American Language Supplement 1
Page 31
garter-snake, 1775 ground-hog, 1784
german-corn (rye), 1741 ground-pea, 1769
glass-snake, 1736 ground-squirrel, 1709
gray-eagle, 1778 gum-swamp, 1799
And under S:
shagbark, 1751 sourwood, 1709
shortleaf-pine, 1796 spice-wood, 1756
slippery-elm, 1748 sugar-maple, 1731
snap-bean, 1775 sweet-potato, 1750
And these at random:
blue-grass, 1751 clingstone (peach), 1705
blue-jay, 1709 lightning-bug, 1778
butternut, 1741 pond-lily, 1748
canvasback (duck), 1782 tree-frog, 1738
cat-bird, 1709
Under blue- the DAE lists scores of such coinages, and under black- and white- almost as many. Some of the natural objects encountered by the first settlers, e.g., the bear, the beaver and the eagle, were more or less strange to them, and that strangeness stimulated their word-making proclivities, and thus enriched their vocabulary. In a paper in American Speech in 19351 Allen Walker Reed listed a large number of Americanisms in bear- dating from the Eighteenth Century, e.g., bear-skin, 1647; bear’s oil, 1674; bear’s fat and bear-venison, 1709; bear-hunter, 1765; bear-ham, 1766; bear-bacon and bear’s meat, 1772; bear-fat, 1780; bear-steak, 1788; and bear-ground, 1797. The term was also used in a figurative sense, as in bear-grass, 1750. The new political and social conditions under which the settlers lived also suggested a large number of new compounds, some of which survive to this day, e.g., statehouse, selectman, best-room, leaf-tobacco, hoe-cake, frame-house, spinning-bee, State’s attorney, land-office, worm-fence, hay-scales, dry goods, bottom-land, and double-house. Lieut. Thomas Anburey, of the British Army, who surrendered with Burgoyne at Saratoga on October 17, 1777, and spent several years as a prisoner in America, thought it necessary, when he came to write of his adventures for his fellow Britons, to explain the meaning of fence-rails.1 The DAE does not claim the compound as an Americanism, but its first example goes back to 1733, and the NED does not list it at all. Fencing-stuff, signifying material used for making fences, has been traced to 1644; fence-viewer, an official appointed to inspect fences, to 1661; fencing-rail to 1780, and under fence to 1796; but on the fence (in the political sense), fence-law, fence-rider, fence-row, fence-war and fencing-wire belong to the Nineteenth Century. All of them are Americanisms, and so, apparently, is fence-corner. The DAE traces worm-fence to 1652, rail-fence to 1649, and snake-fence to 1805. Back-log is traced by the DAE to 1684. It is still a stranger to the English, and when it appeared in an English edition of Henry A. Wallace’s “The Century of the Common Man” in 1944, a correspondent of the London Times Literary Supplement demanded to know what it meant.2
Statehouse used to be credited by etymologists to the Dutch stadhuis, but in 1902 Albert Matthews produced evidence that it was in use in Virginia in 1638,3 and had reached Maryland by 1662, and that it did not appear in New York until 1671. The DAE traces best-room to 1719, leaf-tobacco to 1637, hoe-cake to 1774, frame-house (in the early form of framed-house) to 1639, spinning-bee to 1679, State’s attorney to 1779, land-office to 1681, hay-scales to 1773, dry-goods to 1701, bottom-land to 1728, and double-house to 1707. The second element of spinning-bee may have been invented by some ingenious Americano, for etymologists have been unable to find any trace of it in the vocabulary of England. The NED suggests it may embody “an allusion to the social character of the insect,” but the DAE rejects this as lacking evidence. The first spinning-bee, according to the DAE, seems to have been recorded in 1769, but the term was still a novelty at that time, and it was not until after the Revolution that it came into general use. After the War of 1812 there was a great proliferation of bees, especially in the new West. Whenever a pioneer had a job in hand that was too much for him and his family, the neighbors pitched in to help, and there was usually a jollification when the work was over. The DAE traces husking-bee to 1816, apple-bee (for paring and cutting up apples preparatory to drying them) to 1827, quilting-bee to 1832, logging-bee and raising-bee (for raising the frame of a new house) to 1836, pigeon-picking-bee to 1841, paring-bee (a new name for an apple-bee) to 1845, cellar-digging-bee and sewing-bee to 1856, and spelling-bee to 1875. All of them are probably older, especially spelling-bee. The simple word bee, without a prefix, was also used to signify a donation-party for a pastor, and sometimes that party included repairs to his house. In this sense the DAE traces the word to 1823. Bee-line is also an Americanism, traced to c. 1845.
