⁷ Dos and Don’ts For Doughboys, by H. W. Seaman, Manchester Sunday Chronicle, March 22, 1942: “Hockey is here called ice-hockey. The game the British call hockey is played on the ground with a ball.”

⁸ Hog, says Horwill, “is rarely used in England nowadays except figuratively, e.g., road-hog.” Partridge says that road-hog is an Americanism, adopted by the English c. 1898.

⁹ The DAE traces hog-grower to 1869.

¹⁰ London Daily Sketch, July 14, 1938: “A woman shopkeeper at Knock-holt was threatened by two men, armed with what appeared to be a revolver, in her shop yesterday and robbed of about £5 in cash. The raiders also visited her cottage nearby and took about £2.”

¹ See generator.

² On May 14, 1936 the London Daily Telegraph printed a picture of a hook-and-ladder in action, captioned “A Fire-Escape Used by Painters.” The DAE traces hook-and-ladder company to 1821 and hook-and-ladder truck to 1882, and marks them both Americanisms.

³ A Bristol correspondent of an unidentified English newspaper, c. 1936: “English girls who have thoughts of getting married collect things to that end in what they call their bottom drawer. A Canadian girl who married my nephew always spoke of her hope chest.”

⁴ London News-Chronicle, Oct. 31, 1936: “The Ministry of Transport has failed to convince the local authorities that … electric hooters should be silenced day and night.” Advertisement in the Cape Times (Cape Town), June 18, 1938: “Nash Sedans have Twin Hooters.”

⁵ U. S. and British Staff Officers Overcome Language Difficulties, by Milton Bracker, New York Times, July 1, 1943. On July 5 the Times printed a letter from David Allan Ross of Budd Lake, N. J., saying “I have never heard a hot-water bottle or bag called anything but that in England. Stomach-warmer, at least in army circles, would be a euphemism for bellyband.” But Col. Wayne Allen, U.S.A., listed stomach-warmer as the English equivalent of hot-water bag in the Quartermaster Review (Washington), March-April, 1943, p. 58. So did the Stars and Stripes, June 15, 1943.

⁶ London Daily Telegraph, Nov. 1, 1935: “Housebreaker’s Fate. After over 50 years as a house-demolisher Henry Elbury was killed yesterday.” London Times, April 5, 1936: “The School of Oriental Studies, in Finsbury Circus, is now in the hands of the housebreakers.” In the United States a housebreaker is a burglar.

⁷ Huckster is not an Americanism, but it is used much oftener in the United States than in England.

⁸ “An Englishman,” says Horwill, “hunts foxes, stags, otter(s) and even hares. When he pursues grouse or partridge he does not go hunting but shooting.” In the United States gunning is often used. See Notes on “The American Language,” by Stuart Robertson, American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 187.

⁹ Please Speak English, by Dale Warren, Seven Seas, Spring, 1939, p. 26: “[In England] ice-cream is always an ice.”

¹⁰ The King’s English, by Wayne Allen, Quartermaster Review (Washington), March-April, 1943, p. 58: “A tag, identification, is an identity disk.”

¹¹ i.e., limited, from limited liability company. See corporation.

¹ Aids to the Talkies, by D. W. B(rogan), Oxford Magazine, Oct. 17, 1935: “The difference in attitude involved in the American for inquiry-office being bureau of information is left to the reader to appraise.”

² The plural is used in the United States when more than one inning is spoken of.

³ News of the World (London), July 31, 1938: “Hire-purchase agreement means an agreement under which the goods become the property of the hirer upon the payment of all the agreed instalments. Credit-sale agreement means an agreement for the sale of goods under which the purchase-price is payable by five or more instalments.” Mr. P. E. Cleator tells me that instalment plan is now often used in England.

⁴ D. Cameron-Forrester, author of A Dictionary of Life Assurance, explained in John o’ London’s Weekly, Sept. 3, 1937, that assurance is used because the insured, if he keeps up his payments, is assured of benefits soon or late, whereas the holder of, say, a fire insurance policy may pay for years and never have a fire.

⁵ See domestic mails. The DAE traces internal revenue to 1796.

⁶ Sometimes doorkeeper. The Trial of Professor John White Webster, by George Dilnot; London, 1928, p. 5: “This was the college caretaker, or, in American terminology, the janitor.”

⁷ The DAE traces jimmy to 1854. It does not list to jimmy.

⁸ See Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed.: New York, 1929, Vol. XIII, p. 659.

⁹ The DAE traces landslide to 1838 and marks it an Americanism.

¹⁰ London Daily Telegraph, Feb. 1, 1936: “Major Courtauld claims damages for alleged breach of agreement relating to a let to him for five years.” Lease, of course, is used in England, and the NED traces it to 1292, but let seems to be common in advertisements and law reports.

¹¹ London Leader, March 27, 1943: “Other Yankee words that come to mind are legal holiday for bank holiday, and union suits for combinations.”

¹² A Guide to British Educational Terms, by Herbert B. Grimsditch, Wilson Bulletin (New York), May, 1936, p. 578: “Men of both the ancient universities wear blue shirts for athletics, Oxford dark and Cambridge light. To be a blue is to be chosen to represent one’s university in a team. Football, cricket, rowing and other consecrated sports carry full blues; while less popular games, like hockey and lacrosse, give only half-blues.”

¹³ In England a life-guard is a member of the Household Cavalry. In the United States, a life-saver is a member of the former Life-saving Service of the Coast Guard, now the Beach Patrol Division. Life-guard in the American sense is traced by the DAE to 1896, life-saver to 1887, and life-saving station to 1858.

¹ London Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 16, 1935: “By life-preservers are clearly meant what we call life-belts.” See blackjack.

² Limited is traced by the DAE, in American use, to 1879. The first English example is dated 1883. See express.

³ “A row of persons waiting their turn,” says Horwill, “is in England a queue. In America it is a line.” Queue seems to have been introduced by Carlyle in his French Revolution, 1837. To queue up is traced by the NED Supplement to 1927.

⁴ Living-room is not exclusively American and sitting-room is certainly not exclusively English.

⁵ The first recorded English example of long-distance is from American usage.

⁶ In England lumber usually means discarded objects, as in lumber-room.

⁷ Horwill says that lunch, in England, always means a midday meal; in America it may designate a light repast at any time. A lunch-counter is a snack-bar to the English.

⁸ The English call a sewing-machine operator a machinist. Want-ad in London News-Chronicle May 4, 1936: “Machinists required for ladies’ gowns.”

⁹ Americans Bound Coronationwards Should Read This Alphabet, London Daily Express, April 28, 1937: “Ask at your hotel for your post or your letters, and you’ll get your mail safely.” A Truck By Any Other Name, by Robert Lynd, London News-Chronicle, May 22, 1943: “The English traveler in America gets all the happier sensation of being a traveller when in a hotel he has to ask for his mail instead of his letters.” Horwill says that the English use mail very little, though mail-train, mail-bag and mail-van occur.

¹⁰ Learn English Before You Go, by Frank Loxley Griffin, Atlantic Monthly, June, 1932, p. 775: “There are no mail-boxes from which mail is collected. The lack of them is not a serious inconvenience since there are a number of letter-boxes, which are cleared frequently.” A letter-box is attached to a wall; a pillar-box is on a stand. The NED traces pillar-box to 1858 and letter-box to 1849. Mail-box is not an Americanism, but to mail, mailability, mailable, mail-carrier, mail-day, mail-matter, mail-order, mail-pouch, mail-

¹ The DAE traces railway-postoffice to 1874, and mail-car to 1855.

² Marriage lines is confined to the vulgar. On higher levels marriage certificate is used.

³ Heard and Overheard, P.M. (New York), Nov. 24, 1943: “[In England] an emcee is a compère.” New York Studies, London Daily Telegraph, May 12, 1936: “Naunton Wayne is the witty compère this week, and he has some clever acts to introduce.”

⁴ Horwill says that maybe has “almost become an archaism and a dialect word” in England.

⁵ “In the United States,” says the DAE, “molasses has entirely supplanted treacle.” Molasses is not an Americanism: the NED traces it in English use to 1582. But it is now supplanted by treacle, first recorded in 1694. The DAE traces molasses in American use to 1666, molasses-candy to 1809, molasses-cake to 1836, molasses-jug to 1839, and molasses-barrel to 1846. All the latter are Americanisms. Molasses is still used in England to designate a heavy, crude syrup, mainly used in cattle feeds.

⁶ London Daily Mail, June 17, 1936: “Life is complicated enough without any help from outside in the way of throwing spanners into the works.

⁷ As She Is Spoke in the United States, by J. H. M., Glasgow Evening Citizen, Aug. 29, 1936: “You may take the trolley, also called the street-car or surface-car, but never the tram. In any case the driver is the motorma.”

⁸ These terms, of course, are for the house, not the film. The film, in both countries, is the pictures; in the United States it may also be the movies or film (or fillum), and in England the flicker or flick. All the terms for pictures are usually heard in the plural. In 1927 the London Mercury dropped the Cinema title on its film article and substituted Movies, and since then various other English publications have followed suit.

⁹ London Morning Post, Aug. 25, 1936: “Take, for instance, the question of moving house. Every woman in her heart rejoices in the event, as in a festival. It stirs her to the depths of her being, as if it were a translation to another and a better world.”

¹⁰ The DAE traces mucilage in this sense to 1859 and makes it an Americanism.

¹¹ Please Speak English, by Dale Warren, Seven Seas, Spring, 1939, p. 26: “I presume that in some of the smarter places they know what a napkin is, but many’s the apple-cheeked lass who responds more readily if you let it be known that a serviette is what you desire.” The NED defines napkin as “a square piece of linen, used at meals to wipe the fingers and lips,… a serviette,” and traces it in English use to c. 1489. It traces serviette to 1420. There are Englishmen who deny indignantly that serviette is ever used by respectable people in their country. Vandalism?, John a’ London’s Weekly, March 18, 1938: “To plant palm trees and pampas grass on the Devon hills is like calling a table napkin in an Englishman’s dining-room a serviette.”

¹ Tie, in fact, is in common use in America. Black tie, on an invitation, means that dinner-coats (or tuxedos) are to be worn.

² A railway-station newsstand, in England, is a bookstall. The DAE traces newsstand to 1871 and marks it an Americanism.

³ The DAE traces notions to 1796 and marks it an Americanism. At the start it included anything sold by a peddler, e.g., clocks and wooden ware, but it began to be restricted to its present meaning after the Civil War. The English-Speaking Peoples, by Alistair Cooke, London Evening Standard, Dec. 1, 1936: “He asks for the notion counter and a bright girl assistant, who has heard that it is the American name for haberdashery, directs him there.”

⁴ Horwill says that oarlock is “seldom heard” in England.

⁵ The DAE does not list breakfast-food, but it traces cereal to 1900.

⁶ Learn English Before You Go, by Frank Loxley Griffin, Atlantic Monthly, June, 1932, p. 775: “A tenant is not the occupant, but the occupier of the building, and he does not rent his quarters — he hires them, or they are let to him.”

⁷ London Daily Telegraph, July 11, 1936: “Mr. G. W. Simpson, a dentist, was attacked in his surgery in the Broadway, Southall, last night.” The Mr. before the name and the the before Broadway will be noted.

⁸ T. L. Nichols: Forty Years of American Life; London, 1864, Vol. I, p. 344: “In the office, as the American lawyer’s chambers are called.” I take this from the DAE.

⁹ Please Speak English, by Dale Warren, Seven Seas, Spring, 1939, p. 26: “In England you invariably … live in a street.” A Guide to British Educational Terms, by Herbert B. Grimsditch, Wilson Bulletin (New York), May, 1936, p. 576: “On the street pulls the Englishman up a little queerly, for he thinks of a street (not a road) as a canyon, and says in, only using on the street for daughters of joy.”

¹⁰ The authority here is Horwill.

¹¹ The DAE traces orchestra, in this sense, to 1856 and marks it an Americanism.

¹ In the United States by-law designates only the rules and regulations of private associations.

² British Names Headache to Supply Men, Stars and Stripes, June 15, 1943: “The British list … an overcoat as a greatcoat.” But overcoat is also used in England.

³ Package is by no means exclusively American, and parcel is often used in the United States, as in parcels-post.

⁴ New York Speaking, by T. Kerr Ritchie, Northern Daily Telegraph (Blackburn) May 20, 1939: “[In America] the larder is a pantry.” Pantry is not an Americanism.

⁵ Letter from a Canadian in the Manchester Guardian, reprinted in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Oct. 5, 1937: “What those quaint folk in Britain call paraffin the United States Americans call kerosene and we Canadians call coal-oil. What we call paraffin you poetically acclaim as white wax.” See coal-oil.

⁶ An unidentified London paper: “Many of the large houses were pulled down and the sites converted into car-parks.”

⁷ Both terms are now obsolescent: Pullman is already in wide use in England, and chair-car in the United States. The DAE traces parlor-car to 1868 and marks it an Americanism. Chair-car, also so marked, is traced to 1895. Pullman-car goes back to 1870. In the United States Pullman usually signifies a sleeper. The NED traces saloon-carriage to 1855.

⁸ Horwill says that in England parole “is used in relation to prisoners of war only.”

⁹ Officially, police constable, usually abbreviated by the English newspapers to P.C. The DAE marks patrolman an Americanism. Patrol-wagon is another.

¹⁰ But see the Seaman list at the end of the last chapter. Peanut is traced by the DAE to 1807. It was preceded by ground-nut, 1622, and ground-pea, 1769. Goober apparently did not come in until the 40s of the last century. The NED traces monkey-nut to 1880 in England; apparently the English were not familiar with Arachis hypogaea before that time. The DAE traces peanut-politics to 1887, but peanut was used as an adjective of disparagement so early as 1836. Peanut-candy is traced to 1856, peanut-stand to 1866, peanut-gallery to 1897, and peanut-brittle and -butter to 1903.

¹¹ I have never heard pebbly beach.

¹² Penitentiary is used in England to designate a reformatory. It began to be used for a prison in the United States early in the Nineteenth Century. The DAE traces penitentiary-offense to 1855.

¹³ New York Speaking, by T. Kerr Ritchie, Northern Daily Telegraph (Blackburn), May 20, 1939: “[In America] nibs are pen points.”

¹ Do You Speak American?, by John Blunt, London Daily Mail, Aug. 17, 1932: “A full stop is a period.”

² In 1935, when Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed was being done as a movie in Hollywood, the author made a number of changes in the script, seeking to substitute English locutions for Americanisms. Associated Press dispatch from Hollywood, July 31: “Where Torpenhow says: ‘He had some very important personal business,’ Kipling’s question is, ‘What does this word personal mean?’ He substitutes private.” So, in English usage, before letter, etc.

³ As She Is Spoke in the United States, by J. H. M., Glasgow Evening Citizen, Aug. 29, 1936: “What’s that in that window? Gramophones? No, phonographs, or victrolas.

⁴ Dos and Don’ts for Doughboys, by H. W. Seaman, Manchester Sunday Chronicle, March 22, 1942: “What you call an apple pie we should have to call an apple tart with a lid on it.”

⁵ Hong Kong Sunday Herald, Aug. 7, 1938: “Just as the ball crashed past the pins for a broken leg [the thrower-up] side-stepped with the easy grace of a matador.” The DAE does not list pin-boy.

⁶ Horwill says that pitcher is “nowadays an archaic or poetical word in England.”

⁷ See sirloin.

⁸ Postpaid is not an Americanism, but it is used much oftener in the United States than in England.

⁹ Poolroom, in the United States, also means a room in which bets on horse-races, etc., are taken.

¹⁰ Dos and Don’ts For Doughboys, by H. W. Seaman, Manchester Sunday Chronicle, March 22, 1942: “If you want French-fried [potatoes] you must ask for chips. If you want chips you must ask for crisps.”

¹¹ The DAE traces pot-pie in American use to 1824. Mr. James E. Walker, before cited, tells me that it is in use in the North of England.

¹² The DAE traces preferred stock to 1850 and marks it an Americanism.

¹³ Do You Speak American?, by John Blunt, London Daily Mail, Aug. 17, 1932: “The chairman of a company is its president.” The American chairman of the board is a different functionary. The DAE traces president, in this sense, to 1781, and marks it an Americanism.

