The American Language
egotistical, insolent, rodomontade sort of fellow"; America is no
longer the "brigand confederation" of the /Foreign Quarterly/ or "the
loathsome creature, ... maimed and lame, full of sores and ulcers" of
Dickens; but the Americanism is yet regarded with a bilious eye, and
pounced upon viciously when found. Even the friendliest English
critics seem to be daunted by the gargantuan copiousness of American
inventions in speech. Their position, perhaps, was well stated by
Capt. Basil Hall, author of the celebrated "Travels in North America,"
in 1827. When he argued that "surely such innovations are to be
deprecated," an American asked him this question: "If a word becomes
universally current in America, why should it not take its station in
the language?" "Because," replied Hall in all seriousness, "there are
words enough in our language already."
§ 3
/The Expanding Vocabulary/--A glance at some of the characteristic
coinages of the time, as they are revealed in the /Congressional
Globe/, in contemporary newspapers and political tracts, and in that
grotesque small literature of humor which began with Judge Thomas C.
Haliburton's "Sam Slick" in 1835, is almost enough to make one
sympathize with Dean Alford. Bartlett quotes /to doxologize/ from the
/Christian Disciple/, a quite reputable religious paper of the 40's.
/To citizenize/ was used and explained by Senator Young, of Illinois,
in the Senate on February 1, 1841, and he gave Noah Webster as
authority for it. /To funeralize/ and /to missionate/, along with
/consociational/, were contributions of the backwoods pulpit; perhaps
it also produced /hell-roaring/ and /hellion/, the latter of which was
a favorite of the Mormons and even got into a sermon by Henry Ward
Beecher. /To deacon/, a verb of decent mien in colonial days,
signifying to read a hymn line by line, responded to the rough humor
of the time, and began to mean to swindle or adulterate, /e. g./, to
put the largest berries at the top of the box, to extend one's fences
/sub rosa/, or to mix sand with sugar. A great rage for extending the
vocabulary by the use of suffixes seized upon [Pg077] the corn-fed
etymologists, and they produced a formidable new vocabulary in /-ize/,
/-ate/, /-ify/, /-acy/, /-ous/ and /-ment/. Such inventions as /to
obligate/, /to concertize/, /to questionize/, /retiracy/,
/savagerous/, /coatee/ (a sort of diminutive for coat) and /citified/
appeared in the popular vocabulary, and even got into more or less
good usage. Fowler, in 1850, cited /publishment/ and /releasement/
with no apparent thought that they were uncouth. And at the same time
many verbs were made by the simple process of back formation, as, /to
resurrect/, /to excurt/, /to resolute/, /to burgle/[14] and /to
enthuse/.[15]
Some of these inventions, after flourishing for a generation or more,
were retired with blushes during the period of aesthetic consciousness
following the Civil War, but a large number have survived to our own
day, and are in good usage. Not even the most bilious purist would
think of objecting to /to affiliate/, /to itemize/, /to resurrect/ or
/to Americanize/ today, and yet all of them gave grief to the
judicious when they first appeared in the debates of Congress, brought
there by statesmen from the backwoods. Nor to such simpler verbs of
the period as /to corner/ (/i. e./, the market), /to boss/ and /to
lynch/.[16] Nor perhaps to /to boom/, /to boost/, /to kick/ (in the
sense of to protest), /to coast/ (on a sled), /to engineer/, /to
collide/, /to chink/ (/i. e./, logs), /to feaze/, /to splurge/, /to
aggravate/ (in the sense of to anger), /to yank/ and /to crawfish/.
These verbs have entered into the very fibre of the American vulgate,
and so have many nouns derived from them, /e. g./, /boomer/,
/boom-town/, /bouncer/, /kicker/, /kick/, /splurge/, /roller-coaster/.
A few of them, /e. g./, /to collide/ and /to feaze/, were [Pg078]
archaic English terms brought to new birth; a few others, /e. g./, /to
holler/[17] and /to muss/, were obviously mere corruptions. But a good
many others, /e. g./, /to bulldoze/, /to hornswoggle/ and /to scoot/,
were genuine inventions, and redolent of the soil.
With the new verbs came a great swarm of verb-phrases, some of them
short and pithy and others extraordinarily elaborate, but all showing
the true national talent for condensing a complex thought, and often a
whole series of thoughts, into a vivid and arresting image. Of the
first class are /to fill the bill/, /to fizzle out/, /to make tracks/,
/to peter out/, /to plank down/, /to go back on/, /to keep tab/, /to
light out/ and /to back water/. Side by side with them we have
inherited such common coins of speech as /to make the fur fly/, /to
cut a swath/, /to know him like a book/, /to keep a stiff upper lip/,
/to cap the climax/, /to handle without gloves/, /to freeze on to/,
/to go it blind/, /to pull wool over his eyes/, /to know the ropes/,
/to get solid with/, /to spread one's self/, /to run into the ground/,
/to dodge the issue/, /to paint the town red/, /to take a back seat/
and /to get ahead of/. These are so familiar that we use them and hear
them without thought; they seem as authentically parts of the English
idiom as /to be left at the post/. And yet, as the labors of Thornton
have demonstrated, all of them are of American nativity, and the
circumstances surrounding the origin of some of them have been
accurately determined. Many others are palpably the products of the
great movement toward the West, for example, /to pan out/, /to strike
it rich/, /to jump/ or /enter a claim/, /to pull up stakes/, /to rope
in/, /to die with one's boots on/, /to get the deadwood on/, /to get
the drop/, /to back and fill/ (a steamboat phrase used figuratively)
and /to get the bulge on/. And in many others the authentic American
is no less plain, for example, in /to kick the bucket/, /to put a bug
in his [Pg079] ear/, /to see the elephant/, /to crack up/, /to do up
brown/, /to bark up the wrong tree/, /to jump on with both feet/, /to
go the whole hog/, /to make a kick/, /to buck the tiger/, /to let it
slide/ and /to come out at the little end of the horn/. /To play
possum/ belongs to this list. To it Thornton adds /to knock into a
cocked hat/, despite its English sound, and /to have an ax to grind/.
/To go for/, both in the sense of belligerency and in that of
partisanship, is also American, and so is /to go through/ (/i. e./, to
plunder).
Of adjectives the list is scarcely less long. Among the coinages of
the first half of the century that are in good use today are
/non-committal/, /highfalutin/, /well-posted/, /down-town/,
/played-out/, /flat-footed/, /whole-souled/ and /true-blue/. The first
appears in a Senate debate of 1841; /highfalutin/ in a political
speech of the same decade. Both are useful words; it is impossible,
not employing them, to convey the ideas behind them without
circumlocution. The use of /slim/ in the sense of meagre, as in /slim
chance/, /slim attendance/ and /slim support/, goes back still
further. The English use /small/ in place of it. Other, and less
respectable contributions of the time are /brash/, /brainy/, /peart/,
/locoed/, /pesky/, /picayune/, /scary/, /well-heeled/, /hardshell/
(/e. g./, Baptist), /low-flung/, /codfish/ (to indicate opprobrium)
and /go-to-meeting/. The use of /plumb/ as an adjective, as in /plumb
crazy/, is an English archaism that was revived in the United States
in the early years of the century. In the more orthodox adverbial form
of /plump/ it still survives, for example, in "she fell /plump/ into
his arms." But this last is also good English.
The characteristic American substitution of /mad/ for /angry/ goes
back to the eighteenth century, and perhaps denotes the survival of an
English provincialism. Witherspoon noticed it and denounced it in
1781, and in 1816 Pickering called it "low" and said that it was not
used "except in very familiar conversation." But it got into much
better odor soon afterward, and by 1840 it passed unchallenged. Its
use is one of the peculiarities that Englishmen most quickly notice in
American colloquial speech today. In formal written discourse it is
less often encountered, probably because the English marking of it has
so conspicuously singled it out. But it is constantly met with
[Pg080] in the newspapers and in the /Congressional Record/, and it is
not infrequently used by such writers as Howells and Dreiser. In the
familiar simile, /as mad as a hornet/, it is used in the American
sense. But /as mad as a March hare/ is English, and connotes insanity,
not mere anger. The English meaning of the word is preserved in
/mad-house/ and /mad-dog/, but I have often noticed that American
rustics, employing the latter term, derive from it a vague notion, not
that the dog is demented, but that it is in a simple fury. From this
notion, perhaps, comes the popular belief that dogs may be thrown into
hydrophobia by teasing and badgering them.
It was not, however, among the verbs and adjectives that the American
word-coiners of the first half of the century achieved their gaudiest
innovations, but among the substantives. Here they had temptation and
excuse in plenty, for innumerable new objects and relations demanded
names, and here they exercised their fancy without restraint. Setting
aside loan words, which will be considered later, three main varieties
of new nouns were thus produced. The first consisted of English words
rescued from obsolescence or changed in meaning, the second of
compounds manufactured of the common materials of the mother tongue,
and the third of entirely new inventions. Of the first class, good
specimens are /deck/ (of cards), /gulch/, /gully/ and /billion/, the
first three old English words restored to usage in America and the
last a sound English word changed in meaning. Of the second class,
examples are offered by /gum-shoe/, /mortgage-shark/, /dug-out/,
/shot-gun/, /stag-party/, /wheat-pit/, /horse-sense/, /chipped-beef/,
/oyster-supper/, /buzz-saw/, /chain-gang/ and /hell-box/. And of the
third there are instances in /buncombe/, /greaser/, /conniption/,
/bloomer/, /campus/, /galoot/, /maverick/, /roustabout/, /bugaboo/ and
/blizzard/.
Of these coinages, perhaps those of the second class are most numerous
and characteristic. In them American exhibits one of its most marked
tendencies: a habit of achieving short cuts in speech by a process of
agglutination. Why explain laboriously, as an Englishman might, that
the notes of a new bank (in a day of innumerable new banks) are
insufficiently secure? Call [Pg081] them /wild-cat/ notes and have
done! Why describe a gigantic rain storm with the lame adjectives of
everyday? Call it a /cloud-burst/ and immediately a vivid picture of
it is conjured up. /Rough-neck/ is a capital word; it is more apposite
and savory than the English /navvy/, and it is overwhelmingly more
American.[18] /Square-meal/ is another. /Fire-eater/ is yet another.
And the same instinct for the terse, the eloquent and the picturesque
is in /boiled-shirt/, /blow-out/, /big-bug/, /claim-jumper/,
/spread-eagle/, /come-down/, /back-number/, /claw-hammer/ (coat),
/bottom-dollar/, /poppy-cock/, /cold-snap/, /back-talk/, /back-taxes/,
/calamity-howler/, /cut-off/, /fire-bug/, /grab-bag/, /grip-sack/,
/grub-stake/, /pay-dirt/, /tender-foot/, /stocking-feet/,
/ticket-scalper/, /store-clothes/, /small-potatoes/, /cake-walk/,
/prairie-schooner/, /round-up/, /snake-fence/, /flat-boat/,
/under-the-weather/, /on-the-hoof/, and /jumping-off-place/. These
compounds (there must be thousands of them) have been largely
responsible for giving the language its characteristic tang and color.
Such specimens as /bell-hop/, /semi-occasional/, /chair-warmer/ and