Stogy, in the sense of a crude cigar, made with a simple twist at the mouthward end instead of a fashioned head, is not traced by the DAE beyond 1893, but it must be very much older. It is a shortened form of conestoga, the name of a heavy covered wagon with broad wheels, much in use in the early days for transport over the Alleghanies. This name came from that of the Conestoga valley in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, which came in turn from that of a tribe of Iroquois Indians, extinct before the Revolution. The term Conestoga-wagon seems to have been in use in Pennsylvania before 1750, but it was apparently but little known to the country at large until after 1800. Many of the Conestoga wagoners were Pennsylvanians, and they prepared the tobacco of Lancaster county for smoking on their long trips by rolling it into what soon came to be known as conestogies and then stogies. When the commercial manufacture of these pseudo-cigars began I have been unable to learn: it is now centered, not in Pennsylvania, but at Wheeling, W. Va. The Conestoga-wagon survived until my own boyhood. I have seen whole fleets lined up in Howard street, Baltimore, laden with butter and eggs from the Pennsylvania German country. My father made a round trip in one immediately after the Civil War, and was a week on the road from Baltimore to Lancaster and return. The covered-wagon of the Western pioneer was often a Conestoga.
2. THE EXPANDING VOCABULARY
Taking one with another, the pioneers who trekked westward during the half century between the War of 1812 and the Civil War stood a good deal closer, humanly speaking, to the Okies of latter times than to the heroic figures who commonly represent them in historical fiction and the movies. They were not, perhaps, as vicious as the Puritans of early New England, but by the same token they lacked almost altogether the cultural aptitudes and propensities that, in the Puritans, even Calvinism could not kill. Most of them were bankrupt (and highly incompetent) small farmers or out-at-heel city proletarians, and the rest were mainly chronic nomads of the sort who, a century later, were to rove the country in caricatures of automobiles. Very few settled down in the areas that were their first goals. If they headed, at the start, for Kentucky or Ohio, they were presently moving on to Indiana or Illinois, and after that they proceeded doggedly and irrationally to even wilder and less hospitable regions. How the last wave of them was finally brought up by the Pacific on the coast of Oregon is magnificently described in a memorable novel by H. L. Davis, by title “Honey in the Horn.”1 In the case of multitudes, there was but little more sign of intelligent purpose in their painful wanderings than in the migrations of Norwegian lemmings. They simply pressed on and on, sweating in Summer, freezing in Winter, and hoping always for a miracle over the ever-receding horizon. When they halted it was not because they had actually found Utopia; it was simply because they had become exhausted. There ensued, commonly, a desperate struggle with the climate, the Indians, the local Mammalia and Insectivora and an endless series of plagues and pestilences, and if, by some chance mercy of their sanguinary God, they managed to survive and an organized community arose, it was quickly afflicted by a fresh scourge of money-lenders, theologians, patent-medicine quacks and politicians. The loutish humor of these poor folks was their Freudian reply to the intolerable hardships of their existence. They had to laugh to escape going crazy — and not infrequently the remedy did not work. It was not in such relatively civilized centers as Cincinnati and St. Louis that the “tall talk” of the West developed, nor was it in such transplanted New Yorks and Bostons that the racier new words and phrases of the era were coined; it was along the rivers, in the mountains and among the lonely and malarious settlements of the prairies. There was thus very little verbal subtlety in them, for subtlety is the monopoly of classes that were only sparsely represented in the westward advance. But they were often extremely pungent and picturesque, and like every other trait of the rude but really autochthonous trans-Alleghany culture they soon had repercussions in the East.
It was a time, along the seaboard, of ardent but vain efforts to set up a series of Alexandrias in partibus infidelium. Not only Boston, but also New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Charleston had its caste of austere and hopeful Brahmins, and they laid down the law with humorless assurance, convinced that an almost celestial light was in them. They knew precisely what was right and what was wrong, not only in such gross and public matters as speech, but also in the most minute details of private conduct. Reformers of a thousand varieties swarmed the land, whooping up their new arcana and passing the hat. The “gifted” female began to emerge from the seraglio — Margaret Fuller, Lydia Sigourney, Lucretia Mott, all the bad lady poets praised by Poe, all the vestals of elegance and decorum assembled by Godey’s Lady’s Book.1 The effort of one and all was to polish and refine the country; they frowned, like William Jennings Bryan in 1926, upon the suggestion that Homo americanus was a mammal. But all their hard striving went for naught, for the West was fast devouring the East, and a true Century of the Common Man was beginning. The tide turned with Jackson’s first election in 1828, but it took the Brahmins almost a full generation to realize what had happened to them. By the time the fumes of the Civil War cleared away the whole American empire, from the rocks of Maine to the Golden Gate, was far, far closer to a mining-camp in its way of life and habit of thought than to the grove of Academe. Emerson had shrunk to a wraith almost as impalpable as his own Transcendentalism, and the reigning demigod was a river boatman and rail splitter of the West. Of all the evangelists of Better Things who had flourished since 1800 only Noah Webster left any permanent mark upon the American people. He taught them how to spell — a faculty that they were not to lose until the emergence of pedagogy as a learned profession, cradled at Teachers College, Columbia. But he taught them nothing else.1
