The American Language
/chapparel/, /corral/, /broncho/, /plaza/, [Pg087] /peon/, /cayuse/,
/burro/, /mesa/, /tornado/, /sierra/ and /adobe/. To them, as soon as
gold was discovered, were added /bonanza/, /eldorado/, /placer/ and
/vigilante/. /Cinch/ was borrowed from the Spanish /cincha/ in the
early Texas days, though its figurative use did not come in until much
later. /Ante/, the poker term, though the etymologists point out its
obvious origin in the Latin, probably came into American from the
Spanish. Thornton's first example of its use in its current sense is
dated 1857, but Bartlett reported it in the form of /anti/ in 1848.
/Coyote/ came from the Mexican dialect of Spanish; its first parent
was the Aztec /coyotl/. /Tamale/ had a similar origin, and so did
/frijole/ and /tomato/. None of these is good Spanish.[27] As usual,
derivatives quickly followed the new-comers, among them /peonage/,
/broncho-buster/, /ranchman/ and /ranch-house/, and the verbs /to
ranch/, /to lasso/, /to corral/, /to ante up/, and /to cinch/. /To
vamose/ (from the Spanish /vamos/, let us go), came in at the same
time. So did /sabe/. So did /gazabo/.
This was also the period of the first great immigrations, and the
American people now came into contact, on a large scale, with peoples
of divergent race, particularly Germans, Irish Catholics from the
South of Ireland (the Irish of colonial days "were descendants of
Cromwell's army, and came from the North of Ireland"),[28] and, on the
Pacific Coast, Chinese. So early as the 20's the immigration to the
United States reached 25,000 in a year; in 1824 the Legislature of New
York, in alarm, passed a restrictive act.[29] The Know-Nothing
movement of the 50's need not concern us here. Suffice it to recall
that the immigration of 1845 passed the 100,000 mark, and that that of
1854 came within sight of 500,000. These new Americans, most of them
Germans and Irish, did not all remain in the East; a great many spread
through the West and Southwest with the other pioneers. Their effect
upon the language was not large, [Pg088] perhaps, but it was still
very palpable, and not only in the vocabulary. Of words of German
origin, /saurkraut/ and /noodle/, as we have seen, had come in during
the colonial period, apparently through the so-called Pennsylvania
Dutch, /i. e./, a mixture, much debased, of the German dialects of
Switzerland, Suabia and the Palatinate. The new immigrants now
contributed /pretzel/, /pumpernickel/, /hausfrau/, /lager-beer/,
/pinocle/, /wienerwurst/, /dumb/ (for stupid), /frankfurter/,
/bock-beer/, /schnitzel/, /leberwurst/, /blutwurst/, /rathskeller/,
/schweizer/ (cheese), /delicatessen/, /hamburger/ (/i. e./, steak),
/kindergarten/ and /katzenjammer/.[30] From them, in all probability,
there also came two very familiar Americanisms, /loafer/ and /bum/.
The former, according to the Standard Dictionary, is derived from the
German /laufen/; another authority says that it originated in a German
mispronounciation of /lover/, /i. e./, as /lofer/.[31] Thornton shows
that the word was already in common use in 1835. /Bum/ was originally
/bummer/, and apparently derives from the German /bummler/.[32] Both
words have produced derivatives: /loaf/ (noun), /to loaf/,
/corner-loafer/, /common-loafer/, /to bum/, /bum/ (adj.) and
/bummery/, not to mention /on the [Pg089] bum/. /Loafer/ has migrated
in England, but /bum/ is still unknown there in the American sense. In
English, indeed, /bum/ is used to designate an unmentionable part of
the body and is thus not employed in polite discourse.
Another example of debased German is offered by the American /Kriss
Kringle/. It is from /Christkindlein/, or /Christkind'l/, and properly
designates, of course, not the patron saint of Christmas, but the
child in the manger. A German friend tells me that the form /Kriss
Kringle/, which is that given in the Standard Dictionary, and the form
/Krisking'l/, which is that most commonly used in the United States,
are both quite unknown in Germany. Here, obviously, we have an example
of a loan-word in decay. Whole phrases have gone through the same
process, for example, /nix come erous/ (from /nichts kommt heraus/)
and /'rous mit 'im/ (from /heraus mit ihm/). These phrases, like /wie
geht's/ and /ganz gut/, are familiar to practically all Americans, no
matter how complete their ignorance of correct German. Most of them
know, too, the meaning of /gesundheit/, /kümmel/, /seidel/,
/wanderlust/, /stein/, /speck/, /maennerchor/, /schützenfest/,
/sängerfest/, /turnverein/, /hoch/, /yodel/, /zwieback/, and /zwei/
(as in /zwei bier/). I have found /snitz/ (=/schnitz/) in /Town
Topics/.[33] /Prosit/ is in all American dictionaries.[34] /Bower/, as
used in cards, is an Americanism derived from the German /bauer/,
meaning the jack. The exclamation, /ouch!/ is classed as an
Americanism by Thornton, and he gives an example dated 1837. The New
English Dictionary refers it to the German /autsch/, and Thornton says
that "it may have come across with the Dunkers or the Mennonites."
/Ouch/ is not heard in English, save in the sense of a clasp or buckle
set with precious stones (=OF /nouche/), and even in that sense it is
archaic. /Shyster/ is very probably German also; Thornton has traced
it back to the 50's.[35] /Rum-dumb/ is grounded upon the [Pg090]
meaning of /dumb/ borrowed from the German; it is not listed in the
English slang dictionaries.[36] Bristed says that the American meaning
of /wagon/, which indicates almost any four-wheeled, horse-drawn
vehicle in this country but only the very heaviest in England, was
probably influenced by the German /wagen/. He also says that the
American use of /hold on/ for /stop/ was suggested by the German /halt
an/, and White says that the substitution of /standpoint/ for /point
of view/, long opposed by all purists, was first made by an American
professor who sought "an Anglicized form" of the German /standpunkt/.
