the vulgar speech it had produced such forms as to home. The latter have disappeared, but “I have been to Philadelphia” is today sound American.

The other early, glossaries of Americanisms were of much less value than Pickering’s painstaking work. On March 18, 1829, Dr. Theodoric Romeyn Beck (1791–1855) read a paper on Pickering before the Albany Institute, and it was printed in the Transactions of the Institute for 1830. Mathews reprints it in full, but there is little in it of any value. Beck, who was a New York physician and pedagogue, was inclined, like Pickering, to believe that Americans should follow English precept and example in their speechways, though he protested against the “overwhelming ridicule and contempt” with which the English reviewers greeted every fresh Americanism. “This, however,” he went on, “is merely an objection to the manner. The matter of their animadversions deserves more serious consideration.” His brief and far from persuasive contribution to the subject was followed by a series of articles in the Virginia Literary Museum and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c. on December 16 and 30, 1829 and January 6, 1830. Their author was Dr. Robley Dunglison, an Englishman educated in Germany, who had been brought out by Thomas Jefferson in 1824 to be professor of medicine in the University of Virginia. In 1833 he moved to the University of Maryland and in 1836 to Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia. He was a competent medical man, and Fielding H. Garrison says of him that he “compiled an excellent medical dictionary and wrote an amazing array of textbooks on nearly every subject except surgery.”¹ But his vast energy was not exhausted by this professional diligence, and Allen Walker Read adds that “he wrote on almost any conceivable subject.” The glossary which constitutes the bulk of his three articles has been reprinted by Read² and also by Mathews. “His sport,” says Read, “was that of many a later man: the proving that many so-called Americanisms are distinctly of British origin.” But he also made some useful contributions to the subject. He was, for example, the first lexicographer to list the word blizzard, and his entry of it in his glossary is the first example unearthed by the searchers for the DAE. He is also credited with the DAE’s first example of to cavort (in the American sense of to prance, to act up, to cut monkey-shines), to hornswoggle, to mosey, retiracy and sockdolager. Finally, he recorded a number of words that seem to have been of short life, for they are not recorded by subsequent lexicographers, e.g., coudeript (credited to Kentucky and defined as “thrown into fits”), givy (a Southernism signifying muggy weather), and mollagausauger (“a stout fellow”).

Another early glossary of Americanisms was that of the Rev. Adiel Sherwood, first published in his “Gazetteer of the State of Georgia” in 1827 and much extended in a third edition of 1837, Mathews reprinted it in Dialect Notes in 1927¹ and also in “The Beginnings of American English” in 1931. It is mainly interesting because of its indications of the prevailing vulgar pronunciations of the South in the 30s, e.g., arter for after, axd for asked, blather for bladder, bess for best, becase for because, beyant for beyond, crap for crop, fare for far, gimme for give me, gal for girl, hit for it, inimy for enemy, mounting for mountain, queshton for question, sacer for saucer, umberillo for umbrella and year for here, but it also shows some other curiosa, e.g., the use of to assign for to sign, Baptises for Baptists, done said, done did, flitter for fritter, to get shet of, hadn’t ought, to lay for to lie, mighty and monstrous as general intensives, prasbattery for presbytery, plunder for goods and effects, sparrow-grass for asparagus, smart chance for good deal, and to use for to feed. The DAE’s first example of bodaciously, in the sense of wholly, is from Sherwood. “It will be seen,” he said in his brief introduction, “that many of our provincialisms are borrowed from England.”

The first attempt at a dictionary of Americanisms on a really comprehensive scale was made by John Russell Bartlett in 1848, with his “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States.” Bartlett, who was a Rhode Islander, born in 1805 and surviving until 1886, began life as a bank clerk in Providence and was later a partner in a publishing house in New York, but he attained to considerable reputation as a bibliographer and antiquarian and also dabbled in ethnology. His glossary, beginning as a volume of 412 pages, was expanded to 524 when it was reissued in 1859, and reached 813 with its fourth and last edition in 1877. From his first edition onward he supported his entries, whenever possible, with illustrative quotations, but most of them, unfortunately, were not dated. In the preface to his fourth edition he discussed the origin of new Americanisms, and defended his listing of what critics had apparently denounced as ephemeral slang. The novelties of his time, he said, came chiefly from the following sources: first, the jargon of the stock market, rapidly adopted by the whole business community; second, the slang of the “colleges and higher schools”; third, the argot “of politicians, of the stage, of sportsmen, of Western boatmen, of pugilists, of the police, of rowdies and roughs, of thieves, of work-shops, of the circus, of shopkeepers, workmen, etc.” Many of these neologisms had only short lives, but Bartlett insisted sensibly that they should be listed nevertheless, if only for the sake of the record. “Sometimes,” he said, “these strange words have a known origin, but of the larger number no one knows whence they come. Slang is thus the source whence large additions are made to our language.”¹

The “Glossary of Supposed Americanisms” of Dr. Alfred L. Elwyn, which appeared in 1859, was chiefly devoted to showing that most of the 465 terms it listed were English provincialisms or archaisms, but he also listed a few words and phrases picked up in Pennsylvania. Elwyn, under ball, offered one of the early descriptions of baseball. He called it bat and ball, said that it was played in his youth, and hazarded the guess that it might be “an imperfect form of cricket,” though calling it, in the same breath, “a Yankee invention.” He defined lynching, with polite ingenuity, as “a Western mode of arranging social grievances,” and said that “in new countries” it seemed to be “absolutely necessary, as, without it, there would be no hope of ridding society of those who are a nuisance.” “It is,” he went on, “a rough expression of the moral sense, and frequently well directed.” M. Schele de Vere’s “Americanisms: The English of the New World,” which followed in 1871, was not arranged in vocabulary form, but included a great deal of matter not in previous works, especially a learned and valuable discussion of loan-words. Freiherr Maximilian von Schele, the son of a Swedish officer in the Prussian service and of a French mother, took his Ph.D. at Bonn in 1841 and his J.U.D. at Greifswald in 1842. He came to America soon afterward and studied Greek at Harvard. In 1844 he was recommended for the chair of modern languages at the University of Virginia by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and others, and there, save for four years service in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, he taught French, Spanish, Italian, German and Anglo-Saxon until 1895, when he retired to Washington. After coming to America he added his mother’s maiden name, de Vere, to his patronymic, but he was always known at Charlottesville as Schele. He was one of the founders of the American Philological Association in 1869, published a number of books on language, and served on the staff of the Standard Dictionary, 1893–95. He died in 1898. A second edition of his “Americanisms” was published in 1872, but since then it has not been reprinted.¹ For seventeen years afterward no contribution of any importance was made to the subject save Bartlett’s fourth edition of 1877. Then, in 1889, John S. Farmer brought out “Americanisms Old and New,” a stout volume of 564 double-column pages, listing about 5000 terms. Farmer was a busy compiler and lexicographer, and is chiefly remembered for the monumental “Slang and Its Analogues: Past and Present” which he began to publish in London in 1890. This ambitious undertaking, which was enriched with dated quotations on the plan of the New English Dictionary, ran to seven quarto volumes and was completed in 1904. Beginning with the second volume in 1891 the name of William E. Henley the poet was associated with that of Farmer on the title page, and in consequence the work is commonly referred to as Farmer and Henley. In 1905 Farmer brought out a one-volume abridgment for general circulation, with the quotations omitted and no mention of the numerous profane and obscene terms listed in the seven-volume edition. His “Americanisms Old and New” contains many dated quotations from American newspapers, mainly of the year 1888. It shows but little dependence upon its predecessors in the field, and is, in the main, a workmanlike and valuable work, but Farmer occasionally fell into error in his definitions — for example, in that of to get back at —, and, as Burke says, sometimes betrayed a certain British insularity. His preface made it plain that the impact of Americanisms upon English speechways was already powerful in 1888. He said:

Latterly, for good or ill, we have been brought face to face with what has been grandiloquently called “The Great American Language,” oftentimes in its baldest form, and on its most repulsive side. The works, also, of the popular exponents of “American humour,” itself an article as distinct in type as is the American character, have made the English people familiar with transatlantic words, phrases, turns cf expression, and constructions, most of which, strange of sound and quaint in form, are altogether incomprehensible. Their influence is daily gaining ground — books in shoals, journals by the score, and allusions without stint are multiplying on every hand. American newspapers, too, humorous and otherwise, circulate in England by hundreds of thousands weekly — all this and a good deal else is doing its work in popularizing American peculiarities of speech and diction to an extent which, a few years since, would have been deemed incredible. Even our own newspapers, hitherto regarded as models of correct literary style, are many of them following in their wake; and, both in matter and phraseology, are lending countenance to what at first sight appears a monstrously crude and almost imbecile jargon; while others, fearful of a direct plunge, modestly introduce the uncouth bantlings with a saving clause. The phrase, “as the Americans say,” might in some cases be ordered from the type-foundry as a logotype, so frequently does it do introduction duty.

Whatever Farmer’s distaste, as a patriotic Englishman, for this “monstrously crude and almost imbecile jargon,” he was too good a philologian to believe that it could be stayed. On the contrary, he believed that the English of England, in the long run, would have to take in much of it, and that the preponderance of population in the United States would eventually force American speechways upon the language as a whole. He said:

Purists may object, and cry out in alarm concerning sacrilegious innovation, but on going to the root of the matter this tendency is found to be not altogether void of satisfaction when regarded as indicative of the vitality and creative vigor still enshrined in our speech. Language, like everything else, is progressive; there is no spoken language a thousand years old.

Farmer seems to have been a somewhat mysterious fellow, and the reference-books neglect him. Said G. Alexander Legman in Notes and Queries, May 23, 1942:

His productive period was from about 1885 to 1914. The name Farmer is not a pseudonym, as he appeared in court in 1890 to defend his work against a charge of obscenity brought against his printer. He was a frequent contributor to Notes and Queries, which referred to him as “Dr. Farmer.” He was known as an eccentric and believed in spiritualism, on which he published several books. These meagre oddments of information are all that seems to be known of a fine scholar whose published work totals more than thirty volumes.

His works, beside those mentioned, included “A New Basis of Belief in Immortality,” “ ’Twixt Two Worlds,” “Ex Oriente Lux,” “Musa Pedestris” (1896), and “The Public School Word Book” (1900). After his “Americanisms Old and New” came Sylva Clapin’s “New Dictionary of Americanisms,” a third-rate compilation, but valuable because of the inclusion of a number of Canadian terms. Finally, in 1912, appeared the two volumes of Richard Harwood Thornton’s “American Glossary,” and the lexicography of Americanisms was put on a firm and scientific foundation at last.

Thornton was an Englishman, born in Lancashire, September 6, 1845. His name does not appear in any of the standard reference books, and the only printed account of him that I know of is a brief sketch by the Rev. E. H. Clark, published in Dialect Notes in July, 1939. By this it appears that he was the son of a Methodist clergyman who, at the time of his birth, was a classical tutor in the Wesleyan Theological Institution at Disbury. It is possible, though I have no evidence for it, that he was related to the Dr. William Thornton (1762–1828) who was awarded the Magellanic Gold Medal of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia in 1793 for a treatise on phonetics in which Americans were thus exhorted:

You have corrected the dangerous doctrines of European powers; correct now the languages you have imported, for the oppressed of various nations knock at your gates, and desire to be received as your brethren.… The American language will thus be as distinct as the government, free from all the follies of unphilosophical fashion, and resting upon truth as its only regulator.¹

Richard H. Thornton got only a secondary school education, though he seems to have had some grounding in Latin, Greek, French and German. He passed the Oxford entrance examination in 1862, but was too poor to go to the university. Instead he got a job with a business house in London and there he remained until 1871. During this time he also tackled Italian and seems to have acquired a fair reading knowledge of it. In 1871, seeing only poor prospects in London, he immigrated to Canada, and in 1874 came to the United States. In 1876 he entered Columbia Law School at Washington, and was graduated therefrom in 1878. He was then admitted to the bar in Philadelphia, but soon moved to Williamsport, Pa., the home of his wife, Martha Sproul, married in 1877. In 1884 he went to Portland, Ore., as the first dean of the Oregon Law School, and there, save for several trips to England, he remained until his death on January 7, 1925. He was naturalized in 1881. On November 3, 1923 the University of Oregon gave him the degree of doctor of laws.

When he began work on his “American Glossary” does not seem to be known, but it must have been before 1907, for in that year he was in London pursuing inquiries with respect to it. Its format, without doubt, was suggested by that of the NED, which had begun to appear in 1888. Thornton acknowledged in his preface his debt to Bartlett, to Farmer and to Albert Matthews,¹ but the chief burden of assembling his extraordinarily copious materials lay upon his own shoulders. He undertook the herculean task of reading the Congressional Globe from the beginning to 1863, and also got together an immense mass of citations from newspapers, magazines and books. He endeavored to unearth dated quotations showing the use of every one of the 3700 terms he listed, and in many cases he found and presented a large number — in that of Yankee, no less than sixty. Nothing on so comprehensive a scale or following so scientific a method had been undertaken before, and Thornton’s first two volumes, issued in 1912, remain indispensable to this day. Indeed, the DAE would have been impossible without them, and it shows its debt to them on almost every page. Unhappily, the author could find no publisher for his work in the United States, and had to take it to London. There it was brought out in an edition of 2000 by a small firm, Francis & Company. Once it was in type Lippincott, the Philadelphia publisher, took 250 sets of the sheets and issued them with his imprint, but they sold only slowly and so late as 1919 the small edition was still not exhausted. It was never reissued.² Meanwhile, Thornton kept on accumulating materials, and during World War I he tried to find a publisher willing to bring out a third volume or backers willing to stake it. In this he was unsuccessful, so he turned over his MS., in 1919, to Dr. Percy W. Long, then editor of Dialect Notes, who deposited it in the Widener Library at Harvard. There it remained until 1931, six years after Thornton’s death, when its publication was begun serially in Dialect Notes, with prefaces by Dr. Long and Sir William Craigie and the editorial assistance of Mrs. Louise Hanley, wife of Dr. Miles L. Hanley, then secretary and treasurer of the American Dialect Society. It was the expectation at the time that the publication of the volume would be completed by the end of 1933, but the chronic financial difficulties of the Dialect Society got in the way, and the last of the material was not actually worked off until July, 1939 — eight years after the beginning. The instalments were so paged that they could be cut out of Dialect Notes and bound together, but there has never been a reprint in book form. For the following brief reminiscence of Thornton I am indebted to Lewis A. McArthur of Portland, author of the well-known and excellent “Oregon Geographic Names”:

Professor Thornton lived in Portland during the ’90s. He was a great friend of my father. He was dean of the University of Oregon Law School, where my father, who was a lawyer, gave certain lecture courses. I used to see a good deal of him, as he was frequently at our home. I was a small boy then and it seemed to me that he was the oldest man I had ever seen. He had a sort of Old Testament beard and looked as though he was a grandfather of Confucius.

Despite the fact that Professor Thornton looked formidable to me when I was small, I remember that I was often interested in his talks with my father about English words. They both had an unusual knowledge of the business. I have a notion that perhaps that is one of the reasons I have been attracted to the subject.

Professor Thornton subsequently dropped out of sight. He returned to Portland a few years later and was given an honorary degree by the University of Oregon. I saw the old gentleman paddling along Fifth street in Portland in the Fall of 1924 in a pair of carpet slippers. He died in January, 1925.

5. THE POSITION OF THE LEARNED

It will be noted that nearly all the investigators of American speech-ways mentioned so far were either amateurs or foreigners, and that more than one of them was both. The earlier native Gelehrte of the language faculty, with the massive exceptions of Webster and Pickering, disdained the subject as beneath their notice, and even Pickering, as we have seen, discussed it with distaste. Beginning with Lindley Murray (1745–1826) and running down to Richard Grant White (1821–85) and Thomas S. Lounsbury (1838–1915), the more influential of its accepted expositors threw themselves into a mighty effort, not to describe and study the language of their country, but to police and purify it, and most of them accepted without challenge the highly artificial standards set up by English pedants of the Eighteenth Century.¹ By a curious irony it fell to Murray’s fate to be more influential in England than in America, and it would not be absurd to argue that he was responsible beyond all others for the linguistic lag visible in the Mother Country to this day, but it is not to be forgotten that he also had a great deal of weight at home, and was the Stammvater of the dismal pedagogues who still expound “correct English” in our schools and colleges.² From these pedagogues the investigation of the living speech of 140,000,000 Americans has seldom got any effective assistance. All the contributions from the English faculty that have gone into the files of Dialect Notes and American Speech and into such enterprises as the Dictionary of American English and the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada have come from an extremely small minority, scattered among the general as sparsely as raisins in an orphanage cake. There is, of course, nothing really singular in this lack of professional keenness, for it is to be observed in the United States in other similar groups. Of the 175,000 physicians and surgeons in the country, probably not 5000 have ever added anything, however little, to the sum of medical knowledge, and among lawyers the ratio of legal scholars to legal hewers of wood and drawers of water is even smaller. But the percentage of actual students of the language among teachers of English seems to be the smallest of all, and even the members of this minority commonly eschew the speech of their own country. Four-fifths of those who write at all devote themselves to “literary” rabbinism,³ and many of the rest waste themselves upon the current philological crazes — in recent years, upon the study of the mysterious entities called phonemes, and the high-falutin but hollow pseudo-science of semantics.¹ These sombre studies exhaust the brethren, and they have no time or energy left for the investigation of the language they all speak. So far as I can make out, the American Dialect Society, though it was launched by men of high professional reputation and influence and has the support of such men (and women) to this day, has never had more than a few hundred members, and at last accounts the circulation of the interesting and valuable American Speech¹ was stated (probably somewhat generously) to be 520.² The surveys of the Linguistic Atlas are being made by students rather than by teachers, with an Austrian-born professor of German in charge of them, and the DAE was edited by a Scotsman imported for the purpose. Some of the chief defects in the DAE, to be noted presently, are to be blamed on the fact that the far-flung and almost innumerable teachers of English of the country failed nearly unanimously to give it any help.

The Modern Language Association, which includes in its membership virtually all the scientifically-trained language teachers of the country,³ has had a Present-Day English section since 1924, but its activities have been of a very moderate degree of virulence, to say the least, and I judge by the names appearing on its modest programs that it has recruited few philologues who were not already at work for Dialect Notes and American Speech. Nor have all its lucubrations had to do with American English. The Linguistic Society of America, organized in 1924, also gives an occasional glance to the subject,⁴ but the papers in point that are presented at its meetings are seldom printed in its organ, Language,⁵ which is devoted principally to languages more interesting to its members than American English, e.g., Hittite and Old Church Slavonic.⁶ In 1941 a proposal was made to widen the scope of the American Dialect Society by changing its name to the English Language Society of America, but it was rejected by the members at a meeting in Indianapolis on December 30. The society, however, has been hospitable, ever since its organization in 1889,¹ to scholars working in regions outside its own special field, and the files of Dialect Notes are rich with the contributions of such students of general American speechways as Albert Matthews, M. M. Mathews, Allen Walker Read and Dr. Louise Pound and her pupils, and of such specialists in non-English languages as J. Dynely Prince (Dutch) and George T. Flom (Norwegian). In 1943 it issued a circular entitled “Needed Research in American English” in which the whole subject was admirably surveyed, and excellent suggestions were made to willing investigators. By 1917 Dialect Notes had printed 26,000 examples of American dialect terms and phrases, and had accumulated almost as many more. The publication of a Dialect Dictionary of the United States thus suggested itself, and plans for it were undertaken in 1926.² Unhappily, they were delayed inordinately by the Dialect Society’s lack of support, leading to recurrent financial crises, and when, in 1941, Dr. Harold Wentworth, then of West Virginia University, projected, at the suggestion of Dr. Louise Pound, a dialect dictionary of his own, and applied for the use of the society’s files, it was found that they had been lost. The equivalent of a court martial, set up to inquire into this catastrophe, found that the cards had been stored for years in a room in Warren House at Harvard, that the university authorities, having other uses for the space they occupied, moved them out, and that after that they vanished. Harvard put the blame on the officers of the society, and the officers denied that they were responsible, so nothing came of the investigation, nor were the cards recovered. Simultaneously, the society made a narrow escape from bankruptcy. The membership, in 1941, dropped to 38, with three unpaid, and there was an accumulated debt of $868.12. Part of this debt was shouldered by Dr. Miles L. Hanley, of the University of Wisconsin, the secretary and treasurer, and the balance was raised through the efforts of Dr. Pound, Mr. Read and others. In 1941 the society was reorganized, and by the end of 1942 it had 231 members, the annual dues had been raised from $1 to $2, and a receipt and release were in hand from the long-suffering printers of Dialect Notes. Dr. Pound was elected president, Dr. Harry Morgan Ayres of Columbia became vice-president, and Dr. Atcheson L. Hench of the University of Virginia secretary-treasurer. A year later Ayres succeeded Dr. Pound, Dr. Kemp Malone of the Johns Hopkins became vice-president, and Read followed Hench as secretary-treasurer. At the end of 1943 Ayres retired and was succeeded by Malone. Read, who had gone into the Army, was forced by his military duties to resign soon afterward, and Dr. George P. Wilson was appointed in his place. Thus the society stands in the first years of its second half-century, rejuvenated and indeed reincarnated. It is still small, but its members include all the American philologians who are really interested in American English, and it has more ambitious plans than ever before.

The two great events in the study of the American language since the publication of AL4 in 1936 have been the appearance of the first volume of “A Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada” in 1939 and the completion of “A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles” in 1944. The origin, plan and early history of the dictionary are given in AL4, pp. 56 ff, and need not be rehearsed here.¹ When it was announced that Dr. William A. Craigie, one of the editors of the monumental “New English Dictionary on Historical Principles,” had been engaged to edit it, I permitted myself, in a newspaper article, a chauvinistic sniff,² for it was impossible for me to imagine a British don getting to really close grips with the wayward speech of this great Republic. It is still impossible for me to imagine it, but I should add at once that Sir William (he was knighted in 1928) made a gallant attempt, and that the result is a dictionary which, whatever its deficiencies, is at least enormously better than anything that preceded it. It leans heavily upon the pioneer work of Thornton, but it shows a much wider sweep, and, what is more important, a higher degree of accuracy and a greatly superior technical competence.¹ On every page there is evidence that the editing was directed by a first-rate professional lexicographer. Sir William’s long years of service on the NED equipped him as no American of his trade was equipped, and when he got to Chicago in 1925 he assembled a staff of highly competent Americans, including Dr. M. M. Mathews, Dr. Catherine Sturtevant, Allen Walker Read and Dr. Woodford A. Heflin, which remedied the deficiencies in his own first-hand knowledge of the subject. In 1935 they were reinforced by Dr. James R. Hulbert, professor of English in the University of Chicago, who became co-editor. Sir William brought with him a large mass of material that had been gathered for the NED but not used, and he presently set up classes in lexicography at the University of Chicago, and put his students to work. From the great body of American professors of English and from Americans in general he seems to have got relatively little help. Even the names of many of the contributors to Dialect Notes and American Speech are missing from his list of acknowledgments. His predecessors and colleagues of the NED were a great deal better served. In their first volume, published in 1888, they recorded their debt to a list of volunteers ranging from philologians of the first eminence to country clergymen with time on their hands. One of these volunteers actually sent in 165,000 quotations, and another 136,000. Many Americans also took a hand. One of them, the Rev. J. Pierson, of Ionia, Mich., contributed 46,000, and another, the Rev. B. Talbot, of Columbus, O., 16,600. But both clergy and laity seem to have ignored the appeals of the DAE.²

Work was begun soon after Dr. Craigie’s arrival in Chicago,¹ and the first half dozen years were devoted to collecting materials. Then the difficult task of editing was begun, and in 1936 the first fascicle, running from A to Baggage, was published by the University of Chicago Press. The first volume, ending with Corn Patch, was finished in 1938; the second, ending with Honk, in 1940; the third, ending with Record, in 1942; and the fourth, completing the work, in 1943. The whole fills 2552 large double-column pages, beautifully printed by the university printers and substantially bound in maroon cloth, with gilt stamping. The father of the enterprise was the late John M. Manly (1865–1940), a native of Alabama who took his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1890, was head of the English department at the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1933, and made his chief mark as an editor of Chaucer. It was he, apparently, who induced the General Education Board, the American Council of Learned Societies and the University of Chicago to supply the necessary funds — about $350,000 for the editing and $70,000 for printing and promotion.² The print order was for 2500 copies, of which all but about 100 had been sold before the last volume was published. The price was fixed at $100 for the four volumes, but subscribers in advance got a substantial discount, and with review and presentation copies and dealers’ profits counted out, the total receipts were but $120,000.³ Unhappily, the plates of the earlier sections were destroyed before the work was completed, so a reprint was impossible, but plans are now afloat to reset the four volumes at the conclusion of World War II and its sequelae.¹ After the publication of the first volume in 1936 Sir William returned to England, and thereafter his editing was carried on at long distance, with Dr. Hulbert in charge on the ground.²

The DAE lists about 26,000 terms and is by no means restricted to those originating in the United States. It also includes many words that, while old in English, have acquired new meanings in this country, or have come into wider use than in England, or have survived after becoming obsolete there. All save a few entries are supported by illustrative quotations, with dates, and whenever a word or phrase has a history in England the date of the first quotation in the NED is noted. Such are the “historical principles” of the title of the work. It must be manifest that the quotations, in many and perhaps most instances, do not show the actual age of the term: all they show is the date of its first appearance in print, or, more accurately, the date of the first appearance discovered by the dictionary’s searchers. But this is a defect visible in all “historical” dictionaries, including the massive NED. It can be remedied more or less by the accumulation of new material, and in the case of the NED an attempt was made to push the histories back in time by a Supplement issued in 1933, five years after the main work was completed. But in the majority of cases the history of a given word or phrase must remain incomplete, for it would be impossible to read all the printed matter in English, and allowance must be made for the fact that a considerable body of it has disappeared altogether, and for the more important fact that many terms have a history before they are recorded in print, and that others are never recorded at all. There is no way to get round these difficulties, and the most a lexicographer can do is to be as diligent as possible. The editors of the DAE did not spare hard work, and the result is an extremely valuable dictionary, despite its defects. Its indispensability to the student of the national speech is well demonstrated by the number of times it is quoted in the present volume. Unhappily, some of the limitations that the editors set for themselves forced the omission of interesting and useful matter. They did not undertake to investigate American slang after 1875 or the American vocabulary in general after 1900, though they made exceptions in the cases of a few terms. Moreover, they gave relatively little attention to etymology, and avoided the indication of speech levels (always a vexatious business) whenever possible. But for all these lacks the DAE remains an impressive monument to the scholarship of its editors. Going through it page by page, I find occasional evidence that the chief of them was a foreigner, and hence a stranger to the national Sprachgefühl, but against that misfortune must be set the fact that he was an expert lexicographer whose personal prestige (especially after he was knighted in 1928), overcame at least to some extent the prevailing prejudice against the serious study of American speechways.¹

As the successive fascicles of the DAE were published they were reviewed at length in the philological press, and many excellent suggestions were made for additions and improvements. Some of those who were active in this work of criticism and renovation were John A. Kouwenhoven of Bennington College, J. Louis Kuethe of the Johns Hopkins, and Miles L. Hanley of the University of Wisconsin. An elaborate review of the first two fascicles, running from A to Blood, printed by Dr. Hanley in Dialect Notes in July, 1937, raised a considerable pother, for it not only criticized severely the general plan of the dictionary, but also accused the editors of failing to give Thornton sufficient credit for their copious borrowings from him. This attack was met by Allen Walker Read, of the dictionary staff, in Dialect Notes for July-December, 1938. In American Speech for April, 1939, Dr. Hanley withdrew his general criticisms as “presumptuous and probably wrong-headed,” but stuck to his contention that Thornton had been treated badly. On this point, fortunately, it is possible to disagree without rancor. So early as 1930, in a paper in American Speech,¹ Sir William Craigie had made specific acknowledgment of the dictionary’s debt to Thornton and testified to “the great value of his labors,” and in the preface to the first volume, dated 1938, he was given thanks for “frequently” supplying the work with “its earliest instances, as well as the illustration of many colloquialisms and rarer uses.” For the rest, it seems to me that it may be taken as obvious that every dictionary must depend heavily on earlier workers in its special field.

The limitations set by the plan of the DAE have left the way open for further work in this field. It is very weak in slang and vulgar English, even for the period before 1875, and its 1900 deadline bars out a vast number of picturesque words and phrases on all levels. The average reader is bound to be critical of a lexicon of Americanisms, however meritorious otherwise, which omits such terms as blurb, highbrow, jitney, flivver, rubberneck, boob, gob (sailor) and leatherneck, and shows a considerable discretion in dealing with profanity and other loose language. There is, beside, the objection to its high cost, and the fact that no more copies are obtainable. To supply something at once more comprehensive, less burdened with historical apparatus, and salable at a more moderate price the University of Chicago Press has undertaken a “Dictionary of Americanisms,” with the competent Dr. M. M. Mathews as editor. It will include every sort of Americanism save the most transient slang, and will bring the record up to the time of publication. It will also deal with etymologies and pronunciations, omitted by the DAE. How long it will take to complete this project remains to be seen.² Meanwhile, Allen Walker Read, another of the collaborators of Sir William Craigie, continues at work upon his projected “Historical Dictionary of Briticisms,” announced in 1938.¹ It will be devoted to “words found in England but not in America,” e.g., cinema, rook, squirearchy, pub, corn law, bloody (as an expletive), woolsack, beefeater, furze and hear, hear, and will be fortified by dated quotations of the sort made familiar by Thornton, the NED and the DAE. Various other special dictionaries are also in progress. One is “A Dictionary of American English Grammar,” by Dr. Janet Rankin Aiken of Columbia, and another is “A Dictionary of American Criminal Argots” by Dr. D. W. Maurer of the University of Louisville.² The need for special works confined to relatively small areas of space or time was admirably set forth by Sir William Craigie in Tract No. LVIII of the Society for Pure English.³ He is himself engaged upon “A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue,” and other enterprises of the sort, dealing with American English, will probably follow soon or late. There is plenty of room, despite the DAE, for intensive studies, inter alia, of English in colonial America, of the novelties introduced into the language by the great movement into the West, of American trade argots, and of American slang.

The Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada is on a grandiose scale, and if it is ever completed will run to scores of large folio volumes, at a cost beyond the means of all save a small number of the richer libraries and private students. The first section, dealing with New England, began to appear in 1939 and was completed in 1943. It consists of three volumes, each in two parts, and the six immense books are made up of no less than 734 double-page maps. Along with the first volume, in 1939, there appeared a quarto “Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England,” by Dr. Hans Kurath of Brown University. Dr. Kurath with Dr. Miles L. Hanley, formerly secretary and treasurer of the American Dialect Society, as his chief aide, has been in charge of the project since it was launched in 1929, and into it they and their collaborators have put an immense amount of hard work. The funds have been found by the American Council of Learned Societies, which also helped to finance the DAE, and grants in aid have been made by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the General Education Board, and various colleges and universities.¹ The atlas, in its early stages, attracted more attention from professional philologians than the DAE, but as the work has gone on its burdens have been thrown upon a relatively small group, made up mainly of associates and students of Dr. Kurath. I called attention in AL4² to the fact that four of the seven men principally engaged upon it in 1936 had non-English surnames. Dr. Kurath himself is a native of Austria, but came to the United States in early life, and was educated at the Universities of Wisconsin, Texas and Chicago, the last-named of which made him Ph.D. in 1920. After teaching German at Texas, Northwestern and Ohio State, he became professor of the Germanic languages and general linguistics and chairman of the department of Germanic languages at Brown in 1932. Since 1942 he has been chairman of the university’s division of modern languages. He reports in Jacques Cattell’s “Dictionary of American Scholars”³ that his chief interests are “American English; linguistic geography; American pronunciation; linguistic geography of New England; speech areas, settlement areas and culture areas in the United States.” He is a man of indomitable energy, and is carrying on a vast work with a good deal less than an excess of help.⁴

The Linguistic Atlas attempts to record dialectal variations, not only in pronunciation but also in vocabulary. Thus Map No. 235 shows that the common round or littleneck clam (Venus mercenaria) is usually called a quahog along the New England coast, but that in some places it is spoken of as a round, hard, hardshell or hen clam.¹ Similarly, the soft or long-neck clam (Mya arenaria) is sometimes called a long, or soft-shell, or sand, or steaming clam, or simply a clam. Many other familiar terms show equally curious local variations. The common lightning-bug remains a lightning-bug until it comes into the Boston Sprachgebiet, where it becomes a fire-fly. June-bug, which is in wide use to the southward, is seldom encountered in New England, but fire-bug is recorded.² Faucet is the usual New England name for the kitchen water-tap, but spigot seems to be coming in from the southward, and cock and tap are also recorded. A wooden spigot in a cider barrel is sometimes called a spile. The towel used for drying dishes is usually a dish-towel, but in various places it is a cup-towel, a wiping-towel, a dish-cloth, a wiping-cloth, a wiper, a dish-wiper or a cup-wiper. Sometimes such variants appear in clusters on the maps, and sometimes they are scattered, probably in response to migrations. The lingering strength of Puritan prudery is shown in the survival of a number of grotesque euphemisms for bull, e.g., gentleman cow, top cow, cow critter, seed ox, male animal, he-cow, roarer, or the beast, the brute, the sire, the male, the masculine, the old man, the gentleman, the master or the he. Similarly, a stallion is sometimes a sire, a male horse, a seed horse, a stock horse, a top horse, a he-horse or simply a horse, a ram is a buck, a sire, a male or a gentleman sheep, and a boar is a seed or top hog, a gimlet pig, a borer, a sire or a stock hog. The DAE neglects such forms, and as a result the LA makes a novel and useful contribution to the study of the American vocabulary.

But its chief stress is on pronunciations, and in that field it is considerably more interesting to the professional phonologist than to the layman. This is mainly because it uses “a finely graded phonetic alphabet based on that of the International Phonetic Association” — an alphabet so extensive that no less than nineteen pages of the accompanying handbook are needed to explain it. How many separate symbols and combinations of symbols are in it I have not attempted to determine, but the number must run to hundreds. More, it is used differently by the different field workers, and even by the same field worker at different times, and in consequence the lay student of the maps is confronted by a mass of strange characters that are frequently unintelligible and sometimes almost maddening. The truth is that the sounds of American speech are so numerous that it is next to impossible to represent all of them with complete accuracy by printed symbols. They vary not only in every pair of individuals, but also in the same individual at different times. The hopeful penologists, however, do not despair of getting them on paper, and in consequence there is a constant effort to improve and augment the International Phonetic Alphabet, leading to the incessant invention of new symbols and combinations, many of them baffling even to phonologists. Even in its simplest form the IPA is almost as unilluminating to the layman as so much Mongolian, as anyone may discover by examining it in American Speech, where it is printed on the inside cover of every issue, along with an exposition that does not explain. It is dealt with a good deal more understandably in “A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English,” by John S. Kenyon and Thomas A. Knott,¹ but even Kenyon and Knott fall very far short of making its interpretation facile.²

6. THE VIEWS OF WRITING MEN

“American authors,” said Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835,³ “may truly be said to live more in England than in their own country, since they constantly study the English writers and take them every day for their models. But such is not the case with the bulk of the population, which is more immediately subjected to the peculiar causes acting upon the United States. It is not then to the written, but to the spoken language that attention must be paid if we would detect the modifications which the idiom of an aristocratic people may undergo when it becomes the language of a democracy.”¹ Toqueville’s visit to the United States was made in 1831, and his remarks about American writers were certainly true for their time.² The two then principally admired and influential, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, were both regarded by their contemporaries, and with sound reason, as Anglomaniacs. Cooper, to be sure, had been moved, three years before, to protest (anonymously) against the venomous and incessant English revilings of all things American, including American speechways, but he seems to have regretted his contumacy, for in “The American Democrat,” which followed in 1838, he sneered at Americanisms in the best manner of the English reviewers.³ As for Irving, he never ceased to be subservient to English precept and example.⁴ The revolt against both, as against English libel and invective, was left to lesser men, the most effective of whom, James K. Paulding, had been Irving’s collaborator in Salmagundi in 1807, and had brought out a second series all his own in 1819. Paulding, a New Yorker from Dutchess county, in the heart of the Hudson Valley Little England, nevertheless took the American side in the War of 1812, and hastened into print with a “Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan” that must have had a powerful effect at the time, for it remained in print until 1835 and was brought out again in 1867. This last edition had a preface by William I. Paulding, a son of the author. The younger man was apparently somewhat upset by the bitterness of his pa’s satire, and sought to apologize for it as follows:

He wrote in an atmosphere of acerbity, about matters then really of almost national [sic!] concern, though at the present day they can scarcely be made to appear in that light. He looked upon the whole detracting tribe¹ as mercenary calumniators of an entire people, with no claim to either courtesy or grace; and pitched upon the individual subjects of attack rather as types of the the different styles of the British objector than from any personal feeling or knowledge of the parties.

This, of course, was poppycock. Paulding’s savage thrusts were aimed at easily recognized offenders, and he must have known some of them well enough. Thirteen years later, in 1825, he returned to the attack with a still more devastating buffoonery, this time under the title of “John Bull in America, or, The New Munchhausen.” Here he singled out individual travelers so plainly that even his dunderhead son, writing forty-two years later, could not escape identifying them, e.g., Thomas Ashe, Richard Parkinson and William Faux, to whom Thomas Hamilton was added in a new edition in 1837. The book still makes excellent reading, for it is a burlesque full of broad humors, with no squeamish pulling of punches. In his preface Paulding suggests waggishly that the author was probably William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly Review and grand master of all the English America-haters. Throughout he very adroitly parodies Gifford’s condescending style, and is full of other devices that make the thing a capital example of a kind of writing that has been curiously little practised in the United States. Paulding, of course, got some help in his counterattack — from Edward Everett, from Timothy Dwight, from Robert Walsh,² and even from the timorous Cooper — but for twenty years he bore most of the burden and heat of the day. Everett (1794–1865) was a convert to the cause of American independence in speech, and had no truck with it until he visited England in 1815, and then proceeded to Göttingen to take his doctorate. Says Allen Walker Read:

In his early years he imbibed the cultural colonialism that prevailed in Boston, but this he lost upon becoming acquainted with England. He became a leader in defense of the right of Americans to develop new words and to retain old ones, and held that in point of fact the state of English in America was sounder than that in England. He rebutted vigorously the attacks of small-minded British critics.¹

Everett had several encounters with Gifford in London and stood up to him boldly, even to the extent of criticizing the English of the Quarterly itself. He was unfavorably impressed, not only by the multiplicity of English provincial dialects, but also by the accepted speech of the higher circles of London, and sneered impartially at the language of “a stout Lancashire yeoman” who shined his shoes in Liverpool and that of the royal Duke of Sussex. When, on returning home, he became editor of the North American Review, he denounced one of the slanderous English travelers of the time as a “miscreant” and another as a “swindler.” Even when, in 1841, he was made American minister to England, he resisted stoutly the notorious tendency of that exalted post to make its incumbents limber-kneed, and came back in 1845 still convinced that American English was better than British English. He was the first, in fact, to suggest a dictionary of Briticisms. In one of his last publications, the “Mount Vernon Papers” of 1860, he quoted David Hume’s prophecy to Edward Gibbon in 1767: “Our solid and increasing establishments in America … promise a superior stability and duration to the English language,” and added: “What a contrast between these sensible remarks … and the sneers of English tourists and critics on the state of the English language as written and spoken in America.”²

Cooper, as I have noted, blew both hot and cold — and not so briskly hot as cold. According to his biographer, Robert E. Spiller, the purpose of “Notions of the Americans,” which was published in London in 1828 and in Philadelphia a little later in the same year, was twofold: “the misinformed and prejudiced criticism of the English must be silenced, and the slavish mental dependence of the American mind upon British opinion must be brought to an end.”¹ But he was so faint-hearted that he withheld his name from the book and ascribed it instead to an anonymous “traveling bachelor,” seeking to make it appear that this bachelor was an Englishman. In “The American Democrat,” which followed ten years later, he forgot altogether the denunciations of American speechways by the English, and devoted himself mainly to drawing up an indictment on his own account. In part he said:

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms. To these may be added ambiguity of expression. Many perversions of significations also exist, and a formality of speech, which, while it renders conversation ungraceful, and destroys its playfulness, seriously weakens the power of the language, by applying to ordinary ideas words that are suited only to themes of gravity and dignity.

While it is true that the great body of the American people use their language more correctly than the mass of any other considerable nation, it is equally true that a smaller proportion than common attain to elegance in this accomplishment, especially in speech. Contrary to the general law in such matters, the women of the country have a less agreeble utterance than the men, a defect that great care should be taken to remedy, as the nursery is the birth-place of so many of our habits.…

Creek, a word that signifies an inlet of the sea, or of a lake, is misapplied to running streams, and frequently to the outlets of lakes.² A square is called a park;³ lakes are often called ponds;⁴ and arms of the sea are sometimes termed rivers.⁵

In pronunciation, the faults are still more numerous, partaking decidedly of provincialisms. The letter u, sounded like double o or oo, or like i, as in virtoo, fortin, fortinate; and ew, pronounced also like oo, are common errors. This is an exceedingly vicious pronunciation, rendering the language mean and vulgar. New, pronounced as noo, is an example,¹ and few, as foo; the true sounds are nu and fu, the u retaining its proper soft sound, and not that of oo.…²

False accentuation is a common American fault. Ensign (insin) is called ensyne, and engine (injin), engyne. Indeed, it is a common fault of narrow associations to suppose that words are to be pronounced as they are spelled.³

Many words are in a state of mutation, the pronunciation being unsettled even in the best society, a result that must often arise where language is as variable and undetermined as the English. To this class belong clerk, cucumber and gold, which are often pronounced as spelt, though it were better and more in conformity with polite usage to say dark, cowcumber (not cowcumber), and goold.⁴ For lootenant (lieutenant) there is not sufficient authority, the true pronunciation being levtenant. By making a familiar compound of this word, we see the uselessness of attempting to reduce the language to any other laws than those of the usages of polite life, for they who affect to say lootenant, do not say lootenant-co-lo-nel, but iootenant-kurnel.⁵

The polite pronunciation of either and neither is i-ther and ni-ther, and not eether and neether.⁶ This is a case in which the better usage of the language has respected derivations, for ei, in German, is pronounced as in height and sleight, ie making the sound of ee. We see the arbitrary usages of the English, however, by comparing these legitimate sounds with those of the words lieutenant colonel, which are derived from the French, in which language the latter word is called co-lo-nel.

Cooper, always a snob, then proceeded to a discussion of the true inward and glorious meaning of gentleman, at that time laboring under derisory suspicions in the new Republic. He said:

The word has a positive and limited signification. It means one elevated above the mass of society by his birth, manners, attainments, character, and social conditions. As no civilized society can exist without these social differences, nothing is gained by denying the use of the term. If blackguards were to be called gentlemen, and gentlemen blackguards, the difference between them would be as obvious as it is today. The word gentleman is derived from the French gentilhomme, which originally signified one of noble birth. This was at a time when the characteristics of the condition were never found beyond a caste. As society advanced, ordinary men attained the qualifications of nobility, without that of birth, and the meaning of the word was extended. It is now possible to be a gentleman without birth, though, even in America, where such distinctions are purely conditional, they who have birth, except in extraordinary instances, are classed with gentlemen. To call a laborer, one who has neither education, manners, accomplishments, tastes, associations, nor any one of the ordinary requisites, a gentleman, is just as absurd as to call one who is thus qualified a fellow. The word must have some especial signification, or it would be synonymous with man. One may have gentlemanlike feelings, principles and appearance, without possessing the liberal attainments that distinguish the gentleman. Least of all does money alone make a gentleman, though, as it becomes a means of obtaining the other requisites, it is usual to give it a place in the claims of the class. Men may be, and often are, very rich, without having the smallest title to be deemed gentlemen. A man may be a distinguished gentleman, and not possess as much money as his own footman.

