2 Second ed.; Dublin, 1910, p. 319.
3 Both are traced by the DAE to 1843. Shivaree is defined as “a noisy demonstration, especially a serenade for a newly wedded couple; a racket; a confused noise.” In some parts of the country callithumpian, which Bartlett traces to 1848, is used, and there are also other synonyms. See Charivari, by Mamie Meredith and Miles L. Hanley, American Speech, April, 1933, pp. 22–26; A Note on Shivaree, by John T. Flanagan, American Speech, Feb., 1940, pp. 109–10, and Shivaree or Charivari, by Walter C. Lawrence, American Notes and Queries, Jan., 1943, p. 159. The history of the charivari in Europe is set forth in Ueber den Ursprung der Katzenmusiken, by G. Phillips; Freiburg im Breisgau 1849.
1 Baton Rouge, 1931, p. 142.
2 A pamphlet called Mexicanismos en los Estados Unidos, published in the City of Mexico, c. 1920, says that la ñapa originated in Bolivia, and was carried to Cuba, where it means the thirteenth biscuit of a baker’s dozen. I am indebted here to Mr. H. L. Davis. I am also in debt for information about lagniappe to Mr. Roark Bradford.
3 See Terms From Louisiana, by James Routh, E. O. Becker, Stanley Clisby Archer and S. C. Arthur, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part VI, 1917, pp. 420–31; Louisiana, by James Routh, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part V, 1916, pp. 346–47; New Orleans Word-List, by E. Riedel, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part IV, 1916, pp. 268–70, and Louisiana Gleanings, by James Routh, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part VI, 1923, pp. 243–44. The name of the author of the last-named article is given as Rontt at the head of it and as Rouse on the cover of Dialect Notes, but he seems to be identical with the James Routh before mentioned.
4 Canadian French has been studied extensively, but not Canadian English. See Dialect Research in Canada, by A. F. Chamberlain, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Part II, 1890, pp. 43–56, for a bibliography up to that year.
V
THE LANGUAGE TODAY
I. AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
164. [There was a formidable movement to bring American into greater accord with English precept and example during the years following the Civil War. This movement was led by such purists as Edward S. Gould, William D. Whitney and Richard Grant White, and seems to have got its chief support from schoolma’ams, male and female, on the one hand, and from Anglomaniacs on the other.] It was at its height in the 70s and 80s and has been ebbing steadily since 1900, but there is still a certain amount of energy in its backwash, as is evidenced by the continuing prosperity of handbooks of “correct English,” most of them humorless cribs from White. There is little reason, however, to believe that what is left of this old innocent belief in authority is having any serious effect upon the development of the national speech. The schoolma’am’s victims forget her hortations the moment they escape her classroom, and she is herself increasingly frustrated and demoralized by the treason of the grammarians, most of whom, being only pedagogues of a larger growth themselves, are highly susceptible to the winds of doctrine, and thus accept without much resistance the current teaching that one man’s “grammar” is as good as another’s, and maybe a damned sight better. Even Anglomania exerts a great deal less influence than aforetime. It remains enormously potent, to be sure, in the twin fields of national policy and moral theology, but it certainly cuts much less figure than it used to in the field of language. Only an inch or so below the level of Harvard and Groton, English speechways are regarded as preposterous, and even as a shade indecent. Back in 1882, when Charles Dudley Warner spoke of the Standard English of that time as “the English dialect,” complained that it had “more and more diverged from the language as it was at the time of the separation,” and concluded that “we must expect a continual divergence in our literature,”1 there was a vast lifting of eyebrows,2 but today such notions pass unnoticed, for no one can think of anything to say against them. Even in 1882 Warner’s description of the American novelist under the English hoof had to be thrown into the past tense:
We compared every new aspirant in letters to some English writer. We were patted on the back if we resembled the English models; we were stared at or sneered at if we did not. When we began to produce something that was the product of our own soil and our own social conditions, it was still judged by the old standards, or, if it was too original for that, it was only accepted because it was curious or bizarre, interesting for its oddity.