¹⁴ H. W. Horwill in the London Times Literary Supplement, April 16, 1938, p. 264: “Your … reviewer of an American work on landslides notes, among errors that demand correction in a future edition, the author’s use of prying in the sense of prising. I am afraid it is unlikely that this correction will ever be made, for this use of the word was not due to a slip of the pen but was intentional. It is an Americanism. One of the definitions of pry given in the New Webster is ‘to raise or move, or pull (apart) or attempt to do so, with a pry or lever; to prize’ … In his ‘Three Centuries of Harvard,’ Professor S. E. Morison writes: ‘Two years later he was found to be lodging with various undergraduates, and was only pried loose from the college by the faculty’s forbidding the students to feed or lodge him.’ ”

¹ Formerly board-school. A public-school, in England, is an establishment for the sons of the rich, usually endowed. It corresponds to the more fashionable sort of American prep-school. The DAE traces prep-school to 1895. Public-school, in the American sense, is traced to c. 1669.

² In England publisher means a book-publisher.… An English newspaper may have a publisher; he is not, however, the owner, but corresponds roughly to what Americans call a business manager.

³ Pumps is old in English, traced by the NED to 1555, but it seems to have gone out in the 80s. The DAE’s first American example is dated 1726. The Spoken Word That May Occasionally Baffle, by Joyce M. Horner, Yorkshire Evening Post (Leeds), Sept. 1, 1933: “In the [American] shoe department confusion can arise if one asks for court-shoes, for which the American is pumps.”

⁴ The English-Speaking Peoples, by Alistair Cooke, London Evening Standard, Dec. 1, 1936: “The race-course they call race-track.”

⁵ King Edward VIII used radio in a speech soon after his accession, and was denounced for the Americanism, but the official organ of the B.B.C. is the Radio Times (Robert Lynd, London News-Chronicle, May 22, 1943).

⁶ Learn English Before You Go, by Frank Loxley Griffin, Atlantic Monthly, June, 1932, p. 775: “There are no railroads in England, and the railway trains do not have engineers.” But see engineer. Railway is by no means unknown in the United States. On Oct. 4, 1940, p. 14, the Chicago Tribune printed an article showing that of the 137 Class I railroads of the country, 69 use railroad in their names, 65 use railway, and three use neither. But an American always speaks of the railroads, not the railways. Street-railways are always so called in the United States.

⁷ The DAE’s first example of raise in the sense of an increase in pay is marked an Americanism and dated 1898. The word must be much older. See Raise or Rise?, by Helen C. Munroe, American Speech, Aug., 1931, pp. 407–10.

⁸ I Discover America, by Kenneth Adam, London Star, Nov. 30, 1937: “Underdone beef is, of all things, rare.” Aids to the Talkies, by D. W. B(rogan), Oxford Magazine, Oct. 17, 1935: “Applied to under-done meat, rare … can easily be heard in Scotland.”

¹ The DAE traces recess, in this sense, to 1860, and marks it an Americanism.

² The DAE traces roadster for an automobile to 1908, and marks it an Americanism.

³ Horwill says that “in England joint is preferred.”

⁴ Switchback is in use in the United States.

⁵ The DAE traces roomer to 1871, rooming-house to 1893 and room-mate to 1789, and marks them all Americanisms.

⁶ Rooster is marked “chiefly U. S. and dialect” by the NED. Its first example, dated 1822, is of American origin. The DAE says that the use of the term “has been ascribed to … squeamishness about using the word cock.” Mr. Percy Marks reminds me that chicken-breeders use cockerel.

⁷ Cape Times (Cape Town), July 16, 1938: “In the intaglio section of today’s magazine supplement you will find more high-level photographs.”

⁸ The DAE marks roundhouse an Americanism and traces it to 1870. The word exists in other senses in English usage.

⁹ As She Is Spoke in the United States, by J. H. M., Glasgow Evening Citizen, Aug. 29, 1936: “If you want a return ticket you ask for a round-trip.”

¹⁰ From the cross-examination of a bankrupt in the London Bankruptcy Court, 1938:

Q. You know the expression stumer cheques?

A. Too well.

Q. I have some which you have passed at home and abroad.

Partridge says that stumer originally meant “a horse against which money may be laid without risk,” and suggests that it may come from the Yiddish. In the sense of a rubber-check he traces it to 1890.

¹¹ H. W. Seaman informs me that char-a-banc is dying in England, but that some of the English roadside pubs still exhibit signs reading Charabanc Parties Not Accommodated. The term is pronounced sharabang or sharrybang.

¹² Mr. A. D. Jacobs of Manchester tells me that run “is making headway” in England.

¹ London Morning Post, Jan. 1, 1936: “Rutabaga … is a perfectly good English word (spelled ruta-baga), though not much in use now. Brassic rutabaga is the Latin name for the Swede or (as we used to call it in the army) horse turnip.” The rutabaga was introduced into England from Sweden c. 1800 and into the United States soon afterward.

² Dos and Don’ts For Doughboys, by H. W. Seaman, Manchester Sunday Chronicle, March 22, 1942: “A pub is not a saloon, but a group of bars of different social ranks. The saloon-bar is the swellest and the public-bar is the lowest.”

³ British and American, by Josiah Combs, American Speech, April, 1941, p. 153: “William Feather reports that the British magazines that use copy prepared in his Cleveland office [substitute] blackleg for scab.”

⁴ Scallion is by no means unknown to the English. The NED traces it to the Fourteenth Century, and Mr. A. T. Grime of London tells me (private communication, Aug. 8, 1940) that it was in constant use in Northeastern Lancashire in his youth. He says that scally-onion was also used.

⁵ When the English use schedule they make the first syllable shed, not sked.

⁶ London Objerver, Feb. 9, 1936: “University College will award a Sir William Meyer studentship, of the value of about £120, for two years.” But scholarship is also used in England.

⁷ Headline in the London Morning Post, Sept. 25, 1935: Rugby Scrum Fatality.

⁸ See first floor.

⁹ The English-Speaking Peoples, by Alistair Cooke, London Evening Standard, Dec. 1, 1936: “They ask for a sedan, and with a little difficulty get what we call a saloon-car (a phrase that to an American means nothing, but in a vision might mean a rowdy bar on wheels, attached to a train).”

¹⁰ London Daily Express, Sept. 2, 1936: “He sold up practically all of his home.”

¹¹ But Venetian blind is familiar in the United States. The DAE traces shade to 1867 and marks it an Americanism.

¹² The First Reader, by Harry Hansen, New Bedford (Mass.) Mercury, July 27, 1935: “In America the professional man hangs out his shingle, meaning a signboard. In England he puts up his brass plate.”

¹³ See AL4, p. 122. Efforts have been made to introduce the English boot in the United States, but in vain, for the term still indicates, to an American, a foot-covering reaching to the knee. “Inconsistently enough,” says Horwill, “an American calls the boy who shines his shoes a bootblack, while an Englishman calls the boy who blacks his boots a shoeblack.” See boot.

¹ American and English, by Claude de Crespigny, American Speech, June, 1926, p. 492.

² Shoestring is not an Americanism, but it is used in the United States much oftener than in England, mainly because of the influence of shoe. On a shoestring is traced by the DAE to 1882.

³ Do You Speak English?, by John Blunt, London Daily Mail, Aug. 17, 1932: “Sidewalk for pavement is logical, as very few American side-walks were paved in the olden time.” A correspondent of the Liverpool Daily Post, Nov. 9, 1939, called attention to the fact that the Liverpool Corporation uses pavement to indicate the roadway, not the sidewalk. A clipping from the Industrial Daily News, Sept. 22, 1936, sent to me by Mr. P. E. Cleator, indicates that it also uses sidewalk as Americans do.

⁴ The DAE traces silent partner to 1828 and marks it an Americanism.

⁵ Silverware is not unknown in England, but it apparently did not come in there until c. 1860, whereas it was used in America in the Eighteenth Century. Flat-silver and flat-ware seem to be Americanisms.

⁶ The English-Speaking Peoples, by Alistair Cooke, London Evening Standard, Dec. 1, 1936: “What they call sirloin is what we call rump, and our sirloin is their porterhouse.”

⁷ In Australia a slingshot is a shanghai. The slingshot is becoming obsolete in America, for American boys have begun to forget their old sports and games. The DAE traces the term to 1849 and marks it an Americanism.

⁸ But kippered herring is used in America. Kipper is an old English name for the male salmon in the spawning season. But its relation to to kipper, which the NED traces to 1773, is not clear.

⁹ Advertisement in the London Morning Post, Nov. 30, 1935: “A snip! 2 magnificent Python Skins, 18 ft. and 21 ft.; EXTREMELY moderate, for disposal privately.” The NED traces snip to 1894. The DAE does not list snap in the sense here indicated, but traces it in that of a brief, sudden spell of weather to 1740, in that of a string-bean to 1844, and in that of vim and dash to 1865. It is an Americanism in all these senses. So are snap judgment, to snap the whip, snapping turtle, and to snap into it.

¹⁰ The old difference between the English and American meanings of biscuit and cracker seem to be breaking down. The English begin to use both words in our senses, and biscuit is often used in America for what was formerly a cracker, e.g., the Uneeda biscuit.

¹ New York Times Magazine, quoted in Writer’s Monthly, Oct., 1927, p. 335: “Soda fountains are soda bars tucked away in sweet shops, never at the chemist’s.”

² London Leader, March 27, 1943; “Lord Woolton’s Ministry of Food has adopted Uncle Sam’s soft drinks in the place of minerals — few of which were made from mineral waters, anyway.”

³ London Daily Express, Sept. 22, 1936: “I have just got an express delivery letter with the South Kensington postmark of 11.30 A.M. the previous day.”

⁴ Mobile Police, London Times, Feb. 22, 1937: “There has been a friendly reception for last week’s announcement in the House of Commons that the number of mobile police is to be greatly increased. It has been taken as a further and a proper acknowledgment that the duty of the police towards road-users must be educative as well as punitive.” But see AL4, p. 226, n. 1.

⁵ Aids to the Talkies, by D. W. B(rogan), Oxford Magazine, Oct. 17, 1935: “Many Americanisms are also Scoticisms, e.g., faucet for tap.” Mr. L. Clark Keating of Minneapolis (private communication, June 30, 1937) says that spigot seems to be confined to the Philadelphia-Baltimore area. He says that tap is used in up-State New York.

⁶ The English-Speaking Peoples, by Alistair Cooke, London Evening Standard, Dec. 1, 1936: “At the next counter he tries to come to the rescue of an American girl who wants a spool of thread and can make nobody understand. They go into a dumb show and begin to thread imaginary needles for the benefit of the girl behind the counter, who suddenly knows that what they’ve wanted all the time was a reel of cotton.”

⁷ The authority here is Horwill.

⁸ Squash is one of the oldest of Americanisms. It was borrowed from the Indians and is traced by the DAE to 1643.

⁹ Stairs is now common in the United States. The DAE traces stairway in American use to 1708, more than a century before it is first recorded in England.

¹⁰ Law Society and Legal Delays, London Daily Telegraph, Sept. 25, 1935: “The obvious remedy is to have a shorthand-writer.” Stenography is traced to 1602, in English use, by the NED, but all its examples of stenographer are American. The DAE traces stenographer to 1796 and marks it an Americanism. It is, of course, known to the English, but they seem to prefer shorthand-writer, especially when referring to court stenographers.

¹¹ See Chapter III, Section 3.

¹² The DAE marks straight, in this sense, an Americanism, and traces it to 1862.

¹ London correspondence of the South China Morning Post, June 11, 1936: “The Prince of Wales, who for years wore a boater, could not make boaters fashionable.”

² London Daily Telegraph, Sept. 4, 1936: “A new model 22 h.p. Ford V8 car is offered only as a four-door saloon with a swept-out tail.” See sedan. But stream-lined is often used in England.

³ I am indebted here to Mr. P. H. Muir of London.

⁴ The DAE traces string-bean to 1759 and marks it an Americanism.

⁵ As She Is Spoke in the United States, by J. H. M., Glasgow Evening Citizen, Aug. 29, 1936: “Even schoolboys and schoolgirls are students.”

⁶ Or tube. In England subway means an underground passage for persons on foot.

⁷ London Morning Post, May 6, 1936: “The Viscose Company … dividends were … maintained for the year by drawing upon surplus — or, as we should probably call it, reserve.”

⁸ Suspenders is traced by the DAE to 1810, and suspenders-button to 1833. See garter. Aids to the Talkies, by D. W. B(rogan), Oxford Magazine, Oct. 17, 1935: “A striking example was afforded by the puzzlement of a visiting English professor at Harvard who read that [William Jennings] Bryan, at the [Dayton, Tenn.] monkey trial, spoke ‘with his thumbs in his suspenders,’ this appearing to be an acrobatic feat to which all others were (as Americans used to say) ‘no a circumstance.’ ”

⁹ Or cardigan, or jumper. The Spoken Word That May Occasionally Baffle, by Joyce M. Horner, Yorkshire Evening Post (Leeds), Sept. 1, 1933: “Your Englishwoman in America … may cause some puzzlement by demanding to be shown jumpers, and will learn that all jumpers are sweaters, that cardigans, too, are sweaters, and sweaters are somewhat unhappily termed sweatshirts.”

¹⁰ As She Is Spoke in the United States, by J. H. M., Glasgow Evening Citizen, Aug. 29, 1936: “You insult the grocer by asking for fresh butter. What you wanted was sweet butter.”

¹¹ See molasses.

¹² Call Box, by Taylor Scott Hardin, New Yorker, Dec. 7, 1935: “ ‘Where’s the telephone booth?’ I interrupted. ‘Telephone booth?’ ‘Yes. Isn’t there any place I can telephone from?’ ‘Oh, a call box.’ ”

¹³ The NED says that tenpins is called American bowls in England. It is not, however, an American invention, and the traditional etymology given in AL4, p. 248, n. 1, is probably unsound. The DAE traces tenpins in American use to 1830 and tenpin-alley to 1835. A variant called duckpins originated in Baltimore in 1903. See Baltimore Duckpins, by Martin S. Day, American Speech, Dec., 1940, pp. 361–63.

¹ Murder For Pleasure, by Howard Hay craft; New York, 1941: “In America the term thriller is usually employed to indicate the sensational crime story, as distinctive from the police novel proper. In England it has come increasingly to mean the bona fide detective story. When the English wish to signify the sensational novel they say shocker.” I take this from American Speech, Feb., 1942, p. 70.

² Please Speak English, by Dale Warren, Seven Seas, Spring, 1939, p. 26: “I seldom have a need for thumbtacks, but if I did I would have to explain to the stationer that I’d be pleased to have a package of drawing-pins.”

³ Please Speak English, by Dale Warren, Seven Seas, Spring, 1939, p. 26: “A booking-clerk is just our old friend the ticket-agent.”

⁴ London Observer, Feb. 9, 1936: “The libraries have bought a lot of seats.”

⁵ The DAE traces ticket-office to 1835 and marks it an Americanism.

⁶ The DAE traces ticket-seller to 1857.

⁷ Tie is marked an Americanism by the DAE and traced to 1853. Sleeper was probably driven out of American use by the hazard of confusing it with the common American term for a sleeping-car, introduced c. 1875.

⁸ London Daily Telegraph, May 11, 1936: “Southern Railway Hold-up.” It was achieved, not by train-robbers, but by “a point failure outside Waterloo Station,” i.e., some trouble with switches.

⁹ Or W.C. Toilet is not unknown in England, but it is not common. Rest-room is apparently never used.

¹⁰ In the United States she is addressed as Miss —–; in England as Nurse or Sister.

¹¹ Mr. R. Raven-Hart tells me that in England a transom is still the bar below the fanlight, as it once was in America. See Americanisms and Briticisms, by Brander Matthews; New York, 1892, p. 21.

¹² Or, in New York, surface-car. The DAE traces trolley-car to 1891, street-car to 1862, and surface-car to 1889. All are Americanisms, as is you’re off your trolley. Trolley-ride, now obsolete, was in use c. 1900. Electric-car, now also obsolete, is traced to 1888. See motorman.

¹ Truck was used in America, before the automobile, to designate any-heavy wagon, and in that sense is traced by the DAE to 1701.

² Do You Speak American?, by John Blunt, London Daily Mail, Aug. 17, 1932: “Who could tell that truck-farming is market-gardening?” The DAE traces truck-farm to 1866, truck-farming to 1870 and truck-farmer to 1877, and marks them all Americanisms.

³ Road Hauliers Win Test Case, London Daily Telegraph, Feb. 16, 1937: “If there were good foundation for the suggestion of the railway companies that goods were carried by road at rates economic to the haulier and lower than the rates at which the railways could carry the same goods, the railway companies must seek their remedy elsewhere.”

⁴ See baggage-car. Trunk is not an Americanism, but it is seldom encountered in England.

