There are frequent efforts by philologians both professional and amateur to frame a character for American English, with results that show some conflict. “The characteristic American word,” said the New York Times in 1944,1 “must be something short, sinewy, native to the soil of American life — creek, pone, squaw, or something in the rudely fantastic line, like calaboose or gerrymander. The most un-American words, in theory, would be the long bookish, Latin polysyllables.” Almost precisely a year before, Dr. Jacques Barzun of Columbia had taken a diametrically opposite line in the Saturday Review of Literature.2 “Once upon a time,” he said, “American speech was known for its racy, colloquial creations — barnstorm, boom, boost, bulldoze, pan out, splurge and so on. Now it is the flaccid polysyllable that expresses the country’s mind. Pioneer has yielded to pedant, and one begins to wonder whether the German word-order had better not be adopted to complete the system.” There seems to be an irreconcilable difference here over a fundamental matter, but, as in many similar cases, that seeming may be only seeming. What the Times had in mind, obviously, was the pungent, iconoclastic, everyday speech of the American people, whereas what fevered Dr. Barzun was the artificial pseudo-English that schoolma’ams, whether in step-ins or pantaloons, try to foist upon their victims, and the even worse jargon that Dogberries in and out of office use for their revelations to the multitude. The extent of that dichotomy was well described by Dr. George H. McKnight in American Speech so long ago as 1925.3 On the one hand, there is a force making for something almost approaching anarchy in language, a constant upsurge of innovation, some of it close to barbaric, from the levels where the laws of the pedants and precisians do not run; and on the other hand there is a persistent effort to break the national gabble to rigid rules, and, what is worse, to adorn it with inventions springing, not from the field and workshop, but from the study. Nor is this the whole story, for even the common speech has its curious conservatism, its liking for an occasional archaism in the midst of novelty. But the issue of the struggle in the past shows what may be looked for hereafter. The schoolma’am still fights on, but she is plainly fighting a losing battle, and many of her guiding grammarians have become so well aware of it that they have begun to throw up their hands. Said McKnight:
The rule of the grammar and the spelling-book and the dictionary are not over. Better English weeks still support the old régime, to abandon which entirely, indeed, would mean anarchy. But a wealth of fresh words and phrases, products of new conditions of life, are being made to enrich an older language. The “rude and busteous” elements in uncultivated speech are being assimilated to form a re-invigorated form of speech.
That these “rude and busteous” elements are more potent in America than in England seems to be generally recognized. The fact, to be sure, is denied occasionally in England, but only in moments of patriotic exaltation and by American-haters of the extreme wing. So long ago as 1835 Tocqueville tried to account for the superior energy and fecundity of American speech in that era by an appeal to the political theories then prevailing, and so recently as 1940 Dr. Harold Whitehall of the University of Indiana made an attempt in the light of the ideology of today. Said Tocqueville:
The most common device used by democratic peoples to make an innovation in language consists in giving a new meaning to an expression already in use. This method is simple, prompt and convenient; no learning is needed to use it, and ignorance rather facilitates the process, but that process is dangerous to the language. When a democratic people doubles the meaning of a word in this way they sometimes make its old significance as ambiguous as its new one.
This shrewd anticipation of what the current fuglemen of semantics are whooping up as a revolutionary discovery was supported by an excellent discussion of the democratic liking for general ideas, most of them beautifully vague, and for terms of corresponding muzziness to designate them. Said Tocqueville:
These abstract terms enlarge and obscure the thoughts thev are intended to convey. They render speech more succinct, but the underlying idea less clear. With regard to language democratic peoples prefer obscurity to painstaking.
Finally,
When men, no longer restrained by the effect of ranks, meet on terms of constant intercourse — when caste is destroyed and all the classes of society are intermixed — all the words of a language are mingled. Those which are unsuitable to the majority perish; the remainder form a common store, from which everyone chooses nearly at random.1
Dr. Whitehall, like Tocqueville, seeks a political cause for the present state of American English, and finds it in the Industrial Revolution. He says:
In its literate, written form, American English is a pruned and regimented language. But so, for that matter, is the equivalent British English. Wherever distinction may lie, it is not here. Both owe their present form to the effects of authoritarianism working upon bourgeois credulity. Both have succumbed to a vicious purism that is no older than the Industrial Revolution.… Modern Received Standard English, for all its social pretensions, is nothing more than a transmogrified middle-class dialect, and Beacon Hill quite legitimately plays hands-across-the-sea to Mayfair. In language, as in politics and society, the “new men” finally prevailed.
But this authoritarianism, says Whitehall, despite its powerful support by popular education, has never succeeded in quite breaking the free spirit of American English.
