2 Boston, new ed., p. 94.
3 See AL4, p. 40, n. 2.
1 The spelling of this Indian word is variable. The Pennsylvania town, river and college are Allegheny, the mountains are the Alleghanies, and the New York village is Allegany. Webster, in his American Dictionary of 1828, preferred Allegany for the mountains, and Alleganean for a denizen thereof, but the latter word is now commonly written Alleghanian. The form Alleghenian is also recorded. There are various derivatives, e.g., alleghany hellbender (a bird), alleghany plum (Prunus alleghaniensis), alleghany-vine (Adlumia cirrhosa), and allegany-skiff. To alleghany, in the West, once meant to induce the Indians to neglect paying for trade-goods.
1 Three vols. New York, 1809, Vol.III, p. 160.
2 Two vols. London, 1789, Vol. II, P. 357.
1 See AL4, pp. 15, 119 and 223.
2 There was evidence against Pickering here. John Davis, in his Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America, 1798,1799, 1800, 1801 and 1802; London, 1802, said “it is frequently used by the classical writers of the New World.”
1 Of 1806.
1 An Introduction to the History of Medicine; fourth ed.; Philadelphia, 1929, p. 443. Dunglison’s son, also a physician, published a memoir of him in 1870.
2 Dunglison’s Glossary (1829–1830), Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part X, 1927, pp. 422–32.
1 Vol. V, Part X, pp. 415–21. It was omitted from Sherwood’s fourth edition; Macon and Atlanta, 1860.
1 Bartlett should not be confused with John Bartlett (1820–1905), the Boston publisher who, in 1855, brought out a volume of Familiar Quotations that, with revisions by other hands, is still a standard work.
1 Schele’s own copy of the book, with many corrections and additions, is in the University of Virginia library. Dr. Atcheson L. Hench gave an account of it in a paper read before the Present-Day English Section of the Modern Language Association at Philadelphia, Dec 29, 1934. Unhappily, that paper has not been printed, but Dr. Hench has courteously permitted me to see it. Schele’s notes were apparently made in 1872–75. Dr. Hench calls attention to the fact that copies of the first edition of 1871 are extremely scarce; in fact, he has never seen one, and neither have I.
1 I take this from American Projects for an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1936, p. 1142. Thornton’s book, published in Philadelphia in 1793, was called Cadmus, or, a Treatise on the Elements of Written Language. He was a native of Tortola, one of the Virgin Islands belonging to England. He had come to the United States a little while before and presently set up practise as an architect, though he had no professional training. In 1793 he submitted plans for the Capitol at Washington and they were approved by George Washington. His design survives in the central part of the building. He served as one of the commissioners of the District of Columbia until 1802, and after that was Commissioner of Patents until his death. He was mentioned by James Boswell in a letter of July 28, 1793, and was denounced by a Scot, James Adams, for proposing “a plan of abolishing our language,… noticed by a philosophical society.”
1 A Boston antiquary, born in 1860, whose diligent and valuable work entered into the NED, the DAE and other dictionaries, and greatly enriched the files of learned journals. Unhappily, he never collected it.
2 I am indebted here to the late J. Jefferson Jones, chief of the Lippincott editorial department.
1 White and Lounsbury are dealt with at some length in AL4, pp. 61 ff.
2 Murray was born in Lancaster county, Pa., in 1745. Trained as a lawyer, he went into business and made a comfortable fortune during the Revolution. In 1784 he moved to England, where he died in 1826. His Grammar of the English Language Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners first appeared in 1795. It ran through hundreds of editions. In 1804 he published a spelling-book that became a formidable rival to Webster’s.
3 This depressing business was thus described by the late Dr. Otto Heller (1863–1941), of Washington University, in a paper entitled The Pseudo-Science or Literature, Proceedings of the Conference on the Association of American Universities, 1936, pp. 78–88: “Collating all existing versions and variants of literary monuments or compositions; ‘fixing’ the authentic text; making ‘standard’ editions; ferreting out analogies and parallels and tracing sources; annotating; recovering writing lost or missing; excavating literary ruins or fragments; disinterring works and parts of works deservedly buried alive by their authors; disclosing guarded privacies.” The typical “study” is a laborious tracking down of the sources of some work that no one ever reads, or the tracing of the relations between two authors, one of them usually a nonentity, and sometimes both. Dr. Heller admitted in his paper that such humorless inquiries occasionally unearth more or less useful knowledge, but noted sadly that the pedants who engage in them usually “content themselves with the mechanical preliminaries.”
1 Semantics is a new name for semasiology, the study of the meaning of words. Its masterpiece is the discovery, announced with a great fanfare, that a given word often means different things to different people, and that words worked to death by ignoramuses, e.g., democracy, commonly take on emotional overtones that quite obliterate their historical meaning. All this, of course, was known to the Greeks, but it seems new and thrilling to the sort of person to whom it seems new and thrilling. Of late the professors of semantics have divided into two factions. The first, led by metaphysicians, lifts the elemental business of communicating ideas to the level of a baffling and somewhat sinister arcanum standing midway between the geometry of the fourth dimension and the Freudian rumble-bumble; the other, led by popularizers, converts it into a club for use upon the skulls of enemies of the current New Deals. The study of phonemes is based upon the revolutionary discovery that there are speech elements smaller than words. Unhappily, no two professors of the new mystery seem to be in agreement as to just what a phoneme is. Their differences were described at length by Dr. W. Freeman Twaddell of the University of Wisconsin in On Defining the Phoneme, Language (supplement), March, 1935. He favored getting rid of the difficulty by calling a phoneme “an abstractional fictitious unit.” “We shall have many a headache,” added Dr. Arthur G. Kennedy of Stanford University in Recent Trends in English Linguistics, Modern Language Quarterly, June, 1940, p. 177, speaking of the analogous morpheme, “before the grammarians, more particularly the philosophical linguists, succeed in straightening out the matter of definitions.” Dr. Kennedy reported that he had also got news of morphonemes, tonemes, enthymemes, glossemes, graphemes, noemes, philosophemes, tagmemes, taxemes, archimorphemes and phonomorphemes. Such monstrosities are hardly more than evidences of the ancient scholastic belief that giving a thing a new name is equivalent to saying something about it.
1 Vol. I, No. 1 was dated Oct., 1925. It was a monthly at $4 a year until Sept., 1927. Then it became a bi-monthly at $3. Between Aug., 1932 and Feb., 1933 it was suspended. In the latter month it became a quarterly at $4 a year, and has so continued.
2 When American Speech was launched, with Dr. Louise Pound as editor, it started off promisingly, and by April, 1926 had 1469 paid subscribers. But in 1929 and 1930 the circulation dropped to an average of 550, and by October of the latter year it had got down to 329. There was a slight revival afterward and it reached 570 at the end of 1932, but soon afterward it dropped again. I am indebted here to Mr. Robert S. Gill, of the Williams and Wilkins Company, Baltimore, its publishers from the start to 1930, and to Mr. H. E. Buchholz of Warwick and York, Baltimore, its publishers from then until the end of 1932, when it was taken over by the Columbia University Press, with Dr. William Cabell Greet as editor.
3 As of Nov. 21, 1942 it had 3925 members.
4 At its second annual meeting, at Chicago in Dec., 1925, it approved the work of the aforesaid Present-Day English section. See Notes and Quotes, American Speech, Aug., 1926, p. 620.
5 Vol. I, No. 1 was dated March, 1925.
6 Since 1928 the so
ciety has been conducting Linguistic Institutes in Summer at various universities. In June, 1944, for example, there was one at the University of Wisconsin. The lectures listed offered instruction in General Linguistics, Phonetics, Vulgar Latin, Syriac, Sanskrit, Hittite, Old Norse, Old High German, the American Indian languages, Old Spanish, Anglo-Saxon, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Greek, but there was only one course dealing with American English, and that was confined to its pronunciation. For the original plans see The Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America, American Speech, Feb., 1928, pp. 171–72.
1 It is probable that the current vogue of the dialect novel had something to do with its launching. For the first time the riches of American dialect were being systematically explored. The resultant reports were often anything but accurate, but they at least directed attention to the subject.
2 The American Dialect Dictionary, by Percy W. Long, American Speech, May, 1926, pp. 439–42.
1 It was at first called The Historical Dictionary of American English, but the change in title was made in 1935, before publication began.
2 The American Language, Chicago Tribune, April 12, 1925. This article was printed simultaneously in a number of other newspapers, e.g., the New York World.
1 The frequent slips of Thornton are discussed by Allen Walter Read in The Policies of the Dictionary of American English, Dialect Notes, July-Dec., 1938, p. 641.
2 There were, of course, brilliant exceptions, notably Albert Matthews, who placed his extensive collections at the disposal of the editors; Herbert Horwill, author of Modern American Usage; Oxford, 1935, who lent them the dated quotations he had used in the preparation of that work; and C. W. Ernst of Boston, whose valuable notes, now in the Harvard library, were open to them. They also had the loan, from the American Dialect Society, of the materials for the third volume of Thornton’s Glossary. In American Speech, in 1930 (The Historical Dictionary of American English In the Making, p. 37), Floy Perkinson Gates called attention to the difficulties caused by the lack of a more general response. “The chief concern at present,” he said, “is the fact that the material on hand is not sufficient for the needs. More examples of the use of concrete words associated with the objects and activities of everyday America, and more instances of indigenous phrases, must be supplied. An examination of the material filed under the caption back, for instance, has shown that of the two hundred words collected, only one-tenth are ideally illustrated, while about one-fifth are represented by single quotations, or are without any first class historical evidence.” But this alarm brought no onrush of volunteers. A direct appeal for “more coöperation in this work,” saying that “it is necessary to emphasize again the need for all the outside help that can be given,” was made by Sir William Craigie in American Speech in February, 1931, and two years later, in July, 1933, Dr. Louise Pound attempted to arouse interest with an article in the American Mercury, but these efforts were likewise in vain.
1 His appointment had been hailed by the Chicago Tribune on Oct. 18, 1924 in an immortal headline: Midway Signs / Limey Prof, to / Dope Yank Talk.
2 In the later stages contributions were also made by the Rockefeller Foundation and by Mrs. Ruth Swift Maguire, a sister to Harold H. Swift, chairman of the university’s board of trustees.
3 I take these figures from American English, Springfield (Mass.) Republican, Feb. 4, 1944.
1 Dictionary of American English, by Dorothea Kahn, Christian Science Monitor (Boston), April 1, 1944.
2 Talking United States, Time, Feb. 7, 1944. “Throughout the long printing process,” says this Time article, “two sets of every proof went to Sir William. He corrected and returned both. Sometimes he did his final editing on proofs, a practise which unnerves typesetters. The mangling got so bad that the press almost lost its staff, and had to serve an ultimatum on the editors. To keep himself sane during his long devotion to thousands of little cards Co-Editor Hulbert refreshed himself with detective stories.”
1 The Anglomaniacal Boston Trans-script was among the first American newspapers to succumb. In Dec., 1924, soon after Sir William’s appointment was announced, it published an editorial (reprinted in the Washington Post, Dec. 10) containing the following: “The dictionary marks a stage in American history, the recognition virtually official that there is such a thing as American English, a language and not a dialect. Sovereign states do not talk dialects, but possess a language. There will be some to rebel at this idea, as they have rebelled hitherto, now with perfect right, and now with too strong an academic slant.” In other words, the American language became respectable the moment a British authority gave it his countenance. On Jan. 22, 1937, after the publication of the first fascicle of the dictionary, the London Spectator followed with: “Now after eleven years of labor this first part disposes once for all of transatlantic bickering, fear of contamination, and the hot suspicion that the American language was something wickedly thought up as a hoax by Mr. Mencken in his Baltimore den.” Finally, L. H. Robbins wrote in the New York Times Magazine, Oct. 6, 1940, p. 11: “American English has been a long while in making the grade to respectability. Noah Webster boosted it, Richard H. Thornton gave it a hand, H. L. Mencken went to bat for it, and still certain classrooms and editoral offices figured that to write United States is sort of low-down, or something. The new dictionary may help to smear that dull notion.”
1 The Progress of the Historical Dictionary of American English, p. 260.
2 It was announced by the University of Chicago Press on March 19, 1944. See Lexicography at Chicago, by M. M. Mathews, American Scholar, Summer, 1944, pp. 369–71.
1 Plans for a Historical Dictionary of Briticisms, American Oxonian, July, 1938, pp. 186–90.
2 Studies in Linguistics (New Haven), April, 1943, pp. 1 and 3.
3 Oxford, 1941
1 The American Council of Learned Societies, organized in 1919, is made up of representatives of the principal humanistic organizations of the United States, e.g., the American Philosophical Society, the American Historical Association, the American Economic Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Oriental Society, the American Sociological Society, the Medieval Academy of America, the American Anthropological Association, the Linguistic Society of America, and the Modern Language Association.
2 p. 58, n. 2.
3 Lancaster, Pa., 1942.
4 The first linguistic atlas was Sprach-atlas des Deutschen Reiches, begun in 1876 and completed in 1926. In 1902–08 Jules Gilliéron and E. Edmont brought out an Atlas linguistique de la France, recording, for 638 localities, the dialectal forms of more than 2,000 words and phrases. There are also atlases for Italy and Italian Switzerland and for Japan, the former edited by Karl Jaberg and Jacob Jud and the latter by M. Tojo. Before World War II others were under way for the Slovak, Flemish and other dialects, and one covering the whole civilized world had been projected. See Linguistic Geography and the American Atlas, by Robert J. Menner, American Speech, Oct., 1933, pp. 3–7.
1 Quahog, borrowed from the Pequot Indian p’quaughhaug, is traced by the DAE to 1799, but is probably older. It has variants in cohog, traced to 1788, and pooquaw, traced to 1848. The field workers for the LA found pooquaw surviving on Nantucket.
2 Lightning-bug is traced by the DAE to 1778 and marked an Americanism. It is avoided in polite speech in England because bug, there, signifies a bed-bug. But June-bug survives in various English dialects.
1 Springfield, Mass., 1944.
2 Its difficulties are discussed in What Symbols Shall We Use?, by Leonard Bloomfield and George M. Boiling, Language, June, 1927, pp. 123–29.
3 De la démocratie en Amérique; Paris, 1835, Vol. II, Book I, Chapter XVI. Translated as The Republic of the United States of America and Its Political Institutions, Reviewed and Examined, by Henry Reeves, with notes and a preface by John C. Spencer; New York, 1858. I am indebted here to Mr. Frank W. Buxton, editor of the Boston Herald.
1 The superior importance o
f the spoken language, often overlooked by writers on the subject, was stressed again nearly a century later by another French observer, Dr. A. G. Feuillerat, professor of French at Yale, in A Dictionary of the American Language, Yale Review, June, 1929, p. 830. “It is,” he said, “the most vital part of the language, the one that will in the end impose its laws when American civilization, having severed all links from English civilization, may eventually desire to assert itself in the adoption of a truly national mode of expression.”
2 It is hardly necessary to add that they were also true for the time immediately preceding. The neologisms of Joel Barlow (1754–1812), noted in AL4, p. 16, were mainly grotesque inventions that showed no essentially American color. See A Historical Note on American English, by Leon Howard, American Speech, Sept., 1927, pp. 497–99. Those of Philip Freneau (1752–1832) were hardly more significant. See Philippic Freneau, by S. B. Hustvedt, American Speech, Oct., 1928, pp. 1–18. Those used by David Humphreys (1752–1818) have been discussed in Section 4 of this chapter.
3 Cooper also discussed the differences between English and American usage in Gleanings in Europe; London, 1836. See Cooper’s Notes on Language, by Robert E. Spiller, American Speech, April, 1929, pp. 294–300.
4 In a postscript to the first English edition of The Sketch Book, 1820, he spoke of the English as “a public which he has been accustomed, from childhood, to regard with the highest feelings of awe and reverence,” and added that he was “full of solicitude to deserve their approbation.” I am indebted here to Conservatism in American Speech, by George H. McKnight, American Speech, Oct., 1925, p. 5.
1 i.e., the English travelers who had begun to support the reviewers in reviling all things American.
2 Walsh (1784–1859) was a Baltimorean, and edited various magazines from 1811 to 1837. From 1845 to 1851 he was American consul at Paris. In 1819 he published An Appeal From the Judgments of Great Britain, an answer to the anti-American philippics of the Quarterly Review.
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