§ 6 The Materials of American
—One familiar with the habits of pedagogues need not be told that, in their grudging discussions of American, they have spent most of their energies upon vain attempts to classify its materials. White and Lounsbury, as I have shown, carried the business to the limits of the preposterous; when they had finished identifying and cataloguing Americanisms there were no more Americanisms left to study. The ladies and gentlemen of the American Dialect Society, though praiseworthy for their somewhat deliberate industry, fall into a similar fault, for they are so eager to establish minute dialectic variations that they forget the general language almost altogether.
Among investigators of less learning there is a more spacious view of the problem, and the labored categories of White and Lounsbury are much extended. Pickering, the first to attempt a list of Americanisms, rehearsed their origin under the following headings:
1. “We have formed some new words.”
2. “To some old ones, that are still in use in England, we have affixed new significations.”
3. “Others, which have long been obsolete in England, are still retained in common use among us.”
Bartlett, in the second edition of his dictionary, dated 1859, increased these classes to nine;
1. Archaisms, i. e., old English words, obsolete, or nearly so, in England, but retained in use in this country.
2. English words used in a different sense from what they are in England. These include many names of natural objects differently applied.
3. Words which have retained their original meaning in the United States, though not in England.
4. English provincialisms adopted into general use in America.
5. Newly coined words, which owe their origin to the productions or to the circumstances of the country.
6. Words borrowed from European languages, especially the French, Spanish, Dutch and German.
7. Indian words.
8. Negroisms.
9. Peculiarities of pronunciation.
Some time before this, but after the publication of Bartlett’s first edition in 1848, William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, devoted a brief chapter to “American Dialects” in his well-known work on English58 and in it one finds the following formidable classification of Americanisms:
1. Words borrowed from other languages.
a. Indian, as Kennebec, Ohio, Tombigbee; sagamore, quahaug, succotash.
b. Dutch, as boss, kruller, stoop.
c. German, as spuke (?), sauerkraut.
d. French, as bayou, cache, chute, crevasse, levee.
e. Spanish, as calaboose, chapparal, hacienda, rancho, ranchero.
f. Negro, as buckra.
2. Words “introduced from the necessity of our situation, in order to express new ideas.”
a. Words “connected with and flowing from our political institutions,” as selectman, presidential, congressional, caucus, mass-meeting, lynch-law, help (for servants).
b. Words “connected with our ecclesiastical institutions,” as associational, consociational, to fellowship, to missionate.
c. Words “connected with a new country,” as lot, diggings, betterments, squatter.
3. Miscellaneous Americanisms.
a. Words and phrases become obsolete in England, as talented, offset (for set-off), back and forth (for backward and forward).
b. Old words and phrases “which are now merely provincial in England,” as hub, whap (?), to wilt.
c. Nouns formed from verbs by adding the French suffix -ment, as publishment, releasement, requirement.
d. Forms of words “which fill the gap or vacancy between two words which are approved,” as obligate (between oblige and obligation) and variate (between vary and variation).
e. “Certain compound terms for which the English have different compounds,” as bank-bill, (bank-note), book-store (book-seller’s shop), bottom-land (interval land), clapboard (pale), sea-board (sea-shore), side-hill (hill-side).
f. “Certain colloquial phrases, apparently idiomatic, and very expressive,” as to cave in, to flare up, to flunk out, to fork over, to hold on, to let on, to stave off, to take on.
g. Intensives, “often a matter of mere temporary fashion,” as dreadful, mighty, plaguy, powerful.
h. “Certain verbs expressing one’s state of mind, but partially or timidly,” as to allot upon (for to count upon), to calculate, to expect (to think or believe), to guess, to reckon.
i. “Certain adjectives, expressing not only quality, but one’s subjective feelings in regard to it,” as clever, grand, green, likely, smart, ugly.
j. Abridgments, as stage (for stage-coach), turnpike (for turnpike-road), spry (for sprightly), to conduct (for to conduct one’s self).
k. “Quaint or burlesque terms,” as to tote, to yank; humbug, loafer, muss, plunder (for baggage), rock (for stone).
l. “Low expressions, mostly political,” as slangwhanger, loco foco, hunker; to get the hang of.
m. “Ungrammatical expressions, disapproved by all,” as do don’t, used to could, can’t come it, Universal preacher (for Universalist), there’s no two ways about it.
Elwyn, in 1859, attempted no classification.59 He confined his glossary to archaic English words surviving in America, and sought only to prove that they had come down “from our remotest ancestry” and were thus undeserving of the reviling lavished upon them by English critics. Schele de Vere, in 1872, followed Bartlett, and devoted himself largely to words borrowed from the Indian dialects, and from the French, Spanish and Dutch. But Farmer, in 1889,60 ventured upon a new classification, prefacing it with the following definition:
An Americanism may be defined as a word or phrase, old or new, employed by general or respectable usage in America in a way not sanctioned by the best standards of the English language. As a matter of fact, however, the term has come to possess a wider meaning, and it is now applied not only to words and phrases which can be so described, but also to the new and legitimately born words adapted to the general needs and usages, to the survivals of an older form of English than that now current in the mother country, and to the racy, pungent vernacular of Western life.
He then proceeded to classify his materials thus:
1. Words and phrases of purely American derivation, embracing words originating in:
a. Indian and aboriginal life.
b. Pioneer and frontier life.
c. The church.
d. Politics.
e. Trades of all kinds.
f. Travel, afloat and ashore.
2. Words brought by colonists, including:
a. The German element.
b. The French.
c. The Spanish.
d. The Dutch.
e. The negro.
f. The Chinese.
3. Names of American things, embracing:
a. Natural products.
b. Manufactured articles.
4. Perverted English words.
5. Obsolete English words still in good use in America.
6. English words, American by inflection and modification.
7. Odd and ignorant popular phrases, proverbs, vulgarisms, and colloquialisms, cant and slang.
8. Individualisms.
9. Doubtful and miscellaneous.
Clapin, in 1902,61 reduced these categories to four:
1. Genuine English words, obsolete or provincial in England, and universally used in the United States.
2. English words conveying, in the United States, a different meaning from that attached to them in England.
3. Words introduced from other languages than the English:—French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Indian, etc.
4. Americanisms proper, i. e., words coined in the country, either representing some new idea or peculiar product.
Thornton, in 1912, substituted the following:
1. Forms of speech now obsolete or provincial in England, which survive in the United States, such as allow, bureau, fall, gotten, guess, likely, professor, shoat.
2. Words and phrases of distinctly American origin, such as belittle, lengthy, lightning-rod, to darken one’s doors, to bark up the wrong tree, to come out at the little end of the horn, blind tiger, cold snap, gay Quaker, gone coon, long sauce, pay dirt, small potatoes, some pumpkins.
3. Nouns which indicate quadrupeds, birds, trees, articles of food, etc., that are distinctively American, such as ground-hog, hang-bird, hominy, live-oak, locust, opossum, persimmon, pone, succotash, wampum, wigwam.
4. Names of persons and classes of persons, and of places, such as Buckeye, Cracker, Greaser, Hoosier, Old Bullion, Old Hickory, the Little Giant, Dixie, Gotham, the Bay State, the Monumental City.
5. Words which have assumed a new meaning, such as card, clever, fork, help, penny, plunder, raise, rock, sack, ticket, windfall.
In addition, Thornton added a provisional class of “words and phrases of which I have found earlier examples in American than in English writers;... with the caveat that further research may reverse the claim”—a class offering specimens in alarmist, capitalize, eruptiveness, horse of another colour (sic!), the jig’s up, nameable, omnibus bill, propaganda and whitewash.
No more than a brief glance at these classifications is needed to show that they hamper the inquiry by limiting its scope—not so much, to be sure, as the ridiculous limitations of White and Lounsbury, but still very seriously. They meet the ends of purely descriptive lexicography, but largely leave out of account some of the most salient characters of a living language, for example, pronunciation and idiom. Only Bartlett and Farmer establish a separate category of Americanisms produced by changes in pronunciation, though even Thornton, of course, is obliged to take notice of such forms as bust and bile. None of them, however, goes into the matter at any length, nor even into the matter of etymology. Bartlett’s etymologies are scanty and often inaccurate; Schele de Vere’s are sometimes quite fanciful; Thornton offers scarcely any at all. The best of these collections of Americanisms, and by long odds, is Thornton’s. It presents an enormous mass of quotations, and they are all very carefully dated, and it corrects most of the more obvious errors in the work of earlier inquirers. But its very dependence upon quotations limits it chiefly to the written language, and so the enormously richer materials of the spoken language are passed over, and particularly the materials evolved during the past twenty years. One searches the two fat volumes in vain for such highly characteristic forms as would of, near-accident, and buttinski, the use of sure as an adverb, and the employment of well as a sort of general equivalent of the German also.
These grammatical and syntactical tendencies are beyond the scope of Thornton’s investigation, but it is plain that they must be prime concerns of any future student who essays to get at the inner spirit of the language. Its difference from standard English is not merely a difference in vocabulary, to be disposed of in an alphabetical list; it is, above all, a difference in pronunciation, in intonation, in conjugation and declension, in metaphor and idiom, in the whole fashion of using words. A page from one of Ring W. Lardner’s baseball stories contains few words that are not in the English vocabulary, and yet the thoroughly American color of it cannot fail to escape anyone who actually listens to the tongue spoken around him. Some of the elements which enter into that color will be considered in the following pages. The American vocabulary, of course, must be given first attention, for in it the earliest American divergences are embalmed and it tends to grow richer and freer year after year, but attention will also be paid to materials and ways of speech that are less obvious, and in particular to certain definite tendencies of the grammar of spoken American, hitherto wholly neglected.
Footnotes
1 Pp. 22-23.
2 America’s Coming of Age; New York, 1915, p. 15. See also the preface to Every-Day English, by Richard Grant White; Boston, 1881, p. xviii.
3 The common notion that the Académie combats changes is quite erroneous. In the preface to the first edition of its dictionary (1694) it disclaimed any purpose “to make new words and to reject others at its pleasure.” In the preface to the second edition (1718) it confessed that “ignorance and corruption often introduce manners of writing” and that “convenience establishes them.” In the preface to the third edition (1740) it admitted that it was “forced to admit changes which the public has made.” And so on. Says D. M. Robertson, in A History of the French Academy (London, 1910): “The Academy repudiates any assumption of authority over the language with which the public in its own practise has not first clothed it. So much, indeed, does it confine itself to an interpretation merely of the laws of language that its decisions are sometimes contrary to its own judgment of what is either desirable or expedient.”
4 Cf. Scandinavian Studies and Notes, vol. iv, no. 3, Aug. 1917, p. 258.
5 This movement won official recognition so long ago as 1885, when the Storting passed the first of a series of acts designed to put the two languages on equal footing. Four years later, after a campaign going back to 1874, provision was made for teaching the landsmaal in the schools for the training of primary teachers. In 1899 a professorship of the landsmaal was established in the University of Christiania. The school boards in the case of primary schools, and the pupils in the case of middle and high schools are now permitted to choose between the two languages, and the landsmaal has been given official status by the State Church. The chief impediment to its wider acceptance lies in the fact that it is not, as it stands, a natural language, but an artificial amalgamation of peasant dialects. It was devised in 1848-50 by Ivar Aasen. Vide The Language Question, London Times Norwegian Supplement, May 18, 1914.
6 A few such works are listed in the bibliography. More of them are mentioned in Americanismos, by Miguel de Toro y Gisbert; Paris, n. d.
7 Maximilian Schele de Vere: Americanisms: The English of the New World; New York, 1872.
8 Richard H. Thornton: An American Glossary..., 2 vols.; Phila. and London, 1912.
9 Organized Feb. 19, 1889, with Dr. J. J. Child, of Harvard, as its first president.
10 Author of Travels in North America; London, 1829.
11 A Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America; Boston, 1816.
12 A Letter to the Hon. John Pickering on the Subject of His Vocabulary; Boston, 1817.
13 4th ed., New York, 1870, p. 669.
14 Op. cit. p. 676.
15 The English Language; New York 1850; rev. ed., 1855. This was the first American text-book of English for use in colleges. Before its publication, according to Fowler himself (rev. ed., p. xi), the language was studied only “superficially” and “in the primary schools.” He goes on: “Afterward, when older, in the academy, during their preparation for college, our pupils perhaps despised it, in comparison with the Latin and the Greek; and in the college they do not systematically study the language after they come to maturity.”
16 In Recent Exemplifications of False Philology; London, 1872.
17 Americanisms, parts I-VIII, April, May, July, Sept., Nov., 1878; Jan., March, May, 1879.
18 A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States, 4th ed.; Boston, 1877.
19 Feb., March, June, July, Sept.
20 Vol. xiv, pp. 484-5; Cambridge, 1917.
21 Vol. xxv, p. 209.
22 July 18, 1913.
23 Of the words cited as still unfamiliar in England, Thornton has traced hobo to 1891, hold-up and bunco to 1887, dive to 1882, dead-beat to 1877, hoodlum to 1872, road-agent to 1866, stag to 1856, drummer to 1836 and flume to 1792. All of them are probably older than these references indicate.
24 Summarized in Literary Digest, June 19, 1915.
25 America Today, Scribner’s, Feb. 1899, p. 218.
26 London Court Journal, Aug. 28, 1892.
27 In Pastures New; New York, 1906, p. 6.
28 Concerning the American Language, in The Stolen White Elephant; Boston, 1882. A footnote says that the essay is “part of a chapter crowded out of A Tramp Abroad.” (Hartford, 1880.)
29 Hartford, 1872, p. 45.
30 The Editor’s Study, Harper’s Magazine, Jan. 1886.
31 Die englische Sprache in Nordamerika, band iv, heft i; Braunschweig, 1848.
32 Étude sur l’Anglais Parlé aux Etats Unis (la Langue Américaine), Actes de la Société Philologique de Paris, March, 1874.
33 Metoula-Sprachführer.... Englisch von Karl Blattner; Ausgabe für Amerika; Berlin-Schöneberg, 1912.
34 Polyglott Kuntze; Schnellste Erlernung jeder Sprache ohne Lehrer; Amerikanisch; Bonn a. Rh., n. d.
35 Like the English expositors of American slang, this German falls into several errors. For example, he gives cock for rooster, boots for shoes, braces for suspenders and postman for letter-carrier, and lists iron-monger, joiner and linen-draper as American terms. He also spells wagon in the English manner, with two g’s, and translates Schweinefüsse as pork-feet. But he spells such words as color in the American manner and gives the pronunciation of clerk as the American klörk, not as the English klark.
36 Molee’s notions are set forth in Plea for an American Language...; Chicago, 1888; and Tutonish; Chicago, 1902. He announced the preparation of A Dictionary of the American Language in 1888, but so far as I know it has not been published. He was born in Wisconsin, of Norwegian parents, in 1845, and pursued linguistic studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he seems to have taken a Ph. B.
37 American English, North American Review, Jan. 1883.
38 Oct. 1, 1909.
39 J. F. Healy, general manager of the Davis Colliery Co. at Elkins, W. Va., in a speech before the West Virginia Coal Mining Institute, at Wheeling, Dec. 1910; reprinted as The American Language; Pittsburgh, 1911.
40 Westminster Review, July, 1888, p. 35.
41 W. W. Skeat distinguishes no less than 9 dialects in Scotland, 3 in Ireland and 30 in England and Wales. Vide English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day; Cambridge, 1911, p. 107 et seq..
42 Art. Americanisms, 2nd ed.
43 F. L. Pattee: A History of American Literature Since 1870; New York, 1916.
44 A. H. Sayce: Introduction to the Science of Language, 2 vols.; London, 1900. See especially vol. ii, ch. vi.
45 Cf. the chapter, Interlude: On Jargon, in Quiller-Couch’s On the Art of Writing; New York, 1916. Curiously enough, large parts of the learned critic’s book are written in the very Jargon he attacks.
46 Alexander Francis: Americans: an Impression; New York, 1900.
47 G. Lowes Dickinson, in the English Review, quoted by Current Literature, April, 1910.
48 Speech before the Chamber of Commerce Convention, Washington, Feb. 19, 1916.
49 Speech at workingman’s dinner, New York, Sept. 4, 1912.
50 Wit and Wisdom of Woodrow Wilson, comp. by Richard Linthicum; New York, 1916, p. 54.
51 Speech at Ridgewood, N. J., April 22, 1910.
52 Wit and Wisdom..., p. 56.
53 Henry Sweet: A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical, 2 parts; Oxford, 1900-03, part i, p. 224.
54 Despite this fact an academic and ineffective opposition to it still goes on. On the Style Sheet of the Century Magazine it is listed among the “words and phrases to be avoided.” It was prohibited by the famous Index Expurgatorius prepared by William Cullen Bryant for the New York Evening Post, and his prohibition is still theoretically in force, but the word is now actually permitted by the Post. The Chicago Daily News Style Book, dated July 1, 1908, also bans it.
55 Scientist is now in the Oxford Dictionary. So are reliable, standpoint and gubernatorial. But the Century Magazine still bans standpoint and the Evening Post (at least in theory) bans both standpoint and reliable. The Chicago Daily News accepts standpoint, but bans reliable and gubernatorial. All of these words, of course, are now quite as good as ox or and.
56 Art. Changes in the Language Since Shakespeare’s Time, Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv. p. 491.
57 Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. ii, pp. 333-4.
58 Op. cit., pp. 119-28.
59 Alfred L. Elwyn, M. D.: Glossary of Supposed Americanisms...; Phila., 1859.
60 John S. Farmer: Americanisms Old and New...; London, 1889.
61 Sylva Clapin: A New Dictionary of Americanisms, Being a Glossary of Words Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States and the Dominion of Canada; New York, 1902.