1 Following this dialogue, pp. 130–31, Palmer lists the following “other words and sayings that are peculiar to the United States or differently applied to what they are in England”:

Smart. Clever, active, industrious.

Sick. Unwell; they never use the word ill.

Log. A trunk of a tree when felled and the branches off.

Right away. Straight along.

Hwich, hwen, etc. Sometimes used for which, when, etc.

Madam. The word spoken at full (except in the cities) [i.e., not reduced to ma’am.]

Improved. Occupied.

Ingen. Indian.

Nigger. Negro.

Lengthy. Long.

Progressing. Passing.

Tote. Pull.

Boss. Master.

Chunk. A small horse.

Tarnation. Annoying or excessive.

Awful. Unpleasant, very.

Trade. Barter.

All these words are discussed at other places in the present Supplement.

2 The Art Journal Catalogue of the Paris Universal Exhibition, edited by S. C. Hall. F. S. A.; London, 1868, p. 122. For this I am indebted to Mrs. James W. Craig, of Scituate, Mass.

1 Harold Child, in The Cambridge History of English Literature; New York, 1916, p. 278.

2 A Diary in America, With Remarks on Its Inhabitants; New York, 1839, and Second Series of a Diary in America; Philadelphia, 1840. I am informed by Dr. P. I. Nixon, of San Antonio, Tex., that Marryat is also credited in the Southwest with the authorship of a book called Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet in California, Sonora and Western Texas, published in 1849, but there is no record that he was ever in that region and he had died in England in 1848. Dr. Nixon says (private communication, July 15, 1937): “Raines, in his Bibliography of Texas, dismisses the book with this comment: ‘A sensational story, with a strange mixture of truth and falsehood; the truth borrowed from Gregg’s Commerce of the Prairies and Kendall’s Santa Fé Expedition; the falsehoods being original, perhaps.’ ” A Narrative of the Texan Santa Fé Expedition, by George W. Kendall (1809–67) was published in 1841, and Commerce of the Prairies, by Josiah Gregg (1806–50) in 1844.

1 His own evidence showed that this was far from true.

2 Neither the NED nor the DAE records these picturesque verbs, but Webster’s New International, 1934, lists fourble as a noun in the sense of a stand of oil-well pipe of four lengths.

3 The DAE’s first American example of to admire in this sense is from one of the letters of Benjamin Franklin, c. 1770. The word was first recorded in England in 1645, but soon afterward was reduced to dialect, as indeed it has been reduced in the United States. Pickering defined it as “to like very much; to be very fond of” and said of it: “This verb is much used in New England in expressions like the following: ‘I should admire to go to such a place; I should admire to have such a thing, &c.’ It is never thus used by the English; and among us it is confined to the language of conversation.”

1 The DAE says that ugly was used in this sense in England before it has been found in America. It is recorded by Dunglison, who calls it a New Englandism. Pickering does the same, and says that it and the compound ugly-tempered “are both heard only among the illiterate.” In my youth in Maryland ugly was widely used in the sense of ill-tempered, especially as applied to horses.

2 The DAE’s first example of the use of bad in the sense of sorry is from Marryat’s book, and it does not record the other senses at all. Witherspoon, Pickering and Dunglison all overlooked them, as did Humphreys.

3 Witherspoon, Pickering, Humphreys and Dunglison all overlooked mean, and the DAE’s first example is from Marryat. The DAE defines it, in to feel mean, as “to be ashamed, feel guilty; to feel ill or uncomfortable,” and marks it an Americanism. It was used in both senses by Mark Twain in Sketches Old and New. Webster’s New International calls it “colloq. U.S.,” and notes also a slang meaning, as in “He pitches a mean curve.”

4 The DAE calls handsome an Americanism in two senses — “of any aspect of a landscape; satisfying to the eye; of pleasing appearance,” and as used in the phrase to do the handsome thing. Its first example of the former is dated 1773, and of the latter 1796. Pickering says of the word in the former sense: “An obliging correspondent observes that [it] ‘is here applied to almost everything,’ and then adds (though in rather too strong terms) that ‘in England it is used only in reference to the human countenance.’ ” He says that the Quarterly Review noted it as an Americanism in a review of the record of the Lewis and Clarke expedition. Dunglison said of it in 1829: “Handsome is more extensively used in this country than in England. There they would rarely or never speak of a handsome garden, although the term is now more extensively applied there than formerly.” Harriet Martineau said in her Society in America; London, 1838, Vol. III, p. 83: “[The Americans] say … that Webster made a handsome speech in the Senate; that a lady talks handsomely (eloquently); that a book sells handsomely. A gentleman asked me in the Catskill Mountains whether I thought the sun handsomer there than at New York.”

5 No other observer of American usage reports to stimulate in this sense. Probably Marryat heard it as a nonce-word, or imagined it. Pickering, in 1816, called awful, in the sense of disagreeable, ugly, a New Englandism, and noted its use as a general intensive. “In New England,” he said, “many people would call a disagreeable medicine awful; an ugly woman, an awful-looking woman; a perverse, ill-natured child that disobeys its parents would be said to behave awfully, &c. This word, however, is never used except in conversation, and is far from being so common in the seaports now as it was some years ago.” He added that John Lambert, in Travels Through Lower Canada and the United States of America; London, 1810, Vol. II, p. 505, reported that to “the country people of Vermont and other New England States … everything that creates surprise is awful: What an awful wind! awful hole! awful hill! awful mouth! awful nose! &c.” The DAE calls awful, in the general sense of very unpleasant or disagreeable, an Americanism and traces it to 1809. In the sense of very great, without any connotation of the unpleasant, it is also an Americanism, but seems to have come in later, for the DAE’s first example is dated 1842. Bartlett says that this second sense, in his time, was “ peculiar to the West.”

1 To suspicion still survives in the vulgar speech, but to opinion must have been rare, for no other observer records it.

2 In this situation considerable is traced by the DAE to 1722 and called an Americanism. Followed by of it was also in wide use, and that use was confined to the United States. Witherspoon, 1781, says that considerable of was then peculiar to “the Northern parts.” Theodoric Romeyn Beck, in his Notes on Mr. Pickering’s Vocabulary, 1829, says that the locution was “formerly used in a similar way in England,” and notes that it had appeared in the bitterly anti-American Quarterly Review in a review of a book by Southey. Dunglison marks it “New England.”

3 The DAE records no use of great in this way before Marryat, but lists another and earlier peculiarly American use of great, as a noun, in “Sloop sunk at Boston and spoiled a great of our English goods,” 1724. This use seems to survive in dialect. Sherwood, 1837, said of great as an intensive: “This word is used variously — great Christian for pious man; great horse is applied to a small pony, meaning a horse of good qualities and bottom; great plantation, a fertile one.” Pickering did not note it. Gal is apparently an Americanism. It was listed as an “impropriety” in an American grammar-book published in 1795, but the NED’s earliest English example, marked “vulgar or dial.”, is dated 1842. It is listed by Humphreys, 1815, and Sherwood, 1837.

4 There were various early forms of the word — absquatulate, absquatalize, absquatiate, absquattle, absquatelate, absquatilate, absquotulate, absquotilate — of these, absquatulate finally prevailed. Mathews, in The Beginnings of American English, p. 114, defines it as meaning to go away. It is not listed by the early writers on Americanisms, and seems to have been relatively new at the time Marryat noted it.

1 Pickering says that the free use of some in America was borrowed from the Scotch, and quotes the Monthly Magazine, May, 1800, in proof. He marks it “New England” and “used chiefly by the illiterate.” He gives these specimens: He is some better than he was; it rains some; it snows some. The DAE’s first example of its use as an adjective is dated 1845. It survives in full vigor, and has given rise to two very familiar locutions, going some and and then some.

2 There seems to be an impression that how was borrowed from the Indians, but there is no evidence that they ever used it in the sense of what. According to John Bradbury, whose Travels in the Interior of America in the Years 1809, 1810 and 1811 was published in 1817, it signified, among them, come on or let us begin, and according to George Catlin, writing c. 1837, it was “their word for yes.” The DAE marks it an Americanism in the sense of “an interrogative used in asking for the repetition of something not quite understood,” but traces it no further back than Marryat. In the form of a simple greeting, also an Americanism, it is traced to 1817.

3 To guess, as we shall see, was not an Americanism, but it survived in America after it had become obsolete in England, and is now listed by the NED as “U.S. colloq.” The DAE runs it back to 1805, in American use, in the sense of to suppose, expect, judge, or believe after consideration, and to 1816 in the sense of to purpose, intend or expect. Thornton’s examples extend from 1812 to 1869. Pickering quoted an example from John Lambert’s Travels Through Lower Canada and the United States; London, 1810. To reckon, said Pickering, was “used in some of the Southern States,” Dunglison, 1829, ascribed it to Virginia. On Sept. 30, 1844 the following appeared in the Spirit of the Times (Philadelphia): “The New Englander guesses, the Virginians and Pennsylvanians think, the Kentuckian calculates, the man from Alabama reckons.” In American Speech and Foreign Listeners, American Speech, Dec., 1940, pp. 448–49, John T. Krumpelmann snowed that this was lifted from A Night on the Banks of the Tennessee, Blackwood’s Magazine, Sept., 1844, pp. 278 ff, and that the Blackwood paper was a translation of the second chapter of George Howard’s Esq. Brautfahrt, by Charles Sealsfield (Karl Postl), published in German at Stuttgart in 1843. Sealsfield (1793–1864) was an Austrian priest who came to the United States in 1822, and wrote several books on his travels.

1 An early, and now obsolete use of to stump, in the sense of to challenge, is noted by Humphreys. The DAE traces it to 1766, and calls it an Americanism. In the sense of to confuse or baffle the verb is traced to 1828, and in that of to electioneer to 1838. In both these latter senses it is also an Americanism. So is the noun stump in the sense of hustings: the DAE traces it to 1775.

