3 Described as recent in Beau Geste, by J. M. Steadman, Jr., American Speech, June, 1928, p. 416. George Philip Krapp, in his Comprehensive Guide to Good English; New York, 1927, suggested that it came from the French beau geste. Steadman listed many examples of its use.
4 Shambles is a very old word in English. The NED traces it to c. 825 in the sense of a stool, to 971 in that of a counter for exposing goods for sale, to c. 1305 in that of a stall for the sale of meat, and to 1548 in that of a slaughtering-place. In Notes on American Usage, American Speech, Feb., 1941, p. 19. I. Willis Russell says that, in American usage, it has now come to signify any sort of “very great, perhaps complete disorder, confusion or destruction.” He gives nine examples from current books, newspapers and magazines. In Shambles (editorial), Aug. 9, 1939, the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch said that the word had come in “within the last year.”
5 In AL4, p. 210, I expressed the opinion that alibi was going out. In American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 186, the late Stuart Robertson described this as “overoptimistic,” and he was right. Alibi is still in wide use to indicate any sort of excuse. In the legal sense it is confined to a plea on the part of a person accused of crime that he was somewhere else when it was committed. See Speech Degeneracy, by M. V. P. Yeaman American Speech, Nov., 1925, p. 93.
6 Definitely seems to have been borrowed from the English. Partridge says that it came into use in England during the present century, and has been a counter-word since c. 1920, confined to “non-proletarian” circles. Wilson Follett says in Words Across the Sea, Atlantic Monthly, March, 1938, p. 365, that it was introduced in the United States by an English best-seller, Busman’s Honeymoon, by Dorothy L. Sayers. Weare Holbrook, quoted in American Speech, Dec., 1936, p. 297, says that it came in in that year. Dwight L. Bolinger, in The Living Language, Words, May, 1938, p. 67 calls it a favorite of the “tricky-speech crowd.” In 1937 it was denounced by Wilfred J. Funk, the lexicographer, as one of the ten most overworked words of the time, the others being O.K., terrific, lousy, to contact, gal, racket, swell, impact and honey. In Okay and Lousy Terrific to Funk, the New York Times, March 27, 1937, reported him as saying that “American débutantes evidently thought they were imitating the English by saying ‘Yes, definitely,’ definitely so and just definitely.” He declared that “the word in England is used excessively by the lower classes.” In 1940 (Definitely: I Don’t Like It, by Man in the Street, London Star, Aug. 30) Mr. Justice Humphreys, an English judge, protested against its use by witnesses before him.
7 Flair: A Recent Semanic Development, by Albert H. Marckwardt, American Speech, April, 1935, pp. 104–06, and Flair, by Joseph E. Gillet, American Speech, Dec., 1937, pp. 247–57. Gillet presents a long list of examples, the earliest dated 1927.
8 Some examples from the Congressional Record, ranging from 1917 to 1921, are in The American Language, third ed.: New York, 1921, p. 136, n. 22.
9 Plus, by Mamie Meredith, American Speech, Dec., 1927, p. 161.
1 Used by Chaucer in The Romaunt of the Rose in its old sense of to deceive. It now means to interest, to inveigle, to enchant, and a host of other things.
2 Popularized by Theodore Roosevelt by a speech at Chicago, April 10, 1899, and in vogue for a quarter of a century.
3 In its original meaning, traced by the NED to 1535, fearful, timid; by extension, traced to 1827, over-scrupulous, over-cautious; now used in the general sense of careful, painstaking. I am indebted here to Dr. Sherman Kent of Yale.
4 I am indebted here to Mr. Stephen E. Billings of the Rutland (Vt.) Herald.
5 In heavy counter-use to designate the stand of an orchestra-conductor. It is an architectural term indicating, inter alia, a raised platform in an ancient ampitheatre. In that sense it was recorded so long ago as 1848, but in the sense of a perch for a musical gymnast it did not come into vogue until c. 1935. I am indebted here to Mr. John Irwin Bright of Ardmore, Pa.
6 Advertisement in the London Telegraph, Sept. 27, 1935: “Lagonda will appeal particularly to knowledgeable motorists.” London Morning Post, Oct. 5, 1935: “The author has fulfilled his commission very knowledgeably.” The same, July 2, 1936: “Knowledgeable gardeners will now have Iris juncea abloom.” News of the World, June 21, 1936: “The locale of the play is the home of an amusing, knowledgeable matriarch.” London Telegraph, June 17, 1937: “Parisians … wish to appear knowledgeable about international affairs.” Autolycus, in London Sunday Times, Feb. 20, 1938: “If the steps of any knowledgeable London-lover chanced to carry him to Soho Square on Friday afternoon he would surely have blinked with astonishment.” For all these examples I am indebted to the collectanea of the late F. H. Tyson.