The same German influence may be behind the general facility with
which American forms compound nouns. In most other languages, for
example, Latin and French, the process is rare, and even English lags
far behind American. But in German it is almost unrestricted. "It is,"
says L. P. Smith, "a great step in advance toward that ideal language
in which meaning is expressed, not by terminations, but by the simple
method of word position."
The immigrants from the South of Ireland, during the period under
review, exerted an influence upon the language that was vastly greater
than that of the Germans, both directly and indirectly, but their
contributions to the actual vocabulary were probably less. They gave
American, indeed, relatively few new words; perhaps /shillelah/,
/colleen/, /spalpeen/, /smithereens/ and /poteen/ exhaust the
unmistakably Gaelic list. /Lallapalooza/ is also probably an Irish
loan-word, though it is not Gaelic. It apparently comes from
/allay-foozee/, a Mayo provincialism, signifying a sturdy fellow.
/Allay-foozee/, in its turn, comes from the French /Allez-fusil/,
meaning "Forward the muskets!"--a memory, [Pg091] according to P. W.
Joyce,[37] of the French landing at Killala in 1798. Such phrases as
/Erin go bragh/ and such expletives as /begob/ and /begorry/ may
perhaps be added: they have got into American, though they are surely
not distinctive Americanisms. But of far more importance than these
few contributions to the vocabulary were certain speech habits that
the Irish brought with them--habits of pronunciation, of syntax and
even of grammar. These habits were, in part, the fruit of efforts to
translate the idioms of Gaelic into English, and in part borrowings
from the English of the age of James I. The latter, preserved by Irish
conservatism in speech,[38] came into contact in America with habits
surviving, with more or less change, from the same time, and so gave
those American habits an unmistakable reinforcement. The Yankees, so
to speak, had lived down such Jacobean pronunciations as /tay/ for
/tea/ and /desave/ for /deceive/, and these forms, on Irish lips,
struck them as uncouth and absurd, but they still clung, in their
common speech, to such forms as /h'ist/ for /hoist/, /bile/ for
/boil/, /chaw/ for /chew/, /jine/ for /join/,[39] /sass/ for /sauce/,
/heighth/ for /height/ and /rench/ for /rinse/ and /lep/ for /leap/,
and the employment of precisely the same forms by the thousands of
Irish immigrants who spread through the country undoubtedly gave them
a certain support, and so protected them, in a measure, from the
assault of the purists. And the same support was given to /drownded/
for /drowned/, /oncet/ for /once/, /ketch/ for /catch/, /ag'in/ for
/against/ and /onery/ for /ordinary/. [Pg092]
Certain usages of Gaelic, carried over into the English of Ireland,
fell upon fertile soil in America. One was the employment of the
definite article before nouns, as in French and German. An Irishman
does not say "I am good at Latin," but "I am good at /the/ Latin." In
the same way an American does not say "I had measles," but "I had
/the/ measles." There is, again, the use of the prefix /a/ before
various adjectives and gerunds, as in /a-going/ and /a-riding/. This
usage, of course, is native to English, as /aboard/ and /afoot/
demonstrate, but it is much more common in the Irish dialect, on
account of the influence of the parallel Gaelic form, as in
/a-n-aice/=/a-near/, and it is also much more common in American.
There is, yet again, a use of intensifying suffixes, often set down as
characteristically American, which was probably borrowed from the
Irish. Examples are /no-siree/ and /yes-indeedy/, and the later
/kiddo/ and /skiddoo/. As Joyce shows, such suffixes, in
Irish-English, tend to become whole phrases. The Irishman is almost
incapable of saying plain yes or no; he must always add some extra and
gratuitous asseveration.[40] The American is in like case. His speech
bristles with intensives: /bet your life/, /not on your life/, /well I
guess/, /and no mistake/, and so on. The Irish extravagance of speech
struck a responsive chord in the American heart. The American
borrowed, not only occasional words, but whole phrases, and some of
them have become thoroughly naturalized. Joyce, indeed, shows the
Irish origin of scores of locutions that are now often mistaken for
native Americanisms, for example, /great shakes/, /dead/ (as an
intensive), /thank you kindly/, /to split one's sides/ (/i. e./,
laughing), and /the tune the old cow died of/, not to mention many
familiar similes and proverbs. Certain Irish pronunciations, Gaelic
rather than archaic English, got into American during the nineteenth
century. Among them, one recalls /bhoy/, which entered our political
slang in the middle 40's and survived into our own time. Again, there
is the very characteristic American word /ballyhoo/, signifying
[Pg093] the harangue of a /ballyhoo-man/, or /spieler/ (that is,
barker) before a cheap show, or, by metaphor, any noisy speech. It is
from /Ballyhooly/, the name of a village in Cork, once notorious for
its brawls. Finally, there is /shebang/. Schele de Vere derives it
from the French /cabane/, but it seems rather more likely that it is
from the Irish /shebeen/.
The propagation of Irishisms in the United States was helped, during
many years, by the enormous popularity of various dramas of Irish
peasant life, particularly those of Dion Boucicault. So recently as
1910 an investigation made by the /Dramatic Mirror/ showed that some
of his pieces, notably "Kathleen Mavourneen," "The Colleen Bawn" and
"The Shaugraun," were still among the favorites of popular audiences.
Such plays, at one time, were presented by dozens of companies, and a
number of Irish actors, among them Andrew Mack, Chauncey Olcott and