2 To fork is not listed by the DAE, but to fork on, in the sense of “to appropriate to one’s self,” is in A Collection of College Words and Phrases, by B. H. Hall; Cambridge, Mass., 1851.

3 Matthew XXIII, 24.

4 In this sense to strike is listed by none of the lexicons as an Americanism.

5 The DAE lists this as an Americanism. Its first example is from J. P. Kennedy’s Swallow Barn, 1832.

6 To clear out is a nautical term. The DAE’s first example of its use in a non-nautical sense is dated 1792. In that sense it is an Americanism. The NED lists to quit, in the sense of making off, as “dial, and U.S.” The DAE’s first example of it is dated 1833. The NED lists to put, in the same sense, as “obs. exc. U.S. colloq.”, but the DAE finds no trace of it before Marryat’s example. Save in the phrase he put off it is seldom heard today. To shut, without up, is not listed by any of the authorities. Probably Marryat actually heard to shut up.

7 Whether or not this is an Americanism I do not know. No authority so lists it.

8 Dander is found in various English dialects. Its origin is uncertain, but it may come from dandruff.

9 The DAE calls wrathy an Americanism, and traces it to 1828. In Baltimore, in the 80s, it was in common use among boys, but was always pronounced rossy.

10 One of the grotesque tropes characteristic of American in the days of the great Western migration. The DAE’s first example is from C. A. Davis’s Letters of Jack Downing (not to be confused with those of Seba Smith), 1834.

1 To slope, in this sense, has not been traced before Marryat, but the DAE presents later examples. It does not list to splunge, nor does Pickering.

2 Seldom so called in America after 1800, when the term began to be supplanted by barber-shop. The usual English form is barber’s-shop.

3 Marryat then proceeds to tell the familiar story about the coon that, on being treed by a famous hunter, cried “Don’t shoot! I’ll come down.” He makes the hunter Captain Martin Scott, of the United States Army; usually he is David Crockett. The abbreviation coon for raccoon is traced by the DAE to 1742. Its first example of the application of the term to a human being is from W. G. Simms’s Guy Rivers, 1834. It also appeared in A. B. Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes, 1835. Apparently its use to designate a Negro did not come in until the 80s.

⁴ Marryat’s explanation here is hardly convincing. Nasty is but one of many derogatory adjectives that Americans have used, by trope, in commendatory senses. The DAE quotes the Knickerbocker Magazine, 1834, as explaining that to sling a nasty foot then meant to dance exceedingly well, and that “she is a nasty-looking girl” meant that she was “a splendid woman.” In later days mean and wicked have been widely used in the same sense.

5 i.e., bayous.

6 Here again Marryat fails as an etymologist. It is more probable that, in the sense of baggage, the word was borrowed from the Dutch. The DAE’s first example is dated 1805.

1 Marryat was here making contact with tall talk, which was to flourish in the South and West after his visit. There are specimens of it in Richard H. Thornton’s American Glossary; Philadelphia, 1912, Vol. II, pp. 969 ff.

2 The DAE traces City of Brotherly Love to 1799; it is a translation, of course, of the Greek Philadelphia. City of Elms is not traced beyond 1843. Cincinnati began to call itself the Queen City in the 1830s; when Buffalo adopted Queen City of the Lakes I do not know.

1 Feb., 1930, p. 250.

2 And also in Ireland. On Oct. 9, 1926 The American Slanguage appeared as the heading on a letter in the Irish Statesman (Dublin).

3 Revised ed.; New York, 1855, p. 122.

1 Aug. 3, 1943.

2 See AL4, pp. 29 ff.

3 The King’s English, editorial page, Feb. 12.

4 The DAE overlooks this verb-phrase, but it is almost surely an Americanism, for the much more comprehensive NED does not list it, and it is not in Partridge. The DAE also omits to check out, meaning to leave a hotel, and the nouns, checkup and check-off, the latter in the sense of the deduction of a worker’s union dues from his pay. It traces to pass in one’s checks to 1869, to hand them in to 1870, and to cash them in to 1880. Berrey and Van den Bark, in their American Thesaurus of Slang; New York, 1942, define to check up on as to investigate, to examine. They also list to check out, to check in and to check up with. Partridge lists to cash, pass or hand in one’s checks, calls all three forms Americanisms, and says they began to creep into English c. 1875. He adds that during World War I the English soldiers used to get one’s checks in the sense of to be killed, and also in that of “to receive one’s discharge, especially from a medical board.” He says that to take check was formerly used in England in the sense of to be offended, but indicates that it is now obsolete. So is to check up or to check it up in the sense of to enter a theatre on some other person’s discarded pass-out check. Partridge says that the English busmen have been using checker in the sense of an inspector since c. 1925. It is much older in the United States, though the DAE does not list it. Berrey and Van den Bark show that checker is used in the sense of an employer’s spy or spotter in many industries. It is also used by deep-sea fishermen to designate a fish-pen on deck, and by gamblers to designate a silver dollar. Checker-upper is used in two senses — that of a superintendent and that of a chronic dissenter, or no-man.

1 Of O.K. he said: “From the slang of the American bargee it has advanced to the favor of the diplomatist.” There is, of course, no such thing as an American bargee: we call him a bargeman. By and large is an old nautical phrase which seems to have come into general use in the United States in the pre-Civil War era. To demote is traced by the DAE to c. 1891 and marked an Americanism. It does not list to contact, but there can be little doubt that it originated in the United States.

2 English is Good Enough, Nov. 9, 1941.

1 Casual Comments, April 8, 1942. Falkirk is a sizeable town in Scotland, midway between Edinburgh and Glasgow. On July 22, 1298 it was the scene of a battle in which the celebrated William Wallace, leading the Scots, was defeated by an English army under King Edward I. The Scots of today, though no right-thinking Englishman admits that they speak English, are commonly fervent defenders of it against American influence.

2 The DAE hesitates to call so long an Americanism, but the first English example is dated 1865, and Walt Whitman was using the phrase in his 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.

3 The Conquering Tongue, London Spectator, Feb. 5, 1943, reprinted in Encore, Sept., 1943, p. 351. Brogan is professor of political science at Cambridge, but his interests are by no means confined to that lugubrious discipline. He spent some time at Harvard and knows the United States well, and a large part of his writing is devoted to explaining Americans to Britons and vice versa. His books include Government of the People: a Study of the American Political System; London, 1933; U.S.A.: An Outline of the Country, Its People and Institutions; London, 1941; The English People: Impressions and Observations; New York, 1943, and The American Character; New York, 1944.

1 There is some discussion of the reaction of later British travelers to American speechways in Nevins, but his book is mainly devoted to other matters. There is more in As Others See Us, by John Graham Brooks; New York, 1908. The subject is barely alluded to in The American Impact on Great Britain, 1898–1914, by Richard Heathcote Heindel; Philadelphia, 1940, otherwise a very valuable work.

2 For the history of this book, and of the attempt of an American, G. Washington Moon, to refute it, see AL4, p. 27, n. 2.

3 I borrow this quotation from an article by James Thurber in the New Yorker, May 13, 1939, p. 49.

1 Jan. 8 and June 4, 1870. I am indebted for this reference, and for the one following, to Dr. Richard H. Heindel.

2 There were, however, stalwarts who kept up the clamour, Kaiser or no Kaiser. Thus, when Percival Pollard published his Their Day in Court, in 1910, a reviewer for the Academy (May 28, p. 511), in a generally favorable notice of it, added: “It is unfortunate for Mr. Pollard that he should be an American because, do as he will, he is unable to get rid of the vulgarities which attach to American methods of thinking and American methods of writing.” As a matter of fact, Pollard had an English father and a German mother, and was born at Greifswald in Pomerania.

1 The first proposal that such a conference be held came from the American side in March, 1922. It was signed by Robert Underwood Johnson, representing the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the following academic dignitaries: John Livingston Lowes, head of the English department at Harvard; Fred Newton Scott, professor of rhetoric at the University of Michigan; James W. Bright, then professor of English literature at the Johns Hopkins; Charles H. Grandgent, professor of Romance languages at Harvard; Charles G. Osgood, chairman of the department of English at Princeton, and John M. Manly, professor of English at Brown. This proposal was addressed to Arthur J. Balfour (then only a knight), Sir Henry Newbolt and Dr. Robert Bridges, the last-named Poet Laureate and founder of the Society for Pure English. After seven months a favorable reply was received, but nothing came of it and the meeting of 1927 was actually arranged by Bridges and Henry S. Canby, the latter then editor of the Saturday Review of Literature. The American delegates who made the trip were Canby, Lowes, Johnson, Scott, George Philip Krapp, Louise Pound, Kemp Malone, Leonard Bacon and William A. Craigie, then in the United States as editor of the Dictionary of American English. Those representing the British Isles were Balfour (by now an earl); Newbolt, president of the Royal Society for Literature; Sir Frederic Kenyon, director of the British Museum; Sir Israel Gollancz, secretary of the British Academy; Sir John Reith, chairman of the British Broadcasting Corporation; Dr. Dover Wilson, of the British Association; John C. Squire, editor of the London Mercury; George Bernard Shaw, John Buchan (later Lord Tweedsmuir), Dr. F. S. Boas, and John C. Bailey, editor of the Literary Supplement of the London Times. See the International Council For Speech, by Kemp Malone, American Speech, April, 1928, pp. 261–75. The letters exchanged in 1922 were printed in the Literary Review of the New York Herald Tribune, Dec. 16, 1922, p. 330.

2 June 25, 1927.

3 It was reprinted in full by Dr. Malone in the article just cited, American Speech, April, 1928. Parts of it were reprinted in Words Across the Sea, by Doris Fox Benardete, New Republic, June 12, 1929, p. 102.