Whether Warner realized how powerful an influence Mark Twain was to exert on American writing I do not know, but probably he did, for the two had done a book in collaboration only nine years before.3 Whether he did or he didn’t, that influence was already in the making, and by the turn of the century, eighteen years ahead, it was to produce a wholly new style of writing — a new and freer choice of words, a new way of putting them together — that was to be as clearly American as the style of Hawthorne, dead eighteen years before, had been clearly English. Even the prissy Howells was to yield to it, though he could never get over the uneasy feeling that Mark went too far. On lower levels the revolution proceeded quite as slowly, but was even more complete. The American journalist of today has forgotten altogether the banal clichés of the Horace Greeley era, and devotes himself joyously to embellishing and glorifying the national vulgate. Here it was Charles A. Dana’s bright young men of the old New York Sun who showed the way, but the thing has gone a great deal further since the Sun went into Frank A. Munsey’s cannibal pot, and there are now signs that the journalese of tomorrow may be indistinguishable from the barbaric (but thoroughly American) jargon of Variety and Time. Even the politicoes of the country no longer try to write like Junius and the Samuel Johnson of the Rambler. They still, of course, write badly, but they at least try to write in the actual language of the people they address.1
It was Abraham Lincoln, fresh from the Western wilds, who first broke away from the bow-wow style of the classical school of American statesmen, and made a deliberate effort (far more artful than most of his admirers seem to think) to speak and write in the simple terms of everyday Americans. He did not succeed altogether, as Mark Twain was to succeed, but he at any rate made the effort, and it had a long-reaching influence.2 “The new words of the American language,” says Carl Sandburg, “streamed across the Lincoln addresses, letters, daily speech. The Boston Transcript noted old Abe’s use of ‘the plain homespun language’ of a man of the people who was accustomed to talk with the ‘folks,’ and ‘the language of a man of vital common sense, whose words exactly fitted his facts and thoughts.’ That ex-President John Tyler should protest his grammar was natural. W. O. Stoddard wrote that the President knew how some of his plainer phrasing would sound in the ears of millions over the country and did not ‘care a cornhusk for the literary critics.’ ”3
Today it is no longer necessary for an American writer to apologize for writing American. He is not only forgiven if he seeks to set forth his notions in the plainest and least pedantic manner possible; he is also sure of escaping blame (save, of course, by an Old Guard of English reviewers) if he makes liberal dips into the vocabulary of everyday, including its most plausible neologisms. Indeed, he seems a bit stiff and academic if he doesn’t make some attempt, however unhappy, to add to the stock of such neologisms himself. How many are launched in this great Republic every year I do not know, but the number must be formidable. So long ago as 1926 a lexicographer of experience was reporting that “the accepted language grows at the rate of 3000 words a year — of sufficient currency to be inserted in the dictionary.” “In days of stress, in times of war, in an era of discovery and invention,” he continued, “5000 or more words will win the favor of the public so that their inclusion in the dictionary is demanded by scholar and layman.”1 This estimate may have been too high, for during the same year the late Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly put the number of new words submitted for inclusion in the Standard Dictionary at but seven or eight a day, and reported that “relatively few” were accepted,2 but it must be obvious that words thus submitted do not include the whole crop, nor indeed any substantial part of it. In 1944 Dr. Charles E. Funk
, successor to Dr. Vizetelly as editor of the Standard, testified, without venturing upon statistics, that the production of new words and phrases was still at a high mark. “The art of neology,” he said, “is by no means dead or even decadent. It is distinctly alive and flourishing. Personally, I have no doubt that it is more robust than in the days of Shakespeare and Bacon, and that inventiveness of phrase is even more ingenious and delectable than in their day.”3 So many novelties swarm in that it is quite impossible for the dictionaries to keep up with them; indeed, a large number come and go without the lexicographers so much as hearing of them. The present book and its predecessors were written in vain if it is not obvious that at least four-fifths of those which get any sort of toe-hold in the language originate in the United States, and that most of the four-fifths remain here. We Americans live in an age and society given over to enormous and perhaps even excessive word-making — the most riotous seen in the world since the break-up of Latin. It is an extremely wasteful process, for with so many newcomers to choose from it is inevitable that large numbers of pungent and useful words and phrases must be discarded and in the end forgotten by all save linguistic paleontologists.1 But we must not complain about that, for all the great processes of nature are wasteful, and it is by no means assured that the fittest always survive.
2. THE MAKING OF NEW NOUNS
168. [All the processes for the formation of new words that are distinguished by philologians have been in operation in the United States since Jackson’s time, and after the Civil War their workings took on a new impetus.] These processes are numerous, and are best described by examples. In the following classified list of nouns I have added the year of first recording whenever the term appears in Bartlett, Thornton or the DAE:
Clippings or back-formations: gas from gasoline,2 photo from photograph (1863), auto from automobile (1899), phone from telephone, movie from moving-picture, facial from facial-treatment, flat from flat-tire, lube from lubricating-oil, smoker from smoking-car (1882), sleeper from sleeping-car (1875), bronc from bronco (1893), knicker from knickerbocker, co-ed from co-educational, coke from coca-cola, frat from fraternity (1899), ad from advertisement (1868), Y. from Y.M.C.A., high-brow from high-browed,3 bunk from buncombe.4
Blends:1 Hobohemia (hobo and Bohemia), Aframerican (Africa and American), Hoovercrat (Hoover and Democrat), radiotrician (radio and electrician), sportcast (sport and broadcast), swellelegant (swell and elegant), Chicagorilla (Chicago and gorilla), refugew (refugee and Jew), sneet (snow and sleet),2 guestar (guest and star), travelogue (travel and monologue), cablegram (cable and telegram, 1868), radiogram (radio and telegram), insinuendo (insinuation and innuendo, 1885).