A glance through the DAE is sufficient to show how luxuriantly the new American language bloomed during this gaudy era. Hundreds and perhaps even thousands of terms that are now inextricably of its essence were then hatched by ingenious men — to the horror, I have no doubt, of all the “madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Agrarians, Seventh-Day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians and philosophers” sneered at by Emerson,2 and perhaps to the equal horror of Emerson himself, but to the delight of the populace that these visionaries were bent on saving. They contributed nothing to the store themselves, and the populace itself contributed no more, but on the other side of the ideational fence were plenty of antinomians well fitted by talent and taste for the job —the journalists of the new penny press, the humorists who came from their ranks, the great class of itinerant traders and schemers, the politicians who roared from 10,000 stumps. I turn to the letter S and find the DAE listing the following common coins of American speech as born in the period under review:
saloon (drinking-place), 1841
salt (sailor), 18403 sassy, 1831
saw-buck (a $10 bill), 1850
saw-log, 1831
say, to have the, 1838
scare up, to, 1841
school commissioner, 1838
school-teaching, 1846
scoot, to, 1841
score, to (to castigate), 1812
Scotch-whiskey, 18484 scraper (for making roads), 1823
scratch, to (a ticket), 1841
scrawny, 1833
scrod,1856
sea-food, 1836
season-ticket, 1820
secession (of a State), 1830
seckel-pear, 1817
secretary (book-case with writing-desk), 1815
second table, 1850
section (quarter or district), 1814
seed-store, 1833
self-culture, 1837
self-made man, 1832
semi-monthly, 1851
semi-occasional, 1850
send-off, 1856
set (as in all set), 1844
seventeen-year locust, 1844
seven-up, 1836
sewing-circle, 1846
sewing-machine, 1847
sewing-society, 184
2
shad-bellied, 1832
shakes (ague), 1825
sheepnose (apple), 1817
sheet-music, 18571 shell (racing-boat), 1858
shell out, to, 1833
shell-road, 1840
sheriff’s sale, 1817
shine, to cut a, 1819
shine off, to take the, 1834
shine to, to take a, 1840
shingle (a doctor’s sign), 1842
shingle, to (to cut the hair short), 1857
ship, to (by land), 18572 shirt on, to keep one’s, 1854
shirt-bosom, 18523 shoe-bench, 1841
shoe-findings, 1836
shoe-peg, 1854
shook (a bundle of staves or other wooden objects), 1819
shooting, as sure as, 1853
short (a broker who sells for future delivery securities he does not yet own), 1849
show-window, 1855
shuck, to (corn), 18344 shucks (exclamation), 1847
shut down, to (to close a factory), 18505 side-show, 1855
side-track, 1840
side-wheel, 1845
sight, not by a damned (or darned), 1834
sight-draft, 1850
silent-partner, 1828
silk, as fine as, 1836
simon-pure, 1840
single-track, 1838
sis (for sister), 1835
six-shooter, 1853
skeeter (mosquito), 1852
split, full, 1834
splurge, 1830
sponge-cake, 1805
spool-cotton, 1839
sport (a gamester), 1859
spots off, to knock the, 1861
spot, to (to recognize), 1848
spread-eagle (bombastic), 1858
spring-chicken, 1845
spring-fever, 1859
sprouts, course of, 1851
squally, to look (to be threatening), 1814
square-meal, 1850
square-thing, c. 1860
squirt (a contemptible person), 1843
stag-dance, 1843
stag-party, 1856
stall, to (come to a halt), 1807
stand, old, 1847
stand from under, to, 1857
standee, 1856
star-spangled banner, 1814
state-bank, 1815
state-line, 1817
State’s evidence, 1831
State-university, 1831
station-agent, 1855
stay put, to, c. 1848
stick at, to shake a, 1818
still-hunt, 1836
stock-car, 1858
stock-grower, 1837
stock-raising, 1800
stone-bruise, 1805
stool-pigeon (used to catch criminals), 1836
stop off, to, 1855
stop over, to, 1857
store-clothes, 1840
stovepipe-hat, 1855
stranger (as a form of address), 1817
street-railroad, 1859
stub one’s toe, to, 1846
sucker (an easy victim), 1836
sugar-cured, 1851
Summer-complaint, 1847
Summer-hotel, 1852
Summer-resort, 1854
sure-enough, c. 1846
sure-thing, 1853
sweat, to (to force to confess), 1824
swell-front (house), 1848
swell-head, 1845
switch, to (railroad), 18611
swivel-chair, 1860
The boldness of trope so often marked in the neologisms of unschooled and uninhibited men will be noted in many of these, e.g., saw-buck, send-off, shad-bellied, to keep one’s shirt on, to slop over, soft-soap, stag-party, swell-head and spread-eagle, and also the frequent brutal literalness, e.g., shakes, smash-up, spitball, standee, store-clothes and sure-thing. There is apparent likewise, in the coinages of the era, a great fondness for harsh debasements of more seemly words, e.g., to scoot, scrawny, slick, to snoop, slather and to smooch. The NED surmises that to scoot may be derived from a sailor’s verb, to scout, signifying to go away hurriedly, but adds that in its current meaning it was “apparently imported into general British use from the United States.” The DAE relates it to to skeet, an obsolete variant of to skate, but that is in a somewhat different sense. It is traced, in its commoner meaning, to 1841. Scrawny is first recorded in 1833, and the DAE suggests that it may have been derived from scranny, though for this there is no evidence. Slick, which comes, like sleek, from a Middle English slike, is old in England, but it seems to have dropped out of use there and was revived in the United States early in the Nineteenth Century. Most of the phrases in which it occurs, e.g., as slick as a whistle (or as grease, or as molasses), to slick down, to slick up and to slick off, are unquestionably Americanisms. Slather, marked “origin unknown” by the DAE, is not recorded before 1876, when Mark Twain used it in “Tom Sawyer,” but it is probably considerably older. To smooch, meaning to dirty, is old in English, but has been almost exclusively in American use since the early Nineteenth Century. It apparently comes from to smutch or to smudge. To smouch, meaning to pilfer, is also an English archaism revived in the United States. Mark Twain used it so often that Ramsay and Emberson call it one of his favorite words.