7 Denounced by A. P. Herbert, with many horrible examples, in Word-Skirmish, Punch, March 17, 1937, pp. 288–89.
1 There are some examples in All For Love, by Joseph Wood Krutch, New Republic, June 3, 1936, p. 714.
2 In Re Quisling and Others, the Manchester Evening News, July 8, 1940, reported that a High Court judge had “refused to look at any document with and/or in it.” In 1935 Justice Chester A. Fowler, of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin (Word Study, Feb., 1936, p. 3), described it from the bench as “that befuddling nameless thing, that Janus-faced verbal monstrosity, neither word nor phrase, the child of a brain of someone too lazy or too dull to know what he did mean, now commonly used by lawyers in drafting legal documents, through carelessness or ignorance or as a cunning device to conceal rather than express a meaning, with a view to furthering the interest of their clients.” On Jan. 21, 1938, at a meeting of the New York City Board of Estimates, Acting Mayor Henry H. Curran ordered and/or expunged from all documents brought before the board, and x or y or both substituted.
3 The linguistic pathologist eager to pursue the subject will find more material in A Dictionary of Clichés, by Eric Partridge; New York, 1940; the various parades and exemplifications of clichés by Frank Sullivan in the New Yorker (for example, The Cliché Expert Testifies on Literary Criticism, July 24, 1937, pp. 15—16, and The Cliché Expert Testifies on Vacations, Aug. 21, 1937, pp. 15–16); How Copy Desks Treat Hot Days, 1926, by H. I. Phillips, American Press, Aug., 1930, p. 7; The State of the Language, by Wilson Follett, Atlantic Monthly, Oct., 1939, pp. 540–50; The Cry of the English, Nottingham Journal, April 30, 1943; Experiments in Words, London Times Literary Supplement, June 24, 1944; Bad Words, London Observer, Nov. 27, 1938; and Attractive Is Too, Too Attractive, London Morning Post, April 9, 1937. The argot of revivalists is dealt with by John D. M’Inerny in American Speech, Dec., 1935, p. 316; that of Jewish uplifters in Definitions From a Demagogue’s Dictionary, Jewish Standard (Toronto), July 9, 1934; that of book reviewers in The Book Reviewer’s Vocabulary, by Wilson O. Clough, American Speech, Feb., 1931, pp. 180–86; that of radio announcers in Clichés on the Air, by Frank Sullivan, Atlantic Monthly, Aug., 1941, pp. 220–22; and that of business men in Business English, Coming and Going, by Maurice H. Weseen, American Speech, May, 1926, pp. 447–49; The Business Letter, Old Style and New, by F. Walter Pollock, American Speech, July, 1926, pp. 539–40; On Commercial Correspondence, by the same, American Speech, Nov., pp. 96–99; Re: Business English, by Herbert B. Bernstein, American Speech, April, 1927, pp. 319–21, and Business English, by William Feather, American Speech, July 1927, pp. 447–48.
4 Notes on the American Language, American Speech, Oct. 1937, p. 186. The familiar use of whom in Matthew XVI, 13 (Authorized Version) — “Whom do men say that I, the Son of man, am?” — has long engaged grammarians. For the following note on it I am indebted to Mr. Sydney J. Mehlman of Brooklyn: “The Greek simply means ‘Who do men say that the Son of God is?’ The rest is dogmatical interpolation. The Latin version would be: ‘Quern dicunt homines esse Dei Filium?’. In this construction both Latin and Greek employ the accusative (objective), whereas good English uses the nominative. So I guess it should be who.”
1 The Split Infinitive, May, 1927, pp. 341–42.
2 A Grammar of the English Language; III. Syntax; Bost
on, 1931, pp. 458–67.
3 Fowler devotes six columns to the subject in this book. This discussion was first published as The Split Infinitive, along with an essay on The Position of the Adverb, in S.P.E. Tract No. XV, 1923. The Dictionary of Modern English Usage was first published in 1926. The other defenders of the split infinitive include Dr. Kemp Malone (To Split or Not to Split, American Speech, Feb., 1932, p. 223), Wallace Rice (The Split Infinitive, English Journal, College Ed., March, 1937, pp. 238–40), and the late Frank H. Vizetelly (Our Much-Criticized Language, New York Times, Dec. 20, 1931). Intelligent lay discussions of the subject are in The Pardonable Sin, by Jackdaw, John o’ London’s Weekly, Nov. 12, 1937, and Split Infinitives (editorial), Mobile (Ala.) Press, Feb. 4, 1937.
4 I find the following beautiful variation in H. P. Blavatsky, by Caroline Hoering, New York Herald Tribune Books, Jan. 9, 1938: “It is my belief that one should acquaint themselves first with the subject.”
