American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

1 Peters (1735–1826) wrote a number of other books, and was a man of celebrity in his time. In 1794 he was elected Episcopal Bishop of Connecticut, but was never consecrated. He later moved to New York and there died in poverty and obscurity.

  2 i.e., the French and Indian War of 1754.

  1 Harrisburg, Pa., The Aurand Press, 1928.

  2 Slants on the Origin of Bundling in the Old World; Harrisburg, 1938; Little Known Facts About Bundling in the New World; Harrisburg, 1938; eleventh printing, 1943; and Bundling Prohibited: Pennsylvania History, Folk-lore and Sociology; Harrisburg, 1929. See also The Art of Bundling, by Dana Doten; New York, 1938.

  3 Slants on the Origin of Bundling, just cited, pp. 11 ff.

  4 Sophomore, April, p. 270.

  1 The Use at American Colleges of the Word Campus. Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Vol. III, 1900, pp. 3–9.

  2 Vol. II, p. 24.

  1 A Manual of Pharmacology, by Torald Sollmann; 6th ed.; Philadelphia, 1942, p. 366.

  2 The symptoms, which may be very alarming, are described at length in Stramonium Poisoning, by John D. Hughes and James A. Clark, Journal of the American Medical Association, June 17, 1939, pp. 2500–02. See also Mandrakes in the Bible, Literature, and Pharmacology, by David I. Macht, American Druggist, Dec., 1933.

  3 London, 1766, Ch. IX: “They would talk of nothing but high life and high-lived company, with other fashionable topics, such as pictures, taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses.”

  4 I am indebted here to Mr. D. F. Munro of Lexington, Mo.

  1 “In England,” says Horwill, “store has normally much the same meaning as storehouse.” He quotes the following from Some Impressions of the United States, by E. A. Freeman; London, 1883, p. 63: “In the early settlements a shop was really a store in a sense which it hardly is now on either side of the ocean.”

  1 Martyr was an Italian whose real name was Pierto Martire di Anghiera; he was born at Arona in 1457 or thereabout. As a young man he went to Rome and there became secretary to the governor of the city. In 1487 the Spanish ambassador, Count Tendilla, induced him to go to Madrid. He entered the church in 1494 and was made tutor to the children of Ferdinand and Isabella. After some experience in the Spanish diplomatic service he became dean of the cathedral at Granada in 1505 and royal chronicler in 1520. He was also a member of the Council for the Indies. His book was an attempt to bring into one volume all that was known in the early Sixteenth Century about America. He died in 1526. He is not to be confused with that other Peter Martyr (1500–1562) who was born at Zürich, became an Augustinian friar, renounced Catholicism, married a nun, became professor of theology at Oxford, and survives in history as a salient figure of the Reformation.

  2 But an American Maize Products Company is still listed in the Manhattan telephone directory (1944).

  1 Says Edgar J. Goodspeed in his preface to The Goodspeed Parallel New Testament: the American Translation and the King James Version; Chicago, 1943: “Differences of meaning have … grown up in different parts of the English-speaking world since Tyndale’s day. What he called a corn-field we call a wheat-field, and his account of the disciples plucking the ears of corn conjures up a wholly false picture before the American mind; they were picking ears of wheat. King James’s corn of wheat, of course, means a grain of wheat. Neither of them ever saw what we understand by a corn-field.” I add the following from What Does Corn Mean? by W. Beach Thomas, London Spectator, Oct. 9, 1936, p. 584: “Possibly the much quoted corn in Egypt refers to barley.… Corn began as a generic name for a group of edible grains; but it was also adopted as a specific name for the standard grain of the country: for wheat in England, for oats in Scotland, for maize in America.… Does it, in our generic use, include rye? “The NED says that it does —and also barley and rice.

  1 March, pp. 121–33.

  2 Some Nebraska terms in -corn are discussed by Mamie Meredith in Squaw Patch, Squaw Corn, Calico Corn, Yankee Corn, Tea Wheat, Sandy Wheat, American Speech, Aug., 1932, pp. 420–22. Squaw-corn is traced by the DAE to 1824 and calico-corn to 1849. Yankee-corn is not listed. Miss Meredith also mentions Pawnee-corn.

  3 The difference between the English biscuit and the American biscuit is discussed at length by Horwill.

  4 The more usual term seems to be parade of shops. I find “Fine Parade of Freehold Shops” in a real-estate advertisement in the London Telegraph. Business-block is unknown to the English.

