American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  Corn, in the American sense, is known to the English only as an odd Americanism; they use the word to designate any sort of edible grain, but especially wheat, as in Corn Laws. They commonly call our corn maize, which was its first name in America. The early Spaniards borrowed both the grain and its name from the Indians of the West Indies, and the English colonists took over both from the Spaniards. The first occurrence of the word in English found by the searchers for the NED is in Richard Eden’s translation, published in London in 1555, of Peter Martyr’s “De Rebus Oceanicis et Novo Orbe Decades,” which had come out in Spain, in Latin, thirty years earlier. The word appears in Eden’s translation as mazium, described as “a kynde of grayne.”1 His book, which he called “The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India, Conteyning the Navigations and Conquests of the Spaniards, with Particular Description of the Most Ryche and Large Landes and Islandes Lately Found in the West Ocean,” was designed to arouse English interest in the new discoveries and to encourage English adventurers to attempt to seize land along the American coast. He was supported in both purposes by Richard Hakluyt, whose “Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation” came out in 1589, and by Samuel Purchas, whose “Purchas, His Pilgrimage,” followed in 1613. Hakluyt’s book was republished in three volumes in 1600, and in the third of them maize appeared as maiz, which was then, and is still, its Spanish form. In Purchas it was made mais. Other forms recorded before 1700 were maith, maix, mass, maze, may is, mahiz, mayze and maes, but by 1683 William Penn was spelling the word maize in his “Brief Account of the Province of Pennsylvania,” and maize it has been ever since. The DAE shows that it began to drop out of use in America so early as 1629, being supplanted by corn.2 To distinguish this New World corn from the grains which were called corn in England the latter were called English corn. To help in the differentiation maize was often called Indian corn, and indeed it sometimes is to this day, but by the middle of the Eighteenth Century simply corn usually sufficed.

  At present the word is always understood, in the United States, to mean maize. Such derivatives as corn-pone, -field, -hill, -husk, -crib, -crop, -cultivator, -fed, pop-, sweet-, -starch and -whiskey all relate to maize, not to any other grain,1 and so does the familiar American phrase, to acknowledge the corn. The DAE traces corn-field to 1608, -ground to 1622, -stalk to 1645, -basket to 1648, -land to 1654, -snake to 1676, -crib to 1687, sweet- to 1646, -blade to 1688, -house to 1699, -husk to 1712, -hill to 1751, -row to 1769, -patch to 1784, -cake to 1791, -fed to 1793, -bread to 1796, -country to 1817, -shelter to 1819, -grower to 1831, -pipe to 1832, -dodger to 1834, to acknowledge the corn to 1840, -bottoms and -whiskey to 1843, -juice to c. 1846, -worm to 1849, pop-, to 1851, -barn to 1852, -State to 1853, -starch to 1857, and -Belt to 1882. All these save the first half dozen are probably materially older. The American colonists took to corn at once, and borrowed not only the Indian method of growing it — by planting an alewife or other fish in every row, for fertilizer — but also some of the Indian ways of preparing it for the table, e.g., by making hominy. But the English at home did not like it, and in John Gerard’s “Herball, or Generall Historie of Plants,” enlarged and amended by Thomas Johnson; London, 1638, a favorite authority of the time it was denounced as unfit for human food. “The bread which is made thereof,” said Gerard-Johnson, “is meanly white, without bran; it is hard and dry as bisket is, and hath in it no clamminess at all; for which cause it is of hard digestion, and yieldeth to the body little or no nourishment; it slowly descendeth and bindeth the belly, as that doth which is made of millet or panick [an Italian variety of millet].” When John Winthrop, Jr., governor of Connecticut, went to England in 1662 to obtain a new charter for the colony, he was elected a member of the Royal Society and got upon friendly terms with Robert Boyle, the chemist. At Boyle’s suggestion he prepared a long memorandum upon the growing, milling and uses of corn (including the preparation of a malt for brewing), and it was deposited in the Royal Society’s archives. There, save for a few extracts, it remained unprinted until 1937, when Fulmer Mood unearthed it and printed it in full in the New England Quarterly.1 Winthrop defended corn stoutly against the ignorant sneers of Gerard and Johnson. But the English, to this day, do not like it.2

  Rock, to an Englishman, commonly signifies a stone of large size, and the Pilgrims so used it when they named Plymouth Rock in 1620. But the colonists apparently began to apply it to small stones during the Eighteenth Century, though the DAE’s first example of to throw a rock is dated no earlier than 1817. A year before this Pickering recorded in his Vocabulary that “in New England we often hear the expression of heaving rocks for throwing stones.” Some of the early American writers on speech tried to restore rock to its original English meaning, but in vain. Webster omitted it, in the American sense, from his dictionaries, and Sherwood, in his “Gazetteer of the State of Georgia,” denounced it as follows:

  He threw a rock at me. Stone is the proper word. There are rocks, stones and pebbles; the first are large and unmanagable by the hand; the second, the stones, are smaller and can be thrown. David slung a stone at Goliath, but it would have required Sampson [sic] to have cast a rock.

  Cracker, to indicate what the English commonly call a biscuit, is traced by the DAE to 1739. In recent years biscuit, in the English sense, has been borrowed in America, as in National Biscuit Company, and simultaneously the English have begun to make increasing use of cracker, which first appeared in England so long ago as 1810.3 The word seems to come from the verb to crack, and probably was suggested by the cracker’s crispness. Block, in the sense of a group of houses, is sometimes used in England, as in block of shops, but perhaps only as a conscious Americanism.4 The DAE’s first American example is dated 1796, but the NED does not report the term in English use until fifty-five years later. In the sense of the whole mass of buildings between four streets it goes back to 1815 in the United States, and is still exclusively American.1 It is also American in the sense of the distance from one street to the next, as in “a block further on,” and “he walked ten blocks.” In this last sense the DAE traces it to 1843. South of the Mason and Dixon Line, in my boyhood, it was common to use square to designate the distance from one street to the next, but I don’t think the term ever had much currency in New York. The DAE traces it to 1827. Square was also used in the South to designate the area marked off by four streets, and in that sense was employed by Thomas Jefferson in 1776. In Australia block means a portion of public land — roughly, what we call a section. It has given rise to a common derivative, back-blocks, signifying the back country.

  Creek, in England, means a tidal inlet of the ocean or of some large river, but in America it began to designate any small stream so long ago as 1637, and, along with run and branch, has since pretty well obliterated the English brook.2 It is still occasionally used in the United States in the English sense, as in Curtis creek (Maryland), and Deep creek (Virginia), but the English never use it in the more usual American sense. The use of spell in various familiar phrases, e.g., spell of sickness, is apparently indigenous- to America. Spell of work is old in English, but the first known examples of spell of weather, spell of sickness, cold-spell, rainy-spell and hot spell are American, and so is the first recorded use of spell standing alone, as an indicator of “a time or while.”3 Lumber, in England, means articles left lying about and taking up needed room, and in this sense it survives in America in a few compounds, e.g., lumber-room; in the sense of timber it is an Americanism, traced by the DAE to the Seventeenth Century. In this American sense, says the DAE, it “undoubtedly arose from the fact that ship masts, sawed timber, barrel staves, etc., as important but bulky commodities, once blocked or lumbered up roads, streets and harbors of various towns,” In England college ordinarily means one of the constituent corporations of a university, though sometimes it is also applied to a preparatory school; in the United States, since the Seventeenth Century, it has been applied to any degree-giving institution short of univ
ersity rank.1 In England city is restricted, says Horwill, to “a large and important town, or one that contains a cathedral”; in America it has been applied since the early Eighteenth Century to much smaller places.2 Boot, in England, means what Americans, since the Seventeenth Century, have been calling a shoe; for our boot, signifying footgear covering the leg as well as the foot, the English commonly use other terms, e.g., Wellington.3 Boot-black, traced by the DAE to 1817; boot-brush, to 1866, bootee (a half boot), to 1799; bootlegger, to 1889; and to bootlick, to 1845, are all marked Americanisms by the DAE, but they originally referred to the American boot, not the English. Bureau, to an Englishman, means an article of furniture including a writing desk — what we ordinarily call a secretary; in the United States it means a chest of drawers for holding linens. The English use it occasionally in our sense of a government or other office, but not often: they prefer office. But they use bureaucrat and bureaucracy just as we do.

  Many English zoölogical and botanical terms were misapplied by the early colonists to species generally resembling what they had been familiar with in England, but actually not identical. The cases of partridge, rabbit, beech, hemlock, lark, laurel, swallow and bay are discussed in AL4, pp. 123 and 124.4 The list might be greatly lengthened. For two curious instances I am indebted to Mr. Theodore W. Bozarth of Mount Holly, N. J. He says:

  The European robin (Erythacus rubecola) is a member of the warbler family, but the settlers gave its name to a bird (Planesticus migratorus) that belongs to the thrush family and is second-cousin to the mocking-bird. In 1920 the Postoffice Department pictured both the English and the American types of mayflower on its Pilgrim Tercentenary stamps. To quote from “A Description of United States Postage Stamps,” published by it in 1933, p. 31: “The border at the left of the picture presents a vertical row of hawthorn blossoms (the British mayflower); the border at the right contains a row of trailing arbutus (the American mayflower, which tradition says was named by the Pilgrims after their ship).”

  The impact of a new landscape upon the early colonists caused them to abandon a number of English topographical terms, e.g., moor, and to make heavy use of others that were rare or dialectical in England, e.g., run and branch. They also invented many quite new ones, usually devised by giving familiar English words new meanings, e.g., divide and bluff. The NED’s first example of bluff in the sense of a promontory is dated 1737 and comes from John Wesley’s diary. The DAE, on the authority of a contemporary document printed in the South Carolina Historical and General Magazine for July, 1929, carries its history back to 1687, and gives four more examples antedating Wesley, including the one from Francis Moore, 1735, quoted in AL4, p. 3. It says that the word was used only rarely before 1700, and then mainly in the region of Savannah. The noun is plainly a derivative of the adjective bluff, meaning presenting a bold and more or less perpendicular front. This adjective, which was applied to ships’ bows that were blunt and nearly vertical, has a history in English going back to the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, and was apparently borrowed, like many other English sea-terms, from a Dutch prototype, blaf, now obsolete. As I recorded in AL4, p. 3, bluff as a noun has the distinction of being the first Americanism sneered at by an English purist.1 But though he called it “barbarous” in 1735, it was used without apology by the eminent English geologist, Sir Charles Lyell, in the first volume of his “Principles of Geology” in 1830, and by 1842 it was appearing in a poem by Tennyson. It has never, however, become as familiar in England as it is in the United States, and there is no English parallel to our frequent use of it in geographical names, e.g., Council Bluffs and Bluff City (applied to both Memphis, Tenn., and Hannibal, Mo.). It had emerged from the Savannah area by the middle of the Eighteenth Century, and when the movement into the West began it enjoyed a large increase in use. By 1807 a traveler beyond the Alleghanies was explaining that “by bluffs in the Western country is understood high steep banks which come close to and are washed at their base by the rivers.” Whether the other American bluff, in the sense of bluster or pretense, derives from the adjective or the noun I do not know: probably it owes something to both. It seems to have first appeared in the game of poker, but by 1852, as the DAE shows, it had come into general use as a verb. Its use as a noun probably preceded this, and by 1850 both bluffer and bluffing had appeared.

  4. ARCHAIC ENGLISH WORDS

  The notion that American English is fundamentally only an archaic form of British English has been propagated diligently by two groups of writers on language: first, Americans who seek to establish the truth of Lowell’s saying that “our ancestors, unhappily, could bring over no English better than Shakespeare’s,” and second, Englishmen who deny Americans any originality whatsoever in speech, and seek to support their denial by showing that every new Americanism that pops up was used centuries ago by Chaucer, Spenser or Gower. The latter enterprise has been sometimes carried to extravagant lengths; indeed, it would not surprise me to find a correspondent of the London Times or Manchester Guardian reporting, with a mingling of patriotic satisfaction and moral indignation, that he had found even duck-soup and hitch-hike in a state paper of the age of Henry VII. But despite all this absurdity, it remains an undoubted fact that there is a recognizable substratum of archaic English, or of English faded into the dialects, in the American vocabulary, and that it includes a number of terms that other watchful Englishmen have denounced as American barbarisms. Ready examples are to guess, to advocate, to notify, to loan, and mad for angry. Nearly all the early English travelers noted the use of to guess in America, especially in New England — not in the sense of to conjecture or suppose, but, as the NED says, “with playful moderation of statement, in reference to what the speaker regards as a fact or a secure inference.” But, as we have seen in Chapter I, Section 4, this distortion of the original meaning of the verb was by no means an American invention, for the NED finds it so used in no less respectable an English book than John Locke’s “Some Thoughts of Education,” published in 1692. It passed out of English use during the Eighteenth Century, and though Byron revived it in 1814 and Scott in 1818, it is now unused in England save as a conscious Americanism.1

  To notify, as in “The policy were notified,” is not in common use in England, where the word is more often employed in such forms as “The appointment was notified in the newspapers,” but what is now the American practise is traced by the NED, in English use, to 1440, though it has been rare since about 1700. To loan has been traced by the DAE, in American use, to 1729, and in recent years it has been worked so heavily that it strikes Englishmen as a very typical Americanism, but the NED traces it to c. 1200, and it appears in one of the acts of Henry VIII. Since the middle of the Eighteenth Century, however, the English have preferred to lend. Mad for angry is now regarded by the English as another characteristic Americanism, but the NED traces it in English use to c. 1300 and it survives in a number of English dialects. So with sick for ill. The NED traces it to the King Alfred translation of Boëthius’s “De Consolatione Philosophiae,” c. 888, but it began to be displaced by ill in the Fifteenth Century, and the English now regard the latter as more chaste and elegant, and have given sick the special sense of nauseated. In that sense it is not found in English use before 1614. In many compounds the original (and now American) sense survives, e.g., sickness, sick-bed, sick-allowance, sick-bay, sick-room, sick-leave, sick-rate and sick (noun).

  The list of such old English terms still alive in American might be greatly lengthened, and it would include many other words and phrases that have been denounced as abominable Americanisms, from time to time, by English purists, e.g., to progress, patch (of land), clever (in the sense of good-natured and obliging), druggist, gotten, gap (a break in a range of hills), to wilt, deck (of cards), shoat, and Fall (for Autumn).2 But, as the late George Philip Krapp argued effectively in a paper published in 1927,1 it is easy to overestimate the size and importance of this archaic element in American speech. It is largest in the dialect of c
ertain remote communities, notably that of the mountaineers of Appalachia, but even in such communities it is smaller than is commonly assumed. The theory that the English brought to America by the early colonists underwent a sort of freezing here was first propagated, according to Krapp, by A. J. Ellis, a distinguished English philologian of the last century.2 It was apparently suggested to him by the well-known fact that the Old Norse of c. 1000 has survived with relatively little change in Iceland. But, as Krapp shows, Ellis appears to have been densely ignorant of the history of the English settlements in America, and ascribed to them a cultural isolation that never approached in completeness the isolation of the Norwegians in Iceland. Krapp goes on: