American Language Supplement 1

But not even the radio is under such oppressive censorship as the magazines and newspapers, which may be barred from the mails, and hence subjected to ruinous loss, at the fiat of a Postmaster General who maintains a bureau of snoopers and smut-snufflers for harassing them. In the proceeding against Esquire in 1943–44 these Dogberries actually objected to its use of such perfectly harmless words as backside, behind and bawdy-house.¹ It is thus no wonder that American newspapers, with few exceptions, continue to use the euphemisms inherited from the Victorian age, e.g., criminal operation, house of ill repute, statutory offense, intimate relations, and felonious assault. Sometimes the result is extremely amusing. Not long ago, for example, a New York paper reported that a fiend had knocked a girl down, “dragged her down the cellar-steps, beat her with an iron pipe, and then assaulted her.”² In 1943, when a wealthy lady of café society named Lonergan was murdered in New York by her husband, all the local papers avoided mention of the fact that the accused claimed to be a homosexual, and in fact had made it an essential part of his defense. Finally PM broke the ice by referring prissily to “indications of an abnormal psychological nature,” and a few days later “every paper, as if by common agreement, came right out with the word homosexual.”³ Romance is constantly used to designate an illicit love-affair,⁴ and love-nest has been widened in meaning to include the more elegant varieties of houses of prostitution. In 1931 a Chattanooga paper made journalistic history by reporting that a man in that town had been arrested for “walking the streets accompanied by a woman.”⁵ It was generally recognized by the brethren that this was a euphemism for something else, but precisely what that something was did not appear, and they speculated in vain. It is in England, however, that this fear of plain terms produces the most absurd extravagances. In AL4, p. 311, I give some specimens from the News of the World. Others that have accumulated since are a certain illness (syphilis), mode of living (prostitution), certain suggestions (a proposal that women go on the street), a certain result (abortion), improper assault (rape), to interfere with (to rape), and associating (living in adultery). In 1936, when a female lunatic stripped off her clothes in St. Paul’s Cathedral, “the Daily Telegraph described her as unclothed, as did the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. The Daily Herald went so far as to call her nude in a heading but used unclothed elsewhere. The News-Chronicle favored unclothed and unclad. Not one was able to face the horror of the word naked.”¹

In England, the opposition to free discourse on venereal disease seems to come, not from religious bodies, but from the newspapers. When, in 1937, Sir William Wilson Jameson, a distinguished health officer there, demanded “Let us get rid of this taboo,” and the Ministry of Health followed a year later by preparing the first of a series of very frank advertisements for insertion in the newspapers, the copy committee of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, of which Leonard Raftery, advertisement manager of the London Daily Mail, was chairman, objected to some of the terms used, and the ministry was forced to modify them. Here, for example, is a paragraph from the advertisement:

In another paragraph the sentence “Professional prostitutes are not the only source of infection” was struck out, and in yet another the phrase sex organs was twice eliminated. The Lancet, the principal organ of the English medical men, protested against this bowdlerization with great vigor, saying:

The rage for euphemisms arose in England in Puritan times, and was quickly transferred to the American colonies. The Restoration naturally brought some abatement at home, but there was never any real return to the free utterance of the Elizabethan era, and during the Eighteenth Century prissiness enjoyed a considerable revival. The Puritans not only made war upon all the old expletives and all the immemorial names for physiological processes; they also strove to put down the abhorrent vocaoulary of Holy Church, which they described elegantly as the Whore of Babylon. Zachary Grey records in his notes to Samuel Butler’s “Hudibras,” 1744, that the word saint was actually deleted from the titles of the principal London churches, and that some of the more fanatical Puritans began substituting an ironical sir for saint in the designations of the saints themselves, e.g., Sir Peter, Sir Paul and even Sir Mary. Some of them, going further, tried to substitute Christ-tide for Christmas in order to get rid of the reminder of the outlawed mass in the latter, but this effort seems to have failed. The nasty revival of prudery associated with the name of Victoria in England went to extreme lengths in the United States, and proceeded so far that it was frequently remarked and deplored by visiting Englishmen. Said Captain Frederick Marryat in 1839:

Marryat then quoted the following from the book of a fellow traveler, Mrs. Trollope:

Mrs. Trollope recorded that, to the more delicate Americans of that day, Shakespeare was obscene and unendurable, and that the very mention of Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” made them shrink in horror. It is worth noting here, as one of the ironies of literary history, that Pope himself, in his edition of Shakespeare, brought out in 1725, heavily bowdlerized the Bard. In the masquerade scene of “Romeo and Juliet,” for example, he changed the word toes in the lines:

to feet, though letting corns stand.² A century later, in the United States, feet was also under the ban. The palmy days of euphemism ran from the 20s to the 80s. Bulls became male cows, cocks became roosters,³ the breast became the bosom,⁴ both a chair and the backside became seats, harlots became fallen women, cockroaches became roaches,⁵ trousers became inexpressibles, unmentionables, unwhisperables, nether garments,⁶ or conveniences,⁷ stockings (female) became hose¹ and such ancient words as bitch, sow, boar, stallion, ram and buck disappeared from the vocabulary. How, in the midst of this excess of delicacy, the harsh and forthright female should have come into general use as a noun I simply can’t tell you. It was old in English and had been used by Steele in the Guardian in 1713, but it seems to have carried a suggestion of scorn in early Nineteenth Century England. In the United States, however, it was used perfectly seriously, and was apparently a special favorite of clergymen, reformers and other such patterns of propriety. The DAE shows that there were female seminaries, boarding-schools, institutes, orphan-asylums and missionary societies in the 1820–70 era. The term did not go unchallenged, but it took a long while to put it down, for there was a span of nearly thirty years between the time the Legislature of Maryland expunged it from the title of a bill on the ground that it was “an Americanism” and the time Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book succeeded in persuading the trustees of Vassar to drop it from the name of that great institution. Thus her argument:

The Maryland Legislature substituted women for females, in the bill just mentioned, but woman was felt to be somewhat rough, and the true rival of female, for many years, was the English favorite, lady. Says Dixon Wecter in “The Saga of American Society”:³

As we have seen, there is still a strong tendency in the United States to deprecate plain words, but the war upon them has become official rather than popular, and though the movies and the radio still submit, the majority of newspapers and magazines make some show of resistance. One of the first rebels against the delicacy of the era we have been reviewing was the elder James Gordon Bennett (1795 – 1872), founder of the New York Herald. Says Frank Luther Mott: “He flouted the prudery of the times which prescribed the use of the word limbs for legs, of linen for shirt, of unmentionables for trousers.”² As we have also seen, it took a long while to break down even the most irrational and preposterous of the taboos, but in the end they succumbed. They survive today, save in the obscene fancies of Post-office wowsers, only in the back-waters of American speech, e.g., dialects of such regions as the Ozarks. Vance Randolph, whose studies of the Ozark vocabulary have been numerous and valuable, has devoted one of them to its forbidden words.³ In it he says:

8. EXPLETIVES

313. [In 1931, writing in American Speech, L. W. Merryweather observed that “hell fills so large a part in the American vulgate that it will probably be worn out in a few years.”]² Merryweather regarded this deterioration as so likely that he proposed that “clerical circles should take it upon themselves, as a public duty, to invest some other theological term with a shuddering fearsomeness that will qualify it as the successor to hell, when the lamentable decease of the latter actually takes place.” Fortunately, his fears have not been borne out by the event. Hell still flourishes in the Republic, in so far as profanity flourishes at all, and every one of the combinations and permutations of it that he listed remains in use. I borrow his grand divisions:

Nearly all the examples I have cited are of American origin: the English have a much less inspiring répertoire of terms in hell. The DAE traces to give him hell to 1851, to be hell on to 1850, hellion to 1845, hell-diver (a bird)² to 1839, hell-bent to 1835, and hell of a to 1776, and marks them all Americanisms. It records a number of forms that have since become obsolete, e.g., hell-face and hell-to-split (1871), to smell hell and hellabaloo (1840), hell-sweat (1832) and hell-kicking (1796). It also records some forms that have flourished only in relatively restricted areas, e.g., hell-rotter and hell-west. Merryweather says that hellion seems to have been invented by the Mormons, along with by hell and son of hell. He adds that the use of these terms by the saints is apparently grounded on the theory that “if it is evil to use celestial names profanely, it must be good to take infernal names in vain. Hellion and son of hell are obvious substitutes for a pair of common obscene epithets, and by hell takes the place of by God.”³ New combinations embracing hell are being launched all the time, and old and forgotten ones are frequently revived. In 1944, for example, a United States Senator got a flattering editorial notice in the New York Times for springing “The hardtack was as hard as the hubs of hell” in the course of a Senate debate on the Army K ration. It was, said the Times, “a striking number.” A few days later a correspondent wrote in to say that the simile was used by the soldiers during the Spanish-American War, and that hubs should have been hobs.⁴

Many of these are Americanisms, but not all. The DAE traces blasted in the sense of damnably to 1854, blamed to 1863, consarn to 1825, cussed to 1840,² cracky to 1851, dinged to 1843, dad-blamed to 1884, dad-burn to c. 1845, dad-shamed to 1834, dad-seized to 1844, dad-blasted to 1890, dad-sizzled to 1898, dad-swamped to 1866, switched to 1838, goldarn to 1853, gum to c. 1815, goldast to 1888, great snakes to 1862, great guns to 1884, gee-whizz to 1888, Jemima to 1887, land (in land’s sake) to 1834, good land to 1845, law (in law sakes) to 1846, Jerusalem to 1861 and gosh to 1857.³ Walter notes some Irish euphemisms, familiar to all Americans, but now obsolete, e.g., bedad, faith, bejabers and begorrah. He also notes some extensions of Jesus and Jesus Christ, e.g., ke-rist, Jesus H. Christ, Jesus H. Particular Christ, Jesus Nelly, holy jumping Jesus, Jesus Christ and his brother Harry, Jesus Christ and John Jacob Astor, and G. Rover Cripes. He lists nearly 400 picturesque oaths in the by form, e.g., by hell’s peekhole, by all the ten legions of divils of Killooly, by Amerigo Vespucci, by hatchet-heads and hammer-handles, by St. Boo gar and all the saints at the backside of the door of Purgatory, by the devil and Tom Walker, by the double-barreled jumping jiminetty, by the high heels of St. Patrick, by the holy cinders, by the holy St. Mackerel, by the piper that played before Moses, and by the ripping, roaring, jumping Jerusalem. Finally, he notes that the Old Testament makes Jahveh Himself swear gently on occasion, as the pious will discover in Ezekiel XVIII, 3.