  1 The editor of Karl Baedeker’s The United States; London, 1909, thought it necessary to list and define block in this sense for the information of English travelers. It was not included, however, in the list of Americanisms with English equivalents in A Short Guide to Great Britain, issued by the War and Navy Departments for the guidance of American soldiers in England, 1943.

  2 In Topographical Terms From Virginia, II, American Speech, April, 1940, p. 168, George Davis McJimsey quotes the following from a Virginia document of 1637: “Up towards the head of the maine Creek over small creekes or brookes.…” See also Runs, Creeks and Branches in Maryland, by J. Louis Kuethe, American Speech, Dec., 1935, pp. 256–59.

  3 See p. 9.

  1 There is an interesting discussion of its early uses in America in On the Use of the Words College and Hall in the United States, by Albert Matthews, Dialect Notes, Vol. II, Part II, 1900, pp. 91–114.

  2 Not infrequently it is embodied in their names, as in Ellicott City, Md., with 1216 inhabitants; Dow City, Iowa, with 588; Filer City, Mich., with 408; and Lee City, Ky., with 152.

  3 The American trade term for a low shoe is Oxford. Slipper designates a topless foot-covering that does not lace. I am indebted here to Mr. Charles H. Jaggard of Woodstown, N.J.

  4 All save rabbit are also dealt with by Horwill.

  1 The Moore just mentioned. His sneer was in A Voyage to Georgia, Begun in the Year 1735; London, 1744, p. 24.

  1 See The Chaucerian-American I Guess, by Stuart Robertson, Modern Language Notes, Jan., 1933, pp. 37–40.

  2 A number of others are listed in American English, by M. J. C. Meikeljohn, London Spectator, Aug. 6, 1927, pp. 212–13. Said Daniel Drake in Pioneer Life in Kentucky; Cincinnati, 1860, p. 128 (speaking of Kentucky c. 1795–1800): “The Fall, as we always called it, not less than Spring and Summer, brought its sylvan scenes and pleasures; but do not for a moment suppose that the foreign adjective (sylvan) I have just employed was a word of those days, or that Autumn and forest made a part of our vocabulary. All was rudely vernacular, and I knew not then the meaning of that word. We spoke a dialect of old English, in queer pronunciation, and abominable grammar.”

  1 Is American English Archaic?, Southwest Review, Summer, pp. 292–303.

  2 In his On Early English Pronunciation, brought out at intervals from 1869 to 1889. Ellis was born in 1814 and died in 1890. He was also a mathematician and a writer on musical theory.

  IV

  THE PERIOD OF GROWTH

  1. A NEW NATION IN THE MAKING

  Though the American language had begun its dizzy onward march even before the Revolution, it did not begin to show the vigor and daring which mark it today until after the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Its chief riches, at all times since, have come out of argot and slang, and American slang, says Krapp in the paper quoted at the end of the last chapter, was “the child of the new nationalism, the spirit of joyous adventure that entered American life after the close of the War of 1812.” He goes on:

  One will search earlier colonial literature in vain for any flowering of those verbal ingenuities which ornament the colloquial style of Americans so abundantly in the first great period of Western expansion, and which have ever since found their most favorable conditions along the shifting line of the frontier.

  In support of his thesis he quotes the following from F. J. Turner’s well-known book, “The Frontier in American History”:1

  That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick
to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom — these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.

  The old American frontier, of course, had vanished by the end of the Nineteenth Century, but it is not to be forgotten that, to the immigrants who poured in after 1850, even the slums of the great Eastern cities presented what were reasonably describable as frontier conditions, and that there are still cultural, if not geographic frontiers at Hollywood and Miami, not to mention Oklahoma, Nevada and Mississippi. From 1814 to 1861 the influence of the great open spaces was immediate and enormous, and during those gay, hopeful and melodramatic days all the characteristics that mark American English today were developed — its disdain of all scholastic rules and precedents, its tendency toward bold and often bizarre tropes, its rough humors, its not infrequent flights of what might almost be called poetic fancy, its love of neologisms for their own sake. In recent years most of these neologisms come from the East, and not a few of them show a somewhat painful artfulness, but during the half century before the Civil War the great reservoir of them was the West, which then still included a large part of the South, and they showed a gaudy innocence. Said a shrewd and well-informed observer, Dr. Thomas Low Nichols:1

  The language, like the country, has a certain breadth and magnitude about it. A Western man “sleeps so sound it would take an earthquake to wake him.” He is in danger “pretty considerable much” because somebody is “down on him,”2 like “the whole Missouri on a sandbar.” He is a “gone coon.”3 He is down on all “cussed varmints,”4 gets into an “everlasting fix,” and holds that “the longest pole knocks down the persimmons.” A story “smells rather tall.” …5

  In the Southwest is found the combination of Western and Southern character and speech. The Southwestern man was “born in old Kaintuck, raised in Mississippi, is death of a b’ar, and smartly on a painter1 fight.” He “walks on water, out hollers the thunder, drinks the Mississippi,” “calculates” that he is “the genuwine article,” and that those he don’t like “ain’t worth shucks.”2 He tells of “a fellow so poor and thin he had to lean up agin a saplin’ to cuss.” He gets “as savage as a meat ax.” He “splurges3 about,” and “blows up like a steamboat.”