Many of the early American terms had to do with food, e.g., buckwheat-cake, first recorded in John Adams’s diary, September 21, 1774; corn-bread, 1796; spoon-victuals, 1777; johnny-cake, 1739; bread-stuffs, first recorded in a report by Thomas Jefferson, December 16, 1793; and hog-and-hominy, 1792. The inventor of the buckwheat-cake, though immortal, remains unknown. Buckwheat was being grown for human food in Pennsylvania so early as 1698, and was then sometimes called French wheat; in the South it seems to have been used, in the first half of the Eighteenth Century, only as hog and poultry food, or as a crop to be plowed in to enrich the soil. In parts of Appalachia, to this day, it is eaten much more extensively than wheat. Johnny-cake had acquired the variant form of journey-cake by 1754,1 and in consequence Noah Webster surmised that this may have been the original term, and that it signified a hard loaf baked for use on a journey. The DAE suggests that both johnny-cake and journey-cake may have been corruptions of jonokin, traced to 1675, but no one seems to know precisely what a jonokin was, and there is no actual evidence for the derivation. It is much more plausible to accept an etymology given by Will H. Loudermilk, in his “History of Cumberland” (Maryland), 1878:
A favorite article of diet amongst these (Shawnese) Indians was a cake made of maise beaten as fine as the means at command would permit. This was mixed with water, and baked upon a flat stone which had been previously heated in the fire. The trappers followed the Indians’ example in the baking of Shawnee-cakes, as they called them, and the lapse of a few years was sufficient to corrupt the term into that of johnny-cake, so familiar throughout the South, and in common use at this day.1
It is possible that breadstuffs was invented by Jefferson, for the first recorded use of it was in his report of 1793. It was first noted as an Americanism by one of the watchful English critics in a review of John Marshall’s “Life of Washington,” 1804–1807, in the Annual Review, Jefferson defined it in his report as “bread-grains, meals and bread.” Said Pickering in 1816:
It has probably been more readily allowed among us because we do not, like the English, use the word corn as a general name for all sorts of grain.… A friend has favored me with the following remarks on it: “Breadstuffs is American. In Jamaica they have a term for the esculent roots, &c. substituted for bread, viz., breadkind. Some generic name is wanting here in these cases, analogous to lumber, which is the term used for the whole class of rough wooden materials.”
The early Americans, counting out a relatively small class of intelligentsia, largely clerical, were a far from elegant folk, and their rowdy personal habits were naturally reflected in their vocabulary. The DAE traces tarring and feathering to 1774, gouging (“the action of squeezing or pushing out a person’s eye”) to the same year, Lynches law to 1782, and rough-and-tumble to 1792. Thomas Hutchinson’s diary for 1774 indicates that tarring and feathering was already so well established a practise by that time that regular committees were formed to carry it on, and that they objected when volunteers undertook it. Gouging reached its highest development among the boatmen of the Western rivers after the beginning of the movement across the Alleghanies, but it was already practised before the Revolution, along with biting, butting and scratching. “To perform the horrid operation,” said Isaac Weld, an English traveler toward the end of the century, “the combatant twists his forefingers in the sidelocks of his adversary’s hair, and then applies his thumbs to the bottom of the eye, to force it out of the socket.”2 There is, unhappily, some difference of o
pinion among etymologists regarding the identity of the man who served Lynch’s law (and its progeny, lynch-law, lynching, lyncher, lynching-bee and to lynch) as eponym. Dr. James Elbert Cutler, in an extremely painstaking and valuable study of lynching, published in 1905,1 came to the conclusion, supported by impressive documentation, that its father was Colonel Charles Lynch (1736–96), a Quaker magistrate and militia-officer of Bedford county, Virginia, but the DAE says that the practise was “named after Captain William Lynch (1742–1820) of Pittsylvania county, Virginia, and later of Pendleton district, South Carolina.” Local tradition at Lynchburg, Va., which was founded in 1786 by Charles Lynch’s younger brother, John, supports the former theory, but it should be said that an interview with Richard Venable, an aged and much respected citizen of Prince Edward county, published in Harper’s Magazine in 1859,2 gave some countenance, on the strength of personal recollection, to the latter.