Its spoken forms have always veered so sharply from its most elevated literary form that they could develop almost untrammeled. American colloquial speech, constantly modified and enriched by the changing patterns of American life, has served the modern American literary language as an inexhaustible reservoir. By contrast, the equivalent influence of British colloquial English has been a thin, attenuated stream. Of all the differences between the two national languages, this is the most significant.2
More than one observer has noted the likeness between the situation of American English today and that of British English at the end of the Sixteenth Century. The Englishmen of that time had not yet come under the yoke of grammarians and lexicographers, and they were thus free to mold their language to the throng of new ideas that naturally marked an era of adventure and expansion. Their situation closely resembled that of the American pioneers who swarmed into the West following the War of 1812, and they met its linguistic needs with the same boldness. By a happy accident, they had at hand a group of men who could bring to the business of word-making a degree of ingenuity and taste running far beyond the common; above all, they had the aid and leading of a really first-rate genius, Shakespeare. The result was a renovation of old ways of speech and a proliferation of new and useful terms that has had no parallel, to date, save on this side of the Atlantic. Standard English, in the Eighteenth Century, succumbed to pedants whose ignorance of language processes was only equalled by their impudent assumption of authority, and, as Dr. Whitehall says, their influence still survives more or less, even in the United States. But here the national spirit, as everyone knows, has resisted stoutly, and the schoolma’am who carries the torch of Samuel Johnson has certainly not prevailed against it. The following description of what was going on in Shakespeare’s time, by an English scholar, George Gordon, might well be used as a description of the situation in the United States today:
The first quality of Elizabethan English … is its power of hospitality, its passion for free experiment, its willingness to use every form of verbal wealth, to try anything. They delighted in novelties, and so exultingly that prudent word-fearing men became alarmed. The amusing thing is that even the alarmists were unable to deny themselves the very contraband they denounced; in this matter of language they were all smugglers. Thanks to this generous and unlicensed traffic we discover a quite astonishing number of words, introduced, apparently, by the Elizabethans, which today we could not do without. We observe also — what is not without some practical interest for us — the impossibility of predicting, of any new words at any given moment, which of them were going to last.1
Mr. Gordon gives some curious examples, from Shakespeare and other writers of the time, of neologisms that have come to seem so necessary and so commonplace that we could hardly imagine English without them, e.g., scientific, idiom, prolix, figurative, obscure, delineation, dimension, audacious, conscious, jovial, rascality, to effectuate, negotiation and artificiality. Shakespeare himself either invented or introduced to good literary society a large number, e.g., aerial, auspicious, assassination, bare-faced, bump, clangor, countless, critic, disgraceful, to dwindle, fretful, gloomy, gnarled, hunchbacked, ill-starred, laughable, pedant, seamy and sportive. Like all the other writers of his time, he made extremely free with prefixes and suffixes, and disregarded altogether the irrational rule, still maintained by the less intelligent sort of pedagogues, that they must agree in origin with the roots they modify, i.e., Greek with Greek, Latin with Latin, and so on. He employed dis-, re- and en- with the utmost daring, and made frequent and effective use of the old English suffixes -full, -less and -y. Word-making was in the air, along with phrase-making, and there was emulation and imitation of one writer by another,1 and, as in any other such natural process, a high percentage of failure and wastage, with only a minority surviving. A great many of the novelties of the time, says Gordon,
were made quite casually. It was easy enough; a man once started could turn them out forever. Shakespeare made them and forgot them, coining disgraceful, for example, at the beginning of his career, and never using it again. But there was more than casual fertility in the matter.… The reason why so many adjectives were made was partly, no doubt, because they were needed, but still more because they were fancied: because Golding2 and Spenser, among others, had deliberately cultivated them, and because Shakespeare and all the other young expression-hunters of the 1590s had Golding’s Ovid and Spenser’s poems in their heads. It is amusing to see how smartly they borrow each other’s finds; how Golding’s heedless and careless, for example, reappear inevitably in Spenser and Shakespeare, and Sackvill’s luckless in all three; or how Spenser and Marlowe almost dispute by their nimbleness as connoisseurs the Shakespearian paternity of gloom. For they were collectors as well as inventors, and hunted words and verbal patterns as bibliophiles hunt first editions.
There was some ostentation in Lowell’s saying that “our ancestors could bring over no English better than Shakespeare’s,” but it is a fact that the first immigrants brought in the precise attitude toward word-making that was the mark of his time. “The American language,” says a recent Irish observer,3 “developed its distinctive note because it was three thousand miles away from Europe, and began its course four years after Shakespeare died.” The long arm of the Eighteenth Century pedants reached out to police it, but the wide and thin dispersal of population hobbled their effort, and when the great Western trek began there was enough of the Elizabethan spirit left to flower again. This spirit was given a powerful reinforcement by the appearance of Webster’s American Dictionary in 1828, for until it provided Americans with a standard of their own they were necessarily more or less dependent upon the authority of Samuel Johnson, who was not only bitterly hostile to everything American but also the grand master of all the pedantic quacks of his time. No eminent lexicographer was ever more ignorant of speech-ways than he was. In his dictionary of 1755 he thundered idiotically against many words that are now universally recognized as sound English, e.g., to wabble, to bamboozle, and touchy. To wabble he described as “low, barbarous,” and to bamboozle and touchy as “low,” and at other times he denounced to swap, to coax, to budge, fib, banter, fop, fun, stingy, swimmingly, row (in the sense of a disturbance), chaperon and to derange. Thus Sir John Hawkins, editor of his Collective Edition of 1787:1
He would not allow the verb derange, a word at present much in use, to be an English word. “Sir,” said a gentleman who had some pretensions to literature, “I have seen it in a book.” “Not in a bound book,” said Johnson; “disarrange is the word we ought to use instead of it.”
The NED’s first example of to derange is from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” 1776. In the United States the verb acquired the special meaning, now obsolete, of to remove from office, and was so used by George Washington. To bamboozle had been under fire before Johnson tackled it. It was used by Colley Cibber in “She Wou’d and She Wou’d Not” in 1702, but eight years later Jonathan Swift was listing it in the Tatler2 among corruptions introduced into English by “some pretty fellow” and “now struggling for the vogue,” along with banter, sham, mob, bubble and bully. Dr. John Arbuthnot, one of Swift’s intimates, used it in 1712 in his political satire, “The History of John Bull,” but it remained below the salt until the end of the Eighteenth Century, and Grose listed it as slang in 1785. Not until toward the middle of the Nineteenth Century did it come into general usage in England. In America it got into circulation at about the same time, and presently the perfect participle took on the special meaning of drunk, never used in England and now obsolete here. The NED says that its origin is unknown, but that it was probably borrowed from the cant of rogues. It has been ascribed to the gipsies, but does not occur in any vocabulary of their language that I am aware of. Banter, noun and verb, is equally mysterious. Swift, in “A Tale of a Tub,” 1710, says that it was “first borrowed from the bullies in White Friars, then fell among the footmen, and at last retired to the pedants.” Samuel Pepys had used it in his diary, December 24, 1667, and John Locke had mentioned it in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” in 1690, and by 1700 it had worked its way into respectable society, but Swift and Johnson continued to denounce it. Its origin, like that of to bamboozle, is unknown, and the NED is uncertain whether the noun or the verb appeared first. In the United States, early in the Nineteenth Century, it acquired a number of special meanings, unknown in England. First, as a verb, it came to signify to haggle, to bargain, and in that sense is traced by the DAE to 1793. Then, after the turn of the century, it came to signify a challenge or to challenge. In the original sense of to chaff, to make fun of, to provoke by ridicule, it is now perfectly sound English.
To budge is old in English, and was in good usage in the Seventeenth Century, but for some reason unknown the purists of the Eighteenth took a dislike to it, and their opposition was so effective that the word was listed as slang by Grose in 1785. Its origin remains in dispute. Weekley derives it from a French verb, bouger, meaning to stir, but admits that “this etymology is rather speculative.” Apparently it did not come from the old English noun, budge, meaning a kind of fur, which is traced by the NED to 1382. That noun was originally spelled bugee, bugeye, bogey, huge or bogy, and did not acquire its present spelling until c. 1570. In Virginia, early in the Nineteenth Century, budge picked up the special meaning of nervous irritation or fidgetiness, and in that sense the DAE traces it to 1824. Miss Ellen Glasgow used it in her novel, “The Deliverance,” in 1904, but apparently it has not made any progress elsewhere in the United States. Chaperon, a loan from the French, originally had the meaning of a hood or cap, and in that sense is traced by the NED to c. 1380. In its present figurative sense of a duenna it appeared in 1720 or thereabout,1 and was soon in good usage, though the pedants denounced it for years afterward — mainly, I gather, because they mistook it for a recent importation from the French, and were against all loanwords. To coax, in the modern sense of to wheedle or blandish, is traced by the NED to 1663, but in other senses it is older. It seems to have come originally from a noun, cokes, signifying a fool, but that is uncertain. It has no special American meanings, but when the first coachers appeared in baseball, c. 1890,2 they were often called coaxers by the fans, to whom coacher (later reduced to coach) and to coach were novelties, though the DAE shows that coach had been used in football, as a conscious loan from English, so early as 1871.
That fib, fop, and fun were once under fire may seem incredible today, but it is a fact. Fib, in the sense of a venal falsehood, was used by Dryden, Defoe and Goldsmith. Perhaps its disrepute in the Eighteenth Century arose from the fact that it had, as a verb, acquired the sense of to beat, and was used in that sense by the criminals of the time. Grose gives this specimen of their jargon: “to fib the cove’s quarron in the rumpad for the lour in his bung,” and translates it thus: “to beat the fellow in the highway for the money in his purse.” The origin of the word is unknown, but the NED suggests that it may be a shortened form of fible-fable, a reduplication of fable. Weekley, dissenting, inclines to think that it is a thinned form of fob, an old English word signifying an imposter. The origin of fop is equally uncertain, though all authorities agree that it may be related to the German verb foppen, meaning to fool. In the sense of a fool it is traced by the NED to c. 1440. It did not acquire the special meaning of a person overattentive to his dress until the end of the Seventeenth Century. Johnson’s effort to put it down was in vain, and it is now perfectly good English. Derivatives of the word in its earlier sense were used by Shakespeare, Greene and the Foxe who wrote the once celebrated “Book of Martyrs,” and derivatives in the present sense were used by Hume, Fielding, Evelyn and Addison. Fun, though it seems commonplace today, is a relatively recent word. It appeared toward the end of the Seventeenth Century in the sense of a cheat or hoax, and in that meaning was listed by the mysterious B. E. in his “Dictionary of the Canting Crew,” 1698. Grose testifies that it was still thieves’ cant so late as 1785, but it had also acquired a more innocent significance by 1727, when Swift used it.
Row, in the sense of a violent disturbance or commotion, is traced by the NED to 1787, but it is undoubtedly older. The NED calls it “a slang or colloquial word of obscure origin,” but Weekley thinks it is a back-formation from rouse, which, in the sense of a carousal or drinking-bout, was used by Shakespeare in “Hamlet,” 1601. Row was used by Byron without any apparent sense of its vulgarity in 1820, and by Dickens in 1837. It is now in good usage, though Webster 1934 still marks it “colloquial.” Stingy, in the sense of avaricious, mean, close-fisted, was something of a novelty in Johnson’s day, and his dislike for it seems to have worked against its adoption, but by the end of the Eighteenth Century it had forced its way into the language, and today not even the most extravagant pedant would question it. Weekley says that it is apparently derived from stinge, a dialectical form of sting. The softening of the g is a phenomenon not infrequently encountered in English.1 To swap, in the sense of to exchange, goes back to the end of the Sixteenth Century, and the NED says that it was “probably orig. a horsedealer’s term.” It has always been in more general use in the United States than in England, and it occurs in one of the most famous of American sayings — Abraham Lincoln’s “Don’t swap horses crossing a stream.” Swimmingly goes back to 1622, when it appeared in one of the plays of Fletcher and Massinger, and touchy to 1605. Why the Eighteenth Century purists disliked them I do not know: they are both sound English today. So is to wabble (or wobble), which is traced by the NED to 1657, when it was used by Richard Ligon in describing the gait of the cockroaches of the West Indies.2 To wabble is derived by the NED from a Middle High German verb, wabblen, signifying to move restlessly, but Weekley prefers to relate it to the Middle English quappen, meaning to tremble.
Johnson and Swift, of course, were not the only illuminati of their time to fling themselves against new words that were destined to flourish in America and gradually make their way in England. Another was Horace Walpole, who, in a letter dated February 4, 1759, took William Robertson to task for using interference in his “History of Scotland.”1 In this letter Walpole indicates that he thought Robertson coined the word, and it is possible that he did, for the NED’s first example of it, from Edmund Burke, is dated 1783. Thus Walpole:
If the accent is laid where it should be, on the second syllable, it forms an un-couth-sounding word; if on the third syllable a short-cut is made long. In most places intervention will express interference; in others, intermeddling.2
Walpole also objected to stripped piecemeal, to independency and to paction, the last-named a Scotch form of compact. Thomas Gray, author of the Elegy, was another furious purist; indeed, his dudgeon was aroused not only by neologisms, but also by various words that had been long in use, and by writers of the first chop. In 1741, for example, he wrote to Richard West denouncing John Dryden’s use of beverage, roundelay, ireful, disarray, wayward, furbished, smouldering, crone and beldam. Gray admitted that Shakespeare and Milton had “enriched” the language with “words of their own composition or invention,” but argued that “the affectation of imitating Shakespeare may be carried too far.” The NED traces roundelay to 1573, beldam(e) to c. 1440, crone and disarray to c. 1386, furbished to 1382, wayward to c. 1830, beverage to c. 1325, and ireful to c. 1300.
The authority of Johnson continued in both England and America for more than half a century after the first edition of his Dictionary appeared in 1755.3 Other dictionaries came out during that time, but they were all poor things, and it was not until the publication of Webster’s Compendious Dictionary in 1806 that the Great Cham was ever really challenged. The Rev. H. J. Todd’s two revisions of the Johnson dictionary of 1755, in 1818 and 1827, showed a disposition to break away from his implacable dogmatism, but it remained for Webster to deliver the fatal blow to him in 1828, when the first edition of the American Dictionary, the father of all the Websters of today, was published. But the effect of the American Dictionary, though it was to be felt eventually in England, was chiefly noticeable at the start in the United States only, and down to the middle of the Nineteenth Century the majority of the English learned continued to hold to Johnson’s doctrine that the English language was already copious enough and ought to be protected against change and novelty. All the more respectable English writers stuck to the vocabulary that he had approved, and kept within hailing distance of his orotund and menacing style.1 When Thomas Carlyle began printing “Sartor Resartus” in Fraser’s Magazine, in 1833, the pother it made was produced by its strange words and disregard of Johnsonian “elegance” more than by the ideas in it. Although “Sketches by Boz,” “The Ingoldsby Legends”2 and “The Yellowplush Papers” were only ’round the corner, the paralyzing influence of Johnson still prevailed in England, and Carlyle was taken to task by even his friend John Sterling, whose life he was later to write, for the saucy liberties he was taking with what was still regarded as sound English. Thus Sterling wrote to him:
First as to the language.3 A good deal of this is positively barbarous. Environment, vestural, stertorous, visualized, complected, and others to be found, I think, in the first twenty pages, — are words, so far as I know, without any authority; some of them contrary to analogy; and none repaying by their value the disadvantage of novelty. To these must be added new and erroneous locutions: whole other tissues for all the other, and similar uses of the word whole; orients for pearls; lucid and lucent employed as if they were different in meaning; hulls perpetually for coverings, it being a word hardly used, and then only for the husk of a nut; “to insure a man of misapprehension;” talented, a mere newspaper and hustings word, invented, I believe, by O’Connell.1