1 June 25, 1927.

2 June 20, 1927.

1 Vol. VI, 1927.

2 Dr. Malone noted, in the American Speech article lately cited, that there was no American response to the English onslaught. It was not, in fact, until two years later that any notice of it was taken in the United States, and that notice then got no further than a brief series of letters in the New Republic. On June 26, 1929 George E. G. Catlin contributed one in which he observes shrewdly that the English objection to American speechways is not always “a genuine philological one, but quite frequently is symbolical” of deeper aversions. “Sometimes,” he said, “it is merely an expression of anti-Americanism which, unable to declare itself directly, breaks out like a rash in unexpected places.”

1 Translations, Saturday Review of Literature, Dec. 26, 1925, p. 442. An interesting comparative study of the English and American translations of Lion Feuchtwanger’s Die Geschwister Oppenheim, 1933, is in American and English Translations of The Oppermanns, by Edmund E. Miller, American Speech, Oct., 1935, pp. 180–83.

2 What America Is Doing to Your Language, Jan. 15.

3 See AL4, p. 31.

1 You Are Wrong About the Mother Tongue, Jan. 18, 1930. Mr. Douglas was kind enough to grant that my article had been written in very fair English. He found “only one vulgarism” in it, to wit, the phrase on American motion. “But that,” he said, “is not an Americanism. It is merely bad English.” On (or at all events, upon) his motion is actually ancient in English, though the NED marks it “now archaic.”

2 Words That We Borrow, by Jameson Thomas, Jan. 21, 1930.

3 The American Language, Spring, 1936. The Daily Express extracts appeared on June 5, 1936, and were headed Boloney!

4 This appeared under the heading of More Boloney, June 10, 1936.

5 Daily Express, June 6, 1936.

1 Homing Emigrants, March 11, 1935.

2 Langton was a bitter critic of Americanisms and would not tolerate them in his court. He was a man of curious misfortunes. Once he sat too late in his chambers and was locked up in the Law Courts, and had to wait while a passing office-boy, hailed from a window, found someone with the keys. “The observant office-boy,” said the Eastern Daily Press (Norwich), Aug. 14, 1942, “received a judicial 5s” for his pains. In 1942 the learned justice did a vanishing act while on holiday in the West of England, and the police used bloodhounds in an effort to find him. Four days later his body was found in the river Parret. The coroner’s jury brought in what the English call an open verdict — that is to say, it refused to make an official guess as to how he had come by his death. He was not the only English judge to forbid the use of Americanisms in his presence. Another was Mr. Justice Humphreys, who, when a lawyer read a document saying that an agreement had been reached, roared from the bench: “We do not want these horrible things to get into our language!” (London dispatch to the New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 3, 1937). In England agreements are arrived at, or concluded, and decisions are not reached but taken. I am indebted here to Mr. William S. Pfriender of Glendale, L. I. Less decorous Americanisms are often slapped down by English judges. Even more often they set their catchpolls to guffawing by pretending that they don’t know the meaning of such terms. Thus the London Sunday Express reported on Feb. 21, 1937 that Mr. Justice Clauson, in the Chancery Division, had raised a laugh by alleging that he was baffled by sez you, used by the poet, Osbert Sitwell, and on Nov. 29, 1938 the London Telegraph and Post reported that Mr. Justice Merriman, in the Divorce Division, had got another by saying of hangover: “I won’t yield to the temptation of asking what it is.”

1 The Origin of Bluff, John o’ London’s Weekly, April 4, 1936, p. 33.

2 Americanese, Aug. 27, 1936.

3 See Chapter VI, Section 8.

4 London, 1867.

1 Often they reveal their amateur status by condemning as an Americanism a word or phrase that is actually quite sound English. I take an example from Ireland, the home of bulls, where a Dublin judge in 1935 rebuked a lawyer for using to kill time. “This hideous colloquialism,” said a reproving writer in the Dublin Evening Mail (Jottings by a Man About Town, July 22, 1935), “no doubt originated in Chicago, where gangsters occupy their time by killing it, and one another. The appearance of such expressions in our courts is an alarming reminder that the American language is rapidly shouldering out English and Irish in the Free State.” To kill time is listed by the NED without any indication that it is not kosher English.

2 English Resent Yankee Lingo in Queen Mary Ads, Baltimore Sun, Dec. 28, 1935.

3 Dec. 27, 1935.

4 Markham is a member of the Labor party, and the author of a history of Socialism. He was private secretary to the Prime Minister during J. Ramsay Macdonald’s term in that office, and was chosen to complete the official life of King Edward VII.

5 Associated Press dispatch from London, Nov. 8, 1938. In the course of the same speech he said: “It may be that the Commissioner of Works will in time label this lobby (pointing to the House’s aye-obby) the sez-you-lobby, and that lobby (pointing to the no-lobby) the include-me-out-lobby.”

1 “The outcry against the pollution of our well of pure English by Americanisms,” said a writer in the London Tatler, Oct. 6, 1937, “has yet once again become very clamant.”

2 In a speech to the boys of King’s School, Rochester. The London Sunday Dispatch, June 27, 1937, poked fun at his lordship by heading its report of his remarks: Hot For Good Books, He Slams Slouch Scribes.

3 Americanisms, Glasgow Daily Record and Mail, June 30, 1937.

4 Snob-stuff From U.S.A., Oct. 25, 1937.

5 Unhappily, La Frankau’s indignation led her into the usual forensic excesses. For example, she told of an American who produced a “howl of delight” at a party by demanding of her, “Are you giving me a ham steer?” Whether her ears actually heard this as ham steer or her delicacy prevented her reporting bum steer I do not know. Bum, of course, means only the backside in England, and is thus a naughty word. The poor lady also fell into the error of denouncing serviette as an Americanism for a table-napkin. The NED shows that it was in common use in Scotland so long ago as the Fifteenth Century. It was introduced into England from France early in the Nineteenth Century, but “has come to be considered vulgar.” It is seldom heard in the United States.

1 Good Morning, by Malcolm W. Bingay, Jan. 21, 1937.

2 Montreal Daily Star, March 13,1937; Montreal Gazette, May 5.

3 Published in April, 1936.

4 Montreal Star, March 15, 1939.

1 Debasing Our Speech, London Observer, Jan. 30, 1938.

2 The Invasion From U.S.A., April 11.

3 Slushy Talk: the American Invasion, London Morning Post, Oct. 26, 1933

4 Broadcasting and American Slang, Oct. 31, 1935.

1 Slang and Language, April 13, 1935. Bogus, here listed as a Mayfair invention, is actually an Americanism. The DAE calls it “of obscure origin” and traces it to 1839. The NED calls it “a cant word of U.S.” Shame-making is not listed in any dictionary of English or American slang. It must have had a very short life.

2 Shakespeare as She is Spoke, July 26, 1938.

3 London Evening Standard, July 29, 1938.

4 The English equivalent of the American public schools.

5 A Serious Woman’s Diary, Dec. 14, 1938.

1 Pp. 44–48.

2 To-night, by Tempus, March 24.

3 Americanisms and Slang, Catholic Herald (Manchester edition), June 19, 1936.

4 An English Paper Deplores a Bishop for Deploring, Baltimore Evening Sun (editorial page), Nov 6, 1936.

1 June 17, 1938. What the Times had to say of Weaver’s poems in American at the time of their publication in the early 20s — if, indeed, it said anything at all — I do not know.

2 Defined by the NED as one who takes “a place in the first class in each of two final examinations in different subjects” at an English university.

3 Quoted in English Films and the U. S. Market, by Campbell Dixon, London Daily Telegraphy April 11, 1938.

4 Oh! What Slanguage!, July 23,1938.

5 When I called attention to the same fact in 1930 (What America is Doing to Your Language, London Daily Express, Jan. 15) I was lambasted with great energy. See AL4, pp. 31 and 32.

1 The Conquering Tongue, London Spectator, Feb. 5, 1943, pp. 120–21.

2 A character in Henry V.

3 Two Peoples and One Tongue, June 29, 1943.

1 An interesting contemporary account of him is in Anecdotes of Colonel Humphreys, Monthly Magazine and American Review, June, 1800, pp. 472–75.

2 It is reprinted in full in Mathews, pp. 57–61. He also reprinted it in Dialect Notes, Vol. V., Part IX, 1926, pp. 375–82.

3 The dates are those of the earliest examples in the DAE. That of to boost is the date of the play’s publication. The word was apparently just coming in at the time.

4 Discussed in Chapter VI, Section 8.

5 Humphreys describes darned as “old English,” but the NED’s early examples are all American.

6 I suspect that Humphreys invented this monstrosity. The DAE’s first example comes from his glossary, and its second, obviously borrowed therefrom, from Bartlett’s, 1848. Bartlett says: “This remarkable specimen of clipping and condensing a phrase approaches the Indian method of forming words. The word is very common through New England, Long Island, and the rest of New York.” But he confused it with forzino, the next term on the Humphreys list.

7 Or farzino. The DAE throws no light on either form, and Thornton, Clapin, Farmer and most of the other American lexicographers ignore them. Schele de Vere describes a third form, farziner, as “a violent corruption of as far as I know throughout New England, and in parts of New York, but confined to the most ignorant classes and rapidly disappearing.” Schele was too optimistic. I have heard farzino in Maryland within the last few years.

8 Humphreys so defines the word, but the DAE does not list it.

9 Here again the DAE’s first example is from Humphreys himself.

1 The DAE’s first example of this is from Humphreys himself. It apparently did not appear in England until the middle of the century.

2 London, 1818. The subtitle is A Narrative of a Journey of Five Thousand Miles Through the Eastern and Western States. There was a second edition the same year and a third in 1819. Fearon was sent out in 1817 by 39 English heads of families “to ascertain whether any and what part of the United States would be suitable for their residence.” He reached New York Aug. 6, and sailed for home May 10, 1818. The post-Napoleonic depression was on in England at the time, and he says in his preface that emigration had “assumed a totally new character; it was no longer merely the poor, the idle, the profligate, or the wholly speculative who were proposing to quit their native country, but men also of capital, of industry, of sober habits and regular pursuits.” Despite the recentness of the War of 1812 he was politely received.