This etymology was accepted by the late George Philip Krapp, and argued for with great learning in his excellent work, “The English Language in America,”² and it is adopted by the DAE and mentioned favorably by the NED Supplement. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is considerably more plausibility in Dr. Louise Pound’s theory, launched in 1927,³ that darn and its congeners, dern and durn, are really derived from tarnal, an American contraction of eternal that arose during the Eighteenth Century and was in wide use as an intensive by the time of the Revolution. There are, to be sure, some difficulties in this theory, but they are not as great as those which confront the Webster-Krapp etymology. Tarnal, at the start, was a mere intensive, but it quickly gave rise to tarnation as a euphemism for damnation, and in a very short while tarnation was in use as an expletive. By 1798 it had assimilated the initial d of damnation, and in the course of time tarnal and its direct derivatives in t dropped out of use, and only darn remained. The evidence against the Webster-Krapp etymology and in favor of that of Dr. Pound is somewhat complicated and rather too technical to be summarized easily; it may be found in the Pound article before mentioned, and in a later discussion by Woodford A. Heflin in American Speech.¹

Darn as a mere intensive, as in Webster’s darn sweet, is traced by the DAE no further back than his mention of it in his “Dissertations on the English Language,” but it must have been in use in America for some time before that. Tarnal, as an intensive, is traced to 1775. Both words took on the special sense of damned very soon afterward. The DAE’s first example of darnation is dated 1825, but Thornton, cited by Heflin, traced the word to 1798. Tarnal and all its derivatives, whether in t or in d, are Americanisms. Visiting Englishmen found them piquant, and took them home. Dickens reported darn as an expletive in his “American Notes,” 1842, and made one of his Americans use it in “Martin Chuzzlewit,” 1843. But it never really took hold in England. Not by a darned sight is traced by the DAE to 1834 and marked an Americanism. It was preceded by not by a jugful, 1833, and has been followed by various euphemisms of the second degree, e.g., not by a considerable sight, used by Mark Twain in “Huckleberry Finn,” 1884, and not by a long sight, used by Joel Chandler Harris in “Sister Jane, Her Friends and Acquaintances,” 1896. Darn seems quite innocuous to most Americans today, but so recently as 1941 a Federal judge sitting in New York was objecting to its use in his courtroom, and threatening a lawyer who used it with punishment for contempt of court.² Rather curiously, Webster 1934 does not list either darn as an expletive or its variants, dern and durn. Damn is listed, and also goddam (the latter in the French sense of an Englishman), but not darn. The verb to darn, meaning to repair a hole in a fabric, may come from the old English derne or dierne to which Webster and Krapp sought to lay the expletive, but it is much more probable that it is derived from derner, a French dialect verb which likewise means to repair.

Dog-gone is marked an Americanism by the DAE and traced to the middle of the last century. Its origin is said to be uncertain, but there seems to be reasonable ground for believing that it is simply the Scotch dagone, of exactly the same significance and use, changed in spelling and pronunciation by some vague association with going to the dogs.¹ In the common speech, indeed, it is often dag-gone, with the first syllable rhyming with drag. As adjectives both it and darn have produced superlatives by analogy with damndest, to wit, doggondest and darndest (derndest, durndest). As we have seen, they are by no means the only American euphemisms for damn. The Linguistic Atlas of New England² lists many others in use in that region, e.g., dem, dum, dim, dean, dan, dang, ding, dash, dast, dag, dad, drat, blame, blast, bust, burn, bother, bugger, butter, confound, condemn, consarn, condarn, curse, cuss, crump, gast, gum, hang, rat, ram, rabbit, shuck, torment, plague, dunder and tarn. Dem was brought from England, where it is recorded in the Seventeenth Century; it has produced, in its turn, several derivatives, e.g., demme, demmy and demnition, the last of which may have been invented by Charles Dickens. Dum is traced to 1787 by the DAE and marked an Americanism. Ding, first recorded in America in 1834, did not appear in England until twelve years later, and then only in dialect use. Dad, usually combined, as in dad-fetch and dad-gum, is also apparently of American origin. The DAE suggests that blame, which is traced to 1829, is “probably a substitute for blast,” but this seems improbable, for blast itself is not recorded before 1854. Consarn is traced to 1825. Curse the fellow is in “Tristram Shandy,” 1761, but the NED’s first example of to give a curse is from a letter of Thomas Jefferson, 1763. Gum, which is also a euphemism for God, as in by gum, is traced by the DAE, in the latter use, to c. 1815 in the United States; it did not appear in England until 1832. Shuck, in the plural, is commonly used as an exclamation of disgust or regret without any reference to damn, and in that use the DAE traces it to 1847, but it is also apparently employed in the form of shucked as a euphemism for damned. Tormented is traced by the DAE to 1825.

Seaman, as a patriotic Englishman, warned his countrymen against adopting American profanity, but he must have known that it was almost as feeble as their own, despite the continued prosperity of hell and its derivatives, for he had but recently returned from a visit to the United States, and while here had traveled widely. All American treatises on the subject agree that there has been a marked decline in the Republic since the Civil War, with only faint revivals during the two World Wars. Writing in the North American Review in 1934, Burges Johnson declared that American profanity was fast losing its punch. He said:

Johnson noted that a number of intrinsically innocuous words, e.g., plutocrat, capitalist, bolshevik, communist, fascist, pacifist, radical, Rotarian and bourgeoisie, were coming into use for purposes of invective, and predicted that they would gradually take on the dignity of general expletives. This prediction has been borne out by the event, and to them have been added many other terms, e.g., isolationist and Nazi. But this process, of course, is old in English, and does not lead to the production of true profanity. Another American observer, writing in 1935,¹ reported the results of a thirty-day “campaign of listening,” carried on with the aid of “a small clique of men and women who live anything but cloistered lives.” His conclusion was that Americans had become “a trifle disgusted with their one-time penchant for cursing,” and were turning to such puerile words and phrases as dad-gummed, dad-slapped, fathead, for the love of Mike, and go climb a tree. This tendency, I have no doubt, has been helped by the extraordinary prudishness of the American newspapers, which always hesitate to report genuine profanity in full, or even any harmless discourse quoting its more familiar terms. I had a curious personal experience of this in 1939, when, in the course of a lecture delivered at Cooper Union, New York, I ventured to observe: “American grammar is fast going to hell, which is where all grammars will land, I hope and pray, soon or late.” In the New York Journal-American’s report of the lecture the next morning hell was printed h—l.² Some American newspapers even hesitated to use such euphemistic forms as damfino, damphool and helluva.³ Hollywood is still more prudish. As we have already seen, Article V of its official code of morals prohibits the use of “pointed profanity (this includes the use of God, Lord, Jesus Christ, unless used reverently, hell, s.o.b., damn, Gawd), or every other profane or vulgar expression, however used.”

This pledge is recited by the members after the mass they are supposed to attend every month, and at all meetings of the society. In each diocese it has a spiritual director, appointed by the ordinary, but all the other officers are laymen. There is also a junior society for boys twelve years old or older. At eighteen or thereabout they pass into the society proper. It is apparently the theory of the spiritual directors that Catholic women do not swear, for they are not solicited to join.

Of the non-profane pejoratives in common American use son-of-a-bitch is the hardest worked, and by far. It rose to popularity in the United States during the decade before the Civil War,² and at the start was considered extremely offensive. A German traveler, Theodor Griesinger, reported in 1858 ¹ that it was “der ärgeste Schimpfname, dessen sich der Amerikaner bedient.” He added, however, that “man hört es von Tausenden tausendmal täglich,” and that “nirgends in der Welt wird mehr geflucht and geschimpft als in Amerika, and besonders in Newyork.” He noted its identity with hurensohn, a fighting word among Germans.² Son-of-a-bitch is likewise supposed to be a fighting-word among Americans, but I am inclined to think that many other terms, including the simple liar, are more apt to provoke actual blows. Not infrequently, indeed, it is used almost affectionately, and when accompanied by a smile does not necessarily offer offense. It was so used in “The Virginian,” a novel and movie by Owen Wister, wherein one character said to another, “You son-of-a—,” and the other interrupted with “When you call me that, smile.”³ But, as we have seen, it is now forbidden by the movie code of morals, along with its abbreviation, s.o.b.⁴ The American newspapers avoid it diligently. When, on October 4, 1939, the tabloid New York Daily News, which is bolder than common, ventured to use it in a cartoon caption in the denaturized form of son-of-a—, the Editor and Publisher, the trade journal of the daily press, expressed indignation. The offending cartoon, which was by Ray Bailey, showed Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini standing at a bar. Mussolini seemed to be sulking, and Hitler, with one hand on a bottle of vodka and the other on Mussolini’s shoulder, addressed him thus: “Come, Benito, I want you to shake hands with this son-of-a—.” The caveat of the Editor and Publisher was as follows:

The English bloody continues to seem innocuous to Americans. The NED’s first example of its use as foul language is from “Two Years Before the Mast,” by the American Richard Henry Dana, 1840. After that it seems to have gone into hiding until the turn of the 80s, when John Ruskin denounced its use as “a deep corruption, not altering the form of the word, but defiling the thought in it.” There has been some lessening of the English horror of it since George Bernard Shaw shocked the British Isles, in 1914, by putting it into the mouth of the elegant Mrs. Patrick Campbell, playing Eliza Doolittle in his play, “Pygmalion,” but it is still regarded as somewhat advanced, though every male Englishman from 4 to 90 uses it more or less, and it is not unrecorded on the lips of females, at least below the rank of royal duchesses. Perhaps one may best explain its position by saying that it is still frowned upon officially, but is gradually losing its offensiveness to public opinion. Indeed, there is even some doubt about it officially, and that doubt shows itself in irresolution and lack of consistency. The Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays, who censors all stage plays, allowed it to pass in “Pygmalion,” but six years later, in 1920, he deleted it from a play dealing with labor.² In 1936 he winked at it when Noel Coward used it three or four times in a one-acter,³ but before the end of the year the magistrates at Bath were fining a Fascist soap-boxer for uttering it in a speech.⁴ During this period there was some discussion in the London newspapers of an order issued by Lord Beatty to Captain Sir Ernie Chatfield at the battle of Jutland — to wit: “There must be something wrong with our bloody ships, Chatfield. Turn two points to port” — but all the papers represented bloody by a dash.¹ They were still doing so in 1939,² but soon afterward the decline of prudery which came in with World War II emboldened some of them to spell it out. In 1941 even the London Times went overboard, as D. B. Wyndham Lewis recorded maliciously in the Tatler.³ “Clashing her wiry old ringlets in a kind of palsied glee at her own audacity,” he wrote, “Auntie Times has printed a little poem containing the line, ‘I really loathe the bloody Hun,’ and all Fleet Street stands aghast.… Don’t say we didn’t warn you if Auntie is seen dancing down Fleet Street ere long in her red flannel undies, bawling little French songs.”

By 1942 the consternation of the journalists had begun to wear off, and before the end of that year a respectable provincial paper was printing bloody boldly — in a report of a speech before a Rotary Club by a rev. canon!⁴ Simultaneously, the British Ministry of Information was employing Eric Knight to prepare a handbook for the use of American troops in England, in which it was explained that while bloody had still better be avoided in mixed company it was not forbidden to soldiers in the field. But this change of front was naturally accompanied by aberrations. So late as December, 1939, a Labor M.P., William Dobbie of Rotherham, was forced to apologize to the House of Commons for using bloody in debate.⁵ There is, as I have said, no general objection to it in the United States, but it is not often heard save as a conscious Anglicism, and there are tender persons who profess to shiver when it is used, apparently on the ground that it has not yet come into full repute in England. In 1938 the Boston Globe, a highly decorous paper, shocked the Anglomaniacs of its territority by reporting that a six-year-old American girl, asked on her return from a trip to England how she had liked the country, replied that she had liked it bloody well, and the Globe was forced to get out of the resulting unpleasantness by putting the blame upon an abandoned telegraph operator, who, so it alleged, had substituted bloody for very.¹

There are frequent discussions of the origin of the term in the English philological literature, and even in the newspapers, but no general agreement has been reached. Most Englishmen, asked to account for its lingering disrepute, will tell you either that it is a shortened form of by Our Lady, and is hence blasphemous, or that it embodies a reference to catamenia, and is hence indecent. The first theory, of course, is obviously nonsense, for the English, taking one with another, do not object to blasphemy, and some of their common expressions are much worse. Nor does the known history of the term show any relation to any physiological process.² It apparently arose as a mere intensive in Restoration days, when there was a mild revival of strong language in England, and by the first quarter of the Eighteenth Century it had become quite innocuous. The NED suggests that it may have been related, at the start, to the noun blood, signifying a roistering young man of the upper class, but Partridge rejects this derivation as bookish and unwarranted. “There is no need,” he says, “of ingenious etymologies; the idea of blood suffices.” “The root-idea of blood as something vivid and/or distressing,” he adds in his edition of Grose’s “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,”³ “is never absent in the adjective.” In the early days of its popularity in England bloody often appeared in the adverbial form of bloodily, and it is still used as an adverb quite as often as it is used as a verb, but the -ly ending long ago disappeared — a phenomenon frequently encountered in English, especially when the corresponding adjective ends with y and is in constant use, e.g., very, jolly and pretty. Says Ernest Weekley in “Words Ancient and Modern”:⁴

The question as to how bloody came to be so disreputable in England remains. In 1942 Walter Duranty suggested that it may have suffered that change at the time of the Crimean War (1854–56), when the British soldiers probably encountered the Russian word bliudi, pronounced blewdy and meaning dirty, improper, obscene.³ Unhappily for this theory bloody apparently aroused no indignation among English prudes until long after the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and I have been unable to find any evidence that the British soldiers in the Crimea ever actually became aware of bliudi. It is much easier to believe that the opposition to bloody was originally merely a squeamish Victorian objection to its reference to blood, and that its later extreme disrepute arose from the folk etymologies I have mentioned, and especially from the effort to relate it to catamenia. Such imbecile afterthoughts are common in the history of language, and it is not unusual for a term once perfectly harmless to acquire an aura of the forbidding with the passage of the years.

The Australians, who are much more spacious in their speech than the English, use bloody with great freedom, and do not seem to regard it as especially shocking. They call it, somewhat proudly, the great Australian adjective,³ and have embodied it in some of their folk-poetry — for example, the following refrain of a song sung by Australian troops stationed in Newfoundland in 1942:

The Australians (like the English, but to a larger extent) use bloody as an inserted intensive in various other avoids, just as Americans use goddam, e.g., imma-bloody-material, umber-bloody-ella, inde-bloody-pendent, hippo-bloody-crite, abso-bloody-lutely, hoo-bloody-rah.² It will be noted that the ma in the first example is duplicated, no doubt for euphony. There is also a common abbreviation N.B.G., i.e., no bloody good.³

1 The Study of American English, S.P.E. Tract No. XXVII; 1927, p. 208.

1 See AL4, p. 224. Says H. W. Seaman (private communication, May 9, 1944): “Hard-boiled fiction from America has influenced English speech and writing. The boys’ papers have heroes who speak as nearly American as the authors can manage to make them.”

2 At the start they were upset more or less by the objurgations in the English newspapers, and made some effort to placate English prejudices. When a talkie called No! No! Napoleon was under way in 1929 Variety reported (July 10, p. 15) that it was being done in both an “American version” and an “English translation.” The sentence, “A nut-factory, eh?,” was translated into “A madhouse, eh?,” and “I’ve been framed” was converted into “This is a put-up job.” This spirit of concession was well received by the English cinema magnates, and one of them contributed an article to the London Star on Feb. 4, 1930 in which he expressed the opinion that the day of American slang in England was over. “English actors of both sexes,” he reported, “are being employed in ever increasing number, and a superior type of American artist is being engaged who has the culture and ability to acquire English cadences and intonations.” But Hollywood’s reform did not last long. In a little while its producers discovered that the English fans, at least on the lower orders, really enjoyed and esteemed American slang, so nut-factory, to frame and many congeners were restored to use, and the “superior type of American artist” was displaced by the traditional recruits from the ten-cent stores and barbecue-stands.

1 Hollywood Reporter, quoted in Language Trouble, by Stephen Watts, London Sunday Express, Nov. 20, 1938: “It’s next to impossible for Americans to understand an English accent on the screen.” A very typical American’s difficulties with the speech of actors on the London stage will be recalled by readers of Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth. See Dodsworth’s Dilemma, Nation (New York), May 29, 1929, p. 638.

2 See AL4, p. 38, n. 1.

3 “If half the members of a talkie audience,” said a contributor to the Liverpool Daily Courier, signing himself H. W. S., on Sept. 4, 1929, “shudder every time a character on the screen says ‘Get a load of this’ or ‘It’s in the bag,’ the other half make a mental note of the expression for future use. I can offer no hope to the professors who think that talkies in pure English prose and verse would stem the American tide; for every such professor there are a thousand talkie-goers to whom American has become almost as intelligible as English, and more attractive because of its novelty. There has never been a talkie in pure English prose and verse, and there never will be. American has made such headway, even among its opponents, that there is hardly a modern English play that does not contain half a dozen phrases of American origin, and it is almost impossible to write a defense of English without using a locution or two that ten years ago would have been recognizable as American but now has become common English usage.”

1 For example, I find all set in the caption of a drawing in John Bull, and to knock his block off in a cartoon in the Glasgow Record.

2 The Democratic “Vaudeville,” July 3, 1932.

3 The Wrath of the Church, July 14, 1936.

4 Precautions Against Gate-Crashers at Ascot, June 12, 1938.

1 Brevity and Punch, Oct. 10, 1942.

2 R.A.F. Check on Hooch Drinking, London Daily Mail, Jan. 21, 1942.

3 London Daily Mail, July 21, 1938. The Mail’s headline on his article was Gilbert Frankau Puts One Over.

4 Alibi, London Sunday Times, Oct. 23, 1938. On March 9, 1940 the Manchester Guardian condemned the use of the term in “a well known paper,” but had to admit that it was “being more and more used to cover any sort of explanation.” “The meanings of words,” it observed sadly, “sometimes become distorted because newspapers look for lively terms that will mean much and be short enough for headlines.”

