American Language Supplement 1
Page 46
5 Squirrel-whiskey was first heard of in the early part of the Nineteenth Century. A familiar etymology seeks to account for it on the ground that a man who drank it commonly ran up a tree like a squirrel. I think it is much more likely that it got its name by the fact that squirrels were often drowned in the open-air mash-tubs used by moonshiners and then distilled along with the fermented mash. In the Appalachian mountain stills, to this day, the tubs show a high density of dead squirrels, rabbits, possums, coons, wood-rats, birds, lizards, bull-frogs and insects.
6 Sweat was actually in use, but it was perhaps more common to couple panther with the vulgar name of another saline secretion. See II Kings XVIII 27 and Isaiah XXXVI, 12.
1 The vocabulary of the boozers in a theoretically dry community is dealt with by Vance Randolph in Wet Words in Kansas, American Speech, June, 1929, pp. 385–89.
2 Oliver Wendell Holmes protested against this misuse in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858: “Sir, I repudiate the loathsome vulgarism as an insult to the first miracle.”
3 Second ed.; Dublin, 1910.
4 Speak-Easy, March 25, 1928. On May 7, 1938 Eric Partridge suggested in the London Times Literary Supplement that the term “may have been suggested by the English speak-softly-shop, a significant underworld term for a smuggler’s house at which liquor could be inexpensively obtained.” Partridge traced this English term to 1823. Thornton lists speak-easy, but without attempting to trace it in American usage. He says that it “seems to belong to Philadelphia” — on what ground, I do not know. The NED Supplement calls it “U. S. slang” and traces it to 1889, but it is undoubtedly much older. Partridge, in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English; second ed., 1938, says that it was anglicized about 1925. The DAE traces blind-tiger to 1883 and blind-pig to 1887.
1 For a list of them see Slang and Its Analogues, by John S. Farmer and W.E. Henley; London, 1891, Vol. II, p. 327. An earlier one is to be found in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1770, pp. 559 and 560, reprinted in the Gentleman’s Magazine Library: Dialect, Proverbs and Word-Lore, edited by George Laurence Gomme; Boston, n.d., pp. 142 ff.
2 Franklin’s Drinkers Dictionary Again, American Speech, Feb., 1940, pp. 103–05. The full text is to be found in The Drinkers Dictionary, by Cedric Larson, American Speech, April, 1937, pp. 87–92. It was Seeber who unearthed the earlier dictionary of 1722.
3 Where much of the American rum of the time came from.
1 He was a diligent borrower, and at least a third of the maxims in Poor Richard’s Almanac were lifted from various English authors, especially Pope.
2 Obviously, a printers’ term.
3 For some modern terms see The Vocabulary of Drinking, by Richard Connell, Encore, Feb., 1942, pp. 62–64; Slang Synonyms for Drunk, by Manuel Prenner, American Speech, Dec, 1928, pp. 102 and 103; More Slang Words for Drunk, by the same, the same, Aug., 1929, p. 441; Drunk Again, by Lowry Axley, the same, p. 440; Drunk in Slang —Addenda, by Manuel Penner, American Speech, Feb., 1941; The Elegant Eighties, by E. A. Powell, Atlantic Monthly, Aug., 1938, especially p. 219, and Berrey and Van den Bark’s American Thesaurus of Slang; New York, 1942, pp. 122 ff. A graduated list of terms for drunk, ranging from joyous, lightsome, etc. to dead drunk, from the Monthly Magazine or British Register, July 1, 1816, is reprinted in American Notes and Queries, May, 1944, pp. 24 and 25, with a gloss by R. P. Breaden. Thomas Nash’s list of “the eight kinds of drunkennesse” in his Pierce Penilesse His Svpplication to the Diuell, 1592, is reprinted in the Quarterly Journal of Studies of Alcohol, Dec, 1943, and in Tonics and Sedatives, Journal of the American Medical Association, Feb. 26, 1944. Other compilations are listed in Burke, pp. 151–52.
4 This promise was made, for example, by Al Smith and by Governor Albert C. Ritchie of Maryland.
1 The DAE shows that, from 1817 onward, tavern was in use in the United States to designate a hotel or inn. In England there is a sharper distinction. Tavern, which is now little used, means a drinking place with no sleeping accommodation; inn, according to English Inns, by Thomas Burke; London, 1944, means a place “forbidden to allow itself to be used for tippling or as a place of idle resort.”
2 That is, save in the more elegant form of salon. At the Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, the principal drinking-spot is called the salon d’apéritif.
3 In an English pub the saloon-bar, or lounge, is the toniest part of the establishment. All drinks cost a bit more there than in other parts. The private-bar, also somewhat exclusive, is supposed to be reserved for patrons with particular business to discuss, but in pubs which have no separate ladies’-bar it is commonly-used also by women. The public-bar is for any and all.
4 I am informed by Mr. F. MacCarthy of Watertown, Mass., that at Oxford and Cambridge the students use can and half a can instead of pint and half pint. Whether or not this shows American influence I do not know.
5 I am indebted here to Mr. Harris Booge Peavey of Maplewood, N. J.
6 Audit-ale, June 11.
1 The Evidence on O.K., pp. 3–11.
1 Kendall (1789–1869) was, like Van Buren, a devoted follower of Jackson, and perhaps the most influential member of his Kitchen Cabinet. He was made Postmaster General in 1835 and founded the tradition that the holder of that office should be a practical politician. In 1845 he became interested in the Morse electric telegraph and made a fortune promoting it.
1 O.K.—But What Do We Know About It?, pp. 89–95.
2 Two other examples from the same docket, one antedating the Jackson entry, are given by the DAE under O.R.
3 I am indebted here to Mr. Arthur A. Houghton, Jr., curator of the rare book collection in the Library of Congress and custodian of the early copyright records. He could find no trace of the O.K. Gallopade, but he unearthed the O.K. Quick Step. Whether or not the former was earlier than the latter cannot be established. I have a copy of the O.K. Gallopade, which was entered for copyright, in accordance with the law of the time, “in the clerk’s office of the District Court of Maryland.” Mr. Charles Zimmerman, the present clerk of the court, made a search of its records, but could find no trace of this entry. See O.K., 1840, by H. L. Mencken, American Speech, April, 1942, p. 126.
4 This attempt at humor seems to have taken the public fancy. A year later it was retailed in Adventures in Texas, Chiefly in the Spring and Summer of 1840, by William L. McCalla; Philadelphia, 1841, p. 120. See Kayoed: American Slang, by Albert Matthews, Notes and Queries July 30, 1938, p. 82.
1 On Nov. 21, 1840 the once famous Mrs. Anne Newport Royall printed in her weekly paper, the Huntress (Washington), a paragraph from some unnamed newspaper saying: “The ladies, God bless them, have decided that O.K. means only kissing.” For this I am indebted to Mr. Cedric Larson of the Library of Congress.
2 June 10.1 take this from Read.
3 A Note on O.K., Dec, 1041, p. 256.
4 Nashe applied it, in Have With You to Saffron Walden; London, 1596, (Vol. III, p. 48 of his Works, edited by Ronald B. McKerrow; London, 1910), to Henry Nichols, one of his numerous antagonists in the Marprelate controversy. The passage follows: “Martin is Guerra, Brown a brone-bill, & Barrow a wheelbarrow; Ket a knight, H.N. an o.k.” The meaning is unfathomable. I am indebted here to Dr. Mary Parmenter.
5 Ulster Scots and Blandford Scouts, by S. G. Wood; Boston, 1928, pp. 382–83. Massachusetts Archives, Vol. XCX, p. 552.
6 See also the Heflin paper, before cited, pp. 92 and 93.
7 Labeled Letters of John Richardson, 1780–1799, Copied From Originals That Were in the Possession of H. R. Howland, Buffalo, N. Y., Oct. 1, 1909.
1 My attention was first called to the letter of Sept. 23, 1789 by Mr. A. J. H. Richardson, of the Public Archives of Canada (no relative of the writer), in January, 1942.1 made diligent efforts to track down the original, but despite the courteous aid of Mrs. Elleine H. Stones, chief of the Burton Historical Collection in the Detroit Public Library, and of Mr. Robert W. Bingham, director of the Buffalo Historical Society, was unable to do so.<
br />
2 Vol. VI, 1905, p. 27.
3 The two Richardsons were apparently not related. William (1791–1867) was a Boston business man, twenty-four years old at the time of his journey. John was a Scotsman, born in 1755. At the age of eighteen he came out to America to enter the employ of the great fur-trading firm of Phyn, Ellice & Company at Schenectady. During the Revolution he served on a British privateer of which he was part owner. Afterward he returned to the Phyn-Ellice service. Porteus, to whom his letter was addressed, was a fellow-employé. I am indebted here to Mr. A. J. H. Richardson.
4 Travel Diary of William Richardson From Boston to New Orleans by Land, 1815; New York, 1938. Richardson began his trip on Feb. 17, 1815. He returned to Boston by sea, arriving home Aug. 24. On Oct. 24 of the same year he set out on a second journey, and again kept a diary. It was published by Mr. Wait as Journal From Boston to the Western Country and Down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, 1815–1816; New York, 1940.
5 Mr. Wait kindly sent me a photostat.
1 O.K.—But What Do We Know About It?, before cited, p. 94.
2 My view was quoted in Richardson’s O.K. of 1815, by William Bell Wait, American Speech, April, 1941, p. 85.
3 He was keeping diaries so late as 1844, and recorded his observations on a trip to Europe in one headed Notes For Myself. He also kept one of a trip overland from New Orleans in the days after the appearance of railroads. (Private communication from Mr. Wait, Sept. 11, 1939).
4 P. 86. The note was written by Read.
1 Some objections to this note were offered in O.K. a Comment, by James B. McMillan, American Speech, April, 1942, p. 127, but Albert Matthews offered a new and highly persuasive criticism of Heflin’s position in A Note on O.K., American Speech, Dec., 1941, pp. 256–59.
2 Editor’s preface, by John A. Huybers, to When I Was a Boy in Greece, by George Demetrios; Boston, 1913, p. 5. Robert C. McClelland called attention to this passage in the Classical Journal, Oct., 1933, p. 69. See A Greek O.K., by Robert Weber, American Speech, April, 1942, p. 127, and O.K. Redivivus, by Louise Pound, the same, Dec, 1942, p. 249.
3 Aux Quais, by Beachcomber, London Daily Express, June 28, 1940.
4 Main Library News Notes, Cleveland Public Library, July, 1940. I am indebted here to Mr. L. H. Gergely.
5 O.K., by Robert Greenburger, Linguist (Horace Mann School for Boys, New York), Vol. IV, 1939, p. 15. This etymology was borrowed by the Dublin (Ireland) Evening Herald, Aug. 19, 1941.
1 O.K., by John Godley, London Times, Nov. 2, 1939.
2 Reported but by no means certified by Frank Colby in his newspaper column, Take My Word For It, March 21, 1943.
3 O.K. by W. Snow, London Times, Oct. 26, 1935. The first edition of the Greek Lexicon of Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott was published in 1843.
4 O.K. by Sir Anthony Palmer, London Times, Oct. 28, 1939. Oberst Kommandant is German for colonel in command. In American Speech for Oct., 1938, p. 234, Gretchen Hochdoerfer Rogers published a translation of an article in the Omaha (Neb.) Tribune, a German daily, of Jan. 23, 1938, in which the German officer was changed to Baron F. W. von Steuben, inspector-general of the Continental Army, and Oberst Kommandant to Ober-Kommando, meaning high command.
5 The Cry of the English: Words That Bless and Burn, Nottingham Journal, April 30, 1943.
6 O.K., by Charles A. Christie, London Times, Oct. 24, 1939.
7 I am indebted here to Mr. William McDevitt of San Francisco.
8 O.K., London Times, Oct. 21, 1939.
1 O.K.— The Victorians Used It, by J. W. Lee, John o’ London’s Weekly, Aug. 29, 1936. The song was Walking in the Zoo, by Hugh Willoughy Sweny, with music by Alfred Lee, and it was sung by Alfred Glanville Vance, a popular comic singer of the time, who died in 1888. The refrain was:
2 March 6, 1935.
3 More precisely, in the NED Supplement, published in 1933.
4 Under the heading of Not O.K. By Us, the Morning Post printed an editorial on Dec. 16, 1936 saying: “It would be as absurd for us to describe anything as O.K. by us as it would be for us to describe five o’clock as six bells.”
5 Oxford, 1935.
6 Chemical Trade Journal (London), quoted in the New Yorker, Oct. 19, 1935, p. 70.
7 His Lordship, before he mounted the bench in 1926, was counsel to Oxford University.
1 The Mystery of O.K., June 4.
2 How the Tank Got Its Name, by Sam Bate, Northern Daily Tele-graph (Blackburn), Aug. 19, 1940.
3 W. Averell Harriman, the American representative.
4 The Moscow Conference, by Lord Beaverbrook, Listener (London), Oct. 16, 1941, p. 320.
5 Installment published in the newspapers of Feb. 18, 1944.
6 Amen, New Yorker, Aug. 28, 1943.
7 Associated Press dispatch from Madrid, June 24, 1937.
8 O.K. Redivivus, by Louise Pound, American Speech, Dec, 1942, p. 250.
9 Oct., 1937, p. 240.
1 The Centennial of O.K., by Eugene Pharo, Washington Post, June 9, 1940.
2 See AL4, p. 206.
3 The literature dealing with O.K. is enormous, but save for the papers I have referred to is of small value. An interesting account of its use in German is in Okeh, by A. J. Storfer, Vossische Zeitung (Berlin), Sept. 3, 1933.
1 Demagogue, of course, is not an Americanism, and neither is to demagogue. But demagoguery is, and the DAE traces it to 1855. The English seem to prefer demagogy. See Letter-Saving, New York Times (editorial), Feb. 18, 1942. Says Richard Chenevix Trench in English Past and Present; eleventh edition, revised; London, 1881, p. 109, footnote: “Démagogue was first hazarded by Bossuet, and counted so bold a novelty that for long none ventured to follow him in its use.” Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, a famous French preacher and sometime Bishop of Condom, died in 1704.
2 The author of an anonymous article in the New York Times, Twisting the Dictionary to Pad Political Vocabulary, Dec. 16, 1923, ascribed the introduction of exposé to an Ohio congressman named Duncan, and said that he also launched in cahoots and blowing in the sense of bragging, and popularized up Salt river. The DAE quotes the Virginia Literary Museum, 1829, to the effect that exposé was already “very common” at that time, and had been borrowed from the French. It was apparently first used in the political sense in 1830.
1 In England a lobbyist is a reporter assigned to pick up news in the lobby of the House of Commons. What we call a lobbyist is there a lobby-agent.
2 In that year Senator John Sherman of Ohio made a visit home, ostensibly to look after his farm but actually to see to his political interests. When tackled by reporters he alleged that he had made the trip “only to repair my fences.” The usual form is now to look after. The English use to nurse a constituency.
3 Plum seems to have been launched by Matthew S. Quay, who, on being elected Senator from Pennsylvania in 1887, promised his followers that he would “shake the plum tree.”
4 Plunderbund came later. It was used by the cartoonist, Frederick B. Opper, and probably invented by him, after he joined the Hearst staff in 1899.
5 Ticket, in the sense of “the group of party candidates selected for a given set of officers,” is traced by the DAE to 1764, but it seems to have been known long before that, for to carry a ticket is traced to 1711. To run ahead of the ticket goes back to 1846, the head of the ticket to 1884 and to put a ticket in the field to 1891.
6 Edward Clark in The Solid South, Century Magazine, April, 1885, p. 955: “The Solid South … came into vogue during the Hayes-Tilden canvass of 1876. The Democratic tidal wave in the elections of 1874 had shown a powerful, if not irresistible, drift toward Democracy in all the then lately reconstructed States, as well as in their sisters on the old borderline which had also maintained slavery, but which had not gone into the rebellion. The alliterative term commended itself to the Republican stump speakers and newspaper organs as a happy catchword, and the idea which underlay it was impressive enough to arrest the attention of the whole country.”
1 “The other day, after the election,” said S. S. Cox in Why We Laugh; New York, 1877, p. 75, “a New York editor saluted the writer as a tidal waver.”
2 Carl Scherf, in Slang, Slogan and Song in American Politics, Social Studies, Dec, 1934, p. 429, says: “The expression up Salt river, often used to describe political defeat, owes its origin to a river of that name. It is a branch of the Ohio running through Kentucky. Clay was opposing Jackson in 1832. He employed a boatman to row him up the Ohio toward Louisville, where he was to make an important speech. The boatman was a Jackson man. He played a dirty trick. ‘Accidentally or on purpose’ he missed his way and rowed Clay up Salt river. Clay did not reach Louisville in time to make a speech. Clay was defeated. In the campaign of 1840 this phrase was used in a song:
“Our vessel is ready, we cannot delay,
For Harrisons’ coming, and we must away—
Up Salt river, up Salt river,
Up Salt river, oh high-oh.”
The DAE’S first quotation is from Frances M. Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans; London, 1832, Vol. II, p. 117; and Thornton’s is from J. K. Paulding’s Banks of the Ohio; London, 1833, Vol. I, p. 133. It seems rather strange that the phrase should have gone into circulation quickly enough to get into Mrs. Trollope’s book, if Scherf’s etymology is to be credited.
1 Origins of Attempted Secession, c. 1880.
2 The historian will recall forty acres and a mule, used to inflame the slaves toward the end of the Civil War; the more modest three acres and a cow launched by Jesse Collings in 1886, and the car in every garage of the unfortunate Hoover, c. 1928.
3 English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, by G. L. Apperson; London, 1929.
1 For example, Racial Proverbs, by Selwyn Gurney Champion; New York, 1938, and Proverbs, Maxims and Phrases of All Ages, by Robert Christy; New York, 1905. Neither contains any mention of American proverbs.