In certain circles — notably radio, sports, advertising, and motion pictures — one often does not pay the check, take a dive, tell a joke, or listen to swing music. Instead he pays the checkeroo, takes a diveroo, tells a jokeroo, and listens to swingeroo. Do such terms as these merely end with meaningless extra syllables? Sometimes they do, but not always. There is a perceptible semantic variation between the new forms with tails and the old acaudate ones. That is, it may not be quite so jarring to the playwright’s sensibilities to read that his work is a flopperoo as to read that it is — tersely, bluntly, rudely — a flop. And the hapless sapperoo or bummaroo seems somehow less so than he used to be before the suffixion.5
Jiggeroo, used by tramps as a warning of the approach of police, was reported by F. H. Sidney in Dialect Notes in 1919,1 and again in the same sense by another observer in 1927,2 and gazaroo, meaning a boy, and gozaroo, meaning a fellow, were reported from Newfoundland in 1925,3 but it was not until 1939 that -eroo and its congeners, -aroo, -roo, -oo and -amaroo, began to flourish in a large way. Wentworth, in his paper, presented nearly fifty examples, all of them dated. They included antseroo (ants in his pants), bounceroo (the grand bounce), brusheroo (the brush-off), bummaroo (a loafer), checkeroo (a night-club check), crusheroo (a love affair), flopperoo (a failure), gaggeroo (a poor joke), jitteroo (a jazz song), kickeroo (a mule), kissaroo (a kiss), scooteroo (a ski-jumper), smackeroo (a dollar), sockeroo (a success), stinkaroo (a bad play, movie or other show), and ziparoo (energy). To them, in 1942 and 1943, Bolinger4 and Manuel Prenner5 added jugaroo (a jail), congaroo (a dancer of the conga), pepperoo (a peppy story), switcheroo, whackeroo, chickeroo (a great success), howleroo (the same) and payeroo (the pay-off). The -ador suffix was probably suggested by humidor, which the NED Supplement traces to 1903, and most of the words embodying it show analogous meanings, e.g., beerador.6 Whether or not warmolator belongs to this group I do not know.7 The various words in -legger are all children of bootlegger, a term that was much in the consciousness of Americans from 1920 to 1933. During the middle 20s, when there was a great upsurge of comstockery and simultaneously a large flood of obscene books, booklegger came in to designate a person who either sold them or let them out for reading. Most of the bookleggers flourished in the college towns. Votelegger appeared in 1940, and in 1941 Time began to use foodlegger to designate the illicit foodsellers of rationed England. When rationing was set up in the United States meatlegger and tirelegger followed.1 Gasleggers, coalleggers and duckleggers have also been reported.2 Broadcaster apparently arose in England,3 but it is in the United States that it has produced its chief derivatives, e.g., newscaster, gridcaster (an announcer of football combats), dogcaster, smearcaster4 and gamecaster, and the verbs to telecast, to radiocast, to sportcast and to newscast. Sportscaster also appears as sportcaster.5
The use of -ocrat and -ocracy is by no means new. The NED traces mobocrat in English use to 1798 and mobocracy to 1754. Monocrat (a partisan of monarchy) was launched by Thomas Jefferson in 1792. Shamocrat (from sham and aristocrat) was listed by Bartlett in the fourth edition of his Glossary, 1877, but it apparently had only a short life, for it does not appear in Thornton, in the DAE, in Webster 1934, or in the NED Supplement. Technocracy, which had a great vogue in the closing years of the Hoover era, is also now obsolete. The term was coined in 1919 by William H. Smyth, an inventer of Berkeley, Calif., but was given popularity by Howard Scott, of New York. In its brief heyday technocracy produced many derivatives, e.g., flapperocracy, sexnocracy, pianocracy and healthocracy, but they have vanished with technocracy itself.6 Plutocrat was borrowed from England, but popocrat made its first appearance in the Bryan campaign of 1896. The English are partial to -crat and have produced some forms so fantastic as to suggest American provenance, e.g., shopocrat, millocrat, chromatocrat, poshocrat and demoplutocrat.7 The words in -buster seem to be the children of trustbuster. Gangbuster appeared during the days of Thomas E. Dewey as a prosecutor of racketeers in New York, c. 1935. Union-buster seems to be the invention of the Nation.1 The first of the words in -fiend was probably opium-fiend, which goes back to the early 80s, and maybe to the 70s. It was followed, c. 1890, by cigarette-fiend,2 and a little later by absinthe-fiend, dope-fiend,3 and cocaine-fiend. Then came baseball-fiend, camera-fiend, kodak-fiend, movie-fiend, dance-fiend, radio-fiend, marathon-fiend, golf-fiend, jazz-fiend and the like. The best known of all the children of Al Smith’s baloney, of course, is globalony, launched by the Hon. Clare Boothe Luce in her maiden speech in Congress, February, 1943. Another is verbaloney, which was thrown to the world by the New Yorker on March 27, 1943. There was a time, c. 1925, when aviators of unusual daring (including Charles A. Lindbergh) were called flying -fools, and from the term flowed riding-fool, writing-fool and so on, but they have apparently gone out.4 Many other words have produced, from time to time, a small and transient progeny, but these derivatives are of hardly more than curious interest, e.g., book-mobile and club-mobile from automobile;5 booboisie and joboisie from bourgeoisie;6 elegantsia from intelligensia;7 janissariat from proletariat; aquatennial from centennial;8 hustlerati from literati;9 carnapper, dognapper and pupnapper from kidnapper;1 strippeuse (a stripteaser) from danseuse; bookvertising from book and advertising;2 turkeywich from turkey and sandwich;3 labor-baiter, red-baiter, and Jew-baiter from some earlier -baiter;4 typistry from artistry;5 motel and airtel from hotel;6 trainasium from gymnasium;7 and numerous forms in -ology e.g., boyology, oilology, bagology.8
The suffix -ie was far from new when it appeared in the back-formation movie, but its resurrection gave it fresh fertility and movie was soon followed by speakie, talkie, quickie, okie, and a host of other forms. Nor was -bug new when it appeared in jitterbug, for the DAE traces tariff-bug to 1841 and gold-bug to 1878, but shutter-bug and various like terms seem to have flowed from it. Sometimes an old suffix, revived, undergoes a change in significance — for example, -ana, which dates from 1666 in the sense of things said or written by a person, and to 1741 in the sense of things written about him, or about any other subject.9 In American usage I have encountered it in the strange sense of a trading region.10 “English,” says Edwin Bercke Dike, “has picked up her affixes everywhere, and people have used them freely, and given them strange vogues”11 — especially American people. Prefixes are used much more sparingly. Indeed, I can think of but three that have had any great popularity in recent years, to wit, near-, super- and pro-. The first is discussed in AL4, p. 181. The DAE ignores it, but the NED Supplement traces near-seal (fur) to 1902, near-beer to 1909, near-smile to 1911 and near-engagement to 1926.1 Super- has been used mainly by Hollywood press-agents, to give oomph and zowie to adjectives, as in super-colossal, but it has also appeared in the general vocabulary, as in super-service, super-criminal and super-junket.2 Pro-, which goes back to 1645 in English, usually carries a hostile significance, as in pro-slavery, 1856, pro-rebel, 1868, and pro-German, 1914.
American English is rich in blends, and some of them have been taken into the English of England, e.g., gerrymander. There are authorities who include boost among them, holding that it is made up of boom and hoist, but the evidence seems to be very dubious, for boom in the sense of sudden activity did not come in until the 70s,3 whereas boost as a verb was included in David Humphreys’ Glossary of 1815. Whatever its origin and history, the great vogue of the word was delayed until the last years of the Nineteenth Century, when boosters began to infest the land, and the American proverb, “Every knock is a boost,” was invented by some forgotten Solomon.4 Extensive studies of blends have been made by Louise Pound,5 Harold Wentworth,6 Lester V. Berrey7 and Robert Withington,8 and there have been many smaller contributions to the subject in American Speech. Novelties are produced in great number by Time and the newspaper columnists, but many of them involve puns, most are banal, and only a few have got into general circulation. Wentworth’s doctoral thesis lists 3,600, and includes examples long standard in English, e.g., tragicomedy, squirearchy, luncheon and aniseed; others s
lowly making their way into good usage, e.g., anecdotage; and a large number of American inventions, e.g., pulmotor and japalac. The English, perhaps because they are a good deal less inventive in the philological field than Americans, devote themselves diligently to such simple forms, and some of their less painful inventions have crossed the ocean, e.g., Lewis Carroll’s chortle, and the later brunch (breakfast and lunch) and smog (smoke and fog). The NED Supplement presents evidence that smog was invented by an English medical man named Des Voeux in 1905, but on February 7, 1926 the Associated Press sent out a dispatch from Indianapolis saying:
The United States Weather Bureau has given a new word, smog, to the American language. It is used to describe a combination of smoke and fog which occurs chiefly over the cities of the Central States.
It is possible, of course, that this was really an independent invention, but it is hardly likely, for smog had been occurring in English discussions of the weather for more than twenty years, and the American weather prophets must have encountered it.
Back-formations such as gas for gasoline are constantly coming in, and some of them last only a short while, but photo for photograph is now of respectable antiquity, for the DAE traces it to 1863. Auto was apparently launched in 1899, when the Boston Herald printed an editorial saying, “If we must Americanize and shorten the word [automobile] why not call them autos?”1 Movie, phone and gas are not listed by the DAE, but the NED Supplement calls two of them, movie and gas, Americanisms, and it is probable that phone is another. Terry Ramsaye, author of the standard history of the movie, thus sets forth the genesis of its name:
The word appears to have come into the folk-tongue out of the gamin life of either New York or Chicago about 1906–1907. The motion picture arrived at the status of an independent narrative art in the Autumn of 1903 with “The Great Train Robbery,” a dime novel in 800 feet of film, leading directly to the flowering of the motion picture theatre. It had its beginning in Smithfield street, near Diamond alley, in Pittsburgh during Thanksgiving week, 1905. By 1908 movie began to appear in the reports of social workers and contemporary newspaper accounts. It attained wide circulation shortly through the distribution of the cartoon and comic strip in the daily press.2
Bike, for bicycle, is traced by the DAE to 1882.1 Pep, which seems a characteristic Americanism to the English, though it is not listed by the DAE, is traced by the NED Supplement to 1915, marked “U. S.,” and called “an abbreviation of pepper.” The same etymology is given by Webster 1934, by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and by Partridge, and I favored it myself in AL4, p. 169, but I have begun to suspect that it may be erroneous. Mr. E. H. Peabody suggests, rather more plausibly, that pep is really a shortened form of pepsin.2 I first heard the term in 1890 or thereabouts, at which time there was a rash of popular confidence in the prophylactic virtues of pepsin, comparable to the latter faith in vitamins. One of the most widely-selling chewing-gums of the time contained it, and millions believed that taking frequent doses of it would improve the digestion and stimulate the energies. So far as I know there has never been any similar belief, in the United States, about pepper: it is thought of as a flavor, nor as a metabolic booster. Thus there is reason for making pepsin the father of pep, and I shall embrace that etymology provisionally, with thanks to Mr. Peabody, until the dirt lexicographers apply themselves to and solve the problem.
In Dialect Notes, more than thirty years ago, Miss Elizabeth Wittman printed a long list of similar American shortenings, with a valuable commentary.3 Many of them are still in current use, e.g., ad for advertisement, beaut for beauty, boob for booby, bronc for bronco and Yank for Yankee. Others have come in in later years, e.g., mum for chrysanthemum, pash for passion, bunk for buncombe, and so on. The origin of buncombe, which produced not only bunk (through bunkum) but also to debunk, and probably helped to promote the popularity of bunco (which really comes from the Spanish banca, a card game), has been discussed in Chapter IV, Section 2. The American advertising men, in the glorious days when the more forward-looking of them hoped to lift their art and mystery to the level of dogmatic theology, astronomy, ophthalmology and military science, carried on a crusade against the clipped form ad, but it came, alas, to nothing. This crusade was launched by one of the most eminent of them, William C. D’Arcy, in a speech before a convention of advertising savants holden at San Francisco in 1918, and it roared on through the hopeful 20s. When, in 1925, the brethren met at Houston, Texas, their executive secretary, Robert H. Cornell, asked “the local advertisers and all local organizations that have anything whatever to do with the convention to avoid use of ad in all printed matter and letters going out in connection with the convention.”1 The advertising men of England, it was pointed out, never used it, not even in such convenient forms as ad-writer and want-ad. But though many high-toned and eloquent men took part in this holy war, and Mr. D’Arcy, the pioneer, denounced ad as “the language of bootblacks, and beneath the dignity of men of the advertising profession,” it survived unscathed and is still in almost universal use. To most Americans want-advertisement would sound quite as affected as taximetercabrolet; the term is want-ad. When the Great Depression overtook the ad-men, and they began to be harried and sweated by the New Deal, they forgot all about their philological reform, and nothing has been heard from them on the subject since March 4, 1933.
Miss Wittman, in the paper before quoted, called attention to the fact that it is not only nouns that are clipped by apocope. From adjectives, for example, there come fed (usually used as a noun) for federal, gat for gatling-gun, met for metropolitan, mex for Mexican, co-ed (also become a noun) for co-educational, and legit for legitimate, not to mention such borrowings from England as zoo.2 There are also many short forms of verbs, but most of them are cognate with nouns, e.g., to phone, to gas, to photo, to auto, to bike and to con. Finally, there is an apparently growing tendency to shorten a phrase made up of an adjective and a noun to the adjective alone, and then to convert it into a noun, e.g., flat for flat tire, and permanent for permanent wave.3
American English is rich in deliberate coinages, some of which have gone into standard English, e.g., appendicitis, moron and sundae. The DAE lists sundae under Sunday, but adds “usually sundae.” It is marked “of obscure origin, but usually regarded as related to Sunday.” The DAE’s first example, taken from the New York Evening Post of May 21, 1904, spells the word sundi, and in an abridged dictionary issued by the Consolidated Book Publishers of Chicago in 1925 it is spelled sondhi, with sundae and Sunday as variants.1 The amateur etymologists have had some desperate struggles with it, but without establishing its origin beyond cavil. Perhaps the most plausible of their theories ascribes the introduction of the sundae itself to George Hallauer, of Marshall, Ill., and the invention of its name to George Giffy, of Manitowoc, Wis. This was in the early 90s. At that time Hallauer, who died in 1939, was living in Two Rivers, Wis., and one of his places of call was an ice-cream parlor kept by E. C. Berners. “One night,” related Berners years afterward, “Hallauer dropped in and ordered a dish of ice-cream. As I was serving it he spied a bottle of chocolate syrup on the back bar, which I used for making sodas. ‘Why don’t you put some of that chocolate on the ice-cream?’ he asked. ‘You don’t want to ruin the flavor of the ice-cream,’ I protested, but Hallauer answered ‘I’ll try anything once,’ and I poured on the chocolate. Hallauer liked it, and the icecream sundae was born.” News of the novelty soon reached the nearby town of Manitowoc, and presently George Giffy, who operated an ice-cream parlor there, was offering it to his customers. The addition of chocolate, of course, increased its cost, and in order to cut down the demand Giffy sold it on Sundays only. One day, a week-day, a little girl came in and asked for a dish of it. “I serve it only on Sundays,” said Giffy. “Why, then,” she replied, “this must be Sunday, for it’s the kind of ice-cream I want.” Giffy gave it to her and simultaneously was seized with the inspiration to call the new concoction a Sunday. How the s
pelling came to be changed to sundae deponent saith not.2
News of the novelty spread rapidly, and it was soon popular in the college towns. Mr. Charles P. Davis tells me that in the 90s “one Tuttle, who kept a restaurant at State and William streets, Ann Arbor, used to serve a slab of ice-cream topped with strawberries which he termed a Sunday, not a sundae1,” and Mr. Robert Follansbee that at Ithaca in 1898 “sundaes were being served at the soda-fountain of Christiance and Dofflemyer.”2 Mr. Follansbee adds that he was told that the sundae had originated in the Christiance and Dofflemyer laboratories a year or two before this time. That claim for its birth in Ithaca was supported by the late Gilbert M. Tucker in his “American English,”3 but Tucker held that it was thrown to the world by the Red Cross Pharmacy, in State street, in 1897. There are also claimants for Norfolk, Va., for Washington, and for Evanston, Ill.4 From Mrs. Rho Fisk Zueblin, of Lugano-Cassarate, Switzerland, a former resident of Chicago, I have received the interesting suggestion that the sundae may have been named, not after the Christian Sabbath, but after William A. (Billy) Sunday, the baseball evangelist. Before he took to good works he served for a while as coach of the baseball nine of Northwestern University, and Mrs. Zueblin believes that when the new sweet came in the students may have named it after him.5 But this suggestion makes it all the harder to account for the shift from Sunday to sundae. It is rather astonishing that the -ae ending has produced so little progeny. The only child of the sundae that I have ever encountered is the mondae, a mixture of sundae and soda-water, offered for sale in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1937.6
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