The American Language
loan-words, for example /banjo/ and /breakdown/. /Banjo/ seems to be
derived from /bandore/ or /bandurria/, modern French and Spanish forms
of /tambour/, respectively. It may, however, be an actual negro word;
there is a term of like meaning, /bania/, in Senegambian. Ware says
that /breakdown/, designating a riotous negro dance, is a corruption
of the French /rigadon/. The word is not in the Oxford Dictionary.
Bartlett listed it as an Americanism, but Thornton rejected it,
apparently because, in the sense of a collapse, it has come into
colloquial use in England. Its etymology is not given in the American
dictionaries.
§ 3
/New Words of English Material/--But of far more importance than these
borrowings was the great stock of new words that the colonists coined
in English metal--words primarily demanded by the "new circumstances
under which they were placed," but also indicative, in more than one
case, of a delight in the business for its own sake. The American,
even in the early eighteenth century, already showed many of the
characteristics that were to set him off from the Englishman later
on--his bold and somewhat grotesque imagination, his contempt for
authority, his lack of aesthetic sensitiveness, his extravagant humor.
Among the first colonists there were many men of education, culture
and gentle birth, but they were soon swamped by hordes of the ignorant
and illiterate, and the latter, cut off from the corrective influence
of books, soon laid their hands upon the language. It is impossible to
imagine the austere Puritan divines of Massachusetts inventing such
verbs as /to cowhide/ and /to logroll/, or such adjectives as
/no-account/ and /stumped/, or such adverbs as /no-how/ and [Pg045]
/lickety-split/, or such substantives as /bull-frog/, /hog-wallow/ and
/hoe-cake/; but under their eyes there arose a contumacious
proletariat which was quite capable of the business, and very eager
for it. In Boston, so early as 1628, there was a definite class of
blackguard roisterers, chiefly made up of sailors and artisans; in
Virginia, nearly a decade earlier, John Pory, secretary to Governor
Yeardley, lamented that "in these five moneths of my continuance here
there have come at one time or another eleven sails of ships into this
river, but fraighted more with ignorance than with any other
marchansize." In particular, the generation born in the New World was
uncouth and iconoclastic;[16] the only world it knew was a rough
world, and the virtues that environment engendered were not those of
niceness, but those of enterprise and resourcefulness.
Upon men of this sort fell the task of bringing the wilderness to the
ax and the plow, and with it went the task of inventing a vocabulary
for the special needs of the great adventure. Out of their loutish
ingenuity came a great number of picturesque names for natural
objects, chiefly boldly descriptive compounds: /bull-frog/,
/canvas-back/, /lightning-bug/, /mud-hen/, /cat-bird/, /razor-back/,
/garter-snake/, /ground-hog/ and so on. And out of an inventiveness
somewhat more urbane came such coinages as /live-oak/, /potato-bug/,
/turkey-gobbler/, /poke-weed/, /copper-head/, /eel-grass/,
/reed-bird/, /egg-plant/, /blue-grass/, /pea-nut/, /pitch-pine/,
/cling-stone/ (peach), /moccasin-snake/, /June-bug/ and /butter-nut/.
