The American Language
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 [Pg032] 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 [Pg034] 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,
[Pg035] 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