This word, however, is sometimes used instead of the old terms, sirs, my masters, &c., &c., as in addressing bodies of men. Thus we say gentlemen in addressing a public meeting, in compliance, and as, by possibility, some gentlemen may be present. This is a license that may be tolerated, though he who should insist that all present were, as individuals, gentlemen, would hardly escape ridicule.

What has just been said of the word gentleman is equally true with that of lady. The standard of these two classes, rises as society becomes more civilized and refined; the man who might pass for a gentleman in one nation, or community, not being able to maintain the same position in another.

The inefficiency of the effort to subvert things by names, is shown in the fact that, in all civilized communities, there is a class of men, who silently and quietly recognize each other as gentlemen; who associate together freely and without reserve, and who admit each other’s claims without scruple or distrust. This class may be limited by prejudice and arbitrary enactments, as in Europe, or it may have no other rules than those of taste, sentiment and the silent laws of usage, as in America.

The same observations may be made in relation to the words master and servant. He who employs laborers, with the right to command, is a master, and he who lets himself to work, with an obligation to obey, a servant. Thus there are house, or domestic servants, farm servants, shop servants, and various other servants; the term master being in all these cases the correlative.

In consequence of the domestic servants of America having once been Negro slaves, a prejudice has arisen among the laboring class of the whites, who not only dislike the term servant, but have also rejected that of master. So far has this prejudice gone, that in lieu of the latter, they have resorted to the use of the word boss, which has precisely the same meaning in Dutch!¹ How far a subterfuge of this nature is worthy of a manly and common sense people, will admit of question.

A similar objection may be made to the use of the word help, which is not only an innovation on a just and established term, but which does not properly convey the meaning intended. They who aid their masters in the toil may be deemed helps, but they who perform all the labor do not assist, or help to do the thing, but they do it themselves. A man does not usually hire his cook to help him cook his dinner, but to cook it herself. Nothing is therefore gained, while something is lost in simplicity and clearness, by the substitution of new and imperfect terms for the long established words of the language. In all cases in which the people of America have retained the things of their ancestors, they should not be ashamed to keep the names.

The love of turgid expressions is gaining ground, and ought to be corrected. One of the most certain evidences of a man of high breeding is his simplicity of speech; a simplicity that is equally removed from vulgarity and exaggeration. He calls a spade a spade. His enunciation, while clear, deliberate and dignified, is totally without strut, showing his familiarity with the world, and, in some degree, reflecting the qualities of his mind, which is polished without being addicted to sentimentalism, or any other bloated feeling. He never calls his wife his lady, but his wife, and he is not afraid of lessening the dignity of the human race by styling the most elevated and refined of his fellow creatures men and women. He does not say, in speaking of a dance, that “the attire of the ladies was exceedingly elegant and peculiarly becoming at the late assembly,” but that “the women were well dressed at the last ball;” nor is he apt to remark “that the Rev. Mr. G. — gave us an elegant and searching discourse the past Sabbath,” but that “the parson preached a good sermon last Sunday.”²

Cooper’s plea for “simplicity of speech,… totally without strut … or any other bloated feeling,” had little effect upon his contemporaries, or indeed upon himself. All of them were still under the influence of the Johnsonian or bow-wow style of the Eighteenth Century, and not many of them attempted to make any use of the new and vivid native vocabulary that was flourishing about them. Bryant, born in 1794 and surviving until 1878, was essentially a conformist,³ and after he became editor of the New York Evening Post he drew up a list of terms prohibited to his staff which included some of the Americanisms denounced by the English reviewers, e.g., reliable, balance, standpoint, bogus, lengthy, to jeopardize, to donate and to progress — all of them now perfectly sound American, and even sound English. This Index was imitated in many other American newspaper offices, and its blight is not altogether thrown off to this day.¹ The younger Americans of the classical period showed but little more interest in the evolving national speechways, and Joseph Warren Beach was hardly guilty of hyperbole when he called them “cultivated and anemic writers milk-fed upon the culture of England.”² Mamie Meredith has directed attention to the fact that Emerson, in the seclusion of his diaries, was not above a certain bold experimentation in words,³ but in his published work he wrote like a university-trained Englishman — to be sure, like one of unusual originality and force, but still like an Englishman. It may be true, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, that “The American Scholar,” 1837, was “the intellectual declaration of independence” of America, but if so the independence it declared was a good deal more in ideas than in speech. Poe and Melville delighted in strange words, but very few of them came out of the rising American vocabulary of their time. In a list of 180 terms found in Melville before the earliest dates of their recording from other sources, compiled by James Mark Purcell in 1941,⁴ only a small number are properly describable as Americanisms: the overwhelming majority are either borrowings from or adaptations of the argot of English sailors, or nonce-words of no significance, and usually of very small ingenuity. As for Poe, a similar study published by J. H. Neumann in 1943¹ shows even rarer inventions of any substance, and none that reveal genuinely American influence or have got into the common store. Poe had a weakness for the grandiloquent, and was thus fond of such monsters as circumgyratory, concentralization, paragraphism and supremeness, but his actual vocabulary was relatively small; indeed, Robert L. Ramsay estimates that in his poetry it was limited to between 3,100 and 3,200 words.² He is often credited with tintinnabulation, which occurs in “The Bells,” 1831, but it is really no more than an obvious derivative of a Latin loan traced by the NED to 1398.³ Poe used the phrase American language in “The Rationale of Verse,” and denounced Noah Webster, in “Fifty Suggestions,” as “more English than the English — plus Arabe qu’en Arabie,” but his other discussions of language, in “Marginalia” and elsewhere, showed that he was a rigid purist, and could imagine no standards for American English save those in favor in England. Nor could Hawthorne,⁴ or Thoreau, or Longfellow, or Holmes.

Whitman, the precise contemporary of Melville, was more language-conscious than any of the other writers so far mentioned, and it fitted into his romantic confidence in democracy to praise the iconoclastic and often uncouth American speechways of his time. Two formal treatises on the subject survive, beside a number of notes and reports of conversations. In November, 1885, he contributed a paper to the North American Review under the title of “Slang in America,” and three years later he included it in “November Boughs.”¹ Thirty years before, in the period of “Leaves of Grass,” he prepared a lecture entitled “An American Primer,” and at various times afterward he seems to have devoted himself to its revision. But it was apparently never delivered, and the manuscript did not get into print until 1904, twelve years after his death, when it was published in the Atlantic Monthly by his faithful retainer, Horace Traubel.² Both the paper and the lecture, like all of Whitman’s prose writings, are somewhat vague and flowery, but their central purpose remains plain enough, to wit, to make war upon the old American subservience to Eighteenth Century English pedantry, and open the way for the development of a healthy and vigorous autochthonous language in the United States. In “Slang in America” he said:

Language, be it remember’d, is not an abstract construction of the learn’d, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. Its final decisions are made by the masses, people nearest the concrete, having most to do with actual land and sea.

He labored this theme in many conversations with Traubel in Mickle street, and once said:

I sometimes think the “Leaves” is only a language experiment — that it is an attempt to give the spirit, the body, the man, new words, new potentialities of speech — an American, a cosmopolitan (the best of America is the best cosmopolitanism) range of self-expression. The new world, the new times, the new peoples, the new vistas, need a tongue according — yes, what is more, will have such a tongue — will not be satisfied until it is evolved.

To which may be added the following from “An American Primer”:

The words continually used among the people are, in numberless cases, not words used in the dictionaries by authority. There are just as many words in daily use, not inscribed in the dictionary, and seldom or never in print. Also, the forms of grammar are never persistently obeyed, and cannot be. The Real Dictionary will give all words that exist in use, the bad words as well as any. The Real Grammar will be that which declares itself a nucleus of the spirit of laws, even violating them if necessary.

But these bold words found little realization in Whitman’s actual practise. His prose certainly fell very far short of colloquial ease. In his early days he wrote the dingy, cliché-laden journalese of the era, and after his discovery of Carlyle he indulged himself in a heavy and sometimes absurd imitation of the Scotsman’s gnarled and tortured style. Not many specimens of the popular speech that he professed to admire ever got into his writings, either in prose or in verse. He is remembered for a few, e.g., yawp and gawk, but for a few only.¹ His own inventions were mainly cacophonous miscegenations of roots and suffixes, e.g., scientism, presidentiad, civilizee, venerealee, erysipalite, to memorandize, diminute (adjective), omnigenous, aidancy, poemet and infidelistic, and not one of them has ever gained any currency. Moreover, more than half his innovations were simply borrowings from finishing-school French, with a few examples of Spanish and Italian added for good measure. Dr. Louise Pound, in a study of his French loans,² suggests that he must have picked them up during his brief newspaper days in New Orleans, but it is hard to believe that they were used with any frequency by journalistic colleagues who actually knew French. Most of them were what Dr. Pound, in another place, describes as “social words,” which is to say, pearls from the vocabulary of the primeval society editors of his time, e.g., coiffeur, restaurateur, mon cher, mélange, rapport, faubourg, début, distingué, morceau, bijouterie, résumé, ensemble, insouciance, cortège, haut ton, soirée, ennui, aplomb, douceur and éclat.³ A number of these have been naturalized, but I doubt that Whitman had anything to do with the process. Nor did he succeed any better with his Spanish and Italian favorites, e.g., camerado, libertad, Americano, romanza and cantabile. Like Poe, he was fond of airing foreign words chat struck him as tony, but like Poe again, he wrote a stiff and artificial English, and seldom showed any command of the vernacular riches that he professed to admire.¹

Of the lesser American writers who flourished in the era running from the publication of “Thanatopsis” in 1817 to that of “Leaves of Grass” in 1855, only the professed humorists showed any active interest in American speechways. N. P. Willis, like J. K. Paulding, resented the gross libels of all things American in the current English reviews and travel books, and sought revenge in 1835, in his “Pencillings By the Way,” by giving the English a dose of their own medicine. This work, which still repays reading, is an impudent and often satirical picture of the English life of the time, especially on the more pretentious intellectual levels, and in it there are some effective hits, as when, for example, Willis compliments the second Lord Grenville, who had visited America, on speaking “American English … with all the careless correctness and fluency of a vernacular tongue, [and without] a particle of the cockney drawl, half Irish and half Scotch, with which many Englishmen speak.” “Pencillings By the Way” made a considerable uproar in England, and was attacked violently by the Quarterly Review,² but it seems to have been read, and there was an English reprint so recently as 1943.³ It would be, however, an exaggeration to call Willis an advocate of American independence in speech; on the contrary, he wrote in what he regarded as the best English fashion of the period, and disdained the neologisms that were beginning to show themselves in the work of the popular humorists. His own contributions to the vocabulary were such banalities as biggerness, haughty culture (for high culture), other-people-ness, un-get-about-able, super finery, whirlsated (confused), Caesar-or-nobody-dom and to brickify. He was denounced for these confections by a reviewer in Putnam’s Monthly twenty years after the appearance of “Pencillings By the Way.”¹ But the same reviewer revealed the prissy standards still prevailing in the American reviews by denouncing him likewise, but quite irrationally, for “the recurring substitution of a passive verb, with a preposition and the objective case of the actor, instead of the usual active verb with the actor in the nominative — thus: ‘That was repeatedly heard by me’ instead of ‘I repeatedly heard that.’ ” No one, as yet, has searched the American reviews of the pre-Civil War era, as the English reviews have been searched by Pickering, Cairns and Read, but some light upon their position with regard to American English is to be found in a paper by Read, dealing, inter alia, with their treatment of the early American dictionaries.² On the appearance of Noah Webster’s first dictionary in 1806, it was generally denounced for its inclusion of Americanisms, and the same treatment was given to the works of John Elliott, Caleb Alexander, William Woodbridge and the American Samuel Johnson, Jr., for somewhat less conspicuous offendings. Both the American Review and the Monthly Anthology protested bitterly against the listing of composuist, a substitute for composer, then “much used” according to Pickering, “at some of our colleges,” but now happily obsolete. The Monthly Magazine laid down the doctrine that, save for a few “technical and scientific terms,… any other species of American words are manifest corruptions, and to embalm these by the lexicographic process would only be a waste of time and abuse of talents.” Rather curiously, two eminent pedagogues of the time took the other line. One was Jeremiah Atwater, president of Middlebury College in Vermont, who declared that “local words are always with propriety inserted in dictionaries, especially when marked as being local.” The other was Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, already mentioned as giving aid and. comfort to Paulding. He drew up, in 1807, and not only signed himself but had nine members of his faculty sign, a letter to Webster saying:

The insertion of local terms in your small dictionary we approve. No good reason can be given why a person who meets with words of this kind should not be able to find their meaning in a dictionary — the only place where they can usually be found at all.

It was not, however, such scholastic bigwigs as Webster and Dwight who forced the seasoning of American writing with the pungent herbs of the vernacular, nor was it such literary rebels as Paulding and Whitman; it was the lowly humorists whose buffooneries began to appear in the newspapers soon after the War of 1812, and whose long line culminated in James Russell Lowell and Samuel L. Clemens. The first of them whose work got between covers was Seba Smith, who published his “Letters of Major Jack Downing” in 1830. Of him Will D. Howe has said:

Almost immediately after his graduation from Bowdoin College in 1818 he began to contribute a series of political articles in the New England dialect to the papers of Portland, Maine. These illustrated fairly well the peculiarities of New England speech and manners, and doubtless had a great influence in encouraging similar sketches in other parts of the country. Smith was in several ways a pioneer. He led the way for “The Biglow Papers” and all those writings which have exploited back-country New England speech and character. He anticipated, in the person of Jack Downing, confidant of Jackson, David Ross Locke’s Petroleum V. Nasby, confidant of Andrew Johnson. He was the first in America, as Finley Peter Dunne, with his Mr. Dooley, is the latest, to create a homely character and through him to make shrewd comments on politics and life.¹

Smith was imitated at once by Charles A. Davis, who borrowed not only his method and manner but also his Jack Downing, and in a little while he had a long stream of followers — Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Charles Henry Smith (Bill Arp), George W. Bagby, George W. Harris (Sut Lovengood), Joseph G. Glover, Frances Miriam Whitcher (the Widow Bedott), Samuel G. Goodrich (Peter Parley), Benjamin P. Shillaber (Mrs. Partington), Thomas C. Haliburton (Sam Slick),² Charles G. Halpine (Private Miles O’Reilly), Charles G. Leland (Hans Breitmann), Henry W. Shaw (Josh Billings), David R. Locke (Petroleum V. Nasby), Charles Farrar Browne (Artemus Ward), Mortimer Thompson (Philander Doesticks),¹ and George H. Derby (John Phoenix). Most of these created characters which, like Smith’s Major Downing, were their spokesmen, and as humorists multiplied their characters began to represent many national types — the Southern cracker, the Western frontiersman, the Negro, the Irishman, the German, as well as the New Englander. The result was a steady infiltration of the new American words and ways of speech, and the laying of foundations for a genuinely colloquial and national style of writing.² The first masterpiece of this national school was Lowell’s “The Biglow Papers,” Series I of which appeared in 1848. Lowell not only attempted to depict with some care the peculiar temperament and point of view of the rustic New Englander; he also made an extremely successful effort to report Yankee speech.¹ His brief prefatory treatise on its peculiarities of pronunciation, though it included a few observations that had been made long before him by Witherspoon, was the first to deal with the subject with any approach to comprehensiveness, and in his introduction to Series II he expanded this preliminary note to a long and interesting essay, with a glossary of nearly 200 terms. In that essay he said:

