The American Language
orthodox vocabulary, /e. g./, /to cavort/ from /to curvet/, and /to
snoop/ from /to snook/. Others arose as metaphors, /e. g./, /to
whitewash/ (figuratively) and /to squat/ (on unoccupied land). Others
were made by hitching suffixes to nouns, /e. g./, /to negative/,
/to deputize/, /to locate/, /to legislate/, /to infract/, /to
compromit/ and /to happify/. Yet others seem to have been produced by
onomatopoeia, /e. g./, /to fizzle/, or to have arisen by some other
such spontaneous process, so far unintelligible, /e. g./, /to tote/.
With them came an endless series of verb-phrases, /e. g./, /to draw a
bead/, /to face the music/, /to darken one's doors/, /to take to the
woods/, /to fly off the handle/, /to go on the war-path/ and /to saw
wood/--all obvious products of frontier life. Many coinages of the
pre-Revolutionary era later disappeared. Jefferson used /to ambition/
but it dropped out nevertheless, and so did /to compromit/, (/i. e./,
to compromise), /to homologize/, and /to happify/. Fierce battles
raged 'round some of these words, and they were all violently derided
in England. Even so useful a verb as /to locate/, now in perfectly
good usage, [Pg050] was denounced in the third volume of the /North
American Review/, and other purists of the times tried to put down
/to legislate/.
The young and tender adjectives had quite as hard a row to hoe,
particularly /lengthy/. The /British Critic/ attacked it in November,
1793, and it also had enemies at home, but John Adams had used it in
his diary in 1759 and the authority of Jefferson and Hamilton was
behind it, and so it survived. Years later James Russell Lowell spoke
of it as "the excellent adjective,"[23] and boasted that American had
given it to English. /Dutiable/ also met with opposition, and
moreover, it had a rival, /customable/; but Marshall wrote it into his
historic decisions, and thus it took root. The same anonymous watchman
of the /North American Review/ who protested against /to locate/
pronounced his anathema upon "such barbarous terms as /presidential/
and /congressional/," but the plain need for them kept them in the
language. /Gubernatorial/ had come in long before this, and is to be
found in the New Jersey Archives of 1734. /Influential/ was denounced
by the Rev. Jonathan Boucher and by George Canning, who argued that
/influent/ was better, but it was ardently defended by William
Pinkney, of Maryland, and gradually made its way. /Handy/, /kinky/,
/law-abiding/, /chunky/, /solid/ (in the sense of well-to-do),
/evincive/, /complected/, /judgmatical/, /underpinned/, /blooded/ and
/cute/ were also already secure in revolutionary days. So with many
nouns. Jefferson used /breadstuffs/ in his Report of the Secretary of
State on Commercial Restrictions, December 16, 1793. /Balance/, in the
sense of remainder, got into the debates of the First Congress.
/Mileage/ was used by Franklin in 1754, and is now sound English.
/Elevator/, in the sense of a storage house for grain, was used by
Jefferson and by others before him. /Draw/, for /drawbridge/, comes
down from Revolutionary days. So does /slip/, in the sense of a berth
for vessels. So does /addition/, in the sense of a suburb. So,
finally, does /darkey/.
The history of many of these Americanisms shows how vain is the effort
of grammarians to combat the normal processes of [Pg051] language
development. I have mentioned the early opposition to /dutiable/,
/influential/, /presidential/, /lengthy/, /to locate/, /to oppose/,
/to advocate/, /to legislate/ and /to progress/. /Bogus/, /reliable/
and /standpoint/ were attacked with the same academic ferocity. All of
them are to be found in Bryant's /Index Expurgatorius/[24] (/circa/
1870), and /reliable/ was denounced by Bishop Coxe as "that abominable
barbarism" so late as 1886.[25] Edward S. Gould, another
uncompromising purist, said of /standpoint/ that it was "the bright
particular star ... of solemn philological blundering" and "the very
counterpart of Dogberry's /non-com/."[26] Gould also protested against
/to jeopardize/, /leniency/ and /to demean/, and Richard Grant White
joined him in an onslaught upon /to donate/. But all of these words
are in good use in the United States today, and some of them have gone
over into English.[27]
§ 4
/Changed Meanings/--A number of the foregoing contributions to the
American vocabulary, of course, were simply common English words with
changed meanings. /To squat/, in the sense of /to crouch/, had been
sound English for centuries; what the colonists did was to attach a
figurative meaning to it, and then bring that figurative meaning into
wider usage than the literal meaning. In a somewhat similar manner
they changed the significance of /pond/, as I have pointed out. So,
too, with /creek/. In English it designated (and still designates) a
small inlet or arm of a large river or of the sea; in American, so
early as 1674, it designated any small stream. Many other such changed
meanings crept into American in the early days. A typical one was the
use of /lot/ to designate a /parcel/ of land. Thornton says, perhaps
inaccurately, that it originated in the fact that the land in New
England was distributed by lot. Whatever the truth, /lot/, [Pg052] to
this day, is in almost universal use in the United States, though rare
in England. Our conveyancers, in describing real property, always
speak of "all that /lot/ or /parcel/ of land."[28] Other examples of
the application of old words to new purposes are afforded by
/freshet/, /barn/ and /team/. A /freshet/, in eighteenth century
English, meant any stream of fresh water; the colonists made it
signify an inundation. A /barn/ was a house or shed for storing crops;
in the colonies the word came to mean a place for keeping cattle also.
A /team/, in English, was a pair of draft horses; in the colonies it
came to mean both horses and vehicle.
The process is even more clearly shown in the history of such words as
/corn/ and /shoe/. /Corn/, in orthodox English, means grain for human
consumption, and especially wheat, /e. g./, the /Corn/ Laws. The
earliest settlers, following this usage, gave the name of /Indian
corn/ to what the Spaniards, following the Indians themselves, had
called /maíz/. But gradually the adjective fell off, and by the middle
of the eighteenth century /maize/ was called simply /corn/, and grains
in general were called /breadstuffs/. Thomas Hutchinson, discoursing
to George III in 1774, used /corn/ in this restricted sense, speaking
of "rye and /corn/ mixed." "What /corn/?" asked George. "/Indian
corn/," explained Hutchinson, "or, as it is called in authors,
/maize/."[29] So with /shoe/. In English it meant (and still means) a
topless article of foot-wear, but the colonists extended its meaning
to varieties covering the ankle, thus displacing the English /boot/,
which they reserved for foot coverings reaching at least to the knee.
To designate the English /shoe/ they began to use the word /slipper/.
This distinction between English and American usage still prevails,
despite the affectation which has lately sought to revive /boot/, and
with it its derivatives, /boot-shop/ and /bootmaker/.
/Store/, /shop/, /lumber/, /pie/, /dry-goods/, /cracker/, /rock/ and
/partridge/ among nouns and /to haul/, /to jew/, /to notify/ and /to
heft/ among verbs offer further examples of changed meanings. Down to
the [Pg053] middle of the eighteenth century /shop/ continued to
designate a retail establishment in America, as it does in England to
this day. /Store/ was applied only to a large establishment--one
showing, in some measure, the character of a warehouse. But in 1774 a
Boston young man was advertising in the /Massachusetts Spy/ for "a
/place/ as a /clerk/ in a /store/" (three Americanisms in a row!).
Soon afterward /shop/ began to acquire its special American meaning as
a factory, /e. g./, /machine-shop/. Meanwhile /store/ completely
displaced /shop/ in the English sense, and it remained for a late
flowering of Anglomania, as in the case of /boot/ and /shoe/, to
restore, in a measure, the /status quo ante/. /Lumber/, in eighteenth
century English, meant disused furniture, and this is its common
meaning in England today. But the colonists early employed it to
designate timber, and that use of it is now universal in America. Its
familiar derivatives, /e. g./, /lumber-yard/, /lumberman/,
/lumberjack/, greatly reinforce this usage. /Pie/, in English, means a
meat-pie; in American it means a fruit-pie. The English call a
fruit-pie a /tart/; the Americans call a meat-pie a /pot-pie/.
/Dry-goods/, in England, means "non-liquid goods, as corn" (/i. e./,
wheat); in the United States the term means "textile fabrics or
wares."[30] The difference had appeared before 1725. /Rock/, in
English, always means a large mass; in America it may mean a small
stone, as in /rock-pile/ and /to throw a rock/. The Puritans were
putting /rocks/ into the foundations of their meeting-houses so early
as 1712.[31] /Cracker/ began to be used for /biscuit/ before the
Revolution. /Tavern/ displaced /inn/ at the same time. As for
/partridge/, it is cited by a late authority[32] as a salient example
of changed meaning, along with /corn/ and /store/. In England the term
is applied only to the true partridge (/Perdix perdix/) and its nearly
related varieties, but in the United States it is also used to
designate the ruffed grouse (/Bonasa umbellus/), the common quail
(/Colinus virginianus/) and various [Pg054] other tetraonoid birds.
This confusion goes back to colonial times. So with /rabbit/. Properly
speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are
all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped
the word /hare/ out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in
American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always
applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which, curiously enough, is not
a hare at all, but a true rabbit.
/To haul/, in English, means to move by force or violence; in the
colonies it came to mean to transport in a vehicle, and this meaning
survives in sound American. /To jew/, in English, means to cheat; the
colonists made it mean to haggle, and devised /to jew down/ to
indicate an effort to work a reduction in price. /To heft/, in
English, means to lift; the early Americans made it mean to weigh by
lifting, and kept the idea of weighing in its derivatives, /e. g./,
/hefty/. Finally, there is the familiar American misuse of /Miss/ or
/Mis'/ for /Mrs./. It was so widespread by 1790 that on November 17 of
that year Webster solemnly denounced it in the /American Mercury/.
§ 5
/Archaic English Words/--Most of the colonists who lived along the
American seaboard in 1750 were the descendants of immigrants who had
come in fully a century before; after the first settlements there had
been much less fresh immigration than many latter-day writers have
assumed. According to Prescott F. Hall, "the population of New England
... at the date of the Revolutionary War ... was produced out of an
immigration of about 20,000 persons /who arrived before 1640/,"[33]
and we have Franklin's authority for the statement that the total
population of the colonies in 1751, then about 1,000,000, had been
[Pg055] produced from an original immigration of less than 80,000.[34]
Even at that early day, indeed, the colonists had begun to feel that
they were distinctly separated, in culture and customs, from the
mother-country,[35] and there were signs of the rise of a new native
aristocracy, entirely distinct from the older aristocracy of the royal
governors' courts.[36] The enormous difficulties of communication with
England helped to foster this sense of separation. The round trip
across the ocean occupied the better part of a year, and was hazardous