/Live-oak/ appears in a document of 1610; /bull-frog/ was familiar to
Beverley in 1705; so was /James-Town weed/ (later reduced to /Jimson
weed/, as the English /hurtleberry/ or /whortleberry/ was reduced to
/huckleberry/). These early Americans were not botanists. They were
often ignorant of the names of the plants they encountered, even when
those plants already had English names, and so they exercised their
fancy upon new ones. So arose /Johnny-jump-up/ for the /Viola
tricolor/, and /basswood/ for the common European /linden/ or
/lime-tree/ (/Tilia/), and /locust/ for the /Robinia pseudacacia/ and
its allies. The /Jimson weed/ itself was anything but a [Pg046]
novelty, but the pioneers apparently did not recognize it, and so we
find them ascribing all sorts of absurd medicinal powers to it, and
even Beverley solemnly reporting that "some Soldiers, eating it in a
Salad, turn'd natural Fools upon it for several Days." The grosser
features of the landscape got a lavish renaming, partly to distinguish
new forms and partly out of an obvious desire to attain a more literal
descriptiveness. I have mentioned /key/ and /hook/, the one borrowed
from the Spanish and the other from the Dutch. With them came /run/,
/branch/, /fork/, /bluff/, (noun), /neck/, /barrens/, /bottoms/,
/underbrush/, /bottom-land/, /clearing/, /notch/, /divide/, /knob/,
/riffle/, /gap/, /rolling-country/ and /rapids/,[17] and the extension
of /pond/ from artificial pools to small natural lakes, and of /creek/
from small arms of the sea to shallow feeders of rivers. Such common
English geographical terms as /downs/, /weald/, /wold/, /fen/, /bog/,
/fell/, /chase/, /combe/, /dell/, /heath/ and /moor/ disappeared from
the colonial tongue, save as fossilized in a few proper names. So did
/bracken/.
With the new landscape came an entirely new mode of life--new foods,
new forms of habitation, new methods of agriculture, new kinds of
hunting. A great swarm of neologisms thus arose, and, as in the
previous case, they were chiefly compounds. /Back-country/,
/back-woods/, /back-woodsman/, /back-settlers/, /back-settlements/:
all these were in common use early in the eighteenth century.
/Back-log/ was used by Increase Mather in 1684. /Log-house/ appears in
the Maryland Archives for 1669.[18] /Hoe-cake/, /Johnny-cake/,
/pan-fish/, /corn-dodger/, /roasting-ear/, /corn-crib/, /corn-cob/ and
/pop-corn/ were all familiar before the Revolution. So were
/pine-knot/, /snow-plow/, /cold-snap/, /land-slide/, /salt-lick/,
/prickly-heat/, /shell-road/ and /cane-brake/. /Shingle/ was a novelty
in 1705, but one S. Symonds wrote to John Winthrop, of Ipswich, about
a /clapboarded/ house in 1637. /Frame-house/ seems to have come in
with /shingle/. /Trail/, /half-breed/, /Indian-summer/ and [Pg047]
/Indian-file/ were obviously suggested by the Red Men. /State-house/
was borrowed, perhaps, from the Dutch. /Selectman/ is first heard of
in 1685, displacing the English /alderman/. /Mush/ had displaced
/porridge/ by 1671. Soon afterward /hay-stack/ took the place of the
English /hay-cock/, and such common English terms as /byre/, /mews/,
/weir/, and /wain/ began to disappear. /Hired-man/ is to be found in
the Plymouth town records of 1737, and /hired-girl/ followed soon
after. So early as 1758, as we find by the diary of Nathaniel Ames,
the second-year students at Harvard were already called /sophomores/,
though for a while the spelling was often made /sophimores/.
/Camp-meeting/ was later; it did not appear until 1799. But
/land-office/ was familiar before 1700, and /side-walk/,
/spelling-bee/, /bee-line/, /moss-back/, /crazy-quilt/, /mud-scow/,
/stamping-ground/ and a hundred and one other such compounds were in
daily use before the Revolution. After that great upheaval the new
money of the confederation brought in a number of new words. In 1782
Gouverneur Morris proposed to the Continental Congress that the coins
of the republic be called, in ascending order, /unit/, /penny-bill/,
/dollar/ and /crown/. Later Morris invented the word /cent/,
substituting it for the English /penny/.[19] In 1785 Jefferson
proposed /mill/, /cent/, /dime/, /dollar/ and /eagle/, and this
nomenclature was adopted.