  The Southerner is “mighty glad to see you.” He is apt to be “powerful lazy” and “powerful slow”;4 but if you visit him where he has located himself, he’ll “go for you to the hilt agin creation.” When people salute each other at meeting, he says they are “howdyin’5 and civilizin’ each other.” He has “powerful nice corn.” The extreme of facility is not as easy as lying, but “as easy as shootin’.” A man who has undressed has “shucked himself.” To make a bet with a man is to “size his pile.”… Most Yankeeisms can be found in the districts of England from which the country was first settled. The colloquialisms of the South and West are more original. Miners, gamblers, and all sorts of adventurers, attracted by gold to California and the Rocky Mountains, have invented new forms of expression.

  “American humor,” says Nichols, “consists largely of exaggeration, and of strange and quaint expressions.” That it differs in this respect from English humor, which tends toward understatement, has been frequently noted, and this difference extends to the popular speech of both countries. Said an Associated Press correspondent in London in 1944, in a dispatch dealing with the current English slang:6

  You don’t say some one gives you a pain in the neck; you just remark, “He’s not my cup of tea.” To answer whether a bomb which caused extensive damage took any lives the Londoner will say cautiously, “A decent few.”… An Englishman takes a poor view of something he disapproves. Soldiers who get fresh with girls are saucy.

  “Much that seems droll to English readers in the extravagances of Western American,” says Nichols, “is very seriously intended. The man who described himself as ‘squandering about permiscuous’ had no idea that his expression was funny. When he boasted of his sister that ‘she slings the nastiest ankle in old Kentuck’ he only intended to say that she was a good dancer.” However much this may have been true in the earliest days, among the loutish fur-trappers and mountain-men who constituted the first wave of pioneers, it had ceased to be so by the time the new West began to develop recorders of its speech. From that time onward the naïve but spontaneous hyperboles of those who bore the burden and heat of the day were reinforced by the deliberate inventions of a more sophisticated class, and Western “tall talk” began to take on the character of a distinct and well-recognized genre. The identity of its first recorders has been forgotten, but I suspect that some of them were professional humorists, for by the end of the 40s the stars of the craft were beginning to turn from the New England Yankee to the trans-Alleghany American, often a Southerner and usually only theoretically literate. Joseph G. Baldwin’s “The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi” (then a true frontier country) appeared in 1853, and only a few years later one of the most popular of the humorists, George H. Derby (John Phoenix), a lieutenant in the Topographical Engineers of the Army, made a visit to Oregon. The discovery of gold in California attracted not only fortune-seekers but also journalists, and out of their ranks came a large number of satirical historians of the rise of Western civilization, with Mark Twain, in the end, overshadowing all the rest. It was these wags, I believe, who really made “tall talk” the fearful and wonderful thing that it became during the two pre-war decades, though no doubt its elements were derived from authentic folk-speech. Thornton printed some specimens in the appendix to the second volume of his glossary, and many others have been exhumed in late years by other cultural explorers. It was, said William F. Thompson in 1934,1

  a form of utterance ranging in composition from striking concoctions of ingeniously contrived epithets, expressing disparagement or encomium, to wild hyperbole, fantastic simile and metaphor, and a highly bombastic display of oratory, employed to impress the listener with the physical prowess or general superiority of the speaker or of his friends.

  It survives more or less in Western fiction, and there are even traces of it remaining in real life,2 but the best of it belongs to the era of its first burgeoning. B. A. Botkin, in his “Treasury of American Folklore,”3 gives some specimens of the wild and woolly neologisms it produced, e.g., to absquatulate, angeliferous, bodaciously, boliterated, to exflunct, to obflisticate, to ramsquaddle, ringtailed roarer, ripstaver and screamer. To absquatulate, meaning to depart stealthily, is traced by the DAE to 1833, and bodaciously, meaning completely, to 1837. To absquatulate was once in wide use, but began to drop out during the Civil War, when to skedaddle supplanted it. The DAE suggests that it may be a blend of to abscond and to squat, but that seems hardly likely. The earliest recorded example of bodaciously is in Sherwood’s “Gazetteer of the State of Georgia,” third edition, 1837, but in the form of body-aciously it was used by James Hall in his “Legends of the West,” second edition, 1832. To exflunct, meaning to beat, appeared in the East in the early 30s, but when it crossed the mountains it was changed into the more satisfying to exfluncticate, to exflunctificate, to explunctify and to explunciticate. To obflisticate, meaning to eclipse or obliterate, is traced by the DAE to 1832, and Botkin records to obflusticate and to obfusticate as variants. To ramsquaddle, which is not listed by the DAE, seems to have been a synonym for to exflunct. Ringtailed roarer, meaning a big and hearty fellow, is traced to 1830; ripstaver, meaning a person of consequence, to 1833, and screamer, meaning a strong man, to 1831. Many other similar coinages of the period might be added. Rip-roaring, now almost standard American, is traced by the DAE to 1834, and ripsnorter to 1840. Whether or not teetotal is an Americanism is not certain, but it seems to be very probable. The DAE’s first example is dated 1837, three years later than the date of the firs
t English example, but Thornton finds teetotaciously in 1833, and the DAE offers tetotally (soon to become teetotally) in the letters of the celebrated Parson Weems, 1807.1 Ramstugious, meaning wild, is traced by the DAE to 1847; to cohogle, meaning to deceive, to 1829; conbobberation, a disturbance, to 1835; to explaterate, to talk at length, to 1831; to honeyfogle, to cheat, to 1829; to hornswoggle, also to cheat, to the same year;2 and rambunctious, uncontrollable, to 1835. A number of other inventions of the era, not listed by the DAE, are given by Mathews in his chapter on Western and Southern Vernacular, e.g., blustiferous, blustering; clamjamphrie, rubbish; clodpolish, awkward; to cornuck, to throw into fits; to explicitrize, to censure; killniferously, fondly; monstracious and monstropolous, huge; peedoodles, a nervous disorder; to puckerstopple, to embarrass; and to rampoose, to go on a rampage.

  Some of the Western terms of the 1812–1861 era remain mysterious to lexicographers, e.g., bogus and burgoo. Webster 1934 marks bogus “origin uncertain” and the DAE marks it “of obscure origin.” Efforts have been made to connect it with the French bagasse, meaning the refuse left after sugar-cane is crushed, but there is no plausible evidence for that derivation. Nor is there any evidence for the theory, occasionally propounded by amateur etymologists, that it was borrowed from the name of a man named Bogus.1 A verb, to bogue, meaning to go around, was in use before the Revolution, but no one has ever succeeded in connecting it with bogus. The noun is traced to 1823 by Thornton, and he shows that it then signified an apparatus for making counterfeit money. By 1839, as the DAE records, it was being applied to the money thus made, and by c. 1849 it had become an adjective with the general sense of not genuine. Burgoo is not an American invention, but was borrowed originally from the argot of British sailors, to whom it meant a thick oatmeal porridge. In that sense it was in American use so early as 1787. How it came to be used to designate a meat and vegetable stew is not known. It was in use in that sense in the West by the early 50s, and since then it has been generally associated with Kentucky. Arthur H. Deute, a culinary authority,2 says that a burgoo is composed of a mixture of rabbit or squirrel meat, chicken, beef, salt pork, potatoes, string beans, onions, lima beans, corn, okra, carrots and tomatoes, and is made in two pots, the meats in a small one and the vegetables in a large. When both have cooked sufficiently the meats are added to the vegetables, the two are well stirred together, and the burgoo is ready. “Remember,” adds Deute, “it is not a soup. It is a stew.” Perhaps shivaree should be added here, though it may not be a Western term. All the etymologists appear to be agreed that it is a naturalized form of the French charivari. It signifies, primarily, a rowdy serenade of a newly-married couple, but it is also used to designate any noisy demonstration. The DAE’s first example is from Baynard R. Hall’s “The New Purchase,” 1843. An earlier form, sherrivarrie, is traced to 1805.1 The shivaree still survives in many rural areas, East and West. In the West it is sometimes called a belling or a warmer,2 and in New England it is variously known as a serenade, horning, rouser, wake-up, belling, jamboree, tin-pan shower, skimmelton, shivaree or callithumpian.3 Bartlett said in the first edition of his Glossary, 1848, that callithumpian had been used, “in New York as well as other parts of the country,” to designate a noisy parade on New Year’s eve, but that such parades were going out of fashion.4