5 Later American Word-Imports, by A. H. C., IV, Forres Gazette, Nov. 6, 1935.

6 Traced by the DAE to 1761 and marked an Americanism.

7 Partridge says that this phrase was naturalized in England by 1930.

8 The DAE does not list this verb-phrase, but it traces to hang around (or round) to 1847.

9 Handy is to be found in Thomas Fuller’s once-famous book, A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine, 1650, but it fell out of use in England and was reintroduced from America.

10 First used by J. Fenimore Cooper in Homeward Bound, 1838. To happen along is also an Americanism.

11 Apparently introduced by J. Fenimore Cooper in The Pathfinder, 1840.

12 Traced by the DAE to 1809. Thornton says that the phrase “may have been learned by the English in the War of 1812.”

13 Partridge credits this verb-phrase to New Zealand, but offers no evidence.

14 In the sense of a yokel. The DAE’s first example is dated 1892, but the term must be much older. To get the hayseed out of one’s hair is traced to 1840.

1 The DAE traces to head for to 1835 and marks it an Americanism.

2 The DAE’s first example is dated 1864.

3 The DAE traces to head off to 1841 and marks it an Americanism.

4 This excellent term is not listed by the DAE. Partridge says that it came into general use in England c. 1930.

5 Recorded by Bartlett in 1848. “This word,” he said, “is in common use in the West, and bids fair to spread over the country. There can be little doubt of its derivation from high-flinging.” Webster 1934 suggests that highflown may have had some influence on it.

6 The DAE does not list this phrase, but Partridge says that it originated in the United States before 1869, and began to be used in England in 1883.

7 Traced by the DAE to 1817 and marked an Americanism.

8 Hitched is traced by the DAE to 1847. It has never been used save humorously in the United States.

9 Not of American origin, but in much more frequent use in the United States than in England.

10 Traced to 1835 in the United States and to 1867 in England.

11 In the sense of a check or obstruction the DAE traces hold-up to 1837, and in the sense of a robbery at the point of a gun to 1878. In both senses the term is an Americanism, as are the corresponding adjective and verb.

12 The writer says: “The earliest recorded use of this adjective is American.” That is not true. It appeared in England in 1756 as a translation of the German heimweh. It is often stated that English is the only language having a word of the meaning of home. This is nonsense. The German heim is its exact equivalent, and both come from the same Old Germanic root. The NED traces home to c. 950.

13 An old English word that went out in England but survived in America.

14 Originally, the sound made by a wild goose, noted by Boucher in 1800, but apparently not in general use until c. 1850. It was first applied to the sound of an automobile horn in 1906.

15 The DAE traces on one’s own hook to 1812 and marks it an Americanism. It was used by Thackeray in Pendennis, 1849, and Partridge says that it is now naturalized in England.

16 Partridge says that this phrase came into English use c. 1905.

17 The DAE traces horse-sense to 1832 and marks it an Americanism.

18 This is not an Americanism, but after long desuetude it seems to have been reintroduced to England from America. Partridge says that the Canadian soldiers made it popular in 1916.

19 These terms are old in English, but they came to their present vogue in the United States, and returned to England as Americanisms. Partridge says that they became naturalized c. 1905 and are now “almost Standard English.”

1 As in inside twenty-four hours. Traced by the DAE to 1877.

2 In the sense of a person of the first importance. Partridge says that the English borrowed the term from the United States c. 1910. The use of it in group games also seems to be American. An authority on games, cited by the DAE, says that in England the player who is it “is sometimes called he.” See Toys and Games, by W. Macqueen-Pope, London Times Literary Supplement, March 25, 1944, p. 151.

3 Traced by the DAE to 1711 and marked an Americanism.

4 In such phrases as to be jam up against. Traced by the DAE to 1842 and marked an Americanism.

5 The DAE traces this back-formation to 1869 and marks it an Americanism.

6 See AL4, pp. 121, 141 and 165.

7 The writer lists jiggered as meaning “put in order.” Where he picked it up I do not know: it is certainly not American. Jigger, in the sense of a measure of strong drink, is an Americanism, traced by the DAE to 1836.

8 The DAE’s earliest example is dated 1885, but the term must be considerably older.

9 The DAE traces to jolly, in the sense of to chaff ingratiatingly, to 1890, and marks it an Americanism.

10 The DAE traces jug for jail to 1815, but does not mark it an Americanism, though it probably is.

11 Traced by the DAE to 1826 and marked an Americanism.

12 In the sense of old rope or cable junk has been in nautical use in England since the Fifteenth Century, but in the American sense the DAE traces it no further back than 1842. There was a time when dealers in marine stores were called junk-dealers in this country.

13 As a general intensive, as in time just flew.

14 Whether or not this is an Americanism remains to be established. Partridge says that it was used in England before 1861, but indicates that it then began to go out. It has always been in much more frequent use in the United States. In England the common phrase is to walk out with.

15 This verb-phrase is old in English, but it seems to have been forgotten, and Partridge says that it was reintroduced from the United States c. 1905.

16 Traced by the DAE to 1854 and marked an Americanism.

17 This verb-phrase is probably not an Americanism. Grose listed it as English slang in 1785. But it seems to have come into much wider use in the United States than in England, and to most Englishmen it sounds American.

18 In the sense of to deceive.

1 In the political sense to knife is traced by the DAE to 1888 and marked an Americanism.

2 In the more usual form of to knock around this verb-phrase is traced by the DAE to 1877 and marked an Americanism.

3 The DAE traces to know the ropes to 1840 and to learn the ropes to 1850, and marks them Americanisms. They apparently come from the language of the sea. Partridge says that to know the ropes was accepted as Standard English after 1900.

4 A loan from the Chinese. See AL4, p. 162.

5 The DAE’s first example is dated 1895, but the term must be older.

6 The earliest English example of law-abiding is dated 1867. The DAE traces it in American use to 1834.

7 Lemon, in the sense of something unattractive, e.g., a homely woman, is not listed by the DAE. Partridge says that it was adopted by the English c. 1921.

8 To let slide is old English, but it dropped out in the Seventeenth Century. The DAE shows that it was revived or reinvented in the United States c. 1845, and reappeared in England in 1885.

9 Traced by the DAE to 1851 and marked an Americanism. Partridge says that it was accepted in England c. 1870.

10 Traced by the DAE to 1888. The adjective levelheaded is traced to 1879.

11 The DAE traces this verb-phrase to 1815 and marks it an Americanism. Partridge says it was not naturalized in Standard English until the Twentieth Century.

12 Partridge says that this phrase was adopted by the English c. 1895.

13 To make myself scarce was used by Smollett in 1749 and by Scott in 1821, but it seems to have dropped out, and Englishmen apparently think of it as an Americanism.

14 Partridge says that this Americanism, traced by the DAE to 1834, was taken into English c. 1860.

15 The DAE’s first example is from J. P. Kennedy’s Swallow Barn, 1832. Partridge says that the term was naturalized in England c. 1860.

16 The DAE traces mass-meeting to 1842 and marks it an Americanism.

17 The DAE’s first example is dated 1896, but the phrase must be older.

18 In the sense of a large extra dividend.

19 In the sense of garments needing mending.

20 The DAE’s first example is from George Ade’s Artie, 1896.

1 Not listed by the DAE. It has been suggested that it is a clipped form of muttonhead, but for this I know no evidence.

2 Marked “chiefly U. S.” by the NED.

3 The DAE traces N.G. to 1840 and Partridge says that it was naturalized in England by 1890.

4 Traced by the DAE to 1861.

5 Old-timer seems to have come in during or immediately after the Civil War.

6 The DAE traces one-horse, in the figurative sense of petty or unimportant, to 1854, and one-horse town to 1855. Both are marked Americanisms.

7 Traced by the DAE to 1875. Partridge says it was adopted in England by 1905.

8 Traced by the DAE to 1892.

9 Traced by the DAE to 1807 and marked an Americanism. Until they began to use overcoat the English used greatcoat or topcoat. Both, of course, survive.

10 Adjectives — and Other Words; New York, 1930, p. 182.

11 Of these terms the DAE traces dope-fiend to 1896, stunt to 1895, but omits sob-stuff and high-brow. The NED Supplement traces sob-stuff to 1920, sob-story to the same year, and sob-sister to 1927. All are actually older. The NED’s first example of stunt in the wide sense of any spectacular effort or enterprise is from the United States.

12 Is English Becoming Too American?, London Evening News, Nov. 19, 1931.

13 Oxford correspondence of the Hong Kong Telegraph, Oct. 6, 1936.

1 “Is that,” he asked in parenthesis, “an Americanism?”

2 Dr. Onions described all these verb-phrases as “idioms derived from the stage footlights.” This is possible, but it seems much more likely that they really got their vogue in the United States as baseball terms.

3 Traced by the DAE to c. 1845 and marked an Americanism. It did not reach England until the late 80s.

4 An old English phrase, revived by the game of poker in the United States, traced by the DAE to 1882, and adopted in England, according to Partridge, c. 1913.

5 First recorded by Bartlett in his second edition, 1859.

6 “The American applications of the word dope,” said Onions, “have generally commended themselves and have obtained a wide currency.”

7 Partridge says that best girl appeared in English use c. 1890. The DAE does not list it.

8 Traced by the DAE in this sense to 1887 and marked an Americanism. To fire out, in the sense of to throw out, is also an Americanism, traced by the DAE to 1871 and first used in England, according to J. Redding Ware, in 1896, though Partridge says that it did not become naturalized until c. 1905.

9 Traced by the DAE to c. 1848 and marked an Americanism.

10 Americanisms Now Used in English, Aug. 26, 1936.

11 English on Both Sides of the Atlantic, Listener (London), April 3, 1935, p. 572.

12 News and Views of Literary London, Oct. 4, 1936.

1 Mr. Arthur D. Jacobs of Manchester; private communication, July 19, 1939.

2 To resurrect has been found in English use in the Eighteenth Century, but it came to flower in pre-Civil War America, and to the English of today it seems an Americanism.

3 A Scot Can Always Find the Words, by Lady Sinclair, Dundee Evening Telegraph and Post, April 12, 1944.

4 A Wow. Liverpool Echo, Dec. 6, 1943.

5 Pinched or Stolen. London Evening Standard, Nov. 1, 1943.

6 Sticking Out, April 6, 1943.

7 Fair Exchange, May 20, 1943.

1 American Variations, S.P.E. Tract No. XLV, 1936, pp. 196–97. See also his Modern American Usage; Oxford, 1935, p. ix.

2 The DAE traces to belittle to 1781–2, boarding-house to 1787, business man to 1832, governmental to 1744, graveyard to 1773, hurricane-deck to 1833, law-abiding to 1834, lengthy to 1689, overcoat to 1807, telegram to 1852 and whole-souled to 1834.

3 In The American Impact on Great Britain, 1898–1914; Philadelphia, 1940, p. 310, Richard Heathcote Heindel says that Punch noted the influence of American on the English press so early as the 90s. He also says that many terms “in the category of business … came into English usage before 1914.” “Such invasion of the language as has taken place,” he concludes, “proves the power of the cinema, press and business, not the connivance of British literary masters.”

1 Private communications at different times in 1944.

2 The NED Supplement traces multiple-shop, in English use, to 1903. It marks chain-store an Americanism, but when it came in I do not know. The DAE does not list it.

3 Department-store is traced to 1893 by the DAE and marked an Americanism. The NED Supplement’s first English example of its use is dated 1928.

4 The DAE traces snag, in its literal sense, to 1804 and marks it an Americanism. In the figurative sense of any impediment or difficulty it is traced to 1829. Apparently it first appeared in this sense in England a year later. To snag goes back to 1807.

5 To designate a locomotive. See AL4, p. 240.

6 In Do You Speak American?, London Daily Mail, Aug. 17, 1932, John Blunt included tuxedo in a list of Americanisms “positively incomprehensible without the context” to an Englishman. Others on his list were commuter, rare (of meat), interne, truck-farming, realtor, mean (nasty), dumb (stupid), enlisted man, sea-food, living-room, dirt-road, roomer, scrubwoman, mortician and hired-girl. Four years later, on April 19, 1936, “Are You ‘Dumb’?” appeared as the heading of an advertisement of Sandeman sherry in the London Sunday Dispatch.

1 The DAE’s first example of bathing-suit is dated 1886.

2 Through was still so far from acceptance in 1939 that a correspondent of the London Times was arguing for it formally. He said: “If, say, a film is billed for Monday to Thursday I would probably not go to see it on the Thursday without ’phoning to make sure that to meant on as well. ‘Our lease goes on till September’: what does that mean? Till the end of September, the middle or the beginning? In America they say the film is on from Monday through Thursday. The lease is from January through September (if it meant the end of September; if September 1 it would be through August). And so on. We could use that through in English.” I take this from On American Speech, Baltimore Evening Sun (editorial), Jan. 27, 1940.

3 There are earlier examples in Seaman’s article, Ninety-nine Percent British, American Mercury, Sept., 1937, pp. 46–53. See also Some Recent Americanisms in Standard English, by Helen McM. Buckhurst, American Speech, Dec., 1925, pp. 150–60; The Talkies and English Speech, by Beatrice White, American Speech, April, 1932, pp. 314–15, and Say It in American, London Morning Post, Sept. 11, 1936.

1 See AL4, pp. 322 ff.

2 Such dictionaries, of course, were nothing new. Many are to be found in works of travel by both Englishmen and Americans, and not infrequently glossaries have been added to English editions of American books or offered as programme notes to English productions of American plays. Most of these English-American word lists have been designed to interpret Americanisms to Englishmen, but there have also been a few efforts in the other direction. Allen Walker Read, for some years past, has been engaged upon what will be a comprehensive and scientific Dictionary of Briticisms. He has accumulated nearly 35,000 illustrative quotations, and his skill and experience are such that the work is awaited eagerly. Unhappily, his service with the army interrupted his labors upon it. See Plans For a Historical Dictionary of Briticisms, American Oxonian, July, 1938, pp. 186–90.

1 The headline on this vocabulary, in the edition of the Stars and Stripes before me, is British Names Headache to Supply Men: GI Can is Dust Bin, Hot Water Bottle a Stomach Warmer. I am indebted here to Mr. J. F. Burke.

2 One showing differences in the American and English names for various maintenance items was prepared for the Staff Officers’ School, and another on the same subject was published in the Quartermaster Review, March-April, 1943, by Col. Wayne Allen of the Quartermaster Corps. Dave Breger, the Army cartoonist, did one for the troops in general in the form of an illustrated alphabet beginning with absorbent cotton — cotton wool and running down to zee — zed.

1 The Navy, Army and Air Forces Institutes. Partridge, in his Dictionary of Abbreviations; London, 1942, says that it conducts canteens and other service centers for soldiers and sailors. The name is often abbreviated to naafi, pronounced narfy or naffy.

2 I have not seen the pamphlet, but take this from a notice of it in the London Evening Standard, Jan. 4, 1943.

3 I am indebted here to Mr. J. W. Heenan, Under-Secretary for Internal Affairs in the New Zealand government, and to Mrs. Frances Trimble, of the New Zealand Legation at Washington.

1 Both published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1935 and 1939. This press, which is owned and operated by the university, is also the publisher of the New English Dictionary.

2 Some of those in A Dictionary of Modern American Usage are noted in reviews of it in the Nation (New York), Oct. 9, 1935, p. 418; the Oxford Magazine, Oct. 17, 1935, pp. 10–14; American Speech, Dec., 1936, pp. 302–06; and Publications of the Modern Language Association, Jan., 1938, pp. 35–37. I have noted others myself. Horwill says that blind baggage means baggage carried in a blind car. He says that cleanse “is often preferred in America where clean would be used in England,” and cites street-cleansing department in support thereof. He says that Gentile, in America, “more commonly indicates” a non-Mormon than a non-Jew. He mistakes an accommodation train for one carrying both passengers and freight. He seems to be unaware that American freight-trains have conductors. He confuses hand-me-down and ready-made He neglects to give the chief meaning of hangover. He says that, in America, “home denotes a house inhabited by a single family.” He confuses trunk-line with main-line. And so on, and so on. But in a book of 360 double-column pages these errors are relatively rare, and not many of them are important.

3 Some of the terms listed are discussed at greater length in other places.

⁴ The NED says: Artium baccalaureus …, artium magister … in England are now written B.A., M.A.”

⁵ U. S. and British Staff Officers Over-come Language Difficulties, by Milton Bracker, London correspondent of the New York Times, July 1, 1943.

⁶ Advertisement in News of the World (London), Jan 23, 1938: “Why are you publishing this advert?”

¹ The DAE traces to admit to the bar to 1768 and marks it an Americanism.

² So used by the London Times in its daily announcements of advertising rates.

³ Horwill says: “Aisle is used in England, except in a few dialects, only of a division of a church or of a passage between rows of pews. In America it may denote almost any kind of gangway, whether in a train (where it corresponds to the English corridor), or a theatre, or a shop.”

⁴ The DAE traces almshouse in American use to 1662. Its forthright harshness early bred euphemisms, e.g., county-farm and infirmary. Poor-house is traced to 1785 and poor-farm to 1859. In England, according to Horwill, workhouse is being displaced by public assistance institution. It came in c. 1650 and was preceded by house of work, traced to 1552, and working-house, traced to 1597. Since 1653 workhouse has been used in America to designate a house of correction for minor offenders.

⁵ The NED marks alumnus “U. S.”, and the DAE, which traces it to 1696, calls it an Americanism, but it seems to be making progress in the English colonies, if not in England. The Hong Kong University Alumni Association flourished before World War II, and issued an alumni magazine. (South China Morning Post, May 5, 1938). Alumna is widely used in the United States to designate a female college graduate. The DAE traces it to 1882.

⁶ See A.B.

⁷ Accident Touts May Be Penalized, London Daily Express, Sept. 28, 1936: “Another name for the accident tout business is ambulance-chasing.”

⁸ The DAE traces anxious-bench to 1832, anxious-seat to 1835, mourners’-seat to 1845 and mourners’-bench to 1848, and marks them all Americanisms. The NED’s first example of penitent-form is from Hall Caine’s The Deemster, 1887.

⁹ Americans Bound Coronationwards Should Read This Alphabet, London Daily Express, April 28, 1937: “Apartments are what you call rooms.”

¹⁰ The DAE’s first example of apartment-hotel is dated 1902, and marked an Americanism.

¹¹ The DAE’s first example of apartment-house is dated 1876 and marked an Americanism. Block seems to be an Americanism also, but the English have been using it in the sense of a group of buildings since c. 1850.

¹² The DAE traces appropriation in this sense to 1761 and marks it an Americanism. Appropriation-bill is traced to 1789.

¹ Also commonly applied to what Americans call a garbage-can. Stars and Stripes, June 15, 1943: “A mess sergeant wanting a GI can wouldn’t find his swill-bucket listed in those words on a British maintenance list, but if he were well versed in British nomenclature he’d ask for a bin, dust.” Further on the Stars and Stripes listed: “Can, garbage — bin, dust.” I am indebted here to Mr. J. F. Burke. But see the Seaman list at the end of the last section.

² Mr. P. E. Cleator, of Wallasey, Cheshire: private communication, Sept. 28, 1936: “The name remains with us, but the cart is now an electrically-propelled vehicle. I venture that the old name will inevitably suffer a change.”

³ Mr. Cleator tells me that bin-man is often used. See garbage-man.

⁴ There are Englishmen willing to swear that scent-spray is archaic in England.

⁵ An interesting account of the other terms in use in the early days of the automobile is in The Automobile and American English, by Theodore Hornberger, American Speech, April, 1930, pp. 271–78. This paper also discusses the names for parts and models. London Morning Post, Dec. 10, 1935: “Mr. Justice Bennett, in the Chancery Division, yesterday, criticised a man who described himself in an affidavit as an automobile engineer. Counsel said that he did not know what an automobile was. Mr. Justice Bennett: Nor do I, and nor does he, I expect.”

⁶ Americans, of course, know the meaning of perambulator, and even of pram. Baby-carriage is not listed by the NED; its Supplement marks the term U. S., along with baby-coach. The DAE traces baby-carriage to 1882, and perambulator, in American use, to 1893. It does not list baby-coach. Before baby-carriage came in the American term was baby-wagon, traced by the DAE to 1853. The NED traces perambulator to 1857 and pram to 1884.

⁷ Horwill says that in the United States luggage means empty baggage. But the term is often used in the English sense, and baggage is certainly not unknown in England. See AL4, p. 254. Also, see baggage-car, below. Also see The Growth of American English, by Sir William Craigie, S.P.E. Tract No. LVII; Oxford, 1940, p. 233.

⁸ Mournful Numbers, by Colin Ellis; London, 1932:
I’m certain we shall miss the train!
Is all the luggage in the van?
Oh, George, you’ve dropped that box again!
I’m certain we shall miss the train —
Well, don’t swear, if you are in pain —
Oh, how I wish I were a man!
I’m certain we shall miss the train!
Is all the luggage in the van?”
(Note the use of miss for the former English term, lose.)

⁹ Regulations of the English Ministry of Transport, 1938: “All curves of less than 1,000 feet radius should be superelevated.”

¹ More often, of course, barmaid.

² I am indebted here to the late Sir E. Denison Ross: private communication, May 16, 1939.

³ H. W. Seaman: “We go for a bathe in the sea or a river or a swimming-pool. We take a bath in the bathtub. Bathe, verb or noun, always rhymes with lathe and bath with lath.” London Daily Mirror, Nov. 21, 1938: “Lady Morris, wherever she is, gets home in time to bath her babies.” Headlines in News of the World (London), June 12, 1936: “Doctor’s Last Bathe. Lost His Life After Disregarding Advice at Seaside.”

⁴ This is disputed by many Englishmen, who say that a bath-robe and a dressing-gown differ in meaning, as with us. The NED’s first example of bathrobe is from the American Smart Set, 1895. Its first English example is dated 1924.

⁵ London Daily Telegraph, March 26, 1936: “Beryl Mary Shelton Parker … was found with her head under water in the bath.” The DAE traces bathtub to 1870 and marks it an Americanism.

⁶ Battery is also used in England.

⁷ See bug. Bed-bug is traced by the DAE to 1808. Chinch is old in English, but has been mainly American for many years. As crazy as a bedbug is an Americanism, traced to 1832.

⁸ Learn English Before You Go, by Frank Loxley Griffin, Atlantic Monthly, June, 1932, p. 775: “A bellhop will never bring you a pitcher of ice water, but a page can usually fetch a jug of iced water.” See pitcher.

⁹ As She Is Spoke in the United States, by J. H. M., Glasgow Evening Citizen, Aug. 29, 1936: “Don’t embarrass the booking-clerk by asking him if he can change a fifty-dollar note for you; you mean a bill.” See ticket-agent.

¹⁰ The DAE traces billboard to 1851 and marks it an Americanism. Hoarding is traced by the NED, as a builders’ term for a fence around a building under construction or repair, to 1823, but it apparently did not come into common use to designate a billboard until the 60s. It was apparently preceded by show-board, traced by the NED to 1806, and by posting-board. See Stolen Flowers, Harper’s Magazine, Sept., 1871.

¹¹ Oxford Mail, Oct. 14, 1942: “Seeing one of our soldiers unable to understand what a U. S. A. sergeant was asking him, I offered my services. It appeared that the American required a bill-folder [sic]. This stumped me for a minute or so, but at last I suggested it might be a wallet he required. This proved to be correct when I displayed my own.” The learned Englishman’s use of to stump will be noted. It is an Americanism and is traced by the DAE to 1812.

¹ Chicago Tribune, Aug. 13, 1923: “A milliard, in the American language, is a billion”

² Chinese Mail (Hong Kong), Dec. 19, 1938: “The game so popular in army circles in Hong Kong under the name of tombola is now sweeping South London as a craze called housey-housey. It is played for the most part by housewives who are attracted to open-door booths by a glittering display of cutlery and chromium-plated clocks.” The article then proceeds to describe the method of playing what Americans call bingo. Bingo is a form of lotto, traced by the NED to 1778. Bingo is listed by Grose, 1785, as thieves’ cant for “brandy or other spirituous liquor” and “a dram drinker.”

³ See soda-biscuit.

⁴ Headline in London Daily Telegraph, Oct. 12, 1936: “Life Preserver For ‘Self-Defence.’ ” The DAE traces blackjack to 1895 and marks it an Americanism.

⁵ As She Is Spoke in the United States, by J. H. M., Glasgow Evening Citizen, Aug. 29, 1936: “During the voyage the purser will send out at least one form to be filled in, but to the Americans it will be a blank to be filled out.”

⁶ The King’s English, by Wayne Allen, Quartermaster Review (Washington), March-April, 1943, p. 58: “A torch, blow, is a lamp, brazing.”

⁷ The NED says that deals now commonly means fir or pine cut in planks not more than three inches thick.

⁸ Mr. P. E. Cleator tells me that both terms are commonly used in the plural. See shoe.

⁹ Aids To the Talkies, by D. W. B(rogan), Oxford Magazine, Oct. 17, 1935: “Boulevard, for arterial road, can be illustrated from North Britain.” London Times Literary Supplement, Aug. 23, 1934, p. 570: “Milton described in ‘Paradise Lost’ the modern ideal of an arterial road — ‘a passage broad, smooth, easy.’ ”

¹⁰ London Leader, March 27, 1943: “We have yet to call … a chucker-out a bouncer.”

¹¹ H. W. Seaman: “Your game of bowls, played in an alley, is called skittles here, and is played in a skittle-alley. Our game of bowls is played on a green, which is a lawn.” In the United States bowling is commonly used, not bowls.

¹² Industrial Coinage, Nation’s Business, June, 1942, quoting This Fascinating Railroad Business, by Robert S. Henry; New York, 1942.

¹³ I am indebted here to Mrs. Pieter Juiliter of Scotia, N. Y.

¹⁴ Grilled, of course, is known in the United States.

¹⁵ Pail is also used in the United States.

¹ Bug in England, has acquired the special meaning of bed-bug, and is thus avoided. See AL4, p. 310. American As She Is Spoke, by Eric Partridge, London Observer, Sept. 8, 1935: “Citizens of the United States have often offended English ears with their use of bug.”

² The Al Smith Building, in England, would be Smith House. “In America,” says Horwill, “a structure bearing the name of house would be understood to be a hotel.” But this use of house for hotel is going out.

³ I am indebted here to Mr. P. A. Browne.

⁴ Bureau, in this sense, is traced by the DAE to 1751 and marked an Americanism. It is also used in the United States in the sense of what the English call a government office, as in Weather Bureau. In this sense the DAE traces it to 1831. Chest of drawers has some vogue in the United States, but is used chiefly of an antique.

⁵ London Leader, March 27, 1943: “Our lounge suits are their sack suits.” Sack suit, seldom used, is traced by the DAE to 1895, and marked an Americanism. Business suit is traced to 1880.

⁶ The DAE traces caboose to 1862, but it must be older. The term, which comes from the Dutch kabuis, has been used for many years to designate a cooking galley on the deck of a merchant ship.

⁷ Please Speak English, by Dale Warren, Seven Seas, Spring, 1939, p. 26: “You go to a rank, not a stand, to get a taxi.”

⁸ But Horwill says that calendar is used in England in the criminal courts. It is used in Congress to designate the official agenda — what is known in Parliament as the order paper.

⁹ Industrial Coinage, Nation’s Business, June, 1942, quoting This Fascinating Railroad Business, by Robert S. Henry; New York, 1942.

¹⁰ In England, says Horwill, can means a vessel for holding liquids, but it seems to be ousting tin for other purposes. A Truck by Any Other Name, by Robert Lynd; London News Chronicle, May 22, 1943: “I hate to see the Food Ministry constantly using the word canned where the traditional English word is tinned.”

¹¹ As She Is Spoke in the United States, by J. H. M., Glasgow Evening Citizen, Aug. 29, 1936: “All sweets, even chocolates, are candy or candies.” But the English use sugar-candy to designate what Americans call rock-candy, and Mr. James E. Walker, chief librarian of the London Public Libraries, tells me that candy, in its American sense, is “in common use in Durham and Northumberland.”

¹² Or, confectioner’s.

¹ In England cane is used for a very slender stick.