In choosing the Yankee dialect I did not act without forethought. It had long seemed to me that the great vice of American writing and speaking was a studied want of simplicity, that we were in danger of coming to look on our mother-tongue as a dead language, to be sought in the grammar and dictionary rather than in the heart, and that our only chance of escape was by seeking it at its living sources among those who were, as Scottowe says of Major-General Gibbons, “divinely illiterate.” … Whether it be want of culture, for the highest outcome of that is simplicity, or for whatever reason, it is certain that very few American writers or speakers wield their native language with the directness, precision and force that are common as the day in the mother country. We use it like Scotsmen, not as if it belonged to us, but as if we wished to prove that we belonged to it, by showing our intimacy with its written rather than with its spoken dialect. And yet all the while our popular idiom is racy with life and vigor and originality, bucksome (as Milton used the word) to our new occasions, and proves itself no mere graft by sending up new suckers from the old root in spite of us.… The first postulate of an original literature is that a people should use their language instinctively and unconsciously, as if it were a living part of their growth and personality, not as the mere torpid boon of education or inheritance. Even Burns contrived to write very poor verse and prose in English. Vulgarisms are often only poetry in the egg.²

Unhappily, Lowell labored under the delusion that he had sufficiently excused the existence of any given Americanism when he had proved that it was old English, and so a large part of his essay was given over to that popular but vain exercise. But despite his folly in this respect and his timorousness in other directions³ he did a great service to the common tongue of the country, and must be numbered among its true friends.¹ His writing in his own person, however, showed but little sign of it: he gradually developed a very effective prose style, but it did not differ materially from that of his New England contemporaries. The business of introducing the American language to good literary society was reserved for Clemens — and, as everyone knows, Clemens had a long, long wait below the salt before it ever occurred to any of the accepted authorities of his generation that he was not a mere zany like Browne and Locke, but a first-rate artist. Unless my records are in error, the first academic dignitary to admit formally that he belonged at the head of the table was the late William Lyon Phelps, who did so in “Essays on Modern Novelists” in 1910, just as old Mark departed this earth for bliss eternal.² Since then his importance has come to be generally recognized, even by the authors of school and college “literature” books, though a number of the heirs and converts to the standards of the Haircloth Age, notably Van Wyck Brooks, have continued to hack away at him. In 1929 the members of the English department of the Graduate School of the University of Missouri, led by Dr. Robert L. Ramsay and Miss (later Dr.) Frances Guthrie Emberson, undertook an exhaustive study of his vocabulary, and nine years later it was completed. It bears the title of “A Mark Twain Lexicon” and is a very interesting and valuable work,³ for it shows that Mark not only made free use of the swarming Americanisms (and especially the Westernisms) of his time, but also contributed a number of excellent inventions to the store. In a long preliminary note there is a detailed study of his use of both sorts of words and phrases. He was the first American author of world rank to write a genuinely colloquial and native American; there is little if any trace in his swift and vivid prose of classical English example. He had a magnificent artistry, and few other Americans have written so well, but, once he had thrown off the journalese of his first years, he achieved his effects without any resort to the conventional devices. Drs. Ramsay and Emberson, in an elaborate preface to their lexicon, attempt a detailed analysis of his vocabulary. They show that of the 7802 words they list as characteristic no less than 2329 appear to be Americanisms, with 2743 others possibly deserving that classification. Unhappily, their study was made before the publication of the DAE was begun, but it is highly probable that a reexamination of the materials today would produce relatively little change in these figures, for of all the authors listed in the DAE’s bibliography Mark Twain occupies by far the largest space — more than Bret Harte, the runner-up,¹ and a great deal more than Cooper, Holmes, Howells, Lowell or the whole corps of early humorists.² Save for “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc,” a calculated tour de force, somewhat toilsomely out of character, there is not a book of his that did not yield something to the DAE’s searchers, and some of his major books yielded rich stores. “The flavor of his style,” say Ramsay and Emberson, “is always racy of the American soil, and it owes this quality largely to the prodigious store of native phrases and idioms which he employs.” Nor did he employ them without deliberate purpose. He was, in fact, always very language-conscious, and wrote upon the subject not infrequently. So early as 1872, in “Roughing It,” he was testifying to his delight in “the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains,” and in a prefatory note to “Huckleberry Finn,” in 1884, he showed a pardonable pride in his grasp of it by warning his readers that what followed attempted to differentiate between “the Missouri negro dialect, the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary Pike County dialect, and four modified varieties of this last.”¹ “The shadings,” he said, “have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork, but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.” There was a chapter, “Concerning the American Language,” crowded out of “A Tramp Abroad” in 1880, which antedated all the enormous accumulation of latter-day writing on the subject. In it he said:

Our changed conditions and the spread of our people far to the South and far to the West have made many alterations in our pronunciation, and have introduced new words among us and changed the meaning of many old ones.… A nation’s language is … not simply a manner of speech obtaining among the educated handful; the manner obtaining among the vast uneducated multitude must be considered also.… English and American are separate languages.… When I speak my native tongue in its utmost purity an Englishman can’t understand me at all.²

Mark’s influence upon the development of American prose was very large, but most of his immediate contemporaries fought against it. One of those who followed him, though somewhat gingerly and at a safe distance, was Howells, who came out in the Editor’s Study of Harper’s Magazine, in January, 1886, for American autonomy in speech. “Languages, while they live,” he said, “are perpetually changing. God apparently meant them for the common people,… and the common people will use them freely, as they use other gifts of God. On their lips our continental English will differ more and more from the insular English, and we believe that this is not deplorable, but desirable.… We have only to leave our studies, editorial or other, and go into the shops and fields to find the ‘spacious times of great Elizabeth’ again.”³ The spirit of the time, however, was against this yielding to the national speech habits, and most of its other salient writers were not only careful conformists to English precept and example in their writing but abject colonials otherwise. A ludicrous but by no means untypical example was Henry Van Dyke, D.D., LL.D., D.C.L., a Presbyterian pastor turned poet, pedagogue and literary politician, whose influence throughout the 1890–1910 period was enormous, and not only enormous but also incredible, for it is impossible to find anything in his numerous books, pamphlets and pronunciamentoes worth reading today.¹ When, in 1923, there was a conference of English and American professors of English at Columbia University, he seized the opportunity to declare that “the proposal to make a new American language to fit our vast country may be regarded either as a specimen of American humor or as a serious enormity.”² The assembled birchmen gave him a hearty round of applause, and one of them, Dr. Fred Newton Scott, of the University of Michigan, leaped up to denounce my burlesque translation of the Declaration of Independence into the American vulgate,³ which he took quite seriously, as a crime against humanity, fit “for the hair shirt and the lash, or tears of shame and self-abasement.”⁴ Needless to say, the learned pastor had the enthusiastic support of his colleagues of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A year or two later seven of them joined him in publishing “Academy Papers: Addresses on Language Problems,” a series of earnest pleas for a rigid yielding to English standards, with bitter flings at all the current American authors guilty of stooping to the use of Americanisms. The most idiotic chapter in this preposterous volume was by Van Dyke himself: in it he denounced Carl Sandburg with Calvinistic rancor, and said of “The Spoon River Anthology” (including “Ann Rutledge”!) that “to call it poetry is to manhandle a sacred word.”¹ Brander Matthews, who was one of the contributors, had been an eager student of American speech-ways in the days before World War I,² but the sound of the bugles filled him with colonial doubts that there could ever be any essential difference between the English of England and that of this great self-governing Dominion.³

The outbreak of World War II brought on another upsurge of colonialism, but this time it exhibited a certain weakness, and few authors of any dignity or authority were actively associated with it: indeed, its leaders were mainly writers of palpable trash. Nevertheless, it will probably keep on showing itself in the more or less beautiful letters of the country for a long while to come. After all, England is still the fount of honor for America, and almost the only native literati who disdain English approval altogether are those to whom it is plainly sour grapes. But there has certainly been a considerable improvement in independence and self-respect since the days when Lowell could write:

You steal Englishmen’s books and think Englishmen’s thought;
With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught;
Your literature suits its each whisper and motion
To what will be thought of it over the ocean.¹

The whole swing of American style, for a quarter century past, has been toward greater and greater freedom in the use of essentially national idioms. The tart admonitions of English purists —as, for example, in the Literary Supplement of the London Times — are no longer directed solely or even mainly to writers who need apology at home: the offenders now include many of the best we have yet produced. And they begin to get the understanding and approval of a larger and larger faction of intelligent Englishmen.²

7. THE POLITICAL FRONT

79. [William Gifford, the bitterly anti-American editor of the Quarterly Review, is authority for the story that at the close of the Revolution certain members of Congress proposed that the use of English be formally prohibited in the United States, and Hebrew substituted for it.] This charge appeared in the Quarterly in January, 1814, in the course of a review of “Inchiquen, the Jesuit’s Letters,… Containing a Favorable View of the Manners, Literature and State of Society of the United States,” brought out by Charles Jared Ingersoll in 1810.³ The review was a furious (and, at least in some part, apt and effective) onslaught upon the whole American scheme of things, and included the following:⁴

Nor have there been wanting projects … for getting rid of the English language, not merely by barbarizing it — as when they progress a bill,¹ jeopardize a ship,² guess a probability, proceed by grades,³ hold a caucus, conglaciate a wave,⁴ etc., when the president of Yale College talks of a conflagrative brand,⁵ and President Jefferson of belittling the productions of nature⁶ — but by abolishing the use of English altogether, and substituting a new language of their own. One person indeed had recommended the adoption of Hebrew, as being ready made to their hands, and considering the Americans, no doubt, as the “chosen people” of the new world.⁷

In 1934 Allen Walker Read called attention to evidence⁸ that Gifford had probably lifted this tale from the Marquis de Chastellux,⁹ who served as a major-general under Rochambeau during the Revolution and on his return to France after Yorktown published an account of his observations in America. In Volume II of that work, p. 203, there was the following passage:

The Americans … testify more surprise than peevishness at meeting with a foreigner who does not understand English. But if they are indebted for this opinion to a prejudice of education, a sort of national pride, that pride suffered not a little from the reflection, which frequently occurred, of the language of the country being that of their oppressors. Accordingly they avoided these expressions, You speak English; You understand English well; and I have often heard them say You speak American well; the American is not difficult to learn. Nay, they have carried it even so far as seriously to propose introducing a new language, and some persons were desirous, for the convenience of the public, that the Hebrew should be substituted for the English. The proposal was that it should be taught in the schools and made use of in all public acts. We may imagine that this project went no further, but we may conclude from the mere suggestion that the Americans could not express in a more energetic manner their aversion for the English.¹

The substitution of Greek for Hebrew in this legend was apparently made by Charles Astor Bristed, a grandson of the original John Jacob Astor. This was done in the essay, “The English Language in America,” that he contributed to a volume of “Cambridge Essays” in 1855.² But Bristed’s reference to the matter, I suppose, was intended to be jocular, for he reported that Congress had rejected the proposal on the ground that “it would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it is, and make the English speak Greek.” Eight years before this another writer, this time a German named Franz Loher, had alleged in a book that, in Pennsylvania at least, an effort had been made to displace English with German.³ He said:

In the State Assembly, not long after the conclusion of peace, a motion was made to establish the German language as the official and legal language of Pennsylvania.… When the vote was taken on this question — whether the prevailing language in the Assembly, in the courts, and in the official records of Pennsylvania should be German — there was a tie. Half voted for the introduction of the German language.… Thereupon the Speaker of the Assembly, a certain Muhlenberg, cast the deciding vote in favor of the English language.

This Muhlenberg was Frederick Augustus Conrad (1750–1801), twice Speaker of the Pennsylvania House and later the first Speaker of the House of Representatives at Washington, 1789–91 and again in 1793–95. The story was afloat for a long while, and many German-Americans believed it; indeed, there were those who execrated the memory of Muhlenberg, who was the son of the founder of Lutheranism in America, for killing so fine a chance to make the language of their Fatherland, and not English, the language of their adopted country. Finally, in 1931, Otto Lohr tracked the tale down to 1813, and discovered, as might have been expected, that it was a fable based upon a misunderstanding. The time was 1794 and the scene was Philadelphia, where Congress was in session. The proposal before it was not to make German the language of the United States, but simply to provide for the publication of some of the laws in a German translation, for the accommodation of immigrants — in Virginia, not Pennsylvania — who had not yet learned English. The whole story was later unearthed by Theodore G. Tappert and printed in the Lutheran of Philadelphia.¹ A petition from the Virginia Germans, it appeared, was received on January 9, 1794, and on March 20 it was referred to a committee of three members, one of whom was John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg (1746–1807), a brother to the speaker. The committee brought in a favorable report on April 1, but it was laid on the table. On December 1 a new committee was appointed, and on December 23 it likewise brought in a favorable report. This one was discussed by the House committee of the whole on January 13, 1795, and rejected by a vote of 41 ayes to 42 noes. It is possible that the Speaker cast the deciding vote, and that the story told by Loher thus originated, but it is not certain, for there is no record of a roll-call. In 1795 the project was again revived, but apparently it failed again, for an act of March 3 of that year, providing for the printing of the laws, made no mention of an edition in German.²

Such translations of State laws, however, had already appeared in two of the States, Pennsylvania and Maryland — in the former in 1776, 1778, 1785, 1786 and 1787, and in the latter in 1787. The Germans of Pennsylvania were extraordinarily tenacious of their mother-tongue, and even to this day, as everyone knows, thousands of their descendants still speak it. In 1753, thirty-six years after the beginning of their great influx, Benjamin Franklin wrote to an English friend, Peter Collinson:

Advertisements, intended to be general, are now printed in Dutch [i.e., German] and English. The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German. They begin of late to make their bonds and other legal instruments in their own language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our courts, where German business so increases that there is continued need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our legislators what the other half say.¹

French continued as an active rival to English in Louisiana long after the American flag was run up in 1803. Indeed, its use is still permitted in the courts of the State, though it has been seldom if ever used for some years. The first State constitution, adopted in 1812, was promulgated in both English and French, and it provided that both languages should be used in the publication of the laws. A new constitution, adopted in 1868, abolished the use of French,² but another, adopted in 1879, permitted the Legislature, at its discretion, to publish the laws in French for the convenience of the French-speaking parishes. Under that discretion they were so published until 1915 or 1916. In New Orleans, of course, English was the language of the courts, but a French newspaper of the city, L’Abeille, lived for years on the revenue derived from printing new laws in French. When French was dropped L’Abeille fell upon evil days, and was eventually absorbed into the Times-Democrat.³ In California and Texas, in the early days, the laws were printed in both English and Spanish, and in New Mexico Spanish is still used. On April 18, 1842, after the beginning of German immigration into Texas, the State Legislature ordained that the laws be printed in German also, and in 1858 it added Norwegian.¹ In 1853 a writer in Gleason’s Pictorial reported that the laws of California were being printed, not only in English and Spanish, but also in Chinese, but this seems to have been a false report.² In New Mexico, until 1941, the Legislature was bilingual and the laws were printed in both English and Spanish.³ Spanish is still permitted in the justices’ courts, the probate court and the district courts of the State, though it has been abolished in the United States district court. There are many Mexicans in New Mexico who cannot speak English, and when they face a jury which includes members who know little or no Spanish it is necessary to employ interpreters for them. I am informed by Mr. Brian Ború Dunne of Santa Fé that these interpreters are not always of ideal competence. He says:

In an embezzlement case in the district court of the First Judicial District, the late and brilliant A. B. Renehan, lawyer of Santa Fé, asked, in addressing the jury: “Who killed Cock Robin?” The interpreter translated this outburst thus: “Quien mató à Cock Robinson?” Mr. Renehan, who was a Spanish scholar, mildly corrected: “I said, ‘who killed Cock Robin!’ ” But the interpreter failed to get it and repeated: “Quien mató à Cock Robinson?”

Mr. Dunne continues:

At political meetings it is customary to call for an interpreter, and the sentences of the so-called orators are usually interpreted between commas thus: “Ladies and Gentlemen, señores y señoras, it gives me great pleasure, me da mucho gusto, this evening, estate noche, to speak to you, di hablar a Ustedes.” Visitors hearing this strange arrangement for the first time usually leave the hall in convulsions, but it is a God-send to reporters who are unfamiliar with shorthand, for it gives them plenty of time to take notes.⁴

The English tried to wipe out Dutch in New York after the conquest of the colony in 1664, but it carried on an underground existence for many years, and so late as the second half of the Eighteenth Century an English observer was reporting that it was “still so much used in some counties that the sheriffs find it difficult to obtain persons sufficiently acquainted with the English tongue to serve as jurors in the courts of law.”¹ Dutch, indeed, was the first language in some of the remoter parts of the Hudson valley until our own time, and also in parts of New Jersey. In Baltimore, down to World War I, there were actually public schools, the so-called German-English schools, in which German was used in the teaching of the elements.

81. [In 1923 bills making the American language official (but never clearly defining it) were introduced in the Legislatures of Illinois, North Dakota, Minnesota and other States. At the same time the Hon. Washington Jay McCormick, then a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Montana, offered a similar bill in Congress.] The text of this bill, along with a statement in support of it by its author, is given in AL4, pp. 81 and 82. It was dealt with jocosely by most of the newspapers that noticed it at all, but a few discussed it more seriously — for example, the Portland Oregonian, which said:

Notwithstanding the obvious chauvinism of the movement, more might be said in its behalf if it were practicable to designate specifically, as the Montana congressman would do, which are the “words and phrases generally accepted as being in good use by the people of the United States.” Right here the difficulty lies. Neither in the United States nor in England is there an equivalent of the French academy as a recognized arbiter of propriety in diction. With certain not very well-defined exceptions, language is with us largely a matter of individual preference. In attempting to separate the sheep from the goats by statutory enactment it is likely that Mr. McCormick has attempted more than he is likely to be able to perform.²

The McCormick bill died in the files of the House judiciary committee, but others substantially like it were offered in the Legislatures of various States. One of them was signed by Governor Len Small of Illinois on June 19, 1923, and went upon the books of the State as Chapter 127, Section 178 of the Acts of the Legislature of that year (albeit with considerable revision). The text of it is given in AL4, pp. 82 and 83.³ Its father was a legislator bearing the ancient Irish name of Ryan, and the Chicago papers, then in the midst of their gory battle with Mayor Big Bill Thompson, professed to see the same Anglophobia in it that prompted his Honor’s historic warning to King George V. The News, when the new law was published, headed a sneering article on it “Illinois State Assembly Adopts Menckenese as Official Language,” and then proceeded to the astonishing disclosure that “the term American language was first substituted for English by the Germans during the war, because of their hatred of all things English.”¹ The New York Sun, rather less upset by Big Bill, had thus commented on the act while it was still before the Legislature:

There was a time in American life when it was possible to be both well-fed and 100% American by ordering liberty-cabbage; in these saner times sauerkraut is to be found on the bill-of-fare. Giving a new tag to our language would be just such an adventure in hair-splitting.²

The proposed Minnesota law of 1923, introduced in the State House of Representatives on March 8 by two rural legislators, was reported favorably by the committee on education on April 6, but got no further. It ran as follows:

Section 1. That the official language of the State and people of Minnesota is hereby defined and declared to be the American language.

Section 2. That all laws and parts of laws of this State, including the rules and regulations of the several departments thereof, wherein the printing, speaking, reading, writing or knowledge of the English language is set forth as a requirement for any purpose or use, hereby are amended to the extent of substituting in the text for the word English the word American.

This bill was supported with great vigor by John M. Leonard of St. Paul, president of the American Foundation and founder and business manager of Hail! Columbia, “America’s foremost patriotic magazine,”³ and it also had the countenance of the Hon. Magnus Johnson, who said a year later: “There will be a day in the near future when there will be only one language in this country — the American,”¹ but, as I have said, it failed of passage. Despite this setback the movement continued active in the upper Middle West. In 1927 the Hon. Andrew W. Mellon, then Secretary of Treasury, revived the hopes of its proponents by ordering that the redemption call for the Second Liberty Loan be printed in the American language, and in February, 1934 they got another lift from the Hon. Fred A. Britten of Chicago, who moved in the national House of Representatives that the members of the American corps diplomatique be instructed to carry on their legerdemain in the same. “When an American envoy,” he declared, “begins to lawf and cawf and ape the British, he ought to be brought home and kept here until he speaks the language as we speak it in the United States.”² Early in 1937 a State senator of North Dakota by the name of the Hon. William A. Thatcher introduced a resolution declaring that American, not English, should be the language of that State thereafter, but though it seems to have been passed by the Senate, it was killed in the House of Representatives.³ So the crusade rested until June 3, 1940, when the Hon. Claude D. Pepper of Florida, in the course of a speech advocated all-out aid to the English and their allies, nevertheless gave formal notice that a resolution he had introduced to that effect was “set down in the American language, in black and white.” A month later the Rochester (N. Y.) Central Trades and Labor Council came to the bat with the following:

Whereas, Since the independence of this country was established we have used a language that carried a misnomer, known as the English language; and

Whereas, We believe no foreign name should be connected with our language;

Therefore, be it resolved, That our representatives in Congress be petitioned to enact a law to the effect, henceforth the language we speak is to be known as the American or United States language.⁴

Then there was another armistice until April 20, 1944, when the Hon. Edwin B. Roscoe of Passaic, a member of a Model Legislature sponsored in New Jersey by the Y.M.C.A., introduced a bill at the year’s opening session at Trenton providing that “the official language of the State of New Jersey shall be hereafter known as the American language instead of the English language.” What became of this measure I do not know.

8. FOREIGN OBSERVERS

86. [From an early day the peculiarities of American have attracted the attention of Continental philologians, and especially of the Germans]. Among the pioneer writings on the subject were “Die englische Philologie in Nordamerika,” by Dr. Felix Flügel, in Gersdorf’s Repertorium, 1852;¹ “Woordenboek van Americanismen,” by M. Keijzer; Gorinchem (Holland), 1854; and “Wörterbuch der Americanismen,” by Friedrich Köhler; Leipzig, 1866. The Keijzer book was based on the first edition of John Russell Bartlett’s “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States”; Boston, 1848, and that of Köhler on Bartlett’s third edition of 1860.¹ Nor was it only in Western Europe that the growing differences between standard English and American were noted in that era. In 1858 Czar Alexander II of Russia ordered that “the American language” be included in the curriculum of the Russian military academies,² and in 1861 a memorial of the Chinese Prince Kung Ts’in, petitioning his brother, the Emperor Hsien-fung, to establish a Foreign Office on Western lines, asked that men be appointed to its staff who were familiar with English, French and American.³ The first American appointed was William A. P. Martin (1827–1916), an American Presbyterian missionary who had gone out to China in 1850 and lived to be the first president of the Imperial University at Peking.

During the years between the first two World Wars the Germans printed a large number of guides to and studies of American English and there were frequent discussions of it in such learned journals as Anglia, Neueren Sprachen, Anglistische Studien, the Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, the Giessener Beiträge zur Erforschung der Sprach und Kultur Englands und Nordamerikas, the Neuphilologische Monatsschrift, and the Zeitschrift für französischen und englischen Unterricht. Much of this discussion, of course, consisted only of reviews and summaries of American or English writings on the subject, but there were also some publications embodying original contributions — for example, “Die Volkssprache im Nordosten der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika,” by Johann Alfred Heil; Breslau, 1927; “Amerikanisches Englisch,” by Hermann U. Meysenbug; Ettlingen and Leipzig, 1929; “A Glossary of Americanisms,” by Dr. H. Mutschmann; Tartu-Dorpat, 1931, and numerous monographs by Dr. Heinrich Spies, Dr. Georg Kartzke and Dr. Walther Fischer. Some of these books and papers are noted in AL4, pp. 85 ff, and others are listed below.⁴ There was also a large popular literature on the subject, mainly in pamphlet form.¹ One of the most curious items thereof was Paustians lustige Sprachzeitschrift für Fortbildung, Nachhilfe und Unterhaltung, a serial published at Hamburg which undertook to teach foreign languages and foreign ways in a painless and even joyous manner by reproducing and expounding comic stories and pictures from foreign publications. On April 25, 1938, for example, it printed on its first page a drawing from the New Yorker, and explained the phrase I guess, which occurred in the legend beneath, thus: “ai gess, amerikanisch für I think = ich glaube, denke, meine.” There was also a considerable interest in American English in Italy before the Italian entrance into World War II,² and likewise, though to a less extent, in France, Belgium, Russia, Holland and the Scandinavian countries.³ In Holland the lead in American studies has been taken by Dr. R. W. Zandvoort of The Hague, editor of English Studies (Amsterdam), who said in 1934:

Since the Great War it has become increasingly difficult for European teachers and scholars to ignore the fact that different norms of English usage are being evolved in another hemisphere, and that these norms are beginning to encroach on territory where hitherto Standard Southern English has held undisputed sway.… So long as the attitude of educated Americans towards their own form of speech was expressed in the words of Richard Grant White that “just in so far as it deviates from the language of the most cultivated society in England it fails to be English” there was no need for Continental language teachers to take American English seriously. But with its world-wide dissemination through business, literature, the talking film, the gramophone record, on one hand, and the growing determination of Americans to assert their independence in matters of speech on the other, the situation is taking on a different aspect.¹

Dr. Zandvoort reported that, at the time he wrote, the majority of Netherlands university pundits, like their opposite numbers in the United States, were still disposed to look down their noses at American English, but that Americanisms were being picked up in large number by their students and that a demand for their consideration in university courses was in the making. Unhappily, the practical difficulty of giving instruction in two forms of the same language was a serious one, especially since Dutch Gymnasium students, by the time they came to English, were already more or less worn out by hard drilling in French, German, Latin and Greek. But Dr. Zandvoort and his fellow advocates of American refused to be daunted. “We look upon American English,” he said, “not as a mere lapse from ‘good’ English, but as a legitimate development, autonomous within its own domain, and from the European point of view subordinate to British English for historical and practical reasons only.”

How the Russians, in 1930, solemnly debated substituting American for English in their schools, on the ground that American is “more democratic” and also more “alive and picturesque,” is set forth in AL4, p. 88, But it was the Japanese who, in the days before Pearl Harbor, took the liveliest interest in American peculiarities of speech, and showed the keenest understanding of their significance. Their philologians, headed by Dr. Sanki Ichikawa, professor of English in Tokyo Imperial University, discussed the subject frequently, at considerable length and with great acumen, both in Studies in English Literature, published by Tokyo University, and in pamphlets and books. In this work they were given active aid by Western teachers of English resident in Japan, including several Englishmen. Among the latter was H. E. Palmer, linguistic adviser to the Japanese Ministry of Education, who, when he brought out “A Dictionary of English Pronunciation” in 1926, included “With American Variants” in its title, and listed hundreds of them.¹ Palmer noted that some of the Americans in Japan managed to achieve a passable imitation of the standard English pronunciation, but for every one who did so, he said, there were “about ten” whose speech remained unmistakably American. Another Englishman in Japan who took cognizance of such differences was Thomas R. G. Lyell, lecturer in English at Waseda University and the Tokyo Foreign Language School, whose “Slang, Phrase and Idiom in Colloquial English and Their Use,” listed many Americanisms.² There were also a large number in “English Influence on Japanese,” by Professor Ichikawa,³ and yet more in “An Introduction to the Study of Loan-Words in Modern Japanese,” by Sawbay Arakawa.⁴ In 1930 G. Tomita brought out “English and American of Today,”⁵ which not only discussed the differences between the English and American vocabularies, but also gave an account of the grammar of vulgar American. Finally, Satoshi Ichiya, a well-known Japanese journalist, set English and American in direct apposition in “King’s English or President’s English?,”⁶ and decided that the Japanese had better learn American. Ichiya, who wrote in English, was educated at the University of London, and confessed to a nostalgic attachment to English speech-ways, but he concluded that “in an academic discussion of this nature it is not right to allow one’s personal sentiment to carry away with it one’s sense of truth.” He went on:

Owing partly to the nearness of the United States to Japan, as compared with Great Britain, and partly to the larger number of American teachers of English in Japanese schools, English in Japan has more of an American flavor than a British. Also, a large number of different American periodicals and books — far more than British publications — which are read by a great many people here, including the British themselves, evidently exert a constant influence upon the English used in this country.…

American-English is spoken by a large majority — at least two-thirds — of the English-speaking people of the world,… and its claim is growing year after year with the continued increase in the wealth, influence and population of the United States.… Common sense teaches us the wisdom of deciding for the majority where the question concerned is that of greater utility.

Ichiya noted that there was some prejudice against American speechways in Japan because of “the increasing haughtiness of the United States as a nation, and the bombastic utterances and idiotic and vulgar behavior of many irresponsible Americans both at home and abroad who are pleased to call themselves 100% American,” but he hastened to assure his Japanese readers that “the majority are not like that. As a matter of fact, real Americans are as refined as any other cultured nationals; they are much freer from a foolish snobbery than some so-called ‘cultured’ Englishmen. It is indeed impossible to dislike such Americans or their speech.”¹

As in Germany, there is a considerable popular literature on the English language, with notes on American variants. In the days before World War II all the stewards and waiters on the Japanese Pacific liners were provided with more or less illuminating handbooks instructing them in the mysteries of English idiom, with special attention to the idioms of Americans. That of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha (Japan Mail Steamship Company) included the following:

Although Americans speak English they often use words which are different from those the passengers from London and other British ports use. For example, Americans like to call the first-class cabins staterooms, but English people say first-class cabin, second-class, etc. A London passenger brings a portmanteau, Gladstone and hold-all, but the American would call the same things trunk, suit-case, grip and rug-strap.

To this was appended a list of variants, in part as follows:

	English	American
	walking-stick	cane
	waterproof	raincoat
	galoshes	rubbers, or overshoes
	boots	shoes
	boot-laces	shoe-strings
	braces	suspenders
	waistcoat	vest
	stud	collar-button
	postcard	postal-card
	lift	elevator

1 Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, 1933, pp. 313–334.

2 The Chippewas, or Ojibwa Indians were of the Algonquian race and held a large territory at the head of the Great Lakes. They were warlike, and fought against the Americans in the colonial wars, in the Revolution and in the War of 1812. The few that survive are now caged on reservations in the upper lakes country. They first appear in American records in 1671, when they were called Chipoës. The Orundaks were apparently inhabitants of the Adirondack region.

3 The Six Nations were the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas and Tuscaroras. They came from the St. Lawrence region, but by 1700 had more or less control of a territory stretching from Hudson’s Bay to what is now North Carolina, and from Connecticut to the Mississippi. Most of them took the English side in the Revolution and were settled in Canada after it was over.

5 Calumet was not an Indian word, but came from a French dialect word signifying a pipe. Robert Beverley, in his History and Present State of Virginia, 1705, said: “This calumet is used in all their important transactions. However, it is nothing but a large tobacco pipe made of red, black or white marble.” The colonists soon dropped the French word and used pipe of peace instead.

6 The speech-belt was a belt of wampum (beads used as ornament, and also as currency). The DAE’s first (and only) example of its use is credited to George Washington, 1753, but it must have been familiar to the colonists long before then.

1 Cambridge (1717–1802) was a Londoner, educated at Eton and Oxford. After 1751 he lived at Twickenham and was one of the intimates of Horace Walpole. His Scribleriad, a mock-heroic poem, appeared in 1751.

2 The Connoisseur belonged to the second flight of English essay periodicals, and was founded by George Colman the elder in 1754. It ran on until 1756, and, like the Spectator before it, was reprinted as a book. There was a third edition of that book in three volumes in 1760, containing some new matter. Read’s citation comes from this new matter. The Connoisseur was contemporaneous with Samuel Johnson’s Rambler (1750–52); the Adventurer (1752–54), to which he also contributed; the World (1753–56), to which Chesterfield and Walpole contributed; the Idler (1758–60), also Johnson’s; and the Citizen of the World (1760), written by Goldsmith.

3 La Lennox was born in 1720 in New York, where her father was the royal lieutenant-governor. She went to England at 15 and married there. Johnson knew her and esteemed her. The novel he quoted from was The Female Quixote, 1752. She also wrote Henrietta, 1758; Sophia, 1761; and Euphemia, 1790, but she is best known for her Shakespeare Illustrated, in which she reprinted some of the sources of Shakespeare’s plays and argued that they were better than the plays. Johnson, who agreed, wrote a dedication for the book.

1 Talented was actually quite sound in English, but it had dropped out of use. S. T. Coleridge argued against it in his Table-Talk so late as July 8, 1832. “I regret,” he said, “to see that vile and barbarous vocable, talented, stealing out of the newspapers into the leading reviews and most respectable publications of the day. Why not shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced, &c? The formation of a participle passive from a noun is a license that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse. If mere convenience is to justify such attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come from America.” Coleridge seems to have overlooked moneyed (or monied), used by Marlowe, Bacon, Clarendon and Wordsworth.

2 No. 40, 1759.

3 Philadelphia, 1755.

4 A variant of trace, and already becoming obsolete in Johnson’s time.

5 In Croft’s fling at Johnson, and perhaps also in his praise of American writings, there was more than a little self-interest, for he had announced a dictionary of his own in 1788, and hoped to find a large market for it in America. Down to Johnson’s death in 1788 he and the lexicographer were on good terms, and he contributed the life of Edward Young to the Lives of the Poets. In this he achieved a slavish imitation of Johnson’s thunderous style. Croft was a graduate of Oxford and a clergyman. In 1780 he published a novel in letter form called Love and Madness, and in it used certain letters by Thomas Chatterton, obtained under what amounted to false pretenses from the poet’s sister, Mrs. Newton. For this he was roundly denounced by Southey in the Monthly Review. Nothing came of his projected dictionary. When he died in 1816 it existed only as 200 volumes of manuscript.

1 British Criticisms of American Writings, 1783–1815; Madison, Wis., 1918, p. 21.

2 Nov., 1783.

3 This one, incidentally, was apparently his own invention. The DAE’s first example comes from his Notes on Virginia, written in 1781–2. See Belittle, by W. J. Burke, American Speech, April, 1932, p. 318.

4 In his journal for July 19, 1777.

5 British Recognition of American Speech, op. cit., p. 322.

1 At all events, his specific claim to its invention has never been challenged, and the NED allows it, though fixing the date, erroneously, as c. 1794 instead of 1781. The word was adopted by Noah Webster in 1809 and by John Pickering in 1816. In 1836 it appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, then edited by Poe. The first occurrence of American, applied to the English of the United States, was apparently in the Georgia records of 1740, where it appeared as American dialect. Webster made it American tongue in his Dissertations on the English Language in 1789, and fours years later Dr. William Thornton made it American language in his Cadmus; or, a Treatise on the Elements of Written Language. This book was published in Philadelphia, and was awarded the Magellanic Gold Medal of the American Philosophical Society. See American Projects for an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1936, p. 1142. American language appeared in the debates in Congress in 1802, and by 1815 the North American Review was using it. The DAE lists no example of its use between 1822 and 1872, but no doubt it appeared with some frequency. It is to be found in the Rev. John Mason Peck’s Guide to Emigrants, 1831 (John Mason Peck and the American Language, by Elrick B. Davis, American Speech, Oct., 1926, p. 25), and in Harper’s Magazine, Aug., 1858, p. 336, col. 1, in an anonymous article entitled Vagabondizing in Belgium: “In an instant I was by her side and speaking to her in her own language — the American language.” It thus had a long history behind it when I used it for the title of my first edition in 1919. In late years the English, after long resistance, have begun to use it. See, for example, a headline in the Literary Supplement of the London Times, May 15, 1937, p. 371.

1 i.e., Thomas Paine. Common Sense had been published on Jan. 9, 1776.

1 Schoolma’am, incidentally, is itself an Americanism. The DAE’s first example of it is dated 1844, but it is no doubt older. Schoolmarm is traced to 1848.

1 H. C. Wyld shows in A History of Modern Colloquial English; London, 1920, p. 161, that can’t, han’t, shan’t, couldn’t, isn’t, etc., were in common use in England. Swift noted them in his Polite Conversation, 1712. An’t is traced by the DAE to 1723; the NED carries it back to 1706 in England. Ain’t had begun to supplant it before Witherspoon’s day. It is probable that the word he gives as han’t was really pronounced haint. In that form it still survives in the dialect of Appalachia.

1 II Kings XXI, 13; Psalms CXLVI, 9; Isaiah XXIV, 1; XXIX, 16; Acts XVII, 6.

2 In his first article, published May 9, 1781, he promised to close his discussion with “technical terms introduced into the language,” and at the end of his fourth article, published May 30, he renewed that promise, but The Druid did not proceed any further.

3 I am indebted here to M. M. Mathews, who reprints the four Druid papers in full in Chapter II of The Beginnings of American English; Chicago, 1931, a little book that is indispensable to every serious student of American speechways.

1 Cf. John Fox, Jr.’s Hell fer Sartain, 1897.

2 For example, see Cape Cod Dialect, II, by George Davis Chase, Dialect Notes, 1904, p. 428; A List of Words From Northwest Arkansas, by Joseph William Carr and Rupert Taylor, the same, 1907, p. 208; A Central Connecticut Word-List, by William E. Mead and George D. Chase, the same, 1905, p. 22. See also The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp; New York, 1925, Vol. I, p. 118. In his second volume, p. 168, Krapp discusses the change of e to a in such words as (e)ternal, clerk, Derby and sergeant. Dr. Louise Pound has demonstrated that tarnal was probably the mother of darn. See Chapter VI, Section 8.

1 A History of Modern Colloquial English, p. 175.

1 Dr. Arthur M. Schlesinger of Harvard informs me that this letter was also printed in the New-Hampshire Gazette, April 22, 1775. It was addressed To the Literati of America.

2 Adams borrowed this phrase from Swift’s Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, in a Letter to the Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain, Feb. 22, 1711/12.

1 I am indebted for both the anonymous article and Adams’s signed letter to Mathews, pp. 40–43. The latter is also to be found in The Works of John Adams, edited by Charles Francis Adams; Boston, 1852; Vol. VII, pp. 249 ff.

1 The book was The Diversions of Purley, published in 1786. It had much influence upon Webster, who greatly admired it. Born in 1736, Horne added the name of Tooke to his patronymic in compliment to William Tooke, of Purley, his frequent benefactor. He got into trouble in 1777 for printing an advertisement soliciting funds for the Americans “murdered by the king’s troops at Lexington and Concord.” He served a year in the King’s Bench prison and had to pay fines and costs amounting to £1,000. He died in 1812.

2 Hoffman (1766–1837) was one of the salient figures in the New York of his day. The descendant of a Baltic German who immigrated in 1657, he was connected with many of the rich families of the town, and was himself a leader in its fashionable society. He was a successful lawyer, and was a member of the State legislature in 1791–95 and again in 1797, attorney-general of the State in 1798–1801, and recorder of New York City in 1808–15. He was a Loyalist during the Revolution, became a Federalist afterward, and opposed the War of 1812. His daughter Matilda was betrothed to Washington Irving, but died before they could be married. Two of his sons attained prominence — Charles Fenno as a poet and novelist, and Ogden as a lawyer and politician.

3 Dunlap (1766–1839), a native of Perth Amboy, N. J., studied painting under Benjamin West in London, but on his return to the United States devoted himself mainly to the theatre. He wrote plays and managed the Park Theatre in New York. Late in life he returned to painting and became one of the founders of the National Academy of Design. He also did a great deal of writing, and is perhaps best remembered for his History of the American Theatre, 1832.

1 I am indebted for this to The Philological Society of New York, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, April, 1934, pp. 133 and 134. See also his The Constitution of the Philological Society of 1788, American Speech, Feb., 1941, pp. 71 and 72.

2 American Projects for an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1936, p. 1141.

3 There were, however, several local academies which occasionally showed some interest in language. One was the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, the heir and assign of Franklin’s Junto of 1727. Another was the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences of New Haven, of which Webster was a member. He joined it at some time before 1799 and in 1804 made over to it 50 cents for every 1,000 copies of his spelling-book printed in Connecticut. But both organizations were much more interested in the sciences than in letters.

1 Here again I am in debt to Read. The constitution of the academy is reprinted in full in his American Projects for an Academy to Regulate Speech, just cited, pp. 1154–56.

2 Cardell (1780–1828) was a native of Norwich, Conn., and after 1816 devoted himself to teaching English and French. He was the author of a number of books, including Essay on Language; New York, 1825; and Elements of English Grammar; New York, 1826. He also wrote a very successful story for boys, Jack Halyard.

3 All of them denounced by the English critics of the time as Americanisms that were barbaric, immoral and against God.

1 A full list of the first members — honorary, resident and corresponding — is in The Membership of Proposed American Academies, by Allen Walker Read, American Literature, May 1935, pp. 145 ff.

2 There is a history of the whole matter in Read’s paper, just cited, including some curious details. In another paper, Suggestions for an Academy in England in the Latter Half of the Eighteenth Century, Modern Philology, Nov., 1938, pp. 145 ff, he deals with similar schemes in England. His inquiries into the obscure literature of such projects have thrown much light upon the subject.

1 An Introduction to the History of Medicine, fourth ed.; Philadelphia, 1929, p. 330.

2 For this I am indebted to Mr. Henry Burnell Shafer of Haddon Heights. N. J.

3 New York, 1936.

1 It first appeared in 1783, as the first part of his Grammatical Institute of the English Language, published at Hartford. It was the most successful book ever brought out in America, and is still in print. The New International Encyclopedia says that 62,000,000 copies had been sold by 1889.

2 Letter to James Madison, Aug. 12, 1801.

3 Belknap (1744–98) was a New Hampshireman and a Congregational clergyman. He was one of the earliest of American antiquarians.

4 Warfel, p. 234.

1 p. 189.

2 Madison, Wis., 1929, p. 14. This is a very valuable book and presents a great deal of matter not otherwise accessible.

3 His blistering opinion of democratic government, set forth in a letter to the New York Spectator for Aug., 1837, is reprinted by Warfel, pp. 425–27.

1 Neither of these was actually an Americanism. The former, according to the NED, has been used in England since 1529 and the latter since 1599. But both had attained to wider acceptance on this side of the ocean.

2 Led by Timothy Dwight.

3 Boston, 1789. The book was dedicated to Benjamin Franklin.

4 This was a good prophecy. The United States, Canada and the British West Indies actually reached 100,000,000 population, taken together, about 1912, which was a century and a third after 1789.

5 pp. 20–22.

6 In an anonymous advance puff of his 1806 dictionary in the New Haven newspapers, June 4, written (like many another such sly boost) by himself.

7 p. 65.

8 His own words in his Dissertations, p. 24, are “the general practise of the nation.” On p. 167 he quotes with approval the following from a Dissertation on the Influence of Opinions on Language and of Language on Opinions by the German Hebrew scholar, Johann David Michaelis (1717–91), professor of oriental languages at Göttingen: “Language is a democratical state where all the learning in the world does not warrant a citizen to supersede a received custom till he has convinced the whole nation that this custom was a mistake. Scholars are not so infallible that everything is to be referred to them.” Michaelis was one of the first to study the Bible scientifically.

1 p. viii.

2 p. ix.

3 There was no country-wide copyright until 1790.

4 pp. ix and x.

1 pp. 22 and 23.

2 Cf. Warfel, pp. 345 ff.

3 p. 38.

4 The first volume was published in 1786.

5 The best account of their speculations is in Leonard, lately cited.

6 New York, 1828. This introduction ran to nearly 70,000 words.

1 p. 348. I should add that a high philological authority, Dr. Franklin Edgerton, professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology at Yale, does not agree with this. In his Notes on Early American Work in Linguistics, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1943, p. 26, Edgerton speaks disdainfully of Webster’s “Chaldee” etymologies, which were retained in his Dictionary until his death in 1843, and indeed until 1864, when they were finally eliminated “by C. A. F. Mahn, a German scholar who was then put in charge of the etymological department of the work.” “Even the relative isolation of American scholarship from Europe,” says Edgerton, “hardly excuses such astounding ignorance in Webster, writing forty years after Sir William Jones, twenty after Schlegel, a dozen after Bopp, and half a dozen or more after the first volume of Jacob Grimm.” Jones (1746–94) first called attention to the similarity between the grammatical structures of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin in 1796. Franz Bopp (1791–1867) published Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache in 1816, and his Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic Languages (in English) in 1820. Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) published the first part of his Deutsche Grammatik in 1819 and the second in 1822. August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845) began publishing his Indische Bibliothek in 1823. The first really scientific philologian to rise in America was W. D. Whitney (1827–94). He was a child in arms when the first edition of Webster’s American Dictionary appeared in 1828.

2 It is reprinted in Franklin’s Works, edited by John Bigelow; New York, 1887–8; Vol. IV, pp. 198 ff.

1 Franklin was probably wrong in this surmise. Increase Mather’s Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (the tide was commonly reduced to Remarkable Providences) was not published until 1684, and the DAE shows that to improve in the sense here dealt with was used in the Connecticut records so early as 1640. The same authority shows that Franklin himself used it in 1789!

2 In this sense of to occupy the DAE traces the verb to the Connecticut records of 1647.

1 The pertinent parts of the letter are reprinted by Mathews. It appears in full in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, edited by A. H. Smyth; New York, 1905–07; Vol. X, pp. 75 ff.

1 I am indebted for these extracts to Warfel, pp. 201 and 202.

2 It issued from Sidney’s Press at New Haven on Feb. 11, and made a volume of 408 pages, plus a 21-page preface. The original price was $1.50. The full title was A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language.

3 Some of the most bitter were launched by Joseph Dennie, editor of the Gazette of the United States and the Port Folio in Philadelphia. This Dennie was a Bostonian, a graduate of Harvard, and a violent Anglomaniac. He studied law but after 1795 devoted himself to journalism. In 1799 he was private secretary to Timothy Pickering, then Secretary of State. He died in 1812. Cf. Warfel, pp. 289–323.

1 pp. 306–308.

2 Oxford, 1911; revised in 1929 and 1934.

3 Towards a Historical Aspect of American Speech Consciousness, April, pp. 301–05. I am indebted to Howard for much of what follows.

4 A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States; second ed., Boston, 1859, p. 255. Hereafter referred to as Bartlett.

1 The DAE reports, on the authority of the Transactions of the American Philological Association, 1886, that it was still in use among the Pennsylvania Germans in that year.

2 Port Folio, Nov. 21, 1801.

1 i.e., Webster’s trial-balloon dictionary of 1806, announced some time before this.

2 Travels in North American in the Years 1827–28; 3 vols.; Edinburgh and London, 1829.

1 Cited in Section 1 of this chapter, p. 4. Cairns (1867–1932) was a scholar who deserves to be remembered. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin, became assistant professor of American literature there in 1901, was made full professor in 1917, and served in that chair until his death. His contributions to the history of American letters were original and valuable.

2 Cited on pp. 1 ff.

3 English Studies (Amsterdam, Holland), Oct., 1935, pp. 161–78.

4 Boston, 1816. Hereafter cited as Pickering.

5 1808, p. 241.

6 Vol. VIII, p. 606.

7 The word is perfectly good English, and is traced by the NED to c. 1449.

8 Vol. II, p. 184.

9 Vol. V, p. 97.

10 Vol. I, pp. 356 and 376.

11 Jan., 1814, p. 497. The Quarterly was then edited by William Gifford, perhaps the most ferocious American-eater that England has ever produced. There is some account of him in AL4, pp. 19 and 79.

1 Allston (1779–1843) was both a writer and a painter. He was a South Carolinian, but grew up in New England. In 1801 he became a pupil at the Royal Academy, London, of which another American, Benjamin West, was then the president. He spent four years in Rome. In 1809 he returned to the United States, and devoted the rest of his life to painting and writing. His poem, The Sylphs of the Seasons, was published in 1813, and his novel, Monaldi, in 1841.

2 1815. Quoted by Cairns, p. 14.

1 The Americans, wrote Southey in 1812, “have in the course of twenty years acquired a distinct national character for low and lying knavery, and so well do they deserve it that no man ever had any dealings with them without having proofs of its truth.” Twenty-eight years later, in his Table-Talk for May 28, 1830, he showed a much more friendly spirit. “I deeply regret,” he said, “the anti-American articles of some of the leading reviews. The Americans regard what is said of them in England a thousand times more than they do anything said of them in any other country. The Americans are excessively pleased with any kind or favourable expressions, and never forgive or forget any slight or abuse. It would be better for them if they were a trifle thicker-skinned.”

2 Brown (1771–1810) wrote seven of them, all now forgotten save by literary archeologists. Brought up in Philadelphia under Quaker influences, he succumbed to the English radicals of the time, and was regarded as an advanced thinker. He was the first professional author that America ever produced. For his relations with Shelley see Shelley and the Novels of Brown, by Melvin Solve, in Fred Newton Scott Anniversary Papers; Chicago, 1929, pp. 141–56.

1 “We owe to the Quarterly,” said N. P. Willis in the preface to Pencillings by the Way; London, 1835, “every spark of ill-feeling that has been kept alive between England and America for the last twenty years. The sneers, the opprobrious epithets of this bravo in literature have been received, in a country where the machinery of reviewing was not understood, as the voice of the English people, and an animosity for which there was no other reason has been thus periodically fed and exasperated. I conceive it to be my duty as a literary man — I know it is my duty as an American — to lose no opportunity of setting my heel on the head of this reptile of criticism.” The Quarterly still survives, but is no longer the power that it once was. W. E. Gladstone once described it as “the food which is served up for the intellectual appetites of the highest classes.” See Every Saturday (Boston), Aug. 4, 1866, p. 128, for an account of its skulduggeries in that era.

2 Nov., 1809, and Jan., 1814.

1 Letters From America, Historical and Descriptive; London, 1792, pp. 59–61. For this extract I am indebted to Read’s British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, before cited.

2 Other reports on the early emergence of the New England twang are in Read, just cited, pp. 325–27.

3 The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell; New York, 1824, p. 271. Here again I am indebted to Read.

4 Read suggests that the “penetrating observer” was probably John Witherspoon, who invented the term Americanism in 1781. See the footnote on p. 5.

5 London, 1805, Vol. I, pp. 30–40.

6 Both words seem to be Americanisms. The DAE’s first example of slops is from Parkinson, but the NED does not find it in England until 1815. The DAE traces blades to 1724.

1 An Excursion to the United States of North America in the Summer of 1794; Salisbury (England), 1796, p. 214.

2 Travels in America One Hundred Years Ago; New York, 1894, p. 167.

3 Travels Through the Interior Parts of America; London, 1789, Vol. II, p. 197.

4 Philadelphia, 1818.

5 In three volumes. They included not only his reviews, but also his Peter Plymley Letters on the subject of Catholic emancipation (1807), and a number of his speeches and sermons. There was an edition in one volume; Philadelphia, 1858.

6 As, for example, in AL4, p. 13, n. 1.

1 Dwight (1752–1817) was a clergyman and president of Yale from 1795 until his death. His grandson, also Timothy, was president from 1886 to 1899. The elder Dwight, who was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, was reckoned one of the Hartford Wits, but he was a gloomy fellow and clung resolutely to the Puritanism of his ancestors. His principal poems were The Conquest of Canaan, 1785; Greenfield Hill, 1794; and The Triumph of Infidelity, 1788. They survive today only as literary fossils.

1 Another of the Hartford Wits. His chief poems were The Vision of Columbus, 1787; Hasty Pudding, 1796; and The Columbiad, 1807. Barlow (1754–1812), finding poetry unremunerative, took to land speculation, and in 1788 went to France as agent of the Scioto Company. He made a fortune there by trading in French securities, but simultaneously became converted to radicalism and was made a French citizen during the French Revolution. On his return to America he moderated his ideas, was appointed consul to Algiers, and later became minister to France. In 1812 he followed Napoleon to Russia to negotiate a trade treaty, was overtaken by the retreat from Moscow, and died in Poland. He was one of the backers of Robert Fulton, the pioneer of the steamboat.

1 He also protested occasionally against the high-handed way in which the British government dealt with the United States. Thus in his 1818 article: “The vice of impertinence has lately crept into our Cabinet, and the Americans have been treated with ridicule and contempt. But they are becoming a little too powerful, we take it, for this cavalier sort of management, and are increasing with a rapidity which is really no matter of jocularity to us, or the other powers of the Old World.”

2 On p. v of the preface to his Vocabulary.

1 A book that gives all such dates in a clear and convenient way is Chronological Outlines of American Literature, by Selden L. Whitcomb; New York, 1894. In an introduction to this work Brander Matthews says: “It would be possible to maintain the thesis that American literature began in 1809 with the publication of Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York.”

2 Blackwood’s began as the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine in 1817. Its name was changed to the still surviving form with its seventh issue. It appeared too late to be included in Cairns’s report on the anti-American diatribes of the British reviews, 1783–1815.

3 An excellent account of the reports of these pilgrims, with copious extracts, is in American Social History as Recorded by British Travelers, by Allan Nevins; New York, 1923. Other useful books on the same theme are As Others See Us, by John Graham Brooks; New York, 1908, and The English Traveler in America, 1785–1835, by Jane Louise Mesick; New York, 1922. All three works include bibliographies, and Brooks also lists French and German books.

1 Published in two series; Philadelphia, 1849 and 1851.

2 Literary Notices, p. 857.

3 Two volumes; Boston, 1851.

4 See AL4, pp. 29 and 30.

5 Edinburgh, 2 vols. There was a reprint in Philadelphia the same year. Hamilton was a younger brother to Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856), the Scottish philosopher, and a son and grandson of distinguished medical men. Born in Edinburgh in 1789, he died in 1842. He is best remembered as the author of Cyril Thornton, a novel, 1827, very popular in its day. His Men and Manners in America was translated into French and twice into German.

1 pp. 129–30. Palmer made his tour with two companions, and on the ship coming from Liverpool to New York they found that William Cobbett, in flight from the English police, was a fellow-passenger. Palmer admitted that his dialogue was “not a literal copy,” but added that it embraced “most of the frequent and improper applications of words used in the back country, with a few New England phrases.” He offered it as “a specimen of the worst English you can possibly hear in America.”

2 Creature, in its English sense, of course, took in horses and cattle, but its special application to them seems to have been an Americanism. It was almost always pronounced critter. In the sense of a horse or mule the DAE calls it “chiefly Southern” and traces it to 1782. It was listed as crittur in the glossary appended to David Humphreys’ Yankey in England, 1815. In that printed in the Virginia Literary Museum and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Science, &c., in Dec., 1829, and usually ascribed to Robley Dunglison it was accompanied by the following note: “Much employed in New England for horses, oxen, &c.; this extensive signification is probably obtained from Ireland. In Virginia the word is often restricted to the horse.” It does not appear in P. W. Joyce’s English As We Speak It In Ireland; 2nd ed.; London and Dublin, 1910.

3 As we have seen, p. 32, the use of elegant as a counter-adjective in the sense of the more recent swell was marked by many of the other English travelers of the period. “The epithet is used,” reported Morris Birkbeck in Notes of a Journey in America; London, 1818, “on every occasion of commendation but that to which it is appropriate in the English language.” Birkbeck said that he had heard elegant mill, orchard and tanyard. The DAE, which traces the vogue of the word to 1764, adds elegant fireworks, flannel and potatoes, 1772–1822, and Thornton adds elegant lighthouse, eight-day clock, mare, coffin, schoolhouse, parasol, real estate, lodgings, man, hogs, steamboat, bacon, corn, whiskey, and cement, 1765–1824.

4 This use of heap in the sense of much or many was not actually an Americanism — the NED lists English examples from 1661 to 1884 — but the word was commoner in the United States. In the Virginia Literary Museum glossary it is described as Southern and Western. It does not appear in Pickering, but it is listed by Adiel Sherwood in his Gazetteer of the State of Georgia, 1837. Heap sight is a true Americanism, but it did not appear until half a century later.

5 The DAE quotes one Todd as reporting that in 1835 O my and possible were “universal interjections in America.” Possible does not appear in Humphreys, 1815; Pickering, 1816, or Dunglison, 1829.

1 Dreadful as an adverb was certainly no stranger to English, though it may have been more often used in America. Humphreys, 1815, listed it as “used often, as, very, excessively, even as it regards beauty, goodness, etc.” Bartlett, in 1848, grouped it with awful, powerful, monstrous, mighty, almighty and all-fired as in common use in the South and West.

2 Big had become the favorite adjective of magnitude in the United States, and at a later date also came to signify fine or excellent.

3 Humphreys, in his glossary, 1815, noted under calculate that it was “used frequently in an improper sense, as reckon, guess.” Reckon occurs in many English dialects and is not unknown in the standard speech. In 1871 Benjamin Jowett put it into the mouth of Socrates in his translation of the Dialogues of Plato. But it was in much wider use in the America of 1800–75 than it has ever been in England, and it is still heard often in the South.

4 Why Palmer should have underscored reared I do not know. It is actually much more English than American, and Shakespeare used it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1590. The more usual American term is raised, which the NED calls “chiefly U.S.” To raise, at one time, was also used in England, but the DAE says that it “became obsolete in British usage about 1800.” It was denounced by the North American Review in 1818 as “a provincialism … not to be found in any correct writer” … and “confined almost exclusively to Virginia, and perhaps some of the neighboring states.” It was denounced again by Sherwood, who said primly in his Gazetteer of Georgia, 1837: “We raise horses, cattle and swine, but not human beings.” In his American Dictionary of 1828 Noah Webster said of it: “In New England it is never applied to the breeding of the human race, as it is in the Southern States. In the North we say to raise wheat and to raise horses or cattle, but not to raise men, though we may say to raise a sickly child.” But Dunglison in the Virginia Literary Museum, 1829, gave “I was raised in Virginia” without comment, and the term is now in general use in the United States. “The writers of grammars and rhetorics,” says Mathews, p. 140, “have for over a century voiced their unanimous disapproval of raise … and have commended rear for use in connection with ‘the breeding of the human race’ … [But] a large number of people have never heard of the distinction … and have used raise with peaceful and pleasurable results in places where, according to the rhetorics, rear should have been employed.”

5 This is a true Americanism. The DAE, overlooking Palmer, takes its first example from The Letters of Major Jack Downing, 1834.

6 The DAE’s first example is dated 1796. At first the term was applied only to England, but after the Civil War it began to be used by immigrants from other countries.