Charles and John Lynch were the sons of Charles L. Lynch, an Irishman who came out to Virginia early in the Eighteenth Century, married Sarah Clark, the daughter of a Quaker to whom he was indentured, and acquired with her lands along the upper waters of the James river. Their son Charles settled on this land, and became one of the principal inhabitants of Bedford county. He was appointed a justice of the peace in 1766, and was disowned by his fellow Quakers for taking the oath of office. In 1769 he was elected to the Virginia Legislature, in 1769 and 1774 he signed the two Williamsburg protests against English taxation, in 1776 he served in the Virginia constitutional convention, and in 1778 he became a colonel in the State militia. In 1781 Governor Thomas Jefferson sent him to the aid of General Nathanael Greene in North Carolina, and he took part in all of the subsequent Southern operations until the surrender of Cornwallis. The activities which attached his name to summary justice went on in 1780. Bedford county, at that time, had a considerable population of Loyalists, and some of them engaged in violence; worse, the county, then still a wild region, was ravaged by bands of robbers. Lynch and his fellow magistrates managed to arrest some of these outlaws, but the business of punishing them presented difficulties, for the only court in Virginia authorized to try felonies was at Williamsburg, and a prisoner dispatched to Williamsburg was commonly rescued along the way either by Loyalists or by English troops. Lynch and his colleagues of the local magistrates’ court — William Preston, Robert Adams, Jr., and James Callaway — thereupon decided to set up a rump court of their own, and proceeded to try their prisoners. This proceeding, of course, was unlawful, but they kept strictly to legal forms in their trials, and after inflicting heavy fines on some of the offenders and corporal punishment on others, they managed to put down the prevailing lawlessness. There is no evidence that they ever inflicted the death penalty save once, and that was in the case of a Negro slave convicted of poisoning his master’s wife. After the Revolution some of the victims of their extra-legal justice entered suits against the four magistrates for damages, and in October, 1782 the Virginia Legislature passed an act holding them harmless, on the ground that their measures, while perhaps “not strictly warranted by law,” were “justifiable from the imminence of the danger.”
Until recent years a tree under which Lynch and his brother magistrates were supposed to have held their court stood in the yard of a house near Altavista, Va. The Colonial Dames of Lynchburg made a pious pilgrimage to it in June, 1922, and a Lynchburg lawyer, H. C. Featherston, read them a paper on the life and times of Lynch and the cradle-days of lynching.1 The founder, of the science, of course, was what later came to be called a vigilante, not a lyncher in the current sense. He always gave his prisoners fair and public trials. The subsequent history of the word is largely the history of lynching itself, which is set forth comprehensively in Dr. Cutler’s book, aforesaid.2 The testimony in favor of the Pittsylvania county Lynch as the father of lynching, as given by the ancient Venable to a contributor to Harper’s Magazine in 1859, was in part as follows:
I knew Mr. Lynch well — as well as a stripling could be expected to know a dignified and venerable gentleman. He was for many years the senior and presiding justice of the county court of Pittsylvania, whose terms he attended with remarkable punctuality. Our war, like all wars, was an alma nutrix of depredations and felonies. The prices paid by both armies for fine horses rendered that species of property particularly insecure; and contemporaneously with, or rather in advance of, the Southern invasion by Cornwallis, an organized band of horse thieves had established posts and dépôts from far away North through Virginia into the Carolinas. They were headed by a man of some notoriety, fitted by nature to shine in any office or profession. He was said to be a man of strikingly handsome face and elegant person, of most courtly manners, and easy, graceful conversation. His life was a mystery, and so his fate remains, I believe. He was known as Captain Perkins, and his name was as perfect a terror in the nursery as was that of the Douglas when English nurses were wont to quiet their babies with the lullaby:
Hush ye, hush ye, little pet ye;
The Black Douglas shall not get ye!
These thieves were frequently arrested, often flagrante delictu. They would be committed, examined by a bench of justices, and remanded to Williamsburg for final trial. Even before the occupation of the country by the English, the distance of the court rendered the attendance of witnesses uncertain; and when they appeared to prosecute they would be confronted with any number of contradicting witnesses the occasion might require — men, too, of equal or superior appearance of respectability to themselves, thoroughly instructed as to what they should swear, and as thoroughly capable of strictly obeying their instructions.
The conviction of these outlaws being thus rendered next to impossible, sufferers had become averse to add the cost of time and money to the loss of property, even before the enemy entered the country. The advent of the British troops gave a new impulse to the operations of this gang by bringing the market to the seller, by rendering the chance even of transporting the criminals to Williamsburg more than doubtful, and making the sessions of the court itself very uncertain. The horse-thieves, when they and their guard would be intercepted, were always ready to take English bounty, and being, for the most part. young, wiry, active fellows, acquainted with all the highways, and still better with all the by-ways of the country, they were gladly enlisted in that service, while their guards would, probably, be held prisoners of war. As long as the escape of these miscreants was attributable only to the imperfection of the criminal jurisprudence — was, in other words, the fault of the law — no one thought of overstepping the barrier which that law interposed.
But when a state of things existed which enhanced the evil ten-fold, and took away even the semblance of a remedy, the cry of a whole community suffering under the accumulation of pillage and fire from the enemy, and the loss by theft of what property they could hide from that enemy, came up to the only tribunal to which they could look for relief, the only tribunal, in fact, which might be said to have been left possessed of vitality — the county magistracy — a body of men who, at that time, would have compared favorably with Rome’s proud patres conscripts in the purest days of that republic.
In obedience to this call for relief, and impelled by this stern necessity, the justices of Pittsylvania county were summoned specially to be in attendance at one of the regular terms of their court — a majority, perhaps the whole bench, being present. The presiding justice, Mr. Lynch, having plainly but forcibly reminded them of the extraordinary condition of the country, the entire insecurity of life and property, and the complete suspension of the administration of justice, exactly when stringent laws required most vigorous enforcing, submitted a proposition that in consideration of the fact that the criminal court at Williamsburg had ceased to exist, at least in so far as related to the border counties, the county court of Pittsylvania should undertake to try finally all cases of murder and felony occurring within that county which were required to be sent to the court at Williamsburg for trial, by the words
of the law. That in such trials the accused should have the same rights as to the impaneling the jury, the preëmptory challenge, the challenge for cause, etc.; the same rights as to all pleadings, general and special; as to the summoning and compelling the attendance of their witnesses, and the cross-examination of witnesses for the Commonwealth, and of being heard by counsel, as were secured to them by the law giving jurisdiction of their cases exclusively to the court at Williamsburg. In short, he simply proposed to change the forum. The plan was adopted and recommended to the neighboring counties, by some of which it was also adopted. As may be imagined, the effect was felt at once. A few were caught, tried, and hung — hanging was the legal penalty then — the rest sought a more congenial clime. The gang was dispersed in fact.
Mr. Lynch was a man of enlarged mind, great decision of character, fixedness, almost sternness of purpose, but most eminently a law-loving and law-abiding man. He had thoroughly counted the cost, and carefully weighed the consequences; he took his position with full knowledge of its responsibility, and maintained it with firmness and dignity. He continued to preside over the county court long after it had laid down the powers it had so bravely assumed; and he carried to the grave the love and veneration of all good men.
It will be noted that the two traditions, save in the matter of the identity of the eponymic Lynch, are virtually identical. It is highly probable that they are grounded upon historical facts, and that Southwestern Virginia is thus entitled to public veneration, not only for the invention of lynching, but also for the launching of its name.
The free way in which the Elizabethan English interchanged the parts of speech was brought in as a natural language process by the early English colonists, continued to be practised during the whole colonial period, and is still one of the hallmarks of American English. The New Englanders had made a verb of scalp before the end of the Seventeenth Century, and early in the century following they followed with to tomahawk. To top, in the sense of to remove the top of a growing tobacco plant, is traced by the DAE to 1688, and to tote, which may or may not be a noun turned verb, to 1677. The true origin of the latter remains mysterious. The DAE calls it “of obscure origin,” the NED marks it “origin unascertained,” and Webster 1934 follows it with “origin uncertain.” Noah Webster, in his American Dictionary of 1828, credited “they say” with two irreconcilable etymologies, but did not choose between them. The first was to the effect that the word was of African origin, and had been brought in by the slaves; the other sought to identify it with tolt, an old English law term derived from the Latin tollere through the medieval Latin tolta and the Anglo-French tolte. That term, which is traced by the NED to 1294 and is still in use, is a noun signifying a writ employed to remove a case from a court-baron to a county court. The latter etymology was adopted by Dunglison in the vocabulary of Americanisms that he contributed to the Virginia Literary Museum in 1829,1 and Sherwood declared for substantially the same origin in his “Gazetteer of Georgia” in 1837. “Tote,” he said, “is from the Latin tollit, he carries. It became tolt in English, and then as holpe fell to hope, so has tolt to tote.”2 The later etymologists, both professional and amateur, have continued to speculate about the word. Weekley, in “An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English,” suggests that it may be derived from an old French verb, tauter, meaning to move a heavy object by means of rollers or otherwise. “The existence of an OF word in Virginia,” he says, “would not be unnatural.” In 1935 one J. Windsor of Reading wrote to the London Daily Express,3 saying that he believed it came from “one of the West African tribal languages.” “In Sierra Leone,” he continued, “it is indicative of the method adopted by native carriers when they carry packages on their heads. It is also used by the Kroo boys4 who man the ships.” This African etymology was supported by Nathaniel Tillman, of Atlanta University, in American Speech in 1942.5 He said: