American Language Supplement 1
Page 81
Druid Druidess
Earl Countess
enchanter Enchantress
Emperor Empress
Giant Giantess
god (heathen) Goddess
Inheritor Inheritress
Jew Jewess
Marquis Marchioness
Mayor Mayoress
Mister, or Mr. Mistress, or Mrs.
Patron Patroness
protector Protectress
president presidentess*
Priest Priestess
Prince Princess
Prior Prioress
Prophet Prophetess
Python Pythoness
Seer Seeress
Sultan Sultaness
Viscount Viscountess
Unhappily, some of the lady’s novelties were really not new, though she may have thought them up on her own. The NED traces sculptress, in English use, to 1662, and the DAE traces presidentess, in English use, to 1782, and, in American use, to 1819. James Fenimore Cooper used Americaness in his “Home as Found,” 1838. But it never caught on, and neither did paintress, professoress, scholaress or teacheress.
In AL4, p. 293, I listed a number of familiar substitutes for the harsh second-hand, e.g., used, rebuilt, reconditioned and repossessed. All of them are in the vocabulary of dealers in second-hand automobiles, and one of the latest that I have encountered comes from the same source. It is experienced, which was reported in use in Los Angeles, in the form of experienced tires, in 1942. In New York a second-hand store is now often called a buy-and-sell shop. There is also a continuous flow of euphemisms for damaged or shop-worn, e.g., seconds, slightly-seconds, slightly hurt,1 store-used, and sub-standard. The last had got to England by 1938.2 The department-stores run heavily to like euphemisms, e.g., simulated for artificial pearls, and many more have been launched by advertisement writers, e.g., halitosis3 and B.O. In 1942 the flood of ersatz articles that came in with rationing and priorities brought with it a demand for a word for them, less offensive to the refined mind than substitute. In the April, 1943 issue of the Rotarian, an English contributor suggested superstute as a name “to designate materials, originally substitutes, which later supplement and supplant the original.” At about the same time syntute was offered by a Missouri neologist “as a word to embody the ideas of synthetic and substitute, without their connotations of makeshift,” and supplantitude was proposed by a North Carolinian.4 Meanwhile, materials used as substitutes for tin in the canning industry were being called alternates.5 The appearance of horse-meat for human consumption in 1943 started a search for euphemisms to designate it. Various sportive readers of Life, engaging in this aesthetic quest, suggested filly, stallion, cheval and centaur. One submitted a list of names for dishes designed to “tempt the most ticklish palates,” including braised fetlocks and fillet of Pegasus.6 But sometimes there is a transient revulsion against euphemism, and a bold advertiser resolves to tell the truth. Thus, from a correspondent in California comes a clipping of an advertisement of a Carmel restaurant, announcing pseudo-mint-juleps, and in Baltimore there is a department-store that has more than once advertised fake pearls.
The uplifters in their almost innumerable incarnations are naturally heavy users of ameliorative and disarming words, and some of their more juicy inventions are listed in AL4, pp. 292 and 293. One of the best of recent coinage is doorkey children, a humane designation for the youngsters who are turned loose on the city streets at night to shift for themselves.1 In the lunatic asylums (now state hospitals), a guard is an attendant, a violent patient is assaultive, and one whose aberration is not all-out is maladjusted.2 In the Federal prisons a guard is a custodial officer,3 among social workers case work has become personal service,4 and every surviving orphan asylum has become an infant home or something equally mellifluous. In many American cities what used to be the office of the overseers of the poor is now the community welfare department. The English, in this field of gilding the unpleasant facts of life, yield nothing to Americans. Their reform-schools for wayward boys, which had been Borstal institutions5 since 1902, are now called approved schools6 and there is talk of a further change to hostels.7 Slum has almost gone out of use in England: the reigning term is depressed area, obviously suggested by depressed classes, a euphemism long in use to designate the members of the lowest caste in India. The English prisons have also undergone a cleaning up of terminology, and the old-time warder is now a prison officer.8 Simultaneously, there has been a relaxation in prison discipline, once extremely harsh, and even the incorrigible convicts at Dartmoor, the Alcatraz of England, are now entertained at lectures and concerts, have the use of a library, go to night-school, no longer wear uniforms marked with broad arrows (the English equivalent of the former American stripes, now also abolished), are permitted to shave with safety-razors, and have a weekly paper to tell them what is going on outside.1 I add a couple of other characteristic English euphemisms and pass on. In 1936 the British United Press, in a dispatch to colonial newspapers describing the booing of Cabinet ministers in Downing Street, called it counter-cheering,2 and in 1937 the London Telegraph described the goods found upon a smuggler as uncustomed.
The American movie-cathedral must not be forgotten, though the DAE ignores it, as it does, in fact, movie. The first movie-cathedral to bedazzle and enchant the fans was the Paramount Theatre in New York. Unhappily, the newspaper wits began to poke fun at it by writing about movie-mosques, movie-synagogues and movie-filling-stations, and so it did not prosper. But so late as 1941 a news-cathedral was opened in Poughkeepsie, N. Y.,3 and in Pittsburgh the huge skyscraper used to house the multitudinous departments of the town university is called the Cathedral of Learning. For many years there has been a quiet effort to find a substitute for mother-in-law, which has been cursed with unpleasant connotations by the cheaper humor of the press and stage, and also, perhaps, by personal experience. Gene Howe, editor of the Amarillo (Texas) News-Globe, a son of the cynical E. W. Howe, but himself a man of heart, began a magnificent effort to rehabilitate and glorify the lady in 1930 or thereabout, but did not invent a new and softer name for her. In 1942, however, the Mother-in-Law Association that flowed from his campaign adopted kin-mother, which had been proposed by Mrs. E. M. Sullivan. Other suggestions were our-ma, lawma, assistant mother, ersatz-mother, and motherette, but kin-mother won.4
Substitutes for death and to die, both euphemistic and facetious, have been numerous in America since the earliest days. Many of the latter class are heritages from England, e.g., to croak, to kick the bucket and to peg out, but others are of American origin, e.g., to pass in one’s checks, to go under (traced by the DAE to 1848), and the short form to kick. To go West may be American also, though the DAE does not list it and it was used by the British soldiers in World War I. The same may be said with more certainty of to blow off, to fade out, to kick off, to bite the dust, to fan out, to flunk out, to fold, to get the ax, to hop off, to go off the deep end, to lose the decision, to pass out, to pass out of the picture, to poop out, to pop off, to shove off, to shuffle off, to shoot the works and to slough off.1 Similarly, for death there are the blow-off, the one-way ticket, the wind-up, the fade-out, the finish, the last call and the pay-off, and for dead, checked out, done for, finished, gone under, down and out and washed up. In the days of Prohibition the racketeers invented (or had invented for them by newspaper reporters) a number of picturesque terms for to kill, e.g., to take for a ride, to put on the spot, to put the finger on, to bump off, to wipe out and to rub out, and at other times ordinary criminals have launched synonyms for to be executed, e.g., to fry, to take a hot squat and to walk the last mile (electrocution), to be topped (hanging), and to be gassed (lethal gas). There are also many more decorous terms in the field of mortality, and Dr. Louise Pound has made a study of them in “American Euphemisms for Dying, Death and Burial.”2 The following elegant specimens are seldom encountered of late in city newspapers, but the country weeklies still use them:
For dead: breathed his last, gathered to his fa
thers, laid down his burdens, gone to rest, called home, sleeping the long sleep, passed to his reward, gone ahead, gone to his reward (or account).
For buried: laid to rest, consigned to earth, resting in peace, gone to join his fathers.
For grave: narrow home, long home.
For death: the Grim Reaper, the Destroying Angel, the Pale Horseman.
Along with euphemisms go terms of opprobrium, of which the American language boasts a large stock, chiefly directed at aliens. The English have fewer strangers within their gates, and hence their native armanentarium is smaller, and not a few of the achthronyms3 they use come from the United States. But there has also been some traffic in the other direction, e.g., frog for a Frenchman. It was borrowed by the American troops in World War I, and subsequently got into wide circulation at home, but it had been in sporadic use before. Its history in its present sense in England, according to Partridge goes back only to c. 1870. In the Seventeenth Century it was used to designate a Dutchman (sometimes in the variant form of froglander), and also a Jesuit. At some time before 1870 a Frenchman came to be called a frog-eater in England1 — the NED’s first example is dated 1863 —, and in the era of the Franco-Prussian War this was shortened to frog. It has been suggested by various etymologists that frog embodies a reference to the formerly quaggy state of the streets of Paris and also to the presence of toads on the coat-of-arms of the city, but it seems to be much more reasonable to believe that the eating of frogs by the French, a custom regarded with loathing by the English, is at the bottom of it, as frog-eater indicates. Frog has a derivative in froggy, which is used by the lower classes of Londoners to designate any man with a French-sounding name. They also use frog in the sense of policeman, but Partridge says that this use is so low as to verge upon thieves’ cant. Froggy is in common use in the British Army to designate a French soldier. I am informed by Mr. Edgar Gahan, of Westmount, Quebec, that frog is not applied in Canada to a French-Canadian. The common name for him is Joe, but it is not used often. Mr. Gahan says that in Quebec a drink made by dumping some oysters into a glass of beer is called a frog. In general the Canadians use American terms, in this as in other fields. In the days of the California gold rush the few Frenchmen who turned up were called parleyvoos (parlez vous) or keskydees (qu’est-ce qu’il dit?) by the 49ers.2 Both terms were revived by the American and British troops during World War I. Neither is American. The NED traces parleyvoo in English use to 1815, and in the sense of the French language to 1754. Frencher was used by Cooper in “The Last of the Mohicans” in 1826, but seems to have passed out. The DAE traces cajan (from Acadian), the common term in Louisiana for a rustic of French descent, to 1880, but it is undoubtedly older. The word carries a derogatory significance, and is never applied to the high-toned French of New Orleans, who are creoles. The common American assumption that creole connotes Negro blood is bitterly resented. In 1926 Lyle Saxon published the following disquisition upon the term:
The creole is one who is born away from his country — whatever that country may be. The New Orleans creole is our finest product. The women are lovely. The men are brave. They have charming manners. They are exclusive. They are clannish. They have their own language, their own society, their own customs. They still speak a pure French. The reason the word creole has been so often misunderstood is that their slaves spoke a creole dialect, bearing about the same relation to pure French as our Southern Negro talk does to English purely spoken. Then, of course, there was the Acadian French, or cajan French, as spoken in the outlying districts of Louisiana. And gumbo French — that simply means French incorrectly spoken.1
The DAE says that creole is a French borrowing from the Spanish criollo. This has been challenged by E. C. Hills, who prefers a Portuguese origin. “In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies,” he says, “it referred to any person, animal or plant of European stock that was born or grown in any part of the Americas.”2 From the first appearance of syphilis in England it was labelled French — first, the French pox (1503), then the French marbles (1592),3 and then the French disease (1598), which remained in common English use for more than two centuries. Various sportive synonyms arose from time to time, all of them now forgotten, e.g., the French mole (1607), the French measles (1612), the French cannibal (1614), the French goods (1678). The adjective French-sick survived from 1598 to the end of the Eighteenth Century.4 When, in 1776 or thereabout, a certain contraband device for the limitation of offspring was invented, the English gave it the name of French letter, and the French retaliated by calling it a capote anglaise. This last was changed to capote allemande during World War I, as a gesture in furtherance of the entente cordiale, but the English did not reciprocate, and capote anglaise was restored. To them, anything French is likely to be suspicious, and their language embalms the fact in many common words and phrases, e.g., French leave. The simple word French, to them as to Americans, connotes sexual perversion. The Germans, Spanish and Italians also have forms of French leave. Rather curiously, the French and German belabor one another with opprobrious phrases rather sparingly, despite their long enmity. In Prussia lice are called Franzosen, but in other parts of Germany they are commonly called Schwaben (Swabians) — and cockroaches are Preussen (Prussians). The French call a louse an espagnol (Spaniard) and a flea an espagnole: the difference in gender I do not attempt to account for.1 The chief butts of the French seem to be the Spaniards, the Swiss and the Greeks; of the Spaniards, the Moors; of the Danes and Norwegians, the Swedes; and of the Germans, the Poles.
The origin of gu-gu for a Filipino is mysterious, but it may have some analogy to that of greaser for Mexico, to be discussed presently. Goo, in the vulgar speech, means anything of a syrupy or oleaginous nature, and goo-goo or gugu is a common derivative, as is gook. Gook is also applied to a Filipino, and sometimes gook or gugu is applied to any native of the Pacific Islands, but the more usual term in the latter case is kanaka, a loan from the Hawaiian signifying simply man, or, in a more general sense, the people.2 At the turn of the century, when the Filipinos were in armed revolt against their first salvation by the United States, Filipino came into use in the Boston area to signify an opponent of a regularly-nominated candidate for office.3 The older term mugwump was retained to designate a Filipino of high tone, and Filipino meant especially a mugwump of low tone. During World War II Col. Carlos P. Romulo, aide to General Douglas MacArthur, used Filamericans to designate his people, but the term apparently made no headway.4
Squarehead is applied, not only to Germans, but also to Scandinavians. A correspondent calls my attention to the fact that it is used in Germany to designate a Holsteiner. In Gustav Frennsen’s novel, “Jörn Uhl,”1 Prussian Army officers are made to speak of recruits from Schleswig-Holstein as die vierkantigen [four-cornered] Holsteiner. Berrey and Van den Bark hint that it was originally applied to Scandinavians only, and say that it has been transferred to Germans “since the World War [I].” The other opprobrious names for a German that they list include boche, dutchie, heinie, hun, kraut, limberger, sauerkraut and sausage. In June, 1861, Harper’s Magazine printed a series of caricatures of various American types of the time under the heading of “Modern Idolatry.” The German immigrant was depicted as wearing a beer-barrel as a coat, smoking a porcelain pipe with a long stem, and carrying a long sausage and a sheet of music under his arm. Henry Bradshaw Fearon said in his “Sketches of America,” 1819, that General Joseph Heister, when a candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, was called Old Sauerkraut by supporters and opponents alike. In those days Germans were also called cabbageheads, but that term was apparently likewise applied to the Dutch.2
How the early German immigrants acquired the name of Dutch is well known: it was their use of Deutsch (pronounced Deitsch) to designate themselves that misled the English-speaking Americans. The DAE’s first example of Pennsylvania Dutch is dated 1868, but the term must be very much older. The use of Dutch in the sense of Germans in general is traced to 1742. In the California of gold-rush days
it was applied indiscriminately to Germans, Hollanders and Scandinavians.3 In Missouri, during the Civil War, all Northern sympathizers were called Dutch, no doubt because many of them were Germans. Three familiar American phrases, to beat the Dutch, that’s all Dutch to me, and in Dutch, may allude to the actual Dutch of New York, but it seems more likely that they allude to the Germans. The first is traced by the DAE to 1775, the second to 1899, and the third to 1920. To talk like a Dutch uncle is also probably American, and so is Dutch supper. Both apparently allude to Germans, not Dutchmen. In Ontario, where there has been some immigration of Pennsylvania Germans, they are called hickories.4 The use of Hessian in Indiana folk-speech to designate “anyone who is rough, uncouth, boorish, or, more particularly, an individual whose moral character is of the lowest,” was noted in American Speech in 1943 by Paul G. Brewster,1 and no doubt it is to be found elsewhere. It apparently came into American English in Revolutionary times, but Brewster shows that it is also in use on the Isle of Man and in Ireland. It was used by the Confederates during the Civil War as a term of opprobrium for Northerners, and by 1877, according to Bartlett, had gained some currency as a designation for “a hireling, a mercenary politician, a fighter for pay.” Hessian is used in England to designate what we call burlap. Prushun, apparently from Prussian, is the American hobo’s term for a boy who travels with an older tramp and is usually a homosexual.
The old naval rivalry between England and Holland, at its peak in the Seventeenth Century, brought in a great many compounds in which Dutch appeared as a derisory adjective. The NED shows that in 1608 a Dutch widow meant a prostitute, and that in 1678 a Dutch bargain meant one made in drink. Not a few of the more familiar terms in Dutch originated in America, and had their genesis in hostility between the English and the Dutch in early New York, or between the Germans (almost always called Dutch) and the other stocks in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Dutch courage, meaning a false courage produced by alcohol, is probably an Americanism (though the DAE does not so mark it), for the earliest known American example of its use, dated 1812, precedes the earliest English example by fourteen years. To beat the Dutch may also be American, for the NED’s first example, dated 1775, is from an American song of the Revolution. Dutch route, signifying suicide, is almost certainly American, though the DAE does not list it. So, I suspect, is Dutch auction, signifying one beginning with a high bid and then working downward, for though it is not recorded in America earlier than in England, Dutch auctioneer is. Other opprobrious terms based on Dutch, either English or American, are Dutch concert, meaning one full of discord; Dutch feast, at which the host gets drunk before his guests; Dutch drink, one that empties the pot at a gulp; Dutch treat (unquestionably an Americanism), one requiring each drinker to pay for himself; Dutch uncle, a brutally frank adviser (I’ll talk to you like a Dutch uncle); Dutch wife, a bolster; Dutch reckoning, a bill not itemized;1 Dutch comfort, meaning the kind that does not comfort;2 Dutch consolation, meaning the same; to talk Dutch (or double-Dutch), to speak gibberish; to do a Dutch, to take to one’s heels; Dutch nightingale, a frog; Dutch barn, one without side-walls; Dutch defense, no defense at all; and in Dutch, in disfavor. In truth, there are so many such terms that Farmer and Henley, in “Slang and Its Analogues,” define Dutch itself as “an epithet of inferiority.” It is significant that it serves no such purpose in any other language. The Netherlands government, in 1934, tried to pull the teeth of the English pejoratives by ordering all its officials to drop Dutch and use Netherlands instead,3 but apparently the device did not succeed. In the 80s, as Theodore Roosevelt once recorded in a magazine article,4 “anything foreign and un-English” was called Dutch. “It was in this sense,” he said, “that a West Virginian member of the last Congress used the term when, in speaking in favor of a tariff on works of art, he told of the reluctance with which he saw the productions of native artists exposed to competition ‘with Dutch daubs from Italy.’ ”