Of these, Carlyle seems to have actually invented environment. Stertorous had been used by medical writers since the beginning of the century, and visualized was in Coleridge before it got into Carlyle. The English, to this day, dislike complected as a substitute for complexioned, but it was already in wide use in the United States before Carlyle used it; indeed, the DAE calls it an Americanism and traces it to 1806. Vestural was another of Carlyle’s inventions, but talented was apparently introduced to England by the elder Bulwer-Lytton, who used it in his novel, “Falkland,” in 1827. It was for long regarded by Englishmen as an Americanism, and damned as such by many of them; and so late as 1886 an American writer on the language2 was alleging that it had been transplanted to England by Dickens in “American Notes,” 1842, but for this American origin there is no evidence, and the DAE does not list it as an Americanism. Carlyle’s bold use of hulls as a trope for clothes found no imitators in England, but Emerson used it in “The Sovereignty of Ethics” in 1878. Carlyle’s attempt to differentiate between lucid and lucent seems to have failed, for the NED defines the first, in one sense, as “bright, shining, luminous,” and the other as “shining, bright, luminous,” and both, in another and more familiar sense, as “clear.” Its first example of lucent is from Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” 1820, but it carries lucid back to 1620. The use of orient to designate a pearl seems to have been original with Carlyle, but the gem had been called pearl of orient so far in the past as c. 1440. Browning, following Carlyle, used orient in “Sordello” in 1840. Even T. B. Macaulay, one of the most enlightened Englishmen of the mid-century, took an occasional hand in the vain and irrational effort to put down neologians. On April 18, 1842, for example, he wrote to Macvey Napier to denounce the aforesaid talented. “Such a word,” he said primly, “it is proper to avoid: first, because it is not wanted; secondly, because you never did hear it from those who speak very good English.” But Southey and Coleridge had both used it, and in that very year 1842 it was being used by the immensely correct and elegant Edward B. Pusey in “A Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury on Some Circumstances Connected With the Present Crisis in the English Church.”1
Such attempts to force the language into a strait-jacket all came to grief in America, though the schoolma’am was to continue her shrewish dos and don’ts for a long while afterward. To this day, in fact, she clings to the doctrine that there is such a thing as “correct English,” that its principles have been laid down for all time by the English purists, and that she is under a moral obligation to inculcate it. But not many American grammarians above the level of writers of school texts subscribe to any such ideas. They have learned by their studies that every healthy language has ways of its own, and that those of vernacular American are very far from those of Johnsonese English. From the early Nineteenth Century onward the speech of the United States has been marked by a disdain of rules and precedents, and an eager search for novelties, and it seems destined to go on along that path as far into the future as we can see. Said Dr. Robert C. Pooley in his presidential address to the National Council of Teachers of English in 1941:
American English may be derided by conservative critics for the readiness with which neologisms become accepted and flash overnight to all parts of our land, but the fact itself is a sign of health. The purpose of a language is to communicate; if a new word or a new phrase carries with it a freshness of meaning, a short cut to communication, it is a desirable addition to our tongue, no matter how low its source or how questionable its etymology. We need not fear word creation as harmful; what we must fear is crystallization, the preservation of a conventional vocabulary by a limited minority who resent the normal steady changes which inevitably must take place within a language.…
We are a youthful nation, exuberant and perhaps sometimes a little rowdy. But there is promise and hope in the exuberance of youth; we see in our language a lively imagination, a picturesque freshness, and a readiness to accept change which are characteristic of youth. We need not fear exuberance. What we must fear and guard against is senility, the complacency of old age, which is content with things as they are and mockingly derisive of change.2
To what extent this youth theory is sound I do not profess to judge; it is heard often, and seems to have many adherents. Dr. Pooley, in his paper, called attention to the tendency to mass hysteria which unquestionably exists in the Republic, whether it be due to adolescence or to senility, and showed some of its unhappy consequences in the field of spoken and written communication.
97. [John Pickering was the first to attempt to draw up a schedule of Americanisms.] When I wrote this I somehow forgot John Witherspoon, though I was, of course, familiar with his papers in the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser in 1781, and had in fact summarized them on pp. 4 ff of AL4. There is more about them on pp. 4 ff of the present Supplement. The other early writers on the subject did not attempt to define categories of Americanisms.1 Even Noah Webster, though he had probably formulated ideas as to their nature, omitted all discussion of them from his “Dissertations on the English Language,” 1789, and it was not until he came to the preface of his American Dictionary of 1828, that he undertook any formal consideration of them. In that preface, which is still worth reading in full,2 he said:
Language is the expression of ideas; and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas they cannot retain an identity of language. Now, an identity of ideas depends materially upon the sameness of things or objects with which the people of the two countries are conversant. But in no two portions of the earth, remote from each other, can such identity be found. Even physical objects must be different. But the principal differences between the people of this country and of all others arise from different forms of government, different laws, institutions and customs.
Thus the practice of hawking and hunting, the institution of heraldry, and the feudal system of England originated terms which formed, and some of which now form, a necessary part of the language of that country; but in the United States many of these terms are no part of our present language, — and they cannot be, for the things which they express do not exist in this country. They can be known to us only as obsolete or as foreign words. On the other hand, the institutions in this country which are new and peculiar give rise to new terms or to new applications of old terms, unknown to the people of England; which cannot be explained by them and which will not be inserted in their dictionaries, unless copied from ours. Thus the terms land-office; land-warrant; location of land; consociation of churches; regent of a university; intendant of a city; plantation, senate, congress, court, assembly, escheat, &c. are either words not belonging to the language of England, or they are applied to things in this country which do not exist in that.1 No person in this country will be satisfied with the English definitions of the words congress, senate and assembly, court, &c., for although these are words used in England, yet they are applied in this country to express ideas which they do not express in that country. With our present constitution of government, escheat can never have its feudal sense in the United States.
But this is not all. In many cases, the nature of our governments, and of our civil institutions, requires an appropriate language in the definition of words, even when the words express the same thing as in England. Thus the English dictionaries inform us that a justice is one deputed by the king to do right by way of judgment — he is a lord by his office — justices of the peace are appointed by the kings commission — language which is inaccurate in respect to this officer in the United States. So constitutionally is defined by Todd or-Chalmers as legally, but in this country the distinction between constitution and law requires a different definition.
The other lexicographers of the Webster era attempted no categories of Americanisms: this was true alike of David Humphreys, whose glossary of 1815 has been noticed, and of Theodoric Romeyn Beck, whose “Notes on Mr. Pickering’s Vocabulary” was published in 1830. Robley Dunglison, in the articles headed “Americanisms” that he contributed to the Virginia Museum in 1829–30, contented himself with setting up two classes — “old words used in a new sense,” and “new words of indigenous origin.” He excluded old words preserved or revived in America in their original sense, for, as he said, “if fashion induces the people of Great Britain to neglect them, we have the right to oppose the fashion and to retain them: they are English words.” Also, he frowned upon native inventions that were not absolutely essential. “Those,” he said, “which have been employed to express a state of things not previously existing, which have arisen from the peculiarities of the government or people,” were “allowable,” but “those which have occurred wantonly and unnecessarily … ought to be rejected.” James Fenimore Cooper, in his chapter “On Language” in “The American Democrat,” 1838, showed much the same spirit: he was so busy rebuking Americans for faulty pronunciations and the misuse of the word gentleman that he neglected to lay down the areas in which they were free to exercise their fancy. The English travelers who roved the country between the Revolution and the Civil War, denouncing Americanisms as vulgar and heathenish, were similarly negligent about defining them, and it remained for William C. Fowler, in his brief chapter on “American Dialects” in “The English Language,” 1850, to attempt the first classification of them after Pickering.1 John Russell Bartlett followed in 1859,1 John S. Farmer in 1889,2 Sylva Clapin in 1902,3 Richard H. Thornton in 1912,4 and Gilbert M. Tucker in 1921.5 Alfred L. Elwyn did not set up categories of Americanisms in his “Glossary of Supposed Americanisms,” published in 1859,6 nor did Schele de Vere in his “Americanisms: the English of the New World,” nor did James Maitland in “The American Slang Dictionary,”7 nor did Brander Matthews in his “Americanisms and Briticisms,”8 nor did George Philip Krapp in “The English Language in America.”9 The editors of “A Dictionary of American English,” when they brought out their first volume in 1938, contented themselves with saying in their preface that “the different types of words and phrases” listed in it could “be more readily ascertained by inspection than by any attempt at classification,” but their chief, Sir William Craigie, went into rather more detail in a paper published in 1940.1 After excluding loan-words, the topographical terms derived from them, and “composite names of plants and trees, animals, birds and fishes, of the type black alder, black bear, black bass, &c.,” he listed the following categories:
1. Words showing “the addition of new senses to existing words and phrases.”
2. “New derivative forms and attributive collocations or other compounds.”
3. “Words not previously in use, and not adapted from other languages of the American continent.”
Finally there is H. W. Horwill, who distinguishes nine classes of Americanisms in his “Dictionary of Modern American Usage,”2 as follows:
1. “Words whose meaning in America is entirely different from their meaning in England; as billion, present, ruby type, solicitor.”
2. “Words whose general meaning is the same in both countries, but which, in America, have acquired a specific meaning in addition; as brotherhood, commute, dues, fit, homestead, senior.”
3. “Words whose normal use has, in America, been extended to cover certain adjacent territory; as freight, graduate, hunt.”
4. “Words that, in America, have acquired different shades of meaning and therefore carry different implications; as jurist, politics.”
5. “Words that retain in America a meaning now obsolete in England; as apartment, citizen, conclude, tardy, thrifty, town.”
6. “Words that, in America, have acquired a figurative meaning not in current use in England; as gridiron, knife, pork, stripe, timber.”
7. “Words that, in America, commonly take the place of synonyms that are more generally used in England; as faucet (for tap), hog (for pig), line (for queue), mail (for post), two weeks (for fortnight).”
8. “Words of slightly varying form, of which one form is preferred in America and another in England; as aluminum (aluminium), acclimate (acclimatize), candidacy (candidature), deviltry (devilry), telegrapher (telegraphist).”
9. “Words that, in America, go to form compounds unknown in England; as blue, night, scratch, thumb.”
It will be noted that Horwill does not mention loan-words. Some of the differences he lists will be discussed in Chapter VI, Section 2.
1 Topics of the Times, editorial page, Feb. 24. The author was Simeon Strunsky.
2 How to Suffocate the English Language, Feb. 13, p. 3.
3 Conservatism in American Speech, Oct., 1925, pp. 1–17.
1 The quotations are all from Part II, Book I, Chapter XVI of De la démocratie en Amérique.
2 America’s Language, Kenyon Review (Gambier, O.), Spring, 1940, pp. 212–25.
1 Shakespeare’s English, S. P. E. Tracts, No. XXIX; Oxford, 1928.
1 Thomas Heywood launched to diapason, sonance, moechal, and obdure in The Rape of Lucrece, 1608, and was censured for it nearly three centuries later by John Addington Symonds in the Mermaid edition of his plays.
2 Arthur Golding (c. 1536-c. 1605) published a translation of the first four books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in 1565, and followed them two years later with the remaining eleven. Despite his interest in one of the least inhibited of Roman poets, Golding was a strict Puritan, and also translated some of the writings of John Calvin.
3 The American Language, by Sean O Faolain, Irish Times (Dublin), April 1, 1944.
1 Apothegms, Sentiments, Opinions and Occasional Reflections of Samuel Johnson in Vol. XI.
2 No. 230.
1 A writer in Notes and Queries, 1864, p. 280, quoted by the NED, says that it “means that the experienced married woman shelters the youthful débutante as a hood shelters the face.”
2 An Historical Dictionary of Baseball Terminology, by Edward J. Nichols; State College, Pa., 1939, p. 15.
1 For example, in dingy, which seems to be derived from dung.
2 A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes; London, p. 62.
1 London, 1759. Robertson (1721–93) was historiographer-royal for Scotland and principal of Edinburgh University. He also wrote a History of America; London, 1777, in which he used to derange.
2 Horace Walpole and Wm. Robertson, by W. Forbes Gray, London Times Literary Supplement, March 14, 1942, p. 132.
3 The effects of that authority are hard to realize today. “In modern times,” said George Campbell sadly, in The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1776, “the privilege of coining tropes is almost confined to poets and orators.” For Campbell see pp. 50 n and 97 n of AL4. He was a very sensible man and his book was the best thing of its sort that had appeared in English up to its time.
1 I am not forgetting, of course, Jeremy Bentham and S. T. Coleridge. Bentham not only invented a number of words that still survive, e.g., to minimize, self-regarding, international, dynamic, and unilateral; he also argued formally in favor of neologisms. See Notes on Jeremy Bentham’s Attitude to Word-Creation, by Graham Wallas, S. P. E. Tract No. XXXI, 1928, pp. 333–34. But he used such words sparingly and his writing in general was quite orthodox. Coleridge ran to somewhat wilder novelties, e.g., protoplast accrescence, extroitive, to coadunate, to potenziate, ultracrepidated, expectability, novellish, interadditive, desynonymizative, chilographic, to pantisocratize, poematic, and athanasiophagus. See Coleridge’s Critical Terminology, by J. Isaac, in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association; Oxford, 1936, pp. 86–104. But these were technical terms, and in his ordinary writing Coleridge was safely Johnsonian.
2 R. H. Barham, the author thereof (1788–1845), was a great lover of neologisms and used many of them in the Legends. In particular, he was fond of Americanisms. Into The Lay of St. Odille he introduced, for example, tarnation, and Jim Crow.
3 i.e., of Sartor Resartus.
1 Sterling’s letter is reprinted in Contemporary Comments, by E. H. Lacon-White; London, 1931, p. 325.
2 A. Cleveland Coxe, in Americanisms in England, Forum, Oct., 1886.
1 Macaulay’s letter is in The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, by G. Otto Trevelyan; New York, 1877, Vol. II, p. 100.
2 One People, One Language, English Journal, Feb., 1942, pp. 110–20.
1 One of them, the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, alleged in the preface to his Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words; second ed.; London, 1832, p. xlix, that the only additions the Americans had made to the English vocabulary were “such as they have adapted either from naval or mercantile men, with whom, on their first settlement, they were principally connected, or else from the aboriginal inhabitants,” but the evidence offered by a poem from his hand, printed in the same volume, was strongly against him. This poem bore the title of Absence, a Pastoral Drawn From the Life, From the Manners, Customs and Phraseology of Planters (or, so to Speak more Pastorally, of the Rural Swains) Inhabiting the Banks of the Potomac, in Maryland. It is reprinted by Allen Walker Read in Boucher’s Linguistic Pastoral of Colonial Maryland, Dialect Notes, Dec., 1933, pp. 353–60. There is an account of Boucher in AL4, p. 35, n. 1, and another in Read’s paper just mentioned.
2 It was reprinted in Encore, July, 1943, pp. 90–95.
1 Land-office is traced by the DAE to 1681, when such an office existed in Maryland, but the term did not come into wide use until after the Revolution, when the distribution of public lands to the soldiers began. The waggish derivative, land-office business, in its figurative sense, probably arose during the rush to the West, but the DAE does not trace it beyond 1865, when it was used by Mark Twain. Land-warrant is traced by the DAE to 1742, location (in the sense of “locating or fixing the bounds of a tract or area of land”) to 1718, consociation (now obsolete) to 1644, regent to 1813, and selectman to 1635. The use of intendant to designate a city official analogous to a mayor is traced by the DAE to 1789, but the word is now abandoned and forgotten. Plantation, to the English, means either a colony overseas or an area that has been planted to some useful crop (more especially, trees). In this country it began to take on the sense of a farm in the Seventeenth Century. It is still used in that sense in the South, as ranch is used in the Far West. The upper houses of some of the colonial legislatures were called senates, and the name was given to that of Congress by the Constitution, 1787. Congress was used to designate a gathering of legislators representing more than one colony so early as 1711. When the Continental Congress was set up in 1774 the word was always preceded by the, but the the began to be dropped so early as the year following. It was revived by Woodrow Wilson in 1913. Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover ordinarily omitted it, but it was revived again by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The word, of course, is not an Americanism, though its special meaning is. Neither is assembly, but general assembly, to designate a legislature, has not been found in English before 1619, the date of the DAE’s first American example. In England escheat means the lapsing of an intestate decedent’s land to the crown; in the United States it means its lapsing to the State Treasury.
1 It is given in AL4, pp. 98 and 99. A reviewer in Harper’s Magazine in 1855 alleged that it was really drawn up by G. W. Gibbs, a professor at Yale, “whose studies in the department of comparative philology entitle the productions of his pen on this subject to peculiar respect.” Fowler, who married Noah Webster’s widowed daughter, Harriet Webster Cobb, in 1825, has been rather neglected by American literary historians. He was professor of rhetoric at Amherst and introduced the study of Anglo-Saxon there some years before Francis J. Child began teaching it at Harvard. He gave his father-in-law help with the checking and proofreading of the American Dictionary, 1828, and after the lexicographer’s death in 1843 quarrelled violently with another son-in-law, Chauncey A. Goodrich, for control of it. In this combat he suffered defeat. “Goodrich,” says Warfel, p. 418, “was quietly foxlike, while Fowler was brusque, pompous, and leonine in his rages.” Fowler’s English Language, first published in 1850, was the accepted American authority on linguistics until the appearance of William Dwight Whitney’s Language and the Study of Language in 1867, and even afterward it maintained a high place as a college textbook. It was commonly called Fowler’s English Grammar. The revised edition of 1855 was a tome of 754 pages.
1 Bartlett’s list is given in AL4, p. 98.
2 Farmer’s list is given in AL4, p. 100.
3 Clapin was a Canadian, and had published earlier a Dictionnaire canadien-français; Montreal, 1894, in which some attention was paid to Americanisms. In an appendix to his New Dictionary of Americanisms were reprinted four magazine articles on Americanisms and slang — Americanisms, by a mysterious Dr. Aubrey (possibly a pseudonym), Leisure Hour (London), 1887, pp. 827–29; Wild Flowers of English Speech in America, by Edward Eggleston, Century Magazine, 1894, pp. 848–56; The Philology of Slang, by E. B. Tylor, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1874, pp. 502–13; and The Function of Slang, by Brander Matthews, Harper’s Monthly, July, 1893, pp. 304–12 (reprinted in Parts of Speech; New York, 1901, pp. 185–213). Clapin’s classification of Americanisms is in AL4, p. 100.
4 Thornton’s list is given in AL4, pp. 100 and 101.
5 American English, New York, 1921. Tucker’s list is given in AL4, p. 101.
6 Elwyn’s list is made up almost wholly of English dialect words in use in America, and he leans heavily upon J. T. Brockett’s Glossary of North Country Words; third ed.; Newcastle and London, 1846.
7 Chicago, 1891.
8 First published in Harper’s Magazine, 1891, pp. 214–22; republished in Americanisms and Briticisms, With Other Essays on Other Isms; New York, 1892, pp. 1 ff.
9 Two vols.; New York, 1925. In the Chapter on Vocabulary in Vol. I Krapp discussed Americanisms at great length, but did not undertake a formal classification of them. He was greatly inclined to pooh-pooh them. “Professor Krapp,” said Dr. John M. Manly, in a review of his book in the New Republic, Jan. 20, 1926, “maintains that the vocabulary of English has remained practically unchanged during its three hundred years of existence in America. This attitude of course involves a very summary treatment of new words and phrases and new meanings of old words and phrases.… Any American who has tried to travel or shop in England … will testify that the whole phraseology of common life is different in the two countries, and any American scholar who has written for British periodicals or books will testify to a constant sense of the difference between British and American usage in what is commonly called literary English.” But despite his obsession, Krapp’s writings on the subject are very valuable. They are listed in Bibliography of the Writings of George Philip Krapp, by Elliott V. K. Dobbie, American Speech, Dec, 1934, pp. 252–54.
1 The Growth of American English, I, S. P. E. Tracts, No. LV1; Oxford. 1940, p. 204.
2 Oxford, 1935. p. vi.