The period under review was rich in uncouth neologisms of the class of shebang, shenanigan, shindig, to skedaddle, skeezicks, skookum, slambang, slangwhanger, slantidicular, slumgullion, sockdolager, splendiferous and spondulicks, many of which survive. Shebang, which is of uncertain origin but may be related to the Irish shebeen, an unlicensed drinking-place, came into great popularity during the Civil War, but it is probably older. Shenanigan, which also has an Irish smack, belongs to the same period. Shindig was used in the South, before the Civil War, in the literal sense of a blow on the shins, but it soon took on the wider meaning of a rowdy party, and may have been influenced by shindy. Whether or not shindy is American is not certain. It is recorded as sailor’s slang in England in 1821, but did not come into general use there until after it had become widely adopted in America. To cut a shindy and to kick up a shindy are both marked Americanisms by the DAE. To skedaddle has long mystified etymologists. Webster 1864 sought to relate it to a Danish or Swedish word, said to have been picked up from Scandinavian settlers in the Northwest, but the DAE says that no likely original can be found. The theory that it is of Greek origin, noted in AL4, p. 165, n. 4, still crops up at intervals in the newspapers, but there is no evidence for it.1 The word has been recorded in English dialect use in the sense of to spill milk, but it is difficult to connect this sense with the American meaning of to flee precipitately. Moreover, the English skedaddle has not been traced beyond 1862, by which time the American skedaddle was already in wide use. It came into popularity at the beginning of the Civil War, but it had probably got into the vocabulary some time before.
Skeezicks, originally meaning a good-for-nothing but later used mainly in playful and affectionate senses, is traced by the DAE to 1850: its origin is unknown. Skookum seems to have been borrowed from the Chinook dialect of the Northwest, in which it signified powerful, but Berrey and Van den Bark list it as now synonymous with scrumptious, splendiferous, hotsy-totsy and hunky-dory. Skookum-house, in the West, is a name for the jail on an Indian reservation, and in the argot of American criminals it is sometimes used for any jail. Slam Bang was used in the 30s to designate one of the factions of the Democratic party, and there is every reason for believing that the term was an American invention. The DAE traces slambanging, in the sense of making a noisy tumult, to 1843. Slangwhanger was used by Irving, in the sense of a bitterly partisan political journalist, in 1807, but by the time Pickering brought out his Vocabulary in 1816 it had come to mean also a demagogic orator. It was denounced by the Monthly Review as an abhorrent Americanism in its review of the English edition of living’s “Salmagundi.” Slantidicular, from slanting and perpendicular, is traced by the DAE to 1832. Bartlett dismissed it as “a factitious vulgarism,” and it is now obsolete. Slumgullion,
of unknown etymology, came into use during the California gold rush to signify a muddy residue left after sluicing gravel, but its meaning was soon extended to include anything disgusting, especially food or drink. Among American tramps it is now used as a synonym for mulligan, the name of a stew made of any comestibles they can beg or steal. Not infrequently it is shortened to slum. The DAE traces slumgullion to 1850 and slum to 1874, and marks them both Americanisms. Sockdolager originally meant a knock-down blow, but has now come to signify anything large or overwhelming. Berrey and Van den Bark list it as synonymous with corker, whopper, lollapaloosa1 and topnotch, but note that it is still used by prize-fighters in its original sense. It has lately acquired a variant, sockeroo. The DAE traces it to 1830. Bartlett suggests that it is “probably a perversion in spelling and pronunciation of doxology, a stanza sung at the close of religious services, and as a signal of dismissal,” and the DAE hands on this guess, but no evidence is offered to support it. Splendiferous, first encountered by the searchers for the DAE in R. M. Bird’s once famous “Nick of the Woods,” 1837, is now reduced to consciously whimsical usage, along with its congeners, splendacious, grandiferous, supergobsloptius and scrumptious.2 Spondulicks, often spelled spondulix, is traced by Thornton to 1857 and by the DAE to a year earlier. It is marked “origin uncertain.”
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