⁵ When a Doughboy Goes Shopping in Britain, by Jack Brooks, Chain Store Age (New York), Nov., 1943: “A radio tube, in England, is a wireless valve.” As She Is Spoke in the United States, by J. H. M., Glasgow Evening Citizen, Aug. 29, 1936: “Your room may have a radio (with tubes); it will not have a wireless (with valves).”

⁶ See vest.

⁷ The DAE does not list union station, but it traces union depot to 1862.

⁸ See legal holiday.

⁹ The DAE traces vacationist to 1888 and vacationer to 1890, and marks them Americanisms.

¹⁰ H. W. Seaman: “Vaudeville has an exotic flavour in England.”

¹¹ A Truck By Any Other Name, by Robert Lynd, London News-Chronicle, May 22, 1943: “In England your tailor talks of a coat and vest, and by the vest he means a waistcoat. Outside a tailor’s shop, however, a vest nowadays almost always means, not a waistcoat but an undershirt.” See undershirt.

¹² Warden, an old English word, was apparently first applied to the officer in charge of a prison early in the last century.

¹³ The DAE traces washbowl to 1816 and marks it an Americanism.

¹⁴ The DAE traces wash-day to 1846. It is not marked an Americanism, but is not recorded in England until 1864. Washing-day is still preferred there.

¹⁵ Several English correspondents say that the English for wash-rag is really flannel, but others deny it. The NED does not list flannel in this sense, and its definition of face-cloth is “a cloth laid over the face of a corpse,” but its Supplement, 1933, adds face-cloth in the sense of “a cloth for washing the face,” and traces it to 1930. The Stars and Stripes, June 15, 1943, says that flannel is the English term.

¹ I am informed by Mr. Maurice Walshe of London that washstand is in common conversational use.

² In the London Sunday Express, July 10, 1938, I encountered an advertisement of wastepaper-tubs made of “papier maché finished in light walnut, with nautical designs in low relief.”

³ Don’t Take My Word For It, by Frank Colby, San Bernardino (Calif.) Sun, Nov. 8, 1940: “The Briton takes a bath in water heated in a geyser; the American’s bath water comes from a water-heater, usually referred to redundantly as a hot-water-heater.” A water-heater for kitchen use is called a copper in England.

⁴ The Weather Bureau was operated by the Signal Corps of the Army from Feb. 9, 1870 to July 1, 1891, when it was transferred to the Department of Agriculture. Later it was transferred to the Department of Commerce. The English Meteorological Office was established in 1854. See bureau.

⁵ London Sunday Times, July 26, 1936: “The Minister of Health expressed the hope that soon the bill providing for the contributory persons scheme for blackcoated workers, too often neglected in social efforts, would be introduced in Parliament.”

⁶ Title of an article in Motor News, organ of the Chicago Motor Club, April, 1939, p. 2: “Windshield is Windscreen to the Britisher.” See fender.

⁷ The DAE’s first example of witness-stand is dated 1885, but it must be much older.

⁸ News of the World (London), unidentified date: “Breakdown gangs with a crane and axes went out from Melton Mowbray, while villagers, motorists and police did their best to get at the men, pinned in the cabin of the lorry.”

9 Right Dress, London Daily Express, June 27, 1936.

10 Our prep-school is a public-school in England, and is almost exclusively for the sons of the rich. The best known are Eton and Harrow. In recent years a number of a less expensive sort have been opened, but they are still below the salt. An English prep-school prepares boys for these public-schools and also for the Royal Navy. Its pupils seldom remain beyond the age of fourteen. An official document published in 1900 — Preparatory Schools For Boys: Their Place in English Secondary Education, by C. C. Cotterill — said that the first English prep-school was opened on the Isle of Wight in 1837, but this is disputed by old boys of various schools now operating as such, though they may have been something else in earlier times. See The First Prep-school, London Sunday Times, Jan. 12, 1935.

1 As She Is Spoke in the United States, by J. H. M., Glasgow Evening Citizen, Aug. 29, 1936: “It is not a question of slang but of the astonishing number of everyday words used predominantly in one sense by the British and in another by the nephews of Uncle Sam. It is in the use of these that the stranger is detected — and perplexed.”

1 The King’s English, March-April, 1943, pp. 57–134.

2 I am indebted for Col. Allen’s paper to Dr. George W. Corner of the Carnegie Institution.

3 Weights and Measures, Oct. 27.

1 Americans Bound Coronationwards Should Read This Alphabet, April 28, 1937.

2 Some curious English weights and measures, unknown in the United States, are listed in American Speech, April, 1930, p. 330.

3 The Loom of Language, by Frederick Bodmer; New York, 1944, pp. 126 and 127. Bodmer’s discussion of the subject is exhaustive and excellent.

4 Advertisement of Wm. Whiteley, Ltd., London Daily Telegraph, Sept. 25, 1935.

5 Houses and Estates, same paper, same date.

6 John o’ London’s Weekly, June 20, 1936.

7 London Daily Express, Dec. 12, 1937.

8 Socialist Repartee, London Daily Telegraph, Oct. 5, 1935.

9 Advertisement in the London Telegraph and Post, May 10, 1938.

1 Mr. Theodore Spencer, of Cambridge, Mass., suggests that this is probably because “the English station platforms are always level with the door of the carriage. With us there is usually a difference of level between platform and car; hence on and off, with their suggestion of ascent and descent.…”

2 Up and Down, American Speech, Oct., 1926, p. 19.

3 The whole English railroad terminology differs radically from that prevailing in the United States, though there have been some interchanges. See AL4, pp. 146 and 147. The following is from an advertisement of the Associated British Railways in the New York Times Magazine, May 17, 1936: “What! No cowcatchers? It’s quite true that our railway engines have no cowcatchers, no headlights — no, not even a bell. But they’re modern, and they draw luxurious trains at 80 miles an hour.” The same advertisement warned American tourists that there were “no familiar hot-dog stands, tourist-camps or one-arm lunchrooms along the route.” Why railroad travelers should look for such things was not explained.

4 Anne-Laurence Dodge reports in American Notes and Queries, March, 1944, p. 188, that in Newbury port, Mass., up-along and down-along are used instead of uptown and downtown. There are probably other local variations elsewhere.

1 At the South, At the North, American Speech, Dec, 1931, pp. 154–56. All of Hench’s examples came from the writings of George Carey Eggleston (1839–1911).

2 British-American Differentiations in Syntax and Idiom, Dec, 1939, pp. 243–54.

3 Cited by Jespersen, Sonnenschein and other grammarians.

1 Concerning the American Language, in The Stolen White Elephant, Etc.; New York, 1888, p. 269.

2 “Our journalists,” said Ernest Weekley, in Words, American and English, London Observer, Oct. 9, 1938, “are gradually ejecting the English should in favor of the revived American subjunctive.”

3 From the London Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 16, 1944, p. 456: “The Bodleian do not regard it as a pseudonym.”

4 Cricket English, July 22, 1938.

5 I take an example from the London Times, Feb. 20, 1939: “New College retained their position at the head of the river, but St. Edmund Hall gained rapidly on them over the second half of the course.” A little further on in the same article: “Much confusion was caused in the Second Division when Jesus claimed to have bumped Queen’s at the boathouse. The Queen’s cox failed to acknowledge it and Wadham then bumped Jesus at the Cherwell. The matter will come before the committee for decision.”

1 New York Times (editorial page), Aug. 3, 1938.

2 Aug., 1942, p. 23. I take this from A Protest From the Philippines, by M. J. M., American Speech, April, 1944, pp. 147–48.

3 London Daily Telegraph, Aug. 8, 1936. In 1937 he had the temerity to tackle A. P. Herbert, the linguistic expert of the House of Commons, and suffered in consequence a bad fall. (Lord Bertie Meets His Match, London Daily Telegraph, July 11, 1937). The dispute this time was not over the plural verb after collective nouns, but over amongst, which many Englishmen apparently prefer to among, as they prefer whilst to while. Herbert came out strongly for the American forms and managed to convince the Lords. This defeat so crushed Lord Bertie that he withdrew a motion to substitute “petition for divorce” for “petition of divorce” and “decree of divorce” for “decree for divorce” in a pending Marriage bill.

1 8 More Hours — for 6s., London Daily Mirror, Sept. 20, 1935.

2 London Daily Express, Oct. 3, 1936. I am indebted here to Mr. James R. Barbour of London.

3 American Idiom, London Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 26, 1944, p. 103.

4 Guy, April, p. 400: “It is doubtful if the word would ever have obtained its present currency in America if it had not been for the telescoped meaning of guy-rope or guy-pole in the circus tent. ‘Who’s the main guy around here?’ carries to an American no unpleasant associations; it is just the vulgate for ‘Who is the main support of this institution?’ ”

5 See AL4, p. 254.

6 Band XLIII, Heft 4, Oct., 1931.

1 The Comedy of Errors, II.

2 Woman’s Touch, June 16, 1938.

3 I am indebted here to Mr. Percy Marks.

4 A Shorthand Diary of William Byrd of Westover, by Louis B. Wright, Huntington Library Quarterly, July, 1939, p. 494, later reissued as a reprint.

1 New York, 1925, Vol. I, p. 81.

2 Swamp in Early American Usage, American Speech, Feb., 1935, pp. 30–35.

3 Swamp-angel was the nickname of a big gun used at the siege of Charleston in the early part of the Civil War; it was later used to designate a member of one of the bands of ruffians allied with the Ku Klux Klan.

1 See Mathews’s The Beginnings of American English, pp. 106 and 119.

2 James Macaulay, in Across the Ferry: First Impressions of America and Its People; fourth ed.; London, 1887, p. 93, reported that he had even found it used in the sense of getting right with God. “It represents expressively,” he said, “the vain attempt of the sinner to make himself more worthy of receiving divine mercy and grace.”

1 For example, Ernest Weekley in Adjectives — and Other Words; New York, 1930, p. 174.

2 The English purists frequently discuss this American habit of reinforcing verbs with adverbs. Sometimes they denounce it as ignorant and naughty, as when to try out, for example, was belabored by Dr. Terrot Reavley Glover, Public Orator at Cambridge, in 1933. The London Times Weekly Edition (Feb. 16, 1933) agreed with him in principle, but argued that it was too late to attempt a reform, and testified to its humorous despair by using to get away with, to face up, to stand up for, to slip up, to blow up, to catch on, to play out, to tick off, to haul up, to let off, to stick it out, to hand up, to check up, to shoot up, to bump off, to speed up and to listen in in its comment. At other times the question is dealt with by dredging up proofs that this or that verb-adverb is really ancient in English. See, for example, American Prepositions, by L. Pearsall Smith, London Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 12, 1933.

3 A learned discussion of to get, including some consideration of the American gotten, is in Get and Got, by Wallace Rice, American Speech, April, 1932, pp. 280–96.

1 See AL4, p. 253.

2 Cape Times (Cape Town), Nov. 12, 1938.

3 An English dissenter is free to carry on his gloomy croaking as much as he pleases and is often extremely influential, but his social position is alway inferior. Up to a few years ago the B.B.C., the official English radio, refused to describe a service in a noncomformist tabernacle as a religious service, but always used Wesleyan service, Baptist service, etc. Religious was reserved for the orgies of the Church of England. Once a broadcaster, having inadvertently called a Baptist service at Folkestone a religious service, apologized at once. But this prejudice seems to be abating. So is the feeling that dissenters are presuming beyond their station when they call one of their meeting houses a church. The old name was chapel, and the customers were commonly spoken of as chapel-goers, to distinguish them from Church of England churchgoers. Even Catholic churches were called chapels. But in late years that old invidious distinction tends to disappear, and there are now plenty of Methodist churches in England, some of them free of debt.

1 Sectarian and Nonconformist, by C. P. Mason, American Speech, Feb., 1929, p. 202.

2 University of Missouri Studies, Jan. 1, 1938, pp. cxi and 64.

3 Chapter XXIV. Ramsay and Ember-son give 241 as the page number in the first edition of 1884. In my edition of 1886, apparently printed from the original plates, it is 208.

1 Private communication, Jan. 12, 1938.

2 The English Wesleyans are the American Methodists.

3 i.e., the endowed schools, for sons of the upper classes, e.g., Eton and Harrow.

4 The seeker after further light on this difficult subject is referred to As the English Twig is Bent, by William Oliver Stevens, Saturday Evening Post, May 9, 1936, pp. 14 ff; The School Question in England, by S. J. Gosling, Commonweal, Aug. 13, 1943, pp. 422 ff; and A Guide to British Educational Terms, by Herbert B. Grimsditch, Wilson Bulletin (New York), May, 1936, pp. 576 ff.

1 March 20.

2 i.e., to the bar — the equivalent of the American admitted.

3 An English lawyer, whether barrister or solicitor, never has an office, but always chambers. To devil is defined by the NED as “to do professional work for another without fee, or without recognition.”

1 Contrariwise, many American names for comestibles puzzle the English. In I Discover America, by Kenneth Adam, London Star, Nov. 30, 1937, the author, writing from Richmond, Ind., found it advisable to supply definitions of sauer kraut-juice, clam-chowder, squabs with yams, succotash, cole-slaw, caraway-roll and pie à la mode. He defined sauerkraut-juice as “a kind of bitter apertif,” and squabs as “small chickens.”

2 A Thing Called Not Done, London Morning Post, Aug. 4, 1936: “Good form — that mysterious ideal of schools — was the subject of pointed comment by Mr. W. B. Curry, headmaster of Dartington Hall, Devon, yesterday. ‘Good form, so far as I understand it,’ he told the New Education Fellowship at Cheltenham, ’is a way of making important things seem trivial and trivial things seem important. It is concerned with manners and behaviour and a thing called not done. In schools where good form is thought important, it is much more serious to violate the canons of good form than to violate the Ten Commandments. Serious worship of good form among the young seems inevitably to lead to inflexibility of temper, because the essence of good form is that you do not question it.”

1 Parliament, London Times, Feb. 24, 1944, p. 8. I am indebted here to Dr. John Whyte of Brooklyn College. An amusing note on the difficulties encountered by Americans in English novels is in Mrs. Miniver’s Briticisms, by Marian and George Hibbitt, American Speech, April, 1941, pp. 149–51.

1 Private communications, May 25 and June 4, 1944.

2 The DAE’s first example of the former is dated 1700. Its first example of corncob is dated 1793. Obviously, its searchers overlooked The Adventures of Jonathan Corncob.

3 America in English Fiction, 1760–1800, by Robert Bechtold Heilman. Baton Rouge (La.), 1937, p. 368. “The author’s use of italics,” says Heilman, “makes doubly sure that the reader will notice what the Americans are doing with the language.”

4 I preserve the capitals he used for emphasis.

1 Every Saturday (Boston), March 30, 1867, p. 397.

2 American Slang in England, by D. B. Whitman, of Winthrop, Mass., May 4, 1937. His letter was reprinted in various American newspapers, e.g., the Milwaukee Journal, Oct. 9, 1937.

3 American Speech According to Galsworthy, April, pp. 297–301.

4 Dr. Robertson had noted this misuse of gotten by another English novelist, Rose Macaulay, in A British Misconception, American Speech, April, 1931, pp. 314–16.

5 Cockney American, by Mildred Wasson, American Speech, April, 1932, pp. 255–56.

1 I am indebted here to Miss Miriam Allen deFord of San Francisco.

2 American Speech in English Fiction, by Francis Hayes, American Notes and Queries, Jan., 1942, p. 156.

3 Oct. 10, 1942. She was brought to book in Time and Tide, Oct. 17, by D. W. Brogan.

4 The page numbers are those of the American edition; New York, 1942.

5 Your Radio Life of Christ is an Affront, Jan. 22, 1942.

6 All of Us, by Marshall Maslin, South Bend. (Ind.) Tribune, June 27, 1936.

7 Gangsters, British Type, Detroit Times, May 5, 1935. The book was called Public Enemy No. 1 in England and John Jenkin, Public Enemy, in the United States.

1 War Between US and U. S. A. — Over Language, by Collinson Owen, London Sunday Pictorial, April 11, 1937.

2 Chamberlain seems to have been misled by Sir Samuel Hoare, then Home Secretary, who, in a speech in the House of Commons on Jan. 26, 1939, said: “I am told that in the United States of America there is a class of people who sit listening in hysterical excitement to what is called hot music and waiting for the final crash. Americans, in their forcible language, call them the jitterbugs. There are many people in Europe today that seem to be behaving in much the same way. They sit, listening to all the hot music of the scares and alarms, waiting helplessly for the crash that, according to them, will destroy us all.” This was a correct enough definition of iitterbug, but Chamberlain’s subsequent use of it in the extended sense suggested by Hoare puzzled Englishmen who were familiar only with the original American sense.

