American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  Not a few of the characteristic coinages of the era have became obsolete. I have mentioned slantidicular, and to it may be added spizarinctum, sposhy, to squinch, to squiggle, squirtish, to squizzle, smidgeon, snollygoster, to sqush, savagerous, and the expletive swow. Spizarinctum, meaning specie or hard money, is traced by the DAE to 1845, and may have been suggested by specie. The last recorded example is dated 1872. Sposhy, meaning soft or wet, flourished in the 40s, but is now no more: it had a noun, sposh, signifiying mud or slush, that has also gone to word heaven. To squinch, possibly suggested by to squint, meant originally to screw up the eyes, but soon acquired the general meaning of to squeeze or pinch. The DAE traces it to 1835. To squiggle, meaning to squirm like an eel, was listed by Pickering in 1816 as “used in some parts of New England, but only in very familiar conversation.” I have heard it in recent years, but it is no longer in common use. Squirtish, meaning given to display, is traced by the DAE to 1847, but the last example is dated 1851, so it seems to have had a short life. During that short life, however, it produced a variant, squirty. To squizzle seems to have had the meaning of to explode, but one of the DAE’s examples indicates that it was also used in place of to sizzle. Smidgeon (or smidgen, smitchin or smidgin) meant a small part of anything. The DAE traces it to 1845 and it still apparently survives in the dialect of Appalachia. A snollygoster, apparently confined to the South, was a political job-seeker, defined by “a Georgia paper,” quoted by the DAE, as “a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumacy.” To sqush, obviously a form of to squash, is traced to 1837, and was used by Mark Twain in “Huckleberry Finn.” The DAE says that savagerous was a blend of savage and dangerous, but its first example, dated 1835, is spelled servigrous, and its second, dated 1837, is spelled savagarous, whereas it offers no example of savagerous before 1843, so the etymology is left in some doubt. Bartlett, in the fourth edition of his Dictionary, 1877, marked savagerous “a low word” and “Southern,” and Schele de Vere, in 1872, also credited it to the South, but it seems to have been in general use until c. 1870. “I swow,” which came in before 1800, was one of a long list of euphemistic oaths in wide use after the turn of the century, but now extinct, e.g., “I swan, snore, swowgar, swad, swamp and vum.”

  So far, the letter S only. The reader who gives himself the pleasure of searching the four volumes of the DAE will find corresponding riches elsewhere, but here I must confine myself to a few surviving Americanisms of the period. It is indeed astonishing how many of the common coins of American speech date from it. Consider, for example, the terms in dead-, horse-, and ice-. Dead-broke is traced by the DAE to 1851, deadhead to 1843, to get the deadwood on to 1851, and dead-beat to 1863. Dead letter is not marked an Americanism, but the first recorded American example is nearly seventy years earlier than the first English example. Dead right and dead wrong, it appears, may have originated in England, but if so they were quickly put to much wider use in the United States, and most Englishmen now think of them as Americanisms. The figurative use of deadline (as in newspaper men’s argot) is clearly American, and so are dead to rights, on the dead-run and dead-house. Of the common terms in horse-, all marked Americanisms by the DAE, horse-sense is traced to 1832,1 horse-swapping to 1800, horse-trading to 1826, and horse-thief to 1768. Man on horseback is an Americanism, and was apparently first applied to General Grant in 1879. So is the phrase hold your horses, which the DAE traces to c. 1846. Horse-car, now obsolete, is first recorded in 1833. Horse-show, traced to 1856, may be an Americanism also. There was a horse-show at Springfield, Mass., in 1858, and two years later Harper’s Magazine was praising the term as “good because it is descriptive,” though noting that show had become somewhat vulgarized by minstrel-show.2 The English were aware of iced-cream (borrowed from Italy) so early as 1688, but the first appearance of ice-cream, in 1744, was in America. The DAE traces ice-breaker to 1833, ice-box to 1855, ice-cart to 1842, ice-chest to 1841, ice-company to 1834, ice-cream freezer to 1854, ice-cream saloon to 1849, ice-dealer to 1851, ice-pitcher to 1865 and ice-wagon to 1873, and marks them all Americanisms. But ice-man is not recorded until 1870, ice-pick not until 1879, iced-tea not until 1886, and ice-cream soda not until 1887.

  The stately word anesthesia appeared in Nathan Bailey’s “Dictionarium Britannicum” in 1721, defined as “a defect of sensation, as in paralytic or blasted persons,” but it was Oliver Wendell Holmes the elder who launched it in the meaning of an insensitiveness to pain produced by a drug. This was on November 20, 1846, in a letter to W. T. G. Morton, the discoverer of ether anesthesia, and in the same letter Holmes proposed anesthetic as a designation for the drug itself. Both words have gone into the vocabularies of all civilized languages.1 The Morse telegraph, first used in 1844, did not introduce the word to the world, for it had been used in England since the late Eighteenth Century to designate various other contrivances for transmitting messages. Nor is telegrapher an Americanism, though the English prefer telegraphist. But telegram, first recorded in 1852, seems to be an American invention, as is cablegram, first recorded in 1868. The latter, at the start, was denounced by purists as barbarous, but it quickly made its way. Telephone was introduced by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876: his first patent was issued on March 7 of that year. The verb to telephone is traced by the DAE to 1880; when to phone came in is not clear, but it was probably soon afterward. The introduction of photography in the early 40s brought on a curious combat between photographer and photographist, parallel to that between telegrapher and telegraphist. The DAE’s first example of photographist in American use is dated 1861, but the word actually appeared in Sartain’s Magazine (Philadelphia) so early as 1852.2 It survived until the 70s, but was then completely supplanted by photographer.

  A few miscellaneous examples of words and phrases first recorded during the period under review: blood and thunder is traced by the DAE to 1857, ripsnorter to 1840, to back and fill to 1848, to back down to 1849, way back to 1855, way down to 1851, way off to 1853, way over to 1850, way up to 1850, way-station to 1849, bulletin-board to 1852, chewing-gum to 1864,1 close shave to 1856,2 the whole kit and biling to 1850,3 cow-catcher to 1838,4 go-aheadativeness to 1846,5 to discombobulate (originally to discombobberate, and then to discomboborate and to discomboberate) to 1837, caboose (of a train) to 1862, to raise Cain to 1840, dicker to 1833, to face the music to 1850, to flunk to 1843, level best to 1851, ornery to 1830, all-around to 1856, played out to 1859, walking-papers to 1825, to go the whole hog to 1829, whole-hearted to 1840, surprise-party to 1859, to locomote to 1834, to boost to 1815,6 buddy to 1852,7 in cahoots to 1829, to crawfish to 1848, to donate to 1845, to fill the bill to 1860, grab-bag to 1855, A to izzard to 1835, bridal-tour to 1856, one-horse (in the general sense of petty) to 1854, to be mustered in to 1848, packing-house (for meats) to 1853, pilot-house to c. 1846, extra (of a newspaper) to 1842, firecracker to 1848, wharf-rat to 1837, and quick on the trigger to 1808.

  Blizzard appears to have been set afloat by the first wave of Western pioneers, though it did not acquire its present significance until after the Civil War. Its origin has long entertained speculative lexicographers, and various fanciful etymologies are still cherished, but what seems to be its true history has been established in a characteristically thorough paper by Allen Walker Read.8 The first recorded appearance of the word was in the list of Americanisms contributed by Dunglison to the Virginia Museum in 1829. Dunglison there defined it as “a violent blow, perhaps from blitz (German: lightning)” and ascribed it to Kentucky. It next turned up, in the sense of a rifle shot, in David Crockett’s autobiography, 1834, and a year later he used it in the sense of a crushing retort in his “Tour to the North and Down East.” By 1846, as the DAE shows, it was used to signify a cannon shot and during the Civil War it came to mean a volley of musketry. Whether or not it originated by onomatopoeia is not known, but the possibility is suggested by various English diale
ct words in bliz-, all of them signifying some sort of violent action, and by the German blitz. But where and when was it first applied to a severe snowstorm, with high wind? Read, it seems to me, presents conclusive evidence that this transfer occurred in the village of Estherville, Iowa, and that the first appearance of the term in its now common sense was probably in the pioneer village newspaper, the Northern Vindicator, some time during the early Spring of 1870.1 The Northern Vindicator had been established in 1868 by O. C. Bates and E. B. Northrup, and Bates was the editor from the start until 1871. He was very fond of the neologisms of the time, e.g., lally gag, and seems to have devised a number of his own, e.g., baseballism, weatherist and weatherology. Whether or not he was the first to apply blizzard to a storm is not known — he may have picked it up from a town character known as Lightning Ellis — but he gave it a heavy play after Estherville was snowed in on March 14, 1870, and ever thereafter that storm was spoken of locally as the March blizzard or the great blizzard. “The swiftness of the spread of blizzard after the adoption of the meaning storm,” says Read, “is truly a phenomenon. The preparation for it through the earlier uses is the only explanation.” Bates’s successors in the editorship of the Northern Vindicator continued to use it, and in a little while it had spread to other Iowa papers, and was presently in wide use all over the Upper Middle West. During the Winter of 1880–81, which saw a long succession of severe storms, it reached the rest of the country and even England. Soon afterward the discussion of its etymology began, and there has been wrangling over it ever since. But Read’s paper remains unanswered, and probably unanswerable.

  One of the characteristic inventions of pre-Civil War days was the guyascutus, an imaginary animal that still survives in American folklore, though memory of its ecology and morphology has begun to fade.1 Its original name seems to have been guyanousa, and under that name it was described by an anonymous contributor to the Knickerbocker Magazine in 1846.2 He depicted it as “a monster of gigantic proportions,” inhabiting “the tallest branches of the poplar” in “the disputed territory of Penobscot” in Maine.3 He recorded that men of vision who alleged that they had captured a specimen were going about the country offering to show it in a tent, but that as soon as a paying crowd of yokels was assembled they would rush out from its supposed den yelling “The gyanousa am loose!”, and the customers would flee for their lives, leaving the gate-money behind. This tale4 reached far-away Oregon before the end of 1846, and was retold in the Oregon Spectator,5 with the name of the beast changed to guiaskuitas and the scene of the swindle transferred to the South. In those early days various other variations of the name were recorded, e.g., guyanosa, gyascutus, guyastacutus, sidewinder, lunkus, stone-eater, ricaboo racker, sidehill gouger (or dodger, or badger, or sauger), prock, gwinter and cute-cuss or cuter-cuss, and the habits of the bearer were described differently by different authorities. When, in 1855, George H. Derby (John Phoenix) visited Oregon, he sent the San Francisco Herald an account of the guyascutus, and attempted to differentiate between it and the prock. This account was purportedly from the pen of “Dr. Herman Ellenbogen, naturalist for Governor Stevens’ Exploring Expedition.”1 It gave the prock, or sidehill sauger, the name of perockius Oregoniensis and described it as having shoulder joints capable of dislocation at will, so that it could shorten its legs on one side and thus graze upon steep hillsides with comfort. The gyascutus (gyascutus Washingtoniensis) was said to be a harmless rodent subsisting on “the roots of the Camissis exculenta,2 which its powerful nails permit it to dig with facility.” “Dr. Ellenbogen” proceeded:

  This extraordinary animal is about three feet in height and nine in extreme length, its corrugated tail being about one foot. Its back is covered with a shield composed of scales, or rather plates, of an osseous substance, imposed upon a pachydermatous hide, forming a flexible but secure armor, and having along the dorsal plates a row of short and powerful horns, slightly recurved, which extend from the shoulders to the loins.3

  But in the East the prock and the gyascutus apparently remained identical, and the chief mark of the combined creature was its curious development of the legs on one side. A savant native to Vermont thus described it in the Haverhill (Mass.) Gazette in 1944:4

  During my boyhood on a Vermont farm the gyascutus or cute cuss, was not a rare barnyard animal. He or the female of the species, gyascuta, which we affectionately called the cuter cuss, were as necessary as the cow to most Vermont farmers. Indeed, without the gyascutus, dairy farming in Vermont would have been restricted to the narrow lowlands, the riverside meadows that probably do not account for more than one-tenth of one per cent, of Vermont’s acreage.…

  Obviously, the ordinary cow cannot clamber over Vermont pastures. The early settlers, bringing cows from other States, quickly learned this, and for several years a problem worse than the Indians … was that of getting cows to and from pasture. It took two men for each cow and the task was comparable to teaching her to go up and down a ladder.

  But the gyascutus had legs snorter on one side than on the other, so it could circumambulate the Vermont hills with the greatest ease. The Vermonters immediately understood they must have cows with the gyascutus’s running gear, so they domesticated the creature and by interbreeding developed a new breed of cattle. Today, as all Americans should know, all Vermont calves are born with legs shorter on one side than the other.…

  Some gyascutuses, or gyuscuti, survived in an unadulterated state even as recently as the period of my boyhood. They were cherished by the farmers as evidence of Providence’s concern for their welfare. We recall one especially affectionate gyascuta that was strongly attached to us in our early youth. How many times we have trudged to school in tears at the sight of the cuter cuss’s attempts to follow us on a road made for legs of equal length.1

  On March 8, 1944, at a press conference in Baltimore, the Hon. Gerald L. K. Smith, head of the American First party and former chaplain to the Hon. Huey P. Long, denounced the Hon. Franklin D. Roosevelt as “the great girasticutam,” and explained that he meant that the President wanted to be “the above all man of all above-allers — the President of the world or something of that sort.”2 Challenged by various specialists in pathophilology, including the present writer, because of his apparent ignorance of the name and nature of the guyascutus, he replied that his girasticutam was not a guyascutus at all, but an invention of his own. Writing from his Kremlin in Detroit, he said:

  When real Americans create words they do not bother with thick books like dictionaries or with cynical word surgeons like Mencken. We have a science all our own. For instance, I was taught as a boy in Wisconsin that Chicago is three-sevenths chicken, two-thirds cat and one-half goat, as follows:

  Chi — chicken

  Ca — cat

  Go — goat

  Thus I created the word girasticutam because it sounds like the fourth term. Broken down scientifically, it is as follows:

  Gi — the first two sevenths of giraffe

  Ra — the first one-third of rabbit

  St — the last two-fifths of ghost

  Ic — the middle half of tick

  Ut — the last two-thirds of gut

  Am — the last two-thirds of ram.3

  This somewhat improbable etymology for girasticutam matches those that have been proposed for guyascutus. Webster 1934 dismisses the latter as “quasi New Latin, an arbitrary coinage,” but the DAE is silent on the subject. The theory that the word comes from Gyas scutos, the name of the buckler worn by Gyas, the companion of Aeneas, seems to have been launched by the aforesaid “Dr. Ellenbogen” in 1855. Gyas took a hand in the boat-race which marked the funeral orgies of Anchises, the father of Aeneas: his buckler was made of the scaly hide of a mythical monster. Mills, in the paper I have quoted, suggests that guyascutus may have come from hyas cultus, a phrase in the Chinook jargon meaning very worthless, and a writer in the Cleveland Plain Dealer once sought to derive it from gyre, signifying a circular course, and astichous,
signifying out of line or not arranged in rows.1 I myself once pointed to a possible eponym in Gehazi, mentioned in II Kings V, 20–27, as an ambulance-chaser employed by the prophet Elisha, and remembered for the fact that he tried to shake down a Syrian general named Naaman, who came to Elisha’s office to be cured of leprosy, and was punished by being afflicted with the disease himself.2 The etymology of prock is equally mysterious. The DAE presents a quotation from the New Orleans Picayune of September 8, 1840, showing that the creature was already known at that time, and that its “discovery” was credited to one Kock, owner of a museum in St. Louis. All these animals, whatever they were called, had one character in common: their legs were longer on one side than on the other, and they could thus graze on steep hillsides. The name sidewinder and the various forms in sidehill plainly refer to this.

  The guyascutus quickly entered into the florid mythology of the Northwest, and “The guyascutus am (or is) loose” became a popular catch-phrase, signifying that skulduggery was abroad. The beast is now a part of the Paul Bunyan legend, and Charles Edward Brown, in his “Paul Bunyan Natural History,”3 thus describes it: