American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  One of the most mysterious American verbs is to goose. Its meaning is known to every schoolboy, but the dictionaries do not list it, and so far as I know no lexicographer has ever worked out its etymology. The corresponding adjective, goosey, was noted in American Speech in 1933 as meaning “nervous, touchy,”8 and the diligent Bolinger has recorded that to goose itself has been taken over by truck-drivers and aviators to signify feeding gasoline to an engine in irregular spurts,9 but beyond this the philological literature is a blank. The preponderance of medical opinion, I find, inclines to the theory that the verb was suggested by the fact that geese, which are pugnacious birds, sometimes attack human beings, and especially children, by biting at their fundaments.1 There is also the possibility that the term may be derived from the old custom of examining a goose before turning it out to feed in the fields by feeling of its rear parts: if an egg could be felt it was kept in its pen for the day.2 This method of exploration is still used by some housewives in order to estimate the fatness of a dressed goose. The question remains why one person is goosey and another is not. Some resent goosing no more than they resent a touch on the arm, whereas others leap into the air, emit loud cries, and are thrown into a panic. One of my medical informants suggests that susceptibility is mainly psychic, and may have its origin in an obscure fear (and perhaps an infantile memory) of a sexual attack, but other authorities believe that it is caused by physical sensitiveness and is psychic only by association. Meanwhile, every American knows what to goose means, though the term appears to be unknown in England, and there are no analogues in the other European languages. The practice is the source of many serious accidents in industry and the National Safety Council has issued a number of posters warning against its dangerous and sometimes even fatal consequences.3 It is also frowned upon by the various State industrial accident commissions,4 and by the Army and Navy. The Army also discourages the old soldiers’ game of hot-foot, which consists in inserting matches between the soles and uppers of a sleeping comrade’s shoes, and then lighting them.1 There was a time when a craze for goosing arose on the Hollywood movie lots, to the consternation not only of its victims but also of their directors, who saw many a scene spoiled. One of its most assiduous practitioners was the late Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. When the other performers in his company became so wary of him that he was constantly watched, he took to hiding behind scenery and properties and operating stealthily with a long fishing-rod. He was finally put down by threats of heavy fines from the front office.2

  American English has been producing a great many pungent verb-phrases since the Revolutionary era, and some of them are now firmly imbedded in the national speech, e.g., to stay put (traced by the DAE to 1848), to stand from under (1857), to do the square thing (1860), to face the music (1850), to spread it on thick (1865), to knock the spots off (1861), to slip up (1854), to slop over (1861), to clear one’s skirts (1854), to sit in (1868), to keep one’s shirt on (1854), to shinny on one’s own side (1866), to cut a shine (1819), to take a shine to (1840), to skin out (1869), to shell out (1833), to shoot off one’s mouth (1880), to paint the town red (1884),3 to go in for (1835), to go him one better (1845), to rope in (1840), to go it blind (1846), to go it alone (1855), to fork over (1839), to go for (1835), to go under (1848), to go the whole hog (1829), to snow under (1880), to be solid with (1882), to go to the spot (1868), to make a stake (1873), to size up (1877), to sell short (1861), to scare up (1841), to step lively (1891), to stand off (1878), to stand for (1896), to put on style (1864), to shoot up (1890), to be stuck on (1886), to strike it rich (1852), to take stock in (1870), to stop off (1855), to stop over (1857), to win out (1896), to get back at (1888), to get away with (1878), to make a stab at, and to play up (or down). English commentators often mark the American fondness for hooking adverbs or prepositions to verbs, and note sadly the spread of the practice to England.1 It is, in many situations, quite irrational: there is no logical difference between to lose and to lose out. But in other situations important differences are easily discernible, as between to play and to play up (or down), to try and to try out.2 New verb-phrases of a more elaborate sort are coming in all the time, e.g., to go Hollywood,3 to get it off one’s chest, to tell him where to get off, to go places, to go into a burn,4 to slip one’s trolley,5 to pull a fast one, to do a Corrigan,6 to pitch a woo (to make love), and to eat a little higher on the hog.7 To go haywire, familiar to every American, is not listed in the DAE, but Stewart H. Holbrook says in “Holy Old Mackinaw”8 that it originated in the Maine logging camps and thus discusses it:

  No camp could operate without haywire. This wire was the stuff with which hay for the oxen and horses was bound into bales, for compact toting into the distant camps. Teamsters shaking out a bale to feed the animals took to saving the wire strands, throwing them over an oxbow nailed to the side of the hovel. They would do to mend a busted hame strap, or to put a link in a broken chain. And loggers used the strands to strengthen an ax helve or to wind the split handle of a peavey. Cooks strung haywire above the stove over which to dry clothes and to hang ladles; and often to bind the very stove together. A camp that was notoriously poor in its equipment came to be known as a haywire camp; and from this usage it spread to mean broken, busted, sick, crazy, no-good, and a score of other things, none of them praiseworthy. It is possibly the only authentic logger word the lay public has accepted.

  I have a high respect for Holbrook’s philological parts, but it seems to me that in this case he has got entangled in haywire himself. No one who has ever opened a bale of hay with a hatchet, and had the leaping wire whirl about him and its sharp ends poniard him, will ever have any doubt as to how to go haywire originated. I should add, however, that the Holbrook etymology is supported by Wayne Shirley, librarian of the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, who spent some time in a Wisconsin lumber-camp in his early days.1 To feeze is another verb that deserves more attention from philologians than it has got. In the sense of to put to flight it is very old in English, but in the sense of to disconcert it seems to be American. It is spelled variously, e.g., faze, faeze, feaze, phase and even pheeze and pheese. Thornton tracks it, in its usual American sense, to 1843, and the DAE to 1830. In those early days it had a corresponding noun, signifying perturbation, and that noun is traced by the DAE to 1647. It is now obsolete. But the verb to faze, hough it is seldom used in England, is very familiar in the United States. The preterite fazed is recorded for 1830, but the negative form unfazed is not listed by the DAE, though it is in common use.2 To interview is unquestionably an Americanism, though the cautious DAE does not so mark it. The first example listed is from the Nation (New York) of January 28, 1869, and the quotation is: “Interviewing is confined to American journalism.” The NED’s first English example is from the London Daily News of December 17 of the same year: “The Sun interviews Corbin, Fisk … and whoever else has any story to tell or axe to grind.” Obviously, the Sun referred to here was the New York Sun. The DAE’s first example of the noun interview is from the issue of the Nation just quoted; the NED’s first English example is from the Pall Mall Gazette of December 31, 1884, which said: “Among the permanent gains of the year the acclimatization of the interview in English journalism certainly should be reckoned.” There is a newspaper tradition that the interview was invented by James Redpath, a Scotsman who followed Sherman’s and Thomas’s armies for the New York Tribune during the latter part of the Civil War.

  Verbs produced by back formation are usually challenged by high octane purists, and sometimes denounced with great bitterness: as a result many linger in the Alsatia of slang. But others have won their way into more or less decorous American usage, e.g., to phone and to commute. The DAE does not list to phone, but it has an American smack, and the NED’s first English example is dated 1900, some years after the term had become commonplace in the United States. The DAE traces to commute to 1865, the date, also, of its first example of commuter. To enthuse first appeared in the Congressional Globe on February 16, 1859.
For years thereafter it was derided as fit only for bad newspaper reporters, worse politicians and other such Simiidae, but in recent years it seems to be gathering respectability, and I encountered it not long ago in a serious paper by an American scholar.1 At the start it was a transitive verb only, but it began to be used as an intransitive in the 70s. Richard Grant White denounced it as “ridiculous” and said that he had never heard it used “by any person born and bred north of the Potomac,”2 but he was constrained to admit that it might be derived logically from the Greek root in enthusiasm. By 1929 J. Y. T. Greig was listing it as an Americanism that had forced its way into English,3 and by 1944 John B. Opdycke was reporting that, though still “a low colloquialism,” it was prevailing “in spite of all efforts made by grammarians and lexicographers to discourage its use.”4

  Various other American verbs of the same non-Euclidian sort are listed in AL4, pp. 191 and 192, e.g., to insurge, to vamp and to innovate. To them may be added to propaganda,1 to galack,2 to stenog3 to chiropract,4 to garrul,5 to sanitate,6 to glam,7 to auth,8 to hoke,9 to liase,10 to mart,11 to junk,12 to bootleg,13 to bish,14 to emote, to elocute, to ghost-write, to bookkeep, to televise,15 to collab,16 to refer-end,17 to reluct,18 and to best sell.19 Some of the verbs of this class are already of respectable antiquity. The DAE’s first example of to jell comes from Louisa M. Alcott’s “Little Women,” 1869, and it traces to resolute to 1860, to bach to 1878, to ush to 1890, to burgle to 1870, and to dressmake to 1884. Mr. R. P. Whitmer, secretary of the American Foundry and Furnace Company, tells me that the noble verb to combust apparently originated in Bloomington, Ill., where the first oil-burner heating plants for private houses were made. It is universally used, he says, by the workmen engaged in the industry. To them, “to properly combust the oil means to so shatter it into minute particles as to achieve complete burning.” Thus to combust may owe almost as much to to bust as to combustion.20 To sculp is not American but English. Dr. Johnson listed it in his Dictionary of 1755, but dismissed it loftily as “a word not in use.” But the NED shows that it dates from c. 1535 and that both Stevenson and Kipling used it.

  The American fondness for shortened forms is shown by the prevalence of transferred verbs of the to sleep class, as in “A Pullman sleeper sleeps forty passengers.” Such forms are by no means rare in Standard English, e.g., “He walked his horse,” traced by the NED to the Fifteenth Century; but in late years the chief reservoir of new ones has been the United States. They serve a very real need, for without them the only recourse is to long and sometimes unclear circumlocutions. Bartlett, in his first edition of 1848, recorded of a landlady that “she could eat fifty people in her house, although she could not sleep half the number.” To meal, to room and to fly (in the sense of to convey by airship) have been noted and embalmed by the scouts of American Speech.1 To subsist occurs in an article by an American admiral, and is apparently official in the Navy.2 To go has arisen by analogy with to stop, as in “We’ll see traffic cops stopping and going the entrants.”3 To dance, as in “I was danced by a sailor,” I have not encountered in the United States, but it is recorded in England.4 The medical men seem to have not only adopted to sleep,5 but also to have invented a verb of their own, to belch.6 So far, at least to my knowledge, no saloon or night-club has been described as drinking so many clients an evening, but I suppose it is on its way. An ingenious correspondent, Mr. Julian T. Bentley of Chicago, suggests that the verbs of this class may owe something to the old Greek first aorist, “which carried a sense of causing or forcing action upon the object.”1 Analogous forms are to be found in various terms which, so Mr. Dayton Stoddart tells me, are in common use among American farmers, e.g., to barn, in the sense of to drive cattle to a barn, to grain, in the sense of to feed them grain, and to bug, in the sense of to spray potatoes with insecticides; and in to dessert, in the sense of to serve a dessert.2 Also, there are the verbs to sell, meaning to snare a customer, and, by extension, to propagate an idea; to shave, as in “I shave at the Terminal barber-shop”; and to graduate, in the room of to be graduated.3

  To the list of verbs made of nouns, already given, should be added some specimens of verbs made of other parts of speech. To up offers a good example. It has had a twilight sort of life in English for many years, but it did not flower in American until Variety began to use it. Nothing whatever can be said against it, for its brother, to down, has been accepted since Shakespeare’s time, and it is obviously just as legitimate. It is now in very respectable usage.4 Variety has also used to in and to out, but only with apparent timidity, and not often. I suppose they will be followed soon or late by to on and to off, and perhaps by to with, to at, to by and to to. To the same general category belong to ad lib and to yes and the verbs made of interjections, e.g., to shush, to oomph, to whump,5 and to wow, all of which have a reputable forerunner in to hem and haw, which goes back, in various forms, to the Fifteenth Century. Also, the pathologist of speech must not overlook the verbs made of adjectives, e.g., to obsolete1 and to à-la-mode, i.e., to spread ice-cream on a slice of fruit-pie, thus converting it into pie à la mode.2

  New verbs are frequently formed by adding prefixes or suffixes to old ones, or to nouns or adjectives. Of the prefixes de- seems to be the most popular, with un- as its only serious competitor. To debunk, which appeared c. 1923, was denounced not only on the ground that it was an uncouth word but also on the ground that the activity it described was immoral and against God, but it has survived.3 It was made popular by William E. Woodward, and may have been suggested by to delouse, which appeared during World War I, probably in imitation of the German entlausen.4 Before it came in the English used to disinfest. The DAE records but three American verbs in de- before 1900, to wit, to demoralize (1806), to dehorn (1888) and to demote (c. 1891). Even to derail seems to have been borrowed from England, which also produced to detrain.5 But the crop has been larger in recent years, and in my collectanea I find to dewax, to dejell,6 to degerm,7 to dewater,8 to debulk,9 to deoomph,10 to detooth, to deflea,1 and to derat.2 The new verbs in un- are not numerous. To unquote, meaning to finish a quotation, has been borrowed from the cablese of newspaper correspondents, who must indicate when a quoted passage ends and are forced by high cable tolls to avoid any words of two syllables when they can find or invent one of one.3 To unstink, as in “The American reds have attempted to unstink themselves,” seems to have been coined by Westbrook Pegler. Walter Winchell and Variety have launched a number of analogues, but they have not come into general use.

  The suffix -ize has been used to make verbs in English for many centuries. It was reinforced in the Seventeenth Century by the French -iser, and there is still a fashion in England for spelling such words in -ise, as in to advertise, but the NED says that -ize, the common American form, is correct. A large number of examples are listed in “Lexicological Evolution and Conceptual Progress,” by John Taggart Clark,4 the earliest dating from the 1351–1400 period. To apologize and to latinize came in before 1600, and to barbarize, to criticize and to sermonize in the age of Shakespeare. The DAE traces to burglarize to 1871 and marks it an Americanism. When August Kemmler, the first murderer to be put to death by electricity, was waiting to be executed at Sing Sing5 many of the newspapers reported that he was to be electrized, and it was some time before they abandoned to electrize for to electrocute.1 But it is in recent years that the coinage of such verbs has been most active, and putting together anything approaching a comprehensive list of those that have been launched would be impossible. I must content myself with some specimens:

  Verbs made of proper nouns, including trade-names: to hooverize, to fletcherize,2 to oslerize,3 to peglerize,4 to broadwayize,5 to winterize,6 to texanize,7 to sanforize,8 to TV Aize,9 to websterize,10 to sovietize, to bolshevize, to simonize.