3 British Americanisms, Newsweek, March 13, 1939.

4 Oh! What Slanguage!, by A. Whit-comb Jenkins, Answers, July 23, 1938.

5 The Correspondence of an Easy Gentle Essayist, by Geoffrey Grigson, London Morning Post, Jan. 21, 1936.

6 Best-seller is marked “orig. U. S.” by the NED Supplement and traced in English use to 1912. The DAE does not list it, but I believe it was in use in the United States not later than 1895.

7 Fie, Fie, Right Honourable Member!, Sunderland Echo, Oct. 31, 1934.

1 I am indebted here to Mr. John A. Tillinghast, of Providence, R. I.

2 London Daily Express, June 17, 1943. This beautiful word was first listed by Bartlett in the late 70s; he said that it originated in Missouri. The DAE marks it an Americanism.

3 English Undefiled?, Barbados Advocate, Sept. 11, 1937. I am indebted here to Mr. R. C. Hackett, of Balboa, C. Z.

4 London Daily Express, Nov. 14, 1940.

5 London Morning Post, March 2, 1936; King’s English, Manchester Guardian Weekly, March 6, 1936.

6 The King’s English and the President’s American, by Robert Lynd, New Statesman (London), Feb. 4, 1930.

7 Lord Louis Learns American, London Evening Standard, Sept. 24 1943.

1 This is Not a Phony War: Paris Envoy, London News-Chronicle, Jan. 19, 1940. The News-Chronicle explained that phony was “American slang, anglicized about 1920.” Early in 1940 Lord Willingdon, in an interview in the London papers on the progress of World War II, said “the Empire is all in.” He meant, of course, that it was pledged to fight to the last gasp. The American correspondents in London were warned to explain this meaning if they transmitted his speech to the United States, lest Americans assume that he had said that the Empire was done for. Phony was also used by Paul Reynaud, then premier of France, in a radio speech to Americans on April 3, 1940: “ ‘Il faut en finir’; tel fut, dès le début, le refrain qu’on entendit. Et cela signifie qu’il aura pas de ‘phoney peace’ après une guerre qui n’est nullement une ‘phoney war’.” I am indebted here to Mr. Howard C. Rice of Cambridge, Mass.

2 Election Expenses, 1880, April 24, 1935.

3 Premier’s Gerrymandering Rebuked, London Morning Advertiser, Nov. 21, 1941.

4 London Daily Mirror, quoted in the New Yorker, Oct. 17, 1936.

5 Obituary of Thomas Gilbert White, Feb. 20, 1939.

6 Shot Man’s Legacy to Woman Friend, Aug. 2, 1936.

7 New Yorker, Dec. 19, 1936.

1 When, in 1937, J. M. Steadman, Jr., of Emory University, Atlanta, Ga., polled the students of that seminary, seeking to find out what terms they avoided as beneath their dignity, his returns included chap, cheerio, cinema, jolly (swell, fine), mater (mother), pater (father), petrol, righto, stunning and top-hole, all of them recognized as Briticisms. See his Affected and Effeminate Words, American Speech, Feb., 1938, pp. 13–18. “Americans,” said the London Times in an editorial, Two Peoples and One Tongue, June 29, 1943, “have always been rather shy of drawing upon what they believe to be un-American English. This phrase, that accent, t’other manner remain a joke.”

1 The title of a paper on Walt Whitman’s adventures as a Washington jobholder, by Dixon Wecter, in Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1943, pp. 1094 ff, called him a civil servant, but I suspect that Dr. Wecter may have intended the term to be satirical rather than swanky.

2 Indeed, such an investment banker might run some risk of getting into Sing Sing or Atlanta prematurely, and even unjustly.

3 In England there is a distinction between headmaster and head master. The former is reserved for the chief pedagogues of so-called public-schools (see p. 502); the latter may be applied to the head of what we would call a public-school in the United States. The learned will find an illuminating discussion of this orthographical distinction in the eminent News of the World, Dec. 26, 1937.

4 In his speech to Congress on May 19, 1943, Winston Churchill announced that the British troops in North Africa had begun to drop the English lorry for the American truck, and that the Americans as a return courtesy, had agreed to use petrol. The second part of this was not supported, so far as I know, by any American authority.

1 Rating has been used in the English Navy to designate the rank or station a man holds on a ship’s books since the early Eighteenth Century, but it has been applied to the man himself only since the closing years of the Nineteenth.

2 At Long Last, by Marie Drennan, American Speech, April 1939, p. 156.

1 Mr. Harold M. Tovell of Toronto calls my attention to the fact that flapper occurs in the English translation of the diary of Mme. d’Arblay, published in London in 1846, Vol. VII, p. 253, as follows: “Alex is my companion, or rather I am Alex’s flapper.” But this does not seem to be a use of the word in the modern sense.

2 The following is from Mournful Numbers, by Colin Ellis; London, 1932, p. 15:
Bungaloid Growth
When England’s multitudes observed with frowns
That those who came before had spoiled the towns,
“This can no longer be endured!” they cried,
And set to work to spoil the countryside.

1 See AL4, pp. 40 and 226, n. 1.

2 One is to the effect that it is from C.O.P. (constable of police) which the English police used to write under their names on reports. Another is that it is a telegraphers’ abbreviation for chief of police. A third is that it derives from the fact that early English cops wore brass buttons, mistaken for copper by the street boys. These etymologies are discussed in Calling All Cars, by Malcolm W. Bingay, Detroit Free Press, Feb. 2, 1939.

3 I am indebted here to Mr. Douglas Leechman, of the National Museum of Canada.

4 I am indebted here to Mr. R. Raven-Hill.

1 On April 10, 1941, the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York was advertising a “Sunday strollers’ brunch, $1 per person, served from 11 A.M. to 3 P.M.,” in the Villager, p. 8.

2 The Savoy-Plaza Hotel was advertising a snack-bar in the New Yorker July 25, 1936, but apparently it had changed the English meaning, which is virtually identical with that of our lunch-counter, for its snack-bar offered “luncheon and dinner daily and Sunday.”

3 Governor was used in colonial America to indicate the college dignitary now known as a trustee, or, at Harvard, an overseer.

4 I am indebted here to Mr. Hartford Beaumont of New York.

5 Reprinted in the Baltimore Sun as Our Golf Terms Get British O.K. (editorial page), Aug. 8, 1931.

1 Traced by the DAE to 1864, but to be found in Harper’s Magazine, Aug., 1855, p. 429.

2 Stamp Notes, by R. A. Barry, New York Herald Tribune Books, July 12, 1936, p. 20-VII.

3 Post-Cards, by Florence S. Hellman and Erna R. Stech, American Notes and Queries, June, 1941, p. 44.

1 Aunt (or Aunty) and Uncle, as terms used in addressing aged colored people, are traced by the DAE to 1830. Both were in use before this for addressing whites. Granny and Goody are old in English. The former, about 1790, acquired the special American significance of a midwife. The latter, in early use in the colonies to designate any married woman, survives at Harvard as the designation of a woman who cares for students’ rooms. The DAE traces it, in that sense, to 1819.

1 Lost Mum and Dad: headline in the News of the World, April 19, 1936, referring to two working-class orphans. “I lost my Mummy and Daddy”; caption in an appeal for funds by the Shaftesbury Homes and Arethusa Training Ship in the London Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 1, 1914, p. 10. On Nov. 12, 1939 the Baltimore Sun published an article by Mrs. L. Baring-Wilson, recently returned from England, in which evacuated English children were represented as addressing their fathers and mothers, in letters home, as Pop and Mom, but I have never encountered either term in an English newspaper.

2 I am indebted for help here to Miss Margaret Butcher and H. W. Seaman.

3 The statement in AL4, p. 268, n. 1, that he was a native of Harrisburg caused the antiquaries of the town to inquire into his early history, but they could find no record of him. See Mirrors of Harrisburg, Harrisburg Sunday Courier, Feb. 18, 1940.

1 New York, 1937, p. 241.

2 A somewhat tame English ball game, traced by the DAE to 1636.

3 I take this definition from Baker.

4 Termitodoxa, Feb., p. 116.

1 Norton was often in court. Once he was asked on the stand to define wowser. “It means,” he said, “a fellow who is too niggardly of joy to allow the other fellow any time to do anything but pray.” I am indebted here to Mr. J. A. B. Foster, of Hobart, Tasmania.

2 I am indebted for information about Norton to Mr. Alan Tytheridge, late of Tokyo.

3 Tudor Architecture Restored, London Times, June 17, 1938.

4 Memorial to George V, London Times, June 17, 1938.

1 Amenities of Bath, London Times, June 24, 1938.

2 For all the foregoing see Holiday Resorts Spend Money, Manchester Guardian Commercial, June 24, 1938.

3 Everything But Haggis, Hong Kong Daily Press, June 12, 1936.

4 Famous Pottery Firm to Move, London Telegraph, May 15, 1936.

5 Macao Amenities, South China Morning Post, April 20, 1936.

6 Railway Amenities, London Telegraph, Sept. 4, 1937.

7 Thames For M.P.’s, London Telegraph, May 16, 1936: “Sir Nicholas Grattan-Doyle likes to see the Thames. He is asking Mr. Ormsby-Gore on Monday whether, in the interests of members [of Parliament] ‘whose sole outlook at present is a blank wall,’ he will provide a view of the river’s amenities by restoring some of the raised seats on the terrace [of the House of Commons].”

8 Small Burghs Handicapped, Edinburgh Scotsman, March 1, 1937.

9 I am indebted for most of these examples to the collection of the late F. H. Tyson.

10 But sometimes the American influence conquers even amenities, for example, in Rebuilding of Wellington Barracks, London Sunday Times, Dec. 11, 1938: “Barracks are now being built as homes where every modern convenience is obtainable.”

11 Lord Horder, London Sunday Times, Nov. 26, 1937.

1 At Last We Know What the Amenities Really Are, London Daily Express, Dec. 5, 1937.

2 Words Indicating Social Status in America in the Eighteenth Century, American Speech, Oct., 1934, p. 208.

3 I am informed by Mr. Milton Halsey Thomas, curator of Columbiana at Columbia University, that the M.B. was given by Columbia (then King’s College) from 1769 to 1774, by Harvard from 1788 to 1811, and by Dartmouth from 1798 to 1812. At King’s College a further year of study and a thesis were required for the M.D. In 1811 Harvard granted complimentary M.D. degrees to all previous M.B.’s who had not proceeded to the doctorate.

4 Dr. William Brady, who has conducted a health column in American newspapers since 1918, has tried to induce American dentists to put Dentor instead of Dr. on their signs, but in vain. I am indebted here to Mr. Fred Hamann.

5 Says an English correspondent: “Until he begins to specialize in surgery he is Dr. like any other medical man, though his degrees may be only those of MB. and Ch.B. (bachelor of surgery). It is a sign of rising in the world, proof that he has made the grade, i.e., has become the surgeon in a great hospital or teacher of surgery in a medical school, when he can be content with the title of Mr.”

1 Webster 1934 defines optometry as “scientific examination of the eyes for the purpose of prescribing glasses, etc., to correct defects, without the use of drugs.” In most States optometrists are licensed, and their license forbids them to treat actual diseases. Such treatment is the function of the ophthalmologist, who is a regular M.D.

2 The Degree of Doctor, Aug. 26, 1939, p. 876.

3 Webster defines chiropody as “originally, the art of treating diseases of the hands and feet; as now restricted, the treatment of ailments of the feet, especially minor ailments.” The State licensing acts for chiropodists, like those for optometrists, usually define the bounds past which a practitioner may not go. When his patient presents a condition beyond his science he is supposed to call in an orthopedist, who is a regular M.D. The more high-toned chiropodists now call themselves podiatrists, a term based on the Greek word for foot.

1 Osteopathy is a system of healing based on the theory that most disease is caused by structural derangements which interfere with either the circulation of the blood or the free functioning of nerves. It was launched by Dr. A. T. Still (1828–1917), of Kirksville, Mo., in 1874. Osteopaths are now licensed in nearly all States. The course of instruction in their schools is much more comprehensive than that enjoyed by other irregular practitioners, and they have of late made a campaign for full recognition, including the right of admission to the medical corps of the Army and Navy. A statement of their doctrine as they understand it is in the Encyclopedia Americana; New York, 1932, Vol. XXI, pp. 28–34.

2 The Higher Degrees, in Tonics and Sedatives, Journal of the American Medical Association, April 1, 1939.

3 Chiropractic was introduced by D. D. Palmer in 1895. It is based upon osteopathy, but finds nearly all the lesions responsible for disease in the spinal column. It also adds a curative principle called innate intellectuality, which seems to be identical with the vis medicatrix naturae of the regular faculty. Chiropractors are licensed in nearly all American States. They have invented a number of fancy names to designate specialists within their fold, e.g., radionist, meaning one who operates “a calbro-mago wave radionic machine,” which “deals with disease vibrations … just as the radio registers vibrations of sound.”

4 Some of the varieties of quacks in practise in New York in 1926, with the doctorates they pretended to, are listed in AL4, p. 271, n. 1. Many others have appeared since.

5 Naturopathy is defined by Webster as “a system of physical culture and drugless treatment of diseases by methods supposed to stimulate or assist nature.” It has become, in the United States, a catch-all for every system of healing not embraced in the other schools. In not a few States naturopaths are licensed.

6 Advertisement of the University of Divine Science, Los Angeles, in the London (Ont.) Evening Lamp, Nov. 15, 1938.

1 There is already, in fact, a considerable confusion, as witness M.D. — Not Dr., by D. H. McCarter of Washington, Journal of the American Medical Association, March 11, 1944. “The physicians of the country,” said Mr. McCarter, “in connection with the preparation of many millions of forms required by various government activities, frequently neglect to have their degrees following their signatures and at times prefix their names with the word Dr., providing no other evidence that they are doctors of medicine. This occasionally works a hardship on us bureaucrats because, in order to assure proper distribution of certain types of materials, supplies, equipment and services, we must determine that the applicant is a physician rather than a doctor of science, of divinity, philosophy, naturopathy, chiropractic, podiatry, chiropody or whatever.”

2 Report of the President for the Year 1944, p. 55.

3 In Doctor’s Degrees in Modern Foreign Languages, 1940–41, Modern Language Journal, Nov., 1941, pp. 804–12, Henry Grattan Doyle listed more than 130 Ph.D.’s in the non-English modern languages for one academic year. This was the crop in 31 colleges only. Dr. Doyle confessed that his list was incomplete, and asked for additions.

1 The Title Professor, by N. R. L., Oct., p. 27.

2 Professor is thus defined in The Language of Modern Education, by Lester K. Ade; Harrisburg (Pa.), 1939, p. 29: “Basically, one who professes and pursues an academic subject. The term is applied to the highest academic rank of college and university teachers. It is incongruous to designate as professor a teacher or administrator of any institution below collegiate level, or anyone not actually holding a professional [possibly a misprint for professorial] rank in a college.”

3 Auctioneer Colonels Again, by E. L. Jacobs, Oct. 1935, p. 232.

4 Other discussions of professor are in Professor Again, by Charles L. Hanson, American Speech, Feb., 1928, pp. 256 and 257; Professor Again, by C. D. P., American Speech, June, 1929, pp. 422–23, and Professor or Professional?, by Mamie Meredith, the same, Feb., 1934, pp. 71 and 72. Miss Meredith reprints the protest of a Nebraska editor of 1869 who had been called professor by a colleague. She shows that in his own paper he permitted the term to be applied to a horse-trainer, a barber, the manager of a roller-skating rink, and a dancing-master.

1 May 27.

2 I am indebted here to Professor D. W. Brogan.

1 There are deans in the English and Scottish universities, but they are heard of much less than their opposite numbers in the United States. To the average Englishman a dean is an ecclesiastical functionary, e.g., Dean Inge. He may be either the head canon of a collegiate or cathedral church or a sort of assistant to an archdeacon. The English seldom use dean in our sense of any senior. What we would call the dean of the House of Commons is its father to them. For discussions of the heavy American use of the term see What is a Dean?, by J. R. Schultz, American Speech, Dec. 1935, pp. 319–20, and Why Dean?, by Z. S., American Speech, Feb., 1926, pp. 292–93.

1 London Magazine, July, p. 324.

2 Hamilton’s Itinerarium.… From May to September, 1744, edited by Albert Bushnell Hart; St. Louis, 1907, p. 94. See also Rattlesnake Colonel, by Albert Matthews, New England Quarterly, June, 1937, pp. 341–45.