² Lord Harewood in the London Daily Telegraph, July 2, 1936: “We should like to see these fun-fairs run in such a manner that they are not eye-sores to the neighbourhood.”

³ Carrousel, which is a loan from the French, has nothing to do with the word carousal, meaning a drinking-bout or other orgy.

⁴ The DAE shows that Harvard issued a catalogue so early as 1682.

⁵ The DAE traces catnip to 1712 and marks it an Americanism. French: herbe du chat; German: katzenmünze. H. W. Seaman: “Our movie-trained smarties write glibly of poison-ivy and catnip without knowing what the words mean. Catnip has no commercial value here. I have asked several druggists and none has heard of its use as a kitten’s hooch.”

⁶ News of the World (London), Oct. 23, 1938: “Mrs. Maude Booth, of Ipswich, has been forbidden ever again to enter ’a shop known as a stores’. The ban was placed on her when she was put on probation for two years on a conviction for stealing two bars of soap from a multiple stores.” But since c. 1930 chain-store has been in increasing use in England. Headline in the Sunderland Echo, Jan. 15, 1940: “Mammoth R.A.F. Chain-Store.” See five-and-ten. Also, see the Seaman list at the end of the last section.

⁷ Do You Speak American?, by John Blunt, London Daily Mail, Aug. 17, 1932: “When you want to pay your bill you ask for a check.”

⁸ The DAE finds checkers in the letter-book of Samuel Sewall for 1712. The NED traces draughts to c. 1300. Mr. James E. Walker, before cited, tells me that checkers is in use in the north of England.

⁹ Please Speak English, by Dale Warren, Seven Seas, Spring, 1939, p. 26: “A left-luggage office is simply a place where you check your bag.”

¹⁰ The NED traces cheese-cloth, in English use, to 1741, but it had appeared in America, as the DAE shows, in 1657. Butter-muslin seems to be relatively recent in England.

¹¹ Chicken is an old word in English, traced by the NED to c. 950, and Apperson reports an early form of the proverb, “Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched,” in 1577. But the English, in general, use the term only to indicate very young fowl. In the United States it may designate an old rooster or hen. The DAE traces chicken-pie to 1733. chicken-soup to 1816, chicken-house and -yard to 1853, chicken-feed to 1865, chicken-salad to 1888 and chicken-dinner to 1896. All are Americanisms.

¹ American and English, by Claude de Crespigny, American Speech, June, 1926, p. 492: “The City Hall, to an Englishman, is a town hall, a guild hall, or in the case of the London County Council, a Spring Gardens.”

² Advertisement in the London Morning Post, May 21, 1938, with a picture of a clapboarded house: “Walls: cedar shiplap.” The DAE marks clapboard an Americanism and traces it to 1637.

³ News of the World (London) June 12, 1938: “There is to be an office slum clearance — a mass attack on the thousands of insanitary and overcrowded offices which abound in London.… Every local authority [must make] returns showing the extent of the cleansing campaign.” In Dublin the street-cleaning department is called the cleansing department. (Cleanliness, Irish Times, Dec. 30, 1939).

⁴ The DAE traces clipping in this sense to 1838 and marks it an Americanism.

⁵ Durrant, the Romeike of England, calls his business Durrant’s Press Cuttings.

⁶ New York Times Magazine, quoted in Writer’s Monthly, Oct., 1927, p. 337: “Garments flap in the breeze … attached to the line with a peg instead of a pin.”

⁷ Or kerosene. Kerosene is traced by the DAE to 1855 and coal-oil to 1858, and both are marked Americanisms. See paraffin.

⁸ “I have received a clipping from an American paper,” wrote G. K. Chesterton in 1934, “stating on the authority of Professor Howard Wilson that America’s greatest contributions to civilization are plumbers, dentists and the collar-button.… My ignorance may horrify the world — but what is a collar-button?” I take this from Prams, Trams and Collar-Buttons, by Frank Sullivan, New York American, May 26, 1934. It is hard to believe that Chesterton wrote clipping: the English term is cutting; but I let it go. The DAE marks collar-button an Americanism, and traces it to 1886. It must be older.

⁹ Commencement was in use in the English universities in the Fourteenth Century, and was apparently borrowed from the French. At Oxford, two centuries later, act was substituted but Oxford has returned to it. When it began to be used in the United States to designate the closing orgies of lesser schools I do not know. The NED’s first example of speech-day is from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, 1848. It is used only in the so-called public-schools, corresponding to the American prep schools.

¹ The DAE traces commutation ticket to 1849 and marks it an Americanism.

² London Times Literary Supplement, Aug. 19, 1939: “The commuters of America … are brothers and sisters under the skin to our own suburban season-ticket holders.” Commuter is traced by the DAE to 1863, and to commute to 1865.

³ As She Is Spoke in the United States, by J. H. M., Glasgow Evening Citizen, Aug. 29, 1936: “There will be no guard on the train, but an official with exactly the same duties whom you call conductor.” The English use bus-conductor and tram-conductor. Conductor was used in America, in the sense of a man in charge of a stage-coach, so early as 1790.

⁴ Advertisement in the London Morning Post, July 24, 1936, under a picture showing a small girl eating a banana and a boy holding an ice-cream cone: “A banana for the lady, a cornet for the gent.” In Baltimore I have encountered a sign reading ice-cream cohens.

⁵ Confidence game is traced by the DAE to 1867 and marked an Americanism.

⁶ The authority here is Horwill. He says also that a cook-stove is a cooking-stove in England.

⁷ New York Times Magazine, quoted in Writer’s Monthly, Oct., 1927, p. 335: “A street does not have corners in England, but turnings; neither does it have a head or foot. English thoroughfares possess tops and bottoms.”

⁸ Anglo-American Equations, by William Feather, American Speech, Dec., 1940, p. 444. The DAE traces cornstarch to 1857. Before then it seems to have been called cornflour in the United States also.

⁹ Corporation law is company law in England. The English, of course, know the meaning of corporation in the American sense, but they tend to restrict the word to municipal corporations. See Horwill, p. 85. See president and Inc.

¹⁰ Councilman is old in English, but it is seldom used. The DAE traces the American councilmanic to 1861.

¹¹ Taxicabs and Tips, by E. R. Thackwell, London Observer, May 24, 1936: “The prohibition or the crawling taxi is long overdue.”

¹² In England, says Horwill, “crystal is used in this sense by watchmakers only.” I Discover America, by Kenneth Adam, London Star, Nov. 30, 1937: “I broke my watch-glass yesterday. The jeweller to whom I took it could not make head or tail of what I wanted until I held out the watch dumbly. ‘Ah,’ he nodded. ‘You want a new crystal.’ ”

¹ Custom-made is an Americanism, traced by the DAE to 1855.

² In this sense the DAE traces cut to 1862 and marks it an Americanism.

³ London Mirror, Sept. 19, 1935: “I’d like to build a sun-trap house, designed to catch each ray of golden sunlight.”

⁴ E. O. Cutler in the New York Times, Feb. 14, 1937: “I suggest the use of Summer time instead of the more cumbersome daylight-saving time. Summer time seems to be in general use in Europe and South America.” I am indebted here to Mr. Edgar Gahan, of Westmount, Quebec.

⁵ In this sense the DAE traces deck to 1853. Cold deck followed in the 60s.

⁶ An assault upon a baker’s roundsman was reported in the London Morning Post, Nov. 25, 1935.

⁷ Americans Bound Coronationwards Should Read This Alphabet, London Daily Express, April 28, 1937: “In England it is a horserace, not a hat. If you want to bet call it the Darby; if you want headgear call it a bowler.” In Australia it is a boxer.

⁸ In England, says Horwill, dessert means only “uncooked fruit, nuts, etc.” In America it includes “pies, puddings, etc.”

⁹ Mr. Maurice Walshe of London; private communication, Feb. 22, 1937: “A road detour is, according to the Automobile Association, a loopway.” The commoner English term used to be road diversion, but Mr. P. E. Cleator tells me that detour is coming in.

¹⁰ The DAE traces dime-novel to 1865. It is now obsolete, save historically, as penny-dreadful is in England.

¹¹ The DAE traces dining-car to 1839 and diner to 1890, and marks both Americanisms.

¹² U. S. and British Staff Officers Overcome Language Difficulties, by Milton Bracker, New York Times, July 1, 1943. The NED traces pannikin to 1823. It marks dipper “chiefly U. S.” The DAE traces dipper to 1783 in American use and marks it an Americanism.

¹³ Washer was given as the English name for a dishpan in a chapter entitled Selling American Goods in Great Britain, in a handbook, The United Kingdom, issued by the Department of Commerce in 1930. I am indebted here to Mr. R. M. Stephenson, chief of the European section of the division of regional information.

¹ Advertisement in the Countryman, Oct., 1937, p. 41: “Write for samples and prices, and the name of the nearest stockist.” Advertisement in the London News Observer, June 18, 1936: “Post this coupon for … the name of the nearest stockist.”

² District, in this sense, is traced by the DAE to 1712 and marked an Americanism.

³ Though every criminal offense is prosecuted in England in the name of the crown, the actual prosecution was left, until 1879, to persons aggrieved. Under the Prosecution of Offenses Act of that year, followed by others in 1884 and 1908, something like the American system was set up, but even today the director of public prosecutions and his staff do not intervene invariably.

⁴ Topics of the Times, New York Times, Sept. 29, 1943: “With us a dock is what the British call a wharf. With them a dock is the body of water enclosed within wharves, the thing we call a basin. They say East India Docks and we say Erie Basin. If an American on furlough in London were to tell his English buddy in fun to go and jump off the dock the English soldier would reply, ‘But, I say, a chap can’t jump off a hole in the water, you know.’ ” See also What is a Dock? P. L. A. Monthly, Nov., 1943, p. 306.

⁵ In England the domestic postal rates ore inland also.

⁶ American and English, by Claude de Crespigny, American Speech, June, 1926, p. 491: “Downtown districts in England are called the City because the metropolitan areas take their cue from London.”

⁷ Now commonly called shorts. Long drawers for men are obsolescent.

⁸ Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed., 1929, Vol. VII, p. 641: “Dredging … deals with the process of removing materials lying under water.… The machines employed by engineers to that end are termed dredgers (dredges in America).”

⁹ Druggist is old in English, but is seldom used today.

¹⁰ Pharmacy is known in England, but is seldom used. Drug-store is traced by the DAE to 1819 and marked an Americanism.

¹¹ The DAE traces dry goods-store to 1789 and marks it an Americanism.

¹² Says Mr. A. D. Jacobs of Manchester: “We use dumb-waiter to mean a small table on wheels for transporting food from one room to another.”

¹³ London Daily Telegraph, Sept. 4, 1937: “At the Weymouth inquest yesterday on a newly-born unidentified male child found on Monday on a municipal refuse tip it was revealed that death was caused by a blow on the head.”

¹⁴ The DAE traces editorial to 1830. It was denounced by Richard Grant White in Words and Their Uses, 1870, but has survived.

¹ So denominated, with pictures of electric heaters, in various English newspaper advertisements.

² The DAE marks elevator an Americanism and traces it to 1787, but it was not used to indicate a machine for lifting human beings until the 50s. Elevator-boy is first recorded in 1882, elevator-shaft in 1885, and elevator-man in 1890. The English lift also dates from the 50s. It is one of the few Briticisms that are more pungent and succinct than the corresponding Americanisms. Elevator in the American sense of a building for storing grain is traced by the DAE to 1858.

³ But the union of the English engine-drivers is called the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen.

⁴ Says Mr. A. D. Jacobs of Manchester: “Eraser is also used, but to English ears sounds more pedantic and official than the other term, which is commonly abbreviated to rubber.”

⁵ U. S. and British Staff Officers Overcome Language Difficulties, by Milton Bracker, New York Times, July 1, 1943. The DAE traces excelsior to 1869 and marks it an Americanism.

⁶ The first express company unearthed by the DAE was Harnden’s, which began to operate between New York and Boston March 4, 1839. Expressage, express agent, express business, express car, express charges, express company, expressman, express office, express wagon and to express are all Americanisms, but express train seems to have been used in England a few years before it appeared in the United States. London Times Literary Supplement, May 31, 1934: “The express, or, as we should say, carrier or parcels delivery companies.”

⁷ London Daily Telegraph, May 11, 1936: “She was lying on her bed, and had apparently been strangled with a piece of electric flex.” London Morning Post, Dec. 4, 1936: “The [telephone] subscriber wanted 8 feet of flex for his hand telephone.” The English call an outlet a point.

⁸ But the English use faculty to designate a department in a university, e.g., faculty of medicine.

⁹ Americans Bound Coronationwards Should Read This Alphabet, London Daily Express, April 28, 1937: “Fall. Say Autumn. There’s poetry in your word, but Keats … knew his London climate when he wrote about the season of mists and yellow frightfulness.”

¹⁰ Americanisms and Briticisms, by Brander Matthews; New York, 1892, p. 19.

¹¹ The English-Speaking Peoples, by Alistair Cooke, London Evening Standard, Dec. 1, 1936: “They ask to have the fender (the mudguard) and the windshield (the windscreen) wiped.” Seaman says that wing is usually used.

¹ The English-Speaking Peoples, by Alistair Cooke, London Evening Standard, Dec. 1, 1936: “Their filling-station is now ousting our petrol-pump.”

² The DAE’s first example of fire-bug is from a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1872. Fire-raising, in English use, is traced by the NED to 1685, but its first example of fire-raiser is dated 1891.

³ Rather curiously, fire brigade was used in the official programme of the Oriole Pageant in Baltimore, Oct. 10, 11 and 12, 1881. It is never heard in the town today. The DAE traces fire department to 1825.

⁴ “The first floor of an American building,” says Horwill, “is what would be called the ground floor in England, and the numbering of the higher floors follows according to the same reckoning,” e.g., the American second floor is the English first floor, or storey — always given the e.

⁵ Or, rather, sixpenny-store. Headline in London Telegraph and Post, March 19, 1938: “Duchess of Kent at Sixpenny Store.” It was at Slough and she bought “a pair of quoits, a kite and a toy windmill.” Bazaar is now obsolescent, and Woolworth’s is often heard.

⁶ The King’s English, by Wayne Allen, Quartermaster Review (Washington), March-April, 1943, p. 57: “You are all familiar, I am sure, with the British expression torch as compared with the American flashlight.” I am indebted here to Dr. George W. Corner.

⁷ Advertisement in the London Sunday Times, March 8, 1936: “A distinguished Modern Office Building. Carpet-Area, 11,000 Square Feet.”

⁸ Floorwalker is now virtually extinct in America. He is either an aisle-manager or a section-manager. The DAE traces the term to 1876.

⁹ Wooden Houses, by N. Newnham Davis, London Times, July 1, 1935: “The chief disadvantage of wooden (called frame in U. S. A.) houses has always been the difficulty of maintaining an equable temperature.”

¹⁰ Or goods-van. The English also use goods-train for freight-train, goods-station for freight-station or -depot, and goods-yard for freight-yard, but of late they have shown some tendency to adopt freight. American Journey, by J. A. Russell, Scottish Educational Journal, Nov. 9, 1934: “We should be prepared for freight-car for goods-van.”

¹¹ The DAE traces fruit-dealer to 1874.

¹² The DAE traces fruit-store to 1872.

¹³ London Sunday Express, Nov. 13, 1938: “Alvis are working full out to supply the demand.”

¹ See ash-can.

² Where the Pavements Become Sidewalks, by Alex Faulkner, London Telegraph and Post, May 8, 1939: “The dustman (garbage man) going about his work with an opulent-looking five-cent cigar in his mouth, the milk-carts on rubber-tyred wheels, and the armoured-car guards standing outside the banks with drawn pistols all make their distinctive contribution to the New York scene.”

³ Or simply suspender. Garter, of course, is an old word in English, and the Knights of the Garter go back to April 23, 1349. The term was not used to indicate an article of men’s wear until the 1880s. Before that time American men held up their socks with strings attached to the lower ends of their long drawers. Short drawers were brought in by the bicycle craze. See suspenders.

⁴ American Journey, by J. A. Russell, Scottish Educational Journal, Nov. 9, 1934: “Gas for petrol we are — or should be—prepared for.”

⁵ This French phrase, meaning remaining at the postoffice, is traced by the NED, in English use, to 1768.

⁶ The English-Speaking Peoples, by Alistair Cooke, London Evening Standard, Dec. 1, 1936: “[The Americans] talk with the [English] mechanic about the generator, which he calls a dynamo, and admire the shape of the hood, which he knows only as a bonnet.”

⁷ Advertisement in the London Telegraph and Post, Feb. 22, 1938, with a picture of ginger-snaps: “Romary’s ginger-nuts just melt!” Ginger-snap is not unknown in England, but the NED’s first English example is dated 1868. The DAE traces it in American use to 1805.

⁸ As She Is Spoke in the United States, by J. H. M., Glasgow Evening Citizen, Aug. 29, 1936: “Even if he is a Christian he may not know that he has a Christian name; you ask him what his given-name is.”

⁹ New York Times Magazine, quoted in Writer’s Monthly, Oct., 1927, p. 335: “Mineral-waggons take the place of coal gondolas.”

¹⁰ The DAE traces grab-bag to 1855 and marks it an Americanism.

¹¹ The DAE traces grade in this sense to 1808 and marks it an Americanism.

¹² In American Speech, Oct., 1942, p. 208, Dwight L. Bolinger traces grade in this sense to 1835.

¹³ Level crossing has been in use in England since 1841. The DAE traces grade crossing to 1890, but it must be much older.

¹ Sometimes alumnus is used. America Revisited, by Cyril Alington, London Sunday Times, Feb. 14, 1937: “They [Americans] have leisure to speak of alumni when we speak of boys.”

² Grocery is traced by the DAE to 1791, and marked an Americanism.

³ I am indebted here to the late Sir E. Denison Ross. Hall, in England, ordinarily means a large apartment, e.g., music-hall or the hall of a castle. It is also used in special senses at the universities. Servants’ hall likewise shows a special British use. But hall-bedroom, hallroom, hall-boy and hallway are all Americanisms.

⁴ Learn English Before You Go, by Frank Loxley Griffin, Atlantic Monthly, June, 1932, p. 75: “In the ironmongery department one can purchase what Americans ignorantly call hardware.” Hardware is not an Americanism, but hardware-store is, and the DAE traces it to 1789.

⁵ The Spoken Word That May Occasionally Baffle, by Joyce M. Horner, Yorkshire Evening Post (Leeds) Sept. 1, 1933: “The [American] hash is near to being shepherd’s pie.” Hash is mentioned in Pepys’ Diary, Jan. 13, 1662/63, but it seems to be but little used in England. The DAE traces hash-house to 1875, hashery to 1872, hash-slinger to 1868, and to settle one’s hash to 1809; all are Americanisms.

⁶ Fell In Love With Prison, News of the World (London), June 7, 1936: “I have lorry-jumped my way from Manchester to London.” Partridge says that the British soldiers began to use lorry-hop in 1915.