Various nautical terms peculiar to America, or taken into English from
American sources, came in during the eighteenth century, among them,
/schooner/, /cat-boat/ and /pungy/, not to recall /batteau/ and
/canoe/. According to a recent historian of the American merchant
marine,[20] the first schooner ever seen was launched at Gloucester,
Mass., in 1713. The word, it appears, was originally spelled
/scooner/. /To scoon/ was a verb borrowed by the New Englanders from
some Scotch dialect, and meant to skim or skip across the water like a
flat stone. As the first schooner left the ways and glided out into
Gloucester harbor, an enraptured spectator shouted: "Oh, see how she
scoons!" "A /scooner/ let her be!" replied Captain Andrew Robinson,
her [Pg048] builder--and all boats of her peculiar and novel
fore-and-aft rig took the name thereafter. The Dutch mariners borrowed
the term and changed the spelling, and this change was soon accepted
in America. The Scotch root came from the Norse /skunna/, to hasten,
and there are analogues in Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon and Old High German.
The origin of /cat-boat/ and /pungy/ I have been unable to determine.
Perhaps the latter is related in some way to /pung/, a one-horse sled
or wagon. /Pung/ was once widely used in the United States, but of
late it has sunk to the estate of a New England provincialism.
Longfellow used it, and in 1857 a writer in the /Knickerbocker
Magazine/ reported that /pungs/ filled Broadway, in New York, after a
snow-storm.
Most of these new words, of course, produced derivatives, for example,
/to stack hay/, /to shingle/, /to shuck/ (/i. e./, corn), /to trail/
and /to caucus/. /Backwoods/ immediately begat /backwoodsman/ and was
itself turned into a common adjective. The colonists, indeed, showed a
beautiful disregard of linguistic nicety. At an early date they
shortened the English law-phrase, /to convey by deed/, to the simple
verb, /to deed/. Pickering protested against this as a barbarism, and
argued that no self-respecting law-writer would employ it, but all the
same it was firmly entrenched in the common speech and it has remained
there to this day. /To table/, for /to lay on the table/, came in at
the same time, and so did various forms represented by /bindery/, for
/bookbinder's shop/. /To tomahawk/ appeared before 1650, and /to
scalp/ must have followed soon after. Within the next century and a
half they were reinforced by many other such new verbs, and by such
adjectives made of nouns as /no-account/ and /one-horse/, and such
nouns made of verbs as /carry-all/ and /goner/, and such adverbs as
/no-how/. In particular, the manufacture of new verbs went on at a
rapid pace. In his letter to Webster in 1789, Franklin denounced /to
advocate/, /to progress/, and /to oppose/--a vain enterprise, for all
of them are now in perfectly good usage. /To advocate/, indeed, was
used by Thomas Nashe in 1589, and by John Milton half a century later,
but it seems to have been reinvented in America. In 1822 and again in
1838 Robert Southey, then poet laureate, led two belated attacks upon
it, as a barbarous Americanism, but [Pg049] its obvious usefulness
preserved it, and it remains in good usage on both sides of the
Atlantic today--one of the earliest of the English borrowings from
America. In the end, indeed, even so ardent a purist as Richard Grant
White adopted it, as he did /to placate/.[21]
Webster, though he agreed with Franklin in opposing /to advocate/,
gave his /imprimatur/ to /to appreciate/ (/i. e./, to rise in
value), and is credited by Sir Charles Lyell[22] with having himself
invented /to demoralize/. He also approved /to obligate/. /To
antagonize/ seems to have been given currency by John Quincy Adams,
/to immigrate/ by John Marshall, /to eventuate/ by Gouverneur Morris,
and /to derange/ by George Washington. Jefferson, always hospitable
to new words, used /to belittle/ in his "Notes on Virginia," and
Thornton thinks that he coined it. Many new verbs were made by
the simple process of prefixing the preposition to common nouns,
/e. g./, /to clerk/, /to dicker/, /to dump/, /to blow/, (/i. e./,
to bluster or boast), /to cord/ (/i. e./, wood) /to stump/, /to
room/ and /to shin/. Others were made by transforming verbs in the