1 It was published in Boston and makes a volume of 207 pp. It has never been reprinted, but copies are still occasionally encountered in the second-hand book-stores.

1 Notes on Early American Work in Linguistics, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, July, 1943, p. 27.

2 Allen Walker Read says in American Projects for an Academy to Regulate Speech, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1936, p. 1150, that the academy usually devoted itself to “practical matters in geology, agriculture, mathematics and the like”: the Pickering paper was something of a novelty for it.

1 One of these friends, it would appear, was the Peter Du Ponceau lately mentioned. In 1935 Dr. Julian P. Boyd, then librarian of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and now (1944) librarian of Princeton, discovered a long run of letters from Pickering to Du Ponceau in the Historical Society’s collection, all of them dealing with language. So far they have not been published.

2 The only ones he listed were barbecue, caucus, hominy, moccasin, netop, papoose, samp, squaw and succotash.

1 Pickering’s introductory essay, but not his preface, is reprinted in full in Mathews, pp. 65 ff.

2 The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. X; New York and Cambridge, 1913, p. 516, says that the Todd revision was brought out in four volumes in 1818, but the first volume, at least, must have appeared earlier, for Pickering was quoting it in 1816. It increased Johnson’s vocabulary to 58,000 words.

3 The Rev. Jonathan Boucher, author of a Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words. For an account of him see AL4, p. 35, n. 1.

1 Animadversions Upon the Remonstrants’ Defense Against Smectymnuus; London, 1641.

3 Freshet, in the sense of a flood caused by melting snow or excessive rainfall, is probably an Americanism. The DAE’s first example is dated 1638. The NED’s first is later.

3 Freshet, in the sense of a flood caused by melting snow or excessive rainfall, is probably an Americanism. The DAE’s first example is dated 1638. The NED’s first is later.

4 This curious denunciation is printed in full in AL4, p. 14. The Quarterly Review also denounced the word.

1 Mark Twain used it in Sketches Old and New, 1864, but it is now heard only in rustic speech, and seldom there.

2 Not listed in the DAE. Pickering says that in his day it was “often heard from our pulpits,” but notes that it had come from England, where it was obsolete.

3 The DAE’s first American example is dated 1809. It apparently appeared in England before this, but quickly passed out.

4 The DAE’s first example is from the New England Courant of April 9/16, 1722. The word is in Thomas Wright’s Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English; London 1857. Wright says that it comes from the Anglo-Norman, whatever that may be. The NED gives a quotation from Shakespeare’s King John, 1595, but throws some doubt upon it. Its first unmistakable quotation is dated 1706.

5 The DAE’s only quotations are from Pickering himself and from a review in the British Critic, 1796, which he quotes. He says that the British Critic called the word an American coinage, and declared that it was better than citizeness. It did not last long.

6 Jefferson used the word as early as 1787, and it was admitted by Noah Webster to his American Dictionary of 1828. The DAE’s last example is dated 1879.

7 It was provincial in England. The DAE does not list it.

8 To doxologize and to happify are not listed in the DAE. The latter appears in Dunglison.

9 Traced by the DAE to the Connecticut probate records of 1647. Pickering says that, in his time, it was “in constant use in all parts of New England.”

10 This word, which arose at the close of the Eighteenth Century, went out with the disappearance of the redemptioners themselves. They were immigrants who paid for their passage to America by binding themselves to service for a term of years.

1 Pickering lists this as a New England provincialism. It is not recorded in the DAE.

2 The NED traces brash in this sense to 1566, but says that it is “now chiefly U.S.” Pickering said the term was used “in some parts of New England,” and Dunglison, in 1829, marked it “New England.” It is now used universally by workmen dealing with wood, e.g., carpenters and cabinet-makers.

3 Pickering hazards the guess that this word may be a variant of the Devonshire dialect term, clatchy, meaning the same. The NED traces to clitch, in the sense of to stick, to adhere, to c. 1325, but it apparently vanished into dialect soon after 1400. The NED prints a note from a correspondent who says that to clitch, not to clatch, still survives in the West of England.

4 I take this Webster list from Mathews.

1 It was listed in Todd’s revision of Johnson’s Dictionary.

2 Boston, new ed., p. 94.

3 See AL4, p. 40, n. 2.

1 The spelling of this Indian word is variable. The Pennsylvania town, river and college are Allegheny, the mountains are the Alleghanies, and the New York village is Allegany. Webster, in his American Dictionary of 1828, preferred Allegany for the mountains, and Alleganean for a denizen thereof, but the latter word is now commonly written Alleghanian. The form Alleghenian is also recorded. There are various derivatives, e.g., alleghany hellbender (a bird), alleghany plum (Prunus alleghaniensis), alleghany-vine (Adlumia cirrhosa), and allegany-skiff. To alleghany, in the West, once meant to induce the Indians to neglect paying for trade-goods.

1 Three vols. New York, 1809, Vol.III, p. 160.

2 Two vols. London, 1789, Vol. II, P. 357.

1 See AL4, pp. 15, 119 and 223.

2 There was evidence against Pickering here. John Davis, in his Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America, 1798,1799, 1800, 1801 and 1802; London, 1802, said “it is frequently used by the classical writers of the New World.”

1 Of 1806.

1 An Introduction to the History of Medicine; fourth ed.; Philadelphia, 1929, p. 443. Dunglison’s son, also a physician, published a memoir of him in 1870.

2 Dunglison’s Glossary (1829–1830), Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part X, 1927, pp. 422–32.

1 Vol. V, Part X, pp. 415–21. It was omitted from Sherwood’s fourth edition; Macon and Atlanta, 1860.

1 Bartlett should not be confused with John Bartlett (1820–1905), the Boston publisher who, in 1855, brought out a volume of Familiar Quotations that, with revisions by other hands, is still a standard work.

1 Schele’s own copy of the book, with many corrections and additions, is in the University of Virginia library. Dr. Atcheson L. Hench gave an account of it in a paper read before the Present-Day English Section of the Modern Language Association at Philadelphia, Dec 29, 1934. Unhappily, that paper has not been printed, but Dr. Hench has courteously permitted me to see it. Schele’s notes were apparently made in 1872–75. Dr. Hench calls attention to the fact that copies of the first edition of 1871 are extremely scarce; in fact, he has never seen one, and neither have I.

1 I take this from American Projects for an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1936, p. 1142. Thornton’s book, published in Philadelphia in 1793, was called Cadmus, or, a Treatise on the Elements of Written Language. He was a native of Tortola, one of the Virgin Islands belonging to England. He had come to the United States a little while before and presently set up practise as an architect, though he had no professional training. In 1793 he submitted plans for the Capitol at Washington and they were approved by George Washington. His design survives in the central part of the building. He served as one of the commissioners of the District of Columbia until 1802, and after that was Commissioner of Patents until his death. He was mentioned by James Boswell in a letter of July 28, 1793, and was denounced by a Scot, James Adams, for proposing “a plan of abolishing our language,… noticed by a philosophical society.”

1 A Boston antiquary, born in 1860, whose diligent and valuable work entered into the NED, the DAE and other dictionaries, and greatly enriched the files of learned journals. Unhappily, he never collected it.

2 I am indebted here to the late J. Jefferson Jones, chief of the Lippincott editorial department.

1 White and Lounsbury are dealt with at some length in AL4, pp. 61 ff.

2 Murray was born in Lancaster county, Pa., in 1745. Trained as a lawyer, he went into business and made a comfortable fortune during the Revolution. In 1784 he moved to England, where he died in 1826. His Grammar of the English Language Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners first appeared in 1795. It ran through hundreds of editions. In 1804 he published a spelling-book that became a formidable rival to Webster’s.

3 This depressing business was thus described by the late Dr. Otto Heller (1863–1941), of Washington University, in a paper entitled The Pseudo-Science or Literature, Proceedings of the Conference on the Association of American Universities, 1936, pp. 78–88: “Collating all existing versions and variants of literary monuments or compositions; ‘fixing’ the authentic text; making ‘standard’ editions; ferreting out analogies and parallels and tracing sources; annotating; recovering writing lost or missing; excavating literary ruins or fragments; disinterring works and parts of works deservedly buried alive by their authors; disclosing guarded privacies.” The typical “study” is a laborious tracking down of the sources of some work that no one ever reads, or the tracing of the relations between two authors, one of them usually a nonentity, and sometimes both. Dr. Heller admitted in his paper that such humorless inquiries occasionally unearth more or less useful knowledge, but noted sadly that the pedants who engage in them usually “content themselves with the mechanical preliminaries.”

1 Semantics is a new name for semasiology, the study of the meaning of words. Its masterpiece is the discovery, announced with a great fanfare, that a given word often means different things to different people, and that words worked to death by ignoramuses, e.g., democracy, commonly take on emotional overtones that quite obliterate their historical meaning. All this, of course, was known to the Greeks, but it seems new and thrilling to the sort of person to whom it seems new and thrilling. Of late the professors of semantics have divided into two factions. The first, led by metaphysicians, lifts the elemental business of communicating ideas to the level of a baffling and somewhat sinister arcanum standing midway between the geometry of the fourth dimension and the Freudian rumble-bumble; the other, led by popularizers, converts it into a club for use upon the skulls of enemies of the current New Deals. The study of phonemes is based upon the revolutionary discovery that there are speech elements smaller than words. Unhappily, no two professors of the new mystery seem to be in agreement as to just what a phoneme is. Their differences were described at length by Dr. W. Freeman Twaddell of the University of Wisconsin in On Defining the Phoneme, Language (supplement), March, 1935. He favored getting rid of the difficulty by calling a phoneme “an abstractional fictitious unit.” “We shall have many a headache,” added Dr. Arthur G. Kennedy of Stanford University in Recent Trends in English Linguistics, Modern Language Quarterly, June, 1940, p. 177, speaking of the analogous morpheme, “before the grammarians, more particularly the philosophical linguists, succeed in straightening out the matter of definitions.” Dr. Kennedy reported that he had also got news of morphonemes, tonemes, enthymemes, glossemes, graphemes, noemes, philosophemes, tagmemes, taxemes, archimorphemes and phonomorphemes. Such monstrosities are hardly more than evidences of the ancient scholastic belief that giving a thing a new name is equivalent to saying something about it.

1 Vol. I, No. 1 was dated Oct., 1925. It was a monthly at $4 a year until Sept., 1927. Then it became a bi-monthly at $3. Between Aug., 1932 and Feb., 1933 it was suspended. In the latter month it became a quarterly at $4 a year, and has so continued.

2 When American Speech was launched, with Dr. Louise Pound as editor, it started off promisingly, and by April, 1926 had 1469 paid subscribers. But in 1929 and 1930 the circulation dropped to an average of 550, and by October of the latter year it had got down to 329. There was a slight revival afterward and it reached 570 at the end of 1932, but soon afterward it dropped again. I am indebted here to Mr. Robert S. Gill, of the Williams and Wilkins Company, Baltimore, its publishers from the start to 1930, and to Mr. H. E. Buchholz of Warwick and York, Baltimore, its publishers from then until the end of 1932, when it was taken over by the Columbia University Press, with Dr. William Cabell Greet as editor.

3 As of Nov. 21, 1942 it had 3925 members.

4 At its second annual meeting, at Chicago in Dec., 1925, it approved the work of the aforesaid Present-Day English section. See Notes and Quotes, American Speech, Aug., 1926, p. 620.

5 Vol. I, No. 1 was dated March, 1925.

6 Since 1928 the society has been conducting Linguistic Institutes in Summer at various universities. In June, 1944, for example, there was one at the University of Wisconsin. The lectures listed offered instruction in General Linguistics, Phonetics, Vulgar Latin, Syriac, Sanskrit, Hittite, Old Norse, Old High German, the American Indian languages, Old Spanish, Anglo-Saxon, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Greek, but there was only one course dealing with American English, and that was confined to its pronunciation. For the original plans see The Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America, American Speech, Feb., 1928, pp. 171–72.

1 It is probable that the current vogue of the dialect novel had something to do with its launching. For the first time the riches of American dialect were being systematically explored. The resultant reports were often anything but accurate, but they at least directed attention to the subject.

2 The American Dialect Dictionary, by Percy W. Long, American Speech, May, 1926, pp. 439–42.

1 It was at first called The Historical Dictionary of American English, but the change in title was made in 1935, before publication began.

2 The American Language, Chicago Tribune, April 12, 1925. This article was printed simultaneously in a number of other newspapers, e.g., the New York World.

1 The frequent slips of Thornton are discussed by Allen Walter Read in The Policies of the Dictionary of American English, Dialect Notes, July-Dec., 1938, p. 641.

2 There were, of course, brilliant exceptions, notably Albert Matthews, who placed his extensive collections at the disposal of the editors; Herbert Horwill, author of Modern American Usage; Oxford, 1935, who lent them the dated quotations he had used in the preparation of that work; and C. W. Ernst of Boston, whose valuable notes, now in the Harvard library, were open to them. They also had the loan, from the American Dialect Society, of the materials for the third volume of Thornton’s Glossary. In American Speech, in 1930 (The Historical Dictionary of American English In the Making, p. 37), Floy Perkinson Gates called attention to the difficulties caused by the lack of a more general response. “The chief concern at present,” he said, “is the fact that the material on hand is not sufficient for the needs. More examples of the use of concrete words associated with the objects and activities of everyday America, and more instances of indigenous phrases, must be supplied. An examination of the material filed under the caption back, for instance, has shown that of the two hundred words collected, only one-tenth are ideally illustrated, while about one-fifth are represented by single quotations, or are without any first class historical evidence.” But this alarm brought no onrush of volunteers. A direct appeal for “more coöperation in this work,” saying that “it is necessary to emphasize again the need for all the outside help that can be given,” was made by Sir William Craigie in American Speech in February, 1931, and two years later, in July, 1933, Dr. Louise Pound attempted to arouse interest with an article in the American Mercury, but these efforts were likewise in vain.

1 His appointment had been hailed by the Chicago Tribune on Oct. 18, 1924 in an immortal headline: Midway Signs / Limey Prof, to / Dope Yank Talk.

2 In the later stages contributions were also made by the Rockefeller Foundation and by Mrs. Ruth Swift Maguire, a sister to Harold H. Swift, chairman of the university’s board of trustees.

3 I take these figures from American English, Springfield (Mass.) Republican, Feb. 4, 1944.

1 Dictionary of American English, by Dorothea Kahn, Christian Science Monitor (Boston), April 1, 1944.

2 Talking United States, Time, Feb. 7, 1944. “Throughout the long printing process,” says this Time article, “two sets of every proof went to Sir William. He corrected and returned both. Sometimes he did his final editing on proofs, a practise which unnerves typesetters. The mangling got so bad that the press almost lost its staff, and had to serve an ultimatum on the editors. To keep himself sane during his long devotion to thousands of little cards Co-Editor Hulbert refreshed himself with detective stories.”

1 The Anglomaniacal Boston Trans-script was among the first American newspapers to succumb. In Dec., 1924, soon after Sir William’s appointment was announced, it published an editorial (reprinted in the Washington Post, Dec. 10) containing the following: “The dictionary marks a stage in American history, the recognition virtually official that there is such a thing as American English, a language and not a dialect. Sovereign states do not talk dialects, but possess a language. There will be some to rebel at this idea, as they have rebelled hitherto, now with perfect right, and now with too strong an academic slant.” In other words, the American language became respectable the moment a British authority gave it his countenance. On Jan. 22, 1937, after the publication of the first fascicle of the dictionary, the London Spectator followed with: “Now after eleven years of labor this first part disposes once for all of transatlantic bickering, fear of contamination, and the hot suspicion that the American language was something wickedly thought up as a hoax by Mr. Mencken in his Baltimore den.” Finally, L. H. Robbins wrote in the New York Times Magazine, Oct. 6, 1940, p. 11: “American English has been a long while in making the grade to respectability. Noah Webster boosted it, Richard H. Thornton gave it a hand, H. L. Mencken went to bat for it, and still certain classrooms and editoral offices figured that to write United States is sort of low-down, or something. The new dictionary may help to smear that dull notion.”

1 The Progress of the Historical Dictionary of American English, p. 260.

2 It was announced by the University of Chicago Press on March 19, 1944. See Lexicography at Chicago, by M. M. Mathews, American Scholar, Summer, 1944, pp. 369–71.

1 Plans for a Historical Dictionary of Briticisms, American Oxonian, July, 1938, pp. 186–90.

2 Studies in Linguistics (New Haven), April, 1943, pp. 1 and 3.

3 Oxford, 1941

1 The American Council of Learned Societies, organized in 1919, is made up of representatives of the principal humanistic organizations of the United States, e.g., the American Philosophical Society, the American Historical Association, the American Economic Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Oriental Society, the American Sociological Society, the Medieval Academy of America, the American Anthropological Association, the Linguistic Society of America, and the Modern Language Association.

2 p. 58, n. 2.

3 Lancaster, Pa., 1942.

4 The first linguistic atlas was Sprach-atlas des Deutschen Reiches, begun in 1876 and completed in 1926. In 1902–08 Jules Gilliéron and E. Edmont brought out an Atlas linguistique de la France, recording, for 638 localities, the dialectal forms of more than 2,000 words and phrases. There are also atlases for Italy and Italian Switzerland and for Japan, the former edited by Karl Jaberg and Jacob Jud and the latter by M. Tojo. Before World War II others were under way for the Slovak, Flemish and other dialects, and one covering the whole civilized world had been projected. See Linguistic Geography and the American Atlas, by Robert J. Menner, American Speech, Oct., 1933, pp. 3–7.

1 Quahog, borrowed from the Pequot Indian p’quaughhaug, is traced by the DAE to 1799, but is probably older. It has variants in cohog, traced to 1788, and pooquaw, traced to 1848. The field workers for the LA found pooquaw surviving on Nantucket.

2 Lightning-bug is traced by the DAE to 1778 and marked an Americanism. It is avoided in polite speech in England because bug, there, signifies a bed-bug. But June-bug survives in various English dialects.

1 Springfield, Mass., 1944.

2 Its difficulties are discussed in What Symbols Shall We Use?, by Leonard Bloomfield and George M. Boiling, Language, June, 1927, pp. 123–29.

3 De la démocratie en Amérique; Paris, 1835, Vol. II, Book I, Chapter XVI. Translated as The Republic of the United States of America and Its Political Institutions, Reviewed and Examined, by Henry Reeves, with notes and a preface by John C. Spencer; New York, 1858. I am indebted here to Mr. Frank W. Buxton, editor of the Boston Herald.

1 The superior importance of the spoken language, often overlooked by writers on the subject, was stressed again nearly a century later by another French observer, Dr. A. G. Feuillerat, professor of French at Yale, in A Dictionary of the American Language, Yale Review, June, 1929, p. 830. “It is,” he said, “the most vital part of the language, the one that will in the end impose its laws when American civilization, having severed all links from English civilization, may eventually desire to assert itself in the adoption of a truly national mode of expression.”

2 It is hardly necessary to add that they were also true for the time immediately preceding. The neologisms of Joel Barlow (1754–1812), noted in AL4, p. 16, were mainly grotesque inventions that showed no essentially American color. See A Historical Note on American English, by Leon Howard, American Speech, Sept., 1927, pp. 497–99. Those of Philip Freneau (1752–1832) were hardly more significant. See Philippic Freneau, by S. B. Hustvedt, American Speech, Oct., 1928, pp. 1–18. Those used by David Humphreys (1752–1818) have been discussed in Section 4 of this chapter.

3 Cooper also discussed the differences between English and American usage in Gleanings in Europe; London, 1836. See Cooper’s Notes on Language, by Robert E. Spiller, American Speech, April, 1929, pp. 294–300.