Compounds: sack-suit (1895), sales-lady (1870), schedule-time (1881), glamor-girl, iron-lung, barb-wire (1880),3 share-cropper, trouble-shooter, scrubwoman (1885), section-hand (1873), bargain-counter (1888), shanty-town (1898), shawl-strap (1873), sheep-grower (1868), shirt-waist (1887), shore-dinner (1895), four-hundred (1888),4 cafe-society,5 storm-door (1878), Summer-kitchen (1875), sweat-shop (1867), milk-shed, chewing-gum (1864), monkey-business (1883), fox-trot (1915).6
Nouns made of verbs and verb-phrases: know-how,7 hideaway, kick-back, eats, build-up, hair-do, come-down, send-off (1856), show-down (1884), strike-out, consist,8 shake-up (1887), shoot-the-chutes (1895), yes-man, hand-out (1882), bang-over (1894), set-down,1 stand-off (1888), stand-in (1870), get-up-and-get (1888), shut-down (1884), shut-in.2
Nouns made of other parts of speech: pink,3 married,4 whodunit,5 trusty (1889), what-is-it (c. 1882), smarty (1874), am,6 prominental,7 sissy (1891), once-over, hello-girl (1889), what-have-you,8 high, low.9
Nouns made with agent-suffixes: spotter (1876), sooner (1890), jokesmith, saloonkeeper (1873), sand bagger (1882), sand-lotter (1887), scalper (ticket; 1874), sinker (doughnut; 1870), kibitzer, all-outer, do-gooder,10 uplifter, spellbinder (1888), go-getter, standpatter (1903), gangster, trust-buster, racketeer. Nouns made with other suffixes: shortage (1868), stick-to-it-ive-ness (1867), professoriat, kitchenette, motorcade, socialite, conventionitis, come-at-ability, walkathon, jazz-fiend, gold-bug, chickenburger, dognapper, trainee, receptionist, trailerite, talkfest.
Nouns made with prefixes: near-silk, pro-German, super-film.
Extensions or narrowings of meaning: taxpayer (a building erected to pay the taxes on the lot),11 drive (to raise money; 1890),12 public enemy (criminal),13
dude,1 blueprint (any plan, of anything), cinch (originally, 1859, a saddle-girth; later, 1888, any strong or sure hold; still later, 1898, a certainty), outfit (originally, 1809, equipment and supplies; later, 1869, a group or company of any kind).
Nouns formed by the devices of metaphor: rubber-neck,2 bar-fly, dirt-farmer,3 grass-roots (in the political sense),4 dog-house (place of imaginary incarceration for persons out of favor), tight-wad, stuffed-shirt, tenderfoot (1875), bulldozer,5 hay-seed (1892), shuttle-train (1891), Atlantic-grayhound,6 skin-game (1868), sky-scraper (1883), square-deal (1883), straw-bid (1872), coffeepot (a lunchroom), hot-dog,7 cow-puncher (1879), bonehead, road-agent, screw-ball, steam-roller (political), lounge-lizard, bromide,8 dust-bowl,9 road-hog (1898).
Nouns from proper names: tuxedo (1894), Panama (1873).
Proper nouns from the initials or other parts of a series of words: socony from Standard Oil Company of New York, dokkie from Dramatic Order Knights of Khorassen,1 nabisco from National Biscuit Company.2
Nouns made by onomatopoeia: oomph,3 zow, biff,4 ki-yi (dog and its bark).5
Arbitrary coinages: blurb,6 thobbing,7 googal (1 followed by 100 zeros),
wobbie,1 dingle-doo,2 goof (1920), dingus (1882), dingbat (1861), doodad.3
During the quarter century following the Civil War, as during the same period preceding it, the West was the chief source of American neologisms; down to c. 1885, in fact, they were commonly called Westernisms. But as the pioneer movement lost momentum, the industrialization of the country proceeded, and immigration reached a high tide, the center of language-making moving back to eastward of the great plains, and there it has remained ever since, with a sort of outpost at Chicago4 and another at Hollywood. It is new objects and new procedures that make the largest share of new words, and both are now much more numerous in the big cities than they are on the land. Tenderfoot (1875) was redolent of the old West, and trust-buster, which appeared toward the end of the 80s, still suggested the great open spaces, but rubber-neck, hair-do, kitchenette, mortician, socialite, go-getter, kibitzer and racketeer are unmistakably urban, if very far from urbane.
Two classes of professional word-makers have appeared in the national Gomorrahs since the turn of the century and between them they produce a majority of all the new words that come and go. The first is composed of sub-saline literati, e.g., gossip-column journalists, writers of movie and radio scripts, song writers, comic-strip artists, and theatrical, movie and radio press-agents. The second is composed of the persons who invent names for the new products and services that constantly bid for patronage, and the advertising agents who distort and torture the language in whooping them up. The mortality among the inventions of these innovators is almost as great as that among the fry of the oyster, but now and then one of them contributes a word or phrase that is pungent and really needed, and at all times they keep the fires of transient slang burning. The work of one of them, Walter Winchell of the New York Mirror, is noticed in AL4, pp. 560–61. He runs largely to verbs and verb-phrases, e.g., to be Reno-vated,1 to infanticipate, to middle aisle, and to blessed event, but he is also fertile in new nouns, many of them blends, e.g., revusical (a musical revue), profanuage (profane language), Chicagorilla (Chicago and gorilla), go-Ghetto, and terpsichorine (a chorus girl). He is not averse to puns, e.g., merry Magdalen and messer of ceremonies, and does not hesitate to stoop to phonetic spellings in the manner of the newspaper humorists of the Civil War era, e.g., Joosh (Jewish), phlicker and moom pitcher (a movie), dotter (daughter), Hahlim (Harlem) and phewd (feud). Inasmuch as he is chiefly concer
ned with the life of Broadway and its circumambient nightclubs, his inventions have largely to do with the technics and hazards of its ethnology, e.g., on the merge (engaged), on fire, that way and uh-huh (in love), welded and sealed (married), phfft, soured and curdled (separated), baby-bound and storked (pregnant), and melted (divorced). Some of his phrases are old ones to which he has imparted an ironical significance, e.g., bundle from Heaven (a child) and blessed event (the birth thereof), and he has made a number of ingenious contributions to the roster of Broadway place-names, e.g., Two-Time Square and Hard-Times Square (Times Square), Hardened Artery, Bulb Belt and Baloney Boulevard (Broadway), and Heart-Acre Square (Longacre Square). Many of his contributions to the current vocabulary are apparently not original with him, but he may be credited with giving them vogue, e.g., pash (passion), phooie,2 squaw (wife), giggle-water, and whoopee.3 He is not only an assiduous inventor and popularizer of new words and phrases, but also no mean student of them, and has printed some interesting discussions of them,1 though his attempts at etymologies are often open to question.
No other living newspaper columnist has launched so many neologisms, but he has a respectable rival in Arthur (Bugs) Baer, a master of buffoonery who never yields to Winchell’s weakness for throwing off the jester’s motley and putting on the evangelist’s shroud. Both had a forerunner in Jack Conway, who died in 1928. He was a baseball player who took to vaudeville, and ended his career on Variety, the theatrical weekly.2 He is credited with having launched baloney, though it was the Hon. Alfred E. Smith who, by using it in balony-dollar in 1934, made the country baloney-conscious,3 It is possible that Conway borrowed the term from the argot of the Chicago stockyards, where an old and tough bull, fit only for making sausage, has long had the name of a bologna. The DAE traces bologna, in American use, to 1758, and says that it has been reduced colloquially to balony. The English commonly make it polony. Conway’s other contributions to the vocabulary of his era included S.A. (sex appeal), Arab (a Jew), to click (to succeed), high-hat, pushover, pay-off, headache (a wife), belly-laugh, palooka and to scram.4 The sports writers, as everyone knows, are diligent coiners of neologisms, and not a few of their inventions have been taken into the common speech, but on the whole they contribute only nonce-words, here today and gone tomorrow.1 They are surpassed in ingenuity and success by some of the comic-strip artists, of whom Thomas A. (Tad) Dorgan, Elzie Crisler Segar and Billy De Beck are examples. Dorgan, who died in 1929, is said to have invented or introduced skiddoo, twenty-three, drug-store cowboy, nobody home and the series of superlatives beginning with cat’s pajamas, and to have launched such once popular phrases as “You tell him,” “Yes, we have no bananas,” and “You said it.”2 Segar, who died in 1940, is credited with goon, jeep and various other terms that, at the hands of others, took on wide extensions of meaning, and with starting the vogue for the words in -burger.3 To De Beck, who died in 1942, are ascribed heebie-jeebies, hot-mama, hotsy-totsy and horse-feathers.4 Damon Runyon’s name is always included when lists of word-coiners are published,5 but he has himself protested that he is only a popularizer of the inventions of others.6 George Ade, who died in 1944, is likewise often mentioned as an introducer of novelties, but as a matter of fact his long series of “Fables in Slang,” begun c. 1900, borrowed from the slang of the day much oftener than they contributed to it.
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