5 Calvin Coolidge: Message to Congress, Dec. 9, 1929: “There is no question but that Federal contributions have materially added to the State expenditures of State funds.” The Hon. George W. Norris, Congressional Record, June 12, 1939, p. 9923, col. 2: “There is no doubt but that the Sherman Act was not intended to apply.” The English also use but that occasionally. I find the following in Two More Days of Pilgrimage (editorial), London Times, July 13, 1934: “There seems to be no question but that the pilgrimage,” etc.
6 Described in the Literary Digest, Jan. 17, 1935, as “grammatically incorrect” but “a familiar colloquialism.” It was used by Shelley, but is not common in English.
7 See American Variations, by H. W. Horwill, S.P.E. Tract No. XLV, 1936, and British-American Differentiations in Syntax and Idiom, by Stuart Robertson, American Speech. Dec., 1938, pp. 243–54.
1 This was apparently picked up in the Middle West. In the Chesapeake Bay country crabfeast has never yielded to crabfest.
2 Coined at Hays, Kansas, to designate a series of contests at the normal school there, not only in athletics but also in spelling, cookery, drawing, music and handicrafts.
3 Domestication of the Suffix -fest, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part V, 1916, pp. 353 and 354.
4 There are notes on gabfest, bookfest and applefest in AL4, p. 218, notes 4 and 5.
5 Vogue Affixes in Present-Day Word-Coinage, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part I, 1918, p. 11.
6 American Speech; April, 1914, p. 149.
7 The Living Language, by Dwight L. Bolinger, Words, March, 1940, p. 41.
8 Defined by William White in Radio Jargon, Words, Dec., 1941, p. 99, as “a convention of amateur radio broadcasters.”
9 Defined by Maurice H. Weseen in A Dictionary of American Slang; New York, 1934, p. 405, as “a mess of lawsuits.”
10 The last fourteen are listed by Berry and Van den Bark.
11 American Speech, April, 1938, p. 157.
12 For the last four I am indebted to Dwight L. Bolinger, Words, March, 1940, p. 41.
1 Editor and publisher, April 8, 1944, p. 16, col. 3.
2 Miscellany, by Louise Pound, American Speech, April, 1935, p. 155.
3 Domestication of a Suffix, by Louise Pound, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part IV, 1916, p. 304; Addenda to IV, 4, 304, by the same, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part V, 1916; Vogue Affixes in Present-Day Word-Coinage, by the same, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part I, 1918, p. 11.
4 Hamburger Progeny, American Speech, April, 1939, p. 154.
1 More Progeny of Hamburger, American Speech, Dec., 1940, p. 452.
2 Among the New Words, American Speech, April, 1943, p. 148.
3 Mr. L. Clark Keating; private communication, June 20, 1937.
4 Mrs. Frederick H. Goldman; private communication, June 1, 1937.
5 Advertisement in Life, April 29, 1940. The recipe for it follows: “Brown slices of liver-sausage slowly in butter. Turn and continue cooking until well browned. Split buns. Toast if desired. Serve hot liver-sausage slices between buttered halves of buns. Add onion, pickle, relish or chili sauce as desired.”
6 American Speech. Feb., 1944, p. 78.
7 The last five are reported by Mamie Meredith in American Speech, April, 1942, p. 132. She adds jamburgo, “a Mexican spelling of hamburger found by Dr. A. H. Marckwardt across the Rio Grande.”
8 American Speech, Oct., 1943, p. 237.
9 The Living Language, by Dwight L. Bolinger, Words, March, 1940, I 41. It is defined as “a hamburger served with oomph.”
10 A concoction of ground beef, flour, eggs, milk and spices, browned on a griddle and described by Louella G. Shouer in Main Dishes On Your Budget, Ladies’ Home Journal, Sept., 1943, as a “point saver.”
1 In Nebraska, according to American Speech, Dec., 1934, “a braunschweiger is a sandwich made of bread and ground meat.”
2 All three are listed in the Swift & Company Yearbook for 1943, issued Dec. 20, 1943. It also lists hamburger patties, dried beef, head cheese, bologna, cervelat, salami and genoa. The DAE traces dried, applied to beef, to 1661, but shows that the adjective was usually applied to buffalo meat. The more familiar chipped beef is an Americanism, traced to 1833. The DAE also marks head cheese an Americanism, and traces it to 1841, but H. W. Seaman tells me that it is also in use in the Northern counties of England. Brawn, however, is the usual English word, and pork cheese is used in Norfolk. In the Baltimore of my youth hogs’-head cheese was in common use, and the German schwartenmagen (pro. schwattermagen) was not unknown. Salami, from the Italian, is traced by the NED to 1852, and cervelat, from the Italian through the French, to 1708. I can’t find genoa in any dictionary.
3 Reported by Dwight L. Bolinger in Words, Jan., 1940, p. 11, and described, on the authority of an unnamed newspaper of Nov. 5, 1939, as “turkey on a roll with cranberry sauce.” In American Speech, Dec., 1943, p. 302, Bolinger also reported turkeymally, from tamale (1940), turkeywich and duckwich (both 1941).
4 This last appeared on a restaurant bill-of-fare in Reading, Pa., and may have been due to Pennsylvania-German influence.
5 In 1917 a theatre manager in Cleveland complained to the United Booking Office of the Keith Circuit against a vaudevillian who used the word gesundheit in his act. See Reporting the Acts, Variety, Jan. 12, 1944.
1 Consumer Reports, Oct., 1942, p. 273. The information here was supplied by the Army Information Service, 90 Church street, New York.
2 In August, 1941, the National Association of Meat Merchants, meeting in Detroit, considered a proposal to adopt defense steak, but it did not prevail.
3 The proponent here was a radio orator calling himself Uncle Robert. He offered a prize for the best substitute suggested. Among them were pastime-class and juvenile-class, but no satisfactory proposal seems to have been received. See an editorial in the Nation, Jan. 9, 1943, and the New Yorker, Nov. 14, 1942, p. 11. Kindergarten has been traced in English use to 1855 and in American use to 1862.
4 New Yorker, Jan. 23, 1943, p. 8.
5 Drops Caps on Japs, Editor and Publisher, Aug. 15, 1942, p. 16.
6 Congressional Record, March 29, 1943, p. A1589.
7 Nationalism in Grammar, London Times, Jan. 25, 1938.
8 This last patriotic reform long ante-dated the Nazis. See Medical Terminology in Germany, by A. N. Tasker, Journal of the American Medical Association, July 1, 1922.
9 Hairsatz, from ersatz, was launched by Time, Feb. 16, 1942.
10 A long list is in Borrowings From the German (1930–1941), by Karl F. Koenig, Modern Language Journal, Nov., 1943, pp. 486–93. Another is in Recent American Loan Words From German, by Harold G. Carlson, American Speech, April, 1940, pp. 205–08. It is rather astonishing (and perhaps also lamentable) that Prohibition did not bring in the magnificent German word saufschwester.
1 Feb., pp. 93–95.
2 Bartlett, in the fourth edition of his Dictionary of Americanisms, 1877, ventured upon the following hearsay etymology: “A newspaper man in San Francisco, in attempting to coin a word to designate a gang of young street Arabs
under the beck of one named Muldoon, hit upon the idea of dubbing them noodlums — that is, simply reversing the leader’s name. In writing the word, the strokes of the n did not correspond in height, and the compositor, taking the n for an h, printed it hoodlum.” But this is only too plainly fanciful. Barrère and Leland, in their Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant; London, 1889, described the word as “probably of Spanish origin,” but then added: “It may possibly be the Pidgin English hood lahnt, good, i.e., very lazy; lahnt’o, mandarin.” This is also incredible.
3 Scram, April, 1938, pp. 152–53.
4 Charles Sealsfield’s Americanisms, American Speech, Feb., 1941, p. 27. I am told by Dr. M. J. Bach, for many years London correspondent of the Wiener Neue Freie Presse, that in the years before 1848 Ja-Ja-Manderl was Viennese slang for docile marchers in political parades.
1 The first to do so was Edward Everett (1794–1865), who entered Göttingen in 1815. He was followed by many others, and the stream ran high until 1914. Even those Americans who did not study in Germany were strongly influenced by German ideas, e.g., Emerson. See George Bancroft, Brahmin Rebel, by Russel B. Nye; New York, 1944, pp. 33 ff.
2 American Variations, S.P.E. Tract No. XLV, 1936, pp. 176–77.
3 The influence of Germans on the musical life of the United States has been recounted more than once. I take the following from Editorial Notes, Putnam’s Monthly, May, 1854, p. 564: “We do not regard the Ethiopian opera [i.e., the minstrel show] and the popularity of Old Folks at Home as proof of a general musical taste. At the concerts of the Philharmonic Society at least half of the audience is German.”
4 Beside the works already cited, the bibliography includes The German Influence on the English Vocabulary, by Charles T. Carr, S.P.E. Tract No. XXLII, 1934; Germany’s Contribution to the English Vocabulary, by Harold G. Carlson, Words, May, 1937, pp. 114–16; Some Notes on German Loan Words in English, by Charles T. Carr, Modern Language Review, Jan., 1940, pp. 69–71; and German Influence on the English Vocabulary of the Nineteenth Century, by Edward Taube, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Oct., 1940, pp. 486–93. In Feb., 1935, p. 69, American Speech noticed Studien über den deutschen Einfluss auf das amerikanische Englisch, by R. M. Stone, a dissertation submitted for the doctorate at Marburg in 1934. So far as I know, it has not been translated.
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