4 In a postscript to the first English edition of The Sketch Book, 1820, he spoke of the English as “a public which he has been accustomed, from childhood, to regard with the highest feelings of awe and reverence,” and added that he was “full of solicitude to deserve their approbation.” I am indebted here to Conservatism in American Speech, by George H. McKnight, American Speech, Oct., 1925, p. 5.

1 i.e., the English travelers who had begun to support the reviewers in reviling all things American.

2 Walsh (1784–1859) was a Baltimorean, and edited various magazines from 1811 to 1837. From 1845 to 1851 he was American consul at Paris. In 1819 he published An Appeal From the Judgments of Great Britain, an answer to the anti-American philippics of the Quarterly Review.

1 Edward Everett’s Attitude Towards American English, New England Quarterly, March, 1939, pp. 112–29.

2 I am indebted here to Read, just cited.

1 Fenimore Cooper, Critic of His Times; New York, 1931, Ch. X. I am indebted here to Mr. F. Reed Alvord, of Hamilton, N. Y.

2 The American use of creek to designate any small stream had been remarked by various earlier commentators on American English, including Pickering, Theodoric Romeyn Beck, and Robley Dunglison. The DAE’s first example is dated 1638. It is usually pronounced crick.

3 Square, in the sense of a small city park, is not an Americanism. The DAE traces it to 1698 in Philadelphia, but the NED finds an English example eleven years older. But public square seems to be of American origin, though the DAE, which traces it to 1786, does not so mark it. Square, in the sense of a city block or of the distance between one street and the next, apparently originated in Philadelphia, where William Penn laid out the city in rectangles — the first time this was done in America, and possibly in the world. All the other early American cities, at least in their older parts, have many crooked streets.

4 The use of pond, in England, is confined with few exceptions to artificial bodies of water, but it began to be applied to natural lakes in America so early as 1622, and in the name of Walden Fond it is familiar in that meaning to all readers of Thoreau.

5 The misapplication of river to arms of the sea is quite as common in England as in America; the lower Thames, for example, is actually an inlet of the North Sea, and is often called, more properly, an estuary.

1 A long and interesting discussion of the u-sound in American speech is in The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp; New York, 1925, Vol. II, pp. 155 ff. Krapp shows that a y-sound, in American usage is seldom heard after l or r. After d, t, th, n, sh, s and z the current practice varies, with y the most marked in the Boston area and the South. Noah Webster was violently against it, and advocated the simple u in even few, making it rhyme with zoo.

2 Here Cooper, who was certainly no phonologist, is apparently trying to say that the u should be preceded by the y-sound, as in pure and beauty.

3 Where Cooper heard the pronunciation he denounced, or what his authority was for those he recommended, I do not know. Injine for engine survives in the common speech of today, but certainly not injin, which is reserved for Indian. I have never heard ensign with the accent on the second syllable. In the common speech the first is heavily accented, and the second is drawn out. In the Navy the first is also accented, but the second is clipped.

4 These were all Eighteenth Century pronunciations, surviving in England. Clark survives to this day. Cow-cumber is still occasionally heard in the United States, especially among rustics. In the early days cucumber was often so spelled. The DAE’s first example is dated 1685, and its last (not consciously dialectical) 1742.

5 Leftenant is still the usual English pronunciation of lieutenant.

6 For either and neither see AL4, p. 341.

1 Boss is obviously derived from the Dutch baas, but though it must have been familiar, at least in New York, in the Seventeenth Century, it did not come into general use until the Nineteenth. The DAE’s first example is dated 1806. It was propagated by the proletarian self-assertion that preceded the opening of the first Century of the Common Man, with Jackson’s election in 1828.

2 Sabbath for Sunday was an inheritance from the Puritans. It survived generally until after the Civil War, and is still used by some of the ultra-pious. Cooper’s chapter On Language is reprinted in full in Mathews, pp. 123–29.

3 In 1868 he became president of a primeval National Institute of Letters, Arts and Sciences which proposed, among other things, to police the language. The chairman of its executive committee was the implacable pedant, Richard Grant White. John Bigelow described the project as one designed “to throw the French Academy into the shade.” See American Projects for an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1936, pp. 1141–79.

1 I should add in fairness that some of the other words that Bryant banned belonged to the worst newspaper jargon of the time, and probably deserved to be frowned upon, e.g., above and over for more than, casket for coffin, claimed for asserted, decease as a verb, devouring element for fire, to inaugurate for to begin, in our midst, juvenile for boy, lady for wife, to loan for to lend, Mrs. Governor, ovation, party for person, posted for informed, rendition for performance, Rev. without the the, to state for to say, and on the tapis. But he also prohibited such terms as to beat for to defeat, to collide, to graduate for to be graduated, House for House of Representatives, humbug, loafer, rowdy and on yesterday. On yesterday still appears every day in the Congressional Record, and the rest are in impeccable American use.

2 The Outlook for American Prose; Chicago, 1926, p. 21.

3 Emersonian Unconventionalities, American Speech, Oct., 1936, p. 272.

4 Melville’s Contribution to English, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Sept., 1941, pp. 797–808. Under the same title Purcell corrected a few errors in American Speech, Oct., 1943, p. 211. See also Some Americanisms in Moby Dick, by William S. Ament, American Speech, June, 1932, pp. 365–67.

1 Poe’s Contributions to English, American Speech, Feb., 1943, pp. 73–74.

2 Review of A Concordance of the Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe, by Brandford A. Booth and Claude E. Jones; Baltimore, 1941, in American Speech, April, 1942, p. 112. Ramsay handles this concordance roughly; it is, in fact, of very small value. It should be remembered that Poe’s poetical output was not large, and that this fact may reduce his apparent vocabulary.

3 Six other derivatives are run back by the NED to dates earlier than 1831: tintinnabulatory to 1827, tintannabulism to 1826, tintinnabulant to 1812, tintinnabulous to 1791, tintinnabulery to 1787 and tintinnabular to 1767.

4 Hawthorne may have been the author of three articles on “correct English” which appeared in the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, June and Sept., 1835, and June, 1836. This magazine was published by S. G. Goodrich, for whom he had worked off and on since c. 1828. He was its editor in 1836 at $500 a year. I am indebted here to Mr. John H. Kou-wenhoven of New York.

1 Philadelphia, 1888.

2 April, pp. 460 ff. Traubel says that he found an alternative title in Whitman’s papers, to wit, The Primer of Words: for American Young Men and Women, for Literati, Orators, Teachers, Musicians, Judges, Presidents, &c. He adds: “Whitman told me that when the idea of the American Primer first came to him it was for a lecture. He wrote at this thing in the early 50s —even as far along as 1856–57. And there is evidence that he made brief additions to it from time to time in the ten years that followed. But after 1855, when he succeeded in issuing the first edition of Leaves of Grass, some of his old plans were abandoned — this lecture scheme with others —, and certain new plans were formulated. The Primer was thenceforth, as a distinct project, held in abeyance.” An American Primer was reprinted in an edition of 500 copies; Boston, 1904.

1 Yawp, the most famous, is commonly supposed to have been his invention, but the DAE traces it to 1835, when it was used by J. H. In-graham in The South-West. Gawk has been in use in England since the early Eighteenth Century.

2 Walt Whitman and the French Language, American Speech, May, 1926, p. 425.

3 Poe had a weakness for terms of the same sort, e.g., recherché, outré, dégagé and littérateur. See The French of Edgar Allan Poe, by Edith Philips, American Speech, March, 1927, pp. 270–74.

1 His unhappy efforts to devise new words of English material are described in Walt Whitman’s Neologisms, by Louise Pound, American Mercury, Feb., 1925, pp. 199–201. Dr. Pound apparently includes sit, the infinitive of the verb used as a noun, as one of them. It was actually borrowed from the argot of printers, and is listed in Charles T. Jacobi’s Printers’ Vocabulary as an abbreviation of situation. Whitman’s writings on language are well summarized in Walt Whitman and the American Language, by Leon Howard, American Speech, Aug., 1930, pp. 441–51. In A Study of Whitman’s Diction, University of Texas Studies in English, No. 16, 1936, pp. 115–24, Rebecca Coy shows that the Americanisms in Leaves of Grass are not numerous.

2 The savagely anti-American Gifford had retired as. editor in 1824 and died in 1826, but his heirs and assigns were carrying the torch.

3 In a series called Live Books Resurrected, edited by L. Stanley Jast. It was reviewed in the London Times Literary Supplement, May 15, 1943.

1 Feb., 1855, p. 213.

2 The Development of Faith in the Dictionary in America, read before the Present Day English section of the Modern Language Association at Philadelphia, Dec. 29, 1934. So far as I am aware this paper has not been published, but I have had access to it by the courtesy of the author.

1 The Cambridge History of American Literature; New York, 1918; Vol. II, p. 151. See also American Idiom in the Major Downing Letters, by Ernest E. Leisy, American Speech, April, 1933, pp. 78–79.

2 Haliburton was not an American, but a Nova Scotian, and his Sam Slick, the Yankee clock peddler, was depicted with British bias. He was frequently accused of misrepresentations, not only in character but also in speech. Said an anonymous writer in Putnam’s Monthly, Aug., 1854, p. 227: “He writes tales and sketches of American life on purpose for the English market. He knows about as much of genuine Yankee character as one half the comic actors who attempt to personate it in the stage, i.e., he knows a few enormous exaggerations and nothing more. His representations, however, are received in England as the true thing, and nine out of ten of the current slang expressions which the English ascribe to Yankees are taken from his books, never having been heard of in Yankee land. They strike a New Englander as oddly as they do John Bull himself, and are most likely inventions of the author.” Haliburton, who was a judge in Nova Scotia from 1828 to 1856, contributed his first Sam Slick sketches to the Nova Scotian of Halifax in 1835. Collections of them were brought out in 1837, 1838 and 1840. Despite their prejudiced tone they were widely reprinted in American newspapers.

1 A study of words invented by Thompson or borrowed by him from the popular speech of his time is in Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P. B., Neologist, by J. Louis Kuethe, American Speech, April, 1937. In it he is credited with introducing gutter-snipe, forty-rod, baggage-smasher, brass-knuckles, bucksaw, citified, muley-cow, hot stuff and various other now familiar Americanisms. On the appearance of the DAE it turned out that Thompson had been anticipated in some of these, but in other cases his priority was maintained. In some instances the DAE’s first examples are from his writings.

2 Some of these humorists, notably Browne and Leland, had considerable successes in England, and, as R. H. Heindel says in The American Impact on Great Britain, 1898–1914; Philadelphia, 1940, p. 305, “broke down the resistance to Americanisms.” But that breaking down, of course, was only partial and only transitory. The English reviewers, in the main, sneered at them, despite their popularity. In Every Saturday (Boston), July 10, 1869, p. 52, is a reprint of a curious attack on Le-land’s German dialect verses from an unnamed English review. It dismisses them loftily as “written in the jargon of a German clown who has half learned English” and actually undertakes to translate one of the most famous of them, Han’s Breitmann’s Barty, into orthodox English! A good account of the early humorists, with special reference to their sources, is in Native American Humor (1800–1900), by Walter Blair; New York, 1937.

1 The significance of The Biglow Papers as a philological document was quickly recognized. Said an anonymous writer in Putnam’s Monthly, May, 1853, p. 554: “This is an unmistakably American performance.… It is a valuable repository of the dialectic peculiarities of New England.”

2 In the Policies of the Dictionary of American English, Dialect Notes, July-Dec., 1938, p. 630. Allen Walker Read called this essay “probably the most important discussion of American English in the Nineteenth Century.”

3 He permitted himself, for example, to denounce slang on the ground that it “is always vulgar,” and he thought it worth while to defend Hosea Big-low at some length against the idiotic charge of “speaking of sacred things familiarly.”

1 Speech was not the main theme of his On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, 1869, but that famous essay did not altogether overlook it. The Englishman coming to America, he said in it, felt himself “defrauded, nay, even outraged” because he found “a people speaking what he admits to be something like English, and yet so very different from (or, as he would say, to) those he left at home.… ‘How am I vulgar?’ asks the culprit, shudderingly. ‘Because thou art not like unto Us,’ answers Lucifer, Son of the Morning, and there is no more to be said.… We did not pronounce the diphthong ou as they did, and we said eether and not eyther, following therein the fashion of our ancestors, who unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare’s.”

2 I hailed the marvel in The Greatest of American Writers, Smart Set, June, 1910, pp. 153–54. It was an astonishing event indeed, and without a parallel until May, 1944, when the empurpled illuminati of the American Academy of Arts and Letters discovered at last that Theodore Dreiser was an important American novelist, and paid him $1,000 in cash, apparently as an indemnity for 44 years’ lofty neglect of him.

3 University of Missouri Studies, Jan. 1, 1938. Dr. Emberson’s Mark Twain’s Vocabulary: A General Survey was published in the same series, July 1, 1935. In 1930 the Mark Twain Society of Webster Groves. Mo., published A Vocabulary Study of The Gilded Age, by Alma Borth Martin. It is of small value and is defaced by a donkeyish foreword by Hamlin Garland.

1 So far as I know, there is no study in English of Harte’s vocabulary. In German there is Die Verwendung der Mundart bei Bret Harte, by Heinrich Kessler, Beiträge zur Erforschung der Sprache und Kultur Englands und Amerikas, Vol. V, No. 2, 1928.

2 An anonymous reviewer of the DAE in the Pathfinder (Washington), Feb. 28, 1944, says that Mark “contributed more American words [to it] than any other writer, while Emerson stuck closely to English usage and contributed none.”

1 An attempt to sort out some of these dialects is made in Mark Twain and American Dialect, by Katherine Buxbaum, American Speech, Feb., 1927, pp. 233–36.

2 Concerning the American Language was included in The Stolen White Elephant; Boston, 1882. On July 20, 1879, Mark had written in his London note-book: “One must have a play-book at an English play — the English accent is so different one cannot understand or follow the actors. The same in ordinary conversation which one tries to hear.”

3 Howells’s own prose, as he advanced in life, showed some concession to American idiom, but he never quite got over his fear of vulgarity. See Conservatism in American Speech, by George H. McKnight, American Speech, Oct., 1925, pp. 7 and 8, and my Prejudices: First Series; New York, 1919, especially p. 58.

1 After being graduated from the Princeton Theological Seminary Van Dyke pastored a church at Newport, R. I., and was then elevated to the pulpit of the Brick Presbyterian in New York. In 1900 he became professor of English literature at Princeton. In 1913 his services to the Anglo-Saxon Kultur were rewarded with the post of minister to the Netherlands and Luxemburg. After this service he returned to Princeton, where he remained until 1923. He was a D.D. of Princeton, Harvard and Yale, and an Oxford D.C.L. He was one of the first ornaments of the national letters drafted for the National Institute of Arts and Letters and rose to be its president. Later he became a member of its upper chamber, the American Academy, along with Brander Matthews, Robert Underwood Johnson, George W. Cable, T. R. Lounsbury, William M. Sloane, Henry Cabot Lodge, Owen Wister, Hamlin Garland, Paul Elmer More, John H. Finley and other such immortals. He died in 1933.

2 Van Dyke Scoffs at Ideas of New Language in U. S., New York Tribune, June 4. The statement was discussed at length in the newspapers during the month following, and most of them appeared to agree with Van Dyke. Some of their editorials were summarized in a Daily Editorial Digest then current, printed in a number of papers, e.g., the Roanoke (Va.) World-News, July 4; the Washington Star, July 3; the Salt Lake City Deseret News, July 6; and the Oklahoma City Oklahoman July 6.

3 The American Language, 3rd ed.; New York, 1923, pp. 398–402.

4 Scott, who died in 1930, was a completely humorless man and an almost archetypical pedagogue. He was a delegate to the unfortunate London conference of 1927. He professed rhetoric at Ann Arbor for more than forty years and also taught journalism, though he knew no more about it than a child. He was also an author, and his bibliography includes Memorable Passages from the Bible, 1906; Selections from the Old Testament, 1910; Paragraph Writing, 1893; Introduction to Literary Criticism, 1899; Aphorisms for Teachers of English Composition, 1905; and A Brief English Grammar, 1905.

1 Academy Papers appeared as a book in 1925. It consisted of discourses delivered before the Academy on the Blashfield Foundation between 1916 and 1925. I reviewed it in the American Mercury, Jan., 1926, pp. 122–23, and reprinted my review in Prejudices: Sixth Series; New York, 1927, pp. 155–59. The other contributors to the volume were Paul Elmer More, Bliss Perry, Paul Shorey, Brander Matthews, Robert Underwood Johnson, William M. Sloane and W. C. Brownell.

2 His writings on the subject are in his Americanisms and Briticisms, Etc.; New York, 1892; Parts of Speech; New York, 1901; The American of the Future; New York, 1909; and Essays on English; New York, 1921.

3 In 1936 Mr. Samuel L. M. Barlow of New York took me politely to task for ascribing a war-time Anglomania to Matthews, and on March 8, 1938 Arthur Guiterman denounced me for it in the New York Times. Unhappily, I find myself constrained to stand upon the evidence presented in AL4, pp. 65–66. Certainly Matthews made no effort, while the band was playing, to challenge the silly rantings of Van Dyke, Scott and company.

1 A Fable for Critics, 1848.

2 “The usage of the leading American writers of the period of Lowell and Holmes,” says H. W. Horwill in American Variations, S. P. E. Tract No. XLV, 1936, “was more closely-akin to that of the English writers of their day than is that of Twentieth Century American writers to their contemporaries in England. English readers today have greater need of a glossary for Theodore Dreiser than their fathers and grandfathers had for Nathaniel Hawthorne. Possibly the ambition of so many American writers of the present generation to emancipate themselves from Old World models has something to do with this.”

3 Ingersoll (1782–1862) was a son of Jared Ingersoll (1750–1822), one of the framers of the Constitution. He studied law, spent some time in the diplomatic service and in Congress, and wrote a tragedy produced in Philadelphia and a history of the War of 1812.

4 p. 528.

1 To progress, as a matter of fact, was never used as a transitive verb in the United States. As an intransitive it had flourished in England from c. 1590 to c. 1670, but had then been dropped, and it seems to have been reinvented in America. Benjamin Franklin disliked it and the English reviewers denounced it, but it made its way, and was included in Webster’s American Dictionary of 1828. It is now used in England, but not often.

2 An Old English verb, revived in America and later readopted by the English. Pickering said in 1816 that it was “often seen in the debates of Congress, as they are reported in the newspapers,” but added primly: “It is hardly necessary to remark that it is not in any of the dictionaries.” But Webster admitted it to his dictionary in 1828, though marking it “useless” [to jeopard could be used instead], and by 1834 Sir Henry Taylor was using it in the second part of Philip Van Artevelde. By 1864 the great English philologian, W. W. Skeat, was using it.

3 The English reviewers frequently denounced the large use of grade in America, where it had got the meaning of military rank by 1806, of the slope of a road by 1808, and of a division in a school by 1835. But the English have since used it, though they still prefer level-crossing to grade-crossing.

4 To conglaciate, in the sense of to freeze, was not actually an Americanism. The NED traces it in English use to 1640, and it does not appear in any dictionary of Americanisms.

5 Conflagrative was not an Americanism. Thackeray used it in 1848 and Carlyle in 1865. The NED traces to conflagrate in English use to 1657. The noun, conflagration, goes back to 1555.

6 Jefferson first used to belittle in his Notes on Virginia, 1781–82, and seems to have invented it.

7 The Quarterly’s diatribe was answered by Timothy Dwight in Remarks on the Review of Inchiquen’s Letters; Boston, 1815. He denied formally that any such proposal had ever been made.

8 The Philological Society of New York, 1788, American Speech, April, 1934, p. 131.

9 Voyages dans l’Amérique sententrionale dans les années 1780, 1781 et 1782; Paris, 1786. There seems to have been a private print of at least part of this record at Newport, R. I., n.d. A second edition was published in Paris in 1788. Chastellux (1734–88) also wrote other books, one of them a discussion of the question whether the discovery of America had been profitable or unprofitable to Europe. (He decided that it had been profitable). On the strength of his De la félicité publique; Paris, 1772, which was praised by Voltaire, he was elected a member of the French Academy. His book on America was severely criticized in France.

1 I take this translation from Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781 and 1782, by the Marquis de Chastellux, “translated from the French by an English gentleman who resided in America at that period”; London, 1787; Vol. II, pp. 265–66. There is another translation, by Robert Withington, in The Marquis de Chastellux on Language and Peace, New England Quarterly, (Orono, Maine), June, 1943, pp. 316–19. Withington says: “It is, perhaps, worth observing that apparently no attempt was made to use French as an alternative to English, though it was even then the ‘diplomatic’ language, replacing an earlier Latin for international communication.”

2 There is a summary of the essay, with extracts, in AL4, pp. 60–71. Bristed (1820–74) spent several years at Trinity College, Cambridge. He wrote half a dozen books, but all of them are forgotten.

3 Geschichte und Zustande der Deutschen in Amerika; Cincinnati, 1847, pp. 194–98.

1 Language and Legislation, Nov. 15, 1939, pp. 11–19.

2 Summaries of the Tappert paper are in German the National Language, by W. L. Werner, American Notes and Queries, July, 1942, p. 64, and in The Official German Language Legend, by the same, American Speech, Dec., 1942, p. 246.

1 May 9, 1732. The letter is printed in full in Franklin’s Complete Works; New York, 1887, pp. 297–98. I borrow this reference from Read.

2 At that time it was still spoken in New Orleans almost as much as English. Said Albert D. Richardson in The Field, the Dungeon and the Escape; Hartford, 1865, p. 47: “The French Quarter is more un-American even than the famous German portion of Cincinnati known as Over the Rhine. Here you may stroll for hours, ‘a straggler from another civilization,’ hearing no word of your native tongue, seeing no object to remove the impression of an ancient French city.”

3 I am indebted here to my old friend and colleague, Marshall Ballard, editor of the New Orleans Item.

1 State Laws in Other Languages, by Richard F. Burges, American Notes and Queries, Dec., 1943, p. 144.

2 State Laws in Other Languages, by M. J. P., American Notes and Queries, Oct., 1943, p. 102.

3 American Notes and Queries, Feb., 1944, p. 173.

4 On Oct. 25, 1943 the Associated Press reported from Yuma, Arizona, that a magistrate there, J. T. Hodges, had that day tried and sentenced three successive prisoners in an Indian language, in English, and in Spanish.

1 Bilingualism in the Middle Colonies, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, April, 1937, p. 97.

2 The “American” Language (editorial), March 1, 1923.

3 A few days before this the Legislature designated the American cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) as the State bird, and a little while later designated a song called Illinois, with words by C. H. Chamberlain to the tune of Baby Mine, as the State song.

1 July 25, 1923. The DAE traces American language to a debate in Congress in 1802, and Allen Walker Read runs it back to 1793. See p. 5, footnote.

2 We Still Understand English (editorial), April 9, 1923.

3 Leonard was not the first advocate of the reform in Minnesota. In May, 1920, a St. Paul man named A. J. Roberts launched the American Language National Magazine, and announced his candidacy for the City Council. It was his hope, he said, to become commissioner of education later on, in order “to boost for the American language and American literature in the bearing that these subjects have toward citizenship, Americanization and loyalty to the United States and American principles.” What fate befell this aspiration I do not know.

1 Speech before the Swedish-American League at Duluth, reported in the St. Paul Dispatch, June 25, 1924. “By next Spring,” commented the Dispatch maliciously, “the colleges will be conferring honorary degrees in letters upon Ring Lardner, and then the glory of the American language will be complete. It is accordingly a great pleasure to find in Senator Johnson a champion of it. Through him we may hope for its early acceptance as the national tongue.”

2 Diplomats Should be Understood (editorial), San Antonio News, Feb. 15, 1934.

3 North Dakota’s Language (editorial), Minneapolis Evening Tribune, Feb. 11, 1937. I am indebted here to Mr. James D. Gronan, secretary of state of North Dakota, and to Mr. E. J. Conrad, president of the Capital Publishing Company of Bismarck.

4 Associated Press dispatch from Rochester, July 12, 1940. I am indebted for the text of the resolution to Mr. James H. Faulkner, secretary of the Central Trades and Labor Council.

1 Flügel, who survived until 1904, was the son of a well-known German lexicographer, Johann Gottfried Flügel (1788–1855), whose Vollständiges englisch-deutsches und deutsch-englisches Wörterbuch; Leipzig, 1830, maintained its authority for many years. Johann came out to the United States in 1810 and remained nine years. On his return to Germany with a sound knowledge of American English he became professor of English in the University of Leipzig. In 1838 he was appointed American consul in Leipzig, and during his later years was a corresponding member of many American learned societies. His son, Felix, was also a lexicographer of some distinction, and after Johann’s death brought out many editions of his dictionary under the new title of Praktisches Wörterbuch der englischen und deutschen Sprache: the fourteenth was published at Leipzig in 1883. Felix married Pauline Mencken, sister to Burkhard L. Mencken, grandfather of the present writer, and they had a son, Ewald, who followed in the family line. Ewald was born in Leipzig in 1863 and was educated there and at Freiburg. He took his Ph.D. in philology in 1885, and was privat dozent at Leipzig until 1892, when he was called to the chair of English philology in the new Leland Stanford University. He remained there until his death in 1914. He was editor of Anglia after 1889, edited the Chaucer Lexicon of the London Chaucer Society; London, 1891, and was president of the Pacific Coast branch of the American Philological Association in 1901–02. His numerous publications included “Die nordamerikanische Litteratur,” published in 1907.

1 Flügel had reviewed Bartlett’s first edition in the Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen in 1848.

2 Harper’s Magazine, Jan., 1859, p. 274.

3 For this I am indebted to Dr. Richard H. Heindel.

4 Die amerikanische Sprache, by Georg Kartzke, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 1921, pp. 181–98; Die amerikanische Sprache, by Johannes Hoops, Englische Studien, 1923; Das amerikanische Englisch, by C. M. Bratter, Vossische Zeitung, Feb. 23, 1923; Zur amerikanischen Intonation, by Fritz Karpf, Die neueren Sprachen, Sept., 1926; Amerikanisches und Britisches Englisch, by W. Franz (in Festschrift Friedrich Kluge zum 70. Geburtstage), 1926; Neue Amerikanismen, by Ed. O. Paget, Die neueren Sprachen, 1927; Die amerikanische Sprache, by Arnold Schröer, Kölnische Zeitung, Sept. 13, 1927; Amerikanisches Englisch, by Walther Fischer (in his Hauptfragen der Amerikakunde, pp. 68 ff); Bielefeld; a chapter of the same title in his Handbuch der Amerikakunde; Frankfurt a. M., 1931; Die Erforschung des amerikanischen Englisch, by the same (in Festschrift für Hermann Hirt, Vol. II), 1936; Sprachliche Neubildungen in der englischen Gegenwartsliteratur, by Hans Marcus, Neuphilologische Monatsschrift, July-Aug., 1937; Zur Biologie des amerikanischen Englisch, by Ph. Aronstein, Leuvensche Bijdragen, Jan., 1934; Amerikanisches Englisch, by F. L. Sack; Bern, 1935; Das amerikanische Idiom, by Sigillum, Berliner Tageblatt, May 31, 1935. The discussion of American speechways in German guide-books for immigrants has not been sufficiently investigated. They were numerous before the Civil War. One of them, Der amerikanische Dollmetscher; New York, 1844, is described in College Topics (University of Virginia), Nov. 11, 1936, p. 3. (I take this reference from American Speech, April, 1938, p. 142).

1 For example, The American Language, in America of Today (No. 3 of the English section of Langenscheidt’s Fremdsprachliche Lektüre; Berlin, n.d.); Uncle Sam and His English (No. 32 of the same; Berlin, n.d.); Spoken American, by S. A. Nock and H. Mutschmann; Leipzig and Berlin, 1931. All these are in English, with German glosses.

2 Some of its fruits were La lingua americana, by L. F. Biondi, Corriere della Sera (Milan), Oct. 16, 1928; Cosi si parla in America, by Carlo Rosetti; Milan, 1937; Slang, by L. Krasnick, Milan, 1938.

3 For Russia see AL4, p. 88. From France came an intelligent article, Une nouvelle langue: l’Américain, by Alfred Obermann, Le Mois (Paris), Feb. 1, 1937, pp. 165–74, (I am indebted here to the Rev. Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse of Philadelphia), and from Belgium La langue américaine, by F. Peeters, Revue de l’université de Bruxelles, Dec., 1929, pp. 164–91.

1 Standards of English in Europe, American Speech, Feb., 1934, pp. 3–10.

1 This useful work was written in collaboration with J. Victor Martin, also resident in Japan, and F. G. Blandford. It was published in Cambridge, England, but Palmer’s preface was dated Tokyo.

2 The first edition of this book, which was addressed to Japanese, was published in Tokyo in 1931. A second edition appeared in 1936.

3 Studies in English Literature, April, 1928, pp. 165–208.

4 Tokyo, 1932. This work is in Japanese.

5 Tokyo. This work, like the foregoing, is in Japanese.

6 Kobe, n.d.

1 When AL4 was published in 1936 one of the most searching and intelligent reviews it received (and by no means a wholly favorable one) was by H. Shigemi, Studies in English Literature (Tokyo), Oct., 1937.