3 Not infrequently a notable who started out as captain was gradually promoted, by public acclamation, to colonel. “When we first came here,” says Mulberry Sellers in The Gilded Age, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner; Hartford, 1873, p. 515, “I was Mr. Sellers, and Major Sellers, and Captain Sellers,… but the minute our bill went through the House I was Colonel Sellers every time. And nobody could do enough for me, and whatever I said was wonderful.” “I wonder,” says Washington Hawkins, “what you will be tomorrow, after the President signs the bill.” “General, sir!” answers Sellers. “General, without a doubt.”

4 It should be explained for the benefit of English readers that Ruby, despite his given-name, was male, not female. He was born in 1869 and died in 1941.

5 For some reason unfathomable and greatly to be lamented, the DAE does not mention Kentucky colonel. It lists Kentucky bite (or Indian hug, traced to 1830), Kentucky fence (1837), Kentucky leggins (1817), Kentucky reel (1832), Kentucky yell (1845), Kentucky coffee (1859), Kentucky mahogany (1847), Kentucky ark (1824), Kentucky boat (1785), Kentucky jean (1835), Kentucky rifle (1839), and Kentucky Derby (1875), but not Kentucky colonel. It had become a byword so early as 1825, when John. Marshall, then Chief Justice of the United States, wrote a quatrain that still survives:
 In the Blue Grass region
  A paradox was born:
 The corn was full of kernels
  And the colonels full of corn.

1 Colonel Callahan sent me copies of these letters. He maintained a mimeographed service that he called the Callahan Correspondence, and whenever he wrote a letter to one acquaintance that seemed to him to be interesting — which was very often — all the other persons on his list got copies of it. The colonel had been a professional baseball player in his youth, but lived to be president of the Louisville Varnish Company and a man of substance. He was very active in all lay movements among Catholics, and was the only Catholic I ever knew who professed to be a Prohibitionist.

2 The authority for this is the Dictionary of American Biography, quoted by Horwill, p. 73. McRae (1858–1930) was one of the founders of the Scripps-McRae (now Scripps-Howard) chain of newspapers.

1 Auctioneer Colonels Again, Oct., p. 232. Mr. Jacobs wrote from rural Missouri. In Auctioneer Colonels, American Speech, April, 1935, Dr. Louise Pound had reported the same usage prevailing in Nebraska. Mr. Jacobs reported encountering in Missouri a young man “of perhaps twenty-two or three” who “had assumed the title upon his graduation from some institution, probably calling itself a college, which taught auctioneering.”

2 Add Kurneliana, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, April 11, 1942, editorial page.

3 Some Impressions of the United States; New York, 1883.

4 Through America; London, 1882, pp. 239–40.

1 I am indebted to my brother, August Mencken, for this reference.

2 Visit to the Falls of Niagara in 1800; London, 1826, p. 74.

3 New York, 1869, p. 394.

4 From time to time there are protests against this rule, as, for example, in Question of Title, by Lee Casey, Denver Rocky Mountain News, Dec. 5, 1941: “A judge is properly a judge only so long as he occupies a bench — for that matter, only so long as he is physically sitting on the bench. The title ought to expire with the term of office.” But it never does.

1 The latest edition was “prepared under the direction of the Secretary of State by Margaret M. Hanna, chief of the Office of Coordination and Review, and Alice M. Ball, chief of the Special Documents Section, Division of Research and Publication”; Washington, 1937.

2 p. 8.

3 In the case of foreign diplomats, of course, their native titles take precedence, if they have any.

4 The justices of the Supreme Court of the United States are excepted. On the envelope of a letter addressed to the Chief Justice is to be written simply The Chief Justice, without his surname. Letters to his colleagues are to be addressed Mr. Justice — But the Supreme Court Reporter, a quasi-official publication, makes an associate justice Honorable, with the word spelled out and no the before it. See Proceedings in Memory of Honorable Pierce Butler, Supreme Court Reporter, May 1, 1940, p. xix.

5 If such a functionary has “a military, naval or scholastic title” it is to be used (p. 31) instead of the Hon.

6 The Style Manual does not specify how large a city has to be for its mayor to rate the Hon. It ordains (p. 8) that the mayors of small cities shall be addressed John Jones, Esquire, and notes that it is American usage to spell out the Esquire, whereas the English make it Esq.

1 The Style Manual warns all concerned (p. 10) that the form the Honorable Morgenthau, without a given-name, is not to be tolerated. In all cases it prefers the Honorable to the Hon.

2 The letter A in a page number indicates that it is in the Appendix to the Record.

3 He was entitled to the Hon., according to the Style Manual, while he was in service as secretary to the President. All persons so entitled to it continue in enjoyment of it, by congressional usage, for life.

1 Even the Vice-President of the United States, who is ex-officio president of the Senate, appears in its actual proceedings without the Hon. See Congressional Record, Sept. 14, 1943, p. 7599, top of col. 1.

2 The Hon. Reed Smoot (1862–1941), who was a Senator from Utah from 1903 to 1933, had been a Mormon bishop before he got into politics, and was promoted to the awful rank of apostle before his election to the Senate. Many other members of the two houses hold military rank, whether real or bogus, and almost all of those above the grade of big-city ward heelers have learned degrees, whether earned or honorary. Even the females have such degrees.

1 See, for example, the Congressional Record for May 6, 1938, p. 8467, wherein the Hon. Mrs. Norton, a congresswoman from New Jersey, describes herself in a motion to discharge a committee as “I, Hon. Mary T. Norton.” Again, on Jan. 19, 1938 (Record, p. 194) Congressman Ditter of Pennsylvania introduced a privileged resolution in which he referred to himself as Honorable J. William Ditter. Yet again, on May 11, 1943, three congressmen printed in the Record, p. A2474, a letter they had sent to the Hon. Carter Glass, signed Hon. Walt Horan, Hon. Hal Holmes, and Hon. Fred Norman. In the applications for war bonds sent out in 1943 the Secretary of the Treasury had himself addressed as Hon. Henry Morgenthau, Jr. See A. L. P. Digest, May, 1943, p. 250.

2 The hon. gentleman was born in Kansas in 1901 and has had a varied career. He says in his autobiography in the Congressional Directory, 78th Congress, 2nd Session; Washington, 1944, that he was “educated in public schools,” though “graduated from Yale College in 1923.” Subsequently he was a factory worker, a freight handler and a ranch hand and for a time had a job in an automobile assembly plant. He then “traveled in Germany for the Y.M. C.A.” and was a teacher in a farm-school in Illinois, director of the Dray Cottage Episcopal Home for Boys in Wyoming, and headmaster of the Voorhis School for Boys at San Dimas, Calif., which his family owned and eventually gave to the State, which now operates it as a vocational unit of the State university. The latter office, I assume, gave him the local rank and title of professor, but he does not use it.

3 Congressional Record, May 31, 1944. p. 5228.

1 For Daniels see the issue for Sept. 1, 1944, p. A4160; for Hillman, Aug. 24, 1944, p. A4036; for LaGuardia, Aug. 23, 194, p. A4011; for Willkie, June 13, 1944, p. A3215; and for Baruch, May 23, 1944, p. A2760.

2 April 24, p. A2088.

3 April 12, p. A1873.

4 Nov. 22, 1944, p. A4808.

5 Nov. 21, 1944, p. A4795.

6 Nov. 20, 1944, p. A4787.

7 Nov. 16, 1944, p. A4763.

8 Nov. 16, 1944, p. 8303.

9 April 12, p. A1883, and April 24, p. A2099.

10 Nov. 24, p. A4831.

11 Feb. 18, p. 876, and Sept. 13, p. A4341.

12 Feb. 17, p. A837.

13 Jan. 31, 1944, p. A539.

14 Jan. 31, 1944, p. A530; April 28, p. A2163; April 28, p. A2165; Sept. 29, p. A4577.

15 The old New York Sun, in the days before Frank A. Munsey bought it, always accorded the Hon. to the mountebanks it excoriated daily in its editorial pages. A great admirer of the Sun of that era, I borrowed the custom as a young journalist, and stuck to it throughout my days of writing on politics.

16 The Advance of Honorifics, New Yorker, Aug. 17.

17 For example, the Charlottesville, Va., Progress, Aug. 19, 1935. “Of all the titles abroad in the land,” it said, “none is so absurd or meaningless as that of the Hon. Even a Kentucky colonel has to get a commission from Governor Ruby Laffoon and to pay a fee for being registered, but the title honorable is one that a man simply gives himself. It is enjoyed by all mayors, all district attorneys, all governors, all congressmen, and practically every ward-heeling politician in the country.”

1 In the issue of True Detective for May, 1935, p. 5, for example, it is accorded to Eugene W. Biscailuz, sheriff of Los Angeles county, California. In the issue of Bolivia for Jan.-Feb., 1942, it is accorded to all Bolivian consuls in the United States, including honorary consuls, and under the flagstaff of the magazine the consul-general in New York, who publishes it, is mentioned as the Hon. T. Hartmann.

2 The Present State of Virginia; London, 1724; reprinted, New York, 1865. I am indebted for this reference to Words Indicating Social Status in America in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read; American Speech, Oct., 1934, p. 205.

3 This invaluable record was first published in 1890, edited by Edgar Stanton Maclay.

4 Said the American Museum (Philadelphia) in Oct. of the same year, p. 202: “Nothing shows the propensity of Americans to monarchy more than their disposition to give titles to all our officers of government. Honorable and esquire have become as common in America as captain in France, count in Germany or my lord in Italy.”

5 A Narrative of a Journey of 5,000 Miles Through the Eastern and Western States of America; London, 1818.

1 A writer in Harper’s Weekly, Jan. 9, 1892, quoted by the DAE, said: “It is only permissible in the United States to place before the name of one man the prefix Hoacrable, and that man is the Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts, upon whom the title is conferred by law.”

2 Two vols.; Philadelphia, 1833, Vol. I, p. 241.

1 Second ed.; London, 1929, p. 35. See also Whitaker’s Titled Persons; London, 1898.

2 A county judge’s His Honor is retained after he retires.

3 The NED traces Right Hon. in English use to the Paston letters, c. 1450. It was used by Shakespeare in his dedication of Venus and Adonis to “the Right Hon. Henrie Wriothesley, Earle of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield.” The NED’s first example of Hon. preceding a given name is dated 1674. It was then applied to Robert Boyle the chemist, who was a son of the Earl of Cork. Hon. has been accorded, in England, to corporations as well as individuals, e.g., the Hon. East India Company.

4 The Style Manual of the Department of State, p. 58, gives the form the Right Honorable for a member of Parliament, but that is an error — unless, of course, he is entitled to the honorific on some other ground. See Titles and Forms of Address, before cited, p. 116, and A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, by H. W. Horwill, p. 169.

1 But not if he is actually a learned man. A Ph.D. would be simply the honorable gentleman. Only lawyers, by House of Commons rules, can be learned.

2 Dec. 24.

3 The NED’s first example of honorable gentleman is dated 1783 and comes from a speech in the House of Commons by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

4 Winston Churchill referred to Lady Astor as the noble lady in a debate in the House of Commons in Sept., 1938. See The Astors, by Harvey O’Connor; New York, 1941, p. 453.

1 Not to be confused with Privy Councillors of Great Britain.

2 It will be noted that this official list shows the English spelling of honourable, though the American honorable is used by virtually all Canadian newspapers. The French of Canada use l’honorable. See Études sur les parlers de France au Canada, by Adjutor Rivard; Québec, 1914, p. 256.

1 It is thus, precisely, that he described himself in Who’s Who.

2 I am indebted here to the late F. H. Tyson of Hong Kong. The matter is dealt with in Marriage at 6 A.M., by Tom Clarke; London, 1934.

3 There was, in the old days, a Chinese member of the Legislative Council named Chow Shou-son, who had become the Hon. Mr. on his appointment in 1921. When, five years later, he was knighted, he became the Hon. Sir Shouson Chow, for Chow was his surname, and it was necessary, in order to avoid a solecism, to take it out of its Chinese position in front and put it in the English position behind. See the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), July 23, 1936.

4 The Use of the Abbreviation Rev. in Modern English, American Speech, Oct., 1931, pp. 40–43.

5 On Aug. 3, 1944, Lieut. Gen. Mark W. Clark, in a letter of thanks to the Rev. Frederick Brown Harris, D.D., B.D., LL.D., chaplain of the United States Senate, thanking him for a rousing prayer delivered from the Senate rostrum on June 6, addressed him as “Dear Reverend Harris.” General Clark is a native of New York State, but Dr. Brown is an Englishman and the salutation must have struck him as somewhat strange. It is not, however, wholly unknown in England, for a correspondent writes: “The chaplain of my college at Oxford was always referred to by the servants as the Reverend Ridley, and occasionally as Reverend Ridley, but he had married an American.”

1 Neither part of this is invariably true. The rev. clergy is often encountered.

2 Mr. for Rev., Time, Nov. 27, 1939, p. 50.

3 The amusing rhymed protest against Reverend in AL4, p. 280, was written by the Right Rev. Douglas H. Atwill, now Protestant Episcopal missionary bishop of North Dakota. He was at that time rector of St. Clement’s Memorial Church, St. Paul, Minn., and the verses made their first appearance in his parish paper, St. Clement’s Chimes, on July 25, 1925. I am indebted here to the Rev. E. H. Eckels, Jr., of Tulsa, Okla., and to Bishop Atwill himself.

1 An English archbishop or bishop drops his surname when he is consecrated and uses the name of his see instead. Thus the Archbishop of York signs himself William Ebor— Ebor being an abbreviation of Eboracum, the ancient Latin name of York. So far as I know, only one American bishop has ever ventured to adopt this style. He was William Croswell Doane (1832–1913), bishop of Albany from 1869 until his death. He subscribed himself William of Albany. When an English bishop resigns his bishopric he becomes simply Bishop —. See Inconsistency or Convenience?, John o’ London’s Weekly, Oct. 8, 1937. The rules of the American Postoffice require that, in sending an international money order, one must give “he surname and the initial letters” of the payee’s name, unless he be “a peer or a bishop, in which case his ordinary title is sufficient.”

2 I am indebted here to Dr. George McCracken of Otterbein College. But the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading colored paper, uses Right Rev. to designate a bishop of the A.M.E. Zion or C.M.E. Church.

3 Saluting Nuns, Oct., 1940, pp. 338–39.

1 Mr. is also preferred for American men by Frank O. Colby, author of Your Speech, and How to Improve It, and the conductor of a newspaper column on speechways. In a pamphlet entitled Forms of Address and Precedence; Houston, Tex., 1942, p. 3, he says that Esq., in America, is still “rare.” But I doubt it.

2 The nature of this right is not defined, but I suppose that it is identical with the right to use a coat-of-arms.

1 I am indebted here to Dr. S. E. Morison.

2 I take this from Curiosities of Puritan History, Putnam’s Monthly, Aug., 1853, p. 136.

3 Charles Edgar Gilliam says in Mr. in Virginia Records Before 1776, William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine, April, 1939, p. 144, that it appears in the early Virginia records “after the names of the following classes of public servants without regard to their right to it by birth: vestrymen, wardens, sheriffs, justices, trustees of towns, etc.”

4 It seems to have moved to the United States after this. Said Harper’s Magazine in July, 1852: “There is a certain London cockneyism that begins to obtain among some persons even here — and that is the substitution of the word gent for gentleman. It is a gross vulgarism.”

1 Pickering said that it was frequently coupled with Honorable as in the Honorable A. B., Esq. “In Massachusetts,” he added, c. 1816, “they say in their proclamations, ‘By his Excellency Caleb Strong, Esquire,’ which must seem a perfect solecism among the English.… In the British West Indies they use Esquire with Honorable, as we do.”

2 Schele de Vere said in his Americanisms, 1872, p. 467: “Esquire is a title in England still given only to certain classes of men, and long reserved in the United States also to lawyers and other privileged persons [but it is] now, with republican uniformity, given alike to the highest and the lowest who does not boast of a military or other title, the result being that it is strictly limited to the two extremes of society.”

3 The NED shows that this was done in England in the Eighteenth Century, apparently in an effort to dignify Squire. The DAE’s only American example is dated 1845.

4 Hong Kong Daily Press, Sept. 25. 1935.

1 Says Mr. Gordon Gunter of Rock-port, Tex., who was brought up in Louisiana: “My wife’s grandmother, now ninety years old, always called her husband to his face or in speaking of him M’sieu Hilaire, which was his first name. The old lady can’t speak English. The French or at least the older set often called a man by his first name preceded by Mister or M’sieu. In small communities, as a matter of fact, they must have forgot what the man’s last name was in some instances, for his wife was also called by his first name, decorously preceded by Madam. My grandfather Gunter’s first name was Miles and to all of her French-speaking friends my grandmother was known as Madam Miles.”

1 I take this from The Inauguration of Washington, by Clarence Winthrop Bowen, Century Magazine, April, 1889, p. 823.

2 Mr., New Statesman and Nation (London), May 8, 1937, pp. 766–67.

3 I denounced it myself so long ago as 1911, to wit, in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Dec. 26. Mrs., an abbreviation of mistress, is traced by the NED to 1615. It is a curious fact that neither it nor Mr. has an English plural. To designate more than one Mr. the French messieurs is used, commonly abbreviated in writing to Messrs., and to designate more than one Mrs. there is mesdames. The NED traces Messrs. to 1793 and mesdames to 1792. The former is commonly pronounced messers in the United States. Down to the end of the Eighteenth Century Mrs. was applied to both married and single women. Until that time Miss, which goes back to c. 1660, was reserved for very young girls. In 1940 Motion Picture launched mrandmrs as an (unpronounceable) designation for a married couple, but it did not catch on. See American Speech, April, 1940, p. 131.

1 William Feather Magazine, June, p. 6.

2 First Name Land (editorial), Jan. 5, 1934.

1 Yes, Sir (editorial), reprinted in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, July 21, 1939.

2 The DAE traces Sir as “a respectful term of address” to 1805, and as a mere intensive, as in No, sir (or siree) and Yes, sir, to 1799. The latter is marked an Americanism.

1 Pittsburgh Courier, April 27, 1940.

2 Journalistic Headache, Ken, March 9, 1939, pp. 62 and 63.

3 Part II, p. 1083.

1 The Present State of Virginia; London, 1724; reprinted, New York, 1865, p. 63.

2 Words Indicating Social Status in America in the Eighteenth Century, American Speech, Oct., 1934, p. 205.

1 General John J. Pershing, who was made a G.C.B. (Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honorable Order of the Bath) in 1918 thereby became Sir John Pershing by English law and custom. See Titles and Forms of Address, p. 75. But he never used the honorific.

2 In his account of himself in Who’s Who (English) Sir William does not mention his service as editor (jointly with Dr. James R. Hulbert) of the DAE, though he notes that he is professor emeritus of English at the University of Chicago. Even in Who’s Who in America there is no mention of the DAE. There was none of his knighthood in Who’s Who in America until the 1942–43 volume, which put (Sir) before his name.

3 Said William Hickey in the London Daily Express, June 15, 1939: “From a New York paper: ‘Lord Sassoon, Briton, dies,’ meaning Sir Philip. From a New York paper: An open letter to the King and Queen of England: ‘Your royal highnesses,’ meaning majesties.”

4 Continental usages are also unfathomable to him. So long ago as 1880 Wendell Phillips wrote to Harper’s Magazine (Dec., p. 149) protesting against the current treatment of the name of the author of Démocratie en Amérique, not only by journalists, but also by such bigwigs as William Graham Sumner, Francis Bowen of Harvard, and the editor of Harper’s. “The rules of the French language,” he wrote, “require that when we omit the Alexis or the Monsieur, and give only the family name, it should be simply Tocqueville. There are a few exceptions to this rule. Names of one syllable, like De Thou, retain the de, and names beginning with a vowel.” American copy-readers refuse, however, to drop the de, or the von in German names.

5 For example, they ordain (p. 50) that a formal letter to a duke may begin either My Lord Duke or Your Grace, whereas Titles and Forms of Address gives only My Lord Duke, reserving His Grace the Duke, etc., for the envelope. Again, they pass up altogether, as apparently beyond American grasp, the complicated and baffling rules for addressing such personages as dowager marchionesses and earls’ daughters who have married commoners.

1 A Step Toward Democracy?, Nov. 26, 1942, p. 26.

2 Every Man a Mr. (editorial), Dec. 3, 1942. That Colonel McCormick found some supporters in England is probable, but if so they were kept silent by the censorship. So long ago as Oct. 5, 1935 Lord Camrose’s Daily Telegraph reported that the Socialist Party Conference, in session at Brighton, debated a resolution saying: “This conference deprecates the acceptance by members of the party of titles or honours other than those which a Labour Government finds necessary for the furtherance of its own business in Parliament” — in other words, for packing the House of Lords. This resolution was carried with an amendment instructing the National Executive Committee of the party “to frame rules setting forth the conditions, if any, under which members of the party should accept honours from capitalist governments.”

1 March 18. Maryland Historical Magazine, Sept., 1944, p. 252.

2 Some Impressions of the United States; New York, 1883. His remarks on American honorifics are reprinted in American Social History as Recorded by British Travelers, by Allan Nevins; New York, 1923, pp. 481–82.

1 New York, 1939.

2 Vol. II, pp. 251 and 257.

3 Her husband, who was in the Confederate Army, was killed at Chickamauga.

4 Sandburg, Vol. II, p. 260.

5 New Words for Old, Baltimore Evening Sun, editorial page, June 3, 1938.

6 How’s That Again? Department, New Yorker, Jan. 6, 1940.

7 William Hickey, in the London Daily Express, July 7, 1939.

8 Henry Bean, in the London News-Chronicle, July 11, 1939. I am indebted for both examples to an English correspondent, but his name has unhappily vanished from my notes.

1 For the first; Washington, 1937, see p. 120; for the latter; Washington, 1935, p. 53.

2 p. 28.

3 On Oct. 25, 1939, for example, a congressman of the name of D’Alesandro described her as Madame Frances Perkins in the superscription of a letter on official business, and addressed her as Dear Madame Perkins in the salutation thereof. See the Congressional Record, April 9, 1940, p. 6396.

4 p. 26.

1 His remark upon it was in his Travels in The United States: Second Visit; London, 1849, Vol. I, p. 129. I borrow this from the DAE. A revival of the use of Madam to indicate a dowager was reported in American Speech, Dec., 1936, p. 376. Apparently it was confined to the East. I am informed by a correspondent that the aged widow of Sidney Lanier was so spoken of by her Connecticut neighbors.

2 Edward Augustus Kendall reported in his Travels Through the Northern Parts of the United States in 1806–08; New York, 1809, Vol. II, p. 44, that in Plymouth, Mass., and “some of the neighboring places,” it was prefixed to “the name of a deceased female of some consideration, as the parson’s, the deacon’s, or the doctor’s wife.” Here I am again indebted to the DAE.

3 p. 39.

4 It delicately evades the case of a divorced woman. Frank O. Colby, in Forms of Address and Precedence; Houston, Tex., 1942, p. 3, advises the retention of her late husband’s given-name, but adds that the substitution of her own “is seen more and more in common use.”

1 Americanism: The English of the New World, p. 507.

2 All old speechways seem to linger longer in the South than elsewhere, just as old theological doctrines and political hallucinations linger. It is also common there for colored servants to address their mistress as Miss Mary instead of as Mrs. Smith. The Miss is always heard in this combination, never Mrs.

3 The DAE does not list this meaning. I judge by its absence from Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English that it is unknown in England. Nor is it listed in Sidney J. Baker’s Popular Dictionary of Australian Slang; Melbourne, 1942.

1 I am indebted here and below to Miss Georgia Dickerman, assistant librarian of the association, whose headquarters are in Chicago.

2 On Oct. 4, 1941 the Baltimore Sun fell into the error of describing as a realtor a real-estate agent who had got into the hands of the police on a charge of fraud. It was promptly brought to book by the Real Estate Board of Baltimore, and apologized handsomely on Oct. 7, citing Webster 1934, as authority for the fact that only a member of a body affiliated with the National Association could properly use the name.

1 Private communication, Sept. 28, 1935.

2 Realtor: Its meaning and Use; Chicago, 1925, p. 3, footnote.

1 Every Saturday (Boston), Feb. 17, 1866, p. 196.

2 Insurors, by G. P. Krapp, American Speech, June, 1928, p. 432.

3 San Francisco Examiner, Nov. 2, 1930, Section 1, p. 11.

4 Avigation and Avigator, by Mamie Meredith, American Speech, Aug. 1928, p. 450. Avigator was apparently invented by Lieut. Albert J. Hegenberger. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported him as saying: “When we become familiar with it we shall not confuse it with alligator.” But it did not catch on, and is not listed in Nomenclature for Aeronautics, issued by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; Washington, 1933.

5 American Speech, Oct., 1942, p. 212.

6 Weldor was launched as the result of a labor squabble. In 1941 the welders in the shipyards and on building construction petitioned the American Federation of Labor for a charter of their own. When it was refused they left the Federation and formed the Brotherhood of Weldors, Cutters and Helpers of America. Who thought of substituting the o for the e, and so giving the trade a more dignified smack, I do not know. See Weldors, American Speech, Oct., 1942, p. 214, and An O Creates a New Profession, Des Moines Register (editorial), Dec. 27, 1941.

7 Washington Signs, by J. Foster Hagan, American Speech, March, 1927, p. 293.

8 More Words in -or, by C. P. Mason, American Speech, April, 1929, p. 329.

1 Various correspondents write in to say that I used this term inaccurately. A resurrection man, they point out, was one who robbed graves for the doctors in the days before the Anatomy Acts gave them a lawful supply of cadavers. Nevertheless, I continue to think of them as resurrection men themselves, for the frequent (if not always beneficial, socially speaking) effect of their labor is cheating the grave.

2 The DAE traces burial-case to 1851, and defines it as “a coffin made of metal.”

3 The common substitute, when a body had to be kept more than a day or two, was to put it on ice.

1 Vacation Tourists and Notes of Travel; London, 1864, p. 387.

2 Feb., 1895. According to Elmer Davis (The Mortician, American Mercury, May, 1927, p. 33) “it owes its origin chiefly to Frank Fairchild of Brooklyn and Harry Samson of Pittsburgh, distinguished members of the profession.” He does not give the date.

3 For this date I am indebted to Mr. W. M. Krieger, executive secretary of the National Selected Morticians, with headquarters in Chicago.

4 A mortician, said D. W. Brogan in Our Uncle’s Tongue, Oxford Magazine, June 10, 1937, p. 731, “was once defined by a wit as ‘the man who buries a realtor,’ ” It is highly probable that Brogan invented this saying himself.

1 In the early days of the automobile limousine was in wide use to designate a closed car, but it survives only in the vocabulary of morticians.

2 I am indebted for this to Mr. H. D. FitzGerald.

3 Manufactures, 1939. Caskets, Coffins, Burial-Cases, and Other Morticians’ Goods. Prepared under the supervision of Thomas J. Fitzgerald, chief statistician for manufactures; Washington, 1941.

4 Morticians Protest Proposal to Require $20 License Fee, Washington Times-Herald, Oct. 15, 1942.

5 He is reported by Mr. Dudley Fitts of Boston: private communication, Aug. 30, 1935.

6 Euphemistic Classifications, by Wayland D. Hand, American Notes and Queries, June, 1944, p. 48.

7 In Houston, Tex., there is a cemetery called the Garden of Memories, See the Billboard, Oct. 2, 1943, p. 31, and Forest Lawn, Life, Jan. 5, 1944, pp. 65–75.

1 The ceremony of depositing ashes in one of these basilicas is called inurnment. See Inurnment, by C. Douglas Chrétien, American Speech, Dec., 1934, p. 317. In the early days of California the Spanish term campo santo was often used to designate a graveyard, but it seems to have gone out, save, of course, among the Mexicans.

2 They also cling to the old-fashioned lozenge-shaped coffin. Says H. W. Seaman: “The rectangular casket is unknown. Stiffs are rarely embalmed, and never exhibited in funeral-parlors. Funeral fashions in England are simpler than they used to be. Hearses are plainer and plumes are out. Black is but little worn by the bereaved. But the shroud is still à la mode.” The coffin in which the bones of George Washington lie at Mount Vernon is lozenge-shaped. There is a drawing of it in Mount Vernon As It Is, Harper’s Magazine, March, 1850, p. 435.

3 The Undertaker’s Trade, by C. Wise, London Telegraph and Post, Feb. 17, 1938.

4 His sneer was reprinted in Every Saturday (Boston), May 16, 1868, p. 636.

1 I am indebted for this to Miss Lucile Dvorak of Cleveland.

2 The Cult of Beauty, Feb., 1926, pp. 161–68.

1 William Hickey in the London Daily Express, July 20, 1937. I am indebted here to Mr. P. E. Cleator.

2 Apparently from the Latin canitudo or canus, signifying grey. I am indebted here to the late Dr. Isaac Goldberg.

3 Sydney Herald, Nov. 1, 1935.

4 Beauty and You, by Patricia Lindsay, Baltimore Sun, March 10, 1943.

5 It first appeared in print, so far as my records show, in Feb., 1930, when the Rota Monica, organ of the Rotary Club of Santa Monica, Calif., announced that C. C. Hopkirk, “our own radiotrician,” would address the members on Experiences in Korea, Feb. 7.

6 Electragist, like realtor, is withheld from the public domain. It may be used only by members of the Association of Electragists International, which seems to have been organized c. 1925. See Electragist, by Cornell Ridderhof, American Speech, Aug., 1927, p. 477.

1 Exit the Cobblers — Enter Shoetricians, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Feb. 26, 1940. I am indebted here to Mr. Warren Agee of Fort Worth. I am informed that there was a shoetrician in Omaha in 1936, but if so he must have been a lonely pioneer. In 1938 Women’s Wear (New York) reported that shoeist was being “applied to the proprietor of a shoe store,” but it did not survive. Shoe-rebuilder is by no means extinct. In Jan., 1942, the Bulletin of the New York Public Library announced the appearance in Boston of a monthly called the Master Shoe-Rebuilder.

2 Topics of the Times, March 13, 1940.

3 A canned editorial headed The Icians, appeared in the Indianapolis News and other papers, March 15, 1940, and was widely copied. Another, headed Why Not? They’re All Doing It, originated in the Des Moines Register and then made the rounds.

4 For the last two see Verbal Novelties, American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 237.

5 April, p. 162.

6 Aug., 1929, p. 500.

7 Dec., 1934, p. 318.

8 Feb., 1938, p. 258.

9 April, 1928, p. 350.

10 Jottings in Gotham, Dec., 1930, p. 159.

11 Words, Feb., 1938, p. 30.

12 Jazzicians Voluntarily Join Discharged Colleagues, Cavalcade (London), Aug. 13.

13 Philological Notes, April, p. 450.

14 Some Neologisms From Recent Magazines, by Robert Withington, American Speech, April, 1931, p. 287.

1 One-Way Glass in Chicago, by-Tom Rylands, Manchester Guardian Weekly, Dec. 4.

2 His Travels Through the Interior Parts of American, embodying his diary in the 1879 period, was published in London in 1780. For this reference and several following I am indebted to Words Indicating Social Status in America in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, Oct., 1934, pp. 204–08.

3 A Tour in the United States of America; London, 1788, Vol. I, pp. 98 and 99.

4 Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of America in 1796–1797; London, 1856, p. 414.

5 In 1924 3,000 of the more aspiring of them met in Chicago and resolved to become chirotonsors, but a loud chorus of newspaper ribaldry wrecked the term, and it did not stick. See the Commonweal, Nov. 26, 1924, p. 58. The tonsor part was not new. It is recorded as a name for a barber in Thomas Blount’s Glossographia, 1656.

6 Always with the n; never in the French form, restaurateur. See my Newspaper Days; New York, 1941, pp. 215–16. When jitney-busses came in they brought the jitneur, but when they departed so did he. Confectauranteur for a confectioner, scripteur for a Hollywood scriptwriter and camerateur for an amateur photographer have also been reported, and likewise scripteuse for a female script-writer and strippeuse and stripteuse for a strip-teaser. See Among the New Words, by Dwight L. Bolinger, American Speech, Dec., 1943, p. 301.

1 The DAE records that an effort was made in Jersey City in 1910 to outlaw bartender and substitute server. On Oct. 15, 1936 the Berkshire Evening Eagle (Pittsfield, Mass.) recorded that a Pittsfield bartender, on presenting himself to the local registers of voters for registration, insisted upon being put down a mixologist, and that they let him have his way. (I am indebted here to Mr. Robert G. Newman.) Bartender is an Americanism, traced by the DAE to 1855. The English use barman or barmaid. Barroom is also an Americanism, traced to 1807. So, indeed, is bar, at least in the sense of the room. In the sense of the counter on which drinks are served it has been in English use since the latter part of the Sixteenth Century.

2 John T. Krumpelmann suggests in Studio, American Speech, Dec., 1926, p. 158, that this craze, at least in the Central West, may have been influenced by the German partiality for atelier.

3 May, p. 460.

4 I am indebted here to Mr. Edgar Gahan, of Westmount, Quebec.

5 In the Saturday Review of Literature, Jan. 20, 1934, Christopher Morley reported one who called himself an arrears negotiator.

6 Institute is in wide use to designate trade organizations formed to resist legislative attacks upon the larger industries. See Among the New Words, by Dwight L. Bolinger, American Speech, April, 1942, p. 120.

1 Euphemistic Classifications, by Francis H. Hayes, American Notes and Queries, July, 1944, p. 64.

2 Wanted: A Better Name For Those Queens of the Airlines, by Herb Graffis, Philadelphia Record, May 9, 1940.

3 W. L. McAtee in American Notes and Queries, June, 1944, p. 48.

4 Word of the Week, Printers’ Ink, June, 1923.

5 President’s Greeting on Newspaper-Boy Day, Editor and Publisher, Oct. 9, 1943.

6 In Other Words, by W. E. Farbstein, New Yorker, Aug. 8. 1942.

7 Workers, Arise!, by W. E. Farbstein, New Yorker, Sept. 16, 1939.

8 Farbstein, just cited.

9 Euphemisms for Grocer, by Elsie Pokrantz, American Speech, Feb., 1942, p. 73.

10 United Press dispatch from Atlanta, Ga., Nov. 13, 1928.

11 For New Dignity, Boston Transcript (editorial), Jan. 23, 1940. I am indebted here to Mr. David Sanders Clark, of Cambridge, Mass.

12 Customers’ Men, Newsweek, May 8, 1939.

13 Brokerettes, Newsweek, June 19, 1939.

1 Associated Press dispatch from Milwaukee, July 31, 1936.

2 I am indebted here to the two Farbstein articles, before cited.

3 Psychists Incorporated, Psychic Observer (Lily Dale, N. Y.), Nov. 10, 1943.

4 The Western Union advertised for them in the New York Times, Aug. 16, 1943, p. 29. “Men 50 years or over,” it said, “can help during the war by serving as temporary communications carriers.” I am indebted here to Major R. D. Heinl, Jr.

1 I am indebted here to Mr. Charles J. Lovell of Pasadena.

2 Charwoman is a borrowing from England, where the NED traces it to 1596. Under date of Oct. 28, 1937 David Shulman was complaining in the New York Times that the American scrubwoman was not listed in any dictionary, but this has since been remedied by the DAE, which traces it to 1885. “The scrub-woman,” said Mr. Shulman, “should not be confused with the char-woman. The former scrubs, whereas the latter does other chores besides.” The NED Supplement lists scrub-man as an Americanism, and traces it to 1905.

3 Waste Dealers to Meet March 17, New York Times, March 10, 1941. They call their trade organization the National Association of Waste-Material Dealers.

4 The Terms Hired-man and Help, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Vol. V, 1900.

5 Words Indicating Social Status in America in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, Oct., 1934, p. 207.

1 Here again I am indebted to Read. He says that the same dislike of the word servant was noted by J.F.D. Smyth in Tour in the United States of America; London, 1784, Vol. I, p. 356, and by John Harriott in Struggles Through Life; second ed.; London, 1808, Vol. II, p. 41. Pickering, in his Vocabulary, 1816, said that help was then used only in “some parts of New England,” and Dunglison, in 1829, also marked it “New England,” but we have seen, on the evidence of Jones, that both were in error. For more about help see Schele de Vere, p. 487, Horwill, p. 163, and Hyppo, Blue Devils, etc., by Atcheson L. Hench, American Speech, Oct., 1941, p. 234.

2 The Streets of New York, Eclectic Magazine (New York), Aug., 1865, p. 163.

1 W. E. Farbstein reported in the New Yorker, Sept. 16, 1939, that a Janitors’ Institute in session at Mt. Pleasant, Mich., had lately proposed that its fellows be called engineer-custodians.

2 Reported in American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 238, by Mary Mielenz.

1 Reported in American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 238, by Mary Mielenz.

2 Washington, 1939. I quote the tide page of this formidable volume of 1287 pp. In the preface signed by the Hon. Frances Perkins its preparation is ascribed to the Research Division of the Employment Service.

3 Congressional Record, March 15, 1938, p. 4556.

1 I learn from How It Happened, Philadelphia Record, March 27, 1944, that the counsel in the woodpile was one Maurice Zolotov, described as “Broadway’s Boswell and author of that fascinating series of biographical sketches titled ‘Never Whistle in a Dressing-room.’ ” A portrait of this social-minded literatus is in Esquire, Dec., 1944, p. 58.

1 Strip Teasing Alters Name; Same Exposure, by Robert M. Yoder, Chicago Daily News, April 19, 1940.

2 What’s In a Name, Manchester Evening News, May 25, 1940; Do You Know What an Ecdysiast Is?, Birmingham Evening Dispatch, May 25, 1940.

1 Mainly About Manhattan, by John Chapman, New York News, May 25, 1940.

2 This indignant item went the round of the English press, and even reached the great moral organs of the colonies — for example, the Johannesburg Sunday Times, Nov. 24, 1940.

3 Both the Associated Press and the United Press, under date of Oct. 13, sent out sympathetic accounts of this demonstration, and photographs of La Wilson and her associates were disseminated by the Wire Photo and other photographic agencies.

4 Police Board Put to Flight by Irrepressible Ecdysiasts, Los Angeles Times, Oct. 14, 1942. I am indebted here to Mr. James M. Cain

1 Ecdysiastic Woe, Youngstown Vindicator, Oct. 16, 1942.

2 Gypsy Rose Lee Indignantly Strips Herself of a Definition, May 2, 1940. The substance of the interview was reprinted in Mr. Smith’s anthropological work, Low Man on a Totem Pole; Garden City, N. Y., 1941, p. 92.

3 Despite her professed scorn of the intelligentsia, La Lee is an author herself. Her thriller, The G-String Murders, published in England as The Strip-Tease Murders, got friendly notices in both countries. See, for example, the London News Review, March 4, 1943. She soon followed it with another, Mother Finds a Body, and on Oct. 21, 1943 her play, The Naked Genius, was presented at the Plymouth Theatre, New York. Also, she contributed some amusing reminiscences of her early days on the stage to the New Yorker in 1943. There is a sympathetic account of her in Gypsy Rose Lee, Strip-tease Intellectual, by John Richmond, American Mercury, Jan., 1941.

4 The term appears in John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy, II, 1628.

1 Niminy Piminy, Bystander, Dec. 18, 1934.

2 Promoted, Liverpool Echo, Jan. 31, 1944. I am indebted here to Mr. P. E. Cleator and Mr. Edward L. Bernays.

3 London Times, June 7, 1944. I am indebted here to H. W. Seaman.

4 London Daily Express, April 29, 1944.

5 Butchers or Purveyors?, by S. W. Corley, London Times, Aug. 23, 1936.

6 Random Thoughts on Education, by Adelantemnos, Knife and Steel (the organ of the society), Dec., 1936, p. 6. This article was an eloquent plea for more vision in the retail meat trade. “It is not my job,” said the author, “to educate you; I only wish to stir the smouldering fire of your intellect into a living flame.… You may be tempted to describe these words as bovine excreta. I shall not mind.”

7 Ada S. Kellogg reported in American Notes and Queries, April, 1944, p. 10, that “a transportation company in New Jersey now refers to its drivers and motormen as salesmen, and gives this new name official sanction on placards, etc.”

8 William Hickey in the London Daily Express, Oct. 4, 1943.

1 Word-Skirmish, April 7, 1937, p. 370.

2 Lady, Woman and Person, American Speech, April, 1937, pp. 117–21. Withington returned to the subject in Woman — Lady, American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 235. But the Ladies’ Home Journal, founded in 1883, survives and flourishes.

3 I am indebted here to Mr. Vernon L. Hoyt of Columbus, Neb. Female heads of shop committees in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union are called chairladies.

4 London Telegraph and Post, May 20, 1938.

1 And How! Liverpool Echo, Dec. 10, 1942. I am indebted here to Mr. P. E. Cleator.

2 Editorial page, Dec. 3.

3 Doctresses, Authoresses and Others, American Speech, Aug., 1930, pp. 476–81. See also The Suffix -ess, by Edwin B. Dike, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Jan., 1937, pp. 29–34.

4 Diminutions of the English Language, May, 1865, p. 464. I am indebted for this to Dr. Joseph M. Carriere of the University of Virginia.

5 English Past and Present; London, 1855. They included teacheress, singeress, servantess, neighboress and sinneress. He added pedleress, victoress, ministress, flatteress, discipless, auditress, cateress, detractress, huckstress, tutoress and farmeress from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Addison and lesser authors.

6 Vassar had been opened in 1861 as Vassar Female Seminary, but its designation was changed to Vassar College in 1867. Its founder was Matthew Vassar, a rich and eminent brewer of Poughkeepsie.

1 The authoress notes that those marked ^* are her own inventions.

² The judicious will note that this term is listed under Titles of Professions, not under Titles of Office, Rank, Respect.

1 Used by a book-store in Fifth avenue, New York.

2 Advertisement of Selfridge’s (American-owned) in the London Daily Express, March 13, 1938. It was applied to women’s hose.

3 I am told by H. W. Seaman that oral offense has been used instead of halitosis in England.

4 In England art-silk is used to designate artificial silk, and effects to designate an imitation, as in tweed effects.

5 I am indebted here to Substitutes for Substitute, by M. J. M., American Speech, Oct., 1943, p. 207.

6 Names for Horse-Meat, Life, Aug. 2, 1943.

1 Reported by Max Lerner, PM, April 2, 1943, p. 2. I am indebted here to American Notes and Queries, April, 1943, p. 7.

2 Straight Talk About Sick Minds, by Edith M. Stern, Hygeia, March, 1944, p. 195.

3 I am indebted here to Mr. W. T. Hammack, assistant director of the Bureau of Prisons, Department of Justice. He says, May 12, 1937: “Very few officers in the custodial service bear arms. They are intended as leaders for groups of men and instructors in various activities undertaken for the utilization of prison labor.”

4 Counselling as Social Case Work, by Gordon Hamilton, Social Service Review, June, 1943.

5 From the name of the first such establishment, at Borstal, a village near Rochester in Kent.

6 Basil L. Q. Henriques said in The Word Borstal, London Times, Dec. 7, 1938, that “music-hall jokes about the old school tie” had brought the name into “general disrepute.”

7 Young Offenders: Hostels Instead of Approved Schools, News of the World (London), July 17, 1938.

8 Jottings by a Man About Town, Dublin Evening Mail, July 22, 1935.

1 Dartmoor’s 600 Empty Cells to be Filled Up, News of the World, April 26, 1936.

2 Dec. 6, 1936. This was at the time the Cabinet was considering a plan to force King Edward to abdicate, and public opinion was with His Majesty.

3 Beautiful Home of Poughkeepsie Newspapers to be News-Cathedral, Editor and Publisher, July 12, 1941. The newspapers were the Poughkeepsie Evening Star-Enterprise and Morning Eagle-News and the Hudson Valley Sunday Courier.

4 In Other Words, by W. E. Farbstein, New Yorker, Aug. 8, 1942.

1 Berrey and Van den Bark print a long list in The American Thesaurus of Slang, pp. 117 and 118, but do not attempt to distinguish between American and English phrases.

2 American Speech, Oct., 1936, pp. 195–202. Some Western terms are in Cowboy Euphemisms for Dying, by Mamie J. Meredith, the same, Oct., 1942, p. 213.

3 I lift this word from E. E. Ericson, who used it in the title of an article, Acthronyms; Derisive Names for Various Peoples, in Words, Oct., 1939.

1 It is possible that this was a loan from the German. The German traveler, Charles Sealsfield (Karl Postl), in Der Virey und die Aristokraten, oder Mexico in 1812, published in 1834, used froschesser. It was his habit to quote Americanisms in their original form, but this time he used German. I therefore surmise that he may have brought the term in instead of picking it up. I am indebted here to Charles Sealsfield’s Americanisms, II, by John T. Krumpelmann, American Speech, April, 1941, p. 110.

2 Three Years in California, by J. D. Borthwick; 1857, p. 252. I take this from California Gold-Rush English, by Marian Hamilton, American Speech, Aug., 1932, p. 424.

1 New Orleans Times-Picayune, Feb. 11, 1926, quoted in Creole and Cajan, by William A. Read, American Speech, June, 1926, p. 483.

2 Creole and West Indies, American Speech, March, 1927, pp. 293–94.

3 A corruption of the archaic French morbilles, pox.

4 The use of French was not confined, of course, to the English. Sebastian Brant in De Scorra Pestilenta, (1496) called syphilis mala de Franzos, and other writers of the time called it morbus Gallicas.

1 I am indebted here to Calling Names in Any Language, by Joachim Joesten, American Mercury, Dec., 1935, pp. 483–87.

2 The Hawaiian Language, by Henry P. Judd; Honolulu, 1940, p. 99. Judd says that it is also used by the Hawaiians as an adjective, in the sense of manly, strong, stable.

3 Alexander F. Chamberlain, Journal of American Folk-Lore, Oct.-Dec., 1902, p. 293.

4 A Protest From the Philippines, by M. J. M., American Speech, April, 1944, p. 148.

1 Berlin, 1901.

2 On this point I am not sure. See Harper’s Magazine, Jan., 1854, p. 269, col. 2.

3 California Gold-Rush English, by Marian Hamilton, American Speech, Aug., 1932, p. 424.

4 Says W. J. Wintemberg in the Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XVI, 1903, p. 128: “I am informed that the name was first applied in Pennsylvania, and that it owes its origin to the fact that most of the Pennsylvania Dutch voted for Andrew Jackson (Old Hickory) for President.… It is in general use as a derisive epithet.” Mr. Wintemberg adds that it appeared, in 1903, to be passing out.

1 A Note on the Epithet Hessian, Feb., p. 72.

1 “As brought,” says Grose, “at sponging or bawdy houses.”

2 Grose, in his third edition, 1785, illustrates this term with “Thank God it is no worse.”

3 The Dutch Government Beats the Dutch, by J. F. Bense, English Studies (Amsterdam), Dec., 1934., pp. 215 and 216.

4 Phases of State Legislation, Century Magazine, April, 1885, p. 827.

5 Mr. B. G. Kayfetz of West Toronto.

1 Oct., p. 236.

2 The Lingo of the Mining Camp, Nov., 1926, p. 88.

3 Dec. 3.

4 Informed of his error, he apologized in the Times on May 8. “On the authority of Mencken’s ‘American Language,’ ” he said, “a reader assures me that the slang expression for a German in the United States is squarehead or dutchman, not (as I said) bohunk, which euphonious name is applied to Hungarians and usually shortened to hunky. Fortunately, there is no hunky community in Singapore, so I need say no more than express the hope that, as between the local limeys and squareheads, my mistake has caused no ill-feeling.”

5 Czech Influence Upon the American Vocabulary, by J. B. Dudek, Czechoslovak Student Life (Lisle, Ill.), June, 1928, p. 16.

6 Some Current Substitutes For Irish, Vol. IV, Part II, pp. 146–48.

1 The NED traces wild Irish to 1399.

2 In A Pronouncing Gaelic-English Dictionary, by Neil MacAlphine; Glasgow, 1942, it is defined as “a castrated boar.”

3 To this McLaughlin appended the following note: “Professor George L. Hamilton of Cornell suggests that torc, originally meaning boar, may have been at first specifically applied to a coarse, brutal fellow, for he feels that there is a great difference between calling a person a pig and calling him a boar. However, Professor C. P. Wagner calls my attention to the French-Canadian use of verrat, boar, with no other significance than that implied in cochon.”

1 In Hanover, which was annexed by Prussia on Sept. 20, 1866, it was the custom, for several years after, for cards of invitation to bear the words Ohne Preussen (No Prussians). Every Saturday (Boston), Jan. 4, 1868, p. 30.

2 I am indebted here to Mr. Michael Gross of New York.

3 Camillo P. Merlino, associate professor of Italian in the University of Michigan, in Word Vagaries, Words, Sept., 1936, p, 7.

1 I am informed by a correspondent that guapo is used in Latin America as an adjective signifying strong.

2 Editorial Notes, American Mercury, Oct., 1926, p. lviii.

3 Wap-jawed is listed in A Second Word-List from Nebraska, by Louise Pound, Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Part IV, 1911, p. 548, and its use is illustrated in “That skirt hangs wap-jawed.” Berrey and Van den Bark give the variants wapper-jawed, wabble-jawed, wocker-jawed, whomper-jawed, whopper-jawed, wobble-jawed, womper-jawed, wop-jawed and wopper-jawed. Thomas Wright, in his Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English; London, 1857, lists wap in eight senses and wapper in two, but none of them shows any connection with wap-jawed, which may possibly be an Americanism, though it is not listed by the DAE.

4 It’s a Piece of Cake: R.A.F. Slang Made Easy, by C. H. Ward-Jackson; London, n. d., p. 63.

5 For example, Wop, by John Fair-weather, London Sunday Times, June 9, 1929; Wop, by Harold Lamb, the same, June 23, 1929; Wop: Derivation, by Robert S. Forsythe Notes and Queries, Jan. 2, 1937; Wops, by William Poulton, Newcastle Journal, Dec. 3 and 4, 1940; Why the Wops, Edinburgh Scotsman, Dec. 7, 1940; Wops, Belfast News-Letter, Jan. 1, 1941; Wop-Italian, Notes and Queries, Jan. 18, 1941.

1 The following is in The Conquest of New England by the Immigrant, by Daniel Chauncey Brewer; New York, 1926, pp. 323–24: “Up to the beginning of the Twentieth Century the alien was an alien.… The bosses had their own vernacular.… To some of these the Jew was a sheeney, the Pole a wop, and the Italian a dago.” I am indebted for this reference to Mr. Alexander Kadison.

2 William Poulton in the Newcastle Journal, just cited.

3 London Daily Express, Jan. 20, 1943. I am indebted here to Mr. P. E. Cleator.

4 Baltimore Sun Almanac, 1891, p. 100. I am indebted here to my brother, August Mencken.

5 Dialect Notes, Vol. II, Part I, 1900, p. 31.

1 Its first quotation is from the New York Herald, Jan. 13, 1896: “The average Pennsylvanian contemptuously refers to these immigrants as hikes and hunks. The hikes are Italians and Sicilians.” A second quotation is from the Century Magazine, 1898: “The Italians are termed bikes.”

2 I am indebted for this to Mr. Harry G. Green of Chicago and Mr. Michael Gross of New York. Lukschen also means extremely elongated in Yiddish and is applied to any tall man.

3 Louisiana Gleanings, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part VI, 1923, p. 243.

1 Feb. 11, p. 30.

2 By Robert Max Garrett of Seattle; Vol. V, Part III, p. 84.

3 Our Stakes in the Japanese Exodus, by Paul S. Taylor, Survey Graphic, Sept., 1942.

4 I am indebted here to Mr. Masami Nakachi of Manzanar, Calif. “Twenty years hence,” he says, “we may hear of san-sei, third generation.”

5 For example, Dr. C. Walter Young, of the Johns Hopkins University, who addressed the Baltimore Evening Sun on the subject under date of May 5, 1931. (His letter was published on the editorial page, May 7.) He said that he had induced the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune to abandon Jap “three years ago.”

1 The NED reports it in colloquial use in England, c. 1880.

2 p. 151.

3 Its use is forbidden to broadcasters for the B.B.C. Albert Deutsch in Minorities, PM, Sept. 17, 1942: “Who but the very meanest among us can ever again refer to the great and valiant Chinese as chinks? The spectacle of the sturdy, heroic people pouring out their life-blood for freedom forever blots out the pat caricature of the wily, tricky heathen Chinee portrayed by Bret Harte.”

1 This tale is quoted in The Southwestern Word Box, by T. M. P., New Mexico Quarterly (Albuquerque), Aug., 1932, p. 267, but the author does not vouch for it.

2 Popular Tribunals, by Hubert H. Bancroft; New York, 1887; Vol. I, p. 151.

3 American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 241.

4 I am indebted here to Mr. C. H. Calhoun, of Balboa Heights, C. Z.

5 The Psychology of Prison Language, by James Hargan, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Oct.-Dec, 1935, p. 362.

1 I am indebted here to Messrs. George Weller and C. V. L. Smith.

2 The DAE, in borrowing part of this, dates it c. 1840. Haliburton began his Sam Slick sketches in the Nova Scotian of Halifax in 1835. They appeared in book form in three series, 1837, 1838 and 1840.

3 An extract from the novel was printed in the New Masses, Aug. 6, 1935, under the title of Deportation Special. From it I take this: “Then out with you, go back where you came from, you dago, you hunky, you scoovy, you heinie, you mick, you sheenie, you limey! Get out and stay out!”

4 For this I am indebted to Mr. William H. Davenport, of New Haven, Conn.

1 The first two examples of to jew down are from the proceedings of Congress. Mark Twain used it in Life on the Mississippi, 1883, p. 473, and Frank Norris in Vandover and the Brute, c. 1895 (published 1914), p. 259.

2 His circular letter, addressed to “leading literary men, persons and organizations of national importance, and deans of principal universities,” was dated July 21, 1936. One of the definitions of Jew in the College Standard Dictionary, 1941, is “any usurious money-lender; an opprobrious use applied irrespective of race.” This is marked slang. The Winston Simplified Dictionary; Advanced Edition; 1926, defines Jew, inter alia, as “any one who deals craftily, or drives hard bargains.” In these senses the word is seldom used in the United States. The English still say of a spendthrift borrower that he is in the hands of the Jews, but the American term is loan-sharks.

1 A discussion of the historical difference between Hebrew and Jew, by Dr. Solomon Solis Cohen, is in AL4, pp. 298–99.

2 Twenty-second ed.; New York, n. d., p. 562.

3 New York, 1943, p. 200.

1 New York, 1925.

2 Private communication, June 25.

1 Cambridge, Mass.; 1933, p. 33.

2 You Speak Yiddish, Too!, Better English, Feb., 1938, p. 52.

1 In the course of a speech in the House of Representatives on Jan. 26, 1944 (Congressional Record, p. A446) the Hon. John E. Rankin of Mississippi reported that he had been given the following definition by “a Jewish friend”: “A kike is a Jew that is so detestable that the other Jews are ashamed of him, the Gentiles despise him, and the intelligent Negroes have contempt for him.”

2 In the South many prudent Jews joined it. This course offered them their only means of escape from its afflictions.

3 A List of Briticisms, Feb. 1942, p. 8.

1 Editor’s Drawer, May, p. 854.

1 Resort Ads Reformed, Editor and Publisher, Aug. 7, 1943. The Editor ansd Publisher was not altogether in favor of this censorship. It said: “The religious observances and dietary laws which make it difficult for orthodox Jews to share accommodations with those of other creeds were the base upon which the now out-ruled practices stood. That base has not changed, and instead of the words that offended tender sensibilities, the advertisers have found others to indicate the character of their enterprises. The Editor and Publisher does not believe that racial or religious discrimination is indicated when a hotel advertises that it is prepared to cater to either a preponderantly Christian or Jewish clientele. A good part of vacation joys are based upon association with congenial people, and that is true for people of every religious faith. If the elimination of words which imply inferiority of one racial group to others can be accomplished without limiting the advertisers’ right to choose their patronage groups it is a job worth doing.”

2 American Speech, Dec., 1936, p. 374.

3 He succeeded Booker T. Washington in 1915, retired in 1935, and died in 1940. The origin of his military title I do not know. The Times’ announcement of its conversion at his hands was embodied in the following editorial:
  “The tendency in typography is generally toward a lessened use of capital letters, yet reverence for things held sacred by many, a regard for the fundamental law of the land, a respect for the offices of men in high authority, and certain popular and social traditions have resisted this tendency.
  “Races have their capitalized distinction, as have nationalities, sects and cults, tribes and clans. It therefore seems reasonable that a people who had once a proud designation such as Ethiopians, reaching back into the dawn of history, having come up out of the slavery to which men of English speech subjected them, should now have such recognition as the lifting of the name from the lower case to the upper can give them.
  “Maj. Robert R. Moton of Tuskegee, the foremost representative of the race in America, has written the Times that his people universally wish to see the word Negro capitalized. It is a little thing mechanically to grant, but it is not a small thing in its implications.”

1 Mr. Schuyler is the most competent journalist that his race has produced in America. There are few white columnists, in fact, who can match him for information, intelligence, independence and courage.

1 A member of the lowest of the four Hindu castes.

1 Dr. Miller was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, at Howard University, Washington, and a recognized Negro publicist.

2 May, 1937, pp. 142–46.

3 Here Dr. Miller slipped. The NED says that Jew was “originally a Hebrew of the Kingdom of Judah.”

4 It survives, however, in the name of the Africo-American Presbyterian, a weekly published since 1879 by the Negro Presbyterian Church at Charlotte, N. C.

5 Carl Sandburg says in his Abraham Lincoln: the War Years; New York, 1939, Vol. II, p. 137: “Demurrings arose to Lincoln’s progressions in styling the Negroes, in 1859, negroes; in 1860, colored men; in 1861, intelligent contrabands; in 1862, free Americans of African descent.” Contraband came into use in 1861, when General Benjamin F. Butler issued a proclamation declaring slaves owned by Confederates contraband of war, but it was obsolete by 1870.

6 It is the name of a Negro newspaper of wide circulation and influence, published in Baltimore with local editions in other places. The readers of the paper in Baltimore call it the Afro, and it so refers to itself. “It is interesting to note,” said Dr. Miller, “that the Africo-American Presbyterian and the Afro-American, which stress their names in heavy type at the head of their papers, rarely use these terms in their news service or editorial columns.”

1 Johnston (1858–1927) spent nearly his whole adult life in Africa, and was the author of a number of authoritative books about its peoples. He also wrote a popular novel, The Gay Dombeys, 1919, with characters descended from those of Dickens’s Dombey & Son.

2 It was preceded, and probably suggested, by Amerindian, a name for the American Indian coined by Major J. W. Powell, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, in 1899. Amerindian was quickly displaced by Amerind, which is still in use. See AL4, p. 171, n. 2. In South Africa a similar quest for a sonorous designation for themselves has been carried on by the natives. “Their latest choice,” said J. A. Rogers in Sex and Race; New York, 1941, p. 131, “is Eur-African.” But this is objected to by the whites, who say that they are the only real Eur-Africans. The term Afrikander, which might well designate the blacks, is already monopolized by the whites. In Liberia the descendants of returned American slaves who constitute the ruling caste of the country used to call themselves Americo-Liberians to distinguish their group from the general mass of blacks. But I am informed by Mr. Ben Hamilton, Jr., of the Liberian consulate in Los Angeles, that this compound is now out of favor. He says: “Because of the great amount of intermarriage between the descendants of the colonists to Liberia from America with aborigines of the Negro republic, and because of a wave of nationalism that is sweeping the country, Liberians consider the term Americo-Liberian opprobrious as reflecting upon their [ancestors’] condition of servitude in the States. Hence they prefer to be called civilized or Monrovian Liberians to distinguish them from the natives of the hinterland, who are generally called by their tribal names.” Monrovia is the capital of Liberia, and the home of virtually all its noblesse.

3 Mexicans were not formally classified as white until the 1940 Census. Before that they were lumped with “other races.” Very few of them, of course, are actually white, even in part. The change was made in furtherance of the Good Neighbor policy, and presumably produced a favorable impression below the Rio Grande.

1 Views and Reviews, Pittsburgh Courier, July 17, 1937.

1 Journalistic Headache, Ken, March 9, 1939.

2 Views and Reviews, Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 7, 1936.

3 “Whenever two distinguishable groups,” said Dr. Miller in the article before cited, “are thrown together in close juxtaposition and association, there is always imperative necessity of some mark by which the individual is tied to his classification. Sex constitutes the deepest division of the human race. The individuals of the two sexes are separated by dress as well as by name, so as to relieve the embarrassment of mistaken identity across the sex line. A mistaken identity of race in Mississippi or Alabama might cause as much embarrassment as a similar mistake in sex.… Wherever significant group distinction exists, whether based on race, religion or culture, such terms as Jew and Gentile, Greek and barbarian, Christian and heathen have been universally applied for the purpose of identification.” When Dr. Miller wrote, in 1937, there were 29 American States with laws setting up legal distinctions on account of race, e.g., in such matters as separate schools, separate accommodations for travel, and bans on interracial marriages. But in none of them had the courts ever attempted a precise definition of Negro, nor had the Supreme Court of the United States undertaken that difficult, and maybe even impossible task.

1 In a paper entitled Our Flouted Heritage, by Frank Foster, of Seattle, Wash., not published but sent to me by the politeness of the author, it is suggested that what the Southern cracker really says is nigrer. But the upper classes, unless my ears deceive me, commonly use nigra. I have also heard niggero, but it was used sportively.

2 In The Field, the Dungeon and the Escape; Hartford, Conn., 1865, p. 101, Albert D. Richardson said that the Southerners of that time usually made it nigro, “never negro, and very rarely nigger.”

3 This protest appeared May 15, 1943, in Yes! We All Talk, a philological column conducted by Marcus H. Boulware. Mr. Boulware, in a note appended to the letter, said that “ne in Negro should rime with see, and gro with grow.”

4 Quoted in Journalistic Headache, by R. E. Wolseley, Ken, March 9, 1939. Perhaps the interracial tolerance of the term is helped along by recollection of the fact that in the Old South it often had, on white lips, a ring of genuine affection, though at best it was patronizing, and that it carried something of that character even into the new South. There is never any hint of affection in Negro (or nigrah). It is grudging and hostile.

5 For example, I find the following on p. 1 of the Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 1, 1941, in a dispatch from Due West, S. C., reporting the beating of a colored pastor, the Rev. B. J. Glover, Jr., “because law officers of this prejudice-ridden town thought he was too uppity for a N—r.” Here, it will be noted, the offending word was given a capital N. In the same dispatch occurred the following: “Another officer said, ‘Let’s teach that D— N— a lesson,’ and struck Rev. Glover.”

1 These divisions are made up of Negro elementary and high schools.

1 This correspondence was published in full in Opportunity, April, 1936, pp. 126 and 127.

2 The offense was tracked by eager Negro G-men to G. T. Brian, credit manager of the company, which has headquarters in Baltimore. He protested that he had merely quoted an old phrase and meant no harm, and added that he was a graduate of Cornell, where he had Negro fellow-students, and was on the board of the Baltimore Y.M.CA., where he “worked with an inter-racial committee whose job it has been to aid Negro boys.” But professional saviors of the Negro saw in the episode a chance to make hay, and the company was presently visited by a delegation of them which made a long list of demands, including the employment of Negroes in the manufacturing plant, and threatened a boycott in case of non-compliance. The company refused to be intimidated and nothing came of the boycott.

3 Nation, March 20, 1943.

1 Negro-wench is much older: the DAE traces it (in Boston!) to 1715, and simple wench (in North Carolina) to 1717. In 1807 Charles William Janson reported in The Stranger in America; London, p. 309 (quoted in Words Indicating Social Status in America in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, Oct., 1934, p. 208) that female slaves were “uniformly called wenches.” The term remained in general use until the Civil War and is still used in the South. A male slave was called a buck, and that term also survives in the South.

2 Topographical Terms in Virginia, III, by George Davis McJimsey, American Speech, Oct., 1940, p. 289.

3 Smokers’ Slang, by Robert H. Weber, American Speech, Oct., 19401 p. 335.

4 A Musician’s Word List, by Russel B. Nye, American Speech, Feb-1937, p. 47.

1 Nigger-lover and its congener, nigger-worshipper, were bitterly resented by the Abolitionists to whom they were applied in the days before the Civil War. Max Herzberg says in Insults: A Practical Anthology of Scathing Remarks and Acid Portraits, quoted in Encore, March, 1944, p. 322, that after Stephen A. Douglas had used the latter in a speech in the Senate William H. Seward said to him: “Douglas, no man will ever be President of the United States who spells Negro with two g’s.”

2 From Journalistic Headache, by R. E. Wolseley, already cited, I take the following: “The sports editor of a small Midwestern daily learned this unforgetably one Fall when he jokingly suggested that a good way to stop Ozzie Simmons, the great Negro football star from Iowa, was to roll a number of big juicy watermelons out on the field.… Telephone calls, letters and personal visits from the Negroes of the city made him realize he had hurt some feelings. A formal protest — a petition — from the local Inter-Racial Council brought the matter to the attention of the newspaper’s managing editor.”

3 Hugh Jones reported in The Present State of Virginia; London, 1724, p. 35 (quoted by Read, before cited, p. 208) that mulattoes were “born of a Negro and an European.” Persons born of a Negro and an Indian, he said, were called mustees. The DAE says that mustee was at first applied to what were later to be called quadroons. The word was borrowed from England, where the NED traces it to 1699. It meant there, originally, the offspring of a quadroon and a white, but came to signify any half-caste. It was derived from the Spanish mestizo.

1 New Orleans: The Place and the People; New York, 1895, p. 333.

2 The Swiss naturalist and traveler, Johann Jakob Tschudi (1818–89), in his Peru, Reiseskizzen (translated by Thomasina Ross as Travels in Peru; London, 1847, p. 114) gave the following list of designations for mixed bloods prevailing in Lima: