American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  2 The DAE does not list this, though it is undoubtedly American. The verb phrase to monkey with is also probably American, for the NED’s first English example is dated 1886, whereas the DAE’s first American example is dated 1881. Thornton calls it an Americanism. Monkey-shines is so listed by the DAE and traced to 1847, and monkey-business to 1883.

  3 I listed a few of these in The American Language, first ed.; New York, 1919, pp. 301–03, and in all subsequent printings before the fourth edition, 1936. Many go back to Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac, and new ones are coming in all the time, e.g., “Nobody loves a fat man,” “The Lord is my shepherd: I should worry,” “Don’t spit: remember the Johnstown Flood,” “Kick him again; he’s down,” “Ain’t it hell to be poor?”, “The first hundred years are the hardest,” “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,” “Tell your troubles to a policeman,” and “Smile, damn you, smile.” The provenance of only a few has been determined. “War is hell,” commonly ascribed to W. T. Sherman, is a misreporting of a phrase in a speech he made at Columbus, O., Aug. 11, 1880. See my New Dictionary of Quotations; New York, 1942, p. 1267. “To the victor belongs the spoils (of the enemy)” is from a speech in the United States Senate by William L. Marcy, Jan. 21, 1832. “Life is one damn thing after another” has been ascribed to Frank Ward O’Malley and to Elbert Hubbard, but there is no evidence that either really invented it. “Few die and none resign” is an abridgment of a saying by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Elias Shipman, July 12, 1801. “I’d rather have them say,” etc., was given popularity by Jack Johnson, the colored pugilist, c. 1910, but he did not invent it.

  4 Published in London in 1788.

  1 Which is to say, before 1736.

  2 Adams was elected a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1765. He became a member of the Continental Congress in 1774, and as such was a strong supporter of the committee system of administration, suggesting the caucus system. After the Revolution he was Governor of Massachusetts. He died in 1803, aged 81. His father, likewise Samuel (1689–1748), was also a politico.

  3 Peter Oliver (1713–91) was made a justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts in 1756, though he was not a lawyer, and in 1771 became chief justice. He was a Loyalist during the Revolution, and in 1776 went to England, where he remained for the rest of his life.

  1 Webster’s New International, 1934, inserts a saving probably, but seeks to relate the word to cockarouse, the designation of an Indian chief in Virginia, applied by extension to a white colonist of wealth and consequence. In the former sense John Smith reported the word in 1624, spelling it caucorouse.

  2 Caucus, American Speech, April, 1943, p. 130.

  3 The author of the Vocabulary lately cited.

  1 Private communication, Oct. 11, 1943. I am also indebted to Dr. Barret for a photostat of Pickering’s note.

  2 Russell ran away from school to see the battle of Lexington. He supported the Constitution, was a great admirer of Washington, and denounced the War of 1812. There is an account of him in American Journalism, by Frank Luther Mott; New York, 1941, pp. 133 ff.

  3 Russell was the author of the phrase Era of Good Feeling.

  1 An anti-caucus movement is traced by the DAE to 1824.

  2 “ The caucus system,” said W. E. H. Lecky in Democracy and Liberty; London, 1896, Vol. I, p. 149, “is but another name for the American machine.” Somewhat similarly, the English have preserved the meaning of an American election term that is now obsolete at home. It is the noun electioneer, signifying a political campaigner. It was used by Lowell in the first series of The Biglow Papers, 1848, and may have been launched by him. The DAE cites no later American example. But I find the following in the London Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 9, 1944, p. 444: “Besides being a politician, the author of this pamphlet is a Fellow of All Souls, and it is in that capacity rather than as a Conservative electioneer that he has written it.”

  3 I am indebted here to Mr. Granville Toogood of Philadelphia.

  4 May 18, p. 637.

  1 Sept. 27, p. 66. I take this from Thornton.

  2 That meaning still survives in dialect. See Bunkum, by Louise Pound, American Speech, Feb., 1941, p. 74.

  3 Philadelphia, 1851; Vol. II, p. 52.

  4 Buncombe county was named after a pioneer named Colonel Buncombe in 1791.

  5 Second ed.; New York, 1917, Vol. IV, p. 155.

  6 In American Speech, Feb., 1930, p. 222, Thomas Perrin Harrison, Sr., reports, on the authority of Samuel à Court Ashe, a North Carolina historian (1840–1938), that the speaker was Felix Walker, who represented the Buncombe district from 1817 to 1823.

  7 One of the not infrequent newspaper wars upon it went on in 1935. It was provoked by its use in the title of a book, Art Debunked, by Hubert Furst. See the letter columns of the London Daily Telegraph, March 2, 4 and 9, 1935. One correspondent, A. E. Sullivan, declared that it originated in “the inability of an ill-educated and unintelligent democracy to assimilate long words. Its intrusion into our own tongue,” he went on, “is due partly to the odious novelty of the word itself, and partly to the prevailing fear that to write exact English nowadays is to be put down as a pedant and a prig.” The NED Supplement traces it in English use (though quoted as an Americanism) to 1927. Who invented it I do not know. It is commonly ascribed to W. E. Woodward, who published a novel called Bunk in 1923 and a debunking life of George Washington in 1926, but he has disclaimed its paternity.

  1 Edited by Justin Winsor; four vols.; Boston, 1880–81, Vol. III, p. 222.

  2 Gerry (1744–1814) was one of the early champions of democratic rule and a vigorous opponent of the Federalists. He was a member of the Massachusetts Legislature before the Revolution, and in 1776 he was elected to the Continental Congress. He resigned his seat in 1780 but resumed it in 1783. He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, but refused to sign the Constitution as drafted. After two terms in Congress he was elected Governor of Massachusetts in 1810. He became Vice-President of the United States in the second Madison administration, and died in office.

  3 If this was the Russell before noted, his paper was actually the Columbian Centinel, not the Continent.

  4 Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828) specialized in portraits of Washington, and dozens of them still survive.

  1 It is possible that Pickering omitted it in delicate consideration for the feelings of the Gerry family. Some years ago Dr. Atcheson L. Hench found among the papers of M. Schele de Vere at the University of Virginia an undated and unplaced newspaper clipping saying, on the authority of “Professor Porter of Yale,” that it was omitted from Webster 1828 for the same reason. The widow of Gerry lived in New Haven opposite Chauncey A. Goodrich, who had married Webster’s daughter Julia in 1816, and the two families were on intimate terms. Gerrymander in fact did not appear in Webster until 1864, fifteen years after Mrs. Gerry’s death. The 1864 edition was edited by Noah Porter, obviously the Professor Porter aforesaid. He was professor of metaphysics at Yale from 1846 to 1892 and president of the university from 1871 to 1886. Born in 1811, he lived until 1892. Dr. Hench reported his find in a paper read before the Present-Day English section of the Modern Language Association at Philadelphia, Dec. 29, 1934.1 am indebted to him for access to it.

  2 In AL4, p. 107, I say that Theodore Roosevelt was one of them. This is an error. He voted for Blaine.

  1 Albert J. Engel: Speech in the House of Representatives, April 23, 1936.

  2 Mugwump Denatured, New York Times (editorial), May 10, 1925.

  1 An example of its use occurred in Joe Westwood Does a Filibuster, by Hector McNeil, M.P., London Daily Express, March 14, 1942. Westwood, a supporter of the government, made a delaying speech until the hour fixed for adjournment in order to choke off the threat of a motion of lack of confidence. He was on his legs less than half an hour.

  2 Oct. 3, 1844. I take this from Thornton.

  3 Two vols.; London, 1844.

  4 See Abraham Lincoln: The Pr
airie Years, by Carl Sandburg; New York, 1926, Vol. I, pp. 343–44; and Something About Polk, New Yorker, Aug. 8, 1936, p. 13.

  1 Dialect Notes, Dec, 1932, p. 287.

  2 Ripper Bills, by J. R. Schultz, American Speech, Dec, 1937, p. 319.

  1 According to a correspondent of the New York Post, June 2, 1923, signing himself H.P.S., the beautiful term honest graft was invented by “ex-Senator Plunkett of New York.” The date was not given.

  2 The Hon. Gumshoe Bill Stone, a distinguished Missouri statesman (1848–1918), was in Congress from 1885 to 1891 and a United States Senator from 1003 until his death.

  1 The late Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly told me in 1935 that he had been informed that grass-roots, in the verb-phrase, to get down to grass-roots, was in use in Ohio c. 1885, but he could never track down a printed record of it, and neither could I. See American Speech, April, 1936, p. 186; Oct., 1936, p. 231; and Dec, 1936, p. 376.

  1 The first insurgents to attract general attention were the congressmen who revolted against the iron rule of Speaker Joseph G. Cannon in 1909. In 1912 the term was applied to the followers of Theodore Roosevelt. It was obviously suggested by memories of the Cuban insurgents.

  2 By an act of March 3, 1873, Congress raised the President’s salary from $25,000 a year to $50,000, and the salaries of its own members from $5,000 to $7,500, both retroactive to March 4, 1871. There was such an uproar that the latter provision was repealed a little while later. Congressmen were paid $6 a day until 1856, when they raised their emolument to $3,000, where it stood until after the Civil War. An act of March 4, 1925 lifted their pay to $10,000. In 1909 the salary of the President was raised to $75,000, with a large expense account.

  3 Bartlett, quoted by the DAE, says that the term originated “in the examination of a convent in Massachusetts by legislative order.”

  4 The embargoroons were those who favored the Embargo Act of 1807. They were as infamous for a while as nullifiers, isolationists and economic royalists became in later years.

  1 Mossback was first used in 1885 to designate an Ohio Democrat of the conservative wing. Soon afterward it began to be used for any conservative.

  2 Tory comes from an Irish word, toraidhe, meaning an outlaw, and was first used in 1646 to designate the dispossessed Irish who took to the bush against their English overlords. It began to be used as the name of the English conservative party in 1689. In England, as in this country, it has a derogatory significance, and has been much used by demagogues.

  3 The word was not an American invention. The NED traces it in English use to 1850, and plutocracy to 1652.

  4 That is, in the sense of large industrial organizations, approaching or alleged to be approaching monopolistic proportions. In the common legal sense trust is traced by the DAE to 1700, and in the titles of trust companies to 1834.

  1 It first appeared in 1888 as the Coal-oil Trust.

  2 Named after its sponsor in the House, the Hon. James R. Mann, of Illinois (1856–1922). He lived to be ashamed of it.

  3 Supreme Court of the United States, Oct. term, 1916.

  1 This was in his Gettysburg address, Nov. 19, 1863. It was by no means original with him. It has been traced, in substance, to Some Information Respecting America, by Thomas Cooper; Dublin, 1794; and it was used almost in Lincoln’s words by Theodore Parker in a speech in Boston, May 29, 1850. It was also used in a slightly different form by Daniel Webster in a speech in the Senate, Jan. 26, 1830. See my New Dictionary of Quotations; New York, 1942, p. 902.

  2 Speech at the Republican National Convention, June 5. “Like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress.”

  3 Speech as chairman of a delegation calling upon Blaine, Oct. 29: “We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identity ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism and Rebellion.”

  4 Message to Congress, March 1, 1886.

  5 The idea was not original: it had been voiced by John C. Calhoun in a speech in the Senate, July 13, 1835. Moreover, Cleveland did not mention public office. What he actually said in his inaugural address, March 4, 1885, was: “Your every voter, as surely as your chief magistrate, under the same high sanction, though in a different sphere, exercises a public trust.” “Public office is a public trust” first appeared in the Democratic national platform of 1892, but it is almost always credited to Cleveland.

  6 Harper’s Magazine, Feb., 1854, 414.

  1 Letter to Walker W. Vick, receiver-general of the Dominican Republic, Aug. 20, 1913. Bryan was then Secretary of State in Wilson’s Cabinet, but kept a watchful eye on the party fences.

  2 Speech at the Minnesota State Fair, Sept. 2, 1901.

  3 Speech at Provincetown, Mass., Aug. 20, 1907.

  4 Traced by the NED to 1833.

  5 Speech in St. Louis, May 31, 1916.

  6 Apparently first used in an article in Everybody’s Magazine, Sept., 1907.

  7 The DAE traces pussy-footed to 1893. A distinguished dry of the Prohibition era was the Rev. Pussyfoot Johnson.

  8 Speech in Chicago, April 10, 1899.

  9 Muckrake is an old word, traced by the NED to 1684, but Roosevelt seems to have invented muckraker. He first used it in a speech in Washington, April 14, 1906.

  10 Campaign speech, Nov. 4, 1904. This term, of course, was not invented by Roosevelt. Mark Twain used it in Life on the Mississippi in 1883.

  11 Letter to Henry Cabot Lodge, Feb. 27, 1913.

  12 Address to the Senate, Jan. 22, 1917.

  13 Speech in Philadelphia, May 10, 1915. Wilson’s right to the invention of this phrase is disputed by Oswald G. Villard.

  14 Message to Congress, Dec. 2, 1913.

  15 Address to Congress, Jan. 8, 1918.

  16 This phrase is to be found in R. W. Emerson’s The Conduct of Life, ch. VI, 1860. But Wilson made it generally known.

  17 A word much derided by American intellectuals, but of respectable ancestry. The NED quotes its use in a mathematical treatise of 1857, as follows: “If we denote the co-ordinates of the point of attack, and normalcy, by x" and y"…” Abnormalcy has also appeared. It was used twice (p. 4) by Dr. A. N. Holcombe in Hearing of the New York Newspapers … in Protest to [sic] the Grant of Newsprint Made to the New York Mirror in Docket No. R-628; War Production Board, Verbatim Transcript Reported by Office for Emergency Management, Division of Central Administration; Services, Minutes and Reports Section; Washington, 1944. Dr. Holcombe, who is a Harvard Ph. D. who pursued further studies in Berlin, Munich, Paris and London, is professor of government at his alma mater and was borrowed by the New Deal in 1942 to be chairman of the Appeals Board, War Production Board.

  18 Coolidge, of course, did not invent to hire in this sense: he was simply speaking his native Vermont patois. “In recent usage,” says the DAE, “few Americans would hire land or a house; they would rent them. A car would be rented but a moving-van would probably be hired, the difference seeming to be that things are rented if no service or labor goes along with them, but are hired if a person is employed with them.” I doubt that this distinction is valid: one might either rent or hire a typewriter. Hired-man, hired-girl and their like are discussed elsewhere. The American sign, For Rent, usually becomes To Let in England. In recent years there has been some American imitation of To Let.

  1 The DAE traces on record to 1900, but does not list off record or off the record.

  2 Speech in New York, Oct. 22, 1928. See Coiner, News-Week, April 10, 1937, p. 3.

  3 Letter to William E. Borah, Feb. 28, 1928. His exact words were: “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive.”

  4 Language of the Depression, by Charles Carpenter, American Speech, Dec., 1933, pp. 76–77.

  5 Borrowed from the title of a speech by William Graham Sumner, delivered in 1883. This speech was reprinted in The Forgotten Man and Other Essays; New Haven, 1919, and again as a pamphlet. The Forgotten Man of Sumner was the hard-working, self-supporting fellow who pays his own
way in the world and asks for no favors from anyone. Roosevelt converted him, by a curious perversion, into a mendicant beneficiary of the New Deal doles.

  6 Second speech of acceptance, June 27, 1936.

  7 The same speech. Obviously suggested by Alan Seeger’s poem, I Have a Rendezvous With Death, 1916.

  8 Said an anonymous contributor to Word Study, Sept., 1935, p. 2: “Boondoggle was coined for another purpose by Robert H. Link of Rochester. Through his connection with scouting the word later came into general use as a name given to the braided leather lanyard made and worn by Boy Scouts.” When the New Deal got under way the term was transferred to the innumerable useless tasks performed by recipients of its doles.

  1 Second inaugural address, Jan. 20, 1937.

  2 The Roosevelt Revolution, First Phase, by Ernest K. Lindley; New York, 1933, pp. 26 and 27. The New Freedom was the title of a book by Wilson; New York, 1913. A large part of it was written by William Bayard Hale. Roosevelt’s own some what vague account of the origin of New Deal was printed in Liberty, March 12, 1938, as follows: “On the occasion of the all-night session of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in 1932, I was at the Executive Mansion in Albany with my family and a few friends. While I had not yet been nominated, my name was still in the lead among the various candidates. Because I intended, if nominated, to make an immediate speech of acceptance at the convention itself in order to get the campaign quickly under way, we discussed what I should say in such a speech. From that discussion and our desire to epitomize the immediate needs of the nation came the phrase ‘A New Deal’ which was used first in that acceptance speech and which has very aptly become the popular expression to describe the major objectives of the administration.”

  3 Associated Press dispatch from Washington, Dec. 23, 1943. In Feb., 1944 Vice-President Henry A. Wallace explained that “to some the definition of New Deal” has come to be “Washington bureaucrats and red tape.” Wallace himself seems to have launched century of the common man. Whether four freedoms was invented by Roosevelt, by Churchill or by some anonymous ghost I do not know.