One of the most striking characteristics of American cultural development is the fact that it has taken place under the stimulus of an astonishing number of contacts with the outer world, British and otherwise. The American community has not been segregated, unadulterated, merely self-perpetuating. Relations with the parent country have never been discontinued. Through the appeal of literature they have been growing stronger and stronger from generation to generation. American English and British English are not identical, but they are and always have been equal citizens in the cosmopolitan world of the English language. The absurdity of describing American English as the archaic speech of an isolated community may be realized by considering what might have happened if the conditions favoring isolation had been present. If migration to New England had ceased in the year 1700, if New England had remained after that time a separate state, severed not only from Europe but from the rest of America, it is not improbable that something approximating the language of Dry den might still be heard in New England. But Dry den’s speech is forever lost in the medley of later voices that sound more loudly in our ears.
1 Journal of American Folk-Lore, 1902, pp. 240–67. Chamberlain was an Englishman who received his early education in Canada. He got his Ph.D. at Clark in 1892, and remained there as a teacher until his death in 1914. He was one of the founders of the American Folk-Lore Society and editor of its Journal from 1900 to 1908. He contributed many papers to other scientific journals and was the author of two books on the child and a volume of poems. He took a hand in local politics in Worcester, Mass., and in 1905 was an alderman of the town and chairman of the Democratic city committee.
1 The best easily accessible authority is Webster 1934. Its etymologies in this field were prepared by Joseph Coy Green, associate professor of history and politics at Princeton and now an official of the State Department. See A Gallery of Philologists: Joseph Coy Green, by John Pomfret, Word Study, May, 1939, pp. 2–4.
1 Baltimore Oriole and Persimmon, American Speech, Oct., 1940, p. 334.
1 Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico; Washington, 1907–10.
2 Nahuatl Words in American English, American Speech, April, 1938, pp. 108–21.
3 Chili sauce is traced to 1882 and chili con carne to 1895.
1 Indian and Creole Barboka, American Barbecue, Language, April-June, 1937, pp. 148–50.
2 This is the etymology favored by the NED and by Webster’s New International. In Nov., 1942 Epsy Colling printed the following caveat in College English, p. 136: “When Columbus, writing his journal in Latin, had occasion to mention the boats of the Indians, he used the word scapha. Some careless scribe changed the scapha to canoa, and, as the error remained undetected, Indian boats came to be called canoas. When the Englishman reached the Spanish Main … he taught the word to the Indians.” Scapha is defined by Cassell’s Latin Dictionary as “a small boat, a skiff.”
1 MacGregor (1825–92) was a Scotsman and was called to the English bar in 1851, but spent most of his life traveling. He heard about the canoe on a visit to America, and started out on a long cruise on the inland waterways of Europe in the Rob Roy in 1865. Later he made voyages in the North Sea countries and along the river Jordan.
2 The Cruising Canoe and Its Outfit, by C. E. Chase, Sept., pp. 395 ff.
1 An account of the neologisms thus launched is in Lewis and Clark: Linguistic Pioneers, by Elijah Criswell, University of Missouri Studies, April 1, 1940.
2 Honest Injun, meaning honestly, truly, is traced by the DAE to 1875, but is probably older. Other terms in Indian-, with the dates of the DAE’s earliest examples, are -agent, 1766; -blanket, 1765; -country, 1715; -dance, 1705; -doctor, 1724; -fashion, 1751; -fighter, 1832; -file, 1758; -mound, 1791; -reservation, 1821; and -sign, 1812. The last-named, as a schoolboys’ term, is discussed by Peter Tamony in Indian Sign, San Francisco News Letter and Wasp, July 21, 1939, p. 9.
3 The Term Indian Summer, Monthly Weather Review, Jan. and Feb., 1902.
4 The DAE offers the following quotation from Travels in America, by Thomas Ashe; London, 1808: “The Autumn [in Kentucky] is distinguished by the name of Second summer.”
1 Indian Summer, American Speech, Oct., 1942, pp. 210 and 211.
2 The NED traces St. Martin’s Summer to 1591.
3 Cf. Indian-gift and Indian-giver. The former, defined by the DAE as “a gift for which the giver expects a return; a revoked gift,” is traced by it to 1764. There is another example from the same year in a letter from Nathaniel Ames to a Dr. Mather, March 26: “We Americans well know what is meant by an Indian gift — that is, to make a present but expect more in return than we give.” This letter is in The Essays, Humor and Poems of Nathaniel Ames, Father and Son, with notes by Sam. Briggs; Cleveland, O., 1891, p. 25. The DAE’s first example of Indian-giver is from Bartlett’s first edition of 1848. In recent years the significance of Indian-gift as one “for which the giver expects a return” has rather passed out, and the term now usually means one which the giver takes back.
4 Traced by the DAE to 1634; defined by a writer of a century later as a hole in the ground “lined and covered with bark, and then with dirt.”
5 Indian Summer, by J. E. T. Home, London Daily Telegraph, Oct. 10, 1936. Indian — or St. Martin’s — Summer, by Grace Tyers, Melbourne Herald, April 21, 1936. Miss Tyers says that in Australia, where Indian Summer comes in Spring, it has no name. She suggests the Australian Summerette, or Easter’s Little Summer.
1 Indian Summer in Maryland, Baltimore Evening Sun, editorial page, Dec. 20, 1938.
2 Notes on American Weather Terms, by Mamie Meredith, American Speech, Aug., 1931, p. 466; Blackberry Winter and Snowball Winter, by M. S. Dearing, American Speech, Feb., 1932, p. 233; Blackberry Winter, by Vance Randolph, American Speech, Feb., 1932, p. 239; and Onion Winter, by Mary Mielenz, American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 237.
3 This claim, like that of the Freemasons to descent from the trades unions of King Solomon’s time, has been disputed by cynics. The present order seems to have been organized in Baltimore during the Winter of 1833–34. It has about half a million members.
1 Revised Red Men Illustrated; Chicago, 1928.
1 Apaches in the Dictionary, New York Times (editorial), Aug. 17, 1924.
2 At Random, London Observer, Oct. 31, 1937: “Father Christmas is already in the shops.” But Santa Claus seems to be used occasionally. Headline in London Daily Telegraph, Dec. 27, 1938: “Santa Claus Did Not Forget.”
1 Under St. Nicholas the DAE prints a reference to Santa Claus dated 1773, but it comes from Esther Singleton’s Social New York Under the Georges, which was not published until 1902. H. W. Longfellow used the form Santiclaus in Outre-Mer, 1834 (first page of the section headed Note-Book).
2 The First American Christmas-Tree, by William I. Schreiber, American-German Review, Dec., 1943, p. 4.
3 Philadelphia Christmas Tree, American-German Review, June, 1944, p. 38. In this article the credit for setting up the first tree is given to Dr. Constantin Hering, Lorn in Oschatz near Leipzig, who arrived in the United States in Jan., 1833, and practised medicine in Philadelphia until his death in 1880.
4 Cuyler was a Presbyterian, born in 1822 and surviving until 1909. He was a popular pastor in Brooklyn from 1860 to 1890.
5 Trees Everywhere in the Forties?, American-German Review, April, 1944, p. 31.
1 A Dictionary of the Non-English words of the Pennsylvania-German Dialect, by M. B. Lambert; Lancaster, Pa., 1924, p. 26. Lambert says that it is made up of Pelz, fur and Nikolaus. It is accented on the first syllable.
2 An anonymous article, The American Language, in Putnam’s Magazine, Nov., 1870, p. 523, says that at that time, among American children in general, Kriss-Kingle was “only subordinate to Santa Clous as a designation for that obese personage who, in their philosophy, stands far beyond king or kaiser.” Kriss-Kingle was still in wide use in the Baltimore of my childhood, 1885–90.
3 St. Nicholas is the patron saint, not only
of children, but also of scholars, travelers, sailors, pawnbrokers and the Russian Orthodox Church. He flourished somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean region in the Fourth Century and is said to have taken part in the Council of Niceae. His feast-day, December 6, was assimilated to Christmas during the Middle Ages.
4 Defined in Kramer’s Nieuw Engelsch Woordenboek, edited by F. P. H. Prick van Wely; Gouda, 1921, as meaning master, foreman. It is used in Dutch in many figurative senses, e.g., to designate a jolly fellow, a big baby, a shrewish wife.
1 Baker, however, does not list it.
1 It is possible that spook was helped into American English by the German spuk, of the same meaning. A writer in Harper’s Magazine, Aug., 1853, p. 201, reported that it was then in common use in the vicinity of Strasburg, Va., where the people spoke “scarcely anything but German.”
1 Washington Irving, in A History of New York … by Diedrich Knickerbocker; New York, 1809, Ch. IV: “Certain mealy-mouthed men of squeamish consciences, who are loath to give the Devil his due, have softened [this] into Hurlgate, forsooth!”
2 To these might be added boonder, to brush away; pease, disgusted; grilly, chilly; plock, to settle down; sluck, to swallow; blummie, a flower; blickie, a tin pail; and speck, fat. In the Dutch colony in Wisconsin, “I am fees of that” is used to indicate repugnance — a translation of the Dutch “Ik ben er vies van.” See Fiesty and Fiesty Again, American Speech, April, 1943, p. 111. In the much larger Dutch colony of Michigan there are many more such borrowings, e.g., advokat (egg-nog), voorzinger (front-singer), hutspot (a combination of potatoes and some green), balkenbry (a pork loaf), erwten soep (pea soup), and boeren-jongens (a drink made of brandy and raisins). A number are listed in Dutch Survivals in Holland, Michigan, by Peter Veltman, American Speech, Feb., 1940, pp. 80–83.
3 See A History of Foreign Words in English, by Mary S. Serjeantson; London, 1935, pp. 170–79. Also, A Dictionary of the Low-Dutch Element in the English Vocabulary, by J. F. Bense; the Hague, 1926- Niederländisches Lehngut im Mittelenglischen, by J. M. Toll; Halle, 1926, and The Influence of Low Dutch on the English Vocabulary, by E. C. Llewellyn; Oxford, 1936.
4 The American Language, Nov., p 522.
1 I am indebted here to Miss Ernestine Evans, who picked up news of kwispedoor in the United Press office in Berlin.
1 The Field, the Dungeon and the Escape, by Albert Richardson; Hartford, Conn., 1865, p. 90: “The Southern politicians and newspapers have persuaded the masses that the Yankees (a phrase which they no longer apply distinctly to New Englanders, but to every person born in the North) mean to subjugate them, but are arrant cowards, who may easily be frightened away.” After the war the pejorative usually appeared as damyankee, and that form still survives in the South.
2 Yankee beverage, at the same period, was the name of a drink made of vinegar, water and molasses, apparently on the theory that a true Yankee would not waste whiskey on a guest.
1 Report on The Star-Spangled Banner, Hail Columbia, America, and Yankee Doodle; Washington, 1909.
2 The Etymology of Yankee, in Studies in English Philology … in Honor of Frederick Klaeber; Minneapolis, 1929, pp. 403–13.
3 Washington Irving gave this etymology circulation in Knickerbocker’s History of New York, 1809, but his explanation differed somewhat from the usual one. “The simple aborigines,” he said, “for a while contemplated these strange folk in utter astonishment; but, discovering that they wielded harmless though noisy weapons, and were a lively, ingenious race of men, became very friendly … and gave them the name of yanokies … a waggish appellation, since shortened into the familiar epithet of Yankees.”
4 I take this definition from A Scots Dialect Dictionary, by Alexander Warrack; London, 1911.
1 Here again the definition is Warrack’s.
2 The definition is from Kramer’s Nieuw Engelsch Woordenboek; Gouda, 1921.
3 This suggestion was made by Mr. Paul E. Hansen, of Napa county, Calif.; private communication, Nov. 23, 1939. He called attention to the fact that the Swedes settled in Delaware in 1627, before the first recorded appearance of Yankee.
4 I am indebted here to a correspondent whose name, unhappily, has been lost in the illimitable mazes of my notes.
5 I am indebted here to Mr. Valdemar Viking of Red Bank, N. J. He says: “Jonkheer is a title of respect reserved for the aristocracy, but it would not be surprising if it had been bestowed in a jocular or derisive manner on the Dutch pirates by their fellows of other nationalities. The buccaneers, as a body, may even have applied this honorific to all the Dutch settlers, and in time it might easily have become a nickname for any inhabitant of the Hudson valley and the New England colonies.”
6 Vol. VIII, pp. 244–45. I am indebted for this to Dr. J. M. Carrière of the University of Virginia.
1 See Tooke’s View of the Russian Empire, Vol. I, 409.
2 Logeman’s paper was summarized, with the addition of other matter, in On the Origin of Yankee Doodle, by Harold Davis, American Speech, April, 1938, pp. 93–96. Davis also published Origin of Yankee Is Not Clear in the Boston Herald, July 2, 1938, a letter embodying the same material.
1 Says Steven T. Byington in American Speech, April, 1944, p. 122: “The word makes its appearance in Boston in 1751. Nova Scotia (then including New Brunswick) was ceded to England by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Thenceforth it received English settlers; these lived peaceably among the Acadians, who were not deported until 1755. It was natural that these settlers should pick up from their French neighbors a bit of French cookery, with its name. And of course these Englishmen of Nov? Scotia had friendly relations with New England.”
2 For compounds in prairie- see AL4, p. 151.
1 The African etymology of buckra has been challenged by Mr. Albert Wehde of Chicago (private communication), who says that it is more likely derived from an identical word in the language of the Indians of the Mosquito Coast, now a part of Nicaragua. Mr. Wehde, who lived on the coast in the 90s, suggests that the word got to Jamaica during the days of the buccaneers, and from Jamaica reached the American coast.
1 Bozo, American Speech, Oct., 1939, pp. 238–39.
2 Dr. Turner has kindly given me access to outlines of lectures he gave before the American Dialect Society at Columbia University in Dec., 1938, the Linguistic Club at Yale a few weeks earlier, and the University of Wisconsin in July, 1943. His observations are summarized at some length in The Myth of a Negro Past, by Melville J. Herskovits; New York, 1941, pp. 276 ff.
1 The Bear in American Speech, Oct., pp. 195–202.
1 Travels Through the Interior Parts of America; London, 1789; Vol. II, p. 323. I am indebted here to The Comment of British Travelers on Early American Terms Relating to Agriculture, by Allen Walker Read, Agricultural History, July, 1933, pp. 99 ff.
2 This correspondent was answered by Bernard Aylwin in Back-Log, Times Literary Supplement, April 8, 1944, p. 175.
3 The Term State-House, Dialect Notes, Vol. II, Pt. VI, 1902, pp. 199–224.
1 In 1780 a Moravian bishop, Reichel by name, made a journey from the Moravian headquarters at Lititz, Pa., to the outpost at Salem, N. C. On June 8 he recorded in his diary that he had made his first acquaintance with a journey-cake. The diary was in German, but he entered the word in English. Records of the Moravians in North Carolina, edited by Adelaide Fries; Vol. IV, p. 1894. For this I am indebted to Dr. George T. Harrell, Jr., of Duke University.
1 I am indebted for this to Johnny cake by J. Louis Kuethe, American Speech, Oct., 1935, p. 202.
2 Travels Through the States of North America, 1795–97; London, 1799. Weld was not the first to take news of gouging to England. It was already entered in 1785 in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Grose, with probably unconscious humor, defined it as “to squeeze out a man’s eye with the thumb, a cruel practice used by the Bostonions in America.” Similarly, he defined tarring and feathering as “a punishment lately inflicted by the good people of Boston on any person c
onvicted or suspected of loyalty.” “Such delinquents,” he explained, “being stripped naked, were daubed all over with tar, and after put into a hogshead of feathers.”
1 Lynch Law: An Investigation Into the History of Lynching in the United States; New York, 1905.
2 Lynch Law, May, 1859, pp. 794–98.
1 Women Visit Lynch Tree, Lynchburg News, July 30, 1922.
2 See also Rope and Faggot by Walter White; New York, 1929, and the article on Charles Lynch in the Dictionary of American Biography (by John C. Wylie); Vol. XI; New York, 1933.
1 Reprinted by Mathews in The Beginnings of American English, pp. 99 ff.
2 Unfortunately for Sherwood, there is no evidence that hope is derived from holpe. Holp is an archaic inflection of help, and help and hope come down to us from quite different Old English words.
3 These Names Make News, March 22.
4 A Kroo boy is a native sailor, usually hailing from the coast of Liberia. He speaks a jargon called Kroo English or trade English.
5 A Possible Etymology of Tote, April, pp. 128 and 129.
1 New York, 1939, p. 11.
2 Miss Ruth Wilson, of New York.
3 Cf. an advertisement of the May Company in the Baltimore Sunday Sun, rotogravure section, Nov. 28, 1943.
4 The DAE overlooks an earlier example cited by Peters, from Travels Through the Middle Settlements in North America in the years 1759 and 1760, by Andrew Burnaby; London, 1775. Burnaby was an English clergyman.
5 See The True Blue Laws of Connecticut and New Haven and the False Blue Laws Invented by the Rev. Samuel Peters, by J. Hammond Trumbull; Hartford, 1876. Trumbull (1821–97) was a well-known antiquarian and was especially interested in Indian place-names and the Indian languages. From 1863 until his death he was librarian of the Watkinson Library at Hartford. In 1874 he was president of the American Philological Association. He was State librarian of Connecticut 1854–56 and secretary of state 1861–65.
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